One thing covering music in one city tells you is that good music and bands fail to find audiences for a host of reasons that rarely have to do with quality or talent. Peter Holsapple’s excellent series of blog entries for The New York Times document his life as a songwriter including today’s entry, “Anatomy of a Flop.”  In it, he walks through the making of the dB’s Like This album and particularly the song “Love is For Lovers,” which he felt was a possible hit. The story of how it didn’t become one has to do with band egos, weird relationships, rock stars and the business – some of the usual suspects when it comes to stomping out perfectly good music. In the piece, producer Chris Butler recalls a meeting with Bearsville Records’ owner/former Dylan manager Albert Grossman:

“In the drive to our digs on Albert’s compound, I gushed about to Albert how hard the band had worked in pre-production: how we had taken Peter’s great songs and worked them and re-worked them, and how we were going to make a great record and how grateful everyone was to get the chance to record in a world-class studio. After listening to me silently for a while, he stopped me mid-sentence and said in a rather nasal baritone, ‘Chris…all I am interested in these days are restaurants and wood.’ It was going to be a long autumn.”