Don’t put anything in writing. Because then you have plausible deniability.

One thing about Trump, he’s proven to be surrounded by third-rate attorneys who are really henchmen, lawyers that would be disbarred if their activities ever came to light.

And now we have Dylan Howard and Jon Fine of American Media extorting Jeff Bezos in print, as if they’ve got no idea how the world works, never mind the law.

This is what happens when you’re drunk with power, when you serve those with agendas in the world of gotcha, believing if they’re the biggest bully they will always win.

That’s not only David Pecker, but Donald Trump.

Oh, don’t get your knickers in a twist. Trump doesn’t believe in sunlight, no tax returns, no information on the most powerful man in America, just the way he likes it. And when he’s squeezed, he squeals. And isn’t it interesting the only person who can really get his goat is Nancy Pelosi, a woman.

Now if you’ve been paying attention for the past few years, you know that Nancy Pelosi is an over-the-hill, ineffective hack out of touch with America. That’s how the Republicans and right wing press have depicted her. It’s a veritable war of words, with the Democrats historically playing defense. To the point where when Elizabeth Warren and AOC play offense traditional Democrats decry them, playing into the Republicans’ hands.

But then Pelosi maneuvers herself into the Speaker gig and it turns out that unlike the President, she knows how to play the game, she even runs circles around Chuck Schumer. Because she’s willing to dress up nice but still throw a punch, without looking like she’s even losing control. Sure, Republicans still hate her, but Democrats who bought into the right wing’s depiction of her no longer do.

It’s a veritable club I tell you, the politicians and the news media. Same faces, owed favors. And we never know what’s really going on.

Which is why it’s so great that Jeff Bezos published his story on Medium.

He OWNS the “Washington Post.” He could act like a dictator and insist they include his words. But he could see the negative effect of that, he doesn’t want to tarnish the “Post,” so he publishes on the web.

And goes from zero to hero overnight.

We saw this with David Letterman, extorted over an affair, he exposed the situation on television, and the story no longer was about his moral failings, his duplicity, his stepping out on his wife, but his honesty!

Jeff Bezos acts like an adolescent, then gains his cool and plays like Jordan in the NBA Finals. Or should I say LeBron?

Bezos lays it all out, at length, and it reads like it was written by him.

Now what?

This is bad for the “Enquirer,” this is bad for Trump.

But it’s good for our country.

You see this is how the world has been run for eons. Backroom dealings. You’ve got to know the players to know what’s really going on, in all businesses.

Which is why Pelosi succeeds and Trump fails. Being a politician is a profession. The aforementioned Michael Jordan proved that being the best basketball player of all time didn’t make him a world class baseball player.

But those are both sports.

It’s like saying Mark Spitz would be a great Senator.

Or Howard Schultz would be a great President.

Conversely, I doubt Nancy Pelosi could run Starbucks.

Then again, you or me gets caught up in a scandal and we’ve got no options. Peter Thiel sues Gawker out of existence and Bezos spends bucks to find out what happened at the “Enquirer.”

Meanwhile, like Manafort before him, David Pecker believes the law doesn’t apply to him.

But to quote Bob Dylan:

For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes must get lonely

We’re all human, we’re all the same, with similar desires and similar lives.

But in the era of billionaires, there’s a whole coterie of wealthy people who think they’re better than us.

Then again, those without cash believe money rules.

But they would be wrong, money is trumped by power.

That’s what David Pecker had and has.

Fox News is not worth as much as Netflix, but it’s much more powerful.

This is what insiders know.

And when you play the power game, you’ve got a number of cards.

Pecker believed that Bezos’s ego would not allow him to have his sexual peccadilloes exposed. All the money in the world could not make Pecker and the “Enquirer” go away.

But the honesty card put a knife in the “Enquirer”‘s heart.

And the truth is, if you lay it out for all to see, they’ll look.

You should now:

“No thank you, Mr. Pecker”

The Grammys have not only lost touch with the audience, they’ve lost touch with the artists.

What if you gave a party and nobody came?

This is kinda like the election of Trump. Globalization left behind the underclass which decided to overturn the table. After years of appeasing CBS instead of the artistic community, Drake, Kendrick Lamar and Childish Gambino have refused to perform on the Grammy stage.

Good work my friends!

This is like Kaepernick, only today’s musical artists don’t depend upon the NFL, i.e. the Grammys, to work. That’s why change has come from entertainment first. The barrier to entry is low, and there are fewer constraints upon artists. As for labels…their leverage is their catalogues and their relationships with terrestrial radio and network television, could they be suffering a moment of truth soon?

Kinda like the Backstreet Boys being number one. Only in bizarro world, where the “Billboard” chart means anything. You can’t find a single Backstreet Boys tune in the Spotify Top 50. Meanwhile, “7 Rings,” the song Ariana Grande wanted to perform at the Grammys, is number one on Spotify, not only in the U.S., but the entire WORLD!

