I was supposed to fly from Los Angeles to New York this past Friday, which is a thing that seemed perfectly reasonable five or six days earlier, became worrisome by Tuesday or Wednesday and revealed itself to be an astonishingly bad idea circa Thursday. So I rescheduled the flight (with ease, which I've been told is not the norm) to April 6, which seemed far away and... perfectly reasonable. By Saturday, I wasn't so sure. Now I'm sweating my Thanksgiving travel. It's March. April seems like an unknowable concept. May and June ring a bell but I can't quite picture them. Am I worrying too much? Too little? You? Can you see any more clearly? Now imagine you're a band with a summer or fall tour on your schedule, or two or three festival dates, or an event in late spring in London or Berlin or Atlanta. And imagine that was going to be your main, or only, source of income for the next half year or so. Or imagine you're one of the people trying to manage that tour. Or the manager of a club on the tour route. Or the front-of-house person. Or part of the team trying to roll out the band's album for May or June release and deciding if that's a thing you still want to do. Or the owner of one of the record stores where that album might have sold a few copies. Or, even, a music journalist paid to chronicle these things. This plague year is hitting everybody hard, in multiple ways, but there's an extra wallop for part-time, self-employed and gig workers, which describes a huge percentage of the music business, from artists on down. Respect to the ingenuity, creativity and determination with which many are motoring through, and hugs to those having a tougher time at it. Resources. More resources. Still more. A little hope. A plea for support, which everyone reading this can heed. Call it the year live music broke, literally. Know that the rebound is somewhere around the corner. And that no one's going to stop making music in the meantime... The notion of capital-O originality in music, as in "this is an idea no one had before," is a myth. Everything, no matter how bent, no matter how strange, no matter how disturbing, no matter how beautiful, comes from somewhere. THROBBING GRISTLE is one of the great proofs of that, its pristinely damaged run of late '70s and early '80s albums serving as the source of the musical Nile for hundreds if not thousands of industrial, noise, experimental, synth-pop, psychedelic and beyond bands that came after. TG's nominal leader, GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE, floated off last week to wherever people like Genesis P-Orridge float off to in the end. Genesis' career of creation through destruction also involved the somewhat more accessible band PSYCHIC TV, visual art, performance art and the ultimate art project that was their own body. An amazing—and not at all perfect—life that came about as close to that capital-O as anyone ever does. RIP... SOUNDGARDEN and the estate of TUPAC SHAKUR have withdrawn from the UNIVERSAL fire lawsuit... Has country radio rediscovered women?... Stay home if at all possible, and congregate online, or at your window... RIP also ANTON COPPOLA, DANNY RAY THOMPSON, ERIC TAYLOR and PETE MITCHELL.