So, what do you get, LCD or plasma?

Plasma is sharper, with better blacks.  But LCD is better in bright light.  Then again, there’s that new Panasonic plasma with the matte finish, that shows no glare.

How confusing!

Have you watched anything in HD?  Makes you feel like you’re at the movies.  With that rectangular aspect ratio.  You almost expect the ratings insert to come up before every show.  It’s a religious experience, you’ve got to have it.

Actually, Felice already has it, in her bedroom, a 36" LG.

Isn’t it fascinating how the brands have changed?  In the initial color era, the goal was to have a Zenith.  We had an Admiral, years before anybody else had color.  You see my dad won it in a raffle at the JCC!  It was a hundred dollar ticket.  He ponied up fifty, and two others put down twenty five bucks.  When they won, my father paid each of the others seventy five dollars and took the set.  Yup, that was a good deal back in the sixties, when color televisions verged on a grand.

People would come to our house and marvel at the set.  Oldsters would say the picture was not that good, not that sharp.  But every October my buddies would race to my house from school to watch the final innings of the World Series, when they still played baseball during the day, when young kids still cared about the game, when it wasn’t the addiction of aging baby boomers and truly old men.

Then, three or four years later, in ’65 or ’66, color came down in price to the point where many of my friends no longer came by for the game.  And then the Admiral burned out and we got a Zenith with a remote control.  And that television sufficed until my mother got a lousy Sharp from a friend in the eighties, and refused to replace it, believing that TV was a substandard medium.

Now television is the primary medium.  "Spider-Man 3" might have garnered $59 million its first day, but the reviews have been far from stellar, the word "mediocre" comes to mind.  It’s positively American.  Overhype, mass mentality, all calories and no protein.  All FILLER! Whereas when one sits down and watches "The Sopranos" in HD, one has a religious experience.  Right inside the frame is a whole world, not a concoction of lowest common denominator Hollywood pricks with contempt for their audience, but people who want to test the limits and do something great!  Not that they always succeed, but you applaud their efforts, you root for them, because we want the fruits of their labor, we want greatness.

That’s what the purveyors have wrong, that we want mediocrity.  The reason "American Idol" scores is it’s got more drama than the tripe on the big screen.  We can divine the essence, we’re just not exposed to it often enough.

And there’s an arms race on television.  Between not only Showtime and HBO, but FX and Bravo too.  Everybody’s looking for something that hooks the public.  And that’s why you’ve got to have the box.  To participate.  Watching TV on cell phones?  That’s a joke. It’s not about the information so much as the EXPERIENCE!  Draw the curtains, turn up the sound, blend with the screen.  Get taken away for an hour or two.  That’s what you’re working for, to be able to afford this experience!

And the price keeps coming down.

I love gear.  All the specs, all the philosophies.  It’s not about cutting corners in video, but giving you more cluck for your buck.  And the prices have gotten so cheap that the hoi polloi have ventured in.  They may be buying Vizios from Costco, but they don’t want to be left out.

And if you wander into Magnolia, or Ken Crane’s, or some other video emporium, you won’t want to be left out EITHER!

It’s the picture.  Sometimes the same one replicated over complete walls, one set after another.  And there’s always something better than you can afford, that you can aspire to, that you can dream about.  Sure, you might be looking at a 46" set, but imagine having a 70!  Wouldn’t that be great!

And you’ve got to get a sound system to go with your big screen.  Whether it be cheapie theatre-in-a-box for five hundred bucks, or real B&W sound.  Amplified by a receiver with enough acronyms to baffle anybody but a fifteen year old boy.  Do you need HDMI to go with your 1080p?  There’s a learning curve, and every detail counts, because you want to get it right.

It’s a religious experience.  Divining all the data.

Felice likes the look of LCD, and the room she wants to put the set in has glass doors.  But how big?  A 40" set NOT in HD format shows a picture only as big as her old Sony, presently in the living room.  So, you’ve got to go bigger.  At least 46".  50"?

And what brand?  Sony may be dying in music and portable music players, but it’s on a tear in TV.  It’s like the old days, perceived to be the best, and an extra chunk of change more.  But if you’re spending this much, should you pop for the XBR?

And what about Samsung?  Their set looked better than the XBR!  Could that be store adjustment?  Brighter sets looking more appealing?  Then again, they make the screens in the same factory.

