“I probably partied harder with REO Speedwagon.”

That’s what Neal Preston, photographer extraordinaire, said when I asked him what it was like riding on the Starship, Led Zeppelin’s legendary private jet. He said there were no groupies, very little coke, the main activity on the plane was SLEEP! That was another of Mr. Preston’s aphorisms, “Sleep is underrated!” He never got enough of it, no one did. Maybe two hours a night.

And you wonder why everybody’s on drugs. (They may not have been partaking on the Starship, but everywhere else…)

With the Internet and cable TV, our nation has become homogenized, but every once in a while you have one of those experiences that sets L.A. apart. Like yesterday, when I ascended into the hills to Preston’s house. Surrounded by canyons, with a view across the San Fernando Valley, this hilltop perch is right next door to…Anna Nicole Smith’s pad, where they shot her reality show. That’s L.A. Where few are behind gates and you can be famous but seen shopping at Ralphs.

So Neal grows up in Forest Hills and starts bringing his camera to shows and meets Gary Kurfirst and Shelly Finkel. And they allow him into their shows at the Singer Bowl and he hones his chops and instead of going to college he follows a girl to Los Angeles and as they say, the rest is history.

He gets a partner and they get a staff contract with Atlantic. He becomes best friends with Cameron Crowe and accompanies him on his “Rolling Stone” adventures. And he tells Danny Goldberg he wants to go on the road with Led Zeppelin, and months later he gets the call, he’s good to go.

Now you might think this is the dream of a lifetime. And it is, if you’re a music fan and have the constitution of a Navy Seal. Listening to Neal’s stories and reading his new iBook, you’re first and foremost impressed how much WORK was involved. We see the stars having fun, but not only do you have to earn your exalted position, there’s no such thing as teleportation, you’ve got to journey to all those arenas, you’ve got to come down from the adulation, you’re living in the eye of a hurricane with no perspective. Hopefully enduring the twenty-odd hours when you’re not on stage. Which are brutal.

“I’ve been around the world fifteen times, but I haven’t seen a thing.”

Oh, Neal walked on the Great Wall of China for twenty minutes, but he was so busy doing his gig, all he saw were hotel rooms, limos and arenas. He wants to go back, to Italy, to Russia, where he shot Billy Joel’s show, before he dies. And he’s not going to bring his camera. He never does. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a VACATION!

So we’re upstairs in the fading afternoon light, reviewing decades of rock history, and I’m reminded why I came to L.A., for this feeling, of not doing but living. Talking. In casual clothing. In a place where where you went to college is less important than how well you get along.

And then we went down two flights of stairs to the vault.

I saw pictures of Springsteen that would blow your mind. All the musicians. They were so YOUNG!

That was a very long time ago. When rock stars ruled the earth. When they were as rich as anybody and international heroes.

Like Led Zeppelin.

They were too successful. That’s what Danny Goldberg says in the iBook. FM radio blew them up and the elder statesman rock journalists backlashed. Yes, Danny had a brilliant insight, every three or four years is another musical generation, because that’s how long high school lasts. So pissed, Zeppelin cut off access to the press. Until in the early seventies they hired Danny, and he hired Neal.

And they weren’t the only ones. There was the promo person turned artist relations maven Daniel Markus with the worn out American Express card and the rolling papers with his initials imprinted upon them. And Janine Safer Whitney, the book’s secret weapon, who dropped out of Swarthmore to join the rock and roll circus. She’d booked the Pretty Things for a gig, and when they canceled claiming visa issues, she used a connection to the State Department to get them clearance. But it was all a ruse, there was no impediment. It was all a Swan Song lie. And when she called the office to complain, after ranting on and on, she was given a job.

But there weren’t many. It was a lean operation. Four musicians onstage, very few on the Starship. It wasn’t about the entourage, but money…and power.

And it was all masterminded by a retired wrestler with a big belly known as Peter Grant.

He believed in mystique, in restricted access. It was his band, all access went through him, he was the manager. You know the acts, but behind each and every one is a brilliant mastermind. Read the credits.

And the band raped and pillaged for a decade, before the irascible John Bonham expired. And everyone’s been at loose ends ever since.

Jimmy Page never regained his footing.

John Paul Jones receded even further into the background.

Robert Plant had a middling solo career and then repeated the Zeppelin formula with Alison Krauss, giving people not what they wanted, but what they needed.

And Peter Grant passed away.

And the music lived on.

And when music infects you, you want to get closer.

And despite my incessant questioning of Mr. Preston yesterday, I learned very little. Because it’s not observers who get these gigs, but workers. The musicians create, everybody else plays a role. Want to work for the band? Have no opinion and keep your lips tight. If you can’t get along, if you can’t keep a secret, we don’t want you.

