EELS w/ Journey lead singer Steve Perry in St Paul

Now it’s your turn girl to cry…

Na na na na na na, we’re all at home lounging on the long weekend and we check our devices and find out Steve Perry’s returned from the dead and is performing with the Eels in ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA?

Native son Bob Dylan might be on a never ending tour, but this is a much bigger deal.

He was supposedly too fat to be seen in public.

He could no longer hit the notes.

He might as well be dead…

And then he shows up not even rusty, plying the boards, imploring an audience too young to have been there the first time around to sing and they do and the result is akin to John Lennon returning from the grave.

Oh, don’t accuse me of being sacrilegious. Of all people, Lennon was famous for taking the piss out. If he were alive today, you wouldn’t be revering him, he’d be the old guy in the corner saying edgy stuff that made you feel uncomfortable, lamenting the fact that he once was…

Steve Perry was never that. But Journey bridged a gap, from the old to the new, from the Beatles to MTV, from singles to albums and back to singles again. They were the band the girlfriends of the guys who loved U2 wanted to see. And secretly, their boyfriends wanted to go too.

To the stadium.

Taylor Swift can sell out stadia, but no one else can.

Instead we’ve got these festivals which have become a joke, because they’ve got nothing to do with music, and this year, with most headliners home, the lineups are so thin there’s nothing holding these multiple day events together other than the food and the drugs.

But it didn’t used to be this way. Used to be it was about songs, about records, about albums, and you went to the show to hear it all.

And now nobody wants to hear a single new note by any of these acts. They just want to hear the hits. Before Keith Richards keels over and the other Beatle…

Come on, if you believe in music you’ve never heard of tech.

You know music, where no one uses their own money other than the developing acts, who implore you to listen to their derivative drivel.

To the point where when Steve Perry re-emerges, it’s akin to watching the “Sopranos,” you get an emotional hit that makes your heart flutter, that makes you feel fully alive, and isn’t that what life’s all about?

Not ogling the babes, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but being so entranced by the music that you feel the act is eying you and the only thing that matters is their music.

And once upon a time, this would have been totally different. In a matter of weeks, we’d have read about it in “Rolling Stone,” the straight press caring not a whit about our music.

But “Rolling Stone” is still a magazine, not a website, and most papers are hollowed-out shells, so the truth is we spread the word ourselves on what’s important, we’re the tastemakers, we grab hold and tell everyone, that’s how I found out, via e-mail, with links to a substandard YouTube clip just good enough to prove that it really happened.

Remember when you were excited about the gig?

Remember when you lined up all night for a ticket?

Remember when the people in the front row were not rich assholes but people just like you, who knew every word? When you truly believed that music could change the world, when “Star Wars” was for nerds?

I certainly do.

And it turns out the only bearer of the torch is Steve Perry.

Because he said no instead of yes, he never sold out.

Yup, what kind of crazy fucked up world do we live in where the purest guy on the planet is Steve Perry?

The aforementioned Dylan does TV spots.

Steven Tyler was on “American Idol.”

Everything’s grist for the mill, and if there’s a buck in it, the performer says yes.

And then we’ve got Steve Perry taking no cash, showing up singing his songs in the heart of the country unannounced?

Didn’t Kimye tell us to sell our souls? To stage a spectacle and charge the gossipistas to spread the word to the salivating masses?

“Godzilla” comes and goes in a weekend. The hype lasts longer than the film.

And then we’ve got a guy who does it the old way and we end up positively flabbergasted.

Lara Logan didn’t get an exclusive, there was no “60 Minutes” manipulation.

It’s so stunning that the media monsters haven’t even grabbed hold of this story yet, in a couple of days it’s going to be MONSTROUS!

And it SHOULD BE!

Because art runs this country. And, unfortunately, artists have sacrificed their art.

Gaga was so stupid she didn’t know it was about music.

Jay Z keeps telling us it’s about money, as if the Fortune 500 didn’t have so much more.

And everybody else keeps bitching that there’s no money in recordings. That they can’t get rich.

And Universal is a public company. As is Live Nation. No one’s got skin in the game.

