The Day the Earth Stood Still....

February 9, 1964. Forty-five years ago today The Beatles made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and... pick one.

(1) The "Sixties" officially started.

(2) The decline and fall of Western Civilization got underway.

(3) Two months and eighteen days after we buried a President it was OK to smile again.

The first wave of rock & roll had been repelled. By February 9, 1964 Elvis was in the Army, Chuck Berry was in prison, Jerry Lee Lewis was in exile, and Little Richard had gone to church. Put in their place were the teen idols: Bobby Rydell, Paul Anka, Fabian, Dion. In a government laboratory scientists were able to successfully remove every molecule of soul and humanity from the songs of Fats Domino and Little Richard and grow Pat Boone in a test tube.

But the first battle had been fought with conventional weapons. On February 9, 1964, The Ed Sullivan Theater was added, just below Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Bikini Atoll, to the list of sites where nuclear weapons had been detonated.

Watch it today, and the energy is still there.

Up On the Roof....

London, 3 Savile Row, January 30, 1969. Two and a half years (which, in pop music years, is about ninety-seven) after their last live performance on August 29, 1966, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, The Beatles (plus one) set up equipment on the rooftop of their London head quarters and played live for what would turn out to be the very last time.

The initial idea - of the concert and of the album and of the film - was right there in the working title, "Get Back." The growing sense of separation of John, Paul and George into individual solo artists -- well illustrated by the White Album; 2 LPs that often seems like a collection of solo tracks -- and the disintegration of the very idea of the Fab Four had given McCartney the idea that the band needed to move away from the complex studio effects and heavily arranged music that had become their specialty and "get back" to basics. Unadorned, straight forward, basic rock & roll.

The album was to be called Get Back, the cover photo had been taken and had the four Beatles on the same EMI stairwell they'd posed on in 1963 for their debut LP. This idea had three parts: the album, an accompanying "making of" film, and a live performance. Various ideas had been floated for the live show, a small club gig, an invited audience on an ocean liner, etc.

The reality however was inescapable. The four musicians had grown up and grown apart. Remember that, as the band slowly fell apart leading up to rooms full of nothing but lawyers, not one of the Beatles -- not John, Paul, George or Ringo -- had yet turned thirty. Eventually the theme of "Get Back" was replaced by the more dour-sounding "Let It Be." The film that was eventually issued was structured around this central theme of break down and dissolution, which is a shame because the boys clearly could still play.

The rooftop concert demonstrates that, at the bitter end, there is no denying that these musicians were still capable of pure unadulterated magic. Below is the final performance in three video segments. Enjoy.

Inaugural Impressions.....

So much has already been written about the place of these events in US history and the impact on domestic and global issues that all I really want to here is to share some personal impressions gleaned from the past couple days.

* I was so happy to see Pete Seeger leading the crowd in the best ever version of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," joined by his grandson and Bruce Springsteen. It has always seemed the alternate National Anthem to me and, when, in his inaugural address, President Obama spoke about choosing "our better history," Guthrie's song rings out as a canticle for that better history.

I swear I could almost make out the sounds of J.Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy and all the HUAC members spinning in their graves as the 89 year old blacklisted folksinger smiled broadly and included the "forbidden verses," He sang:

In the shadow of the steeple,
By the relief office I saw my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

There was a big high wall that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, said "private property;"
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me."

* When Joe Biden took the oath of office I was surprised by this wave of emotion that hit me when what this really means sank in:

Dick Cheney isn't the Vice President of The United States anymore.

Wow.

* I thought the piece John Williams wrote based on the Shaker folk melody "Simple Gifts" was surprisingly beautiful. Violinist Itzhak Perlman and cellist Yo-Yo Ma are clearly the classical superstars and played (in the freezing temperatures) with passion, but it was clarinetist (and Peabody Conservatory faculty member) Anthony McGill who added the unique sound of an instrument so closely associated with American music. The ghosts of Benny Goodman and George Gershwin seemed to rise above the crowd for a moment.

