“Sunday Best” – Netflix trailer:

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This is not the doc you think it is… As a matter of fact, I’m not sure it would be made in today’s anti-DEI environment. You think it’s going to be a survey of Ed’s show, the highlights, and although the Beatles do appear, really this is about how Ed was a hero to the Black community, how he featured Black artists and stood up to the man to do so.

If you were alive and conscious back then, Ed Sullivan was hated amongst the Boomer/Beatle generation. Sure, he featured the Beatles, Elvis Presley before that, but Sullivan was square. About as hip as Topo Gigio, who appeared on the show fifty times. I don’t think any artist plying the boards today can compete with the ubiquity of the anthropomorphic mouse. You see we had to watch Topo Gigio’s act in order to see the rock star/musical acts.

First it was Steve & Eydie, acts that appealed to our parents. However, comics were prevalent on Sullivan, Alan King was the Chappelle of the day, and Allen & Rossi were nearly as big…HELLO DERE! The comedy duo were actually on with the Beatles. But they broke up in ’68 and are now lost to the sands of time.

Sullivan hosted a variety show. Something that’s been extinct for a while now, which has no purchase in today’s niche-based society. Variety shows were smorgasbords, a little bit of everything, to appeal to the whole family, and to offend no one.

And if you did, offend that is, you got bounced, ask the Smothers Brothers, although Tommy’s gone now (do you remember the sitcom that preceded the variety show, wherein Tommy was an angel?). “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” was so powerful, it made head writer Mason Williams’s “Classical Gas” a huge hit. But the Smothers Brothers triumphed in the late sixties, although they were born in the thirties, they had youthquake sensibilities. The Smothers Brothers tested TV limits, that’s where you broke acts, Ed Sullivan was more of a victory lap.

But not if you were Black.

We used to make fun of Ed… A really big SHEW! This guy was the antithesis of the sixties, never mind starting in 1948. The show petered out in ’71, when there was FM rock in every town and the entire country had been exposed to the world of hip, not that everybody partook. But marijuana was no longer dangerous, the war was anathema and Sullivan was out of time.

But before that…

What you’ve got to know is Sullivan PAID the acts! The script has been flipped today, acts pay for transportation, hair and makeup, to appear for the exposure, hoping it will make a difference. But other than SNL and CBS “Sunday Morning,” it doesn’t. And despite the hoopla, fewer people watch SNL than they did in its heyday in the late seventies. Then again, there’s online video exposure. Then again, the show is no longer dangerous, no longer a club of like-minded people. You HAD to watch SNL, it was a tribal rite!

But before that there was Sullivan.

The show starts with Sullivan’s story. How he became a journalist and fell into TV broadcasting.

And then comes the story of him airing Black acts.

Berry Gordy testifies, but the doc focuses most on Harry Belafonte, and how the two ultimately became friends.

But those Motown acts… The Supremes were a regular feature. Once Sullivan broke the color barrier, there were a plethora of Black acts who soon crossed over to AM radio and became superstars, if not wealthy.

Now the funny thing is my inbox is just starting to blow up about this doc now. Even though it launched weeks ago, I saw it weeks ago. There were reviews… But does anybody read reviews anymore, even Boomers? No, what is selling this is underground word of mouth. It seems if you were conscious back then it rings a bell and it’s more than nostalgia.

“Sunday Best” is not a slog, it’s only ninety minutes. Billy Joel gets five hours, but a show that truly influenced the culture gets a fraction of that time.

If you were alive back then… You may not necessarily end up loving Sullivan, but you’ll no longer hate him. And you’ll be reminded of the way it was back then.

You remember the sixties, don’t you? When the world was our oyster, when the sky was the limit and before the Army ripped off our slogan we did our best to be all we could be?

Talk about an era in the rearview mirror… The squares want to deny it even happened, want to focus on the drugs and coloring outside the lines. But the Beatles? There’s never been an act that big and that influential since. Period. And they opened the floodgates for more, music dominated the culture and if you wanted to know what was going on you listened to the radio, many turned off the television completely. And really, it all started on Ed Sullivan.

So if you haven’t seen it yet, or if it’s not even on your radar, the consensus is in… “Sunday Best” touches a nerve, affects your soul in such a way that you feel compelled to tell others about it.

Community… This is what “Sunday Best” delivers. Because it’s not pure entertainment, it’s about people, choices and life.

I’m sure you watched the show, forget your preconceptions of Ed, dig in and the sinews of context will begin to form. In ways that most people can only see in retrospect. Good luck making sense of today’s world, one which flummoxes many so much that they want to return to the perceived glory of an earlier era, that had great elements, but was far from perfect.

Racism, sexism… They still exist, but the big breakthroughs happened in the sixties and seventies. And Ed Sullivan helped moved the needle, he did his part. Amazing.

This is Wayne Forte’s fiftieth year in the business. As an agent he’s represented acts as varied as David Bowie and Tedeschi Trucks Band. We discuss his career as well as NITO (National Independent Talent Organization) and the lobbying for and distribution of monies during Covid.

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wayne-forte/id1316200737?i=1000721027462

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/episodes/ff38a328-4dfe-44d5-b9ff-fd6490c7f01d/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-wayne-forte

This is really going to be about the book “Culpability.” Really. But I’m going to start by telling you how I got there, how I ended up reading this book.

You see I read “The Compound,” which has gotten great reviews but was basically a joke, a fictional version of “Love Island,” a waste of my time.

And then I got involved in a couple of girl books.