This is a fake news crisis. How is anybody supposed to believe a Grammy is important, has any gravitas, when there are eight nominees and an act can win with less than 15% of the old farts’ votes. This is when you lose hearts and minds.

Kinda like that inane article in the “New York Times” today about the loudness wars, what is this 2007? It turns out mainstream media is preaching to a tiny fraction of the public, mostly to those who are out of it. If you’re a fan of something, you go much deeper than the big media outlets ever go, so you laugh when you read an article like this.

But back to the Grammys…

Fans resent athletes making all that money, not realizing they bring in the fans and the owners are so much wealthier.

But when it comes to musical artists, perception is the acts earned their big bucks, and are allowed to spend them however they want to. They’re unfettered. So who gains cred here, Drake, Kendrick or Gambino or the Grammys?

Not the organization.

Neil Portnow has been asleep at the wheel for years. A caretaker who slept while the world changed.

And Ken Ehrlich has been out of control ever since he got Aretha Franklin to thank him during the Grammy telecast.

The Grammys are supposed to serve the industry, not defy it.

As for the big CBS contract… Ain’t that America, where you’re beholden to the bucks.

As for these three acts, they’ve got little to gain from appearing on the telecast. Their audience is already aware of them. They don’t depend upon TV to reach potential fans, the internet does it so much better, and there is no Grammy bounce.

This is what the internet and streaming have wrought. You don’t hear Drake complaining about streaming. He’s making plenty of bucks. It’s only the old people who triumphed under the old system who complain. They want their Oldsmobiles in a world of Teslas.

The Oscars lost touch because no one saw the nominated movies.

The Grammys lost touch because the deserved never won.

So Jay Z refuses to play the Super Bowl, says the NFL needs him more than he needs them.

That’s true.

And same deal with Drake, Lamar and Gambino.

This is important stuff, this is a turning point. After thirty years, the artists are taking back control of the industry, because the industry was asleep and driving towards the cliff.

This is like the sixties, when acts refused to record in label studios and use union engineers. When the contract said a label had to release the record, it could not shelve it.

You don’t need a label to put out a record today, and you certainly don’t need a Grammy to enhance your career.

As for the statuette, the legends who won always put them in the bathroom anyway.

And awards in art are a joke, how do you quantify? And with hindsight, so many of the winners are losers.

So I’m encouraging more acts to boycott the Grammys. To put an end to the charade. When you band together, you get change.

But one record and one act can change the world.

And obfuscation and lying are passe. Ehrlich makes up mumbo-jumbo about why Ariana Grande will not sing, and the woman herself takes to Twitter and calls him out, saying he’s wrong, and she needs no prep time.

The same oldsters who complain about social media and the “incomprehensible” Twitter are being bitten on the ass by it.
It ain’t your Daddy’s music business anymore.

THANK GOD!

Don’t tell me what to do
And don’t tell me what to say

Don’t these guys learn? After leaving Lorde out of the ceremony last year?

Medleys suck. If they were so desirable, they’d be on the hit parade. As for the vaunted “Grammy Moments,” none of them equal Prince at the Super Bowl. Come on, what’s next, the Donald singing “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” with Pelosi on backup? The winds of change have blown, and the Grammys and CBS did not get the message, despite having Tina Tchen heading a “diversity task force,” does anybody at the Grammys even speak to each other?

For twenty years, the artists have been tools of the man, now a tiny woman with a big voice who is arguably the biggest star in the land has been told what to do and wants no part of it.

Meanwhile, the bozos from U2 appear three times on the telecast in 2018, and they weren’t even nominated for any awards, unlike Ms. Grande.

Furthermore, as if they had the talent and gravitas of Tom Petty, the Academy won’t back down. Hell, this is 2019, you apologize and move on. What, are you teaching Ariana a lesson? What, are we being jetted back to the fifties? Women have power now, she’s exercising it, and you cry foul?

As for playing her current hit… You opened the show with the Police who hadn’t recorded a new track in decades. Furthermore, people have played their non-nominated cuts seemingly every year.

The institution is not as big as the players.

This business runs on talent. Every executive is disposable, but the acts are not.

Ever since the days of Tommy Mottola, the execs have believed they were king. But not anymore. Because acts don’t even need a label, and they can monetize in so many ways other than recordings. The industry and the lame Grammys are subservient to the talent, not the other way around.

How in the hell can you say no to a woman after last year, is it because Neil Portnow and Ken Ehrlich are on their last legs? They fired Al Campanis, the heads of these guys should have rolled a year ago, when their egregious behavior was on display for the world to see.

CBS and the Grammys should be groveling to have Ariana on the show.

Then again, CBS blew out Les Moonves, and Neil Portnow is still bloviating.

