They’re out to get him.

I didn’t like school, because the teachers were so bad. Forget that they were limited. they wanted to keep you in a box. Make sure you were somebody contrary to your inner tuning fork. They wanted you to conform. But when you found a teacher who took the lid off the jar, who wanted to expand your mind with no limits, it was scintillating, you couldn’t wait to get to class, but it happened so rarely. Like with Mrs. Hurley. She posted “Time” article on “Alice’s Restaurant” on the bulletin board. We went to see Janis Ian at Philharmonic Hall. Saw “MacBird” Off-Broadway. You couldn’t wait to get to class.

But most teachers are idiots and the students are drones.

Of course I’m overstating, but your reaction is the point I’m making… Society is all about conforming. And if you don’t?

You know that Elon Musk smoked weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast. It was all over the news. Well, in case you didn’t know, marijuana is legal in California. The media’s outrage, especially the financial media, illustrates how out of touch these old men are. This is why Trump got elected. You can’t swear in the newspaper, but people swear all day long. The newspaper reports about people who lead. Elon Musk is doing the leading.

GM killed the electric car. Elon Musk resuscitated it.

Now for the uninformed, and that seems to be nearly everybody, of course electric cars don’t pollute through their nonexistent tailpipe, but the key here is they’re more efficient than gasoline cars. It takes less energy to go forward. Of course you need to generate electricity to power them, but significantly less than the amount needed for gasoline cars.

Of course you could power these cars with solar. But Obama lost the government’s money propping up some losers so we should abandon it, throw out the baby with the bathwater, even though foreign nations are using ever less fossil fuel power. They’re also pushing forward electric automobiles. They’re concerned about the future. In America, we like to live in the past.

Never mind SpaceX. We were depending upon the Russians for our rocket power, Musk has pushed forward space technology significantly, in a way the government didn’t.

But he’s an arrogant loser who must be stopped.

Now that dope headline… It was written by people who didn’t listen to the podcast. That’s the media we’ve got today, all news and no analysis, unless it’s about politics, which is now a team sport where too many make up their own facts. But if you listened to the podcast you’d find out…

Elon Musk is incredibly boring. I’m sure women are attracted to him for his money and power, maybe his mind, but being in a relationship with him… There’s more dead air than you’ll find in space. Rogan asks a question and then…Musk thinks. This is not a politician with canned answers at the ready.

And speaking of politicians… You can’t make it without backers, you’re sold out by the time you get traction. Rogan keeps on asking Musk if he’s bringing his ideas to somebody, as if Musk needed approval. Rogan’s living in Hollywood, where you roll up a team of producers and talent and try to convince someone at the studio or Netflix to pay for your enterprise, employing smoke and mirrors all the way. The sale is how you get paid, and the buyer knows this, which is why they might put profit-sharing in the contract, but you never get paid.

Musk made a lot of money. He spends his own.

But he did borrow some. Tesla went public.

Therefore there’s a cabal watching the company like baby boomers follow baseball. It’s all minute data, not big picture.

So Musk got frustrated with those betting against him, the short sellers.

Wouldn’t you be pissed at those wanting you to fail?

And he got uppity during the quarterly numbers call. Wouldn’t you? You’re changing the world and you’ve got to listen to these bozos asking inane questions that have got nothing to do with what you’re really doing. We’ve seen this before, fifty years ago, with Bob Dylan. Just listen to “Ballad Of A Thin Man,” or watch “Don’t Look Back.” The frustration is palpable and the arrogance is evident and Zimmy is not too lovable. Not long after this he retreated to the woods and has been an enigma ever since. He wants to control his own narrative. Dylan tells lies and fables and confounds your expectations. Musk ain’t much different.

Joe Rogan is not dumb. But at first he seems a horrible interviewer until you realize how much Musk is not forthcoming. But Joe’s employing locker room humor in a serious discussion, all that self-deprecating crap used before they take down those truly superior by the by.

But if you listen to what Musk has to say…

He’s anti-AI. But nobody would listen to him.

Then he says the merger of humanity and tech is already here. Your smartphone is an extension of your body, the only problem being the pathway is too narrow and slow. This is what the anti-tech people always get wrong, they’re always trying to deny the present, never mind the future, and get us to return to the past. The smartphone enables production, makes you smarter, it’s a computer in your hand. You don’t want to abandon it because it’s part of you. Give up chastising Apple and Facebook, telling them to put limits on usage. That’s missing the point, we don’t want to use our smartphones and apps less, we want to use them MORE!

This is the merger of identity and technology that Ray Kurzweil has been talking about. This is the Singularity. And it’s already happening, and it’s only gonna get worse/better.

