#33 Bobby

Pushkin. I'm looking out out my window. I'm looking at the clouds, and I could tell you about the things that I see, and you could tell me about the things that you see I see.

Whispered to me.

She doesn't know where this is going. This is going?

Wait? What?

What?

No?

This is two friends sharing their you know, what they see in the clouds. Nothing wrong with that. Why does it have to go somewhere? Okay? Now what I see is a wheelbarrow full of what looks like Teddy Bears. What do you see?

Cloud?

Oh that's that's not good at all, very bad. Sign. I come. I come from Lithuanian stock and we're cloud readers. We see prophetic visions in the clouds. Did you know that? That's why I wanted to trick you into looking at the cloud so that I could tell you your future. Yeah, I should have seen that. Coming from Gimblet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight Today's episode. Bobby, right after the break, I have it, Thanks Bobby. Bobby Lord

Jovin.

I don't think a cord tubes have been use of.

Four War two?

Can I get a schmear of music here? Bob As a sound engineer, Bobby normally has to keep his yap shut. Should he feel compelled to sneeze or say, have a heart attack, he cannot do so until the on air light is safely extinguished. But today we turn the microphone around and aim it back towards one two often shrouded in darkness and obscurity, today we tell Bobby's story, the story of the greatest public embarrassment of Bobby's entire musical career.

I think that's a little traumatic.

I would say not dramatic enough. Don't be stingy with the music, Bob more acorns a little bit of trouble, give me a full bank. Bobby joins me in the studio and tells me how his love of music first blossomed back in middle school, around the time he met a boy named Jake.

He sat in the back of the bus where the cool kids sat, and I think he was wearing like the leather jacket, a punk band T shirt, and he had blue hair.

Bobby's hair was a nerdy brown he played nerdy sacks in the nerdy school band, and here was Jake, who played punk rock electric guitar. Bobby was starstruck. He started dressing like Jake in band t shirts and tight punky jeans he found in the girls section at Coole's. He even begged his parents for a drum kit so he and Jake could form a band.

That credit Jake with teaching me everything about like being in a band and punk music, and then he taught me everything.

You know.

There were a lot of times would be sitting together and both with our own CD players and headphones on, like in different worlds and listening to different records, but just together, you.

Know, Bobby listening to Jimmy Eat World, Jake to No Effects, both of them eating gummy sharks and dreaming about the music they wanted to make. With a couple more friends, they formed a band, and even though they were so young, it wasn't long before they were booking shows. Their first gig was at a local record store.

I was super, super nervous and I was kind of just trying to hide behind my drums. But Jake just kind of has this like British punk rock sneered singing in this snotty little kind of punk singing voice and like looking very cool with a bass.

This is a song of theirs called None Divided. Bobby, age thirteen, is on drums and Jake, age twelve, is singing.

As well.

Now I don't know how old the guys in Green Day are, and I don't particularly like Green Day, but if you told me this was Green Day, I'd say, hey, Green Day is not as bad as I thought they were. That's how good Bobby and Jake were even as children and through their teens, Bobby and Jake continued booking gigs. The dream was to live off their music, but after college it became clear they need day jobs, so Bobby found one as an audio engineer at a Chicago advertising agency.

I came into work and my boss said, we have an ad that I need you to sing.

And I said, sing, sing, but not like Sid Vicious or Joey Ramone or that guy who screams in that song at the beginning of CSI Miami, because those guys never sang advertising jingles for McDonald's, which was exactly what Bobby was being asked to do. The creative in charge, a guy named Tim knew that Bobby was a musician, so he asked Bobby to record the demo track for an ad he was working on.

He wrote a song called random Red Couch, and they had shot all this footage of hipstery looking models holding like McDonald's bags of food and kind of like dancing on this couch, this red couch. Tim was in his like fifties and is trying to write like a comedy thing for younger people, and he I think he thought that at the time, like a comedic sensibility amongst young people was like randomness, like absurd randomness.

By twenty fourteen, the word random had served the youth of America well and was ready for the retirement home where it could play shuffle board with chill pill and boo yeah. But this didn't stop Tim.

I remember, I remember it by heart. How it goes. It starts like we got a random red couch. Don't ask me why people eating burgers with a girl or a guy.

