We are all looking to make it. And we employ signifiers, status markers, to indicate that we’ve crossed the threshold, that we are no longer trapped amongst the great unwashed, that finally we are SOMEBODY!

And one of the main ways you felt settled, that you were not only on your way, but part of the firmament, was seeing your name in the news.

It’s a thrill when it first happens. You mean you want MY opinion, you want to write about ME? But as time goes by, you find out it’s meaningless, because everybody is expressing their opinion or promoting their wares all day long online and your triumph gets lost in the shuffle.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with publicity, and sometimes it even gooses projects and careers, all I am saying is it won’t sustain a career. And longevity is everything today.

Used to be very few people could make it. Could get a record deal, never mind get on the radio and become a star who can sell tickets. Whatever your innate talent, the work of a whole team enabled you to climb the ladder, which is why you see award winners constantly thanking their handlers.

But awards don’t mean much either. I hope you’re thrilled you won, but in a matter of months, seemingly no one remembers your victory. Furthermore, there are a lot of Grammy winners who make their money elsewhere, not in music, or have given up completely. That’s what an award is worth. So if that’s your goal…

I was reading the “Wall Street Journal” yesterday and I saw a friend was quoted. He’s not a public figure, I don’t think his inclusion resonated with a broad swath of the public. For a second there I thought how they didn’t call me, but that’s just a step on the ladder, a momentary feel-good experience. Most people, after they’ve had that brush with publicity, felt good for a moment and have seen the return was relatively minimal, go back to doing the work.

And it’s all about the work.

Ah, that’s a cliché. Let me try to restate it in other words.

If you want to last a long time in today’s world, you’ve got to keep on creating, because there’s so much news and so much of it reaches so few people that most have already forgotten about you, if they knew about you in the first place.

There’s nothing wrong with a feature in the “Times” or the “Wall Street Journal”… But be wary, these outlets are never completely positive. That David Geffen documentary? The one on Jimmy Iovine and Dre? They were love letters, because THEY PAID FOR THEM! They know it’s all about control, kudos.

But if you give up control, beware.

However, let’s return to basics. Most people are looking to get noticed. They want to get out of the hole that they’re in. They want to throw the long ball, they want to believe there is some grand poohbah out there who can reach out and anoint them and their career will be made. Today this is patently untrue.

Let’s start with the number of news outlets.

I know, I know, I’ve lauded Apple News+, but if you read the general feed your eyes will glaze over, it’s all clickbait headlines…and when you click through, there’s very little there.

You even get the same thing in the Google News!

All these outlets fighting for attention have caused people to look elsewhere for information, first and foremost their friends and family, real, or those they’ve met online. It’s like we’re living in the 1800s, prior to modern communication methods. The mainstream has worn out its welcome, been excoriated by those who don’t agree with it, on both the left and the right, and has never meant less.

But we’re not talking about general news here, we’re talking about you.

You’re looking for a leg up, you’re looking for it to be made easier. IT’S NEVER GOING TO BE MADE EASIER! The major label can’t break you, if it will even sign you. Terrestrial radio can’t break you, it takes its clues from Spotify and other streaming media. And Spotify is a great democracy influenced by word of mouth, both online and offline. Social media can drive a hit more than terrestrial radio. But there’s no direct pipeline, no one you can pay to get millions of views.

So…

Paying for streams, for views on YouTube…unless your plan is to leverage these to make a deal with a larger entity, save your money. Your fans don’t care, and it’s only about your fans.

Now I’m not saying fans are irrelevant, it’s just that now there’s a direct conduit from you to them, and you must feed the beast, constantly. Your only hope of growing is via your fans, and if you’re not top of mind, they’re not going to do the work for you. And some fans spread the word and some do not, and you don’t know who is who, so you have to keep spraying bullets and…

Sounds hard, doesn’t it?

It’s VERY hard.

Anybody can get noticed for a minute or two. Every week in the “Times” Sunday Style section they hype a book or previously unknown person and it’s almost like the kiss of death, they’re never heard from again.

