By Danny Goldberg

Gil Scott Heron’s death last week at the age of 62 stimulated a wave of appreciation from critics and the jazz and hip hop communities who recognized his unique contribution to American and African-American culture. To me, it also brought a flurry of emotional emails and phone-calls among those of us who went to high school with him from 1963-67 as we remembered the scintillating, and joyous character we knew as teenagers at Fieldston, the private Ethical Culture school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx attended, then as now, primarily by the sons and daughters of wealthy Jewish families . Gil was one of five black kids out of a class of around one hundred.

In 2007 Gil was up for parole after about a year into the last of his stints in jail (he had developed a terrible addiction to crack cocaine which haunted him until the end of his life) and I was one of several high school friends who wrote a letter to the parole board about his character and value to society. At the same time I sent him a personal letter about what his work had meant to the world . He wrote back a long handwritten reply in which he said that his time at Fieldston had “opened new worlds” for him. I suspect that his gracious words contained both genuine emotion, and a dollop of show biz bullshit. But there is no question that being exposed to his spirit opened new worlds for all of us.

Until he was 12, Gil had grown up in Jackson, Tennessee raised primarily by his grandmother. After her death he moved to New York City to live with his mother. For a couple of years he attended Dewitt Clinton School where an English teacher, recognizing his literary prowess recommended him for the scholarship at Fieldston that brought him to us.

The kid was who was and remained the closest to him was Fred Baron who also entered Fieldston in 9th grade and who lived in Peter Cooper Village not far from the mostly Puerto Rican housing project where Gil and his mother resided on West 18th St. in Chelsea which was a far cry from the trendy gentrified neighborhood it is today. Most Fieldston kids lived on the Upper West Side and Fred and Gil shared the last subway stop after school. Gil’s Mom was very strict and insisted on him being home at a certain time. But Bobbi Heron liked the Barons. Fred recalls fondly that “Gil slept over at my apartment one or two nights a week. Gil’s dad had left his family when Gil was a baby so he adapted my dad. “ Fieldston was a bastion of liberal politics (more than 95% of the student body would “vote” for Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater in a mock election held the next year) but Baron’s father Jerry was a conservative libertarian. “Gil would argue with my dad night after night. My dad gave him Ayn Rand books to read and Gil, although he was still learning, believed in socialism and had a radical view on just about everything. Neither of them changed the other’s mind but they became very close.”

At fourteen, Gil had a boy’s gleeful sense of fun but physically he was a man, gangly but almost six feet tall, the beginnings of a mustache (exotic in Fieldston in 1963) and already possessed of the deep voice that the virtuoso jazz bassist Ron Carter was later to describe as “having been made for Shakespeare.” I would certainly have been intimidated by him had he not been so friendly.

By the time Gil was twenty-three he would have published two novels, and a book of poems and had recorded three albums one of which included the iconic song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” but in high school Gil’s persona revolved around sports and a wicked sardonic sense of humor. He was certainly the coolest kid among us, but he was friendly to just about everyone. The first time I realized that he wasn’t just an affable jock, was in an English class when we had asked to write something about our own life. A few of us read banal two and three page essays . Then Gil raised his hand and we spent the rest of the class listening to him read what must have been a forty page portrait of his life in Tennessee . It was impeccably written with the kinds of descriptions and use of dialogue of real literature. Any fantasy I had that I could someday write fiction pretty much ended there, as I understood what real talent was, coming out of the unexpectedly earnest mouth of my new classmate. Not long thereafter I saw another flash of his precocious talent in the music room as he sat down at the piano and seemingly effortlessly played some blues.

Gil taught Baron to play the piano and Baron showed him how to play the guitar. They formed a rock band. Baron played rhythm guitar, Bill Horwitz played lead, David Applby played drums and Ira Resnick sang lead on songs of Stones, Beatles and Kinks while Gil sang lead on a couple of covers and on his original songs.” He was a great performer even then” Horwitz wrote me in an email,” a real showman who did splits while he performed Sam the Sham and The Pharaohs’ “Wooly Bully”. Resnick remembers, “He was like an old soul, even in high school. We knew Gil was from a different world but he was so great to hang out with. ” They played primarily at Bar Mitzvahs and dances. They called themselves The Warlords named after a local gang. (“The Bronx was festooned with Warlords graffiti tags so we thought it would be a good name and PR for the band” Baron recalls) At a gig at Manhattan College some members of the actual Warlords gang attended. “After initial tensions they liked our sound. “

Horwitz remembers,” Gilbert and I used to practice for the band at my house on Kappock Street in Riverdale. He used to play jacks with my younger sister, who was ten or eleven at the time, his enormous long legs splayed out every which way on our tiny dining room floor. I had a little spinet piano that he liked a lot and he would pound out excruciatingly endless versions of the Moody Blues “Go Now” which he sang at our shows.”

