Read Rock On for Free Online

it’s cropped so tightly, but I’m sitting here thumbing though this stack of faded color prints from that day and the legendary Marvin Gaye is, for just a moment, a man just like anyone of us, standing in a suburban backyard that is littered with kids’ toys. And just out of the frame of what ended up a legendary Motown album cover is a swing set and slide. He towers above it in a full-length black leather jacket. Just over the fence is another modest house. Between takes, he just looks like someone you could’ve been living next to then, but connected to something huge. It’s easy to look at the pictures and imagine some sort of eerie moment where you poke your head over the fence to say hello like a good neighbor and realize the guy next door is tapped into something in the universe so huge, so much bigger than the both of you, and you just back away slowly.
    I picked up another envelope and opened it up. Just an ordinary old business-size envelope, the kind you buy at a drugstore, softened and wrinkled, white but faded, and the adhesive on the flap is brittle and yellowed. In aged pencil somebody has written the year 1975 on the corner of it. I reached inside and pulled out an old Kodak snapshot of a young Jack Nicholson, smoking a joint, sitting at the soundboard with Stevie Wonder during a recording session and laughing; I just stood there with my index finger on the edge of glossy fading proof of an America where handsome, hilarious, merrily de-ranged silver-screen outlaws dropped in at recording studios to listen to what a blind funk genius was laying down onto reels of fat, wide, warm, two-inch analog tape thirty years before the digital age. Stood there thinking about the world outside and wondering if I was born too late.
    Boxes and envelopes yielded print after print and sometimes 35 mm or medium-format negatives. The Supremes in front of the house that was the Motown office and studio that Mr. Gordy named Hitsville U.S.A. Right there, 2648 Grand Boulevard, where he started it all with an eight-hundred-dollar loan from his family. Another faded and yellowed snapshot: the Four Tops driving a big American steel convertible in Detroit, huge humble grins, suits and shades and hearts, a moment that hits you so hard you’re standing there realizing you’ve never
really
tried. Look at those guys! They will play what they play because it’s in their blood and they will play it whether or not the world showers them with millions. Has nothing to do with whether or not they make the money, score the award, grab a shoe endorsement and a video game tie-in, or get a reality show made about them. They look at the camera like they are going to do what they do and if you want tocatch the ride, great, and if you don’t, what’s that got to do with what they’re doing? They sure as hell aren’t gonna switch up their sound based on focus group research or chasing a bigger audience or check. Here are pictures from a time when singing soul meant you had some.
    I grabbed all of them to use in the commercial. The archivist logged everything that I took. I left and got on the subway back to my day job, where there were some ads about blank tape to be written. I called up Ben, the video editor at this place where I freelanced for a week when I had just moved here to New York. I explained how I had all of these photos and a script and footage and had gotten all of the requisite legal clearances, but that I had no idea how to make it all into an actual TV commercial. I told him how I was doing this thing on the sly because I had the Man looking over my shoulder at my day job. So we started building the commercial over at Ben’s editing studio working nights. Maybe from seven to two or so in the morning on any given evening, and I figured that when it was time to show it to the people at Motown, I would sneak out and do it on my lunch hour.
    Getting back to the moment at hand, that’s