He does have a website.

But it doesn’t show up on the first page of Google, the only one that counts.

Actually, I went all the way to page 14 of Google and I still didn’t find it, even though I did see the link for the Clive Davis Institute at NYU on page 7.

In other words, his publisher, Simon & Schuster, is completely clueless when it comes to SEO, otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization.

You see Clive obviously just launched this site, and therefore it hasn’t had time to float up to page 1, there aren’t enough links. Then again, we all know how Google works, and seemingly all the old farts are clueless.

Yes, a bunch of the pages of Google are filled up with news reports of his coming out.

Then again, is this where this kind of news is broken anymore? Don’t you come out on Twitter, announce big news there yourself?

But I already said that.

Clive thinks he’s selling a record. He saved all his publicity for the launch to have a big first sales week to impress everybody in NYC. But the big hit book of the year was “Gone Girl,” which started off slowly and is still up in the Top Five, number two on most lists, nearly a year later.

Oh, when will the old folks learn.

It’s not about publicity, it’s about the book itself, what’s inside the covers.

And I can’t tell you what’s there, because I only got my copy today.

But all the buzz is bad. It’s hagiography.

And that worked in the 1970s, when Clive had his first book. But if you’re not willing to tell the truth today, people move on.

First and foremost, is the book readable? As in well-written.

Second, are the stories interesting?

Too many of these celebrity tomes are self-serving. For fans only. I’ve yet to find one person who thought the Neil Young book was any good.

Then again, people still testify about the Andre Agassi book. Because he said what was truly inside. And utilized a grade A ghostwriter, who didn’t pen celebrity bios for a living and refused to take credit.

This is all just a tempest in a teapot. We’re not going to be talking about this next week, never mind tomorrow.

But music, when done right, survives.

And, unfortunately, too much of the crap that Clive put out on Arista isn’t worth listening to today, and isn’t. Played your Kenny G records recently?

And I think Mr. Gorelick has been unfairly maligned. He’s got a sense of humor about himself. Unlike his mentor.

But now, more than ever, it comes down to what’s in the grooves.

Give Clive credit, he realized one thing, it’s best if you’re a great singer. Too many of today’s wannabes croak like frogs, and wonder why no one is interested.

But a good voice is rarely enough, not since the Beatles, who could both sing and write.

Writing… Do you have something to say?

Your first song is not good.

Nor is your first book.

Want to be a great writer?

Then start writing today and don’t ever stop.

Ditto if you want to be a great songwriter.

But no one wants to work off the grid anymore. No one wants to pay their dues. They want traction, they want to see results.

Do you think anybody in London cared about the Beatles when they were playing in Hamburg? Meanwhile, it may sound exotic to Americans, but Hamburg was a hole.

But I’ll own my mistake. Clive does have a website. And a Facebook page too!

But there’s no reason to go there. They’re static billboards. Akin to what you see on construction sites. Online homes are ever-changing, ever-fresh. If you’re not populating your online home, you might as well kill it.

Unlike Kelly Clarkson. Who’s posting constantly, putting cover clips on YouTube. Keeping her fans happy.

That’s how you do it. You engage constantly.

And ignore the haters.

Then again, I’m not sure Clive Davis KNEW he had haters!

P.S. Google Kelly Clarkson. Her website is the very first link on the very first page, right below the news. Next comes her Wikipedia page. Google Clive Davis… His Wikipedia page is the very first link, his website is nowhere to be found.

Clive Davis – website

Clive Davis – facebook

I made a big mistake. I answered an e-mail.

I should know better.

There’s nothing people like more than tearing you down, and by responding to their e-mail, they now know they have access, and it’s open season.

I don’t understand Twitter wars. You say X, the other person says Y, and then it devolves into F YOU!

Happens every time.

Want access to someone online?

Be nice to them.

I know you don’t want to. You want to be three-dimensional, you want to give your opinion, you want to right the wrong. But all this does is leave you ostracized, outside the door.

Amanda Palmer may meet everybody…

Then again, once her image rose above her minions, she was excoriated. Not a single fan bitched she was ripping off musicians by having them play for free, rather it was outsiders, who were unfamiliar with her and her ethos.

Amanda blinked. She shouldn’t have. It only disappointed those who truly cared, who believed she was the standard bearer against the b.s. Now their hero was just like them, beholden to the man.

You cannot be mainstream anymore. It’s a futile exercise. You have to bland out your image and kiss so much butt that you end up with no sharp edges to hold on to. Ubiquity is no longer for art, but crime, and tech. If you’re an artist you’re inherently niche, appealing to a sliver of the population. As for the others, ignore them.

