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The Marvin Quadrant: Coming to Genre, Part One: My Popular Music Literacy Narrative

[pictured above: Marvin's childhood home in Oak Park, Michigan]

While I Was Napping

I arrived on earth (Sinai Hospital in Detroit, more exactly) just as rock and roll established itself as a tent pole of youth culture—or perhaps the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey signaling an evolutionary leap in human youth consciousness.  An infant, I was likely already asleep in my crib during the first appearances of Elvis Presley on national television in 1956, first on Milton Berle (an extended set piece pitting youth music against slapstick, joke-driven comedy in a kind of prototype for the off-kilter mash-ups of fifties and sixties television), then on Steve Allen’s show (the appearance with the hound dog meant to humiliate the young performer), and then on Ed Sullivan, once Sullivan realized that he couldn’t stick to his pledge to ban Elvis and had to compete with the other shows by repeatedly booking the phenom.  Note the progression through these clips in terms of the overall duration of the appearance, whether the song “Hound Dog” gets played in its entirety, the singer’s interaction with the host and other guests, and the visibility and function of the backing musicians—Elvis’s voice, good humor, and willingness to adapt (he did perform “Rhetoric Hotel,” after all) remain a constant, whatever the situation constructed to contain him.

Milton Berle clip, June 5, 1956: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJnVQDA9rHA Note the full performance of the song, including a second time through at a slower tempo, as well as the full view of the band, even a shot of the guitar solo.  When Berle comes into the scene, the veteran comic (Uncle Miltie) gestures to the band to reprise “Hound Dog” so he can imitate Presley’s dance moves.  Suddenly, vaudeville.  After Berle does his Elvis (perhaps the first of the many Elvis impersonators leading all the way to Andy Kaufman), the band disappears behind a dropping curtain, making way for a Berle-Presley comic dialogue, with a guest cameo from movie star (at the time) Debra Paget—note how Paget functions as a representative of the young women sitting in the audience occasionally shown by the cameras; this serves as a kind of rehearsal for Beatlemania coming some eight years later (before television, the culture had seen a precursor with the swoon-filled fame of young Frank Sinatra) and also connects to the core premise of Bye-Bye Birdie, the plot predicated on a young woman from a Midwestern fan club chosen randomly to kiss Presley-inspired Conrad Birdie on the Sullivan show.  These eight minutes on the Berle show offer a series of genres in quick succession and an early lesson in how television can absorb “transgressive” rock and roll (fairly) seamlessly into a medium at the time learning how to engage a mass audience buying television sets in the millions.

Steve Allen clip, later in June, 1956: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3r5AiBJr2M Allen gestures to the earlier Berle appearance and refers to Elvis’s “first comeback” (weirdly prescient, given the arc of the Presley career).  He introduces the “new Elvis Presley,” who comes onstage wearing a tuxedo and carrying a guitar.  Allen leads Presley across the stage where the band has set up, where there’s also a hound dog in a top hat perched, waiting for a serenade.  Elvis delivers, singing to, petting, and doing moves around the dog, playing along despite the cringy circumstances.  We get a truncated version of the song and very little sense of the backing band.

Ed Sullivan clip, October 28, 1956:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNYWl13IWhY. Some four months later we get the first of several appearances on Sullivan, with a tease at the end for the next appearance scheduled for January 1957 as well as a mention of one of Elvis’s first movies.  Clearly by this time he’s been packaged and commodified across mass media.  An estimated 60 million viewers tuned in for this Sunday night media sacrament (73 million viewed the Beatles’ first Sullivan appearance in 1964).  We get the complete song once through, some sense of the band, and a strange group of four back-up attendants (the earliest iteration of the Elvis entourage?) who don’t seem to have a purpose other than to stand and smile uncomfortably.  Sullivan briefly engages with Presley after the song, leaving immediately to allow Elvis to plug his movie and next appearance, as well as to wish the audience a life as blessed as his.

Again, I slept through all of this.  Unlike Jenny “when she was just five years old” in Lou Reed’s ode to the savior sound spreading like wildfire via the airwaves, I didn’t start dancing to that “fine, fine music” from the New York station or register the seismic shift happening in front of the national television audience.  Put simply, my life wasn’t saved by rock and roll.

