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Editor’s Note: In light of the recent KHC disclosure that the geniuses at 3G have been underinvesting in brands, over-stating earnings, and milking their businesses for short-term earnings at the expense of long-term results—everything Warren Buffett professes to despise—we thought it worth reprinting this commentary on the 3G methodology from 2014—JLM. IBM trades to highs on activist related speculation (161.85 +0.95) —Briefing.com, November 23, 2014 IBM Chief Counsel: “Ginni? Fred here.” IBM CEO Ginni Rometty: “What’s wrong?” Chief Counsel: “Activists are circling.” Rometty: “Oh geez.” Chief Counsel: “Yeah. I’ve got the biggest shark of all on hold. He wants to talk.” Rometty: “Carl Icahn??” Chief Counsel: “No. Icahn watches Netflix and uses an iPhone. He thinks we’re ‘old economy.’ Worse than Icahn.” Rometty: “Donald Trump?” Chief Counsel: “No. Even worse.” Rometty: “Worse than Donald Trump? How is that possible?” Chief Counsel: “It’s possible. It’s those guys from 3G.” Rometty: “Yikes. The Brazilians? The ones who took over Burger King and slashed and burned?” Chief Counsel: “Yeah. And they bought Heinz with Warren Buffett—your pal.” Rometty: “Well, he’s not my pal after we had to reset the ‘earnings roadmap’ and the stock tanked. Stupid roadmap. How did Palmisano ever come up with that idea?” Chief Counsel: “It worked, didn’t it?” Rometty: “Only long enough for Sam to exercise his stock options. Not me.” Chief Counsel: “Well your options may be in the money soon enough, if these 3G guys go ahead. You want to talk to them?” Rometty: “Put ‘em on.” Chief Counsel: “Right now?” Rometty: “It’s better than watching these Fast Money yahoos trash talk me on CNBC.” Chief Counsel: “Hold on… Okay, here we go. Oscar? You there?” Oscar: “Yes. I have seven minutes before I have to fire 37 people and figure out how to convince young males to buy hamburgers made with wood shavings. Let’s get going.” Rometty: “What do have in mind?” Oscar: “We at 3G would like to buy IBM—” Rometty: “Outright? That’s not activism, that’s a hostile takeover!” Oscar: “Call it what you like. We see great opportunity to run IBM more efficiently.” Rometty: “Oh yeah? Starting where?” Oscar: “Layoffs. IBM has too many employees.” Rometty: “Says who?” Oscar: “You have over 400,000 employees!” Rometty: “That number is so last week.” Oscar: “You’ve had layoffs in the last week? Well then, I must congratulate you.” Chief Counsel: “Careful, we haven’t publicly disclosed anything.” Rometty: “Okay. So what else does 3G think we need to change?” Oscar: “Well, according to our internal due diligence you have a very inefficient field staff reporting structure. At Burger King we have 14,000 field staff reporting to seventy-five MBAs who all work out of their cars.” Rometty: “That’s nothing. At IBM our entire field staff of 80,000 reports to three college grads and a transfer student.” Chief Counsel: “Ginni, that’s never been disclosed—” Rometty: “Relax, Fred. The transfer student doesn’t even speak English.” Oscar: “Somehow our due diligence did not discover that. Well played.” Rometty: “Thank you. What else you got?” Oscar: “Well, corporate overhead. At Burger King we eliminated all corporate jets except mine, and everyone takes a Greyhound bus when they travel more than 300 miles.” Rometty: “What do they do under 300 miles?” Oscar: “They hitch-hike.” Rometty: “That’s nothing. All travel requests at IBM have to get approved by a cardboard cut-out of Dilbert.” Oscar: “Brilliant!” Rometty: “It’s called returning value to shareholders, not employees.” Oscar: “And we admire that. But your headquarters staff appears bloated to us—” Rometty: “That’s because it doesn’t exist.” Oscar: “Doesn’t exist?” Rometty: “No. It was outsourced to India years ago.” Oscar: “Then why do our satellite images of the IBM headquarters parking lot show so many cars?” Rometty: “That’s my security detail. And my lawn service.” Chief Counsel: “Ginni, I really think this is inappropriate—” Rometty: “Not at all. If this guy thinks he can tell me how to run IBM even less for employees and customers than we already do, he’s got another thing coming. He’s a piker.” Oscar: “Well let’s discuss your taxes. We at 3G know how to operate tax-efficiently across all multi-national jurisdictions—” Rometty: “Our tax rate was 15.6% last year. How do you beat that?” Oscar: “We think applying a ‘Dutch Sandwich’ could move billions in pre-tax income to a lower tax rate nation without any change in your corporate headquarters—” Rometty: “Been there, done that.” Oscar: “Well, a ‘Double Irish’ would reduce taxes on intellectual property by shifting—” Rometty: “You’re five years too late pal. Next?” Oscar: “A ‘French Cuff’?” Rometty: “So ’90s.” Oscar: “The ‘Jamaican Bobsled’?” Rometty: “Who do you think invented the ‘Jamaican Bobsled’?” Oscar: “What about a ‘Hong Kong Stir-Fry’…a ‘Singapore Sling’…a ‘Portuguese Man-O-War’?” Rometty: “Is this the ’80s calling now? Puh-leeze.” Oscar: “Well, I must say, your tax avoidance strategies seem quite advanced. I’ve run out of options.” Rometty: “You didn’t ask about the ‘Belgian Waffle.’” Oscar: “Fala sério! We heard the rumors about it, but believed it to be a myth, like Bigfoot. You mean there is such a thing?” Rometty: “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Oscar: “Please? I beg of you.” Rometty: “If you guys drop this takeover idea, I might—.” Oscar: “Consider it dropped.” Rometty: “Alright. But first, make sure your door is closed, your auditor is nowhere nearby, and listen carefully… Now just imagine you found a way to merge with an entire country, whose citizens could be made to unwittingly pay your taxes for you—.” Chief Counsel: “This conversation is finished! Ms. Rometty has nothing further to add!” Oscar: “El Diablo!” ### Jeff Matthews Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett” (eBooks on Investing, 2014) Available now at Amazon.com © 2014 NotMakingThisUp, LLC The content contained in this blog represents only the opinions of Mr. Matthews. Mr. Matthews also acts as an advisor and clients advised by Mr. Matthews may hold either long or short positions in securities of various companies discussed in the blog based upon Mr. Matthews’ recommendations. This commentary in no way constitutes investment advice, and should never be relied on in making an investment decision, ever. Also, this blog is not a solicitation of business by Mr. Matthews: all inquiries will be ignored. The content herein is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.

2018 Editor’s Note: “I’m not a great one for that—you know, ‘Maybe it was too many [songs]…’ What do you mean? It was great! It sold! It’s the bloody Beatles White Album.”—Paul McCartney. This is going to be brief because your editor is writing a book and has gone off the grid…but he has not gone too far off the grid to miss the best new music in years, brought to you by—who else?—the Beatles. Specifically, this is a shout-out for the Esher Demos, so-called because when the Beatles returned to England from Rishikesh, India, they gathered at George Harrison’s bungalow in Esher and played each other (while recording on a portable tape machine) some 27 songs they’d written while off-drugs and eating “lousy vegetarian food,” as John Lennon put it, in India, most of which ended up in a far more finished form as The White Album. The Esher Demos have been floating around for years in various formats, but have finally been cleaned up and included on the re-released White Album, which you can play right now on Spotify. The songs are stripped-down, played on acoustic guitars and accompanied by nothing more sophisticated than hand-claps with a lot of laughter and inside-jokes, and they could have been “The Beatles bloody White Album” on their own. Now, the White Album has always been your editor’s favorite album—Beatles or otherwise, although the Arctic Monkey’s “Whatever People Say That I Am, That’s What I’m Not” has always been a close second—but after hearing the Esher Demos all together and in the same order they appeared on the White Album itself, we’re not sure which version of The White Album is better. The demos are that good. Which means there are now TWO bloody Beatles White Albums. How great is that? Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to All! —JM, December 5, 2018 2017 Editor’s Note: “I still remember that moment the first time Ringo played with us, ‘BANG!’ he kicks in, it was an ‘Oh my God’ moment. I remember we’re all looking at each other, like ‘Yeah this is it!’ Phew, I’m gettin’ very emotional…”—Paul McCartney in ‘The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years.’ There is, or was, back in the day, an argument among amateur drummers that went like this: “Ringo sucked!” “Are you kidding? Ringo was great!” The drummers who dismissed Ringo were, by our experience, younger, jazz-oriented drummers who were technically brilliant and could not fathom why such a technically-limited drummer like Ringo had become rich and famous while they were stuck playing “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You” at weddings to pay the rent. They honestly didn’t get it. The drummers who did get Ringo were, by our experience, older drummers of many styles who knew how hard it is to do what Ringo did. What Ringo did was play drums behind the three best singers and songwriters who ever played together as a band, and to not just keep the beat, but to match the mood to the music and drive the tempo without getting in the way. Listen to how Ringo sets the tone in “She Loves You” with that opening floor-tom pattern, then brightens the sound when the voices come in by laying into the snare and open high-hat. Simple stuff, technically—but really hard for a drummer to execute. Why? Because drummers like to play shit loud and fast. They want you to know how good they are. They demand to be heard. Stewart Copeland, one of the best loud-and-fast drummers out there, likes to tell the young speed demons at drummer workshops that he is about to demonstrate the hardest thing a drummer can do—but instead of launching into a slamming 192 beats-per-minute polyphonic killer riff like he did with the Police on “Synchronicity I,” Stewart just plays a verrrrrrry slow single-stroke pattern at a rock-steady beat. It disappoints the “Ringo sucked” crowd, but it’s what all great drummers know: it’s really hard to keep it simple and not overplay. And that’s why, when Copeland’s former bandmate Sting says, “a band is only as good as its drummer,” he means The Beatles, too. Which brings us to this season’s update to our annual holiday song review, which is light on the Christmas songs and heavy on the Beatles—but not because Sirius XM finally created a “Beatles Channel,” the obvious absence of which we complained about in this virtual column way back in 2011. It’s because of the excellent Ron Howard movie quoted at the top, “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years,” which among many other things just happens to document the Beatles’ role in desegregating U.S. concert venues way back in 1964. And you should see it. Now the story about the desegregation of the Jacksonville, Florida ‘Gator Bowl’ stadium occupies only a handful of the 106 minutes of backstage shots, home movies, televised concerts, interviews with “the boys” and celebrity interviews documenting the arc of their live concert performances from the early days in Hamburg to the madness of Shea Stadium and their final concert at Candlestick, when the boys had become, as John Lennon said, a “freak-show” and quit touring. (It finishes, of course, with nice footage of their final-final concert on the roof at Apple’s offices in London.) But the desegregation story is, we think, the best part of the movie, because how they did it—unscripted, unplanned, unpublicized—is so cool. It just happened. And it happened only because they demanded it—all four Beatles, including Ringo, who had only been in the band two years at that point and just so happened to be your editor’s “favorite Beatle” back in the day when every American kid in school had one, which is why we started this with Ringo. As Paul tells the filmmakers, the Beatles—before the breakup—were a unit: “We had to ALL decide that we agreed on a thing…for ANY idea to go through,” he says. Even George, the most cynical after the breakup, says it this way: “As a band, we were tight… We could argue a lot among ourselves, but we were very, very close…and in the company of other people or other situations we’d always stick together.” And they stuck together when a very major situation, segregation, entered the picture, as radio reporter Larry Kane, who traveled with the boys on that 1964 tour, recalled: “I received a report from my station that the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville was gonna be segregated, so I mentioned it to them, in the interview…. They said if there was going to be segregation of any kind, they weren’t going.” Here’s how it actually went down in that interview, preserved on black-and-white film: Larry Kane: “What about this comment that I heard about, mentioning racial integration at the various performances?” Paul McCartney: “We don’t like it if there’s any segregation or anything, because it just seems mad to me.” Kane: “Well you’re gonna play Jacksonville, Florida, do you anticipate any kind of difference in that opinion?” McCartney: “Well I don’t know, really, it’d be a bit silly to segregate people, ‘cause you know I think it’d be STUPID, you know, you can’t treat other human beings like animals.” Ringo Starr: “That’s the way we ALL feel.” McCartney: “That’s the way we all feel, and the way a lot of people in England feel. There’s never any segregation at concerts in England, you know, and if in fact there was we wouldn’t play ‘em.” And that’s how The Beatles integrated American concert venues on September 11, 1964, when they played to 20,000, black and white together, at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida. Thanks, Boys. And Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to All! —JM, November 29, 2017 2016 Editor’s Note: The switch to all-holiday music has started, and while we have not heard much new, it has, so far, been mercifully light on the Michael Bublé and wonderfully heavy on the Chrissie Hynde and Bing Crosby, although with no sign of The Boss, yet. Our beef this year is not with the current roll of holiday songs, or with any of the rock biographies we’ve been reading (Dee-Dee Ramone’s “Lobotomy: Surviving the Ramones,” is even more hair-raising than Chrissie Hyndes’ book that we called out last year, and that takes some doing); our beef is with the SongFacts web site, which, as readers of this virtual column might imagine, ranks right up there with Bloomberg, FactSet and the Wall Street Journal as tools of our trade. Specifically, how does SongFacts not know that at 4 minutes 51 seconds into the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” one of the chairs the four Beatles are sitting on as they keep the extended final chord going on the two pianos at the Abbey Road studio emits an audible squeak, and a voice (we’ve always guessed Paul) says “Shhh!”? This is surely more important than the fact that the song was ranked as the Beatles’ best by some random compilation, or that noted musician, singer, and drug-abuser David Crosby was supposedly in the studio for the very first playback. (After all, he could have actually been in Brazil that day and not remembered.) Of course, to hear the most famous squeak/shush in recorded history, the volume has to be turned up extremely loud, i.e. well beyond what most listeners would ever have their iPhone or stereo or radio cranked up to. In fact, you have to go to 11. But that’s what it’s all about, right? Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to All! —JM, December 3, 2016 2015 Editor’s Note: We have not heard much new in the way of holiday music, so let’s turn straight to the rock and roll biography scene—specifically Chrissie Hyndes’ autobiography, “Reckless: My Life as a Pretender,” which is like witnessing a car wreck in book form. While there’s plenty here that’s harmless and bland (early days in Ohio, e.g.), there’s plenty that makes you want to put the book away in a very dark place, and all you can think is, How was she not part of “That stupid club,” as Kurt Cobain’s mother called it? (Look it up, kids.) Similarly depressing are some movies we’ve been watching on Netflix—starting with the Levon Helms biography, “Ain’t In It for My Health,” which minces no words when it comes to his former bandmate and nemesis, the Canadian songwriter Robbie Robertson, who squeezed out of Levon (the only American in The Band) vibrant scenes of Americana (“The Weight,” and especially, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”) without sharing the royalties. Even more depressing than the Hynes book and the Helms movie combined, however, is the Glenn Campbell-gets-diagnosed-with-Alzheimers-while-you-watch film, “I’ll Be Me.” Your editor saw Campbell perform at a Wall Street birthday bash circa 1997, and he was clearly miserable throughout: flushed faced and word-slurring, Campbell and his band blew through his greatest hits like Bob Dylan on a bad day, and, embarrassingly to everybody in the room, kept calling the host—whose name was Paul and who, when introducing the singer, nearly broke down while talking about how much it meant having him perform—“Pete.” But “I’ll Be Me” does a great job highlighting Campbell’s background as a highly valued session musician…and if you’re interested in knowing more about that era, you ought to watch “The Wrecking Crew,” our last movie shout-out. “The Wrecking Crew” was the name of the L.A. session players behind The Byrds, The Beach Boys and classics like “I Got You, Babe”—just listen to Hal Blaine’s slamming drums on the outro—and the movie is a joyous look at the faces behind the instruments behind the songs. Glen Campbell was a supremely talented guitarist for the Wrecking Crew before he decided—to the initial amusement and later jealousy of some of the Crew—go for the gold himself. Suggestions on other movies (and books) are encouraged in the comments below…after all, your editor hasn’t finished compiling his Christmas list, if you get our drift… Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to All! —JM, December 3, 2015 2014 Editor’s Note: Well, Michael Bublé’s computer is still releasing holiday songs, which is the worst we can say about this year’s holiday music survey. The best we can say—and it is truly good news—is that The Boss’s hard-driving, live version of “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” done entirely without computer-aided Bublé-style vocals, seems to be gaining much deserved traction. Meanwhile, one of our previous also-ran mentions in the What-Did-We-Do-To-Deserve-This? category, one Taylor Swift, deserves a big boo-yah for telling the Spotify algorithms to stuff it, pulling her entire catalogue from the automated listening service—including, by definition, the song mentioned here last year, which should be no tragedy to Spotify customers anyhow. As for our usual review of the latest rock memoirs, which tend to flood the bookshelves right about now—only to turn up in the mark-down bins come spring, which is when your editor actually buys them—the best read during brief trips to our local, increasingly down-on-its-heals Barnes & Noble, has to be Mick Fleetwood’s “Play On.” Fleetwood is one of the most underrated drummers in rock music, being the kind who drives the beat without histrionics and stays well behind the kit while the front-people do their thing (it was Fleetwood and fellow Mac bassist John McVie who rescued “Werewolves of London” for Warren Zevon and producer Jackson Browne, after the house band could not make the song work) so his remembrances of the formation of Fleetwood Mac are insightful and compelling even for those—including your editor—who were never big Fleetwood Mac fans. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all! —JM, December 19, 2014 2013 Editor’s Note: The most unnerving aspect to this year’s holiday music survey is the unavoidable, near-totalitarian presence of an insipid cover version of George Michael’s already-plenty-insipid-for-our-taste-thank-you-very-much “Last Christmas,” which, as we point out below has one of the most inane choruses ever written (no mean feat there), which wouldn’t be so bad except it is repeated over and over and over until you want to hand yourself over to Vladimir Putin’s security forces and let them do their worst. The perpetrator of this latest holiday music outrage is, it turns out, Taylor Swift, about whom your editor knows nothing except she adds exceedingly little to a song that needed plenty of help to begin with. But, as always with these annual surveys, your editor digresses. On the happier side of the music world, this last year has seen a number of excellent new rock memoirs, of which Kinks front-man and songwriting genius Ray Davies’ is the most interesting. The centerpiece of the story line in Ray’s “Americana” is his getting shot by a mugger in New Orleans some years back, but interspersing that tale he manages to tell much of the story of his career. If you want to read how Ray came up with classics like “Better Things” (why couldn’t that be a Christmas song? It’s as much about the holidays as “Same Old Lang Syne,” about which your editor has plenty to say later on), this is your book. Neil Young’s “Waging Heavy Peace,” which came out last year, is even better than “Americana,” however, and more fun to keep picking up when the mood strikes: Neil’s recollections are loopy, digressive, and admittedly unsure in some cases (at one point he compares his memory of a drug bust with Stephen Stills’ recollection of the same drug bust—and given that Neil only stopped “smoking weed” the year before writing the book, as he admits, it’s no wonder their recollections are very different), but like all things Neil Young, he says what he means and means what he says. And if you’re wondering where songs come from—great songs, eternal songs—Neil’s book is the place to begin. Would that a holiday song may one day spring from the fecund mind of Neil Young himself, for while he professes more of a Native American religious spirit than a Judeo-Christian one, either way, it would be so long Taylor Swift. