Too Much Presenting

Too Much Presenting

by | Feb 22, 2023 | Consulting

-“The deck is the product.”

“No, No. the deck isn’t the product. The change, the result is the product. The deck is just a tool to help us get there.”

This was a real conversation that encapsulates the difference between content consultants, who proide answers, and process consultants, who ask questions to drive change.

Consultants and consulting firms, whether content or process spend far too much time focused  presenting. There are hours of angst about, “the deck,” “the slidepack” “the panelset.”

This has always been true, even before PowerPoint, the now ubiquitous Microsoft presentation software. In prehistoric times, when I started in consulting, slides or charts were made by hand using Letraset press-on letters on acetates or “flimsies.”

I know people who worked for firms like Alexander Proudfoot and its’s descendent United Research who hired calligraphers and artists to hand draw “panels, ” 30” x 40” hard white posterboards bound into a leather bound book that was flipped through with the client executive team.

The presentation delivery technology has changed. Now typos are easily correctable and changes can be made up until the very last minute, no, make that the very last second. Some consultants insert video or online connections or TikTok or. . . whatever, because, well. . . because “they can.”

But the process is the same  – a presentation must be :

Planned —- Validated — Practiced —— Presented

In my view too much of the focus is on the last step. Consultants want to sound smart and confident. They want to “Wow” the client. This is unfortunately true for both content and process consultants. Presentations are the “Big Reveal,” the surprise finish to the project.. Consultants dream of a “standing ovation.” In my experience vigorous applause is a rarity and worrying, because the focus may be on the consultant’s “big idea,” and not on achieving results for the client.

Storyboarding: Planning starting with the end.

In an early project as a young consultant, I had learned so much about the industry and the product we were studying I wanted to showcase that knowledge. My project lead, a man who had worked in advertising and entertainment stopped me cold.

“What do you recommend that the client do?”

“Well, because of. . .”

“No, one simple declarative sentence.”

“Well, the channel says that. . “

“What part of ‘simple declarative sentence,’ didn’t you understand?”

I’ll spare you the further repetition of this conversation untill I finally got it.

“Build one product; ignore the other.”

Then my project lead asked me, “Which one finding leads you to that conclusion?

Then, “What other supporting findings?”

He walked me backwards to the beginning, “What did the client ask us to do?”

Each time he asked he wrote the simple declarative sentence on the top of a blank page.

“That’s your story” he said. “Now fill in the data that fits that story, whether it is from interviews, analysis of market data, competitor information. If it doesn’t fit the story or has too much detail it goes in the Appendix.”

The story is what is important. I know some consultants want to tell a “three act story” or the “hero’s journey,” but I favor simplicity

  • You asked us to look at this
  • Here is what we found
  • Here are the implications
  • Recommendations and Next steps

Some consultants build highly complex slides that show the depth of their analysis. They feel this justifies their fees. If the client is confused they look smart. I put those slides in the appendix.

Pre-presents, validation and commitment building

As consultants, we look at data, that might or might not have been easily available to parts of the client system. We talk to customers and suppliers, and staff who might not have been talked to in a while. We might bring some industry  or management knowledge from other client projects.

All of these data may lead us to our conclusions. What we want is for the client to take action. If we are content consultants, we want clients to act on our recommendations. If we are process consultants, we may work alongside our clients, but we want them committed to action rather than just waiting for us to leave so they can go back to doing what they’ve always done.

The “Big Reveal” presentation, where we surprise the client and/or embarrass members of her leadership team  runs counter to that.

Never present data that haven’t been validated or at least shared with those in the organization accountable for acting upon it.

At Gemini Consulting, we used to call those “pre-presents,” which is a silly term that means you present before you present. Where I have worked with extensive client teams, I have built the final presentation with the key members who will act upon it. Sometimes they presented the data, not me.

Isn’t there a danger that members of the client system will rush off to fix problems you uncovered? Yes. If it is a simple fix, that isn’t a problem, just get agreement that you can document the change, giving credit to the one who makes it. If it part of a systemic change you must gain agreement to wait until all the parts of the system are visible. That may require a longer conversation, validating the finding, discussion implications and possible negative effects of acting prematurely.

