99% Invisible - 124- Longbox

Episode Date: July 22, 2014

Reporter Whitney Jones argues that R.E.M.’s Out of Time is the most politically significant album in the history of the United States. Because of its packaging.

This is 99% Invisible. Hey, I can't find that in the radio. I'm Roman Mars. Uh-uh. You'll turn to that station. I went to graduate school in Athens, Georgia, which is a great place to be from the ages of about 18 to 25. If you like going out to bars and listening to live music.

Even though Athens is a fairly small college town, it's had a huge and important music scene for decades and the most famous band to come out of the Athens scene. Undoubtedly, was R-E-M. To be provocative right from the start, I'm going to say that REM's out of time is the most politically important album in the history of the United States. And this provocateur is reporter Whitney Jones, though I have to say, I don't think out of time is even the most important album in the history of REM. Actually my argument here has nothing to do with the music.

This isn't one of those, oh it's a soundtrack to a generation or anything like that. Out of time made such a huge impact because of its packaging. The box that out of time originally came in led to a bill being passed in Congress and an actual concrete law. Let's go back to 1985. The pop charts were full of prints and Shina Easton and the youth of America were being corrupted. Tipper Gore and a few other elite women of Washington formed the Parents Music Resource

Center, or the PMRC for short. They put pressure on the creators and distributors of quote unquote, objectionable music. Musicians and labels called this censorship. There were senate hearings about this, and eventually those little black and white parental advisory stickers started appearing on albums. This set off a wave of censorship across the country. In 1990, a federal district judge in South Florida ruled that the rap group Two Live Crews album, as nasty as they want to be, was so obscene that it couldn't be sold or performed within his jurisdiction. 3 days after the ruling, two live crew played a show in Broward County, Florida, and after the show, two members of the group got arrested.

And it was a live performance, I believe, that they found obscene with, you know, girls doing what would be like what my twerking, I think it would be a very early version of the twerking. Jeff Aerov wasn't there, he saw it on TV. And I just, it was just so offensive to me. Jeff was an executive at Virgin Records, and to be clear, he wasn't offended by the Ranchie lyrics or the twerking. He was offended by the arrests and the blatant censorship of the artist's work.

Jeff spent the next couple of days mowing this over and then he had a revelation. One of the reasons why politicians get away with things because there isn't an anti-constituancy. There was never anything to lose by baiting rock and roll because there was this canard that young people didn't vote. And, you know, within the next two days, the idea came to me like fully formed in some way, and I came up with this name, Rock the Vote.

For Jeff Aeroff, the idea behind Rock the Vote was simple. Get young people to vote for politicians who wouldn't censor music. Yeah, it was that simple. It was the idea if you put kids in the game. The game becomes different. Politicians can no longer scapegoat music. They can't keep using us as an excuse. So Jeff Aeroff got about 60 people together in a Los Angeles hotel to talk about launching Rock the Vote. For example, was there,

past and present California governor, Jerry Brown was there, as were a bunch of other record executives. So there we are, part of this virtuous circle of record executives who have spent a lot of their career being criticized for destroying the youth of America, and it was sort of like in a very altruistic way, I think we can do something positive, we can get kids to vote, we can, you know, it's cool. Also in attendance was Jeff's friend. Also a record labeled executive. Also named Jeff.

Jeff Gold. He was working for Warner Brothers, and one of his major projects at the time was trying to figure out how to package CDs. Compact disc packaging was the hot topic in the record world in the late 80s and early 90s. CDs have been around for a few years at this point, but record stores still didn't have a good way to display them. Here's Jeff Gold. When CDs first came out on the market, record retailers were kind of angry about them because their stores were formatted to display 12 and a inch or 12.4 inch squares albums.

In other words, they didn't have any stands or display cases for these new CDs. So somebody in the record industry said, look, if you put a CD jewel case inside of a cardboard box that's as long as a vinyl album, and only half is wide, you can fit two of these long box CDs side by side in an LP rack. Problem solved. And the Ricker retellers said fine, perfect. And so millions of these things out of nowhere started getting made. Record people loved the long box. They thought it was the future. A headhunt show at EMI wrote this opinion piece in Billboard magazine in 1989 entitled, Why We Should Keep The CD Long Box.

