“Every one of you thinks you are going to get into the Boston Symphony. Let me tell ya, not one of you will. And that’s not what it’s about anyway. I’ll tell you what it’s all about. Me? I play nursing homes. Yah. The great Maneri. Microtonalist. Composer. Theoretician. That’s right. You heard it. Nursing homes. I was in this nursing home on Sunday, see? And I’m playing for the old folks, it’s all great. Then I’m done, and I’m leavin’, and I see this guy sitting alone in a wheelchair.
“I walk up to this guy, and I start to talk to him, to try to, you know, connect a little bit, when I realize this man is deaf. Deaf.” He gesticulated, poking himself in the chest. “Now what is a musician, me, going to be able to do for a deaf guy? I suddenly feel, I don’t know, I don’t know what to do, helpless.”
Joe stopped talking for the first time since he walked in. He took a big breath and blew out the air. He smiled and nodded and walked back and forth across the front of the classroom. He shook his head, stopped, and then shrugged his shoulders. He looked right at me, as with a knowing look, and smiled.
“So what do I do?” he continued, as he scratched his chin. “I look up, I look up to God, and I pray. And I’m moved. I open my case, I’ve got my clarinet with me, that’s what I bring with me to the nursing homes. I open my case, and I take out my axe. I put together my clarinet. I pull out a reed and I suck the reed, you know, to get it ready. And I put the reed in the mouth piece, get it all nice and aligned.”
The students are all with him now. The reed players in the room are licking their lips, imagining putting their instruments together and getting ready to play. I’m with him, too.
“I put the instrument in my mouth,” Maneri says, “and I look at this guy. I look right into his eyes. Right into his eyes. And I breathe. And I pull all the love I have from my heart, from …” and he points with his thumb straight up. “And I start to blow. I’m just trying to blow my love into the clarinet. And the guy looks back at me, and he, and he starts to cry. A tear just rolls down his cheek, and a smile comes on his face. And I continue to blow. And I just play for this guy. I play, and I play, and I play. And when I’m done, he reaches out his hands. I put down the instrument, and he holds my hands in his, and he nods, as if to say, thank you.”
The bell rang. The class was over.
Maneri finished, at top volume. “And that is what it is all about.”
I went up to him, shaken, and, my voice trembling, I introduced myself.
“Yeah, man! Thanks for coming up. Listen, you’ve got to meet Berg. He’s the guy for you.”
I staggered out of the school, confused. I thought I was going for a theory class — what was this? What did it mean?
SCENE THREE:
The Trip to the Woods
Ivy was waiting for me when I got out. I sat in the car, staring out of the window, unable to speak.
“I’ve got a treat planned for us. I found a place for us to take a hike. Walden Pond.”
“Yeah, Walden Pond. What’s that?” I said, abstractedly.
“You don’t know Walden Pond? You know, where Henry David Thoreau lived.”
“Henry … who’s that?”
Though Ivy was gobsmacked by my ignorance, she tried not to sound condescending. “Thoreau, he was this philosopher, an American. He lived on Walden Pond for a while. Wrote a book about it. He was an amazing guy. Here, I went to a bookstore while you were at the school. I got a copy of the book. I thought you might like it.”
I opened the book and read the dedication.
Suck the marrow out of life. Yes, if only. And how? This was why I loved Ivy, for turning me on to shit like this. But somehow, I couldn’t quite bring myself to let her know what this meant to me and said nothing.
We hadn’t been out of the city in too long, and my little nature-sprite needed to be in the country bad. We found a trail and followed it deep into the woods. Instantly, she became one with the green, frolicking through the trees. When we got to a remote corner of the pond, she ripped off her clothes and leapt in the cool, dappled water. She was in ecstasy. “I’m living Thoreau’s dream!” she sang. “Why don’t you come in?”
I leaned against a giant tree, cold, feeling nothing. I kept my clothes on. I didn’t do skinny-dipping. Nothing got in. I browsed through the book in my hands but couldn’t focus on the words. Where had my feeling gone? I looked at the scene around me and tried to see and feel its beauty, but it all seemed flat, meaningless. I began to be overcome by a sense of panic, alarm. Where had it gone? How long had I lived without feeling? Had it always been this way and I had just been unaware of it? I looked at Ivy, with her freedom and verve, as if I was looking at something through a thick glass that was rare, beautiful, and inaccessible.