The Music Seeping Through 

I remember beginning to listen to pop music with emotional commitment and incipient scholarly intent in my early teen years.  Of course I heard music long before that—my older sisters carried on about the Beatles appearing on the Sullivan show at the height of Beatlemania in 1964 and then twice more—I probably watched their appearances with little understanding of the fuss; I vaguely recall hearing various celebrated mainstream singers (YouTube offers Sullivan clips of Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., Vic Damone, Vikki Carr, and Andy Williams, among many others) who frequented the Sullivan show and other “musical variety shows” (vaudeville domesticated for the mass audience) such as Hollywood Palace and the daytime performance plus talk featured on the Mike Douglas Show out of Philadelphia; all of the shows’ producers and hosts accepted the ratings necessity of booking rock and pop acts to expand their demographic appeal, so most hitmaking singers and popular bands made the rounds, co-existing as well as possible with hosts and entertainers from previous generations. (A side note on the Sullivan show, which ran on CBS from 1948-71: the Canadian comedy duo Wayne and Shuster appeared a record 67 times; in terms of comedy genealogies, Frank Shuster was SNL creator Lorne Michaels’s father-in-law and dad of Rosie Shuster, an original member of the SNL writers’ room and source or co-source of the Killer Bees, Bill Murray and Gilda Radner’s Todd and Lisa, and Radner’s Emily Litella and Roseanne Roseanneadanna.)

I think I remember occasional Broadway/Hollywood soundtrack albums (West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof) my parents played on the lumpen stereo cabinet squatting stolidly in the living room (lift the lid to get to the turntable).  I know they had George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue on vinyl.

More Than the Greatest Love

An upright piano stood against another wall in that living room, as my sister Miriam played, taking lessons from a family friend, Eric Rosenow—my eldest sister Cindy was the visual artist among the siblings, taking drawing and watercolor lessons, though I remember her singing in the chorus of the Oak Park High production of Bye-Bye Birdie; they staged the opening teens-talking number on an impressive wooden scaffold something like the grid on Hollywood Squares, a cast member in each square holding a telephone. I guess I was always the word kid, buried in books, newspapers, magazines, and Readers’ Digest.  Along with giving piano lessons, Mr. Rosenow (pronounce the name to rhyme with Romanoff despite the spelling) led a local band, Eric Rosenow and the Continentals, which played at my bar mitzvah party in February 1968; no pop songs at that lackluster soiree—a more popular classmate had his bar mitzvah party the same night, attracting any friends we had in common, so I had a bad case of FOMO among the family members and my parents’ friends who attended.  If I’d been middle-aged, I might have had a good time.  Mr. Rosenow, an immigrant like my parents, possessed a certain savoir faire—I don’t think he wore a scarf, though I like to imagine him wearing one, holding a cigarette in manicured fingers, throwing the scarf blithely over his shoulder at lesson’s end as he left to climb into his Lincoln parked outside.  Picture him as the diminutive, better-behaved uncle of the Russian actor Mischa Auer, best-known for his portrayal of the protégé Carlo in My Man Godfrey in 1936.  A clip of Mischa Auer (at the piano singing in Russian) in the role here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIJ9Apva2zs

I remember singing occasionally after my sister’s lesson with Mr. Rosenow.  I must have been ten or eleven.  As I recall, the Miriam and Marvin standard (stage name M&M if we had ever ventured outside the living room) was a sixties song called “More,” recorded by Andy Williams and many other easy-listening vocalists.  The opening lines: “More than the greatest love the world has known/This is the love I’ll give to you alone.”  I had trouble reaching the high notes.  Needless to say, Mr. Rosenow never invited me to join the Continentals as boy vocalist, though he provided my only glimpse of “show business” growing up.

Andy Williams sings “More”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blJlLKf7NLA  Consider this clip in relation to the Presley clips and the clips I’ll include later in terms of wardrobe (love the sweater), orchestration, and hairstyle.

A side note on coming to cinema: I started working at a local chain of movie theaters (in Detroit, Ferndale, Oak Park, and Birmingham) at fifteen, which introduced me to a much wider range of films and cinema accoutrements (trailers, posters), as the independent chain specialized in arty European films.  Thus I first encountered Ingmar Bergman (Cries and Whispers) and other auteurs of the moment—Truffaut (Day for Night), Rohmer (Claire’s Knee), Fellini’s Roma—and the independent films coming to the fore outside the faltering studio system in the United States—Drive, He Said, directed by Jack Nicholson after he acted in Easy Rider and before his star-making turn in Chinatown, Harold and Maude from Hal Ashby featuring Cat Stevens songs on the soundtrack, Brewster McCloud from Robert Altman.  That high school work experience prepared me to take advantage of the movie-rich environment of Stanford in the seventies, with films available almost every night of the week somewhere on campus.

