I don’t want to tweet. It’s like pissing off a cliff in the dark. No one sees it and you risk getting yourself wet. At best, you screw up and become a pariah. Which is why Twitter is a sea of dropouts and the fawning press trumpeting its IPO doesn’t realize that sites built upon the backs of users are fads. In other words, you’re better off buying Apple, unless you’re a Wall Street pro who buys low and gets out early.

How did it come to this?

Like every fad, once upon a time Twitter was cool. You know how it works, you hear about something from your hipster friends, you say you don’t need it but eventually you dive in, love it and then abandon it. Come on, how often do you update your Facebook page now?

Furthermore, those who fan the flames of cool, the young ‘uns, are always on the hunt for the latest and the greatest, moving on to new social networks their parents are unaware of, only to abandon them when they fall out of favor, or when everybody else is there, or lose their cred.

Do we need a real time news service? One in which we can learn the comings and goings of those we’re interested in and facts from the street from the millions of reporters that the traditional media industry cannot provide?

Yes.

So you’ll find out the world ended first on Twitter.

But you won’t get any analysis. That’s hard to do in 140 characters.

You might even find out your favorite singer got hitched or busted or smashed his or her car in a DUI.

But do we really want to know the comings and goings of everyday people?

No.

Call it the blockbuster mentality. We’re not interested in what most people do, only a few.

Remember when every day your inbox was cluttered with a joke? I haven’t gotten one in years. Because people were thrilled they could connect with old friends from around the world, but they really didn’t have much to say past the initial greeting, so they sent jokes. But now everybody expects to be in contact with everybody they ever knew all the time. So there are no jokes. E-mail is for business. Maybe personal, but people complain when their inbox is being cluttered.

Facebook was cool for a minute because you could hook up with those you’d lost touch with and burnish your own self-image, trying to tell your high school buddies you’d won. But then you realized that once you graduated, no one really cared. As a result, it’s only a hard core who are Facebooking today.

And there’s only a hard core who are tweeting.

I’ve about given up. Because unless I reach deep down inside, try to be witty and viral all the time, unless I consider it my job, almost nothing I have to say will be seen by almost anybody, and it’s just too frustrating to continue. So I’ve dropped out. And so have so many others. Oh, we’ve still got Albert Brooks and Kelly Oxford, but so many I used to follow have gone silent.

To be replaced by newbies with even less to say. Who believe if they just keep tweeting something good will happen to them. But we’ve already forgotten about the kings and queens of MySpace. And if you’re not frustrated with counter games, you’re not playing.

You know what I mean… How many friends do you have? How many likes? How many followers? I mean I competed in high school to get into a good college, grade-grubbing all the way. I gave that up when I got to Middlebury, you want me to play that game again now?

Yup, if I’ve got a low count I’m nobody and there’s always someone with more followers. Either I can stay up at night dreaming how to raise my count or I can get frustrated and leave the arena. Because Twitter followers are like virtual badges, they’re ultimately meaningless. You stop playing that video game, the slate is wiped clean. It’s not like being the king of Twitter pays.

And so many of the tweets are personal preference. Everybody in America is lonely and looking to be important. They believe someone is interested in their travails when the truth is we all live in silos, unless you’re truly famous, which comes with its own set of downsides.

And the news people are trumpeting this stuff you can live without. Links to some blog or videoclip done by some hack with no impact. Or else it’s the same viral sensation you’re already aware of, like that video about the fox. And then the mainstream media hypes the same damn thing making like it’s important when it’s truly not.

But don’t get me started on viral videos. Used to be if you had 700,000 views I was wowed. Then a couple million. Today if you don’t have ten million views of your video I’m shrugging my shoulders. You’re just a drop in the ocean. The standards have risen.

That’s what’s happened all over the world. The exceptional have won and those below just can’t. It’s just like income inequality. But since too many people can’t work or are underemployed they believe if they win in one of these fake games online, like Twitter, then their lives will be worth living.

Yes, Twitter is the new reality TV, only with a lot fewer viewers and not even scale pay.

The Internet has turned into a giant game that everybody’s trying to win at and few can. Remember when everybody was gonna have a Webpage, then a blog? How long do you think they’re gonna be interested in Tumblr or Pinterest? Remember how long Turntable.fm lasted?

So I won’t say there’s nothing there at Twitter. There is a kernel. A nugget. But following people is time-consuming, and ever less fulfilling. As for participating yourself, why would you?

Is it any wonder the world has been taken over by nerds?

It’s the nerds who are outcasts, the nerds who are bullied. If you’re everybody’s friend, chances are you’re not making a difference, at least not artistically.

Once upon a time, during the baby boomer era, being different was a badge of honor. Yes, that’s one thing the boomers got right. But their kids, brought up in an era where you got trophies just for participating, are afraid to stand out, they’re all about their network of friends, they don’t want to be ostracized. And that’s one of the reasons music is so bad.