TV entertainment news? If you think active consumers are even watching broadcast/cable TV, you’re dreaming. That’s not the bleeding edge, and those who make a difference, who change the world, are always harvesting information on the fringe.

So, you’ve got to keep on working, or you’re going to be forgotten. Most of the public does not know your one hit wonder and there’s a tsunami of product and you’re not going to get many streams in the future.

Now wait just a minute you say… I won, I triumphed, I SUCCEEDED!

Maybe by old school metrics.

There’s no overlord with fairy dust spraying it on the lucky few.

No, you’re not only the creator, you’re the fairy too.

And be wary of getting away from your mission. That brand extension might be a mistake if it takes your focus from the core work, if it undercuts your credibility.

In other words, unless you’ve got a plan to get in quick and get out nearly as fast, the world has completely changed. It’s not about momentary vertical success, it’s about continuing to be in the landscape. For year after year after year.

If you’re doing this for an annum or two, before you go to graduate school, don’t even bother, go enroll at the academy. Because it takes longer than ever to gain a following, and you never quite know when you’ve made it, if you’ve made it at all.

Read the news. The trades. Look at who is featured, who is promoted, but don’t feel left out. That’s a moment in time. Used to be it was a rarefied world, only a few could get ink, now EVERYBODY can get ink.

That’s true. If you’re old enough you’ll remember what a thrill it was to be on TV. You told your friends to look for you at the baseball game. Now you don’t even mention it, because it’s no big deal. The barrier to entry is so low, it’s not hard to get on TV, and so many of the people who cross that threshold are nincompoops. Why is it the “Housewives” are always getting in legal trouble and divorced? If they were that rich, this wouldn’t happen. No, they believe if they are on these shows they are stars, whereas truly they are laughingstocks, fodder for the machine. You know the number one rule of reality television…DON’T BE ON IT!

So it’s just you. In the wilderness. Trying to grow a fan base. Even a hit isn’t going to mean you’ve got a career. No, you must do foundational work, one on one. You must nurture your image, not do anything out of character. People need to be able to trust you. And what the press says or doesn’t say about you is essentially irrelevant. Certainly here today and gone tomorrow.

Of course there are people who make it a full time job to appear in the press, but that does not mean they’re rich, that they’ve even got a career, or even fans, just that some people see their names on a regular basis.

But so many still want to believe. That if they hire publicity and promotion people,  if they get their name out in the news, they will be winning.

Today winning is something you feel inside. No one else can claim victory for you. No one else can anoint you with pixie dust. There are social media influencers making more money than most of the people in the Spotify Top 50, even though very few know their names. Young people acknowledge this change, old people pooh-pooh it, because they don’t like having their cheese moved, they don’t like the evisceration of rules. There must be rules, right?

There are no rules, you make it up as you go. And chances are those jumping the track, doing the out of ordinary, never mind extraordinary, are going to win.

So if you’re railing against the system…

You’re the system. Only you. It all comes down to you.

Keep producing. Doesn’t matter what the general public thinks, just what your fans do. And if you’re good enough, you’ll grow a fan base and sustain it. But that’s too heavy a lift for newbies, they want someone exterior, in the firmament, to say they’ve made it, that they’re a star.

But that paradigm went out with the internet. And the internet’s been around for thirty years.

So it’s time to acknowledge where we are. A Tower of Babel world where you’re the act, the bus driver, the social media maven…one in which you wear all the hats and if you want to have a conference, you look in the mirror.

But never forget, people are still looking for great, and there’s very little great out there. So if you are truly great, people will find and promote you…just don’t expect it to happen overnight.

The records that were hits at the same time as the British Invasion.

Tune in Saturday April 4th to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West.

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app. Search: Lefsetz

1

To tell you the truth, I finished this book almost a week ago, and I forgot most of what I wanted to say about it. Primarily the business insights.

Not that I don’t remember the facts. Not that I haven’t internalized the messages.

In any event, this book is not for casual fans, casual readers. If you came to the Mac after Steve Jobs returned or later, you probably won’t get far in this tome. But if you were there at the beginning…

I was not. At the very beginning. Because it was all about the Apple II.