According to Baron, Gil was constantly writing songs from his freshman year on. “ He had a ring binder and he would fill it up with lyrics every month and he had an upright piano in his house and he’d turn them into songs.”

Gil never passed up an opportunity to perform. There is a photo of him from the Fieldston student newspaper wearing a silly cowboy hat from an assembly dedicated to “Cowboys and their Songs,” and when the Warlords didn’t have gigs he also played and sang with another Fieldston band called A Stitch In Time. Keith Kaufman who played guitar in that band recalls, “He was so fucking funny. Just hanging around with him was so much fun and yet he was politically savvy and he was nobody’s fool. Once we were at rehearsal studio and a guy who worked there wanted to record rehearsal and Gil refused saying , ‘I got to copyright these things first.”

Heron was good athlete, at least by New York private school standards, joining Resnick and Baron on the Football team where he was a defensive back and a wide receiver. “He had a very irreverent attitude to football” Baron laughs “He was really good but he wasn’t gung-ho. Gil would hold the ball out with one hand daring defenders to knock it away and then dodge their tackles and crack up laughing.”

Gil was also the starting center on the basketball team and in our senior year Steve Rothschild and I ,volunteered to be the “managers” of the basketball team because it excused us from gym for the winter. Our “job “was to get the basketballs out of the closet for practice and put them away afterwards and to keep score at the games. Despite his nonchalant affect, Gil was the only player to ask me regularly how many points he had scored. Some of the other players could act like assholes to us but Gil was always unassuming and had a way of making us feel like we were in on the joke.

Forty-five years later David Schwartz, the best math student in our grade, still appreciated Heron’s kindness in regular gym classes on the court. “He could shoot hoops and play but he made it that regular kids could play with the stars and he gave us respect. Heron would pass the ball to me for an open shot and afterwards compliment me for doing well in math.”

My own relationship with Gil evolved around our mutual lefty politics. It was an intense time. A few weeks before ninth grade started Martin Luther King had given his “I Have A Dream” speech at the March on Washington. A couple of months into ninth grade John Kennedy was assassinated. In February after the holiday break Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston and shortly thereafter changed his name to Muhammad Ali. The year before, Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” had launched the environmental movement and Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique “ had reinvented feminism. By the Fall of 1965 at the beginning of 11th grade the Viet Nam War protest movement was starting. Joel Goodman and I had protested Air Raid Drills in seventh grade (they were dropped the following year) and in November we organized a bus to Washington for one of the first anti-war marches. Gil didn’t come. Maybe his mother wouldn’t let him. But after that he always spoke to me on another level. We would often play ping-pong in the recreation room during free periods and vent our frustration with those in power. As 11th Grade was ending, in June of 1966,Stokely Carmichael coined the phrase “black power.”

Parallel to the politics, we were getting drawn into the hippie idea before it became commercialized. Pot and acid were present by eleventh grade along with hints of Eastern philosophy and there was an inchoate sense that there was some more cosmic and enlightened way that human beings could relate to each other and to the universe, heady stuff for teenagers.

Despite his popularity, there was always a degree of ambivalence in Gil’s relationship with Fieldston. On the first day of ninth grade Heron, Baron and Resnick were ushered in to see the principal Luther Tate ,who condescendingly told Gil “We brought you here because we want to expand the scope of the Fieldston community so be yourself.” Baron cringed and on the way out muttered “What an asshole,” and Gil cracked up, dissipating the awkward tension.

One day Baron and Heron were in an ethics class “ and some guy started saying that being poor was being one of the people, some ridiculous rap.” Gil, who was ordinarily extremely disciplined in class, angrily interrupted.” Listen ,man ,I’ve been poor and I want to be rich. I want to do what I want when I want. You can be poor”

At an assembly in the Spring of Senior year in 1967, Gil sang the Bob Dylan song “Like A Rolling Stone” backed by Bill Horwitz on acoustic guitar. “It was one of the few times he didn’t sit behind the piano,” Horwitz wrote in an email, “I think he had some things he wanted to say directly to the audience and he was never afraid to say what he believed. It was quite a moment when he got to the line ‘you’ve been to the finest schools all right, Miss Lonely.’ Being at Fieldston was a very complex experience for him to say the least.”

