Why was everybody there?

There’s been no radio, no print, but the gig was sold out, at just over 20,000. What is happening here?

No one exactly knows.

The label head said it was the similarity to Depeche Mode.

The manager said it was Coachella. That they dominated the Gobi tent. And that everywhere they play, when they come back, attendance is doubled.

The agent was flummoxed too. The band’s been around for nine years, it’s been paying its dues, but they didn’t ply down the road of traditional music business success.

Music is not a zero sum game. It’s not tech, where if I win you lose, and if I don’t keep innovating, if I’m not putting up walls around my product and buying or putting my competitors out of business, I’m soon gonna be toast. Every musical act is singular. There’s enough audience for everybody. Assuming you can get one.

Now there’s no rule book in music. No course. No degree. Oh, they’ve got these schools teaching the biz these days, but that’s for middle management, the real winners cannot be contained by an institution. Irving Azoff, David Geffen, Scooter Braun…they’re all college dropouts. These are renegades, square pegs in a round hole, but they know how to make things happen, they’re visionaries, they thread a needle many people can’t even see.

The manager grew up with a member of the group. They’re “brothers,” they’re in it together, after all, who can you trust?

Certainly not Columbia Records, the band licensed an LP to the company which subsequently did nothing. That’s the problem with labels, they just need something to hit, not necessarily your thing, they tell you all they’re going to do, but there’s no guarantee they’re going to do it, usually they don’t.

The band is on Warner Brothers now, but the big radio track has yet to come.

But it’s always about hit songs, whether they get played on the radio or not. The aforementioned manager Danny Robson told me to wait for a certain song, that everybody in the audience would throw their hands in the air and sing along.

This was true. This music was part of their lives, woven into the fabric of their existence, it didn’t matter who else was into it.

But a lot of people are. In this case, half men and half women.

Danny told me they’d done an east coast tour with ODESZA, that it had helped them back when. I said it was the same audience, Danny insisted it wasn’t, that Rufus Du Sol’s audience was older, 25-35.

And Danny was right. These were sophisticated millennials. You didn’t get the impression you were gonna get robbed or run over, then again I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was anxious about going to an outdoor concert at night. I’m not gonna not go, but at this point, mass events in the great wide open…you never know what’s gonna happen.

But everybody looked like they had a job, this was not the ethos of rock and roll, a workingman’s world, but something more upscale.

So what we’ve learned is it’s no longer your father’s music business. Used to be it was all about the label. You wanted to get signed, the company bought tickets. Now it’s more about the live show, the agent is oftentimes more important than the label.

And despite the instant hits of the Spotify Top 50, the acts that sustain have paid their dues, they’ve experimented, they’ve got it down.

As for Rufus Du Sol’s sound?

Bob Moses played before them.

Now for the uninitiated, there’s no one called that in the band.

And the music thumped, it had energy, it took you away from this world.

But the headliner was most definitely Rufus Du Sol, they got more applause, they had a much bigger production, and production is key in this world.

And what world is that?

You could call Bob Moses EDM, but there was a guitar and a bass and drums, this is just not a deejay with a laptop.

And Rufus Du Sol has a drummer too, and the lead singer oftentimes slips from behind his keyboard to play guitar.

You see there’s been an evolution. Maybe that’s why rock is dead, it has stopped evolving.

But Rufus Du Sol was much darker than Bob Moses, with much less thump. There was melody. And the music truly set your mind free.

This is what music used to be about.

Now it’s about going to see the hits played by rote while you shoot selfies…it’s more about the audience than the performer.

But not tonight, not in this world. Everybody was there to be enveloped by the sound, to levitate their own bodies and souls. They wanted a hit of that elixir only music can bring. When done right, it pulls you away from the humdrum world, makes you feel like you’re in a protected bubble, as long as the sound sustains, you’re all right.

Now some might say Rufus Du Sol has been around forever, at least that’s what Phil Blaine told me after the show. He accused me of being a johnny-come-lately.

I am, but at least I’ve arrived.

But most people are out of the loop, and that’s just fine, there are enough believers to make it all work, more than work. You can’t make tech money, nor Wall Street money, in music, but it’s a different profession, it’s about your interior not your exterior.

In the straight world you pick a path and stay on it until you accumulate rewards and then you die. It’s all about investing in the system.

But there’s no system in music. Every act is reinventing the wheel.

So you hone your chops, wait for a reaction, start small before you’re big. Rufus Du Sol played for two hundred, they didn’t start out at the top. Yup, one hit and some acts play arenas! Got to get that money now, while it’s still available!

