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In the world of Shake-Shack, everything is about “The Shack.” Where most restaurants report “same-store sales” and “store-level operating margins” and “store economics,” SHAK reports “same-shack” sales and “shack-level operating margins” and “shack-onomics.” It’s a cute, quirky culture the company has built from modest roots—the now-famous hot-dog stand in Madison Square Park—into an international phenomenon, in 12 short years. Of course, 12 years in today’s world is actually a long time, but things didn’t get serious until 2004 when the first Shake Shack restaurant opened, starting the launching pad that would shoot the rocket ship into orbit following the wildly hyped IPO just 16 months ago to the point where, by the end of the first quarter, there would be 88 such “Shacks,” with an inordinately large number—36 to be exact—licensed to other operators outside the U.S., mainly in the Middle East. And it is towards that Middle East exposure we turn our attention here, since Wall Street’s Finest haven’t bothered—and anything Wall Street’s Finest don’t bother with is always interesting to this virtual column. Not so long ago—in the July 2015 S-1, for the record—SHAK described the Middle East as “our most prominent growth market.” And the Middle East clearly was the prominent growth market at that point, having seen 49.7% licensing revenue growth in the fourth quarter of 2014. But by the first quarter of 2016 that growth rate had throttled down to 14.3%. What happened to SHAK’s “most prominent growth market”? Here’s what management said on the recent earnings call: “Now, while the Middle East remains a very important market and part of our international footprint, we are experiencing softness in sales there this year, particularly in our mall locations throughout energy-dependent markets that are seeing a natural economic slowdown right now coupled with currency headwinds. So we expect sales in our Middle East Shacks to remain under pressure through this year given the macro environment in the region.” Not too long ago—i.e. last summer, around the same time as the aforementioned S-1—the company was describing the Middle East in far rosier terms: “When we had just opened the second Shake Shack on the Upper West Side of New York, Mohammed Alshaya, probably many of you know Alshaya, from the Middle East, came to us and said, I don’t normally do this. I normally go with much bigger brands here, and I know you only have two, but I think Shake Shack would do tremendous in the Middle East and I want to bring you over. And Danny and Randy kind of looked at each other and shook their heads, but out of pure curiosity got on a plane and went to Dubai, saw the way Alshaya operates, saw how they do things, saw how their culture connects with ours and said, you know what, let’s take a chance, let’s do it. So they opened a Shake Shack in the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai and it was one of the leading restaurants in the system and still is at this time.” Alshaya is, indeed, a legit operator, and they do indeed normally go with bigger brands. They’ve opened Cheesecake Factories and Pottery Barns, and they know how to do it. But Cheesecake Factory and Pottery Barn took their time on the whole opening-a-zillion-stores-overseas thing. Specifically, it took Cheesecake Factory 35 years before they opened their first restaurant overseas, in Dubai, with Alshaya in 2012—and the company spent a lot of time getting ready. After all, Cheesecakes in Dubai can’t serve alcohol or sell pork products, so the menu had to be adjusted and the company’s culture had to be transported all the way from Calabasas Hills to the United Arab Emirates. Today Alshaya operates just 9 Cheesecakes, compared to the couple-dozen-plus Shacks it opened with a bang not so long ago. And while Cheesecake has let it be known, most recently in March, that its international units continue to do well, SHAK said on its recent call the Middle East market is already “maturing…quite a bit” as it switched the focus to new licensees in Asia: “If you look at our guidance of seven Shacks all year here for that, the Middle East has got quite a few restaurants there. Our region is maturing for Shake Shack quite a bit. We have some great opportunity. We just opened in Riyadh and doing really well there. As I’ve said, in Bahrain and Oman. So we fully expected that region to mature a little bit.” From “our most prominent growth market” to a “maturing” region in less than 12 months might be a record. Not the record a growth company wants to hold, but a record nonetheless. 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.

It’s bad enough when analysts thank CEOs for letting them ask a question on an company earnings call, at least when they do it in a way that goes beyond a simple act of politeness and more towards a cringe-making act of fawning, which too many analysts have a way of doing these days. This is, after all, a business: it’s an analyst’s job to ask questions; it’s a CEO’s job to answer them. Get on with it. What’s worse, however—much worse—is when an analyst who asks a good question gets schmoozed by the CEO, and instead of following up and getting an answer, surrenders. It happened tonight on the Apple call. After thanking the company for “fitting me in” (really?) the analyst asked Tim Cook—all quotes are from the indispensable Seeking Alpha—a very reasonable question about the “top two or three things” that had changed from the previous quarter, when Apple’s CEO was way more bullish about the demand environment for iPhones than it turned out to be. Cook’s response turned the question into a math equation: “…we did not contemplate or comprehend that we were going to make a $2 billion-plus reduction in channel inventory during this quarter. And so if you factor that in and look at true customer demand, which is the way that we look at it internally, I think you’ll find a much more reasonable comparison.” The analyst jumped on Cook for changing the subject—after all, he said, the fact that you decided to cut $2 billion out of channel inventory must mean you had $2 billion more product in the channel than you expected, which means “true customer demand,” as Cook called it, was $2 billion weaker than plan, right? Ha! We’re joking. The analyst did no such thing. He surrendered. “Okay, great. Thank you,” he said, and then asked a softball follow-up. Tim Cook took home $10.3 million last year. He can handle tough questions. Personally, I’d like to know why Cook—who gets on his high moral horse every time some politically correct brushfire starts up somewhere in America—gives up without a sound when the Chinese authorities demand the Apple Store stop carrying apps involving the Dalai Lama. We know the answer: money. Still, it would be fun to ask. But don’t hold your breath. 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.

