always said that Bernie didn’t bet on the horses, he bet on the jockeys. Michael Bennett comes up with a musical. Mike Nichols comes up with a play, Neil Simon with a play. You try to get their shows in your theaters. So Sondheim comes up with a musical—you say yes. William Goldman used to say, “Nobody knows anything. Every time out, it’s a guess.”

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For most of recorded history, there were two ways of making a living as a musician. You could work for a patron—the court, the church, an individual aristocrat—or you could sing for your supper, sometimes literally, as an itinerant minstrel. Then, by the turn of the twentieth century, a third option opened, that of recording artist, in which little... See more