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“No Saints, No Saviors-My Years With The Allman Brothers Band”

You sold your soul for rock and roll.

Well, at least your life.

For the last twenty years, we’ve been deluged with tales of college dropouts going to Silicon Valley to change the world and get rich.

They used to go into rock and roll. And money was not the primary driver.

Reading this book you’re stunned at the low payouts for concerts. Forget inflation, they’ve been far outstripped by today’s fees.

The experience has changed. Now you don’t save ticket stubs, you shoot selfies, and broadcast them on social media. Used to be attendance was a personal badge of honor, you told the tales of attendance, but it was the inner mounting flame of the music that got you there.

And you’re going to go back again.

When the baby boomers die, rock and roll will return.

Yup, if the delta bluesmen had money and social media they too would have decried the efforts of the English cats. So today you’ve got acts like Greta Van Fleet abhorred because they’re an imitation of what once was. They called them John Mayall’s BLUESBREAKERS, get the point?

So the problem with rock is it got too far from the garden.

Of course there was the Seattle reset, a replacement of the sold out ethos of the hair bands.

But before the advent of MTV, rock cratered because it became all about the Benjamins. It was labeled corporate rock, and in many cases it was.

But the eighties saw the flourishing of derivatives of new wave and ultimately punk but one thing was for sure, there was melody. Hell, Black Sabbath looks like nursery rhymes compared to today’s metal.

Now you might have seen the article in today’s “Times” about hologram tours:

Old Musicians Never Die. They Just Become Holograms.

One thing’s for sure, today’s classic rock performers who are not already dead soon will be, or will be unable to perform. But the hunger to see them, to experience their music, will remain.

This is what those focusing on today myopically don’t understand.

We talk about the Renaissance, even though that was half a century ago.

The sixties and seventies were the musical Renaissance. Maybe even some of the eighties too.

Come on, the Stones and the Eagles sell out stadiums. Look at the touring numbers, they’re dominated by old acts, and it’s not only old people going to see them. People want a hit of what once was.

Yup, when the boomers die, it will be cool to hearken back to what once was, to listen to the music of the seventies, never mind the sixties, all of which is available online. People will hear it and play it and then be inspired by it. And it won’t be about paint by numbers, but a feeling.

There’s no feeling in computer code.

Yup, in a digital world it’s the human that becomes valuable.

Expect a reset, not only back to rock and roll, but literature, story.

Computers can’t write story. And that’s why streaming TV is burgeoning, we’re all addicted to tales, and when the film business stopped talking about real people, there was a vacuum, and television filled it.

Yup, on one hand we’ve got technology out of control, like a bad sci-fi movie… Facebook and so many of the outlets are overwhelmed by consequences that they did not foresee, because the proprietors did not graduate from college, did not read enough books.

Today college is a glorified trade school where you start thinking about your resulting job long before you graduate.

But in the classic rock era… It was just preparation, time to set your mind free, to experiment. You figured out what you were gonna do after graduation, if then, if you didn’t hitchhike cross-country or save for a trip to Europe or…

Now of course today’s society is much more economically difficult. You can’t make it on minimum wage. And this is one reason people are up in arms about income inequality. I mean at least give us a few more scraps, so we can expand our horizons. Yup, there’s a backlash against tech, against elites, against CEOs, against globalization, because they pushed it too far, for their own greed.

The music was for us.

So, Willie Perkins was the Allman Brothers’ road manager.

He’d gone to college, he had a job at the bank, but he threw it all over for rock and roll, for $140 a week (the band members got $90), just to be a member of the circus, just to get closer to the music.

Yup, you start reading this book and you remember how it once was. When there were no smartphones and we were all disconnected and we went to the show to connect.

Funny thing is we can associate online, but we still go to the show to connect.

And that’s how the Allman Brothers broke.

You can’t get national reach anymore. Impossible. Unless you’re Trump or you shoot someone. People keep trying… Ha, in today’s “Times” there’s a story about Steve Martin’s new single…GOOD LUCK! Hell, once you’re promoting in the paper you know you’re screwed, either it starts virally online, spread by like-minded thinkers, or it doesn’t even begin.

So, you start on the road, playing live. That’s where the scene burbles.

But there are so many fewer places to play, and canned music and deejays fill the slots. And those at the advent always ask the same question…where’s the money? IT’S NOT THERE!

After being lauded by your parents, after being coddled, no one wants to sacrifice, at least no one with a brain, forgetting the nitwits who go on reality TV and then back to nowheresville where they came from.

The road less taken is far more difficult, and most people are not up to it.

But some are.

So, we’ve got faux contenders, wannabes. If you’re not a great singer, you’d better be the best lyricist…but in so many bands, this is not the case. It’s like everybody should get a trophy, when in truth only a few can grab the brass ring.