What?

Yes, music is best when it’s spearheaded by outsiders. Certainly not suits who believe they know best. The Beatles refused to do another’s material and insisted on doing their own and “Please Please Me” went to number one. They weren’t afraid to go their own way.

Don’t confuse this with believing you know better. Like a child who thinks he knows more than his dad. I’m talking about questioning authority.

Everyone’s afraid to lose friends. Everyone’s afraid to stand out. Everyone’s afraid of criticism. Hell, kids don’t raise their hands in class because they don’t want to be seen as different, as know-it-alls, better off to play dumb.

Was John Lennon dumb?

John Lennon spoke the truth, that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. Religious zealots freaked out and burned their albums, but that’s how big the Beatles truly were.

Oh, today we’ve got acts that get in trouble with the law, but that’s not the same thing.

We’re looking for the new and the different and if you don’t have people dropping their jaws, chances are you’re not going to last, you probably won’t even be big.

Furthermore, just because no one likes your music, that does not mean you’re on the right path. The key is to be different AND liked. Nothing previous sounded like Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn,” but it was a huge hit. Steely Dan was twisted, but they were embraced by a public that believed it hated the jazz influences Steely Dan was selling.

And if you’re ahead of the game, expect to be excoriated.

All those people who believed they’d never listen to music on computers, that CDs were best… Try taking away their iPhones, their Sonos systems. No one complains as loud as a Luddite, remember that.

So if you’re not experiencing resistance, if you don’t find people trying to rein you in, chances are you’re not shooting high enough.

Dare to be unpopular.

Because that’s where the germ of true popularity begins.

It’s money. And time.

And quality matters, but not as much as the fact that everything’s available. For free.

Do you remember going to the record store? It was a thrilling experience, but also a disappointing one. Because you could not afford everything you wanted. You scanned through the new releases, you thumbed through the catalog, and you slowly started to formulate exactly what you would purchase.

Oh, back in the sixties, it was all about singles. The Beatles broke that curse and made it so the whole country, the whole WORLD, was album crazy. But MTV and the CD brought us back to the single, the only difference being you had to buy an entire CD just to hear it, but the album era was very brief, from ’67 to ’77, when disco came along to obliterate corporate rock.

I’m not saying you didn’t enjoy your albums thereafter. But suddenly, it was more satisfying to watch MTV than to turn it off and play your LPs. Because media, when done right, is all about the club. Not only the one you go to dance your ass off, but the mental one, that makes you believe you belong. That’s what the album era was all about, belonging. You played every cut, sang along in concert and felt a bond with not only the act, but the audience.

And then the Internet comes along and blows it all to pieces.

You used to look forward to the new releases, you wanted to hear what your favorite acts had to say. Other than some squibs in print, you were completely clueless as to what they were up to. But today, no one ever really goes away. They’re available on Facebook, Twitter, even Instagram! Never mind their Websites, which are a cornucopia of information.

After buying your favorite new release, or catalog album, you played it. You paid for it. You had an investment. And no one likes to be a poor investor. You never hear anybody boasting of their losses in Vegas, their lousy stock picks. No, you have to prove to yourself that you made a good decision. So you scoured the album looking for that which hooked you. It sometimes took two or three plays, but by then there was a track that pricked your ears, made you smile, you started playing that side again and again. And when you knew it well, then you flipped over the LP or cassette to learn the other. And when the band came to town, you went. It was cheap. Way under ten bucks. And you were in nirvana as they played your favorite songs. And you knew you had to go to every show, because most of the new album would never be played live again.

But now when the album comes out, it costs you nothing to hear it. Whether on Spotify or YouTube. You dial it up and… You’re rarely impressed. Because the acts don’t realize the era has changed. That good enough is not good enough. That they’ve got to smash us over the head with insane quality. Otherwise…it’s not exactly like we get bored, we just know what else is lurking, cuts that will satisfy us.

And even the albums of your favorite acts… You don’t play those that much either. Not so much because they’re substandard, but mostly because if you play them, you can’t play something else. And there’s so much else you want to play.

But they’re not making more time.

And it used to be all about what was new. The edge. Now it’s about what maintains. If you like something and nobody else does…you go look at what they do. You don’t want to attach yourself to that which has been plowed under by the plethora of product.

It’s got more to do with distribution than product. With the candy store door wide open, with the stock chock full 24/7, there’s no desperation. Remember when you had to rush to the store because your favorite album might sell out? Boy, those days are through. As are worrying about price. You don’t wait for the sale, everything’s on sale all the time!

And of course iTunes and Amazon have sales. But if you’re buying MP3s you’re little different from those buying CDs. A step behind the rest. Everybody else is streaming.

