So What Do The Eagles Have To Do With Advertising?

Just sitting here with a big bowl of oatmeal, looking out the window and seeing the passive aggressive weather outside. The sun is just coming up, and it looks like it’s gonna be a great day.
But it’s a delusion. Allowing yourself to be seduced by what looks like a beautiful day will end in the pain of freezing your ass off because the wind chill makes it feel like -20˚C out there. So I ain’t goin’ nowhere.

The Eagles’ Desperado album is playing on the Bose. “ But here in my heart, I give you the best of my love” … Fuckin’ gorgeous.
This album was released in 1972 and really did take the music business by storm, becoming one of the best-selling albums of all time. I was 25 when I first discovered the Eagles, and the brand new musical genre called country rock that they created.
The songs on this album have remained potent for more than 40 years. And it was just part of a seven-album span, that took up the 1970s, which was relatively short by Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan standards, but substantial all the same.

I Have Always Been Partial To Lyrics

This era, which has and will probably never be repeated, was an era of vinyl LPs, and some of the greatest songwriters and musicians in the history of modern music. And I was lucky enough to be able to discover a lot of them when they were brand spanking new.
The Eagles were at the vanguard of sophisticated, lyric-oriented 70’s rock and country rock music that included people like: Tom Paxton, Jesse Winchester, Joan Baez, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Fleetwood Mac, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, early Bruce Springsteen, Neil Diamond, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt, Paul Simon, Neil Young, Carly Simon, Jim Croce, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Gordon Lightfoot, Harry Chapin, The Doobie Brothers, Pink Floyd, America, Leo Sayers, Cat Stevens and about 100 others that I can’t think of at the moment.
It was an era of intimate evenings at downtown coffee houses (where I first saw Jim Croce & Randy Newman), enchanted evenings at Massey Hall, (Joni Mitchell, James Taylor & Cat Stevens) and mega concerts at Maple Leaf Gardens (where I first saw Springsteen and had great seats for the Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review).
It was an era of greatness in music, as evidenced by its more or less eternal listenability, that has never been repeated since.
We were all listeners and record store denizens. A lot of us were musicians and writers, and for us, these artists represented the pinnacle of success that pretty much laid the groundwork for our futures.
A few of us made it through to the music business. But most of us drifted into the careers we were meant to be in. A lot of us that went into advertising with the inspiration of the music we worshiped, and worked hard to imbue that work with did with a similar spirit.
So we did clever work that we hoped would inspire people into trying the products or services we were marketing. We wanted to set a standard for intelligence in communication, like the Eagles and Dylan and all the others were doing in music, as opposed to cutting across the lowest common denominator.
We believed that we had a lot in common with the consumers we were talking to. We believed that many of them felt the same way about life and love and music the pursuit of happiness as we did.
And during that period we were more right than wrong about that.
What it ultimately created was one of the all-time exciting eras in Canadian advertising. Because the advertising we were doing was as closely bound to the reality of living as it could have been. Because we were all like minded. We were all excited to be doing what we were doing, and we were in touch with the world, through our main connectors: music, movies and TV, pretty much in that order.

This Might All Sound Pre-Historic To Many Of You

This was all in a time before the Internet. Before social media. Before all the bullshit started to build to critical mass and change the way the world worked.
You see a lot of memes showing up in social media these days, (like the one in the banner, that are actually laments, in their own way. These are mostly written or posted by people who are making a statement that the era I have just described was truly an era of innovation and that the sheer numbers of hugely talented people, in all walks of life, was staggering.
Oh sure, if you’re some millennial reading this, you’re probably thinking that this is being written by some sad old fart who misses the 1970s. You might be right. But it would be more accurate to say this was written by a real music fan who was lucky enough to have been young and hard core into music when all the really great music was actually being invented.
When it was a movement that people really got behind. When it was the stuff we lived and breathed and which permeated our subconscious to influence us in a myriad of creative ways.

Since that time, I have seen things change. People in advertising are nowhere near as clever as they used to be. Agencies struggle and work their people to death to pull good ideas out of them, when back in the day, great ideas flowed like wine.
The main reason for this is, believe it or not, the Eagles, and all the other influences that inspired people to do great work. These concepts are inextricably bound to each other.
But in today’s world, a lot of that bond between influencers and influencees has disintegrated. Today’s musical culture, for the most part, is based on beats and not ideas, so there is very little to influence creative people outside of some primal thumping.
Too bad. But on the upside, there are a lot of us that still have it. Because that flame, once it’s lit, never really dies.

To Teach Or Not To Teach. Meh.

More than a few people of my acquaintance of people have suggested that I should put together a course and teach some of what I have learned and have been lucky enough to retain to young people coming up into the advertising industry.
But alas, I am not, nor have I ever been, a teacher. But I have done the odd guest lecture, and maybe that will help a bit.
But, also the problem, as I see it isn’t with the creative people…it’s with the culture of insipidity (credit Phil Friedman) that has evolved from the Internet influence.
For the most part….it’s just plain uninspiring. My old friend Tom Waits said it best.

If this post resonated with you let me know. Feedback is always valuable. So is sharing and releventing. Thx.

PS: Fellow bee @Chas Wyatt wrote an interesting piece on the Eagles, from a very personal perspective: https://www.bebee.com/producer/@chas-wyatt/how-the-eagles-influenced-me

If your business has reached the point where talking to a communication professional would be the preferred option to banging your head against the wall or whatever, lets talk.

Download my free ebook, Small Business Communication For The Real World, here:
 https://onwordsandupwords.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/small-business-communications-for-the-real-world/

All my profile and contact information can be accessed here:

https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/this-post-is-my-about-page



All content copyright 2017 Jim Murray

""""""