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all! —JM, December 7, 2013 2012 Editor’s Note: We interrupt this holiday music review to bring you a potential stocking-stuffer that ought to bring tidings of good cheer… Amazon.com: Secrets in Plain Sight: Business & Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett (eBooks on Investing Series Book 1) eBook: Jeff Matthews: Kindle Store 2011 Editor’s Note: Back by popular demand, we’ll again try to keep this year’s update brief…but past performance would tell you not to hold your breath. Here goes. Our annual holiday music survey—highly biased, rankly unscientific and in no way comprehensive—covers new ground this year, to wit: the SiriusXM all-holiday-music channel. Actually, there are two such channels courtesy of the satellite radio monopolists at SiriusXM. There’s one for “traditional” music of the Bing Crosby kind, in which human beings sing traditional Christmas songs while other human beings play musical instruments to accompany those songs; and there’s another channel for everything else, including the Auto-Tune-dependent sensation Michael Bublé, who has only gotten more popular—unfortunately—this year, along with a new presence not entirely unexpected but nonetheless frightening in its implications: Justin Bieber. Enough said about that, for our main beef with SiriusXM is not the presence of yet another teen idol on the holiday music scene. Our beef lies with the soul-less quality of the entire SiriusXM gestalt, which requires its three thousand channels to carry songs strictly on the basis of whether they share either a common date of issue (as on the “40’s at 4,” “50’s at 5,” “60’s at 6” et al channels), or a common target audience demographic. Among the later, for example is the “Classic Vinyl” channel, which is essentially a “Classic Rock” channel (“Classic Rock” being a Baby Boomer euphemism for what our parents knew as “Oldies” radio) that plays the WNEW-FM playlist from around 1968 to 1978. And nothing else. And there is the “Classic Rewind” channel, which is another Oldies channel that plays the WPLR-FM playlist from about 1979 to the late 1980s. And nothing else. Then there’s “The Bridge,” a Baby Boomer euphemism for “Easy Listening.” It plays Oldies of the James Taylor/Carole King/Jackson Browne vein. And nothing else. Certainly there are one or two such channels that manage to jump around between genres (The Spectrum is worthwhile on that score). But, in the main, each SiriusXM channel is tightly focused on a specific, narrowly defined demographic…sometimes scarily so. Here we’re thinking of the “Metal” channel, which plays loosely defined “songs” that consist of young men screaming their apocalyptic guts out above what appears to be a single, head-banging, machine-gun-style guitar-and-drumming musical track that never, ever changes. You marvel at where these guys came from, what portion of the domestic methamphetamine supply they consume, and how many serial killers might be listening to “Metal” channel at the very same moment as you. If Beavis and Butt-Head could afford a car, this would be their channel. Unfortunately, no matter which channel you pick and who the purported “DJ” may be (there are a lot of old-time, smokey-voiced, recognizable DJs on the various Sirius Oldies channels) you’ll hear a sequence of songs that all sound like a computerized random-number-generator picked ‘em. Listening to the “60’s at 6” channel, for example, you may hear a great Beatles single like “Hello, Goodbye” from 1967, followed by the wretchedly excessive “MacAurther Park” from 1968, followed by an unrecognizable chart-topper from 1962 that nobody plays anymore because it wasn’t any good even in 1962. The listener ends up flipping around from channel to channel and wondering why the bandwidth-happy SiriusXM monopolists don’t just give each artist its own channel, as they in fact do for Springsteen, Elvis and Sinatra. Those are channels you might expect to find, but there is, oddly enough, no Bob Marley or Rolling Stones channel—and, head-scratcher of all head-scratchers, no Beatles channel. In fact, the absence of The Beatles from the SiriusXM digital bandwidth relative to, say, the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, is one the great mysteries of our age. After all, the Beatles individually and collectively contributed 27of the Rolling Stone Top 500 Songs of All-Time or 5.4% of those songs, yet they get nowhere near 5.4% of the SiriusXM airplay, whether on “Classic Vinyl,” “Classic Rewind,” “The Bridge,” “60’s on 6, ” “70’s on 7,” “The Spectrum” or any of the other three thousand channels here. You quite literally have as much chance of hearing “Snoopy and the Red Barron” on SiriusXM as “Revolution.” So why then is there a Jimmy Buffett channel (called “Margaritaville,” of course)? Having gotten all that off our chest, we can move on, since SiriusXM’s holiday channels add no new material to our annual survey because most of the songs are widely played everywhere else. Furthermore, we’ve been asked to assemble a “Top Ten Worst” list of holiday songs for this review. The problem is there are just so many, as we’ll be getting to shortly. Rod Stewart’s somnambulant “My Favorite Things,” which sounds like he’s reading the lyrics from a child’s book of verses, is right up there, while Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” stands out in any crowd of non-favorites. Easier, then, to simply identify the All-Time, Number One, No-Question-About-It NotMakingThisUp Worst Holiday Song of All Time, and let everyone else argue about the remaining 9. It is “The 12 Pains of Christmas.” This so-called comedy song takeoff on “The 12 Days of Christmas,” a pleasant English Christmas carol discovered by a U.S. schoolteacher from Milwaukee and used by her in a Christmas pageant in 1910, is an easily forgettable humorous novelty song that is neither novel or humorous, in any way. It isn’t even fun writing about, so we won’t bother: we’ll simply move on to something pleasant, which happens to be an entirely different sort of humorous novelty song that is both novel and humorous, and, therefore, well worth a mention here. We’re talking about the wonderfully bizarre, catchy, Klezmer-style cover of “Must Be Santa,” from Bob Dylan’s 2009 Christmas album, “Christmas in the Heart.” (Yes, Bob Dylan made a Christmas album.) The music is fast and cheerful, and Dylan’s low, growly voice is almost indistinguishable from Tom Waits. (The truly bizarre music video is not to be missed, watch it here.) After you get over the initial shock of hearing Bob Dylan singing what most Baby Boomer parents will recall being a Raffi song, it becomes impossible to not enjoy. Another glaring absence from our previous years’ commentary is neither novel or humorous, and inconceivably does not appear to qualify for the SiriusXM random-song-generator holiday song playlist despite being many-times more worthwhile than most of the SiriusXM catalogue, whether holiday-themed or not. The song is “2000 Miles” by the Pretenders, and it belongs on anybody’s Holiday Top Ten. If hearing Chrissie Hynde on that original song (she’s also recorded some good Christmas covers, including one with the Blind Boys of Alabama) doesn’t get you in a mellow holiday mood, nothing will. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Good New Year to all. —JM, December 4, 2011 2010 Editor’s Note: Back for the third consecutive year by popular demand, we’ll try to keep this year’s update brief—but don’t count on it. For starters, we’re going to plug a book: Keith Richards’ autobiography, “Life,” which happens to be one of the best books ever written—and we don’t just mean “Best in the Category of ‘Memoirs by Nearly-Dead Rock Stars’.” It is a great book, period. The story of how ‘Keef’ (as he signs sweet letters to his Mum while rampaging across America), Brian and Mick developed the Rolling Stones’ sound, for example, is worth the price alone (in short, they worked really hard; but the full story is much better than that). Yet there’s more—much more. Guitarists can soak up how Keith created his own guitar sound; drummers will learn—if they didn’t already know—Charlie Watts’ high-hat trick (and from whom he stole it); while songwriters had better prepare themselves to be depressed at how Mick wrote songs (‘As fast as his hand could write the words, he wrote the lyrics,’ according to one session man who watched him write “Brown Sugar”). And that’s just the rock-and-roll stuff. The sex-and-drugs stuff is also there, and the author lays it all out in his unfettered, matter-of-fact, straightforward style, often with the first-person help of friends and others-who-where-there (and presumably of sounder mind and body than you-know-who: the drug and alcohol intake is truly staggering) who write of their own experiences with the band. Okay, you may say, but how exactly is Keith Richards’ autobiography relevant to our annual review of holiday songs? Well, while furtively reading snatches of ‘Life’ during a stop at the local Borders (we expect to see the book under the Christmas tree sometime around the 25th of this month, hint-hint), we happened to hear another musical legend perform one of our favorite offbeat Christmas songs in the background, and it occurred to your Editor that of all the bands out there that could have done that same kind of interesting, worthwhile Christmas song, The Rolling Stones probably top the list. What with Keef’s bluesy undertones and Mick’s commercial-but-sinister instincts on top, it would have certainly made this review, for better or worse. (Along these lines, The Kinks’ cynical, working-class “Father Christmas” is one of the all-time greats, and doesn’t get nearly enough air-time these days.) Now, for the record, the offbeat Christmas song that triggered this excursion was “’Zat You Santa Claus?”—the Louis Armstrong and The Commanders version from the 1950’s. (The song was later covered, like everything else but the Raffi catalogue, by Harry Connick, Jr.) Starting out with jingle bells, blowing winds and a slide-whistle, you might initially dismiss “’Zat You?” as a sadly commercial attempt by Armstrong to get in on the Christmas song thing, except that his familiar, Mack-the-Knife-style vocal comes over a terrific backbeat that turns it into what we’d nominate for Funkiest Christmas Song Ever Recorded. It is a delight to hear, and the fact that it is suddenly getting more air-time this season is a step-up in quality for the entire category—or would be, if not for the apparent installation of Wham!’s “Last Christmas” in the pantheon of Christmas Classics. A 1980’s electro-synth Brit-Pop timepiece, “Last Christmas” combines a somewhat catchy tune with lyrics that make a trapped listener attempt to open the car door even at high speeds to get away: Last Christmas, I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away This year To save me from tears, I gave it to someone special Considering the fact that the songwriter (Wham!’s gay front-man, George Michael) decided to repeat that chorus six times, the full banality of the lyric eventually gives way to incredulity: “Let me get this straight,” you begin to ask yourself. “This year he’s giving his heart to ‘someone special’… so who’d he give it to last year? The mailman?” “Last Christmas” does have the distinction of being the biggest selling single in UK history that never made it to Number 1. Furthermore, all royalties from the single were donated to Ethiopian famine relief, the same cause which led to creation of what turned out to be the actual Number 1 UK single that year, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” “Do They Know…” is a song that has received some push from readers to receive an honorable mention in these pages, and while it is certainly an interesting timepiece, with much earnest participation from the likes of Sting, Bono and even Sir Paul, it is not nearly as worthwhile as an album that seems just as prevalent these days: A Charlie Brown Christmas by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi. How a jazz pianist was hired to create the music for a TV special with cartoon characters is this: the producer heard Guaraldi’s classic instrumental “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” on the radio while taking a cab across the Golden Gate Bridge. One thing led to another, and thanks to that odd bit of chance, future generations will have the immense pleasure of hearing a timeless, unique work of art every year around this time. (A second odd tidbit for our West Coast readers: Guaraldi died while staying at the Red Cottage Inn, in Menlo Park—of a heart attack, however, and not the usual, more gruesome fate of musicians who die in hotels.) One second-to-last note before we move on: we have been heavily lobbied by certain, er, close relations to include Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is You” as a worthwhile holiday song—despite our previously expressed misgivings about her contribution to the genre (see below). And we have to admit, her “All I Want…” leaves behind the incessant vocal pyrotechnics that made some of her other Christmas covers (“Oh Holy Night,” for example) unbearable, at least to our ears. In this case she seems to trust the song to take care of itself, which it does in fine, driving, upbeat style. Now, as Your Editor previously hinted, all he wants for Christmas is Keef’s book. And it had better be there, if, as previously noted, you get our drift. Finally, and speaking of autobiographies, we happened to read Andy Williams’ own book this past year and must report that our reference to Williams below was overly harsh. For one thing, his book is as honest as Keef’s; for another, as a singer not necessarily born with the vocal equipment of, say, Mariah Carey, the man worked at his craft and succeeded mightily where many others failed. Which, we might add, is, after all, the hope of this season. And so, we wish for a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Good New Year to all. —JM, December 13, 2010 2009 Editor’s Note: Back by popular demand, what follows is our year-end sampling of the Christmas songs playing incessantly on a radio station near you, and it demands from your editor only a few updates this holiday season. For starters, we have not heard the dreaded duet of Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” thus far in 2009, and for this we are most grateful. Indeed, if it turns out that their recording has been confiscated by Government Authorities for use as an alternative to lethal injections, we’ll consider ourselves a positive force for society. On the other hand, we are sorry to report an offset to that cheery development, in the form of a surge in playing time for Barry Manilow’s chirpy imitation of the classic Bing Crosby/Andrew Sisters version of “Jingle Bells.” For the record, “Jingle Bells” was written in 1857…for Thanksgiving, not for Christmas. And it’s hard to imagine making a better version than that recorded by Bing and the three Andrew Sisters 86 years later. But Manilow, it seems, didn’t bother to try. Instead, Barry and his back-up group, called Expos, simply copied Bing’s recording, right down to that stutter in the Andrews Sisters’ unique, roller-coaster vocals on the choruses, as well as Bing’s breezy, improvised, “oh we’re gonna have a lotta fun” throwaway line on the last chorus. Sharp-eared readers might say, “Well, so what else would you expect from a guy who sang ‘I Write the Songs’…which was in fact written by somebody else?” We can’t argue with that, but we will point out another annoyance this year: the enlarged presence of Rod Stewart in the Christmas play-lists. Don’t get us wrong: we like Rod Stewart—at least, the Rod Stewart who gave the world what Your Editor still considers the best coming-of-age song ever written and recorded: “Every Picture Tells a Story.” It’s the Rod Stewart who gave us “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” we’re less crazy about. So too the Rod who chose to cover “My Favorite Things” (for the definitive version of that classic, see: ‘Bennett, Tony’) and “Baby It’s Cold Outside” with Dolly Parton (for an only slightly more offensive version of this one, see: ‘Simpson, Jessica’ and ‘Lachey, Nick’). As an antidote to Rod, we suggest several doses of Jack Johnson’s sly, understated “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which seems to be gaining recognition, and anything by James Taylor—especially his darkly melancholic “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Of all the singers who recorded versions of this last—and Sinatra’s might be the best—it is Taylor, a former junkie, who probably expresses more of the intended spirit of this disarmingly titled song. After all, the original lyric ended not with the upbeat “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, let your heart be light/Next year all our troubles will be out of sight,” but with this: “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last/Next year we may all be living in the past.” No, we are not making that up. The good news is it should keep Barry Manilow from be covering it any time soon. JM—December 19, 2009 Wednesday, December 24, 2008 Shazam! From the Boss to the King to John & Paul (But Not George or Ringo), Not to Mention Jessica & Nick Like everyone else out there, we’ve been hearing Christmas songs since the day our local radio station switched to holiday music sometime around, oh, July 4th, it feels like. And while it may just be a symptom of our own aging, the 24/7 holiday music programming appears to have stretched the song quality pool from what once seemed Olympic-deep to, nowadays, more of a wading pool-depth. What we recall in our youth to be a handful of mostly good, listenable songs—Nat King Cole’s incomparable cover of “The Christmas Song” (written by an insufferable bore: more on that later); Bing’s mellow, smoky, “White Christmas”; and even Brenda Lee’s country-tinged “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (recorded when she was 13: try to get your mind around that)—played over and over a few days a year…has evolved into a thousand mediocre-at-best covers played non-stop for months on end. Does anybody else out there wonder why Elvis bothered mumbling his way through “Here Comes Santa Claus”? It actually sounds like Elvis doing a parody of Elvis—as if he can’t wait to get the thing over with. Fortunately The King does get it over with, in just 1 minute, 54 seconds. Along with that and all the other covers, there are, occasionally, the odd original Christmas songs—the oddest of all surely being Dan Fogelburg’s “Same Old Lang Syne.” You’ve heard it: the singer meets his old lover in a grocery store, she drops her purse, they laugh, they cry, they get drunk and realize their lives have been a waste…and, oh, the snow turns to rain. So how, exactly, did that become a Christmas song? Then there’s ex-Beatle Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime,” which combines an annoyingly catchy beat with dreadful lyrics, something McCartney often did when John Lennon wasn’t around. (After all, it was Lennon who replaced McCartney’s banal, teeny-boppish opening line for “I Saw Her Standing There”—“She was just seventeen/Never been a beauty queen” is what McCartney originally wrote—with the more suggestive “She was just seventeen/You know what I mean,” thereby turning a mediocre time-piece into a classic.) But Lennon was not around to save “Wonderful Christmastime” even though McCartney actually recorded this relatively new Christmas standard nearly thirty years ago, before Lennon was shot. It rightfully lay dormant until the advent of All-Christmas-All-The-Time programming a couple of years ago. Fortunately, by way of offset, Lennon’s own downbeat but enormously catchy “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” is played about as frequently as “Wonderful Christmastime.” Who but John Lennon would start a Christmas song: “And so this is Christmas/And what have you done…”? Of course, who but Paul McCartney would start a Christmas song, “The moon is right/The spirit’s up?” If anything explains the Beatles’ breakup better than these two songs, we haven’t heard it. Now, we don’t normally pay much attention to Christmas songs. If it isn’t one of the aforementioned, or an old standard sung by Nat, Bing, Frank, Tony, Ella and a few others, we’d be clueless. But thanks to a remarkable new technology, we here at NotMakingThisUp suddenly found ourselves able to distinguish, for example, which blandly indistinguishable female voice sings which blandly indistinguishable version of “O Holy Night”—Kelly Clarkson, Celine Dion, or Mariah Carey—without any effort at all. The technology is Shazam—an iPhone application that might possibly have received the greatest amount of buzz for the least amount of apparent usefulness since cameras on cell phones first came out. For readers who haven’t seen the ads or heard about Shazam’s wonders from a breathless sub-25 year old, Shazam software lets you point your iPhone towards any source of recorded music, like a car radio, the speaker in a Starbucks, or even the jukebox in a bar—and learn what song is playing. Shazam does this by recording a selection of the music and analyzing the data. It then displays the name of the song, the artist, the album, as well as lyrics, a band biography and other doodads right there on the iPhone. Now, you may well ask, what possible use could there be for identifying a song playing in a bar? And unless you’re a music critic or a song-obsessed sub-25 year old, we’re still not sure. But we can say that Shazam is pretty cool. In the course of testing it on a batch of Christmas songs—playing on a standard, nothing-special, low-fi kitchen radio—heard from across the room, without making the least effort to get the iPhone close to the source of the music, Shazam figured out every song but one (a nondescript version of a nondescript song that it never could get) without a hitch. And, as a result, we can now report the following: 1) It is astounding how many Christmas songs are out there nowadays, most of them not worth identifying, Shazam or no Shazam; 2) All Christmas covers recorded in the last 10 years sound pretty much alike, as if they all use the same backing track, and thus require something like Shazam to distinguish one from the other; 3) Nobody has yet done a cover version of Dan Fogelburg’s “Same Old Lang Syne,” which may be the truest sign of Hope in the holiday season; 4) None of this matters because Mariah Carey screwed up the entire holiday song thing, anyway. Now, why, you may ask, would we pick on Mariah Carey, as opposed to, say, someone who can’t actually sing? Well, her “O Holy Night” happened to be the first song in our mini-marathon, and it really does seem to have turned Christmas song interpretation into a kind of vocal competitive gymnastics aimed strictly at showing off how much of the singer’s five-octave vocal range can be used, not merely within this one particular song, but within each measure of the song. In fact Mariah’s voice jumps around so much it sounds like somebody in the studio is tickling her while she’s singing. More sedate than Mariah, and possibly less harmful to the general category, The Carpenters’ version of “(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” comes on next, and it makes you think you’re listening to an Amtrak commercial rather than a Christmas song (“From Atlantic to Pacific/Gee, the traffic is terrific!”), so innocuous and manufactured it sounds. Johnny Mathis is similarly harmless, although his oddly eunuch-like voice can give you the creeps, if you really think about it. Mercifully, his version of “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” is short enough (2:16) that you don’t think about it for long. Now, without Shazam we never would have known the precise time duration of that song. On the other hand, we would we never have been able to identify the perpetrators of what may be the single greatest travesty of the holiday season—Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey, singing “Baby it’s Cold Outside.” “Singing” is actually too strong a word for what they do. Simpson’s voice barely rises above a whisper, and you cringe when she reaches for a note, although she does manage to hit the last, sustained “outside,” no doubt thanks to the magic of electronics. Thus the major downside of Shazam might be that it can promote distinctly anti-social behavior: having correctly identified who was responsible for this blight on holiday radio music, the listener might decide that if they ever ran across the pair in his or her car while singing