By Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio.

With the recording industry in freefall, the manager of one of the most respected bands in rock announced last month a new sort of record label, perhaps more akin to a venture capital company.

Brian Message represents Radiohead. But now with Polyphonic, a new company he’s helping to create, new artists will be signed and given funding but then will record their own music and choose outside contractors to handle their publicity, merchandising and touring.

According to the NY Times,

Instead of receiving an advance and then possibly reaping royalties later if they have a hit, musicians will share in all the profits from their music and touring. In another departure from tradition in the music business, they will also maintain ownership of their own copyrights and master recordings — meaning they and their heirs can keep earning money from their music.

Meanwhile, Nielsen reports that sales of physical albums fell off , while individual digital tracks rose  27 percent. That follows news from earlier this year that indicates that teenagers are not only buying fewer CD’s (nothing too radical there), but also fewer digital downloads of music, prompting a market researcher to remark, “ These declines could be happening due to a lack of excitement among teens about the music available, but it could also reflect a larger shift in the ways teens interact with music, given that so much music is now available whenever and wherever they want it.”

Intrigued, I asked one of the veterans of the music industry, Danny Goldberg, what he makes of what’s happening in the industry he’s worked in for his entire adult life.  He said these developments are part and parcel of the radically different environment in the music industry.

““The record side of the business has been terribly, terribly damaged by the availability of free music on the Internet. The sales of individual tracks thru companies like iTunes in no way compensate for the loss of CD sales, so the total amount of revenues for recorded music are way less than half than 10 years ago.  Thousands and thousands of jobs have been lost.  Now, there are people who suggest that maybe some of those jobs should have been lost, and some of the people at record companies were egotists, and maybe didn’t do that much, but some people did do a lot.  It’s like marketing in any business smart hard working people are likely to do a better job than stupid, lazy inexperienced ones…. There’s just nothing to be done about it in the short term.”

Although some cutting edge observers of the media (like Chris Anderson) conclude this to be all to the good, many others think the jury is still out on that verdict.

Goldberg adds…”It’s not just the record business, it’s also the book business, movie, newspaper business, and to a certain extent, the record business, as technology creates alternatives for people and fragments the business and some of it is not connected to people getting paid for their creative work.”

I was speaking to him upon the publication of his memoir of his 40 years in the business, Bumping into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business, just released in paperback.

Although it might be reach to call Goldberg a ‘Zelig’ of the rock music industry, he has had a glorious life in the business that continues to this date, where he currently manages Steve Earle and Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine fame) among others.

His book (which doesn’t focus much on the business of rock much at all) begins with remembrances of covering Woodstock 40 years ago for Billboard Magazine, then catapults when he begins doing public relations for a little band called Led Zeppelin back in 1973.

After Zeppelin, Goldberg also spent considerable time working over the past four decades with Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks, Bruce Springsteen, Warren Zevon, and Kurt Cobain.

Goldberg ended up being introduced to Nirvana by mutual friends Sonic Youth.   He spends 55 pages in the paperback version of Bumping Into Geniuses writing about his experience with the band and Cobain, which he calls the most important relationship of his professional career.

He revisits those halcyon days of grunge that was 1991, and includes a reference to a cutting remark Cobain once made about Pearl Jam.  It reminded me of that time when, for those who cared, you either had to be in the Nirvana or PJ camp.  Kind of like the Beatles or the Stones in the 60’s, if you were around then.

Being a Nirvana partisan, I remember reading about how Cobain was upset in 1993, when Vs outsold In Utero, and Eddie Vedder made the cover of Time.

In his book, Goldberg recounts how he thought a Cobain caustic remark about Vedder was “unfortunate.”  I asked him why he wrote that.

Goldberg said Cobain regretted making the remark, and that he and Eddie Vedder became good friends before Cobain died. “And they really were from the same planet artistically and spiritually and culturally, but you know, sometimes when somebody who’s similar to you can be a threat emotionally. There was competition but there was more collegiality.”

In addition to his musical adventures, Goldberg is a self described passionate liberal. In 2005, he wrote the book, How the Left Lost Teen Spirit and around the same time became the CEO of the Air America Radio Network.  One of the biggest radio markets in the country that the network never penetrated has been the Tampa Bay area.

Despite proclamations from Bill O’Reilly on a seemingly annual basis, the network itself is still on the air. (Although it’s biggest stars, such as Al Franken, Randi Rhodes, Janeane Garafolo and for all intends and purposes, Rachel Maddow, have long departed). But he admits the idea of something like Air America is easier to imagine than to execute.

