Once upon a time you saw the Beatles on "Ed Sullivan" and wanted to be a musician.  Now you read the "Wall Street Journal" and want to work for Live Nation.

Kind of like Nathan Hubbard.  Once upon a time Mr. Hubbard was one half of the musical act Rockwell Church.  Despite having diehard fans, the road was a grind, compensation was meager, so they broke up the band, Mr. Hubbard got his MBA and just got paid $5.7 million to be the CEO of Ticketmaster.

I won’t say that Mr. Hubbard is doing a bad job.  Still, his $626,00 base salary is excessive and exactly why does he deserve all those bonuses?

Nathan Hubbard making $5.7 million is like a wannabe band getting paid the same amount.

But that’s the difference between entrepreneurship and working for the man.  It doesn’t pay to be an individual, it doesn’t pay to risk, to do something new, you’re better off working for the company, where a circle jerk of directors controlled by the Chairman compensates all the key employees under the fallacy that if they don’t overpay them, someone else will.  Tell me again, who else is going to pay Nathan Hubbard $5.7 million?

But it’s even better to screw up and be fired.  Jason Garner, Live Nation’s inept Global Music CEO, got paid nearly $7 million to go away.  Now that’s the kind of money I want to make.  That’ll allow me to make my health care payments after the Republicans eviscerate Medicare.

What the hell has happened to our country?  I thought one got paid for creating, for doing good.  Now you get paid for creating illusory balance sheets and laying the whole thing off on someone else too stupid to understand the core business.

That is the plan, right?

Let’s go back to the beginning.  What exactly was the synergy Bob Sillerman saw in rolling up the concert promoters into SFX?  The only beneficiary was the acts, who were ultimately overpaid.

The whole thing was laid off on Clear Channel under the concept that there were incredible synergies in owning radio stations and a concert promotion company.  This is like ESPN owning sports stadiums, but even worse, in this case government regulations prohibited preferential treatment to the concert promotion company by the radio stations.

So Clear Channel wrote off billions and spun off the company.

Michael Rapino survived to win.  And that’s the key element, that’s Rapino’s main skill, killing those around him and surrounding himself with loyalists.  In other words, if you’re not Canadian, don’t bother starting a career at Live Nation.  And what exactly does Steve Herman do again?

And Irving Azoff does an incredible job of extracting cash for his artists.  But whenever he’s been the buyer instead of the seller, he’s failed.  He couldn’t make money at MCA Records and he couldn’t make money for himself at Giant, not in any significant amount.

But somehow, Azoff, the ultimate manipulator, smarter than everyone involved, i.e. Warner and bankers and even Barry Diller, convinced these entities to play ball with him.   To the end result of compensation of $22.8 million.

Now Rapino, Azoff and Hubbard are no different from the rest of the corporate titans.  Remember this, Michael Eisner started off as an employee of Disney and ultimately became the company’s largest shareholder.  That’s like playing for the Yankees and ending up owning the Yankees.  No, that’s not an accurate analogy…  The team truly depends on its players. But does it depend on the manager?  Using Eisner rules, Casey Stengel’s family should own the Yankees.  And Tommy Lasorda should own the Dodgers.

The players in Live Nation’s case are the musicians.  And Live Nation might still overpay, albeit not by as much as in the past, but you’re still better off working for the company than taking the stage.  Your career will be longer!

Just like Goldman Sachs and the rest of Wall Street no longer make anything but money, we’ve yet to see Live Nation build anything that wasn’t there before.

Dynamic pricing might be a godsend.  But why wasn’t Mr. Hubbard’s compensation tied to success?  What kind of screwed up world do we live in where the bonus is given BEFORE performance!

And come on…  Michael Rapino gets compensation for almost meeting performance targets when 2010 was an utter disaster?  Isn’t that like letting Bernie Madoff keep some money because he didn’t blow it all?

Where exactly is the upside at Live Nation?  The screwed over proletariat cannot afford to go to more than one show a year and the lion’s share of the sale of theoretical ancillary items will go to Mr. Azoff’s acts, or to those of another manager, who is never going to agree to let Live Nation keep most of the money when the concert receipts are divvied up on a 90/10 basis.  Hell, there’s never even any divvying up, because of excessive guarantees.

