She’s mentally ill.

That’s what they don’t tell you about so many of your heroes, the rock stars of yore, their hold on reality is very tenuous. I’m not saying that Shocked should be forgiven, that her comments were either valid or the right thing to say, but you must look at them through the prism of the person. And that person is…someone I found it impossible to connect with in my one sit-down meeting with her at a boba shop on Western Avenue about a decade ago.

Psychiatrists call it “tracking.” Can someone tell a story and stay on point. Can you have a dialog that is linear. I’m not saying that everyone has to agree with me, but when we can’t communicate, that’s an issue. And I found that the most basic of discussions was difficult with Ms. Shocked.

Now I’m not a doctor. And let’s dismiss the online reference to Ms. Shocked’s mother committing her to a mental hospital. Let’s just say there’s background here, just like there is in the banking crisis in Cyprus. What appears one way on the surface might be completely different when you investigate the underlying facts, like Cyprus banks were a haven for the money of Russian oligarchs, who received a return there that was impossible to find in the United States, never mind other financially-challenged nations.

We think these artists are two-dimensional. We want them to open wounds and reveal all, but we want to treat them like cardboard cut-outs, without feelings, without dimensions. Actually, I’ll posit the greater the artist, the looser their grip on reality. There’s no more talented artist than Joni Mitchell, but conversation with her is extremely difficult. It’s hard to get to the meat of the matter for Joni challenging and interrupting your premise, however irrelevant.

Not that I speak with Joni all the time. But I’ve had a few interactions. Not that she’s crazy, but I will say she’s difficult. Then again, she made the best self-confessional music of all time. Furthermore, she can play and sing and write. Do you think a normal person can do this?

OF COURSE NOT!

A normal person plays it close to the vest, is manipulative, whereas an artist is out there completely, warts and all. Artists need representation because they can’t fathom the manipulation of business, they need protection.

And so does Michelle Shocked.

At this point in her career, the handlers have evaporated. It’s just her against the world. Whatever she’s doing to keep herself together, even if it’s religion, is fine by me. It’s a hard life, you do what you can to get through.

As for her comments… Inexcusable.

But she deserves another chance.

And help.

My mother went to Radio Shack.

Can someone please explain why this chain exists? To sell substandard items to the ignorant? To be a reseller of perpetually behind the times Sprint wireless? Back in the sixties, when a storefront was everything, you went to Radio Shack as a hobbyist, to buy stuff to build stuff, or for odds and ends that no one seemed to stock (sometimes the same thing), and to get a free battery. Yes, they had a club, with a card, you got one free battery a month. Remember when people wanted D’s? Now everybody wants double or triple A’s!

No, I’m not talking about bra size, but you know that’s coming. Remember when big lips were offensive? Now you’ve got everybody in pursuit of Lisa Rinna, ruining their face to obtain a paragon of beauty no one from the opposite sex adores. As for big rear ends… This is still flummoxing women throughout America. Do you want to be J. Lo or Kim K. or should you have a tush as tiny and flat as a boy’s? Looks are fashion. But they don’t sell fashion at Radio Shack.

Then again, they do. The inventory is completely different every time you go there. Well, not quite. I go there once a decade, to buy something in person that just doesn’t make sense on the web. Then again, I never buy anything, because the help is so ignorant I already know more than they do and it seems that whatever I’m looking at doesn’t fit my bill.

Ah, the problem of inventory. How do you stock what everybody wants without going out of business from the carrying charges?

So my phone rings. Just as I walk in the door. And I’m in a rush. I’ve got a lot to accomplish in very little time and I’m leaving on a jet plane tomorrow, but it’s my MOTHER! Get old enough, and you never blow your mom off. Or let me say that THEY get old enough and you realize they’re not here forever and you’re worried that the one time you don’t take their call, the next one is that they’ve passed and you’re forever haunted by your decision to put yourself first, instead of them, that last interaction, or lack thereof, haunts you forever.

