by Dan Kennedy
Oh.
No.
Suit.
Lawyer?
Wait!
Ice-T!
Is here?
Small hands.
No way.
Just shake his hand.
Normally!
Mr. Jackson’s big-hearted, robust introduction is filled with the kind of love and generosity that I am misguided and naïve enough to think must be found in the halls of every major record label on the planet. A big man, maybe 250 pounds of him, and his handshake and love for what he is doing here almost throws my medium frame across the room. I’ve managed to navigate a straight path to the big leather sofas in the corner of his office ready to show this thing. Okey dokey, Mr. Jackson and . . . Mr. Ice? Oh, good question. Would you say Mr. T? No, don’t say that. That’s the guy from that old show on television.
After all of the late nights editing and the days spent lost in the archive, after listening to the advance copy of the fortieth anniversary CD a million times, I am strangely confident in what Ben and I have created, but a burst of self-confidence is almost always a disaster warning for me. I put the tape into George’s VCR, and he starts tweaking an enormous console of preamps, patch bays, and equalizers from the leather chair he’s sitting in — it’s a scene that looks like a 250-pound black man is commandeering the bridge of the starship Enterprise.
The slate on the commercial counts down backward from ten like movies in school did, and on the last beep, the commercial starts in. The opening riff to “Superstition” pumped through speakers that look like they belong in the space program. Totally lethal speakers that I’ve never seen in the consumer sector, and on the screen forty years flash before our eyes. JFK, Marvin Gaye, Apollo rising from the launch pad, a still young and innocent Michael Jackson with his brothers clowning around on the streets of Tokyo during the first Jackson Five tour, Los Angeles in flames more than once — 1965, a routine traffic stop sets L.A. on fire for six days in Watts; 1992, L.A. is on fire again after the Rodney King verdict comes in, an edit that makes you wonder if anything has changed — and Stevie Wonder singing, “Very superstitious . . . writing on the wall,” cut back to Martin Luther King saying he has a dream over the top of Stevie Wonder’s riff. Goddamn, I’ve never noticed how much MLK looks as innocent as a child when he says it, you don’t see an agenda as much as a man just doing the right thing in the eyes of his mother. Cut to a shot of that motel in Memphis, the one that the gunman had in his aim when he pulled the trigger that morning in April of 1968; cut to a black-and-white photograph of Berry Gordy Jr. standing on the porch at Hitsville U.S.A, a young man about to go farther than even his wildest dreams for this thing; cut to the Supremes on Ed Sullivan’s stage; cut to the Beatles hanging out with Berry Gordy Jr., and his baby daughter. This is the same spirit that made colonies, that went west, that went to the moon and back, this man starting out against the odds with a small loan in his pocket, he winds up making history.
Damn, why hasn’t this commercial hit me like this until now? I watched it played down a hundred times in the editing studio. Maybe I drank way too much last night after we finished what we figured was our last editing session, and now I’m too hung over to be watching it and, Jesus, I think I’m going to cry or something. What if the lights come on and Ice-T sees me standing here crying? He will kill me. Have you heard this guy’s songs? Jesus, he probably actually has a song about killing guys that look like they’re about to cry over their own commercial.
The spot finishes and George’s assistant is about to turn on the lights when George says not to. Thank God. Maybe he doesn’t want to be seen getting ready to cry? But then George says the reason we’re leaving the lights off is because we’re going to watch it again. Oh, shit. This means they’ve found a mistake or something. Why did I take this on? At the end of the second time, the lights come back on. These two men are still facing away from me, and they stay seated, not saying a word. I’m standing an arm’s length away and slightly behind them and it’s quiet. Way too quiet. George Jackson, without looking, out of nowhere pulls back his huge arm and punches me hard in the shoulder. And since his hand is about the size of my entire head and neck region, I am off balance and tilting, now falling, slow-motion up against the wall. Shit. I got it wrong. My slow motion fall up against the wall continues, and while it’s all happening, I’m thinking: I swear, I’m on your side, brother. Strangely, I still have a nervous polite smile on my face. I settle up against the wall; it’s still quiet. And then he starts laughing. Through his huge booming laugh and with a smile in his voice, George Jackson says, “Dan Kennedy! Goddamn!”
