Click on each title to go to a blog page with audio tracks.
MORNING
Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day, I’ve got a wonderful feeling, everything’s going my way. That was the song I had just composed in a dreamed and which I proudly premiered to my mother when she came to get me out of bed. I may even have been in a crib and she would have had to lift me out, since this was still in the stucco Spanish bungalow from which we moved in my third year. My little room looked out onto the front lawn, on which I was never to step foot since it was just a steep grassy slope down to a rocky precipice ten feet or so above the street, the name of which was Haight Avenue Extension.
It was cruel that everyone else, except for the Luftreichs, who lived across from us, even everyone in stories, lived on a street, a lane, an avenue, a road, or even a way, but never on an extension. And the names of their streets, if not downright jolly, like Cherry Street, were comfortingly evocative, like Collegeview Avenue, or practical, like Main Street or, at worse, meaningless, like Forbus Street. I not only lived on what, for all I knew, was the only extension that was also an address in the entire world, but one which was named after one of the worst things there could be, and it made no difference that I had been told as soon as, probably before, I could grasp the concept, that our street was spelled differently and named after a person. So much the worse for him.
After I had sung my little composition, “How clever of my beamish boy!” is not what my mother said. With the precise honesty which came naturally to her and my father because it was a necessary concomitant of their elevated self-esteem, she told me that I had not made up the song, as I had assumed, but that it often could be heard on the radio. It was not long, an hour or two, before what had been the beautiful morning to a beautiful day became a morning of dismay when, thanks to a disc jockey on WKIP, my mother’s assertion was confirmed. It was my first inkling of the existence of the subconscious, or at least of one particular subconscious, and a cheating one at that.
~~~~~~~
MORNING
Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day, I’ve got a wonderful feeling, everything’s going my way. That was the song I had just composed in a dreamed and which I proudly premiered to my mother when she came to get me out of bed. I may even have been in a crib and she would have had to lift me out, since this was still in the stucco Spanish bungalow from which we moved in my third year. My little room looked out onto the front lawn, on which I was never to step foot since it was just a steep grassy slope down to a rocky precipice ten feet or so above the street, the name of which was Haight Avenue Extension.
It was cruel that everyone else, except for the Luftreichs, who lived across from us, even everyone in stories, lived on a street, a lane, an avenue, a road, or even a way, but never on an extension. And the names of their streets, if not downright jolly, like Cherry Street, were comfortingly evocative, like Collegeview Avenue, or practical, like Main Street or, at worse, meaningless, like Forbus Street. I not only lived on what, for all I knew, was the only extension that was also an address in the entire world, but one which was named after one of the worst things there could be, and it made no difference that I had been told as soon as, probably before, I could grasp the concept, that our street was spelled differently and named after a person. So much the worse for him.
After I had sung my little composition, “How clever of my beamish boy!” is not what my mother said. With the precise honesty which came naturally to her and my father because it was a necessary concomitant of their elevated self-esteem, she told me that I had not made up the song, as I had assumed, but that it often could be heard on the radio. It was not long, an hour or two, before what had been the beautiful morning to a beautiful day became a morning of dismay when, thanks to a disc jockey on WKIP, my mother’s assertion was confirmed. It was my first inkling of the existence of the subconscious, or at least of one particular subconscious, and a cheating one at that.
~~~~~~~
DOATS
Unhappily (I suppose), I have not achieved that pitch of notoriety at which I might be asked by an interviewer from The Paris Review when did I first know I was going to be a writer, a question which, as if not marred enough already by its high-toned banality also carries the stigma of ambiguity, since “to know” drags along behind it a clamorous troop of ill-sorted and sometimes antithetical meanings. Infrequently, perhaps only once, one early Spring afternoon in nineteen-seventy-something, I “knew” with a precision which no lexicographer, much less a pale, crew-cut intern for The Paris Review with a ring through her tongue, could have fathomed, the meaning of “to know,” although I could not have told you afterward what it was.
Thanks to that ambiguity, I am free to assign the honor of that primal moment to any one of a number of different occasions: reading the final paragraph of Stuart Little and not believing at first that I had come to the end of the book and thus exultantly realizing that the writer of a story can do anything he wants; or, as my Uncle Ben read Treasure Island to me when I had the measles, finding myself indentifying with a boy much more heroic than myself; or coming to believe -- this would be much later, of course, and turn out to be unfounded – that writers were guaranteed exciting sex lives. But the first inkling I had of the potentiality of literature was not only before I could make sense of the printed symbols that I knew somehow stood for the words that people spoke, but before it even dawned on me that their intelligibility was based on any sort of order.
The revelation that it is the linear arrangement of words that refine their definitions into meaning, and that this arrangement is flexible, was the most useful lesson I learned from my father’s youngest brothers, Uncle Aaron and Uncle Norman.
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?
The song, Mairzy Doats, already was caught up in my toddler synapses, thanks to its seemingly endless repetition on the seemingly ubiquitous radio, when Uncle Aaron and Uncle Norman sat me down and explained it to me. It took a while, but suddenly – of course! Mares eat oats. Does eat oats. Little lambs eat ivy. A kid will eat ivy too. These four simple sentences were shutters which my uncles flung open to reveal a new landscape – the one we, you and I, inhabit at this moment.
This was a new world – not just a daydream world in which everything one knew, up to that point, was available for arrangement in any way one wished, nor the remembered world in which, for example, my mother admonished me not to eat the clover leaves on the lawn (which I had found to have a pleasant sour taste) because dogs may have wee-weed on them, nor the anticipated world, in which my father would soon come home and divert all the attention from me to him, nor the mythological world where, for example, you knew about the witch before Hansel and Gretel did, nor those flat, colorless, strange worlds in the folio of American drawings, the only book of artworks to be found in the Spanish bungalow on Haight Avenue Extension (probably it had been a gift), of which nothing could be known but what was there before one’s eyes. My uncles’ decipherment of Mairzy Doats opened up to me the verbal universe, a universe of infinite possibilities, in which one could dictate a unique reality by the manner in which one chose to proceed through it. Of course, as my uncles patiently explained, you first had to know what a mare was and what a doe was.
