{"id":2449,"date":"2011-07-03T19:17:48","date_gmt":"2011-07-03T23:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2449"},"modified":"2015-09-26T13:49:32","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T17:49:32","slug":"schools-out-night-in-the-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2449","title":{"rendered":"School’s Out: Night in the City"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theme Songs Page<\/a> |Previous Theme Song<\/a> | Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n

School’s Out<\/h1>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/h2>\n

Night in the City, by Joni Mitchell (1968), encountered 1968<\/h3>\n

Buy it here<\/a> | See it here<\/a> | Lyrics here<\/a><\/p>\n

And just like that, my exciting first year of college was over.\u00a0 True, there\u2019s always a relief in getting to the end of a semester.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t think I was particularly eager for it to end.\u00a0 I was enjoying being a collegian, even enjoying my studies, challenging as they were.<\/p>\n

I wish I could write more fully about my classes, the one topic from that year I haven\u2019t touched on in these musical memoirs.\u00a0 But my memory is selective, and my studies have largely been selected out.\u00a0 And in any case, I don\u2019t have music that specifically triggers memories of my studies, not that year anyway.\u00a0 I think it\u2019s safe to say, though, that I knew, coming out of that year, that I was going to be an English major.[1] And there was no doubt that, in my mind at least, I\u2019d worked as hard as I\u2019d played.\u00a0 This equivalence would not have satisfied my demanding mom, but it suited me.<\/p>\n

A Little Bit of Coping<\/h3>\n

Piecing together the few documentary clues that give me dates, I believe I finished up on or about Friday, May 10.\u00a0 But being off duty required a little bit of coping.\u00a0 My parents couldn\u2019t come and pick me up until the following Friday.\u00a0 There were two reasons for this: they had their own classes to teach during the intervening week (and indeed for a week or two thereafter), and they wanted to be in Baltimore that following Friday for the 25th<\/sup> reunion of the Johns Hopkins University Class of 1943, of which my stepdad was a member.\u00a0 So obviously I had to stay East somehow for a week.[2] I actually had one reason of my own, which was a philosophy paper I needed to finish, a paper which, thankfully, my professor[3] let me hand in late.<\/p>\n

The Penn dorms had closed, however.\u00a0 That meant I had to find someone to put me up, or perhaps, better said, to put up with me.\u00a0 I have no recollection of asking or being invited, but somehow I ended up staying with Steve, a classmate who lived in Northeast Philadelphia, son of a dentist (who, if the Web is to be believed, now practices dentistry himself).\u00a0 At that time it was a love of poetry that drew us together.\u00a0 We had talked about rooming together sophomore year, but for whatever reason, that didn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n

I wrote a friend about that week: \u201cTheir place and food are lovely, not to mention [the family] \u2026 His mother urges food on me \u2013 \u2018Force yourself!\u2019 she says.\u00a0 My beard put her off at first, but she\u2019s figured out I don\u2019t mean anything by it.\u201d\u00a0 (This in an era when beards signaled political dissent, and the dentist dad was of the generation forged in the patriotism of World War II \u2013 as a soldier he had been part of the liberation of the first concentration camp discovered.\u00a0 I actually got rid of the beard while staying at their home.)<\/p>\n

Joni Wasn’t Packed<\/h3>\n

Most of my stuff was packed away in the trunks for Railway Express, but I know there was one album that wasn’t: Joni Mitchell\u2019s Song to a Seagull<\/em>.\u00a0 Well, at least that was the name at one time; it gets a bit fuzzy now.[4] Whatever it was called, it was stunning.\u00a0 Of course there\u2019s nothing original to be said about Joni Mitchell these days, but that stunning voice and those original chords and those poetic confessional lyrics were like nothing most of us had heard then.\u00a0 I can picture sitting in Steve\u2019s parents\u2019 front room and playing it when I probably should have been finishing that Philosophy paper.[5]<\/a> I must have played it enough so that two weeks later, writing Steve, the first thing I did is mention the album in a way I would only have done if I had known him to be as familiar with the order of the tracks as I was.\u00a0 There’s a phrase in one letter that suggests we may have been listening to Steve’s copy.<\/p>\n

My guess is that sensitive young women of that era responded more to the songs on the album about how tough it was to be female and sensitive in New York or about the liberating influence of the seaside.\u00a0 My favorite, though, was the most masculine song on the record, Night in the City<\/em>.\u00a0 In the comments with which Joni prefaces her performance of the song the previous year (in the video hyperlinked above), she intimates that it was inspired by impatience with a roommate who was taking too long to get ready for a night on the town.\u00a0 But the real subject of the song is simply how exciting the big city is at night.<\/p>\n

