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He was the first star drummer.

Except, of course, for Ringo Starr, but he was a Beatle. The Beatles were gods, everybody else was a musician.

And musicians the Young Rascals were, except of course for frontman Eddie Brigatti, with that space between his teeth. We knew everything about the bands, all we had were the album covers, and we stared at them, can close our eyes and still picture them.

I’d like to say I’m shocked that Dino Danelli died. And on one level I am, but on another, like Christine McVie, he did not die young, before his time, he was 78. Back in the Young Rascals’ heyday that was considered old, now everybody expects to live into their nineties, but if that were the case why would the U.S. average life expectancy be 76.1 years? Dino just beat the average, but one thing’s for sure, he and his band never were, average that is.

But it was a different era.

Kids had no idea who ran GM or IBM, there were no billionaires and the entire nation was music crazy. Credit the aforementioned Beatles. They broke in ’64, a slew of British bands invaded right thereafter and seemingly everybody in America bought an electric guitar, because like Roger (then Jim) McGuinn sang, they wanted to be a rock and roll star.

And to be a rock and roll star you had to be your material. You had to write it, play it and sing it. The Monkees were derided for not living up to this standard, today no one would care.

And the first Rascals hits were covers. The delicious “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore” and the exercise in excitement, “Good Lovin’.” The Grateful Dead might have made the latter a staple of their live show, but anybody but a Deadhead would tell you the Rascals’ version is definitive.

In retrospect, the first Young Rascals album was just an introduction. It was what came thereafter that really cemented their reputation. The second LP, “Collections,” had the stellar Felix Cavaliere original “(I’ve Been) Lonely Too Long,” and the Cavaliere/Brigatti compositions “Love Is a Beautiful Thing” and “What Is the Reason.” Have you heard these recently? They maintain their energy, they stand up, exceed what is on the hit parade today. As for the third album, “Groovin’,” there was the title track, “A Girl Like You,” “How Can I Be Sure” and “You Better Run,” all on the same album!

The Young Rascals were a juggernaut. And I went  to see them headline a five act bill in the gym at Fairfield University.

People always ask me what was my first concert. Honestly, I can’t remember. We were taken to cultural events from the onset of my earliest memories. Young people’s concerts, plays, to go to a show was de rigueur. And using today’s terminology, we were free range kids. Taking the train into New York City alone… And going to the show alone. We didn’t need an escort, a chaperone… We were dropped off and waited in line after the show to use the pay phone to call for a pickup. By time our parents arrived the venue was usually empty, security, or what stood in for it back then, would be telling us to leave, they didn’t care about our safety, they just wanted us out.

Now on October 15, 1966 when this concert took place, no one left early. No one cared about beating the traffic and you couldn’t miss the opening act.

Anticipation built and the Young Rascals delivered. This was long before the day of tapes, never mind hard drives. You either had it or you did not. There was no click track. There were only four men on stage, running through their hits.

And even though he was in the back, Dino was as big a star as Eddie out front. There’s the way he twirled his sticks… That was his trademark, we’d seen it on TV, it seemed impossible, he never dropped a stick and never missed a beat. You can see Dino in action at 4:48 in this clip: https://bit.ly/3W3qFNp

When the show was over my friend and I rushed the stage, got right up on the platform, and we took Dino’s sticks.

They were thick. And they had slices in the parts where your hands would normally be. Yes, Dino played both ends. After he twirled them he couldn’t be concerned with which end he was playing.

I kept those sticks until 1975, when my mother turned my bedroom into an office. She threw out my all my stuff, all my mementos, my World’s Fair hat…and Dino Danelli’s drumsticks.

She also threw out my baseball cards and my American Flyer slot cars. If I had both of those today, I could retire. But in truth, it’s all about the memories, and I can still see Dino Danelli twirling those drumsticks on the Fairfield University stage. As for the records…they’re embedded in wax, we change but they never do, and when we listen to them we remember who we were and what we were doing and it matters not a whit to anybody else, but it’s everything to us.

