I’ve written about this before.

Been one of those days, my computer speakers blew up, now what? That makes three dead sets on my desktop. And the manufacturers of all of them have gone out of business. Do I spend a lot, the internet seems to recommend Audioengine, or do I go for cheapies, those JBL clear ones for $160, or maybe sequence to Sonos Ones, but that’ll be good for Spotify, but not everything.

The night before was wonderful.

Coran Capshaw was being honored by the City of Hope. And although the entertainment was Trey Anastasio and Dave Matthews, nobody listened. And although the food included sushi, it seemed like nobody ate, everybody was so busy TALKING! It was like a reunion, people from across the country you see once a year, or once every couple of years, we caught up, talked about Trump and Weinstein, I coulda stayed there all night. Actually, I did, just about closed the place.

And I was so revved up I could not fall asleep. I don’t know about you, maybe you’re integrated, but not me, most of the time I’m alone in front of a computer screen, and to tell you the truth I don’t want to hang with most people, but there are certain environments that are so satisfying and rewarding I could stay there forever, like summer camp, like that month in Mammoth, like last night.

So I’ve been in a fog all day. And my Fridays are now like college Fridays. You remember those… You’d stay up late, 3 or 4, playing records, getting high, getting drunk, and although I do neither of those anymore on Fridays I stretch out, I rarely get to bed before 3, which is to say I read two days of papers through and through and found out the kneeling has had no effect on the NFL, they studied it, ratings are down because there’s too much football, but no more in red states, which you’d expect, and although I read this in the WSJ, it’s amazing how the scuttlebutt is wrong, all the bloviators on TV, and then I read about the Netflix ratings, which are inherently inaccurate, since they don’t include tablets and phones, but “Stranger Things” is a smash, let me look it up, 15.8 million people watched the initial episode the first three days, 4.6 million watched the entire series last weekend, and that shows the power of programming, a hit, that’s as much as the “Walking Dead,” as many as “Game of Thrones.”

And then I watched Bill Maher, which is depressing because political comment seems to have no effect, the Republican party has rallied around Trump, fearful of being primaried, and then I went out for a hike, just shy of midnight, it was cloudy, yet bright, because there’s a full moon, and it’s cooling down, a SoCal November, which means it’s hovering around 60, and then I walked in the door and took out my contacts, which for some reason were foggy, and on Spotify I heard…

“Hey, Western Union Man.”

I’m shuffling all my tracks, it’s pretty fascinating. And the last time I wrote about this was when I discovered the original by Jerry Butler on XM, but the version that hooked me was on Al Kooper’s initial solo LP, “I Stand Alone.”

Al not only played the organ on “Like A Rolling Stone,” he formed Blood, Sweat & Tears, and got kicked out of his own band, which then went on to monster success with his formula, but the irony is no one ever plays that album anymore, fans just spin the original, “Child Is Father To The Man,” which is spectacular, and it’s this formula that’s employed on “I Stand Alone.”

The flourish on the Butler original is strings, but on Kooper’s take of “Hey, Western Union Man,” it’s horns, the track starts with a flourish right out of Philadelphia, kinda like “Rubberband Man,” BUT THAT CAME AFTER!

It’s like you’re at a castle, but the king is hip, the trumpeteers are part of an ensemble, they’re wearing uniforms, but not military, they’re infected by the sound, they’re not standing still, they’re swaying with the music, you can only stand at attention.

Oh, Western Union Man
Send a telegram

That’s right, now it’s just for moneygrams, but it used to be the quickest way to send a message, the e-mail of its day.

This is what I want you to do
I want you to tell her that I’m all alone

The scourge of humanity, it’ll keep you in a bad relationship, it’ll have you hanging with boring people, because staring at the four walls can drive you to suicide.

And if a telegram don’t do
Send a box of candy too
And maybe some flowers
Tell her that I missed her for hours and hours

That’s lyric writing. The twists and turns, the image, the compactness.

