He was originally on "Huckleberry Hound", just a featured player, supporting the star.

But like an opening band that blows away the headliner, Yogi Bear could not continue in a supporting role, he demanded his own show.

And Yogi became a star, a perennial, like Elton John.  Someone whose famous lines are known by everybody and continues to tour, who never seems to fade.  If you haven’t quoted Yogi, you were brought up in a house without television.

"Want to steal some pick-a-nic baskets?"

"Hey Boo-Boo!"

I’ve been to Jellystone twice.  And I couldn’t stop looking for Yogi and Boo-Boo.  I thought I saw them a couple of times, but I was confused, it wasn’t them.

If I think about it, Yogi encapsulates my personal philosophy…

"He will sleep til noon, but before it’s dark, he’ll have every picnic basket that’s in Jellystone Park."

I’m an endless quest to catch up.  And I came across this story in the newspaper:

Warner Brothers Won’t Fight ‘Yogi Bear’ Video Parody

And I watched the video and I got so sad.  It’s got the feel of "The Sopranos".  Or "The Road To Perdition".  Great films are about mood more than dialog.

This is so sad…

Yogi Bear Parody

I heard he was sick…

I’m not sure Frank Zappa is going to be remembered, to a great extent he’s already been forgotten. But if you don’t own the first few albums, you’re missing out.  "You Didn’t Try To Call Me", from both the very first album, "Freak Out", and the doo-wop remake on Ruben & the Jets, encapsulates the despair of unrequited love as well as any song ever written.  And when you hear the line about reprimering the right front fender, you chuckle, Zappa was not like today’s artists, taking himself too seriously, he never lost his sense of humor.

And Zappa was not only about himself.  He was an empire builder.  He released records by acts diverse as Alice Cooper, Wild Man Fischer, the GTOs and Captain Beefheart.

The Captain did not start out with Frank.  Nor did he remain with him.  But his most famous work was released on Zappa’s Bizarre label.  Frank had two, Bizarre and Straight, eventually he had more.

"Trout Mask Replica" was not made for Top Forty radio.  Hell, it wasn’t made for any radio.  It was an album made to be played from start to finish in your bedroom, as you tried to decipher its dense lyrics and music.

And the hype was just as good.  In "Rolling Stone", Beefheart said it took only eight hours to record the record.  When asked why it took so long, the Captain replied that he had to teach the band their instruments.

Not that we believed that.  But how great to have someone who could reply tongue-in-cheek, who wasn’t giving the bland answers television seems to require in its endless quest to appeal to everybody, ultimately appealing to nobody.

Eventually, the Captain became more comprehensible.  There was that album "Clear Spot", that came in a plastic bag, which contained the positively mainstream "My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains".  Which the Tubes ultimately covered.  But they’ve been forgotten too.  The real Tubes, the "White Punks On Dope" Tubes, not the MTV eighties Tubes singing about sushi and beauties and…

And then the Captain faded away.  He didn’t play the oldies circuit, he went back to being Don Van Vliet and resumed painting, his first love.  Supposedly the fumes got to him.

Maybe the obits will say.

And if you really care about history, if you’re the type who’s up for a challenge, who takes the road not traveled and doesn’t turn back, check out Beefheart’s work.  Start with "Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)", it’s the most accessible.

But there won’t be TV tributes and there won’t be a funeral at Staples Center and you still won’t hear his music on the radio.

But those who remember will never forget.  An era when being a musician was the highest calling and financial reward was not the Holy Grail.  Zappa was exploring.  He and his merry band of musician/pranksters didn’t compromise a whit.  They just kept on doing what they believed in. Sometimes the audience caught on, sometimes it didn’t.

Alice Cooper went on to hook up with Bob Ezrin and record one of the great rock albums of all time, "Killer".  The fact that it took forever for the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame to acknowledge this diminishes its quality not a bit.

Pamela Des Barres, nee Miss Pamela, went on to be a famous groupie.  Then again, that’s what she was before she was in the GTOs.  That’s how close she wanted to be to the band.  That’s how close we all wanted to be to the band.

And Beefheart was like Zappa.  Playing on a high plane, waiting for the audience to catch up with him.

Eventually Frank played on a low plane too, which gained him some commercial success, but Beefheart never did this.  And when the record deals ran out, he moved on.  An artist is about artistry, not fame.

