By Bob Welch

I opened for the Righteous Brothers when "You've Lost That Lovin'Feeling" was a current hit.

Why did they want me to write this article? For one thing, I'm older.

Okay, maybe just a little older than many of you. But I suppose they could have gotten BT, the hot young producer, to write it, or maybe that guy I read about who lucked into the Destiny's Child gig from his mother's basement. As good as these guys may be, however, their perspectives on the music business are at most barely fifteen years old, given that they're in their twenties.

My memory goes back a lot farther, and so I can bitch and moan to you in a wider context. I go as far back as cutting at Goldstar on Santa Monica Boulevard on a 3 track. I go as far back as my ex-ex-ex -band (the Seven Souls) opening for the Righteous Brothers in Sacramento when "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" was a current hit.

Advancing age brings me another advantage as an "at-large" writer: I don't have to care as much about being perceived as , the next big thing, or a totally fly guy. Although I still love working, I'm fairly comfortable now, and the days of needing to make a name for myself are in the past. I am what I am, and I don't much care what anybody thinks of me at this point. Ah, the luxury!

So I hope you will accept my opinions in this column with equanimity and a grain of salt. I may sometimes express some harsh judgments, but in my heart it's all good, because in the end, we're all in this together.

I titled this column "The Only Thing That's 2001 About 2010." and what I mean is, I'm profoundly disappointed. I remember vividly seeing the premiere of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1969 on Hollywood Boulevard. Wow! By the year 2001, the movie implied, we and the Russians would be partners in a war-free world, and mankind would be in contact with an alien superior intelligence that would help the human race take the next step in its collective evolution. How wrong, and how childishly "hippie-naive" to hope for that!

Instead, what do we really have in 2011? Al-Qaida, bin Laden, the Indians and Pakistanis threatening nuclear war with each other, white Aryan supremacy hate groups and neo-Nazis, anthrax mailings, and gangs where Martin Luther King once preached. On top of this, we have an entertainment business that way too often caters to the lowest and most violent instincts in us, and a music business that is so divided and divisive that it is now a joke to think of Jay-Z, Fiona Apple, Garth Brooks and Celine Dion on the same stage together the way that Janis Joplin, the Who, Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding were at the Monterey pop festival in '69.

Devo had it right. We have de-evolved from our pinnacle of human understanding in the much-mocked 1960s to today, s attention deficit-spiked, ultra-violent world.

Look at the difference between the original Woodstock and the impostor "Woodstock" of ten years ago, where some Limp Bizkit "fans" just about torched everything and everybody. And people used to complain about Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath being bad influences. We have far exceeded that in 2010. We now have real gangsters, people who have committed serious person-on-person crimes, making records and becoming superstars. It's as if Al Capone would've had a hit record right along with Sinatra and Dick Haymes! This is Lord of the Flies and A Clockwork Orange stuff come true.

And we have a whole group of instant gratification addicts who evidently think music to be so valueless and disposable that they have no qualms at all about stealing it from the Internet. These aren't exactly high moral standards.

So, my naive hippie-esque hopes for the new millennium have fizzled miserably.

I'll tell you what I do think is great, though: The technology is the only thing that's 2001 about 2010. The computer software, microphones, digital recorders and so on that are available today are far more creative and reflective of great art than is much of the music being made on these same devices.

Who could have imagined 30 years ago that all those huge, expensive machines we used to have to use could be translated into digits inside a computer? These virtual machines in themselves far exceed anything the visionaries who made 2001 could have predicted. It's sad though, that the containers (the tools) are more exciting than the contents (the music).

Whether we are going to use all this wonderful technology to express love, hate, beauty, greed or ugliness is, as usual, up to us.