They didn’t know what they were doing.

All those legendary hits, played ad infinitum on transistors way back when and Sirius today? The creators were just trying to get ahead, they were just trying to get paid.

I’ve been sifting through books and I came across “What’s Exactly The Matter With Me?: Memoirs of a life in music,” by P.F. Sloan and S.E. Feinberg.

P.F. Sloan, the guy who wrote “Eve of Destruction,” right?

The dirty little secret of these rock bios is they’re terrible. Interesting subject matter, with too often too little revealed (can you say Linda Ronstadt?), but they’re poorly written and even when the celebrity is involved there are glaring factual mistakes and agendas and my plan was just to skim it and toss it, but then I got hooked.

P.F. Sloan hated Lou Adler. Now Lou only gets good press these days, even though he’s been out of the game for eons. He’s the legend that goes to Laker games. But he’s just a guy screwing him in Sloan’s eyes. And Adler went on to much greater success, whereas after Lou…crickets for P.F.

So P.F. is paired up with Steve Barri, who he feels responsible for, since Barri is married with a kid. And neither of those are their real last names, hell, Sloan’s dad renamed the clan from “Schlein” after leaving New York for Los Angeles and there was no big plan, Sloan and Barri didn’t want to become legends, they wanted to SURVIVE!

We forget once upon a time music was a backward business peopled by thieves and crooks where the records came and went and if you were involved you might end up with some fame but very little money.

This is so different from today. Where constructing a hit single is like building a skyscraper. Nothing’s done on a whim, except by the wannabes, but it used to be that those on the bottom could not get a chance, recording deals were rare, so they worked.

They worked as recently as the nineties.

As you are probably aware, Col. Bruce Hampton died on stage this week. And I can’t help thinking how I saw him with Phish back in ’92. And I’m looking up the gig and I’m stunned, Phish is playing across the country every night. With no major record deal and no fame, they were building it as they want along.

But now you cannot do that, because there’s nowhere to play. The clubs have disappeared and those that still exist want deejays and no one will tolerate mediocrity, never mind new music. The audience wants all hits all the time and if you don’t provide them they’ll just immerse themselves in their mobile devices, shutting you out.

So Col. Bruce Hampton paid his dues. I forgot that he was in the Hampton Grease Band, but remembered he opened for the Mothers at the Fillmore, used to see their name on the poster, in an era where you had no chance of hearing most records released, your department store didn’t rack them and you couldn’t afford them.

And Hampton played with Zappa and formed the Aquarium Rescue Unit with ultimately famous players and kept on working until his 70th birthday party which turned into a wake. He never got rich, didn’t even get famous. But if you follow musicians, it was a veritable who’s who who showed up to pay tribute to him the other night.

That’s the way you used to do it, formed a band and hit the road and if you were any good you got more bookings and you got high and got laid and some people dropped out and some sustained and ended up being able to do the same thing today, even though you wonder if you should be home with your wife and kids. This is the life you chose. You can barely even choose this life anymore.

But in P.F. Sloan’s era it was different. There was no glamour. Believe me, everybody didn’t want to be a rock star before the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, what you heard on the radio was ENTERTAINMENT!

But someone had to make it. Someone had to work for bupkes writing songs.

And most of these songs were shite. But you choose a line of work and get better by doing it and then get to know everybody and opportunity opens up. In this case, with Jan & Dean, Adler’s other charges.

But then Sloan starts talking about the studio. Not only the players, but the engineers. What their skills were. Using limiters. How Jan Berry employed multiple units to get that sound and suddenly you’re hooked, you want to go deeper, you just can’t get enough, this is what you lived for.

Yes, we lived to go to Manny’s to look at the guitars.

We wanted to know everybody in the credits. We wanted to know the tricks, how the magic was created.

And you didn’t need a famous father, you didn’t even need an education or money to participate, you just had to move to L.A. and move through the social network, only this one wasn’t online, but virtual. And I’ll tell you every damn day that today is better than yesterday, I don’t want to go back to the pre-internet era with its loneliness and its boredom, but something’s been lost in the transition, kinda like when cars lost their vent windows to a/c… Every once in a while you just want to open the vent.

And if you lived through this era, the early to mid-sixties, you remember. Going to school, having crushes, and being addicted to the radio. EVERYBODY knew the hits, a number one track is a fraction of what it was back then. You felt part of a group, a movement, a tide.

