“Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again”: https://shorturl.at/ICCaY

This is a riveting read.

But I didn’t learn much. Regarding the facts. But aging and personalities?

Maybe it’s my personality, always looking for the negative in myself. Seeing where I falter. This makes me strive to be better, but whatever I do it will never satisfy my mother. At least she’s dead, which is a big psychological relief.

Everybody dies. But what is the attrition beforehand?

I mean you can get killed in a car accident. Pow! Wham! But assuming you live a long life and die of natural causes, or some kind of disease or cancer in your eighties and nineties, what are the odds you’re going to have all your marbles?

Not high.

Everybody fades. Sure, occasionally you find someone nearing a hundred who retains all their faculties, but…

They move slower.

They talk slower, and probably softer.

And their voice changes and…

When is this going to happen to me?

That’s what I took most from this book. Otherwise, I was stunned how closely I follow the news. There was very little I didn’t know. Sure, there was this conversation and that, but almost all of this was published in the ensuing years leading up to Biden removing himself from the race. But to see it all in one place…

Sure, you’ve seen the headlines, you know the essence of the book.

However, you really don’t know how cloistered Biden was, how little access anybody but his insider group had to him, and that was only a handful of people. Cabinet members? They barely saw him. There was a cabal running the country. And they massaged the info so as to not only keep Biden happy, but sometimes out of the loop.

The other big takeaway for me was what wimps the elected officials were. I can see why Trump is appealing. And Bernie too. They’re not playing the game. And when you don’t, they don’t like it. They made sure Bernie didn’t win the nomination and they made sure no one primaried Biden in the run-up to the 2024 election. It was all about knowing your place, tippy-toeing around people who might get offended.

We see this not only in politics, but in business too. Unless the CEO commits truly egregious behavior, they endorse him. After all, he probably installed them on the board to begin with.

And the rest of us sit at home and ask how this could have happened.

Well, what do you have at risk? No one in America wants to risk their job, their status and their income. That’s why we revered the rock stars of yore and the techies after them. They weren’t playing by the traditional rules. Sure, Americans admire money, but even more they cotton to personality. And it’s always lone riders, outsiders. And those playing the game hate them.

As far as our country?

If a fading man can be in charge, even though the hoi polloi can admit what he and his handlers cannot, how in the hell can we move forward and accomplish anything?

Trump is hell-bent on destruction.

Did you see what I did there? I put my livelihood at risk. I’ll get e-mail castigating me for inserting a jab at Trump. They want to keep me in line. Some will unsubscribe. Others will continue to work the refs, try to make me afraid.

Are you afraid?

Seemingly everybody in America is. They’ll bloviate about this or that, but when they have anything at risk, they shut up.

That’s why we’ll never see anybody with any money stand up to Trump. Even the law firms caved. No, only those without portfolio seem to be able to speak truth to power.

I don’t know what happens with the Democrats going forward. Not only did Biden single-handedly put Trump back in office, the party lost touch with the public. Everybody in the party was afraid to offend anyone. Therefore we got pronouns, an insistence that trans women should be able to play in all women’s sports… And if you crossed the line, there was an army of people to shut you down. George Carlin would be laughing. Seven dirty words? There are a slew of words you can’t use anymore because they’re going to offend someone. Where is the line? Well, the funny thing is both parties think it doesn’t exist. On the right they believe in absolute free speech, which the Constitution never guaranteed, never mind Musk blocking those on X who take a shot at him. On the left you need a cheat sheet to know how to behave, what to say, knowing that you’re going to be trashed if you get the tiniest thing wrong.

So most people tune out of politics. Believing they’re powerless. Hell, the stockholders voted against Zaslav’s exorbitant pay, but it made no difference, the board didn’t and won’t cut it.

The aforementioned Carlin said your vote doesn’t make a difference, because the owners of this country will never let you have control.

And I don’t wholly agree with George, but the elected officials are beholden to the money and…

The Democrats were supposed to be different. The Republicans were the party of let me keep mine and you’re on your own, stand on your own two feet. The Democrats were supposed to be the big compassionate tent. But they ended up self-dealing and losing touch with the public at large. What’s that old saying, sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me? But in the Democratic party everybody’s moaning and crying that someone said something negative. Everybody in this book was afraid of Biden, never mind attacking his wife who was delusionally protecting him.

