• The exodus of established stars from the decaying music industry continues, with Madonna signing a concert management company, not a record company, to distribute her next few CDs. Other artists, including space-heater heir Trent Reznor, are going further and selling direct to fans.
• That quintessential “legacy media” company, NBC, is buying up Oxygen (one of the last big non-conglomerate-owned cable channels) and vacating its historic studios in Beautiful Downtown Burbank. Under California laws intended to preserve media-biz jobs, the network has to offer the lot to a buyer that’ll keep it operating.The Tonight Show will move to the Universal Pictures lot, which NBC also now owns; the NBC News bureau, the KNBC-TV local news, and Access Hollywood will move to a new building nearby. The other network show still made on the Burbank lot, Days of Our Lives, is rumored to be ending in ’09.

  But by that time, the whole company might be sold off.

• Get ready for more Letterman “Network Time Killer” segments: The movie and TV industries are bracing for the first writers’ strike since 1988. The difference this time: The networks and cable channels might let a strike go on for a while, running a bunch of cheap reality shows instead of scripted fare.
• Our pal Sherman Alexie is in the running for a National Book Award. It’s for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a “young adult” novel about a Spokane Reservation teen who finds himself an outsider everywhere he goes.It’s also got fabulous illustrations by another of our ol’ pals, the one-n’-only Ellen Forney. It couldn’t have happened to two nicer folks.
• Looking for an industry even more moribund than recorded music? Try mass-market beer. Miller has already merged with South African Breweries; Coors has merged with Molson. Now both seek to merge their respective U.S. operations.The deal would turn the once competitive domestic swill market into a duopoly between “MillerCoors” and Anheuser-Busch. (The Pabst brands are now owned by a marketing company that contracts out its production to Miller.)

  I can still remember when there were five mass-production breweries in the Northwest alone, each operated by a different company.

  Fortunately, we now have a wealth of microbreweries, whose broad range of tasty product has long since rendered superfluous the likes of “Colorado Kool-Aid.”

• As the world gets hotter, it also gets humid-er.
• Ann Coulter inanity of the day: Now sez she wishes all Jews to “perfect” themselves, by becoming Christians.
• Office whoopee? Go right ahead, say many companies. Just don’t try to cover up the aroma by burning microwave popcorn in the break room.
• While other commentators wax nostalgic about the fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, P-I business columnist Bill Virgin gushes undeserved laurels on the semicentennial of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (that other favorite novel of male virgins everywhere).Let’s compare n’ contrast, shall we?

  Both Kerouac and Rand are better known today for their celebrity and their ideas than for their prose stylings.

  But both authors’ rambling self-indulgences actually serve their respective egotisms.

  Both liked to hype themselves as daring rebels, valiantly crusading against the stifling anti-individualism of grey-flannel-suit America.

  Kerouac helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-centered dropouts and anarchists to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of mainstream society.

  Rand helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-cenetered tech-geeks and neocons to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of civil society and rule of law.

  But at least Kerouac’s devotees don’t go around declaring that the oil companies and the drug companies somehow don’t have enough power.

  (P.S.: Digby has much more lucent thoughts than mine i/r/t Randmania.)

As I mentioned a few days back, I’m working to make my music history book Loser fully available again. This time, I’m dealing with a print-on-demand outfit whose largest standard page size is smaller than the one used for the last Loser print run.

That’s little problem for the original 1995 pages; Art Chantry had designed them for a 10-inch-tall page, rather than the 11-inch-tall size the original publisher used.

But I subsequently designed the 1999 addenda (Chantry was living out of state at the time) for a full 11-inch page. I’ve been adapting those 45 pages to the smaller dimensions without cuting anything.

Now for the big question: How much updating should I make to the 1999-edition text?

…today’s overall downbeat theme, Belltown’s own legendary rock venue the Crocodile Cafe is going through a fiscal rough spot. Apparently it’s been, at best, only marginally profitable the past seven years, as newer and bigger venues compete for the top touring bands. But since founder Stephanie Dorgan’s divorce earlier this year from R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, there’s no longer rock-star zillions to plow into the place. Managers say business has rebounded a bit the past few months, but the Croc’s long-term future remains to be seen.

…a Courtney Love-branded perfume? Even she’s not so sure.

My ol’ emo/folkie musician pals Gary Heffern and Chris Eckman (the latter from the Walkabouts), most of whose recordings have only been issued by Glitterhouse Records in Germany, have released their first domestically-distributed music in years. Appropriately enough, it’s a track (called “Wave”) on
Song of America, a three-CD box set compiling new versions of classic American tunes, from “Lakota Dream Song” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” to “I Am Woman” and “Streets of Philadelphia.”

The mastermind behind this master mix? None other than America’s last law-abiding chief lawyer, Janet Reno. (No, unlike her immediate successor, she doesn’t pretend to sing.)

