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It used to be only the classic acts’ albums tanked immediately.

Now it’s everybody. At least at first.

You debut at the top of the chart, after the execution of the launch plan. The story is everywhere, but the kids don’t care, they just know, the way you used to in the pre-internet days. The music is released, they devour it for two weeks at most, and then they’re on to something else.

At this moment, the highest charting Taylor Swift song is “Lover,” with a downward arrow, at #28. On the Spotify chart, of course. Forget “Billboard,” it’s just a way for the ancients to feel good about themselves. That’s right, “Billboard” is like D.C., seen as behind the times, irrelevant and powerless. The chartmakers check with the labels before they make any changes, meanwhile, life goes on all around without them.

The “Billboard” chart, and now the “Rolling Stone” chart, are manipulated. They take in sales and paid-for streams and non-paid for-streams and radio play and by time they’re done, it does not reflect reality. The truth is, radio today is where you go to resuscitate a track, to push it back up the chart, to get the non-fans interested. Then again, the fans of these acts don’t listen to radio, despite the format’s protestations, despite the majors’ focus on it. They stream and only stream, just like they do with TV. Ever seen a Gen-Z’er sit through commercials on a network program in real time? Impossible!

Used to be labels dripped out tracks, to try to convince you to buy an album. Before they completely eliminated singles and forced you to buy the album for the hit track. But the majors have lost control of distribution, it has become egalitarian, they can only hope that an act’s base is big enough to project it to the top and hope that some looky-loos will come along too.

This week it’s Post Malone. Next week it’ll be someone else. This is completely different from buying an LP and playing it ad infinitum because you can’t afford anything else. Listeners are fans of music more than any particular album, this is what streaming and availability has wrought. You try to make an album have legs, and even the tour doesn’t help much, because the tickets are so expensive the act is playing to fans only.

So it’s about awareness. And then trying to boost the initial weeks’ listening time. And then cleaning up with ticket sales while you work like hell to keep the music alive, which at the present time is mostly done via radio. And what lasts is often that which has never broken before, like Lizzo. She started without a fan base. She’s at the reaching new people/an audience stage now. But soon, with her next LP, she’ll be just like everybody else. There will be anticipation, her tracks will dominate the Top Ten, then they’ll fall off.

It’s not on streaming services.

Oh, it’s on Deezer, where I’m listening now, but that’s the difference between U.S. and Europe, licensing, almost twenty years later the industry still hasn’t gotten its act together, even major label stuff is unavailable, like Steve Winwood’s 1982 album “Talking Back To The Night.” Oh, you can hear “Valerie,” the belated remixed hit on “Revolutions: The Very Best Of Steve Winwood,” but most of the rest of “Talking Back To The Night” is not, his very best that is.

There was the unanticipated comeback, after Winwood had been given up for dead after the failure in the marketplace of his ’77 solo debut. It was not uncommon for stars to fade away. They burned out and did not radiate. But then “Arc Of A Diver” came out three years later and brought Winwood back to the airwaves, you could not escape “While You See A Chance,” and this being the era when no one purchased singles, on the basis of that track boomers went out and purchased the LP and became infatuated, it was a living room staple. So there was great anticipation for its follow-up two years later, “Talking Back To The Night.”

I remember it sounding less vivid, somewhat muted. Until the belated impact of “Valerie,” I remembered it as somewhat of a dud.

Until I listened to it.

You forget how many times you listened to these albums. You were a fan, you purchased the new release immediately and spun it a number of times to get it. And then maybe you moved on if it didn’t resonate at that point, but I didn’t realize how much I continued to play “Talking Back To The Night,” when I was preparing for my Sirius show last week I played it and I was stunned, I knew every lick, it brought me back to that era, but even more I loved those tracks, I was disappointed I could not share them with my Sirius audience, but ever since they’ve been playing in my head, I can’t get anything else in there, they’re on an endless loop. Especially three. Starting with “Big Girls Walk Away”:

“Big Girls Walk Away”

You hold your broken heart out
And you say it won’t stop hurting
Like there’s something I can do

The lyrics are by Will Jennings, a harbinger of what’s to come on “Back In The High Life,” they’re sensitive and insightful, but it’s Winwood’s plaintive delivery that brings them home. And the sound, with the doubled vocal.

