Enjoying epic & rare daddy/daughter moment, thanks to U2 and their “Songs of Innocence.”

The Sweetest thing! Lily and I bonding at U2 concert…

I’m a dude and I have three daughters. Immutable facts and I wouldn’t change them for anything. However, being the only male in my household has, at times, left me feeling like an outsider. For example, when the children were younger and collectively into “princesses” (or what I call the purple and pink years) I could NOT relate. I distrusted Disney before the girls were born and grew more disturbed by the “House of Mouse” as their DVD’s piled up in our den along with cheaply made castles and myriad other crap. (I’m guessing if one has boys the corollary would be armies of action figures and I can’t deny that that wouldn’t test my nerves either. Princess or Transformer, stepping on one in the middle of the night sucks equally.)

Mercifully, save for nail polishes, my girls have aged out of the purple and pink. Yet, I still must look hard for things they love that I can relate to. Like their mother, they like romantic comedies and reality TV. Guess again if you think I’m ever gonna watch The Bachelor.

During our drives together we listen to their music, Top 40, which is what you’d expect for tween and teen girls. No surprise little of it does anything for me. However, I can and do give props to Katie Perry & Taylor Swift for making solid pop songs. Additionally, these young mega stars are clearly in control of their careers, which sends a good message, empowering to young women. But I ain’t a girl.

So, I was very pleased to find the girls listening to U2’s new album, Songs of Innocence; and even more excited to take them to see the band’s latest tour, last week in San Jose. None of this would have happened, by the way, if U2 had not freely delivered their album to iTunes – a move, which, in my view, had been unfairly criticized by many of you.

U2 show cool enough even for teen girls…

Taking them to a rock concert, especially one as notable as U2, is a moment in time we will never forget. Emphasis on “we.” In my opinion, doing this with them will resonate as an iconic daddy-daughter moment. More so than family dinners or vacations, which though hugely important, are pieces of a bigger mosaic. In the emotionally segregated domains of popular culture, with U2’s music and concert, we finally and truly had something in common and were able to share it!

Calling out GQ magazine on some double-pleated shite.

Yeah, these two are the problem.

So, I picked up the latest issue of GQ to read on the plane. I like looking at all the cool shit men can own, wear and do. Provided you’re super f-cking rich. (More on that later.) Anyway, I get to this piece, “The Least Influential People of 2014” and topping the list, at Numero Uno, is “Bono and U2.” The editors were leveling some serious hate on the Irish band because they “strong-armed” their “dad-rock” into your iTunes “without your consent.” For those unawares, U2 released their new album, Songs of Innocence for free. The magazine called it a piece of “direct mail.”

Oh, the indignity!

A little history: Apple and U2 go back ten years in a relationship that helped launch the iPod as well as taking the iTunes platform to a whole ‘nutha level. Remember those iconic commercials in 2004, featuring the band’s hit, Vertigo? Nobody complained.

But that was then. If ever there was proof ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ this latest U2/Apple collaboration is it. Were U2 & Apple presumptuous in their noble deed? Maybe even pretentious? Probably.

But so is GQ. Frankly, GQ has been on a vanity trip as long as Bono has. And as for being “least influential” what exactly has GQ given us, other than inferiority complexes? Who among the working class can even buy anything in GQ? A pair of boots for two grand? A watch for 24k. Give me a f–cking break. “Dad-rock?” Who else besides movie stars and trust-fund babies can afford any of the shit from GQ magazine? That’s right. Dads. And only a small handful of those at that. Hating on a 50-yr-old do-gooder like Bono for giving his work away reeks of annoying millennial hipsterism if not downright hypocrisy.

Speaking of which, in GQ’s advice section, The Style Guy an editor criticizes wearing sweat clothes outside of the gym, blithely suggesting they are “worn by oversize bouncers, bodyguards and repo men in the hip hop industry.” Fair enough. And classist. Yet, on page 34 they show a dude wearing sweatpants ($320!) with a sweater ($400), shirt ($350) and jacket costing one grand. Later, “GQ’s exclusive advertising section” pays tribute to the winner of Express’s Back2Business contest, Nick Taranto. Dude is wearing sweats pants. He is not in a gym. Nick is drinking coffee in someone’s loft. There are other sweats-wearing people in this issue, both advertorial and editorial.

