Johnny – Spotify
Johnny – YouTube

I heard this on the Spotify Americana playlist.

I’m getting sick of the news podcasts. The big outlets are neutral when more emotion is necessary. And the ball never really moves.

So I decided to listen to music. I pulled up my Discover Weekly, and surprisingly, every track was up my alley, but only two resonated, David Bromberg’s “Sharon” and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Swingin’.”

She called her mother-in-law
And said ‘I need a little money
I know I can count on you
After that night in Vegas
And the hell we went through

This stuck out. Funny how you can hear a track a zillion times yet still learn new things, how it can hit you in new ways. She didn’t call her mother, but her MOTHER-IN-LAW! My ex asked for money from my father just before she moved out. Funny, aren’t the parents of your spouse supposed to be the enemy, especially your mother-in-law? But when you’re down and out who can you count on? Only those related to you by blood and law.

I never thought of “Swingin'” as a major track. It was not laden with changes, more of a riff and a sound if nothing else, a workout, noise when you’re angry, but judged against the rest of the stuff in the playlist this Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers cut loomed large, illustrating that you can know how to play, can know how to write, can know how to sing, but still not be transcendent, there’s an alchemy of those skills that makes musicians and their work memorable, Petty sings like he means it, as if he’s got an important story to tell, albeit with attitude, and the rest of the band plays exquisitely, but this was already in the era when MTV had gone pop/hip-hop and now if you’re an ancient rock band and you release new material the tree has definitely fallen in the forest, but almost no one hears it. Many people make music today, but few deserve attention, we need focus on those who do, but then there are poseurs not quite up to snuff, have you been hit by the Phoebe Bridgers hype, have you listened to the album, when you’ve got a story in the “New Yorker” in advance of release I’m suspicious, when something is jammed down my throat, I’m suspicious, it’s only when I hear about something from friends that I pay attention, it’s not that Ms. Bridgers’s work is bad, it’s just that based on the endless hype you’d expect it to be spectacular, and it’s far from it.

She went down swingin’
Like Glenn Miller
Yeah, she went down swingin’
Like Tommy Dorsey
Yeah, she went down swingin’
Like Sammy Davis
She went down swingin’
Like Sonny Liston

Humor. Irony. Petty sings these lyrics straight, but the deeper meaning cracks you up. The image portrayed earlier in the song is of someone who is struggling, not someone who is dancing, but music is a long continuum, and if you know your history you know that the mentioned musicians did, swing that is, but so did Sonny Liston, so the song ends with that pugilistic legend. “Swingin'” never hit me this hard before, it was rewarding, but once again it was so much better than everything else in the playlist, but it was minor Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, then again in the sixties and the seventies the best and the brightest went into music, whether they were educated or not, and the music was enough, we never did get Tom Petty jewelry, never mind cologne.

I found my Release Radar playlist much less rewarding, too much that was not actually new, and the final cut was “Mother of Muses” by Bob Dylan and once again, I respect the new album on paper, it’s just that it’s not that listenable.

So what next?

The Discover Weekly playlist had been so rewarding. And so many of the genre playlists are not. There was a lot of country in my Discover Weekly, but there are too many skips on the country playlists.

So I went to the Americana one. Which was not extremely rewarding until I got to Sarah Jarosz’s “Johnny.”

Sarah gets credit right out of the box, for not changing her name, compromising her authenticity. John Legend? His real last name is “Stephens,” what’s so wrong with that? Even worse, “Legend” is too self-important, and the truth is this guy is reasonable, especially in attitude/statements, but his moniker undercuts his image, same deal with Alicia Keys, whose real last name is “Cook,” but that was not good enough for Clive Davis, calling yourself “Keys,” would Arthur Rubenstein call himself “Artur Keys”? Once again, it’s self-congratulatory and undercuts any gravitas she might evidence.

Johnny’s on the back porch drinking red wine

THE PRODUCTION!

Now that the barrier to entry is so low, not only do people with substandard voices make music, they surround themselves with amateurs across the board, even though these players and producers believe they’re superstars when the truth is there are journeyman professionals who are superior and available, but it does take some cash.

How could a boy from a little bay town
Grow up to be a man, fly the whole world round
Then end back up on the same damn ground he started

The sound, the playing, and the GROOVE! I immediately locked on to it, was nodding my head, felt good. In other words, to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, you know it when you hear it.

