BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. On November 2nd, filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam. The man charged with the crime is a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim extremist. The motive - a film that Van Gogh had made called "Submission" about the treatment of women under Islam.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: For the Dutch, it was a moment of reckoning. Suddenly, the country found itself struggling with its long, proud tradition of tolerance, and its resolutely politically correct press would have to raise those questions and report on the debate. The media throughout the west are in the midst of developing a vocabulary to address the issues raised by the culture clash between rapidly expanding Muslim communities and their host nations.
BOB GARFIELD: Back in the Netherlands last week, the popular right wing politician Geert Wilders called for a five year halt to non-western immigration, saying that the country had been tolerant of intolerant people for too long. Meanwhile, a wave of violence committed by and against Muslims has consumed the country. Martin Walker is the editor in chief of United Press International. He's been reading the papers in the Netherlands and around Europe, and he says the Dutch press reflects the anguish of that nation.
MARTIN WALKER: On the front page of Algemeen Dagblad, one of the great daily papers of Holland, they have the front page editorial to the queen saying "Your Majesty, please speak to us, your people. Hate is spreading like wildfire through the country. Mosques, churches, schools, children are targets of attack. The Netherlands is in danger of becoming a country of them and us. Your Majesty, please speak."
BOB GARFIELD: The New York Times described that the Dutch have been almost tongue-tied in their inability to deal with their conflicting feelings.
MARTIN WALKER: But what they're all trying to agree upon is that there has to be absolutely no compromise with the fact that this was a vicious murder and that there are ruthless Islamic extremists who have to be brought under control. To that extent, some of the old easy, knee-jerk liberal response towards integration and immigration really has become bypassed by the realities of what's been taking place in Holland. And that's also, I think, been happening in much of the rest of Europe where there has long been a fairly unthinking political correctness saying that there should be a welcome for immigrants. After all, we need their labor. They should be allowed to maintain their culture. And it began to go very sour, I think, with the elections in France 18 months ago when Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen became the challenger to Jacques Chirac, when we've seen in Germany the, the rise of far right parties of, frankly, a neo-Nazi party in Germany. Far right parties emerging also in Britain. We've seen them in, in Belgium become the, the biggest single party in the Flemish part of Belgium.
BOB GARFIELD: And leave us not forget Austria.
MARTIN WALKER: Let's not forget Denmark either, where they're also terribly powerful. And as a result, what we've seen in traditionally liberal newspapers, to give you one example, one of the most liberal papers of all is Sweden's Expression -- says that they "entirely support the way the Dutch government has declared war on Islamic terrorism. It might be a risk, but it's a risk that has to be taken, because the threat of a growing division in Dutch society and in Europe more widely would have been much greater had the authorities not reacted. The kind of political extremism which Van Gogh's murderers represent is just as dangerous as that of the Communist terrorist of the 1970s or of neo-Nazis, and we have to be very, very clear about that." In Germany, Die Welt: "We can now see that the liberal European belief in building communities like a little Istanbul or a little Marakesh are, in fact, turning into Europe's own nightmare of a little Gaza, a little Baghdad here in the Netherlands. Some day it might become a little Fallujah. Europe has to accept the prospect of serious clashes with Islamic extremists, and if governments are unable react appropriately, Europe will not only face the feared clash of civilizations. We will also face the prospect of an increasingly strong far right that is going to be too strong to be stopped."
BOB GARFIELD: It's such a striking situation. In the U.S., of course, we face similar tensions, trying to preserve civil liberties and to protect the idea of the melting pot while simultaneously trying to protect our borders and, and our people from terrorism. Is Europe and the European press now getting a taste of the American dilemma?
MARTIN WALKER: There has long been this feeling in, in Europe of rather smug superiority vis-a-vis America -- that America was the place that had the racial problems, the civil rights problems, and there was liberal Europe without such difficulties, and suddenly they're realizing that they've been living in a dream world, and what we're seeing is not simply the actual conflict with Islamic extremism, but we're also seeing, I think, a real tussle with the traditions of political correctness you see, for example, in Die Welt. "Our states in Europe have hitherto allowed extremists to create networks under the protection of the so-called communal dialogue, the beneficiaries of whom have had only one goal -- to live in accordance with their own rules and cancel out ours -- to abolish our constitutional state. We cannot afford to let that happen." Theo Van Gogh was not alone in starting to do fairly hard-hitting films, TV documentaries, radio programs. In Britain, something that we've seen over the last year has been a couple of documentaries on honor killings by Islamic fathers of daughters whose offense was simply to date European or British boys whom they had met at school. Something of the same kind has been taking place in France, where we've had a couple of TV documentaries on a phenomenon called the "tournante" -- in effect, a gang rape of a French girl by young Muslim boys, and there is some claim that in some parts of Muslim society this has become almost a rite of passage for adolescence. These may be very isolated examples, but in the mood of Europe at the moment, they have simply mushroomed and become very, very explosive urban legends and ones that I think are going to have a really important impact upon coming elections. I think Europe's in for a very, very tricky period.
BOB GARFIELD: Martin, thank you very much.
MARTIN WALKER: You're very welcome.
BOB GARFIELD: Martin Walker is editor in chief of United Press International. BROOKE GLADSTONE: This week, CBS announced that its evening news anchor, the man who had held that post for an unprecedented 24 years, would be signing off on March 9th. Ladies and gentlemen, Dan Rather is leaving the building. [NEWS THEME MUSIC UP & UNDER]
ANNOUNCER: This is the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather reporting from CBS News Headquarters in New York.
DAN RATHER:Good evening. Danger. War. Killer. Fraud. CIA. Mayhem. Crisis. Horrible. Inflation. Military threat. The flaming debris. Fatal heart attack....
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It would have been tough for anyone to take the mantle from the person once voted Most Trusted Man in America, but though it was hotly contested, Bill Leonard, then head of CBS News, called it for Rather.
BILL LEONARD: I'm delighted to announce that Dan Rather will succeed Walter Cronkite as anchorman and managing editor of the CBS Evening News in early 1981.
DAN RATHER: I seek to be in the Walter Cronkite mold, in the Ed Murrow mold before him. To the best of my abilities, I want to be an honest broker of information.
WALTER CRONKITE: Well, let me-- I'll just add a word to that. I don't think that with Dan taking over the CBS Evening News there's any problem of transition.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But despite Cronkite's reassuring words, there may have been a problem or two. At the time, some thought veteran newsman Roger Mudd was the heir apparent, passed over because he wasn't as pretty as Rather. And though Cronkite denies it, there were rumors that Uncle Walter was being rushed into retirement because Rather threatened to switch networks. In that scenario, reminiscent of the film "All About Eve," Rather plays a rising star who ruthlessly pushes her mentor out of the way. We don't know about that. But the film's famous quip still works. [ALL ABOUT EVE CLIP]
BETTE DAVIS: Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In Dan's case, that night lasted 24 years. He walked off a newscast when it was delayed by a tennis match. He was attacked by a man on Park Avenue who asked: Kenneth, what is the frequency?* He briefly ended his newscasts with the word "Courage," causing waggish competitors like Bryant Gumbel to sign off with "Mazeltov," and "Hot dogs." And if you can't remember those bumps in Rather's road, you have only to cast your mind back to the monumental pothole he drove over last September, that 60 Minutes II- story about the president's dubious National Guard record and those equally dubious memos used to back that story up.
DAN RATHER: Are those documents authentic, as experts consulted by CBS News continue to maintain, or were they forgeries or re-creations? We will keep an open mind, and we will continue to report credible evidence and responsible points of view as we try to answer the questions raised about the authenticity of the documents.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And, a week later...
DAN RATHER: I made a mistake. I didn't dig hard enough, long enough, didn't ask enough of the right questions.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Here was proof positive, or perhaps just the latest in a career-long series of proofs positive, that Dan Rather had a liberal bias. But reporters are people too, and everyone, with the exception of Jim Lehrer, has some kind of bias. They just try not to let it show. Cronkite rarely did. When he pronounced the Vietnam War unwinnable, the Johnson administration gasped. Despite a few suppressed tears when President Kennedy died, Cronkite was always clear-eyed and steady in the tradition of network newsmen he helped to establish. Dan was different. He let it show. He let everything show, as at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. [HUBBUB -- SEVERAL SPEAK AT ONCE]
DAN RATHER: I know you-- but don't push me! Take your hands off of me unless you plan to arrest me!
MAN: Wait a minute, wait a minute! Wait a minute--
DAN RATHER: Walter, as you can see--
WALTER CRONKITE: I don't know what's going on but this - these are security people apparently, around Dan--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And after the Twin Towers fell on September 11th, 2001.
DAN RATHER: If they could go down to Ground Zero and see the following -- see those firemen--[CHOKED UP WITH EMOTION] Take this, [...?...] will you?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: He was emotional, excitable, occasionally obnoxious. Even when confronting famously combative presidents like Richard Nixon, he just couldn't put a sock in it.
DAN RATHER: Thank you, Mr. President. Dan Rather, with CBS News. [APPLAUSE, CHEERS]
RICHARD NIXON: Are you running for something? [LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE]
DAN RATHER: No, sir, Mr. President, are you? [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: He didn't like Nixon. We know that. There was hardly anything about Dan Rather we didn't know, if we watched regularly, and millions did. He was a bit of a loon, especially on election night. Oh, those Ratherisms.
DAN RATHER: You'd have to say this thing is as tight as the rusted lug nuts on a '55 Ford.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As he explained to David Letterman--
DAN RATHER: I grew up around people who talked this way.
DAVID LETTERMAN: Oh, I see. So all of these are, are -- you just recall them from your experience.
DAN RATHER: Yeah, and during the year, if I hear something that I say to myself -- you know, that's colorful language and I think I could use it election night...
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I never met anyone who talked like that, but I believe him when he says he did. Rather is believable because he is so raw. The first and only extreme anchor in network news. In a time when journalists are suspected of secretly harboring opinions, Rather, consciously or not, goes with full disclosure. In an era when anchors are processed and poured into a mold like Velveeta, Rather is pungent and runny. He hyped and sentimentalized coverage, but I do not agree with the critics who say that Dan Rather in all his discombobulated liberalness compromised the integrity of network news. If anything sinks that once great institution, it won't be lefty-ness or even craziness. It'll be cowardice. Come to think of it, 18 years ago, when Rather intoned "Courage," at the end of his newscasts, maybe he wasn't talking to us. [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: Up next, the vast amounts of money it takes to keep mainstream music terrible, and the terrible music that gets trapped in your brain.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR. [MUSIC] * When originally aired, the assailant's question was mistakenly reported as "Kenneth, where is the frequency?" BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. A few weeks ago, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer issued subpoenas to the four big music conglomerates, investigating how songs earn or buy radio play. Spitzer's investigation shed light on one of the oldest problems in pop music: payola. Payola had its heyday in the 1950s, when a handful of disc jockeys were convicted of taking money in exchange for playing a few potential hits. Many thought the practice had gone the way of rigging game shows, but it seems to have merely changed form. James Surowiecki wrote about modern payola for the New Yorker magazine, and he joins us now. Jim, welcome back to the show.