Rock and roll is a hard mistress. What seems like forever is really just a few years long. When you’re young you think these bands will last forever. But few do. Except for the superstars, the rest go on to straight jobs, or die prematurely. It’s weird, without education or experience so many end up doing manual labor. They were your heroes, and now…

Of course there are oldies shows. And the Rascals even reunited and Dino spun his sticks once again, but now it’s too late. Just like a Monkees reunion is too late. Life bit ’em in the ass, and eventually it’s going to bite us too.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. What you’ve got to understand is in the sixties kids ruled. Oldsters didn’t want to be us, they resented us. Kids tested limits, kids drove the culture, and nowhere was this as prominent as it was in music. I’d detail the growth, from cottage industry to public company, but if you were not there… Let’s just say before the Beatles no one expected rock acts to be forever, for the members to be rich, to live the lives of royalty. This was a new thing. And ever since everybody wants to imitate them, become rich and famous. But it’s not the same. Acts got ripped-off, but they got laid. The adventures were incredible, but now…

Elvis’s sales are going down, his audience is dying off. SiriusXM’s 60s on 6 is no longer on 6. That low channel number is valuable real estate. First it was the forties that switched to a high number, then the fifties and soon it will be the seventies. Our history is disappearing right in front of our eyes, and most don’t seem to care. They’re into the new. When sometimes the old is much better.

But in the era of constant school shootings, how much news value does the death of an old rocker have?

After Dino came Ginger Baker, the drum solo. But Ginger’s dead too. So many of them are already gone, with more on the way. If you didn’t see them, you never will.

All that’s left is the pictures in your mind. You can talk about them, but unless you were there you have no idea of the visceral impact of Dino Danelli and the Rascals and so many more. I remember tingling when I saw Gene Cornish in Sam Ash on one of those non-supervised trips to New York, we had to cruise 48th Street, go to Manny’s and the rest of the music stores that are no longer there. You had to go to the city to get a discount, now you just go on Amazon.

So if you were there you know how I feel. You want to remember Dino in that schoolboy outfit twirling his sticks and pounding the skins positively alive. You don’t want to think about the decades thereafter. Because Dino was a star, someone you looked up to, someone who was cool, someone who gave you reason to be alive.

But he’s dead now.

And soon you will be too.

This isn’t about social media, this is about authoritarianism. This is what happens when one person has too much power and exercises it willy-nilly. Not only can no one stop him (or her!), a good percentage of the population supports them.

That’s right, Elon Musk is now a hero to the right. Which is kind of a headscratcher since his reputation was being a hero to the left, i.e. Tesla. Yes, the right, from the “Wall Street Journal” opinion page to legislators to the rank and file, is anti-electric automobiles. There are bogus scientific explanations, there’s the defense of the oil industry, there’s a refusal to accept change and at the root it’s got to do with freedom. Yes, the freedom to drive gas-guzzlers.

And freedom of speech. That’s the right’s complaint about Twitter, that it’s biased towards the left, even though statistics tell us otherwise. As for Hunter Biden’s laptop… I won’t wade into this quagmire, but assuming everything they say is true, what has it got to do with Joe Biden? Somehow Donald Trump is immune to the activities of his children and his real estate empire but Joe Biden, a civil servant with a fraction of the cash, is responsible for everything every relative ever did?

It doesn’t make sense. Don’t try to analyze it.

But that’s the rank and file. Here we’re talking about Elon Musk.

He’s a billionaire. Can we stop talking about his fall from #1 to #2? Isn’t that like saying Scarlett Johansson or some other legendary beauty has a zit? I mean what difference does it make, they’re still extremely attractive. And Elon Musk is still extremely rich. And in this country we venerate money and looks. Hell, that’s another thing Elon Musk does, criticize people’s attractiveness, their weight, even though he was shown in a bathing suit to be less than a perfect specimen.

But it’s not only the physical Musk addresses, he also called a cave-rescuer a pedophile. Even worse, he believes the SEC does not apply to him.

It’s not only Donald Trump who has skated legally. Musk still hasn’t been prosecuted for failing to publicly announce he exceeded 5% ownership in Twitter. And he’s lobbying for previous SEC restrictions to be lifted.

In other words, in America if you’re rich and powerful enough, the rules don’t apply. This has been the situation for eons, but we never had people this rich and powerful. Furthermore, a good proportion of the rank and file root for the rich, believing they too will be rich sometime. And they vote for policies for the rich for the same reason, like lower taxes. Never mind the power of the rich to sway public sentiment. The rich are a shadow government. Hiding in plain sight. They’re the rock stars of modern life. As for the theoretical musician rock stars? They’ll do anything for the money, music is just a jumping off point to become rich. The goal is to become a brand. There’s just not enough money making music. Can you say Rihanna? Meanwhile, these dodos, oftentimes uneducated, after all, what other vertical requires no schooling to enter, don’t realize the essence of music is the ability to speak truth to power. Rupert Murdoch is not in it for the money, he’s in it to sway the course of not only public opinion, but the country itself. That’s the power of owning the ink.

