1

It wasn’t nostalgia, we’re too old for that.

Now maybe some newbies came to this show because they were intrigued by the presence of Michael McDonald, but probably most of this audience had already seen the Doobie Brothers, more than once.

You see nostalgia is when you look back and remember the good times. You know, you go to the show and bask in the aura of what once was. But after you do that a few times, it comes down to the music, just the music. Does it resonate with you? Does it make you feel good? Does it make you smile?

The opening number, after a bit of Michael McDonald improvisation was “Nobody,” the opening song on the very first Doobies album, a stiff, I didn’t hear it until it came through the speakers as part of the boxed set. This occasionally happens, you hear an unknown hit, kinda like “Love Shines” from the Fleetwood Mac boxed set, which disappeared, but now the song is part of a new compilation. The focus is on Stevie Nicks, and as a result Christine McVie’s smooth excellence is too often overlooked. I love “Love Shines,” listen to it here: https://spoti.fi/3V3ar6z

But even though Fleetwood Mac started recording long before the Doobie Brothers, the Doobies had commercial success first. But not on the first album, “Nobody” had the ultimately instantly recognizable sound, but it was too early, radio wasn’t on board, that happened with the second LP, 1972’s “Toulouse Street,” and “Listen to the Music.”

And when Tom Johnston stepped up to the mic and started singing “Nobody” a jolt of adrenaline went through my body, I was one with the music, I said to myself, THIS IS FANTASTIC!

You see this is the only place you can get this sound. The chunka-chunka guitar and Tom’s voice. It’s classic, and too often the Doobies are pooh-poohed, because they had hits when those were secondary, when bands were hip with backstories and featured on FM as opposed to AM, if they got any radio play whatsoever. That’s what happens when you’re a cut above, you’re embraced, as Fleetwood Mac with Stevie and Lindsey ultimately were in ’75.

But this was ’72.

2

Albums rarely jump out of the gate, at least back then. There’d be a hit on the radio, but most people didn’t buy the LP based on that, because albums were expensive, and you didn’t want to get a dud. But “Toulouse Street” had a second cut, a cover of “Jesus is Just Alright,” which first came to fans’ attention on the Byrds album “The Ballad of Easy Rider,” which was for dorm and living rooms only, it didn’t break through on the radio, even though the magnificence of Clarence White’s playing was ultimately recognized.

But the Byrds’ take on “Jesus Is Just Alright” was a bridge between what once was and what now was becoming. You could hear the classic Byrds’ sound, whereas the Doobies’ take was different, it rocked harder, with searing electric guitar, the label pushed the track and radio played it, but I didn’t buy the album. The hits came too soon, and I didn’t know anybody who owned the album, so I never heard it.

And then came “The Captain and Me” eight months later and “Long Train Runnin'” was ubiquitous, you couldn’t avoid it, AM, FM, it was everywhere. Followed up by the superior “China Grove” and now the Doobies were the hottest act out there, and they were everywhere. You see by 1973, the establishment had woken up to the power of music, there was “In Concert” Friday night, you saw bands, albeit not as much as you did during the MTV era.

And the Doobie Brothers got put in the meat and potatoes category, I mean hit after hit, who else does this? And it’s not like there was a dark past, it was just straight ahead rock.

But the single “Another Park, Another Sunday,” from 1974’s highly anticipated “What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits,” stiffed, and just when it looked like the momentum had evaporated, “Black Water” became a left field smash and people all over America were singing along in their cars. You couldn’t help yourself, “Black Water” sounded like nothing else on the radio, and that’s what we’re drawn to most.

And that’s where I came along. That’s when I became a fan.

You see I might not have purchased the mainstream product, but the mainstream did. I spent a month in Mammoth, California in a condo with six other freestyle skiers and Jimmy Kay’s 8-tracks, which he’d made himself. He had “Toulouse Street,” “The Captain and Me” and “What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits,” although the songs’ order was rearranged, and hearing them every day I got infected, and ultimately that fall purchased them myself. And the song that got under my skin was “Natural Thing,” the opening cut from “The Captain and Me,” with the sounds of Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, who created those magical sounds on Stevie Wonder’s albums.

3

Now the following spring I got the world’s worst case of mononucleosis but was wary of leaving my BMW in Salt Lake City, so I went to Odyssey Records on Main Street and bought six prerecorded cassettes, something I’d never done before, because you can make better ones at home, and took off for the east coast.

