Jonathan Taplin

and then at some point you become Jonathan. So I'm just interested what people normally call you. My friends call me John, okay John that I will call you John. So how does a teenager end up being the road manager from major musical acts. I was a fan of Bob Dylan and three sixty four UM. In the summer of nine, I had graduated from high school and was headed to Princeton and I got a b in my bonnet that I would go to the Newport Folk Festival.

And my brother had a friend named Paul Clayton, who was a a friend of Bob Dylan's, was an important Ethne musicologist, and he got me a backstage pass at Newport, and then he introduced me to a band called the Jim Question Jug Band. Uh had a singer named Jeff Muldar,

and they needed a road manager. And their road manager their real manager was Albert Grossman, and Albert Grossman happened to manage Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary Paul, Butterfield Blues Band, Odetta, pretty much all the important people in the folkustic business. So they introduced me to Albert. He hired me, and then on a whim on a Saturday afternoon, Bob Dylan decided that he would play electric music at

the Newport Folk Festival. And Mulda and I had been watching the Butterfield bluespan do a a workshop and Alan Lomax, who was a very famous at the musicologist, tried to unplug the electricity from the Butterfield Blues Band, and so Muldar told this story to all the artists in the Grossman circle in the artists tent afterwards, and Dylan, I think, just decided on the spur of the moment, well, hell,

I'll play electric two. And so they quickly threw together a band made up of the Butterfield Route Land Rhythm Section and Mike Bluefield and brought in Cooper from New York and rehearsed for a few minutes, and then on Sunday night came out and played and the reaction was explosive, to say the least, um the folk fans. Visually, Dylan came out in black leather jacket, a bright orange shirt, tight pants, English rock and roll boots, and and it was not the blue work shirt Bob they had all expected.

And then they launched into Maggie's farm. And when Maggie's Farm was over, it was just like silent. And then eventually people started booing and it went downhill from there. And uh so, you know, I was witnesses something, and I don't think at the time I really realized how important it was, what a breakpoint it was in the history of rock and roll. All I knew was I like the music. Um, I like Bob's direction. I had

loved like a rolling Stone on the radio. And uh so, eventually, over the years I got closer to that as being part of the Grossman family, so to speak. So you're at this transcendent rock and roll moment, not that you were aware that it was so important. How do you end up becoming a road manager Albert Grossman seemed to like to having college kids be the road managers or or college educated man. John Cook, who was Janice's road manager,

had graduated from Harvard, you know, a son of Alistair Cook. Uh, I don't know. He liked people with a certain way of acting, and so uh. I worked for the Question Jug band for a year before you get there. Before you get there, but you were literally just starting college. Was there anybody else in your position? I was. I would go on the weekends to do concerts because that's

the way the concert scene was working. Yeah. I guess what I'm saying is for those of us who were fans, it seems kind of amazing that someone could walk off the street less than twenty years old suddenly have this amazing job. And the other thing is, you know you in your personality In your book, you were saying you were somewhat alienated individual. But I certainly know what it takes to be a movie producer. One has to ask to what degree you put yourself in the mix and

asked for that job. Well, I I did ask for the job. I wanted. I want very much to be part of that world. I didn't know that I could a living out of it, but I wanted desperately to be I mean, Dylan was to me the most important star in the world. Uh he was. He defined what a great artist was to me, and I wanted to be close to that. It took me a few years to get there. I mean, I had to go through other bands. I worked for Question, and then I worked for Judy Collins, and then I did a little work

for Jennis Choplin. And then eventually the band which had been the Hawks became a group, and then I became their tour manager. And then eventually Bob decided and he wanted to go out and start playing again, and I took them to the Isle of Wight, and so, I mean it was a progression. It wasn't immediate, but I I made a living all through college to working on the weekends, and then once I graduated. Literally, you're there at the Newport Folks Festival, your backstage of the backstage pass.

How do you literally get the job road managing Jim Question? Do you send a letter? Do you call Albert? Does he tap you? What happens? I a friend of theirs, said Paul Clayton. He said, this is John Taplin he's a the brother one of my best friends, Randy Taplin. He's a good guy. And and Jeff Muldart said, well, we need somebody slept this equipment around all weekend, and I said, I'll do it. And then so then Muldar took me over to meet Albert and I think I

probably got paid hundred dollars for the weekend. You know, it wasn't big money, and that was it. And then once that was over, then I was inside the Grossman sir, yeah, you've passed the test. So Jonathan Jim Queskin was famously a member of the Mel Lineman family. Do you have any experience with that? Only peripherally, I mean, obviously the mail Lineman kind of cooperative in Roxbury went a little crazy start using LC and uh so Mel had dropped out of the band by the time I was starting

to work with them. He was not involved in the Question Jug band. He had become a a guru. Okay, so you do the Question Jug band. Your next act is Judy Collins. Okay, at the time she was a quite admired lady. What was it like being a young man working with Judy Collins? Well, she had a huge fan base. You know, she had done Sue's and that Leonard Cohen song and it had been very popular. Um, we would play you know, three thousand seats Hall's college concerts,

things like that. She had a very small group. She had a bass player, Bill Lee, who was Spike Lee's father, and a piano player named Paul Harris. And you know, we just take a plane on Thursday night, get to a college town, play a college concert on Friday, player another one on Saturday, and come on on Sunday. So how close did you get to Judy Collins herself? Well, I mean as close as anybody could get. I mean she she had a very personal life. She was having

a romance with Steven Stills at the time. Uh. We traveled all over the country for a year and a half. I mean we had some good times and we had some bad times. Okay, how do you manage being a tour manager while you're going to Princeton at the same time. Well, I don't know, Bob, I don't know how old you are, But in in the sixties you could skip a lot of classes and still get a good grade if you could write a good paper. Um, So I mean, I don't I my roommates used to think I didn't take

my college life very seriously. But I did graduate and get my degree, and so that's that's what matters. And I ran in some good professors, and so I mean it was a very loose time. Okay. So if I talked to the other students at Princeton at the time, would they say, oh, yeah, that's the enigma, that guy's really never around doing his own thing. That would be true. Okay. So what was Albert rousemidlike? He was amazing. I mean, for a lot of people were kind of intimidated by him.

