Tune in Saturday July 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

YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/ye2yyv8s

We got Duke and the Drivers.

You’d be surprised how many people in the music business got their start with the concert committee at their college. They tell tales of student apathy, as in they had no problem getting on the board, and then they booked and promoted concerts, made contacts, got a toehold in the industry.

Not at Middlebury College.

I looked forward to Winter Carnival. Well, I’m going to tell you, just like après ski, if you think the Carnival is going to bring its own fun, you’re wrong. These events are just for those already partying to get down harder. Well, at Winter Carnival it’s even worse. Really, it’s just an excuse to have a few events, like a concert.

But Middlebury College didn’t have enough money to pay the people I wanted to see.

But having said that, we did have a few big shows. We got Mahavishnu Orchestra, can you believe that? Not long after “The Inner Mounting Flame.” But when bands played my out of the way college, they were punching the clock, they weren’t truly into it. Want to see a great show? Go to a gig in L.A. or New York, or London or Paris or Berlin. You’ve got to go where the press is. That’s when the act turns it up and delivers. Most acts save L.A. for last, others start in L.A., which I think is a big mistake. You see the band usually isn’t ready at the beginning, and the reviews are less than stellar. But, you say, you need those reviews to sell tickets! I get that, but if you end the tour with raves people are primed to come next time around.

We got Poco after Jimmy Messina had left, right after the live album “Deliverin’,” when it was clear the act was never going to break through. And, of course, the band ultimately jumped from Epic to ABC and did have hits. I love “Heart of the Night.” There’s that one great line…

“Shining down on the Ponchartrain”

That album also contained “Crazy Love.”

But the track I love most from the ABC era was not a hit, it was the opening cut from “Head Over Heels,” the first album on the label, Timothy B. Schmit’s “Keep on Tryin’.” I had to buy that album just to be able to hear the song at will.

Wow, “Head Over Heels” is not on Spotify, what’s up with that? I just wrote about it and I needed to hear it.

But it is on Qoboz, and in hi-res!

But it’s not on Amazon. Meanwhile, while I’m at it, the Free stuff is in hi-res on Amazon, sounds amazing.

But “Keep on Tryin'”?

“I’ve been thinkin’ ’bout

All the times you told me

You’re so full of doubt

You just can’t let it be

But I know

If you keep comin’ back for more

Then I’ll keep on tryin’

Keep on tryin'”

Check it out on YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/5cd482yp

The word that comes to mind is EXQUISITE! Believe me, back in the day when we all saved our pennies for big rig stereos, to hear this emanating from the JBL L100’s was utterly delicious, a transcendent experience, an acoustic guitar with Timothy B. like an angel on top, WHEW!

Did I ever tell you I saw Illinois Speed Press at the Fillmore, before Paul Cotton decamped for Poco? Only a few will know that band, and now Cotton is dead and no one seems to care, just like no one seems to care about posting “Head Over Heels” on all the streaming services.

This was Timothy B.’s last hurrah. Enough already. He decamped for the Eagles, and now he’s known for “I Can’t Tell You Why,” but there’s so much more. Listen to the Poco compilation “The Forgotten Trail,” that’s on all the streaming services, the best of the Epic years, like with Free’s “Molten Gold: The Anthology” you’ll realize how good Poco actually was, both in the Furay days and thereafter. But having said that, I loved the first Souther, Hillman, Furay Band album. “Border Town”? EXCELLENT!

Oh, we did get Brewer & Shipley. I mean who cares. This was long after “One Toke Over the Line.” However, on that first album, the almost seven minute closer “Fifty States of Freedom” is great, check it out, that’s on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/z6h3y74n

Now it may sound like we actually had a decent number of acts at Middlebury. Oh yeah, we also had “It’s A Beautiful Day,” long after “White Bird,” however I must say “Don & Dewey” from the second album is a killer. What the hell, I’ll post that too… Well, it turns out that “Don & Dewey” is not on Spotify, probably a Matthew Katz thing, but here it is on YouTube, and you really should give it a listen. I doubt most people know it, but it’s a tear, hang in there for thirty seconds until it starts to explode: https://tinyurl.com/mwjazakv (There is a live take of the song on Spotify, you don’t have to e-mail me about it, it’s nowhere near as good.)

So I was at Middlebury College for four years. I did not take a semester abroad, I could not sacrifice any ski time, I’m just that into it. And if you look at the above shows that’s a piss-poor track record when you compare it to what other colleges presented. I remember driving to Colgate to see Bonnie Raitt and Randy Newman on one bill!

Anyway, at the aforementioned Winter Carnival the last year I was in Vermont…yes, we’d get name talent for Winter Carnival and Spring Weekend if we were lucky, rumor had it that we were going to get a band from Boston. J. Geils? They’d put out “Give it to Me,” but the legend was built on the live album, “Full House.” And then the rumor was we were going to get James Montgomery, fronting one of the hottest bands in Boston. But like I said above, we got Duke and the Drivers. And almost nobody went, I know, because I was there. It was kinda like that moment in Spinal Tap with the miniature Stonehenge. It’s all about perspective. This was a loser show. Driving ‘cross country the following fall I saw Ry Cooder in Teton Village, at the base of Jackson Hole ski area, and Little Feat at the Troubadour in L.A… In the real world, there was a plethora of talent available, but in the wilds of Vermont…

Montgomery had an album on Capricorn, his career was burgeoning, but when I left the east coast I never heard of him again. To tell you the truth, I thought he’d given up, or was dead.

