Wow.

I was going to write about another Netflix documentary, “Breakdown: 1975,” but when the ending reflected the attitudes of today…I lost the inspiration.

You see there’s no snow in Colorado. Just the stuff they made back in November. Since then, not only has it been too warm to make more snow, it hasn’t snowed for three weeks. The news has been pretty widely disseminated, but don’t conflate what is going on in California to what is happening in the Centennial State. As of this writing, Mammoth has gotten 67″ already from the Golden State storm you’ve been reading about, and it’s still snowing! And that’s not completely atypical for California, where they have these insane dumps and then days and days of sunshine. In Colorado it’s an accumulation of a few inches here and a few more there and you end up with three hundred plus inches at the end of the season. But not this year.

Now my policy is to go out each and every day. But on Monday…

It’s more crowded here than I’ve ever seen it. Bombers and beginners. The slopes are frightening, a straight-liner missed me by mere inches. But later in the day, just before I was done, I was just above the entrances to chairs 3&4, below the SLOW banners, and I saw this snowboarder about ten to fifteen feet away and I yelled out DON’T HIT ME! She was barely moving, I was completely stopped. And then she ran right into me.

I haven’t been out since.

Of course she skied away. And when I got up from my fall, my butt hurting and my knee a little bit too, I raced down to confront her. She just smiled and said she was skiing, she didn’t apologize at all.

And there you have it in Vail, Christmas 2025. It’s supposed to snow one inch tomorrow, and then six the day after and…I’ll go back out, but really, that’s not enough to make a truly significant difference.

So I’ve been reading and last night we finished “Pluribus” (am I the only one who doesn’t get it?) and today I decided to fire up Netflix and watch the 1975 documentary.

And this smorgasbord of images is great, however it always bothers me when they interview those who were not alive back then to testify… But everybody’s afraid if they only feature old farts, youngsters won’t watch. And for a minute there, I thought every American needed to watch “Breakdown: 1975,” to see the way it once was, when movies were necessary viewing, at the theatre, but… The film fudged the dates, it just wasn’t 1975, and then said the era was over with “Jaws,” which was untrue, and then featured right wing blowback and the gas emptied from my tank.

So I decided to watch the Seymour Hersh documentary, “Cover-Up.” Once again, WOW!

Now thinking about it, what struck me most about this doc was when Hersh referred to himself as an outsider. That’s it in a nutshell. Now, more than ever, society doesn’t like outsiders. And people don’t want to be  outsiders, they don’t want to be out there alone, never mind victimized by online abuse, so they take a side and stick to it. Seemingly everybody in America, from musicians to corporate executives…they hold their head down and don’t make waves because they don’t want to suffer the consequences, even if they’re right.

And Hersh has been right many times.

Of course he’s also been wrong. But that’s the nature of the game, if you’re never wrong, you’re playing it to close to the vest, you’re holding back too much. I guess you could say the same thing about musicians, when you get inspired and what you’ve created is too far out for the record company, if you’re afraid of alienating fans, that’s what you should include, that’s what you should release, because that’s what changes the world, not what is expected.

So you get Hersh’s story… His upbringing, his acceptance at the University of Chicago almost by accident. And I hate to piss people off, but that college experience helps form him, makes him who he is, because in that elite hothouse there are smart, educated people who challenge him, who want to wrestle with ideas, who inform and teach him too.

And then he becomes a reporter.

His “cases” are legendary. There’s the My Lai Massacre.

No one wanted to believe it. And then Calley was released from jail soon after conviction…just like the January 6th protesters. Didn’t matter what you did, if you supported the war… And Hersh posits that the story hadn’t leaked despite so many knowing about it because it was de rigueur, it happened all the time.

And if you ever thought Henry Kissinger was a hero instead of a war criminal… Wow a third time. He had a cozy relationship with the “New York Times,” they printed what he dictated while he was responsible for so much heinous stuff that people were unaware of. (At least until Hersh arrived.)

