Maxell’s “Chair Man”: He’ll Blow You Away (part 2)

“Opera for Dummies”

Name the classical piece from Act III, Scene I of German composer Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walkure, which premiered on June 26, 1870, at the Court Theatre in Munich, Germany, together with Das Rheingold?

If you pronounced his name ”Wag-na" instead of "Vog-ner," and think Rheingold is an old, lousy beer, I'll bet you don't have a clue!

Perhaps, then, you'll remember the piece as the background music for the helicopter scene in the movie Apocalypse Now? (I love the sound of Wagner in the morning— sounds like victory).

You say you never saw Apocalypse Now.

OK, then. It also played in other movies, like The Blues Brothers, Full Metal Jacket, 8 1/2, Fantasia 2000, King Solomon's Mines, National Lampoon's Men in White, Rebel Without a Cause, Repo Man, The Running Man, Say it Isn't So, Small Soldiers, Stay Tuned, What's Opera Doc, Captiva Island and Excalibur.

It was also the background music for Nazi propaganda films of German planes in flight. The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has a tradition of playing it loudly in the mornings of finals week. And recently, a British automobile association named this strident classical piece the number one tune not to play while driving a car; research shows loud music can cause accidents.

But for many of us musically challenged old rock ‘n’ rollers, it’s best remembered as the music that boomed out of the JBL speaker when the Maxell Man in the Chair made his television debut in 1980. Click here:

Thus a star was born, and only in America could our makeup man, "Jack," have gone from cutting hair to being an iconic image now recognized by millions. (See part 1)

Scali McCabe Sloaves, the ad agency that created "Jack," had the difficult assignment of communicating why Maxell's high fidelity tape was, as their tag line suggested, "Worth It."

After all, Scali had made a star out of Frank Perdue (the tough man who made tender chickens). According to Maxell's former president, Tadao Okada, "if Perdue could get people to pay higher prices to eat dead chickens, Maxell could surely get higher prices for people to record live music."

I'm not sure if Perdue made better chickens, but I know Maxell did (and still does) make the best tapes. If this sounds “highly biased” (pardon the pun), well, it should be. You see, I was Maxell’s Product and Marketing Manager at that time and proud of the company and the products we built. Hey, perhaps Scali could have used me as the pitch man? "It takes a cool guy to make a cool tape”? (Oh, brother!)

If you remember, in the early ‘80s, sales of Walkmans, car stereos and boom boxes were booming. Young people were less and less likely to listen to music as depicted in the "Chair Man" (“500 plays”) campaign.

So "500 Plays" (it was thought) was "played out," and a campaign called ”The tape that lasts as long as the legend” was created, featuring the likenesses of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Aretha Franklin, Humphrey Bogart and director John Huston. The artwork was beautiful, but the campaign did more for selling Aretha Franklin's music and James Dean’s movies than it did for selling tape. So that campaign was soon abandoned.

By 1986, "500 Plays" had long been put to pasture. Ironically, ”Jack" had now become a legend as well, and my department was still receiving daily requests for the famous poster. I prodded my boss at the time, Mike Golacinski (now the president of Memorex), to think about resurrecting the campaign. We did, and soon found that Jack was "a legend that lasts as long as our tape."

Like Charlie Brown, I felt like “I just did something right."

But my 15 minutes of fame were more like 15 seconds. At my direction, I had Scali bring “Jack,” the original Chair Man, out of retirement. We put him in the same chair, but this time we set him in front of a TV, hoping he would do for our videotape what he had done for audio.

However, like many sequels, it never could quite live up to the original. See for yourself (click here). As a result, here I sit today, writing you newsletters from Total Media. (But you’re still a good man, Charlie Brown!)

Today, with iMacs and iTunes, USBs and CDs, bandwidths and downloads, file swapping and file copying, earbuds and iPods, listening to music the way it is depicted in the Maxell commercial is as dated as watching an old 24" black and white TV set with tubes on the inside, rotary dials on the outside and "rabbit ears" on the top that you maneuver around the room, hoping for channels 2-13 to come into focus.

If you're under 40, you’ve most likely only read about a time in our country when families sat around their one black and white TV set on a Sunday night, watching Ed Sullivan. And if you fell asleep on the sofa watching the "really big show," you were awakened by the national anthem, followed by nothing but the sounds of static.

So, too, when listening to music meant carefully taking an LP out of its jacket, placing the shiny black vinyl record on the turntable and strategically placing the stylus in the grooveless area along the circumference. A time when you sat back in your recliner and listened to beautiful love songs, like the Temptations singing "My Girl," or Elvis’s “Can't Help Falling in Love."

Or maybe, like the Maxell Chair Man, “Jack,” you sat back in your easy chair, cranked up the volume and got blown away by the magnificent Wagner composition, “The Ride of the Valkyries.”