It finally caught up with Sheryl Crow.  Famous for showing up anywhere someone would pay her, seemingly at the opening of a mall (do they still build those?), Sheryl is now the poster girl for corporate excess.  All due to Maureen Dowd.

Sheryl’s nice.  She had breast cancer.  She shows up at the appropriate rallies, she supports the right causes.  Why not Chicago, or Earth, Wind & Fire?  Why beat up on Sheryl Crow?

Because Sheryl had a patina of hipness, she still appeared to be current.  And Maureen Dowd was angry that the public was paying for her performance at the Northern Trust extravaganza.

In case this hasn’t reached you yet, Northern Trust, a bank, took our money and then flew their peeps out to Southern California for a golf tournament, where they wined and dined them, even closed the House Of Blues so they could showcase Sheryl Crow.  Only problem, we, the public, paid for this show!  What’s a bigger crime, scalping tickets to shows people want to see, after all, that’s supply and demand, or major corporations filching money from us in great quantities?  Obviously, the latter.  But now it’s become a sexy issue.  Because they’re truly doing it on our dime.

So you can’t pay a private anymore.  Not for a corporation that drank from the corporate till.  The watchdogs have hit the entertainment business.  It’s not gonna look good.

Then again, maybe this is just confirmation that Sheryl Crow is a has-been.  Now maybe the public will realize she can’t sell a record, can’t play the big rooms for big bucks anymore.  Does she still have her Universal deal?  I’d say she could sell product at Wal-Mart, she’s the perfect candidate, no woman has done it yet, but didn’t she sing that song about selling guns at the store that got her product banned?

Well, if she can take the Northern Trust bucks, er, our money, maybe she can do a mea culpa with Wal-Mart.

This is why she needs to be part of Irving Azoff’s organization.  He could rehabilitate her, get her not only that Wal-Mart deal, but a ton of revenue from Live Nation for merch and other ancillary streams.

The future isn’t the corporation, not the major label or Northern Trust.  The future is you, and your fans.  Grow this link.  The easy corporate money is gone, the whole world is watching, a cop for faux pas, and the traditional labels want more rights for more bucks.  Who’s the indie promoter who’s gonna save Sheryl Crow?

It’s a modern music business.

And don’t tell me about sexism…  This is girl on girl hate.  Then again, today’s article in the "Wall Street Journal", featuring a giant pic of  Sheryl, was written by a man.  All publicity is not good publicity.

Maureen Dowd: "I Ponied Up For Sheryl Crow?"

WSJ: "No Entertaining Please-It’s Golf"

Can we bring Todd Rundgren back for a victory lap?

I was lying on my back doing my back exercises when "I Went To The Mirror" came over my iPod Touch.

"Something/Anything?" is not my favorite album.  But that’s not because there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just that I like "Ballad" a little bit better.

"Something/Anything?" contains the hit, "I Saw The Light", as well as the remake of the Nazz staple, "Hello It’s Me", but neither represents the soul of the double album.  There’s the last side suite, a band functioning at full tilt.  The mysterious third side, beginning with the heavy "Black Maria", and then the first record, containing one exquisite masterpiece after another, from the heartbreaking "It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference" to the romp "Wolfman Jack" to the almost experimental "I Went To The Mirror".

An alternative to Nilsson’s "Gotta Get Up" from "Nilsson Schmilsson", "I Went To The Mirror" is sung in that druggy, half-awake voice you employ on Saturday and Sunday morning, when you’ve imbibed too much and are stunned you’ve woken up in your own bed.  Listening to it, I was stunned that I knew every word, every lick, and that this was an almost forgotten track on a double album.  One which contained no throwaways, that was a keeper from start to finish.

But how come no one under twenty five seems to know Todd Rundgren?  How come he had to do that execrable New Cars tour for the cash? Can’t we bring one of our supremely talented musicians/producers/engineers back?  Someone who cut the Band’s "Stage Fright" and produced Grand Funk’s greatest track ever, "We’re An American Band"?

