Tom Watson

That 70s Show

Back in season two of The Sopranos, in an episode in which nothing much happens - no ventricle-charged bloodshed, no real turning points, the kind of week that drives the obsessive plot-sitters wild with frustration - Tony Soprano is forced to report for duty every day as an executive at the waste management company he owns. With the Feds closing in, his lawyer advises the boss to stay out of the strip club and away from the streets. As with every week in this brilliantly-written series, the episode was its own discreet chapter and it ran along a crooked road to this soundtrack:

Disco Inferno - The Trammps
Gotta Serve Somebody - Bob Dylan
More Than a Feeling - Boston
Space Invader - The Pretenders
You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory - Johnny Thunders

The songs were perfect; against an almost casual lack of action, they portrayed much of the underlying tension in the life of a mobster. And man, they took me back.

Music propels The Sopranos, and so much of it was either recorded in - or inspired by - the 1970s, and a certain style of life here in the low-down middle atlantic states of that wonderful, dogshit time. Although the backdrop is the real estate-charged world of turn-of-the-millenium north Jersey, the hoods who make up the revolving central cast are leather-clad, picaresque hot-rod jockeys riding the Turnpike of 1977 or so, flipping 8-tracks into the console, sucking on the embers of an old joint,  and downshifting battered Camaros past the exit signs.

Line up Tony's crew in black and white in the parking lot of the Bada Bing, and they look much like an aging band of northeast classic rockers, with paunches, thinning hair, and leather coats - the E Street Band in their 40s and 50s. Oh yeah, one of them is the E Street Band in hs 50s - Steve Van Zandt, a musician of singularly good historical taste, who no doubt inhabits the soundtrack of The Sopranos just as well as he fills the greasy pompadour of Silvio. Van Zandt's wardrobe for the show is amazingly like his threads for the Darkness on the Edge of Town tour - no accident there, I think.

Indeed, outside of Tony's thoroughly modern children and their plot lines, every character in The Sopranos has that 70s grime on them - before unleaded gas, before environmental controls on the refineries of Elizabeth, before new graffiti-free subway cars, before a sterile Times Square. And yeah, before the unrelenting Federal prosecution of the 80s made the Soprano crew into pure fantasy. Although he's the youngest member of the gang, Christopher Moltisanti is the clearest 70s throwback in the cast, played to spectacular precision by Michael Imperioli - those of us who grew up in Yonkers in the 70s knew this guy, and I suspect this goes for Belmont, for Queens, for Brooklyn, for Newark, for Philly, and onward down the seaboard. The character is pitch perfect, although at the extreme range of violence - his sensibilities toward life, his priorities, are closer to The Seven-ups (that underrrated 70s car-chase opera), than to the old-time gangsters of The Godfather.

At the center, of course, is James Gandolfini, whose habitation of Tony Soprano has certainly ruined him for future lead roles. As Chris is the young Tony, living his 70s now, Tony just looks back. He only looks back. There are few clues to what he thinks about the future, what he wants to do, or really, how he wants to live. Everything is about the past - an elegaic but unsympathetic view of the past. Tony talks about his younger days on the therapist's couch, but when he walks into the kitchen singing Aqualung, you're back there.

Sunday's episode indulged that 70s symbolism to the max, with its noirish, filthy carnival scenes, the short leather jackets, the focus on cars and drugs, the big hair, and the music. Over the course of its run, repeat musical quotations have framed the action, with pulll quotes from Jefferson Airplane, Booker T and the MGs, Cream and Eric Clapton, Paul Simon, The Eagles, Boston, Led Zeppelin, Steve Miller Band, Stones, Tom Petty, Elvis Costello, and Steely Dan. No accident that Silvio tried to lure the outed gay gang member back with backstage passes to the big Blood, Sweat, and Tears show.

