I needed a new head gasket.

One of the things I love about driving a Japanese car is nothing breaks.  So when something does, prematurely, aren’t head gaskets supposed to leak sometime after 100,000 miles?, I always wonder if I’m being ripped off.

My father believed in the dealer.  But an independent mechanic will give you an honest appraisal, he’ll tell you you can drive for a while, not to worry.  Because usually the independent has more experience.  Then again, the only indies I’ve gone to used to work at the dealership, I’m not about to go foraging for someone new just to save a few dollars.  Still…

And it’s even worse when they say it’s not critical, that you don’t have to fix it today.  Okay, I’m coming in for service again in about seven months…  TOO LATE!  Your sparkplugs could be fouled, your engine could miss!  Okay, you sold me, just do it.

So what started out as a routine oil change turned into a $500 bill.

And I’m so frustrated and dejected that I decide to walk home.  It’s not close, but it’ll give me time to chill out, otherwise I’ll be bouncing off the walls.  But when the service writer just called to say my machine was ready and offered me a ride back, I took it.

He said the driver would call me on my cell.

He didn’t.  He beeped.  I wasn’t sure it was him.  I went outside.  There was someone turning around in the next driveway in a make unlike the one I drive but it turned out to be my ride, I told him to wait a second for me to go inside and get my wallet and my keys.

I always talk to the driver.  He’s doing me a favor.

But I remember Coran Capshaw telling me he always talks to the runner.  You learn more from the person on the street than the one in the ivory tower.

And this man is complimenting my neighborhood.  Which begs the obvious question, where does he live?

And after learning he owns two houses in the Fairfax district, I asked him how long he had been working at the dealership.

Twenty three years.

Whew!

I remarked that you’re lucky to have a job at all today.

And that’s when he started pouring out his philosophy.

You can’t sit on the sidelines, you can’t turn down a nine dollar an hour job waiting for one that pays eighteen.  You can never make up the money you lose staying home.  You’ve got to take any job.  And do anything they tell you. Because if you show you can work, you’re gonna get a raise.

And I thought how knowledgeable this guy was.  The hardest thing is finding a good employee, someone you can trust.  You don’t want to blow him out to save five bucks, you want to overpay him to get him to stay!

Still, the guy owned two houses…  Did his wife work?

Well first of all, he almost lost both houses, he borrowed too much money to remodel, based on their present value, as opposed to the hundred grand he paid for them back in 1997.

But no, he’s not married.  He’s divorced.  Back in 1999.

Did he have someone new?

No.  Girls today want someone with money.  Who’s young.  He’s fifty four.  And he’s got two grandchildren.  But he’s not gonna stay at home like he once did.

Yes, for five years after his divorce this guy stayed at home watching television.  He was just too depressed to leave, to engage.

If that ain’t the modern condition.

And he talked about wanting that five years back.

I want the ten years back that I wasted after my divorce.

But one day he said enough.  He opened the front door and put on a smile.

How did he do it?  How did he motivate himself?

He punched his heart and then pointed to the sky.  Himself and God.

Good for him.  I needed psychotherapy.  Too many people take the easy way out, they kill themselves, or live quiet lives of desperation.

Even though it was difficult he put on a happy face.  And he discovered the energy he gave out came back in spades. If he was nice, people were nice to him.  He made all kinds of new friends.

And then we were in the garage.

I got distracted by the cashier.

I did a post mortem with the service writer.

I wanted to leave, but they were washing my car.

And that’s when I noticed the man hunched over the hose was my driver.

I almost wrote about James Taylor a couple of weeks back, because he’s giving free guitar lessons on his Website, actually, since I was last there, he’s posted one more:

James Taylor guitar lessons

Although I gave up playing the guitar decades ago, I was stunned that a musician of his caliber seemed to be not only utilizing the Web, but using it to give back.

But that’s not what inspired me to write right now.

Last night, I was flipping the channels before going to bed and I caught James on Charlie Rose.

