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翻��：Paul McCartney: One for the Road

原链接：https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/paul-mccartney-one-for-the-road-43295/ He blew it. Not that anybody spotted it. The audience at the Rosemont Horizon, outside Chicago, was too busy swooning in the ersatzcandlelight of a few thousand cigarette lighters and luxuriating in the warmbalm of nostalgia as a real, live Beatle reprised one of the band’s biggesthits onstage. Nobody appeared to notice — or care — that Paul McCartney had completely botched the words to his enduringturn-of-the-Seventies hymn “Let It Be.”

他搞砸了，虽然倒也没人发现。在芝加哥外的好事达体育馆，千千万万观众们都忙于举起打火机，在虚假烛光中陶醉，沉浸在温暖怀旧气息里，因为舞台上，一位真实的披头正在重演披头士乐队最受欢迎的歌曲之一。没有人发现（或者说，没有人在意）McCartney完全把Let It Be的歌词唱错了，这首发行于七世纪年代头上，经久不衰的歌。

“I condensed that little one very nicely — it took on a newmeaning,” McCartney confesses later with an embarrassed laugh. “All I did was,I forgot the second half of the first verse and put in the second verse. And Ithought, ‘God what am I going to do? I’ll just do the second verse and probablyno one will ever notice that I’ve done it twice.’ But I was so thrown off thatI ended up getting it wrong in the last verse as well.” Not that it was all hisfault anyway, he insists with a disarming smile. “I spend most of my timewatching these little cameos in the audience. It’s like all human life isthere, a big sea of it. And it’s a bit distracting. If I get off on the wrongfoot, it’s because I’m hung up on the audience.”

“这首歌我提炼得不错，给了它些新内涵。”McCartney尬笑着坦白，“我就，把下半首歌的第一段给忘了，唱成了第二段，想着天哪咋办，要不我就直接唱第二段得了，大概也没人会发现我唱了两遍。然而我脑筋整个被搞乱，结果最后一节也弄错了。”他毫无防备地笑着，坚持说这并不都是他自己的错，“大部分时间我都在观察观众席。看着人山人海，人类生活都浓缩在那儿，有点让人分心。心思都在观众身上，把我的步骤都弄乱了。”

And because, he might have added, that audience always was, still is and forever will be hung up on the Beatles. Currently in the midst of hisfirst major concert tour since his splashy 1976 American jaunt with the lateWings, Paul McCartney is digging deep into his half of the Beatles’ song bagafter spending most of the past twenty years pretending — in concert,anyway — that he had never been Fab in the first place. He is nowrediscovering to his eternal surprise, night after night, the enduring impactand resonance of the act he had effectively denied for all those years.

他可能还会补充说，这也是因为披头士乐队依然永远吸引着观众。McCartney正在进行一场大规模巡演，是自Wings乐队在1976年的那场高调美国巡演以来的第一次巡演。在过去的20年中，他一直在假装自己从来不是披头士乐队的一员（至少在演唱会上是这样表现的）。而为了这次巡演，他则深挖了自己创作的，占据披头士曲库一半的作品。如今每一晚他都能重新体验那份惊喜，那份他曾经故意拒绝面对，但是对观众有着经久不衰的影响和共鸣的惊喜。

It’s not all hot tears and wet seats, of course, like it was in’64. At the Rosemont Horizon, where McCartney and his five-piece band holdcourt for three sold-out nights, it’s more like bright shrieks of astonishmentand deep sighs of contentment, spiced with moments of poignant intimacy anddroll hilarity:

Two teenage girls in the front row gently sobbing during“Yesterday,” a song written nearly ten years before they were born.

A middle-aged couple slow-dancing in the balcony to “Hey Jude.”

A family of three, including a little girl of kindergarten age,holding up signs that read, “We ♥ Paul,” except the little girl is holding the “We” upside down.

The thirtysomething fella in the tenth row holding a cellularphone over his head, apparently phoning in the gig to a ticketless yuppie palat home.

在好事达体育馆，McCartney和他的五人乐队举办了三场售罄演唱会。现在不是1964年，观众席已经没有粉丝们的滚滚热泪和湿哒哒的椅子。取而代之的是快乐的惊声尖叫和愿望满足的大叹，点缀着各种亲情与搞笑时刻：

前排的两个少女听着 "Yesterday "轻轻啜泣，这首歌是在她们出生前10年写就的。

一对中年夫妇缓缓地伴着“Hey Jude”在看台上跳舞。

一家三口，举着“We ♥ Paul”的牌子，不过那个看着才在上幼儿园的小姑娘把“We”的牌子举倒了。

第十排的三十多岁的小伙子高举着移动电话过头顶，显然在给��个没买着票只能家里蹲的雅痞朋友打电话。

“I’m touching a lot of different nerves out there,” saysMcCartney, quite rightly. “Young couples and not-so-young couples who wereyoung when ‘Hey Jude’ came out. You see lots of guys doing high fives to eachother, a lot of communication, a lot of warmth.

“不同的人对我的表演都有感触。”McCartney说。他没说错。“不管是对年轻的情侣，还是对“Hey Jude”刚出时很年轻但现在已经不年轻的情侣。你可以看着好多人互相击掌，看到各种交流各种温暖。“

“It’s not so much déjà vu for me. I’ve come back asanother person. I have different sensibilities now. I have kids, all that.Let’s face it, the first tours the Beatles did, the main essential thing wasscoring chicks. I’m a different person now, because that’s not allowed” Hegrins.

“但其实我对这场景并不熟悉，因为我回归时已经成长为另外一个人了，带着更多感情更多见解，有了孩子什么的。老实和你说，披头士第一次巡演最重要的目标就是找妹子而已。现在我不一样了，可不允许我这么干。”他笑笑。

“And what I find now is, I get really touched by the audience,” hesays. “I keep telling Dick Lester [the director of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, whois making a film of the tour] to capture all the little things we see from thestage. Nobody in the audience really sees it. But we do, because we’re lookingat them. And that’s the real show.”

“我发现自己倒是被观众感动着。我一直和Dick Lester说要捕捉到从台上向下看的各种细节。（Dick Lester是A Hard Day’s Night and Help!的导演，也在为此次巡演进行拍摄。）我们能看到观众在席内看不见的细节，因为我们才是面对观众的人。观众的反映才是真正的演出。”

That’s also the crux of Paul McCartney’s continuing dilemma as anex-Beatle. McCartney, 47, has been a solo artist for nineteen years, nearlydouble his tenure as a Beatle. In 1988 he made a welcome return to his Fiftiesrock & roll roots with the Russian-only “covers” album Snova v SSSR, a.k.a. Back in theU.S.S.R. Last spring he released his most critically acclaimed(although commercially disappointing) album in years, Flowers in theDirt. In addition, his recent songwriting partnership withElvis Costello has yielded two Top Forty hits, his own version of “My BraveFace” and Costello’s recording of “Veronica.” He capped 1989 by debuting afine, new touring band featuring top-drawer studio and road guys who couldoutplay Wings blindfolded — guitarist Robbie McIntosh (the Pretenders),singer-guitarist Hamish Stuart (Average White Band), keyboardist Paul “Wix”Wickens (Paul Young, the The) and drummer Chris Whitten (the Waterboys, JulianCope), plus McCartney’s wife, Wings vet Linda, on keys and harmonies.

这也是McCartney作为一位前披头士一直进退两难的症结所在。47岁的他已经单飞19年，几乎是他披头士生涯的两倍。1988年，他推出了一张只在俄罗斯发行的翻唱专辑Snova v SSSR（又名Back in the U.S.S.R.），令人欣喜地追溯回（影响到他的）五十年代的摇滚乐根源。去年春天，他发行了多年来最受好评的专辑Flower in the Dirt，虽然商业成绩不理想。此外，他最近与Elvis Costello的合作了两首歌曲，McCartney版本的My Brave Face 和Costello的 Veronica，都打到了排行榜前四十名。1989年，他首次组建了一支优秀的新巡演乐队，都是优秀的录音室和巡演音乐人，蒙着眼睛弹也能超过Wings乐队--吉他手Robbie McIntosh (Pretenders)，主唱吉他手Hamish Stuart (Average White Band)，键盘手Paul “Wix” Wickens (PaulYoung, the The)和鼓手Chris Whitten (Waterboys, Julian Cope)，再加上他的妻子，Wings乐队常驻成员Linda，负责键盘和和声。

Yet it has hardly escaped McCartney’s attention that many of thepeople packing arenas and, later this spring, stadiums on his 1989-90 worldtour are not coming to see him play obscure album tracks from Flowers in theDirt. They are coming to see the Beatles-by-proxy. They arecoming to have their emotional buttons pushed by the songs that defined andtransformed their youth — “The Long and Winding Road,” “Can’t Buy MeLove,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Good Day Sunshine,” “Things WeSaid Today,” “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” the climactic“Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End” medley from Abbey Road. Theyare coming to see many of these songs performed live for the first time (thebulk of the Beatles oldies in McCartney’s show postdate their 1966 retirementfrom the stage) and, quite possibly, the last.

然而，McCartney当然不会假装无视，其实铺满场馆的人们并不是来听他演出Flowers in the Dirt中稍显晦涩的曲目。他们是来食用披头士代餐的。他们希望听到那些定义并改变了他们青春的歌曲，去触动自己的情感开关— “The Long and Winding Road,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Sgt.Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Good Day Sunshine,” “Things We Said Today,”“Back in the U.S.S.R.,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” Abbey Road中高潮迭起的 “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End” 组曲。他们的目的，是来欣赏史上头次（也有可能是最后一次）现场演出的披头士老歌，大量1966年披头士离开舞台以后创作的曲目。

At the Rosemont Horizon and later that week at the Skydome inToronto and at the Forum in Montreal, you could feel the audience buzz take apalpable dip every time McCartney went into an unfamiliar number from Flowers in theDirt, like the reggaefied shuffle “Rough Ride” or “We GotMarried,” a Flowers highlight recalling the hard-rock melodrama ofmid-Seventies Wings. The pressure drop was particularly noticeable at thebeginning of the two-and-a-half-hour show, as the crowd cheered the soundtrackof Beatles, Wings and solo McCartney hits that accompanied Richard Lester’sopening rockumentary-film montage with its kinetic blasts of Beatlemania,flower power, Vietnam, et cetera. After which McCartney and his band hit thestage and stepped right into … his new single, the appealing butcomparatively low-key “Figure of Eight.”

在他巡演的各个场地都能感觉到，每次McCartney表演一首Flowers in the Dirt中的新曲目，观众的热情会陡然下降，比如雷鬼风的“Rough Ride”或者 “We Got Married”，令人眼前一亮回想起七十年代中期Wings的硬摇旋律的“Flower”。这在开场尤其明显。观众们欢呼着披头士，Wings, McCartney的solo作品，伴着导演制作的记录着摇滚年代开场，屏幕上展现了披头士狂热，花之力，越战等等。之后，McCartney和乐队上台直接演出新单曲，是吸引人但相对低调的 "Figure of Eight"。

“We did thaton purpose — we had to do that,” McCartney argues over aveggie burger (the McCartneys are devout vegetarians) during a preshowdinner break backstage in Toronto. “Originally, we were going to open with ‘ISaw Her Standing There.’ But I really got upset by the idea. I was going homeone night and I thought, ‘That’s really betraying our new material, sending itright down the line.’ Like saying, ‘Hey, I haven’t been around for thirteenyears and I haven’t done anything worthwhile. Here’s the Beatles stuff.’

“我是故意的。“McCartney吃着素汉堡解释道（McCartney一家都是坚定的素食主义者）。”本来我们想拿I Saw Her Standing There开场，但我真的不支持这个想法。一天晚上回家的时候我想着，‘这简直在背叛我们的新作品，整个把格调拉低了’。这个安排就好像在说，‘嘿，我神隐了13年，啥有价值的事都没干。喏，给你们听听披头士的歌得了。‘“

“It’s the obvious thing. Boom, bang, Beatles, Beatles. Then yousay, ‘Now we’d like to do some new material.’ Boo! Hiss! I’ve seen the Stonestry and do it, and it doesn’t go down that great. That’s a fact of life. Evenwith the Beatles, new material didn’t always go down that well. It was theolder tunes. ‘Baby’s in Black’ never went down nearly as well as ‘I Feel Fine’or ‘She Loves You.’ That’s just the nature of the beast.

“真的很明显。如果上来就砰砰唱披头士的歌，然后说‘现在我们想演一些新作品。’嘘声就来了。我见过滚石他们这么做，效果不太好。这就是人生嘛，就算是披头士，新作品落地激起的浪花也不会大，老歌才更能带动人们。唱‘Baby’s in Black‘的效果就没有唱‘I Feel Fine’ 或 ‘She Loves You’好。这行就是这样。”

“It is hard to follow my own act,” he admits. “But the only answerto that would be to give up after the Beatles. I only had two alternatives.Give up, or carry on. And having elected to carry on, I couldn’t stop.”

McCartney has been consistently productive as an ex-Beatle. He hasnot, however, been consistently successful. His Eighties chart duds include Pipes of Peace,Give My Regards to Broad Street (the soundtrack to hisdisastrous feature film of the same name), Press to Play and thesolo/Wings “greatest hits” package, All the Best. Notably, McCartneyincludes only one song from the first three albums in his current show: “SaySay Say,” his Number One duet with Michael Jackson, from Pipes of Peace, isfeatured in Richard Lester’s opening film.

他承认，“追上先前的成就很难，唯一的答案是在披头士之后就放弃。只有两个选择：放弃，或者继续。既然选择了继续，我就停不下来。"

McCartney作为前披头士一直都很高产，但也没有持续成功。他80年代排行榜上的哑弹包括Pipes of Peace、Give My Regards to Broad Street（超灾难的同名电影原声带）、Press to Play和Wings的精选集All the Best。值得注意的是他本次演出只收录了前三张专辑中的一首歌：Say Say Say，是他与迈克尔-杰克逊合作曲，打上了榜单第一，也在演唱会片头影片出现了。

Flowers in the Dirt has done reasonably well saleswise — 600,000 copies inthe United States, 1 million in continental Europe by year’s end — but hasnot been the chartbuster either McCartney or his manager, Richard Ogden,certainly hoped for.

Flowers in the Dirt的销量相当不错--在美国发行了60万张，到年底在欧洲发行了100万张--但还没有达到McCartney与他的经纪人Richard Ogden希望的畅销程度。

“It was as if it didn’t exist,” Ogden says ruefully. “I sat with aradio program director from Chicago, very nice, very up about the show. And hesaid, ‘What’s the next single?’ And I said, ‘We’re just starting with “Figureof Eight” ‘ And he said, ‘What about “This One”? That’s really good.’ And Isaid, ‘That came out in August, mate.’ That really drives me crazy.”

“打单结果就好像消失了一样，”Ogden怅然若失地说，"我和一个芝加哥的电台节目总监坐着，他人很好，对这个节目很上心。他说，'下一张单曲是什么？’我说：" Figure of Eight " 他说"那This One呢？这首很好听。”我说, ‘这首8月份就发行了啊，老哥。’真的好抓狂。"

McCartney’s response, says Ogden, is a bit stoic. “Paul’s beendoing this for a long time, and he’s going, ‘I don’t want to think about thisanymore. You guys sort it out.'” In fact, McCartney’s response to his ongoingEighties commercial and, until recently, critical slump has been to get out andplay, something he had done infrequently (Live Aid, the 1986 Prince’s Trustconcert) since Wings broke up following his arrest in Japan in 1980 forpossession of marijuana. In 1987, with Ogden’s active encouragement andorganization, McCartney initiated a series of Friday-night jam sessions at asuburban-London studio with an eye toward eventually finding enough new,inspiring players to start a formal band. He also liked the idea, he says, ofhaving a rockers’ equivalent of cafe society.

McCartney的反应倒是挺淡定，他在这一行太久了。他说，“我不想考虑这个了，你们搞定吧”。实际上对于自己八十年代作品商业上的低迷，和最近才上升的风评，他的对应方式一直是出去演出（Live Aid，1986年Prince的Trust演唱会），虽然自1980年在日本因持有大麻被捕后Wings解散以来，他很少这样做了。1987年，在Ogden的积极鼓励和组织下，McCartney在伦敦郊区的一间录音室发起了一系列周五晚上的即兴演奏会，目的是找到足够多新人、有灵感的乐手来组建一支正式的乐队。拥有一个像咖啡公社一样的rocker团体，这个想法他很喜欢。

“The Beatles nearly did that once,” says McCartney. “We were goingto open an Apple tea room, where we could all go and be intellectual, talk artor Stockhausen. So I thought, ‘We’ll do a similar thing with the jam. Maybe theword will get out that there’s a jam every Friday night, see who shows up.’ Butin fact, because it’s done by your office, and they just ring specific people,it didn’t work out like that. Whoever they rang, showed. Whoever they didn’t ring,didn’t show.”

McCartney 说，“披头士差点就这么干了，本来我们想用Apple的一个茶室，大家都进去开拓思路，聊聊艺术或者Stockhausen。我想着我们的即兴排练也学样，每周五的活动的话传开了，看看谁会参加。但其实因为是办公室组织的，而他们只会给一些特定的人打电话，效果不好。接到电话的人会参加，没接到的就不参加。”

When asked why he stayed off the road for so long, McCartney saysvery casually: “I just couldn’t be bothered. Until Live Aid came along, Ididn’t think of doing anything live. I don’t know why. Maybe because nobodyasked me. Nobody asked me personally, anyway. I’d hear little things here andthere; I heard that Elton John was quoted as saying, ‘What he needs is to getback on the road.’ But it never seemed that vital for me; I was alreadyenjoying myself.”

问他为什么这么久没有巡演，McCartney反应很随意，“我就不是很care嘛，在Live Aid之前都没想过现场演出，我也不知道为什么。大概因为没人问过我吧，至少没人当面问过我。小道消息确实听说了点，我听人说Elton John说过“McCartney他现在需要的是回去巡演”。但这对我来说也不太关键，我已经很享受自己的生活了。”

McCartney was never really much of a road hog. Wings’ first andonly American tour came ten years after the Beatles said sayonara to the roadat Candlestick Park. And it’s easy to tell how much time has elapsed by watchingMcCartney’s current show. The production is heavy on Seventies arena kitsch:lasers galore, levitating keyboards. McCartney’s between-song patter alsoprobably seems quaint (“We’re going to go back through the mists of time, to atime known as the Sixties”) to veteran Eighties concertgoers used to thenarrative command of Springsteen or Bono’s spiritual cheerleading.

