My friend Dorothy Reik was recently elected to the L.A. County Democratic Party Central Committee. She received more votes than anyone else who has ever run for that position. Ever! Yesterday, Reik wrote to subscribers of her influential daily update list that "Bernie was on Chris Hayes last night and Velshi this morning. He also hosts town halls on line. Where is Biden???
On days like today I'm reminded of how much I love our country. I was born here, but I chose to live here. Soon after Nixon was elected I gave up on the U.S. and moved abroad-- maybe for a few months, maybe a few years... I didn't know at the time. Years later, as the impeachment hearings were in full swing, I decided to move back home. I could have stayed in Holland, which I had come to love and which I thought of as an alternative home.
What do Randy Bryce, Amy McGrath, MJ Hegar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all have in common? Well, if you hit the links, you'll probably know what I'm talking about. None of those are expensive 30 second TV spots. No one ever heard of any of the candidates before those videos launched them onto the public consciousness.
Phil Festa is happy to have a life outside the corporate music business. You can tell from his most recent music. "It's great" he wrote, not to have a record company in charge of your ability to be heard." I know what he means. Enjoy!
I have a vague recollection that this happened. The first part of this video above was a TV show I apparently taped with KTVU icons Ann Fraser and Ross McGowan in the early 80s in San Francisco about the punk rock scene. Someone sent it to me Friday. (And, no, that was not John Amato shouting "Howie" when I came out on the set. This was decades before we ever met. Does sound like him though.) It looks like they put makeup on me. Eventually I stopped allowing that when I went on TV but this early in my show biz career.
Like me, Steven Machat comes out of the music business. His time at Warner Bros Records, though, predated my own and it was years later that I learned who he is-- a lawyer, an accountant and a visionary who became famous working with artists at every level of their careers. He’s a a team builder-- called the “dreamers dreamer” by those who know him best.
I was surprised at the outpouring of interest we got from the post last weekend about the new hard rockin' Body Count single, "No Lives Matter" from their upcoming album Bloodlust. Someone asked me if we ran it because of Black History Month. Uh... no; we ran it because Bodycount put out a new single about issues relevant to the DWT mission. But Happy Black History Month too.
Body Count's new album, Bloodlust, will be out March 31 but yesterday, the band's new single was released. You can hear it-- and watch the provocative new video-- above; please do. It's special for me, mostly because Bodycount is a band I worked with when I was general manger of Sire Records. Seymour Stein had signed Ice-T to the label and he was a star-- a successful star who sold a lot of albums. In 1990 Ice asked me to come see his metal band, Body Count, play. Their music and stage show were right up my alley and they were a big hit at Lollapalooza in 1991.
SONY Records— they were still called CBS at the time— had just bought my independent label, 415 Records and I was over in England hanging out with the Clash, Generation X, the Boomtown Rats and Wire and scouting for bands I could sign to 415 now that we would have CBS’ marketing muscle behind us. I met a young unknown singer from a small indie label, Innervision, George Michael and he played me a tape of a kind of protest song called Wham Rap. It was a little slick for 415 but… 415 could change. One thing I knew instantaneously— it was a hit.