One of those albums was the Doobie Brothers’ “Takin’ It to the Streets.” It was confounding. Was this even the same band? The cassette came with almost no information, and there was no internet to check. I mean it was good, but it was completely different.

And then this completely different unit had a breakthrough with “Minute by Minute” just when they were about to be written off, and stunningly, they were now the biggest band in America. With a new lead singer, Michael McDonald. Who after one more album with the Doobies, left, the whole band broke up, because everybody wanted a song on the LP “One Step Closer,” and it suffered in quality as a result, but there was one absolute smash in sound and lyrics, “Real Love.”

Michael McDonald followed this up with his solo hit, “I Keep Forgettin’,” but the hits didn’t continue to flow, the original Tom Johnston unit reformed and made two albums on Capitol and then it was the nineties, and everybody was an oldie. The world had superseded them. But unlike so much of what surrounded them in the seventies, their music sustained, it got airplay. And the Doobies worked and Michael McDonald worked and then came the idea to merge the two for one big 50th anniversary tour. Ergo, last night.

4

What can I tell you about the YouTube Theater? Having been built so recently, a lot of the flaws of yore have been eliminated. There’s a separate VIP entrance, a separate VIP lounge, albeit much smaller than the Forum Club, and excellent sight lines and sound. But it’s industrial. No carpet. It looks like you could hose the whole thing down after a show. And in truth the best halls are kinda greasy, kinda lived-in, like the Forum, and the YouTube Theater is brand new, and last night it held an old audience.

You hear it all the time, from “heritage” acts. Yup, there’s a whole new generation at their shows. Well, they weren’t in attendance last night. I saw three kids about twelve, but the rest of the assembled multitude was old. Like me. They’d lived through the heyday of the Doobies in the seventies, they remembered it like yesterday, and now with all the years gone by they were worse for wear. The woman behind me wore skintight pants and had plumped up lips, but everybody else seemed to be comfortable in their skin, they owned who they were. And they didn’t dude themselves up for the gig, which many boomers do. No, these were the same clothes they’d worn that afternoon. Jeans. 501s more than designer duds. And they sat. Tom Johnston kept on imploring the audience to stand, and a number of people in the pit did, but when you’re in your sixties and seventies your knees are creaky, you’d rather sit and let your mind drift.

And on some level it was cognitive dissonance. Just when you were marinating in the Tom Johnston/Pat Simmons sound, there’d be a Michael McDonald number. So you got the blending of a rock show with more MOR, more cerebral tunes. It was the same band, but…

Michael McDonald exhibits no charisma, he doesn’t want the spotlight, he played the keyboards throughout, and he got the most initial applause, you know when the audience recognizes the intro to the song, which made me think of the era, the late seventies, when disco was peaking and the music industry was about to collapse of its own weight. McDonald’s songs were great, but they are not rock like the earlier Doobies work.

But there’s that one killer line in “You Belong to Me”:

“You don’t have to prove to me you’re beautiful to strangers”

Wow, what insight!

And the upbeat “Takin’ It to the Streets” was a powerhouse. And I must admit a fondness for “Here to Love You,” which was especially good last night, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was the rockers, the traditional, classic sound of the Doobies, that reached me most. Like “Rockin’ Down the Highway.”

“Oh, ROCKIN’ DOWN THE HIGHWAY”

This was the hedonistic seventies. The sixties were done, we were focusing on fun, and we had it, sans documentation, the records inspired us and the rest is only in our minds, those nights of being falling down drunk, out in the country, rollin’ down the highway with the windows down, back when that was still a thing.

But I must say Pat Simmons’s “Clear as the Driven Snow” was a highlight. That’s an album cut off of “The Captain and Me” that you know when you buy the album and play it, otherwise you’d be out of the loop. the acoustic guitar, the mellowness, that ultimately leads to an electric journey, this is the kind of music that sets your mind free.

And the band had the balls to play a few songs from their new album, which I knew, but most people seemed not to, and then…

Tom told us they were going to play a song they normally don’t, they were resurrecting that stiff song from “What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits,” “Another Park, Another Sunday.”

5

“I’m sittin’ in my room, I’m starin’ out my window

And I wonder where you’ve gone”

These are the songs we like most, the introspective ones, that engender stories of our own life.