I somehow got on his good side right off the bat. Uh. He would He had a very different view from most managers, which was that you actually shouldn't do a lot of public appearances. In other words, he turned down almost every television show appearance that was offered to Bob Dylan. Uh. He turned down everything for the band until finally Ed Sullivan offered them to come on and then we took that, you know. So, I mean Albert's thought was most artists are out there too much and and you gotta have

a little mystery to you. And the second thing about Albert was he believed that if if if you had signed a bad record contract when you were really young and somehow now you've gotten really good, then he should be able to go in and completely renegotiate that contract with the record company. And he did that regularly. Used to drive Moaston or you know Oskar men and crazy, but he did it all the time. So what was his negotiating style. We'll go on strike, we just won't

show up at the studio. You may have him my artists with a really bad royalty rate, but you're not gonna have any output. So what good is it doing you? And was he a raver or he was he quiet and intense? No, he could. He could scream at people. Uh, if he got really angry, he would. He could be very intimidated. I'd see him throw people out of a room, you know. So you know he's he's unfortunately no longer with us, and he has a certain reputation. Would you

consider him, based on your experience, to be a great manager. Yes, I'd consider him to me maybe the greatest manager. And if you can amplify that a little bit, well, I think even David Geffen would probably tell you that he learned an awful lot from Albert Grossman. Uh And you know, people could argue that maybe David Geffen was the best

manager for a while. Uh So, I mean he was incredibly protective of his artists, and the artist felt that protection and in that sense, and he never made you do stupid stuff, you know, I mean, never me anybody, uh dress a certain way or anything. I mean you think of all the stories of Marvin Gay rebelling against Motown because they wanted him to dress in certain costumes and stuff like that and he didn't want to do it.

Albert never got into that. Okay. When Albert get involved in the music, were only the business, only the business. He felt that the artist's job was make the music and decide what he wanted to do, and his job was just to protect the artists and make sure that he got treated fairly. Now, you were in the belly of the beast, and then Dylan Jettison, Albert Todd Rundwyn did too. What's your viewpoint on those situations? Well, Bob leaving Albert had more to deal with the dispute over publishing.

Albert from the beginning it had owned half of Bob's publishing, and Bob didn't think that was fair, and he thought he was paying Albert too much money. And Albert, though willing to renegotiate any artists contract for the record company, was not willing to renegotiate his publishing contract with Bob, and so it came to a split. Uh. But then almost eight months after that, Jannis Joplin died accidentally, UH,

of an overdose. And Albert had really invested a lot of emotion, heart love into Janis's career, and that really killed him. And you know, I just watched him pull back. He stopped going into Manhattan, UH, stopped going into the office and and just spent all his time in Woodstock. Um started building a restaurant called the Bear and of recording studio, and it was like, I don't have anything to do with this business. Is is too cruel. And yet you know, he started spending more time on his

restaurant than he did on the music business. Okay, So when you would be on the road with his acts, would you ever get a call from him about this and that? Or you were pretty much on your own. I was on my own until a critical moment. For instance, I mean the story I tell him the book about the band's debut at winter Land, right, so that would be a moment where Albert would come out on the

road to be there. And so when Robbie Robertson got a hundred and re fever and couldn't keep anything in his stomach the day before we were to have our debut at winter Land, Albert was there, and Albert was the one said we're not going to cancel, and Bill Graham was saying, well, I'll get a hypotensis, and so they they brought in a hypnotsus and he put Robbie in a trance and he told him your stomach will feel as calm as a mountain lake, and your head

will feel like the north wind is blowing on, and your legs will feel like springs. And he brought him out of the trance and he said, whenever you hear the word grow, all those feelings will expand. And so Robbie looked around and he felt his head and he

didn't feel feverish. And Levan said, let's go play some rock and roll, and so literally the opening act had already gone off the stage, and we got in a car and police escort to Winterland got on, played the gig and when Robbie came off, he said to Richard Manuel, the piano player who the hyperness side, put him right behind the speakers, so he had a sightline to Robbie, but he was much closer to Richard Manuel. And Robbie said to Richard, wasn't that weird? Between every song this

guy was yelling grow? And of course Richard said, well, I never heard a word. So somehow they gotten on a frequency together. Okay, so eventually you graduate from Princeton, and granted it's a few decades back, but don't you say to yourself, well, now it's really my life that I want to, you know, set the world on fire. You don't really want to be a road manager at that point? What's going through your head? No, I was having too much fun. I was in Woodstock in nine

when I grab do it. It was by this time I was getting paid a decent amount of money. I had a crew of five people that I was managing. I had a bunch of musicians in the band that I loved and who were making extraordinary music every night. And we're on the road a lot. In six nine we went to the Woodstock Festival. We went to the Isle of Wight with Bob Dylan. I mean, what's not

to like? Meet the Beatles, you know? I mean? Now, I stayed with it for two or three years, and then eventually, Uh, most of the artists I cared about after I produced the contract for Bangladesh, most of them had stopped working, and so I went out to California and started making movies and that was different. Okay, let's go back to the musical era. How do you end up being involved with the band? So? Uh, I was producing.

