It was while living alone in the basement apartment in Jamaica during the 1970's that I spent a week or two writing and putting on a cassette tape the only few song commercials that I would ever write. In the 1970's the biggest corporate media television advertisers in the USA like General Motors had not yet been sold the right to use the folk and rock songs written by songwriters like Bob Dylan during the 1960's, as soundtracks for their television commercials. So I naively thought that maybe I could make some extra money to help fund my protest folk song writing, pay my rent and help finance my subsistence lifestyle of emancipated poverty, by selling some original song commercials to the then-biggest U.S. transnational, General Motors.
I now no longer recall either the lyrics or the melodies to the few General Motors song commercials I wrote in the 1970's. But I do recall being mailed a letter from one of the General Motors marketing executives, along with the returned cassette tape on which the song commercial had been recorded, indicating that he liked the songs but that GM had no need for them at that time. Perhaps if GM had used some of these song commercials as the soundtrack for their tv commercials in the 21st-century it would not have nearly gone bankrupt during the post-2008 Great Recession? Only kidding, of course.
