Last Sunday night I went to the Wiltern to see Ray LaMontagne.<\/p>\n
I am not a fan of the act, but I am of the manager, so as a favor I went.\u00c2\u00a0 I wasn’t closed.\u00c2\u00a0 But the throng in attendance was.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a veritable babeathon.\u00c2\u00a0 I saw Joey Lauren Adams downstairs by the bathroom, I LOVED her in "Chasing Amy.\u00c2\u00a0 During the break I saw the sex addict from HBO’s "Tell Me You Love Me" with her posse on the next couch over.\u00c2\u00a0 And Lisa was swooning over Tom Brady’s baby mama Bridget Moynihan in the lobby, although I thought she had a tiny head and Eric thought she was nowhere near a 10.<\/p>\n
But women only made up half of the audience.\u00c2\u00a0 The guys were out in force.\u00c2\u00a0 And they didn’t look soft.\u00c2\u00a0 And the assembled multitude ROARED not only when Ray hit the stage, but after every single number.\u00c2\u00a0 And what did Ray have to say about all of it?\u00c2\u00a0 NOTHING! Other than the obligatory "Thank you" and band introductions.<\/p>\n
It was truly strange.\u00c2\u00a0 We’re used to assaults.\u00c2\u00a0 Productions.\u00c2\u00a0 Shows.\u00c2\u00a0 The music hasn’t stood alone for oh-so-very long.\u00c2\u00a0 Blame MTV, blame Top 40 radio, blame Tommy Mottola, but where we are today is so far from where we once lived.\u00c2\u00a0 Used to be the acts and the audience were in it together, celebrating the music.\u00c2\u00a0 The acts of yore didn’t wear stage outfits, they came on stage in their regular clothes, like Ray LaMontagne, wearing his flannel shirt, well-worn jeans and work boots.\u00c2\u00a0 But when they hit those notes, you got this inner joy, you looked to the heavens and sang along as the music inhabited your soul.<\/p>\n
On the way back from Beverly Hills just now, I heard "Statesboro Blues" on Outlaw Country.\u00c2\u00a0 The Allman Brothers version.\u00c2\u00a0 Do you know it?\u00c2\u00a0 You could be lying somnambulant on the couch, even stoned out of your mind, and when you hear Duane’s slide you’ve got no choice but to jump up and start dancing around the room.\u00c2\u00a0 Your mood is instantly changed.\u00c2\u00a0 You feel positively alive.<\/p>\n
In a long conversation with Alex Hodges at the Greek Saturday night he told me he booked EIGHTEEN stadium dates for the Allman Brothers in the summer of ’74.\u00c2\u00a0 EIGHTEEN!\u00c2\u00a0 There isn’t an act extant that can sell out eighteen stadium dates today.\u00c2\u00a0 Not even U2. They gave up on that kind of trek in the U.S. after the "Pop Mart" tour.\u00c2\u00a0 The Stones may book ’em, but they don’t sell ’em out.\u00c2\u00a0 Kenny Chesney tries, but he books a whole slate of acts, he alone is not enough.\u00c2\u00a0 The Allman Brothers were enough.<\/p>\n
Conventional wisdom is no one wants to go, no one wants to sit that far away.\u00c2\u00a0 But we went to the stadium shows the same way people went to Obama rallies.\u00c2\u00a0 We wanted to show our solidarity, we wanted to unite with our brethren against the forces of evil, WE WANTED TO HAVE A GOOD TIME!<\/p>\n
And it’s nice to be able to be up close and personal, to be able to see the acts full-size, but that’s secondary to the music.<\/p>\n
We haven’t sold music that infects the audience in so long.\u00c2\u00a0 Let me change that, music sans artifice hasn’t dominated the national conversation in far too long.\u00c2\u00a0 The machine wants flash, it wants gossip, the music is just a platform upon which to build a personality. Even though so many of the great musicians were verbally impaired and could only truly speak through their instruments.<\/p>\n
Talk to a promoter.\u00c2\u00a0 Ask him or her what sells.\u00c2\u00a0 They’ll talk about bands you barely know that come back to their market more than once a year and never falter, even though they haven’t had a new record in eons.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s like there’s a private network supporting these acts.\u00c2\u00a0 Reported nowhere but in the grosses.\u00c2\u00a0 Like that Ray LaMontagne gig.\u00c2\u00a0 He sold out TWO Wilterns!<\/p>\n