Anyway, Musk is so rich, that he could buy Twitter outright. We’ve never seen this in America before, where one person could own what appeared to be a public institution, responsible to no one. That’s right, there are no guardrails at Twitter. And Musk keeps saying one thing and doing another. Just hours after saying he wouldn’t ban reporters, he did.

Part of his rationalization is protecting his family. Well, this is evidence of the lack of privacy we all experience. And as of this writing there’s no evidence to the case, i.e. that his family was at risk, that there was a specific event. But in any event, Musk is shoring up power, he cannot be at risk. Just like an authoritarian despot like Putin. Or Orban, the hero of the right. And other totalitarian rulers. It’s their world, and we just live in it.

And Twitter is so big and so powerful that as of now, it can’t be supplanted. That’s the online history, no platform has ever been decimated by protest or cancellation of accounts. Theoretically there could be a competitor, but look at Truth Social, a backwater most are unaware of.

Meanwhile, the press keeps reporting Musk’s antics and nothing changes.

In truth, Musk is going to run up against new EU rules… But in America we’ve been told we live in the greatest country in the world and most of the population has never been anywhere else and the EU is looked down upon. It’s Brexit on steroids here in the good ole’ USA.

Even worse, Musk has the right to do all this! Yes, he owns Twitter, it’s a private company, he can ban whomever he wants to. Another headscratcher, the right is too dumb to know that freedom of speech does not apply to private companies just like concertgoers are too dumb to understand that all the ticket fees don’t go to Ticketmaster. Today the facts don’t matter, emotion does. And amazingly, the emotion on the right is that Musk is standing up to the big bad government. The same government that swooped in and aided Florida after the hurricane, even though DeSantis is a Republican.

The government is no match for Musk. He’s unafraid of it. And there can be no penalty because there is gridlock in D.C., half the elected officials’ singular goal is to make sure the other makes no progress. And if you clamp down on Musk there will be public outcry.

And in truth most people don’t care about Twitter, but the social network is where journalists themselves hang out, where news is initially made and distributed. That’s why the Twitter story never leaves the newspaper. This is the henhouse where reporters live. And they are used to speaking truth to power, that’s why you become a reporter, and now you can’t speak at all!

This is just a dry run for what can become. This is what it would look like if Trump got re-elected, became president again. One person acting on their whims, responsible to no one, even if the supposed rules say otherwise.

This is scary. We expect this nonsense from Kanye, but he doesn’t own Spotify.

This is happening in plain sight. And many Americans have their heads in the ground, like they did with the Holocaust and the Ukraine war…they think it doesn’t affect them. But eventually they come after you.

He or she who controls the news controls the country. And right now, Elon Musk controls the news. On a supposedly open platform.

I could tell everybody to cancel their account, but like I said above, this won’t happen and there will be no change.

No, our only hope is the government, which is paralyzed.

As for billionaires… This is the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Low taxes. Trickle down? Is Elon Musk giving you any of his money? The rich give proportionately less to charity than the poor.

No one should be that rich. Absolutely no one. That wealth distorts not only the economy, but public life.

And now I’ve alienated a good portion of my readers. They support Musk no matter what he does, it’s a religion.

And I’ll speak the truth but many will not. They’re afraid, of it affecting their pocketbook. Oldsters like David Crosby will state their truth and not care about the effects, but the younger generations? They don’t want to be political, they don’t want to take a risk, which is why they end up with little power. Unless you’re willing to stand up for your beliefs, you don’t count.

There will be more news. Who knows, Musk could even reinstate the accounts of these reporters. But just you wait, further shenanigans will ensue. Musk has huge blind spots. We think if someone is rich they know everything, have skills in other verticals, but this is patently untrue.

And don’t talk to me about the last election and the defeat of the red wave. Rust never sleeps, and authoritarianism is gaining ground around the world. People want someone who will make the trains run on time, who grants them the illusion that there is control. And once that person gains control, they never ever give it up.

Be forewarned. I’d say this is just the beginning, but it’s been going on for decades. The freedom that many want is really control. They want to make sure you don’t have a voice, and eventually have no power. And then…

“Washington Post” tech correspondent Taylor Lorenz is the number one reporter on social media. We go through all the platforms, their history and where they are going. Taylor is deep into it, she’s not only a scribe, but a player in the sphere. She’s the one you need to listen to!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/taylor-lorenz/id1316200737?i=1000590266784

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/episodes/a5bcc66a-8375-4362-b9f8-b7d56fb16c98/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-taylor-lorenz

https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast/episode/taylor-lorenz-209855193