That’s what Kid Rock told me last night in Malibu.

After he told me Billy Joel gave him shit for showing up at the Grammys in a t-shirt and Rock told him “That’s why I got into this business, to dress how I want!”

The goal was never to do it their way, but your own. To utilize your success to garner freedom, instead of locking yourself down on Maggie’s Farm.

Interesting conversation, Rock’s quite the raconteur. And informed on politics to boot. He’s pro-abortion and pro-gay marriage, but he wants everybody to work, for self-dignity, to pull themselves up by the bootstraps with government help so they can get off government help.

And I agree. Why can’t we have an apprenticeship program in the USA, like Germany? Why can’t we give our people a lift up?

But Rock doesn’t want to be a political spokesperson, he considers himself first and foremost a musician. What does he do when he’s not on stage? Listen to music!

That was interesting. I guess too many people are focusing on the trappings, so busy trying to get rich that they’re ignoring their core competency, assuming they’re competent to begin with.

And as for his trailblazing $20 concert ticket… It was a raging success, he played to more people, he converted them, he made millions, but good luck trying to get other musicians to follow his lead because their handlers, their managers and agents, are afraid to play without a net, without a guarantee.

And there you have it in a nutshell. No one in America is willing to take a risk. They all want a handout, whether it be from the government, the record label, Live Nation or the VC. They don’t really want to build their own business, they want to cash out. How did this happen? Is everybody so scared, is everybody just looking for a pile of money to retire with? I’m not looking to retire, I want to work! Because that’s where the satisfaction is. And the goal of a rock star is to do it your own way. And you end up with a fan base because you’re a beacon for people’s freedom. You wonder why everybody is perfecting their melisma and starting perfume companies and whoring themselves out to corporations?

Because that’s what today’s stars are doing.

Sure, it starts with the music.  But once you climb that hill, you’ve got a responsibility to be a three-dimensional person, to direct and conduct yourself in such a way that you’ll sustain a career, you’ve got to be more than an entertainer, you’ve got to take risk, you’ve got to stand for something, if it’s nothing more than having it your way.

Isn’t it screwy that that’s the motto of a hamburger chain?

Or as I always say, the Army ripped off our slogan, “Be All You Can Be,” that used to be the motto of the rock star!

Then again, Rock also told me you can’t buy cool.

Those institutions can embrace our slogans, buy access to our music, but cool is reserved for those who create outside the box, live their lives far from the rule-based system.

And by those standards, Kid Rock is very cool, and he’s making a lot of money being himself.

That’s a rock star.

What kind of crazy fucked up world do we live in where a mobile video game has more mystery, more charm, and generates more revenue than the productions of all the wannabe musicians?

One in which the developer pulls it from the app store and the minions can’t stop talking about it.

This is what it was like in the days of yore, when we fought to know more about musicians and went to the show just to find out what was going on.

Yes, while musicians can’t stop bitching that they can’t get rich, this guy in Vietnam creates a video game that churns out 50k a day and then deletes it saying that to modify it would kill it, that he just can’t handle the intensity of its success.

Huh?

Is this like Ray Davies and David Bowie saying they were going to retire? (If you’re wet behind the ears, you might have missed that…)

Then again, Flappy Bird is more addictive than anything on Bowie’s new record.

And isn’t it funny that the biggest hits of the year were by guys in helmets from France and a barely adolescent girl/woman from New Zealand? Oh, forget about “Blurred Lines,” it was a remake of a Marvin Gaye track.

This is like Paul being dead.

That’s one thing I hated about last night Beatles tribute, it made the Beatles look small. When Paul and Ringo played the audience sat in rapt attention. When back in the day we were out of our heads.

Did you get the memo on Flappy Bird? Did you know to download it?

I certainly didn’t. Then again, I’m not into mobile video games. But rather than appeal to me, the developer ignored those who did not care. He just uploaded it to the app store and it took off!

Maybe there’s more, how the hell would I know.

All I do know is my inbox is filling up with people telling me this story, more passionately than they talk about any band. They want to know what is going through this guy’s head. Remember when we got “Rolling Stone” to read the interviews? I’ll listen to Howard Stern extract nuggets from Donovan, but I haven’t read an interview in “Rolling Stone” in eons, not because the writers are so bad, but because the acts have nothing to say! To think that once upon a time we looked up to musicians, who were worldly on not only music, but politics and so much more.