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Thanks for having me on.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what is modern payola?
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Well, the simple idea of payola, of course, is record labels paying radio stations in order to get their records on the air, and modern payola takes a variety of forms. The simplest form, which I think is the one that Spitzer is really trying to investigate are record labels use these people called independent promoters who basically funnel money to radio stations by a variety of means. They pay for things that they call research funds. They give gifts in kind. They'll throw big events, etc. -- in order to kind of basically push their records -- at least get their records on the horizon. And then there's this other interesting form which has gained a lot of notice recently which are called spot buys.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And that's legal.
JAMES SUROWIECKI: That's totally legal, and basically what a spot buy is, is essentially a record label will buy big chunks of air time. One of the examples I wrote about was Avril Levigne's record label basically bought radio time on a series of stations around the country, and they would just play the song over and over again, like three, four times an hour.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You say that this kind of legal payola is worse than the illegal kind.
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Well, you know, the traditional form of payola back in the 1950s when famously, you know, Alan Freed, who was one of the first real rock & roll deejays, was eventually accused and indicted for taking bribes to play records. That payola, what that actually did was break a lot of interesting records. There's a real good argument to be made that a lot of black music--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You mean break them into the--?
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Into the mainstream [LAUGHS] - yeah, I'm sorry -- break them as hits, not smash them -- that Chuck Berry, people like that would, would maybe never have become the pop icons they became had it not been for payola. Because what it did was it allowed these relatively unknown artists to get played. The problem with this kind of spot buy payola is that it actually has nothing to do with real popularity. It has nothing to do with breaking new artists. It really is just an attempt to game a completely corrupt system, which is the Billboard ranking system, and it really serves no purpose other than to kind of artificially create popularity.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, let's talk about the Billboard ranking service, because as you noted in your piece, this is how radio stations, many of them, determine their playlists, and if people buy spot ads, basically buy the time to play those songs, it still counts on the Billboard chart.
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Yeah. That's the most perplexing part of this, and, and it's - it's sort of hard to keep in your head, but, but if you think about it, all Billboard is basically recording is how many times individual songs are played. And for some bizarre reason, they do not distinguish between records that are played because some deejay decides to play them and records that are played because a record label has bought the time. So that's a huge flaw and loophole in the ranking system, and that's what these labels are trying to exploit.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But paying for placement is acceptable in other markets. Coke pays to have its soda displayed prominently in the supermarket. Publishers do the same in bookstores. Why not music on the radio?
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Well, I think the reason why we accept it in supermarkets and we accept it in, in bookstores -- although the truth is, we don't, most people don't know about it in bookstores -- is that radio is a weird medium. A song is an advertisement for itself. The record labels give these songs to radio stations effectively -- they pay a small royalty -- so that people will hear them and then say oh, I gotta buy the album. But at the same time radio is kind of art as well, you know, you don't - you - we don't want it to be corrupt.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But let's talk about transparency, then, because you make a big point in your piece of saying that legal payola is fully disclosed. If the record company that owns Avril Levigne's records pays for those air plays, the public hears that they're being paid for. Does that make a difference?
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Well, it certainly makes a difference legally. As long as payola is acknowledged, it, it is legal, and these Avril Levigne songs, at the end they would say, you know, "this has been sponsored by" - or at the beginning…
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So instead we have this legal and aboveboard system whereby big companies can pay for play and thereby queer the Billboard charts that all the stations look at to determine what they're going to play. So is there any way to know what the public really likes?
JAMES SUROWIECKI: That's a really fascinating question, because I think at this point it's a sort of circular logic going on here. Popular songs get played, but what gets played is what's -becomes popular, etc. So it is very hard to figure out exactly what the audience wants to hear. I do think that Billboard -- and it mystifies me why they have not done this -- should just change their ranking system. It would not be hard to do. The spot buys have to be acknowledged, so they have to be recorded. Billboard should just exclude those, and then we'd still be with this radically impure system, but it would be a lot better than what we've ended up with.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What does the conventional wisdom tell us about whether it's possible to create a hit simply by playing a song a lot?
JAMES SUROWIECKI: I think conventional wisdom probably would tell us that you can buy a hit. I actually don't fully believe that. It's certainly possible to push songs higher up than they would normally be. I feel about it a little bit the way I feel about movies. It's very easy to open a movie big. But it's very hard to create a movie that actually endures over time. And I think with records it's probably pretty close to the same thing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jim, thanks very much.
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Thanks for having me on.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: James Surowiecki is author of The Wisdom of Crowds, and columnist for the New Yorker magazine.
BOB GARFIELD: Last week, the major record labels trade group filed copyright infringement lawsuits against another 761 users of online peer to peer file trading networks, bringing the total to nearly 7,000 lawsuits filed.
At the same time, Atlanta-based research firm Big Champagne reported that more Americans than ever, nearly 20 million of them, are using peer to peers. For the five years that networks like Napster have come and gone and come again, their fans have been saying one of the prime attractions is the availability of music that isn't on the shelves at big box retail stores and isn't being played on commercial radio.
Rick Karr reports that the business model used by major labels has driven musicians and fans to the peer to peers. And to other new technologies.
RICK KARR: Every generation seems to hear the decline of Western civilization in the next generation's pop music, but apocalyptic visions of the aging aside, the aesthetics of pop music have changed over the past couple decades, in large part due to changing business realities in the music industry. Harold Vogel is a New York financial analyst and author of Entertainment Industry Economics, a textbook that's just gone into its sixth edition. He says the changes have affected the record business and radio in the same way.
HAROLD VOGEL: There's a cycle of, let's say, protectionism and risk-aversion, and we're in the depth of that right now. There's certainly a lot of risk-aversion. If it isn't popular in twelve different markets, why should we play it? And nobody wants to play the unpopular or the new or the different.
RICK KARR: Vogel says the risk-averse phase of that business cycle is a long hangover of sorts from the industry's huge expansion in the 1960s and '70s. The Baby Boomers set off a boom in the record industry, rewarding labels that took risks on new talent by making those artists into bankable stars. [LED ZEPPELIN MUSIC PLAYS] Vogel says record labels got used to strong cash flow and big profits, so when the boom tapered off in the late '70s, the industry scrambled to sustain profitability. One solution came from sales of the new compact discs. A lot of music fans bought their record collections all over again. [LED ZEPPELIN] The other way to sustain profits was to cut costs, and so the record industry started to consolidate: conglomerates snapped up independent labels, and major labels merged. The conglomerates set earnings targets and borrowed a page from the movie business's playbook -- the "tentpole release." Vogel says that's what Hollywood calls a film that's supposed to be a blockbuster that props up the studio's finances.
HAROLD VOGEL: An expensive picture, high marketing, high production value, lots of big stars, and all your other pictures, your other 15 pictures or so, would fall under the tent, basically. This would carry the season and be the thing you talk about to your shareholders in the annual report that you write the next spring.
RICK KARR: The same pressures drive tentpole releases in the record business. At least once a quarter, says former Mercury and Warner Bros. chief Danny Goldberg, you have to have a big hit.
DANNY GOLDBERG: When you look at a schedule, and you know you have to make whatever the number is for your company -- 200 million or 300 million or 400 million for the year in terms of your top line of sales -- something you can ship a million of is ten million of those dollars, and almost the same amount of staff time goes into setting up a release where you ship a million as setting up a release where you ship a hundred thousand.
RICK KARR: By extension, a record that sells ten million copies is an even better financial proposition. Goldberg says that makes it harder for major labels to take risks and puts a premium on releases by bankable stars. Labels pay bigger and bigger cash advances to those stars and spend millions promoting their releases to retailers and radio broadcasters. But--:
DANNY GOLDBERG: The more resources that go into that, the less resources are available for the development of, of new talent.
RICK KARR: Even established stars suffer if their records sell only, say, a few hundred thousand copies. The business model at today's major labels, Goldberg says, can't accommodate and act like the Pretenders [PRETENDERS MUSIC UNDER] who released two platinum and one gold album at their peak in the 1980s. [PRETENDERS MUSIC UP FULL] But the business models at smaller independent labels are designed to support acts like that, and in fact the Pretenders are now signed to Goldberg's four and a half year old Artemis Records. Goldberg says independent labels have traditionally been where new artists go to build their careers.
DANNY GOLDBERG: We're just putting out our second album by somebody named Jesse Malin. I'm very excited about it. The first album did about 30,000 but got good press; created some good interest at some parts of the media, and he's a brilliant guy. [Jesse Malin SONG PLAYS]
DANNY GOLDBERG: I think a major label might have spent more on the last record in terms of things like tour support, but they might not have made the second record.
RICK KARR: Goldberg says that throughout the history of the music business, independent labels have gone through cycles of their own, releasing jazz, R&B, rock & roll and punk when the majors were avoiding risk. Once the new genres became popular, the majors swooped in and co-opted them. The down side of the independent label, Goldberg says, is that it has a much harder time marketing artists like Jesse Malin by getting them played on commercial radio, an industry that went through its own cycle of consolidation and risk aversion in the '90s. But Danny Goldberg is bullish on the ability of new technologies to make up for the lack of radio exposure. He likes satellite radio, and he's a big fan of the subscription internet service Rhapsody which allows users to listen to a library of hundreds of thousands of songs for a flat monthly fee. Even the peer to peer networks, the scourge of the major labels, are proving to be places where smaller artists can get some attention. Consider the Seattle-based trio The Jeunes. [THE JEUNES MUSIC PLAYS] They've only played 14 shows, none of them outside the Pacific Northwest. But they have a passionate new fan 4,695 miles away in Derby, England: Musician and D-J Jyoti Mishra.
JYOTI MISHRA: I found about [sic] their music, cause I downloaded it, I thought illegally. Turns out they'd posted it themselves, to try and get better known.
RICK KARR: Mishra says The Jeunes are one of thousands of bands taking part in an on-line Renaissance of pop music -- recording at home, and if they're lucky, gathering fans from among the millions who troll the internet looking for music.
