A must-listen!

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jon-batiste/id1316200737?i=1000729683233

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/episodes/80ce0633-5e67-4a18-b1d0-ad3cf9ec797e/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-jon-batiste

There’s nothing I hate more than physical retail.

Mostly it’s an OCD thing… I’ve got to find the perfect thing. If it’s clothing, it’s got to fit exactly right and…

At this point I do all my shopping online. Where I can do research ad infinitum. Too much, but at least I get what I want. I know, I know, you can return stuff, but that’s a pain in the rear end.

As for settling for good enough…THA’TS NOT ME! I need the best. And the best isn’t always even more expensive, you just need to know what to buy.

And I always buy the best footwear. Nike. Now New Balance. No imitation for me, no equivalent to Thom McAn instead of Stride Rite, if you can remember your single digit days.

So…

I’m going somewhere where I need slip-on shoes. I’ve got to take them off and put them back on multiple times. So, I decided to investigate Skechers… It’s a mid- level brand, then again it’s become a juggernaut and I’ve seen all those ads where you can step on the heel and slide right in.

They don’t make those anymore. But I didn’t find this out until I went to the retail store and they told me.

Now they make slip-ons, but not the crunch slip-ons, they haven’t made those for two and a half years. Are they coming back? The help wasn’t sure.

So let’s get this straight… I drove to the physical store because I wasn’t sure exactly what size I was in Skechers. And like I said above, I don’t want to go through the buy and return process online.

So… It’s late in the afternoon, there’s no one there. Well, one customer. As for help? Nowhere to be seen!

But after waiting the better part of ten minutes, a guy shows up and I ask him what’s the difference is between all the shoes.

And he asks me what I’m going to use them for…

A reasonable question. I say walking, I want a cushy sole.

Let the games begin!

They’ve got a zillion styles. And this guy can’t tell me the difference.

Finally I decide to do it by process of elimination. Try on two different models, pick the better one, then compare that one to the next one until I find the one I want.

He disappeared for so long I think he went to the factory to get them, but he eventually came back and I found out the sneakers were true to size, and I liked the cushioning in one better.

Great.

Then he left me to take care of a sale. Which he was still doing when I exited the store twenty minutes later. I mean how hard is it to do? You swipe your card and..?

And now a woman comes out of the back. She’s wearing the Skechers shirt, but she’s not coming over to me.

So I go over to her.

And I start asking her the difference between the shoes…

And that’s when I realize she knows less than the first guy.

And I’m thinking they’re not that expensive, and the first ones worked, but I was interested in their arch support shoes, for stability and I told this woman and she spoke in gobbledygook, I mean some shoes said Arch Fit right on them! So I just pointed to a pair to try them on.

Hmm… I’m not sure if I need the arch support or not. But one thing is for sure, I want a shoe with more cushioning than this one.

She says they don’t have any. Huh? I can see them all on the wall.

But she says they’re all wides…

Then again, that’s what the first guy said before he brought out the right ones, that they only had them in wide, which is too wide for me.

And all this time I’m trying to go to the website on my phone. But I’m in a mall and there’s no access. Says they have wi-fi, but good luck connecting.

Meanwhile, the music is blasting so loud I can barely communicate with these people. Then again, they did play the Spinners’ “Rubberband Man,” so it wasn’t a complete loss.

Then I’d had too much, I was overloaded. I was going to have to go home and study the website, and buy them from there, if at all. I mean at least online they’ve got all the INVENTORY! (And these definitely weren’t commission salespeople.)

What do I always tell you?

DISTRIBUTION IS KING! No matter how good it is, if you can’t buy it, it doesn’t matter.

CVS? Walgreens? You’re better off buying from Amazon, because they’ve got all the items in stock!

As for the help… They don’t pay anybody so no one is any good.

I go to this ski shop in Vail that charges top dollar. You can save $75 to $100 on everything if you want to. They go by MSRP, “Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price,” as opposed to MAP, “Minimum Advertised Price.” Even the websites of the manufacturers go by MAP.

However, at this shop the employees are lifers. They don’t stock everything, only what’s right. I went against the salesman’s advice once, I’ll never do that again. He sold both products, but the other one was better for me.

As for the people who mount the bindings… Lifers.

The tuner? He worked on the World Cup.

Now, like shoes, maybe you don’t need the best, maybe adequate is good enough for you. Then again, you may not have experienced the best to know the difference.

But most retail outlets won’t pay the help an adequate wage because the public will go across the street for a penny, take another airline if it’s ten dollars less, even if it took a hundred dollars to get to the damn airport. You’ve got to pay for service, and no one wants to.

So what we’ve got is stores with incomplete inventory and ignorant help. You waste your time and good luck getting what you want.