But it wasn’t his first album.\u00c2\u00a0 His music wasn’t jammed down America’s throat.\u00c2\u00a0 It was allowed to percolate, it was owned by the public, not the media.\u00c2\u00a0 And suddenly, SUPERNOVA!<\/p>\n
And it’s only about the music.\u00c2\u00a0 He didn’t party with an Olsen twin, he’s not involved in a big scandal, he’s just writing his truth, and the audience has responded.<\/p>\n
We’re in a new era.\u00c2\u00a0 There hasn’t been this big a divide between the Top 40 and what’s real since the late sixties and the advent of underground FM radio.\u00c2\u00a0 The Top 40 acts of that era might be able to play the lounge in Vegas, but Eric Clapton still plays arenas.\u00c2\u00a0 If Led Zeppelin reunited, THEY could sell out stadiums.\u00c2\u00a0 Their success was based on the music.\u00c2\u00a0 Personalities came second, if they figured in at all.<\/p>\n
If you want instant fame, record a Top 40 hit.\u00c2\u00a0 Flog it to high heaven.\u00c2\u00a0 If you want a career, create great music.\u00c2\u00a0 That makes people jump up and participate.\u00c2\u00a0 Worry less about staggering statistics than the rabidity of the audience you do have.<\/p>\n
I discovered the Allman Brothers in January of 1970, smoking dope in Dave McCormick’s dorm room, downstairs in Hepburn Hall, at Middlebury College.\u00c2\u00a0 If you haven’t been high and nodded your head to the guitar figure in "Midnight Rider", you haven’t been stoned.<\/p>\n
Bill Graham booked the act without a national profile to close the Fillmore East.<\/p>\n
Shortly thereafter, the double live album, sans any hits whatsoever, was unleashed upon the marketplace.\u00c2\u00a0 It became the soundtrack to dorm life, even though the mainstream media was completely out of the loop.<\/p>\n
Then Duane died.<\/p>\n
But the band didn’t.<\/p>\n
"Eat A Peach" shored up the base.<\/p>\n
But it wasn’t until the fall of ’73, YEARS after the band had been formed and started recording that they broke through, with "Ramblin’ Man".\u00c2\u00a0 Even though I’d seen them the summer before, blowing the Band and the Grateful Dead off the stage at Watkins Glen, it wasn’t until months later that the rest of America stood up and took notice.\u00c2\u00a0 And not only bought "Brother & Sisters", but went back and purchased the catalog.<\/p>\n
This is the way it used to be.\u00c2\u00a0 This is the way it’s gonna be now.\u00c2\u00a0 The mark of your success will be how many tickets you can sell, not how many discs you can move.\u00c2\u00a0 Casual listeners are satisfied with the track, fans want to go to the show.<\/p>\n
Like Barack says, we’re all in it together.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s time for the music business to heed this lesson too.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ve got to bring the audience in. And the way you do this, the way you keep people coming back, is not through production, flash and sets, but music.\u00c2\u00a0 Top 40 stars are only as big as their last hit.\u00c2\u00a0 Whereas the Allman Brothers, even absent multiple key players, can still do bang up business on the road forty years later.<\/p>\n
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Last Sunday night I went to the Wiltern to see Ray LaMontagne. I am not a fan of the act, but I am of the manager, so as a favor I went.\u00c2\u00a0 I wasn’t closed.\u00c2\u00a0 But the throng in attendance was.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a veritable babeathon.\u00c2\u00a0 I saw Joey Lauren Adams downstairs by the bathroom, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-shows","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-mO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}