Not to mention "Bat Out Of Hell"…  Supposedly Todd cashed out his production royalty and bought a spread in Hawaii.  He’s talent rich, and cash poor.  And that just sucks.  If Concord Records could give Ray Charles a final hurrah, can’t we do the same for Todd?  As well as so many unsung geniuses?

I think we give him one chance, to cut one great track.  That we’ll promote the hell out of.  Maybe we’ll give him two sides and press the thing up as a 45, which we’ll give away to anybody who can prove he’s still got a turntable.  Upbeat on one side, downbeat on the other, this two-sided gem will contain the essence of the wizard, the true star.  Maybe we’ll whore out the upbeat side to ESPN and employ the ballad on some network television show that enraptures the distaff side.  We’re gonna give Todd one last moon shot, to let him know not only how much enjoyment he’s given us, but to let the unwashed masses know that a genius walks amongst us.

I’d say to do a tribute album, but that’s been overdone.  Maybe a tribute album along with a "Behind The Music" type show for a PBS pledge break.  He’s a baby boomer act, Todd just turned 60 last year, his brethren should take him in.  And they should bring along their children too.

Sure, we’ll do the career retrospective, but Todd’s going to create two tracks so good that he’ll sell himself, he’ll make it easy for us.

He doesn’t need a label.  He just needs us all to agree.  If whole cities can read the same damn book, can’t we motivate everybody to listen to a classic artist for a month?  Can’t we see this as a public service, to both artists and listeners?

If you want to make a case that albums should survive, you’ve got to do this by showcasing the classic albums of the past, not only "Dark Side Of The Moon", but works just a bit less mainstream, but just as precious.  Like "Something/Anything?".

If an artist cut "I Went To The Mirror" today, you’d find him impossible to ignore.  And to think that Todd engineered, produced and played all the instruments to boot.  But he’s looking for bread.  It’s criminal.

The live music model is broken because they broke it. It would fix itself if it were allowed to continue and Live Nation was prevented from using its ponzi scheme to announce the next deal without making the last one work.

Wishful thinking?…no…this is from LN’s very own claim that the business won’t survive as it is. But the difference between allowing this one to fail, as opposed to say GM, is that this will create opportunities for new entrepreneurs. Agents will have no choice but to find someone to make offers. And they will find them, if not create them.

The LN model would work if they negotiated each market separately, and paid $100K for an act in Indianapolis that they are paying $200K here. But they can’t help themselves. They are the ones stuck in a broken model, the tour offer. It doesn’t work, and their attempt to keep all the cookies for themselves is what has made them too fat to play with the other children.

What they need to do is have their people learn how to horse trade instead of trying to corral every bronco on the plain. That’s how they could use their power that they amassed to make money. It would be so easy for them. Yes they might lose a few battles such as Merriweather over Nissan here. But they need to get over that, and start making money with the markets they can win on by having the best venues, not by trying to control the ones they don’t, perhaps even getting rid of some.

Imagine if Starbucks tried to force everyone to buy coffee at the shops that people didn’t want to go to, by lowering their prices storewide. The reduction in overall profit would far outweigh whatever they made by getting people to go to the underperforming shops.

But I can’t control or change them. Well, maybe. We’ll see.

Seth Hurwitz

_____________________________________

I gave up after watching the officials we elected conduct the steroids hearings.  It was so embarrassing that I wrote to one of the Senators and told him I was ashamed to be an American after their total display of ignorance and grandstanding.  

BTW, I’m happy to see that you’re subconsciously adopting my view of antitrust.  Eventually all so-called monopolies become bureaucracies and some clever entrepreneur takes their business away.  Some day long after I’m dead, the government will disband the Antitrust divisions of the FTC and the Justice Department and stop wasting the taxpayers’ money on this nonsense.  

