Real Life: The Series

We continue here with a piece I wrote after seeing James Taylor in concert in 2005, which has been moldering in my files ever since. In part 1, I started feeling like there was something strange about the show. In part 2, as the band played “Mexico,” I realized that it was the night being a baby boomer jumped the shark.

My reaction to the second set is probably unfair to Taylor, shaped by the realization I’d had with “Mexico”—but I find myself wishing he’d just get finished already. Taylor had done a brief bit before intermission in which he was surprised to find a copy of his list for the second set at his feet. He held it up and joked that the songs would make a fine set. I guessed at the time that there were about 12 songs on it, and now I find myself counting them, and checking my watch. After a while, the uptempo numbers, such as “Steamroller Blues” and “How Sweet it Is”—and the crowd’s reaction to each—start to seem like parody. Despite his age and ours, he’s playing at rock star, and we’re playing at still being cool enough to rock and roll.

The ritual of begging for the encore is followed by “Up on the Roof”—never a favorite of mine—and “Summertime Blues,” which is more rock-star parody, I think to myself, because Taylor’s primarily a balladeer and has never been convincing as a rock singer. I hold out a small glimmer of hope that the second encore might be “You’ve Got a Friend” and somehow redeem the whole night. It isn’t, and it doesn’t.

I don’t see how my body language, both during the encores and as we head down the steps and out of the arena, can be especially neutral, although when I mention to The Mrs. on the way out how dull I’d found the second set, she sounds flabbergasted. We don’t talk about the concert on the way home, although I ask one of our companions, who’s seen Taylor three times before, how this show compared to the others. She says he seemed more relaxed and spontaneous than she’s ever seen him, signing autographs for people in the front rows and bantering with them, and with his musicians. I don’t confess what I felt about the show, and the subject never comes up again.

Understanding the point of James Taylor’s performance is easy. He’s a working musician, and if people are still willing to pay premium prices to watch him work, he’d be foolish to leave the money on the table. Understanding the point of the audience’s performance is harder. Why were we there, exactly? Why did we load up the CD players in our midsizes and minivans with Sweet Baby James or October Road, and make this particular scene? Was it just an evening’s diversion? Was it a ritual of tribal solidarity? Or was it another act in our personal productions of Real Life: The Series?

There’s an argument that attending Taylor’s concert is the opposite of a mediated performance. What’s more real than being right there in the hall while the man himself, a man you’ve listened to for 35 years and who has no greater agenda than playing some of his songs, is just a few dozen feet away? But if you read some of the reviews of earlier shows on the tour, you learn that Taylor’s Everyman blue shirt is one he’s worn before. And you learn that the joke about finding the list for the second set, which seemed so spontaneous, is actually a part of every show. So the spontaneity wasn’t spontaneous at all—but it didn’t matter. The audience’s happy laughter and self-satisfied feeling of identification with Taylor as a regular guy making the sort of hyper-clever joke we’d want to make if we were in his shoes is exactly what our role requires. We’d have played it that way whether the joke was real or not.

Unpacking stuff in this way is like peeling an onion—only the onion’s layers corkscrew back on one another instead of coming apart distinctly. The difference between showmanship and manipulation. The difference being entertained and understanding that we’re being entertained. The difference between the people we were in the 1970s and the more mediated people we are now.

(Yes, there will be a part 4, which will be, mercifully, the last part, next week.)

Career Day

I got to speak at Career Day last Friday. It was the last day before spring break at one of the local middle schools, and they invited various local businesses and professions to send representatives. I volunteered to take the gig for Mid-West Family Broadcasting.

The kids I spoke to were on the younger side of middle school—fifth and sixth graders—so it’s not as though their career decisions are imminent, but then again, I was in fifth grade when I fell in love with radio. So their questions focused not on the best educational path to take into the biz, but on the nuts and bolts of the jock’s job: “Does your music come from CDs?”  “Why does it take so long for you to play my request?” “Do you ever get nervous?”

I decided to tackle the request question honestly, by explaining that I don’t get to pick the songs I play—that the sequence is laid out for me, and I don’t have room to change it. “If you request a hot, popular song, chances are good that it will get on, but if you want to hear a song from three or four years ago, that’s harder for us to work in.”

