The Mamas, The Papas, and The Grandpas

My grandfather participated in the liberation of Matthausen concentration camp.  I don't know much more about this than what I've gleaned from a briefcase full of faded photographs that surfaced after he died, and the lone comment he made one evening.  "The smoke from the chimneys was so sweet it made you sick," he said.

He came home from the war and restarted his life.  A year later, his brother and his brother's family were killed in a fire.  I don't know much more about this, either, except for the newspaper clippings found in the same briefcase.  But I do know that it was my grandfather who was sent to the morgue to identify the charred bodies.

How people overcome these sorts of things is beyond me, and in retrospect maybe it was beyond him, too.  He drank a lot, and he threw into the fireplace anything that wasn't nailed down.  The man could not stand clutter.  My father's comic books and baseball cards went up the chimney as soon as the old man moved out, for example.  Visits to my grandfather's house consisted of watching him drink Coors while he stared at  this and that curling  up in the flames.  Whatever he saw there occupied him.

But not everything fits into a fireplace, and that's where grandchildren come in.  Many visits to my grandparents' little house in the mountains resulted in piles of castoff junk in the back of our Bel-Air wagon.  If it was taking up space, not combustible, and not garbage it came home with us.  My aunt made the mistake of leaving her childhood belongings behind when she ran off with her Air Force husband, and thus her portable hi-fi and her record collection were handed down to my sisters and me.

"Portable hi-fi" deserves a bit of explanation in an iPod world.  This beast was the size of a hard shell suitcase and must have weighed 485 pounds.  Okay, it probably weighed 30 pounds, but what's the difference?  Hardly portable for a preschooler.  One would set the suitcase on its side and then open it like some sort of elaborate steamer trunk.  The hinged top swung open to reveal the turntable, and the sides of the case swung outward to expose the two stereo speakers.  Considering my only experience with stereo equipment was the kiddie record player in my bedroom, this was quite a step up.

Because my sisters shared a room it was decided that the stereo would live there; after all, they represented 66% of the ownership.  We set it up in a corner, across from the bunk beds and just right of the E-Z Bake Oven, and there it stayed until we moved a few years later.

Now, since the stereo was in their room, it only made sense that my aunt's records would live there, too, so when my sisters left for school I would sneak into their room and spend my pre-nap hours rifling through the albums.  Sonny and Cher were there.  I recognized them from television, but Sonny was dressed up like a hippy.  Very strange.  And Elvis - I knew who Elvis was.  He was the guy on TV on Saturdays, so this must be the music from those movies.  He's an Army guy in this picture, so this must be G.I. Blues; there's a carnival tent on this album, so this must be Roustabout.  He was old and he looked funny.  I didn't like Elvis, but I liked that I knew who he was.

She had other records, too.  These people weren't on television, so I had no idea who they were.  They were all hippies, and my father and grandfather spoke often about what worthless, filthy, deadbeats hippies were.  One album cover showed four fully-clothed hippies in a bathtub - two men and two women.  They seemed to be having a good time.  The blond woman was beautiful.  She looked like she belonged on TV.  Why were they all in a bathtub?  It didn't make sense.  Bathtubs were a place to be alone and naked.  The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to stare at the blond lady in the picture.

Some of the other hippy records were simply too terrifying.  Angular men in pegged pants and wraparound sunglasses, smoking.  They had long hair and moustaches.  Grandpa had a flat top.  He was one of the good guys in the War.  I didn't like looking at the scary hippy records.

And right in the middle between the TV people and the dirty hippies were the crown jewels of my aunt's record collection:  Meet The Beatles; Beatles '65; Songs, Pictures and Stories of the Fabulous Beatles (on the Vee Jay label); and Rubber Soul.   I knew who The Beatles were.  I don't know how I knew, I just did. I think everybody did.  It wasn't because my parents were caught up in the throes of Beatlemania.  I'd never seen my father intentionally listen to music, and my mother listened to showtunes. The Beatles may have been as close to a universal pop culture reference that spanned generations and geography as was possible when I was a kid. 

I couldn't read the titles of the albums, but I knew the faces.  On most of the records they looked like they were having fun.  They wore suits and smiled and goofed around for the camera.  Their hair was funny but not scary.  They looked like the kind of grown-ups who wouldn't ignore me.

At least that's how they looked on all but one of the albums.  Rubber Soul was different.  On the front cover they loomed over the camera like menacing giants.  That's not quite right.  The experience was more like I woke up to find four strangers watching me sleep.  It was a bit dizzying and unsettling.  The back cover was a collection of black and white photos that I'm sure were quite tame, but to my little brain they were pure dissonance.  No more suits, and that one is wearing sunglasses like the scary hippies wear on their album covers. The worst offense?  They were smoking cigarettes.  The nice guys in suits had turned into cigarette smoking hippies.

This was obviously dangerous cargo, this album.  If the nice guys in suits could turn to the dark side then anybody could.  Could I?  Maybe I was already there.  Maybe I was a bad kid.  Maybe that's why I liked looking at the blond lady in the bathtub so much.

My son and I describe certain songs as "goosebump music."  These are the songs that are so deeply tucked beneath your skin that they literally make you tingle.  Just thinking about putting Rubber Soul on that hand me down hi-fi gets me there.  Pure goosebumps.