When seniors were asked to select a quote to go with their photo in the yearbook Gil chose a line from an ad then running in the New York City subways “Young enough to ride for free? Young enough to ride your knee!” Was it an oblique reference to having gotten a scholarship and some feeling of inhibitions that came with it?

Heron attended the historically black Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania where one of Gil’s idols, Langston Hughes, had studied. It was an extraordinary time in black culture. (The very word “black” was replacing “colored” and “Negro.”). The environment triggered an explosion of creativity in Gil that would form his persona for the rest of his life. Rock and roll was jettisoned and he immersed himself in jazz and blues, bonding with several musicians, including Brian Jackson ,who would play with him on and off for decades. When the radical poetry group The Last Poets played at Lincoln, Gil had a vision of how he could synthesize his talents and his visions.

At the same time he stayed in close touch with Baron and his dad. Early in his Sophomore year dropped out of college to write his first novel,” The Vulture,” which was published in 1970. In 1996 when the novel was re-issued he wrote a new forward: “It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that my life depended on completing “The Vulture” and having it accepted for publication. There was a special man, a very gentle man, the father of a High School classmate of mine who I believe was the person ‘the spirits’ helped me connect with somehow.“ Jerry Baron had gotten Gil’s manuscript to the publisher and the dedication of his first book read “To Mr. Jerome Baron without whom the “bird” would never have gotten off the ground.“

Gil never had the commercial killer instinct of Bob Dylan but he was as influential and as stubbornly unique. Abiodun Oyewole of the Last Poets called Gil “a prince that was on his own.” Most of Gil’s inspiration came from John Coltrane and Lightnin Hopkins, from Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka ,from Fannie Lou Hamer and Malcom X and Martin Luther King and other African-American geniuses. But as the years went by I was convinced that there remained a residue of the hippie idea in his approach to his art , mysticism and politics.

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised “ has Malcom X’s fierceness, and ridiculed the shallowness of much of popular culture, but its subtle intensity also contained the message, as Heron often pointed out in later years, that any true revolution must take place inside yourself. The proto-typical hippie rock radio station, KSAN in San Francisco must have felt those vibes when they played his early albums which led to several bookings at the Fillmore.

Gil was always gracious when Fieldston kids would show up at gigs. Ira Resnick saw him in San Francisco in the nineteen seventies when Gil was playing with Brian Jackson as a jazz duo. “We got high and hung out all night. He couldn’t have been friendlier. There was zero star trip” Keith Kaufman had a similar experience at shows in California finding his sense of humor livelier than ever. “We laughed all night.

I was the only other person from our class who had gotten into the music business but as a journalist and PR guy I stuck to the rock and roll culture Although I had watched Gil’s growth as an artist with awe I didn’t re-connect with him until 1979 when I co-produced and co-directed the film “No Nukes” which chronicled a series of concerts that raised money for groups opposed to nuclear power plants. (It was a close to the hippie idea as the rock culture came up with in the late seventies organized primarily by Jackson Brown, Graham Nash and Bonnie Raitt). PR guy David Fenton and I suggested Gil who was one of the few artists who had actually written a song about a near nuclear meltdown called “We Almost Lost Detroit”. I had no idea if Gil would even remember me given the passage of more than a decade and his iconic status but when I entered the dressing room at Madison Square Garden he warmly embraced me and we briefly joked about high school before he did a mesmerizing set. I included “We Almost Lost Detroit” in the film and it was one of the highlights . One of the editors of “No Nukes” was Joel Goodman who had also gone to school with us. We all were all old men of 29 or 30 years old.

Once in New York when Gil didn’t have an answering machine Baron went to see him in his neighborhood in Harlem ” On the street he was known as Scotty. If you asked for Gil they didn’t know who you meant. He was sitting with a bunch of guys and it was the one time I felt he was a little embarrassed to be seen with someone from High School. Later he wrote a song saying “When I’m with my boys—you slide’.

