My Romantic Tendencies

I have always been a closet romantic. I enjoy the sentimental side of things.

As a pre-teen, listening to my little panasonic transistor radio every night late into the night, it was almost all love songs, and the music meant everything to me. (Not the love-song lyrics necessarily - I remembering recoiling in 10-year-old horror at the saccharine "La La La La La Means I Love you " by the DelFonics. But most love songs I blithely took in).

My teen years were simmered in Zappa, who sneered at love songs. I learned to sneer, too. I vowed never to write a sappy love song. I laughed at love songs, ha-ha!

Sure enough, in my writing for The Bobs, I kept love at arms length. Well, more than arm's length. And even when I thought I might try my hand at writing something romantic, it just didn't work for me. I was more comfortable being funny. Yet, I still wanted to write beautiful music. Even when the lyrics avoided romanticism, the music to my songs tended to be consonant, not acidic.

When I write for the theatre or for film, where one writes for a character or a situation, I am able to explore my romantic tendencies.

For I am a romantic. I love beauty for its own sake. In the past I loved music and art that was acrobatic and virtuosic and acerbic and anti-sentimental, but now I crave music and art that tries for beauty. I still like acerbic. I don't like grossly sentimental things. I'm bored by virtuosity. But I love good music. Honest music, I like to call it.

Two Hands? It's my first time giving in fully to my romantic side. It's not written for a play or a character or a commission - it's written to please myself. And St. Cecilia. And anyone who cares to listen in.

The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World LIVES!

It's been a few years since The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World was produced. The legal problems which held it back were recently lifted, and an exciting developmental reading is slated for early December at Playwrights Horizons in NYC. I and my collaborators (Joy Gregory, playwright, John Langs, Director) met up in LA recently to look over our acclaimed musical. We came to it with fresh eyes and ears, and while we found many things to improve upon, the overall feeling was of exhilaration at having created such a fine piece of theatre. It's really good (he said with all humility). I'm currently spinning out new music for the reading. While the reading is not big enough to open up to the public, I can tell you that it sports a fantastic cast, including Tony Award Nominee Peter Friedman as Austin, Jamey Hood, Hedy Burress and Sarah Hays returning as the sisters, and broadway veterans Matt Doyle, Kevin Cahoun, Steve Routman and Anastasia Barzee filling out the cast. Returning as music director is the marvelous Aaron Gandy, leading a rocking band. This is, we hope, the first step towards a long run (Off-Broadway, anyone?)!

Recording Bandon at Skywalker (video)

Here's another video taken from the recording session for "Two Hands". It's not the take that is on the CD (that take was not caught on camera). If you compare them you can hear the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in performance. This one has some nice moment (but the one on the CD is deeper and better).

This piece, "Bandon", is particularly poignant for me. In the summer of 1964, when I was nearly 8 years old, I took a two-week trip to visit my great aunt and uncle on their cranberry farm in Bandon, Oregon. All by myself (along with 18 or so passengers, and a very nice stewardess who had very red nails and gave me a pilot's wing pin), I flew up on a DC3 or DC8 or some such old plane. The visit was much more playful than the music suggests, yet this is the music of the memory: Fishing for trout with a spool of thread and a bent pin; the swimming hole with the zip line running from the cliff to the beach; driving a tractor with my uncle; arguments over Elvis vs. Beatles with the local tomboy (in her room lined with posters of the King); picking blueberries; and struggling to sit still while my Aunt Gunny (Gunhilde) painted a watercolor portrait of me. That portrait still hangs on the wall of my parents' house. It's titled "A Poor Attempt at the Beatle - 1964". I must have been a non-stop Beatlemaniac that summer. When they asked if I'd like a souvenir to bring home from the trip (they were probably thinking of one of the locally made toy models of fishing boats) I pulled them to the record shop, where they bought me "Meet the Beatles" - in Stereo! My smile couldn't have been bigger. Their puzzlement couldn't have been deeper (I recall they played nothing but soupy Henry Mancini in their house). Aside from the Beatles, my visit with them was one of the highlights of my elementary school years.

Our Amazing Brains (aka My Sony Tape Deck)

When I was 15, a friend and I worked most of the summer painting my family's house. With the money I earned I bought a reel to reel tape recorder. It was one of my proudest and most useful possessions. Not only could I record my nascent songs, and experiment with sound-on-sound and varying the speeds (the wow when you played something back at 1 7/8 ips was REALLY cool), but at 3 3/4, I could put 2 entire LP's on one 'side' of the tape. 4 LP's on one 7 inch reel! it was an early form of piracy, before piracy was even an issue. But I was a poor teenager, LP's were expensive, and I could borrow records from my friends, tape them, and expand my musical library, while having to live with a modicum of tape hiss.

Here's the really cool part - I had always gone to sleep while listening to LP's. But you only got 20-25 minutes of music that way. But put a tape on, and you got 4 times that amount of music. And the music went deep into my brain, a kind of sleep teaching if you will. And even though my piracy was relatively cheap, tape still cost money, and my listening library was still very small (by today's standards). I listened to the music I had over and over and over.

I didn't realize how deeply this music was in my brain until recently, when I treated myself to a couple of recordings that I'd had on reel-to-reel, but hadn't heard since (the tape deck fell apart from constant use by the time I left for college).

One of the albums, Tower of Power's "East Bay Grease", I got a couple months ago. It was SO great to hear it again. It's a flawed record, but there's great stuff in it, too. I was a devoted fan of them when they first appeared on the scene, they gave a great live show, and I devoured their record when it came out. I've listened to it a few times over the past couple months. And then, while gardening in the back yard a few weeks back, I started humming the sax solo from "Back on the Streets Again". And I kept going. And I realized, I know every squeak and honk of that solo, and all the horns hits behind it. It's all in my brain, every moment of it! That shocked me.

And now, just the other day, I treated myself to "The Bill Evans Album", another recording I used to go to bed to night after night. I downloaded it, heard the first notes, and was instantly transported to my 16 year old self, the joy, excitement, and comfort of this music. I LOVE this album. And as it played on my computer, I realized I know every note of every solo. Especially the bass solos, I love humming Eddie Gomez's lines. But I know every stab and comp of Bill's too. This music is deep inside me. I thought I'd forgotten it. But hearing it just once brings it all back instantly. Aren't our brains amazing?