Rock On

by Dan Kennedy

  I’ve been told that one of the ever-changing copresidents of the company wants to make sure I understand that my ad campaign is going to be targeted largely to females forty to fifty-plus years of age, so I need to be writing in that voice. The first thing I do is pace around the temporary office they’ve got me in, wondering how the hell I’m going to do this. I start trying to write some headlines that I think forty- to fifty-something-year-old women can relate to. For some reason they all sound like those Hallmark greeting cards that aren’t really for any occasion in particular. Like, they’re usually filed under a section called “Just because” or “Friend.”

  • Remember the first time you heard that special voice?

  • Here’s to the voice that taught us about love.

  • Who was really your first love?

  In a quiet panic, I cut those headlines and I jump to adjectives like biggest-selling, chart-conquering, platinum-smash, and then I land on the word hero. Yes! He’s a hero! Okay, maybe not a hero, I think to myself. But maybe there’s a word that’s not really hero and not quite as big as God, but something kind of less grandiose and somewhere in-between. I decide I’ve got to dig deep. This is my first assignment and I’m convinced this is one of those quasi high-profile New York jobs where if you don’t really nail your first assignment, they fire you. I’ve got to get into this guy’s head. Who is he? What makes him tick? Think, man!

  Okay, stop. You’re freaking out. Pull it together and let’s consider this for a second:

  What do we already know about him?

  We know that he admits he can’t hurry love.

  He has also said that he can’t stop love.

  He is also someone who — even with all of what’s going on in the world today — thinks it’s not too late for love.

  And overall he’s got a clear understanding that love is a loving feeling you get when you fall in love against all the odds. Plus, he has enough humility to admit that his love doesn’t stop even after — and this is kind of interesting — the other person has stopped loving him. In this new song I’m listening to, he’s literally saying that he can’t stop loving you.

  If you were to look at the Time Warner building from the outside at this moment, you would see a perfect grid of glass and steel divided off into square offices, and in each of those offices somebody sitting still and confident at a desk or table. Except for one little square in the grid where a little man was pacing back and forth and looking up at the ceiling and silently saying, “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.” And asking nobody in sight silent, mimed questions like, “What am I doing here? What am I going to do now? What was I thinking?”

  Well, apparently here’s what I’m going to do now: I’m going to go start selling myself on twenty-five years of heartwarming love songs from Phil Collins. It feels like when I was in my twenties and made the mistake of finally joining one of those records clubs where you get to choose twelve albums free if you buy two more at regular club prices. You know that disheartening moment where you’ve chosen the only remotely cool albums for your twelve free ones, and you still have, like, six more to choose? That moment where you’re sitting there alone convincing yourself that you really do want the Crash Test Dummies album without the hit and, say, The Essential Leonard Bernstein?

  “Okay, look,” I say to myself, “the fact is this: Phil Collins is a guy who has lasted twenty-five years in a business that eats people alive. You think he has a day job? You think he’s in an office trying to figure out how to make his boss happy and keep his job? He does whatever the hell he wants. I mean, if I’m so into what’s cool and what’s not your average adult, well, this guy doesn’t have to wake up at nine to be at work. I mean, listen, say what you will but Phil Collins is doing whatever he wants to do.”

  By day two of this assignment, the inside of my head is doing things like this: “Hey, who am I to have any opinion about the songs or music this guy is writing? How many songs have I written? None, that’s how many.”

  Day three:

  “I mean, who’s to say I even know what Phil Collins’s songs are about. I mean . . . ‘She’s an easy lover, she’ll get a hold on you, believe it?’ Come on, man. . . .”

  “She could be anything . . . it could be a metaphor for the establishment for all I know.”

  “SHE’S AN EASY LOVER? I mean, he’s basically saying the government is screwing us. So, anarchy is the only solution, is basically what he’s saying.”

  My boss walks in to see how things are going. Hair, eyes, smile, whatever, not noticing, not noticing, not nervous, not nervous. I’m concentrating so hard on not being nervous, that it probably looks like I’m thinking. She stands at the front of my desk, as if she’s not sure about interrupting me, but then: “So, have you had any time to work on the Phil Collins thing?”

  Any time? Jesus, sister; I’ve been here for three fricking days losing my mind on this thing; like Sheen’s character in Apocalypse Now when he’s locked in that hotel room.

  “Hi,” I manage.

  “You can stop wherever you’re at with it. I just talked to Phil and his manager on the phone and they don’t want to make a big deal out of the ad. They were actually really cool about it and basically said that at end of the day it’s, you know, pop music and they don’t want the label to make a big deal out of it.”

  “Wow. Yeah, exactly. I was kind of in the same . . . yeah, that’s so cool of him to say that. He seems pretty cool. That’s totally . . . I totally agree with him. That’s cool.”

  She continues, “So, they’d like the ad to just be a picture of Phil and the number ‘twenty-five.’ Not even the word twenty-five. Brilliant, right?”

  Going through my head: What? A picture of the guy’s face with a number next to it? Where’s the writing in that? There’s no craft in that. You don’t need me here. Why are you paying me?

