It’s raining.

That Albert Hammond song is almost accurate. It hardly ever rains in L.A. And when it does, it’s a surprise. You get used to precipitation on the east coast, in Southern California it’s a rarity. It changes your mood. It makes you reflective.

Funny, you wait your whole life to grow up, and when you’re finally an adult you enjoy the freedom, but there’s a certain something lacking. Maybe it’s structure. Or, possibly, as you get closer to the end, you feel it, life starts to become meaningless. Does it matter who wins this or that, who gets chauffeured in a limousine? As Bob Dylan once sang, "For them that think death’s honesty won’t fall upon them naturally, life must sometimes get lonely."

But getting older gives you perspective. You wince at some of the things you said, you’d like to go back in time and take them back. You realize some of those movies you loved were crap. And records that didn’t especially move you then have the air of classics today. Like Stephen Stills’ debut.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper and listening to XM while I overate. I’ve been trying to diagnose this behavior. I’m starting to realize it occurs when I feel closed out, when I feel oppressed by people. I used to be able to tell my story, but something happened during the last decade that zapped this ability. I can listen, but unless I feel especially comfortable, unless I feel someone is paying attention, unless the listener responds, I just can’t talk. Oh, I can ask for more from my compatriot, the speaker, I’m an excellent listener myself, but I find no entry point to start telling my tale. My story just seems too insignificant. And since it’s my one and only story, I don’t want to tell it and have it evaporate into thin air. It’s like bleeding. Lose too much blood and you don’t survive.

Today was one of those days. It was about them, not me. An inner anger builds up, that I’m not even aware of. Until I snap at someone wanting my attention when I’m finally alone, until I overeat.

And after postponing my daily back stretches, I finally picked up an iPod to help me get through this endurance test. I needed to hear what I already knew, my songs, I pulled up a playlist of my fifty all time most played iTunes tracks. That’s when I heard Stephen Stills’ "Do For The Others".

I know every lick of this album, but this track didn’t register when I listened to it during the winter of ’71 at Middlebury. I just couldn’t get over how "Love The One You’re With" was not as good as "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes". And even though the now dead Jimi Hendrix played on one of the cuts, "Stephen Stills" was good, but not good enough. It’s only thirty-odd years later that I’ve found out I’m wrong. I love "After The Gold Rush", I can listen to "Don’t Let It Bring You Down" every day, but that rough-hewn album, Neil Young’s first solo after the CSNY debacle, just doesn’t touch me the same way as Stephen Stills’ solo debut.

I was not even going to write about it. I planned on doing a piece on Laura Nyro’s "Save The Country", I found a treasure trove of her remastered albums in the kitchen, but when I inserted "New York Tendaberry" into my Mac, I winced, I didn’t want to hear this, I needed to hear Stephen Stills. I was reminded of long ago, when I believed there was a record for every mood and I had one for each.

I didn’t have "Stephen Stills" assembled in my iTunes library. So I decided to build it. And in the process, fired up "Sit Yourself Down", the opener of side two of the vinyl record.

When I get restless, what can I do

That’s EXACTLY how I felt. Stephen was singing about needing love, I’ve got that, but I still feel restless in life. Where’s my place? What should I be doing? Can I say no to the people who want my time? What’s fulfilling to me?

And there’s an intimacy that brings me right back to Hepburn Hall, listening to the record in the dark after returning from a day at the Middlebury College Snow Bowl, before gathering my strength to take an endless hot shower and make it to dinner before they stopped serving. I thought of the cold, the darkness, the winter. Which is ending soon. I can feel it in the air, the atmosphere’s different in L.A. The endless cycle, ever faster despite being exactly the same length of time. In first grade, summer vacation was endless, now, if the heat seems oppressive, I tell myself fall is right around the corner. But winter’s going to evaporate too. Have I gotten in all the skiing I need to?

Still, "Sit Yourself Down" eventually explodes, becomes almost exuberant. I needed a track to match my pain, I went back to "Do For The Others".

