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exactly where I am: on my lunch hour, standing nervous and sleep-deprived outside the forty-eighth-floor corner office with Mr. Jackson’s assistant, waiting for the green light to go in. In a few seconds I will have to walk in and say hello and try to do a hopefully-not-clammy handshake with him —
the
handshake? Do you do
the
handshake when you’re in this position? Should I try to throw it down kind of soul style in my little Banana Republic nine-to-five junior PR writer ensemble? The door opens and I walk in, keeping pace to the staccato rhythm and groove my brain is stabbing at me with each step:
    Oh.
    No.
    Suit.
    Lawyer?
    Wait!
    Ice-T!
    Is here?
    Small hands.
    No way.
    Just shake his hand.
    Normally!
    Mr. Jackson’s big-hearted, robust introduction is filled with the kind of love and generosity that I am misguided and naïve enough to think must be found in the halls of every major record label on the planet. A big man, maybe 250 pounds of him, and his handshake and love for what he is doing here almost throws my medium frame across the room. I’ve managed to navigate a straight path to the big leather sofas in the corner of his office ready to show this thing. Okey dokey, Mr. Jackson and . . . Mr. Ice? Oh, good question. Would you say Mr. T? No, don’t say that. That’s the guy from that old show on television.
    After all of the late nights editing and the days spent lost in the archive, after listening to the advance copy of the fortieth anniversary CD a million times, I am strangely confident in what Ben and I have created, but a burst of self-confidence is almost always a disaster warning for me. I put the tape into George’s VCR, and he starts tweaking an enormous console of preamps, patch bays, and equalizers from the leather chair he’s sitting in — it’s a scene that looks like a 250-pound black man is commandeering the bridge of the starship
Enterprise
.
    The slate on the commercial counts down backward from ten like movies in school did, and on the last beep, the commercial starts in. The opening riff to “Superstition” pumped through speakers that look like they belong in the space program. Totally lethal speakers that I’ve never seen in the consumer sector, and on the screen forty years flash before our eyes. JFK, Marvin Gaye, Apollo rising from the launch pad, a still young and innocent Michael Jackson with his brothers clowning around on the streets of Tokyo during the first Jackson Five tour, Los Angeles in flames more than once — 1965, a routine traffic stop sets L.A. on fire for six days in Watts; 1992, L.A. is on fire again after the Rodney King verdict comes in, an edit that makes you wonder if anything has changed — and Stevie Wonder singing, “Very superstitious . . . writing on the wall,” cut back to Martin Luther King saying he has a dream over the top of Stevie Wonder’s riff. Goddamn, I’ve never noticed how much MLK looks as innocent as a child when he says it, you don’t see an agenda as much as a man just doing the right thing in the eyes of his mother. Cut to a shot of that motel in Memphis, the one that the gunman had in his aim when he pulled the trigger that morning in April of 1968; cut to a black-and-white photograph of Berry Gordy Jr. standing on the porch at Hitsville U.S.A, a young man about to go farther than even his wildest dreams for this thing; cut to the Supremes on Ed Sullivan’s stage; cut to the Beatles hanging out with Berry Gordy Jr., and his baby daughter. This is the same spirit that made colonies, that went west, that went to the moon and back, this man starting out against the odds with a small loan in his pocket, he winds up making history.
    Damn, why hasn’t this commercial hit me like this until now? I watched it played down a hundred times in the editingstudio. Maybe I drank way too much last night after we finished what we figured was our last editing session, and