On the weekends. Bobby was a mother freaking antichrist, hanging with punk rockers who'd sooner sell the nose rings infecting their noses than sell out. And here he was crooning about ninety nine cent chicken cutlets sold by a clown. But lucky for Bobby, no one would ever hear it. Random Red Couch was just a demo, one of many ideas circulated internally that never got green lit.

Things got killed all the time, so I never thought that the thing would get made. But every step of the way, we just kept hearing that it's not getting killed, it's not getting killed, it's still going.

And going and going. Random Red Couch was like this unstoppable, unkillable monster. For whatever reason, Bobby's bosses were butt up ba ba ba loving it, and so Random Red Couch was suddenly green lit. Bobby Lord was now the voice of a national advertising campaign for McDonald's.

And this is where it became not fun because it starts to air and like it played a lot.

McDonald's bought so much airtime that during the twenty fourteen NHL Playoffs, Bobby says he couldn't walk into a bar without seeing the ad. It was everywhere, and from the moment it started airing, Random Red Couch was immediately and universally and passionately reviled.

A good illustration of how hated this ad was is that it was on McDonald's official YouTube channel and it got so extremely ratioed with thumbs downs and negative comments that they took it off their own page. Like the hatred and the vitriol on Twitter about this ad was, I've never seen anything quite like it, Like.

Can can you read some of those tweets?

Yeah? One second? Okay, that McDonald's random red couch commercial is annoying as hell. There better not be a random red couch in jail after I stab the writers of that horrendous commercial. Hey, McDonald's, if I see the random red couch commercial one more time, I'm going to kill someone and the blood will be on your hands. I want to kill the random red couch. Fuck your random

Wow, that's really harsh. People on the internet are mean.

I know.

I know.

At this point, I'm so amped up on all the reviews slash death threats. I can't wait to experience the ad for myself. I don't think I've ever wanted to click on a link more in my entire life.

Oh man, I'm so excited.

Okay, here we go.

Shit, Okay, we got a random red couch.

Don't ask me why keep your favorites with your good art.

Guy, gotta random med couch. Pull up a seed. You don't want to be the one with nothing to eat. We got a band of cows, ast you friends with them. McDonald's bag, never hands ic.

Chu gate, McDonald beef and cheese, helone that's the flavor.

Of dyla menu and more on a random read couch.

The ad features a group of young actors, each of them looking like one of those kids who would have smoked a pipe in college. They dance about with the desperate energy of hostages in a hostage video, who, instead of being forced to recite from que cards, are being

Yeah?

Sure, we gotta random red couch.

You don't ask me why.

Guy gotta random red couch pulled up.

A seat, which, by the way, a couch is a seat. You don't need to pull up a seatuch.

And this guy's wearing a pork pie.

Hat never ends, chicken mcdouble, beef and cheese.

Oh, this is like my personal health, A random red couch. Like, what is it?

What is it?

There's nothing random about this couch, Like it's I know.

There's nothing random. It's the only set piece. There's nothing.

It's very pointed. Despite years of practice, years of playing gigs and paying his dues, Bobby's most widely played song was his worst. Bobby was mortified.

This horrible, annoying commercial will come on a lot all the time, and you didn't want to be like that's me. It was like really embarrassing.

You just wouldn't say anything. You'd be with people.

I tell anyone, I.

Knew it was his voice instantaneously.

This is Bobby's oldest, coolest, bluest haired friend Jake. As embarrassed as Bobby was about the ad, he was especially embarrassed that Jake might hear it. Then he not only loses punk Red, but also the respect of the person who taught him everything about music in the first place. So even though Jake and Bobby spoke every day, had practice each week, Bobby never said a thing about the ad. But then one day, Jake was hanging out with Billy, a third member of Jake and Bobby's band.

We're watching The Black Hot and then all of a sudden, we hear this song come on and we started like kind of like giggling at the song and then and then I was like, holy shit. I was like, that's Bobby. And he goes, no, no, no, it's not and I go, dude, that is Bobby. I know Bobby's voice. There's no one else that sounds like that's Bobby.

We had a TV that we had the access to rewind it, so we rewinded and rewatch, this is Billy and then the tagline at the very end he speaks it on a random redcouch, so it's clearly him, Billy, and.

He's like, oh my god, it is Bobby, and we started laughing and freaking out.

Later that day they saw Bobby Jake asked him about the ad.

And his face just drops, just drops, and he's like, oh my god. He's like, don't tell anyone about this.

And until this moment, have you kept the promise that you made to Bobby? Have you never told anybody?

