From excerpts and interviews I’m gathering that Walter Isaacson has managed to turn out a biography equal to his subject in Steve Jobs. I love the fact that Isaacson reports that Dylan was the soundtrack of Jobs’s life, which means the only real difference between Steve and me is a few billion dollars. And though I wish this particular story from the book was about a Dylan song, the Beatles are by no means a sorry second choice. The story being that Jobs had a bootleg of the Beatles multiple recording sessions for Strawberry Fields as they struggled to get it to their liking, and he would play the tape for his managers to help create the business culture he wanted at Apple. From the book:
"It's a complex song, and it's fascinating to watch the creative process as they went back and forth and finally created it over a few months," said Jobs. "They kept sending it back to make it closer to perfect. The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the numbers of models we'd make of a new notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a function operates. It's a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and soon it's like, 'Wow, how did they do that?!? Where are the screws?'"
We all grew up hearing the legend of how Thomas Edison went back to the drawing board for his light bulb 1000 times, leading to his famous dictum that “Genius is 1% inspiration; 99% perspiration.” And though it’s rather hard to imagine anyone literally sweating over the invention of a light bulb--or the recording of a song for that matter--we all get the idea. Finished products just don’t drop out of the sky and into our laps--they require trial and error. Sometimes lots of trials and lots of errors.
The irony is that a song with the theme “Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about” would pave the way for the second richest company in the world. I once worked for a company which had as its theme “We Are the Champions.” Without a hint of irony or embarrassment, every year they would end their annual meeting by having their largely male and quite macho sales force rise and sing along with prancing Freddy Mercury and Queen. To add to the irony, that company was eventually bought out by a competitor. Champions of the world indeed.
Whether the whole Strawberry Fields thing was determinant in the ultimate championship of the world by Apple, we cannot know for sure, though Norman O. Brown, writing in the midst of the zeitgeist that would produce both the Beatles and Apple, suggests that the link between the two is essential. In Love’s Body, Nobby writes:
Literal meanings are packaged commodities for passive consumers; in symbolic poetry the reader is incorporated into the work, actively participates in the poetic process itself—“the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself.”…Enigmatic form is living form; like life, an irridescence; an invitation to the dance; a temptation or irritation. No satisfying solutions, nothing to rest in, nothing to weigh us down.
As John Lennon sings: Always know sometimes think it's me, but you know I know and it's a dream/I think I know of thee, ah yes, but it's all wrong/That is I think I disagree/No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low/That is you can't you know tune in but it's all right/That is I think it's not too bad.
Oh, how my heart aches for the 60s when such splendid nonsense filled the air and invited listeners to participate—to create their own meaning. We can easily imagine that the Apple employees who listened to Jobs’s cherished bootleg tape over and over again were not just inspired by the 99% perspiration that went into the making of Strawberry Fields, but influenced as well on a more subversive level by the liberating message “Nothing is real, nothing to get hung about.”
I would like to think that if the Founding Fathers had the choice of what song they wanted to listen to over and over again through the writing of the Constitution, they would have chosen "Strawberry Fields" over "We Are the Champions." The deep schism in our current political culture can be as easily defined by these two songs as by such banalities as “red states” and "blue states.” The real schizophrenia at the heart of our national political divide is that those who most trumpet “American exceptionalism” are most contemptuous of our self-rule government and those who express the most faith in that government are the most likely to take exception to the notion of American exceptionalism by riffing on “Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.”
Those of us who came through the 60s are often accused of making too much of the impact music has on history. But when I think on the two songs that get played over and over again to set the tone for our management team at the top—“The Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America”—it is little wonder that we are driven to be the most pious arsenal the world has ever seen.