I was working for Judy Collins, and Harold Levinthal, who was another important manager at that time, decided to stage a memorial concert for Woody Guthrie, who had finally died after many years of of being in hunting, having hunting in his career. And so Harold got Bob and leave On and the Hawks as they were known to be part of that concert. And Judy was part of the concert.

And so I was the stage manager for that. And so the mysterious Bob Dylan and the Hawks, who had been out of sight of everybody since Bob had had an accident in the nine six, show up in suits with beards and hats and play three amazing what he

got three songs in this concert. And when it was all over, Robbie said to me, because Albert had introduced me to Robbie when backstage and told me that I had worked for Question and everything, and Robbie said, we're thinking of recording our own album and going on the road. Would you like to be our tour manager? And I said, of course. And so they went off and did music

from Big Pink. But then Rick Danko drove his car off the road into a ditch and broke his neck, and so they didn't go out on the road um after Big Pink, and that kind of increased their aura. They were like, mysterious, who are these people? Nobody's ever seen them on stage? And then I took them out to California to do the second album at Sammy Davis Junior's house, and then after that we did Winner Land

and then then we were on the road for two years. Okay, when they were doing the basement tapes, when they were doing the first album, were you around? Are you on the road with other people? I was on the road with Judy Collins at that time. Okay, sent you that personal experience with these people and the people alive, tending not to talk, and everybody's dead. Hey, how serious was Bob Dylan's motorcycle accident? It was serious. I don't think it was. I don't think he he almost killed himself,

but he hurt himself badly. And you know, honestly, the sixties six tour it was pretty crazy in terms of that same kind of angry booing and all that nonsense that was going on. Uh, and Bob was probably taking a fair amount of and fetlemen and uh, I mean he told Robert Shelton, the New York Times reporter after the accident, that he'd been up for three days when he had the accident. So that tells you something. Um,

So I think he needed to stop. And if that was the Almighty telling him watch yourself, maybe that was it. But he certainly did slow down, and and then he had three kids and four years and started painting and then started slowly getting back to making music with the band and in Big Pink in the Basement tapes. Okay, he's famous for obfiscating tall tales, even the movie about the Rolling Thunder review even at Sharon Stone in it. So one on one, what was what has been your

experience with him he was great. I mean I was not around on the sixty six tour, which was evidently very stressful, so my experiences with him were great. He would come out with the band in the summer of sixty nine just as a secret special guest artists a lot of the time, and so he was very low key at that point. Um when we went to the Isle of Wight, he was all business. He wanted to

he wanted to make a great impression. I mean, I think the last time he had been in England, uh, he had been at Albert Hall and there had been a lot of booing, and so he wanted the show to be great. And of course, as I say in the book, you know, we rented a house on the Isle of Wight and set up a rehearsal studio, and the night before the gig, the Beatles showed up in

a helicopter. No, no Paul, but but John, George and Ringo and their wives and but instead of you know, jamming, Bob want to rehearse and the Beatles hung in there and then then eventually everybody started playing you know, rockabilly, which was the kind of common genre that leave On and John Lennon both knew were you pinching yourself or who you ja did at that? I was pinching myself. My other one of my other roadies said, oh my god, if if we'd had a recorder going, that would have

been historic. Course, it would have changed it too, if we'd had a recorder going, of course. So I mean the people I know who work with Bob Dylan today, there's a lot of levels of interference in between them and Bob. And Bob is uh, let's say, not nonverbal, but uh doesn't utter a lot of words. So was that your experience with him or was it more of a friend experience? No? He he was fairly quiet. He

doesn't talk a lot. Um. I mean I had a few kind of just fun evenings in Woodstock of playing music. There was always interesting, um you know what's sucking before the Woodstock Festival was very kind of low key. Nobody really knew about it and and would so there were but A. Grossman had a lot of his musicians living there. The jug band was living there, The Butterfield Blues Band was living there. Janice was spending a lot of time there.

The band was there, Bob was there, Peter Yarrow was there. I mean it was. It was like a music town, but it was a very low key music town. So there was a kind of nice late night play, some acoustic music stuff that went on, and Bob was very good at that. He knew a lot of old songs. Okay, now you're working with the band to what did we are you if at all involved in the creative level? I was not. I was involved in the creative level in the sense of when an album was on, I

helped Robbie do the album covers. I'm a big photography collector and so I spent a lot of time on trying to find new photographers and so that was part of my job. But really my job was to make sure that the tours were booked and that that the the tours went off. Well, you know, Rick Danko had a written on the back of one of his road cases, don't bring the entertainer down, and and that's the key. You know, the road crew has to make it as

easy for the musicians to do what they do as possible. Okay, we look at the band's career, Uh, first album amazing, I believe the second album is even better. Third album really good. And then it starts to go downhill, and then the band ultimately dissolved. Why do you think that they couldn't sustain the mojo? Unfortunately drugs, I mean, uh, Richard was a big drinker, and it got worse. He became a day drinker. Rick was. There was no white powder that you could put in front of him that