And it was all based on the music and interacting. It wasn’t about accumulating likes but being real friends, actually knowing people that could move you down the board. And when Sloan talks about being locked out of the arena in Hawaii at a Beach Boys and more gig… You resonate. You haven’t played in Hollywood unless you’ve felt left out. He was the bass player, but his friend Carl Wilson, who he hung with in the studio, didn’t remember him. He was scheduled to play but he couldn’t get inside, how big a deal was he? How big a deal are you? How big a deal am I?

And the recently departed Bob Krasnow worked at a label called Domain which begged Adler for songs. Used to be songs were everything and acts didn’t write their own and Krasnow, et al, were always puffing up their image, pontificating about nonexistent sales, because you fake it to make it, truly.

As for the studio cats, Sloan delineates their qualities, their essence, the way Leon Russell could play octave notes on the piano with his left hand and it made all the difference. He was not the Master of Space & Time, he was a studio cat making a living, not getting rich, but having fun.

And then Sloan hears a voice and writes five hit songs in a night. Including “Eve of Destruction.” Who knows where inspiration comes from. Who knows how whacked our heroes are. Hell, this is the same guy who says he sold fifty newspapers to James Dean two years after he died. And we fans can never get over the fact that our heroes are done. They had hits once, now they no longer do. Styles change, people lose the muse, but the truth is music is a business of luck and it runs out very quickly, be stunned you make it at all.

And the people in this book were stunned. They were building an edifice, the foundations of classic rock, music that has lasted forever, and they thought they were building cheap motels that wouldn’t last a decade. Hell, Peter Grant sold out Zeppelin’s catalogue, who’d want to listen to that music decades hence?

And reading Sloan’s book I realize as much as I know I don’t know anything, about the music business, about life. There is no master plan. You just march forward and try to make the best of the opportunities. And when you’re changing the world, you think you’re just earning a living. It’s only with hindsight that you can see what you accomplished. All the rules and regulations, the restrictions you carped about, ironically led to your success. They channeled your efforts and when they were truly inane, you revolted, like Terry Melcher and Sloan, who locked out the Columbia engineer when he wouldn’t link up the echo chambers, they figured they had an hour to make “Mr. Tambourine Man” work themselves.

And they did. With a lot of reverb and effects. Same performances, same basic tracks, but the tweaks turned it into a hit.

I’ve got no idea if Lou Adler is a good guy or a bad one, I don’t know him well enough. But I do know that Brian Epstein sent out a promo kit trying to get someone to release the Beatles in America, and when Sloan liked the four tracks Epstein told Andrew Loog Oldham to send on the Stones. You see it was just that simple, serendipity. And the business was smaller. You knew the players and were not inundated with product.

And you didn’t think you were changing the world.

But you were.

What’s Exactly The Matter With Me?: Memoirs of a life in music

When was the last time you changed your word processor? Remember arguing over WordPerfect and WordStar? Maybe you were a fan of the Mac-only WriteNow. But now you just use Word, or some notes app, maybe something built-in, Google Docs, something that is free. The point being we saw decades of constant evolution, tumult, change, and then it all stopped. Now maybe word processors will be superseded, by collaborative tools like Slack, but you give not a thought to your word processor of choice, assuming you pay at all.

That’s another thing that’s gone by the wayside. Used to be you needed not only a word processor, but a standalone spell-checker. Then spell-checking and all the rest of the add-ons were baked into the behemoth word processing programs and the little companies disappeared. Hell, even the little mobile app companies have disappeared. Hell, software in general, the kind you buy, is a moribund field.

Change happens.

But so does consolidation.

We were so busy watching the movie, jumping from stone to stone, from Friendster to MySpace to…that we thought it would never stop. We believed this was the way of the world. The internet begat constant refinement, innovation, we were wowed on a regular basis. Then we saw no need to replace our iPad, our mobile phones lasted a lot longer, almost no one buys a desktop computer and the laptop you own, unless the company gives you a new one, provides service for the better part of a decade.

Yesterday Facebook delivered astounding numbers. But most of the talk on the street is negative. Commentators want the social network to solve the unsolvable. Decades on we still have e-mail spam, we’ve never been able to eradicate piracy, but somehow Facebook should be able to cleanse its system of all heinous activity and provide a fair and balanced look at the world.