Mr. McCleery: You aren’t one of those agitators, are you? Benjamin: What? Mr. McCleery: I hate ’em. I won’t stand for it. —The Graduate We here at NotMakingThisUp only write book reviews when we like the book. (If we don’t like it, we don’t write anything at all, because it’s hard—really hard—to write a book, so just the fact that someone has written a book ought to be respected, not criticized.) Journalist Dan Lyons has not only written a book, but it’s good—and not just “good,” but laugh-out-loud good. The subject matter, however, is not always laugh-out-loud funny. It’s about Lyons’ time at HubSpot, the “cloud-based marketing and sales software platform company” he worked for at roughly the peak of the Web 2.0 cycle (Lyons would probably describe it as a “spam-based marketing and sales software platform company,” but we’ll go with the official terminology), and while you may be more familiar with the frat-boy excerpts that have already made made plenty of headlines, they’re nothing anybody who was around during the last bubble hasn’t heard about before and don’t need repeating here. Way more interesting is Lyons’ take on what it’s like to be a 50+ year old Boomer working at a hotshot Millennial company—or “cult,” as he sees it. Lyons listens to conference calls with the company’s ‘social media scientist,’ “a competitive weightlifter who lives in Las Vegas and basically does nothing”; he spends too much time in meetings, which, “like most journalists—and, I would argue, most sane people” he detests; and he gets so fed up with the bubbly self-reinforcing “Happy!! Awesome!! Start-Up Cult” culture that he begins sending around emails like “Jan is the best!!! Her can-do attitude and big smile cheer me up every morning!!!!!!!” about the “grumpy woman who runs the blog,” until he is told to “cut that s— out.” It’s a riot, and it makes the book swing, but that’s not the important stuff. The important stuff includes the sheer whiteness of the workforce, which should be no surprise to him but is (did he really report on the technology world most of his career and not notice that before?); not to mention the youngness of the place, which should also be no surprise to him (does he not know how young Mark Zuckerberg still is?) But the spookiest bit has nothing to do with the age thing, or the “astonishing lack of diversity” (did he think poverty-trapped kids from Harlem are actively recruited by young affluent suburban white kids?), it’s the cultish behavior reinforced from the top, most notably in the way in which employees who’ve been fired are NOT said to have been “fired” or to have “resigned to pursue other interests.” They are said to have “graduated.” “Nobody ever talks about the people who graduate,” writes Lyons, “and nobody ever mentions how weird it is to call it ‘graduation.’” Yet “graduations” happen quite a lot, apparently: the best line in the book being “People just go up in smoke, like Spinal Tap drummers.” Of course, Lyons himself eventually “graduates” after the culture clash starts to get to him (which it actually did on his first day at HubSpot, but he persevered) and he begins to set himself up in ways that make you scratch your head and wonder if he ever actually worked in a corporate environment. Exhibit A in the did-he-really-not-see-this-coming-a-mile-away setup to his own graduation is when Lyons pitches a new online magazine—an idea his direct boss had already rejected—to his boss’s bosses without his boss knowing Lyons was going over his head. “They love the idea,” he says of the meeting with HubSpot’s co-founders. “That night I go home feeling like a conquering hero.” Poor bastard, you think, reading that line. Exhibit B in the did-he-really-not-see-this-coming-a-mile-away department is when Lyons is shocked—shocked!—that nothing subsequently happens, because he didn’t have anyone else at the meeting to verify that the two co-founders actually approved the idea. As one colleague far wiser than Lyons in the ways of corporate politics tells him, “You should have had a witness.” Exhibit C in the did-he-really-not-see-this-coming-a-mile-away department, naturally, is when Lyons’ boss-who-rejected-the-idea-before-Lyons-chose-to-go-over-his-head appropriates the idea as his own. By now, however, even Lyons has figured out what’s happening: “At this point the message could not be more clear,” he writes. His boss “is doing everything short of hiring a skywriter to scrawl GET OUT, DAN in the airspace above HubSpot headquarters.” Lyons at least has some fun as the clock winds down. At an anything-goes marketing idea meeting he proposes putting an “unbearably ambitious and energetic young woman who recently graduated from college, loves HubSpot more than life itself, and would do just about anything to get a promotion” in an orange (the Hubspot color) jumpsuit and helmet and firing her “right through an open window and into a cubicle. Bang! There she is! She doesn’t miss a beat. She just starts giving a lecture about marketing.” To a cynical career journalist, HubSpot was a gift that kept on giving. On the downside, however, Lyons stretches at times to make bigger points—something book editors tend to encourage authors to do in order to gin up the meaning of an otherwise highly enjoyable, and very telling fish-out-of-water memoir. For example, trying to turn his time at HubSpot into a lesson about the cheerful heartlessness of the Web 2.0 revolution, he actually quotes Carl Icahn—the slimeball takeover artist who bankrupted TWA while pocketing a sweet discount airline ticket deal for himself, among many other things that make Donald Trump look magnanimous and would normally set a cynical journalist’s hair on fire—about Marc Andreessen from back when they were fighting over eBay, which is stupid because Andreessen (think Netscape, Facebook, Twitter, among other life-changing companies he’s been involved in) has added more value to the current quality of life in America than even Carl Icahn has managed to extract for himself. Lyons also quotes, of all things, a snarky Robert Reich “Facebook post” about the sharing economy having become a “share the scraps” economy—tell that to the next Uber driver you get who’s paying his way through college or saving for a condo or running a non-profit and wouldn’t have the flexibility to earn extra income without Uber. Finally, Lyons surveys the money-losing business models of so many Web 2.0 start-ups and naively wonders “why there are so many companies that remain in business while losing money”—this after he has started the book with a chapter about getting fired from his prestigious and well-paying job at Newsweek Magazine, which, like most dead-tree publications “has been losing money for years.” Losing money, whether for a start-up with vast potential, like Amazon.com, or for a fading franchise like Newsweek, has never stopped anybody from trying. That is, after all, Capitalism. But the big-picture stuff feels like an editor made him do it, because the other 98% of the book moves fast, tells a great story, and actually will make you laugh. Out loud. —JM NB: Just for the record, prior to its publication, the author of Disrupted asked, and I answered, a couple of questions about my perspective on the SAAS business model of Salesforce.com.

