Anything For A Hit

If “Anything For A Hit” was written by a man it would be a best-seller.

Every, and I mean EVERY wannabe should devour this book. Because it delineates the game and how it is played, and it’s much worse than you’ve ever dreamed.

Oldsters know all that. But they’ll read for the salacious details anyway, mostly about Ahmet Ertegun, who is dead.

This book is not what it was billed as. It’s not the sexual harassment expose. I’m not saying there’s not a lot of bad behavior, even actionable behavior revealed, but that’s not what the book is really about.

It’s the first half that will have you glued.

Dorothy Carvello’s time at Atlantic. Which is run like a family, a highly dysfunctional one where executives are underpaid and illegalities are rampant but fun is job one.

This is why people wanted to be in the record business. The endless money, the endless dope, the endless trips, the famous people, the high living. Yup, just as Dorothy tells it, that’s the way it was, and she’s not even bragging!

This is not a self-congratulatory autobiography like Clive’s unreadable “Soundtrack of My Life.” You won’t be able to put “Anything For A Hit” down, I devoured it and finished it all in one day, today, hell, it’s 2:25 AM, I should be in bed, but I’m all fired up!

Carvello is no picnic, but as Don Henley sang, it’s one of the things they loved about her. She’s sassy, alive, a good hang. One of the boys. And believe me, to make it back then you had to be one of the boys, or be the mistress of one of the boys.

But she’s also clueless. When one A&R guy labels her “relentless,” you come to believe it. She’s constantly misreading the signals, working against her own interests.

But don’t we all. I certainly have. Took me DECADES to figure out how this world worked. And I too credit therapy for opening my eyes. After Carvello goes to the shrink, on the advice of Tim Collins, a good man who’s been exiled from the business, we’ve got no space for them here, she changes, she mellows, she understands the game.

Not that the people on top do. They’re playing a completely different game, three-dimensional chess. Which is why you have to decide who you want to be, the boss or the employee. The boss can get away with it, the employee cannot.

And if you’re not the boss, you’re gonna lose your job in the music business. Eventually the bosses do too, but they last longer.

You’ll be horrified at Ahmet’s behavior, but those who knew him admit the man was charming.

And Carvello’s distribution of anger and praise will make insiders laugh. Be nice to her and you get a pass, are these passes deserved? I’ll let you read and decide, assuming you know the players.

And she makes a classic mistake, working without a contract. And believing her lawyer is loyal to her, not the industry. Acts come and go, the business remains. Stand up for yourself, tell the truth, and you’re history.

At least you were.

That business doesn’t exist anymore. Never mind label head, you don’t even want to be a rock star…a techie, even a financier lives a better life. The banker stays home most of the time, and he always flies private, and despite the illusion most musicians do not, often it’s somebody else’s plane they’re hitching a ride on.

Music is mature. It’s dead. The action is all on the promotion side. It’s much harder to get a record deal than a date. And at that date promoters can see whether the audience reacts, they’re the first ones to know whether you’re hot. And they speak with agents, not lawyers. The whole business has flipped.

And a hit is not what it used to be. You can be number one and most of America has never heard of you.

And you can be reviewed in “Variety,” “Billboard,” “The Daily Mail”… I figured this book was a stiff because it was published by an indie. But the hype has been as good as that for a book from a major.

But there’s no reaction. Because those outlets don’t sell books anymore.

You do.

Maybe you were old enough to remember when “Hit Men” came out, the industry all bought and read it in a week. This is the most honest music business book since, but no one cares.

Because the audience is being fed salacious details 24/7 on TMZ. Because we’re a long way from Christopher Moltisanti noting Tommy Motttola waltzing by the velvet rope into a New York club. Because everything unknown spreads slowly in this world of cacophony. Getting traction is nearly impossible, but once you get some, it builds.

This is a sexist business. And to a great degree, it’s eluded the #MeToo movement. Because everybody involved loves working in it and knows if they blow this whistle they’re out. Is this right? Of course not. But it’s the truth.

Buy this immediately.

Like I said, the second half drifts and is dispensable, although you read it anyway, but the first half…

It was written about the heyday, when music still drove the culture, when MTV was God, when CDs rained down cash.

I can’t tell you about what’s coming in the future, but…

“Anything For A Hit” is definitely how it was in the past.

That’s this week’s Sirius Show topic.

Tune in Tuesday September 25, on Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

Phone #: 844-6-VOLUME, 844-686-5863

Twitter: @siriusxmvolume/#lefsetzlive

Everybody knows the prep school kids are the worst offenders.

You think we live in an homogeneous society, all starting from the same line, with the same information, with melting pot backgrounds with various pluses and minuses that balance out in the end.

You’re very wrong.

I went to a melting pot high school. There were only a handful of African-Americans, but no truly rich people. But some from the projects. I grew up fifty miles from New York City. Partook of New York media. I thought I knew what was going on.

Until I went to Middlebury College.

I went to Middlebury because it was in Vermont, had its own ski area, was coed and prestigious. It just seemed like another step in the endless road forward, of life.

But I was wrong.

I learned a lot at Middlebury. But almost none of it was in the classroom. You see 45% of Middlebury students came from prep school.

They were self-confident, they knew the game, and they were much better read than us, the public school denizens. That’s right, you get a much better education in a prep school. Forget DeVos and vouchers, that’s for the religious and poor, what’s left of the middle class. Those with money like DeVos, they send their kids to prep schools. And I’m not talking about the exclusive NY and L.A. institutions like Trinity and Dalton and Harvard-Westlake and Campbell Hall. No, I’m talking sleeping away miles from Mommy and Daddy, being formed by the wisdom of the crowd. That’s a reason breakthroughs are rarely from the preps. You see prep school teaches you how to get along. Sure, you want to excel, but you know first and foremost you want to be a member of the group. That life is long and relationships pay off. A public school valedictorian dreams of future opportunities, the prepsters are born to them.

