The “MMMBop” boys are all grown up with families and they’re still making music and touring. This is what they’re up to now.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hanson/id1316200737?i=1000668457020

 

 

 

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One more day.

We’re here for Mancini night at the Proms. Well, to be specific, it’s entitled “Ultra Lounge – Henry Mancini and Beyond.” It’s Hank’s 100th birthday and there have been events all year long trying to raise awareness and consumption. The ultimate goal is to reach the younger generations, but just like with the major labels, there’s no clear way to do that. I guess you just want to be in the world and try to get lucky, like Toto with Weezer’s cover of “Africa.” You never know when lightning will strike. Which is why you should never sell your assets. Are you following the Manilow/Hipgnosis story? Other than the fact that Merck promised all these services that never arrived, the return is what is fascinating. Barry got $7.5 million, and the records were bringing in about 500k a year. In other words, in fifteen years Hipgnosis would have made its money back and still own the asset! Barry? SCREWED! You have to understand these outfits don’t give you the money on a whim. They run the numbers ad infinitum, that’s what bankers specialize in. You think you’re winning, but money is what they know, they can’t write a hit, but they can run circles around you when it comes to income streams and cash.

So now I know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall, but I don’t. But being in the building reminded me of the cover of “Sgt. Pepper.” As in when you look at the people in the upper deck, they look like the people in the background on the front cover of the album. Hard to explain, so I won’t. But I will say we don’t have an equivalent building in the U.S. Think of an arena and then shrink it down to a third its size, that’s the Albert Hall. Furthermore, this Mancini event was streamed live on BBC3 and will live online for the rest of the year. That’s what you get for your annual payment. Seems so very civilized. Anybody who tells you the U.S. and the U.K. are the same hasn’t been to both.

And speaking of having been…

We went to Stonehenge. I’ve seen all the sights in London, at least the biggies, and I’m a big museum-goer/tourist, lifestyle ain’t enough for me to be in London. As for London attractions, the two few talk about are the Churchill War Rooms and the Imperial War Museum, truly great.

But anyway, we drove two and a half hours southwest. You get off at the Visitor Centre and then you get in a bus for about a two mile ride and towards the end, over the horizon, you see the stones and are…

Not that impressed. I guess I thought they’d be bigger.

But when you get up close and personal, walk in a circle around them, your feeling changes. You can see the notch on top of the rock that would keep the horizontal stone in place. And sure, you wonder about how they got all these stones in place, but more you’re just overwhelmed at the whole thing, that it exists, and you do too, but not for long. Talk about feeling insignificant…

I was under the illusion that Rome may not have been built in a day, but Stonehenge only took a few years. Wrong. And it had something to do with the angles of sunrise and sunset. And I could go on, but you probably wouldn’t care. And yes, you think of “Spinal Tap.” And I won’t say it’s a reverential moment, like seeing the Mona Lisa or the Last Supper, I mean you’re out in a field with sheep, but…there is absolutely something magical about Stonehenge, it’s not like you hang out for hours, once you’ve seen it you’ve seen it, but you’ve got to see it once.

And from there we went to Oxford. And I never want to go back to school, but when you go into Christ Church College and see the dining hall referenced in seemingly every movie, never mind “Harry Potter,” it’s very cool. And there are so many references, over the ages. Like the door etched with the message for Peel not to come in. That’s Robert Peel, of the Bobbies, of why they call the cops the “Peelers.” And one famous person after another went there. It doesn’t seem like you have to go to Oxford or Cambridge to succeed, but when you read the list of those who’ve graduated, it seems that way.

And we went to the famous pub, the Turf Tavern, where everybody from Thomas Hardy to Bill Clinton to Steven Hawking has partaken, but it’s a bit of a tourist trap, in that the food is not great, but being there you do get a sense of history, the place has been there nearly a millennium. We think Harvard and Yale are for the ages, but they’re no competition to Oxford.

And when we got back to London and I read the news I felt like Joni Mitchell in “Blue.” I didn’t run into Carey, I’ve never even been to Greece, never mind an island, and I’m not quite so lonely this very second, but I am traveling, looking for the key to set me free. And the funny thing is I found it. It’s the perspective. I was reading the news and it sure looked bad, they certainly won’t give peace a chance, that’s just a dream some of us had in the sixties and seventies. I saw some doctor on X posting about the absurdity of using Ivermectin for Covid, and the responses… Not only that he was wrong, but that vaccines don’t work at all, and they kill people, just made me want to shut off my phone completely, which I did, or at least put it down. All day long there are these petty battles online, you can get caught up in them to the point where you’re no longer living, they seem like life, but there’s a whole world out there, of people just getting on. We saw them as we Ubered out to Fulham to meet Richard at the River Cafe. The driver took us to the wrong River Cafe! As for the meal, I finished with a great cup of roasted almond ice cream. It reminded me of Good Humor’s Toasted Almond ice cream bar, that was the number one seller back in the early sixties, when the truck rang its bell and you ran out of the house with your dime and…this was much better, memorable.