he wouldn't consume as much as he could. And leave On, you know, took a lot of valium and eventually started playing with arolin. And it was sad, you know it just but this is a story of a lot of bands, you know. Okay, So there are only two members alive today, Robbie and Garth, and leave On ends up beating cancer. He writes a book He has conscience at a barn in Woodstock, such that the public tends to be in one camp or another, and a lot of people are

anti Robbie Robertson for no other reason. He didn't give credit to the others for the songs. What's your take on this? Well, I watched Robbie get up at h into his studio by nine o'clock every morning. He had a piano and a guitar, and he wrote, you know, For the first album, he wrote all but four songs. The second album he wrote all but three songs. By

the third album he was writing them all. And quite honestly, by the third album, uh, it was hard to get leave on out of bed before you know, two in the afternoon. N Uh. The idea that Robbie didn't bring these songs into the studio fully baked all the lyrics, all the melody. Oh yes, maybe Levin would add a little bit of different drum feel to it, but that's

not enough to get a song credit. I mean, I, Bob, I don't know about you, but I don't think if you had said in nineteen nine the only people who will make money in the music industry and the year two thousand two will be songwriters, that would not a bet you would have made. The musicians were getting larger royalty than the songwriters. But what happened was that as Napster and the other digital destructive forces came in, as CAP and b m I kept collecting money for songwriters.

You know, whether it was at the gap store or the local bar. They made sure the songwriter kept getting his money. Whereas if you were going to replace your whole record collection as you did in the late eighties with c d s. By two thousand, well you didn't need to do that. You just go on Napster or some other place and get it for free. And so the record royalties for a group like the band just came to a crashing halt. I mean they had been

even if they had stopped recording in seventy seven. They made good money in the eighties, and they made good money in the early nineties too, because everyone kept getting rid of their LPs and getting c ds. But that came to an end. And then so leave On was piste off. And I don't blame him. He was out of money. He he didn't have enough money to pay for his cancer treatments, and and Robbie was still making

money as a songwriter. But this was not something that Levan would say in ninety nine, Hey give me part of that song credit. I mean, when he did do something extraordinary like life is a Carnival, Robbie gave him a songwriting credit. But this is hindsight. So when you're working with the band, how much are they getting a night? Um, thirty thousand maybe right. That's what people don't realize, and that the value of ticket tells, even with inflation, have

gone way up. Now. Your book is really unique rock book in that most books are just a recitation of the history. You put a lot of philosophy, You quote famous thinkers evidencing your Princeton education. Was that conscious? Did you set? I was saying, this is the book I want to write. Yeah, I mean, I didn't want to be a rock memoir. This is a book about this period of time that I was lucky enough to be part of. And what is the meaning of it? What?

What you know? There's a quote in there from Peter Townsend, what did rock music start? That it didn't finish? You know? Uh? And to me, the role of the artists in society is very important. I I think if I think about the earl the sixties, the music that Dylan was making and others were making was very hopeful and aspirational. The times they are a change in we shall overcome, and that sense of hope and of lifting people up is something that, at least for the last few years, I

think has been missing. I find a lot of the popular culture today being very neholistic and dystopian. If I if I turn on the TV. Ever since nine eleven. What have I seen, you know, the Wires, Sopranos, succession breaking,

bad mad men. They are all these horrible people. I mean, the heroes are all bad people who screw up, and that's who you're rooting for, and I think that has an effect on society, and so I I felt I wanted to write about that in the same way that the last book I wrote about was how maybe all this wonderfulness of the Internet isn't everything that's cracked up to be okay? Which came first, though those TV shows are their reflection of what was going on. I think

that's one of the hardest questions to ask. I mean, obviously, the Wire started being broadcasts, you know, nine months after nine eleven, so one could say that political geopolitical things put a moody air. Filmar movies of the early fifties came a few years after we dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I mean, you know, Norman Mailer made the point that that that had a lot to do with what happened to the culture. So, I mean, it's hard

to tell. But now, after all, we're twenty years, thirty years past that we ought to be able to get out of that whole that we put ourselves in emotionally. Okay, now you grew up an era, and then your book is about the sixties when music literally drove the culture. If you wanted to know what was going on, you listen to a record. You just spoke of television. Everyone

agrees we're in the heyday of television. Certainly, now there are many outlets to exhibit your work, but even before that twenty years ago, Why what's your view on music? And I certainly don't believe it drives the culture. Do you believe it does? And why doesn't it or why does it? According to your uh feelings? I don't think it drives the culture anymore. I mean, think about what was happening this summer, last summer with Black Lives Matter, and then into the fall into try to get people

to vote. Who were the culture heroes that were driving that dialogue. It was Lebron James, it was basketball players. It was not Jay z. He was too busy negotiating a contract to sell his champagne company. So I mean, I think the culture, the artists, especially the musical artists, ought to try and take it back. And you know, I'm not saying that there aren't a lot. I mean, I think Kendrick Lamar is doing incredible stuff. I think Lizzo is a real talent of you know, Rhiannion Kittens.

