I love the Sound Opinions podcast from music critics Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot and listen to it every week.  Last week they did a great show where they broke down their favorite live albums of all times.  As usual I learned a few things and discovered some music (in this case the Ani Difranco album).  But guys, how do you not even mention the live music that promoter extraordinaire Bill Graham gave us from his Fillmore East Club in the East Village?

We still have great albums coming out of the re-opened Fillmore West - check out Lucinda Williams Live @ The Fillmore double CD, and the 60s produced some killer stuff by Santana, Chuck Berry and the Jefferson Airplane on the west coast.  But to me the Golden Age of Live Recordings occurred in New York at the Fillmore East in the roughly year and a half after New Years Eve 69-70 when Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsies the  recorded their incredible live album Live At The Fillmore East.  Two months later Alvin Lee and Ten Years After made a seminal live album Live At The Filmore East, and in March Neil brought his new band Crazy Horse down to work the kinks out of Down by the River and Cortez the Killer, which was only released  recently as Live At The Fillmore East as part of Neil’s archive project.  Later in the year Clapton came by and recorded his amazing Derek and the Dominos Live album Live At The Fillmore.  In April of the following year the Dead recorded 5 shows there that turned into Ladies And Gentlemen…The Grateful Dead: Fillmore East, New York City, April 1971. Frank Zappa brought the Mothers and closed out the run in June 1971 with a solid live album shortly before the venue closed.  And of course what is in my opinion the greatest live rock and roll recording ever made - The Allman Brothers Band “At Fillmore East” (rereleased as The Fillmore Concerts) which was recorded in March 1971.

Other notables who made great live records at the Fillmore were Aretha, John Mayall, John and Yoko, Miles Davis and the Byrds.

Some of the greatest live guitar solos ever recorded happened on Second and Sixth in Manhattan in that 18 month period, and damn it Jim and Greg, you blew it by not including them in your show.

Derek and the Dominos - Why Does Love Got to be So Sad?

Band of Gypsies - Hear My Train

The Allman Brothers Band - Done Somebody Wrong

Ten Years After - Good Morning Little Schoolgirl

Posted: May 9th, 2009 under digital music, live music, portable devices.
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I taught a cooking class yesterday as part of unclasses.com.  The theme of the class was learn how to keep your kitchen/pantry stocked so that you can cook stuff without making extra trips to the store.  The class was a lot more work (mainly in preparation) than I thought it would be, but it was fun and I think I’ll do it again.

unclasses is a really cool concept, I hope it catches on.

Peggy Curry from the Growing Great organization let me use her fantastic designer kitchen and coached me through the syllabus as well as helped me during the class. She is a superstar green entrepreneur, I’m looking forward to working with her again.  If you live in LA plan to make it to her Living Healthy Festival on Sunday May 17.  Thanks Peggy!

Thanks to Stephen Henault for taking some great photos.

Here is what we made and ate:

1.    Hot garlicky olives
2.    lemon vinaigrette
3.    classic pesto
4.    Braising - Coq au Vin
5.    Roast Vegetables and Roast Chicken wraps
6.    Stock and simple red sauce
7.    Pressure cooker risotto
8.    Pasta - Perciatelli with Artichokes
9.    Lemon bars

My syllabi:

Cook More Often, Eat Better Part 1 - Free Legal Forms

Cook More Often Eat Better Part 2 - Free Legal Forms

Posted: April 5th, 2009 under food.
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This is my last week at Flux/MTVN. I have mixed emotions about leaving. When I left Yahoo! in July 2007 it was for a lot of reasons, but primarily I wanted to find a role that was closer to product and strategy side of the organization - the running of a business. Joining Flux gave me the opportunity to get back to what I love best and work on marketing, product, organizational leadership, and of course doing deals and managing a business development team. It was a wild ride, we cranked out a lot of groundbreaking products and worked with a ton of great partners. The acquisition of Flux by MTVN was a great outcome for our investors and for our employees, and it gave me the opportunity to help lead a team through the often difficult process of integrating with a large media organization. But its become apparent over the last few months that my career path will take me in another direction and that now is the time to go. Good luck and a big thank you to everyone at Flux and MTVN, keep making it happen.

