George Young – Spotify

1

Walking down the street
Kicking cans

New wave was the hip-hop of its day, something new to wipe out everything that came before it, new wave grew out of punk, which didn’t fully break through until the nineties with Nirvana, but new wave triumphed in the late seventies and blew up in the early eighties and then was decimated by the English sound of Culture Club and Duran Duran, which triumphed on MTV.

But in the late seventies, when new wave burgeoned, it was not up front and center, there was no MTV, needless to say no Spotify, you read about it in “Rolling Stone” and other rags and if you were lucky…your community had a station that played it.

Now Los Angeles was a rock town. Which was ultimately decimated by the MTV sound, KMET ruled, but it refused to play “Tainted Love” and “Don’t You Want Me” and then it died, kinda like pop is thrashing these days, did you read the “Wall Street Journal” article? First they came for our rock, then they came for our pop, what will replace hip-hop?

One can argue hip-hop is like punk, as in its first incarnation it was big, but decades later it was HUGE! That’s what streaming has wrought. Once the public was in control, it hungered for something deeper, more authentic, more meaningful, the same way Nirvana usurped the throne from hair band music, which has never been resuscitated.

So, if you were a hipster in the late seventies living in Los Angeles you lived by KROQ, not the ROQ of the 80s, but a free format station steered by deejays who have disappeared, foisting shenanigans upon their audience whilst playing cutting edge music like Flash and the Pan.

You only had to hear “Walking In The Rain” once.

This is what the wankers don’t understand. Now, more than ever, it’s about one listen. Which is why “Despacito” is huge and your project had desultory results. There’s nothing wrong with being accessible. And that does not mean the sound must be hackneyed, just something that reaches out and grabs you.

Now ultimately Grace Jones had a hit with “Walking In The Rain,” proving a great song is a great song and can be covered by anybody, but as insistent and intriguing as her rendition is, the original is far superior, it’s TRANSCENDENT!

It was the groove, the atmosphere, it felt like a walk down a rain-soaked street after midnight, when you were inside your head and anything could happen.

Summing up the people
Checking out the race
Doing what I’m doing
Feeling out of place

Alienation. That was the essence of music back when. It was the other. The acts were iconic outsiders who spoke their truth which turned out to be our truth and we were drawn to them.

Walking in the rain

But this was when being an individual was treasured.

2

Monday mornin’ feels so bad

By time ’66 was bleeding into ’67 the wheel had turned, the old sound was wiped from the map, Perry Como was in the rearview mirror and the British Invasion ruled. This was truly like hip-hop, as in the other sounds didn’t survive, rock wiped the slate clean.

And we were all addicted to our transistors. This was just before the advent of FM underground radio, before Hendrix and Cream and so many more, our little radios run by 9 volt batteries didn’t even include the FM band, but we knew exactly where our stations were, and that’s where we heard the Easybeats’ “Friday On My Mind.”

Some records you never forget.

Used to be work was a drag, before the highly educated prized it and the lower class was completely screwed. The key was personal development, being your all, before life became about cash and cash only.

Gonna have fun in the city
Be with my girl she’s so pretty

We were ALL young. And if you look back at the photographs you’ll be stunned how pretty we were. That’s right, the baby boomers ruled, certainly in numbers, there was no competition from Generation X or Y or Z, we completely crushed it.

And so did our music.

3

Gettin’ robbed
Gettin’ stoned
Gettin’ beat-up
Broken-boned
Gettin’ had
Gettin’ took

It’s certainly a long way to the top if you wanna rock ‘n’ roll.

Hotel
Motel
Make you wanna cry

No one wants to pay their dues anymore. They expect instant success.

But if you were living in godforsaken Australia, the land of few people, you honed your chops on the road, so by the time you hit the boards in America you were PHENOMENAL!

This was nearly half a decade before “You Shook Me All Night Long.” AC/DC was just as fantastic but they were seen as a curio, coming along at the time loud guitars were fading, being eclipsed by corporate rock and disco, but when “It’s A Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘N’ Roll)” emanated from the speaker you were immediately hooked.

But what makes a great record legendary is the bagpipes, coming out of left field, evidencing that everything, including the kitchen sink, was being thrown in to make this glorious sound that made you forget about your problems and nod your head and thrust your arm in the air.

The bagpipes were George Young’s idea.

