Everybody can’t do everything.

My inbox is littered with people saying not to use their name. As if the average citizen in New Jersey has to worry about Trump’s revenge. (Then again, maybe they do…)

They call this a “chilling effect.” Bedrock in Constitutional law. Something might look benign on the surface, but have the unintended result of stifling speech or action by Americans.

Americans are ShuttingTFU for fear of retribution by Trump.

Actually, our nation is so fractured that many people refrain from making statements if they don’t comport with conventional wisdom, even if they believe they are correct. You don’t want to support Israel instead of Palestine…(Did you see Chappelle’s statements over the weekend, reinforcing the divide between Blacks and Jews?) You’ve got the woke left, the anti-DEI right…we can’t even have a debate in America anymore.

Even about music…

W. David Marx has a new book “Blank Space,” which refers to the hole in culture that we’ve experienced in the recycled twenty first century. He references “poptimism”… You know, the junk that dominates Top 40 that true fans of music used to decry. Now, that stuff is considered good, criticize Taylor Swift or BTS at your peril. Their minions will attack you. And the main reason you can’t say anything negative is because of the MONEY! If it makes a lot, it’s good. Period.

And you wonder why so many have checked-out of popular music, don’t listen at all…

As for “musicians,” did you see yesterday’s “New York Times” article talking about the influence of Britney Spears?

“Gen Z’s Pop Breakouts Danced in Britney Spears’s Footsteps in 2025 – Sabrina Carpenter, Tate McRae and Addison Rae’s music is influenced by the superstar who shot to fame before they were born. They’ve learned lessons from her hard times, too.”

I’m not going to dignify this article with a link, never mind a free one. It’s the end of music when Britney Spears is seen as a paragon of excellence, someone whose legacy is worth referencing, never mind exalting. Britney Spears had one great song, “…Baby One More Time,” a certified smash that I went out and purchased just to be able to hear on demand. But that record had little to do with Spears, it was written, and co-produced with Rami Yacoub, by Max Martin, who is the biggest star of the past thirty years… Can you say “Quit Playing Games (with My Heart)”? While the top line artists have recycled themselves and the past, Martin has evolved, no producer since the Beatles has had this long a run making different styles of music than Martin. Sans Martin, Taylor Swift is a country artist. It was Martin who brought her into the mainstream with “1989,” who is propping Swift up on her latest album… Martin is the star machinery behind the popular song.

And you can’t get a modern musical star to make a statement, take a side, for fear of alienating some potential audience member. This ain’t art. The job of art is to challenge convention, surprise people, make them uncomfortable. Today’s artists just give listeners more of the same, and we read about their vapid lives in massaged publicity efforts.

And we’ve got the wannabes… Just because it’s now easy to create and post music online that does not mean you deserve to be a professional musician. And I can’t even say that! I’m pissing on people’s dreams! Truly, I hear from people all day long that musicians should be guaranteed a living, that the system is stacked against them… Hogwash, if you’re good, you’re surviving. BETTER than you did in the old days. More people are making more money in music than ever before. But if you don’t say that everyone deserves a chance, that Ticketmaster is screwing the artists and the public, you’re a pariah.

Which brings us to Bari Weiss.

You might have seen John Oliver’s takedown, but the article you need to read that got much less fanfare was recently in “New York”: 

“L.A. Woman – Bari Weiss left New York five years ago under a cloud of infamy. Her exile in Hollywood paved the way for a triumphant return.”

 

https://apple.news/ABwYAe3IBTL6_rbA9v9zPkQ

This is the music business article you should read. This will tell you more about how to become a success than any of the fawning tripe you read in “Rolling Stone” and elsewhere. You see first and foremost Weiss is a businessperson. Who charmed contacts to become a star and ultimately a multi-millionaire and head of CBS News. These are the skills that make someone successful in the U.S. today.

Do you have access to household names? Do you know how to charm them?

This is what you learn in college, this is what elite breeding and education yield. You’ve got to be able to speak their language, manipulate them, otherwise you’re just a pawn in their game, truly.

As for becoming a star… Bill Maher says in this article that he made Weiss one, and I’ve got to say he probably did. He gave her all that exposure.