They’re fancy but they’re sweats.

GQ, I’m calling bullshit on your double standards. What’s worse than a man purse? A douche bag.

Final Note: After Bono, GQ chose Barack Obama as the second “least influential person of 2014.” Both men appear before Donald Sterling. Which makes sense, I suppose, if you’re a douche bag.

Singing praises of popular music. It brings out the teen-ager in all of us.

My girls in girl mode, from a recent plane trip

The weekend drive to the barn with my daughters is a mostly beautiful 20-mile trek north of Mill Valley to horse country in Nicasio. Normally, I listen to sports radio, catching up on football scores, half-heartedly paying attention to an assortment of retired jocks conversing about this team and that play. I don’t particularly care but I find the chatter soothing. Sometimes.

But not today. Last week, Taylor Swift dropped her newest album, 1989 and my girls, like millions of other girls, are agog over it. Rather than plug into it from their iPhones, they chose to sing from memory. Given how new the album was, they hadn’t exactly memorized the tunes yet. I got a kick out of listening to them singing aloud and correcting each other and saying which song was the best and their favorite and so on.

The music industry maybe in shambles but some things never change. When a superstar like Taylor Swift releases a new album the world listens –at least the world of young women. From what I understand she’s sold over a million copies in the first few days, way more by now. Pretty freaking amazing. Like her and her music or not, you’ve got to give the gal props. She knows what she’s doing. She has for years. My God, she’s not even 25!

Swiftly went Platinum…

After a while of listening to my kids singing a-cappella, I asked one to play the album from her phone. I don’t have blue tooth so we listened to it straight from the iPhone’s tiny speaker. It sounded like crap but that didn’t matter. My girls were in heaven.

Anyway, the whole thing reminded me of when I was 16 and one of my favorite bands put out a new album. I was all over it. Just like my girls in the back seat. My friends and I would gather in our bedrooms and crank these new discs until our ears bled. Doodling the bands’ logos or cover art icons onto our notebooks, hands, tee shirts and walls. Passionately arguing over which song was best and whether this album was better than the last or better than the other guy’s favorite album. Who was the greater guitarist? Which concert kicked more ass.

Wait a minute. Who am I kidding? I’m still the same dude! A couple weeks prior, U2 released their newest album, Songs of Innocence and I’ve been listening to it non-stop. Granted, that’s only when I am running or biking but I do that a lot. Songs of Innocence has been in constant rotation. Critics be damned, I think it’s a great album. When it’s not playing I catch myself singing lyrics from it all the time, the same way my girls do with Ms. Swift’s latest.

I woke up at the moment
When the miracle occurred
Heard a song that made some sense
Out of the world
Everything I ever lost
Now has been returned
In the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard

U2 – The Miracle Of Joey Ramone (from Songs of Innocence)

Rather than get into a critique of U2 or Taylor Swift, I would like to just pause here and revel in the fact that my children and I have this great thing in common: The love of music, of singing out loud, bastardizing the lyrics, comparing and contrasting, waiting for the concert. Being alive. It’s a good thing in a world that needs more of them.

The coolest thing we take for granted: “You had to be there” is not what it used to be.

Great tune. Too bad I wasn’t there. Or am I?

I’m reading Bill Flannigan’s book, U2: At the End of the World, about the band’s epic Zoo TV tour in the early nineties. The book is equal parts fascinating and cloying (like the band!) but one thing is certain the dude was there for all of it: back stage, in the vans, on the plane, in the pubs, at the hotels and, most importantly at the concerts.

And now because of the miracle of Internet, so am I. I can find high quality footage for any number of these amazing U2 shows online. I know we take it for granted that anything and everything is now available to us if we have a computer; hell, even a phone.

But back when Flannigan wrote this book, and U2 did those concerts, none of that was true. One could only imagine how cool the stage was and how bombastic the band. Flannigan’s words could only do so much. In the end, we are left with that great old saying: You had to be there.

