I thought I heard her calling my name

I had a Norelco Compact Cassette player. Yup, that’s what it said right on the tiny machine about the size of a shoebox, but much thinner, with a speaker on top and a drawer for the cassette below. Eventually they changed the name to Philips and dropped “Compact” but back in ’68 8-tracks were just taking hold, no one thought the cassette would make inroads, never mind last.

And it came with a microphone that looked like nothing so much as a sex toy, but recording friends was a novelty, the machine’s main function was to record music, after I went to Radio Shack to purchase the proper connectors. Yup, back before it was a going out of business cell phone store Radio Shack was the home of odds and ends, you could find a cable to do anything, like the one I used to turn stereo into mono, that took the outputs of my all-in-one Columbia box and turned them into one plug I could connect to the Norelco.

This was long before people borrowed albums to record to save money, to make mix tapes for friends, most people didn’t have any albums, they had mostly singles and the radio was their main source of music, imagine that, sitting at home, waiting for your favorite track to come on!

Which is what I did. But with my hand on the triangular Norelco button, which I pushed to RECORD whenever I heard the notes of my favorite tracks on WDRC.

That’s right, the hip FM in Hartford, which my box could get, I was not limited to the New York sounds. And I was an album guy, and there were certain LPs I knew I’d never own, there was nothing worth owning other than the hit, but I wanted to be able to hear that over and over again, on the go, those tapes traveled everywhere with me, they’re up on my wall right now.

Hush, hush

My goal was to get it perfect, my reflexes got quite good. But I’d still get the deejay talking over the beginning and the end. And those tracks on my cassettes, on no-name brands long before the advent of Maxell, became part of my DNA.

There’s nothing like getting behind the wheel of your own machine. Hearing the sound pouring out of the multiple speakers. Yes, yesterday was one of those days that everything sounded good, the oldies and the newbies. But I was driving on the 405, deep into darkness, and I heard this.

First it was Steppenwolf, whose “Magic Carpet Ride” I also had on cassette.

And some songs you’ve heard so much you think you’re immune.

But I just bought a new amplifier, the old one burned up, and the bass was pumping and suddenly it was 1968 all over again, Deep Purple’s “Hush” sounded brand new.

There’s that Ritchie Blackmore screaming intro, back before we knew his name.

And there’s the groove. And it’s not Ian Gillan. But it is Jon Lord.

That’s right, the singer is Rod Evans, long before anybody could conceive of “Smoke On The Water.” And the record came out on Bill Cosby’s Tetragrammaton Records, but what seals the deal is the organ. As if Felix Cavaliere pushed up the volume and fought with  Gene Cornish for attention. There were no limits on “Hush.” Heavy metal had to start somewhere, and most people say it was Zeppelin, yup, that’s what was metal before speed and screech, but it took bands pushing the limits, taking us to the stratosphere, to get us there.

So I’m parked, sitting in front of Felice’s house, and I’m enveloped in that sound, of Jon Lord squeezing the keys, it’s like I’m in a spaceship that’s about to levitate.

And it felt so good!

P.S. The song was written by Joe South. I heard “Games People Play” too much to like it back then, and it was contrary to the edgy rock which was suddenly starting to dominate, but I can hear its greatness now.

P.P.S. The original version was done by Billy Joe Royal, yes, the maestro of the boondocks, now that’s a song I love. And if you listen to the original, which made it up to #52 on the chart, which means most people never heard it, you’ll hear the framework of the Deep Purple hit, but that’s all. Who do we credit for Deep Purple’s take, Joe Meek’s compatriot Derek Lawrence, whose memory has been lost to the sands of time?

P.P.P.S. The entire Deep Purple debut album was cut in three days. You see greatness is about catching lightning in a bottle. Labor long enough and you can get it perfect, but perfect is rarely a hit, not one that sticks, because perfect eliminates humanity. That’s right, once upon a time we went to the gig and expected the performance to be different from the record, do that today and the audience boos.

P.P.P.P.S. Come on, it sounds like a band, a cohesive unit that you can only marvel at, that you can’t penetrate, like Stonehenge. We bought songbooks, we learned how to play these songs at home, but we could never get close, because the musicians were Gods and their tracks were the Torah.

