Were you ever a fan of Crosby, Stills & Nash?

You remember, the band with the perfect harmonies that charmed the girls and were loved by the boys too? Who were sensitive without being wimpy…well, except for a few Graham Nash tracks.

Oh, maybe you’re younger than that. Let’s fast-forward twenty years, to Toad The Wet Sprocket, with their exquisite “Walk On The Ocean,” a track they never quite equaled, but I could play incessantly.

Like either of those?

Then you’re gonna LOVE “Half Moon.”

Here’s a Spotify link:

 Spotify – Blind Pilot-Half Moon

Or you can check it out on YouTube:

 YouTube – Blind Pilot-Half Moon

I was driving home from Staples last night, I went to see Muse, my main question is HOW DID EVERYBODY KNOW? They’re doing three nights! Tickets are cheap, under $70, but is it KROQ or word of mouth or..? They put on a spectacular show, everybody leaves satiated, and when it was all done I got in my car for the rainy drive home.

And first I heard “Lo and Behold” by Cold Blood. You remember, Lydia Pense! The band had almost no traction outside San Francisco, but I was intrigued by the satellite readout, could this be a cover of the James Taylor song?

Absolutely.

Interesting.

Then I switched to the Spectrum. Where I heard a great Neil Young song, from his later period, one I didn’t instantly recognize. And after exiting the freeway I heard “Half Moon.”

I was wondering if it was the night. You know how sometimes everything sounds good?

But I just pulled “Half Moon” up on Spotify and the harmonies are…DELICIOUS!

You may not be hooked immediately. But the longer you play it, the harder it is to turn off. And then you hit that moment, around 2:40, when the instruments all drop out and everybody sings and it’s like…UNCLE JOHN’S BAND!

But it continues, majestically. And you can’t help but nod your head and feel that life is beautiful.

P.S. Muse’s first album came out in 1999. I saw them at the Mayan half a decade ago. “Half Moon” came out in 2011. Stuff happens slower than ever before, unless you’re the beneficiary/victim of the mainstream hype, wherein you become famous but are oftentimes kicked to the curb shortly after your rocket ride. Stay at it. It takes time to get good, it takes time for people to find out.

Albums keep getting longer and every time I crack a Dannon yogurt…I find less inside.

How would you feel if you were a heroin addict and Afghanistan switched to producing cocaine? Or if the Yankees still occupied their stadium, but they now played soccer? Pretty disillusioning, wouldn’t you think?

Man, I’m in withdrawal. The food staple of my life, Dannon coffee yogurt, is disappearing from the shelves. It’s like end of times. Going from market to market. With all the clerks telling me it’s gone, and I’m one of the clamoring masses still looking for it.

You see the company’s gone all Jamie Lee Curtis on me. Promoting their Activia brand. Which comes in Lilliputian containers and must be consumed slowly, like brandy, because in just one or two teaspoonfuls, it’s history.

Not that I want it anyway. It’s just that I need a delivery system for my trail mix.

I discovered this in Utah. Jimmy bought a plethora of nuts and a bunch of yogurt and we all lived on it just for one day. But I got hooked, like the kid who smokes marijuana once and decides to go on to harder stuff. Yup, I’ve got a friend who’s tried crack, he’s done everything, he likes experimenting on his vacations, but me, I do nothing, because I know one hit and I’m toast.

I tried everything. Until I settled on Dannon vanilla.

Then I burned out on that, and discovered Valhalla, the exquisite elixir known as Dannon coffee yogurt.

It’s a cult. Like the Moonies. Either you’re a member or you can’t understand. It’s like no yogurt you’ve ever eaten before. There’s no fruit, no stirring, just a concoction that’s akin to ice cream, but is much better for you.

But now there’s only one market where it’s available. And it’s nowhere near my house. And I’m wasting time driving there only to discover the shelves have been picked clean, by other addicts.

And I’m thinking about going cold turkey. But I still need a mixer for my nuts.

Which led me to the fad of the day, GREEK yogurt. Have you tried this stuff? It’s got double the protein, but has the consistency of paste. And the best brands come with a little jelly next door, in a separate compartment, which you must reach in and mix yourself. I tried it, I don’t like it.

So hunting for Dannon coffee yogurt in the one place that I used to get it and hadn’t checked yet, I found they no longer carried it either but they had Dannon Oikos, the company’s Greek model, I decided to try it, I mean I need something.