So, I take the call. Since now we always know who’s calling, since we can see the name on the screen. Hell, if I see digits only on my cell phone, I don’t pick up. It’s like Seth Godin says, we live in a permission society. If I don’t know you, if we don’t have a preexisting relationship, my door is closed.

But it’s my mom. And she wants a phone.

Now I already bought her a three handset Panasonic last year. But now she wants a handset for her bathroom. And this might sound like luxury to you, but my mother uses a walker, not that you’d know this if you had her on the phone, she’s the most vibrant 86 year old you’ll ever meet, and she still loves to travel, she’s treated like royalty at the airport, schlepped around in a wheelchair, but if the phone rings and she’s in the loo…she’s never gonna reach it. Ergo, the desire for a phone in the bathroom.

And I’m of two minds. Either I handle things immediately, or almost never. And since it’s my mom, I decide to jump right on this.

And boy is it confusing.

I go to the Panasonic site, that’s where you start your research, at the manufacturer’s page, to get the lay of the land. And I’m the kind of customer who needs the best, and the best phones are not that expensive, so I click on the DECT 6.0 Plus. Makes me crazy when people are cheap. Buy an inexpensive phone and then no one can hear you for years, but you saved ten bucks! Kind of like iPhones, my mother’s got one of those, she’s hip, you buy it and you can use it. Buy an Android and unless you’re a geek, you can do very little. Save the hate mail, statistics are on my side. Bottom line, I’m looking for the best phone.

But it’s only a satellite. An outpost in the condominium. Do I really need the absolute best? After all, my mother started off at RADIO SHACK! A DECT 6.0 is probably good enough.

And all these major companies have bad websites. They should just hire the guy who did Apple’s and be done with it. Comparing products is a nightmare. Not the chart you get after you click through, but finding where the buttons are, learning after the fact that you can only compare three items at a time. Huh?

But I finally nail it down.

And I call my mother. She said she wanted white. There is no white. Silver or black?

SILVER!

Easy.

But you’ve got to know me. The odds of me buying something on the first pass through are essentially nil. I can’t make a mistake. So I decide to pull up the original invoice, from a year ago, to check compatibility.

THANK GOD! Turns out the original phones are DECT 6.0 Plus, and I’ve got to start all over again. And there is no silver. And do I pay five bucks extra for a bigger white screen? After all, my mother’s eyesight is not so good, and the old phones are white.

So I call my mother back. Hell, I’m talking to her more in one day than I did in months in college.

And I whittle it down, I go for the expensive item, with the big screen, and then I go to buy it on Amazon.

The pictures and model numbers don’t match.

Huh?

This is my mother. She’s not tech-savvy. She’s not going to return, hell, she doesn’t even drive anymore, she’s not going to the post office. And we’re only talking about forty bucks anyway.

And all the prices are different on Amazon. And I might as well get free shipping, but if you buy direct from Amazon…they don’t have the identical model.

So I decide to buy from Panasonic’s site. Hell, the prices are the same. What a win for the Japanese company, they’re cutting out the middle man! If you’re selling, make sure people can buy from your site, at a fair price…

But I’ve got to go through the rigmarole of entering all my information, my address and my credit card, and I don’t understand why it ships in 1-3 days, either they have it or they don’t, Amazon ships right away, but I click through and I’m done.

Forty minutes later.

Which seems like a waste of time.

But if I’d bought an incompatible item, that truly would have been a waste of time!

And I’m thinking how it’s every man for himself these days. How you have to do all the work.

Then again, the prices are cheap and the expert at the store, like at the aforementioned Radio Shack, usually is not.

Still, it’s amazing what’s at our fingertips these days. It’s hard to succeed with smoke and mirrors. Hell, that’s what killed the album, not piracy, but the bad value proposition, thirteen bucks for one good song?

So everyone laments the passage of the good old days.

And in some respects they were so damn good.

But I like today better. Because our society is run on information. And it’s all on your screen. Want to win? Stop tweeting and Facebooking and read. Everything you want to know about how the world works is right in front of your face, for free. You can win. If you put in the time.

So you’re fifteen years old. You haven’t got a driver’s license, but you’ve got a computer, an iPad and an iPhone. Your parents insist you do well in school, you’re on the advanced placement track. Worldly in a way your parents, no generation was at your age previously, you see that we live in a society of winners and losers, and you don’t want the short end of the stick. So what do you do in your limited free time? Play the guitar? Sing in a band? Those odds are horrendous, almost no one succeeds, you’re dependent on too many others, and success never lasts. No, you develop an app, you pursue your tech dreams.

People in the music business don’t like this. They want you to believe the tunes are as good as they ever were, and if you challenge them, they say you’re too old, you listened to crap too, like the Beatles, the Stones, Elton John… They want you to believe that Justin Timberlake is a national star. That what’s on Top Forty is universal. That Justin Bieber is forever. They’re delusional. The game has changed.

Once upon a time Top Forty radio was everything. It was your best friend. Want to know why it burgeoned? TRANSISTOR RADIOS! That was your heart’s desire in the sixties, not an iPod, computers were something incomprehensible that filled whole rooms, you just wanted the tiny box that streamed your music via your best friend, the deejay. And when the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, all cheeky, having honed their wares for years, the whole nation went nuts, everybody picked up a guitar to get some of what they had, fame, riches, and sex. There are a lot easier ways to be rich, famous and get laid today, which is why the best and the brightest don’t go into music.

The baby boomers sustained the business during the classic rock era, the early seventies, with FM and arena and stadium shows, but then the whole thing collapsed and was resuscitated by MTV and then the Internet blew a hole in the music business so wide that those still in it can’t see it. The center is gone. The glue has melted away. Nothing SCALES!

Let’s start with this week’s big music business story. Justin Timberlake’s sale of almost a million albums. At wholesale, that’s not quite ten million dollars. David Bowie debuts with 85,000 albums, but this week he only sold 23,000, everybody who truly cares bought it, there’s no virality. Bon Jovi’s new album dropped by nearly 70% in its second week. If you think Bowie or Bon Jovi or even Justin Timberlake is going up from here, you’re delusional.

Hell, the only person who went up from here was Adele. Whose album sold purely on its music, she disdained almost all hype, the audience embraced it, everybody knows it, it scaled.

The reason Summly sold for $30 million is because the potential audience is EVERYBODY! That’s what musicians just don’t get. They’re still living in an antique universe wherein if you’re anointed, you sell tonnage and get rich. Where exactly is that vehicle again? Radio is moribund and MTV plays no videos. There is no space program. Your only hope is to be the next Beatles, i.e. Adele, to create something undeniable, but all we’ve got is made by committee fads. Want to hear the next PSY record? NO, OF COURSE NOT! “Suit & Tie” was a radio stiff, like the initial Justin Bieber track from his new album, until the label muscled it up the chart. Justin Bieber is already over, he just doesn’t know it yet. As for Mr. Timberlake… Do you expect multiple singles over the course of a year? Could happen, but reviews have been positively mediocre. Mr. Timberlake’s success seems due to marketing prowess and likability. And that’ll get you in the door, but it won’t sustain you.

So we’ve got a disconnect. An industry that says piracy is bringing it to its knees when nothing could be further from the truth. Piracy is history in the music business. Why bother to steal when you can hear everything on YouTube for free? Sales suck because most people don’t need the product, or want to spend their cash on something more desirable, like a data plan for their iPhone.

What we’ve got to confront is the old days are gone and may never come back. The reason “American Idol” worked is because it SCALED! You could reach the masses with something new, you could break…two acts. Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood. After that, it was all about television, drama as opposed to music. Will there be another paradigm that blasts music to the top?

Possibly.

But where’s the audience? The audience respects innovation and excellence, which is delivered constantly in tech, but is rare in music.

And where’s the music?