I read the news today, oh boy.  And I was emotionally affected and needed to reach out to you. They’re rewriting rock and roll history and getting it all wrong.  They want you to think that Patti Smith was more important than Alice Cooper, that Top Forty radio ruled in the late sixties and early seventies, that everybody was always in it for the money.  But that’s wrong.  We know the truth.  It’s incumbent upon us to keep the flame alive.  Beefheart was part of the firmament.  He may not have been dead center, but he had a place.  And we took notice.  And his death leaves an emptiness. There’s a hole in the sky tonight, a black one, where Don Van Vliet used to live and create.

The New Rock-Star Paradigm

Read this.  Not because it’s a blueprint for your success, but because it illustrates the decline of the major label paradigm.  Today you’ve got to do it for yourself.  If you’re waiting for someone else to help you, you’re waiting to be enslaved, if anybody pays attention at all.

Attention…  How do we measure that?

Major labels use old school metrics.  Primarily record sales and traditional publicity.  Yes, majors are investing heavily in online video, but if you think one spiking YouTube video establishes success, you just haven’t watched the Evolution Of Dance on YouTube

158,981,597 views and counting: Evolution of Dance

One thing we do know…  Music lives online.  It’s a digital medium.  The fact that majors still get the most revenue from CD sales illustrates their fear of the future.  If you’ve got nothing to lose, you take chances.  If you’re the steward of a dying business, you don’t want to take the blame.  You want to blame everybody else.  But the blame game is done.

In order to make money you’ve got to have an online presence.  You’ve got to build your name to the point that people know who you are and are interested in following your next move.  Once upon a time a hit made fans interested in what came next.  Now a track is seen as an isolated event.  You can quite literally be here today and gone tomorrow.  How do you succeed?  By burrowing deep online.

1. Match your music to visuals.  Music should be enough, but if you can get someone to stop what they’re doing and pay attention to your work online, you’ve got a better chance of hooking them.

2. Constantly create.  You have to engage your fans on an almost daily basis.  It doesn’t always have to be new music, although that helps, but interaction and innovation should be your credo. Constantly put something in the trough that hooks fans.

This is the primary reason the major labels are dying.  They’re massaging tracks for long term radio success.  And radio is dying just as quickly as they are.  Everything has a short shelf life online.  It’s the accumulated mass that establishes you.

3. Ask your fans to help.  It’s not as simple as building a street team.  Sure, you can ask for money, but that’s kind of cheesy.  Ask them to put up posters.  Ask them to house you and your road crew. Ask them to sell food at your gig in an alternative location.  You may view it as shitwork, but that’s not how your fan feels.  A fan feels involved, like a piece of the puzzle, and his beaming countenance and frothing description of his interaction with you will gain more followers than an e-mail imploring someone who doesn’t care to listen to your MP3.

4. Music is your calling card.  If you don’t think it should be free, you’re destined to the dustbin.  The key is to charge for it in different forms.  Maybe you personalize songs for fans.  Or you create special packaging.  Or you stream it online and it’s downloadable at the store.  iTunes is about convenience.  Many people aren’t savvy enough to know how to download from the Web, or don’t want to take the time.  In other words, you can give it away and still sell it too.  The key is to get someone to listen.

5. Forget trying to make it by the old rules.  It will only hold you back.  Gain enough success so the old school people come to you and offer you a deal on your terms.  Still, old school people can do less for you than ever before, and want more money for their efforts because they make less income. If you’re not about making the money for yourself, you’re not successful.

6. Only you will know if you’ve made it.  Sure, "Billboard" and BigChampagne have newfangled online charts, but they can’t calculate the number of fans and the quality of the bond.  Only you can. Using your own metrics.  Do you get more e-mail?  Have more friends?  Is attendance at the gig increasing?

We are living in an era of chaos.  And it’s unsettling to oldsters and newbies who want to get a ride on the old train.  The oldsters are refining their paradigm to the point of ridiculousness. They want cute kids who in many cases haven’t even reached puberty who can appeal to impulse buyers, those their same age.  If you’re twenty five and play anything but beat-infused tunes and you’re wondering why the major isn’t interested in you you’ve got your head up your ass.

