Adventures in Typesetting

The Psychedelic Furs song “The Ghost in You” starts playing in my ears as I’m walking along, and suddenly I’m thinking about typesetting. Go figure. But there is a reason for it.

I’ve worked in the magazine industry for a long time. Maybe not long when compared to the lifespan of a sequoia or a whale shark, but a good stretch in human years. When the Furs’ released Mirror Moves, the album with “The Ghost in You,” in 1984—approaching 40 years ago—I was already a magazine guy, eking out a living as editor of a little entertainment publication in the Boston area. That was my first full-time magazine job, if you don’t count my short stint at the Hollywood Reporter, and we did things a little differently then. Today anyone can be his or her own typesetter or even publisher. But back in the sepia-toned year of 1984 it wasn’t that easy. If you wanted to set words in type, you needed a professional.

Here’s how that worked. First, writers had to get me copy—words usually typed out on paper on a manual typewriter. Since this was before email, I often met the ink-stained wretches in person someplace in Boston—perhaps in front of the Rat in Kenmore Square—to get their copy so I could bring it back to my home office for editing.

I distinctly remember the first time I felt like I had a knack for this editing thing. I was working on an article about a few local bands. The writer was good, but his piece seemed too long, and it kind of bobbed and weaved all over the place. It didn’t flow the way I felt it should. I got out my pencil, scissors, and tape and started reshaping. I started by marking up the typed article with pencil, but that wasn’t enough. So I cut the manuscript into pieces and taped them back together the way I thought they should go. It was like the William S. Burroughs cut-and-paste technique in reverse, since I was trying to create structure, not tear it down. If I needed any new transitions, I typed them up on my typewriter and taped them into place. When I was done, I thought my Frankenstein monster of an edit read pretty well.

In fact, when the piece appeared in print, the writer complimented me on what a fine job I had done with his copy. Believe me, that’s rare. And when it does happen, it’s the good writers who thank you. The bad writers complain about how you’ve manhandled their exquisite prose and cut all the fine phrases that had pleased them the most. I even had one writer tell me I had taken out all his “cinnamon” and replaced it with “vanilla.” “Thanks for proving my point,” I should have said but didn’t, because I edited my response. What I said instead was, “Fuck you.”*

Once done with my editing, I would jump into my faithful 1975 Toyota Celica to bring the copy to Typo Tech.

That was our typesetter. The women who worked there—and it was mostly women, I recall, one of whom told me she owned an ocelot—would then type up the edited copy and print it out as long paper galleys, which I would dutifully retrieve, edit, and return for final type. This arrived as sturdy, slick galleys we called repro (because, I guess, it was suitable for reproduction in print). The magazine designer—who was also the magazine publisher until we briefly hired a freelancer—cut up the galleys, ran them through a waxer, and pasted the waxed repro down onto boards, along with the illustrations, to design the magazine. The printer would photograph the completed boards and make plates for the printing press. Yes, kids, that’s the way we did it back then.

Primitive, right?

Not as primitive as it was in Benjamin Franklin’s day. In my very first book, Ben Franklin’s Philadelphia, I discuss the Founding Father’s job as a printer. This is what I said:

The work of a printer was tedious and tiresome. He had to compose his type letter by letter, setting them up backward and upside down, and to do so as quickly and efficiently as possible. The broadsheet of the Declaration of Independence required three or four hours of composing work. Franklin recalled one time when he spilled his type after spending hours composing pages. He had to work through the night redoing it but saw the silver lining in the incident, as his neighbors noted his extraordinary work habits, and word of his industry and dedication began to spread.

After setting the type, the printer next applied ink with a device called an inking ball. Made from tree sap, linseed oil, and lamp black, black ink was a sticky substance that adhered well to the metal type. The printer applied the ink to the paper by turning a long handle that pressed the paper to the type. He had to repeat the process—inking the type, putting in the paper, and making the impression—for each page, and then he had to set the type for the next page, and the next.