Some people are categorically incapable of doing the right thing. They don’t deserve second chances.

So Rihanna and a slew of other acts refuse to play the Super Bowl in support of Kaepernick, they abhor the plantation mind-set of the NFL.

And now Ariana punts the Grammy football away.

Neither star NEEDS the institution. They’re doing fine without it.

The Grammy ratings keep on going down and all we get is endless medleys, hackneyed scripts and TV stars reading from teleprompters.

Did the VMAs insist on medleys?

Telling Ariana Grande what to do…who do they think they are?

You don’t own me
Don’t try to change me in any way
You don’t own me
Don’t tie me down ’cause I’d never stay

THANK YOU LESLEY GORE!

I gotta quit this habit
It’s like this drug for you

Actually, after a ruinous New Year’s Eve I was finally recovering, finally seeing a road unfolding in the future. She’d left back in May the year before and for a long time I thought she’d come back, but she didn’t. And then just when she said she was ready, I was worried, fearful of the craziness returning, but just before I could tell her I was unsure, her doctor told her the time was not quite here, and togetherness was tabled.

Until two months later, around noon, when there was a knock on the door. There she was.

That’s how life works in case you don’t know. Once you give up on something it happens. You can’t play mind tricks, convincing yourself it won’t happen, you’ve got to have truly given up, gone through all the Kubler Ross stages. And then…

She was smiling. Walking into the house we used to share. And for some reason, I showed her the video of Elton John’s “Club At The End Of The Street.”

I was a massive Elton fan, still am. And after he took a break, after “Blue Moves,” when he ultimately showed up on Geffen, it wasn’t quite the same. There was that other lyric writer, Chris Thomas instead of Gus Dudgeon, and there were hits but they didn’t have the same essence of what came before, until…

“Club At The End Of The Street.”

This was when MTV ruled. Before Nirvana eviscerated the hair bands, when you turned on the television to know what was going on, radio followed in MTV’s footsteps, after all, the programming team was poached from KROQ, the hippest station in the land.

And this was also when production values mattered, when a performance video no longer cut it. And I couldn’t get over how in the animated video Elton’s flip was imperfect. Like the clip was done on the cheap. In any event, I taped it and played it again and again, it made me feel good. Especially the bridge:

There’s a downtown smell of cooking
From the flame on an open grill
There’s a sax and a big bass pumping
Lord, have mercy
Ooh, you can’t sit still
Oh, you can’t sit still

That’s right, listening to “Club At The End Of The Street” lit my spirit, Elton was back, and quite possibly so was I. Lord have mercy!

And she walks in and it’s like she never left. And caught up in the mood, I showed her the video, you can watch it here:

Elton John – Club At The End Of The Street

And then she was on her way, to Seattle, to recover. We went out to her truck and she showed me our wedding picture and then she was gone. Like always.

I was doing my back exercises the other day and I was calling out songs to Alexa, on the Echo Show. I don’t believe in playlists, they’re unsatisfying. And I didn’t want to hear the hits, I wanted to hear the album tracks, songs that resonated with me.

And that’s when I thought of “Blue Avenue.”

And it’s no use each way we lose
You and me at the crossroads of Blue Avenue

Actually, I thought of “Club At The End Of The Street” first, but I wasn’t in an upbeat mood, I wanted something to soothe me, that lived in my head, that would make me feel comforted, not alone.

You see “Blue Avenue” is the last song on that 1989 album containing “Club At The End Of The Street,” “Sleeping With The Past.”

And playing the CD in the wake of loving “Club At The End Of The Street,” I fell in love with “Blue Avenue,” it’s got the gravitas Elton’s famous for, all the way back to “Sixty Years On” and “The King Must Die.”

And I’m lying on the floor listening, and I was wishing after the farewell tour Elton would go on the road to play all the album cuts. Yes, he does “All The Girls Love Alice,” but I need to hear “Elderberry Wine” and “Teacher I Love You” and “Blue Avenue.”

You’ve got the same obsession

And then she called. Just when I was coming down from her disappearance. I couldn’t be all lovey-dovey, I couldn’t make nice, I told her she called me when she needed me, but what I needed…

Was to get off, and I did.

And I found new love. Just like that. I was done. I was on the high of connection, finally feeling good after a year of hell.

And then she came back to L.A. and called.

She was now ready.

But I was not. I told her, I was involved with somebody else.

But that phone conversation totaled my love connection with the record company girl. You see she was upbeat and game, but I was married to the other one, we’d lived together for years, she could not be instantly forgotten, she’d touched my heart, and then broke it.

And it’s no use each way we lose
You and me at the crossroads of Blue Avenue
Hit and run hearts collide here
True love passes through
Looks like we’ve got a wreck babe
Up on Blue Avenue

Blue Avenue Spotify

Blue Avenue YouTube