Music in the Medium and the Message

Remember that what I describe here unfolded in a media environment defined by single-screen movie theaters along with network television reaching its adolescence in the sixties after the toddler technology took over living rooms through the fifties.  Also consider the relationship between the Baby Boom (with Boomers born between 1945 and 1965, my sisters and I in the cohort) and the burgeoning of what I’m calling “youth culture”—expand a consumer market through a high birth rate and new mass media, and the engines of capital will roar with invention and revision.  To wit: I have vague memories of a set of music-focused network series during my first full decade as a fledgling consumer of culture (the sixties): Hootenanny, on ABC from 1963-64, featured folk acts; Shindig!, which replaced Hootenanny on ABC from 1964-66, widened the range of music spotlighted, including British Invasion bands (Beatles, Stones, Who) as well as Tina Turner, James Brown, Bo Diddley, Jackie Wilson, The Beach Boys, The Supremes, and The Ronettes; Hullabaloo on NBC in 1965-66 aired as a response to Shindig!, including the same British Invasion bands introduced by Beatles manager Brian Epstein as well as such pop-scene luminaries as Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas & the Papas, Dionne Warwick, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Sonny & Cher, the Supremes, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and Roy Orbison, who first saw pre-breakout Elvis in the fifties as a nineteen-year-old—they were roughly the same age.  Note the market-driven shift from folk to pop and rock and roll on two of the three major networks.  Even Bob Dylan had gone electric, and The Turtles and Byrds covered some of his early songs, defining the early folk-rock genre.  Some clips to give a sense of the music scene on the networks:

Judy Collins on Hootenanny 1963: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-anKnExpu4

Ian and Sylvia on Hootenanny 1963: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHcSy_3ZO_c Think of these two in relation to Mitch and Mickey, played by Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy in Christopher Guest’s affectionate folk tribute A Mighty Wind.  Clips here of two Mitch and Mickey songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMbeMmYkAXQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwLZfPPM7GQ.   Bonus clip of The Folksmen from the same movie, comprised of the members of Spinal Tap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JhLuVu-Cho

Opening medley from Shindig! 1964: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46K0IzErJsA.  Just little snippets of songs but note the shift in musical idioms from Hootenanny as well as the widening of the range of pop genres making it into primetime.

Tina Turner and Marvin Gaye on Shindig! 1965: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1aqzVloyjE. The host introduces the performance as an “opera”—a remarkable artifact.

Chuck Berry on Hullabaloo 1965: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTHtsDLwvig. Playing the revised version of “Rhetor B. Goode.” 

The Rolling Stones on Hullabaloo 1965: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO4fIRVscgM

While no longer napping, I again admit to only dim awareness of these manifestations of youth culture, though I expect my sisters watched avidly while I absorbed it all with less intense focus, as something simply part of my pre-teen environment, like air and water.  Coming to musical awareness, slowly, I remember watching The Monkees on television during the two-year run of their show from fall 1966 to spring 1968 (overlapping, oddly, with the run of the original Star Trek for those two seasons).  I learned later how the group came together as a “pre-Fab Four” through auditions of young actors and musicians in Los Angeles—Stephen Stills auditioned and didn’t make the cut due to an unfortunate pointed tooth deemed disqualifying for television; we should all thank the rock gods for that.  The members of the Monkees resented their reputation as mere actors, not bona fide musicians, and advocated for themselves to write and perform their own material.  Monkee Michael Nesmith had written “Different Drum,” a hit for Linda Ronstadt and The Stone Ponies, so the boys had a point; I hope they felt some gratitude, though, to Neil Diamond for their hits “I’m a Believer” and “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You,” composed before Diamond joined the ranks of singer-songwriters, dramatically eclipsing The Monkees’ brief fame with a decades-long career.  (A note on the Monkees: after the show ended, they starred in a little-known film called Head, directed by Bob Rafelson and co-written by Rafelson and Jack Nicholson before they made Five Easy Pieces in 1970.  My memory doesn’t speak but mumbles regarding this obscure film.  I know I saw it, and I think I saw it in a school setting, or perhaps on a field trip with a hip teacher.  The film, likely made to take advantage of the success of A Hard Day’s Night several years before, aimed for absurdist satire and bombed at the box office.) 