~~~~~~~
Unhappily (I suppose), I have not achieved that pitch of notoriety at which I might be asked by an interviewer from The Paris Review when did I first know I was going to be a writer, a question which, as if not marred enough already by its high-toned banality also carries the stigma of ambiguity, since “to know” drags along behind it a clamorous troop of ill-sorted and sometimes antithetical meanings. Infrequently, perhaps only once, one early Spring afternoon in nineteen-seventy-something, I “knew” with a precision which no lexicographer, much less a pale, crew-cut intern for The Paris Review with a ring through her tongue, could have fathomed, the meaning of “to know,” although I could not have told you afterward what it was.
Thanks to that ambiguity, I am free to assign the honor of that primal moment to any one of a number of different occasions: reading the final paragraph of Stuart Little and not believing at first that I had come to the end of the book and thus exultantly realizing that the writer of a story can do anything he wants; or, as my Uncle Ben read Treasure Island to me when I had the measles, finding myself indentifying with a boy much more heroic than myself; or coming to believe -- this would be much later, of course, and turn out to be unfounded – that writers were guaranteed exciting sex lives. But the first inkling I had of the potentiality of literature was not only before I could make sense of the printed symbols that I knew somehow stood for the words that people spoke, but before it even dawned on me that their intelligibility was based on any sort of order.
The revelation that it is the linear arrangement of words that refine their definitions into meaning, and that this arrangement is flexible, was the most useful lesson I learned from my father’s youngest brothers, Uncle Aaron and Uncle Norman.
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?
The song, Mairzy Doats, already was caught up in my toddler synapses, thanks to its seemingly endless repetition on the seemingly ubiquitous radio, when Uncle Aaron and Uncle Norman sat me down and explained it to me. It took a while, but suddenly – of course! Mares eat oats. Does eat oats. Little lambs eat ivy. A kid will eat ivy too. These four simple sentences were shutters which my uncles flung open to reveal a new landscape – the one we, you and I, inhabit at this moment.
This was a new world – not just a daydream world in which everything one knew, up to that point, was available for arrangement in any way one wished, nor the remembered world in which, for example, my mother admonished me not to eat the clover leaves on the lawn (which I had found to have a pleasant sour taste) because dogs may have wee-weed on them, nor the anticipated world, in which my father would soon come home and divert all the attention from me to him, nor the mythological world where, for example, you knew about the witch before Hansel and Gretel did, nor those flat, colorless, strange worlds in the folio of American drawings, the only book of artworks to be found in the Spanish bungalow on Haight Avenue Extension (probably it had been a gift), of which nothing could be known but what was there before one’s eyes. My uncles’ decipherment of Mairzy Doats opened up to me the verbal universe, a universe of infinite possibilities, in which one could dictate a unique reality by the manner in which one chose to proceed through it. Of course, as my uncles patiently explained, you first had to know what a mare was and what a doe was.
~~~~~~~
DIALECTIC
I very early learned to take disillusionment in stride. By the time the luxurious indolence posited by Row Row Row your Boat was displaced, one day in kindergarten, by the frantic excitement of singing the song as a round, and the premise of life-as-a-dream was dashed in a clamor of “rows” and “gentlys” and “streams,” forcing the mind to focus on words as sounds, sans meaning, I already was resigned to having to endure what promised to be a never-ending series of shattered certainties.
On a Hegelian level, every negation is meant to have its corresponding new and happy actuality. Most of the time, I had a hard time discovering what that was. Not so, however, with the canonic antithesis to the lovely barcarolle of the solitary oarsman. The overturning of the appealing individualism of row your boat merrily, life is but a dream, by the rigid totalitarianism of the canon form was more than compensated for by the pleasure of participating in a cooperative effort to create something beautiful, something merrily beautiful. The deeper meaning of the song may have been lost, but knowing what my duty was (not to begin singing until the children over there had sung “stream” and the children over there had sung “boat” and not to get mixed up) gave a surprising new Aristotelian slant to existence.
There was one problem with Row Row Row your Boat sung as a round: despite its admirable formal structure, it lacked a satisfying dénouement. Either a finis was arbitrarily imposed by gestures from our teacher who, since after all we were only five-year-olds, was never able to coordinate us into a coda that was not ragged and disorderly, or our singing simply petered out as the more easily diverted lost interest.
Here was the other side of dialectic, a hint of the chaos that lay in wait if a synthesis were to fail. It was a fascinating refinement of the dichotomy of form and content that I had discovered in Mairzy Doats.
~~~~~~~
COMMOSHIEIGHNOO
Our family attended Vassar Temple – so named, with the assimilative fervor of its Reformed Jewish founders, after its location on Vassar Street. In the same assimilative mood, its weekly religious instruction for children was called Sunday School.
A Sunday School teacher or the rabbi surely must have passed on to us, as a matter of interest, if not as an element of faith, the literal meaning of the words of the sprightly hymn, Ein Kelohainu. But unlike the happy picture-book animal world that could be discovered in the cubist text of Mairzy Dotes, the revealed mysteries of Ein Kelohainu had no connection to the world I knew or wished for and – to use a favorite phrase of exasperation of my mother’s – went in one ear and out the other.
What Ein Kelohainu lacked in interest and wit compared with Mairzy Dotes, it gained in conviviality. The exuberance allowed – encouraged, in fact – in belting it out was a relatively exciting experience in the diurnal round of middle-class Jewish eight-year-olds in Poughkeepsie in the post-war Forties. Not only did hallooing Ein Kelohainu erase, momentarily, the wary anxiety I usually felt among a group of peers I did not know all that well (my friends’ parents all were Conservative Jews, and thus were members of Temple Beth- El) but, because its language was so peculiar, it was like going crazy in costume.