The printing industry has changed tremendously since Franklin’s day, but we still use the same terminology. We talk about the press, although its definition has expanded to include television news as well as printed media. Printers kept their capital letters separate in an upper case, giving us the terms for upper- and lower-case letters. Printers minded their “p’s and q’s,” since they looked similar, and a disgruntled printer might be “out of sorts,” the sorts being his metal type, which eventually wore out and had to be replaced.

That was when an “ink-stained wretch” could actually be stained with ink.

Weren’t we going to talk about “The Ghost in You” from the Psychedelic Furs’ Mirror Moves album?  I think we were.

One of the perks of the job at the rock magazine was that I got promotional copies of new albums. I had to hand off most of the good ones to my reviewers, but before doing that I copied them onto cassette tapes.  I did that with Mirror Moves. On the other side, I taped ABC’s much-maligned second album, Beauty Stab. I listened to that cassette a lot back in 1984 and 1985 as I was driving my Celica on the roundtrip trip across the Charles River to deliver magazine copy to Typo Tech in Cambridge. And that’s why “The Ghost in You” made me muse about typesetting.

Later I left Boston for a job at a national magazine in Washington, D.C. Our typesetting company there was called Unicorn Graphics and my customer rep was a very polite man named Steve. Perhaps he realized I was slightly over my head serving as managing editor of a big national magazine, because he could be very diplomatic when he sensed I didn’t understand something. “Here’s the thing,” he would begin as he gently guided me away from error.

Instead of taking copy to the typesetter myself, I now enjoyed the luxury of calling a messenger service—Fleet Feet—to deliver the goods. (This was a time when you would see bicycle messengers weaving through traffic all over the city. On Fridays, huge flocks of these spandex-clad creatures would meet after hours in Dupont Circle. I assume that modern communications technology has made the bicycle messenger an endangered species, if not outright extinct.) After Unicorn’s people set our copy, they would Fleet Feet galleys and then repro back to me. The art director would still have to wax the repro and paste it down on boards. I was impressed by his skill with an X-Acto knife. If we needed to make changes after the pages were already laid out, he would swiftly cut up the pasted-down repro—eliminating a word here, a phrase there, rebuilding the sentences on the page, gently inserting tiny scraps of galleys with periods or commas, and making it all fit. On one occasion, though, that led to disaster. Somehow one of the reconstructed sentences fell off the board between our office and the printer, and I didn’t notice the missing words until I got the printed magazine. Oops.

I told them no secrets of American typesetting.

Unicorn Graphics handled a lot of magazines, including Soviet Life, a propaganda publication put out by the USSR. This was the 1980s, the Soviet Union still existed, and Soviet Life featured lots of stories about the wonders of life under Communism, with pictures of rippling wheat fields and proletariat tractors. I remember one year at Unicorn Graphics’ annual Christmas party when the managing editor of Soviet Life struck up a conversation with me at the buffet table. Later, Steve took me aside. “Here’s the thing,” he said, and he told me that the Russian worked for Soviet intelligence and sometimes tried to recruit Americans. He advised me to be careful talking to him. So, I guess I can thank Steve for keeping me from becoming the magazine industry’s equivalent of Aldrich Ames, spilling all the secrets of American publishing to the Russians.

The Soviet Union wasn’t the only entity to experience change since then. I did, too. While working in Washington I began to use a high-tech thing called a word processor. I had received my first inkling of these things a few years before, when I read an interview with former President Jimmy Carter in Newsweek. The ex-president was working on his memoirs with a computer that let him move blocks of text around his manuscript and rewrite things without having to use paper, scissors, tape or even typewriters. “Wow,” I thought. “That sounds . . . complicated.” I felt glad I would never have to use such a complex device myself.