Never gonna happen. No matter how much money Zuckerberg throws at the problem.

And before the brouhaha about Live, the advertising community was up-in-arms about metrics. If Facebook was so bad, wouldn’t you pull your spots?

But no, Facebook is the new network TV, the one of yore, before cable, when there were only three outlets, you bitched about the content, you bitched about the price, but Madison Avenue overpaid for the privilege of reaching its customers, network TV was nearly the only game in town, it blew everything else away in terms of reach and effectiveness.

But now it’s even worse. Because newspapers and magazines, those that still exist, pay fewer dividends than ever before. And other than Google, so much online advertising is pissing in the wind, you just pays Facebook and hope for the best.

No one saw this coming. No one saw the consolidation in power. No one saw this rise in power. No one saw the calcification of systems.

But that is where we are.

And one can argue this concentration of power is even more important than what’s happening in D.C. Because just like politicians learned you got elected on television, now the populace pays attention on the internet. So if you’re not Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft or Facebook, you’re not in the game, you’re irrelevant.

And it’s funny how the same people complaining about Facebook are lauding Apple. Is it because those running Apple are older and more experienced? Is it because Facebook is always testing the limits? Is it because you denigrate the newbie and laud the establishment?

And let’s not forget, that unlike Apple, Facebook laid down beaucoup bucks, double digit billions for the lack of income WhatsApp and the burgeoning Instagram. Credit Zuck for making good bets. For taking a risk. For knowing that you’ve always got to stay in front of your competitors online, however few those might be…

Facebook has become an institution. Like the radio chains of yore, it’s got AM and FM, the original service and Instagram. You built your life there, your friends are all there and there’s no reason to go anywhere else.

So the belief that a big, unforeseen revolution is gonna happen online? A tsunami from left field that’s gonna blow us away? Ain’t gonna happen, that’s all in the rearview mirror. The internet has been carved up and distributed.

And Facebook rules.

Mud Slide Slim – Spotify

I’ve got no idea what this song is about. Oh, I could apply my collegiate interpretive skills and come up with some stuff, tell you what certain phrases mean, but really it’s as impressionistic to me as a late nineteenth century French painting with as much obfuscation as a Picasso.

Most people think “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon” is James Taylor’s second album. And for most purposes, it was. The first available so briefly on Apple Records before it disappeared. But I always preferred the original take of “Carolina In My Mind” and I love the segues and come on, “Circle ‘Round The Sun,” even back then it reminded me of the majesty of life, the power of interpersonal relationships.

But “Sweet Baby James” was simpler. Like an art restorer had scrubbed away the accoutrements and only the essence was left. And who could predict it would be such a gigantic hit. You see at that point, singer-songwriters did not dominate the hit parade. And it wasn’t like JT worked with rappers on the side, wrote hits for pop acts, he was just doing his own thing by his lonesome and it clicked.

Not that they didn’t know they had something special.

And the most special song on that second album for me was “Country Road,” do you know even Al Kooper did a cover? Al could always pick the tracks.

But “Country Road,” it took numerous plays for the title track to sink in, even though the references to the Berkshires puts “Sweet Baby James” over the top for me now. Yet the first cut that resonated was the one before the closer on side one, “Country Road.” I guess I just like those songs that could never be a hit, that were never shooting for that, those that pick you up and take you somewhere, grab your hand, get you to stand up and walk into the wilderness, kinda like “Take Me To The Pilot” off of Elton John’s first (really second!) album, “Your Song” was the hit, but I loved the romp that came thereafter. Eventually I got into “The King Must Die” and “Sixty Years On,” but what made me an Elton John fan was “Take Me To The Pilot,” I used to live to drop the needle on that in my dorm room, it just shot lightning through my body, made me feel powerful, like the guy on this disc and me were on the same page, I was always looking to belong, I was always looking for my tribe.

Walk on down
Walk on down
Walk on down

This was back when we saved our money for stereos and guitars. We adjusted the speed of the turntable to the LP and then we figured out the chords, “Country Road” was one of the songs I could play and sing, I had a big yellow legal pad of the songs I’d figured out, my own personal fake book.

And then came “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon.”

Am I the only person who loves “Love Has Brought Me Around”? No one ever mentions it, but I got it from the very first play and did not love “You’ve Got A Friend,” although I did cotton to Carole King’s iteration, with her banging her hands on the piano like she meant it.

Now this was back when you had to buy an album to hear it. Before they decided to sell LPs by making it a value proposition, of multiple hit singles. No, you were a fan and you laid down your money, broke the shrinkwrap and found out what you got.

Now one of my favorite JT songs is on the second side of “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon.” That cut is “You Can Close Your Eyes,” which is billed a a lullaby, a tale from an oldster to a young ‘un, but that’s not how I ever saw it, I saw it as the words of someone world-weary, a traveler who’s stopping by just this night and is worn down and exasperated but after a few drinks and a few smokes reveals the bond that you shared and always will. Isn’t it great when an old friend connects? You used to see each other every day, now it’s much rarer than that, but the connection is palpable, it’s what you live for, it’s what makes life worth living.

And then there’s the next cut, “Machine Gun Kelly,” with its spoken intro and studio talk and hypnotic groove, we read about this one in advance, in “Rolling Stone,” the burgeoning music press, and unlike the Eagles’ “Desperado” soon to come it was less a hearkening back to what once was than a modern tale with a criminal moniker. Listening is like being in the first grade, maybe second, remember singing in rounds? Remembering singing at all?

I’d ask you if you remembered laughter, but this was after the misfire of “Led Zeppelin III,” ZOSO was yet to come.

And when I bought the CD, which was one of my initial digital purchases, I used to program three tracks ad infinitum, and the third was “Riding On The Railroad.” Travel used to be the American Pastime, getting in your car with the journey being more important than the destination, before flight was de rigueur and you could be anywhere in a matter of hours, go to a football game out of state on a whim. Now no one ever moves, but they fly all kinds of places. Used to be we didn’t fly hardly at all, it was too expensive, but moving was something we did on a regular basis. Ask a baby boomer how many apartments he’s lived in. We went away to college and never thought about returning home, we led peripatetic lives and lord only knows how we ended up where we did. No, that’s wrong, I ended up in California because of the music, because of the Beach Boys.

Now there are other good tracks on “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon,” most especially the second side opener “Hey Mister, That’s Me Up On The Jukebox,” and “Places In My Past” and “Long Ago And Far Away,” but the one going through my brain at the kitchen table was “Mud Slide Slim.”

Snippets were floating through my mind…

I’ve been letting the time go by
Letting the time go by

Have I? And what does this mean anyway? Should he speed up or slow down? I wonder this all the time. Do I stop and smell the roses or buckle down?

‘Cause there’s nothing like
The sound of sweet soul music
To change a young lady’s mind

That’s what they were, young ladies. I remember my dad insisting the letters I sent to girls being addressed MISS! All our music had boys and girls, men and women, we were all looking for a relationship, we had our long hair and bell bottoms, our look, we were just waiting for someone to open their heart to us, in the meantime all we had were these records.

I’m gonna cash in my hand and
Pick up on a piece of land
And build myself a cabin back in the woods

This was during the Back To The Land movement. After the tumult of the sixties, the failures of the Movement, people wanted to check out, leave the metropolis, bake their own bread and experience nature. Just imagine, with no internet!

Mud Slide, I’m depending upon you
Mister Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon

Who am I depending upon? The older I get the more I realize you can only depend upon yourself. I’ve met too many famous people to believe they’re vessels for our hopes and dreams, they’re flawed just like you and me. But once or maybe twice, or if truly talented even thrice, they channeled genius, and their works still survive. It’s funny, no one wants to watch the movies of yore, never mind the TV shows, but the music, we’re still listening.

And when I listen I feel whole.

I’ve been in a spot where I can’t eat, I can’t sleep and then when my brain started singing “Mud Slide Slim” I realized that was my escape, my ticket out, to put on the record and…

Groove.

Funny is funny.

And sincerity never goes out of style.

I’m freaked out. Every day I read three newspapers from cover to cover, I refresh their apps, comb news sites, trying to get a handle on what is going on.

I can’t.

I see Rupert Murdoch is sacrificing his Fox News empire to control Sky, which makes me wonder how much influence Rupert has anyway. It’s positively frightening when the media consults with the elected officials and tells them what’s going on, read Jim Rutenberg’s column, that’s exactly what Murdoch’s apparatchiks did.

