THE LETTER

My introduction to rock music wasn’t on television, not even radio, but the jukebox, at the Nutmeg Bowl.  After a couple of strings I’d find myself peering through the glass, studying the tracks, waiting for my parents to pick me up.

That’s where I first heard "Dawn (Go Away)" and "I Get Around".

I heard "Pretty Woman" on the jukebox at the JCC.

And I heard "The Letter" on the jukebox at Bromley, the ski area where I spent my youth in Peru, Vermont.

The old wooden base lodge, built by Fred Pabst with his beer money long before ski areas were about real estate, featured an alcove, in the very back, where worn out at the end of the day we listened to the jukebox.

"The Letter" is one minute and fifty two seconds long.  Tell that to today’s artists filling up entire CDs.  It was and remains solely about quality. And "The Letter" was quality.  A great song, with a brilliant intro, but what put it over the top was the vocal of one Alex Chilton.

Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane
Ain’t got time to take a fast train

This was before air travel was de rigueur.  When you still dressed up to fly, were scared shitless the plane was going to crash and the ticket cost a fortune.

I don’t care how much money I gotta spend
Got to get back to my baby again

URGENCY!  That’s what you heard in Alex Chilton’s voice.  No, he didn’t write the song, but he made it his own.  This wasn’t an "American Idol" contestant singing for a record contract, one got the idea this record was cut on a dark rainy night and leaked out by accident.  In an era where so much of what was featured on the AM band was sunny, there was a darkness to "The Letter".  Chalk it up to Memphis.  Or Dan Penn.  Or both.

CRY LIKE A BABY

Anybody can have one hit.  But can you do it twice?

NEON RAINBOW

A cross between the New Vaudeville Band and Petula Clark, if the Box Tops hadn’t hit before, "Neon Rainbow" would be what we call a guilty pleasure, something outside your favorite genre that you want to hear again and again, that puts a smile on your face.  "Neon Rainbow" sounds like it was recorded in black and white, and that’s what makes it so great, you infuse your own colors into it.

RADIO CITY

I used to go to Andy’s room to listen to the Kinks’ "Everybody’s In Showbiz" and the Velvet Underground’s "Loaded".

"Everybody’s In Showbiz" is a forgettable Kinks album, but it contains "Celluloid Heroes".

Today everybody knows "Loaded", but dropping the needle on "Sweet Jane" was a revelation, especially after that ethereal intro.  The Velvets were supposed to be incomprehensible.

But one day Andy told me I had to listen to a new record, a group formed by the lead singer of the Box Tops.

The songs on "Radio City" had a certain power, and a certain intimacy.  Like the Box Tops records, they seemed to be made without the audience in mind.

That’s rare today.  That’s the first thing purveyors ask, WHAT’S THE MARKET?  Put it in a slot for me, make it easy.  If it’s like nothing that came before, I can’t sell it.

And, you guessed it, "Radio City" never sold.

But I drove cross-country with that album.  The explosive guitar intro of "Back Of A Car" sounded like nothing else in my cassette box.  The track was cut by someone who’d listened to a hell of a lot of English records, but there was definitely an American sensibility.

And "Way Out West" went up and down the scale with power.

And why don’t you come on back from way out west

She didn’t dump him.  She moved on.  But he’s still here.  Thinking about her…

Used to be California was a completely different state of mind from the East Coast, never mind Memphis.  There was no Facebook, no e-mail, no SMS…just very expensive long distance phone calls.  And when this track was cut, no one even had an answering machine.  Way out west was out of mind.  Yet he’s still here, in the same neighborhood, going to the same clubs, listening to the same radio stations.  She’s living, he’s dying.

Then there was "September Gurls".  Just like the English cats, but better.  "September Gurls" was too perfect for the radio.  It was made for the garage, for headphones, just for the listener.  Of which there weren’t many.

THIRTEEN

Big Star broke up.  They had no chance.  This was before the resurgence of indie labels in the nineties, people shied away from something on Ardent.

