Adrianne Geffel

by David Hajdu

  [Geldman is prompted to elaborate on what he characterized as “wrong” with Geffel.]

  I keep forgetting you weren’t there for any of this. You missed a lot. But you can call yourself lucky for missing what I’m talking about now. Geffel came back after intermission [at Merkin Hall], and she wasn’t her normal self. It had to be obvious to anyone who had ever seen her before. She was missing that gravely serious expression she had whenever I saw her perform. She was smiling and swaying her head back and forth in time as she played. She smiled so broadly at times that her teeth showed. It made me realize, I had never seen Adrianne Geffel’s teeth.

  The music was, above all, the sure sign that something was off. The first piece she played was a soft, slow ballad—lyrical and soothing. It reminded me somewhat of Debussy’s lovely works for the piano—things like the first movement of the Suite Bergamasque, “Clair de lune,” or “Reflets dans l’eau,” in the way the music evoked the stillness of a peaceful body of water. It was stunning, like nothing I had ever heard Adrianne Geffel play. I was baffled and horrified. I thought to myself, What’s going on? How could she do this? What’s wrong with this woman?

  She played only a couple more selections before ending the concert at Merkin, and they were very much in the same aesthetic vein of beautiful pieces that conjured the placid wonders of the natural world. At the conclusion, she played something companionable but slightly variant—a buoyant waltz with a catchy tune and a gentle beat. I’ll never forget it.

  [Geldman hums several bars of an attractive melody.]

  See what I mean? It was mortifying! Gone was the explosive irrationality, the dizzying emotional intractability of the music Adrianne Geffel had always made before this. There was barely a hint of the radical qualities that made Adrianne Geffel’s music what the listeners in the lofts and galleries and critics like me knew—and acclaimed—as Adrianne Geffel’s music.

  A critic must always give the artist the benefit of the doubt. With this in mind, I excused Geffel for what I could only hope was a freakish lapse. I ignored that part of the program in the review I handed in, and went to the next performance she gave, on the opening night of her run at The Kitchen, with an open mind, hoping to hear the Geffel I could recognize again.

  The Kitchen was very well known by then as the premier venue of presentation for a heterodox school of music and performance art that was not really very well known. It was on Broome and Wooster [an intersection of streets in SoHo], and it was the “inside” place for creative outsiders like Adrianne Geffel, Peter Greenaway, Pauline Oliveros, Rocco De Petro, and celebrity oglers from uptown who had never set foot in any other kind of kitchen. After The Kitchen became a success, The Living Room opened on Stanton Street. As best as I can recall, there was no venue called The Bathroom. CBGB’s served the function.

  Geffel played a residency of a week at The Kitchen—six nights, no show on Monday. She had become a subcultural phenomenon—the doyenne of downtown music, in a phrase. I coined that and used it in a number of my pieces on Geffel, but you should feel free to use it, too. Just credit me—no copyright notice necessary. I was in the front row at The Kitchen for Geffel’s opening and came back, after a night to recover from the shock, and saw the last four shows. I could hardly believe what I heard. Geffel played beautifully. She opened the first night with a lilting tone poem that wafted through the air of The Kitchen like the mist rising from a pond, and every piece to follow was just as disappointing. The audience, all seasoned veterans of the experimental music scene, wriggled in their seats and exchanged furtive glances in distress. Adrianne Geffel had delivered us to musical hell.

  With each successive night of her residency, the audience dwindled. The word had gotten out that Geffel, for whatever reason, was suddenly incapable of producing or unwilling to produce the wild and furious, hostile, inscrutable music that had made her that doyenne of downtown music. I took no pleasure in holding her accountable for this in the series of articles I wrote on the subject, and in the additional criticism I added to my original review of the Merkin Hall concert for inclusion in my book.

