Surf's Up

The month of September is at my doorstep, but the summer is still trying to suck every last drop of life blood out of us, like a crazed vampire who doesn't know when to stop draining its victim.  Almost imperceptibly, the great wheel of the seasons is turning with tantalizing slowness, and the sun continues its languid, snail-like journey towards the south part of the sky.  I leave my weekly aerobics class at approximately the same time, 6:50pm, and I can tell it's getting a tiny little bit darker each time.  Used to be I would walk out of the gym into the bright sunlight of an early evening, but now the sun is hovering just above the western horizon, sinking a little more each day.  The equinox is about three weeks away, and before long I will exit the gym to a sky devoid of sunlight..

I so love autumn because it has always been a time of reflection and contemplation, a time to consider what has been done so far this year, and plan for the long cold winter nights.  Everything seems richer and more colorful; the air will soon carry a touch of chilliness in the morning, and there will be a fragrance that speaks of the harvest and coming-of-age, of promises fulfilled and lessons learned.  The nighttime sky, always an indication of things to come, shows the Scorpion slinking low across the south toward the faintly glowing western horizon, and gallant, regal Pegasus, the celestial flying horse, making a powerful leap into the eastern sky, taking its rightful place of honor in the starry firmament.

In the coming months, the Scorpion will disappear in the west just as Orion the Hunter throws his leg up over the eastern mountains and hoists himself sideways into the sky, his faithful dog beside him and Lepus the celestial rabbit underneath him.  The Scorpion and Orion are locked in a death pursuit, each chasing the other but never catching up.  Scorpion wants to sting Orion with its glittering tail, and Orion wants to kill Scorpion with his club.  They've been doing this for billions of years and will probably continue for billions more. Such is their fate, both of them hopelessly joined in titanic struggle that will never be resolved.  Orion will rise higher in the southern sky until around the winter solstice, when Orion will take his rightful place as Lord of the Sky, glistening in the cold, deep winter night, Master of Heaven and Earth, surveying his kingdom.  The Rabbit will still be underneath him, right above Columba the Dove.  And very late at night, right around the winter solstice, you will spot the star Canopus, the harbinger of spring, skimming barely above the southern deserts and wildly twinkling like an over-caffeinated, multicolored strobe light.

I have been listening to a lot of music from the 1960s recently.  XM satellite radio in my vehicle, along with the music channels on DirecTV, serves up an endless stream of great tunes from that amazing decade.  Some of the music still sounds incredibly fresh and new, as if recorded just last week.  The music and the vocal harmonies of a lot of the groups were startlingly complex and intricate.  Looking back over four decades, I have a new appreciation for the achievements of bands like The Mamas and The Papas, Spanky and Our Gang and the glorious "Jersey Boy" pop of the Four Seasons.  Even shallow contrivances like The Cowsills, a musical family whose members ranged from youngsters barely out of the toddler stage to the surprising youthful and hip (for the 60s) mother, recorded an amazing song called "The Rain The Park and Other Things."  The Cowsills were a manufactured pop group, a precursor to the ubiquitous "boy bands" of the 80s and 90s, and their short-lived success degenerated into a series of acrimonious lawsuits which ended up tearing the family apart.  Besides the reign of brash, revolutionary groups like The Beatles and the Jefferson Airplane, the 60s also saw the dawning of the singer-songwriter era with geniuses like Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell, whose brilliance would continue into the new millennium. 

Sure, there was a lot of crap music from that era, something that is inescapable no matter which decade you examine.  The "bubblegum" music craze was particularly obnoxious, and unabashedly phony studio groups like "The Archies" and "The 1910 Fruitgum Company" sold millions of annoying records.  Reflecting the cultural war at the time, a lot of people snapped up faux-patriotic potboilers like "The Ballad of the Green Berets" by SSgt. Barry Sadler (1966) - and on the other end - whiny, overwrought polemics like "Eve of Destruction" by Barry McGuire (1965).  But all that was counterbalanced by Motown, the early Beatles, and the whole San Francisco psychedelic era, and those are the musical genres with real creativity, and real staying power.

Also central to the 60s sound were the Beach Boys, whose music and sophisticated vocal arrangements are still universally regarded as the best of the best.  Brian Wilson's perfectly crafted masterpieces such as "Good Vibrations," "Wouldn't It Be Nice," and the shimmering, transcendent "Surf's Up" are unforgettable.  The Boys, along with lesser lights such as Jan and Dean, created the entire California youth scene, an eternal playground full of fast cars, surfing and beautiful girls in bikinis frolicking on a golden beach in an endless summer (recently given a garish, playfully hallucinogenic update by Katy Perry in her "California Gurls" video).  As someone just entering their teenage years, I was completely captivated by this perfect vision of a happy, carefree world drenched in lemon-yellow sunlight where you didn't have to work, and the biggest problem you had to worry about was catching the perfect wave.  Growing up as I did in a gritty steel-mill town near Pittsburgh, life could get oppressively dull and dreary.  The nearest body of water was the dirty Allegheny river which absent-mindedly meandered nearby, definitely not conducive to surfing.  The "beach" (derisively called the "Polish Riviera") consisted of a tiny strip of land on the other side of the river made up of smooth, round river rock, which was incredibly uncomfortable to walk or lay on.  Wintertime could be long, harsh and very depressing, often not seeing the sun for two weeks at a time, the trees devoid of green leaves, and the world locked in a frigid grip of icy, frozen ground and heavy, leaden skies.  But gods help me, that was my home, and I loved it.  Truth be told, sometimes I miss those incredibly dismal, cheerless winter days.

When conditions outside become difficult or unpleasant, either emotionally or because of the weather, the natural urge is to turn inward for solace.  Whether it's 10 or 110 degrees outside, it's the same thing, two sides of the same coin.  Memories are important stepping-stones back to a world with which you are intimately familiar, and that can be a very comforting thing.  It's endlessly fascinating to me how a song or a piece of music can evoke such rich, detailed memories of who you were and what you were doing when you first heard it.  I can remember all the words to songs I have not heard in 40 years, yet I can't remember what I did last week.  Funny how such seemingly trivial things make such an enormous impression on you.  Memories are funny, precious and remarkable milestones on the journey of your life.

Kent State Plus 40 Years

Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the Kent State shootings. For those who are too young to remember anything about it, four college students were shot dead by Ohio National Guardsmen as they were protesting the war in Vietnam, among other things. In comparison to, say, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, this seems like small potatoes but at the time the seismic waves of this event shook the country to its core.

It's impossible to truly understand Kent State without understanding the context of the country in 1970. The nation was truly in turmoil, probably the most profound it had experienced since the Great Depression or the Civil War. The war in Vietnam was going badly and was polarizing the country intensely. Richard Nixon was president and he was truly one of the most psychotic and unpopular presidents in history. His administration was top-heavy with right-wing creeps and rife with paranoia; they were sure that hordes of dirty hippies were crawling out from under every stone to destroy everything that was good in this country. They apparently couldn't figure out that hippies were stoned all the time and could barely get it together to go to the store and buy a box on Twinkies, let alone subvert and corrupt an entire country. The sexual revolution was in full bloom, and conventional morals and gender roles were being swept aside for the then-salacious "if it feels good, do it" maxim. Timothy Leary was urging everyone to "turn on, tune in and drop out," and the nascent women's movement was turning everything upside down, from the home to the workplace.

Additionally, the country had gone through the disastrous Democratic National Convention in Chicago during the presidential elections of 1968, and the media had shown mobs of long-haired anarchists trashing the streets and getting arrested. The previous year, the infamous Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967 brought the libertine, anything-goes counterculture to every corner of middle America, and people were appalled and frightened. Everything sounds pathetically dated and antiquated now, just like watching a rerun of "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In," but back then it was heady, radical stuff. Rarely in this country's history had so much changed so drastically and completely in such a short time, and the sense of disorientation and confusion was palpable.

So, into this intense cultural and social maelstrom I was dropped. I had just graduated high school in June of 1969 and was preparing for my freshman year as an astronomy major at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland that September. Just going to college was a very dislocating experience for me - I had led a very sheltered life in a small steel-mill town in western Pennsylvania and was now facing a big and totally alien world on my own, away from everything with which I had become familiar. I also learned more about the socio-economic class system in this country because at college I was rubbing elbows with students who came from very well-to-do families in ultra-wealthy, upper-class New York enclaves like Rye and Scarsdale and White Plains and they kind of regarded me as a poverty case from the wrong side of the tracks. I felt alone and isolated a lot of the time.

Monday, May 4, 1970 started out like any other day. A very pleasant mid-spring morning, the trees on the grounds of the student union were blooming and warm breezes blew through the Lagoon park, a favorite place to hang out. But that afternoon, news of the shootings spread through the campus like wildfire. People went NUTS! Students poured out of the dormitories and classrooms. Euclid Avenue, a main thoroughfare in east Cleveland which ran right through the campus, was blocked by thousands of angry protesters. The police quickly showed up with some officers on horseback. They started charging the crowd to try to break us up, but the crowd quickly re-formed in their wake. I will never forget seeing a young mother pushing her baby daughter in a stroller, right in the front of the line of students, facing the police on their horses with a grim look on her face. The stand-off lasted several hours and eventually Euclid Avenue got freed up. The students went back on the campus grounds, and the mounted police stayed to maintain order. Despite all the anger and outrage, a short time later we were coming up to the policemen and talking to them, and petting the horses. Classes at the university were suspended for weeks, and I spent my days going to workshops and seminars put on by various radical political factions. I attended speeches and rallies by such notables as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

Kent State University is located in Kent, Ohio, about 35 miles south of Cleveland, so the shootings had a real sense of urgency to us. It was personal because it was so close to us, and we all knew it could have easily happened here. The incident was my first real indication that our government was not always the benevolent, remote presence in our lives, but could be corrupt, dangerous and murderous.

The actual act of shooting took 13 seconds. In the end, four students died and nine more injured. Not one of the National Guardsmen who fired into a crowd of young people was ever punished, another indication to me that justice in America is not independent and objective, but rather situational and relative, and easily influenced by politics and driven by motives other than fairness for all.

A lot has happened since then. Forty years - 1,261,440,000 seconds- a whole lifetime. But I will never forget how on that pleasant spring day in 1970, my world expanded exponentially and 13 seconds changed my life.

Be My Baby, Ellie Greenwich

A couple of days ago it was announced that songwriter Ellie Greenwich passed away at age 68. She is one of those people whose name is not instantly recognizable but the influence she had on early sixties pop music was enormous. You may have not heard of her, but you've certainly heard the songs she crafted.

Ellie worked in the famous Brill Building in Manhattan in the early sixties. What an amazing, astonishing place that must have been in its heyday. Imagine walking from office to office, floor to floor and hearing fantastic music and singing coming from everywhere. There were a number of record producers, arrangers and composers who had office space there, and some of the leading girl-group acts of the day could be heard trying out new songs and melodies. Talk about being in the right place at the right time - the Brill Building in the early 60s was ground zero for some of the most listenable and enduring pop music ever produced.

Greenwich worked on some of the landmark pop songs of that era. Who can resist a perfect confection like the Dixie Cups' "Chapel of Love," or the earnest optimism of "(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry" by Darlene Love? This was back in the day when marriage was an ultimate goal and the highest accomplishment to which one could aspire. Ellie Greenwich had her hand in a number of hit records by some of the quintessential sixties girl groups. Tunes like "Then He Kissed Me" and the jaunty "Da Doo Ron Ron" by The Crystals, and "Baby I Love You" and the flawless gem "Be My Baby" by The Ronettes. This last song in particular was a perfect storm of great songwriting, great performing and artful musical craftsmanship. It's doubtful that Phil Spector's legendary "Wall of Sound" would have seemed quite as good without Ronnie Spector's soulful vocals and that ideal vehicle of a song. Ronnie Spector's singing was so good she reprised her unforgettable stylings to great effect on Eddie Money's 80s hit, "Take Me Home Tonight."

Then there was The Shangri-La's "Leader of the Pack," a marvelously overwrought teen-angst classic. A three-minute Wagner opera created for twelve-year-old girls, it had everything that makes your teenage years appalling and exhilarating the the same time: an uncomfortable, slightly illicit teenage attraction, parental disapproval, a motorcycle rebel, and a tough-chick attitude captured perfectly by the vocals. It started like the dialogue in a play, a girl and her friends discussing a new boyfriend when the lead vocalist rips into the melody:

"I met him at the candy store,
He turned around and smiled at me -
You get the picture?"
"Yes, we see!"
"That's how I fell for
the Leader of the Pack!"

The song goes deliciously off the rails as the love affair tanks and the cycle rebel gets into a traffic accident, the vocalist shrieking out a frantic "Lookout! Lookout! Lookout! Lookout!" at the last minute followed by horrendous skidding and crashing sound effects. And after all the histrionics and carrying-on, the song fades out with a howling, never-ending screech of tires over an evocative vocal phrase repeated over and over like a prayer: "Leader of the Pack, now he's gone, No, No, No..." You could not ask for more in a song.

As a pre-teenager growing up in relative cultural isolation in a small western Pennsylvania steel-mill town, I remember many summer nights laying in bed listening to my transistor radio through an earplug, and if the atmospheric conditions were right I was able to tune in an AM radio station from distant New York City. Cousin Brucie on WABC had a nighttime program where he spun all the current hits, and to me it was an audio window to another world, so exotic and different from my life it might as well have been coming from the other side of the planet. Even the commercials were fascinating to me, because they referenced places like Brooklyn, Queens, Madison Avenue, and Broadway, places I had only heard about. The radio signal would phase in and out, and the hissing static would almost sound like hypnotic waves of an ethereal ocean, just adding to the mesmerizing and surreal quality of the experience. I never forgot those wondrous summer nights, and the incredible music coming in through the night from a far-off, glittering city I could only dream about.

Alas, something this brilliant and creative burns out quickly, and Greenwich saw her career eclipsed by the British invasion several years later, which ushered in the era of the singer-songwriter. With talents like Joni Mitchell on the west coast and Laura Nyro on the east coast, and the Beatles coming over from England, artists were now writing and performing their own music, and Ellie found less demand for her skills. She did help Neil Diamond with his first couple of hits, and even penned the naughty, salacious "(My Baby Does The) Hanky Panky" by the mega-cheesy Tommy James and the Shondells. Her career enjoyed a brief resurgence in the eighties as a Broadway musical, "Leader of the Pack," introduced her meticulously crafted music to a new generation.

Now Ellie is gone, but her music is not. It will endure as long as there are teenagers growing up and listening to impossibly beautiful music, written especially for them and drifting in over the radio waves on warm, still, summer nights, speaking directly to their hearts.

Won't you please be my baby, Ellie Greenwich?

Go Ride The Music

Had an opportunity this morning to take another stroll down Memory Lane. An email from Wolfgang's Vault arrived and pointed the way to a tape-recorded concert of Jefferson Airplane, circa 1967. Wolfgang's Vault is an amazing website where an unbelievable number of concert tapes, made at countless Bill Graham (Graham's actual first name was "Wolfgang") musical events, are available to listen to for free. Check out their roster of artists - you are guaranteed to find someone you like and may spend a lot of time reliving some very great music.

Good music of that kind has an enormous capacity to transport you back to when you originally heard it. Music can embody a certain time, a specific place, who you were with at the time, and more importantly who you WERE when you heard it. Music can perfectly encapsulate an entire era or a part of your life. It does more than capture a moment - it captures a spirit, a consciousness, an essence. You can feel young and idealistic again - the world can once more explode with hope, possibilities, passion and potential.

The late sixties were a singular, pivotal point in time. American culture went through a drastic, radical, relatively instantaneous change. From the stodgy, stifling musical conformity of the previous decade, the Beatles and the British Invasion were a breath of fresh air against the blandness that went before them (except, of course, for Motown in the early sixties which still is and forever will be totally awesome). This set the stage for the Psychedelic Sixties, an immense blast of color and music and art and light that illuminated this country from coast to coast. Everything was new, fresh, wonderful and exciting. It was like a Great Awakening, a new Renaissance, a blossoming and opening of the mind, a time when you really, truly believed that anything was possible.

And the music! The music that was happening in California on the San Francisco/Los Angeles axis was a magnet that pulled everyone's attention to the west coast. For me the Jefferson Airplane was the first and only band for me. I played all their albums until they were worn smooth (I actually went through 3 copies of "After Bathing At Baxter's" - I'm talking vinyl here). Their music was powerful, soaring, uplifting and inspiring to me. Along with some friends, I hitchhiked in the dead of winter from Pittsburgh to Cleveland in 1970 to see them in concert. I was never so cold in my life but it was so worth it.

So many artists did fantastic, career-defining work in that era. The first Crosby, Stills and Nash album was simply amazing; the music and harmonies were so pristine and pure, just like sunlight in the "garden in the morning after it rained," to quote a line from the song "Guinevere." Joni Mitchell's "Ladies of the Canyon" is a perfect time capsule for me. Listening to those songs is like going on a mini-vacation for me. I can forget about whatever problems or issues I'm dealing with at the time and for a while I'm 18 years old again. But maybe my favorite album from that era is David Crosby's luminous, transcendent solo effort "If I Could Only Remember My Name." Unbelievably good from start to finish, it's almost too perfect and wonderful to be true. We may never hear music of that quality and beauty again.

Jefferson Airplane's majestic anthem to future times, "Wooden Ships," ends with the soaring voices of the singers chanting, "Go Ride The Music" over and over. It really is music that will literally and figuratively pick you up and carry you away. The sixties were like that - anything was possible - and you can still feel the power and hear the echoes at Wolfgang's Vault.