But the friendship endured. Baron become a geologist and his work often brought him to cities where Gil was playing clubs. “I’d see him at half-time in between sets. He was a good friend. He was warm and wise and I always listened to him carefully. Every once in awhile he would come up with something that was so profound. But he was living in a different world than me. “Baron noticed that at every gig there were local activists from food banks or battered women’s shelters asking Gil for help that he was in no position to give. And as the years went by Gil seemed more beaten down by the music business, complaining once “They always got some slick nigger giving me a headache telling me to sing songs from latest album.”

One time Baron and Heron were catching up on each other’s families” when suddenly Gil looked at the time, ran over to an ice machine and stuck his head in the ice, jumped up and ran out on stage to cheers just seconds after we’d been hanging out. I realized again that he was in a different reality.”

For a time, Gil’s talent seemed to conquer all. His song “B-Movie” released in 1981 at the peak of sixties revisionism, has a fearless moral clarity and remains one of the most trenchant commentaries on the election of Ronald Reagan. But soon, one additional “reality” was the hold that crack had gotten on Gil Scott-Heron. From 1970-82 he made thirteen albums. He would not make another for eleven years . “Spirits” released in 1993, included “The Other Side” a searing description of drug addiction.

Many alcoholics and junkies have found solace in twelve step programs. Neither fear nor therapy nor spiritual practice worked for Gil. He was arrested several times and jailed more than once, the last time in 2005. He’d been arrested for possession of cocaine and he told the judge, who was a liberal, that he had already committed to a European tour and that it would hurt a lot of people if it was cancelled, recalls Baron. “The judge said he could do the tour but that as soon as he got back he had to go to rehab or else she would have him sent to prison. We had a beer when he got back from Europe and Gil was joking around about it. He thought that with all the crime that police had to worry about they wouldn’t bother coming for him. A few nights later they broke into his apartment at four in the morning.”

Gil was sent to a prison up in northern New York State. “He was such a thin guy I was worried he would be cold up there” says Baron so he asked if he could send him silk underwear . Prison officials said it was OK as long as they weren’t gang colors. Baron also sent his friend a leather bound book with writing paper. “I slipped into the binding a photo of him when he was 16 . “ After Heron was released he told Baron “You nailed my ass—I was lying in my bunk. Time is forever in jail. For a while the book was so nice I didn’t want to write in it but finally I picked it up—and that picture fell out and it fell on me and I could step inside my head when I was that age. It gave me some perspective on all the places the mind has been and I started writing again.”

Even after that jail stint and the loss of several teeth Heron never stopped using drugs. “ I went to SOBs after he got out and saw him at half time and he was wired. He was friendly but his leg was shaking like crazy the whole time. “

In 2010 XL Records released “I’m New Here” Gil’s first album in 16 years and his last. In an interview with Jaime Byng in the Observer of London Gil repeated one of his life-long themes “If someone comes to you and asks for help, and you can help them, why wouldn’t you? You have been put in the position to be able to help this person.”

There are a million junkies, crackheads and drunks. Very few prophetic geniuses.When he was nineteen, with awful clairvoyance, Gil wrote a poem as an intro to “The Vulture.

Standing in the ruins of another black man’s life.
Or flying through the valley separating day and night.
‘I am death’ cried the vulture,’ For the people of the Light.

So if you see the vulture coming, flying circles in your mind.
Remember there is no escaping for he will follow close behind.
Only promise me a battle for your soul and mine.

God speed and thank you Gil Heron. Life lost. Battle won.

I've recently written two articles on Alternet.org about the left, culture, etc. Links are below.

You can read my new article "Mad Men vs Math Men" on The Nation website here. It discusses what the left should do post election.

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For information about my company Gold Village Entertainment and our clients, please go to Goldve.com. The following is a piece I wrote for the web site Downwithtyranny.com that also ran on alternet.org following the announcement that Air America Radio was going into Chapter 7 bankruptcy:

"AIR AMERICA RIP"

By: Danny Goldberg

I think that the New York Times got it exactly wrong on Monday in declaring that “the enduring legacy of Air America’s failure is that political media from either side of the aisle is more successful when run as a business instead of a crusade”

That very attitude is what has hobbled the growth of liberal talk radio but conservatives have never thought about media that way and they still don’t. The week before Air America shut its doors the Rev James Dobson announced that he was starting a new radio show with his son Ryan, a thirty-nine year tattooed surfer who shares his father’s ultra-conservative views. On Dobson’s Facebook page he asked his supporters to fund the new show “Your participation will be greatly appreciated, especially during this time when startup costs will be very expensive. The budget for the first year, including the costs of radio airtime, will be about two million dollars.“

Conservatives believe in doing whatever it takes to promote their ideas. Richard Viguerie, viewed as one of the architects of the modern conservative movement, wrote a book in 2004 called ‘America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media To Take Power” in which he explains how the right wing used talk radio among other tools. Viguerie stresses that conservatives understand that ideological change does not usually occur over night, that it takes patience and long term thinking to build a movement.