Young was the brother of Malcolm and Angus, he’d been a member of the Easybeats, he was one half of production team Vanda and Young, who also made up Flash and the Pan.

George Young died yesterday.

He made it to the top, he established his place in the firmament, it wouldn’t be the same rock ‘n’ roll without him.

Gettin’ old
Gettin’ grey
Gettin’ ripped-off
Underpaid
Gettin’ sold
Second hand
That’s how it goes
Playin’ in a band

We all wanted to, we all picked up instruments, but it was too long a road for most of us, too rough and mean, but George made it, all the way from Down Under.

It wasn’t an avocation, it was everything.

And it’s everything to us too.

I know you know what I mean.

It’s harder than it looks. It took us off the defined path. Now we’re old and grey and all we’re left with are these records.

And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

“The Pop Diva Identity Crisis-With the rise of hip-hop, a string of A-list pop stars like Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry have stumbled. ‘There’s a changing of the guard.'”

We went to Storm King.

I told you my mother was a culture vulture. You need to have plans, you need to DO something, watching television during the day was illegal in our house, as is staying home and relaxing. But when we get back from the day’s activities my mother does have a stiff vodka, my dad owned a liquor store, their drink of choice used to be the whiskey sour, as for telling my mother how much to imbibe, in December she’s gonna be 91!

And all of her friends are dead. Except for Franki in Westport and Jene in California and Judy in the building. Oh, she has other friends, but the inner circle has passed, but my mother soldiers on. But instead of the weekends being full of activity, now they’re quiet.

But she gets around. Despite needing a walker and a wheelchair. She’s GAME!

So yesterday we went to the Yale Center for British Art, it just reopened, and…

I’ve told you I’d be cool with living the rest of my life in a museum. In this case, it wasn’t the art so much as the STORIES! It started in the 1500s, and the people…

Looked just like you and me.

Talk about perspective!

We think we’re important, we think what we’re doing counts, and then you read about the guy who spent his whole life in pursuit of marrying the queen. He didn’t make it. And the teenagers getting married. Most people died in their fifties, but they had huge estates and you contemplate their life and you realize they were unaware of mobile phones and the internet, but otherwise it was the same, they worked, they screwed and they gossiped, and they drank, there was a lot of drinking, and if the people in the paintings weren’t wearing different clothing, you’d swear you knew them.

And when we got back from New Haven we stopped at Pepe’s to eat, that’s right, Pepe’s Pizza, considered the best in the land by many, and of course we had the white clam, and Stanton joined us.

Stanton was a year ahead, in my sister’s class, but he didn’t leave town, he stayed here, he’s the city attorney and…

He knows everybody and everything.

Reminds me of my dad. It’s what’s going on beneath the surface that matters, that explains it all.

And we talked about the musicians who live in town, like Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, and all the acts that now come to FTC, the Fairfield Theatre, and the billionaires too, like Ray Dalio, and then we talked…

About people we knew.

Some dead, some alive, all of whose lives have been written, now that we are this age.

That’s one weird thing, you stop at the grocery store and you don’t recognize the cashier, for years I did.

And so many are retired…

And I want to work forever, but sometimes your health does not allow this. And at what point do you give up anyway, when it’s too much effort to keep up, when you don’t like the new music and no one catches the references and you’re better off hanging with the people you know until…

Felice’s mother is 93, she copes by hanging with the younger set. She’s resigned from some boards, but she’s out seemingly every night, it’s amazing.

But so many of my friends can no longer work in the music business. And so many of my friends have limited retirement accounts, if they have them at all, and just like every generation before us, we thought we’d never get old, but we did.

So today we went to Storm King. I studied it in college. That’s where the David Smith sculptures are. We were allowed to park right up close, because of my mother’s frailty, and it bugs me that the handicapped spots are always full, of wankers beating the system, hell, just getting my mother out of the car and into her wheelchair is a production, if you saw it you’d never needlessly park in one of those blue spots again, but that’s what America has turned into, a selfish state, then again, it’s amazing how people will take the time to open doors.

So Storm King is a sculpture garden. Across the Hudson, in New York, and if you go there you’ll want to move there. It’s kinda like that Arlo Guthrie song “Massachusetts,” or “Sweet Baby James” and that line about the Berkshires, even though it’s in New York, but no one would know the difference if they didn’t have signs at the border, all the landscape is the same, rolling, hilly.

