“Live at the Fillmore East and West: Getting Backstage and Personal with Rock’s Greatest Legends”

What people don’t understand is classic rock was a revolution, populated by the disenfranchised, hungry to have fun and make a difference. To think that these degenerates could conquer the world and lead a nation was anathema to the powers-that-be, the same way they were confounded by the nerds who took over the world with tech in the twenty first century.

Janis Joplin was an outcast looking for acceptance who never got it until she demonstrated her greatness and made it. Then it killed her.

Carlos Santana was a street urchin from Tijuana who would still be an unknown if it weren’t for Bill Graham.

Grace Wing was a rich girl’s daughter, who thrived on the privilege and then deemed it necessary to test limits, whiplashing her band and the entire nation in the process.

And we ate it all up. We went to the Fillmore and then Woodstock. Money started to rain. And then cocaine flew up everybody’s noses and the entire scene matured and has never been the same.

I don’t expect anyone under thirty to read this book. Because they believe that they’re in charge and the world is their oyster. But in the fifties and early sixties this was not the case. Kids were subservient. The old white men ruled. You were afraid of your mom and dad, they weren’t your best friends.  And then we heard the music.

It didn’t start in the suburbs. There was no internet, never mind cable TV. If you didn’t live in the metropolis, if you weren’t within earshot of the city airwaves, you were out of the loop, a year or two behind. By time the band was on Ed Sullivan there was a whole new crop of acts the cognoscenti were into. But you didn’t know them. There was no social media, the newspaper was everything, and even if the newspaper reported, young people did not read it, it was for the oldsters.

And then came the radio.

This book barely focuses on the recording side of the equation, which has been lauded ad infinitum. This is all about the gig, the live performance, where most of these acts made their bones. The Beatles started live, as did Joplin, Santana, the Jefferson Airplane and the Dead, all of whose careers are profiled herein. They were outsider musicians, back when you could survive on a few dollars a week, when life was about opportunities instead of closed doors.

There are so many inaccuracies and misspellings in this book you’ll be horrified.

But you’ll also learn inside details you never knew.

Bill Graham was making the lion’s share of the dough, but he built the scene, there were no concomitant promoters to compete with him until the acts could sell themselves. Which is how they ended up with ninety percent of the gross. You can count the number of people in attendance, you cannot count how many records have been shipped, stolen or bought. The record company kept that info private, and still does. But the rubber meets the road at the gig. And that’s where the fire is lit. All these acts made it based on their performances, most significantly at Woodstock.

You’ve got no idea how big the movie and attendant triple album were. Sure, the Beatles may have conquered America, but they were safe, Brian Epstein cleaned them up. No one cleaned up Janis Joplin or Grace Slick or Carlos Santana. And when you saw them perform you wanted so much more.

And they didn’t give a fuck. Sure, they liked the money. But they could offend the audience, they were on their own trip. And it was so different from today.

I wasn’t planning on reading this book. But going through a pile of what was sent to me I uncovered it and got hooked. Every night I couldn’t put it down. I went down the rabbit hole to what once was and will never be again.

You see the scene was nascent, no one knew what was happening, and then the worm turned and it hasn’t been the same since. Kinda like the web was for exploration, before pop-up ads and all kinds of shenanigans made it lucrative for the usual suspects. If you were surfing in 1995 you remember the naked women tracking their every move, the people detailing their lives, it wasn’t about money so much as self-fulfillment and exhibitionism.

And there’s a healthy dose of exhibitionism in rock and roll.

You can make music. You can make money.

But you cannot become one of the richest people in the world. To do that, you had to play music in the sixties and seventies. When fans gave the acts all their dough. Because without music life was empty. Hit singles counted, but where you were going was more important than staying still.

Albert Grossman tried to get Janis Joplin clean. Bill Graham did a great job of managing the Airplane. But the musicians didn’t want to listen. They wanted to be free, to their detriment, Paul Kantner admits this.

But it was this specific middle finger to the powers-that-be, to the establishment, that made them so attractive.

Don Henley was right, we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.

But if you want to know what it was like, read this book.

They say we should listen to “24 Frames,” but if you do so you’ll get an appreciation of Jason Isbell equivalent to the one of Ryan Adams if you listen to “New York, New York.”

