{"id":410,"date":"2006-05-02T22:20:13","date_gmt":"2006-05-03T06:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/archives\/2006\/05\/02\/warning\/"},"modified":"2006-05-02T22:20:13","modified_gmt":"2006-05-03T06:20:13","slug":"warning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2006\/05\/02\/warning\/","title":{"rendered":"Warning!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m going to print more Coachella responses.\u00c2\u00a0 So that people don&#8217;t accuse me of being biased, I&#8217;m not going to edit them and am only going to exclude those that are completely redundant and incomprehensible.<\/p>\n<p>Now it took ME forever to slog through these.\u00c2\u00a0 So, I wasn&#8217;t going to reprint them, I was done.\u00c2\u00a0 But everybody&#8217;s so into it, and I don&#8217;t want to give the illusion I require the last word, so I&#8217;m putting the raw data out there so YOU can investigate and come to your own conclusions.\u00c2\u00a0 The same way the government releases transcripts so you won&#8217;t argue with its conclusions.<\/p>\n<p>I could sit here and try to explain myself further.\u00c2\u00a0 But shit, I&#8217;d say those with any power of analysis know where I&#8217;m coming from already.\u00c2\u00a0 And then there are others who so desperately need to believe in their lives, what they&#8217;re doing, that they can&#8217;t hear a contrary opinion.<\/p>\n<p>You could say all this action shows we&#8217;ve got a great group of believers, of music fans.\u00c2\u00a0 That might be true, but I don&#8217;t draw the same conclusion.\u00c2\u00a0 Rather, I believe we&#8217;ve got a snapshot of America as a whole.\u00c2\u00a0 Too many ill-informed, self-righteous people who believe just because they put in an effort something is good.\u00c2\u00a0 What I&#8217;m waiting for is responses from the artists.\u00c2\u00a0 Because without them, none of this matters.\u00c2\u00a0 But artists can&#8217;t relate to businesspeople.\u00c2\u00a0 Their goals are different.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s that one moment on stage.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s not about the next buck as much as testing the limits (assuming they can pay the rent!)\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s one thing you learn quickly in this business.\u00c2\u00a0 The industry, the executives, the businesspeople, are on a completely different team from the artists.\u00c2\u00a0 The artists not only bitch about the infrastructure, they make fun of so many of its players behind their backs.\u00c2\u00a0 Or, to speak in a language everybody can understand but the prissy girls who constantly e-mail me can&#8217;t handle&#8230;backstage nobody wants to fuck Lyor Cohen or Jimmy Iovine or even Clive Davis for that matter, despite their money and power.\u00c2\u00a0 But they&#8217;ll suck the dick of the drug-addicted bass player who&#8217;s gonna be working at the gas station soon.\u00c2\u00a0 Because there&#8217;s a power in the music.\u00c2\u00a0 Something that eclipses dollars.\u00c2\u00a0 Something sensual.\u00c2\u00a0 Something you can feel inside, that makes you tingle.<\/p>\n<p>You went to Coachella and you had a good time.\u00c2\u00a0 I don&#8217;t give a flying fuck.\u00c2\u00a0 I care just about as much as I do about those people praying in megachurches in Texas.\u00c2\u00a0 Don&#8217;t agree with me?\u00c2\u00a0 I don&#8217;t really care about that either.\u00c2\u00a0 I&#8217;m running on instinct.\u00c2\u00a0 Because that&#8217;s all we&#8217;ve got.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s when you start calculating, worrying about results, that you fuck up.<\/p>\n<p>I found it odd that everybody who was buzzing about Coachella in years past didn&#8217;t even mention the festival this year.\u00c2\u00a0 There were no phone calls about renting houses, no talk about the bands, NOTHING!<\/p>\n<p>I had dinner Saturday night with someone who used to be INVOLVED in Coachella.\u00c2\u00a0 Last year, even though he&#8217;d moved on to a new company, he insisted I go to the festival in the desert.\u00c2\u00a0 This year he didn&#8217;t even bring it up during the meal.<\/p>\n<p>Then, when my twentysomething engineer at KLSX asked me why I wasn&#8217;t at Coachella during a commercial break, I asked him why HE wasn&#8217;t there.\u00c2\u00a0 And believe me, he&#8217;s a player, he&#8217;s just as hip as any of you.\u00c2\u00a0 And he said the lineup SUCKED!\u00c2\u00a0 There was nobody there he wanted to SEE!<\/p>\n<p>Then, when I got home from my show, at 11 PM, I fired up Safari to get a take on the show.\u00c2\u00a0 And found almost no buzz.\u00c2\u00a0 I even went to the Velvet Rope, where I have NEVER EVER POSTED, not under an assumed name, NOTHING, despite what those people think, and I found essentially no discussion.\u00c2\u00a0 So I went to the show&#8217;s site.\u00c2\u00a0 And was linked to an AT&amp;T Webcast page to view Tool.\u00c2\u00a0 But AT&amp;T doesn&#8217;t work with Macs.\u00c2\u00a0 Because everybody is so paranoid that their music will be stolen, they need Windows Media DRM, which is unavailable in a Mac player.\u00c2\u00a0 And when I fired up my PC, I got nothing.<\/p>\n<p>And I started to wonder whether anybody other than the people who went really cared about Coachella.\u00c2\u00a0 And the fact that Goldenvoice would make a deal with a company that&#8217;s not Mac-savvy, even though Macs are the computers of artists&#8230;\u00c2\u00a0 I started to get a feeling, my instincts told me this was not the buzz event of the past.\u00c2\u00a0 Despite constant coverage in the L.A. &quot;Times&quot;.<\/p>\n<p>Then I wrote.<\/p>\n<p>We take all our experience into our communications.\u00c2\u00a0 I could quote my bona fides, but what&#8217;s the point, you&#8217;d just ridicule them.\u00c2\u00a0 And I concluded, with no input from anybody with an agenda, that something was DIFFERENT about Coachella this year.\u00c2\u00a0 And you know what, I STAND by that.\u00c2\u00a0 Because I&#8217;ve found the only time I get fucked up is when I IGNORE my instincts, and am influenced by others.<\/p>\n<p>But having said that, I&#8217;ll quote an old seer.\u00c2\u00a0 James Taylor.\u00c2\u00a0 Who you might think is a joke, but he&#8217;s still here.\u00c2\u00a0 And too many of the festival acts from the last decade no longer are.<\/p>\n<p><em>But just because I might be standing here<br \/>That don&#8217;t mean I won&#8217;t be wrong this time<br \/>You could follow me and lose your mind<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&quot;Lighthouse&quot;<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m going to print more Coachella responses.\u00c2\u00a0 So that people don&#8217;t accuse me of being biased, I&#8217;m not going to edit them and am only going to exclude those that are completely redundant and incomprehensible. Now it took ME forever to slog through these.\u00c2\u00a0 So, I wasn&#8217;t going to reprint them, I was done.\u00c2\u00a0 But [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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-410","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\/s96vPs-warning","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410","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=410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}