I remember that at the end of the semester in my Law and Economics class I looked back through all the seminal cases involving the government setting aside mergers as anticompetitive.  As I leafed through the case names, I realized that the common thread of all the companies on the other side of the v. (you know, where it says The United States v. Schwinn, White Trucks, Sears Roebuck, Continental Airlines, etc.) was that they ALL went bankrupt.   The government blocked the "anti-competitive" merger that turned out to be their last remaining hope of solvency.  A few years later the companies tanked because they couldn’t compete.  It would be really nice if the legislators passing all these dumb laws had even the vaguest concept of economics.

Peter Paterno

This has been a bleak year for me.  The gig that covered my nut evaporated.  Seemingly every year or two this occurs.  But I always have hope a new job will appear.  Right now, I don’t have that hope.

I open the newspaper and find articles telling me it’s worse than everybody says.  That the banks are not lending the money we gave them because they’re insolvent.  And while elected representatives with assured incomes try to triangulate and guess what’s good for themselves, their constituents, keeping their jobs all the while, I just feel they’re out of touch, they don’t know how bad it truly is outside the beltway.

I saved each and every dollar I made.  Not literally, but close.  Because I had a brush with debt twenty years ago whose emotional scars I still bear.  I lived frugally, in fear that an impasse might occur, and I would have to rely on my savings, protected by the FDIC because of their limited number, yet sufficient to get me through.  But not everybody did.  Some I blame, but some I don’t.  If you’re feeding a family of four, and you’ve got a mortgage and you lose your job…  How long until your economic viability collapses?

Be sure to see the movie "Milk".  I went reluctantly, but am so glad I did.  Not because Sean Penn embodied the character so well, which he did, but because of what a state congressman says to Sean right after their debate, when Sean is telling him that he’s going to win.  This already elected official says it won’t happen, because Penn/Milk is minus one crucial element, hope.  You’ve got to give people hope.

I haven’t watched a Presidential address since I lived on the east coast.  They usually occur before the work day is over in California.  And what is said is the same old nonsense.  But tonight, I entered the bedroom and found Felice watching our President speak, and I got hooked.

The standing ovations bugged me.  These are the same people who put roadblocks in front of progress, who say the right thing on camera, but sabotage our future when no one is watching.  But the black man at the podium, as he continued to speak, I felt a fire start to burn inside.  At first just a flame, but when he spoke of taxing the richest two percent of our citizens and stopping torture, I cheered.  Someone could see the truth, someone was trying to make a difference.

And maybe you don’t agree with Obama’s policies.  I’ve no need to debate you.  But when our country is as fucked up economically as it is, when all anyone can speak of is recession, where everywhere you turn you find someone out of work, we need a leader, who just doesn’t tell us to shop, but gives us hope.

Yes, we do need to shop, consumer spending will help eradicate this crisis.  But we’re not going to part with our cash until we believe our personal coffers will be refilled.  Who’s going to give us confidence that the future will be bright, that we will not only survive, but prosper?

I used to rely on rock stars.  But when Bruce Springsteen makes a deal with Wal-Mart and then says he is performing at the Super Bowl because he’s got an album to sell, I end up deflated.  Who is doing what’s right, what he feels inside, who is not worried about his personal advancement and public approval?

Funny that it’s our President.

I wasn’t a fan at first.  But when he spoke of Google, he hooked me.  Finally a candidate that lived in the same world I did.

I don’t have a problem with you being rich, as long as it’s not at my expense, as long as you don’t try to protect your lifestyle, denying the working man a chance to get ahead.  For too long this country has been about the haves and the have-nots.  The uneducated people Obama spoke of believing the American Dream was as vibrant as ever when even the right wing paper of record, the "Wall Street Journal", said it was harder than ever to get ahead.

I love my country.  And I know you do too.  We criticize it because we want it to be better.  And now, we’re willing to sacrifice in order for all to progress, not only ourselves, but the unknown masses that make up society.  We’ve got work to do.  But we will only do it if we have hope, that by standing together and working hard things will get better. Without hope, we’ve got malaise.  We’ve got suicide.  We’ve got heartbreak.

Tonight I have hope.

I hope you do too.