Well, I’ve got a message for you, that’s the essence of art, having skin in the game, putting it all on the line, confounding our expectations.

AND THAT’S WHAT STEVE PERRY DID LAST NIGHT!

P.S. Now what? Who knows! While we’ve been waiting for Robert to reunite with Jimmy, do Neal and Steve make peace and go on a stadium tour satiating those who’ve waited decades? And when it’s done does the band go back out with Arnel, the same way Mike Love reunited with Brian Wilson and then left him in the lurch? Or maybe nothing. There appears to be no plan. And there hasn’t been no plan for eons, ever since the head of marketing became a king at the label. You’re supposed to have a campaign, you’re supposed to orchestrate, you’re supposed to leave no stone unturned, you’re supposed to carpet-bomb. And having done all that, your story fades. What kind of bizarre world do we live in where Solange attacking Jay Z is a bigger and longer lasting story than Beyonce’s last album?

P.P.S. This is rock and roll. Doing the unexpected in your street clothes. Were there lasers? A backdrop? Was there merch? Most stuff you see and forget, I saw this clip and I can’t stop thinking about it, I can’t stop believin’.

Once upon a time you wanted to be a musician. You saw the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan,” heard the catchy tunes, saw the screaming girls, and said…I WANT TO DO THAT!

No longer.

No one’s got tunes that catchy, hell, do you really want to be Pharrell singing “Happy”? And the lifestyle of musicians pales with respect to those with real money, the bankers.

What do the bankers make? What do they do? I could explain it to you, but I wouldn’t have to kill you after imparting this wisdom, for you’d be asleep, or your eyes would have glazed over, because that’s just how interesting banking and buying and selling corporations is. Although you do make a ton of money, more money than most people can calculate.

Yes, Stephen A. Schwartzman, a household name if I’ve ever heard one, made $375 million last year. Leon D. Black, of that famous band Apollo, did just a little bit better, $546.3 million. Oh, of course they’ve got all those road expenses, the stage, the roadies, the private jets… No, there are no expenses, and if perhaps there are, their clients pay them, and according to a story in the “New York Times,” their investors pay expenses that don’t even exist. It’s kind of like the band charging you ten bucks a month for years after you saw them at the Garden or Staples. But you don’t bitch, because you had the privilege of being at the show.

Huh?

I’m a smart guy. We can debate how much is DNA and how much is a result of Jewish family push. But all I knew from the moment I stepped onto the school ground was I was going to college, I told my kindergarten friends I was going to be a lawyer, because that’s what was drummed into me by my dad. He wanted me to become a professional, he wanted not to worry about me after he was gone. Today professionals are chumps.

Yes, chumps.

That’s what the mainstream doesn’t understand. That the best and the brightest have no desire to ply the stage, to do creative work, to see their name in lights. They’re happy just cashing the check and making sure you can’t live in Manhattan, or have to park miles away from the lifts because they’ve bought up all the real estate at the ski area base.

So the rich get richer, and the poor stay dumb.

In other words, if I was graduating from college today, I wouldn’t go into the music business. And I’m not dumb enough to develop an app, or start some other long shot business. I’d do what the Ivy alumni do, go straight to where the money is, the banks. Isn’t that what Willie Sutton said, when asked why he robbed banks, he said “Because that’s where the money is!”

Money. It’s got economic consequences. Those with brains follow it. And those who have it are constantly shaving points, because that seems to be the nature of the human condition, enough is never enough, how can I make just a little bit more, especially if most people have no idea how I’m doing it.

In other words, if you’re a smart, hard-working person, you too are a chump. You work for a company that will lay you off on a whim and lose your pension with a shrug. They don’t care about you. Just ask your kid, done with college, sleeping on your couch, he knows the score.

But too many of these kids don’t go to college. And too many who do don’t get the memo. Sure, the degree might get you in the front door where someone else may not, but what is the house you’re entering?

And the point is our whole society has changed. Sure, some of these rich people give away some of their money, but on a percentage basis, much less than the poor and middle class. And their heirs will have this cash for eons, perpetuating a two class society. And if you don’t think the heirs of the rich are frequently do-nothing doofuses, you don’t know any.