JYOTI MISHRA: People aren't waiting round for permission from major labels to have a career, to having their own career themselves. It may be tiny; it may be very locally-based. It may be internet-based. But they're not waiting round or spending their whole lives chasing some dream of, of being signed and getting some big thing happening. [JYOTI MISHRA'S YOUR WOMAN PLAYS]
RICK KARR: But Mishra knows firsthand that the major labels still dominate one thing -- marketing. They have the clout and the money to grab media attention in a crowded marketplace. His song, Your Woman, recorded under the name Whitetown, got him picked off a small independent label and on to the major EMI Records. In 1997, it went to number one in eight countries and sold more than a million singles and albums worldwide. Without EMI, it would probably never have sold more than a few thousand copies. Seven years later, Jyoti Mishra says, technology is at least starting to give musicians and music fans a choice. They no longer have to buy into the major labels' business model. For On the Media, I'm Rick Karr in New York.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did you ever have a tune burrow into your brain? Experts call it an earworm, and it can sound like this: [MR. SOFTEE THEME PLAYS UP & UNDER] Last summer, in his continuing battle against noise pollution, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg had proposed banning that theme from city streets, where it spills forth all summer long from Mr. Softee ice cream trucks. Think of the mayor as exterminator, nozzle trained on a public infestation of earworm. I remember the first time I had one. I was 9 years old. [MY BOY LOLLIPOP UP & UNDER]
SINGER: MY BOY LOLLIPOP, YOU MAKE MY HEART GO GIDDYAP, YOU SET THE WORLD ON FIRE, YOU ARE MY ONE DESIRE, YOU'RE MY LOLLIPOP [HARMONICA]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: My Boy Lollipop was number two on the hit parade, and it made my heart go giddyap until I was ready to dash my brains out. Took me years to get rid of it. Even now, it sneaks back if I'm tired. But, it could have been worse. [IT'S A SMALL WORLD PLAYS]
CHORUS OF
SINGERS: IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL, IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL, IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL....
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That nightmare tune appeared on a list of top ten earworms compiled last year by University of Cincinnati marketing professor James Kellaris, with the help of his students. As you might have guessed, songs with lyrics stick most, followed by commercial jingles and instrumental tunes. Kellaris found that most episodes last for hours. Those poor kids. [LION SLEEPS TONIGHT PLAYS]
SINGER: IN THE JUNGLE, THE MIGHTY JUNGLE, THE LION SLEEPS TONIGHT IN THE JUNGLE...
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In June of 1985, two young climbers attempted to scale a peak in the Peruvian Andes. As told in the book and documentary Touching the Void, one of them fell into a crevasse and was presumed dead. At one point, he almost wished he was, because of an earworm. [TOUCHING THE VOID CLIP PLAYS]
MAN: I did have one time when I got a song going through my head, and it was by a band called Boney M. I don't really like Boney M's music.
SINGERS: TRA LA LA
MAN: SHOW ME A MOTION--
SINGERS: TRA LA LA LA LA LA--
MAN: SHOW ME A MOTION--
SINGERS: TRA LA LA, LA LA--
MAN: SHE LOOKS LIKE A SUGAR IN THE PLUM
MAN: And it just went on and on and on, for hours. I found it very upsetting, cause I, I wanted to try and get it out of my head, I was thinking, you know, bloody hell, I'm going to die to Boney M.
MAN: SHOW ME A MOTION--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They say that musicians, women and neurotics are most susceptible to earworm, but according to the San Francisco Gate, Mark Twain once wrote a short story about a, quote, "jingling rhyme" that became indelibly lodged in the author's mind until he passed it on to another hapless victim. But does that really work? They say breathing into a paper bag can cure hiccups, but can no one rid me of this meddlesome tune? [MISSION IMPOSSIBLE THEME PLAYS UP & UNDER] Yes. It turns out Neva Grant, a senior producer at NPR's Morning Edition, has the cure.
NEVA GRANT: Yes, I do, Brooke. It is the song America from the musical West Side Story. You deploy this particular antidote when the song that's stuck in your head is so bad that even hearing: [SINGING] I LIKE TO BE IN AMERICA, over and over again is, is better than what was ever there before. Because you need something forceful to kind of push whatever the other thing is firmly out of the way.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So there you have it, folks. An end to misery. But don't thank me yet. It may not work for you. Even worse, you might not be able to get America out of your head. In that case, blame Neva. [INSTRUMENTAL SECTION OF AMERICA UP & UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, a song you probably will have no trouble getting out of your head. I know. I wrote it. BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Some years back, Bob had a speaking engagement in Nashville. Being an exquisitely sensitive person, he was seized by the vibrations emanating from the Grand Ol' Opry as well as visions of fortune and fame. This is what happened.
BOB GARFIELD: I was going to be in Nashville for a day and a half and my speaking gig wasn't going to tie me up for long, so I figured while I'm in town why not just write a hit country song and get it cut by a major recording star. I mean -- I am a writer. I live in a country. How hard could it be? [CLIP OF COUNTRY SONG PLAYS]
ASHLEY CLEVELAND: [SINGING] LOVELY LILY, HEAD SO FAIR HAZEL EYES, GOLDEN HAIR CLIMB THE BRANCHES OF YOUR FAMILY TREE YOUR MAMA'S ROOTS ARE IN TENNESSEE--
BOB GARFIELD: So I did what most aspiring musicians do as soon as they hit Nashville -- I found my way to the Bluebird Cafe. Open mic nights there have launched the careers of Garth Brooks, Vince Gill, Mary Chapin-Carpenter and more guitar-playing songwriters than you can shake a pick at. They duck in from the rain and sing about their pain -- (you might say if you were a professional songwriter, such as myself) -- displaying their charms for Opryland's waiting arms.
ASHLEY CLEVELAND: [SINGING] TENNESSEE-- TENNESSEE--
BOB GARFIELD: Singer/songwriter Ashley Cleveland was born and raised up just down the road a piece -- an advantage I don't have. I was born in Philadelphia and live in Washington. In other words -- I'm an outsider -- which suddenly struck me as a potential impediment to overnight fame and fortune. But just as I started fretting about possibly being too Washington for Nashville, who should I run into but former Governor Lamar Alexander who ran an entire presidential campaign bragging about being just the right amount of Nashville for Washington. Naturally, I asked him for advice.
BOB GARFIELD: My problem is I'm an inside-the-beltway kind of guy. I'm exactly what you ran against. Can I make it here in Nashville as an outsider any better than you made it in Washington that way?
LAMAR ALEXANDER: You, you've got to-- you've got to feel it. [LAUGHTER] But you can feel it from wherever you came from. [LAUGHS]
BOB GARFIELD: Even inside the beltway.
LAMAR ALEXANDER: You've got more to overcome than most people. [LAUGHTER]
BOB GARFIELD: Maybe he was looking at my blue blazer and penny loafers. But proprietor Amy Kurland told me to pay talk like that no mind. She's seen plenty of city slickers succeed and plenty of country boys with cowboy boots and big old hats squeezed by the business like a dip of snuff between your cheek and gum. All right, Miss Amy, I asked -- how do I mash that button of success? AMY KURLAND: Well something that -- creative that makes you different from the usual trite "come-into-my-arms-with-your-charms - I've got pain because - and I'm in the rain" -- you don't want to be saying that. You want to be a little more original than that. My fav--personal favorite them in country music is I'm a guy which makes me really dumb and now that my woman has pointed it out to me, I'm going to be better, and -- cause I really, really love her. That, that's a fine them in country music and one that sells all the time.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: Honesty -- that's what it takes to write a country song. You've got to make yourself vulnerable and do it in a way in which you're telling the truth for people. Tell 'em what you really feel.
BOB GARFIELD: Meet Rivers Rutherford, an up and coming young songwriter who splits his time between Whistler's Music, [sp?] a sophisticated commercial music production house on Music Row, and MCA Music Nashville, one of the big song publishers in town. Rivers and I would write our hit song together. It turns out that hardly anyone writes alone in Nashville. They team up, swinging from partner to partner in a sort of literary square dance. This was particularly convenient for me inasmuch as I can neither sing nor play an instrument. Also in terms of the themes that pervade country music, Rivers' Memphis upbringing was sure to complement my very substantial experience with big business, government and Judaism -- or so I thought. Now Rivers is extremely talented and a very nice guy but frankly a little difficult to work with. We only had one day -- yet still he categorically rejected my first two ideas -one about falling in love with a lonesome cowgirl at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee and the other about raising the younguns -- it had a catchy lyric-- PAPA DIDN'T RAISE YOU TO BE NO FOOL-- YOU'D BEST GET INTO A MAGNET SCHOOL. -- but Rivers didn't bite. And he was at best half-hearted in trying to put a melody to my song about those losers in the '83 Camaros who cut me off on the beltway because it's the only place on earth where they feel in control.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: [SINGING w/GUITAR] THERE YOU RUNNING ON THERE [...?...] RUNNING BEHIND FASTER YOU RUN THE LESS THAT YOU FIND BUT I THINK A BIG [...?...]'S THE VERY WORST KIND RUNNING, RUNNING, RUNNING AWAY FROM YOU.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: I gotta be honest with you -- I'm looking at the lyrics -- I think it's a little bit of a -you want to write a hit country song--
BOB GARFIELD: Yeah, and I'm running out of time.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: Okay. [LAUGHS] Yeah, we are running out of time on that aren't we. This is probably not going to get you a number one song in the short amount of time you got. The best thing to do is find a simpler idea, I would say. [LAUGHS] You know what I'm saying?
BOB GARFIELD: Oh, I knew all right! He was feeling threatened by the new kid on the block, by my rare insight into human behavior, by my tenderness, by my stunning command of-- what do you call it -- you know -- words. And most of all, my capacity for plagiarizing Jackson Browne. Professional jealousy is never pretty so I just let him natter on.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: Another slant on it would be to say basically that instead of running from these demons, what if the demon is just trying too hard or being too busy.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, wait, wait, wait -- what about this-- everyone's so busy -- now they're running behind -- what if-- what if - you ever have a conversation with somebody you can't have because you're calling their voice mail and they're calling your voice mail--
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: Right. Phone tag. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BOB GARFIELD: -- and then you-- Phone tag - and you know at the end - by the end of it you're just saying tag, you're it, right?
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: Okay.
BOB GARFIELD: So what if - what if there were a relationship building in an exchange of voice mail messages and the whole song was just this exchange of voice mail messages and the hook was Tag, You're It.