“City streets and lonely highways I travel down

My car is empty and the radio just seems to bring me down”

I’ve been there. You’ve been there. You can’t stay home any longer, back in the pre-internet era, where everything good that happened happened outside the house. You need a change of scenery, you need to cut free.

“I’m just tryin’ to find me

A pretty smile that I can get into

It’s true, I’m lost without you”

Well, in today’s #MeToo era, finding another pretty smile to get into seems a bit macho, but the key here is he’s lost without her. All guys are. They say they kicked her to the curb, but inside they’re dying.

“Another park, another Sunday

Why is it life turns out that way

Just when you think you got a good thing

It seems to slip away”

Live long enough and you start to prepare for this. You can make plans, but that does not mean they’re going to happen. When everything’s going great, you know to anticipate the bringdown.

“Another park, another Sunday

It’s dark and empty thanks to you

I got to get myself together

But it’s hard to do”

Sunday is the loneliest day. When you’re heartbroken you can’t wait for the work week to start back up again, to see people, to distract yourself from these feelings. And you try to get yourself out of the hole….but only time helps, if it helps at all.

And word is “Another Park, Another Sunday” tanked because of the supposed put-down of radio, which was a misreading of the song, but in truth “Another Park, Another Sunday” is too good for the radio. The mellifluous sound, the indelible chorus, the meaningful lyrics… It’s now my favorite Doobie Brothers song. I play it all the time. And to see it performed live…

WHAT ELSE CAN YOU ASK FOR?

I wasn’t thinking about the seventies and that Mammoth condo, I was thinking about this year, the past few months, being out of sorts and pulling up “Another Park, Another Sunday” on my phone to root myself, to make myself feel good.

6

“Black Water” was a tour-de-force, but it’s the finale that truly sums it up.

“What the people need is a way to make ’em smile”

And that’s what the Doobie Brothers do, all you’ve got to do is listen to the music.

That’s what we did back then, listen to the music. And it was foreground, not background. And if you were big, you were gigantic, much bigger than any of today’s hit acts. The Weeknd only reaches a small fraction of the populace compared to the Doobies back then. The entire nation was driven by the youth, who by the seventies were gaining power, and it was music that powered them forward.

“Whoa, oh, listen to the music”

All the time.

7

I didn’t see a single person I knew. I haven’t had that experience in years. Which was a bit weird, was this show off the radar? Then again, as I said up top, the Doobies were never cool, they were providing for the audience, not the insiders and critics.

And the key to a show is to gauge whether your mind wanders, whether you’re checking your phone.

People weren’t checking last night. And they didn’t even leave early! Which is de rigueur in Los Angeles.

And by time the classic anthem was being played everybody in the hall was on their feet, thrusting their arms in the air, singing along, just like me.

And when that happens everything else falls away, it’s a pure moment, a peak moment, what life is all about.

Do I think the Doobie Brothers’ music will be heard fifty years hence?

I wouldn’t bet on it.

Maybe this music dies with us. But that’s all right, because we won’t be here either.

Our parents went to concerts, but not like we do. We learned in our youth and we are maintaining the mission. Music is in our DNA, we know these songs by heart, to go to the show to hear them performed live is better than a new car, better than almost anything other than sex.

The gig ended at 10:20. Early enough for the oldsters to get home and go to bed, staying up past midnight is long in their past. The train pulled into the station at eight PM and then departed two hours and twenty minutes later. The experience was dropped, and then the rock and roll circus moved on to another town, to satisfy thousands more people you know like best friends, because you share this history, it’s a point of connection, you’ve got something to talk about even though you’ve never met.

The Doobie Brothers don’t get enough respect. Because they’re not edgy, they’re not controversial, they’re delivering right down the middle, but it feels so right.

And it did last night.

The goals have changed, and you need to change accordingly.

Used to be Johnny Carson was a god. Forget that he’s already been forgotten, at best a distant memory in the minds of boomers and Gen-X’ers, but David Letterman is fading too. Don’t expect Netflix to continue to lay out the big bucks for his services, that paradigm is dead. The streaming outlets made gargantuan deals to draw attention, to give them status, they no longer need it, the companies are mature, they now live or die based on original hits. “Stranger Things” means much more to Netflix than David Letterman, just like “Ted Lasso” means much more to Apple TV+ than Oprah Winfrey, whom the Cupertino service just parted ways with.