When I go down to the I'm on the board of the America on a music association. When I go down to americani Fests in Nashville in September, there's always wonderful new work that just thrills me, Brandy Carlile, all sorts of people. So it's not like there isn't good music, but it's not essential to the culture the way it was in n Now. I attribute this to income inequality. You certainly lived through the era where there was a

dominant middle class. Starting in the eighties, uh, certainly, with Reagan lowering taxes, etcetera, we start to get income inequality such that if you went to Princeton today and you told your parents, oh, I'm gonna graduate from Princeton and be a music road manager, they'd flip out. People who go to Ivy League colleges, people who are educated have a better sense of what's going on than a lot

of the prognosticators. They realize life is hard. They want to get on the train to their destination right away. They don't want to left but be left behind. So where is In the sixties you had middle class people making music the example I always use Jefferson Airplane up against the wall, motherfucker. Today it's traditionally lower classes who will do what anybody tells them to do. We talk about commerciality, etcetera. You have a take on that, Yeah,

I do. I think that the ability of somebody to go get a college education and then leave it and take a chance on being a musician or being a screenwriter or being a film director or something is still important. If if universities are just a big funnel to push you into Mackenzie or Golden and Sacks or Procter and Gamble. Uh, Look,

there's plenty of people to fill those jobs. But I'm still hoping that young people who have dreams can take a chance and say, I don't know if my Princeton education is going to do anything to help me write a screenplay, but I'm going to take a chance at doing that, even though I may completely fall on my butt and have to go get a law degree or something like my father wants me to do. Well, I find the problem is you'll get I'll get email for people said, I'm gonna take two years off to try

to be a rock star. Otherwise I'm gonna go to graduate school. Whereas in the old days, first of all, you could live on minimum wage. Not well, but you could live. People were in for the long haul. But switching gears, Uh, you got a gig teaching at usc and you became a expert on digital disruption. How did you get the gig? What did you teach? How did

that all come together? I had started in a company called Entertainer, which was the first streaming video on demand service, and we got financing from Microsoft and Sony and Intel and a bunch of Silicon Valley companies, and we built a pretty good product, and we we went out and we had licensed because I had been in the movie business for twenty years. We went out licensed content from Warner Brothers and Sony and Universal and Paramount, and so

we had a lot of movies on the service. And then in two thousand and two, the major's studios decided to form their own cartel UH called movie Link, which would do exactly what we were doing. And of course this was all put forth by Sony which was a shareholder of our company and had been uh exposed at the board level to everything that we were doing. And the next thing I knew, all the major studios stop

licensing US content. So we had to shut down Entertainer and I sued all the major studios in federal anti trust court. So need let's say I was not going to go back to being a movie producer, and the dean of the Annenberg School at uh USC said, well, look, I don't care if you're suing all the major studios. Why don't you come and teach. You have all this knowledge about what the real entertainment economy is about, and what the convergence of entertainment and the digital world is about.

Why don't you come and teach. So I said great, because I couldn't be a movie producer. Then three years later we won the anti trust suit. Well, I mean they settled out of court just before we went to court, so then I could afford to be a movie I mean a professor. And then I just kept teaching and then eventually started the Annaburg Innovation Lab at at Annaburg, and ironically, some of the very companies that I had sued became sponsors of the Innovation Lab, So that was

an interesting twist. What do you think about digital disruption today? Well, let's take off Facebook and social media. That's all a separate topic. But in terms of traditional entertainment movies, music, etcetera. Today, what's your take, Well, let's separate the music business from the movie business, because I think they're two totally separate things.

So the music business to me, and I know you differ because I read your column religiously, I think that YouTube is still a real problem because I think the whole key is if the music business is really going to become as successful as it could be, more people have to be subscribers to premium streaming services. Uh so the premium Spotify and Apple Music like that, because those pay a decent per stream payment to artists. But whenever YouTube puts and YouTube of course claims he doesn't put

it on, it says it's users put it on. Puts a brand new song on YouTube for free, it's it's eliminates the need for somebody to go and pay for it through a premiums for service. So I think it undercuts the whole streaming economy. And because YouTube has this safe harbor. So you can never sue YouTube. You can file a takedown notice and they'll take down the song, and long behold, it goes up the next day from some other user. So it's like a game of whack

the mole. So you can never win against YouTube. And it's let's put aside that it's also an extraordinarily destructive force in the terms of all the anti vaccine propaganda that's on YouTube, all the other nonsense that's on YouTube. Um, so that's the music business problem. Well, let's stay with the music business for a second. One we do know is that YouTube does pay. So there are a few people who still want their stuff taken down, but they do pay. The argument seems to be how much they

should pay. Let's also look at Spotify. Spotify has a free tier, and as you mentioned earlier reference it pays less. If you could snap your fingers, what would be the solution. Well, I would like to see the free tiers go away. And and by the way, YouTube pays in the sense that it pays some advertising revenue, and it's it's essentially a gun to the head of every music business executive. You know, if you don't want your tune on here. It's gonna get on here anyway, so why don't you

take some advertising revenue? And the payments of YouTube purse stream are way below even the payments of Spotify is free tier. So I mean, look, I would like The second thing I would like to do is see new work go on the premium serve us is for a certain period of time and then go onto the free tier, and that might induce more people to subscribe to the premium services. Okay, a couple of things. So if we look at your perfect world, unless you pay, you don't

have access. So the world where everybody can has access to everything, now you have to pay. Developing acts might say that makes it different, more difficult for us to be get known. Philiping and acts could always put their stuff up on SoundCloud if they want to. I mean, it's not like there isn't ways to get your music out for free to people if you want to. But

if you don't want to, you shouldn't have to. And but today, I mean it's it's like I don't really have a choice because it's gonna go up on YouTube whether I want to or not. And so you know, it's it's like an old mafia routine. Okay, the only thing I'll say about, uh, you know, behind the paywall for a first couple of weeks. Uh, we tried that and that drove piracy. But let's just leave that at that. Now you're going to move on to the movie business.