By the time I reached that national magazine I was using a word processor, on a bulky IBM PC with two floppy drives. We got an upgrade in our typesetting operations with the addition of another PC that we used to send our copy to Unicorn Graphics via a telephone line. First, though, we had to add codes to our copy to set column width, font size, and that kind of thing. Then we inserted the floppy disk into the typesetting IBM to h ‘n’ j. That meant “hyphenate and justify.” We’d transmit the text to Unicorn Graphics’ computers (via a dial-up modem), wait a minute or two, and then “fetch” it back. It wasn’t yet a galley—we would still have to print out copy on a dot-matrix printer—make any final edits, and then send the final version to Unicorn and have it printed out as galleys.

In effect, editors had become typesetters. I still recall with pride one of my early h ‘n’ j triumphs, when I decided I wanted the text for a short item about an airplane-themed wine to appear in the shape of a wine bottle. That meant taking a ruler, measuring how much to indent every single line of the text, and then coding each line individually. It didn’t quite work out the first time, or maybe the second, or perhaps even the third, but we finally got galleys back in a near perfect bottle shape. Sometimes it’s the little things that give you the most pleasure.

My type bottle.

That was when I was working at a Washington-based aerospace magazine. That magazine sent me to Denver for a week to train on the Quark Publishing System. Quark was the dominant page layout software at the time, and QPS was a publishing “suite” that allowed text editors to interface with the page layout and get a real-time sense of what the pages would look like. (They called that view WYSIWYG, pronounced “whizzy wig.” It meant “what you see is what you get.”)  QPS was complex and sometimes sulky software—we used Apple computers and I got more than my share of the dreaded “bomb” on my screen when the computer and the software got into a duel of wills—but was it also kind of cool.

There’s been a lot of ink under the bridge since then. The magazine industry has certainly changed.  PDFs have replaced paper galleys and designers lay out pages on computers, not boards. I’ve changed, too. I’ve had some magazines shot out from under me, and I’ve been shot out of some magazines. That fact that I still work for an ink-on-paper print publication is something of a miracle, though. Let’s see how long that lasts.

Oh, yeah. “The Ghost in You.” It’s a hell of a song.

*Okay, okay. Not really. But I thought it.

Movie Paradise

A badly framed image of Washington’s Uptown Theater. This would have been in 1988 because the theater is showing Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Lately I’ve been listening to the streaming service Pandora when I walk in the morning. One of the “stations” I like is Ennio Morricone Radio. It plays the music of film composer Morricone, who scored more than 500 films before his death at the age of 91 this year. He’s best known for his music for Sergio Leone “spaghetti westerns,” especially The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, the film that transformed Clint Eastwood into a movie star.

One piece by Morricone that always sends me tumbling into a wormhole of memory is his theme from the 1988 film Cinema Paradiso. The movie tells the story of a famous Italian director who returns to the town where he grew up and recalls how, when he was an adorable post-war moppet, he befriended the projectionist in the town’s little theater and began a life-long passion for movies. I saw the film when it came out but I wasn’t especially impressed. From what I can remember, I thought it was a little saccharine. Perhaps I should see it again.

The movie came out when I was living in Washington, D.C., and had plenty of time for movies since I was new in town and didn’t know many people. Looking back, it seems like I spent much of my existence at that time cocooned in darkness, immersed in the aroma of popcorn, and staring raptly at images on a screen. Not a bad way to spend time. On weekends I would get the Washington Post and plot out my strategy. (This was when newspapers still ran movie listings.) The city seemed crammed full of movie theaters, and a lot of them were within walking distance or accessible by Metro. Maybe I’d catch a matinee at the Circle Theater on Florida Avenue, or walk down to the Kennedy Center and catch a double-bill at the American Film Institute. Or perhaps make the short walk to the jewel in Washington’s movie crown, the Uptown Theater on Connecticut Avenue at Cleveland Park, and see the latest Hollywood blockbuster on the huge curved screen. The movies I saw there ranged from the sublime (the 25^th anniversary screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey) to the ridiculous (Howard the Duck). Sit in the right spot near the middle of the theater and all you could see was movie screen.