McCartney从来都不痴迷巡演，披头士在Candlestick Park演出和观众彻底说byebye十年后Wings才在美国巡演。这是第一次也是最后一次。而看McCartney现在的演出，马上就能知道时间过去了多久。这场演出充满了七十年代舞台上的奇特风格：激光灯效，键盘悬浮着，对于八十年代资深演唱会观众，他们已经习惯了Springsteen 的narrative command【？】或者Bono的精神鼓励的，McCartney演出间歇的唠嗑风格古早，“我们将穿过时间的迷雾，回到一个被称为六十年代的时代”。

One distinctly Eighties aspect of McCartney’s tour is hiscontroversial tour-sponsorship deal with Visa for the 1990 American shows. TheVisa arrangement — reportedly worth $8.5 million, which McCartney saysbasically covers the cost of transport for the tour — represents a new,potentially troublesome twist in pop-music sponsorship: rock & rollsponsored (some will say co-opted) not simply by a merchandiser butby a credit-card company, with close ties to banks and their complex networksof possibly questionable investments. McCartney says he vetted Visa asthoroughly as possible before saying, “I do.” “It may be true that they are agigantic money corporation,” he says, “but I can’t see what’s wrong with that,unless you can prove to me South African links.”

本次巡演的一个明显80年代特征是他与Visa公司就1990年美国演出达成的赞助协议，这个协议其实有点争议。据报道，Visa公司赞助达850万美元，McCartney说，这笔钱基本上包括了巡演的交通费。它代表了流行音乐赞助中一个新的、潜在的麻烦：摇滚乐的赞助（合作）不是简单地由一个商人赞助，而是一家信用卡公司，与银行及其可能会出问题的复杂投资网络关系密切。McCartney在说 "我同意 "之前，他尽可能彻底地审查了Visa。"他们可能确实是一家巨大的财团，"他说，"但我不觉得有什么问题，除非你能向我证明他们和南非之间有关系。"

McCartney also insists he is not betraying any kind of political,social or emotional trust represented by the Beatles or the songs of theirsthat he’s performing on tour. “Whether you like it or not,” he says, “no matterwhat people thought was going on in the Sixties, every single band that didanything got paid for it. You look back at the early Beatles concert programs,there were Coke ads. We always got paid for everything we did, and when we madea deal, we always wanted the best.

McCartney坚持认为他并没有背叛任何一种披头士乐队代表的政治、社会或情感寄托，也没有与他在巡演中歌相左的行动。“实话实说不怕你惊讶，"他说，"不管你觉得六十年代是什么风气，每个乐队做的任何举动都是有报酬的。你回头看看披头士早期的演唱会，有可乐做的广告。我们做任何事情都会得到报酬，做交易总是希望得到最好的。“

“Somebody said to me, ‘But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.’That’s a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now let’swrite a swimming pool.’ We said it out of innocence. Out of normal, fuckingworking-class glee that we were able to write a ‘swimming pool.’ For the firsttime in our lives, we could actually do something and earn money.

“有人和我说，‘可是披头士是反物质主义的呀。’这只是个传说罢了。John和我以前真的会坐下来写歌，说“咱们写个游泳池出来”，这些都是无意识说出来的。这种普通的，tmd工人阶级的志趣使我们通过写歌赚到了一个“游泳池”。这是我们人生第一次，确确实实可以种瓜得瓜挣大钱。

“You get any act around the table with their record company, theytell their manager, ‘Go in and kill.’ They don’t say, ‘Oh, let the punters inat half price.’ We’ve actually done a lot of that — the free program, thatwasn’t necessary.

“你和唱片公司打交道，他们都会和经纪人说，‘去吧，大干一场’。他们不会说，‘欧我们票价打对折吧’。事实上我们也做过免费的项目，不过也没必要罢了。

“And I think it’s just going to be tough if people don’t like it,”he says coolly. “Stick the finger up and say, ‘Sorry, boys, it’s tough. You maynot like me because of it. Tough darts. I know I’m not doing it for whateverperception you put on it. It doesn’t alter me.’ I’ve taken money off of EMI.The Beatles took money off of United Artists.

“而且我认为如果人们不喜欢，他们就得忍着。”他酷酷说，“我会举个中指说，‘Sorry咯，这事就这样了，你可能不喜欢，但你也只能忍着。我做这个并不是为了你对我的看法，你怎么想都不会改变我’。我拿的是EMI的钱，披头士拿的是联美公司的钱。”

“I wish we’d taken a little more actually,” he says, suddenlylaughing, taking some of the chill out of the air. “The accountants on A Hard Day’s Night gotthree percent. We got a fee.”

他突然笑着说，“我倒是希望当时多薅点，A Hard Day’s Night的会计都拿了百分之三，我们只拿了一笔固定的钱。” 气氛突然放松了起来。

“I‘m actually getting tired of Paul interviews,” Linda McCartneyremarks with a shrug while her husband is being trailed by a television-newscrew backstage in Chicago. “People always ask him about the same things. WhatJohn said about this, or what such and such Beatles song meant? Why don’t theyask him about other things, about the important things going on in theworld?”

当他电视新闻人在跟着McCartney在芝加哥场后台采访时，Linda McCartney耸耸肩说，“Paul的采访我都已经疲了。人们总是问他同样的问题：John说了什么，或者这个那个披头士歌曲是什么意思？他们为什么不问其他的，问问世上真正发生的重要事件？"

For many of the press hounds, radio DJs and TV interviewers following this tour, not to mention the fans who are paying for the privilege, the Beatles are still one of the most important things in the world. In a world still reeling from their original sound and remarkable creative vision, the Beatles’ significance as a cultural touchstone and spiritual anchor cannot be overestimated. In the Sixties the group was the embodiment of youthful ambition and utopian desire amid the graphic realities of war in Southeast Asia and at home in the urban ghettos. Now, with the world plagued by crack, wracked with racial hatred and poised on the edge of ecological apocalypse, talking about the Beatles is like a form of therapy.

对于关注这场巡演的许多狗仔，电台DJ，和电视记者，更不用说付钱来看的观众，披头士乐队依然是世上最重要的事情之一。他们的原创声响和非凡的创作理念仍在影响着这个世界，作为文化试金石和精神支柱的意义是不可低估的。在六十年代，这支乐队在斗争纷飞的东南亚和城市贫民窟，体现了青年们的志向和对乌托邦的向往。而现在，在这蔓延着毒品，种族仇恨和生态灾难的世界，谈论披头士乐队更像一种疗愈手段。

That seems to be just as true for McCartney as it is for any fan. During rehearsals for the tour, the band would take an occasional tea break, at which point, Paul Wickens recalls, “anecdotes would come out about the old days, little stories about him and John.”

对McCartney来说似乎也是如此。在巡演排练期间，乐队偶尔会进行茶歇，Paul Wickens回忆道，“他会说一些旧日轶事，关于他和John的小故事"。

But the usual aura of Beatlemania that accompanies McCartney wherever he goes has increased tenfold, at least, with the inclusion of so many Beatles songs in his set. The recent settlement of the band members’ lawsuits with their record company, Capitol-EMI, and among themselves has also brought the tiresome issue of a Beatles reunion back to the fore. McCartney himself fanned that flame at the start of the American tour in November when he suggested during a Los Angeles press conference that with their legal differences settled, maybe he and George Harrison might write songs together for the first time. (He didn’t say anything about writing with Ringo Starr.) Harrison quickly put the kibosh on a possible reunion, issuing a terse press statement: “As far as I’m concerned, there won’t be a Beatles reunion as long as John Lennon remains dead.”

但无论McCartney走到哪里，平时就伴随着他的披头士狂热至少成十倍地增长，毕竟他的演出中加入了这么多披头士的歌曲。最近，乐队成员结束了与Capitol-EMI唱片公司的诉讼，这也重新聚焦了披头士重聚这个老大难问题。McCartney在11月的洛杉矶巡演的新闻发布会上表示，随着他们解决法律分歧，也许他和George会第一次一起写歌。(他没有说任何关于与Ringo一起写作的事情。)George很快就打消了这个念头，发表了一份简短的新声明：“就我所知，只要John没活回来，披头士是无法重聚的。"

Indeed, John Lennon is an extremely conspicuous presence on McCartney’s tour, by his very absence. His name, his music and his celebrated differences with McCartney during and after the Beatles’ lifetime repeatedly come up in both interviews and idle conversation. Lennon figures prominently in the autobiographical passages that constitute the bulk of the 100-page concert program McCartney is distributing gratis at his shows. But in discussing Lennon in the context of his own contributions to the Beatles’ legacy, without Lennon to answer back, McCartney runs the risk of looking like he’s grabbing all the glory.

事实上，John的缺席反倒在本次巡演中成为了一个极其显眼的存在。采访和闲谈中人们都反复提及他的名字、音乐以及他与McCartney在披头士解散前后的著名纠纷��巡演中免费【免费!!!!!!!!】发放的【多达!!!!!!!!】100页场刊大段的自传段落中，John的身影占重要地位。但在讨论Lennon对披头士作品的贡献时，此时没有Lennon回击，McCartney看着像抢走了所有风头。

For example, a portion of the program’s interview section is devoted to McCartney’s adventures in the nascent London underground of the mid-Sixties: hanging out with art scenesters like gallery owner Robert Fraser, attending avant-garde music concerts, helping to set up the pioneering Indica Bookshop and Gallery, funding the seminal underground newspaper IT (International Times). “I’m not trying to say it was all me,” McCartney points out in the program, “but I do think John’s avant-garde period later, was really to give himself a go at what he’d seen me having a go at.”

例如，场刊访谈有一部分是关于McCartney在伦敦六十年代中期新生地下艺术中的穿梭：与画廊老板Robert Fraser等艺术界人士混在一起，参加前卫音乐会，帮着打造先锋书店画廊Indica，资助开创性的地下报纸IT（International Times）。"我并不想说这都是我的功劳，" McCartney在场刊中指出，"但我确实认为John后期对先锋艺术的探索，是为了给自己一个新生活的机会，因为他看到了我经历的新生活。"

“Because I talk about this so much, people go around saying, ‘Oh, he’s trying to reclaim the Beatles for himself, to take it away from John,'” says McCartney while relaxing on the chartered jet ferrying him, his family and the band between Toronto and Montreal. “I’m not doing anything of the kind! I’m not trying to claim the history and achievements of the Beatles for myself. I’m just trying to reclaim my part of it.

"因为我经常谈这件事，所以人们到处说，'哦，他想把披头士据为己有，从John那里夺走它'，" McCartney乘着包机轻松谈到（这包机在多伦多和蒙特利尔之间接送他自己、家人和乐队成员）。"完全没有的事! 我不想把披头士的历史和成就据为己有。我只是想找回属于自己的那部分。”

“It’s not sour grapes. It’s true. I was there in the mid-Sixties when all these things started to happen in London. The Indica Gallery, art people like Robert Fraser. I was living in London, and I was the only bachelor of the four. The others were married and living in the suburbs. I was just there when it all started to happen.

“真不是酸葡萄心理，六十年代中期伦敦百花齐放的时代，我就在那旋涡中心，在Indica画廊，与Robert Fraser这类艺术人士在一起。我就住在伦敦，也是乐队里唯一一个单身的。另外三个都结婚了住在郊区，我只是正巧那时在那地而已。”

“The difference is that once John got interested in it, he did it like everything else — to extremes. He did it with great energy and enthusiasm. He dove into it headfirst with Yoko. So it looked like he had been the one doing all the avant-garde stuff.

“It’s the ultimate conundrum,” he admits rather helplessly. “If I don’t say anything, I go on being the so-called wimp of the group. If I do open my mouth, it looks like I’m sullying John.

"不同的是，约翰一对它产生兴趣，他就开始走极端，就像他做别的事情那样。他以极大的精力和热情去投入，和洋子一起，一头扎进去。所以看起来他才一直在做各种先锋前卫的活动。”

"这是终极难题。"他颇为无奈地承认。"如果我什么都不说，我就一直是所谓的群体中的懦夫。但如果我真的开了口，看着就像是我在diss约翰。”

“And this has only become an issue because he’s dead. Because of the mythologizing that inevitably comes with someone as special as that. And he never wanted that for himself. I remember driving in a car, listening to an interview with John on the radio on the day he died in which he said, ‘I don’t want to be a martyr.’ He didn’t want that responsibility, to be larger than life, to be some kind of god.”

No one brings it up, but this discussion, ironically enough, is taking place on the evening of the ninth anniversary of John Lennon’s murder.

"而正是因为他去世了，这才成了一个问题。因为他地位如此特殊，不可避免会被捧上神坛，可他从来都不想这样。我开车时，听过约翰去世那天的电台采访，他说，'我不想成为烈士'。他不想要那种责任，大于生命，要成为某种神什么的。"

虽然无人提及，但讽刺的是，这场访谈是在John Lennon遇害九周年的晚上进行的。

“The fact is, we were a team,” McCartney states firmly as the plane begins its descent, “despite everything that went on between us and around us. And I was the only songwriter he ever chose to work with. Nuff said.”

"但其实我们是一个团队，"他在飞机开始下降时坚定表示，"尽管我们之间以及周围环境发生了各种事情，但我依然是唯一一个他自己选择合作写歌的人，就是这样。"

A day in the touring life, McCartney style, is a nonstop series of interviews, photo opportunities, press conferences, sound checks and meals grabbed quickly by a band on the run. And, of course, the nights are busy, too.

McCartney的巡演生活每天充斥着持续的采访、拍照、新闻发布会、试音，在奔波中随意扒几口饭。当然，晚上也很忙。

This evening’s performance at Toronto’s Skydome includes McCartney’s nightly plug for Friends of the Earth, the international ecological lobbying group that he is promoting throughout the tour. As the final notes of the closing Abbey Road medley reverberate around the cavernous Skydome, McCartney and the band jump into a fleet of golf carts, which zoom through the hallways to a waiting tour bus. With all aboard, the bus pulls out of the Skydome Starsky and Hutch-style before most of the fans have even left their seats. Back at the hotel at 1:00 a.m., McCartney hosts a small bash for the tour entourage in his suite. The food is vegetarian Chinese. The main attraction is a video of the evening’s Sugar Ray Leonard-Roberto Duran fight. At 2:30 a.m., as the party breaks up, McCartney, wearing a bathrobe, dances alone in the living room to the new Quincy Jones album.

今晚在多伦多Skydome的演出，包括McCartney每晚为Friends of the Earth做的宣传，一个国际生态游说组织。当空旷的Skydome回荡着Abbey Road组曲最后一个音符，McCartney和就乐队跳上高尔夫球车，穿过走廊驶向一辆等着的巡演大巴。大多数歌迷都还没来得及离开座位呢，大家就都上了车，飞速驶出了Skydome，像在演警界双雄似的。凌晨1点回到酒店，他会在套间里为随行人员举办一场小型派对，吃的中式素食，电视里放着当晚Sugar Ray Leonard-Roberto Duran的比赛录像。凌晨2点半派对散场，他会穿着浴袍，听着Quincy Jones的新专独自，在客厅里独自跳舞。

Sedate in tone, organized with stunning military efficiency, the 1989-90 Paul McCartney World Tour is strictly business — the business of putting on a good show, promoting the latest record, getting maximum publicity and attempting to satisfy the constant public hunger for all things Beatle.

“This is more like a Beatles tour, strangely enough,” says McCartney. “In doing this tour, I’ve taken hints. If someone comes up and says, ‘How should we do this?’ my mind goes back to the best tours I’ve been on. And those were the first Beatles tours of America. They were highly organized, very efficient.

基调沉稳，组织高效，1989-90年Paul McCartney世界巡回演唱会是一场严格的商业活动—是为了举办一场优秀演出，推广最新唱片，获得最大宣传，并试图满足公众对披头士相关的持续渴望。

"挺奇怪的，这倒更像是一场披头士巡演，"McCartney说。"巡演中，我有一些自我暗示。如果有人过说，'我们应该怎么做？'脑海里就回想起我参加过的最好的巡演：披头士的第一次美国巡演，组织得很好，很有效率。

Where there was once the hysteria of four wild boys with the world at their feet, however, now there is the calm of a middle-aged man who spends nearly all of his offstage hours meeting with assorted advisers, attending to his family (he and Linda are accompanied on this series of shows by two of their four children, Stella and James) and in turn being attended to by personal staff and security, the most prominent of the latter being three muscular, well-dressed men who look as if they had graduated with honors from Secret Service finishing school. Hell raising, needless to say, is at a premium on this tour.

曾经的，是四个狂野男孩带动的歇斯底里，站在世界之巅，现在的，是一个冷静的中年男子，几乎把所有台下时间都用在会见各种顾问、照顾家人（四个孩子中Stella和James这次陪他和Linda巡演），并反过来又受助理们和安保的照顾，其中最突出的是三个肌肉发达、衣着光鲜的男人，看着像特工学校毕业的优等生。Hell raising【？】在此次巡演中很重要。

“I’m not used to that,” Robbie McIntosh says of the tour’s emphasis on organization. “When I was with the Pretenders, we would do a sound check and then we would go to a pub or something. Now with this, I get a feeling I can’t do that. It’s a lot more regimented, basically because the security is a lot heavier, because of who Paul is. And I guess because of what happened to John, although nobody directly mentions that.”

"我不习惯这样。" Robbie McIntosh提到这次巡演很强调组织性。"当我和Pretenders乐队在一起时，做完音响检查，我们就回去酒吧或者别的地方。现在我感觉自己不能这样做了。一方面因为Paul的身份，安保工作更加严密。另一方面我猜也是因为John的原因。虽然并没有人直截了当提出来。"

McIntosh observes that the band “is sort of sacred” to McCartney, wholly separate from business. “He never talks business. Never, ever. He’s never mentioned money or anything like that to me. If he’s got something to say, then he’ll say it to the manager, and you will get it from him.

McIntosh发现乐队对McCartney几乎有些“神圣”，是完全与商业活动分开的。“他从来不说商业上的事情，从来都没有。他对我从来不提钱啊什么的。如果他想说，他会和经纪人沟通，经纪人再来和你沟通。”

“And he’s got a very young approach as far as the band,” says McIntosh “You’d think this is his first band the way he goes on. You see him at sound checks, going around in circles and doing those silly little jumps. It’s a real novelty to him to have a band again — and he treats it like that.”

"搞乐队这方面，他的各种行为都显得相当年轻，" McIntosh说，"他的做法会让你以为这是他待的第一个乐队。试音时你会看到他绕圈圈，傻傻在蹦跶。对他来说，再度拥有乐队是一件很新奇的事情--他也是这样应对的。"

The sound checks are shows in themselves. McCartney doesn’t run through any of the songs in the regular production; instead, he leads the band through a batch of oldies (Carl Perkins’s “Matchbox,” an old Beatles cover, and tracks from the Russian album, like “Just Because” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”), the Wings B side “C Moon,” the jaunty British music-hall number “Me Father Upon the Stage” and a Latin-hustle medley of Beatles songs.

试音本身就是一场演出。通常人们会过一遍歌单，但McCartney不这样。他会带着乐队演一些老歌(Carl Perkins的“Matchbox,” 翻唱披头士的歌，俄罗斯独家专辑里的歌, 类似 “Just Because” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”这种。)Wings的B面单曲“C Moon”，英式音乐厅的欢快曲目 "Me Father Upon the Stage "和披头士曲目的拉丁风串烧。

“He’s a real clown,” Wix says quite admiringly. “He loves to show off, and he loves to be there doing it, making people laugh.”

And sure enough, onstage you can see by the light of his beaming, vintage Beatle Paul smile and the way he throws himself into the sixteen Beatles songs featured in the show that no one is enjoying this forward-into-the-past expedition more than McCartney himself.