But the chorus was not up to the standard of the verse.

Nor was the bridge, but at least there was a bridge!

But I had to play “Johnny” again, and again, to sustain the mood, that’s what music delivers that is absent from not only the news, but movies, television, even books, that’s music’s magic.

Lately he’s been thinking ’bout the meaning of time
The small amount we’re given must be sort of crime
Yet the little we have feels like too much most of the time

Well put. Especially in this Covid-19 era, where we’ve got so much time but so much we don’t want to do, we could hoover up the classics, movies, books, but somehow nothing feels right as the clock keeps ticking, and the older you get the more it bothers you, you can see the end, but then there are so many of my generation who’ve surrendered, retired, in thrall to the Grim Reaper long before their time.

He takes another sip of that blood red wine
Just waiting on the stars that will never align
A little luck, a little love, a little light and he’ll be doing just fine

We’re not looking for that much, but it’s amazing how elusive it is.

Sarah Jarosz has been around forever, she first released music at 19 and now she’s only 29. But it took her this long to get seasoned, to have some perspective, despite being nominated and winning a few Grammys, showing how irrelevant those awards are, how come in film and TV there are so few categories and in music there are nearly a hundred, cheapening the already worthless awards, not to mention the imprimatur of victory killing careers, let’s see how Billie Eilish follows up “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?,” I’ll tell you where there is to go, down, that’s the only direction from the pinnacle, Michael Jackson spent the rest of his life trying to equal “Thriller,” and he never did, despite labeling himself the “King of Pop,” he became a caricature of himself, the music has to make you feel good, not the statuette.

Unfortunately, “Johnny” is not good enough to cross over. It won’t go from the swamp of Americana to the country playlist, never mind Top Forty, but if it were just a tad better, if the chorus and bridge were as good as the verses it would be undeniable, the kind of thing you’d play for everybody you knew, unable to get out of your head, but too many settle for good enough, don’t push themselves to excellence, because it’s hard, it’s easier to stay in the backwater as opposed to going for the brass ring, which you might not even reach. But that’s art, it’s a competition with yourself and the closer you get to the goal the more anxious you become, the harder it is to get to the peak, and as soon as you’re self-conscious, you’re screwed, which is why it’s so hard to do to begin with, those who blaze trails are to be respected, to follow in footsteps is relatively simple.

Yes, I’m employing absolute scale. In an era where the history of recorded music is at everybody’s fingertips and you can only listen to one thing at one time, I like “Johnny” more than all the rest of the new stuff I’ve heard recently, but that just makes me want more, I don’t want Sarah Jarosz to rest on her laurels, I want her to PUSH IT, like Tom Petty, who continued to reach peaks long after his initial heights, who was never satisfied.

“Swingin'” – Spotify
“Swingin'”  – YouTube

Former worldwide head of music at WME, Marc Geiger has history as an agent, a record company executive and a tech founder. Known as a seer, here Marc dives into the inner workings of the agency business and assesses the concert landscape. Listen for insights into the music industry as well as Geiger’s history, from UCSD to Hollywood.

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Maybe you have to know someone who died.

Hope. It’s an elusive concept, but you need it to survive. Not blind hope, but a belief based on facts, on odds, on the notion that if you do the right thing events will work out in your favor.

But not only your favor, but everybody’s favor.

But that’s not the way the world is going.

You grow up studying history, all the turf wars, you think it can’t happen now, but then it does. Why? Well, it’s got a lot to do with income inequality. When things are going badly, many abdicate their power to a strongman, who promises they’ll make everything right, and maybe they do for a while, make the trains run on time, but then you wake up with fewer rights as you’re lorded over by an omnipotent power. It’s happening in Eastern Europe. And Russia.

But we didn’t think it could happen here.

Timing is everything. There’s only so much you can control in life, luck plays a big part. And I was lucky enough to be born in the fifties. The fifties weren’t so great, but the sixties were. They started off with the election of JFK.

“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

We live in bizarroland today. George Costanza rules, people do the opposite of this.

“My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”

Together. An interesting concept. The U.K. breaks away from the EU. The U.S. pulls out of the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal and the W.H.O., as if we, and the world, can go it alone, when everybody knows you need a team to triumph.

So JFK said we were going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. We were torn, whether to put faith in the president’s proclamation or deem it a pipe dream. But then Americans rocketed into space, and despite setbacks like the Apollo 1 fire, in the summer of ’69 men walked on the moon, and we watched it all on television.