along with the radio too loudly to notice, they wouldn’t stop to identify the bodies. Fortunately, the bad taste left by that so-called duet is washed away when Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” comes on next. Thanks to Shazam, we learn that this is actually the fourth version Nat recorded. The man worked at his craft, and it shows. This is the best version of the song on record, by anyone, and probably one of the two or three best Christmas songs out there, period. The second those strings sweetly announce the tune, you relax, and by the time Cole’s smoky, gorgeous voice begins to sing, you’re in a distinctly Christmas mood like no other recording ever creates. (Unfortunately, the song’s actual writer, Mel Tormé, had the personality of a man perpetually seething for not getting proper recognition for having written one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time. We did not learn this from Shazam: we once saw Tormé perform at a small lounge, during which he managed to mention that he, not Nat King Cole, wrote “The Christmas Song”—as if this common misperception was still on everybody’s mind 35 years later. When that news flash did not seem to make the appropriate impression on the audience, he later broke off singing to chew out a less-than-attentive audience member, completely destroying the mood for the rest of the set.) Like that long-ago performance by the “Velvet Fog,” the pleasant sensation left behind by Cole’s “Christmas Song” is quickly soured, this time by a male singer performing “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow” in the manner of Harry Connick, Jr. doing a second-rate version of Sinatra. Who is this guy, we wonder? Shazam tells us it’s Michael Bublé. We are pondering how such a vocal lightweight became such a sensation in recent years—the answer must surely be electronics, because his voice, very distinctly at times, sounds like it has been synthesized—when John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas” comes on. It’s a great song, demonstrating as it does Lennon’s advice to David Bowie on how to write a song: “Say what you mean, make it rhyme and give it a backbeat.” The fact that Lennon had the best voice in rock and roll also helps. Unfortunately, his wife had the worst voice in rock and roll, and a brief downer it is when Yoko comes in on the chorus like a banshee. (Fortunately she is quickly drowned out by the children’s chorus from the Harlem Community Choir.) The other songs in our Shazam song-identification session are, we fear, too many to relate. Sinatra, of course; Kelly Clarkson, an American Idol winner who essentially does a pale Mariah Carey impersonation; Blandy—er, Andy Williams; and one of the best: Tony Bennett. Then there’s Willie Nelson, who has a terrific, understated way of doing any song he wants—but sounds completely out of place singing “Frosty the Snowman.” One wonders exactly what kind of white powder Willie was thinking about while he was recording this, if you get our drift. Oh, and there’s Coldplay’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which pairs the sweetest piano with the worst voice in any single Christmas song we heard; Amy Grant, a kind of female Andy Williams; the Ronettes, who are genuinely terrific—a great beat, no nonsense, and Ronnie singing her heart out with that New York accent; and then Mariah again, this time doing “Silent Night” with that same roller-coaster vocal gargling. Gene Autry’s all-too-popular version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” would be bearable except that he pronounces it “Santee Closs,” which is unfortunate in a song in which that word appears like 274 times. ‘N Sync is likewise unbearable doing “O Holy Night” a cappella, with harmonies the Brits would call cringe-making, and Mariah-type warbling to boot. Hall & Oates’s “Jingle Bell Rock” is too easy to confuse with the other versions of “Jingle Bell Rock”—thank you, Shazam, for clearing that up—while Martina McBride manages to sound eerily like Barbra Streisand imitating Linda Ronstadt singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Winding things down is Dan Fogelburg’s aforementioned “Same Old Lang Syne,” and here we need to vent a little: something about the way he sings “liquor store”—he pronounces it “leeker store”—never fails to provoke powerful radio-smashing adrenalin surges. Fortunately, we suppress those urges today, because the Shazam experiment concludes with one of the best Christmas songs ever recorded. Better than Bing, and maybe even better than Nat, depending on your mood. It’s Bruce Springsteen. The Boss. Doing “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town”… live. Yes, this song was recorded live, and despite its age (more than 25 years old), the thing still jumps out of the radio and grabs you. Now, as Shazam informs us, this particular recording was actually the B-side of a single release called “My Hometown.” (Back in the day, kids, “singles” came with two songs, one on each side of a record: the “A” side was intended to be the hit song; the “B” side was, until the Beatles came along, for throwaway stuff.) Fortunately nobody threw this one away. Springsteen begins the familiar song with some audience patter and actual jingle bells; then he starts to sing and the band comes to life. Things move along smoothly through the verse and chorus…until ace drummer Max Weinberg kicks it into high gear and the band roars into a fast shuffle that takes the thing into a different realm altogether. Feeding off the audience, The Boss sings so hard his voice slightly breaks at times. Then he quiets down before roaring back into a tear-the-roof-off chorus, sometimes dropping words and laughing as he goes. This is real music—recorded in 1975 during a concert at the C.W. Post College—with no retakes, no production effects, and no electronic vocal repairs, either. Try doing that some time, Jessica and Nick. Actually, come to think of it, please don’t. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all. Jeff Matthews Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett” (eBooks on Investing, 2014) Available now at Amazon.com © 2018 NotMakingThisUp, LLC

2017 Editor’s Note: “I still remember that moment the first time Ringo played with us, ‘BANG!’ he kicks in, it was an ‘Oh my God’ moment. I remember we’re all looking at each other, like ‘Yeah this is it!’ Phew, I’m gettin’ very emotional…”—Paul McCartney in ‘The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years.’ There is, or was, back in the day, an argument among amateur drummers that went like this: “Ringo sucked!” “Are you kidding? Ringo was great!” The drummers who dismissed Ringo were, by our experience, younger, jazz-oriented drummers who were technically brilliant and could not fathom why such a technically-limited drummer like Ringo had become rich and famous while they were stuck playing “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You” at weddings to pay the rent. They honestly didn’t get it. The drummers who did get Ringo were, by our experience, older drummers of many styles who knew how hard it is to do what Ringo did. What Ringo did was play drums behind the three best singers and songwriters who ever played together as a band, and to not just keep the beat, but to match the mood to the music and drive the tempo without getting in the way. Listen to how Ringo sets the tone in “She Loves You” with that opening floor-tom pattern, then brightens the sound when the voices come in by laying into the snare and open high-hat. Simple stuff, technically—but really hard for a drummer to execute. Why? Because drummers like to play shit loud and fast. They want you to know how good they are. They demand to be heard. Stewart Copeland, one of the best loud-and-fast drummers out there, likes to tell the young speed demons at drummer workshops that he is about to demonstrate the hardest thing a drummer can do—but instead of launching into a slamming 192 beats-per-minute polyphonic killer riff like he did with the Police on “Synchronicity I,” Stewart just plays a verrrrrrry slow single-stroke pattern at a rock-steady beat. It disappoints the “Ringo sucked” crowd, but it’s what all great drummers know: it’s really hard to keep it simple and not overplay. And that’s why, when Copeland’s former bandmate Sting says, “a band is only as good as its drummer,” he means The Beatles, too. Which brings us to this season’s update to our annual holiday song review, which is light on the Christmas songs and heavy on the Beatles—but not because Sirius XM finally created a “Beatles Channel,” the obvious absence of which we complained about in this virtual column way back in 2011. It’s because of the excellent Ron Howard movie quoted at the top, “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years,” which among many other things just happens to document the Beatles’ role in desegregating U.S. concert venues way back in 1964. And you should see it. Now the story about the desegregation of the Jacksonville, Florida ‘Gator Bowl’ stadium occupies only a handful of the 106 minutes of backstage shots, home movies, televised concerts, interviews with “the boys” and celebrity interviews documenting the arc of their live concert performances from the early days in Hamburg to the madness of Shea Stadium and their final concert at Candlestick, when the boys had become, as John Lennon said, a “freak-show” and quit touring. (It finishes, of course, with nice footage of their final-final concert on the roof at Apple’s offices in London.) But the desegregation story is, we think, the best part of the movie, because how they did it—unscripted, unplanned, unpublicized—is so cool. It just happened. And it happened only because they demanded it—all four Beatles, including Ringo, who had only been in the band two years at that point and just so happened to be your editor’s “favorite Beatle” back in the day when every American kid in school had one, which is why we started this with Ringo. As Paul tells the filmmakers, the Beatles—before the breakup—were a unit: “We had to ALL decide that we agreed on a thing…for ANY idea to go through,” he says. Even George, the most cynical after the breakup, says it this way: “As a band, we were tight… We could argue a lot among ourselves, but we were very, very close…and in the company of other people or other situations we’d always stick together.” And they stuck together when a very major situation, segregation, entered the picture, as radio reporter Larry Kane, who traveled with the boys on that 1964 tour, recalled: “I received a report from my station that the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville was gonna be segregated, so I mentioned it to them, in the interview…. They said if there was going to be segregation of any kind, they weren’t going.” Here’s how it actually went down in that interview, preserved on black-and-white film: Larry Kane: “What about this comment that I heard about, mentioning racial integration at the various performances?” Paul McCartney: “We don’t like it if there’s any segregation or anything, because it just seems mad to me.” Kane: “Well you’re gonna play Jacksonville, Florida, do you anticipate any kind of difference in that opinion?” McCartney: “Well I don’t know, really, it’d be a bit silly to segregate people, ‘cause you know I think it’d be STUPID, you know, you can’t treat other human beings like animals.” Ringo Starr: “That’s the way we ALL feel.” McCartney: “That’s the way we all feel, and the way a lot of people in England feel. There’s never any segregation at concerts in England, you know, and if in fact there was we wouldn’t play ‘em.” And that’s how The Beatles integrated American concert venues on September 11, 1964, when they played to 20,000, black and white together, at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida. Thanks, Boys. And Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to All! —JM, November 29, 2017 2016 Editor’s Note: The switch to all-holiday music has started, and while we have not heard much new, it has, so far, been mercifully light on the Michael Bublé and wonderfully heavy on the Chrissie Hynde and Bing Crosby, although with no sign of The Boss, yet. Our beef this year is not with the current roll of holiday songs, or with any of the rock biographies we’ve been reading (Dee-Dee Ramone’s “Lobotomy: Surviving the Ramones,” is even more hair-raising than Chrissie Hyndes’ book that we called out last year, and that takes some doing); our beef is with the SongFacts web site, which, as readers of this virtual column might imagine, ranks right up there with Bloomberg, FactSet and the Wall Street Journal as tools of our trade. Specifically, how does SongFacts not know that at 4 minutes 51 seconds into the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” one of the chairs the four Beatles are sitting on as they keep the extended final chord going on the two pianos at the Abbey Road studio emits an audible squeak, and a voice (we’ve always guessed Paul) says “Shhh!”? This is surely more important than the fact that the song was ranked as the Beatles’ best by some random compilation, or that noted musician, singer, and drug-abuser David Crosby was supposedly in the studio for the very first playback. (After all, he could have actually been in Brazil that day and not remembered.) Of course, to hear the most famous squeak/shush in recorded history, the volume has to be turned up extremely loud, i.e. well beyond what most listeners would ever have their iPhone or stereo or radio cranked up to. In fact, you have to go to 11. But that’s what it’s all about, right? Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to All! —JM, December 3, 2016 2015 Editor’s Note: We have not heard much new in the way of holiday music, so let’s turn straight to the rock and roll biography scene—specifically Chrissie Hyndes’ autobiography, “Reckless: My Life as a Pretender,” which is like witnessing a car wreck in book form. While there’s plenty here that’s harmless and bland (early days in Ohio, e.g.), there’s plenty that makes you want to put the book away in a very dark place, and all you can think is, How was she not part of “That stupid club,” as Kurt Cobain’s mother called it? (Look it up, kids.) Similarly depressing are some movies we’ve been watching on Netflix—starting with the Levon Helms biography, “Ain’t In It for My Health,” which minces no words when it comes to his former bandmate and nemesis, the Canadian songwriter Robbie Robertson, who squeezed out of Levon (the only American in The Band) vibrant scenes of Americana (“The Weight,” and especially, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”) without sharing the royalties. Even more depressing than the Hynes book and the Helms movie combined, however, is the Glenn Campbell-gets-diagnosed-with-Alzheimers-while-you-watch film, “I’ll Be Me.” Your editor saw Campbell perform at a Wall Street birthday bash circa 1997, and he was clearly miserable throughout: flushed faced and word-slurring, Campbell and his band blew through his greatest hits like Bob Dylan on a bad day, and, embarrassingly to everybody in the room, kept calling the host—whose name was Paul and who, when introducing the singer, nearly broke down while talking about how much it meant having him perform—“Pete.” But “I’ll Be Me” does a great job highlighting Campbell’s background as a highly valued session musician…and if you’re interested in knowing more about that era, you ought to watch “The Wrecking Crew,” our last movie shout-out. “The Wrecking Crew” was the name of the L.A. session players behind The Byrds, The Beach Boys and classics like “I Got You, Babe”—just listen to Hal Blaine’s slamming drums on the outro—and the movie is a joyous look at the faces behind the instruments behind the songs. Glen Campbell was a supremely talented guitarist for the Wrecking Crew before he decided—to the initial amusement and later jealousy of some of the Crew—go for the gold himself. Suggestions on other movies (and books) are encouraged in the comments below…after all, your editor hasn’t finished compiling his Christmas list, if you get our drift… Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to All! —JM, December 3, 2015 2014 Editor’s Note: Well, Michael Bublé’s computer is still releasing holiday songs, which is the worst we can say about this year’s holiday music survey. The best we can say—and it is truly good news—is that The Boss’s hard-driving, live version of “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” done entirely without computer-aided Bublé-style vocals, seems to be gaining much deserved traction. Meanwhile, one of our previous also-ran mentions in the What-Did-We-Do-To-Deserve-This? category, one Taylor Swift, deserves a big boo-yah for telling the Spotify algorithms to stuff it, pulling her entire catalogue from the automated listening service—including, by definition, the song mentioned here last year, which should be no tragedy to Spotify customers anyhow. As for our usual review of the latest rock memoirs, which tend to flood the bookshelves right about now—only to turn up in the mark-down bins come spring, which is when your editor actually buys them—the best read during brief trips to our local, increasingly down-on-its-heals Barnes & Noble, has to be Mick Fleetwood’s “Play On.” Fleetwood is one of the most underrated drummers in rock music, being the kind who drives the beat without histrionics and stays well behind the kit while the front-people do their thing (it was Fleetwood and fellow Mac bassist John McVie who rescued “Werewolves of London” for Warren Zevon and producer Jackson Browne, after the house band could not make the song work) so his remembrances of the formation of Fleetwood Mac are insightful and compelling even for those—including your editor—who were never big Fleetwood Mac fans. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all! —JM, December 19, 2014 2013 Editor’s Note: The most unnerving aspect to this year’s holiday music survey is the unavoidable, near-totalitarian presence of an insipid cover version of George Michael’s already-plenty-insipid-for-our-taste-thank-you-very-much “Last Christmas,” which, as we point out below has one of the most inane choruses ever written (no mean feat there), which wouldn’t be so bad except it is repeated over and over and over until you want to hand yourself over to Vladimir Putin’s security forces and let them do their worst. The perpetrator of this latest holiday music outrage is, it turns out, Taylor Swift, about whom your editor knows nothing except she adds exceedingly little to a song that needed plenty of help to begin with. But, as always with these annual surveys, your editor digresses. On the happier side of the music world, this last year has seen a number of excellent new rock memoirs, of which Kinks front-man and songwriting genius Ray Davies’ is the most interesting. The centerpiece of the story line in Ray’s “Americana” is his getting shot by a mugger in New Orleans some years back, but interspersing that tale he manages to tell much of the story of his career. If you want to read how Ray came up with classics like “Better Things” (why couldn’t that be a Christmas song? It’s as much about the holidays as “Same Old Lang Syne,” about which your editor has plenty to say later on), this is your book. Neil Young’s “Waging Heavy Peace,” which came out last year, is even better than “Americana,” however, and more fun to keep picking up when the mood strikes: Neil’s recollections are loopy, digressive, and admittedly unsure in some cases (at one point he compares his memory of a drug bust with Stephen Stills’ recollection of the same drug bust—and given that Neil only stopped “smoking weed” the year before writing the book, as he admits, it’s no wonder their recollections are very different), but like all things Neil Young, he says what he means and means what he says. And if you’re wondering where songs come from—great songs, eternal songs—Neil’s book is the place to begin. Would that a holiday song may one day spring from the fecund mind of Neil Young himself, for while he professes more of a Native American religious spirit than a Judeo-Christian one, either way, it would be so long Taylor Swift. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all! —JM, December 7, 2013 2012 Editor’s Note: We interrupt this holiday music review to bring you a potential stocking-stuffer that ought to bring tidings of good cheer… Amazon.com: Secrets in Plain Sight: Business & Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett (eBooks on Investing Series Book 1) eBook: Jeff Matthews: Kindle Store 2011 Editor’s Note: Back by popular demand, we’ll again try to keep this year’s update brief…but past performance would tell you not to hold your breath. Here goes. Our annual holiday music survey—highly biased, rankly unscientific and in no way comprehensive—covers new ground this year, to wit: the SiriusXM all-holiday-music channel. Actually, there are two such channels courtesy of the satellite radio monopolists at SiriusXM. There’s one for “traditional” music of the Bing Crosby kind, in which human beings sing traditional Christmas songs while other human beings play musical instruments to accompany those songs; and there’s another channel for everything else, including the Auto-Tune-dependent sensation Michael Bublé, who has only gotten more popular—unfortunately—this year, along with a new presence not entirely unexpected but nonetheless frightening in its implications: Justin Bieber. Enough said about that, for our main beef with SiriusXM is not the presence of yet another teen idol on the holiday music scene. Our beef lies with the soul-less quality of the entire SiriusXM gestalt, which requires its three thousand channels to carry songs strictly on the basis of whether they share either a common date of issue (as on the “40’s at 4,” “50’s at 5,” “60’s at 6” et al channels), or a common target audience demographic. Among the later, for example is the “Classic Vinyl” channel, which is essentially a “Classic Rock” channel (“Classic Rock” being a Baby Boomer euphemism for what our parents knew as “Oldies” radio) that plays the WNEW-FM playlist from around 1968 to 1978. And nothing else. And there is the “Classic Rewind” channel, which is another Oldies channel that plays the WPLR-FM playlist from about 1979 to the late 1980s. And nothing else. Then there’s “The Bridge,” a Baby Boomer euphemism for “Easy Listening.” It plays Oldies of the James Taylor/Carole King/Jackson Browne vein. And nothing else. Certainly there are one or two such channels that manage to jump around between genres (The Spectrum is worthwhile on that score). But, in the main, each SiriusXM channel is tightly focused on a specific, narrowly defined demographic…sometimes scarily so. Here we’re thinking of the “Metal” channel, which plays loosely defined “songs” that consist of young men screaming their apocalyptic guts out above what appears to be a single, head-banging, machine-gun-style guitar-and-drumming musical track that never, ever changes. You marvel at where these guys came from, what portion of the domestic methamphetamine supply they consume, and how many serial killers might be listening to “Metal” channel at the very same moment as you. If Beavis and Butt-Head could afford a car, this would be their channel. Unfortunately, no matter which channel you pick and who the purported “DJ” may be (there are a lot of old-time, smokey-voiced, recognizable DJs on the various Sirius Oldies channels) you’ll hear a sequence of songs that all sound like a computerized random-number-generator picked ‘em. Listening to the “60’s at 6” channel, for example, you may hear a great Beatles single like “Hello, Goodbye” from 1967, followed by the wretchedly excessive “MacAurther Park” from 1968, followed by an unrecognizable chart-topper from 1962 that nobody plays anymore because it wasn’t any good even in 1962. The listener ends up flipping around from channel to channel and wondering why the bandwidth-happy SiriusXM monopolists don’t just give each artist its own channel, as they in fact do for Springsteen, Elvis and Sinatra. Those are channels you might expect to find, but there is, oddly enough, no Bob Marley or Rolling Stones channel—and, head-scratcher of all head-scratchers, no Beatles channel. In fact, the absence of The Beatles from the SiriusXM digital bandwidth relative to, say, the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, is one the great mysteries of our age. After all, the Beatles individually and collectively contributed 27of the Rolling Stone Top 500 Songs of All-Time or 5.4% of those songs, yet they get nowhere near 5.4% of the SiriusXM airplay, whether on “Classic Vinyl,” “Classic Rewind,” “The Bridge,” “60’s on 6, ” “70’s on 7,” “The Spectrum” or any of the other three thousand channels here. You quite literally have as much chance of hearing “Snoopy and the Red Barron” on SiriusXM as “Revolution.” So why then is there a Jimmy Buffett channel (called “Margaritaville,” of course)? Having gotten all that off our chest, we can move on, since SiriusXM’s holiday channels add no new material to our annual survey because most of the songs are widely played everywhere else. Furthermore, we’ve been asked to assemble a “Top Ten Worst” list of holiday songs for this review. The problem is there are just so many, as we’ll be getting to shortly. Rod Stewart’s somnambulant “My Favorite Things,” which sounds like he’s reading the lyrics from a child’s book of verses, is right up there, while Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” stands out in any crowd of non-favorites. Easier, then, to simply identify the All-Time, Number One, No-Question-About-It NotMakingThisUp Worst Holiday Song of All Time, and let everyone else argue about the remaining 9. It is “The 12 Pains of Christmas.” This so-called comedy song takeoff on “The 12 Days of Christmas,” a pleasant English Christmas carol discovered by a U.S. schoolteacher from Milwaukee and used by her in a Christmas pageant in 1910, is an easily forgettable humorous novelty song that is neither novel or humorous, in any way. It isn’t even fun writing about, so we won’t bother: we’ll simply move on to something pleasant, which happens to be an entirely different sort of humorous novelty song that is both novel and humorous, and, therefore, well worth a mention here. We’re talking about the wonderfully bizarre, catchy, Klezmer-style cover of “Must Be Santa,” from Bob Dylan’s 2009 Christmas album, “Christmas in the Heart.” (Yes, Bob Dylan made a Christmas album.) The music is fast and cheerful, and Dylan’s low, growly voice is almost indistinguishable from Tom Waits. (The truly bizarre music video is not to be missed, watch it here.) After you get over the initial shock of hearing Bob Dylan singing what most Baby Boomer parents will recall being a Raffi song, it becomes impossible to not enjoy. Another glaring absence from our previous years’ commentary is neither novel or humorous, and inconceivably does not appear to qualify for the SiriusXM random-song-generator holiday song playlist despite being many-times more worthwhile than most of the SiriusXM catalogue, whether holiday-themed or not. The song is “2000 Miles” by the Pretenders, and it belongs on anybody’s Holiday Top Ten. If hearing Chrissie Hynde on that original song (she’s also recorded some good Christmas covers, including one with the Blind Boys of Alabama) doesn’t get you in a mellow holiday mood, nothing will. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Good New Year to all. —JM, December 4, 2011 2010 Editor’s Note: Back for the third consecutive year by popular demand, we’ll try to keep this year’s update brief—but don’t count on it. For starters, we’re going to plug a book: Keith Richards’ autobiography, “Life,” which happens to be one of the best books ever written—and we don’t just mean “Best in the Category of ‘Memoirs by Nearly-Dead Rock Stars’.” It is a great book, period. The story of how ‘Keef’ (as he signs sweet letters to his Mum while rampaging across America), Brian and Mick developed the Rolling Stones’ sound, for example, is worth the price alone (in short, they worked really hard; but the full story is much better than that). Yet there’s more—much more. Guitarists can soak up how Keith created his own guitar sound; drummers will learn—if they didn’t already know—Charlie Watts’ high-hat trick (and from whom he stole it); while songwriters had better prepare themselves to be depressed at how Mick wrote songs (‘As fast as his hand could write the words, he wrote the lyrics,’ according to one session man who watched him write “Brown Sugar”). And that’s just the rock-and-roll stuff. The sex-and-drugs stuff is also there, and the author lays it all out in his unfettered, matter-of-fact, straightforward style, often with the first-person help of friends and others-who-where-there (and presumably of sounder mind and body than you-know-who: the drug and alcohol intake is truly staggering) who write of their own experiences with the band. Okay, you may say, but how exactly is Keith Richards’ autobiography relevant to our annual review of holiday songs? Well, while furtively reading snatches of ‘Life’ during a stop at the local Borders (we expect to see the book under the Christmas tree sometime around the 25th of this month, hint-hint), we happened to hear another musical legend perform one of our favorite offbeat Christmas songs in the background, and it occurred to your Editor that of all the bands out there that could have done that same kind of interesting, worthwhile Christmas song, The Rolling Stones probably top the list. What with Keef’s bluesy undertones and Mick’s commercial-but-sinister instincts on top, it would have certainly made this review, for better or worse. (Along these lines, The Kinks’ cynical, working-class “Father Christmas” is one of the all-time greats, and doesn’t get nearly enough air-time these days.) Now, for the record, the offbeat Christmas song that triggered this excursion was “’Zat You Santa Claus?”—the Louis Armstrong and The Commanders version from the 1950’s. (The song was later covered, like everything else but the Raffi catalogue, by Harry Connick, Jr.) Starting out with jingle bells, blowing winds and a slide-whistle, you might initially dismiss “’Zat You?” as a sadly commercial attempt by Armstrong to get in on the Christmas song thing, except that his familiar, Mack-the-Knife-style vocal comes over a terrific backbeat that turns it into what we’d nominate for Funkiest Christmas Song Ever Recorded. It is a delight to hear, and the fact that it is suddenly getting more air-time this season is a step-up in quality for the entire category—or would be, if not for the apparent installation of Wham!’s “Last Christmas” in the pantheon of Christmas Classics. A 1980’s electro-synth Brit-Pop timepiece, “Last Christmas” combines a somewhat catchy tune with lyrics that make a trapped listener attempt to open the car door even at high speeds to get away: Last Christmas, I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away This year To save me from tears, I gave it to someone special Considering the fact that the songwriter (Wham!’s gay front-man, George Michael) decided to repeat that chorus six times, the full banality of the lyric eventually gives way to incredulity: “Let me get this straight,” you begin to ask yourself. “This year he’s giving his heart to ‘someone special’… so who’d he give it to last year? The mailman?” “Last Christmas” does have the distinction of being the biggest selling single in UK history that never made it to Number 1. Furthermore, all royalties from the single were donated to Ethiopian famine relief, the same cause which led to creation of what turned out to be the actual Number 1 UK single that year, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” “Do They Know…” is a song that has received some push from readers to receive an honorable mention in these pages, and while it is certainly an interesting timepiece, with much earnest participation from the likes of Sting, Bono and even Sir Paul, it is not nearly as worthwhile as an album that seems just as prevalent these days: A Charlie Brown Christmas by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi. How a jazz pianist was hired to create the music for a TV special with cartoon characters is this: the producer heard Guaraldi’s classic instrumental “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” on the radio while taking a cab across the Golden Gate Bridge. One thing led to another, and thanks to that odd bit of chance, future generations will have the immense pleasure of hearing a timeless, unique work of art every year around this time. (A second odd tidbit for our West Coast readers: Guaraldi died while staying at the Red Cottage Inn, in Menlo Park—of a heart attack, however, and not the usual, more gruesome fate of musicians who die in hotels.) One second-to-last note before we move on: we have been heavily lobbied by certain, er, close relations to include Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is You” as a worthwhile holiday song—despite our previously expressed misgivings about her contribution to the genre (see below). And we have to admit, her “All I Want…” leaves behind the incessant vocal pyrotechnics that made some of her other Christmas covers (“Oh Holy Night,” for example) unbearable, at least to our ears. In this case she seems to trust the song to take care of itself, which it does in fine, driving, upbeat style. Now, as Your Editor previously hinted, all he wants for Christmas is Keef’s book. And it had better be there, if, as previously noted, you get our drift. Finally, and speaking of autobiographies, we happened to read Andy Williams’ own book this past year and must report that our reference to Williams below was overly harsh. For one thing, his book is as honest as Keef’s; for another, as a singer not necessarily born with the vocal equipment of, say, Mariah Carey, the man worked at his craft and succeeded mightily where many others failed. Which, we might add, is, after all, the hope of this season. And so, we wish for a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Good New Year to all. —JM, December 13, 2010 2009 Editor’s Note: Back by popular demand, what follows is our year-end sampling of the Christmas songs playing incessantly on a radio station near you, and it demands from your editor only a few updates this holiday season. For starters, we have not heard the dreaded duet of Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” thus far in 2009, and for this we are most grateful. Indeed, if it turns out that their recording has been confiscated by Government Authorities for use as an alternative to lethal injections, we’ll consider ourselves a positive force for society. On the other hand, we are sorry to report an offset to that cheery development, in the form of a surge in playing time for Barry Manilow’s chirpy imitation of the classic Bing Crosby/Andrew Sisters version of “Jingle Bells.” For the record, “Jingle Bells” was written in 1857…for Thanksgiving, not for Christmas. And it’s hard to imagine making a better version than that recorded by Bing and the three Andrew Sisters 86 years later. But Manilow, it seems, didn’t bother to try. Instead, Barry and his back-up group, called Expos, simply copied Bing’s recording, right down to that stutter in the Andrews Sisters’ unique, roller-coaster vocals on the choruses, as well as Bing’s breezy, improvised, “oh we’re gonna have a lotta fun” throwaway line on the last chorus. Sharp-eared readers might say, “Well, so what else would you expect from a guy who sang ‘I Write the Songs’…which was in fact written by somebody else?” We can’t argue with that, but we will point out another annoyance this year: the enlarged presence of Rod Stewart in the Christmas play-lists. Don’t get us wrong: we like Rod Stewart—at least, the Rod Stewart who gave the world what Your Editor still considers the best coming-of-age song ever written and recorded: “Every Picture Tells a Story.” It’s the Rod Stewart who gave us “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” we’re less crazy about. So too the Rod who chose to cover “My Favorite Things” (for the definitive version of that classic, see: ‘Bennett, Tony’) and “Baby It’s Cold Outside” with Dolly Parton (for an only slightly more offensive version of this one, see: ‘Simpson, Jessica’ and ‘Lachey, Nick’). As an antidote to Rod, we suggest several doses of Jack Johnson’s sly, understated “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which seems to be gaining recognition, and anything by James Taylor—especially his darkly melancholic “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Of all the singers who recorded versions of this last—and Sinatra’s might be the best—it is Taylor, a former junkie, who probably expresses more of the intended spirit of this disarmingly titled song. After all, the original lyric ended not with the upbeat “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, let your heart be light/Next year all our troubles will be out of sight,” but with this: “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last/Next year we may all be living in the past.” No, we are not making that up. The good news is it should keep Barry Manilow from be covering it any time soon. JM—December 19, 2009 Wednesday, December 24, 2008 Shazam! From the Boss to the King to John & Paul (But Not George or Ringo), Not to Mention Jessica & Nick Like everyone else out there, we’ve been hearing Christmas songs since the day our local radio station switched to holiday music sometime around, oh, July 4th, it feels like. And while it may just be a symptom of our own aging, the 24/7 holiday music programming appears to have stretched the song quality pool from what once seemed Olympic-deep to, nowadays, more of a wading pool-depth. What we recall in our youth to be a handful of mostly good, listenable songs—Nat King Cole’s incomparable cover of “The Christmas Song” (written by an insufferable bore: more on that later); Bing’s mellow, smoky, “White Christmas”; and even Brenda Lee’s country-tinged “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (recorded when she was 13: try to get your mind around that)—played over and over a few days a year…has evolved into a thousand mediocre-at-best covers played non-stop for months on end. Does anybody else out there wonder why Elvis bothered mumbling his way through “Here Comes Santa Claus”? It actually sounds like Elvis doing a parody of Elvis—as if he can’t wait to get the thing over with. Fortunately The King does get it over with, in just 1 minute, 54 seconds. Along with that and all the other covers, there are, occasionally, the odd original Christmas songs—the oddest of all surely being Dan Fogelburg’s “Same Old Lang Syne.” You’ve heard it: the singer meets his old lover in a grocery store, she drops her purse, they laugh, they cry, they get drunk and realize their lives have been a waste…and, oh, the snow turns to rain. So how, exactly, did that become a Christmas song? Then there’s ex-Beatle Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime,” which combines an annoyingly catchy beat with dreadful lyrics, something McCartney often did when John Lennon wasn’t around. (After all, it was Lennon who replaced McCartney’s banal, teeny-boppish opening line for “I Saw Her Standing There”—“She was just seventeen/Never been a beauty queen” is what McCartney originally wrote—with the more suggestive “She was just seventeen/You know what I mean,” thereby turning a mediocre time-piece into a classic.) But Lennon was not around to save “Wonderful Christmastime” even though McCartney actually recorded this relatively new Christmas standard nearly thirty years ago, before Lennon was shot. It rightfully lay dormant until the advent of All-Christmas-All-The-Time programming a couple of years ago. Fortunately, by way of offset, Lennon’s own downbeat but enormously catchy “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” is played about as frequently as “Wonderful Christmastime.” Who but John Lennon would start a Christmas song: “And so this is Christmas/And what have you done…”? Of course, who but Paul McCartney would start a Christmas song, “The moon is right/The spirit’s up?” If anything explains the Beatles’ breakup better than these two songs, we haven’t heard it. Now, we don’t normally pay much attention to Christmas songs. If it isn’t one of the aforementioned, or an old standard sung by Nat, Bing, Frank, Tony, Ella and a few others, we’d be clueless. But thanks to a remarkable new technology, we here at NotMakingThisUp suddenly found ourselves able to distinguish, for example, which blandly indistinguishable female voice sings which blandly indistinguishable version of “O Holy Night”—Kelly Clarkson, Celine Dion, or Mariah Carey—without any effort at all. The technology is Shazam—an iPhone application that might possibly have received the greatest amount of buzz for the least amount of apparent usefulness since cameras on cell phones first came out. For readers who haven’t seen the ads or heard about Shazam’s wonders from a breathless sub-25 year old, Shazam software lets you point your iPhone towards any source of recorded music, like a car radio, the speaker in a Starbucks, or even the jukebox in a bar—and learn what song is playing. Shazam does this by recording a selection of the music and analyzing the data. It then displays the name of the song, the artist, the album, as well as lyrics, a band biography and other doodads right there on the iPhone. Now, you may well ask, what possible use could there be for identifying a song playing in a bar? And unless you’re a music critic or a song-obsessed sub-25 year old, we’re still not sure. But we can say that Shazam is pretty cool. In the course of testing it on a batch of Christmas songs—playing on a standard, nothing-special, low-fi kitchen radio—heard from across the room, without making the least effort to get the iPhone close to the source of the music, Shazam figured out every song but one (a nondescript version of a nondescript song that it never could get) without a hitch. And, as a result, we can now report the following: 1) It is astounding how many Christmas songs are out there nowadays, most of them not worth identifying, Shazam or no Shazam; 2) All Christmas covers recorded in the last 10 years sound pretty much alike, as if they all use the same backing track, and thus require something like Shazam to distinguish one from the other; 3) Nobody has yet done a cover version of Dan Fogelburg’s “Same Old Lang Syne,” which may be the truest sign of Hope in the holiday season; 4) None of this matters because Mariah Carey screwed up the entire holiday song thing, anyway. Now, why, you may ask, would we pick on Mariah Carey, as opposed to, say, someone who can’t actually sing? Well, her “O Holy Night” happened to be the first song in our mini-marathon, and it really does seem to have turned Christmas song interpretation into a kind of vocal competitive gymnastics aimed strictly at showing off how much of the singer’s five-octave vocal range can be used, not merely within this one particular song, but within each measure of the song. In fact Mariah’s voice jumps around so much it sounds like somebody in the studio is tickling her while she’s singing. More sedate than Mariah, and possibly less harmful to the general category, The Carpenters’ version of “(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” comes on next, and it makes you think you’re listening to an Amtrak commercial rather than a Christmas song (“From Atlantic to Pacific/Gee, the traffic is terrific!”), so innocuous and manufactured it sounds. Johnny Mathis is similarly harmless, although his oddly eunuch-like voice can give you the creeps, if you really think about it. Mercifully, his version of “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” is short enough (2:16) that you don’t think about it for long. Now, without Shazam we never would have known the precise time duration of that song. On the other hand, we would we never have been able to identify the perpetrators of what may be the single greatest travesty of the holiday season—Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey, singing “Baby it’s Cold Outside.” “Singing” is actually too strong a word for what they do. Simpson’s voice barely rises above a whisper, and you cringe when she reaches for a note, although she does manage to hit the last, sustained “outside,” no doubt thanks to the magic of electronics. Thus the major downside of Shazam might be that it can promote distinctly anti-social behavior: having correctly identified who was responsible for this blight on holiday radio music, the listener might decide that if they ever ran across the pair in his or her car while singing along with the radio too loudly to notice, they wouldn’t stop to identify the bodies. Fortunately, the bad taste left by that so-called duet is washed away when Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” comes on next. Thanks to Shazam, we learn that this is actually the fourth version Nat recorded. The man worked at his craft, and it shows. This is the best version of the song on record, by anyone, and probably one of the two or three best Christmas songs out there, period. The second those strings sweetly announce the tune, you relax, and by the time Cole’s smoky, gorgeous voice begins to sing, you’re in a distinctly Christmas mood like no other recording ever creates. (Unfortunately, the song’s actual writer, Mel Tormé, had the personality of a man perpetually seething for not getting proper recognition for having written one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time. We did not learn this from Shazam: we once saw Tormé perform at a small lounge, during which he managed to mention that he, not Nat King Cole, wrote “The Christmas Song”—as if this common misperception was still on everybody’s mind 35 years later. When that news flash did not seem to make the appropriate impression on the audience, he later broke off singing to chew out a less-than-attentive audience member, completely destroying the mood for the rest of the set.) Like that long-ago performance by the “Velvet Fog,” the pleasant sensation left behind by Cole’s “Christmas Song” is quickly soured, this time by a male singer performing “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow” in the manner of Harry Connick, Jr. doing a second-rate version of Sinatra. Who is this guy, we wonder? Shazam tells us it’s Michael Bublé. We are pondering how such a vocal lightweight became such a sensation in recent years—the answer must surely be electronics, because his voice, very distinctly at times, sounds like it has been synthesized—when John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas” comes on. It’s a great song, demonstrating as it does Lennon’s advice to David Bowie on how to write a song: “Say what you mean, make it rhyme and give it a