You should write a book, I hear a lot. At 75, part of it is that I may be running out of time. If I’m going to do it, better get going. So why do that, I pretend to deliberate. That gives way to who would this book be for? A very small subset of people I dither. On the other hand, the real audience is me and the growing number of grandchildren I seem to have something to do with. Maybe my siblings, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they are contemplating their version of summing up, or whatever the goal is.
Last night, I lay in bed pondering why I used to do drugs. Pot, coke, mushrooms, drinking to cut the coke, etc. Our generation got high by default, until we either were overwhelmed with it or got bored. For me, it was both. One thing that never occurred to me was that it always had me by the balls, just because I thought I was in charge. The dream reverie, the sense of a random, Godless universe that might as well be played, an instant community of fellow travelers, heightened reality. Transitioning away from that was the free high, that running out was a subjective problem not evidenced by any real need. I quit it all, step by replacement step, and health warnings took care of the rest. Even there, it wasn’t really about me, but the others who could not stop or didn’t want to. My trick was remembering what it was going to be like when I ran out, and beating it to the punch. And yet, all along the feeling of a creeping dread that who was kidding who.
My childhood was brief, punctuated by warring parents who were just a little too smart for the room. I envied their real world of issues and tactics, world war, hurry up divorces and slow motion separations. We were a multilevel family built on 4 marriages, our mother of three boys sandwiched between our half sister and brother and the awkward realization that we were responsible for breaking their parent’s marriage up. Even now on our weekly Zoom calls, you can feel the vestiges of that pain and our mutual decisions to overcome the details. As our parents splintered into the next breakup, we developed a nuclear family of split domains, in our case Woodstock and our father’s various apartments in the City. Woodstock seemed to be an oasis, but I hated it. The Village where my dad retrenched from the upper West Side, was the shit: double features at the corner of 11th and Seventh, the mysterious and quaint Bleeker winding diagonally through the folk clubs. I never cared what I was going to do when I grew up, as long as it felt like this did.
Later on, I met some of these people in the clubs. At 13, I was all dressed up and nowhere to go. I lived in Woodstock with my mother and two brothers, Tommy and Danny. Danny had the unfortunate role of being my baby brother, easily the most serious of the bunch but the baby. Our caretaker, Harold Short, called him the old grandfather, as in “how’s the old grandfather?” I left and moved to the City at 13, when my mother acknowledged I was old enough to have my opinion considered in a courtroom. Danny stayed for a number of years of good behavior. Tommy was the real wildman; a pox on both houses was his verdict. Just before he died in a bicycle accident, he spent a week with me in my apartment in Cambridge. The 3 boys were set in their ways: doing the right thing, living in the future, and hell bent on living the life he was seconds from losing. I loved my brothers, but took pity on the baby and admired the gall of the middle one. In truth, I was afraid of him, knowing the more I played it safe, the less I had to lose.
Cambridge was the perfect blend of frontier and safe place. Woodstock was constructed as an artist’s colony, but Cambridge was a staging ground for the new revolution. Everybody showed up there eventually: the first and most ear-damaging experience was a little room across the street from the Harvard Coop record store called Club 47. The band was the original Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and talk about the vanguard, the shape of things to come. I’d seen the Stones at Worcester War MemoriaL Auditorium, the Beach Boys before Brian Wilson went nuts at probably the same venue, and the Beatles at Boston Garden. But the Butterfield band was a trip so intense that I still hear the ringing silence as I stepped out onto the street. Much later, I watched Paul pick up an acoustic guitar and feed its overtones into the open mikes in a Woodstock living room. Everything was possible, and yet impossible for him to survive.
The college town used its people for the overtones. It never officially occurred to me how you could orchestrate the mathematical probabilities of this organic combustion, but the roots of the time were deeply embedded wherever we turned. I knew full well I was not at the highest level of this melting pot, but as a listener with a good ear, I served some purpose. Not that I wasn’t scrounging for luck, or that stupid idea of momentum you get when you’re locked out of where you want to be. Over time, things accumulate to the point where you begin to make your own luck, but even then I knew full well who was hungry enough to overtake the speed of light. I grew up on baseball books, the story of Babe Ruth calling his shots, and the genies of television and radio bringing these immortal events into our lives. I needed no instruction in the impact of recording, the terrible trance of the limo turning inexorably onto Elm Street beneath the Book Depository.
The Zapruder film is now embedded in our memory, but in fact it was not weeks or even months before it became available. We now process the event as a combination of recording and playback, but we still don’t know how much of that event was withheld to create a narrative. Or even if any of it was altered. There is an answer to that question, but it’s not available. Are these mysteries or just fabrications of alternate scenarios? As with Watergate, we will never know, but does it really matter? The combination of prehistory and post production is the event, intertwingled as only a made up word can be with electrons and surfboards. It doesn’t necessarily pay to follow the trail of idea to insight, but we try anyway. It was definitely not a good idea to leave the roof off the limo; not everyone loved you, Mr. President.
A few months ago, I called David Ossman of the Firesign Theatre, The idea was to record a history of the time through the eyes and I Ching throes of the group. Something about it seemed a little off, the premeditated memoir disguised as a conversation. As we wound down the call, I sensed it would only happen if I got past this struggle of live or record. We’d settled on the idea of not a history of Firesign but the Sixties in parallel to the underlying subtext of the writer collective that was the group. Certainly there was plenty to dredge: bounded by the end of Watergate and the blur of cocaine and disco. It wasn’t the blur that killed it, I acknowledge today. It was the difficulty of mastering the comic moment only to endure a self-conscious reluctance to go back there again. The Beatles had largely overcome that trap, but to what end.
Ironically, the Beatles held together as a project long after they were over. At the time, we experienced the breakup with a fascination of history in the round, the immutable balance of McCartney’s drive to recover his sense of family, Lennon’s loss of his natural partner, and Harrison’s tormented little brother engine that drove so much of the whole thing. How immensely difficult it must have been to sit at the vortex of the times, with Lennon’s faux-journalist word salad exceeding the boundaries of their success. In a time of phony heroes, the group waved off Dylan’s declining of responsibility in favor of a sneering wistful nod to the grace of the R and B roots of their heritage. To the idea that 3 or 7 minutes of a song could stand up to the terror of the times, they didn’t ever question the possibility of success in the form. The balm of their stacked harmonies inoculated them; to this day, the astonishing When We Was Fab overcomes the idea of Beatles capitulation. At once, a pastiche of licks and George Martin-esque production and a touch of Ringo and zero McCartney, they’re all there in 1987. The BigLie is that the dream is over. All they were saying is not give peace a chance, just some of it.
The Beatles are as much a study of failure in the face of the tragedy of dashed hopes and impending fear. Yoko Ono’s strategy in breaking up their marriage feels treacherous in spirit, but somehow gave them permission to bring a child into the world. The failure of the techgods seems trivial in near retrospect. Trump is a blight, not necessarily a catastrophe. Harrison at 57 matter-of-factly notices the seconds it feels like between 17 and two years before his death. I don’t need his or anybody’s permission to go there. Even the former president of the United States must stand naked.
Funny