Oh? No, I told people.

Of course, Bobby's best friend and bandmate was going to dine out on Bobby's humiliation, and so group text were sent, links were forwarded, and everyone laughed for Bobby. It was a huge embarrassment. But the thing that's outlived that embarrassment is a lingering question what the hell happened?

If you were to see this on TV, you would just be like, how did this happen? How did this get into my TV? How did this get through?

At the time, Bobby was a kid in his early twenties, the lowest on the ladder, with no visibility into how the ad got greenlit. But now, as an adult, he wonders who ultimately greenlit the ad and at what cost?

Like I heard a rumor that like Tim, the maker of the ad, had been seen like in the office of the Big Guy. Then he was like all red faced and like screaming, and like maybe like I started to feel like if you had worked on this commercial, like you were like a rayah that started to become like a thing, like you would hear people like you guys worked on random red couch.

How's Tim's career doing.

I don't know. I don't know. I would like to know who's a super super nice guy. He would always wear like a low baseball hat in classes, and he talked like this, like real quiet, kind of like a stoner.

Random red couch.

Right, this is Tim.

It's all coming back to me now.

Unfortunately Tim's now retired, but he was in advertising for over two decades, from Office Max to Budweiser. Tim's worked on tons of successful campaigns, but I'm calling to talk about his least successful one. I asked if he would rewatch the ad with me while offering a running director's commentary, and Tim says, yes, he is a super super nice guy.

We got a random red cows.

Don't ask me why people favorites with dark got a random red couch.

Pull up a seat. You don't want to be the one with nothing to eat. We got a random red couch. Cat friend.

Never had mc chicken, McDougall beef and cheese.

Hello now, that's the flavor of Dalla menu and more on a random red couch.

It is the worst commercial ever made. Like Joe Cocker wouldn't have made that good.

Random red Couch is pretty bad? But is it The worst McDonald's commercial ever made? Is that McDonald's burger Delicia? Is it worse than this McDonald's add from the nineteen sixties in which Ronald McDonald leaps out from behind a bush to accost a child on the street.

Mom told me never to talk.

To strangers, But I'm Ronald, you're all proven.

I'll give you three more hamburgers. I'm not even sure Random red couch, which is the worst McDonald's jingle ever? Can it be worse than this one for chicken McNuggets?

I'm into nuggets, y'all. I'm into nuggets, y'all.

I'm into nuggets, y'all. Can it be worse than a pre George Costanza Jason Alexander prancing down the street in pastel colors singing about the virtues of the McDLT.

What about the.

People on the hot side ho DLT the McDLT. No more would beef and lettuce have to commingle through the miracle of a double styrofoam clamshelltris put it together?

You can't.

Is Random Red Couch really worse than all that we got?

A random red Chiles, don't ask me why.

Yes, yes it is. All those other ads might be forgiven due to their moment in cultural history, the pre stranger danger atmsphere of the sixties, the delight in styrofoam and sherbet colored blazers of the eighties. But Random Red Couch is free from cultural excuses, a monolith of bad taste that rejects any context.

I didn't actually think what I had written was ever going to see the light of day, but I was trying to get an assignment off my plate.

It turns out that just like Bobby Tim also thought Random Red Couch would be killed, He never written a jingle before and was confused about why he was asked to write one.

Now.

Nonetheless, I think I might have been let go because of that commercion. Are you kidding?

It wasn't explicit like that, but it was a thing where I had just heard through a couple of friends there that it had to have some influence of the decision.

How long after the Random Red Couch did where you let go?

I would say, within lunths. Huh, yeah, that was the end of a chapter for sure.

After twenty five years at the agency, Tim was fired, perhaps for something that wasn't even his idea in the first place. But if random Red Couch wasn't Tim's idea, whose was it who ultimately gave random red Couch the green light? Super super nice. To the end, Tim hesitates to name names, but it's not long before he's singing like a young Jason Alexander. Kathy Kathy.

I had become good friends with Kathy, who I was working with on it, and she was the creative director, and there wasn't a lot of oversight, and she kind of pushed it through.

While Tim was above Bobby, Kathy apparently was above Tim rung By Rung, I was climbing a ladder, a ladder of blame to find out who bore responsible ability for the abominable and random Red Couch boy. All this talk about ads sure is making me thirsty for ads, and lucky for me, here comes a big, fat, thirst quenching tub of them.