BOB GARFIELD: Well come to think of it, why not a song about telephone tag with your sweetheart? It's a common experience, harvested from my own life completely consistent with my inside-the-beltway sensibilities and just as the proprietor of the Bluebird Cafe suggested, it could be about a clueless guy who treats his woman wrong until she slaps him upside the head and gets him back on the road to love.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: [SINGING w/GUITAR] JUST CALLING TO LET YOU KNOW I GOT YOUR MESSAGE -- UM-- I GOT YOUR MESSAGE-- A WHILE AGO-- IN MY SUITCASE BY THE DOOR AND NOW-- SUITCASE IN MY HAND 6 O'CLOCK THIS MORNING I HADN'T TALKED TO YOU IN A COUPLE DAYS [...?...] CHECKING ALL MY CALLS-- 7 MESSAGES, YOURS WAS LAST OF ALL--
BOB GARFIELD: Yeah, I mean what - what if it tells a story -what story can we tell on the basis of two people who are just like-- electronic ships passing in the night? [LAUGHTER]
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: [SINGING w/GUITAR] DON'T KNOW, KNOW, KNOW DARLIN' I MISS YOU--
BOB GARFIELD: Sort of -- yeah-- I LOVE YOU-- I think you should leave the-- TAG, YOU'RE IT CALL ME WHEN YOU CAN SOMETHING, SOMETHING, SOMETHING, I'M A BUSY MAN--
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: [SINGING w/GUITAR] TAG, YOU'RE IT CALL ME WHEN YOU CAN--
BOB GARFIELD: All told it took us about 6 hours, and I don't mind telling you I was dripping with satisfaction like gravy over hot biscuits. All we had to do now was play the song for his publisher, Jody Williams, president of MCA Music Nashville. Then it would be demo'd and then shopped to likely artists -- Garth Brooks, Willie Nelson, what have you -- and my career would be launched even as I boarded the 6:05 p.m. flight back to Washington. Rivers was a little less enthused than I was in the very narrow sense that he thought upon further reflection that a song about telephone tag was pretty stupid and unlikely ever to be recorded much less hit the charts. And Williams, before he sat down to hear the thing, was none too encouraging either.
JODY WILLIAMS: The numbers are against you tremendously in this business. A thousand songs a day get written in this town. Two percent of those songs get recorded. Not 10 percent. 2 percent. Sometimes it's, it's supposed to work like this -- the best song wins. It doesn't always work like that. There are politics involved. There are people doing people favors.
BOB GARFIELD: Politics? Favors?! For this I left Washington? Whatever happened to just being an artist and succeeding on your God-given talent? Tell you what, Jody -- I don't need any political connections to make it in this town. Just listen to the song. Just listen to Tag, You're It.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: [SINGING w/GUITAR] HELLO, I'M SORRY DARLIN/ I MISSED YOUR CALL AGAIN IF YOU'DA TRIED AT 10 TO 5 I MIGHT HAVE SQUEEZED YOU IN I REALLY WANT TO REACH YOU BUT TIME IS KIND OF TIGHT I LOVE YOU, HON BUT I GOTTA RUN, SO KISS THE KIDS GOODNIGHT TAG, YOU'RE IT CATCH ME IF YOU CAN I'D LOVE TO SAY I LOVE YOU BUT I'M SUCH A BUSY MAN I KNOW WE'LL REACH EACH OTHER IT'S JUST A QUESTION WHEN I'M CALLING YOU BUT I CAN'T GET THROUGH SO TRY ME BACK AGAIN IN REFERENCE TO YOUR VOICE MAIL AND GIRL I MISS YOU TOO YOU'RE QUITE CORRECT WE SHOULD CONNECT THE WAY WE USED TO DO I'LL TRY TO SHOW THAT I STILL KNOW WHAT LOVING REALLY MEANS LOOK FOR SOMETHING SPECIAL, HON ACROSS YOUR FAX MACHINE TAG, YOU'RE IT CATCH ME IF YOU CAN I'D LOVE TO SAY I LOVE YOU BUT I'M SUCH A BUSY MAN I KNOW WE'LL REACH EACH OTHER IT'S JUST A QUESTION WHEN I'M CALLING YOU BUT I CAN'T GET THROUGH SO TRY ME BACK AGAIN JUST TURNED MY COMPUTER ON FOUND THE E-MAIL THAT YOU SENT S.O.S. - I'M IN DISTRESS NEED ACKNOWLEDGMENT YOU SAID OUR SHIP WAS SINKING BUT THE METAPHOR AIN'T RIGHT CAUSE WE'RE NOT SHIPS JUST MICROCHIPS PASSING IN THE NIGHT TAG, THAT'S IT! [SEE ?] ME IF YOU CAN I'M HERE TO SAY I LOVE YOU AND I'M SUCH A FOOLISH MAN WE HAVEN'T TOUCHED EACH OTHER SINCE I DON'T REMEMBER WHEN HANG UP [...?...] COMING HOME [...?...] TAKE ME BACK AGAIN.
BOB GARFIELD: The president of MCA Music Nashville had just heard our song about telephone tag and for a moment he just sat there, quietly stunned.
JODY WILLIAMS: I've never heard that idea before.
BOB GARFIELD: Judging from the look in his eyes, I don't reckon he ever needed to hear it again. I was hoping for him to get a blank contract out, but instead he and Rivers went back and forth on how the song could be re-written.
JODY WILLIAMS: A guy who's just busy -- I mean have a mid-tempo song or have a ballad saying our, our lives are -- you know - this is ridiculous, you know? And start sympathizing with each other. I don't think it's-- [...?...] new hook cause Tag, You're It ain't gonna [...?...] at all.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: Tag, You're It ain't gonna do it.
BOB GARFIELD: Ain't gonna do it?! TAG, THAT'S IT! BELIEVE ME IF YOU CAN IF I THOUGHT I WAS A SONGWRITER, I'M SUCH A FOOLISH MAN Just like that, my dreams of more than 30 hours were crushed. I guess Lamar was right after all.
ECHOES OF LAMAR ALEXANDER'S VOICE: You've got more to overcome than most people. [ECHOING LAUGHTER] You've got more to overcome than most people. [ECHOING LAUGHTER]
BOB GARFIELD: Later, as he was packing me off to the airport, Rivers spoke to me as if I were Dorothy and he were the Good Witch of the South. He could have told me that playing that song for Jody Williams would get me sent back to Washington -- but I had to find out for myself.
BOB GARFIELD: At what point did you just completely lose hope in this--?
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: I think the-- at the point when you said something about-- you know we could write a song about, about phone tag -- that's when the, the hope pretty much flew out of the window for me. [CLIP OF PATSY CLINE SINGING "CRAZY" PLAYS]
PATSY CLINE: [SINGING] CRAZY I'M CRAZY FOR FEELING SO LONELY I'M CRAZY CRAZY FOR FEELING BLUE--
BOB GARFIELD: Yeah, Patsy -- I must have been out of my mind to think I could pull this off.
PATSY CLINE: [SINGING] CRAZY FOR FEELING SO BLUE--
BOB GARFIELD: I can't get a record cut any more than Reba McIntire can do a 5-part series on health care reform. But as I sat in my airplane set, dejected, I couldn't help but notice someone familiar sitting across the aisle. It was someone who knew not only the inside of the beltway but the epicenter -- the ultimate Washingtonian -- and yet someone equally rooted in the cultures and rhythms of the rural South. I traded seats with the Secret Service Agent next to him and asked Jimmy Carter about his taste in music.
JIMMY CARTER: Do I listen to a country music station? Well in Americus, Georgia and I listen to a whole gamut of country music.
BOB GARFIELD: Is it possible do you suppose to bring a Washington sensibility to country music?
JIMMY CARTER: I'd be amazed.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, well then I just want to play this for you -- would you just listen to this?
JIMMY CARTER: Sure.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, thanks.
BOB GARFIELD: Whereupon the former President of the United States strapped on my headphones and listened to my song, flashing his famous toothy grin and, if I'm not mistaken, tapping his toe securely beneath the seat in front of him.
BOB GARFIELD: So what do you think?
JIMMY CARTER: I think the song is good, and the music's good. I'd like to hear it every now and then on my country radio station, and-- you know you might get in touch with -- I'm not - I think the performer's very good but-- if somebody like Willie Nelson or Tom T. Hall is one of my best buddies-- I think they would like it and they could give you some good advice.
BOB GARFIELD: With your compliments?
JIMMY CARTER: Of course, sure!
BOB GARFIELD: I'll see you at the Country Music Awards, Mr. President.
BOB GARFIELD: Upright bass, Dave Pomeroy; Robbie Turner on dobro, Tom Rody on drums, Aubrey Heaney on fiddle, [sp?] Rivers Rutherford on vocals and acoustic guitar and -- ladies and gentlemen --Mr. Willie Nelson.
WILLIE NELSON: [SINGING w/BAND & BACKUP VOCALS] HELLO, I'M SORRY DARLIN I MISSED YOUR CALL AGAIN IF YOU'DA TRIED AT 10 TO 5 MIGHT HAVE SQUEEZED YOU IN I REALLY WANT TO REACH YOU BUT TIME IS KIND OF TIGHT I LOVE YOU, HON BUT I GOTTA RUN, SO KISS THE KIDS GOODNIGHT TAG, YOU'RE IT CATCH ME IF YOU CAN I'D LOVE TO SAY I LOVE YOU BUT I'M SUCH A BUSY MAN I KNOW WE'LL REACH EACH OTHER IT'S JUST A QUESTION WHEN I'M CALLING YOU BUT I CAN'T GET THROUGH SO TRY ME BACK AGAIN IN REFERENCE TO YOUR VOICE MAIL AND GIRL I MISS YOU TOO YOU'RE QUITE CORRECT WE SHOULD CONNECT THE WAY WE USED TO DO I'LL TRY TO SHOW THAT I STILL KNOW WHAT LOVING REALLY MEANS LOOK FOR SOMETHING SPECIAL, HON ACROSS YOUR FAX MACHINE TAG, YOU'RE IT CATCH ME IF YOU CAN I'D LOVE TO SAY I LOVE YOU BUT I'M SUCH A BUSY MAN I KNOW WE'LL REACH EACH OTHER IT'S JUST A QUESTION WHEN I'M CALLING YOU BUT I CAN'T GET THROUGH SO TRY ME BACK AGAIN
WILLIE NELSON: Take it, boys! [INSTRUMENTAL]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was directed by Katya Rogers and produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York, and Mike Vuolo, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director, and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Anne Kosseff and Neil Rausch. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media, from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Goodbye, Darlin'.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. On November 2nd, filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam. The man charged with the crime is a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim extremist. The motive - a film that Van Gogh had made called "Submission" about the treatment of women under Islam.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: For the Dutch, it was a moment of reckoning. Suddenly, the country found itself struggling with its long, proud tradition of tolerance, and its resolutely politically correct press would have to raise those questions and report on the debate. The media throughout the west are in the midst of developing a vocabulary to address the issues raised by the culture clash between rapidly expanding Muslim communities and their host nations.
