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Playlist:

“Follow The Yellow Brick Road” – The Munchkins – 1939 – “The Wizard of Oz”

“Itsy-Bitsy-Teeny-Weeny-Yellow-Polka-Dot Bikini” – Bryan Hyland – summer 1960

“The Yellow Rose Of Texas” – Mitch Miller – 1955- in “Giant” in ’56

“She Wore A Yellow Ribbon” – traditional
(“Sing Along With Mitch” album from 1958 – “You Are My Sunshine,” “Down By The Old Mill Stream,” “I’ve Been Working On The Railroad,” “Don’t Fence Me In”)
Movie -theme song – 1949 with John Wayne

“Yellow Submarine” – ’66

“Mellow Yellow” – Donovan – October ’66 in U.S.

“Yellow Balloon” – Jan & Dean – 1967

“Yellow Balloon” – “Yellow Balloon” (included Don Grady – Mouseketeer, “My Three Sons”)

“Yellow Man” – Randy Newman – 2nd album, “12 Songs,” one with “Mama Told Me Not To Come”

“Big Yellow Taxi” – 1970 – “Ladies of the Canyon”

“Tie A Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree” – ’73-Tony Orlando & Dawn ’81 – Iran Hostage Crisis

“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” – October ’73

“Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow” – Frank Zappa – ’74 album “Apostrophe” (Album after “Over-Nite Sensation” with “Montana” and “Camarillo Brillo” -Now on DiscReet records

“Yellow” – Coldplay – 2000

_______________________________________

Note – This is an hour long show, so I can not include EVERY yellow song.

For example, I could not include the following in the broadcast:

“Green, Yellow and Red” – John Kilzer – 88

“Yellow Ledbetter” – Pearl Jam – 92 flip side of “Jeremy”

“Black And Yellow” – Wiz Khalifa- (2011 – “Rolling Papers” album)

“Yellow Flicker Beat” – 2014 – Lorde – “Hunger Games”

“Yellow Bird” – Pretty Lights

“Purple, Yellow, Red And Blue” – Portugal. The Man -2013

“Bodak Yellow” – Cardi B – 2017

“Yellow Is The Color of Her Eyes” – Soccer Mommy-2019 (about mother with a terminal illness)

The above are from my notes I assembled while constructing the show.
Just so you know.

Tune in today, August 4th, to Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

Hear the episode live on SiriusXM VOLUME: HearLefsetzLive

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app: LefsetzLive

Once In A Lifetime – Spotify

Once In A Lifetime – YouTube

It’s really hard to write a hit song. I’m not talking about one that tops the chart, but one that grabs the listener and won’t let go, that makes you feel good every time you hear it.

I’m a fan of this guy. Primarily because of his 1983 LP on Geffen, “Nothing But The Truth.” At that point Geffen put out very few records, after the label’s initial splash it was relatively cold, carried by Quarterflash and other acts lost to the sands of time. But then they signed a country act?

Well, that was the pitch, but the truth is “Nothing But The Truth” is closer to a singer-songwriter LP from the seventies than country, but Mac is definitely country, he hails from Mississippi, a state northerners still don’t understand, still don’t know is just a stone’s throw from Graceland.

The radio track on “Nothing But The Truth” was “Minimum Love,” and it actually got some traction, but it was generic whereas the rest of the cuts on the LP were more specific, kinda like “Doctor My Eyes” from the first Jackson Browne LP. But the killer cut is the title track.

We were skippin’ the pages in the bookstore baby when I realized we hit the skids
I got a book about contraceptives and you got a book about kids

These are not the lyrics you hear over the air, but they’re the ones experienced by people all over the world every day. Are your interests aligned? Are you working towards marriage and kids or should you break it up, is someone gonna jump ship.

I was knockin’ around in the grocery store baby on the night of the last election

“Nothin’ But The Truth” is wistful. Reserved. Someone who’s had a lot of experience and is testifying as to their truth. And every four years the above line goes through my brain, whenever there’s an election, funny how music rides shotgun, how it’s our own personal milepost even if no one else knows it, music may be heard in groups, but it’s utterly personal.

But there was never another Mac McAnally album on Geffen.

Next thing I knew Mac was playing with Jimmy Buffett. A sideman instead of the main man. He’d gotten his chance, but he hadn’t connected.

But there was one song, from 1990, about the time Garth Brooks was initially triumphing, but I never heard it, this was still when there was a distinct line between country and rock, despite so many rock acts including country elements in their records, it wasn’t until the twenty first century that old rock fans realized if you wanted to hear guitars, if you wanted more of what used to be, you had to go to Nashville, in your mind anyway.