In the early nineteen seventies the Washington Post and New York Times were instrumental in helping expose the Watergate scandal and publishing the Pentagon papers. Conservatives felt that liberals had an advantage in setting the agenda because of the influence of New York and D.C, newspapers on the national media. In 1976 Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post and it has lost money every year since, the total loss estimated to be more than half a billion dollars. In 1983, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon created the Washington Times, which has also lost money every year. Widely published reports place Moon’s losses at over $1 billion on the Times and other political media including a purchase the venerable wire service UPI. These money losing properties have put dozens of conservatively slanted stories onto the national radar screen, altered the framing of every important political issues, and nurtured virtually every right wing pundit who now thrive as TV talking heads.

More recently, Phillip Anschutz bought the money losing Weekly Standard from Murdoch and announced plans to invest in more conservative media and his fellow billionaire and former Republican Treasury Secretary Pete Petersen started a digital news service called The Fiscal Times.

The fatal flaw in Air America’s genetic code was the pretense that liberal talk radio was a great business opportunity, that progressives could have their cake and eat it too, do well by doing good, make big salaries and get a great return on investment while also pursuing an ideological agenda. Sure, every once in awhile political media like Michael Moore’s movies or Rush Limbaugh’s radio show will make money, but for those interested in influencing public opinion, media in all venues is vital whether they make money or not.

Air America’s lesser-known competitor, Democracy Radio had a more coherent rationale. It was set up as a non-profit and it spawned the Ed Schultz Show and the Stephanie Miller show both of which survive but which may never have been launched were it not for Democracy Radio’s initial funding. (Democracy Radio folded in 2006 as a result of a lack of financial support from progressive donors).

Some blame bad management for the failure of both Air America and Democracy Radio and since I spent one unhappy year midway through Air America’s life as its CEO I suppose I am one of a dozen or so who are in that category. But if progressives really wanted to address talk radio they could have started competing companies with different management . Instead, most of the monied progressive community did the opposite of their conservative counterparts and bought into the notion that media should stand or fall based on media market forces.

It’s not that the left doesn’t have money to spend on communication. Labor unions, public interest groups, and Internet activists have raised and spent tens of millions of dollars on TV spots and digital marketing even during non election years.

138 million people commute to and from work in automobiles in which they can look neither at computer or TV screens .For around one third of them, or 48 million, AM talk radio is their entertainment of choice. Of the top 10 AM talk radio shows, 9 are hosted by extreme conservatives giving the right wing a captive audience of around 40 million listeners a week. at least 7 times greater than the combined audience for Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. Talk radio’s audience dwarfs that of every other category in the news political arena including the network news and Sunday shows, NPR’s public affairs shows, and political websites.

It was not pre-ordained that all of the millions of people who identify with the “tea-party” movement would believe the conservative narrative that the economic ills afflicting the middle class are the result of liberalism. But given that tens of millions of them had no alternative explanations or solutions, it is not surprising that conservative ideas and candidates are ascendant.

Many progressives blame the current political climate on the Obama administration, and I disagree with a number of Obama’s decisions including his Afghanistan policy. But why should progressives expect any President to lead the way on our issues given the nature of our political system? At the outset of the Obama administration there were dozens of columns reminding progressives that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had told the liberal activists of his day to “make” him initiative progressive programs by mobilizing public opinion. Instead, most of the modern left spent the last year talking to itself while conservatives convinced millions of people that global warming is a hoax, that torture in required to keep America safe, that non-millionaires in Canada and Europe have worse health care than their American counterparts. The right wing could never have convinced 45% of Americans that the Democrats wanted death panels if their outreach was limited to Sarah Palin’s Facebook page and the three million people a night who watch Fox’s highest rated shows.

Perhaps the major liberal donors have become confused because they became accustomed to focus groups and polling are very useful tools in predicting short-term public reaction to political messages. They can tell you if a particular TV spot will turn off swing voters two weeks before an election. But long-term political ideas have a more complex and uncertain creative path. Conservatives understand the need to focus on both long and short-term political communication.

