Face It, Quality Is Instrumental to Our Future

According to the headlines, we as a nation are “optimistic yet cautious” right now, basking--with a heavy coat of sunscreen, evidently--in the glow of the new Clinton presidency. Myself, I’ve been varying between “giddy yet guarded” and “wary yet waffling.”

The new Prez has announced “a call to a season of service from a joyous mountaintop” or some such Dr. King-inspired rallying cry, and maybe it is time to get our cautious, guarded, wary rears off the fence and do something useful. In the memorable words of the uplifting yet dead Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we have nothing to fear but utter, bloodcurdling, heart-stopping, pink-slipped fear itself.

I’ve decided to do my bit, and henceforth will forswear the negative, grumpy tone that typically enfolds this column, at least for the next six or so paragraphs.

There indeed are causes for optimism, signs that the great engine of American ingenuity is again turning. Just flip through the pages of the current Johnson Smith Company catalogue. That’s right, the same Johnson Smith Company that has been every kid’s pal since 1914, offering such essentials as whoopee cushions, fake vomit and “scientific” ram-jet engines. In grade school I used to daydream about how many $2.25 ram-jet engines it would take to put my bicycle on the moon, and the fun I could have with fake vomit there. This doubtless was during the class time when I was supposed to be learning how to write.

It was some surprise to find that the Johnson Smith Company has kept pace with the latest trends and technology. Now they have New Age crystals and, instead of clumsy jets for exploring space, they offer a video to “learn mind travel and astral projection” for $34.95. Their new “spilled mess” joke is one that makes it look like you’ve glopped ketchup over your computer keyboard. And forget the rude whoopee cushion of the past--now there’s the digital electronic remote control whoopee cushion. And they say this nation ignores its infrastructure!

I recently spent a day at the National Assn. of Music Merchants market at the Anaheim Convention Center, the place where instrument makers show their wares. Some years those wares have seemed about as squirrelly as the things in the Johnson Smith catalogue. Guitars would be either slavish rip-offs of the late Leo Fender’s innovations or goofus pointy shapes and skull-and-crossbone designs made more for videos than actual music-making.

This year it seemed the trend was more toward doing things with personality and pride, and boy are those qualities that have been missing largely from this country of late.

I have a guitarist friend who I swear can’t tell the difference between his guitars and his girl friends. It’s a wonder he hasn’t electrocuted himself. I’m one step removed from that, at best. I tend to use guitars as the measure of America’s strength, spirit and business acumen. To me, guitars can illustrate the state of American business in this century.

Let’s start with the way things used to be: Once, a guy like Orange County’s Leo Fender would get a unique idea (Fender’s creations included the Telecaster, Stratocaster and electric bass) and follow it through. He’d start a little company and put enough effort behind his dream that people would see the virtue in it. He’d be in the factory every day with his sleeves rolled up trying to make his products the best they could be, because he was putting his name on it, and pride mattered. When he’d go down to the Cadillac dealer, the salesman would ignore him because he looked like a factory worker.

Like all good ideas, Fender’s guitars caused others to follow suit--traditional companies such as Gibson as well as wacko newcomers such as Danelectro, which encased its guitar pickups in chrome lipstick tubes.

The dozens of firms following Fender didn’t just copy. Each came up with its own variations on the electric guitar, with unique concepts and visions. Even the cheapest companies prided themselves on making their own distinctive products. The shelves of department stores such as Sears in the ‘50s and ‘60s were stocked with weird, well-made designs that were dripping character.

Following the Beatles boom of the ‘60s, guitar companies started getting bought up by corporations that saw dollars there. Fender was sold to CBS. Within a few years “pre-CBS” became the catchword for distinguishing good Fenders from bad because, rather than musical instruments, Fenders became cut-corner commodities shaped like guitars. It might seem like there wouldn’t be that much difference between similar combinations of wood and metal, but players could sure feel the difference.

That kind of soullessness largely has prevailed in the years since, as successions of corporate lawyers and business school dweebs who never had a creative idea in their lives called the shots, forgetting the free in free enterprise, or that business could mean innovation, adventure, dreams or anything other than the plodding bottom line. Perhaps you’ve seen a similar trend in other businesses, not that I’ve seen USA Today recently.

As seems to be happening in the culture, politics and other changing aspects of our society, one can only eat cardboard and say it’s bread for so long before reality necessarily sets in. What I saw at the NAMM show this year were dealers, old and new, who seem to have gotten bored sick making a world they don’t want to live in. Both the little entrepreneurs and the big dinosaurs are doing things in which they can justifiably find pride, satisfaction and even fun again, and that has to be good.

I like that. I also like the fact that even a lumbering mess like GM can do something right again, as exemplified in its Saturn line. And I think that it’s a tremendous sign that the Clinton inauguration included the likes of Maya Angelou, Los Lobos, Illinois Jacquet, Little Richard, Aretha Franklin and Beausoleil instead of the Care Bears or whoever it was Bush had. Now if the President would only put them all in his cabinet, this country might just make it to the millennium.