And I became aware of that song when it was covered by Kenny Chesney, it’s one of his staples, it’s entitled “Back Where I Come From.”

Well in the town where I was raised
The clock ticks and the cattle graze
Time passed with amazing grace
Back where I come from

It sounds like Mayberry. A slower pace. Where people live life as opposed to race it.

And as good as Kenny’s studio version is, the definitive performance is the one included in his 2006 LP “Kenny Chesney Live.” It’s slower, it’s pregnant with meaning. And when Kenny steps away from the mic and lets the audience sing…your heart pitter-patters, this is the unity too often lacking in the U.S. today. Kenny’s #1 venue is outside of Boston, where the Patriots play, but this southern music resonates just as much there. You see we all come from somewhere. Most probably a place where there was no spotlight, where we became who we are today.

But the most poignant lines are:

Some say it’s a backward place
Narrow minds on a narrow way
But I make it a point to say
That’s where I come from

Not only do most Americans not go overseas, most haven’t been far from where they grew up. In the seventies, prior to cheap air travel, never mind the internet, it was a rite of passage, with your family, while you were in college, to get behind the wheel and explore, to see America, Paul Simon even wrote a whole song about it.

“Back Where I Come From” is a hit, the kind I mentioned above, indelible, above the rest, a statement, that penetrates your soul, that you can hear over and over again and never burn out on.

Now the original Mac McAnally version is more upbeat, your mind drifts less, you’re caught up in the groove, smiling, like you do when you hear his new track “Once In A Lifetime.”

Every day is truly once in a lifetime. It’s not coming back. Which is what bugs me about this Covid-19 era, being in suspended animation, watching my life go by, the grains of sand flowing through the hourglass, with only so many left.

Every day is once in lifetime
And right now just me be the right time

I must admit, I’m a glass half-empty kind of guy, but my glass is full when I listen to music, the right music, it not only makes me happy, it emboldens me.

I didn’t get “Once In A Lifetime” at first. Close, but no cigar. But then I listened a second time, now I pull it up and let it play over and over again, I don’t want the mood to end.

I only met McAnally once. Back in the earlier part of this century. At a Jimmy Buffett show in Chula Vista. It was still sunny, he was wandering around backstage with no airs, he could have been a roadie to those out of the loop, or a lumberjack, with his red hair and beard. But I had to talk to him, I had to tell him how much I liked “Nothing But The Truth,” I figured it would mean something to him, that the unheralded work reached a listener and still meant something to him.

But what stunned me in the reaction was the accent. This guy was truly from Mississippi. And he kept his head down, he was humble, he didn’t want to talk about it, he just wanted to move on, he seemed to be embarrassed by the attention. Funny how you think you know who someone is based on their records. That someone sensitive in their music, plumbing their emotions, would be eager to have that conversation in real life, but not Mac, at least not that day, he wasn’t dismissive, he just wanted to elude the spotlight.

Now “Once In A Lifetime” sounds like it’s being sung by the riverbank, with only a few in attendance, made for the joy of music as opposed to the audience, as opposed to the money.

And I don’t think there’s gonna be a lot of money in “Once In A Lifetime,” unless it’s covered by one of Nashville’s stars. The recording is a blueprint, they’d just find someone with a rich voice with little character and gussy up the production, make it slick, but what makes “Once In A Lifetime” so good is its roughness.

It used to be different. If you were the kind of person who could get a record deal, get a song on the radio, you were established, you could turn it into a career. But today if these same people make music very few hear it. You can’t be doing it for the money, you’ve got to be doing it because you love it.

And I love “Once In A Lifetime.”

The story of “Once In A Lifetime” and a live acoustic performance thereof

This is a music business issue.

Despite the corroded infrastructure of the twentieth first century music business, based on terrestrial radio and a small number of top of the chart records, the best way to reach the target demo, the youth of today, with music, both old and new, is TikTok.

We heard about gaming. Music is secondary at best, background noise.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band? A limited number of tracks, you couldn’t play EVERYTHING!

But on TikTok, the uploaders use a cornucopia of songs and many see traction elsewhere, on Spotify, YouTube, et al. Some even become gigantic hits.

Not that this is an unknown paradigm. There are big acts like Drake feeding songs to the service, trying to jump-start or enhance their trajectory in traditional music media.

