Arroyo Seco Weekend

I’d rather go to this than Desert Trip.

As for Coachella, despite the press of it being America’s greatest festival, the truth is it’s a rite of passage for Southern California teenagers, where you put on your outfit and take selfies, they should rename it INSTAGRAMELLA, because it’s got little to do with the music and all to do with the attendees. And I give the promoters credit, they’ve finally woken up to this fact, albeit far too late, booking Beyonce, now replaced by Gaga, and Kendrick Lamar, if they really had it together they’d have booked Bieber, years ago, because he is now credible and the favorite of those who actually go to this show, although most of them will be high in the Sahara Tent, listening to deejays. The undercard? No one’s broken out of Coachella, any damn festival at all, for eons, if at all. It’s a circle jerk, akin to a booking at SXSW. You used to go from nowhere to somewhere by appearing, now you still stay nowhere, unless there’s a big push on you anyway and the festival is just icing on the cake.

But this Arroyo Seco Weekend…

The first canard is that Coachella is such a beautiful site, on the polo fields. Wrong. It’s a barren landscape with a few rides and sculptures that can be way too hot and way too windy and the truth is the biggest festivals in America, other than gross, the best planned and most fun to attend, are Lollapalooza and ACL right in the heart of the city. Kind of like the granddaddy, Jazz Fest, which ends in the early evening so everybody can shuttle back to town and eat!

And for those who went to Desert Trip, what they could not stop talking about was the food. The concert experience has flip-flopped. You used to be satisfied being treated like cattle, eating hot dogs and popcorn, now you want respect, and the lineup of eateries involved with Arroyo Seco makes one interested in going irrelevant of the acts on stage.

Food is more interesting than music right now, MTV is no longer called “Music Television” while the Food Channel continues to burgeon and everybody on it has a restaurant and brand extensions. Because chefs take risks, they don’t play it safe, something musicians have lost sight of.

As for the headliners at Desert Trip, other than maybe Neil Young, they’re all past they’re sell date. McCartney’s voice has withered, Dylan’s is near-nonexistent, Roger Waters never sang much to begin with, and although the  Stones and the Who are experiencing renaissances, with the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band firing on all cylinders and Roger Daltrey taking time off between gigs to rest his voice, you can see them anywhere and everywhere, as for the Who’s recently announced Las Vegas residency, positively brilliant. The road kills bands, why not have the audience come to them. Vegas is the new Branson, for far too long it was about irrelevant shows with boobies and aged entertainers, but now it’s a mix of old and new musicians/singers and is more attractive every day, kudos.

So, Arroyo Seco, unlike Coachella, underplays. It’s not for everybody, but locals. I’m not saying out of town people and foreigners can’t attend, but the truth is every community now has its festival and by trying to be more than that you often end up with less.

Tom Petty may be from Florida, but he’s now seen as a SoCal act. As are Dawes, Fitz & The Tantrums and Weezer and…

This festival may be enhanced by the food, but first and foremost it’s positively about music. What a change from Coachella. And it’s not a notch in the belt like Desert Trip, where old fogeys go to congratulate themselves, but an enjoyable experience both seeing the headliners and those coming up. And I’m sure substances will be taken, but this is not music made inside the box, but with real instruments, played by both the old and the new, it’s refreshing, you can go and enjoy what you already know and discover new bands. This festival is more in touch with the audience than any record company, playing to radio and the lowest common denominator listener, Arroyo Seco is about the AUDIENCE!

And the audience is segmented. Arroyo Seco writes off the baby boomers, if they want to come, cool, but really it’s about the Generation after, X, which is fifty give or take. But it does not write off their younger brethren, still stimulated by music that in many cases gets no airplay.

And I cannot ignore the food, but this is the first festival in a long time that is about the music, not the site, not the aura. You see the lineup, note it’s in Pasadena, and say I WANT TO GO!

GOOD WORK GOLDENVOICE!

