Rock On (5 page)

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:

Oh.

No.

Suit.

Lawyer?

Wait!

Ice-T!

Is here?

Small hands.

No way.

Just shake his hand.

Normally!

Mr. Jackson's big-hearted, robust introduction is filled with the kind of love and generosity that I am misguided and naïve enough to think must be found in the halls of every major record label on the planet. A big man, maybe 250 pounds of him, and his handshake and love for what he is doing here almost throws my medium frame across the room. I've managed to navigate a straight path to the big leather sofas in the corner of his office ready to show this thing. Okey dokey, Mr. Jackson and . . . Mr. Ice? Oh, good question. Would you say Mr. T? No, don't say that. That's the guy from that old show on television.

After all of the late nights editing and the days spent lost in the archive, after listening to the advance copy of the fortieth anniversary CD a million times, I am strangely confident in what Ben and I have created, but a burst of self-confidence is almost always a disaster warning for me. I put the tape into George's VCR, and he starts tweaking an enormous console of preamps, patch bays, and equalizers from the leather chair he's sitting in — it's a scene that looks like a 250-pound black man is commandeering the bridge of the starship
Enterprise
.

The slate on the commercial counts down backward from ten like movies in school did, and on the last beep, the commercial starts in. The opening riff to “Superstition” pumped through speakers that look like they belong in the space program. Totally lethal speakers that I've never seen in the consumer sector, and on the screen forty years flash before our eyes. JFK, Marvin Gaye, Apollo rising from the launch pad, a still young and innocent Michael Jackson with his brothers clowning around on the streets of Tokyo during the first Jackson Five tour, Los Angeles in flames more than once — 1965, a routine traffic stop sets L.A. on fire for six days in Watts; 1992, L.A. is on fire again after the Rodney King verdict comes in, an edit that makes you wonder if anything has changed — and Stevie Wonder singing, “Very superstitious . . . writing on the wall,” cut back to Martin Luther King saying he has a dream over the top of Stevie Wonder's riff. Goddamn, I've never noticed how much MLK looks as innocent as a child when he says it, you don't see an agenda as much as a man just doing the right thing in the eyes of his mother. Cut to a shot of that motel in Memphis, the one that the gunman had in his aim when he pulled the trigger that morning in April of 1968; cut to a black-and-white photograph of Berry Gordy Jr. standing on the porch at Hitsville U.S.A, a young man about to go farther than even his wildest dreams for this thing; cut to the Supremes on Ed Sullivan's stage; cut to the Beatles hanging out with Berry Gordy Jr., and his baby daughter. This is the same spirit that made colonies, that went west, that went to the moon and back, this man starting out against the odds with a small loan in his pocket, he winds up making history.

Damn, why hasn't this commercial hit me like this until now? I watched it played down a hundred times in the editing
studio. Maybe I drank way too much last night after we finished what we figured was our last editing session, and now I'm too hung over to be watching it and, Jesus, I think I'm going to cry or something. What if the lights come on and Ice-T sees me standing here crying? He will kill me. Have you heard this guy's songs? Jesus, he probably actually has a song about killing guys that look like they're about to cry over their own commercial.

The spot finishes and George's assistant is about to turn on the lights when George says not to. Thank God. Maybe he doesn't want to be seen getting ready to cry? But then George says the reason we're leaving the lights off is because we're going to watch it again. Oh, shit. This means they've found a mistake or something. Why did I take this on? At the end of the second time, the lights come back on. These two men are still facing away from me, and they stay seated, not saying a word. I'm standing an arm's length away and slightly behind them and it's quiet. Way too quiet. George Jackson, without looking, out of nowhere pulls back his huge arm and punches me hard in the shoulder. And since his hand is about the size of my entire head and neck region, I am off balance and tilting, now falling, slow-motion up against the wall. Shit. I got it wrong. My slow motion fall up against the wall continues, and while it's all happening, I'm thinking:
I swear, I'm on your side, brother
. Strangely, I still have a nervous polite smile on my face. I settle up against the wall; it's still quiet. And then he starts laughing. Through his huge booming laugh and with a smile in his voice, George Jackson says, “Dan Kennedy! Goddamn!”

And Ice-T says, “That's right, you know what I'm sayin'? What you did right there, you showed that it's history. It's
music, yeah, but it's a part of America, see. That's what makes it so . . . so moving.”

I readjust my body so I'm not falling against the wall anymore. Kind of make it look like I was done with what I hoped came off as a casual and confident leaning, as opposed to being a medium-frame white guy who was knocked off balance and startled.

“That's why the man gets paid. Right there. That's why,” George says. I think at best I managed to quietly mumble something like, “Hey . . .” then.

A week or two later I'm in George's office to talk about doing an ad campaign for the Marvin Gaye remastered CD that Motown is releasing in a few months. About ten minutes into this visit, Stevie Wonder walks into the room. My twenty-nine-year-old brain tries to process the string of events:

1. Hung over again.

2. On my lunch hour, need to get back soon.

3. I am shaking Stevie Wonder's hand.

Mr. Wonder reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small DAT tape, telling George that he recorded this song at home last night and that George absolutely needs to hear it, that he feels like it's one of the best songs he's ever written. Holy God, I am going to hear a song that Stevie Wonder wrote less than twenty-four hours ago. A song that he's standing right here saying he thinks is one of the best things he's written.