Guitars, Beer and More Guitars

Last night, I was invited over to the Fifth Avenue offices of Future US, where I got to hang out with some friends from Guitar World.  We were treated to a night of listening to terrific playing from some of the longtime contributors to the magazine.  With beer.

This was really cool for me, because I got to meet some of the guys whose bylines I had seen in the publication for years and see them play - Andy Aledort, Jimmy Brown and Paul Riario among them.  Editor in Chief Brad Tolinski was there, too.  It was doubly cool when these guys hung out with us after putting on a classic rock clinic that featured some great tunes from the Allman Bros, Pink Floyd, Led Zep and Guns N' Roses.  These guys are really passionate about their guitars and their playing.  Jimmy Brown in particular spent some time talking with me and some of the guys about vibrato technique, custom mods he made to his Gibson SG and tips for getting the most out of practice time.

It was a great time.  Thanks to everyone at Guitar World for making it happen and for inviting me.

New York's Free Daily Papers

I'd like those advertisers who place ads within New York's free daily papers to devote a minute or two to thinking about how their message is perceived in those vehicles.  One of the things I'm struggling with is that in a world where The New York Times and other non-free papers are struggling to stay in business, these free daily papers continue to book business and distribute their product.  An ad in the Times enhances a brand - I'm not so sure about how people perceive brands that advertise in the free dailies. Consider for a moment that the best a free paper can do is tell you how many copies are printed and distributed.  "Distributed" in this context, though, takes on a different meaning than the one many media buyers might be used to.  Many of the papers are dropped off at kiosks.  A great many are literally shoved into the faces of subway, bus and rail commuters as they make their way to work.  Often, it's done in a rude or pushy fashion.  That the garbage cans on any corner where the paper pushers are handing them out tend to quickly fill up with copies of the paper is testament to the notion that many commuters really don't want them.

There's the environmental impact of wasting so many trees.  Then there's the drain on public resources - we pay sanitation people to empty public garbage cans, and we pay people who have to pick up copies that are simply discarded in the street.  Piles of the papers end up abandoned in phone kiosks and in the middle of the sidewalk.  Someone has to get paid to collect the trash and get rid of it.

Not to mention that we all pay a cost when we stand in line, waiting to enter and exit the subway.  When we get to the top of the subway stairs, or to the main exits from Penn Station, we find that the reason we've been held up is that there is a bunch of paper pushers crowding the tops of the stairs, pushing newspapers in people's faces.  The MTA spends money reminding people to quickly exit the landings of escalators once they get to the end.  And yet, the free dailies are paying people to stand there and push their product, holding up the lines for everyone in order to distribute a product that a lot of people don't want.

Some of these papers pushers are downright rude.  Today I stopped under the awning of a place I visit frequently for a coffee or egg sandwich, just to get out of the rain.  I was told rudely by a paper pusher (and in colorful language) that I needed to get out of the way so he could give out his papers.  On a public sidewalk.

And that's the straw that broke the camel's back, and what prompted me to write this post that's been ruminating in my head for a few years.  From time to time, I know marketers stop by here to read some of my blog posts.  And I just wanted to remind those people who care about their brand that they ought to consider steering clear of the free dailies.  You might not be getting what you're paying for, and it might not be presenting your brand in the most favorable light.  Consider underwriting other vehicles.

Reviving My "Musical Career"

The earliest I can remember music and computers beginning to come together was when I was a kid playing with my Commodore 64.  I can't remember the name of the program, but it allowed me to input music scores and edit them, and the computer would play them back in this weird square-wave tone.  Just a few years later, I was introduced to MIDI by my middle school music teacher, and that started a wave of my own little pet theories about how music and computers would eventually come together.  No, I never foresaw the rise of MP3, but I did wonder many times how we might use computers to record our musical ideas.  I also wondered (probably after my drummer didn't show up for the umpteenth band rehearsal) when computers could allow one person to record drums, bass, keys, guitar and vocals. By the time I moved out of my parents' house, I had a lot of those tools.  When I bought my first serious PC, I also bought MIDI and digital audio interfaces in the hopes that I could spend some time getting the ideas out of my head and on to some recording medium.  For a short period of time, when I was living in Manhattan, that's exactly what I did.  I would do consulting work from my apartment on the Upper East Side, spending time looking at dot com business and marketing plans, improving them and collecting checks from clients for most of the day.  At night and with whatever free time I had, I'd record stuff.

