THE SAUCE AND THE STUFF …

It’s one of my favorite stories my father tells, from his quartet days. It always makes us belly laugh around the table. It’s funny because it’s true.

His trio was performing at a gospel music festival. In those days, they just called them “singings” or more appropriately, “sangins.” The trio was broke and threadbare and showed up in an old, white station wagon, pulling a trailer. Their gear was sub par, and at first glance it might’ve been easy to dismiss them.

As the story goes, they watched a group pull into the festival in a brand spanking new Silver Eagle bus. Everyone watched in awe as the members of this group unpacked the latest, greatest sound equipment and instruments. Dad recalls that everyone felt very intimidated by those guys. And they were just waiting for them to take the stage and own the night. As it turned out, dad’s trio was scheduled to go on RIGHT after this force-to-be-reckoned-with ensemble. And he recalls how frightened he was.

They looked serious. They were serious. Surely, this is what the “big time” looked and smelled and acted and felt like. And so, my father’s little rag tag team of music makers stood on the side of the stage and awaited their complete and total annihilation. They were having to follow this juggernaut. And he was sure it wouldn’t be pretty.

The super hero quartet emerged from their bus in expensive, matching suits (the true sign of a successful quartet). They had their game faces on, their hair spray-locked in, and they were ready to make that stage their own personal stomping ground for the next 45 minutes. As they walked into the spotlights and took their places behind the microphones, a hush fell over the standing-room-only crowd. This was going to be epic. Suddenly, the lead singer gave the drummer the nod to start. And as everyone held their breath in excitement, the drummer began playing eighth notes slowly, on the ride cymbal. Great misdirection! Next, they would no doubt explode into something mind bending. But the drummer just revved up and got faster and faster on the cymbal until he reached a certain tempo. Then, he seemed to be ready. What was happening?

The quartet launched into their first song …once the tempo was acceptable. And when they jumped in, it was …well …interesting. Three of them sang the melody (badly) and one of them sang bass …out of tune. At first, everyone thought it was a joke of some kind. They politely applauded after the song was over. Surely, this was some sort of comic rouse. But then, they started the second song with the drummer doing the same thing on the ride cymbal. And sure enough, they sang the second song in unison …with an out-of-tune bass singer.

By the third song, people caught on and started to get up and leave. They were seeing and hearing a group of people who were well funded and who looked right and acted like they belonged there, but who had no business on any stage, anywhere. No amount of money could cover that up. Their clothes looked amazing. But those clothes were filled with empty, talentless wanna bees. And it couldn’t be spun. It just was what it was. The sauce (the trappings) looked great. But the stuff (what they actually DID) was rancid.

All sauce …no stuff.

When they left the stage, almost everyone in the building had walked out on them. My father’s trio took the stage in their mismatched suits and with their hodgepodge of equipment, and proceeded to burn the freaking room to the ground. By the time they were done, the audience had come back in the building and had given them two standing ovations.

See, they were light on sauce …but they had the stuff.

We live in a world that is constantly balancing the sauce and the stuff. Some people have the sauce, but there’s no stuff there. Some people have the stuff, but their sauce is not fully cooked. I can relate to this. I’ve always concentrated on the stuff. And I have to run and lift and diet and coif and preen to get the sauce close to being right. As I age, I pretty much just focus on the stuff. The sauce is its own full time job.

The problem is, people really want both. If you’ve got the sauce AND the stuff, you’re what we call “the total package.” But sometimes, it’s hard to make out which is which.

In life, you have to learn to tell the difference between the sauce and the stuff.

Politically, I think we’re currently watching an object lesson in the difference between the sauce and the stuff. Every time I watched Barack Obama, during his presidency, I thought about that quartet from my father’s youth. Great presence. Great speaker. Inspiring. Winning smile. Aspirational figure. Iconic. Wonderful story. First minority president. Great sauce. But …

GDP that never broke 2% (which had never been done over an 8 year period in American history). Healthcare turned into more of a complicated mess than it originally was. Higher taxes on everyone. Crippling regulation on small businesses. Chaos in the middle east, sparking a Christian genocide. More displaced refugees on the planet than since WWII. Russia invading the Ukraine and Crimea. US ambassadors killed in embassy attacks. America’s credit rating actually lowered for the first time ever. No significant economic bounce in almost a decade. Wages and income on downward trends Every. Single. Year. That is the musical equivalent of having three people sing unison while one sings bass …out of tune.

That kind of a performance will usher in someone like a Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton’s biggest mistake was telling the country she was going to carry on the Obama legacy. See, we’d all already sized it up as all sauce.

In Trump’s case, the sauce is weird, undercooked and lumpy. But the stuff might just be there: Lowest unemployment rate in 18 years. Lowest black unemployment rate since they started keeping records of such things. GDP knocking on 4%. Stock market breaking SIX records in a year (and a new one JUST today). Taxes simplified and lowered and regulations rolled back. ISIS LITERALLY surrendering and being driven out of all the land it had acquired in previous years. North Korea finally being engaged head on for what they are …tin horn blow hards …and agreeing to sit down with the south Koreans for talks. I’m not sure that has happened in my lifetime. Some people (a lot of people) thought the engaging of NK like Mel Gibson’s character from Lethal Weapon was dangerous. I always felt inaction was more dangerous. Maybe it’s just me. Either way, something is working. And whatever that something is …hasn’t been working until now.

If you concentrate on the sauce, i.e. Twitter rants and weird statements and things like how we “feel” as a nation, or worse, what Dick Durbin (a man known to fabricate things) says the president said in a meeting, things look kind of bleak and dark. But if you look at the stuff …it seems to be working. Donald Trump was not my choice in the Republican primaries and I find his words (when he’s speaking off the cuff) to be quite frankly some of the strangest verbiage I’ve ever personally heard on the American stage. But his actions – the stuff – is what matters.

Great speeches are sauce. Well placed one liners are sauce. Acting “presidential” is sauce. Looking good at the podium is sauce. And we as consumers are obsessed with great sauce.

But if your stuff is over regulation, it doesn’t work. If it’s higher taxes, it doesn’t work. If it’s moral equivocation on the world stage, it doesn’t work. And even if you’ve got the perfect sauce …the crowd is going to eventually get up and walk out on you.

Because it might take a song or two, but people eventually figure out the difference between the sauce and the stuff.

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R