Bruce? Couldn’t You Make Bail? *Updated w/Link to New Single

This is the cover of the new Bruce Springsteen album, due out in early October. 

What is he trying to say?

Is he very sad? 

Did we wake him?  

Actually, excerpt for the styled hair, it looks like a mug shot.  Like he’s channeling James Brown:

 or Glen Campbell:

And don’t his eyes look a little…unfocused? Like one is looking over here and the other is looking over there?

This is supposed to be a rockin’ fun album with a lot of the E Street Band.  The cover does not convey that.

*Update:  Here’s a link to his new single, “Radio Nowhere.”  It’s…ok.  Melodically a little monotonous.  He’s mining the same territory as Tom Petty’s “The Last DJ,” complaining about the complete loss of any personality in radio. 

I was tryin’ to find my way home
But all I heard was a drone
Bouncing off a satellite
Crushin’ the last lone American night
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?

I was spinnin’ ’round a dead dial
Just another lost number in a file

Except Tom Petty wrote about this problem five years ago. 

It should go without saying that the worm has turned a little.  After all, Bruce, you released the single on the Internet.  Where there is a ton of great music, infinitely more than even during the great years of classic rock radio.   I can make my own 1,300-song playlist now, include as much old and new music as my mp3 player will hold, put it on random play, and it’s like the best, most eclectic underground radio station ever. 

Bruce could probably afford an even bigger mp3 device. He is The Boss, after all.

I try to do as little old-guy complaining about changes in the world as I can.  I’ve been rebuked for doing it by a good friend on this site!  Even Tony Soprano said, “‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.”  So while I think Bruce is going to get attention for this Major Statement, it’s pretty empty if you ask me.

The reality is, the radio industry’s changes reflect the Paradise Lost of our popular culture.   In the glory days after the Beatles’ arrival on Ed Sullivan until the mid-70s, the culture united around an inclusive idea of pop music, when radio stations would play the Rolling Stones followed by Aretha Franklin followed by Frank Sinatra followed by “The Ballad of the Green Berets” or a song by a French nun.   

By the time Bruce Springsteen came onto the scene, those days were about gone, which is why he got so little airplay until he was able to figure out how to use TV in the mid-80s.  I was a huge fan back then, and I felt like a disciple, telling people about this great rock hero many of them had never heard of.  

I don’t see anyone bringing those days back.  Pop’s biggest star right now is Justin Timberlake.  I cannot hum a single one of his tunes.  And one of the reasons why is I never listen to top-40 radio anymore.  I am now in charge of what I want to hear.  About half of my personal Top 10 are technically dead, but they live on in the music I carry around with me.  And, Bruce, old as we are, I think that’s a good thing.

Suicide Virus Attacks Music Industry!

Again.

Why oh why, music plutocrats from Pluto, does it make sense to choke off a source that lets your consumers find out about new music? 

The practical result of this ruling…

In a decision that could drive the nail in the coffin to Internet radio providers, the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board has endorsed a proposal by SoundExchange to enact royalty rates for webcasts and streaming music sites that will stay in effect from 2006 until 2010.

SoundExchange, the royalty collecting division of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), will seek to retroactively charge webcasters for streaming content delivered throughout 2006 to users, a decision that could send the sites packing for good.

The new rates will require webcasters to pay for each song streamed to each user, and will increase yearly…

will be to transform Internet streaming radio sites into one of two things:  A former Internet streaming radio site; or a site that plays sure-fire hits with a predetermined, guaranteed audience.  Kind of like the crappy radio music you can dial into today.

Does the music industry have the slightest clue about how listeners use their product?  Have they ever surveyed listeners who bought a CD or a download from a new performer, or from a non-mainstream genre, to find out how the listener became aware of the existence of this music they’ve now added to their life?   It’s not radio, because radio pretty much plays the music people already know.  And, sorry all you marketing geniuses, but it isn’t the advertising, the PR, the promotions, the commercial tie-ins. Or at least not those things alone; and they don’t apply to the fringe styles of music that many Internet streaming sites specialize in.

Mike at Techdirt channels how the recording industry thinks:

They still view the world (especially the internet) as a broadcast medium. Therefore, they want at small number of “professional” content producers who create the content for everyone else. Then they can just sign a few ridiculously large licenses with those large players, and “the people” get to consume it. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the internet as a communications medium — a medium where people express themselves back and forth to each other, rather than a place we go sit back and “consume.”  

Bad for the culture, bad business choice by the music industry.

(via LA Observed and Instapundit.)

All Grim Fascination, All the Time

In my days as a commuter, particularly the last few years, I usually spent most of my trips up and down the Harbor Freeway on dreadful phone calls that were about as much fun as passing a kidney stone.  But there were days when I didn’t need to do that, and I could listen to the radio, or to one of the six CDs loaded in the player in my trunk. 

If anyone wanted to find out how I was really feeling, deep down inside, they could have asked me, “What did you listen to?”  If I said music, that was a sign I was in good spirits.  If I said “talk radio,” that probably meant I was in the throes of depression.

I was reminded of those grim days by LA Observed’s report that “Jamie, Jack and Stench,” a morning show on Star 98.7, is cancelled.  I occasionally listened to Jamie White, “Stench” (worst nickname ever), and former child actor Danny Bonaduce when that was the lineup.  With various co-hosts, Jamie White has been on Star 98’s morning drive shift for nine years, according to the LA Times. 

