I was driving in my car earlier today and I ended up on the 10s Spot, SiriusXM’s station that features music from the 2010s.

That wasn’t my intention. Actually, I was switching from the news band to one of the music bands, I wanted to dial in John Mayer’s channel, but I must have hit something by accident, and I ended up on this station. And they were playing Halsey.

And I heard the thump. Is that the defining feature of today’s hit music? The bass, the beat, the 808? You even get it in country. Never has an era of music been confined to such a narrow paradigm.

The Halsey track was okay, but then they played “Rude Boy” by Rihanna. I seem to be the only red-blooded male who doesn’t have a thing for Rihanna, as a matter of fact, most of her career slid right by me, because by the time she had hits… MTV & VH1 were no longer a factor, you didn’t have to hear the Top 40 hits if you didn’t want to. So “Rude Boy”…I recognized it as one of the songs Rihanna played at the Super Bowl. And if you were a fan, if you listened to Top 40, you were thrilled and sang along, the rest of us were nonplussed.

So I’m driving down Santa Monica Boulevard thinking about how we got here.

Well, during the MTV eighties, and the fumes of music television thereafter, it was about the single, but the single was promoting the album. A label might put out a single for a minute, to gain traction in the marketplace, but as soon as the track hit, they’d delete it, forcing the consumer to buy the entire album if they wanted to hear the hit.

This was concomitant with the rise of the CD era… Suddenly you were paying twice as much and oftentimes you found out that the song you liked was the only good one on the album.

But other times you dove deeper, and got into the rest of the act’s work on the album, maybe then went and bought albums from the catalog.

Whereas today, it’s about the hit and the hit only. There might ultimately be an album, but all you’ve got to look at is the streaming numbers on Spotify, the hit has been played disproportionately, oftentimes the album tracks’ streams are de minimis.

But who would want more from the Top 40 artists, whose songs are oftentimes written by committee, whose productions go through layers of mixing and… These are commercial products. This is the business the major labels are in, this is the business that gets all the press, but never has it been such a sideshow.

Now Top 40 ruled for years before the late sixties. FM radio made album rock burgeon. Along with “Sgt. Pepper” (maybe it started with “Rubber Soul” or “Revolver”). The act was making a full-length statement, that you wanted to hear. And FM started off free-format, not only would they play the obscure, they’d play entire album sides…it changed the culture of music, suddenly rock was a serious art form that deserved respect, that ultimately the entire nation, the entire world, cottoned to.

Now FM became formulated, thanks to Lee Abrams, there was a tight format, but it was understood that it was still all about the album, the track on the radio was just the sample, excised from an opus you needed to consume.

And then MTV took this formula into the stratosphere.

Now when Napster came along, suddenly you could pick and choose the songs you wanted, and only the songs you wanted. Which was the business model of iTunes and then Spotify, et al. At first the labels hated this, because they were baked into the old model, they thought they could only make money via albums…Daniel Ek proved to them that this was untrue. As for the acts…they were pissed, because they didn’t want their full-length opus messed with, you were supposed to listen to it the way they wanted you to. Remember when acts were concerned about leaks, of not only albums, but work tapes and live tracks? That’s fallen by the wayside, your deepest desire is that people will find you at all, listen to you at all, and it’s your hard core fans who are keeping you alive, and you want to superserve them.

And then there were acts who said they were going to give it one last shot and then they were no longer going to make albums, like Sheryl Crow. But the problem was that no matter how much hype there was, you could not get the public to consume an entire album by someone from the prior century, it was nearly impossible. Then those acts stopped making new music at all…why put in all that effort if no one would hear it?

So today we’ve got the Top 40. Which is akin  to the heyday of MTV, but the acts have no depth, the album isn’t where it’s at, it’s only the single that counts, that people are interested in (of course there are exceptions, but don’t nitpick).

There are acts doing it the old way, not on major labels, oftentimes complaining they’re not being paid by streaming outlets and… Do they deserve to be paid? Is their music such that masses of people want to listen to it?

Oftentimes no.

So what we’ve got here is a sphere of Top 40 vapidity, and too many acts that don’t deserve attention on the other extreme. And the business won’t be healthy until it starts promoting those acts who are creating bodies of work that are worth listening to.

The major labels don’t want to do this, the lift is too hard, never mind the amount of time it takes to break through. They just keep repeating the formula of dreck. To the point where music has never gotten this little respect in my lifetime. It’s seen as ditties, entertainment, warring camps of fans, there’s no there there.

But music used to be the bleeding edge, that’s where you went to find out what was really going on.

