Just when I thought the Soho House was jive…

I went for a meeting with a Canadian. That was what the Soho House was pitched as, a home away from home, a place you could do business when you were on the road.

But then Soho House came to L.A. And after the usual suspects signed up, the wannabes descended. And the funny thing is someone’s got to vouch for you, you’ve got to pass inspection. And just when I’m thinking that the joint is full of thirtysomethings, when I see nobody I know, which is a first, this twentysomething guy leans over and tells me he’s a big fan.

Hell, we all like compliments. He said his boss told him he had to do two things when he got the gig, sign up for the “Lefsetz Letter” and book a national tour.

For Logic.

Logic. I never write about him because a guy from the label has hammered me so hard on him. It’s a people business. And when you come on like a bulldozer, it turns me off. Especially when all the data is up close and personal for you to see.

Like on Twitter.

That’s where Chris Zarou, head of Visionary Management, found Logic.

You see he’d been a soccer player. But Chris realized he just wasn’t good enough. That’s what’s funny about getting older, it separates the men from the boys (and the women from the girls!), and the smart people realize this and get out of the way, drop out and find something better to do.

For Chris, it was music management. It was the only other thing he was interested in.

So he started to study, he combed the net. That’s when he saw the tweet about Logic. Chris checked out the video, he was bowled over, he made contact with Logic via his Facebook page, and then took the Megabus from New York down to Maryland to visit him. Chris said he wanted to be Logic’s manager. That Logic didn’t have to sign any paper. That the act could judge by the results.

So Chris went back to Long Island and started to hustle, while working at Abercrombie & Fitch, his dad didn’t believe this music thing was gonna work out.

But they put out a mixtape. And then four video “singles” on YouTube. Chris traded out with a nascent director, who Chris said would get on screen credit in exchange for his free work.

But it wasn’t an overnight success. Those still steeped in the last decade believe if you build it, they will come. But they won’t. There’s too much noise, too much clutter. So Chris allowed free use of Logic’s music in gaming videos. His goal was to get people exposed to the music, he believed they’d like it if they only heard it.

This is the antithesis to the baby boomer/Gen-X paradigm, where it’s all about the Benjamins, thinking about money first. Chris thought about audience first.

And there was another mixtape and then a deal with Island/Def Jam in 2012. They needed the money, they could not take the next step without it. Zarou and Logic had been working together since 2009, the next step was a tour, but how could they float it, they couldn’t get any advances from the venues!

That’s when they made the deal with IDJ. And went on the road with a rented minivan and an Altima, all across this great nation of ours.

Enterprise said the automobiles could not leave New York. But Chris thought if they returned them in New York, how would Enterprise know?

They didn’t. You’ve got to bend the rules to get ahead.

And Logic sold out clubs across the nation. The bookkeeping was manila envelopes, one for each gig, with the cash stashed and every withdrawal noted, when someone needed twenty bucks for weed, it was written down. And at the end the net was $60,000.

That’s right, no major label record and no radio airplay… THERE HASN’T BEEN ANY AIRPLAY TO THIS DAY!

And then they went to Europe.

WHO BOOKED THIS?

Some guy at an independent that no longer exists who is now at Paradigm. Although Logic is at WME. You see, you’ve got to start at the bottom, with people who are hungry and wet behind the ears just like you, they’re interested, they want to make their bones with you.

And Chris needed help. And he found Harrison Remler, a club promoter from Vassar, and signed him up as an intern, this is the guy who tapped my shoulder and told me what his boss told him to do.

His boss, Chris, is now 27.

Harrison is 24.

That’s right, it’s a new music business. Peopled by the young and hungry. They’re excited, they’re doing it their way and they don’t care about where we’ve been, but only where we’re going.

Chris studied Spotify in its infancy and saw that the key to streams was getting on playlists. He gave Spotify Logic exclusively if they’d work him on their playlists. There are always angles, but can you see them and figure them out?