When I was looking through my desk drawer a few weeks ago I noticed that the cowbell that we rang (loudly) when we closed a new partnership and got a new site live was tucked away there, and hadn’t been rung in a long while.  Somwhere between being a scrappy fast moving startup and becoming a division of a major media company you stop doing things like ringing cheap cowbells when you get up on the scoreboard.  I’m not sure whose bell it was originally, and I hope they don’t mind that I’m taking it with me to my next gig.

Posted: March 25th, 2009 under digital entertainment, flux, social networking, work.
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My friend from high school and fellow CA transplant Mike Byrne tagged me on Facebook with one of the viral notes that has been going around, and this one inspired me to post.  There was no way I could limit it to just 10 albums.  Enjoy!

1. KISS – Destroyer:  3rd grade in 1977, the first real rock and roll I got into

Detroit Rock City

2. The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band:  LOVED The Beatles in grade school

With a Little Help From My Friends

3. Led Zeppelin – Houses of the Holy:  Hearing The Ocean for the first time blew my mind

The Ocean

4. The Grateful Dead – Cornell ‘77:  Its not an album, but it sure is awesome.

New Minglewood Blues

5. Bob Marley & The Wailers – Rastaman Vibration:  My Dad somehow owned this great record - I’ll never forget being curious and digging it out in 5^th grade, dropping the needle and hearing the dub groove for the first time.

Positive Vibration

6. Dire Straits – Alchemy:  Straits!!Strictly speaking this video isn’t from Alchemy, but Knopfler played the same notes every night so it might as well have been.  Knopfler melts Clapton’s face for a few minutes starting at 4:30 and then at 8:00.

7. Pearl Jam – Yield: One of only 4 or 5 cassettes I had when I drove around Europe and Turkey for 3 months in ‘98, their most underrated album and still my favorite.

No Way

8. Thelonious Monk – Monk’s Music:  One perfect melody after another with Hawkins, Monk and ‘Trane trading jams. Purchased in Providence in a bargain bin, played 1000 times.

Epistrophy

9. Joni Mitchell – Blue: well, you know

California

10. Drive-By Truckers – Southern Rock Opera:  My favorite rock band reaching and making anthems work - a masterpiece

Ronnie and Neil

11. The Stooges – Fun House:  Missed this one growing up in the Aerosmith, J Geils, Boston dominated Northeast in the late 70s, discovered it later, now a lot of other things make sense

T.V. Eye

12. Ryan Adams and the Cardinals – Cold Roses:  No artist gets more airtime on my stereo the last few years - this is the record that drew me in.

Easy Plateau

13. Howlin’ Wolf – London Sessions:  Introduced me to the Blues when I found it at age 14 – without that where would I be?

Built For Comfort

14. The Allman Brothers Band – Live at the Fillmore: (hon. mention Derrick and the Dominoes at the Filmore, Band of Gypsies at the Filmore, Santana at the Filmore, and Bill Graham)

In Memory of Elizabeth Reed

15. Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks: My favorite album by my favorite artist

You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go

16. Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band – The Mountain: The greatest bluegrass album ever recorded, and nobody knows it.  The mandolin intro on The Graveyard Shift is precision awesome.

Harlan Man

17. Neil Young with Crazy Horse – Everybody Knows This is Nowhere:  Still thrills me to cue this one up, the soundtrack to a lot of wild times in high school on the tape deck of my ‘78 Pontiac Catalina.

Cowgirl in the Sand

17. Bruce Springsteen – Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.:  A lot of Springsteen albums could be on this list, but this one stands the test of time - the Boss was my guy in the musical wasteland of the early 80s.

Spirit in the Night

18. Miles Davis – Filles de Kilimanjaro: We all wish we were cool, I wish I was Miles.

Frelon Brun (Brown Hornet)

19. Kimmie Rhodes – Love Me Like a Song:  I heard Love and Happiness on public radio late at night in my car, searched out the album, then searched out Kimmie in Austin and became friends. Alec and JJs favorite lullaby, and for that I’ll always be greatful.