  N. D. Nieve:

  As I wrote in the Village Voice, Adrianne Geffel, at her best, forced us to face the worst within us. Her art was nothing less, but everything more, than emotional truth revealed behind the false front of musical notes. She created from the inside out, and then turned that outside-in. To experience her music was to see and feel, to taste and smell, the inner essence of humanity with the palpable tactility of organs bursting from a body viscerally ripped apart. From the small stage of The Kitchen on a week in January 1984, Geffel undid all the undoing she had done. All she could offer was the sound of the sight of a pretty young person, intact and brushed clean, with glowing skin and a sparkling smile that said, “Enjoy me, for I have nothing more to give than the glistening, vacuous treacheries of joy.”

  Ann Athema:

  I brought Jeffy with me, and we went to see Geffel at The Kitchen. We were there on the third or fourth night. I always loved Geffel’s music, you know that. I couldn’t always quite process what she was doing. But I loved the fact that she was doing it. This show that week was like the Merkin concert—the second half—but even more so. It was so rich and sunny, I was melting in my seat. I remember thinking, “What on Earth would I do if Geffel ever asked me to make art for this kind of music?” My mind drifted off to concepts I could use—confetti and marzipan, a long, warm bath . . . I started to giggle, and Geffel heard me and picked up the giggle in the music, and Adry’s piano and I kept giggling together. Jeffy whispered to me, “I didn’t know Adry’s music was so . . . enjoyable.” I whispered back, “It wasn’t.”

  It was shockingly beautiful—shocking for Geffel’s music—but as true and honest and deep as anything she ever played, and far more moving. I reveled in it. I found it transporting. It gave me a feeling of pure bliss.

  Dr. Emil Vanderlinde:

  Although I was not treating Adrianne on an ongoing basis, I followed her career with acute interest through the media. I was well aware of the events you’re asking about. Two of the research fellows working under my supervision at the institute were responsible for monitoring developments in Adrianne’s case through media accounts. They prepared quarterly reports for my assessment and alerted me intermittently to circumstances of special note. The reviews and so forth pertaining to Adrianne’s performance conduct in 1984 documented a significant departure from her historical pattern of practice. Music reviewers found her output in this period to be highly objectionable.

  It was apparent that Adrianne was experiencing a level of emotional satisfaction or happiness that had not been manifest in her behavior prior to this. Strong feelings of pleasure were attenuated in the superficial amygdala, which we know to be important to the experience of joy in humans. In Adrianne’s case of psychosynesthesia, feelings of this character would trigger neural input from the amygdala and the hippocampus to the auditory cortex, taking form as aural hallucinations of pleasing music. Adrianne channeled those hallucinations at the piano to produce enjoyable musical sounds which, in turn, triggered intense displeasure among reviewers.

  [Vanderlinde is asked to address how certain listeners can hear pleasing sounds as unpleasing.]

  The phenomenon is one of social science, not real science. Neuroscience can come into play, however. Social responses to sensory input become normalized in the brain over time. Hence, an intellectual response that is socially informed and consciously asserted can, with repeated experience, evolve into an unconscious reaction. We know this as “learning to like” something. One can also learn to dislike. The brain rewires itself in accord, and the pleasant sounds that once stimulated the superficial amygdala register as unpleasantness in the lateral basal amygdala. Excuse me, but I can’t tell if you’re listening to me. Are you falling asleep?

  [Vanderlinde is answered in the affirmative.]

  Harvé Mendelman:

  We had good money invested in the concert at
Merkin Hall. Four hundred bucks, the venue charged us for recording off the soundboard. Top dollar. First class. High fidelity, stereo. Dolby sound. The tape they supplied us was releasable quality, technically. Musically, that was a different story.

  I’m a marketeur—you understand. I have good ears, and I know how to use them. I’m not saying I’ve got million-dollar ears. But they’re half-million-dollar ears, maybe seven-hundred-fifty-, eight-hundred-thou ears. And when I use my ears, I use my brains. I listen to the people working for me. And I listen to the experts—the critics and the writers. Don’t forget, our line of product is an upscale line. As I’ve explained to you, I call it our avant-line. I have to use my brains to be a marketeur for our market. “Upscale” is what “avant” means, in another language. I’m almost sure of that.

  [Mendelman calls through the door of his office.] Bethany—look up the word “avant” for me, will you? It’s not English.