If I was listening to a political talk host like Laura Ingraham, Al Franken or Hugh Hewitt, that was an indication of a mild, manageable melancholia. Howard Stern?  Creeping despair and angst.  But if I was listening to Jamie White and co. or Tom Leykis, that was a sign I’d gone clinical and should be on suicide watch.  

Why did they bother me so much?  If you don’t know the programs, they’re both phone-in talk shows in which the hosts and their callers tell us as much as they can get away with about their sex lives.  Not just intercourse, but the whole process of meeting people of the opposite sex, dating, sleeping together, becoming dissatisfied with the sex, cheating on them and rationalizing it, finding out they’re cheating on you and not putting up with their rationalizations, breaking up with them, posting embarassing information about them along with nude pictures on the Internet, getting a restraining order… you know, modern romance. 

Of all the words used on these shows, the most common was probably “bitch.” The sex they talked about is anything but ecstatic. It’s more of an exchange of value, in which both sides are looking for the edge. The highest praise is bestowed upon men who cadge sex out of a woman without spending any money courting her; and on women who manage to do the reverse–find a man with a lot of money and make him burn through a lot of it before yielding to his sexual demands. 

In the world of Leykis and White, the opposite sex is always the adversary, never to be trusted.  Falling in love is equated to being a complete idiot, especially if one falls in love with a partner who is of the wrong economic status, or who is less attractive than one’s personal attributes are worth on the open market. But that’s another part of the contest.  Boys, you’re supposed to make attractive women think you’ve got more money than you do.  Girls, if nature didn’t give you the physical features required to catch a wealthy man, then it’s off to the plastic surgeon for a makeover.

Both shows thought they were funny.  There was a lot of guffawing when a caller would talk about a succesful con job they’d pulled off, or a nasty breakup that left the ex-partner completely humiliated.  But all I could pick up from these programs was a lot of anger.  Here we are, the most fortunate people on the planet, living in the free-est and wealthiest country, many of us in the beautiful Mediterranean climate of Southern California, and all anyone thinks about is how dissatisfied they are with their sexual status.  These people don’t even sound horny to me.  They only want the kind of sex that validates their self-image–with people that make others envious.

The callers to these shows are all 20- and 30-somethings, and at the time I was a mid- to late-40-something, happily married and with lots of fond memories of my wilder years. I can’t recall ever evaluating a woman the way they do on such shows, nor can I recall being evaluated that way.  Anyone I connected with romantically or sexually, it had to do with something undefinable, not a checklist.  The whole point was to feel good. It was private. And while break-ups are inevitable when you’re young, they were rarely something to celebrate. 

The popularity of shows like Leykis’ and Jamie White’s suggested that, somehow, without me noticing, the world had turned a lot harsher, and happiness became more elusive for the generations coming up after mine.  I listened to those shows when I was trapped in a different misery of my own, so I guess I was looking for something that reflected it — even though it made me more depressed and worried for the children in my life.

Star-98 says White was dropped because “management decided that the show is not a long-term fit with the music-intensive, artist-driven direction that began last April….”  Those words sound reassuring to me.  I’m not familiar with too many of the ”artists” the station’s website talks about, but the change might mean they found out their listeners wanted to be inspired by something special in the mornings, rather than be dragged down into the muck of dysfunction, resentment and envy that Leykis and White celebrate. 

“May I Speak to Mr. Dylan, Please?”*

I wanted to excerpt a piece from this week’s New Yorker about longtime radical radio host Bob Fass, but the article isn’t online.  However, the magazine’s website has something even better to offer:  Two long, downloadable clips from the show, including a rambling 93-minute, 1966 interview with Bob Dylan.  (*Update, 3/11/07.  Looks like the links were taken down. Oh well.) (*Corrected update, 3/12/07:  They’ve just been moved to here.  I’ve fixed the first link. Thanks, Steve.) 

On the Dylan Timeline, 1966 is the year he released ”Blonde on Blonde” and toured with members of The Band.  I use the term “interview” very loosely; it’ s more like a visit, although they do take calls from listeners.  I haven’t had time to listen to all the Dylan clip, but early on, he talks about meeting Liberace, expresses amazement that Lightnin’ Hopkins actually recorded a song called “I Wish I Was a Baby,” and feigns anger when a caller won’t recognize him as an “ethnic folksinger.”  

For those who hadn’t heard of him, Bob Fass went to work for NYC’s Pacifica station WBAI in the early 1960s, getting assigned the overnight beat.  He turned it into “Radio Unnamable,” which became a nightly free-form platform for alternative politics, underground music, police brutality reports, marijuana and on-air psychotherapy.  He’s been on and off the air ever since, rising and falling based on the station’s mercurial politics.  At 73, he now appears Thursday nights. According to Fisher, the other nights, Fass cruises around the city in a beat-up Chrysler, “imagining the show he might be doing.”

Over the years, Fass’ regular guests included Abbie Hoffman, who came up with the term “Yippie” while listening to a 1967 New Year’s Eve show in which Fass wondered aloud how to radicalize dope-smoking hippies, and then called to show to share his brainstorm with Fass’ listeners.  Years later, Hoffman broadcast his vasectomy live on Fass’ show. 

If you want to read the whole thing, find the New Yorker with a cartoon of a piano lesson on the cover.  The issue is dated December 4, 2006.

