Michael Sigman

A Bold New Way To Say No to Cliche

2013-06-18T19:33:34-04:00

Sixty-seven years ago, George Orwell observed that "[Political] prose consists more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen house."

Nowadays, you can't watch cable news for 10 minutes without hearing a talking head hold forth with a "having said that," a "game changer" a "double down" or a "walk back." If everything is "robust," then nothing is. Most excruciating, of course, is "at the end of the day," which should never apply to anything but the actual end of an actual day.

When these cringe-inducing mal mots insidiously lodge themselves in our minds, is there anything can we do to ensure that we don't unconsciously secrete them the way the mouth secretes saliva?

Turns out the nascent but burgeoning field of cliché-prevention offers hope via a variation of The Costanza Doctrine (aka "DTO" or "Do The Opposite"): "Say the opposite."

Why not lower the bar, cast a narrower net, see the small picture, be impactless or take it to the same level? Don't plant a seed but do rush to judgment. To put it positively, always give 10 percent. To cast things in a negative dark, if at last you do succeed, don't try again.

Is a daunting project making you feel you're out under your head? Ratchet it down, step it down, ramp it down. Keep it up and down. When things go north, remember that you lose some, you lose some. You can always throw the baby in with the bathwater, throw out the towel or, if need be, throw the towel over the bus.

What if you're finding it easier done than said to "embrace your uniqueness"? Dare to be the same. When it comes to owning it, doing your own thing, being your own man and being your own boss, don't. Think inside the box!

Recognize that you've got none of the time in the world. So count those chickens before they hatch, look that gift horse in the mouth, judge that book by its cover. Be unreal, get unreal and keep it unreal.

Know that however random the universe appears, some things are always true. Always say die, always say never, always look back. Happily, love means always having to say you're sorry.

In the small scheme of things, God does not work in mysterious ways. Since nothing happens for a reason, you might as well live against the moment, or, as The Buddha didn't say, be out of the moment. Let go of letting go, because if you wait long enough, nothing changes. This too shall not pass. In the same words, it isn't what it isn't.

Ignore the most important insight John Lennon never had: "Life is not what happens while you're busy making other plans." On the same hand, be mindful of what sages from Ram Dass to Ray LaMontagne haven't advised: "Be there then."

Go for the grain and against the gold. Bite the hand that feeds you but not the bullet. Don't break a leg but do get a leg down on the competition. In terms of jobs, jobs, jobs, give up your day job but don't do whatever it takes to get the job done.

In long, do worry, don't be happy.

Least but not last: When the chips are up, do not take your time, slow down or "be the ball." Rather, be afraid of your own shadow.

If all else succeeds, be late for your own funeral.

North Pond Hermit Is No Robin Hood

2013-06-13T11:04:16-04:00

The recent arrest of "North Pond Hermit" Chris Knight -- a forest-dwelling loner and serial thief who is said to have committed 1000 burglaries over the past 27 years in Maine -- turned him into something of a pop-culture hero. The story got huge press and hit a worldwide cultural chord, yielding songful tributes ("How he kept alive in winter is a mystery to me"), bail money and marriage proposals. A deli sandwich called "The Hermit" was created in Knight's name, an honor usually reserved for comics rather than the comical.

The New York Times reported that Knight "had lived in someone else's woods, undetected under camouflage-colored tarps and completely off the grid; he paid no taxes, had no address and never used a cellphone. He told the police that he had not spoken during his decades of self-exile except for one day in the 1990s when he uttered a greeting to a passing hiker." Perhaps the hiker failed to return the greeting...

Knight was admired for all that. An old high school friend said that because Knight took only what he needed, "He's got this kind of Robin Hood aura about him."

This celebration of a Robinesque forest-dweller brought to mind the 1989 film Fellow Traveller, now airing on HBO. Written by Michael Eaton, directed by Philip Saville and starring Ron Silver, it's the story of a fictional blacklisted writer in the 1950s who flees an FBI subpoena by going to London to write episodes of the TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood, a real-world show that ran for five seasons on both sides of the pond during the heyday of the red scare (1955-59). The film and the TV series showcased the bravery of brigands -- a blacklisted writer and the character Robin Hood -- risking it all, fighting the system for the greater good.

The connection between The Adventures of Robin Hood and the Hollywood blacklist was profound. The series was created and produced by Hannah Weinstein, an American journalist and left-wing activist (in FBI/HUAC lingo, a "concealed communist") who moved to London in 1952 to avoid the perils of McCarthyism. She surrounded herself with more than a dozen stellar blacklisted writers, including Waldo Salt and Ian McLellan Hunter. Ring Lardner Jr. wrote the first episode as "Lawrence McClellan."

Lardner, a member of the Hollywood Ten, went to jail because he refused to give up the names of other Hollywood heavyweights with ties to communism, however tenuous. Careers of writers and actors could be ruined even if they'd attended a single Communist Party meeting years before.

Lardner and company turned out to be quite proficient at writing for kids. But while we youngsters were enjoying Robin's arboreal trials and triumphs, those of our parents who were also watching may have detected a certain subversiveness in the plots. This was, after all, the '50s, when the notion of a champion of the poor redistributing wealth might have been viewed as part of, well, a communist conspiracy. Lardner later said that Robin Hood provided him "with plenty of opportunities to comment on issues and institutions in Eisenhower-era America."

The theme song for The Adventures of Robin Hood featured a refrain that, nearly 60 years later, remains lodged in the synapses of millions of boomers even as we repeatedly lose track of the location of our iPads:

Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men
Feared by the bad/loved by the good
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood

I got a preview of the tune before my six-year-old friends did because I was sitting under the piano in our living room when my dad, Carl Sigman, wrote the words and music -- in one afternoon. The song became a pop hit on both sides of the pond in 1955, as sung by Dick James (with Stephen James and His Chums), who would become the Beatles publisher, and produced by George Martin, who would become the Beatles' producer. That same year, "Robin Hood" served as the b-side of Nelson Riddle's No. 1 smash "Lisbon Antigua." It was later parodied by Monty Python -- the Beatles of comedy -- with an inept Dennis Moore standing (or riding) in for Robin. Other coverers have included Frankie Laine and Deep Purple (!).

Fellow Traveller's Michael Eaton, still fascinated by the transgressor as cultural touchstone, has come full circle, having written a play about Charlie Peace, a Victorian burglar and murderer whose real-life exploits turned into legend after his capture, trial and execution -- turning him, some would say, into, yes, a Robin Hood figure. It's scheduled to premiere next year in Nottingham, just a few miles from Sherwood Forest. Plus ca change...

Those who glorify the North Pond Hermit for his skin-deep connection to the Robin Hood myth ought to consider this before arguing for a Chris Knighthood: Knight was nailed, finally, for stealing marshmallows and other treats from a camp for the disabled.