Well it’s earnings season again. That means it’s time for IBM to puke another quarter and hold an incomprehensible—literally, incomprehensible—earnings call during which it spins every data point in such a positive light that you’d think they held the winning Powerball ticket, while strictly limiting analysts to one question—no follow-ups, please—and abruptly cutting things off when the hour is up. For those of us accustomed to the full disclosure practiced by the terrible, horrible, no-good banks, this practice of IBM’s management team not belaboring bad news is something out of Fawlty Towers (“Don’t mention The War. I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it.”) By way of comparison, Wells Fargo and Citi’s back-to-back earnings calls last Friday started at 10 a.m. E.S.T. and ended at 1:15 p.m., give or take. Analysts on both calls were free to “get back in the queue,” as they say, and they did, until every question was exhausted. But that practice is not the IBM Way. No sir. Windy analysts are quickly cut off and the opportunity to follow-up an obfuscatory answer (the IBM norm) is not given—bringing to mind yet another Basil Fawlty line: “Trespassers will be tied up with piano wire.” So if you didn’t get a chance to listen to IBM’s earnings call—and we’ve poked fun at them for years, most recently here—you really ought to read the transcript courtesy of the indispensible Seeking Alpha, here. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that IBM is swimming in gold, that its cloud offerings are taking the world by storm (“We’re the largest,” they declare, without mentioning that their internal measure includes low-margin IBM hardware), and that Watson, which as they always remind us won Jeopardy in 2011 (or was it 2010? Or was it actually Wheel of Fortune during Kardashian Week?) is the next Amazon Web Services, which it is not. In reality, IBM’s revenues are down—even in the not-falling-apart Americas—its cash flows are down, its share repurchases are down (even though the stock is down, and presumably more attractive than the last time they spent billions propping it up), and the only reason it “beat the number” was, naturally, the tax rate, which IBM plays like Duane Allman played “Whipping Post.” (See “Bring Out the Belgian Waffle!” here.) Oh, and never forget that IBM always makes sure to exclude the negative impact of currency and divestitures on these calls and in their press releases, but does not exclude the positive impact of acquisitions. And IBM made seven cloud acquisitions alone in 2015. Altogether, it is, as we started at the top, literally incomprehensible. And if you don’t believe us, try this answer from the CFO on for size, about the miss in IBM’s super-high-margin software business: Sure thank you, thanks Toni. A few comments on software, so as we said in our prepared remarks, the deceleration third to fourth really was driven by this – by the mix shift and the continuation of the transaction closing rates that we saw in September. So we talked about – coming out of September we talked about a slower rate of closing in some of our larger deals and that’s what we experienced as well in the fourth quarter. And as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, because of the mix shift alone we see an improvement and as you point out the weather company another acquisitions by the way to the extent that they are – have software in them they will obviously bolster that growth rate. A few things, I think are important to note within software. First, as we said in our prepared remarks and the phenomena is really no different in the fourth and what we’ve seen all year, our annuity business within the software business. So that’s about 70% of our overall software stream. Our annuity business continues to grow. So that has a service in it, it has our subscription and support business in it as well, so that continues to grow. And then outside of our largest clients and this is a phenomena that we’ve been talking about, outside of our largest clients where they don’t have as broad access to our software portfolio, we continue to see growth as well, both transactionally and they’re obviously part of the asset service stream. Within the large clients as I mentioned earlier and as we talked about in our prepared remarks, we provide flexibility, it gives them – it gives our clients an ability now to manage their projects and they deploy maybe differently than they anticipated at the beginning of the year. From my discussions with our clients, a lot of that depends on the visibility they have both of their demand patterns and the visibility they have to sort of the – kinds of projects they might have to implement in the near-term. So I don’t think that’s any different than what we’ve experienced in the past… If you can make anything of that—and we’re pretty sure even Warren Buffett, the largest IBM shareholder, couldn’t make anything of that—let us know. Meantime, don’t mention the revenue drop, the earnings decline or the cash flow shortfall. I mentioned them once but I think I got away with it… Jeff Matthews Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett” (eBooks on Investing, 2015) Available now at Amazon.com © 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.