And after their heyday, the Brothers were broke. Sure, they liked the money, but that’s not why they did it. And then they didn’t go straight, they continued to play, in clubs, not arenas.

Some things never change. There will always be a hunger for music with melody played by human beings.

And there will always be a hunger for those who push the envelope, break the formula.

And sometimes it’s just a reconstitution of the formula. The Brothers had two lead guitarists and a frontman on a bench.

Now when you drop the needle on “Fillmore East”…

“I woke up this morning, I had them Statesboro Blues.”

Blind Willie McTell wrote it back in 1928. And forty-odd years later the Allman Brothers Band reinvented it.

And through the magic of the internet, you can hear the original, just one man and his guitar. It’s the same song, but a vastly different record.

Now the same thing is gonna happen in the future, after we believe rock is long dead and gone. There’s gonna be a coterie of youngsters who reject the pop sound, who become addicted to numbers ignored by others. They’re gonna learn how to play them, then they’re gonna perform them, and seemingly overnight the TR-808 and the jive of the hit parade will crumble and this new sound will take over. Happened with the Beatles, it can happen again.

And we’re getting to the starting point, the Doors came back, as did Led Zeppelin, but today the hits aren’t even hits, they’re far from ubiquitous, and what came before is just history, albeit encased in amber, at least the recordings.

And when I read Willie Perkins’s book I immediately got that jolt, that hit of the way it used to be, both in the music and the business. When you had to get paid in cash, when you handcuffed your briefcase to the bathroom pipe, when you’d do anything to get into rock and roll.

Music can move mountains when it’s done right.

And right is always a bit off-center.

The pebbles are there, you can follow the trail.

But being a musician is nothing like being an influencer, a social media star, a Kardashian. It’s not about getting rich, but avoiding a day job, living a different lifestyle, that feeling when you’re on stage and all the players lock in and you’re levitated into the stratosphere.

And the audience comes with you.

The audience is waiting, it always is. It moves faster than the media, it’s got more members, looking 24/7. Giving people what they want is a road to death. It’s the disruptors who triumph. And usually it’s only one or two, and then others are inspired to take risks too.

I know, I was there.

But those who were not, they’re gonna want to get close.

“This airplane is designed by clowns who are in turn supervised by monkeys.”

(Boeing employee)

Where is Ralph Nader when you need him?

The 737 Max should be scrapped, stricken from the air, but regulators are afraid of putting Boeing out of business.

That’s right. In a failed attempt to compete with Airbus, which had seen the future and designed a whole new plane to address it, Boeing was caught flat-footed and gussied up an old plane, A FIFTY YEAR OLD PLANE!

Think about that. It’s like putting airbags in your Valiant. You can try, but what you end up with probably won’t work.

The 737 was designed for a different era, one without jetways, one in which you walked onto the plane from the tarmac.

Meaning the wings were low and the engines that hung from them were low too. So if you wanted to add more power, you needed bigger engines, that would not fit. So Boeing moved them forward. The only problem was that screwed up the stability of the plane, now it might stall because of this weight imbalance. So, in a concept only Rube Goldberg could embrace, Boeing decided to solve the problem with software, and essentially not tell anybody about it. Yup, it was so foolproof, like Windows 3.0, that you’d never get the blue screen of death, it would always work as intended, it would never CRASH!

But, of course it did.

Now if you’re following this closely, the old guard, the Chuck Yeagers of this world, those who flew planes before computerization, who could land in your backyard, are saying it’s all pilot error. Actually, Boeing said this too, as if everybody behind the wheel of an automobile should have the skills of Lewis Hamilton.

But not only are newbie pilots flying these planes, especially overseas, in America they overuse newbie pilots and underpay them as they fly you on regional airlines. It’s business baby, and you’ve got to make a profit, and the public requires you to deliver low prices.

If you followed the recent numbers, manufacturing is continuing to crater in the U.S., although its revenue is being replaced by services, which is what every reasonable economist and techie has been saying for decades.

But NO! Trump was gonna bring back those well-paying jobs that if they exist today are being done by machines.

And it’s not only the right, the Democrats, and all those line workers used to be Democrats, believe we need a reset too.

And the public refuses to pay $2500 for a flat screen.

Yup, we love low prices. And we want the lowest. And if they made these items in America, they’d be much more expensive.

You can’t have it both ways, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

But no one can sacrifice in America. We’re entitled to drive monster trucks known as SUVs and live in giant homes and pollute. Jimmy Carter said to put on a sweater and he was excoriated!

But the truth is America is sinking. Its reputation as the greatest country in the world? Ask outside.

And yes, people are still dying to immigrate here, quite literally, but there’s no vision of the future, no idea that the future is coming, hell, most of our elected representatives are tech-challenged, which is why Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign is getting any traction at all.