At a turning point in my life, I took a full-time job at an ad agency that had previously hired me as a consultant.  Lots of time that I used to spend on recording became time I'd spend at the office.  Then 9/11 happened, I started my own agency and then moved out of Manhattan and back to Long Island.  I got married.  I moved a couple times.  I had a kid.  I still have all the gear, but little time to use it.

I have a lot of gear - stuff that would make many studio rats salivate.  Guitars, keyboards, computers, giant piles of rackmount gear, a P/A system - you name it.  It's all sitting in my basement waiting for me to get back to it.

There are times I think about what it would take to get back into it.  My wife jokes with me about it.  She says one day I'll come home and find it all sold.

That's just the thing.  When all the home improvement projects have died down, when Kate is sleeping upstairs and Lauren wants to watch Desperate Housewives, I want to go down in the basement and get some ideas out of my head and onto a hard drive.

Right now, everything in my basement is pushed toward the middle of the house, in giant piles.  It hasn't moved since the mold contractor completely upended everything.  Everything is clean, but it's all sitting in a big room with four concrete walls and miscellaneous air conditioning ducts hanging all over the place.  I rarely go down there because I know about all the other things that need to happen in the basement before I can even THINK about setting up:

1. We have to finish the air conditioning.  Hopefully, that will be done in a week or two.
2. I have to coat all the walls with Drylok.  There's a big 5-gallon pail awaiting me in the garage.
3. I have to have a fight with my wife.  Yeah, I know.  Basically it goes like this - I shared my proposed floorplan for what I think the basement should look like and it doesn't match what she thinks it should look like.  I requested we put up some sheet rock for two small rooms with a sliding window between them - A room for the computer and the board and some studio monitors, and then another room for miking up instruments and such.  The second room could double as our exercise room.  I dunno where this is going to net out, but my vision doesn't match my wife's.
4. I should probably replace all the sheet rock the mold contractor took away.
5. The electrician needs to figure out what's going on down there.  Wire outlets, get rid of some wires left over from when the previous owner had satellite TV, install some lighting and a bunch of other stuff.
6. Maybe put in some flooring.

So there's a bunch of stuff that needs to happen before I can even think about setting up.  Add to this the list of projects that probably need to get done before I can attack THESE projects and the notion of sitting down to record a song seems light-years away.

Still, I'm really looking forward to one day having a studio again.  It's how I always pictured my life - Working hard at a job, taking vacations with the family, doing the Dad thing, but spending some time making music when everybody's asleep or the kids are outside playing.  One day I'll get there.  It's just so far off in the distance.

It's really ironic.  I always thought the tough part would be getting all the gear together.  "Oh, man, how am I ever going to afford that Mac Pro?" or "How am I going to mic a Marshall combo so that it sounds like a wall of stacks?"  It was never "Where am I going to find the time?" or "Where am I going to find the space for all this stuff?"  For a while, time and space were all I had.  Now I've got all the gear and no time.

That's Irrigation

On Friday, the mold abatement contractor unexpectedly kicked me out of the house, saying I couldn't be inside to breathe the fumes from the chemicals he was using to kill the mold in my basement.  So I had to make a bunch of Underscore-related phone calls from the patio and take my Mac outside.  Not a big deal, but as the day went by, it got hotter and hotter outside until I just couldn't stand it anymore.  I popped the computer back in the house a little after noon and started doing some work around the yard. For my birthday this year, my mom got me a year's worth of Scott's Lawn Service.  She told me they were coming by on Friday to aerate the soil and throw some seed down.  I just didn't know what time they were going to arrive.  Meanwhile, in the middle of the lawn, there's a pipe sticking up out of the ground from when I cut it a couple months ago.  Actually, I sort of yanked it out of the ground and it snapped in half.  When we had the Bobcat to take down the pool, I also pulled the old swingset out of the ground by grabbing it with the bucket and using the hydraulics to basically lift it out, concrete and all.  On the way, one of the concrete pieces snagged a sprinkler line and pulled it up out of the ground, too.

I figured it would be best to finish up fixing the sprinkler system and hopefully get that done before the Scott's guys got there.  Problem was, I knew that in driving the Bobcat all over the back yard and in spreading out 30 yards of topsoil, I had destroyed some heads and probably buried some of the lines down further than the 6-8" depth where they're usually found.