BOB GARFIELD: Back in the Netherlands last week, the popular right wing politician Geert Wilders called for a five year halt to non-western immigration, saying that the country had been tolerant of intolerant people for too long. Meanwhile, a wave of violence committed by and against Muslims has consumed the country. Martin Walker is the editor in chief of United Press International. He's been reading the papers in the Netherlands and around Europe, and he says the Dutch press reflects the anguish of that nation.
MARTIN WALKER: On the front page of Algemeen Dagblad, one of the great daily papers of Holland, they have the front page editorial to the queen saying "Your Majesty, please speak to us, your people. Hate is spreading like wildfire through the country. Mosques, churches, schools, children are targets of attack. The Netherlands is in danger of becoming a country of them and us. Your Majesty, please speak."
BOB GARFIELD: The New York Times described that the Dutch have been almost tongue-tied in their inability to deal with their conflicting feelings.
MARTIN WALKER: But what they're all trying to agree upon is that there has to be absolutely no compromise with the fact that this was a vicious murder and that there are ruthless Islamic extremists who have to be brought under control. To that extent, some of the old easy, knee-jerk liberal response towards integration and immigration really has become bypassed by the realities of what's been taking place in Holland. And that's also, I think, been happening in much of the rest of Europe where there has long been a fairly unthinking political correctness saying that there should be a welcome for immigrants. After all, we need their labor. They should be allowed to maintain their culture. And it began to go very sour, I think, with the elections in France 18 months ago when Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen became the challenger to Jacques Chirac, when we've seen in Germany the, the rise of far right parties of, frankly, a neo-Nazi party in Germany. Far right parties emerging also in Britain. We've seen them in, in Belgium become the, the biggest single party in the Flemish part of Belgium.
BOB GARFIELD: And leave us not forget Austria.
MARTIN WALKER: Let's not forget Denmark either, where they're also terribly powerful. And as a result, what we've seen in traditionally liberal newspapers, to give you one example, one of the most liberal papers of all is Sweden's Expression -- says that they "entirely support the way the Dutch government has declared war on Islamic terrorism. It might be a risk, but it's a risk that has to be taken, because the threat of a growing division in Dutch society and in Europe more widely would have been much greater had the authorities not reacted. The kind of political extremism which Van Gogh's murderers represent is just as dangerous as that of the Communist terrorist of the 1970s or of neo-Nazis, and we have to be very, very clear about that." In Germany, Die Welt: "We can now see that the liberal European belief in building communities like a little Istanbul or a little Marakesh are, in fact, turning into Europe's own nightmare of a little Gaza, a little Baghdad here in the Netherlands. Some day it might become a little Fallujah. Europe has to accept the prospect of serious clashes with Islamic extremists, and if governments are unable react appropriately, Europe will not only face the feared clash of civilizations. We will also face the prospect of an increasingly strong far right that is going to be too strong to be stopped."
BOB GARFIELD: It's such a striking situation. In the U.S., of course, we face similar tensions, trying to preserve civil liberties and to protect the idea of the melting pot while simultaneously trying to protect our borders and, and our people from terrorism. Is Europe and the European press now getting a taste of the American dilemma?
MARTIN WALKER: There has long been this feeling in, in Europe of rather smug superiority vis-a-vis America -- that America was the place that had the racial problems, the civil rights problems, and there was liberal Europe without such difficulties, and suddenly they're realizing that they've been living in a dream world, and what we're seeing is not simply the actual conflict with Islamic extremism, but we're also seeing, I think, a real tussle with the traditions of political correctness you see, for example, in Die Welt. "Our states in Europe have hitherto allowed extremists to create networks under the protection of the so-called communal dialogue, the beneficiaries of whom have had only one goal -- to live in accordance with their own rules and cancel out ours -- to abolish our constitutional state. We cannot afford to let that happen." Theo Van Gogh was not alone in starting to do fairly hard-hitting films, TV documentaries, radio programs. In Britain, something that we've seen over the last year has been a couple of documentaries on honor killings by Islamic fathers of daughters whose offense was simply to date European or British boys whom they had met at school. Something of the same kind has been taking place in France, where we've had a couple of TV documentaries on a phenomenon called the "tournante" -- in effect, a gang rape of a French girl by young Muslim boys, and there is some claim that in some parts of Muslim society this has become almost a rite of passage for adolescence. These may be very isolated examples, but in the mood of Europe at the moment, they have simply mushroomed and become very, very explosive urban legends and ones that I think are going to have a really important impact upon coming elections. I think Europe's in for a very, very tricky period.
BOB GARFIELD: Martin, thank you very much.
MARTIN WALKER: You're very welcome.
BOB GARFIELD: Martin Walker is editor in chief of United Press International. BROOKE GLADSTONE: This week, CBS announced that its evening news anchor, the man who had held that post for an unprecedented 24 years, would be signing off on March 9th. Ladies and gentlemen, Dan Rather is leaving the building. [NEWS THEME MUSIC UP & UNDER]
ANNOUNCER: This is the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather reporting from CBS News Headquarters in New York.
DAN RATHER:Good evening. Danger. War. Killer. Fraud. CIA. Mayhem. Crisis. Horrible. Inflation. Military threat. The flaming debris. Fatal heart attack....
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It would have been tough for anyone to take the mantle from the person once voted Most Trusted Man in America, but though it was hotly contested, Bill Leonard, then head of CBS News, called it for Rather.
BILL LEONARD: I'm delighted to announce that Dan Rather will succeed Walter Cronkite as anchorman and managing editor of the CBS Evening News in early 1981.
DAN RATHER: I seek to be in the Walter Cronkite mold, in the Ed Murrow mold before him. To the best of my abilities, I want to be an honest broker of information.
WALTER CRONKITE: Well, let me-- I'll just add a word to that. I don't think that with Dan taking over the CBS Evening News there's any problem of transition.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But despite Cronkite's reassuring words, there may have been a problem or two. At the time, some thought veteran newsman Roger Mudd was the heir apparent, passed over because he wasn't as pretty as Rather. And though Cronkite denies it, there were rumors that Uncle Walter was being rushed into retirement because Rather threatened to switch networks. In that scenario, reminiscent of the film "All About Eve," Rather plays a rising star who ruthlessly pushes her mentor out of the way. We don't know about that. But the film's famous quip still works. [ALL ABOUT EVE CLIP]
BETTE DAVIS: Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In Dan's case, that night lasted 24 years. He walked off a newscast when it was delayed by a tennis match. He was attacked by a man on Park Avenue who asked: Kenneth, what is the frequency?* He briefly ended his newscasts with the word "Courage," causing waggish competitors like Bryant Gumbel to sign off with "Mazeltov," and "Hot dogs." And if you can't remember those bumps in Rather's road, you have only to cast your mind back to the monumental pothole he drove over last September, that 60 Minutes II- story about the president's dubious National Guard record and those equally dubious memos used to back that story up.
DAN RATHER: Are those documents authentic, as experts consulted by CBS News continue to maintain, or were they forgeries or re-creations? We will keep an open mind, and we will continue to report credible evidence and responsible points of view as we try to answer the questions raised about the authenticity of the documents.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And, a week later...
DAN RATHER: I made a mistake. I didn't dig hard enough, long enough, didn't ask enough of the right questions.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Here was proof positive, or perhaps just the latest in a career-long series of proofs positive, that Dan Rather had a liberal bias. But reporters are people too, and everyone, with the exception of Jim Lehrer, has some kind of bias. They just try not to let it show. Cronkite rarely did. When he pronounced the Vietnam War unwinnable, the Johnson administration gasped. Despite a few suppressed tears when President Kennedy died, Cronkite was always clear-eyed and steady in the tradition of network newsmen he helped to establish. Dan was different. He let it show. He let everything show, as at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. [HUBBUB -- SEVERAL SPEAK AT ONCE]
DAN RATHER: I know you-- but don't push me! Take your hands off of me unless you plan to arrest me!
MAN: Wait a minute, wait a minute! Wait a minute--
DAN RATHER: Walter, as you can see--
WALTER CRONKITE: I don't know what's going on but this - these are security people apparently, around Dan--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And after the Twin Towers fell on September 11th, 2001.
DAN RATHER: If they could go down to Ground Zero and see the following -- see those firemen--[CHOKED UP WITH EMOTION] Take this, [...?...] will you?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: He was emotional, excitable, occasionally obnoxious. Even when confronting famously combative presidents like Richard Nixon, he just couldn't put a sock in it.
DAN RATHER: Thank you, Mr. President. Dan Rather, with CBS News. [APPLAUSE, CHEERS]
RICHARD NIXON: Are you running for something? [LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE]
DAN RATHER: No, sir, Mr. President, are you? [LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: He didn't like Nixon. We know that. There was hardly anything about Dan Rather we didn't know, if we watched regularly, and millions did. He was a bit of a loon, especially on election night. Oh, those Ratherisms.
DAN RATHER: You'd have to say this thing is as tight as the rusted lug nuts on a '55 Ford.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As he explained to David Letterman--
DAN RATHER: I grew up around people who talked this way.
DAVID LETTERMAN: Oh, I see. So all of these are, are -- you just recall them from your experience.
DAN RATHER: Yeah, and during the year, if I hear something that I say to myself -- you know, that's colorful language and I think I could use it election night...
BROOKE GLADSTONE: I never met anyone who talked like that, but I believe him when he says he did. Rather is believable because he is so raw. The first and only extreme anchor in network news. In a time when journalists are suspected of secretly harboring opinions, Rather, consciously or not, goes with full disclosure. In an era when anchors are processed and poured into a mold like Velveeta, Rather is pungent and runny. He hyped and sentimentalized coverage, but I do not agree with the critics who say that Dan Rather in all his discombobulated liberalness compromised the integrity of network news. If anything sinks that once great institution, it won't be lefty-ness or even craziness. It'll be cowardice. Come to think of it, 18 years ago, when Rather intoned "Courage," at the end of his newscasts, maybe he wasn't talking to us. [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: Up next, the vast amounts of money it takes to keep mainstream music terrible, and the terrible music that gets trapped in your brain.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR. [MUSIC] * When originally aired, the assailant's question was mistakenly reported as "Kenneth, where is the frequency?" BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. A few weeks ago, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer issued subpoenas to the four big music conglomerates, investigating how songs earn or buy radio play. Spitzer's investigation shed light on one of the oldest problems in pop music: payola. Payola had its heyday in the 1950s, when a handful of disc jockeys were convicted of taking money in exchange for playing a few potential hits. Many thought the practice had gone the way of rigging game shows, but it seems to have merely changed form. James Surowiecki wrote about modern payola for the New Yorker magazine, and he joins us now. Jim, welcome back to the show.
