But there’s a big fat point
That you seem to be missing
And it’s driving you to distraction
That doesn’t seem
To stop you in the least
Or halt this obsession
That’s got you goin’ back
Week after week
Day after day
Hour after hour
From where you came
For more of the same

I got Amazon credit for using their service.  Not to buy music, but electronic gifts.  I ended up with $8.00 worth of MP3s. They expire on 1/31, so I decided to redeem them.  They were supposed to be free, so why did Amazon ask for my credit card?  I e-mailed the service, the response that came back is just as vague as the original e-mail gifting this credit to me.  You mean I’m supposed to say I’m paying, but then when I go to check out you’re going to tell me it’s all been a mistake and not charge me?  So I can end up getting charged and have an incomprehensible conversation with someone named "David" in Bangalore?

No thanks.

But I still wanted that one track.  The one I’d searched for for almost a decade, that was completely unavailable.  It was unstealable.  And unbuyable.  It was too obscure.

But not in my mind.

In the seventies, KROQ was a free format station, playing Deaf School, whatever the deejays fancied.  Then the late Rick Carroll took over and formatted it into the "Roq of the 80’s".  It was Top Forty.  Just bizarre, scatological and English hip.  KROQ put KMET out of business going on "Tainted Love" and "Don’t You Want Me", tracks the station down the dial wouldn’t dare play next to Molly Hatchet and Boston.  But it wasn’t only the big hits, not even only the English hits like Depeche Mode’s "Just Can’t Get Enough", there were tracks that only KROQ played, that were hits if you listened to the station and were unknown if you lived out of town or didn’t turn the dial all the way to 106.7.  Like Toni Basil’s "You Gotta Problem".  I haven’t heard it in eons.  But it’s in my DNA.  I wanted to hear it again.  I was going to "buy" it from Amazon.  Now, no way.  I was frustrated.

Actually, the real name is not "You Gotta Problem".  That’s what Toni Basil labeled her cover.  The original is entitled "Pity You".  It’s by Devo.

The Akron band peaked with "Whip It".  How do you follow up a novelty hit that becomes a cultural institution, an MTV staple?

You can’t.  "New Traditionalists" tanked.  You might hear "Beautiful World" in commercials thirty years later, but it didn’t get airplay back then.  Nor did the truly classic "Love Without Anger".  And "Pity You".  "New Traditionalists" is uneven, but when it peaks, it TRANSCENDS!

I didn’t even know "You Gotta Problem" was a Devo number.  But when I found out, I bought "New Traditionalists".  I love it.  Stole every MP3 early in my P2P career.  But I still could not find Toni Basil’s cover.  Which I remembered as being even more dynamic, even more explosive.

It’s not.  I now know.  Because having abandoned Amazon, I was inspired to fire up my Sonos system, to search Rhapsody.  If Amazon was selling it, then it was available to stream, right?

Actually, not everything is.  I wanted to listen to Simon & Garfunkel the other day and found their albums absent from Rhapsody (they are on Napster.)  Is Paul Simon that out of it?  Has Rob Glaser’s company run out of money to license?  But most is.  Like Toni Basil’s "You Gotta Problem".

Sonos with Napster/Rhapsody is like the original Napster.  Once you’ve got it, you realize how great it is.  And what makes it so great is the iPhone/iPod Touch integration.  It makes the whole thing workable.  You get an inspiration to hear something, and then, almost instantly, YOU DO!  I’ve got the system hooked up in every room in my house, it’s like living in my own club, the sound envelops my whole domain.

You can’t take it with you.  Not easily, the hand-held Rhapsody player sucks.  But if you’re home, you’re in heaven. You no longer need to own the track.  Why spend the time searching, why spend the money?

America was a nation of renters, then the movie industry taught them to buy.  That’s what happened in the DVD world. Can’t the opposite happen in the music world?  Can’t everybody become a renter?

Truth is, they will.  If you came to my house right now, I could sell you Sonos with streaming, straight from the pipe, no computer required, instantly.  Maybe that’s what I should do.  Stock up with equipment, make money marking it up and selling it to you.  It’s just that fucking good.  So good, that this is where we’re going to end up.  Probably when Apple sells a subscription service, tethered to the iPhone.  It’s just a matter of when.

But it’s not now.

But it will be.

So lower the price of downloads.  Almost give them away.  License P2P.  Because in the not far distant future, no one will bother owning anything.  It won’t be worth the effort.

It’s coming from the promoter.

In Aspen, Jim Lewi and Diarmuid Quinn lamented that there was nowhere to get cash anymore.  That the label couldn’t afford to fund everything.  Where was the money going to come from?

Two weeks later a promoter who was in attendance laughed.  He told me the promoter was the new bank!  It’s the promoter who’s guaranteeing the tour, but he’s not seen as a partner, the agents and acts just want to extract as much cash as they can, they don’t care about the health of the company that puts on the show.