There was a catch, though. The lunacy broke down and reality glared through when we reached one particular phrase: ch’moshienu. These six syllables marred the mindlessness and gleefulness of the Ein Kelohainu experience because in them I heard the word “commotion.”
“Commotion” was another of my mother’s expressions of exasperation. She was aware that a certain degree of high spirits was a sign of pediatric mental health – an ongoing concern of hers, beset, as she was, with two seemingly deliberately moody children. She used “commotion” to describe a level of physical activity and/or vocalization that was not enough to be forbidden, but was enough to get on her nerves. “That’s enough commotion for now!” she would cry – or something to that effect.
It was so typical of life – even then I knew it – that in the midst of a warbling Dionysian fellowship a twinge of self-consciousness was sure to intrude.
~~~~~~~
OCEAN
Excluding Mother Goose rhymes and such melodic strands of our cultural DNA as The Farmer in the Dell and Row, Row Row Your Boat, whose “life is but a dream” became my introduction to the wisdom of the East (although I did not know it at the time), and Oh What a Beautiful Morning, which somehow sprang from my toddler unconsciousness without ever being learnt, this was the first real song I was taught to sing:
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
My Bonnie lies over the sea,
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me.
Bring back, bring back,
Bring back my Bonnie to me, to me.
Bring back, bring back,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me,
It was a real song in the sense that none of the other children I knew sang it and in the sense that it was my first sophisticated song. It was apparent to me, as it was not, yet, for The Farmer in the Dell and Row, Row, Row Your Boat, that there was something subversive about My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.
My first hint may have been the undisguised glee with which Uncle Norman and Uncle Aaron taught it to me and drilled me in it until I had the confidence to stand up in a room of adults and sing it. My suspicions were confirmed when my uncles taught me an addendum.
My Bonnie leaned over the gas tank.
She lit up a match for to see.
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me,
Realizing that the adults – with the exception of my mother, who was not quite sure of its propriety – preferred my uncles’ addendum was a learning experience.
I had assumed their addendum was of their own invention, but it turns out that it was simply the Poughkeepsie Variant or Hudson Valley Variant or Northeast Corridor Variant of a burlesque devised long ago by some anonymous card. An early example:
My Bonnie leaned over the gas tank,
The height of its contents to see;
I lighted a match to assist her,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me,
My uncle’s version is superior to any of the others. It is the only one which achieves its goal – to deride the sentimentalism of the original – by artfully turning the last couplet of the first stanza into a refrain, and a deliciously gory double-entendre.
At some point, my uncles explained to me what the effect would be of lighting a match while examining a gas tank, and I realized that they’d made the story of poor Bonnie into slapstick. I had not yet been in a movie theater, but I was familiar with the genre from birthday parties. The climax of any birthday party, if the parents were at all up-to-date, was watching the birthday child’s father’s hilarious attempts to operate a Rube Goldberg device known as an 8mm movie projector.
Usually the machine eventually would yield to torturous prodding and mild persiflage and cast a few snagless minutes of the merry mayhem of Felix the Cat, Tom and Jerry or Charlie Chaplin – until the film broke or, even more fun, caught fire – onto a knobby silvery screen which had been erected – with almost as much amusing adult aggravation as accompanied the operation of the projector – at the end of a table cluttered with plates of melting ice cream and gobs of yellow and blue or pink cake.
The great thing about slapstick was that it was humor that could be enjoyed equally by children and adults. In that way, it was the opposite of My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean; there was nothing subtle about slapstick. I did not try to analyze why misrule – the flaunting of both civil, moral and physical laws – could unite a group of children and a group of adults in a common sense of pleasure like nothing else could, but the fact that this was the case was another learning experience.
~~~~~~~
OCEAN
Excluding Mother Goose rhymes and such melodic strands of our cultural DNA as The Farmer in the Dell and Row, Row Row Your Boat, whose “life is but a dream” became my introduction to the wisdom of the East (although I did not know it at the time), and Oh What a Beautiful Morning, which somehow sprang from my toddler unconsciousness without ever being learnt, this was the first real song I was taught to sing:
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
My Bonnie lies over the sea,
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me.
Bring back, bring back,
Bring back my Bonnie to me, to me.
Bring back, bring back,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me,
It was a real song in the sense that none of the other children I knew sang it and in the sense that it was my first sophisticated song. It was apparent to me, as it was not, yet, for The Farmer in the Dell and Row, Row, Row Your Boat, that there was something subversive about My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.
My first hint may have been the undisguised glee with which Uncle Norman and Uncle Aaron taught it to me and drilled me in it until I had the confidence to stand up in a room of adults and sing it. My suspicions were confirmed when my uncles taught me an addendum.
My Bonnie leaned over the gas tank.
She lit up a match for to see.
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me,
Realizing that the adults – with the exception of my mother, who was not quite sure of its propriety – preferred my uncles’ addendum was a learning experience.
I had assumed their addendum was of their own invention, but it turns out that it was simply the Poughkeepsie Variant or Hudson Valley Variant or Northeast Corridor Variant of a burlesque devised long ago by some anonymous card. An early example:
My Bonnie leaned over the gas tank,
The height of its contents to see;
I lighted a match to assist her,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me,
My uncle’s version is superior to any of the others. It is the only one which achieves its goal – to deride the sentimentalism of the original – by artfully turning the last couplet of the first stanza into a refrain, and a deliciously gory double-entendre.
