We are living in the greatest era for music ever, and if you don’t believe this you’re an executive, not an artist.

Why?

Because of access.

Although rights holders have not figured out a way to monetize this access, presently the history of recorded music is at the fan’s fingertips.  And it’s not hard to find.  Most is sitting there on YouTube, waiting for you to Google it.  And rarities you hunted for for years are stored in lockers, a click away.  Have a desire to hear something and you instantly can do so.  Have a friend tell you about a track and you can pull it up and make your own judgment.

Furthermore, artists have access to the public.  Middlemen are not required to be heard.  You don’t have to get the A&R man to believe, radio to play your track, you can just post it online and your fans can hear it.

Assuming you’ve got any.

This is the challenge of the modern era.  Obscurity.  It truly flummoxes the old and weary.  They spend years and tons of money and no one cares.  First and foremost, should anybody?  Too many of these alta kachers make bad new music. Second, is it the audience’s fault that radio has become calcified and there are better places to find out about new music?

We don’t trust the old filters.  The new filters may not have completely gelled, but that doesn’t mean the old ones should have free reign.

Just because you’re unsure of the future, that does not mean you should stay in the past.  This is like continuing to bleed medical patients rather than develop antibiotics.

And new acts lament the avenues which made old people stars are no longer available to them.  They’d rather replace the multi-channel cable systems of today with the three network universe of yesteryear, upon the belief that those who pass through the sieve are going to get rich and they are winners who will be able to navigate these waters.

But there were very few winners back in the days of three networks.  Niches went unfilled.  Programming was bland.  In the search to reach every man, the networks satiated few.  Cable is a panacea.  And now the Internet YouTube/Hulu world is truly blowing up the old model.  Do you want me to tell you to ditch your DVR and sit in front of the big screen with only a handful of channels available?  Then why do you keep bitching about the music landscape?

If you hate Comcast and Cablevision, trying to maintain their monopolies, why would you give a pass to record labels?

Look at this from an artistic viewpoint.  Look at this from a fan fulfillment viewpoint.  Do not look at this from a money viewpoint.

You’re complaining you can’t get rich when in the old days you wouldn’t have even been able to get in the game!

As for those who used to be rich…  Do you want the Wall Street titans to continue to make double digit millions?  Then why should you listen to the protestations of calcified classic rock acts!

Go to see Woody Allen’s "Midnight In Paris".  It’s easy to get nostalgic for times of yore, but were they really better?

These are the good old days.  We’re never going back to the past.  It’s about paving new pathways in the future.

Remember when you pooh-poohed computers?  That they were for nerds with no life?  Then in the nineties, when Windows finally worked and AOL made online easy you rushed to the store to buy a machine and play.  We’re in that same development era in music, the fifteen odd years it took to get from the Apple II to Windows and AOL.  Don’t complain, look forward to the great world to come!

As for who survives…

Again and again and again, it’s those who are willing to change.

Take risks.  Know there will be blind alleys.

But also know we are never going back to the past and if you make something good it’s easier than ever for people to hear it.  And that’s the goal of an artist, to have someone experience his work.

Don’t worry about the money.  It’s coming.  In prodigious amounts.  Because you can’t rack up that many eyeballs without someone figuring out a formula.  Like MTV in the eighties.  Our ratings are anemic, but we’re gonna charge you a fortune to advertise to our highly concentrated youth audience.  Cable channels with small shares can be more lucrative than networks, which is why so many networks purchased cable systems!

This formula may not work in music, because of unlimited distribution, but success comes from throwing in with the innovators, not pushing them aside from your vision.

E-mail killed the post office.  Do you really want to eviscerate e-mail to keep all those mail carrier jobs intact?

Do you want to maintain e-mail, because Google gets viewers from Gmail and Microsoft gets viewers from HotMail, diminishing IM and text and..?

Stop with this fear of the future.  Are you scared of lightning too?

Change is scary.

But it’s good.

Inspired by Jeff Pollack’s "Sympathy for the Devil: Why the Major Labels Might Be Right This Time"

There’s something exhilarating about watching great actors perform.  It’s like watching Michael Jordan sink a basket with tenths of a second left on the clock, or watching Jeff Beck wring notes from his guitar.  Surrounded by mediocrity, our eyes bug out when we’re exposed to brilliance.

Everybody wants us to settle for mediocrity.  It’s good enough.  It makes money.  Everybody else is happy, why aren’t you?

"God Of Carnage" was on the periphery of my vision.  Theatre takes place in New York.  By time the production gets to Los Angeles the buzz is gone and so are the stars.  But in this case, the stars came back.

Marcia Gay Harden overacts in the beginning.  But then she crosses that line from well-behaved to I don’t give a fuck and we’re riveted, because we’ve all been there.

Jeff Daniels will forever get a pass from me because of his wonderful performance in "Something Wild", going from someone who can’t be honest with himself to one who rises to the occasion, after deciding to let go and go with the flow, which is so difficult for those of us who grew up saddled with the expectations of our parents, going to college and getting a good job and doing what we should do instead of succumbing to temptation.  But Mr. Daniels is only great here.  Whereas the other actors transcend.

