Colin Marshall

Two years of ideational marketeering

Well, that went by pretty fast. The Marketplace of Ideas saw many changes in its second year, including but not limited to improved sound quality (amazing what happens when you stick a windscreen on your mic), widened guest variety (welcome, musicians, broadcasters and filmmakers), a greater number of interview-conduction methods (love those tape-syncs) and some more formal creativity (love those thematically-linked multi-segment specials). In the name of tradition, I'll once again highlight my five favorite conversations from the past year, though with one restriction: they can only be with first-time guests, not returning ones. Why? 'Cause I feel like it.

So, off the top of my head:


The opportunity to converse with one's childhood heroes comes rarely, if ever. I thus siezed/carved out the chance to interview Thomas Lopez, president of the ZBS foundation and creator of the finest modern audio dramas. Hearing one of ZBS' productions at age nine — specifically, the Jack Flanders adventure Dreams of the Amazon — revealed the vast world of audio experience to me. Were I to write my autobiography, you could easily trace the threads from my discovery of ZBS straight to my current pursuits in radio, podcasting, field recording, music, etc. Not without prompting did sound become so important to me.



Lawrence Osborne has, in recent years, become one of my favorite travel essayists. (As distinct from the "IF YOU GO" sidebar-writing "travel writers.") Given his dual interests in Asia and in wine, I suppose it's no surprise that I've latched onto his stuff. I thus naturally rushed down the opportunity to book an interview when Bangkok Days, his impressionistic collection of pieces on his long, colorful relationship with Bangkok, got a U.S. release date. He turned out to be even more articulate, thoughtful and funny than his writing had prepared me to expect. Pieces of our conversation have floated to the forefront of my mind on a near-daily basis since we had it: how, in contrast to Asia where life is really going on, London and Paris have become "bureaucratic museums"; how Bangkok's never-colonizedness has lead to its remaining a truly foreign culture on the deepest level; how, when thinking of old Blighty and its boiled dinners, he says, "To hell with that!"; how European publishers disregard subtitles but American publishers insisting on slapping them on at all times, even if badly misrepresentative.



Longer-time readers no doubt know that I spend quite a lot of time thinking about how to do stuff. In fact, the practice probably cuts into the time I should spend, y'know, doing stuff, but never mind. Though he puts out a bunch of admirable net stuff (and is currently writing a book) about the workings of the creative mind and how to actually accomplish accomplishments, Merlin Mann could win me over with his relatively newfound loathing of clicky distractions, unhelpful "tips" and "user-generated" content alone. I could go over all the helpful, hilarious, digressive stuff he had to say in our conversation, but perhaps I'll just excerpt my favorite writing of his, the essay "Better":

What makes you feel less bored soon makes you into an addict. What makes you feel less vulnerable can easily turn you into a dick. And the things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks — empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your personality while sitting alone at a screen.


Don’t get me wrong. Gumming the edges of popular culture and occasionally rolling the results into a wicked spitball has a noble tradition that includes the best work of of Voltaire, Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, and a handful of people I count as good friends and brilliant editors. There’s nothing wrong with fucking shit up every single day. But you have to bring some art to it. Not just typing.

Ah, the conversation that — I suspect — landed The Marketplace of Ideas on the front page of iTunes' podcast directory. I've long admired Michael Silverblatt's KCRW program Bookworm for its unusual brand of intimacy, lighthearted seriousness and earnest appreciation of text and reading. As it is not unusual for a disciple to climb Mount Everest to seek pearls of wisdom from the master who resides, still and cross-legged, on its peak, I figured I would take a flier and see if Silverblatt was interested in coming on my program. The result, if I can be bold, is an interview that's something of a hybrid of the Bookworm and Marketplace of Ideas aesthetics. I've listened to it many times, and in each I pick up on something new — plus, I always enjoy reliving the experience.



Years ago, I read Patrick Humphries' groundbreaking biography of Nick Drake. When I began interviewing, I regretted that I came a decade too late to credibly invite him on my program to promote the book. However, it dawned on me that the 40th anniversary of Drake's first album, the pretty-much-perfect Five Leaves Left, loomed on the horizon, so maybe I could find a tie-in. My production sensibility grew more ambitious as the far-flung year of 2009 approached, so by the time Five Leaves Left neared the big 4-0, I felt comfortable challenging myself to bring not just one but all of Drake's biographers on board. Though my conversation with Humphries constitutes, I believe, the bulk of the show, both Trevor Dann, author of 2006's Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake and Peter Hogan, author of 2008's Nick Drake: The Complete Guide to His Music, were happy to talk and shared plenty of wisdom about both the man and his music. I very much enjoy the effect of three different perspectives on the album sometimes coinciding and sometimes colliding; it paints such a full picture of the work discussed.