Love and Happiness For You

20. Tom Waits – The Heart of Saturday Night:  “Love needs a transfusion, let’s shoot it full of wine - fishin’ for a good time starts with throwin’ in your line.”

New Coat of Paint

21. Tom Petty - Damn the Torpedoes:  A nearly perfect rock and roll record that I never tire of listening to.

Even the Losers

22. Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble - Soul to Soul:  I saw SRV 6 times in concert before he died during my junior year in college.  I had tickets to his final show but I passed on the 3 hour drive from South Bend to Wisconsin because I had just seen him the month before.  The first time I saw him was at a Jazz festival in Massachusetts touring for this album the day I got my driver’s license.

Ain’t Gone ‘N’ Give Up On Love

23. Brian Eno – Music For Airports:  An original Sam-leg (burn by my brother-in-law Sam), this album and red wine has gotten me through that last hour of the JFK-SFO, ATX-SAN, SEA-LAX more times than I care to count.

2/1

Posted: February 24th, 2009 under mp3blog, social networking.
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The intellectual output coming from Peter Strauss’s cabana is truly impressive.  It must be the water.  In Jonathan’s latest post (with graphs!) he makes a compelling argument that introduces the “Piracy gap” that exists between a passive/defensive online content strategy and an online aggressive strategy.   The theory clearly illustrates what happens in the space between trying to lock your content down and embracing the future in which all content is ubiquitously indexed and freely available.  I would tweak the graph slightly (see below) to account for Ian Rogers’ attention scarcity theory so the gap becomes defined by both piracy and people moving to the next most marginally valuable piece of content on the infinite playlist that is the internet.  I.E. if you make your content a pain in the ass to use people will either steal it or consume something else.  Which makes Jonathan’s point even more salient (piracy is better than no eyeballs at all!).

Jonathan’s excellent post does however repeat a somewhat faulty point of view that is shared in countless articles, blog posts, and music industry forums about the state of the music industry and just how wrong the labels got it.  It is *not* true that investors value the long term survival of the company over short term profits.  They actually value the net present value of all future cash flows - classical Finance 101 is about trying to predict what those cash flows might be and correctly assign a present value to them in order to make investment and management decisions.  So as the CEO of a company (both public or private) you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to try to maximize that number within the constraints of myriad other variables.  I find that critics often make this mistake when breaking down the recent history of the music industry.  Put another way:

Sometimes the most profitable/ethical course for a business is one that sets it on a path to obsolescence.

One of the best 5 or 6 classes I took at Anderson was a Business Ethics course given by Bill Cockrum (a legendary finance/entrepreneurship professor at UCLA).  The framework he taught for ethical problem solving was essentially one in which we identified all of the stakeholders for a given issue and detailed the outcome from each point of view.  So a hypothetical problem involving gender equality in the workplace would be looked at from many points of view:  shareholders, male employees, female employees, residents of the local community, etc…  Interestingly, one common theme that came from our casework is that managers often incorrectly overvalue a company’s survival at the expense of creating shareholder value.  Most executives try not to work themselves out of a job.

To oversimplify, consider a case in which a CEO has to choose whether or not to create a new product that will require expensive-to-the point- of-bankruptcy new R&D and marketing.  All of his analysis tells him that the product’s probability of success is a binary coin flip:  50% of the time it will be incredibly profitable and increase earnings 5X, 50% of the time it will put the company out of business.  Given those odds the right answer from the shareholders perspective is to green light the product - they’d gladly flip a coin to risk $1 to make $5.  But from management’s point of view its not such an easy decision.  Heads I get some kudos and maybe a bonus, tails I lose my job in disgrace.  This ethical problem is pretty much why companies like to compensate their executives with stock and stock options, and also why big companies are typically not good at taking risks (its one thing to bankrupt a startup with a few dozen employees, quite another a big public company with 100o’s of employees).

Now lets take a look at what happened in the music industry.  Say you could wind back the clock to the Napster era in 1998 and provide the heads of the labels with perfect clarity about their probability weighted expected returns for 3 courses of action.