And then the mood changes with the chorus:

Big girls walk away

The only other song I know with a similar lyric is the Four Seasons’ “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” which my mother had to buy, she loved it.

And then come the most memorable lines.

You want to play with princes
On a million dollar holiday
But you never met their mothers

She’s a party girl, actually that’s in the lyrics:

You just got so high
Party girl just keep the earrings

It’s an observation, a warning. You picture an elite level of interaction you do not have access to, on the Riviera, where money and looks are everything.

And there’s even a bridge!

The second of the trio is “Help Me Angel”

“Help Me Angel”

It’s the repetition of the title of the song that resonates, only Winwood can turn a phrase into a whole musical experience, moving up and down the scale. And then there’s the synth solo that sounds like a horn. “Help Me Angel” is not the kind of song you listen to on the couch, you move around the house, cleaning up, organizing, nodding your head.

Right before “Help Me Angel” on the LP is “It Was Happiness”

“It Was Happiness”

“It Was Happiness” is an opus, just under five minutes long, with the vibe of “The Finer Things” on “Back In The High Life.” But what brings it home is the chorus:

It was happiness, so clear, happiness
It was happiness, no tears, happiness

It’s a love story. Seen from the wrong end, when it’s over, when you’re reminiscing about the good times. And unlike the relationships in Hollywood, all over TMZ, relationships amongst the hoi polloi are private, intimate, it’s just the two of you, at least they were when this LP came out, before social media.

That’s the essence of the album for me. Of course I liked the opening cut “Valerie,” but it’s the above three tracks that resonated and shockingly still do, my opinion of the album was wrong, it might not have hits, but its got a place in my life, because of the lyrics, the sounds, when it peaks it truly does.

And then comes the title track:

Talking Back to the Night

But this is not the version that resonated with me.

Sometime in the last century, when CD boxed sets were still a thing, I implored Steve Leeds to send me the Winwood one entitled “Chronicles.” It was a four CD set. Actually, maybe it was a promo, I can’t find it online, but I listened to it incessantly, and there was a remix of the aforementioned “Talking Back To The Night,” and I became enraptured with it. It was much more immediate, in your face, punchy, funny how it was the same record but so much more impactful:

Talking Back to the Night

Now it turns out this ’87 remix was on a single album compilation also entitled “Chronicles,” so it was commercially available, but you won’t find it on American streaming services.

High above the heat of a summer New York street
An out of work musician plays a solo saxophone
He’s a preacher and a teacher
And he stands up all alone

It calls up the memory of Sonny Rollins blowing on the Brooklyn Bridge in that ’77 Pioneer ad. But the truth was after achieving fame, Rollins played for years on the Williamsburg Bridge in the early sixties, to the fumes and the wind and himself, getting it right. It wasn’t about fame, but music.

And they look from such a height
That somehow it’s all right
They’re talking back to the night
It’s all that they can do
Talking back to the night
It’s how they make it through

How do you make it through? Especially when no one’s paying attention, when you’re stuck. You can give up, some do, today you can bitch online, but in the old days all you could do was soldier on, playing, practicing.

All these memories came back to me doing research for my Sirius show.

But when I was actually on the air, what followed the “Talking Back To The Night” album was, of course, “Back In The High Life,” starting with “Higher Love.”

It’s completely different from what came before, the ‘pre ’82 Winwood has never really returned. It was four years later, it was a shock to the system. Sure, it was still Winwood. And mostly Will Jennings. But the secret sauce was…

Russ Titelman.

Russ drew players from his little black book, legendary in studios but mostly unknown to listeners, at least their identities. Like Jimmy Bralower and his drum programming. And Eddie Martinez. And Paul Pesco. Never mind horn legends like Randy Brecker and Tom Malone. And never forget the rhythm of Nile Rodgers, long before Chic was chic amongst rockers, long before “Get Lucky”…where are Daft Punk when you need them?

