Thursday 7/8/21
* Started proofing/revising the entirety of Glue God: Essays (and Tips) for Repairing a Broken Self again. Talk about taking the time to get it right.
* Sent Become Your Own (Super) Hero: Modern Fiction in Twenty Easy Steps (Stories) to someone.
* Sent an op-ed to USA Today. He won't respond.
* Pitched this Lee Morgan box set to two major newspapers. They won't respond. I've written for both a lot. The people at one of them want me dead. The new staff at the other is absolutely useless.
* Sent arts ideas to The Wall Street Journal pertaining to Muddy Waters, the Beatles, Sam Cooke.
* Someone wrote me and said they could hear the pain in my voice on the radio. I guess I'm not doing a great job masking it.
* These half hour segments I'm doing now, though, are dynamite. Doesn't lead to anything. There isn't anyone out there looking for talent, hoping to improve their product. That's just not how the world works now. You see all of these faltering radio stations, and they could just snatch me up, for cheap, and see where I can take something, but they don't care. Everyone is oblivious. Every job is given for another reason. And everything sucks, frankly. There is hardly any talent anywhere. Talent is done. But good Lord--I am infinitely better at this than other people. Kimball gets it--that show is completely different during that half hour. I've had a number of people say that to me. The entire thing changes. The excitement, the energy, the insight, the humor. And Kimball changes too, people tell me.
*Some sports thoughts. I thought Kucherov's comments after the game last night was total bush league stuff. As I've said, the Lightning are a modern day dynasty--or could be--but I also don't like how they worked the system. If I didn't play the regular season, taking on that wear and tear, and then magically showed up for the playoffs, I'd be ashamed of myself. I wouldn't feel like a full-fledged contributor, no matter how many points I scored. He's a great player, but clearly a dick/child. And he slagged off Fleury, too, in Las Vegas? And couldn't get his name right? The whole thing was classless.
* The Red Sox sent out a dumb Tweet about how they remembered what people were saying about them early in the year. It's like--you're not dominant. You're scrapping your way to wins. Who knows if this can hold up. I wrote about their run differential the other day. They could easily come back to earth. Don't shake your ass about. This team was an embarrassment the last two years. They got fat after winning in 2018. Just go out and play. Earn it. Win people back.
* I wrote Bloomsbury about marketing the Sam Cooke book.
* Huge Beatles guy got in touch to say how much he liked the excerpt from the chapter. There's definitely never been a Beatles book like this one. And all Beatles book now do one of two things. They're all about some niche of a niche of a niche--and I don't find that interesting at all--or they're just some biographical spin. For instance, I thought Lewisohn's book was awful. I just don't care. Didn't change how I heard the band. But sure, if you like knowing what they called themselves for nine days in 1959, which hadn't technically been documented before, then knock yourself out. And he can't write. If you can't write, I can't get around that, no matter what info you have. But what I have is a totally different Beatles book, a mainstream Beatles book, and also a Beatles book for the Beatles obsessive, and I have it this late in the game, after decades of Beatles books. The freshest one is being done now. And it will change how you hear them. Give you an entirely different musical history. And be its own work of art in the process.
* Editor said Coltrane feature was a work of art.
* This is Jelly Roll Morton's thirty plus minute "The Murder Ballad," recorded by Alan Lomax in 1938. It will feature heavily in my book about extended residencies/sessions that shaped American music history, along with discussion of Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Elvis, Miles Davis, the Dead.