And that lore is repeated here, the creation of the Apple I, the Apple II team’s frustration that it was considered a second class citizen whilst generating all the profits, keeping the company alive well into the Macintosh era.

But I came in in 1986. With the Mac Plus…

The original Mac was close to unusable, it only had 128kb of RAM…

Now let me see… This machine I’m running has 48 GIGS of RAM. 128kb was infinitesimal. Months later came the Fat Mac, with 512kb, but the Mac Plus had a MB of RAM. However you still had to swap floppies. The screen was still small and black and white. But if you bought in, it was a religion. Like being a fan of your favorite band, but deeper. Maybe because you were there early, you were intrigued, and you knew these machines would change the world.

Computers were not rare in 1986, but most of them were PCs…which really didn’t have an effective Windows interface until 1995. In other words, they were not very usable. They were business tools.

But what really blew up computing was AOL. Didn’t matter what platform you were on, they all worked with AOL…and people ran out and bought computers just to play.

But that was almost thirty years ago. Do today’s generations, many birthed in this century, know this?

No, just like we couldn’t fathom the introduction of television in our parents’ era.

Anyway, I had no allegiance to Apple. All I knew was I wanted to start a newsletter and needed a computer to do so. And it didn’t take much research to find out I needed a Mac, with PageMaker, and a LaserWriter.

This was a different era, not quite the hobbyist era, but the machines were not foolproof, unlike your iPad and iPhone. Not only did they crash, they might not reboot. The Mac wasn’t truly user-friendly for everybody until the introduction of Mac OS X, based on Unix with the Mach kernel.

Not that you need to know that, not that today you need to know how your car runs. But for almost all of my life, you had to have a rudimentary knowledge of how your automobile functioned, because it would break! Computers were even worse, although they rarely physically broke, they just stopped working.

And you had to figure out why.

That’s right, there was no Genius Bar, really very little tech help at all. You had to sit in front of the computer and figure out what was wrong, and it could take you hours…I found it nearly impossible to fall asleep until I’d solved the problem, gotten my computer back on the right track.

Needless to say, those are not these days.

2

So forty years ago…

Not only was there no internet, techies were considered nerds, geeks, they were not respected by the hoi polloi, who were infatuated by MTV. But once you got bitten…

I used to say it was like having a math problem on my desk. Only there was no test, I wasn’t graded, but when I figured it out the level of satisfaction…

And what the Macintosh could do, and what the PC could not!

So if you were around in those days, you’ll be intrigued, you will be riveted, because Pogue brings it all back. The system updates, which you had to go to the store at first to get. The step by step innovation. The dark years and then the renaissance.

Now this is not the first time this territory has been covered, but it has never been covered so well, because David Pogue is one of our own, he’s not only writing about the Mac, he LIVED the Mac!

The best books ever about the Mac and Mac products were authored by Pogue, and I used to buy the “Missing Manual”s and read them cover to cover. You’d be stunned how powerful these machines are, most only use a tiny faction of their ability.

And the software too.

I read all the manuals, also from cover to cover.

Do you know if you double-click the top of your window, it will shrink it down to the dock? I could list tons of tips, but most are not used and not cared about. It’s almost an insider’s game. But…

Those early days, do you remember Conflict Catcher?

All the breakthroughs and bumps in the road are catalogued by Pogue. In an upfront, breezy style. He makes Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs look like the doorstep it is. Content is secondary to readability, and Pogue is very readable. And as much as he knows to leave in, he’s not afraid of leaving a bit out. It’s a book. Made to be read from start to finish. If you do so, you’ll know Apple’s history.

But how many people need to know this?

3

Apple was the little engine that could. The true breakthrough was the iPod.

But before that, during Jobs’s hejira with NeXT…

The problem with Sculley was he was a marketer, of a completely different product. Pepsi could sit on the shelves for a while. Computers lost value every day they were held in inventory.