1. Lock It Down and Sue Your Customers:  If you follow this strategy, you slow down the death of your existing CD sales line of business to the greatest extent, but you alienate your customers and allow smaller nimbler players to take all of the future online profits, putting you out of business in 10 years.
2. Hybrid: You drag your heels somewhat, slowing down the rate of cannibalism of the CD sales business and developing alternate forms of business that allow you to fumble your way into an evolved but less profitable business model in 10 years time.
3. Open It Up and Survive:  You clearly embrace a customer-centric view of the future, and rapidly develop long-term winning strategies for content consumption that hasten the demise of your existing business but put you on a long term path to sustained profitability.

Now lets calculate the net present value (discount rate=10%) of your hypothetical expected cash flows.

Clearly, given this spectrum of expected returns, the best course of action is the one in which you drag your heels into planned obsolecence.

NOTE: I’M NOT SAYING THAT THIS IS WHAT DID HAPPEN OR WHAT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED!! IT’S AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION.  The labels did not act rationally in possession of omniscient foresight, just as the other media companies actions wrt Boxee etc. are not likely profit maximizing.

In most cases profits are maximized by reinvesting profits from cash cows into evolved business models that strike a balance.  The intended take-away is that in the case of killing highly profitable cash cows, its incorrect to argue that all decision making should be predicated on long term viability as a business.  Sometimes the most profitable (and correct) course kills you.

Posted: February 23rd, 2009 under digital entertainment, digital music.
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Hulu’s content partners are have asked Hulu to ask Boxee to remove Hulu from it’s product.  This makes no sense.

If you haven’t used Boxee, its an interface for media based on the XBox Media Center (XBMC) platform.  You can install it on your Mac and it’ll scan all your media folders and give you a browsable interface thats compatible with the little white Apple remote.  It also does a good job with streaming content sources (like Hulu, Comedy Centtral, etc) and it is social (you can make friends and see what they are watching, etc.)

But what really had people excited was that you could install Boxee on AppleTV and access all the same functionality on your living room on your sweet HDTV with your home stereo etc.  I’ve been following this space for a long time and it seemed like just maybe someone had finally cracked the living room media center code, which has seen hundreds of millions of dollars in flame outs.  Why?  An open architecture that would work on any living room based linux box with a good mix of streaming vs. owned media and a nice UI and some lite social networking.  No DRM, no prepackaged content deals with a locked partner set.  And a small company with a moderate burn rate that didn’t need to become a behemoth to be successful and provide a good return to its investors.  Success would mean that the streaming/caching models that are developing on the internet would work on your best media-watching screen.

And Boxee has been going about their business the right way.  They preserve the Hulu interface, preserve its commercials, don’t allow stream ripping, etc.  Its basically the same experience you can have right now on your PC.  Any Macgiver with some duct tape and some patch cables can already put Hulu on their TV.  Boxee just made it easier.

I don’t actually use Boxee a ton, but it’s great for what it is.  I NEVER watch live TV, I always time shift so I never watch commercials in my living room.  The only exception being on Hulu on Boxee on Apple TV.

So if you are a media company and you’ve already come to terms with putting your content on Hulu, why on earth would you not want entrepreneurs to figure out ways to get that content on more screens?  Of course this means that existing models and franchises (like Sat TV and cable TV esp.) are threatened, but that was the case before Boxee.  And as Mark Cuban has so elequently (and correctly) argued the internet is a long way from being able to replace satellite and cable for breadth of on demand HD content in the living room at a mass market level.  Companies like Boxee are exactly the kind of companies you want innovating for you, because if the innovation doesn’t happen there its all hacks and hackers and torrents.  Plus if they start picking up steam you can buy them and have them help you evolve and live to fight on.  Its like our experience with the music industry all over again.

The living room TV is a screen, just like my phone and my computer screen.  Captive media audiences are a thing of the last century, you can’t lock down the content and you can’t completely control distribution.   If you can’t figure out a way to create loyal followers with great user experiences, your content is useless.  Pissing off early adopters is a horrible way to go about evolving your business.

