How come no one can write English?

Who do we blame, the schools, wherein if they have anybody write at all, they have them do it in a way that eliminates all creativity?

We live in a world of the written word. But too many people can’t write in a comprehensible way. Let me restate that, too many people can’t write in a way that people want to read it! Especially business people.

I don’t believe in business plans, they’re a way for MBAs to feel good about themselves, a circle jerk that leaves out the hard work of true creation, having an idea and going balls to the wall. If everybody’s on your team from the get-go, your idea isn’t revolutionary enough. But if you can’t explain your idea, no one will ever invest.

So the first criterion of writing is…READABILITY!

I’m not talking about spelling and punctuation, rather I’m referring to words that string together in a way that cuts like butter.

Schools impose structure, business people are too busy trying to impress, and the truth is most words go unread, because they’re just not interesting enough.

And a lot of the highfalutin novels are just as bad. That’s what I hated about “The Flame Throwers,” you could tell it was rewritten a million times, to add nuggets, this is the bane of the graduate writing programs. He who says rewriting is the essence of writing should give up. If the first draft ain’t really good, stop, you can’t fix a track in the mix, either it’s a hit or it’s not. Which is why Stephen King triumphs and many people don’t read the vaunted best books of the year. First and foremost, Stephen King is READABLE! Whereas so much that is hyped by the literary establishment is not. A metaphor is nice, but instead of giving endless description, give us some plot.

So let’s start with e-mail and business presentations…

WRITE LIKE YOU SPEAK!

If it’s not flowing real fast, start over. If it’s in your head and you can’t get it out, take an enema and just let it flow. Writing is not hard, it’s like every other pursuit, you’ve just got to start, hit go and you’ll learn along the way.

But you’ve been writing all your life, so you’ve got a head start.

Want to impress someone? Don’t overthink it, just make it straightforward.

I just read a business proposal so incomprehensible I’m not sure what it’s about.

Just like I read screenplays with tons of stage direction but crappy dialogue. A good film is all about the dialogue, ask Woody Allen!

And every rule of writing can be thrown out the window if it’s interesting. And most teachers are not successful writers, so take everything they say with a grain of salt. Or, to put it another way, school is all about eviscerating your creativity, making you conform.

So, most of what’s online is unreadable.

My dear friend Jason Hirschhorn puts out a daily newsletter of links entitled MediaRedefined. I suggest you sign up, just go here:

Jason Hirschhorn’s MediaREDEF

But the truth is so many of the articles Jason links to have great headlines, often evidencing brilliant insight, but when I click through and start to read my eyes cloud over, because the people just can’t write. Which is why I gravitate to the links of the name publications, because they know first and foremost it’s about writing and readability. Ideas are a dime a dozen, getting them across is the hard part.

“The New Yorker” is pompous, but it has good writing. Not the only good writing, but subscribe and become inured.

And Malcolm Gladwell is the king of business writers. Not because his ideas are better, although they sometimes are, but because he writes so coherently, he demonstrates through examples, you want to turn the page, you want to know what he has to say next.

What makes you think if you never write that some business plan you execute is gonna be any good?

Ditto on e-mail. You might have something important to say, but if I can’t understand it, if it’s too complicated and boring to read, I’m not gonna.

And forget the saw that it must be short and compact. We’re all looking for long and great. We rarely find it, but when we do, we luxuriate in it.

So, once again, start by writing like you speak. And, if it’s important, use spellcheck, it’s built-in.

You can’t watch all the YouTube videos and you can’t read all the online posts.

Want yours to stick out? MAKE IT READABLE!

This is a step backwards.

Or to put it another way, Amazon is the new Microsoft, which releases half-baked products that it tries to improve on the fly. As opposed to Apple, which tries to get it right the first time. And what did Steve Jobs famously say, hardware is hard? The Kindle Fire is still a POS after many iterations. It’s like Jeff Bezos has power, but no vision.