Also, Sculley was a publicity hog, who wrote a book and liked being perceived as a visionary, even though he was not. We see this story again and again, do not believe the hype. Which is easy to garner. Can you say “Theranos”? No, the true people to admire are those who are doing the work, whose names are out there, but oftentimes say no to press, it slows them down, never mind that the press always gets it wrong, ALWAYS! Because unlike Pogue, most writers are not familiar with the territory.

Was Jobs a terror?

Yes.

And he was milder when he came back.

But he had a vision, and he didn’t believe in consumer research. He was about the bleeding edge. A lot of this has been documented, which is why the second half of the book is less interesting.

As for Tim Cook and the players in power today…

Yes, the petty wars are delineated, but the real point is they are not superstars, they are not visionaries, those only come along once in a while.

Like a classic musician, Jobs is focused on getting it right, in a world where everybody is taught to compromise to get along, where no one wants to stand out, upset the apple cart. Jobs focuses on product, believing the rest will take care of itself.

And prior to his return and their replacement, those who sat on the board saw Apple as a traditional business. They wanted to sell it, before it cratered, before Jobs came back and reinvigorated it.

Now I remember one of the lessons I wanted to impart… Don’t underestimate expertise. We see this all the time in the music business, since you don’t need a degree to be in it, no one has any respect for those who work in it. Average citizens believe they can find talent, they can do ticketing. But again and again outsiders fail, because the expertise cannot be quantified, it is built over time, it’s something you feel, it’s something innate. Even as simple as picking the hits. I’d say at least ninety percent of what people e-mail me, saying it’s great and deserves further attention, does not. I’m not saying they can’t like it, but they don’t have the seasoning and the vision to know what will spread to the public.

But it’s not only in music, in politics people have contempt for expertise. There’s this belief everybody can do everything. Then why did it take Steve Jobs to come up with the iPod and iPhone?

Breaking rules all the while. Getting rid of legacy ports on computers, getting rid of the physical keyboard on the iPhone. People are attached to the past, and if you’re busy serving them you’re going to be left behind. Jobs knew the iPhone was going to destroy the iPod, but rather than keep the music player alive, Jobs insisted on pushing the envelope, he was not willing to rest on his laurels, giving competitors a window to leapfrog Apple.

Hell, me-too is everywhere. When was the last time you heard a successful record that was truly surprising, completely different? Labels don’t sign those acts anymore, it’s too heavy a lift. They want it easy. Just like the movie studios, whose lunch was eaten by Netflix. Let me see… You raise the prices, you make fewer movies in obvious genres and then you complain that the theatre experience is dying? Believe me, people will show up for something unique and different. Then again, something might have to percolate in the marketplace for a while to catch on, but these flicks play in theatres for a minute and are then available on TV, which is a better experience.

User experience. That was Jobs’s main focus. But in most avenues of life, this is denied. Purveyors are trying to whittle down and control human behavior, keep it in the past, which is a fool’s errand.

4

The press is all over Apple’s 50th.

But it’s kind of like a lifetime achievement award… Once you get that, you’re usually done.

I get a new iPhone every year. But recently, the changes have been miniscule, almost irrelevant.

Apple is making a ton of money on services, and maybe the days of hardware breakthroughs are done, then again, the days of tech wowing us died over a decade ago, now tech is the enemy.

But the story of going from Motorola to Intel to in-house chips… Once again, the company is always thinking about the future, whereas in entertainment, everybody seems to be constantly blind-sided. Kind of like George Bush and 9-11. Who could envision they’d fly planes into buildings?

Then again, entertainment executives are all about lifestyle, accumulating and displaying. The company is something to milk.

Oh, I just remembered another thing that struck me… This happened again and again, but foremost with the original Macintosh team.

Yes, Jobs asked for the theoretically unachievable, which they always delivered, but once the Mac was released…most of the members of the team were so burned out, they couldn’t work for months, if ever at this level again. Most left Apple. None set the world on fire once again. They’d been to the mountaintop, they’d experienced the ride and the rewards, they just weren’t up for doing it again, like a hit act that cannot create hits anymore.