They see education as a game.

The prep school kids taught me that you didn’t have to hand a paper in on time. You could always go to the teacher and get an extension. And it was true!

The prep school kids are the ones who lobbied for a bar on campus.

The prep school kids joined fraternities.

The prep school kids knew what an MBA was, I certainly didn’t.

And you can read on TMZ the inner-workings of seemingly every celebrity extant. But the prep school kids, the true insiders, know that it’s best to remain silent.

Let’s see… The prep school kids taught me how to rip off the Pepsi machine.

The prep school kids had names for all the girls in “New Faces,” the printed Facebook of its day. Don’t think you had one of those at your high school, never mind your college, right? It was the prep school kids who’d marked all the “attractive” women by move-in date.

So when I hear Kavanaugh and his cronies denying their behavior, I have to speak up, because it’s BAKED IN!

You see there are two Americas, the privileged and the not. And most people never encounter privilege. They watch “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous,” but the truly rich try not to be famous and will never be on a show like this. And they can bury bad news, by hiring David Boies, as Harvey Weinstein did to try and keep stories out of the “New York Times,” which was also paying for Boies’ firm’s services. You see it’s a club, and you’re not in it. Even worse, you don’t know about it.

So you sit at home and judge shenanigans through the only lens you know, which cannot see bad behavior.

“Animal House” was based on Dartmouth. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to go there, back then there were still no women. Now a bunch of these legendary prep schools do have women. But the stories I heard…

Show weakness and you become a pariah. There’s no running to your parents, if they’re even paying attention. You learn not to snitch. You learn not to reveal bad behavior. You learn how to bend the rules.

Now I cannot tell you whether Kavanaugh behaved as alleged or not. But the only thing I know is this behavior is consistent with the prep school ethos.

And this is far beyond right and left, far beyond racism and abortion. Then again, the preps are overwhelmingly white, they let in a few anomalies, but listen to the testimony of those in endless books, they’re outsiders living a separate life. You’re stunned when you hear “educated” people utter anti-Semitic and racist comments? They’ve been exchanging them for years unsupervised in prep school.

That’s right, there’s no supervision. No accountability. No parental oversight. No one saying otherwise in your formative years.

I met rich and famous people in college, it’s helped me in my so-called career. I learned you never fawn, never talk about money, that first you sidle up and become friends, and that’s oh-so-hard to do, because the rich and famous are skittish, they are not open books, and they believe the system outweighs any momentary event.

There are some things you cannot learn unless you experience them.

Talk to a prep school graduate.

Then again, they won’t tell you.

Tyler was an itinerant drummer from Alaska, switching genres from punk to metal to country to survive. But his wife had rheumatoid arthritis and was suffering in the cold so they moved to Vegas whereupon Tyler’s wife told him she met with someone who was talking about Zappos and she thought it would be a great fit for him, since he was burned out on the road.

But he couldn’t get in, acceptance rate is in the single digits. So he made a video where he played all the instruments to a song he wrote why he wanted to work at Zappos, and he got in.

He started in the call center.

It was FUN!

Does not compute, I know. But he loved blowing people’s minds. They’d call all huffed and puffed and he’d send a replacement and give a credit and a fifty dollar coupon to boot. That’s the essence of Zappos, it’s a customer service outfit, not a shoe store.

And Tyler, a redhead with a long beard, pitched in on events. With parade floats, parties, things like that, and word got around, he was called into HR, they asked him what he wanted to DO!

They’d already been calling him the “Chief Fungineer.” He said that’s what he wanted to be. So HR said to go home and write up a job description and come up with how much he wanted to be paid and when he turned it all in, they said YES!

So Tyler built built events and everybody was having so much fun and he was doing so well that Tony asked him to fly to L.A., with him and by the end of the trip made him head of “Brand Aura.” You know, enhancing the brand, the image, what everybody tries to do while ripping you off all the while.

And now that’s his gig. It’s Tyler who coordinated with Jason to build and execute the activities at the Church of Rock & Roll. And he wants to proceed further, and don’t think Zappos is handing out money, Jason is a force of nature, when dedicated he can infect you and convince you.

So, I’m here at Fergusons meeting so many people. It’s like summer camp. I have to come back, when it’s quieter, when I can relax. But what I like most is the people. I work alone. I don’t have kids and I don’t go to an office. So it’s moments like this I lust for, and lament the passing of, I could be crying tomorrow.

And this music business is a giant party, where everybody’s working 24/7 yet not complaining. I had a long conversation with Greg Perloff last night where we discussed where we came from and where we are now. We bonded over Laura Nyro, he said the greatest rock band was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and it was like we’d known each other forever, even though we’d only met in passing before.

That’s the power of rock and roll.

And Florence and her Machine were quite good last night. She’s got the music in her, albeit very differently from Kiki Dee. And the band was tight and honest. But she still lost half her audience by the end of the show. Then again, it was late. If I was a headliner I’d want to go on EARLIER!

And walking back to my trailer, everybody was mouthing the words of Travis Scott, who was prowling the stage sans musicians. Never underestimate the power of a hit.

And Foster The People sounded like music, which can be a relief. And their finale with Cirque du Soleil on “Hey Jude” was quite the spectacular.

And long after midnight, you could still not get into the EDM tent.

And they say the bill drew all the females.

But I still have questions. I’m still looking for answers.

Then again, talking to Tyler my belief in the American spirit was rekindled. We’re a can do people. We see a target and we go there. How did our politicians become all about the negative.

And if I had to start all over would I work at Zappos?

Maybe.