And then to the Royal Albert Hall…

The orchestra played a bunch of Mancini classics, Monica even sang “Moon River,” but the funny thing is if you lived through the sixties, you knew every song, whether it be the themes from the “Dating Game” and “Mission Impossible” and even “Casino Royale,” never mind “Alfie” and “The Look of Love.” And I’m sitting there thinking how it was a different era, we all knew the hits, whereas you probably can’t name two songs off the new Taylor Swift album. We were there then, and those days will never return.

Then again, on the bus back from the stones, some guy wanted to give up his seat for me, because I looked…old. Talk about disillusioning.

Then again, “The Pink Panther” is forever, I’ve yet to find a kid, anybody who doesn’t know it. Twentysomethings and thirtysomethings may not know the Mancini catalog, but that’s one number they do know, even if they don’t know who wrote it.

So I’m going off to see Ralph for lunch. Tonight I’m going to the O2 to see Niall Horan, and tomorrow we take that big bird back to Los Angeles, and it will be like we’ve never been here, only a few days gone, as opposed to Led Zeppelin’s “Ten Years Gone.” But our entire identities were built on song. We were addicted to the radio. And going to a show was not expensive, the hardest part was just getting a ticket.

And that’s a big brouhaha over here, about flex pricing on Oasis tickets. Seems the industry can never get it right, acts are afraid of charging what the tickets are worth, but they don’t want to surrender the upside to the scalpers. And the fans? Each and every one of them believes they deserve to sit in the front row for under a hundred bucks. And nobody truly wants a solution, the bands hide behind Ticketmaster, the politicians grandstand and the public is delusional. And there you have it!

Oh, and then there’s the X kerfuffle in Brazil. I’m digging that. Today the tide of the news has changed. Brazil is saying it’s just the first government to stand up to Elon Musk, that right wing bully. He’s got his army saying free speech is absolute, but nobody really wants that. That’s how we got into this mess. Everybody has their own news, everybody is burdened by society, everybody wants it their way, and they don’t want anybody in charge but themselves. That’s no way to run a country, and Musk is trying to run the world! People have no idea of the power of the pen. “The New York Times” is a lousy business financially, but its worldwide impact is greater than any single politician.

But there’s that dreaded “New York Times” again. Derided by the right and the left as biased while everybody is busy playing Wordle.

And you wonder why it’s good to disconnect.

But you’ve got to be forced to.

And then you see there’s a whole big world out there and you’re only going to be here for a very short time, and that you and your efforts don’t really mean that much and won’t be remembered, so navigate to the best of your ability, don’t work so hard you miss out on life, and if I told you I had the secret of life I’d be lying, but yesterday the silver rain was falling down upon the dirty ground in Paul McCartney’s London Town. And I didn’t get a tan standing in the English rain, but I could see how not everybody comes to the U.S. and stays there. There’s something in the landscape over here. The history. That makes you feel part of something. Knocks down your ego a bit. Makes you realize you’d better enjoy the passage of time.

And there won’t be a quiz about all the musical references above, but one thing is for sure, you can’t be over here and not sing songs in your head, constantly.

I’m not on the next plane out of London, that will be tomorrow, and I have no idea if it will be on runway number five, but the amazing thing is you can get on a plane on in L.A. and be in a whole different world in a matter of hours. Amazing.

“Prom 57: Ultra Lounge – Henry Mancini and Beyond”: https://rb.gy/khrm83

You gotta be rich.

Actually, first we stopped in Harvey Nichols. All the men’s clothing is on the first floor, broken down by designer, and if I had 5 or 10k to spend I could change my entire look and be happy with it. But that ain’t gonna happen.

At Harrods the women’s stuff is on the ground floor. And the amazing thing is a lot of these handbags, the Louis Vuitton, the Balenciaga, have no price tags. If you’ve got to ask…you’re not going to be able to afford it.

And to tell you the truth, I didn’t see many people buying. Actually, at that point it was just us and the help. Seems that everybody slept in after a long night, they showed up around noon.

