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Pop: CD sales and digital downloads have screeched to a halt this week.
Drake only sold 23,563 CDs and digital downloads last week, while the number 1 album was The Avett Brothers’ “True Sadness” with about 45,000 copies. Now that’s true sadness.
But all was not lost for Drake. If we factor in his streaming sales, his “Visions” came in at 109,437. That was an increase of 86,000– nearly twice what the Avett Brothers sold. The Avetts, whose album is quite wonderful, by contrast had about 3,000 streams.
Drake is easily the streaming king at this point, and his “Hotline Bling” is bigger than ever. On Spotify, “Hotline” and “One Dance” account for close to 1 million streams total. By contrast, the Avett Brothers’ top 10 tracks together equal fewer than 70 million streams.
The pop chart this week was dismal for “real” sales– CDs and digital downloads. The top 10 sold about 200,000 copies. The top 50 was less than 400,000. Beyonce’s “Lemonade” has finally been drained.
The weird note of the week: a deep discount sale on Van Halen’s “1984” album, released 32 years ago, pushed it to number 12.
At the end of next week, new albums by Maxwell and Blink-182 will appear somewhere on the charts. Otherwise the balance of the summer looks pretty bleak with the exception of Steven Tyler’s solo album and DJ Khaled, who’s starting to turn up everywhere on TV.
The top albums in contention for Album of the Year (with September 30th looming as a deadline): Adele, Kanye West, Beyonce, Drake, Paul Simon, David Bowie and maybe the Avetts.
You’d have to go back a long way in the Steven Spielberg canon to find a worse marketed, lousy opening for one of his films as “The BFG” has just had. It just shows you, you can be the most famous director in the world and it still doesn’t matter if the studio isn’t behind you.
On Friday “The BFG” made $7 million. Movie trackers were spot on predicting a $21 million weekend (three days), with $24 mi by end of July 4th. “The BFG” cost $140 million.
This was the fourth film in a row that Spielberg has released through Disney/Buena Vista. War Horse, Lincoln, Bridge of Spies preceded it. Of those three, only “Lincoln” was a bona fide hit although “Bridge of Spies,” at least was Oscar nominated and Mark Rylance won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Everything about “The BFG” pointed to success. The Roald Dahl book is beloved. Spielberg brought the movie to Cannes, where it had a very positive launch. But post-Cannes, “The BFG” was MIA. It all but disappeared. Even a 72 on Rotten Tomatoes wasn’t enough to compel Disney to really market the film. A couple of days ago, my dry cleaner asked me about the upcoming weekend movies. He hadn’t even heard of “The BFG.” That says a lot.
It’s too bad. I wrote from Cannes that I thought Spielberg had captured the energy and essence of “ET.” I still feel that way and will pay to see it again (we had no screening in NY). Maybe word of mouth will push it along. But it could be that Disney has become so used to touting Marvel and animation and sequels, what was needed for “The BFG” just didn’t happen.
First, Neil Young hung up on a Newsweek writer named Zach Schonfeld. The writer was trying to ask him over the phone about animal sounds on Neil’s latest un-listenable release called “Earth.” Zach was ordered to listen to “Earth” on a Pono player, still harder to find than Kryptonite. (You’re better off getting an Astell & Kern AKJr. It has amazing sound and doesn’t look like a Toblerone bar.) It’s a very funny story. Since Neil left his wife, went back to being a Republican, etc. I’ve given up on him. But his old music will last a lifetime.
Poor Zach. I don’t know if he’s still at Newsweek. But they had just had a second round of firings at International Business Times, their parent online publication. From the reports it seems like there aren’t many people left at either part of the company. IBT and Newsweek are mysteries wrapped in enigmas. I’ve never seen anyone from either outlet anywhere. Poor Newsweek. Once it was a great publication (15 years ago.) Now it’s like the UPI. Sometimes I see the UPI logo on a story and wonder where is it coming from? Mars? The hatch in LOST?
Then there’s Sara Hammel. After 14 years she quit People magazine’s L.A. bureau with a bang. I don’t blame here. To be a woman covering celebrities must be horrible. And in L.A. to boot, where journalists are treated like dogs. Sara’s got a book on Amazon Kindle. I’m going to buy it right now. Here’s the letter she wrote to People, via Keith Kelly at the Post:
The following is an edited version of Sara Hammel’s resignation letter.
Dear People Magazine,
I quit.
