I couldn’t write all those great f***in’ albums for Neil, or have the pain that he has so he could get those emotions out. I can protect him, I can showcase him, I can make sure when it’s special, everyone knows. | | | | Elliot Roberts (right) with Joni Mitchell in Amsterdam in 1972.
(Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | | | “I couldn’t write all those great f***in’ albums for Neil, or have the pain that he has so he could get those emotions out. I can protect him, I can showcase him, I can make sure when it’s special, everyone knows.”
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| | rantnrave:// The last interview ELLIOT ROBERTS gave, as it turned out, wasn't about the artist he spent most of his life managing, or any of his artists. It was, rather, a lament on behalf of all artists whose masters were lost in the infamous fire at a UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP vault. “It’s a crime that [the original masters of] BILLIE HOLIDAY or BUDDY HOLLY or all those artists of the ’40s and ’50s are gone,” Roberts told the LOS ANGELES TIMES two weeks ago. He complained that labels were too cheap to spend the money to properly back up their analog masters. "You can yell, you can jump up and down, you can look to insurance, you can sue," he told the newspaper, "but if you lose a master, you’re [sunk]." On Friday, Roberts, a tireless artist advocate who broke into management with JONI MITCHELL and went on to manage many others including BOB DYLAN and TOM PETTY, but who was best known for his nearly lifelong relationship with NEIL YOUNG, died at 76. A cause of death has yet to be reported. "He was there for me and protected my music with a fierceness," Young wrote on Saturday. It's fitting that Roberts went to the grave protecting all music with the same fierceness, while still sounding like he was speaking on Young's behalf. There's hardly any major artist who's spent as much time preaching the gospel of pristine sound as Young. If the Times had called him two weeks ago, he might have said the same thing Roberts did, word-for-word. That's the bond Roberts had with his clients. "Follow the vision of the artist, because that's who has the vision," he told WARREN ZANES a year ago in a long interview that could serve as a master class in music management. "If you start screwing around with it because you think you're smarter than your artist, which is never the case, you'll f*** it up." He was a creative and business partner with Young on a number of projects including his films, his BRIDGE SCHOOL benefits and PONO. He was beloved throughout the industry for his ethics and his joie de vivre (or, as the NEW YORK TIMES put it in its obit, he "took part in the rock ′n’ roll lifestyle of his clients"). As a bonus, as another client, DAVID CROSBY, once said, "he is, in his managerial capacity, capable of lying straight-faced to anyone, anytime, ever." Or perhaps that's not a bonus, just part of those ethics. A rock legend either way. RIP... A good number of artists, producers and songs have been credited with inventing rock and roll. Almost all are objectively wrong—like most music, rock wasn't invented so much as organically generated somewhere along a neverending continuum—and subjectively plausible. “There was nothing else like it at the time," PONDEROSA STOMP founder IRA PADNOS says of "THE FAT MAN," the 1949 collaboration between FATS DOMINO, who died in 2017, and producer/arranger/co-writer DAVE BARTHOLOMEW, who died Sunday at age 100. "He put a heavy backbeat behind an old blues tune, and it became rock and roll.” Domino was the man in the foreground. Bartholomew, of whom Padnos was speaking, spent most of his career in the background while creating some of the greatest mid-century R&B and rock and roll to emerge from New Orleans, which is to say, some of the greatest, period. Bartholomew and Domino were as inseparable as, say, Roberts and Young, but in a different way. Bartholomew, the more urbane and musically educated of the two, "tried to burnish Domino’s music, by, for instance, imposing a structure on his songs by giving each a beginning, a middle and an end," the NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE recalls. "Fats," New Orleans radio DJ GWEN THOMPKINS tells the newspaper, "didn't seem to care about that." I believe it goes without saying, but just in case: There is no rock and roll without both of those things... The estates of TUPAC SHAKUR, TOM PETTY and SOUNDGARDEN are among the plaintiffs in a $100 million plus class-action suit against UMG, the first legal fallout from recent revelations about the 2008 Universal vault fire... CARDI B and the late NIPSEY HUSSLE were among the major winners at Sunday's BET AWARDS... TWITTER has peaked and it will be all downhill from here: Being Beyoncé’s assistant for the day: DONT GET FIRED THREAD... Under the terms of new COPYRIGHT ROYALTY BOARD rates for songwriters, Spotify says it "overpaid most publishers in 2018" and will deduct those overpayments from 2019 royalties. DAVID ISRAELITE, chairman of the NATIONAL MUSIC PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION, called the announcement "hypocritical," noting that Spotify is currently appealing those CRB rates... RIP also: KELLY JAY and DENNIS FARNON. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| Motivated by the death of rap star Nipsey Hussle, Los Angeles-area gangs engage in the most ambitious effort to end violence since the 1992 riots.. | | |
