Tune in today, June 8th, to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West.

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app. Search: Lefsetz

Owen Elliot-Kugell has a new book about her mother, “My Mama Cass: A Memoir.”

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/owen-elliot-kugell/id1316200737?i=1000658032740

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1sl8xK4R5cKJgPohii0SDL?si=dF9R0qzFQZyfyUYS0WW70w

Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/episodes/0bacfeba-fa5c-4c7a-9a48-66e39e459eb6/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-owen-elliot-kugell

iHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-30806836/episode/owen-elliot-kugell-183178037/?cmp=web_share&embed=true

“This is the last day of our acquaintance”

Sinead O’Connor

I wasn’t going to come. Too many bad memories. But for the first time Canadian Music Week was Monday to Wednesday instead of Thursday to Saturday, so theoretically I could come. So we were on the chairlift and my buddy John put it to me, after a year of discussion, was I going to our Middlebury reunion or not. And I told him only if he picked me up in Toronto and drove me to Vermont. And he said…DONE!

So here I am.

We left T.O. so early, for me anyway, that we encountered traffic in a part of town that I didn’t even know existed. There are all these skyscrapers, north of the city, or maybe it’s east, in the middle of nowhere. I mean you leave the city center and the skyline disappears…and then it reappears! Strange.

And then there was rain. You know, the kind that the windshield wipers can’t keep up with.

But we stayed on the highway to Kingston, and ultimately crossed the St. Lawrence River into the good old U.S.A. and…I was stunned how wide the river was at that point. As for the customs officer…you’d think we were international gunrunners. He looked at our licenses and deeming them insufficient asked us for our passports. So I got out of the car, to get to my computer bag, where said passport resides, I delivered it to the gentleman and then he declared…GET BACK IN THE CAR!

Okay, officer. I retreat and become subservient in the face of authority of this type, John fights back. But he held his tongue, until we got to the tollbooth, whereupon he remarked to the tattooed guy in the hoodie how the border officer was having a bad day…but the guy was too entranced in his boredom to give an adequate reply.

And from there it was surface roads all the way to Middlebury.

And we had lunch in Massena. Not Jim, I saw no Loggins, but after Yelping for the best spot in town, we walked into what turned out to be a bar and the four townies gave us a look like we were in trouble, and there was no food until dinner.

So they sent us to another place just like it, with older regulars at the bar, and I got chicken wings from our server Kim. Who had about as much attitude as the drinkers. But John told her we were going to our reunion, and she started to wax rhapsodic about her high school reunion, how they had five classes and a party and…

The thing about these rural towns is they look so enticing until you actually move there. And then you ask yourself what the hell you’re doing there.

So eventually we cross the bridge over Lake Champlain and we’re approaching the campus and I get wistful. This is my roots, part of my heart is still here, this is Vermont.

Lush, green, beautiful. So different from L.A. I didn’t expect to be so moved, to be so affected.

And then we got to the President’s house for the reception and…

There was no one there.

But she ultimately came out of the house and got into her Ioniq 5 and asked us if we were there for the reception. Yes, and…didn’t we get the e-mail?

NO ONE GOT THE E-MAIL!

This is the difference between business and academia.

Well, the reception had been moved to Ross, because it was going to rain.

Oh, we knew where that was, the SDUs, the “Social Dining Units,” which opened our freshman year. So we drove over there, and what used to be our regular dining place was now the international building.

So that was confusing. But I pulled out my maps app, and Apple, now my guider of choice, said they’d moved Ross…YOU CAN’T DO THAT! You can’t take the name from one building and put it on another, but they did.

And when we drove to the new Ross, looking for a parking spot, we were approached by a nice gray-haired lady who told us she was coming back from the class picture.

Now wait just a minute… That was supposed to be at 6:15. But because of the rain they’d moved it up to 4:15. Have you ever heard of such a thing, moving something up, with no notice?

And I don’t care about being in the picture, but I wanted to be in this one to right a wrong. You see for the senior yearbook, if you didn’t like your initial photo, you could have it reshot. Which I did. But the end result was… I wasn’t in the yearbook at all! I still have nightmares wherein I need to show my diploma and the college denies I was ever there. But if I was in this picture…

And I looked at the name tag of this nice woman and when I saw her moniker, I got a jolt.

She was the best-looking woman in “New Faces,” the original Facebook, wherein they had all the pics of the freshman class. The guys in the dorm salivated over her. I don’t think she ever knew.