Let me state here that I listened now as a voracious consumer, consuming pop songs the way I consumed network television and candy, with little of the critical/analytical distance that would come later.  Now I recognize that television and radio trained me to watch and listen and always want more—incidentally, though likely intentionally, the media trained me in genre.  Episodic plot structures became part of the wiring of my brain, along with pop song staples pertaining to verse, chorus, break, and rhyme along with the ever-present theme of young love lost, thwarted, or requited.

Transistor Radio

I’ve written in a previous newsletter piece about my childhood bedroom serving as the family television room and the beige fold-out couch that I slept on growing up.  That room also contained a small desk, though I rarely sat there (the desk had a “secret” side compartment in which I used to hide candy, though I had no reason to hide it—I just liked having pretend contraband in the hidden compartment).  I preferred to do homework stretched out on the floor between the couch and the dresser on which the television perched.  While doing homework I listened to a transistor radio, a rectangle about the size of a cellphone, though thicker.  This trusty radio kept playing through many of my childhood years—it had a kind of butterscotch-almost-soft-orange vinyl wrapping with round perforations for the section covering the tiny speaker.  I imagine lousy sound quality, though I valued the reliability and portability—at that age I didn’t listen for anything but the familiarity of the current hits.  AM radio in those days played only hits, on roughly a two-hour rotation, so if I listened for an extended period I could count on hearing any favorites I had more than once. 

Imagine a photograph or better a sequence of stills from a movie set, as the imagining here requires that one wall of the setting not be there to allow a variety of camera angles to provide the editor shots to arrange to tell a story (remember the original credit sequence from The Dick Van Dyke show composed of a montage of stills).  We see a character (young me) stretched out on the bedroom floor, with open books and sheets of paper covered in handwritten words, pen in easy reach (no typewriter, no computer, no screen other than the blank television hovering above).  A foot or so from his head sits the transistor radio playing the local AM station softly but audibly.  Imagine a cut to a still from another angle, with the prone character at the bottom of the frame, above him the bedroom door slightly ajar, with another character standing in the doorway (my father), with a look mixing bemusement, parental concern, and pride in the studious son.  A close-up of the look and then a shot from over his shoulder capturing the father observing the son.  The caption reads “I don’t know how you can listen to music when you’re doing your homework.”  As my father spoke these words, he didn’t come all the way into the room or pronounce any rules forbidding radio listening while doing homework, as I clearly did my homework and brought home good grades.  Results counted—no reason to ban music.

My psychological tether to the transistor radio stretched late into the night after the household retired.  Now, with the couch unfolded into a bed, I placed the radio on the mattress, about a foot from my head on the pillow, set at low volume to avoid disturbing my parents, whose bedroom was just a few yards away.  I often fell asleep with the radio on; when I awoke at 2 a.m. or so, the small speaker sounded dangerously loud and I quickly reached to turn it off, though my parents never mentioned that they heard the radio playing at night.

There’s Something Happening Here

I came to a different level of consciousness watching The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS from 1967-69 (also overlapping with the original Star Trek for two years); this landmark mash-up explicitly and unabashedly presented itself as counter-culture in attitude, despite the preppie look of the brothers and their roots in folk music.  Tom Smothers’s politics catalyzed the rhetorical stance, brought to life by a writers’ room including veterans Hal Goldman and Al Gordon and young iconoclasts Steve Martin, Don Novello (later Father Guido Sarducci on SNL), Rob Reiner, Lorenzo Music, Bob Einstein (brother of Albert Brooks and later Super Dave Osborne and much later Marty Funkhouser on Curb Your Enthusiasm), Mason Williams, and Leigh French (best-known for hosting the recurrent bit “Have a Little Tea with Goldie” on the show).  Musical guests encompassed an eclectic Boomer Hall of Fame: George Harrison, Joan Baez, Buffalo Springfield, Cass Elliot, Harry Belafonte, Janis Ian, Cream, Donovan, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Spanky and Our Gang, Steppenwolf, Ray Charles, and Simon and Garfunkel.  The network objected consistently to the politically and religiously irreverent humor (for instance, Pat Paulsen’s presidential campaign and comedian David Steinberg’s sermons), though the ratings kept the show on the air.  A note of cultural significance: the show battled NBC juggernaut western Bonanza in the Sunday time slot and held its own.  The times, they were a’changin.   