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 rock 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 explaining Campbell’s life now and back when…and if you’re interested in knowing more about that back when, 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. Currently priced at $30.79 at Barnes & Noble for the hard copy version, or $21.00 on Amazon, I’ll wait until spring and pick it up for $5.99—sorry Mick, but that’s the business we’re in. 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 © 2015 NotMakingThisUp, LLC

In case you thought Berkshire Hathaway was involved in only one bad deal—the $36 billion all-cash takeover of cyclical, airline-supplying Precision Castparts for 20-times what may (or may not) turn out to be peak-cycle earnings—well, there’s another deal Berkshire is involved in, indirectly, that is not looking great for the acquiring company and its shareholders: M&T Bank’s $5.4 billion all-stock acquisition of Hudson City Bancorp. Berkshire Hathaway has owned shares of M&T for years, maybe decades, and for good reason: run by down-to-earth Bob Wilmers, whose annual shareholder letter is required reading for anyone in this business, M&T is one of the few banks with $50 billion or more in assets that made it through the financial crisis without losing a dime, or needing a bailout, or both, thanks entirely due to the sober culture of the place. And while your editor owns M&T shares for exactly the same reason as Berkshire Hathaway, the acquisition of Hudson City is looking more like a pig in a poke than the tarnished gem it appeared to be the day the deal was announced way back in August 2012. The Feds, you see, have yet to approve the deal, for reasons supposedly relating to concerns about M&T’s anti-money-laundering capabilities. And while M&T has been spending heaps of money to fix whatever accounted for the Fed’s concerns, the deal approval kept getting deferred. Meantime, M&T’s stock—and the value of the shares it agreed to pay for Hudson—kept climbing and now stands 30% above the initial $7.56 value per Hudson share to $10.20 today. With 530 million Hudson shares outstanding, that means the initial $4 billion price tag has jumped to over $5.3 billion. Worse, given the long-deferred approval, Hudson has been shrinking. Who, after all, wants to work with a bank that may or may not be around—depending on the Feds—in a year or two or three? And who wants to work for that bank? No surprise, then, that employment at Hudson has shrunk from over 1,600 to 1,466 at last count, while the loan book has likewise been shrinking—from $27 billion or so around the time of the announcement to around $20 billion today. Deposits have also skedaddled: there were $18 billion at last count, down from $23 billion back when. And despite the 30% jump in the value of the transaction, shareholder equity has barely budged: $4.8 billion, up from $4.7 billion. So what M&T was once paying below book value for it is now paying a pretty fancy multiple of book, in bank terms. Nevertheless, Wall Street’s Finest continue to cheerlead the transaction. When Hudson yesterday announced a $30 million settlement with the Feds (a different branch of the Feds from the ones who will decide on the deal’s fate shortly) over allegations of “redlining,” you would have thought Hudson had instead announced that it had discovered that the company’s Paramus headquarters was sitting on a giant shale gas field with a pipeline already connected to Con Edison ready to supply New York City’s energy needs for the next millennium: M&T’s stock popped and research reports declared that this was just the sign we needed that the deal would shortly be approved. And maybe it will be. But as an M&T shareholder, I’d just as soon not be paying 30% more for so much less. Jeff Matthews Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett” (eBooks on Investing, 2015) Available now at Amazon.com © 2015 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.

TV personality, author and commentator William D. Cohan is grumpy about a lot of things. There’s the Duke lacrosse scandal, for one, about which he’s just publish a “shocking, thought-provoking new book”—according to the description on his own web page. And for another there’s Wall Street, from whence he came, and about which he’s written plenty of grumpy, conspiracy-minded books. Hence it’s no surprise to find Cohan invited to speak at the Sun Valley Writer’s Conference, whose attendees tend to be wealthy, Wall Street-leery arts supporters from L.A. It’s even less surprising that one of the talks he gave to those same attendees was entitled “Who Has the Real Power Now on Wall Street?”—actually, less of a talk and more of a very grumpy, very conspiratorial dish about what he perceives to be the current state of Wall Street—and that said Wall Street-leery audience was with him from the get-go. Kicking off with the quite legitimate observation that the Dodd-Frank law was not understood by Mr. Dodd or Mr. Frank, Cohan explained that Dodd-Frank did nothing but give more power to the six major banks at the heart of the 2008-9 financial crisis (now five, since Bank of America rescued Merrill Lynch), although he failed to explain why (it’s the fact that big banks can spend the big regulatory bucks while smaller banks have a harder time doing so: hence, regulation favors the large and hurts the small, yielding consolidation). No matter the reason Dodd-Frank failed its mission, the crowd nodded approval at Cohan’s dark conclusion and murmured its disapproval of the Big Bad Banks. Bolstered by this friendly reception, Cohan then proclaimed that government regulators don’t help address the weaknesses in the Dodd-Frank regulations because “the SEC is a tool of Wall Street.” After all, he pointed out, U.S. Presidents appoint Wall Street people to the job of overseeing Wall Street. Since they will eventually go back to Wall Street, they aren’t going to do anything to kill the golden goose. Thus, he noted, Mary Shapiro left FINRA to run the SEC with a $9 million bonus from her work at FINRA, at which the crowd gasped and murmured its disapproval of money-grubbing Mary Shapiro. At this point, Cohan could have said anything he wanted—he could have said Paul McCartney really was dead; John Lennon really had mumbled “I buried Paul” at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever; and the Abbey Road cover photograph was, in fact, an allegory of a burial ceremony because Paul was barefoot—and the crowd would have gasped and nodded and murmured their approval. Instead what he said was something far sillier than “Paul is Dead.” He said that thanks to their status as bank holding companies regulated by the Federal Reserve, “the investment banks are now a cartel.” In fact he said they are even more of a cartel than OPEC, because they split up turf, noting darkly that “Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley don’t compete all that much,” which might be news to some of the traders and bankers we know at those firms. No matter, the Bank Cartel is