13. Folk's Music
There was plenty of music in the house...not necessarily the kind I would need.
This is an ongoing story, meant to be read in order. If you’re just arriving here for the first time, please start at the beginning by following the index.
Our small den is the family’s go-to place after dinner. We usually watch TV there, but sometimes, like tonight, we listen to music.
Amy, David, and I are maniacally dancing with Dad to “The Twist,” Chubby Checker’s 1960 hit. Even though it’s 1967, the tune still feels like a hit. It’s my dad’s kind of pop music—and he has an innate feel for its swing-shuffle groove. Not me. I’m more than a bit awkward. Can’t coordinate my twisting hips and feet.
“You’re such a klutz, Peter,” my brother teases. I don’t argue—I’m barely able to keep my balance.
“Yeah, you look like you’re going to fall on your butt!” Amy sticks out her tongue and snarls.
Mom leans in the doorway, shakes her head, and laughs.
The music emanates from a dark brown stereo console that takes up the better part of an entire wall. The center top opens to a turntable. Beneath that, two accordion doors slide open, revealing a shelf with a tube amplifier and a tuner. The amplifier has no top—to keep it from overheating?—which makes it look delicate, yet forbidding. The tubes radiate an orange glow that pulsates with the music. I sometimes stare at the amp as I listen to music, transfixed by its dark light as if it’s an alien presence. The LP records and a few 78s are in the compartment below. On either side, hidden behind patterned grills, are the large speakers.
A black-and-white TV sits on its stand, perpendicular to the console. In two years we will be allowed to stay up late to watch the live broadcast of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon.
* * *
My parents’ record collection ran the gamut—from classical, with a heavy emphasis on the three Bs, to pop/rock and folk: Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Rolling Stones, The Weavers, Woody Guthrie, and his young protégé, Bob Dylan.
Having fairly catholic musical tastes, Mom attended plenty of live concerts, either alone or with my dad. She went alone to see Dylan a year before, in 1966, right before he took an eight-year sabbatical from performing. My mom told my grandfather that she was going to the concert.
“Dylan . . . Dylan? Oh, you mean the Zimmerman boy from Hibbing!”
As the president of B’nai B’rith, my grandfather knew Dylan’s father, Abraham (Abram) Zimmerman, who had been head of the Jewish organization’s local chapter in Hibbing, Minnesota. His son, Robert Allen Zimmerman (aka Bob Dylan) became a staple on the cassette player during long family car trips to Colorado and the Southwest in the mid-70s. When Dylan resumed touring with The Band in 1974, we all attended his debut return concert at the Chicago Stadium.
Music was very much part of our family life—as were sports and politics. But unlike the latter two, which we all actively participated in, music was regarded as a spectator sport. Like my mom going alone to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Friday afternoon concerts or the whole family going to hear Pete Seeger performing at an outdoor folk festival.
Music of that level was outside of us, left to the professionals.
So Amy and I practiced and took private music lessons in the living room. We all played records in the den. Yet, with the two rooms only thirty feet apart—live music in the living room and the pre-recorded music in the den—it was all completely unconnected, worlds apart. And that’s how it stayed. Amy and I weren’t playing duets like the Mozart kids, Wolfie and his older sis, Nannerl. We weren’t jamming like the Marsalis family in jazz, collaborating like the Gibbs brothers of pop. None of these forms of musical communication would have even occurred to us.
Which was fine, of course. Loving music and having a talent to create it at a high level are different things. But when I was older—and in the process of becoming a professional musician—I’d worry about that lack of musical talent and creation in my immediate environment, family, school, the larger community.
My parents had many friends, but only one musician among them, a harpist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. So I basically lacked models of how professional musicians played and lived—though the latter may have been a good thing.
Was my not having a native musical community somehow hampering my musical development?
Was it making my connection to the music I played somehow less organic, less authentic because I didn’t come from the communities where that music originated?
Would this lack of an intimate cultural connection make me forever an outsider to my own music?
Eventually, I sought out creative musical communities to help fill these perceived holes. But until then—well before I came to understand that music would be my lifelong mission—I simply absorbed all of the music that was there, rather than worrying about what wasn’t.
I remember when I was four, we went to see the film version of The Sound of Music with Julie Andrews. At home, we often sang along with the record. We all loved the music, but couldn’t help poking fun at some of the overly dramatic tunes, like the stentorian “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.”
The first pop songs I remember connecting to were Petula Clark’s “Downtown” (1965) and Simon & Garfunkel’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” (1966). The pop music of that time, into the early 1970s, made a lasting impression on my writing and soul. Paul Simon—who I consider to be one of the master songwriters of all time—is among my musical heroes and an important influence on my songwriting style.
But strangely, my first musical obsession wasn’t pop, rock, or folk. It was classical march music. Well, not so much the genre itself, as a particular album of classical march music in my parents’ collection. It was comprised primarily of marches by Russian composers, like Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev. For whatever reason—the insistent march rhythms, Tchaikovsky’s always colorful orchestration—I went nuts over that record.
When I wore it out from repeated playings, I demanded a replacement. My dad searched high and low, but never could find the same LP. The cover of the one I loved was white with elegant black-and-gray scriptwriting, framed by embossed gold fleur de lis figures. Part of listening to an LP, as everyone knows from that time, was the physical presence of the cover itself, which became inseparable from the music. So when my dad couldn’t find the same LP, he came home with what he thought would be a suitable replacement. But the cover and album were all wrong. The cover had a close-up photo of the queen’s guard on the front, all gaudy red and black. And the music was worse. Cloying nationalistic anthems, like “God Save the Queen,” arranged bombastically for brass band. I hated it and threw a fit.
As I later began to forge my artistic identity, I liked to think these initial impressions—these fledgling musical obsessions—had some deep significance, a magical meaning. Collectively, they should form a kind of leitmotif that keeps showing up in my later work, subconsciously driving the creative process. A musical memory that I keep mining, unearthing like an archeological dig that reveals the deepest meaning of me. I’d like to think that because it would give me a sense of musical grounding where there otherwise may be a musical abyss or infinity, an unending, overwhelming array of choices. But lacking an immediate musical community as I did, I’d later cling to the musical remnants of my past, trying to give them special meaning and make them my roots.
* * *
Twisting motions tend to make me dizzy. I have vertigo issues. Even swinging on a swing makes me nauseous. So “The Twist” isn’t an ideal dance for me. Nonetheless, we’re all into it, so I go all out. But near the end of the tune—for the first and only time in my life—I black out and faint.
Many years later, a doctor will tell me my head is too big. Its weight is compressing the vagus nerve in my neck, causing intense dizziness at times. I assume he’s speaking of the physical size of my head.
This really brings back old memories. How did you know I went to the Dylan concert alone? The grandpa story is, of course by now apocryphal.
I loved Downtown and Feelin' groovy and can hear them both in my head right now.
You do actually appear to have a big head.....
So sorry we don't have musical soulfulness, but we appreciate music in many and various ways.