At some point, my uncles explained to me what the effect would be of lighting a match while examining a gas tank, and I realized that they’d made the story of poor Bonnie into slapstick. I had not yet been in a movie theater, but I was familiar with the genre from birthday parties. The climax of any birthday party, if the parents were at all up-to-date, was watching the birthday child’s father’s hilarious attempts to operate a Rube Goldberg device known as an 8mm movie projector.
Usually the machine eventually would yield to torturous prodding and mild persiflage and cast a few snagless minutes of the merry mayhem of Felix the Cat, Tom and Jerry or Charlie Chaplin – until the film broke or, even more fun, caught fire – onto a knobby silvery screen which had been erected – with almost as much amusing adult aggravation as accompanied the operation of the projector – at the end of a table cluttered with plates of melting ice cream and gobs of yellow and blue or pink cake.
The great thing about slapstick was that it was humor that could be enjoyed equally by children and adults. In that way, it was the opposite of My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean; there was nothing subtle about slapstick. I did not try to analyze why misrule – the flaunting of both civil, moral and physical laws – could unite a group of children and a group of adults in a common sense of pleasure like nothing else could, but the fact that this was the case was another learning experience.
~~~~~~~
CHOO-CHOO
From the very start, I regarded music as a pleasure, like food and stories and pissing, and not just another one of those things that were simply there: ordinary events, like the alternation between day and night, ordinary objects, like plates and spoons, ordinary sounds, which were called noise, and rules.
As I grew older I came to appreciate the melancholy beauty of everyday phenomena that, like music, took place during the passage of time: the alternation of day and night, the passing of the seasons, the aging of a favorite article of clothing, and noises, such as the ticking of a clock, tires clicking along a highway’s slabs, the songs of birds and frogs. I even learned to find pleasure in ordinary things, like plates and spoons.
To this day, however, I am unable to appreciate music that sounds to me like deliberate noise. Although there is a niche in my interior zendo for John Cage, the sage, with a few exceptions, I just cannot take pleasure in the amorphous and arrhythmic noise of his and his followers’ indeterminate compositions – nor in the atonal music of the Second Viennese School. I just don’t get it. I simply take it as a matter of faith that it can give pleasure – to other people.
As for rules: by the time Uncle Aaron and Uncle Norman performed Chattanooga Choo-Choo at the top of the stairs to Grandma’s, I already had changed my mind about rules and today maintain what I regard as an exquisite little personal collection of rules. Just one, for example: Do not wear a corduroy shirt if you are wearing curduroy pants.
One day, when I was about eleven, in one of my extended ruminations as I rode my bicycle aimlessly through the quiet streets of the Eighth Ward, I had a long, hard think about rules and their variety. There were arbitrary rules, many of them silly and mean, like not putting your elbows on the table, sensible rules, like traffic lights, and inevitable rules, as in arithmetic. But there was also another class of rules, neither arbitrary, sensible or inevitable, but fitting and pleasurable rules. They could be artfully stretched, as E. B. White did at the end of Stuart Little, but not without tact and delicacy. They were the kind of rules which made the difference between music and noise.
I was taking piano lessons at the time and had been clumsily practicing Czerny’s boring exercises. When I tried to play them, they came out as noise, but when my piano teacher, Mrs. Schwartz, played them, even though they still were boring, they sounded like music. It occurred to me that the rules that governed a work of art could be a source of pleasure in themselves, outside of the content of the work. I would not have expressed it like that at eleven, of course but, for example, it enhanced my fascination with the four bare-breasted mahogany mermaids whose upturned tails supported the marble coffee-table in front of my grandmother’s purple velvet sofa.
My grandmother lived in the upstairs half of a two-family house, and when I was seven, eight, nine years old I spent many happy hours – a cliché, perhaps, but accurate – playing casino with her in the sun porch above Worrall Avenue, the afternoon sun filtering through the bamboo shades onto the green leatherette card table. Time may have tinted rose my memories of those hours with my grandmother, given my impression – and it couldn’t be true, could it? –that it even had been fun getting my arm stuck in the electric wringer of her washing machine.
It was there, at the top of Grandma’s stairs, that the form-content dialectic was deliciously reconciled by my uncles Aaron and Norman with their all singing! all dancing! Chattanooga Choo-Choo.
Capering and warbling in unison, in the striped sleeveless sweater over white shirt which was collegiate de rigueur – it was what was worn under raccoon coats – Norman, still in high school, and Aaron, a Freshman at Cornell, waved their neat little trilbies, which had just reached the apex of fashion – in those days, interestingly enough, that was the point at which a mature style was emulated by the young, instead of vice-versa – collapsed their knees in the most hilarious way and became robot-like pistons with every “choo-choo.” It was just like what people in movies did.
I was then and remain now grateful for the privilege and honor to have been, although just a little boy, chosen as the sole audience for my uncles’ magnificent synthesis of exuberant passion (content), and studied virtuosity (form).
~~~~~~~
PECK
“I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and I love you all to heck,” I sang aloud one afternoon while engaged in one of my favorite pastimes, stepping on ants. This sport’s prime venue, literally my stomping ground, was the flagstone terrace above the sunken driveway, where every morning the milkman came to the kitchen door, recycling (although he had no idea that is what he was doing) the Emmadine Milk bottles, which were oddly shaped, with a bulbous mouth into which could be inserted a small right-angle spoon (provided by Emmadine) to block the milk below so the cream could be pored off, and occasionally the egg man, a gruff, grizzled, disheveled rural Jew, whose dissimilarity to the two types of Jew I was familiar with, the clean, well-scrubbed one who played golf, wore natty clothes and spoke like Jack Benny and the older aspiring middle-class Eastern European one whose English was not so good, tantalized me with the possibility that there might exist a not utterly uncongenial way of being an adult.
