Last week Stern was on Letterman.<\/p>\n
I gave up watching Dave fifteen years ago, when he put on the suit and started catering to a theoretical demographic which I did not belong to.\u00c2\u00a0 Old people.\u00c2\u00a0 The irreverence was gone.\u00c2\u00a0 Paul Shaffer’s group went from being the World’s Most Dangerous Band to the CBS Orchestra.\u00c2\u00a0 Need I say more?<\/p>\n
Now don’t e-mail me to say it’s a question of intellectual property, that they couldn’t use the name, couldn’t they come up with something better?<\/p>\n
And the show’s always the same.\u00c2\u00a0 Nitwits coming on to sell.\u00c2\u00a0 Who are so pre-screened that it’s like watching a high school play as opposed to experiencing something fully alive.<\/p>\n
For that you have to go to radio.\u00c2\u00a0 That was its selling point.\u00c2\u00a0 The immediacy.\u00c2\u00a0 Before Clear Channel programmed all the stations from a central location and they hired metrosexuals like Ryan Seacrest as opposed to potheads.\u00c2\u00a0 Now the only life emanating from the dashboard is Howard himself, on Sirius.<\/p>\n
So I see a link to Howard’s Letterman appearance on the Huffington Post.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not only a whiner, I’m a reader!\u00c2\u00a0 But I’ll go wherever the links are best, I’ve got no loyalty to the HuffPo, the same way I switched from Perez Hilton to TMZ.<\/p>\n
But the clip was only two minutes long.\u00c2\u00a0 I enjoyed seeing Howard needle Paul, like that he chided Rob Burnett for directing a movie while he’s still producing the show, but I needed to see the entire thing.<\/p>\n
So I took to YouTube.<\/p>\n
And that’s where I found a clip of Howard on Letterman from the eighties.\u00c2\u00a0 And I won’t say he was bad, but he wasn’t great.<\/p>\n
He looked like a clown.\u00c2\u00a0 With a big bushy moustache, this was before he had the end of his nose snipped off.\u00c2\u00a0 And he was playing to the audience, but he wasn’t quite sure it was with him.\u00c2\u00a0 He was still the high school outcast as opposed to the ringleader.\u00c2\u00a0 Trying to worm his way in as opposed to wearing the crown.<\/p>\n
And the other night I heard a tape from Howard’s early days on Sirius.\u00c2\u00a0 And he wasn’t fantastic then either.<\/p>\n
Howard Stern is now so good that everyone listening to him testifies, the same way you spread the word about a great new act, not because you’re getting a check, but because the music makes you feel so good you can’t help but share it!<\/p>\n
All those schemes to incentivize people to become mini-moguls…\u00c2\u00a0 You know, sell my music for me and I’ll give you a cut? Those are wrongheaded.\u00c2\u00a0 Because people sell great without being compensated, and people can smell a rat from miles away.<\/p>\n
So all those years I was ignoring Howard Stern?<\/p>\n
I was right.<\/p>\n
He just wasn’t good enough.\u00c2\u00a0 Not good enough so he could close anybody, like Prince.<\/p>\n
But now he is.<\/p>\n
Thirty odd years later.<\/p>\n
Think about this.\u00c2\u00a0 We want our musical stars to be instant.\u00c2\u00a0 Isn’t that what "American Idol" is all about?\u00c2\u00a0 And if you don’t know this is the situation at the labels, you don’t know shit.\u00c2\u00a0 They want it fast and furious.\u00c2\u00a0 And they don’t care if it’s disposable. Because they’re not gonna stick around for ten years to find out.<\/p>\n
All those MTV-era stars?\u00c2\u00a0 Hits overnight, forgotten today.\u00c2\u00a0 Whereas the classic rock acts are not only touring, they’re filling thousands of seats.\u00c2\u00a0 Because to make it back then not only did you have to practice and be good, but you had to grind it out and get better, waiting for the moment when excellence meets opportunity.<\/p>\n
Howard Stern does his radio show four days a week, for four plus hours each morning.\u00c2\u00a0 Most of it evaporates.\u00c2\u00a0 Like that show you did in Cleveland.\u00c2\u00a0 You’re doing it for the audience that’s at the gig, not the scout who didn’t attend, not for those who might discover you two years down the road.\u00c2\u00a0 Can you play to your core audience, constantly honing your skill, getting better all the while?\u00c2\u00a0 To the point where new fans can be closed?<\/p>\n
No one’s great out of the box.\u00c2\u00a0 As for those instant hits?\u00c2\u00a0 Check the credits.\u00c2\u00a0 See who wrote and produced them, the star is just a face.<\/p>\n
It takes time to get good.<\/p>\n
But in this business, no one cares about you down the line.\u00c2\u00a0 Hit driven, its main feature is obsolescence.<\/p>\n
Hits are fine, but they’re overrated.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s about the main act.\u00c2\u00a0 Doing it every day.\u00c2\u00a0 Getting better and better.<\/p>\n
Today Howard interviewed Mario Lopez.\u00c2\u00a0 You know, the guy from "Saved By The Bell".\u00c2\u00a0 Who gives a shit?<\/p>\n
Certainly not me.<\/p>\n
But I found out Mario got sued three times for punching guys.\u00c2\u00a0 He stopped after the last time, when it cost him sixty grand to settle, even though he only made $3500 a week on that Saturday morning TV show.\u00c2\u00a0 Wow, I always wondered what it cost to settle a bar fight if you’re a celebrity. <\/p>\n
And then Howard brought up the fact that Mario screwed a woman at his bachelor party.\u00c2\u00a0 Huh?\u00c2\u00a0 Corbin Bernsen told Howard that he met a woman on the beach and had sex with her during his HONEYMOON!<\/p>\n
Who else is asking these questions?\u00c2\u00a0 Who else can get people to answer them?<\/p>\n
You can dress up a hottie and put her on the red carpet and have her ask what designer the nominee is wearing.\u00c2\u00a0 You can put Stuttering John on the same carpet to ask gross questions that go unanswered.\u00c2\u00a0 But asking questions that elicit interesting answers that are on the edge of privacy?\u00c2\u00a0 That’s a skill.<\/p>\n
Not the only one Howard Stern has.<\/p>\n
But now that he’s comfortable in his skin, he can not only ask them, but get them answered.<\/p>\n
I don’t care if you listen to Howard.\u00c2\u00a0 You’re missing out if you don’t, but the point is I’m writing this because Howard got better, and in the world of popular music acts hit a point early in their careers and stay there, or go backward.<\/p>\n
And you wonder why no one gives a shit.<\/p>\n
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Last week Stern was on Letterman. I gave up watching Dave fifteen years ago, when he put on the suit and started catering to a theoretical demographic which I did not belong to.\u00c2\u00a0 Old people.\u00c2\u00a0 The irreverence was gone.\u00c2\u00a0 Paul Shaffer’s group went from being the World’s Most Dangerous Band to the CBS Orchestra.\u00c2\u00a0 Need […]<\/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":[2,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business","category-the-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-Zj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3801","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=3801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3802,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3801\/revisions\/3802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}