And there was no airplay.

And the bands that were succeeding were BIGGER!  From Boston to Journey, it was about playing to the last row, not the first.  You wanted all the money, not some.

So I found Big Star’s first album in a cut-out bin at Music Plus.  No one wanted it.

But on that very first early seventies record there’s a gem in the league of "Walk Away Renee".  It’s entitled "Thirteen".

Won’t you let me walk you home from school

That’s how it starts.  It appears casual, but you had to get up the gumption, screw up your courage to ask.  And carrying her books you feel like you’re sitting on top of the world.

Won’t you let me meet you at the pool

This is public.  She’s got to let you not only into her head, but her entire world.

Maybe Friday I can
Get tickets for the dance
And I’ll take you

Most people listening to this record had never been on a date.  But it was their utmost desire.  They lived vicariously through this lyric.  It got them through until they too could find romance.

Won’t you tell your dad, ‘Get off my back’
Tell him what we said ’bout ‘Paint It Black’

Rock and roll was ours.  Our parents didn’t wear designer jeans and work out at the gym.  They hated the Beatles and the Stones.  But to us this music was everything.

Rock ‘n roll is here to stay
Come inside where it’s okay
And I’ll shake you

Can she leave behind her Barbies, her cheerleading and enter his world?  Can she risk the power of emotions?

Won’t you tell me what you’re thinking of
Would you be an outlaw for my love
If it’s so, well, let me know
If it’s ‘no’, well, I can go
I won’t make you

He’s not about to compromise.  He wants someone to enter his world.  We all want someone to enter our world.  We want to show off our trophies, both physical and emotional.  We want to share not only our victories, but our point of view.

And that’s why Big Star is so important.  The band expressed emotions, both musically and lyrically, that squared exactly with ours.

This made it tough for radio.  Radio plays to a theoretical everyman.  And Big Star was personal.

But that’s why Big Star lives on.  You may not recall who scored the winning goal at the basketball game, but you can never forget with whom you shared your first kiss.

ALEX CHILTON

We have a fantasy that our heroes live on a higher plane, live a better life than us…that they’re surrounded by bucks and babes.

But watching Alex Chilton perform you were struck that his life was much more difficult than yours.  He had to go from town to town, playing to appreciative, but tiny audiences, who loved him, but that love won’t keep you warm at night, it won’t pay your bills, it won’t pay your health insurance.

My internist told me heart attacks are preventable.  If you get treatment.  Change your diet, take the appropriate drugs, get monitored.

But I doubt that Alex Chilton had the cash, never mind the wherewithal.

And now he’s gone.

Never to be forgotten by a small coterie of fans.

Is that enough?

I don’t know.

But I do know that Alex Chilton did it for the rest of us, not brave enough to take the risk, we who prayed in our basements for girlfriends as we studied for the SATs to get into a good college so we could become professionals.  And we love him for it.

From: Andrew
Date: March 16, 2010 11:52:41 AM MDT
To: Bob Lefsetz
Subject: Re: Money, Power & Fame

Bob –

Interesting note about Lewis’ new book. There is a backlash on Amazon because the publisher has neglected to release a "Kindle version" (currently 24 negative reviews from people who have not read the book – all citing lack of a Kindle version, compared to 20 favorable reviews from people who have).

Customer Reviews
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

It’s amazing how the publisher’s desire for extra profit has precluded Amazon’s most loyal market – Kindle owners. Kindle users are a group of people who are constantly checking Amazon for new releases. The irony of a book discussing Wall Street’s greed is that the greed of the publisher is killing its potential to reach the widest audience possible during a week that has consisted of non-stop promotion for Lewis with appearances on a variety of highly visible media outlets.  

all the best.

Worse is in 2007 Michael Lewis testified about the Kindle:

Michael Lewis discusses Amazon Kindle

Even worse is Lewis’ lionization of derivatives prior to writing "The Big Short".