Night in the city looks pretty to me<\/address>\n
Night in the city looks fine<\/address>\n
Music comes spilling out into the street<\/address>\n
Colors go flashing in time<\/address>\n

And what really made the song for me was Steve Stills\u2019s slightly funky bass, which made that one song sound much more like rock and less like folk than anything else on the album.\u00a0 Cities rocked, and the bass line confirmed it.<\/p>\n

Well, my whole freshman year had confirmed it too.\u00a0 I might have been a bit homesick for Ann Arbor, but downtown Philly, on one\u2019s own, was an intoxicating place to me.\u00a0 And now I was somewhere else.\u00a0 For the moment, I was in a quiet, comfy home in suburbia, awaiting going back to a college town for the summer, stuck finishing a paper.\u00a0 To be sure, I was going to find ways of having fun.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t going to be the same.<\/p>\n

Encountering Baltimore<\/h3>\n

Come that Friday, I trained down to Baltimore, my first real visit to the town which, though I didn\u2019t know it, was where I\u2019d spend the biggest portion of my life later on.\u00a0 My parents had flown into Philadelphia and were supposed to have caught a shuttle flight to Baltimore, but their flight was canceled, and they too had to take the train down, a later one.\u00a0 In consequence of this delay, I checked into their Baltimore hotel room some hours before they did.\u00a0 Talk about none of us knowing what we were getting into \u2026<\/p>\n

The Baltimore my parents thought they were visiting had just been given the coup de grace, though the dying would take years.\u00a0 After the Martin Luther King assassination on April 4,[6] the town had been plunged into eight days of riots, which any Baltimorean can tell you changed everything<\/a>.\u00a0 The town was in for years of sliding downwards, losing corporate headquarters, heavy industry, white citizens, pro sports teams, and civic pride.\u00a0 While my folks had been there in the 1940s, it had been a genteel Southern town (which was great if you happened to be white and genteel like them).\u00a0 It was never going to be like that again.<\/p>\n

By the time I turned up on the town\u2019s doorstep on May 17, law and racial order had been restored, and I don\u2019t think I saw any of the destroyed neighborhoods \u2013 of which I later discovered there were plenty.\u00a0 But another source of civic chaos had just erupted which would stand in for it.\u00a0 This was Preakness weekend.\u00a0 And we were staying at what was then called the Sheraton Belvedere, a faded dowager of a Beaux Arts hotel that was being respected by the party-hearty race-goers in about the same way Blanche Dubois was respected by Stanley Kowalski.\u00a0 There was constant yelling and running in the halls, raucous laughter everywhere \u2013 and a couple I\u2019ll call Drew and Lacy.<\/p>\n

I think Drew was a college pal of my stepdad\u2019s.\u00a0 In my recollection he was a southern-fried lout, and his wife made some nasty insinuating remarks about my status as stepson, not son \u2013 and insinuated accurately, but as if this did me some discredit, that I was partly of Jewish heritage. \u00a0I think there were also some arch comments about Mother being markedly older than my stepdad.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know what my stepdad was doing being friends with such lowlifes.\u00a0 But they seemed to fit right in with the overall picture at the hotel that weekend.<\/p>\n

I saw some of Hopkins too, but I really don\u2019t remember it.\u00a0 What really sticks in the mind was getting off the bus on North Charles Street at Hopkins, off the campus.\u00a0 It was hot and dusty, and the street seemed too wide (I hadn\u2019t yet learned to allow for the subtraction of the trolleys which had shaped so many urban thoroughfares and then disappeared from the scene.)\u00a0 I remember thinking that this was a much less entertaining place than Spruce Street running by my dorm at Penn.\u00a0 If only I\u2019d remembered that perception later!\u00a0 As dull as this stretch of Baltimore was, it got duller in Ann Arbor, to which I soon returned.<\/p>\n

Shortly after my return, I wrote a friend that I\u2019d visited a men\u2019s clothing store, where I was told they\u2019d had their slowest Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in the store\u2019s history, seriatim.\u00a0 Of course, this was the nadir, before the summer session started.\u00a0 Things did improve a little as the summer went by.\u00a0 And I had all the leisure I wanted to try for a second summer to finish my novel.<\/p>\n

The Exciting City Night<\/h3>\n

But there was no doubt that I wanted to be back in that exciting city night that Joni had sung about:<\/p>\n

Moon\u2019s up, night\u2019s up.<\/address>\n
Taking the town by surprise.<\/address>\n
Stairway, stairway,<\/address>\n
Down to the crowds in the street.<\/address>\n
They go their way<\/address>\n
Looking for faces to greet \u2026<\/address>\n

Well, I\u2019d be getting my shot soon.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

