Gumption (26 page)

Despite her televised success in the variety format on
The Garry Moore Show
, Burnett kept thinking,

I’m not really television, I really want to be Broadway. But the television became more fun for me because we still did music and we still had comedic sketches, with the advantage that it changed every week. So I was able to learn how to do different characters, and to be different people, as opposed to being the same person on a sitcom every week, or the same person eight shows a week on Broadway. This was like doing a little Broadway revue every single week, and that became what I liked the most because it gave me, as we say, variety.

Meanwhile, she continued to knock down tall accomplishments like so many bowling pins, as she befriended the likes of Ms. Andrews, as well as Jim Nabors, Mike Nichols, and Lucille Ball. CBS signed her
to a ten-year deal, and Lucy, an obvious mentor and producing magnate with her company Desilu Productions, offered Carol her own sitcom called
Here’s Agnes!
, which sounds like a pretty hilarious idea based solely upon imagining Burnett as any “Agnes” that might be presented so. The title almost carries with it an implied addendum, as in
Here’s Agnes! (Good Luck)
or
Here’s Agnes! (With Apologies)
or
Here’s Agnes! (God Love Her).
No matter how they might have played it, the idea was stillborn, because Carol Burnett had her heart set on a sketch and variety show.

CBS was not immediately sold on the idea, as they felt like this arena was not ideal for a person of Carol’s gender. As she remembers, “Are you kidding? I was told by CBS that comedy variety shows were a man’s game, that it was the domain of Sid Caesar and Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason.” Nonetheless, she had a thirty-week guarantee in her deal with the network to try out just such a show, so try it out she did, thank the sweet baby Jesus.

This wasn’t the first time Carol had run into staunch opposition on the basis of her gender. It’s in that arena that I really sit up and notice her gumption. Burnett tells a story about having wanted—scratch that—having dreamed of attending UCLA: a sheer impossibility for her, as the tuition for one semester in 1951 ran to an exorbitant forty-three dollars. She and her grandmother, existing on welfare, were paying thirty dollars a month in rent, relegating her collegiate aspirations to the realm of fantasy.

Her grandmother, with six marriages under her belt, suggested that she “learn to be a secretary and then you can ‘nab the boss.’” Carol, unwilling to pursue her grandmother’s questionable career
advice, had no options, until she was astonished one morning to find a mysterious fifty-dollar bill in their pigeonhole mail slot. Apparently, somebody had thought she was worth a shot.

Now, let’s back up a second and renew our gaze upon our United States. You may or may not (I sincerely hope it’s the former) have heard of a notion called the Equal Rights Amendment. To nutshell it for you, it was proposed in 1923, so almost a hundred years ago. The amendment simply states that men and women shall have equal rights in this country. That’s it. The amendment still hasn’t passed. “What? ‘Women’s lib’ happened in the seventies, playa!” That’s as may be, Vanilla Ice (that was Vanilla Ice chiming in—special thanks), but governmentally, here in 2015, we are still shitting the bed. This is the Carol Burnett chapter, so I’ll amend that to pooping the bed. You know what? Out of respect for dear Buddy Hackett, let’s do sha-pooping the bed. See how easy it is to amend things?

Of course, our government can take a hilariously long time to accomplish things. In fact, somebody should write a comedy program about the glacial pace of . . . oh, they did.
Parks and Recreation.
I’m given to understand it’s a quality program. But ninety-two years is maybe a bit much, no? To simply state—well, let’s let Ruth Bader Ginsburg say it better than I could: “If I could choose an amendment to add to the Constitution, it would be the Equal Rights Amendment. . . . I would like my granddaughters, when they pick up the Constitution, to see that notion—that women and men are persons of equal stature—I’d like them to see that it is a basic principle of our society.”