I know, I know, this is contrary to the MTV ethos. But MTV no longer airs videos and you don’t even know what channel it is. Why are you putting faith in an old paradigm?

When you start out, you’re available. When you’re a nobody, you acknowledge all comers. You’re thrilled anybody cares. But once you’re somebody, the doors close. There are just too many crazies in this world. Kate Upton was an unpopular nebbish in high school. Just try approaching her in real life today, especially if you’re a man. You’re gonna get the cold shoulder, you’re gonna be physically removed by a bodyguard. Not because you’re a predator, but because somebody else is.

We live in an unjust society. And one way the oppressed, the disillusioned, the angry can get revenge is by attacking the winners online. No one knows this better than Barack Obama. His detractors don’t care if he was born in America, they just hate the man and everything he stands for. It’s not about facts, it’s about emotions. If Obama provides his birth certificate it doesn’t end the conversation, it ignites it! By engaging Obama legitimizes his detractors, he gives them raw meat, they go wild. So he doesn’t.

And neither should you.

Assuming you’ve got a profile that high.

The rulebook is being rewritten. Traditional media, newspapers, magazines, movies and television…they think they’re better than you. They didn’t get the memo. That we’re now all truly equal online. So these old powers try to ignore reality, put a finger in the dike, stop the tsunami of digital communication. They either deny it exists, or rant about piracy and sue your ass.

That’s a flawed strategy. If you don’t acknowledge that communication has fundamentally changed, you’re destined for the dustbin.

The question is how to deal with this new world.

Don’t try to educate every ignoramus. Don’t try to neutralize every hater. It’s more about them than you. They don’t want to know the truth, they just want to be acknowledged, seen as important in this depersonalized world. Anybody saying the customer is always right doesn’t have an Internet connection.

It’s sad that the few ruin it for the rest of us. But that’s reality. Ten percent of responders are insane. The problem is you just don’t know who that ten percent are. And therefore, you can’t respond to anybody.

Want to communicate with the rich and famous?

Become so yourself.

That hasn’t changed.

Want access? Then you’ve go to deserve it. You’ve got to accomplish something. You’ve got to be vetted. You’ve got to be trustworthy. Then you can hang with George Clooney and have a conversation with Jennifer Lawrence. Otherwise, the door is shut. Because of history, because of the crazies.

But the good thing is you’ve now got the tools. To create and distribute. They’re essentially free. You can gain access. But not by bitching, not by making fun, but by earning it.

And the funny thing is once you get inside, you’ll find everybody treats you right. Because you can’t get to the top by being a hater. No one’s got time for that.

David Geffen called Don Henley a malcontent. Was never gonna let the Eagle get the best of him.

But Geffen’s not only a businessman, but a billionaire.

We’re used to that. Rich people believing they’re entitled to speak their truth. Above recrimination. But ARTISTS?

I’m stunned at the traction Kelly Clarkson’s response to Clive Davis got yesterday.

Used to be you were afraid to speak truth to power. And if you decided to, you vetted your words with a high-priced PR person and negotiated with the mainstream press to print them.

But Kelly Clarkson’s words were most certainly her own, and she did nothing but post them online, and her minions spread the word.

The truth?

It almost doesn’t matter. But what does is the days of artists being beholden sheep are done. We’ve reached a turning point. And isn’t it stunning that the revolution is being led by the winner of a TV talent show. The ungrateful b____.

That’s what the Internet has wrought.

A bunch of people who believe they rule. Who know you win by going to your fans, to the public, not the old men. (And those who are not men act just like them.)

It’s like a Mafia movie. In one fell swoop, Kelly Clarkson took a shiv and killed Clive Davis. His book was reviewed in today’s “New York Times,” but that’s irrelevant. Online Kelly Clarkson beat him so bad, he doesn’t even know what happened.

Clive Davis wrote a whole book about how he did it his way. Steered the ungrateful ingrates known as artists, and if you don’t think the execs have contempt for the acts, you don’t know any, away from their instincts and on to success. Prevented them from recording their own lame material and insisted they record canned stuff in a fashion distilled to play well on Top Forty radio. They got rich. Everybody was happy.

Same deal with Tommy Mottola. He didn’t want Mariah Carey to inject hip-hop influences into her music.

Yup, Clive and Tommy were anti-art. They were pro-money.