Mike Ginsberg turned me on to Traffic. I met him at a NEFTY week in New Hampshire. I took the train up to West Hartford and we sat in his attic and he spun the second LP, the one that started with “Feelin’ Alright,” long before Joe Cocker made this song so famous. And then the band blew apart.

It wasn’t like it is today, there was no Wikipedia, we couldn’t figure out whether Dave was in the band on the first album or a roadie and then they were three once again and Dave went on to play with Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, who’d recorded before but broke through when Eric Clapton sat in and they put out the album “On Tour.” And the track that got all the traction from that LP was “Comin’ Home,” with the soon to be Derek’s guitarwork, but the standout cut was one “Only You Know And I Know,” with Delaney and Bonnie trading lead vocals, but dedicated credit readers knew the song was composed by one Dave Mason, and just a few months later, in the spring of ’70, Dave put out his own solo LP on Blue Thumb entitled “Alone Together.”

Now we’d never heard of Blue Thumb.

Most people had never even heard of Dave Mason.

And that’s where I first came across Tommy LiPuma, he produced one of the best rock albums of all time, just check it out, it starts with “Only You Know And I Know.”

It’s the same song as on the Delaney & Bonnie LP, not a radically different arrangement, but it’s in the pocket, a hit in a way its predecessor is not.

Now “Alone Together” was a paragon of packaging. With panels that folded out to reveal a portrait of Dave in front of rocks that you could hang on the wall, with a hole for a pin or nail on top, and encased in the pocket was a record that looked like an hallucination, as if rocky road and vanilla and strawberry had all run together and… It resembled nothing so much as one of those spin paintings you make at the elementary school carnival.

And then you dropped the needle.

Now they made records differently back then. Stereo effects were in, as was separation, how something sounded was key, because we were all buying new stereos the way people bought new computers in the nineties, but rather than want to commune with our brothers online we wanted to bask in the tunes.

And “Alone Together” is the first LP I played when I heard Tommy LiPuma died last night.

Now this is completely strange. Because for the last couple of years it was Tommy weighing in on the deceased. Most recently with Leon Russell. Weird when the chronicler disappears, it leaves a vacuum, and I don’t think I can fill it.

But I knew him.

Mostly in e-mail.

In person at MusiCares.

And most people get old. Or they try too hard to be young. But Tommy… He was aged in years, but in spirit he was still in the pocket, he knew about the technology, but first and foremost he knew the music, he’d been bitten by the bug way back when.

As were we.

It’s hard for the younger generations to understand, what music meant to us. The Beatles were our Facebook.

Only bigger.

FM radio was our internet.

Everybody bought a guitar, everybody played.

And we knew who everybody was.

Which is why Tommy LiPuma stood out. He was not one of the usual suspects, one of the producers du jour, not Felix Pappalardi from Cream, not George Martin from the Beatles, but he birthed an album so exquisite, with each track playable, that you knew he was gonna be a legend.

And he became one.

Now Dave Mason got in a snit over money, where there’s a hit there’s a writ, and he decamped from Blue Thumb for Columbia, where he ultimately had a big radio track, 1977’s “We Just Disagree,” but he never reached the heights of “Alone Together” again, because he didn’t work with Tommy.

And the thing about Tommy is he didn’t have a signature sound, all his productions sounded different.

Prior to Mason, Tommy produced “Guantanamera” for the Sandpipers, a boomer classic if there ever was one, one they knew by heart, as did their parents.

And after Dave he produced not only Barbra Streisand, but eight tracks on Natalie Cole’s “Unforgettable.”

And then he made Diana Krall a star.

And most people still have no idea who he is.

But they know his productions.

And what more can you ask for?

Only you know and I know
All the love we’ve got to show

And I’m showing it for Tommy right now.

So don’t refuse to believe it
By reading too many meanings

That was the era, you were supposed to lay back and take it all in, not only were nerds not lauded, aggressive business people like Mark Zuckerberg were decried. It was not about making money so much as searching for truth, and disseminating it when you found it.