I was in Lululemon in Vail buying some shorts. I wanted to try the next size up to compare. No, they didn’t have odd number sizes, only evens, that’s what they told me. But I just got an e-mail from Lululemon telling me shorts were back in stock and I clicked through and found OF COURSE they make them in odd sizes, it’s just that the store in Vail didn’t stock them!

That’s what made Tower Records so great. The breadth of inventory, they didn’t only stock the greatest hits album.

As for streaming…

There used to be a rare records business. Out of print stuff. Stuff that no retailer would stock. But online, almost all of that stuff is just a click away on a streaming music service, and if not there, on YouTube. Sure, you don’t have the physical product, but at this point in time… Collecting is so last century, today it’s about access and experiences. There’s no reason to build a monument to yourself.

Now the truth is malls are dying left and right. My experience tells you why.

The news tells us there’s been an uptick in retail shopping after lockdown, but…

I just don’t get it.

Then again, I never saw shopping as a sport, as entertainment.

Shopping is just another way in which the internet has eclipsed the physical world.

Then again, there’s a good story in today’s “New Yorker” about Cory Doctorow’s new book about ensh*ttification:

http://bit.ly/4mGiLG1

Which I find worst on Amazon. The site is littered with ads and Amazon’s Choice is not always the best and in truth most of the company’s profits come from AWS, Amazon Web Services, to the point that the guy who ran that, Andy Jassy, now runs all of Amazon, he replaced Bezos. Furthermore, Amazon makes more money selling third party products than their own.

So a good thing never lasts.

I want to give you my money, can you just make it a bit easier?

But you’re squeezing every last dollar out of the business, which makes me hate you.

I mean I go into the ski shop, I have a relationship with the help. They don’t rip me off for knicks and knacks.

But I’m paying for that service.

I’m going to delve into the Skechers site now, wish me luck!

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74mV9qwlCgg

Chalk one up for Aerosmith. The band that too many saw as imitators of the Rolling Stones have trumped the English band with their latest release, it’s got the energy of hard rock in a way nothing on “Hackney Diamonds” does.

Then again, where do you put the Stones these days, which slot? They’re not Top Forty, they appeal to the oldsters who always bought their records.

But Aerosmith… Wasn’t Steven Tyler supposedly retired? But then he’s singing here and there, like at the Ozzy tribute, where YUNGLBUD appeared in his breakthrough moment.

You start to feel it, a name keeps coming across the transom, and it reached fever pitch for YUNGBLUD after that July show.

Not that the average person knows who YUNGBLUD is, BUT THAT’S JUST THE POINT!

Hell, I didn’t even know this single was out until I was reading Ryan Downey’s Substack newsletter which told me it had gone to number one. HUH?

But Active Rock is a backwater. It very rarely cross-pollinates with the Spotify Top 50. This is not the era of MTV, where all genres sat side by side.

As for Active Rock… It’s HARD ROCK! Bang your head for real rock. And I’d like to tell you to tune in an Active Rock station but unless you’re a dedicated fan, you’re going to be turned off by most of the material. It derives from Metallica more than Led Zeppelin. It’s noisy and angry, JUST LIKE MY ONLY ANGEL!

I guess that’s the point. Consciously or unconsciously Aerosmith and YUNGBLUD didn’t make a song for everybody, but those in the Active Rock ghetto.

How do I know it’s a ghetto? According to “Billboard,” “My Only Angel” had only two million streams last week and it went to number one on the Hard Rock Songs chart. To put that in perspective, Laufey’s song “From the Start” sits at #50 in the U.S. Spotify Top 50, with 520,502 streams A DAY! And that’s only one service!

Now hard rockers have shot themselves in the foot, they’ve agitated ad infinitum against streaming, and it is now hurting them. Scratch a hard rock listener and they’ll tell you streaming sucks and it doesn’t pay.

But it does… At least more than no listens at all!

Then again, how big a sphere is hard rock in today’s world?

I guess that’s one of my points. One thing about Steven Tyler, HE CAN SING! (Well, at least historically and here, how often and how well on the road…I don’t know.) And that separates him from almost everybody else on the Active Rock chart. And that means if you were a fan of the old hard rock, which was heavy but not necessarily fast and screaming, you might like this.

And if it were the old days, MTV would have played “My Only Angel.”

Is it the best track I’ve ever heard? No. But the litmus test is whether you want to hear it again, and I did.

Having said that…

This is music made for old school stereos. With POWER! And clarity. This stuff doesn’t sound good on earbuds.

I listened first via Spotify on my Genelec computer speakers. The chorus stood out, but the verses blended together in noise.

So I fired up Qobuz and listened in hi-res and suddenly the vocal was more prominent. Ditto on Amazon hi-res.

But still…

This is when I fired up the big rig. With enough power to wake up the neighborhood. And when the sound came out of the speakers…

This was the experience of yore, being surrounded by music, having the noise of life squeezed out.