I’ll admit I checked out Letterman first, but he was doing his once a year grocery bagging competition, you know, where he gets the big winner and goes head to head and throws stuff on the floor and cheats and it used to be funny, but that was back in the eighties.

And flipping with the remote, I can’t wait for Time Warner to have an iPad remote, that truly shows what’s going on, that makes cable TV comprehensible, I saw a guy I recognized with just a few too many years on him since I’d studied him last.  It was definitely James Taylor.  But the sync was off.  I switched to the non-HD iteration, but his mouth and his voice weren’t aligned there either, so I went back to HD.

And it’s no crime to get old.  But in fine detail, James Taylor looked less like a star and more like a person.  After all, these are just human beings, flawed like the rest of us, but they wrote those songs…  How did they write those songs?

Not the way they do it today.  Not the way those big Top Forty hits are constructed.  They’re built from the ground up. And even those Nashville compositions are anything but bolts of inspiration.  Brick by brick you build the song today. But great songs are feats of inspiration, they enter your brain and you have to write them down fast, before you forget them.

I was stunned, I was pissed I’d missed the first half of the show, because James Taylor was talking about creativity, something I deal with every damn day.

You can be reading the newspaper, watching TV, walking down the street, standing in the shower, and suddenly you get an idea, and you’ve got to RUN to the computer.

And sometimes it’s not a complete idea.  Sometimes complete songs come to James, other times just fragments, which he has to put together with other fragments to get an entire number.

And it’s tougher now, because of the expectations.  Everybody is watching.  Well, not everybody, but his loyal fans. You’re only a superstar for a little while, but he’s lucky, a fan base has endured, that comes every year to see him, that keeps him alive.  That’s his insight, not mine.  But too often stars are delusional.  But James is not.  And he’s got the wisdom of years.  But he can’t be an outsider anymore.

That’s how he felt as a teen.  An alien.  And he needed to write songs to delineate his condition, his feelings.  To illustrate where he was coming from.  But once everybody knew where he was at, they were watching, and that’s pressure.  That makes it harder.

Our greatest stars were alienated.  They were not the cheerleader or the captain of the football team.  They were closer to suicide than being voted most popular.  But there’s a little bit of alienation in all of us.  And when they sing, we swoon.

James Taylor on Charlie Rose

The Death Of The Music Industry

This has been burning up my inbox all day.  It’s a viral sensation.

First thought is the music business is screwed.  Second thought is LOOK AT THAT GIANT CD MOUNTAIN!

I’m not privy to the original Bain report, I’d like to see the inflation rate factored in, for all I know this graph is a hoax, but it feels right.

In other words, the CD was the greatest invention in the history of recorded music.

And it was fueled by high prices, vinyl replacement and television, MTV built acts whose music the public wanted to own.

We’re never going back to high prices, that paradigm is dead.  At the advent of the CD era a VCR cost almost a grand and you fixed it if it broke, now VCRs don’t even exist and their replacement, the DVD player, which is almost extinct itself, goes for under a hundred bucks and if it breaks you throw it away.  We’re still dazzled by technology, but we expect it to be cheap soon, if not immediately.  Now it’s all about mass adoption out of the box, and then the price goes down to commodity level.  The odds of a new expensive music format coming down the pike are nil.  But we can learn from the computer and mobile phone industries, everyone needs to consume/pay for music, it’s just about making the proposition attractive and cheap enough.  In other words, we shouldn’t be talking about driving the price up, but down, to gain instant and mass acceptance.  As for MTV breaking acts…  Ratings were always horrific, but the cumulative audience and the channel’s monopoly in a limited music universe are not easy to replicate, but not impossible.  It’s about building a music exhibition/discovery site that features thrilling music.  At the advent of the eighties, the dawn of the MTV era, music was exciting, as it was at the dawn of the twenty first century, with Napster, everybody was talking about music, it was on the cover of "Newsweek", now everybody’s on Facebook and young kids want to grow up to be Mark Zuckerberg instead of Boy George or Simon Le Bon, because Zuckerberg does it his way, by inventing something new we didn’t know we wanted.  How long has it been since music has delivered this?