And when the first IDJ LP came out, after a two year wait, when Chris told the label not to even tell anybody Logic was signed, it disappointed, Chris about cried. Not because it was a failure, it went Top 5, but because Chris believed it would have been number one, if only the label had put enough product on the street. IDJ just did not believe it. That a band that existed only on the internet could be so big.

But they learned their lesson. Said Zarou was right.

Before this Logic sold out Irving Plaza. Not one single IDJ employee showed up. And this is when Zarou realized he had screwed up, he had failed to work the company!

You see he’s learning on the fly.

Now that’s the music business I love.

It’s not like a typical profession. Where you study and apprentice. No, you look yourself in the mirror and say you’re worthy and go forth and prosper. By your wits. Getting screwed, getting an education along the way. No school can teach you how to do it, no way. It’s always individuals with desire, who can operate on their wiles, who can figure out the angles, who win.

And I’m talking to Chris and he smiles and his perfect teeth shine bright and his hair is perfectly parted and I realize this guy would win at whatever he wanted to do.

But he chose the music business.

Which makes me believe the business is healthy and will have a future. Because where else can someone with no CV triumph and make bucks?

So last time through, Logic sold out two Wilterns.

And now IDJ is getting ready to push the radio button. Which excites Chris, because where else can you make 100 million impressions? Worldwide on Spotify, what do you get, 50-60 million?

Chris couldn’t do it without IDJ. They’re fully on board now.

And Chris has a pop act on Capitol too, named Jon Bellion (with one cut on Spotify with 216,731,231 streams and four others at 52,43, 38 and 27 MILLION!)

And everything you thought you knew that you’ve been bitching about never crosses his mind.

His world lives on the internet. That’s where you discover, that’s where you spread the word, that’s where you make bucks. Logic’s top cut on Spotify has 163,334,570 streams. The next four are all in double digit millions, at 72, 60, 32 and 15. Do I hear Logic and Chris bitching about recorded music revenue? ABSOLUTELY NOT!

And, once again, this is completely without radio. Radio can only juice these figures. Whereas many acts get radio play and get nowhere near this number of streams. You see the audience is pushing these acts forward. With some help from the team, in this case Chris, his two other employees and IDJ.

That’s right, Chris is not overstaffing, they’ve been woarking in the basement.

Chris graduated from Adelphi, after attending three previous institutions. And Harrison went to Vassar. And I’d put both of them up against an MBA from Harvard or Stanford. Because they’re hungrier, they don’t feel entitled. AND THEY’RE PASSIONATE!

So, Chris and Harrison had to leave for a meeting at Live Nation. They told me to watch Logic on the VMAs.

And as I was descending the staircase I said to myself…I NEED TO COME TO THE SOHO HOUSE MORE OFTEN!

Her name is on the building.

That’s the power of songs. It buys you six floors on Cahuenga, you’ve got a permanent piece of the rock, it illustrates…

You made it.

Do you know how hard it is to make it?

Music ain’t like Wall Street, where your relatives give you a leg up, ensure your career. Sure, your name might get you a gig on the business side, but on the creative side? It’s every person for themselves.

And all that education you’ve got, that fancy degree, it don’t mean nothin’ in Hollywood, where it’s only about hits, can you write one?

This is a completely different business from performing. Where you can go on the road and earn bucks in this crazy era. No, either what you write goes up the chart and coin rains down…

Or it doesn’t.

Diane comes from Van Nuys. There are some upscale communities in the San Fernando Valley, but that’s not one of them. Her father sold insurance. Her two siblings were much older.

But she was born to write songs.

Now when you hang with the business people you get loudmouthed glad-handers. If you ain’t got the gift of gab, you ain’t gonna make it on that side of the aisle. It’s all about relationships, and if you’ve got smarts, you can make it to the top, otherwise there’s no room for you. The people my age are either running the enterprise or they’re out. Because people are lining up to work for free, and no one wants to hear about your family commitments on your fat salary, they’ll just hire someone younger and hungrier who will give them their all.