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Thanks for having me on.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what is modern payola?
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Well, the simple idea of payola, of course, is record labels paying radio stations in order to get their records on the air, and modern payola takes a variety of forms. The simplest form, which I think is the one that Spitzer is really trying to investigate are record labels use these people called independent promoters who basically funnel money to radio stations by a variety of means. They pay for things that they call research funds. They give gifts in kind. They'll throw big events, etc. -- in order to kind of basically push their records -- at least get their records on the horizon. And then there's this other interesting form which has gained a lot of notice recently which are called spot buys.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And that's legal.
JAMES SUROWIECKI: That's totally legal, and basically what a spot buy is, is essentially a record label will buy big chunks of air time. One of the examples I wrote about was Avril Levigne's record label basically bought radio time on a series of stations around the country, and they would just play the song over and over again, like three, four times an hour.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You say that this kind of legal payola is worse than the illegal kind.
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Well, you know, the traditional form of payola back in the 1950s when famously, you know, Alan Freed, who was one of the first real rock & roll deejays, was eventually accused and indicted for taking bribes to play records. That payola, what that actually did was break a lot of interesting records. There's a real good argument to be made that a lot of black music--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You mean break them into the--?
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Into the mainstream [LAUGHS] - yeah, I'm sorry -- break them as hits, not smash them -- that Chuck Berry, people like that would, would maybe never have become the pop icons they became had it not been for payola. Because what it did was it allowed these relatively unknown artists to get played. The problem with this kind of spot buy payola is that it actually has nothing to do with real popularity. It has nothing to do with breaking new artists. It really is just an attempt to game a completely corrupt system, which is the Billboard ranking system, and it really serves no purpose other than to kind of artificially create popularity.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, let's talk about the Billboard ranking service, because as you noted in your piece, this is how radio stations, many of them, determine their playlists, and if people buy spot ads, basically buy the time to play those songs, it still counts on the Billboard chart.
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Yeah. That's the most perplexing part of this, and, and it's - it's sort of hard to keep in your head, but, but if you think about it, all Billboard is basically recording is how many times individual songs are played. And for some bizarre reason, they do not distinguish between records that are played because some deejay decides to play them and records that are played because a record label has bought the time. So that's a huge flaw and loophole in the ranking system, and that's what these labels are trying to exploit.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But paying for placement is acceptable in other markets. Coke pays to have its soda displayed prominently in the supermarket. Publishers do the same in bookstores. Why not music on the radio?
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Well, I think the reason why we accept it in supermarkets and we accept it in, in bookstores -- although the truth is, we don't, most people don't know about it in bookstores -- is that radio is a weird medium. A song is an advertisement for itself. The record labels give these songs to radio stations effectively -- they pay a small royalty -- so that people will hear them and then say oh, I gotta buy the album. But at the same time radio is kind of art as well, you know, you don't - you - we don't want it to be corrupt.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But let's talk about transparency, then, because you make a big point in your piece of saying that legal payola is fully disclosed. If the record company that owns Avril Levigne's records pays for those air plays, the public hears that they're being paid for. Does that make a difference?
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Well, it certainly makes a difference legally. As long as payola is acknowledged, it, it is legal, and these Avril Levigne songs, at the end they would say, you know, "this has been sponsored by" - or at the beginning…
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So instead we have this legal and aboveboard system whereby big companies can pay for play and thereby queer the Billboard charts that all the stations look at to determine what they're going to play. So is there any way to know what the public really likes?
JAMES SUROWIECKI: That's a really fascinating question, because I think at this point it's a sort of circular logic going on here. Popular songs get played, but what gets played is what's -becomes popular, etc. So it is very hard to figure out exactly what the audience wants to hear. I do think that Billboard -- and it mystifies me why they have not done this -- should just change their ranking system. It would not be hard to do. The spot buys have to be acknowledged, so they have to be recorded. Billboard should just exclude those, and then we'd still be with this radically impure system, but it would be a lot better than what we've ended up with.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What does the conventional wisdom tell us about whether it's possible to create a hit simply by playing a song a lot?
JAMES SUROWIECKI: I think conventional wisdom probably would tell us that you can buy a hit. I actually don't fully believe that. It's certainly possible to push songs higher up than they would normally be. I feel about it a little bit the way I feel about movies. It's very easy to open a movie big. But it's very hard to create a movie that actually endures over time. And I think with records it's probably pretty close to the same thing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jim, thanks very much.
JAMES SUROWIECKI: Thanks for having me on.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: James Surowiecki is author of The Wisdom of Crowds, and columnist for the New Yorker magazine.
BOB GARFIELD: Last week, the major record labels trade group filed copyright infringement lawsuits against another 761 users of online peer to peer file trading networks, bringing the total to nearly 7,000 lawsuits filed.
At the same time, Atlanta-based research firm Big Champagne reported that more Americans than ever, nearly 20 million of them, are using peer to peers. For the five years that networks like Napster have come and gone and come again, their fans have been saying one of the prime attractions is the availability of music that isn't on the shelves at big box retail stores and isn't being played on commercial radio.
Rick Karr reports that the business model used by major labels has driven musicians and fans to the peer to peers. And to other new technologies.
RICK KARR: Every generation seems to hear the decline of Western civilization in the next generation's pop music, but apocalyptic visions of the aging aside, the aesthetics of pop music have changed over the past couple decades, in large part due to changing business realities in the music industry. Harold Vogel is a New York financial analyst and author of Entertainment Industry Economics, a textbook that's just gone into its sixth edition. He says the changes have affected the record business and radio in the same way.
HAROLD VOGEL: There's a cycle of, let's say, protectionism and risk-aversion, and we're in the depth of that right now. There's certainly a lot of risk-aversion. If it isn't popular in twelve different markets, why should we play it? And nobody wants to play the unpopular or the new or the different.
RICK KARR: Vogel says the risk-averse phase of that business cycle is a long hangover of sorts from the industry's huge expansion in the 1960s and '70s. The Baby Boomers set off a boom in the record industry, rewarding labels that took risks on new talent by making those artists into bankable stars. [LED ZEPPELIN MUSIC PLAYS] Vogel says record labels got used to strong cash flow and big profits, so when the boom tapered off in the late '70s, the industry scrambled to sustain profitability. One solution came from sales of the new compact discs. A lot of music fans bought their record collections all over again. [LED ZEPPELIN] The other way to sustain profits was to cut costs, and so the record industry started to consolidate: conglomerates snapped up independent labels, and major labels merged. The conglomerates set earnings targets and borrowed a page from the movie business's playbook -- the "tentpole release." Vogel says that's what Hollywood calls a film that's supposed to be a blockbuster that props up the studio's finances.
HAROLD VOGEL: An expensive picture, high marketing, high production value, lots of big stars, and all your other pictures, your other 15 pictures or so, would fall under the tent, basically. This would carry the season and be the thing you talk about to your shareholders in the annual report that you write the next spring.
RICK KARR: The same pressures drive tentpole releases in the record business. At least once a quarter, says former Mercury and Warner Bros. chief Danny Goldberg, you have to have a big hit.
DANNY GOLDBERG: When you look at a schedule, and you know you have to make whatever the number is for your company -- 200 million or 300 million or 400 million for the year in terms of your top line of sales -- something you can ship a million of is ten million of those dollars, and almost the same amount of staff time goes into setting up a release where you ship a million as setting up a release where you ship a hundred thousand.
RICK KARR: By extension, a record that sells ten million copies is an even better financial proposition. Goldberg says that makes it harder for major labels to take risks and puts a premium on releases by bankable stars. Labels pay bigger and bigger cash advances to those stars and spend millions promoting their releases to retailers and radio broadcasters. But--:
DANNY GOLDBERG: The more resources that go into that, the less resources are available for the development of, of new talent.
RICK KARR: Even established stars suffer if their records sell only, say, a few hundred thousand copies. The business model at today's major labels, Goldberg says, can't accommodate and act like the Pretenders [PRETENDERS MUSIC UNDER] who released two platinum and one gold album at their peak in the 1980s. [PRETENDERS MUSIC UP FULL] But the business models at smaller independent labels are designed to support acts like that, and in fact the Pretenders are now signed to Goldberg's four and a half year old Artemis Records. Goldberg says independent labels have traditionally been where new artists go to build their careers.
DANNY GOLDBERG: We're just putting out our second album by somebody named Jesse Malin. I'm very excited about it. The first album did about 30,000 but got good press; created some good interest at some parts of the media, and he's a brilliant guy. [Jesse Malin SONG PLAYS]
DANNY GOLDBERG: I think a major label might have spent more on the last record in terms of things like tour support, but they might not have made the second record.
RICK KARR: Goldberg says that throughout the history of the music business, independent labels have gone through cycles of their own, releasing jazz, R&B, rock & roll and punk when the majors were avoiding risk. Once the new genres became popular, the majors swooped in and co-opted them. The down side of the independent label, Goldberg says, is that it has a much harder time marketing artists like Jesse Malin by getting them played on commercial radio, an industry that went through its own cycle of consolidation and risk aversion in the '90s. But Danny Goldberg is bullish on the ability of new technologies to make up for the lack of radio exposure. He likes satellite radio, and he's a big fan of the subscription internet service Rhapsody which allows users to listen to a library of hundreds of thousands of songs for a flat monthly fee. Even the peer to peer networks, the scourge of the major labels, are proving to be places where smaller artists can get some attention. Consider the Seattle-based trio The Jeunes. [THE JEUNES MUSIC PLAYS] They've only played 14 shows, none of them outside the Pacific Northwest. But they have a passionate new fan 4,695 miles away in Derby, England: Musician and D-J Jyoti Mishra.
JYOTI MISHRA: I found about [sic] their music, cause I downloaded it, I thought illegally. Turns out they'd posted it themselves, to try and get better known.
RICK KARR: Mishra says The Jeunes are one of thousands of bands taking part in an on-line Renaissance of pop music -- recording at home, and if they're lucky, gathering fans from among the millions who troll the internet looking for music.