That’s right, they were both in bands that didn’t work out for them and went solo and suddenly got acclaim, Ryan Adams on an indie label with “Heartbreaker,” with its masterpiece “My Winding Wheel.” But if you listen to “Gold,” the follow-up, you’ll discover “New York, New York” was one of the weakest songs on the LP. an album-opening ditty made to appeal to the casual listener, and neither Adams nor Isbell is for those driving by, they’re for the cognoscenti, the diehard fan. But labels are flummoxed and they point to the catchy tune when anyone who believes knows that the track on “Gold” is the slow burner “Nobody Girl,” and the track on Jason Isbell’s “Something More Than Free” is “Speed Trap Town,” a song that no one writes about that stopped me in my tracks when I was listening to it way past midnight in the Santa Monica Mountains.

We’re looking for something human, that touches us, that helps us make sense of this complicated world, that makes us feel not so alone. But the music business has given up on this paradigm, it’s just too difficult, because if you take the non-pop road you’ve got to deliver on an “A” level, you can’t fake it if you want to survive. But for those of us who live for the sound, who are waiting to be soothed and made to feel life is worth living, these are the tracks we’re looking for, the ones that cannot be categorized that ooze truth and the whole ball of wax we call life.

Well it’s a Thursday night, but there’s a high school game

That’s what you do when you live in nowheresville, go to high school sports, even though you’ve graduated and you no longer care, if you ever did. But there are so few options. Thank god for the internet, used to be the small town was literally death for those who stayed, emotional, if not physical. If only you could get up the gumption to leave…

Sneak a bottle up the bleachers and forget my name

The boonies will make you an alcoholic. I know, I lived there. There’s nothing to do. First you drink for the excitement, then you drink to get away from your everyday life, and then you drink in the hope of having the greatest night of your life and when you wake up hung over the next morning having failed in your quest the depression is so overpowering all you can do is lie in bed with the phone turned off and wait for the darkness.

And it never did occur to me to leave ’til tonight

I always wanted to get out. From my hometown. From Middlebury, Vermont. I wanted to go where nobody knew my name and I could continue to be anonymous unless I happened to do something great. The smaller the town the more people you know, but the harder it is to escape from your branding, the preconception everybody formed of you on Day One, however inaccurate.

And there’s no one left to ask if I’m all right

That’s when the wind of loneliness blows hardest, when you’re needy and you discover there’s no one who cares. You go to school and everybody’s down your throat, telling you what to do, and then you graduate and no one cares about you, you’ve aged out, you’ve become an adult, even though you still feel like a child.

The doctor said Daddy wouldn’t make it a year
But the holidays are over and he’s still here

He’s conflicted. He loves his dad but he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to abandon him but he wants him to be gone. But it keeps dragging on. He’s looking for the release of being an orphan, of being free, that’s what they don’t tell you about losing a parent, as sad as it is there’s an incredible sense of freedom, you can finally grow up and do what you want, without judgment.

He didn’t care about us when he was walking around
Just pulling women over in a speed trap town

How do you square the biology with the practicality? When your loved ones are not like those depicted on television. Life is chiaroscuro but too often it’s portrayed as black and white. And until you gain the confidence to know that everybody is insecure, has more questions than answers, you feel inadequate.

I’ll sleep until I’m straight enough to drive, then decide
If there’s anything that can’t be left behind

The truth is you can leave it all behind, but you’re scared of being that naked and free, without anyone to bounce off of, to complain about. Too many stay because they’re too scared to leave. But you’ve got to go, you’ve got to save yourself.

The road got blurry when the sun came up
So I slept a couple hours in the pickup truck
Drank a cup of coffee by an Indian mound
A thousand miles away from that speed trap town
A thousand miles away from that speed trap town

What did James Taylor sing, “There’s nothing like a hundred miles between me and trouble in my mind”? But that was back in ’76, when we looked to singers for answers, before the dash for cash made our country coarser, before the artists started telling us how much better they were than us, before we stopped looking to music for answers.

And I’m not sure there are any answers in “Speed Trap Town,” on all of “Something More Than Free,” but the truth is even Bob Dylan was confused, he could only sing what he saw and hope that we resonated.

We did.

And I resonate with “Speed Trap Town.”