Practice, Practice, Practice

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell highlighted and amplified he research of K. Anders Eriksson, that anyone who is world class, has logged at least 10,000 hours of practice. One might think that consultants who quote this research wouldn’t resist practice or say,

“Practice? Nah. I got this. I like to keep it fresh.”

As consultants we pride ourselves as being “good on our feet,” confident sounding presenters.  I have found that practice helps and the “freshness” of a first run-through is quickly derailed by an inconvenient client question.

The Big Day – Presenting with competence and confidence.

There are multiday courses on presentation skills. I have learned a great deal from them including where to stand, when to use a microphone, and what kind, how to dress, move, gesture, and use the full range of my voice. I’m not going to try to replicate those courses in a few paragraphs.

I will impart a few principles:

  • Know your audience. If you have done your work on the project and the appropriate validation steps you have a good start. I have seen partners who don’t have this advantage arrive just early enough to meet and greet a few of the executives. This also means watch your examples. I had a colleague who told me that some movies I referenced were made before she was born. We laughed when later she mentioned some musical artists that left clients my age scratching their heads.
  • Think Engagement – not data dump. Remember that your goal is action, not absorbing every miniscule esoteric piece of analysis you have done. This will lead you to dress and act like the client, maybe a little better. This will lead you to stop periodically and ask questions of the group. It will lead you to move to different positions to be closer to different people. It will encourage eye contact and not turning your back reading off the screen.
  • Capture reactions and questions. I am a fan of the parking lot, a flipchart or whiteboard on which I can capture questions or reactions in real time. That way I can keep the flow and come back to them later. On mult-consultant teams, whomever wasn’t speaking manned the parking lot.
  • Be cautious about technology. Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had the same rule: “No Live Demos!” I’m a bit of a technophobe, so I assume Murphy’s Law will apply, (Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong). So I check batteries in laser pointers and slide changers, make sure I have an extra bulb for the projector and am exceedingly leery of on-screen Internet links and videos. There are effects I never used as a consultant and those I did I checked and rechecked.
  • Follow up The presentation is not the end; it’s the beginning. You want action, change, so even if you are a content consultant and everyone applauded your recommendations, things go awry. Get back with the client, answer questions, offer suggestions on roadblocks. I’ve also seen what was widely viewed as a disastrous presentation saved by follow-up.

 

Plan—- Validate — Practice —— Present —– Follow-up

Confidence born of competence. Content before style. Be authentic, helpful where you are asked to be, and focus on action and results.

And remember, present only as much as you need to. Nothing is happening when you are talking.

Do Computers Hate Me?

Do Computers Hate Me?

by | Feb 19, 2023 | Living

Maybe

The fourth time the disembodied phone-tree voice said “Please give me the phone number on the account” and I answered, she said “You seem to be having trouble. Good-bye.” The ensuing dial tone caused me to swear.

“Again?” My wife poked her head into my office.

“Yes, arrrgh” (I’ll spare you the rest of my response.)

“That happens to you a lot.”

It does. Phone trees don’t hear or accept my responses. Websites freeze. When I do get a customer service rep or technician on the phone I frequently hear “I’m sorry. Our system is being really slow today,” or “Sorry my screen just went blank, bear with me while I reboot.”

This happens to me when I call to make airline or hotel or restaurant reservations. It happens when I buy tickets on the phone or online, move money around, and even on some charity websites when I make donations.

“Oh that happens to all of us,” my wife said recently. I asked her how often she encounters these glitches with her computer, or with those of service personnel. “Maybe ten percent of the time, maybe less.”

I think I’m closer to forty percent of the time. I’ve even adopted a funny line to say when technology bites me, “Computers save us time, right?” It always gets a laugh.

History of my dysfunctional relationship with computers

My mother became a computer programmer in 1956.

I’ll stop for a moment and let that sink in.

My mother was a math whiz who started programming computers when a computer was three floors of an old shoe factory filled with vacuum tubes. That was before circuits were printed on silicon chips, when “bugs” in the program were likely to be a cockroach that crawled across a tube connection somewhere in the warehouse.

That computer had less computing power than your iPhone and made calculations for the space program.