Digital Fabrication: More Than the Stuff of Dreams

2013-06-06T13:25:12-04:00

America's economy will suddenly grow by $400 billion -- roughly three percent --on July 31, when the Bureau of Economic Analysis begins to include in its GDP calculations the value of investments in such intellectual property products as songs, books and movies. The new numbers will reveal that Stephen Sondheim, Stephen King, Steven Spielberg and Ray "Even Stevens" Stevens have been far more important to the nation's financial well-being than government stats have previously indicated.

This news feels as uplifting as a double dose of premium-grade placebo. But there's more than feel-good bookkeeping at stake here. Plays, stories, films and music generate wealth -- wealth government stats are supposed to measure.

The nation has always struggled with who owns that wealth. In the Wild West frontier of the internet, music, films and news were easily pirated. Now, there's a newer, quite possibly wilder West, this one represented by the arrival of the 3D copier and the promise of a revolution in digital fabrication.

You may be skeptical about the process by which a copier can spit out ears, earrings, guns and chocolate. What's even harder to wrap one's head around is the possibility that within a few decades, you personally may be able to make most of the stuff you want anywhere, at any time and for a fraction of the going rate.

The aptly named website Pirate Bay calls digitally fabricated items "physibles" and claims, both literally and metaphorically, "We'll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal."

Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms and the creative force behind a pioneering "FabLab," takes things a step farther, predicting that we'll be able to "turn data into things and things into data." If he's even half right, our very notion of "stuff" -- its manufacture, its ownership, its effects on the environment -- may become as anachronistic as gladiators and town criers.

If all this sounds too Rod Serling meets Harlan Ellison, consider that President Obama, in his most recent State of the Union Address, said, "A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the-art lab where new workers are mastering the 3-D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything."

The future is unknowable and perhaps unimaginable, but that shouldn't stop us from pondering the thrilling and terrifying consequences of advanced digital fabrication. Shipping costs, child labor and pollution could be vastly reduced. But where will the jobs be? "We're on the verge of the next industrial revolution, no doubt about it," Dartmouth College business professor Richard D'Aveni told Yahoo News. "In 25 years, entire industries are going to disappear. Countries relying on mass manufacturing are going to find themselves with no revenues and no jobs."

For a musical glimpse into this future, check out the "vinyl" records Amanda Ghassaei has created via 3D printing. Daryl Friedman, chief advocacy & industry relations officer for The Recording Academy (The Grammy folks), thinks we don't need to worry about widespread digital/fab piracy, at least not yet: "With numerous free and legal digital music services, it's unlikely that the average consumer would opt to print his own vinyl records. The real challenge will be to the hard goods industries. This is more about cars than The Cars."

The Journal of New Music Research reports on the production of a 3D-printed flute, and though a Steinway may never pop out of your computer, most of the parts probably can. (Since each key on the keyboard has nearly 60 levers, springs and screws, imagine the cost savings.)

All this creates thorny issues of ownership and compensation for creators of both the intellectual stuff the BEA just got around to recognizing and physical stuff, which won't be so, well, physical.

With Napster, people could rationalize that they were borrowing invisible, impossible to own "data." But producing your own objects is more analogous to making copies of a Picasso or a great piece of album art for resale. Morality aside, if everyone's printing copies of your albums, sculptures and manuscripts in their basements and dorm rooms, who you gonna sue?

In which case, what's the incentive to innovate? Or does innovation accelerate as everyone works to stay one step ahead of the knock-offs?

So thanks, Bureau of Economic Analysis, for the GDPat on the back. That was the easy part. The radical challenge of digital fabrication is dead ahead.

In Hoops, Is a Hot Hand Hot?

2013-05-27T13:58:39-04:00

Anyone who's played a fair amount of basketball knows the thrill of the "hot hand." You hit two or three in a row and soon even the longest of long shots finds its way into the hoop. (For mere mortals, hot hands are quickly followed by "cold feet," extended periods of time when the ball becomes a block of concrete and even the simplest layup turns into an airball.)

Yet decades of research on professional and college shooting stats seems to have indicated that believing in the hoop hot hand is as foolish as having faith that a coin toss will come up heads because the previous one did. If the so-called "hot hand fallacy" applies, then anyone who ever "got hot" -- in a half-court pick-up game, a high school intramural contest or the seventh game of an NBA championship -- has been conning him or herself. (This mass delusion would cover all b-ball fans too.)

I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a world where scientists can "prove" that my felt experience of a hot hand is all in my mind. Next thing you know, they'll say there's no such thing as a planet on a hot streak.

But hold on. News that Humboldt University scientists recently confirmed the hot hand (sort of) is as welcome as recent evidence of the healing powers of wine, coffee and chocolate. Their deep analysis of free-throw stats from 2011 found that the "probability of success following a success is higher than the probability of success following a failure." Somewhere in the timeless realm, Marv Albert is screaming, "Yesssssss!!"

Not so fast. Just when common sense appeared to make sense, results from another, even broader study of NBA stats ratchets up the crazy. Here, we learn that a player who hits one shot is more likely than chance would suggest to take the team's next shot. So far, so good. But, this study purports to show, that player is also more likely to miss it!

All may not be lost, however. The to-and-fro of these surveys suggests that the variables of human experience are so vast that one statistician's hot hand may be another statistician's coin toss. Most of these studies don't include non-free-throw shooting, where the hot hand seems much more relevant, at least to this non-statistician. And what about defense? Ignoring these aspects of the game is like leaving out love in a survey of why people get married.

"All you need to do to see that the hot hand exists is to watch Kobe Bryant heave up brick after brick during a Laker game, only to see him just as suddenly start making every shot, from every impossible angle. When this happens--and it pretty much happens at least every other game--households like mine sound like this when Kobe rises up off one leg for a 24-footer with two guys in his face: 'No Kobe! No Kobe! No Kobe! Yeeeees Kobe!'" said Steve Lowery, a former Los Angeles Times sportswriter who claims to have twice experienced having a hot hand as an adult. "In both cases, I suddenly became aware that I could not miss. I mean, could not ... and believe me, I tried."

There's no denying that we tend to desire and imagine patterns where they do not exist. That too is common sense. And some day in the dystopian future, when bots rule the courts, bot statisticians may draw more accurate conclusions. Unless, of course, they develop their own free will.

If all this makes your head spin faster than a Globetrotter's flourish, sit quietly, breathe in and out, and, with the concentration of a Steve Nash at the free throw line, focus on the time-tested Zen koan, "Is a Hot Hand Hot, or What?"

What's Really Behind All Those Village Voice Layoffs

2013-05-19T13:56:28-04:00

When I heard about Friday's layoffs at the legendary, historic, iconic alt weekly The Village Voice, I Googled "Village Voice + layoffs." It took hours to wade through the links to the myriad past layoffs, firings and resignations at the once-great journal, but eventually I learned that this time, Michael Musto, the paper's veteran gossip columnist, Robert Sietsema, its long time restaurant reviewer, and George Jean Nathan Award-winning theater critic Michael Feingold were among the victims.

