{"id":1789,"date":"2009-03-17T17:05:34","date_gmt":"2009-03-18T01:05:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=1789"},"modified":"2009-03-17T17:05:34","modified_gmt":"2009-03-18T01:05:34","slug":"even-more-u2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2009\/03\/17\/even-more-u2\/","title":{"rendered":"Even More U2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night I was prevented from falling asleep by the book "Strange Brew: Eric Clapton & The British Blues Boom 1965-1970".\u00c2\u00a0 It had a day by day recounting of the travails of not only E.C., but John Mayall and Peter Green, with an interweaving of every other British blues musician of the era.\u00c2\u00a0 And I’m frantically looking through the book, to see if the Cream date I attended in Wallingford, Connecticut is there, at the Oakdale tent.\u00c2\u00a0 Problem is, I can’t remember exactly what month it was.\u00c2\u00a0 But I eventually found it, on June 15, 1968.\u00c2\u00a0 And I also found the gig at the New Haven Arena the following fall, where I stood fewer than ten feet away as Cream played with the ferocity I anticipated the previous spring but had not experienced, and I recorded the entire proceedings on the Norelco cassette deck I snuck inside.<\/p>\n

It’s not the same.<\/p>\n

Or maybe it is, maybe that’s why I’m writing this.<\/p>\n

You see music was the Internet of the sixties.\u00c2\u00a0 People got the bug and couldn’t get enough.\u00c2\u00a0 Both players and listeners, both coders and surfers.\u00c2\u00a0 There was a pulse, a heartbeat that was ignored at first by the mainstream.\u00c2\u00a0 Eric and Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck didn’t do it to get rich, they followed the music.\u00c2\u00a0 Sure, their playing spoke for them, allowed them to attract the opposite sex, but the music itself was the driver.\u00c2\u00a0 And the music infected the public at large.<\/p>\n

You’d be stunned how much Cream played in America.\u00c2\u00a0 And not every gig was a success.\u00c2\u00a0 It was impossible to get noticed.\u00c2\u00a0 And as their career grew it was like video games in the first era of Nintendo, the cultists were intrigued, their parents pooh-poohed.<\/p>\n

We wanted to know everything about our bands.\u00c2\u00a0 The family trees led us to other acts.\u00c2\u00a0 There was no TMZ, no PerezHilton, we only found out how famous these musicians truly were when Woodstock happened and it turned out EVERYBODY was into the music.<\/p>\n

But not everybody’s into the music anymore.<\/p>\n

Never forget that popular music was in a trough, an incredible downturn prior to MTV.\u00c2\u00a0 People were tired of the shenanigans, corporate rock, mindless disco, everything the music stood for in the sixties was gone.\u00c2\u00a0 Now it was only about making money, and the public moved on.<\/p>\n

But MTV had a vibrancy akin to the underground FM radio stations.\u00c2\u00a0 It was run by the lunatics, not the guards.\u00c2\u00a0 And although musical experimentation was limited, visual risks were taken daily, to the point where all movies and television were affected by the MTV style.<\/p>\n

But then we hit an artistic nadir.\u00c2\u00a0 Rather than innovation, we got slickness.\u00c2\u00a0 We had the Web as an alternative, and the golden era died.<\/p>\n

People still want to bring the golden era back.<\/p>\n

Let me tell you how this Web works.\u00c2\u00a0 Millions are surfing every day, and they’re linking to and e-mailing what they think is good.\u00c2\u00a0 And when I get the same story ten times, I take notice.\u00c2\u00a0 Be sure to read the following: <\/p>\n

\n
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I know it’s long, but this is the story of the music business too.\u00c2\u00a0 The goal was to bring the old world into the new, preserving all its elements.\u00c2\u00a0 This is impossible. And what we’ve got now is cultural chaos.<\/p>\n

So U2 can open the Grammys, play Letterman for a week and fly for quick gigs to multiple cities and not only are their first week sales about half of those for their 2004 album, in the second week there’s a dramatic drop.\u00c2\u00a0 Yes, according to hitsdailydouble.com,\u00c2\u00a0 this week U2’s "No Line On The Horizon" is number 3, having sold 124,958 copies, a drop of 74%!<\/p>\n

Nobody wants it.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not about quality, people are just interested in something different, they don’t want to spend the time with U2’s album.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re interested in other things, other bands, they believe they’ve got enough U2 music.<\/p>\n