And when they did…

MAGA won’t like it in London. Because of all the ethnicities.

Now the funny thing is if you mix and mingle, your anxieties and prejudices evaporate. Not everybody has met a Jew, never mind a Muslim. I saw women covered head to toe regularly. Arabs are not a rarity.

Then again, this is the land of Brexit, this is the land where Elon Musk stoked riots based on a falsehood. That’s the power of social media, which is why Brazil is banning X. Enough with absolute free speech. That’s never existed anywhere, not even in the U.S.A. But free speech is the new gun control. What I mean is you’ve got to have words and guns to stand up to the government, which is going to take all your rights away, after it taxes you and wastes the cash on losers. I’m not saying the U.S. was ever cosmopolitan, but the last time I remember this south versus north divide was during the redneck era. Actually, when the devil went down to Georgia, Charlie Daniels was a Democrat, but that didn’t last.

I guess I’m saying you walk the streets of London and you feel insignificant, in a good way. Maybe it’s the living history, all the buildings that have been around forever. The landscape remains, you’re just here temporarily.

As for the men’s floor in Harrods…

Completely mind-blowing… It was the SHOES!

I read about high end sneakers in the “Wall Street Journal,” a grand a pair, but it seems like everybody except the super wealthy is still wearing Nikes and Adidas and Hoka and On in the U.S., along with some Brooks, Asics and Puma. But in Harrods… There was room after room of sneakers, one high end brand after another that I’d never heard of, many models.

And there was a room of Nike and Adidas, but they had many more models than you see in a store in the U.S.

And I actually recognized a few of the sunglass brands, but 395 pounds is out of my ballpark, especially when you can get ’em online for nearly half off.

And they had Moose Knuckles and not Canada Goose, which cracked me up. Jake told me in Aspen that he’d gotten a Moose Knuckles jacket for free, that it was a Canada Goose competitor. I thought it was a cheap imitation, maybe it’s the other way around.

And there are so many things you don’t see anywhere else, like you used to see in F.A.O. Schwarz in the sixties. Like kid cars for 50k. Multiple ones. Oh, and they had F1 simulators too. I counted four of them. You could get in one for 10k, but there was another one for 60k. You do know that the Formula One drivers actually practice on these things. And it’s not like footballers playing Madden, it actually helps.

And then there were the TVs. More B&O stuff than you’ll ever see in one place.

I was looking for the Wilson speakers. I once saw a pair of the top of the line in a corner, as if you could buy ’em for under 100k. But now Harrods no longer sells Wilson, they focus on Focal, the French brand, whose speakers I have in my car.

And they had a whole headphone section. And the prices were listed. They had the Sennheisers for multiple grand, but there was a brand I’d never heard of that wanted eight grand for the top of the line. EIGHT GRAND FOR HEADPHONES! Are they worth it? Who is buying this stuff?

And the truth is they wouldn’t make it if no one was buying it.

Everybody thinks they’re going to be rich. But the truth is they’ve got no idea how the rich really live.

Forget the anomalies, the Kardashians, Taylor Swift…

There are a lot of guys in finance who don’t think twice about these prices, it’s just a matter of if they want the item.

Like I saw this Christian Dior jean jacket in Harvey Nichols. I knew it was Christian Dior because it said so, in embroidery, right on the front. I don’t know what doofus would buy this stuff, but could a doofus afford 2k? That was the sticker price!

Maybe this is coming out wrong. Negative. But that’s not what I felt.

I felt like a kid in a candy store that had every treat available, but they were all off limits.

Actually, amazingly, we got free samples of this passion fruit chocolate bon bon. It was delicious, what would you expect?

And that’s why I wanted to go to Harrods, for the food halls.

Harrods smokes its own salmon, and there are multiple models, depending on how smoked you want it.

Reminded me of the pillow department. Not only did they have down pillows, but they were filled with feathers from multiple countries, Bulgaria, Canada…I mean how do you choose?

Oh, and they said certain pillows were best for side sleepers and…

I almost wanted to buy one. Actually, once you get off the first floor there are plenty of things you can afford, that you don’t have to mortgage your house for. But this was Disneyland, no way was I going to buy anything. I can barely decide what I want for dinner. I need to go alone and focus before I can buy clothing, and sometimes I still get it wrong. I need to get the right thing, and I’m so fearful of getting the wrong thing, that oftentimes I can’t buy anything at all!