alive and well, according to Cohan, because he’s “been assured by bankers on Wall Street” that they are going to “raise prices on their clients.” The crowd tisked and shook their heads and nodded knowingly: I knew it! Now, Mr. Cohan is not just a TV Personality. He is an author, and he has written books about Wall Street, where he did, after all, once work. And being an author, it apparently occurred to him that he ought to offer some proof for his “cartel” theory besides unsubstantiated hearsay. So he did: “Wall Street is booming in every way,” he said, declaring, as if stating an indisputable fact, “Profits have never been higher. ” Quote, as they say, unquote. Now, having just listened to supposed-cartel-co-conspirator BankAmerica CEO Brian Moynihan point out that his company has just completed its 15th consecutive quarter of reducing employment by 3,000 human beings or more, the phrase “booming in every way” wouldn’t necessarily spring to the mind of anyone remotely paying attention to the current environment on Wall Street. However it’s the “profits have never been higher” that seemed flat-out wrong. Since this was a speech, and there were no fact-checkers around as would be the case if this had been a manuscript for publication, we here at NotMakingThisUp decided to check the facts ourselves to see if Mr. Cohan was, in fact, not Making That Up. The results, from our trusty Bloomberg, are in the table below, which shows the most recent earnings data from the five money-centers that remain intact from the crisis days compared to their peak quarterly numbers, almost entirely from the 2006-2007 fat years (Wells Fargo is not included because it is a substantially different entity thanks to the Wachovia acquisition): If that is a cartel, it is not doing a very good job of jacking up prices for its clients. Return on equity for the “booming-in-every-way” cartel is down 50% from peak levels; return on assets is down 40% from peak, and earnings (in billions of net after-tax dollars, adjusted for non-recurring items), are nearly 30% below peak. Not even close to “Never been higher.” And while we are at it, we should probably also point out that John Lennon actually said “cranberry sauce,” not “I buried Paul,” at the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever;” that Paul went barefoot during the Abbey Road cover shoot because it was a warm day outside the EMI studio at St. John’s Wood, not because the cover photograph was an allegory of a burial ceremony; and that Paul is actually still alive and well, and recently turned 73. Just in case Mr. Cohan tells you otherwise. Jeff Matthews Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett” (eBooks on Investing, 2015) Available now at Amazon.com © 2015 NotMakingThisUp, LLC

The best part of this year’s Berkshire meeting—except seeing Charlie Munger in good form, which we’ll get to in a bit—was the movie. Not the movie itself, but the end of the movie, when the sing-along tribute to Berkshire’s managers, which always used to be set to the tune of “My Favorite Things,” turned out to use “Sgt. Pepper” instead. That’s some good taste there. But, actually, the best part of the Beatles-themed piece of the movie came as it died out and, miraculously, the “Sgt. Pepper Reprise”—the best two minutes of The Beatles ever recorded, in your editor’s opinion—began to play during the credits. (Yes, we know—Dear Prudence…Across the Universe…Revolution…Oh! Darling…Something…Everybody’s Got Something To Hide…The End—are up there, but it all depends on what mood you’re in, right? And the mood we were in was, “Hey, this is seriously good taste.”) But that was before the absolute best part of the entire meeting actually occurred, which was when the Sgt. Pepper Reprise died out and the house lights stayed dim and suddenly that willowy organ introduction—Can they really be playing this?—to Joe Cocker’s full-throated ¾-time version of “With a Little Help From My Friends” began to coil above the sound of 20,000 or so Berkshire shareholders shifting in their seats waiting for Warren and Charlie to hit the stage, which they did as The Grease Band came in over the organ with a bang, young Jimmy Page leading the charge on electric guitar… It doesn’t get any better than that. And it didn’t. Not that it wasn’t a good meeting. It was a very good meeting. It just was kind of all downhill from there—at least when it comes to the energy of the thing. Substance-wise, Warren and Charlie sat for the usual five-plus hours of thoughtful questions (for the most part) and thoughtful answers (with a bit of deft tap-dancing on Warren’s part, particularly when the enormously touchy subject of 3G—the Brazilian takeover artists whose Berkshire-financed slashing-and-burning at Heinz has turned a sleepy-but-modestly-profitable ketchup company with declining sales into a hugely profitable ketchup-and-potentially-mustard company with declining sales—came up). Naturally, Carol Loomis did the bringing up, because a) Carol is a terrific journalist, and b) Carol has no fear, while she also knows that Buffett can rationalize anything. And rationalize 3G he did, saying “I don’t think you can ever find a statement that Charlie and I have made…where we’ve said more people than are needed should be working at our companies.” That’s not the point, of course: the point is that if 3G ran Berkshire it would very likely have substantially fewer than 300,000+ employees in short order, no matter how often Buffett points to the 25 FTEs at corporate headquarters as proof that Berkshire doesn’t have any fat. (Buffett later, and ludicrously, claimed that if Berkshire operated as a normal bloated American company it would have a huge corporate headquarters staff which 3G would be entitled to slash if it ran Berkshire—thus ignoring the corporate headquarters functions scattered throughout all the various Berkshire companies, which naturally have their own CFOs and Treasurers and controllers and legal et al.) But we came to praise Buffett and Munger, not to criticize them, particularly Charlie, who got in his usual wonderfully concise, pointed observations after Buffett had frequently wandered around the metaphorical map on various topics ( and Charlie participated in literally every question asked during the first half of the session). For example: On why Clayton Homes (criticized in a recent Seattle Times “expose”) has some customers who default: “If we made the default rate zero we wouldn’t be lending to people who need it.” On what investment formula Buffett and Munger could provide to evaluate companies: “We don’t have a one-size-fits-all system.” On his and Buffett’s less-than-healthy diets: “The way I look at it, if I die earlier I’ll just avoid a few months of drooling in the nursing home.” On why Van Tuyl has been wildly successful in the notoriously nepotistic car business: “Van Tuyl has a system of meritocracy where the right people get the power and the ownership.” On why Berkshire changed over time as it did: “We were always dissatisfied with what we knew…we wanted to learn more.” On how to succeed without a business degree: “Play the hand you’ve got.” And on what he and Buffett look for in business partners: “The trustworthiness is more important than the brains.” And that’s just the first half of the meeting, because we left at the lunch break, never to go back. Readers who wish can call up Charlie’s bon mots on Twitter and on the “live-blogs” of any of half a dozen financial news outlets that covered the event, but we’re not going to pretend to have been when and where we weren’t. Why now? Maybe it was seeing the NetJets pilots and attendants, dressed to the nines in their uniforms and walking quietly and respectfully in a very long oval outside the CenturyLink Center the entire meeting, so different in seriousness and demeanor from past “Hey look at us!”