That seemed to satisfy them, because hot-and-popular songs are what they usually want to hear. In fact, eyes rolled at my mention of “three or four years,” as if I’d said, “the 19th century.” It reminded me of a conversation I once had with an 11-year-old who liked to tape her favorite songs off the radio. “Do you have a lot of tapes?” I asked her. “No,” she said. “I just use the same one over and over. Why would I want to save a bunch of old songs?”

Why, indeed.

As for the nervousness question, it’s one I’ve been asked by other (and older) people many times. Intellectually, I know that whenever I open the microphone, there are hundreds or thousands of people listening, but I have never imagined them in the aggregate, like they were sitting all together in an auditorium. I see one person in a car here, two people in a kitchen there, four people in an office over there. Until (and unless) you, as a jock, can visualize your audience that way, you’ll never stop being an announcer, and you’ll never be able to start being a personality.

I did a little research while I was there. I polled the kids to find out which stations in our group they listened to. Most said they listen to at least one, but I suspect that a lot of this listening happens accidentally because their parents tune in. It would be a glorious thing if fifth- and sixth-graders were discovering good old terrestrial radio and deciding to stick with it, but almost everything we know about the demographics of the modern audience argues against it—the kids also own MP3 players. The most we can say is that there’s still an upcoming audience to be captured, and that listening to terrestrial radio has not yet become unimaginable to young people. Finding the right way to capture them is the challenge, because we aren’t going to make them give up their iPods or their commitment to downloadable culture. They have never known a world without it.

Recommended Reading: A blog that’s new to me, Birds With Broken Wings, another blog that uses music as memoir. The latest post is a medical marijuana adventure, with a fine selection of early-70s stoner rock from Lee Michaels. And at Barely Awake in Frog Pajamas, there’s a fine selection of 80s power ballads. Rock on.

Outsider at the Party

This is part 2 of a 2005 piece I found in my files, written after seeing James Taylor in concert but never published anywhere. In part 1, four numbers into the first set, I noticed that the concert felt a little strange. In this part, I am trying to figure out why.

Let me make clear that I consider myself a Taylor fan. I first heard “Fire and Rain” when I was ten, and over the intervening years, it’s always been something special—that delicate guitar laid against jarring drums, the same way that life’s most precious moments can’t be separated from life’s hardest knocks. I believe that 500 years from now, people will still want to hear “You’ve Got a Friend,” which, apart from the line about keeping your head together, has not dated. Sweet Baby James and Mud Slide Slim are two albums as good as anybody’s ever recorded back-to-back. Through “Handy Man” and “Her Town Too,” the hits kept coming and I kept listening. I’d never seen Taylor in concert (except on TV), and when his tour date nearby was announced, The Mrs. was eager to go. So I thought, “Why not? I’ve dug the man myself for a long time.”

All of that is on my mind as I sit there, mostly unmoved, trying to figure out why I’m not getting into it.

Taylor sings “Handy Man,” which I had hoped he would play, but instead of finally breaking through the barrier, the song bounces off like all the others. From there, the band kicks into “Mexico,” and 22,000 people are on their feet and singing along. I have to stand if I want to see anything, and I find myself following the beat a little, albeit in my customary feet-planted, knee-bending fashion. I look over at The Mrs. and our companions, and they’ve all joined the celebration. I begin to feel self-conscious—perhaps not like a whore in church, but definitely like an outsider at a party.

In his book Mediated, anthropologist and social critic Thomas De Zengotita argues that modern life is so drenched in media that we perceive ourselves as being on stage every moment of our lives, and so the choices we make reflect the way we want the audience—which is, in the end, primarily ourselves—to perceive our performance.

While the band is rockin’ out on “Mexico,” it hits me. Just like Taylor, the crowd is performing. We are white, middle-class baby boomers with enough disposable income to drop $100 or $150 on a pair of concert tickets, and one of the requirements of our role is to sing and dance along with James Taylor. The artificiality of it, revealed to me all at once, is staggering. And the disappointment that comes with it is powerful, too.

Taylor wraps the first set with “Fire and Rain,” and I close my eyes at those first delicate notes, hoping that maybe I’m wrong. I’m not. This isn’t going to turn around. This isn’t going to be one of those transcendent concert experiences—it’s going to be something else again.

It’s the night being a baby boomer jumps the shark.

(Part 3 to come.)

