14 minute read
Following the Stars
THE STARS
JONATHAN TAPLIN ’65 HAS HAD A STORYBOOK CAREER
A chance meeting with music manager Albert Grossman sent Jonathan Taplin ’65 into the world of icons such as Bob Dylan and the Band, and then into a career in music, film and the intersection of media, culture and technology.
Jonathan Taplin ’65 came to Brooks with a set of expectations placed on him by his family: He was to go to college, go to Harvard Law School and then move home to Shaker Heights, Ohio, where he would work alongside his father and take up the mantle of the family’s law firm.
That’s not how it worked out. At Brooks, Taplin found his voice and galvanized his values as the Civil Rights movement grew in the world surrounding campus. He matriculated to Princeton University, and then his future changed. Fresh off of his Brooks graduation, Taplin got a gig helping move equipment for the Kweskin Jug Band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The band’s manager, the legendary and influential Albert Grossman, offered Taplin a summer job as road manager for the Kweskin Jug Band two years later, and Taplin’s path was set.
With Grossman as a defining force in his life over the next decade, Taplin became the tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band. He witnessed firsthand the power that music has to expand the individual’s and society’s collective vision of what could be. As Taplin writes in his recently published memoir, “The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life,” the sense of possibility that art carries is hopeful; it “allows culture to be at its most vital and powerful, even in difficult times.”
In “The Magic Years,” Taplin explores this idea as he recounts his own career in the music industry, alongside greats such as Janis Joplin, George Harrison and the Rolling Stones; as film producer, and producer of the Martin Scorsese film “Mean Streets”; as an executive at Merrill Lynch; as creator of the Internet’s first video-on-demand service; and now, as a cultural critic and author focused on the ways in which technology has and will continue to affect our culture and its foundations. Here, and with permission, the Bulletin excerpts portions of “The Magic Years” to share some of Taplin’s memories from his extraordinary life, and his thoughts on topics ranging from his time at Brooks to the role musicians and artists must play in our collective future.
EXCERPTS FROM “THE MAGIC YEARS”
On Frank D. Ashburn, founding headmaster of Brooks:
The first headmaster of Brooks was a twenty-five-year-old Groton and Yale graduate named Frank Ashburn, and he was still headmaster when I arrived in 1961. We named him Prune, and his wife Phyllis we called Fille. They were both tightly wound and spoke with the Boston version of a British upper-class accent. Ashburn had the kind of slicked-back hairstyle you might see in a silent movie from the 1920s, and he wore small wireframe glasses. His pinched-in mouth led to the nickname Prune. He had the appearance of a stodgy old man, but, as I eventually found out, he was, unlike many of his station, open to new information.
<< Jonathan Taplin’s new book, “The Magic Years,” is a memoir that recounts his journey through the music and film industries, and that discusses the effect technology has on our collective artistry and culture. In the cover photo, Taplin is on the far right, facing the camera. On Students for a Democratic Society and its Port Huron Statement:
On the evolution of Bob Dylan’s songwriting from folk music to rock-n-roll:
What’s so astonishing about the music Dylan and the Hawks made in the eighteen months they were on tour is that it prefigured punk rock. Every night was a battle. Bob would tell his band as they went onstage, “Don’t stop playing, no matter what.” Occasionally, angry fans would try to storm the stage, and Robbie Robertson said he sometimes felt he might need to use his Telecaster as a weapon to fight his way off.
<< An article in the Brooks Shield recounting Jonathan Taplin’s and other students’ participation in a march through Boston led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Though some of the Port Huron Statement can seem dated, its emphasis on “participatory democracy” was extraordinarily prescient … If only the Democratic Party had been able to reconnect with its Jeffersonian roots, with its emphasis on the innovative power to be discovered and developed at the state and local level, as opposed to believing that all wisdom flowed from a gigantic (and distant) federal government. Those of us who study innovation realize that true breakthroughs come from organizations that have pushed power out to the edges.