So…

“My Only Angel” is niche. Everything is niche today. Even Taylor Swift. There’s mania over her new album, but do you care? Do you care about Alex Warren? K-pop?

If you read the music trade press you do. Where the major labels have manipulated the charts into irrelevance. Hell, the newspapers that still exist don’t even publish the top ten anymore, because WHO CARES?

So we read about this label exec and that promoting pop and hip-hop dreck that makes it to the Spotify Top 50, but has no meaning.

But Aerosmith is from a different era. The second generation of rock, influenced by and taking off from the first, the Beatles and the Stones. When the goal wasn’t brand extension, but sex and drugs. Sure, you wanted to make money, but the music and the lifestyle were superior.

So…

Check out “My Only Angel.” If you don’t like it, no biggie. You don’t like most stuff and neither do I! But don’t be under the illusion that anyone cares about your opinion, that you don’t like stuff. The bottom line is…do some people like something enough for its makers to have a career?

And everybody knows that it’s about careers. More than momentary hits. If you’ve got a catalog of albums that fans adore, even if most tracks are unknown by most, then you can tour forever. And in today’s world, starting from zero, if you build it on the road and it grows…it never falters, because it’s not hit dependent.

So that’s the world we live in today. One of the Weeknd and Sabrina Carpenter and the rest of the acts with press and attention who oftentimes work with producers like Max Martin where the act is fungible. That’s right, Max can create a hit with ANYBODY! A modern day Mutt Lange. So when you have a hit with him… I’d like to see you do it with someone else!

But although Aerosmith has worked with different producers, one thing is for sure, it’s about them, they are in control, they always sound like themselves.

And “My Only Angel” sounds like Aerosmith.

This would have been a big deal in the pre-internet era.

As for working with YUNGBLUD…this doesn’t look like rockers making disco tracks in the late seventies, but a marriage of the old and new while sticking to your roots.

This collaboration may not be featured in all the news outlets printing what PR people serve up to them, but the truth is today’s world is all about word of mouth, spreading. That’s what happened with YUNGBLUD. How far will the word on “My Only Angel” spread? I DON’T KNOW! But that doesn’t matter, because the metrics have changed, it’s almost a return to the early seventies when having an AM hit was unnecessary to have cred and a career. You’re making your music for your audience. You want to satiate them. Not necessarily giving them what they want, but with them in mind. You don’t need cowriters, you don’t need remixes, you don’t need to polish the turd into slickness, you can leave it rough such that…

When you go to the show and they play this music you nod your head and smile and feel good.

This is the essence of the rock experience. When it was about what was in your ears as opposed to what was on screen, big time production.

I don’t want to oversell “My Only Angel”…I’ll just say in an era when most classic rockers have given up making new music, believing no one cares, and others are making new music that’s a far cry from the old, Aerosmith has somehow delivered just what they used to. “My Only Angel” is not a retread, it’s new, but it sounds like the band. And YUNGBLUD is just a dollop of guacamole upon the chip.

This is the future.

Instead of thinking about everybody, think about yourself and your audience and career. Stick to your guns.

And BE GOOD!

And that’s a very high bar for most to hurdle.

Pauline Kael famously said: “I only know one person who voted for Nixon.”

Needless to say, Nixon won the 1972 election. In what was declared a landslide.

I find that most of those on the left/Democratic side of the fence are never really exposed to the words of those on the right. I even read “The New York Times” and I say to myself, “These people are living in a bubble.” It’s an echo chamber, they are not experiencing right wing blowback from the rank and file, and therefore they don’t have their finger on the pulse of the nation. And this is one reason Kamala and the Democrats lost, they were out of touch with the street. It’s one thing to watch Fox News, but quite another to talk to the people who watch Fox News.

So I print the below e-mail as a service. To those on the left, who are not exposed to what Republican voters, think/have to say. And until you interact with said people, you truly don’t know what is going on.

——————-

Re: Job Firings

I read your column for amusement.. I don’t there there’s another far leftie like you in America that spews so much hate for the Christian right.

You’ll continue to preach the left mentality knowing that the majority of us.. that’s right, the majority think you’re full of sh*t.

I like you Bob.. we grew up in the same generation.. I played music professionally . I know some of the same people youdo (did).

I worked for Nick Di Anthony…

Somewhere we went divergent paths.

I believe in A world different from the California dumpster you consider paradise.

I sold my California business division when it became apparent that California has no future but I’m super glad you’re still there to pay the ridiculous taxes  to support a third of your population who are here illegally.

Like I said, I will continue to read your column, especially when you focus on your passion, which is music in the arts.. as for politics, you were one of the most confused people I’ve ever come across. List in your own SoCal bubble.. good luck with your future.

Chris Linck