Okay, that’s powerful. On a side note, how badass is the Ginsburg household that they have the Constitution just lying around where
grandchildren can pick it up and peruse it? Back on point—our government was founded by a bunch of white dudes. It was a crazy Anglo-Saxon sausage party, and the new nation that they forged has done a great deal of good, as it continues to do. However, they naturally filled the inaugural documents with a lot of language like “all men are created equal” and “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”

Well, at the time, it at least made more sense, since women were still many dozens of years away from being allowed to vote. But to allow the condition to persist in this day and age strikes me as rather egregious. I wouldn’t blame the ladies one bit if they described the penis bearers with the same words our Founding Fathers used in reference to their own oppression at the hands of Great Britain: “They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.” Man, those sons of bitches could write. “Consanguinity,” by the way, means “from the same blood,” or, more simply, “kinship.”

We get it, guys. You’re dudes. If you let the ladies into the club, you’re going to have to stridently rein in the farting. Believe you me,
I get it.
By the way, it’s not just the bros standing in the way of our female counterparts; it’s also, sadly, some real asshats who happen to presumably wield vaginas. One of the most effective of said asshats in the effort to squelch the ERA was named Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative Republican activist who ran for a congressional seat in Illinois, my home state, to my shame. She made a very big stink on behalf of traditional gender roles, arguing that this amendment could (gasp) cause women to be drafted into the military and lead to unisex public bathrooms!

Such a dipshit sounds laughable now, I agree, but when she was spouting this tripe in 1972, it had an effect. Another piece of propaganda targeted “unskilled housewives” who would “risk losing their alimony” if the amendment were ratified. This was the climate into which
The Carol Burnett Show
was launched, which made it an incredibly powerful statement on behalf of women’s equality.

When asked later if she considered herself a feminist, Carol replied, “I really didn’t at the time, until the ERA came about. And the person who got me very interested in the ERA was Alan Alda. He’s a feminist, and he took my husband and me out to dinner one night and he started talking about the ERA and what it was about. I was rather apolitical then, but I said, ‘Well, that’s not right. Women should be equal in the eyes of the law.’ So I got on the bandwagon.”

She added, “It was a threat to a lot of women who thought, ‘Well, then my husband won’t open the door for me’; everybody thought women were going to run around smoking cigars. I mean, how stupid.”

My pal Amy Poehler, who has logged an amount of hustle, chuckle, and triumph similar to that of young Carol, sets a great example for all of us by wielding a sunny feminism with a focus on positivity. In fact, she runs an outfit called Smart Girls, which is a great “online community for young girls and the young at heart, which encourages women in volunteerism, activism, and cultural growth.” Amy substantially tips her cap to the inspiration Carol provided her: “There was something very generous about her that came across when she performed, a certain female energy. You knew it was her show, and she was running it, but she ruled with an open fist.”

I can attest to that, on the part of Amy, as I spent seven rewarding years working not under but alongside the open fist of Amy herself.
Parks and Recreation
won a lot of nice attention for its strong female story lines and positive depictions of women in leadership roles, and with good reason. But when I think about Carol Burnett on her show, or Amy on our show, or my aunts and my grandmother running the farm, or Linda Gillum and Lisa Ragsdale running the Defiant Theatre, or R. Lee running Offerman Woodshop, or Jill and Stephanie and Jess and LeeAnn at Dutton Books running the editing and collating of these very lines, or Megan running me into goodness—wow, this is a great sign of progress: A lot of my life is being administrated by ladies!—I don’t think about feminism, or even that they’re women. In all these contexts, they are just people. People who are good at their jobs, doing good work.

Thanks to the example set for us by people like Carol Burnett, who hasn’t logged her victories by shouting or campaigning but by simply doing what she does best, we can begin to understand that women are
already
leading us. They always have been, despite what the white guys wrote in the history books. They gave birth to each and every one of us, and so there is no denying their majestic power. Shouldn’t they be earning the same wages, then, as the rather less magical dudes? It wouldn’t be special treatment. It would be simply treatment. When we as a nation can finally deal fairly with people of every gender, wherein all the people are receiving the same
treatment
, then I believe one of the benefits will be that we’ll have more time for laughter.

