Memory and Music: Fragments

When I was a kid my parents owned a restaurant. It sat on the main drag of a small town, just a block away from the High School. Since the school operated on the modular system and had an open campus policy, kids would often hang out there. One morning when I was five or six years old and not at school for some reason, I saw what a typical morning was like for my parents at work. The High Schoolers didn’t spend much. Nickels, dimes and quarters flew back and forth, as did the cups of coffee, milkshakes, and lots of orders of toast. No one sat still or spoke quietly and coins were continually dropped into the jukebox. Some of the songs: Candida, I’ll be There, Bridge Over Troubled Water. One laughing girl tipped her china saucer and the hot coffee spilled on her. I remember her gasp, the excitement, and more laughter. The Jackson 5 will always take me back to that moment.

My sisters brought 45's into the house and played them on a cheap turntable. Summer Breeze and Cherish were favorites of theirs. I liked Spirit in the Sky. That song never sounds old to me. A week ago my wife and I were coming home from the beach and it came on the radio. I mentioned, probably for the twentieth time, that I never get tired of it, that it always makes me smile, and that it was Norman Greenbaum’s only hit. I then ventured a theory: "I’ll bet this song wasn’t planned out at all." My wife replied, "Those musicians at that particular moment will never be duplicated," and I added, "It’s a total accident." We laughed at the lyrics: "Never been a sinner, never sinned. I got a friend in Jesus. So you know that when I die, he’s gonna set me up with the spirit in the sky." It’s like he’s in with the mafia. Only it’s Jesus. The synthesizer doesn't sound like it should go with the old-fashioned gospel singers, but the disjunction creates a sound that is old and new simultaneously, with the result that the song always sounds hip.

I met my wife twenty-five years ago, in a restaurant with a jukebox. Everybody Wants to Rule the World played continuously.

I was listening to the Doors when the news of John Lennon’s death came on the radio. And Lennon’s Imagine was playing at work when I heard the news on 9/11/2001. I thought about the song, and then I thought about Mark David Chapman, and then I heard the news.

There are songs I won’t listen to. They remind me of something I’d rather forget. Also, I suffer from stuck-tune syndrome. I once had an Elvis Costello song in my head for two weeks. I’d go to bed with it in my head, and wake up with it in my head. It nearly drove my crazy. And don’t ask the name of the song. Maybe Fran Hill will appreciate this: I combat stuck-tune syndrome by making the song my own. How? By singing it in all sorts of weird ways (bystanders are either disturbed, puzzled, annoyed or amused, depending on their nature).

I knew a guy years ago who taught me all about jazz. One day he put on Sun Ra’s Atlantis. I had never heard anything like it. Ra was doing violence to that organ, forcing sounds out of it that surely could not be considered music, certainly not conforming to any notion of music that I understood. There was no melody or rhythm, no structure at all. It sounded like a tidal wave, like the earth being upturned, and its dying creatures screaming out. I couldn’t handle it. Today I understand that that is exactly what the artist intended. He had created in sound the sensation of a continent collapsing into the ocean. I am perfectly at home with his music now, and sometimes when I play Sun Ra the birds outside my window sing back.

My country's invasion of Iraq has made me so angry, frustrated, and heartbroken that while writing or playing online I often listen to Radio Darvish, the station of traditional Persian music. I’m listening to it now.

I met someone from Russia this week. He wants to improve his English and meet Americans. His first questions to me were about American rock n’ roll. I was reminded of an interview Lou Reed did with Vaclav Havel. There was a time when listening to clandestine cassettes of the Velvet Underground in Prague inspired revolutionaries. Imagine that!

The girl in the restaurant is close to sixty years old now. But in my memory she is forever sixteen, the coffee is still hot, and the Jackson 5 never can say goodbye.

The Night Blooming Cereus

They bloom one or two nights a year.

Some think the snake-like vines are ugly, and rip them out.
But then, every June, they miss this:



There are unique moments in a life when a particular image and a specific thing meet by chance and from then on the two are linked in that person’s mind. For me such a correspondence exists between the night blooming cactus flower and The Unknown Garden. It was late spring, nearly solstice, when Kate called to tell me Frank was gone. Their divorce had just gone through and as in our other conversations of late—all about Frank—Kate’s voice was a weird medley of emotions: anger, bitterness, regret, embarrassment, sadness, fear, concern. I hardly knew—because I doubt she did—which emotion to grab onto as the predominant one; they all revolved around a wild broiling heart churning in distress. Frank was gone now. He had left the condo to her and his books and CD’s to me. These were his only possessions apart from a cache of drawings and a box of writings which he had apparently burned. A cruel act, Kate and I thought. Wouldn’t we have preferred one of his drawings to a room, one of his poems to a Mozart CD? She had called late, nearly midnight. Not knowing what else to do I walked outside, up and down the alley behind my house. The annual cactus flowers had bloomed. There is a row of them, along a white slat fence that borders my neighbor’s yard and mine. The flowers, once they caught my eye, were so commanding, so alien, so primal, that everything within me—my confused thoughts and feelings—came to a sudden and complete stop. The flowers filled the whole moonlit night. As I approached and examined one up close, it became the world. So tender, yet so fierce. Such boldness, yet such vulnerability. Such softness, puffing out like a cloud from bracteal spears against robust arms sentineled with clusters of needles. "So like Kate," I thought. I went back inside and hugged my wife, who rolled back over and went to sleep.

(from my story The Unknown Garden)