From: Buddy Buie
Subject: Ronnie’s funeral

Dear Bob,

Your words were read at Ronnie’s goodbye. Arnie Geller, record executive and my former partner, gave an elegant and moving reading of your tribute.

Barry Bailey, J.R. Cobb, and Dean Daughtry were there. Robert Nix and Paul Goddard were not there because of health issues. The Atlanta Rhythm Section and I APPRECIATE your respect and enjoyment of our music.

Keep Rockin’,

Buddy Buie

Growing up in the suburbs, going to college in Vermont, I never dreamed I could reach my heroes.

It’s a sad day when they leave us.  But their music lives on.

Ronnie, wherever you are, I’m still so into your music (and the rest of the band!)

By taking an alternative path, these musicians make our lives worth living.

Goodbye.

I never really knew you.

Then again, we did.  Millions of us.

Subject: NEWSFLASH: 60% Off Bon Jovi’s Vancouver Show, Tickets Now $6.75

From the Travelzoo Newsdesk:

VANCOUVER–MARCH 17, 2011– A limited number of tickets to see Bon Jovi’s "Live 2011" tour are now 60% off exclusively for Travelzoo subscribers. Prices have been reduced to as low as $6.75 to this month’s Vancouver show, which is the only stop in Western Canada.

The following seat levels and prices are only available for
Bon Jovi’s Saturday, March 26, performance at Rogers Arena
(formerly General Motors Place):

– Level 6 … $6.75 (reg. $16.75)
– Level 5 … $11.75 (reg. $26.75)
– Level 4 … $16.75 (reg. $36.75)

The Grammy-winning rockers will be the sole performers at this show. This sale ends March 23.

To purchase tickets, click below and select a level. Fees of
$7.50 per ticket and a $5.80 order processing fee are
additional.

http://www.travelzoo.com/ca/newsflash/4000137-996110/
—
About Newsflash:
Travelzoo sends a Newsflash email with newsworthy offers to
our subscribers just as the deal is released.

Tell one person on the Internet and everybody knows.  My inbox is filling up with forwards of this Travelzoo e-mail.

You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.

And it appears Bon Jovi is the former.

As he laments the passing of vinyl records and cover art, he’s overcharging and overtouring to the point where tickets have to be sold at a discount.  This is good for business how?

And the reason I’m picking on Bon Jovi is he’s number one, the biggest touring act.  And we depend on our leaders to lead, not to undermine the business.

We’ve got to stop discounting.  We’ve got to stop papering.  They may fill the hall for one show, but they hurt the business in general, they teach the public to wait for the deal.  So, instead of racing to buy tickets at 10 a.m. on Saturday, people hang back and wait for the discount offer, or the totally free offer.  And nobody’s out of the loop, everybody hears about the deal.

Hell, if we went to paperless we’d find out so many of these shows don’t sell out instantly, that demand is soft.  Instead, the acts create this mania to get you to overpay soon…  But you feel ripped off after, when you find out the guy next to you got a deal.

How about a fair price, how about transparency, how about being honest with the customer instead of employing subterfuge?

I love "Slippery When Wet".  When the record opens and they launch into "Let It Rock" my whole body is energized.  But Bon Jovi has convinced me that he cares not a whit about me, about the bond between artist and fan, about that special belief that the act is speaking to you and only cares about you, but money.

Bon Jovi needs to be the richest and the most lauded.

And we just can’t relate to people like that.

That’s closer to Lloyd Blankfein than John Lennon.

Sometimes you only have to hear a record once.

And this I heard on the only rock station in Salt Lake City.  It was entitled "Dog Days".  There was a moodiness that always appeals to me, but mostly it was the vocalist, and the chorus:

The dog days were scorchers
Southern torture

Living out of a suitcase, otherwise known as my BMW 2002, I was nowhere near owning a turntable, but when I was finally in one place I bought this album by the Atlanta Rhythm Section and wondered why they weren’t big stars.

Maybe it’s because they were on Polydor Records.  Barely a major, if you were on Polydor or any of the affiliated PolyGram labels, like Mercury, you had a strike against you.

But the follow-up, "Red Tape", was even better.  There was this almost ten minute track called "Another Man’s Woman".

Today they want the songs shorter, to appeal in call-out research.  You’ve got to have a bite-sized hook.  But the tracks we liked best in the seventies were mind-benders that started one place and took us to quite another.  Of course you know "Stairway To Heaven" and "Free Bird".  But you should know "Another Man’s Woman" too.  With its epic wailing, the intertwining playing, weaving a tapestry that was so tight you could bounce a coin on it and be so amazed that you kept doing so.

Eventually, the Atlanta Rhythm Section started having hits.  "So Into You".  "Imaginary Lover".  But they got mislabeled, making it on these soft cuts most people did not know they could rock.  That’s what happens when you’re a bunch of faceless studio cats from Georgia.  People want to pigeonhole you, they don’t want to believe you can do it ALL!

I was a fan.  I went to see them at the Roxy with my girlfriend.  They were mine.  I was glad to see them break through.  I wore a smile on my face.

And it’s these second level bands that we bond ourselves to.  Anybody can have the superstars, but we hard core musos love the unheralded, the misunderstood, the acts with the goods that can blow almost everybody else off the stage.

And when you connect with an act, you don’t only go along for the ride into the future, you also blast back to the past.

And on one of the band’s earlier albums I discovered a gem.

Yes, on 1974’s "Third Annual Pipe Dream", there’s this magical cut "Doraville".

Doraville, touch of country in the city
Doraville, it ain’t much, but it’s home

Ain’t that the truth.  That’s America.  That’s where you come from.