So I think the streaming economy right now is at a point of somewhat crisis. So what I mean if you think about chord cutting, which is something you've written about and I used to talk a lot about, the idea was I'm paying Spectrum two hundred bucks a month for TV, internet, phone, everything. It's too much. So I'm going to cut the chord and I'm going to figure out another way to get as much content as I

used to get. So now I've got my sixty dollar a month broadband bill, and then I started adding on Netflix, HBO, Max, Disney plus, Discovery plus Paramount plus Free Thing. Next thing I know, I'm right back up to my hundred and fifty dollars, and then I probably have to get YouTube TV because I still want to get you know, sports and all that. And I'm right back where I started from.

So I don't think that the ecosystem can sustain twelve fifteen different streaming services, and I think what we'll see in the next two or three years is going to be a consolidation where you know, you notice that Sony basically gave up and said, we're not going to go into that game. We're gonna just license to Netflix. And I think you're gonna see the big three, which I would say would be Netflix, Disney, and HBO probably begin to take over the the other laggards, because I doubt

that Paramount plus will survive another two years. You know, Viacom is like a case study of how not to run a company, and uh, this is probably one of the parts of the case study. Okay, just to go a little bit deeper, Why is Viacom that case study how not to run a company? Okay? So, Viacom in the heyday of MTV had more data and more understanding

of a young audience than any company in America. They had so much data and so much understanding that companies used to come to them, like they build a little consulting firm just to tell you the MTV generation how to explain it to Procter and Gamble. So the world of streaming comes along, and the world of digital comes along, and Viacom basically says, sue those bastards. So those you know,

stop it. I heard a very famous story of John Doulton, who was the president of Paramount, got a a demonstration of ti Vo from the two top executives of TiVo. They come to Paramount and Dulgon as this famous big conference from on the second floor on the Paramount lot where he could smoke the only place you could smoke indoor. So they go and they show him this wonderful thing where you can record TV shows and everything, and they

say this is gonna change TV. Can believely. So Tolgon goes over to the box after the demonstration, starts unplugging it and they're kind of like. He says, I'll tell you what you can do with this, and he throws the tebow out the window down to the pavement of the second floor. That was Paramount Viacom's attitude towards the digital age. You know, we're and so they lost all

their power of understanding young people. They just buried it everything that they build up with MTV, and they blew it and and and and so I don't know, I mean, look, all you have to do is think about if yours uh a shareholder and Viacom for the last twenty years it was a trail of tears. Okay, we both grew up in an era where if you lived in l A, you knew who ran the major studios. Now, unless you

have that job, it seems no one seems to know. Now, we know that Netflix was a disruptor, but Netflix is a valuable company independent Apple. What we do is has unlimited money. Now we have HBO and attendant stuff sold to a T and T. As you project outward, who is really going to have the power? Well right now next,

Flix has the power as far as I can see. Um, it seems to be able to make both daring choices in terms of programming, and it's certainly got the largest number of subscribers, and so in that sense, from a pure cash flow machine point of view, if you get to three million subscribers everybody all around the world paying ten bucks a month, that's a fairly serious money machine. And eventually you're gonna start to build up a library

of content. I mean, part of what they had to do and why they were spending so much money on content was they had no library, which is of course what Disney and HBO do have. Um, but I think Netflix is very savvy at sensing the taste of its public and going there. Um. Disney will continue to pursue it's niche, which is a lot younger, and it won't make you know, it won't make the Chicago seven Trial

or you know, it's not gonna make those kind of movies. Uh, And HBO Max will be okay as long as A T and T figures out a way to slowly pay down instet and not just become I'm mean, obviously a lot of people have left Warner Brothers in the last few months. All they seem to hear about is we have to pay down the debt. We have to pay down the debt. We have you know, A T and T levered itself up to the neck to get to where it is. I don't know, and they have a

very large dividend they have to keep paying. So I mean, we'll see. Okay, let's go back. How do you decide to break from Woodstock and go into the movie business and what are your experiences there? I had done the concert for Bangladesh and I had come to the conclusion at the end of that that um, there probably wasn't a band that was wanting to tour that could support the kind of operation that I had built in terms

of sound systems, trucks, all that stuff. And George Harrison didn't want a tour, Eric Clapton was sick, Bob didn't want a tour. The band was not touring very much. Uh. I did, as you know from reading the book, I did a try out with the Rolling Stones and then decided I didn't want to do that, and so I just thought, well, look, maybe i'll see if I could do something in Hollywood. It can't be that hard. I mean,

this is how naive I was. I thought, well, in in the concert business, if something screws up, from a technical point of view, you've got twenty people in a stadium clapping for the concert to start, you're you're in big trouble. But in the movie business, if something screws up, you could come back tomorrow. And so somehow I thought it would be not that hard. The other thing I didn't really understand was you weren't supposed to use your own money. You know, the term O P M other

people's money. Nobody told me that term. So I came out to Hollywood. Uh, A friend named Jake has said, when you go out there, look up my friend Marty Scorsese. He he edited Woodstock and he loves rock and roll, and you'll you'll like him. So I met Marty and he had this script he'd been trying to make for three years called Season of the Witch, which we've renamed Mean Streets. And I just didn't know enough not to

put my own money. And I had a friend who had some money too, and so we put up each put up two fifty dollars and we made Mean Streets. And fortunately for us, Marty made a great movie and we were able to sell it to Warner Brothers. And you know, I still make money off it fifty years later. Okay, did you realize who Score says he was going to become? And then you have one movie under your belt? How did that change your perspective? And what did you want

