{"id":2696,"date":"2011-10-26T22:10:13","date_gmt":"2011-10-27T02:10:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2696"},"modified":"2015-09-26T13:59:34","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T17:59:34","slug":"house-of-song-and-laughter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2696","title":{"rendered":"House of Song and Laughter"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

House of Song and Laughter<\/h2>\n

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Come Together, by John Lennon & Paul McCartney, performed by the Beatles (1969), encountered 1969<\/h3>\n

Buy it here<\/a> | See it here<\/a>[<\/a>1] | Lyrics here<\/a> | Sheet music here<\/a><\/p>\n

Beginnings, by Robert Lamm, performed by Chicago Transit Authority (1969), encountered 1969<\/h3>\n

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

How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You\u2019re Not Anywhere At All by The Firesign Theatre (1969), encountered 1969<\/h3>\n

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

\u201cTime passes much too quickly, when we\u2019re together laughing\u2026\u201d<\/em> Robert Lamm, Beginnings<\/em> (1969)<\/address>\n

2209 Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, where I lived during my junior and senior years of college, occupied a deceptively grand-sounding address (it isn\u2019t actually on Philly\u2019s famed Rittenhouse Square), but it certainly proved grand enough for me and my housemates.\u00a0 There were officially three of us \u2013 no, wait, there were officially two of us, one of whom wasn\u2019t actually one of us at all unofficially \u2013 but in reality there were four of us if there weren\u2019t five \u2013 unofficially.\u00a0 It was that confusing (as college housemate arrangements so often are).<\/p>\n

Perfect for Us<\/h3>\n

Somehow it had been agreed toward the end of my sophomore year that I and my girlfriend S. and two of her freshman friends from Baltimore, Otts and Chuckie, would all figure out a way to room together.\u00a0 We had all done the campus thing, and were eager for the excitement of downtown.\u00a0 But where?\u00a0 We were wandering around a side street downtown with eyes peeled for \u201cFor Rent\u201d signs when a door opened and a hippie-ish art student type came out, and we accosted her, as someone who looked a likely bet to share both our outlook and our limited finances.\u00a0 She chatted with us for a while, then offered to show us her house, shared with some other art students, as an example of what we might find.<\/p>\n

It was perfectly sized: three bedrooms, two with bath, two with studies.\u00a0 And it had atmosphere to burn: erratic but carefully drawn stripes running along floors up walls and on the ceiling, a highly unconventional color scheme, and, in one room, a mural of a harpy-like monster to which the residents had added a sculpted torso that came out of the wall at you.\u00a0 Naturally, we didn\u2019t want to live in a place like<\/em> 2209; we wanted to live at<\/em> 2209.\u00a0 Was there any chance this place would be coming available? we asked.\u00a0 Why, yes, as it turned out, there was.\u00a0 The caravan of artists was about to pull out.\u00a0 We formed an instant determination to succeed them.<\/p>\n

A Little Fraud Among Friends<\/h3>\n

We were warned that the rental agent, a man with the unlikely name of George Wallace, was devoted to enforcing the mandate of the landlord, a man with the unlikely name of John L. Sullivan, not to rent to groups of college kids.\u00a0 We needed a married couple as a front.\u00a0 S. was the only young woman in our circle, so she had to be the fianc\u00e9e — and she was going to be in Philly the summer of \u201969 to spearhead the negotiations, but all of the guys destined to be the actual rent-payers were going to be out of town for the summer.\u00a0 A Philly-dwelling fianc\u00e9 had to be located.\u00a0 By dint of extraordinary luck, we prevailed upon an otherwise sensible pre-med colleague of mine named Tom who was willing to complete the charade and put his name on the lease.\u00a0 Of course Tom insisted (as did George Wallace) that a bona fide responsible adult put his name on the lease, and so my poor father stepped up with a guarantee; I think he was supposed to be Tom\u2019s step-dad.\u00a0 Could George and John possibly not have seen through this?\u00a0 If they didn\u2019t, they were idiots.\u00a0 And if they did, why bother and not just rent out in the open to the college boys who after all were going to be the rent-paying tenants?\u00a0 Not our problem: Tom (who never set foot in the house, so far as I know) and S., who barely knew Tom, were the happy engaged couple, and my father, who never met Tom, was Tom\u2019s father \u2013 and the proprieties were preserved.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m glad to say that neither my dad nor Tom ever lost a penny by this rickety arrangement.\u00a0 But it was a harbinger of the generally lawless lifestyle we were to pursue at 2209.\u00a0 We started with that fraud (though we meant and did no harm to anyone by it), and went on from there.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t just that we were drinking underage or having sex without benefit of clergy.\u00a0 Kids, don\u2019t try this in your home: LSD was literally kept in the fridge for consumption by \u2013 one or more of us \u2013 but let me hasten to say it wasn\u2019t me.[2]\u00a0 I was one year older than pretty much everyone else who passed through our door, and held down the role of the grownup persona, and that abstemiousness was in keeping with the role.\u00a0 But I had no problems with anyone else\u2019s bliss.\u00a0 It was the Sixties still, even if Nixon had won.\u00a0 And I may have been the designated grownup, but I was a Sixties grownup.<\/p>\n