He writes, quote, I want to see the music industry continue to thrive and prosper as one of the cornerstones of entertainment. And I think making full use of the 6x12 CD-Carton is one way to help us do just that. But not everyone loved the long box. Artists said, wait a minute, we don't want you cutting down millions of trees to put our CDs in and then having people throw these things away, it's an incredibly wasteful and bad thing to do for the environment. Because the thing about the long box is that it was never meant to be collected.

It had the feel of a big mic and ike carton. When you bought a CD in a long box, you'd open it up, you'd take out the jewel case, which had the actual CD and the album art in it. And you tossed the long box. There was no reason to keep it around. So REM have a record coming out in 1991, and they're saying to me and to Warner Bros., there's no way our record is coming out in a long box. We're sensitive to the environment. This is a ridiculous thing. Forget it.

And the Warner Brothers sales department is saying it absolutely has to come out in a long box or record retailers are going to penalize you. And that's when Jeff Gold got this idea. He could merge the two projects he was working on. They could use the CD Longbox to advance the Rock the Vote campaign. But first, he needed a concrete political cause to connect it to. And Jeff Eroff had found just the thing. We were sitting there looking for a raison d'être to get us into a political situation. I'm

reading Newsweek or Time and there's this column article about the motor voter bill. We just said, we're going to help these people from the motor voter bill. This was going to be our first thing we were going to do. So there's this motor voter bill that's been bouncing around Congress since the 1970s. If passed, motor voter would allow people to register to vote at the DMV when you got a driver's license. It also allowed you to register by mail or when you apply for social services like welfare or unemployment, basically making it easier for lots of people, including rock loving young people, to register to vote. By 91, a few states had already adopted it,

but Congress had never been able to get it passed nationally. Jeff Gold went to a political event in Hollywood about the motor voter bill, and one of the speakers was Columbia sociologist and political activist Richard Cloud. He said that writing to elected officials could help sway them on the issue. After Cloud's talk, Jeff Gold went up and spoke with him. And when I started talking to him, I said, What amount of letters would a Senator or a congressman take note of on a particular issue when he said, Oh, 150, 150 200 that would really have an impact and I said really that few he said yeah that you know people don't write so getting 150 200 letters about an

issue would would definitely make them sit up and take notice that weekend Jeff Gold was writing his bike around Santa Monica and i had this moment where it rushed into my mind this fully formed idea that we could take care of our e-m by turning their long box into a positive if we put a petition on the back of the long box that would go to rock the votes and i support the motor voter bill and we could distribute it to their respective senators. And I knew we could generate an unbelievable amount of mail doing that. Jeff Gold got on the phone with Jeff Aeroff and they agreed that this would be the strategy.

They would turn the album long box into a piece of political machinery and they would flood Congress with support for the motor voter bill. That Monday, Jeff called R REM's manager with the plan. And he said, all right, let me call the guys, and I'll call you back. I probably heard back from him within an hour, and he said, great idea, they're totally into it, let's do it. So out of time, hit the record stores on March 12, 1991. And then the petition started rolling in.

And I remember vividly, maybe four or five days after the record had come out. I mean, a very short period of time. And they had bags full of these things. It was really incredible. Nobody could seem to put their hand on what the exact number of that we got of these were. But I remember thinking, wow, after three weeks we've got 10,000. I mean, that's, you know, 100% of of her that's already half of what Richard Clouds said would make an impact and these things just kept coming in and drove

their canvas bags full of them coming in. About a month after Ariam released the album rock the votes political director plus two members of the hip hop group KMD. Weeled a shopping cart full of these first ten thousand petitions into a Senate hearing and they just left them there for Senators Windall Ford and a very young Chopping cart full of these first 10,000 petitions into a Senate hearing. And they just left them there for Senators' windall Ford and a very young-looking Mitch McConnell. In May of 1992, after thousands of petitions and Senate testimony, the Motor Voter Bill passed Congress.

But then President H.W. Bush vetoed it. This was in July right in the middle of Bush's re-election campaign. Bush's opponent Bill Clinton took up Motor Voter as a talking point, bashing Bush over his veto. And the rest is basically history. Clinton wins 92. The bill comes back before the House. It's actually the second bill that the House takes up in January of 93.