Most of those acts fade away, not all of them, but most of them.

And then there are acts further off the radar screen. And they play and play until…

They’re touring the world, tired as hell, but with all the perks, the money, the sex, the… They stand on stage and play for multitudes who not only adore their surface, but want to know what they’re thinking, where they’ve come from.

No, the internet did not kill music creation, quite the opposite, in fact.

But the truth is the business has morphed and the oldsters don’t want to admit it. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, but one thing’s for sure, what brings people in is the feeling, the excitement, the energy, the irresistible pull of music. When done right, there’s nothing like it.

The Black Keys Get Real About the Music Business | Joe Rogan

What kind of crazy, fucked-up world do we live in where an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast is more important than any TV show?

One in which Howard Stern gets all the A-listers. They make news on Stern, it’s all fluff on TV.

We’re in the era of the cult of personality. And the most important personalities are those who’ve been in the game for decades, honing their chops, just waiting for that moment when word spreads enough that they turn into a supernova. I can talk all day about what I’ve seen on TV and no one else has a clue, but if I talk about what happened on Stern, everybody knows! (And if you don’t, the joke is on you.) The biggest news splash re Billie Eilish was her interview with her brother on Stern last week. She appeared three-dimensional, and she reached the unreachable, so many in Howard’s audience have no time for anything else, they ignore hype, but they check out what Howard promotes, which is what makes him so powerful.

I remember when Joe Rogan hosted “Fear Factor,” back in the beginning of network reality TV, after “Survivor,” when it was about games and quasi-truth as opposed to the fake crap that followed it. I didn’t get Rogan and the show was canceled and I knew who he was and then I heard…

He was the king of MMA. Instead of worrying about whether boxing is relevant, whether it should be banned, the younger generation moved on to MMA and the UFC, where Rogan was a host. That turned him into one of them, someone on the edge, he became part of the fabric, to the point when he launched his podcast he had a built-in audience.

Not that I listen. I don’t find him that funny and I’ve got limited bandwidth, like all of us. But today I got an e-mail about the Black Keys being on his show:

Hi Bob,

I think you’ll enjoy this short video from the Joe Rogan show in which The Black Keys talk about the state of the music business (stay for the end for the story about Aerosmith at the MTV video awards)
The Black Keys Get Real About the Music Business | Joe Rogan

Cheers,
Stephen Humphries

Note, Humphries was not promoting himself. I laugh at those e-mails that say whatever I’m writing about is junk and _____ is the shit. And then I realize ___________ is the writer’s band! And I wanted to hear what the Black Keys had to say, so I clicked through.

Patrick Carney is explaining the bundle game. Wherein the act has to pay money from their tickets to get to number one on the Soundscan chart, how the money ends up in the label’s hands, and it only counts on Soundscan if the purchaser clicks for the digital album, and only half of them do this.

In other words, the Black Keys would be paying to be number one. WHAT WOULD THAT DO FOR THEM?

You see it every damn day, someone here or there promoting that they went to number one on the chart, the newspapers write about it, the brain-dead websites repeat it…BUT WHAT DOES IT REALLY BUY YOU?

You’re impressing people in the media, who matter less than ever before, there’s a reason why social media posters are called “influencers.”

It’s all a sham and you lose money in the process!

And everybody in the biz knows it’s a joke, oftentimes your album immediately drops off the chart.

And then Carney goes deeper. About kids running records up the chart by playing them a zillion times, like he did with Vanilla Ice. But is that good music, is that what people really want to hear, is that what music FANS really want to hear?

Now never forget, it’s this system that built the Black Keys. So, it’s easy to pooh-pooh it when you’ve been the beneficiary of it and can coast on the spoils, but…

Today a new act like the Black Keys can’t even play that game, the major labels don’t want to promote anything but hip-hop and pop.

Now it used to be there were two sides of the story, the outward-facing hype and the truth, and the hoi polloi were never privy to the truth. But in the era of the internet, it’s out there (along with a lot of b.s., but that’s another story). Artifice is revealed. And it’s credibility that has longevity.

Patrick Carney brilliantly delineates today’s music business. How the Spotify Top 50 is just a niche, oftentimes a manipulated niche, and only a small, relatively young audience is even listening.

The point is, where do we go from here?

If you’re chasing trends, the joke is on you. Sure, if you top the streaming chart, you can make real money. But never forget if the devil gets you there, i.e. the major label, he wants his pound of flesh. Whereas if you go your own way and own everything you can make all that money every musician is complaining they haven’t got.

