The story behind the song, the chair and Marilyn Monroe

Ian Foster

Last night, I went to a CD release party at a local bar. The musician was a gentleman from Newfoundland, Ian Foster, and he spent the night telling stories. The stories came in many forms: his songs were often stories, about things as varied as lost loves to shipwrecks. His music and lyrics were lovely. But he told stories about these stories, too, which is what I found interesting. Each song was introduced with a  story about how he had written it, or a funny thing that happened one night when he was performing the song. None of the songs stood alone. They came wrapped in a story – stories within stories.

It occurred to me that this is quite different from what we usually get in the modern age, and I wondered why. If you go to a rock concert, Mick Jagger doesn’t tell you about how he was sitting in his car ( or wherever) when he wrote “Brown Sugar”. Of course, part of this is that most people who hear a new song won’t encounter it in concert, but on the radio or internet. But even if you attend a rock concert, in my experience few musicians take time to explain the origins of each song on their new album. They might say here’s a track from the new CD, but that’s it. The song is expected to get by on its own merits, cut off from its artistic roots.

Homes without stories

That attitude is a very modern one, and does not just apply to music. If you look around the room where you are sitting, chances are you are surrounded by objects that you bought in a store, that come with no story whatsoever. You have no idea where your computer was made, and even if you guess correctly that it was Taiwan or Korea, you haven’t a clue about any of the people who made it. The same is true for that chair you are sitting on, or the light bulbs in the lamps. They are commodities, made by people somewhere, but we haven’t a clue about the story behind each of these goods. Was Li-Huang having a good day on a Tuesday when she put the circuit board into your Mac? Was this the last computer she would ever work on, or the day after her son graduated from high school? No one knows.

There was a time not so long ago, where pretty much everything came with a story. In pioneer days, families had to create a lot of the furniture and food in the house. That table was made by Pa that first winter we arrived, you can still see where the axe slipped. Food grown in your own garden has stories built in which you literally eat and become part of you. This is the lettuce we rescued from the raccoons, and the pickles Ma made last winter when we had a bumper crop of cucumbers. Even before the pioneer days, when most of our ancestors lived in villages, in Europe, Africa or Asia, people often knew the people who made the things in their homes. Even if it was the smith from the next village who had pounded out the shoes on your horse, you knew his name, and his reputation.

When mass production came along, the price of efficiency was the loss of story. When every product was meant to look exactly the same, insuring consistent quality, then it didn’t matter anymore who made it. In fact, the idiosyncratic element of the worker’s personality needed to be removed, so that Bob’s widgets weren’t preferred over Ellen’s. Every toaster of a particular brand needed to be exactly the same. That sameness was a fiction, of course: some toasters were defective, others lasted longer than most. But in the modern age, all you needed to know was the name of the manufacturer. The worker’s stories were removed, and replaced with advertising campaigns, which provided a story which would apply to every product, as if they were all the same.

Andy Warhol: The Original is the Copy 

This new kind of meta-story was captured brilliantly in Andy Warhol’s art. His genius was to realize that in the 18^th century, artists painted portraits of heroes, and rich people. But in the modern age, the true heroes weren’t people at all, they were products, like a Campbell Soup can. Moreover, what made that soup can heroic was that it was the same as all the other soup cans. Its elevated status came from the fact that it was not unique, but one of a million copies, all purportedly identical.

And what of the heroic people in our culture, the rock stars and movie stars? Warhol realized that what made them famous was not that they created unique performances, but that they too were replicated, via the movies they starred in. Marilyn Monroe would not have become a star if there was only one print of each film she made, which was passed around from theatre to theatre. Her fame came from the fact that through film, her identical image was multiplied, so her movies could be seen on screens all over the country at the same time. Monroe, like an Ikea chair or a soup can, was a product of multiple copies. So when Warhol painted Elvis or Marilyn, he painted them three or four times on the same canvas, like frames from a film. Their power in modern culture came from the fact that they were copies.

It could be argued that one of the paradoxes of the modern age is that while it removed stories from the physical objects in our lives, it also provided a way to vastly increase the number of stories we can consume. In previous blogs, I have mentioned that the average American spends five hours a day watching television, and I suspect few hard working medieval peasants could have spared that much time for story telling around the kitchen hearth. We may have lost the stories of our furniture and food, but we have  (over?) compensated by engorging ourselves on mass-produced stories.

Did we lose something important by forgetting who and how our goods are made? There is something about knowing the story behind an object which gives it some charm. We all know that a jar of jam made by a friend seems to be more valuable than a similar jar bought in the store. It matters that we know the person who made it, it makes it seem more special, more soulful. Similarly, when we go on vacation, we like to buy souvenirs from the local market where (we think) we are meeting the local folk artist who produced it. Those souvenirs are more valuable and soulful than the Chinese-produced “I love Barbados” t-shirt that we can buy in the airport as we leave. A souvenir is not just a thing, it is part of a story that involves you, and may sit on the shelf at home for years to come as a warm reminder of a great holiday.

The story behind the movie

But does the story behind a story work this way? When DVDs started replacing VHS tapes, it was assumed that one of big draws would be the extras on how a movie was made. The director’s commentary through the entire film,  and the behind-the-scenes mini-documentaries became a standard feature of DVDs. But when movies became downloadable, these features dropped away. Part of the reason may be cost, but I suspect the other reason is that most people weren’t watching the making-of features, especially for films they had not seen before. Making-of stories can detract from the power of a movie, since they show how films are ultimately made of boring actors, equally boring directors, and a lot of special effects that look like nothing  special on set. Unlike a jar of jam, knowing how a movie was made can hamper the enjoyment of a film. Our suspension of disbelief can be eroded, particularly when we haven’t seen the film before, or it is new. For a movie to work, we need to forget that the film crew is there.

Paradoxically, once a film has become famous, like Star Wars or Casablanca, then it is easier to watch making-of features. I think this shift occurs because an older movie becomes a myth, a story with its own power, regardless of who made it. Star Wars was created by George Lucas, but it is independent of him now ( which is one of the reasons Disney can safely take over the franchise and make new versions). The story has entered that kind of movie heaven where stories live forever, divorced from their origins. This allows us to return somewhat nostalgically to how it was made. We can marvel at the misconceptions the original cast and crew held about the film they were working on. The stars have aged, the director is bald, the effects are passé, but the film is still forever young, preserved against time, living in its own parallel universe. Like a myth, it has a life of its own, and can be remade by new people, but the story itself will persist independent of them.

That takes us back to where we started – to our modern-day troubadour at the CD release party. Mr Foster charmed us with tales of how he first wrote his songs, and told us funny anecdotes about the places he had performed them. The people in the audience will carry away his CD with a story about the night they saw him, and heard the making-of tale behind a particular favourite song. His story-telling style beckons back to a lost age when everything had a story attached to it, from chairs to love songs. But my guess is that if his songs live on among his fans, it will be because, like movies, they will attain a life of their own. If people are still performing them fifty years from now, they won’t know much, if anything, about the circumstances of how they were written. What will become important is that the songs have their own inherent power. Songs, like stories, float through time. But hearing the song’s origin is certainly a nice send off.

To hear some of Ian Foster’s music, click here.

Stephen Milton is a freelance documentary film maker in Toronto.

www.milton2.tv