  I wasn’t able to attend the Merkin concert in person, by the way. I had a dinner engagement. I left that recording in the hands of my good friend Biran Zervakis. You must know from the live-in-concert album, The Merkin Concert, we released the entire first half of the program—three selections, which Adry named for us later.

  [Mendelman again calls through the door of his office.] Bethany—bring in a copy of The Merkin Concert album for the oral-history man here, would you please? Thank you!

  [Mendelman’s assistant, Bethany Reyes-Edelstein, enters with a copy of the album and a slip of note paper. Mendelman hands the album to the interviewer, reads the note, crumbles it, and discards it.]

  My friend Biran was producer, and he made the recommendation to shelve the second part for reasons of quality. He had my complete confidence, and I understood his reasoning when Adry gave her concerts at The Kitchen, and the reviews came in. Adry had taken an unfortunate turn and was making a completely different kind of music now.

  I started to worry. The professor at the New School for Social Research who consulted for us [Dr. Stewart Rauschmittel] invited Adry to play for his students. He gave a lecture on Adry’s music, followed by a performance. Called me afterward and told me the class was a disaster. The students were totally confused. Adry’s music had nothing to do with anything he taught in his lecture. Told me, “Mr. Mendelman, you’re in terrible trouble—she humiliated me in front of my students. I don’t know what’s gotten into that woman, but she’s not the same anymore. If she keeps this up, she’ll be the laughingstock of the avant-garde. She’ll ruin her career and take Infini Records down with her.” He used more impressive words. But that’s the essence of it.

  Dr. Stewart Rauschmittel, Ph.D.:

  No, that [account, read to Rauschmittel] fails to do full justice to the debacle Adrianne Geffel incited in my classroom. I provided a foundational deconstruction of Geffel’s aesthetic, interrogating the elemental paralogic and absonant discord that inform the art, but rarely misinforms it and certainly would never lie to its face. Geffel proceeded to present a program of indefensibly lyrical irrelevance. She nearly lulled the class into a state of blissful catatonia with her lilting melodies and luxurious harmonies. I could only think she must be joking, though I saw no humor in a display of such unremitting cheeriness.

  Harvé Mendelman:

  She threw us for a loop or two. Had to do something. Being a marketeur, I knew I would have to marketeur my way through this. Decided it was time to get Adry back into the recording studio and show the world she was still the same deeply serious and hard-to-listen-to Adry Geffel. Just then, she phoned me herself to propose a new recording project. I said, “Great, Adry—that’s my girl! Let’s set up a meeting with Biran, and you can tell us all about it.”

  She said, “I want to tell you right now.”

  I said, “I love that enthusiasm! Keep that. Bring it with you when we meet with Biran.”

  And she just launched into her pitch. Said she wanted to do a follow-up to the Oh, Negative album. That was her third record, live in the basement of the Judson Church. Nice seller for us, a critical sensation—fantastically challenging and unpleasant. Opened with “Gunpowder and Blush,” closed with “Gutter Tumbleweed.” I can’t even listen to most of it. Classic Geffel! She said she already talked to the Judson Church people, and they were on board for recording there on their little Steinway baby grand. No audience this time, just her at the piano. The cost to bring in recording gear and the engineer wouldn’t be cheap, but it was worth it to me to have some viable Geffel product to market. I gave her the go-ahead and told her to fill Biran in on the details. She started to laugh. I laughed back, to be friendly. She hung up.

  I don’t know what kind of research you do for oral history, but if you read the police reports, you know how that went. Adry never told Biran anything about the recording plans. He got wind of it and showed up at the church on the day of the recording. Adry was already downstairs, playing. She had half the record in the can. Adry’s girlfriend was planted in front of the door to the church with a team of lesbians to keep Biran out. Biran claimed that he only punched in self-defense—who knows?

  Adry brought the tape in to play for me the next day. Biran was still in the hospital. My secretary, Karen, got the tape spooled up and ready to play. Adry said, “Remember—I see this as a companion to Oh, Negative, an answer to it. It will be called Oh, Positive, because the music is all very positive.”