The four or five of us grew quite close, even vacationing together.\u00a0 I can remember borrowing my dad\u2019s Saab station wagon in New York and taking the whole crew together with someone\u2019s girlfriend from Barnard up to the mountains.<\/p>\n

Domesticity<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>We may not have been art students like our predecessors in phony leasehold, but we did expand on their period style.\u00a0 We found some red carpet and some green carpet, and covered the stairs in alternating colors.\u00a0 S., who was handy with a sewing machine, ran off curtains with fabric of the era, paisleys and wild hot floral prints and such.\u00a0 You can see some of the tamer curtains behind me in this photo of the house from the front.\u00a0 They were hung by simple rings from wooden dowels, but they covered the windows and gave us the atmosphere we were looking for.\u00a0 The material came from Otts\u2019 dad, who wholesaled paper products, especially psychedelic-style writing pads, many of which were covered with these fabrics.\u00a0 In his line of pads, the fabrics were laminated in plastic squares and held in place with spiral binding.\u00a0 In our windows, the fabrics hung free.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure we pained the neighbors.\u00a0 Rittenhouse Square, even the street bearing that name three blocks from the actual grand Square, was for grownup achievers, not for the likes of us.\u00a0 We knew that full well, and felt looked down on.\u00a0 I recall a moment of pushback, when Chuckie grabbed a ball (I think it was on a sedate Sunday morning) and led us all out onto the street, yelling \u201cEverybody out for volleyball, rich people!\u201d\u00a0 (No one came out to play.)<\/p>\n

Which is not to say that the neighbors didn\u2019t actually deal with us pretty well.\u00a0 The couple next door, a dentist who sang opera, and his wife, had a cute French au pair we were close to (though the wife told us firmly no one was to seduce the au pair).[3]\u00a0 Behind us across the alley was a gay alcoholic landscape architect or interior decorator (I can\u2019t remember which) who spent most of the time over my nearly two years in the house arranging and rearranging the bricks in his driveway to some fantastic degree of perfection, but spoiled the effect somewhat by driving home plastered lots of nights in a big station wagon, terror of the narrow alley\u2019s garbage cans.\u00a0 He was truculent when drunk, friendly enough when sober.\u00a0 A New Yorker<\/em> cartoonist, a reserved family man, had the big house to our east.<\/p>\n

The Folks That Come With The House<\/h3>\n

We attracted an interesting crew.\u00a0 There was Carol, a sweet young lady so in love with us and the house she moved from bedroom to bedroom as time progressed.\u00a0 There was a guy we knew only as The Freak, a true drug casualty, who had had some kind of connection to the departed art students but never figured out they were not in residence any more, and turned up from time to time.\u00a0 He\u2019d come in, harangue whoever was home with tales of how he was playing now in the Rolling Stones (once it was The Doors), serenade us with an air guitar solo while singing tunelessly, and end up pulling various illegal substances out of his bloodstained socks and dosing and\/or injecting himself with them.\u00a0 Thus fortified, he\u2019d wander back out on the street.\u00a0 There was our summer substitute roommate, Jodie, who used dill in everything she cooked (I grew to despise dill and her other favored ingredient, internal organs), and who was proud of her mom who had reentered the workforce as \u201ca professional astrologer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Freak wasn\u2019t the only music fan in our environment.\u00a0 You could encounter music all over the house, coming out of the stereo in every bedroom, and sometimes the basement.\u00a0 Probably the first specific memory I have of us all together in the house was of the four of us sitting in my and S.\u2019s bedroom listening to Abbey Road<\/em> which I had purchased the day or the day after it came out.[4]\u00a0 Someone, I think it may have been Carol, then Otts\u2019 girlfriend who became Chuckie\u2019s girlfriend in due course, and reportedly (after my time in the house), Larry\u2019s girlfriend,[5] came in and tried to say something, and Otts shushed her, saying we were having a religious experience.\u00a0 And he was right.\u00a0 (In honor of which I\u2019ve picked the lead-off number from the album, Come Together<\/em>, as a Theme Song for this piece.)<\/p>\n

