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Lake Success: A Novel

I almost cried when this book ended. I was sitting in an Air Canada 777, staring straight ahead, unable to move, never mind start reading something else.

Reading was my first love, before baseball, before skiing, before music.

I loved the library. I’d take out seven books at a time. The librarians would always be wary, but when I showed up a few days later for a new stack of books, they began to understand I was a reader.

I remember driving to see my mother’s parents, lying in the wayback of the station wagon, reading “Shortstop On Wheels.” I couldn’t put a book down.

But then my interest shifted to periodicals. And when I discovered “Rolling Stone”…

This was before they broke the Patty Hearst story, before they sent Hunter Thompson on the campaign trail, before the magazine had respectability, before it won awards and became part of the firmament. There was an entire magazine devoted to my interests. And as good as the music coverage was, there were always stories that stuck indelibly in my brain which were off-topic. If it was in “Rolling Stone,” I read it, cover to cover, it was a ritual, it was the highlight of every other week.

And today I get more magazines than anybody I know. It doesn’t make sense to pay for Apple News+ because I’m paying already.

Actually, my interest in magazines has shifted to newspapers, especially since so much of magazine writing is awful, or close to it. Amateurs writing about subjects they’re unfamiliar with. Stories without detail, in an era where information is not scarce, magazines have dropped a notch, trying to be all things to all people and failing. I can get specific information online, usually for free, why should I pay for an ersatz version?

And as my mother says, she can fly coast to coast with only the “New York Times.”

There’s no flight long enough for me. I never buy the wifi, I love being off the grid. But by time I comb through the newspapers, the flight is often over, or it’s time to go to sleep…

Then again, my best reading is done when I’m disconnected, when everybody’s asleep. I spent every night in Toronto reading “Lake Success” for at least an hour, what I really wanted to do was stay in bed and read it all day, it was that good.

“Lake Success” is by Gary Shteyngart. I read his well-reviewed 2010 novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” set in the future when I was in Val d’Isere back in 2011. Never told you that, just didn’t write for a week, but that was back before the tsunami of information, just before the attention economy, a term I coined and now everybody uses. And I didn’t enjoy it, but if I buy a book I finish it. It’s my own personal commitment to myself.

If you don’t pay, you don’t have to finish. But if you do…

In 2009, Felice bought me a Kindle for my birthday. This is what put me back on the road to reading books. My mother rarely paid, she got on line at the library, where you could get a best seller for free a year after it was published. But before Apple colluded, all Kindle books were $9.99. Amazon was building a market. Which the publishing industry quickly destroyed. The concept was Amazon was going to grow the market via lower prices. But the antiquated publishers, technically ignorant, business ignorant other than their narrow silo, were unhappy. Just like the record business, albeit with a much lower total gross.

The record business was brought into the future by theft and Spotify.

The book business is still living in the past.

Now the Kindle books are not that cheap, but what’s worse is the paperback version of “Lake Success” is over four dollars cheaper than the Kindle version. Printing, shipping, returns…that’s what physical comes with. It’d be like charging a hundred dollars a month for Spotify to maintain CD sales, keeping the labels in control of a small market. So what we’ve got now is a self-satisfied publishing industry that isn’t even aware it lost the war. Amazon was doing them a favor, but they missed it. The economics of digital are so much better. But “book lovers” say they love print, the same way the vinyl fanatics go on about LPs and the inane press trumpets gross figures when digital figures are net and… Never underestimate the power of Luddites to hold back the future.

If “Lake Success” were still $9.99, you’d impulse buy it. But at $13.99…you’re not so sure, maybe Lefsetz is wrong. Look at the reviews on Goodreads and Amazon itself, less than four stars. But these are wankers who want easy reading of books that are glorified movie scripts. Whereas “Lake Success” is…

Art. And not that hard to read to boot.

“Lake Success” is “Bonfire Of The Vanities” without the over the top comic tone. Oh, “Lake Success” is funny, but it’s also believable.

Now this is not a book for the underclass. This is a book for strivers, winners. It’s about the haves and the have-nots. About the super-rich versus the rich. But with a conscience.

Yes, the game is rigged, but these are the people who rig it.

But…at what cost?

There’s always a day of reckoning. And then do you wake up and find out you’ve wasted your whole life, doing what’s expedient?

“Lake Success” is au courant. Better than any record this year, better than any book I’ve read in YEARS!

The characters are believable. And flawed. And what happens is not expected, you keep on turning the pages believing you know what’s going to happen and then it doesn’t.

We’ve got instant best sellers, and then we’ve got the books that sneak up on you, that percolate over time.