But very few players deserve the attention. The barrier to entry is too low in all creative fields, anybody can make a record.

But if you can get on Joe Rogan…

People are gonna pay attention.

I bought a file cabinet.

Actually, that’s not what I’d call it, but that was the heading I found it under. I needed some storage in my new office. But I didn’t want to wait until I found the exact right unit, I wanted something cheap, to store the stuff in boxes.

So I started surfing. Actually, Felice surfed first and she was pushing to get a response, otherwise she’d stop helping me, so I dug in.

Wow, it’s tough. There are a zillion units and a zillion sellers, never mind a zillion price points. But based on the suggestion of my physical therapist, I checked out Target. And eventually found a unit that looked reasonable, for $249, I forwarded the page to Felice, she agreed it would work, so…

I went to buy it. And in the process, I found it at Staples for $189, a whopping difference. I was done, gonna purchase at Target, but Google showed me Staples and then I looked at the fine print and it said…”unassembled.” Now how hard could assembly be? I’m actually good at following the directions. But maybe the Target unit was more expensive because it came built, but that turned out to be untrue, Target required assembly too.

So I looked up the instructions. You can find that kind of stuff online. And it did not look easy.

But I was ready to buy…and then I wondered if Amazon sold it, because I’d get it much quicker via Prime. Amazon had it too, at the same $189 price point, and just as I was putting it in the cart, I was offered assembly. Hmm… $112 on a less than $200 unit? But then I thought of other jobs I’d done, the learning curve is so steep, the second one would be much easier, but you’re only buying one, and oftentimes you screw up and scratch/damage the unit, so I agreed to pay to have it put together.

And you’ve got to make sure you’ve got the right zip code and then you schedule online and my schedule has been jam-packed but I had to be home this afternoon to do a Skype call for a conference in Toronto, so the 2-5 PM window looked good.

Meanwhile, my TV was not getting any of the pay channels and Spectrum said they had to send someone out. Now normally I can only deal with one thing at one time, but since I was home, I decided to go for it.

And I kept on getting e-mail from the installation company, was I really gonna be there on Friday? And if the unit had to be moved, it would be another $75. Huh? This unit is not that big. And then the unit, which was supposed to arrive on Thursday, did not, until late afternoon, when I was on the phone to Sydney.

So I missed Felice’s text. She had the delivery man leave it by the side of the house. She said it was heavy, and boy was it. So would I have to pay the additional $75 to get it up the steps? But I told myself the call to Sydney was more important and paid well enough for me to eat the $75, so…there was no other option anyway.

And last night while at the Sunset Marquis, I got a text from the installer, could he come at 9 AM instead of 2 PM? This made me uptight, I could not do it in the morning, but I was afraid of pissing him off. He told me his name was Vincent and he’d be there at 2.

And at the appointed hour, Felice texted me that he was here.

I walked out in front of the house and I noticed something funny, we had a hard time communicating. He could barely speak. Was he unable to speak?

But I pointed him to the box and when he got there, he whipped out his phone and started typing.

I AM DEAF.

Wow. That explains it. And I’ve got OCD, and I like everything perfect, I’m constantly quizzing workers, and I realized I’d be unable to do so in this case. But I’m not gonna keep the handicapped from working, I’ve got to buck up and be the better man.

So he asks me to lift the box with him.

I think no way, but I can’t talk to him, so I whip out my phone and text that we should take the pieces out of the box to make it much lighter, we’re only going about thirty five feet.

But he types NO. So what am I gonna do?

I should have put my foot down. But I felt too guilty, so I picked up one end of the box and started to walk and after about fifteen feet as my arm started to ache…I REALIZED IT WAS MY BAD ARM, THE ONE I HAD SURGERY ON!

Now I’ve had a ton of surgeries, and this rotator cuff operation is the only one I’ve ever had with a 100% success rate, but I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say I still babied it. And I felt my tendons tugging and…

I put down the box.

And then I had to start typing to the installer, what was going on, which was difficult, the ultimate solution was to take the back of the box and use my other arm, but my sixth sense was right…going up steps, the back is heavier.

And I only stopped the anti-inflammatories two months ago. I took prednisone for thirteen months and weaning myself from it my back went nuclear, the neurosurgeon kept telling me to have an operation, that I could be back on skis in January…but I didn’t want to miss December, I decided to take the risk, I got more injections and took the anti-inflammatory and it worked. Although I did have to pass on heli-skiing all season, and I didn’t ski bumps until March, but I made it.

But every time I tried to decrease the dosage of the NSAID, my back would go nuclear again.