Then, it was time to go to Berg’s. We drove through the bucolic, historic Massachusetts landscape into a little town by the sea with old wooden houses painted different colors. The smell of wood smoke filled the cool, spring evening air. We knocked on the door of one of the creaky domiciles. A guy with wire rimmed glasses and wild black hair answered the door. He wore a thick, maroon, hand-woven sweater and was in stocking feet. His face was radiant with a bright, beaming smile.
“Come in! Come in!” he bellowed. A soft yellow light beckoned from within. “Can I get you a cup of tea?” His house smelled sweet with a wood stove crackling. We sat in his living room on worn old couches with deep, soft cushions and chatted amiably for a few minutes. My stocking feet rubbed against the wide plank floor and the edge of the worn hand woven rug.
Then he said, “Come! Let’s go to the piano. Let’s see what you have.” I offered him the book of rudimentary harmony exercises that I had worked on with Alex. He opened the pages. “Ah! Yes. I see what you are working on, what you are up to.” He looked at them, reading the music as if he could hear it in his head, humming, chuckling, and nodding his head with approval. He put the notation notebook on his piano and started to play. He played a few chords. Then, he jumped up enthusiastically. “Listen to that B! Listen! Oh, do you hear? Do you hear? That’s beautiful! I love the way you move through the sub-dominant region, and how the alto works against the tenor line. Yes, let me play it again!”
He played a chord, paused, and closed his eyes, like he was sipping a fine wine, taking in the sound, luxuriating in it. “Yes. Yes!”
What was he hearing? What was he feeling? Damn if I knew. I just heard notes in a silly exercise. He seemed to care so much. Why didn’t I care? The void inside of me opened up into a dark chasm. The life around me made me painfully aware of the deadness inside of me that felt decades old.
I started to feel this unbearable, heartbreaking longing. I wanted what Ivy and this guy had, but it seemed to be across an ocean, beyond the sea outside our doors, in a faraway land I could only imagine. I wanted freedom from this coldness inside, to break through this barrier, to find the beauty in things, to create beauty. But there was nothing to access. It all felt empty inside. I was consumed with grief, at my own death, which happened mysteriously, out of my sight, who knew when.
In a monotone voice, I asked, “So, if I was to come to work with you, to study, what would we do, what is your method?”
Berg grabbed a book off a shelf. He held it in his hand as if it were a sacred tome from the library at Alexandria. It seemed to glow in his hands.
“This is the book. In German, it is called Harmonielehre. In English, Theory of Harmony, by my hero, Arnold Schoenberg. His method, ach. I can’t even begin. He takes you through the entire history of harmony, he says you must learn the law first before you can break it, but the law is, in the end, for him, love. I learned this from Maneri, who learned from Schmidt, who learned from the master himself!”
“Schoenberg,” I said almost inaudibly. “Great. I’ll check it out.” I noticed it was dark out. I couldn’t stay there any longer. I had to go. I stood up. “Listen, thank you for your time. It really has been great. I’ll, I’ll … get back to you.”
As we
walked toward the door, Berg said, “I would love to work with you. You really have something here. We could do amazing work! I would love to teach you!”
I looked at him, paused, and looked around, as if, for some reason, there was someone I didn’t want to hear what I was about the say. “Maybe I will come. Maybe I will. I promise you’ll hear from me.” We left, and I felt rattled to the core. Some revelation was peeking through. Not a solution, for sure, but in fact, its opposite, a problem, an unsolvable dilemma. I was stuck, frozen, like in the fairy tales, spellbound.
As we made our way on the highway back toward the city, I was suddenly struck with desperation. I had to get out. I had to get out of New York, away from the studio, away from the drugs, away from the humiliations, the abuse, the endless hours, the narrow life, the studio tan, the boredom, the drudgery.