There are a lot of lessons in Pogue’s book. Not that he bats you over the head with them. But almost no one is going to read this book. They might buy it, but the average punter just doesn’t care about the minutiae of tech, the history of creation. Kind of like cars. You may love Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari, but how many people want to go back seventy or a hundred years and hear about the arguments and decisions regarding what kind of engines and suspensions to use, the failures…

However, the thing about Apple is unlike any single car brand, unlike any musician, period, the company’s products and services touch a broad swath of the public. Sure, Android might be bigger internationally, but all the innovation is on the iPhone first, which has over fifty percent market share in the U.S.

And now with the MacBook Neo, Macs are no longer expensive. The last hurdle has been eliminated, you can enter the cult on the cheap.

And once you do…

You get locked in.

And the love for Apple sustains. This is not a musical act or TV show that ultimately peters out. We expect Apple to continue to deliver, to lead us into the future.

Did it miss AI?

I’m not even gonna get into it. Could be their philosophy of licensing turns out to be the best.

But one thing is for sure, Apple is not a one trick pony. So many use their products and they think they know what goes on inside the gold mine. In truth they don’t. And, in truth, they don’t really care that much, they have no need to know.

But if you do…

P.S. Don’t buy the e-book unless you’re going to read it on an iPad… There are numerous color photos.

https://www.reddkrossfilm.com

This is strangely interesting.

I only checked it out because Steve Poltz recommended it, and I trust him implicitly. But to be honest, I’m not a big Redd Kross fan. Actually, I’m not a fan at all. Oh, I’m aware of the band, but I couldn’t pick their music out of a playlist. They were another one of many Southern California bands that meant something locally, but never blew up on the national scene.

Having said that, this is one of the few documentaries that I believe will bring attention to the band, that will burnish their image and career.

Assuming people see it. Which is the hardest thing to do today, to get the attention of an audience. You’ve got no idea how valuable ninety minutes is to someone today. They have so many opportunities for their time, their attention, it’s hard to even get people to dive in, never mind stay in.

But I did stay in. Poltz got me to check it out, but I stayed in because…

The movie depicted a bygone era. When you formed bands, when bands were still a thing, when there was a musical culture, a musician culture, and you believed that someone from your ilk, your little scene, might break through.

So, Redd Kross start out as punks.

And the funny thing is kinda like the Ramones, not everybody knows their music, but they know Black Flag’s name. And the Circle Jerks.

And there was a scene. Sure, punk may have had its epicenter in Orange County, then again it flourished at the Masque and the Hong Kong Café in Los Angeles.

So the McDonald brothers, the mainstays of Redd Kross, are from Hawthorne, California. They go back home and…

Their original homeland has been turned into a freeway, the 105.

This is bedrock California history. Somewhere in here is the essence of the Southern California mentality. Unlike the east coast, no one is worried about going to college, they’re not concerned with SAT scores, they’re just watching television, going to the beach, living their lives…the future may be on the horizon, but no one is really thinking about it or preparing for it.

I think it’s the weather. It’s never too cold and it hardly ever rains and you’re never cooped up inside, you feel a sense of freedom.

Furthermore, chances are your parents immigrated here, so there’s a tradition of breaking with roots, taking chances.

And then there’s the nihilism of punk, which was a reaction to society…

We don’t even get that backlash anymore. Maybe in the manosphere, but all those people are sad and angry and licking their wounds, whereas the punks believed that they were tuning forks, that a lot of people were on their page, that maybe they were the mainstream, not the underground.

And what I like is the inclusion of all the players, not just the musicians, but the bedrock, formative people. Not only the parents, but the kids they went to school with, the woman whose 8th grade party Redd Kross played at. They got booed, but unlike a band today, they laugh about it. They’re a weird combination of straight and hip, outsider but leader. This is not New York, where you’ve got to dress in black and wear sunglasses at night and smoke cigarettes, no, you can wear your Chucks and some cartoon t-shirt and…

Eventually Redd Kross evolves from punk to what one might call power pop, and this is where the music gets interesting, but don’t think because I’m intrigued that this film is not hagiography… Oh, you’ve got people from the scene waxing rhapsodic how great Redd Kross are. How they influenced Axl Rose and grunge and… Fine, but there’s a reason why some acts make it and some don’t. I mean the brothers aren’t quite sour grapes, but the film makes Redd Kross out to be gods, and they are most certainly not.