Or maybe media advisors and consultants who advise labor unions and an assortment of progressive groups on media strategy are culturally uncomfortable with the crude language of AM talk radio and other mass culture, or are often so nervous about losing control of” their “message.” Whatever the reasons, the theory of leaving political media to the marketplace has enabled a status quo in which one third of the American public are never exposed to progressive ideas or even to facts that are incompatible with the right-wing narrative.

To be fair---the radio business has an idiosyncratic culture that is hard for outsiders to grasp. In 1987 when the Reagan administration ended the Fairness Doctrine the cultural landscape was such that many conservatives felt under-served by the mainstream media of the time and Rush Limbaugh was able to use his considerable broadcasting skills to attract millions of them as an audience and revive the economic fortunes of AM radio stations around the country. At the same time, as described in Viguerie’s book, conservatives focused on small market stations for religious and political purposes and helped create an infrastructure that continues to serve them well. Traditional radio stations attract audiences based on “formats” that grouped together demographic cohorts. Thus music radio is either R&B, pop, rock, country or various versions or hybrids of those genres. A listener to a country station would not want to hear a Metallica song programmed sandwiched in between Toby Keith and Sugarland. While liberals ignored AM radio, viewing it as a passé medium for troglodytes, conservatives honed their skill at talk radio and by the nineties, most liberal moderate talk hosts had been taken off the air because they did not fit into what was now the “conservative talk ” format.

Many of the radio executives who programmed the right wing radio stations of produced the shows did not agree with their politics but, like most business people, they gravitated to the easiest path to make the most money the quickest. These “radio people” understandably were not going to be motivated by an ideological agenda, even one that they agreed with. But activists and public interest groups are supposed to be motivated by ideology.

When Air America and Democracy Radio launched in 2003 they faced, not only a lack of liberal talent with the broadcasting chops to entertain radio listeners, but also a lack of stations on which to place programs even by someone with the celebrity of Al Franken. One of the main reasons a sizeable investment was needed (though nothing like the scale of the investment made by Murdoch and Moon in money losing right wing newspapers) was the need to create enough programming- to fill up the time of stations 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so as to justify a “progressive talk” formatted station.

Conservative talk had a 17 year head start and so there just weren’t enough experienced broadcasters with progressive politics to create a format. Identifying, developing and marketing talent takes a lot of experimentation with a predictable amount of failures in order to establish successes. This is part of the reason it took even an ultimately successful company like Fox News years to turn a profit.

Another need for investment was to market a brand new format with lots of personalities new to radio and to give incentives for radio station owners in smaller markets to give the new format a chance.

There are some who claim that liberals are just not good at talk radio. Right-wingers accuse liberal talkers of being elitists who don’t understand radio entertainment. Some on the left feel that the talk radio audience demands a simplistic angry polarizing tone that is incompatible with progressive values. Both theories are nonsense. I am an unabashed Al Franken fan, but even if one disliked his style or politics, the fact is that his show attracted several million listeners a week on AM talk radio stations and because of the under-development of the liberal talk format, it could only be heard, at its peak, by around half of America’s radio listeners. Ed Schultz has reached a comparable number and he too has not been able to get broadcast in markets where “conservative talk” is the only game in town. The apex of Air America’s penetration was in 2005-2006 and it not only helped broaden the audience for progressive bloggers who were regular guests, but it gave activists like Cindy Sheehan access to Americans who do not listen to the Amy Goodman Show or read The Nation. Just as conservative investment in the intellectual world eventually produced legitimate conservative academics and writers, so would liberal investment in the populist media result in more Rachel Maddows.

In Viguerie’s final chapter he wrote that Air America “was the most ambitious effort by liberals so far to compete with conservatives in the alternative media marketplace. “ He nervously acknowledged Air America for “turning to articulate entertainers with liberal political convictions” But he was confident that it would not succeed because of what he called liberals “fear of long-term commitment,” adding “Conservatives didn’t build their alternate media empire overnight. It was the result of decades of hard work.” Viguerie presciently observed that Air America had “inadequate capitalization. Starting a network with clout will cost a lot more than the $20-30 million they claim to have raised. And to start to expect to make a profit in just four years in unrealistic. Ask Rupert Murdoch.”