This week, as Christopher fell back into heroin and self-hatred, the score returned to Johnny Thunders - the ultimate destructive 70s era New York rocker. The carnival faded to near black and white: deep, horrific colors like a faded print of the French Connection. And Thunders and the Heartbreakers lurched into a live, raucous version of Pipeline - no doubt played in some dive club in Brooklyn circa '78, filled with half-drunk, leather-clad guys like Christopher Moltisanti.

Trouble in the Heartland

Like many men of my age and geography, I will purchase just about anything Bruce Springsteen sells, and that includes his strange and raucous new release, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, nominally a tribute to octogenerian folksinger Pete Seeger, but more broadly another small piece in Springsteen's ongoing reinterpretation of American culture. The record covers traditional folk material - no originals. It sounds entirely live, recorded with a wide-ranging group of musicians, the errant tuba occasionally reminiscent of Springsteen's whirling, precocious early sound.

Being both a careful producer and a careful liberal, Springsteen is always controlling about both his musical releases and his statements. But this record is sloppy, haphazard. So is the message, but the results are less joyful. Because there in lineup is that old folk warhorse, the Ballad of Jesse James - and because of it, the calliope crashes to the ground.

Everybody knows the song, and perhaps in its inherent long-standing myth, there's an innocence that calls for forgiveness to actual history, at least for aging rock musicians:

Jesse James was a man
And he killed many men
He robbed the Glendale train
And he took from the rich
And he gave that to the poorer
He'd a hand and a heart and a brain

History tells a different tale. Skip the heart - in history, Jesse James had a hand, and a gun, and a brain - that brain belonged to the lost cause of the Confederacy, to race hatred, and to revenge. And the gun belonged to American terrorism.

Jesse James was terrorist who killed without compassion. The record on that is clear. Oh, he wasn't the mastermind of a movement like Osama bin Laden (that honor in the Border Wars belonged to the hate killers Bill Anderson and William Quantrill), but he certainly was of the ilk of killers like Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abdelkarim Hussein Mohammed al-Nasser, and others on the U.S. most wanted list of international terrorists. And the U.S. government, on behalf of its terrorized civilian population in Kansas and Missouri and the midwest, hunted Jesse and his brother Frank and the rest of their gang with at least the relentless passion we now employ against killer hiding in Pakistani provinces.

Author T.J. Stiles wrote a brilliant revisionist book a few years back that tore the cover off the James myth (created largely in the 20th century, long after his death at the hands of bounty hunter Robert Ford). Jesse James : Last Rebel of the Civil War is a terrific page-turner, but it's also terrifying to those who believe in the ancient values of the American heartland, who go for the Disney view of the Civil War's aftermath, western expansion, and the deadly growth pains of our nation. It's surprising that Springsteen hasn't read it, and that musicians like Seeger and Van Morrison (who also prominently covered the ballad) don't have a clue as to the real story.

Under a greater "lost cause" movement led by Quantrill after the Confederacy to punish pro-Union supporters in Missouri, James and his ilk engaged in ritual torture, murder, scalping, dismemberment, attacks on unarmed civilians, destruction of property, and general violent mayhem. They also lined their own pockets. But James is remembered primarily because of his canny use of the media of the day, mainly pro-Southern newspaper publishers who created in him a Robin Hood figure for the lost cause of the South. "In his political consciousness and close alliance with a propagandist and power broker, in his efforts to win media attention with his crimes," wrote Stiles. "Jesse James was a forerunner of the modern terrorist."

There is nothing but religion and modern munitions technology to seperate the Quantrill/James movement of the midwest from the al-Qaeda of today. Yet, when Stiles' book reached the Amazon best-seller list a few years ago, some reviewers attacked it as "anti-southern." In an instant, you could see the distant, historic connection between the defeat of the Confederacy and its violent aftermath and the successful "Southern Strategy" of Ronald Reagan's Republican Party, which leveraged the chip on the South's historic shoulder to provide stunning electoral success - and reward the very political party that Southerners once believed had ravaged their culture forever. Steve Gillard writes about this quite often, under the banner of not letting the GOP off the hook (and I think, under the hope that the strategy is on its last legs in 2006). He has another good post on the traditional Reagan-based Stars and Bars strategem; here's a piece:

There are two Confederacys, one of history and one of imagination.