Pete Seeger’s appearance in 1967: Seeger, a target of the McCarthy blacklist, hadn’t appeared on network television for seventeen years; he performed “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” an anti-war song set in the early 1940’s with the chorus ending with “the big fool said to push on,” as the commanding officer takes his soldiers deeper into the mud.  My memory, which I can’t corroborate through sources, has the network or perhaps the local CBS affiliate in Detroit cutting off the song midway through.  I sat in my room staring at the black and white television, processing with some glimmer of understanding that the forces that were would not allow Seeger to sing this clarion indictment of the president, the government, and the military in primetime. 

Some clips to provide a sense of the show and another of the same period:

Smothers Brothers, “Mariah” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFHh0Rs34v0.Note how the brothers blend their standard comic shtick (older brother Tommy playing the fool in contrast to earnest and proper brother Dickie) with impressive musicianship and vocal harmonies.  Steve Martin likely learned something from them, as his early stand-up had him playing a variant of the fool while playing banjo with great skill.

Buffalo Springfield, “For What It’s Worth” on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndOWwqva0sM As this is a comedy hour, the brothers undermine the musical performance, however briefly, by appearing in quick cuts away from Stephen Stills to mime moments from the song (inspired by a youth protest about a night-time curfew Stills observed in Los Angeles).

Buffalo Springfield, “For What It’s Worth” and “Mr. Soul” on Hollywood Palace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V8VvEzuQ6Y Here we have a host (shades of earlier hosts clearly out of generational synch with the acts they introduce) referring to how the band has fared well financially.  Note the shades-of-vaudeville stage with the rock band at the front, performing on a counter-culture island.  We get a snippet of Stills before Neil Young takes over the main microphone to sing lead on “Mr. Soul.”

Pete Seeger, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXnJVkEX8O4 Here we get the entire song, though my memory insists that at least in Detroit the screen went blank or cut to commercial mid-way through.

Shul Trek

A note on my father’s singing.  Saturday mornings during my childhood I walked with my father the half-mile or so to Young Israel of Oak Woods, the relatively orthodox synagogue (more colloquially “shul”) just down Coolidge from Oak Park High School.  According to Wikipedia, “A hazzan or chazzan is a Jewish musician or precentor trained in the vocal arts who leads the congregation in songful prayer.”  Let’s go with chazzan here.  Most of the chazzans at Young Israel didn’t sound to me particularly well-trained.  I appreciated them when they expedited the services without embellishment and with minimal vocal flourishes, chanting more than singing.  Again according to Wikipedia, a “shamash” or “gabbai” functions as an assistant to the rabbi, making sure the prayers run on time and organizing traffic around the “bimah,” the raised platform where congregants read from the Torah.  I appreciated the old yet spry and wiry Young Israel gabbai, whose name I don’t recall, for his no-frills approach when he called people to the bimah and occasionally led a service.  He sprinted through the liturgy as if he had a stopwatch timing him.   High Holiday services, which run very long, especially on Yom Kippur, featured a special chazzan I remember only from those most holy of days—I also remember my youthful impatience with the near-operatic extravagances of his cantorial style, as he was something like Las Vegas-era Elvis minus the cape and sequins.  Now I understand why his approach was appropriate to those days and those services—back then I squirmed in my seat.  As for my father, I sat/stood next to him (lots of sitting, then standing, then sitting and standing again in shul), so I knew my father’s voice.  I noticed that he didn’t have a high range, so when the prayer’s tune went higher, he dropped an octave, not all the way to Darth Vader, but down.  I grew familiar enough with the liturgy that I knew the melodies (still do) and familiar enough with my father’s voice that I could anticipate the octave drop—that familiar downshift became part of my shul experience and to this day provides one of my vivid aural memories of my father.

