The institution is bigger than the acts.

You can’t play Coachella every year, but you can go there.

For decades, the touring business was talent based, but the burgeoning festival scene has turned that paradigm on its ear.

When rock music started to break out with the Beatles the promoter made the lion’s share of the money. Then Peter Grant realized Led Zeppelin was gonna sell out no matter what and he flipped the script, now the act got 90%. And then came the days of Jimmy Buffett, when his Parrothead following would drink and buy merch and Jimmy got 110%, the promoter knowing it would make it up on the ancillaries.

Looks like bad business, right?

WRONG!

Never forget that the promoter is the one who pays, who’s got all the money. While the labels tried to rip off their acts to make up their margins, with 360 deals, the promoter paid and paid, making it up on ticketing and sponsorship and ultimately festivals.

That’s right, the initial Coachellas were a disaster, to the point where the festival was sold to AEG. And now…it’s the highest grossing “concert” in the world.

Think about that, the promoter invested in its future, what did the label do?

Meanwhile, the labels are finally being challenged by DIY. Their only hope is control of playlists, which they’re doing a mighty fine job of, but their physical distribution power is now passe and as for radio…it means less and less every day.

Meanwhile, this is the year the younger generation has taken over at festivals. About time, since the younger generation in acts are people like Eminem, who’s been around for twenty years, and Beyonce, fifteen. The classic rock acts have been shoved aside, along with the alternative favorites of Gen-X.

And now you go to the festival not to experience the music so much as hang with your buds and have a good time. Meanwhile, they keep enhancing the experience, with better food and amenities.

How did the acts become second-class citizens?

That’s right, Coachella sells out with no acts announced. And despite the hosannas heaped on Beyonce and a stream of her performance on YouTube, one wonders why it doesn’t stay up for all time, the festival is much bigger than she is, and will outlast her.

This is what Justin Timberlake didn’t realize about the Super Bowl, it supersedes him!

So what we’ve got are savvy promoters who’ve augured the future and seized it…

And me-too acts that don’t realize they’re fungible.

Coachella just needs someone on stage, not YOU! Especially those on the undercard.

And there is an endless parade of deejays to fill the Sahara Tent, the real musical draw, and now that pop acts have infiltrated the scene…there are much broader pickings.

So think about it. If you’ve got limited cash, you’re better off going to the festival than any specific show. You can see more and get closer and hang with your friends to boot.

Sure, there’s a club scene for the highly dedicated, but this business has always been built upon the whims of the once in a whiles, for a long time Rapino said Live Nation’s customer only went once a year. Well, if they’re going to a festival they’re laying down a whole hell of a lot more cash than they are at the arena.

This is a sea change.

For the promoter…they make a lot more money, they pay a flat fee to the acts and reap the rest, this is no 90/10 deal.

For the attendee…they get to see many acts for one fee, and have a good time roving the premises with their friends.

For the acts…sure, they can get a big payday, but not every year, and the undercard is privileged to play and gets paid accordingly.

Welcome to the new era, where the promoter is king.

Is about challenging preconceptions, surprising us, delivering the unexpected.

I just got finished watching John Oliver. The funniest part was the MSNBC newscaster who kept quoting rap lyrics to make his point, making himself look ridiculous in the process. And then there was a long expose on corporate taxes, which I actually am very familiar with, devouring three newspapers a day and surfing stories online in between. Nothing makes me angrier than ignorance, which is plentiful, every day I hear people speak inanities and untruths with soulful conviction, and if I bother to correct them, which I’ve learned not to, they get all puffed up and say I’m the problem and I’m wrong which is why I’ve ceased doing this. America is all about getting along, especially amongst millennials, and then someone jumps the track, delivers the unexpected, and you’re wowed.

Now let’s be clear, this is not about more cheese on your nachos, more explosions in your movie, no, creativity is an intellectual thing, it speaks to your brain, not your wallet, and when it resonates…you’re thrilled.

This was the essence of the sixties, this is why the right wing excoriates that decade, because of the decision by young people to question norms and authorities and wow the audience, in the arts, in clothing, in expression… Believe me, you didn’t swear in public like they did in the sixties previously, there was no such thing as free love, although the birth control pill helped, remember tie-dye? It wasn’t about fashion, so much as self-expression, letting your freak flag fly, which no one does anymore unless they’re trying to gain followers on Instagram.

But this creativity was evidenced most in art. It was about pushing limits. Look at album covers, which started as commercial art and ended up an art form unto themselves. But even more were the records…there was a constant testing of the limits, whether it be Frank Zappa with the first double album and then the “Sgt. Pepper” parody “We’re Only In It For The Money,” or the Doors’ “The End.” And it was in movies and theatre, how about the nude scene in “Hair”? Never underestimate the power of shock, can you say “I Am Curious (Yellow)”?

And just when the John Oliver show was winding down, when it looked like it was over, the host starts talking about this Russel Crowe divorce auction, and its overpriced, irrelevant items.