JYOTI MISHRA: People aren't waiting round for permission from major labels to have a career, to having their own career themselves. It may be tiny; it may be very locally-based. It may be internet-based. But they're not waiting round or spending their whole lives chasing some dream of, of being signed and getting some big thing happening. [JYOTI MISHRA'S YOUR WOMAN PLAYS]
RICK KARR: But Mishra knows firsthand that the major labels still dominate one thing -- marketing. They have the clout and the money to grab media attention in a crowded marketplace. His song, Your Woman, recorded under the name Whitetown, got him picked off a small independent label and on to the major EMI Records. In 1997, it went to number one in eight countries and sold more than a million singles and albums worldwide. Without EMI, it would probably never have sold more than a few thousand copies. Seven years later, Jyoti Mishra says, technology is at least starting to give musicians and music fans a choice. They no longer have to buy into the major labels' business model. For On the Media, I'm Rick Karr in New York.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Did you ever have a tune burrow into your brain? Experts call it an earworm, and it can sound like this: [MR. SOFTEE THEME PLAYS UP & UNDER] Last summer, in his continuing battle against noise pollution, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg had proposed banning that theme from city streets, where it spills forth all summer long from Mr. Softee ice cream trucks. Think of the mayor as exterminator, nozzle trained on a public infestation of earworm. I remember the first time I had one. I was 9 years old. [MY BOY LOLLIPOP UP & UNDER]
SINGER: MY BOY LOLLIPOP, YOU MAKE MY HEART GO GIDDYAP, YOU SET THE WORLD ON FIRE, YOU ARE MY ONE DESIRE, YOU'RE MY LOLLIPOP [HARMONICA]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: My Boy Lollipop was number two on the hit parade, and it made my heart go giddyap until I was ready to dash my brains out. Took me years to get rid of it. Even now, it sneaks back if I'm tired. But, it could have been worse. [IT'S A SMALL WORLD PLAYS]
CHORUS OF
SINGERS: IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL, IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL, IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL....
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That nightmare tune appeared on a list of top ten earworms compiled last year by University of Cincinnati marketing professor James Kellaris, with the help of his students. As you might have guessed, songs with lyrics stick most, followed by commercial jingles and instrumental tunes. Kellaris found that most episodes last for hours. Those poor kids. [LION SLEEPS TONIGHT PLAYS]
SINGER: IN THE JUNGLE, THE MIGHTY JUNGLE, THE LION SLEEPS TONIGHT IN THE JUNGLE...
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In June of 1985, two young climbers attempted to scale a peak in the Peruvian Andes. As told in the book and documentary Touching the Void, one of them fell into a crevasse and was presumed dead. At one point, he almost wished he was, because of an earworm. [TOUCHING THE VOID CLIP PLAYS]
MAN: I did have one time when I got a song going through my head, and it was by a band called Boney M. I don't really like Boney M's music.
SINGERS: TRA LA LA
MAN: SHOW ME A MOTION--
SINGERS: TRA LA LA LA LA LA--
MAN: SHOW ME A MOTION--
SINGERS: TRA LA LA, LA LA--
MAN: SHE LOOKS LIKE A SUGAR IN THE PLUM
MAN: And it just went on and on and on, for hours. I found it very upsetting, cause I, I wanted to try and get it out of my head, I was thinking, you know, bloody hell, I'm going to die to Boney M.
MAN: SHOW ME A MOTION--
BROOKE GLADSTONE: They say that musicians, women and neurotics are most susceptible to earworm, but according to the San Francisco Gate, Mark Twain once wrote a short story about a, quote, "jingling rhyme" that became indelibly lodged in the author's mind until he passed it on to another hapless victim. But does that really work? They say breathing into a paper bag can cure hiccups, but can no one rid me of this meddlesome tune? [MISSION IMPOSSIBLE THEME PLAYS UP & UNDER] Yes. It turns out Neva Grant, a senior producer at NPR's Morning Edition, has the cure.
NEVA GRANT: Yes, I do, Brooke. It is the song America from the musical West Side Story. You deploy this particular antidote when the song that's stuck in your head is so bad that even hearing: [SINGING] I LIKE TO BE IN AMERICA, over and over again is, is better than what was ever there before. Because you need something forceful to kind of push whatever the other thing is firmly out of the way.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So there you have it, folks. An end to misery. But don't thank me yet. It may not work for you. Even worse, you might not be able to get America out of your head. In that case, blame Neva. [INSTRUMENTAL SECTION OF AMERICA UP & UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, a song you probably will have no trouble getting out of your head. I know. I wrote it. BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Some years back, Bob had a speaking engagement in Nashville. Being an exquisitely sensitive person, he was seized by the vibrations emanating from the Grand Ol' Opry as well as visions of fortune and fame. This is what happened.
BOB GARFIELD: I was going to be in Nashville for a day and a half and my speaking gig wasn't going to tie me up for long, so I figured while I'm in town why not just write a hit country song and get it cut by a major recording star. I mean -- I am a writer. I live in a country. How hard could it be? [CLIP OF COUNTRY SONG PLAYS]
ASHLEY CLEVELAND: [SINGING] LOVELY LILY, HEAD SO FAIR HAZEL EYES, GOLDEN HAIR CLIMB THE BRANCHES OF YOUR FAMILY TREE YOUR MAMA'S ROOTS ARE IN TENNESSEE--
BOB GARFIELD: So I did what most aspiring musicians do as soon as they hit Nashville -- I found my way to the Bluebird Cafe. Open mic nights there have launched the careers of Garth Brooks, Vince Gill, Mary Chapin-Carpenter and more guitar-playing songwriters than you can shake a pick at. They duck in from the rain and sing about their pain -- (you might say if you were a professional songwriter, such as myself) -- displaying their charms for Opryland's waiting arms.
ASHLEY CLEVELAND: [SINGING] TENNESSEE-- TENNESSEE--
BOB GARFIELD: Singer/songwriter Ashley Cleveland was born and raised up just down the road a piece -- an advantage I don't have. I was born in Philadelphia and live in Washington. In other words -- I'm an outsider -- which suddenly struck me as a potential impediment to overnight fame and fortune. But just as I started fretting about possibly being too Washington for Nashville, who should I run into but former Governor Lamar Alexander who ran an entire presidential campaign bragging about being just the right amount of Nashville for Washington. Naturally, I asked him for advice.
BOB GARFIELD: My problem is I'm an inside-the-beltway kind of guy. I'm exactly what you ran against. Can I make it here in Nashville as an outsider any better than you made it in Washington that way?
LAMAR ALEXANDER: You, you've got to-- you've got to feel it. [LAUGHTER] But you can feel it from wherever you came from. [LAUGHS]
BOB GARFIELD: Even inside the beltway.
LAMAR ALEXANDER: You've got more to overcome than most people. [LAUGHTER]
BOB GARFIELD: Maybe he was looking at my blue blazer and penny loafers. But proprietor Amy Kurland told me to pay talk like that no mind. She's seen plenty of city slickers succeed and plenty of country boys with cowboy boots and big old hats squeezed by the business like a dip of snuff between your cheek and gum. All right, Miss Amy, I asked -- how do I mash that button of success? AMY KURLAND: Well something that -- creative that makes you different from the usual trite "come-into-my-arms-with-your-charms - I've got pain because - and I'm in the rain" -- you don't want to be saying that. You want to be a little more original than that. My fav--personal favorite them in country music is I'm a guy which makes me really dumb and now that my woman has pointed it out to me, I'm going to be better, and -- cause I really, really love her. That, that's a fine them in country music and one that sells all the time.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: Honesty -- that's what it takes to write a country song. You've got to make yourself vulnerable and do it in a way in which you're telling the truth for people. Tell 'em what you really feel.
BOB GARFIELD: Meet Rivers Rutherford, an up and coming young songwriter who splits his time between Whistler's Music, [sp?] a sophisticated commercial music production house on Music Row, and MCA Music Nashville, one of the big song publishers in town. Rivers and I would write our hit song together. It turns out that hardly anyone writes alone in Nashville. They team up, swinging from partner to partner in a sort of literary square dance. This was particularly convenient for me inasmuch as I can neither sing nor play an instrument. Also in terms of the themes that pervade country music, Rivers' Memphis upbringing was sure to complement my very substantial experience with big business, government and Judaism -- or so I thought. Now Rivers is extremely talented and a very nice guy but frankly a little difficult to work with. We only had one day -- yet still he categorically rejected my first two ideas -one about falling in love with a lonesome cowgirl at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee and the other about raising the younguns -- it had a catchy lyric-- PAPA DIDN'T RAISE YOU TO BE NO FOOL-- YOU'D BEST GET INTO A MAGNET SCHOOL. -- but Rivers didn't bite. And he was at best half-hearted in trying to put a melody to my song about those losers in the '83 Camaros who cut me off on the beltway because it's the only place on earth where they feel in control.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: [SINGING w/GUITAR] THERE YOU RUNNING ON THERE [...?...] RUNNING BEHIND FASTER YOU RUN THE LESS THAT YOU FIND BUT I THINK A BIG [...?...]'S THE VERY WORST KIND RUNNING, RUNNING, RUNNING AWAY FROM YOU.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: I gotta be honest with you -- I'm looking at the lyrics -- I think it's a little bit of a -you want to write a hit country song--
BOB GARFIELD: Yeah, and I'm running out of time.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: Okay. [LAUGHS] Yeah, we are running out of time on that aren't we. This is probably not going to get you a number one song in the short amount of time you got. The best thing to do is find a simpler idea, I would say. [LAUGHS] You know what I'm saying?
BOB GARFIELD: Oh, I knew all right! He was feeling threatened by the new kid on the block, by my rare insight into human behavior, by my tenderness, by my stunning command of-- what do you call it -- you know -- words. And most of all, my capacity for plagiarizing Jackson Browne. Professional jealousy is never pretty so I just let him natter on.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: Another slant on it would be to say basically that instead of running from these demons, what if the demon is just trying too hard or being too busy.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, wait, wait, wait -- what about this-- everyone's so busy -- now they're running behind -- what if-- what if - you ever have a conversation with somebody you can't have because you're calling their voice mail and they're calling your voice mail--
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: Right. Phone tag. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
BOB GARFIELD: -- and then you-- Phone tag - and you know at the end - by the end of it you're just saying tag, you're it, right?
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: Okay.
BOB GARFIELD: So what if - what if there were a relationship building in an exchange of voice mail messages and the whole song was just this exchange of voice mail messages and the hook was Tag, You're It.
