by Mike Edison
My preview of a Mahler cycle was a thinly disguised run at Pink Floyd:
“A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything,” Mahler famously said, but by no means did he embrace the kitchen-sink worldview later perpetrated by over-reaching art rock bands, throwing in every gloop and gleep one can possibly make by twisting the knobs on a Mini Moog, confusing syrup with sentiment and bombast with importance. Mahler’s work puts into sharp contrast the kind of contrived angst that sourpusses like Pink Floyd have made a career of by capturing and expanding on genuine feelings of dread, sadness, joy, and redemption—to name but four—and without the aid of inflatable pigs, laser light shows, and idiotic, ham-fisted “wall” metaphors that were tired long before Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists.
I guess ripping Pink Floyd meant I was working as a heel—at least in some circles—but as “Rowdy” Roddy Piper once told me, it is always the heels who sell tickets. Anyway, I was totally “over” with the publicists and press agents who handled classical music concerts in New York. They were ga-ga for my gimmick, which meant plenty of comped tickets.
But, to the point: Later in his life, my father also became enthusiastic about classical music, although you can be sure his path had been quite different from mine (no stoners stun-gunning one another for laughs), and I tried very hard to engage him on the topic. I thought maybe—finally—we had reached some common ground, and that hopefully our relationship could take a right turn onto some friendly turf. Surely he would approve of my own good taste!
I was practically groveling for some respect. A nod, a wink, some father-son bonhomie—anything. Look! I have culture, too! Now maybe it will be okay to like me! Maybe a bit of Brahms or Borodin was just the salve we were missing? I have to imagine that he felt it, too. Haven’t we grown up, at all?
As usual, I blew it. I mentioned that I had begun writing about classical music for the local paper, which, in New York City, was a pretty big coup. I thought parents were supposed to be proud of stuff like that.
“You know, I’ve been going to the symphony a lot lately,” I told him, after listening to him boast how great the weather was in Arizona, and with such fierce pride that you’d think he was somehow responsible for it himself. Places that still had winter were below his station.
“Oh really,” he wagered. “I thought you were into punk rock.”
“I’m into all sorts of things, you know. But I’ve really been loving going to see the symphony, and writing about it. It’s a great gig.”
“Classical music is an expensive hobby,” he sniffed, the same way he had so generously helped me with my photography, the message being: You should quit now.
What I should have quit doing was trying to find something we could talk about. That was a brushback pitch, and if I didn’t stop crowding the plate, the next one was coming at my head. But you know me: I can hardly stop myself.
“Well,” I said, “The radio is still free. But since I’ve been working for the newspaper, the publicists and press agents have been super nice to me. Anyway, even when I don’t get comped, the cheap seats at Carnegie are great. Even upstairs in the balcony it sounds fantastic. It’s not like Avery Fisher Hall…”
And right there, I stepped in it by having the temerity to criticize that great playground of the aristocracy, the former Avery Fisher Hall (now known as David Geffen Hall), the airport-like cavern in Lincoln Center where the New York Philharmonic saws at their fiddles.
I am not the first person, not by a long shot, to question the acoustics at Avery Fisher. They were notoriously bad—the topic of much discussion and expensive attempts at course correction. Basically, the room is just too big. There is too much air to push around without the benefit of amplification, and on a bad day—solo piano concerts are the worst—the sound just kind of hangs there, and then dissipates, like Lewis Carroll’s cat.
Anyway, I was really only suggesting the relative merits of Carnegie Hall, my very favorite place for this sort of hootenanny, but it was too late. Clearly I had shit the bed.
“It does not become you to criticize Lincoln Center,” I was told. “Now you think you are smarter than Lincoln Center?”
I probably should have just packed it in right there and headed for the nearest bar. But before I sulked off, I had to mention that I had just been to Lincoln Center that week, where I saw part of a Stravinsky cycle. I wrote a review of it and wanted to send it to him. Maybe seeing my name over a newspaper column might impress him.
