The Boy Who Cried Freebird

by Mitch Myers

  CHAD WACKERMAN (FRANK ZAPPA: 1981 1988)

  “I showed some of my parts to other drummers and they didn’t know how to start. But you break things down slowly like you would with any difficult piece. His music demanded fearlessness. That’s the only way you could play it—if you took away the fear then it opens up for you. I worked with Frank and the London Symphony Orchestra playing multiple percussion parts on the drum kit. Frank told me, ‘Do you realize that the drum-set has never been used this way, ever? We’re making history here!’”

  A CHANCE ENCOUNTER

  I was sitting alone in my favorite coffeehouse, enjoying a cappuccino and reading a fairly good book, when I spied an old friend of mine, Adam Coil, walking through the door.

  Adam and I had bonded years earlier, and our affinity was mostly due to a strong mutual interest in what we considered to be good music. I hadn’t seen him in months and immediately motioned for him to join me.

  As he smiled and headed across the room, I recalled the last time we’d seen each other. It was just before Christmas, and I’d confronted Adam on his obvious depression.

  I hadn’t spoken to Adam since that day and felt embarrassed that I hadn’t been in touch. He sat down and we exchanged pleasantries. He seemed to be in good spirits, and after a bit of small talk and more cappuccino, I cautiously brought up his dark mood of the previous winter.

  “I was really worried about you,” I told him. “I can’t remember ever seeing you so discouraged.”

  He sat there silently for a long time, apparently deciding whether or not to confide in me. Finally, he said, “You know, I was down. I was so down that I was ready to pull the plug.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “You know what I mean,” he said quietly. “I was going to kill myself. I’d been depressed for months. I was crying every day and I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. I missed so much work that eventually I lost my job.”

  Coil’s confession left me uneasy; I said something about me being there for him and how glad I was that he was still around. “You seem fine now,” I said. “How’d you get through it?”

  Adam looked smug as he leaned forward to share his tale.

  “It’s a funny thing, actually,” he said. “It was March and I hadn’t left my house in weeks. I couldn’t have been more depressed. I was crying so much that my vision was blurry and I couldn’t even read or watch TV. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. It wasn’t as if I really wanted to die but I couldn’t stand the pain. I’d already bought a gun and was ready to blow my brains out. But I was scared and thought that I should try talking to someone. So, I dialed a crisis intervention number that I’d scribbled down after hearing a Public Service Announcement on the radio.

  “Somebody answered the phone and said ‘Hotline’ and I started spilling my guts. I explained how I had become a total shut-in and couldn’t stop thinking about killing myself when the guy stopped me and asked if I was over eighteen. I told him that I was well over eighteen and needed to talk to a professional. I said that I was desperate and if I didn’t get to talk to the right person I was likely to shoot myself in the head. There was a short pause and I was transferred to a woman who sounded very experienced and very patient. I started telling her my problems.

  “Almost immediately, the woman stopped me and asked if I could give her a credit card number. I was surprised because I thought that I had dialed a free hotline. Here I was in the middle of baring my soul when all of a sudden she asks for my credit card? I was going to hang up but then I decided, screw it—if this doesn’t help me I’m going to kill myself, so who cares what they might charge me?

  “I gave the woman my credit card number and then she started asking me some very personal questions. I was amazed by her ability to change gears like that—it was as if there had been no break in our discussion. She was warm, compassionate, and surprisingly reassuring. She listened to me as I cried and she told me not to worry. She promised that she was going to make me feel better. Her soothing voice had me entranced. I don’t know exactly how long it took me to realize that I’d misdialed the phone number and had inadvertently called one of those 900-number sex lines.”

  Adam shrugged his shoulders and grinned. “Damn if I didn’t find the will to live after that,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been talking to the same woman twice a week ever since, and I feel better than I have in ages.”

  Then he glanced at his watch and said, “Wow, look at the time. I have to run. I just came in to get a cup of coffee before my softball game. Listen, it was great running into you. I’ll call you and we’ll get together and hang out for sure.”