And it was all a very long time ago. Neal’s since shot Nancy Kerrigan, the Olympics, a ton of stuff for “People.”

But that’s all news.

Led Zeppelin was art. And it’s art that remains.

And it’s not only the music, it’s the images.

These were truly rock gods. But instead of relying on a hand-me-down book generations old, the music is still pristine, and Preston’s images shock us into the past, we confront what once was and forever will be.

Neal Preston Photograph

“Led Zeppelin: Sound And Fury by Neal Preston”

I stole things.

Or as my father would say, I LIBERATED THEM!

That’s a term we used back in the sixties. It permeated the culture, kind of like “bling” and “baby mama” do today. Petty theft was seen as a way of sticking it to the man. But the stuff I stole would have no value to most people. I loved trail signs.

More archaic than today, less formulaic and more unique, ski trail signs were nailed to trees, and if you hiked up the mountain in the middle of summer, it was free pickings.

But not anymore.

You can steal stuff today, but you’re gonna get CAUGHT!

What did they say ten years ago, 9/11 changed everything?

Well that didn’t turn out to be true. But technology did.

Watching this week’s shenanigans in Boston was like having a ringside seat at the best movie ever made. One that reached out from the screen and scared you, just ask the people in Watertown.

It started with the information. Used to be you had to wait until the next day, at school or work. Or there was an interruption on television. But now you turn on your smartphone and something incomprehensible is transpiring. When I boarded the plane in Denver it was a slow, snowy day. When I landed in L.A, the sun was shining and all hell had broken loose. I was jumping from e-mail to tweet to newspaper site, what exactly was going on?

And my initial reaction was it wasn’t Muslim terrorists. I figured it was right wing crazies, a la Oklahoma City, I mean does the Boston Marathon fly on the radar screen of the Middle East?

But the nature of modern day America is you jump to conclusions. Especially on television, where the “news” channels do no reporting and all the talking heads do is bloviate. But I’m sophisticated enough to know how unsophisticated I truly am. I was sure Richard Jewell was responsible for the Olympic bombing in Hot Lanta. Come on, he was nervous and fidgety and he looked the part! I used to believe in the knee-jerk reaction, instant judgment. Ah, youth. But life is complicated and the longer you live the less you know, you realize that very rarely is the world cut and dried and you’ve got to keep foraging for information. If you’re not surprised on a regular basis, you’re not alive.

And the first surprise came Thursday night, when they revealed the bombers’ pictures.

Huh?

They looked like no one was watching. They’d seen too many movies. They thought there was nothing better than hiding in plain sight, acting like you’re innocent.

But that doesn’t work anymore.

In other words, if you’re going to break the law, if you’re going to commit a heinous crime, be prepared to die. Because the odds of escaping are close to nil, because now we’ve got CAMERAS!

Forget the ATMs, the security cameras attached to buildings, it was the casual snaps that delivered the definitive information. Instead of one Zapruder film, we can piece together seemingly any live event via crowdsourcing. P2P and social networks are not only for copyright infringement…

And then there was the Reddit thread. Wherein they identified one of the perps.

Only they didn’t. But to watch it play out in real time was mind-blowing. I couldn’t sleep for following the thread, was it really Sunil from Brown? Who’d disappeared and gone underground to commit this awful crime?

Turned out it wasn’t. But blind alleys are de rigueur in law enforcement. If you’re not willing to make mistakes, if you’re not willing to fail, you’ll never solve the mystery.

In other words, we were all in it together. Whether monitoring police scanners or sifting through websites, the entire country was focused on capturing the men in the photograph. And we got them.

Thank god. Hopefully the younger brother will live and we’ll get some answers.

But it ain’t your papa’s world anymore. It’s not even the twentieth century. Crime could be eradicated in our lifetimes. Well, not exactly, but unless you’re willing to sacrifice your life or want to get caught, you’re gonna hew to the straight and narrow.

You’ve given up your privacy.

Now you’ve got to manage your behavior. You’re building your resume from the instant you can type. Employers and universities will be combing for bad behavior. We live in “1984” already, it happened when we weren’t watching.

And the right wing nuts believe they need arms to fight the government.

You’re better off with a smartphone. Networking is more important than bullets. Information is king. The Man of the Year? It’s inanimate, it’s DATA!

Meanwhile, the movies have devolved to irrelevancy, fantastical creations focused on special effects with no credible connection to reality. While television knows it’s all about story. And politicians are beholden to the NRA and big money not knowing that it’s data that will trip them up.

What am I saying?

I’m not breaking any laws.

And most likely you aren’t either.

If you want to do something wrong, do it in the privacy of your own home, alone, in the dark.