Dropping Standards

My radio hero, Saul Levine, has disappointed me with his decision to switch Los Angeles’ KKGO-AM from the “standards” format to country.  Apparently, the median age of people who listen to Sinatra & co. is too old.

“I began to get dozens if not hundreds of telephone calls from country fans saying, ‘You’re the last one who can save it,’ ” says Saul Levine, president and general manager of Mt. Wilson FM Broadcasters, which owns XSUR and KKGO. “This kept going on and I thought, ‘These were really nice people.’ “

These also were more desirable people — at least to advertisers — than KKGO was attracting with the “standards” format the station had for the last two years.

“I love the standards format,” Levine says. “But it was difficult to sell. The median age of listeners is 65-plus, and when an ad agency hears that, there’s no buy there. The outer fringes of what they’re looking for is 54.”

The median age of the 650,000 people who made up the steady KZLA audience, however, per Arbitron research, was in the early 40s.

“As much as I love the standards format, I’m not in position to continue after two years of losing money,” Levine says. “And here are people begging me to put a format on that isn’t currently in the market.”

I’m a little surprised at the demographics driving Levine’s problem with advertisers.  Isn’t “the great American songbook” going through a bit of a revival?  Meanwhile — contemporary country music seems completely disposable, but that’s just me.  I’ll always have time for Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Ray Price, but acts like Shania Twain, Brooks and Dunn, Tim McGraw and the rest would put me right to sleep if they weren’t so annoying.

Oh well.  I still love Saul for K-Mozart and for saving KLON, the non-commercial jazz station at Cal State Long Beach.  If a bunch of oafs in cowboy hats can spruce up his cash flow to keep those other stations going strong — yee-hah!

Welcome, Paris Hilton Fans!

Every time Paris Hilton or one of her friends does something to schlock the conscience of a nation, there is one little-noticed side-effect: “From the Desert to the Sea” gets a lot more hits.

I usually find out about Paris’ latest missteps by observing the spike in my visitors; whereupon my first thought is: My heavens, what’s Paris done now? (Today, it’s a DUI.)

Most of my new readers (welcome everyone!) go to this post from last February, in which I express surprise that Elliot Mintz, a LA radio personality from the “underground” days and then prominent publicist, confidante and acolyte to John Lennon and Yoko Ono would ply his trade on behalf of Ms. Hilton, her sister, and several other blonds-in-distress like Christie Brinkley and Janet Jones Gretzky.

I did a little bit of digging and was able to find some facts to verify my recollections, plus a pricelessly funny, oh-so-earnest display ad from the time Mintz was a late-night host on KABC-AM. I had fun writing it; it brought me back to the days when all I wanted was to live as cool a life as the zonked-out DJs with left-wing dreams and mystical fantasies who introduced me to the Grateful Dead, Carlos Santana, David Bowie and Steely Dan.

My post got picked up by LA Observed’s Kevin Roderick, who gave it a very kind boost, which led a lot of other people to it, which floated the post up the Google search list, which then meant I got more hits the next time Paris did something that Mintz had to go out and explain to her worried public.

Eventually, my homework was transformed by someone into a Wikipedia entry on Mintz, which includes two links back to my blog. If you Google “Elliot Mintz,” you’ll find my handiwork at #2, just behind the Internet Movie Data Base entry. (At IMDB, you’ll find that Mintz was featured in Something’s Happening, a 1968 documentary about the youth movement. His co-stars were Muhammed Ali and General Herschey Bar.)

It’s quite a compliment to the public relations industry that so many people are interested not just in the celebrity, but in the publicist behind the celebrity. But, like me and quite a few others who have served clients as a PR professional, the job is not something we started out planning to do; self-doubt comes with the territory.

Even Mintz. His quaalude-calm demeanor and icy self-control seemed to wobble a bit when he had to explain why Paris was laughing at her boyfriend’s obscene taunting of Lindsay Lohan. I mean, this is the same guy who was hanging out with John Lennon when he was talking revolution! Now he’s babysitting a childish socialite who flouts the rules of decent bourgeois society not because she wants to overthrow the system, but simply because she’s got enough money to buy her way out of any trouble she gets into.

Paris Hilton is the black hole of scandal journalism; what would destroy almost every other celebrity’s reputation only enhances hers. I think I see, just behind Mintz’ reptile eyes, an unspoken wish that his Paris Hilton gig wasn’t so easy…that everyone in the press and Hilton fandom who enables her arrogant sense of entitlement would, for once…just ignore her.

Or maybe he wishes he were young and foolish again, and that he didn’t have to be a designated driver to someone who knows so little about what used to matter to people like Elliot Mintz.

“Say What??” Or: A Trip Down Memory Lane With Saturday’s LA Times

If you’re too young to have listened to Jim Healy’s nightly sports news/comedy act during evening rush hour, too bad, and today’s column by former LA Times Sports Editor Bill Dwyre (“Journalist Bill” on Healy’s show) won’t affect you like it affected me — laughing helplessly at the recollection of how Healy mashed up real sports scoops with sound clips of various sports figures at their worst. You can listen here to some of Healy’s bits — out of context, who knows if they’ll seem funny unless you heard them when they were fresh.

Dwyre got me to raise my eyebrows when I read this part:

Healy had news flooding in from everywhere. He had a million leakers, and it became a badge of honor to be one of his snoops. Sometimes, it almost seemed as if he were clairvoyant.