Actually, I consider "Do For The Others" part of a trilogy, the middle chapter. The first is "4+20" from "Deja Vu", the last is "See The Changes" from the 1977 CSN reunion album. They’re all acoustic, all quiet, all intimate. The apotheosis might be "4+20", because of its raw pain.

Four and twenty years ago, I come into this life
The son of a woman and a man who lived in strife
He was tired of being poor
And he wasn’t into selling door to door
And he worked like the devil to be more

This is the baby boomer story. Our parents struggled to give us so much. They didn’t get divorced, they stayed together, they were bound by honor and duty. They thought we didn’t see their pain, but we did. But no one talked about it. We needed to be more. They gave us the platform, but they were conflicted, shouldn’t we get 9 to 5 jobs just like them, become professionals?

"See The Changes" was written years later, after Stephen had seen even more.

Ten years singing right out loud
I never looked was anybody listening
Then I fell out of a cloud
I hit the ground and noticed something missing

Now I have someone,
She has seen me changing
And it gets harder as you get older
Farther away as you get closer

And I don’t know the answer
Does it even matter?
I’m wonderin’ how

How the classic rockers gained their wisdom at such a young age, I’ll never know. Sure, they had the experience of playing live and being on the road, but still, how much had they seen?

Fame does not solve your problems. You do need someone to share it with. But staying together is so tough. It’s easier to move on. The closer you get, the more daunting the challenge appears.

Still, as great as "4+20" and "See The Changes" sound, there’s a certain connection, a certain bond in "Do For The Others" the others lack. You listen to the others, the lyrics are like a movie unspooling. Whereas "Do For The Others" sounds like a walk with the singer. You’re bonded, you’re intertwined, you may be listening, but the story is being told especially to you.

Round, round, up and down
All along the lonely town
See him sinkin’ low
Doesn’t see the joy there is to know

When you’re alienated, when you’re depressed, you’re locked in not only your own mood, but your own space. It’s like you’re living in black and white in a world of color. There’s no meshing. I won’t say I’m depressed. But sometimes I wonder where my place is in this world. I’m starting to realize I’m not a businessman, I just can’t create a reality distortion field and sell. Yet, we live in a money-based society. And life is about relationships. But what makes up a reasonable relationship? The person who only calls you, only goes to lunch because of your position?

When I’ve got more questions than answers, I turn to music. That’s why I’ve got a problem with Clive Davis’ productions, so much of the Top Forty music. It slides right off of me. It’s made for winners, in a world that’s much more complicated than that. Even those who appear victorious are confused, like Stephen Stills in "See The Changes". But you can’t talk about this anymore, if you do, you’re a loser, you’re left out. You’ve got to shine up your personality, be a good time guy. But that’s so phony. At least the music was honest. That was the core of the explosion, the honesty. Our favorites were not slaves to corporations, they were seers, who we followed everywhere.

At this point we can agree that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 ruined not only radio, but the record business.  The key to selling records is exposure.  And once all the stations consolidated, became homogeneous, the public tuned out, there was no consensus.

The consensus has evaded satellite radio.  Even Howard Stern speaks to a fraction of the faithful.  So, despite satellite’s strengths, it’s not an aggregator, it’s not a central marketplace, where you can drop in and check out what people are into, get a taste of what’s going on almost instantly.

Of course you could listen to Top Forty radio, but it hasn’t been classic Top Forty, the best of the best, in over a decade.  So the fan has been flummoxed.

But as bad as radio is, why do all the cool acts come from the U.K?  Why, when you listen to a U.K. act do you get excited, feel that inner pulse, and the American acts leave you feeling "been there, done that"?

I got a number of e-mails complaining that Duffy is too close to Amy Winehouse.  That both are reminiscent of an era gone by.  But do you remember the ska revolution of the early eighties?  There were great tracks by the (English) Beat, the Specials, Selecter…  There was a vibrancy to the music, and it wasn’t just a clone of the earlier Jamaican sound…  I’ve never heard a sixties ska record that sounded like "Mirror In The Bathroom".  Even if one concedes that Duffy and Amy Winehouse are cut from the same cloth, that sound is new to so much of the audience, and is not a direct rip of what came before.  The fact that there are insiders pooh-poohing them makes me feel good.  This is the passion we used to have in the U.S., before everybody started playing video games.