* For me, the person who really hit one out of the park was Elizabeth Alexander, whose poem "Praise song for the day" seemed as perfect as such a thing is capable of being, ending,

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

* At the end of the evening I tuned in to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. This was a mistake; it was too early for the inevitable cynicism and I didn't laugh so much as want to slap him. And he got it wrong, too! In a clever bit in which he juxtaposed lines from Obama's speech from next-to-identical lines from Bush speeches, the conclusion was that they don't sound so irritating coming from Obama because he doesn't really believe them. I'm sorry, I disagree. I think the difference is one of substance. I (don't have to) wonder what would happen if you were to ask each man to write an essay on what those phrases actually mean; to put them in their historical context and discuss their evolution as ideas that power a national ideology.

* At some point I think I heard someone compare the inauguration to the moon landing on July 20, 1969. I believe that's slightly off the mark. What I felt watching Barack Obama take the oath of office (with no help from John Roberts) was more like watching Apollo 11 lift off its launch pad on July 16, 1969.

I remember watching it on a small black & white TV. I remember that it went up, slowly, straight, looking like all systems were working. I remember the feeling of hope we all had that it would reach the moon and that it would return, safely. It was watching the potential for a great and wonderful thing begin its journey. This seems much more like that. And, when you consider the list of problems we face, it really does seem a bit like "shooting for the moon."

Godspeed.

Thirty-nine quotations about music....

"Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself." - Igor Stravinsky

"Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them." - Richard Strauss

"God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way." - Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player

"One of the perks of being an unemployed musician is that you get to play much less bad music." - Jack Daney

"In opera, there is always too much singing." - Claude Debussy

"Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were no singers!" - Gioacchino Rossini

"Hell is full of musical amateurs." - George Bernard Shaw

"The drummer drives. Everybody else rides!" - Panama Francis

"Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds pretty good and you win. Some days you try and nothing works and the horn wins. This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins." - Dizzy Gillespie on playing the trumpet

"Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one." - Duke Ellington

"Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time." - Ornette Coleman

"We never play anything the same way once." - Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians

"Someone who knows how to play the accordion, and doesn't." - Al Cohn's definition of a gentleman

"Music is a very hard instrument." - Vido Musso

"The only tune they play in 4/4 is 'Take Five!'" - unknown, talking about the Don Ellis band

"If I could play like Wynton (Marsalis), I wouldn't play like Wynton." - Chet Baker

"I'm too old to pimp and too young to die so I'm just gon' keep playin'." - Clark Terry

"Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already." - Gustav Mahler, to Bruno Walter who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria.

"I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve." - Xavier Cugat

"Musicians talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art." - Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home

"Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make a living." - Kirke Mecham, on his life as a composer

"I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to my feet." - Nicolo Paganini

"What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?" - Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought two or three seats." - Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Michigan

"If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation." - Oscar Wilde [FINALLY! SOMEONE EXPLAINS ALL THE TALKING AT NET SHOWS!]

"Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together." - Mel Brooks

"Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years." - William F. Buckley, Jr.

"You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow." - Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket

"Wagner's music is better than it sounds." - Mark Twain

"Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently." - James Gibbons Hunekar

"If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder." - Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland

"There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major." - Sergei Prokofiev

"I never use a score when conducting my orchestra. Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?" - Dimitri Mitropolous

"Already too loud!" - Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra, on seeing the players reaching for their instruments

"I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere." - Frederic Chopin

"When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano." - Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller

"I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that has made giant strides in reverse." - Bing Crosby

"A ponderous orchestral absurdity." - Frank Zappa on his rock symphony debuted by the Los Angeles Philharmonic

"The bottom line of any country is, what did we contribute to the world? We contributed Louis Armstrong." - Tony Bennet

On the Beach....

My father celebrated his 90th birthday last week. Since it is so near the Thanksgiving holiday my wife and I drove to my brother's house in Cleveland and then the four of us drove the next day to Atlantic City. A year ago my father sold the house in Philadelphia he bought in the late 1950s and moved in with my sister Rose just outside of Ocean City, NJ.


It's been a few years since I was there and even longer since I walked on the beach and the boardwalk. The day before Thanksgiving was sunny and mild so we all drove into Ocean City and walked along the mostly deserted boardwalk.


