Like music in the sixties, the Food Network is riding the wave of public interest in comestibles all the way to the bank. They’re so successful, they even added a second channel. Everybody eats, but one must credit their programming department, they’re always coming up with new spins on the reality theme that get you watching.

And my favorite is "Restaurant Impossible".

Hosted by Robert Irvine, he takes a crack team and $10,000 and completely rebuilds failing restaurants in two days. He cleans up the kitchen, redecorates the dining room, remakes the menu and turns disaster into success.

We need the same program in the music business.

Forget "American Idol" and "X Factor", even "The Voice". They’re all about wannabes. People with little to no writing talent who have a good voice at best. People with no backbone who will do anything to make it.

But what if instead of having Christina Aguilera and Adam Levine as hosts, they were contestants. Yes, what if we took people on the downside of their careers and gave them honest criticism, imagine how great that would be!

There’s an endless supply of artists. Those who once were and those, like Ms. Aguilera, coming off a stiff. They come on the show and they play their new record.

And they’re torn apart, honestly criticized.

There’s a blue chip panel of Simon Cowells, people who are honest to a fault.

And then we get a team of people to help. Producers and songwriters are desperate for work. We get them on to remake the star’s music. And with all this television airplay, the resulting music will hit. Maybe not on the Top Forty, but all that exposure will increase road business dramatically.

The classic rock artists can’t write a hit.

Imagine telling them so. Enough with the divvying up of songwriting credits. We only want great material. Go back and write a new chorus, add a bridge, we’ll be satisfied with nothing but great.

And the MTV acts… Culture Club would be desperate to do this. Even Backstreet Boys.

Our goal is not to beat people up, but to emerge with hits. To illustrate to the public how hard it is, what it takes to make it, what a hit truly is.

Enough with the no-talents. Let’s deal with those who have a proven track record. Let’s help those with talent to see the light.

And that’s the problem. All these people have handlers and friends who blow smoke up their ass, telling them their new music is good. No one ever speaks the truth to an established artist.

And the established artists can’t take it. Because they once were, they don’t want to get down in the pit, they don’t want to be busted back to private, they don’t want to endure the pain, they don’t want to hear that their new material is just not good enough.

We want to inspire people. To take them to their limits. Because good is not good enough, the public only cares about great.

And if I had my druthers, we’d extract no ounce of flesh from these acts. We wouldn’t require them to give up an interest in the resultant records, we wouldn’t want a slice of touring revenue.

Then again, maybe we could establish an honest brain trust. Who could provide all these services for a fee. Experts who the acts would want to employ.

Execution is everything.

But this is a slam dunk idea.

"Restaurant Impossible"

"Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist."

"Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs"

EMI Music Publishing doesn’t pay royalties.

I know this firsthand.

Let’s forget the issue of underpaying, on certain tracks they don’t account at all.

And the truth is the rest of the major label infrastructure is no different. That’s their business model. Rippling off the acts, not paying them their due. Which is why they’re fading.

Oh, they blame the public for stealing and use declining revenues to extract even more rights from clients in vaunted 360 deals.

But that’s just because their owners, their executives, want to make more money.

The Goldman executive talks about the change in culture at his firm… Let’s talk about how in the past twenty years the label executives got richer than the acts. But without the acts they’re nothing. Isn’t that topsy-turvy?

Meanwhile, not a single high profile executive has come forth to tell the truth. Because the music business is like the Mafia. Workers are afraid of getting whacked. And not being as lucrative as banking, the ranks of those who can give the middle finger and survive are few.

The labels don’t care if you’re the Eagles or a newly-signed act. They’ll still rip you off willy-nilly. The A&R and marketing people will tell you it’s not their purview, that royalties are another division.

How long can an enterprise that puts its clients last and rips them off survive?

Not long.

Which is one of the main reasons the major labels are doomed.

Am I the only one who doesn’t want to sign up for Facebook in order to use Spotify, Vevo and god knows what’s next?

I’m not on Facebook. Oh, I’ve got a fake account so I can be up to speed, but I’ve got no desire to hook up with every girl I ever dated and be back in contact with every person I went to high school with, that’s why I moved to California!

Is it just me? Have I just reached my limit? Did they finally get to my station on the Internet and now, just like the people who say they prefer CDs to MP3s and physical books to Kindle files, I’m suddenly a Luddite?

I don’t want to people to know what I’m listening to. What’s next, a camera in my bedroom so everybody can see me having sex?

And I don’t want digital recommendations. Anybody actually use iTunes Genius?

That’s why I hate Pandora… Seemingly every suggestion is a tune-out.

Then again, I seem to be the only person who gives a thumbs-down to the site. Everybody else is complaining they don’t know what to listen to on Spotify and they want algorithms to hip them to what’s good.

But algorithms never work, not consistently enough to invest your listening time. The filter, when it arrives, will be based on tastemakers, not data. Data might help, but it will never rule supreme.

I’m sick and tired of having to protect my privacy. Facebook is one giant cesspool whose raison d’etre is serving up targeted ads based on what I do on the site.

But it’s worse. We don’t even get the same Google results. Yup, you and I can put in the same search terms and get completely different listings. And no one clicks on anything beyond the first one anyway.