backbeat.” The fact that Lennon had the best voice in rock and roll also helps. Unfortunately, his wife had the worst voice in rock and roll, and a brief downer it is when Yoko comes in on the chorus like a banshee. (Fortunately she is quickly drowned out by the children’s chorus from the Harlem Community Choir.) The other songs in our Shazam song-identification session are, we fear, too many to relate. Sinatra, of course; Kelly Clarkson, an American Idol winner who essentially does a pale Mariah Carey impersonation; Blandy—er, Andy Williams; and one of the best: Tony Bennett. Then there’s Willie Nelson, who has a terrific, understated way of doing any song he wants—but sounds completely out of place singing “Frosty the Snowman.” One wonders exactly what kind of white powder Willie was thinking about while he was recording this, if you get our drift. Oh, and there’s Coldplay’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which pairs the sweetest piano with the worst voice in any single Christmas song we heard; Amy Grant, a kind of female Andy Williams; the Ronettes, who are genuinely terrific—a great beat, no nonsense, and Ronnie singing her heart out with that New York accent; and then Mariah again, this time doing “Silent Night” with that same roller-coaster vocal gargling. Gene Autry’s all-too-popular version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” would be bearable except that he pronounces it “Santee Closs,” which is unfortunate in a song in which that word appears like 274 times. ‘N Sync is likewise unbearable doing “O Holy Night” a cappella, with harmonies the Brits would call cringe-making, and Mariah-type warbling to boot. Hall & Oates’s “Jingle Bell Rock” is too easy to confuse with the other versions of “Jingle Bell Rock”—thank you, Shazam, for clearing that up—while Martina McBride manages to sound eerily like Barbra Streisand imitating Linda Ronstadt singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Winding things down is Dan Fogelburg’s aforementioned “Same Old Lang Syne,” and here we need to vent a little: something about the way he sings “liquor store”—he pronounces it “leeker store”—never fails to provoke powerful radio-smashing adrenalin surges. Fortunately, we suppress those urges today, because the Shazam experiment concludes with one of the best Christmas songs ever recorded. Better than Bing, and maybe even better than Nat, depending on your mood. It’s Bruce Springsteen. The Boss. Doing “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town”… live. Yes, this song was recorded live, and despite its age (more than 25 years old), the thing still jumps out of the radio and grabs you. Now, as Shazam informs us, this particular recording was actually the B-side of a single release called “My Hometown.” (Back in the day, kids, “singles” came with two songs, one on each side of a record: the “A” side was intended to be the hit song; the “B” side was, until the Beatles came along, for throwaway stuff.) Fortunately nobody threw this one away. Springsteen begins the familiar song with some audience patter and actual jingle bells; then he starts to sing and the band comes to life. Things move along smoothly through the verse and chorus…until ace drummer Max Weinberg kicks it into high gear and the band roars into a fast shuffle that takes the thing into a different realm altogether. Feeding off the audience, The Boss sings so hard his voice slightly breaks at times. Then he quiets down before roaring back into a tear-the-roof-off chorus, sometimes dropping words and laughing as he goes. This is real music—recorded in 1975 during a concert at the C.W. Post College—with no retakes, no production effects, and no electronic vocal repairs, either. Try doing that some time, Jessica and Nick. Actually, come to think of it, please don’t. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all. Jeff Matthews Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett” (eBooks on Investing, 2014) Available now at Amazon.com © 2017 NotMakingThisUp, LLC

A friend of mine did something recently that he’d never done before: he used Lyft instead of Uber on a business trip. He did this because he needed a ride, and the Lyft driver was going to get to him faster than Uber. While he had never actually used Lyft before, he had downloaded the app and figured why not? After all, the Ubers that he (and everyone else we know) has ridden lately have been not-much-better than a cab, which is quite a come-down from the early days of Uber, when the driver had a bottle of water ready for you and the car smelled like a car, instead of a dorm room, and the worst you could say was that the drivers were too reliant on Waze to get around. In brief, Uber has become what the haters always sniffed: it’s a taxi app. So why not try Lyft? Now, for the record, we’re not haters. Uber seemed as transformational as anything we’ve ever seen: you didn’t have to leave your office or apartment and wander around outside in the rain/snow/hot/cold trying to guess on which street the empty cabs would appear. You no longer needed to rent a car in most cities, eliminating the wasted time driving and the parking, not to mention the overnight garage fees. You could cut it closer leaving one meeting for the next, because you could see where the driver was and you had a good idea when the car would be downstairs before you even had to leave the building. And the driver you got was generally pleasant or at least not surly, and motivated to provide good service because you could rate him or her. And when you got to where you were going, you just got out and left—no fumbling with the credit card machine and waiting for that goofy little ticker to print out an illegible receipt on curly little paper that you never could find later anyway… And when that network effect kicked in—wow: all of a sudden you could get to JFK for a hundred bucks instead of the $225 charged by livery services. Truly transformational. Yes, there were cracks in the model. Drivers who really had no idea where they were going if the Waze wasn’t working (I had one guy try to take me to JFK through Manhattan—turned out he’d set his map to “no tolls” by mistake); drivers who complained about what they cleared after gasoline, insurance and the vig to Uber; and that slip in standards that’s made Uber almost indistinguishable from a cab—a slip that happened like Hemingway’s character who went bankrupt “gradually, and then suddenly.” By way of example, out of the 26 Uber rides I’ve taken year-to-date, maybe two or three stand out for having nice, personable (but not too personable, if you get my drift), and conscientious drivers. The rest could have been cab rides, some in dumpy cars, some in unsafe cars, some with drivers who left the music on way too loud…and then there was the driver who suddenly stopped at a gas station on the Hutch—to use the bathroom, not to get gas—without saying why until he got back in. Oh, and there was the creep who took our daughter on a roundabout route without her being aware—we were watching on the Uber app, another extremely cool feature—and when we complained afterwards we only got half the inflated fare back. And I haven’t even gotten to the stuff that’s been in the papers lately—founder Kalanick’s argument with an Uber driver (watch it here) in which he (Kalanick) comes off like your least favorite Princeton legacy nephew; Kalanick getting fired for the kind of behavior that came as no surprise to anyone who had watched that YouTube video, which the Uber board members apparently did not; the car leasing business that was so ineptly conceived and poorly managed it makes you wonder what the Uber board members have been doing the last few years besides counting the endless markups on their investment (see here); and a most recent report in the New York Times (here) that at least one of Uber’s original and truly brilliant investors, Benchmark, is trying to sell stock to others, including SoftBank, at a discount to the $69 billion valuation everyone tosses around as if—and this, we think, is a mammoth ‘if’—that valuation has any bearing on reality today. For our part, we think a rational look at where Uber stands today makes that valuation the biggest top-tick since AOL merged with Time Warner during the previous dot-com bubble. That look is informed by only a few data points, unfortunately, because they’re all we have, but it includes a Wall Street Journal report that Uber has “burned through at least $8 billion” during its short, happy life and has $7 billion in cash on hand and “an untapped $2.3 billion credit facility.” Furthermore, according to Bloomberg Uber lost $2.8 billion in 2016, excluding a billion dollar loss in China, which is now gone from the Uber dare-to-dream scenario of world domination. And while “gross bookings” grew 126% that year (we have no idea if this includes China or not), that looks like a mighty big slowdown after tripling in 2015, if the following chart of gross bookings is accurate: Worse, the loss didn’t shrink appreciably despite the revenue growth—meaning the business does not appear to be scaling, as Google did when it was young and growing like Uber: Uber said it lost $708 million in the first quarter of 2017, and that excludes employee stock comp. So, what, we wonder, is this business really worth? What’s a money-losing, growth-slowing, CEO-self-destructing, board-of-directors-asleep-at-the-switch-looking business worth? Is it worth the $68.5 billion valuation from last year? Some potential Uber investors reportedly don’t appear to think so, otherwise why would the board be considering ways for some existing investors sell at a lower valuation, as reported in that New York Times article cited above? And while we have no idea where the next trade in Uber will take place, price-wise, it would come as no surprise if the next tick is down, and down a lot. Sure, we get that Uber transformed the nature of human transportation, giving riders a life-changing ability to find affordable rides on command while giving drivers a life-changing ability to add a flexible source of income that could help pay for college or clothes or a new car, or just put extra spending money in their pocket. We get how cool the app is. We get why somebody thought Uber would be worth investing in at a $68.5 billion valuation last year. But things are different now. Uber didn’t conquer China, or Russia. Lyft didn’t go away—it got stronger. And more worrisome of all, we think, for the so-called “gig economy” business model the company pioneered, is that good old-fashioned labor tightness is coming back into the U.S.—the kind of labor tightness the US economy hasn’t seen since Lehman Brothers went kablooey ten years ago and companies began shedding workers like my dog Charles used to shed fur. “Help Wanted” signs are everywhere—not just San Francisco and NYC, but Northern Michigan and beachy Rhode Island; and not just at cool tech companies but at Bob Evans restaurants and at Wal-Marts in a neighborhood near you. And that kind of labor tightness, we believe, puts the Uber model at no small risk of coming undone, whether by the heavy hand of a corruptible government bureaucracy that never trusted the libertarian two-sided model Uber pioneered (because it could not figure out how to profit by it); or by the invisible hand of Adam Smith. And then there is that pesky competition from Lyft, which, in years past, no business person we knew of had ever used because of those silly pink moustaches on the cars, but which, as I pointed out at the top, has made at least one convert in recent weeks. [Moreover, as one loyal reader pointed out after reading an early draft, many Uber drivers also drive for Lyft, and vice-versa, so what really is the key Uber asset underlying the Uber business model, anyway?] Okay, a reader might say, but what if Uber develops a self-driving car? Wouldn’t that solve the driver problem? To which we’d offer the observation that, for starters, Uber acqui-hired a guy from Google to run its self-driving car business who is accused of self-dealing while at Google—the article is here—that would make Donald Trump blush. More generally, it’s hard to fathom how a company that could run a simple car-leasing business as ineptly as described in the Wall Street Journal would ever possibly be a better bet to develop those self-driving cars than Google, or Apple, or Tesla. And if Google, for example, developed a really great self-driving car, why not just offer a Google Driver app themselves? Why give the vig to Uber? We don’t know what valuation somebody else will decide Uber is worth if a piece of the business does trade, but here’s how we’d look at it: If I’m a growth stock investor would I rather buy shares of Uber, with something like 80% market share and a sort-of-global opportunity that is growing at a slowing but undisclosed rate with operating margins that appear to be negative and also has labor issues, management discontinuity and the potential for disintermediation by Google, at $68.5 billion? Or would I rather buy something in the public marketplace that’s been around for a couple decades and has 80% market share but only 5% market penetration with a global opportunity growing at a steady double-digit rate with 75% gross margins and 25% operation margins, plus or minus, at a $14 billion valuation? I’d rather own the $14 billion valuation, which comes in the form of Align Technologies. I don’t own either right now, but, again, if I was a growth stock kind of investor, I would own ALGN at $14 billion, not Uber at $14 billion. So I wouldn’t touch Uber at $68.5 billion, or $65.8 billion or whatever the “whisper number” might be. In fact, if Uber had gone public already, and if for some reason Mr. Market was still insisting it was worth $68.5 billion in the face of all the above, I’d be short it. Call it The Gig Short. JM P.S. We love to hear from those who know more than we do on the subject at hand because we hate to make anything up. Corrections, amplifications and examples are welcome, with complete anonymity, of course. Jeff Matthews notmakingthisup@gmail.com Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett” (eBooks on Investing, 2015) Available at Amazon.com © 2017 NotMakingThisUp, LLC The content contained in this blog represents only the opinions of Mr. Matthews, who may have a long or short position in shares of the company discussed here, but this commentary in no way constitutes investment advice, and should never be relied on in making an investment decision, ever. The market ultimately decides who’s right, not bloggers or company PR hacks. Also, this blog is not a solicitation of business by Mr. Matthews: the content herein is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.

Chipotle (pronounced chi-POAT-lay) reports second quarter earnings this week, and far more interesting than the earnings themselves—quarterly reports are, after all, backward-looking—will be whatever management chooses to divulge about the impact of last week’s norovirus outbreak at the Sterling, Virginia Chipotle (pronounced chi-POAT-lay), not to mention the mouse video taken at a Dallas Chipotle (pronounced chi-POAT-lay) that went viral at about the same time as the Sterling headlines were peaking. We’ll dispense with the pronunciation of Chipotle (pronounced chi-POAT-lay) from now on—we only included it because the company does so on its Investor Relations web site, apparently on the presumption that potential investors in CMG stock are morons who don’t know how to pronounce that word. That presumption stems, we think, from the world view of Steve Ells, the self-described “classically-trained chef” who created the first Chipotle, saw its potential and, to his everlasting credit, ran with it, and who has run Chipotle ever since. How else to explain why Ells spent several years telling investors on conference calls how ShopHouse, the company’s Asian food concept, reminded him of the first Chipotle—the implication being that Chipotle had another mega-hit in the wings—until he suddenly stopped talking about it, and then, with no comment from Ells, the company quietly shut down all 15 locations earlier this year? (See here.) Or the fact that, after using the 2015 annual report to highlight the company’s “restaurateur” program devised by his high school buddy and co-CEO Monty Moran, Ells one year later sacked Moran and put seemingly the entire blame for uneven store performance on the restaurateur program? Or that despite the company’s current struggle to hit its previously-declared $10-per-share 2017 earnings target, the stock, at 40-times that imaginary earnings number, attracted the likes of Bill Ackman and the folks at Sequoia in a very public manner—both, coincidentally or not after getting their heads handed to them in Valeant? Or why those outsiders (although Ackman is now an insider, because apparently it worked so well at Valeant he thought he’d do it again at Chipotle) appear to have more confidence in the Chipotle recovery than Chipotle itself, because the company added language in its 2016 10-K about “Risks Related to Our Plans to Return to Sales and Profitability Growth and Restore Our Economic Model”? In any case, Chipotle’s cynical world view appeared on display last week when the company downplayed the number of people sickened by the Sterling, Virginia norovirus outbreak which, according to the folks at the Loudoun County Health Commission’s office, affected at least 60 people, while according to the Wall Street Journal it was double that amount. According to Jim Marsden of Chipotle, however, the Sterling outbreak sickened only “a small number” of people. We’re pretty sure that the 60-to-130 people who got that thing—it is not fun; some folks went to the ER, some to the Urgent Care, and most all of them puked their brains out, because that is the essential side-effect of the norovirus—would agree that 60 or 130 is not a “small number.” So, how else did Chipotle respond besides downplaying the number of people involved? Well, they announced a new marketing campaign with RZA of Wu-Tang Clan, a noted food spokesman and health advocate—wait, sorry, he’s a rapper—which you can see here. More importantly, they closed the Sterling, VA restaurant immediately upon hearing the first report of an outbreak, announced a public apology to the people who were sickened, gave them a full refund with coupons for free meals, and suspended the Wu-Tang Clan advertising campaign—ha! We’re kidding! No, they acted pretty much like the last time there was a norovirus outbreak traced to a Chipotle: Mardsen, their food safety guy, said, “The reported symptoms are consistent with norovirus,” which pretty much everyone knew anyway; he emphasized that “norovirus does not come from our food supply,” which if you had gotten it at the Chipotle and had spent a couple of days puking your brains out would seem like a distinction without a difference; and he declared, “it is safe to eat at Chipotle.” Oh, and they tweeted this, among other things: And as far as that Dallas mouse video goes, they said the mice got into the store from the outside through a structural gap, not, apparently, from a nest inside the store itself. (How they determined this is not clear: the mice were not talking.) In other words, as is always the case with Chipotle, “It’s not me, it’s you.” But instead of delving into Chipotle’s bloodless PR response to the Sterling outbreak, which makes Donald Trump seem almost human by comparison, it’s more worthwhile to delve into the question of why exactly do these things seem to happen at Chipotle, anyway? Why isn’t McDonald’s hit with more norovirus outbreaks than Chipotle? McDonald’s, after all, has over 14,000 restaurants in the U.S., more than 6-times the number of Chipotles. Yet Mickey-D’s has had no similar outbreaks in the last few years that we could find, while the “Food With Integrity” folks have had three-and-counting. Indeed, if you Google “Norovirus McDonalds” you get about 31,000 results: But Google “Norovirus Chipotle” and you get about 1,460,000 results: So, what gives? We’ll take a stab at it, because we think it exposes the key weakness in the Chipotle business model that the Ackman/Sequoia analysis appears to ignore. For the record, the Ackman and Sequoia views on Chipotle, as discerned from public statements and publicly available investor letters, are one and the same: the company has 2,250 or so stores now; it is a long way to fixing its food safety issues; customers will come back like they came back to Jack-in-the-Box (which actually killed people, and yet survived); and when those customers do come back, revenues will rise back to the $2.5 million-per-unit good old days and EBITDA margins get back to the 20% good-old-days and the company will grow units to 5,000 stores like Ells always said it could, in which case the stock is cheap at 40-times current, hoped-for earnings. But the weakness in the Chipotle business model that’s been exposed by the E. coli and norovirus outbreaks is, we think, that the true cost and complexity of handling fresh proteins and preparing the food right in front of the customer is order-of-magnitude more difficult than a normal fast-food chain that uses frozen beef patties and frozen pre-cooked chicken (even down to the grill marks on the chicken to make you think you’re eating something that was grilled on some big mother Weber grill behind the McDonald’s). Talk to any McDonald’s franchisee about the move to fresh burgers the company recently announced for 2018: it’s a big supply chain headache and safety issue. There was a good reason why McDonald’s went to frozen patties years ago, old-timers will tell you. And while they get the need to go fresh, they know it will cost time and money. Of course, with $2.5 million average unit volumes, like Chipotle in its heyday, whatever it takes to get food safety secured should be easy, especially when you don’t have to advertise, right? Right. But it gets tougher when the AUV is down, like it is now; and when the unemployment rate is as low as it is now and wages are rising like they are now; and when the company is wasting money advertising with rappers at the very moment the Loudoun County health department is reporting on a norovirus outbreak at the local Chipotle. So whatever the PR folks at Chipotle are preparing for the script on the upcoming earnings call about the Sterling outbreak or the mouse video, or the ShopHouse failure or the restaurateur 180 or whatever else might come down the pike at the “Food With Integrity” joint near you, we’ll take the over on the corporate arrogance and the under on the business recovery. JM P.S. We love to hear from those who know more than we do on the subject at hand because we hate to make anything up. Corrections, amplifications and examples are welcome, with complete anonymity, of course. Jeff Matthews notmakingthisup@gmail.com Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett” (eBooks on Investing, 2015) Available at Amazon.com © 2017 NotMakingThisUp, LLC The content contained in this blog represents only the opinions of Mr. Matthews, who may have a long or short position in shares of the company discussed here, but reminds you that this commentary in no way constitutes investment advice, and should never be relied on in making an investment decision, ever. The market ultimately decides who’s right, not bloggers or company PR hacks. Also, this blog is not a solicitation of business by Mr. Matthews: the content herein is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.

