I asked ALEXA to play some music featuring HAL BLAINE. I asked eight different ways. First she gave me a TIDAL playlist called Classical Romance, then a THUGZY song featuring CHINGO BLING (beyond the "BL" in Chingo's last name, your guess is as good as mine). And so on until, frustrated, I asked Alexa, who lives inside a stereo pair of HAY SONOS ONE speakers in my bedroom, to play "BE MY BABY." She offered the ARIANA GRANDE song of that name, which features a skittering electronic beat and no live drums. "'Be My Baby' by the RONETTES," I clarified, and she finally came through. Getting your smart speaker to play one of the greatest drum tracks in pop history, it turns out, isn't quite as easy as kick k-kick snare. I tried SIRI, too. Twice I requested "music by Hal Blaine," and twice she spelled that exact phrase on my IPHONE screen before mysteriously autocorrecting the name to "PAUL BLEY" and queuing up some piano jazz. There will never be another HAL BLAINE. But there will be reasonable, maybe even more than reasonable, equivalents: percussion masters who are wired into the pop zeitgeist and are in great demand, who are openly sneered at by established older musicians, who help define the sound of their era, and who are incredibly nice. I'm not worried about that. What I worry about is that there won't be any way for a music fan to know in our interconnected, faceless world. There won't be any guides to point the way. Then again, maybe it's always been that way. If you were a casual fan of "Be My Baby" or "GOOD VIBRATIONS" or "THEME FROM MAHOGANY" in their day, you probably had no idea who was playing the beat. He died Monday, age 90, having played on 40 #1 singles, 150 top 10s, some 35,000 tracks in all. He was the drummer on six straight GRAMMY Record of the Year winners, 1966 through 1971, which makes him music's MICHAEL JORDAN. He drummed on more classic BEACH BOYS tracks than DENNIS WILSON did—although, as he once pointed out, "while I made $65 for an afternoon in the studio, he'd make $65,000 that night in concert." Such is the lot of the studio musician, even the very very best. With the WRECKING CREW, which ruled LA studio recording through the 1960s and into the '70s, he accompanied artists from ELVIS PRESLEY to FRANK SINATRA, from the BYRDS to GLEN CAMPBELL, and he was as essential as the writers and producers. "We didn't have written arrangements," ATLANTIC RECORDS executive JERRY WEXLER once said of those days. "The musicians routinely came up with things that made those records." BLAINE recalled that arrangers "used to tell us, 'Listen, guys, don't even look at your [written] part, just do your thing.' They wanted a hit record, and they knew that everything we were doing was becoming hits." Easy as kick k-kick snare. And just as easy, sometimes, to forget. RIP... A report released this morning by the BERKLEE INSTITUTE FOR CREATIVE ENTREPRENEURSHIP and the nonprofit WOMEN IN MUSIC finds widespread gender bias in the US music business, with 78 percent of the 2,000 women they surveyed saying they've been "treated differently in the music industry because of my gender" and 52 percent saying their employment has been directly affected. Nearly half said they were behind where they should be in their career, and women who report to women are making less money, on average, than women who report to men. And yet, women across all income levels reported being "extremely or somewhat satisfied" with their job. Which is a nice statistic. And which made me think of DOROTHY CARVELLO, who in her 2018 book, ANYTHING FOR A HIT: AN A&R WOMAN'S STORY OF SURVIVING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY, painted a picture of widespread sexual harassment and other abusive behavior at ATLANTIC RECORDS in the '80s and '90s, while also telling readers she loved her job. That's not a contradiction. It's a horrible and not uncommon truth. The fact that employees are outwardly satisfied doesn't absolve their employers of the obligation to be aware of, and to address, the very real obstacles they face. Harassment and discrimination are always wrong, no matter how many people might be smiling... Songwriters deserve to be paid more, says SPOTIFY while attempting to explain its decision to challenge a US COPYRIGHT ROYALTY BOARD decision that does just that... There should be four QUEEN movies, each covering the same period but telling the story from a different bandmember's pov. "BOHEMIAN RASHOMON"... RIP JASON JINX.