For many old-media types I talked to, there was more resignation than outrage this time around, as though a cherished institution were already gone. Former Voice staff writer Tom Carson captured the mood when he took to Facebook to ask that someone "just put the paper once known as the Village Voice out of its (and our) misery." (Carson, I think, was making the subtle point that while misery doesn't necessarily love company, some companies love misery.)

Laying off these writers seemed so absurd, I was determined to find out if perhaps there was a method to the madness. It took more than 45 minutes of intense shoe-leather investigative reporting, but I got my answer: By summer's end, the Voice will have what budget mavens call a negative head count. To put it in layman's terms, the total number of Voice employees come September 22, 2013 -- including the business and editorial staffs -- will be a negative number.

This may seem counter-intuitive to those who learned math before quantum equations became de rigueur. But the late John Entwistle, CEO, Executive Chairman, COO, CIO and President of VV parent company Village Voice Media Group (VVMG) -- which recently bought Village Voice Media (VVM) -- told me, "In a negative economic climate, you have to be willing to go negative. The beauty of what I like to call 'sub-zero staffing' lies in its simplicity -- it simultaneously increases revenues and cuts costs."

Entwistle's erstwhile partner, the late Keith Moon, said, "Since the turn of the century, there's been a drum beat from high-hat 'intellectuals' who say the Voice sucks. I cannot disagree with that. But hey, we're creating a new paradigm here. You got a problem with that?"

I was also able to track down the elusive VVMG Chairman of the Board Roger Daltrey after an awkward email exchange with the singer Chris Daughtry proved fruitless. While twirling a microphone, Roger told me, both on and off the record, that the template for the Voice plan came directly from the 1977 Elvis Costello number "Less Than Zero." When I pointed out that the song doesn't mention newspaper layoffs, he screamed, "I haven't heard it! It's good enough for me that the title meshes so well with our branding strategy!!"

Most alt-media honchos refused to comment on the Voice plan. But I located Stephen Mindich, who shut down the iconic, legendary, historic Boston Phoenix last month because he couldn't meet payroll. Mindich, who was driving down the Atlantic coast and hadn't heard the news, was stunned. "If I'd known it was possible to operate a paper with fewer than zero employees, I might have saved the Phoenix. I wish my friends at the Voice nothing but tsouris."

The Voice's endgame is unclear. Pete Townshend, VVMG's Corporate Creative Director, mused mysteriously that sometimes it's necessary to break some guitars to make an umlaut. He added that an additional revenue stream might flow from younger writers already accustomed to working for free, who "might go one step farther and actually pay us for the privilege of being published in the Voice."

I'm not so sure. When I put that proposition to a random 20-something walking across Union Square while texting furiously, she looked up momentarily and said, "What's the prob? I love The Voice. I watch it for free every week on my iPhone while I'm driving home from the mall. Okay fine, they need new singers. But why would they need writers?"

Hedda Bolgar, Pioneering Psychoanalyst, Dies at 103

2013-05-15T11:19:00-04:00

Dr. Hedda Bolgar, an extraordinary psychoanalyst, scholar, teacher, supervisor, lecturer, speaker, author and social justice activist, died peacefully Monday at her Brentwood home.

She was 103. She saw her final patient just a few weeks ago.

Over the course of an 80-year career, Hedda was instrumental in the founding and development of three significant educational institutions.

Hedda was born in Switzerland in 1909. Her father was a prominent historian and diplomat, and her mother was a feminist and a journalist, one of just two female war correspondents during World War I.

She received her Ph.D. in Psychology in 1934 from the University of Vienna, where she knew Anna Freud and attended Sigmund Freud's lectures -- one of the few people still alive in 2013 to do so.

Hedda fled Europe for the United States in 1938, the day the Third Reich annexed Austria. She trained at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and was a faculty member of the University of Chicago. In 1956, she and her husband Herbert, who died in 1973, moved to Los Angeles, where she was Chief Psychologist at Mt. Sinai Hospital and where she established a postdoctoral residency program in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.

In 1969, Hedda helped found the California School of Professional Psychology. The next year, she co-founded Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies (LAISPS). In 1974, Dr. Bolgar and three colleagues -- including Dr. Allen Yasser, who is still the organization's executive director and has remained close with Hedda throughout the years -- created Wright Institute Los Angeles (WILA), which houses an internship and postdoctoral training program in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and a non-profit, mental health clinic offering intensive long-term psychotherapy at low cost.

Dr. Yasser said, "I've known, been mentored by, worked with, and loved Hedda for 45 years. She was a dear friend and like a loving mother to my family and to me."

As chair of the WILA board, I got to hang out with Hedda from time to time. She was always gracious, elegantly dressed and held forth in perfect, eloquent sentences about Bach, Godard, Freud, vegetarianism and politics. She reserved scorn for Tea Partiers, global warming know-nothings and people who were unkind to animals. She was especially critical of most of pop culture, which she saw as a source of depression for many women who become more and more obsessed with their physical appearance as they reach their 50s and 60s.

Hedda infused her work with a spiritual dimension. She disdained organized religion but loved Buddhism. We talked about the commonalities and differences between Buddhist practice and psychoanalysis. Each is a radical way of understanding oneself where nothing is hidden and nothing is good or bad, just meaningful. But Buddhist practice involves sitting and watching one's thoughts come and go without dwelling on them, while psychoanalysis encourages patients to follow their thoughts and feelings and find meaning through a trail of free associations.

Anyone who encouraged Hedda to slow down at, say, 90, 95 or 100 was met with incredulity. Until very recently, she kept a full schedule of patients, and still found time to teach, lecture and participate in writings and documentaries about aging. In her last years, most of her patients were women. Some were therapists themselves; others sought therapy for the first time. She specialized in treating people in their 70s and 80s, clients who could open to an empathic ear from someone who could have been a parent.

Hedda remained on WILA's board until her passing. The Institute's mission embodies her passions: rigorous training, intellectual depth, practical teachings, low fees and long-term care at a time when insurance generally reimburses, if at all, for one visit and a prescription.

I never heard Hedda talk about her own death, but she was a virtual insight machine with regard to her elderly patients' deep fears that soon they would deteriorate into a world of physical pain, economic hardship and the humiliations of navigating a world in which they could no longer function independently. She couldn't fix their physical or their financial conditions, but she could help assuage their fears, which could be more painful than their "real-world" challenges.

Hedda was no Pollyanna. She understood well that she was one of the lucky ones who enjoyed the good health that facilitated a pioneering career and an astonishing life.

The Tao of Cross Country

2013-05-07T14:19:45-04:00

An old farmer's only horse runs away. His neighbors tell him they're sorry he's suffered "such bad luck." "We'll see," the farmer replies. The next day the horse returns -- along with three wild horses. "How wonderful," the neighbors say. "We'll see," the old man says. The following day, the farmer's son gets thrown trying to ride one of the wild horses and breaks his legs. The neighbors say they're sorry for his misfortune; the farmer says, "We'll see." A day later, a warlord arrives at the village to draft all able-bodied young men to go to war. Because the son is disabled, he is spared. The neighbors congratulate the farmer on his good fortune. "We'll see," he says. -- Taoist fable

Ryan Chalmers was born with spina bifida and has used a wheelchair all his life. He doesn't see this as "bad luck" -- he feels blessed with an athletic body that, with hard work, has helped him win a slew of sports competitions since age eight and propelled him to a spot on the U.S. team at the 2012 London Paralympics.