[1] An excerpt from a letter to my mom and stepdad in April 1968: \u201cBut no matter what I do, I can\u2019t digest French idioms, or petty details about the Baroque synthesis, or what species of brachiopod was dominant during the Permian.\u00a0 I can\u2019t even properly assimilate too much of what I moderately like.\u00a0 And the frightening other side of the coin is that I can spend endless amounts of time doing things I really like, like English, like writing poems, like reading newsmagazines, like Penn Players.\u00a0 This indicates that my control of my powers of concentration is just about nil.\u00a0 And this results in lower grades.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2] Or at least it seemed obvious to them at the time.\u00a0 Given that I ultimately flew back in to Michigan separately from them, and that my stuff went back by Railway Express, I\u2019m not sure that there was any obvious necessity for me to stay on the East Coast for that week.\u00a0 Maybe they really wanted to have me at their reunion, but I\u2019m almost absent from my mom\u2019s diary entries covering the event.\u00a0 I think it was just the kind of thing parents of college kids do: not quite reckoning with how independent the kids have become.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3] This was Robert Solomon<\/a>, perhaps my favorite professor at Penn.\u00a0 I ended up taking three courses from him.\u00a0 And the day Allen Ginsberg came to talk and read at Penn, he sat in on Solomon\u2019s class, two rows behind me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4] The name was spelled out in flying birds in Joni Mitchell\u2019s hand-drawn cover art, pictured above.\u00a0 AllMusic indexes the album under that name<\/a>.\u00a0 Yet the spine shows only Joni\u2019s name. \u00a0And Jason Ankney\u2019s biography of Mitchell on the same website calls the album \u201cself-titled.\u201d\u00a0 Don\u2019t ask me how to resolve the contradiction; I only work here.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[5] It still wasn\u2019t done when I left Philadelphia, and I don\u2019t think I finished it for another week.\u00a0 Thankfully, this episode of procrastination was kind of a one-off, and was not going to be my way with school work generally.\u00a0 As a student, a writer, and a lawyer, I generally get things in on time.\u00a0 Call this more of the adjustment to the rhythms of college than a portent of things to come.<\/p>\n

[6] From a letter to my parents on April 9: “Shortly after the news got around, the black students on campus gathered in front of the Library, huddled around a transistor radio.\u00a0 I joined them for a while, but I had work to do.\u00a0 Later the black students walked over to the ghetto, to be with their people.\u00a0 The next day they held a really frightening vigil at noon.\u00a0 After some gospel singing, the small crowd of blacks and much larger one of whites was treated to a series of Black Power harangues.\u00a0 I got upset.\u00a0 I don’t like being called ‘honky’ any more than a black likes being called [n-word].\u00a0 One of my black friends got up and spoke, and I didn’t like the change in him at all.\u00a0 Still the last two speakers addressed the larger crowd of whites, warning them not to take everything said literally.\u00a0 They said that the Negro is a very emotional person, and that this anger is his natural response, but that militancy is just one approach and that nonviolence and moderation were still at leas as valid as militancy.”\u00a0 A confusing time!\u00a0 And no one realized that it’s insulting to talk of “the Negro” or for that matter “the white man.”\u00a0 Not the speaker I quoted, and not me, at the time.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for artwork<\/p>\n

Theme Songs Page<\/a> |Previous Theme Son<\/a>g | Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Of course there\u2019s nothing original to be said about Joni Mitchell these days, but that stunning voice and those original chords and those poetic confessional lyrics were like nothing most of us had heard then. I can picture sitting in Steve\u2019s parents\u2019 front room and playing it when I probably should have been finishing that Philosophy paper. I must have played it enough so that two weeks later, writing Steve, the first thing I did is mention the album in a way I would only have done if I had known him to be as familiar with the order of the tracks as I was. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,968],"tags":[2689,2828,1988,2817,2826,2815,2831,2818,2829,2827,2814,2832,2197,2816,2811,2824,2655,2823,43,2820,2822,2821,2819,2812,2830,2825,2813,2464],"class_list":["post-2449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theme-songs","tag-2689","tag-a-streetcar-named-desire","tag-baltimore","tag-baltimore-riots","tag-bass","tag-beards","tag-beaux-arts","tag-belvedere-hotel","tag-blanche-dubois","tag-civic-decline","tag-dentists","tag-jason-ankney","tag-joni-mitchell","tag-martin-luther-king-jr","tag-night-in-the-city","tag-overdue-papers","tag-penn-players","tag-philosophy","tag-race-riots","tag-railway-express","tag-robert-c-solomon","tag-robert-solomon","tag-sheraton-belvedere","tag-song-to-a-seagull","tag-stanley-kowalski","tag-steve-stills","tag-the-johns-hopkins-university","tag-university-of-pennsylvania"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2449"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5508,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2449\/revisions\/5508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}