Give Daniel Ek credit. He launched Spotify through sheer will. And wouldn’t come to America until all companies were on board. Unless you have everybody, you’ve got customer confusion. And that’s the last thing we need right now, hell, even musicians can’t figure out Spotify payments. It’s quite clear, Spotify pays out 69%+ of its revenues to rights holders, almost exactly the same amount as Apple, and this fact is easily discoverable but no one seems to know it. Now we’re gonna have a streaming music service without a great percentage of the music people want? How does that benefit anybody but Amazon? How do we get everybody to pay for music in the future? This is a rearguard move by a guy who’s trying to dominate the world and will never realize he can’t. Facebook faltered with its mobile phone. Everybody can’t do everything. I can’t play in the NBA and it turns out Microsoft couldn’t win in mobile phones. So give Apple credit for playing only occasionally, where they think they
can win. And at least Google’s crazy efforts are not located in a walled garden akin to a cult.

Yup, that’s what Amazon’s trying to build, a cult. Where everybody does it the Bezos way.

I’ll be clear, I love buying from Amazon. Because it’s friction-free. There’s never a problem, I get what I order and if I don’t, return is simple. There’s TRUST!

But now Bezos wants me to waste time, which nobody has any of, to click around and find the music I want to hear on his service, ultimately being disappointed in a fair share of my efforts? This is not a benefit, this is a DISTRACTION! And it’s not gonna get anybody to sign up for Amazon Prime, and it’s not going to move the ball of streaming music forward. First and foremost, this is a service Prime customers DON’T WANT!

Kind of like the free books. How do I wrap my head around that one again? If I’m a Prime member, some Kindle books are free. What is this Easter, and I have to dig in the snow for eggs?

As for its streaming movie/TV service, Hollywood is at fault here. For not realizing we’re going to a Spotify model for visuals. With everything available in one place for one price. Hollywood almost DARES its customers to steal, believing they’re impenetrable, a lovable behemoth, ain’t that a laugh. Furthermore, they’re gonna go to day and date, windows will be gone.

But Amazon is still doing windows with this music service. You’ve got to retrieve your calendar to figure out whether a new release is old enough to stream. Yup, that’s what I want, to wait six months for today’s evanescent music which isn’t even worth listening to then.

We’re fighting the few hold-outs who don’t go day and date on Spotify, who cling to the iTunes/download model, and now Jeff Bezos comes in and confuses us again?

But don’t worry, his service won’t get much traction. Because it’s confusing and people don’t care and why do you need it if you’ve got YouTube?

Me-too is a disaster. Either invent here, or take a big step forward, both of which were Apple’s strengths under Steve Jobs. The MP3 player might not have been invented at Apple, but the iPod was a great leap forward. And the iPhone and iPad were pure innovations. Whereas Amazon invented downloadable books, and dominates there, but is an also-ran in MP3 downloads, streaming movies and tablets. If Bezos thinks he’s winning, he truly believes he can bring back Menudo, make Rebecca Black a superstar, do what everybody in the music business knows cannot be done…MAKE A STIFF A HIT!

People subscribe to Prime for the free delivery. Bezos keeps thinking if he adds stuff on, it’ll make it more desirable. That’s hogwash. That’s breaking Apple rule number one, which is MAKE IT SIMPLE! If you’re gonna add stuff, have it work seamlessly, intuitively and easily. Using Amazon’s music service will be like going to a record store with half the inventory which is scrambled in a way that you’ve got to pick through every album to find what you want. And if you think that’s progress, you grew up in a third world country where offerings were slim.

This is not about empowering the consumer, Amazon’s mantra, this is about megalomania, making Amazon the provider of EVERYTHING!

Never gonna happen.

Furthermore, with so many Apple-haters out there, what makes Bezos believe the public will go along?

Spotify now gives everything away for free, with advertising, on the mobile. It’s finally getting traction, more adoption, and then you get this greedy jerk in Seattle, who doesn’t know Nirvana from the Nerves, dipping his toe in the water, creating confusion.

Yup, confusion! Why should I buy Spotify if I’ve got Amazon Prime?

Take that musicians. Get everybody to sign up where your music is NOT! You want to be on Spotify, at least people can hear your music. And if you think payments will continue to be low, you don’t know the definition of scale.

So I applaud Lucian Grainge for refusing to play ball this with this pompous nerd.

And I say we’ve achieved half of our goal here. We’ve got all the music, in one place, for everybody to hear. This is phenomenal. YouTube and Spotify have done a great job. We’ve just got to convince people to PAY FOR IT!

P.S. Making music an add-on devalues it. Music is not the glass you get for filling up at the gas station, it’s the petrol itself, the main driver, the expensive elixir, the one thing you cannot motor without!

It was wasted on the Eels’ audience.