Honestly, I'm a bit stumped right now.  This is the part of the narrative where I'm supposed to describe the turn "Wonder Years" style:  "At that moment I knew..."  And that to some degree is true.  Even now when I hear "I've Just Seen A Face" I get an inexplicable feeling of hope and change.  It's not there in the lyrics, it's not really even in the music.  What it comes down to, I think, is this:  The sheer, absolute beauty coming from those speakers exposed the world I knew as a lie; well, if not a lie then as a much more complicated place than "heroes have flat tops and hippies are bad."  I couldn't fathom that bad people could make such perfect music.

"Michelle" was equally mind altering.  If hippies were losers and deadbeats they must be stupid, right?  And yet that guy is singing in something other than English.   My little brain couldn't imagine the complexity of speaking two languages.  For that matter, I'm not entirely sure I knew there were languages other than English.

On and on.  I treated that record like a manifesto.  "Think For Yourself."  "Run For Your Life."  "I'm Looking Through You."  "In My Life." There was a world out there.  That's why those four guys were looming over me on the album cover.  I was asleep, and they wanted to wake me up.

So I guess that "Wonder Years" moment, hackneyed as it is, is true.  That album changed me.  Even as young as I was, it opened my eyes to worlds that I had no idea even existed.  It was the moment that I began to see the world for myself versus through the lens of the adults in my life.

And from there we were off to the races. 

The End of Music

I have been turning this question over in my mind for years:  How can the music industry be dead?  I don't want to bother with the details -- there are Google-a-plenty details available --  but the gist is that the major labels are the new Rust Belt.  Only established acts make money, and even they can only make money through merchandising and relentless touring.  Van Halen, AC/DC, the Rolling Stones, Roger Waters, KISS, stop me any time.  These are the bands that are commercially viable.  There's no room for you youngsters, best of luck at Starbucks.  You'll make a great barrista. 

The music industry is a relic of another time, the story goes.  Yet there's my teenage son, every bit as passionate about his favorite music as I was - as I am, for that matter.  And what's wonderful for me and a bit tragic for him is that a good chunk of that music passion overlaps our generations.  We bond over Bowie and Zeppelin, The Who and Zappa.   Granted, he has his own thing going on, too, but it's kind of on the periphery of contemporary music.

And why is that?  Because a boy who takes the time to figure out "St. Alphonzo's Pancake Breakfast"   on the xylophone isn't likely to contract Bieber Fever.  He isn't going to embrace Katy Perry or Lady Gaga or the kids from Glee.  He's not looking for a prepackaged, marketable experience.  He wants something that he can claim as his.  And so for the most part he's stuck in my stacks, discovering deep cuts and planting his flag.

Music matters to him.  It matters to me.  It still resonates.  The music industry isn't dead - it has simply forgotten that music matters.

Don't misunderstand:  Crappy pop music has existed at least as long as recording technology has existed.  Edison's recording of "Mary Had A Little Lamb" wasn't exactly "Stairway to Heaven."  But especially since the Sixties the major labels always struck a balance between art and commerce.  Sometimes they got lucky and the two collided - The Beatles, for example.  Sometimes, not so much (see: Herman's Hermits).  The point is that the game wasn't so absurdly stacked in favor of accounting.

Tom Waits is an outstanding example.  His first album, Closing Time, was released on the Asylum label in 1973.  It's by no means a bad album, but it bears no resemblance to the brilliant beast that we know and love as TOM WAITS.  And neither does his second album, nor his third.  Three years later on his fourth album, Small Change we see the Tom Waits make an appearance.

That one barely cracked Billboard's top 100, and it would be 12 more albums and almost 25 years before he cracked the top 30.  Maybe more importantly, it wasn't until 1983's Swordfishtrombones that Waits emerged as a fully formed, unique voice.

What I'm getting at is that Tom Waits managed to kick around the music industry for ten years and nine albums before he got it all dialed in.  In that ten years his best chart showing was #89.  What does this tell us?  Somebody -- many somebodies -- believed in his act of creation enough to subsidize it, arenas and merch be damned.  And as a result of this patronage, a truly unique artist was allowed to develop.  Without some money guys trusting that there was a Black Rider lurking in there somewhere, we'd be down several musical treasures.

This is the major label music industry that is dead, unfortunately.  Obviously people still make music, and Web 2.0 has enabled a grassroots indie movement that I couldn't have even begun to imagine when I was a teenager with an asymmetrical haircut and a penchant for college radio.  But a major label (or two) giving an artist ten years to find his sea legs?  No way, Jose Feliciano.  A new artist doesn't get that kind of time to develop.  It doesn't make good short term business sense.

But it doesn't have to be that way.  I genuinely believe that the big labels need to be reminded that art matters, that music matters.  It isn't just a commodity.  It isn't New Improved Tide.  There is a reason that old farts like me think of music as the soundtracks to our lives.  I enjoy a good laundry detergent, but that's hardly the same thing.

So here is what I'm fiddling with:  I know I'm not speaking to anyone but myself here.  I may be self-absorbed but I'm not delusional.  But I think I'd like to walk through the soundtrack of my short life, to tell the story of the music that I've known.  Maybe I'll get lucky and someone will listen.

Wish me luck.