And speaking of rolling, they have this one land sculpture by Maya Lin that resembles waves. Another one that is a stone wall, going across the hill and dale. And you remember that the world runs on art and physical beauty, but too many are chasing the buck.

We took a tram around the property, seeing one sculpture after another, and on the hill are the David Smiths, which is what they started with, they showed slides of them in art class, but that was forty five years ago.

I don’t want to go back, I don’t ever want to be in school.

And I remember wanting to escape, to the west.

But the west is new, and spread out. In the east there are a ton of attractions mere minutes away. Whereas once you’ve been to Santa Barbara, San Diego and Big Bear, you’ve burned out L.A.

And there’s so much history. And the roads are curvy and the trees are close and it all feels so intimate, everything looks good in hindsight, even the dead of winter when you stayed inside and drank hot chocolate, but…

I don’t know what but. You make choices in life and you end up where you do, there are no do-overs. And you lose time, you wake up and your life is set in stone, but you always wonder, should I have done it differently?

And on the way back the app took us across the countryside, avoiding the highways, and you see the ponds and the cows and the churches and your brain starts to spin tales, you feel warm and fuzzy, alive.

And then we stopped at Aspetuck Farms, so I could buy Macoun apples, a fall staple in Connecticut. I did, but they were out of cider, and the clerk implored me to try one of the free Sweet 16s, and it tasted better than any apple I’ve ever eaten in California, then again, everything does when you buy it at the farm, when it’s about local consumption as opposed to agribusiness.

Not that I want to denigrate the future, there’s some b.s. in the “Times” today about traveling without a phone. I’m sick and tired of self-satisfied boomers wanting to jet back to the past, sure, the future is imperfect, but it’s so much better. Hell, remember the cars, that used to break all the time? We may not have vent windows, but automobiles all come with air-conditioning and as I write this I remember how people bug me, run on emotion instead of fact, are set in their ways, which is one of the reasons I moved to L.A., where they tear down the past before you get used to it, it’s all evanescent, it’s all in motion, you just grab on and ride, no one’s in your business and you feel free.

And freedom’s where it’s at.

But on the east coast there’s context, and meaning, and…

I’m gonna miss it.

Yale Center for British Art

Storm King Art Center

Frank Pepe Pizzeria

Aspetuck Apple Barn

I’m so high on cookies it’s INSANE!

I sat down for the Wrap Up show and there was a bag with a note and I figured it was a gift from the Stern show but it turned out to be a bag full of Levain chocolate chip cookies, delivered by Judy Tint, and it made me so happy. I ate two for lunch and two after dinner and now I may never sleep again, high on sugar. The cookies are akin to cakes, thick, and the chocolate chocolate chip ones are to die for, I’d like to say you can stop eating them, but you can’t.

And a lot of people recommended their personal haunts in the city, and I’d like to try them all out, but alas I’m now in Connecticut, my homeland, where it is so…

Green.

That’s right, the leaves have not turned yet, or just barely. But if you live in Los Angeles Connecticut is a revelation, you take it for granted when you live here, but the foliage makes you feel warm and alive, cocooned, like the planet was made to be inhabited by people.

And my mother lives in an apartment on the sixth floor and from her balcony you can look over the Sound all the way to Long Island, and this may not mean anything to you if you’re not from the area, but once upon a time the Hamptons were not hip and the thought of taking the ferry to the Island…wasn’t exactly unthinkable, but you didn’t do it. This was before I went to summer camp and found out so many lived on that island known as Long, found out about the Five Towns, and once again you either know what I’m talking about or you don’t. And the truth is the east coast is one big club, with its own references, a bunch of culture, and if you live here it’s hard to move anywhere else, but some of us escape, to Florida, where the humidity will kill you, or Los Angeles, where the most important thing is what kind of car you drive, which is just phony enough for me. Hell, where I went to college never comes up in California, whereas in the east it’s a badge of honor.

So I woke up and went to the Stern show.

One thing you’ve got to know about New York is the security. You can’t make your way into any building without credential. And the elevators have no buttons, you can go to your floor and only your floor, and this used to seem like overkill but in this era of Las Vegas, of mass shootings every week, it’s good to be safe, hell, you get off the elevator and you still can’t get into Sirius, there’s a guard, you’ve got to be buzzed in.