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I've come to grasp one thing over the past year, however tenuously: when it comes to self-marketing and self-promotion, I am the suckiest man who has ever lived. I have some friends who are absolute self-promotional aces, but they have not, as yet, lent me their mad skills. I'd worked backward from the astute saying that "marketing is the tax you pay for unremarkability," assuming that I could simply create a remarkable product and thus let the rest take care of itself by word of mouth and what have you. I must conclude, at this point, that I am not making a remarkable product. Perhaps that's not the real problem, but a good chunk of me still believes that the most effective, long-lived form of self-promotion is simply to create good stuff. The case of Nick Drake, I realize, continues to insist otherwise.

Whatever the barrier, though, I grow more obsessed by the day with finding a way to break it. If I don't, the mantra of "Man, I gotta quit x; man, I gotta quit x; man, I gotta quit x," where x is any of my endeavors that don't get little response — radio, blogging, writing of any kind, etc. — will continue to haunt my dreams, louder and more insistent by the night. If you guys have any suggestions, I'm more than open to 'em.

A lesson from Nick Drake

This past Tuesday marked the 40th anniversary of the release of English singer/songwriter/guitarist Nick Drake's first album Five Leaves Left, which hit record stores in Drake's country ("record shops") on September 1, 1969. He would go on to record two more, the lush Bryter Later, which most serious enthusiasts regard as Drake's best, and the stark, brief Pink Moon, which some serious enthusiasts regard as Drake's best. But Five Leaves Left remains my favorite, especially with the favorable data point that I've just produced an entire radio show about the album and haven't grown sick of it.

The show in question is a Marketplace of Ideas special on Five Leaves Left, featuring conversations with Trevor Dann, author of Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake, Patrick Humphries, author of Nick Drake: The Biography and Peter Hogan, author of Nick Drake: The Complete Guide to His Music. In a way, something of a miniature dream has come true for me: I've long thought about making something for the record's 40th in the far-flung year of 2009, but only as the date approached did the relevant ideas coalesce in my mind. I'd hoped to interview Humphries since reading his biography, a vivid tapestry of personal remembrance and historical context, but couldn't think of a reason. Morally opposed to making anything easy on myself, I ultimately asked: why talk to just one biographer when I could talk to everyone who's ever written a Nick Drake book?

In these conversations and my extensive, enormous, exhaustive preparatory reading for them, I saw a certain lesson emerge from Drake's story. Here was a young man who, through a degree of dedication to his craft that reduced everything else in life — especially academics — to dim background noise, developed a musical skill and sensibility that, committed to tape, still awe, captivate and nearly mystify listeners. But he failed to find success: some estimates of his record sales place them as low as 10,000, total, in his lifetime. This didn't align with Drake's high musical ambition and — some would say — his arrogance about the quality of his own material. He seemed to assume his music, by mere virtue of its excellence, deserved to be heard, and, let loose, would spread like a melancholic wildfire.

By the time his music actually did sweep the listening world, Drake had been in the ground for about 25 years. Would that he could have lived to enjoy his modern-day popularity, but it's no mystery why that popularity took until the modern day to arrive: whether by inability, disinclination or both, Drake didn't promote his albums. Absent radio single releases from his label — and it's far from certain that such products, had they materialized, would have achieved heavy-rotation airplay — the need arose to gig and gig and gig. Uncomfortable with solo performance, Drake gave touring a handful of attempts, heart never in it, songs never adapted to a live setting, and eventually just threw in the towel altogether.

From Drake's disheartening experience, I draw the lesson that (quality) * (promotion) = (success). Not to put too fine a point on it, but it seems that if you're not actively selling your work, then it doesn't matter how abstractly "good" it is or how much effort you put into it. When I say "selling," I don't mean literally exchanging for money; I mean "selling" as in "pitching," as in "hardscrabbling some brainshare the old-fashioned way." For example, I've put quite a lot of work into this Five Leaves Left radio special, but if I don't tell potential listeners about it — by writing blog posts, say — then that's all for nought.

On a related note, a television director visited my film production class last night to help us recreate and shoot a scene from The Big Lebowski. After the shoot, I asked him what surprised him most about his career in The Tndustry, and he mentioned meeting all these aspiring actors, directors, writers and the like on his way up. They didn't seem like much, but they talked a big game, declaring that they would — would — become big players, doggedly pushing forward without hesitation. And they're the ones who made it! I asked if, conversely, he'd encountered many aspirants who seemed to have the goods and the skill to spare but got discouraged and fell off the ladder: oh yeah. He found that the separator came pretty clearly down to "tenacity."