So, the truth is, the 737 Max should be scrapped. This is not the 787 Dreamliner, with new technology, batteries that must be fixed. This is not cutting edge technology whose quirks have to be ironed out. Rather, this is all about putting lipstick on a pig, AND NOT TELLING ANYBODY!

Now talk to the airlines that bought ’em. They’re screwed. They’ve had to cancel flights, they’re losing money, actually they’re pushing Boeing to compensate them.

And the truth is you’ve got to order planes way in advance, you can’t make them in a day.

But who is gonna make the airlines whole if the planes are scrapped?

Well, D.C. made GM whole but did not compensate those who purchased cars from deleted brands, like Saab and Pontiac. Not to mention that GM was mismanaged into bankruptcy, which is just what Detroit is doing right now. The manufacturers just say they’re giving people what they want. But when gasoline prices soar, when people’s desires change…they’ll have nothing to sell them. The future always come running down the pike.

So Boeing moved its headquarters to Chicago, because the execs were sick of being in a backwater in Washington, State that is. And one of the best analyses I’ve read of the crisis is you gain info from walking the production line, being in the factory, engaging with the workers. But this was impossible! It’d be like asking you or me to say what’s happening on the moon, we can only guess, we haven’t been there and we’re not going there and the execs didn’t bother to go to Everett.

Sometimes you’ve got to start over, you’ve got to jettison the past.

That’s what made Apple so successful under Steve Jobs. Not only did he introduce the GUI and mouse, he was famous for ditching legacy ports. pushing his customers into the future. Oh sure, they’d bitch, but come on, have you heard someone complain about the lack of parallel ports on a Mac recently? (And the parallel port was designed after the 737!)

Already there’s a ripple effect as a result of the grounding of the 737 MAX, not only are the airlines who bought them and ordered them hurting, but so are the suppliers, they’re laying off workers.

And in America it’s all about the bottom line, right? We lionize billionaires, right? If you’ve got that money you were an honest, hard-working citizen who is brilliant and entitled to it…wrong!

So fired CEO Dennis Muilenberg walks with $62 million and we’re left with this albatross.

Now, chances are, they’ll figure out the software, the MCAS for the 737 Max. Then again, it was gonna take a few months, and now it’s nearly a year. It’d be like having your printer malfunction and waiting a year for a patch. Huh?

And most people are ignorant when it comes to flying anyway. They think the plane is gonna crash when the truth is your odds of being killed in a car are so much higher.

And people are scared of flying in the 737 Max and they probably should not be.

But should they keep on making this Frankenstein plane?

Let’s be practical here. There’s almost no way they’re gonna scrap the already built planes, but should they build any more? Air travel has not ground to a halt without the 737 Max in the air. Maybe without deliveries growth will be hampered, but the truth is the airlines are rolling in dough after years of mismanagement by having the planes fly full and charging you for not only bags, but the right to select your seat, never mind put your luggage in the overhead compartment. They, and we, can afford the wait for new planes.

But the government doesn’t want to penalize Boeing.

In a reasonable country, the government would claw back Muilenberg’s golden parachute. But no one with any money, no one at the top of the food chain, none of the bankers on Wall Street who cratered the economy paid, none went to jail. Imagine if they sent Muilenberg to jail! Do you think any airplane manufacturer would cut corners in the future?

But no, the little guy always pays, you and me. The government will rescue Boeing and then give them cash, like they did with Wall Street.

And you wonder why there’s a left wing backlash. Yup, the people at the center of this system don’t want Bernie or Elizabeth to be nominated, because they like things just the way they are, and they’ve convinced so many that the little guy will lose if there’s any change. At least give the Trumpers credit, they realized the world was no longer working for them, even if they desired to go back to a past that wasn’t so good to begin with and can never come back, because the future only goes in one direction.

But no one in D.C. has any balls. They’ll testify, kick and scream, they just won’t do anything.

Scrap the 737 MAX. It will be good for America.

In more ways than one.

It was personal.

We’re watching this Norwegian series on Netflix. It’s entitled “Occupied.” Because of an energy crisis, Russia ultimately infiltrates Norway. And there are a lot of parallels to today’s world. Like the rule of law. Once you throw it out, everything implodes. Once you use illegal information to convict someone, what is the legal system worth?

But then there’s a power struggle. The prime minister leaves no room for his number two in the new government in exile. She wasn’t elected, but she has incredible influence, she tells the prime minister what to do. And when she finds out there’s no place for her, despite promises she’s an integral member, too important to get a specific title, she goes behind the PM’s back and forms a new government in Norway with HER as prime minister.

Never underestimate the power of being dissed.

Now the truth is, so many of the prognosticators, the talking heads, those inside the beltway, do not have high public profiles, especially the lobbyists and corporatists who work behind the scenes. So they’re not aware of the social media blowback.

