“What kind of fucked up world do we live in where a U.S. dollar fetches 94 cents Canadian?” wrote Bob Lefsetz in his first emailed dispatch from the Fairmont Royal York Hotel, site of the Canadian Music Week conference.

Well, what kind of music industry convention keynote puts Anne Murray on a pedestal while chastising Leslie Feist for making disposable novelty tunes? Naturally, a conversation with Murray’s outspoken manager in the opposite seat.

“The cool factor, I think, hurts the business,” spouts Bruce Allen, the Vancouver manager best known for his stewardship of Bryan Adams, plus country singer Martina McBride and crooner Michael Bublé, along with Murray — whose all-female Duets: Friends & Legends was her biggest seller in around 30 years. Allen conjured up the idea after seeing the success that Tony Bennett’s Duets: An American Classics had: “You think I think up this shit?”

But he drew the line when EMI Canada suggested getting Feist on there, too.

“She’s an absolute novelty,” says Lefsetz, a music-business attorney whose emailed rants are responsible for his viral notoriety, in no small part due to his judicious use of capital letters TO TYPE LIKE HE TALKS.

And, it seems, Lefsetz is unafraid to faintly sing a chorus from the stage: “'1-2-3-4’… compare that to ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ compare that to Joni Mitchell. The iPod she plays on is more credible than she is.

“Do you wanna fuck Feist?” Lefsetz fires at Allen, who abides with a head-shake. “Janis Joplin was not attractive, Laura Nyro was not attractive, but there was something in there that made you think, I WANT MY SHOT!”

“I think she’ll be defined by what she does next,” volleys Allen. “The Beatles started out with ‘She loves you/ Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

With his well-worn department store wardrobe, mid-fiftysomething Lefsetz looks like someone who’s more likely to be escorted out of a conference — even one where sartorial splendour isn’t a priority — than being a first-day-closing draw. But, much like comedian Andy Kindler got a career out of delivering an annual take-no-prisoners State of the Industry rant to the Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal, a schlub unafraid to name names is a sure crowd-pleaser.

Lefsetz makes regular reference to being in several music industry loops, although he’s not too forthcoming about who’s paying his rent and buying his ski-lift tickets. The editorial biases are usually eclipsed by his bluster, anyhow. While he started out with a print newsletter, now he writes what he wants when he wants, hitting “send” from his bachelor hovel in Santa Monica.

Compared to most of the Canadian Music Week panelists, who are almost all beholden to someone beholden to shareholders, Bruce Allen’s credibility comes from the fact that he’s been running his show since steering Randy Bachman out of the Guess Who and into Bachman-Turner Overdrive in 1973.

Allen is inextricably linked with Bryan Adams, taking him on as a pimply-faced teen three decades ago. A fixture in the Vancouver media, Allen hosts a weekly talk radio show, and caught flack last fall for ranting too loudly about immigrants.

The verbal dance between the pair fits like Lefsetz’s battered Nikes, more McLaughlin Group than William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, as Allen defends his strategies for selling the kind of artists who can still sell on CD.

“There is pressure,” he concedes. “You have to do Dancing With the Stars, you have to do American Idol — but you see a spike. Late-night TV, that doesn’t sell.”

Done with rock bands, Allen explains his current aesthetic, designed to defy the next trend: “Elton John is entertainment, ["Hey There, Delilah" emo one-hit wonders] The Plain White T’s aren’t. Too many people looking at their feet while playing their songs, that’s not entertainment.”

Coming up on 16 years since the hair-metal bands were eviscerated by grunge, that’s hardly an original quip, but Bryan Adams has kept working — thanks to the fact that label A&M Records were willing to give Adams three tries to get it right.

It’s his own mortality that Allen seems most self-conscious of, particularly when his 19-year-old daughter has 4,000 records in her pocket, and the sounds are consumed like they’re disposable: “The pinch on the hourglass is getting tinier.”

“I don’t believe these kids have ADD,” says Lefsetz. “What they have is an unbelievable bullshit detector.” He used to hate when Louis Armstrong’s “Hello, Dolly” (1964) came on the transistor radio, would flip to another station, and then another — and it would be playing on both of those, too. Satchmo no more.

But explaining that music is for kids? “That’s having contempt for the kids,” says Lefsetz, who theorizes that adults would be more inclined to explore new music if there was a mainstream site that served as a filter: “The person who can tell us what to listen to today is going to make a lot of money.”