So do I advise you read this book?

What you’ve got to know is most people don’t read ANY books. And most people are not comprehensive in their reading anyway. Both the Democrats and the Republicans have their preferred news outlets, cable channels, blogs, they don’t really want to know that which might upset them or undercut their beliefs.

And for that reason alone “Original Sin” should be read.

Are you aware of the Ukraine drone attack on Russian sites/planes? Maybe the headlines, but if you dig just a bit deeper, it turns out the drones themselves were extremely inexpensive, but the science, the technology behind them? That’s what America used to specialize in, and by getting rid of scientific research the whole country is now at risk.

Hate the libs all you want. Decry delusional MAGA-ites.

But you’re so busy playing the game that you’re losing the plot.

“Original Sin” will tell you how the game is really played. While those involved ignored the plot.

It’s downright scary.

Who has more power, a billionaire businessman who earned his money through hard work, insight and guile who has 220.1 million followers on the social media site he owns, or a grifter who inherited his money, has taken companies bankrupt numerous times, has a rinky-dink social network and has turned the White House into a cash machine?

In other words, who is more powerful, the MAGA-ites or the tech bros?

The MAGA people hate the libs. But this battle has nothing to do with the libs. So do they defend the Donald or go with Elon? You don’t have to dig too deep to discover that the Big Beautiful Bill will disproportionately benefit the wealthy and increase the deficit and…most people are against those, they’re easy concepts to understand, so they side with Elon here.

I heard an interesting analysis on some news station over the weekend. It posited that the Republicans in Congress are not as stupid as we think, rather they’re AFRAID! Just like the average American, their number one priority is keeping their job, and if they speak up against Trump they’ll risk being excoriated by the man and lose his endorsement and maybe even be primaried. But if there’s a leader with no skin in the traditional game…

Musk thought he was winning by being a part of the government. Turns out he had much more power OUTSIDE of D.C. The man is so damn rich that he believes he can defeat the government at every turn. And until DOGE he was doing a good job of it. Forget just blatantly ignoring the long arm of the law, rule against him and he’ll move corporate headquarters to Texas, Delaware be damned.

Trump ignoring the courts and the administrative state? Musk has been doing this for years, it’s just that most people weren’t paying attention. If it doesn’t affect you personally, most people in America just don’t care. But taxes and benefits? Those they understand.

Now for all the people who haven’t gotten rid of their Teslas…

They want to believe in them. They believed in them so much that they bought them to begin with. Can they pivot back to Muskville?

For all of today’s cancel culture, America loves a comeback story. Many would forgive Musk if he woke up and admitted his mistakes, which he seems to be doing here.

And if Trump thought he made news…

Musk OWNS the news!

First and foremost because news now lives on social media as opposed to mainstream media, nevertheless traditional media loves covering the Musk story. It’s an American story. Immigrant comes to this country and not only makes bank, but revolutionizes multiple industries along the way.

Furthermore, unlike Zuckerberg, never mind Cook, Nadella and Pichai, Musk is not media-controlled to the max. He says what he wants when he wants. Just like Trump. But try finding someone who thinks Trump is smarter than Musk. A lot of Trump’s supporters just like his positions, they overlook his lies and lack of intelligence. The entire economic world has railed against the tariffs, saying they make no sense, but Trump soldiers on, flip-flopping along the way.

Now Tesla sales have declined worldwide. But not only is Musk’s fortune tied to the company, the entire world has pivoted to electric cars. Trump wants to bring us back, Musk wants to bring us forward, into the future.

So…

Musk is providing cover for Republican congresspeople to go against Trump, and Mike Johnson is way out of his league here.

Meanwhile, even more than McDonald’s, the general public is LOVIN’ IT!

This is better than the Kendrick Lamar/Drake rap battle, this is real life, with real consequences. And Musk isn’t going to back down. Because he’s not a politician and if he were able to consider all factors and then make a decision he wouldn’t have impulsively purchased Twitter to begin with!