Then again, the book industry is so insular, they review books a week or two BEFORE they come out, and then there’s no publicity unless they get traction. So it’s all word of mouth.

Hell, I wasn’t gonna read this, I was done with Shteyngart, but then Kate testified and I decided to download the sample chapter, and was immediately hooked and impulse bought it, after midnight, because the endless characterization of the rich’s viewpoint was so spot-on.

“Lake Success” is legendary. Maybe it’s barely known because it skewers the readers themselves. It’d be like trying to sell a book about the lunacy of fantasy sports to those that participate in them. If you worked hard to get ahead, I mean REALLY hard, in high school, to get into a good college, and then slaved to build a career so you could drive a Tesla to your vacation house…you might be offended.

But maybe that’s the point, the rich don’t have a sense of humor about themselves, they’re confident in their beliefs, have contempt for those wasting their opportunities, when the truth is for all their education and experience they’ve got huge blind spots, they know much less than they think they do.

Okay. If you’re capable of reading, and you must be if you got this far, I need you to purchase this book immediately. It’s so right on so many levels. And the plot moves forward and you know the characters and the worst thing that happened to me this week was IT ENDED!

Is cannabis the new music?

The week before CMW, Neill Dixon had a cannabis conference. With 3000 attendees! It’s the wild west, nothing is settled, it’s like music in the days of Napster.

Then again, Robbie Robertson spoke about the sixties. How you had to listen to a record to learn which way the wind blew.

Robbie told a good story. About being on tour with Bob Dylan. How Bob was a folkie and they were rockers and Dylan wanted some of what they had. So they went on tour, and people HATED IT! Normally when you get a bad reaction, you change up the set list. But Bob refused to do this. But it was Bob’s show, so Robbie wasn’t that worried about the response, other than dodging thrown objects. Night after night, he wondered whether it was them or the audience. After the tour the audience caught up with the music. Dylan was pushing the envelope when fans want you to stay in your own lane. That’s death. And Dylan survives when the folkies…many of them are literally dead, or retired or playing to tiny audiences.

But we’ve got no one testing those limits today.

Scott Cohen gave a futurist presentation. Hire him to speak at your conference. After Sony started telling him and Richard how to run the Orchard, Cohen ankled the business. And was hired by Max Lousada at Warner, even though he wasn’t looking for a gig. I don’t want to give away the secrets of our conversation after, but he remarked how the streaming services have all the data and the labels do not. And the money is in the data.

Yes, we have not reached the end of the line in music, there is still runway. Scott talked about AI helping amateurs to make music, so they don’t have to practice for a decade to do this. Like amateurs with Instagram. They’re not professional photographers, they don’t know what an f-stop is, but they employ filters and have a good time.

As for Dave Grohl… I sat there wondering if he gained this personality from all those years on the road, being with a bunch of guys in the van, on the bus… To survive in that atmosphere you have to know how to poke fun, to duck for cover, to deflect. And even though he’s overexposed, Grohl was the master of the quip. He was interviewing his mother, about her book about the mothers of musicians. He told her stuff she never knew and was consistently entertaining, you could not hate him.

Then at the urging of Larry LeBlanc, I went to the Palestinian panel. He’s been bugging me to go to this conference on the West Bank, I’ve been anxious. And it was all copacetic until someone asked about Roger Waters and cultural boycotts and this woman on the panel said cultural boycotts don’t work, that the Israelis stole their land and committed genocide and if you think there’s gonna be peace in the Middle East, you’re dreaming.

And then I went to the pitch panel, a mini Shark Tank.

Cracked me up. This woman pitching an app called Side Door about hooking up musicians for house concerts. Did she ever hear of SCALE?? It’s not like Bon Jovi is gonna play in your backyard, certainly not for less than seven figures. The company takes 10% of revenue, how you make any money…

And then there were the guys pitching music for health purposes. They’ve got some AI, artificial intelligence for those out of the loop, that will help soothe people and they projected some insane eight figure revenue total in five years and after reading the Theranos book, I couldn’t stop laughing. Did they pull that number out of their ass? Does anybody believe these business plans anymore?

But there was this one company called Squiggle or something similar. Their concept is to make electronic music… Let’s just say instead of playing one tone at a time, you can have the tone go up or down and…

You’d have to see it.

And they put up the numbers for music software and it was very convincing, but when they said they were gonna do $35 million in five years, I wondered.

This came up at dinner. Someone wanted to create an app. THAT WAS TEN YEARS AGO! I told this person to hang with people who’d already had tech victories, to learn the lessons. But the curse of the amateur is they don’t want to know much, they think they’re the first person to ever tread these waters, they don’t know that investors are only interested in grand slams as opposed to bunts or singles.

