Subject: Re: John Martyn<\/p>\n
Hi Bob…I was so surprised to see you reference John Martyn’s “Head and Heart” as you developed this topic, so had to write. He was a British “folk singer” and quite a trip…talented, fun and outspoken!\u00c2\u00a0We were so fortunate to work with and become friends with John during those embryonic beginnings of our band in England in 1970-71. His album, “Bless The Weather” was released at the same time as our 1st album “America” in the U.K., and of course that is the album that included “Head and Heart”. We would hear him sing it often when we did shows with him in those days, and when he sang his voice carried such heart and emotion it could bring tears to your eyes. Like you, this song stayed with us so much that we had to record it ourselves when we returned to the U.S. recorded our second album, “Homecoming”! He had a prolific career making lots of music, and a tragic life in the end but we remember him fondly. Thank you for reminding me of those days.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n best always, Dewey Bunnell<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n Subject: Re: John Martyn<\/p>\n Hi Bob,<\/p>\n After seeing the reference to John Martyn, I had to chime in. \u00c2\u00a0I worked at a small label in the early 90\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s called, Mesa\/Bluemoon. \u00c2\u00a0We released a John Martyn album in 1993 called, No Little Boy. \u00c2\u00a0It was a really great album. \u00c2\u00a0I got to spend some time with John, spoke with him a lot on the phone. \u00c2\u00a0He was funny, friendly, really delightful. \u00c2\u00a0I took him to an interview at KCRW back then. \u00c2\u00a0He did a gig at McCabe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s guitar shop in Santa Monica around that time. \u00c2\u00a0Tiny place, but it was packed to the brim. \u00c2\u00a0Not only was John a legendary songwriter, he was an amazing guitarist. \u00c2\u00a0One of the best of his time. \u00c2\u00a0Sorry we lost him. \u00c2\u00a0Thank you for bringing him to your readers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 attention again!<\/p>\n Bud Harner<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n Re: John Martyn<\/p>\n I was John Martyn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s agent in 1975\/6. Richard Griffiths<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n Subject: Re: John Martyn<\/p>\n john martyn, ‘solid air’, play what would have been the first side back in 73.\u00c2\u00a0 the lyrics are unintelligible, the guitar playing like a fred neil acid trip—-and it will blow your mind.\u00c2\u00a0 i wanted to see one of his last shows before he died.\u00c2\u00a0 played for 20 people, was in a wheelchair with both legs gone and so drunk he fell out of it.\u00c2\u00a0 i couldn’t bear to be part of this freak show—–but that’s rock and roll.<\/p>\n Chris Spector\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Midwest Record<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n Subject: Re: Leo Sayer Responds<\/p>\n Hey, Bob. I was at Leo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s original showcase for Warners above a fish and chip restaurant in Brighton, England. We got reacquainted when he supported Foreigner on an Australian cruise a few years ago. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s still got it with great songs, a strong voice, and all his own hair!<\/p>\n Best, Phil Carson<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n Subject: Re: Leo Sayer Responds<\/p>\n Love Leo. I did like 5 albums with him back in the day starting in the late 70’s.<\/p>\n A great singer\/writer and an even nicer guy!<\/p>\n Luke<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n Re: Wolfman Jack<\/p>\n My son, age 21, a self taught\u00c2\u00a0 musician, a bit of a savant (high functioning autism), absolutely loves Todd Rundgren. He knows everything about him (and other music icons of many genres). Spotify said he was the second most frequent listener of Todd Rundgren in the whole world in 2019.\u00c2\u00a0 Like Todd, he does it all himself.<\/p>\n I’ve been reading you for years. Thank you for staying real.<\/p>\n Marit Sathrum<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n Re: Todd & the Wolfman<\/p>\n Your podcast with Todd Rundgren was the best interview I have ever heard with him, and I highly recommend it to your readers who haven’t yet listened.<\/p>\n I was Wolfman Jack’s last Program Director in 1996 for the Liberty Broadcasting Network. We had him on fifty stations.\u00c2\u00a0 Early in our relationship, he asked me to join him in\u00c2\u00a0his limo to\u00c2\u00a0critique an aircheck from the previous week. I expressed my admiration for him and my hesitancy to review tape with a legend. He just laughed and said, “Come on, man….I wanna hear what ya have to say. Everybody can get better,\u00c2\u00a0including\u00c2\u00a0me!”\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve been expressing that simple thought to talent ever since, and while not everyone listens, those who do invariably achieve greater creativity.<\/p>\n “Look me in the eyes baby, now you cut that jive Whenever I listen to Todd’s song, I feel like I’m back in that limo with The Wolfman.<\/p>\n Keep up the excellent work, Bob,<\/p>\n Mark Lapidus<\/p>\n Fairfax, Virginia<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n Re: Wolfman Jack<\/p>\n Todd has been a good friend for years.<\/p>\n Unique in every way and wonderfully unpredictable.<\/p>\n There is a lesser-known album of his called “Healing”<\/p>\n It is profound from the first note.<\/p>\n Recommend head-phones of you want to be in the \u00c2\u00a0room with him.