Psycho (Torah) Reader

When I was twelve, in the midst of watching Star Trek and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the time came for me to prepare for my bar mitzvah, the transition to adult responsibilities regarding fulfilling commandments (mitzvahs) and other matters religious.  The bar mitzvah ceremony marks the first time a young person can read from the Torah—that reading serves as the focal point of the bar mitzvah Saturday, with family and friends and regular members of the congregation serving as a decorous but supportive cheerleading squad.  Mr. Bodzin (no first name on record) served as my bar mitzvah vocal coach (these days I expect there’s an app for that).  He wouldn’t make the cut as a PWR lecturer, as his pedagogy consisted of “sing it like I sing it.”  To practice on my own, I taped Mr. Bodzin singing my haftorah (the small portion I would chant/sing)—later when I tried to play the tape at home, I found that when recording I had pushed the wrong button on the tape recorder and thus had a blank tape.  I stared into the silence for a good long while.  Asking Mr. Bodzin to record the portion again took several years off my life—he fixed me with a glare before repeating his performance.  This time I recorded successfully, leading to many evenings of preparation singing along to Mr. Bodzin’s rendition.  The day came in February 1968.  I ascended to the bimah.  A friend told me later that he’d never seen anybody turn so pale before.  I sang the haftorah portion.  Kvelling ensued.  I never spoke to Mr. Bodzin about the performance.  Somebody told me they asked him to grade me.  He gave me a B.

I Draw the Line at Guitars (A Flash Forward Digression)

My older sisters had “Sweet Sixteen” parties in the years before my bar mitzvah (son of commandment, or mitzvah), as the bat mitzvah (daughter of commandment, or mitzvah) ceremony had not become common practice in the congregations in Oak Park.  Young Israel, as an orthodox-adjacent shul, did not call women to read the Torah and separated the women and men congregants with a mechitza, or partition—this practice extends to today in orthodox congregations such as Emek Berakha, where I said kaddish for my father in 2006 (the only congregation in the area that I could rely on for the daily minyan of ten necessary to reciting the kaddish).  A generation later, though, in 1992 and 1994, respectively, my nephew and niece had their bar and bat mitzvah services at Beth Israel in Ann Arbor, a reform-adjacent congregation in which bat mitzvahs happen in the natural (new) order of things, women read from the Torah and lead services as chazzans every week, and services move back and forth between Hebrew and English.  (The congregation still uses many traditional liturgical melodies that I recognize from Young Israel.)  My parents attended the bar and bat mitzvahs with enthusiasm, as I recall, though I suspect my father had some misgivings or at least musings stemming from his upbringing and perhaps thought about what his father would think about his great-granddaughter reading from the Torah. 

When the pandemic started, Beth Israel created a Zoom link and then a YouTube channel to make services available, so I’ve attended their high holiday services remotely and can see the bimah where my nephew and niece read from the Torah and where I delivered the eulogy for my mother in 2013.  Along with the traditional melodies, the High Holiday services include a married couple, long-time members of the congregation, singing an a cappella version of Paul Simon’s “Old Friends” every year.

In regard to shul-based change, I (and I think my father too) draw the line at guitars.

School’s In

I sang in the choir, as did many students in the Oak Park public school system—I don’t remember what songs, though I recall we did Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence” one year, the music teacher’s nod to the contemporary scene.  I did an assignment for a high school Humanities class taught by Mr. Gamache, a member of the OPHS English Department who described himself as a “230-pound gadfly,” referring to his fondness for the Socratic Method—he was a florid, affable man fully committed to his vocation as a teacher.  For the assignment (I don’t remember the prompt), I taped myself providing a close reading of two songs meant to illuminate two versions of teenage disaffection—time has swallowed any documentary evidence, though I know one was an obscure Elton John/Bernie Taupin song, “I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself” from the 1972 album Honky Chateau.  The assignment allowed me to bring together the school genre of “close reading” I routinely performed for English classes and what mattered to me outside of school, in this case the songs I listened to over and over in my “music room” at home. 

I want to dwell on this assignment a bit as an early experience in genre application, blurred boundaries, and a kind of internal battle between logic and emotion.  For my high school English classes with the teachers who shaped future me, Shirlee Citron, Barbara Goldsmith, and Thelma Rosenbaum along with Joe Gamache and Bud Kulka, I felt entirely at home with New Critical interpretive/analytical strategies—“meaning” resided in the text, with the school genre’s purpose requiring the reader/writer to use close reading skills (finding patterns of theme and imagery, bringing to the foreground specific figurative language) to find and bring to the surface the meaning.  That became my genre wheelhouse, a wielding of laser-focused decontextualized intellect.   My relationship with popular songs didn’t rely on intellect but rather emotional identification—I didn’t sing along as an intellectual exercise in extracting meaning but as a celebration of feeling, though I’ll admit a dawning aesthetic awareness, a pleasure in recognizing and duplicating what the singer did and perhaps adding some vocal spin of my own.  Consider the different ways we come to genre, how intellect, emotion, or identity can lead the engagement, with other facets of ourselves in supporting roles.  Consider genre as an invitation to parts of ourselves, with implicit and/or explicit warnings against bringing those uninvited parts of the self into the writing.  Mr. Gamache’s assignment created space for my teenage self’s emotional connection to pop songs, a self I kept subordinate in my close readings of literary texts and that I continued to keep cordoned off when completing later college writing and research assignments. 