These days, Ryan, 24, can be found steering his racing chair somewhere between Los Angeles and Manhattan, the beginning and end points of his Push Across America, a 71-day cross-country odyssey sponsored by the non-profit group Stay-Focused.

Roger Muller founded and runs Stay-Focused, which helps young people with disabilities primarily by teaching them to SCUBA dive and experience the physical freedom and pleasure of gliding through the deep water. He was my best friend in junior high; the only kid in town who wasn't Jewish, had divorced parents and spent his early years in Switzerland cross-country skiing to school. I'm still not clear how he got home.

Roger, who has mentored and coached Ryan since they met at a track meet in 2005, has cross-country in his blood. His older brother Bobby was a champion high school cross-country runner who served as Roger's inspiration and, well, big brother.

When Bobby graduated the Vietnam War was raging, and most of his classmates opted for draft deferments, which permitted them to protest the war from the confines of college campuses. Bobby chose Marine combat and, six months in, was shot through the chest and nearly killed while riding on top of a tank, rendering him wheelchair-bound for life.

Wheelchair-bound but hardly inactive. After a prolonged, excruciating rehab, Bobby founded and ran Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA), which, with enormous financial, moral and musical support from Bruce Springsteen, became the most important vets' rights organization in the country. (In his spare time, Bobby co-founded the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines and shared in that group's 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.)

Bobby and Bruce became good friends. Says Bobby about Springsteen's scorching 1984 anti-Vietnam War anthem "Born In The U.S.A," "In the '80s ABC did a special feature on me. They interviewed Bruce and asked if I was 'the cool rockin' daddy' Bruce had in mind when he wrote the song. Bruce chuckled and said, 'Yep, that's right. He sure is.'"

Thanks to the Bobby-Roger-Ryan-Bruce connection, Sirius XM's E Street Radio channel asked Boss fans to suggest a theme song for Ryan's journey. As Bobby's song is "Born in The USA," Ryan's is "No Surrender." Ryan now calls in to the station every Friday morning with a progress report.

There's much to celebrate in the accomplishments and intertwining relationships of Ryan, Roger, Bobby and Bruce. But this no "triumph of the human spirit over adversity" fairy tale. Roger must compete with thousands of other worthy non-profits to keep Stay-Focused afloat; at 67, Bobby is in poor health after decades of pain and medical complications; and Ryan's long, strange trip sometimes seems like an endless advertisement for climate change starring fierce sandstorms, torrential rains, vicious winds, scorching deserts and freezing mountains.

How will it all turn out? We'll see.

License To Philosophize, Sinatra-style

2013-05-01T14:39:29-04:00

When you reach a certain age and no longer have a job where large numbers of people are incentivized to laugh at your jokes, moments arise when you wonder what you are doing on this planet.
Your very being may even come into question.

Say you've finally reached the front of the line at Starbucks, where the young, beautiful barista ignores your plea for a simple venti-skinny-extra-foam-iced-mocha-latte to flirt with the artfully disheveled guy perusing the store's "Ode to Chocolate." Or say you're taking your morning constitutional and a pair of pretty passers-by look right through your smiling "Good morning."

Sometimes, you just don't know what to do or how to be.

If you have $4 million to spare, a Lamborghini Veneno may help confirm your existence, if not your identity. For a cheaper, deeper way to connect with fellow humans, consider this dispatch from the front -- of my Toyota:

Within days of installing my license to philosophize, strange things began to happen. Sitting at a long red light, I noticed two stoned dudes on the street pointing to the plate and giving me a thumbs up, way up. The service guys at Hollywood Toyota have always been polite, but after a recent tune-up they wanted to schmooze about the depths of Frank's romantic suffering. A long-time neighbor I've never talked to sang a few "do be do be do"s as she walked her dog past my house. I posted a photo of the plate on Facebook and received "Likes" from a couple of people who I'm pretty sure don't like me.

A more melancholic encounter unfolded as I walked a long block on a rough street in Hollywood toward my parked car. Time slowed while I watched an old, down-on-his-luck man staring intensely at the plate. When he noticed me approaching, his glance seemed filled with meaning. I wanted to engage him, to find out how he felt, but he quickly disappeared around the corner. Was he thinking profound thoughts about doing and being? Reflecting on that long, lonesome road Frank marks out in "One For My Baby"? Nostalgic about a very good year in his past? Or was he just scared?

Precisely where the great German philosophers Immanuel Kant (1724-1824) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) stood on matters of doing and being is the subject of many an abstruse scholarly text. As for Sinatra (1915-1998), we know that the immortal "do be do be do" is nowhere present in the urtext of his monster 1966 hit "Strangers In The Night." Could it be that Ol' Blue Eyes, who detested the song, added those immortal syllables to the fade-out to express the synthesis, if you will, of Kant's thesis (being) and Nietzsche's antithesis (doing)? Or is it the other way around?

We'll never know the Chairman of the Board's innermost insights about doing/being, if indeed he had any. What cannot be denied is that his choice of material covers a rich spectrum of emotional leaps and existential twists and turns.

The delight of Sammy Cahn/James Van Heusen's "Come Fly With Me" conjures the upbeat title of Thomas Harris's 1967 best-seller I'm Okay/You're Okay, while Cole Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin" sends the message, "I'm Okay/If You're Okay." The Paul Anka-penned "My Way" -- with its startling invocation of expectoration, "I ate it up and spit it out" -- boils down to "I'm Okay/I Don't Give A Shit If You're Okay." Johnny Mercer's ironically titled "Goody Goody" offers a cheerfully sadistic "I'm Okay Because You're Not Okay." "That's Life," my favorite Sinatra chart-topper, enthuses "I'm Okay And/Or Not Okay," depending on the month.

If Sinatra's do-be-doings don't strike you as plate-worthy, there are other choices. Religious boomers may prefer "Let all that you do be done in love" (1 Corinthians 16:14). The sublime "Dom dom dom do dom do be do" of the Fleetwoods' "Come Softly To Me" will transport the most cynical atheist to pop heaven. And what person of a certain age can forget the "Shoo-Be Do"s of "In the Still Of The Night (I'll Remember)"?

Documentary Charts History of UK Indie Record Shops

2013-04-23T13:01:19-04:00

Twenty years ago, the UK boasted a thriving record-store culture, with over 2200 indie shops and as many as three on a single block in a single small village.

The sad but thoroughly enjoyable documentary Last Shop Standing, directed by Pip Piper and produced and narrated by indie exec/music maven Graham Jones -- based on his 2009 book of the same name -- surveys the rapid rise and dramatic decimation of this phenomenon. By 2009 only 269 shops remained. The film makes the case that there is now a "rebirth" of indie retail activity, but the fact that there are now some 300 stores says this is more about survival than revival.