  Adam Coil threw a few dollars down on the table and was out the door in a flash. I looked blankly around the coffeehouse, sipped at my cold cappuccino, and tried in vain to resume reading my damn book.

  HIGH NOON

  The sun hangs high in the Texas sky, and West Fourth Street in Austin is totally deserted. Alejandro Escovedo sits motionless in the back room of La Zona Rosa nightclub. Then, slowly, he stands up and begins to strap on his 6-string guitar.

  A pretty young woman rushes in and pleads with the solemn guitar-slinger, “Al, you don’t have to go out there! You don’t have to prove anything to anyone; all of your albums are great, no matter how little they may have sold! Besides, they’ve brought in some big names for the South by Southwest music festival this year. It will be suicide! Let’s just leave town and go somewhere new and start over.”

  Alejandro Escovedo smiles ruefully and wipes a tear from the young woman’s cheek. “It’s too late for a man like me to start over, my dear. I’ve come too far and seen more miles than money. If this doesn’t cut it—well, that’s just the way it is.”

  Outside, the clock tolls twelve and three grizzled men walk down the middle of the street. Neil Young, Elvis Costello, and Bruce Springsteen stare straight ahead—barely aware of the bystanders anxiously watching their every move.

  Leaving his woman crying in the back of La Zona Rosa, Alejandro Escovedo steps out into the blinding light to face his fate…

  Exactly what happened next is hard to confirm.

  Some think Alejando’s elegant balladry saved his ass. Others insist it was his ear-bleeding version of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” Me? I say it was his finale of “Gravity/Falling Down Again” segueing straight into Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle” that made all of the difference.

  Anyway, believe what you want to believe. That’s the stuff of legends, ain’t it?

  THIS AMERICAN LIFE

  We’re among the pastoral foothills of the Sierra Nevada in rural Camptonville, California, at Terry Riley’s secluded “Sri Moonshine Ranch.” And what does the godfather of modern minimalism have in store for us today? Creating a landmark batch of salsa, of course.

  Terry Riley and his wife, Ann, have been cooking up salsa for many a summer and their kitchen tradition remains an industrious-yet-imprecise science. Using hot chilies grown on their farm and peppers received from their friends and neighbors, the Rileys chop, stir, and boil impressive amounts of organic tomatoes, onions, and cilantro into their annual “hot” concoction.

  Upstairs, above the kitchen, is where Terry makes an even more vital blend. Two beautiful grand pianos sit side by side in his workspace. Removed from urban distractions, this is where Terry composes music. Riley is a wise and gentle sort, articulate but unassuming, and in the course of his long career he’s influenced artists as diverse as composer Philip Glass, rock icon Pete Townsend (remember “Baba O’Riley” from Who’s Next?), and sound architect Brian Eno.

  Terry is one of the most important composers of the twentieth century, and his timeless composition In C duly eliminated the boundaries between classical music, minimalist experimentalism, and trance-improvisation for all who followed.

  Born in Colfax, California, in 1935, Terry was a barrelhouse piano prodigy by the time he attended San Francisco State College. One of hi
s early peers was Pauline Oliveros, a groundbreaking composer in her own right. “When we were going to school together, Terry was a really hot pianist,” she recalled. “It was quite clear that he was an enormous talent and had music coming out of his pores.”

  After leaving San Francisco State, Terry enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley in 1959, and became a member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center—a Davisadero Street workshop that became a prime gathering place for northern California’s avant-garde community.

  Alongside filmmakers, dancers, and artists, Riley forged relationships with musicians whose names now read like a postclassical who’s who. Besides Oliveros, Terry exchanged ideas with composers like Morton Subotnick, Steve Reich, and Ramon Sender—even future Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh was there.

  Most importantly, Riley encountered La Monte Young while at Berkeley. And if Terry Riley is the founding father of modern minimalism, then La Monte Young is the genre’s designated granddad.