“Stravinsky is dissonant. I don’t like it,” he told me. “I don’t know anyone who does.”
Really, Dad? No one?
I suggested that there was a lot more to Stravinksy than “Rite of Spring,” which I correctly assumed he was talking about, because that is all any casual fan ever knows. I suggested that Beethoven, for instance, also used some pretty nifty dissonances and cacophony, especially in his Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, but also in the Third and the Seventh, some of the better piano sonatas, and the Late Quartets. But we were not going to be discussing Beethoven, or much else for that matter.
“Beethoven isn’t dissonant,” he told me. “You don’t know what you are talking about.”
There is a wonderful book, The Lexicon of Musical Invective, by the composer and conductor Nicolas Slonimsky, which collects contemporaneous reviews of famous composers, from Beethoven to Wagner. All of the reviews are bad. You can look up key phrases in the Lexicon—critical jewels like “incoherent mass of rubbish,” which will lead you to Wagner; “drooling and emasculated,” which takes you to Mahler; and “incomprehensible union of strange harmonies,” “obstreperous meowing,” and “wrong notes,” all of which bring you to Beethoven, because there is more clanging in those big symphonies than in a prison riot. It is no wonder they were considered monstrosities by the sonically unadventurous when they first hit air.
Anyway, “obstreperous meowing” aside, what my dad was trying to articulate, of course, was that his Beethoven was better than my Beethoven.
I realized that the old man had no idea what he was listening to and that he didn’t really care, which made sense—in my whole life, I had never once heard him play music at home. My parents owned exactly two long-playing phonograph records, the soundtrack to Man of La Mancha, and something by the Ink Spots, and they never played either of them. In the car he played the “beautiful music” station—not “light classical,” or “adult soft rock,” or even “easy listening,” but Muzak®—the genuine article—and it made me nuts riding anywhere with him when I was a kid. Who would want to listen to elevator music by choice? And wasn’t he worried he’d fall asleep and wreck the car and kill everyone in it?
But I tried very hard to share the music I liked with him, looking for some common ground we could cohabitate on and feel smart together. I remember when I was thirteen and got my first cassette deck, I painstakingly prepared tapes for us to listen to in the car together on long rides, featuring some of the Beatles more effete offerings—“Michelle,” “Penny Lane,” “Yesterday,” etc. I didn’t even like these songs (when it comes to the Beatles, I’ve always been more of a “Helter Skelter” kind of guy), but I figured it was pretty close to the dentist-office crap he was into (they even played versions of all of those songs on the “beautiful music station”). Perhaps, if I could get him to cop to liking the Beatles, then at least our worlds would touch, ever so tangentially, and maybe he would realize that I wasn’t simply a witless wrestling fan. I was even willing to keep my mouth shut during “Rocky Raccoon.” No sacrifice was too great if it would have helped our relationship.
Those tapes never made it into the dashboard tape player. “I don’t want to hear it,” he told me flatly. “Put it away. I don’t like your music.” This was the party line until he was about seventy, when he blurted at an otherwise typically awkward dinner with him, “Oh, I like your kind of music now. I think Buddy Holly is terrific.”
I have no idea where this came from. Maybe he wa
s having dinner at a rich friend’s house, where some oldies happened to be playing while they had wine and cheese, and this is what he came away with. I ribbed him that he was only about sixty years behind the curve (“What, were you waiting for the lines to die down?”) and that maybe if he lived for another sixty, he’d start digging the Sex Pistols. At least he laughed at that.
“Do you know who the Sex Pistols are?” I had to ask.
“I am assuming they are one of your punk rock bands.”
“Well, not one of mine, per se, but sure, I’ll accept that.”
“And how is your band doing?”
“Well, we’re doing pretty good, actually. Playing a lot, having fun. But it’s not like we’re the Rolling Stones or nuthin’…” And then I asked, because I can never be sure of what he did or didn’t know, “Do you know who the Rolling Stones are?”
“Yes,” he said. “They are a successful rock band.”
Every once in a while he won a round.