And, as Lou Reed said politically incorrectly back in ’72, the colored girls sing…

SEND A TELEGRAM
SEND A TELEGRAM

They don’t make ’em like this anymore, this sound isn’t even replicated, a sound you’d hear in nightclubs, with big bands, Steely Dan goes out with a horn section, but no one else wants to pay, but the horns put the whole thing over the top.

And after the flourish of the chorus, with everybody wailing, the whole thing breaks down, just a bass, and Al testifying, right in the middle of the number, and then…

Listen to me…

Tell me have you got a boy you can send
This is what I want him to do
Put him on his bike right away
And see if he can get my message through
Date it tomorrow
But mail it today
I want the girl to know that I miss her
Something like yesterday

Nobody even knows about mail anymore, the Post Office is for junk and Amazon on Sunday, but you used to live for what came in the box.

And the hook is that chorus…all about sending a telegram, and just when you’re wishing for it, that horn flourish comes back and there’s literally a telegraph beeping in the track, literally everything, including the kitchen sink, has been included, all you can do is jump up and jive, thrusting your arms in the air, willing her to come back.

That’s the power of music, it’s why women are drawn to musicians, how do they come up with this, how do they lay this sound down, a sound that has yet to come back.

Greta Van Fleet is bringing back rock, but no one seems to be bringing back the big dance bands, all we’re left with is records, deejays, and it’s just not the same.

Do you hear what I say?

I bought Al Kooper’s solo LP because I loved Blood, Sweat & Tears that much. I was a white boy in the suburbs, in an era of experimentation after the British Invasion had started to fade, but the truth is there were people older than me who’d experienced history and knew the greatness of these soul tracks.

Like “Hey, Western Union Man.”

Hey, Western Union Man – Spotify

Hey, Western Union Man – Youtube

I’m addicted.

We never ate hot sauce when I was a child, it was not a thing, food was bland, vegetables were boiled and my taste buds were fresh. But as I’ve aged I’ve required a little zest to spice up my food. As a matter of fact, I employ Tabasco each and every day, usually with Bob’s Market’s chicken salad.

That’s right, the market is named after me! And before Santa Monica outlawed plastic bags I had a plethora of name brand merchandise! And I never ate chicken salad, hell, it was years before I even ate tuna salad! I’d sneer when my mother made it. I was all about fried bologna, I even ate fried eggs back then, even though I won’t touch the progeny of chickens in any recognizable form these days (unrecognizable is cool, especially in ice cream!) But as I’ve gotten older I’ve become more experimental, hell, there’s little I won’t eat other than eggs and liver, I’ve got to have sea urchin with a quail egg at every sushi bar, the weirder the better, and I’m burning out on so many of my staples, but not Bob’s chicken salad.

Really, what they’re selling is meat. Bob’s is all about the butcher shop. But not only do I not cook, I don’t know how to! I no longer go out for every meal, but I buy prepared stuff. And Whole Foods is expensive but bland. And Gelson’s is expensive and good, but geographically inconvenient. So I’m left with Bob’s.

So I decided to try the chicken salad.

I don’t want too much mayonnaise. But Bob’s is thick, mostly chicken. Bob’s chicken salad is almost like eating a breast. Whereas everybody else’s is some gooey mess and…

The point is I cannot burn out on Bob’s chicken salad.

But I only eat it with hot sauce, without it it’s too bland.

Oh, not too bland for the hoi polloi, but for my aged taste buds, and I’ve come to need that Tabasco zest in order to be satiated, in order to survive.

Yes, Tabasco. Mostly traditional red. Very occasionally green. And I keep a bottle of chipotle around, but I’ve got a love/hate relationship with it. And speaking of Chipotle, you’ve got to listen to Guy Raz’s podcast “How I Built This” with Steve Ellis, the founder of the chain bearing that name. I once got sick from Chipotle, but this makes me want to go back, I like this guy.

