Keep The 'What the . . . ?'

make sure you don’t have a clue – find others who are just as ignorant – get to work

I took this job at an advertising agency called DDB. Now this was a big deal for me because it represented a seismic shift in the direction I’d been taking my life, which was live production of theater, concerts, festivals, circuses, you name it. I’d worked thousands of live shows and I absolutely loved the work, the pressure, the results, but my daughter was a wee one and I couldn’t see missing every birthday, holiday and weekend because I was working.

Theater was a single person’s world and I wasn’t single. I needed some stability and a steady paycheck and with a little networking that became DDB. I may be the only person in the world that considered a switch to the advertising industry a move to a more stable environment, but back stage at rock and roll shows was the wild west, so an office on Madison Avenue struck me as the height of a genteel existence.

I didn’t have a clue who or what DDB was; I didn’t know a thing about advertising, its history or even what an ad was. DDB was like the Taj Mahal of creativity, I’d just never heard of the place. Looking back on it, I’d say that worked in my favor and taught me the value of naivety, or is that naivete. Doesn’t matter. It turned out not knowing what was going on was a solid way to function in such a complicated place and get creative results.

My job when I began was to produce advertising music. First day on the job they gave me dozens of reels and said listen to these, these are the companies we use. Okay, I listened. And listened. And listened. I didn’t get it. I’d been in music since I was eight years old but this was unlike any music I’d ever heard before. I didn’t recognize the forms, the tempos, the beats, the ideas, the words, it all seemed weird to my ears. What kind of music was this? What vibe did it fit? I just didn’t understand it and decided it was some sort of sub-genre I’d completely missed in my music education. Jingles.

And the budgets. I spent more on a thirty second piece of music for an aspirin commercial than I did producing Cosi Fan Tutti, complete with thirty musicians, lights, sets and an entire cast of opera singers. It was insane.

Being Mr. Popular never seemed the way to get high levels of creative done, and I quickly became an anathema to the established jingle companies in NYC, but I also inadvertently moved the bar for what a jingle was by simply applying basic laws of the song writing universe to ads and hiring new writers for the jobs; it was fun and crazy. At one point we produced the Kit Kat jingle straddling the toilet in this young composer’s loft. He didn’t have a clue what a ‘jingle’ was, but he wrote one hell of a catchy tune in his bumping around in the dark approach.

We did dozens of tunes in the next ten years with untried talent, and I always strived to wander into areas I hadn’t a clue how to function in. I’m still doing it. Keeps you fresh. Beginner’s mind. Never lose it.

Wear Shoes

don’t stare at man under bed – pick glass out of foot – beg for leather

Edenvale Hospital was a big, sprawling hospital east of Johannesburg, South Africa, all shiny and nice and well kept and busy, but it wasn’t Edenvale Hospital my mother took me to that day. It was Invisible Edenvale Hospital, hidden behind the big hospital, a sort of sub-hospital, out of sight, back there behind the pine trees, where it couldn’t be seen, a semi-secret hospital no more than rows of Quonset huts, half the size of the big buildings out front, but with twice the patients. So many patients in fact, people slept three to a bed, under beds, on gurneys, in the hallways or just sprawled on a floor. It was chaos, run by six Irish nuns, who worked as hard as anybody worked, sleeves rolled up, scurrying back and forth, begging for medical supplies, doctors, medicines anything they could get their hands on to help with the endless tide of broken bones, cuts, gashes, stab wounds, cancers, aches and pains that staggered, hobbled, crawled and fell through their doors every day.

My mother wanted to help. She wanted to do anything she could to aid this small cadre of over-worked nuns, and they had a specific request for her; shoes, any size, make, model, as many as she could get. You set someone like my mother on a task like that and step back. You want shoes? You’re going to get shoes.

To understand the need for shoes, you need to understand the township of Alexandria. What do I remember? Millions of people, Africans, Indians, families, gangs, hunger, dirt, corrugated iron roofs, cardboard walls, poverty, drugs, danger, exhilaration, chaos. And a lot of folk walking barefoot and getting glass in their feet, so many people that it was the number one injury treated at the hospital. Hence, the shoe drive.

I don’t remember the mechanics of this effort, posters, pleas, preaching from pulpits, none of that; I just remember driving round in my old beat up Morris station wagon, piling shoes into the trunk then driving over to the hospital, laying them out in rows and watching people pick over them looking for the right pair. Man, we must have gotten thousands of shoes over to that hospital. It went on for days. You want to save world, do big things, shake and rattle the days and nights, but sometimes all it takes is a pair of shoes, worn out, tossed aside, looking for a home.