On the role technology will play in our democracy and culture:
In an age when there is so much fear around the rise of autocratic regimes … we need to remember our source of power is in these ideas of freedom, not On Mr. Ashburn’s reaction to Taplin’s piece in technology and weaponry … the Shield advocating for Brooks to integrate, Ultimately I have faith that our and following Taplin’s participating in a march in Boston led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: country can reform itself and that the techno-determinists can be At my school, it was a moment of change. When I reported back to Frank Ashburn, I sensed that even brought to heel. And I believe that if Bill Coffin had upset him a year earlier, the tide of history had changed and he knew it … By the time I artists can be part of that effort. graduated, the school had begun to transform itself into the wonderfully diverse institution it is today.
EXCERPTS FROM “THE MAGIC YEARS”
On the ways in which music helped usher in democracy in the former Soviet Union:
What the politicians of the right didn’t understand was that the Berlin Wall came down not because Reagan was any smarter or tougher than Gorbachev but because the world itself had changed. Bruce Springsteen, George Lucas, and Marvin Gaye had broken through the wall years before; Gorbachev was just smart enough to finally accept that a wall wasn’t going to keep his people from the type of freedom they were seeing on MTV Europe and listening to on pirated American CDs.
On “The Last Waltz,” Martin Scorsese’s documentary concert film of the Band’s final performance. The film featured appearances from musical icons Muddy Waters, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Dr. John. Taplin was the executive producer:
Above: Photograph of “The Last Waltz.” Here, the Band with Bob Dylan and other guests performing “I Shall Be Released.”
Looking at “The Last Waltz” nearly half a century later, it is an astonishing film that captures a group of musicians at the height of their craft … It is a film for the time capsule, filled with truth and sorrow, but always based in the essential notion that this wonderful wellspring of American music that flowed from the churches On the ways in which and bars of the Mississippi Delta could be shared streaming music services by musicians from Arkansas, Ontario, Ireland,have changed and artistry: songwriting England, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Vancouver. Today’s streaming scene has There was common ground. made even U2 change their approach. Back in 1987, the Edge would begin “Where the Streets Have No Name” with forty seconds of ambient noise. Then a guitar arpeggio enters and >> Jonathan Taplin (center, black accelerates into the driving rhythm of the drums and bass, which coat) with the Band at Woodstock. arrive about a minute into the song. Nearly two minutes pass Manager Albert Grossman, who fundamentally changed the before Bono starts to sing. They still do this onstage, but services course of Taplin’s career through a like Spotify have reshaped the music business — and pop songs. If chance meeting and the offer of a summer job, is pictured at far left. the singing doesn’t start immediately, users click to the next tune.
On managing the Band during its appearance at Woodstock:
On Sunday at 1 p.m. the helicopter sent by the festival landed in my backyard in Woodstock. The Band and I piled in and within twenty minutes were coming up over a ridge in Bethel, which revealed a sea of humanity dancing below to Sly and the Family Stone. It was a stunning, almost biblical sight. There was a sense that Youth Culture had reached some sort of critical mass … The fact that three hundred thousand kids were camped out in the mud below us in order to celebrate their culture, with no regard to the responsibilities of adulthood, must have opened the eyes to the advertising executives that read the morning paper over the weekend. If there was a single point at which the symbols of rebellion got co-opted by Madison Avenue, it was those three days in August.
Also by Jonathan Taplin
Jonathan Taplin’s 2017 book, “Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy,” tells the story of how a group of “monopoly firms” — Facebook, Amazon and Google — have come to determine the future of the media, publishing and news industries. Taplin offers a forward-thinking blueprint for how artists can reclaim their audiences by working together and using lessons from the past. “Move Fast and Break Things” draws on Taplin’s own career to reimagine the ways in which we interact with the firms that dominate the Internet.
A CONVERSATION WITH
Jonathan Taplin
The Bulletin sat down with Jonathan Taplin to discuss his life and work, and to get his opinion on some pressing current issues in technology and the media.
Tell me more about your time at Brooks. What did it feel like to be here during the 1960s in the middle of the Civil Rights movement and increased efforts at
social justice? Those notions didn’t really exist at Brooks. They weren’t really in anyone’s consciousness, and that’s why I felt like such an outsider. Because I was managing editor of the Shield, the campus newspaper, I had a platform and I was able to write about it. That caused more trouble, though there were some teachers who were supportive. Fortunately, a few students became supportive and then went down to Boston with me to march with Dr. King. The fact that Mr. Ashburn was willing to accept what I thought about integrating the school was helpful. And then, when Brooks became coeducational, I think it changed radically, and the idea of what it means to be a Brooks School student has continued to evolve. In the end, Mr. Ashburn gave me the Allen Ashburn Prize at graduation, which was a shock to me. It turned out that he had a sense of grace about the whole thing, and I think that’s partially because he was a religious man and he understood that was the right thing to do.