What kind of self-respecting KCRW listener is going to sing along with Steve? You know, NA NA NA NA NA NA!

But there’s pure joy in those words.

And there was pure joy in the Orpheum tonight, when Steve Perry returned to the boards in Los Angeles and delivered an arena-sized performance.

You forget that these guys have experience. That they’ve played the big rooms. That they started out rusty and developed chops. And Perry exhibited all of his experience tonight!

I’ll be honest, I knew he was gonna show. Otherwise why go?

I’m not saying I’m not an Eels fan, I love “Jeannie’s Diary,” it’s just after decades of life I only want to go if I get that jolt in my arm, that injection that obliterates all my worldly concerns, that jets me right back to who I was at sixteen, sitting in my bedroom in the dark, listening to the music on headphones.

And I never went to the show to ogle the girls, to tell anybody I was there, but to connect with the music. It was the only place I felt whole. The venue was my synagogue, where high priests delivered the sermon that truly spoke to me.

I’ve never been one for clothes, never been one for appearances. What turns me on is something visceral. Like tonight’s performance.

And I was not a Journey fan when the band ruled, but I know all the songs, they were played incessantly back in the day when the radio was your only true option in the car, sure, you played cassettes on a long trip, otherwise you wanted something new.

But that was back when music ruled the world. When it was seen as the preeminent art form. Before nitwits like Iggy Azalea ruled and a big hit song was entitled “Wiggle,” back when there were two avenues, the mainstream and the underground, and the true music fans were members of the underground, forget all those pop charts, no one listened to hit radio back then, we all smoked dope, grew our hair and dedicated ourselves to the slow-talking deejays on FM.

Then Lee Abrams codified the playlists. But bands amped up their tunes. You may decry Boston and Journey, but they put out professional records which satiate even more now as a result of the dreck that dominates today’s airwaves.

You know that Filipino guy in Journey is pretty good.

But he’s not the real thing.

The real thing sang tonight at the Orpheum, and it was MINDBLOWING!

Forget the YouTube clips, forget the fact that his voice wasn’t perfect in Minneapolis, if you were there you would have grinned from ear to ear, if his audience had been in attendance heads would have exploded, a la that SNL clip wherein Oprah gives stuff away.

And I thought of Oprah during the show. Because she does live gigs. She doesn’t need the money, but she needs the hit, that feedback you get from the audience, and that’s why Steve Perry did it tonight.

He sang an Eels song.

A Journey song.

And then he told a tale. Of writing a song in L.A. and being called by a band up north and rewriting it so it was localized to the city by the bay. Yes, Steve Perry sang LIGHTS!

When the lights go down in the city…

And what was most amazing was it was him. His voice, his timbre. And he could still sing when so many of his contemporaries cannot. I love Elton John, he’s one of my all time favorite artists, but his voice is far from what it used to be, all that’s left is huskiness, too much huskiness.

And Billy Joel sings pretty well. That’s why he’s getting his victory lap.

But Steve Perry’s been gone for twenty years. For him to sing is like having Mickey Mantle come back from the dead, kick the dirt from his cleats, smile at the stands and then hit one over the fence.

Because that’s what Mantle did.

Steve Perry did what he does tonight. He emoted, he reached out and grabbed the audience, he gave a performance. One that was based not upon dancing or set decoration, but purely the music itself.

He told stories, he sang to the heavens, he touched me.

And I’m not gonna listen to a single jaded fuck say a negative word about it.

No, not gonna happen.

I’m gonna delete the e-mail that says he can no longer sing. That laughs at me because he fronted Journey. The ones that denigrate me and Steve in order for the writer to feel better about him or herself.

That’s what’s wrong with America today, everybody on the sidelines saying they can do better when they can’t. Unwilling to take a risk, not knowing how hard it is to not only make it, but to sustain.

I mean I’m in the audience, moving closer and closer, because I need to merge with the experience, jump inside, get further taken away to the place I once lived in and am yearning to return to.

What we all want is hope.

And I refuse to give it to the wannabes without talent.

But when someone who reached the pinnacle returns without pretense and blows me away, I can only say…

THIS IS THE SHIT!

