Ken Nordine And The Grateful Dead

I was at Mary's Place Friday night listening to my son's band Alpha Drop (he is the drummer) and got to talking to a sound man about this and that (mostly my experiences at WFMT from '62 to '63) and I mentioned I had just done a post on Ken Nordine. He suggested I look up - Ken Nordine Grateful Dead - I did. The above is the result. The first bit is one of my very favorite Ken Nordine pieces. And of course the Dead. The Greatest Band In the Universe (according to Nordine).

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Jonesing

And where does the term "jonesing" come from? From the Grateful Dead. And the song? Casey Jones. Introduced here by Bill Graham who talks about "all the shit that has gone down." No shit.



Grateful Dead Stuff

Oh. Yeah. A few words on how the Jones Act is hampering cleanup in the Gulf.

H/T Jccarlton at Talk Polywell

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Living Dead

It looks like the Grateful Dead will live on in business schools.

Oddly enough, the Dead’s influence on the business world may turn out to be a significant part of its legacy. Without intending to—while intending, in fact, to do just the opposite—the band pioneered ideas and practices that were subsequently embraced by corporate America. One was to focus intensely on its most loyal fans. It established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed through its own mail-order house. If you lived in New York and wanted to see a show in Seattle, you didn’t have to travel there to get tickets—and you could get really good tickets, without even camping out. “The Dead were masters of creating and delivering superior customer value,” Barry Barnes, a business professor at the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship at Nova Southeastern University, in Florida, told me. Treating customers well may sound like common sense. But it represented a break from the top-down ethos of many organizations in the 1960s and ’70s. Only in the 1980s, faced with competition from Japan, did American CEOs and management theorists widely adopt a customer-first orientation.

As Barnes and other scholars note, the musicians who constituted the Dead were anything but naive about their business. They incorporated early on, and established a board of directors (with a rotating CEO position) consisting of the band, road crew, and other members of the Dead organization. They founded a profitable merchandising division and, peace and love notwithstanding, did not hesitate to sue those who violated their copyrights. But they weren’t greedy, and they adapted well. They famously permitted fans to tape their shows, ceding a major revenue source in potential record sales. According to Barnes, the decision was not entirely selfless: it reflected a shrewd assessment that tape sharing would widen their audience, a ban would be unenforceable, and anyone inclined to tape a show would probably spend money elsewhere, such as on merchandise or tickets. The Dead became one of the most profitable bands of all time.

It’s precisely this flexibility that Barnes believes holds the greatest lessons for business—he calls it “strategic improvisation.” It isn’t hard to spot a few of its recent applications. Giving something away and earning money on the periphery is the same idea proffered by Wired editor Chris Anderson in his recent best-selling book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Voluntarily or otherwise, it is becoming the blueprint for more and more companies doing business on the Internet.

Sound's good to me.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Tim Leary And Ron Paul

Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine takes a look at Timothy Leary.

Never too comfortable with politics (he dismissed student activists as "young men with menopausal minds" and proclaimed that LSD stood for "Let the State Disintegrate"), he nevertheless hosted a Los Angeles fundraiser in 1988 for the very buttoned-down Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ron Paul (now a congressman from Texas).

I voted for Ron Paul for President. in 1988.

I got reminded of the Gillespie article by this Althouse article.

"Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different." LSD folkhero Owsley speaks. More:

"I never set out to change the world," he rasps in recalling his early manufacture of LSD. "I only set out to make sure I was taking something (that) I knew what it was. And it's hard to make a little. And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too. Of course, my friends expanded very rapidly."

By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the entire modern psychedelic movement....

He found the recipe for making LSD in the Journal of Organic Chemistry at the UC Berkeley library.

Those were the days of competing chemists. The Jefferson Airplane was supposed to have a Shell Oil chemist who grew his own ergot. It wasn't called Bezerkeley for nothing in those days.

Well just to get in the mood I have a Dead version of Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away on in the background.

Oh yeah. Ron Paul. Ron Paul. Ron Paul. Ron Paul. Ron Paul. Ron Paul.

However, I'm leaning Fred Thompson these days.

Cross Posted at Classical Values