Musk is a hothead, a live wire. And not traditionally a flip-flopper. I don’t want to lionize the man, but up until he got deeply involved in politics he was considered to be the new Steve Jobs. And Jobs was hated and exiled into the wilderness before he returned to Apple a changed man and triumphed. Jobs learned how to get along. Has Musk learned lessons from his personal disaster of the last few months?

Musk thought he knew everything because he was rich. And he’s not the only one. But unlike most wealthy people he continues to go all-in, he’ll risk everything for his vision. And people cotton to someone like that, they believe in someone like that, BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT THEY’D LIKE TO DO!

People want heroes. And Trump never really fit that description. Musk? For a while there he was #1. Can he recapture the magic?

One thing is for sure, he feels burned by Trump and the system. He doesn’t even smile when he blows back. He nearly sneers. He feels like he was taken.

So…

This is not an endorsement of Musk, but an analysis. Who is more powerful, the President or Elon Musk? Who has more sway over the public? Who controls hearts and minds? Who do people want to believe in?

Never mind Musk being 53 and Trump turning 79 in a matter of days. Musk is digitally native, Trump hasn’t even conquered the English language, never mind tech. Trump is all about smoke and mirrors, with Musk what you see is what you get, and in a world where all warts are revealed, Musk is the modern one.

And Musk doesn’t need a plane from Qatar. He’s so damn rich he doesn’t need more money. Meanwhile, he keeps making money for others. Those who invested in X didn’t get their lunch eaten, they got paid back in spades when X was merged with xAI.

We’ve been waiting for a reckoning. A moment of truth. Someone to stand up to the insanity. We can all see it, but the Democrats say they’re powerless and anybody with a buck is afraid to put it at risk. Law firms and media have fallen in line, and the chilling effect is monstrous.

But you can’t keep Elon Musk in line.

Just like you couldn’t keep John Lennon in line.

Yes, Elon Musk is more akin to a legendary rock star than anybody in the Spotify Top 50, because he did the one thing that they won’t, HE SPOKE TRUTH TO POWER!

Musk didn’t put his finger to the wind, didn’t commission a poll, didn’t get so hung up in the potential negatives that he refused to act. No, he moves fast and breaks things, in the classic tech style.

I thought Trump would be defeated by an Arab Spring moment. Someone sans portfolio screwed by his policies who just can’t take it anymore. I didn’t foresee a billionaire barking back.

But that’s just what Musk has done.

And so far Trump and his cronies don’t know how to handle it, they’re not even sure what they’re up against. They keep accommodating Musk, hoping he’ll issue a mea culpa and rejoin the fold. Instead, Elon has doubled-down, he keeps publicly criticizing Trump policy.

And what is Trump going to do? Musk is bigger than he is. Everything comes down to money, and Musk has more, MUCH more.

And that money can sway elections. Not for unelectable candidates, but when the battle is close.

This is just the beginning. The Big Beautiful Bill won’t pass intact, no way, it would be career suicide for those in Congress. They know it’s flawed, yet they’ve been afraid to go against Trump, but Musk is now giving them cover to defect.

This is just the beginning.

Watch this space.

“Buzz Me In: Inside Record Plant Studios”: https://shorturl.at/CkwqG

Just when you think every story’s been told…

I couldn’t put this book down. I started it yesterday and finished it today. And I’m a slow reader. I want to devour every word. I’m memorizing without even realizing it. Because that’s just how much I care.

The same way I read every scrap of music business news…before there became too much and the stars were cut down to our size, no matter what the press would want us to believe. The starmaking machinery is not turning out a new Joni Mitchel, no one is close. And we never did get a new Beatles, forget a new Dylan. And we might soon be saying we never got a new Springsteen…

Who recorded at the Record Plant.

It’s not like the history of the various Record Plant studios is unknown. And if  you were a newshound back then, you read Lucian K. Truscott IV’s “New Times” story about Gary Kellgren and the studios…

“New Times.” It was the best news magazine of that era. Did you read the exposé of Gregg Allman’s drug bust and trial?

Probably not.

And you probably aren’t even aware of the eighties’ best magazine, “Manhattan, Inc.,” Clay Felker’s tour-de-force.

Then again that’s when writers could still compete with rock stars. When we had an entirely new generation of scribes. Hunter Thompson, Tom Robbins and Tom McGuane.

And there was a clear dividing line between the stars and us. We all wanted access. To be inside the room where it happens, as “Hamilton” delineates.

And boy did it happen. There are pictures of albums recorded at the various Record Plants and the only one I didn’t recognize, didn’t know by heart from buying it or seeing it in the bins, was one by the Attitudes. Then again, this supergroup comprised of Danny Kortchmar, Jim Keltner, the then-unknown David Foster and bassist Paull Stallworth’s two albums only came out in Japan. That’s what Wikipedia tells me, but it’s not always right, nor are the timeline and some of the facts in this book, but the mistakes are minor. And it was a long, long time ago (and “American Pie” was recorded at Record Plant N.Y.)

So you’ve got the stories of the engineer Gary Kellgren, who had the creative vision, Chris Stone who had the business chops, and a Revlon heiress who invested the initial capital? I didn’t know that.

And if you’re a student of the game, you know the outlines of the stories, but this book puts you directly in front of the console. Hell, I know a lot of these people and I still learned a bunch of stuff. I spoke at length with Robert Margouleff for an aborted podcast, but still I learned more about Stevie Wonder and TONTO and Malcolm Cecil and the music they made.

What you’ve got here is a musical engineering school, where everybody was taught a little, and then thrown into the deep end. Roy Cicala would start the session and then disappear without notice, that’s how Jimmy Iovine became the engineer for “Born to Run.”

Jack Douglas? Thom Panunzio? They worked their way up the food chain. Not that all of them can still work today, not all of them are even alive.

It was a golden era. And that’s what all the wankers who say it’s no different today than it ever was have wrong. You see they were inventing it as they went along. Kind of like the internet, before Facebook, Apple, Google and Microsoft became established enemies.

Studios were ratholes. But there were technological breakthroughs. The Scully 12 track, which seems to now be completely forgotten. Forget SSL, these studios didn’t even have NEVEs! API was the breakthrough, and by the eighties most front liners didn’t want to work on that board, even though it’s come back into vogue, a little bit.

Man, I know Bob Ezrin well, but they tell stories of Bob in his heyday… I knew he taped Peter Gabriel to the wall in Toronto, but that was a regular feature of Ezrin’s sessions, taping people to chairs, all kinds of nonsense/shenanigans. And when Bob works with KISS he says his goal is to entertain THEM, to keep them energized.

Sure, there are some production tips. But it’s more of a dive into a lost era. Dead Sea Scrolls. There was so much money raining down that you could pad expenses… Forget billing the label for studio time, they billed the companies for drugs and equipment broken by the acts. There was so much MONEY!

And the goal of the Record Plant was to keep you coming back, assuming they didn’t get you to lease a studio for years, like they did with Stevie Wonder.

And it was a floating party. And you’d occasionally see these people out and about. In the Rainbow parking lot, next door in the Roxy… But you could never ever enter the circle. The days of expensive privates had not arrived. Rock stars were gods, and everybody wanted to touch them, gain access.

Now those who haven’t died have lost some of their charisma, but the music they made, it’s set in amber, it’s for all time. There are even stories of how they came up with some of these legendary tunes, often only in a matter of minutes.

And how some acts couldn’t let go, they wanted to record and remix forever.

And there’s a more accurate depiction of Phil Spector than I’ve seen anywhere else. When he fires a gun right next to John Lennon. When he was constantly drunk. When he held tapes hostage.

These are the stories behind the records. The people who made them and how they made them. And I think young people don’t give a sh*t. They don’t care about this history. I grew up and TV was de rigueur. But for my mother, it was a breakthrough! Ditto on my generation and the internet.

As for the acts, some will be rediscovered, many have never left the playing field…you can hear their records in regular rotation on ClassicVinyl and DeepTracks.

This particular book has not been written before. We’ve got books listing all the sessions, but exactly what went down inside the buildings…some of us care, and if you do…

The book made me feel good, it made me feel like my life was worth living, that my choices were good.

And it’s hard these days. When everything is topsy-turvy. If you want to know which way the wind blows, you don’t listen to a record. We had the Drake/Kendrick cartoon rap battle… It’s entertainment. Never mind the acts making musical pabulum believing this is what the public wants. The acts back then didn’t care a whit what the public wanted, they needed to put down what THEY wanted.

Today you can cut at home on your laptop on almost an infinite number of tracks. Time is not money. But it used to be. And it was spent.

To go into the studio back in the day… There was a magic, your skin tingled…

And that feeling is captured in this book.

Netflix trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72hK6FUmm8o

How does everybody know?

My e-mail has been blowing up about this show starting on Thursday, the day it went live. And I did see reviews in some papers, but to think the success of this show is based on the usual hype is to believe the mainstream media is still in control of success, and that is completely untrue.

“Dept. Q”‘s success is based on word of mouth. And that is everything today. You can’t build it and you can’t sustain it.

That’s another thing the oldsters have wrong. You don’t try to build and string out, today everything is hit and run. Online fads/memes can be done in a week. Then on to the next thing. Once the mainstream finds out about it it’s already on the downswing.

Now Netflix does have the advantage of its home screen. Not that I knew what it was, but they were pitching me “Dept. Q” starting a few days before it went live.

That’s another thing, advance hype to build excitement? Why? Remember when acts were worried about their masters being stolen and released before street date? Acts just wished there was that amount of mania about their new music today. For a while there we got the secret drop…you know, you wake up and it’s there. But today there’s so much in the pipeline that even that doesn’t work.

Not that music is identical to streaming TV. There is no home screen for music. If you think real estate on Spotify makes a difference, you’re probably paying for it. If you think it’s all about playlisting…you don’t know that active listeners pick and choose, they don’t listen to playlists (I didn’t make this up, Spotify has told us this over and over again). People believe in playlisting the same way they insist on still sending you their CD, as if it’s not easier to just click and listen…and turn off! If your PR person says they’re going to ship CDs, fire them, or don’t hire them to begin with. But there are a ton of people who’ll take your money and everybody’s frustrated because they don’t know what to do, how to gain attention for their work.

It’s easy… Make the best work possible. There’s very little great stuff out there, and if something is great people will find it, and talk about it.

Not that I think “Dept. Q” is phenomenal, the whole bit with Merritt and what happened to her doesn’t ring true with me. But Matthew Goode as Carl Morck is such a prick, superior and he doesn’t even know how his personality works against him.

As for Kelly Macdonald… Did you see her in “Line of Duty”? Or maybe “Giri/Haji”? Hell, she’s got an arm’s worth of credits. But we don’t keep being beaten over the head with her, she’s not constantly in the gossip columns, she’s an actress.

As for the show…

It isn’t long on nuance. This isn’t one for the ages.

But we’re only three episodes in. And there are nine. And I must say the third episode is the best one yet.

Would there be this amount of buzz and excitement if “Dept. Q” was dropped week by week? OF COURSE NOT! Not only do you hear about it, but you can dive deep immediately.

People are constantly talking sh*t about Netflix, and Netflix keeps winning, doing it their way. Netflix is bigger than a network, it’s THE network. With more product than any network every purveyed.

As a matter of fact, we’re in the middle of this Norwegian show “Pernille,” which gets better and better as it goes along. There are five seasons of six shows each, all about half an hour, and it’s rewarding in ways that conventional shows are not. And it’s on Netflix.

We want to feel like we belong. And media keeps telling us to pay attention and feel like we belong, but that doesn’t work, even though everybody involved in that game keeps slapping each other’s back, smiling and believing they own the game.

The people own the game. And it’s fun to be watching and clued-in to what everybody else is.

I wish we had music like this. And we do have some, but it’s mostly country. Finally the mainstream press is acknowledging this, but we had to hear for years and years that we lived in a hip-hop nation. Not anymore. Or to whatever extent we are, it’s fading.

Because everything fades. Even rock and roll.

But when was the last time you heard a straight ahead one listen rock song? Creators are too deep in their niches to do this. They want to belong to a scene. When the scene is purely great music.

As for “Dept. Q”… I can’t wait to continue. And isn’t that the essence?