I would say it was probably the biggest plunker that I had ever done in my career.

This is Kathy, the creative director for Random Red Couch and the person Tim worked under.

Tim's an excellent writer. Oh my god, he's an extremely talented guy.

Like Tim. Kathy retired from advertising some years ago, but says Random Red Couch is stuck with her. I ask if she recalls any of the lyrics? Yeah, which ones do you remember?

Well?

What is it?

I got a Random Red Couch.

Maybe I have a bigger mental block against this spot than I thought.

According to Tim, Kathy had approved the Random Red Couch. But according to Kathy, it wasn't as simple as that.

As a creative director, you have a handful of bosses and people reviewing the work.

Just when I think I've reached the top step of the blame ladder, Kathy tells me that she never had the authority to greenlight. That level of decision making came from her bosses, and.

These guys like absolutely loved it.

One boss in particular, So at that.

Time, our group creative director, Tony Malcolm was a brit and he really wanted to use a song. You know, he had a lot of success with that in the London market and he wanted to do it.

Like the ants come merching home, and I'm like, Tony, we can't do a song with ant for a McDonald's commercial. That's you know, they definitely have their list of nogos and insects of any kind as a nogo with McDonald's, right, he definitely wanted to shake things up. You know what, you should try reaching out to Tony and he's.

A super nice guy, really super nice.

I did a commercial that was called just passing By in the UK.

This is Tony Kathy's boss and just passing by was a poem Tony wrote for McDonald's in England. After it aired, actual sales went up five hundred percent and so Tony was offered the job in Chicago.

The whole poem started saying the laborers and cablers and council motion tablers were just passing by. Then the coffee type and coffee types and like their coffee swaffy types were just passing by. Those on their own whilst on the phone, douncan McNuggets and having a moan were just passing by it.

They're driving through with hungry crew.

Who just pulled off the A three to two were just passing by it.

On the it Boary.

So how did happen? How did Tony go from crafting odes to rival Wordsworth to.

Wig Random Red Couch.

Tony explains the genesis of Random Red Couch. He'd wanted a song that was funny, but funny in a uniquely American way.

I think there's a brashness to American humor. There's there's no subtlety in it, and there's no intellectualism in it. It's just very body and very funny. I think it is probably, you know, a British psyche thing. We're very reserved and less likely to shout. And when I first came to Chicago, what I realized is culturally we're very different, especially in humor terms. You know, the improv scene, Second City and and I remember Kathy was a big fan of a program called Between Two Ferns.

So instead of two ferns, Tony thought, one couch. What could be more American than sitting on a couch? Tony hoped to achieve the so bad it's good aesthetic of Between two Ferns, but Random Red Couch stalled ats so bad It's bad in general, though Tony is right about British and American comedy they're nothing alike. Whereas British humor has a you in it, American humor has no U. And whereas the American office is funny, the British office,

If you take the music out, I just put a great voice in there. Morgan Freeman French would have been ideal. And he'd have just invited you to join him in a a beast burger or some very very tasty offerings. He's got that sort of gravitas. They would have been a random made couch, pull up a chair.

You know when you're climbing a ladder, not just the blame kind, but any kind. Really, there's that step at the tippy top, the one that reads this is not a step Tony. As it turns out, is that not a step step, which is to say, there's no one higher than Tony.

I did have to rub a stamp. Everything that went out as an AD.

Like it all kind of came down to you.

Yes, I'm to blame it for it. There in that respect, I didn't want to say that. You know, I'm the one who passed it. I'm the one who said, yep, let's go with that.

Within a year of the AD's release, Tony was sent back to the UK.

I moved my family to Chicago to try and be successful, and I would be living there now still had things gone the right way, but they don't. Sometimes.

Although Tim and Cathy are no longer in the ad business, Tony is and in general it's been pretty good to him. For one thing, it's allowed him to buy a thirteenth century chateau, which is French.

For castle, but this is a quite modest chateau.

Tony's been learning all about the history of his humble fortress and is even writing a book about it, filled with fun facts like this one about the stairway in his turret.

If you're going up up it, it goes anti clockwise, so if the people attack your castle, your chateau, and they start to come up the turret, then will struggle to swing their sword in their right hand. You're coming down clockwise and you can have a full swing, and these people of the swing is being restricted by the fact the stairs go up anti.