I had a lot of options back then. The two big chains in town were the Circles, owned by the Pedas brothers, who put up money to back the Coen Brothers’ first movies, and KB Cinemas. The theaters ranged from the big screen on Wisconsin Avenue at Friendship Heights, to a bunch of smaller screens at the Foundry, in Georgetown down by the C&O canal. There was also a Circle Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue not far from the White House, but I think that one showed mainly second-run features. I remember seeing Repo Man there once. There was a big theater below street level on K street, where I saw things like Aliens and the first Tim Burton Batman. That might have been a KB theater. There was another big theater up Wisconsin by Rodman’s drugstore. I remember one summer when all the big releases flopped and that theater began screening older films. I saw The Bridge on the River Kwai and Dr. Strangelove there. There were theaters way up Wisconsin Avenue at Mazza Gallery, where I remember seeing Until the End of the World and a re-release of Orson Welles’ Othello.

The Avalon was a beautiful old theater on Connecticut below Chevy Chase Circle. My wife-to-be was involved in a charity event once where they had a premiere of the Bond flick The Living Daylights there in 1987. The actor who played the villain, Jeroen Krabbé, was there and a couple of women who had bits in the film as “Bond girls.” Also arriving were more people than the theater could hold, since the charity organization had blizzarded the region with free tickets. I managed to squeeze in with some friends, but even 33 years later my wife can’t recall the chaos of the event today without shuddering.

One Saturday I decided to catch the first matinee of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X at the big Circle theater on Florida Avenue. I showed up just before showtime to find the theater still closed, the doors locked. I waited. And waited. No one arrived to open the theater and eventually I left in disgust, my movie game plan for the day in shreds. I wrote a letter of complaint to Circle Theaters and received some free passes in response. Maybe that was because at the bottom of the letter I typed “cc: Spike Lee.” At the time the director had accused theaters of crediting receipts for Malcolm X to other movies to deliberately underreport its box office, so I figured Circle might be a little paranoid about giving Spike more ammunition for his charges. Since I was the only person waiting to get into the theater that morning, I suspect this particular screwup had little impact on the film’s earnings

Washington also had some great repertory houses. One of them was the Biograph, a former autobody repair shop on M Street at the edge of Georgetown. I remember seeing Ross McElwee’s surprising and funny documentary Sherman’s March there with my wife-to-be. It was probably one of our earlier dates. There was another theater in the heart of Georgetown on M Street. Its name escapes me, but the theaters were up a narrow flight of stairs. The aforementioned wife-to-be and I saw Withnail and I there, but we were in such a Withnail-like state that we barely remember it. There was another movie theater on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, but while I lived in the area it showed only one movie—Caligula. I never saw it.

Then there was the AFI. I spent hundreds of hours in that theater, which had car parts—hoods, bumpers, trunks—attached to the walls as sound buffers. They had some great programs there. I remember an Alec Guinness festival where I got to see a lot of his classic Ealing comedies for the first time, and also a Billy Wilder program that blew me away. One time they showed Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, with star Joseph Cotton in attendance. I bought a copy of his autobiography and he signed it. (Years later I visited his grave in Petersburg, Virginia. He signed nothing for me that day.)

The Library of Congress had regular movies in its little screening room. In 1987  I attended a screening of the 1927 film Wings (winner of the first-ever best picture Oscar, then called “best production”). The film’s star, Charles “Buddy” Rogers—all flashing white teeth and smoking-jacket elegance—mingled with the crowd before the film, bringing a hint of old-time Hollywood to Washington. The National Archives also showed films on occasion and I remember seeing Anatomy of a Murder there.