Once, a decision was made about a major firing in The Times’ sports department, and Journalist Bill, who was going to do this Friday, told his wife about it Wednesday night. He told no one else. Thursday afternoon, Healy had it on the radio. Mrs. Journalist Bill has not been trusted since.

Okay….

Speaking of the LA Times, today’s front page carries a long feature by former pop music editor Robert Hilburn. Now, if you were too young to miss his long journalistic career, no worries. The story is the encapsulation of almost everything he ever wrote — Hilburn distilled, for better and for worse. Only Bruce Springsteen is missing among the cast of characters he profiles.

Despite all the caveats about Hilburn’s clunkiness and repetitiveness, I recommend the piece. He tells many stories I found (to use a Hilburn word) “affecting.” Like this one about John Lennon:

I was a fan of the Beatles. But I also wanted to know more about the man behind the 1970 album “Plastic Ono Band,” a flat-out masterpiece. It was Lennon’s first solo album and a chilling attempt to move beyond the emotional scars of being abandoned by both parents.

In the opening lines, Lennon sang about loss so painful that his voice seemed tied to a nerve deep inside: “Mother, you had me / But I never had you/ I wanted you / But you didn’t want me.”

When I finally met Lennon in 1973, he was temporarily estranged from his wife, Yoko Ono, and living in Los Angeles. Depressed about the separation and the pressure of trying to live up to his fans’ high creative expectations of him, he spent much of his time partying with friends or drinking and taking drugs on his own; sometimes drinking a bottle of vodka or half a bottle or more of brandy a day. Years later, he told me that when he had an important business meeting the next day, he’d spend the evening with me because I didn’t drink.

“I think I was suicidal on some kind of subconscious level,” he said of what he called his “lost weekend.”

“The goal was to obliterate the mind. I didn’t want to see or feel anything.”

One evening at his hotel, Lennon turned on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and ordered up cornflakes and cream. I didn’t think much of it until the same thing happened another night.

“What’s up with the cornflakes?” I finally asked.

He smiled.

As a child in London during World War II, he explained, he could never get milk, so this was special. The lesson of the evening was that there are some childhood losses you can deal with through room service. For
Lennon, the harder ones could be exorcised only through his songs.

And then this story, with a similar subtext, about Michael Jackson:

I got the rare chance to observe this new pop phenom at close range, before allegations of child molestation and the resulting legal actions began to rule his life. In 1984, during the “Victory” tour, I worked with him on his autobiography for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday.

She wanted a formal autobiography; he wanted a picture book. One evening, I began to see how difficult a book of any sort would be. Jackson had handed me a folder with dozens of family photos. I picked out a shot of an elderly man, who turned out to be his grandfather.

“I love him very much,” Jackson said.

“OK, shall we put that in the book?”

He looked shocked. “Oh, no,” he said, “that’s too personal.”

After nearly an hour of this, he decided it was enough work for the evening. Popcorn was ordered from his personal chef, then he pulled a video from one of the huge trunks he took on tour. Slipping it into the VCR, he settled on a couch and said, “Let’s watch cartoons.” Jackson was 26.

For all his brilliant showbiz instincts, Jackson was ill-equipped to deal with many of life’s most routine matters, as if the years of childhood stardom had left him socially stunted and more than a little frightened. His world was so guarded that admission to his room was strictly by invitation only.

Part of this, most certainly, was security, but Jackson also was not good at dealing with people, especially adults. Adults could be cruel, he said.

I understand Hilburn’s working on a book. I’m sure I’ll read it, gnashing my teeth all the way through, to find nuggets like these.

Speaking of LA Radio…

It’s more than a little ironic that, according to the Spring 2006 Arbitron radio ratings released yesterday, talk-radio KFI is tied for first place with Univision’s KLVE, which programs music in Spanish. KFI’s afternoon and evening programming is now almost completely dedicated to tirades about illegal immigration, especially “The John and Ken Show,” four drive-time hours of rabble-rousing. It’s the first time an AM station has been in the top slot for nearly 20 years, so I have to assume that screaming about “closing the border” and the alleged perfidy of MEChA is a hit formula. Bummer.

———

Also, Bud Furillo, R.I.P. The obituaries emphasized his role as sports editor of the Herald-Examiner, nurturing gifted columnists like Allan Malamud and Melvin Durslag, but I got to know of him through his long stint as the lead sports guy on KABC. Can you imagine, a news-talker like KABC devoted three or four hours every afternoon, during drive time no less, to sports? The best show I heard was “The Steam Room” with Bud “The Steamer” Furillo and his partner, usually Tommy Hawkins, but also Geoff Wicher or Rick Talley, which was on the air from about 1979-87.

(Furillo is pictured at right, looking kind of nervous.)

KABC had the Dodgers during that period, so my drives home during baseball season would be all about listening to Bud and Tommy set up that evening’s Dodger game.

Bud’s radio persona was that of an ever-optimistic fan. The Dodgers would win a few games, look like they might be turning a mediocre season around, and there would be Bud, imploring LA: “Are you on the bus? Are you on the bus??” He got me onto that bus many a summer.

Saul Levine and the Long Tail

If you haven’t lived in LA for decades, the name Saul Levine might not mean anything to you, but if someone was going to compile a list of “100 People Who Make LA Great,” Saul Levine would be near the top.