Used to be hosting a late night TV show was the dream. Didn’t work so well for Conan O’Brien. He’s trying to reinvent himself as a podcaster, but in truth he’s been hobbled by late night TV, his talents could have been better employed elsewhere, he would have been better off pushing the envelope all by his lonesome than under the constriction of sitting behind a late night desk.

As for Jay Leno… He was on Bill Maher’s new podcast, where Bill frequently doesn’t let the guest speak, and Jay said he was at a friend’s house and this buddy told his fourteen year old son that Jay used to host “The Tonight Show” before Jimmy Fallon and the kid didn’t believe it.

So, if you’re a late night host, you get to be the face of the network. But that network is bleeding viewers. The only thing that’s no longer on demand is sports, and natural disasters. Otherwise, you watch it when you want to, and usually you don’t.

Then there’s the power of TikTok. It’s killing Facebook. Prognosticators are saying the social media giant is going to circle the drain. You can’t find one person who believes in their metaverse play other than Mark Zuckerberg, who didn’t come up with the idea for Facebook anyway, originality is not his forte. He just buys or competes. But now Instagram is cratering. There’s not enough there there, you keep seeing the same stuff over and over again. All the creators have gone to TikTok.

The appeal of TikTok is humanity. We are social people. We always want to know what other people are up to, we dream of interacting with them. And TikTok is far different from Instagram, what came before. Not being static, it’s hard to fake. It’s the most real social medium. And it’s the new haven of comedy.

For a while there it was Twitter, before everyone realized most people are not even on Twitter, they can’t comprehend it, how to use it, the service has a stink upon it, even though it’s vital for those addicted to the news, which is just about everybody these days.

Comedy didn’t work on Instagram, it moves, unlike the pictures of celebrities and other boasters.

But on TikTok… Like comedy, and the algorithm will serve up more. While Facebook was focusing on serving advertisers, TikTok was focused on users, delivering what they wanted. And they do! Sure, there’s a China problem, which needs to be addressed, but as a user, TikTok is the heartbeat of America, even though everyone is watching something different.

This is the problem that the mainstream continues to fail to acknowledge. We no longer live in a monoculture. Mass is a fantasy. Everything is niche. You can get the story everywhere online and still people are unaware of it. Come on, admit it, shows played in your hometown that you were unaware of, that you might have gone to, this never happened before.

So the old verticals, the old desires, just don’t mean that much anymore.

Sitcoms. Forget that they don’t make many. “Seinfeld” made every standup salivate for a show. But even if you get a show now, almost no one will see it. And today it’s not about casual fans, but dedicated fans. Casual fans may have the money, but they don’t have the time. There’s so much stuff I’m interested in, but there’s a limited amount I’ll do a deep dive on, that I’ll pay for.

So you don’t want to have a sitcom.

And now Trevor Noah says he doesn’t want a late night television show. It’s hindering his progress. Not only is it limiting his lifestyle, he’d like to travel more, see more, not be tied down with so much work, and he’d also like to explore his standup more. You may do a monologue on TV, but others write those jokes. But if you go on the road, interact with a live audience, you can hone a new act, you can feel more alive.

And it’s not only TV personalities, it’s music ones too.

Used to be the goal was to have a hit. There’s nothing wrong with achieving one today, even though it reaches many fewer people, but it’s not the anchor of a career it once was. That’s road work. You cement the relationship on the road. And as far as getting new fans, it’s the old fans who bring them. You just feed the diehards, not only live, but online. They can’t get enough of you. Don’t bother casting a wide net trying to entice newbies, it can’t be done, not at a significant level.

You can have a track in the Spotify Top 50, the Spotify Top 10, and you’ll get hosannas from the label, even a bit of mainstream ink, but that does not mean you can sell any tickets, that you’ll have a continuing stream of income. Because you’ve got no diehard fans! You’ve got to be around longer than that, you need a body of work.

As for being on the road… You can’t do it alone. First, you need a good team, a good manager and agent, and then you have to work with other acts, trade favors. That’s where hip-hop has it right, but now even that genre is fading:

“Hip-Hop Is the Hottest Music of the Streaming Era. Is It Now Cooling Down? – A dearth of new breakout rap stars and innovation in the genre has some music executives concerned about a slowdown”: https://on.wsj.com/3Rtq1p2

It’s so easy to play these days, but harder than ever to win. Not only are you competing with every other act, you’re competing with streaming music, video games AND the history of recorded music. Good luck! If you’re in it to get rich quick, stay out, go into tech.