Sometimes I served as the Washington stringer for The Hollywood Reporter and reviewed the occasional film or play. I covered an international film festival where I saw movies from all over the world at various theaters across town. Once I attended a screening of a documentary about filmmaker George Pal at the Motion Picture Producers’ Association screening room. Another time my editor in Hollywood asked me to review the 1986 movie Good to Go. Later renamed Short Fuse, it starred Art Garfunkel as an investigative reporter and played out amid Washington’s Go-Go music scene. The movie was so terrible it was not released anywhere else, so far as I know, and the studio never held a screening for critics. That meant the responsibility of getting word out to THR’s readers rested on my shoulders. I snuck out of work to catch it at the Florida Avenue theater one cold fall afternoon. Watching the movie, I quickly understood why the studio had avoided screening it for critics, but the climactic scene took place in Washington’s Old Pension Building, which was one of my favorite places in the district. To the best of my recollection, that was the scene were Garfunkel starts nodding his head in time to the beat, signaling his acceptance—perhaps it was even late-blooming love?—of Go-Go music. The movie did nothing for either Garfunkel or Go-Go or, for that matter, my career as a critic.

So why did the theme from Cinema Paradiso trigger all these memories? I can thank another one of the Circle Theaters. This was the Outer Circle, a little two-screen theater in uptown Washington on Wisconsin Avenue between Tenleytown and Friendship Heights. It primarily showed foreign films and smaller independent releases. I think I saw Betty Blue, Ken Russel’s Gothic, and Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused there. And every time I saw a movie there the theater had a song playing over the p.a. in the little lobby area. I could not identify the piece, but it tugged at my memory. I would stand in the lobby and wrack my brains. What was that song? It was an instrumental—something wistful and melancholy. I knew I had heard it before. But where?

Not until years later, when I heard Morricone’s theme from Cinema Paradiso, did it hit me. That was the song I used to hear at the Outer Circle so many years ago. It made perfect sense, too. Why not play a song from a movie about the joy of movies in a movie theater?

Looking back, I realize that I had been living in my own Cinema Paradiso at the time. Now it appears to be a paradise lost. The pandemic has decimated movie theaters. The big chains are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and the little independent theaters are fighting to keep their heads above water. I was heartbroken when I heard that Washington’s beautiful Uptown Theater closed back in March.

I haven’t been in a movie theater since sometime last winter. Nowadays you can watch movies on your phone. But who wants to do that? Not me—at least not until someone makes a phone as big as the Uptown.

Orson Welles and Me

That’s me with the glasses at center left.

My co-star, Orson Welles.

Lately I’ve been listening to podcasts as I walk. One I’ve written about already is I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere. I also like the Battle of Gettysburg Podcast. (It helps if you’re interested in the Battle of Gettysburg.) Turner Classic Movies just started an excellent podcast about the life and career of director Peter Bogdanovich, and the other day I listened to an episode of the podcast from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The last two podcasts I mention had something in common: Orson Welles. The famed director/actor/showbiz personality had been a close friend of Bogdanovich’s. In fact, at one point he lived in the younger director’s house, and Bogdanovich played an onscreen role in Welles’s last film, the recently-completed The Other Side of the Wind. And the Folger podcast I listened to dealt with Welles’s life-long love of Shakespeare. Not only had he directed legendary theatrical productions of Macbeth and Julius Caesar in stage in the 1930s, he also did cinematic versions of Othello, Macbeth, and the Henry IV plays (as Chimes at Midnight).

I’ve long been interested in Welles. He’s a fascinating individual, one of those people you can describe as “larger than life.” His film Touch of Evil is one of my all-time favorites, and so is The Third Man, in which he appeared as Harry Lime. Even his lesser films show flashes of brilliance. I have a bunch of books about his life and career. But I also have a personal connection with Welles, because I once appeared in a film with him.

Let me explain.

After graduating from high school, I went to a small college in Maine. I liked it there, but it was pretty close to home. Then one day I read a newspaper article about the film school at the University of Southern California, which was celebrating its 50^th anniversary. it was like the proverbial light bulb went off over my head. That was the way to get a college education—by watching movies! I immediately applied to the film program.

And I didn’t get in. I had always been a good student. I was the valedictorian of my high school class. I was accepted by every college to which I applied (well, one of them wait listed me first, but I got my revenge by not going there). I did not take this rejection lightly. Instead, during spring break of my sophomore year I hopped on a Greyhound bus in Maine and headed out to Los Angeles to find out what had gone awry.