For years, anyone who has owned a “stick” (e.g. a license to operate a radio station) in a major market like Southern California sold it to the highest bidder, who would program it for the biggest audience, to reap the most profits. That’s why Los Angeles radio is so alienating; why most of the AM dial is dominated by redundant right-wing talk, goofy sports or Spanish-speaking programming, and why most of the FM dial plays hip-hop, classic rock or Spanish-speaking programming. Even public radio has succumbed to compulsion to maximize dollar value per program. It’s why KPCC’s once-great music programming was replaced by way too many NPR chat shows, and why KUSC’s daytime classical programming has become so dumbed-down, playing only the movements of symphonies and concertos that are easy to work, eat or drive by.

Except Saul Levine, owner of K-Mozart, a commercial FM classical station, and KKGO-AM, which plays pop standards. According to a lovely profile in today’s LA Times Business section, Levine could sell the FM station alone to a conglomerate for $100 million, which is about $99,999,975 more than he paid for it. He’s grandfathered into having an 18,000-watt signal, when the current FCC standard is just 680 watts. But Levine just won’t sell. He wants to keep his stations independent — and playing the music he wants to play.

Brahms symphonies…Nat King Cole singing “Sweet Lorraine”…that’s what Levine provides Southern Californians, really, out of his pocket. He undoubtedly makes money doing it, but nowhere near as much as he could serving a bigger audience. Levine is a throwback to a time when people chose a vocation out of love, not necessarily to maximize profit. But he also might be a man ahead of his time:

(He) does not want his children, both of whom are involved in the operation of the family company, Mt. Wilson Broadcasting Inc., to sell when he is gone and live off the proceeds.

“You are supposed to work,” Levine said. “I would not want them to sit around on an island in the Mediterranean.”

Levine’s son, who is KMZT’s marketing director, declined to comment on the station’s future.

“He is still the owner,” Michael Levine said quietly.

In the meantime, Saul Levine forges ahead. He loves to talk about podcasting — the station offers listeners downloadable interviews and lectures about music on its website.

“Otherwise, you are in the horse-and-buggy era,” Levine said.

Now, I haven’t yet read The Long Tail, but I wonder if Saul Levine has. Chris Anderson’s book, which evolved from this 2004 article in Wired (which he edits) believes that the “hit” mentality that has driven the media for a century is giving way to those media providers who will cater to non-mainstream tastes — a process enabled by the zillion-channel universe of the Internet. From the Wired piece:

To get a sense of our true taste, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity, look at Rhapsody, a subscription-based streaming music service (owned by RealNetworks) that currently offers more than 735,000 tracks.

Chart Rhapsody’s monthly statistics and you get a “power law” demand curve that looks much like any record store’s, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero – either they don’t carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.

The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it’s just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.

This is the Long Tail.

You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There’s the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to ’80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which don’t have the distribution clout to get into Tower at all.

(skip)

What’s really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you’ve got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see “Anatomy of the Long Tail“). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity.

Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: “The biggest money is in the smallest sales.”

Radio is a classic “scarcity” medium of the 20th century. Only so much spectrum in any given geographic area. Except now, the spectrum isn’t as much of a limiting factor. Each satellite radio service offers more than 100 channels. Internet audio, including podcasts, grabs more and more ears. And services like Rhapsody and Yahoo! Music allow you to program your own audio streams, either on your computer or in your mp3 device, without having to buy the tracks (unlike the somewhat overpraised iTunes, which demands that you buy a track before you can listen to it.)

Now, Saul Levine is a radio programmer from the get-go. His first act after hoisting his antenna atop a flagpole in 1958 was to spin Franz Lehar’s operetta “The Land of Smiles.” And this is what he and his staff still do. They decide what plays, and you can listen. The element of choice that Rhapsody or Amazon give us, Levine’s stations don’t give you — although his interest in creating podcasts is a big clue that he gets it, that choice is the future.

I guess what you could say about Levine and the Long Tail is that he kept the flames burning until the media could catch up with his craving to serve minority tastes. The kinds of music he programs have been in danger of disappearing from the culture, but in LA, classical music rides one of the region’s strongest signals. Some kid might stumble on K-Mozart tonight and hear Beethoven for the first time. And tomorrow morning, try to find more Beethoven in his computer.

Mighty, Mighty Stress

I wonder if talk-radio fans get embarassed when they hear who sponsors their favorite programs: Peddlers of marginal cures for obesity, baldness and tax problems. I assume there is some basis for their claims, however slight, but it is delightfully surreal to listen to hard-heads like Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt tout herbal cures that promise to build your brain or restore your eyesight without glasses. The most disquieting ad I’ve heard is for a product that will make your children taller. Please, parents are competitive enough already!

This digression leads into a startling fact I learned this morning via Boing-Boing: Severe stress can cause children to stop growing. The most famous case of psychogenic dwarfism is JM Barrie, author of “Peter Pan.” The site’s Cory Doctorow wants to draw your attention to a couple of “mind-opening” lectures by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford researcher and expert on the physiology of stress, now available via podcast. The links are here on Boing-Boing and on BrainConnection.com, which includes a short summary of Sapolsky’s lectures:

Sapolsky related a story about a boy from a very psychologically-abusive setting who was hospitalized in a New York hospital with zero growth hormone in his bloodstream. Over the next two months he developed a close relationship with the nurse at the hospital–undoubtedly the first normal relationship he had ever had–and soon, amazingly enough, the growth hormone levels zoomed back to normal. The nurse then went on vacation and the levels dropped again, rising once more immediately after her return.

