Vince told me to make sure they de-iced.
"You're a paranoid guy, Bob. I know you'll stay on it."
This is exactly why I go to the OCD shrink. To NOT be on it. To turn it over to the EXPERTS!
Still, with what happened with Dick Ebersol the other week, I must say my stomach did a backflip when Jason offered me a seat on his jet back to L.A.
Oh, did we have a great day on the slopes.
I'd been planning to leave at the crack of dawn. Instead, I packed up my crap and took a $20 taxi ride a handful of miles to Jason's place just below Aspen Highlands.
And then Kevin Weaver got behind the wheel of the Cayenne Turbo and dropped me off at the lift.
I mean okay, I understand you need four wheel drive, and why not a Porsche, but do you really need a TURBO? In Aspen?
Well, I got the whole story at lunch. From Brian, the guy who manages Jason's property. You see it came in a divorce. He'd driven to Phoenix to pick up the damn car, and then driven it back to Phoenix for the summer, at 130 MPH, and then the couple had BROKEN UP! So Jason got the machine at a fire sale price.
But it was Brian's story that interested me. He and his sidekick Ed manage seven properties. And even though they're doing the management and maintenance work, their lives are FULL of high rent perks. Brian knew more about private planes than anybody I've come across in the music business.
Yup, it was Jason, Brian, Ed, Ed's dietitian girlfriend Michelle and me. Tearing up Aspen Highlands under a sky without a cloud. Oh, it was a religious experience. Having lunch at 10,750 feet. Overlooking the peaks of the Rockies. All the way to Steamboat and Longs Peak. Our backgrounds were all DIFFERENT, but we were soulmates in our love of screaming down mountains, feeling on the edge, feeling fully ALIVE!
After Michelle took me back to Jason's house, after reconnecting with the rest of our posse who'd skied back to the abode through the woods, I took a shower and packed up my shit once again. For the final journey.
And Jason got behind the wheel of the Cayenne. And who shows up to schlep the rest of us, but the same taxi driver from earlier that morning. Hell, he rang up six bucks of charges BEFORE WE LEFT THE HOUSE!
And flying private is so easy.
We ride right out onto the tarmac, they throw our crap in the back of the plane, and we get inside.
Oh, it wasn't gigantic. Just a row of seats on each side. With two pilots up front.
After confirming it WAS Jason, after accounting for the other four passengers, the stairway was pulled up and we taxied to the FAR END OF THE RUNWAY! Maybe this is where United and America West start out, but it seemed FURTHER! Like we'd driven to New Mexico. That we needed JUST THIS MUCH ROOM TO TAKE OFF!
And my anxiety is low. Since there's not a cloud in the sky. And the wind is only the typical mountain gusts.
And then the plane starts to shake. And like a slingshot, as if there's rubber band hooked on the far side of the runway and we've stretched it just about to its limit, the plane starts HURTLING down the runway.
But this ain't no commercial jet. This ain't no lumbering 747. This ain't no Airbus. This is a sceptre, a fine-tuned machine. a dancer amongst leadfoots. Within MOMENTS we're off the ground. Shooting straight into the air. And then, like out of a movie about the Blue Angels or something, as the plane is hurtling towards the sky, it starts to arc, over Snowmass, out west, out towards California.
And deep inside I started to smile. It was like the cover of that Doobie Brothers album. The one with the big Michael McDonald hits. It was like "Almost Famous". But without the turbulence and without anybody testifying they were gay. I only wish my father were alive. My bank account might not have many zeros, but this was SO FAR from his hand to mouth upbringing in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
And about ten minutes into the flight, Jason pulled out his iPod, dialed in a track and handed me the little white machine.
I told him to hold on. I rumbled to the back of the plane. Where the toilet was. To retrieve my Bose headphones from my boot bag.
And when I plopped back down in my leather recliner, I took his 40 gigger from him and inserted the gold plug at the end of the wire attached to my noise-cancelling headphones.
And looking at the dial, I thought I was HALLUCINATING!
For the battery indicator. What, was it GREEN? Or maybe closer to TURQUOISE!
Wait a minute, the whole SCREEN was in color.
I flipped the little machine over, it looked just like mine, was I UNAWARE of this color setting?
Then I was informed it was an iPod Photo. And then I thought the shift from black and white to color was akin to...well, the switch from black and white to color on computer screens, hell, on TV!
And the track Jason wants me to hear is by Antigone Rising.
Chip had implored me to see the band eighteen months ago. It was a bunch of chicks playing rock and roll. I got INTO IT!
And last fall I went with Jason to this studio in the Hollywood Hills, where the son of Jerry Lieber was cutting the record.