The film captures with warmth the exuberance of proprietors who have devoted their adult lives to their shops, in some cases since 78s reined. We also hear from 20-somethings who now dispense their obsessive, encyclopedic pop smarts from behind the counter, High Fidelity-style.

There are tales, told with relish, of "chart fixing." In this British version of payola, label promo men got credit for extra sales -- the mere reporting of which secured more radio play and higher chart positions -- by giving away tons of records to shopowners, who would then sell them and pocket all the profits. (Some stores who had nothing at all to do with supplying information to the chart compilers went for years without having to buy any new records.") Quite an ironic twist, since the major complaint about online music -- the Napster ethos -- is that it gives away music for free with nobody making a profit.

It's been more than three decades since the release of Spinal Tap, the incomparable rock mockumentary that revealed so much truth about rock bands and the music biz that devours them. Since then, documentaries have become where it's at for many filmmakers and fans, and it seems like a new pop music-related doc is released every couple of days. Are they better than their fictional counterparts because documentarians have become better story tellers? Have we all become postmodernists for whom the distinctions between truth and fantasy are less and less clear? Is it part of punk's DIY ethos?

Even Tap director Rob Reiner didn't call a quirky character Quirk. But in the real world, Paul Quirk, who runs the Entertainment Retailers Association -- the self-proclaimed "Voice of Entertainment Retailing" -- argues that record companies missed the boat when they replaced vinyl with CDs.

When Jimmy Shannon, proprietor of The Diskery in Birmingham, announces that he is going to spin some "poultry music," his eyes light up. "Chicken Rhythm" by the late American jazzman/scat singer Slim Gaillard is unlikely to be found in a supermarket -- not even in the poultry aisle. Shannon, a devotee of music that, he says, "could make your ears bleed," remembers "A butcher named Dave who used to come in because he was into chickens." Jones has his own gustatory metaphor, telling Billboard's Phil Gallo, co-author with Gary Calamar of the terrific 2010 paean to record stores Record Store Days, "You're never going to see supermarkets rack vinyl next to the baked beans."

Other musicians reminisce about the wonders of youthful hours passed at the local record outlet. The great Billy Bragg recalls his early years plumbing the organized chaos of a shop that featured records in Sanskrit. Johnny Marr remembers that when he saw the ocean of discs in his first record store, he knew that was "Where I'm going to be every weekend for the rest of my life."

Jones researched his book four years ago by visiting some 50 record shops around the UK, where, he says, "The mood was doom and gloom." Going back to 20 locations three years later for the film, he said, "There was a sense of optimism among the shops, who look after their customers and serve as a meeting place for music fans." But even the optimistic Jones says, "I think over the next few years record stores will remain around this level." The challenge is whether the stores that remain can play a lively role and avoid be relegated to novelty or museum status.

Owners have had to become agile jacks of all trades to keep up with changes in the way music is delivered. Some play the role of concert promoter (lots of in-store appearance by bands), critic (putting brief reviews on album jackets), ticket agency (selling concert tix), social networking/Internet hub (selling music worldwide via email, Facebook, Twitter and other internet services) and general music shop (selling instruments and paraphernalia) .

Last Shop Standing was the official film of the sixth annual Record Day, April 20th -- a day of special events that draws together so many thousands of fans one retailer likens it to "Ten Christmases put together." On that day, the documentary was released on DVD and screened at scores of indie stores all over the world, from the UK to the U.S. to China.

Fittingly, Last Shop Standing closes with the James Clark Five's "Sexbombe Uber Alles" (James Clarke Five), which declares, "Oh Lordy, I guess I'll never get to heaven cos/Oh Lordy, I stay up way past eleven." The tune has just been released as a single and Jones says he's been inundated with requests.

The State of the State (Song) of the Golden State

2013-04-18T21:37:50-04:00

My next-door neighbor flagged me down recently to enthuse that the California State Song brought back memories of childhood hikes in the Alps.

I wondered what in the world she was talking about.

Turns out the official Golden State tune isn't the jaunty Al Jolson vehicle "California, Here I Come." Nor is it the Mamas and the Papas' haunting classic "California Dreamin'," which could as easily have been called "California, Here I'd Like To Come."

Also lacking theme-worthiness, apparently, are the hundreds of songs called simply "California," penned by such scribes as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and the Kooks.

No, our official State Song is "I Love You, California," now serving its 100th year in that lofty role. With lyrics by L.A. clothier Francis Bernard Silverwood and music by conductor Abraham Franklin Frankenstein, it was introduced by opera superstar Mary Garden in 1913.

"I Love You, California" does display a certain mannered charm. But as Dick Clark might have said, you can't dance to it. More specifically, it doesn't comport with the West Coast Swing Dance, the official state dance. Nor does it square with the Square Dance, California's official state folk dance.

Still, Grapestaters deserve better. My former colleague Marc Haefele, an expert on many things, wonders about the choice of a clothier to write the lyrics, asking, "Would you buy a suit from Stephen Foster?"

If "I Love You California" is an exercise in sap, things could be worse, much worse. In 1921, it beat back a challenge from "California, Sweet Homeland of Mine," which, to the contemporary listener, manages to conjure the Exxon Valdez: "You're the land at the foot of the rainbow/Where the great pot of treasure was spilled."

"All Hail to Massachusetts" doesn't quite succeed in making our mouths water when it rhapsodizes, "All hail to grand old Bay State, the home of the bean and the cod." Harry Truman, one of our most musical presidents, remarked that his home state's State Song, "Missouri Waltz," was "as bad as 'The Star Spangled Banner' as far as music is concerned."

The glorification of war in "Star Spangled Banner" is often reflected in official state ditties. South Carolina's "Carolina" asks its residents to, "Hold up the glories of thy dead; say how thy elder children bled." Maryland's martial monstrosity, written in 1861, proclaims that the Old Line State, "Is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb/Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum!" That these words are sung to the tune of "O Tanenbaum" proves once and for all that fact is stranger than fiction.

The theme songs of some fighting forces are less violent. Take "We're All American," the theme of the 82nd Airborne Division, written by my dad, Carl Sigman, during WWII. Its playful Tin Pan Alley rhymes are present from the outset -- "Put on your boots, boots, boots and para chute chute chutes" -- and remain through the refrain, "Make your jumps/take your bumps."

Rock and roll has had a monumental impact on American culture, but has yet to crack the state song racket. "Louie Louie," one of rock's all time most rug-cuttable numbers, nearly became the official song of Washington State some years back, but it didn't make the cut.

If you've heard "I Love You California" at all, chances are it's from a Jeep commercial. Has the moment arrived to dream up a more up-to-date theme? Perhaps something along the lines of, "Home costs up-up-upped/ Now we're bank-rupt-rupt-rupt." Or "Why be a grump/It's just a slump."

Give us your favorite line for a new California state song in the comments section below.