Are they doing this to edify us, to improve our lives?

NO, THEY’RE DOING IT FOR THE MONEY!

Please, please, please. If you’ve got a site and you’re thinking of tying in with Facebook, please give us the option to register without either needing to be on Facebook, or scrobbling all our data if we are.

Why don’t I just give you my social security number right now. My birth date and income tax return. Legitimate sites are now as bad as phishing sites. They want our data so they can make money. They say it’s good for us but I don’t know why… I’ve never ever clicked on a Google ad.

And without us, without our data, Facebook is nothing. Think about that.

Meanwhile, every wannabe company in America just wants to give Mark Zuckerberg more power. Yup, keep tying in with his service and one day you’ll wake up like the record industry, beholden to Apple, iTunes dictating to them the same way Amazon does its best to dictate to publishers.

I don’t think we’re going back to an era where we all live in silos with no data to track us. We’re gonna be able to find our nursery school buddies if we want to.

But it feels like Facebook, et al, are forcing us to. It’s a bad sci-fi movie, the walls keep getting closer as big brother squeezes us all together in the name of profits.

I’m mad as hell and I’m not taking it.

But I wonder if I’m the only one.

We’ve been shooting reds and yellows all day…

The night before my first college vacation I went with my friend Larry to the Batts, to visit his girlfriend Karen, whom he’d met the second day of school.

It didn’t last.

But it went on a good long time. They turned out to be opposites. She an artist, he a social scientist. But at this point they didn’t know that. They had their attractiveness in common. Add in a dollop of niceness and you have a newly-minted relationship.

Which gave me entry into the aforementioned Batts, the colloquial name for "Battelle Hall", a sprawling two story edifice where each and every freshman girl resided. You might say "woman", but at age eighteen, you’re on the cusp of transition. Boys are horny, but they don’t know what to do with themselves other than show up in the right place and hope and pray.

And the Batts was the right place.

It’s hard being a hanger-on. You’ve got entry to the club, but no real status. You’ve got no room to move, to exhibit your personality, because if you commit a faux pas, you might be ejected. And that would hurt.

So we journey up to Karen’s room and there’s a cluster of girls, maybe four or five. And not a single guy in sight. And putting my best foot forward, which was not always easy for me to do, I spoke to Judy. Who spoke back. And I got that tingling inside. That this could be romance.

And I had forty minutes to contemplate it, because that’s how long it took us to listen to "Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers".

This was Firesign Theatre’s third album. The first two I only knew by title, "Waiting For The Electrician or Someone Like Him" and "How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All". The latter, in addition to having an eminently quotable title, featured a memorable cover, which you only had to see once. There was a row of revolutionaries, akin to the dictators in "Bananas", and they had their arms in the air hailing Lenin and Marx. Only, in this case, it was John Lennon and Groucho Marx.

Creativity. We marvel in its presence. How do people come up with this stuff?

And music was the bleeding edge. Whether it be the Beatles, Frank Zappa or this comedy group, if you were interested in seeing limits tested, you put on a vinyl record.

It’s so different from today. Where so-called "artists" are looking where to sell out. In the sixties and seventies, the Fortune 500 was afraid of the musicians. And the musicians had contempt for the businessmen, who were abusing the planet and marginalizing the proletariat.

You only had to listen to "Don’t Crush That Dwarf" once to remember the catch phrases. The adventures of the Tirebiters were just that fascinating.

And I’d like to tell you that when we returned from vacation, Judy was interested. But that would be a lie. All these years later I’m thinking her distance could have been about anxiety more than disinterest, guess I’ll never know.

But during that vacation I purchased "Don’t Crush That Dwarf". And I subsequently acquired the even further out there, "I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus".

Follow the yellow rubber line…

This vinyl theatre penetrated the counterculture. The Grateful Dead embraced Bozoism. Today people think Bozo’s a clown, but if you were hip forty years ago, you knew bozos were more than that, you learned about them from the Firesign Theatre.

It was a club. Not so small, and its members could quote lines back and forth ad infinitum. We hung our culture upon them.

And if you’re under forty, you’ve got no idea what I’m speaking of.

Maybe if you’re under fifty.

Because very little lasts.

But that does not mean that which fades has no value.

But to understand the Firesign Theatre you’d have to have lived through Vietnam, experienced the absurdity of our politicians, you’d have to want to stay out more than buy in.

Maybe, with the inability to penetrate the upper class, we’ll see a burst of creativity in the arts. College graduates will be consumed with more than creating new investment vehicles.

Peter Bergman went to Yale. And he didn’t go to work for Goldman Sachs. He went into radio, not the Ryan Seacrest Clear Channel make me puke terrestrial of today, but the public airwaves of yesteryear. And while doing a show at KPFK, the Firesign Theatre was born.

I don’t need you to listen to the records.

But I do need you to understand the culture of days gone by. When Peter Bergman and his compatriots were counterculture heroes and affected society more than Ivy League dropouts desiring to clean up in Silicon Valley.

Peter Bergman didn’t O.D. He didn’t go out with a bang. He lived to the ripe old age of 72 before the cancer got him.

It’s gonna get all of us. Best to try and leave your mark before it does.