The one we deal with today is of imagination.

The one of rebel flags and the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the cult of the dead rebels.

It has little to do with reality.

The real Confederacy was closer to Biafra than Nazi Germany. A poor, break away Republic destined to be crushed by the larger neighbor.

The reason you get people like Jim Webb playing cute and George Allen praising the Confederacy has to do with how the Confederacy was resurrected in the postwar period. It was about race and integration, not history.

He is exactly correct. And it's really not such a Southern Strategy any more - as Steve has said, it's a dissatisfied, disenfranchised whites strategy nowadays, going far beyond the borders of the Southern states. But it's showing its age and fraying at the edges as well, mainly because the economic reality for so many middle class white people is so starkly disadvantaged when compared to the wealth of those who actually run the Republican Party. These days, the civil rights battles of the old South make for good tourism in the new South. I've been the Birmingham and Montgomery recently - civil rights history is bringing the tourists in.

Still, this love of Confederate myth - the glorious lost cause - persists. A few years back, I was in Charleston on business and a friend and I took a walking tour of the old part of the city. Fascinating and beautiful. But in the old church downtown, there's a memorial to the martyred sons of "the nation" - and it's ain't the United States they're talking about. My friend was horrified, and vilified the local guide - who calmly described the pre-Civil War Charleston as a city in a golden age when African-American slaves had it pretty good. We passed on the Bobby Lee statues in the gift shop and decided on a self-guided tour from that point on.

Bruce Springsteen should know better. This pining away for the Confederate past and its post-war terrorist followers shouldn't make his latest record - no matter how traditional the tune is. The hero myth should die.

In Kearney, Missouri they still hold their Jesse James Festival every year - paid for partly with municipal funds - and the official history of the town on the Web still rails against the cruelty of "the Federals." A group of citizens gives tours at the nonprofit Jesse James Farm Museum, and raises money to preserve the hallowed ground.

Tourism, I guess - maybe someday there'll be a similar set-up in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Bulletin: Silicon Alley Still Dead

Don't believe everything you read, and watch out for what section of the paper you read it in. Those are the two thoughts I have for you this morning, as I add my voice to the disapproving chorus of those reacting to the rather silly story in the Style section of the Times. Alive and Well in Silicon Alley purports to document the rise of New York's media technology sector once again - and damnit, the wonderful "style" of those go-go 90s we all miss so damned badly. So cool. But as Jason Chervokas says this morning, "if Silicon Alley's going down that road again, well, I've got a start-up to sell you, online pizza delivery, $100 million valuation. It could happen."

Great line, and it refers to an actual company that (successfully) made the funding rounds in 1996 in New York. Which should tell you something. After the Netscape IPO in 1995, the gold rush enveloped the formerly anti-entrepreneur ruling class of New York. Silicon Alley 1.0 was a gold rush town straight out of HBO's virulent Deadwood - a shoot 'em up frontier village filled with con men, hustlers, snake oil salesmen and all the hookers, hangers-on, and profiteers you could possibly fit into lofts and cube farms from the Hudson to the East River. It was all great fun, I have to admit - oh except for the heartache, the bankruptcies, and the thousands of employees left with stock options that retained as much value as Confederate paper circa 1865. Nor was it much fun for all the late investors, for would-be angels, the amateur money that flooded the town looking for the next eBay, the next Amazon.

Still and all, there was a creative spirit that was eventually welded to the greatest graduate business school of them all - the mean streets of a cruel market - and I know it was a fascinating period in my own professional life. Ideas were everywhere, even if countless ne'er-do-well trust fund babies spent other people's money on high-end vodka, cocaine, and Super Bowl ads. [When I found myself featured in a full-color spread - clothed - in Penthouse magazine next to a certain notorious party boy and his dog, and two pages away from an explicit montage of two, er, Vikings of some sort ... well, I knew the jig was up: the for-sale sign went up quickly at good old @NY].