“It’s twenty years, man,” McCartney says a bit wearily in response to the questions that have dogged him the whole length of the tour — why Beatles songs, and why so many?

"他真的是个小丑式人物。"Wix相当佩服地说。"他喜欢炫技，喜欢在台上搞笑让观众快乐。"

在舞台上，你可以从他那笑容满面、复古的披头士Paul的笑容，以及他投入演出中的十六首披头士歌曲中的方式看出来，没有人比他本人更享受这种向着曾经去探索的征途。

麦卡特尼有些疲惫地回答了困扰他整个巡演的问题--为什么是披头士的歌，为什么这么多？

“You can’t keep angry forever, twenty years after an event that hurt,” he says, referring to the band’s acrimonious breakup. “Time is a great healer.”

谈起披头士乐队的激烈解散，他说道，"已经二十年了，老兄，二十年前的事我再心痛，也不可能永远生着气。时间很能疗伤。"

McCartney explains that in preparation for the tour he actually sat down with pen and paper and drew up a list of his favorite Paul McCartney songs, Beatles and otherwise. He came up with so many of them that at one point there was talk, briefly anyway, of doing two completely different shows in each city. “I’d said to myself, ‘You’re a composer,'” he says. “‘There’s no shame in doing these songs.'”

他解释说，“准备巡演时自己真的拿着纸和笔，坐下来，写了一份他心中的Paul McCartney最佳曲目，其中包括披头士乐队和其他时期写的。单子太长了，甚至一度提到要在每个城市做两场完全不同的演出。"我对自己说，'你是作曲人'，"他说，"'演这些歌并不丢人'。"

The songs of late partner John Lennon were a different matter. “In fact, I considered doing a major tribute to John,” says McCartney. “But it suddenly felt too precious, too showbiz. I was going to have a whacking great picture of John and just say, ‘He was my friend.’ Which was true. I’m totally proud to have worked with him.

演出已故搭档John Lennon的作品则含义不同。“我其实考虑过加一个John的致敬环节，但这回忆对我来说太珍贵，这环节也太作秀了。我本想挥着一张John的照片说，‘他是我的朋友’，这是真的，能与他合作我真的很骄傲。”

“But then people started saying, ‘Why don’t you do “Imagine”?’ And I thought, ‘Fucking hell, Diana Ross does “Imagine.” They all do “Imagine.”‘ That’s when I backed off the whole thing. You go on tour, you sing your songs, arrange ’em nice, do it, and if you do it well enough, that’s what people will remember.”

“但人们又要说了，‘为啥不唱Imagine?’我就觉得，‘草了，Diana Ross也唱过Imagine，所有人都唱Imagine’。于是我退却了。我就想着去巡演，唱着自己的歌好好编排，如果做得够好，大家是会记住的。”

Paul McCartney was rather late out of the starting gate for the 1989 Dinosaurs on the Road Sweepstakes, eating the dust already kicked up during the summer and early fall by the Who, the Rolling Stones and even Ringo Starr. But he’s not bugged either about his membership in the club — “I’m another dinosaur,” he says frankly — or by the implicit pressure to prove his viability as a contemporary artist to an audience obsessed by his past, if necessary at the expense of his peers.

【这段的典故没咋看懂，也没查到，有无老师解答？】

“It’s never stopped,” says McCartney, sitting on a bench in the Montreal Canadiens’ locker room while a sold-out house awaits him inside the Forum next door. “I will never stop competing with every other artist in this business. Pet Sounds kicked me to make Pepper. It was direct competition with the Beach Boys. So what? That’s what everyone’s doing. Although when Brian Wilson heard Pepper, he went the other way.

“竞争从来没有停止过，”他说，在更衣室里坐在板凳上，隔壁漫长的人都在期待着他演出。“我永远不会放弃和这行艺术家们竞争的。Pet Sounds促使我推动Sgt. Pepper项目，这是和the Beach Boys直接竞争，但又怎样呢？大家都这么做。虽然Brian Wilson听完Sgt. Pepper，他就调转枪头啦。”

“But, yeah, it’s competition. If you put ten children in a room, after an hour or so, they’ll sort themselves out. The smart one. The big, tough one. The cowardly one. The funny one who’s the friend of the smart one and the big, tough one. They will establish a pecking order.”

And where does McCartney place himself in rock’s pecking order?

“I’d put me at the top. Just because I’m a competitor, man. You don’t have Ed Moses going around saying, ‘Sure, I’m the third-best hurdler in the world.’ You don’t find Mike Tyson saying, ‘Sure, there’s lots of guys who could beat me.’ You’ve got to slog, man. I’ve slogged my way up from the suburbs of Liverpool, and I am not about to put all that down.”

“但竞争就是这样。你让10个孩子在一个屋子里，过一两个小时，他们就分出区别了。聪明孩子，壮硕孩子，强悍孩子，怂孩子，以及和聪明孩子壮硕孩子强悍孩子关系都很好的搞笑孩子。他们自己就会分等级。”那McCartney认为自己在哪一级呢？

“我觉得自己是最高一级，因为我确实很有竞争力。你看不到Ed Moses到处说：‘我是世上第三好的跨栏选手哈。’也不会发现Mike Tyson说，"很多人都能打倒我啊。”人必须要努力啊，伙计。从利物浦的郊区一路打拼上来，我不会放弃这一切的。"

Nor is he about to let all that go forgotten. With the key Beatles lawsuits settled, he’s keen to go ahead with the long-discussed authorized Beatles film biography, The Long and Winding Road, although the project hit an early snag in terms of finding a director. McCartney mistakenly attempted to solicit interest from top screen talent by sending form letters outlining the project to the likes of Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott and Michael Apted. “George [Harrison], who’s in the film business, went, ‘Major no-no, man, we shouldn’t have done that.’ And he should have stopped me. It was a mistake.”

他也不打算让这一切消失于记忆深处。随着披头士乐队关键官司解决了，他开始积极推进讨论已久的乐队授权电影传记The Long and Winding Road，虽然在找导演时就早早遇到了阻碍。他错了，他试图征求顶级大导的兴趣，他向Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott 和Michael Apted等人发送了邀约。"涉足电影行业的乔治说，'可千万别，咱不能这么干。’他确实该阻止我，这决定是错误的。"

Yet having willingly reawakened the Beatlemania beast with his current show, Paul McCartney enters the Nineties with a new variation on his old Seventies dilemma: How do you follow an act like the Beatles — again? He talks of making a new album with his touring band, and he’s halfway through a major orchestral and choral piece, written with British conductor Carl Davis, to be debuted during the 150th-anniversary celebrations of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic next year. More important, though, he’s come to realize that you don’t follow an act like the Beatles. You learn to live with it, and learn from it.

Paul McCartney通过他目前的巡演，有意唤醒了人们对披头士的狂热。进入九十年代后，他对这七十年代的老难题态度又有了变化：如何重现披头士的行事作风？他说自己会和巡演乐队一起制作一张新专辑，和英国指挥家Carl Davis共同创作的大型管弦乐和合唱作品也已经完成了一半，将在明年皇家利物浦爱乐乐团150周年庆祝活动中首次亮相。但更重要的是，他已经意识到，自己不能重现披头士的作风了，而是要学会与之共存，并从中学习。

“I’ve already done the thing where you go out and shun the Beatles,” says McCartney. “That was Wings. Now I’ve done this whole thing. I recognize that I’m a composer and that those Beatles songs are a part of my material.

“出门演出，假装自己不是个披头，这事我已经干过了，就是Wings。我现在想要的，是意识到自己是一位作曲人，而披头士的歌曲是我作品的一部分。”

“The only alternative is that I turn my back on it forever, never do ‘Hey Jude’ again — and I think it’s a damn good song,” he says before heading out onstage, where he’ll play it again for a grateful crowd. “It would really be a pity if I don’t do it. Because someone else will.”

“另一个选项是，我得永远无视披头生涯，永远不能唱Hey Jude。可这真tm是首好歌。”他上台演出前说着，“如果我永远不唱那就太可惜了，因为会被别人唱掉的。”

1 note · View note

johnsoedercc · 5 years

Photo

I wrote this profile of record producer extraordinaire and philanthropist Tommy LiPuma for The Plain Dealer, on the occasion of a Tri-C JazzFest salute to him that coincided with the “Modern American Masters: Highlights From the Gill and Tommy LiPuma Collection” exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The Art of Tommy LiPuma

By John Soeder published April 11, 2004, in The Plain Dealer

NEW YORK – Yes, he produced a chart-topping album for Barbra Streisand.

And yes, he also had a hand in Grammy-winning recordings by George Benson, Natalie Cole and Diana Krall.

Running down the mile-long list of his accomplishments as a record producer and music industry executive, however, it’s easy to overlook one of Tommy LiPuma’s most truly remarkable achievements:

He made a Wham! fan out of Miles Davis.

The late, great jazz trumpeter visited LiPuma at home in the 1980s to discuss working together. LiPuma popped a cassette by the George Michael-fronted pop group of “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” fame into the stereo.

Davis “freaked out,” LiPuma says. “He loved it.”

Who knew?

LiPuma recounts the story over lunch at Sistina, his favorite Italian restaurant. It’s not open for lunch, mind you – unless you’re Tommy LiPuma, in which case you and a guest have the dining room all to yourselves on a snowy March afternoon.

Such are the perks when you’re chairman of the world’s largest jazz record company, Verve Music Group. LiPuma, a former Clevelander, has held the title since 1998.

He’ll be back in his hometown this week for the 25th annual Tri-C JazzFest. Benson, Krall, Dr. John, Joe Lovano, Jimmy Scott and others perform Saturday at Playhouse Square’s Allen Theatre in a salute to LiPuma, 67.

“I’m honored,” he says. “On the other hand, it makes you wonder: Are you coming toward the twilight of your career? Frankly, I feel I’m at the top of my game.”

LiPuma co-produced three albums for Davis, starting with 1986’s “Tutu.” It included a cover of “Perfect Way,” originally done by Scritti Politti, another 1980s pop act that LiPuma brought to the attention of Davis.

“He wasn’t what I call a jazz cop,” LiPuma says. “He loved all kinds of music.”

Ditto LiPuma. He wholeheartedly buys into the old Duke Ellington maxim: There are only two kinds of music – the good kind and the other kind.

LiPuma’s latest productions are albums by Al Jarreau and Krall.

Veteran vocalist Jarreau’s “Accentuate the Positive” is due in stores Tuesday, Aug. 3. LiPuma was behind the mixing board for two previous Jarreau releases, “Glow” (1976) and the live double album “Look to the Rainbow” (1977).

“He’s a brilliant producer,” says Jarreau, who performs Friday at the Allen Theatre as part of the JazzFest’s “Silver on Silver” salute to another LiPuma client, hard-bop pianist Horace Silver.

LiPuma has a knack for “knowing artists, knowing what they do, allowing them to do it and then pushing them where he thinks their strengths are — and beyond those strengths,” Jarreau says.

While working on his new album, Jarreau found himself scatting the melody of “Groovin’ High,” a Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie chestnut: “Duh-dut, duh-dut-dut, bah-doo-bee-ooh-bee-ooh-duh-dut’ll-doo-day.…”

LiPuma’s ears pricked up. “Is there a lyric, Al?” he asked.

“Well, I’ve thought about doing a lyric for it,” Jarreau replied.

LiPuma encouraged him to go for it.

Jarreau did. The finished track turned out to be “one of my best efforts,” he says.

Krall’s new album, “The Girl in the Other Room,” comes out Tuesday, April 27. It features six songs co-written by the singer-pianist and her husband, rocker Elvis Costello.

LiPuma co-produced “The Girl in the Other Room” with Krall, whom he refers to as “my baby.” He has overseen seven of her eight albums.

“Tommy is my ears — he can hear things I can’t hear,” Krall said in a 2001 interview with The Plain Dealer. “He loves music, art, beauty and all the meaningful things in life, including really good wine.”

At Sistina, LiPuma orders a bowl of pasta. It arrives perfectly al dente and prepared, per his specifications, with cherry tomatoes. A seafood dish follows in short order.

“This is the branzino,” LiPuma says, digging into the Italian-style sea bass. “Delicious!”

Between sips of espresso in the afterglow of the meal, he’ll gladly tell you about working with ultradiva Streisand on “The Way We Were,” her 1974 No. 1 album: “She knows exactly what she wants.”

Or the truth behind “Weekend in L.A.,” singer-guitarist Benson’s 1977 live album: “It wasn’t really as live as it sounded…. We had to redo the vocals.”

Or the emotional experience of recording the title track of Cole’s 1991 “Unforgettable” album, a virtual duet between the singer and her late father, Nat “King” Cole: “When we did it, it stopped all of us in our tracks.”

Lawyers, accountants running the show

LiPuma lights up when he talks about music. But his mood turns somber when the conversation turns to the music business.

“The sooner corporate America gets out of it, the happier I’m going to be,” he says.

Verve Music Group is the parent company of four record labels: Verve, Impulse!, GRP (which LiPuma ran in the 1990s) and Blue Thumb (where LiPuma worked in the late ’60s and early ’70s with such acts as Dan Hicks and Dave Mason).

In addition to a catalog rich with jazz greats (Ellington, Count Basie, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, among others), the company’s current artist roster includes the likes of Krall, Jarreau, Benson, violinist Regina Carter and keyboardist Herbie Hancock.

Verve Music Group is a subsidiary of the world’s leading music company, Universal Music Group, which had revenues of $6 billion in 2003. Universal (itself a division of multinational media conglomerate Vivendi Universal) does not release specific financial data for its subsidiaries.

“The record business used to be basically a group of entrepreneurs … who made gut decisions and ran their own ships,” LiPuma says. “They didn’t have to worry about making their quarter or if Wall Street was going to give them its blessing. They were music people.

"Today, with a few exceptions, you have lawyers and accountants running the show. It’s very unfortunate.”

LiPuma has delegated the day-to-day responsibilities (read: headaches) of running Verve Music Group to his second-in-command, President and CEO Ron Goldstein.

“I handle the creative aspects,” LiPuma says. “When you make records, all you want is the right performance…. As a producer, everything is about waiting for the moment when the artist drops a magic take. One of the most important parts of my job is knowing when the moment happens.”

Magic has struck in the studio time and again for LiPuma, who has made more than 20 gold, platinum or multiplatinum records. He also has won three Grammy Awards: Record of the Year in 1976 for Benson’s smash “This Masquerade,” Album of the Year in 1991 for Cole’s “Unforgettable” and Best Jazz Vocal Album in 2002 for Krall’s “Live in Paris.”

The way he was: Cleveland roots

Born in Cleveland to Italian immigrants, LiPuma was the youngest of five children. His brothers, Joe and Henry, and sister Therese still live in the area; another sister, Josephine, died in 1984.

LiPuma’s family moved often when he was young, from Cleveland’s Kinsman neighborhood to University Heights to Warrensville Heights to Beachwood.

“The radio was always on in our house,” LiPuma says. “In those days, it was Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters, Jo Stafford.

"Some way or another, I ended up where I ended up. But I’m a pop junkie. I love great pop music.

"By the time I was 18, I loved bebop — Charlie Parker, Horace Silver, all those guys. But it didn’t take away from my love for pop music.”

When he was 9, LiPuma developed osteomyelitis, a debilitating bone infection. He spent nearly three years laid up in bed.

“The radio became my friend,” he says. “I discovered the R&B station in those days, WJMO, and I started hearing Charles Brown, Louis Jordan, Nat Cole and Ruth Brown. I was a complete R&B nut by the time I was 12.

"Then I started playing saxophone…. I’ll never forget: The music teacher at Shaker Heights Junior High School gave me an F in music because I didn’t show up for a concert.”

LiPuma dropped out of school when he was 18, although he only made it through 10th grade. His illness had left him two grades behind his friends. “I felt out of place,” he says.

By then, he was earning $25 a night playing sax in local clubs.

His father, a barber, sent LiPuma to barber college and gave him a loan to buy a barbershop in the Keith Building on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland. Among his customers were various radio disc jockeys, including future “American Top 40” host Casey Kasem, who used to work at the old WJW AM/850.

But LiPuma’s heart wasn’t into cutting hair. He leased the shop, packed his sax and hit the road for a year with a jazz combo.

Upon his return to Cleveland in 1960, LiPuma got a job as a record promoter with M.S. Distributors.

The following year, he was hired to do promotion for Liberty Records. He later transferred to the company’s music publishing division. LiPuma primarily was based in Los Angeles, although he briefly lived in New York in 1962 and relocated there permanently in 1984.

The first album he produced was “Comin’ Through,” the 1965 debut by an R&B group from Canton — the O’Jays.

Making hits, taking hits

He scored his first gold record one year later with the Sandpipers. The easy-listening trio’s Top 10 single “Guantanamera” was produced by LiPuma, who also recited the spoken-word bit in the middle of the tune: “I am a truthful man from the land of the palm trees… .”

He went on to work as a producer and A&R (artists and repertoire) executive for several other record companies, including A&M, Warner Bros. and Elektra. Along the way, LiPuma collaborated with a range of artists, from Dr. John to Michael Franks to Joe Sample.

Somebody once asked LiPuma how it felt to be the father of smooth jazz. He was mortified.

“I detest — de-test! — smooth jazz,” he says. “Shall I call it the height of mediocrity? Everything has become so predictable.

"The jazz community can blame itself for what ultimately ended up happening with jazz. Basically, it has gone nowhere.”

Some jazz purists blame LiPuma for his pop-savvy meddling — at least to hear him tell it.

“Critics like Gary Giddins hate my [expletive] guts,” LiPuma says. “They think I’m the Antichrist. [Giddins] referred to me as a hack.”

Giddins, former jazz critic for The Village Voice and the author of biographies of Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and Charlie Parker, is widely regarded as a top jazz authority. (Even LiPuma says Giddins is “erudite.”)

Giddins gave his side of the story via e-mail last week.

“I don’t hate Tommy LiPuma’s ‘[expletive] guts,’ ” he wrote. “It is possible that I once referred to him as a hack, but I can’t recall the occasion and a global search of everything on my hard drive, dating back 20 years, turns up only one mention of his name.”

In a review of the 1997 JVC Jazz Festival, Giddins made a passing reference to LiPuma as “the record industry menace who specializes in convincing good musicians to play bad music.”

‘A rare breed’ and ‘a beautiful cat’

Tommy LiPuma — a “menace”? Jarreau scoffs at the notion.

LiPuma is “a rare breed,” Jarreau says. “Maybe a guy like Tommy is too nice for this industry.”

Sax player David Sanborn, on the bill for the JazzFest’s Silver tribute, has cut a couple of albums with LiPuma.

“You can always tell a Tommy LiPuma production,” Sanborn says. “He makes high-class, high-quality records…. He has the ability to make records with broad appeal, too.

"I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with a lot of people liking your music. If you’re doing something you don’t believe in, that’s another story. But I don’t think Tommy has ever done that. . . . He has a real passion for the music.”

LiPuma is “a beautiful cat,” says another music legend from Cleveland, jazz singer Jimmy Scott. His 1992 comeback album, “All the Way,” was produced by LiPuma.