But the real problem lies with the incentive.  It just doesn’t pay to be artistically creative anymore.  Used to be entertainers made all the money.  Entertainers were rich.  If you think today’s entertainers are rich, you’re dumb.  Corporate titans and bankers make much more and they do it for decades, whereas an entertainer’s career can be done in months.

So the best and the brightest don’t become engineers, don’t become teachers, don’t become entrepreneurs, they go into finance, where they use their degrees to come up with ever more incomprehensible products that yield profits to them, but add nothing to the economy.  It’s like our entire nation has turned into Las Vegas.  With everybody betting instead of creating.  But the poor bet on winning the Lottery.  That’s their only hope of making the kind of money a CEO earns.

Yet we do have incredible tech innovation, because in Silicon Valley you can still make money.  But music is a joke.  Come on, admit it.  Coachella the brand eclipsed any of the acts that took the stage, most of them will be forgotten moments from now.

And Warner Music was raped and pillaged by bankers and executives.  The company’s worth about the same as it was when they bought it.  Talk about creating value…  Meanwhile, what great acts were developed?  Paramore, with their vaunted 360 deal?

Turns out greatness does not come from the corporation but from the individual.  When Mr. Azoff controlled the hottest talent of the seventies he worked for himself and reported to nobody.  He ran a renegade outfit that dictated to not only concert promoters, but politicians.  But that was back when musicians were leaders, with something to say, instead of poor people trying to get rich, too uneducated and dumb to go to work for the man.

Rapino, Azoff and Hubbard are doing nothing the rest of corporate America is not.  Only this time, they’re doing it in our own backyard, in a business we can understand.  And we ask ourselves…  What have these men done?  Create the iPad? The Prius?  What can we point to that explains this level of compensation?

Nothing.

It’s like everyone in America is shrugging his shoulders and saying "It’s not my fault."  Then I must ask, whose fault is it?

Enough with the tax cuts for the rich.  Enough with the trickle down theory.  I want a world where the musician makes more than the executive.  Because without the musician, there’s nothing.

But that ain’t the world we’re living in now.

Everything old is new again.

So I’m in the bar at the Royal York in Toronto and I’m introduced to the Sennheiser rep.

I do what any obnoxious denizen of the cultural landscape would do.  I ask her about Beats.

I tell her I’m a dedicated Sennheiser fan, they’re my headphones of choice, I have both studio and portable models, but everywhere I go I see that red cord.

She said it all came down to marketing.  That Sennheiser wasn’t going to spend those dollars.  That they were in it for the long haul.  Had I heard the HD 595?  I needed to check ’em out.  If I wanted, she could send me a pair…

That’s hard to turn down.

They came yesterday, but I didn’t uncrack them.  I was once involved with a woman who would be so eager to wear what she’d bought that she’d often parade around with the price tag streaming off, albeit unknowingly.  I’m the opposite.  If I get something important, I wait…

But you can’t wait forever.  And I had to let this woman know I’d received the headphones.

So I just got the scissors, cut the tape and extracted the headphones and then plugged them into my Mac Pro, which has a jack right on the front.

And after setting the System Preferences to get sound, I was jetted back to the seventies, the era of stereo.

People reminisce about shopping in record stores, I miss going to the hi-fi emporium, checking out the new gear, listening to the Mobile Fidelity half-speed mastered records.

I’d buy a product a year.  A Sansui integrated amp.  A top of the line Yamaha tuner.  A Nakamichi tape deck.  And when I hooked them up I’d spend the rest of the day, the whole weekend, spinning all my old records, to see how they sounded now.

I decided to visit my iTunes playlist, the one containing my Top 200 most played tracks.

Suddenly, James McMurtry was singing just to me.  That banjo on that Keith Urban record was just to my right, the electric guitar exploded to my left, I was taken away.

They say it’s not the same.  That you can’t finger the album covers.  That everybody multitasks.  But this music was stopping me in my tracks, forcing me to spread my wings and fly.  It was the same as it ever was.