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Anyway, out of the blue Jim Guerinot sends me a sampler of Dexter Holland’s hot sauce.

Dexter Holland… I’m not the biggest Offspring fan. But I respect him, for not being a nitwit. He has a Ph.D., right? And I know he flies Guerinot to Telluride in his jet. He’s a renaissance man.

But I’m sick of brand extensions. Just because you’re famous that doesn’t mean I should be interested in, never mind buy, the products outside your vertical.

But in this case, I LOVE hot sauce, I’m gonna try it out!

Right now the benchmark is Cholula, it’s everywhere, it’s the standard at Two Elk in Vail, where I pour it all over my chili, like I said, I need to spice up EVERYTHING! And basic Cholula is good, and the brand extensions are fascinating, but they don’t wear well, Tabasco does. You never burn out on Tabasco. You check into a hotel, they deliver those breakfast sausages with those tiny little Tabasco bottles, MMM! Although I will say opening those little bottles is damn near impossible. It’s the seal. And once you do, you have to shake them violently to get any out. Which makes no sense, since you’re gonna toss the bottle anyway, why not let it all come out, or hang out, like that great song by the Hombres…

So there are three models of Dexter’s Gringo Bandito hot sauce.

There’s the traditional red, which is satisfying, but I still prefer Tabasco.

And then there’s the hot stuff, and once again, Tabasco is preferable.

But then there’s the green stuff…

Now I’m looking for things I can eat so I can use it.

No, hot sauce does not go well with yogurt. But with tuna salad??

I was hungry last night, I was reading Jennifer Egan’s “Manhattan Beach” and I realized I could not go to bed without a few bites of something. And my nutritionist says the Balance bars I devour are like candy bars, so I’m trying to cut down, but I’m not really interested in real food, but then I see some tuna fish in the fridge and a lightbulb goes off, I CAN EAT IT WITH DEXTER’S HOT SAUCE!

So I break out all three flavors. Testing them once again. But it’s the green I cannot get enough of.

And I’m thinking of other greens. That one at Campos, it’s pretty spectacular, but it’s much more spicy, that zest is not for every day.

And they don’t have a good green at Poquito Mas.

And I’m wondering where Dexter’s green is on the spectrum…

But then I don’t care. I’m convinced. This is great stuff!

So I go online and Google, and it turns out I’m not the only one. This stuff IS pretty fly for a white guy, someone not from south of the border.

And salsa has eclipsed ketchup. Our entire nation is one of gourmands. So I know many people don’t care, then again many do.

And in Southern California, the shelves are littered with hot sauce brands.

And to tell you the truth, I have not tasted them all. But I have tasted a lot. But most are one and done, I don’t need any more.

But I’m already worrying about Dexter’s Gringo Bandito green running out. And there’s nothing worse than having chicken or tuna salad without hot sauce. I’ve literally gotten up from the table and run out to buy some, because every meal must resonate.

And every life must have some spice.

TRY IT!

Dexter Holland’s Hot Sauce

“JAY-Z Struggling To Sell Seats On ‘4:44’ Tour”

This is all over social media. Because hip-hop is a culture of informed fans. This is akin to the early days of file-trading, when albums leaked, were determined to be substandard and tanked upon release, can you say Lenny Kravitz?

The fans have been abused by the promoters and acts for decades.

Now the fans are fighting back.

I’m not saying every show is gonna stiff, I’m just saying duplicitous sales techniques are going to backfire.

As it is, many of the initial sales are to brokers anyway, despite Ticketmaster’s hoopla about Verified Fans, it doesn’t work, but don’t expect the media to divine that, no the solution is dynamic pricing, otherwise brokers would be scalping airline tickets.

Stones tickets don’t get scalped, and they’ve got the highest grosses around. Because they sell the tickets for what they are worth, and they flex price them accordingly, if demand is low, they drop the price.