And now she’s head of CBS News. Which is like Andy Lack becoming head of Sony Music. Remember the rootkit controversy? Maybe not… But Andy Lack came from news to get the trains to run on time at Sony, and then he nearly ruined the company with this fiasco and more. Just like Bari Weiss is doing at CBS News.

You know… The reporters at “60 Minutes” are amateurs, no match for the insight and skill of Bari Weiss…

This is like saying your middle schooler is ready for the NBA!

Like no one in TV news knows anything.

And unlike the wimpy, brain-dead, fearful musicians (people hate when I criticize musicians…but why should they be off limits, can’t I implore them to lift themselves and the music up?), the “60 Minutes” producer responsible for this pulled story barked back… Saying she reached out to the Trump administration and that it hadn’t responded, that the story was screened five times and was cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. Furthermore, it was ADVERTISED! Was Weiss now giving Trump a KILL SWITCH?

But Bari Weiss said the story wasn’t complete, that it wasn’t ready…

Because it nailed the Trump administration, and CBS is part of Paramount and Paramount wants to own Warner Bros. Period.

Have you been following this story? “60 Minutes” settled with Trump on a specious claim so that the Ellisons could buy Paramount. But now Trump is wavering, he’s been attacking “60 Minutes” again… The game is to get Trump to put the kibosh on Netflix’s acquisition of Warner so that Paramount will get it. Period.

Don’t think otherwise.

As for the news… Who can you trust?

That’s where we’ve arrived. Our institutions have crumbled. Not only because of Trump, but the string-pullers referenced in the Bari Weiss article linked above.

Meanwhile, there’s so much news, from oil tankers in Venezuela to killing the offshore wind industry to sending a special envoy to Greenland that this “60 Minutes” story is now being buried under the tsunami of everyday B.S.

As for Weiss… Like a pre-internet dolt, she has gone on record today defending her position, believing her elite status is such that she’s entitled to do things her way…

That’s America. The rich and powerful don’t even live in the same world as the hoi polloi, they fly private, live behind gates and have contempt for those who are not in their circle. Weiss is too stupid to know that by doubling-down she’s undercutting not only her own reputation, but that of CBS. If anything was required here it was a mea culpa… But Weiss believes she’s bigger than the game, bigger than the institution, just like when she cried foul at the “New York Times.” How come Bari Weiss knows so much and we know so little?

Now most of the rich and powerful refrain from publicity unless it is manipulated by a team, they don’t want you to know how evil they are, and how they’ve arranged their finances so they pay few taxes to boot. But Bari Weiss is bigger than the system, she knows better.

And you and me?

WE’RE SCREWED!

1

Where were you the first time you heard “More Than a Feeling”?

Probably driving around in your car listening to FM radio. This was 1976, the first Ramones LP came out that year, but it took decades for it to go gold. The Stones were changing guitarists. McCartney had followed up 1973’s “Band on the Run” with 1975’s “Venus and Mars,” but he never reached this peak again.

As for Led Zeppelin… 1975 was the year of “Physical Graffiti,” 1976’s “Presence” was a disappointment.

In other words, the old guard was stumbling, but the new guard?

Now you’ve got to know, by 1976, the sixties hangover was over. The war was finally wrapped up in ’75. What we had in ’76 was a nation where the power of music was acknowledged, the surprise of Woodstock was seven summers before. And every market had an FM station that dominated the conversation within its signal range.

It wasn’t quite the monoculture of the MTV eighties, but there were a slew of hits on FM that everybody in the nation knew. Frampton came alive. Steve Miller came back with “Fly Like an Eagle.” Aerosmith cemented their legacy with “Rocks.” Bob Dylan was mainstream with “Desire.” Hall and Oates followed-up their breakthrough RCA debut with “Bigger Than Both of Us,” with the ubiquitous “Rich Girl.” Genesis showed us they could triumph without Peter Gabriel with “A Trick of the Tail.” Joni Mitchell released “Hejira” and Boz Scaggs “Silk Degrees.” And 1976 was the “The Year of the Cat.”

It was a cornucopia of riches. Disco was on the horizon, but it hadn’t gone mainstream. And Stevie Wonder capped his incredible run with “Songs in the Key of Life.”

But there was a song by a new act that emanated from the car speakers that was undeniable, that you got on the very first listen, that has not faded over the years, that is not only still played today, but still sounds fresh.