In the old days, with so much less music, great would surface. Not anymore. And even if it does, it may take years to shine through. Such that the thinkers who can create this music that deserves attention don’t. They oftentimes don’t even start. They go into tech or finance, where the odds of success are much, much higher. And even if you do play the game and gain success you get no respect. The intelligentsia laugh at you, whereas the intelligentsia used to have to take notice… Everybody watched MTV, EVERYBODY! Those were universal hits.

Today’s hits are niche.

We can talk about distribution platforms, a changing market, but we can also say that we’re not inspiring artists, and that those who are inspired are not given a leg up, are not promoted because they don’t sound like what’s on Top 40, as if most people want to pay attention to today’s Top 40, which is really the Spotify Top 50.

It starts with the artists. How do we encourage them, how do we get them to take their work seriously, how do we get them to say no to opportunities that will hurt their image?

Today music is dominated by the lowest common denominator who have no options, they’re going nowhere fast, the model is the Kardashians, not the Beatles, never mind the Moody Blues, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, the Eagles…

But after we inspire the acts, we much change the focus, to those who are creating a body of work worth paying attention to.

We need to realign the vision of the labels, the press, we have to stop celebrating the penumbra and go for the nougat, the essence. Enough with the fashion and the brand extensions, how do we make music number one?

There are examples, most notably Rosalía with “Lux,” but experimental, limit-testing music used to be the standard, the goal, the mainstream, by time we hit the seventies Top 40 was a sideshow.

But to the casual listener, and it’s the casual listeners who need to be corralled to lift the status of music, the Top 40 is tripe, they’re listening to oldies (keeping the major labels’ coffers full). The music business has successfully marginalized itself. And no one will take responsibility, especially the major labels, which will tell you they’re businesses, first and foremost.

But excitement about quality new music lifts all boats.

But right now we’re sunk.

You don’t want to read this book.

I’m only bothering to write about it because it’s been on the best seller list for months.

Books are not like music, you don’t get to experience it before you buy it, so with the accolades and sales many people are purchasing this book, and I won’t say as few are completing it as Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” but I think most people never make it to the end.

The bottom line is first and foremost a book must be readable. Information is not enough, you must have a narrative, you must pull the reader in. But “1929” is a pastiche of facts, of research, it reads like a college thesis, and you know how many people read those when they’re done…ZERO!

I’ve got no problem with Andrew Ross Sorkin. Then again, when you spread yourself this thin… Ryan Seacrest might be doing many things, but he’s got as much gravitas as a box of Cheerios. It’s mindless. Whereas Sorkin is on CNBC, helped create “Billions” and is a writer for the “New York Times.” As for taking the time to write a book? When? With not only these gigs, but three children to boot!

So you’re scratching your head saying he writes for the “New York Times,” how bad can he be?

Well newspaper writing is different from book writing. Newspaper writing is about information laid out clearly and concisely. Furthermore, in a paper like the “Times,” opinion is relegated to a different page, so there’s no attitude, no real perspective, just the facts.

If you want someone to take the time to read a book…

The dirty little secret is most books don’t sell. Maybe a couple of thousand copies at best. And in a country of 300+ million, that’s bupkes. But we’re subjected to hype about these tomes for months, and reviews and… Kara Swisher talked about her lame book for months, as if anybody cared, and it came out and face-planted…it wasn’t good, I tried to read it. But she gets a pass from the others in the information industrial complex.

As for the book business… If you want to talk about people with a lot of self-respect, it’s not down and dirty like the music business. And those who work in it hate that lowbrow stuff is keeping the lights on.

So “1929” was billed as a deep dive into the crash, with lessons for today.

Well, at first I could see the parallels, but those died pretty quickly. It was a different time with different regulations, or lack thereof. Are there still crooks in finance? Yes, but they’re not really doing it the same way. (Although you did see that Jamie Dimon made $770 million last year…and this is heinous, no one deserves that much, especially when people are hurting, having a tough time making ends meet, never mind getting health care.)

What I wanted was drama. What it felt like when the market actually crashed. And at that point, Sorkin is writing about the market day by day, I’m waiting for the shoe to drop, but it never does narratively, you feel like the market went down and then down further and…whatever is happening on Wall Street is detached from the rest of the country in “1929.”

At the end of this book, Sorkin thanks Erik Larson for advice. I’ve read all the Larson books, the best one is still the one I read first, “Devil in the White City.” But as good a researcher as Larson is, and decent with narrative too, his books are flat, there’s no arc, just endless information. As for Sorkin’s “1929,” it’s a pale imitation of Larson.

Only when you get to the end of the book does Sorkin say he wanted to flesh out the personalities. Well, the focus of the book kept on switching from the people to the market and…you can’t do everything, focus on one or the other, or write about one person, or the crash itself, a secret of writing is you sometimes have to leave the best stuff out, because it doesn’t fit with the narrative. But Sorkin throws in the words of a preacher from Massachusetts at the end…someone without profile who had no connection with the players, why?

Because Sorkin was determined to see all his research in print.

The most amazing thing, the true lesson for me, was that so many of these people ended up broke, they were gamblers, they never saved for a rainy day. And most of their names have been forgotten. And you will read a bit about the individuals, but you’ll tell yourself there’s got to be a better book about this out there, and I’m sure there is, probably one of those Sorkin credits as a jumping off point.

Writing is hard. And I’ll also say, writers are born, not made. As a matter of fact, the more you teach someone how to write the more you risk squeezing the creativity out of them. We don’t need me-too, we need unique.

So I finished this book, even though at times my eyes glazed over and I had to reread passages, but not only was it disappointing, I just couldn’t get over the fact that this was the book everybody was hailing, everybody was talking about, that was selling.

It doesn’t deserve it.

1

He was the cute one.

The history of the Grateful Dead is presently well-known, but at the turn of the decade, from ’69 to ’70, that was not the case. The Dead were a fringe band from San Francisco which had a deal with a major label but had no radio hits, never mind a Top 40 hit, unlike Jefferson Airplane, another act that was seen as a collective, living together in a house. Eventually news squeaked out about the Warlocks, but unless you were living in San Francisco, the Dead were an enigma.

They finally got press with their 1969 double album “Live/Dead,” but that didn’t move the needle significantly. Whatever audience the Dead had was built on the road. And since the band had to survive, they worked.

And then came “Workingman’s Dead” and “Uncle John’s Band,” which was perfect for the summer of 1970, it sat right alongside the CSNY hits. And it was a double whammy, in the fall came “American Beauty,” the true breakthrough, much more accessible than anything the band had released previously, and this is when their touring footprint increased and they garnered new fans. It was really three tracks: “Friend of the Devil” and “Ripple” and “Sugar Magnolia.” Easily digestible, as opposed to the space rock that preceded them, this is when new fans came aboard, casual listeners. And when they went to see the band they expected something conventional, short songs as opposed to extended jams, which turned out to be a bonus.

Not that the audience was completely ignorant. Let’s be clear, the Dead were not an AM thing, they existed on FM and turntables. But that’s where the passion was, that’s where the action was, that’s where the exploration was, that’s where the envelope was being pushed. The listeners of FM were always eager to have their horizons expanded. They might have known about the long Dead shows, but it was the short songs that were the entry point.

And live, it might have been Jerry Garcia’s band, but Bob Weir was the frontman.

The rest of the band did not look like people you knew, the suburbanites who cottoned to the Dead were used to more freshly-scrubbed acts. Sure, some might be rough around the edges, but the Dead looked like they rolled right off the bus, maybe without a shower. They were not physically appealing.

Except for Bob Weir. He was younger than the rest, and he had that shoulder-length hair. How did he end up in this band? It was as if the act recruited from summer camp…how did he get a chance, how did he get included, how did he stay in the group?

But he was definitely a member, as delineated in “Truckin’.” They were all drinkin’ and druggin’ and although the one-two punch of the 1970 albums brought them closer to the mainstream, right thereafter they steered away. The Dead were sui generis. Maybe influenced by what had come before, blues, jug band music, but no one sounded like the Grateful Dead, no one even went down the jam band path until that scene flowered in the nineties.

But to have a band this big, women must be interested. And women were, and Weir has to get credit for that. Otherwise, the Dead would have been Rush, a cadre of male acolytes, but very few females.

Bob was a member of the band, overshadowed on wax until his solo album “Ace” came out in 1972.

By this point people were hungry for everything Dead affiliated, there’d been an album released from the era before Warner Bros. And earlier in the year, Jerry had released “Garcia,” his first solo album. It started with the infectious “Deal” and contained “Sugaree,” which became a standard, but it was definitely a side project, a ramble down the road of Garcia’s personal interests.

That was January. “Ace” was released in May. And it delivered what “Garcia” did not, in your face upbeat playability, with one bonafide standard, “Playing in the Band,” and “One More Saturday Night,” which became a staple of the Dead’s live shows, and “Cassidy.”

This was a surprise. From a distance it almost seemed like a rivalry. But “Ace” lifted Bob Weir’s cred dramatically, he and Jerry were now clearly the leaders of the band…if not quite equals, Bob was now right there alongside him. 