In a podcast conversation with semi-regular guests Lynn Warren and Alex Ali, Adam Carolla cites, with equal conviction, the importance of resilience. He argues that, if you're doing anything worthwhile, nine out of ten of your projects die trying to get out of the gate. The trick is not to stare at yourself in the mirror in aftermath, questioning your value as a human being and desperately trying to divine why, exactly, the universe has it out for you — this, apparently, being a condition with which Adam's guests routinely struggle — but just, like a salmon going to spawn, keepin' on facin' in the right direction and keepin' on swimmin', never stoppin'. It's unclear whether Nick Drake ever stared into the mirror and cast his self-worth into question, but his sister Gabrielle did once say that he could handle neither rejection nor criticism, nor, presumably, being ignored — that he was "born with a skin too few."

The anti-Oleander screed

From a 1997 Perfect Sound Forever interview with Ken Freedman, general manager of freeform radio colossus WFMU:

PSF: Could you talk about importance of freeform programming?

KEN: It's an approach that doesn't really exist in any other form, really. Freeform radio demands that a listener employ different sensibilities to judge or appreciate the different components of the program. Nothing else does that — museums, records, books, etc. Freeform radio can make people realize that their musical biases are utterly full of shit, and once you realize that any of your beloved biases are baseless, then you're ready to make some real progress as a human being.

Here we see the finest articulation of a thought I've often had myself, but never so clearly. I think back to eighth, ninth, tenth grade, and how we all led such small, confined lives — thanks, in large part, to the schools funneling us into those grades — that we had little else with which to build ourselves but the music we listened to. Pledge allegiance to a certain band, and we implicitly swore off hundreds of others. Enjoy a certain singer's album, and our identities became those of people who "love" that singer. Get annoyed by a certain single by a certain artist, and we were lumped into the group who "hate" that artist. How much effort we burned struggling to maintain the stupidly consistent mosaics of musical biases in our heads. It was just like Super NES versus Genesis in the elementary schoolyard, writ large.¹

Then again, maybe musical choices offered the most effcient hack we had to determine who to hang out with, though if they did, it's a sad commentary on our inner lives' then-poverty. I remember many high school couples, especially early in the game, claiming to have gotten together when they realized they "liked the same music." I scoffed at this even then, despite suffering from the inverse affliction of needing to gripe about the music the girls with whom I was associated at the time listened to. "Alternative rock?" I asked, rhetorically. "Uh, alternative to what?" While I can no longer produce my full anti-Three Doors Down, anti-Oleander and anti-Alien Crime Syndicate screeds, rest assured I once could. Sort of.

Whether my negative musical biases or their positive ones, though, Freedman is correct about both: they were utterly full of shit. Why in the name of the baby Jesus did I care? I have, as I've written before, an awfully hard time getting inside the mind of those who hold strong opinions about what cultural stuff sucks, and that includes Colin₁₅. As Patton Oswalt said in a recent Paste interview, "Pointing out that stuff sucks is not edgy or dangerous anymore. Everyone knows what sucks. What’s better is to find the stuff that’s amazing and hold it up." At this point, I only care about what's fascinating; I'm comfortable with my indifference toward everything else. And except in rare special cases, active dislike — and especially hatred — is completely off the table. "You really hated that movie/album/book?" I think whenever someone professes to have, in fact, hated that movie/album/book. "No you didn't. Not so impacted by? Maybe. Hated? Doubtful."

The astute connection Freedman makes between freeform radio and the discrediting of said full-of-shit musical biases seems totally logical and yet surprising, especially since, despite my own love of the format, it hadn't occurred to me. Musician, music writer and "curator of sound" David Toop once said an interview that he began listening to massive quantities of experimental music in his youth as an attempt to "reprogram" his brain, and I suspect he was on to something big. The "culture = brain programming" meme has bounced around my head for months and months now, and it shows no signs of bouncing out any time soon.

I've found that whatever cultural experiences I happen to have shape the background states of my mind, influencing what I want to do. If I've been watching Charlie Rose's shows, I think about interviewing how he interviews; if I've been watching Huell Howser's shows, I think about producing programs how he produces them. If I've been reading Clive James' books, I think about writing how he writes; if I've been reading David Foster Wallace's books, I think about writing how he writes. If I've been watching Werner Herzog's films, I think about shooting how he shoots; if I've been watching Andrei Tarkovsky's, I think about shooting like him. If I've been listening to Thomas Dolby, I think about recording how he records; if I've been listening to Cornelius, I think about recording how he does. Everything I absorb effects, pretty much immediately, how I perceive the world, how I organize and interpret experience. As the composition of what I've internalized changes, the world changes — or at least my processing of it changes, which is all I can access anyway.