Everything sounded good.  It was like my favorite tunes had been scrubbed of all the detritus and were now pristine.

And I was afraid the spell would fail.  I’d switch cuts and it just wouldn’t be the same.  But track after track was a revelation.  I dialed up Spirit’s "So Little Time To Fly" and I could have closed my eyes and been lying in the dark on the floor of my childhood home.  Randy California may be dead, but in my ears, he was positively alive.  And the history of rock and roll is ploughing through my brain.  The fact that the famous riff from "Stairway To Heaven" is a direct lift of a Spirit cut.

Then that live take of "You Oughta Know", from the Grammys.  They never sell this stuff, you’ve got to steal it, but it’s so damn good.  Slowed down, with an orchestra, you remember it, right?  Back before Napster when the music landscape was still comprehensible and this twenty one year old came along during the summer of 1995 and blew us all away, took hold of the mainstream and owned it!

Then I pulled up Little Big Town’s "Bones"…you know, the one that sounds like classic period Fleetwood Mac.  It was like the four members were singing in my ears, literally.

And I’m scanning my library, wanting to hear more than I have time for.  Like John Grant’s "I Wanna Go To Marz".  And Crosby & Nash’s "Carry Me".

I was in such a terrible mood.  Soldiering on in order to prevent collapsing in a heap.  I’d just broken out the headphones to make sure they worked, so I could thank the sender, I had no idea my world was about to go from black and white to color.

Sometimes you think the past is history.  Frozen.  Unreachable.  Untouchable.  But listening to these tracks on these headphones makes me feel like I can touch down in any of the last forty five years, my popular music consciousness.

It’s a solitary experience.  That unites you with the creator, the performer, that makes you feel included even though you’re alone.  And it’s so good that you’re drawn to the gig, like a lemming, like a zombie in "Dawn Of The Dead", where you join the mass of people who feel exactly like you.  It’s not about money, it’s not about fame, it’s about sound.  A religious experience more powerful than any that takes place in a traditional house of worship.

All because of a simple piece of gear.  Opening up new vistas.

I almost expect my college buddies to come walking through the door, my high school crush, my summer camp loves.  You may look at me and see somebody old, but I feel the picture of youth, as alive as one can be.

Sennheiser HD 595

Indulge me.

I’m downloading live shows.  And what’s incredible is I got this Billy Joel show from ’72 wherein his voice is still pure and high and when he sings "teller" in "The Ballad Of Billy Kid" I hear something I never did before, I get insight that has previously eluded me, even though I know and love this song even though I came to Billy Joel late, with "Songs In The Attic".  Makes me wonder if everybody is best early, when they’re still hungry and have something to prove.

But I didn’t miss a beat with James Taylor.  I was there before just about everybody else, even at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester when there were maybe a hundred people in a venue that held far in excess of four figures.

And I found the recording from when I saw him at Harvard the month before, in April of ’70, just a couple of nights after my birthday, which I spent watching "Woodstock" stoned for the very first time when you had to go to a major metropolis to see a flick, when they used to platform the release.

And I’ve got this Pat Benatar show, that I won’t write about because you’ll accuse me of having lowbrow tastes, even though the debut made by Mike Chapman and Peter Coleman is revelatory and I’ve got a special place in my heart for "Shadows Of The Night" despite the hokey video.

And for my cred I’ll tell you I listened to this Jeff Beck Group show from ’68 where Rod still sounds like the man we fell in love with and Beck blisters but it was recorded on a cassette from the audience and just wasn’t worth keeping.

And I’m downloading this Steely Dan show from ’74, but the reason I’m writing is this James Taylor show from Oakland.  I’ll attach the essay by the distributor at the end, be prepared.

I imported this concert into my iTunes library, recorded back in ’71, and immediately played my absolute favorite, "You Can Close Your Eyes", which delivered and ended the show and then I clicked on "Chili Dog", which dedicated fans will know from "One Man Dog" which has been forgotten except for the hit, "Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight", but I love so much.

And "Chili Dog" is one of the best cuts on that album.  Along with "One Morning In May", featuring a duet with Linda Ronstadt, and "Mescalito", but this take is totally different from the studio version.

