Just a note to tell you he was Jeff Beck’s drummer last night.

Rhonda Smith played bass with Prince, as well as Beyonce and Justin Timberlake.  And Jason Rebello has played keyboards with Sting and Chaka Khan.  And all three were incredible, but I want to focus on Mr. Walden.  Whom I remembered as being announced for this tour, but didn’t recognize on sight.

But you don’t have to recognize a player to realize he’s great.  Don’t confuse fame with talent.  We’ve been doing that for far too long.  The machine tells us to follow someone, we go to the gig and applaud, and ultimately we forget them.  They’re creatures of the media more than music.  Then there are others who never get the big push, but manage to eke out careers, sometimes quite successfully, and when you’re exposed to them, you’re wowed.

I could reel off some of Mr. Walden’s credits.  I could send you to his Wikipedia page.  But that’s not the point.  Watching him last night I was mesmerized not only by his power, but his fills, how he turned his kit into a musical instrument.  He just wasn’t banging, he just wasn’t performing, he was making music!  Tying down the bottom with Ms. Pierce.  And bottom doesn’t have to be plodding.  These guys were dancing all around down there.  Still, they provided a foundation.

Used to be we revered people for their musicianship.

Then we applauded them for their dancing.  And now it’s about the production, the show.  But it’s talent that ultimately survives.  And that requires dedication and practice. 10,000 hours alone in your room working it out on your instrument as opposed to playing the keyboard on your computer, spreading the word how great you are.

This guy was not the main attraction.  He was support, although he did more than that on stage, he was a vibrant member of the ensemble.  But I’m telling you about him because he was so damn good!  The way he held the cymbals and hit them, the way he rat-a-tatted on the drums in a way that energized me, made me pay attention, drew me in and kept me there.

This is the future of music.  Not a scrim between audience and performer, keeping each separate, but a transmission from player to listener, a bonding.  Which happens mostly live these days, since recordings are so manipulated.  And when you experience it you tell everyone you know, because you want to share the joy, you want to turn them on to something so great.  And you never forget it.  That’s what great music, great playing is…indelible.

I can’t fall asleep, I ate too much pastrami.

That’s a birthday tradition.  A movie, a sandwich at Langer’s and a hot fudge sundae.  Although it didn’t go down exactly that way today.  You see the movie was too long to make it to the gig so we went to the movie first which meant Langer’s was closed by the time it was over so we went to Brent’s in the Valley and then downtown.  Langer’s pastrami is hand-cut, they say it’s the best in the nation, but now that the neighborhood’s turned so bad, they close at four, and everyone tells me how great Brent’s is, and it is pretty damn good, but it’s thin-style/machine cut meat.  But it’s still pastrami.  And that leads to thirst and indigestion.

We went to see "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo".  Salander was just a bit too pretty for my taste, and a bit too tall, but the movie was very well done, although a tad unsatisfying, since I knew what was going to happen, having read the book.  But it made me want to go to Sweden.  Live out the bleak winter.  With all that white snow and bitter cold.  The blast of heat upon coming indoors.  It’s so refreshing.

And maybe these actors are stars in Scandinavia, but it was refreshing to see unknowns who weren’t young and pretty (except for Salander).  Cecilia Vanger and Erika Berger had smile lines.  Can you imagine someone on "Desperate Housewives" with smile lines?  Can you imagine watching "Desperate Housewives"?  They feed us TV so we won’t pay attention as they rip us off.

And like I said, from the Westside to the Valley and then downtown for this Jeff Beck show at the Grammy Museum for two hundred people.

You should have been there.  To see Jeff tapping, putting Eddie Van Halen to shame.  And the band was so locked in!  The drummer was incredible and when the keyboard player showed his jazz chops during the interview segment, his versatility was astounding, like Jeff said, he could PLAY!

Yes, there was an interview segment after Jeff not only played songs from the new album, but "A Day In The Life" and BRUSH WITH THE BLUES!  My all time favorite Jeff Beck song.