‘Cause you know that I mean what I say
So don’t go and take me the wrong way

So far from today’s duplicity. We’re a divided country unsure of what’s right but there was no debate way back when, you just listened to the music.

You know you can’t go on getting your own way
‘Cause if you do, it’s going to get you someday

The ethos of a musician is different from that of you and me, they’re not competitive, awards are b.s., it’s about the tunes and the journey. And if you disobey the laws of the universe you’re gonna pay someday.

I don’t mean to mislead you
It’s just my craziness coming through

Mama, we were all crazy then. Now no one admits it, now image rules.

But when it comes down to just two
I ain’t no crazier than you

You’re no better than me, the Woodstock Generation knew it was all in it together, we were all brothers and sisters until Reagan legitimized greed and if you don’t believe that you probably thought the Vietnam War was a good thing.

But it’s hard to believe in
When you’ve been so mistreated

That’s the story of the twenty first century, the wealthy and powerful lord their position over us, tell us they know what’s right while they rip us off and leave us behind. And that’s the damn truth, that’s why Hillary couldn’t win the election, because of all that money she made selling books and giving speeches. How about us, who’s gonna look after us?

Certainly not the musicians looking to follow in the footsteps of the techies. Scratch today’s superstar and you’ll find someone invested in startups. The music just ain’t enough.

But it used to be.

When legends like Tommy LiPuma walked the earth. Bridged the gap from what once was to what became, from jazz to rock and roll and back again.

Because not only is it only rock and roll.

It’s only music.

And I mean what I say.

And when I listen to “Alone Together,” all I think of is this guy who did not change his ethnic name, who cared not about image, but delivering the truth of the artist on wax, back when producers were footnotes, literally, that we unearthed and read like Dead Sea Scrolls, and it’s been nearly fifty years and “Alone Together” remains and sustains. Will the best work of Max Martin achieve this goal?

Doubtful.

“Only You Know And I Know”:

This Girl – Spotify

This Girl – YouTube

How did I miss this?

Sometimes I feel like I’ve been dropped on this planet without a map. Oh, prior to electronics, the internet, I knew exactly where I was, what path I was on, growing up in the suburbs to go to a good college to get a professional job, before the aforementioned internet blew a hole so wide in the universe that I no longer have any idea where I am anymore.

I used to be one of those people in the know.

Now I’m one of the billions of clueless.

Oh, there are people who tell us they know what’s going on, even though they usually do not, but even if they do, their vertical is very narrow, I could stump them with questions I’ve got the answer to all day long. And the point is it’s not a competition, but there’s no coherence.

The baby boomers hate it. They’re either overwhelmed or removed. They think the youngsters have it figured out, but the kids don’t either. Kind of like that canard that women can multitask and men cannot. The truth is NO ONE can multitask, not effectively.

But we want to get so much done.

I’m sitting there listening to Bruce Hornsby’s latest album last night and trying to read the newspaper, doing both ineffectively. And who knew Hornsby put out an LP where he plays dulcimer instead of piano last year, actually, I did, but after the advance single I lost the plot, I never listened, although last night I realized “Rehab Reunion” was good. But it’s like it almost doesn’t exist, there’s no chart action, unlike “The Way It Is,” which inspired me to search, but that initial hit was back in ’86, does he still have to play it in concert and does he squeeze the new stuff in? The dirty little secret is tickets are so expensive the audience feels entitled to hear the hits, and it’s hard to blame them.

So yesterday I spent time away from Howard cruising the Sirius XM dial. And on the Loft I heard some great new stuff, it’s just that it didn’t sound radically different from the old stuff, just variations on a theme. And that had me wondering, are we all just waiting for a new sound? I think so. The way the Beatles wiped everything that came before off the map. We’re waiting for music to be exciting like tech was the past twenty years, to all listen and discuss and buy instruments and…

That’s not what’s happening now.