Barry Goldberg: Fifty Years Of Chicago Blues

2013-04-06T08:35:32-04:00

Listening to him today, even seeing him on YouTube may not be enough to show younger people how intimidating Howlin' Wolf seemed 40 years ago. At six and a half feet tall, he was a colossus of a bluesman, a frighteningly intense force of nature delivering such tales of misery and love gone very, very wrong as "Smokestack Lightning," "Spoonful" and "Killing Floor." When I was assigned to interview Wolf for a music magazine, I was more than a bit nervous about how he would take to a young middle-class Jewish white kid from Lawn Guyland. He turned out to be nothing but kind and helpful.

The story of American music is often the story of race -- and particularly of white boys and girls learning about music from black men and women. The tale of Elvis Presley hanging out in Mississippi juke joints is something like a gospel story in the history of American culture.

The compelling new documentary Born In Chicago (directed by John Anderson, produced by John Beug and co-produced by Barry Goldberg) is the Genesis story of a bunch of middle-class white kids (Goldberg, Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, Nick Gravenites, Charlie Musselwhite, Elvin Bishop, Harvey Mandel et al.) who forged personal and musical relationships with Wolf, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin and other seminal Chicago bluesmen. The result was an extraordinary body of work every bit as important as charttopping blues-influenced British Invaders like the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Yardbirds.

More than 50 years ago, Howlin' Wolf's ferocious music and gentler side were revealed to guitar whiz Bloomfield and Goldberg, his keyboard-adept buddy. They had taken Bloomfield's mom's car across the tracks to see Wolf perform at Silvio's, a rough and tumble blues club on the South Side of Chicago. That they were the only white people in the joint was all the more conspicuous when they were seated at a front row table.

In the middle of his set, Wolf, who'd taken an interest in Bloomfield's mind-blowing guitar work, told the audience, "We got some little white boys in the house." He summoned the two kids to sit in for a while. The dynamic duo seized on their "let there be blues" moment and made it through without a scratch.

Not long after, during a Muddy Waters show at Big John's, a mixed race venue, keyboardist Otis Spann asked Goldberg to spell him. When Muddy, the writer of "Got My Mojo Workin'," "Mannish Boy" and, yes, "Howlin' Wolf," spotted the callow youth playing literally at his feet, he was displeased. But Goldberg kept coming back and kept sitting in until, he says, there came "a single moment when I suddenly got it -- mind, body and music became one. I could tell that Muddy felt it too."

What's chronicled in Born In Chicago is no starry-eyed mentorship program. Gravenites calls his younger self a petty hoodlum and Musselwhite carried a hammer that had quite a different purpose than Pete Seeger's mythical tool of justice. In an aside that's funny only in retrospect, Buddy Guy says that in those days, "When a white face showed up at an all-black club, you think, 'Don't mess with him -- he's a cop.'"

The documentary, which debuted at SWSX last month, provides a tantalizing taste of just a few of the myriad offshoots of Goldberg's generation, including the seminal Paul Butterfield Blues Band (Butterfield played with Waters on "Mannish Boy" in The Last Waltz) and Goldberg/Bloomfield's phenomenal horn-rock band the Electric Flag, whose first recorded song was Wolf's "Killing Floor."

The film includes a Windy City twist to the oft-told Dylan-goes-electric momentat Newport, when he and his band -- with Bloomfield on guitar and Goldberg on keyboards -- changed rock history forever by "plugging in." They closed, of course, with "Like A Rolling Stone" -- another homage to the Muddy Waters song that gave the Rolling Stones their name. Goldberg says, "When we played 'Like A Rolling Stone' at Newport, we were playing the blues.'"

Marshall Chess, son of Leonard Chess, whose family-monikered label housed Wolf, Waters and too many other blues geniuses to mention, narrates the film with wise elder-statesmanship. He says, "You can't play music that hasn't gone through Chicago."

But if the blues are importantly a Chicago phenomenon, that's only because the city was so intimately connected with the migration of blacks from the Deep South, and especially Mississippi. Rock and rollers tracing the music's migration often ended up in the Delta -- or, like Keith Richards, in Southern literature.

Richards had a fascinating correspondence with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Eudora Welty. Welty, born in Mississippi, caught Richards' eye after he read her short story, "Powerhouse," which was inspired by a Fats Waller performance. In one letter, Welty, after watching a Stones concert on PBS, expresses her amazement at, "all the energy and the costumes. You all dress better than women, especially that Mike Jagger."

Richards responds that all his heroes have "been Negroes and mostly from your state, Muddy, Wolf, B.B., Hooker." He adds that his "spiritual blackness" is in his blood. "You know blood, luv? My blood? The blood I've supposedly had transfused in a secret hospital somewhere?" (Hat tip to Mark Hanzlik.)

The film includes footage of the barely-out-of-their-teens Rolling Stones -- whose 1962 recording of Muddy Waters' "Little Red Rooster" went to No. 1 on the charts three days after its release -- playing with Waters in Chess Studios. Cut to Keith Richards, who says the Stones must have had "brass balls" (brass stones?) to presume they could do justice to Waters' tune.

Goldberg, a bundle of energy at age 70 who says "I'm still happiest when I'm playing," stresses that the blues isn't all about tragedy and disaster. Just last year, he wrote "Havin' A Good Time With The Blues" with Charley Musselwhite and Johnny Lee Schell. After five decades of gigs, including a recent month-long residencyat L.A.'s The Mint, he's bursting to hit the road with Stephen Stills and Kenny Wayne Shepard, with whom he just cut a blues album.

How to Avoid a Charmed Life

2013-04-05T14:22:12-04:00

The New York Times reported last week that Federal agents arrested SAC honcho/"stock-trading wizard" Michael Steinberg for insider trading and securities fraud. (SAC is the multi-billion dollar hedge fund owned by Steinberg's multi-billionaire mentor Steven A. Cohen.) The story of how Steinberg ended up trading in his cuff links for handcuffs can serve as an object lesson to other .001 percenters living "charmed" lives.

If you think you have it all and only blue skies await, you may want to consider these warning signs of impending discharmament. (Quotes taken verbatim from the Times account.)

1. You grew up in an affluent town like Great Neck or Scarsdale -- and when you came of age, your primary concern was how to monetize your trust fund without paying taxes.

2. Your multi-billionaire boss/mentor plunks down a cool $60 mil for a Hamptons getaway while he faces possible indictment.

3. In describing your leisure activities, people use the word "summer" as a verb; even worse, they use "Hamptons" in the same sentence, as in, "He summered in the Hamptons." (Technically, you can only summer in one Hampton at a time. But if you're rich enough, the rules of physics don't apply.)

4. It takes eight figures to express your annual income even though you've been employed for just a few years and don't actually produce anything.

5. You learned the ropes from a boss/mentor whose net worth requires more digits than the sum of the digits on both your hands to express -- and who has never actually produced anything. ("Mr. Cohen and Mr. Steinberg were close.")

6. You are known for "sharing a love of art" with your multi-billionaire boss, who supplemented his Hamptons acquisition by forking over $155m for a Picasso.