But we’re not going to abolish banking and there will always be some people richer than others.

But we can have a discussion about it. How the fabric of our country is being ripped apart while we’re not watching. How ignorant musicians think that by getting a sponsor they’re ripping off the system, but truly, the joke is upon them.

If someone told me in college that their father was a stockbroker, that he worked on Wall Street, it meant that they made the same amount of money as a doctor. About 20k a year. And who’d want to do that gig anyway, commuting into the city.

But today all the hedge funds are in Fairfield County, and college is 60k a year. Who’s got that cash?

The rich bankers. Who can send their scions there, while you can’t.

Furthermore, all these elite institutions survive on their endowments, 60k doesn’t even cover the cost of a year of schooling, so they’re beholden to the bankers who control their money.

So America looks completely different from when I grew up.

Ronald Reagan legitimized greed, Michael Milken went to jail, but the end result is even worse. The American Dream is alive and well for a limited elite, and the rest of the public is too ignorant to understand how they make it.

And you can’t explain it to them. Because they don’t want to know. Because it eviscerates hope. When you tell them their track is not good enough you’re the doofus, because they’re going to prove you wrong, but they never do, all they’ve got is their willpower, and tell the VC that’s why you want a job at the firm, he’ll laugh you out of the office.

Snooki is already gone. As is Paris Hilton. Kim Kardashian got married yesterday and it’s merely months before she’s toast. Because that’s what those famous for nothing do, they disappear. Some of the work of great musicians lasts, but try humming the last decade’s hits and then tell me they’re gonna be around in fifty years, like the Beatles’ songs, yeah, right.

But we’re lining up to sing on TV shows, as if the real winner weren’t Fox.

We’re bitching about streaming payouts when the problem is not Spotify, but the audience, that doesn’t want to pay fourteen dollars for a CD, never gonna happen, they’re broke and even though the dope-smoking musicians say they should be moral, ain’t that a laugh, they see everybody else breaking the rules so why shouldn’t they?

And no one wants to read about it, because it’s arcane and boring.

But when you go to buy a house. When you get a seven year loan to acquire a car. When you have a desire to do but your bank account says no… Then you know you’re living in the new America. One wherein the problem isn’t a government spending your money, but a government rigged to benefit the rich, which you voted to give them the power to do, all in the name of lower taxes…

Ha!

“The Deal’s Done. But Not The Fees”

Brian Wilson gets all the respect and Jan Berry’s been forgotten and I’m gonna try to rectify that right now.

“THE LITTLE OLD LADY (FROM PASADENA)”

Because it’s the one you know.

When I first heard this in the summer of ’64 I had no idea where Pasadena was, but I was enraptured nonetheless.

I can still remember hearing this on the transistor blaring over the pavilion at the beach in Fairfield, Connecticut as I waited for them to deliver my ten cent fries.

She may be the terror of Colorado Boulevard, she may be implored to go, but the magic is in Dean’s harmonies, and the way the song starts with the chorus and soars with the Super Stock Dodge.

Back when what you drove was more important than what was in your pocket, when we were all optimistic, when cynicism had not yet been born and we were all yearning to go to California.

SURF CITY

TWO GIRLS FOR EVERY BOY!

I bought a ’34 wagon and we call it a woodie

And that’s how the term was popularized, that’s the power of popular music.

You know it’s not very cherry, it’s an oldie but a goodie

And there’s another term new here but a cliche now!

And during the chorus you can literally see them on the waves.

Frank Zappa didn’t want us to hear surf music ever again, but that was before surf music itself was forgotten.

This is so inherently joyous that if it was played on the radio today people would stop in their tracks, unable to move, wondering what this alien sound coming out of the speakers was. Yup, it sounds like the soundtrack to a Pixar movie, something so different, yet so exquisitely good, that it’s embraced right away.

BABY TALK

Let’s go back to the beginning, the initial Lou Adler and Herb Alpert production that was a top ten hit, REALLY!

