The Big Picture and the Closeup

Whatever I was thinking, and I swear I don’t know, the result was that my little musical contribution to the theatrical end product was to strip out any musical context for a racial argument largely couched in musical terms.

Around 1:30 on the Sunday morning, someone mishandled a cigarette near some combustible Christmas decorations. The ground floor was promptly engulfed in flames, which then quickly spread up the one stairway to the second floor. People on the second floor were trapped. Many jumped from the window, some were pushed from the window by frantic partygoers behind them …

However, for sheer guillotine-like intensity and definitiveness of severance, nothing in our society, short of divorces and funerals, begins to compare to the moment when parents leave kids off at college for the first time.

The summer after my graduation was perfect. I wasn’t working; couldn’t find any. So I kept my own hours — noon to 3 a.m., working on the Great American High School Novel. Only problem: I really had nothing to say about high school. But I think my inchoate hope was that by making sense of it all through fiction, I could still get the girl to love me.

Those who were paying any kind of attention to Sgt. Pepper on that hot afternoon knew that they’d have to pay a lot more attention, later on, that we’d all have to listen to it several times to get out of it a reasonable helping of what the album had to offer. But hey, we had the time. That was the beauty of the moment for us. We had the time.

The big draw, of course, was the main title and the rest of the source music and score by Herbie Hancock. Unbeknownst to me, Hancock was providing me a brief (far too brief) glimpse of the main current of jazz at that moment: modal jazz. If you listen to that main title, you’ll hear that about half of that brief minute-and-a-half is taken up with powerful rhythm guitar and then blasting trumpets doing complicated things that resonate with the G-major 7th and G-minor 7th chords Herbie Hancock is laying down on the piano. This willingness to work away at single chords for extended musical passages, along with not worrying much about orienting entire pieces toward single keys, is the hallmark of modal jazz. For me, a marker had been laid down.

That was kind of the impression I got of Dorothy Ashby’s harp – that she had some abnormal number of fingers and strings to syncopate with. It was a preternatural experience. Which, come to think of it, is exactly the kind of thing orchestrators rely on harps to convey anyhow. I wanted to locate things that no one else knew were there, not just my parents but my contemporaries. Developing a taste for something obviously objectively very good, not just an affectation, which no one else I knew even knew about, that was one way to do it.

Theme Songs Page | Previous Theme Song | Next Theme Song Someone’s Hopeless Romance Elusive Butterfly, by Bob Lind (1965), encountered 1966 Buy it here | See it here and here | Lyrics here | Sheet music here There are going to be a few times in these music memories when I can’t tell the […]

This Casanova stuff was terribly exciting, but in the psychotherapeutic language we all use today, I needed to process it. And that’s when I had my California Girls moment.

The Buckinghams prophesy that “Girl, I still love you,/ I’ll always love you,/ Anyway.” That’s the way it feels at the time, but of course we all move on, especially from yearnings that afflict us in younger years.