It’s not me, it’s you. It’s been a wildly dysfunctional 14 years, and you’re an entirely different magazine than when we first got together. I swear half the current staff doesn’t know my name, despite my contribution to something like fifteen hundred stories in your celebrity annals, so here’s a refresher: I worked inside your London, Los Angeles and New York bureaus, covered breaking news in nine countries, and dealt with too many celebrities to remember (I know this because I was cruising through your archives recently and found my name on files I had no recollection of writing, and interviews with people I have no memory of meeting, like Ellen and Portia together, plus both leads in Nip/Tuck and that guy from Burn Notice). My first celebrity assignment for you was Spice Girl Geri Halliwell in 2002. My last was Robert De Niro in April 2016.
In between, there were memorable encounters galore, including making the gorgeous and empathic Mariska Hargitay ugly-cry (turns out she cries at like every charity-related event, phew), enduring an Oscar winner’s public bullying over an intimate dinner, facing a personal crisis at Tom Cruise’s wedding in Rome, getting basically, kind of spat on by a snotty J. Lo (okay, it was like a very wet pffttt in my general direction, really obnoxious), having fun with endless lower-key celebs like Rosario Dawson and Kyle MacLachlan and Michael Douglas, observing just how stiff and awkward George Clooney is around kids, insulting Sheryl Crow’s baby, and getting groped/harrassed by an A-list [omitted] performer in New York and Paris (that’s not to be flip—it was violating as hell. I’m still pissed I didn’t jab him in the balls with my pen).
This is just what the entitled stars and their bat—t crazy publicists put me and many other talented, hard-working reporters through. You people, as it turns out, are worse. Stupidly, we expect loyalty and support from you after years of service. We are naïve. Despite your nicey nice, glossy and chirpy veneer, some of us think of you more as the Leo DiCaprio of magazines, using up every beautiful model that crosses your path (“beautiful model”= “award-winning journalist” in this scenario), discarding them, and pretending you leave no wake behind you.
I’m oddly surprised my tenure here is ending not with explosive hatred stoked by a cold dismissal from an insensate behemoth (i.e. you)—a fate I watched ashen-faced friends and colleagues endure before my eyes during the Los Angeles bureau’s 2008 culling—but with a slow fade-out and a final venting of my gossip-weary spleen. Then again, that’s why I’m happy being freelance. I’ve survived something like eight rounds of layoffs where talented colleagues were bitch-slapped into oblivion and, I hope, will never give their nights, weekends, relationships and sanity again to keep up with an email chain about whether Jennifer Aniston is pregnant at 47 because of those tummy photos and what kind of mom will she be, when really she just had an extra burrito at lunch; but oh, wait, the rep says it’s just a rumor so there’s no story this week after all.
I will say, what happens after that is that my debut teen mystery, the one I spent my adult life making into a reality, but which, despite the schlock regularly featured in its pages and online, People decided to ignore—more to the point, they ignored me entirely—even after I toiled away for them for 14 years. They wouldn’t even give me a digital post that I wrote, sourced, and agreed to remove the name of my book from (LOL). That book is called The Underdogs.
I’ll leave you with the kicker:
As I was crafting this letter, a Tweet came through from one of your top editors, Kate Coyne, crowing about her full-page People feature promoting her brand-new book, accompanied by a colorful screenshot. “Don’t ask how, but I got in touch with someone at @people—now I’m in the new issue. So grateful!”
Paul Simon, a 75 year old man who came from Forest Hills, New York, returned there last night after 50 years. He took the stage at Forest Hills Stadium with his versatile band (including the amazing Mark Stewart) and played a two and a half hour show that musicians half his age would give their whole Twitter followings for.
But returning to Forest Hills, the neighborhood from which he and Art Garfunkel launched to stardom with “The Sound of Silence” in 1966, didn’t make Simon nostalgic. He didn’t bring Garfunkel or refer to him, and he didn’t sing “The Sound of Silence”– even though it’s been the last song at almost all of the shows he’s done this spring to promote his excellent new album “Stranger to Stranger.”
Simon is not about nostalgia or looking back. This is clearly important to him. And even though he told the New York Times this week that he’s done with show business, he also clearly is not. He’s happy as a clam up there, and the good vibe radiates right across the open air venue. For a small physicality, Simon projects large on stage. He captains a big band of crack multi-tasking musicians including several who go back 25 years to the innovative “Graceland” period of his career.
After opening with “The Boy in the Bubble,” from that era, Simon did stop for a minute and say, “I can’t tell if this is strange or a dream,” or something to that effect, about his return to Forest Hills. And then he pushed on. It’s a 28 song show, with just a few nods to Simon & Garfunkel– “Homeward Bound” reworked in neo-Simon post “Graceland” style was magnificent. A bit of “El Condor Pasa” was used to introduce “Duncan,” a song from Simon’s first solo album that has lately been revived and given new prominence. “The Boxer” was the only song that suffered; thrown in at the end, it felt rushed and lacked its usual power.