But on TikTok, the public, the users, pick the songs. And successful clips can be viewed triple digit millions of times, and more than one person can employ the same tune, this is oftentimes the case. TikTok is a hotbed of track development, it can not only make careers, it can bring the ancient back to life.

But the conversation in the music business is always about the past. Those with power want to preserve old systems and keep bitching about their cheese being moved, they abhor change.

First and foremost TikTok illustrates that breaking records will move more and more into the hands of the public. And the public decides what is a winner and what is not. And the gap between what is employed and what is not will be even greater than it is on streaming services. In other words, gatekeepers lose power, and the music business loves gatekeepers, that’s what streaming service playlists are all about! Get the company to insert your track and…most people using playlists are listening in the background, it’s hard to convert them into active listeners, to pick out a track, it’s not vastly different from Muzak in the office. But when a song is used on TikTok, it’s frequently integral to the action, without the song there is no clip. And the hook is key, demonstrating the axiom that hooks are nearly always necessary for great success in the music business. It’s a free-for-all, and the music business HATES free-for-alls, it wants to control and constrict the narrative, isn’t this the history of music online, starting with Napster?

And then the old artists and the ones working in the old manner, a few years to make an album which drops all at once, can’t stop complaining about social media, they keep telling us they’re artists, and you’re impinging on their creativity if you make them do anything other than sit in a studio and record twelve tunes. But the history of music on the internet is it blows up via word of mouth, which is hard to control, if people like something they pass it on, and if they don’t… This is very different from radio, where you’re trying to convince the programmer, online it’s straight to the customer/listener.

And Donald Trump wants to shut TikTok down.

Here’s where music and politics merge. Here’s where you’re out of the loop if you’re not reading the headlines. Because you have no framework, no sense of reference.

Donald Trump wants to shut TikTok down because it’s a haven of anti-Trump activity. It is hard to gauge TikTok’s effectiveness in this area, but one thing is for sure, the arena wasn’t full in Tulsa, could that be as a result of all the TikTokkers asking for tickets they were never going to use, the president to promise an overflow crowd that did not appear? Did you see the second stage outside the BOK Center, they started tearing it down during the event inside, there was no one there.

But if TikTok shuts down, the music business is collateral damage.

But the music business is silent. Used to be the music business was cutting edge, where you went to get the news, now it’s caught flat-footed. Don’t you defend your turf? Everybody else in America does.

So sure, Trump doesn’t like China having control of TikTok, hoovering up all that data, but why does TikTok have to shut down NOW?!

TikTok is a community. Of youngsters. And anti-Trump fervor is rampant on the service. Which assembles its army to fight Trump in the real world.

Meanwhile, Microsoft says it’ll buy TikTok.

But this is not good enough for Trump. Because this won’t solve his problem! Which is less about China and more about him and his election prospects.

The TikTokkers were all in a rage, downloading their content, crying in their fruit juice. That’s the difference in the Trump era, in the sixties users would fight back! But today’s youth are used to having their freedoms taken away.

Then again, one of the great things about social media, including TikTok, is its effect is essentially unmeasurable. All the data won’t tell you the ultimate reach and adoption. The service can’t be controlled and…

TikTok is not Facebook. All the conversation has been about disinformation on Facebook, not realizing that its users skew older.

As for Snap… Snapchat made its bones on an evanescent service. But its hook was Stories. But before Stories had mindshare outside a small coterie, Instagram copied it, stealing the momentum. That’s the narrative of the internet, there’s a first mover advantage, but you can never rest on your laurels, you must not sleep, you must keep on pushing. Which brings us to the strange case of Travis Kalanick. Travis employed this strategy to turn Uber into a behemoth. So, he was lauded by the same people who ended up criticizing him, and the end result was that Lyft gained traction and now Uber is not the leader it once was. It’s a jungle out there I tell you.

So, Facebook and Google can’t buy TikTok, no way. The only thing accomplished in last week’s hearings was to spread the word that these entities are duplicitous monopolists. Don’t expect any change to the existing services, but don’t expect it to be business as usual going forward. The government would never allow these two entities to buy TikTok. But Microsoft?

Zuckerberg can’t compete with TikTok, even though he’s trying. You see TikTok has critical mass. It was small once, when kids used Musical.ly in the U.S., but then that service was merged into TikTok and became a behemoth. TikTok was not secret, but somehow Zuck missed it. It grew too big right under his nose. And now there’s nothing he can do about it.

Is TikTok forever? History tells us social media sites are fads. Even Facebook itself, now the company’s main driver is Instagram. But TikTok’s growth proves that despite the footprint of the tech majors, there are still holes, they can still be beaten.