  “Well, you know, yeah, if you look at it from a certain angle it is a very nice, simple, elegant ad. Sometimes that’s kind of a good way to go, you know?”

  WHEN IT BEGAN, OR THE TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD WHITE GUY FROM ORANGE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA, TELLS YOU ABOUT SOUL MUSIC

  Right, so there’s a question that comes to mind. It’s a question that I’ve been asked by family members and friends entirely too often already: how did I even get this job? I guess the only answer is that it probably all began with this commercial I did when I was freelancing.

  I was twenty-nine years old, hung over, and standing outside the office of the late George Jackson, then president of Motown Records. Like the winner of some kind of cruel and indifferent essay contest, or the victim of an especially inventive hazing, I was there to show Mr. Jackson — and evidently also rapper Ice-T — what I felt the fortieth anniversary of Motown Records meant to folks. How the hell did I get tapped to make a television commercial commemorating the history of Motown? There was nobody more suburban white-bread than me in this city, this building, let alone walking around on Motown’s floor in said building. It didn’t help that I was so sleep deprived from the long nights put in during this strange little random trial by fire that I felt like I was going to cry at the stray notes of a Boyz II Men ballad coming from a small portable stereo somewhere down the hall. Standing there in front of Mr. Jackson’s door and hoping to God that I did this right, I started feeling convinced that God was nothing more than a bored man on a cloud with a plain old-fashioned cruel streak who didn’t mind toying with people like me for kicks. I had been in New York only a year at this point; just the typical delusional inductee to the city, staying out late every night and getting maybe three hours of sleep before reporting to the entry-level work I had turned up at a high-pressure C-list PR firm; work that basically involved writing press releases and magazine ads for a decreasingly popular brand of blank audiotape. The owner of the PR firm was an openly and unapologetically bitter man who blew cigarette smoke in my face as he shook his head and marked up my drafts with red felt pens, all the while his index finger absentmindedly fishing a
round in the ever-present little bottle of pills prescribed to restrain the fits of stress-related ticks in his head, neck, and right shoulder. The honeymoon, I like to call it.

  Anyway, I got this Motown gig because of Dave, whom I had met by chance as soon as I landed in New York, who worked on staff at Atlantic Records, it turned out. He called and asked if I would be interested in talking with someone at Motown about some freelance work. Motown had asked him first, but for obvious reasons he couldn’t work for another record company on Atlantic’s dime, so he called me and asked if I wanted the work. Dave’s generosity confused the hell out of me. I didn’t question it and would soon learn that it would be exactly this type of kindness and generosity that would save my ass in this city. I came to New York thinking it was a small and cramped violent island infested with drug-addled dreamers, desperate comedians, charming small-time street thieves, and dubious banker types — but that has not been my experience, to put it mildly. I gratefully accepted Dave’s kind gesture of keeping me in mind for this break, and since there was no conflict of interest with my nine-to-five job at the chain-smoking bitter man’s PR firm, I said yes, that I’d love to do a little free-lance and create a TV commercial for Motown’s fortieth anniversary. Never mind that I had never created a TV commercial before, let alone a TV commercial that would attempt to sum up four decades of soul music in sixty seconds. Oh, and kind of tie it to a thematic summation of what I thought it meant to be black in America. Our struggle, if you will. Anyway, how hard could it be to write and produce a television commercial, right? Here is what I say to the children who are our future: never underestimate how denial and a good old-fashioned mild learning disability can team up to come off as unwavering self-confidence.

  When I initially met with the people at Motown, I got scared realizing what I was getting myself into. I started accidentally soft-selling myself for the project a little, and I think it came off as confidence. They would say something like, “You know, this is about more than music. This is a soundtrack to lives. And we want to convey that in the commercial. George sees it being this spot that reminds the viewer of all the things that happened in the country in these forty years.” And I was freaking out inside, so I would just sort of stare pensively out the window, trying like hell to think of something — anything — to say to them. And then calmly, almost catatonic from fear, I would say something like, “Well . . . you know . . .” — long pause, debating whether or not I should just tell them the real situation and how they’re going to need someone who has made a TV commercial before — “It’s . . .” — Come clean, you are nothing — “. . . American history, yeah, but . . . it’s also the American . . . Dream we’re talking about here.” Oooh, that one even impressed me a little somehow. The man who was so into the creative process he couldn’t even look them in the eye was onto something; it’s true, though, what Berry Gordy Jr. did starting a label in Detroit on eight hundred bucks borrowed from family, a risk and passion that goes on to make history, that’s the soul of the American Dream.

  Full disclosure on how I was almost accidentally able to summon self-confidence during this period: I was still getting used to wearing prescription glasses for the first time in my life, and they were really working some magic. Aside from being able to read more than a paragraph of text without falling asleep almost instantly, I was taken aback by how smart they made me feel in moments like this. You say something like that without glasses on and people might be like, “You’re not really paying attention. You need to stop staring out the window daydreaming and focus on what we’re telling you.” But when you do it with glasses on, it’s more like, “Oooh, look at him staring out the window, then down at his shoes, then out the window again. Shoes, window, shoes, window . . . what’s he thinking? What makes him tick? What’s he about to tell us?”