It was an epic trip that lasted several days. I traveled through parts of the country I had never seen before. I stopped in Dallas to surprise a friend I hadn’t seen in years, hitchhiking from the bus terminal to his campus. I remember buying a taco from a street vendor in El Paso and staring over the border into Mexico. I felt like Jack Kerouac—or I would have, had I read On the Road at that point. But I hadn’t. Still, I was young and having the adventure of a lifetime.

Eventually I made it to California, where I stayed overnight in Pasadena with the parents of a girl I knew back at college. I took a bus from their house to the University of Southern California in downtown Los Angeles and made my way to the film school. Back then it was housed in a tiny 1920s-era bungalow. Over the entrance someone had written, “Reality Ends Here.” I went inside and found a grad student—I can’t remember how I connected with him—and asked what I should do to get into the film program. He suggested two things—to get some teachers to write letters of reference (I hadn’t provided any with my first application), and to apply to the history and criticism program instead of the production side. He gave me an application. I found a typewriter at the journalism school, typed up the application, turned it in, and the next day I was back on a Greyhound heading east. Once back at school I changed my major from English to psychology because I liked my psychology professor. He agreed to be my advisor and wrote me a nice reference for USC. I few weeks later I received my letter of acceptance.

That’s how I ended up watching movies to get a college degree. I can’t say it was the most practical education, but it did lead to an internship at the Hollywood Reporter, which led to my first pieces of published writing outside of my high school paper and a letter in the Tomb of Dracula comic book.

It was also fun. I saw a lot of great movies that I had never been able see in that pre-VHS/DVD/Blu-ray world. Los Angeles at the time had a slew of repertory houses, so I spent many hours in once-glamorous movie palaces watching double bills of the classics. I also got to see a lot of famous people in my classes. Jack Lemmon came by once to talk about the movie Missing. It seemed like he would have been happy to answer questions all night. Gene Wilder spoke about something he had done for an anthology film called Sunday Lovers. (I thought it sucked, but what did I know?) Clint Eastwood and director Don Siegal came for a screening of The Beguiled, with director Sam Peckinpah sitting right behind me. Director Richard Marquand showed his film Eye of the Needle and announced that he had been chosen to direct the next Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi. Martin Scorsese took a break from editing Raging Bull to talk about that film. (Man, the guy was wired!) Pandro Berman, who produced a lot of classic Astaire/Rogers films at RKO spoke. So did director Rouben Mamoulian, another survivor from Hollywood’s Golden Age. He was there for a screening of the musical Love Me Tonight.

So, yeah, it was a great way to get a college education. And it led to my appearance with Orson Welles.

It happened this way. Welles wanted to come to USC to film a question-and-answer session with film students about his movie of The Trial. The session took place in a big auditorium. I believe that people in the film program got first crack at seats, which was good, because the place was packed. All attendees were told that no one would be allowed inside if they had a script. It was like the old joke about the woman who was so stupid she tried to get ahead in Hollywood by sleeping with a writer. In this case, I couldn’t imagine any film student thinking the way to get ahead was by slipping a script to Orson Welles, who couldn’t even get his own films made. Be that as it may, I didn’t have a script for Welles to read, so I was clear.

We watched The Trial and then Welles appeared for a 90-minute Q&A session. I did not ask a question, but the woman in front of me did. It made me laugh, because I knew I would appear on film.

Laugh while you can, monkey boy!

Years passed. I never heard of Welles doing anything with what he had shot. Eventually I began remembering that the session had been about Othello, not The Trial. I wondered if it had been included on the DVD of Othello when that film was restored and re-released. It was not. Then, several years ago, I stumbled across the full session on YouTube and I was stunned and amazed to see my young but still hirsute face staring out from the screen.

Okay, okay. Admittedly, it’s not a large role. It’s not even a speaking part. But, as the old saying goes, there are no small roles, only small actors. I like to think that I light up the screen during my short appearance. I wonder what Welles thought. “Who is that young man?” he may have asked. “Such charisma! We must track him down so I can cast him in my next film. Perhaps he has a script he can give me.” Alas, we will never know. Welles died in 1985 without ever reaching out. By then I had left Hollywood behind and was working on a magazine career in Washington, D.C.

