Music

My father was an entertainer. My mother put me up in front of people when I was 3 to entertain them by singing. She said that on VJ Day, August 1945, I stood on the roof of our apartment building in the Bronx and sang “Don’t Fence Me In.” I don’t remember that, but I do remember playing rhythm guitar for a house band called the Melody Playboys at the Diamond Horseshoe dance hall in Lawton, Oklahoma, in 1962 when I was in the Army. I also remember singing the same Johnny Cash song, “Big River,” several times at parties and informal gatherings. My sister played French horn in several orchestras in the Bay Area when she was young. We were at a Gilbert and Sullivan thingie one evening when she said she used to know a lot of people in the pits in plays all over the City. So with this kind of background, would I encourage the kids to be minstrels or chemists or models or auto mechanics or what? All, actually. The kids have done all these things.

I like music. I like the classics and operas my father liked. I like the country and western songs that were popular when I was in middle school and high school in the 1950’s. I like Celtic stuff. I love bagpipes and drums. I like the Asian harp, the koto and its variations. I like rap, reggae, rock and punk when people are putting interesting variations into constricted forms. The guitar player for my daughter’s angry grrrrl band once did a beautiful chord progression amounting to a melody in some number that sounded like young girls screaming while loud machinery was drowning them out.

A lot of punk was purposefully making fun of music. When I was a kid the big band Spike Jones and His City Slickers played songs with sirens, gunshots, gargling, washboards, cowbells and other comical stuff. But the band was good. They knew how to play standard big band music, which they did, while running around gargling and shooting. The punk band Schlong, with my #1 son on guitar and keyboards, put out a CD “Punk Side Story” which was the soundtrack for “West Side Story” in punk style. My daughter screams “There’s a Place for Us” and “I Feel Pretty.” A lead “singer” belched loudly and followed it with “the most beautiful sound I ever heard…” leading into the song “Maria.” They also covered Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” on a 7-inch vinyl record they titled “Tumors.” They had to do it really fast to get it to fit. They had to know the originals well in order to arrange them as they did.

Their heyday was more than fifteen years ago. They have occasional reunions, which they say are better attended than their gigs in the early 1990’s.

My daughter’s boyfriend is learning a lot of new stuff on the guitar. Me, I practice to try to remember what I learned fifty years ago.