  When the two met in 1960, La Monte had already developed some highly original ideas on extended tones, and how musical time could pass with the smallest amount of sound. These concepts marked the beginning of the school of musical “minimalism.”

  La Monte moved to New York, and along with his wife, Marian Zazeela; John Cale (future member of the Velvet Underground); and Tony Conrad, Young formed the Theater of Eternal Music, whose droning, drug-fueled performances would last through the night and into the dawn.

  La Monte Young is notorious for a long-standing feud with Cale and Conrad. Their dispute is over the rights to recordings that they made together in the mid-’60s. Terry, who also performed with the ensemble, remained close to La Monte.

  “Terry Riley is the most harmonious musician to work with I have ever known,” Young said. “I appreciate it more and more over the years, although we don’t have as frequent an opportunity to perform and rehearse together. We really were able to capitalize on this in the Theatre of Eternal Music because there was so much cocreativity encouraged in the group.”

  The 1960s were a period of heady discovery for Terry. Outgrowing honky-tonk piano, he experimented with tape manipulations and employed a tape-delay device called the time-lag accumulator. Some of his music reflected the use of psychedelic drugs, like the mesmerizing tape-loop construction, “Mescalin Mix.” “Mescalin Mix” was recorded between 1960 and 1962 and was inspired by musician/engineer Richard Maxfield.

  “I went to Europe for a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley,” Terry recalled. “That’s when I had a big period of bringing my ideas into focus and got to work with Chet Baker in Paris. The Tape Music Center had gotten started, and when I came back, I reconnected with Pauline and Morton Subotnick. There was a lot of work I’d been doing, including [music for the theater production] The Gift with Chet Baker. I found, through accident, that tape loops build up this long form. I’d sit there listening as this loop was repeating over and over, creating a whole musical form. The way time passes and the way the mind works when it focuses on an object, it’s like a meditation. A tape loop is a kind of mantra.”

  Riley’s collaboration with jazzman Chet Baker accompanied The Gift, which was a 1961 theater piece written by Ken Dewey that debuted in Paris. Both the “Mescalin Mix” and The Gift involved sonic fragmentation and the stretching and slackening of time using (now) primitive tape recording technology. Terry looped reels of audiotape through one tape player, extended the loops out his window and around a wine bottle, and back into a second tape machine.

  All this experimental work, however, paled at the debut of his most memorable composition, In C. It is a seminal instrumental work with a nonstop pulse, repetitive themes, and interlocking modal melodies. It was devised by Riley during a bus trip and written out in the space of two days.

  In C is a cosmic sound cycle—one that gradually blossoms into a shimmering aural experience via fifty-three recurring figures. The composition took Riley’s hypnotic tape-loop concepts and his other motifs of repetition and adapted them, using traditional acoustic instruments.

  “In 1964, I’d been working on all these electronic pieces,” said Riley. “I’d [also] written In C, but it had never been performed. So I took all this stuff down to the Tape Music Center. I met Steve Reich and Jon Gibson, and they put together this pickup band and In C was recorded.”

  Crediting La Monte Young for the spirit of In C but not the content, Terry is proud of the resilient piece, which has been performed all over the world. There have been Canadian and Italian versions, a twenty-fifth anniversary concert recording, and a rendition by the Shanghai Film Orchestra using traditional Chinese instruments. Guitarist Henry Kaiser played on the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of In C and he maintained that Riley is the “most significant and influential composer since World War II.”

  In the ’70s, a fifteen-piece rock band performed In C; in the ’80s, there was an all-guitar performance; and in the late ’90s a Lincoln Center Festival featured an electronic version with Robert Moog on synthesizer.

  But CBS Records released Riley’s most distinguished rendering of In C back in 1968, and the clarity and precision of that recording remains unsurpassed.

  When I said to Kronos Quartet leader David Harrington that one couldn’t write about Riley without discussing In C, his response was succinct: “It’s the same way you can’t talk about Stravinsky without discussing The Rite of Spring. In C is an idea about life, about making music together, and about community. It’s so simple and yet so profound, it always sounds right and it always sounds different.”

