BACKBEAT
I came late to rock ‘n’ roll. In the late 1950s and early ‘60s, when the rhythm and blues of Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, The Big Bopper, and other black musicians merged with the sound of white country-music singers, largely due to the unique talent of a certain Elvis Aron Presley, I was into the folk music of the Kingston Trio, the Weavers, and Joan Baez. I also liked Harry Belafonte’s renderings of traditional American folk songs and Trinidadian calypsos. I learned to play acoustic guitar, finger-style, and when I got to Yale I hung out during the evenings at an off-campus coffee house called La Galette, where folkies exchanged songs and taught one another new licks. A few of them played basic Mississippi Delta twelve-bar blues, which they learned from recordings by musicians like Lightnin’ Hopkins, Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Gary Davis, Howlin’ Wolf, Huddie “Lead Belly”) Ledbetter, and Muddy Waters. It should be mentioned that we Yalies who played at La Galette were all white, and none of us were from the Deep South.
I also picked up the rudiments of bluegrass guitar from a banjo player who lived down the hall from me at Yale’s Saybrook College. I used to practice in the communal bathroom on my floor, because the tiles on the walls and floor provided a reverb effect that covered up my mistakes. The banjo player was from New Jersey, and had never set foot in Appalachia, but he made his instrument ring. I can’t say the same for what I did with mine, at least at first, but I got better after playing for awhile at La Galette, for my fellow folkies were very critical about technique.
They were also authenticity snobs. The Kingston Trio was considered hopelessly commercial; Baez was accused of over-prettifying her selections of traditional ballads (well, with a voice as silvery-pure as hers, she would have made dirty limericks sound clean); and Belafonte, that early in his career, sang songs like “Day-O,” which, according to the folkie sticklers at the coffee house, made loading bananas under brutal conditions sound almost pleasant. Maybe they hadn’t listened to Belafonte’s lyrics very carefully. “Work all night on a drink of rum!/Stack banana till de mornin’ come!” didn’t sound like much fun to me.
But my curiosity gave me my own mild case of authenticitis. I began haunting the folk sections of New Haven’s record stores, and found albums recorded in rural American communities by the great musical folklorist Alan Lomax. I also became a Weavers fan, and the authenticity freaks couldn’t fault me about that, because every member of the quartet had learned the songs he or she sang from the oral tradition. And Pete Seeger, who led the group, was a committed socialist and a friend of Woody Guthrie, the bard of the victims of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.
Also in the 1960s, various English and Scottish singers began recording selections from the Child Ballads, the collection of traditional music amassed in the British Isles by Francis James Child in the late 19th century. Ewan MacColl (who married Pete Seeger’s sister Peggy) was the best-known of those singers, and because he and his associates did folk songs that later came to America with the Scots-Irish who settled Appalachia, I began buying recordings of mountain music in its pure, high, lonesome form, without the razzle-dazzle, lickety-split banjo and fiddle riffs of bluegrass.
But by the mid-Sixties, rock music was changing seismically. Bob Dylan had started as a three-chord protest-song balladeer (before he changed his name from Zimmerman, he visited the dying Woody Guthrie in the hospital, expressed his homage, and received Guthrie’s blessing – a story right out of the Book of Genesis), but he went electric and acquired a full back-up band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, to his purist fans’ horror. But adding a touch of rock to his music was a brilliant stroke, it seemed to me. It opened up new musical worlds to him, and garnered him a much wider audience.
And of course the Beatles were turning rock ‘n’ roll upside down and inside out, shaking the usual teenage lust ditty like a quartet of terriers toying with a rat, and adding harmonies far more complex than Elvis’s arrangers ever came up with. Their lyrics, too, had nuances only Dylan and Paul Simon could match for sublety, and included almost as much social commentary. The times were indeed a-changin’.
But I remained a folkie. Although I loved what the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and other shock troops of the British Invasion were doing to rock, performing it required getting an electric guitar and forming a band. The expense and the effort weren’t worthwhile to me, because my real passion was acting, and I had no interest in becoming a professional musician. In my spare time, I kept on playing my two acoustic guitars, a nylon-string Goya G-10 classical instrument, and a big steel-string Martin D-35. And because I had acted in several of Shakespeare’s plays, and loved Elizabethan music, in 1967 I bought a lute. It had seven courses (six doubled strings tuned an octave apart, with a single top string), and I got it at a small shop in New York’s East Village that also sold mandolins, guitars, and ukuleles.
According to the shop owner, who had a vaguely Middle-European accent, the lute had been made in East Germany. I was intrigued, and asked him how he had come by it. He told me that due to the thaw in US-USSR relations, initiated by Nikita Khrushchev, items like musical instruments could be imported from Soviet Bloc countries without restrictions. That still sounded a little fishy to me, but the lute was priced within my budget, and I bought it.