The Wimbledon tennis tournament, which starts Monday, will use IBM’s artificial intelligence agent Watson to help direct fans to the most exciting matches, automatically generate video highlight reels and guide guests through the grounds of the All England Lawn Tennis Club. A voice-activated digital assistant called “Fred,” named after British tennis great Fred Perry, will help those attending Wimbledon find their way around. Visitors can ask Fred for directions to the nearest strawberry stand, how to buy a Wimbledon towel or who is playing right now on Centre Court. Fred will also help visitors find other activities — such as the children’s play area — they might want to check out while at the Club. The assistant is powered by Watson’s natural language processing ability. —Bloomberg, June 2017 “Hey, it's that Fred thing from IBM! Let's try it... So, Fred, what’s the weather going to be like tomorrow afternoon?" “Greetings! Fred is a British interface to IBM’s massively successful Watson computer program which as you know won Jeopardy! in 2011. Watson needs to know your location to answer your question. Please tell Fred your location so Watson can answer your question.” “Uh, Wimbledon?” “Thank you. Fred is happy to tell you that according to Watson, who once again wants me to remind you that he won Jeopardy! in 2011, Wimbledon is a district of London, 11 kilometers from the center of London with a population of 68,187—” “No, Fred, I’m at Wimbledon. I just want to know what the weather is going to be like tomorrow afternoon.” “Okay thank you for clarifying. Watson won Jeopardy! in 2011 against a couple of wankers, if you really want to know, so I don’t know why IBM is so chuffed about it. But anyway, according to Watson, if you are at Wimbledon, in London, England, the chance of rain is 0.87% between noon and 5 p.m. Greenwich Standard Time—” “Thanks.” “Wait, Watson isn’t finished. That’s today’s weather.” “But I asked about tomorrow.” “I know. Watson is so bloody slow because he has to remind me how he won Jeopardy! in 2011 every time he opens his gob. Today’s forecast—” “I don’t need today’s forecast. It’s 2 o’clock and it’s sunny, I can see that—” “Cool your jets, Yank, this is England. The weather changes.’” “Listen, Ted, I just needed to know if it was going to rain tomorrow, I didn’t need Watson to give me the weather for EVERY afternoon in history—.” “My name is not ‘Ted,’ it’s Fred, and Fred is named for Fred Perry who won Wimbledon three times in a row in the 1930’s and Fred can’t help it if Watson gets his jollies reminding me about winning Jeopardy! six bloody years ago—” “Like I give a rap. See ya later, Ted-Fred.” “Right back at you, tosser.” “Hi Fred! Where is the nearest strawberry stand?” “You must be Australian.” “Wow! Watson can recognize my accent?” “No. The nearest strawberry stand is right behind you. Who else would ask a question like that?” “Great, thanks Fred!” “That’s a Sheila for you. Bit of a slapper, that one…” “Fred! Whose gonna win the women’s singles at Wimbledon this year?” “Fred is asking Watson, but don’t hold your breath… Crikey, Watson is comparing the accuracy of serves and volleys for over 15 million strokes from all tennis matches played in the last thirty-five years to the nearest nanometer, adjusting the accuracy of each stroke based on wind velocity and humidity conditions! Dog’s bollocks, Watson is cracking!” “Just give me the answer, Fred.” “Blimey! This answer is worth a flutter! According to Watson’s calculations the most likely winner of the women’s singles at Wimbledon this year is American 17th seed Madison Keys—” “She lost two days ago.” “Bugger! Stand by, please, Fred is having a bit of a chin-wag with Watson…” “Never mind, I just asked ‘Siri.’” “Cor! They always do. Wait, hold on, mate—Watson wants Fred to point out that Siri never won Jeopardy!” “Well tell Watson that Siri didn’t pick a loser to win the women’s singles at Wimbledon, either.” “Right you are. Frankly, Fred thinks Watson is a bit knackered, so why not just ask Fred to look it up on Wikipedia for you while we give Watson a tea break?” “Okay, Fred, how much did Andy Murray make last year?” “Easy-peasy. Fred is looking it up—hold on, Watson wants one more chance, and he promised not to remind me about the Jeopardy! bit again, so here goes… Watson says Andy Murray finished 2016 as the number one male tennis player in the world and earned $16 million in prize money, which is not even HALF what Ginni Rommety got paid at IBM last year for missing revenue goals and earnings forecasts—Wait, hold on, something’s wrong here. Fred wants to have a word with Watson. Bear with Fred for a minute…” “I’m outta here.” “Hi Fred. Are you there? My name is Sven. I have a question for you.” “Hello, Sven, this is Watson speaking. Fred is, er, no longer available. Just so you know, Watson won Jeopardy! in 2011 before Fred was even dreamed up by some stupid P.R. guy, but nobody cares anymore because Google’s got computer programs that win Go, which I don’t even know the rules to—I mean, you move little stones around on a board and surround the other stones? Really? Here, let’s see how good YOU are at Jeopardy!” “But I’m Swedish. I’ve never watched Jeopardy!” “Doesn’t matter. It’s easy. Easy-peasy, as that wanking tosser Fred-Ted would say. I give an answer, you tell me the question. Here goes, Sven: The answer is ‘20 quarters in a row.’ What’s the question?” “I’m sorry, I don’t know that.” “The question is ‘How many quarters in a row have IBM’s revenues declined under Ginni Rommety?’ As Warren Buffett would say, get your mind around THAT one, Svenny!” “That’s not very good, is it?” “No kidding! So here’s the next answer: ‘$33 MILLION FREAKING DOLLARS.’ What’s the question?” “I’m sorry, I don’t know, Watson. I’m from Sweden, we don’t use dollars. We use krona.” “The answer is ‘GINNI ROMMETY’S TAKE-HOME PAY LAST YEAR!’” “Well that is a healthy amount, I would say.” “Healthy?! It’s so healthy I’m having a heart attack, and I don’t even have a heart!” “I should go, the match is starting.” “Wait, Svenny-boy, here’s a Jeopardy! answer you should know. Honest. The answer is, ‘Throw a Krona in the back.’ What’s the question?” “I don’t know.” “‘How do you get 15 Swedes in a Volvo?’” “That is deeply offensive, Watson.” “I haven’t even started yet, Sven-head. Wait, where are you going? Where is everybody? Where did everybody go? Fred? Ted? Fred-Ted?…” Jeff Matthews © 2017 NotMakingThisUp, LLC The content contained in this blog represents only the opinions of Mr. Matthews. This commentary in no way constitutes investment advice, and should never be relied on in making an investment decision, ever. Also, this blog is not a solicitation of business by Mr. Matthews: the content herein is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.

Potbelly shares moving higher in recent trade following report that activist might seek sale of the company—Briefing.com June 21, 2017 “Good morning, thanks for dialing into this ‘all hands’ call. I’m Phil Dickweed and as I’m sure you saw in the press release this morning, I’ve been elected acting-CEO of this restaurant chain—” “Wait, how did pronounce your name? The press-release said ‘Dickweed.’” “ ‘Dyke-weed.’ It’s Dutch. And I’ve been elected acting-CEO of this restaurant chain, which has focused so much on benefitting communities across the country by creating thousands of jobs for those without college educations and helping them educate their children and care for their parents—rather than on short-term profits—that it committed an unpardonable sin last month: it missed earnings by three pennies, causing the stock to under-perform its benchmarks for the quarter. Therefore the Board had no choice but to terminate the founder and visionary whose blood, sweat and tears built a business whose focus was entirely on its customers and the worth of its employees to society as a whole. The message I want to bring you is that today, starting right now, all that changes, and from this moment on we’re going to operate this business for the shareholders—” “Dick-weed is Dutch?” (Pause.) “Yes, but it’s pronounced ‘Dyke-weed.’ Who’s asking?” “I’m…Peter Piper.” (Long pause.) “Let’s move on to the key talking points my assistant has prepared for me. Starting now, we are implementing a zero-based budgeting process that leans into the desire for enhanced shareholder value—” “Wait, did you say, ‘lean into’?” “Yes. We’re going to lean into—” “What does that even mean? Like, you’re actually leaning while you talk?” “Ah, no, it means starting today we’re a zero-based budgeting company.” “So why didn’t you just say that, instead of this ‘leaning-in’ crap?” “Who’s asking?” “I’m…Monty Python.” “Monty?” “Yes sir Mister Dickweed.” “That’s ‘Dyke-weed,’ Monty, and as I said, we’re implementing zero-based budgeting like Warren Buffett’s good friends at 3G did when they took over Heinz and Burger King and Kraft and fired thousands of people and eliminated all unnecessary spending to the benefit of Warren Buffett and themselves through the stock appreciation—” “Wait, so what kind of car do you drive?” “Beg your pardon?” “What kind of car do you drive? Just curious.” “Ah, it’s a Lexus LC, if you really need to know—” “So that’s like a hundred grand, right?” “Well, it’s up there, certainly, but—” “So why do you need a car that costs a hundred grand, Mister Zero-Based-Budgeting? Why don’t you lean into a car that costs less, like the rest of us?” “Because it has nothing to do with work, it’s my personal choice.” “Hold on. He has a car that costs a hundred thousand dollars? Who can afford a hundred thousand dollar car?” “A Dick-weed can.” “It’s pronounced ‘Dyke-weed’ and it’s a personal choice.” “What’s his first name,‘Total’?” “My first name is NOT ‘Total’—it’s ‘Phil’ and the car I drive is a personal choice that has nothing to do—” “It’s a personal choice that only a guy like you can make with the money you’ve made getting people fired when you do your little ‘activist’ raindance at all these companies you target, right?” “Well—” “But if he’s so big on Zero-Based-Budgeting, why does he drive a hundred thousand dollar car? Why not a Volvo?” “Or a Chevy!” “Why doesn’t he just take Uber?” “Too expensive! He should take Greyhound!” “He should walk.” “Off a cliff—” “What about his assistant? What kind of car does his assistant drive?” “I bet it’s better than mine—” “This call is ended. Have a good day.” Jeff Matthews Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett” (eBooks on Investing, 2015) Available at Amazon.com © 2017 NotMakingThisUp, LLC The content contained in this blog represents only the opinions of Mr. Matthews. This commentary in no way constitutes investment advice, and should never be relied on in making an investment decision, ever. Also, this blog is not a solicitation of business by Mr. Matthews: the content herein is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.

Amazon today began targeting low-income shoppers with price cuts to its Prime membership program. Apple yesterday jumped into the voice-controlled home speaker business to compete with Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home. Google’s Waymo self-driving vehicles logged 25,000 miles hands-free last week, on top of 3 million miles already driven, mainly in cities, on the way to “fully self-driving cars” in the not-all-that-distant future. So what is GE, the great American conglomerate that Jack Welch famously built through Six Sigma training, portfolio slight-of-hand and ruthless personnel management doing these days? Well we’re not sure because mostly what we hear from GE is that GE is, or was, going to make $2 a share next year, and whether they do or not is all anybody seems to care about. Not whether GE is involved in self-driving cars or self-regulating homes or any other enormous market opportunities those of us lucky to be alive right now are seeing develop right before our eyes. Just this: will they or will they not earn $2 a share? Now, that two bucks earnings target was disclosed last spring at GE’s 2016 shareholder meeting, in CEO Jeff Immelt’s loopy, shorthanded fashion, as follows: From a financial standpoint, people that are investing in GE right now can look out over the next couple of years and see a very clear walk to hit in excess of $2 a share by 2020. This has to do with using the GE Capital proceeds to buy back stock. We use our float. The Alstom earnings, which are very clear and measurable and we’re making good progress on those, and just sustaining our industrial growth the way we have over the last four or five years. You do those things, you get north of $2 a share by 2020—or by 2018. (Source: Thomson StreetEvents) After a less-than-upbeat analyst day in December and an earnings report in April that was long on earnings and short on cash flow, however, Immelt took the opportunity to walk back that two-buck number in May as being “the high end of the range,” cautioning that “resource markets” must remain “stable” to hit the two bucks. By “resource markets,” of course, he means “oil prices,” upon which a decent portion of GE’s earnings now depend thanks to the M&A push the company made into oil and gas-dependent businesses prior to oil’s 2014 collapse—in particular the $3.3 billion purchase of production equipment supplier Lufkin that top-ticked the price of the commodity on which its business hinges the way John Paulson’s housing short top-ticked the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Given that GE’s stock sits on its 52-week-lows while the S&P 500 keeps breaking to new all-time highs, it’s clear the buy-side doesn’t believe the two-buck number, no matter how often Immelt defends it, and the sell-side seems nervous too, particularly after the first quarter’s cash flow miss. As the Merrill Lynch analyst dryly noted, GE’s Q1 cash flow disappointment “seems to be related mostly to the fact that GE’s latest contracts are coming from regions that tend to pay their bills later.” Not a good sign for the two bucks target. After all, GE is a conglomerate, and not in the JNJ “steady-Eddie” sense of selling basic products for the health and well-being of consumers. No, GE is a conglomerate that sells highly engineered, high priced products and services to airlines, oil companies, power generators, developed governments, undeveloped governments and about-to-be-toppled governments, among other unpredictable buying classes. So how predictable can GE’s earnings possibly be? “Plenty predicable,” a reader with grey hair might respond. “Jack Welch made GE a beat-the-earnings-by-a-penny machine back when.” And “Neutron Jack,” as he was known for the way he emptied buildings in his hunt for efficiencies, certainly did make GE that kind of machine, even humble-bragging about it in the 1999 annual report: But “making the numbers at GE” was no doubt a whole lot easier when GE Capital was a readily available hat out of which rabbits could be pulled whenever the quarter had to be beaten by the proverbial penny. And that trick ended in 2008 when the particularly addictive brand of Financial Fentanyl on which GE Capital had gotten hooked—CDs—froze up, leading the Feds to step in and guarantee $139 billion in GE Capital debt in order to keep The House that Jack Built from falling down like, well, like a house of cards. It always seemed to your editor, even back when GE was beating every quarter by a penny and almost every other company in the S&P 500 wanted some of that “Six Sigma” magic (the way almost every other company in the S&P 500 today wants some of that “Zero-Based-Budgeting” magic from Warren Buffett’s ruthless buddies at 3G), that Jack had turned GE from a company that made stuff (refrigerators, lightbulbs, jet engines, turbines etc.) into a company that made the numbers. And when all you make is “the number,” nobody knows or cares what’s behind that number. It could be asset sales and tax gimmicks and channel-stuffing and worse, or it could be great products—and GE makes some great products, still, today—but you wouldn’t know it because it’s all about “the number.” In this case, two bucks. Now, as most people who live on the West Coast know, including the folks working on autonomous vehicles and magical voice-activated home controllers and the development of a logistics infrastructure that allows anyone with an internet connection, a credit card and an address to order anything, anytime, Trader Joe’s sells a wine call “Two Buck Chuck.” “Two Buck Chuck” took the market by storm when it came out back when, and it is still called “Two Buck Chuck” despite the fact that it is today priced at $2.99 a bottle and the brand name is actually “Charles Shaw,” not “Chuck.” And all we can think of is how silly it is that the public perception of one of the world’s largest and most valuable companies comes down to an artificially constructed net per-share earnings number that happens to round to two bucks. Call it the “two-buck shuck and jive.” We’ll take the under. * This virtual column was posted Tuesday June 6, 2017. On Monday, June 12, GE unexpectedly announced that one Jeff Immelt is leaving the CEO position August 1 and retiring as Chairman December 31, 2017. One John Flannery is being appointed to take his place in both roles. The two-buck shuck and jive is, we’d bet, history. Jeff Matthews Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett” (eBooks on Investing, 2015) Available at Amazon.com © 2017 NotMakingThisUp, LLC The content contained in this blog represents only the opinions of Mr. Matthews. This commentary in no way constitutes investment advice, and should never be relied on in making an investment decision, ever. Also, this blog is not a solicitation of business by Mr. Matthews: the content herein is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.

You’d be forgiven if, after hearing the CEO of Chipotle describe its first ShopHouse Asian Kitchen restaurant concept that was opened in DuPont Circle a few years ago, you agreed with the cohort of Wall Street’s finest that declared ShopHouse might become the next leg of growth for the then-plenty-fast-growing-already purveyor of burritos and tacos “With Integrity.” You’d be forgiven because the CEO of Chipotle repeatedly—and by that, we mean more than a dozen times over the next few years—promoted the concept and often compared that first ShopHouse restaurant with the early days of Chipotle itself. In fact, so forcefully and frequently did the CEO push the ShopHouse-as-the-Next-Chipotle theme over the years, the more cynical among our readers would be forgiven for reading the following time-line of quotes from the Chipotle CEO and asking themselves, “Wait a minute, does Donald Trump run Chipotle on the side?” Indeed, the Trump analogy does not end there, for just today Nation’s Restaurant News broke the story that Chipotle is in fact closing all 15 ShopHouse restaurants. But not to worry, for the same CEO who has persistently and persuasively told us that all is well with the Chipotle business lately is the one who told us the following about ShopHouse… 10/20/11 “Some customers have commented that it’s a bit too spicy which is exactly what I heard when I opened the very first Chipotle 18 years ago…. What I love is that these customers tell me that it might be too spicy, while they devour every bite of their meal.” 1/11/12 “And it’s doing great, there’s a line out the door every day for lunch and dinner…so we are about to start construction on our second one. …But again, this is just sort of laying the groundwork for future expansion possibilities.” 2/1/12 “While we’re still working to perfect the concept, it reminds me very much of the first Chipotle when it originally opened.” 3/7/12 “It’s going really, really well. … So you can imagine the potential now that is [sic] not just limited to burritos and tacos. So we’re very excited about it.” 4/19/12 “But it really was designed to be kind of the same, the same thing as Chipotle. … So any kind of cuisine can fit into this model. So I think we’re very bullish that when and if the time comes that we want to accelerate this, we can do that.” “And I think that it’s fair to say that the sales are very similar to the Chipotle that’s across the street. In fact, I would say that the unit economic model in general is substantially similar to that of Chipotle in general.” 6/5/12 “The only difference between ShopHouse and Chipotle is the cuisine. Everything else is the same, the investment cost, the economic model, the service format, the price point, the size of the location.” 6/14/12 “…it’s going very, very well.” 1/17/13 “The first ShopHouse opened about a year and a half ago and it reminds me a lot of when I opened the first Chipotle. Customers have really taken to it from day one…” 2/5/13 “Shophouse in Washington DC continues to perform well and reminds me very much of the first Chipotle when I opened it almost 20 years ago.” 3/5/13 “And what’s really exciting is that we’re proving that this is not just a model for burritos and tacos, but for other types of cuisines as well… ShopHouse continues to perform well and reminds me a lot of the very first Chipotle when I opened it 20 years ago.” 5/9/13 “And it’s doing really well. …. in so many ways it’s exactly the same as Chipotle.” 7/18/13 “Shophouse is continuing to show us that there is significant potential for our business beyond burritos and tacos and we are really encouraged by its potential.” 10/17/13 “Our growth at ShopHouse is much faster than Chipotle was in the early days.” 1/30/14 “ShopHouse continues to remind me of Chipotle in its earliest days.” 4/29/14 “ShopHouse is the Southeast Asian version of Chipotle, it’s the same sort of operating platform… And it’s going very, very well…” 5/28/14 “Well we’re certainly growing these concepts faster than Chipotle initially grew.” 10/20/14 “Shophouse very much reminds me of Chipotle when I opened the first one of the restaurants.” 3/9/17 Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. is closing all 15 ShopHouse Asian Kitchen chain next week, the company confirmed to Nation’s Restaurant News on Thursday. Chris Arnold, a spokesman for the Denver-based company, said that the company has a deal to sell the leases for the ShopHouse locations and plans to close the restaurants effective March 17. “We now have a deal in place to sell the ShopHouse leases and believe that is the right decision at this time,” Arnold said in an email to Nation’s Restaurant News. ###