Of course, that song is “More Than a Feeling.”

You didn’t have to be known. You didn’t have to slug it out in clubs, never mind on the internet… If you had the goods and they were exposed on FM radio, you could go from zero to hero literally overnight.

Like Boston.

To tell you the truth, I never loved “More Than a Feeling.” I actually like it more today than I did in the seventies. But there is one song on that album that is positively indelible, that utilizes the Led Zeppelin trick of going from electric to acoustic and back again, “Long Time,” with its ethereal, jazzy intro “Foreplay.” When “Foreplay” ended… It was like a space captain pulled back on the controls, held the ship steady, and out of the blue there was this singing guitar and…I get goosebumps just writing about it.

That was forty nine years ago,

And it was very different from today.

2

Same as it ever was. That’s what I keep hearing people in the business say. But nothing could be further from the truth. As a matter of fact, Daniel Glass told me recently he wasn’t exactly sure what a record label was anymore. But back in the seventies…

There were six and the men who ran them were titans. And the records they released were cultural fixtures that exceeded the power of not only television, but movies too. As great as the movies of the seventies were, the decade ran on music. It was a veritable victory lap after the explosion of the sixties. All kinds of genres. A zillion publications. Everybody knew the hits, and everybody knew Boston.

Sounds quaint, I know…but it wasn’t.

First and foremost because the second side of that debut LP was just about as good as the first. Opening with “Rock & Roll Band” and then segueing into “Smokin'” and then my personal favorite, “Hitch a Ride.” This was an album you could play over and over and never get sick of, and I did, and many others did too. It was the best-selling debut album to date. The internet tells me it ultimately sold 20 million copies (in the pre-SoundScan era everything is up for grabs…or as Jerry Heller told me about “Straight Outta Compton,” “My company, my number!”)

But word was that the second album, “Don’t Look Back,” was rushed out against Tom Scholz’s wishes and ultimately there was a third LP, “Third Stage,” and the complete story is told in this book, “Power Soak,” which was the name of the original incarnation of the Rockman.

3

Today everybody’s sophisticated, they’re more knowledgeable about the business than their instrument. And anybody can record and release their material. However, in the old days, the seventies, you had to get a record deal… And you would sacrifice, sign anything, just to have an album on a major label.

Which is exactly what Tom Scholz did. And as bad as the production deal he made with Paul Ahern was, Ahern changed it thereafter to his further benefit, making one of every four LPs royalty free to CBS. Scholz got screwed so bad…

And Scholz had agreed to split the royalties equally with the band. Even though they were Johnny-come-latelies… This was not today, when you didn’t have to tour, you needed a band…

And when Tom was tinkering in the studio, what was the band to do?

“Power Soak” tells the complete story.

Critics hated Boston, called it corporate rock, which it is anything but. For the critics your backstory had to be poverty, crawling from the gutter to deliver insights the bourgeoisie needed to hear. So something polished, from an MIT graduate from a rich family who worked at Polaroid? That was a nonstarter. But the public, the public devoured Boston, it was exactly what people wanted.

4

Now this guy I do not know, Brendan Borrell, e-mailed me to tell me he’d written a book about Boston, the inside story. Well, how much is left to tell? I’ve even gotten e-mail from Scholz setting the record straight.

And I prefer reading fiction to nonfiction, I like to be taken away, but trying to close out my e-mail, two nights ago, long after 11 PM, I pulled up the PDF Borrell sent.

Wow. This was not the typical rock book. Slapdash, printing the myth instead of the truth. “Power Soak” is deeply researched. All the agreements, the court records, Borrell studied them.

And the Boston story is here. Scholz does not have a warm and fuzzy image, and he doesn’t come across as a saint in this book, but he is first and foremost an artist (after being an engineer!). He wanted to do it his way.

And he didn’t think Paul Ahern was on his team. And Walter Yetnikoff was until he wasn’t.

You see Boston was CBS Records’ biggest seller. Walter wanted more. So he told Tom he could call him at home. It was all warm and fuzzy, until Tom kept missing deadlines, not delivering a new album, and then Walter held back royalties and ultimately sued Scholz.

This was a big story back then. But there was no internet for fans to marshal support for Scholz, the record companies had the ultimate power, which they no longer do. They could not only make your career, they could break it.