What drew me to the song, A Bushel and a Peck, was its wit – the rhyming of “peck” with “heck” was the cat’s pajamas to a five-year-old – but it was its simplicity, the ease with which it could be reiterated, that rocketed it to first place in my hit parade. As for its sentiment, like many, many songs – far too many, it seemed to me – it revolved around a particular grown-up word that eluded decipherment. I wish I could say that it all became clear as my mother suddenly stepped out the back door and I found myself singing it to her, but “I love you, too, my darling boy” is not what she said. Instead, looking off into the distance, absorbed in the problem of how best to deal with what was in store for her, now that she had a son who sang silly songs to himself, she remarked, “That’s nice.” After she returned inside, I resorted to another of my favorite activities, fetching stones from the garden and throwing them over the ramparts of the terrace, while imagining the destruction they were wreaking on the ants on the driveway twenty-feet below.
~~~~~~~
BOLERO
My parents were intelligent, educated, reflective, but not very interested in the arts. They subscribed to The Book of the Month Club, but I don’t think they read the novels it sent them. They just ended up on the bookshelves. (I may have been the only one in the family ever to remove a book from the bookshelves.) As for music and painting, they were cultured enough to recognize the high points of the canon (as it was then) – Beethoven’s 5th, Claire de Lune, The Last Supper, Picasso’s Blue Period – but as far as I know, they never went to museums and seldom attended concerts.
While my friends’ families owned fairly extensive record collections – the Goldbergs owned dozens of Broadway show albums, for example (it still was the 78rpm era, mind you) – we didn’t have very many records. We probably would not even have had a phonograph, but since phonographs were among the products distributed by Electra Supply Co., we had to have one, a top-of-the-line model, and a few records to go with it. Among them was a performance of Ravel’s Bolero, conducted by Arthur Fiedler. It filled three sides of two twelve-inch records. (On the fourth side was Falla’s Fire Dance.)
I first heard Ravel’s Bolero when I was six. It drove me crazy, almost literally. I was fascinated by it, but it was a tormenting fascination, painful and pleasurable at the same time. I wanted to listen to the Bolero again and again, yet it clapped my brain into an excruciating, inescapable – disagreeable, to say the least. Fortunately for my mental health, the phonograph was considered too complicated a device for me to be allowed to operate it on my own.
Evidently, I was not such an outlier when it came to my reaction to Bolero.
From today’s Wikipedia:
The premiere was acclaimed by a shouting, stamping, cheering audience in the midst of which a woman was heard screaming: “Au fou, au fou!” (“The madman! The madman!”). When Ravel was told of this, he reportedly replied: “That lady… she understood.”
When I was seven, I contracted a severe case of measles. I must have been on death’s door – kids occasionally do die of measles – because when my fever was at its worst I was moved to my parents’ room, to my mother’s side of the bed. At night she slept beside me; my father took the chaise lounge. Dr. Rosenberg, usually pretty sanguine, must have conveyed to them that the threat of my measles was dire, otherwise they never would have disrupted the cherished and guarded intimacy of their bedroom life. (My sister and I always had to knock before entering. Often we were turned away and often the door was locked.)
At height of my fever I became delirious. My delirium consisted of hearing in my mind’s ear Ravel’s Bolero, the same agitated melody, again and again, louder and louder, more and more insistent, a torture I could not escape, sending me spiralling down into a clamorous infinity. Accompanying this auditory hallucination was an image, a landscape – not hallucinatory like the music, but a backdrop to it. As Bolero swelled and thundered, three Mexicans on donkeys slowly plodded across a high rickety wooden bridge spanning a deep, steep-cliffed canyon. (I knew they were Mexicans because they wore sombreros and serapes and rode donkeys.)
(This exotic vision was a composite of scenes from cowboy movies and comic books, and from my own secret life as a dashing shooter of bad guys and a rescuer, usually while still on horseback, of pretty girls. This Superman-like transformation was accomplished by buckling on my most precious and talismanic possession: a pair of fringed white leather holsters hanging from a wide white leather belt, in which nested a pair of exquisite long-barreled cap pistols with pearl handles.)
On they plodded, the three Mexicans, hunched over their drooping-headed mounts, never progressing beyond the center of the bridge. Watching how deliberately, stoically, they withstood the surging, maniacal melody, I saw that, unlike the heroism of Gene Autry or Roy Rogers, here was a heroism that was within my capabilities. Here was a kind of courage I could call on to defend myself against such terrors of life as Ravel’s Bolero.
~~~~~~~
CLOCK
The Golden Age begins when you learn that words can represent ideas and that these ideas are familiar to everyone or, at least, to your good friends, who all, for example, see what's funny about a shaggy dog story, and ends with the onset of irrational puberty.
My good friends during the Golden Age, all classmates at Governor George Clinton School, were Eddie, Peter and Steve, and later, wry, shy Mark. We met after school to play card games and board games and word games and finally chess. (Peter and I learned to play chess from Rabbi Winters, when we went to his house for Bar Mitzvah lessons. Needless to say, while we were okay at chess, we fumbled through our Bar Mitzvahs.)
On week-ends three or four of us took bicycle excursions, to the miniature golf course beyond the railway overpass, just past the field where carnivals set up once or twice a year and where I once saw an encampment of gypsies, or to Vassar College, where we enjoyed making pests of ourselves (not that we were delinquents; we knew that three loud, bantering, waggish 10-year olds touring the groves of academe for an hour on their bikes was bothersome enough), or to the old cider mill at the top of the really steep hill on Cedar Avenue which Eddie and Steve could manage to pump their way up but which defeated Peter and me, both of us overweight, who had to walk our bikes for the last hundred yards, with its musty museum of oddities – the most important and prominent of which was a rearing two-headed calf – with its room-temperature cider on the cusp of fermentation and sugary, dust-infused cookies, and with its old guest book opened to a page signed by Vassar student Edna St. Vincent Millay.