We’re going through a wrenching transition. And it’s really about the death of the baby boomer paradigms. Who cares what the top ten is in any genre? Music, movies, TV… It’s all about what you want to see, and there are very few people whose recommendations you trust.

Just like Firesign Theatre said, everything you know is wrong. And if you’re not willing to re-evaluate… Being stuck in the past is a recipe for a quick death. It’s fine if you want to silo yourself off, take yourself out of the discussion, but if you want to play, comment intelligently, not only do you have to read the mainstream publications, you’ve got to surf the news all over, informing your own opinions. Be wary of blind spots. And if you’re watching TV news, you’re already behind.

Just like there are people who keep saying that electric cars aren’t the future. In June 2021, Mercedes-Benz said it was going all electric by 2039. Now it’s by 2030: https://on.wsj.com/3rn1TtL And Toyota is being castigated for being behind. Every other traditional manufacturer is on a sprint to electric, not only because of Tesla, but because of the Chinese! Used to be innovation came from the States, but that’s before we decided to go to war with ourselves and stop progress. God, the influx of immigrant technologists? Whose jobs were they taking? Now they’ve gone to Canada, stayed home in India… People in Silicon Valley know all this, but D.C. is behind the game, and the public is grossly misinformed.

So ask yourself if the target you’re shooting for still applies, or whether it’s an anachronism. Talk to people who are true digital natives, the ones born after the internet took hold, like the college students who are now born in the twenty first century. Sure, they might have a vinyl fetish, but not at the cost of a streaming music subscription. And they don’t have TV sets, never mind cable subscriptions.

It’s astounding to observe. For ten or twelve years the boomers loudly protested about the arrival of the future, all the changes it begat. You don’t even hear the oldsters bitching about streaming royalties, which they still don’t understand, anymore. The younger generations have accepted the new paradigms. Oldsters yelling is akin to Grandpa Simpson howling about how it was in his day, and the boomers think they’re so young that they won’t get the hearing aids they need. And if you can’t hear what’s going on, good luck knowing what’s going on.

So Trevor Noah has it right. And no amount of Carpool Karaoke can convince James Corden it’s worth sacrificing his stage and screen career. And it was a fad anyway, heard people talk about it recently?

Laying pipe to stick around… Very few people have the patience and commitment. But it’s what it’s all about today. And you forge your own path. Momentary success is just that. Might be a peak, but in isolation, a monadnock. You’re better off climbing every hill in New England than one 14k mountain in the Rockies. The initial glory may be less, but…

It takes a lot of effort to build a career. Expend it wisely.

Or they do…

Tune in tomorrow, Saturday October 1st, to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West.

Phone #: 844-686-5863

Twitter: @lefsetz

Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3UU1jkQ

YouTube: https://bit.ly/3MbIsxP

1

“Dirty business down in coal creek”

COAL CREEK? Where was THAT?

The past is starting to blur, but I’m here to tell you the seventies were different from the sixties. The sixties were about testing the limits, pushing the envelope, the seventies were about licking our wounds, there was the back to the land movement. Yes, everybody lost faith in their ability to move the needle when it came to the government and the war and they retreated to the country. It was the opposite of today, where you go to the city for the action, fifty years ago people had had enough, they moved to Vermont, Oregon, upstate New York, long before the era of the internet and smartphones, even before cable, you were out in the boonies not only physically, but emotionally. And life was slower…

The soundtrack to this movement? The Grateful Dead.

The Gen-X’ers who came on board during the eighties, who are convinced they know the history because they’ve listened to all the tapes, don’t. You had to be there.

The Grateful Dead were not a hit band. And really, the only impact they had was in the San Francisco area. They got no radio play. Most people had no idea what their music sounded like, most believed it was heavy, a la Black Sabbath, Consider the moniker!

But then there was a concerted effort to push them on the east coast. Credit Bill Graham and the Fillmore East. They started with a full page photo on the back of the program, with a caption about 2,600 people being happy during the Dead’s show. All to promote the shows that began at midnight. They’d play…until they could play no more, until the sun came up, this was something new.