Like Hope Davis.  When she blossoms near the end of the play, drunk on rum, with long arms and legs extended, you’re exposed to the inner life of those who are so busy toeing the line that we have no idea who they really are.  Sure, alcohol helps, but unlike Meryl Streep, we don’t see Ms. Davis acting.  She has become the role.

And then there’s James Gandolfini.  Arguably the biggest star of the ensemble after the triumph of "The Sopranos", the best drama ever made for television.  At first Mr. Gandolfini is so busy playing against type that we’re disappointed, but when he finally explodes and lets go we’re frightened the same way we were in that Mafia show.  We’re just not sure of his limits, we’re just not sure he’s going to color inside the lines.

Gandolfini claims he’s a Neanderthal.

This is after Daniels says his son is a savage.

The piercing of the veil to honesty is striking.  That’s when art touches us.  When it speaks a truth that normally goes unspoken.

There’s that playful moment when Ms. Harden and Mr. Gandolfini are making fun of the other couple, imitating them.  If you haven’t been here, I feel sorry for your relationship.  Your spouse should be a co-conspirator, someone on your side who you can laugh at the absurdity of life with.

But then it all becomes so complicated.  Spouses switch sides.  Enemies become friends.  Convention is cast aside and truth is revealed.

But the truth that scared me most emanated from Mr. Gandolfini’s lips.

It’s in reaction to his wife’s description of him.  Ms. Harden says:

"I live with a man who has decided once and for all that life is synonymous with mediocrity. It’s very hard to live with a man who’s walled himself up in that notion, who doesn’t want to change anything, who never gets excited about anything."

Life, ain’t it a bitch.

Mr. Gandolfini’s character is a wholesaler.  Of household goods.  When he embellishes his identity by making reference to a fictional employee in Secaucus we’re reminded not only of the lies we tell to boost our status, but that we need to do so because inside we’re insecure.  Furthermore, you wake up one day and ask if this is it, is this why you struggle, for what? To be miserable every single day?

Then Mr. Gandolfini says:

"Children soak up our lives, then they blow them apart. Children lead us to disaster, it’s like a law of nature. You see these young couples, laughing all the way to the altar, and you think they don’t know. Poor bastards don’t know a thing. They’re happy. Nobody briefs you in the beginning. This army buddy of mine is going to have a kid with his new girlfriend. I say to him, a kid at our age, what are you stupid? You got ten, fifteen good years left before you get cancer or have a stroke and you’re going to saddle yourself with a fucking kid?"

Whew!

Nobody tells you that marriage is misery.

Then again, nobody wants to admit that life is so terrible you just don’t want to go through it alone.  All the petty losses, if you can’t share them with someone, if you can’t blow off steam, you’re unable to carry on.  Same with the triumphs.  There’s truth in that cliche that life’s victories have no meaning if you’ve got no one to share them with.

Then you die.

A friend of mine died.  We weren’t best buds, but we knew each other and he was barely sixty and ultra-rich but it didn’t matter, the Big C got him.  Seems that sometime after fifty, maybe a little bit after sixty, the Big C looms in everybody’s life. No one escapes.

Makes you wonder about the time you spent in the sun and the food you ate and the air you breathed but it’s too late, those cells are mutating and you’re struggling to stay alive, even though only moments before you weren’t sure life was worth living.

You see we’re all drowning.  And when we realize this we want to shed baggage, cut commitments and rise to the surface. We’re gulping for air, we don’t want to be brought back down.  We want to have hope, we want to believe.

But it’s hard to have hope.  In a world where when you’re in school everybody tells you what to do, and thereafter no one gives a shit.

How do you make sense of it all?

Through art.

Tickets were not cheap, but it costs more to see a hit musical act and the venues are bigger and it’s all business and too often soulless.  Whereas theatre, which is nearly ignored in America, can touch your heart and stay with you for days, because of the truth involved.

I’m sure it’s great to be a star.  Whether it be movies or music.

But it’s really about the performance.

And the performance is all about the underlying work.  The play, the songs.  No matter how great you are, if the words are substandard, you fail, even if you get paid.

But when the script and the delivery align, not only do the actors soar, but the audience too.

I was soaring last night.

Once upon a time you couldn’t get rich in the music business, not really rich, not Lloyd Blankfein rich, not corporate America rich, not fuck you rich.

Music was a developing business.  Akin to snowboarding and computers and so many other enterprises that started out as hobbies but eventually generated boatloads of cash.

Sure, there were always tunes.  But what broke music big was the Beatles, the album and baby boomers.

Suddenly, you had a ready market willing to go in for an advanced price and money was generated.

But it still wasn’t that much.  Because in the sixties and early seventies tax rates were high, corporate titans weren’t overpaid and we were all in it together.  We envied the rock stars’ lifestyles more than their bank accounts.  The women, the travel, the fun…  Hell, most of the acts were broke or close to it, how much money could you make on three dollars a show and a draconian record deal?

