I have a new solo album out. It is an autobiographical work. It's called fathers sons and brothers. Here is the back story to song #3 Superbloom. Stream or buy the album at link in first reply.

In the late 1960s, my family moved from Spain to Southern California for my father's next military assignment at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino. This area, often called the Inland Empire, was distinct from the Los Angeles metropolitan area, separated by agricultural and ranching lands. When we arrived, it was still a major citrus-growing region. The arid valley, with proper irrigation, was well-suited for citrus farming. Historic orange crate art, the kind you often find framed in antique shops or on the wall of a motel lobby, is usually from farms in this region. The region also housed key industrial institutions crucial for the Cold War, including a steel mill, large railroad yards, defense contractors, and numerous military bases. It was the kind of place where local cowboys, bikers from the steel mill, and GIs regularly clashed in honky-tonks.

My parents were pleased with this assignment because my father's family had largely emigrated from Arkansas to the nearby Coachella Valley, or "low desert" as the locals called it. The Coachella Valley is now famous for the Coachella Music Festival, but back then, it was known for Palm Springs, a sort of Hollywood in the desert on the west end of the valley, and a vast expanse of winter farmland on the east end, stretching south to the Mexican border. The east side of the valley attracted seasonal farmworkers, many from Mexico, but also poor southerners and Oklahomans who came to pick crops in the winter. My grandparents had been making trips from Arkansas to Indio since the munitions plants in Arkansas closed after WWII. In the late 1950s, they moved permanently to Indio. It's funny because their house was right across the street from the Polo Grounds, where the Coachella Music Festival is now held. If I could go back in time and tell them that one day one of the biggest music festivals in the world would take place across the street from their house, they wouldn't believe me. "Here? In Indio? In this godforsaken sun-blasted landscape? Here?”

A superbloom is a rare and spectacular botanical event where a large number of wildflowers simultaneously bloom, usually in desert or semi-arid regions. Some of the most spectacular superblooms occur in the Coachella Valley and surrounding mountains, typically after a particularly wet desert winter. The seeds of the wildflowers may remain dormant for years but erupt into blooms when there is abundant rain followed by warm weather. The blooms usually occur in late winter or early spring, transforming the desert from sand into a sea of orange and purple flowers. It's technicolor, like an acid trip without the acid.

And then just as suddenly, it's all gone. Dead. Just sand-blasted rocks and relentless heat again.

This was also the Coachella Valley in the 1960s. The west side of the valley was chic, exploding with luxury hotels and golf resorts. This was when Sinatra and other celebrities came here and built their mid-century modernist poolside mansions, swank cocktail lounges, and after-hours nightclubs. Movie moguls, actors, directors, writers, athletes, and mobsters. It was technicolor. The other side of the valley was plainer but just as robust. Desperate dreamers rolled down Route 66 and later Interstate 10 or Interstate 40 to live the good life in California. They didn't have enough money to live on the coast, so they settled in the Coachella Valley. You didn't have the ocean, but you had the sun. Well, you sort of had the ocean—the Salton Sea—but that's another story for another time. These were the poorer cousins to the Californian fortune seekers Joan Didion describes in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. But being poorer wasn't a problem. Desert land was cheap, and entire subdivisions were thrown up overnight. One aunt and uncle bought their house for $8,000. People worked at gas stations or in farm packing sheds, but managed to buy a car and a house. And if you were still too poor for that, you bought a trailer and moved into a trailer park. It was a superbloom. It was an economic magnet for people in Arkansas and eventually all my aunts and uncles moved here to join my grandparents. And it was glorious for a time.

Each summer, my parents would drive us down to the desert, where we would stay for a week with my grandmother or sometimes with an aunt, uncle, and cousins. My mom and dad would then return to the Inland Empire. These visits were usually uneventful. We often stayed with my grandmother or my aunt, who was a dispatcher for the police department. It was all pretty normal. In the early '70s, when I was about 13, my last set of cousins moved from Arkansas to the Coachella Valley. My parents decided I should spend a week with them since I hadn't spent much time around them.

They were wild. I knew it immediately. There was one boy cousin my age, Gary, an older girl named Norma Jean, probably about 15 or 16, and then two older adult boys—twins with red hair. As my grandmother was fond of saying,"Red hair is how God marks the crazy ones." Indeed. Their dad, my uncle Johnny, had dabbled in being some sort of hellfire-and-brimstone preacher. He was obviously very religious, but he’d also cuss up a storm. A mercurial and volatile personality, not without his charms. (More on him later in Piney Woods)

I arrived on a Sunday, and it was a typical Sunday dinner. We watched baseball and had an early night. In the morning, my aunt and uncle went to work, and the two older twins disappeared for a while but came back shortly with a car—a late-model convertible of some kind. They wanted to take me for a ride in it, but first I had to promise not to tell my uncle and aunt. They told me their father didn’t want them having a car, so they had secretly bought it and parked it a couple of blocks away at a friend’s house so he wouldn’t know. This seemed a little odd to me, but hey, they were an odd family. We drove around for a while, they dropped me off at the house, and then went to park it at their friend’s house.