In other words, the CD era was an anomaly, not to be replicated, and to continue to try to prop up this paradigm is economic death.  Labels still make 74% of their revenue from CDs

CDs still 74% of sales in 2010. Long live the CD!

They just have to look at Kodak to see the fallacy in this game.  Everybody said digital photography was coming, and finally it did, killing the film business, killing Kodak.  But people are shooting more images than ever, we’re living in the midst of a photographic explosion, we’re living in the midst of a music explosion, just because there’s presently less money in the sale of recorded music than previously doesn’t mean there’s not a ton of money to be made in music.

Note: Subscription has to win, otherwise recorded music revenues go flat and never recover.  We’re moving to the cloud.  If people can listen to their MP3s anywhere there’s no incentive to buy a subscription.  That’s why we need free subscription before digital lockers take hold, to inure people to paying VERY LITTLE for ALL THE MUSIC.  We’ve got to get everybody paying for music, get the price extremely low, it can always go up, like cable, but if it doesn’t start out low, adoption rates will be limited.  I’m behind Spotify because it presently has the best functionality.  It’s not beholden to the browser, it’s its own app, and this is a good thing.  Because of P2P technology functionality is equivalent to ownership.  But unless it launches free, it’s dead on arrival and we go to digital lockers and economic death. Rhapsody and Napster proved long ago people don’t want to pay for subscriptions out of the box.  But don’t think this means people won’t rent music.  They rented movies then paid for them and are now renting them again.  The public is malleable!

RADIOHEAD

If it’s not about the first week sales, entering the chart at number one, you can announce only days before your album is available, not only surprising and elating fans, but cutting down on the dreaded leak syndrome.

Sure, the major label built Radiohead.  Then again, after "Creep", what did EMI do for them?  It’s not like the band got a lot of airplay.  They followed their own muse and made challenging music that appealed to their fans.  Radiohead knows it’s not about closing everybody, but just those who care.

Who do I hate?

RADIOHEAD FANS!

Because whenever the band does something they clog up my inbox, whenever we discuss music they froth at the mouth. But I know, unlike a street team, they’re not being paid, they’re doing it out of passion and belief, so I don’t really hate them, I envy them, that they’re so into something, so I will never ignore Radiohead, even though they’re not my act of choice.

MUMFORD & SONS

In the old days, we never would have known Mumford & Sons was the hit of Grammy night.  Because we wouldn’t have instant sales information and the album couldn’t have been successful because the limited physical inventory would have sold out in a flash in brick and mortar stores.

But now you can manufacture ad infinitum, online, iTunes was ready with all the inventory necessary.  Mumford & Sons is still number one on the iTunes chart.

The old wave constantly bemoans the new wave, says the Internet ruined music.  What the old wave hates is it’s lost control.  Which came in the form of distribution.  Radiohead could not go their own way.  And it would have been hard to seed retail with enough copies of Mumford & Sons to show a spike, to feed demand.

The future is not digital sales, it’s streaming.  And if the labels were smart, which they are not, they’d go with Spotify immediately, before Apple or Google allows customers to keep their purchases stored in the cloud, obviating a need for subscription services.  So these sales statistics, which are anemic by old wave standards, are not harbingers of the future.  But they do illustrate demand.  You cannot categorize what appeals to the public.  In this crazy world anything can hit.  With everything available, the public selects from the giant smorgasbord, messing with the system.

People want to be touched emotionally.  That’s what Mumford & Sons delivers best.  In other words, in an era where so much music is made by machines, people truly desire that which is made by humans.

When it’s all said and done, Mumford’s album could outsell Katy Perry’s, it’s close.  Sure, Katy sold more singles, but do singles build careers?