“Think about it,” Sapolsky said, commenting upon the story. “The rate at which this child was depositing calcium in his bones could be explained entirely by how safe and loved he was feeling in the world.” He added that while this standard textbook version of stressed dwarfism is rare, there is nevertheless “major league psychopathology” throughout society, retarding human growth.

“Major stress is the police and social workers breaking down the door of the apartment, finding the kids who have been locked in the closet for two months, the food slipped under the door. Total nightmare situations that turn out often in history. . . kids in war zones, kids in areas of civil strife.”

The problem with human beings, Saplosky says, is that unlike animals, we expose ourselves to sustained periods of stress — sometimes through undergoing a prolonged, horrific experience like war or abuse, sometimes because we anticipate, or remember stressful experiences…and sometimes because we choose stress as a lifestyle.

Stress is fundamental to our economy. We make heroes out of people whose work habits are unhealthy, and tell young employees to model themselves after stress addicts. Without asking the question directly, employers try to assess potential employees’ ability to handle stress. Job applicants understand this game, too. They know it won’t be helpful to their employment prospects if show too much curiosity about the company’s “work-life balance policies.” Better to say, “I’m used to working long hours,” or even “I don’t have a life.”

The only job interviews where prospects raise “work-life balance” occur when the prospect knows they have many competitors for their services. But even in cases where bidding is heavy, the potential employee’s perceived market value is usually associated more with their ability to carry a huge workload than their talents. “He’s a horse,” a boss will say admiringly. “She’s got such energy.”

The glorification of stress may never change, but the employer eventually pays a price, Sapolsky research suggests. Stressed-out workers slowly become stupider.

Until recently…it was commonly believed that if you lost brain cells they were lost forever. “You can make new neurons in your brain after all,” Sapolsky said, “and especially in the Hippocampus in response to things like learning and environmental stimulation. But stress will block the formation of new neurons.”

While the hippocampus does have the capacity to regenerate, it’s far from certain that this will occur, Sapolsky asserted. People who have endured horrible stress, such as Vietnam combat veterans and victims of prolonged childhood sexual abuse, are often fated to suffer permanent damage to the hippocampus, resulting in memory loss.

Depression, “what Sapolsky termed the common cold of psychopathology,” also attacked the hippocampus with stress hormones. Massive long-term depression, he said, was almost certain to cause permanent damage in the form of memory loss.

Companies that want to “invest in their employees” need to keep this in mind. Your best employees’ long hours might make them more profitable, but the brainpower-per-square-inch will decline unless you take some of the pressure off.

Three More Seasons

If you were born in the New York area in 1944, and started listening to Dodger games on the radio at age six, then moved with the team to Los Angeles eight years later, where you’ve remained til now, then you would have a perfect Vin Scully attendance record. And when Scully retires at the end of the 2008 season, you would be 64 years old.

The eternally smooth Vin Scully. He’s been fumbling his words a little more than he used to, like you’d expect a man in his late 70s would do. But his delivery is still clean and clear and his voice as young as a cool mountain stream.

Scully is an advertisement for the fountain-of-youth benefits of baseball. The game is for little boys (and girls). When the players’ competitive juices get fired up, when they exhibit the uninhibited joy of a victorious moment, Scully loves to say “you have to have a lot of little boy in you to play this game.”

Baseball still brings out the little boy in him — and that brings out the little boy in me, and probably you, too, if you’re his fan.

I assume I’ll still be around in 2009 after Scully’s current contract expires, to begin the post-Vin Scully period of my Dodger fandom. I assume I’ll still follow the team. Old habits die hard. Vin already takes about a third of the games off, so I’m used to hearing other, lesser voices describe the action.

We can let go of you, Vin. We knew we’d have to some day. But this is one of those moments when the cliche encomium “immortal” seems more like a cruel deception. The immortals are merely mortal like the rest of us. The idea of Vin Scully taking his well-earned retirement makes us yearn that it could be otherwise.

(Update 2/22/06:  Sorry if this post was unreadable earlier. PCs have an aspect-ratio problem now.  My laptop has a wide screen, but many PCs don’t.  On the narrower screen, the image of Scully & Doggett covered up part of the text.)

Salute to Richard Thompson

The upcoming issue of Newsweek spotlights singer/songwriter/blazing guitarist Richard Thompson, promoting his five-disk box set, The Life and Music of Richard Thompson. Writer Malcolm Jones makes a bold claim for Thompson:

Nothing here—and the song list runs to about 80 songs—sounds dated. There is no disco period to live down, no glam rock to wince at, no electronica era to omit. Instead, the material has a consistency of intent and execution that puts it totally at odds with the faddish history of most other pop music. One has to look to the likes of Dylan to find someone who has written this many good songs over the same length of time.

Someone comparable to Bob Dylan you’d think might be as famous as Bob Dylan. But if you’re unfamiliar with Thompson, that’s not surprising. I don’t think his music was ever played on commercial radio — possibly excepting when he was a member of Fairport Convention in the late 60s, when pretty much anything got played on FM rock stations.  Otherwise, you would have had to read about him.

I have to admit, what originally got me interested in Thompson was gossip.  For several years in the 70s, Thompson was teamed with his wife, Linda, a gorgeous singer. Their final album together, Shoot Out the Lights, coincided with their breakup. 