This same person quoted Howard Kaufman.  Irving once told me in a phone call that he had no problems with Rapino, he just had to say "You don’t want me to have Howard call, do you?"

Michael Rapino wanted to change the structure.  Wanted acts to share in the upside.  But suddenly Howard’s acts weren’t going to play Live Nation sheds.  They were going to take a year off, or play indoors.  Howard controls the shed sellouts, everything from Jimmy Buffett to Def Leppard to Journey.  Rapino caved.

Not that you can blame Howard.  He can’t help it if promoters are clambering over each other to pay more.  That’s what we’ve got, a pay more world.  Where Live Nation and AEG outbid each other.  Live Nation needs the business and AEG has got more money than god.  But is this helping the industry?

Sure, momentarily it’s helping the acts.  But, as a result, ticket prices go up and promoters end up stealing from acts. Who wouldn’t?  It’s almost impossible to make any money.  And if you’ve got a loss, it’s significant.  Used to be the agents/managers/acts would help the promoter out if he lost money, the talent needed the promoter to stay in business.  But now that Live Nation is a publicly traded company and AEG is so rich, why?

So the promoter has to cough up a ton of bread.  The promoter is the bank.  But he’s getting very little in return.

Why can’t deals be restructured?   Where costs are covered and everybody shares in the upside?  Why can’t labels use some of that 360 money, that live revenue, to develop new acts?  Why does the promoter put up all the money and have such little power?  Where else do you take all the risk and end up with so little reward?

We’re fighting amongst ourselves and we’re the losers.  Live gigs are a once a year event, something planned way in advance as opposed to a weekly or monthly occurrence like they used to be.  Hell, tickets go on sale more than twelve months ahead in some cases!  And unlike in sports, the teams/acts are constantly changing, so you don’t have a legacy of good will bringing the customer inside the building.

But ultimately, you’ve got to blame the promoter himself.  The promoter has to learn how to say no.  But he hasn’t yet.

I read in the "Wall Street Journal" that bowling is making a comeback.  I’m not talking about the wii version, which is almost as good as the real thing, but the one with the sixteen pound balls and the oiled lanes.  The one I was religiously addicted to in the early sixties.

That’s where I first heard the Beach Boys.  Via the jukebox at Nutmeg Bowl down on Kings Highway.  After you bowled your strings, you hung out.  Even at age 10.  Polished your ball, ate french fries and listened to the jukebox.

But that wasn’t as much fun as tobogganing with my family at Fairchild Wheeler Golf Course.  My father purchased a seven seater.  I remember winter Sundays whooshing down the slope to the sand trap. Not that we always made it that far.  Usually the toboggan would start going sideways not long after we pushed off.  And then it would flip over and we’d be spewed all over the snow.

But then we became skiers, converted on our trip to Mt. Snow in February 1964.

But the journey to Bromley the following Christmas was a bust.  You see it rained.  We went for a lame lunch of canned spaghetti at a long gone restaurant in Manchester and retreated to Connecticut the following day.  And when it came to February vacation, my parents were wary of repeating the process.  They didn’t want to risk being rained out.  Instead we went to the Concord.  My mother shushed me down by recounting how a friend of a friend, an intermediate skier, had found the skiing satisfying.

I wouldn’t go that far.  There were a couple of t-bars, slopes longer than those I’d first experienced in Bobby Hickey’s backyard, I went every day, but I was disappointed.  My parents made it up to us by going to Stratton the following month, but I remember more than the skiing at the long gone Concord.

There was the dining room.  Where the menu was irrelevant.  My father told me we could have whatever we wanted.  Both lox and blintzes.  It didn’t matter whether we ate them.

Then there was the indoor pool.  A sweatbox that made the local JCC look like a spa.

I didn’t do much hanging out in the teen room.  But I remember the music playing through the overhead speakers.  It was Jay and the Americans’ "Let’s Lock The Door (And Throw Away The Key)".  The follow-up to the sixties gem "Come A Little Bit Closer", "Let’s Lock The Door (And Throw Away The Key)" was what today would be called a throwaway.  But none of the songs we heard on the radio back then were categorized as such.  They were hits.  Which we knew every lick of.  Every single track from the Beatles on.  But what came before?

The Concord was not only about food and sports.  Every night there was entertainment in the nightclub.  Where you pounded sticks with wooden balls at the tips on the table instead of applauding.  And the last night we were there the headliner was…Neil Sedaka.

I had no idea who he was.

My older sister kept referencing "Calendar Girl".  My brain didn’t click.

And my father kept calling him Neil "Sebaka".  Which he then chuckled and said meant "dog" in Russian.

I didn’t care.  Although I loved the Four Seasons, I was a dedicated fan of the British Invasion.  I looked forward after the Beatles, not back.

And then this grinning Brooklynite took the stage and in a moment out of "Dirty Dancing" started singing hits I didn’t think I knew but had somehow penetrated me, had become lodged in my DNA.