You might say we can Zoom around the world these days, but there’s no colony on Mars, we stopped exploring, because it was seen as too costly, but the truth is the space program paid dividends. Not only Tang, but computer development.

So JFK gets assassinated, but LBJ gets civil rights laws passed. The younger generation questions everybody and everything, and protests the war to the point that LBJ decides not to run in ’68. Sure, there was opposition, but both sides agreed on the facts, it was only a matter of spin, of opinion, what to do next.

But the sixties were thrilling. Kinda like seeing Prince. Or Freddie Mercury. You were either there or you weren’t. And you might be able to listen to recordings, watch videos, but they’re just facsimiles, you can’t feel it, you can’t live it, you’re at a distance, your heroes are dead.

And the truth is in 1970 a bunch of heroes died. Most notably Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison and Duane Allman in ’71. Suddenly, we were licking our wounds, we were living in a can’t do culture, and we’ve been living that way ever since, except for a brief period of internet excitement at the end of the nineties and the beginning of the twenty first century, before the techies became billionaires and we ended up with a Tower of Babel society, with no one taking responsibility.

Responsibility. Credibility. Morality. Honor. Important concepts in the sixties, irrelevant today. You’re just a person, equal to the billionaires and no better than those of color. But that is not the message you’re sent. You’re told you’re inadequate and if you don’t get in line, crawl for cash, you’ll fall through the cracks and no one will rescue you. We went from help your brother to put down your brother, and that had consequences.

So despite smartphones and flat screens, life is hard in today’s U.S.A. Both parents have to work and you can’t make it on minimum wage. Sure, you can save up for the front row for Drake, but then you can’t afford another show all year. Meanwhile, the banks and the corporations drink from the public trough and you’re parched, just waiting for a drop of water. Even worse, it’s deemed your fault. It’s your fault if you’re poor, if you get cancer, if you get Covid-19. Because the winners won’t succumb.

But they do.

I just got word a friend is in hospice for Covid-19.

It’s not like a car accident, it doesn’t happen suddenly. You get sick, then maybe you get a little better, and then maybe you get sicker and then, weeks after it all began, you pass.

How did he get it?

His granddaughter flew to a distant state to hang with a friend. If the states had been closed, if there wasn’t a quick reopening, he never would have gotten Covid-19, he would have lived.

This is not rocket science, you don’t need a genius to explain it. But somehow even if they can understand it, many won’t accept it. Why?

Because they believe it won’t happen to them.

But it always does, it’s just a matter of when.

Your kid gets cancer. You lose your job. Your wife leaves you. Life isn’t smooth sailing, the goal is to hang in there and survive.

Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another
Right now

Now you piss on your brother. Raise your head and you will be attacked. Even worse, those who truly commit faux pas, even when they’re caught, they skate. They just ignore it. Or wait for the afternoon, when another story will replace it.

There are no consequences.

The worst thing that could happen when I grew up was to come home with a note that your parent had to see the principal.

Today, if a kid comes home with said note, the parent goes to the school and tears the principal a new one, after all, their progeny can’t be at fault.

No one can be at fault in America today, it’s always someone else’s problem.

And then the music stops, and there’s no chair left for you.

Even worse, no one cares, except for your family and friends.

That’s America today, no one cares and there’s not enough money to go around. You can’t get ahold of the unemployment office in California, if you’re poor, it’s your fault, find your own damn health insurance, borrow money from friends, assuming they’ve got any, sleep on a couch, or on the sidewalk, after all, you’re responsible.

But what if your birth circumstances were not privileged? What if you got the short end of the stick through no fault of your own?

Tough nuggies.

Recent news says if we all wore masks, Covid-19 would be harnessed in three weeks. Is this true? Maybe, maybe not, but we could at least try it.

But that would mean you’d be responsible, you’d have a duty, you’d have to care about others, and that’s just not today’s ethos.

It’s a free-for-all, and no one is in power.

They fine people for breaking the rules in foreign countries, in America even when there is a law, the governor might choose not to enforce it.

So who should you listen to, who should you believe?

And then there are the optimists, who believe a regime change will solve all our problems, when the truth is you can never catch up to the computer age if you’re using fax machines, you’ve got to tear down and start over, rebuild the infrastructure. But that costs money, and the government is the enemy, and therefore you should not pay taxes and the rich shouldn’t either because they are the job creators, wrong, and they know where the money should go, not those in power, so screw ’em.