TikTok won’t be shut down. The public won’t stand for it. Microsoft will purchase the service.

Then again, Trump has done so much with little consequence. And as stated above, the youth have acquiesced in many cases. But the youth are activated, that’s what the anti-Trump TikTok rebellion is all about. And Trump should remember, every action has an equal reaction.

But the music business is looking at this from afar, hands-off.

People were file-trading and the music business was up-in-arms.

They came for the record stores and the music business was up-in-arms.

But somehow, when it comes down to what might be the best way to expose music today, the business is silent. Talk about being ripe for disruption…

MTV broke the Go-Go’s.

As late as the seventies, there were two Americas, the cities and the rest of the country, the hip and the non-hip, the clued-in and those out of the loop. But MTV started the long march towards unification, cable TV and the internet completed the journey, and now nobody is big, nobody reaches everybody, despite having the infrastructure to achieve this.

If you lived through the Go-Go’s ascension in Los Angeles this movie is not news. This was post Elvis Costello. Post Sex Pistols. Even post Blondie. The highest calling in America was to be in a band, a successful band. And they were bands, if you didn’t play an instrument, if you didn’t write your own songs, you were a pop singer, on the AM, and were considered culturally irrelevant, even if you had some financial success. But all the action was on FM, supported by print media. If you cared, you knew, and a lot of people cared.

You had to go out as opposed to stay in. You could read about it, but the only way of participating was to go to the clubs and see for yourself. Whether it be the Whisky or the Masque. The scene was not hidden. All you had to do was pick up the “L.A. Weekly” and you were plugged-in.

And the “Los Angeles Times”… This was before you could get the “New York Times” delivered daily in Los Angeles, that didn’t happen until the mid-eighties. The L.A. “Times” ruled. And not only did it have its tabloid Sunday “Calendar” section, providing more music news than any other newspaper in America, far surpassing that in the “New York Times,” there were multiple writers, if you had any traction, you got ink. And my point here is the Go-Go’s were not an unknown quantity in Los Angeles. They’d been kicking around for years. First as amateurs…and then it took a long time for them to shed that image. I could cite band after band from the late seventies who never made it nationally who everybody knew in Los Angeles. Many even got record deals, even though their albums stiffed. But the Go-Go’s didn’t get signed.

But then they did. On IRS. Which was seen as a tertiary label distributed by A&M. For English acts that couldn’t get releases in the U.S., for nothing that broke big.

Until the Go-Go’s.

So, the band got signed and their initial record was produced by Richard Gottehrer. He’s the unsung hero of the band’s success. He gets some footage in this documentary, but when he was announced as the producer of the band we all scratched our heads. The guy responsible for the Strangeloves “I Want Candy,” and a cowriter on “My Boyfriend’s Back” and “Hang on Sloopy”? Talk about looking in the rearview mirror… Sure, Gottehrer produced the first two Blondie LPs on Private Stock, but the band didn’t break through until it switched to Chrysalis and engaged the Commander, Mike Chapman, to produce it. Mike Chapman was not interested in the Go-Go’s, not Roy Thomas Baker, not Nick Lowe…this was not an album destined for success.

And then it came out.

We were aware of “We Got the Beat.” We heard it on KROQ. Interesting, but not a home run.

And in L.A. “Beauty and the Beat” did not slip out unannounced, there was as much promo, as much hype on the album as there was on anything released, it was a hometown band, of girls, this was not 20/20 or Great Buildings, this was the Little Engine That Could…could it?

And then we heard “Our Lips are Sealed.”

Yes, the story was about the album cover, the making of the record, but what broke the band was an indelible single you only had to hear once, that melded the best of AM and FM, catchy yet without a mindless sensibility, you had to own it.

And I did. And seemingly everybody else in Los Angeles did too.

Never underestimate the power of a hit single.

And there was nothing quite as good on the rest of the LP. There was a cleaned-up version of “We Got the Beat,” and “This Town” and a bunch of songs that could play in the background, that could amp you up, but nothing as catchy as…

Richard Gottehrer had worked his magic. It was a sixties girl group, but it sounded positively fresh, definitely eighties as opposed to what came before.

And in the movie, they talk about opening for the Police. But that was how you broke a band in the seventies, in the eighties…

The record business had collapsed. Corporate rock was overbaked and disco failed and CBS Records had to fire a zillion people and then came…

MTV.