And Diane Warren is hungry. She shows up at nine every morning and writes till…whenever. She’s got friends, she goes out to dinner now and again, but her work is her life. She doesn’t feel like she’s sacrificing, but to an outsider..? No kids? Almost no vacations? No weekends? But that’s what it takes to make it. And you only work this hard if you’re driven.

Diane is driven.

So she e-mailed me.

Normally we see each other at restaurants. We’re strangely simpatico. Diane has no airs, maybe a bit of self-discomfort, but she’s open, she’ll talk and reveal, and we connect. So when we spoke on the phone and she asked me to come to her studio to hear the song she’s most proud of…

I said I would.

But I didn’t expect her to own the building.

It’s where Mike Caren and Atlantic Records used to be set up, next to the Hotel Cafe. You can drive by and see her name, even if you can’t get in, security is just that tight, there are weirdos everywhere these days. But when you’re a wannabe, and we all were at one time, these establishments are iconic. Not only the Capitol Tower, I remember coming to L.A. in the sixties and noticing Liberty Records was across the street from our hotel. I had no idea who Simon Waronker was (although I was a huge fan of the Chipmunks!), never mind his son Lenny, but I got up my gumption and crossed the street and a receptionist who couldn’t have cared less answered my question, gave me a list of titles for the new Jan & Dean album, they were my favorites.

All over L.A., there are edifices wherein…

The magic is made, in the room where it happens.

So the last time I was in this studio, Flo Rida was cutting a hit.

But Diane told me it was owned by SOLAR, but then Dick Griffey lost it in a divorce, and then Death Row moved in (there are still bullet holes in the ceiling), and then Atlantic and I probably missed one or two residents, but Diane’s there now. She’s moved from her abode around the corner, her office of 32 years, with her studio that’s never ever been cleaned.

She doesn’t want anybody touching her stuff. Not because they’re gonna compromise a new tune, move a lyric sheet, but because it’s HER STUFF! And she needs to feel comfortable there.

Me too. My place is a dump. No one can come in. Same with her old studio. Some stuff may have not been touched in years, but we know exactly where it is.

So the story is the song was written for a movie, about Thurgood Marshall, coming out in October.

You see Diane had the couplet in her head for a while now:

It all means nothing
If you don’t stand up for something

But when she found out about the movie and the producer said he was open to a song, she went to work.

She sits at a keyboard and…

She says she can’t describe her process, but if you’re a creator you understand it. She puts her fingers to the keys and…

Something comes out.

The chorus in twenty minutes. The second verse took longer thereafter.

And then…

Days to do the first verse.

Every word counts. Hell, there was that recent song a star wanted to cover, but this person rewrote the lyrics to the point it was lousy. Diane said no, she will bend, but she will not break.

And this is different from the collaboration city that dominates the music business today. Sometimes Diane co-writes, but most of the time…

It’s just her and the keyboard.

So she played me the tune from her phone.

I chuckled. I came all this way and I’m not listening to the full spectrum master? I mean we were behind the console, with the keyboard customized for Pro Tools, and the zillion faders, with the Yamahas and the Genelecs and the no-name speakers in the wall, and the music was playing through there…

And I immediately got it.

“Stand Up For Something” was gonna get nominated for an Oscar. There was no doubt in my mind. It was gonna play great in the film, have gravitas.

But I wasn’t as sure it was gonna be a pop hit. Because today pop is all hip-hop and…

But “Stand Up For Something” is performed by Andra Day, with a rap by Common, and the rap isn’t overdone and it was not calculated, Common ran into Diane and when she told him what she was working on he asked…

And the whole number is shy of four minutes and…

The chorus is anthemic.

It all means nothing
If you don’t stand up for something
You can’t just talk the talk
You got to walk that walk, yes you do

Finally someone singing it straight. A counterweight to a society where money is everything and if you ain’t got it, you don’t count. Kinda like that inane Louise Linton, wife of Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, who thinks since she walks in designer clothing she has the answers.