-type protests at the Berkshire meeting; maybe it was Buffett’s inability to admit publicly, “Well, yes, it’s true, the 3G guys are more Mr. Potter than my George Bailey, but so what?”; maybe it’s the fact that Business Insider—Henry Blodgett’s quite wonderful online vision of what would happen if People Magazine covered the business world (with occasional great scoops thrown in the mix)—published a reporter’s visit to Warren Buffett’s Favorite Steakhouse (here), complete with photos of the actual type of steak Warren likes to order… We don’t know, but after hearing Joe Cocker (1944-2014, sadly) singing his guts out on the heels of Ringo and The Boys slamming it, the whole thing just seemed like enough. And so, enough. Jeff Matthews Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett” (eBooks on Investing, 2015) Available now at Amazon.com © 2015 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.

Tom Prescott announced his retirement last night. You may not have heard of him, but as CEO of Align Technologies (the inventors of Invisalign “invisible braces”) Prescott helped turn a $70 million revenue company with 35% gross margins, negative operating margins and a $127 million market value into a near-$800 million revenue company with near-80% gross margins and 25% operating margins. Oh, yeah, and a $4.5 billion market value, last we checked. More than that, Tom Prescott helped Invisalign develop from a niche product not much liked by the orthodontists who were supposed to use it (it’s far more expensive to them than the old-fashioned wires and brackets, plus, in the early days, before Prescott, the Invisalign treatment was far more limited in what it could do, teeth-moving-around-wise) into a near-standard of care in orthodontics around the world. And he did it the old-fashioned way: by spending on R&D to improve the product (a quarter billion in the last six years alone), marketing like crazy, and proselytizing every chance he had. Along the way, Prescott had to contend with a near-fatal copycat product (fought and won in courts of law), short-selling attacks (fought and won the best way possible: just running the business well) and big-company patent suits (smartly settled). If there ever exists a CEO Hall of Fame, Tom Prescott should get in on the first ballot. Thus it was quite a surprise to see the headline come across the tape after last night’s close that he would retire in June, with an outside-the-company successor to take his place. No mention of such plans had ever passed his lips to anyone outside Align, and being the ripe young age of 59, nobody had ever bothered to ask him. Nevertheless, as the ensuing conference call made clear, the decision was voluntary, had been in the works for a year and a half, and had produced a successor who looks eminently worthy of filling some big shoes. Now you would think the first question on the call would be about the decision itself, with perhaps a follow-up on the successor and whatever plans he might have for the company. But you would be wrong. The first question was about what it’s always about for some of Wall Street’s Finest…near-term earnings: “Thanks. Good afternoon. Tom or David [White, the CFO], could you just elaborate on sort of the preliminary 1Q outlook in terms of revenues and EPS…?” It was as if Leo Messi suddenly announced his retirement from Barcelona during half-time, and the first question out of the reporters’ mouths was about who’s going to win the match. You could almost hear Prescott and his team restraining their incredulity, but, class acts that they are, restrain they did. Still, if there ever exists a Hall of Fame of Silly Analyst Questions, that one will get in on the first ballot. Jeff Matthews Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett” (eBooks on Investing, 2015) Available now at Amazon.com © 2015 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.

Ned Isakoff: “You got me blacklisted from Hop Sing’s?” Delivery Man: “She named name!” —Seinfeld, “The Race” Like Elaine Benes in that Seinfeld episode, Charlie Munger named name. Two names, in fact: Greg Abel and Ajit Jain. Unlike Elaine Benes’s name-naming, however, the two named by Munger have nothing to do with Communist agitation and the destruction of capitalism as we know it—far from it. Rather, they have everything to do with Capitalist orthodoxy in its purest, most meritocratic form: who might succeed Warren Buffett as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway under the scenario, as Munger puts it, “Buffett left tomorrow.” Here’s the direct quote from Munger’s comments written for the 2014 Chairman’s Letter that hit Berkshire Hathaway’s web site this morning (2015 being the 50th anniversary of Buffett’s takeover of the company, both men wrote individual retrospectives on the last 50 years and what the next 50 years might bring): But, under this Buffett-soon-leaves assumption, his successors would not be “of only moderate ability.” For instance, Ajit Jain and Greg Abel are proven performers who would probably be under-described as “world-class.” “World-leading” would be the description I would choose. In some important ways, each is a better business executive than Buffett… While Munger’s naming of names does not carry the same penalty as in the Seinfeld episode—neither man will be banned from ordering takeout at Hop Sing’s—it does carry far greater ramifications, because the moment Munger’s comments appeared on Berkshire Hathaway’s web site this morning, both men’s lives changed forever, for obvious reasons that we won’t enumerate, since everybody else will be doing that starting, oh, now. Instead, we encourage a careful reading of the full Berkshire letter—including both Buffett and Munger’s insightful commentary on what made Berkshire what it has become and where it might go—here. Fortunately, our book on the topic of Munger’s name-naming—“Warren Buffett’s Successor: Who it Is and Why it Matters,” (eBookson Investing, 2013)—was published well before Munger actually chose to name names, but we don’t have to change a word of it. Jeff Matthews Author “Warren Buffett’s Successor: Who it Is and Why it Matters”” (eBooks on Investing, 2014) Available now at Amazon.com © 2015 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.