JEFF TWEEDY

I
f you look him up on the Wikipedia website, the entry begins like this: “Jeffrey Scot ‘Jeff’ Tweedy (born August 25, 1967) is an American songwriter, musician, record producer best known as the leader of the band Wilco.” I don’t recommend you do look there, as there are two perfectly good books about Jeff and Wilco, and I would always encourage you to eschew the computer in general, not to mention—that website is weak and yields inconsistent information.

First of all, the grammar is for shit. Somebody who can tolerate monkeying with computers, please go in there and put an
and
in front of
record producer.
Number two, they are burying the lede by a country mile. Jeff Tweedy is really nice. Jeff Tweedy is really smart. And Jeff Tweedy is really, really cute. He’s what the young ladies of a bygone era would refer to as a “dreamboat.” For my money, he’s also the preeminent American singer-songwriter of my generation. Finally, I would add that I am in love with him. We are getting married. The end.

Just kidding, guys. Just joshin’ around. But not really.

He is already married to a champion named Sue, and I am also
already married, to a champion named Megan. Plus, Jeff and I are heterosexuals. Strike two. If it weren’t for these formidable obstacles, then we would probably be together already and be very happy, but I guess since that’s not in the cards, I will have to be satisfied with writing this chapter about him and also being his pal.

In the late 1990s, my friends Pat Healy, Paul Adelstein, and Pat Roberts were three veritable gold mines when it came to turning me on to music that thrilled my bucolic blood. You see, I was (and still am) a very slow and methodical student when it came to learning anything new in our culture. That is why Roberts was able to hook me on Pink Floyd twenty years after they blew everybody else’s minds. These three estimable mates caused my CD rack to brim with Ween, Radiohead, Gillian Welch, Beck, the Beastie Boys, Will Oldham, BjÖrk, Ben Folds, and a lot of early Bob Dylan records. Once they were added to my shelf already sagging under the expanse of Tom Waits, Neil Young, Johnny Cash, They Might Be Giants, Laurie Anderson, and Nick Cave, we had the makings of a well-tuned young hedonist, not to mention a swell hoedown.

Like most humans, I am very moved by music. It can rile me up or make me incredibly happy, or it can move me to tears, all with a commensurate amount of relish. Music shared among friends and family, I have found, is one of the most powerful bonding methods we have as monkeys who can wear jean shorts and press “Play” on our music devices with our handily opposable thumbs and fingers. So when Pat, Pat, and Paul brought me Wilco, in the form of their first two records,
A.M.
and
Being There
, I was born anew. Jeff Tweedy’s music spoke to us, and much of the eared world, with a compelling relevance. It was
clearly
our
music. How did he do it? How could he see inside me? Little did I realize that I was enjoying the song stylings of my future husband.

As I had recently moved to LA from Chicago, the town that Jeff Tweedy has called home for twenty-five years or so, his lyrics inspired in me a strong tendency toward nostalgia for my recent years in the Windy City, which had been immensely satisfying on an artistic level. At the time, I was still very good at smoking, so the lines “When you’re back in your old neighborhood / The cigarettes taste so good / But you’re so misunderstood / You’re so misunderstood” really pushed my fond-memory button. With good reason, it turns out, as Mr. Tweedy grew up in a geographical circumstance quite similar to my own. His hometown of Belleville, Illinois, was proximate to St. Louis in the same way that my village of Minooka, Illinois, was close to Chicago. We both felt out of place, or “Misunderstood,” in our conservative communities, and so we turned to the arts as an escape route to the world at large.

In the late eighties, Jeff met his future wife, Sue Miller (just the sort of charismatic lady you want to be in charge of things), when she was booking bands at the Cubby Bear in Chicago. Sue subsequently operated the legendary rock club Lounge Ax in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, which quickly became the premiere venue for taking in the most enervating new indie rock acts, including Tweedy’s band from Belleville, Uncle Tupelo. My pals and I enjoyed the bar for the killer music (like Adelstein’s band, Doris) and the cheap, cold longnecks, so there’s a good chance that Jeff and I spilled beer on each other at Lounge Ax in the early nineties, although Cupid was clearly not ready for our two hearts to beat as one just yet.