But what is missing from this film, which I couldn’t stop thinking about, was how did these guys SURVIVE! Not only them, but all the talking heads in this film…

So many are stuck in the past. Sexagenarians, septuagenarians, and still dressed in the clothes, the look, of yesteryear, their twenties. It’s almost like they couldn’t give up and wasted their entire lives. I’m sure they wouldn’t see it this way, but I do. At what point do you bite the bullet and pivot, realize it’s not going to work out for you and do something different?

Now I’m sure some do or did. And a bunch die. And some weren’t going anywhere so fast to begin with.

But… There was an entire scene, a subculture, not quite the art students of your high school, but misfits, and people who wouldn’t buy the b.s. of life. They all formed bands and gravitated to each other. And the funny thing is there was no hierarchy, like in regular life, where it’s usually about money or education or some other delineation of status, no…they were all there together, the little engine that could, playing music, getting high.

I mean even the guy in Redd Kross gets hooked on drugs and goes to rehab. I mean that’s a cliché, right?

Wouldn’t happen to me. But maybe that’s just the point. I grew up on the east coast and my parents prodded me to succeed from birth. We were prohibited from watching TV during the day, and my mother wasn’t too thrilled about us watching it at night either. We knew we were going to college from the moment of consciousness. We didn’t necessarily have to be somebody, but we had to get established, so we could pay our own bills, so our parents didn’t have to worry about us.

Which is why the people I grew up with and went to college with didn’t set the world on fire. We weren’t programmed for it. We were programmed to play it safe, to buy insurance, whereas the McDonald brothers and the people in this film…I’d basically say they were oblivious to the structure of everyday life, the bills and the obligations.

Now deep into this movie we find out one brother is married to Charlotte Caffey, who’s got a good income stream from the Go-Go’s. And the other is married to Anna Waronker and…

I still don’t know how they survived.

And the band has highlights. Everybody who ever tried to make it in Hollywood does. In this case, one brother is dating Sofia Coppola and the band is flown by her dad up to Napa for the weekend, private, when most people didn’t know that’s what was going on at the Van Nuys Airport, the rich and famous flying in and out.

But stories don’t pay the bills.

So, the barrier to entry here is not low, you’ve got to pay to see this flick now, it’s not on a streaming service. Maybe it will be eventually, since the McDonald brothers are so weird, like the Mael brothers of Sparks, if not that far off the deep end.

And there are more great twists and turns, stories of growing up, but…

I don’t care if you’re a fan of Redd Kross or have never heard of the band. That’s irrelevant. The scene depicted in this movie, the lifestyle, the attitudes…they are completely foreign to what is happening in music today.

Today no one has a sense of humor, no one questions authority, they want to buy in, they’ve got no fear of selling out. But it used to be your identity and viewpoint were more important than money. You could have nothing and judge and people would agree with you. Now, if you’ve got no portfolio, if you don’t have a big bank account, you’re derided, if not completely ignored.

So, it was a time and a place. But it’s also a breed of people… Who still exist, but they’re not forming bands.

Today you make your music at home on your computer, oftentimes alone. A band is too hard to manage, and if you make it you have to split up all the money.

So you put your stuff up on YouTube, you spam everybody you know and then complain that you’re not successful.

Redd Kross were not about complaints. I’d say they were about music, but it’s more than that. They were about a sensibility, involving both emotion and intellect. They marched to the beat of a different drummer, and they were not the only ones.

In truth, this film is subversive, parents don’t want their kids to see it, for fear they’ll take it to heart and jump the track.

But everything worth paying attention to was made by people who jumped the track, from music to tech.

And isn’t it funny how so much of it came from California.

I won’t belabor the point, because today everybody thinks California is an unlivable hellhole, but what they don’t know is California is a state of mind, one of freedom and possibility, where you jump before you talk yourself down from the ledge.

Like Redd Kross.