“He knows his stuff,” Scott says. “If you have an idea and you talk it over with him, he’ll make it happen. He doesn’t limit his thoughts about the music.”

LiPuma doesn’t limit his interests to music, either.

Paintings by American Modernists usually fill his Park Avenue apartment, although for the time being, the walls are dotted with empty hooks. “Modern American Masters: Highlights From the Gill and Tommy LiPuma Collection” is on view through Sunday, July 18, at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The exhibition features works by some of LiPuma’s favorite artists (not of the recording variety), including Alfred Maurer, Marsden Hartley and Arnold Friedman.

Gill is LiPuma’s wife of 35 years. They have two grown daughters.

“I love art…. You’ve got structure, form, textures — the same things you have in music,” says LiPuma, recently elected a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.

“I’d like to be a private [art] dealer,” he says. “I also still enjoy making records. I don’t want to stop…. At this point, the last thing I’m thinking about is retirement.”

0 notes

johnsoedercma-blog · 5 years

Photo

For me, it doesn’t get any better than telling stories about people with a passion for the arts. I wrote this profile of record producer extraordinaire and philanthropist Tommy LiPuma for The Plain Dealer, on the occasion of a Tri-C JazzFest salute to him that coincided with the "Modern American Masters: Highlights From the Gill and Tommy LiPuma Collection" exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The Art of Tommy LiPuma

By John Soeder published April 11, 2004, in The Plain Dealer

NEW YORK – Yes, he produced a chart-topping album for Barbra Streisand.

And yes, he also had a hand in Grammy-winning recordings by George Benson, Natalie Cole and Diana Krall.

Running down the mile-long list of his accomplishments as a record producer and music industry executive, however, it’s easy to overlook one of Tommy LiPuma’s most truly remarkable achievements:

He made a Wham! fan out of Miles Davis.

The late, great jazz trumpeter visited LiPuma at home in the 1980s to discuss working together. LiPuma popped a cassette by the George Michael-fronted pop group of "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" fame into the stereo.

Davis "freaked out," LiPuma says. "He loved it."

Who knew?

Such are the perks when you’re chairman of the world’s largest jazz record company, Verve Music Group. LiPuma, a former Clevelander, has held the title since 1998.

"I’m honored," he says. "On the other hand, it makes you wonder: Are you coming toward the twilight of your career? Frankly, I feel I’m at the top of my game."

LiPuma co-produced three albums for Davis, starting with 1986’s "Tutu." It included a cover of "Perfect Way," originally done by Scritti Politti, another 1980s pop act that LiPuma brought to the attention of Davis.

"He wasn’t what I call a jazz cop," LiPuma says. "He loved all kinds of music."

Ditto LiPuma. He wholeheartedly buys into the old Duke Ellington maxim: There are only two kinds of music – the good kind and the other kind.

LiPuma’s latest productions are albums by Al Jarreau and Krall.

Veteran vocalist Jarreau’s "Accentuate the Positive" is due in stores Tuesday, Aug. 3. LiPuma was behind the mixing board for two previous Jarreau releases, "Glow" (1976) and the live double album "Look to the Rainbow" (1977).

"He’s a brilliant producer," says Jarreau, who performs Friday at the Allen Theatre as part of the JazzFest’s "Silver on Silver" salute to another LiPuma client, hard-bop pianist Horace Silver.

LiPuma has a knack for "knowing artists, knowing what they do, allowing them to do it and then pushing them where he thinks their strengths are — and beyond those strengths," Jarreau says.

While working on his new album, Jarreau found himself scatting the melody of "Groovin’ High," a Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie chestnut: "Duh-dut, duh-dut-dut, bah-doo-bee-ooh-bee-ooh-duh-dut’ll-doo-day. . . ."

LiPuma’s ears pricked up. "Is there a lyric, Al?" he asked.

"Well, I’ve thought about doing a lyric for it," Jarreau replied.

LiPuma encouraged him to go for it.

Jarreau did. The finished track turned out to be "one of my best efforts," he says.

Krall’s new album, "The Girl in the Other Room," comes out Tuesday, April 27. It features six songs co-written by the singer-pianist and her husband, rocker Elvis Costello.

LiPuma co-produced "The Girl in the Other Room" with Krall, whom he refers to as "my baby." He has overseen seven of her eight albums.

"Tommy is my ears — he can hear things I can’t hear," Krall said in a 2001 interview with The Plain Dealer. "He loves music, art, beauty and all the meaningful things in life, including really good wine."

At Sistina, LiPuma orders a bowl of pasta. It arrives perfectly al dente and prepared, per his specifications, with cherry tomatoes. A seafood dish follows in short order.

"This is the branzino," LiPuma says, digging into the Italian-style sea bass. "Delicious!"

Between sips of espresso in the afterglow of the meal, he’ll gladly tell you about working with ultradiva Streisand on "The Way We Were," her 1974 No. 1 album: "She knows exactly what she wants."

Or the truth behind "Weekend in L.A.," singer-guitarist Benson’s 1977 live album: "It wasn’t really as live as it sounded. . . . We had to redo the vocals."

Or the emotional experience of recording the title track of Cole’s 1991 "Unforgettable" album, a virtual duet between the singer and her late father, Nat "King" Cole: "When we did it, it stopped all of us in our tracks."

Lawyers, accountants running the show

LiPuma lights up when he talks about music. But his mood turns somber when the conversation turns to the music business.

"The sooner corporate America gets out of it, the happier I’m going to be," he says.

"The record business used to be basically a group of entrepreneurs . . . who made gut decisions and ran their own ships," LiPuma says. "They didn’t have to worry about making their quarter or if Wall Street was going to give them its blessing. They were music people.

"Today, with a few exceptions, you have lawyers and accountants running the show. It’s very unfortunate."

LiPuma has delegated the day-to-day responsibilities (read: headaches) of running Verve Music Group to his second-in-command, President and CEO Ron Goldstein.

"I handle the creative aspects," LiPuma says. "When you make records, all you want is the right performance. . . . As a producer, everything is about waiting for the moment when the artist drops a magic take. One of the most important parts of my job is knowing when the moment happens."

Magic has struck in the studio time and again for LiPuma, who has made more than 20 gold, platinum or multiplatinum records. He also has won three Grammy Awards: Record of the Year in 1976 for Benson’s smash "This Masquerade," Album of the Year in 1991 for Cole’s "Unforgettable" and Best Jazz Vocal Album in 2002 for Krall’s "Live in Paris."

The way he was: Cleveland roots

Born in Cleveland to Italian immigrants, LiPuma was the youngest of five children. His brothers, Joe and Henry, and sister Therese still live in the area; another sister, Josephine, died in 1984.

LiPuma’s family moved often when he was young, from Cleveland’s Kinsman neighborhood to University Heights to Warrensville Heights to Beachwood.

"The radio was always on in our house," LiPuma says. "In those days, it was Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters, Jo Stafford.

"Some way or another, I ended up where I ended up. But I’m a pop junkie. I love great pop music.

"By the time I was 18, I loved bebop — Charlie Parker, Horace Silver, all those guys. But it didn’t take away from my love for pop music."

When he was 9, LiPuma developed osteomyelitis, a debilitating bone infection. He spent nearly three years laid up in bed.

"The radio became my friend," he says. "I discovered the R&B station in those days, WJMO, and I started hearing Charles Brown, Louis Jordan, Nat Cole and Ruth Brown. I was a complete R&B nut by the time I was 12.

"Then I started playing saxophone. . . . I’ll never forget: The music teacher at Shaker Heights Junior High School gave me an F in music because I didn’t show up for a concert."

LiPuma dropped out of school when he was 18, although he only made it through 10th grade. His illness had left him two grades behind his friends. "I felt out of place," he says.

By then, he was earning $25 a night playing sax in local clubs.

His father, a barber, sent LiPuma to barber college and gave him a loan to buy a barbershop in the Keith Building on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland. Among his customers were various radio disc jockeys, including future "American Top 40" host Casey Kasem, who used to work at the old WJW AM/850.

But LiPuma’s heart wasn’t into cutting hair. He leased the shop, packed his sax and hit the road for a year with a jazz combo.

Upon his return to Cleveland in 1960, LiPuma got a job as a record promoter with M.S. Distributors.

The first album he produced was "Comin’ Through," the 1965 debut by an R&B group from Canton — the O’Jays.

Making hits, taking hits

He scored his first gold record one year later with the Sandpipers. The easy-listening trio’s Top 10 single "Guantanamera" was produced by LiPuma, who also recited the spoken-word bit in the middle of the tune: "I am a truthful man from the land of the palm trees. . . ."

Somebody once asked LiPuma how it felt to be the father of smooth jazz. He was mortified.

"I detest — de-test! — smooth jazz," he says. "Shall I call it the height of mediocrity? Everything has become so predictable.

"The jazz community can blame itself for what ultimately ended up happening with jazz. Basically, it has gone nowhere."

Some jazz purists blame LiPuma for his pop-savvy meddling — at least to hear him tell it.

"Critics like Gary Giddins hate my [expletive] guts," LiPuma says. "They think I’m the Antichrist. [Giddins] referred to me as a hack."

Giddins gave his side of the story via e-mail last week.

"I don’t hate Tommy LiPuma’s ‘[expletive] guts,’ " he wrote. "It is possible that I once referred to him as a hack, but I can’t recall the occasion and a global search of everything on my hard drive, dating back 20 years, turns up only one mention of his name."

In a review of the 1997 JVC Jazz Festival, Giddins made a passing reference to LiPuma as "the record industry menace who specializes in convincing good musicians to play bad music."

‘A rare breed’ and ‘a beautiful cat’

Tommy LiPuma — a "menace"? Jarreau scoffs at the notion.

LiPuma is "a rare breed," Jarreau says. "Maybe a guy like Tommy is too nice for this industry."

Sax player David Sanborn, on the bill for the JazzFest’s Silver tribute, has cut a couple of albums with LiPuma.

"You can always tell a Tommy LiPuma production," Sanborn says. "He makes high-class, high-quality records. . . . He has the ability to make records with broad appeal, too.

LiPuma is "a beautiful cat," says another music legend from Cleveland, jazz singer Jimmy Scott. His 1992 comeback album, "All the Way," was produced by LiPuma.

"He knows his stuff," Scott says. "If you have an idea and you talk it over with him, he’ll make it happen. He doesn’t limit his thoughts about the music."

LiPuma doesn’t limit his interests to music, either.

Paintings by American Modernists usually fill his Park Avenue apartment, although for the time being, the walls are dotted with empty hooks. "Modern American Masters: Highlights From the Gill and Tommy LiPuma Collection" is on view through Sunday, July 18, at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The exhibition features works by some of LiPuma’s favorite artists (not of the recording variety), including Alfred Maurer, Marsden Hartley and Arnold Friedman.

Gill is LiPuma’s wife of 35 years. They have two grown daughters.

"I love art. . . . You’ve got structure, form, textures — the same things you have in music," says LiPuma, recently elected a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.

"I’d like to be a private [art] dealer," he says. "I also still enjoy making records. I don’t want to stop. . . . At this point, the last thing I’m thinking about is retirement."

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newagesispage · 7 years

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JULY 2017

*****Kathy Griffin lost her CNN NY gig over her Scary Clown 45 severed head gag. Word is that Anderson Cooper wants to replace her with Andy Cohen. Last I heard, he had not talked to her directly either. Jim Carrey wonders about all that The President says and he still has his job. He commented that he has a dream about golfing with Trump and just holding that club and then he wakes up.

*****Chance the Rapper and a few others are calling for Bill Maher to be fired after his comment about working the fields.

*****A federal court upheld a ruling that could free Brendan Dassey. The court said the investigators led the confession and Dassey’s story was involuntary. Wisconsin has 90 days to retry.

*****Better call Saul had its season finale and OMG!! If Michael McKean does not get an Emmy, the world is just wrong!! Actually the show and the whole cast is amazing but come on!!

*****Elon Musk , David Rank and others have resigned from the Trump administration after America was taken out of the Paris climate agreement. The deal took years of negotiation and compromise and clean energy is the economics of the future. Scary Clown said that he represents Pittsburgh, not Paris and seems to see the agreement as a threat to his isolation America first ideas. The mayor of Pittsburgh tells us, “What Trump did was not only bad for the economy but also weakened America in the world.” It will take 4 years before the U.S. can actually quit the deal. Luckily, so many companies in this country are so against Trump that we’ll probably hit our goals anyway.** The mayors of Paris and Pittsburgh have since made their own climate deal.** Others have resigned over the lack of interest the Trump administration is showing AIDS.

*****The Eagles will use Vince Gill and Glenn Frey’s son, Deacon for some NY and LA shows.

*****Word is that the American Idol reboot wanted Randy Jackson for the host gig but he turned it down.

*****Wal Mart insurer, Ohio Casualty is in a dispute against Tracy Morgan who refuses to testify. The company claims he exaggerated his injuries after being hit by the Wal Mart truck. Morgan’s camp say that the 90 million they claim to have paid him is the exaggeration.

*****Do you notice all the home security ads on the ID channel? I guess the true crime scares you into getting more protection.

***** After many of Trump’s minions have tried to convince us that what they have done is not a travel ban, the man himself says it is. They originally claimed that this would only be for 90 days and they would have new things in place and it has been over 90 days. The President tells us that they are extreme vetting anyway so why does he want to take this to the Supreme Court?**The supreme court is letting them do it now!!** His rabid supporters and GOP cohorts are just enablers at this point.

*****The Cosby trial ended in a mistrial. I was at the Red Cross the other day and some employees were watching a news report about the trial. The pig of a man in the group piped when they put up a shot of Cosby’s accuser. “Ooh, she is not a pretty woman. I’d have to drug MYSELF to do her,” he laughed.** Cosby is now going to do a town hall type tour.

*****Anne Rice says that she has been blocked from trump’s twitter site.

*****Trump lawyer, Jay Sekulow is so blatant about using donations from his Christian non profit to fund his personal life. Please read the article in the Guardian because the history of this is so far reaching that I can’t even go into it all here. Perhaps these givers don’t care and want to support this guy but they should know where there money is going.

*****The buzz about American crime story is starting even though it won’t be out until 2018. Next up is a look at Versace then hurricane Katrina and the Lewinsky scandal.

*****George and Amal had twins, Alex and Ella.

*****Megyn Kelly didn’t do much hard hitting on her Putin interview. She sure seems to like interviewing the hate mongers.

*****Alice Cooper is coming out with a new album.

*****Jay-Z is upset with the Prince estate. He is quoted as saying, “This guy had ‘slave’ on his face. You think he wanted the masters with his masters?”

*****Elvis Costello is working on a Broadway musical about A Face in the crowd. Hooray! He is also heading out on tour.

*****Forbes is doing its part to expose the Trump’s. They did an in depth story about how Eric Trump’s charity money for kids with cancer was funneled back into the business. There is now an investigation into this claim.

*****Thank you Chicago for the 10 story mural by Eduardo Kobra. The Muddy Waters mural was unveiled on June 8 at 17 N. State Street for the Chicago blues fest. The Muddy Waters legacy gave a free concert.

*****The HBO doc,’ If you’re not in the obit, eat breakfast’ is so inspirational and adorable. Dick Van Dyke is still a sexy beast and who knew that Carl Reiner’s oldest friend is an army buddy known as the greatest harmonica player.

*****Reality Winner has been charged with leaking classified info.

*****The infrastructure plan that Trump told us was” largely complete”, isn’t done at all. He now signed a proposal that is not binding so it means nothing. WTF are they doing?

*****Days alert: Oh, I was so hoping that they would find Tony Dimera on that Island, even though Anna carries around his ashes. It is a soap, everybody comes back. Speaking of that, Chandler Massey, who played the first ‘out’ Will Horton, is returning in September. Rory’s back!!** Where is Paul’s Mom since he is fighting for his life? ** So.. Chloe gives up the baby to Nicole and the court takes it away. Maggie is allowed to see the baby, why wouldn’t she just try to get custody of her grandson and Holly would still be in the house?? ** Thank goodness we are seeing more of Andre!

*****Chris Rock was on the cover of Rolling Stone and is on tour to make money after his divorce. He “jokes” that he had multiple affairs. Many claim that the famous affair he mentioned was with Kerry Washington.

*****The President wants to give 110 billion to Saudi Arabia for weapons.

*****Chris Wray has been nominated for FBI director.

*****Beyonce and Jay Z had twins.

*****Paul McCartney got the companion of honour in the UK.

*****Thank you CBS all access for topping off your latest ad with Matthew Gray Gubler! YES!!

*****Panama is breaking ties with Taiwan and shifting allegiance to China.

*****The director of health and human services in Michigan, Nick Lyon has been charged with involuntary manslaughter over the contaminated water.

*****Congrads to Jill Brummel and Keith and baby Wagner!

*****Check out Blood Orange for some great tunes!!

*****Woodstock has joined the National register of historic places.

*****Intel chiefs like Dan Coates refused to answer questions from their oversight committee in the probe. Rogers, Rubenstein and McCabe all seem to have trouble talking. This cover up is so much worse than Watergate. Former US director of National intelligence, James Clapper says, “Watergate pales, really, in my view, compared to what we’re confronting.”** The opening statement of James Comey was released the day before his big day. He confirms that Trump wanted him to drop the Flynn stuff and talked about the cloud of the Russian stuff. He transcribed the conversations with the President as soon as they were over.**Ya know, I was mad at Comey for the Hillary crap that he now tells us went public because he did not like the Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch meeting. Most that have worked with him seem to call him an honorable man. I was trying to believe he would do the right thing in the Trump administration investigations. After he was fired, Trump mentioned he may have tapes and Comey had a friend release his version even though some say the leaks were first. The Trump tweet was May 12 and the first news of leaks were May 16. Now, I still try to believe that Comey is an honest man but he sometimes acts like a child (someone does something so he immediately seems to say, ok, well take that!!). But we have to notice that Scary Clown’s stories always change, Comey’s does not. As far as who called who, there must be records.**As Comey was testifying, the house repealed Dodd Frank. C’mon Press, let’s get ALL the news out there!** BTW, there are no tapes, that was just more scary clown BS.** It seems that 38% of this country is trying to run the show and those 38% don’t give a shit about the rest of us.

*****Investigators have found a direct link that puts Putin at the center of the election disruption. The plan was to help Trump and hurt Hillary. Word is that the Obama administration did not take action because they thought Putin might escalate his cyber meddling. John Kerry tried hard to get some action but the White house thought they would be accused of trying to sway things for Hillary. It’s sad but true because the Trump camp would have went nuts. The instability and doubt may have changed this country forever. It seems many do not care as long as they have their guy in power now. **Power outages in the Ukraine have also been linked to Russia. It looks like they are now gunning for us. The centralized system in the Ukraine is not as hard to set right as ours would be. Our power system is more complicated and would be harder to tamper with but also harder to straighten out. Russia appears to have an adaptable and reusable software.** Fox’s Brit Hume says that even if the Trump campaign did collude with Russia, “it’s not a crime.” They all say ‘America first’ but I am beginning to think they would all be happier in Russia.** Over 2000 pages of financial documents have been turned over to the investigation.