2016 Editor’s Note: The switch to all-holiday music has started, and while we have not heard much new, it has, so far, been mercifully light on the Michael Bublé and wonderfully heavy on the Chrissie Hynde and Bing Crosby, although with no sign of The Boss, yet. Our beef this year is not with the current roll of holiday songs, or with any of the rock biographies we’ve been reading (Dee-Dee Ramone’s “Lobotomy: Surviving the Ramones,” is even more hair-raising than Chrissie Hyndes’ book that we called out last year, and that takes some doing); our beef is with the SongFacts web site, which, as readers of this virtual column might imagine, ranks right up there with Bloomberg, FactSet and the Wall Street Journal as tools of our trade. Specifically, how does SongFacts not know that at 4 minutes 51 seconds into the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” one of the chairs the four Beatles are sitting on as they keep the extended final chord going on the two pianos at the Abbey Road studio emits an audible squeak, and a voice (we’ve always guessed Paul) says “Shhh!”? This is surely more important than the fact that the song was ranked as the Beatles’ best by some random compilation, or that noted musician, singer, and drug-abuser David Crosby was supposedly in the studio for the very first playback. (After all, he could have actually been in Brazil that day and not remembered.) Of course, to hear the most famous squeak/shush in recorded history, the volume has to be turned up extremely loud, i.e. well beyond what most listeners would ever have their iPhone or stereo or radio cranked up to. In fact, you have to go to 11. But that’s what it’s all about, right? Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to All! —JM, December 3, 2016 2015 Editor’s Note: We have not heard much new in the way of holiday music, so let’s turn straight to the rock and roll biography scene—specifically Chrissie Hyndes’ autobiography, “Reckless: My Life as a Pretender,” which is like witnessing a car wreck in book form. While there’s plenty here that’s harmless and bland (early days in Ohio, e.g.), there’s plenty that makes you want to put the book away in a very dark place, and all you can think is, How was she not part of “That stupid club,” as Kurt Cobain’s mother called it? (Look it up, kids.) Similarly depressing are some movies we’ve been watching on Netflix—starting with the Levon Helms biography, “Ain’t In It for My Health,” which minces no words when it comes to his former bandmate and nemesis, the Canadian songwriter Robbie Robertson, who squeezed out of Levon (the only American in The Band) vibrant scenes of Americana (“The Weight,” and especially, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”) without sharing the royalties. Even more depressing than the Hynes book and the Helms movie combined, however, is the Glenn Campbell-gets-diagnosed-with-Alzheimers-while-you-watch film, “I’ll Be Me.” Your editor saw Campbell perform at a Wall Street birthday bash circa 1997, and he was clearly miserable throughout: flushed faced and word-slurring, Campbell and his band blew through his greatest hits like Bob Dylan on a bad day, and, embarrassingly to everybody in the room, kept calling the host—whose name was Paul and who, when introducing the singer, nearly broke down while talking about how much it meant having him perform—“Pete.” But “I’ll Be Me” does a great job highlighting Campbell’s background as a highly valued session musician…and if you’re interested in knowing more about that era, you ought to watch “The Wrecking Crew,” our last movie shout-out. “The Wrecking Crew” was the name of the L.A. session players behind The Byrds, The Beach Boys and classics like “I Got You, Babe”—just listen to Hal Blaine’s slamming drums on the outro—and the movie is a joyous look at the faces behind the instruments behind the songs. Glen Campbell was a supremely talented guitarist for the Wrecking Crew before he decided—to the initial amusement and later jealousy of some of the Crew—go for the gold himself. Suggestions on other movies (and books) are encouraged in the comments below…after all, your editor hasn’t finished compiling his Christmas list, if you get our drift… Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to All! —JM, December 3, 2015 2014 Editor’s Note: Well, Michael Bublé’s computer is still releasing holiday songs, which is the worst we can say about this year’s holiday music survey. The best we can say—and it is truly good news—is that The Boss’s hard-driving, live version of “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” done entirely without computer-aided Bublé-style vocals, seems to be gaining much deserved traction. Meanwhile, one of our previous also-ran mentions in the What-Did-We-Do-To-Deserve-This? category, one Taylor Swift, deserves a big boo-yah for telling the Spotify algorithms to stuff it, pulling her entire catalogue from the automated listening service—including, by definition, the song mentioned here last year, which should be no tragedy to Spotify customers anyhow. As for our usual review of the latest rock memoirs, which tend to flood the bookshelves right about now—only to turn up in the mark-down bins come spring, which is when your editor actually buys them—the best read during brief trips to our local, increasingly down-on-its-heals Barnes & Noble, has to be Mick Fleetwood’s “Play On.” Fleetwood is one of the most underrated drummers in rock music, being the kind who drives the beat without histrionics and stays well behind the kit while the front-people do their thing (it was Fleetwood and fellow Mac bassist John McVie who rescued “Werewolves of London” for Warren Zevon and producer Jackson Browne, after the house band could not make the song work) so his remembrances of the formation of Fleetwood Mac are insightful and compelling even for those—including your editor—who were never big Fleetwood Mac fans. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all! —JM, December 19, 2014 2013 Editor’s Note: The most unnerving aspect to this year’s holiday music survey is the unavoidable, near-totalitarian presence of an insipid cover version of George Michael’s already-plenty-insipid-for-our-taste-thank-you-very-much “Last Christmas,” which, as we point out below has one of the most inane choruses ever written (no mean feat there), which wouldn’t be so bad except it is repeated over and over and over until you want to hand yourself over to Vladimir Putin’s security forces and let them do their worst. The perpetrator of this latest holiday music outrage is, it turns out, Taylor Swift, about whom your editor knows nothing except she adds exceedingly little to a song that needed plenty of help to begin with. But, as always with these annual surveys, your editor digresses. On the happier side of the music world, this last year has seen a number of excellent new rock memoirs, of which Kinks front-man and songwriting genius Ray Davies’ is the most interesting. The centerpiece of the story line in Ray’s “Americana” is his getting shot by a mugger in New Orleans some years back, but interspersing that tale he manages to tell much of the story of his career. If you want to read how Ray came up with classics like “Better Things” (why couldn’t that be a Christmas song? It’s as much about the holidays as “Same Old Lang Syne,” about which your editor has plenty to say later on), this is your book. Neil Young’s “Waging Heavy Peace,” which came out last year, is even better than “Americana,” however, and more fun to keep picking up when the mood strikes: Neil’s recollections are loopy, digressive, and admittedly unsure in some cases (at one point he compares his memory of a drug bust with Stephen Stills’ recollection of the same drug bust—and given that Neil only stopped “smoking weed” the year before writing the book, as he admits, it’s no wonder their recollections are very different), but like all things Neil Young, he says what he means and means what he says. And if you’re wondering where songs come from—great songs, eternal songs—Neil’s book is the place to begin. Would that a holiday song may one day spring from the fecund mind of Neil Young himself, for while he professes more of a Native American religious spirit than a Judeo-Christian one, either way, it would be so long Taylor Swift. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all! —JM, December 7, 2013 2012 Editor’s Note: We interrupt this holiday music review to bring you a potential stocking-stuffer that ought to bring tidings of good cheer… Amazon.com: Secrets in Plain Sight: Business & Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett (eBooks on Investing Series Book 1) eBook: Jeff Matthews: Kindle Store 2011 Editor’s Note: Back by popular demand, we’ll again try to keep this year’s update brief…but past performance would tell you not to hold your breath. Here goes. Our annual holiday music survey—highly biased, rankly unscientific and in no way comprehensive—covers new ground this year, to wit: the SiriusXM all-holiday-music channel. Actually, there are two such channels courtesy of the satellite radio monopolists at SiriusXM. There’s one for “traditional” music of the Bing Crosby kind, in which human beings sing traditional Christmas songs while other human beings play musical instruments to accompany those songs; and there’s another channel for everything else, including the Auto-Tune-dependent sensation Michael Bublé, who has only gotten more popular—unfortunately—this year, along with a new presence not entirely unexpected but nonetheless frightening in its implications: Justin Bieber. Enough said about that, for our main beef with SiriusXM is not the presence of yet another teen idol on the holiday music scene. Our beef lies with the soul-less quality of the entire SiriusXM gestalt, which requires its three thousand channels to carry songs strictly on the basis of whether they share either a common date of issue (as on the “40’s at 4,” “50’s at 5,” “60’s at 6” et al channels), or a common target audience demographic. Among the later, for example is the “Classic Vinyl” channel, which is essentially a “Classic Rock” channel (“Classic Rock” being a Baby Boomer euphemism for what our parents knew as “Oldies” radio) that plays the WNEW-FM playlist from around 1968 to 1978. And nothing else. And there is the “Classic Rewind” channel, which is another Oldies channel that plays the WPLR-FM playlist from about 1979 to the late 1980s. And nothing else. Then there’s “The Bridge,” a Baby Boomer euphemism for “Easy Listening.” It plays Oldies of the James Taylor/Carole King/Jackson Browne vein. And nothing else. Certainly there are one or two such channels that manage to jump around between genres (The Spectrum is worthwhile on that score). But, in the main, each SiriusXM channel is tightly focused on a specific, narrowly defined demographic…sometimes scarily so. Here we’re thinking of the “Metal” channel, which plays loosely defined “songs” that consist of young men screaming their apocalyptic guts out above what appears to be a single, head-banging, machine-gun-style guitar-and-drumming musical track that never, ever changes. You marvel at where these guys came from, what portion of the domestic methamphetamine supply they consume, and how many serial killers might be listening to “Metal” channel at the very same moment as you. If Beavis and Butt-Head could afford a car, this would be their channel. Unfortunately, no matter which channel you pick and who the purported “DJ” may be (there are a lot of old-time, smokey-voiced, recognizable DJs on the various Sirius Oldies channels) you’ll hear a sequence of songs that all sound like a computerized random-number-generator picked ‘em. Listening to the “60’s at 6” channel, for example, you may hear a great Beatles single like “Hello, Goodbye” from 1967, followed by the wretchedly excessive “MacAurther Park” from 1968, followed by an unrecognizable chart-topper from 1962 that nobody plays anymore because it wasn’t any good even in 1962. The listener ends up flipping around from channel to channel and wondering why the bandwidth-happy SiriusXM monopolists don’t just give each artist its own channel, as they in fact do for Springsteen, Elvis and Sinatra. Those are channels you might expect to find, but there is, oddly enough, no Bob Marley or Rolling Stones channel—and, head-scratcher of all head-scratchers, no Beatles channel. In fact, the absence of The Beatles from the SiriusXM digital bandwidth relative to, say, the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, is one the great mysteries of our age. After all, the Beatles individually and collectively contributed 27of the Rolling Stone Top 500 Songs of All-Time or 5.4% of those songs, yet they get nowhere near 5.4% of the SiriusXM airplay, whether on “Classic Vinyl,” “Classic Rewind,” “The Bridge,” “60’s on 6, ” “70’s on 7,” “The Spectrum” or any of the other three thousand channels here. You quite literally have as much chance of hearing “Snoopy and the Red Barron” on SiriusXM as “Revolution.” So why then is there a Jimmy Buffett channel (called “Margaritaville,” of course)? Having gotten all that off our chest, we can move on, since SiriusXM’s holiday channels add no new material to our annual survey because most of the songs are widely played everywhere else. Furthermore, we’ve been asked to assemble a “Top Ten Worst” list of holiday songs for this review. The problem is there are just so many, as we’ll be getting to shortly. Rod Stewart’s somnambulant “My Favorite Things,” which sounds like he’s reading the lyrics from a child’s book of verses, is right up there, while Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” stands out in any crowd of non-favorites. Easier, then, to simply identify the All-Time, Number One, No-Question-About-It NotMakingThisUp Worst Holiday Song of All Time, and let everyone else argue about the remaining 9. It is “The 12 Pains of Christmas.” This so-called comedy song takeoff on “The 12 Days of Christmas,” a pleasant English Christmas carol discovered by a U.S. schoolteacher from Milwaukee and used by her in a Christmas pageant in 1910, is an easily forgettable humorous novelty song that is neither novel or humorous, in any way. It isn’t even fun writing about, so we won’t bother: we’ll simply move on to something pleasant, which happens to be an entirely different sort of humorous novelty song that is both novel and humorous, and, therefore, well worth a mention here. We’re talking about the wonderfully bizarre, catchy, Klezmer-style cover of “Must Be Santa,” from Bob Dylan’s 2009 Christmas album, “Christmas in the Heart.” (Yes, Bob Dylan made a Christmas album.) The music is fast and cheerful, and Dylan’s low, growly voice is almost indistinguishable from Tom Waits. (The truly bizarre music video is not to be missed, watch it here.) After you get over the initial shock of hearing Bob Dylan singing what most Baby Boomer parents will recall being a Raffi song, it becomes impossible to not enjoy. Another glaring absence from our previous years’ commentary is neither novel or humorous, and inconceivably does not appear to qualify for the SiriusXM random-song-generator holiday song playlist despite being many-times more worthwhile than most of the SiriusXM catalogue, whether holiday-themed or not. The song is “2000 Miles” by the Pretenders, and it belongs on anybody’s Holiday Top Ten. If hearing Chrissie Hynde on that original song (she’s also recorded some good Christmas covers, including one with the Blind Boys of Alabama) doesn’t get you in a mellow holiday mood, nothing will. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Good New Year to all. —JM, December 4, 2011 2010 Editor’s Note: Back for the third consecutive year by popular demand, we’ll try to keep this year’s update brief—but don’t count on it. For starters, we’re going to plug a book: Keith Richards’ autobiography, “Life,” which happens to be one of the best books ever written—and we don’t just mean “Best in the Category of ‘Memoirs by Nearly-Dead Rock Stars’.” It is a great book, period. The story of how ‘Keef’ (as he signs sweet letters to his Mum while rampaging across America), Brian and Mick developed the Rolling Stones’ sound, for example, is worth the price alone (in short, they worked really hard; but the full story is much better than that). Yet there’s more—much more. Guitarists can soak up how Keith created his own guitar sound; drummers will learn—if they didn’t already know—Charlie Watts’ high-hat trick (and from whom he stole it); while songwriters had better prepare themselves to be depressed at how Mick wrote songs (‘As fast as his hand could write the words, he wrote the lyrics,’ according to one session man who watched him write “Brown Sugar”). And that’s just the rock-and-roll stuff. The sex-and-drugs stuff is also there, and the author lays it all out in his unfettered, matter-of-fact, straightforward style, often with the first-person help of friends and others-who-where-there (and presumably of sounder mind and body than you-know-who: the drug and alcohol intake is truly staggering) who write of their own experiences with the band. Okay, you may say, but how exactly is Keith Richards’ autobiography relevant to our annual review of holiday songs? Well, while furtively reading snatches of ‘Life’ during a stop at the local Borders (we expect to see the book under the Christmas tree sometime around the 25th of this month, hint-hint), we happened to hear another musical legend perform one of our favorite offbeat Christmas songs in the background, and it occurred to your Editor that of all the bands out there that could have done that same kind of interesting, worthwhile Christmas song, The Rolling Stones probably top the list. What with Keef’s bluesy undertones and Mick’s commercial-but-sinister instincts on top, it would have certainly made this review, for better or worse. (Along these lines, The Kinks’ cynical, working-class “Father Christmas” is one of the all-time greats, and doesn’t get nearly enough air-time these days.) Now, for the record, the offbeat Christmas song that triggered this excursion was “’Zat You Santa Claus?”—the Louis Armstrong and The Commanders version from the 1950’s. (The song was later covered, like everything else but the Raffi catalogue, by Harry Connick, Jr.) Starting out with jingle bells, blowing winds and a slide-whistle, you might initially dismiss “’Zat You?” as a sadly commercial attempt by Armstrong to get in on the Christmas song thing, except that his familiar, Mack-the-Knife-style vocal comes over a terrific backbeat that turns it into what we’d nominate for Funkiest Christmas Song Ever Recorded. It is a delight to hear, and the fact that it is suddenly getting more air-time this season is a step-up in quality for the entire category—or would be, if not for the apparent installation of Wham!’s “Last Christmas” in the pantheon of Christmas Classics. A 1980’s electro-synth Brit-Pop timepiece, “Last Christmas” combines a somewhat catchy tune with lyrics that make a trapped listener attempt to open the car door even at high speeds to get away: Last Christmas, I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away This year To save me from tears, I gave it to someone special Considering the fact that the songwriter (Wham!’s gay front-man, George Michael) decided to repeat that chorus six times, the full banality of the lyric eventually gives way to incredulity: “Let me get this straight,” you begin to ask yourself. “This year he’s giving his heart to ‘someone special’… so who’d he give it to last year? The mailman?” “Last Christmas” does have the distinction of being the biggest selling single in UK history that never made it to Number 1. Furthermore, all royalties from the single were donated to Ethiopian famine relief, the same cause which led to creation of what turned out to be the actual Number 1 UK single that year, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” “Do They Know…” is a song that has received some push from readers to receive an honorable mention in these pages, and while it is certainly an interesting timepiece, with much earnest participation from the likes of Sting, Bono and even Sir Paul, it is not nearly as worthwhile as an album that seems just as prevalent these days: A Charlie Brown Christmas by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi. How a jazz pianist was hired to create the music for a TV special with cartoon characters is this: the producer heard Guaraldi’s classic instrumental “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” on the radio while taking a cab across the Golden Gate Bridge. One thing led to another, and thanks to that odd bit of chance, future generations will have the immense pleasure of hearing a timeless, unique work of art every year around this time. (A second odd tidbit for our West Coast readers: Guaraldi died while staying at the Red Cottage Inn, in Menlo Park—of a heart attack, however, and not the usual, more gruesome fate of musicians who die in hotels.) One second-to-last note before we move on: we have been heavily lobbied by certain, er, close relations to include Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is You” as a worthwhile holiday song—despite our previously expressed misgivings about her contribution to the genre (see below). And we have to admit, her “All I Want…” leaves behind the incessant vocal pyrotechnics that made some of her other Christmas covers (“Oh Holy Night,” for example) unbearable, at least to our ears. In this case she seems to trust the song to take care of itself, which it does in fine, driving, upbeat style. Now, as Your Editor previously hinted, all he wants for Christmas is Keef’s book. And it had better be there, if, as previously noted, you get our drift. Finally, and speaking of autobiographies, we happened to read Andy Williams’ own book this past year and must report that our reference to Williams below was overly harsh. For one thing, his book is as honest as Keef’s; for another, as a singer not necessarily born with the vocal equipment of, say, Mariah Carey, the man worked at his craft and succeeded mightily where many others failed. Which, we might add, is, after all, the hope of this season. And so, we wish for a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Good New Year to all. —JM, December 13, 2010 2009 Editor’s Note: 
Back by popular demand, what follows is our year-end sampling of the Christmas songs playing incessantly on a radio station near you, and it demands from your editor only a few updates this holiday season. For starters, we have not heard the dreaded duet of Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” thus far in 2009, and for this we are most grateful. Indeed, if it turns out that their recording has been confiscated by Government Authorities for use as an alternative to lethal injections, we’ll consider ourselves a positive force for society. On the other hand, we are sorry to report an offset to that cheery development, in the form of a surge in playing time for Barry Manilow’s chirpy imitation of the classic Bing Crosby/Andrew Sisters version of “Jingle Bells.” For the record, “Jingle Bells” was written in 1857…for Thanksgiving, not for Christmas. And it’s hard to imagine making a better version than that recorded by Bing and the three Andrew Sisters 86 years later. But Manilow, it seems, didn’t bother to try.

 Instead, Barry and his back-up group, called Expos, simply copied Bing’s recording, right down to that stutter in the Andrews Sisters’ unique, roller-coaster vocals on the choruses, as well as Bing’s breezy, improvised, “oh we’re gonna have a lotta fun” throwaway line on the last chorus. Sharp-eared readers might say, “Well, so what else would you expect from a guy who sang ‘I Write the Songs’…which was in fact written by somebody else?” We can’t argue with that, but we will point out another annoyance this year: the enlarged presence of Rod Stewart in the Christmas play-lists. Don’t get us wrong: we like Rod Stewart—at least, the Rod Stewart who gave the world what Your Editor still considers the best coming-of-age song ever written and recorded: “Every Picture Tells a Story.” It’s the Rod Stewart who gave us “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” we’re less crazy about. So too the Rod who chose to cover “My Favorite Things” (for the definitive version of that classic, see: ‘Bennett, Tony’) and “Baby It’s Cold Outside” with Dolly Parton (for an only slightly more offensive version of this one, see: ‘Simpson, Jessica’ and ‘Lachey, Nick’). As an antidote to Rod, we suggest several doses of Jack Johnson’s sly, understated “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which seems to be gaining recognition, and anything by James Taylor—especially his darkly melancholic “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Of all the singers who recorded versions of this last—and Sinatra’s might be the best—it is Taylor, a former junkie, who probably expresses more of the intended spirit of this disarmingly titled song. After all, the original lyric ended not with the upbeat “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, let your heart be light/Next year all our troubles will be out of sight,” but with this: “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last/Next year we may all be living in the past.” No, we are not making that up. The good news is it should keep Barry Manilow from be covering it any time soon. JM—December 19, 2009 Wednesday, December 24, 2008 Shazam! From the Boss to the King to John & Paul (But Not George or Ringo), Not to Mention Jessica & Nick Like everyone else out there, we’ve been hearing Christmas songs since the day our local radio station switched to holiday music sometime around, oh, July 4th, it feels like. And while it may just be a symptom of our own aging, the 24/7 holiday music programming appears to have stretched the song quality pool from what once seemed Olympic-deep to, nowadays, more of a wading pool-depth. What we recall in our youth to be a handful of mostly good, listenable songs—Nat King Cole’s incomparable cover of “The Christmas Song” (written by an insufferable bore: more on that later); Bing’s mellow, smoky, “White Christmas”; and even Brenda Lee’s country-tinged “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (recorded when she was 13: try to get your mind around that)—played over and over a few days a year…has evolved into a thousand mediocre-at-best covers played non-stop for months on end. Does anybody else out there wonder why Elvis bothered mumbling his way through “Here Comes Santa Claus”? 

It actually sounds like Elvis doing a parody of Elvis—as if he can’t wait to get the thing over with. Fortunately The King does get it over with, in just 1 minute, 54 seconds. Along with that and all the other covers, there are, occasionally, the odd original Christmas songs—the oddest of all surely being Dan Fogelburg’s “Same Old Lang Syne.” You’ve heard it: the singer meets his old lover in a grocery store, she drops her purse, they laugh, they cry, they get drunk and realize their lives have been a waste…and, oh, the snow turns to rain. So how, exactly, did that become a Christmas song? Then there’s ex-Beatle Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime,” which combines an annoyingly catchy beat with dreadful lyrics, something McCartney often did when John Lennon wasn’t around.