And Jeff had some interesting things to say.  About how the records we love most were done in a fit of pique, in one take, how we’ve got all this technology today, but it actually works against us.  And then he said artists repeat themselves out of cowardice.  And that he started in ballrooms, where he never got paid.  Ain’t that interesting, the best rock guitar player of all time (he said Segovia is the best GUITARIST of all time) started off playing for free and the hacks working harder at social networking than music are whining "where are the bucks?"  And he ragged on the critics too.  Saying he doesn’t win things. And when a questioner from the audience said that he plays slide in G, Jeff put him down to the point where the whole audience was aghast, then laughed.  WHO CARES?

Yup, who cares about the wannabe.  We’ve only got time for excellence.

And the most fascinating bit of insight came as a result of another audience question, another guitar player asking…why does Jeff no longer use a pick?

Because the great rockabilly players, the great Segovia did not.  It gave you options, you could play triplets, and it was clearer than ever at this point that the man in the sleeveless outfit might be a star, but first and foremost, he’s a MUSICIAN!

What a concept!

In an era of "Idol".  And "X Factor".  Those shows build train-wrecks, so that old men can make money.  But being a musician, you’ve got to do it for yourself, there may be no other reward.

To see these four musicians on stage, watching each other, playing in harmony, playing in tune, was the antithesis of what we hear on Top Forty radio.  This wasn’t producer-driven.  The music was not built piece by piece.  It was organic.  Alive. And if you didn’t hear it tonight, you never heard it at all.

And when it was all over, we went upstairs for the hang.  I’d like to say the conversation with Jeff was pithy and insightful, but it takes hours for these musicians to calm down from delivering, although he did riff with Felice about playing "Moon River" and "Peter Gunn".

And when it was all over, I roamed the halls of the Grammy Museum.  They had Neil Diamond’s outfits.  The ones from the front and back covers of "Hot August Night".  Utterly shocking.  Like entering King Tut’s tomb.  And a Post-it with a handwritten note from the man himself saying he traded in his Martin D-18 for this Everly Brothers Flattop Gibson, upon which he wrote "Cherry Cherry", "I’m A Believer", "Red Red Wine"…all the hits you know and love.

He started nowhere.  On a fencing scholarship at NYU.  He formed a songwriting partnership with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich.  And then he made it.

Do you know how hard it is to make it?

Just imagine, you’re broke, your family doesn’t understand you, you move to San Francisco, develop a new family and suddenly…

That was the most poignant moment of the evening.  Seeing the handwritten notes from Janis Joplin to her family.  Pages long, talking about Ralph Gleason rave reviews, the $15-20,000 offers from major labels.  Trying to bridge the gap between daughter and mother with evidence of a success her parent just couldn’t understand.

And they had Janis’ painted Porsche.  And an unretouched photo showing her acne scars.  She wasn’t beautiful, but boy could Janis sing.  That’s what it used to take, talent.  But talent wasn’t enough, Janis made it, but the drugs killed her.  How can you go from being an alien, an outcast, to being everybody’s favorite?  You were nobody, now you’re somebody. Difficult for a poorly-adjusted kid to cope with.

And seemingly all the stars of yore were poorly adjusted.  Start with John Lennon.  And put Jeff Beck in there too.  But man can he play.  And when he walks his fingers down that fretboard, when he picks those notes, when he works the whammy bar you can hear all the joy, alienation and frustration of the life he’s led, he speaks through his instrument, and you’re touched deep inside, you say to yourself, this is exquisite, this is life itself.

THE APPLE NUMBERS

How long do you keep a cell phone?  Two years at most.

That’s why Apple stock is going to go through the roof.

I thought it was properly priced or overvalued, I told a friend not to buy any more at these prices.  But what made me think different was Jason Schwartz’s analysis on thestreet.com:

"The fact that this company’s hottest product is an iPhone that needs to be replaced every 18 to 24 months is a fact that not many analysts have noticed."

Schwarz: Forget Microsoft, Apple’s market cap certainly will end up crushing Exxon’s

Whew.  Think about that!  That’s like the record companies upgrading sound quality every two years so that people have to buy the same product all over again, or blowing out MP3s because we’re going to streaming services.  And the ultimate goal is recurring income!