Hmm… “Girl books,” what do I mean by that?

Well, when you look at the reviews on Amazon none are from respected publications, they’re at best from fashion rags, and a lot of the author’s friends are testifying. They might by endorsed by Jenna, or be a GMA book, but rarely is that first class fiction. And then there are books that seemingly all the women have read and they testify about them, say how great they are, but once again none of the traditional reviewers have weighed in, never mind uttered a good word. They may be bestsellers, but…

I don’t know why I reserved “Culpability” on Libby. Once again, I get my reviews from the Sunday “Times” Book Review, Ron Charles’s WaPo newsletter and “The Week.” Some other outlets too, but those are my mainstays. But by time the book finally arrives, I don’t recall why it interested me. And in this case, not wanting to start a loser, one of the aforementioned “girl books,” whose titles I choose not to reveal for fear of angering readers, I decided to research “Culpability” before I started it.

Turns out it’s an Oprah book. And despite the James Frey and “American Dirt” controversies, she usually endorses worthwhile books (and “American Dirt” was pretty good!).

And it had 4.5 stars on Amazon, which is rare.

But doing more research I learned that it was about AI…which sounds about as interesting a book on JavaScript.

But Oprah said: “I was riveted until the very last shocking sentence.”

Don’t wait for it. The last sentence is not shocking, as a matter of fact, the book kind of peters out about 95% through, but before that…

“Culpability” is about the ethics of the algorithm. We make them, but AI is a black box, nobody knows exactly how it works, truly.

But the context is a family story. There’s a plot and AI is laid down on top of that.

You see it all comes down to whether the algorithm is responsible, does it take all the blame, or are we, the constructors of said algorithm, responsible.

And a lot of the issues arise around products that are here now. Like self-driving cars and drones. Forget legislation, forget hysteria, these products driven by algorithm will come into play more and more…who is responsible for their actions?

But the story could survive completely sans the AI overlay.

Of course you’ve got the family dynamics…three kids who alternately love and hate each other, a genius mother and a genial father. Then throw some tragedy into the mix…

And a billionaire techie… Who thinks the rules don’t apply to him and throws money at every problem all the while denying any culpability.

And the law…

“Culpability” is highly readable. This is not dense literary fiction that has you looking up multiple words on every page. This is the kind of book you can discuss with your friends.

But you have to read it first.

I recommend you do.

I really wanted to write about this story “Trojan Whores Hate You Back” from Eric Puchner’s collection “Last Days on Earth.”

You see that’s the name of the band, punks who are reconnecting to go on the road decades later. The lead singer Alistair says he’s doing it for his buddy Glenn who just got out of rehab and is destitute. They’re driving to the final show of their tour at the Wiltern. Yes, they have an audience, but they’ve never heard a song of theirs on the radio until the drive down.

The day before the show Alistair decides to drive with Glenn back to Claremont, where they grew up, shared the same sensibility, became infatuated with the music and started to make it. But as they’re driving around, as Alistair is pointing out how the old landmarks have been replaced with new ones, Glenn doesn’t react. And then Alistair realizes although they were buddies once, their lives have deviated, they’re no longer on the same page.

As for the gig at the Wiltern… The venue is not sold out, but it’s full enough, it’s a triumph, which Glenn celebrates by hitting the bottle. And as they’re standing there outside, they see a kid with a blue mohawk standing up through the sunroof of a Prius while the radio blasts a song with the lyric “F*ck you and your Hampton house/I’ll f*ck your Hampton spouse/Come on her Hampton blouse/And in her Hampton mouth.” To quote the book, “It made Trojan Whores look like the Wiggles.”

If you’re fiftysomething are you truly a dangerous punk? Hasn’t that ship sailed? Sure, people might want to come and see you, to relive the era, but what about you and your life?

Alistair cannot only not relate to Glenn, but the other two members of the band. They’re all on different pages. This is not living your life for rock and roll, this is being lost.

They go on TV for the exposure and the young host makes fun of them.

WHAT ARE THEY DOING HERE?

Then Alistair calls his wife up in San Francisco, who’s about to break up with him after nearly two decades together. She just can’t handle the adolescent behavior anymore. She wants to be an adult, she IS an adult!

And all this made me think of real life. When I go to the show and I see the old guys with their long hair and their black leather motorcycle jackets. I mean really? Who are you kidding? I laugh inside while my brain says GROW UP!

And then there are those who live to see the dinosaurs, again and again and again. Guys on stage…and it’s almost always guys, oftentimes with plastic surgery and wigs, to give you the illusion that they’re the same as they were in their twenties, but they’re not. They’re playing your favorites of yore, they’re veritable jukeboxes, there’s money in it, but it’s positively soul-crushing. And being on the road at twenty five is one thing, after fifty? To say it’s a slog is charitable.

So what’s a poor boy to do?

Most don’t want to look at themselves. They just go on living blindly. Like in that trade publication that’s the same today as it was back in the eighties, the only thing that’s changed is the names of the bands. How can you live in such denial?

As for the new acts… They’re mostly for young people. But it’s not like you can trade your allegiance. Because there’s rarely anything there. They’re famous, but so were those acts before the Beatles.

It’s a conundrum. And it all became clear reading “Trojan Whores Hate You Back.” That’s why you read fiction, to illuminate life.

Now “Last Days on Earth” is comprised of previously printed stories, so I thought I could find it online and you could see for yourself, but it’s not available anywhere.

But I haven’t been able to get the story out of my head.

Next time “Culpability.”