We passed Kohr Brothers, a frozen custard stand that has been there as far back as I can remember. Some of this custard is kept in a lab at the University of Chicago where physicists have studied its properties, eventually agreeing with me that it just might be the densest matter in the known universe. Closed in the off season, all I could do was stand in front of the place, quietly moaning in a Pavlovian response.


I saw some stairs that went down from the boardwalk and onto the beach. I haven't walked through sand since I can't remember when. As I got closer to the ocean the sand got firmer and easier to walk on.



I love the ocean.


I am in awe of the ocean.


I don't know if it is some million year old primordial race memory of crawling up out of it or some dim echo of a past life as a sailor, but being by, or on, the sea always feels strangely familiar. Who knows.

Let America Be America Again

I had a longer post almost finished and ready to put up here when I opened my email and found one from my friend, the sociologist Carol Brooks Gardner. It was simply the text of the 1938 poem by Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again."

I have a short temper when it comes to poetry; I can tell in a line or two if I'm going to finish reading it. When I find a poem I like, I will almost always read it out loud so I can feel what the words are like when they hang in the air for a moment.

I know almost no one with a heart as cold and dead as my own, but try as I could, I could not get more than a couple verses into this poem without weeping. I almost never cry. By the end of this, the emotion of last evening still fresh, I wasn't sure if I would ever stop.

Originally published in Esquire, and in the International Worker Order pamphlet, A New Song (1938).

Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

On Time...

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.” - John Archibald Wheeler

I have been fascinated by time for as long as I can remember. As with a variety of subjects, I collect quotations about time. These are three favorites:

"The flower that you hold in your hands was born today and already it is as old as you are." ~ Antonio Porchia

"Who forces time is pushed back by time; who yields to time finds time on his side." ~ The Talmud

"Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations." ~ Faith Baldwin

I started to notice a problem with time when I noticed odd things happening to the children of our friends. Someone we knew would have a daughter, a month later she'd start school; we'd be told how well she did on her SATs, she was majoring in history with a minor in Chinese. By the time we spoke again we found that she made partner in a good law firm and just had her second child.

Meanwhile, in our reality, it was still October.

This hyper accelerated time we find ourselves in has fascinated me since I realized that it was summer when I woke up, drank some coffee, fooled around on the computer, then had to put on pants because suddenly the leaves had turned and it was fall. I went through various stages; anger, confusion, denial, more confusion, a bit more anger, confused denial, etc.

"Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?" ~ John Dos Passos, 1917

"How long a minute is, depends on which side of the bathroom door you're on." ~ Zall's Second Law

"The time you think you're missing, misses you too." ~ Ymber Delecto

No one understands where the sudden flash of insight or inspiration comes from. A famous composer teaching a master class at a music school in Austria was asked by a student, "Maestro, in your third symphony, in the second movement, there is a theme that suddenly appears that may be the single most beautiful thing I've ever heard. How did you come to write that?"

The old man replied, "I remember, I was working in my office. It was a lovely spring day and, at noon I decided to take my lunch by the river. I found a spot along the bank, sat down, and unwrapped my sandwich. It was liverwurst on dark bread; I noticed that there was a stain on the wax paper in the shape of a dog. Some birds flew by overhead in the blue sky. I heard some children playing behind me. And then suddenly, the damn thing just popped into my head!"

"Let not the sands of time get in your lunch." ~ Author Unknown

This morning I was pouring my coffee. I was thinking I would make a cheese omelet. I heard my wife in the other room laughing at the dogs. I put the cup down on the counter and suddenly a theory popped into my head.

My wife came into the kitchen.

"I think I may have just figured out the reason time has been moving SOOOO fast," I said.

"Why?" she asked.

"I believe that the universe itself just can't wait for Bush to be gone."

She paused for a moment. "Makes sense to me," she said. "Good job."

"Thanks," I said, and drank my coffee.

I think it will be wonderful when things begin to move at normal speed again. A child's 6th birthday will come a year after her 5th, instead of a half hour after her 3rd. John Cage's "4'33" will last for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. But it will still feel longer.

There's nothing we can do about that one.