"Calendar Girl" was great.  But the finale, the piece de resistance, was "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do".

I wasn’t the only one addicted.  Elton rescued Neil’s career in the seventies, putting out "Laughter In The Rain" on his Rocket label.

But now even Elton no longer releases records.  No one wants them.  Even if they’re good.  He’s become calcified in the audience’s memory.  He’s a has-been.

But maybe at some point we all become has-beens.  Maybe we all start looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, remembering a better time, before all the losses of life accumulated and started crushing us under their weight.

That’s what songs do.  They bring you back.  When I heard "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" on XM twenty minutes ago, I was in junior high school, living upstairs in my parents’ split-level, my father was still alive.

Fleetwood Mac was an English-based blues band whose manager put a faux version of the act on the road.  That’s what I remember from "Rolling Stone".  It was kind of like a fake Savoy Brown, or another band that gigged incessantly but had never broken through…  Who cared?

I’d seen their albums in the bins.  How many labels had they been on?  Sure, I knew "Oh Well", even "Albatross", but many bands had one or two great tracks. Like Blodwyn Pig.  Hell, Blodwyn Pig’s tracks were even better!  A great English blues band was not solely about the blues, they broke through!

But Fleetwood Mac never did.

Then suddenly, Fleetwood Mac was the biggest band in the world.

Watch this video.  It’s going to make you feel incredibly good.  It’s going to give you hope.  Gladwell gets a few of the facts fucked up, but they’ve got nothing to do with his point.  Which is that Fleetwood Mac experimented for a decade before they got their sound right.  And the companies involved with the act, most especially Mo Ostin’s Warner Brothers, were cool with this.  They believed, they supported the band and then they finally broke through.

Gladwell posits that the previous 16 records before "Rumours" were not very good.  That didn’t feel right, but it used to be after every hit record you went out and bought the catalog, and although I love the title track, thinking back on it, "Heroes Are Hard To Find" is not exceptional.  And I can listen to "Station Man" off "Kiln House" incessantly, but the rest of the album leaves me cold, it’s unnecessary.  But put me in a dark room and play "Gold Dust Woman" and I get goosebumps.

Gladwell says there are two kinds of creators.  The conceptual and the experimental.  A conceptual artist is like Picasso.  He gets a vision and executes it, sometimes just that fast.  But an experimental artist has to weave his way, to find his greatness.  Listening to Gladwell I thought of the Talking Heads.  Nothing on the first album made me believe they could come up with anything remotely like their cover of "Take Me To The River".  Hearing the track in my mind now, I must say I’ve never heard that exact sound on any other record.  You know, where they’re pulling on the guitar strings and each note sounds like the plop of a gumdrop in a giant underground pool.  Or maybe it was a synth.  Who knows.  But it was this sound and the groove and David Byrne’s vocal that made the track so infectious, so perfect, such a reworking of a classic that it still sounds fresh every time you listen to it.

Gladwell states that in the modern era, most creators are experimental.  They’ve got to go down blind alleys to get to the crunchy goodness.  But today a label will can you after the first single, never mind a whole album.  Labels believe that only kids buy records and go to gigs and that youngsters don’t want to see old fucks perform, so they latch on to young ‘uns with desire, but very little else.  And you wonder why the public no longer cares.  Because the public can’t relate!  The music just isn’t good enough!  Or it satiates someone truly into the scene, but a casual listener is left cold.  A great track crosses boundaries, it doesn’t matter if you’re a fan of the genre.  I can’t say I love hip-hop,  but "Can I Get A…" is one of my absolute favorite downloads.  The groove, when the chicks come in and answer, putting Jay down, asking him how he’s gonna get around on his bus pass…  Kind of like the Beatles.  They sounded like nothing that came before, but we were instantly converted.

Watching this video gives me hope.  Because like Leonard Cohen sings, everybody knows.  That the music business is decrepit, run by fat cats who just want to hold on to their money, purveying evanescent shit that slides right off your back.

You want to make it today?

Be able to sing.  Put in a melody.  Have a catchy chorus.  A bridge would be nice.  It’s not about revolution so much as evolution.  What I’ve just described is the music of the greatest group of all time, the Beatles.  There’s nothing wrong with being able to sing on key and being able to play your instrument.  And once you’ve got the basics down, you can truly experiment.

The Beatles didn’t create those classics overnight.  I’ve got tons of demos and false starts from the band.  They honed their chops and experimented.  They had to get it right.  And when they did, we responded.

Just like you’ll respond to Gladwell’s speech here.

You see we’re sick of celebutards who’ve got nothing to say.  Somehow, over the course of many speeches, Gladwell has refined his presentation to the point we’re hooked.  We like wrestling with new ideas.  We like being stimulated.  It makes us feel alive.  The same way listening to those Fleetwood Mac tracks did thirty years ago.

Malcolm Gladwell Outliers: The Story of Success