Hush – Spotify link

Chatting with the Chopped Teen Tournament, Part 4 Winner

The judges talked shit.

Why is it that everybody believes their kid is a talented musician deserving the accolades of everybody and no one will tell a wannabe he sucks to his face?

Felice is addicted to the Food Network. Because of my ongoing ass problems, I’ve been unable to exercise, so once again I found myself lying next to her watching ten o’clock TV, in this case the “Chopped Teen Tournament.”

What I loved was the passion. These kids had been cooking for years! And no one said how many followers they have, Facebook and Twitter didn’t come up at all! You see it’s all about the food, although presentation does count, and the penumbra is irrelevant.

Kind of like in music. That’s what no one likes to admit, that it all comes down to the music. They believe if they’re pretty, if they’ve got a kick-ass YouTube video, if they’ve got lots of friends, then they’re entitled to success. But the truth is it’s in the file. Music is something you hear, that goes in your ears, everything else is secondary.

So do you pick up an instrument and play it for years?

Sure, you can sing cover songs. But have you been practicing in obscurity, trying to find your way?

These young chefs have. And what stunned me most was their ability to improvise on the fly, their ability to take mystery ingredients and concoct a meal in thirty minutes, with no prior preparation. This would be like having “Idol” contestants write and record a song every episode. Would that song be good? Probably not. Not all of the meals were good. The meat was undercooked, the couscous sticky. But did the judges say what a fantastic job the young contestants did? NO! They spoke honestly, told them the truth. Something we all know but never say out loud, especially in the music business. Yup, we’ll talk behind someone’s back, but tell them right up front they and their music are not good enough? Never gonna happen.

There’s a fiction that young people can create at the level of those who are mature. But the truth is almost all of the teens with success in music are working with adults, oftentimes middle-aged adults. Yup, if you think it’s a youth business, you’re wrong. Youth are just the front. Max Martin is the star. And speaking of presentation…

Presentation does not mean you’re beautiful, it means the production is seamless and enticing. One kid got chopped because he forgot to put sauce on one of the judge’s plates. Everyone agreed his meal had fine elements, but you just can’t succeed if you don’t hit the notes. Sure, you might have written a good song, well, probably not, but is it produced in a way that most people will enjoy it, people who consume music every day?

And there’s no fiction that these teens will open a restaurant at the end of the episode, that they’re ready for prime time. They’re fighting for scholarships, they need more education.

Now rumor has it that Linda Perry’s got an honest show on cable. I’ve yet to see it, maybe she’s turning the tide.

But the truth is music is hard to do, at least very hard to do well. Most people will never make it. Insiders know this. But the truth is not usually on television and baby boomer and Gen-X parents believe their kids are perfect and entitled to success.

Success is always the same, it’s about hard work and practice, and inspiration.

Yes, it’s about passion. And the passion of these young chefs on the “Chopped Teen Tournament” was palpable. It wasn’t about fame, it was about food!

What a concept.

It’s a lesson we can learn in the music business. That music comes first. And it’s hard. And it makes no sense to instill false concepts into the makers. Those who continue to succeed have talent and desire. You can only be the front person for old men for so long. We’re looking for acts that last. Because unlike food, great music is forever!

“Five Lessons The Faltering Music Industry Could Learn From TV”

You’ve got to stop e-mailing me this article.

This is what drives me crazy about America, people glom on to something that squares with their world view and trumpet it to high heaven even though the writer’s got no basis in reality and the whole missive leaves the consumer and business realities out of the equation.

We had a high quality carrier in the music business, it was known as the CD. Hell, we even improved it, with the SACD and DVD-A. But the truth is no one wanted the latter. They hit the market like the DeLorean, too late and too expensive, out of touch with the times.

Yup, the music industry was there first. The CD was an improvement to most people’s ears. They had scratched vinyl and high-speed duplicated cassettes, to hear pristine sound was a revelation. The fact that it was tinny and not remastered for the format initially…change takes time, was every show in HD when you bought your flat panel?