Well, it’s the same song, but delivered differently.  Slower, in a style that anybody who saw JT in the early days will understand, when he had more time than material and he would feature comedic interludes, spin songs as to be funny as opposed to serious.  You may hate him for the maudlin "Fire and Rain", but if you went to see him back then, you’d love him, not only because he had long hair, but like all great musicians he didn’t take life that seriously, he could laugh at it, and we laughed along with him.

Actually, in this evolving version, James is a chili dog then he wants one!

And unlike in the album version, he sets up the line about "Orange Julius", he tells us to HOLD ON before he delivers the line.

Actually, it’s all about delivery.  That’s what a great live performer does.  Anybody can get up and sing their hits.  Then again, maybe this is untrue, especially today, when talent is a moving target, when without audio effects talent is elusive.

Make my bed out of Wonder Bread
Spread some mustard upon my head
Don’t need no onions and sauerkraut, mama
Hold my bun, oh, work it on out

And JT’s talking about a hot dog, but he’s using the vocabulary of the dance floor, he’s winking at us as he’s singing.

I want a chili dog
Please give me a chili dog, mama
Got to have a chili dog
DELICIOUS!

He pauses just before the "delicious", like he’s just finished licking his lips and is finally able to speak.

Don’t read me no Ann Landers
Don’t feed me no Colonel Sanders

And then everybody in the audience cracks up…  This was at the peak of KFC.

I just need a chili dog, baby
Gotta gotta have a chili dog
Whoa, yeah yeah yeah
No, please bring home a chili dog, babe
Stone delicious
AND GOOD FOR YOU TOO!

I actually pulled into the parking lot of Tomy’s today.  The chili almost got me.  If I just didn’t have my tooth replaced I would have stayed.  Sometimes nothing satiates, nothing makes you feel good like food.

Now the studio take is fantastic, but it’s slick and there are other players and the music triumphs over the lyrics whereas this live, in progress take, is closer to "Steam Roller", a slow blues, and if you’ve ever seen JT do it live you know what I mean.

The recording may be forty years old, but it sounds like it just happened last night, it’s full of life.

Hi, I’m Bob, I’m an archaeologist and I’M LOVIN’ IT!

This Great James Taylor Show…Comes With A Little History!…I First Received  This Bootleg A Few Years Ago…….With The Given Show Date July 5th 1972 And Show Location Oakland, California…And That It Was Also A Live Album Recorded By Warner Brothers But Never Released…And Then Released By The Polar Bear Records As A "Silver CD" Release…That Was It!

Just Recently I Discovered That The Original Bootleg Was Not The Complete Show…When I Saw This On A "James Taylor Blog"… "Previously available on the CDR trading circuit, this excellent recording of a 1972 Oakland, CA show was originally planned as an official live release by Warner Brothers. Collectors will note that this CD omits 25% of the planned double-album, as it was mastered from only three available reels of the original four-reel set."

Which Led Me On A Search For The Complete Show….And In Doing So I Discovered The Following……

The Original Recording Date Was Wrong…..This Was Confirmed By Checking The Events Held At The Oakland Coliseum On That Date.

I Found This Description On A "James Taylor Music Blog"………"If this show was at the Oakland Coliseum then it is probably March 25, 1971…Carole King and Jo Mama opened. They had a giant closed circuit TV screen over the stage. The review appears to match up fairly good with the set list provided, "It is definitely NOT July 5, 1972 The "Ice Follies" played at the Oakland Coliseum each night July 5 – July 9, 1972"!

So Unless James Taylor Was On Ice Skates….And Doing A "Triple Lutz"….The Date For This Show Is Certainly Not July 5th 1972

But The All But Confirmed…March 25th 1971….I Think The Mistake Was Made Because The Date On The Original Tape Box Turned Over To Warner Brothers Was July 5th 1972 (See Photo Below)…But This Was Just The Date Warner’s Received  The Tapes…Not The Actual Show Date!

This Is Where It Gets Interesting………

I Found This Info….On Another "James Taylor Blog"….."Here’s the story of this recording…This was JT’s first attempt (of several) at recording a live album, with label Warner Brothers…He was touring with Carole King and Kootch’s band, "Jo Mama"… guitarist Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar, bassist Leland Sklar, and drummer Russ Kunkel.