So I’ve been around computers for a while, and it hasn’t always been a friendly relationship.

In 1970, at one of my first jobs they used an IBM 360, a washing-machine-sized white minicomputer. (My mother was on the team which programmed the 360 operating system.) The marketing manager called this computer Sally, and used it to maintain the mailing lists and send direct mail marketing.

One day I came into the computer room looking for Steve and Sally shut down. A day later, I went looking for Steve. I found him in the computer room looking at me nervously. I had a cup of coffee in my hand which I proceeded to set down on Sally’s white desk height flat surface.

“DON”T. . .”  screamed Steve whereupon I jumped and spilled coffee on Sally. The computer reacted by shutting down.

Afterwards a sign appeared on the computer room door in bright red letters:

“ ALAN CULLER IS NOT ALLOWED IN THIS ROOM”

In business school, I learned to program Basic. I started out doing my assignments on the shared keyboard during normal business hours like everyone else, but I was so slow and the mainframe seemed to crash so much when I was around that I was given a 10:00 p.m. slot. One night, I finally finished my assignment at around 1:00 a.m. (Technically the computer operator finished it for me because he reached the point where he wouldn’t let me touch the keyboard.)

I biked home and collapsed into bed. I had just fallen into a deep sleep when my wife shook me. “It’s time.” Our third child was arriving. I mumbled “Try to go back to sleep,”  not my finest moment, I admit, but I still wonder about the reach of a computer’s antipathy.

In the 80s desktops came out and I’d become a full-on technophobe. People didn’t want in their offices because computers mysteriously crashed when I was around. I couldn’t make my email work and people in the next office would start yelling at me because I didn’t respond. I got cranky and said “We sit twelve steps apart, why are you sending me email!”

I eventually learned to work a computer, became pretty proficient on Word, and PowerPoint and marginally competent on Excel. However, I remain a late adopter on most technology and often when I bump the dishwasher, or washing machine or do something with the TV remote, I hear my wife say what I’ve heard tech people say for forty years:

“ALAN! What the hell did you do?”

The latest battle in the war

Computer and other technical problems do seem to come in cycles with me. In the 70s on WBCN’s morning radio show there was an astrology reporter, Daryl Martini, the “cosmic muffin” (I know, but it was the 70s,). Daryl said that when “Mercury was retrograde” or the “Moon was void of course” to expect technical problems. I haven’t checked my periods of computer hell against the stars, but I had another “hate-wave” recently.

My emails took days to arrive. This was especially true for anyone I sent to who was on, Verizon, aol or yahoo. Several of My ISP’s servers were blacklisted and tech service recommended that I sign-up for Google workspace and point my email address through there. I reluctantly agreed.

Five days later, I still had no email and tech people at my hosting service and Google had no idea why it wasn’t working. I was online chatting with Google and on the phone with technical service at my host going back and forth. Both threw their hands up for the weekend. On Monday I got a phone call from a woman at Google in India who ultimately solved the problem, but only after wiping out my entire email history.

My email works now, but I spent several days texting and emailing to rebuild email addresses and retrieving unused gift cards. I’m still not getting the New York Times and several email newsletters.

Then it was all over or so I thought. I called the host for this blog with the result described above “You seem to be having trouble. Good-bye.” My financial planner said, “Oh wait, our system seems to have locked up. Tell me how things are going with you while I try to get this working.”

“Computers save us time, right?”

“Oh that’s a good one.”

In frustration, I decided to go to CVS to pick up some over-the-counter meds and birthday cards. I decided it might be safer to pay in cash. Then the little screen asked me a question about a receipt and I mindlessly clicked the green button for an email receipt.

The little screen went blank. The clerk’s screen went blank. The screen of the clerk next to him went blank too. Neither could get it running and the woman went off franticly looking for the manager. Moments later she hadn’t returned, but a manager with a nametag Ciro arrived.

“Vincent! What did you do?!” he stage-whispered to my guy.

“I didn’t do anything. He just pushed the email receipt button.”

I waited patiently, while they shut the whole store’s system down and brought it back up. In fact a growing line of customers from all the store’s registers waited patiently while Ciro and Vincent rebooted and all the pharmacy clerks reentered the sales they were working on.