And your flat panel is enough for television, and the price cratered seemingly overnight. Whereas in music you need an amplifier and speakers and it’s all very expensive when people are notoriously cheap.

And speaking of cheap, that’s one of the main reasons people stole music, which they wanted to hear so much they wanted to own it. No one’s building a collection of TV shows, once is enough. Furthermore, no one wants to watch the TV shows from the sixties and seventies, to a great degree the eighties and nineties, whereas classic rock gets tons of airplay today.

And getting back to hardware, we got the iPod back in 2001. We didn’t get video on hand-held devices until the advent of iPhones and broadband streaming, and still most stuff is unavailable, you’ve got to steal it, and for this the writer is lauding the TV industry?

And if you think appealing to oldsters with new music is the answer, you probably believe these same people are still going to prom and dreaming of having babies. Statistics tell us oldsters don’t want to hear new music, they just want to groove to the greats. Sure, a few people are aficionados, but tell me a mass market company that can survive appealing to niches. Remember when Ford came out with that modern T-Bird? They had to discontinue it, not enough people wanted it, it didn’t scale!

And sure, we’re not in the golden age of music, but that does not mean great stuff doesn’t exist. Meanwhile, why doesn’t this writer come down upon the movie industry, which had a bad summer and makes bland product appealing to minors. Because the movie industry gets all the respect and sophisticated people know that the DVD market plummeted and the only way the studios can make their money is to appeal to overseas viewers. In other words, if it doesn’t play everywhere, it can’t make any money, and money is the bottom line.

Along with distribution. The barrier to entry in music is almost nonexistent. You know how much money it costs to make those TV shows? Far in excess of what it does for an album. And despite endless uploads to YouTube, almost no one has gravitated to network or cable from that platform, because they’re just not good enough. What, should the labels sign alta kachers just so this writer will feel good, this writer who will move on to a new topic tomorrow?

We’ve learned time and again that producing music requires expertise. Andy Lack came up with the copy protection fiasco and drove Sony right towards the cliff, re-signed Springsteen to a deal so rich the Boss was the only one who could make money. But armchair quarterbacks believe they can solve all the music industry’s problems on a whim.

Are there problems?

Of course!

But the truth is if you’ve got any popularity, the bitch is that no one can get a ticket. Prices are insane and StubHub is more than profitable. This is a problem?

As for giving it away… This idiot would probably tell the TV industry to charge every time someone watches a program, misunderstanding not only the model, but business realities.

The truth is the music business was the canary in the coal mine. The reason files sound so bad has got to do with bandwidth, the ability to send over thin pipes. And this was when the movie and TV industries were laughing, believing their content was unstealable, not realizing as soon as we got fat pipes, they’d be in trouble.

And what have these visual content companies done? Lobby against the high speed pipes of South Korea and other bleeding edge technical nations. Yup, blame TV and movie studios for holding our whole nation back, because the truth is faster broadband falls straight to the bottom line. Spotify started in Sweden because of the insane speed of the connections. Imagine what could be developed in the U.S. if we had equally large pipes?

And speaking of Spotify, we’re far ahead of TV and movies. You can listen to all our product for one low price all in one place. Try doing that with television. You’ve got to pay everywhere, and it’s only getting worse. You’ve got to have a Hulu subscription, an Amazon one and a Netflix one, and you still can’t see everything. Which is why when you delve into P2P statistics, you see that most of the content is visual, not music, because in music we’ve gone a long way towards solving the problem of fair, legal distribution.

And technology hurt in music too. Because YouTube gained traction in the United States before Spotify, so it inured people not to pay. And it’s easy to remove visual content from YouTube, but much harder with music. Because TV shows and movies are long, and YouTube used to have a length limit. Furthermore, the service is riddled with TV and movie excerpts. But where are the tribute videos, the covers that are so prevalent on YouTube it’s almost impossible to eradicate them. Furthermore, who’d want to do this? It evidences passion, and passion delivers dollars. Yup, while the television and movie industries are all about walls, we’ve torn them down in the music business, we’re far ahead, there are numerous bumps in the road coming for the visual industries.