There’s Watergate…

You’ll watch “Cover-Up” and be disillusioned with the government. But the weird thing is today, the administration is doing all this stuff openly that they used to hide.

But the generations have changed. Boomers were taught to question authority. If you do that today, you can’t get a job at the bank, and then you can’t join the country club and…

When you’re outside looking in and it doesn’t add up, oftentimes you’re right, which is why this Bari Weiss/”60 Minutes” thing is so important. If we can’t depend on the news to bring us the truth…

Then again, today most people get their information online and are convinced of inane conspiracy theories that end up overshadowing the real ones. Even Abu Ghraib…we all saw the images. Today, the news site you click on, the one that aligns with your views, may not even post a story that doesn’t comport with the orthodoxy… Fox News got the message, when it started challenging Trump it was losing viewers to even more right wing outlets, so it got with the program.

Everybody gets with the program, but not Sy Hersh.

And this documentary is a bit different from most. It’s not a linear retelling of Hersh’s life. You ultimately get some details of his growing up, but what you’ve really got here is his greatest hits, and his reluctance to do this movie at all.

So “Cover-Up” is the documentary all Americans need to see. And since it’s on Netflix, many more people will see it than if it debuted in the theatre. You only get publicity once, and if people can’t partake immediately, they forget about a movie when it’s finally available for streaming, it’s not only no longer new, there’s a tsunami of additional product and…

Netflix is smart. “Cover-Up” came out today, when most people are on vacation and have the time to watch it. “Cover-Up” cuts to the heart of not only the government, but life in these United States. On one hand it will leave you numb, on the other suspicious of the government. And you should be suspicious of the government, and corporations too…Hersh gets into Gulf & Western and in the process it’s revealed that the editor he reports to, who doesn’t want to run Hersh’s business stories in the “New York Times,” has crossed the line too. And what does the editor say when confronted with his behavior? That his lawyer said it was okay. And then Hersh responds that that’s what he hears every day from those he’s investigating.

I can’t recommend “Cover-Up” enough. Not because it’s the best documentary I’ve ever seen, but because it raises issues that are not being raised elsewhere, and it illustrates you can make it, have a career, challenging conventional wisdom. Just don’t expect to be honored by the company or be invited for drinks at the bar…

But if you have the cojones…

I feel vindicated! According to the obituary in the “New York Times,” Pete Townshend considered “Yummy Yummy Yummy” one of his favorite songs when it came out. And I loved it too! I even bought the single! And singles were made to be played over and over, until the vinyl turned grey, and mine did… I even took it along with me to Providence when we went to visit our cousins on some holiday, I was the only boy there, I sat in the corner of the room alone and listened…

You’ve got to know, everybody hated bubblegum music.

Scratch that… Bubblegum music had a huge audience amongst the young and brain dead, who had not shifted to album rock, which had its biggest triumph with “Sgt. Pepper,” which had no singles at all, in the same year that the 1910 Fruitgum Company released…

“Simon Says.” I hated that song! It was stupid!

1967 was not only the year of “Sgt. Pepper,” it was also the year of “Disraeli Gears” and “Are You Experienced,” both of which you had to own to hear, at least until the summer of ’68, when “Sunshine of Your Love” crossed over, “Purple Haze” never did.

1967 was the year of FM rock’s birth. First in San Francisco, then in New York. And believe me, I was a listener, I owned all those albums, but if you lived anywhere else you were a victim of AM Top 40 radio. Most people didn’t even own an FM radio… That band was seen as traveling short distances and featuring classical music. As for cars…good luck finding one with an FM receiver back in ’67.

So the hipsters not only knew the albums of the burgeoning album rock scene, but the Top 40 too. Upon which they placed judgment. And there were a lot of great tracks in ’67, like “Dance to the Music” and “Respect” and “Soul Man” and…nobody bought the albums of these acts (don’t write me and tell me you own one, the bottom line is the album phenomenon started with white rock, period). Stuff that those in the know could listen to and enjoy. But “Simon Says”? That was going backwards! That was a return to the pre-Beatle era. That was the kind of commercial dreck labels put out today, commerce as opposed to art.