Vincent didn’t ask; he just gave me a paper receipt.

I thought it impolitic to give my usual joke, “Computers save us time, right?”

I also didn’t say, “My fault. Computers hate me.” But I think they do.

 

Pitfalls and Potholes of Acquisitions

Pitfalls and Potholes of Acquisitions

by | Feb 12, 2023 | Leading

“Double in size, easy-peasy.”

Early in my consulting career a client acquired a competitor. The post-acquisition process had fallen apart, people from both firms were leaving, combined sales declined for three straight months, and the exec didn’t know what he was losing because he closed down the acquired company’s systems before all the data had been migrated.

This leader vented. “’Double in size overnight,‘ the investment banker said. ‘Easy-peasy.’ The board bought it. I did too, but I’m stuck with this mess.”

At the time, I worked for an organizational consultant, who took senior people off for an ocean rowing exercise to demonstrate teamwork. It helped, but the relationship that formed there between the two IT managers and the controller produced the best outcome. Those three people left the seaside and worked through the weekend to “get some real numbers to manage the business.”

The numbers were worse than they thought, but they people’s attention. The execs called key customers and suppliers, and started a retention process to ensure that people with critical skills stayed. The firm survived.

“Mergers suck!”

Later during process improvement training in a serial acquirer, participants were asked to introduce themselves, “name, job, a little known fact about yourself to help us all get to know each other.”

“Hi I’m___ from____ department. Mergers suck!”

The hour we lost in discussion following demonstrated that this wasn’t  a “little known fact” in this company. Everyone had a story of short-sighted decision making, being “lied to” or disrespected, of waste,  loss of customer-focus, squeezing suppliers, and a general lack of trust of each other and management.

Conflict is natural when you combine two businesses. Conflict can better ideas. However, if you deny conflict, cover it up with superficial MNBS (this company’s acronym for “make nice bullshit”) conflict doesn’t go away – it intensifies.

“If you’re so great how come we bought you?!” This came bursting out repeatedly at the department head level in a what senior executives described as a “merger of equals.”

I witnessed the CEO of this Pittsburgh bank scream at the IT manager of the acquired Philadelphia bank, “When I said we’d pick the best systems, I meant OUR SYSTEMS!”

Mergers suck because they are founded on a lie; there are no mergers. There are only acquisitions; one company buys another company. Sometimes when the companies are the same size, the acquirer may take an enlightened view by treating the acquired firm equally than to protect value. It still isn’t a merger.

As a consultant, I did some work on customer-supplier partnerships, and once I created an alliance between two competitors going after a larger piece of business than either could have handled on their own. There are several differences between these structures and acquisitions, even those called mergers.

  • The scope of these agreements is limited and spelled out. The scope may be restricted to certain areas of the business or may be limited by a fixed time duration, but there are limits to the combination.
  • The interests of both parties, what each contributes and what benefits each expects are also clearly delineated.
  • Even after the deal is closed, either party can walk away. There is often a requirement for notice or penalties for lack of delivery, but there a process for dissolution of the deal.

Compare this to an acquisition:

  • Scope is total.
  • Very often each party’s reasons for the combination are not even talked about. Acquirees who agree to be acquired to have access to investment often find that the acquirer has so borrowed so much to pay for the acquisition that they can’t afford any new investment.
  • Once the deal is done, unhappy acquirees are told “You took the money. Deal with it!” Spin-offs do occur, but usually only after significant losses.

The Danger Zone – pre-close to the first 100 days

Executives may have signaled intentions to sell and interest to buy for years. Thorough due diligence may have gone on for months. Investment bankers may have conducted an auction or a detailed multiparty negotiation. However, once an acquisition is announced, chaos ensues. Fifty-two pick up, the cards are in the air.

  1. Shareholders of the acquired company hold the stock as it rises and then sell just before the close. The acquirer’s stock often drops precipitously, making the deal more expensive.
  • Customers worried about delayed deliveries and price increases lock in another source of supply.
  • Suppliers worry about maintaining prices in the face of increased negotiating power.
  • People worry about losing their jobs.
  • Competitors worry about your increased size, sale or scope. They may buy each other or your largest supplier, or acquire your customers with deep discounts on long term contracts.
  • Headhunters and area employers start recruiting your stars.