And don’t forget about repeatability. How many times do you want to watch “Breaking Bad,” once is enough, and that’s one of the great shows. Whereas even second-rate music has people playing it again and again. And everything new is competing with everything old. That’s right, Rihanna is competing with Led Zeppelin, never mind numerous other acts with less traction.

And this bozo says we can solve our problems by getting people to pay for music, by stiffening our backs and telling the public to do it our way. Hasn’t happened yet. Didn’t we try that? Didn’t the RIAA sue people? Did that make revenue jump? OF COURSE NOT!

So you don’t like the way it is now, you’d like it to return to the way it used to be.

Well, I’d like my hair back, and so many other benefits of youth. But that ain’t ever gonna happen. Oh, I could get a rug and plastic surgery and those around me would tell me I look good when the truth would be everybody would be snickering behind my back, laughing at me.

Like I am with this author.

We lived through the Renaissance of music, the sixties and seventies. And MTV blew up revenues in the eighties and nineties, while focusing the whole world’s attention on few acts. The Internet blew a hole in all of that.

The television and movie industries like to make like the Internet doesn’t exist.

As for desirable product… It turns out that what the majors are selling is the only thing people are buying. All the vaunted Americana acts, all the acts for oldsters that get ink, check their plays on Spotify, never mind sales on SoundScan, they’re bupkes.

The truth is major labels are a business. They are not public institutions charged with propagating and sustaining greatness. That’s the opera and the symphony, meanwhile the Met is financially challenged and symphonies keep shutting down. Why doesn’t this writer just tell these institutions to have some self-respect and charge more!

That’s right. The music industry is almost fully-adjusted for the modern era, the dog days are behind us. And the truth is, if anybody does anything good we’ve got millions looking for it, who will blow it up, and majors who will sign anything with traction.

The fact that there’s more money in the financial industry and tech, that the best and the brightest don’t see music as a calling, that’s got nothing to do with the business, Lucian Grainge didn’t cause that.

The great thing about music is how the constant flow of material renders indelible hits that could not be predicted a moment before their arrival. Like Lorde’s “Royals,” which is better than most television and is so infectious listeners can’t stop playing it. Maybe she’ll inspire others, let’s hope so.

But the truth is the music game is in the hands of the consumers. The business just follows the trends. The consumers upended the business model and the consumers are the artists, with the ability to change the world.

And now we’ve got a guy complaining we don’t go back to the old era, where content was behind bars and the gates were controlled by a few old men.

RIDICULOUS!

I came for the fantasy.

Last night I stumbled into Felice’s house and she was watching “A Star Is Born” on TCM. I was instantly hooked because this is the way it was, when the stars were bigger and life in Los Angeles was better.

I spent the latter half of the seventies at the movie theatre, back when releases opened here and in New York and many films never made it to the hinterlands. But it wasn’t only the new flicks, but the ancient features at the revival house, the Nuart, the La Reina, the Beverly. I’d drive all over the Basin, from Van Nuys to Los Feliz to Hawthorne, to see movies that could not be viewed any other way.

And I loved it.

This edition of “A Star Is Born” is not the most famous one, that’s the original, from 1937, but the story remains the same. Someone living in obscurity wants to make it and someone who already has has peaked. And that story never changes. People believe their problems will be fixed if they’re embraced by the entertainment business and gain an audience, I certainly did.

Movie studios used to be like Google. Places you could view the exterior of, but could never get inside. But the Hollywood dream factories were about story, not technology, and the story off screen was as important as what ended up on screen. To get on the lot was to tingle, to enter the soundstage was to make your jaw drop. This is where it all happened.

Same deal with the recording studio. With its long board and isolation booths. You couldn’t cut anywhere else, this is where it happened, and it mostly happened in Los Angeles.

Where there were no smartphones, no one tracking your every move. The east coast establishment pooh-poohed the west coast, saw it as secondary, so if you lived in L.A. you were free.

Do you know what that means? That means you never ran into people you grew up with, or went to college with. And in a fluid society it didn’t matter where you graduated from, or if you did so at all, everybody was reinventing themselves, trying to climb the entertainment ladder.