Samsung…  Can you imagine buying a Samsung ANYTHING twenty years ago?  KOREAN?  Give me a break!  That’s one thing the oldsters don’t get anymore, there’s no loyalty to the old names.  Not even to Jay-Z.  There’s no legacy, what’s best TODAY!

And the Samsung looks pretty damn good.

So do you pop for the B&W ceiling speakers?  They’re blowing out some Klipsch set.  And Bose…  Funny how in the high end shops they pooh-pooh the direct-reflecting household name.

And I see all the shit they have in "Sound & Vision".  Definitive!

As for receivers…  Igor wouldn’t go with anything less than the $1,600 Yamaha.  You want your Blu-Ray player to render at 1080, right?

How did the music business fuck up so badly?  This used to be OUR domain!

Pristine sound…  You wanted to get closer to the music.  Oh, it was a hit out of the speaker in your dashboard, but at home you wanted to be bathed in the notes, you couldn’t really appreciate the music until you heard it on a component system.

But then the cassette became the standard.  Oh, you could buy a Nakamichi deck and record a tape every bit as good as vinyl, but the prerecorded stuff was duped onto crap, at high speed.  These tapes were not made for component stereos.

And then if the CD was perfection, what did it matter what you played it on?  In the nineties, a stereo became an all-in-one, for a couple of hundred bucks.

And then we got the iPod.

The iPod allows you to take your music everywhere.  But you don’t expect a replication of your home in a hotel (unless it’s frighteningly expensive!)  The iPod is about convenience.  What about EXCELLENCE!

Well, the music companies gave up on excellence.  So the gear makers moved on to TV.  Oh, this video revolution has been percolating for nearly two decades.  But it’s finally taken hold.  NOW IS THE TIME!

When is the time for sound?

Well, in order for it to work, the sound has to be good.  Have you listened to hit CDs?  Thank god we play them on iPods, they assault one’s ears.

All I know is today in Ken Crane’s I got that rush from the seventies, when I used to haunt Pacific Stereo, and University Stereo, and Federated.  Back when that was my number one aspiration, good sound.  I used to subscribe to three magazines, "Stereo Review", "Hi-Fidelity" and "Audio".  I used to love to stay home and play records.  That was an activity unto itself!

Now I get a better hit, one that I feel in my gut, watching the aforementioned "Sopranos".  The bigger the screen, the better.  With not only surround, but a center speaker and subwoofer.

Recorded music is a shitty experience.  But video is in a GOLDEN AGE!

If you weren’t at Coachella are you a loser?  Hopelessly out of touch?  Living in a world where the memo never gets to your inbox?

It’s Bon Jovi night on "American Idol".  Funny to think that Jon Bongiovi was once a hungry musician from New Jersey who would do anything to make it, and now will do just about anything to stay on top.  Jon worked at the Power Station, his uncle’s place.  He wrote songs.  He made demos, he assembled a band.  And when hooked up with Desmond Child and Bruce Fairbairn he recorded an album that captured the zeitgeist of the late eighties, when the hip and the mainstream merged, when Generation X threw off the restrictions of its baby boomer big brothers and grabbed hold of the reins of popular culture.

That’s how you made it back in the eighties, you got your mug on the MTV.  Exposure sold records.  But MTV is now meaningless.  Just ask teenagers, it’s got nothing to do with music.  Kind of like the major labels.  That sound they’re purveying has got nothing to do with music, with art, and really just centers on money.  Isn’t that what they say?  They’re only making what sells?  It’s not about musicianship, Clive Davis finds a beautiful face, puts it together with the usual behind the board suspects, and a new star is born.  But the public no longer respects said stars.  What are you to do if you want to play in the mainstream?

That’s exactly the point.  There is no mainstream.

Coachella is not mainstream.  And neither is Bonnaroo.  The Live Earth concerts try to be, and that’s why they leave one cold.  If you’re playing to the mainstream, you’re screwed.  Because no one lives there.  No one is that uninformed, that unhip.  Except maybe the prepubescent kids soon to reject what they now embrace.

The major labels are still trying to figure out how to get paid for their wares.  They’ve been arguing about it for eight years.  Trying to prop up the CD, suing their customers and arguing with Steve Jobs.  All the while, fewer and fewer people are paying attention.

The ruckus about Net Radio fees?  It’s positively sixties.  It’s about us vs. them.  How dare you fuck with us?  How dare you deprive us of what we’re building, what we’re enjoying!