This all happens while the acquiring company is learning the acquiree’s business – things that didn’t show up in due diligence – and the acquiree is learning about the differences in “culture.”

This is a critical time. It is a time when neither party has as enough information. The temptation for leaders of both companies is to hide their ignorance with secrecy, double-speak and platitudes.  This never works.

Things Leaders in Mergers & Acquisitions Should Never Say

  • “Don’t worry.” (Of course, people will worry. Maybe they’ll worry less if they have information, but they’ll worry anyway.)
  • “Nothing will change.” Of course, things will change. Otherwise why did you do this deal. Trying to lessen worry with an untruth isn’t helpful.
  • “No one will lose their job.” Come on. Even with the best redeployment plans, there will be redundancies. If you must promise something – promise that those let go will be notified as quickly as possible and treated fairly.
  • “This is a merger of equals.” Even with the best of intentions, even with the best integrations processes, this will turn out to be a lie.
  • “We will share information on a need to know basis.” Yeah, that might work in the CIA, but in business, people resent being told that they aren’t important enough to be informed. Sure, some strategic information will need to be kept close to the vest, but a much better posture is “If we have information that affects you, we will tell you what we know as soon as we know it.”
  • “Don’t believe the rumors.” When my wife worked for a small hospital acquired by a large University healthcare system, she had an epiphany. “the rumors are always true.” No matter how much you try to hide information, people talk and the secret is blown. It’s also true that, in the absence of information, people make stuff up that is worse than the truth. Get a handle on rumors. Create an anonymous rumor hot line where people can record a rumor and you can respond within a day.
  • “We are looking for synergies.” The word synergy means a combination greater than the sum of the parts. Unfortunately my consulting brethren have changed the meaning to cost reduction and specifically “people off payroll.”
  • If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” By definition an acquisition “broke” all processes from both legacy companies. Use the opportunity to redesign and improve and ensure ownership by all parties.
  • “The integration is complete.” I have seen companies where, years later, I found legacy company uniforms, letterhead, logos, and old processes reverted to after redesign. Some of that is fine. People need to remember where they came from, but if it gets in the way of everyone working towards shared goals and feeling a part of a united company, this memorabilia needs to go.

Leadership Integration Priorities

In my work life I was personally around fourteen acquisitions. In two I was a part of the acquired company. In six I was engaged as a consultant to help with the integration. In six, I was engaged on other work where I had to do some de facto integration in order to complete my brief.  It’s my view that acquisitions can be harder than organic growth. The challenges are certainly different and the risk of company-shaking disaster is higher.

Every few years some consulting firm does a study of large acquisitions over a recent period and determines that 70-80%. of large public company mergers fail,  that is the merged company’s total share value is less than the combined value of the two legacy firms. By this measure less than five percent actually increase in value.

Given this why do companies continue to acquire? Remember the opening quote “Double in size, easy-peasy,” top line growth ignoring difficulty and value destruction. There may be something about CEOs, loving the media spotlight around the acquisition, while abdicating the mess and blaming their minions

Failure is often blamed upon “culture clash.” Integration processes should be inclusive and rational as a remedy to the “clash,” – join the cultures by doing real work together.

People are important, but real work is more so. Leadership priorities are in this order:

  • IT systems first –you need real data that people believe in, P&L, management accounting, sales, production, and HR. Run both sets of systems until you are sure the integration has lasted for three months.
  • Customers – this isn’t just data, but relationships and sales should not the only point of contact.
  • Suppliers – I have seen too many supplier agreements thrown out for “synergy,” which crippled the company’s delivery to its customers
  • Operations -operating processes can always be improved, but they need to be maintained and integrated slowly. Often both manufacturing and service quality decline during integration.
  • People, Organization, Culture – Why does a “change guy” like me put culture at the bottom of the list? Especially when companies may have twice the people we need in some functions?

 

Most of the people issues can be addressed as you do other work. Shouldn’t you get to know the people you acquired before you sacrifice them to “synergy?”