But it wasn’t a joke. Actually, it was. After making fun of the items for sale, after lambasting the person who purchased a jock strap for seven thousand dollars, Oliver revealed it was HIM!

The show bought so much crap, to deliver to the sole remaining Blockbuster store in Alaska.

This is not Jimmy Fallon trying to create viral material, this is a bunch of hooligans trying to freak out and crack up their audience. This is why you used to go to the live show, FOR THE UNEXPECTED! When it was clear who the stars were, not the people in the audience, and you had to have talent to stand on stage.

It was kind of like tech in the last twenty years, we were addicted to the creative explosion of the sixties. There were books, like Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” when you read the liner notes for Dead albums and saw the publishing company was Ice Nine, you were clued in. There was Richard Brautigan’s “Trout Fishing In America,” there was even “Bob & Ted & Carol & Alice.”

And sure everybody wanted to make money, but there were no billionaires, and you could make it on minimum wage. Science was putting men on the moon, but art was keeping us fulfilled.

Back when the building blocks were taught in school, before home schooling was invented, when we were all in it together trying to find our way.

It’s these creative moments that make life worth living. But they’re hard to make and have been superseded by a focus on cash. I’ll never forget Fee Waybill running around the Roxy with his chainsaw humming during the “Rock and Roll Hospital” number, which never made it to a Tubes album, but the experience was just that indelible.

And it’s funny how comedians are testing limits, when way back when George Carlin had to can his act and reinvent it to truly succeed, comedy was not a leader in the days of yore.

I’m waiting, surprise me.

Alaska’s Blockbusters

There was no review in the newspaper.

I now track TV shows like I used to track record albums. I research and find out when they’re going to be released. “Bosch” launched yesterday on Amazon Prime, but you wouldn’t know it unless you’re a fan, and you should be.

As I always say, distribution is king. If “Bosch” were on Showtime, it would be the talk of the town. It’s not an HBO show, there’s no deeper meaning, it’s plot-driven only, but oh-the-cinematography! You watch and fall in love with a city you already live in. It’s got the film noir look we haven’t seen on the big screen since “L.A. Confidential,” back when movies were America’s foremost art form, when we tracked them and went to them.

But now…

If the newspapers want to survive they’ve got to get with the times. I’m turning the pages of the NYT seeing reviews of films I’ll never go to see, that I won’t remember when they ultimately hit the flat screen, meanwhile, television drives the culture. This disconnect between and art and commerce, art and publicity, is unfathomable to me, kind of like the new ESPN app…if you’re not going to give everybody everything, don’t play. You can’t bunt in a world of home runs, and you must be willing to cannibalize your legacy business to protect your future.

So “Bosch” is a cop show. And I’m addicted, even though I’ve never read a single Michael Connelly book. Actually, I’m off genre tomes. Too often there’s a twist at the end that is wholly unsatisfying. But the truth is America lives for story, and those who deliver it succeed.

The star is Titus Welliver. Whom I did not know. Now you’re gonna tell me he was on “Lost” and “Sons of Anarchy” but I never watched those, I don’t watch much TV, still don’t, but health problems got me searching and I love escaping into the story, there’s a way filmed entertainment (digital video) allows you let go of your troubles and releases you into a new world that is wholly satisfying. This is what I loved about going to the movies. You sat there during “Chinatown” and were engrossed in a fictional story that became real for two hours. In a world with too many distractions, this is incredibly fulfilling.

And at first you don’t get Titus. I guess we’re used to more suave cops, spies, people larger than life. But as the series progresses you can’t imagine anybody else in the role. He comes across as a loner. A man of principles without being too self-righteous.

As for his ex-wife…

She blows like the wind. We know people like this, who are pulled by their desires. And in the new season when she’s playing poker at night and looks haggard, she looks real, and I’m all for truth in my viewing.

I remember Amy Aquino as Melanie Griffith’s secretary in “Working Girl,” a tiny role. She’s great here, as a lesbian lieutenant with an edge yet a heart.

And there are people of color.

It looks like L.A.

And it’s not shot on the uppity westside, nor the transient Hollywood, but downtown. Angels Flight, the Bradbury Building.

Everything’s kind of yellow, kind of twilight, deep in meaning, you’re drawn in.

Now the TV shows that get publicity unfold over months, the HBO syndrome. But that’s unsatisfying. It’d be like having “Sgt. Pepper” dripped track by track whereas when it was released you sat at home, alone, and played it over and over again until it revealed itself and you knew it by heart.

I feel like we’re the only people watching “Bosch,” but that makes the experience even more satisfying. We can own it, and spread the word as we enter the world. Seemingly everybody’s got Amazon Prime, do they know this series is on?

I doubt it.

I made a mistake at Rite-Aid. I bought three ESCs instead of three WRWs.

“What are you talking about?”

