O you storied land of America: a nation awash in anecdotes, in monologues echoing from every street corner, in oral histories rising from every porch in the land. Statistics bear this out. America has more New York cabbies, Georgia filling-station proprietors and Oklahoma truck-stop waitresses than all of Western Europe. If current trends continue, by the next century every single person in America will be over 65, the prime years for reminiscence. To Will Ackerman, who made a tidy fortune peddling the glib chimes and bells of New Age music as founder of the Windham Hill label, all this undocumented anecdotage was a precious resource going to waste. Armed with a tape machine and a stack of contracts, he set out to record America's rich heritage of ... well, stuff that happened to people.
Thus began Ackerman's new label, Gang of Seven, a name he chose mostly because it sounded nothing like the genteel pingings and pluckings of Windham Hill. With seven titles out since last May, Ackerman is already predicting that Gang of Seven will someday be bigger than Windham Hill, which he sold to BMG Music early this year. First, though, storytelling will have to break into the retailing mainstream from its present position "somewhere behind the polka albums." It is easier to say what Gang of Seven isn't than what it is. It isn't the stylized folk tales of storytelling festivals. It isn't books on tape; when one Gang of Seven narrator, Time Inc. editor Richard Stolley, showed up for a taping with written reminiscences of covering civil-rights marches in the South, Ackerman turned the pages upside down and forced him to speak from memory. It isn't stand-up comedy. The difference, says Rick Reynolds, whose mordant tales from childhood were released as "Only the Truth Is Funny," is that a comic has to evoke continuous laughter, leaving no time to sound any other notes, such as satiric, thoughtful or sad. Storytelling is the world's most efficient use of humor: Reynolds can extract a 30-minute cassette side out of a joke that would be gone in 10 seconds on "The Tonight Show."
Of course, this is not entirely a new discovery. Jean Shepherd was mining his childhood for reminiscences on late-night radio a generation ago. Back in 1970 a Mississippi fertilizer salesman named Jerry Clower recorded the first of his stories of coons, possums and the people who love them-run over lightly, skinned and boiled. His 23 albums, with 8.5 million copies sold, have enlivened many long-distance truck rides with stories like that of the hog with a wooden leg; he saved the owner's baby from a burning building, and, the farmer explained, "you don't eat a hog that wonderful but one ham at a time." But the vogue for anecdotage owes much to the towering figure of Garrison Keillor, who has inspired numerous successors with the power of storytelling-the primal medium, the first entertainment most people ever knew. The disembodied voice of the storyteller on radio or tape goes "directly into the heart, into the spirit of the listener," says Joe Frank, whose dark, brooding, postmodern-Gothic tales have driven countless National Public Radio listeners into the night to rent "It's a Wonderful Life." "It's almost like in the Old Testament when God spoke to people. You never saw God."
Of course, God also had pretty good material. Gang of Seven's initial offerings are of less uniform quality. Alaska humorist Tom Bodett says he is hoping to go beyond his reputation as the pitchman for a motel chain, but his account of an incontinent house cat ("We kept changin' food to see if it would help. Just seemed to make him sicker. It was always comin' out of one end or the other . . .") can only make his fans wish he'd stick to mattresses. On the other hand, Lynda Barry, the cartoonist and playwright, offers a charming portrait of a geeky adolescent boy she secretly liked. Stolley's segment shows both the strengths and shortcomings of the medium. There is undeniable power in his tale of covering the integration of a Southern high school by a single brave girl, who came home the first day with "so much spit on [her] dress she could have wrung it out." But the story ends lamely with the girl leaving school ". . and I've never heard of her since." If this were a magazine article, Stolley would damn well send a reporter out to find the woman.
Also, this rather bleak little tale may cause the thoughtful consumer to ask: is this what I want to listen to on the StairMaster? Then how about Gang of Seven's upcoming releases, which may include couples talking about how they met, recollections of people over 100 and-a touch any journalist can appreciate-tales from the front of the cab? That's the great thing about America. Everyone's got a story.