Give Trump credit, by tweeting he single-handedly brought D.C. into the present. It used to be a club of insiders, now it’s run by an outsider and all the Republicans are kowtowing to him, but not those he’s dissing on social media.

The most important article about the killing of Soleimani was in the “Washington Post” a week ago:

“Soleimani posted memes antagonizing Trump on social media”

The bigger the narcissist, the more they abhor negative feedback. Just ask Taylor Swift! Furthermore, Swift was a target because she was the biggest act in the business, and Donald Trump is PRESIDENT!

I’ve been there. When you say something about someone who believes they’re invulnerable, above it all, THEY GO INSANE! Now at this late date, those who are savvy don’t respond, if you don’t amplify something, it tends to die out. But when you’re hit over the head every day, when someone thinks they’re just as powerful as you and has a significant position on the world stage…

IT DROVE DONALD TRUMP INSANE!

That’s why they can’t come up with a reason for the killing of Soleimani. Yup, for a week the press has been trying to figure out why. And Trump and the Republicans keep obfuscating, because there’s no legitimate reason other than Trump had had ENOUGH!

This is why the Democrats are doomed. They’re still living in the last century. Where everybody’s prim and proper, where you don’t use profanity, and you don’t use modern media to get your message across. The Russians took ads on social media… Hillary Clinton was so busy triangulating that she had no idea what was going on!

Like Joe Biden. Who didn’t even get pissed, didn’t go nuclear when the Hunter Biden contract at the heart of the Ukraine controversy became front page news. If Biden were smart, and he’s not, he’d have gone on the attack immediately, muddied the waters, and if he played the game the way Trump does, so successfully, he would have ADMITTED IT! Yup, Hunter got the well-paying gig because I was his dad. The same way Ivanka got all those contracts, the same way most people get a job these days…YOU’VE GOT TO KNOW SOMEBODY! That would have resonated with the public. Instead, when Biden did speak up, he kept avoiding what we all knew…Hunter got the gig because he was Joe’s son, even if Joe didn’t get him that gig and didn’t try to keep Hunter and the company from being investigated. It’s not that hard, you’ve just got to speak ENGLISH!

Now what the Republicans have done so well is eviscerate facts, nothing is believable anymore, everything is up for grabs. Forget climate change, it’s the little things, the every day things, the right doesn’t believe them. And what did the Democrats and the non-right wing press do…NOTHING! There’s all this insider analysis re Soleimani when it’s obvious, if you look at the big picture.

Everybody keeps talking about the job, the office, the responsibility… But that’s not who Trump is. Trump is impulsive, used to getting his way. He stiffs contractors. He gropes women. And he was immune until he became President.

And Trump knows his game. Deny and refuse to reveal, over and over again.

That’s another thing the hoi polloi does not understand. The press, the legal system, those are things to be MANIPULATED!

Yup, you’ve got your PR agent and you place the story or spin the story or trade the story to make sure it does not appear.

As for the government, the legal system, it’s just business. You fight, you’ve got the resources. Legal battles take years. Cases are hard to prove. And worst case you settle, usually for not that much. As for the CEO of Boeing, he just walked with $60 mil, after getting fired!

Sure, we’ve got all this #Me Too coverage, and that’s great. But we’ve got very little coverage about what it’s like inside the boys club, amongst those who really run the world.

If you’re not battling from day one, if you don’t have your eyes on the prize, you’re never gonna get there.

And on the way you’re gonna have to be two-faced and manipulative. And when you succeed you’re going to undermine and eliminate your adversaries.

And you’re gonna live a large lifestyle just to prove what a big swinging dick you are. Chances are you don’t have time to visit all those vacation homes, sail on that yacht, but all your contemporaries know you’ve got ’em. And there are the trophy wives and we lionize these corporate titans as winners, even though we abhor their morals, even though we won’t do what they do.

And sure, there are some sociopaths, more than you’d imagine, but the rest of ’em? They’ve got no real friends, because they trust no one. And they sleep with one eye open.

So when Soleimani said “It is not in our president’s dignity to respond to you…” and “If you begin the war, we will end the war. You know that this war will destroy all that you possess.” Trump had two choices…to laugh or go nuclear.

True winners laugh. They know which of their enemies really have power. And they ignore those who ain’t got it, and work behind the scenes to get those who do. Come on, that’s how Obama got Osama, right? He didn’t boast every day that he was gonna get him, didn’t keep threatening him, he actually lulled Osama into complacency, and then BOOM!

Sometimes it’s not that complicated. Sometimes the intellectuals ignore the human.

And we’re all human. And it takes a lot to ignore the slings and arrows. The truth is most people can’t. And Trump? NO WAY!