The press glommed onto the juicy discomfort of their plight.  Here they were, already split, touring in support of an album of songs documenting the betrayals, paranoia and resentment they were both experiencing at that moment.  Sure, I’ll check that out. The songs were amazing, with titles like “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed,” “Don’t Renege on Our Love,” and the utterly beautiful, painful, “Walking on a Wire.”

An even greater revelation was Thompson’s guitar-work. His electric guitar solos are as piercing as Neil Young’s — except with much more technique (sorry, Neil.) His acoustic playing is not only virtuoso-level, it demonstrates a thorough knowledge of English and American folk styles.  His melodies are rooted in the modal sounds of folk music, even when the backing sound is conventional rock (with perhaps a button accordion mixed in.)  

His lyrics alternate from sorrowful to scornful, and this is probably why his gifts haven’t gotten the recognition they deserve. Thompson has many uptempo songs, but not upbeat. His outlook is a bit on the bleak side, though never lacking compassion. 

One of my favorite Thompson songs is “Al Bowlly’s in Heaven,” in which, over a dirge-like beat, a disabled beggar recalls his glory days during World War Two.

We were heroes them, and the girls were all pretty
And a uniform was a lucky charm
Bought you the key to the city
We used to dance the whole night through
While Al Bowlly sang, ‘The Very Thought of You’
Al Bowlly’s in Heaven, and I’m in limbo now

I gave my youth to King and country
But what’s my country done for me
But sentenced me to misery
I traded my helmet and my parachute
For a pair of crutches and a de-mob suit
Al Bowlly’s in Heaven, and I’m in limbo now

Hard Times, hard hard times
Hostels and missions and dosser’s soup lines
Can’t close me eyes on a bench or a bed
For the sound of some battle raging in my head

Old friends, You lose so many
You get run around all over town
The wear and the tear of it just drag you down
St. Mungo’s with its dirty old sheets
Beats standing all day down on Scarborough Street
Al Bowlly’s in Heaven, and I’m in limbo now

Can’t stay here, got to foot slog
Once in a blue moon, you might find a job
Sleep in the rain, sleep in the snow
When the beds are all taken, you’ve got nowehere to go

I can see me now, back there on the dance-floor
With a blond on me arm, red head to spare
spit on me shoes and shine in me hair
And there’s Al Bowlly, up on the stand
That was a voice, and that was a band
Al Bowlly’s in Heaven, and I’m in limbo now

There are few more eloquent anti-war songs. In fact, I don’t think it’s an anti-war song so much as a song about war’s tragedy. I love the specificity of the character’s memories: Al Bowlly was a beloved British pop singer of the times; a de-mob suit was the outfit British soldiers were given when they re-entered civilian life.

Thompson’s written dozens of songs as good as “Al Bowlly’s in Heaven,” and has recorded guitar solos every bit as thrilling as Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page or U2’s the Edge.  He’s been successful enough to keep making records and touring into his mid-50s. So this isn’t a sad story about a neglected artist. It’s a sad story about the millions of people whose lives would be enriched by hearing Richard Thompson’s music, but who haven’t heard of him.

If you’re into iTunes, Yahoo! Music or Rhapsody, here are some additional songs (some with Linda Thompson) you might want to download if you can:

1952 Vincent Black Lightening; Beeswing; When the Spell is Broken; Walking on a Wire; Shoot Out the Lights; Tear Stained Letter; How Will I Ever Be Simple Again; Turning of the Tide; Waltzing’s for Dreamers; I Misunderstood; I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight; For Shame of Doing Wrong; Down Where the Drunkards Roll; Dimming of the Day; She Twists the Knife Again…. and I’d better stop there.

Harder to find is a 2003 live disk called, 1000 Years of Popular Music. Somehow Thompson takes us from “Sumer is Icumen in,” through “Shenandoah,” to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Old Rocking Chair’s Got Me,” then songs by the Who, the Beatles, ABBA, Prince and Britney Spears’ “Oops, I Did it Again.” Yep. In his hands, it’s a pretty good song.

The Payola Factor, Continued

When I wrote the post below, I swear, I was unaware of this story:

Hundreds of radio stations are under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission in the payola scandal rocking the music industry, ABC has learned.

“The FCC staff is working with voluminous evidence right now. It’s a complicated and wide-ranging investigation.” FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein told ABC News in an exclusive interview.

“This is potentially the most widespread and flagrant violation of FCC rules in the history of American broadcasting,” Adelstein said. “We’ve never seen evidence of such a systematic betrayal of the responsibility of broadcasters.”

Payola — or pay-for-play — is a practice seemingly as old as the recording industry itself. In the past the money went to rogue disc jockeys in exchange for increasing the airplay for individual songs and driving those songs to the top of the charts. In the modern version, the money goes to the bottom line of the radio stations and the conglomerates that own them, according to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

“We have people in suits coming in with documents rather than cash payments under the table to a DJ,” Spitzer told ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross.

And:

Spitzer said record company documents obtained in the investigation of Sony BMG and Warner, both of which have settled with the attorney general, revealed payments for songs that became major hits, including Jennifer Lopez’s “I’m Real” and John Mayer’s “Daughters.”

Other artists whose songs are named in the Spitzer documents include Jessica Simpson, Celine Dion, Maroon 5, Good Charlotte, Franz Ferdinand, Switchfoot, Michelle Branch, and R.E.M. The record companies allegedly paid radio stations to increase airplay of those artists’ songs.