And of course there are a few acts where everybody knows all the tunes. But most people only know the singles. It’s one of the reasons the old acts do so well in concert, everybody knows the material!

And of course there are niches, a small group of people who know every note. But a lot of the time this is more about identity, belonging, a badge of honor, than the quality of the music. You know, they tell you how they listen to something incessantly and then you spin it and you say HUH? In the old days, you’d have bought it and played it too, because spending money meant you spun it. But in the old days there was so much less music. The entry bar was so much higher. The relative quality was much greater. And isn’t it funny that all those sour grapes acts that said they were squeezed out of the system have not emerged triumphant? Yes, in the Internet era everybody can play, everybody can distribute, but it’s a thin layer of mostly major label acts who succeed, because most acts are just not good enough to gain mainstream acceptance/success.

But, since there’s so much in the pipeline, we gravitate to excellence, even fewer acts break through on a big basis. It’s even harder to reach critical mass.

And of course I miss the old days.

But they’re never coming back.

It cemented Randy Rhoads’s reputation and made me like Ozzy Osbourne all at the same time. Yes, I’m one of those naysayers who doesn’t really care that much for the Prince of Darkness in his original band Black Sabbath, I prefer the solo act. But just like that band in its present incarnation is sans its drummer, the band that cut “Flying High Again” can never reunite, because Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake have been excommunicated and Randy Rhoads is dead.

Randy Rhoads… He played in an L.A. band with a Japanese deal that could never break outside the Basin. Yes, by time Quiet Riot banged its head all over America, getting everybody to feel the noise, Randy was long gone. You can’t keep a superstar down. And the best players always leave, unless they’re the band, and if they’re not the lead singer, they’re not.

So Black Sabbath comes from left field with its debut, out-heavying everybody out there, and then starts fading not long thereafter, still making records, but soon losing quality, certainly after “Paranoid.” Then Ozzy gets kicked out and goes solo, like we care. But suddenly, people did.

You’ve got to understand, L.A. was the king of rock radio. We had so many FM rock stations, it was almost like SiriusXM. We had the soft rock of KNX at 93.1 all the way up to KWST, aka “the Led Zeppelin station,” up at 105.9 and KROQ, the home of alternative, even further up the dial. And right smack dab in the middle were the reigning champions. The hip KMET 94.7 and the conservative me-too outlet KLOS at 95.5. And when you hit the weekend, KMET, KLOS and KWST turned it up, in a war for rock supremacy. This is when you heard Foghat, when if it was slow and easy, they didn’t play it. And suddenly I started to hear this song again and again. I soon realized it was Ozzy, I recognized the vocal sound, but I could never figure out its name. There was no Internet. You’d comb the albums in the store, but how was I to know it was entitled “Flying High Again”? You just couldn’t make out the words through the car speaker. But the hypnotic groove and Randy Rhoads snaking his way up and down the fretboard starting at 2:20, ultimately peeling off the notes so fast and so right, made it so you could never forget this track. Time passed, I started to look forward to the weekend, when I could hear this song once again.

It’s the blistering guitarwork. But it’s also Ozzy saying “Here we go now…”

Oh no, it’s loud guitars and Marshall amps and a sound so deafening half the audience dismisses it on principle. That’s why people love metal. Hell, it got faster and noisier as the years passed by, but you can’t find a single tattooed gunslinger who will not admit to positively loving Ozzy Osbourne and his work with Randy Rhoads.

Oh, according to Daisley and Kerslake, the former wrote a bunch of the music and most of the lyrics on “Diary Of A Madman,” and the latter was mostly responsible for “Flying High Again.” And eventually their dissatisfaction with credit and compensation had Sharon wiping their work from the album, but now it’s been restored, so it’s the same as it ever was.

But it’s completely unlike the sound of that band that uttered those lyrics. Yes, while Talking Heads were leading an alternative/new wave revolution, Ozzy was heading further into the hard rock wilderness, and the funny thing is it’s his music that’s remembered most.

What you want at the show is to be totally enraptured, to become one with the music. And the performance counts, but it starts with the material. “Flying High Again” has got more twists and turns than a roller coaster, it’s a ride for only the hearty, who enjoy it so much they don’t get off, they keep riding. When you hear “Flying High Again” at the show, you raise your arms in the air, you bang your head, you feel like someone finally gets you!

Daddy thinks I’m crazy he don’t understand
Never saw inside my head
People think I’m crazy but I’m in demand
Never heard a thing I said

Exactly. They never understand, they stop listening, meanwhile their progeny sneaks out at night, following the Pied Pipers of the new sound, which cannot be denied.

Yes, once upon a time, before MTV, before the facelift, Ozzy Osbourne was dangerous. And we loved him for it.

But even more, we loved his music.

Rhinofy-Flying High Again