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Stanford Business magazine

 

They’re Playing Our Song

Music has been a part of his life since he started piano lessons at age 6 in Spokane, Wash. These days Business School Dean Robert Joss is known to sit down at the keyboard with family and friends for a sing-along of Broadway tunes or Christmas carols, so it was not surprising that Bob Asadorian, MBA ’72, who helps find guest deejays for the campus radio station, asked Joss to do Lunch Special duty one day in February.

Among the songs on Joss’s KZSU playlist was “You Can’t Stop the Beat” from the musical Hairspray, a song his grandkids sing, and “Only You” by the Platters, “a very popular 1950s group when my wife and I were in high school,” Joss said, “and over the years, this has become ‘our’ song.”

The dean’s other selections ranged from the sublime “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot, which he heard Pavarotti sing with the Three Tenors in 1997, to Australian folk songs “Waltzing Matilda” and “I Still Call Australia Home,” which remind him of the country he called home in the ’90s when he was CEO and managing director of the Sydney-based bank Westpac.

Any undergraduate listeners were probably most surprised, however, to learn the history

behind the Dean’s choice of “Rock Around the Clock,” by Bill Haley and His Comets. Before that song came out in the mid-’50s, Joss said, “Adults and children all listened to the same music. The Hit Parade of top 10 songs was something you and your parents would both watch and listen to on TV. After rock ’n’ roll appeared, the parents and kids went their separate ways musically.”