Maybe Jay Z’s nosebleed seats should have been ten bucks to begin with. No one wants to sit in the upper deck. Sure, with some hot acts it’s enough just to be in the building. But if it’s a legacy act…

That’s right, Jay Z is a heritage artist. Once again, don’t judge heat by the manipulated mainstream press, go to the Spotify Top 50 to see what people are really listening to. Jay Z was so busy propping up his lame gonna die Tidal that he held the album back from Spotify, but it never really penetrated anyway, because the audience has turned over, it is young.

This is the biggest story in music and one the old farts want to deny. They’ve been so busy bitching about streaming they missed the memo. Streaming is saving the business, did you see Sony’s numbers? But it’s saving a whole different set of acts, mostly hip-hop, who got on the streaming bandwagon early.

This even seems to be biting Taylor Swift in the ass. Her new track “Gorgeous” is not in the Spotify Top Fifty. And she may still do good business, but those multiples…

You see you live and die on the hit. Unless you’re not playing the hit game at all, like the classic rockers. But if you’re Katy Perry…

Whose tour is also soft. And there has been publicity about it. But the pop network is not as good as the hip-hop one.

So people will rush to buy tickets…

Then again, that’s been stopped to a degree. Because many people don’t want to pay in advance, they don’t want to sit in their underwear on Saturday morning, they’d rather overpay a week before when they know they want to go and can choose their seat. Kinda like the World Series. You could get a ticket right before the game. But those tickets were expensive, and owned by brokers.

So the brokers are taking a hit on bad seats at concerts. But they cover the spread with good ones. Yet acts play to arenas with thousands of empty seats and it ruins their image, and next time around people don’t rush to buy so fast.

And could it be that Jay Z has gone to the well too many times? This is happening in the country world, acts are touring endlessly, to diminishing returns.

So what we have is an information war. Once fans see that often the on sale is fictitious hoopla, they’ll hold back.

We need a better system.

The fans are revolting the same way they did with Napster, when they refused to overpay for an album with one good track. Everybody said the fans were thieves but the truth is they were sophisticated and portending the future. Same deal here, the future is more information, not less, obfuscation is gonna fade. We need a better pricing model.

As for getting fans in cheaply, go paperless or forget it.

You either love him or hate him.

But Bob is standing up for much of what you believe. This is the only promo he’s doing, this and Megyn Kelly, he’s had it with the music industry, kissing ass, playing the game, it’s just him and his music, his show and his personality, isn’t that enough, hasn’t he earned it?

That’s right, the man you hate is on your side.

Now he tried for a long time before Andy Karp rescued him from obscurity for his release on Jason Flom’s Lava Records. The beneficiary of MTV, this cowboy became a giant just before the end of the century, when you lived and died on the video, when you could go diamond and be ubiquitous, but that paradigm is dead, everybody’s niche, the only difference is Kid Rock admits it.

Great to hear someone with a sense of humor about himself and the game. Someone who’s not so busy playing to a theoretical king, but rather tearing the kingdom down.

Rock admits he’s shared the stage with musicians far better than he is. Humility? Haven’t heard that in eons, certainly not from someone rooted in hip-hop.

But Bob has left that aside. First he went rock and straddled the country world, now he’s more of an outlaw, in his own sphere, playing to his own audience, that’s right, he’s more twenty first century than most major acts out there.

And he knows he’s selling not only music, but religion, a whole experience, the Kid Rock lifestyle, where the downtrodden come together to party, and this is where I get off the train, when there’s too much of this redneck us vs. them propaganda. Then again, Rock’s playing rock music, and…

It’s taken him a while to find his voice. He sang too high. The tracks were too dense. But now, it’s as if Bob Seger were sitting on a porch in Tennessee with his homies, drinking a few and playing up a storm. And if you don’t want to get in on that, you’re no friend of mine.