  Karen pressed PLAY. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and as I listened, the music conjured mental images of a sun-drenched beach. Waves rolled slowly in and out as barefoot children frolicked in the sand. I ordered Karen to pause the tape. I said, “Adry, Adry . . . tell me, is the entire album like this?”

  She beamed and said, “You bet!” She gave me some double-talk about some selections being in different keys and having various harmonic concepts—whatever. I looked her straight in the eye, and I said, “Adry, I’m sorry, but I can’t release this, for your sake and mine. The critics would tear you apart, and you’d turn off the audience that you, we, have been working so hard for so long to build. This would do more damage to you and us than I can allow. Take some time off. Go away. Clear your head. Take a balloon ride and paint happy faces in the clouds. Get this out of your system. And come back when you’re your old self again.

  “After you do that—if you do that—call me. But if you don’t or you can’t do that, I’m sorry, we can’t work together.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The Devil and the Mailman

  (1984–1985)

  Biran Zervakis:

  My Adry—my Adry . . . She was always my Adry—always and ever in my heart, and not only there. On paper, too—on every one of the albums I produced for marketing in her name and the copyright registrations for the music, and, since then over the years, all the legal papers, back and forth . . . The very name of the publishing company I formed and incorporated in the State of New York was there in print, right there in the fine print, for all to see if you look for it. I called it My Adry’s Music, Inc. So, you can see that even in that dark, dark time when Adry and I were physically separated and she was away from me, across town to that dismal locale on Ninth Avenue, and not just physically—though ours was a relationship, if that word could be used to describe the indescribable what-it-was between us, that should never and shouldn’t ever be thought of in terms of the merely physical—she was still My Adry, right there in the very name of the publishing company.

  [Zervakis is prompted to explain why he sees this period as “dark.”]

  My God . . . my heart had fallen into darkness, longing for my Adry. And our home—the residence we had together, until we were no longer together, physically or otherwise, was quite literally dark. I kept the lights off in her room—the room where my Adry used to be, when I was home—to save money on electricity. Keep in mind, I was forced to carry the full burden of maintaining the apartment now. From the beginning, I had always handled the payment of all the bills, to spare Adry from worrying about such matters
. I personally paid a full thirty percent of the costs of rent and utilities, including phone and cable, out of my own funds, filling in the rest by drawing on Adry’s income from the performances, recordings, and publishing I was overseeing. After she left—I should say, after she was taken away from me—I paid the full sum of the costs of all the apartment expenses, which I was able to do successfully by continuing to draw from Adry’s earnings for as long as possible, until she noticed.

  [Zervakis is asked to verify the interviewer’s understanding that Zervakis, as sole owner of My Adry Music, Inc., received fifty percent of the revenue from Geffel’s publishing and, in addition, a manager’s commission of twenty percent on Geffel’s share, as district court filings indicate.]

  Pardon me, did you say “court filings”?

  [Zervakis is answered in the affirmative.]

  You’re a historian—you should know better than to believe what goes on in court. People will say anything under oath. Let’s stay on topic, shall we? It was a dark, very dark, dark time in Adry’s career. You must know that, since you’re obviously so adept at reading things. Have you not read the media accounts of the downturn in Adry’s music? She was on the verge of being dropped from Infini Records. I’ll have you know, as a matter of fact, she was eventually [dropped], through no fault of mine, I’ll have you know.

  My dear friend Harvé Mendelman was stuck with the tapes Adry manipulated him into allowing her to record at the Judson Church. The music was unreleasable, unless Infini Records suddenly decided to go into the business of producing soundtracks for nature documentaries, and I refer not to the exciting kind about tsunamis and plants that eat human flesh. I refer to the kind about families of bunny rabbits and colorfully winged birds gliding off into the sunset. Harvé was going to hit me up for the costs of the remote recording in the church, and even after deducting those expenses from Adry’s account, applied to future earnings, the prospect of those earnings diminishing in the imminent future was deeply disconcerting to me, as it would be to anyone whose financial well-being was dependent upon Adry and who truly cared about her and wished to maintain that well-being.