And the following year’s “1, 2, 3, Red Light” was just as bad, if not worse.

Bubblegum music was foisted upon the public by the team of  Kasenetz & Katz. They were the stars, the bands were faceless, they usually didn’t really exist, although concoctions were formed to go on the road and hoover up money.

But back in ’67… “Rolling Stone” launched that year and didn’t gain mainstream traction for almost half a decade thereafter. Meaning…there wasn’t much information about these two producers and their productions, all we had were the records. It was not like today, where you can go deep down the rabbit hole on the internet.

But it was more than straight bubblegum.  Kasenetz & Katz had their first hit with the Music Explosion’s cover of “Little Bit O’ Soul” earlier in the year of 1967, before anybody had even heard of bubblegum, never mind “Simon Says.” And “Little Bit O’ Soul” was seen as credible, it was infectious without being saccharine, it got respect. It fit into the Texas oeuvre of Doug Sahm and…even though the band was from Ohio.

And after the run of bubblegum was just about done, in 1969, Kasenetz & Katz had a hit with Crazy Elephant’s “Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’.” Which had the rough-throated vocals of FM rock matched with an undeniable hook of a chorus and a driving beat. These were not saccharine, clean-cut boys who’d barely crossed the line over to puberty, these were definitely men, there was a sexual undertone, and an organ solo and a guitar solo… If only today’s acts could write a song so infectious. Yes, that’s what Kasenetz & Katz specialized in, infection…you heard their songs and you could not get them out of your head.

Now I didn’t know until the internet filled in the gaps that 10cc worked with the producers, even participated in the records before they were called 10cc…they used the money to build Strawberry Studios in Manchester.

But Kasenetz & Katz’s epoch faded except for one last gasp with Ram Jam’s version of “Black Betty,” which was big in the heartland, not so much on the coasts.

But their benefactor, Neil Bogart, really hit his stride in the seventies. After parting ways with Buddah and forming Casablanca he stumbled with his initial release, a Johnny Carson compilation, but then struck gold with KISS and Donna Summer and more.

What Bogart did best was promote. As for the money and where it went… Well, Polygram ultimately swallowed the label. And although Bogart started over with Boardwalk, the times were different. The full force promotion of yesteryear no longer worked. Bogart could will a hit. Well, not exactly will it, but create such a field of distraction and excitement that people paid attention, and hits ensued.

It was a different era.

Well, not completely different from today, which is cottage industry. Kasenetz & Katz came from nowhere, they established a foothold with the help of Bogart and more. Today, you’ve got all the tools at home, you don’t need a major label deal, you can post and get views and listens and make money and most people have never even heard of you or your music. But back in ’67, it was different. There was a threshold. Either you had a record deal or you did not. And either you were on AM radio or you were a sideshow… FM came along to rescue the sideshow, make it the main show, but before that…

“Yummy Yummy Yummy”…

I constantly have acts and their retinue tell me to give a record a few spins, to live with it.

Nothing like that was a hit back in the days of sixties Top 40. If you didn’t get it on the first listen, didn’t die to hear it again on the radio, didn’t need to go to the store to buy the record to hear it whenever you wanted to…you weren’t in the game, no one was interested, not the stations or the public.

And unlike today, records didn’t last a long time. They were hits and then they were done, replaced by new hits…not that you ever forgot the old ones. You played them to death until you could listen no more, but they were indelibly imprinted upon your brain.

As for “Yummy Yummy Yummy”…it had a driving beat. And then a nasal vocal that did sound straight out of the bubblegum canon, but then there was a change…

“Ooh love to hold ya, ooh love to kiss ya

Ooh love, I love it so”

The singer took it up a notch, lost his nasality, and then there was a chorus of backup vocalists, making the whole thing sweet.

And then the driving beat once again, with stabs of emphasis.

And the second time through the verse the backup vocals were littered throughout, everybody was having a good time. There was exuberance!

And then came the nonsense lyrics…

“Ba, da, ba, da, da, da, da

Ba, da, da, da, da, da”

And then the modulation up! And even more emphatic vocals.

And an outro with the “Ba, da, ba” backup vocals and the lead singer testifying on top…and when it fades out all you can do is take it from the top once again.

And if you don’t get it…

You’re too hip for the room. You’re the same person who believes “Metal Machine Music” is a masterpiece, who listens to music with your head as opposed to your heart, who is worried about what others think about your taste while simultaneously bullying them into believing your word is gospel.

In other words, you need to take “Yummy Yummy Yummy” on the surface. Shut off your brain and just let the music…

Infect you.

Kasenetz & Katz infected the entire world.

Legendarily, those behind the scenes make most of the money, the acts that front the songs end up famous with the name and oftentimes little else. Then again, Kasenetz & Katz were not only the producers, in many cases they were essentially the act.

Leaving the question… How did they do financially?

Now the truth is bubblegum music has never faded away, those songs are still played, so there’s publishing money, assuming they took an interest, and it being the sixties they probably did.

And assuming they continued to get paid by the record company… You complain about streaming royalties? Good luck getting paid at all by indie labels in the past.

Now did they sell their interests?

I don’t know… Maybe some deep research will tell me, but all I know is those records were hits over half a century ago and they’re still part of the fabric of society today. So whoever owned the rights/income stream has done very well. What seemed as disposable, transitory back then, turned out not to be. Which is why I always tell acts not to sell their songs, their babies. Certainly when they’re young.

So a piece of music history died this week. You may not have known Jerry Kasenetz’s name, but if you’re a student of the game, he and his partner Jeffry Katz are LEGENDS!

And I still smile when I hear the Music Explosion, Crazy Elephant and Ohio Express hits. They’re part of my life. AND I AIN’T APOLOGIZING FOR IT!

Mr. OK Go.

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/damian-kulash/id1316200737?i=1000742674669

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/episodes/500badd5-c4b7-429e-810a-14fd9cbbf833/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-damian-kulash

I didn’t read it either…

But I did read “Tale of Two Cities” in high school…you know, it was the best of times and the worst of times (kind of like today, although I think we’re leaning towards “worst”). And “Great Expectations” with Pip. But that’s it. As for reading Dickens in college… It was part of a course that required you to read books up to a thousand pages at the pace of one a week and if I actually did all the reading…I’d have no time to do anything else.

There have been all these stories recently how even in college students no longer read entire books. But the dirty little secret is always what college you go to. If you go to a classic liberal arts college, believe me, you will. As for studying business at a multi-university…I don’t know. Then again, my classic New England upbringing leaves me with a different view of college from most people today. College was not a place you went to to get a job, but to enrich your life.

Now I could go on a rant here about education… You do know that despite hating on teachers’ unions the goal of many is to starve public schools, to replace them with parochial schools… But I feel like I’m living in bizarroland. I just grew up in the middle class suburbs. Where education was treasured. And I won’t say necessarily rigorous, not for everybody, but I assumed this model continued to dominate, now I know that is not the case. And just one more thing here…although I don’t understand sending your kids away to prep school, I will say they get a much better education there. I was stunned at how well read my prep school compatriots were at Middlebury.

Not that I feel totally warm about Middlebury… I’ve mellowed, but it took me ten years to get over that place. It was a hothouse of conservatism where the students jockeyed for position and…the real world was not like that, god…if you just showed up every day you ended up ascending the job ladder quickly.

Anyway, I hope the title of this spiel doesn’t turn you off, because this 2005 BBC production of “Bleak House” is definitely worth your while.

Now before this we watched “Eddington,” which had a big buzz when it was released over the summer, there were articles and conversation but I’m not going to to go to the theatre… Once again, for many reasons, but…I find I can’t slow down enough to enjoy the picture, if nothing else. I can’t go from working steadily to calming down on demand.

