Contrary to the wholly invented assertions on a few websites, I NEVER wrote anything to suggest that Courtney Love has anything to do with the "downfall of Nirvana." I said that when they became successful, sometimes Kurt asked her to articulate some of his professional concerns which changed after the band's explosive success. Thereafter, the band made several more successful albums and continued to tour. Nirvana was together and brilliant until the day Kurt Cobain killed himself. There was no "downfall," except for his death. As I write in the book, Kurt was plagued by demons that I believe were rooted in his childhood. He was prone to depression and was a drug abuser before Nirvana and long before he ever met Courtney. Everyone knows that both Kurt and Courtney had drug problems and like any couple, had their ups and downs. But the main thing I know about their relationship is that they loved each other and that Kurt hated it when people dissed Courtney. Kurt Cobain loved Courtney Love and so do I.

Danny Goldberg

The impending publication of my new book "Bumping Into Geniuses" made me reactivate this site. It is a memoir about the rock and roll business starting with the Woodstock Festival which I reviewed for Billboard when I was nineteen and ending with the death of Warren Zevon in 2004. It's my love letter to rock and roll and the rock and roll business which has sustained me all these years. The title comes from a story about Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun that David Geffen told after Ahmet died.

As a young man, Geffen had asked Ahmet how to get rich in the music business and was told "Keep walking around until you bump into a genius and when you do, hold on and don't let go." Among those I bumped into and was lucky enough to work with were Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Nirvana, Hole, Stevie Nicks, Bonnie Raitt, Steve Earle and Zevon.

After having taken a year off from the music business to be CEO of Air America Radio , I returned to artist management in 2006. My company Gold Village Entertainment represents Steve Earle, The Hives, Allison Moorer, The Old 97s, Rhett Miller, Tom Morello, Ben Lee and Care Bears on Fire among others. For more information on Gold Village go to http://www.goldve.com.

My previous writing has mostly been about politics so I feel I should say: Plese support your local Democratic candidate unless they are a "blue dog" who votes like a Republican. Please vote for and contribute to you can to the Barack Obama for President campaign. http://www.barackobama.com

No matter what happens in the election it is important to protect our civil liberties so please support the American Civil Liberties Union. http://www.aclu.org.

EXCERPT FROM INTRODUCTION to "Bumping Into Geniuses"