Maybe, at some point in the future, we’ll find a new way to measure music success.  But sales of recordings is no longer it.

Old schoolers think albums don’t sell what they used to because of theft.  The real story is albums don’t sell because not enough people care.  The audience is scattered.  Then again, it’s easy to reach everybody online.  You can gain great success.

I applaud OK Go, but I’m not sure where they go from here.  Their success demands constant stunts. But they started in the major label game, looking for instant attention.

Don’t do that.  Grow slowly.  Over time.  So that when someone hears about your act from friends multiple times over years, they finally decide to check you out.  They figure you’re in it for the long haul.  They believe you’re for real.  They want to know what all the fuss is about.

MTV rocketed acts into outer space and they quickly fell back to earth.  Corporations are the twenty first century equivalent.  Everyone is looking for the easy way out.  But if you want to sustain, involve no middlemen, keep yourself pure.  Just keep building the bond with your fans.  Spend nights thinking how you can get people more involved, not what third party you can get to pay you.  You don’t want to be owned by anyone but your fans.

Distraction is the spice of life.

To tell you the truth, I usually put it differently, I say "Digression is the spice of life."  And I truly believe that.  The story is much less important than the nuance.  Just the facts ma’am?  I hate that, it’s so boring, that’s like reading the newspaper.  Informational, but not satisfying.  But a great book?  There are so many characters and subplots, a great novel is a tapestry of irrelevancy, just like life. You can sum up so many great novels in one sentence.  "Anna Karenina", the greatest novel ever written according to me?  Woman in despair jumps in front of a train.  There it is, now you don’t have to read it.  But if you don’t, you’ll be missing something.  Not only insight into Russia over a century ago, but the dawning realization that life never changes, despite railroads then telephones and now iPhones, the human condition remains the same.

So if you’re telling me a story, add the flavor.  If you tell me your father died, tell me how much he loved strawberry ice cream.  My dad did.  Didn’t have it every day, but when he ate it he smiled in a way I’ll never forget.  And then there was that time we rented roller skates at Venice Beach.  My father was possibly the worst athlete ever born.  But he put on skates and not only did he roll off into the distance, when he returned he did little pirouettes, not showing off, just performing something deep in his DNA, that had been buried at least since I was born.  That gives you a little insight into the man who passed away in 1992 from multiple myeloma. Seventy seemed old then.  Now it seems he was taken way before his time.

And now that I’ve digressed I can return to my initial aphorism, "Distraction is the spice of life."

If you always do what’s expected of you, if you fulfill all your obligations, on time, you’ll live a life, but it will be no fun.  We feel this insane pressure to answer our e-mail.  At least read it.  Maybe glance over it.  Yes, I know people who commit e-mail suicide, they become overwhelmed with the contents of their inbox and delete all the messages en masse, but that’s truly drastic, and I could never do it.  Not only are these real people e-mailing me, I might miss something.  A nugget!  And if I don’t get back to someone not only might I miss an opportunity, they might get pissed at me, and I can’t tolerate this anger, so I read every message.

Which was what I was doing when Felice was flipping the channels in the background.  Yes, I’m one of those snooty people who look down their nose at television.  Then again, television is far superior to the movies these days.  I read an explanation in the "Wall Street Journal".  You see movies are made to be consumed worldwide, they’re lowest common denominator, whereas television is paid for by adults, and if they’re not satisfied, they pull the plug.  Yes, we’re talking about cable here, especially what’s known as the premium channels, like HBO.  If they play to foreigners who don’t speak English, as the movie business does, subscriptions would falter and HBO would be history.  No one watches their pocketbook like an adult.  Kids waste money, their parents don’t.  Adults want value.  Which is what HBO and Showtime and now Starz do their best to deliver.

And playing on HBO in the background, as I was answering e-mail, was Carrie Fisher’s "Wishful Drinking".

I had no desire to see it.  She’s an unemployed actress looking for a paycheck and a bit more celebrity…  I didn’t want to see it live and I didn’t want to watch it on HBO.  But out of the corner of my ear I heard Carrie talk about her family, which I thought I knew the history of, and it was so fucked up and her commentary was so funny, I got hooked, I cast my inbox aside and watched Princess Leia deliver her story.

And I learned I must be the only male who never had a crush on her.  Carrie talked about a random encounter with a person who said he thought about her every day for years.  Really?  Yup, to be more specific, FOUR TIMES A DAY!