Top 5: Afternoons in Iowa

Twenty years ago this week I was celebrating my first anniversary on the radio in Clinton, Iowa, population 30,000. I didn’t yet know it was the last stop of my full-time radio career, although in retrospect it’s hard for me to imagine where I thought I might go from there. But I wasn’t worried about that in 1991, not yet anyway. It occurs to me now that I was living in the moment, not thinking too hard about where I’d been or where I was going. What a concept.

We had live, local shows in the morning and afternoon on the FM side, but we got the rest of our programming via satellite. Eventually, I would put the satellite PD on speed-dial. I called the guy a lot—frequently to ask him what the hell he was thinking. On his show, which followed mine, he liked to count down the top five requests of the week on Fridays—which seemed like the dumbest damn thing in the world given that we didn’t play requests during our local shows, and we couldn’t during our satellite programming. I once called to ask what was up with the midday guy on the service, longtime Los Angeles jock Charlie Fox, who once went for months without saying anything beyond song title, artist name, and positioning liners. In response to my question, the PD laughed and said something to the effect of “Nobody knows what’s up with Charlie.” Even at his most minimal, Fox was better than the satellite’s morning jock, whose show we carried for an hour before and and hour after our local morning show. That guy was three or four of the worst jocks I’ve ever heard in my life.

Our local morning guy was extremely good. He was one of two people on the radio in the early 90s who would make me laugh out loud regularly. (Bob Collins at WGN was the other.) We didn’t get along very well, however. I was the program director, and I sometimes had to resort to mind games and/or subterfuge to get him to do what I wanted him to do. It was exhausting, but as so frequently happens in showbiz, talent cancels out almost everything else.

I did the afternoon show. After dealing with a day full of programming minutiae, it’s a fine thing to go into a room, shut the door, and be alone for a while. I still have a few airchecks from those shows, and they’re OK. Not great, but not horrible either: decent, workmanlike, small-market radio. Here are five songs I was playing on those shows in the spring of 1991, from the Cash Box chart dated March 23, 1991, with Twitter-esque commentary.

2. “One More Try”/Timmy T (holding at 2). Even though “One More Try” was a Number-One song in Billboard, you don’t remember it, do you? Me neither.

12. “Where Does My Heart Beat Now”/Celine Dion (down from 7). Her first really big hit. The bombast is there, but there was no reason at this point to imagine her as the diva she would become.

20. “Mercy Mercy Me”-”I Want You”/Robert Palmer (up from 23). “Mercy Mercy Me” is a better song than almost everything else on the radio that spring. “I Want You” is not. Here’s the video:

21. “Baby Baby”/Amy Grant (up from 26). Would eventually be burned crispy by radio overkill. Listening now, it sounds as dated as Vanilla Ice.

87. “More Than Words”/Extreme (debut). See previous entry for Amy Grant. (Hear it here.)

In the spring of 1991, more than two years of my Clinton career were still ahead. I’m far enough removed from it now to look back on it fondly. We did some good things, had some fun, endured some frustrations—in other words, it was pretty much the way life is, everywhere.

What You Look Like You’re Doing

I was procrastinating the other morning, poking through old files, when I came across a piece I wrote in 2005 after seeing James Taylor play at Summerfest in Milwaukee. I wrote it with the intention of trying to sell it to somebody, but I couldn’t even finish it to my satisfaction. Reading it now, however, it feels finished enough, so I’m putting it up here. And because I am a gasbag, it’ll take four installments to get it in.

***

It’s not what you look like
When you’re doing what you’re doing
It’s what you’re doing when you’re doing
What you look like you’re doing

–Charles Wright, “Express Yourself”

I was born in 1960, but I consider myself a baby boomer. I have more in common with those born in the late 40s and 50s than I do with those born later on in the 1960s. The experiences a kid had during those years are going to shape him in a particular way, and so there’s no need to apologize for it. In my case, what shaped me more than anything else was my obsession with radio and records. Lots of people share that obsession—at least the record part—and continue to live with it into their dotage. Nothing wrong with that, either; no need to apologize.

One thing about baby boomers is that we’re clannish. We like hanging out with our own kind. We can talk to each other. We get the references. I even said as much the other night, as The Mrs. and I walked up the ramp with another boomer couple, part of the crowd on the way to our seats at the James Taylor concert. “These are our people.”