*****And WTF is up with John McCain? He was like a dog with a bone about bringing up the Hillary stuff again. And he does not seem to like women asking questions because he keeps interrupting. It is time to retire.** Did you see Sen. Martin Heinrich??

*****Rep. Al Green of Texas and Brad Sherman of California are drafting articles of impeachment because Trump obstructed justice when he fired Comey. Just as this is in the works, Melania and Baron finally move into the White house.** Pence and even Trumps lawyer have hired attorneys.**After 8 years of class and pride, this country sure has taken a big step into the gutter.

*****The Generals seem to have their problems with the new President. A quote from Trump says,” The Lieutenants, the captain, their majors, the colonels- they’re professionals. They love doing it. So I authorized the generals to do the fighting.” I thought he said he knew more than them but now he gives no direction so his hands don’t get dirty. He has no strategy and there are so many vacant positions that there are not enough experts to go around. Using U.S. money to follow his family around while they make business deals instead of the government being properly staffed does not seem very safe for the rest of us.

*****Did ya’ll see those relaxed pics of Obama and Trudeau and their wine in Montreal? Wow.. It all seems so wonderfully normal.

*****Turkey has banned Wikipedia, calling it a national security threat.

*****Kevin Spacey did a great job hosting the Tony’s. His opening number included Whoopi and Stephen Colbert. Spacey later did his Carson and said “admit it, you missed me”. I suddenly felt so sad because I realized I really do miss him. Richard Thomas and Danny Devito were both nominated for The Little Foxes but both lost to Michael Aronov. Foxes did get a win for Jane Greenwood for costume design and featured actress, Cynthia Nixon. Nixon gave a fabulous speech about the people of this nation that do not take what is happening in Washington lying down. James Earl Jones won the lifetime achievement but only got a snippet of time on air. Laurie Metcalf won for leading actress in a play for A Doll’s house part 2. Bette Midler looked great and won but would not shut up.** Best Dressed was Sarah Paulson and worst was Carolyn Murphy.

*****Patricia Krenwinkel was denied parole again.

*****Oliver Stone interviewed Putin over 20 hours in 4 visits. Putin drove him around and seemed to convince Stone that he is a pretty great guy. He seemed to take Putin’s word about meddling in the election. Some say it is a love letter to Putin and I see shades of Barbara Walters and Fidel Castro.

*****There was some voter fraud in Alton, Il. An 88 year old election judge pleaded guilty to voting for Trump for her dead husband. She claims he would have wanted her to.

*****Summer Camp 2017 in Chillicothe, Il. had some great artists this year with Claypool Lennon delirium, the Wood brothers and Gov’t. Mule. A few people were taken away after the sudden storm but other than that fun was had by all.

*****Phil Collins had to postpone a London gig after a fall.

*****Dick Gregory is out again making appearances and I wanna go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*****Theresa May misjudged her public when she called for an election in the UK. Her conservative party has lost some of its power.

*****The UK has acquired Feud: Bette and Joan to play later this year.

*****OMG: TLC SYTTD UK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*****John Oliver is being sued by a great friend of Trump’s, Robert Murray. Murray, the CEO of Murray energy warned him not to do a story on him but he did it anyway. Go John!! Look it up, it’s a story worth seeing.

*****Diedrick Bader just gets hotter

*****The Downton Abbey movie will start production in 2018!

*****An inconvenient sequel, which is out July 28, has added a bit after Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord.

*****Ivanka is being ordered to give a deposition in a lawsuit about copying a shoe design. The Italian company that sued is Aquazzura but she claims that she had nothing to do with any of it. Her claim is that she can’t give the deposition because it would be a distraction from her WH duties. Her Fox and friends interview sound bite was :”I try to stay out of politics.”

*****Leslie Jones hosted the BET awards and earned good reviews but she later tweeted about the hotel she stayed in. She suggested that people not stay at the Ritz Carlton because, “they don’t like black people.”

*****Farm Aid is being held in Burgettstown, Pa. with Willie, John Mellencamp, Neil Young and the Avett Brothers among others.

*****Fox news will no longer use the line, “fair and balanced.”

*****Daniel Day Lewis has retired from acting.

*****Tony Bennett is given the Library of congress Gershwin prize.

*****Judd Apatow is making a doc bout Garry Shandling. Can’t wait!!

***** Sean Spicer is interviewing his own replacement including Fox news and Daily mail employees.

*****The U.S. spent 28 mil on uniforms for the Afghan military. They were not field tested and did not work out. An official wanted a specific lush forest motif while most of the landscape is desert. WTF?

*****O.J. is up for parole.

*****The secret health care bill came out and many protested at Mitch Mcconnell’s office. Police were sent in to drag them out, wheelchairs and all. It seems we have not been this divided since the civil war. What is more important than health care for all, than equality? Is a wall more important? Are tax cuts for the rich more important? In the end, the haters always lose but not without hurting so many along the way. It always comes down to equality. It is always about some trying to keep down others and that is never right. It always has to lose in the end. ** The vote has now been delayed. **Good old Mitch who was given treatment for his polio, as a child, because of the kindness of the March of Dimes now refuses to talk to them. They disagree with the health care plan.**More health care insurance providers are bowing out of coverage. The companies blame the uncertainty of Washington. This is just another reason to blame Obama for the senate and house’s own doing. Keep things in chaos and blame the other guy while the rest of the country suffers. ** The Pres now says that the ACA should just be repealed, new plan or not.

*****It is being reported that the CIA health professionals did not just torture detainees during the Bush administration, they performed experiments.. This is like right out of the Nazi playbook.

***** We don’t hear enough about men who are straight and mostly dress masculine but like a little makeup. I find that adorable and they need to be represented

*****Wow!! The NY senate after a decade, still did not vote on the child victims act. The Catholic Church and the Boy scouts lobby so hard because they think it will bankrupt them. The bill would let survivors bring civil cases until they are 50 years old, felonies until 28, and give a 1 year window for both public and private institutions instead of 90 days. Republican majority leader John Flanagan will not even put it up for a vote.

*****Illinois has its fair share of problems right now with the budget crisis, Chicago and Peoria shootings and the Belleville shooter, James T. Hodgkinson.

*****Why do the View and the Tonight show play all these stupid games with their guests? Does the audience enjoy this? It is often so awkward.

*****Jess Session says that Trump has not been in a single briefing about North Korea. I am sure the new South Korean president is reassured by that as he came for a visit. The shuffling of reporters and questions about the idiot in chiefs twitter made him feel welcome too.

*****And now the airwaves explode with the latest scary clown 45 twitter directed at the Morning Joe team. Why do we have to talk endlessly about this crap every time the baby has a tantrum? Unless we find some real evidence or this impeachment march does some real good, we better get used to the fact that our President has no fucking class!

*****Neil Young is reminding us to stand up for what we believe and resist this 4th with a new video.

*****The Presidents team is trying to get personal info on voters like social security numbers and voting history which could lead to voter intimidation.

*****The Frye fest head Billy McFarland has been arrested for wire fraud.

*****Adele has cancelled the rest of her tour because of damage to her vocal chords. It is especially sad for she has hinted that this could be her last tour.

***** If you haven’t seen the 2014 doc ‘ Starring Adam West’, check it out. The Kickstarter film is so honest and a great tribute to a man who will be missed. He also has some hot sons!!

*****R.I.P. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Manuel Noriega, Jimmy Piersall, Roger Smith, Peter Sallis, Modd Deep, Stephen Furst, Rosalie Sorrels, Glenne Headly, Simone Veil, Adam West and Anita Pallenberg.

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thegloober · 6 years

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Where Does Creativity Come From (and Why Do Schools Kill It Off)? (Ep. 355)

Studies show kids are more creative when they aren’t promised a reward. But schools — with their incentives for performance and emphasis on quantifiable outcomes — may not be set up to prioritize creativity. (Photo: Ben_Kerckx/Pixabay)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Where Does Creativity Come From (and Why Do Schools Kill It Off)?” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

Family environments and “diversifying experiences” (including the early death of a parent); intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations; schools that value assessments, but don’t assess the things we value. All these elements factor into the long, mysterious march towards a creative life. To learn more, we examine the early years of Ai Weiwei, Rosanne Cash, Elvis Costello, Maira Kalman, Wynton Marsalis, Jennifer Egan, and others. (Ep. 2 of the “How to Be Creative” series.).

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

Stephen DUBNER: I don’t understand why you’re not in prison in China. It sounds like — obviously they did it for a little while.

Ai WEIWEI: I’ll tell the truth. I tried to think about it and suddenly, just this moment, I realized the answer. The jail in China is not large enough to put me in.

DUBNER: What do you mean?

WEIWEI: I’m just too large for them. My ideas penetrate the walls.

Are your ideas big enough to penetrate walls? His, apparently, are.

WEIWEI: My name is Ai Weiwei. I’m 61 years old. I was born in 1957 in Beijing, China. But in the year I was born, my father was exiled.

In our previous episode, we asked the art economist David Galenson to name a true creative genius.

David GALENSON: I mean, Ai Weiwei is a giant. Ai Weiwei I believe is not only the most important painter in the world, he’s the most important person in art. Ai Weiwei has changed the world. With his art, he has made a contribution to political discourse. This is a unique person in art, almost in the last hundred years.

So we went to Berlin to visit Ai Weiwei. We interviewed him in his subterranean studio, a former brewery in the former East Berlin.

DUBNER: And how do you describe what you do now?

WEIWEI: That is a little bit confusing, because as a profession, most things I did relate to so-called art. So people call me artist. But since I have been also working in defending human rights or freedom of speech or human condition, they call me activist.

DUBNER: Do you care what people call you?

WEIWEI: I don’t really care. I think I’ll live my life. I do care if I still can wake up the next morning. I do care if I can walk to school to pick up my son.

(Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty)

You can see why people are confused by what, exactly, Ai Weiwei is, or does. He spends a lot of time making things but also a lot of time on Twitter, calling out institutional hypocrisies or cruelties. He once created a museum piece comprised of 100 million handmade porcelain sunflower seeds; he also made a series of photographs in which he drops a Han Dynasty urn to the ground and smashes it to bits. Lately, he’s been consumed with the global refugee crisis: he hung 14,000 life vests around Berlin’s main concert hall; he installed a sprawling public-art project in New York called “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors”; and he made a documentary film called “Human Flow.”

WEIWEI: The officials came here and told them, look, there’s no way you’re going to get papers to continue. Either you go voluntarily, or we arrest you.

Ai Weiwei’s enduring obsession has been to stick his finger in the eye of the Chinese government. He helped design the Olympic stadium for Beijing’s 2008 Games; but by the time it was built, he’d attacked the organizers for cronyism and corruption. After the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan that killed tens of thousands, he launched a citizens’ investigation into the poorly-built schools where so many children died; he gathered up the mangled rebar from quake sites and turned it into a sculpture called Straight. When the government placed him under surveillance, he responded by making a sculpture called Surveillance Camera. In 2011, Ai Weiwei was kidnapped and jailed by the Chinese government, charged with “subversion of state power.” Upon being set free, he decided it was best to leave China.

WEIWEI: Since I was born, I would be seen as a son of the enemy of the people. They see you are dangerous. They see you are someone who could have a potential to make big trouble.

DUBNER: They were right.

WEIWEI: They’re perfectly right. But I try to live up to that kind of conditions, too. I am not satisfied with what I did.

Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was a prominent poet and intellectual. Before the Communist revolution, he was considered a leftist subversive. When Mao took over, Qing started out in the new regime’s good graces but eventually fell out of favor, and the family was exiled from Beijing.

WEIWEI: So I grew up in the Xinjiang province, which is Gobi Desert. And spent about 18 years in that location.

DUBNER: So when you were a kid, you’re growing up in — we call them labor camps or reeducation camps. I don’t know what you call it?

WEIWEI: We call it reeducation camps to remake you, to become a better part of a society.

DUBNER: It didn’t seem to have worked.

WEIWEI: It did work on me.

DUBNER: Well, if the state was trying to reeducate you —

WEIWEI: But that reeducation is very important, because it builds your reactionary to this kind brainwashing or trying to limit individual’s rights and freedom of speech. So you get, somehow, immune to these attacks.

For several years, the family lived underground, in a cavern. For two decades, Ai Ching did not write.

WEIWEI: My father is so scared. There is no single day he comes home not physically shaking because he’s been so mistreated and —

DUBNER: He tried to kill himself several times.

WEIWEI: He did. He attempted three times.

DUBNER: How did he try? Do you know?

WEIWEI: He once, the electric — how do you call that?

DUBNER: Socket.

WEIWEI: Socket. Of course, the whole light went off because of the shortage. And he once tried hanging himself, and it’s so lucky the nail was loosened.

DUBNER: And you were a teenager then or younger?

WEIWEI: I was about eight or nine.

DUBNER: And did you know what happened?

WEIWEI: I didn’t know at all. He told me.

DUBNER: Later.

WEIWEI: Yeah.

Concerning Ai Weiwei’s upbringing, at least two questions come to mind, both of them probably unanswerable. The first: what are the odds that that boy, living in a labor camp in the Gobi Desert, would become one of the most influential artists in the world? And: how much did that environment have to do with who he became?

* * *

Ai Weiwei’s childhood was of course atypical. And a lot of his art is clearly a response to his family’s treatment during China’s Cultural Revolution. But is there any way to say that his upbringing was a cause of his creativity?

Dean SIMONTON: Yeah, that’s very important. We actually have a term for it. We call it “diversifying experiences.”

Dean Simonton is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California-Davis. He’s spent decades studying the biographies of great artists and scientists to help understand where creativity comes from.

SIMONTON: What “diversifying experiences” means is you’re exposed to one or more events, in childhood or adolescence, that puts you on a different track from everybody else. So instead of being raised just like all the other kids on your block in a very conventional fashion, you all of a sudden find yourself different. You see yourself as different. You have different goals. And these diversifying experiences can take a lot of different forms, and often you look at the lives of a lot of creative geniuses and you see more than one of them operating.

DUBNER: So you’re saying that diversifying influences would tend to lead to higher creativity then, yes?

SIMONTON: Tend to lead to creative genius.

Pat BROWN: I didn’t realize that he was a spy until I was a teenager.

That’s the scientist Pat Brown. He grew up all over the world — in Paris, Taipei, in Washington, D.C.

BROWN: The way I figured it out was that a good friend of mine, my dad was his boss in a way, and he made some mention of the fact that his dad worked for the C.I.A., and I thought, “Well, that’s weird because —”

DUBNER: “My dad doesn’t.”

BROWN: Yeah.

For a time, Brown was best known as an inventor of a method of genetic analysis called the D.N.A. microarray, which has become useful for the study of cancer.

DUBNER: Was this research primarily within the context of solving cancer, addressing cancer, or no?

BROWN: No. Let’s put it this way. It’s kind of hard to, for so many of these things that I would do, any scientist would do, it’s not necessarily that there’s a single reason why you’re doing it. You just realize that, if we could do this, there’s all these cool things that you could apply it to. Okay. And in fact, in the early days when we had first got this thing working, we had a few good ideas there was reason enough to do it. And then as you’re actually doing experiments you realize, “Oh we could do this. Oh we could do this.”

Until a few years ago, Brown was a sort of high-end researcher-without-portfolio at Stanford. And then he took a massive left turn and founded a startup with rather modest goals.

BROWN: I’m currently the C.E.O. and founder of Impossible Foods, which is a company whose mission is to completely replace animals as a food production technology by 2035.

I asked Brown whether he saw any connection between his globe-trotting childhood with a C.I.A. dad and his scientific career.

BROWN: I think the fact that I traveled and lived in multiple places in the world. And in those days kids were a lot more like free-range at a young age. And I felt like I had a lot of freedom to explore all these places and so forth, I think had an impact on me in the sense that it just it just made me aware of the fact that there is basically no place on earth that’s inaccessible.

Maira KALMAN: Probably the base of everything that I do is a fantastic curiosity about people, intense empathy that we’re all struggling, we’re all heroic to just even wake up in the morning.

That’s Maira Kalman.

Maira KALMAN: I am an illustrator and author.

And she’s got a son.

Alex KALMAN: My name is Alex Kalman and I’m a designer, a curator, a creative director, a writer, an editor, and someone with generally many ants in their pants.

DUBNER: Can one or both of you — you can take turns, you can interrupt, whatever you want — just describe briefly the family. That’s a small topic, but just a little bit about the family growing up and until now.

Maira KALMAN: Did you say that’s a small topic?

DUBNER: Yeah.

Maira KALMAN: Oh my God. That’s an epic. I think that’s the epic topic. There is no bigger topic than the family.

Maira Kalman is best known for her children’s books and her illustrated edition of The Elements of Style and her work for The New Yorker, including one of its most famous covers ever, called “New Yorkistan.” Her work manages to be whimsical and melancholy at once. Paintings of cake and dogs and demure old ladies in plume-y hats. She once bought a pair of the conductor Arturo Toscanini’s pants at auction, just to have them. Actually, she bought the whole suit …

Maira KALMAN: But his pants have a lot more panache when you say his pants.

For years, Maira Kalman was best-known as the right-hand woman to her husband Tibor Kalman, a wildly creative and influential designer. He died young, nearly 20 years ago, when their two children were young. I’ve known them since around that time.

DUBNER: Pretend I don’t know either of you at all.

Maira KALMAN: Okay.

DUBNER: And we’re sitting next to each other on an airplane or something and I say, “Who are you?” Oh, you guys are a mother and son, tell me a little bit about yourselves. What kind of family was this? Where did you live and what was that household like?

Alex KALMAN: I think we’d say, “Do you mind if we swap seats so that we don’t have to sit next to each other on our flight.” Yeah. We’d prefer not to talk, actually.

Maira KALMAN: I’m going to say, I’m going to be in business class and he’s going to be in — no, anyway, so go on.

Alex KALMAN: Mom!

Alex and Maira are collaborators too. They created an installation called Sara Berman’s Closet — Sara Berman being Maira’s mother and Alex’s grandmother — and the installation consisted of the contents of Sara’s closet, artfully curated and arranged. It’s appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. So I was curious what the Kalman house was like to grow up in.

Alex KALMAN: It was a really joyful and wild and fun childhood. We were all very close and we went on many adventures. And days were filled with looking around and making books when we were bored and cooking dinner and listening to music from all corners of the earth and just a real — really deep exposure to everything and anything that was not familiar in our day to day.

Maira KALMAN: And I thought that a house where we’re making books and dancing and making costumes and turning the furniture upside down is — How could you not do that? So the creativity in the home, in the family, was a sense of play and a sense of loving language and art and music.

Alex KALMAN: I think that real creativity isn’t this thought to say, “Okay now let’s be creative.” It’s just a natural feeling or understanding of saying, “All these rules are opportunity to create new rules or bend certain rules.” And the joy in that type of experimentation and that type of play, hopefully with some result that is meaningful or profound or funny or entertaining.

Nico MUHLY: My parents to their enormous credit were really not that pushy.

That’s the composer Nico Muhly, the youngest person to ever have a commission from the Metropolitan Opera, in New York. He grew up in New England with a painter mom and a documentary-filmmaker dad.