So you get the ins and outs of Scholz’s record-making and legal issues, but the most fascinating part of the book is when Tom’s lawyer, Don Engel, shops a new record deal…

This is when we get David Geffen, in cahoots with Walter Yetnikoff. A deal was hammered out but Geffen could never seem to sign it, Walter was supposed to go to Warner, a deal Geffen was brokering, and David wasn’t going to put pen to paper until the deal was done.

But Myron Roth told Engel that Irving Azoff would sign the same deal. And Irving did. And ultimately, years later, “Third Stage” was released and sold millions.

5

So who runs record labels today? They may be more well known than movie studio heads, but both of these categories of people used to be titans known by all. They lived above the hoi polloi, they were all powerful, and they were guiding the success of artworks that truly defined the nation.

That’s been lost. That era is gone.

Now in the earlier part of this century, everybody who’d been in the business pre-internet started to say it was no longer fun. “Power Soak” is about the era when it was fun, when it was peak fun, when the money was raining down… Warner records built the Warner cable system. Nothing scaled like music. Sure, album budgets were going up, but the costs were de minimis when spread over millions of records sold. And the labels and execs got rich… The acts? Sometimes. Oftentimes they had bad deals, maybe the manager made real money, but not the musicians.

“Power Soak” delineates the way it was. The shenanigans, the successes, the personalities. If you were around back then, every note of this book will ring true. It was not today’s music business, where #1 might not even be known by most of the public…this was an era of giants, who were dominant, on both sides of the deal.

Now you can buy a digital copy of this book on Amazon for $2.99. And you should. And it’s only 87 pages and you’ll whirl right through them. But the feeling you’ll get when you read them…it’s a peek inside the gold mine, into a past era, the way it used to be, when the acts were bigger than they ever were before and are still much bigger than almost all of the acts today. They do call it “classic rock.”

And Borrell doesn’t do it like Fredric Dannen and “Hit Men,” he’s not out to get anybody, you can tell he’s a fan. He just wants to get it right.

And we get it right about so few of our heroes.

You need to buy this book. The barrier to entry is incredibly low, like I said, $2.99. Or you can pay $9.99 for a paperback.

Forget the autobiographies, forget most of the writing about this business. “Power Soak” is the real story, and if you want to know the way it was, you need to READ IT!

Completion of playlists from previous shows.

Tune in Saturday December 20th 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

This just feels wrong.

Most Americans were not alive when JFK was assassinated. One can argue that’s when the sixties began. That’s when the generations split. The fifties were somnambulant, even the hipsters had crew cuts. By time the sixties arrived, there were pockets of experimentation, the roots of new musical acts that would triumph after the Beatles, and there were always bohemians, still labeled beatniks, soon to be labeled hippies, however many wives did not work outside the home, GM was the wonder of the world and the U.S. was an international monolith that wasn’t questioned by its citizens, never mind those from outside the country.

JFK barely won. Victory wasn’t declared until the morning after the election. But JFK ushered in a new era of hope, a break from the past, you see he was younger than the old farts, the country was now looking forward, not back.

He asked what you could do for your country instead of yourself.

He didn’t wear a hat at the inauguration and that business died overnight.

And he vowed to put a man on the moon before 1970. And manned spacecraft were launched.

Now protest was burbling. Civil rights were being fought for down south. It was a point of transition that Johnson ultimately certified into law, forcing the nation to treat everybody equally. And there was a folk music scene to support the underprivileged and abused, the U.S. was not mindlessly partying, then again, most people were not hip to the inequality and issues of our nation until later in the decade, after JFK was gone.

And then came the Cuban Missile Crisis. There hasn’t been anything like it since. You really felt like the end was possible. We were still afraid of nuclear war, we hid under our desks to protect ourselves, and we saw the pictures of the missiles going to Cuba… And JFK stood up to Russia and the crisis was averted.

But some people didn’t want progress. They wanted the country to be rooted in the past. With whites triumphant and illegality pushed under the rug…never forget that the original RFK was attorney general, and he was rooting out malfeasance…

And then JFK was murdered. Every boomer knows where they were when they heard the news. It was incomprehensible. Our parents had the TV on 24/7, Jack Ruby killed Oswald and then there was the day of mourning and…

They immediately started renaming things to honor JFK’s memory. Idlewild airport became JFK. It seemed a bit overdone at the time, and a bit of it was pulled back, then again, the president was killed in cold blood.