And then I saw him on Tom Rush’s Patreon channel.

Tom’s been hosting some of these legends recently. Like Tom Paxton, and Jim Kweskin. These guys are still around, they’ve got amazing stories. And they tell them on Tom’s channel, and I thought I was the only one watching, but unsolicited Jack Tempchin testified how great these videos were, and then on Sunday…

James Montgomery. And the man looks good! He’s not ragged and wasted, like so many of these guys. And I looked him up on Wikipedia and saw that he’d graduated from Boston University. This is so rare, if they started, they dropped out. But not James…

And he’s still doing it.

So they’re talking about James doing gigs with his Capricorn labelmates the Allman Brothers. And this guy is totally lucid, telling a good tale, and I’m into it, and then ten minutes into it, Tom talks about playing a song. They’re going to do “Statesboro Blues.”

James says he’s not sure he remembers all the lyrics, but he’ll give it a whack. And then Tom starts strumming his guitar, and then James comes in on his harp… JAMES COME IN ON HIS HARP!

Man, this is the sound that launched a million careers. The blues of yore. We heard it, locked into the groove, and were influenced by it. We played the blues, we listened to the blues, but the blues are nowhere in today’s modern music world. Oh, you can hear influences. But the pure element? That’s gone. But Tom and James are locked right into it.

And then James starts to sing and…

Man, this is good!

So I go back to Wikipedia, to find out more details, I mean where’s this guy been? Performing! But in the Boston area. He’s still doing it, like a bluesman of yore. And he’s got it.

And just like pornography, you know it when you hear it, and I’m hearing it. I’m woken right up. James is positively wailing on that harp, like a pro, not an amateur, it’s everything it used to be, BUT IT’S NOW!

Now every boomer of my vintage knows “Statesboro Blues,” BECAUSE IT OPENED UP “AT FILLMORE EAST”!

You’ve got to know, it took another two years for the Allman Brothers to become ubiquitous, with “Ramblin’ Man” and “Brothers & Sisters.” But if you were in the know, if you were a fan of the music, if you believed, you were aware that Bill Graham hired the Allman Brothers to close Fillmore East. They simulcast it on the radio, no way could you get a ticket.

And a couple of months later, “Fillmore East” was released. I knew “Idlewild South” by heart, it was a dorm room staple. But “At Fillmore East”? It blew the roof off the joint.

And that’s how I learned “Statesboro Blues.” I’d heard of Blind Wille McTell, its composer, but I hadn’t heard his performance. And yes, Taj Mahal cut the song on his first album, Jesse Ed Davis and Ry Cooder accompanied him, but I didn’t buy that album and no one I knew did either. This was the old days, when you had to buy it to hear it, and you couldn’t buy everything. Now the third album, with the cover of “Take a Giant Step,” that I knew, people owned that. But when you dropped the needle on “At Fillmore East” at the end of the summer of ’71, wow, Duane’s slide immediately slid, the notes were jumping, the drums were pounding, Gregg ended up singing, WHAT WAS THAT??

“Wake up mama, turn your lamp down low”

But these were the lines that truly resonated:

“I woke up this morning, I had them Statesboro blues

I woke up this morning, I had them Statesboro blues”

And the deal was sealed a few lines later with…

“But if you can’t make it baby, your sister Lucille said she wanna go”

LUCILLE!

This is the sound that got people to travel to gigs. Before Springsteen. Sure, the Dead were on the road, but the Allmans were together, never sloppy, it was streamlined, it was a powerhouse, just to be in proximity was a peak experience of your life.

Now James Montgomery/Tom Rush’s take on “Statesboro Blues” is closer to Blind Willie McTell’s than the Allmans’, it’s rootsy, it’s got its own magic. And I was blown away and I told Tom to post the performance to YouTube. And here it is.

From Fontana to Montrose to Capitol to Geffen to Van Halen to Cabo to tequila and rum, we cover it all!

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/episodes/eb06293c-ee42-46a7-bad4-a508ad418a34/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-sammy-hagar

https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast/episode/sammy-hagar-305038680

“The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood”: https://tinyurl.com/39p9w4kz

This is a fabulous book.

I was not planning to read it. Read the reviews, reserved it at the library, but I’m anti-nonfiction, I find that fiction resonates more, and I’d just finished a couple of music biographies that made me feel like I was wasting my life, they were just that frustrating. But I figured I’d skim “The Big Goodbye,” get an idea, before it expired and went back.

But I instantly got hooked.

Most of these recreation of Hollywood books are not good. Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” is the definitive statement on seventies movies, and so far we haven’t needed more.

But “The Big Goodbye” provides more.

Should you read it if you haven’t seen “Chinatown”?

No. But even if you only saw “Chinatown” once, when it came out, you should. Because it will bring you right back, to the late sixties and early seventies.