So I’m pushing the buttons down to Octane, and I get hooked on this song “Lifeline” by Thousand Foot Krutch. Its energy and forcefulness tapped into my anger. Maybe that’s what it’s all about, I’m trying to fit in too much, I’ve got to let my freak flag fly. And then a Linkin Park song came on next and I liked it and I felt once again I was out of the loop, doesn’t everybody know Linkin Park?

I forget the name of that tune, but I can see on Spotify that “Lifeline” has 671,268 spins, so it’s just me and… Maybe they’ll come through town and I can listen to the album ad infinitum to go thrust my arm in the air…

Or maybe not.

I want to belong. I want to be part of the discussion. But where is the group, what are they talking about?

So, overwhelmed and obliterated, my normal state these days, I decided to sit and have lunch with the music off, catch up on the news, that’s something we can all understand and relate to.

And then I saw that “New York Times Magazine” article entitled

“25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going”

and I decide to play them, one by one, on my Sonos system, to prove my superiority and smugness. Yes, they’ll all be rotten and that will cement my position.

Although they all were not.

Most were. If you grew up in an era of melody and acoustic instrumentation, of songs you can sing along with, you’ll be horrified.

But number 9, “This Girl,” by Kungs vs. Cookin’ On 3 Burners intrigued me, I got it immediately, I was wowed, it was exactly what I was looking for, something ear-pleasing yet different.

But then I made a mistake, I completed the list, played nearly twenty more tracks, and then they all ran together, kind of like listening to a Spotify playlist, not as background, but foreground, Pandora’s background, like in a retail store, I don’t want that, music means too much to me, and all this hunting for needles in haystacks is driving me crazy, and I’m sick of wasting so much time.

Point being when I finally got back to “This Girl” I didn’t find it quite as special, but it still resonated.

So, it’s a remix by a French guy you’ve never heard of of a 2009 track by an Aussie act with no traction in the U.S. Interested? Not on paper certainly. Turns out Kungs was surfing YouTube and discovered it, do people really do this, waste so much time, this is what we did in the sixties when input was scarce, now we’re constantly looking for filters, to tell us what to do and where to go.

And he remixed it on a lark and it became a big hit, confounding everybody involved. But that’s the nature of music, when you get it right people cannot get enough of it.

Assuming they hear it to begin with. As of this writing “This Girl” has got 369,741,877 streams on Spotify, another 214,305,916 views on YouTube, but until this afternoon I was clueless. Then again, it got little traction on the U.S. filters, it made it to #26 on the “Billboard” Hot 100, and only the top ten or fifteen tracks count. And who is listening to terrestrial radio anyway?

I’m not saying you haven’t heard “This Girl,” just that I haven’t, and most people have not either. To give you a point of reference, “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever (Fifty Shades Darker),” by Taylor Swift and Zayn only has 308,433,148 streams on Spotify, and she’s the biggest act in the American business and this remix of an old song exceeds her?

Proving you too can make it to the top. Just that it’ll probably take longer than you think. And what is the top anyway.

And speaking of that video… It’s infectious, sans the trappings of late period MTV it’s just the music and the scenery and a young love scene sans the physicality and the nudity that’s de rigueur online these days. You remember the days of yore, or yearn for them in your loins.

So we don’t read the same news, can’t agree on the same facts, all listen to different music, yet the barons of yore tell us there’s a definitive path. Huh? As for the kids, are they just surfing the zeitgeist or are they as overwhelmed and flummoxed as you and me?

Bottom line, “This Girl” genre hops. Kungs takes a slow funk song and speeds it up. Turns it into something we wouldn’t like on paper but can’t get enough of in real life. Because while they keep feeding us the same old stuff, the truth is we want something different.

We’re looking for leaders who do not play it safe, then again that’s artistry.

And right now we’ve got a lot of commerciality, just listen to the rest of the “Times” 25, much of it execrable, the emperor’s new clothes.

Then again, wasn’t that a great Sinead O’Connor song? From back when we knew who the artists worth paying attention to were, before names were tossed up and made famous and we checked out their stuff and winced.

Welcome to the new world.

Completely different from the old world.