If we gathered at my house, we would sprawl around my bedroom and have metaphysical conversations about whether time was the fourth dimension or if anything exists outside our individual observation of it, etc., or play kriegspiel (blind chess, which requires three chessboards, two chess sets and a referee who sits on the bed and keeps track of the moves of the two players, out of sight of each other on the floor on either side of the bed), or fool around with my tape recorder.
An electrical engineer friend of my father’s had given me a professional Ampex reel-to-reel machine. It was about eighteen-by-sixteen-by-sixteen, weighed a ton, and spewed an ozone exhaust that hung in the room for hours after my friends had left. The thin, narrow magnetic tape frequently broke, but could be repaired, painstakingly, with a tape splicer – a small metal guide with a diagonal slit - an exacto knife and special splicing tape, insubstantial and often wayward. Unfortunately, if the tape reel dropped onto the floor and, defying the laws of gravity, balance and entropy, wobbled across the room, upright on its narrow circumference, there was no gadget for untwisting the twenty feet of quarter-inch-wide ribbon of caramel-colored film that trailed behind it. I once tied a pencil to the end of it and dropped it out the window hoping it would just spin its way straight. (Close, but no cigar.)
We would write and record radio plays which, we thought, were the height of wit, and experiment with sound effects, but we never used the tape recorder for music. Music was reserved for Peter’s house, where we lay on the floor in the Rosenbergs’ living-room and listened to records. The Rosenbergs collected classical records, pieces like Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from Mid-Summer Night’s Dream and Prokofiev’s March for Three Oranges that would fit on one side of a 12-inch 78, or Beethoven's Fifth on four records in the sleeves of a thick, heavy album. Then came 33⅓ rpm. The Rosenbergs' first LP acquisition was Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto with Horowitz and Koussevitzky.
We didn't have many records at our house. Steve’s parents had a shelf of 78’s they brought with them when they fled the Nazis, Eddie’s parents collected Broadway shows, but although the large radio console in our den included an elaborate record changer, the only record I can remember being played at our house was Ravel's Bolero.
Everyone had a piano in their living-room, but the Rosenbergs’ seemed to be the only one intended for other purposes than for practicing piano lessons or playing "Chopsticks" and there always was some music open on its music shelf and a few music books scattered on its lid. Once, mysteriously, a book of barbershop quartet arrangements appeared there. Inspired - there haqppened to be four of us there - we chose the easiest, “My Grandfather’s Clock”. Eddie took the melody, Peter and Steve, tenor and baritone, while I sang bass.
We practiced until we thought we were good enough not to be made fun of by our friends and patronized by adults. From there we had planned to move on to a more difficult song, but singing “My Grandfather’s Clock” was so satisfying that we never got around to it, and besides, Mark's parents, always in the avant-garde, had just acquired a wonderful new board game called Scrabble.
If you were to ask me to sing “My Grandfather’s Clock” today, I would sing you the bass line. If you asked me to sing the main melody, I probably could, but I would have to think about it for a moment.
CLOCK
The Golden Age begins when you learn that words can represent ideas and that these ideas are familiar to everyone or, at least, to your good friends, who all, for example, see what's funny about a shaggy dog story, and ends with the onset of irrational puberty.
My good friends during the Golden Age, all classmates at Governor George Clinton School, were Eddie, Peter and Steve, and later, wry, shy Mark. We met after school to play card games and board games and word games and finally chess. (Peter and I learned to play chess from Rabbi Winters, when we went to his house for Bar Mitzvah lessons. Needless to say, while we were okay at chess, we fumbled through our Bar Mitzvahs.)
On week-ends three or four of us took bicycle excursions, to the miniature golf course beyond the railway overpass, just past the field where carnivals set up once or twice a year and where I once saw an encampment of gypsies, or to Vassar College, where we enjoyed making pests of ourselves (not that we were delinquents; we knew that three loud, bantering, waggish 10-year olds touring the groves of academe for an hour on their bikes was bothersome enough), or to the old cider mill at the top of the really steep hill on Cedar Avenue which Eddie and Steve could manage to pump their way up but which defeated Peter and me, both of us overweight, who had to walk our bikes for the last hundred yards, with its musty museum of oddities – the most important and prominent of which was a rearing two-headed calf – with its room-temperature cider on the cusp of fermentation and sugary, dust-infused cookies, and with its old guest book opened to a page signed by Vassar student Edna St. Vincent Millay.
If we gathered at my house, we would sprawl around my bedroom and have metaphysical conversations about whether time was the fourth dimension or if anything exists outside our individual observation of it, etc., or play kriegspiel (blind chess, which requires three chessboards, two chess sets and a referee who sits on the bed and keeps track of the moves of the two players, out of sight of each other on the floor on either side of the bed), or fool around with my tape recorder.
An electrical engineer friend of my father’s had given me a professional Ampex reel-to-reel machine. It was about eighteen-by-sixteen-by-sixteen, weighed a ton, and spewed an ozone exhaust that hung in the room for hours after my friends had left. The thin, narrow magnetic tape frequently broke, but could be repaired, painstakingly, with a tape splicer – a small metal guide with a diagonal slit - an exacto knife and special splicing tape, insubstantial and often wayward. Unfortunately, if the tape reel dropped onto the floor and, defying the laws of gravity, balance and entropy, wobbled across the room, upright on its narrow circumference, there was no gadget for untwisting the twenty feet of quarter-inch-wide ribbon of caramel-colored film that trailed behind it. I once tied a pencil to the end of it and dropped it out the window hoping it would just spin its way straight. (Close, but no cigar.)
We would write and record radio plays which, we thought, were the height of wit, and experiment with sound effects, but we never used the tape recorder for music. Music was reserved for Peter’s house, where we lay on the floor in the Rosenbergs’ living-room and listened to records. The Rosenbergs collected classical records, pieces like Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from Mid-Summer Night’s Dream and Prokofiev’s March for Three Oranges that would fit on one side of a 12-inch 78, or Beethoven's Fifth on four records in the sleeves of a thick, heavy album. Then came 33⅓ rpm. The Rosenbergs' first LP acquisition was Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto with Horowitz and Koussevitzky.