Leaders, if you take one thing away, please stop thinking that acquisitions are easy.

Change is always tough. It’s tough for an individual to lose weight, or quit smoking.  Breaking old habits and doing something different is hard.

Organizational change means that many people have to break habits and do something different, but at least they know each other and can support each other in the process.

In an acquisition, two groups of people must act differently, and are starting from different places and they don’t know each other.

Easy-peasy it is not.

Soundtrack of a Life

Soundtrack of a Life

by | Feb 5, 2023 | Living

“He was only ever interested in music and the transfer of energy, which he considered the same thing.”

This is a line written about Josiah Fells, the father in the Showtime series “The Man Who Fell to Earth.“ This series is based upon the 1963 Walter Nevis novel, of the same name and picks up the story after the place where the 1976 David Bowie movie ends.

Josiah, (played by actor Charlie Peters) is an interesting character a tinkering, innovating scientist who builds kinetic sculptures, is a kick-ass jazz guitarist and, in the plot, is given the job of creating a cold fusion generator to power a spaceship to send the alien home, using music.

The line struck me to the point that I rewound the DVR to write it down verbatim.

I ruminated on it at the time and now six months later I’ve come upon the page in my notebook where I recorded those ruminations.

Music is notes, a specialized notation, an alphabet, a language of tones, of frequencies and particular durations – whole notes, half notes, quarters, eighths, triplets, etc. The frequencies vary – melody and harmony, keys, chords, dissonance and harmonics. The durations vary by rhythm, tempo, or patterns of time.

According to the first law of thermodynamics, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can be transformed from one form to another. There are two types of energy transfer, thermal and kinetic.

A light bulb transforms electricity to heat and then to light, an example of thermal energy transfer. Imagine kinetic transfer; I swing a golf club, which (in a perfect world) hits a small white ball and transfers the kinetic energy of my swing to the ball, launching it for two hundred yards straight down the fairway, (or in my case into the air as I whiff or into the ball shanked thirty yards into the rough).

In the natural world there are different types of thermal energy transfer, conduction, convection and radiation and there are different processes that facilitate that transfer, such as chemical (oxidation – think fireworks, light, heat and boom-sound waves), and nuclear (fission, -you know, splitting uranium atoms to power your hair dryer creating leftovers with a 600-year use-by date).

Kinetic energy is often transferred through work (pushing the car out of the garage) or redirected e, g,, engine rotational energy pivoted ninety degrees by transmission gears to the wheels.

This is as far as 12th grade physics transfers through my worn neural pathways and compromised synapses.

But music. . . sound waves. .  can transfer to kinetic energy from toe tapping to dancing, (which, I think, my kids would still rather I didn’t do in public).

“Music can change the world because it can change people.” – Bono

What the lead singer of the Irish rock band rings true if you have ever been to a live music concert. It doesn’t matter what genre of music. A performance is usually planned to engage, draw in, the energy of the audience and take them through various moods, peaking at a climax and leaving  them a little more “energized” than when they arrived. Think about that. We come in to a concert as individuals each with our own joys and frustrations and share a set of emotions driven by the sound wave energy of a performance. It’s what people mean when they say “music unites people.”

Some of my most profound experiences with music have been at protest marches singing “We shall overcome,” led by Pete Seeger or Joan Baez. I shared solidarity with those working for civil rights, ending hunger, or ending a war. The music wasn’t enough, but it was a start.

“Music doesn’t lie. If something needs to be changed in the world, then it can only be changed through music.” – Jimi Hendrix

 

“Music is the soundtrack of your life.” – Dick Clark

Some may have no idea who Dick Clark is. Some may remember him from countless New Year’s celebrations broadcast on live TV from Times Square in New York City. For me Dick Clark will always be the host of American Bandstand, where I learned about the transition from 1950s dance ballads to Rock-a-Billy to rock and roll.

Let me be clear, I do not consider myself a musician.

Yes, my father was a singer, a professionally trained bass, who sang with the Handel Hayden chorus in Boston. We sang a lot in our home, and I still sing a lot in the shower. I can turn almost any conversation into a song using lyrics from many musical genres, a trait that those who love me put up with, while groaning and telling me how truly annoying it is.