So we saunter on over to Forest Hall, to registration, and after we get our name tags, which you’ve got to wear to get food or into any event, we go back to the sidewalk and encounter two girls, er, women, and first you look at the purse, er, the nametag, and then you know them and…

It’s all these years later, and the woman I’m talking to is cute. And nice. And I’m trying to square her with the person I remember and then…

Greg comes along, who I’ve maintained contact with, he wrote about me for the alumni magazine, and even in the internet era, I didn’t get a single response, and we had a good conversation, and then we went to the new Ross…

And saw all the white-haired people standing up, sitting down, conversing, and I got the urge to run.

We walked through the door and I immediately saw someone I didn’t want to talk to. This self-satisfied guy who probably doesn’t even remember my name. It’s a small college, you know everybody in your class, but you don’t really.

How am I going to get out of this?

And I start casing the joint…

And I don’t know a single person. How can this be?

Now I’m frightened, so I follow John to the bar, and we stand at a table, and I hang on for dear life.

I’m surveying the landscape and…who are these people? I felt like such an outsider.

But Bruce came up and we talked skiing. After all, the college had its own ski area. That’s one of the main reasons I went there, and I guess it was the right place, since that’s one thing I still do.

But the food was all the way on the other side of the hall, I’d have to run the gauntlet to get there, but ultimately I braved it.

And once again, I didn’t recognize anybody. This was not L.A., where a few courageous people let their hair go gray. But these people… Their hair had gone beyond gray, it was white, they were old, and then I wondered, HOW DO I LOOK? I must look as old as they do. And it depressed me.

Ultimately someone got up and gave a boring speech and this reinforced I was at the wrong place. But it was even worse when the aforementioned college President took the stand and started quoting statistics, how great the place was and…

I tuned out. Who cared, there was not going to be a test. Everybody was taking it so seriously, clapping, and it reminded me of nothing so much as…

Being there. This is one of the reasons I hated the place. Everybody took it so seriously, studied hard, as if by doing so they’d win in life. And I’m thinking of Irving Azoff and David Geffen who never graduated. I’m thinking of the person I was in the private jet with last week who never even bothered with college, telling me he was a bad student, but now manages household name bands.

This is not my place.

And I’m surveying the landscape, now with everybody seated. And I see must to avoids and people I now recognize and would love to catch up with, but how do I do this? I’m not even sure they’d remember me.

But I’d love to hear their story.

So I got Soupy’s. Who had that name because, of course, in elementary school, there were two Sues. And she was Sue P…and the name stuck. And we bonded over attitude and history, even though we were far from friends back then, and I felt more connected.

And then Dana came by. He lived on the first floor. Of course I remembered him, he remembered my name. And the funny thing is he’s the same guy, same laugh, same laughing attitude, and catching up with him was good.

This was what I was looking for. I wanted to talk to each and every person in attendance, spend time with them and find out what happened in all the intervening years. But they weren’t approaching me, and I didn’t have the chutzpah, the wherewithal, to go up to them and say…you might not remember me, but what happened in your life?

But I wanted to.

And everybody’s so different from home. It’s not how they look, but who they are. They want to talk about the books that they’ve read. It’s east coast, but also Middlebury. It’s an intellectual environment so different from California, at least my California, Los Angeles, where the most important thing is how you look, and maybe what car you drive, and that’s just phony enough for me.

And then there’s the anonymity of the big city. No one knows your name and no one cares. Which I love, it’s very different from a rural area.

And a number of my classmates have moved back to the area. And I understand the draw, the pull of Vermont, but to go to a smaller society…I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I don’t want to be judged.

And after we exited, or should I say escaped…

I felt relieved, but also disappointed. Was this the way it was going to be? Was I ever going to get to talk to all these people, most of whom were retired, gladly? They’d peaked, they’d done it for decades, it took me forever to hit my prime, and I’m still working.

And now I have this hunger to connect. But I’m not sure it will ever happen.

Man is this weird.

The best thing I saw was a demonstration of Steve Stewart’s Songhub: https://songhub.co Yes, the manager of Stone Temple Pilots has solved some of the biggest issues in royalties, data and creation by starting from the bottom up, with the songwriters as opposed to the publishers, who embrace change at about the speed of the labels, which is not fast.

Songhub allows songwriters to collaborate. And it stores your files. And you put the split right into the software. This has been necessary, but no one outside the business has done it because they didn’t see the big bucks, Songhub is something that only someone from the inside could create. A home run. Check it out.

As for the attendees…

There’s a blue chip assortment of speakers. Really, I’m impressed. But the audience hasn’t changed much. Wannabes trying to get ahead.

Rock and roll rule #1… THERE ARE NO RULES! If you’re looking for someone to tell you how to do it, you’re already lost. You can go to a conference to learn the landscape, the basics, but the household names invented their jobs, they’d be successful at whatever they did. Music business college is a rip-off. It’ll teach you how to be a middle manager, until you lose your job. Never ever forget that to succeed in the music business you have to attach yourself to talent. Unless you’re attached to talent you’re going to get squeezed out, or not rise high.