She does not.

You can have all the money in your hands
All the possessions anyone can ever have
But it’s all worthless treasure
True worth is only measured not by what you got
But what you got in your heart
You can have, you can have everything
But what does it, what does it mean

Criticize Warren if you want, but she made it and you didn’t. That’s America for you, full of sour grapes. Someone else has your job, you coulda made it if only…

If only what? If you put your nose to the grindstone? If you didn’t do so much dope? If you put yourself in uncomfortable positions? If you moved to Hollywood and got kicked around before you broke through?

Now you can write songs about love all day long. And love makes the world go ’round, it truly does. But now, thinking people are starting to wonder… How long is that world gonna last? Are we gonna get cooked by heat or blown up in war and we haven’t seen this level of tumult since the sixties.

And in the sixties, we had anthems that engendered belief and pushed us forward.

Diane Warren is doing her part.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

“McConnell, in Private, Doubts if Trump Can Save Presidency”

This is the end
My only friend
The end

Only amateurs believe the paper prints the news.

Professionals MAKE the news. They control the narrative. They provide access, tidbits, the papers just do their dirty work.

And it is the papers, because the video outlets have no reporters. Oh, if there’s a war or a tornado or a murder they’ll send a well-coiffed person with a camera to make pictures. But the less glamorous stuff? Fuggedaboutit on cable, and network can be dismissed when it comes to news. The newspapers set the agenda, and there are only three, “The New York Times,” “The Washington Post” and “The Wall Street Journal.”

And “The Wall Street Journal” ain’t breaking much news, they’re stretched too thin. Trying to be everything to everybody they’re failing. But “The Washington Post” got an infusion from Bezos and they’re competing with the “Times” on breaking stories.

And together they’re controlling the national dialogue.

How do I know this?

Talk radio takes cues from the “Times” and flipping amongst the three major cable news outlets today who was deepest into the McConnell story? Fox. That’s right, Murdoch’s empire is reacting to the “Times.”

Anyway, we’re in uncharted territory.

Or are we not?

Credit Frank Rich with pointing out it was a matter of time. That Nixon was impeached long after the break-in.

“Just Wait, Watergate didn’t become Watergate overnight, either.”

But then there was that opinion piece in the “Times,” postulating that Trump would not go until Fox News turned against him.

“Want to Get Rid of Trump? Only Fox News Can Do It”

We’re getting to that point.

If you believe the “Times” reporters dug and came up with this story, you’re wrong. They were TOLD! By people who wanted to get back at Trump, people who worked for McConnell. Deny, deny, deny, have no quotes, but put the land mines out there.

This is how war is fought today, certainly in D.C., in the media.

You use the media to your advantage.

Trump thought he was winning, with his direct access to the public via Twitter. But reporting on those musings was like reciting the baseball scores. Interesting to a few, but not many. The problem is there’s little amplification. Anybody online knows that news comes and goes, and unless it’s everywhere, it’s nowhere. So Trump keeps tweeting to a smaller and smaller audience. We’ve seen the train wreck, we no longer care. And today Trump got schooled by the old school.

That’s what I hate about the prognosticators, they miss the memo, always get it wrong. Traditional media is challenged FINANCIALLY, but not in IMPACT! The more news outlets there are, the more we gravitate to a few.

Trump got ahead of himself. He thought the revolution was complete, but it’s still being televised, it’s still being printed, turns out the old media companies are still the most powerful.

Come on, how many of the online news outlets have reporters. They have meme-thinker-uppers and typists, but no one out there digging, no one who knows how the game is played. They think it’s about clicks and ads and maybe that leads to money, but ad rates are going through the floor and just like you’re paying for music, soon you’ll be paying for news. Yup, that’s the story of the imminent future, the old wave companies are getting the new ones to capitulate. Both Facebook and Google are talking about being gatekeepers who pay fealty to news outlets.