The Canadian tar sands have been very good to Clean Harbors, a perennial Wall Street favorite that evolved from a disaster cleanup business (for which the company’s web pages still carry a plug at the bottom: “For 24-Hour Emergency Response, call 800.OIL.TANK”) into a diversified industrial service company through 35-plus acquisitions costing about $2 billion over 25 years. The tar sands business came with the 2009 acquisition of Eveready, and so swiftly did CLH expand deeper into so-called unconventional energy (everything from feeding and housing roughnecks in lodges to hauling out drilling waste) that oil and gas exploration and production services went from 0% of the company’s total business in 2008 to 27% in 2012, before the $1.25 billion acquisition of Safety-Kleen got them into the lube oil re-refining business, diluting the oil and gas piece to something closer to 15%. Now, I have a friend who refers to any company repeatedly flogged by Wall Street analysts while never quite seeming to meet their lofty expectations as a “Next Year in Jerusalem” story, after the phrase concluding the Passover Seder. No matter what happens in the business, and how it varies from their expectations, the analysts, metaphorically speaking, say “Next Year in Jerusalem!” Granted, CLH deserved some free passes after beating analyst expectations for eight straight quarters from mid-2010 to mid-2012, but the streak ran out some time around the aforementioned Safety-Kleen acquisition—which seemed like a good idea at the time to the cheerleaders (fee-generating transactions generally do that!)—and the company failed to match expectations in 6 of the next 10 quarters, at least according to Bloomberg. But don’t take our word for it: the transformation of CLH’s from “beat and raise” to “hit or miss” is told in the headlines from various so-called analyst reports along the way: 5/11: “Premier Mid-Cap Growth Story” 2/12: “Momentum Strong Enough to Raise 2012 Outlook, but Still Conservative” 5/12: “Slight 1Q12 Upside; Reiterates Guidance; Growth Story Intact” 8/12: “2Q Transition/Seasonality or Structural? We Believe LT Story Unchanged” 10/12: “Upgrading to Strong Buy on Highly Accretive Safety-Kleen Acquisition” 2/13: “Q412 Results A Bit Light; No Change to 2013 Guidance; Reiterate Buy” 5/13: “Q1 Revenue Light with Targets Back End Loaded; Segment Results Mixed” 7/13: “Inflection Unlikely for 2Q but More Likely in 2H” 8/13: “2Q More Painful Than Expected, but Upside Narrative into 2014 Unchanged” 8/13: “Q2 Weak/Guidance Cut; Technical Services Needs to Lead Charge” 9/13: “Investor Day Enables Sentiment Shift; 2014 Appears Conservative” 9/13: “A Very Bullish Investor Day; Reiterate Buy” 11/13: “2013 Outlook Cut; Choppy Segment Results Don’t Help” 11/13: “2014 Can’t Come Fast Enough” 2/14: “Another weak quarter and outlook” 2/14: “Oil & Gas/Re-refinery Drive Forecast Lower; Shares Finally Washed Out?” 2/14: “CLH has not delivered a beat & raise quarter since 4Q11.” 3/14: “From Land of the Lost toward the Path to Enlightenment” 5/14: “Finally, a Good Quarter; Cost Reductions in Focus and Upside May be Returning” 6/14: “Takeaways from Investor Meetings…businesses appear to be stabilizing/improving…” 8/14: “Solid 2Q Driven by the Key Tech Service Franchise; Estimates Raised” 11/14: “Estimates Cut on Energy Trends; Hopefully a Refocus on ‘Core’ Franchises Along the way, one large “activist” investor accumulated a 9% stake in the company, but months later announced it was shutting down its fund…and CLH began a strategic review, presumably with one eye on the “activist” investor…but then oil prices collapsed (in the truest sense of the word), putting a sudden damper on high-cost oil development in places like the Canadian tar sands and the U.S. shale areas where CLH had been planting its flag up until recently…so much so that shortly before year-end a “comp” to the company’s lodging services business—called Civeo, which had been spun out of Oil States International just last summer in order to “enhance shareholder value” at the behest of the same kind of “activist” investor that had accumulated 9% of CLH—shocked its own cheerleaders, saying thusly: “The acceleration in November of the decline in global crude oil prices and forecasts for a potentially protracted period of lower prices have resulted in major oil companies reducing their 2015 capital budgets…reducing the near-term allocation of capital to development or expansion projects in the oil sands, which is a major driver of demand for the company’s services in Canada. It has also increased the difficulty of reliably estimating 2015 occupancy levels for the company’s facilities…” It wasn’t long ago—that 2013 “very bullish analyst day,” in fact—that the company’s cheerleaders were congratulating CLH for the lodging business being one of its highest return businesses. Now, Warren Buffett likes to say that when a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, “it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.” But in the case of Clean Harbors, the analysts like to say, “Next Year in Jerusalem!” Jeff Matthews Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett” (eBooks on Investing, 2014) Available now at Amazon.com © 2015 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.