Furthermore, the vaunted records in the U.S. are always indie rock.  Thin, alternative stuff made by geeks who never had a date about fantasies they’re having in their bedrooms.  Intellectually, one might be able to relate, but there’s a lack of sex, an absence of a visceral quality, that revs one up and gets one excited.

That’s what’s off the grid.  What’s on the grid is disposable.  Rap has become a laugh.  And the popsters are all molded by old men, with their sexuality drained as they sing the concoctions of professional songwriters.  You just can’t get excited about music in the U.S.  But in the U.K., you can feel the heat, you’re involved.  It’s a national pastime, following hit records (instead of the grosses of high concept movies!)

I was inundated with e-mail about this act Adele.  At first listen I loved her, then when I downloaded all the tracks I realized that she was just a bit too jazzy for me.  But I applaud where she’s coming from.  But although she’s a smash in the U.K., I seriously doubt she can make it big here in America.  Because she’s FAT!

Yes, you can be a drug addict.  You can be stupid.  But don’t be FAT!  In America it’s all about appearances.  Fat girls don’t get a chance.  Hell, the girl on "Ugly Betty" isn’t even ugly!

But when was the last time you SAW a record.  Oh, that’s right, MTV made music a visual medium.  Well, it’s NOT!  Music is something you hear, check Adele out through your ears.  Then maybe watch some video footage.  Because it will be a shock.  We never see ANYTHING like this on television in America.

Sure, some of the U.K. acts don’t travel, you’ve got to be British to understand them.  And some are flashes in the pan.  But so many are frozen out of our system, there’s just no way for them to enter, to get traction.  And that’s a comment on us, not them.  While U.K. residents are scheming up innovative tunes, in America kids are playing "Guitar Hero", or learning dance steps and getting plastic surgery to win on "American Idol" or get on Top Forty radio.

At least on "Guitar Hero" they’re playing great music.  That’s the draw.  There hasn’t been great music on the radio in the U.S. for far too long.  And I don’t see Clear Channel and its brethren taking chances any time soon.

It’s our culture, stupid.  We don’t revere great music, we revere fame.  Our national radio station is TMZ.com.  We don’t want to listen to Britney’s music (which hasn’t been great since the very first hit), we just want to watch the train-wreck.  Beyonce is beautiful and talented, but her material is not memorable.  We don’t foster creativity over here.  For a renegade country, we do our best to give renegades no chance.

Ahmet Ertegun said a hit record is something you hear on the radio while lying in bed in your pajamas that makes you get up, get dressed and go to the all night record store to buy.  When was the last time you heard a record like that on U.S. radio?  When was the last time you LISTENED to U.S. radio?  Radio’s all about business.  Music is all about money.  Isn’t that the number one complaint of musicians today?  How do I get paid?

Stop worrying about getting paid and start worrying about making music unfiltered by the system, that grabs people, and makes them want to hear it again and again.  Maybe, if you do, we can get people excited about music.  When "Rolling Stone" features starlets and is loaded with car ads you know the air has gone out of the balloon.  And the Web isn’t much better.  Like I said, listen to those indie alternative records championed on Pitchfork.  The big players ignore the Websites and the Websites like being so far off the grid that most people ignore them.  Can’t we fight it out in the center, like in the U.K?  Can’t we all be focused on greatness in one pool?  Can’t we try to MAKE some cream, never mind have it rise to the top?

Adele – Chasing Pavements

Adele – Hometown Glory

So I’m cruising up 20th Street, accelerating in my Saabaru, since that’s the only thing it’s good for, to get ahead of the car in the left lane before it holds me up waiting to turn.  And as I sit at the light, noticing the cop in my rearview mirror, the idiotic deejay on Sirius’ Spectrum starts reciting all the records we just heard, which I didn’t, because I hadn’t left my house that long ago.  Then she says she believes the intro of this Duffy song sounds just like "Stand By Me" and that’s got me paying attention as the song starts to play.

Utterly ridiculous.  Oh, I can understand where she’s coming from, the deejay that is, but I would never have come up with that.