A snarky voice popped into my head. Shoeberg, or whatever his name is. What nonsense. We are not living in fin de siècle Vienna! No one cares about modern classical music! Why would you want to get involved in something that no one cares about? You won’t be known at all. You’ll study, like a good little student, and what will the learning give you? You want immortality? Now Bob Fosse, he is more famous now than Schoenberg ever was or will be. His movies have made millions of dollars! Schoenberg’s music is forgotten today. No one knows who he is, and he just died twenty years ago. But 50 years after Fosse is dead, his movies will be adored. Why would you want to give this up for some integrity trip?
The voice faded as I felt myself getting sucked back into the all-consuming maw of New York. I saw a great big city, filled with people who were dead inside, and I needed to escape, to save myself so I would be the last person to care. Then I became confused. Maybe caring meant staying and sacrificing everything for art. Then back again. No, I had to leave, I knew it was meaningless, I knew there had to be more to life, I knew that I didn’t want to be dead inside, and if I stayed, I’d never find myself. A scene from Fosse’s Damn Yankees sprang to life in my head. In that movie, the devil convinces this old guy that he will turn him into a baseball star, but he has to give up love, his wife, his life, and, of course, his soul. Along the way he and Gwen Verdon, Fosse’s real-life wife, the devil’s sexy handmaiden, sing “Two Lost Souls.”
“We’re two lost souls, on the highway of life …”
As our rental bumped over the decayed roads of the outer boroughs, it became clear, though I wouldn’t say the words out loud. I decided I had to leave. We were just about done with scoring the movie. My work would be finished. As soon as we could, we’d leave the city. I’d find a place to live in Massachusetts. I would study with Berg. It would be a new decade and I would be in a new place, a new life, with my girlfriend. It sounded so much better than the tedium of projects that would never be as good as All That Jazz.
If it was going to be real, I had to say it out loud.
I turned to Ivy in the car and said, “Alright. I’m done. We’ll leave. Jazz will be over soon, and we’ll get out of here as soon as it is finished. I’ll just quit. We’ll move up here. I’ll study music with Berg. Whaddya think? We’ll get out of this dirty shit hole and I’ll be done with all this crap.”
She looked at me, her moon-like eyes welling with tears of happiness.
ACT FOUR: THE ACT
SCENE ONE:
The Gig
To just about anyone reading, Bob Fosse’s decision, at the last moment, to use the mono version instead of the stereo version of the soundtrack to his film All That Jazz would seem inconsequential. But to me, the film’s music mixer, it was an utter catastrophe. How could such a minor technical difference be so devastating?
At the end of the summer, when we finished recording the various musical cues, overdubbing the vocal performances for the film’s songs, and mixing the music down to six tracks, my part in the process was complete. There was nothing stopping me now from getting out of Dodge. I’d make my girlfriend happy. I could tell myself that Jazz had been a great experience. Nothing would top it. I always said that I’d know when to hang up my spikes. I had survived and it was time to move on.
But then something happened that was so uncanny that it made me wonder if there were forces at work beyond my comprehension.
I got a call from Kenneth Utt, the line producer for the film. He was the guy who took care of all the daily details that needed to be seen to in order to get this huge, unwieldy thing called a movie made. He was a lovely, grizzled guy with a spiky salt and pepper crew-cut. He was a pro who knew what he was doing. He asked to meet with me. When we sat down together, he spoke in his even but commanding deep Southern accent and said, “Glenn, you’ve done a fine job on this film so far. Bob likes your work so much that he wants you to join us on the dubbing stage to do the re-record, handling the music.”
I started to bubble inside. This was incredible! After the score was recorded, the final part of the filmmaking process was post-production, where the dialogue, sound effects, and music are mixed together to create the final sound track. This is what Utt was asking me to participate in.
Utt went on. “We had a hard time making this happen, and the guys at Trans Audio, where we are going to do the mix, only agreed to it on the following conditions. You’ll get paid a nice hourly rate by the studio, but you can’t ask to join the union. This is going to be on background. You’ll get credit on the film but not for post-production. That’s the deal, my friend. Are you up for it?” He smiled.
“Of course! Yes! I’d love to!”
I was so excited, I didn’t give a shit about the small print. Who wanted to be in the union anyway?