BOB GARFIELD: Well come to think of it, why not a song about telephone tag with your sweetheart? It's a common experience, harvested from my own life completely consistent with my inside-the-beltway sensibilities and just as the proprietor of the Bluebird Cafe suggested, it could be about a clueless guy who treats his woman wrong until she slaps him upside the head and gets him back on the road to love.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: [SINGING w/GUITAR] JUST CALLING TO LET YOU KNOW I GOT YOUR MESSAGE -- UM-- I GOT YOUR MESSAGE-- A WHILE AGO-- IN MY SUITCASE BY THE DOOR AND NOW-- SUITCASE IN MY HAND 6 O'CLOCK THIS MORNING I HADN'T TALKED TO YOU IN A COUPLE DAYS [...?...] CHECKING ALL MY CALLS-- 7 MESSAGES, YOURS WAS LAST OF ALL--
BOB GARFIELD: Yeah, I mean what - what if it tells a story -what story can we tell on the basis of two people who are just like-- electronic ships passing in the night? [LAUGHTER]
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: [SINGING w/GUITAR] DON'T KNOW, KNOW, KNOW DARLIN' I MISS YOU--
BOB GARFIELD: Sort of -- yeah-- I LOVE YOU-- I think you should leave the-- TAG, YOU'RE IT CALL ME WHEN YOU CAN SOMETHING, SOMETHING, SOMETHING, I'M A BUSY MAN--
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: [SINGING w/GUITAR] TAG, YOU'RE IT CALL ME WHEN YOU CAN--
BOB GARFIELD: All told it took us about 6 hours, and I don't mind telling you I was dripping with satisfaction like gravy over hot biscuits. All we had to do now was play the song for his publisher, Jody Williams, president of MCA Music Nashville. Then it would be demo'd and then shopped to likely artists -- Garth Brooks, Willie Nelson, what have you -- and my career would be launched even as I boarded the 6:05 p.m. flight back to Washington. Rivers was a little less enthused than I was in the very narrow sense that he thought upon further reflection that a song about telephone tag was pretty stupid and unlikely ever to be recorded much less hit the charts. And Williams, before he sat down to hear the thing, was none too encouraging either.
JODY WILLIAMS: The numbers are against you tremendously in this business. A thousand songs a day get written in this town. Two percent of those songs get recorded. Not 10 percent. 2 percent. Sometimes it's, it's supposed to work like this -- the best song wins. It doesn't always work like that. There are politics involved. There are people doing people favors.
BOB GARFIELD: Politics? Favors?! For this I left Washington? Whatever happened to just being an artist and succeeding on your God-given talent? Tell you what, Jody -- I don't need any political connections to make it in this town. Just listen to the song. Just listen to Tag, You're It.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: [SINGING w/GUITAR] HELLO, I'M SORRY DARLIN/ I MISSED YOUR CALL AGAIN IF YOU'DA TRIED AT 10 TO 5 I MIGHT HAVE SQUEEZED YOU IN I REALLY WANT TO REACH YOU BUT TIME IS KIND OF TIGHT I LOVE YOU, HON BUT I GOTTA RUN, SO KISS THE KIDS GOODNIGHT TAG, YOU'RE IT CATCH ME IF YOU CAN I'D LOVE TO SAY I LOVE YOU BUT I'M SUCH A BUSY MAN I KNOW WE'LL REACH EACH OTHER IT'S JUST A QUESTION WHEN I'M CALLING YOU BUT I CAN'T GET THROUGH SO TRY ME BACK AGAIN IN REFERENCE TO YOUR VOICE MAIL AND GIRL I MISS YOU TOO YOU'RE QUITE CORRECT WE SHOULD CONNECT THE WAY WE USED TO DO I'LL TRY TO SHOW THAT I STILL KNOW WHAT LOVING REALLY MEANS LOOK FOR SOMETHING SPECIAL, HON ACROSS YOUR FAX MACHINE TAG, YOU'RE IT CATCH ME IF YOU CAN I'D LOVE TO SAY I LOVE YOU BUT I'M SUCH A BUSY MAN I KNOW WE'LL REACH EACH OTHER IT'S JUST A QUESTION WHEN I'M CALLING YOU BUT I CAN'T GET THROUGH SO TRY ME BACK AGAIN JUST TURNED MY COMPUTER ON FOUND THE E-MAIL THAT YOU SENT S.O.S. - I'M IN DISTRESS NEED ACKNOWLEDGMENT YOU SAID OUR SHIP WAS SINKING BUT THE METAPHOR AIN'T RIGHT CAUSE WE'RE NOT SHIPS JUST MICROCHIPS PASSING IN THE NIGHT TAG, THAT'S IT! [SEE ?] ME IF YOU CAN I'M HERE TO SAY I LOVE YOU AND I'M SUCH A FOOLISH MAN WE HAVEN'T TOUCHED EACH OTHER SINCE I DON'T REMEMBER WHEN HANG UP [...?...] COMING HOME [...?...] TAKE ME BACK AGAIN.
BOB GARFIELD: The president of MCA Music Nashville had just heard our song about telephone tag and for a moment he just sat there, quietly stunned.
JODY WILLIAMS: I've never heard that idea before.
BOB GARFIELD: Judging from the look in his eyes, I don't reckon he ever needed to hear it again. I was hoping for him to get a blank contract out, but instead he and Rivers went back and forth on how the song could be re-written.
JODY WILLIAMS: A guy who's just busy -- I mean have a mid-tempo song or have a ballad saying our, our lives are -- you know - this is ridiculous, you know? And start sympathizing with each other. I don't think it's-- [...?...] new hook cause Tag, You're It ain't gonna [...?...] at all.
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: Tag, You're It ain't gonna do it.
BOB GARFIELD: Ain't gonna do it?! TAG, THAT'S IT! BELIEVE ME IF YOU CAN IF I THOUGHT I WAS A SONGWRITER, I'M SUCH A FOOLISH MAN Just like that, my dreams of more than 30 hours were crushed. I guess Lamar was right after all.
ECHOES OF LAMAR ALEXANDER'S VOICE: You've got more to overcome than most people. [ECHOING LAUGHTER] You've got more to overcome than most people. [ECHOING LAUGHTER]
BOB GARFIELD: Later, as he was packing me off to the airport, Rivers spoke to me as if I were Dorothy and he were the Good Witch of the South. He could have told me that playing that song for Jody Williams would get me sent back to Washington -- but I had to find out for myself.
BOB GARFIELD: At what point did you just completely lose hope in this--?
RIVERS RUTHERFORD: I think the-- at the point when you said something about-- you know we could write a song about, about phone tag -- that's when the, the hope pretty much flew out of the window for me. [CLIP OF PATSY CLINE SINGING "CRAZY" PLAYS]
PATSY CLINE: [SINGING] CRAZY I'M CRAZY FOR FEELING SO LONELY I'M CRAZY CRAZY FOR FEELING BLUE--
BOB GARFIELD: Yeah, Patsy -- I must have been out of my mind to think I could pull this off.
PATSY CLINE: [SINGING] CRAZY FOR FEELING SO BLUE--
BOB GARFIELD: I can't get a record cut any more than Reba McIntire can do a 5-part series on health care reform. But as I sat in my airplane set, dejected, I couldn't help but notice someone familiar sitting across the aisle. It was someone who knew not only the inside of the beltway but the epicenter -- the ultimate Washingtonian -- and yet someone equally rooted in the cultures and rhythms of the rural South. I traded seats with the Secret Service Agent next to him and asked Jimmy Carter about his taste in music.
JIMMY CARTER: Do I listen to a country music station? Well in Americus, Georgia and I listen to a whole gamut of country music.
BOB GARFIELD: Is it possible do you suppose to bring a Washington sensibility to country music?
JIMMY CARTER: I'd be amazed.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, well then I just want to play this for you -- would you just listen to this?
JIMMY CARTER: Sure.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, thanks.
BOB GARFIELD: Whereupon the former President of the United States strapped on my headphones and listened to my song, flashing his famous toothy grin and, if I'm not mistaken, tapping his toe securely beneath the seat in front of him.
BOB GARFIELD: So what do you think?
JIMMY CARTER: I think the song is good, and the music's good. I'd like to hear it every now and then on my country radio station, and-- you know you might get in touch with -- I'm not - I think the performer's very good but-- if somebody like Willie Nelson or Tom T. Hall is one of my best buddies-- I think they would like it and they could give you some good advice.
BOB GARFIELD: With your compliments?
JIMMY CARTER: Of course, sure!
BOB GARFIELD: I'll see you at the Country Music Awards, Mr. President.
BOB GARFIELD: Upright bass, Dave Pomeroy; Robbie Turner on dobro, Tom Rody on drums, Aubrey Heaney on fiddle, [sp?] Rivers Rutherford on vocals and acoustic guitar and -- ladies and gentlemen --Mr. Willie Nelson.
WILLIE NELSON: [SINGING w/BAND & BACKUP VOCALS] HELLO, I'M SORRY DARLIN I MISSED YOUR CALL AGAIN IF YOU'DA TRIED AT 10 TO 5 MIGHT HAVE SQUEEZED YOU IN I REALLY WANT TO REACH YOU BUT TIME IS KIND OF TIGHT I LOVE YOU, HON BUT I GOTTA RUN, SO KISS THE KIDS GOODNIGHT TAG, YOU'RE IT CATCH ME IF YOU CAN I'D LOVE TO SAY I LOVE YOU BUT I'M SUCH A BUSY MAN I KNOW WE'LL REACH EACH OTHER IT'S JUST A QUESTION WHEN I'M CALLING YOU BUT I CAN'T GET THROUGH SO TRY ME BACK AGAIN IN REFERENCE TO YOUR VOICE MAIL AND GIRL I MISS YOU TOO YOU'RE QUITE CORRECT WE SHOULD CONNECT THE WAY WE USED TO DO I'LL TRY TO SHOW THAT I STILL KNOW WHAT LOVING REALLY MEANS LOOK FOR SOMETHING SPECIAL, HON ACROSS YOUR FAX MACHINE TAG, YOU'RE IT CATCH ME IF YOU CAN I'D LOVE TO SAY I LOVE YOU BUT I'M SUCH A BUSY MAN I KNOW WE'LL REACH EACH OTHER IT'S JUST A QUESTION WHEN I'M CALLING YOU BUT I CAN'T GET THROUGH SO TRY ME BACK AGAIN
WILLIE NELSON: Take it, boys! [INSTRUMENTAL]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was directed by Katya Rogers and produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York, and Mike Vuolo, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director, and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Anne Kosseff and Neil Rausch. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media, from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Goodbye, Darlin'.
- Back to story:
- November 26, 2004
-
From the Archive: PSYCHIC TIPS, MEDIA FRENZIES AND TEXAS
-
The Edward Snowden Narrative, Privacy vs. Convenience, and More
-
The Fox News Mole
-
Happy Birthday
-
'Is Anybody Down' is Gone - For Now
-
Is Snowden a Hero, Traitor, or Something Else
-
Thanks For Everything, Bing
- Where do you stand on government surveillance?
-
Our Privacy Delusions
-
My Voice is My Passport
