Serve Somebody (dance remix version)

Back when we were young and dumb, there were two music-related events we couldn’t get our heads around: Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity and the rise of disco.

Aside from Dylan, the born-again Christian thing seemed like a fad at first. It swept through my then-circle of friends like a pandemic, taking two couples and a cousin with it. Actually, it happened so quickly, involving changes in personality and relationships, that it felt more like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It was difficult to understand and seemed counter to where we were in life: in our early twenties, with personal freedoms we could only wish for in high school, and now everyone who had fallen under the spell was taking a step backwards, afraid to face the future without some ethereal presence placing its hands on their shoulders and directing them.

In Bob Dylan’s case, it was equally hard to figure. The “spokesman for a generation,” raised Jewish, chastising audiences as non-believers and making what amounted to gospel records. It felt like losing a cool uncle to a cult.

Even while all this happened, the distant thump-thump-thump of disco started being heard. At first, it seemed more than a bit corny and a mutant strain of the R&B we’d grown up with, 1001 songs that sounded the same, 975 of them about dancing, the rest about sex.

Donna Summers

It spread fast, quickly becoming the soundtrack in bars, hair salons and car rides. It didn’t matter one bit that much of the music was being made by black musicians or embraced by gays. What bothered us was that disco, like being born again, translated into a lifestyle we didn’t understand or aspire to. On the outside at least, it seemed hollow. It was about perfect hair, flared pants and dancing, for God’s sake – not flannel shirts and sneakers. (Although for both sides it was all about wearing the right uniform for the army you’d volunteered for).

But once you got past the fashion, the unspoken secret of disco was that we began gravitating toward it. There was plenty to like. The dynamic guitar solo on Donna Summers’ “Hot Stuff” (played by Elliot Randall, also responsible for the lead guitar on Steely Dan’s “Reeling In The Years”). The undeniably cool synthesizer workout that ruled Summers’ “I Feel Love.”

John Lennon claimed to be a fan of Shirley and Company’s “Shame, Shame, Shame” (we were too, but just didn’t want to admit it). Neil Young confessed his admiration for Donna Summers’ “Bad Girls.” When rock groups began appropriating the disco sound, we were all in. Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” was unbearably dumb, but appealing. I played the extended dance remix of the Stones’ “Miss You” – the version you’d hear in gay clubs and the discos we’d never set foot in – to death.

The golden age of disco was relatively brief, and it was probably done in by general overexposure and crap like this. I’ve read it was white rock fan backlash that killed disco, but if that’s true the jokes on them as dozens of English bands took to synthesizers, drum machines and the unmistakable dance beat as the foundation of new wave music.

Bob Dylan, as he always has, stayed away from any sort of stylized music like disco. His Christian phase lasted only a couple of years (at least as far the public is concerned). The two albums he made under the influence were – another unspoken truth – among his better efforts from the decade.

 

 

 

 

When you're a Jet

I used to approach each upcoming New York Giants football season with boundless naivete, overlooking their legion of slow running backs (“they run hard”), undersized offensive linemen (“scrappy”) and the overall defense, a who’s who of mediocre NFL journeymen (“experienced veterans”) and deciding that with the right breaks, the team could be a contender.

When it was announced that the Giants and Jets would meet for the first time in an August 1969 preseason game, there was the same silly optimism. Who cares that the Jets won the Super Bowl eight months earlier? It was a fluke, and Spider Lockhart will get a couple of interceptions off overrated Namath, and Homer Jones can beat any of their defensive backs, and on and on.

At the very least, a win over the Jets would be some response to the long winter and spring following their Super Bowl victory, when you couldn’t escape Namath or his teammates. They showed up on Ed Sullivan, Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett, The Kraft Music Hall. Namath got his own Saturday night talk show on Channel 5 (co-hosted by Dick Schaap, there to ask Namath’s guests all the serious questions).

Joe Namath and Dick Schaap

But as August drew closer, It was obvious that the Jets weren’t treating this like another preseason game.

The Jets, at least the guys who’d been with the team the longest, truly resented the Giants’ haughtiness and sense of entitlement over which team owned New York City. How the Mara family was looked upon like royalty. How the Giants cut Don Maynard, the Jets star receiver, years earlier for refusing to get rid of his long sideburns and cowboy boots. Maybe even how Frank Gifford got all those Jantzen swimwear ads and that the Giants players got better service at P.J Clarke's

Each year I sent away for the Giants yearbook, with its inevitable staged shot of a player, dressed in a suit and with an attaché case, waving goodbye to his wife (always holding a baby) as he leaves for his off-season job as a stockbroker. It was a team image the Giants eagerly promoted and protected.