to do? Um? I thought he was incredibly talented. The only thing I had to judge on were his student films. So I saw these these shorts, The Big Shave, It's Not Just You Murray, and a longer student feature called Who's that Knocking at My Door? And I just thought it was incredibly talented, especially the short code Who's It's Not just you Murray? And so that was the only basis I made the uh judgment off of UM. Once I had made in Mean Streets it, I wanted to

keep making movies. I had ups and downs like anybody making movies. It's hard to get movies made. UM. You know, some were good, some were not so good. Uh. I think The Last Waltz is a great movie. I think under Fire it's a great movie. I think, Uh, Until the End of the World is a great movie. I think Shine is a great movie. I think To Die For is a great movie. And then I made some things that I don't think you're so good? So was it fulfilling being the movie producer? I mean it's as

you said, it's a heavy lift. You know, you have to go to a million lunches, etcetera, and nothing happens. I found it very fulfilling. I found the notion of organizing artists and trying to keep the train moving forward is not dissimilar from being a tour manager. Uh. You know, you just got to keep the show on the road, and people will have throw fits, and you know, artists will be artists, and you know, oftentimes you would encounter

the same problems you counted in the movie business. Gary Busey was a big coke head on Karney, so was Nick Nolty on under Fire. You know. I mean it wasn't like these were angels. These are people who had their own same demons like anybody else. So you had to try and manage through that. Uh but uh I found it fulfilling. Yeah I did. Okay, now you say that you were the link between the Bass Brothers and Disney's okay and disneyse and Turmoil. It's about to be

taken over. Tell us how you become that lake. So I had bought from Robert Altman, a studio called lions Gate not to be confused with the lions Gate Films, that some big action movie producer. But it's a it's a small studio over on Bundy that had a fantastic sound mixing stage and the best mixer in Hollywood named Mike Binkler. Just one another oscar less the other night, um and so I bought it from Almond and I thought, okay, maybe I can use this as the core to build

a small independent production business. So t bone Burnett. Uh was from Fort Worth, Texas, and he introduced me to a guy named Richard Rainwater who was the Bass Brothers investment guru. And I went down to see Richard with this idea of like could we make something out of Lion Skate films? And he spent a lot of time

with me. He was very generous with his time, and then he said, John, you know, it takes just as much energy to do a two million dollar deal as a two hundred million dollar deal, but the returns are a lot better on the two hundred million dollar deal, So why don't you come back to me when you

have a two hundred million dollar deal? So I went home and went back to work, and then about a year and a half later, I found myself producing a film for Walt Disney UM and I used to go up to the executive dining room in the animation building where all the executives worked every day, and as I had come out, Ron Miller, who was president of Walt Disney in was playing poker with three friends every day for two hours in front of all the employees. It was like and Disney at that point was going in

the toilet from as a movie studio. So I was kind of piste off and I took the ten k the financial statement down to Richard and I showed it to him and I said, look, I think this is maybe the most undervalued company in America. Uh. The whole film library was carried on the balance sheet at like thirty million dollars, all those classics. So Richard looked at it, and we spent a lot of time together, and he said,

this is a really interesting deal. The problem is we own nine point nine percent of Texico, and Texico wants to buy Getty Oil and we don't want him to buy a Gettar Old, so we may have to go to So that's another two billion dollars. So we can't afford to do know another deal. So I went home.

And then about three months later, a guy named Saul Steinberg, with the help of Mike Milkin, started a corporate raid on Disney, and the Disney management to flipped out and in the middle of it said bass and Richard called me and said, John, we just sold all our Texico

sock when we're ready to save the mouse. So I went down and talked to Ray Watson, who was the chairman, and we managed to get him on a plane to Fort Worth, and we made a deal to sell the Basses real estate holdings in Orlando to Disney for stock, and it put enough stock in friendly hands to block Saul Seinberg. And the Basses paid me as their investment advisor. So I made more money in two weeks and I had made in six years, you know, So it was

it was a kind of eye opener. And then they asked me to go to work for their real investment banker, which was Merrill Lynch, and I did and what was that experience like? Interesting? At first, it was kind of fun. I mean, I've never had that kind of money before, and you know, being in the deal business was kind of exciting. We did right off the bat, we did Viacom,

you know, we helped some the Redstone by Viacom. Uh. And then slowly it got less interesting, and I began to miss the creative life of musicians and directors and writers. And by the end, by the late eighties, you know, you were you were seeing people like Ivan Bowski and it's really people. You you have a meeting and you have to take a shower afterwards, and and so I

I didn't feel good about it. And so a German director named Vin Venders said he wanted to make a science fiction film called on to All the End of the World, and what I produced it and it was just like, Okay, I need, I need to get out of here. So it's like a perfect skate hatch. And I went off and and joined VIM for two years. Okay, you get yourself into the Albert organization. You know all these musicians, if one reads his book, you seem to

know every creative person in Hollywood. What's your secret? How does this happen? Well? I don't know if I know every creative verson in Hollywood, but I I knew a lot of good people, and I had a fairly decent instincts. And you know, you just have to stay open to change. I mean, I don't know how many careers you've had,

but I've had a lot of them. And and the trick is, if you see a door open and it looks like an interesting opportunity, you should probably walk through the door and and check it out at least and not be afraid that what you're leaving behind is much better. So, uh, in that sense, it was. It was interesting for me. I mean, I I you know, I didn't make blockbusters. I made art films. And there are all of them. I I mean almost all of them. I I think

we'll hold up in the long run of things. Uh but you know, you you can't make a living, but you can make a fortune in Hollywood. So it's one of those feast or famine things. Okay, you say that you're great at hurting cats, but in terms of producing the film, you also have to sell. So what's your magic there? Well, you know, if if you have a decent story and and you can put it together with a good director, that seems to be the secret to me.