In order to survive, the major labels have to change their paradigm.  Sign acts for less, make records for less, sell more music for less and be willing to make less up front themselves, be invested on a percentage basis as opposed to earning fat salaries.  But it appears that the majors don’t want to save themselves, they’d rather just cry about losing what they’ve got.

Meanwhile, the scene moves on.

There’s a festival on every block this summer.  Even one in Baltimore, sponsored by Virgin Mobile.  Starring the Police and Cheap Trick as well as the hipsters of Coachella.

So, if you flew all the way to Palm Springs are you a he-man of the universe or a laughable loser?  If you went to have a good time, and did, more power to you.  But your attendance at Coachella is no longer a badge of honor.  Because there no longer are any badges of honor.  The scene’s been democratized, it’s positively niche.  If you expect those new acts that played at Coachella to break out, I’m laughing.  But that’s not what it’s about.  It’s just one person’s vision/scene, Paul Tollett’s.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Despite the hype in the major media, Coachella is not representative of the country at large, never mind the world, it’s not where you break acts, it’s jus a scene.

As is Lollapalooza in Chicago.  And Bumbershoot.  And Summerfest.  And JazzFest.

Want to know what the recorded music landscape will look like in the future?  Just look at today’s live music landscape.  Rejecting the overpriced, performed to hard disk indoor extravaganzas, the audience prefers to go outdoors, where it gets more cluck for its buck.  That’s the story of festivals.  You get to experience a lot.  And, it is an experience.  A festival is like a night at the Fillmore East, as opposed to an assault in a hockey rink.

In the future recorded music will feature far fewer winners.  Just more acts making a living.  With fan bases, and not much more.  Rather than argue about DRM and raising the price of tracks, to save themselves recorded music purveyors must realize the days of diamond sales are done.  And you’ve got to sell something interesting.  And you’ve got to give people a lot, for a little.

It’s not about Coachella being a new Woodstock, it’s about 2007 being a revolution in the touring industry.  With festivals creating a buzz, an excitement, unseen for years.  Will some acts break out of these extravaganzas?  Probably not.  Unless they play every one of them, and add to their fan bases.  One performance is not enough.  It gets lost in the shuffle.  For everybody raving about Coachella, there are many more shrugging their shoulders, not even paying attention.

Then again, Bon Jovi had better songs than so many of these new acts.  But when these young ‘uns get their material together, all but high water marks like Mr. New Jersey will be unable to tour, they will be pushed aside by acts people believe in.

That’s the main criterion, belief!  You can play every festival because they all have different audiences.  Appear on "American Idol" and other mainstream outlets and the multiple impressions eviscerate belief.

I don’t want to denigrate Paul Tollett, that’s not my point.  It’s just that it’s not only him.  It’s he, Marc Geiger and Michael Rapino that are the new kingmakers.  The promoters and agents now rule.  The label guys…  You don’t really want to work at a label, do you?  There’s no risk, no innovation.  That’s all outdoors.  At a one time only performance.

So we’re in the dressing room and Tom and Joni Mitchell are discussing open tunings.

Tom had just finished up the first set with "Panama Limited", a compilation of Bukka White numbers.  And Tom and Joni were reminiscing about the days back in Detroit, when they met, when the old blues men were still revered, when Tom first heard "Urge For Going".

Actually, Tom was past deadline on his new album.  He needed material.  He got Joni to send him a tape.  And, at the end, Joni added a number she’d just written, a song she wasn’t sure was any good.  And Tom liked it so much, he named the album after it, "The Circle Game".

Truth be told, Tom Rush was a little before my time.  He grew out of the folkie era.  Hell, if you want to know more about this period, buy Joe Boyd’s "White Bicycles".  Although at dinner Tom laughingly told me that Joe had stolen all the good stories from him, for they were roommates at Harvard.

Tom took piano lessons.  He hated them.  But, when a relative showed him how to play the ukulele, he took to it, he embraced it.  And from Groton to Harvard, somehow he switched to the guitar.  Not that he was a musician at first, he was a deejay, running a live music show on Harvard’s 5 watt station.  He used this as an entre to meet all the legendary blues and folk pickers, to get them on his show.  And he could!  This was before the days of superstardom, when access was easily had at the club.

