Stopping Pete

Speaking of WMFU's blog, I saw yesterday that they'd posted an open letter to Pete Townshend asking him to please stop allowing his songs to be used in TV commercials. (I note that the comments section has some pretty fired-up people sounding off.)

Now, I have no special love for "Bargain" as a Toyota Sale-A-Thon jingle. (I don't know about you, but I personally would not stand naked, stoned and stabbed, or for that matter drown an unsung man, in order to obtain a zero-percent financing deal on a Camry Solara.) Still, I'm not quite willing to go as far as John Fogerty, who says that "[w]hen you use a song for a TV commercial, it... almost turns it into nothing." Sorry, that's just too far. I'm old enough to know what "Fortunate Son" is really about. That doesn't make me 100% comfortable seeing it used to sell Wranglers, especially over Fogerty's objections, but I can't bring myself to say "Fortunate Son" is worthless today because of it. Pete's allowed -- the songs are his, he can do what he likes.

And yet I want Pete Townshend to know something. I don't know how I could ever get this message to him -- surely he wouldn't read a letter sent to the address in the WFMU blog post, would he? -- but he should know what's happened between me and the Beach Boys. You see, way back in my formative years (c. 1984), when I was just becoming dimly aware of things like Pet Sounds and Who's Next from the record bins at PathMark of all places, someone in control of the Beach Boys' catalog licensed a couple of songs for use in TV commercials. I'd heard these melodies on the AM radio in mom's 1972 Polara, and had some idea of "Good Vibrations" and "Wouldn't It Be Nice," but I hadn't yet processed the lyrics or reached any kind of understanding of what the songs were all about.

At this stage, my young mind was just waiting for these songs to arrive in thirty-second bursts, delivered multiple times daily throughout an entire summer of paper routes and Yankee games on WPIX. I'm afraid that at this critical stage, the authors of advertising campaigns for Tropicana and Sunkist beat the actual Beach Boys to my cortex. And, worse still, they didn't use the original lyrics. Either brand probably could've gotten away with simply associating itself with the feel-good summertime sound of the Beach Boys, but instead, both companies elected to go the extra mile and write brand-new lyrics for those classic songs. (This occurred over the vehement objections of Brian Wilson and his brothers, by the way. My understanding is that World's Greatest Dad Murry Wilson cut a deal to sell the publishing rights several years earlier, sacrificing untold millions in the process.)

I hope that if he were alive today, Murry Wilson would be happy to know that today, at age 34, when I hear "Wouldn't It Be Nice," I have to consciously decide whether I am listening to a song about two innocent young lovers staring at the precipice of adulthood, or whether I am preparing to drink a long-forgotten orange-juice-to-go product called a Tropicana Chugger. I hope he would be pleased to know that when I hear his son's masterpiece, "Good Vibrations," I briefly think of the rhyming line "Sunkist orange soda taste sensations" instead of anticipating the idea that she's giving me excitations. The meanings of these songs have not been trivialized to me; they've been replaced by other meanings! They were ruined before I got a chance to really enjoy them for what they were.

And so, Pete Townshend, I hope you're looking forward to someone else's generation -- not yours -- believing all the wrong things about your songs. I hope people misconstrue your songs, and believe they're about the opposite of what you really meant when you wrote them. Because it's obvious that those things don't matter to you anymore, that you yourself believe that "Bargain" has simply run its course. If you treat it as ancient history, as something that happened 35 years ago and that doesn't really matter anymore, I'll gladly think of it that way too. Good luck being part of the fossil record. May history be kinder to you as a car salesman than as a songwriter.


FMFM: "Substitute"