7. You have a "long-term art adviser." (As opposed, I guess, to a series of short-term or medium-term ones.)

8. Your boss introduced you to said art adviser.

9. You require that your middle initial appear in all PR materials. As in "Michael S. Steinberg."

10. Media accounts of your exploits use the words "wizard," "Wall Street," "hedge" and "fund."

11. Your firm is described as having started out as "just Mr. Cohen and several dozen traders." "Just Mr. Cohen?" And merely "several dozen traders"?

12. Your firm racks up "stupendous returns year-after-year." (Shades of Bernie Madoff.)

13. You send emails that, if read by the wrong people, can send you to jail for a very long time. ("Emails from Mr. Steinberg...were included in the indictment.")

14. You think you're safe if you end those incriminating emails with "Please keep to yourself."

15. Your hedge firm hedges its bets by issuing a press release that says, "We believe him to be a man of integrity." Believe him to be?

16. You deploy the phrase "give back" when you put up a tiny fraction of your net worth to establish a foundation in your own name.

17. Scores of people you barely know refer to you as a "dear friend."

18. Your friends "always marvel" at your good fortune.

19. The word "charmed" appears next to the word "life" in your autohagiography.

Boston Phoenix Falls, Smaller Alt-Weeklies Survive

2013-03-21T11:59:07-04:00

The abrupt closing last week of the 47-year-old Boston Phoenix was a shock to the alternative weekly ecosystem. It also underscored the divide between struggling big city papers and more viable smaller-market ones.

The Phoenix has for decades been one of the best and most successful alt-weeklies in the county, and owner Steve Mindich stressed that attracting readers was never an issue. Despite reader loyalty, advertising revenue had plunged. "Not getting major advertisers -- national/regional -- was the whole problem," he told me. He wished he could have kept things going: "I guarantee you if I was a billionaire I never would have said 'no mas.'" (Mindich had been subsidizing losses for several years, according to executive editor Peter Kadzis, and folded the paper rather than institute severe cutbacks that would sacrifice quality.)

Mindich said that when he canvassed some local, deep-pocketed potential buyers, they all asked, "Are you crazy?"

Unless the paper's reported $1.2 million debt and assets of $500,000 is wildly off the mark, it's puzzling that some kind of sale, joint venture or, at worst, takeover -- a path taken by other failing papers with far less to offer than the Phoenix -- couldn't have been arranged. Perhaps Mindich, at 69, was simply exhausted and saw no clear path to the paper's survival.

Jack Shafer, a superb media critic who has edited alt-weeklies in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, analyzed the larger picture on his Reuters blog: "What's changed, and what probably convinced the Phoenix to exit, is that the papers are no longer a 30 percent (or higher) margin business, and that lost business is not returning. Publishers who hope to survive will have to content themselves with 10 percent margins."

The Boston Phoenix didn't have any profit margin. But the notion that a 10 percent margin (which once would have thrilled publishers) is cause for despair is a function of the wave of alt-weekly acquisitions over the past 15 years by corporations, venture capitalists and leveraged buyout specialists.

Most of the first-rate alt-weeklies were founded, owned and edited by the same person, someone with a vision to supply his community with a passionate voice in opposition to its daily paper -- and the relentlessness to survive, whatever it took. The Village Voice (Norman Mailer/Dan Wolf) led the way in 1955, followed by The San Francisco Bay Guardian (Bruce Brugmann), The Chicago Reader (Bob Roth), LA Weekly (Jay Levin), The Seattle Weekly (David Brewster), The Stranger (Tim Keck), The Riverfront Times (Ray Hartmann), Baltimore City Paper (Russ Smith) the Phoenix New Times (Mike Lacey/Jim Larkin) and on and on.

Once these papers became cogs in the machinery of larger companies or wealthy investors, their new owners required miraculous returns to service their debt and meet their numbers. Meetings once dominated by discussions of public policy and authenticity were soon driven by new anxieties: how to capture the youth advertising demographic, whom to lay off and, most crucial, how to "execute" an "exit strategy" in which investors, after just a few years, would "flip" the papers to another buyer for an enormous profit.

When LA Weekly, where I was publisher from 1983-2002, was bought in 2000 by a group whose chief investor was Goldman Sachs, our profit margin was close to 30 percent. (Still not satisfied, one of the buyers said cheerfully that he thought we could hit 40 percent pretty quickly!) After the dot.com bubble burst and we slipped to around 25 percent -- still a shitload of money -- a program of cost-cutting ensued which, over the years, gutted the staff and the editorial/design budget.

It's pointless to dwell on the glory days when alt-weeklies had edgier editors, more writers and generous page counts. The question is whether it's better, right now, to have a corporate-owned, smaller Village Voice, or LA Weekly, or Chicago Reader, than none at all. The answer is that while these papers may be shadows of their former selves, people willing to put Twitter on pause and read them will still find compelling news, arts and culture coverage and investigative reporting.

Mindich's announcement that his Portland Phoenix and Providence Phoenix will continue to publish makes sense, given the success of a number of smaller-market alt-weeklies.

These papers, for the most part, continue to be locally owned and operated, often by their founder/editors. Rather than simply selling ads, they seek to create partnerships with local businesses on virtually a door to door basis. Some have become innovators in finding non-advertiser revenue, via local business directories, online stores, social media management or other digital marketing services. (Larger papers try to do this as well, and some have scored with event sponsorships and street teams. But they tend to be less nimble than their smaller-market brethren. And, like the Phoenix, they've relied far too heavily on national and big-budget local advertisers which have virtually vanished from their pages.)

The Boise Weekly (circulation 32,000) is expanding its reach to serve as something of a hybrid of an alt-weekly and a daily, multimedia news source. AAN executive director Tiffany Shackelford says Boise Weekly owner Sally Freeman, "has positioned her paper to become the local breaking news source in town. She is also entrepreneurial in her approach to monetization streams -- she has worked with local technology companies to expand and promote programs like the 'Best of Boise.'"

David Comden, publisher of the Ventura County Reporter (35,000 circ) adds, "Warren Buffett is bullish on smaller market papers. We are too."

Of course, you can't hire a whole lot of investigative reporters on the budget of a low revenue/small circ paper...

Andrew Oldham: Stone Free At Last

2013-03-19T07:09:59-04:00

Andrew Oldham's recently-released book Stone Free is, as mentioned here, more a rumination on the art of the hustle than a traditional memoir.

In his earlier volumes Stoned and 2Stoned, the former Stones manager/producer provided a narrative of a career that began a half-century ago when a clueless teenager forsook the usual pursuits of sports and proms to infuse himself into the careers of the holy trinity of the Beatles, the Stones and Bob Dylan before his twentieth birthday.

Now, armed with five decades of street scholarship -- his "post-graduate education in double-dealing" -- Oldham dissects the moves of such "pimpresarios" as Albert Grossman, Malcolm McLaren and, most important, Allen Klein, among whose hustle-ees were Sam Cooke, the Beatles, the Stones and Oldham himself.