Could the newest Bin Laden video be really a bad Milli Vanilli lipsync job?

The founder of New York’s legendary punk club CBGB and OMFUG outlived his beloved garage-rock palace by one year. In the often mercenary milieu of NYC showbiz, Kristal was an accidental kingmaker. He’d opened his Bowery bar in 1973, expecting to book nice late-hippie fare (the name stood for “Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers”). Instead, he booked the new raucous rock acts then congregating in lower Manhattan’s (at the time) low-rent districts. Many of them became worldwide legends (Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith). Others became cult idols (Richard Hell, Wayne County, Television).

While CBGB’s initial stars became too big for the place, and its subsequent regulars never quite hit it big (remember the Shirts?), the “Home of Underground Rock” remained a constant for more than three decades. The New Yorker once called it “the ultimate garage–the place to which garage bands everywhere aspire.”

I watched the Disney Channel produciton High School Musical 2, the most hyped entertainment event on cable TV since the CNN/YouTube Presidential debate. The frothy, bombastic, hyper-squeaky-clean TV movie bears only a passing resemblance to the corny but human-scale live-action Disney sitcom movies of my own youth.

At minute 41, the precise difference hit me: This is a Bollywood movie that happened to have been made in Hollywood (well, actually filmed in Utah). All your Mumbai-musical elements are there–the gleeful overacting, the sudden breaking into song-and-dance at unpredictable intervals, the almost-but-not-quite-kissing moves in the flirtation dances, the overwrought farce, the family/tribal bonding elements, and especially the X-treme “wholesomeness” turned up to fetish/kink levels.

Elsewhere in East-Meets-West-land, I present the absolute weirdest thing South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have ever made. It’s a series of totally-sincere online animation shorts, done in standard SP style, based on brief snippets of speeches by the late philosopher/guru Alan Watts. Really.

(Priscilla Presley quoted in USA Today): “Elvis means something to people because he wasn’t a contrived person, he was organic and true to himself.”

Sorry, ex-mother-in-law of Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage. You’re mistaken.

As Brit musicologists Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor write in their fascinating new book Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, Elvis was as contrived as they come.

He carefully constructed a persona that was one part nice Mississippi mama’s boy, one part James Dean sneer, and one part R&B outlaw. And it worked. These seemingly incompatible traits melded together in the 1954-58 Elvis persona, creating a musical legend and a world icon.

The trick to the early Elvis wasn’t that he was “natural.” It was that he made his particular artificiality seem natural.

Presley’s later reinventions, as a goody-two-shoes matinee idol and as an overstated Vegas self-parody, were no more or less “real” than his first persona. And they were just as successful with audiences of the time–as they are to this day, in the form of impersonators and merch/DVD sales.

So, on the 30th-anniversary week of Presley’s passing, let’s remember the real “real” Elvis, the consummate entertainer who found a way to rock the world.

(Faking It, by the way, is a wonderful book. Its chief premise: Forget “authenticity” or “keepin’ it real.” All pop music is a contrivance, and that goes for country, folk, blues, punk, hiphop, and square dancing too. Sure, the Monkees were a manufactured image–but so was John Lee Hooker.)

…to two of the greatest entertainers and entertainment packages ever.

Merv Griffin was a genius strategic dealmaker who also happened to be a genial talk-show host and made-it-seem-easy raconteur.

I’ve already told my favorite Merv Griffin Show story, about the long Richard Pryor monologue that slowly built up to one big punchline that was completely bleeped. For every moment like that, there were hundreds of smarmy lovefest chats with the likes of Angie Dickinson, Telly Savalas, Helen Gurley Brown, Eva Gabor, Jackie Mason, and Jonathan Winters. As dull as these segments often got, there was at least the promise of some opening repartee with his trumpet player Jack Sheldon (who was also Schoolhouse Rock’s favorite male vocalist).

But Griffin’s real talent was on the business end of the business. A brief outline:

• After stints as a big-band singer and radio personality, the Goodson-Todman game show empire signed him up to host Play Your Hunch, a blatant ripoff of G-T’s own To Tell the Truth.
• After four years of that, NBC signed Griffin in 1962 to host an afternoon talk show. It premiered on the same day (and from the same studio) as Johnny Carson’s first Tonight Show. Some observers believe the network was grooming Griffin as a potential relief pitcher, should Carson’s show flop.
• Carson, obviously, didn’t flop. NBC dropped Griffin’s show. But as part of the contract, Griffin got to place two daytime games on the network. The second of these, premiering in 1964, was Jeopardy!.
• By 1975, NBC’s daytime boss was one Lin Bolen. She believed in modern innovations, such as expanding soap opera episodes from 30 to 60 minutes. She hated legacy game shows with old-man hosts, such as Jeopardy!‘s original host Art Fleming. Bolen moved J! to worse and worse time slots, and finally axed it. But as part of Griffin’s contract, he got to place another daytime game on the network. That was Wheel of Fortune.
• Meanwhile, Griffin had revived his own show in syndication, then moved to CBS late night, then back to syndication, demanding and getting more cash each time.
• By the 1980s he’d successfully placed Wheel in syndication and revived J! as a sister show.
• He sold the whole thang to Columbia Picutres for $250 million and a share of future profits. He built that stake into a “luxury” leisure empire of hotels, casinos, resorts, and race horses.
• But he remained involved in TV production. He produced a kids’ game show, Click, shooting the second of its two seasons in Seattle. (He lived on a yacht moored at south Lake Union during the tapings.) And in his last days he was selling a new show, Let’s Play Crosswords.

His private life was as delightfully kitschy as his talk show. After one failed marriage, he appeared in public with the likes of Gabor and even the widowed Nancy Reagan; while rumors spread of his affections toward poolboys and valets. If true, that meant he had a real self he felt he had to hide from the world, even after he was financially set for life.

ACROSS THE POND, meanwhile, we must say goodbye to Tony Wilson, best known here as the subject of the film 24 Hour Party People. But Wilson’s achievements were too big for one movie (let alone one blog entry):

• He began by hosting a local music TV show in Manchester, welcoming acts the London-based network shows wouldn’t touch.
• He went from there into narrating serious network documentaries, and from there into anchoring Manchester’s only commercial TV newscast.
• On the side, he continued to support new music by cofounding Factory Records, home to Joy Division, New Order, the Happy Mondays, and many more.
• He opened The Hacienda nightclub, where top acts played (and “house” electronic music was partly developed) for 15 years.
• More recently, he became a political activist. His chief cause: “Devolution.” No, not de-evolution, but a crusade to bring more political power to England’s regions, away from London’s central bureaucracies.

Wilson was an honorable man in three often dishonorable professions (music, TV, politics).

And everything he did was informed by his lifelong devotion to his hometown.

He’s someone we could all admire and emulate.

…(or rather, a streaming-content company working with AT&T’s sponsorship) deliberately censor Eddie Vedder leading an anti-Bush chant during a live Lollapalooza webcast?

And in a related question, are there really still Lollapalooza concerts?

Yes to both questions.

But the company insists the sound-silencing was a mistake done by an overzealous “content monitor” employee at the content contractor.

It couldn’t have happened at a better time for critics of the company now known as AT&T. (You’ll recall, won’t you, that today’s AT&T is really Southwestern Bell Corp., one of the “Baby Bell” spinoffs of the original AT&T, which recently acquired the name and other remnants of its former parent.)

The company’s online critics have chided it for cooperating with the Bushies’ warrentless wiretap schemes, and for advocating so-called “throttled” broadband services (in which Internet service providers such as itself could speed up or slow down consumers’ connections to specific Web sites), and for cooperating too closely with MPAA/RIAA file-sharing crackdowns.

It’s not as if AT&T were censoring a site it wasn’t directly sponsoring.

It’s not as if you couldn’t get the deleted words from other sources. (Pearl Jam has put up the whole unbleeped sequence on its own site.)

And it’s not as if you can’t find anti-Bush messages online from many other sources.

Still, it ain’t good PR for a company trying to prove its trustworthiness (whilst basking in its share of the iPhone hype).

…Marlow Harris n’ Jo David have a nice, pretty puff piece about ’em in Sunday’s Seattle Times.

Meanwhile, yr. ob’d’n’t Web-ster’s continued the crowd-control detail at the orthodontists’ convention. Fortunately, I didn’t have to do usherin’ duty at a Philips-Sonicare sponsored free concert at Benaroya Hall, starring the ultimate dentist’s-office musician.

…we must offer one last bourbon-and-soda for lounge pianist Howard Bulson.

Somebody’s made a snarky/poignant collage music video to the Kingston Trio’s 1958 cold-war burlesque, “The Merry Minuet.” (Hard to believe, but the song was written by Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick.)

Rolling Stone came out with its 40th anniversary issue, full of celebratory interviews with 20 genuine Sixties Generation Icons (SGIs). In keeping with RS founder Jann Wenner’s long-standing priorities, there’s a demographic purity to the choice of celebs–eighteen white males and two white females. But then again, Wenner always was one to love, say, Howlin’ Wolf principally for inspiring covers and copy songs by Brit pretty boys.

The mag also has, hidden behind a fold-out liquor ad, a list of the 40 most important songs of the past 40 years, in chronological order. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is #38, which means the editors thought only two hits of the past 15 years approached its influence. Those are by Britney Spears and the White Stripes.