  I went away from those initial meetings confident in my understanding of what they wanted to convey, and how I could see it through creatively. The only thing I wasn’t sure of was how to go about doing stuff like getting pictures.

  I spent the next few days writing a script all about — you know, what . . . what it means to feel soul music. And I took this direction from George to have these huge numbers hitting the screen before we land on the number “40.” Numbers that tell us how many riots (“3”) our people have seen. How many of our men marched in D.C. (“1,000,000”), etc. I spent another week using the Internet while I was at work in order to research how to buy stock footage of things like historical civil-rights demonstrations, footage from the Apollo space program, footage from the Apollo theater, how to contact Martin Luther King’s estate to get permission to use still photos of him. I was allowed to hang out in the vaults at Motown all by myself, albeit with a guard at the door during my visit and an archivist logging numbers, codes, times, and dates for every photo I touched or wanted to take for production. And everything in the photo vault went back to day one. All the way back to snapshots from Berry Gordy Jr.’s personal collection stowed in envelopes, old boxes from Detroit film labs, flat file drawers stuffed with sleeves of negatives. Outtakes from some of the most famous photo sessions in the history of American music! One envelope I found was filled with an original round of prints from the shoot for Marvin Gaye’s album What’s Going On. He was in his backyard — you’d never know it from the final front cover because it’s cropped so tightly, but I’m sitting here thumbing though this stack of faded color prints from that day and the legendary Marvin Gaye is, for just a moment, a man just like anyone of us, standing in a suburban backyard that is littered with kids’ toys. And just out of the frame of what ended up a legendary Motown album cover is a swing set and slide. He towers above it in a full-length black leather jacket. Just over the fence is another modest house. Between takes, he just looks like someone you could’ve been living next to then, but connected to something huge. It’s easy to look at the pictures and imagine some sort of eerie moment where you poke your head over the fence to say hello like a good neighbor and realize the guy next door is tapped into something in the universe so huge, so much bigger than the both of you, and you just back away slowly.

  I picked up another envelope and opened it up. Just an ordinary old business-size envelope, the kind you buy at a drugstore, softened and wrinkled, white but faded, and the adhesive on the flap is brittle and yellowed. In aged pencil somebody has written the year 1975 on the corner of it. I reached inside and pulled out an old Kodak snapshot of a young Jack Nicholson, smoking a joint, sitting at the soundboard with Stevie Wonder during a recording session and laughing; I just stood there with my index finger on the edge of glossy fading proof of an America where handsome, hilarious, merrily de-ranged silver-screen outlaws dropped in at recording studios to listen to what a blind funk genius was laying down onto reels of fat, wide, warm, two-inch analog tape thirty years before the digital age. Stood there thinking about the world outside and wondering if I was born too late.

  Boxes and envelopes yielded print after print and sometimes 35 mm or medium-format negatives. The Supremes in front of the house that was the Motown office and studio that Mr. Gordy named Hitsville U.S.A. Right there, 2648 Grand Boulevard, where he started it all with an eight-hundred-dollar loan from his family. Another faded and yellowed snapshot: the Four Tops driving a big American steel convertible in Detroit, huge humble grins, suits and shades and hearts, a moment that hits you so hard you’re standing there realizing you’ve never really tried. Look at those guys! They will play what they play because it’s in their blood and they will play it whether or not the world showers them with millions. Has nothing to do with whether or not they make the money, score the award, grab a shoe endorsement and a video game tie-in, or get a reality show made about them. They look at the camera like they are going to do what they do and if you want to catch the ride, great, and if you don’t, what’s that got to do with what they’re doing? They sure as hell aren’t gonna switch up their sound based on focus group research or chasing a bigger audience or
check. Here are pictures from a time when singing soul meant you had some.

  I grabbed all of them to use in the commercial. The archivist logged everything that I took. I left and got on the subway back to my day job, where there were some ads about blank tape to be written. I called up Ben, the video editor at this place where I freelanced for a week when I had just moved here to New York. I explained how I had all of these photos and a script and footage and had gotten all of the requisite legal clearances, but that I had no idea how to make it all into an actual TV commercial. I told him how I was doing this thing on the sly because I had the Man looking over my shoulder at my day job. So we started building the commercial over at Ben’s editing studio working nights. Maybe from seven to two or so in the morning on any given evening, and I figured that when it was time to show it to the people at Motown, I would sneak out and do it on my lunch hour.

  Getting back to the moment at hand, that’s exactly where I am: on my lunch hour, standing nervous and sleep-deprived outside the forty-eighth-floor corner office with Mr. Jackson’s assistant, waiting for the green light to go in. In a few seconds I will have to walk in and say hello and try to do a hopefully-not-clammy handshake with him — the handshake? Do you do the handshake when you’re in this position? Should I try to throw it down kind of soul style in my little Banana Republic nine-to-five junior PR writer ensemble? The door opens and I walk in, keeping pace to the staccato rhythm and groove my brain is stabbing at me with each step: