The Day the Music Died

(Originally published March 2, 2009)

1980, Age 8. “Nowhere Man,” by The Beatles, from Rubber Soul.


John Lennon was the first person I was close to who died. My grandfather died two years before Lennon, but I was only six and I didn’t really know him. He lived two hours away and we weren’t close and he had never really confided in me the way John had.


It was the 9th of December, a day I’ll always remember . . . I was sitting at our kitchen table before school and Good Morning America was just starting to come on. My mom, who had already been up for an hour at this point and realizing what the opening story was going to be, turned to me and hurriedly said, “John Lennon was shot last night.” Then I heard the voice of David Hartman, the morning show’s host, say, “John Lennon is . . . uuhh . . . dead.”


It may seem strange to some that an 8-year-old boy should care so much about the death of John Lennon, but I was a huge fan of The Beatles. True, they had broken up two years before I was born, but I could still sing every word to almost every major hit they had. I knew who George Martin was, who Yoko Ono was, who Brian Epstein and Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe were. I knew about The Quarrymen and The Silver Beetles and Hamburg and the Cavern Club and “Paul is dead” and Maharesh Maharishi Yogi and Apple. I learned to be an obsessive music fan at an early age.


When I got to school the first thing I did, of course, was go see the Risucci brothers. Michael was John, Chris was George and I was Paul. We never could find an acceptable Ringo, as Daniels Elementary strangely seemed to have only three Beatles-obsessed 3rd graders in attendance. Naturally, Michael was the most upset. Mr. Durrett, our gym teacher, belittled our grief. It was only the first of many times that I would be mocked by a dumb jock.


The Risuccis were twins. They had moved to Daniels, WV, from Platsburgh, NY, a city I had never heard of and that sounded as foreign to me as Cairo or Bangkok. I never knew why they had moved there with their mother. Their mom was divorced, which in itself was an anomaly in our little community. Coupled with their thick New York accents and their obvious “ethnicity,” the family stood out like a sore thumb. Right away I dug them. They had moved in during our 2nd grade year.


I can’t remember how I learned that they were Beatles lovers, too, nor do I remember if they ever told me how they had come to worship the Fab Four. They liked other music, too. For our 2nd grade talent show in 1979, the year that “Le Freak” and “Do You Think I’m Sexy” topped the charts, they sang “Love Potion Number 9.” I also can’t remember how each of us came to be assigned our Beatle alter ego. During my first year of junior high some years later, several fellow students commented that I looked somewhat like Julian Lennon (he of “Hey Jude” fame), so I don’t think it was that any of us bore particular resemblance to our corresponding Beatle. Certainly the Risuccis didn’t. I think it had something to do with our perceived levels of coolness. John was obviously the hippest Beatle, so it made some sense that Mike would be Lennon. Paul was perceived as the least cool in some way, a more family-friendly Beatle, so I guess it made sense that I would assume that role.


We talked about the group every day at school. We talked about the meanings of particularly obscure lyrics, argued with fellow students about the monumental importance of the band and discussed Beatles’ minutia with a fascination that bordered on clinical obsession. I remember one discussion where we debated the smoking habits of each of the members. Michael concluded that John probably smoked 3-5 packs a day, George 2-3 and Paul a mere single pack a day, confirming Paul’s lower ranking in the hierarchy of hipsters (poor Ringo . . . he didn’t even figure into these discussions).


My own love of the band had come about in a rather curious fashion. After school each day I watched television reruns on WTBS out of Atlanta. I watched Space Giants; Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.; and The Brady Bunch. I also watched The Monkees, one of the finest television shows ever produced. Noting my enthusiasm for the show, one of my older brothers asked if I liked The Beatles. I had never heard them, I said. I was teased for my ridiculous lack of sophistication and judgment. I was six years old.


By the time I had begun 2nd grade I was being paraded in front of relatives to sing “She Loves You” and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” complete with hand claps. I knew that Paul McCartney shared a birthday with my older brother Dusty (June 18th), one day after mine. I knew all about their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and how they took America by storm. I had also deduced that their popularity was somehow responsible for the long bowl-cuts worn by my classmates and me, while my brothers, 13 and 15 years my seniors, had been forced to sport crew cuts through elementary school. When our music teacher, Mr. Greenwald, had the class sing “Octopus’ Garden,” the Risucci twins and I were the only ones who knew every word. We were the only ones who knew any of the words.

When John Lennon died I became obsessed with learning all the details of his murder (or “assassination” as it was dubbed in the media). The night following the murder, there was virtually nothing else on TV, and I sat and watched news program after news program about it with my sister and my babysitter. I sat riveted as I learned about Mark David Chapman and his copy of Catcher in the Rye. The days following would reveal how this man was obsessed with Lennon and how he had stalked him, how he even had an Asian wife just like John. I bought up Beatles’ tribute magazines and my mania deepened.


My father thought John Lennon was a “dope head.” That was at least part of the reason for my love of The Beatles. My parents did not like The Beatles. They were just slightly too old to have been fans the first time around and their tastes tended toward Nat King Cole or Patsy Cline. The Beatles were somehow mine. Though both of my brothers liked them just fine, they were more interested in their collections of Alice Cooper, David Bowie and Santana albums than The Beatles. When I listened to those songs, it was as if they were written for me. This was my first experience with this phenomenon, though not my last. From The Beatles I learned what falling in love would feel like when it happened to me. I learned that all I needed was love. I learned about the pain left when love was gone. I learned about loneliness. The Beatles gave me the emotional archetypes and vocabulary I would need for my adolescent years.


I never outgrew The Beatles, per se, though my obsessions moved on. Junior high school would bring a fixation with Prince and his Minneapolis mob. By the time high school rolled around, my tastes tended toward jazz and I was memorizing the solos on John Coltrane’s Blue Train album the way I had once learned the lyrics to “I Am the Walrus.” When I was in college I learned that everyone my age now loved The Beatles and were as likely to own Revolver as they were Under the Table and Dreaming. Their classic status among a generation too young to know them the first time was sealed by the media’s portrayal of John Lennon as the archetypical outsider. Freshman sported t-shirts that simply said, “Imagine” and hung posters in their dorm rooms of John in his own “I Love NY” sleeveless tee.


I guess it was around this time that John Lennon’s legacy began to trouble me. He had been canonized by the popular culture before he had even been murdered. His death only seemed to heighten the mythology: his status was elevated to rock-and-roll martyr. John Lennon was quoted by some the way others might quote the Bible or Nietzsche. Years earlier John had opined that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ and though there had been a general uproar at the time, he had not been disproved in the intervening years. Now he had his own Judas Iscariot/Pontius Pilate rolled into one in the person of Mark David Chapman.


In the years since his death I had read the occasional article about Chapman on the anniversaries of Lennon’s murder. I had also continued listening to The Beatles and managed to read Catcher in the Rye a few times. I had visited New York and seen the Dakota, the apartment building where John was shot.


The problem is that the Lennon of legend is different than the Lennon of fact. That this should be so is no longer surprising to me, but it was a revelation when I was 19 or 20. The same man who sang, “Imagine no possessions,” lived at one of the most expensive addresses in Manhattan. He sang about peace but a closer examination of his life showed that he was a very angry and sometimes intolerant person. He was neither messiah nor prophet. He was just a rock-and-roll singer and songwriter, albeit a really talented one.


Something no one ever seems to mention in the discussion of the murder is that Mark David Chapman was right. Yes, he was a deranged murderer, but he was pretty much spot on in his assessment of Lennon. I’m sure that opinion is none too popular among Beatle fans, but it seems unavoidable to me. Certainly John Lennon is not the only example, but perhaps the most obvious one. He was the family man who had abandoned his first wife and child. He was the working-class radical (“Viva la Revolución!” he once read into the camera) with servants and limousines. Too late Chapman realized his idol had feet of clay.


Lennon himself may have recognized this tendency toward sanctimony. One of the Beatles’ lyrics I had memorized at a young age John had penned about himself:

“He’s a real Nowhere Man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.”

Grandiose hypocrisy is something we have come to tolerate, perhaps even expect, in these people who live lives larger than ours. We keep our mouths shut as the pop star whose biggest hit celebrated his eternal love for his girl is found cheating on her. We turn a blind eye as rock-and-rollers from around the globe burn enormous quantities of jet fuel to converge on a benefit concert to raise awareness of global warming. We fail to note the irony of gangsta rappers protesting war when their albums celebrate a life of violence against those who have disrespected them. We treat pop stars as oracles but require their ethics to rise no higher than used car salesmen. If Holden Caulfield had been traipsing through Manhattan on a winter’s day in 1980, he may well have lumped John Lennon in with his list of “phonies.” Salinger’s “catcher” wants the role of protecting children. Instead, Chapman shattered my naiveté, and that of the Risucci twins, with five hollow-point bullets from a .38. He is closer to Lennon’s “Nowhere Man” than Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”:

“Doesn’t have a point of view, Knows not where he’s going to . . .”

Isn’t he a bit like you and me?

The Thing About Music

(Originally published March 1, 2009)


Let me say from the outset that I suffer from an extreme bias. I am a musician and a music teacher by vocation, so the idea that I will have any balanced perspective on the subject is completely out the window. The idea that musicians would have a balanced perspective on anything is absurd anyway. Most musicians I have known seem to split equal amounts of time between blowing their horn, listening to little-known records by lesser-known artists and ingesting large amounts of alcohol. They are, as a group, little noted for perspective. Take this Frank Zappa lyric for example:

“Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not
truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is THE BEST . . .”

I suppose that in an ontological discussion I would have to disagree with Frank and say that wisdom, truth and love are all more important than music, though I’d still pick music when I’m rolling down the highway late on a summer evening with the windows down and life feels just perfect. “Beauty,” “truth” and “wisdom” are mainly words after all and you can’t rock to words. And it goes without saying that you’d pick your wife, your mom and your children (though being childless at this point in my life, I do wonder) over music if you had to, but you don’t really have to, do you? I mean, I love my wife more than I love music, but the theoretical masked gunman is never going to break into our house and ask, “Which will it be: music or your wife?” Those types of abstract discussions are of interest in your dorm room late at night, but since college I have had very few interactions with masked gunmen. We live in a really safe neighborhood anyway.


I mean, just listen to the song that’s playing right now: “Walking On Sunshine,” by Katrina and The Waves. My wife doesn’t like it, but there is no accounting for taste. Come to think of it, I don’t think I liked it when it came out. Nevertheless, it is just the sort of thing I want to hear in the above-mentioned scenario involving the highway, car windows and a summer evening. That clever opening line (“I used to think maybe you loved me, now baby I’m sure”), the catchy horn riff, Katrina shouting, “Don’t it feel good?!” It’s just a great song. It makes you want to shout with her, “Yes! Yes! Yes! It DO feel good Katrina!” It’s one of those songs that can completely alter my mood, one of those songs that makes me feel that life is mostly good stuff happening to me and that no matter how crummy work is tomorrow or how much weight I have put on since Christmas or how bust my bank account currently is, at least there is this song!


It can go the other way though. The first record I ever bought by The Kronos Quartet was Black Angels, featuring the piece of the same name by George Crumb. For anyone who has not heard this piece of music, I would highly recommend it, though not if you’re on anti-depressants or suffer from any type of anxiety disorder. Its aural canvas is limited to the sounds four players can make with two violins, a viola and a cello (plus some other minor household items I think), but it sounds like Death and War and Terror and Pain. It’s one of those pieces you just can’t be neutral about. People hate it or they love it. The first time I heard it was with my college roommate and we both thought it was the most frightening thing we’d ever experienced. The thing was, we kept coming back to it and listening again and again and again.


In music school we used to discuss philosophies of music and how different musicians thought about the nature of music throughout history. I was really keen on the whole discussion, though a lot of students thought it was fairly pointless. (“Talking about music,” Louis Armstrong may or may not have said, “is like dancing about architecture.” A lot of musicians feel that way.) There is a lot of talk about music being “the language of the emotions,” which sounds kind of trite and a little like an “inspirational” poster marketed to music teachers, but I guess it’s true.


Supposedly there were a bunch of composers like Arnold Schoenberg and his buddies who thought that music should not be primarily emotional but a purely intellectual exercise. (I say supposedly because I don’t know that I’ve actually read what Schoenberg said on the subject. I’m getting this information primarily from music history professors who weren’t players anyway.) Really though, what’s the difference? Emotion is the product of our minds, just like thought, so I’m not sure it much matters. This false dichotomy between intellect and emotion gets bandied about in music circles quite a bit but it seems that the point is fairly moot. It may be that “Judy Is A Punk” is not particularly “intellectual” in the traditional sense, but The Ramones reach our emotions primarily through the cerebrum, the same way that old Ludwig Van does.


So what is it about music anyway? Assuming that you are a more normal person than me, you probably don’t place quite as high of a value on music as I do, but I would guess you probably have an iPod or a Discman or at least an 8-track machine of some sort. And you probably know the words to “Amazing Grace,” or “Home On The Range,” or “American Pie.” You probably sing in the car or the shower. You probably play an instrument or used to play or wish you did. There are some people who say they don’t like music, but I’ve never met someone who really disliked music. When someone says they don’t like music, they usually mean they don’t like talking about it all the time or they don’t like the music everyone else does or they only like the Stones’ albums from the seventies. I’ve never met anyone who went running from the room when music was played. I’m not saying these people can’t possibly exist, but I’ve taught public school for 12 years and I’ve never run into any.


So . . . what is it about music that we all love? Why can’t we worship or get married or bury someone without it? Why do we need to play it at football games, at parades, in the supermarket, at Starbucks? Why do movies seems so dull without it? Why do millions of teenagers spend every waking moment with their iPods in their ears?


I don’t know. At least, I don’t know the psychological and behavioral motivations behind our music obsession. (I’m reading a moderately interesting book right now – or at least, I was until it got interrupted by a couple of other more interesting books – called This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin that attempts to answer some of these questions. That has to be one of the worst titles I have ever seen, but it’s an interesting book nevertheless.) But there is something there that is more than the sum of its parts, something that is ephemeral and ineffable and transcendent.


Nick Hornby has written about how hard it is to be an atheist while listening to Rufus Wainwright harmonize with his sister, and while I’m not a big Wainwright fan (and I’m not really much tempted to atheism anyway), I think I know what he means. For me those glimpses of the holy happen while listening to the opening arpeggiated tenor saxophone figures on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Or hearing Pablo Casals develop those scales – they’re just scales for crying out loud! – on the Prelude from Bach’s first cello suite. Or when I hear The Soul Stirrers harmony behind Sam Cooke’s soaring tenor on “Touch The Hem Of His Garment” – especially when Cooke sings those slightly raspy (unusual for him, certainly) “Whooaas,” “Ohhhs” and “Iaaaahhhs” at the peak of the melody. Or listening to that final whistle on Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay” that seems to tell us that, like Sophocles and Malcolm Arnold before him, Otis has resigned himself to the cycles of life, that as the Preacher told us there is truly nothing under the sun and even less that can be done about it. That this should be so is not really surprising. These pieces of music at least seem to be about the transcendent or trying to achieve transcendence in some way.


The thing about music, though, is that this is true not just about Trane on A Love Supreme, but its also true about Dizzy Gillespie on “Salt Peanuts.” It’s true about Lee Dorsey on “Ya Ya” (a new favorite song of mine) – the chorus of which tells us, “I’m sittin’ here La La waitin’ for my Ya Ya a-hummm.” It’s true about Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” and David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” and Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” and a million other songs that were never intended to communicate some profound truth. Songs about cars and parties and trains and boys named Sue and yellow polka-dot bikinis all seem to pull the trick. Our minds may not immediately turn to thoughts of eternity and life’s Ultimate Meaning, but there is something in those songs – in all music – that makes us feel more alive. Music makes joy seem more joyful and pain seem more present and desirable at the same time. It crystallizes our emotions into some kind of essence like a really potent, legal drug.


