I am a Navy brat, so my family moved around a lot when I was growing up. But one constant through those years was the whole family attending church choir. You could say I was nominally raised Southern Baptist, but the Navy has a tradition of non-denominational chapels and my two favorites were the one on Midway Island and the one at the Naval Air Station Lemoore, California. By “favorites” I mean the sort of architectural space. These are not the cathedral buildings of Europe and older U.S.A., but more “modern,” yet wonderful to sit in. The Lemoore Chapel had beautiful, massive walnut beams, walnut pews, a rich royal blue carpet, and a large balcony at the rear that held the choir. It also provided a marvelous acoustic space.
I spent many an hour during Wednesday’s choir practice, my duties in the children’s choir having ended, hanging out in the pews as the adult choir rehearsed and the organ played to a nearly empty chapel. I would be there near dusk, dying light streaming from the stained glass above the Choir balcony, reading science fiction, while transported by ethereal music.
As I said, my whole family sang. My mother had a soft, lovely alto voice and my father, a deep, resonant baritone. Both of my sisters rang out as sopranos and I started as an alto then aged down to tenor. Though the repertoire was tilted toward the hymnal with a touch of sacred classical, it was still often thrilling to participate in. My sisters and I had an innate understanding of harmony and I learned to read sheet music well enough. At home, my parents listened to the pop music of the day on radio and TV. Later on, I performed second lead in a couple of high school musicals. So you could say I grew up around music.
Still, despite enjoying the opportunity to perform, and learning to appreciate the qualities that made a fine voice, I really did not fully get music: so much of it failed to move me. Of course, from junior high and into high school, I would listen along with my friends to the then burgeoning rock-pop pouring out of the radio. I liked much of what I heard, but was still perplexed by the amount of attention my peers paid to it, the joy they showed in it. Some of this comes down to being unfamiliar with the new musical language. And some if it comes down to being raised in a subculture that frowned upon hints of sexuality, that regarded with suspicion any music meant to move the body. Of course, the blues and gospel origins of rock gave it a sensual, rhythmical core that was I wasn’t used to. But much of it had to do with the art of paying close and deep attention.
Now, my dad was a woodworker and electronics hobbyist. In the late 60’s he built a Heathkit color television. He also built a stereo receiver/amplifier, then created a large and lovely walnut cabinet to house them both, along with two large, separate speakers that sat on either side. He would play recorded pipe organ music, barber shop quartets, and light, pop muzak-styled string music that he said kept him calm. While I admired his craft skills and persistence (building a color TV?!), all too often his musical taste seemed to suck the energy out of the room. To me, it had a kind of assaultive blandness. Of course my reaction involved age-related differences in energy, combined with my countercultural bent, but it also seemed to grow from my parents’ desire to seek comfort above all else. Once I was out living on my own, whenever I would visit their house, I found myself sliding into a drowsy fugue state, as though slowly smothered in an overly warm blanket. It seemed that my parents had created a world devoid of all hints of excitement. As Depression-era babies who also lived through WWII, and raised kids in the fifties, I won’t judge them. But as a bright, inquisitive kid lacking stimulation, it took me a long time to understand and mitigate the psychological effects.
Despite all this, after graduating from high school, I had a small unexpected experience that completely changed how I related to music.
One evening, in the summer of 1970, with my sisters and parents out of the house, I put on a rather long cut by Jimi Hendrix: “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” on the living room stereo and sat on the floor between the speakers. Though it was during the time I occasionally smoked weed, this particular evening I was quite straight. My friend John had said some very positive words about this particular piece. I gave it all the focused attention I could. Strangely, this was something I had never really done. As it started, I tried to track each musical line — guitar, base, drums, voice, and the odd sound effect — as it arose and wove in and around the others, paying attention to tonal texture, harmonics, and variations in rhythm. Shortly, I found it impossible to track them all at once. But the effort created a feeling of richness, a sense that wherever I placed my attention, there was more musical landscape just beyond. I became entranced, mesmerized, pulled into the sound. At the same time, I had the very peculiar sense that I had lifted a couple of feet off the carpeted floor, as an amorphous ball of… something…enveloped in and suspended by sonic waves. Holy crap! This is this what everyone else was experiencing? Not the suspension stuff, just the elation of musical experience. The guitar lines pulled me forward and just felt so cool, so thrilling. What was this sorcery? I felt I had cracked some sort of code.
Over the next few days, I tried to apply this particular set of inner gestures, this focused appreciation, to various styles of music with differing results. I noted that some pieces were textural, some were linear, some were atmospheric, some quite emotional. There were pieces that just used instruments as a backdrop for storytelling, others whose instrumental content entwined and heightened the lyrical content, or offered both as equal musical elements. The thing was, I found some music more amenable to this kind of intense experience than others. And some days I would be moved by a piece, but on other days it would leave me flat. Over time, as I developed strong likes and dislikes, I saw that so much of anyone’s taste in music depends upon exposure and familiarity. It was like learning a language, an ability that arises from the interaction of personal proclivities and local culture. Plus, there were so many flows of musical tradition, so many degrees of expressive freedom to be drawn from. With some exceptions, I found that after getting used to the musical conventions of a genre I could start to enjoy pieces I would not have been drawn to before.
A notion that arose from this experience was that musical taste was fairly mutable, that with the proper exposure, anyone may learn to enjoy a new piece of music, or one they previously disliked. I was quickly disillusioned.
One division I noted right away in the rock-and-roll realm— and this I twigged during my foray into playing disk-jockey at friends’ parties— was between fairly complex, often keyboard-based music that moved me and guitar-based music that moved me. The straightforward blues-based, guitar rock was meant to move bodies and had a lot to do about the desire and promise of sex; it would really get folks moving on the dance floor and it appealed to almost everybody. “Duh!” you might say, but remember, this was at the end of my high school days, when I didn’t know anything and was mostly a social outsider. I was amazed by how well I could shift the energy of the room by choosing one cut over another, based mostly on rhythm. And though I had the chops to segue between thematically and texturally related songs from many artists to keep things interesting and moving along, whenever I moved toward what’s now known as “progressive music”, I got the same attrition of attention. Compositions not centered on the drama around getting laid were much less popular. I tried to sit some of my friends down and ask them to pay close attention to the sounds of other, more complex music, but only a few even understood what I was talking about.
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Of course, the above is rather abstract, overgeneralized and needs grounding in specifics. What music? What were my high-school chums exposed to or excited about? Most of it was counter-cultural rock, which is a very wide category and can be infused with elements from multiple genres. My friends and I were all, in no particular order, Joni Mitchell fans, we loved Jimmy Hendrix, Van Morrison, Credence Clearwater Revival, The Blues Breakers, John Mayall, The Animals, The Doors, It’s a Beautiful Day, Jefferson Airplane, The Allman Brothers, Cream, Jeff Beck, The Beatles, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Santana, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, and the Rolling Stones. (About the Stones: I was a cheap drunk and never too fond of alcohol. But the first time I got drunk was also the first time I “got” the Rolling Stones. And though now I don’t drink at all, I’ve been a fan of that band ever since.). Bands that appealed more exclusively to me, were Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Elton John, The Moody Blues, and Fairport Convention, among others. I later branched out into jazz, classical and space music. More on these at another time.