Maybe we should have had Linda Perry there to set them straight.

But Neill is now doing four cannabis conferences a year. He’s the smartest guy in the room, he pivoted.

If you want to succeed, to paraphrase Sam Kinison, YOU’VE GOT TO GO WHERE THE MONEY IS! If there’s not big money to be made, most people are not interested.

Then again, Scott Cohen said that the labels are now populated by thirtysomethings who worked in tech like drones and didn’t get stock options and now want to have fun and make a difference.

The truth is music’s in a lull, it’s the last throes of the baby boomers.

The world is gonna change, it’s just a matter of figuring out where it’s going.

Like Neill Dixon.

Linda Perry insulted the audience.

Unfortunately, I didn’t hear the beginning, I walked in when someone from the audience was singing. After that, Perry said she was looking for rock stars, and no one in the audience was one.

She said you can feel it, you can see it, the way they dress, the way they handle themselves…and then she spread her arms and said I’M A ROCK STAR! I’M A ROCK STAR 24/7!!

She convinced me. And I can’t say I’m her biggest fan.

But do you know how hard it is to make it, and to continue to have success? NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE!

Perry radiated uniqueness, with attitude.

Then she started lamenting today’s scene. Nile Rodgers did this too. Is today’s music really that bad or are these oldsters over the hill?

I’ll let you answer that question.

But there’s a yearning for what once was.

Perry bemoaned the focus on social media. It was all about the RECORD!

Oldsters know this, but youngsters don’t, they focus on social media.

This guy Rick Barker, a supposed social media guru, came next. It was billed as “How To Become A Social Media Ninja In Under An Hour.” But he didn’t have an hour, so he just hit the highlights. Actually, he said you could watch his presentation free at rickbarker.com/ondemand Go for it!

I had no doubt Barker was personally successful. He was driven, with attitude, but when he started telling the assembled multitude how to leverage Instagram Live, and to tweet twenty times a day because people don’t see it, I wanted to stand up like the Nazi in “The Producers” and say…THIS IS EVERYTHING WRONG WITH THE MUSIC BUSINESS TODAY! THE ENDLESS HYPE TURNING US OFF COMPLETELY!

It was the opposite of Linda Perry.

And when Rick gave a commercial at the end, selling his services, with a cell phone number for emergencies, I realized he was just another hustler like everybody else. He said he was Taylor Swift’s first manager, could be, but I’ve never heard of him. And if you’re on the verge of superstardom his techniques would probably work, but like Linda Perry said, there were no rock stars in the audience.

I have social anxiety. So I don’t introduce myself to people and oftentimes run in the other direction when I see people I know. But when Fran DeFeo buttonholed me and insisted I come to the green room to hang with Merck…

I only knew Merck in e-mail, so I agreed.

I did not know I was going to meet Dave Stewart.

The thing about celebrities is you have a mental image of them, often at odds with who they really are, especially musicians (as for “creatives,” I hate that term, EVERYBODY is creative, and it’s just a way for those struggling to label themselves, I’ve never heard anyone successful refer themselves as a “creative.”)

And after telling Dave I saw the Eurythmics on their first American tour, at the Palace, we engaged in conversation.

I guess since he’s produced so many hits, I expected Dave to be edgy, but he was soft. Like you could immediately become friends. We bonded over his great work with Stevie Nicks. If you haven’t listened to “In Your Dreams,” you should, it’s the best solo work she’s ever done, the only thing that comes close is “Bella Donna.” That’s the problem with oldsters, even if they cut great new stuff it can’t get traction.

And Dave told me one of the albums he did with Stevie was cut in a week, live in the studio.

I remarked how it was about capturing the magic, more than perfecting the sound.

And Dave told me the acts often had a vision they were so busy trying to achieve that they missed the destination.

I said it was our mistakes that made us human, that endeared us to people, that we had to leave in.

And I thought the conversation was over, we’d entered the ballroom, but Dave wanted to continue. He said the intro to “Sweet Dreams” was a mistake, and then he demonstrated it to me, slapping an air drum, pushing out the sounds from his mouth.

I relate to musicians best. The business comes second, if it comes at all.

And after being interviewed about his new company Hipgnosis, Merck and Nile Rodgers brought Dave up on stage to sign his new Hipgnosis contract. And then he started to talk…

About his teens asking if he’d heard of this act Etta James!

He laughed, said that’s the beauty of the internet, it’s all available.

And he said he was still writing songs, that he and Nile came up with one on the drive over.

He’s a lifer.

And so am I.