MTV. You’ve got to know, at the beginning, prior to Michael Jackson, MTV was like an FM rock station, Bob Pittman said as much, but suddenly everybody in the WORLD was exposed to this music. And the funny thing is technology worked in reverse. Cable had made inroads in the hinterlands, initially to combat bad over-the-air signals, but subscribers signed up for HBO and then when systems were offered MTV…they picked it right up, the battle was in the metropolis, where cable systems made real money, and with limited bandwidth operators were not about to sacrifice a channel to music videos.

Ergo, the “I Want My MTV!” campaign! One of the most brilliant of all time. Sure, it ended up overused and hackneyed, but at first to be able to see household name musicians on TV, albeit in promos, had a huge impact, usually you had to go to the gig to see them, or they were on canned shows like “In Concert” and “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.” Kirshner was never hip, he thought it was about him, not the acts, as if he were Ed Sullivan in a different era, but suddenly there was a whole channel controlled by the youth, it was SNL on steroids.

And “Our Lips are Sealed” was one of the first videos MTV played.

Few were making clips when the channel launched. What it aired were oldies, mostly performance videos made by English acts to penetrate the continent, where it was hard to get on the radio. So, the Go-Go’s video stood out.

And most people did not have MTV. So, if you went to the house of someone who did…you watched it endlessly. It wasn’t until the turn of the century that A&R people stopped having MTV on a 24 hour loop in their offices, if you wanted to know which way the wind blew, you watched MTV.

And since Miles Copeland and IRS always did things on the cheap, the video for “Our Lips are Sealed” was made for bupkes, but somehow it contained the essence of the band, their camaraderie, their sense of fun, their willingness to break the rules. Sure, in the movie they talk about wanting to get busted for romping in the fountain, but everyone at home knew this was taboo…did they get permission, did they just do it? YOU WANTED TO HANG WITH THESE GIRLS! With the utterly amazing song.

This was not a studio concoction. This was not Cher. We had not seen regular girls/women on TV like this, certainly not playing music, they were UNFILTERED, there was MAGIC!

And as MTV grew, so did the Go-Go’s, they became a household name.

Now if you were really into “Our Lips are Sealed,” you also had to own the version by Fun Boy Three, I certainly did. It was a funny era, singles were taboo, but now you’d buy a 12″, you had to have the sound at your fingertips.

The rest of the Go-Go’s story?

Had little to do with the fact they were women.

It’s hard to keep a band together.

First, it’s nearly impossible to get a seat on the roller coaster. But you can’t get off once you’re on. The ride is zipping along, and your handlers, those who built you, say the only way off is to die, and if for some reason you choose to jump off, you will never make it again, it’s all over, you’re toast.

Kinda like the ousted bassist in the Go-Go’s and their original manager. This was their one and only shot, it was now or never.

So, riding high, the band continued to…

Stay high, go on the road, act outrageous and go into the studio with…little material, almost none of it of hit quality. You see the machine doesn’t care about you, it just needs fuel. And if you can’t provide it, someone else will.

Then there’s the money. You’ve been in a whirl for years, you must be getting rich, right?

But that’s not the story of rock and roll. Someone else is always getting the money. Usually the label, sometimes the manager, but if it’s other band members…

Believe me, few understood publishing at this time, everybody was just eager to get a deal. Sure, the big time artists now self-published, but if you were punk or new wave you just wanted a seat at the table, you’d sacrifice just about everything. But Ginger was smart enough not to cough up the rights and when the bills were paid…the songwriters got rich, everybody else did not. It’s kinda like finding out your parents left most of their estate to another sibling, you can never get over it. And then there are power struggles and one band member leaves and then…it’s over.

It has nothing to do with the Go-Go’s being girls. That’s just the way it is. The difference with the Go-Go’s was they had a HIT, which was written by the band, a few, in fact. They did not comb the catalogs for covers, they were originals. They were all in it together until…

The money. As they say in the music business, it’s not about the money…it’s about the money.

So, Belinda Carlisle has single hits, just like Alice Cooper, the front person always has a leg up when the band breaks up.

But then that success runs out. Rock and roll is a young person’s game. At least through the eyes of those who control it. And those who age don’t own it, they lie about their birth date and act like they’re twenty, even though everyone knows the truth, that they’re acting like children.

So, the Go-Go’s reunite, and are successful on the reunion/oldies circuit…you’ve got to pay those bills. And on stage is the only place you can get that hit, that attention, that adulation and then…

There’s one big promo play. In this case, literally a Broadway play and a movie and a single…

Which cannot succeed. Doesn’t matter how good the track is, today’s business will not allow the oldsters to play.