MUHLY: And it’s the usual, you have to be driven to the thing and then you have to get all the books and you have to pay for these classes and whatever. So my parents were really great about that, but it wasn’t this version of the thing where it’s as if we were going to press you so hard to become a concert violinist. Nor was it, isn’t this a cute hobby but you need to work for Goldman Sachs. I think they found the good middle point.

It’s less about them being artists and more about them creating a household in which ideas were spoken about. And I think that’s the real luxury of my childhood was not necessarily being surrounded by art in that way, but by people who read and thought about a million things and channeled that into, not just artistic expression. I mean, we all know, we all have horror stories of people raised by artists.

Horror stories, maybe. But also success stories. Growing up in a creative household means learning not only that a creative life is possible; but if you pay attention, you can learn how to do it. That was the case with Elvis Costello, the singular singer-songwriter, whose father was a singer with a popular dance band.

Elvis COSTELLO: Nobody would regard them as hip in the slightest way but the leader, Joe Loss, he managed to front a band from the late 20’s to the 80’s. He was a remarkable character in English light entertainment. They weren’t by any means up with the rock and roll vibe or anything like that.

Young Elvis — actually his name was Declan MacManus back then — young Declan would hang out in the darkened balcony of the Hammersmith Palais in London during the band’s Saturday afternoon set. Watching his father emerge into the limelight, in jacket and tie. Which is why to this day, Elvis Costello pretty much always wears a jacket and tie.

COSTELLO: You have a sort of admiration for your parents’ ability to do whatever it is they do. That was one perspective of performance. And he brought music into the house that he was learning for the weekly broadcast. Later on, after my parents separated, his life transformed. He then sort of took on an appearance closer to sort of Peter Sellers in What’s New Pussycat? He grew his hair long and he started to wear fashionable clothes and listen to contemporary music, because he left the safety of the nightly gig with the dance band and decided he wanted to do his own thing.

So that striking out and being independent thing was sort of from his example, no matter what the music was or the style — and bear in mind my taste in music changed just like any teenager; it was all about one thing, the next day it was all about another; it was always about the song. I had spent the last two years of schooling in Liverpool which at that time was musically very quiet in the early 70’s, and tried to make my own way playing my own songs. I had a partner, we sang in bars and any evening where they would let us on the stage, really.

We were making tiny little bits of money, just about covered our expenses, and I learned a little bit how to do it, but I never really thought that I was — I looked at the television every Thursday to see Top of the Pops and saw the distance between the way I looked and felt and sounded and what was a pop singer right then, which was a lot of people in baker foil with eye makeup on; that was the music of that moment, the glitter, glam moment. That seemed very distant from a 17-year-old.

DUBNER: Did you wish you could do that?

COSTELLO: No, I never wanted to do that. I might be the only person in English pop music that made a record that never wanted to be David Bowie, while still loving everything he did.

Wynton MARSALIS: My father really struggled a lot. He couldn’t make money playing modern jazz.

Wynton Marsalis is one of the most celebrated musicians alive — a jazz and classical trumpeter who also composes, teaches, and runs the landmark Jazz at Lincoln Center program. His father, Ellis Marsalis, is also an accomplished jazz musician: a piano player.

MARSALIS: He played with great musicians, but the people didn’t really want to hear the style of music they were playing.

In the 1960’s and 70’s, when Wynton was growing up in New Orleans, the dominant popular music was funk and R&B; not the modern jazz his father played.

MARSALIS: I’d grown up around the music, so my father and them played, they listen to their music, no one else was listening to it, but I heard it.

So Ellis Marsalis supported the family by teaching.

MARSALIS: Well my daddy, the first jobs my father had paid $5,000 a year, $6,000. He was a band director for segregated high schools and in towns like Opelousas, Louisiana. Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

But Ellis was still an influential musician in New Orleans — and for his son.

MARSALIS: Musicians knew what he was. People in the neighborhood respected him for his opinions. Yeah you can’t say nothing to jazz musicians; they know stuff. The barbershop or something. And also because in the barbershop, at the height of black nationalism, my father was always the one who was not nationalistic and that was a great embarrassment for me.

I’d be saying, “Man, why are you always talking to stuff that’s against what everybody is saying?” And he would always be very philosophical: “Man, you don’t attack people that’s not there. You gotta tell the people in front of you what they don’t want to hear.” And he was always, a big one, he used to say, “All of everybody never does anything.” If you said, “they,” he would always say, “Who is they, man? Can you tell me who they is? Do you know them? Who are their names?”

Wynton’s mother was also a big influence.

MARSALIS: My mama was unique, and she had an originality. Her food tasted different, she had her own way of doing stuff. She was a big creative person.

DUBNER: The way she decorated your house, I understand was artistic? Yeah.

MARSALIS: Everything about her, everything. She grew up, she’s from the projects. So, she’s very unusual, because she very much had the street element which has become a cliché now. Then it wasn’t as cliché. And she was also it was her first to graduate from college, she went to Grambling University. She was extremely intelligent in terms of just her ability to do, she could do my chemistry homework when I was in high school and any spatial problem she understood. But she also had a very deep social consciousness that was not, it was not cliché.

And Wynton Marsalis distinguished himself at a very young age.

MARSALIS: Well, I played the Haydn Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic when I was 14. And the Brandenburg Concerto with the New Orleans Youth Orchestra when I was 16.

DUBNER: How did you recognize that trumpet was going to be what you were good at?

MARSALIS: Well, I didn’t know till I was 12 that I was going to be interested in it and then it was just a matter of applying, practicing and stuff. I noticed, if you practice you got better. Because a guy in my neighborhood was always picked on. And he saw Bruce Lee, Enter the Dragon, and he decided to get some nunchucks. And man he would swing these sticks and then all of a sudden, maybe five months of him swinging these sticks every day, he became a virtuoso at it.

Then there was no more picking on him, calling him fat, taking his money, stuff that people liked to do him. All of a sudden it was, hey, say Fats, come swing them sticks for us. And then Fats, his name was Theodore. We called him Thedo. We grew up, we were in the country, Kenner, Louisiana the black side, segregated side. And I noticed one day, he had an encounter with a guy name we called Big Pull, and after that encounter he definitely was not picked on.

And I thought, “Man, practicing is something.” This guy, six months ago, everybody was picking on him, now he practiced swinging these sticks and his whole position in the hierarchy of this food chain has changed. I understood from watching him that just the diligence and repetition, intelligent repetition you could become better at things.

A couple of years later, Wynton and his brother Branford joined a funk band.

MARSALIS: I was good at making a bass line. I’m left-handed so they would always say, “Put a bass line on this bro,” so I’d put a bass line or something. We rehearsed in the 9th Ward, we had a band called The Creators at that time. In New Orleans, my brother and I were the two youngest musicians on the whole funk scene. I was 13 and Branford was 14. Our band was mainly older men, maybe in their early 20s and teens, late teens. There were maybe 10 to 13 bands they all had names like Cool Enterprise, Flashback, Stop Inc., Vietnam, Blackmail, the Family Players.

We would have battles of the bands, we’d play dances. We’d play gigs everywhere, wedding receptions. We did a series of talent shows that the police department would sponsor to make community relations, and people would come up out of the audience, we played the worst areas of New Orleans, and it was the most fun we ever had. And they would come up and sing or play. And we had to learn their 15 or 20 songs and we learned that, we never look at music of course, most of the times there was never music. We just learned the music and we played and it was great.

I actually didn’t want to join the band, because at that time, when I was 12, I wanted to play jazz. And my daddy is the one that said, “Man, play in the band.”

DUBNER: Oh really?

MARSALIS: Yeah he said, “Man, join the band.”

DUBNER: Because why?

MARSALIS: Because you have to have experiences to know what something is. Don’t cut yourself out of experiences when you’re young. He was always saying, don’t adopt my prejudices; develop your own.

Mark DUPLASS: Jay and I were just this little two-person team.

That’s the filmmaker and actor Mark Duplass, one half of another New Orleans brotherhood.

DUPLASS: We would sleep in Jay’s single bed together for way too late. Jay had already gone through puberty. I mean it was weird. But I think we started to develop this sense of we might try to become artists. And that seems like an impossible thing to do and be financially sustainable. So we better link arms and souls.

Mark and Jay Duplass both write, act, and direct, sometimes together, sometimes not. They had a pretty standard-issue suburban upbringing.

DUPLASS: Mom’s home with us while Dad’s cranking away 50 to 55 hours a week, building the American dream. So we can one day take a vacation that’s not in the car, one day fly to a vacation. That was the goal. So what that meant practically for me and Jay is that we didn’t have a lot of stuff. Our parents gave us a lot of emotional support and a lot of love, but they didn’t buy us a lot of stuff, so we were very bored.

And I think when cable arrived which was a marker of success. My dad was like, “We’re getting cable and we are doing it.” That’s when H.B.O. came into our lives and that really lit us up as a storytellers, because for those of you who don’t remember in the early-to-mid 80’s, there was no curation as to when certain kinds of movies were shown. They generally leave the R-rated movies for the nighttime now but back then we would come home from school and it was Ordinary People and Sophie’s Choice and we were just enjoying the hard-hitting dramas of the late 70’s and early 80’s. And I think it really shaped a lot of who we were.

DUBNER: I’m curious, so you guys are what? You’re maybe 10 and Jay’s 14 or something at this point?

DUPLASS: Yeah, right around that age, yeah.

DUBNER: Yeah. So you’re watching Ordinary People and Sophie’s Choice, which are not exactly teen or tween fare. Were you aware that you were outliers in that regard?

DUPLASS: It was still very subconscious, because we would take our bikes to the streets and still play with the other kids and play football. They really wanted to talk about Star Wars. And we were fine, and we watched those movies to keep up. But it was this feeling, which I think a lot of people have maybe later in high school when you start to realize, “Oh, this is not my tribe. I know how to play this game. I know how to talk about the things to get along, but when I go home, I’ve got my one or two people that are really are my tribe. And we’re talking about that stuff.” That sort of dynamic happened to me and Jay much earlier than most people talk about it happening.

The Duplass brothers pretty much built their mental model of a creative life from scratch. For Rosanne Cash, the opposite was true. She’s the daughter of country-music legend Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian. As for Rosanne following in his footsteps:

Rosanne CASH: My mother was afraid of the life it would lead to. So she didn’t encourage me that much. My mother was very creative in other ways. She crocheted, and she painted, and she was president of her garden club and she was creative in some domestic realms. But writing and music just carried a lingering fog of fear around it for her.

But I remember my dad was on the road and I remember secretly writing him when I was 12 and saying everything I wanted to do with my life, that I wanted to be a writer that I wanted to do something important, that I wanted people to read my words, that I loved language, that music was so important to me and had changed my life. I told him all of these things and he wrote me back and he said “I see that you see as I see.” It was powerful even to a 12-year-old. It gave me encouragement.

Her parents got divorced around this time; her father had become a heavy drinker and a drug addict. This made her rethink putting music at the center of her life.

CASH: Well, that was complicated for me because my dad was a very famous musician and I grew up thinking that fame was a terrible thing that happened to you, like a disease. And I thought, why would I go into that? Why would I try to attract that kind of attention? And you never have any privacy and privacy is so important to me because a writer needs privacy and I don’t want to go on the road and I don’t want to take drugs and get divorced. Well, actually I did want to take drugs in the beginning so that was — But most of that imprint came from my mom because she was really afraid of fame because of what happened in her life with my dad.

For Rosanne Cash, it was a cautionary tale but, in the end, not enough to stop her.

CASH: Yeah, I started writing songs and then I wanted to sing them myself and then I made demos and then I showed them to a record label. There was no turning back.

Rosanne Cash went on to put out many records, mostly country and pop, some of them big hits; she’s also written four books. She’s about to release a new record, called She Remembers Everything. A childhood like hers — a musician father, always traveling; drugs and alcohol; fame and its attendant burdens; her parents’ divorce: it’s practically the model for what we think of as a dysfunctional family. And having a dysfunctional family is often seen as the model for living a creative life.

Teresa AMABILE: It’s false.

That’s Teresa Amabile, a social psychologist from Harvard who studies creativity.

AMABILE: Many creative people do have dysfunctional families but not every creative person has a dysfunctional family. There’s some interesting research on this by David Feldman and Robert Elbert and a number of other people who have looked at the biographical backgrounds of people who have distinguished themselves for their creativity. Very often they faced a lot of adversity in childhood. Maybe they had a serious illness themselves. Maybe a parent was seriously ill or died. Maybe there was an ugly, acrimonious divorce or they lost a sibling.

Those kinds of events can crush a child, they can they can lead to a lot of problems; they can lead to substance abuse, they can lead to various forms of emotional illness. They can also lead to incredible resilience and almost superhuman behaviors, seemingly, if people can come through those experiences intact. I don’t know if we — we being the field in general — have discovered what the keys are, what makes the difference for kids.

It is true, however, that eminent people in a range of fields are much more likely than the average person to have lost a parent at a young age. In the U.S., the rate of parental death before age 16 is 8 percent. For high-performing scientists, the rate is 26 percent; for U.S. presidents, 34 percent; for poets, 55 percent. But, we should note, the rate of parental death is also disproportionately high for … prisoners. So it may be that a parent’s death is a shock to any child’s system, but that it’s hard to predict the direction of that shock. Too much depends on the circumstances, like how talented the kid is or whether they have some key guidance.

AMABILE: Sometimes it’s one key adult who can somehow rescue them in their lives. Sometimes it seems to just be a trait of the kid. Something within themselves.

There’s also the notion that creativity itself can be a kind of coping mechanism — as it was for the graphic designer Michael Bierut.

Michael BIERUT: I was a really good elementary school and junior high school and high school artist. I was very accomplished, I could do very realistic drawings that impressed people. And boy, did I take pleasure in impressing people. Most of my other physical attributes and mannerisms were the things that would provoke many strangers just to beat me up. But this magic ability to draw things actually seemed to be a thing that even bullies would be impressed by.

Early on, I started associating creativity not with just something that I would do in a lonely room for my own satisfaction but something that somehow would give me a way of operating in the larger world. If you were designing a poster for the school play, you got to go to rehearsals. So even if you couldn’t sing or dance or act, you got to make a contribution to the overall effort that went into bringing that play to the stage.

SIMONTON: Well, that’s another example of a diversifying experience. Being in an out group.

Dean Simonton again.

SIMONTON: Being a minority, as long as you’re not oppressed. I mean, this is the problem. A lot of minorities are oppressed, and so they’re not going to realize their potential, even though they are more inclined to think outside the box. If they can’t get a job, then it’s not going to help them much. I mean, a good example of that is that Jews in Europe are well-known to be overrepresented in a lot of domains of creativity, particularly in the sciences. For example, Nobel prizes in the sciences, Jews are overrepresented.

DUBNER: It’s something like 20 percent.

SIMONTON: But, guess what? That’s most likely to be in the case where Jews were emancipated, where they were no longer subject to the kind of anti-Semitism that they saw in medieval Europe. In Switzerland and a number of other countries. So Switzerland, that disproportion is much much higher than you see in Russia, which actually has many more Jews, but had a much longer history of anti-Semitism.

Maira KALMAN: I used to use the Nazis invading my studio as a motivator to finish an assignment that I was dragging. And I would say, “Well, if the Nazis came in two hours, would it be done? What if they came in one hour — would it be done then?” And that was expecting the worst. And I was brought up, of course my family — especially from my father that sense of you never know what’s going to happen. Horrible things will happen.

Kalman grew up in Israel, her parents having escaped Belarus before the Holocaust. But the rest of her father’s family did not make it out.

Maira KALMAN: In our family, all roads lead to the Holocaust. It’s kind of an inescapable part of a section of our lives and it’s a reference point for so many things. When we talk about politics or things being bad and we say, “Well, it’s not the Holocaust so get a grip.”

When I visited Kalman recently in her Greenwich Village apartment, one room was dominated by cardboard boxes, recently freed from storage. They contained the possessions of her late husband. She and her son Alex are planning to make a documentary about Tibor Kalman.

DUBNER: Would it be fun to open a Tibor box and just see what’s in one?

Maira KALMAN: No. I mean, it could be. Oh wait, I take that back. Let’s open this box.

DUBNER: Okay.

Maira KALMAN: This box is — no, not that box. This box — Yes. Okay. This is — he used to take this extendable fork to a restaurant. And he’d opened the extendable fork and then all of a sudden — this is — well this needs to be repaired but he would reach over to another plate from the customers next to us and take the food off their plate.

DUBNER: Oh, not at your own table?

Maira KALMAN: No, not at our own table. What would have been the fun of that? The fun of this was that he would reach over into somebody else’s table and take their food. He did it in Italy, and everything is much more jolly and festive there and everybody’s laughing a lot at this guy who’s reaching over. And these are Karl Marx communist potato chips which I made for the Tiborocity show. We created a mock store, and this is after he died of course, and I thought, shouldn’t we have Karl Marx communist potato chips, as if that was part of our collection.

The Mmuseumm is housed in an old freight elevator. (Photo: alexkalman/Wikimedia)

Maira and Tibor Kalman’s son Alex is now 33 years old. It’s pretty obvious that a lot of his creative spirit comes from his mother and his father. His main project at the moment is a small museum called Mmuseumm, he calls it “a contemporary natural history museum” and a form of “object journalism.” This is where “Sara Berman’s Closet” originated, before it landed at the Met. We visited Mmuseumm with Alex Kalman one afternoon. Mmuseumm is very, very small. How small? It’s housed in an old freight elevator. About three people can fit comfortably. And yet: it is a museum.

DUBNER: This is nicely done.

Alex KALMAN: Museum quality.

DUBNER: It is museum quality.

Alex KALMAN: It is.

DUBNER: Seriously.

Alex KALMAN: Yeah. Well the idea is that it’s a museum. There’s certain rules we felt we had to follow.

DUBNER: Yeah.

Alex KALMAN: And if we did that then, there’s other rules we could play with. So this collection is called “Modern Religion,” and it’s basically exploring how these ancient traditions stay relevant in today’s society and one way of staying relevant is redesigning the elements or the tools of that religion to fit in with modern trends. So today, everybody’s gluten-free. So now there’s gluten-free communion wafers. Or everybody’s on-the-go, so there’s on-the-go Communion kits. It’s looking at these seemingly banal objects, and —

DUBNER: And this one here is the —

Alex KALMAN: Yeah.

DUBNER: Really? It looks like a piece of Nicorette, and is that wine and a little host, then?

Alex KALMAN: That’s right, yeah. The idea in Mmuseumm is that we want to touch on many different notes of what it means to be human. So there’s things in here that are totally devastating and there’s things in here that are completely absurd and we don’t want the trick to be on you. We want you to be a part of it.

I asked Kalman how his father, and his father’s death, influenced him as a human and as a creative.

Alex KALMAN: There always felt to be a really deep and natural and profound connection between Maira and Tibor and Lulu and me.

Lulu is Alex’s sister.

KALMAN: So there is just a sensibility and a way of feeling and interacting and thinking and doing and why we’re doing and what we’re doing that feels very just binding and natural. And I often think that, subconsciously, the work that I do today feels like a way of maintaining a dialogue with Tibor and he feels very present and very active in it all.