I received for Christmas the least looked-forward-to book I have ever received: John Cleese’s “So, Anyway…”. Cleese, of course, is a founder of Monty Python, the wildly successful British comedy group that took male teenagers by storm in the early 1970s and was considered inheritor to The Beatles’ mantle as conquerors of America by none other than George Harrison (according to his friend Eric Idle, another Python). Cleese is also co-creator, co-writer, producer and star of what has been called the best TV sitcom ever created, Fawlty Towers. Thus, for a certain generation—i.e. male baby-boomers who came of age when Monty Python was laying waste to all previous notions of what was funny—a book, any book, by John Cleese would be a no-brainer for Christmas, or Hanukkah, or even New Year’s Eve. But despite having grown up on the original Python series aired on PBS, and despite having seen the group live at City Center in 1976, and despite having seriously considered traveling to London to see the group’s final reunion at the O2 Center last summer, I had no interest in this book, the reason being an especially scathing review in the Wall Street Journal by one Wesley Stace, a British author who also performs as a singer-songwriter by the name of John Wesley Harding, the title of an old Bob Dylan album (go figure). In his review, John Wesley Harding/Wesley Stace wrote pretty much what you might expect of a book by Cleese, whose intensely intellectual approach to comedy, and the well-known years he spent in psycho-therapy, tends to make him appear to be the John Lennon of the Pythons—Lennon being the ex-Beatle who had the nerve to dismiss his achievements as a Fab Four by saying, “We were just a band that made it very very big, that’s all.” And that’s the tone of the Wesley Stace/Wesley Harding review in a nutshell: The title “So, Anyway . . .” implies a cavalcade of convivial anecdotes and lengthy digressions. This is a grave misrepresentation, partly because of an occasional reluctance on Mr. Cleese’s part (“actually telling you about [the Footlights does] not fill me with excitement”) and partly because promising stories are derailed by the decision to narrate them in the voice of Mr. Cleese playing a crashing bore at a party in a Python sketch… It’s a difficult book to enjoy and “The Last Laugh” would perhaps have been better a title, so often does Mr. Cleese give himself the punch-line in age-old disputes. He rehearses every perceived slight. The “undeserved insult” of being overlooked for a position of authority at school left a life long scar: “I believe that this moment changed my perspective on the world.” His ill feeling towards his dead mother is likewise undimmed by time… But receive the book for Christmas I did, and am glad I opened it and began reading it. Because if, as I suspect he did not, Hardy Wesley/Stace Wesley had in fact read the entire book, as I have, he would have discovered that [We interrupt here to explain that book reviewers frequently do not read the actual book before reviewing it; many reviewers, in fact, rely on summaries provided by the book publisher for scheduling and cost reasons, as we learned during the publication of “Pilgrimage to Warren Buffett’s Omaha,” when a reviewer took issue with a blog post the author had written, mistaking it for the book—Ed.] what John Cleese has done is write a tight, funny, comprehensive-but-compact biography that zeros in on the whys and wherefores of how he, and, indirectly, the Pythons, got to be what they became. He starts at the beginning, when and where he was born, and while the stuff about his father and mother (and grandparents, too) may seem irrelevant and mean-spirited to Stacely/Hardley, it’s all part of explaining how he developed the sense of humor he did. The fact that Cleese had a tough time with his mother explains a lot, while the fact that he really liked and admired his father seems jarring at first, considering his recurring role as the demented authoritarian figure in Python sketches, but that role is explained by his memories of being bullied at school, followed by this insight: “Peter Cook [Another revolutionary British comedian—Ed.] always said that he quite deliberately staved off bullying by being funny. I think in my case it was less a conscious activity—more ‘Oh, that felt nice.’ And, as I realized, I became funnier, of course, because the spark is always there. So the bullying faded away, and I started, for the first time, to make friends.” Hardly ‘rehearsing every perceived slight,’ as the Stacy/Hardy review put it. In fact, the entire book is supremely well written in the Cleese manner—there is no “as told to” laziness here—and while the anecdotes are not, as the reviewer would seem to prefer, “convivial,” they all serve to tell a point: the point being, “here’s where it came from.” Along the way, we learn where the germ of certain bits were developed (e.g. Sybil Fawtly’s description of her paranoid mother—“And she’s always on about men following her; I don’t know what she thinks they’re going to do to her, vomit on her, Basil says”—came directly from Cleese’s phobic mother); why he and Graham Chapman worked so well as a writing team (“When you begin to write comedy, the biggest worry is simply: is this funny? Writing with a partner ensures you get priceless feedback, and Graham and I worked together well: we found each other funny and when we did laugh, we really laughed); and how the path to Python let through unknown (in America, at least) radio and TV shows like “I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again,” “At Last The 1948 Show” and “The Frost Report.” To be sure, Cleese aims zingers at old archaic conventions and the occasional petty personality who offended his sense of justice, but those asides are overwhelmed by the surprisingly affectionate portraits of writers, producers and directors who helped him along the way (including David Frost, despite the fact that Eric Idle gave a merciless portrayal of Frost as “Timmy Williams” in the Python series). All in all, it is hardly the cranky kind of stuff Wembley/Stadium would have readers believe, and even the occasional gibes all serve the main point of explaining where all this great stuff came from. As, for example, when Cleese reprints parts of several old sketches from various pre-Python shows, including a couple that later made it into Python sketches, either on film or on records, as well as some laugh-out-loud bits that did not. And for anyone interested in creativity—especially of the breakthough, Python kind—this is invaluable, and pleasurable reading. Wembley Stadium notwithstanding. 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.