Make The Gates
Around the time Jerry Seinfeld was starting out in comedy, many broadcast television companies and radio networks began formally banning the use of curse words. Some comedians were outraged. So they didn’t get to play anymore, Seinfeld said. “But the rest of us went, ‘Ok. I still wanna play—I’ll play by the new rules…I’ll get around that.’” It’s like slalom skiing, Seinfeld continues. “I always say, ‘If I’m Lindsey Vonn, I don’t care where you put the gates on the mountain. Put ‘em anywhere you want. I’m going to make the gates.’” Since “culture is a liquid—it’s always changing, always moving, always taking a slightly different shape,” he continues, “you have to feel it and work with it…That’s the job.” That’s this week’s theme: working with it…The People Who Have The Hardest Time
Throughout his career, John Mayer has embraced new media. When artists had mailing lists, to announce a new album—he would design little postcards in Photoshop, print one out, photocopy however many copies, put a stamp on them, and mail them out. When websites became more common, he learned HTML and built his first website. When message boards then social networks became more common, he was active on them. “An artist has to accept that this is a constantly changing environment,” Mayer explained. “The people who have the hardest time are the people who are fighting the future.” Similar to Seinfeld, when Mayer was starting out, the music landscape was shifting. People were starting to consume music differently. Many artists complained about “the way things were going,” Mayer said. “You’re not gonna hear me complain about the record industry or downloading because my complaining isn’t gonna change it. All you can do is ride it.”
Why Dr. Seuss Went Into Children’s Book Work
Dr. Seuss is the bestselling children’s book author ever. He got into writing children’s books because of a gate. Before publishing his first book at 33, Seuss was a freelance artist. In 1927, Geisel was working on a cartoon to be published in a satire magazine called Judge. In it, a knight is sitting upright in bed as a menacing dragon approaches. The knight uses Flit insect spray to fend off the dragon. That issue of Judge was picked up in a beauty saloon by the wife of Lincoln Cleaves, an executive at the Standard Oil Company, which produced Flit. Mrs. Cleaves loved the cartoon. She showed it to her husband and soon after, Geisel signed a contract to produce Flit ads, which he would do for the next seventeen years. The job paid well, but it was creatively boring. “For seventeen years,” Dr. Seuss explained, “[I used] exactly the same caption by drawing a different picture each time.” So eventually, “I was really wanting something more to do.” His Flit contract “forbade me from doing an awful lot of stuff,” he said. Writing children’s books wasn’t forbidden. “I would like to say I went into children’s book work because of my great understanding of children,” he’d later say. But, “I went in because it wasn’t excluded by my [Flit] contract.”How Jimmy James Became Basically A God
In the mid-1960s, Johnny Echols, the lead guitar player of the band Love, was touring with the musician Little Richard. When Little Richard’s guitar player needed a night off, the tour bus driver, Jimmy James, filled in. Jimmy James was a so-so guitar player, Echols says, but for the most part, “he was the gopher.” Then in 1967, there was an invention called the Vox Wah-Wah pedal. Vox sent one to both Echols and Little Richard. Vox pitch was, “this pedal will make your guitar sound like a trombone.” Most musicians felt the same way about the pedal—as Echols put it, “If I wanted the sound of the trombone, I would play the trombone, so i put the damn thing in the closet.” A year later, Echols got a phone call—“there’s this incredible guitar player named Jimi Hendrix playing at The Whiskey tonight. He sounds unlike any guitar player you’ve ever heard—you have to go see him.” The Whiskey wasn’t far from where Echols was living at the time, so he went to see this incredible guitar player. “We went to The Whiskey expecting to see somebody that we didn’t know.” It was Jimmy James…playing the guitar with the Vox Wah-Wah pedal. “In the space of a little over a year,” Echols says, “he goes from being just a so-so guitar player to being god basically…Without that [Wah-Wah pedal], there would have been no Jimi Hendrix. That’s what made him sound different. And that’s what made everybody look—because he didn’t sound like every other guitar player; he sounded different…And it was because he embraced the new technology.” (Here’s an interesting article on how this was a pattern throughout Hendrix’s career)