But finally I got off it. In the middle of August.

And I’ve been feeling pretty good, but now carrying this box I realize there’s going to be a penalty, my belief is I screwed up my back to begin with by helping my friend’s father move out of a store, we were lifting file cabinets, we were young and strong.

My back has never been the same. There’s no disk there. The doctor who did the injections asked me who did my surgery. I told him I’d never had back surgery. He then told me those two vertebrae were fused.

So the installer came with enough tools to build a house. And part of OCD treatment is to not watch the worker do their work, because you’ll find problems, so I sat at the computer and tried to ignore him.

Meanwhile, Spectrum came. Someone on the payroll as opposed to an independent contractor.

I was not getting the pay channels because the previous guy had put in a Spectrum box and we have a Time Warner legacy system. So, should we go all Spectrum? He advised against it, the DVR features are not as good, so he put a new box on my TV, but I could not use the DVR to record myself, because only one DVR can be in a Time Warner household, so I had him switch the DVR box from the bedroom to the living room, so if Felice was asleep, I could still program it. Bottom line, when connected properly, you can run the DVR from any box. I could go deeper, but if that’s not clear to you… I loved talking to the installer from Spectrum, because we could go into all this tech stuff and he explained that in a Time Warner household you needed these filters so the modem wouldn’t get jammed by the TV signal and he installed them and then I heard his life story and It was so interesting, he’s from Israel and he married a woman from Peru, and he’s really an animator, but he’s freelance and there’s not that much work now so since he’s married and he feels the pressure to earn, he took this job.

Meanwhile, the file cabinet installer is still working.

They budgeted the job at 2-3 hours. I didn’t see how it could take that long, but it was a flat fee and… Felice remarked, did he know what he was doing? I didn’t want to say no, he was so focused and he was deaf and I was worried I’d miss something while I was talking to the Spectrum guy in the other room but…

There were a few incidents. He put a hammer on the table and it fell to the floor, the floor that the builder said would scratch easily.

And he didn’t put a tarp or anything underneath, to protect the floor, but it was nearly impossible to converse with him, I didn’t want to bug him and I decided to bite the bullet.

And then I heard a crash!

Now I was upset, I walked over to see if there was a dent/scratch in the floor. It looked o.k., so I went back to the computer.

And that’s when the installer tapped me on the shoulder.

He walked me to the drawer that had fallen on the floor. I didn’t think much of it.

But then he pointed out the crack, the break.

Well, the guy’s deaf and maybe I should be amenable and then…

I notice the crack is on the outward facing panel. That a corner is essentially broken off.

And then my brain starts racing. They’re gonna want to write off the labor and make me keep the damaged unit. But I don’t want to, I’ve got a brand new office and anybody would see the broken corner.

So the installer starts typing that he’s gonna call his boss. How he’s gonna communicate with him I do not know.

And nothing is happening.

So after about fifteen minutes he types that he needs the wifi info. I know what he’s doing, he’s trying to hook up wifi calling, I’ve done it to everybody’s phone, works great.

But he’s on AT&T and it doesn’t work exactly the same way.

So, I just type in the password and give him the phone back.

Meanwhile, another person had texted me about confirming the appointment, yup they were relentless with the timing, so I texted that person.

She had to get in touch with the manager, who was unavailable. After a few back and forths, telling me said manager wouldn’t pick up, she gave me the number and I had the same experience.

Well, if she’s not the manager, who is she?

Meanwhile, about half an hour has gone by and the installer types that he can’t get ahold of his boss. Obviously, the same boss.

And now it’s nearly six and…

I go on Amazon, they’ve got a “Happiness Guarantee.” Woo-hoo!

But you go through the prompts and you end up sending a message to the installation company and are told to wait two days for a response.

Now I’ve got no idea what to do.

Meanwhile, the deaf guy is heaving. Audibly. I feel so bad for him. I mean being deaf, what are his job opportunities anyway? I don’t want him to get in trouble, I don’t want him to lose his job. I was going to tip him $30, but obviously not now, the project wasn’t even finished.

So now he starts typing on his phone again. Saying he’s sorry he broke the unit. I want to let him off the hook, but I’m not sure why I should bite the bullet and be confronted with a broken cabinet for years. I want a new one, one that is right, how hard can that be?

And suddenly the installer starts cleaning up. He pushes the unit on the floor, making me anxious about scratches again, but at this point what am I going to say.

And part of the deal is they throw out the detritus, the packaging. And he wants to know where to put it and I point to the garbage and then he forgets a bunch of cardboard and I’m lucky he turns toward me as I’m waving my hands and comes back.