Don’t try and get Lefsetz excited about something like Vampire Weekend, though, or anything he figures is being championed by rock-critic types, young or old: “These are guys who couldn’t get laid in high school.”

“I call them eunuchs in a whorehouse,” says Allen, certainly not for the first time.

Since the 62-year-old Allen doesn’t have a computer at home, and seems in no hurry to get one, his idea of how to reach the marketplace is un-repentantly past.

The main theme of the hour-long confab, then, isn’t all that different than most other such panels of late: how does one sell out?

A million online “friends” can’t fill a nightclub in reality, concedes Allen. “And if your friends won’t pay to see you, then who will?”

But the record companies just want names for email spam lists, anyhow. Meanwhile, ticket prices for shows people want are inflated by online ticket cyberscalpers. Allen laments, and laments, and laments some more. “Back then you could see the market,” he says. “Now, it’s like looking through steel wool.”

The solution is finding the right corporate partnership — Allen’s sole American client, Martina McBride, turned down a seven-figure alcohol sponsorship deal because it wasn’t the right fit for her image. However, for the biggest hats in Nashville, there are still payoffs waiting to happen.
 
This new paradigm hasn’t been unkind to Michael Bublé, as Allen hails the cocktail singer’s ability to conduct a conversation as well as he can carry a tune.
 
“So, the housewives lie in bed, they put the record on, and masturbate to Bublé,” sums up Lefsetz, whose then-printed newsletter once consisted of an account of how he did the same with Lisa Loeb, and that was with the artwork of a cassette. “That’s entertainment. But that’s not rock 'n' roll.” 

Steve Jobs, on the other hand, fits Lefsetz’s definition fine, keeping new Apple product developments a secret — unveiling them on the day they can be bought.

With most of the 1970s vinyl guard out of the recording industry game — due to factors of age, or economics, or common sense — Allen and Lefsetz were addressing a crowd of 500 people generally younger than them. Where’s the next generation of music-industry miscreant?

Probably too preoccupied with trying to sell you a locked cellphone plan, with the promise of exclusive mobile music content, likely from artists that released their last good album over a quarter-century ago.

A panel witnessed in the preceding hour, The New Media & The Future of Radio, featured a group of execs primarily gabbing about how to pour old wine into Tetra Paks. Their platforms still have penetration, see — just no more cultural clout. Sounds like the current strategy is to forget about even trying to revive it.

Then there’s Bruce Allen’s longtime nemesis, Terry McBride, who will be happy to sell you a Barenaked Ladies USB stick — with the credibility that comes with the guarantee that all the money goes to them.

Allen is still a proponent of the old-school system, because he’s tailored his own business to deal with the artists they can deal with.

Country fans still buy cassettes, no? And the universe where Kenny Chesney, Gretchen Wilson and Rascal Flatts are the successors to AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Def Leppard was a recurring meme for Lefsetz last year. Allen makes some allusion to how Bryan Adams is going to zero in on that crowd for his next album.

Those attending this conference to learn how to make money can’t deny Anne Murray Duets, either, which went double platinum in two months. The disc features a virtual duet with the late Dusty Springfield on “I Just Fall in Love Again.” (The all-female lineup automatically disqualified Artie Lange.)

Shelby Lynne is on Murray’s album, too, and the idea was floated by Allen to co-promote Duets with Shelby’s recent tribute album to Dusty, Just a Little Lovin', across the daytime talk circuit. The offer was flatly turned down — what alt-country vixen wants to be seen with Anne Murray? But the Shelby Lynne album was a sales-chart non-starter.

By contrast, Allen boasts of how he was able to raise awareness for Murray by linking up with the CanWest Raise-a-Reader initiative, trading charitable contributions for promo in the National Post. “They’ve got lots of space to fill.”

Lefsetz complains of being oversaturated with Beyoncé, has heard more than enough times that Britney Spears is mentally ill, and knows none of this seems to justify the investment of an entertainment software conglomerate.

But what keeps Bruce Allen alert is the challenge of reviving Anne Murray in the United States of America. Where to take her promotional message?

“Can’t she go on Oprah and say that she’s gay?” asks Lefsetz.

No, because this is Canada, where Anne Murray was given over 3,000 words in the Globe and Mail last November to reveal that she wasn’t.

Previously on Scrolling Eye @CMW: Millennial Malaise

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