And yes, I have played at guitar since I was thirteen and write some folky, country, rock-ish songs. But real musicians dedicate themselves to the craft. They read music and write in music notation. I’m a music hack, (that’s not being modest or self-deprecating) and I’m OK with that.

Still, music has been a large part of my life. As an eleven-year-old Boy Scout, I loved campfire singalongs led by Scoutmaster Ed Hoxie, and laughed at the Tom Lehrer songs he sang.

“About a maid I’ll sing a song, sing rickety-tickety-tin. About a maid I’ll sing a song, who didn’t have her family long. Not only did she do them wrong, she did every last one of them in.”

When I was thirteen, I got the six-string pictured above and spent $285, earnings from caddy camp, on a stereo, which for 1962 was one helluva sound system. I only just finally sold the speakers about five years ago. My first album purchase was Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin, which shocked my parents, who had no idea I would even know who Gershwin was. My first 45 was Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Peter, Paul and Mary, which I sang along with at the top of my rebellious teenage lungs.

At fifteen I was cast as Billy Bigelow, the lead in the musical “Carousel,” which probably saved my life, as I was hanging out with a group of street-fighting vandals, most of whom ended up dead or jailed before twenty.

This was a turning point in my life, which is why the Billy Joel song “Keeping the Faith” resonates so much with me:

“’cause I never felt the desire to let music set me on fire, and then I was saved, yeah -That’s why I’m keeping the faith. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Keeping the Faith.”

The next year I played the King in “The King and I,” went to college and studied theatre, playing Matt in “The Fantasticks.”

Of course, I ultimately gave up musicals, and theatre, but I continued to listen and explore music. For years, I picked up the guitar, whenever I felt a little blue, or exuberant, or contemplative. In my thirties I wrote my first songs. In retirement I wrote some more and copyrighted nine songs and I have seven more in different stages of completion.

I have discovered that listening to and singing the blues gets me over the blues. I am aware of the absurdity this displays as highlighted by George Carlin:

“What do white people have to sing the blues about? Banana Republic ran out of chinos?”

I have written parodies of my love of the blues and I love Martin Mull’s “Ukelele Blues:”

“I woke up this mornin’ ‘n’ saw both cars were gone. . . and I feel so low-down, I threw my drink across the lawn.”

I listen to my vinyl albums, (yes, I still have a turntable). And while I agree with Neil Young that analog sound production is much better than digital, I do sometimes listen to a Spotify shuffle when I walk.

I love all kinds of music, blues, rock, reggae, country, folk, jazz -especially trad-jazz, Coltrane, Davis, Gillespie and Armstrong, big bands, and classical, even opera, though I’m more partial to Pavarotti than Callas. I remember when I first discovered different genres – Sam Kopper, on WBCN -Boston introduced me to reggae. Paul Grazda, who I worked with, introduced me to the musicologist-artist Ry Cooder in 1976 and I’ve followed Ry ever since, through all his iterations, film scores, world music, Buena Vista Social Club, and “No Banker Was Left Behind,” his response to the TARP bailout in 2008.

I’m still learning about music. The other guitars in the picture are cigar box guitars. The tree-string on the left was made by my son for my seventieth birthday. The other two, “Punch Rose,” and the four-string resonator “Black Copper” were Covid projects,  built with video instruction from Shane Speal (“King of the Cigar Box Guitar”) and his book “Poor Man’s Guitar.” These were my first electric guitars and I’m contemplating buying an amp upgrade from the 2 ½ watt one Zac built, and maybe a Classic Vibe Strat or a Gretsch Streamliner.

“How many guitars do you need?” Even a hack guitarist like me can use the response of guitarists everywhere. “Maybe just one. . . more.”

So music is the soundtrack of my life. I have a make-me-feel-better playlist that includes “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley, (“Don’t worry about a thing, ‘cause every little thing is gonna be alright”) “Honky-Tonk Women” by the Rolling Stones, and the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s ninth symphony.

What’s on yours?

“Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace abolishing strife.” — Kahlil Gibran

 

And if there is some hope that music might unite us and change the world, what should we be listening to or playing?