And then we’ve got a President who ricochets like a pinball from one opinion to another. If I acted this way in college, I’d have flunked out. It was all about preparation and staying the course, knowing the consequences. What are the consequences to the shenanigans in D.C? I don’t know!

And then you have the “New York Times,” which in an effort to appear unbiased, even though the right wing has completely neutralized the news outlet and believe it is, hires a right wing columnist who says the problem with climate scientists is they’re just too strident, they’re just too convinced.

Hmm… We grew up in a nation where free speech was a mantra. But at what point do you channel Howard Beale and say I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore?

Turns out that Middlebury professor apologized to protesting students for not keeping them in the loop. We all want to be in the loop, we all want to know what’s going on, we all want to be considered.

And then there was that column re Ann Coulter and Berkeley… It’s not like she’s gone unheard, that she doesn’t get a platform.

And my point is when are the libtards, as my inane uneducated readers label the left wing, gonna grow a pair?

Last night Stephen Colbert did. He ravaged Donald Trump. A complete no-no, Karl Rove still has his knickers in a twist.

But I thank god someone stood up. Furthermore, he was funny. They’re trying to play gotcha politics, saying he made a homophobic comment, but the truth is money talks and Colbert is killing it in the ratings and CBS ain’t gonna do nothing to upset the juggernaut.

You see, taking a stand is good business.

Those of us who lived through the sixties know this, but those who didn’t, who came of age in the Ronald Reagan get mine before you can get yours MTV era, don’t.

So we’ve got a false equivalency in promotion. We believe the number one rule is not to offend anybody. But this is plain wrong, especially in a world where it’s nearly impossible to get attention anyway.

The world runs on buzz. How are you gonna get it?

By excelling at your job, by being sincere.

I know they are making new records, I know there’s a business there, but it’s peopled by self-centered wimps who are seemingly too dumb to take a stand. Don’t tell me it’s hard to write a hit protest song, Colbert’s writers come up with new material every night. You mean you can’t write a hit song if you try? Even with Max Martin and his team?

OF COURSE YOU CAN!

But you don’t want to take the risk.

The Dixies were chicked nearly a decade ago. We no longer live in that world. We live in a world of tribes, where everybody gets their own news from their own source, and your only hope is to energize your tribe so they spread the word elsewhere. PR doesn’t work, none of the usual marketing angles work. God, just open the paper, they’re always hyping somebody, and then the record disappears, just like that.

Artists take a stand, that’s what they do.

And then we come to the strange case of Jimmy Kimmel. Who built his career on irreverence and last night spent the better part of fifteen minutes telling the story of his newborn’s heart disease, at the end coming down hard against the right wing’s plan to eviscerate health care coverage and preexisting condition exclusion. Hell, his kid was BORN with a preexisting condition, what kind of chance did he have?

It’s hard to argue with personal experience.

But that’s what an artist does, channel personal experience.

For twenty five years, late night has been repeating the David Letterman hijinks formula. Until Agent Orange became President and Colbert decided to flip the script. And Jimmy Fallon, everybody’s darling, became like Frankie Avalon after the advent of the Beatles. And Fallon can’t change, he can’t catch up, because it’s not in his DNA.

But it is in Colbert’s.

And maybe it’s not in the DNA of today’s musical artists, but like Mr. Avalon and Mr. Fallon that just means they’re out of step with the times.

Taking a stand is good business. Controversy is good business. When it’s sincere, when it’s not fake.

And it’s been about fake marketing in the music business for oh-so-long.

Something’s gotta give. And chances are it won’t come from the usual suspects. Someone from left field is gonna stand up and the media is gonna fan the flames of the conflagration and it’s going to get ever bigger.

The only question is when.

Colbert-short version:

Colbert Blasts ‘Presi-dunce’ Trump in Scathing Late Show Monologue

Colbert-long version:

This Monologue Goes Out To You, Mr. President

Kimmel:

Jimmy Kimmel Reveals Details of His Son’s Birth & Heart Disease

Jim Rutenberg:

“Murdochs’ TV Deal in Britain Hinges on 3 Words ‘Fit and Proper'”

Bert Johnson – The Middlebury Campus:

“An Apology from PoliSci Chair to the Community”

Will Bunch – Daily News

“The Problem with NY Times and climate change isn’t what you think”