And I crack a container…

And there’s nothing there!

It’s like going to Crater Lake and finding a puddle. Like lifting the cover of your swimming pool and discovering it’s only half full. Talk about a buzzkill.

And this doesn’t seem possible. I start scouring the container, looking for an indicator of its contents.

I turn it round and round until I discover there’s 5.3 ounces of yogurt.

5.3?? I remember when it used to be 8! I could handle the reduction to 6, well not really, but what comes next, a container with an eyedropper’s worth?

I mean I get it.

Dannon is putting all this advertising behind Activia. And they’re paying the supermarkets to shelve it. So they decide independently, with no research, to clear out coffee, and then they reduce the contents but not the size of the container figuring you won’t notice.

It’s like they’ve never heard of New Coke.

First and foremost satiate your EXISTING customers before you try and get new ones!

No regular yogurt customer is switching to Activia. They’ve already got their favorite. And coffee is a cult, I buy a box at a time, at a minimum.

But now I can’t get any at all.

As Dannon hurtles towards the cliff.

How’d he come up with this shit?

Yes, I went back to the movies. And once again was confronted by someone who was flummoxed by parking lots. You know the doofus, the person who sits behind the wheel of their SUV, blocking everybody, looking for a space right next to the door so they don’t have to exercise their chubby little legs when there’s a plethora of parking just another floor up…right by the elevator to boot! I mean you don’t even have to be sixteen, you don’t even have to have a driver’s license to know that there’s parking further up or further down, but NO, you’ve got to block traffic while the rest of us wait for you to slide your behemoth into a space exited by a Honda Fit which you have to jockey back and forth to get into.

Drives me fucking nuts.

But not as much as the people texting during the movie.

You left your house and bought a ticket just so you could come to the theatre, a public place, and do exactly what you do at home? And god forbid you tell these people to shut down their screens…you’d think you impinged upon their ability to home school their kids and fire an arsenal of automatic weapons.

And how you could take your eyes off the screen during this flick is beyond me.

Once upon a time, before many of you were born, in the late sixties and early seventies, we went to each other’s houses to play records that had us asking…HOW DID THEY COME UP WITH THIS?

That was not only the essence of Frank Zappa, but Yes and so many trailblazers.

But today everybody’s fighting to be second. YOU innovate, I’ll follow in the path you’ve created.

But was there ever a credible, never mind successful, follower of Alanis Morissette?

“Jagged Little Pill” was so damn honest. Giving head in a theatre? Did that really happen?

But today’s music is safe, just like the playgrounds with rubber mats where the monkey bars have been removed. God forbid little Johnny falls and cries. That would be a disaster!

So after agreeing to be Christoph Waltz’s valet, Jamie Foxx emerges in a shiny blue suit straight from the court of Louis XVI, and over the speakers you here…

JIM CROCE’S “I GOTTA NAME”!

Talk about cognitive dissonance. It’s 1858 and you’re playing a song from the 1970s?

This is the opposite of Spielberg. Tarantino’s not fucking with your eyes, but your ears. Furthermore, he probably discovered the track from its initial use in 1973’s “Last American Hero,” having seen it in the video store where he worked for eons gaining knowledge of the medium. Let’s quiz Justin Bieber on music history… We’ll probably get a big fat DUH! And if you don’t know where you came from, you’ve got no idea where you’re going.

And then there’s Samuel L. Jackson’s turn as Stephen, the black man beholden to the white who runs Leonardo DiCaprio’s household, CANDIELAND! You’re not even sure it’s him. With the limp and the white hair. But what’s most impressive is the intensity. You can see his mind turning, you can feel how he gets everybody in line.

And there are sequences so long that any major studio would cry for cuts. But Tarantino’s on his own trip, only he can execute the vision in his head, remove a smidge and you ruin the whole casserole.

That’s what musical acts don’t realize. Cowrite, change just a little bit, and you’ve lost your essence, what makes you you.

And it’s not like there’s no audience for “Django Unchained.” The flick has already taken in nearly $200 million. Not because it’s mainstream, not because it’s for everybody, but because Quentin Tarantino has a huge fanbase!

Yup, you’re evidencing a milquetoast personality, trying to reach everybody while offending nobody, and as a result, you’ve got little impact. Whereas Tarantino knows it’s about the core. Hell, you’ve got to go to his flicks just to see what he’s up to!