Oldham's relationship with Allen Klein is the substance of the most complicated and revealing chapter in Stone Free. Armed with extraordinary accounting skills and a relentless pursuit of the hustle, Klein stripped Oldham of his Stones royalties, making him virtually dependent on Klein's largesse -- which was often generous -- for his income. (Klein was similarly helpful to the extended family of Sam Cooke after his death.) Rather than playing the victim, Oldham uses the Klein chapter to take responsibility for his own early lack of business acumen.

(Before you buy into the trope of Klein's empire as all about the money, newly revealed tapes have no less a heroic figure than John Lennon giving Klein credit for what he calls "one of the funniest lines" in Lennon's scathing anti-Paul song "How Do You Sleep?" from his 1971 solo album Imagine: "The only thing you done was yesterday.")

A highpoint of Stone Free, edited by Brit-pop expert Ron Ross, is Andrew's depiction of a meeting with Phil Spector and Seymour Stein in 2008, the year before Spector began serving a 19 years to life sentence for the 2003 murder of Lana Clarkson.

Spector, of course, is the genius behind some of pop music's greatest singles, including the Ronettes' "Be My Baby," the Crystals' "Then He Kissed Me," and "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" by the Righteous Brothers. He also produced or co-produced such monumental albums as George Harrison's All Things Must Pass and the above-mentioned Imagine.

Stein is a colorful record biz icon who has played an integral role in the careers of such superstars as the Ramones, the Talking Heads, the Pretenders and Madonna. He's also amassed a knowledge of popular music that's beyond encyclopedic. Oldham observes, "If WC Fields had been younger, better looking and not anti-Semitic, he might have been Seymour Stein."

Stein had first hustled Andrew circa 1964 in New York's Brill Building, that citadel of songplugging where the Runyonesque inhabitants included bookies disguised as elevator operators. Forty-four years later, Andrew recalls, Phil summoned Andrew to accompany Stein for a meeting at Spector's mansion in Alhambra, California. The subject: the potential recording career of Phil's new 28-year-old wife, former Playboy model Rachelle Spector.

In Andrew's telling -- and he's the first to admit that he's offering only "the truth of my recall" -- Stein politely passes on the deal, and everyone walks away with dignity and shared affection intact.

Just who is hustling whom in this Chinese puzzle is left for the reader to ponder. What's most interesting -- and moving -- is how Oldham turns his compassion for Spector into a meditation on the pain of rejection, a universal experience Spector captured so profoundly 45 years ago in "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," which he not only produced but also co-wrote (with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil). Oldham says, "I know that the pain of rejection is never limited to the snub at hand. It comes in waves, reverberates like a chord with all the other disappointments in a life. Perhaps, finally, this is okay. Rejection is an old friend who can only hurt you if you are foolish enough to let it."

For Oldham, an insight machine who writes with a self-deprecating wit that sometimes borders on self-laceration, what matters is the way one conducts a hustle. Reached at his headquarters in Bogota, Columbia, he said, "As long as that which you hustle is the real thing, you're in a pretty special place in the world. You are, in fact, at one with the world even if you do not realize it at the time."

Is this declaration a piece of practical advice, a mind-blowing koan or just plain confusing? Andrew writes, you decide.

The title Stone Free is, as Freud would say, overdetermined. It refers to both the author's hard-fought freedom from over-identification with the Stones and his freedom from the need to get stoned (he's been sober since the '90s.) There's also "Stone Free," the first song Jimi Hendrix ever wrote, an ode to rock & roll life in the ultra-fast lane, which resonated with Oldham's experience.

I asked Oldham if he was conscious of an ever deeper, more cosmic connection with another Stone Free: the herbal (drug-free) remedy for kidney and gallstones. (All things must pass, indeed.)

He wasn't, but ever the hustler, said, "Lawdy, I'd love to do a tie-in! Buy three bottles, get the book free!"

Also on HuffPost:

Andrew Oldham, Pete Kameron and the Zen Hustle

2013-03-04T17:39:55-05:00

Stone Free, the third volume of Andrew Oldham's autobiographical trilogy (after Stoned and 2Stoned), is a meditation on the art of the hustle, from the man who managed the Rolling Stones and produced their records from 1963-67. Oldham knows whereof he speaks -- he's hustled and/or been hustled by an array of entertainment biz honchos since he was a teenager publicizing the Beatles.

Stone Free devotes a chapter to the late Pete Kameron, Oldham's long-time close friend and partner in hustledom. Oldham sees Pete as a "Zen hustler," a quality I witnessed up close and personal during our time together at LA Weekly, where he was an original investor and board member and I was publisher.

Pete expressed his business mantra succinctly: "Ya know, sometimes you have to be yin, sometimes yang." During one spectacularly contentious board meeting circa 1992, psychiatrist Oscar Janiger (best known for giving LSD to Cary Grant) rose to say, "I'm sensing there's anger in the room." That was about the moment Pete reminded me to be (or at least to act) yin. When I didn't grasp his meaning, he translated: "Shut the fuck up and let them come to you." (Billionaire Leonard Stern -- of the eponymous Stern School of Business at NYU -- who bought The Weekly shortly thereafter, gave me substantially the same advice, sans the spirituality: "All you need to know about business is when to kick ass and when to kiss ass.")

Equally comfortable with gangsters, corporate CEOs and Tibetan masters, Pete sometimes wore lush spiritual robes (or, when he got older, worn-out bathrobes) to the meetings we had at his Jupiter Drive home on Mount Olympus. (I'm not kidding; that's the L.A. neighborhood where he lived for years.) Once, he descended the stairs brandishing a favorite gun.

When cutting a deal, Pete strove relentlessly to get exactly what he wanted without hurting the other party. But in his drive to win, he could be stone cold when he had leverage. In Stone Free, Oldham recalls a time when, having been outhustled by Allen Klein, he was at a low point financially. He enlisted Pete and Kevin Eggers (the very non-Zen hustler behind Albert Goldman's execrable bio Elvis) to help him close a lucrative deal for writing his memoir. After a series of stops and starts -- including a hilarious misadventure with Michael Medved, who went on to become an annoying right-wing pontificator -- the deal fell apart when Oldham grokked that what Kameron and Eggers had in mind was a lurid tell-all. This stung, but mutual respect, affection and a shared sense of the absurd kept the Oldham/Kameron friendship intact. Oldham writes, "(If) someone's going to take your money, better to call him a friend."

There's one deal no mortal can hustle. At 87 and facing terminal liver cancer, Pete stayed remarkably yin when he said his goodbyes to Andrew and other friends and colleagues in mid-2008. I'm told by one of Pete's comrades that his final words were those of a frustrated but determined negotiator. Waking up in pain after a nap for the last time, he demanded, "What the fuck am I still doing here?"

Next time: more on Stone Free, featuring Sergei Diaghilev, Albert Grossman, Malcolm McClaren and Allen Klein. Plus a previously untold tale of Oldham, Phil Spector and record industry vet Seymour Stein, whose collective knowledge of pop/rock music could fill Borges' "Library of Babel."