Original Cookin’ On 3 Burners version of “This Girl”:

Spotify

YouTube

“Lifeline” by Thousand Foot Krutch, which turns out to be a Canadian Christian band in the marketplace for twenty-odd years:

Spotify

YouTube

It’s the best thing that ever happened to the college!

This is what the mainstream media does not understand, that it’s hard to get attention, nearly impossible. We all labor in backwaters, waiting for the sun to shine upon us, while those holdovers from the old school believe they still matter and can impart truth and steer the culture.

WRONG!

In a world where alternative facts rule, and everybody has their own news source, the most difficult task is to reach critical mass.

Middlebury College has finally reached critical mass.

I don’t really care what went on there, they don’t write, they don’t call, they’re not looking for me because I’m not rich. That’s the dirty little secret of non-profit organizations, they’re always looking for cash, and those with it sit on boards and steer the institutions and the rest of us shout opinions in the dark. I graduated decades ago, it’s a line item on my resume that no one looks at, I’m not on LinkedIn, I’m sick of the endless networking of today’s generation, it’s a bigger sport than football, working the connections, kissing butt to get a new job, and to tell you the truth no one on the west coast even asks me where I went to school, they assume it was a state institution if I attended at all, but now when I utter my alma mater’s name…

Some people will know what I’m talking about.

Make note of that, SOME people. Because despite all the attention the Charles Murray fracas has yielded, most people still do not care.

Fascinating, isn’t it? That they’re churning out news 24/7 that we don’t care about, because we’re so busy in our niches, that’s what the internet has afforded us, the ability to wallow in that which we care about as opposed to being dictated to by those who believe they know and are better than us.

To protest in Middlebury, Vermont is like breaking your act in the Northwest Territories. There aren’t enough people to matter, to get traction.

But with this newfangled internet, getting longer in the tooth every day, word can spread about inanities and…

You can become famous overnight.

Now Middlebury is not a band, it was founded in 1800, it will survive, and let that be a lesson to you, that attention strikes last, long after the fact, when  you’re already established and worth talking about. Middlebury will soldier on just like aged boomers will attend concerts by the remnants of Yes to hear “Roundabout,” the only difference is those who never heard Yes, never went to Exeter and never applied to Middlebury, are now in the loop, well, at least some of them.

Let’s see, prior to this…

Middlebury was famous for that line in “American Graffiti,” where the teacher said he left after a year because it was too competitive.

And in “The First Wives Club,” the protagonist went to Middlebury.

But in the pre-internet era, there was no virality.

And now there’s tons of it.

The liberal elite won’t let a right winger speak. The Republicans are loving this!

And the administration, they’re blaming it on outside agitators, talk about taking a page from Trump himself.

And the new college president is taking names, like the Dean Wormer in “Animal House,” when everybody knows few will pay, then again, unlike in the seventies, they’ve got film, er, tape, er, video.

So did you see that Rachel Maddow beats Tucker Carlson?

Because individuals matter. It’s less about the ethos and perspective than the deliver of the b.s., turns out people liked to watch Megyn Kelly.

And Colbert beats Fallon.

And my point is everything you know is wrong. But I learned that back in the seventies, when records still mattered and the Firesign Theatre was cutting edge.

You see our society has become complacent, there are no big thinkers, no leaders, just a bunch of blowhards from the old school and youngsters seeking followers.

Then again, the youngsters aren’t as bad as their parents, who post on Facebook because it’s permanent, they can list their social CV, whereas youngsters realize your rep precedes you, they love the evanescence of Snapchat. You’re either cool or you’re not, you’re either famous or you’re not.

So now Middlebury College is famous.

For what, doesn’t matter.

Come on, sing two Taylor Swift songs, I dare you. But you know her name and what she looks like and who’s she’s dated.

As for all those other acts shoved down our throat, we’re ignoring them.

Because we’re immune to publicity, just like ads.

But news, real things that happened, we eat them up!