We didn't have many records at our house. Steve’s parents had a shelf of 78’s they brought with them when they fled the Nazis, Eddie’s parents collected Broadway shows, but although the large radio console in our den included an elaborate record changer, the only record I can remember being played at our house was Ravel's Bolero.
Everyone had a piano in their living-room, but the Rosenbergs’ seemed to be the only one intended for other purposes than for practicing piano lessons or playing "Chopsticks" and there always was some music open on its music shelf and a few music books scattered on its lid. Once, mysteriously, a book of barbershop quartet arrangements appeared there. Inspired - there haqppened to be four of us there - we chose the easiest, “My Grandfather’s Clock”. Eddie took the melody, Peter and Steve, tenor and baritone, while I sang bass.
We practiced until we thought we were good enough not to be made fun of by our friends and patronized by adults. From there we had planned to move on to a more difficult song, but singing “My Grandfather’s Clock” was so satisfying that we never got around to it, and besides, Mark's parents, always in the avant-garde, had just acquired a wonderful new board game called Scrabble.
If you were to ask me to sing “My Grandfather’s Clock” today, I would sing you the bass line. If you asked me to sing the main melody, I probably could, but I would have to think about it for a moment.
~~~~~~~
RADIO
The same audio engineer friend of my father’s who gave me my Ampex tape recorder also gave me a Zenith Transoceanic radio, which I kept at the edge of my bedside table, next to my pillow. In the morning I listened to The Breakfast Club with Jack Benny; before dinner, variously Amos ‘n’ Andy, Lum and Abner, Abbott and Costello, Ozzie and Harriet and The Great Gildersleeve, which was my favorite, perhaps because I identified the pompous, loveable water commissioner with the pompous, loveable Major Hoople who warmed my 10ish-year-old cockles daily in a one-panel cartoon in the Poughkeepsie Journal. But at night things got serious. Before going to sleep, I would listen to (these are the ones I can remember) Suspense, Inner Sanctum, The Thin Man, Boston Blackie, Counterspy, Dragnet, FBI in Peace and War and Gang Busters.
Then, around eleven o’clock, the radio world changed. The syndicated dramas finished; most local stations closed down for the night. Along the uncrowded airwaves, which anyway were stronger at night than in the day, came AM stations from as far as 1,000 miles away, from Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Canada – Ottawa and New Brunswick – and, with the strongest and clearest signal of all, Wheeling, West Virginia.
The Zenith received short wave but, once the novelty wore off, the only things I could ever find on short wave that I wanted to listen to were classical music and BBC quiz programs. The most common short wave fare was one side of an extremely tedious ham radio conversation (“I know what you mean” [prolonged static] “Yeah” [prolonged static] “Yeah, I went up there the other day” [prolonged static] “That’s what I thought” [prolonged static]), or someone reading a never ending list of numbers, or news and weather in a foreign language, or one of the Soviet satellites’ English language services, whose enticement as forbidden fruit soon wore off thanks to its deadeningly boring content. When I did find some classical music or an interesting BBC program, it invariably would fade out and I’d have to get up on an elbow and fiddle with the tuning knob.
WWVA from Wheeling seemed to be a one-program station, but that one program was a humdinger: Grand Ole Opry. I didn’t realize it back then what great music I was listening to, since I disdained all kinds of popular music. (I have no idea where I picked that up that attitude. Perhaps I was emulating my father, who became subtly patronizing – so subtly that only my mother and I could detect it – when he was prevailed on by the Goldbergs or the Rosens or the Mannings to listen to the latest Broadway show or the new Guy Lombardo album.) Even though I could be riveted by a banjo or fiddle solo on Grand Ole Opry, I regarded bluegrass and country music as a whole as beneath me. I was an ignorant snob then, instead of the informed snob I am today.
It was not the music that kept me tuned in to the Grand Ole Opry, it was its foreignness. Foreign language stations were just marathons of gobble-de-gook with occasional half-recognizable words. Wheeling, West Virginia, was as foreign as Paris, except they spoke English. The jaunty twang of the announcer and the musicians, who seemed to love to talk as much as play music, and the hillbilly jokes, gave me the thrill of listening to aliens while understanding everything they were saying.
Nothing on the CBC led me to understand Canadians like the Grand Ole Opry let me understand West Virginians. The CBC’s classical music was introduced by announcers with the same plummy American accents I could hear when my father took me for lunch or an ice cream soda in one of the luncheonettes near the courthouse, where lawyers and lawyers’ secretaries would go.
A local station, WKIP, went through spates of trying to schedule an hour of classical music in the evening, but the CBC’s classical music program was far more sophisticated, with symphonies by Sibelius, piano sonatas by Prokofiev, concerti grossi by Corelli, 18th century wind quintets, etc. (Thankfully, the CBC then was not yet required to broadcast 50% Canadian content.)
One night, the CBC outdid itself in sophistication by playing a long, fascinating, outlandish piece of music, the most wonderfully eccentric and unusual sounds I had ever heard. I had no idea even what instrument I was listening to, although it was clear that it was plucked. The music itself was incredibly intricate and, unlike the classical music I listened to, playful and intimate, conversational.
I missed its introduction and could not make heads or tails of what the announcer said when it was over, and for years I wondered what it was that I had heard until, in the early ‘60’s, someone played me a Ravi Shankar record. I finally discovered the beauties of bluegrass a few years later, when I briefly mistook a bluegrass banjo solo for part of a raga gat.
~~~~~~~
MADRIGAL
One day in the early summer of 1955, when a short cloudburst was followed, as cloudbursts often are, by a clear blue sky and sunshine sparkling in the droplets left behind, Lisa Ress, Don Devan and I abandoned a gathering at the Eisners to go for a walk.