Planned for release as a double album, the masters were passed around on four reel-to-reel tapes for a while until it was decided to air the show on FM instead of releasing a record. (They would try again–unsuccessfully–to capture James live for an album in 1981)

About five years ago, I paid through the nose for three of the four original WB reel-to-reel tapes at ebay (reel #2–these 6 songs–was missing) and I lovingly transferred them to CDR for the free trading community. I am attaching a jpeg of one of the reel covers, which makes a nice CD cover.(See Photo Below) My Oakland 1972 CD made the rounds until some bastards at Polar Bear bootlegs decided to release my (and others’) hard work on silver CDs and make some money at it.

I didn’t get too upset, this wasn’t the first time this happened…I also mastered the "Alternate One Man Dog" set from quad reel-to-reel tapes, intended for free trading only"….. By Greg B.

Then This From The "Complete"…"James Taylor Sweet Baby James By The Bay"…Bootleg Text File I Received With The Show.

"The "Baby James By The Bay" show is a really nice sounding soundboard…It was however, missing 6 songs.

So I dug them up from an old reel to reel copy. This show was originally rebroadcast on FM radio (I believe WNEW in NYC) around 1974. At that time, the venue for the show was listed as the Oakland Coliseum. The missing songs went between "Rainy Day Man" and "Highway Song"…Unfortunately, the missing songs were recorded at a slow tape speed (3.75 ips) way back then and some tape degradation has set in. The quality is a step below the James Taylor "Baby James By The Bay" original Warner Brothers SBD recording…In spite of that, I decided to include the missing songs, so that everyone can have a complete show from a really good concert."

"I took both sets of Shn files and decompressed and converted them to Flac. I ran them through cool edit pro 2.0 to take care of any glitches…amplify the volume overall where necessary and to amplify some of James banter which you couldn’t hear.

I then recombined the whole show into one file and tried to ease the track transitions and patch in the missing songs as well as I could. Although I was tempted to use some hiss reduction, especially on the missing songs, in the end I decided not to.

To do this half right, it always takes more hours than one thinks, I’m no pro but I think it came out very good."

(If I Knew Who Did This Fine Job…I Would Give Them All The Credit!)

And Finally This Description From Another "James Taylor Music Blog"……………….

A great soundboard recording. It’s been claimed that this is a Warner Brothers official recording that was initially going to be released as a live album but was instead replaced by another studio album. The quality is fantastic and James puts on a very good  performance. There are a few fades between songs but that is all there really is to complain about. I’m not sure how much this show has been circulated but it will make a great addition to any James Taylor collection. Overall, a definite must have!!

So There You Have It….The Whole Crazy History Of This Fantastic…And Now Complete…"Sweet Baby James Bootleg"…..

So Now Enjoy!   

And

Play It Loud!

James Taylor

"Sweet Baby James By The Bay"

The Oakland Coliseum

March 25th 1971

Recorded By Warner Brothers For An Unreleased Live Album (SBD)

*Taken From WNEW-FM NYC Broadcast 1974 (FM SOURCED)

01.Sweet Baby James

02.Something In The Way She Moves

03.Greensleeves

04.Tube Rose Snuff Commercial

05.Sunny Skies

06.Chili Dog

07.Rainy Day Man

08.Riding On a Railroad*

09.Places In My Past*

10.Carolina On My Mind*

11.Long Ago & Far Away*

12.Blossom*

13.Country Road*

14.Highway Song

15.On Broadway

16.Fire And Rain

17.Love Has Brought Me Around

18.Whoa, Don’t You Know

19.Steamroller Blues

20.Help Me Find This Groove

21.Promised Land~(Pre-Encore Applause)

22.You Can Close Your Eyes

The biggest story of the week is the death of the Flip camera.  From the cradle to the grave in four years.  I believe its death was collateral damage, any other company would have continued the business, but Cisco selling consumer products was like a record label selling blade servers, ridiculous.

Still…what is the lifespan of a product?