And then the sixties ensued. The Vietnam War blew up, with America pouring gasoline on the conflagration. The younger generation separated from their elders. Not only did they have their own music, everything was in question, everything was up for grabs, the motto was “question authority.” To be smart, educated and informed was a badge of honor, it was these people who were lifting the populace out of ignorance.

Then there was Jackie. Young with designer clothing. Who led tours of the White House on TV. We heard that she spoke seven languages. And she put the arts front and center. So it was not a big stretch when she started fundraising for a national cultural center, nor was it surprising when it was named the Kennedy Center, a living memorial to JFK.

Now every day I turn on my phone and it’s looney-tunes, I can’t believe what I read. I’m also aware that many people feel differently from me, they want to jet back to a past that they’re looking at through rose-colored glasses. Progress has been good. Change still needs to be made. But the world always goes forward. JFK led the charge into the future. That is why he was both revered and hated.

Ironically, those with the anti-JFK viewpoint are triumphant today. Trump is in power. Unlike some of my lefty brethren, I feel he won fair and square.

And I can quote the litany of his efforts that stick in my craw. From throwing the baby out with the bathwater with DOGE, pardoning the January 6th rioters, wobbling on support of Ukraine in its war with Russia… These are all substantive issues, which deserve a debate.

As for the less important… There’s the gilding of the White House like some Eastern European dictator. The plaques. The ballroom.

But renaming the Kennedy Center is just too much.

Because this is the arts. Something Jackie Kennedy not only supported, but did her best to spread across America.

And this is JFK. Set in stone.

Build some memorials to Trump after his term. He’ll get a library, probably some statues, and I won’t be happy with the lionization of the man and his memory, but I’ll shrug and accept it.

But renaming the Kennedy Center? Why?

Trump has never been a champion of the arts. If anything, he’s doubled-down on the commercialization of America, where the dollar is now king and the best and the brightest don’t go into the Peace Corps or politics and try and improve the world, but go into finance to enrich themselves, to line their pockets.

Ain’t that America.

But do you have to touch the arts?

That’s the one thing we have left. Art foments change. But Trump is putting the kibosh on that. He’s sending a message, that he is in control. It’s all right to be an artist and sell out to corporations, make a ton of bread, but if you question authority, look out.

Then again, I am a child of the sixties. Sure, musical acts made good money, but the money was secondary to the music, the message, the exploration, the pushing of the envelope. We had rapid development and innovation not only in music, but movies…all the arts. We went from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “Sgt. Pepper” to Woodstock and “Hello Dolly” to “The Graduate” and “Bonnie and Clyde.” This was the sixties, which started with JFK, an era many old white men have denigrated and tried to make disappear for decades.

But we still had our cathedrals, where the arts were displayed untouched. Carnegie Hall. The Metropolitan Opera House.

The Kennedy Center.

Art was up front and center in these edifices. They were bastions of creativity, of exploration, of soul-fulfillment.

But no more.

I could delineate all the negative moves Trump has made at the Kennedy Center this year, and the concomitant drop in revenues, but the building still stands as tribute to JFK.

But no longer. Now Trump’s name comes first. It’s a stick in the eye not only to Democrats, but to artists all over the country, all over the world. The message is not only that everything is up for grabs for Trump, but that the past that is revered by him and his cronies is being eviscerated, and a message is being sent that no one is safe, no one is untouchable. Artists better watch out. You think late night hosts are not safe…

Is nothing sacred?

I guess not.

Live long enough and the past you remember…seemingly no one else remembers it, or not how it really played out.

The brief tenure of JFK was about hope and freedom, righting wrongs.

But homey don’t play that anymore. As a matter of fact, minorities got too big for their britches, they had to be taught a lesson, constrained. And on one level the renaming of the Kennedy Center is just another stake in the heart.

But it’s so much more. It’s an erasing of American values.

It’s an erasing of JFK’s memory.

It’s an erasing of my personal past.

It’s an erasing of the America I knew.

It’s a bridge too far.

Is it the straw that breaks the camel’s back? Is this when the public will say no mas? I have no idea.

But this one hurts.