And the song is playing, it’s so simple, I’m not addicted, but it’s not so bad that I’ve got to switch the station.  Then, just shy of two minutes in, there’s this change and I look down at the radio, I’m hooked!  I remind myself to steal this when I get home.  I’ve got to steal it, because you can’t buy it on iTunes, it hasn’t been released in the U.S.

But I forget, and it’s only when I’m cruising through the e-mail, reading "Record Of The Day", do I see that this very song is set to remain at number one in the U.K., and that the Feeling is headed for number one on the album chart.

The Feeling, I love those tracks.  The band can be a bit cheeky and jive live, they’re too British for American audiences, but that doesn’t come across on record, the music is pure pop!  But none of the singles had an impact.  The album stiffed over here.  Because Top Forty radio, the only format that counts in the U.S., is an urban ghetto.  Oh, of course there’s pop there too.  But not this kind of pop.  Pop on U.S. Top Forty is plastic, overdone, evanescent crap by TV contest winners or Clive Davis prodigies.  If 10cc’s "I’m Not In Love" was released today, it would have no chance, never mind "The Things We Do For Love".  Both classics.  The Feeling’s tracks are not quite that good, but they’re very good!

But Duffy is something completely different.  It sounds like it was cut in America in the midsixties, before the country had become completely infatuated with the U.K., before FM took over from AM.  It sounds like a 45 you spun in the basement with the lights low as you inched your spiked shoes and sweater-encased chest up to the opposite sex, copping a cheap feel.  "Mercy" sounds like the fourth side of the "Quadrophenia" movie soundtrack.  Hell, "Mercy" would have fit in quite well in that flick.

I don’t know the backstory.  I know in Britain everybody knows every detail.  They probably already hate Duffy.  Maybe she’s a fake.  Maybe she didn’t write the song.  Maybe people believe it sounds too similar in places to "Chain Of Fools".  All I know is that it impacted me.  I heard it and wanted to hear it again!

And now I’ve got the video on endless repeat on YouTube.  It’s infectious.

You only get an excerpt on MySpace, as a result of the Universal war on the social network.  And you can get a free track (not the single) on Duffy’s Website, but you’ve got to register.  You can use a fake name, but when you’re done, you end up with a WMA file.  WMA is HD DVD to MP3’s Blu-Ray.  Nobody wants a WMA.  Probably encrypted to boot.  To prevent further trading.  And, the way it works is you don’t cull e-mail addresses up front, those are worthless.  You ask people for their e-mail addresses, you want permission, you want to grow the relationship!  People are savvy, they know you want to spam them in the future.  Don’t they get the choice?  That’s Universal Music for you.  Mafia men with a hint of Gestapo added in.

Even without airplay this record would spread over here.  But, will it get that Top Forty airplay?  When I first heard "Mercy", I thought no.  It sounds like nothing else on the radio.  But it’s so damn good, I believe stations will spin it.  Maybe Amy Winehouse has paved the way, opened the door.

"Mercy" might not be fresh to denizens of the sixties, but to a young ‘un, it sounds like nothing else on the radio.  It’s exciting!  This is the old AM radio hit, the hypodermic to the heart.  This is how we revitalize the business.  With shit like this, which isn’t a clone of what came before.  Then again, by time the label is done ramming this down our throats, hyping Duffy ad infinitum, we’ll want nothing to do with her anymore.  There won’t be a career, just a single.

Meanwhile, check this out.  E-mail your buddies.  You can be cool for a week or two.

Duffy – Mercy
(Don’t bother to look at the images, don’t e-mail me about the bad sync, just listen!)
(P.S. The WMA is copy-protected, and not even playable on a Mac.)

I’m going to make a prediction. The major labels are not going to control the future.

This is important not only because the majors controlled the past, but because they’re trying to control the future. And as the media chronicles each and every flailing, defensive effort, the sea change in consumption of music is being ignored.

Americans used to purchase their records based on radio and the resultant word of mouth. There were very few opportunities to get signed and promoted, and the few winners that resulted were extremely successful. It is this era and goal that the majors are trying to hold on to and return to. They want very few acts to be exposed and sold in an era where anybody can make music and distribute it and it’s extremely difficult to get notice.