Eventually, Tom was goaded into taking the stage at an open mic night.  And through a combination of moxie and luck, he got a residency at Club 47.  And ultimately made a record.  With someone lost to time who said he had a tape recorder.  Then, after all his jealous contemporaries got deals, Paul Rothchild signed Tom up to Prestige, and then Jac Holzman’s Elektra.

Tom was the singer/songwriter star before James Taylor.  He was the college campus favorite.  Whenever I hit the dorm rooms of upperclassmen, they all had "The Circle Game", and his debut on Columbia.

Actually, his deal with Columbia lapsed, they failed to pick up their option.  But Tom’s manager and attorney told him to re-up anyway, not to go to Warner, to play nice with Big Red.

A total mistake.  The deal was worse and the record didn’t sell.  Tom found himself dropped.  And then he decided to drop out of music and become a farmer in his beloved New Hampshire.

But it didn’t take.  In six months Tom started playing gigs again.  He felt contrary to Columbia’s protestations, baby boomers were still interested in music.  They might not want to go to clubs, but going upscale, Tom booked Boston’s Symphony Hall and sold out!  And he’s been cottage industry ever since.

Funny how these musicians are humble, how they’re evasive.  It’s so hard to make it that after they’ve crossed the threshold, they don’t like to talk about the desire, the effort.  Sitting with Tom in Valentino it all seemed like luck.  But I know better.

But as low key as Tom was at dinner, he positively came alive at the gig.  You see he gave a performance.  Not like you see on TV, not like you experience at the arena.  It was just him and three guitars.  And a lot of tales.

You see Tom’s smart, and educated.  So what comes out between the songs is just as fascinating as the music itself!  It’s the story of a life.  Told with the humor of an observer who’s still here to reveal the details.  Of time in New Hampshire, Wyoming and now California.  Yup, Tom’s moved across the country.  But his most rabid fan base is still on the east coast.  Did I know that from one corner of Wyoming to the other was the same distance from Toronto to D.C?  The traveling was hell, that Tom was doing to his supposedly fifty but really more like sixty five gigs a year.  But he didn’t tire of getting up on stage.  It was a rush, to play music for a living.  He had no regrets.

Before Joni arrived he did "Urge For Going".

But the highlight of the first set was the aforementioned "Panama Limited".  When he made his guitar duplicate the sound of a train north of Memphis, and the Panama Limited coming in from the south.  This wasn’t hit of the minute, this was part of a long folk tradition.  This wasn’t gloss, this was America.

But it was "Merrimack County" that touched me the most.  This transcended conversation, transcended McCabe’s music room.  We’re all from somewhere.  And for those of us who have developed in the wide open spaces, our dreams are as vast as the landscape.  And all that hope and reflection was embodied in Tom’s performance.

And there was a killer version of "Drift Away", prefaced by a story of meeting its writer, Mentor Williams, in the Nashville airport.

And, in his discussion of cover versions of "No Regrets", Tom told of humoring Bono, who had taken to performing the song on his band’s tour.  Turned out Bono didn’t have a sense of humor about the music of his homeland.

Then again, was this detail apocryphal?

You never knew with Tom.  So many of the stories started believable, but when you got to the end, you wondered if you’d been had.  There was a punch line.  Was all that preceded it also false?

And following "No Regrets", Tom segued into "Rockport Sunday".

Tomorrow’s the first day of the week.  According to Christians, it’s the lord’s day.  We don’t work, we’re supposed to reflect.  And hearing this instrumental about a morning in Maine, I felt at peace, that all my choices had been if not right, at least arguable, that the mistakes I’d made were minor, that my life might not be perfect, but it had turned out all right.

I followed the sound, just like Tom.  Funny how we’d never met previously, but we were alike.

There are stars and then there are musicians.  Sometimes they’re one and the same, but not so much anymore.  As the stars become more plastic, we’re driven to the musicians, they point the way, just by following their muse.  They’re not about accumulating a pile of money so much as joy, both on stage and off.  Telling their stories, about life.

I’m only pissed I missed the show Friday night.  When spotting Jackson Browne in the audience Tom launched into "Jamaica Say You Will".  You see Jackson was signed to Elektra’s publishing company.  Tom had access to his tunes.  That’s how he ended up recording "These Days".  They were all in it together.  And although Tom’s Festival Express buddy Janis Joplin and so many are gone, many have survived.  They’re still out there, accessible.  Make the effort, partake of their wisdom and joy, you’ll be richer for it, not monetarily, but where it truly counts, in your heart.