So I was greeted by Steve Brandano, Stern’s young music expert. He talked about loving the Dead with Mayer, going to six of Phish’s Baker’s Dozen, and liking Daniel Glass’s Jade Bird and Durand Jones, I love picking people’s brains, seeing what they’re excited about, that’s where I get my best tips.

And then the show ended and we were ushered into the Wrap Up studio and that’s when I realized I was out of energy. I started to talk and…

I wasn’t gonna blow my big moment, was I?

Reminded me of the bar exam. The multistate. Whose cutoff point is higher in California than anywhere else. When I took the bar far under 50% passed it. And they say you guess on the multistate, multiple choice exam, BUT NOT BOB LEFSETZ!

Oh yes I did. It was about ninety minutes into an all day exam and I realized…

I was flunking. So I went to the bathroom, sat on the pot, pulled myself together, and passed.

So during the first commercial break I ate an energy bar, got up my gumption and…

Ran with it.

Gary wanted to talk vinyl. I told him I had all mine and was all for it as long as the records were originally recorded analog, i.e. on tape, otherwise it’s a fetish, hell, many people buy vinyl who don’t even own turntables!

And they asked me to beat up on Rahsaan for not liking the Beatles.

But I couldn’t. You see it’s a white boomer thing. And Rahsaan is black and thirty two and grew up in a household of funk. Everybody’s s ethnocentric, everybody’s so self-satisfied. But the truth is there’s a generation gap as wide as the one in the sixties, been happening for years, when you listen to the Spotify Top 50 and laugh, the joke is on you, there’s a culture in hip-hop, boosted not only by music but the clothing, and the oldsters just can’t understand it, and since white boomers have power they think they’re right, that their music rules, but they’re wrong.

Then again, Rahsaan loved “Led Zeppelin II” and the Beatles and the classic acts drove the culture in a way hip-hop does not, because we had so few outlets and we all listened to the same ones, radio ruled, and I’ll argue the old music was better because in today’s income inequality world the middle class does not go into the industry but we can discuss that amongst ourselves.

And the thing about the Stern show is it’s a family. And you feel included. We talked about Sal and Ronnie and it was like talking about someone you go to school with, we all want to belong and being at the Stern show feels like home, and you never want to leave.

But ultimately I did.

And I went out to this restaurant Whelk with my mother, in Westport, I Yelped it, had eight oysters and a lobster dish, you can’t get this variety of oysters in the west, one from Norwalk, right next door, and another from Connecticut and the rest from Massachusetts! And they were all delicious. Did I tell you about the time Marc Reiter and I went out for dinner and ordered eighty oysters? Your man Luke may be able to eat fifty eggs, but we can eat…

And Paul Newman lived in Westport and the Post Road is the same but different. The Chinese restaurant is gone, but Gold’s Delicatessen is still there. And you drive past the haunts that were a staple of your youth, when you were not only young, but ignorant, yet thought you knew everything, and you feel a sense of connection and loss all at the same time. This is my life, but I know I’m never returning here anymore.

That’s what’s funny. All the things you leave behind, they’re not in the distant past. You run into an old love and the sinews start forming instantly, what brought you together is still there, and you have to hang for a while to remember what pulled you apart.

And today Gord Downie died. I knew him. He was an artist more than a rock star. But I never thought he’d pass before me, at fifty three. Canada is mourning and New Orleans is sinking and my mother is still living when almost all of her friends have passed. Weekends are quiet, but she fills up the days, she’s game, she uses a walker but she gets around, went to a play at Yale Rep this afternoon and she’s got me totally scheduled for the next two days and it’s like she’ll be here forever but I know she won’t and I don’t want to contemplate this.

And high on cookies I decided to tackle four hundred and fifty e-mails and in the middle I found one from Jimmy Kimmel, inviting me to the taping today, with Howard, but I left Sirius straight for Connecticut and missed out.

Jimmy did the show and then went to see Springsteen.