Kindle Bomb for Michael Lewis and The Big Short

Lessons To Be Learned:

1. Best sellers draw attention to underlying business issues.  In other words, if Palm bans an app, no one cares, it’s a dying platform, but if Apple bans an app, issues of censorship are raised.
2. The book business, supposedly peopled by the best and the brightest, the educated and the erudite, learned absolutely nothing from the music business’ debacle.  The era of media companies dictating to their customers is dead.  First thing you do, make peace, tweet, collect feedback, establish a bond.  Then try and stretch people to where you want them to be.  But to sit in your ivory tower and dictate is a recipe for ridicule and ultimately death.  Talk to a new act today, if it’s peopled by real musicians, they don’t want to be on a major label.  That’s what ten years of the RIAA against the people will do.
3. Your history rides shotgun along with you.  Your entire online life is searchable.  So, if you do a 180, you’d better have a good explanation.
4. Stories are nurtured online these days.  If you think you can manipulate the mainstream press and breathe a sigh of relief, you’re wrong. What you never wanted publicized gets traction online.  Because if you’re wrong, there’s always a watchdog who wants to nail you, and an army behind him or her ready to join the tribe.

This story is still building, note not only the Motley Fool piece, but Peter Kafka’s at AllThingsD, where I found the above YouTube video: Michael Lewis Loves the Kindle. But Not This Week.

The best Elton John album is "Tumbleweed Connection".  Released on the heels of "Elton John" and the huge success of "Your Song", "Tumbleweed Connection" had no singles and itself was soon followed by "Friends", "11/17/70" and at the end of the year, "Madman Across The Water".  Casual listeners are unaware of the record, but fans hold it dear.  It contains Elton’s original showstopper, "Burn Down The Mission", his take of "Country Comfort", which Rod Stewart had just done, "Son Of Your Father", which Spooky Tooth was placing its ultimately failed hopes in, and…

Where To Now St. Peter?

The first side ended with the laconic "My Father’s Gun".  Well, it started out like a tale from a hayseed with a stick of straw emanating from his mouth, but eventually it devolved into the rhythm of a paddle-wheeler on the Mississippi, blend a margarita and listen on your back porch as the sun sets, as this epic unfolds.

But the second side opened with something we hadn’t heard from Elton previously, an intimate piano figure, an ethereal vocal…  Listening to "Where To Now St. Peter?", you truly felt like you were floating down a river.

I took myself a blue canoe
And I floated like a leaf
Dazzling, dancing half enchanted
In my Merlin sleep

Floating is the operative word.  "Tumbleweed Connection" arrived during Christmas vacation, when I returned to Middlebury for Winter Term I saw the Record Club of America box over the shoulder of the mail clerk.  Also included in the box were "Gasoline Alley" and the very first Rod Stewart album, eponymous in the U.S., entitled "An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down" in the U.K.  And I loved them both.  But when I dropped the needle on "Where To Now St. Peter?" I resonated, like this track was made just for me, it took me away from my studies, I felt like Elton lived next door and dropped by to play a tune long after dark.

And it being the winter of marijuana, and long days on the ski slopes, I’d drop the needle on the second side of "Tumbleweed Connection" to hear "Where To Now St. Peter?" and it would slide into "Love Song".  This was long before CD players, long before remote controls, long before endless repeat.

There was a percussion element that sounded like a scratch, believe me, I checked.  And a song unfolded which sounded like nothing else on the album.  Because it wasn’t written by Elton, but one Lesley Duncan, who duetted on the track with him.

There’s a story here.  I don’t know what it is.  Aspiring stars don’t cede that real estate, they don’t give up those royalties.  Yes, unable to move from my bed, I heard "Love Song" again and again, I broke open the gatefold cover and read the credits, I knew who was responsible.