MY FATHER TRULY WAS HIS MOTHER’S SON. She was also a habituant of the concert hall, attending Friday afternoon concerts by the Boston Symphony with her sisters, followed by high tea at the Ritz-Carlton on Arlington Street.
Ironically, during the years that she was attending, the music director, Serge Koussevitzky, was responsible for supporting and commissioning some pretty far-out modernists like Prokofiev, Bartók, and that crazy Stravinsky. Whether she knew it or not, she was getting hit with some pretty hip shit. But for her, going to the symphony had little to do with music. It was just what rich old ladies did.
My dad didn’t empathize or sympathize when his kids were sad or sick or happy or in pain or victorious or suffering defeat, so he wasn’t suddenly going to be transported by the pathos of Beethoven’s Ninth or Mahler’s Second, never mind the bathos of Sgt. Slaughter vs. The Iron Sheik.
What he never got, or didn’t want to accept, was that digging Beethoven didn’t make you a genius any more than liking professional wrestling made you a boob. Nor were they mutually exclusive. Sometimes I even watch wrestling with the sound turned off while listening to the Fifth Symphony, which just proves it. Then again, I also like to watch baseball while listening to Aerosmith, so maybe not…
WrestleMania and Idomeneo live on the same continuum of drama and entertainment. The Marx Brothers, Star Wars, Glengarry Glen Ross, A Chorus Line, Jaws, M*A*S*H, The Twilight Zone, Romeo and Juliet, and West Side Story probably fall somewhere in between. But isn’t West Side Story just another staged battle blown up into a ridiculous, massive spectacle?
Actually, when it comes to West Side Story, I’m with Pauline Kael. I find the whole thing a bit bumptious. But what the hell do I know. Anyway, I don’t go to the symphony because it makes me feel smart, I go because it makes me feel whole.
But, to hear my father tell it, classical music is a moneyed avocation—not for me—and he began bragging to me about a fund-raiser he had held at his house for his local well-meaning, but ultimately undistinguished, philharmonic.
“So, basically,” I ribbed him, because I never learn, “you are helping to fund an unpopular form of music that is wholly unsustainable without grants and subsidies. Hey, if that’s what you’re into, I could really use a new guitar.” I thought that was pretty funny, but I was wrong.
“You need to grow up,” he told me. Nothing had really changed since I brought home fifteen cents’ worth of Atomic FireBalls.
Then one night he called me up and told me I should stop playing music altogether.
“Huh?”
“You think you are a big shot, but you are not. No one cares about your music. If you were any good, you would have made it by now.”
I honestly had no idea where this was coming from. It was very much out of the blue. The guy never called to see how I was. He forgot my birthday more than once.
“I’ve been thinking about it, and I think you should stop. No one wants to hear you,” he said.
I had no response.
“You once told me how happy playing music makes you,” he continued, and I wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but I had to agree with that. It was true.
“Absolutely,” I said, “I am pretty much happiest when I am playing, no question about it. It brings me a great deal of joy.”
“But you can’t make a living doing it, so you should quit now. It’s a waste of time.”
It really was just an awful non-conversation, and I never quite figured out what precipitated it. I hung up the phone fairly distressed. Then I sat down on the couch and picked up my Telecaster®. I strummed the chords to “Boom, Boom.” It felt pretty good. I picked up my Les Paul® and played a Chuck Berry riff. It weighed a ton and felt even better. I shrugged and decided to put new strings on both guitars, and then go shopping for a new amplifier.
I understood why he hated it when I started playing the drums—they were a low instrument, the Yiddish of the musical hierarchy. And drummers, oy! Not fit for polite society. But playing the drums was the one thing that gave me confidence when I got to college, and they were eventually my ticket to adventure. Why did he keep telling me I sucked, when clearly I didn’t? No drums, no plane tickets to Tokyo. No flights to Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Madrid, Paris, or Zurich, never mind Austin, New Orleans, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Las Vegas. Later on, when I started playing the guitar seriously, I was doing monthlong tours of France, playing blues and gospel in bars and clubs for two hundred euros a night.