And Ice-T says, “That’s right, you know what I’m sayin’? What you did right there, you showed that it’s history. It’s music, yeah, but it’s a part of America, see. That’s what makes it so . . . so moving.”
I readjust my body so I’m not falling against the wall anymore. Kind of make it look like I was done with what I hoped came off as a casual and confident leaning, as opposed to being a medium-frame white guy who was knocked off balance and startled.
“That’s why the man gets paid. Right there. That’s why,” George says. I think at best I managed to quietly mumble something like, “Hey . . .” then.
A week or two later I’m in George’s office to talk about doing an ad campaign for the Marvin Gaye remastered CD that Motown is releasing in a few months. About ten minutes into this visit, Stevie Wonder walks into the room. My twenty-nine-year-old brain tries to process the string of events:
1. Hung over again.
2. On my lunch hour, need to get back soon.
3. I am shaking Stevie Wonder’s hand.
Mr. Wonder reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small DAT tape, telling George that he recorded this song at home last night and that George absolutely needs to hear it, that he feels like it’s one of the best songs he’s ever written. Holy God, I am going to hear a song that Stevie Wonder wrote less than twenty-four hours ago. A song that he’s standing right here saying he thinks is one of the best things he’s written.
“I’m tellin’ you . . . George, you gotta hear this. Put this in and turn it up.” This from Stevie Wonder, now standing about fourteen inches to my left.
How is any of this happening? In my head, I reel and stagger, trying to figure out what any of this means. Does this mean my life is the type of thing where I spend my lunch hour sitting around with the man who wrote “Superstition” and “Higher Ground,” shooting the shit, listening to demo songs, having a laugh? Have I been admitted to some club that I don’t even realize I’m part of yet?
“Hang on, let me get finished with Kennedy about this TV stuff and get him on his way here. Then you and I, we’ll sit down and we’ll listen to it.”
Duly noted.
FURTHER PERSONAL NOTES ON SOUL MUSIC
Most insightful thing a white guy has ever said to me about soul music:
“I never could’ve written anything as good as that Marvin Gaye song, because after I wrote down the word brother once, I’d get stuck. I’d be sitting there going, ‘Let’s see . . . what else can I say here? I just used the word brother so I can’t use that again.’”
— My friend Loren Victory, 1998
I’M TOO EMOTIONALLY UNAVAILABLE TO WRITE A SOUL SONG
Me and my girl
seem to be doing fine.
She’s been pretty busy with things
I’ve been pretty busy with things as well.
Anyhow, no complaints, really.
Me and my girl
will probably take a trip this summer.
We’ve both been wanting
to do something
in order to get out of the city.
Yeah, so . . . anyway.
Chorus: It’s been nice here this summer.
Hasn’t been as humid as it usually is. [repeat 3x]
So . . .
How are you and Kate doing?
(solo)
CHANGED HIS NAME SO I DON�
��T GET SUED
I’m basking in the afterglow of having the Phil Collins headline situation behind me when Amy pops in to remind me that there’s a sales and marketing meeting that I should attend. I tell her I wish I was still young like she is. She assures me that I’m vital and have most likely outfoxed the terrifying wave of good sense that can make zombies out of men by their late thirties. She looks me in the eyes and tells me that I don’t need to worry that my adolescent dreams have given way to office hours, lattes, conference rooms, an odd and passive unrequited crush on a woman fifteen years older than me, and sitting in my office thinking about how much I envy the assistant that is ten years younger than me. At least that’s what I infer from her when she says, “It’s the sales and marketing meeting, and it’ll be mostly be sales, actually — just to let you know.”