My primary question of cultural selection has, therefore, shifted. Where once it was "What will probably give me the most pleasure?", it's now "How do I want to program my brain?" That's not to say that the answer sets to these questions are mutually exclusive; don't mistake this for some sort of eat-your-greens mindset applied to culture.² I, for the record, lived and will die a Genesis man. (If a bitter, crusty jazz aficionado instructs you to "listen to music that's good for you," you should just sock him.) I find there's a great deal of pleasure indeed to be found in the brain-programming task, but it's not one to be taken lightly: "you are what you eat" holds even truer for what you read, watch, listen to and experience than, uh, what you eat.

So perhaps an even better question than "How do I want to program my brain?" is "Who do I want to be?" And thus we might seem to have circled right back to culture-as-identity, but I mean more how you want to be than what you want to be. One way I most certainly don't want to be is mediocre, and thus I continue my War on Mediocrity. But to find the truly non-mediocre tools of brain programming, one must do a fair amount of brain programming, specifically to open it to new input as wide as possible. (There is no mediocrity so thundering, so poisonous, as that of the narrow mind.) Freeform radio is, indeed, a decent route to that.

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¹ I, for the record, lived and will die a Genesis man.

² Though I've become acutely aware that many of the extremely health-conscious with whom I interact will, despite their vigilance about what they put into their mouth, consume the cultural equivalent of the foods featured in This is Why You're Fat without a second thought. Or even a first.

Crap from the Past (Ron "Boogiemonster" Gerber, 1992 - )

At the tender age of eleven, Ron "Boogiemonster" Gerber began laboriously copying the chart positions of every single on the American Top 40 into a binder, genuflecting before the divine word of Casey Kasem. At the same time, he began regularly purchasing 45s of every top single he didn't already own. His enthusiasm for pop music has, in the ensuing three decades, evolved into Crap from the Past, where he's been behind the mic passing the love on to us for sixteen years now.

Gerber currently broadcasts out of KFAI in Minneapolis, with syndication in England and New Zealand. (Luckily for everyone who isn't a Kiwi, a Brit or Prince, there's a podcast feed.) If he were simply slapping a hodgepodge of pop tunes onto the turntables every week, his program would be no worse — and, let's admit it, probably better — than most of that which spews forth from community radio. But Crap from the Past is so much more; the Boogiemonster bills it as, in effect, "a graduate-level course in pop music," but it's even better than that, because he rarely if ever resorts to critical post-structuralist gender theory.

See, when Ron Gerber lays down a show on Tears for Fears, he doesn't spin "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" and call it a night. He spins "Everybody Wants to Run the World", which the band re-recorded from scratch as a charity single for some kind of benefit run, changing only one word. He spins "Victims of Fact", a single recorded by Neon, an early group comprising the members of what would become Tears for Fears and the members of what would become Naked Eyes. He spins a cut recorded for The Karate Kid Part II by Mancrab, a one-off outfit helmed by Tears for Fears' lead singer. And he digs out his 1980s issues of Billboard to read out the original reviews of these songs.

Similarly, a New-Kids-on-the-Block-themed program features Biscuit, the boy band's bodyguard-turned-rapper, the Perfect Gentlemen, an even younger boy band created by the New Kids' producer Maurice Starr, and the James Brown records off of which Starr bit to formulate that irresistible New Kids sound. Interwoven are interview excerpts from a New Kids concert VHS tape. (Imagine how full this guy's house is, and of what else.)

Gerber also conducts the occasional interview of his own: electronic pop pioneer Thomas Dolby, forgotten — and much Boogiemonster-championed — power-popper D.L. Byron and mayor of Funkytown Stephen Greenberg, to name only three.

Though Gerber introduces certain songs as, say, "atrocities," don't take the Crap in Crap from the Past too literally: the show's not some sort of kitschfest, but if it's necessary to play some kitsch, the Boogiemonster won't back down. (He may, however, talk over said kitsch or yank it off early.) As a man unashamed of his pop habits, I adore Crap from the Past. If you don't deign to enjoy pop yourself, prepare to be converted. It's a bit of a cliché to put it this way, but were you to give his show a listen, you'd almost certainly be infected with his near-obsessive — okay, obsessive — passion for well-crafted pop and all information relating to it.

[Originally published at Maximumfun.org.]