Rock On Read online

  I get off at Rockefeller Center, walk up Sixth Avenue, and enter the revolving doors at 1290 to catch the elevator going up. Off the elevator and through the twenty-fourth-floor lobby. Aside from the sort of spaceship feel of the lobby up here — with its huge wall of video screens, its unmarked magnetized frosted glass doors, and its hallway lit with recessed floor lighting — the place resembles every advertising or marketing agency I have ever set foot in as a freelancer, except that the ad agencies were a little . . . less conservative than this? What? Ah, but look. There. In the first office you pass, there’s a hint of the rock-and-roll experience that awaits: an electric guitar mounted to the wall with about three hundred laminated backstage passes on lanyards hanging off of the neck. Okay, so maybe there’s something vaguely eighties about that particular installation, and also about this particular cream-colored completely unscathed Fender Stratocaster guitar with matching unscathed cream-colored pickguard — as well as the forty-something suburban-dad rocker who looks up at you as you briefly regard the guitar and backstage passes as you walk by. He looks so at home in his otherwise sensibly decorated office that it feels like I’ve peeked into his dining room at home. The whole vibe is a bit like a “Don’t get him started about the time he got to introduce Huey Lewis and the News at Giants Stadium” situation. But still, you can’t argue that electric guitars are often used in creating or performing rock-and-roll music, and I think the idea is that backstage passes are reserved for important and exciting people — therefore, I say to you: I am at the beginning of an important and exciting job on the front lines of rock and roll. I keep moving down the hall, down to the conference room in the corner. This is where the magic happens, right? Right. Yes. No matter what, so shut up, because I’ve been waiting since the day I turned ten — twenty-five years and seven months almost to the day — for something to finally make sense about adults and adulthood, so let me have this. I’ve been sitting at life’s banquet table listening to losing raffle numbers and staring at my handful of tickets for a while now, so throw me the door prize, God.

  I meet my assistant outside the conference room. Amy. She addresses a few things that we need to talk about: Do I want paper or electronic phone messages, or both? Do I need my e-mail printed out at the end of each day to be read on the way home? Wednesdays are her busy days because she has to do the TBS reports (I wish I could tell you, but I never found out myself). She can schedule car services for me if I’m working late, or I can also just wait if I don’t know how long I’ll be working and then get them myself with the vouchers on her desk if she’s not around. If I need help or suggestions for my boss’s birthday, let her know. Also, she takes notes in this marketing meeting and then e-mails them.

  Wait. An assistant?

  I spent my twenties barely dodging bullets like nametags and hairnets and now I have an assistant? Okay, fine; I didn’t dodge the nametag bullet. Anyway, all you need to know about Amy: a decade younger and somehow a decade smarter with freshly scrubbed New England blonde looks that hint at summers with a large, well-adjusted family spent mostly at a medium-sized lakehouse — an all-American guise to belie the permanent pistol-hot, whip-smart Saturday night grin and a glint in brown eyes that are hiding anything from a joke to a body. You talk with her for two minutes and all you can think is, “Somewhere a twenty-six-year-old man unwittingly awaits severe heartbreak and the kind of drinking where one ends up weeping alone for hours and then dialing.”

  The fact that I have an assistant is too much to process, really, so I stare at her, overwhelmed and saying nothing, hoping I come off as understated and reserved instead of touched by semi-common mental disabilities. After a brief, barely-oxygenated battle with what feels like the soft, sweet, weighty pull of narcolepsy, I manage to suddenly straighten and swiftly motion with my right arm toward the conference-room door, seeming to suggest that we walk in and find our seats for the meeting. I sit down and take a quick inventory of the room:

  • Huge conference table surrounded by super-expensive Germanic-looking chairs on rollers that swivel? Check.

  • Big glass windows looking out to neighboring skyscrapers and an heir’s view of Central Park? Check.

  • A life-size cardboard cutout of, well, a totally anonymous boy band who evidently, years ago, failed to become the next Backstreet Boys or ’N Sync and are now faded blueish-green by the sun and left to tower over us? Uh, check.

  • Catered coffee, fruit trays, and tiny muffins cut in half to fuel this rocket ride? Check.

  Welcome to the command center for a little starship by the name of SS Rock and Roll, sister. Hovering twenty-four stories off the earth’s surface. I am awash in imagining that this is the room where my moments of genius will most likely occur. I am drunk on slow-motion visions of saying things and having ideas in here someday that will rescue the record business from peril. And the record business I am envisioning in my mind is not so much a modern-day ivory tower of mogul monsters, but some kind of timeless, broken, and lovable Frankenstein patchwork of people, albums, and songs that changed, inspired, and saved lives at any point along the weird jagged path of American adolescence. That brought a connection to something bigger than our darkened suburban bedrooms through radios hidden under pillows or cheap headphones that somehow made the stretch up to the bed from a cheap little off-brand stereo on the floor next to dirty laundry and unfinished homework. Let’s get this meeting going. Let’s stoke the fire that kept me and probably everyone in this room alive when we were fourteen and laying in bed, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, staring at a perfectly white ceiling and facing the fact inside that we were too suburban and polite to ever do the suicide. Knowing we would instead have to take the ride of public schools and years of boredom, longing for some kind of sex, even though we couldn’t even figure out how to have it, and never thought we would actually get it. Let’s go. Somebody say something. Fuck it, I’ll break the ice; unthinkable usually, but then again, right now I’m connected to a force in the universe larger than I will ever be or have ever been.