P.S. In 2004, Bush defeated Kerry by playing the gay marriage card. Just ask John Glenn, Ohio was the linchpin. And not even a decade later, gay marriage is flourishing. And we’ve got a black President. Everything we thought impossible has not only happened in our lifetimes, there’s much more to come.

P.P.S. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. To be uninformed is to take yourself out of the equation. News comes from everywhere. Not only traditional outlets, but Twitter, websites, e-mail… Pre-internet most people were ignorant, you just didn’t know it. Today many more people are clued-in. And he who harnesses data wins.

Ajax. That’s what made Gmail work so seamlessly.

Greetings from the hot as hell San Fernando Valley wherein on my way to get a haircut in Dixie Canyon I drove by Freakbeat and saw a huge line for Record Store Day!

Gotta give ’em credit. Those record stores have built something out of thin air, via marketing, and tchotchkes. That’s what Record Store Day is about, souvenirs. And if you think that scales, you’re still clinging to your Blondie picture disc.

So I end up at Poquito Mas, and over a steak tostada I begin reading “Wired,” which I got a subscription to for ten bucks, but rarely has anything worth reading. And this is one of those stunt issues, you know mainstream publishing, they love lists and best ofs, pure content is not enough. This an alphabetical reading of the tech highlights of the past twenty years. And I know too much and they’re barely scratching the surface and then I get to Gmail.

You didn’t want web mail back in 2004. Even if you were on broadband. It just ran too slow. But somehow, Gmail was fluid, it worked fast. Why? I learned today! The aforementioned Ajax, “a JavaScript hack that lets web pages update without reloading.”

1. “Hack,” like “P2P,” has become a bad word. Funny how everything on the bleeding edge is castigated, but it’s there that innovation happens.

2. This proves my point about reading. I’ve talked about Gmail for nearly a decade, no one has ever revealed why it works so well. I just got my money’s worth from my “Wired” subscription, even better, I feel satiated, inspired, the same way I used to when my heroes revealed their truth in “Rolling Stone,” before entertainment became purely about the sell.

That’s the difference. Mainstream music is marketing. Tech is viral.

Tech is built upon a long foundation. Music is developed out of thin air.

The reason people cared about Gmail was because of Google. The search engine. Which magically did what no one had been able to manage before, deliver the results you wanted. It was just that simple. You had to tell your friends about it. Just like you told your friends about that band. Now the bands speak to the media and bombard the public with multiple impressions, hoping to hit you once, not realizing you’re hit multiple times and end up hating what’s being sold. It’s all top down, as opposed to ground up.

But the reason ground up doesn’t work in music is because the underlying source is just not good enough. That’s the key to virality, quality. And the goal of virality is to go from the personal to the universal.

That’s the tech game. How can I go from one to many? How can I produce something so good, it sells itself?

That used to be the music paradigm, but it hasn’t been in a long while. Instead we’ve just got thousands of wankers complaining that you won’t take the time to listen to their album and they can’t make any money. If you’re not laughing at this, you don’t have an inbox.

You start with a hit.

The iPod. The modern Apple is built upon it.

The aforementioned Google. And you can never rest on your laurels, you don’t tour the world for years cleaning up the dough from your hit, you go back to the drawing board and try to have another, you’re constantly innovating, you’re constantly expanding your base, or you die.

Companies die all the time, why can’t bands?

If you’re not trying to create something that catches fire all by its lonesome, whose greatness is spread by listeners, then you’re truly a niche player. And niches can be fun, but that’s not where the money, the fame and the glory are.

How many Googles are there?

One.

How many Apples?

One.

So why do you think the public has time for thousands of bands?

Oh, they’ve got time for a few, but that’s it.

P.S. The problem with Record Day is despite all the hype, most people don’t want physical music artifacts. There is a business selling these, but it’s niche. Same as vinyl. If you love your records, fantastic. But if you expect everybody else to love LPs, you’re delusional. As for the insane PR campaign that goes on ad infinitum, saying how vinyl’s making a comeback, there’s your mainstream marketing irrelevancy right there, check the statistics, vinyl hovers in the neighborhood of one percent of the market.

P.P.S. Think big. Think how you can get everybody interested and involved. If you’re not playing for everybody, you’re gonna be close to broke, or working for a living as opposed to relaxing.

P.P.P.S. The music business used to be the ultimate in scale. You made something for a minimum of money and then you could replicate it and sell it for years at a decreasing cost. The labels survived on catalog, which required no new investment. But catalog only sold if it was deemed worthy by the public. Otherwise, tracks were just recycled for pennies on compilations sold at gas stations.

P.P.P.P.S. Blame Clive Davis, blame Tommy Mottola. They realized marketing was more important than music. But that was in the last century, when we had so few options. Now, more than ever before, your success depends upon your music.