"There aren't any secrets," Atlantic Records President Jerry Wexler growled at me, as if I were the dumbest person he had ever met. I was nineteen and it was the winter of 1969, more than thirty-five years before Wexler would be immortalized by Richard Schiff's portrayal of him in the movie Ray. I was writing a column for the weekly trade magazine Record World when Wexler had asked one of his executives to gather a group of young journalists who wrote about rock and roll. The real Wexler was far more imposing than the cinematic version. He was broad shouldered, with a salt and pepper beard and sunken eyes that gave him the look of an Old Testament prophet. He had a defiantly thick Bronx accent, an intimidating intellect, and the ultimate rock and roll and R&B pedigrees.
Some months earlier, at the storied Greenwich Village nightclub The Village Gate, I had seen a talented R&B singer named Judy Clay dedicate her hit, "Storybook Children," to Wexler who stood up and waved with an understated noblesse oblige.
I had no idea what a record company President did but I was stunned that such a soulful singer would publicly acknowledge a mere businessman. But I soon discovered that Wexler had also worked with Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and Sam and Dave, and had been the person at Atlantic who actually signed Led Zeppelin.
My awe at Wexler's résumé was reinforced by seeing his house in Great Neck, Long Island, which had an entire room filled with gold records and a living room with original Legers. Amidst thick marijuana smoke, Wexler played records on his state of the art stereo, alternating an acetate of a forthcoming Delaney and Bonnie album with the Beatles Abbey Road. It was a relief to know that even an insider like Wexler was a Beatles fan. " Those guys sure know what they're doing," he sighed listening to the end of "Carry That Weight." During a moment between songs, in a lame attempt to enter the conversation, I asked Wexler if he was going to an upcoming conference on the music business. "I never go to those things," he snarled, "The premise is that you can go there and learn secrets. First of all there aren't any secrets." He paused dramatically and then with a wolfish grin concluded, "and second of all, if there were any secrets, we wouldn't tell them."
Over the next several decades I would come to understand what he meant. Although I never came close to equaling Wexler's historical contribution to the music business, I was lucky enough to find myself in many situations that would make rock history. I had a press pass to the Woodstock Frstival. I worked for Led Zeppelin from 1973 to 1976. I managed Nirvana when Nevermind came out and Bonnie Raitt when she won four Grammys. I did PR for Kiss and Electric Light Orchestra. At the peak of Fleetwood Mac's popularity I helped launch Stevie Nicks' solo career. And twenty-four years after meeting Wexler I was given his old job as President of Atlantic Records.
**
I can't be objective about the music business. I know it hurt a lot of people; artists were often lied to, royalties weren't always paid, bad people sometimes got promoted while good ones were fired. Drugs, misogyny, and death stalked rock and roll. A lot of shlock was produced. A lot of pretense masked shallow, materialistic quests for fame and money. It's not like I don't know these things and it's not that I mind writing about them. It's just that the part of the music business I know best, the rock and roll business, also produced and popularized a lot of music that I love. And it gave me and a lot of my friends a place in the world.
One nonsecret of the rock and roll business was that no one became a rock star by accident or against their will. Bob Dylan's memoir, Chronicles, begins not with a reference to Woody Guthrie or Allen Ginsberg, but with a meeting Dylan had as a young man with music publisher Lou Levy. Levy showed him the studio on the west side of Manhattan where Bill Haley and the Comets had recorded "Rock Around the Clock," which is widely considered the song that made rock and roll music a part of mainstream American culture.
Folk music did have an aesthetic that existed separate and apart from commerciality. But the very point of Dylan "going electric" was not merely that he was adapting a more complex musical backdrop for his songs but that he was consciously entering a world and a business defined, at the time, by the Beatles. One of the salient points about Dylan's rock single "Like A Rolling Stone" was that it went to number one on the pop charts. If it hadn't been a hit, it wouldn't have mattered anywhere as much. Members of the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, The Lovin Spoonful, and The Byrds all started as folkies. Far from selling out, they were buying into a rock and roll culture and business that from the very beginning had been as much or more about money and success than about the nuances of the art. The tradeoff was that rock and roll was a vehicle that could impact millions of more people and yes, make artists lots of money The contradictions between art and commerce were not something that took folk artists by surprise, but was in implicit in their decision to enter the world of rock and roll in the first place.
I was one of millions of rock fans who went to High School in the nineteen sixties and one of a thousand or so who figured out a way into the business of rock and roll in the years that followed. I had all of the contradictions of rock and roll. Like most of my colleagues, I soon got caught up in the sometimes grim reality of what did and what did not make money. And like most of them I never stopped being a fan.