Not anymore. Not now. Now I can literally find the very concerts he was writing about, and watch them. In Sydney. In Dublin. In my hometown of Chicago. All those big, fantastic shows I/we could only read about are right here right now.

I am able to do the same thing for Guns and Roses, upon reading Slash’s recent memoir. Or Keith Richard’s. The idea of being able to read about a specific event and then find that event online and watch it is, to me, one of the coolest things about the Internet.

See and hear what he’s talking about…

I was so captivated by this notion, I took my entire third novel, Sweet by Design and committed it to a blog and gave virtually every reference in it a link to some relevant piece of content. A character goes to Water Tower Place to get a blow job (read the book) I provided a link to Water Tower Place. Every restaurant, town, street or landmark I gave a link. The reader could click on the word and see for himself what the character was seeing. (It takes me a couple hours or more to produce a single blog post. You do the math on a novel.) I even crowd sourced the cover, should it ever get published in -egads- paper. Check out the winner. It’s a pretty sweet design.

Did I expect people to actually check the links? Maybe a little, here and there. Honestly, I didn’t expect very many people would even read the damn book! But I did it anyway. It took hours every night and many months. I didn’t care. That’s how much I loved the idea.

I still love the idea. It still blows me away. A kid reads about the JFK assassination and she can watch the Zapruder film. And countless other related pieces. That’s amazing kids.

Brutal… but available.

Many of you can’t relate, I know. But I’m old enough to remember when none of this was possible. To support a lecture, professors told students to read this book or rent that movie. And a lot of times there was no supporting content, or if it did exist you had no way of accessing it. It wasn’t free. It wasn’t for you. Try and imagine that. Can you even? Oh well, I guess you had to be there.

And in a strangely related way, this bit of nonsense… http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/d9db0b63ef/the-novelizationalist-w-brian-cox

Client from Hell: Resist becoming a monster when dealing with one.

In the face of evil…

In a 2005 concert recording of U2’s lovely ballad, Miss Sarajevo Bono prefaces the number by offering a prayer to victims of a then-recent terrorist bombing in London. The prayer (paraphrasing) is that “we don’t become a monster to slay a monster.” What he was suggesting, I think, is that the US and UK resist warfare to deal with the terrorists.

I think about that prayer. Granted, not in the noble context Bono gave it but in an everyday sort of way. It’s a big idea for a prayer and I don’t mean to belittle it but sometimes I think about those words in terms of relating to difficult people or circumstances, sort of like praying for your enemies.

On that note, I’d like to reflect on one the most difficult clients I have ever encountered. I won’t name them. They are dead to me now. For the sake of this piece think of them as the worst client you have ever faced. See if you can relate…

To creating endless versions of copy only to be rejected, redirected and even insulted for ineptitude.

To egregious meeting times that are completely indifferent to your schedule or any reasonable schedule.

To having quality people burned up, sometimes quitting or (almost a mercy) being asked off the business.

To compromising one’s principles in a futile attempt to meet so many impossible demands.

To helplessly watching as an entire team loses all hope that anything they do will ever get bought, let alone made.

To the realization that even if something were produced it would only be CRAP.

To getting to the point where even black humor has lost its power.

To enduring brutal closed-door meetings about a failing relationship and inevitably bleaker outcomes.

And yes, because it matters: to not getting paid.

God forbid if this sounds familiar. Your client has become a foe. They will fire you. Their passive aggression can have no other outcome. Yet, other than put up with abuse and keep on keeping on, what does an agency do in the meantime? What can it do?

For most of us resigning business –no matter the circumstances- will have negative repercussions on the numbers, on staffing, on perceptions in the marketplace. The client is a bird in the hand even if it is a vulture. Deeper down, perhaps, resignation is an admission of failure. Whatever the reason, letting business go never seems like an option. In all my years, I have never been part of an agency that has resigned a client… even the one I allude to above.

So the prayer for the “meantime” is that we don’t become a monster.

That means holding on to one’s culture and, if at all possible, one’s people. It means resisting punishing those who had the thankless task of tending to the beast. We don’t point fingers. We won’t lash out at our fellows or take ugliness home to our families. In short, we do not become the monster.