I never learned to read conventional musical notation, but I could follow lute tablature, because it was similar to the diagrams of guitar chords which appeared over the melody and lyrics of traditional American folk songs in Alan Lomax’s books. The tablature in 16th and 17th century lute-song collections, such as the “Bookes of Ayres” compiled by Thomas Morley and John Dowland, which I acquired in facsimile from the same dealer who sold me the lute, even included tiny numbers illustrating the order in which the strings should be plucked. After some practice, I began playing the lute pretty well, for an amateur. And I had a masterful guide: the classical guitarist and lutenist Julian Bream had made a recording of Elizabethan lute music drawn primarily from the Morley and Dowland repertory. He also accompanied the lyric tenor Peter Pears in several lute songs by Dowland and Thomas Campion. They were originally written, in all probability, for boy sopranos, and even Pears was forced to use falsetto to reach the highest notes. As an indifferent baritone, hence, they were far out of my range. I transposed a couple of them down an octave, and thought they sounded all right, though less ethereal than the Elizabethans would have liked, or so I assumed. However, years after I sold my lute, the rock singer Sting recorded some Dowland lute songs in his own indifferent baritone. He accompanied himself on a lute, but because he wasn’t fully accomplished with it, a virtuoso lutenist backed up his accompaniment, doing the difficult grace notes. I like the recording even better than I like the Pears-Bream version, authenticity be damned. Sting’s versions were lusty, and Gloriana’s England was a lusty place.
Julian Bream also recorded the Bach Lute Suites, which in the composer’s day would have been played on an arch-lute or a theorbo, both of which featured a second neck, and had up to fifteen courses. But Bream played them on a guitar, for reasons I never fully understood.
I couldn’t play the lute suites, because they were written in conventional notation, not tablature, and also because they were far too complex to fake. But I did fake Dowland’s complicated “Lachrimae Antiquae Pavane,” without tablature (because I couldn’t find any), playing Bream’s recording of it until I learned it by ear, grace notes and all.
I rarely played my lute in public, but when opportunities arose, I took them. In 1969, at the old American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, I played small roles, and one of them was Balthasar in Much Ado About Nothing. I sang “Sigh No More, Ladies” (pitched in my comfort range), masking my less-than-superb voice with flurries of ornamental notes on the lute. Len Cariou, whose voice was superb (he later played the title role in Sweeney Todd,) had just done the lead in Henry V and he invited me to come with him to a fund-raiser for the Festival. I accompanied him as he sang several Shakespearian songs set to music by Henry Purcell, and the fat-cat donors were generous. Awhile later, I was in a production of As You Like It, cast as Amiens, and sang “Under the Greenwood Tree,” again using lute flourishes to distract the audience from the cracks in my voice as I broke into falsetto.
But after a few years I began to neglect my lute. I began writing folk-rock songs, accompanying them with one or the other of my guitars, and the lute languished in its case, unplayed. I felt guilty about that, and finally sold the instrument to a student at the Bloomingdale School of Music for considerably less than it was worth. My own songs weren’t very good, but I covered far better ones by the likes of Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Paul Simon.
In warm weather I’d take the Martin or the Goya to Riverside Park and practice. On one occasion I met a Puerto Rican guy named Harry Nino playing his own guitar, a Les Paul arch-top Gibson. He was into jazz, and knew the full range of bar chords to various popular songs, but he played with a pick. So I started improvising, finger-style, on my Martin, riffing on a couple of tunes we both knew. He was a good singer, and we harmonized on pieces like CS&N’s “Wooden Ships” and Simon’s “Lincoln Duncan.” Our voices and our guitars blended nicely, and we began performing on open-mike nights at various downtown clubs. I finally got us a paying gig at a place in Greenwich Village. It turned out to be a gay bar, and the clientele seemed more interested in hitting on handsome Harry than in listening to our music. After one man put a hand on Harry’s knee, his Latino machismo kicked in, and he erupted with rage. It was all I could do to keep him from decking the guy. Of course we were kicked out, and on the sidewalk he lit into me, cursing me out in both English and Spanish, and saying that I was probably a maricòn myself, or I never would have booked us into a fag joint. He stomped off, and I never saw him again. So much for my career as a folk-rocker.
I kept on playing my guitars until arthritis in my fingers made it impossible, and then I gave the instruments away. The Martin went to a young friend who lives most of the time in Paris. He uses it in a band called Moriarty (named after Dean Moriarty, Sal Paradise’s buddy in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road) which has become quite well-known in Europe. The Goya wound up with Black Lamb contributor Dean Suess, whom I’d met through the magazine.
Since then, I haven’t been able to make music. But I still have dreams in which my old abilities have come back, and I’m pickin’ and grinnin’ as happily as ever. Sometimes when I wake from them, my fingers are still flexing, the way a dog’s paws twitch when he’s dreaming of running. Unfortunately, even that dream-playing is slightly painful, and the pain is what wakes me up.
So nowadays, I’m strictly a listener. And I still love rock music, even though I never got very far with trying to play it. In recent years the pop music pundits have repeatedly sounded the death knell for rock ‘n’ roll. First they said punk killed it. Then, they maintained, rap and hip-hop burned it to ashes. But they were wrong. Rock’s proving to be a phoenix that rises from its pyre intact with its wings spread, ready to soar off in new directions. The punks succumbed to their own nihilism and died off. The rappers and hip-hoppers began to add actual music to their moronic electronic drum tracks, which didn’t improve their messages much, but at least made what they put out a little less painful to the ear.
And the latest generation of rap artists (I use the term guardedly) have stopped glorifying misogyny, gangsterism, and guns in their lyrics. Now that (mostly white) cops have begun gunning down black people for no good reason, the rappers have started developing something like a social conscience, or at least a push-back against police brutality. They’re almost beginning to sound like Bob Dylan, with his first “finger-pointing” songs. The music’s come full circle – and it’s still rock ‘n’ roll. As Neil Young sang with quiet certainty, “Hey, hey, my, my,/Rock and roll will never die.” I hope he’s right.