Friends of mine say I oughta move to New York
New York’s fine, but it ain’t Doraville
Every night I make a living making music
And that’s all right to folks in Doraville

Pride.  Not obnoxious I’m better than you pride, but a warm feeling inside, a belief that how you’re doing it is right despite everybody else telling you that you’re doing it wrong.

Later in the song, Ronnie Hammond urges us to "come on down and visit, you’ll dig it".

And I truly felt that I would.

To be sitting in this studio with these cats where it’s all about music.  Where the charts are secondary to locking into a groove.

But I guess that’ll never happen.

You see Monday, Ronnie Hammond passed away.

And it hits me right HERE!

I don’t know if the music of these bands survives.

But they’re the fabric of my identity.  Basic building blocks.  I agonized over every album purchase.  I committed myself to who was good.

And the Atlanta Rhythm Section were good.  They delivered.

Their music is a part of me.

From: Al Kooper
Re: Ronnie Hammond

Bob – you eastern-western-but-never- Southern-guy,

I knew Ronnie Hammond well.

I befriended the band they were b4 ARS when they played New York as The Candymen. They were Roy Orbison’s back up band and they opened for The Blues Project and Blood Sweat & Tears when I was a member of each and Orbison took time off. They were signed to ABC-Paramount back then.. We became good friends and when I played Atlanta as Al Kooper with my band in 1972, they invited us down to hear their just built studio and jam. I fell in love with that studio and also the other bands I heard in town when I spent that week there.

I bought into the studio and had my roadies pack up my apartment in New York City and I never even went back HOME from that trip. I moved to Atlanta in 1972, started my own label (Sounds Of the South) and signed  two of the bands I heard in town that week (Lynyrd Skynyrd & Mose Jones) Robert Nix, ARS drummer played on Skynyrd’s track "Tuesday’s Gone" and Ronnie Hammond and Ronnie Van Zant  challenged each other for the same woman on more than one occasion. I played on two ARS albums and they backed me up on one of my solo albums. When I heard he passed away, I hit You Tube to see what he looked and sounded like lately and he had aged pretty well. However only he and the keyboard player remained from the original band and that was sad.

It rang my bell when you quoted "Doraville," cause that’s where Studio One of which I was part owner for awhile  was. "Free Bird" "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Saturday Night Special" were all cut by that Jacksonville band…… in Doraville.
I was told Ronnie wasn’t feeling well and went to the doctor’s office and promptly died right there.

Give ’em hell up there in Heaven, Ronnie.

Al Kooper

And who said the Internet never broke a star?

This is what the Black Eyed Peas have wrought.  After songs with inane lyrics like "My Humps" and "Boom Boom Pow" is it any wonder that Rebecca Black’s trifle is a YouTube sensation?

Oh, don’t focus on the barely literate lyrics.  We’ve been pandering this crap for a decade and now we’re surprised the public buys it?

And the de rigueur rapper.

And the music video.

This is just the logical conclusion to where the major labels and radio have led us.  And you wonder why both are dying.

You can’t have it both ways.

You can’t sell crap and then get pissed when someone creates same and profits from it.

So we’ve finally reached that crossroads where real artists and "stars" part ways.

Isn’t it interesting.  The so-called "stars" of today are all over the gossip blogs, even the mainstream press is infatuated.  It’s a simple story.  Take good-looking kid and music industry and radio consensus and everybody gets on the bandwagon to sell this worthless product.  Which is why most Top Forty acts can barely play clubs.  Or if you have fame, your "career" arc is very brief.

And "American Idol" is no better.  Just because Jimmy Iovine worked with the Boss and Dr. Dre that does not make the contestants deserving of anyone’s attention.  And trotting out all those "producers".  Used to be artists fought to produce their own records, now they can’t wait to sign up with the major label and get made over by the usual suspects, who do the same for every pretty face, just like Ark Factory.

I think it’s funny.  I think if you dig down too deep you’re missing the point.

It does not matter exactly why this video caught fire.  That’s what happens online.  There’s a constant flow of overnight sensations, train-wrecks we watch, discuss for a nanosecond and then move on from.

Like I said, don’t confuse this with artistry.

And unlike in the old days, something can reach everybody in a day or two.  Gatekeepers are irrelevant.  The public spreads the news.

But do you research that accident you saw on the freeway?  No, you focus and forget.

What we’ve got now is the dying gasp of the old media.  Not only music, but news too.  Otherwise, how in the hell could Kim Kardashian be such a star?  The mainstream media was complicit, otherwise no one would pay attention, not for long.

And I’m not saying these nitwits will never rise to the surface.

But I am saying that they’ll constitute ever less of the music business money.

Come on.  Everyone’s got the software.  The tracks on the radio feature auto-tune and you want to beat up this little girl with rich parents miming the concoction of bottom feeders?

Little kids like seeing people their own age.

Little kids want to believe they too can be stars.  That if they met Rebecca Black, their life would work.  It’s about the fantasy.

It’s not about the music.

But the music is not that far different from what the big boys are selling.

So why are they complaining?

And why are you complaining?

We no longer live in one homogeneously controlled landscape.  The fact that you hate crap is not so significant.  It’s about what your peers like.

And if you’re over twenty and your peers are interested in Rebecca Black, you must be a pedophile.

Rebecca Black will go back to middle school.

In college, people will laugh at her fleeting fame.

To believe she’s a star is to believe the cast members of the "Real World" have lasting talent.

Move right along folks, there’s nothing here of interest.  Real music requires inspiration and dedication and tons of practice and it lasts.

Unlike "Friday".

Rebecca Black – Friday

Ark music Factory Launch Video Highlight