But I can always say that I have something in common with people like Joseph Cotton, Marlene Dietrich, John Gielgud, Everett Sloan, and Edward G. Robertson. I appeared in a film by Orson Welles.

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It Didn’t Use to Be This Way

Is anything, is anything the way it used to be?

That’s a line from a song I heard yesterday morning as I walked. It’s from “I Dreamt I Spoke with You Again” by Death Cab for Cutie, off the 2018 album Thank You for Today. If the song had played during a scene in a movie soundtrack, critics would probably have complained that it was “too on the nose.”

The walk was a mixture of beauty and anxiety. Trees were displaying their spring flowering. Near the park, all its playground equipment wrapped in yellow caution tape, I found a small piece of fieldstone, brightly painted and leaning against a tree. Someone had written “Trust” on it. Lawn signs promised, “You Are Not Alone” and advised “One Day at a Time.”

Later the Death Cab song “Gold Rush” came up, with this line:

It didn’t use to be this way.

That’s for sure.

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The Eyes of Nostradamus

I’ve been walking through a world that has undergone some wrenching change. Newspapers lying at the end of driveways bear headlines about Pennsylvania being in lockdown. A sign on a neighbor’s lawn reads, “You Are Not Alone.” The house being built down near the creek stands empty and unfinished. Life as we used to know it has come to a screeching halt, all thanks to a virus too small to be seen with the naked eye.

And yet. Some people are out mowing their lawns and others are taking walks. Kids whose schools have been closed play on the sidewalks, and a couple sitting on lawn chairs in front of their garage waves at me as I pass. Abnormal, meet normal.

One thing I listened to on my walk the other day was “Nostradamus” by Al Stewart, a live version of the song that originally appeared on his 1973 album Past, Present and Future.

Like many people, I first heard of Al Stewart when “Year of the Cat” became a hit in 1976. I bought the album and played it a lot. The opening piano notes of the title song immediately cast me back to the 1970s. There’s so much to love about “Year of the Cat”—the way the band kicks in after the piano intro, the string arrangement that blends into the guitar solo, which starts as a delicate acoustic before abruptly shifting into soaring electric that segues into a classic 1970s sax solo. The lyrics perfectly capture “a morning from a Bogart movie in a country where they turned back time.”

I also love like the album cover, one of the great works done by the Hipgnosis collective. I was also fascinated by the cover of Stewart’s earlier Past, Present, and Future album. It depicted what appeared to be the Marvel Comics character Dr. Strange disappearing into a mystical portal conjured up atop some damp seaside battlements. The cover of Stewart’s next album, Modern Times, showed us where Dr. Strange was going, as he materializes in a flash of light on the lawn of a stately mansion where a gangster in a fancy car addresses a beautiful woman who has turned her back on him. (Wikipedia informs me that the gangster is Stewart himself, the woman is Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour’s first wife, and the car—a Cord—belonged to Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. That’s a lot to unpack.)

I listened to those albums a lot, and to Time Passages once that was released. They form a significant portion of the life soundtrack from my later high school years and my freshman year in college. I will be the first to admit that they aren’t particularly “cool.” Stewart’s reedy tenor sounds kind of twee and his obsession with historical themes is a little nerdy. He wrote a song about President Warren G. Harding! “Roads to Moscow,” another historical ditty from Past, Present and Future, remains my favorite song about World War II’s Eastern Front. I don’t know any others. I do love that song, though, all eight minutes of it. It has a soaring grandeur about it, and a tragic irony, too, for its narrator gets sent to a Stalinist gulag after spending years fighting the Nazis for the Russia he loves.