P.P.P.P.P.S. Unless playing live IS your act, go back and record instead of being on the road. Recordings keep your career alive. If you become really big, you can rake in dough by playing the summer festival circuit. In other words, if you’re the Grateful Dead or Phish, recordings are close to irrelevant. But unless your stage show is different every night, an experience that changes people’s lives, focus on the music, not the show.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Just because Internet blowhards said for years that the new paradigm is to give away your music and make it up on live performances and merchandise, don’t believe them. Hell, unless you’re a superstar, there’s more money in a successful YouTube video. Just because recording revenue tanked, that does not mean new opportunities have not arisen. The money’s on the bleeding edge. As for recordings, the sun is setting on the pirate era, streaming is just too easy, and on streaming services everything is available, so how do you rise above, via marketing, no, through music!

To read about the origins of Gmail, go to this page and click on the Gmail link: wired-20th-anniversary

Line outside Freakbeat Records

What kind of crazy fucked up world do we live in where a single track trumps an entire rock festival? One in which Daft Punk releases its new single on the second weekend of Coachella.

Not that the two are not intertwined.

But that’s the power of music, that’s the power of one recorded track.

The buzz has been building, it’s at a fever pitch. And if upon first listen you believe “Get Lucky” lives up to the hype, you’re lying. But something curious happens as you continue to listen, you get hooked.

At first you don’t know whether it’s an outtake from “Saturday Night Fever,” a highly-skilled SNL skit or… The verse vocal sounds like something from Peter Lemongello, and then you hear the swelling vocals in the chorus and you say THAT’S TODAY’S DANCE MUSIC!

And to think we all claimed disco sucked back in ’79! Wiped it from the face of the earth to make us feel self-satisfied, denying the magic of Prince’s “Dirty Mind,” which was basically distilled disco. In other words, that which you hate today you’re gonna love tomorrow.

And you’re gonna love “Get Lucky.”

And the person who’s gonna hook you is Nile Rodgers.

Huh? The has-been disco star who went on to produce rock records and then disappear, who was last seen on a creepy cancer victory lap, selling a book, the last stop of those who’ve exhausted all other options?

Maybe because dance music is faceless. You can be old, young, fat or thin, it doesn’t matter. Hell, doesn’t the music set you free anyway? Throw off your inhibitions?

“Get Lucky” is the song of the summer, and it’s still SPRING!

Repeatability. Something you want to hear again. That’s a hit. Whether radio plays it or not, whether the press writes about it or not, “Get Lucky” is gonna be unavoidable in the clubs, at the beach, because not only is it infectious, it makes you feel GOOD!

I know, I know, you hate dance music and everything it stands for. But the problem with Brooklyn music is it’s too cerebral, you’ve got to think about it to like it.

And Top Forty music is too calculated, the artist is just a two-dimensional face atop the calculated work of old people who need the money to feed their lifestyle, to make their car payments and private school tuition.

And I’d like to tell you “Get Lucky” is revolutionary, but it’s just a distillation of what came before, but without the kitchen sink, it’s pretty simple.

And the magic comes in at 2:20. When you hear Nile’s influence.

And speaking of has-beens, has there been a delay in the transatlantic cable? Pharrell?

Then again, the last time Daft Punk put out a new record we all didn’t have smartphones.

So what have we learned?

1. Daft Punk earned it. They say you’ve got to be young, you’ve got to be fresh, you’ve got to be new. But none of that applies if you want to last.

2. Don’t equate mainstream press with ubiquity, never mind success. Most acts are on the front page for a day, and then they’re gone, like my favorite whipping boy, David Bowie. Read ANYTHING about his new record in weeks? Bowie made a mistake, the marketing campaign was better than the music, and at the end of the day it’s what goes into your ears, not your eyes. Daft Punk never peaked, but they’ve been on the lips of not only hipsters for years.

3. Less is more. Sure, there was the SNL teaser, the Coachella video, but these strategic strikes eclipsed Justin Timberlake’s scorched earth publicity campaign. We don’t want to be beat upon the head, we want to meet you halfway.

4. The publicity campaign did not work without the history. Contrary to the Davis/Mottola paradigm, you don’t front-load any longer. If you want to last, if you want to get rich, you grow slowly, you percolate, which seems antithetical in this here today and gone tomorrow era, but that’s just the point! You don’t want to be flavor of the moment, if you peak, you want it to be deep into your career.

5. The game is about listenability and repeatability. It’s not whether someone says your track is good or bad, but whether they say PLAY THAT AGAIN! That’s the reaction you want.

6. None of the above is an adequate explanation. There’s just a way “Get Lucky” affects you, that’s its magic. It’s a drug with no aftertaste, no hangover. Other than euphoria!

Get Lucky – YouTube

Get Lucky – Spotify