To dedicated Winwood fans like myself, “Back In The High Life” was sacrilegious, overproduced, but oh-so-tasty. It seemed like Winwood had sold out, but you couldn’t stop listening to it. Ultimately you realized it was a breakthrough, a harbinger of sounds to come, a bridge between the rock of the past and the future.

But based on this huge success Winwood made a rich deal with Virgin and never grasped the grail again until 2003’s “About Time,” initially released on an indie label, a pushing of the envelope, quite possibly the best late term album by any classic rock legend.

But when that didn’t resonate with the masses, Winwood signed to Sony and released the jaw-dropping track “Dirty City,” with extended Clapton soloing, but it was too late, this sound was dead in the marketplace. Once again, only the short version is available on U.S. streaming services, the nearly eight minute take is only available on YouTube:

“Dirty City”

If you want to go back to what once was, relive the sixties and seventies, but in a different light, stream “Dirty City” till the end, the playing will blow your mind.

The Book of Prince

I haven’t read about this anywhere else.

I saw it first on “The New Yorker”‘s Today app. If you’re a subscriber, it’s extra info, to get you through the week, the viewpoint of intellectuals in a dumbed-down world. Of course, of course, “The New Yorker” is stuffy, self-important, self-congratulatory and written in a singular style, but it’s great to read something intelligent by someone who can write, as opposed to what is published in most magazines and on most websites. In the information age, one can see the difference between one who has talent and one who does not. And believe me, most people writing have no talent. It’s only about the facts. Oftentimes you quit reading because the writing’s so bad, and the article is so heavily edited by the publication that it’s got no soul. That’s one thing for artists, if they’ve truly got it, you’ve got to get out of their way. Used to be that way in the seventies in music, the label had no input into the content or releasability of the album. You delivered it, they had to put it out. Labels did this because of the increased income from music in the late sixties. Warner Brothers Records built the Warner cable system, there was just that much cash. Because records are relatively cheap to make and market, compared to TV and film, and when they hit, the cost of manufacturing more is de minimis, so you can make tons of bucks, they call this scale.

Not that the music business gets any respect.

Conventional wisdom is the music business is fly by night. Crooked. For young people. But the truth is it’s much harder to make a great record than a great movie. Then again, today’s hit records are made like movies, done in collaboration, everybody having input, so you end up with an homogenized product targeted for a specific audience, as opposed to the genius of one. The music business story this summer has been Taylor Swift’s “Lover,” and the discussion has been more about marketing and profit than content. Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” started out as a business story. His first film after the Weinstein empire imploded, “Once Upon a Time” was paid for and released by Sony at a pretty penny, scuttlebutt was there was no way the company could get its money back, certainly not in a Marvel world where indie/adult pictures have cratered. The budget for “Once Upon a Time” was $90 million. So far, the gross is $286,219,865. And “Once Upon A Time” has been the cultural event of the summer.

We never talk about records anymore. I mean really discuss them. We might mention them in passing, but our opinions tend to be of the thumbs-up or thumbs-down nature, not extended riffs on content. Sure you can read reviews by puffed-up blowhards, but they usually go ignored. But now, everybody with a brain is talking about “Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood.”

I haven’t seen it. I was invited to a pre-release screening at the Cinerama Dome, but screenings never start on time and they’re full and I was traveling shortly thereafter and I didn’t go. That was a mistake, because I can’t be part of the discussion. At dinner last night, Lisa and Mary Kay were waxing rhapsodic. I felt completely out of it. Like I might have back in the early aughts when we still went to the movie theatre, when you had to go to be part of the discussion, before we all looked at each other and said the flicks were worthless.

Of course, after “Once Upon a Time,” we discussed television. There was some commonality there, and then everybody testified as to their personal favorite we had to see, it was like record recommendation culture before the internet made everything available and overwhelmed us, back when music drove the culture. Back when we talked about Prince.

