Rock On (4 page)

We're also going to street team it

We need to wait and see

About in-stores

for Kill Hannah.

Leaning back in my office chair with my feet up on my desk, as I believe one is supposed to be posed at moments like this, I stare up at the ceiling pensively — toying with a couple of pens from a brand-new, fresh box. My posturing is informed by old movies like
Big
and
Wall Street
and a scene I recall from that TV show
thirtysomething
. I probably look like I'm thinking pretty hard, but I'm basically still trying to decipher the code that the product managers were speaking during the morning meeting. It is, however, time for me to actually get started on my first big assignment.

Before we get to the first assignment at the new, intense, high-profile rock-and-roll job, let me first admit that there is a delusion I have apparently quietly indulged since, say, age thirty, and it's this: that I am still as cool as I was when I was seventeen. Inside the heart and head, a sort of suspended animation. A never-quite-acknowledged freezing of time. Unmonitored, this is how the tragedy of uncles who “still get high” happens. And now having taken a full-time job working on the marketing and advertising of bands — somehow this delusion is raging in a very bad way. In the days leading up to this job, I've spent a lot of time laying on my couch, listening to my iPod and daydreaming about how I am basically going to be paid to be some sort of intense über rock-and-roll
person who is marketing loud, fierce developing bands that are not yet registering on the radar of the so-called normal, run-of-the-mill adults in the mainstream. Those were great, powerful, and beautiful moments of delusion, mostly because I had not yet sat down and faced this first big assignment: to write an inspirational and congratulatory ad campaign that celebrates twenty-five years of heartwarming love songs from Phil Collins.

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?”

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 around 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.