James Taylor. He is, in some ways, the Platonic ideal of boomer adulthood: perceptive, honest, reliable, persistent, never taking himself too seriously—yet still able to rock and roll. He may have strolled the world with a guitar on his shoulder as a young man (and took a lot of drugs, and had some emotional problems, and a broken marriage), but he knew when it was time to grow up and become a solid and respectable member of society. When we look at Taylor, then, we boomers see ourselves. He embodies our ups and downs (and the poetic inspirations within them), and our triumphant march into respectable middle age.

We arrive at our seats in time to watch the arena fill up. Four girls who look to be teenagers take the seats next to me, and just for a moment I am tempted to ask what they’re doing there. The other people around us are more typical—fortyish guys with neatly trimmed beards, polo shirts, and baseball caps, fortyish women showing some skin in tank tops and short skirts (for it is an outdoor concert on a July night, after all). There are white-haired couples past 60. “Couples” is an operative word here, for it’s pretty clear that this is a date night for lots of the people who are there.

The lights go down, the crowd whoops, and James Taylor strolls out from the wings, stage right, wearing a blue shirt. He is neither more or less elaborately dressed than his audience. The ovation gets louder. He salutes it, takes a bow in response, picks up his guitar, sits down on a stool, and begins to play “Secret o’ Life” from his 1981 album Dad Loves His Work: “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.” He brings out the full band, and an impressive band it is, featuring Steve Gadd on drums and Lou Marini on sax. They play “Summer’s Here,” also from Dad Loves His Work, and “Your Smiling Face,” and by this time, the entire crowd is completely into it.

Well, not the entire crowd. I notice that compared to the rest of the band, Taylor seems to be poorly miked, but it doesn’t seem to be bothering anyone else. As the first set continues, however, something bigger than the poor sound starts bothering me: Why does this concert feel so strange? And what is that feeling, precisely?

(There’s your cliffhanger. Tune in for Part 2 on Monday.)

The Flower’s Doing Real Good

Sometimes it seems like you can say anything now. Politicians talk publicly about minorities, the homeless, and their political opponents in terms they wouldn’t have dared use privately a generation ago. In pop culture, we’ve removed a few words from George Carlin’s famous list of seven you can’t say on TV. And thanks to the Internet, no subject is unmentionable, hidden, or taboo.

Except we all know you can’t say everything now. Where Richard Pryor could win comedy Grammys with albums called That Nigger’s Crazy and Bicentennial Nigger in the mid 70s, we’ve infantilized the term to “the n-word” and banished it from the language as if it were a crime just to think it. (We won’t even let Mark Twain say it anymore.) Not only that, we don’t even like words that sound like “the n-word.” Remember the controversies involving the word niggardly, in which people who knew what it means were accused of racism and insensitivity by people who did not? Niggardly means stingy, is descended from the Old Norse, was used by Chaucer, and is not remotely racist.

Similarly, we get the vapors over the kind of drug references that were everywhere in the 70s, thanks to the scolding chorus of cultural watchdogs that formed during the Reagan 80s, the modern-day heirs to the Just-Say-No crowd and the PMRC. Consider what would happen if a popular weekly television program today were as openly drug-soaked as Saturday Night Live in the 70s: network boycotts, sponsor boycotts, and pious who-will-save-the-children wailing on every news channel until the shameful show was cleaned up.

All of that makes certain artifacts of the 1970s, innocuous at the time, seem positively amazing now. Certainly SNL is one of them; I have the first five seasons on DVD, and I am often astounded at what they got away with. Another one popped up on shuffle the other day: Jim Stafford’s 1974 hit single “Wildwood Weed.” It’s the story of accidental marijuana farmers and how they outwit “this feller from Washington.” “Wildwood Weed” was an AM-radio smash during the summer of 1974, reaching the Top Ten in a 13-week run on the Hot 100, although it didn’t stay on radio playlists very long after it dropped off the chart. Stafford still performs it during his shows in Branson, Missouri, a wink and a nod to those who were indulging nearly 40 years ago. And a small screw-you to the cultural watchdogs who would fumigate contemporary culture until nobody can see anything that isn’t fit for eight-year-olds. If it’s safe enough for Branson, it’s safe enough for everybody.