Rather than a linear chronology, Bruford takes a simple idea – What do musicians do during the day, or How hard is it to play the drums – and turns it into a well-researched, thoughtful essay. The writing is intensely British, as is the humor (I think it’s British humor), and he doesn’t throw anyone under the tour bus. That’s the good news. The less happy side is that Bruford is a tortured artist; much of the book deals with his insecurities about his talent, his musicianship, and his creativity. In Neil Peart’s Road Show, you read about on-the-job concerns that are particular to touring musicians but not all that hard to believe: slightly dangerous but over-enthusiastic fans or missed cues within imperfect performances. Peart is a drummer who enjoys drumming and lovingly refers to his bandmates as “the guys from the office;” Bruford’s book left me feeling that he approached his music like a semi-regular trip to a moveable office. By Chapter 19, Bruford’s drums are Dilbert’s cubicle, equipped with ride cymbals and a sense of dread. Bruford relates his appearance on Peart’s “Burning for Buddy” tribute with the sense that he couldn’t wait for his two hours of big band time to hit the shout chorus.

It’s a book worth reading, espececially if you like prog rock and the Canterbury centered groups (Egg, Gong, Hatfield and the North) or ever wondered what Robert Fripp is like as a band mate. You’ll listen to “Close to the Edge” with new appreciation for how it was written and recorded, and wonder why Bruford can’t be equally amazed at his own musical accomplishments.

Here’s my proposed track listing:

1. 65 minutes. The song is listed as 3:45 on the CD, but it runs 4:30 with two false endings.

2. No Pants. Discovering untold truths, and things better left to the strangest of imaginations, discounting for attendance at sci-fi conventions. Contains the previously unknown Mr. Peanut riff.

3. Mute All Lines. A thoughtful exploration of the tragedies of multi-tasking, especially around children, dogs, and bathrooms.

4. Next Slide. Sampling everything from Gregorian chants to Jay-Z’s sampling of the Doors and superimposed over a synthesized back beat, it’s the soulful anthem of those dying by Powerpoint.

5. Repeat. Heavily influenced by Frippertronics, the middle parts of Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach, and the entire catalog of Yngwie Malsteen, this theme and endless variation starts with the most rudimentary of music theory and ends up making Bach glad he’s still dead.

I like it, which is the equivalent of “I like you as a friend” in music romance. It has some good moments, and deserves a few more rotations on the iPod. My major complaint is that it feels assembled – some keyboards, some guitar licks, some layered vocals – and not so much experienced as older Yes albums. On the other hand, it’s so much better than the last two things that passed for studio albums (Open Your Eyes and Magnification) that it’s comfortable. And there’s the trouble: I didn’t want comfortable. I wanted the jarring, what’s-that-sound effect of hearing “Sound Chaser” for the first time (having to look up “fruition” in the paper dictionary), the delight I get out of listening to Steve Howe’s guitar solos in various versions of “Yours Is No Disgrace” and even the contrasts of “Tales” (listen to “The Ancient” starting around 12:20 in for some of the best Howe guitar work in the context of Yes songwriting. Ever.) Those aural reactions don’t happen at first listen. The best comparison, on many levels, is to Drama – including Geoff Downes on keys and the production hand of Trevor Horn. I absolutely hated it when it was first released, and now I am privileged to have heard “Machine Messiah” and “Tempus Fugit” live.

For now, I’ll take assembled, and remember that “change we must.”

This particular incident played way up on the neck for us.

Loyal readers (all dozen of you) know that the Bubba and I are big Coheed fans. I took a group of seven teenagers to see the show at the Starland Ballroom in Sayreville back in April (not the best parenting decision I’ve ever made, especially when I lost sight of one of them on the mosh pit event horizon); we had tickets in hand for last Friday’s opening set at the Soundgarden show in Newark. When Mic stated (through some online channels) that he would be giving private bass and guitar lessons this summer, it seemed like a fun way to surprise Bubba. A few emails back and forth with Mic ensued, leaving us with a tentatively scheduled lesson before Friday’s sound check at the Rock. That morning brought a flurry of text messages, a rough schedule, and a lot of hope. I tempered expectations – mine and Bubba’s – with the reality that the band was between shows, they were on a tight schedule in an arena they hadn’t played before, they were the opening act, and that any number of things could interfere with our schedule.

You can guess the outcome: We never connected and both Bubba and I shrugged it off as “typical bass player.” Got a text from Mic after their set in response to my “great show” textual applause, and that seemed the logical end of the story.

Until the news items started showing up last night for a sad epilogue.

Clearly Mic has addiction issues; he issued a bomb threat in person and then used a taxi cab to return to a concert arena with six bottles of pills gleaned from a pharmacy robbery. That goes beyond the label of “serious” applied by his former band mates. Addiction extracts a heavy emotional tax on people two or three arm’s lengths away. Much literally closer to home, it’s still freaking me out a bit: I invited the guy into our home studio, and 48 hours later he’s having bail revised upward due to a history of previous charges. The incident creates some stark contrast around the people we hold up as success stories and role models.

Mic needs to get clean and deal with the “rock and roll lifestyle” that has claimed way too many young, talented artists. Repairing the trust that comes from creating music with whom Neil Peart calls “the boys in the office” to rebuilding credibility with fans and the recording industry will come over time once the full price of addicition has been paid.

[Update July 12] Since writing this last night I’ve been struggling to determine why I’m so bothered by this event, and I think it comes down to something a few email list colleagues call “papa bear mode.” Mic Todd made a commitment to me and to my kid, and then bailed on that commitment and some much larger ones to service his addiction. Doesn’t make him less of a great musician and artist, but makes me angry that he let us down in many ways. Get better, Mic.

As a saxophone player in high school, I was fascinated with the Brecker Brothers and Clarence Clemons. The Breckers fused jazz, rock, and guitar effects to great fun; Clemons was just great fun in everything he did and played. Seeing Springsteen for the first time in 1981 (at the Spectrum in Philadelphia) it was hard to split my attention between Bruce and the Big Man. They were a team, with a dynamic that used Clarence’s sax as another voice in many songs, a melodic accent and echo to Bruce’s gritty storytelling. Listen to “New York Serenade” on Wild, Innocent and E Street Shuffle and you hear Clarence darting in and out as Bruce releases the tension in his story. “Rosalita” on the same album has Clarence pulling the band from section to section in one of the best-known bridges (of any sort) in the Garden State.

My college buddy Steve used to play a lot of Springsteen on the piano. I pulled out the sax and tried joining him one night; about half a song in he said “Listen to how Clarence never stops playing, but never gets in front of the song. He’s always filling in, but in a quiet or complementary way.” Best description of the Big Man ever, in song, in real life, on stage. Last indictment that my career as a saxophone player wasn’t going very far, but delivered in an amazingly perceptive way.

And for anyone who went through high school and college on a steady diet of Born To Run, Clemons’ solo on “Jungleland” remains one of the best parts of the album. Like “Serenade,” it takes us to the close, a siren call that brings the Rat and his girl beneath the city where two hearts beat.

Tonight, in Jungleland, one of those big hearts beats no more, and we all miss the Big Man.

The first nice late spring day of the year yesterday, and I’m thinking about summer. Maybe it was attending a customer event in Long Branch, and having dinner on the beach, barefoot (I was shocked at the number of people who stomped through the sand in expensive shoes), listening to The Boss.

Memorial Day weekend starts the 99 days of summer if you remember summers listening to 99X (WXLO, NY).

“Barefoot girl, sittin’ on the hood of a Dodge, drinkin’ warm beer in the soft summer rain.”

Summer tours start this week, with the Phish Summer 2011 tour opening tomorrow night. I’ll be checking Phish From The Road for set list updates pretty much every night for the next few weeks. Also on the roster: Soundgarden with Coheed and Cambria and Peter Frampton. 35 years ago, a cut from Frampton Comes Alive stamped each day, a mark on the summer calendar.

Will have both kids at home for about 6 weeks, for the first time in a year. I’ll object to the noise regarding resource contention for the bathroom for about three minutes until I remember how good it is to be surrounded by the sounds of family.

I’m going to rollerblade the Atlantic City boardwalk, end to end, twice, without wiping out, because I’m in better physical shape than a year ago, and because skating with a bit of early morning ocean air mixed with early morning/late night hangover casino exhaust is a Jersey experience. Can’t do that in Vegas.

It’s time for summer romance. Hug your wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, spouse, significant other, or partner close.

Work tomorrow, then I’m going down the shore.

We ran a lot of advertisements for City Gardens on WPRB-FM. The station’s rock demographics covered just about everyone who appeared just down US-1, on the stage or on the floor in front of it. Despite being in the studio when innumerable commercials were recorded for the acts, and helping interview Romeo Void (editing out Deobrah Iyala’s comment about what she played) before one of their shows (I still have the button given to me by saxophone player Ben), I only took in one show at City Gardens: New Year’s eve 1983, featuring The Groceries, Regressive Aid, and The Lunchmeat 2000.

The Groceries were musical soup. In today’s terms, boil the Barenaked Ladies, and drop in Bob Marley and flavor with Madness, and you get the taste. Their songs were equally quirky and catchy: “Hire High School Girls” and “No Teeth No Money No Job” were tongue in cheek economic advice and reality. Groceries Bassist Rich Morse (a/k/a Rich Lather) manages the Hotel Oluffson in Haiti and plays Creole music several nights a week.

Regressive Aid was a trio that played hard-charging instrumentals, heavy on complex drumming and layered guitar work. If you trace those musical genes down the rock family tree, you’ll see Soundgarden, Ministry and maybe some other “industrial rock” bands among the second and third generations. In their case, “knew them when” predated even recognizing the genre as such. And when they played a show together, instead of arguing over top billing, they would advertise the “Lunchmeat 2000″ as the headliner, with the Groceries and Regressive Aid opening. Lunchmeat were a union of both bands, and plenty of fun. What you’d want for New Year’s Eve at the crest of the punk/post-punk wave.

City Gardens closed its doors for good years ago. Even CBGB, where both bands played in 1983, is shuttered.

Twelve years ago today, Bill Tucker, Regressive Aid’s guitarist, unplugged from the amp for the last time. He ended his own life to end severe physical pain. It’s amazingly sad – our collective loss – that a guitarist so talented, who would go on to work with Ween, Ministry and other bands, is no longer broadening people’s horizons with his music.

You can find most of the Regressive Aid recordings online, including parts of the CBGB show. There’s a Facebook page with some great pictures. A long list of tributes gives you a sense of the depth, breadth and impact Tucker delivered, and how much he is missed.

[Ed note: tonight's somewhat melancholy yet hopeful mood brought to you by the oustanding Livingston High School student theater production of Dog Sees God. The fact that we saw it on the anniversary of Billy Tucker's death is pure coincidence, but I sometimes believe there are no coincidences.]

Here’s a revenue model for an established band with an RIAA gold-certified single. I based some of these numbers on discussions and business models put together with someone who has done music distribution in a previous life; the others are based on estimates of average artist royalty share for physical goods sold through the big box stores and discounters like Wal-Mart. Even if the numbers are off by a bit, the rough orders of magnitude indicate that whole-album sales and touring put the most money in the bank. The extremes of the spectrum: single downloads from iTunes (and its degnerate cousin, people who share music “for free” and violate the copyright) and high-end, limited edition items, are important but not funding the retirement account.

So why play at the ends? Because that’s what drives volume back into the middle.

The lack of a solid middle is what’s killing the music business today. To quote Cory Doctorow, it’s not piracy, it’s obscurity. Any garage band can use Garage Band and CDBaby to get a song into iTunes. The music business and listener’s ears aren’t necessarily the better for it until that band develops a following, a sound, an album or three, and a business model. The good news is that music doesn’t need to be dominated by bands jamming the distribution channels terminating in Wal-Mart and Best Buy; there’s aural room for an order of magnitude more small, variegated acts. Just not a song at a time. Want the evidence? Harvard Business Review’s quick note that while downloads are up, album sales are down. Artists are losing money on a song-by-song basis but making it up in volume, as the old anti-business adage goes.

