by Chris Price
All of which meant I would have to be completely unimpressed by the Grand Canyon.
We parked and walked towards the viewing area, Joe hoisting the camera onto his shoulder and following close behind as I approached the rim in order to capture my awe on tape. 'However big it is in your head mate, it's waaaay bigger in real life.'
'It's a hole in the ground.'
'You wait.'
As we neared the edge I reminded myself to remain calm, collected and nonchalant, and under no circumstances to utter the words 'goodness', 'crikey' or 'fuck me'.
I stepped onto the viewing platform. 'Fuck me.'
Shit.
I had seen deep holes before. Looking into a hole – a well perhaps, or a deep crevasse – and not being able to see the bottom was not a new experience for me. Looking into a hole that is four miles wide and not being able to see the bottom definitely was. We stepped onto a lower platform and joined a large crowd of people, mainly Americans, 'wow-ing' and 'ooh-ing' into the emptiness, their voices muted by the nothingness all around. A hazy autumn sun bleached the colour from the pinstripe of reds, browns and yellows visible on the opposite side of the gorge, each layer representing millions of years of erosion and earning themselves such incomprehensibly ancient sounding names as Palaeozoic, Precambrian and Triassic. The Grand Canyon was, ahem, awesome.
There are two things that you cannot prepare for on a visit to the Grand Canyon. The first, of course, is its perspective-shattering dimensions. The Grand Canyon operates on a scale which demands you abandon your everyday frames of reference with regard to size and distance and shift up several notches. How far is it to the other side of the canyon? How deep is it? There is only one answer to every question about the Grand Canyon: 'Very.'
The second thing we noticed upon arriving in the car park at the south rim, was the profusion and seriousness of signs screaming 'Do NOT attempt to walk to the bottom and back in one day', a precaution also necessitated by the dizzying incomprehensibility of the canyon's vastness. Lacking the wherewithal to work out how far it is to the other side (it varies along its length from four to eighteen miles), any guess as to depth will be just that – a guess. To the untrained eye it could be 500 metres, could be 10,000, which is the difference between a brisk scenic stroll and a fatal gallop into the lungs of hell. Hence signs which combine text and imagery in a terrifying mix that is one part Orwell to two parts slasher flick. And with some justification, as people die in the canyon with alarming regularity. If visiting the Grand Canyon is on your list of 'things to do before I die', try very hard to ensure you aren't one of the four or five people every year for whom a canyon visit jumps to the top of a very short list of 'things to do immediately before I die', either from falling, dehydration, heat stroke, hypothermia or drowning.
'Shall we try and get down to the river and back?' I swaggered.
'Can't you read?'
'Yeah, but we've run marathons. We'll be OK.'
Chris pointed a finger at one of the signs along the rim. 'You reckon?'
'COULD YOU RUN A MARATHON?' it shouted. 'THIS GIRL COULD, AND NOW SHE'S DEAD.'
Why?
'BECAUSE SHE TRIED TO GET TO THE BOTTOM AND BACK IN A DAY.'
This is going to sound very churlish, but I can't help begrudging America the Grand Canyon a tiny bit 'Bigger and better' is virtually the national motto, and by a geological quirk they have ended up with the biggerest and betterest natural phenomenon of them all. And there's a part of me that wishes it was much harder to get to. As it is, you can order a drink at your Vegas hotel bar, leave your air-conditioned lobby and get into an air-conditioned limousine to the steps of an air-conditioned private plane, see the canyon and be back in your seat by the time your margarita arrives. Surely the wonders of the natural world should demand a little more effort than that?
We attempted a brief stroll down the pathway which zigzags into the first few hundred yards of the canyon.
After twenty minutes Chris started to grimace and groan. 'Mate, my leg's starting to hurt.'
When Chris' leg hurts you have to be careful. It's a proper, bona fide injury. While training for a marathon in 2003 he overdid it and detached the muscle lining from the bone in his left leg.
'Oh. OK. How much further can you go?'
'Probably make it back to the top.'
I feel bad for admitting it, but this pissed me off a bit. The downside of Chris' ability to focus is that, rather like a spider under a magnifying glass on a sunny day, he has a tendency to burn out. Deep down I couldn't help feeling his injury was down to his not being able simply to run a marathon, but having to do it faster than Haile Gabrsellassie or not at all. So when he said 'My leg's starting to hurt', what I heard was: 'I deny you this once-in-a-lifetime moment because of mistakes I made several years ago which we're bot paying for now.'
Yep, I do feel bad for admitting that.
Despite best efforts to carry ourselves like intrepid fit folk, we shuffled back to the car like a couple of fat kids, electing instead to take a bus tour of the south rim. The tour guide announced it was a round trip of seventy-five minutes. Chris was indignant. The canyon may have taken 5.4 million years to create, but seventy-five minutes! I mean, we're busy people.
One hour and sixteen minutes later we were back behind the wheel, controls set to sea level. The road east from Grand Canyon, Highway 64, leaned lazily downhill. Even a swarm of Harley Davidsons with sidecars – and wow, trailers too – failed to add any of yesterday's tension to the easy calm of descent.
Chris looked puzzled. 'Doesn't a sidecar and trailer sort of defeat the point of having a motorbike?'
'To normal people, yes. To Harley riders, probably not.'
'But surely – and stop me if I'm missing the point here – those bikes, when you factor in the sidecars and trailers, are wider than a car, longer than a car, and have one more wheel than a car?'
'Harley riders are a strange breed. You hear that clanking sound their engines make?' A five-wheeled fandango glugged past on our left. 'A few years back Harley Davidson spent loads of money fixing the sound so it was clean, rhythmical and didn't make those odd plopping noises. But all the Harley riders complained, so they spent even more money making it sound like a steam engine again. Logic isn't a word in the Harley vocabulary.'
As ludicrous as five-wheeled motorbikes are, they looked right at home in scenery this big. The easy riders pulled in for gas, and so did we. Unable to compete with the classically American iconography of the bikers, we decided to try out something equally American and iconographic: beef jerky.
How lucky Americans are to have beef jerky, and how apparently limitless the opportunities for enjoying it. Inside, a breathtaking array of 'Jack Links' jerky varieties hung on branded racking occupying one entire end of an aisle. Variations on standard beef – peppered, teriyaki, sweet and hot, hickory smoked – were presented alongside jerky made from quite different types of meat altogether – ham jerky, buffalo jerky and, my favourite, turkey jerky (high fives round the marketing department that afternoon no doubt).
We selected a large bag of original beef and a smaller one of sweet and hot, and made our way back to the car chomping enthusiastically on this classically American delicacy. (Not that it's exclusively American. Jerky is essentially just dry cured meat, and as such is found in South Africa as biltong, Ethiopia as qwant'a, across pretty much the rest of the world, in fact, wherever people eat meat. The only country you won't find it would appear to be Great Britain. But then we've got Scotch eggs and pork scratchings, so who's laughing now?)
While we cruised and chewed on mouthfuls of leathery, salty hide, Chris put another album of singer-songwriter western crooning – another attempt at preaching to the averted – into the CD player and gave me the back story. Stay with it (I had to).
Let me introduce you to a remarkable lady by the name of Bette Nesmith Graham. In 1951, Bette was a single mum with a young son to support, working as a secretary to the chairman of the T
exas Bank and Trust. Her brand-new IBM electric typewriter was wonderful. Fast, quiet and ergonomically designed, it delivered even spacing and left hand margins straighter than any she had seen. It had multiple copy control and a fancy 'Impression Indicator' which prevented her from hitting the keys too hard. But there was a problem: the new carbon-film ribbons made correcting mistakes virtually impossible, at least in the way she was used to – with an eraser. Which was an issue, as Bette was a terrible typist.
So Bette, bless her Christian Scientist socks, had a bash at mixing some tempera paint at home in her kitchen blender – the same stuff she had seen used by signwriters who painted the holiday windows at the bank each Christmas. If they made a mistake, she noticed, they simply painted over it. With a few improvements courtesy of her son's high school chemistry teacher, Bette's homemade concoction was ready. She took a bottle to work and – right under the nose of her disapproving boss – used it to paint out her mistakes. Before very long she was struggling to keep up with colleagues' requests for more and, recruiting little Michael to help her fulfil the orders, 'Mistake Out' was born. Later she changed the name to 'Liquid Paper', which became a lucrative sideline with which to supplement her income at the bank.
But in 1959 she was fired by the bank after absent-mindedly typing her own company's name at the top of a letter. She threw herself into the business full time. By 1967 she had patented and trademarked her product, and the operation had moved into an 11,000-square-foot automated production plant. She eventually sold the company to the Gillette Corporation in 1979 (having been turned down by IBM) for close to $50 million.
I just love this story. I love Bette's humble but Herculean insight that mistakes could be painted over rather than erased, which, self-evident as it seems to us now, demonstrates a level of lateral thinking that even Edward de Bono would be proud of. I love the fact that it was a mistake left uncorrected which got her sacked and presented the opportunity of correcting mistakes full-time. And I love that IBM turned down the chance of making even more money from their flawed typewriters. But what I love most of all – more than any of this – is how Bette decided to spend all that money.
But we'll come to that in a moment. First I'd like to tell you what happened to her little boy. Remember Linda Ronstadt's boyfriend, the 'hootmaster' at the Troubadour in LA? That was him. In 1965, Michael Nesmith responded to an ad in the Hollywood Reporter looking for 'four insane boys' to join a Beatles-inspired pop group and television series called The Monkees. Beating off competition from, among other noteworthy auditionees, one Stephen Stills (reputedly rejected because of his thinning hair and bad teeth), Mike added another household name to the Nesmith product portfolio as one quarter of the world's first manufactured pop act.
But it was 'Different Drum', the song he had given to Ronstadt and which I'd fallen in love with via The Lemonheads, which was running around in my head. I made another decision.
'We need to go to New Mexico.'
We were on US160, headed north towards Monument Valley on the border of Utah and Arizona.
'What?' huffed Harland, head buried in a road atlas. 'Why on earth do we need to do that? New Mexico isn't on the itinerary.'
'Mike Nesmith lives there. In the Nambé Valley. We could go to his house.'
He interrupted his map reading and looked across at me in the driving seat.
'Mike Nesmith? As in the twat in the hat from the Monkees?'
'That's the one.'
'And what, pray tell, makes Mike Nesmith worthy of…' – a glance at the map, a thumbing of pages and a sucking of teeth – '… a two-hundred-mile detour?'
'He's important.'
'Important how, exactly? I don't think made-for-TV popstars qualify, do you? Mike Nesmith is about as important as Joey from New Kids.'
This was supposed to rile me. It did.
'You're being deliberately obtuse,' I sulked. He was.
'Oh, come on. We're supposed to be looking for the beating heart of rock and roll America. Mike Nesmith's contribution is hardly coursing through the veins of the American music corpus…'
'But there's more to him than meets the eye,' I said, but he wasn't listening. He was on a roll with his beating heart metaphor.
'… In fact "Daydream Believer" is more like a relentless, twitching nerve in your elbow. Nags away until it drives you potty. So before we consider even setting foot in New Mexico, give me one good reason – one – why Mike Nesmith deserves our attention.'
'I'll give you several.'
'Please do.'
'He's one of the great polymaths of the modern age.'
'He was a Monkee.'
'Singer, songwriter, film producer, novelist, entrepreneur, philanthropist…'
'Philanthropist? Really?'
'Yep. And stepfather of country rock.'
'I thought that was Gram?'
'Gram was the godfather of country rock. Do try and keep up.'
'Of course. Silly me.'
'And Nez was the grandfather of MTV. So I sort of owe my living to him. I really ought to say thanks.'
'Sorry?'
'Mike Nesmith invented MTV.'
'Now you're just making things up.'
'It's true.'
'Hmmm. And you think he deserves thanks for that?'
He had a point I suppose, but Mike Nesmith is a much more noteworthy fellow than most people give him credit for. That he was a popstar with a penchant for woolly hats and sideburns is where most people's acquaintance with him starts and ends. In fact, not only does Nesmith's post-Monkees output embrace ideas in virtually every field of creative endeavour, I can tell you without fear of hyperbole that one very specific enterprise is devoted to nothing less than the furtherance and elevation of ideas themselves (more of which in a minute). His Monkee beginnings are by far the least interesting chapter in his life story. And there was one particular entry on this list of achievements for which I personally owed him a debt of gratitude. In a very roundabout way I owed my living to the man, and surely that deserved at least a polite thank you if ever the opportunity should arise.
So for Joe's benefit – and, I hope, yours – a handful of reasons to love Nez.
He invented MTV. Kind of. In 1977 he made a promo clip for solo hit 'Rio', a conceptual rock video which received very little play in the US and was never a hit there. But it was played heavily on New Zealand channel TV2, which aired a late night music show named Radio with Pictures. Inspired by its success, Nesmith piloted a show called Popclips for cable channel Nickelodeon, which he later sold to Warner Communications as the concept for a twenty-four-hour-a-day music channel. That channel became MTV.
Precisely who 'invented' MTV is a matter of some debate. In the glory days of global domination and multimillion-dollar music videos, pretty much anyone who had uttered the words 'music' and 'television' on the same day would attempt to claim credit. These days it's a little like owning up to a silent-but-deadly in a lift. But I latched onto the Nez connection straight away when I left the BBC for the Viacom Corporation. Invention by one of my favourite songwriters was one helpful way of easing my conscience over jumping into bed with the enemy. (A terrible one I'll admit, roughly on a par with 'Darling, it didn't mean anything.')
But back to Bette, and how she decided to spend all that money. In 1978, just before she died, she established the Gihon Foundation, a mysterious organisation dedicated to the pursuit of entrepreneurial philanthropy which, among many other wonderful things, runs the ambitious and loftily entitled Council on Ideas. This forum, hosted by Nez himself at his Nambé Valley home every two years, gathers together a handful of the world's most respected thinkers – Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, professors and university fellows, journalists and company CEOs – to identify and recommend solutions to the most pressing issue of the day. Nez, in the role of intellectual midwife, pays each of the invited visionaries five thousand dollars from the foundation coffers, sits them around a table in a converted barn on his estate, and then di
sappears to let the ideas gestate. The goal is one 'extraordinary moment' of insight – a solution to the most pressing issue of the time.
Whether that extraordinary moment is even possible remains the subject of some debate (two members of the 1990 gathering clashed so angrily that the entire group walked out), but you can't blame him for trying. And there's something very heart-warming about Mike's determination that the cash from Ma Nesmith's own little moment of insight – correcting typos – should be put to use with the aim of correcting nothing less than the world's problems.
And that, along with production credits on several great movies (Repo Man, Tapeheads among them) and a strange but beautiful sci-fi novel called The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora to his name, is why I think Mike Nesmith is a pretty wonderful fellow.