Now Prince’s first album was a stiff. He didn’t live up to the hype. They lied about his age, not that he was not young enough, but there was not a hit and it was sold to the rock audience when it appealed more to the black audience and nothing happened.

The second LP skewed black, and had a hit on black radio, “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” but it did not cross over. Oh, don’t quote me “Billboard” numbers, where it went #11 Pop, first and foremost it’s about the Top Ten, and the radio charts and “Billboard”‘s don’t always align, and if the track had truly been that big amongst white folks Prince wouldn’t have been booed opening for the Rolling Stones, he wouldn’t have been a new discovery with “Purple Rain.”

Actually, Prince didn’t break through to white audiences until “Controversy,” his fourth LP, even though it was not nearly as good as what came before, “Dirty Mind.” Which was disco and sex-laden and infiltrated the white rock critic cognoscenti when that fraternity still had a hold on the minds of listeners. Now this was when you had to buy it to hear it. Unlike its predecessor, the eponymous “Prince,” “Dirty Mind” had no hits, but if you did take the leap and dropped the needle you were overwhelmed, even if you were a notorious wallflower, you had to dance, the music instantly penetrated you, and there was a cheesily rocking song that infected you, that you knew was a hit even though it wasn’t, entitled “When You Were Mine,” ultimately covered by Mitch Ryder and Cyndi Lauper. And of course, “Dirty Mind” contained the legendary “Head,” which Prince wanted to give, white acts were not pushing this envelope, this was a revelation. And the second side opened with “Uptown.” Prince made other Minneapolis references, but you had to go there to get them, kinda like how records come alive when you finally get to L.A., “Uptown” is the hip area of the Mini-Apple, it’s not just a generic, theoretical place.

But timing is everything. And by time Prince came back to the marketplace in 1982, after “Controversy,” MTV was in full swing, it was hotter than the acts it featured, but those acts benefited from the exposure, and Prince didn’t need no story video, he didn’t stand static, he did his full act on film and beamed into so many houses in America, he finally entered the consciousness of those paying attention, the rest came along with “Purple Rain.” We were implored to party like it was “1999,” and that track became the anthem of the millennium, and its opening flourish was made for the masses, to get them to pay attention, like the king’s trumpeters flourishing from the top of the walls of the castle. And then came “Little Red Corvette.” A killer record, the video was the icing on the cake, the cherry on top, you could not watch it and not be overwhelmed. Who was this black guy who rocked and came from Minneapolis and was hotter than all the classic acts he blew away?

And after “Purple Rain,” Prince was an institution, he never left the scene, he always had a presence in our minds, he was as big as they get.

And then he died.

Oh, before that he was legendary for extravagance. Rumor was he was going broke. But Prince was not MC Hammer. But he did know that living large was part of the image, and he knew that image was part of the marketing, and if you followed it with great music you triumphed, continuously.

Now it turns out Prince was collaborating on a book before his death. I might have read about it in passing, but then every rocker is writing a book, almost all of them bad, but they have an audience nonetheless, kinda like all these music documentaries that are being released today. And his cowriter was a guy named Dan Piepenbring, whom I’d never heard of, but he’s a “New Yorker” writer and a bigwig at “The Paris Review,” talk about insular, and he was suggested to Prince and they ended up working together, for a time.

Not that there was any agreement. The greats don’t need any, at least between the creators. You follow the creativity, you jump on the bus, you drive into the unknown, otherwise you’re left behind. Piepenbring jumped on the bus. But first he journeyed to Chanhassen.

Piepenbring had written a requested essay, “about our relationship to his music and why we thought we could do the job.” Piepenbring immediately wrote and sent his composition, harnessing the inspiration, and he heard back from the Prince camp at 2:23 AM, six hours after the submission.

Now there’s a lot to unpack here. Suits, non-creative people, have the notion that creative work, especially writing, is a long, tortuous process wherein you drink coffee, stay up all night, create, make revisions and then finally submit past deadline. Sure, there are a lot of people who do it that way, especially those who went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but most great art is based on inspiration, you’ve got to grab the spirit before it dissipates, you’ve got to channel the gods, you’ve got to lay it down, and if you change it, you ruin it. And its this essence, the passion, the bleeding from the heart, that resonates with the audience, which is why Prince contacted Piepenbring immediately. You see work like this is rare. As for the late evening/early morning response, the music business is 24/7, if you’re not willing to work on the weekends don’t even bother to show up on the weekdays. But you do it because you love it.