At a memorial service for Ahmet Ertegun the founder of Atlantic Records and Wexler's partner and boss, David Geffen repeated one of Ahmet's aphorisms about the rock business. The way to get rich was to keep walking around until you bumped into a genius and when you did --hold on and don't let go. Of course no genius was likely to let you hold on very long if you didn't have anything to offer them. One had to know something valuable about aspects of the way the business worked. Some successful rock businessmen started as record producers. Some began as tour managers or concert promoters .Many offered financial expertise. I began in the subculture of rock criticism and publicity but, over the years, developed a reasonable number of clues about radio promotion, the workings of record companies and the dynamics of touring as well.
I was in tenth and eleventh grade in 1965 when the rock and roll business was in the middle of a dramatic expansion and reinvention that began with the launch of The Beatles the year before. Although The Beatles had initially come across like a turbo-charged version of the pop pin-up idols that had preceded them, they soon spawned an intensification of focus on rock and roll by both artists and fans. In March, 1965, Dylan released his first "electric" album, Bringing It All Back Home, a coherent and brilliant body of original material such as "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Gates of Eden" which was a dramatic contrast to disposable pop/rock albums that had one or two hits and lots of filler. (Even The Beatles' early albums had contained a number of "cover" versions of old songs to pad out the band's original material.) In July 1965, the Rolling Stones released Out Of Our Heads, much of it edgy and rebellious for the time (this was the album that had "Satisfaction," and the first ironic commentary on the record business itself "Under Assistant West Coast Promo Man"). Responding to the challenge in December 1965, The Beatles released Rubber Soul, which was widely considered their first "serious" album. These albums and others created and defined a new business. Previously, the primary rock and roll product was the "single," which sold for around a dollar. After 1965, the dominant creative and business product of rock and roll was the album, which sold for five to ten times as much.
To the new generation of rock fans like me, these albums were worth every penny. Every photo, every word of the liner notes, and every single song was another window into the minds of artists who were perceived by their fans as the coolest and most interesting people in the world.
Among the biggest and most talented rock stars I would meet when I got into the business, even those with the fiercest sense of integrity balanced their artistry with streaks of pragmatism.
In 1980, I worked with Bruce Springsteen in the context of making No Nukes, a political concert documentary that featured several live Springsteen performances. While waiting for the editors to cue up an edit one night, Bruce mused about how elusive a Top 40 hit single had been for him. (Born to Run was a press phenomenon, and the title song had been a huge album cut on rock radio stations, but Top 40 barely touched it.) I was amazed to hear that Bruce had recently met with Kal Rudman who ran a radio tip sheet called the Friday Morning Quarterback, filled with radio and promo hype. Rudman talked fast with glib high-pressure shtick. Although, like Springsteen, Rudman was based in New Jersey, he was the personification of the old school pop business hype that was the ultimate contrast to Springsteen's intense, poetic, unpretentious rock and roll persona. (In Rudman's tip sheet, a hit song was called a GO-rilla.) "Kal explained to me," said Springsteen in his urgent, hoarse drawl," that Top 40 radio is mainly listened to by girls and that my female demographic was low. And I thought about the songs on Darkness and I realized that the lyrics really were mostly for and about guys," he concluded, shaking his head ruefully. "So on this new album I'm working on-there are some songs for girls."
Just to hear the Boss utter the word "demographic" was a shock to my system, but then again why wouldn't he want to appeal to as many people as possible? Indeed, The River album was released several months later, and, in addition to its many poetic gems and macho celebrations that protected Springsteen's identity, the album included the first single "Hungry Heart," which featured a sped up vocal, a romantic lyric, and retro harmonies by the sixties pop duo, the Turtles, with the result that Springsteen did, as planned, finally have his first Top 40 hit.
Of course, the fantasy of rock and roll liberation was often dashed by the reality of the business. Drug and alcohol abuse were far too common. The tragic arc of Elvis Presley's career was a metaphor for the dark side of rock and roll: materialistic, druggy, and predictable. Kurt Cobain, the greatest rock artist I would ever work with, shot himself to death. He was only one of dozens of brilliant rockers who died decades before their time.
No one artist or group of artists can contain the sprawling and complex totality of rock and roll but I believe that between them the artists I write about here, Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Stevie Nicks, Bonnie Raitt, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Hole, Warren Zevon and Steve Earle among others represent a broad and powerful portion of the psychic real estate of the rock and roll kingdom. I am not objective about any of them. I love them all.