Tweedy, like Dylan, has the knack of composing and delivering
his poetry so that
everybody
feels as though it’s about him or her personally. When his album
Summerteeth
came out in 1999, with the particularly dark poetry of “Via Chicago,” we couldn’t stop playing it over and over again at the house in Silver Lake we called Rancho Relaxo (cribbed from
The Simpsons
). Wilco’s subsequent records have only served to deepen my discipleship.

The music of Wilco, once they distanced themselves from the slight Uncle Tupelo flavorings of their penetrating first record,
A.M.
, has been delightfully mercurial through the years. It changes and transmogrifies, much like, well, a maturing human personality. One noteworthy peak across the ridge of the Wilco mountains is the story of their 2002 release,
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Sam Jones made a swell documentary film about this juncture in the band’s career, called
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.

Jeff Tweedy and company were making some excellent new noises with the exploratory songs on the record. Unfortunately, the new bosses at their label, Reprise Records (a division of AOL Time Warner) were not remotely looking for any adjectives like “new” and “exploratory.” Despite the fact that Reprise had paid Wilco to produce the record, it looked like the band might get dropped. Industry insiders were astonished at this bullheaded corporate move, as Wilco had become one of the last great original American bands—the kind of trailblazing artists who would attract other acts to Reprise if they played their cards right. Well, as you might have guessed, Reprise shrugged, dropped their drawers, and took a shit on their cards. At the last second, having gotten wind of the bad PR that would be generated by their split with Wilco, they gave them back the rights to
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
, free of charge.

Tweedy and the band reached into their reservoir of gumption and made the album’s tracks available online at a high quality, so that it wouldn’t be pirated in a lower-quality audio file format, a canny move, which yielded a great deal of traffic. Wilco then set out on tour and found that, not only were they selling out, but fans were singing along to the new tracks, evidence that their gambit had struck pay dirt. Once news of this reaction got around, labels were lining up to sign the band and release the record. Jeff ended up choosing Nonesuch Records, a small label that happened to be under the very same AOL Time Warner umbrella. Nonesuch agreed to purchase the new record, meaning that the noble troubadours of Wilco had produced an exciting, new, and creative rock-and-roll album, paying no heed to current fashion or radio popularity, as they never have, and they got AOL Time Warner to pay them for it. Twice.

That kind of happy ending doesn’t seem to happen to artists who are striving for fame and fortune. By sticking to their creative guns, Wilco ended up being rewarded exponentially more than they ever would have had they been trying to produce radio hits or merely capitalize on their cute faces. Especially Jeff.

There was a point in time, before television—so, like, back in Jesus’s day—when the population paid much more attention to poets and playwrights and essayists and fiction writers. One of the only sources of entertainment or enlightenment was through the verses that came in the form of pamphlets or were delivered orally in the theater or the village square. In the arid climate of contemporary culture, so many American boys and girls regrettably seem to eschew reading of any sort if they can help it. Our grandparents were made to
memorize entire poems or Shakespearean sonnets for school, against their wills in most cases, sure, but still they were instilled with an understanding of poetry.

Popular music nowadays is frequently quite vapid. It’s fun, sure, and conducive to jiggling one’s fanny, but the same platitudes are regurgitated in hit after hit, with all the pop and flavor of a fine sugared breakfast cereal, and with about as much sustenance. “Tonight’s gonna be a good night,” “I love you, especially your prominent hindquarters,” “Let’s get ripped and party according to our rights as free fans of country music” are just a few examples,
verbatim
, of songs that are making their authors millions of dollars on the music channels right now.

A band like Wilco, however, can provide similar feelings of blood-rushing elation with the added bonus that their songs stimulate one’s imagination. Both in the beginning and today, I try to take in a Wilco concert for my birthday whenever I can. I recall saying to Pat Roberts when we saw them at the Wiltern in LA a couple of years ago that the thing I love about Wilco live is that their poetry and melodies are so pleasing and penetrating, but then they say, “Oh, now would you like us to crank out some throbbing, evocative rock and roll in which you can lose yourself in waves of bodily pleasure?” And then they deliver exactly that.