It’s not the seventies anymore. Only one format matters, Top Forty, and instead of being rock, like it was at the advent of MTV, it’s mostly hip-hop with a little pop. So you can put it out, but few will hear it.

So let’s get back to MTV.

MTV minted worldwide stars. And record companies, despite bitching about the cost of the clips, which they charged to the acts anyway, made more dough than they ever had in their existence. Because of the worldwide reach of superstars and the profits in the newfangled CD.

But then MTV went pop. And then it went hip-hop. Videos were expensive and if you weren’t great-looking… Those were the complaints in the nineties, all the rock acts getting closed out. Actually, at first there was the Seattle Sound, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but as the decade wore on, there was no room for them on MTV either.

And then came the internet. And soon MTV aired fewer music videos, and then none at all! And the bitching!! God, it was like artists complaining about Spotify today. Everybody said MTV was the enemy. When the truth is music video had become an on demand item online and MTV’s only way to survive economically was to go to shows, whether they be reality or scripted or game…it became just another TV outlet, it even removed “Music” from its name, and I’ve got to ask you, when was the last time you even watched MTV, when was the last time you even COMPLAINED ABOUT IT??

Then the enemy became the public, those file-trading on Napster and its clones.

Then, supposedly Steve Jobs was the savior, when he got people to buy files, even though they were no longer required to buy complete albums.

And then Spotify and streaming came along and revenues went back up and…

Once again, many artists were left out, behind. When the truth is almost every act’s career atop the chart is brief, and thereafter they’re an oldies act, releasing music for the hard core only. Hell, have you even listened to the past few Bruce Springsteen albums? Maybe you did, but most people did not. Only two tracks on “Western Stars” exceed ten million plays on Spotify, when number 50 on the Spotify Global Top 50 chart had 1,507,297 streams JUST YESTERDAY! Yup, Springsteen owns boomer mindshare, gets all the ink, but in reality it’s all about the old stuff, not the new, no matter how good or bad it might be. Meaning, maybe Spotify is not the devil, maybe your time has passed.

Oh, maybe you’re young and make music and are still complaining.

Well, chances are you’d have been completely closed out in the MTV era. You had to be good-looking, are you? And there were very few slots, probably you could not get one at all.

Big wheel keeps on turnin’, Proud Mary keeps on burnin’, as the business floats down the river while what’s left behind struggles to stay afloat, or drowns.

Meaning…

Maybe you saw that story this week, about the life of old songs, whether kids remember them:

“How We’ll Forget John Lennon”

Everything has its window. Elvis memorabilia is tanking in the marketplace, because his fans HAVE DIED!

So, if you want to know the way it was, watch this Go-Go’s documentary. At the end, I was worried it was devolving into a “Behind the Music” episode, focusing on the Broadway play and the new single, but that footage turned out to be very brief.

This is a story about a band that was willing to sacrifice everything to make it. And funnily enough, the only member who had graduated from college, the straightest of the group, guitarist and songwriter Charlotte Caffey, was the one who got hooked on heroin. Yes, truth is stranger than fiction.

But there was an era where even to be an amateur you had to dedicate all your time. Promote yourself online? Maybe you could tack some posters to telephone poles, and would people even come if they’d never heard of you or your music? Usually no.

It was a big risk. And most didn’t make it. And you had to live at home. And you were broke. As your friends started to make money and… Not get that rich, nobody was that rich in that era, that didn’t come until Reagan legitimized greed, the boomers sold out and the techies arrived. Tech is MTV on steroids. You create a product that can reach EVERYBODY! It’s like shoes. Only there’s no physical and reaching Prague costs the same as reaching Peoria.

So, right now, we’ve got a very narrow pipe. Only a few things are successful, and they’re far less successful than they were in the MTV era. Everybody knew the Go-Go’s, does everybody know Drake? Parents knew the Go-Go’s, the world was smaller and we were all paying attention to MTV. There was a slew of gatekeepers. And if the one, and it was frequently just one, at MTV, didn’t cotton to your sound AND IMAGE, good luck!

But those who passed through, those who made it, were bigger than bankers, politicians and CEOs. Musicians were our gods. And the funny thing is the usual dues didn’t matter. Who your parents were, where you went to school? IRRELEVANT! It was a flat world where everybody started in the same place.

Well, assuming you were in Los Angeles. Assuming you had the hunger. Assuming you had the beat.