It’s the plot twists, the humor… Like the scene where the wannabe Klan members can’t see through their hoods and the guy whose wife made them is so pissed he abandons the mission.

You literally watch this movie with your mouth agape.

When you’re not laughing profusely.

We don’t care about everybody. We’re not interested in me-too.

We want limit-testers, people not beholden to the system, who don’t shrug their shoulders and say their hands are tied but go off on a wild adventure that we can’t wait to share!

HMV

Did you see that story in the “Sunday Times” entitled “Music giants rush to save HMV”?

 Music giants rush to save HMV

Ain’t that the entertainment business, always with one foot in the past, propping up that which is going under.

They don’t even listen to their own artists, what did Bob Dylan so famously say, “He not busy being born is busy dying”?

If your main goal in propping up physical retail is to aid in negotiations with iTunes, Amazon and supermarkets, you’re probably buying Best Buy stock and working on jamming cell signals inside so people can’t “showroom.”

Just like an addicted gambler, the entertainment companies can’t walk away from a losing hand. Yup, HMV closes so they get stiffed. How long did it take them to get rid of their CD pressing plants?

This movie is going to streaming.

I’d focus on upping YouTube payments. I’d be scared of Daniel Ek and Jimmy Iovine more than Tim Cook. Then again, the labels were smart enough to get a percentage of streaming services.

As for all you people lauding the CD, STFU. No one’s listening. Then again, the labels are. This is the main way they make money. But instead of preparing for the future, they’re wedded to the past. If Spotify had launched earlier, if it wasn’t delayed by label negotiations, YouTube wouldn’t be the default streaming platform. Nature abhors a vacuum. If you don’t give it to people the way they want it, a worse alternative appears, one in which you receive less compensation or none. Fighting Napster begat KaZaA. Shutting down Limewire resulted in locker services. The best bet against piracy? Easy to use authorized services. But if you’re always looking to make what you once did you’re a delusional retired baseball player just waiting for the call to suit up. Things change, change with them.

And know that the mainstream press is last. Hell, are you gonna trust the L.A. “Times,” which saw its subscriber base sink from 739,000 to 454,500 in the wake of the 2008 “Tribune” bankruptcy? There’s no one even there to report a story, everybody’s been given a golden parachute (well, more like tin) and those left are positively the B-team. Hell, the above story was in the LONDON “Times,” not the LOS ANGELES “Times,” even though the latter is in the same city as Hollywood.

A CD is a delivery system. HMV is a retailer. Delivery and retail change, the art remains. What next, a return to general stores, with no freeway access? The key is to focus on growing the future, not buttressing the past.

RIMM/BLACKBERRY

Done.

BlackBerry 10 is a failure.

How do I know?

CAN YOU SAY PALM?

I want you to name one tech company that came back from the dead. Oh I know, you’re gonna throw a curve ball, you’re gonna say Apple. Well, if it was still only in the computer business, Apple would be so marginalized as to be unknown to most people. What grew Apple was new products, the iPod, iPhone and iPad. If you told me RIMM was coming up with something new, instead of burnishing an old phone, I’d at least pay attention. Instead you’ve got an antique company trying to reclaim its glory days based on the fact that it sells physical keyboards and has an e-mail solution.

The initial Androids had keyboards… If that’s what people wanted, they’d all have them. As for e-mail, ask your teen if he’s addicted. No, he loves texting!

And Apple taught us it was about software and the ecosystem.

BlackBerry’s software has always been far from seamless. Ever wait for a BlackBerry to boot up? The world could end in the interim. And if you never had a BlackBerry that crashed/froze, you didn’t own one. Where is all the good will for this device? The people clamoring for BlackBerries are the same ones heralding the CD! I miss my BlackBerry not one iota. And the functionality on the iPhone is so high, it’s almost like it’s in a different product category.

And app developers like to get paid. There are almost no apps for BlackBerry 10 and no one’s gonna write any, because the universe is so small.

But the mainstream press, even the “Wall Street Journal,” never shuts the door on the Waterloo company. It always posts the positive. As if there’s a chance RIMM can come back.

IT CAN’T! IT’S TOAST! IT’S AS DEAD AS PALM!

But the insiders don’t know it yet. Only the hoi polloi are clued in.

Ain’t that modern America.