Disconnected from the tentacles of old society you were set free to dream, to make your fantasy become a reality.

This is why we came here. When being a contract player, or even an extra, didn’t guarantee stardom, but did evidence your inclusion. Movies ran this town.

And then came music. Sure, Capitol Records was on Vine, but the L.A. scene burgeoned when they built that ski lodge in Burbank, housing Warner/Reprise. The attitude was different from CBS. It wasn’t about suits, and it was all about creativity. If those ads by Stan Cornyn didn’t make you want to move here, you didn’t see them. To hang with these hipsters bringing us Hendrix, Zappa, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. These people drove our culture. That’s right, music took over from film, which was hobbled by television, which knew not what to be. Suddenly it was more about the individual than the group, and the individuals emanating from Warner/Reprise showed a beacon and changed the world.

And watching “A Star Is Born” you see the cars. Yesterday I got my new issue of “Automobile” magazine. And I’m wondering why I still get it. Cars are now niche items, at least those talking and salivating about them. That passion is from a bygone era where movie stars were larger than life.

It used to be about story. Then it became about explosions. That’s what money will do.

And in music the same thing happened. CDs and MTV made companies and performers greedy. They didn’t want some of the money, but all of the money.

And then things changed, the same way they did for Norman Maine, he interrupts Vicki Lester’s Oscar speech to implore his old compatriots to give him a  job. That’s what we’re all looking for, a gig, some work to make our lives meaningful.

But today the labels employ so few. And the acts can’t make much on recordings. But the truth is life changed, the old days are never coming back.

In this iteration of “A Star Is Born” there’s television. Showing a prize fight, telecasting the Academy Awards, you can see the camera. The movie companies could see it coming but didn’t know what to do about it, kind of like the music companies in the twenty first century.

But we’ve got new centers of attention. Today everybody is a star, at least in their own mind. Video cameras come in phones. You can post your clip on YouTube for free. You may not garner an audience, but the hope remains.

But it used to be you had to come to Los Angeles to have hope. Movies were expensive, as were records. Only the exalted few got to play.

But now that everybody can play the game has changed. Facebook and Google control the world. And even though they reach as many people as the movies, actually far more, they too employ few.

But they’re new and exciting, they’re cutting edge.

But they don’t happen in Los Angeles.

I guarantee you fifty years from now we’ll be nostalgic for today. Our little hobbled smartphones, our giant flat screens that one person can’t carry. Life will be better, but something will be lost along the way. That’s how it always is. Change ushers in something more ubiquitous that’s new and exciting, but some soul of the past is left on the scrapheap.

Kind of like album covers and liner notes. They’re not needed in the twenty first century, but that does not mean we don’t miss them.

And maybe you don’t get this yet. Maybe “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” was made before you were born. Maybe you missed the golden age of film known as the seventies, when directors pulled power from studio heads who believed they’d lost touch and created films we not only went to, but talked about.

Maybe you’ve listened to Led Zeppelin, but you don’t know what it was like to hear “Communication Breakdown” on the radio, buy the album and discover “Dazed and Confused.” You were alone in your bedroom, unable to text or e-mail, to post your excitement and luxuriate in groupthink, you had to go to school, talk amongst your friends, get them to come over to experience the vinyl. And then go to the show where you could connect with your heroes.

I don’t want to go back. The boredom of yore was intolerable. You’d sit in your house with your couple of channels, bouncing off the wall, finally emanating from your abode to go somewhere, anywhere, to connect with people and feel part of society.

And you’d go to the record store and see all the albums you could not afford.

But that was back when you could drive to the record store, or go to a movie in Woodland Hills on a whim. When there was a rush hour, but it didn’t last all day long.

Which is all to say I fell down the rabbit hole last night. I was brought into a world I recognized but was unfamiliar with. And that’s how it always was, getting in your car, parking and waiting for the lights to come down and reveal a feature you knew so little about.

Kind of like coming home and breaking the shrinkwrap on a record. It was a journey into the mind of the musicians, that you took alone, but ended up feeling so close to the makers on.

Those were the good old days. And so are these. Enjoy them while you can, they’re not forever.