I can’t get over what a non-event the release of an album is today.  Oh, the media trumpets the dropping of these discs like the second coming.  But no one’s paying attention.  Well, that’s not really true, VERY FEW PEOPLE ARE PAYING ATTENTION!

We used to live in a small universe.  Fewer than 5,000 albums were released a year.  And people like us, we knew every one.  Now nobody knows every one, and not many people care that they’re uninformed.  But it gets worse, sales superstars like Avril Lavigne release "monster hit singles" that nobody hears.  "Girlfriend"?  A hit in the media, but most of America has never heard it.

Then there’s Patti Smith’s covers album.  She just got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, she’s riding a wave of publicity she hasn’t been the beneficiary of since the seventies.  But will anybody buy her record?

Not many.

Doesn’t matter how good it is, most people don’t care.

And it’s not Patti.  If you’re a heritage artist putting out a new record…nobody wants it.  They just want to hear your old stuff.

And if you don’t have a big time rep, then you’re not going to break through, unless you sell your soul to the promotion/marketing machine, and then you STILL won’t go platinum probably, and you’ll just be a footnote in the history of music.

What the hell is going on?

Back before publications like the L.A. "Times" printed new album previews, we were hungry for the new discs of our favorite bands.  We wanted to hear all the new albums, maybe someone would surprise us and we’d BECOME a fan.  Now, an act has a hard core of dedicated fans and that’s IT!

But it gets worse.  Household names?  They don’t have a dedicated sales base.  Oh, they might be able to tour if they’re from the classic rock era, but all those famous people from the last forty years, they can’t sell tonnage.  NOBODY CAN SELL TONNAGE!

Oh, let’s not make it black and white.  There might still be phenomena.  Nickelback is a phenomenon.  Then again, their initial monster hit predated this new era.  People were still listening to Top Forty radio and watching MTV when "How You Remind" me broke.  Same band releases same initial single today?  Much less impact.  Hell, let’s look at it this way, if Nickelback’s latest album had come out at the turn of the decade, at the height of CD sales, it would have gone diamond, done in excess of ten million in the U.S., I have no doubt.  KID ROCK went diamond, and he had FEWER HITS!

We read about these new discs, it’s as if these acts can sell records, but they can’t.  And sure, there’s no more Tower and the big boxes are stocking fewer albums, but the real story is there’s just no focus.  There’s a coterie of not quite adolescent girls following the mainstream, and then everybody else is off in his own niche.

Used to be an album release was just the beginning.  It was like starting a fire on "Survivor".  Once you had your flint and your logs, you were gonna blow on the tinder, if you did it right you were gonna have a  CONFLAGRATION!  Now the PEAK is when the record drops.  It’s all downhill from there.  Oh, a few discs build.  But most just fade off into oblivion.  They’re run up the flagpole and then they disappear, as the media runs another record up the flagpole.

Acts used to be excited.  We’ve got an album coming out!  We and the label are going to build it into a raging success!  No you’re not, if you’re lucky you already have a road audience and you’ll sell the disc to the people coming to the show, or actually AT the show.

Don’t buy the hype.  All those stories, all the reviews, almost nobody’s paying attention!  Who could, it’s overwhelming!

But the media and the music business don’t stop.  If the public isn’t interested in reading the reviews of a zillion new records and stories of how they’re being made, how come they’re printing this stuff ANYWAY?  And if you can’t release a record with the hope of it going platinum, why are you investing so much money, time and effort?  If you’re only going to sell 25,000, maybe you should cut the album more cheaply and maintain a really good mailing list to get the word out, rather than employing high-priced publicists who try to reach the masses who don’t give a shit.

This is reality.  The blockbuster era is done.  The business is living a giant lie, the purveyors are participating in a giant circle jerk.  The public has tuned out, and is only listening to each other.

It’s not about beating acts or labels up.  It’s actually depressing that the scene is so saturated and there’s so much choice that it’s almost impossible to go gold.  In the future there could be a new avenue of exposure that builds hit acts, then again, maybe not.

So don’t be impressed when you read about so and so’s new album.  There’s nothing going on other than this story.  It’s a cardboard facade with carney-level sales figures behind.

And if you’re a musician, realize that it’s about those who you know, serving your fan base, growing it organically.  Your dream of a big break and mass appeal?  That’s not gonna happen.  And, if it does, like a flash mob, the audience will move on to something new soon thereafter.