Your dad wanted you to go to college, go to Harvard Law School and then follow in his footsteps at his law firm. Your career ended up pretty far from that. Do you attribute that to fate or to luck?
It’s a combination of both things. I mean, in some sense, there was a certain amount of luck involved. I wanted to go to the Newport Folk Festival in July of 1965, the year that I graduated from Brooks. I was determined to do that, but the fact that Bob Dylan would go there and then change the whole tenor of the music business; that I would happen to be there at that seminal time and feel the extraordinary energy that was coming out of that scene. I got sucked in and there was no way I was going to law school after that. The fact that the most powerful man in the music business, Albert Grossman, took a shine to this 18-year-old kid and thought that maybe I could do something, maybe I could work for him: That made it even easier because then I knew I could make some money from it and I could be around that extraordinary change in the culture.
I wonder if you can speak to the ways in which changing ways of making a profit in music and media has changed the idea of “culture eating strategy for breakfast.” With the rise of streaming services, have the arts become
more mainstream and safe? Well, look. There’s always been pop, whether it’s in the music or the movie business. Probably it wasn’t until George Lucas came along and did “Star Wars” or Michael Jackson came along and did “Thriller” that people understood pop was a global phenomenon, not a U.S. phenomenon, and that the amount of money that a single piece of intellectual property could earn was so huge. I mean, it was beyond the ken of anybody that I knew. Bob Dylan’s first album sold 4,000 copies, and “Thriller” sold 60 million copies. The money became very interesting for a lot of people, but that didn’t prevent the more artistically oriented musician or filmmaker from continuing to try to make the work they wanted to make. That was never going to be super popular around the world. But you could still get them made, there was still a mechanism for them to get made. And quite honestly, I think that continues to this day. So as long as the system continues to make not just the Marvel Cinematics Universe, but makes both kinds of movies, we’ll be okay. The people who want the Marvel Cinematics Universe will be able to get that, and the people who want “Don’t Look Up” or “Drive My Car” will be able to find that too. That’s a hopeful sign, and I think the same thing is happening in the music business. There’s still some really interesting stuff getting made. My sense is that it’s just necessary for the industry to be able to keep financing both the super-pop stuff and the artistic stuff.
JONATHAN TAPLIN
JANIS JOPLIN
<< Jonathan Taplin (right) with Janis Joplin in July 1968.
Jonathan Taplin ‘65.
Below: The cover art to the Rolling Stones album “Exile on Main St.” Jonathan Taplin suggested in a meeting with Mick Jagger that the photographer Robert Frank create the upcoming album cover, then recruited and handled Frank throughout the process. This cover art is widely considered one of the best of all time.
What do you feel that you have left to do? You’ve had an amazing career; what do you want to do
next? I’m in the midst of writing a book called “The End of Reality: The Metaverse, Mars, Crypto, QAnon, and the Age of Unreason.” The thesis of the book is that we have now entered into a world in which nothing is true and everything is spectacle. It’s a postmodern reality in which even the richest people on the planet — Bezos, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg — have basically decided to give up. The whole notion of the metaverse is that reality sucks, so you can go and put this headset on for eight hours a day and live in an alternative reality that won’t suck. You can pretend like you have a great mansion and you can fly through the air like Superman and all of this. It will cost you some Bitcoin, but you can live in a total fantasy world. Some time in the last few years we just disconnected from reality, and we’re living with the result of that. It’s partially a human issue. In other words, it is in the realm of the spiritual more than the realm of the technical. These are people who are lost, who have no sense that there’s any meaning in life. I still believe that there are higher reasons for us to be here. We have to keep coming back to, well, thinking about what it means to be a human. Hopefully schools like Brooks continue to try to ground their pedagogy in things that have to do with virtue and humanness, and love and the bigger virtues.
