"If These Walls Could Rock": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ishdiLEz4tg

If you want to feel left out... Unless, of course, you were there.

So what did I learn...

Doc McGhee is a sharp guy with a lot of insight, as are the most successful people in rock and roll. They may not have a CV, but they've got brains, and they know how to use them. Doc shoots it straight, only so many people have the talent to make it, there are plenty of gigs as cocktail waitresses, as support in this industry, you can be in it, but the odds of you being on stage...

And then there's Phil Collen... Who says he's got to be drunk to go on stage as his avatar.

They all are just regular people. But when done right, rock stars are larger than life.

And they're in this movie.

It's not like the Sunset Marquis is an unknown quantity. God, I had dinner there with Jack Casady on his birthday a few months back. Talk about an OG, he's got stories from before the eighties, the era when the Sunset Marquis truly flourished, when it was the destination of the outrageous. Jack's agent was staying in the hotel, that's his regular haunt. As it is for so many managers and others from out of town.

And if you hang around long enough, show up, you too will be privy to memorable insider moments, that's why you live in L.A., come here, because even though you can make a record in your bedroom, people need to interact, and most of them do it in L.A.

Not New York. That's a different vibe. The down and dirty seventies? Those musicians can't even live in Brooklyn anymore. And Times Square has been cleaned up. Manhattan is where money talks, and the bread that speaks is made by people with a lot more cash than musicians.

But back in the eighties... A musician could be as rich and powerful as anybody in America. No longer, which is why the acts sell out to the man and have brand extensions.

But once upon a time...

And that time is gone. History. Never coming back.

Life is all about evolution, even though most can't do it. They're stuck in time. Like an aged rock star with long hair and tattoos and a lifted face plying the boards every summer to fans who look decades older.

And the Sunset Marquis evolved. Went upscale you can say. From not quite a dump, to a respectable outlet. They expanded, put in that restaurant, installed the studio. Kudos.

If only the music and those who make it would take note.

Now you could do it and get away with it back then, in the last century, before cellphone cameras. You were free and easy, with plausible deniability. That's why you became a rock star. AC/DC had it right...getting robbed, getting stoned, getting beat up, broken boned... It's harder than it looks. And despite "Cribs" and the rest of the image-making machinery of the MTV years, a lot of the famous players were not rich. They had bad deals, there were too many hands in the pot, but they were on stage, they were in the videos, they were famous, their mugs opened doors.

And this movie is all about the stuff the rock stars did behind closed doors. Some so outrageous, nasty, that no one will even talk about them in this film. The Beastie Boys in the hot tub...

Then again, code of the road. We all know stories we cannot tell, we cannot break that bond, otherwise we'd be out. There's no contract, no deal, just a look in the eye.

And if you're not on this side of the velvet rope, you think you're missing out.

And for a long time you were.

But not anymore.

Oh, there are still charts, but there's more innovation in tech, everyone talks about AI...and isn't it funny how so many musicians are against it, the same people who knew no limits way back when. What we've got is a caricature of what once was. It needs to be reinvented. It's not about tattoos and long hair... Tom Verlaine had no tattoos, and I'm pretty sure none of the Talking Heads do either. They all looked like people you went to high school with, but they were built different, twisted.

Then again, that's the east coast intellectualism. Even the Ramones were intellectuals, otherwise how do you come up with the concept, never mind execute it.

But as the eighties rolled on, we got image and bombast.

So... Unless you were a participant, this movie will make you feel like you missed out, that something was happening there and whatever it was, you had no access. And it's not like the Sunset Marquis is a private club, anyone can book a room there, it's not even that expensive. But getting behind closed doors, becoming members of the club, it don't really happen that way at all anymore.

And the man who sang those words, Roger Daltrey, said he never participated, he was in a band with three alcoholics.

And Ian Anderson told me he went back to his hotel room after the gig, sans groupies and substances.

No, the people in this movie...they're different. They want to be a part of the action, they want to mix with people, they want to use these relationships to their advantage.

Is that you?

Probably not. Musicians are a special breed... Are you willing to hang it all out there on a dream? As Doc McGhee says, he doesn't want to be involved with anybody who has a Plan B.

So what we've got here is a family story, George Rosenthal, who builds the Marquis and his son Mark, who it is named for, who ultimately takes it over.

Rosenthal was as big a rock star as the famous people who stayed at his hotel. An entrepreneur who wheedled his way into Hugh Hefner's orbit and was inspired to build the Sunset Marquis right down the road and then went on a real estate spree, all based on borrowed cash.

Are you willing to take this risk?

So we've got the two Rosenthals, and a slew of rock stars. Genuine rock stars. No one said no to this film. They reminisce about their time at the hotel. Seemingly only Joe Elliott is humble. The rest...they're luxuriating in their image, this is what they do, create music and become larger than life.

But the era has changed. We can see behind the curtain. Music, like it was before the Beatles, is first and foremost a business, the names come and go, sure you can sell tickets today, but are you changing the world?

When these people were stars, you did. Your image was displayed all over the world on MTV. There was basically one outlet and people were mesmerized by it.

Now MTV is just a pawn, if even that, in the Paramount/WarnerDiscovery merger.

So if you're a fan, if you're the kind of person who lives to go to shows, to see your old heroes go through the motions...

You've gotta see this movie, you're gonna love it.

If you've got a brain, unlike too many stars today, who are built and promoted by committee, and you want to make an impact in music today, you should see this movie too... Not to salivate and imitate, but to slurp up history and use it as a jumping off point, to do something different.

We've seen this paradigm. Of the larger than life. Whether the underlying people deserved it or not, were truly outrageous or not.

But today, no one sits above... All the celebrities going to Rande Gerber's Whiskey Bar in the Marquis... Most two dimensional...actors can no longer open a movie, their opportunities are mostly on television.

However, there are nobodies from nowhere employing the new digital tools to change the world. And despite the carping from the oldsters' whose cheese was moved, there's a lot of humanity in it. It's just different.

Truly different from what came before.

But if you want to know the way it was...

This film is a good starting point.


--
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
--
Listen to the podcast:
-iHeart: https://ihr.fm/2Gi5PFj
-Apple: https://apple.co/2ndmpvp
--
http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz
--
If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter,
http://www.lefsetz.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1

If you do not want to receive any more LefsetzLetters, http://lefsetz.com/lists/?p=unsubscribe&uid=828178025010391a0f83cf7802ae715b

To change your email address http://lefsetz.com/lists/?p=preferences&uid=828178025010391a0f83cf7802ae715b