Sounds dated, but that doesn’t mean you won’t love it!

JENNIE LEE

Well, this tribute to a stripper, was really the first, in ’58, but Dean was in the Army and Arnie Ginsburg sat in for him.

LINDA

Yup, Linda Eastman, Paul McCartney’s beloved, written about her when she was all of one year old…

A cover, but Jan & Dean made it their own.

LLLLLLLLINDA!

DEAD MAN’S CURVE

The one! The one that took the deceased teenager trope and jetted it to the stratosphere, killing almost all competitors, as well as the genre itself.

Let’s race all the way to Dead Man’s Curve

There’s no one in Los Angeles who doesn’t reference it. Everybody knows every twist and turn of Sunset Boulevard, L.A.’s most famous drag.

But this was before they straightened it.

I was cruisin’ in my Sting Ray late one night
When an XKE pulled up on the right

And here we are, plunked right down in the midsixties, after a horn intro that immediately enraptures.

The street was deserted late Friday night
We were buggin’ each other while we sat out the light
We both popped the clutch when the light turned green
You should ‘a heard the whine from my screamin’ machine
I flew past La Brea, Schwab’s and Crescent Heights
And all the Jag could see were my six tail lights
He passed me at Doheny then I started to swerve
But I pulled her out and there we were
At Dead Man’s Curve

And if that don’t make you want to move to L.A…

Yup, back when Van Nuys Boulevard used to be gridlocked, when everybody was drivin’ and draggin’.

And there’s ultimately a spoken interlude you’d never be able to get away with today and…

This is a dated masterpiece, definitely of a time, but it’s still just as rewarding as ever.

THE NEW GIRL IN SCHOOL

The flip side to “Dead Man’s Curve,” but a chart hit itself, an infectious ode to the new student in high school, come on, you remember that!

If you don’t sing along with Dean, you ain’t got a voice!

RIDE THE WILD SURF

From the movie starring Fabian, this was the title track.

I owned the album, I just couldn’t get enough, I even went to see that flick, I’VE STILL GOT TO TAKE THAT ONE LAST RIDE!

TELL ‘EM I’M SURFIN’

I played this so much my father used to sing along, and he hated my music!

Yup, nothing equated surfin’…not baseball, not the girl with the pool…just pack Jan a lunch and he’ll be on his way!

SIDEWALK SURFIN’

Grab your board and go sidewalk surfin’ with me!

Yup, once upon a time that’s what it was called, back before polyurethane wheels, when you went around a corner and…slid.

Yup, there was a skateboarding phase in the midsixties that died out before the midseventies technological renaissance and this, a remake of the Beach Boys’ “Catch A Wave,” was the anthem.

I FOUND A GIRL

One of the last chart hits, but still definitely worth a listen.

THE ANAHEIM, AZUSA AND CUCAMONGA SEWING CIRCLE, BOOK REVIEW AND TIMING ASSOCIATION

I knew it because it was the flip side of the “Ride The Wild Surf” single!

I had no idea where these towns were, but I knew I had to get closer to this sound, I had to move to the west coast, I begged my mother, I had to wait to graduate from college, but it was not a moment too soon. People always ask me what made me move to California and I always say the Beach Boys, and that’s true, but it’s Jan & Dean too, I was a fan of theirs first.

THEME FROM THE T.A.M.I SHOW (HERE THEY COME FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD)

Yup, Jan & Dean were the hosts of the live concert movie almost as famous as “Monterey Pop” and “Woodstock,” the one that brought James Brown to a white audience, where he upstaged the Rolling Stones and Felice was part of the audience at the Santa Monica Civic.

But this take is from Jan & Dean’s live album, “Command Performance,” not only my first live disc, but one of my first albums ever, I played it so much the grooves turned grey. I play it now and it sounds like nothing so much as…me.

SURF CITY-LIVE

This is the opening cut on “Command Performance,” and as great as the radio single was, I prefer this, because of the ENERGY!

MORE COMMAND PERFORMANCE

“Dead Man’s Curve,” “Sidewalk Surfin'”, they’re better on “Command Performance,” I’m gonna include the entire LP so you can know what it was like to be little Bobby Lefsetz, alone in his bedroom in a house dominated by females dreaming of a better life in…L.A.

