There is a song about my elevator.
My parents took us to the Grand Rapids Art Museum shortly after the new building opened in the fall of 2007. I do not remember what art we saw, but, like most children who visit art museums, I do remember the gift shop. Specifically, I recall that my parents purchased a CD of music for the films of Charles and Ray Eames.
(West Michigan readers will, of course, associate the Eames name with the lounge chair, and anybody who has traveled through Detroit Metro Airport’s McNamara Terminal will have enjoyed the comfort of a different kind of Eames chair.) Charles and Ray Eames made several films — perhaps most famously Powers of Ten, which they produced for IBM in 1977. Most, if not all, Eames films had an original soundtrack to go with them, and these soundtracks filled the CD that my parents purchased in 2007.
I had forgotten about the Eames CD until I moved into a building with three original Westinghouse elevators and remembered one particular song: Westinghouse in Alphabetical Order, which simply listed every product produced by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in alphabetical order to a catchy tune. The product was excellent — so excellent that it became the soundtrack to McKnight family life for months. This means that, for a brief period in my life, my entire family (and probably our carpool friends — nobody was safe) could have rattled off Westinghouse’s 1965 catalog of products — in alphabetical order, naturally. This is why I am the way I am.
I do not know what has come of the CD, which is terrible because the song and the film are both impossible to find online. The best I can find is a collection of promotional material that Westinghouse produced ahead of the film’s release.
My hours of searching, though, led me to the wonderful discovery through an NPR story that Westinghouse in Alphabetical Order was just the tip of the iceberg in a wonderful world of mid-century American industrial musicals — fabulous musical productions staged at tremendous corporate expense exclusively for the internal promotion of new products.
One man in New York City, Steve Young, has spent the last few decades attempting to save this little world. This has led to a book, a spot in the New York Times, a Spotify playlist, and a delightful documentary which Netflix has foolishly removed. His work has unearthed a treasure trove of weird corporate musicals.
Most people do not think of Michigan as a great exporter of musical theater on the level of places like New York, but during the age of industrial musicals, it was. When “My Fair Lady” opened on Broadway in 1956, it had a budget of $500,000. Chevrolet produced its own musical that same year with a budget of $3 million.
The people who wrote the music for “Fiddler on the Roof” also wrote songs for Ford. Oldsmobile of Lansing got in on the action, as did Whirlpool of Benton Harbor. Detroit Diesel, which manufactures diesel engines, produced an entire show entitled “Diesel Dazzle!” and the music is, as the Gen Z-ers say, a bop.
The McKnight family, for our part, has found a new favorite in American Standard’s “The Bathrooms are Coming,” which will just have to do until we track down the old Westinghouse CD.
Distractions
Things I have been reading and watching this week.
Supermarket Sweep now on Netflix
On the subject of mind-numbing 20th-century consumerism, this game show from the nineties (which is a reboot of a show of the same title from the sixties) is my new favorite game show of all time. (Work was ridiculous enough last week to earn the Michigan Legislature the opening spot on Saturday Night Live, so I figure that I deserve to have my mind numbed at this point.) Supermarket Sweep is a colorful celebration of grocery mediocrity. An infectiously inoffensive host presides over a game in which randomly selected audience members just shove as many turkeys and diapers into a shopping cart as they can in a limited time. It is the same general energy as The Price Is Right except I do not associate it with being sick and stuck at home.
“Welcome to Your Bland New World” by Ben Schott in Bloomberg
And now some mind-numbing consumerism for 2020. People my age, we are told, are less interested in established brands and more keen on “disruptive” startups that sell a standardized product at a “premium mediocre” price. This has led to a whole new world of what Schott calls “blands.” There are lots of these — think companies that will blanket an entire subway car with their pastel ads. It is the new marketing strategy for my generation and learning to spot it has probably already stopped me from buying a mattress in a box.