This is bigger than Beyonce. Because people actually want the game!

I don’t know how we get back to the garden in music, it may be impossible, manufactured mystery is the worst.

And I do believe there’s a backstory here, involving legal issues, but what intrigues everybody, why this story is flourishing, is because it appears this guy is leaving money on the table.

No one leaves money on the table in music. They just want more. They want to scalp their own tickets, synch to TV shows, garner sponsorships with corporations…

But one thing remains true… If your motives are pure and your music is great, if you’re a true believer in your art and the public responds…

There’s enough money for everybody.

“Popular Flappy Bird Game Mysteriously Grounded”

Highway To Hell – Bruce Springsteen – Perth Arena 8-2-14

And now the transition is complete, from the era of recordings to live performance, from you need to own it to you need to be there.

As bad as this audience video is, I’m sure the experience of being there was absolutely delicious. Like the surfers in Malibu always say…YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN HERE YESTERDAY!

You watch the shenanigans of Pink and the dancing fools.

You feel the work of Springsteen here.

How can he get it so wrong on wax, but so right live? How can he break out of the stultification of playing the same hits to adoring fans to throwing a curve ball so wide, yet over the plate, that he’s got our jaws dropping?

This rock and roll is a curious thing. It’s a thread that runs through us that is in danger of dying because those playing it today are too often shoegazers so obscure, with tinny guitars and poor vocals, that only the indoctrinated get it.

But in the days of yore, a band started off just left field enough that they earned an initial fan base and the rest of us caught up when they cut their definitive hit.

For Bruce it was “Born To Run.”

For AC/DC it was “You Shook Me All Night Long.”

And as great as “Rosalita” is, there’s a veritable classic on AC/DC’s second album, “It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll).”

Ain’t that the truth.

Gettin’ robbed
Gettin’ stoned
Gettin’ beat-up
Broken-boned
Gettin’ had
Gettin’ took
I tell you folks
It’s harder than it looks

Every band was unique. Not only did every picture tell a story, but everybody’s scrapbook was different. Unlike school, unlike the straight and narrow path, rock and roll was a sui generis adventure wherein you learned how to play, got some gigs, went on the road, and listened to the radio and bought records all the while.

To know Bruce Springsteen knows “Highway To Hell” is even more refreshing than knowing he was aware of all those Mitch Ryder killers he used to cover three decades past.

Because once upon a time we were all students of the game.

And we were all in it together.

And the road we were on…WAS THE HIGHWAY TO HELL!

We didn’t know where we were going, only that we had to put the pedal to the metal to get there faster. We weren’t planning for our future like Generation Y, worried about our retirement and credit scores, we were into feeding the beast and feeling good.

And that’s what you do at the show.

It’s not a movie.

It’s not the same thing every night.

It’s a living, breathing, enterprise full of surprises.

More like this please.

P.S. The highlight, other than the riff, is when Morello and then Lofgren and then Bruce and then Little Steven solo on this rock classic. Because like that old Kiki Dee nugget, they’ve got the music in them, you can feel it, you just want to get closer, and isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?

We knew who they were and their success had nothing to do with the death of President Kennedy.

Prior to the ascension of the Beatles, the biggest acts in the land were the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons. By ’64, Elvis had already petered out, he was an old man in bad movies. Doo-wop was dead too, but that does not mean we were in a burgeoning era of creativity, that limits were being tested on the radio. Rather, we were ready for something new.

The only thing I can equate it to is the summer of ’95, when everybody bought a computer so they could play online. I’d bought my Mac Plus nearly a decade before. People saw no use for Macs, never mind PCs, they were business tools, and then suddenly everybody had to have a desktop machine, so they could connect with their brethren around the world, it’s the energy we’re still running on online today, the human need to…connect.

And that’s what the Beatles did, bring us together, our bond with their music connected us, and the old fogies had no idea what hit them.

Sure, President Kennedy had died. It’s an indelible event in the minds of baby boomers. But it wasn’t the older Freedom Riders who built the Beatles, it wasn’t college students and intellectual pipe smokers, it was the barely pubescent, adolescents at best, who cottoned to this new sound the way today’s kids jumped to Instagram. This was not a cultural turnaround based on a needed pick me up after the assassination, but a middle of the winter, unforeseen left field assault, that drove us all to the radio and the record store.