And ever since Jason had been ruminating. Calling me. To talk about the RADIO TRACK!
Oh, he'd had the band work with Rob Thomas.
And I heard that cut at lunch with Jason and the band's new manager, Simon Renshaw, last spring. And it was good, but it wasn't OBVIOUS!
Oh, it was back to the drawing board. New songs were written. Covers were recorded. All in an effort to figure out a way through the radio maze.
And the night before in the Jerome we'd had a meeting. After midnight. How to break this band.
Mark Gorlick gave us the radio report.
Don Strasburg analyzed road possibilities.
And Chip's charge Lynn Cingari, who'd signed the band, was there running interference. Not only giving the road report, uttering statistics, but sticking up for the band's values, for who they were, since she was the only female on board, representing an all female band.
Triple-A came up. The act had received a rollicking response in Boulder at the Summit.
But can you get a record started at AAA? Can you really jump something from there? And so many of the chieftains of those stations are pricks, lording over their irrelevant domains.
And even the days of crossing over from Hot AC to Top Forty are almost done.
No, Top Forty is an urban world. With a sliver of slots for pop and left field records. How were we going to shoehorn Antigone Rising into this world?
We weren't.
So I came up with an alternative marketing plan. Maybe that's what earned me my spot on the jet. Shit, I can come up with this stuff out of thin air. That's my expertise, looking at the facts and coming up with a plan that's based on the entire landscape.
And that idea is private. Deeded to Lava.
Not that I couldn't come up with one for you.
But now, I was listening to the music. The final, unmastered mixes. What enamored me over a year ago, did it still HOLD?
We're flying over the west of dreams. All brown and rocky tens of thousands of feet below. With patches of snow here and there. Chasing the sun to the ocean.
And this cut, it's sounding good. In the way that music made by major labels does. Professional. In the ballpark. But, not different, not singular, not OVERWHELMING.
But suddenly most of the instrumentation fell into the background. And a lone voice like Stevie Nicks crossed with Ronnie Van Zant was singing with all her pure lung power from the mountaintop. As if she didn't care if you were paying attention. She just had to get her emotion out.
MEANWHILE, the whole GROOVE changed. All the instruments were descending the scale like our posse swooping down Grand Prix on the side of Aspen Highlands earlier in the day.
It was out of the blue. It was unexpected. Suddenly the song went from one of the pack right to my SOUL!
And then this part came back. Again. And then again.
Jason has broken out the cheese plate. The assembled multitude is tearing it apart. With the ravenous appetites of people who've exerted themselves in the mountains.
But not me. I'm sitting in my seat. Grooving. Thrusting my head back and forth. With a SHITEATING GRIN ON MY FACE!
And then, I stand and yell at a volume so loud as to try to be able to hear myself over the sound pounding into each of my ears. THIS IS FUCKING GREAT!
Jason immediately turned in my direction. And said something. But I can't tell you what it was. I couldn't hear it.
Meanwhile, the track doesn't end. It goes on and on. Like an alternative "Free Bird". Like one of those songs you'd hear on the radio in the...seventies.
Then it occurred to me. There was no format for this music. No outlet for this sound that made me want to fire up my laptop on the spot and write. Music that encapsulated the better part of a week in Aspen that if you weren't there you could never completely comprehend. Not only skiing, but bonding with likeminded people, assessing not only the status of the business, but our lives.
But alas, I'd left my laptop at home.
And after listening to the entire album. An hour later, we got into it.
I told Jason that to do a cover would be to dilute the essence of the band.
Any band that emerges fully-developed is not real. It's a creature of the label, massaged to death. I didn't love every track on the Antigone Rising album. But about half of it was much better than average. About half of it RESONATED with me. And there was nothing wrong with the rest. On the whole, this was FAR BETTER than Aerosmith's debut. Better than the first records of SO MANY GREAT SEVENTIES BANDS.
But back then, bands could develop. Radio would play the GOOD tracks. There was only one format that mattered, AOR. And although eventually Lee Abrams consulted it to a narrow death, there was a period before, when if a record had great guitars, or great piano, as long as it MEANT SOMETHING, a station would play it. Think about it, would Active Rock even play "Stairway To Heaven" if it were released by a new band today? Wouldn't they tell the promotion man it was TOO WIMPY? That their constituency wouldn't STAND FOR IT?
Oh, the filters suck. These people are in touch with their genitals, but not the public. It's a circle jerk. The public is into SO MUCH! The same way the audience for AOR was into both the Allman Brothers and Elton John. "Kashmir" and all those tracks off "Tea For The Tillerman". Songs that TOUCHED THEM!
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