The numbers above are what I’d expect a band like Coheed and Cambria to do in support of an album (consider Year of the Black Rainbow, their latest; CoCa had two gold albums previously). They derive benefit from airplay and some promotion by the distribution companies, but for a smaller act (think Five Finger Death Punch, who opened for Godsmack on their latest tour), the volume is created by personal recommendation out of word of mouth, a shared car ride, a social networking site link or direct band outreach to fan clubs and street teams. There’s immense value in getting your one-song fans to listen to an entire album, or attend a live show and decide they want to buy the rest of your catalog; there’s even more value in getting a non-consumer to enjoy his or her first song and become a paying fan.

The ends of the spectrum are important because at a dollar a song, the barrier to new listener entry is very low; people will spend a buck if they think they like a song. Shazam and shared playlists like those from my yoga teacher drive volume on the low end. At the high end you have your strong affinity super-fans; the people who are the first to update their Facebook status to “Got tickets for Denver show” and to take a dozen pictures at the show. You strengthen that affinity with exclusive offers, direct outreach, and implicit permission to share your passion for the band. Coheed and Cambria, to extend the example, most definitely get this – from the limited edition versions of the graphic novels used as album backstory to the green vinyl re-release of Second Stage Turbine Blade in support of this spring’s tour. They don’t need non-stop airplay, heavy advertising, and direct promotion because their hardest core fans do it for them. That’s what musical passion incites in fans: a desire to share the music and the passion for it.

The price-versus-consumption spectrum reflects a nearly 1:1 mapping of a brand sub-spectrum. Brands are created and curated; they are imagined and then distributed to the public to varying degrees. On one extreme you have “forced inclusion” brands, where you simply can’t get away from them. Think Disney in Times Square, or on Saturday morning TV. This hasn’t changed in 40 years – it was the Wonderful World of Disney and a re-release of an animated movie and the Mickey Mouse Club before Simba chased the hookers off of 42nd Street. The musical equivalents are Miley Cyrus, Miranda Cosgrove and Justin Bieber. This hit me while sitting at a Miranda Cosgrove concert (with my outstanding young rocker nieces) when the tween behind me exclaimed (in reference to opener Grayson Chance) “He’s my new Jonas Brothers.” I hope that in the next few years, she develops her own tastes in music, and not just what the mass media tell her is appropriately hip.

At the other extreme are things so rarefied that they don’t need any media support: Lamborghinis, country clubs, Indie Rock Pete and his musical elitism, high-end oenophiles, the American Express Black card and the secret level of the affinity club. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it doesn’t even scratch the surface. If you have to ask, you don’t belong, and that’s the root of the exclusivity. It’s driving in Boston. Taken to an extreme, it’s the elitist fascination and brand allergies as central themes in William Gibson’s Zero History, Spook Country and Pattern Recognition.

Neither extreme holds much promise for the music business. While you can buy a guitar played by Sully Erna on tour, your ownership of an item with a cardinality measured in tens doesn’t make Godsmack more popular; and just because anyone with a piano and a flip camera can make music and a video doesn’t mean that they will turn it into a community with fans (Hoku anyone?). It’s the middle ground that matters: reaching out through selective inclusivity (Twitter, Facebook, email opt-in) and attraction of the super-fans through selective exclusivity that build a brand outside of the physical goods distribution networks.

Selective exclusivity relies on first followers: brand spotters, trend setters, whatever you want to call them. In the music world, though, the spotting and rebroadcast is many to many; it’s not one skirt length or one set of colors but Seattle grunge and sadly (for me) Autotune. It’s how Rush has managed to be the fourth best-selling band of all time despite only a handful of Top 100 songs. You either know the Lerxst in Wonderland, or you’re on the outside. It’s Jac Vanek bracelets (disclosure: Jac Vanek is a partner in the Let Us In Campaign; she makes our bracelets).