Prince immediately challenges Piepenbring’s screed. Tells him his over-analytical critical words don’t fit him. Prince is not “breaking the law,” he’s about “harmony.” He says Led Zeppelin broke the law, not him. And Prince went on, he hated critics’ use of the word “alchemy.” Even worse was “magical.” Prince was about funk. “Funk is the opposite of magic. Funk is about rules.”

If you’ve been paying attention to the internet blowback, you’re aware that Lana Del Rey responded to Ann Powers’s NPR review of her new album. Powers called Lana Del Rey’s lyrics “uncooked.” Huh? What exactly does that mean? That’s a writer trying to describe what she does not understand. Especially with Lana Del Rey, where the words are meaningful. This is why Zappa called rock journalism “People who can’t write, doing interviews with people who can’t think, in order to prepare articles for people who can’t read.” First and foremost you should try to get into the head of the artist, where he or she is coming from, perspective is everything, but how the music makes you feel is most important. But that’s today’s world. That’s why music interviews are so unreadable. You might learn some facts, but you won’t get any meaningful analysis. The musicians of yore had viewpoints we looked up to, what does a 17 year old pop queen have to say anyway?

We learn a lot about Prince. “I thought I would never be able to play like my dad, and he never missed an opportunity to remind me of that…” The drive comes from somewhere. If you grew up in a happy home, if your upbringing was peaches and cream, chances are you’re not changing the world, because that motivation comes from having something to prove, all the greats come from the same place.

But the most interesting parts of the article have to do with racism.

At this point we see racism as inner city or crackertown. We think it’s not us. We think Minnesota is all white, but it’s not. And Prince testifies as to the slights he endured growing up. But he goes on and on how Piepenbring doesn’t understand his viewpoint. Then he starts talking about Black Wall Street in Tulsa. More than 100 black-owned businesses. And then whitey burned it all down. Huh? I’d never heard about this. Illustrating the racial divide. We don’t learn black history, but blacks know it. And speaking of being black…African-Americans have been screwed since they came to this country, so Prince asks Piepenbring whether he’s been paid, getting paid is important, it’s not only the cash, but the respect, and Prince believes artists should be paid, they should get respect.

Furthermore, Prince wants to write his own contract. To have the ability to remove the book from the shelves if he no longer agrees with its tenets. Sure, he’ll have to pay for this, but it’s worth it.

So you see the world from Prince’s perspective. And no one has ever said he’s an uneducated, non-thinking nincompoop. You respect his opinion, you’re interested in his take, from an era when recognition came from the work, when you couldn’t sell it online to the point where the marketing eclipses the art.

“There’s a lot of people who say you gotta learn to walk before you learn to run. That’s slave talk to me. That’s something slaves would say.”

In other words, if you’ve got it, you can play. Like that amateur who threw the ball 96 MPH and was immediately signed by the Athletics. And everybody pays dues, they call it life, we all have a perspective, not that we’re able to articulate it. Even worse is when someone has it and is kept down by the industry, because they’re too young, too inexperienced, they have to be taught a lesson.

And the revelation of this “New Yorker” article is the humanization of Prince. No, he is not like you and me, but he is no longer opaque and manipulative, there’s a real person there, in 3-D.

But he’s dead. And what he stood for, his perspective, does not dominate today. Today it’s about marketing and money. Hell, your music is only a license for your brand expansion into tchotchkes or clothing. Isn’t the music enough? In an age where only art can honestly speak truth to power?

So, if you’re a Prince fan at all, you should read this article. You’ll feel like you’re living in a bygone era, when artists were exalted for their content as opposed to their reach, when we worshipped their work as opposed to their antics, when one person could dig deep down and deliver.

More like this please.