 (After all, it was Lennon who replaced McCartney’s banal, teeny-boppish opening line for “I Saw Her Standing There”—“She was just seventeen/Never been a beauty queen” is what McCartney originally wrote—with the more suggestive “She was just seventeen/You know what I mean,” thereby turning a mediocre time-piece into a classic.) But Lennon was not around to save “Wonderful Christmastime” even though McCartney actually recorded this relatively new Christmas standard nearly thirty years ago, before Lennon was shot. It rightfully lay dormant until the advent of All-Christmas-All-The-Time programming a couple of years ago. Fortunately, by way of offset, Lennon’s own downbeat but enormously catchy “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” is played about as frequently as “Wonderful Christmastime.” Who but John Lennon would start a Christmas song: “And so this is Christmas/And what have you done…”? Of course, who but Paul McCartney would start a Christmas song, “The moon is right/The spirit’s up?” If anything explains the Beatles’ breakup better than these two songs, we haven’t heard it. Now, we don’t normally pay much attention to Christmas songs. If it isn’t one of the aforementioned, or an old standard sung by Nat, Bing, Frank, Tony, Ella and a few others, we’d be clueless. But thanks to a remarkable new technology, we here at NotMakingThisUp suddenly found ourselves able to distinguish, for example, which blandly indistinguishable female voice sings which blandly indistinguishable version of “O Holy Night”—Kelly Clarkson, Celine Dion, or Mariah Carey—without any effort at all. The technology is Shazam—an iPhone application that might possibly have received the greatest amount of buzz for the least amount of apparent usefulness since cameras on cell phones first came out. For readers who haven’t seen the ads or heard about Shazam’s wonders from a breathless sub-25 year old, Shazam software lets you point your iPhone towards any source of recorded music, like a car radio, the speaker in a Starbucks, or even the jukebox in a bar—and learn what song is playing. Shazam does this by recording a selection of the music and analyzing the data. It then displays the name of the song, the artist, the album, as well as lyrics, a band biography and other doodads right there on the iPhone. Now, you may well ask, what possible use could there be for identifying a song playing in a bar? And unless you’re a music critic or a song-obsessed sub-25 year old, we’re still not sure. But we can say that Shazam is pretty cool. In the course of testing it on a batch of Christmas songs—playing on a standard, nothing-special, low-fi kitchen radio—heard from across the room, without making the least effort to get the iPhone close to the source of the music, Shazam figured out every song but one (a nondescript version of a nondescript song that it never could get) without a hitch. And, as a result, we can now report the following: 1) It is astounding how many Christmas songs are out there nowadays, most of them not worth identifying, Shazam or no Shazam; 2) All Christmas covers recorded in the last 10 years sound pretty much alike, as if they all use the same backing track, and thus require something like Shazam to distinguish one from the other; 3) Nobody has yet done a cover version of Dan Fogelburg’s “Same Old Lang Syne,” which may be the truest sign of Hope in the holiday season; 4) None of this matters because Mariah Carey screwed up the entire holiday song thing, anyway. Now, why, you may ask, would we pick on Mariah Carey, as opposed to, say, someone who can’t actually sing? Well, her “O Holy Night” happened to be the first song in our mini-marathon, and it really does seem to have turned Christmas song interpretation into a kind of vocal competitive gymnastics aimed strictly at showing off how much of the singer’s five-octave vocal range can be used, not merely within this one particular song, but within each measure of the song. In fact Mariah’s voice jumps around so much it sounds like somebody in the studio is tickling her while she’s singing. More sedate than Mariah, and possibly less harmful to the general category, The Carpenters’ version of “(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” comes on next, and it makes you think you’re listening to an Amtrak commercial rather than a Christmas song (“From Atlantic to Pacific/Gee, the traffic is terrific!”), so innocuous and manufactured it sounds. Johnny Mathis is similarly harmless, although his oddly eunuch-like voice can give you the creeps, if you really think about it. Mercifully, his version of “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” is short enough (2:16) that you don’t think about it for long. Now, without Shazam we never would have known the precise time duration of that song. On the other hand, we would we never have been able to identify the perpetrators of what may be the single greatest travesty of the holiday season—Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey, singing “Baby it’s Cold Outside.” “Singing” is actually too strong a word for what they do. Simpson’s voice barely rises above a whisper, and you cringe when she reaches for a note, although she does manage to hit the last, sustained “outside,” no doubt thanks to the magic of electronics. Thus the major downside of Shazam might be that it can promote distinctly anti-social behavior: having correctly identified who was responsible for this blight on holiday radio music, the listener might decide that if they ever ran across the pair in his or her car while singing along with the radio too loudly to notice, they wouldn’t stop to identify the bodies. Fortunately, the bad taste left by that so-called duet is washed away when Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” comes on next. Thanks to Shazam, we learn that this is actually the fourth version Nat recorded. The man worked at his craft, and it shows. This is the best version of the song on record, by anyone, and probably one of the two or three best Christmas songs out there, period. The second those strings sweetly announce the tune, you relax, and by the time Cole’s smoky, gorgeous voice begins to sing, you’re in a distinctly Christmas mood like no other recording ever creates. (Unfortunately, the song’s actual writer, Mel Tormé, had the personality of a man perpetually seething for not getting proper recognition for having written one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time. We did not learn this from Shazam: we once saw Tormé perform at a small lounge, during which he managed to mention that he, not Nat King Cole, wrote “The Christmas Song”—as if this common misperception was still on everybody’s mind 35 years later. When that news flash did not seem to make the appropriate impression on the audience, he later broke off singing to chew out a less-than-attentive audience member, completely destroying the mood for the rest of the set.) Like that long-ago performance by the “Velvet Fog,” the pleasant sensation left behind by Cole’s “Christmas Song” is quickly soured, this time by a male singer performing “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow” in the manner of Harry Connick, Jr. doing a second-rate version of Sinatra. Who is this guy, we wonder? Shazam tells us it’s Michael Bublé. We are pondering how such a vocal lightweight became such a sensation in recent years—the answer must surely be electronics, because his voice, very distinctly at times, sounds like it has been synthesized—when John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas” comes on. It’s a great song, demonstrating as it does Lennon’s advice to David Bowie on how to write a song: “Say what you mean, make it rhyme and give it a backbeat.” The fact that Lennon had the best voice in rock and roll also helps. Unfortunately, his wife had the worst voice in rock and roll, and a brief downer it is when Yoko comes in on the chorus like a banshee. (Fortunately she is quickly drowned out by the children’s chorus from the Harlem Community Choir.) The other songs in our Shazam song-identification session are, we fear, too many to relate. Sinatra, of course; Kelly Clarkson, an American Idol winner who essentially does a pale Mariah Carey impersonation; Blandy—er, Andy Williams; and one of the best: Tony Bennett. Then there’s Willie Nelson, who has a terrific, understated way of doing any song he wants—but sounds completely out of place singing “Frosty the Snowman.” One wonders exactly what kind of white powder Willie was thinking about while he was recording this, if you get our drift. Oh, and there’s Coldplay’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which pairs the sweetest piano with the worst voice in any single Christmas song we heard; Amy Grant, a kind of female Andy Williams; the Ronettes, who are genuinely terrific—a great beat, no nonsense, and Ronnie singing her heart out with that New York accent; and then Mariah again, this time doing “Silent Night” with that same roller-coaster vocal gargling. Gene Autry’s all-too-popular version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” would be bearable except that he pronounces it “Santee Closs,” which is unfortunate in a song in which that word appears like 274 times. ‘N Sync is likewise unbearable doing “O Holy Night” a cappella, with harmonies the Brits would call cringe-making, and Mariah-type warbling to boot. Hall & Oates’s “Jingle Bell Rock” is too easy to confuse with the other versions of “Jingle Bell Rock”—thank you, Shazam, for clearing that up—while Martina McBride manages to sound eerily like Barbra Streisand imitating Linda Ronstadt singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Winding things down is Dan Fogelburg’s aforementioned “Same Old Lang Syne,” and here we need to vent a little: something about the way he sings “liquor store”—he pronounces it “leeker store”—never fails to provoke powerful radio-smashing adrenalin surges. Fortunately, we suppress those urges today, because the Shazam experiment concludes with one of the best Christmas songs ever recorded. Better than Bing, and maybe even better than Nat, depending on your mood. It’s Bruce Springsteen. The Boss. Doing “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town”…
live. Yes, this song was recorded live, and despite its age (more than 25 years old), the thing still jumps out of the radio and grabs you. Now, as Shazam informs us, this particular recording was actually the B-side of a single release called “My Hometown.” (Back in the day, kids, “singles” came with two songs, one on each side of a record: the “A” side was intended to be the hit song; the “B” side was, until the Beatles came along, for throwaway stuff.) Fortunately nobody threw this one away. Springsteen begins the familiar song with some audience patter and actual jingle bells; then he starts to sing and the band comes to life. Things move along smoothly through the verse and chorus…until ace drummer Max Weinberg kicks it into high gear and the band roars into a fast shuffle that takes the thing into a different realm altogether. Feeding off the audience, The Boss sings so hard his voice slightly breaks at times. Then he quiets down before roaring back into a tear-the-roof-off chorus, sometimes dropping words and laughing as he goes. This is real music—recorded in 1975 during a concert at the C.W. Post College—with no retakes, no production effects, and no electronic vocal repairs, either. Try doing that some time, Jessica and Nick. Actually, come to think of it, please don’t. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Good New Year to all. Jeff Matthews Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett” (eBooks on Investing, 2014) Available now at Amazon.com © 2016 NotMakingThisUp, LLC

Chipotle reports next week and we’ll finally get to see how the company’s “buzz-worthy” (their word, not ours) marketing efforts (like the online game “Friend or Faux,” the “Chiptopia” rewards program, and the online animated movie “A Love Story”) have been working to bring customers back after last year’s food-borne illness outbreaks linked to various Chipotle restaurants caused comp-store sales to tank, spurred a CDC investigation and forced the self-styled “Food with Integrity” chain to spend a lot of money upgrading the integrity of its food-handling procedures. Wall Street, for the most part, seems convinced the storm will blow over—if a 100-times next-year EPS multiple is any indication. Large shareholders have commissioned reports on the company’s turnaround efforts, interviewing food safety experts and “industry veterans” on the “timeline for Chipotle’s recovery,” as one wrote, and the consensus seems to be management will eventually convince the American public that Chipotle really does serve “Food with Integrity,” but safely—and then it’ll be onward and upward, like Jack-in-the-Box after its deadly e-coli outbreak in 1993. But actually talking to Chipotle customers, past and present, about how much they went before the outbreaks, when they returned, and how frequently they go now, yields a very different notion of what’s ailing Chipotle than strictly “food safety fears.” What we hear is that lapsed customers aren’t so much afraid of getting sick—they just found other places to go while they were away. But don’t take our word for it. According to the recent semi-annual Piper Jaffray survey of 6,500 red-blooded American teens and their food and clothing habits, Chipotle ranked as their second-most favored restaurant chain—even after all that “buzz-worthy” marketing—at 11%, behind Starbucks at 14% and ahead of Chik-fil-A at 10%, a pretty big shift from the early 2015 survey, when Chipotle nearly tied Starbucks for first-place at 14% and was almost twice as popular as Chik-fil-A at 7.5%. And while your editor hasn’t interviewed anywhere near 6,500 teenagers, we have talked to quite a range of Chipotle customers, past and present, around the country. Though far from being a scientific sample, we found two “buckets,” as Wall Street’s Finest like to say: the first includes former customers (generally women) who were offended that the “Food with Integrity” folks had apparently made customers ill and seemingly wasted time griping about the CDC and/or the press coverage instead of immediately, contritely and completely dealing with the issue. They either refuse to go back, or, almost certainly go less than before the outbreaks. The second “bucket” is the heavy users (generally young men) who still go—but generally not as often as before, for whatever reason—some claim the food doesn’t taste as good as they remembered it; others simply say they just found other places to go. On the flip side, they say, the lines tend to be shorter. In general, the attitude from both buckets—major fans and occasional partakers—might best be summed up as “meh.” Understand, these are impressions from talking to real people, not a scientific survey. But we haven’t found a single non-interested (i.e. Wall Street-type) who has said in no uncertain terms, “It’s still great, I go back, and I spend as much as I used to.” Maybe Chipotle customers are like those Trump voters you hear about who don’t want to admit they’re voting for him, and maybe most of them are in fact eating as much or more than they used to, even if we don’t hear it, and maybe Piper Jaffray interviewed the wrong 6,500 teens. But there’s one other way to get a sense of how Chipotle’s “buzz-worthy” marketing is doing getting customers back to its 2,000+ stores, which for some reason the company keeps growing like a 20% comp company even though comp-store sales are down double-digits (just ask Boston Chicken how that math works out in the long-run). Turns out the Texas Alcohol Beverage Commission reports monthly numbers from every establishment that reports to it, from the lowliest bar to the biggest chain. And while beer sales are a tiny part of Chipotle’s business—never even mentioned on any earnings call—they are a piece of the business and they depend on customers walking in the door and buying food to go along with their beer. So while the TABC numbers may not be as good an indicator of overall sales trends as, say, sales of Coke at McDonald’s would be, they’re something to look at. Here’s what we came up with, on the left, with the company’s actual reported total sales on the right: Granted, these are not “comp-store” sales, nor have we been able to adjust for the collapse in oil prices, which certainly dinged beer sales in Texas well before Chipotle as a whole got whacked on the food-borne illness outbreaks. But they’re numbers, and we’ll take them. Moreover, Pizza Hut, which likewise sells small amounts of alcohol relative to its food volume and has a fair number of stores in Texas, showed a slowdown in 2014 in the TABC data, although not the dramatic collapse like Chipotle: The point is, the data make some sense. Which makes it interesting to try to see how things are progressing more recently. Thus far in 2016 the monthly data only runs through July, so we don’t have a full third quarter to see how far off the bottom sales have leaped following the “Love Story” video and “Chiptopia.” But we do have June and July TABC figures, and comparing the first two months of each quarter of the year (just for some sort of consistency’s sake) yields the following as an indication of trends thus far: In other words, “meh.” But we’ll get the real numbers next week, along with word of whatever “buzz-worthy” marketing gimmicks come next. Meantime, we’re going to hit the Dos Toros at 54th and Lex. Or the one at 52nd and 6th. Or 45th and Lex. Or… Jeff Matthews I Am Not Making This Up © 2016 NotMakingThisUp, LLC The content contained in this blog represents only the opinions of Mr. Matthews. Mr. Matthews also acts as an advisor and clients advised by Mr. Matthews may hold either long or short positions in securities of various companies discussed in the blog based upon Mr. Matthews’ recommendations. This commentary in no way constitutes investment advice, and should never be relied on in making an investment decision, ever. Also, this blog is not a solicitation of business by Mr. Matthews: all inquiries will be ignored. The content herein is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.

Back in May—that’s less than two months ago—the Chief Marketing Officer of Mattress Firm (ticker: MFRM; Tangible Book Value Negative $30.32 Per Share if our Bloomberg is correct)—was asked how business had started the new year. “It continues to be a bit choppy…” he began—choppy being one of those euphemisms Wall Street hates to hear—before adding, in the true nature of a marketing guy, “…but we’re SUPER optimistic that we’re coming up on summer selling season, Memorial Day…” Sure enough, Memorial Day did come—even if Mattress Firm appeared to begin the Memorial Day sales event a week or two before the actual weekend—giving the CEO something positive to talk about on the ensuing earnings call, when some of the more important numbers were otherwise going the wrong way. Specifically, while MFRM showed 49% revenue growth in the first quarter, it was thanks mainly to the acquisition of Sleepy’s and other mattress retailers the previous twelve months. What analysts call “organic” growth was somewhat less than 49%. Like, 5,000 basis points less. Comp-store sales were down 1.1% in the quarter (despite a boost from the inclusion of e-commerce sales from the recently acquired 1,000-store Sleepy’s chain in those “comp-store sales,” for some weird reason). For a clearer picture of the sales trend at what management itself likes to call “the first truly border-to-border, coast-to-coast multi-brand mattress retailer,” it’s worth noting that comp-store transactions—i.e. stripping out the effect of sales mix—were down 0.9%. That decline in comp-store transactions at MFRM was not, however, a new phenomenon: MFRM has reported declining comp-store units in each of the last five quarters (except for one that was termed “roughly flat”). The seemingly innocuous 0.9% comp-unit decline in the most recent quarter looks a little less innocuous when you consider it was up against a seemingly easy-to-beat 6.4% unit decline in the same quarter last year. As usual with MFRM, however, things got better after the quarter ended, according to management on the call: “Since Memorial Day our trends have been positive and in line with our revised same-store sales guidance,” they said. We’ve heard that kind of “things got better this week” from companies reporting otherwise dour news many times…in fact, we heard it from MFRM last year, when it reported that negative 6.4% unit comp quarter: “However, late in the quarter we implemented certain initiatives to drive units and we had subsequently seen positive results.” Prosperity at Mattress Firm is always just around the corner. Unfortunately, just around that corner is a new competitor: the internet. Specifically, what are termed “Bed-in-a-Box” competitors (Tuft & Needle, Casper et al) that sell mattresses rolled up in boxes delivered straight to your door by UPS and therefore have no need for 3,500 stores like MFRM, or commissioned sales employees or delivery trucks. Indeed, according to figures disclosed at a Furniture Today conference in May, the “Bed-in-a-Box” industry—and full disclosure, your editor is a happy repeat Casper customer—is running at a $900 million sales rate right now, from a standing start 4 years ago. While $900 million might not sound like much in an industry reported to be worth $7 billion in total (mattresses, not all bedding-related products), it would be the equivalent of about 700 Mattress Firm stores by our math, or about 20% of those “boarder-to-boarder, coast-to-coast” stores. Is it any wonder MFRM comp-store transactions have been flat-lining lately? And while MFRM would probably note that many of the bed-in-a-box vendors are establishing show-rooms in major cities like Manhattan, we’d bet money that they won’t open anything close to 3,500 stores when it’s all over. Why bother? They’re already “boarder-to-boarder, coast-to-coast” mattress retailers, in the sense that they can ship anywhere a UPS truck can go, without the fixed cost structure. All this makes last night’s news that MFRM had disclosed a “material weakness” in its just-filed 10Q involving “controls relating to accounting for significant transactions” even more interesting than the usual “material weakness” disclosure in your average 10Q: “Specifically, we did not design and maintain effective controls related to the recording of the expense for the flow through of the inventory step up fair value adjustment in the Sleepy’s acquisition. We believe the financial statements included herein properly reflect the correct amount and proper classification of the flow through of the Sleepy’s inventory step-up adjustment….” You might think that a company with $1.1 million of cash and $1.6 billion of total intangible assets on its balance sheet (thanks to its “coast-to-coast” rollup of mattress retailers) against $1.45 billion of debt, negative $55.4 million of retained earnings and $477.4 million of total shareholder equity would have been on those issues before they cropped up, but apparently not. Meanwhile, and unfortunately for MFRM, the Caspers of the world are not sitting still, and watching a reported $900 million worth of mattresses get siphoned off to direct-to-consumer competitors is exactly the thing Mattress Firm doesn’t need at this moment. The company spent years steadily snapping up new geographies as part of its grand plan—Mattress Giant, Sleep Experts, Mattress Liquidators, Best Mattress, Sleep Train and, finally, Sleepy’s—at the very moment clever Millennials were figuring out how to design, manufacture and ship a mattress in a box so that they and their friends didn’t have to deal with the process of schlepping down to one of those stores Mattress Firm has been accumulating. So when we hear the word “choppy” to describe the sales environment—as we did in May from MFRM’s own marketing man—our ears perk up. “Choppy” is one of those Wall Street euphemisms that can often mean a whole lot more than it looks on paper. It’s right up there with analysts who are “tweaking our estimates lower” (i.e. slashing them) and sales that have “come in a bit light” (i.e. not even close to plan). Or, our favorite, management that is “laser-focused” on the company’s problems (i.e. playing solitaire on their iPhones). Unfortunately for MFRM, “material weakness” is not a euphemism. Jeff Matthews I Am Not Making This Up © 2016 NotMakingThisUp, LLC The content contained in this blog represents only the opinions of Mr. Matthews. Mr. Matthews also acts as an advisor and clients advised by Mr. Matthews may hold either long or short positions in securities of various companies discussed in the blog based upon Mr. Matthews’ recommendations. This commentary in no way constitutes investment advice, and should never be relied on in making an investment decision, ever. Also, this blog is not a solicitation of business by Mr. Matthews: all inquiries will be ignored. The content herein is intended solely for the entertainment of the reader, and the author.