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| The documentary "Limelight" arrives at a time when interest in electronic dance music is at a peak in America. | | |
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| New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation |
| Artist manager Elliot Roberts interviewed by author and musician Warren Zanes, presented by the Trombone Shorty Foundation, the Grammy Museum and the Jazz & Heritage Foundation's Sync Up conference. | | |
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| The trumpeter, composer and bandleader has an uncanny ability to spot and nurture promising performers, most notably Fats Domino. He helped stamp New Orleans’ imprint on the developing genre of rock ‘n’ roll. | | |
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| Three female artists, Aluna George, Rebecca Taylor and Chloe Howl have spoken out for the first time to The Next Episode podcast about their alleged experiences of being sexually assaulted by men in the music industry. | | |
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| Concerts by the two superstars show just how fast the shape of pop is changing. | | |
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| Nolan Gasser, musician and musicologist, knows why you can't quit 80s music. | | |
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| Before my brain injury, my entire life had a soundtrack. Now, I’m basically allergic to sound. | | |
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| Titus Andronicus’s 'An Obelisk' roars against society, but the front man Patrick Stickles explains that it also represents a journey of self-understanding. | | |
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| I knew I loved the Grateful Dead and its fans. But it would take me 30 years to understand the Dead magic fully. | | |
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| The music business is fighting streaming fraud with a pointless new “Code.” It won’t work -- but these ideas will. | | |
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| As a young music writer, she read Pitchfork religiously. Now she is the site's first female editor in chief. | | |
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| The unusual state of hold music, which works pretty much the opposite way that every other kind of music does, for reasons both technical and psychological. | | |
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| For the Bangles, "Manic Monday" was a career breakthrough and, according to Bangle Susanna Hoffs, the culmination of a magical series of events. | | |
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| “It’s important to broaden the aesthetic of what opera can be.” | | |
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| Who would have thought that a sunny-sounding, outwardly LGBTQ-friendly single, released during Pride month with a video featuring many of pop culture’s favorite queer faces, would make so many people hopping mad. | | |
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| Chronicling the circuitous artistic path of the German-British vocalist, from her time in seminal punk band the Slits to becoming a dancehall queen in Jamaica. | | |
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| Two female sound engineers explain why they chose a career in a male-dominated industry - and how they deal with discrimination. | | |
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| Last week, the "New York Times Magazine" released a devastating, detailed report from Jody Rosen about a fire at Universal Studio’s Hollywood back lot in 2008. That fire incinerated an enormous warehouse filled with master tapes from Universal Music Group’s (UMG) mammoth catalog-much of those recordings ending there through mergers and acquisitions of countless smaller record labels. | | |
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| What’s Keith’s favorite show-opener? Why doesn’t Mick like playing “Beast of Burden?” The band shares how they plan a gig ahead of their U.S. tour launch. | | |
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| | | | | Benny the Butcher ft. Pusha T |
| | That synth loop. From "The Plugs I Met," out now on Black Soprano Family. |
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