When my dad ran Greenway all those years ago and I was working there, I never really appreciated the no-nonsense nature of working on sprinkler systems.  Without rewriting that whole passage from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it breaks down pretty easily into a bunch of subsystems that are each pretty simple in and of themselves.  Under "sprinkler system" you have "water" and "electric."  Under "electric," you have things like your controller, valve wiring and valve solenoids.  Under "water" you have all your fittings, pipes and sprinkler heads.  Fixing a sprinkler system is much like the process of elimination described in Zen.  You try one thing - if that doesn't fix it, you move on to the next thing it could be and you gradually eliminate all the possibilities.  All those years working with Dad, I don't remember anything that ever truly stumped us.  (Although I do remember a problem we had with a rock that was just the right size that would tumble down a pipe and block off flow to several heads, but only when the conditions were right...  That one kept us occupied for the better part of a day.)

Anyway, I ran through all the zones, stopping to replace a head or a break or to dig up a fitting and replace it.  When I got to the zone with the pipe sticking up, I shut it off and then repaired the break.  Three hours went by and I was pretty much on auto-pilot, gradually getting the task of "repair sprinkler system" done without really having to think much.  As I was burying the last head and raking out the surrounding dirt to make sure it was level, the Scott's guy came into the yard and announced his presence.  I finished just in time.

The last time I worked with my Dad at Greenway was easily a decade ago, probably more.  Yet, all the little techniques come back to you within an instant - how you cut the pipe so that a coupling will fit in easily, how you light your torch, how you unfold your pipe cutters over your knee so you only have to use one hand.  And there's not really all that much to it.  Just a bunch of little tricks of the trade that help you do things a bit faster.

On Sunday I was babyproofing my kitchen while Lauren was out with the baby at her friend's house.  Someone knocked on the door.  It was a young kid who owned the sprinkler company who serviced my place when the prior owner was there.  He introduced himself and asked me if I had gotten somebody to take care of the sprinklers yet.  I told him about my dad and about Greenway and how I had just finished up running through the whole system to get it going.  Turns out this guy bought up a bunch of little irrigation companies in the area, and we chatted for a few minutes about the business.  As we were wrapping up, he asked me "Mind if I ask what you're doing now?"  I told him I was running an ad agency in Manhattan.  Then he headed out to his car.

Not long after he left, as I was babyproofing the umpteenth cabinet door, I found my mind wandering and soon I was in a full-blown fantasy about the lawn sprinkler business.  The guy who visited asked me what I was doing and instead of telling him I worked at an ad agency, I told him "nothing much" and he offered me a position running a crew.  And then I was going to work every day and not needing to use too much brainpower to get the work done, but could instead concentrate on using the business experience I've had since college figuring out how to make things run more efficiently and how to get customers.  And it wasn't rocket science.

Jolting back to reality, I started to think about why that was an enjoyable fantasy for me.  I think it's because the field I work in is equal parts art and science, and you can try all you want to drill into each variable of what constitutes an effective marketing program, but along the way there will be intangibles or unknowns that will take a technique that was successful in the past and make it fail, or take something that failed before and make it a success.  You can't isolate every variable in the system, quickly find the failure point and fix it.  You have to constantly ask yourself why something is successful or why it was a failure and try to isolate it, but you realize simultaneously that nothing really happens in a vacuum and that it's impossible to solve for every variable.

Sprinkler systems are not like this.  They're straightforward and you can quickly isolate what's wrong with it.  You fix it and you move on to the next broken system.  Sure, there are unknowns, but not in the day-to-day repair work - only in things like billing and in figuring out how to manage your supplies and whatnot.

I think I fantasize about things like getting into a struggling service business because "work" seems a lot more defined than it does in the marketing business.  You go out and you fix things and you come back to the shop.  You're not coming into things wondering what's going to happen next - Will a client cut their budget and suddenly you have to make a program work (somehow) on half the money?  Will a new opportunity force me to clear my schedule?  Will some new technology completely change the game and force us to reinvent ourselves yet again?

Don't get the impression that I'm looking for another line of work.  I love the business that I'm in.  It's just that sometimes I long for something that doesn't require constant tearing down and rebuilding - I long for the straightforwardness of knowing what to expect.

Or maybe it's just the humidity...

My dad used to have this simple little saying when we ran into difficulty on a sprinkler job.  "That's irrigation," he'd say.  I think it was because that was all there really was to it.