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Life
Lessons from
a DJ and a Songwriter
by
Ben Fong-Torres
AsianConnections
is proud to present the adventures of Ben Fong-Torres, our Renaissance
man: author, broadcaster, and former senior editor and writer at Rolling
Stone Magazine. This guy's our hero!
Ben
was a featured character in "Almost Famous," the Oscar and Golden
Globe-winning film by Cameron Crowe.
- AC Team
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I have a friend
- I'll call her "Suzanne Joe Kai" - who's always telling
me that she's got stage fright. She's a successful businesswoman,
a former San Francisco TV journalist who now runs a top-flight and
still-growing Asian-American Internet portal. She's constantly on
the go, making presentations and speeches, and appearing on panels
around the country. In front of the mike, she's poised and articulate.
And yet, she insists, she's freaked.
Oh, OK. I guess,
to a certain extent, we're all nervous about speaking in public.
My theory is that you should be; a little nervous energy gives you
an edge, and keeps you from being so relaxed that deliver a speech
by rote, like some airline attendant describing the cabin's safety
features for the millionth time.
Schurr
High School, Montebello, CA
photo credit: Jonathan Kishina
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People who see
me just before a panel or a talk, a radio or a TV show, think I'm
pretty calm. They should've seen me the other evening, when I was
about to do the keynote speech for a national conference of high
school journalists. I walked into the ballroom at the San Francisco
Marriott at 7 p.m., a half hour before my scheduled talk, and saw
a field of seats - 2,000, at least. They were lined up perfectly,
like so many grapevines, and they were empty. I panicked. Here they
were, these several thousand kids, on their first evening into San
Francisco. They were downtown. It was dinner time. They were with
friends. And they were going to come and listen to a speech?
With a vision
of all those chairs remaining pristine and untouched, I wanted to
go home. I felt horribly responsible for what was going to be an
embarrassment for the Journalism Education Association and the National
Scholastic Press Association.
Schurr
High School, Montebello, CA
photo credit: Jonathan Kishina
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I disappeared
for awhile, and when I returned, the room was almost full, with
students and teachers still rolling in. I looked around the cavernous
room, now filled with chatter. I felt absolutely calm.
That may be
because I had an opening line set. That, I believe, is the key to
combating stage fright. Get past that first remark, get a laugh,
and you�re rolling.
So after I was
introduced, I told the audience that I needed to make an update
on my name. "In light of some recent, earth-shaking events-namely,
her name change from Jennifer Lopez to J-Lo, and, more recently,
Puff Daddy becoming P. Diddy, I am no longer Ben Fong-Torres. Please
call me "B-Fo."
And that was
it. We were on our way.
Oh, yes - here's
another tip. Be impromptu. When I looked out into the crowd and
saw one of the biggest I'd ever faced, I was amazed, and said so.
In fact, I said, I wanted a memento of this moment, so I asked a
front-row student holding a camera to jump up on stage and shoot
the audience. I asked the audience to smile. Flash! And, again,
it was going to be all good.
As for what
I said to the aspiring writers, photographers and artists in the
audience, it was the same old crap I've been laying out at schools
and seminars for years.
I did begin
by exploiting the thing that probably drew so many of the students
into the ballroom: the film, "Almost Famous," in which
an actor plays me, circa 1973, when I was an editor at Rolling Stone.
A lot of the kids had seen it, now that it was out on video. So
I showed the clip of my first conversation with the main character,
based on director Cameron Crowe when he was all of 15.
The point, of
course, was that it was indeed possible to get a call-and an assignment
-- from Rolling Stone when you were still going to high school.
How to make
that possible...well, that's where the same old same old came in.
Of course, for young people, it may be new. And for some people,
you can't offer nuggets of wisdom - or whatever it is I've had in
my head all these years - often enough.
Here, bottom
line, is what I told the students: At Oakland High School, I picked
up some advice from a Top 40 disc jockey on my favorite station,
KEWB, Color Radio, Channel 91. Gary Owens, who became famous as
the announcer on Laugh-In, was my favorite DJ, and when I managed
to land a summer job there in 1961, pulling college football scores
off the wire machine and setting them up for the Saturday newscaster,
I met him. One day, we spoke about my ambitions. He knew that I
loved radio, that, like many kids, I harbored fantasies about doing
what he was doing.
Gary knew that
success in radio was a difficult goal, and he told me that, as much
as I loved radio, I shouldn't concentrate only on that industry.
Take liberal arts, he said. Learn a bit about as much as you can-history,
literature, science-so that you'll be ready for whatever comes your
way.
And that's pretty
much what I did.
The other advice,
such as it was, came later. Here's how I relayed it in my speech:
"I've been
asked about pivotal moments in my college life. It's my belief that
you make your own moments. Here's a quote that has stuck with me
over the years. 'If you don't take a chance, you ain't got a chance.'
I'm not sure who came up with it, but a friend told me she heard
it from Bobby Neuwirth, singer, songwriter, and buddy to Bob Dylan,
Kris Kristofferson, and many others."
A simple idea,
but one that resonates. I had a chance to meet Neuwirth at last
year's South by Southwest music conference in Austin. He was wondering
about whether or not he should take on a producers role in a documentary
about the making of this new film by the Coen Brothers, "O
Brother Where Art Thou?" He wasn't sure he was ready for the
assignment. What an opening. I leaned over to him and said, 'I heard
somewhere: if you don't take a chance, you ain't got a chance.'
What could he say?
I concluded
my talk by adding: "Stay curious. Stay true to your goals,
but be flexible. Don't be rigid: about yourself or about politics,
or about people, or about technology, the economy, or anything else.
Although you have chosen to write about people and events, don't
be detached. Participate in life. Don't live through your notebook,
your tape recorder, your camera."
"Learn
from your work and apply those lessons and insights to the most
important assignment, the most important story of all: your own
life."
"I've done
it, and I hope that you will, too."
Epilogue:
That bit about
"Suzanne" and her stage fright? As a certain mobster on
HBO would say, feggetaboutit. I just shared a podium with her at
a fundraising gala for the Chinese Historical Society, and she...well,
she aced it. Afterwards, she still claimed to have been nerve-wracked.
But from what people in the audience said afterwards, it wasn't
apparent. She was perfect. So maybe that's her formula: Say you're
nervous, over and over again, until you take possession of that
bundle of nerves. Drag it on stage with you. Then set -- or kick
-- it aside, and take care of business. That bundle, it may turn
out, is just a friendly, mental accomplice.
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Visit Ben's Official Site: www.BenFongTorres.com
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