This was before everyone moved to the Sun Belt. This was just after Major League Baseball moved to the west coast, before most people knew anything about hockey, never mind the NBA. The weekend was comprised of Biddy League basketball and Wide World of Sports. Yes, Jim McKay was our star, sports ruled, and then came…

The Beatles.

Sure, we knew the “Ed Sullivan” show. “Bye Bye Birdie” had memorialized it years before.

But we’d been infected by “I Want To Hold Your Hand” a month previously.

If anything, the Beatles owed their success to filling the after holiday vacuum. Yup, in the cultural doldrums of January 1964, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” burst onto the airwaves and some people got it and some people didn’t but in a matter of a week, we were all Beatlemaniacs. Not because of media manipulation, but because the music had such energy, the vocals were so good, the songs…made us feel alive.

So by time the Beatles hit “Ed Sullivan,” we were already in the know enough to show up at the airport. And in this era of only three TV networks, there was almost no youth oriented news. Which is why we all scrambled for information in mainstream news outlets. It’d be like the “Wall Street Journal” covering a bake sale…we couldn’t believe something so dear to us was actually deemed important by THEM!

And by this time we knew the songs by heart. If your parents didn’t buy you “Meet The Beatles,” they didn’t love you. We knew their ages, when they were born, that John Lennon was married, we had to know, we had to get closer.

And then came Sunday night.

No, that’s not true. We knew long before that the Beatles were going to be on. We counted down the weeks, the days. We talked about it at school. Everybody was on the same page, America was at war, a culture war.

And when the band came on…

We took photographs of the television set. Forget that they didn’t come out, with the flash and all, we wanted to memorialize the event, back when everybody didn’t have a camera and photos were still in black and white and you picked and chose what you shot.

And they were cool.

The way John Lennon bounced on his feet like a frog.

The way Paul McCartney leaned his body at the waist, like he owned the world.

The way quiet George Harrison alternately smiled and seemed disinterested.

The way Ringo shook his head and his hair, as if there were electricity jolting him through his throne.

There was a burst of energy so severe, the sixties were shaken from their foundation into a new era. The baby boomers jetted away from their parents and the establishment that very night. Because unlike today’s one hit wonders, unlike yesterday’s one hit wonders, the Beatles had something to back it up. A whole album you could listen to from beginning to end. Another hit in the wings, “She Loves You,” and there was a plethora of acts from across the pond ready to follow this invading army. Previously we’d seen England as war-torn and not fully recovered, now we saw it as a hotbed of innovation and liberalism and fashion.

And to say we were not jaded would be an understatement.

There were no hipsters, except for Maynard G. Krebs on TV.

Oh yeah, there were a couple of ancient naysayers saying that Elvis was king and this music was a fad.

But the Beatles didn’t seem to care.

They were nonchalant. Believers in their own myth and power. And unwilling to bend to the powers that be to be successful. It was all a lark. That was the magic of “A Hard Day’s Night,” the way they didn’t seem to care yet did all at the same time, the way the whole world kowtowed at their feet…these four scousers who knew what they’d been through but to this day has never truly been revealed. From desperation with pluck, to worldwide fame that lasted.

And there’s no tribute, no TV show that can capture this magic.

Because today everything’s just fodder, grist for the mill, wherein statistics rule and art takes a back seat. Every year we hear about some middling act breaking some Beatles chart record. Hogwash. They’re nothing compared to the Beatles, who not only ruled the airwaves for years, but changed everything.

We were primed that Sunday night. We knew something was happening.

But we didn’t foresee the change.

We grew our hair. We bought musical instruments. We aspired to bigger and better stereos, to get closer to the music. We came to believe you were either one of us or them, and “them” were left behind.

If you were there, you remember it, you know what I say is true.

If you were not…

You will never really know. Like I said, it’s akin to the Internet revolution. the same way you’re addicted to your mobile phone, that’s the same way we were addicted to the Beatles and the British Invasion. Listening and talking about the music 24/7, as if it was the only thing that mattered.

And it was.