One can argue what the lifespan of today’s music is, but the fascinating thing is purveyors assume we’re going to consume music the same way as we ever have.  Paying per track and waiting for our song to come on the radio.  And that’s just plain wrong.

The iPhone killed the iPod.  Not literally, but iPod growth is done.  Apple could have held back the iPhone to get a few more years of iPod revenue, but then, when that income plunged, Apple’s lunch would be eaten by Android and any other smartphone that got market share.  Hell, one can argue that Android got a toehold because Verizon didn’t have the iPhone. Come late to market and you’re screwed.

Which brings us to the second biggest news story of the week, the $114 Kindle.

For those not paying attention, you save $25 by getting ads in the screen saver and on the bottom of the homepage (not in books).  Amazon is putting the stake through the heart of physical books, by getting a player, i.e. a Kindle, in the hands of everybody who reads, by dropping the price.

Now let’s revisit history here.  Amazon was on the road to extinction.  Then the business was revolutionized.  New blood said the concept of stocking everything was insane.  Amazon’s SKUs were greatly reduced.  Then Amazon realized they made more money on used than they did on new, and transformed their business to compete with eBay.  Then Amazon started leasing server space, yes, Amazon is a gigantic cloud computing company, powering not only its own efforts, but those of companies you think are working on their own.

In other words, Amazon dreamed big and was willing to change course along the way in order to dominate and survive.

Amazon could have just continued to sell physical books.  But with digital, there are no inventory issues, you can store everything.

Despite the outcries of the Luddites, physical needs to be killed, both in music and movies.  It’s inefficient.  Sure, the highway’s going to be strewn with bodies, but explain how an enterprise based on physical inventory, needing to be shipped, needing to be trashed when not sold, purveyed in a brick and mortar store with bills for rent and utilities, is better? That’s like saying we should kill the ATMs and all go into the bank.

The third biggest story of the week is the new Spotify rules.

One, they’re too confusing.  How many hours?  How many spins?  It matters how long I’ve subscribed?  Apple wrote the rule book on this one.  Make it SIMPLE!

And if you can’t make money on an advertising-supported system, I’ve got no problem with new models, then again, make it comprehensible.

Then again, Spotify is two years old.  Is it halfway through its useful life, like the aforementioned Flip camera?

That’s what’s stymied the music industry.  It’s waiting for the next big thing.  Maybe it’s an endless flow of little things, with a short shelf life.

In other words, maybe Facebook is a fad, just like MySpace.  It depends on user input, without your information, Facebook is worthless.  Sure, it’s more efficient, the design is better than MySpace, but saying Facebook must exist is like stating that the Pet Rock must sell during Christmas 2011.

In other words, if you want to know what’s going on, if you want a digital roadmap, look to Amazon.

Amazon reinvented what the company was.  First, it was only physical books, ordered online.  Now it’s just about everything, sometimes sold by partners, but guaranteed by Amazon (no passing the buck here!)  And B to B, i.e. server services.  And digital distribution, i.e. the Kindle.

People are cheap.  Amazon knows this.  Which is why it found a way to lower the Kindle’s price.  Who knows, soon a Kindle may be free, like a phone.  Maybe it comes with the guaranteed purchase of ten books.

And Amazon didn’t ask for permission.  It paid physical wholesale to publishers to build its Kindle market, losing money on every sale.  Then it went to the agency model.  And now this agency model is utilized by people publishing themselves.

Compare this with the music business.  Where you must pay the same amount you did twenty years ago, and the industry prefers you buy the antiquated album, preferably on CD.  Huh, do you want me to use a Motorola Flip Phone too?  Or do you want me to use the RAZR, the cellular equivalent of the Flip camera?

People are cheap, but track sale prices went up.

People are cheap, but concert ticket prices keep going up.

Who’s speaking to the cheap?  Goldstar and Groupon.  And isn’t it funny, those enterprises are flourishing, unlike the powers-that-be in the music industry.

We need a rethink.

Then again, with their guaranteed contracts music employees are focused on their income, not survival.

Amazon and Apple are focused on survival.  They realize tomorrow they can be the new Flip.  And so can you.