  “Is that a, um, blueberry one?”

  Jesus, I’m an idiot. Not what I had in mind to open with.

  “This is chocolate chip.”

  “Oh, okay, chocolate chip. Okay.”

  “It’s good. What’s wrong with chocolate chip?”

  “Nothing. No, I’m not saying . . .”

  “Are you turning your nose up at it?”

  Holy Christ, is she serious? She looks kind of tough, this woman. But in her defense, she’s wearing a hippy sundress that looks like it could be made out of hemp or recycled paper towels; she’s an angry, aggressive tempest in clothing made by kind, passive people in Oregon. She seems mad, like she was mad before this exchange, I mean — like she’s been mad for years about something. Maybe it’s an act; she’s probably another perfectly respectable mid-thirties Caucasian-female passive-aggressive creative type from, say, Venice, California, who has realized the only way she’s survived for a decade here is to be perceived as tough.

  I try to size up the stern look on her face, but when I do I think it looks like I’m staring her down. I swear to God I was just saying it nervously and nicely and just being the new guy making small talk. I really don’t care about the stupid muffin. Why would I be turning my nose up at it? I want to tell her that I’ve spent plenty of afternoons in the last three years standing in my tiny kitchen eating everything from bouillon cubes to pieces of leftover burrito and stale holiday candy, all within minutes of one another, all while staring out the window at this beautiful, ageless, and indifferent city, drinking from a carton of milk, wondering when my next freelance gig would come. Christ, there were plenty of points in the illustrious Bush Jr. economy when I would’ve gladly risked the misdemeanor of stuffing a chocolate chip muffin down the front of my pants in a Greenwich Village deli and running until I found a place to catch my breath and eat it.

  “So, what, you’re new, I guess.”

  “Yea
h. Hey, I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “We haven’t really met. I’m Beckah.”

  (long pause) “Sorry, I didn’t catch . . . is it Rebecca?”

  “Beckah. I didn’t catch your name because you didn’t say it.”

  I pause again, staring at her and trying to think of a mnemonic device that will prevent me from suffering a future scornful stare when I call her Beth or Chaka. I think of something like, “Chocolate chip muffin for a woman named Rebecca, then just take away the ‘Re’ and you’ve got Beckah.” I’m certain I’ll forever know her as “Chocolate Chip” or “Muffin.”

  “Anyway, I just thought it was blueberry because . . .”

  “Yes, I know. You pointed that out,” she says with the kind of stressed thin smile angry people force onto their faces on occasions that require at least a visible attempt at good cheer.

  Whatever. . . . I just kind of raise my eyebrows and refocus.

  Ms. Chocolate Chip is the in-house music-video producer, and frankly I don’t care what she thinks of me. Sure, it’s not very strategic, this rare bout of self-confidence I’ve chosen to indulge. But, I look across the table and Vallerie, my boss, is smiling, so I am relieved. What can I tell you about Vallerie? She’s a senior vice president here, my direct boss — the person who hired me on — and that makes it even a little more awkward that I basically live in fear that I’ll wind up in a meeting absent-mindedly writing her name over and over on my binder or notepad like a seventh grader with a crush on a teacher a few years before he learns to deaden unexplained feelings with heavy metal, canned beer, and petty crime. At one point she was a model living in London and was on the cover of an album that was in every one of my friends’ older brother’s record collections — and I probably started noticing her right around then. She’s fifteen years older than me, look, quit freaking out — Jesus! Yes, she’s beautiful; we’re all beautiful, okay? Shut up. Drop it. She’s older than me. She’s my boss. I was just trying to describe her. I’m not saying I have a crush on her. God. Fucking act like an adult.

  The meeting starts and the first order of business is talking a bit about the progress of the new Fat Joe album. I write the first meeting note on the fancy notepads they gave me with my name and the company logo on them: “Who is/are Fat Joe?”

  The Fat Joe album is coming along, evidently, and then talk turns to Fat Joe’s work strike. Something about some rumor of not continuing on the CD until the label buys him a thirty-thousand-dollar fur coat that he’s had his eye on.

  “What?” I start laughing, but turn it into a cough super fast, when I realize that this is apparently nothing to laugh at. Duly noted. It’s so weird, though, especially since I’m starting to gather that this guy is some sort of gangster hiphop rapper guy? Maybe it’s a joke everyone is making? Maybe it’s a joke that Fat Joe made? I have no idea at the moment, but I look around the table and they seem to be sort of serious. And then someone starts to say something else about it and is quickly interrupted so that the meeting can move along.