Anyway, RottenTomatoes rates “Eddington” at  69/65 and I’d say that’s exactly right. Which is why I’d refrained from watching it previously, my threshold is 80, but the film continues to pop up in my reading so we delved in.

“Eddington” rang my bell at first, it’s a perfect depiction of the maelstrom we presently live in, with beliefs on the left and the right, arguments between the young and the old, but they throw in everything, including the kitchen sink, it’s overplotted, and you end up disappointed at the end.

Which is why I found myself on Metacritic researching TV series. Once again, I like the character development in series, the greater depth, even though the educated classes, Hollywood royalty, still think movies are the sh*t.

So I’m looking at the best TV series of all time on Metacritic, and not far from the top I find a 2005 remake of “Bleak House.” And wanting to watch something good, we dove in.

Now you can watch “Bleak House” on multiple platforms. We watched it on Amazon… As for the ads, there’s a thirty second one before every episode and that’s all, so you don’t have to pay the $2.99 to get rid of them. I can afford $2.99, but I find it an insult. Just give me one overall price, stop pecking me to death like an overaggressive duck. If you want to see where you can see “Bleak House,” just go to justwatch.com  Ah, here’s the page:

https://www.justwatch.com/us/search?q=bleak%20house%202005

So this 2005 series is not the only edition of “Bleak House,” but this is the one that was rated so well on Metacritic. It stars Gillian Anderson.

Now as I said previously, science fiction is not my thing, so I never watched “The X-Files,” I wasn’t really familiar with Anderson’s work. But she was so good in “The Fall,” I became a fan. And you should watch “The Fall”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(TV_series) 

And Anderson is great in “Bleak House,” but she’s far from the only draw. It’s a cornucopia of great U.K. actors. You’ve seen Anna Maxwell Martin in so many productions…you may not recognize the name, but you’ll know her instantly by her face. Charles Dance as Mr. Tulkinghorn is an intense villain, without becoming two-dimensional. It even features a young Carey Mulligan. This is not an American series with stars showing off, oftentimes sans acting skills. This is a primer in great acting.

Anyway, the plot is…

There’s a legal case regarding a will that’s been going on for years, but everybody whose put their faith in a payout has had their life ruined by this focus.

And then there’s the heritage of Anna Maxwell Martin’s Esther Summerson.

But, there is tons of plot, tons of twists and turns. You see a huge issue that would be resolved in the very last episode in an American series and then you’re stunned when the truth comes out much earlier…where is the story going to go?

Meanwhile, it’s all set in mid-century England, the 1800s, and you’ve got vast income inequality, the idle rich living in luxury and the poor living in squalor. Actually, it’s not that different from today, even though we’ve pulled back from the extremes.

So there are issues of money, but also passion and honor and…

Don’t be scared off by it being Dickens… You’d be interested no matter who wrote it

The avarice.  Everybody’s trying to get ahead, whether it be the drunken landlord Krook or the invalid carried by chair Smallweed.

Do you let young lovers live their impassioned lives impulsively or does the elder try to slow their lives down, having learned how life plays out over his years.

And can you restrict your passion, your love for another, even if society frowns on it?

And then there’s the power wielded over those who have no standing.

The surprises are plentiful.

My only regret is one of my favorite actors, John Lynch…

Well, I don’t want to give anything away, I’ll just say I wish he was featured more in the series.

You may not be hooked immediately, but within two or three episodes you will be, you’ll be drawn to the TV because you want to know what happens. And you’ll be surprised by what happens.

And on one hand you’ll be taken away from today…but so many of the same issues are in play in the twenty first century.

“Bleak House” was written as a twenty episode serial over a year and a half. Which means Dickens had to keep the reader interested, on the edge of their seat, wanting to know what happened.

Don’t let a knee-jerk aversion to Dickens prevent you from watching this series. It’s a BBC tour-de-force.

And much better than all the vaunted American productions of 2025.