Apple sold 8.75 million iPhones this past quarter, compared with 3.79 a year ago.  As for the iPod?  Sales were down 1%, but revenue was up as buyers switched to the more expensive Touch.  Which is like getting people to buy more expensive CDs while the market is moving to digital.

So, what we need are artists, who develop and build.  The artist is the hardware, the iPhone/iPod, and the ticket sales and merch are the data plan.  Don’t forget most apps are free.  Then again, now you can monetize within the app.

Is Jobs limiting the iPhone by restricting the tools developers can use and making it porn free, or by controlling everything has he got the winning formula?  Unclear.  But the whole world is watching.  The leak of the iPhone 4G by Gizmodo is a bigger story than the leak of any music.  Maybe because Apple is even purer than Jay-Z.

What kind of fucked up world do we live in where the Black Eyed Peas are beholden to the man, tied in with every corporation known to man, and a computer company is pure?  Think about that…

The Most Corporate Band

And people believe in Apple, they buy the Peas, but they don’t believe in them, and that’s a big difference.

Then again, in tech you’re only as good as your last product.  Which is why, rather than continuing to tour on the old ones, rest their laurels on Windows and Office like Microsoft, Apple is releasing and updating product like crazy, trying to not only ride the wave, but paddle out in front of the next set.

iPAD/KINDLE

Publish or Perish
Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business?

This article is SO good I want you to stop reading this and immediately click through and read it.

I could argue with the conclusion, and the editor ultimately made it unclear whether Amazon was benign or the enemy, but I was riveted.

I culled too many quotes to ultimately insert them here, but I’ll just leave you with one:

"Bookstores return about forty per cent of the hardcovers they buy; this accounts for $5.20 per book."

Holy shit, this is a business model?  Where profit is a dollar?

Really, read this!

INSIDE THE BIZARRE WORLD OF REALITY TV NIGHTCLUB APPEARANCES

Inside the Bizarre World of Reality TV Nightclub Appearances

And you wonder why they don’t book live music.

But forget the club owner’s viewpoint, would you rather see a wannabe musical act or a reality TV star in the flesh?  The former is a whore who cloaks himself in music to obscure the truth, the latter is more honest, the reality TV star truly is a whore!  I’m gonna do anything to be famous and then cash-in!

DEVO

The Devo Song Study

This is SO well done.

Under the aegis of asking for help, they’re getting you to listen to the songs.  But funny how they’ve only got snippets, like call-out research, if only they let you stream the entire song.

Meanwhile, Devo was always about conception, being more than the songs.  The Web is built for them.  Their time has returned.

You might not understand it.  You might be well-adjusted, you might fit in, you might be happy where you are.  But some of us need a fresh start.  We need to leave, move on, to a place where we can be accepted on our own terms, where we can reinvent ourselves, live the life in our heads, the one in the Beach Boys songs.

At this late date, California even has natives.  But they’re unlike the denizens of New York.  They’ve got no need to say L.A. is the best, that nothing compares.  But they don’t want to live anywhere else.  Because of the lifestyle.  Sure, the weather’s great, but where else can you live where no one else is in your business, where you can strive to be everything you want to be?

This is the California Dream.

And we’re all dreamers.

Glenn Frey’s a dreamer.  Don Henley and Joe Walsh too.  From Michigan, Texas and New Jersey respectively.  They all came to L.A.  To express themselves, to make it.

And making it used to be so different.  The best and the brightest went into music.  A world where victory meant you were beholden to no one, where you got all the pussy you could handle and had more than enough money to pay for drugs and the whims of your imagination.

They call those people bankers today.  Wall Streeters have the money.  Sure, an athlete can make twenty mil a year for a while, but then he flames out.  A musician?  He’s making bupkes in comparison.  And then there’s Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, the Google twins.  They’re the rock stars of today.  On sheer wit not only are their enterprises raining coin, they’re in each and every one of our homes, they permeate our lifestyle.  Steve Jobs says the iPad is the next big thing and everybody checks it out.  We use Google multiple times a day.  And Facebook is the new FM radio, a place where the like-minded congregate.