* * *

Dean Simonton, you will recall, is a psychology professor who’s studied the biographies of creative geniuses.

Dean SIMONTON: To get back to just pure psychology, there’s something called the “Big 5” personality factors.

The “Big 5” are: conscientiousness, extraversion-slash-introversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and …

SIMONTON: And one of those “Big 5” factors is the openness to experience factor. And it has a lot of different facets to it. It is openness to values, openness to actions, you’re willing to try out different foods, try out different music, all sorts of different things. And this factor is so powerful as a predictor of human behavior, that you can actually tell by going to someone’s dorm room in college whether or not they’re high or low in openness to experience. Okay? Well it turns out this correlates very, very highly with creative genius. Creative geniuses tend to be very, very high in openness to experience. They’re willing to explore different values, different approaches.

We did find a lot of openness to experience in the creatives we’ve been speaking with, often starting in childhood.

Margaret GELLER: I was very much interested in the arts as a child.

That’s Margaret Geller, a path-breaking astrophysicist.

GELLER: And my mother, who was a walking dictionary and loved literature, used to take me to the beautiful Morristown, New Jersey library. It was in a very old building, and one of the things that we read together were plays by all the famous American playwrights. And from that, I really inherited a love of the language and I became fascinated by the theater and by the human condition. So I demanded that I go to acting school. I don’t think my father was that fond of this idea, but it was impossible not to do it.

Geller’s father was a chemist at Bell Labs, the famous tech incubator.

GELLER: I think he started taking me there when I was around 10 and he used to have a mechanical calculator, probably nobody listening, or virtually nobody, knows what one of those are. But they were called Monroe calculators, and the fascinating thing was all the noise they made. And the best thing was to, say, divide one by three, so it would just go, “ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunk,” and just put out all the threes it could.

I learned how to load an X-ray camera, and I learned how to measure an X-ray diffraction photograph, how to use a Vernier. And people would come in and chat with me. And also Bell Labs had, in its lobby, a Foucault pendulum which I used to be fascinated by, many stories high. So that was a fascinating thing to see.

The inventor James Dyson, he of the multi-billion-dollar vacuum fortune, was not predestined for a life of engineering.

James DYSON: My father was head of the classics department at my school till he died. My brother was a classics scholar. And my mother was an English scholar. So there was no engineering, or manufacturing, architecture, or anything in sight.

So how’d that happen?

DYSON: So all I knew about creativity, or the only creative thing I did in school, was art. I went off to art school or arts university to pursue art as a career, as a painter, in fact. But when I got there — and this is in London — I discovered that you could do quite a large number of forms of design, like furniture design, interior design, architecture, ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, filmmaking, and so on. And I became interested in design but ended up doing architecture.

And while I was doing architecture I discovered that I was very interested in structural engineering. I don’t know why. Except that at that time, it was the time of Buckminster Fuller and his triadic structures, geodesic structures, and Frei Otto with cable-tensioned structures. And it was a time that concrete and, for that matter bricks, were disappearing as the structure for buildings and being replaced by steel structures of one sort or another. And I realized that architecture was going to be about the structure and the engineering, and not so much the form. And I found engineering fascinating, I don’t know why. I’d never come across it in my life before.

DUBNER: I’m curious if you were at all intimidated by the notion of architecture and engineering as much as it appealed to you, did it strike you as something that lay outside the realm of possibility for a boy who came from a family where the classics were the foundation? Did it seem at first just too hard?

DYSON: Not at all. You have to remember — or maybe it’s my arrogance, but you have to remember this was the mid-60s in London, where anything was possible. And it didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t be an architect or a structural engineer or anything for that matter.

It’s probably no coincidence that moving to a big city like London changed the way James Dyson thought about his creative prospects. The same thing happened to Ai Weiwei years ago when he lived in New York City for several years.

WEIWEI: Yes, basically the whole universe is so quiet. Not everywhere is like New York City.

The world has gotten more urban over the past few decades. And that’s probably a good thing for the sake of creativity and innovation. Economists like Harvard’s Ed Glaeser argue that cities play an outsized role in economic growth.

Ed GLAESER: I think the city is our greatest invention because it plays to something that is so fundamental in humanity. It plays to our ability to learn from one another.

Our ability to learn from one another in cities. Ideas colliding, on purpose and by accident. Also, there’s competition in cities — and with that competition comes strong incentives to create. But this raises its own, larger question: is creativity best-served by external incentives and motivation, or internal? When Wynton Marsalis was first thinking about pursuing a career in music, his father warned him: he said don’t do it unless you truly love it. “Don’t sit around waiting for publicity, money, people saying you’re great,” he told him, because “that might never happen.” Things obviously worked out well for Wynton Marsalis, but he remembers his father’s message well, and passes it along to his own students in the jazz program at Juilliard, where he teaches.

MARSALIS: My first thing I have my students do is write a mission statement. And that mission statement has three sentences. What do I want to do, how do I achieve it, and why am I doing it? And based on that mission statement, I teach them. And I have, my fundamental teaching to them is, I want you to rise above the cycle of punishment and reward. I’m not going to reward you or punish you. This is information, and you can do what you want with this information. So, you’re always actualizing. And I always tell them, if you want to learn something I can’t stop you. If you don’t want to learn it, I cannot teach you.

What Ellis Marsalis taught Wynton, and what Wynton teaches his students, is supported by the academic research on creativity and children. A few decades ago, the Stanford psychologist Mark Lepper ran an experiment with nursery-school students in which he first watched them doing various activities, one of which was drawing with markers. Teresa Amabile, who studied under Lepper when she was getting her Ph.D., tells the story.

AMABILE: He then took all of the children, if they’d shown any real interest in these markers, he put them into his experiment. And had them go into a separate room and they were randomly assigned to one of a couple of conditions. The experimental condition was one where the children sat down, and the experimenter said, “Hi, I’ve got some Magic Markers and some paper here for you. I wonder, would you be willing to make a drawing for me with these materials in order to get this “good player award?” And the experimenter then held up this little award certificate with a big shiny gold star on it and a place to write in the child’s name. That was the expected-reward condition.

The kids in this group, as promised, got the certificate for making a drawing. A second group of kids were invited to make a drawing — with no mention of a reward — and got the certificate as a surprise afterwards. This was called the “unexpected-reward condition.” And a third group of kids, a control group, made drawings but were neither promised a reward nor surprised with one.

AMABILE: The results were amazing. They were very strong. The kids who were in the control condition, who were in the unexpected-reward condition, were just as interested in playing with those markers and drawing pictures in their free play time as they had been before they went into the experimental room. The kids who were in the promised-reward condition, the contracted-for-reward condition, were significantly less interested in playing with those markers. So this showed very clearly — and there were many subsequent experiments showing — that intrinsic motivation, intrinsic interest in children and in adults, can be undermined by the expectation of reward.

This finding — that extrinsic motivation can erode someone’s intrinsic desire to create — came as a surprise.

AMABILE: It was revolutionary at the time, which was the early 1970s, because behaviorism still held sway in much of psychology, the notion that rewards are purely good, that they motivate behavior, that you can shape behavior with reward and that is true. In fact it’s still true that rewards can be very powerful shapers of behavior. But Mark discovered this very counter-intuitive, unexpected, unintended negative consequence of reward.

Amabile herself, in a follow-up experiment, explored how extrinsic motivation affects the quality of creative work. She gave kids a bunch of art supplies and asked them each to make a collage.

AMABILE: Without a really strict time limit, although we generally guide people to finish the collage in 15 to 20 minutes.

The kids were divided into two groups. The first group was not promised any sort of reward; the second was told that the best collages would win an Etch-a-Sketch or a Magic 8 Ball. This was called the “competitive-reward condition.” Now all Amabile needed were some judges.

AMABILE: I brought in people from the art department at Stanford individually and asked them to rate each collage relative to the others on creativity on a nine-point scale, something like that. And when I analyzed the data, I found that the kids in the competitive-reward condition, made collages that were significantly less creative than the ones made by the kids in the other condition.

Based on this research and more, it would seem that the promise of extrinsic rewards — the kind of incentives that economists think encourage productivity — that actually discourages creativity, and decreases the quality. At least for kids, in these settings — it’s impossible to generalize. But the evidence is strong enough for Amabile to draw some conclusions.

AMABILE: I think that the biggest mistake we make in our schools, and I’m talking about everything from kindergarten now up through college, is to focus kids too much on how the work is going to be evaluated. Part of that is the extreme focus on testing in the United States right now and the past several years. Part of it is the way curricula have been structured, even before the current major push on testing.

There’s too much focus on “what is the right answer, what are people going to think of what I’m about to say?” and too little focus on “what am I learning, what cool stuff do I know now that I didn’t know last week or a year ago, what cool things can I do now that I couldn’t do before?” And I think that if we could if we could switch that focus, we would do a lot to open up kids’ creativity.

Kids come intrinsically motivated to learn, and we stamp that out of them through the educational system. I don’t think it’s impossible to reorient the way we teach. It’s not going to be easy. But I think we can do it. I think we have to do it.

Walter ISAACSON: I think we all see kids who are slightly rebellious, who talk back, who question the teacher.

That’s Walter Isaacson, who’s written biographies of Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein.

ISAACSON: And at a certain point, the teacher either spends more time and lets the imagination wander or punishes them and says, “Quit questioning me.” Einstein ran away from his school in Germany because he was expected to learn by rote, and he was swatted down every time he tried to question the teacher. So he was lucky — he gets to run away and go to Switzerland, where they have a new type of school system that nurtures questioning authority.

One institution that has raised the questioning of authority to an art form is the M.I.T. Media Lab. It has research units called Opera of the Future and Biomechatronics — and Lifelong Kindergarten. That last one is run by a professor of learning research.

Mitch RESNICK: My name is Mitch Resnick.

Resnick argues that randomized, controlled experimentation — the gold standard of a lot of science — just doesn’t work very well for a subject like creativity.

RESNICK: One problem is it changes one variable at a time. And I don’t think any one variable is going to be the key to creativity. I think that what we see is the most creative environments have lots of different things that work together in an integrated way. So it’s really not so easy to take the classic approach of make a tweak in one variable and see the changes. I don’t think it’s going to be the way that we’re going to get a deeper understanding of the creative process.

Resnick argues that the lack of clear, quantifiable outcomes is a big reason why schools don’t prioritize creativity.

RESNICK: Schools end up focusing on the things that are most easily assessed, rather than focusing on the things that are most valuable for kids and valuable for thriving in today’s society. So what we need to do is to focus more on trying to assess the things we value rather than valuing the things that are most easily assessed.

Resnick and the Lifelong Kindergarten group develop software that lets kids make things, like animated stories or interactive Lego models.

RESNICK: Very often, traditional learning has taken the form of delivering information, delivering instruction. And the view has been if we just find a better way to deliver the instruction, kids will learn more. But I think research has shown that learning happens when kids, and adults for that matter, actively construct new ideas. There’s the expression we “get” ideas. We don’t “get” ideas. We make ideas. So I think that yes, there’s some role for just delivering information. But I think the most important creative experiences come when kids are actively engaged in making new ideas through their interactions with the world.

The program is called Lifelong Kindergarten because Resnick thinks the ideas should extend well beyond childhood.

RESNICK: We focus on four guiding principles that I call the four Ps of creative learning: projects, passion, peers, and play. So we feel that the best way to support kids developing as creative thinkers and developing their creative capacities is to engage them in working on projects based on their passions in collaboration with peers in a playful spirit.

We lead most of our lives by working on projects. A marketing manager coming up with the new ad campaign is working on a project. A journalist writing the article is working on a project; in our personal life, we plan someone’s birthday party. That’s a project. So we want kids to learn about the process of making projects.

We also want them to work on things that they’re passionate about. We’ve seen over and over that people are willing to work longer and harder and persist in the face of challenges when they’re working on things they really care about. They also make deeper connection to ideas when they’re working on projects that they really care about.

The third P of peers — we’ve seen that learning is a social activity, that the best learning happens in collaboration and sharing with others. We learn with and from others.

Then the final P of play, I sometimes call the most misunderstood P. Often when people think about play they just think about fun and laughter. And I have nothing against fun and laughter but that’s not the essence what I’m talking about. I see play not just as an activity but a type of attitude and approach for engaging with the world. When someone has a playful approach, it means they’re constantly experimenting, trying new things, taking risks, testing the boundaries. And I think the most creative activities come about what we’re willing to experiment and take risks.

Jennifer EGAN: I remember when I would come home from school and no one was home and I didn’t have a plan. There was this almost mysterious excitement that I would feel about just being alone.

That’s the writer Jennifer Egan, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad.

EGAN: I have to say, I feel I lost touch with that through maybe even decades of my life where I was so worried about what everyone else was doing, how I measured up, how what I should be doing as opposed to what I was doing whether there was some important thing everyone else was doing that I should be doing too. And this was before social media. I think this is a scourge for young people now. From everything I hear. But if I can get that out of my head, which I find easier and easier as I get older, there’s a feeling that there’s sort of a mystery that’s waiting for me that I can possibly enter.

There’s so many childhood narratives that are really about this. I mean, The Secret Garden, all the Narnia books about passing through a membrane or a border or a door or jumping into a pool and being in another world. It’s a really basic fantastical longing. This wish to be at a distance from one’s own life and to touch something outside it, which is first of all thrilling in and of itself. And second of all returns you to your real life charged in some way. That’s what fiction writing does for me.

ISAACSON: I think that when we’re young, we really indulge our wonder years.

Walter Isaacson again.

ISAACSON: That notion of playing and being imaginative, and having downtime where you can be creative — that’s something we sometimes lose in our school systems today.

One beneficiary of this creative downtime? Leonardo da Vinci.

ISAACSON: He had the great fortune to be born out of wedlock, which meant that he couldn’t go to one of the Latin schools that middle-class families of the Renaissance went to. And so he’s self-taught — he sits by a stream and puts rocks and different obstacles in it to see how the water swirls, and he draws it. And then he looks at how air swirls. All of these things you get to do when you’re young, you’re full of wonder, and you’re using your imagination.

We see that in Ben Franklin as a young kid, just being interested in, “Why does condensation form on the outside of a cold cup?” The type of thing that maybe we thought about, but somehow we quit thinking about. So that’s the number-one secret of being imaginative and creative, is almost being childlike in your sense of wonder. Albert Einstein said that. He said, “I’m not necessarily smarter than anybody else, but I was able to retain my childlike sense of wonder at the marvels of creation in which we find ourselves.”

But Walter Isaacson — like Mitch Resnick and Teresa Amabile — isn’t calling for a ban on conventional instruction.

ISAACSON: I think that creativity is something you can nurture, and even try to teach. But more importantly, creativity without skill — creativity without training and learning — can be squandered. If Louis Armstrong had not found somebody — King Oliver — to teach him how to play the cornet, all of his imagination would have been lost. So we should not disparage the role of training, of learning.

The same is true of Einstein — as a little kid, he’s wondering how the compass needle twitches and points north. What’s important is that he goes to the Zurich Polytech and starts understanding the concepts behind Maxwell’s equations. So people who think we should just nurture creativity without the skill sets and the training that allow creativity to be turned into action, to allow for things like applied creativity, they’re being too romantic about it. Leonardo had to work in Verrocchio’s workshop and learn how to do a brush stroke.

There are, of course, plenty of obstacles that may keep a person from gaining both proper instruction and the latitude to play and imagine. Nor is every kid lucky enough to grow up with two parents as talented and creative as Tibor and Maira Kalman. Or with parents like Margaret Geller’s, taking her to Bell Labs and indulging her passion for acting. These are privileges, not rights. They’re not always fully appreciated. Here’s John Hodgman, the comedian, author, and former Daily Show correspondent.

John HODGMAN: People who are hand-to-mouthing it and are really economically anxious, of course they’re going to have a disadvantage to, say, an affluent white dude from Brookline, Massachusetts who is an only child who had the full benefit of all of his parents’ love and never had to share anything in his life. I had a lot of time to sit around thinking and daydreaming to the point where, when I went to college, my dad said, “I don’t care what you do in college, I ask you only that you take a single course in bookkeeping and finance, so you know how that world works.” And I was like, “Dad, I love you, but no way.”

DUBNER: Really? That wasn’t a big ask on your father’s part.

HODGMAN: Even that. I know, fathers, I know.

DUBNER: What a spoiled brat you were.

HODGMAN: Totally. This is what I’m saying. I’ve regretted it every day of my life. It was an incredibly selfish and ridiculous thing to do, because I was spending his money to go to college. And yet I was like, “No, I’m going to sit on the grass and read 100 Years of Solitude for the fifth time.” You could make an argument that it paid off for me, to a certain degree.

But I mean, look: art comes out of all communities everywhere. Communities of means and communities of no means. I mean, the greatest art movement of the 20th and 21st century, that is probably the most globally meaningful art movement, is the development of hip-hop, which was creation in the South Bronx by young people who were obviously not affluent.

John Hodgman sure sounds like he’s got a grip on the causes and consequences of creativity. Wouldn’t you say? And that he’s got his own creative ducks in a row. He’s had a lot of creative and commercial success. But do not be deceived. If you think prior success insulates a creative person from — well, anything, you should think again.

HODGMAN: I mean, let me put it this way: I am a person for whom being creative is terrifying. It is the most rewarding thing that I can do. But it is a constant struggle with a very clear feeling that I am out of gas every day, every day. And that I will not be able to support myself or my family, because I have now finally run out of ideas, for sure, this time, I mean it. It’s not even a fear. It is a certainty that I’m done, that I have no further ideas, and I’ve been doing this — this and only this, whatever this is — now for 21 years.

We’ll explore that fear, and many other aspects of creativity, in future episodes of this series. Until then, keep your ears open for a bonus episode, our full conversation with Elvis Costello, who’s had one of the most extraordinary careers in modern music and has just put out a wonderful new record, called Look Now.

* * *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam and Matt Frassica. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Alvin Melathe, Harry Huggins, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Teresa Amabile, psychologist and professor emerita at the Harvard Business School.

Michael Bierut, graphic designer.

Pat Brown, chief executive and founder of Impossible Foods Inc.

Rosanne Cash, singer-songwriter.

Elvis Costello, musician, singer, songwriter, and composer.

Mark Duplass, film director, film producer, and actor.

James Dyson, inventor, industrial design engineer and founder of the Dyson company.

Jennifer Egan, novelist and journalist.

David Galenson, economist at the University of Chicago.

Margaret Geller, astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Ed Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard University.

John Hodgman, humorist.

Walter Isaacson, biographer and professor of history at Tulane University.

Alex Kalman, co-founder, director, and curator of the Mmuseumm

Maira Kalman, illustrator, writer, artist, and designer.

Wynton Marsalis, American musician, composer and bandleader.

Nico Muhly, composer.

Mitch Resnick, leader of the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Dean Simonton, professor emeritus of psychology at University of California, Davis.

Ai Weiwei, contemporary artist and activist.

RESOURCES

Creativity In Context by Teresa Amabile (Routledge 1996).

EXTRA

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Knopf 2010).

Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play by Mitch Resnick (M.I.T. 2017).