We all want to be in the know. Even though we know so little. In a disconnected world where we all have different reference points it’s key to be able to talk about the topics of the day.

But what the mainstream doesn’t realize is the spin has changed.

We no longer live in a gotcha economy. It’s about resonating with your core audience. Trump says heinous stuff and his acolytes love him! Who even cares if it’s true, it FEELS true!

And the media and those who want to be featured in it haven’t fathomed the change, that facts are less important than feelings. Come on, in a world where everything is digitized, zeros and ones, we yearn for the soft edges of the liberal arts economy.

That’s right, science builds the roads.

But the liberal artists inhabit them, make them interesting.

And that’s what Middlebury College does, teach you how to think. There’s no practical track, no business, no nursing, no nothing other than pure academics. And if I had to do it all over again I wouldn’t go there, because the description is right, it’s an upper class haven of coddled teenagers, but now I’ve got a feather in my cap, I’m on the radar screen, my inbox is filling up with people wanting my opinion on the situation at my alma mater. I was just sitting here, in my underwear, and suddenly the spotlight was upon me!

Because I was in the game, I revealed where I went to college, it permeated the landscape over decades, so when the opportunity came…

Be ready to seize your opportunity. But know in today’s economy you’ve got to pay your dues and wait, otherwise you’ll be a flash in the pan.

And know getting your name recognized is more important than the content. Your fans will love that you got the accolades and the others can now dig deep, into the bread crumbs you’ve left over decades online.

Charles Murray is a wanker who said some heinous things and is held up as a deep thinker by the right wing elite which wants you to believe that the problem is you instead of them. Is he entitled to speak, of course. Then again, his appearance was foisted upon the campus by a tiny minority seeking to override the wishes of the vast majority. Sound like our politics to you? It’d be like featuring Avicii at a Garth Brooks show. Florida Georgia Line opening for Rihanna. The sponsors wanted to stick it in the eye of the liberals, hoping for an altercation like this. And they think they’ve won…

But they don’t realize most people just don’t care, life is too hard, they’re trying to make ends meet or find Fentanyl after their Oxy script ran out. But ain’t that America, where no one delves deep into the real problems.

Who’s going to stop applying to Middlebury now? Certainly not the people who think they’ve got a better chance of getting into one of American’s finest institutions of higher education. As for Harvard, they just dismantled their investment team, after it yielded poor results, and money always triumphs, but no one other than alumni and the rich care about that, because they’d rather talk about gender politics.

You’ve got a gay uncle, you’re trans and want to go to the bathroom. The only people who care are the same ones offended by this Middlebury situation and they don’t realize sunlight is the best disinfectant and they’ll lose in the end.

So, Laurie Patton, Middlebury’s President, should shrug and bite back, just like Trump. Stop being a wimp like a Democrat, realize Middlebury’s winning and say so. They’re a hotbed of politicism. They’ve got a student body that cares so much. This is a teaching moment. Put a positive spin upon it instead of falling on your sword like a good liberal. Come on, Bill O’Reilly is constantly in scrapes and he always emerges victorious, by realizing in today’s society people are out to get you and if you don’t defend yourself, you lose.

Most people don’t even know who Charles Murray is. But now they know what Middlebury College is. Nothing they did otherwise penetrated. Felix Rohatyn saved New York, did anybody care he went to Middlebury?

It’s a whole new world baby, and the media and the institutions are out of touch, they’re playing by old rules. Apologies are out, outrageousness is in. There’s gonna be an accounting after the great consolidation coming in the future, but now is the time to make your bones, to gain traction, or be left behind…

Middlebury College is now the most famous liberal arts school in the nation. Far outstripping Williams and Amherst, its main competitors.

This is the time for a victory lap. When a tiny college becomes world news it’s like…

Ed Sheeran breaking out of nowhere to become the biggest act in the world.

But he didn’t start yesterday. And he was abused for his lion tattoo.

And he or she who is not dodging stones does not matter. If you’re not being attacked, no one cares enough about you. But when they do…

YOU RULE!