As for going to the White House…

Rock played for Obama too. And he’s not about to turn down an invitation. He’s played for five Presidents. Hell, it’s hard to argue with an American on that.

As for all that hunting and fishing b.s., he told Howard that he’d missed out by not eating freshly killed deer, a delicacy. And I’d be fine if they banned all guns, although bows and arrows would be cool, and the truth is someone has to prevent overpopulation. And the point is if you’re not willing to look at all sides, I don’t want to hear your opinion. I may not hunt, but I will say a fish never tastes as good as the one you’ve caught yourself and fresh meat is exquisite and now you’re wincing but I’m just saying it’s complicated, life is so complicated.

As for the Senate thing, it was a joke, it was always a joke, Rock said yes to another’s bandwagon, he picked up the cause, and on Howard’s show he said he wouldn’t run, not that he doesn’t have opinions.

Gay marriage fine. Then again, he said some lame stuff about transgender people. Although what he primarily said was he couldn’t understand it, which is different from accepting it. Hell, Rock seemed more open-minded than most left wingers.

I’d be all for Rock being in the Senate. He’d bring some sense to the right wing cabal, assuming he wasn’t co-opted. Then again, I don’t believe in everyday people being in government, it’s a profession, leave it to the professionals, we don’t want to see elected officials on stage singing and strumming guitars.

And Rock admitted being brought up in an upper middle class household and having to wrestle with admitting it. That’s one thing I hate about America. Everybody grew up poor. They did poorly in school. Then they say they went to Harvard and you’re scratching your head saying HUH?

But that’s Hollywood for you, everybody lies.

But Rock has left Hollywood behind.

But the funniest thing he said was his jet was better than sex, that he’d give up sex rather than his plane. It represented the essence of America, FREEDOM! He could go where he wanted to go, with whomever… AND HE DID! People talk about freedom, but just like Sally in that movie, they don’t go anywhere, they don’t have sex on the kitchen floor.

You’d want to hang with Rock because he’s FUN!

I hear from him late at night. Always giving me shit. Always in my face. But if you don’t take offense, if you give it back and play along he calms down and becomes real and it’s like some guy you went to high school with, who you sat in the back of class with and connected.

Rock is not Plant. First and foremost he doesn’t believe he’s that good! And he doesn’t take it that seriously, although he does love music.

And why is it Rock tackled ticket prices and nobody else did. Why is it Rock gives so much to charity and others don’t. As for money, Rock kept saying he was loaded, had so much, didn’t need more, which is funny, since the techies and the financiers are never satisfied.

As for the perks of the road…

Rock is faithful to his fiancee. After all, he’s forty six!

Rock was refreshing. He had a sense of humor. He got excited. He expressed vulnerability. He rolled with the changes, he was a good hang.

But what has got me writing this is when they got to the new album and Howard played a few tunes…I LIKED THEM! I GOT THEM IMMEDIATELY!

You won’t listen. But the truth is you won’t listen to so much of today’s music, everybody’s in their own hole. And Rock realizes this. He’s feeding his own frenzy, those already addicted, who bring their friends to his balls-out show.

So you may not care, but Kid Rock is a modern rock star in an era where that no longer exists.

Do you call someone who whores himself out to the corporation a rock star?

Do you call someone who’s so busy working they’ve got no life a rock star?

Do you call someone who’s so busy boasting they’ve lost touch with reality a rock star?

No, a rock star is someone who’s made it who does it his way. Who doesn’t hew to the corporate line, who doesn’t care what society says, who plays to himself and has a bunch of acolytes who help him survive.

That’s Kid Rock.

He’s a rock star. A modern day cowboy. Someone who knows you don’t have to be master of the entire range, just your own domain. That if you’re true to yourself, the audience senses it and bonds to you.

So this is a great experiment. Sans hype will Rock’s tickets sell?

And that’s all that matters these days.

I’m thinking yes.

I’m hoping yes.

Kid Rock On Howard Stern