As for the talent, with so much in the landscape, do we need you? Would you be sitting at home dreaming up a new search engine? Then why do you think people are clamoring for your me-too music, which has no basic utility.

First, create it. If there’s no reaction, forget it. Don’t blame the audience. Change or be broke.

Second, once you have traction, don’t look for someone to grow you, GROW YOURSELF! If you do so, you’ll be inundated with people who want to work with you. The labels no longer build anything from scratch. So unless you have a CV, a history, fans…no one will be interested anyway. It no longer matters how good your music is, but whether people react to it. Let me put it a better way, you can create something great and nothing can happen. Nada. If you build it, they will not come. Not only do you have to light the fire, you have to tend it, add logs to keep it burning, have it glow so much that you get people’s attention. Don’t look to the Beatles or Taylor Swift for a pathway, those avenues are closed off. The Beatles hit in the sixties and Swift broke when country radio was still strong and she crossed over to Top Forty TEN YEARS AGO, when that format, when terrestrial radio still mattered. The active audience doesn’t listen to terrestrial radio at all, forget the disinformation campaign from the industry.

Think about where you go online. And if you don’t go anywhere…the joke is on you. If you’re not fluent in YouTube and Instagram and TikTok you’re not going to make it. Consider them the record stores of yore, of the FIFTIES! Yes, when you could go into a booth and spin a record and decide whether you wanted to buy it. SINGLE records. You need that one track that catches people instantly, if you don’t have it, don’t expect any traction until you do.

And if you have expertise in the business, that does not make you a good artist. We’re short on revolutionary artists, not revolutionary businessmen. It all comes from the art. We’re one superstar away from the entire landscape changing. Focus there.

And I ain’t gonna give you false hope. Ed Bicknell talked about Dire Straits doing 240 dates a year. You have no idea how punishing that is unless you’ve done it. To make it in music requires all your money, time and effort, period. If you don’t want it more than anything, if you’re not willing to roll the dice on yourself, if you’re not willing to forgo the perks of adulthood, stop and GET OUT!

Ed interviewed Bill Silva. And got Bill to talk about the financial ups and downs of his concert promotion career. Entrepreneurs walk a fine line between bankruptcy and success. And it’s more about relationships than how smart or rich you are.

Last night at the awards show Kingfish played, and immediately everyone in the audience was nodding their head along to the music. Instantly. Kingfish set a groove, and the people fell into it. I’d like to tell you the song was as good as the playing, but the playing…

It was basic. No synths, no hard drives. No different from half a century ago, from the bluesmen before that. Kingfish is in a long tradition of blues players who lit up the world until the plot was lost and hair bands dashed for cash and hip-hop took over.

Kingfish’s blues is made for a live performance. Because it is live. Kingfish squeezes out the notes and grimaces and you feel it.

As for the Pursuit of Happiness celebrating Jake Gold’s induction into the Hall of Fame… That too was revelatory. This was the noise that addicted us, and it was a noise. From the garage, from the basement. Todd Rundgren cleaned up the sound for wax, but live…it reminded me of Cheap Trick, noisy and to the point. Funny how the roots of rock and roll are right in our face.

And today it’s all about the software. If you’re arguing about distribution and/or payments, you’d better be a superstar, otherwise I don’t want to hear it. Your focus is wrong. There’s not enough money on the recording side if you get a de minimis number of streams, and there’s never going to be. Music is so far advanced, it’s light years beyond TV, we’ve figured it out, all the music in one place for a low price. The pipes are there, all they need is software, i.e. the music.

You don’t only have to feel the music, you’ve got to have something to say, you’ve got to have influences. And although music itself is important, so are movies and books and the internet…to be a great artist you must be fluent in the CULTURE! Which no one under fifteen is. I don’t want to hear that you’ve been doing it since you were five. God, those people are all over social media, and they’re quite good, but they have nothing to SAY!

And nothing has really changed. The audience needs entertainment, is hungry for entertainment. Your job is to create something as good as “Baby Reindeer,” a hit around the world, done by a newbie. I don’t care whether you like it or hate it, you can discuss “Baby Reindeer,” have an opinion on it. We’re looking for the same thing in music, but you’re not providing it.

Or to quote Don Henley…

Let’s just say we haven’t that spirit here since 1999. Never have so many had so little to say.

I’m trying to scare you, jolt you alive, be the antidote to your friends and family. I want to be the army drill sergeant in a world where no one making music is fit for the army, they’re that different, that outside the mainstream.

We want truth, honesty. We want a beacon. We want to go down a new road. Can you take us there?

Then we’ll be right alongside you.