Clockwise, anti clockwise. That's what we hear in the US of a call counterclockwise. And what goes up counterclockwise must come down anti counterclockwise. And it was time to go back down to where this whole thing got started. Bobby.

Helloo.

I asked Bobby if he's available to talk, and Bobby says why, And I say, don't ask me why.

So I.

Went back to Chicago, as it were, Okay, spoke to all kinds of people, Okay. I filled Bobby in on how the random red couch came to be greenlit, as well as the arcane distinctions between British and American stair climbing. To Bobby's greater concern, I break the news about the fate of his coworkers. It does seem like they probably lost their jobs because of this thing. Really that's true, but wow, all of them seem to be like happy

That is that is genuinely nice to hear. That is really cool that they have moved on from that world.

For Tim, Kathy and Tony, all the campaigns are now a blur. There's one thing though, that they do hold onto.

Tim used to come in and we'd sit there and chew the fat and laugh.

You know.

We became good friends, all these guys, and we'd had some fun, you know.

I mean, the people that we worked with were all great, and Tim's just hilarious.

I remember very formerly Cassi and Tim, he had a little fun.

Their happiest memories, it turns out, are not so much of the work, but of the people they made the work with. It's the same for Bobby. He remembers hanging out in practice bases with his friends a lot more than he does the actual gigs they were practicing for In fact, Bobby says he never really got past feeling like that kid in the record store hiding behind his drum kit at the back of the stage.

I didn't like playing live, even though I did it a lot for many years, because I kind of felt like I was supposed to and that I would eventually grow into it. And it took many years to realize. I was like, I don't like this.

What Bobby really liked, what he still misses is hanging out with his best friends.

Jake still lives in Chicago, and I miss him, you know, every day. Billy moved to New York, but pandemic started and now he's gonna leave, so like, oh, I didn't even really get to see him that much in New York. I missed that built in friendship of being in a band. I liked just spending time with them and just having like this like built in reason almost like well, we have to hang out Tuesday night because that's what we do. You were just in each other's lives in a real way.

We had an amazing tam.

Jake and Billy miss playing with Bobby. Also, yeah, he stole them from me. Yeah, sorry for that.

I mean he was always a prodigy growing up, like on any instrument that he touched. Yeah, he's He's probably the best songwriter I know.

And for all of Bobby's worry. When I ask Jake and Billy if they judge Bobby for random Red Couch, they say, of course they don't. They never did.

I think if anyone else had done that song, they wouldn't be as embarrassed as Bobby, because Bobby can make really good music. I think with what he was given, he did the best he could.

Ah, that's that is so sweet, but.

It's still turned into pile of crap.

A pile of crap then infuriated a nation. What can be more punk than that? If we weren't in the middle of a pandemic, I would spare no expense in assembling the old Gang to play together. I'd fly them all back to Chicago to Jake's parents unfinished basement, and I'd play the role of the sound engineer, keeping quiet, handing out complimentary coconut water and contractually obligated gummy sharks.

How do you guys doing so good?

But we are in a pandemic, So instead I spend thirty seconds creating a zoom link.

You get glasses, Yeah, they're pretty new. That is.

I offer to spend thirty seconds creating a zoom link, but Bobby says it'd be easier if he just does it himself.

What are we doing?

The thing I want to give Bobby, after all the acorns he's given me, is a chance to play with his friends the way he used to as a kid, when it didn't matter what they were playing, only that they were all playing it together.

We got me, Gosh, don't ask me why people believe and favorites with the guy gotta ran a red couch flab gust friends.

With Themmie Donald beadle and she double but she's alow.

Now that's the flavor of dollar menue and home.

Yeah that was that was I could tell that horns really got Jesus.

All right.

A moon.

See.

So, now that the Fernitus return into it's good will home dishes the last we explained both numbers and elections across as an ending war.

The black end of Fame gives me the prints on every dog blood show. Now that the last.

Months round, just skin with the damage deposit. Take this moment to decide if fermented if we.

Try feltzer up, prefer to thanks accidently.

This episode of Heavyweight was produced by Stevie Lane, along with me Jonathan Goldstein. Our senior producer is Khalila Holt. Special thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Bloomberg, Chris Neary, nazin In Rosson, Johnny Phoebe, Flanagan, Nebielle, Cholienpot, Jake Anderson, Billy Klein, and Jackie Cohen. The titular Bobby Lord mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson, Michael Hurst,

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