But artists aren’t in it for the money, despite the ravings of that lunatic Gene Simmons, they’re in it for the audience and the attention, the money is way down the list, the eyeballs fill a hole in their souls. One of the reasons we get crappy music is the people whoring themselves out to major labels are not damaged malcontents like Don Henley, but pragmatists who see music as a way to chase the wealth of Wall Street and the computer titans. And as the money disappeared from music, the execs squeezed the acts even more.

And now they’re revolting.

The Eagles put out their own album.

And if the label is mad at you, you just post videos on YouTube, release mixtapes. They can’t stop piracy, you think they’re going to stop their own charges from making music? The acts of the pre-Internet era were afraid. No longer. Call it upbringing, say the Millennials are entitled. I’ll say it’s the Internet. Where people speak truth to power all day long. It’s in their DNA.

Do you think anybody online is taking Clive’s side? The octogenarian who’s all over conventional media but doesn’t realize that’s passe? He thinks being on ABC gives him gravitas, when everybody in the audience laughs at the talking heads, making happy talk and bloviating.

Kelly Clarkson certainly sang those songs. She wrote some of ’em. She got a toehold and won’t shut up. She was screwed by Clive, who buried her personal album, and not only is she not forgetting it, she’s rubbing his face in it.

This is music’s Arab Spring. When the youngsters take power from the old men and refuse to give it back.

Got to thank “American Idol” for that.

And the Internet.

Kelly Clarkson – whosay

P.S. Kelly posts her rebuttal on WhoSay, which I’m sure Clive’s never heard of, and finally, today, just an hour ago, Clive Davis releases a statement to the media. He doesn’t even have a Website, and he’s promoting a book! He’s on Twitter, but it’s canned promotion as opposed to personal revelations. Hell, he should have broken the fact that he was bisexual on Twitter the day before his book came out, THAT’S modern publicity:

Clive Davis answers Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Soundtrack’ criticism

P.P.S. Geffen called Henley a malcontent in “History Of The Eagles,” which is now on demand on Showtime.

I’m gonna be sixty.

And unlike Tommy Mottola and Lyor Cohen I’m not gonna shave a decade off my age in order to appear young and hip, because my hip hurts, you can get plastic surgery, put on a happy face, but you’re still your real age inside, you might as well own it, especially because once you die you’ll be…forgotten.

That’s the dirty little secret. You think you matter, that you’ll be remembered, but has anybody even mentioned Mindy McCready to you today? I think not. And that proves the point.

Surviving is difficult. All those musicians who O.D.’ed, they took the easy way out. Life is full of changes and challenges. Every time you think you know what’s going on the mirrors descend, the fast ball turns into a curve ball and you’re suddenly clueless. The only ones confident in their opinions are the youngsters, who know so little they think they know everything.

Yesterday I went to Costco. I am not a member. Because I don’t have a family. That’s one thing I forgot to do. Oh, I had the biological urge about twenty years ago, when I was still married but estranged from my ex-wife, I told her I wanted to get back together to procreate, but she didn’t. And then the time passed by. And I’m not about to have children now. Most of the birth defects come from older fathers, and if my dad died when I was twenty not only would I have been crestfallen, I might not have been able to pull myself up by my bootstraps. We need people to rely upon, to point the way, to be in our corner. Otherwise life’s just too difficult.

And after eating a strangely bland hot dog I went into the emporium and was confronted with scads of people much younger than myself, beating the prices at the Albertsons right next door. It was so exciting, poring through the goods, more fun than being famous, like Camille Grammer and Johnny Rzeznik, whom I saw at the baggage carousel the night before. Camille, with her puffed-up lips, was just sad and probably lonely. We think fame will solve our problems. But that was back before anybody could be on TV, when we had contempt for those on the box, as opposed to looking up to them. As for Rzeznik, there was an old guy with a video camera following him around, but nobody else recognized him, in a coif that he’d probably like to abandon, despite it being his trademark. How much time did it take to pouf it up? We get older and we just want to relax, be ourselves, not waste time, do our best to fit into life like an old worn-out shoe.

And then there was the girl stumbling around in the high heels. These I don’t get. You can’t walk so you’ll look cool to other women? Overpaying for the privilege of wrecking your feet? Or maybe I missed the memo, maybe I’m the outlier here, but I get turned-on by these suddenly taller females not a bit. Kind of like Stevie Nicks on Letterman last week. Teetering on high heels singing a song nobody cared about. It’s just sad. Having to emulate who you once were. As the rest of the world ages, adjusts, moves on.