And it IS!

CONCLUSION

For a long time they were forgotten. Then their story was told in a ’78 TV movie, and then they were forgotten again.

You see Jan Berry had an accident himself on Sunset Boulevard, and was never the same.

The act reunited, I went to see them at the Starwood, it was bizarre and creepy but a necessary pilgrimage nonetheless, because they were my heroes.

And Jan Berry was no loser, he had two years of medical school under his belt when he crashed his car.

And Dean Torrence went to USC and ultimately became a graphic designer responsible for the covers of some of your favorite LPs.

But somehow they’ve been forgotten to history, they’re in the rearview mirror.

And Brian Wilson’s deserving of all his accolades, but Jan Berry was no slouch, he too could write and produce. He was a true wunderkind.

And I doubt I’ll be able to convince those who were not there, but if you were, you remember it… When our heroes sang about a life we could all share, out in the elements, having FUN!

Rhinofy-Jan & Dean Prime

It’s staying light so late!

I know, it’s almost Memorial Day. But Memorial Day is no longer the 30th, or was it the 31st? I’m forgetting, it’s been too long since holidays became expedient, Monday affairs so everybody could have a long weekend.

Used to be it was Memorial Day that was hot, Labor Day cooled off.

But not in Los Angeles. I’ve gotten sick on more than one Memorial Day, dressing for hot when it turned out to be cold, shivering in my shorts.

Yes, summer is coming, and I’m not prepared for it. The hot days. Everybody going on vacation. I prefer to work. I want everyone home and paying attention.

But one thing I love is these long days. Although they are confusing me. I sit in front of the computer thinking I’ve got hours left in the day and then I look at the clock and it’s almost over!

It’s getting dark long after 8 in L.A. Long after 9 in Toronto. But it’s only going to last another month, and then the days will be getting shorter again, counting down the hours until Christmas, when we start going in the other direction again.

And when you’re young the world doesn’t spin fast enough.

But when you’re old, you want to slow it down.

I want it to stay light this late for a few months, I want to savor it. The yellow. The brightness. The feeling that life is all about endless possibilities.

And sure it’ll be hot in July and August, but every day will be a bit shorter, it will be depressing.

I can’t help think about growing up, playing baseball, I lived to play baseball, back when you told your mother you’d be home for dinner and walked out the front door to god knows where.

You’d get on your bike, I’d get on my bike and ride to the school where we’d play. Eventually Little League. Which began practice on April 1st and games at the end of the month. Which means you had to start throwing in March, to be ready.

But this was back before the Major League started in March and played until November. The season was over the first week of October and it rarely snowed in April.

And unlike today, we went to school through the middle of June, and never had to return until after Labor Day. Now everything’s sped up, kids are out in May and suddenly August is a school month. As for colleges, it seems they don’t even go to school at all.

And I never want to go back to school. You’re supposed to learn but too few of the teachers are stimulating, especially as you enter higher education. I prefer following my muse, my interests, that’s what I love about the Internet, the ability to dig down deep.

Do kids lie in the backyard and stare at the sky anymore? Marveling how the clouds move?

Do they take their sleeping bags out and look at the stars, and wake up to the sun long before their parents, and go inside and watch cartoons?

Wait, that was before it was a badge of honor to never sleep, when kids arose before parents, before adults boasted that they got up at 4:30, why would you want to get up so early? Don’t you love the night time?

I do. It’s when everything slows down, when the driven wind down and the night owls like me inherit the earth.

So much of my life is lived in the darkness. But not now. It’s like I’m in the bonus round, the recipient of a natural plus that thrills me, that I don’t want to let go of.

But it’s going to evaporate.

And at some point, I won’t even be here.

So I want to savor it. As those younger than me believe they’re going to live forever, but those of us wise enough to know better marvel at the simple things, knowing that possessions are overrated, that a German car is nice, but not necessary, that it’s what you feel inside that counts, because what you show to the outside no one’s looking at.