<\/p>\n Joe Walsh<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n From: Tony Hawk<\/p>\n Subject: Re: The Tony Hawk Documentary<\/p>\n Thanks Bob! I was hoping you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d see it because you know the mindset it takes to do this stuff at a high level. I was excited to hear your take and it did not disappoint. We are driven, determined and obsessed – sometimes to a fault – with an activity that was largely misunderstood for decades. And I look forward to returning to it as soon as possible.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Tony<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n From: PORKFOOT and The One Man Boyband<\/p>\n Subject: Re: The Tony Hawk Documentary<\/p>\n I once met Frank Hawk when I as 15 years old. We helped him set up for a skate contest and he took my friend and I to 7\/11 for slurpees. We hung out around him all week, and I only found his strictness to be complete dad vibe. You are right. Tony was so lucky to have a father that was so invested in his son’s own interests.<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n From: Tony Hawk<\/p>\n Subject: Re: The Tony Hawk Documentary<\/p>\n That sums up my dad; gruff but warm and giving.<\/p>\n Tony<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n From: Wendy Waldman<\/p>\n Subject: Re: Mailbag<\/p>\n In Warsaw right now and reminded in a million different ways that many Americans have absolutely no clue. My Polish friends are stepping up to the plate even when their stupid government lags behind. The PEOPLE of Poland are sheltering more than a million refugees themselves. Everyone is helping.<\/p>\n Cause these guys lived under communism- Mietek wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t allowed to record until after the wall fell- then he had hits out of the box- he remembers standing in line for cabbage with his grandmother and he speaks excellent Russian which was forced on him\u00e2\u20ac\u201d yeah they remember and they hate the Russians. They know how it can be and they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re rallying like they did in Solidarity. The head of one of the big centers downtown personally brought back 70,000 people in his car back and forth to the border.<\/p>\n Everyone is helping in whatever way they can.<\/p>\n As the brilliant and well known here composer bassist Marcin Poszpieszalski said, this is a historic moment.<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n Subject: Re: Dann Huff-This Week’s Podcast<\/p>\n Bob, the podcast with Dann Huff was one of the best yet. \u00c2\u00a0No wonder it went almost three hours \u00e2\u20ac\u201d could\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve gone for eight!<\/p>\n Such a brilliant guy, but so humble and (comfortably) introspective. Loved the bit about what he had learned from his first co-production stint \u00e2\u20ac\u201d for just one example.<\/p>\n Also really fun to hear how the conversation built momentum all the way til the end. Together you guys got to the very core of things.<\/p>\n When he asked you \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bob, how long do you plan on doing this?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d it was like a perfect ellipsis had been reached.<\/p>\n Hope he gets U2 as a result of your show with him. \u00c2\u00a0I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d love to hear the result.<\/p>\n Stev Lindstrom<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n Subject: Re: Book Recs\/Bonnie Raitt<\/p>\n I first heard Bonnie Raitt late one night while attending college. I had just discovered my girlfriend was cheating on me with the big drug dealer on campus.<\/p>\n Call it love, call it infatuation, or maybe it was just the sex but I was in love with that girl some kinda bad. She had long blonde curls and I had a huge fro. This was \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc69\/\u00e2\u20ac\u02dc70 and our relationship was very much taboo in Virginia.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Love Has No Pride\u00e2\u20ac\u009d made me cry a river. Even listening to it now is like a time trip. So I fell in love with Bonnie (naturally).<\/p>\n I had a friend who ran Whisper Concerts and was fortunate enough to catch whenever she played the DC\/Richmond\/ \u00c2\u00a0Norfolk region. Usually with Little Feat and\/or Jackson Browne.<\/p>\n I got to meet her backstage (it was my birthday) and someone tipped her off. She came over and said \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ok Tom, the jig is up\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and gave me a peck on the cheek. I almost peed my pants.<\/p>\n And much later when she was was signed to Capitol I mentioned the incident to her and she laughed. I think she was just being polite.<\/p>\n Bonnie is one of those REAL artists.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Genuine and true. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nice to grow old with her music.<\/p>\n Tom Cartwright<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n From: Arny Schorr<\/p>\n Subject: RE: The Grammy Ratings<\/p>\n I watched parts of it because my wife wanted to see it but I just couldn’t bring myself to endure the entire show. I was trying to explain to her why it was so horrendous and it came to me…it was over produced (too slick, too busy, too schmaltzy). When announcing the nominees, you couldn’t focus on the artist because there were so many graphics laid over the artist visual and the “in memoriam” was just too busy, too much camera movement, too many distractions from acknowledging those who passed.