This is the genesis of album rock.  It wasn’t about the radio so much as the limited music we acquired and our inability to get up off our rear ends.  The needle slipped into the next groove, and over time we became fans of what followed.

And what follows "Love Song" is "Amoreena", a song with such a swagger, you want to put on your guns and amble down a dusty Texas street.

Then there was the quiet "Talking Old Soldiers" and the tour de force of "Burn Down The Mission".  Side two was my favorite.  I’d put the play ratio of side two to one that month of January 1971 at ten or twelve to one.  It took quite a while to sink in how great "Comes Down In Time" truly was…you see it was located on the first side.

"Love Song"’s key feature is its intimacy.  As if it were playing in your head as you strolled through the park on a spring morning.  It’s not the best song on "Tumbleweed Connection", nor is it my favorite.  But I know it.  Like I know a member of my family.  Because, believe me, these records rode shotgun with me through my life, they were right there in my saddlebags.

Lesley Duncan just died.

RIP, Lesley Duncan (March 12, 2010) British Singer-Songwriter

Elton John, Pink Floyd collaborator Lesley Duncan dies

Have you been following the story of the runaway Prius?

Turns out the guy declared bankruptcy and his lease was about to expire and…

Bottom line, science doesn’t lie, and his Prius just didn’t have the brake wear it should have if the story was true.  Take it from the "Wall Street Journal":

Questions Arise in Prius Case

Point is, the truth outs.  If there’s money involved.  And believe me, Toyota’s worried about its financial future.

Do we really care about the financial future of Sam Adams?

The Sam Adams sales are a fake.  Let’s just say a little birdie told me.

But I want to clue you in on the brilliant analysis Jay Frank did on his Website.  They say dogged pursuit of the truth can only be done by newspapers?  Mr. Frank is a perfect exhibit of the power of the Internet.  He’s an EXPERT!  He’s not starting from scratch, researching a story, he KNOWS all the background so he can ultimately deliver the truth, on an issue that’s important to him and his readers.  The filter isn’t Joe Everyman, reader of the newspaper, but hard core music biz denizens.

Anyway, from Jay:

SAM ADAMS: IS IT A FUTUREHIT?

March 14, 2010 – 10:59 am

This week, there is a controversy brewing over new Boston rapper Sam Adams. He released a new EP called Boston’s Boy that quickly shot up to #1 on the iTunes Hip Hop album charts and even debuted in the Top 75 of the overall Billboard album chart. Immediately, people have been questioning if the artist/management bought the tracks themselves which Adams not only denies, but provided a 3500 page document showing all the individual sales the song has gotten. It’s been a hot topic of discussions amongst labels and one conversation I had on it has since been immortalized by Bob Lefsetz.

So the question remains…is it real? Let’s look at the evidence:

SALES

It’s not just that he sold several thousand EPs and over 20,000 copies of his single in one week. It’s also that he sold a fair amount of individual tracks from his other songs on the EP. On the one hand, why fake that as buying the album tracks doesn’t help your chart position. On the other hand, the purchasing pattern of those other album tracks are typically at a much lower ratio to the single sales.

Also, while iTunes shows strong numbers and typically has the strongest sales for any artist, Amazon’s sales registered nowhere near as high. In fact it just barely made it into the Hip-Hop Top 100. There’s gonna be a disparity amongst the two charts, but if it was really hot, the Amazon chart would be a much closer reflection.

SIMILAR ARTISTS

If you listen to the song (which we’ll dissect in a moment), you’ll quickly hear that the song is more a pop/rap song than an actual traditional rap song. If that’s the case, why is it that people who bought the EP also bought more “street” rappers such as DJ Khaled, Wiz Khalifa and Ace Hood? And then, again on Amazon, why is the similar artists showing up as Vampire Weekend, Michael Buble, Colbie Caillat and Ke$ha? The disparity is rarely that great unless something funny is going on. And to my ear, the Amazon similar artists are more what I’d expect the audience to be.