Some of the above-mentioned artists are critics’ favorites, some most definitely not. Given the recent revelations about pay-for-punditry, however, one might reasonably wonder why critics champion certain recording artists who (at least to my ears) don’t merit the hype.

I’d assumed up til now that it’s only because I’m an old guy that I couldn’t feel the Franz Ferdinand magic.

Travels of Elliot Mintz

I was reading a thoroughly disgusting story on the Times’ website about a celebrity sleaze broker who has gotten his mitts on Paris Hilton’s diary — which he plans to sell at auction for $20 million — when I came across a surprising name.

Elliot Mintz is Paris Hilton’s publicist.

When I moved to LA in 1968, there was a great FM “underground” rock station out of Pasadena, KPPC. It was the radio home of the Firesign Theatre and Dr. Demento, who had their shows on Sunday nights. The rest of the week you’d hear DJ’s who, to my 12-year-old ears, sounded like the coolest guys you could ever aspire to be. Elliot Mintz was one of them. I think he was the one who played a bootlegged copy of the Beatles’ “Get Back” album that ultimately was never released. I taped it on my parents’ reel-to-reel and played it for friends, thinking I was now a rock-and-roll insider.

Later, after KPPC met the same fate of all good radio stations and vanished without warning, Mintz went on to appear in other LA media, most notably as a late-night talk jock on KABC who was supposedly in touch with the young, “happening” crowd. The graphic below should fill your lungs with a blast of the silly yet solemn air that suffused the early 1970s.

Later, I became aware that Mintz was the publicist for John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Whenever something strange happened in the world of John and Yoko — who were always stirring up trouble during the 70s — it was Mintz’s sober, judicious voice you’d hear commenting on it. Mintz also spent hours, hundreds of hours, in taped conversation with John, which he edited into an FM radio series after his murder, “The Lost Lennon Tapes.”

Digging around on the Internet, it appears Mintz was or is working for Bob Dylan, too. But that representation didn’t draw as much attention as his work with his first clients, Lennon-Ono, or his most recent ones. Since I normally skip about 98.5 percent of all Paris Hilton stories, I had missed the frequent Mintz quotes.

As he was with John and Yoko, Mintz is a family retainer. When sister Nicky Hilton got married in Las Vegas in 2004, someone must have compared it to Brittany Spears’ 55-hour marriage, which started with a Vegas wedding. It was Mintz who set E! Online straight, “This is a real, serious, meaningful, loving relationship–not spur of the moment. [The wedding] was treated with great sobriety and seriousness.” Mintz has the perfect voice to say things like this. Back in the 70s, rock-and-roll was serious business, just like global night-clubbing is now.

You’re objecting to what, exactly?

Hugh Hewitt is a pied piper for the right, an aggressive drummer for the Bush Administration, and an arbiter of all that is politically correct from the Republican point of view.  As such, he’s very careful to avoid the stereotypes that liberals associate with the right.  He’s polite. He listens. He is careful never to appear intolerant. He works hard to demonstrate that his viewpoints are “the voice of reason”– not the resentment and paranoia displayed by some other right-wing pundits. He’s good at what he does.

So I was surprised at this item, “The Worst Top 300 List Ever,” about K-Earth’s New Year’s weekend countdown:

K-Earth 101 FM in Los Angeles is a huge station in the market, and plays oldies. Over the long weekend, for a good portion of my wife’s and my long drive north and then back south, we could get the signal and listened, amazed, at the K-Earth “Top 300 Songs of All Time.”

Here are the top 25, in reverse order, in this station’s universe, which is obviously working ahrd (sic) to grab a slice of the urban audience:

With that lead-in, you’d expect to see a list featuring a bunch of rap songs glorifying cop-killers and pimps.  But no, Hewitt took offense to (from the top 25):

25 Tierra Together
24 Wonder, Stevie My Cherie Amour
23 King, Carole It’s Too Late
22 Green, Al I’m Still In Love With You
21 Isley Brothers That Lady
20 Lennon, John Imagine
19 Wells, Mary My Guy
18 Spinners I’ll Be Around
17 Heatwave Always And Forever
16 Morrison, Van Brown Eyed Girl
15 Earth, Wind & Fire September
14 Rolling Stones (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
13 Gaye, Marvin What’s Going On
12 Young-Holt Unlimited Soulful Strut
11 Righteous Brothers Unchained Melody
10 Green, Al Let’s Stay Together
9 Beatles Twist And Shout
8 Gaye, Marvin Let’s Get It On
7 Sledge, Percy When A Man Loves A Woman
6 Santana Black Magic Woman
5 Orbison, Roy Oh Pretty Woman
4 Gaye, Marvin Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)
3 Franklin, Aretha Respect
2 Temptations My Girl
1 Santana Evil Ways

Hugh, I thought you were my age. Maybe during the 60s and early 70s you were too busy sniffing out liberal bias on the all-news stations, but let me tell you: The great thing about AM radio in those days was it was completely integrated!  You could hear soul, then rock, then something a little bit Latin, then pop.  A hit was a hit.  The audience demographic was “young” but otherwise not divided by race or ethnicity. By any standard, these 25 songs are all hits.

Sure, not everyone in LA thinks “Evil Ways” is the greatest song ever. (I’m partial to “Tumbling Dice” myself.)  But presumably K-Earth knows its audience, and nowadays, the LA audience is heavily Latino. Is that what Hugh has a problem with? He’s not clear. But the implication is kind of iffy.