Jim Washburn, Boy Flack

by Jim Washburn

How I Spent My Summer

You don’t spend decades in journalism without arriving at the opinion that publicists are of an insect race, and about as necessary as condoms for condors. It is not for nothing that they are called flacks and that writers hold them in such low regard that we never bother learning if it’s spelled flack or flac.

A journalist’s life is chopped into countless segments by deadlines, and you’re in a non-stop struggle to jump each hurdle without scraping off too much spiritual shin, when the phone rings. It’s a publicist, of course, launching right into a spiel about the most important and dynamic artist she’s ever heard, her client. If gnats traveled by phone, they would sound like flacks.

There are local flacks. There are ones who call from New York. Sometimes it’s Barcelona. They are vampires who crave your ink, and they will wear you down until you just offer them your neck for it to be over with.

And now I have become a flack. That’s me on your phone, wheedling and offering to return that Jo Jo Gunne LP I borrowed from you 20 years ago, if you’ll just do me up an article, would you, please?

How could this happen to me? Me, who years ago instituted the Lee Mallory Alert at the Times OC newsroom? Lee was and is a poet. He used to hang with Bukowski. Now hangs on your phone, seeking publicity for his poetry nights. Boy, was he persistent. He was like Big 5, but instead of a weekly Shoe Explosion! he’d talk you up every time like this was it, the jumbo-rama going-out-of-meter poetry sale of the century.

If Mallory didn’t get satisfaction from you, other phones would ring in the Calendar section, then in Metro and I don’t know that he didn’t call the sports writers and cafeteria, too. So I suggested a new office rule, where the first person who got a call from Mallory would send out a warning to the other writers, so they’d know not to answer their phone for the next couple of hours, or until the “robust poetry revival” ended, whichever came first. Flacks!

But now when you hear the baleful sound of your phone ringing, it’s me calling about the most important and dynamic acts I’ve ever heard. I am a flack, practicing flackery upon my former fellows in the fourth estate. “What are the first three estates?” you ask. Clergy, exotic dancers and lobsters. Now stop interrupting.

How’d this transition happen? It just another step in my grand career strategy, which consists of waiting for the phone to ring. I think it was Hunter Thompson who said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,” which in my case means that, while my less eccentric scrivening brethren are getting laid off, people keep calling me with work, because they know that if I do screw a project up, it will at least be in new and entertaining ways.

Granted, it’s just enough work for us to stay off Food Stamps, which is good, though I do wonder what they taste like.

The ringing phone in this case had the Irvine Barclay Theatre on the other end. Some of the people there are friends, and I respect their organization immensely for the two decades of great culture they’ve brought to Orange County, from Tuvan throat singers to daring dance companies to Mavis Staples to a flamenco festival bursting at the heels with the adventure and abandon rock used to have.

They’ve taken a similarly wide-ranging approach to a summer concert and dance party series they’re producing with the Orange County Great Park for the second year. Instead of tribute bands and other musical corndogs, the park’s stage has been hosting a global array of acts more typically seen at Lincoln Center, world music festivals and/or remote villages. Some of the performers who’ve already played this summer are Celtic fiddler Eileen Ivers (dubbed the Hendrix of the violin by the New York Times) , Chile’s Inti-Illimani paired with Cirque du Soleil’s “Alegria” singer Francesca Gagnon, young Zydeco force Cedric Watson, Colombia’s wondrous singer Toto la Momposina, Cuban jazz pianist Nachito Herrera, and the band I saw this weekend, 17 Hippies, a crazed Berlin ensemble that sounds like a Bulgarian wedding band wedded to Captain Beefheart. Not bad, particularly considering that all this was free. FREE!

These shows are professionally staged and held under the stars on warm summer nights. There are seats aplenty and a lawn. You can bring your dog. You can bring a picnic or buy from a largely vegetarian café there. There’s a bar, and a convenient balloon ride near it, to enjoy your buzz from 400 ft. (Like the concerts, the balloon ride’s free, though you have to get on the list pretty early to make it. There is an $8 per-car parking fee at the park shows, an inducement to carpool or parachute in.)

The Barclay folks wanted some help getting the word out on the series, because there’s evidently something about a free, world-class concert series in a lovely park readily accessed by the 5 and 405 freeways that just hasn’t been ringing the bells of local media.

I can see the media’s side in this. I mean, why in these recessionary, down-in-the-dumps times would their readers or viewers have any interest whatever in knowing about FREE, WORLD-CLASS CONCERTS AND DANCE PARTIES IN THEIR MIDST, where people are dancing and clapping and casting off their cares for a few hours and feeling like a community under the full moon? Who needs that sort of hooey when they can stay home with a can of Dinty Moore stew?

That does rather seem to be the collective position of the press, and the Barclay folks asked me to help amend that, by temporarily becoming a publicist.