But it’s all irrelevant until it hits home.

If it hasn’t already, it’s gonna. It’s just a matter of time. No one wins forever. And when things don’t go your way, good luck. Chances are the government won’t be there for you, and in a country of 300+ million people, a few can be lost. But what if it’s you?

None of the above can be debated, it’s written in stone. How you choose to live your life is up to you, but actions have consequences, and in the old days it was incumbent upon bad actors to take responsibility, today they deny and that’s all she wrote.

Black Lives Matter was an illustration that America doesn’t work for everybody, whether you stand for the “Star-Spangled Banner” or not, that’s all show, it won’t put money in your bank account.

We’ve got a vacuum of leadership. We revere corporate titans, are beholden to their wares, but when it comes to what is between the ears, we get no food, no direction.

There are a lot of false prophets. Most especially religious ones. But if you believe prayer is the answer to all your issues, I hope you don’t get Covid-19.

We need someone to take control. Someone akin to JFK, or MLK, or even Mario Savio. Someone who’s driven by what’s right as opposed to what pays out.

While we’re waiting, there will be casualties.

Like my friend today.

Billboard Announces New Chart Rules: No More Merch & Ticket Bundles

Who woulda thunk streaming would break the charts?

The charts are for the industry. “Billboard” has to play nice or companies will find someone else to provide this information.

It wasn’t until 1991 that the charts reflected any modicum of reality. That’s when SoundScan appeared, tallying what actually sold, via computer information, as opposed to conversations with retailers that were then manipulated by the head of charts with input from the record companies themselves. Prior to SoundScan, a record started at the bottom and then moved its way up the chart. SoundScan flipped the script, albums started out at number one and then fell, because most sales for known acts come right after release.

But, going to a non-human compiled chart not only demonstrated that albums sold prodigiously and then less (except for developing acts, of course), but that more genres other than those featured on MTV were represented in the sales world, i.e. country flourished. Seen as a backward genre prior to this time, it turned out country sold incredibly well, and started to appear in the Top Ten, one can argue that it’s this chart change that turbocharged modern country.

But today, it’s all hip-hop and pop all the time. That’s what’s consumed most on streaming services, therefore, in order to get to number one on the “Billboard” chart in another genre, you had to manipulate it, i.e. bundle the album with merch or tickets or who knows what.

You see the labels want bragging rights. The execs may get little press outside the industry, but they can tell anybody they encounter they went to number one, it makes them feel good, it burnishes their image, irrelevant of how much money was made.

And the money is in streaming.

But once we went to a consumption model, we found out hip-hop was bigger than any other genre, and unlike with SoundScan, every other genre other than pop was completely squeezed out. With physical, you bought it, it didn’t matter how many times you listened to it. But now it’s all about how many times something is listened to, so… It’s the opposite of today’s television world. The truth is that network shows still tend to have the largest audiences. Even worse, in an on demand world, not everybody watches a show right away. Add on top of that the fact that Netflix does not report comprehensive data, so no one knows how many people watched a show, and the overall television ratings have become irrelevant. Newspapers still print the “Billboard” Top Ten, but even the “Los Angeles Times” no longer prints television ratings, never mind radio ratings.

But the truth is the average person does not read the physical newspaper. And the “Billboard” chart is buried so deep in the online iteration that unless you’re looking for it, you don’t see it. Most people get their news online, it’s a grazing activity, and you only go deep if the world exploded or it’s a personal interest, so no one knows your record went number one unless you tell them. As for all the non-hip-hop and pop acts that go number one based on chart manipulation, since they instantly fall down the chart, the story has no sticking power, although the PR industry hypes this achievement wherever and whenever it can.

But few talk about network television shows anymore. All the discussion is about Netflix, Amazon and pay cable, whose flagships have also entered the on demand streaming sphere. Television drives the culture today, after politics of course, and sex supersedes everything, but what excites people in television is that which often is seen by few. In other words, TV resembles the free-form FM radio stations of the late sixties, whereas music resembles the old days of three TV networks.

But the reality is more people are listening to more genres of music, and in quantity, than ever before. Concomitantly, what is number one is listened to less than ever before. You can have a number one track on Spotify and most of the nation is completely unaware of it. Its fans are streaming it prodigiously, but others don’t know it, even more, they’re not interested.