Opposite Trajectories<\/h3>\n

I was first and foremost a Beatles man.\u00a0 As readers of these pages know, my loyalties had been fired in the forges of 1964<\/a>.\u00a0 Otts may have been more open to the very newest stuff, being a year younger and music editor for 34th<\/sup> Street, the new arts-and-commentary supplement to the Daily Pennsylvanian, our campus newspaper, meaning that he received all the hot new albums as they came out.\u00a0 But even for him this was a religious experience.<\/p>\n

At that point, though, it would be fair to say, Otts was a Chicago man.\u00a0 Their awe-inspiring first album, Chicago Transit Authority<\/em>, had just been issued in April: two big LPs of jazz rock.\u00a0 While I and probably most fans were taken with the brass section, what got Otts was the drumming of Danny Seraphine.\u00a0 And if you listen to just the first number, Introduction<\/a><\/em>, and if you know anything about what rock drumming sounded like back then, you can tell that the tempo changes, the polyrhythms, the very un-rock-like tempos, were all remarkable: disciplined, erudite, mostly from a world more sophisticated than rock.\u00a0 Otts hankered to reproduce that feel.\u00a0 So in short order we had Otts\u2019 drum set assembled in the basement, and frequently the house, and no doubt the neighborhood, would resound with Otts attempting to make like Danny Seraphine.\u00a0 So there was never a question I would also be enthusiastic about Chicago.<\/p>\n

Abbey Road<\/em> was, though we couldn\u2019t know it yet, the end of something, the last artistically successful Beatles album. Let It Be<\/em>, the chronicle of and testament to their breakdown and breakup, would not be released until the end of the academic year.\u00a0 But Abbey Road<\/em> itself, evan as one of the Beatles\u2019 successes, was rather labored going.\u00a0 Come Together<\/em>, for instance, came together mostly on the basis of John\u2019s nonsense poetry, delivered in a distortion of his now heroin-addicted voice.\u00a0 (\u201cHold you in his armchair, you can feel his disease.\u201d)\u00a0 It feels<\/em> exhausted; a man as great as Lennon should be doing more than second-hand Dylan, however great a man Dylan is, and however apt the hommage<\/em>.[6]\u00a0 Meanwhile, Chicago Transit Authority<\/em> both was and felt like a bolt of new and promising lightning.\u00a0 (Check out the video hyperlinked at the head of this piece to see what I\u2019m talking about.)\u00a0 The Robert Lamm song Beginnings<\/em> makes that quite explicitly, repeating the phrase \u201conly the beginning\u201d time and again.<\/p>\n

It would be a mistake to make too much of this.\u00a0 Every<\/em> age, every year, every moment, is a transition between something and something.\u00a0 There are so many things out there to wax and wane, that you can always pair up a couple of them headed in opposite directions.\u00a0 Still, this exemplied the kind of transition to which the house on Rittenhouse Square bore witness.\u00a0 The early 60s, the high 60s, if you will, led by the Beatles, full of a certain kind of youth and fun, were giving way to something powerful and worthwhile, but without the careless rapture.<\/p>\n

Tuning In To Ralph Spoilsport<\/h3>\n

There was plenty of fun left, of course.\u00a0 There\u2019s always plenty of fun.\u00a0 One of the things that made for fun was the unique comedy of Firesign Theatre, four amazing Angelenos.\u00a0 They were so sui generis<\/em>, I am almost at a loss to describe them.\u00a0 Though they had their roots in radio, their real medium was the LP.\u00a0 They created densely-layered experiences in which, for instance, a character might be listening to the radio and then find himself inside the program he was listening to, and grow old or young during the experiences inside the program.\u00a0 You would quickly lose track of which experience was the frame and which the \u201creal\u201d world.\u00a0 The whole would be accompanied by outrageous wordplay, references to Joyce or Shakespeare or Conan Doyle.\u00a0 I\u2019m dropping a small sample in an endnote.[7]<\/p>\n