Film. You’ve got no idea the respect it used to get. Sam Wasson talks about this. There were film societies. New courses in college. Film was seen as the American art form. You went back and watched W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, were a completist of the legends, from Greta Garbo to William Wyler and Jean Renoir. It was a badge of honor to see the foreign film, if you said you didn’t want to read subtitles you were ignored. Today, an old film is “Old School,” released in 2003. Movies don’t engender that desire for history, to know the past. Today movies are all about the gross, every weekend the totals are published. As if big money makes a good movie, or little money makes a bad movie.

And the people in this book have big desires. Sure, there’s a bottom line, you can’t make too many losers, you won’t work. But the films cost a couple of million to make, not nine figures. And marketing budgets were not stratospheric either. So art reigned.

Roman Polanski… I’m not going to address what happened in and around the jacuzzi at Jack Nicholson’s house with that thirteen year old girl, even though it’s addressed in this book, but what you ultimately realize is the reason “Chinatown” is so great is because of Roman. The supposed hero, the screenwriter Robert Towne? He gets credit for the idea, along with his girlfriend, who found books on old L.A. and more, and he had a cowriter who didn’t get credit who most people are unaware of, but in truth it was Polanski’s movie, he turned it into a movie. I hate to say it, but this book is the worst advertisement for the writer ever. I’ve always believed the writer is everything. But Polanski shaped “Chinatown.” He knew what it lacked and ultimately what it needed.

And his history is delineated here. At length. You might know a lot, but you won’t know it all. Read it and you’ll understand where he came from, and how he dealt with Sharon Tate’s murder, how he suspected his friends.

Robert Evans?

At this point, after the book and movie, he’s been frozen into the past like the not quite dead Clive Davis. Busy trumpeting his own horn, as if he deserved all the credit. But Evans does deserve a good amount of credit, and he was all about the art and enabling the creators, unlike Mr. Davis. He wanted you to let your freak flag fly, he wanted to enable your imagination, but he was there to tell you when you went out of bounds. After Evans? Paramount was run by Barry Diller, a TV guy. The movies have never recovered.

Evans was an enabler, in some cases in a bad way, like with coke. But he was akin to Mo Ostin, even though Mo kept an even lower profile and was not self-aggrandizing. Make the talent feel comfortable, like there’s someone on their side, they’ll be loyal, they’ll deliver their best work.

As for Towne… He grew up in L.A. So many are immigrants, but for those who were here before, their history informs them in a way those who are transplants can never fully fathom. Towne too slid into coke. But even worse, he had trouble completing scripts. And isn’t it funny that when Towne ultimately got to direct, his desire, the result was nowhere near as good as when he worked with first class collaborators, on “Shampoo” and “The Last Detail.” Towne was the ultimate script doctor, but he wanted more. And in movies, it’s a long struggle, you need someone to believe in you, to give you the money. You’ve got to earn your opportunity. Towne got there, but ultimately seemed to be overwhelmed and frozen.

And all of these guys were womanizers. Like the rock stars, but the rock stars were selling something different. That was part of their image, whereas these film guys were holier-than-thou, thought they deserved respect, but they oftentimes acted reprehensibly.

So you’ll learn how “Chinatown” gets made. And there were a lot of changes to the original script, A LOT! It took forever to come up with an ending. And Faye Dunaway lives up to her reputation as a diva, difficult to work with, but she ultimately delivers. And John Huston is drunk. And they fire the cinematographer and come up with someone new, just like they ultimately do with the score. Instinct as opposed to data, that’s how films used to be made. And Jack Nicholson? He shines throughout. He may not have treated Anjelica Huston well, but his image is burnished even more in this book, he was cool, he believed in himself and delivered, he was a star.

So…

Do I really think you’re gonna read this book?

Probably not. First because you probably don’t even read books, I mean who has time, right? And you’re up for lessons, but this is about what happened fifty years ago, how does that apply to you? But people never change, the problems remain the same, like the petty war between Frank Yablans and Robert Evans. Screw the movie, I want money and power!

And “The Big Goodbye” is not always the easiest read. Some of the sentences, the analysis, might flummox you at first, you might need to read them again, but ultimately what we’ve got here is a first class depiction of a golden era, the equal to “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” not a survey, but a deep dive into how movies are made.

But really, it’s the history, call it nostalgia if you’d like, of the way it used to be.

It’s not that I want to live in the past, tech delivered what the movies did not over the last twenty five years, but it was a golden era, like classic rock. Not every art form, not every business vertical continues to thrive at the same level. They have peaks, and then decline to a steady status. And the peak always happens with innovation, when you let the artists go free, worry less about the bottom line than the end product.

“Chinatown” is a great movie. And you’ll be stunned how many choices, what detail went into making it. It’s fascinating, and if you lived through it you’ll want to know.

“The Big Goodbye” calls to you, you want to get back to it, and when you read it you’re distracted, removed from the regular world, you’re in reverie, just like in the theatre watching a great movie.

This book is really something. It’s not the thing, but it’ll tell you about the thing. And until you know about the thing, how it came to be, you can’t create the thing yourself. And I know that’s what you want to do.