<\/p>\n And with all due respect, the fact Taylor Hawkins got 90 seconds and Charlie Watts got 3 seconds encapsulates a major problem with the Grammys and the RnR Hall of Fame. The Taylor Hawkins of this world rode in on the path laid down by Charlie Watts, Neal Peart, Keith Moon, Ed Cassidy, Ginger Baker and others of their ilk who’d been around for years and were also cultural icons.\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The Hall of Fame recognizes more current artists while shunning artists who had a massive cultural impact…Steppenwolf, Jethro Tull, Bad Company, King Crimson, New York Dolls, DEVO, Link Wray, Dick Dale all have had an impact musically and culturally but Journey, Def Lepard, ELO, Dells and (solo) Stevie Nicks are in?<\/p>\n Just the whiny ramblings of an old man who views the concept of musical ‘justice’ differently….<\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n Re: Spotify’s Share<\/p>\n I’m certain that Apple completely dropped the ball re: music by making iTunes a completely unusable piece of orphan software. As a Gen Xer, I tried all sorts of ways to leverage my huge ripped CD library, punctuated by Napster-era stolen music and infrequent MP3 purchases from Amazon and other sources), but it was a complete mess to manage. \u00c2\u00a0I am convinced that “synching” anything is the biggest software lie ever perpetrated.<\/p>\n Despite all its flaws, after my kids hoodwinked me into setting up a famils membership two years ago, Sporify’s been nothing short of transformational. \u00c2\u00a0Now that’s had time to stew, it’s suggesting stuff I’d long forgotten about … especially “Yacht Rock” era gems such as\u00c2\u00a0https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=GMlB0302S50\u00c2\u00a0.\u00c2\u00a0After your recent Todd Rundgren piece, I backfilled elements of “Something, Anything” I hadn’t heard in 35 years since college, and now they’re once again part of my daily listening rotation. Magic.<\/p>\n In addition, its usefullness as an incredible podcast organization tool is not to be underestimated (that’s how I listen to you, by the way, including the back catalog).<\/p>\n Sincerely,<\/p>\n Gunnar Miller<\/p>\n Frankfurt, Germany<\/p>\n From: Dan Millen<\/p>\n Re: Spotify’s Share<\/p>\n In the olden days you wanted to sell a revolutionary new widget you needed:<\/p>\n Cash – The widget itself cost $ – cash you need to pay upfront in order to even manufacture the widget and \/ or to hire the employees to make it and sell it. You pay the shipping, either to the distributor or to retail.<\/p>\n You hired a sales force to knock on doors to get your widget placed into stores even if you go through a distributor,\u00c2\u00a0because chances are the distributor isn’t going to go out of their way to push your widget to retail unless it’s a big smash hit.\u00c2\u00a0 And you’ve got to give the salespeople\u00c2\u00a0incentives, spiffs and bonuses. At the end of the day you’re lucky if you’re making 15% margin on your widgets.<\/p>\n With physical records the artist got screwed even more.<\/p>\n Cost the same for the label to make, but they’ll only pay you mechanicals on up to ten songs. Packaging deductions Holdback against returns Nowadays they want a piece of your merch and touring too.<\/p>\n You never recoup, it\u00c2\u00a0costs you more than it’s worth to audit, and all you see is publishing.<\/p>\n If you are selling apps as widgets on IPhones you are still making 15-20% more gross margin than if you were shipping the widgets to retailers.<\/p>\n If you are putting music up on Spotify without a label you have a chance of making much more than you’d make on a traditional deal – you just need to be heard.<\/p>\n The level of ignorance around this is stunning, but wilful ignorance and finger pointing is what passes for culture around the world.<\/p>\n Pandemics and wars apparently are not enough to quell the selfishness, entitlement mentality and finger pointing of humanity.<\/p>\n Perhaps next a zombie apocalypse will get humans back to basics?<\/p>\n \/end of rant.<\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Subject: Re: John Martyn Hi Bob…I was so surprised to see you reference John Martyn’s “Head and Heart” as you developed this topic, so had to write. He was a British “folk singer” and quite a trip…talented, fun and outspoken!\u00c2\u00a0We were so fortunate to work with and become friends with John during those embryonic beginnings […]<\/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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-music-business","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-4PF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18579","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=18579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18580,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18579\/revisions\/18580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nOne of the most extraordinary talents I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve ever worked with.
\nWhen he was clean and sober he was absolute charmer.
\nWhen he wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t he could be nightmare.
\nHe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s never had the acknowledgement his work deserves.<\/p>\n
\nYou know the Wolfman’s just about
\nThe number one cat alive”<\/p>\n
\nYou sold it to someone else at 50% off list (not 30% or less which is what apple takes) or you sold it to a distributor sometimes at an even sharper discount.<\/p>\n
\nYou make volume discounts and net terms to retailers (30 day payment saves you 1%)<\/p>\n
\nMaybe you get 10-13 points on your albums after deductions.<\/p>\n
\nBreakage deductions<\/p>\n
\nHoldback against marketing
\nIf you have a shitty attorney they cross collateralize your mechanicals with your record royalties, and maybe even publishing if they can get their mitts on it.<\/p>\n