This site was built for the publication of the paperback version of my book "How The Left Lost Teen Spirit" which came out in 2005 and the info on it pertains to that book. I never became as assiduous blogger although I periodically post at the Huffingtonpost.com and at tpmcafe.com My current business activities can be found in the near future at Gold Village Entertainment

Don Imus hated the title of the original hardcover edition of this book, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, and urged me to change it to the subtitle, How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. "Dispatches sounds like you're a member of the Communist Party or something," the talk-radio superstar grumbled.

Besides being my personal homage to Kurt Cobain, I appropriated the phrase "teen spirit" to refer to the energy that a political movement needs�not only to mobilize young people, but also to touch older people who make political decisions based on emotional and spiritual reasons rather than purely intellectual ones, and who are thus more affected by the language of popular culture than by the language of editorial pages. In the quarter-century since Ronald Reagan was elected president, Republicans and conservatives have understood such populist emotions better than Democrats and the political left.

This book is a rant in the form of a memoir. The rant is against a particular kind of liberal self-destructiveness that masquerades as pragmatism but has been, instead, one of the main causes of the decline of progressive political power despite widespread support for progressive political goals.

I have been in the music business for more than thirty years as a PRguy, a personal manager, and, for the last decade, a record-company president and owner. I have worked with rock legends such as Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, KISS, REM, Warren Zevon, and Nirvana, with pop icons such as Diana Ross and Madonna, with politically committed musicians like Joan Baez, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, and Steve Earle, and with gangsta rappers, singer-songwriters, boy bands, heavy-metal icons, classical tenors, country divas, jazz masters, and critical darlings, as well as with counterculture icons such as Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, and CornelWest. I am fifty-four years old, a "baby boomer" and an "aging hippie." I am also a businessman. I live in New York now, which is where I was born. But for most of the 1980s I lived in Los Angeles, and when I visit there I am still a "Hollywood liberal," and have worked with such conservative targets as Norman Lear, Barbra Streisand, and Jane Fonda.

My wife, Rosemary Carroll, and I are parents of a girl and a boy, which, contrary to conventional wisdom, hasn't made us any more politically conservative. We have hosted fundraisers for, among others, liberal Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Russ Feingold, and Ted Kennedy, and worked with independent progressive leaders like Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader (although not in 2004!).

To some establishment Democrats, it is people like me who have screwed up the party. I was against the war in Iraq, and I met with and supported Howard Dean in the early stages of the primary campaign, thinking that he was a strong vehicle for that opposition. I have been involved with political fundraising concerts, I'm an ACLU board member, and I'm a friend of Michael Moore. To me, it is the conventional wisdom prevailing in Washington, D.C. that has screwed up the party.

In November 2004, many Washington pundits began reviving the term "culture wars." Post-election polls indicated that "morality" was the number-one issue for voters. Of the 22 percent who said that issue motivated them, more than80 percent voted for George Bush. Democratic soul-searching began in earnest and focused primarily on three areas, all of which have long intrigued me: youth, spirituality and religion, and cultural positioning.

Hollywood on Trial
http://www.alternet.org/story/20567/

Looking Back, Looking Forward
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041220&c=5&s=forum

I dont blog much but post Republican convention I wanted to shares these thoughts:

Sept 6,2004 Labor Day

ADVICE TO THE KERRY CAMPAIGN:


The Clintonization of the Kerry campaign will not be enough to defeat George W. Bush .

Unlike the 1992 election where “it’s the economy stupid” was the right frame--- this year’s electorate is primarily concerned with security.

It’s safety stupid.

The Democrats already tried to run an election against George W. Bush in which they ignored security. They ran 2002 mid-terms on social security, jobs and prescription drugs and they suffered one of the worst mid-term defeats ever for a party not in control of the White House.


Bush’s decline in popularity 2003 and early 2004 had nothing to do with the economy it as the result of a huge and justifiable loss of public confidence about his conduct of the war on terror.


Some pollsters claim that their research shows that the economy is the biggest issue that comes out of their focus groups but it defies common sense to assume that the various colored alerts and the memory of the World Trade Center attacks do not dominate the psyche of American voters. Any research that tells politicians to ignore security is flawed and is failing to get at the core emotional issues effecting Americans.