Still, when revenues shot up, the originators sold out.  Most famously Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic and Jac Holzman at Elektra. Sure, Ahmet came from money.  And Atlantic wasn’t known for paying prodigious royalties.  But with Ahmet it was about the music.

It’s not about the music anymore.

Think about this.  The labels and the concert behemoths are not in the same business as you.  They only care about the money, art is secondary.

When they decry P2P theft they don’t do it on behalf of the artists, but themselves.  After agitating on behalf of the artists, saying theft is going to kill creativity, they keep all awards to themselves and ask for more rights for artists and pay less money to them.

But now it’s even worse.  Because music executives want to make as much money as the corporate titans.  That’s the game they’re in.  They’re no longer midwives to art, but adherents of Ayn Rand, looking to increase their personal bank accounts, becoming worldbeaters unto themselves.

It’s kind of like finding out the manager makes more than the players and doesn’t care if you win or lose, as long as he gets paid.

I don’t think the public knows all this.  Because the public has never been party to the vast sums being traded in the music world.  Then again, many people would rather steal than buy, because they don’t think the artist sees any of the cash, and in most instances, they’re right.  Sure, as long as the company stays in business it pays some advances and royalties, but the vast majority of the revenue is never distributed to those who make the music.  As for those shepherding the tunes through the system, is there anyone who believes we’re in a golden age of hit music?  That the labels are doing a good job?

I’m catching up on my Twitter feed and I come across this, from Jim Fusilli, the "Wall Street Journal" music critic:

"I’ll play along: Make the case for any Faces track."

The problem with the Faces is just like their lead singer, Rod Stewart, their albums got worse as their career progressed. But in the case of the Faces, it was even worse than that, because since Rod the Mod kept all the good songs for himself, the Faces albums were so mediocre as to have one listenable track at best.  The band ended with a whimper, when Ron Wood left to join the Stones, but they were done eons before, probably with their second Rod/Wood album, "Long Player". Which, although uneven, had a remarkable cover of "Maybe I’m Amazed", which was even more amazing in concert.

Remember when you went to the show, your jaw dropped and when it was over you couldn’t stop talking about it?  It oftentimes took years for your friends to catch up, until the band finally had a hit and broke through and you said I TOLD YOU SO!

That’s how I felt seeing the Faces in the spring of ’71 at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, just moments before "Every Picture Tells A Story" was released and "Maggie May" hit and Rod Stewart became a superstar.

Scrolling down my Twitter feed, because you read in reverse, I saw what started the hubbub.

Fusilli said:

"Just deleted the only Rod Stewart track in my 12,000-song iTunes library. I feel very good about this."

How could someone be so wrong and so proud at the same time?

And people were recommending "Bad ‘n’ Ruin", which is barely better than adequate, and "I’m Losing You", which is great, but a cover, and then someone mentioned "Handbags and Gladrags", which is fantastic, but no one mentioned the very first album by the reincarnated group, with the excellent cover of Dylan’s "Wicked Messenger" and…

"Flying".

So I go to YouTube to find the track, to tweet to Mr. Fusilli, but all I can find is a live cut from Paris.  And the sound is breaking up and I’ve got to find the studio cut, where the guitar stings, but as the music from Paris continues to play in the background the technological glitches dissipate and I go back to the video and there he is…

The star.

There are singers.  Performers.

And then there are stars.

Who knew Rod Stewart was so confident and charismatic until you saw him?

This was not only in the days before YouTube, but plastic surgery.  You just brought yourself on stage, your personality and chops had to fill the entire hall, convince the audience.  Could you do it?

Most couldn’t.

That’s why all those "American Idol" winners tank.  They’re vessels, they’re not the drink itself.

And I’m not saying you’re gonna be closed if you were not a fan, this music is not slick, the performance is not perfect, but it’s got an energy that can’t be denied.

And when Rod Stewart looks up to the heavens and sings…you think there’s something up there, you want to look too, he’s got access you don’t, but if you join the rock and roll circus and follow along, just maybe you can gain entrance too.

You had to go to know.

It was like the Homebrew Computer Club where Wozniak and Jobs introduced the Apple 1.  If you were there, you got it, if you weren’t, you weren’t unimpressed, you were completely ignorant!

We were music crazy.  We were enraptured by the sound, the emotion, unlike Facebook, it was life itself.

And ever since video, what was once there is now gone.

But with the death of music on MTV, we’ve got another bite at the apple.

What if you were just that good, just that charismatic, and you didn’t whore yourself out, didn’t sell yourself, didn’t hype, just let the music and the performance do the talking.

That’s the way out.  A refusal to market.  Confidence that the music is enough.

To the point where the public finds you and follows along.

There’s just something in this clip.

It’s not about perfection.  It’s got nothing to do with technology.

It’s got to do with life.

You can watch your bank account grow as the stock market climbs, but it’ll never compete with the feeling you get, the tingling from the top of your head to the tips of your toes, when you feel, see and hear great music.

Faces "Flying" -1/26/71