So, just when we thought Trump was forever, at least four years, the dam broke. And how do you lose a Presidency? Just like you lose a fortune, very slowly and then all at once.

Could be Charlottesville was the breaking point. All the built-up frustration came home to roost. The Republicans in Congress are afraid to stand up in public, but put the shiv in you off camera? They’re all for that, watch a season of “House of Cards,” especially the first, you’ll understand.

If Trump goes, it’ll be because the Republicans say so.

And now they’re starting to.

When the music’s over, TURN OUT THE LIGHTS!

When did this become a thing?

Like the lead in “Atypical,” my goal in life was just to SEE boobies, never mind all the time, everywhere.

It’s a funny culture we live in now, one wherein the famous are merging with the hoi polloi. Did you see Ryan Adams’s twitter rant about Father John Misty?

“Ryan Adams Calls Father John Misty the ‘Most Self-Important Asshole on Earth”

Used to be we’d read about this in the gossip pages at best.

Now we see it up front and center. With the perpetrators seemingly unaware of the consequences, until they wake up and take their words down. Or, like Steve Mnuchin’s wife Louise Linton, are unable to:

“Steve Mnuchin’s Wife Has A ‘Let Them Eat Cake Moment On Instagram”

So Tiger and Lindsey are stunned, positively stunned, that their selfies are in the wild.

What possessed them to shoot and send them to begin with? Just because they could?

It appears no one has any self-restraint. Kinda like birth control in the heat of the moment. We seem unable to eradicate unwanted pregnancies and we seem to be unable to keep our selfies to ourselves. Call me a prude, but anything I don’t want to be common knowledge I don’t put in an e-mail, even to a friend. You’d be amazed how this stuff finds its way out. You type it and it lasts forever. Never put anything illegal or damaging or critical in an e-mail unless you want everybody in the world to know it, period.

As for Tiger and Linds, the truth is they were stupid. Their passwords just weren’t strong enough. Assuming they were on iPhones, this has been proven again and again, there is no server compromise. What happens is bad actors guess their passwords. Which are oftentimes linked to their personal life, the street where they grew up on, their favorite items, it’s not about length so much as GUESSABILITY!

But they’ll find the perpetrator, there are just too many digital crumbs, you can never get away with it, certainly not if you live in America, maybe if you live in Russia or a third world nation. The only people committing crimes and getting away with it these days are white collar people, who can afford attorneys to make it all go away. Other than that, there are cameras everywhere and digital bread crumbs and crime is on the way out.

So I looked. Not something I haven’t seen a million times online, only in this case Tiger and Lindsey are famous. So, they’ve coughed up a bit of privacy. That’s the price of fame. Don’t want to sacrifice, don’t be famous. But if you are famous, you’ve got to be smart.

So the truth is the internet is doing for America what hundreds of years have not. Which is to decriminalize the human body, make our country less puritanical about sex. You can see nude bodies and sex acts all over the web, all you have to do is Google (be sure to take off Safe Search, but only an oldster would be unaware of this.)

So on one hand society is expanding, on another it is contracting.

Anything does not go anymore. This is not ten years ago, when piracy was rampant and the perpetrators eluded the law. Anybody bitching about piracy today is ignorant, ignore them. Legal solutions are much easier and cost-effective. And illegal activities are trackable more than ever before.

So Tiger and Lindsey, you’re shocked, positively shocked that your photos leaked.

Well why were you sending them in the first place? Why were they sitting on your phone?

And if your answer is you should have the right to do so, that brings us back to my initial premise, that no one has any self-restraint, including celebrities.

But we’re all accustomed to nudity today. It’s no big deal. Hell, even sex tapes have lost their luster, Kim Kardashian was the last person to build a career upon one and that was YEARS ago.

So we live in a sexualized world, is that such a bad thing?

I’d say not.

P.S. But you’ve got to get the memo. That it’s not smart to flaunt your wealth or express your bile if you’re in the public eye. Funny how the internet reveals who these people truly are, oftentimes to their detriment.