UPDATE:  check out Jonathan Strauss’s Boxee logo with a black eye.

Posted: February 18th, 2009 under digital entertainment, portable devices, social networking.
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Jason Isbell is a singer/songwriter from Muscle Shoals Alabama who is best known for his 3 album stint with the Drive-by Truckers (he left the band last year). I’ve seen him live before 3 or 4 times with the Truckers and I caught his phenomenal acoustic show last week (with Browan Lollar on guitar and vocals) at the Mint in Los Angeles presented by an Aquarium Drunkard.

Isbell’s music is both easy and difficult to categorize. Easy: He’s an alt-country singer songwriter from Alabama. Hard: He’s a little bit of Townes Van Zandt (imagery), Bruce Springsteen (symbolism), the Band esp Danko (brawling musicianship), Willie Nelson, Tom Petty (hooks), Dylan (songwriting). With the release of Sirens of the Ditch he’s got a shows worth of great songs to perform, going back to his early Truckers’ songs (Outfit, Goddamn Lonely Love) and before (TVA). He’s also not afraid to do a cover - Dylans The Man in Me was a real highlight last night. He made mention that there “probably aren’t too many cover bands in Los Angeles”, like he was the only one in on the joke.

Another highlight of the evening was the young Marine from Jason’s hometown of Greenhill, Alabama who had driven up from the proving grounds at 29 Palms to see the show. Juxtaposed against Isbell’s poignant intro to Dress Blues where he talked about the empty space a dead soldier could leave in a small southern (anywhere?) town that inspired the song, the young soldier’s presence was moving.

It was a great performance that left me really looking forward to his 2nd solo album which is due out in early ‘09. He mentioned last night that the album is in the can and seemed really happy with it.

If by some Google’s chance in hell the guy taping last night’s show stumbles across this post - hit me up I’d love a copy.  Also MickO leave a comment when you get your film developed and up on Flickr.

Jason Isbell - Dress Blues

Drive-by Truckers - Outfit

Drive-by Truckers - Goddamn Lonely Love

Sirens of the Ditch on Amazon

Posted: November 16th, 2008 under digital music, live music, moblog, mp3blog.
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Two of the most remarkable and memorable nights of my life have taken place in the last month.  These weren’t transcendent church-like experiences like the one Hendrik Hertzberg so elegantly blogged, but they were charged by a rare and too-often-missing connectedness with my neighbors.  They took place in sports bars, of all places.

Three weeks ago I went to Sonny Mclain’s to watch game 5 of the ALCS - the game started at a weird 5 PM and the venue was impromptu so I was solo.  I am a rabid Red Sox fan though I almost always watch them at home, but at about 3 in the afternoon I decided I wanted to watch the game with other people.  In a packed and die-hard bar we saw a depressing end to-the-season season funeral transformed during the course of 7 outs into an embrace-a-stranger-in-a-hug euphoria.  During a massive economic tremor.  An uncommonly emotional night about family and place came from out of nowhere.  But that was nothing compared to the election today.

My friends who read this blog know I’ve been sweating this election for a long time.  And so have they, its   probably why we’re friends. Voting involved a line and some intense neighborly banter.  Everyone in the office voted.  Jen (who phone banked over the weekend) and I met our great friends Mark and Tania at Busby’s - which is totally nondescript sports bar in Santa Monica that is always packed - to witness the election tonight.  And people were cheering like crazy and let’s just say it got really dusty in there during the acceptance speech.  (Best speech I have EVER heard).  There is so much patriotism in the air tonight (media!!) and it feels so empowering because its in abrupt contrast with a false and ultimately harmful impostor.  And he’s black?!?  On election night Obama feels like a gift to the nation.

And I won $1500 bucks on Obama futures!!!  Yeah!!

Ian’s post

Jonathan’s post

Mark’s post

Lucas’s post

Mark W’s post

Posted: November 4th, 2008 under politics, sports, travel.
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Ryan Adams and the Cardinals released their new record Cardinology this week.  Ryan Adams has been quite prolific throughout his career, but he hadn’t officially released anything yet in 2008.  Was Cardinology worth the wait?