I could be the last person on earth still wearing hard contact lenses. I know, I know, I should have gotten with the program and had my eyes done, gone under the knife, but the problem there, in addition to possibly less than perfect results, is that if you’re aged, you still need reading glasses, so what’s the point? Oh, that’s right, you could only have one eye done and then if you’re nearsighted, like I am, it would all work, as a matter of fact you can get one contact for distance and one for reading and supposedly your brain adjusts, but my doctor said if you read a lot, don’t, and I’m reading all day.

And speaking of quality, the truth is hard contacts give you much better vision than soft. But most people are pussies and cannot handle the pain. Whereas we He-Men of the Universe, inoculated back in the sixties, are used to having boulders in our eyes and can tolerate anything, hell, I wore two right lenses for two years, you see I was going to an exam and it was way early and I put one contact on top of the other and lost one in the extraction process and didn’t know which was which and I had to order one via mail, being far from Connecticut in the wilderness of Vermont, and I guessed wrong. And when I asked the ophthalmologist to check the two years later, he said it was impossible, that I’d know, but I didn’t, and I was right.

And the truth is no one really wears hard contacts anymore, you wear GAS PERMEABLES, which are a true breakthrough, because then your eye doesn’t conform as much to the lens itself, you see air passes through and I can see great but…

I’ve got this thing in one eye, it only happens in one eye, where there’s some kind of allergy that clouds the lens. And the traditional solution, now known as Boston, even though way back when I was addicted to the pink bottles of Barnes-Hind, just isn’t strong enough to clean the lenses, or in this case lens, because, as I just stated, it only occurs in one eye.

This is when my genius doctor put me on Lobob, which I used to laugh at in the aisle of the drugstore, whenever I’d see it, which was rare. Lobob had amateurish packaging, it looked like it was cooked up in someone’s garage, but now they’ve got state of the art design, never underestimate logos and artwork, they make a difference, can you say STEVE JOBS?, and Lobob Optimum works great, because it’s so damn STRONG!

I know you don’t care, but if you do, you can take a peek at their page here:

Lobob

And if you do, you’ll find there are three necessary packages, CDS for soaking, WRW for wetting and rewetting, and the hot sauce of contact lens solutions, ESC, the EXTRA STRENGTH CLEANER! You’re only supposed to use it once a week, but with my allergy I need to use it every day, and it solves the problem, but a little dab’ll do ya, and like I said, I made a mistake, I thought I was picking up WRW, which one goes through regularly, and I bought three packages of ESC, and one lasts nearly a year.

Now I could have returned them, if I still had the receipt, but come on, my time is worth something so I didn’t and then last night I decided to do the calculation, whether my bottles were gonna expire before I used them.

So I looked for the expiration date and saw it was 2020!

Not like the TV show, not like Barbara Walters, but as in twenty years after the millennium, HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Talk to a boomer and you’ll find that he or she was always calculating what age they’d be in the year 2000. But we’re past that. And we haven’t decided how to label the new era ever since.

Now, occasionally, people talk about 2000-2009 as the aughts, but during the period almost no one did.

And now that the teens are almost over, I’ve still never ever heard a single person refer to this decade as such, even though when I was growing up we referred to the period from 1910-1919 as the teens. Are we waiting for the twenties, as in ROARING?

Meanwhile, time keeps marching on.

So I’m sitting on a couch on Easter Sunday and we’re trading customs stories. And the dentist tells us he was busted twenty five years ago, and I realized that was 1993! That seems like YESTERDAY! But it’s twenty five years ago.

I remember the teenager, the high school student who lived with her mother across the walkway from my sister on Dorothy Street when I first moved to L.A., she was 16, oh-so-young. But thinking about it now, I realize today she’s 59!!! Eeegads! The teen stars of the eighties, they’re entering menopause. Meanwhile, they keep making new people. They’re just shoving the rest of us down the moving sidewalk of life, until we fall off the end.

And we don’t believe it, but we’re confronted with it. Reach 65 and you feel like you want to retire, because everybody else is, and the game of life is now so much less interesting, you’ve figured it out, realize nothing’s gonna last so you might as well have a good time, assuming you’ve got your health and some cash, which not that many have, at least not both.

So some take social security early. I’m never gonna do that, I don’t want to outlive my money, some friends of my parents did this, they ended up with a reverse mortgage, depending upon their kids, it’s ugly. So do you live for today or live for tomorrow? Do you spend or save?

Meanwhile, no one is stopping the train to ask these questions. The institutions just keep rolling on. Don’t we need a committee to get us all to agree to call this decade the teens? Then again, we couldn’t get everybody to agree to the metric system, which is quite a fail. You’re in a foreign country looking at the speedometer, freaking out, and then you realize it’s in kilometers. As for Celsius, go to Canada enough and you learn you double it and add thirty two, but in a nation where people can’t even name their Representative I doubt they can fathom that, and in the era of calculators no one can do math in their head anyway.