Walking into the room, there’s a carryover of some folks who were in the meeting where the muffin situation occurred. The flock of product managers, Vallerie, and an aged Robert Wagner type and several of his brethren, two of whom are rocking sort of eighties-suave Alberto-VO5-dry-look-hairstyle-and-affordable-blazer getups. They lean way back in their chairs most of the time, almost tipping backward it seems, only occasionally sitting up to write a release date in a handsome leather day planner with their expensive, ornate ballpoint pens. Not sure what department they’re from.
At the head of the table is the guy who used to be another record executive’s publicist back in the day. He’s the general manager, but for a while there he was a copresident, I think. Or maybe that’s what he is now. At any rate, his name is Bill, but don’t worry, Bill, I will change your name if I write more about you so that you don’t get all in a knot and have one of your tantrums where you scream at people. So you don’t yell at grown female executives at the top of a twenty-five-year career and make them cry, as we’ve all heard the reports of. I will change your name so that you remain anonymous here, and also so you don’t sue me since you make a seven-figure salary for doing whatever the hell it is you do here and you have a lot more money than I do. So don’t worry, Dick.
A collection of thoughts that run through my mind when I first see the way Dick tends to treat people who aren’t the pop stars that he is so unapologetically over-the-top sweetly accommodating of:
• My, you’re a delusional power-drunk little angry hornet in very expensive clothing, aren’t you?
• Someday I will stab you in the leg with an ordinary pair of office scissors like a modern-day Boo Radley, finally fed up for good with the way you treat others, Sir.
Today, Dick is demanding that everyone in this room do anything it takes to make the newly signed band on the handouts in front of us into huge stars.
“We are going to make this happen” — pause for dramatic effect that will hopefully offset his small, boyish, and frankly strangely lovable, voice. “We will not stop until these guys happen in the U.S. and even then we’re still not going to stop, because Europe will be next. They’re going to be huge stars, and we have the rough cut of their first video in here today, we’ll watch it, and I think you’ll see what I’m talking about.”
He keeps addressing the room in a slightly perturbed effeminate voice and demanding that these guys become stars. It somehow tugs at heartstrings I didn’t even know I have, the way he keeps talking about how we need to make this happen. The sales guys have a can-do attitude on their faces, but you get the impression they’re savvy enough to make a can-do face even when they don’t think they can do something. Younger product managers sit attentively, shifting in their seats uncomfortably the more Dick says that failure is not an option; older VPs seem to be looking down a lot, or at one another for some kind of quiet confirmation, but mostly looking down at whatever notes or PDA gadget is in front of them.
It all feels so fake, this kind of demanded enthusiasm; like we’re building forts out of sofa cushions and making machine-gun and grenade sounds with our mouths to go with the pantomime of our imaginary war zone, except instead of innocent kids playing for fun we’re all thirty to fifty years old and the fort is in some high-tech, huge conference room at the top floor of this building in New York City, so we’re supposed to act like it’s all for real, and really important. I do actually feel important, which is kind of cool.
Dick looks over at Suave Older Robert Wagner Character and SORWC quickly turns off the Evil Underground Lair light switch, and the lights perform their overly choreographed shutting down, stuttering a sublime flash sequence that leads toward the screen at the end of the room while smaller key lights simply fade down in perfect timing as the music comes up. In the conference room on the twenty-sixth floor, that’s what’s simply referred to as turning off the lights.
Okay, look up at the huge screen at the end of the conference room. A ten-years-too-late Eddie Vedder look-alike stealing Jim Morrison’s moves. And a bassist and guitarist who move in a way that seems to be saying, “Yes, you learned lead singer moves in our local college’s night class on how to be a rock star, but never forget that while you were doing that, we were studying how to posture ourselves properly as well, and we have just as important a role as you. See, we indicate that we’re passionate about the guitar playing in the band.” There’s dancing, pouting, and these bored and angry mood swings that seem to say, “We’re angry. No, we’re sexy. No, we’re bored. Wait, we’re angry again. Hey, now we’re longing! We are, in fact, feeling everything you could possibly want us to feel — But no matter what we’re feeling, we’re rocking.”
I have a hunch that everyone here knows that this band’s biggest problem is that they’re not so much authentic as they’re trying to indicate to you that they are authentic. We sit there smiling politely and watching.
The video ends and in much in the same way as the newly signed band mimics being rock stars, those of us sitting around the conference table mimic being moved and inspired by the young men mimicking being authentic rock stars. There’s got to be some kind of scientific name for the chain of mimicry going on here.
Someone politely and quickly taps the big touch-screen remote control console in the center of the table, another person on the periphery hits the lights and they fade back up slowly and methodically, revealing Dick in a sort of Dr. Evil pause at the head of the long conference table. He looks at everyone lining the table and conference room walls and says, “They . . . are . . . going . . . to be stars. They . . . are . . . going” — hold it for a beat. Hold it, wait for it, and — “to be huge.” The basis for this thinking, as Vallerie was kind enough to clue me in on in the hallway later, is:
1. They have a huge manager and are a huge priority with him and so they’ll be a huge priority with us.
2. Lead singer is the brother of a rock star.
3. Lead singer knows how to “move.”
I feel like we’re all looking for the quality of genius around here — in ourselves as much as in new bands. But something about what it takes to survive in a corporate setting has me feeling further away from being a genius than I’ve ever been. But, you know, obviously I never say that. I mean, come on, you won’t get anywhere admitting things like that.
SO YOU WANNA BE A CHART-TOPPING ROCK-AND-ROLL STAR EMBRACED BY MAJOR-LABEL MARKETING EXECUTIVES AND CORPORATE RADIO, WELL LISTEN NOW TO WHAT I SAY.
1. Lead singer type: You need to have “moves.” Moves should be odd combination of sexual advances and a temper tantrum, punctuated with moments of apparent hypoglycemia. Best-case scenario, you have long hair that is worked into moves. If it helps, use some mnemonic devices or prompts to help remember the order and choreography of the aforementioned “moves.” (See below.)
a. “Where’s your wallet?” (Grabs own ass with right hand.)
b. “Is your crotch okay?” (Pushes pelvis out, seeming to look down at it out of the corner of his eye as his head and hair fall to the side a bit.)
c. “Show me where the camera is.” (Points toward lens in video or television performance. In live performance,
change prompt to “Show me where the exit signs are”; this should elicit a pointing motion to horizon out past audience.)
d. “Can you see where we’re sailing to, Captain?” (Puts one leg up on the monitor at edge of stage and looks out.)
e. “Shame on you.” (Hangs head down with arms at side. Use this prompt during long guitar solos that leave lead singer type without much to do.)
2. Lead guitarist: You should look bored, as well as skilled in Web-site development, including back-end architecture and server-side technology. You should also appear to be courting an iron deficiency in the blood. It should be unclear as to whether the iron deficiency is from long hours developing e-commerce and mobile blogging application or touring with band.
3. Bassists: You should be prone to being emphatic with instrument, regardless of how simple bass line to song is. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, bass players: I’ve only ever met one woman who understands that you aren’t playing the guitar solo in the middle eight bars of the song. And the only reason she understood the difference between the lead guitarist and bass guitarist is because she was a brilliant bassist. So, bottom line, when the guitarist is blazing away, go ahead and take a step forward with your bass and sell it with an intense rock face, humping motion, etc.
4. Drummer: You should be even cuter than the lead singer if you want this band to be huge. It should be almost statistically improbable that you wound up doing anything in a band that doesn’t involve your face being prominently displayed within savvy proximity to the front row.
HI, DO YOU GUYS CARRY PICTURE FRAMES, LITTLE MAHOGANY BOXES COVERED IN ALLIGATOR SKIN, LITTLE PEN HOLDER THINGS MADE OF LEATHER, THAT KIND OF THING?