The Road to Mediocrity

I learned how to be stupid, from which I learned how to think, from Lou Costello, Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, and more recently from movies like Airplane!, Young Frankenstein, Victor Victoria and the Griswold Family Christmas, not to mention The Big Lebowski. If stupid is beneath you, well, I wouldn't read any further unless you yearn to give me a thumbs down.

Which brings me to Pyotr [Peter] Tchaikovsky.

Imagine what Peter would have thought about likes and thumbs down had Facebook and YouTube been around in the 19th century. Well, imagine no more.....

LOVER. Your violin concerto is the greatest piece of music you've ever written, Peter. But there's a big problem.

PETER. I've already told you I don't care if Stalin finds out we're gay.

LOVER. No, I'm talking about your violin concerto.

PETER. And why should Mother Russia care that we're in love with each other?

LOVER. Maybe in a hundred years she won't care but that won't solve the problem with your violin concerto.

PETER. Okay, what's the problem?

LOVER. The problem's quite simple. Parts of your violin concerto are unplayable on the violin by any living or maybe even any dead violinist.

PETER. I don't care.

LOVER. But if it should be played it'll get a thumbs down because the violinist can't play it, and it won't get any likes.

PETER. I don't care. What do I care who likes it, except for you.

LOVER. I love it beyond words, Peter. But if you can't get likes and thumbs up....

PETER. Who cares. I wrote it for myself. I write everything for myself and Mother Russia. Also, I think Stalin's gay.

LOVER. Will you stop with the gay stuff, Peter. You think everybody's gay. Beethoven's probably rolling over in his grave.

PETER. I never knew that little strumpet was gay.

LOVER. Most of the great composers are gay, at least that's what Elton John will say a hundred years from now, which will also be when people start using the word gay. Just think, Peter, we're a hundred years ahead of our time.

PETER. Hmmm. I wonder if in a hundred years Elton will get threatened with jail by a U.S. President.

LOVER. No. Americans never threaten to throw gays or opponents in jail. Only Mother Russia sinks to that level.

PETER. Well, that may be true today but a truth that's only good for one day is yolki-palki, pardon my Russian. Anyway, I have a truth that will still be true in a hundred years, no matter if you're Russian or American.

LOVER. Well, Peter, given that we won't be around in a hundred years, please tell me now what that truth is.

PETER

Okay, my dear friend, it's a little complicated and some may want to turn it inside-out and upside-down but here's the thing. If almost everyone gives you a thumbs up for what you create, your rewards will be happiness and maybe success. That is, unless you're a conceited full-of-crap perfectionist, pardon my English, like Rimsky-Korsakov, whom I never trusted. How could I trust a guy who's part Czech, part Lithuanian, part Polish, part Roman and part Russian, and who knows what else.

Last week he sat down at the piano and asked my opinion of a new composition he'd been working on. I must tell you that Conceited Rimsky plays the piano even worse than Conceited Modest Mussorgsky. After Rimsky finished playing an absolutely dreadful piece he referred to as Scheherazade, I gave him a thumbs down and told him I never knew he was part Japanese.

I should have been a standup comedian, don't you think? Anyway, and quite seriously, if almost no one gives you a thumbs up for what you create, the seeds of a most treasured reward will be yours.

Because the truth today and the truth tomorrow is that the road to mediocrity is lined with thumbs up.

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If you want to do something great, think like Tchaikovsky.

Or if you're not into Tchaikovsky....

In 1971, a Philadelphia disc jockey, after listening to a song from Helene & Marc's album, confided to Helene and Marc that he'd recently heard a handful of beautiful but sad songs written and sung by some depressed dude named Don McLean, and that all of McLean's songs had been rejected by dozens of recording companies.

I suppose the disc jockey was trying to prepare Helene and me for the same flood of rejections. Mercifully, those rejections never came because, rather unmercifully, Helene and I split before we ever talked to a record company. But because of that moment in 1971, any time I hear a Don McLean song—Bronco Bill's Lament for instance—I think of Helene & Marc's album.

But here's the thing. Faced with one rejection after another, Don McLean refused to give in or give up. His sad songs were eventually released on a label nobody ever heard of or cared about. That label was Mediarts and Don McLean's album was Tapestry, which quickly found its way into the vinyl abyss of 1970.

But one year later, United Artists bought Mediarts and because of that unforeseen event, we all know about a song titled American Pie, a song which one recording company executive described as interminable and unlistenable when he heard the demo.

In that executive's thumbs down, along with all the previous rejections of Don McLean's music, lay the seeds of a treasured reward.

Greatness.

Be Don McLean.