Karl Rove knows this. The over riding theme of the Republican convention that created such a bump for Bush was related to September 11th and the war on terrorism . Tax cuts and other Republican issues were mentioned only in passing.


“Do you feel safer than you did four years ago?” The answer is “no.”

1.Bush was commander in chief on Sept. 11th. Richard Clarke’s book and testimony to the 9/11 commission makes it clear that the low significance Bush gave to the Al Qaeda threat made us less safe.

The 9/11 report itself says that America’s “domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have direction and they did not have a plan to institute. The borders were not hardened. Transportations systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law enforcement were not marshaled to augment the FBI’s efforts. The public was not warned.”

As Thomas Powers points out in the New York Review of Books---“These things that were not done must have been not done by somebody and the somebodies reporting to them are not criticized by name” That is because the 9/11 commission was bi-partisan. The Democratic campaign need not be. George W. Bush was the responsible officer of the government who did not do the things that the 9/11 Commission said needed to have been done.

2.Bush was the commander in chief during the time of the prison abuses of Abu Gharib. Regardless of who is directly responsible—there is no question that the top level position papers of his legal counsel Albert Gonzalez and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld didn’t create the best climate for the command structure. Notwithstanding Rush Limbaugh’s assertions to the contrary, most Americans do not believe that this kind of humiliating and immoral conduct makes Americans safer.

3. Bush’s pre-emptive approach to foreign relations that led to war with Iraq, and that could lead to wars with Iran, Syria and North Korea….makes Americans less safe. We need governments and populations of other countries to help find and arrest terrorists. American workers and tourists around the world are now less safe.


4.Bush’s insistence on offending traditional American allies make sit far more difficult to get their help on the war on terror, and it makes the full $200 billion plus cost of the war
America’s burden. This reduced funds for domestic security, protection of our borders, better equipment for police and fire-fighters, etc. This makes America less safe.

5.Bush’s constant religious rhetoric about the war on terror, beginning with his reference to it as a “crusade” has needlessly converted millions of Moslems into anti-Americans. It’s bad enough that we have to deal with Jihadists like Al Qaeda, who indeed must be stopped by force. But making such fanatics sympathetic to extreme anti-American rhetoric—makes Americans less safe. Pakistan, which does have a real nuclear arsenal is less stable. These things too make Americans less safe.

In all of these areas, Kerry has policies that would make Americans more safe.

Ben Varkentine's blog points out that there is a great interview with Ron Reagan, the late President Reagan's son on the Salon.com site in which young Reagan excoriates the presidency of George W. Bush and makes is clear that he sees far more differences that similarities between his father and the current president. The interview was done a few months ago but it's highly relavent.Ron Reagan can make a huge conversation to the national conversation about leadership in months to come.

I wrote about Reagan a lot in my book because I feel that progressives can learn an enormous amount about how to communicate their ideas in an accessible, morally toned, emotionally meaningful way. As far the policy shortcomings of the Reagan administration, I again refer readers to the Nation whose issue this week has several excellent pieces, as well as to Paul Slansky's brilliant "The Clothes Have No Emperor" and Mark Green's "Reagan's Reign of Error." But none of Reagan's shortcomings obviate he accomplishment in making peace with Gorbachev when a lot of the neo-cons were against it.

Many of my progressive friends want to prod John Kerry . I agree that he needs to more clearly differentiate himself from Bush and he must not take for granted the votes of veryone fed up with the current regime. Young people and other undecided voters particularly need clarity or else they will be tempted not to vote or to vote for Nader.

However I cant help bt be optimisitc about Kerry. I think he has more of a common touch that his overly formal speaking style owuld indicate. I like the old photos with John Lennon. I like the emotiuonsl connection he has to many fellow veterans, and I thought his silent dignififed appearence at the Reagan library was exactly the right touch.