As usual, Star Trek provides an interpretive lens.  Let’s posit that I wrote essays like Mr. Spock, relying on intellect/the form of reason specific to literary interpretation, I listened to music like Dr. McCoy, prone to emotion, exasperation, and joy whatever his medical training—I did nothing like Captain Kirk (nerds need not apply to sit in the captain’s chair).

Music Room  

Let me explain more about the “music room” mentioned above.  When both of my sisters left for college in Ann Arbor, I by stages “inherited” their shared bedroom as they spent less and less time in their childhood home.  I somehow acquired a small turntable (“record player” in the parlance of the time) and gradually turned their room into my listening room—frankly, also a singing room, as once I heard the songs enough times I wanted to sing along.  After school I’d sit on the floor of that room playing Carole King’s Tapestry, Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection and Madman across the Water, James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, Cat Stevens’s Tea for the Tillerman, and Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night.  I probably sang along to all of them once I learned the words (often the printed lyrics came with the album), but I remember most clearly singing along to Tapestry.  Yes, I felt the earth move under my feet.  In those days my vocal register closely matched Carole King’s (allow me my memories…).  One day my mother, in the basement doing laundry, heard me singing through the vents.  When she came upstairs, she violated the privacy of my sanctum to come into the room to tell me she heard me singing and was glad I was happy.  She may have hugged and kissed me.  I wouldn’t call myself a rebellious teenager, but I had enough teenage attitude to think my parents clueless—I didn’t have the patience or the words to enlighten Mom, to tell her that my singing stemmed from misery, not happiness.  Thinking back now, she may have been right—wallowing in teenage angst might indeed qualify as teenage happiness.

Then I graduated from high school (of course there’s a story).  After a summer working at the movie theaters, my winter coat and I boarded the plane to SFO, got on the Stanford bus, and arrived at Larkin, some 50 yards from the lawn on which Sweet Hall now stands.

Next Time: Coming to Genre, Part Two: the Brill Building (NYC), Motown (Detroit), and Laurel Canyon (LA) Preview: Genre defines and limits and guides creativity in context.  Let’s consider the pop music genre in relation to time—we can experience pop music as essentially epideictic, praising the present moment (even if there’s pain for the speaker and blame for the distant or absent or cheating lover), as the genre at its core celebrates all facets of the emotion and even more the persistence of (young) love, the genre’s primary reason for being.  How do the past and future come into the pop music genre in the fifties and sixties?  The past as a static wasteland exists either without love or with previous love now gone, while the future exists either as the eternal extension of love or a barren expanse of lovelessness.  The genre subordinates the past and future to the present or more exactly collapses the past and future into the present.  Thus the past and future function as frozen in the moment.  How does this relate to a genre like the RBA?  The proposal RBA aims to transform the unsatisfactory present into a better future through enacting the proposal.  The forensic RBA aims to bring judgment of the past into the present through analysis of past events from the perspective of the present.  A persistent challenge of the RBA as genre has to do with the difficulty of creating a dynamic between and a balance among past, present, and future.  The three-minute popular song can afford to flatten time into the present with the emotion driving the narrative, creating exigence (the heart must sing) and expression (in the hallowed form the genre provides).

In the Meantime: Write Your Own Popular Music Literacy Narrative—think about your aural memories of music and whatever sense of “music literacy” you developed growing up.  This can include music you experienced live, made yourself, experienced via media, as well as what people (family, friends) made accessible to you.  Think about the formation of your musical taste in relation to genre and your own evolving expectations of what music could and should do.

Parallel Meantime Activity: Write Your Own School Literacy Narrative—think about your school writing memories, though you can also include other writing you did in community or on your own that conversed with school genres.  Consider how you experienced genre in school contexts—were genres straightjackets that felt constricting and uncomfortable or more flexible, giving you room to move around as a writer.

 

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