Yes, that used to be our clubhouse.  The FM dial.  Everywhere we went, there was a station just for us.  But us was each and every baby boomer.  You can’t find a boomer who doesn’t know "Hotel California".  May hate it, just like people pooh-pooh the iPad, but there’s not a boomer alive who hasn’t heard it.  Whereas a large part of the population hasn’t even heard today’s Top Ten.  And those making music are sold out whores, tying in with corporations to get their vapid message across.  And what exactly is the Black Eyed Peas’ message?  That they know how to make money?  You’ve got a feeling that you want to touch her humps, her lady lumps…welcome to the parade, you’re adding no insight into humanity, this is Life 101.

But it used to be different.  We used to listen to what the acts had to say.  We wanted the insight in addition to feeling good.  The deejays were our best friends.  We went to the gig to commune with our brethren.  And the music played…it was ubiquitous, everywhere you went in the summer of ’72 you heard "Take It Easy".  "One Of These Nights" in the summer of ’75.  And the winter of ’77 was filled with "Hotel California".  And in between them was a plethora of hits, to the point where the Eagles don’t have to dance, no production numbers are necessary, the music is more than enough.

And we in SoCal go.  Because when we hear "The Boys Of Summer" we picture PCH, we visualize the sun setting on the beach, we know elation and despair.  And we know how to keep on keepin’ on.

And we don’t give a shit what anybody else thinks.  We’ve got our own culture.  Where the Eagles are equivalent to Shakespeare, the bards of our life in the fast lane culture.

FAST TIMES

So, halfway through the "Long Run" Solters taps me on the shoulder.  Are we ready to come backstage?  After nodding in agreement, he puts us on hold while he retrieves two more members of the posse, Cameron Crowe and Neal Preston.  And after showing our credentials to the gestapo, we’re in the inner sanctum.  And when Irving performs the introductions, I’m stunned to find out that Cameron and Neal know who I am.  But it gets better, because Cameron starts testifying about what I wrote about "Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around", telling me I nailed the essence of being a reluctant male and how he forwarded it to a fellow director and while I’m contemplating how to respond, who comes by, but Neil Diamond, who pronounces the Eagles’ harmonies the best since the Everly Brothers before exiting, since he has to vocalize the following night and I’m standing there thinking it might as well be 1975.

Irving’s cracking up that the newspapers are controlled by old radio guys and he and Cameron are reminiscing about the x-rated version of "Fast Times" and we all feel like veterans of a war.  But we’re still here.  A little thicker, with a little less hair, but with our sense of humor still intact.

LONG ROAD OUT OF EDEN

It got the anticipatory applause, you know, when the riff is played, long before the chorus, people purchased the double album and listened to it.  Still, "Long Road Out Of Eden" is not "Hotel California", it’s had no cultural impact, not because it’s deficient, but because we live in a different world, where music no longer dominates and neither does the left.

Everybody in this business is waiting for the seventies to return.  Or at least the eighties, when MTV ruled.  Bring back the days when ‘N Sync sold two million albums in a week, when Boston’s debut sold far in excess of ten million copies and there wasn’t a soul under twenty who didn’t know Boy George.  Today’s youngsters want the fruits, they want the fame and the attendant riches. But you listen to the Eagles perform hit after hit and you realize how hard the work was, how long and strange the trip.  Journeying to L.A., backing up Ronstadt, playing in go-nowhere bands, living in the shadow of the Bowl, operating on your wits.  Climbing the mountain instead of looking for a helicopter to deposit you on top, hell, there were no helicopters.

But there was a mountain.  One we all knew and paid attention to.  Now we’re living in the Himalayas, gigantic peaks all around, to the point where even the new Eagles album is niche.

Welcome to the twenty first century.  Where kids think stardom is fame and graybeards remember when dinosaurs walked the earth, when James Brown was called in to quell riots.  That was the power of music.  And it was about the music.  The rest was just trappings.  But now, all we’ve got are the trappings.