At the same time, it was obvious that many of the Jets seemed to have a different attitude. Some dared to wear their hair on the longish side. Namath had his Fu Manchu mustache. Don Maynard’s sideburns were still intact. In the summer of 1969, these things mattered to kids questioning how society worked. I had a vague idea of what I wanted in life, but it sure wasn’t being a stockbroker. Two uncles owned Giants season tickets. One was an insurance agent, the other an office manager. Was that my future too?

It was hard to face the notion that the Giants were “The Establishment,” while the Jets were crossing the moat and kicking down the doors to the castle.

One week after Jimi Hendrix closed Woodstock and four days before my 15^th birthday, I spent a long afternoon listening to the game on the radio, 17-0 Jets before the Giants even got a first down. Final score: 37-14. This from the Daily News: “In his best Super Bowl form, Namath hit on 14 of 16 passes for 188 yards and three touchdowns before trotting off the field with hands raised joyously in triumph after his third scoring toss with 7:10 left in the game.”

Wellington Mara could accept his team’s overall lack of talent, but not a loss to the Jets. Two weeks later, he fired head coach Allie Sherman. The Giants went 6-8 that season, including a disastrous seven-game losing streak. Over the following ten years, the entire decade of the 70s, they won just one-third of all their games.

Today I seem to be a card-carrying member of The Establishment if defined by age, skin color and lofty position in corporate America.  Honestly though, I keep the card hidden away. The Giants’ fortunes, however, I still wear on my sleeve. 

 

 

The Willingboro Olympics 

It’s no wonder I was late to the meeting. To get to the Medco Health Automated Pharmacy in Willingboro, NJ, you needed to get on the Turnpike South to Cherry Hill, then several local highways before a turn off into an industrial park.

The pharmacy was a huge facility, a converted department store built to impress potential clients with high-tech machinery and a conference room with a long table and windows that overlooked a maze of conveyor belts and technicians emptying jars of pills into automated dispensing systems. I sat off to the side of the conference room and scoped it out. Seated around the table were a couple of Medco execs, some folks from an outside marketing agency, plus Mark Spitz, Greg Louganis, Al Oerter, Peggy Fleming, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Bruce Jenner.

Wow.

During my ten years there, Medco went from Merck subsidiary to the Fortune 100. Management craved  some sort of big national advertising campaign and hiring a group of gold medalists with chronic health conditions to hype our mail order pharmacy and lower prices, seemed like a good way go. There were even whispers about a possible Super Bowl ad. (The crucial caveat that everybody seemed to overlook was that a consumer couldn't just order medicines from Medco. Your health plan had to be using Medco as its pharmacy benefit managers.).

There was a presentation, then a tour of the pharmacy. Jenner’s gold medal performance had been 31 years earlier, but he was a big dude with broad shoulders and easily recognizable (even with the facelift – nobody but Jenner knew he was on his way to being reincarnated as a real-life Roberta Muldoon) and the pharmacy techs on the floor were walking away from the kind of machinery that requires a watchful eye just to shake his hand.

Watching the group dynamics during breaks, the athletes gravitated together into smaller groups. I imagine that when astronauts got together it was the same thing -- the natural camaraderie of people who'd experienced something the rest of us will never get close to.  

The meeting broke out into smaller sessions as the agency people and some of us from Medco went over campaign speaking points and answered the athletes' questions.  I sat in with Greg Louganis and Peggy Fleming. I corrected her handler on one point and answered a couple of questions she had. All I could think of was getting this issue of Sports Illustrated in the mail when I was 13 years old:

That morning in Willingboro may have been the high point of the campaign. For whatever reasons, Fleming dropped out. Al Oerter’s chronic health condition turned out to be cardiac related and he died suddenly a few months later of heart failure. (Oerter may have owned the most impressive Olympic achievement, four consecutive gold medals in the discus between 1956 to 1968). He was replaced by Bob Beamon, who broke the world long jump record by an astounding 22 inches during the 1968 Olympics.

In the end, the campaign wasn’t podium worthy. Beamon and Kersee made a few personal appearances at client meetings or gave talks to employees. I don’t recall Jenner being very active. Things fizzled out quickly, with only Spitz appearing in a couple of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ten-second TV ads that got sandwiched into commercial breaks during late afternoon talk shows. Later, he sued Medco for using his image after his contract expired.

Two years later, Medco was gone after merging with its biggest competitor.

Spitz, Beamon, Louganis, Kersee and Jenner in their Medco track suits