“It was a very ambitious notion, to try to have 24/7 programming out of nothing. (But) radio is more done program by program. Randi Rhodes did well, Rachel … but it’s hard overnight to create a culture of 24/7 liberal talkers .Liberals express their way thru print and comedy. Conservatives have focused on talk radio, but look at TV comedy. Liberals have an advantage. Different kinds of culture connect asymmetrically to different types of culture”.

The media landscape is changing before our eyes. But Danny Goldberg’s book should remind us that though rock is a(n ever changing) business, it’s also about doling out lots of pleasurable experiences along the way. Let’s hope it never dies.

By Lorna Bracewell
PoHo contributor

Confronted with a news story involving lesbian penguins at a German zoo, you would think that evil geniuses Bill O’Reilly and Dennis Miller could muster at least one decent lesbian joke.

Watch their pathetic attempts after the jump.

If you can do better (and I know you can!) please share in the comments section.

Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio

The shocking assassination of late-term abortion doctor George Tiller on May 31 has brought back the volatile issue of abortion on to the national landscape.

Of course, it’s never gone away. But the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor by President Obama to the Supreme Court — and her relatively scant record on abortion issues — has elicited analysis that, perhaps unlike every previous Supreme Court nomination over the past few decades, her nomination won’t be heavily focused by her thoughts on Roe v. Wade.

Pro-choice advocates were stunned when Gallup reported last month that for the first time since it began asking the question, a majority of Americans now call themselves pro-life vs. pro-choice (although a review of other similar polls taken over the past year continue to reflect a majority pro-choice America.)

If that wasn’t at least a soft blow to those reproductive rights advocates, Tiller’s death by the hands of 51-year-old Scott P. Roeder absolutely was.

And for a portion of the public, upon learning of Tiller’s death, thoughts immediately turned to Bill O’Reilly, who focused relentlessly on the controversial doctor’s status as one of just a handful of M.D.’s in the country who continued to perform late term abortions.

Some liberal commentators and bloggers immediately blamed the cable news analyst for inciting Roeder to commit murder.  O’Reilly, predictably, pushed back, and used the opening moments of his show last week to argue that his foils, NBC News and company, were just as responsible for the murder of U.S. soldier William Long in Arkansas by a Muslim convert.

For many in the abortion rights movement, Tiller’s death brought back the dark days of the 1990’s, when doctors David Gunn, Bernard Slepian and John Britton were killed for their work as abortion providers.

Sarasota resident Sherry Svekis received a late-term abortion from Tiller in 1985. Not being a regular Fox News viewer, she was unaware of the very public campaign O’Reilly had wrought against Tiller over the years until his death.

But after hearing the denunciations of Tiller,  Svekis penned a letter to the Tampa Tribune last week, describing her encounter with Tiller, and her very fond memories of him.

Intrigued by her acknowledging the abortion with the late doctor, I spoke with her last week.

In 1985 there were only a few places Svekis knew where she could get an abortion after being 20 weeks pregnant (she says she was at 24 weeks into gestation).

She says her mother, a Unitarian minister, had learned through a contact about Tiller, and after her ob-gyn physician contacted the medical examiner in Kansas, she felt confident that she would be in good hands.

But unlike the Frankenstein depicted by his critics, Svekis says that Tiller was a compassionate man. She says nearly a year after her abortion, Tiller contacted her to see if she was interested in adopting a baby — after diagnosing that a woman patient he had was too far along in her pregnancy to abort.

“It was reminiscent of John Irving’s novel The Cider House Rules, the doctor who says he can give you an abortion or give you an orphan…. I don’t know what his guidelines were, but she was too far along for him to give her and adoption, and would we like to accept?”

She respectfully declined. But she was touched by his thoughtfulness. (She subsequently had two children of her own.)

“He spent the time to understand what a woman’s position was. Why she was there. What her physical and emotional situation was … he’d try to work with her and whomever came with that person to support her.”

Svetkis says she’s aware it’s a bit unconventional to want to tell the world about a surgical procedure from more than 20 years ago. She says her family and friends were aware of her abortion.

But, she says, when she heard of Tiller’s death, “It was like I needed to make my experience as public as possible as to what an incredible, compassionate man this was, and how important this service was.”

She continued, “There are so few people who can do it. And those that are and the people that can do this procedure are being intimidated out of their rights, and I view it as terrorism.”

Sherry Svetkis says she hopes that with the considerable skills that Barack Obama posses, that perhaps a discussion can be renewed in America about the issue of reproductive rights.

She says, “We need many more voices from the women, and families in this country who have made these choices, so we can have an understanding to what these situations are, and why its important to have services. It’s a woman’s right to her body, and Dr. Tiller was a firm believer in that. We need to support women so they don’t have to be in this situation.”

