Wanna Buy a Revolution?

By Elizabeth L. Bland/New York and Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles

Five months ago Nike had some new shoes. All it needed was a way to launch them. First came a tag line: "Revolution in Motion." Then, according to Kevin Brown, Nike's director of corporate communications, "another brain wave struck -- using the Beatles classic Revolution, music that best epitomizes the concept, to help make our point."

The Beatles had never been heard in a commercial before, although Help! was performed by a sound-alike group in a 1985 Lincoln-Mercury spot. Says Kelley Stoutt, an account executive at Wieden & Kennedy, who helped work out the ad campaign: "We never considered sound-alikes. We're baby boomers too. This is our music. In our minds, it was the Beatles or no one." After some ticklish negotiations and two large payments, it was the Beatles singing and playing for Nike-Air shoes. No getting around it: Nike has brought the current craze for rock commercials to a benchmark and made a bit of pop history as well.

John Lennon was using reflexive radicalism to have a little sport when he wrote this song in 1968. He wasn't promoting revolution at the time -- or sportswear at any time. Photographed on jumpy, grainy black-and-white tinted Super 8, edited to look at first like some family-heirloom home movie but in fact adeptly synced to the hard rhythms of the song, the Nike spot rousingly shows several pros (including John McEnroe and Michael Jordan) and lots of gleeful amateurs working themselves into sweaty transports of athletic fulfillment. "We tried to make a kind of radical sports documentary," says Paula Greif, who produced and directed the spot with her partner Peter Kagan. "It's about emotional moments." For nostalgists, Beatles fans or anyone else who takes rock as seriously as, say, Lennon or Paul McCartney, the ad's most emotional moment may be hearing Revolution's ferocious guitars at the service of salesmanship.

Ad people consider the commercial a dazzler and the use of the Beatles a clear coup. "It's an interesting development," comments Stephen Novick, a production director at Grey Advertising, "and a very, very powerful tool." Others express some doubts. John Doig, a creative director at Manhattan's Ogilvy & Mather, remembers the days of anti-Viet Nam demonstrations with "bloody police truncheons coming down and Revolution playing in the background. What that song is saying is a damned sight more important than flogging running shoes." "Music is replete with the meaning of the time," reflects Marshall Blonsky, a professor of semiotics at New York City's New School for Social Research. "Beatles music has to do with revolt, but the fitness game isn't revolutionary, it's conformism. The commercial's an attempt by advertisers to appropriate the missing past."

McCartney and George Harrison have not commented on the commercial flap, but Yoko Ono had a statement issued that said in part, "Yoko doesn't want to see John deified. She likes the idea that ((the commercial)) is making John's music accessible to a new generation." Ringo Starr is currently appearing on-camera in a wine-cooler commercial, but even if he and the others objected to use of the song, they would have no legal recourse. They do not own the rights to their Beatles music. Master rights (that is, rights to use the song as recorded by the Beatles) are controlled by Capitol Records in North America and EMI in the rest of the world. Publishing rights -- in effect, permission to use the song -- are now controlled by SBK Songs on % behalf of Michael Jackson. He successfully bid $47.5 million against McCartney, among others, for ATV Music when it became available in 1985; ATV's catalog included 251 Beatles tunes. Nike paid the record companies an estimated $250,000 for a year's use of Revolution and a similar amount to SBK.

"We're not beating every cent out of the catalog," insists Pat Lucas, director of West Coast operations for SBK, who adds that after turning down some 20 copyright requests (with a potential value of a "few million dollars"), she and Jackson "sat down to decide which songs he would consider usable. His love for a song was the main criterion. He'd never use Eleanor Rigby or The Fool on the Hill. Those songs touched him in a different place, and besides, I can't imagine a suitable tie-in." They came up, Lucas says, with a list of "only 40 you'll ever possibly see in an ad. All Together Now. Good Morning, Good Morning . . ."

Even for performers who do not own publishing companies, rock can be a straight business deal. Jackson, of course, fired up the rock-ad trend by bopping through his own Pepsi commercials. Phil Collins and Genesis look delighted singing out for Michelob. Randy Newman, whose tunes have been used to hype Ford, NutraSweet and Nike, draws the line at booze commercials but says, "Music isn't sacred. Rock 'n' roll isn't intrinsically holier than the advertising industry." Beach Boys songs have gone to everyone from Lincoln- Mercury (Wouldn't It Be Nice) to Sunkist soft drinks (Good Vibrations), although Lead Singer Mike Love is miffed that the group has never been asked to sing for the ads. "We'd be very willing to do commercials, provided they didn't hype toxic waste or nuclear plants, whisky or cigarettes," he says. "But if a company is selling Hide-a-Beds and is willing to part with lots of dinero, why not?"

Well, now. There are some people for whom rock is not just a diversion or a vocation, or even just a personal expression. It is a lifeline. "My songs," says John Cougar Mellencamp, "weren't written to sell products." Chrysler wanted Bruce Springsteen for a major campaign and floated an offer estimated at $12 million and counting. Springsteen responded as he always does to such propositions: he refused even to discuss it. When he sang, in Badlands, "I believe in the faith that can save me," Springsteen was summoning up the spiritual power of rock. John Lennon held to the same articles of faith. Mark David Chapman killed him. But it took a couple of record execs, one sneaker company and a soul brother to turn him into a jingle writer.Jay Cocks.