One of the things that is so offensive about music that is truly banal is that it doesn’t seem that hard to work this magic. I’ve heard elementary school kids do that bit of glamour banging five notes on a xylophone and I’ve heard 75-year-old ladies do it croaking their way through “Guide Me Oh Thou Great Jehovah.” It is part of the nature of music itself and even music that is flawed can transport us emotionally above the clouds and the atmosphere. That the Kenny Gs and Clay Aikens of this world seem so terrestrial in their musical trajectories is almost blasphemous.


Susan Langer, a music philosopher, has said that music makes time audible, which I think is something like what I am trying to say. Anyone who has listened to Barber’s Adagio for Strings will tell you that it can make time appear to move almost imperceptibly. Each note seems to pass in slow motion. On the other hand, “ABC” by the Jackson 5 is one the quickest ways to spend three minutes I know. The song is over before you think, “Was that the Jacksons?” Some songs can take you back in time. If I hear “I Wanna Be A Cowboy” by Boys Don’t Cry, in my mind I’m on a bus and in the 8th grade, coming home from a football game. (And yes, I did have to Google that song to find who sang it.) There are even those few songs that give you glimpses of the future. I remember hearing “American Tune” by Simon and Garfunkel when I was only 18 and feeling all the weight and weariness of my life after 40 or 50 years. (The lyric said, “I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees,” and it seemed so true, though everyone I knew was only beginning to dream about their lives.) Almost everyone has had experiences like this. Its at least part of what brings us to music over and over again. To quote Frank Zappa again: “Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.”


Music not only has this effect on time, it can have the same effect on personality. In No Direction Home, Bob Dylan talks about coming across an old 78 of Bill Monroe singing “Drifting Too Far From The Shore.” “The sound of the record made me feel like I was somebody else,” he says. That a Minnesota boy of Armenian-Jewish extraction should so immediately identify with this sound from the Appalachian Mountains might seem remarkable, but lots of us have had just that type of experience. An entire generation of white British teenagers felt like they were black bluesmen from the American South. Ghanaians have a particular affinity for the music of Dolly Parton. Lionel Ritchie is the sound of celebration for thousands in Qatar and Libya.


When I was in 7th grade, my favorite album was 1999. The apocalyptic perspectives of the title track and its anthemic insistence that we party all night in the face of imminent world annihilation seemed to be exactly what I was feeling the moment I heard it. My own experience with partying was limited to the Valentine Dance that year in the gym of Shady Spring Jr. High School (we had a live band!), but I was sure I would be up to it when Mr. Nelson insisted that we dance the night away. Similarly, “Little Red Corvette” spoke to me in a very familiar way, never mind that my experiences with both cars and sex were similarly limited and the synth-funk slow jam was light years away from the Hank Williams and Glen Miller my parents listened to at home. I was certain that if the Artist Then Known As Prince would visit my junior high he would find in me a kindred musical spirit and insist that I go on the road with The Revolution. I even asked my mom if I could buy a purple trench coat to wear to school, but she refused for reasons she has still never made clear.


The long and the short of this is that although I have an admitted bias, I’m pretty sure music is better than just about anything else. Books have some of the same powers that music has, but music can do in three minutes what it takes a book 50 pages to achieve and it doesn’t have to use words to accomplish it. Painting, sculpture, dance, theatre – all of these are great, don’t get me wrong. But one of these – dance – is almost completely dependent on music and another – theatre – is quite significantly improved by the addition of music. Sport doesn’t even begin to approach it.


So put those earphones on, close your eyes and push play. If you don’t know what to listen to, just ask. I have just the record that I know you’ll love.