The Justice Department announced late last week that it was launching an investigation into whether anyone else was involved in Tiller’s death and investigating for potential violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinics Entrances Act.

Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio.

As the Dow Jones Industrials and the S&P 500 continued their dismal descent last week, conservative commentators appeared proud that they alone have deciphered the reason why – it’s President Obama’s economic proposals, of course.

From the Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial on Friday:

What’s worrying about the plunge in equities since January 2, and especially in the last week since Mr. Obama released his radical budget, is that it has come amid the unveiling of the President’s policy agenda. Equity prices have reacted to those proposals by signaling that they expect a much deeper and longer recession.

And on the next page, former Bush 41 Economic Advisor Michael Boskin wrote under the doomsday headline “Obama’s Radicalism is Killing the Dow:”

It’s hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president’s policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.

And so on. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly led off virtually every one of his “Talking Points” segments by also blaming the president’s “Socialist spending sprees” as further evidence that Wall Street is not impressed.

But is this really correct? One political theorist laughed when I asked him this last week.

Michael Lind is perhaps best known as being a neo-conservative who switched jerseys back in the mid 1990’s. Now a fellow at the new American Foundation, he slammed the idea that Obama’s policies have had anything to do with the Dow sliding down to 1996 numbers.

“I find it amusing to learn that all of these conservative Republican investors just in order to spite President Obama are foregoing vast opportunities to enrich themselves to buy good stocks today. I don’t believe that at all. This is not a typical recession. I think we’re seeing the collapse of a super bubble that began in 1982 to 2007/2008.

You saw a giant bubble, and the tech bubble and housing bubble were inside it. So this is a generational collapse taking place, and so to blame it on Obama (or Bush for that matter) is missing the point. This is an epochal event.”

Lind wrote an essay on Salon.com last week that accused Obama of falling into line of what he calls the neoliberal attitude.

In a nutshell, Lind argues the neoliberalism of the ’80s and ’90s was personified by Bill Clinton’s triangulation style politics, and a shift of its base from organized labor to the financial elites of Wall Street.

In his Salon.com essay, Lind accuses Obama of being too timid, and of getting poor economic advice. “We’re in a transformational moment, but we don’t have a transformative presidency. I think he’s a brilliant and gifted leader. I have great confidence in Obama, but I think his economic team is too wedded to this bubble economy that has now burst.”

Lind points his finger specifically at Lawrence Summers, the head of the White House’s National Economic Council for the President, as “believing in this discredited 80’s idea that the markets are self-regulating.”

Similar criticism has come Obama’s way from NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, who wrote last Friday that he believes the administration is diddling with halfhearted measures to deal with the banking crises and is putting off the inevitable – nationalizing some banks.

Meanwhile, the cable news world was all atwitter last week (that’s not to be confused about Twitter. Heard about that recently?) on the question of who runs the Republican Party.

Although this issue may have some relevance, I really find it to be to perhaps be a part of the stimulus bill I missed. You know, the part that insures that cable news networks have plenty of filler to talk about …even though there’s an economic, housing and banking crises to the likes we haven’t seen in perhaps 7 decades!

Why is it important for Republicans to have a leader right now, 4 months after having had their clocks cleaned for the 2nd straight election? Yes, the party is asunder, and frankly, simply not that popular these days.

But it’s where the party goes next that will decide their relevance in the future, not who is leading it. Certainly not in March of 2009.

After John Kerry lost in 2004, Democrats were disheartened, angry, and broken spirited. That led to a fight between the grassroots (which later became known as the netroots) and the Washington establishment.

The best writing to document that fissure was captured in Matt Bai’s book, The Argument.

It’s a natural progression that will inevitably take time to follow. Of course, you don’t hear too many new ideas these days (save for lower taxes) from the right. You hear a lot about how this country needs to go back to “Ronald Reagan principles”, and how Newt Gingrich is still the man of a thousand ideas.

But the Republicans are being branded (and playing the roll nicely) of the Party of No. That’s unimaginative, but ultimately might work, if the economy is still stalled a year from now. (However, you may remember how the GOP tagged Senate Minority leader Tom Daschle with the sobriquet “obstructionist”, and it seemed to work).

The winner in this silly debate of course is Rush Limbaugh. Just last year, the radio personality signed a staggering eight year $400 million dollar contract with Premiere Radio Networks. And after 20 years of national syndication, he remains a dominate voice doing political talk. In the age of podcasting, Ipods, satellite and Internet streaming, the fact that he still can become the focus in the national conversation says something about his broadcasting skills.

It also shows that you can say some hideous, hurtful and insensitive things, and get rewarded for it.

and O’Reilly, the dance remix (NSFW):