Maybe they could get "Long Road Out Of Eden" in a movie.  Ah, who am I kidding.  "Hurt Locker" wins the Oscar and still no one sees it.  We see Snooki and Kim Kardashian.  More people know who Rachel Uchitel is than have heard "Long Road Out Of Eden".  So, it’s frustrating to be an artist.  Your canvas is large, but the gallery is small.  You can go on tour to beaucoup bucks, playing for people who want to relive their memories, still…you remember when what you were doing made a difference.

And so does the audience.

LIFE’S BEEN GOOD

Sober Joe does turn out to be the linchpin, ripping off the notes that turn the music into rock and roll, and singing his own hits.  But what made this number so great was the vintage footage on the big screen behind.

Everybody’s got a camera today, everybody makes movies.  Your life is documented from birth to death.  But in the seventies making a movie was an enterprise that required money, time and skill, no Flip cameras were extant.  So, watching the footage on the big screen was like looking into Tutankhamen’s tomb.  Relics!  Rock stars on parade.  Living the lives of stars, in an era when musicians were at the pinnacle of the food chain, when there was no more powerful position.  In an era when YOU told the record company what to do.

DESPERADO

Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses
You’ve been out ridin’ fences for so long now

We spent the sixties exploring the world, protesting inequities.

In the seventies we licked our wounds and looked inward.

And in the eighties, we sold out.  Became our own worst enemy.  It was fine to have children, but did we have to rape and pillage financially, did we have to drive SUVs, did we have to be so mine for me?  But everybody else was doing it, so maybe we should too.

And it’s only gotten worse.  Why not license your music for that commercial?  I’ve got to get bigger, I’ve got to eat.  Everybody else is doing it.

But isn’t it funny the music everybody wants to hear predates this era?  Comes from a time when the music was enough, when it was pure and inviolate?

That’s why the classic rock acts can still do boffo at the b.o. and so-called stars of yesterday, and I truly mean yesterday, are working day jobs.  Because music is no longer soul food, but fast food, made for the here and now, to be denigrated and forgotten.

Things have changed.

But the boomers remember.  They’d like a do-over, but that’s not how life works.  So you go to the Eagles show to remember when…you heard "Take It Easy" for the first time, fell in love for the first time, were carefree for the last time.

HEARTACHE TONIGHT

Some people like to stay out late
Some folks can’t hold out that long
But nobody wants to go home now
There’s too much goin’ on

Today there’s truly too much going on, but so much of it is noise.  It’s like we’re living in a Brillo pad, being scratched by shit we don’t care about, looking for clear light.  That’s what music was, clear light.

And the music was enough.  The Eagles can play for nearly three hours and no song is unknown, there’s no bathroom break. Because that’s the way it was.  You paid your dues in pursuit of the pulpit, and then you could preach in churches and synagogues around the world, to this day.

You might believe in God.  I believe in rock and roll.

And I’m not the only one.

We bought the records to keep us alive at night and then went to the gig to ogle the opposite sex, clap our hands and sing along at the top of our lungs.

Last night we took it to the limit one more time.  In the only way we know how.  We prayed at the Hollywood Bowl.  Hoping a day will come when musicians lead us once again, doubting it will happen, but enjoying ourselves in the meantime.

SEVEN BRIDGES ROAD

There are stars in the southern sky
And if ever you decide
You should go
There is a taste of time sweetened honey
Down the seven bridges road

It rained all afternoon.  By showtime, it was fifty degrees.  What kind of crazy fucked up world do we live in where an outdoor concert is scheduled for April?

Southern California.  Where it occasionally does rain, but optimism reigns, where water was brought from the mountains and images were manipulated and then projected around the world as reality.

But as powerful as movies can be, they’re no match for music.  You watch movies, music penetrates your soul.

The Eagles were both sunny and dark, purely human, three-dimensional troubadours commenting on the lifestyle we were living or in pursuit of.  Maybe you’ve got to come to California to understand it, maybe you can close your eyes and visualize it.  But last night, we lived it.