And truly, the words are secondary. It’s more about the sound. The spareness. That loping acoustic guitar providing the rhythm, that electric guitar wailing in pain, “Speed Trap Town” sounds like the prairie, sounds like somewhere barren, which we know everything about even if we’ve never left the city, because we’ve all experienced emotional barrenness. And that’s when we turn to music.

I don’t know what happens to the music industry, hell, I don’t know what happens to our country, with income inequality and global warming, but I do know I’m looking for a needle in a haystack.

And in this case I’ve found one.

Don’t let the relentless hype turn you off.

Jason Isbell is not that good. Steve Earle’s “Guitar Town” is a classic, “Something More Than Free” is not. But back when Steve cut that nailing the experience with an acoustic guitar and some words was a goal, like writing the Great American Novel in the fifties, now music is mostly about getting rich, which leaves Jason Isbell as a party of one. Sure, there are others doing his act, just nowhere near as well. But if we all listened to “Speed Trap Town” and saw Isbell’s path as viable…

Maybe Jason had nothing more to lose. He wasn’t on the fast track. He could take risks. Which is why our greatest art rarely comes from the educated and privileged, who usually play it safe. Jason Isbell is risking it all, he doesn’t care what we think.

Which is why we care so much.

Rhinofy-Speed Trap Town

I spoke at the METal meeting.

METal International

Don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of it either. But its majordomo implored me to come and my shrink was on vacation so I decided to get up early and appear.

It was the opposite of the music business.

The music business is populated by uneducated hustlers, people who do their best to triumph on bluster, employing smoke and mirrors. Their main goal is to get you to believe they’re a winner, and to dedicate time to checking their effort out, whereas the METal attendees are the same, but different. Because it takes a lot more money and smarts to make an app, to play in the tech world.

It reminded me of nothing so much as the Homebrew Computer Club, where the two Steves made their debut, introducing the Apple computer.

Which got little reaction, by the way. Don’t be put off by jealousy. Your compatriots don’t want you to make it, to pull ahead, because that leaves them behind. Chances are if you succeed you’re going to get a whole new set of friends, the same way Howard Stern was invited to Jennifer Aniston’s wedding. You’re nobody and then the door opens. But it opens for very few.

Now the entrance barrier to METal isn’t nonexistent, unlike in music. You’ve got to pay $100 a month, and $35 every time you attend. Supposedly the latter fee is for breakfast, and they had everything from pastry to fruit, but the older we get the less we’re interested in carbs and the truth is I tanked up before I left the house.

The first thing I noticed was no women. And I was about to get on my high horse and complain about this but then someone clued me in, they can’t come. Well, once a month only. Because otherwise no work is done, everybody’s peacocking around to impress the ladies. But the ladies have their own group, that meets every couple of weeks.

And the goal of the group is to make investments. This one guy was an MD who was funding a microscope and I thought it was all kind of fantastical until he laid out the numbers. A billion dollar marketplace and his product was going to cost a fraction of those now dominating. And he’d had one victory already. And I wondered if everybody was a winner. I’m not sure.

First speaker was Nolan Bushnell. That’s right, Mr. Atari, Mr. Chuck E. Cheese. He talked about the future, virtual reality and augmented reality. He believed in the latter. He said the former made you sick, and you didn’t get over the illness so fast.

And then there was this guy who worked with Oliver Stone who talked about advertising. And I hated and loved him at the same time. Because I hated the manipulation, but I could tell it was real. He had it down to a science.

And then there was the run-down on new products. Most exciting was a camera. Who needs a new standalone camera, right? But this cheap device has sensors that not only help it decide what to record, but can automatically edit together a clip of everything you did all day. It was fascinating, it’s a winner.

And then there was the company that tells you what to eat based on your DNA.

But what I found most fascinating was FanGram.

What I love about Los Angeles is so much is happening right under our noses. Hell, I saw Bob Costas on Rodeo Drive earlier today, at least I think it was Bob… But while we’re focusing on celebrities, in Santa Monica especially is a whole bunch of unheralded techies who are trying to change the world. This guy put 150k of his own money into trying to make sense of social media.

So this is how it works…

It’s an app. Mobile is everything. It presently only works on iOS. All the apps start on iOS. You may love your Android, but not only are you susceptible to viruses, you’re one step behind in the tech world, trash it for an iPhone, immediately.

So, FanGram has scraped the web. Found every personality (even me!) And when you search and find them, there are buttons, for news, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, everywhere the personality plays. You click on the icons and you get the info.