SEARCH

A quick look at Google searches shows that the term “Sam Adams” did indeed grow by a noticeable amount when the EP came out. But it also cooled off considerably after the first week. If the song was truly becoming a hit, the searches would either be more sustained or they’d be growing. This is doing neither.

Then there is the searches itself. If you actually search “Sam Adams” on Google, you get what you’d probably expect: the beer, the Founding Father, and the Portland mayor. If the song was truly hot, Google should be recognizing that in search. The only thing that does show up is some news articles on the fix. In fact, the Lefsetz post has a higher search result than the iTunes link. A sign it’s a fix if there ever was one.

But the signs don’t stop there. With a typical hit, you see a lot of results for “artist + song title”. When you type Sam Adams in the search box, the song recommendation doesn’t come up. Even on YouTube, the full recommendation doesn’t come up. This means significant people aren’t searching for the track.

I talk about searchability a lot in regards to the Futurehit. The reality is that you need an artist name and song title that’s easily searchable so you can be found. People have very short attention spans. Don’t give them a reason to miss out on who you are. Sam Adams does neither. His artist name is terrible for search results.

Even the song title is terrible for search results. If you search “Driving Me Crazy”, you’ll find that Sam Adams is competing against songs with the same title by new hitmaker Taio Cruz, Knightowl, Phil Collins, and an artist named Northern Cree. Not to mention a 1991 Dom Deluise movie and a 1988 Nick Broomfield documentary. All of whom have higher search traction. If you have a less relevant search result than an obscure 1991 Dom Deluise movie…

FILE TRADING

One of the things Bob left out of the conversation we had, which included Eric Garland of Big Champagne, was how many people were stealing Sam Adams. The answer is barely any. The reality is that any song that truly is a hit has theft to go along with it. This song didn’t.

THE SONG ITSELF

So, now let’s put “Driving Me Crazy” thru the Futurehit.DNA filter. Being a very commercial pop song, this should easily work within the filter itself. Aside from a short intro (2 seconds before Sam Adams starts shouting out the names of the producer, etc.) that I detail as a key success metric in Chapter 1 of Futurehit.DNA, the song is a surprisingly flat basic track. The song is basically two 64 beat loops repeated over and over, a structure that is on its way to being relegated to the structure of the last generation. The lack of dynamic range, the lack of truly stand-out lyrics (in my opinion), and then an overly long fade-out with no lyrics (at a time when you need short endings). These are all elements that, to me, suggest that this song has a very unlikely chance of being a true commercial breakthrough. Now, as with any formula, it can always be proven wrong in rare circumstances, but I don’t think “Driving Me Crazy” is that circumstance.

If there was some widespread purchasing of Sam Adams’ song, it is having the desired effect of said purchase: people have noticed, they are listening to a track with no radio play, and there are indisputable legit sales occuring (see: Amazon). The music business history is rife with many songs having purchased chart positions thru various methods. Why should the digital age be different? I’d love for purity to still exist, but this is the music business. iTunes has successfully blocked out many attempts at rigging their chart, so it’s interesting that somehow this may have slipped thru. However, in my opinion, if you’re gonna spend money on juicing a hit song, it should be spent on one with a higher likelihood of legit traction.

Now, this story hasn’t gotten huge mainstream press attention, and if it did, it would probably become a hit just because of the story. But it’s funny that the blog attention to date has been limited to:

-Song debuts high on chart, blog world cries foul

-Artist produces proof of legit sales, blog world says OK

I guess people don’t want to take the time to research and report. And it’s not like I did heavy duty digging. This came from just looking thru a few top-level Google searches (and one conversation with Eric Garland). I didn’t really intend to go all CSI on this track, and I have nothing against the guy. And I also can’t definitively prove that this is 100% not-legit. It could be a random fluke of college kids in New England (his obvious base) who truly love and want to support the guy.

But, then again, as I told Lefsetz…if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and looks like a duck…

FutureHit.DNA