Now there are multiple restaurants, I couldn’t even begin to describe them, but back to the food halls…

There’s the Iberian ham. The fish on ice. Do they really sell it through? This stuff doesn’t last that long.

And there was great takeout stuff too. Little lobster salads, actually not so little, for fifteen pounds. Better than Whole Foods and about the same price!

We ain’t got nothing like this in the U.S.

And there was a whole room of chocolate. And if you recognize the brand names, you must be Willy Wonka.

And we wanted to get a bite to tide us over until dinner. We ended up getting hot dogs at Darling’s.

Spencer gave us the whole rundown. Harrods doesn’t charge rent, they just take a percentage. But the dim sum place didn’t make it. But they had a brand name fish and chips shop… Well, it wasn’t actually a shop, every area, and there were about six of them active, from ramen to sushi to pasta to…had a counter like the Apple Pan.

I mean get older and you look at this fried stuff and wonder how you ate it with impunity when you were young, the Cokes with sugar too. You didn’t think twice. Talk about smoking taking years off your life, the American diet… Actually, I read a story in the WSJ about this area of Scotland where everybody has heart surgery in their forties, because they eat fried food and no vegetables.

I took a sneak peek. Actually, unlike Arthur Treacher’s, the fish had a very light batter. The chips… Were kind of like steak fries, but they weren’t slick on the sides. Actually, I felt that would have been a good choice.

In my mind I wanted to sit at the oyster bar. But just like the Wilson speakers, they don’t have that anymore.

Ultimately I burned out Felice and we left, but I could have spent hours more in the store. It’s a cultural experience. It’s an education. All those brands, entire spheres of products, all in one place. I buy almost everything online these days, but Harrods is retail therapy, entertainment. And there’s nothing like it in the U.S., nothing close. I’m not saying the U.S. ain’t great in certain ways, but not all ways. I mean at Harrods they even had a dinosaur head for sale! I thought it was a museum piece, but Felice asked. We didn’t get the price. I’m sure if you actually want to buy it, you can negotiate. But staring at it connected me to back then. These things really walked the earth all those years ago? And why are the bones always found in Montana…was Montana the New York City of the dinosaurs?

And it was hot and I took off my sweatshirt and when I went to check out the Leicas the sales agent immediately commented on my Submariner. Little does he know it’s nearly fifty years old, little does he know that I got it way under a grand, my mother’s cousin was in the business, list was $495, and I got it wholesale.

Yes, signifiers. I’m sure you can go places and people recognize the brands you bought at Harrods. They’re signifiers amongst the elite. Anybody can buy a Benz or a BMW, but are you really going to drop four or five figures on clothing?

And it’s not like there was a ton of inventory. This was not the Gap, with a back room full of duplicates. How much of this stuff could a company move in a year? That’s one reason it’s so expensive. But also, to be exclusive.

Did you read that Burberry is screwed? They dropped prices, everybody bought the stuff and now they’re over it. So Burberry is trying to move upscale, but they don’t seem to be able to do it. Their outlet shops are not helping them.

Isn’t Bernard Arnault one of the richest men in the world? Google tells me he’s worth $180 billion, that’s where luxury goods will get you. Then again, Bloomberg says Arnault has lost more money in 2024 than any billionaire.

But do you want to focus on money?

Actually, most everybody does, to some extent, it’s no fun to be broke. But in too many areas it’s now all about the money. Isn’t art supposed to be the antidote?

So, Spencer at the hot dog counter asked me if I could get him Oasis tickets. I told him I’d seen the band at the Whisky. He’d never heard of the Whisky.

Was he that big a fan of Oasis?

Not really, but he wanted to be included.

So who else are you into Spencer?

He drew a blank, and after pondering the question he said music was in a bad space right now, and he couldn’t name any contemporary acts he liked. And this guy is in his TWENTIES!!

Think about that. The labels are investing in and purveying music that gets all kinds of ink, that they tell us is driving the culture, but then you talk to the average person, this guy was hip, and they shrug their shoulders.

It’s kind of like when you hang with music business people. They might talk grosses, but really they want to talk television.

I remember when going to the record store was a ritual. And don’t complain about the death of retail, it was what was in ’em that made it so great. This was mecca, this was a museum, you went to marinate in the vibe, commune with greatness.

Now you get that at Harrods.

Ain’t that a shame.

But really, Harrods is one of the few things in life that lives up to the rep. In a world of overhype, Harrods delivers. And it’s only one store.

Amazing.

Tune in Saturday August 31st to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West.

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app. Search: Lefsetz