Firesign had just come out with its second album, How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You\u2019re Not Anywhere At All<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0 We rapidly committed the entire first two albums to memory, doing the voices, capturing the rhythms.\u00a0 Firesign turned out to be as full of phrases applicable to any occasion as were Shakespeare and the Bible.\u00a0 We competed to see who could find the most applicable Firesign phrase for any given situation, leavening it with the occasional Dylan or Beatles quote.\u00a0 Otts recently reported to me that he had seen them in concert in recent years, and for some of their routines there were, in effect, \u201csingalongs,\u201d where everyone in the audience knew the words, just as we\u2019d known the words.<\/p>\n

So this was what life at 2209 sounded like.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t perfect (too far off campus, for one thing).[8]\u00a0 But it was our first toehold in urban living.\u00a0 Not one of us came from a big downtown.\u00a0 Not one of us had lived away from both home and campus before.\u00a0 Not one of us regretted it.\u00a0 With all its imperfections, it was a house of song and laughter, a great first experiment in the independent lives we were getting ready to lead.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

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[1]\u00a0\u00a0 As the YouTube comments point out, this is an artful mashup of the sound from the album, video from the Concert for Bangladesh<\/a>, and little bits of Paul from other videos.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[2]\u00a0\u00a0 It had just been made illegal the previous year<\/a>.\u00a0 Considering that the Congress which had come up with that decision was the one funding the War, considering the the delegitimizing effect of the Draft then going on (about which this blog will shortly have more to say), considering that the use of the substance was observably doing no serious harm to any of us, is it any wonder we thumbed our noses?\u00a0 For some reason, marijuana wasn\u2019t part of the package in our establishment; I think there were some other hallucinogens from time to time.\u00a0 There was all kinds of stuff going around.\u00a0 But since I never sampled it, I just never got au courant either.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[3]\u00a0\u00a0 Fat chance.\u00a0 She was older than we, and I\u2019m quite certain far more sexually experienced as well.\u00a0 She flirted, but we were not on her radar screen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[4]\u00a0\u00a0 Per Ian MacDonald, as ever my source on all things Beatles, the U.S. release was Wednesday, October 1, 1969.\u00a0 So this would have been Wednesday, Thursday, or just possibly Friday of that week.\u00a0 Revolution in the Head<\/em><\/a> at 461 (3rd<\/sup> ed. 2007).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[5]\u00a0\u00a0 Larry was a friend of Otts and Chuckie\u2019s, and played in a band with Otts, and I think may have lived there after S. and I moved out in 1971.\u00a0 Plus Larry and Otts lived together in New York later.\u00a0 The point is, we were definitely keeping Carol in the family.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[6]\u00a0\u00a0 Ian MacDonald makes some grandiose claims about this song, which makes it one of the relatively rare places we part company.\u00a0 \u201cNothing else on Abbey Road<\/em> matches the Zeitgeist<\/em>-catching impact of Lennon\u2019s cover-breaking announcement, after two verses of faintly menacing semi-nonsense: \u2018One thing I can tell you is you got to be free.\u2019\u00a0 The freedom invoked here differs from previous revolutionary freedom in being a liberation from all<\/em> forms and all<\/em> norms, including left-wing ones.\u201d\u00a0 And he adds: \u201cEnthusiastically received in campus and underground circles, COME TOGETHER is the<\/em> key song of the turn of the decade, isolating a pivotal moment when the free world\u2019s coming generation rejected established wisdom, knowledge, ethics, and behaviour for a drug-inspired relativism which has since undermined the intellectual foundations of Western culture.\u201d\u00a0 Revolution in the Head<\/em><\/a> at 359-60 (3rd<\/sup> ed. 2007).\u00a0 I\u2019m sorry, I don\u2019t think any of us who were busy rejecting some<\/em> of the established wisdom, knowledge, ethics and behavior took this as a marching song.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[7] \u00a0\u00a0The title piece in the album discussed further above, How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You\u2019re Not Anywhere At All<\/em>, begins with a parody of the TV ads of a Los Angeles auto dealer named Ralph Williams, here rechristened Ralph Spoilsport:<\/p>\n