The post Where Does Creativity Come From (and Why Do Schools Kill It Off)? (Ep. 355) appeared first on Freakonomics.

Source: https://bloghyped.com/where-does-creativity-come-from-and-why-do-schools-kill-it-off-ep-355/

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gwynnew · 7 years

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'E.T.' at 35: Older bro Robert MacNaughton tells what 'D&D' at Harrison Ford's, 'Weird Al,' Elvis Costello had to do with it

From left, Henry Thomas, Drew Barrymore, and Robert MacNaughton in ‘E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL,’ 1982 (Photo: Everett Collection)

Robert MacNaughton has seen E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial many times, in many ways, in the 35 years since he starred as Elliot’s older brother Michael in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi family classic. He’s seen it with composer John Williams conducting the score live; he’s seen it in Germany, with his role dubbed by an actor who stepped on all his punchlines; he’s watched it at home with his wife, actress Bianca Hunter (who always starts crying before he does); he’s taken his son at to an outdoor screening at Brooklyn Bridge Park; and when the movie returns to theaters courtesy of Fathom Events on Sept. 17 and 20, he plans on taking his stepsons. “I know everybody’s seen it a million times, but it’s different when you see it in the theater with other people, and they’re all losing it too,” MacNaughton tells Yahoo Movies of the emotional film, about a lost alien who brings a family together.

MacNaughton left acting in his 30s and has been happily employed by the U.S. Postal Service for 15 years. But just as the 1982 film has remained a part of pop culture (as an obvious inspiration for Netflix hit Stranger Things, for example), it has always remained a part of his life. At 14, the actor won the coveted role of Michael, a teenager struggling for independence while caring for his younger siblings Elliott (Henry Thomas, 10) and Gertie (Drew Barrymore, 6), in a memorable series of auditions, one of which consisted of a Dungeons and Dragons game at Harrison Ford’s house.

Spielberg shot the film chronologically so that the actors’ real-life bonding, both with each other and the incredibly lifelike alien (whose operators were kept hidden from the children to further the illusion), was captured on film. The set was a place of compassion and creative freedom, where MacNaughton could improvise a line in Yoda’s voice (actually Thomas’ idea, inspired by a Weird Al song) and E.T. “talked” to Barrymore when the cameras weren’t rolling, because the puppeteers knew he was real to her.

When he wasn’t filming, MacNaughton attended school with Thomas, Barrymore, and Matthew DeMerritt, an 11-year-old boy born without legs who did E.T.’s stunts (including the famous drunk scene) inside a rubber costume. By the time they shot the harrowing third-act scenes of E.T.’s death and resurrection, the cast and crew were genuinely devastated that their time together was ending.

Robert MacNaughton today (Photo: Robert MacNaughton)

And yet, in a way, it never did end. MacNaughton has stayed in touch with his E.T. family (he recently ribbed Thomas about his tear-filled audition video going viral). In a strange twist of fate, the film brought him and his wife together — with an assist from Drew Barrymore — decades later.

In a wide-ranging interview, MacNaughton spoke with Yahoo Movies about the once-in-a-lifetime experience of making E.T., returning to his high school with the nickname “penis breath,” and deciding to leave show business — though he says he’d make an exception for Stranger Things.

E.T. is the rare movie that has never gone away. It’s remained very present in pop culture for the past 35 years. Yeah, I can’t believe it. It’s been on Netflix for like a year now, and I attribute that to Stranger Things. My wife and I watched Stranger Things, and it was like, “Wait a minute — that’s straight out of E.T.!” And they’re playing Dungeons and Dragons! It was funny because Dungeons and Dragons was even in the audition process [for E.T.]. One of the auditions was at Harrison Ford’s house because he and Melissa Mathison, who wrote the script, were together, and his kids Ben and Willard played Dungeons and Dragons. So one of the auditions was at Harrison Ford’s house with all of us playing Dungeons and Dragons. So it was always a part of the whole, of the script, an integral part.

In fact, the last scene in the movie wasn’t supposed to be the scene that ends up in the movie. The last scene was going to be all of us playing Dungeons and Dragons again, except this time, Elliot’s the dungeon master. Because he was the one that found ET, he sort of got in with the group. And so that was supposed to be the final scene, it was in the script and everything, and then they would pan up to the roof and you’d see the communicator and it’s still working — in other words, Elliot is still in touch with E.T.. But after they did the score, the music, and they saw what they had with the spaceship taking off and everything [laughs] — how can you follow that? I mean, it was a wise choice.

But it was funny because the script was top-secret so [the producers] sent just a few pages of the script to the creator of Dungeons and Dragons. And he said, I absolutely will not allow the name D&D to be used because they’re gambling on the game. I guess he misunderstood; there was a script note that we had money for pizza on the table, and he thought we were gambling on Dungeons and Dragons. [laughs] So I think that was kind of a costly mistake. He could have had all that high-end E.T. marketing.

Did you already know how to play D&D or did you learn for the film? Oh yeah, that was partly what got me the role. Because they didn’t show anybody the script, and I missed all the preliminary auditions. I just lucked out because I had auditioned for another movie called The Entity with Barbara Hershey, and the casting director for that, she had seen a play I did in New York, and so she flew me out there for the audition. And it fell through; I didn’t get the part. So she said, you know what, I feel bad because you came all this way to L.A., so I’ll make a call. I hear they’re casting something over at Spielberg’s and I’m not casting it, but I’ll call [E.T. casting director] Mike Fenton and see if I can get you in. So I lucked out.

My first audition was just a meeting with Steven, and it was on the day that President Reagan was shot. I’ll never forget, it was really crazy that morning, because I’m talking to Steven — who was my idol — and people are running in saying, “James Brady just died!” and all this stuff. But one of the things he asked me was, “What do you like to do?” I said, “Well, I ride bikes a lot.” He goes, “Yeah, that’s in the movie.” And I said, “I play Dungeons and Dragons.” And he goes, “That’s in the movie too.” [laughs] So it was just I said all the right things, I guess.

Robert MacNaughton, Henry Thomas, and Drew Barrymore in ‘E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial,’ 1982 (Photo: Everett Collection)

Henry Thomas’ audition tape was posted online a couple years ago and went viral. Yeah, he wasn’t real happy about that. [laughs] I’ve stayed friends with Henry all through the years. He’s the person I was closest to on the set. I talked to him yesterday, in fact. My wife Bianca has been the go-between; she’s the one who contacted everyone about Carlo Rambaldi, the guy who created the mechanical E.T., his daughter is having a 35th anniversary memoriam for her father, and so she wanted us to record little videos for his memorial, so my wife contacted Peter Coyote and Henry. Drew’s the only one we’re sort of out of contact with.

So yeah, Henry Thomas wasn’t real happy with the video. Because you know, it was an audition and you don’t expect your auditions to be public. I told Henry, “Really, everybody loves that video because of Mike Fenton’s acting.” He’s the guy reading the other lines off camera. [laughs]

I never thought about how strange it would be to see some lost thing from your childhood like that, all of a sudden become public. I mean, I thought it was great. He really bought into it, you could tell he was really heartfelt. He’s just a real genuine person.

That’s awesome that you’re still in touch. It’s funny because now one of my stepkids is named Henry. I mean, I had nothing to do with it. So when we’re in the park or something, I think people think I named him after him.

I want to talk about the very unusual process of shooting this film, which I understand was filmed chronologically? All of the interiors, pretty much, they did chronologically. The scenes where we say goodbye were filmed toward the end.

And there was a fair amount of improvisation? Yes. For one thing Melissa, the writer of the script, was on the set every day, which is rare for movies. Usually they don’t let the writer anywhere near the set. [laughs] But she was a really big part of E.T. and the heart of E.T., and because she was always there and she was always asking us for ideas, we all felt perfectly enabled to come up with different lines that might be saying the same thing but felt more natural to us. And Steven also encouraged a lot of that. Everybody could sort of chime in. It was Henry’s idea that I use the Yoda voice when I say “You have absolute power.” Because we used to listen to this show Dr. Demento that played novelty songs, and at that time ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic had a song called “Yoda” that was like the Kinks song “Lola.” And so I used to play that for Henry and I used to do a Yoda impression, just between us. But then when we were doing the movie he said, “’You have absolute power’ sounds like something Yoda would say.”

There’s also a scene where you walk into a room and you’re singing “Accidents Will Happen” By Elvis Costello. [pause] Yes. Now that was Melissa all the way. Because on the audition at Harrison’s house when I first got there, they were listening to the Elvis Costello album Trust. It’s funny because I’ve seen him probably about 15 times in concert, and I’ve loved all his music all through the years. But at that time I wasn’t familiar with his music. I was 14, but the year I was 13 I did like five plays and a bunch of TV movies. So I was always working from the time I was about 12, and I was just devoted to the stage. So the only music I knew was like, showtunes. [laughs] So I didn’t know Elvis Costello at all. I knew who he was but I didn’t know his music. They gave me a tape like, the night before with the song.

Elvis Costello had a book signing recently, and my wife arranged for me to meet him beforehand. And the first thing I did was apologize. [laughs] “I’m so sorry, I butchered the song, it’s a great song, I can’t sing and I wasn’t real familiar with the song!” But I told him how big of fans Melissa and Harrison were, and to a lesser extent Steven, because he wasn’t real into popular music either. He said, “Yeah, I didn’t think Steven was a fan.” [laughs] But I said, “But he was there and he was listening to it, so he obviously didn’t hate it!” But yeah, that’s my only regret, is that I wish I would have done it kind of better.

Tell me about the first time you saw the E.T. puppet. That was crazy because it could basically do everything you see it do in the movie. It was really a combination of Carlo Rambaldi being a genius — you know, he designed the mechanical alien for Alien, he did the sandworms in Dune, and also he did the Close Encounters aliens. Anyway, he was really a genius, but [the effects team] really worked hard. I mean, E.T. was one-tenth of the budget. The budget of the movie was $11 million and E.T.’s budget was one-and-a-half million dollars. Anyway, so it could basically do everything you see it do in the movie: his face could react, he had like 85 muscles in his face he could move, his eyes looked exactly the same.

But they kept it secret from me. We had a week of rehearsal, and then about two weeks on the soundstage before I had a scene with E.T. So the first time I saw him was when I see him in the movie.

Robert MacNaughton and Henry Thomas in ‘E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial,’ 1982 (Photo: Everett Collection)

They used that shot? It’s basically that shot — I mean, they had to set it all up and everything — but that was the first time I had seen him. Henry had already done scenes with E.T., so I was sort of pumping him for information, like, “What does it feel like? What does it look like? What does it do? “Because the only thing I had seen was the bicycle-basket E.T., because the first week of filming was the bicycle scenes and the scenes around the neighborhood. I don’t think that was an accurate representation of what E.T. could look like, that was just sort of a mock-up E.T.

So when I first see it, it was incredible. I’d never seen anything like it. I mean, you say “puppet,” but puppet sounds so basic compared to what it could do. They used to pretend with Drew, because she believed he was real and she would have conversations with it. Sometimes when it wasn’t filming, the guys that operated it would actually make it react to what she was saying [laughs] just to confuse her even further. But yeah, it was not CGI or anything added afterwards. When I think of E.T. I think of Carlo, because he was kind of like Geppetto — he was such a kind man, he was a Sicilian guy and he was very expressive, and would talk about everything he wanted E.T. to do. And then I think of Caprice [Rothe] who’s a professional mime, and she did the hands. She was usually kind of perched under the mechanical wires and reaching her hands up and expressing his emotions with her hands. And then Steven, he always read all of E.T.’s dialogue. So some of the lines I still hear Steven’s voice when I watch the movie.

The character moves around the set so naturally in the film, but there must have been all kinds of crazy accommodations for the puppeteers, right? When he moves around, primarily there was a different set-up: a walking costume. And that was really just a kid named Matthew DeMeritt. He was our age, he was 12, and we went to school with him, but he was born without legs. But he didn’t like to use the prosthetic legs. He would get around on his hands, and he had a skateboard he would get around on. So E.T., the way he waddles, is totally because of Matthew, because that’s the way he walks on his hands.

So when he was interacting with you or the other kids, you had Caprice doing the hands and the animatronics people pressing buttons? Yeah, it was hydraulics, and there was a team in the other room that we couldn’t see. They had a video camera on E.T. So they were doing it in another room, and we just had E.T. set up with all the wires leading to another room. I think it was 10 or 12 guys operating it in another room. And then Caprice would be sort of under it. So I felt so bad for her during the scenes where he’s eating or drinking the beer. She would get beer poured all over her head, or potato salad.

So whenever it’s one place, like in the closet, it was a really elaborate set-up. But then when he had to move, it was a really realistic costume, but the face would be limited to only a few movements. The face could still move but it wasn’t like the whole set-up.

Even when I was re-watching the film yesterday, I had a lot of trouble getting through the scenes where E.T.’s dying. Just like I did when I was a kid, I find them extremely stressful. Were they stressful for you to shoot? Yeah. That was hard because it was exactly what you see in the movie: they sort of took us out of our comfort zone with covering the house in the plastic. And all the doctors were real — that’s something I don’t think Steven gets enough credit for. The entire team of doctors that was working on E.T. were real emergency room doctors and various specialists from around California, and that was entirely improvised. He just wanted them to do it like a real code blue situation.

Henry Thomas and Robert MacNaughton in ‘E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial,’ 1982 (Photo: Everett Collection)

That’s probably one of the reasons that scene is so hard to watch, too — it really feels like you’re sitting in the ER. Especially with Drew. For her it was chaotic and she didn’t understand what was going on. The mood around the set was somber. There was not a lot of joking around when ET was dying. And plus, it was kind of close to the end of filming, and it was a great working environment and everybody knew that was going to come to a close. and nobody wanted it to end. So there was that too. The last week of filming was up in Crescent City in the redwoods — all the outdoor scenes in the redwoods — and so it was kind of like, this is the last stuff we’re doing in the studio. And so there was a feeling of regret and sadness. I mean, it’s very harsh, those scenes.

I’m serious, I still have trouble watching them. Especially as a mom now, I just want to swoop in and take Drew and Henry away, because they look like they’re in so much pain! Dee [Wallace, who played Mary the mother] really did a good job of comforting Drew, and it comes across in the movie. Because Dee was a mom too, in real life, and she really took Drew, watched out for her. It was hard, because she really didn’t know what was going on. And to her, E.T. was real. To us, a lesser extent. But the mood was really somber. Henry is brilliant in that scene where he’s saying goodbye to him; that’s the one that gets me every time. When he’s talking about the hollow feeling he has, “I don’t know how to feel anymore” — that’s the part where I just lose it. My wife loses it when E.T.’s on the floor in the bathroom and he’s reaching up at Mary and she’s just panicking. I joke sometimes with my wife that of all the toys, they never had a sick E.T. toy, that white E.T.

It’s so scary when you first see him like that! And you’re the one who finds him. Yeah, according to my wife, the movie’s all about me. [laughs] I’m the hero that saves him. She has her own theory of E.T. because she was a fan — in fact, that’s how we met. My wife and I met on a blind date set up by Drew’s mother a long time ago. And then we both had separate lives, other relationships, and then we found each other about seven years ago on Facebook. And we’re married.

So you first met after E.T. came out? We met back in 1985. I was doing a play in New York, and she had watched the movie and she was friends with Drew. And she had wanted to meet me a few years earlier, but Drew’s mom said, “No, you’re too young.” I think I was 16 and she was 13? Then I was doing a play in Central Park with Kevin Kline a few years later, I was 18 and she was 15. So she asked Drew’s mom, “Can you ask Robert’s mom for his number?” And so we talked on the phone and went out on a blind date. But it was just one date and then we didn’t see each other. There was the age difference, and I lived in California, and she lived in New York. So then we didn’t see each other again. [laughs] And then I got a message on Facebook. And we’re married.

That’s a great story. What was it like for you after E.T.? You must have suddenly been very recognizable. I was actually filming I Am the Cheese when it came out, so I was in a real small place, Barre, Vermont. I was reading about people lining up to see it but I wasn’t really exposed to the craziness when it initially came out. So then a few months later, I had to go back to high school. Which was crazy. Because I had been [to high school] one year before that, and I was sort of nondescript, I flew under the radar. But then of course, all of a sudden I was invited to all the football parties and everything. [laughs] Plus I got to be “penis breath” in high school. But I really wasn’t there that much because I was still working a lot.

You stepped away from acting for a while and you’re getting back into it — is that accurate? Not really. I was pursuing it in Los Angeles till I was about 30, and I found I’d kind of lost the joy for acting. I was auditioning for things I didn’t really want to do even if I got the part, just to keep my agent happy. I was really not happy.— I was happy when I was doing theater, but it was infrequent. And so I visited Arizona during that time, and I just liked the pace and I liked it better than where I was living in California. So I decided I wanted to move there. And then I tried still going back for auditions and everything, and that didn’t work. It was too much, driving from Arizona to Los Angeles twice a week. So then I had to get a real job [laughs] and I started working for the postal service. I’ve worked for them since 1995. And I was able to get a transfer to the New York area when I married my wife.

So then what happened was, I didn’t really plan on getting back into acting, but my wife is an actress and she had the lead in a mob movie called Laugh Killer Laugh. And the director, Kamal Ahmed, asked if I wanted to work on the movie. He had a part for me but it was working one day, just a few scenes. And it was kind of a funny part and I said ok; he was a friend and I did it for no money. I didn’t plan on getting back into acting. In fact it was the first time I picked up a script in 25 years. So I just did it sort of as a one-off. And then while I was doing that, this guy who was doing a horror movie asked if I wanted to do that. And I went, “Yeah, I never was in a horror movie!” [laughs] So I did that. But it wasn’t any kind of planned comeback or anything.

So if the Stranger Things producers called and wanted you to show up in Season 3, what would you say? Of course I’d say yes! I think they’re brilliant. It’s just that I’m not really keen on getting back into auditioning every day and putting myself out there. That’s the part I’m not interested in resuming.

Has anyone ever talked to you about doing an E.T. sequel or reboot? There was talk of a sequel back around that time. They wrote a treatment for it. Henry Thomas had seen it and said he wasn’t real thrilled with it. I had never seen it until recently it surfaced on the internet, and I read it and kind of saw what he meant. I mean, the treatment was written by Melissa and Steven, and I’m sure it would have been good if they’d written the whole script. But I think Steven wasn’t thrilled with the idea of having to do a sequel. And I’m glad he wasn’t. I mean, for personal, selfish reasons, I would have liked to have gotten the work, but I think it would have cheapened the original. And I don’t know, I think a reboot would never happen. I think he wouldn’t allow that. That’s like his baby. [laughs] It’s such a personal story for him.

At this time when everything seems to have a sequel, E.T. being a stand-alone movie makes it feel special. It keeps it pure. And I mean, the marketing and everything was not something [Steven] was thrilled with doing either. He had said to us on the set that he wasn’t planning on having E.T. toys everywhere. But I think, I don’t know for sure, that was something that he had to concede in order to not do the sequel.

Tickets for the September screenings of E.T. are available at Fathom Events.

Henry Thomas remembers teary ‘E.T.’ audition, 7-year-old pro Drew Barrymore:

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