  I sit there trying to make a face that that says, “Listen, I agree, it is not a laughing matter.” I keep a straight face — a feat I’m starting to realize is the secret to succeeding in business — and the meeting passes in what shifts between a slow, deadening grind of numbers and dates and a fast amnesiac flash of upcoming highlights. And somehow after an hour of this, the rapper wanting the coat already no longer seems funny or ridiculous to me. Whatever, I’m the guy who wants a fat salary, expense account, perks, and stock options to write and produce the rapper’s advertising campaign between the hours of ten-thirty and six, so what am I laughing about? Me and this dude are in the same racket, basically.

  The product managers in today’s meeting consist of a couple of twenty-something guys who got the lucky break after working their asses off for a year or five as assistants, and a handful of suburban folks who look like your average neighbor in a pleasant leafy suburb, save for a requisite shock of bright red hair dye, or — in the case of one woman from radio promotions — a dicey middle-aged venture into the land of leather pants worn without a trace of irony. There’s one woman, thirty-something and slightly more metropolitan than the others, whom I would say resides in the file of: married smart, risked little, gained a lot, prefers to think of herself as “chic” and prefers to spend weekends in their house in the country instead of the downtown loft they bought. The thing that draws your eye to her is how she clearly concerns herself with being stylish and smart in every regard, except for the fact that she’s very attached to a particular denim jacket that I would have to guess, in a conservative estimate, went out of style approximately two decades ago. She seems to have a studied, natural way of flaunting it in a variety of settings, the way an Ancient Pueblo tribesman might flaunt a colorful blanket he was awarded as an elder chief or tribal councilman. She hangs it on her chair, she tosses it over her arm, she drapes it over her shoulders — which she scrunches up toward her ears, indicating to all that she’s evidently chilly. In her office, she leaves it hanging on the back of her chair, proud embroidery facing out to passersby. I recognize the jacket from when I walked by what must be her office on my way in this morning. I can only assume that her one exception to a wardrobe that otherwise refrains from dating itself to the Reagan Administration must have something to do with the status that comes with having the phrase WORLD TOUR embroidered above the right breast and the word CREW atop the left, and the same stitched words repeated on the back of the jacket (in case you didn’t catch it when she was coming at you) along with the band’s name and the year of the tour. I size up her mid-thirties petite frame, manicured hands, and well-moisturized, unweathered face and decide there’s no way she actually got her start as a thirteen-year-old roadie for Genesis, humping the band’s gear in and out of stadiums around the globe in 1981 during the Abacab World Tour.

  Topping off the assembled marketing folks this morning, we’ve also got one very handsome metro-sexual gentleman who should be making side money modeling in cologne advertisements if he isn’t already. He’s sitting to the left of me; and he’s a man who seems too suave and smart to get very tangled up in any of this — but he is, because he speaks up and starts off a domino effect, and one by one, all of the product managers take a turn at weighing in with a report of what’s going on with the artists they’re in charge of working with.

  “Okay, Junior Senior; really good phones; adds are huge, doing paid dates — like, mostly DJ stuff at clubs. I’ll talk to radio about the second single. Pantene is a yes from Linda if they’re still looking, she might be a little outside the demographic, though, so we’ll see. I’ll know if Brandy is a yes today, but it depends when they want to deliver and what the Jewel situation is. I still need approvals for hotel, air, and that girl for nails and facials. Spins are up for Junior, too, forgot to mention that. If Chris moves to PD at Z100 then, well, we’ll see what happens there, but . . . right now the first single’s crossing to everything, Modern AC to AC and even a few AAA, researching great across the board.”

  It’s funny how fast forty-five minutes passes when you have no idea what anyone is saying whatsoever. I pretend I’m familiar with the words they’re throwing around; I listen intently to what they’re saying, nodding with a pretty steady frequency that I start to worry could appear too steady, and almost syndromic. I find myself essentially acting not unlike a dog that’s simply tilting his head, excited by whatever phonetically pleasing sounds seem to cut through the clatter of the unintelligible.

  As we finish and file out, little fragments of their marketing monologues are still swirling in my head and forming a surreal little lyric to start the day with:

  Why don’t you think Jewel would do Pantene Pro-V?

  If we book the Super Bowl is it all lip-synch then meet-and-greet

  or are they letting people sing?

  Still waiting to hear about Kid Rock for Letterman

  but we would have to fly him private

  to ma
ke it in time.

  Spins are up on everything for me

  And we worked out the Nappy end caps thing

  Phones on the single will help

  We’re also going to street team it

  We need to wait and see

  About in-stores

  for Kill Hannah.

  I’M PAID TO WRITE LOVE NOTES TO PHIL COLLINS

  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.