You hear people all the time telling you what they don’t need. They don’t need a new phone, they don’t need a faster connection, don’t listen to them, they’re the ones being left behind, they can’t handle the future.

But the future is coming. Musk is optimistic. He says he’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.

The media is pessimistic. Just like the educational system. The teachers and administration want to drag you down into the hole they’re in (thanks Dylan!) But if I could sit with Musk, if I could be exposed to some of these thinkers…

They’re changing our lives. But the people “in charge” are too stupid to understand them. Musk spoke with fifty governors, i.e. all of them, about the detriments of AI and…they didn’t get it.

Congress doesn’t get it, they’re just a brake after the fact. And of course we need brakes on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, but if you don’t take the time to understand how they truly work, live with those running them as opposed to questioning them for a few hours every other year, you’ll never get it.

Maybe Tesla will go broke. Maybe the fact that the Chief Accounting Officer left after a month is significant. But let’s get some perspective here, before Musk and Tesla the electric car was dead. Now the electric car is the future. Get your head out of your rear end and look at the rest of the world, they’re moving quickly into electrics.

We try to pull down those who are the outliers. We’re self-satisfied. If you’re smart, you’re a wuss to be made fun of. America is all about conforming. Just ask the millennials, they don’t want to stick out, they just want to fit in.

Of course Musk has gone off the rails a few times, like criticizing the savior of the cave kids.

But you can understand why he wanted to take Tesla private, so he didn’t have to listen to these uneducated naysayers all the time.

Musk is pushing the envelope. All the while having fun. He considers the Tesla a toy, the X will dance to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. But the S will beat the pants off a Porsche, which is why Porsche is now going electric.

The future is coming, stop denigrating those who are leading us there.

Electric.

If you’d have asked me whether I wanted to go, I would have said no. But my friend Steve was in from New York, and he’s their longtime agent, and we were gonna have dinner before, so…

I said I was in.

We went to Republique, the old Campanile space. Did you ever go there on Thursday for Grilled Cheese Night? Yup, a whole menu of grilled cheese sandwiches from ten to twenty bucks, definitely a memorable experience. Hell, we celebrated my father’s seventieth ten days before he died upstairs at Campanile, he could barely eat, but I remember it. And Steve e-mailed he was gonna be late, so I looked for a parking spot in the neighborhood. Unavailable. I found a lot, where you paid by meter, but as I got out an obvious concertgoer leaned from his car and asked me if I’d ever parked there before. I said only during the daytime. Then he pointed to the sign that said no parking after nine unless you had a permit? Huh? Who does this work for? I mean if I live in the neighborhood I want to park before nine… And eventually I found a spot on a side street where the meter would end before free parking began. I’m always anxious about this, I hate trying to beat the odds, but I left it there. Oh, I could have gone back and parked at Republique, where I was just about to pay before I got Steve’s message about being late, but that’s when I realized the restaurant and the venue were within walking distance, did I want to pay twice? No. But then as we stood outside the venue, waiting for our tickets, I asked myself, can you walk seven blocks at eleven o’clock at Wilshire and La Brea? And it ended up being twelve-thirty and no one tampered with my car but I wouldn’t want to die for thirty five bucks, what it would have cost me to park twice. The dilemmas of living in Los Angeles, where there are more cars than spaces but you have to drive everywhere. Oh, you could Uber but I don’t drink and it would be more than parking and…

The Dover Sole was INCREDIBLE! I just figured I’d get fish because I didn’t want to be bloated at the gig, but I didn’t expect it to be filleted at the table and to have an exquisite taste and I ate it as we continued to talk…

About the old days. That’s what we baby boomers do, talk about the gigs and the players and in this case Andy Slater’s movie about Laurel Canyon, premiering at the L.A. Film Festival. Which led to stories about Brian Wilson, because APA is his agent, and then Andy told the story of becoming friendly with Hot Tuna. I’m loath to tell it, but otherwise I don’t know if you’d ever hear it, he tells it so much better. But in short, he got friendly with Vinny the roadie when he was in college in Atlanta and he and a buddy helped Vinny schlepp the equipment. And then asked Vinny whether they could do the same at the Palladium the following week, which was a seventeen hour drive, and after Vinny said yes they got a drive-away car and Andy didn’t tell his parents he was home and ultimately Andy went to Paragon Sports to make a Hot Tuna satin jacket. He sent one to Jorma and…

Now Hot Tuna is not the mainstream music business. For a while, back in ’72, it was close, Jorma and Jack were still riding high from the Airplane, but today does anybody know that Hot Tuna exists?

Most of the crowd were antiques. Longhairs. Not cleaned-up for the office. Although there were a few youngsters there.

And did I tell you it was SOLD OUT??

Every night in Los Angeles acts with records on the hit parade play big rooms where people sing along to the manufactured show. That’s what they think live music is all about. But Hot Tuna live was not a show, but a concert. And there’s a difference.

So we went back to the dressing room and I was stunned how tiny and thin Jack Casady was. Jorma was big and burly like a lumberjack, and Jorma was thrilled the gig was sold out, L.A. is not one of their strongest markets and both men were very friendly but we had to leave because they were about to go on. Oh, did I tell you we had to walk across the stage to get to the dressing room? I was embarrassed, I thought there would be catcalls, but nobody said a thing. The difference between stage and audience was close to nonexistent, you see at a Hot Tuna show, everybody’s in it all together.

And then Jack and Jorma hit the stage, along with a drummer, and you start thinking, how old are these guys?

So you pull up Wikipedia to find out Jack is seventy four and Jorma’s about to be seventy eight! And it’s then that you realize, this is no different from students in the sixties excavating old blues artists to play on their college campus.

And that’s what they were playing, the blues, but Jorma was WAILING!

Now this is mindblower. Because of his age. Because it’s no longer about guitar heroes. Because you think that records can be manufactured, but this was positively real.

And that’s when I realized it was like the Fillmore.

And those days are long gone.

Of course you wanted to see your favorites, but sometimes you went no matter who was on stage, for the atmosphere, for the experience.

This is different from waiting for the hit and taking selfies, you’re going to marinate in the music, to be taken away, to let your mind drift. This is the true Grateful Dead experience! That’s right, before it got out of control in the mid-seventies, before it became ridiculous in the eighties, you went to a Dead show and they played for four hours, most of it noodling and experimentation, trying to find the essence. You hung, and not on every note. Sure, there were moments of climax, especially during the final hour, but really it was a communal experience that was the other, away from the mainstream. That’s right, before the Airplane and the Dead were popular, they were nobodies. This is not teenage rappers going from zero to hero on their first record, prepubescent pop stars singing canned music for their peers. No, you had to be in the know, and if you were, you were way ahead of the scene. Now you’re way behind the scene, but the scene is so vapid that a gig like this is a revelation.

And despite not ending until long after midnight, no one left.

There was a break in the middle.

And in the second set, the band came alive. It’s subtle, and so different from playing to hard drive. Suddenly, everything clicked, Steve Kimock was in on the action, and your ear pricked up, you could tell the difference, the extended version of “Good Shepherd” was the highlight, you didn’t want it to end.

And it’s not ending for Jorma and Jack. They’re musicians, they’re gonna play till they drop.

And the Airplane’s money was held up by manager Matthew Katz.

In other words, these are not rich rock stars living on past income, Jorma and Jack are in their heyday now, working for a living.

It was so strange, you could walk near the stage and feel like you were bonding with the act. Or go back and have a conversation and feel the music soothing you. It was a night out. Sure, there was merch, but no over-expensive food and drink, this was positively in the past, when it came to ethos anyway.

Now the jam band fans are aware of Hot Tuna, they play Peter Shapiro’s Capitol Theatre, then again, jam band music peaked fifteen years ago, it had a good run, but Blues Traveler ain’t gonna be on the hit parade again any time soon. Tedeschi Trucks does good business, but if you don’t know, you don’t know. Which is so different from the era when Jack and Jorma were kings. When fans knew the entire music scene, what was out there, and a hit could come from left field.

So should you go?

I’d say young people should especially. To see the POSSIBILITIES! Full room of groovers, with no parents in the quiet room waiting to take their kiddies home. This was not big business, it was THE BUSINESS!

But it doesn’t matter to Jack and Jorma whether you come or not, they’ll still perform, they’ll still do their act. Playing for hours to get it right. Septuagenarian Jack even started to jump in the middle of the second set. Not exactly like Eddie Van Halen used to, but Eddie had a hip replacement and Eddie is younger yet you’re listening to Jorma and thinking of Eddie. Eddie is glorified as the king, along with Clapton and a few other pickers, but the truth is there are more than that, and each person has their own style. It was not cookie-cutter, it was different.

And it was different last night.

“The Chain”

What kind of crazy, fucked-up world do we live in where Lindsey Buckingham gets kicked out of Fleetwood Mac and the band gets better?

The same one in which Glenn Frey passes and the Eagles improve.

Now we know the Mac can’t sustain without Stevie, but without Lindsey…NO PROBLEM!

No one doubts Mike Campbell’s guitarwork, he doesn’t emote quite like Lindsey, but he can pick just as well.

As for Neil Finn…HE’S A REVELATION!

Maybe you remember Crowded House, but you should really look back to Split Enz, which couldn’t get traction until Neil joined. Then he got us and sent a message to our girl and won our hearts and financial success to boot. But being a proud New Zealander, he tends not to be on our radar screen, but he is now!

It’s no secret Stevie Nicks can do arena business without the rest of the group, but this is something different, it takes Stevie’s skills and appeals, mixes in the temporarily gone crooning of Christine McVie and now the band has been reenergized, gone from an oldies act to a new one overnight, how did this happen?

Now we know there was a schism in the band’s history, multiple ones in fact. I doubt fans of the Peter Green iteration liked the Stevie/Lindsey concoction. Then again, there was the interim era with Bob Welch and this seems more like an evolution than a substitution of journeyman players. Who knew Vince Gill could add so much to the Eagles, who knew Neil Finn could add so much to Fleetwood Mac? And as “The Chain” ends and Mike Campbell starts to wail you don’t miss Lindsey Buckingham one bit. Used to be his band, no longer. If they paid to see the act without Christine, what is Lindsey gonna bring to the picture to share the cash…NOTHING!

Now the funny thing about this iteration is it makes you want to hear new material. McCartney was on Stern today and it made you realize how much he missed Lennon. Because John held his nose when McCartney delivered tripe, and vice versa, they pushed each other to excellence. You’ve got to believe Mike and Neil have reinvigorated the other four members of Fleetwood Mac, and one thing you know about Neil is he can write, and unlike his peers, having never reached superstar status, he can still do it, he still has the fire.

But does anybody really want new Fleetwood Mac music?

Today it’s all about the road. The modern music business has detached from classic rock, all rock in fact. It’s all hip-hop all the time. Did you read today’s “Wall Street Journal” about the huge payments by the majors for barely proven hip-hop talent? They don’t care about radio, they can make their bones online and cash too, it’s a whole new paradigm. And never underestimate the power of classic rock, it too is streamed now, but its acolytes are no longer hungry, they might have smartphones but they still don’t subscribe to streaming services.

But they’re fans.

That’s the difference between the oldsters of yesterday and today. THE FERVOR! Go to a Mac show and people are not sitting in their seats, rattling their jewelry, they’re standing and singing and dancing…

The oldsters lived through something. It’s hard for the youngsters to understand. Music was EVERYTHING! Everybody had a stereo, everybody bought albums, they were addicted! Let’s analogize it to movies. Neil Simon dies and you remember his flicks and how you used to go to the theatre. Now you no longer go to the theatre, they make movies but you don’t want to see ’em. Sure, you might hit a documentary, about Mr. Rogers or RBG, but they’re a zit on the financial ass of the theatrical business.

But the funny thing is the classic rockers still rule at the venues.

So modern music is like today’s movies. Two-dimensional characters, nothing you can believe in. Candy that’s eaten and forgotten. There’s a business, they trumpet the grosses, but does anybody care?

Of course a few do.

But when it comes to movies, the great stuff was all pre-blockbuster, pre “Jaws” and “Star Wars,” when there was not that much money in it and all the glamour and the impact was in films.

Even more in music. Because movies when done right are larger than life, music when done right is life itself.

And now television has taken over from movies by being what flicks used to be. About people as opposed to superheroes and monsters. Because we want to see our real lives reflected.

And you can say today’s pop music is just today’s kids’ flavor, but the truth is it was different. Stevie Nicks was not an overnight success… Nobody in today’s Fleetwood Mac was an overnight success. They paid their dues, starved in obscurity, toured, lived the hard life until breakthroughs came years later.

That is not the paradigm today. Today everything is instant and then fades away. Those with intellects and souls stay far away from entertainment, the odds are too long, they want a protected life, but…back then entertainment was ruled by the middle class, playing without a backup plan.

Then again, there was little income inequality.

And a bigger safety net.

You could survive.

And you’ll be rejuvenated and alive when the lights go down and the band implores you to…

LISTEN TO THE WIND BLOW!

“Gypsy”

From a majordomo at Swan Song, Led Zeppelin’s record label, to managing Bonnie Raitt and Nirvana in their heydays to label gigs at Atlantic, Warner and Mercury, Danny Goldberg has seen and done it all.

And much more.

Here is the story from beginning to now, from being a stoner and leaving college to managing Steve Earle.

Danny fought his way to the top without a parent in the business, when music drove the culture.

You think you want to follow in his footsteps, well here they are for you to see!

A snippet:

Danny Goldberg on this week’s podcast: https://t.co/dTSlgQYWzo Danny on meeting Bonnie Raitt: pic.twitter.com/T1zwoaJFsH

— Bob Lefsetz (@Lefsetz) September 4, 2018

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