Carrie didn’t need to know that.

And she no longer looks like Princess Leia.  And I’m not talking about the body, gaining weight is no crime, but the plastic surgery. You wouldn’t be able to pick her out of a lineup.  They say Jennifer Grey is unrecognizable?  Carrie Fisher is worse.  You could be talking to her and not know it was her.  Why do people do this to themselves?  You age and we can still see the old you in you.  We can no longer see the old Carrie in today’s Carrie Fisher.

And her voice grates.  But worse is the delivery.  Malcolm Gladwell would say just because you have a good story, that doesn’t mean you’re a great monologist.  Which is why any Spalding Gray film is better than "Wishful Drinking".  You get carried away, even though it’s only Spalding at a table.  He’s telling his tale and you get images in your brain, emotions wax and wane.  The facts are secondary to the humanity, the trip.  Carrie speaks so slowly, so didactically, that you get pissed off.

But that doesn’t mean the content isn’t interesting, and that she adds no nuance.

I could recite everything she said in this seventy five minute special, but it was the pure digressions that stuck with me, that I want to convey here.

My favorite?

"Celebrity is obscurity waiting to happen."

That’s almost as good as:

"Show business is high school with money."

Martin Mull said that.  At one time, few people knew it.  Now even D-listers quote it.

Then there’s that analog, which most of the public is still unaware of:

"Politics is show business for ugly people."

I like that.  If you think your Congressman or woman is akin to Mr. Smith, going to Washington to stand up for what’s right, then you never noticed all the people in student government who were not on the football team, who were not popular.

But let’s get back to Carrie’s aphorism…

Everybody thinks fame is gonna last.  Forever.  But not only do you eventually get to "Where is he now?", you live long enough and the younger generation is truly clueless, they’ve got no idea who you are.  So if you’re coasting on your fame, just wait.  One day you’re gonna be broke without an education, with no obvious means of support.  That’s one of the reasons celebrities die young, they don’t want to admit they’re just like us.  It horrifies them.  They need to feel "special", and if they’re not…

And the other revelatory irrelevancy in "Wishful Drinking" is Carrie’s explication of Paul Simon’s "Hearts and Bones"…

One and one-half wandering Jews

That’s about Paul and Carrie.  Yup, she’s half-Jewish, Eddie Fisher was a member of the tribe.

How many times have I heard that lyric?  I had theories, but I never truly knew what it meant.  To be honest, I thought it meant nothing, that it was a figment of Paul Simon’s imagination.

But that’s not true.  Carrie Fisher was Paul Simon’s muse.

Maybe that’s stretching it, but she delineates other references to her in his work.  And that’s just mind-blowing.  We think our greatest creators come up with this stuff out of thin air.  Hell, it was mindblowing to me to be in Minnesota and to notice we were on HIGHWAY 61!  Dylan didn’t just pluck that thoroughfare out of his tucas, he grew up in Minnesota, Highway 61 is part of his heritage, his DNA.

Any insight into the creative process thrills us.  And to hear Carrie go on about her relationship with Paul had me on the edge of my seat.  It’s like someone was with the Beatles in the Cavern Club and suddenly surfaced and told the real story of the songs on the first two albums.  Not just an easy reference, but details, where John and Paul were when they wrote it, what they were eating.

Not that Carrie went that deep.  Then again, she did.  She talked about a conversation they had when Paul dropped her at the airport.  We find out that even though they were only married for a miniscule time, the relationship went on for twelve years.  Ain’t that life.  You can’t break up, but you can’t make it right, even though you keep trying.  Then you finally disconnect and one of the parties lives happily ever after with someone else?  Huh?

Yup, Paul Simon is married to Edie Brickell.

Carrie Fisher found someone in so many ways like her father who ultimately turned out to not only be a bad choice, but gay.

What I’m saying here is casting aside my obligations, my work, what I should have been doing, I had a much richer experience hearing Carrie Fisher talk about her life.

I know, I know, I slagged her appearance, her voice and her delivery.

But I’m telling you you won’t be able to turn "Wishful Drinking" off.  It’ll stick with you.  Little elements will fire synapses in your brain days later.  Watch it.

Trailer

No Underwear In Space