I think the selective exclusive domain is the savior of album sales and the breeding ground for successful tours. It has to be carefully cultivated (there is a measure of exclusivity); but it also has to be given the ability to participate and share and promote. This is the fundamental shift awaiting the music industry – to move away from a hierarchical, top-down controlled distribution of music to a bottom-up, empowered and infinitely broader set of networks. It’s Tim O’Reilly’s architecture for participation and I’m counting on it to make more music accessible more broadly. I’m counting on it, because I can’t afford that Godsmack guitar and I definitely can’t do another Miranda Cosgrove gig.

[note: Thanks to Jonathan Kriner, Stu Hinds, David Ross, Ben Stern and Cory Doctorow's interview with William Gibson for thoughts that went into this rant]

Someone recently asked me about the fascination with Facebook and Twitter, and why we’re so attuned to the mintutia of others’ lives. Facebook is interesting to us because it allows us to both create and listen to the ambient soundtrack of our daily routines. With all due respect and attribution to Paul Lansky, what the Walkman did for mundane events like walking to class Facebook does for even more quotidian parts of our lives: sitting at a desk, waiting for the kids in the parking lot, going out for dinner. Lansky claimed the attraction of the Walkman was that we could put our lives to music, creating a unique and immediate “music video” of whatever event we tuned out with the headphones. Personal music players created a personal music video environment. If we can’t be in movies, where music is married to narrative, then we can force a union of our own unwritten journals and favorite songs. It’s all about making our own stories interesting, even if to an audience of very few.

We like Facebook and Twitter for many of the same reasons: our friends and interests lay down a backbeat to a story, and we share it the way we share our latest musical discovery or first-run movie impressions.

But the whole reason MTV came into existence – to show us the music, explore “behind the music” and otherwise add context to song was that it was another channel for the music industry to promote its products. MTV was about creating a long tail for music, through obscure videos of bands playing in grassy fields, derelict car lots or in jail cells, long before we knew that we were supposed to be looking under that part of the curve for music that we liked.

Take those two functions – creating a narrative of our lives (in song or 140-character verses) and both publishing and consuming those narratives – and you have Facebook. Facebook is for the Millenials what MTV was for the late Boomers; and MTV has turned into a network of social situations.

After dabbling in Phish-related phanaticism for the past dozen years, I finally saw my first Phish concert in Atlantic City this Friday, opening night in the 3-show set that closes this leg of the current tour. I’ll admit that I didn’t quite “get” the Phish culture at first – definitely liked the few studio albums I’d purchased, and they were a comforting mix of catchy song hooks, goofy lyrics, and intense solos. Even after digesting half a dozen live collections, I was still at a loss to understand their immense impact.

Over the past year, I’ve retail or online purchased significantly more live Phish than swimmingly fun studio work. I’ve tried to decpipher the lyrics to You Enjoy Myself. And I came to three pretty simple conclusions:

(1) Phish are outstanding musicians. They switch styles, vary tempos, interleave songs, improvise, and generally play with a passion that’s infectious.

(2) Their shows are a window into musical history and influences that shine a light (sorry) on bands that quite honestly many current fans may not have on their iPods. “Light Up Or Leave Me Alone” was a great addition to Friday night’s show, and perhaps will get a few people to explore some of Traffic’s early live work.

(3) They are genuinely having fun, and that fun spills off the stage and into the crowd.

More interesting to me is that the amount of meta-Phish data available on phish.net, and the Twitter accounts that provide real time updates from the road create a deep, tighted connected social graph that adds context to every single show. Sometimes I wonder if people who take in dozens of shows “collect” song experiences the way you might assemble a set of baseball cards, trying to get full coverage of whatever cross-section captivates your interest. I’m not sure how to value the statistics provided by AC/DC Bag (one of my favorites) other than to be happy it showed up second (it’s frequently a first set opener).

What I do know is that I had a great time; the crowd was rocking from the first notes and didn’t sit down until “Loving Cup” had run out (sorry). Somewhere around the solo in “Slave to the Traffic Light” I realized that I had heard something fantastic; of course I downloaded the show once I got home.

And here’s what the music business can learn from Phish: they encourage fans to share their media, expanding the fan base and awareness. Our dinner waitress said she’d never heard of Phish; radio airplay hasn’t been the staple of their promotional diet. There’s a lot of understanding to go around.