And then came “Workingman’s Dead” and everything changed. You’d hear “Uncle John’s Band” on FM radio, when you were hankering for more of those Crosby, Stills & Nash harmonies, we didn’t yet know the Dead’s vocals were never close to pristine in real life. Word started to spread. And then “American Beauty” was released fewer than four months later, in November, of 1970.

I feel the same way about “Ripple” as I do “Your Mama Don’t Dance,” if I hear it I’ll have an uncontrollable urge to hit someone. “American Beauty” was softer, even more accessible than “Workingman’s Dead.” But “Truckin'” was very radio-friendly, and it got played, and was continued to be played. Unfortunately, as it sustained we had to hear “Sugar Magnolia” and “Friend of the Devil” too.

“Workingman’s Dead” had its own “Truckin,'” also closing the LP, “Casey Jones.” But it also had “New Speedway Boogie,” the band’s story of Altamont, and “High Time” sounded like country, the real thing, not the stuff from Southern California. “Cumberland Blues” wasn’t sappy. “Black Peter” was the flip side of “High Time,” there was no bow to commerciality, it was this authenticity that allowed the Dead to swerve from an experimental electronic sound to something more understandable by the hoi polloi, and Pigpen’s “Easy Wind” was the connection to the first “Live/Dead,” where he was still primary instead of secondary, never mind gone.

So there started to be a groundswell. In cities, but really the word was spread on college campuses. It’s not like you could not get a ticket, but the venues were bigger, and people talked about them, the religion was beginning, and it was ultimately cemented by the three-disc “Europe ’72,” now if you were out of the loop…you were gonna stay out of the loop.

But while the band was ascending, they had an opening act, it was de rigueur, the show started with the New Riders of the Purple Sage. There was little info about its members, the main story was that Jerry Garcia had learned pedal steel and sat in with them. The New Riders were seen as an adjunct of the Dead, the fact that they ultimately recorded their own album and went their separate way was a surprise. They were part of a cohesive scene, now what?

2

It was all about the first album. Word was the fourth record, “The Adventures of Panama Red,” was a return to form, the title song ultimately became an FM standard, anything about dope ultimately did. But by that time I was gone. Many of us were gone. Because of what came in between.

“Powerglide.” I bought it. I didn’t need another version of “Hello Mary Lou,” never mind an almost seven minute version of “Willie and the Hand Jive.” Where was that originality of the first album? Back then every album was a statement, and if you failed, if you bunted, didn’t give it your all, it hurt your career.

The follow-up, “Gypsy Cowboy,” didn’t penetrate the radio sphere whatsoever. It was for those still hanging on, and there weren’t that many of those.

But that first album…

It started with “I Don’t Know You,” a perfect opener, a jaunty number that got you moving, it appealed to your emotions as opposed to your brain, it was not intellectual. And it made John “Marmaduke” Dawson a star. We thought he was just that blonde guy on stage playing with Jerry Garcia opening for the Dead. It was a lark. But “I Don’t Know You” demonstrated it was no lark, one could argue quite strongly that what the New Riders dropped was even more commercial, more radio and audience friendly, than what the Dead had released by this point.

“Glendale Train” was “American Beauty” adjacent, but somehow more credible. You didn’t feel like the New Riders were trying for a hit, they were just doing what they did. “Last Lonely Eagle” was closer to the Dead’s output, but it fit perfectly in that oeuvre, and in truth Marmaduke had a better, more consistent voice than Garcia or Weir.

“Henry” was another dope runner song. You heard it all the time. Dope has always been cool, even though it ultimately killed so many. You’d be surprised who never survived the sixties and seventies, even if they didn’t die, they missed the mainstream and never caught up.

Then there’s my favorite from the debut, one that I sing to myself all the time to this day, “Portland Woman.”

“I wanna get me a Portland woman

Portland women treat you right

Portland’s gonna be mine tonight”

This was back before cheap air travel. You might drive cross-country, looking for America, but Oregon was not at the top of the list, it wasn’t until Microsoft that people saw Seattle as a legitimate outpost, never mind hip.

So “Portland Woman” is wistful. It’s what he hasn’t got. And when I went to college, no one had. With only 1,800 students on campus it was like going to school with your brothers and sisters. That paradigm of leaving home and sowing your wild oats, having relationships, didn’t exist at Middlebury. You saw the same people every day, it was unavoidable, make a mistake and it would confront you until the end of your tenure.