But what they are interested in is excluded from the chart.

Oh, “Billboard” has a zillion genre charts, as does Spotify, but those are seen as backwaters. And the old paradigm of crossing over from one genre to another is almost completely dead.

And the end result of this is music discovery is negatively impacted, and it hurts the industry at large.

Ed Sheeran was so successful, the Brits changed the chart rules so he couldn’t dominate, so other records could get a chance.

We need the same adjustment in the U.S., so other genres can get traction.

But it’s really not “Billboard”‘s fault as much as it is the streaming services’ fault.

In other words, just like Facebook, Spotify, et al, are not just pipes, passive conduits, they influence what people consume. So how do we get streaming services to reflect actual music listening/fans of bands and genres, and how do we get streaming services to boost bands outside hip-hop and pop?

This is not about denigrating or marginalizing hip-hop and pop, it’s about broadening the spectrum, to reflect what else is consumed, what else is worthy of attention, which would benefit the business and the consumer, would lead to a healthier marketplace.

Look at the concert numbers. They are not all hip-hop and pop, actually, their numbers are not even dominant, never mind that many streaming chart toppers cannot even sell a ticket.

So how do we come up with a chart that reflects reality and helps music as opposed to the three manipulative major labels who get rewarded based on the quantity of streams and therefore only sign and promote hip-hop and pop?

Once again, you’ve got to create a chart that the industry adopts. “Pollstar”‘s weighted chart means nearly nothing. “Rolling Stone” came out with a good chart, but the industry wasn’t interested. The labels want control, they don’t want to learn that what they’re purveying is not consumed.

Forever, this business has been one of hit material. Appealing to youngsters. But so much has changed! There are no constrictions on marketing and distribution, anybody can play, and not everybody wins, but many more than those on the “Billboard” chart do, some of them don’t even have a label, at least not one aligned with the three majors.

So, we need a new chart.

But the industry must buy into it.

But the industry just wants the chart to reflect what is already streaming.

And the touring industry goes completely by ticket and merch sales, and isn’t very interested in the “Billboard” chart.

The two are at cross-purposes.

Turns out raw consumption is not accurately reflective of the public’s interest. Like SoundScan, it’s a revolution, even though the interesting thing here is “Billboard” refuses to go to a straight streaming chart, because that would make its “special sauce” unnecessary. Streaming service consumption charts are the cutting edge, the most accurate representation of music listening, the “Billboard” chart is a joke, once again, only useful for industry bragging rights.

So, to repeat, we need a new kind of chart.

But we also need streaming services to accept responsibility for the fact that they have a huge impact regarding the breaking and acceptance of acts. If the services featured other genres on their homepage, promoted tracks by these other acts like it does the Weeknd, they’d break. But, once again, the labels don’t want this, they want control, they want a symbiotic relationship, and the streaming services, just like Facebook and Zuckerberg and the Administration, want to keep the labels happy and buy into their construct, which hurts the public, because it is aware of fewer genres and acts.

As for kids…

Few of them have credit cards, their parents are paying for streaming services. And many have family plans, and the adults stream too, but whenever they pull up the streaming service, all they see are tracks appealing to their kids, and if they dig down into the genres, it’s nearly impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff, the great from the dreck.

Yes, the streaming services must accept responsibility. Consumption is important, but it’s not the only factor driving success today. Furthermore, what is not streamed prodigiously oftentimes has great inroads into public consciousness and would grow even bigger if amplified by streaming services.

Do I expect change?

No, but ultimately there is revolution. When you accede to an old game, eventually that game is disrupted. There’s the assumption that new players will ultimately agree to be purchased by old players, but I don’t know why. If you’re not in hip-hop or pop the majors don’t really want you, and if for some reason they do, they want a piece of your touring pie, where you make your nut, and if you self-distribute, you make most of the streaming money.

So expect more manipulation of the “Billboard” chart. Read the memo, they didn’t totally exclude it, they just moved the goalposts.

There is nothing wrong with music, but there’s a lot wrong with what gets attention and the resulting charts. It all seems transparent, but the truth is it’s manipulated by the players. But the interesting thing, once again, is if you look at what sells tickets, the scene is wide open, and a lot of these fans care about the system not a whit.

The industry is trying to replicate the twentieth century, but we live in the twenty first, hallelujah!