Tour demand will be great.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s a different animal.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a celebration of the CAREER of U2.\u00c2\u00a0 Yet, despite the gross, not that many people will go, not when you compare the number of attendees with the number of people living in America.<\/p>\n

In other words, music is narrowcasting once again.\u00c2\u00a0 Rail about piracy, but that’s not the issue, that only has to do with monetization.\u00c2\u00a0 We had those gargantuan sales in the eighties and nineties because everyone was paying attention to the same outlet, MTV.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, radio aligned its playlists with what the television giant was airing.\u00c2\u00a0 But we no longer have one dictator.\u00c2\u00a0 We have a plethora of outlets and a plethora of bands.\u00c2\u00a0 If you’re about the sell, your words are falling on deaf ears, people just don’t care.\u00c2\u00a0 They’ve got to be infected by the music, which is extremely difficult to do.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to record great stuff and hope your audience spreads the word.<\/p>\n

But U2’s audience has stopped talking about the music.\u00c2\u00a0 U2’s audience is as calcified as the one for the dinosaur acts touring the sheds, from Chicago to Earth, Wind & Fire to even Styx and Def Leppard.\u00c2\u00a0 U2’s audience is fortysomethings wanting to relive their college days.\u00c2\u00a0 And if you’re not in your forties yourself, not only do you not care, you’re turned off by the ravings of these lumpy parents.<\/p>\n

As opposed to Bob Dylan.\u00c2\u00a0 People care about his new album because not only did they not have to wait for it forever, not only was there no extreme advance hype, but Dylan is known for taking chances.\u00c2\u00a0 Like his shows.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re cheap, but you never know what you’ll get.\u00c2\u00a0 Dylan’s still alive, too many bands are perceived as dead.<\/p>\n

Will Dylan’s album be a blockbuster?<\/p>\n

Probably not.<\/p>\n

But Dylan’s a musician, not a star.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s not trying to preserve his status so much as doing his job, making music, taking chances all the way.<\/p>\n

It’s your chances that endear us to you.<\/p>\n

Or else it’s Britney or Madonna or…\u00c2\u00a0 And we’re only going for the spectacle, it’s got nothing to do with music.\u00c2\u00a0 The Spice Girls proved no one cares about the spectacle ten years out.\u00c2\u00a0 The Allman Brothers are proving people still care about the music, how it lives and breathes and changes every night, at their stand at the Beacon right now.<\/p>\n

If you want to be a star, be my guest.\u00c2\u00a0 E-mail Perez, compliment him and give him an exclusive.<\/p>\n

If you want to be a musician, take chances.\u00c2\u00a0 Worry less about hits than aural adventures.\u00c2\u00a0 Create something new, and different, that’s intriguing, with rough edges that can hook listeners.<\/p>\n

That’s what you do with music, listen.<\/p>\n

We didn’t need pyrotechnics to draw people to see Cream.\u00c2\u00a0 The music was enough.\u00c2\u00a0 It still is.\u00c2\u00a0 If you’re good and you see yourself practicing an honest profession, one that feeds your family, but doesn’t buy you a private jet.\u00c2\u00a0 We need bankers. But when they ruin our economy and believe they’re entitled to millions, we’re turned off.\u00c2\u00a0 We need musicians.\u00c2\u00a0 But when they believe they’re entitled to live like princes, trading on decades-old laurels, we’re disgusted and look for something new.\u00c2\u00a0 Something vibrant.\u00c2\u00a0 Which may not even be music.\u00c2\u00a0 But we’re always susceptible to something aural.\u00c2\u00a0 If it tickles our ears, makes us feel all warm and fuzzy, removes us from this dreary life and makes us believe we live in one that’s better.<\/p>\n

That’s what Eric Clapton and the great British axemen did.\u00c2\u00a0 They took us away.\u00c2\u00a0 And it wasn’t about their looks, or the production, but the music.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s got to be that way in order for music to drive the culture once again.<\/p>\n

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Last night I was prevented from falling asleep by the book "Strange Brew: Eric Clapton & The British Blues Boom 1965-1970".\u00c2\u00a0 It had a day by day recounting of the travails of not only E.C., but John Mayall and Peter Green, with an interweaving of every other British blues musician of the era.\u00c2\u00a0 And I’m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"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":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-sR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1789","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1789"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1790,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1789\/revisions\/1790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}