Over the last 80 years, my parents and my grandfather combined have given by my estimate over half a million private music lessons (conservatively: my dad at 110 lessons a week x 45 weeks x 45 years = 222,750 lessons, plus my mom at 40 lessons a week x 45 weeks x 45 years = 81,000 lessons, plus my grandfather at 120 lessons a week x 45 weeks x 40 years = 216,000 lessons, for a grand total of 519,750 lessons. The actual total is probably a lot higher. It boggles the mind.). Sharing not merely the physical and mental skills involved in playing the violin, viola, and piano, these 3 people have produced many fine professional players, but also, more importantly, a legacy of thousands of students who, whatever level of proficiency they attained on their instrument, have a deep love, informed respect, and rich appreciation of music which informs their lives every day. After posting, a few weeks back, the first section of this little family musical autobiography-- which dwells some on the darker parts of my grandfather's musical history and legacy-- a former student of his wrote to me and pointed out that Sam was anything but a dark figure to his students. Rather, my grandfather was a warm and bright musical light who passed on his rich knowledge and deep love of music in general and the violin in particular to thousands of students over many decades. While he passed this gift on to my dad and ultimately to myself with some complex baggage attached, pass it on he did, and music is the gift which, once received, enriches your life every single day you are here on this planet. My parents and my grandfather are the Givers of this gift. Each spring, my parents hold a recital for any students in their class who volunteer to perform. Recitals regularly feature students ranging in age from 5 or 6 on up to senior citizens and people who have been playing less than a year to people with jaw dropping skills who are receiving conservatory scholarships. The events are celebrations not only of these people’s growth as players but also of their appreciation for music in general, and for the Great Gift of all of this that my parents bestow upon everyone in their ken.
Into this family, I was born...
THE
PRODIGAL SON
Like my father,
I was sent to my grandfather for lessons at the age of 4 ½ and told that I
would be a violinist like my father and his father before him. It didn’t work out that way. I did not practice every day. In fact, I never practiced, ever. I wanted to play baseball, not Bach or
Beethoven. I went each week to my
grandfather’s studio utterly unprepared for my lesson. I was terrible. I sat ignominiously at the back of the 2nd
violin section of every orchestra I ever played in and was lucky they didn’t
stop me at gunpoint as I slithered in to rehearsals, and I was lucky my
grandfather never smashed a violin over my head or stabbed me in the heart with
a bow. Certainly, apart from his own
short-circuited performing career, I was my grandfather’s Greatest
Disappointment. Indeed growing up, I
resented music and the way it dominated my family’s lives. At one point, assigned a musical part in a
Cub Scout skit, I pitched a fit, shouting, “I hate music! Everything in this house is music, music,
music, and I’m sick of it!” I was given
a different part in the skit. However,
unbeknownst to me, I had received a gift from which there was ultimately no
escape.
Although
as a boy, I wanted no part of the world of classical music in which my parents
moved, in the 6th grade I took a shining to Elton John. Taking some birthday money to the record
store, I bought a cassette of Caribou, featuring “The Bitch is Back” and
“Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” which I played endlessly on a portable
cassette player which had also been part of the birthday package. From that moment until this day, pretty much
every spare cent I have had has gone towards my personal music library. Despite my insistence that I was musically
overloaded, oversaturated, sick of it, the powerful combination of musical
genetics and musical surroundings in which I had been conceived and raised had
taken hold. I blasted the hell out of
“Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting” and “Crocodile Rock” on that little
cassette player, I plunked out pop melodies, one note at a time, on the piano
by ear, and I drummed to tunes in my head on the desktop at school incessantly
(at one point, Doug Smith, assigned to the desk next to me, reached over, grabbed
my arm, and said, with murder in his eye and voice, “If you don’t stop tapping
on that desk, I’m gonna hafta kill you”). By 7th
grade, having already amassed a hefty box full of cassettes by Elton John,
Barry Manilow, and other gooey popstars of the mid-70s (yes, Barry Manilow—my
dad had played for him and gotten me in to the show. Shut up.), I demanded that if my parents were
going to make me continue violin lessons (they were), that I also be allowed to
learn the guitar. They acceded. At the age of 12, I got a cheap nylon string
guitar and was sent, of course, to private guitar lessons at a nearby guitar
store.
While
I never, ever practiced the violin (indeed it rarely left its case at any time
other than at my weekly lesson with Sam), I have played, practiced, and / or
performed on the guitar pretty much every fucking day of my life since the age
of 12. Moving quickly beyond the gooey
pop of Elton John and Barry Manilow into meatier territory, I was soon picking
out Led Zeppelin licks by ear (yes, “Stairway to Heaven,” but also “Misty
Mountain Hop” and “Whole Lotta Love”).