Still, the show was all about “Stranger to Stranger,” a big hit for Simon after two previous albums– the top notch “Surprise” and “You’re the One”– were poorly marketed. He played three songs from the new one– the title track, “Werewolf,” and “Wristband,” and could easily have done more. A large part of the show (about 8 songs) is dedicated to “Graceland” and its followup, “Rhythm of the Saints,” including “You Can Call Me Al” and “That Was Your Mother,” which mix African and New Orleans sounds joyously. There was also a rockin’ cover of “That’s Alright” — convincingly Presley-ish– dedicated to the recently passed Scotty Moore.
You know, Simon sings in “Still Crazy After All these Years” the line I’m not the kind of guy who likes to socialize, which may be true. But on stage he is an expansive socializer. He is more expressive than ever, and his voice has taken on a scotch and soda melodic quality that may lack Garfunkel’s sweetness but remains its own notable achievement.
He closed last night’s show with “American Tune,” a song written right in the middle of the Vietnam-Watergate malaise that’s every bit the profound anthem of “Sound of Silence” or “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” The song’s themes resonate even more than they did in 1973– rising above despair and abuse–and it’s certainly shocking that it still means as much if not more than it did then.
PS If you go to Forest Hills Stadium tonight, do check out the Kiosk near Section 4 where a sensationally talented artist, Bill Sullivan, is selling gorgeous posters for this season’s shows. Sullivan is an actual artist, the real thing, and his posters– I can’t even call them that, they’re artworks– are a steal for $40.
Gay Talese– contrary to a Washington Post story this morning– does not disavow his new book “The Voyeur’s Motel.”
Talese tells me that the headline should read: “Author Gay Talese disavows Paul Farhi for distorting how he feels about the book.” Gay says: “I definitely am going to promote it, beginning this coming week.”
He’s sticking to his booking on The Late Show with Seth Meyers, and will be doing plenty of other appearances.
The legendary 84 year old author and reporter first tipped off “The Voyeur’s Motel” in the New Yorker this winter. He wrote then, and writes in the book– which I’ve read and is quite mesmerizing– that he knew certain things his subject, Gerald Foos, told him did not add up. Talese cautions us that Foos is not always reliable. But he makes a damn good character, nonetheless.
This would matter if Foos had been retelling history. But this is Foos’s private history– a voyeur who owns a motel and witnesses, among other things, a murder. Did he own the motel? Yes. Did he equip it for spying? Yes. That’s all you need to know. Are we listening to some tall tales? Sure. But what did you expect? This isn’t Ulysses S. Grant telling his life story. Foos is a notable low life.
So I’d calm down, WashPo. “The Voyeur’s Motel” is true enough. The writing is impeccable and no one’s been harmed if Foos was good at exaggeration.
Bye bye Mr. American Pie. All I keep hearing about Don McLean, who was one of my favorite singer songwriters of all time, is just terrible.
Now his daughter Jackie has written a short memoir online. It’s startling. She writes: “My father was afraid to let us leave the house. He always told us that it was dangerous outside. Friends were not allowed to come over.”
And this: “My father could never forgive us for growing up. He wanted to keep us, his lost children, in a Peter Pan fantasy. Every sign of growth caused an outburst, a strain on the bubble that contained us. As I got older, I took to hiding in my room more and more. My very appearance was evidence of my failure to stay the way he wanted me to. Every day he talked wistfully about the good times when we were immobile, mute, helpless against any influence. “I remember when you were first born,” he’d say, “you were the first thing that was ever completely mine.”
McLean is still pending trial on his domestic abuse arrest from last winter. In that time, his wife of 28 years has divorced him. I’m told he’s also estranged from his son. What a mess. What a sad, sad story. Well, I always say, if we’d known Picasso, we wouldn’t have liked him.
Hollywood is not having a great summer. It’s certainly not the Blockbuster summer everyone hopes for. It looks more like a Summer Bomb Buster.
First, Fox went off track with both “X Men: Apocalypse” and now “Independence Day: Resurgence.” Neither of them came close to making the kind of money their predecessors had. If it weren’t for China not caring what the movies are about, the finances would be out the window. As it is, with “IDR,” even China may not really save it.
Now comes the $200 million “Legend of Tarzan.” It’s got a 25 critics score. Social media reviews are very negative. Warner Bros. has shielded “Tarzan” from New York press. But I fear the worst is coming. One tracking site is predicting a $21 million four day weekend. Can China save it? Do the Chinese even know about Tarzan?
Warner’s has two potential hits coming– “Suicide Squad” and “Fantastic Beasts.” So those will help.