2

I could recite the rest of the Dead’s history. From their own label to the hit with Clive Davis to the eighties when Gen-X glommed on and cities didn’t want the Dead in their buildings because of the penumbra they brought with them, the hangers-on.

And then Jerry Garcia died. In 1995. Before his time, at age 53. It wasn’t surprising his body gave out, after all the abuse he’d put it through, but Jerry was seen as the heart and soul of the Dead and the rest of the members decided not to operate under that moniker. Not that they didn’t play, they just called it something else, like the Other Ones, whose double album “The Strange Remain,” with Bruce Hornsby in the group, is my favorite late “Dead” work.

Weir, Lesh and Hart were in that band, but there were also solo projects. The legend continued. And the man carrying the flag forward was Weir. Sure, Phil had his fans, and would do solo work, but it was Weir who’d written and sung those songs, Weir with the personality. Sometimes they played together, and sometimes not. And I won’t say that anybody could replace Jerry, but sans Bob, there would be no continued Dead mania, and there was.

There were highlights, like “Fare Thee Well,” and then came Dead & Company, pure heresy to many fans who’d come on board from the sixties to the eighties, but the dirty little secret was that Dead & Company were tight in ways that the original Dead were sloppy. If you went, you know.

But you can’t go no more.

Now the thing about the Dead is as important as the music was and still is, it’s a culture, far surpassing any act of its stature. You belong to a family. And just like with a family, everybody has a different take on the history, there are arguments. If I write anything about the Dead I hear from Deadheads correcting and insulting me, as if I have no right to write. When the funny thing is almost all of them came aboard in the eighties and I first saw the band in ’71. Bought my first album in ’69. But that is not enough. However I see it is wrong. But I do see it, and this is my take.

3

Joe Walsh once said he was too old to die young. That the paper wouldn’t be filled with laments about being cut down before his time. 78? Every boomer expects to live longer, but that’s a full ride. Sure, Weir wanted more, we wanted him to have more, but it’s over. Sure, there was shock hearing about Bob’s death, but there was an underlying weirdness, that the dream had died, that it was all over. Without Jerry we had the Dead. Without Phil we had the Dead. Without Bob, there is no Dead. Period.

Sure, John Mayer can lay down the licks. Hornsby can tickle the ivories. But that would be more like a tribute band.

There’s not going to be a 65th anniversary show. And no more Sphere shows either, no more pilgrimages to Las Vegas to revel in the history of the music and this band.

It’s over. That’s that.

When on some level we thought the Dead were forever.

The interesting thing is the Dead never flagged, and that’s extremely unusual. Most acts are hit dependent, the Dead never were. After “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty,” with “Europe ’72” as the cherry on top, the Dead could always sell tickets. Just as many as before. There was never a dip in their business. Bob Weir has been in the public eye for nearly sixty years. He never went on hiatus, retreated to the mountains for a decade, or to a monastery like Leonard Cohen. He was always here, playing that music.

And he aged in public. From that long brown hair to short to a white mop top and moustache, looking like a Gold Rush miner. Sure, he got his teeth fixed, but otherwise it was still the same Bob underneath. And no one with this amount of fame is a regular person, but Weir never evidenced an edge, he was always open and friendly. He’d come from a family band and treated you like family.

So it’s like the death of a loved one. Kinda like your mother or father. Someone you knew your whole life, who you never lost touch with, who you checked in with on a regular basis, who remained true to themselves, who you could count on.

So the absence hurts. Not in an Elvis way, or a Garcia way, there was shock, but Weir’s death hit me as the end of an era. Sure, classic rockers have been dying with increased regularity over the last decade, but somehow the Dead always carried on. Usually with Bob out front. But that’s gone.

So it makes me think of my own mortality. When I first saw the Dead Bob was 23, I was in college. I’m never going back to any school, and the people I studied with are in their seventies, unlike Weir, many retired. They’ve left whatever mark and now they’re running on fumes. Off the radar screen. But Weir? He was still up front and center.

So…

That’s it. A complete career arc. A lot of us saw it from start to finish, and we can’t say that we were ripped-off, Weir gave it his all, he was the last frontman standing, and every band needs a frontperson.

What happens to the Dead’s music hereafter?

I don’t know, predicting the future is a fool’s errand. Sure, there will be tribute acts, but how long will that last? And the truth is the Dead were always a live experience, the records were just a jumping off point. You had to be there.

And many of us were.

But never again.

Tune in Saturday January 10th to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West.

Phone #: 844-686-5863

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