Although the earliest and wackiest group of Air America owners overspent on a few items like studios and initial salaries, within months the primary characteristic of Air America was a lack of cash for marketing, for affiliate growth and for talent development. The pressure from wealthy liberals was not to create a long-term strategy as conservatives had done but to show a business model that would turn a profit in a year or two

Thus, several ill-fated iterations of Air America were driven by delusional projections of traditional business viability and consequently misled themselves and staff regarding what resources would be available and then inflicted onerous cuts on a business that was already underfunded. During my brief tenure I got thousands of hate mails form fans of comedian Marc Maron whose morning drive time show (the time when most commuters listen) was cancelled to move Rachel Maddow from the obscure 5 AM time slot into the morning drive. Given her talent and discipline it is likely that Rachel Maddow’s success was pre-ordained, but there is no question that the audience she developed in drive time was one of the assets she brought to MSNBC. However if there hadn’t been such a cash crunch, there would have been a way of developing Maddow and keeping Maron and also giving more talent a real chance.

By 2004, the radio business, after years of robust growth that made it a darling of investment bankers, was beginning to feel the erosion of its business model experienced by all “old media.” The idea that conventional investors would find a liberal talk syndication company a sexy investment was laughable. Contrary to published reports, there were and are numerous “radio people” involved in running various versions of progressive radio but they all found that it was not a particular good business based on pure economics. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t and isn’t a good political investment for progressives whose agenda is to battle conservative ideology.

Thom Hartmann, Bill Press, Randy Rhodes, Stephanie Miller, Ron Reagan, and many other liberal radio survivors deserve all the credit in the world for their resourcefulness and heir commitment. But the broader progressive community should not be leaving them to a Darwinian world while the likes of James Dobson continue to raise ideological money to further broaden the hold of right wing mythology on the minds of 48 million commuters who happen to like talk radio’s rhythms.

In 2007 I returned to management with the formation of Gold Village Entertainment (GVE), which initially consisted of myself, and Jesse Bauer representing Steve Earle and Allison Moorer. Since then we have added four more executives, Brady Brock, Cyndy Villano, Laura Benanchietti, and Toy Vano.

The company’s website Goldve.com has more info on the company and contains a complete client list and info on each of the artists we represent. As of October, 2009 this list consists of:

The Cranberries, just reunited. The group will be touring North America November-December,2009 and Europe starting in late February. GVE also manages Cranberries lead singer Dolores O’Riordon whose current album The Journey is out on Rounder Records in North America and Cooking Vinyl Records elsewhere.

Steve Earle who is touring worldwide in the wake of the release of his album Townes.

Allison Moorer recording a new album for Ryko Records, which will be released in early 2010. She also appears and sings in the forthcoming film We The People.

The Hives who are commencing writing for their next album, expected out in spring, 2010.

Rickie Lee Jones, just signed to Concord Records. Her new album “Balm In Gilead” will be released November, 2009. (co-managed by Peter Wark)

Tom Morello whose new group Street Sweeper Social Club with Boots Riley of The Coup is getting attention world-wide.

The Old 97s who will have a new album out in 2010. GVE also manages Old 97s lead signer Rhett Miller who will be touring in Europe with Steve Earle

Ben Lee, who recently re-formed his first group Noise Addict with Lou Barlow and released an album free on the Internet.

Care Bears On Fire whose first album Get Over It is out on S-Curve Records. They are about to appear in an episode of the Nickelodeon series “True Jackson” playing themselves and performing their song “Everybody Else”

Joseph Arthur who is performing regularly at the City Winery in New York and working on songs for a new album. (co-managed by Peter Wark)

David Broza (just finished recording an album of new songs David wrote based on previously unpublished poems by the late Townes Van Zandt. Steve Greenberg’s S-Curve Records will be releasing in early 2010.

The Grates an Australian group ,now touring North America whose current album Teeth Lost Hearts Won if gold in Australia and just been released in North America by Thirty Tigers Records.

Ian Hunter, whose current album Man Overboard has gotten great reviews .Ian has just appeared to adoring crowds at the Mott The Hoople re-union shows in London.

School of Seven Bells finishing an extensive world tour and beginning work on a new album, which will be released by Vagrant Records in early 2010. (GVE co-manages School of Seven Bells with Ryan Gentles company Wizkid Management).

A-Camp is a group consisting of Nina Persson former lead singer of The Cardigans, Nathan Larson, formerly of Shudder To Think, and Niclas Frisk. Their most recent album, Colonia was released in 2009.