We’ve got Adele at ten million, and then just about nobody else. Taylor Swift used to lead with her music, but now she’s lost control of her career, it’s about the tabloids as opposed to the tunes. And we all know soon Kim Kardashian will wake up with Kanye’s kid and nobody will care, hell, her TV show’s ratings are already tanking.

I’m not saying there are no good acts. I’m not saying you’re not entitled to love new music. But I am saying that most acts playing today are clueless. They want to enter the space program, not realizing it’s been dismantled. If you can’t sing and your tunes are crummy, or esoteric, do you think everybody’s gonna care?

OF COURSE NOT!

Festivals are the new radio. And festivals are bigger than any acts that appear. Festivals have scaled, but the acts have not. Isn’t that interesting… It’s more about the vibe at the show as opposed to any of the individual music. And what do we know about festivals? They’re whored out to sponsors. Just like the acts. Everybody in the music business is a second class citizen. And the public knows it. Which undercuts the ability to scale.

So what you’ve got is a teenage Englander who sits at home and changes the world.

Isn’t that what musicians used to do?

“He Has Millions and a New Job at Yahoo. Soon, He’ll Be 18“

Oh, I know, it’s not cool to like Toto. Just ask my buddy Steve Lukather, he’s gotten so much abuse he’s got a hair trigger, if you bring up the band’s name he figures you’re going to complain.

But I’m not.

Hell, I don’t even own a copy of “IV,” you didn’t have to! “Rosanna” was all over the radio! It was ubiquitous!

But it’s Lukather’s solo composition that I still want to listen to all these years later. Oh, and “Make Believe”… Hell, that’s how I go to know Steve. I wrote how much I loved hearing it on XM, despite its kinda corny, kinda stupid lyrics, and Steve took offense…and I told him that this was about as positive as I get!

And I still love hearing “Make Believe”… It’s the David Paich piano intro, the saxophone, the track positively SWINGS! On paper it’s nothing, but on wax it puts you in an exquisite mood and lifts you out of your seat. And then there’s the break…

Always remember…
The day we met in the pouring rain

It’s so SUNNY! Oh, I know it’s dark and precipitating, but music when done right embodies joy, and you can hear it in this cut. Hell, listening to it I make believe my life has no pitfalls, that it’s an endless highway of good times.

But “Make Believe” is not the track I’m writing about.

Once again, the piano sets the mood. This is heavy, this is meaningful. And the strings…arranged by David Paich’s father, Marty…when was the last time you heard a real orchestra on a pop record?

And the verses are sincere, but it’s the way they’re sung that truly resonates, like Steve is singing from the depths of his heart, that he really means it.

But what puts the track over the top is the chorus…

You know I won’t hold you back now
The love we had just can’t be found
You know I can’t hold you back now

It’s the way the words are EMPHASIZED!

And the way the strings swirl. And the piano fills.

And the way the whole band comes in before the last line…and then drops out.

But first and foremost, it’s about TIMOTHY B. SCHMIT’S VOICE!

Background vocals. They never get any respect. But Crosby & Nash sweetened James Taylor’s records, Flo & Eddie added beauty to Zappa’s material, and here Timothy B. truly delivers. Oh, there’s ultimately a great Lukather solo, the recording works on every level, but what puts it over the top is TIMOTHY B!

The little things matter.

Sure, you’ve got to write the song. You’ve got to be able to play. But sometimes the littlest sound, the littlest vocal, makes all the difference.

And I’m sure Mr. Schmit didn’t get a royalty, he doesn’t go to sleep thinking about “I Won’t Hold You Back,” but he made it a hit!

Ain’t that music. We hear something and are bonded to it and oftentimes it’s years later before we realize exactly why.

I heard this on the satellite minutes ago.

But it’s only when I pulled it up on Spotify, on the good speakers, that it all became clear…IT’S ABOUT TIMOTHY B!

Rhinofy-I Won’t Hold You Back

Previous Rhinofy playlists