She has seen me changing
It ain’t easy rearranging
And it gets harder as you get older
And farther away as you get closer

Crosby, Stills & Nash reunited. Young didn’t bother, he had a burgeoning solo career, the rest hit a dead end, their hits dried up, as did their audience. And these albums are supposed to disappoint, check the history of rock and roll, reunions never satiate, and 1977’s “CSN” wasn’t quite as good as what came before, but it was surprisingly excellent, with the still on the radio “Dark Star” and “Just A Song Before I Go” but the even better “I Give You Give Blind,” “Shadow Captain” and the piece de resistance, “See The Changes.”

The predecessor was “4 + 20” on “Deja Vu.” I lived in Utah with a twenty four year old wondering where his life had taken him. He sat in front of the stereo playing that track over and over, feeling the solidarity, trying to gain wisdom.

And then, surprisingly, Stephen Stills gave an update.

Ten years singing right out loud
I never looked was anybody listening
Then I fell out of a cloud
I hit the ground and noticed something missing

We think we know where we’re going. We have a plan and stick to it. Or we fall into something and do our best to get ahead and then suddenly…time has passed, we’re older, we can’t get back to where we once belonged, we can’t start over, and suddenly we’re not sure we like where we are.

It’s the human condition. It causes firings, quittings and divorces. It’s our one and only go-round and we don’t want to make a mistake. And what they don’t tell you is it’s hard enough to accomplish one thing, never mind everything. Suddenly you take a good look around because you’re never going to be back. You lose your looks, you’ve still got the sexual fantasy, but not quite the ability, and the people at Costco are younger than you.

And that’s when you hear “See The Changes” on the radio.

That’s exactly what happened yesterday.

After seeing the two bedraggled men exiting the building wearing brand new bright orange Fila sneakers, on sale for barely double digits, after holding back from scolding the mother with the toddler balancing on the handrail of the cart, about to fall off, after seeing a 65″ TV for $3500, after realizing that while I was busy in my house trying to make it for twenty five years, everything changed, I tuned into the mellifluous sound of Stephen Stills telling me he experienced the same damn thing.

It’s hard to rearrange. That’s what freaks me out about my contemporaries, not their eagerness to diet and fit into children’s clothing, but their lack of desire to change. They like physical books, they abhor the DVR, they’re dead and they don’t even know it yet. They’ve given up. And what happens next is you’re discarded. Like the Republican Party, which couldn’t read the statistics, which didn’t realize the immigrant tsunami, the people of color, were going to bury them. Adjust or die.

And I was once young too, with an answer for everything. But now I hit countless dead ends. I know Verizon has better connections than AT&T, that all those using another provider are having a second-rate experience, but maybe they have a good sex life, maybe the connection just doesn’t matter.

Now I have someone
She has seen me changing
And it gets harder as you get older
And farther away as you get closer

But at least now I have someone. Because being alone positively sucks. Living alone leaves your options open, but as the window closes you don’t realize what you’re missing. You’re left out of couples social life, you don’t go on vacation, and you’re forced to log on to OKCupid where everybody’s desirous of coupling up but refuses to do the work to see why they’re alone. Set in their ways, they don’t realize the problem is them. That you’ve got to change to make it. In life. In relationships.

Nobody laughing
All the good times
Getting harder to come by without weeping

Instead of discussing bands, you talk about your health. Everybody I know has cancer. Except for those too scared to go to the doctor. Believing if they live in denial they’ll be okay. But the Big C waits for no one. Do it now, go to the doctor and live, because if you think the sand in the hourglass is endless, you’re sorely mistaken. Turns out there’s not as much as you think. And you don’t want to live forever anyway, with all your friends gone.

And I don’t know the answer
Does it even matter?
I’m wonderin’ how

The question of the ages, the meaning of life. What is it? Damn if I know. Anybody who tells you otherwise is ignorant or a charlatan. In high school you want to live for yourself, make all your own decisions. As you age you look for the instruction book, the manual, you want answers, because you certainly have none.

But it’s all irrelevant.

Forty years ago there was no Costco. For all I know, forty years from now food will be grown at home in your 3-D printer. Just like you no longer have to go to the post office to send a missive, how you no longer have to go to the bank to manage your money, the changes come fast and furious, unforeseen. And you do your best to adjust.

And it does get harder as you get older.

And sheer will cannot fight Father Time.

And it is farther away as you get closer.

Just when you think you’ve finally figured it out, you find out you were wrong. The hurricane destroys your house, depletes your life savings. The earthquake topples your abode. You thought you were prepared, but life is laughing at you. Pray if it makes you feel better, but no one’s listening. Not God, not the government, not the media. You’re on your own.

Unless you’ve got a good record collection.

And someone to listen to it with.

Then you’re all right.

See The Changes – Spotify

See The Changes – YouTube