By high school, I had also found my people: one night I went for a
sleepover at the house of my new friend Brook who, that night, introduced me to
the wild art rock musics of Yes, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, the
heavy metal poundings of Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and AC/DC, and the
experimental sonics of Pink Floyd, Robert Fripp, and Brian Eno. The world suddenly exploded with
possibilities for musical expression. I
didn’t realize it, wouldn’t have formulated or articulated the idea in this way
until I was much older, but sitting there on the floor wedged between two
stereo speakers spinning vinyl, I had found my religion, the nexus of my
spirituality, the place I went and still go when I was and am lost, my bible and mode of
prayer. My spirit and soul have lived
there ever since. Music people—musicians
and the folks who troll record store racks—were
and are my people, and as I learned to spot ‘em, I connected with more
and more of them, and they quickly expanded my horizons to include John
Coltrane’s jazz, David Grisman’s Dawg Music, and much much much more.
And my
guitar playing took off. I scraped
together enough money for a cheap Les Paul copy and was soon picking out not
only lead licks and melodies but thick riffs and chord changes by ear. My parents, classical musicians trained to
play written music, didn’t understand: how did I know what to play if I didn’t
have the music? Blessed with their
musicians ears, marinated my whole life in piano notes and chords, and reaping
ironic benefits from the years spent hacking away on a stringed instrument once
a week at my grandfather’s studio, I just listened, heard the intervals, and
played. The private guitar lessons helped, too,
but mostly I learned to play by sitting in my room with the guitar and
my record collection. I played in a
heavy metal band (Manitcore) that was awful—our drummer couldn’t keep time and
I didn’t sing so much as screeched, but we had a hell of a lot of fun. By the time I graduated from high school, my
musical tastes cut a huge swath—encompassing all varieties of rock and roll,
jazz, and avant-garde music, and had even expanded enough to now include a
powerful appreciation for the classical music of my parents and their musician
friends.
In
college, seeking to cut an artistic and intellectual figure on campus, I
explored jazz more deeply—the big band swing of Basie and Ellington, the fusion
explorations of Pat Metheny, the free form odysseys of Keith Jarret, the
bebop and small combo improvisations of Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk. I have often joked that my undergraduate
degree should have been embossed by the local jazz club—the now defunct
Nature’s Table—rather than by the University of Illinois. Also cultivating a
hippy-dippy strain, I sold my Les Paul copy in favor of a steel string Alvarez
acoustic, suitable for strumming Grateful Dead tunes on the quad. I didn’t have the music theory or technique
to play most of the jazz I listened to on the guitar, but I could knock out a
Dylan or a Dead tune quite nicely, thank you.
A SLAP
IN THE FACE
Nominally,
I studied literature and creative writing in college with the goal of becoming a high
school English teacher. One night, trying to play the part of the
Literary Dude, I went to an open-mic poetry reading at the Nature’s Table. I didn’t have any of my own poetry to read (which
shoulda told me something right there), but the previous day in a poetry workshop class, a girl
had shared a poem she had written which really floored me.
I read it aloud at the open-mic, and although I attributed it to her (I
didn’t pretend I had written the thing), I read the poem without her permission
and without her even being there.
Thinking she would be flattered, I told her I had done this the next
day. She slapped my face so hard you
could see the shape of her fingers on my cheek.
Reading the shock and confusion on my face, she quickly apologized and
took me out for a cup of coffee to explain her rage. She explained that she didn’t have a choice
about writing poetry— that poems just came out of her without her control and
that they were almost like body parts in that regard, and so reading something
that she had written in public without her consent had been like showing people
a picture of her naked without her consent.
Thus the slap. While this was NOT
my relationship with poetry, a flash of obvious insight did lead to the realization that this was essentially my
relationship with music—that songs played in my head constantly whether I
wanted them to or not, that I sat in class unconsciously fingering guitar
licks, that I banged on desks and hummed incessantly, whether I wanted to or
not. I had no choice in the matter, but
that as a happy cause and effect of this uncontrollable drive I had solid
guitar chops, a great ear, an impeccable musical pedigree, an impressive
knowledge and a record collection documenting a huge array of music, and I
loved music more than anything else in the world. Although I had, as I say, nominally been studying literature, really, I had been studying music at college and my entire life… and yet something was
missing.
For
many reasons—most lying just barely under the surface of the above narrative—
and despite the fact that I knew that really in the end nothing mattered to me
as much as music, I lacked the guts and the confidence to take myself seriously
as a musician. I didn’t believe that I
had the ability to make some kind of career out of my skills and passion. No one had ever told me I couldn’t be a
musician, but my own lack of discipline as a child and my failure to
recognize and give serious credence to a muse that was clearly calling to me as
a teenager and young adult left me watching the train pull away as I entered
adulthood. The Depression had cheated my
grandfather, my grandfather had cheated my dad, and I have cheated myself out
of what each of us might have been.
So it
goes...
No comments:
Post a Comment