The next day was also interesting. The twins left for a while and came back with radio controlled cars for me and my younger cousin Gary. We were having a blast with these in the backyard when we noticed the police in the neighbor’s backyard. My cousin asked them what was going on. “Someone robbed this house. Did you see anybody come over the fence here?” There was a clear trail of footprints that led out of the back of the neighbor’s house across the sand to the fence. My cousin’s backyard had a lush lawn, so even if the robbers had come into this yard, there would be no trail to follow. Gary and I didn’t think anything of it. When my aunt got home, one of the twins asked for the toy cars back. “My pop will be home soon, and he is real strict. He doesn’t like us playing with toys. I’ll put them under my bed.”

The third day was even stranger. My younger cousin Gary disappeared with the twins. I asked Norma Jean where they went. "They went to Sears," she replied. Norma Jean and I played cards and watched TV for a while, and then the phone rang. It was clear the caller wanted to speak to my aunt, her mother, but Norma Jean was explaining she wasn’t home while also trying to find out why they wanted to talk to her.

Suddenly, Norma Jean said, "Oh, hold on, it looks like she just got home." She put the phone receiver down on the table and proceeded to act out a radio play, complete with sound effects. The door loudly opening. A greeting to the children in an adult voice, "Mom, someone from Sears wants to talk to you on the phone," in her own voice. Loud heels across the linoleum. "Hello, this is Mrs. Kelly," now in an adult voice. The conversation went on for some time, with my cousin Norma Jean expertly playing her mom. Apparently, the boy cousins were shopping at Sears but trying to purchase things with collectible silver dollars. "Well, their grandfather gave them those coins. If they want to spend them on nonsense, that’s their problem." Amazingly, this seemed to work, and later the twins came home with, among other things, a couple of .22 rifles. These also went under the bed before my uncle came home.

But nothing could have prepared me for what happened the next day. I may have been only thirteen, but it was clear to me what was going on. Without my aunt and uncle around, I didn’t want to be in the house with my insane cousins, so I asked Norma Jean if they could take me to my grandparents' house since I was feeling homesick. Norma Jean was always sweet, and she suddenly became the big sister. “Of course, baby. I’ll get the twins to drive you over there.” This didn’t sound like the best idea, but I was desperate. The twins left to get their car, but they were gone for quite a long time. Just as I was about to ask Norma Jean to call my grandmother, the twins showed up, each with a car. One was in the convertible, the other in a four-door sedan. I was told to get in the sedan.
We followed the convertible, but instead of heading west toward my grandparents' house by the polo grounds, we headed south into the farm fields. It was summer, and most of the fields were fallow. It was unbearably hot. We turned off the highway and drove down a dirt road through the fields. Up ahead, I could see the Colorado River aqueduct. My cousin pulled the convertible right up to the edge. He got out of the car and walked around to the other side. He was messing with something in a bag, then he threw it into the back seat and came running back to our car, alternately laughing like a maniac and shouting, “Go, go, go!” Flames began rising from the convertible, and our car kicked up a cloud of dust as the wheels spun in reverse in the dirt. I started to sob uncontrollably. The twins suddenly became the best big brothers. “Oh no, it’s okay. Don’t cry. Everything’s all right. You’re not in trouble. You weren’t here. Let’s go to Grandma’s. It’s okay.” The twins were playing the local FM album rock radio station in the car as we drove to my Grandparents. At some point Ozark Mountain Dare Devils came on. “If you want to get to Heaven, you got to raise a little hell.”

And that was it. That was the superbloom. An explosion of unrestrained, misguided young male violence. Technicolor flames. The orange bloom of a burning car on the aqueduct.

And really, that was the end of the superbloom for the Coachella Valley also. By that time, Palm Springs had already begun its decline. It was seedy and shabby around its edges, soon to be the dark muse of a series of pulp crime novels by Joseph Wambaugh. Then the Salton Sea would begin to dry up. As the sea grew more shallow, strong winds would bring the sediment at the bottom to the surface, and some days the whole valley would smell of death.

But it was fun while it lasted.

Storm clouds came up from Mexicali
Cast shadows on the Salton Sea
Here with my father’s family had settled
From Arkansas to the Coachella valley
Like the Grapes of Wrath in the ‘70s

My grandfather packed dates
Near the polo grounds
And he sometimes mowed people’s lawns
Grandma was a housekeeper in Palm Springs
Or the Bermuda Dunes country club

One summer went to stay with cousins in Indio
They were fleeing poverty in Arkansas
My uncle was a hellfire Baptist minister
My cousin Norma Jean that's her name she was sweet
But her twin brothers trouble for the law

The twins stole a car
And they took me to watch them
Burn it by the aqueduct
Then they robbed the neighbor’s house
I was frightened and ran away.
Never told my grandfather what they’d done

Dark haired Mary in the eighth grade
Her mother was from Mexico
Her father was a soldier
And she asked me to the dance
Sat in the bleachers just held hands
One slow dance in at the end

It rained and snowed a lot that winter
In the spring came a Super Bloom
The desert was a sea of purple and orange flowers
From Cabazon on down to Mexico
+++++++++++++++
David Lowery: guitars and vocals davidl.lnk.to/FSB

I don’t think most Californians appreciate the dread experienced by band business managers when they see California on the tour itinerary. California just sent Camper Van Beethoven a 2023 tax assessment for $800. CVB has been a Virginia LLC since the late 1990s. We haven’t played in California since 2019. It’s not really clear to me what value the state is providing to the band. And don’t bother trying to get anyone on the phone. No one is home at FTB. This is a simplification, but once you play in California, FTB likes to assess you as if you are a Californian entity whether you are playing there or not. Tennessee used to do something similar but they seem to have stopped.