Then there’s Steven Spielberg’s “The BFG.” I raved about this movie in Cannes. I loved it. I’ve never heard a word from Disney or Lucas Films about even a screening in New York. Nada. That is a bad sign that the studio has no faith in the film. Spielberg didn’t come to New York. Mark Rylance? Who knows?
Last night they had a low cost low profile screening at Village East Cinemas. That ain’t the Ziegfeld. (It’s not even the AMC Lincoln Square. Village East, in the East Village, is used for low low budget indies.) Seems to me “The BFG” had huge potential. But again, tracking sites say $19 million for four day weekend. Is that even possible?
For Disney it doesn’t matter. They already have billions this year from Zootopia, Captain America, etc. They’re the box office leader. But Spielberg might be a little upset.
Stay tuned. July 4th weekend may not be filled with many fireworks.
Hey Sam Smith. This is what a James Bond theme song is supposed to be. Rihanna’s “Sledgehammer” has the drama, the orchestration, a hook. It also has Rihanna’s voice. Rihanna is one of the few singers who’s always in the news but has the pipes to back it up. Love it. Make no “Bones” about it!
EXCLUSIVE Johnny Depp, Alice Cooper, John Mellencamp and Jay Leno will be among the performers at next month’s annual Starkey Hearing Foundation in Minneapolis. But for the first time in several years, there will be no Clintons and not even a Bush.
In recent years, the two past presidents and Hillary Clinton have all been guest speakers at Starkey’s dazzling gala in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Annual performers have included rock stars (Elton John), comedians (Steve Martin, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Chevy Chase), nostalgia acts (Frankie Valli), and TV stars of the past (hearing impaired “Hulk” star Lou Ferrigno).
The politicians — or rather their charities– have been well paid for it. The Starkey Foundation’s tax filings show that over the last four years they’ve given $2.2 million to the Clinton Foundation, $1.5 million to the George W. Bush Library, and close to $700,000 to Global Health Corps, a $5 million foundation run by Bush’s daughter Barbara.
But politicians are staying away this year as Starkey sorts out being part of an ongoing federal investigation led by dogged US Attorney Andrew Luger. There are also whispers of a sitting grand jury.
The Starkey Foundation is famous for doing good works around the world, supplying hearing aids to anyone who can’t afford them as the offshoot of Starkey Hearing Technologies, a leader in audiology equipment. Their charitable missions in Africa, South America and even the South Bronx are famous.
The Starkey reputation was glowing until last fall when it was suddenly marred by news of discord and scandal. Bill Austin, who’s owned the company since 1970, abruptly fired a bunch of top executives including the company’s president, who’d been there for 37 years. He claimed there was a conspiracy of some kind among the execs.
But sources say Austin wanted to put his stepson in a position of power, and the execs resisted. Austin had kicked a previous stepson (different marriage) to the curb, and the man had retaliated by starting a competitor. Austin didn’t want that to happen again.
The fired execs sued Starkey. Two of them filed whistleblower lawsuits claiming everything from Austin dodging taxes to the foundation fobbing off cheap product on charity cases. The company responded by countersuing, with claims against the execs including– in one case– embezzlement. For Minneapolis, it’s a nasty business in a small town.
The news came as a shock because Bill and Tani Austin, the owners of Starkey, are like the Carringtons of “Dynasty” in the Twin Cities– a golden couple on top of local society, admired by all, and benefactors of so many good works. I’ve been to the Austins’ home, and witnessed the excitement and enthusiasm in Minneapolis about them. It’s real.
But things have taken a turn– on June 21, two of the fired execs saw the cases against them moved to federal court from state court by US Attorney Andrew Luger. Luger had previously tried to stop discovery in the cases, claiming it was interfering with his own Starkey related investigations. But when Luger’s motion was denied he had the cases moved. (A third case is pending mediation.)
So now a federal investigation regarding Starkey is moving forward, with word of a grand jury that’s been meeting for months regarding the fired executives. News of the grand jury– which is supposed to be secret– apparently came out in papers filed by Starkey and Austin. That news, and the new attention of the US Attorney, means there’s no donation big enough to lure any Clintons or Bush back to Eden Prairie this summer.
The Beatles have released a video from their Cirque du Soleil Las Vegas show “Love.” It’s the 10th anniversary of the spectactular show, and the “Love” album has just been made available on Spotify.
The track is George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” If you think you’ve never heard this before, that’s because you haven’t. The version only exists in the “Love” show. The late George Martin and Giles Martin added the strings from Beatles leftovers in the studio, with George Harrison’s permission.
I went to the opening of “Love” and the 1st year anniversary, and I’ve been back a couple of times over the years. It’s the best show in Las Vegas. Happy anniversary to the whole gang!