In a word - YES.  This is one hell of a band ladies and gentlemen, and this album feels like they have finally made their collective creative peace and gone for it - esp. guitarist/vocalist Neil Casal and Ryan.  I’m a sucker for a great harmony, and these two really know how to sing together and are obviously sonically simpatico.  They are also excellent guitarists in an understated, riffy sort of way, and the guitar work is about as solid as I’ve heard from anybody in a long time.  The tradecraft learned while constantly touring really shows - listening to some of the tracks I get the feeling every pick stroke, every pickup mic setting is there for a reason.  And the pedal steel played by John Graboff is as good as any you’ll hear anywhere.

I will admit that on first run through I was somewhat disappointed by the record because the songs themselves are less hooky and don’t all hang together as well as the previous RA albums I play so often.  The catchiest songs are front loaded, and from there they really slow down and become less accessible till you get to a really raw piano only ballad “Stop” for the last track.   But listening to the album a few times (esp on headphones) I at some point “got it”.  Its a lot less about hooks than it is about making a really great band get everything they can out of every track.  Thanks - applause.

That being said the single “Fix It” is right there in the pantheon of great Ryan Adams songs.  The lyrics are genius.  I automatically assumed at first that he was referring to “fixing” a broken relationship (life’s greatest cliche?), but what he’s really referring to is fixing the game of breaking up.  Its dark and funny and personal all at the same time.  And the song itself rocks - I found myself playing it on repeat more than once this week.

I know its not a game

but it feels like losing

when someone you love throws you away.

I’d fix it

if I could

and I’d always win (and you would always lose)

I’d always win in the end

Cardinology - Fix It

Cardinology - Evergreen

Cardinology on Amazon

Review at Aquarium Drunkard

Update:  Someone from the Cardinals followed me on Twitter and just tweeted this sweet live acoustic show:

Posted: October 31st, 2008 under mp3blog.
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Great post/

The most insidious ignorance meme going forward is the liberal-bias-in-media propaganda. Lately (the last week or so) I am seeing a lot of objective data being presented by the MSM about the proportion of “positive” coverage Obama has gotten vs. the amount of “negative” coverage McCain’s campaign has gotten, and then using that data to draw the conclusion that the media is biased.

The problem with that line of logic is that OBAMA/BIDEN ARE OBJECTIVELY THE BETTER CAMPAIGNERS AND THEIR CAMPAIGN HAS BEEN OPERATED MUCH MORE SKILLFULLY THAN MCCAIN/PALIN’s HAS.

By any impartial objective measurement this can be shown to be true - politics aside. Obama has made fewer mistakes, been more consistently on message, been more skillful with his communication strategy, been the better debater, given the better speeches, and shown better judgment. When Obama has made a mistake (clinging to guns and religion, having a batshit crazy minister friend) the press has been all over him. But his mistakes in aggregate don’t compare with not knowing the difference between a Sunni and Shiite, prattling on and on about the surge and whether its successful or not, choosing a woefully unqualified ideologue as a running mate, saying he’s going to suspend his campaign and cancel the debate and then not doing it, saying the economy fundamentally sound, scowling like a crazy old coot during the debate, etc. Obama has kicked McCain’s ass at politics for 5 months and an objective non-biased press should indicate that fact, just like the polls do now and just like the ballots will next week. There is a difference between fairness and justice, and an objective press doesn’t have a duty to make sure the positive/negative ratio is 1 for both candidates. When one guy is better, its OK for that fact to come out.

But to come back to Mark’s post, perpetuating this liberal bias myth is the ultimate Orwellian capitalization of a populace’s ignorance. As long as the Republican spin meisters can find a home deep oin our public consciousness for this line of bull, they’ll have a reliable patch of ignorance from which to launch their other misleading screeds. It doesn’t matter what FACTS YOU READ OR HEAR, the only unbiased truth comes from Hannity and Rush and the other troglodytes.

Originally posted as a comment by steveray on Mark, my words using Disqus.

Posted: October 30th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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