I think all together I must have played about 1,000 gigs, which may or may not sound like a lot, but to put it in some sort of perspective, in the course of their careers the Ramones played 2,280 shows; the Grateful Dead, 2,318. Led Zeppelin, about 600. I have also played on about a dozen records, some of them pretty good.
IF THERE WERE A THOUSAND GIGS, then there must have been at least two thousand rehearsals. That’s a lot of playing nice with others.
My father once asked me if I considered myself “a professional musician.” I said sure—I show up on time, sober, dressed for the gig, knowing all the songs, ready to go. That is what is called being “professional.” But I know he was looking for a dollar amount. And sometimes we made pretty good dough. Sometimes I came back from a tour with a ton of cash (or I’d just hang around in Paris and spend it before I came home). Other times, not so much.
I’ve played in circus tents and at universities, in art galleries, butcher shops (paid in pork chops), liquor stores (paid in booze), Wall Street strip clubs, French sportatoriums, a famous Brooklyn haberdashery (paid in hats), anarchist squats in Holland and Germany, street fairs, festivals, house parties, libraries, breweries, war zones, weddings, BBQ joints (paid in meat and money), on boardwalks and beaches, and in Eastern European theaters so baroque they bordered on rococo. I did a gig in a pizza parlor in Chicago once, and they named a pizza after me—“the Mike Edison Dirty Pie.” That was a good day. But every gig is a privilege. I take nothing for granted. Lots of people far more talented than I am never get out of the garage.
All of this made my father angry. “I hate that you get to live your dreams before I get to live mine,” he growled.
My mother didn’t exactly discourage me, but she wasn’t much better. She was certainly no fan of the modern drum set.
“I wish you would have taken piano lessons,” she used to sigh.
“I wanted to, if you remember. I was in sixth grade. I played the piano they had in the band room at school one day, and I really liked it, and I came home all excited and asked if we could get a piano and you told me no.”
“Your father wouldn’t get one, he thought it was a waste of money. You could have played guitar… like the ones at summer camp. What do you call those guitars? That’s what I would have wanted for you. You could have played for children. You would have been good at that.”
“An acoustic guitar? Actually, Mom, I do play the guitar. Acoustic and the other kind. I’ve been playing them for about twenty years. You’ve seen me play—don’
t you remember that picnic when I played the guitar and sang a few songs?”
“That was you? I thought you played the drums.”
There was no winning with these people.
What I came to realize was that my father, not being creative himself, was simultaneously jealous and distrustful of those who were. Except those who were successful, if their paintings represented an asset that he could hang on his wall, or if he could somehow benefit socially from the association. But mostly artists were agents of chaos. He was threatened by people who didn’t prioritize making money. It confused him, and confusion was a dissonance that truly made him angry. Musicians were the worst—they undermined his entire worldview by actually having fun while they weren’t making money.
Which goes a long way to explaining why ten-year-old me trying to learn how to play the saxophone struck terror into his heart. Maybe that’s why, forty years later, he was still trying to pour water on me. I was a time bomb, ticking.
14
I AM JUST A JEEPSTER FOR YOUR LOVE
Recently I told a friend that I was working on a new book. “Something of a childhood memoir, largely about my relationship with my father. It’s called You Are a Complete Disappointment—his last words to me.”
“Oh shit, really?”
And then he laughed. As I’ve said before, it’s like ringing a bell. I’ve told the story two dozen times, and without exception the person I am talking to laughs, and then immediately apologizes for laughing. “Oh, man, that is horrible, I am so sorry that happened to you.”
And then they laugh some more, because it is funny, at least if you look at it straight-on: An old man calls his son over to his deathbed, and then just when it seems like it is going to be one of those touching father-son scenes we always imagine, Dad smashes the kid over the head with the emotional equivalent of a folding chair. It would have played well in any number of comedies. Woody Allen could have dined out on that for years.