And then he’s gone.

All This Music Must Fade Spotify
All This Music Must Fade YouTube

What kind of crazy, fucked-up world do we live in where the Who come back from nostalgia to release a track superior to anything on the Active Rock chart?

One in which you no longer have to have a great voice and you can get away with uttering platitudes, getting a facelift to look young and hip when you’re not.

The amazing thing is there’s no 808, none of those synthetic handclaps, it sounds exactly like the Who. Remember when all the bands were unique? Come on, who sounded exactly like the Who? The key was to go down your own path.

But somewhere during the nineties, when radio still ruled, when MTV went all hip-hop and pop, it was determined by the gatekeepers that no one wanted to hear the music of the old farts. I realized this when Danny Buch told me that programmers rejected Robert Plant’s “29 Palms.” Sometimes people return to form, Neil Young is a perfect example. Suddenly Plant releases a near masterpiece, “Fate Of Nations,” and no one cares anymore.
As for the twenty first century… Most oldsters have given up putting out new music, believing it’s going to go straight into the dumper, that no one cares and it’s hard to get motivated when no one is listening. But somehow Pete Townshend maintains his edge, the edge of the blade.

I don’t care
I know you’re gonna hate this song

Yup, it’s like Townshend is living in 2019, reflecting on the world we live in, where if you play new music the audience gets up for a bathroom break and haters online will tell you it sucks.

It’s not new, not diverse
It won’t light up your parade
It’s just simple verse

The oldsters and the critics retain the concept of the holy grail, they remark that the new music sucks, which in truth it does, of course there’s good stuff out there, too much of which goes unrecognized, but nothing approaches the tracks of the classic acts. And it’s easy for the cognoscenti to be haters, you’ve got to be cool, incomprehensible by the masses, out there.

But now no one cares about that stuff either.

All this music will fade
Just like the edge of a blade

Townshend’s right. The Beatles will be remembered for a while, but almost everything else will fall by the wayside. Remember Steve Jobs? Ask someone under fifteen, they might not know his name. Furthermore, get old enough, having lived through the trials and tribulations, and you realize…it’s all b.s., we’re here and then we’re gone, if you’re trying to leave your mark you’re on the wrong path.

I don’t mind
Other guys ripping off my song
I’d be lying
If I said I never done no wrong
All this sound that we share
Has already been played
And it hangs in the air

We’re all in it together. How sad is it that fifty years later greedy attorneys are convincing broke heirs to sue the classics, costing everybody money. As for the new music, everybody’s scared, where there’s a hit there’s a writ.

Yours is yours and what’s mine is mine
And what’s mine is mine and what’s mine is yours
WHO GIVES A FUCK?

Yup, listen to the end and Pete utters that profanity. He’s lived long enough to have seen truth, it’s about the music more than commerce, he doesn’t take the music that seriously, it’s only rock and roll, right?

And I like it.

Now “All This Music Must Fade” is not as great as “Baba O’Riley” or “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” but it’s in the same league, and anybody creative will tell you if you get motivated and keep at it that’s when genius emerges, and it’s best when it’s singular, one person…hell, most of the Beatle songs were written by either Paul or John, even though they both got credit, today songs have so many writers and are worked over by executives to the point where their essence is lost.

And I love Pete’s solo stuff.

But what puts “All This Music Must Fade” over the top is Roger’s vocal. This is definitely a Who song.

And being a Who song, it’s got Pete’s slashing guitar, and the tinkling synths in the background, it’s powerful, but it’s not noise.

“All This Music Must Fade” is not a bathroom song, you want to hang with the crowd and listen.

And if you still have a big rig, if your stereo still has power, if you’re not limited to AirPods, you can’t help but turn it up and become enveloped in the sound. That’s the power of rock and roll, it squeezes everything out.

It’s like we’re lost in the desert, like we’ve lost the formula, all those new rock acts, they’re retreads, bombastic, with little sense of dynamics, never mind melody.

It may sound like I’m overstating the case. But it’s like being in a cave with no light and stumbling upon a beacon which illuminates your world and makes you optimistic, a believer once again.

Pete may be telling us it’s all gonna fade…

But it’s everything to us.

This is not nostalgia, it’s brand new, and the key point is listening to it doesn’t make you think you’re fifteen, you’re old and craggy, but your music still matters, Pete and Roger are still on your wavelength, they’re delivering for you.

Oh, what a glorious sound.

And it is all about the sound.

And the power.

It could move mountains, change society. It could not be denied back then…

And suddenly it can’t once again!