At the bottom of the long flight of steps from the Eisners’ front porch to Adriance Avenue, we turned left, then left again at Lockerman Avenue where, talking of Michelangelo, etc., we plunged into the Eighth Ward. There we ambled past clipped hedges framing lawns and rose gardens glistening like English china, and high fences of rustic slat over which hung branches of Japanese exotics whose damp white and pink blossoms brushed our heads and left the occasional petal in our hair.
A few puddles had formed in the declivities of the paving stones. We only had to lengthen our stride to avoid them. One puddle, though, Don failed to notice.
My level of sophistication having reached the level where a juvenile remark, well-chosen and well-timed, could pass as wit, in a mocking sing-song I intoned,
Donny stepped in a puddle
In a burst of inspiration, Lisa joined in, in tune, trilling,
Stepped in a puddle puddle, stepped in a puddle puddle
Dropping a couple of octaves, I chanted
Puddle puddle, (and a fifth lower) puddle puddle.
Puddle puddle, puddle puddle.
Then Donny’s voice rang out,
Donny stepped in a puddle, he stepped stepped stepped
Soon—soprano, tenor, bass-baritone—with “Donny stepped in a puddle” as our text, we were improvising a gleeful intricate madrigal (redressing, at last, the neglect of the form by J. S. Bach).
Passing around the melodic line—Lisa warbling it, Don pouring it out with the eloquent conviction of a heldentenor (heroic indeed, since he soldiered on with his right foot soaking wet), I flinging it upwards from a stentorian rumble to leap and dance like an acrobatic clown—we paced down Lockerman and up Willow Bend, tossing it back and forth with increasing rapidity on Whitehouse for a virtuosic coda, then bringing it back to the tonic and close harmony as we turned into the Eisners’ driveway and finally—aware that we had had an experience that would never be repeated—finishing in a soft, wistful minor chord.
For many years I would refer to those three quarters of an hour as the happiest moments of my life. Then, noticing a shimmer of consternation on Nelly's face as I rhapsodized about that summer afternoon in 1955, I realized I would have to refine my terms: if not necessarily the happiest, they were the most purely happy moments.
No joy can compare with what I felt on seeing my daughter enter the world, I told Nelly, but in the background lay other feelings, more complex; I had just become a parent.
The dark seams of time lurk within virtually all of life’s moments of great happiness. The joy of “Donny stepped in a puddle” was unalloyed; without the taint of the looming future and inevitable mortality, those moments had been pure gold from Mt. Olympus, showered down on Lisa, Donny and me in honor of our youth, if nothing more.
~~~~~~~
WEOK
When I was twelve years old my father bought me a radio station. To put it another way: My father would not have bought WEOK in 1949 if he had not thought it was a good investment, but a radio station was not the kind of thing my father usually got involved in. He probably would have passed, when the opportunity arose, if he had not been worried about his goofy, balloon-shaped son who did not seem to possess even the iota of ambition needed for it to dawn on him, as it eventually would dawn on any normal insufferable lay about with a family business awaiting him, that he is damn lucky, and whose most marked idiosyncrasy was, late at night, when he should have been asleep, at a volume so low that he thought no one else could hear, he would listen to the radio.
After my father became a part-owner of WEOK, on Saturday or Sunday afternoon we often dropped in at the studio, the second floor, fitted out in sleek high-tech, of a small office building next to the newspaper, the Poughkeepsie New Yorker, from which WEOK rented roof space for its aerial. It was a perfectly normal and natural father-son week-end excursion. Before WEOK, we had been at a loss for them. My father hoped that on one of these visits something would catch and I would take more of an interest in WEOK than simply congratulating myself that I was standing at the very inner-sanctum from where Harold Henning, the station manager, behind the soundproof glass, read the Saturday Rhinebeck and Red Hook News Roundup.
It was my father whose curiosity and intellect was aroused by WEOK, and he soon learned enough to talk to Henning about frequency interference, Nielsen, and ten second spots. The furthest my own mild interest went was to fantasize having a radio program with Hank Levin and Eddie Horowitz on which we would tell jokes and play Stan Kenton, Leadbelly and Spike Jones.
It was a fantasy that sputtered briefly to life in 1954, when Hank Levin and I were offered a fifteen minute radio show on WKIP. Hank was a hustler and somehow had cornered the manager of WKIP – at a wedding, or in the College Hill Golf Course Clubhouse, or on Bring Your Son to Rotary Day – and sold him on the show.
WKIP was looking for an opening into the teen-age market. The Sam and Hank Show (I can’t remember what it really was called) was meant to be a high school gossip show, interspersed with music. How out of touch the generations had become, even back then, can be measured by the fact that the grown-ups who ran WKIP thought that Hank and I in any meaningful way resembled Poughkeepsie’s average teen-ager, or could represent him or her in any way. For our first show, our “gossip” was a precis, by Hank, of the life of one of his Jewish heroes, Harry Houdini. (Mickey Mantle, Oscar Hammerstein and “Slapsie” Maxie Rosenbloom were others.) My contribution was to cue up the next record and introduce it in a tone as self-assured, urbane and casual as possible – a hair-raising endeavor.
Hank didn’t care what records I played, as long as one of them was “Bali Hai”. He recently had seen South Pacific with his parents. After I got “Bali Hai” out of the way, as a sop to the hoi-polloi, I played “Hernando’s Hideaway” which, in my opinion, rose above the usual pap one heard on the radio. I ended our quarter-hour with Tom Lehrer’s Fight Fiercely, Harvard. Few people had heard of Tom Lehrer then; I had to bring my own record.
As we came out of the sound booth, the station manager was standing at the door. He could not hide his distress, although I think he tried to. He told us not to come back next week; or ever.