Hiya, friends!\u00a0 Ralph Spoilsport, Ralph Spoilsport Motors, the world\u2019s largest new used and used new automobile dealership, Ralph Spoilsport Motors, here in the City of Emphysema.\u00a0 Let\u2019s just look at the extras on this fabulous car!\u00a0 Wire-wheel spoke fenders, two-way sneezethrough windvent, star-studded mudguards, sponge-coated edible steering column, chrome fender dents, and factory air-conditioned air from our fully factory-equipped factory.\u00a0 It\u2019s a beautiful car, friends, with doors to match! \u00a0Birch\u2019s Blacklist says this automobile was stolen, but for you, friends, the complete price, only two thousand five hundred dollars, in easy monthly payments of twenty-five dollars a week, twice a week, and never on Sundays.<\/address>\n

At this point, Ralph is interrupted by Babe, the persona whom we follow through the hall of sonic mirrors, who wants to buy the car, and suddenly we\u2019re inside the ad, on a weird odyssey that will not end until 27 minutes later with Ralph reciting an adaptation of Molly Bloom\u2019s soliloquy from the end of Ulysses.\u00a0 If you want to hear what I just quoted, click on the link at the head of this piece.\u00a0 For commentary and the text just quoted, go to The Firesign Theatre\u2019s Big Book of Plays<\/em><\/a>, 37-39 (1972).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[8]\u00a0\u00a0 I can remember lugging my so-called \u201cportable\u201d typewriter to campus on foot across the Walnut Street bridge in the heat, or waiting for the buses in freezing snow.\u00a0 S. nominally lived in a dorm at the far end of campus (even though it was obvious we weren\u2019t doing a very successful job of fooling her parents, but proprieties had to be observed on both sides), and sometimes I\u2019d have to stay at her place, in her tiny cramped bed.\u00a0 And it often seemed as if we were really living, at least on the weekends, on the Penn Central Railroad, going up to my dad\u2019s in New York or down to S.\u2019s parents in Baltimore.\u00a0 Though it consequently sometimes felt more like a pied-<\/em>\u00e0-terre<\/em> than a home, it beat everything else hollow.<\/p>\n

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

Theme Songs Page<\/a> | Previous Theme Song<\/a> | Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m glad to say that neither my dad nor Tom ever lost a penny by this rickety arrangement. But it was a harbinger of the generally lawless lifestyle we were to pursue at 2209. We started with that fraud (though we meant and did no harm to anyone by it), and went on from there. It wasn\u2019t just that we were drinking underage or having sex without benefit of clergy. Kids, don\u2019t try this in your home: LSD was literally kept in the fridge for consumption by \u2013 one or more of us \u2013 but let me hasten to say it wasn\u2019t me.<\/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":[3036,3061,3072,1241,3077,3066,2350,3056,2688,2309,3054,3053,3074,3073,2922,3058,3063,3059,2053,3055,3079,3064,2057,3065,3078,3080,373,3067,3076,3075,2054,54,3062,3060,3071,3070,1023,3057,3069,2731,3068],"class_list":["post-2696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theme-songs","tag-3036","tag-2209-rittenhouse-square","tag-34th-street","tag-abbey-road","tag-babe","tag-barnard-college","tag-beatles","tag-beginnings","tag-bob-dylan","tag-chicago","tag-chicago-transit-authority","tag-come-together","tag-concert-for-bangladesh","tag-danny-seraphine","tag-drugs","tag-firesign-theatre","tag-george-wallace","tag-how-can-you-be-in-two-places-at-once","tag-ian-macdonald","tag-introduction","tag-james-joyce","tag-john-l-sullivan","tag-john-lennon","tag-lsd","tag-molly-bloom","tag-penn-central-railroad","tag-president-richard-nixon","tag-psychedelic-patterns","tag-ralph-spoilsport","tag-ralph-williams","tag-revolution-in-the-head","tag-richard-nixon","tag-rittenhouse-square","tag-robert-lamm","tag-the-daily-pennsylvanian","tag-the-doors","tag-the-draft","tag-the-firesign-theatre","tag-the-rolling-stones","tag-ulysses","tag-volleyball"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2696","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=2696"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5519,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2696\/revisions\/5519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}