That is not an easy line to cross. As I’ve mentioned, even though entertainment and arts journalists rely on publicists to tell them what artists and venues are up to, they still often revile them. Journalists also tend to have the bitter suspicion that everyone else, the publicist included, is working less than they are, for more money, from an office with a view, Aeron chairs and better-looking coworkers.

It surprised me a few weeks back to go to an Orange County Press Club dinner: surprised to find there still was an OC press club, and that the only way it’s survived is by taking in publicists as members. This is like letting ocelots and squirrels in the same club, though I’m not sure who is which in this case, just that its damned unnatural. The keynote speaker had been the Octomom’s flack for a couple of weeks, which was also how long her speech lasted. (She went through hell, but now she has Larry King’s cell phone number!) When she finally concluded her spiel, flacks asked her questions for another half-hour, like they were reporters, except the real reporters were champing at the bit to get to the bar.

Along with my reservations about becoming a flack, there was also is the matter that I don’t clearly know what a publicist does; I just have an impression, having been on the receiving-end of decades of publicity, of what a flack most certainly shouldn’t be, including whiney, pushy and overly-familiar.

I worried also that it might be awkward working for people I’m friends with—which has wound up to not be a concern since the Barclay folks have graciously made it feel more like I’m working with them.

I’ve known several journalists who’ve maintained a strict firewall against forming friendships with anyone in the fields they cover, to avoid the hint of impropriety and the instances of wondering if someone’s only your friend because it gets them print. That’s never been my rule. I think friendship is a rare and grand enough thing that you should encourage it wherever it buds, and just hope to know thineself well enough to recognize and avoid any conflict of interest.

Now that I’m largely out of the journalism racket, and am of about as much use to my entertainment industry friends as a sidecar on a goat, I’m delighted that these friendships have endured, not that I expected otherwise.

My biggest concern was wondering what it would be like dealing with my journalist friends. Sure there’d be some scorn and pity—“It’s come to this?” my old Register cohort Barry Koltnow asked—but I worried more about possibly transgressing on my friendships. You ever see The Big Kahuna, where the young salesman feels pressured to steer a conversation about Jesus around to the subject of industrial lubricants? Would that be me, calling a friend and steering the chat around to my paid interests, or relying on our friendship to land a story in the paper?

Probably. At this point I’d be willing to do a live strip-o-gram to get some press for the series. There have been some very nice pieces—mainly on blogs—but for the most part neither the individual shows nor the series has gotten much ink. I’ve taken to trying to spread the word via “dog-friendly event” websites.

Sure, both the major So Cal papers are in bankruptcy (Funny, someone recently commented to me, that the staunchly anti-government Register has no qualms about hiding under the skirts of a federal bankruptcy court. Shouldn’t “the market” be sorting out their hash?); sure there’s less room for stories and the shrinking staffs are overworked: yet I can’t help but be bugged when the L.A. Times has expended not one word on this free, world-class concert series, yet had nearly two pages on a recent Monday devoted to a crumbling cemetery and a “spiritual tour” in upstate New York, neither especially convenient from the 5 or 405 freeways. Maybe papers would be faring better if they gave readers information they could use.

Why, I sound like a whiney publicist! How’d that happen?

Since my attempts at flackery have largely fallen on deaf ears, I have no recourse but to flack upon you, dear readers: Three weekends of FREE concerts and dances remain. This very weekend, for example, on Friday, September 11, L.A. Salsa kings Johnny Polanco y su Conjunto Amistad will roil the dance floor, and on Saturday, September 12 there’s Niyaz, a group that mixes traditional Iranian music and Sufi poetry with modern electronic trance music. You know how such fusions sometimes sound forced and gimmicky? Niyaz is anything but: they make a soulful noise, and there’s probably no more atmospheric place to enjoy them than under the open night sky.

On the following weekend, the September 18 Friday night dance features the boot-scootin’ country strains of the Merchants of Moonshine, while the September 19 concert is Hapa, possibly the second-best product out of Maui. The closing weekend has a special Bollywood disco party (all these dances are preceded by free dance lessons at 7:30) on Friday, September 25, while the next night wraps up the series with reggae’s Easy Star All-Stars, the folks who brought you the hit re-imagining of Pink Floyd, Dub Side of the Moon. For no reason in particular, I should inform you at this point that there is no smoking of any kind allowed in the park.

The concerts and dances all start at 8 pm, and you get there by taking Irvine’s Sand Canyon Ave to just east of the 5 freeway, where Marine Way will take you into the park. It’s the former El Toro Marine Base, don’t you know, on its way to becoming a major metropolitan park.

There, that’s all the info you need for three weekends of recession-busting fun.

Now, perhaps I can go and flack no more.

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