It turned out that Ralph Burns put this idea into Fosse’s head. The music meant everything to him, of course, and it was a super-important part of the movie. He knew how complex the music mix was going to be and how demanding Fosse could be. Dick Vorisek, the guy who had been hired to do the post-production mix, was not a music guy. Ralph and I had formed a strong bond over the months of recording. We’d shared those meals at Ponte Vecchio. He wanted someone at the final mixing board who got music and represented his interests. He lobbied Fosse to hire me to work alongside of Vorisek. Clearly, Fosse liked the idea.
Mostly, I was pumped to have the opportunity to do this kind of work. I’d never done anything like this. I was up for the challenge. It sounded like the ultimate fun. And, it reinflated that balloon in my head. Ignoring the reality of the deal, that I wouldn’t get a post-production credit, I told myself that this was the ticket I had been waiting for. Here was my pathway to stardom. Here was the way I could win that Oscar. Up until then, the movie could win for sound, but my name wouldn’t be attached to that. Now I’d be on the dubbing stage. I’d figure out some way to get the goddamn credit.
My excitement and fantasizing slammed into a brick wall of reality: my promise to Ivy.
SCENE TWO:
Claude’s
Ivy and I were having breakfast at Claude’s, this little French patisserie on West 4th Street in the Village. Claude was an irascible Norman who looked like a french Pillsbury Doughboy. His éclairs were poetry itself. If he didn’t like you, he took out what he called his “grandmother’s toothbrush,” a large wrench, from behind his counter, and he would wave it at you until you ran out of his shop. But he never did that to us. We were part of the in-crowd at Claude’s.
As we luxuriated in our warm pain au chocolat and sipped our cappuccini, I screwed up my courage and said, “I got this incredible opportunity yesterday. Bob wants me to do the post-production mix! It’s an amazing honor, I mean, I’ve never done this before, and to do this for Jazz, that would be a dream come true.”
I could see her tighten. Her already big eyes got larger and started to fill with tears. This was something I experienced all too often, and it drove me nuts. We could never seem to get through a meal at a restaurant without her crying. Fuck, I thought to myself, here it comes. The last thing that I needed was to have Claude see her blubbering. He’d smack me with the tooth
brush. I went on. “Look, I know I said we’d leave, and we will! I mean, this can’t go on for that long. The movie has to come out by the end of the year. We’ll probably be done in a few weeks. As soon as it’s done, we’ll leave. I promise.”
Her voice trembled with rage. Trying to keep quiet, she seethed, “I don’t believe you! This is what this whole thing has been like! You tell me you’ll be home by seven and then I don’t see you for three days. You say this is the end, but then another ‘incredible opportunity’ will come along, and the next thing you know, five years will pass. I hate it here!”
I assured her this was the last heist. We’d make a killing on this one, and it would give us the cake to get out in style. “Look, it will be better this way! I’ll make so much money, I won’t have to work for who knows how long! And you won’t have to work. You can just write poetry, like you’ve always wanted to.”
Tears fell onto her pastry.
I couldn’t help but react. “Do we really have to? For Christ’s sake, don’t let Claude see.” She just stared at me with a look so cold it was like an ice pick to the heart.
I thought I was fucked, until fate came up with a scheme to get her to go along with the plan.
SCENE THREE:
The Screening
I had now moved into a higher echelon. Bob invited me to an advance screening of a rough cut of the film, to give me an opportunity to see the entire film for the first time so I’d know what we would be working on when we got to the dubbing stage. He told me to bring my girlfriend along. He also invited some of his friends and acquaintances to this showing to get some early feedback.
The first thing I had to deal with was Ivy’s resistance to this whole idea. But beyond that, I was nervous about her reaction to the movie. She could be a tough critic. She considered herself a radical feminist. She was a poet with a 4.0 from Yale and could be pretty snobby when it came to art. If anything even smacked the slightest bit of misogyny or female objectification, she felt the obligation to put it down. This included any nuanced or somewhat realistic depiction of human relationships and/or portrayals of beauty and/or sexuality. We had a huge fight on one of our first dates after seeing Woody Allen’s breakthrough film Annie Hall because she considered the totally beautiful character of Annie to be offensive. There were almost no characterizations of women, especially those created by men, which passed her muster. And I had seen enough clips during recording to know that Fosse didn’t shy away from sexualized portrayals of the superior gender.
Never Say No To A Rock Star Page 21