Not that we realized this immediately. But by time the first New Riders album came out, we did, and the goal was to get out of town at every opportunity, looking for action we never found. And we’d drive south on Route 7 in John’s Catalina and when we got to Pittsford, we’d sing:

“Gonna meet me a Pittsford woman”

That was a joke. I don’t think I’ve ever even stopped in that one gas station town, but the memories are still vivid.

3

But there was one more track on that initial New Riders album, it finished the first side, at length, 8:19 in fact, and it was entitled “Dirty Business.”

“Dirty business, dirty business

Dirty business down in coal creek

Dirty business down in coal creek”

There was nothing fast about the song. It was a slow, lumbering number. Just like living in the country, which so many of us were now doing, or were talking about doing. It was about the working class, when they were still admired, before they were put down, seen as ignorant.

“Well I make two bucks a day

And that ain’t a healthy pay

My kids are just beginning to get sick…”

Life was hard.

They don’t make tracks like this in the streaming era. “Dirty Business” was an album cut, for those who bought the album, they weren’t going to cherry-pick tunes, it was too much of an effort to get up off the couch and move the needle, and you came to like the slow pace of “Dirty Business” anyway. “Dirty Business” is in my DNA, I don’t have to hear it to know it, I can never forget it. And today I heard it on Deep Tracks and…

It didn’t end.

I’d been pushing the buttons. I didn’t catch it from the top. And then I started to wonder…was this a live version? But it was too perfect. Immediate in sound and accurate singing and playing, no one sounds this perfect on a live recording. I’m studying the cut, listening for differences, and it was still playing when I got home. And then I fired up Amazon Music and found out…

There’s a brand new New Riders live album, entitled “Lyceum ’72,” that just came out last Friday. I fired it up to compare and…

It had that same immediate sound. Sure, it was just the tiniest bit different from the studio take, but it was just as satisfying, I’m still not absolutely sure which one I heard on SiriusXM.

But I’m listening to this new live version of “Dirty Business” and it’s stunning how it seems so alive, but Marmaduke is dead, has been for quite a while. There are still New Riders, but it was the Old Riders who truly comprised the band. And they were still alive on this recording.

4

You can’t write about the Grateful Dead. Because you don’t know enough for the aficionados. You might get a minor point wrong, and in any event you’re not entitled to an opinion. Yes, Dead superfans are akin to Trumpers. It’s anything but a big tent. If you weren’t there before, you can’t get in now. But I talk to these people and they weren’t even alive when “Workingman’s Dead” came out, never mind seeing the band. They’ll criticize my view of the New Riders. With some cockamamie story. Telling me how it really was.

But I was there. The New Riders weren’t even also-rans. They were a concoction of players who opened Grateful Dead shows. And then they put out an album every bit as successful as those of the Dead, if not even more so. And if you were around back then, you know the New Riders’ debut, you couldn’t escape it. It was perfect stoner music, and a bit less serious, a bit lighter than the Dead, with even catchier numbers, a mellow act that fit the ethos perfectly, this was the soundtrack of the back to the land movement. When you didn’t move fast and break things, you moved slow and there weren’t many things to break.

“There’s talk been goin’ ’round

How they’re gonna shut it down

If the man don’t come and fix things

Pretty quick”

It ain’t much different today. But back then the anger was more cerebral. It was not a one note life. We played our records and talked. Analyzed the issues. The music was not superfluous, it rode shotgun, there were no video games, TV was anathema, it was the musicians who were the leaders, on our side, not that of the corporations, the goal was not to be a brand, rather to speak your truth and make enough money to continue doing so.

Most people didn’t even own cassette players back then, 8-tracks were what was in cars, and they were bleeding edge. The home recording scene was years off. The Dead may have been recording their performances on Nagras, but it was years before tape trading became a big thing. All we had was the records. Which we played over and over again. The show was a pilgrimage, to commune with the seers. The Dead didn’t perform, they got on stage and played, and there’s a difference. Same deal with the New Riders of the Purple Sage.

It was dirty business. Everybody was getting ripped off. But they soldiered on, because it was about more than money.

It was the culture.

“Dirty Business” was part of the culture.

And if you listen to this live take you’ll get a glimpse of the way it used to be…

And never will be again.