We can castigate NARAS for a lame Grammy show, the third lowest rated in history, but do these poor numbers have anything to do with what was up on screen or could it be that nothing could garner the numbers of the past? The Grammys actually won the evening. It’s just that fewer people are watching network television. They’re spread over many cable channels and untold Websites. And they’re not coming back. But the major labels believe they will.

Give the television networks credit. Once they realized cable was siphoning off their viewers, they purchased the cable outlets. However that was in a limited universe, getting on a cable system is very difficult. Majors try to make deals with independent labels, but they seem unaware that independents have options, and that the label might not be the key player controlling the act, that the label might only have a small piece of the overall pie, that the manager is the one collecting all the revenue.

The concept of rolling up indies or distributing them is a sound one. But the majors don’t seem to notice it’s a changed marketplace. The majors just offer their muscle. But you don’t need the majors’ muscle to get paid at iTunes. And very few acts are Top Forty radio friendly, or can get on television, the two areas where the majors can exert power independents usually can’t. Furthermore, print publicity sells fewer records than ever before, independents actually do a better job of publicity, focusing on what works online, where the people are paying attention, whereas the majors employ more of a scattershot, press the button philosophy. Independents grow slowly. This is anathema to the majors, who are also dishonest, both in promises and payments. So, the concept of rolling up indies is flawed. Transparent deals and accountings would have to be married with larger pieces of the pie. But the majors will never deliver this.

Majors are run by kingmakers in a world increasingly run by serfs. In order to succeed in the future, majors would have to establish trusted relationships with not only their acts, but their consumers, and be willing to sell ten thousand of this and twenty thousand of that, knowing that almost nothing will go platinum.

There will be rich people in the music business in the future. Acts and managers, of course. But the businessmen who are successful will see their roles differently, as aggregators. Selling wide swaths of product to everybody who wants it at a cheap price.

It’s akin to IBM and Microsoft. IBM ruled computers when most people didn’t have them. Big Blue believed the money was in corporations. Microsoft in concert with PC manufacturers ultimately sold an inexpensive product that everybody could buy. IBM? They sold their PC manufacturing business, even their vaunted ThinkPad line, they’re now a profitable company operating in a much smaller sphere, in the world of services. Major record labels have huge assets, their catalogs, this will give them a seat at the table in the future, they will do business, but they won’t dominate. They’re not constructed to dominate in the future.

In the future it’s about volume. Something the majors still don’t understand. The paradigm isn’t one track for a buck, but getting everybody to be a music consumer at a low price. Under the guise of protecting music’s "value", the majors are killing their business. And making recorded music sales challenging for everyone. Which is why all new players look to maximize touring revenue, sometimes giving their music away for free on the Internet.

The biggest story of the year is how the mainstream press and the pollsters were completely out of touch with the electorate. No one foresaw Obama, no one predicted his success. And his success so far has proven that people want change, they’re sick of the past, they want to believe in something new. The public has embraced digital music. People own thousands of tracks. The majors are against this. They want the average citizen to pay $40,000 to fill his iPod. But, more importantly, the majors and the infrastructure surrounding them fail to realize what the public truly wants, music to believe in, not the evanescent, oversold crap which dominates today. I’m not saying all sponsorships/endorsements/advertisements are bad, but I am saying that sometimes they come with a cost. They erode the consumer’s belief in the underlying act and its music. Majors talk about whoring out the music, they don’t ever speak of the bond between fan and act. But it’s exactly this bond that is at the heart of the future. And the new players know this.

Don’t become infatuated with the exact date the CD dies. Or ridiculous predictions by consistently inaccurate research companies when digital sales will eclipse those of physical product. There’s no evolution here, just revolution. And a research outfit can’t predict the details when confronted with a shake-up of this magnitude.

Music will be vital in the future. Its potential to reach people exceeds all other entertainment media. But it takes individuals who understand technology, in touch with the customer base, willing to take risks, in order to be successful. Those running the major labels fit none of these criteria. Therefore, these companies are doomed for marginalization.