All the true promise of AI does not require violating writers, artists, photographers, voice actors etc copyrights and rights of publicity. You know, stuff like reading MRIs and X-rays, developing pharmaceuticals, advanced compounds, new industrial processes, etc.

All the shitty aspects of AI DO require intentional mass copyright infringement (a RICO predicate BTW). You know stuff like bots, deep fakes, autogenerated "yoga mat" music, SEO manipulation, autogenerated sports coverage, commercial chat bots, fake student papers, graphic artist knockoffs, robot voice actors etc. But that's where the no-value-add-parasitic-free-rider-easy-money is to be made. That's why the parasitic free-riding VCs and private equity want to get a "fair use" copyright exemption.

Policy makers should understand that if they want to reduce the potential harms of AI they need to protect and reinforce intellectual property rights of individuals. It is a natural (and already existing) brake on harmful AI. What we don't need is legislative intervention that makes it easier to infringe IP rights and then try to mitigate (the easily predictable and obvious) harms with additional regulation.

This is what happened with Napster and internet 1.0. The DMCA copyright infringement safe harbor for platforms unleashed all sorts of negative externalities that were never fairly mitigated by subsequent regulation.

Why do songwriters get 0.0009 a stream on streaming platforms? Because the platforms used the threat of the DMCA copyright safe harbor by "bad actors" (often connected to the "good actors" via shared board members and investors*) to create a market failure that destroyed the value of songs. To "fix" the problem federal legislation tasks the Copyright Royalty Board in LOC to set royalty rates and forced songwriters to license to the digital platforms (songwriters can not opt out). The royalty setting process was inevitably captured by the tech companies and that's how you end up with 0.0009 per stream.

TBF the DMCA safe harbor requires the platforms to set up "technical measures" to prevent unlicensed use of copyrights, but this part of the DMCA safe harbor were never implemented and the federal government never bothered to enforce this part of the law.

This is the Napster playbook all over again.
1. Unleash a technology that you know will be exploited by bad actors**.
2. Ask for federal intervention that essentially legalizes the infringing behavior.
3. The federal legislation effectively creates private monopoly or duopoly.
4. Trillions of dollars in wealth transferred from creators to a tiny cabal of no-value-add-parasitic-free-rider-easy-money VCs in silicon valley.
5. Lots of handwringing about the plight of creators.
6. Bullshit legislation that claims to help creators but actually mandates a below market rate for creators.

The funny thing is Lars Ulrich was right about Napster. At the time he was vilified by what in reality was a coordinated DC communication firm (working for Silicon Valley VCs) that masqueraded as grassroots operation. But go back and watch the Charlie Rose debate between Lars Ulrich and Chuck D, everything Lars Ulrich said was gonna happen happened.

If Lars Ulrich hadn't been cowed by a coordinated campaign by no-value-add-parasitic-free-rider-easy-money Silicon Valley VCs, he'd probably say the same thing about AI.

And he'd be right again. * In the case of YouTube, it was bought by Google. Google has explicitly used Youtube as a sort of "bad actor" to get favorable licensing from labels, performers and songwriters. Google flooded key departments of the federal government with revolving door appointments...

If you want know what's screwed up about Antitrust in the US, look at how songwriters are treated. Since the early 50s both major songwriter organizations (ASCAP/BMI) have been governed by DOJ "consent decrees" ostensibly for anti-competitive behavior 1/x because the DOJ treats songwriters as producers of a goods, not laborers, when we collectively bargain we are treated as colluding on prices. This is complicated by the fact the songwriter organizations also have publisher members 2/x

In the age of Silicon Valley monopoly pseudo-capitalism, a tell that an organization is up to no good, is the use of the word "open." Take OpenAI. It has slathered itself in a pseudo-academic ooze, presenting papers, hosting "discussions, hoping you don't realize who really owns OpenAI: The same Silicon Valley monopoly pseudo capitalists that have given you all the other monopoly platforms. Start with Sequoia capital. Go from there. Now it's important for the scam to present it as something that is "open" to the public as if they are creating something..

Windowing is a concept from the movie business. That is you move your release from one "platform," say movie theaters, to another say subscription streaming, eventually something like free over the air TV. The idea is the price decreases as the value of the movie decreases 1/x with time. At least to the consumer. The legacy corporate music business doesn't do this (with rare exceptions). Everything goes straight to streaming. Essentially valuing the recording from the outset at residual long term price. In the case of music about $0.005/stream.