And below this part of the screen is every bit of news about the personality.

And below that is everybody who’s related to the personality, who you might want to follow.

And that’s right, you can follow people.

But what I find most amazing is FanGram makes social media comprehensible. Puts all the services in one place. Because the truth is we want to follow people, that’s where it all starts. And on Twitter it’s all mashed up and it keeps loading and you’re overwhelmed. On FanGram it all suddenly makes sense.

This is the future. We’ve got enough services, how do we integrate them and make them comprehensible?

It’s what we’re looking for in music, but haven’t found yet.

Now METal is run by Ken Rutkowski, who’s got a radio show syndicated around the country that focuses on innovators. Ken gets cut into the deals, he provides his network and expertise.

And it’s all happening here in L.A.

And I’d love to tell you you need to go, but the longer I sat there the more I saw the difference between tech and art. Everybody’s trying to get rich in both, but when everything works the end result in art is so much more satisfying to me.

But art is a tsunami of product that no one can make sense of.

We need a FanGram for art.

I’m waiting…

FanGram – Get Invitation

Bob-

Jeff Stevens here, I thought I’d “part the curtain” and give you a look inside :)   When you said “The advantage of being Nashville’s biggest star is you get to play with the biggest and best players.” I knew I had to reply. My son Jody Stevens and I worked in studios on this album for 7 months straight, pretty much 7 days a week. Some of the songs were recorded and played totally “in the box”  by Jody in our little studio, like “Home Alone Tonight” and we brought in Jimmie Lee Sloas on bass and Adam Shoenfeld on electric guitar as overdubs on that one.

“Huntin’, Fishin’ and Lovin’ Everyday” however was as old school Nashville recording as it gets. We tracked it at beautiful Ocean Way studio A through the Neve 8078 with Derek Bason at the helm. We did have the best players in the world available to us and they came when asked. That’s Greg Morrow on drums, Mark Hill on bass guitar, JT Corenflos and Kenny Greenberg on electric guitar, Ilya Toshinsky on acoustic guitar and banjo and Mike Rojas on the Hammond B3. The album credits don’t give specifics on who played what so I’m thrilled to shine a light on these gentlemen.

Upon taking his seat and picking up his famous among musicians, blueTele, JT Corenflos clicked on that wonderful throwback phaser tone and delivered the signature lick and subsequent direction of the track. Mark Hill’s simple bass line punctuates the lyric wonderfully in the choruses, sounding more like the bass player that wrote the song instead of a world class musician. Ilya Toshinsky’s banjo at the end of the track sounds like a four year old boy chasing a butterfly “through a field downwind”. We only took a second pass at recording it because everyone was having so much fun on the first pass we couldn’t remember if it was any good or not and besides that everybody wanted to play it again!

Luke sang his lead at “The Pond” studio at Starstruck (another beautiful facility) improvising many of the lyrics that you hear including “ya’ll close them eyes, let’s go there in our minds”  and “Mercury”. Perry Coleman stepped up to the microphone and after hearing Luke’s vocal track delivered an incredibly inspired background vocal. You can hardly call it a background vocal, he gave it more of a  group or duo feel. Again, like your brother was over there singing.

Derek Bason tore into it at his mix station which is also in “The Pond” using the SSL 9000J, tons of old school outboard gear and he rendered the world class mix that it deserved. Put on a good set of headphones and listen to Luke records, listen to Carrie Underwood records. Derek Bason is a genius who still knows how to make the big records.

I’ve loved recording with computers at my home ever since I did it first in the early 90’s but even the most talented musical programmer/musician with the latest plug-ins cannot model the feel and heart these folks achieved on this track. You are correct, you don’t get these sounds at home.

Have a great day!
Jeff Stevens

PS: I want to emphasize how fortunate we feel in todays market to have the budget to go in and record a track such as this.

 

From: Tom Gilbert
Subject: Re: Luke Bryan Live From Irving Plaza

Hey Bob,

Just wanted to share, that’s my father in law playing pedal steel on “Play It Again” – although it doesn’t really sound like your typical steel in that tune! You might enjoy this video: https://youtu.be/FdtvenGLWHw

Russ Pahl is an innovator on the instrument and can be heard on countless records.

Always enjoy your rants. Cheers.

Tom