Rage Against The Machine

"I'm not angry; I'm just passionate about music and trying to speak the truth about it," says Lefsetz, who once worked in the music industry. (By Jonathan Alcorn For The Washington Post)

Lefsetz graduated from Middlebury College with an art-history degree and did some freestyle skiing in Utah before moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. Something about the vibe in all those old Brian and Dennis Wilson songs about Southern California. Plus, he was following a girl.

He earned a degree from Southwestern Law School, landed at a firm with entertainment clients, tried -- and failed -- to make it on his own as an independent record-label owner and talent manager, got mixed up in the movie business, then met heavy-metal singer Blackie Lawless from the band W.A.S.P.

That led to Lefsetz's first -- and last -- major music-industry job, in 1984: Running the U.S. division of Sanctuary, a London-based management firm whose clients included Iron Maiden and the notoriously raunchy W.A.S.P. Lefsetz was fired less than a year later. "I was fighting for the artistic integrity" of a W.A.S.P. album, he says, "and that was secondary to everybody getting along and keeping people's egos stroked."

Thinking back to high school, Lefsetz eventually "got back in touch with wanting to be a writer" and unsuccessfully pitched a few magazines. Then, thumbing through a copy of Billboard, he had a Lefsetzian revelation: "This is [expletive] TERRIBLE! I can do better than THIS!"

The Lefsetz Letter launched in 1986, its six pages of 8 1/2 -by-11 paper filled with odd, opinionated musings on the music business. "One of the early subjects," Lefsetz says, "was Stevie Winwood and whether the fact that he was dancing in his videos was [expletive] his credibility." (Short answer: Yes.)

The goal was simple: "Get another gig in the music business." There were no advertisements in the biweekly newsletter; revenue would come from subscriptions, at an annual rate of $89, which was soon raised to $110. Lefsetz went through an industry directory to find potential readers and the early returns were encouraging, with the likes of then-Arista Records chief Clive Davis signing on. (Never mind that Davis soon signed off, becoming, Lefsetz says, "one of only two people who ever canceled me when I had the print newsletter.")

The Lefsetz Letter created a stir from the outset, but there was no windfall for its author-publisher, who recalls: "I'm living off the credit cards, basically starving, and I'm not doing so well. And then my wife moves out and my father dies and I REALLY crash."

Or started to, anyway: He bottomed out in 1994, when a 6.7-magnitude earthquake rocked Los Angeles, leaving Lefsetz badly shaken. "The newsletter is coming out every two weeks, no matter what. But at this point, I've fallen off the edge and I want to give up."

Never did, though. Lefsetz -- who has always taken the emo approach to pontificating by weaving threads from his personal life into his music-business analyses -- continued to publish the newsletter while working through his issues. And in 2000, he took the Lefsetz Letter online after writing about a not-yet-released David Geffen biography and e-mailing the piece to some of his subscribers. "The response was phenomenal," Lefsetz says.

He ended the print edition and stopped charging. The newsletter's subscriber base grew from about 2,500 in his first year online to, well . . . Lefsetz won't say exactly. "When I hit send, I'm reaching tens of thousands of people," he says coyly. Then: "I reach more people than most first-time novelists."

But if they don't pay, then how does Lefsetz earn a living? Where does he get the money for the ski vacations, the increasingly expensive therapy sessions, the dinners with industry players that he's always writing about?

"That's the age-old question," says Larry Solters, the spokesman for Ticketmaster, Nielsen SoundScan and the Eagles, and a regular Lefsetz reader. "How does Bob make his money? I don't think anybody knows."