P.S. He was an engineer. That’s the dirty little secret of those who truly make it. They know they may not. They pursue alternatives, because no one knows if they’re truly gonna get their shot, whether they’re ever gonna break through. And he comes home and his girl’s not there. And this is unusual, this is strange, he doesn’t want to be uptight, but he is. So he sits by the front window and… She gets out of a Corvette. And as only Steve could put it, she and the driver LOCKED UP! And when she walked inside, she denied every little bit of it, said Steve was dreaming. And that’s when Steve Perry wrote “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’.”

You make me weep and wanna die

What do you do when you feel this way? PUT ON A RECORD! And what makes those records so damn good is the people who create them have had the same damn experience, only they’ve written about it. We bond with the humanity, the truth. And the truth is I’ve got no idea where Steve Perry goes from here. But to watch him ply the boards at the Orpheum was to see a giant amongst men, to see someone world class inhabiting the neighborhood, someone with the ability to reach out and grab my heart and sacrifice it on the altar of rock and roll.

There were two good things about Howard Johnson’s, the fried clams and the Swiss chocolate almond ice cream.

By time I grew up, HoJo’s was already over the hill. But we drove by on a regular basis, and they’d have these ads for fried clams in the window.

Monday night was fish fry, you could eat as much as you wanted. At this point I didn’t even eat fish, and my dad was a gourmand, so we rarely went, maybe once or twice. As for ice cream… It was all about Friendly’s and Carvel, baby. Our house was stocked with soda and ice cream, my father owned a liquor store and he sought out locations for Friendly’s. Come to my house and you could have as much as you wanted. My parents were never about limits. Assuming you got good grades.

But at one point in my youth I did eat those HoJo’s fried clams. They were tasty, but nothing too special. But then I had a college roommate with a house in Wellfleet and discovered what a fried clam truly is.

We were Hyannis people. When we went. Which was mostly when I was a tyke. But Wellfleet is the lower Cape, just before Provincetown, it’s not commercialized, and it was there that I had the fried clam of my dreams.

It had a belly. Something absent from the HoJo’s iteration. And it was golden brown and hot to the touch and if you put me on death row, include one in my final meal.

Which is why when Jack Douglas suggested lunch at Connie and Ted’s, I was all in.

Food is the rage. And so much more satisfying than music. Hell, there’s even a wannabe YouTube/Food Network, check it out at Tastemade.com.

And when C&T’s opened, I was aware. But at this point, traffic is so horrific that I do my best not go to east of the freeway, certainly not in the middle of the day.

So I didn’t make it to Connie and Ted’s until today.

Were the fried clams as good as those in Wellfleet?

Negative on that. They had bellies, although not as big as the ones experienced on Cape Cod. And the frying… Mmm, let me see, kind of a better HoJo’s. Well, better than that, the breading occasionally flaked off, but as much as I loved eating them, I can’t say they were a culinary dream.

But the oysters were a whole different story.

Chocolate and blood. Huh?

Neither one tastes like its moniker. Both from Baja, the blood were incredible. Kind of like an oyster with a red pepper tail, or the tamale in a lobster. Utterly scrumptious. And the chocolate had its own unique taste. As did the cornucopia of other varieties we scarfed up. I could eat oysters all day, and these were fantastic.

As was the smoked mahi-mahi. Served cold, like in a deli. Oily and stringy and only mildly fishy, it was delectable.

As were the steamers.

On the east coast they come a little bit more wet. But no biggie. The clams had long necks and big bellies and there were both broth and butter for dipping and if it didn’t bring you right back to the shore, you’ve never been.

So it’s a big thumbs up for C&T’s. I’ve got to go back, to experience the lobster roll.

Connie and Ted’s

P.S. We also had the strawberry and rhubarb pie. Ruharb is another thing I wouldn’t touch as a youngster that rings my bell today.

P.P.S. Jack told me about starting out, working with Roy Cicala at the Record Plant, who he said taught him everything he knew. Jimmy Iovine, aka “Jimmy Shoes,” was the assistant who kept missing the punch-in, but he called the track a hit. People wanted Jimmy in the room, for his vibe, for his ability to pick singles.

Roy Cicala

P.P.P.S. Jack said how people have no idea how hard it was to break into the music business back then. He said what his daughter remembered most about him growing up were broken promises. That’s what I remember about everybody who made it, they were always at work.

P.P.P.P.S. Jack teaches courses and says to never forget your friends. You see it’s a relationship business. You may be good enough, but unless you know how to work it, you’ll never make it.