But as much as I love feeling the visceral rush of rock and roll through m’blood veins, it always comes back to the lyrics, which recalls Wendell Berry’s adulation of the human brain’s ability to embroider words and images in its imagination more poignantly than any sensation that can ever be grasped in the light of day. So many of Tweedy’s verses are wrought of an inscrutable poetry that leaves the
listener no choice but to interpret it personally, which leads to inspiration and a much more personal, mutual experience between author and recipient. A favorite of mine:

Remember to remember me

Standing still in your past

Floating fast like a hummingbird

So now you should have a pretty clear idea of my admiration for this artist. Perhaps you’re considering your own strategy to ensnare him in a marriage of your very own. Get in line, sailor.

Imagine, then, if you will, my excitement when Jeff Tweedy came to work on
Parks and Recreation
, in an episode I was directing, no less. We met. In fact, we embraced. Jeff was a little nervous about acting on-camera, which makes sense. Ask him to perform any piece of music and he’ll tear into it like a seasoned cleric, but take away the security of his superpower—music—and he’s understandably more uncertain about what to do. Luckily, he had two beautiful superfriends to guide him through the scene, in Amy Poehler and Chris Pratt. After a couple of warm-up takes, making us laugh behind the camera, he was confidently nailing his bits.

In a sublime example of what made Chris Pratt such a genius on that quality program, he was to sing a song in the scene and play guitar, then get Jeff’s character to join in on the song. Well, naturally, Jeff warmed right into the singing and even began to harmonize with Chris, which was one of the dreamiest scenarios I could ever have imagined: Jeff, Chris, and Amy being hilarious, then Jeff Tweedy starts
singing just like Jeff Tweedy, and they’ll just keep going until the director yells, “Cut!” except the director is
me
, so we’ll do this all night! Magnificent! It’s good to be the king!

Except . . . every time Jeff would chime in, Pratt would immediately stop the song and say, “No, no . . . wrong. Listen to me.” I would think, “Agh! Chris! Jeff is singing! I would like to hear him! Singing out of that hole in his beautiful face!” But at the same time it was so goddamn funny that Chris’s character, Andy Dwyer, would unwittingly commit such a sacrilege. He even became visibly frustrated that Jeff “just couldn’t get it right.” Perhaps Pratt’s general secret was that he would simply discern what would be the one thing that his Andy
shouldn’t
do in a given scenario, and then he would do exactly that thing, with the relentless enthusiasm of a puppy. Whatever the source of his alchemy, I could never get enough of it, and it certainly served that night to allow Tweedy (and all present) to enjoy himself.

That was the night Jeff and I became friends. I have had the pleasure of his company on several occasions since, most gratifyingly whilst directing a music video for Jeff and his older son (from his current marriage to Sue Miller, as Jeff and I have no kids of our own), Spencer. They have a two-man outfit called Tweedy, and our little video film was for their catchy ditty “Low Key.” Really the first project that I have directed all by myself, the video turned out quite satisfyingly, and so I would recommend you view it on the YouTube computer channel (a rare ilk of computer session that I can condone).

Like so many of the troublemakers in my book, Jeff turned out to be incredibly nice. Like a goddamn sweetheart type of nice that I like. I mean to say I like it, which is why I put a ring on it. I can’t help
but admire his commitment to his family, for one; to his bandmates and other crew, for two; and for three, to his home in Chicago. Sitting at the kitchen table in the Wilco loft, where the Topo Chico mineral water flows like translucent shavings from a Lie-Nielsen hand plane, I met the members of Wilco. They are handsome to a fault, as sweet as a piece of pecan pie, and I trembled to shake their hands, from nervous excitement, but also in fear that I would somehow clumsily injure the phalanges that spin such glorious noise.