Motor Voter passes the House. It passes the Senate. And then Bill Clinton signs it into law as the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. At the White House earlier today, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Voter Registration Act, commonly referred to as the Motor Voter Bill. And we get invited to the White House for the signing ceremony. And it's this totally surreal scene, Jeff and his wife are there, and I there with my wife and all the people from Rock the Vote. And Clinton at the signing talks about how Rock the Vote really helped to make the difference to get this build passed.

As I said, I have long supported the idea of motor voter. More than a year ago, I promised this president that I would sign HR2 and fight for its passage. I'm pleased to be able to keep the promise today that I made on this Rock the Vote card which still has my signature back in New Hampshire. Shaking his hands after the bill signing, we identified ourselves as Rock the Vote. You said you guys got this pass and it was really one of the most surreal moments of my life. I want to stop a minute and point out just how bizarre this scene is. Remember Rock the Vote had formed an open protest against a censorship group that was started by the new vice president's wife, Tipper Gore. You know those little black and white parental advisory stickers, those were nicknamed Tipper Gors' husband was now praising Rock the Vote.

And it's a tribute to one group whose voice and organization was absolutely unprecedented. America's young people, they rock the vote, they got this done. So in Jeff Gold says, It was really one of the most surreal moments of my life. Yeah, I think surreal is probably the right word here. What's interesting here is that this campaign really could have only happened during a very brief period of time. Because before Clinton had even signed the Motorboter Bill, Jeff Gold had actually found

a way to kill off the long box for good. He hatched a plan and he went to talk about it with the chief financial officer at Warner Brothers, Murray Getland. I said, Murray, how many of these things do we make a year? And he said, oh, I don't know, 90 million between the group, something like that. And I said, how much do they cost? He said, yeah, 25 cents a piece. I said, okay, so you're talking about 20 to 25 million dollars a year, one of these expense on long boxes. And he said, yeah, I said, okay, so you're talking about 20 to $25 million a year, one of these expense on long boxes.

And he said, yeah. I said, so what if we stopped making long boxes and we took that $25 million and gave it in the form of rebates to record retailers just to pay for them to reconfigure their bins. And we did it as a one-time, you know, discount or payment. And they got all the money we saved for the first year. And then for the rest of time, we're saving $25 million a year. As Jeff Gold tells it, the other Warner Brothers executives liked his idea. They took it to the distributor, the distributor went for it, and that was the end of the long box. Some stores got new

racks to accommodate the long box for each of the dual cases. Others held onto their 12-inch bins, but started putting CDs inside of these reusable plastic cartridges. And record companies have been profitable and solvent ever since. So long boxes are gone, but the motor voter bill, which after it passed, became the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. That's still very much a thing. Between 1995, when the law went into effect in 2012, the percentage of the voting age population that is registered to vote went up more than 10 points, from 69.5% to 79.9% and in that same time span, more than 150 million

voter registrations have been filled out at the DMV. That doesn't even include mail-in registrations or registrations through social services for which the law also provides. So I think that proves it. No album is as important to politics in the US as REM's out of time. But really, their most important album, important about the things that actually really matter is Murmer.

Musically, of course, it's not their best album. Automatic for the people is their best musical album. What, how old are you? I'm 30. You're a child. You don't know anything. Murmer. This name I got we all agreed 99% Invisible Let's Produce This Week by Whitney Jones with Sam Greenspan, Katie Mangle, Avery Truffleman, and me Roman Mars.

Whitney Jones and Alex Kaplanman are the creators of Pitch, a documentary radio show about music on which this story originally appeared. Their second season starts in August, so you might as well subscribe to their podcast now and be the first in line when the new episode starts flooding in. Find out more at herepitch.com. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced at the offices of ArcSign and architecture firm in near Wild Heaven, Oakland, California. The full 99% invisible experience isn't just the episodes that you hear. The 99Pi crew are great at Twitter. You can follow us at Roman Mara Samliss and Skatingmingle and Trouffleman.

We're on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr and Spotify too. But I invite you to tell us which Aurem album makes you the happiest. It's a Judgment-Free Zone at 99pi.org. From PRX.