As a board member of NYSIA, I spent a couple of hours at the our old haunt at 55 Broad Street this week and schmoozed with its chief Bruce Bernstein - who has more staying power than any dozen start-ups - and we talked a bit about the buzz in the air. It's not the money really, although there have been a few nice exits, primarily of companies that ran cheap and have been plugging along for years now, some of them before the catastrophe of 9/11. It's more the creativity - lots of ideas, lots of open discussion, some collaboration. And then there's Google and Yahoo - why did they move their big sales units to New York? Easy: it's where big media lives and they want to get the big campaign money. And they probably will: that's business.

Which the Times Styles article clearly was not. Back in the day, Jason and I were first attracted to the business story and to its place in New York's history; as he says:

...first and foremost we took seriously the ideas that New York could be an important hothouse for the invention of new media technology businesses and that the boys in Silicon Valley could learn something from New York's media-centered approach to technology. We also believed that media technology start-ups could have a major financial impact on a city that hadn't had a new home grown industry since movies left in the 1920s.

The kernel of this remained during the bad years, but the explosion of the phony bubble we had predicted accurately - but too early, of course - killed thousands and thousands of jobs. Now we're getting photos of pool tables again, and descriptions of techie wardrobes. Who cares? At 55 Broad, I bumped into John Tepper Marlin, the economist who did some terrific reports on New York's job growth and job decline during and after the bubble. Now out on his own and working on some project, he told me that the job numbers are just starting the creep up again. This is a good thing, real evidence of an important - and still young - sector coming back from the dead in town. The Times didn't bother to report this. In short, I'll agree with Fred Wilson's take:

I don't like the name Silicon Alley either and never did.

Why do we need some wannabe name to describe something that is going on in every major city in our country and increasingly every major city in the world?

Entrepreneurs are building interesting companies using technology and brains and imagination.

That's all there is to it.  And if there's a story in that, let's put it where it belongs in the business section or the technology section, not the style section.

There is a business story there, and I'll be paying more attention myself in the coming months. But I have to chuckle. This morning I noticed that Jason Calacanis, our old bete noir from the 90s, is in fighting spirit and spitting at my old partner (and me as well) after Jason's initial blog post. Here's the Calacanis take:

I love the fact that I beat them so bad that Jason still can't get over it. That is what competition is about--getting inside the other guys head to the point at which they take their mind off the game. I *tortured* these guys for five years and ten years later they are still throwing stones.

I think Jason has let L.A. get into his DNA, infecting his viewpoint - it's a very non-Brooklyn sentiment, it seems to me: unkind, inaccurate, and all-hype. You know, post 9/11 in this town and after the Iraq debacle, bragging about torture - even in jest - ain't cool. We like to keep it real around here (let's hope the Times is listening). Hey Jason, time to get out of the cabana and come back to a real city. Where, it seems, there is some interesting growth - in business, not in style.

UPDATE: Man, so much passion for the 90s. Read the comments via Chervokas, Wilson, and Calacanis as well as Steve Gilliard's acerbic memories of the boom - here's a handy list of links via Pamela Parker, an [email protected] who proved one thing: Jason and I knew talent, at least. Her post is here.

• Jason Chervokas - Style over Substance in Silicon Alley
  
• Tom Watson: Bulletin: Silicon Alley is still Dead
  
• Jason Calacanis: 10 years later... lessons from the SAR/@NY Battle
  
• Fred Wilson: Alley Wag and Revisionist History, Calacanis Style
  
• Brouhaha: Back Alley Fighting
  
• Steve Gilliard: Warning, bullshit alert
• i-boy: Fight Club: Silicon Alley Style
• PR Differently
• Daly Om: Silicon Alley vs. Silicon Alley

It's a good debate, and I'm glad the initial Chervokas post touched things off. Meantime, I re-read the Times story and you know, it's not such a bad business piece - a bit simple perhaps, badly labeled and positoned, but the story is well-told, in general  - there is something brewing again in town.