I saw Springsteen at the Bottom Line back in ’74, when boasting about seeing an act early was a thing, before Bruce was a thing, after I became enamored of “The Wild, the Innocent…”

But we’re neither wild nor innocent anymore. We tend to be complacent and living on our laurels. Hell, Bruce Springsteen is selling nostalgia. A notch on the belt for supposed fans. But the truth is he not busy being born is busy dying and it’s Dylan who’s the beacon, who never gives us what we want but follows his own muse and I no longer want to go but I get it, you’ve got to keep pushing the envelope, keep searching, keep going when everybody else gives up, not to win, but to be happy, for the stimulation, embrace the new and unknown and you’ll have disappointments but also the experiences of a lifetime.

So I cannot go to sleep. For some reason Henley’s “End of the Innocence” keeps running through my head, I don’t know why, but it’s true, like that old Canadian band once sang, I’m an adult now, I’m responsible for my own life, I’ve got to go where I wanna go, do what I wanna do, with whoever I want to do it with…

And so should you…

That’s right, tomorrow, Wednesday, I will be sitting down with John Hein and Gary Dell’Abate to discuss the day’s Howard Stern show and more. And either this rings your bell or it doesn’t. Either you’re a fan of Howard or you’re not. But Howard is the king of his world, which includes late night TV, it’s the number one get in celebrity interviews, so…

I’m excited.

Tonight I went to Morton’s for the Lead Edge Capital dinner. Pretty fascinating, one is rarely in such a group, people who’ve made it in their various fields and now have money to invest. The M&A attorney whose son started “The Source,” the CFO of Dell who opened his own bank in Austin, the guy who started Playlist.com and even a headhunter for hedge funds, who knew there was such a thing?

Although Ilana Weinstein does have an undergraduate degree from Penn and an MBA from Harvard. Not that she’s airy. Once you’re in the club everybody’s relaxed, but everybody’s a self-starter, everybody saw the light and went their own way, it’s kinda like the music business before it was codified, before they taught it at school, Jay Marciano dropped out of college to open a music store and then became a concert promoter, while still a student Irving Azoff represented WLS deejays and even flew to New York for an ultimately unproductive meeting with Morris Levy, Mo Ostin was running finance for Frank Sinatra before he became a label head, and the hedge fund/investment world is still a little wild despite now getting so much attention.

Mitchell Green, now thirty six, started Lead Edge Capital seven years ago. He had a hunch that Alibaba was a winner, he was right. But before that he raised $17 mil for a friend’s business that turned into 80, quite a return, but Mitchell BELIEVED! That’s akin to a music manager, or the old independent record company heads, never forget, Jerry Moss started out as a promotion man.

And after a bit of steak and wine, the discussion opens up. But it’s not about the content, but the business. Kinda like in music, only in music the discussion is how many tickets Taylor Swift will sell, in this case it’s about whether Netflix stock will go up or down. I was sitting next to an analyst, who’d spoken at the conference, sounds a bit like school, you’ve got to grind it out for quarterly numbers, they work hard for the money, and if you don’t like it…

And I like being in New York.

Everybody in L.A. wears sunglasses. But in New York the buildings are so tall and block so much sun that I was the only one walking with shades.

And everybody does walk. It’s good exercise. But when you bump into someone and excuse yourself you realize they’re not paying attention, do this in L.A. and the person turns around and glares, in New York they just soldier on.

And they talk to you. This is what I hate about Los Angeles, the lack of banter. Everywhere you go, people start up a conversation, it’s silent in the elevator in Los Angeles, but not in New York.

And speaking of elevators, I got into a conversation with a young woman from Mexico City. Her family spends summers in San Diego and Vail. You see there’s a rich circuit, and there’s tons of dough in Mexico, but most people are unaware, if you only saw how the other half lived, I went to Jerry Perenchio’s house and remarked that if everybody saw the property there’d be riots in the streets, it’s literally the “Beverly Hillbillies” house, there’s a long access road in Bel-Air, and it just went on the market for $350 million, and you don’t even know who Jerry Perenchio was.

He was an agent, and so much more.

And he hated publicity.

But the point is most business is not like entertainment, the movers and shakers are not in it for the glory, so you’ve got no idea who they are or what they’re doing or…

So it’s fascinating to be let inside.

I’m leaving tomorrow, going to visit my mother after Howard, so for those of you who e-mailed me about getting together, mea culpa, I wanted to do so much of it, but not as much as I wanted to go the cookie place recommended by attorney Judy Tint, the Levaine Bakery even has lines, I jones for chocolate chip cookies, my absolute favorite was David’s, I’m waiting to find something as good.

But there’s always next time.