It's it's it's the script and the director. Then after that, if you get that part done, then you can probably attract the talent the actors to do it. I mean, you know, my daughter who produced you know, a lot of films more than I have, somehow manages to do it. And uh So, I I think it's there's no secret to being in Hollywood. It's just good material and good artistic directors who have a real point of view. Okay. Another element of your book is your love life in marriages.

So what do you learn and what are the lessons for the listeners. Uh, well, my first two marriages, we're uh, both ended in divorce. So I guess, um I feel I mean, this is a very awkward question for me. Somehow I could write about it, but I don't know if I want to talk about it. But I would say that I thought I was kind of a white Knight. Rescuing is slightly artistic hippy girls, and that's never a

good stance to take. Now, I've been married for twenty two years, the Maggie Smith, the photographer, and we have one of the great marriages. My friends all think we have the best marriage. So I must have learned my lessons somehow. Look, another thing in the book is you. And I mentioned this a little bit earlier. Up until you go to Princeton and you start working in the rock and roll business, you talk about your alienations. You're difficult with your father, not fitting in in prep school.

Yet somehow you give the appearance now of being plugged in in a member of the group. So what's the evolution there. I was an awkward teenager. I was small, I didn't grow till I was sixteen seventeen. I got picked on. I was a kid from the Midwest sent to a boarding school in in Massachusetts. I didn't understand the mores of kind of heavy sarcasm the way people you know, it's kind of lord of the flies, and

I didn't really know how to deal with it. So it wasn't until I found something to stand on, which was the Civil rights movement, that I began to feel like I could stand up for myself. And then I began to grow and I wasn't picked on quite so much. I mean, boarding school is a horrible experience. It's much better now because they're co ed, But in the old days, you know, you had older students policing younger students and a level of cruelty that was unbelievable. Did you send

your kids to prep school? No? Okay, So now you've written this book, what what else do you have a hand in these days? Well, I'm doing some business steals, but I can't really talk about them right now. With some very well known musicians, you know, I'm I'm put it this way, I'm interested in the publishing music publishing business. Well that's that's a conversation unto itself. Yeah, well maybe

we can have that in about four months. Okay, So, uh, you your book is all about this tumultuous era, and we are in a tumultuous era. Now. You talk about the optimism of back then the nihilism of today. Is there any hope? Yeah? I think there is. I mean, you know, as I said to you, I go every year to this thing called Americana Fest, which is Americana is kind of like the non hat part of the

country music business accepted. It includes the staple singers and sacks bold and so there's this kind of weird concnotation of Rhann and Giddons and Brandy Carlyle and all these different people. And I as pure music, it's extraordinary. It's really good. These people are making great songs, are singing

great and and they're trying. You do also think about the traditions that they came up with, whether it's Rhan and thinking about the traditions of the banjo and how that played a world in in black music in in the eighteen fifties. You know, I mean this, these are interesting questions. So I have hoped that musicians will continue to be exploring and not just you know, look for the Benjamin's. I have hoped that filmmakers will continue to

make interesting movies. I mean, I thought both Nomad Land and Uh Judas and The Black Messiah were extraordinarily good movies. So I mean it's not like there aren't artists making really strong stuff. There are, but there's also a lot of junk out there, and part of that I put

on Mark Zuckerberg's shoulders. You know, I think there's there's too much nonsense and disinformation out there, and I think people are confused, and you know, there's the information theorists that m I T used to use the word entropy, which was if you get too much information, everything just

gets chaotic. And that's probably the world that we experience last year, and unfortunately it's still going on because there's a reason people are having a hard time getting people to go and get a vaccination, just because there's so much damn disinformation out on Facebook that people think that Bill Gates is trying to implant a microchip in their arm when you get a shot. I mean, that's how nonsensital get and so we might not get the herd

immunity just because there's so much stupidity out there. Well, staying on the political element, certainly, since artists were very political in the sixties. Uh, you talk about Facebook, you talk about vaccinations. Where's the optimism there? Well, there isn't in that sense. I mean, I I think we have to deal with the fact that we have a basic disinformation anarchy in and it's affecting a lot of things.

But that doesn't mean that in small places, important artists can't be beginning to make good work and get it seen. I think it can. And so look, there's balance. We've lived through four kind of tough years, and I feel more optimistic now than I felt in a long time. I think the economy is going to come back. I think the you know, the sense of pent up demand

is is a real deal. I mean, I don't know about you, but you haven't been to a music club probably in a year, right, you haven't heard live music in a long time, and and you're probably gonna want to do that again as soon as it feels safe to do that. And my guess is by the fall, you'll feel safe to do that, and so that will make the music kind of begin to come back. It will build confidence, It will make make us all feel like, okay,

we can do this again. Okay. That brings us right up today you've been listening to Jonathan Taplan who has a new book called The Magic Year, Scenes from a Rock and Roll Life. As I said, I did read the book. It is unique and if you're interested in the perspective of the sixties in music as opposed to just a recitation of facts, I highly recommend it. And it's definitely very readable. And I'm not blowing smoke up

your rand because that's not my style. But I picked it up and I couldn't put it down, and I'm certainly interested in that era. So Jonathan, thanks so much for taking the time. Thank you so much, Bob for all you do. Until next time, This is Bob left Sex