  La Monte Young had his own high praise for Riley’s work. “In C is a perfect masterpiece,” said Young. “I compare it with the theme from the ‘Funeral March’ in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Schoenberg’s opening theme in Verklärte Nacht. Terry not only influenced Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and their protégés, such as John Adams, but his influence spread out to certain European rock groups such as Daevid Allen’s Gong, Can, and Tangerine Dream. In the case of these rock groups, I think sometimes Terry was the direct link.”

  Invigorated by the success of In C and hopeful to return to Europe, the Rileys made their way across America in a Volkswagen bus. “I’d been in Mexico living the hippie lifestyle and ended up in New York broke—so we traded our van for money for a loft,” Riley recalled. The couple settled in Manhattan, where Ann Riley worked as a schoolteacher and Terry reunited with La Monte Young.

  “La Monte was my main contact, so I started going over [to his place],” Riley explained. “Tony [Conrad] and John [Cale] and Marian and La Monte were singing on a very regular basis. John had already started work with the Velvet Underground. Within a couple of months he left, and I found myself as one of the main members of the group. La Monte, Marian, and I were singing, and Tony was playing an amplified violin. In addition, we used little tank motors for drones and later on, sine-wave generators. We did several concerts. Tony Conrad was brilliant, I really liked working with Tony.”

  His tenure with La Monte was brief, but Terry had established himself in Manhattan’s burgeoning loft scene. “I left the group because I wanted to get back to the work I’d been doing after In C,” he said. “I got this little harmonium that had a vacuum-cleaner motor. It was primitive, but I started playing keyboard studies on it and doing some of the first loft concerts around New York.”

  Lengthy, mutable tunes like “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band” evolved into mesmerizing solo concerts that incorporated Riley’s keyboard studies, tape delays, and his soprano saxophone style—one that borrowed from both La Monte Young and John Coltrane.

  Tony Conrad was impressed with Riley’s metamorphosis and enjoyed his solo shows during this time. “Terry’s keyboard work had evolved a conceptual coherence and technical mastery that was on a tier above any musician then playing and was as original and articulate as Bird in the early ’40s or Tudor/Cage in the ’50s,” explained Conrad. “The magic and power of the soundscape that Terry created
in concerts defied all explanation or understanding. His proficiency as a performer, combined with the intricacy of his rhythmic and melodic structure, left most listeners dumbfounded, simply able to drink in the endlessly undulating liquidity of his sound.”

  Riley’s hyperbolic solo shows in 1967 and 1968 would often last until morning, predating the tranced-out rave culture by decades. English DJ Mixmaster Morris kept an extensive library of Terry’s recordings and considered him one of the great innovators in contemporary music. “[Riley’s] use of electronic modulation in a live context was thirty years ahead of the field,” said Morris.

  After securing a three-album deal with CBS Records’ Master-works, Riley recorded his classic version of In C. His “pickup band” included Stuart Dempster on trombone, Jon Hassell on trumpet, and Margaret Hassell, who played the single, C note “pulse” throughout on piano.

  The 1968 recording of In C galvanized Terry’s reputation as a serious composer, but it was marketed to younger consumers. Indeed, In C and his follow-up album, Rainbow in Curved Air, were portrayed as psychedelic brain candy—appearing in ads alongside synthesizer oddities like Walter (now Wendy) Carlos’s Switched-On Bach and Morton Subotnick’s Touch.

  While In C was the acoustic precursor to many future-minimalist works, Riley’s Rainbow in Curved Air was a one-man electric circus geared to re-create the experience of his all-night concerts.

  So, besides his accomplishments with In C, Terry Riley effected a ground-zero change in the realms of electronic and ambient music. West Coast intellectual Stuart Brand said, “Riley had profound and immediate influence on Brian Eno, evident in his albums My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Music for Airports. In C persuaded Brian that endlessly original algorithmic music doing permutations on a sound palette designed by the composer could make brilliant listening. This is something Brian and I have talked about a lot.”