“Nostradamus” is the standout track from that album, though. It’s a song about Frenchman Michel de Nostredame. Born in 1503, Nostradamus seemingly predicted future events in his poetry. (John Lovitz once portrayed him on Saturday Night Live and gave him the irritating habit of saying, “I knew you’d say that” to people in conversation.) Listen to the song and you might think Nostradamus was on to something. In the first part, Stewart makes it sound like this mystical Frenchman foresaw the execution of England’s King Charles I, the rise of Napoleon, and the ravages of “Hister, a captain of greater Germany.” Getting Hitler’s name slightly wrong just makes it seem like Nostradamus was doing his best to peer through the misty veil of years. After a lengthy instrumental break, Stewart sings some verses about predictions that hadn’t come true—yet. According to the liner notes by author Erika Cheetham, Nostradamus was predicting the rise of the Anti-Christ, who would come from Asia and start a war that would last 27 years. “The visions of Nostradamus of war and doom are similar to those of every prophet through the ages,” Cheetham wrote. “Perhaps he may yet be honored in his own country, and his warnings not ignored by future generations.” I should point out that Cheetham believed this war would begin “at the end of the 1970’s,” so it appears we dodged that bullet, at least for now.

I bought the album at a time when I was really into things mysterious and inexplicable. I read books about UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle and devoured magazines articles about bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. I knew all about the disappearance of Flight 19 and the Marine Sulphur Queen (both alleged victims of the Bermuda Triangle) and the story of how Betty and Barney Hill were abducted by a UFO outside Exeter, New Hampshire in 1961. I even picked up a slim volume called The Prophecies of Nostradamus at Mr., Paperback, the bookstore in Augusta, Maine, where I whiled away many hours of my young life. (The little sticker still stuck inside the cover tells me I paid $1.79 for the book.) I’m not sure I believed that any of the stuff I read was true, but I loved the little thrill I got thinking that maybe, just maybe, there were unknown things lurking outside our prosaic lives. I got the same tingle listening to “Nostradamus” and reading Cheetham’s liner notes.

Did Nostradamus have anything to say about our current days of dread, sickness and anxiety? Apparently not. He did have first-hand knowledge of plagues, though. My little book tells me he spent three years in Aix “attending on victims of the plague which broke out in 1546 and raged fiercely and for a long time.” I don’t know if I would want Nostradamus to predict the future right now, unless he could say, “It’s all going to be fine. Don’t worry. Chill.” That would be a comfort during these troubled times.

One comfort I have found recently is in the world of Sherlock Holmes. I’ve read or re-read “writings on the writings” and I’ve returned to the original stories, some of which I haven’t read in decades. It got me thinking about a passage near the end of “His Last Bow,” chronologically the last Sherlock Holmes story. It takes place near the start of World War I, as Holmes—with a little help from Dr. Watson—takes down the German spy Von Bork. Afterwards, Holmes and Watson have “a quiet talk” on the terrace of Von Bork’s residence. It includes this dialogue:

“There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”

“I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”

“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”

I am not a religious man, and I don’t believe that history’s horrors—whether they are wars or diseases—derive from some omnipotent being that sees fit to torment the world. Still, I do derive comfort from the idea that when we emerge from this coronavirus nightmare we will, indeed, be better and stronger. But I don’t know for sure. I am no Nostradamus.

Like what you read here? You can find all my previous Walker columns in one easy-to-handle volume. Order your copy now!

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Hooked on Holmes

A business card from the Sherlock Holmes Museum on London’s Baker Street.

I suffered a major loss recently.

My phone died. It was not a smartphone by any sense of the word, and I did not use it to connect to the Internet. I used it for phone calls, texts, and the occasional picture.

It was not at all a well phone, and one morning it wouldn’t wake up. I tried applying phone CPR, desperately pressing buttons in the hope that I could revive it. “Stay with me, phone,” I pleaded. “STAY WITH ME!” Much to my relief, the phone turned back on. It worked for a few hours, as though  it just wanted a chance to say goodbye, and then it shut down for good.

Now I have a smartphone.

That means I can now listen to podcasts on my phone while I take my morning walk. Today I streamed the latest episode of I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, a podcast with charming and erudite hosts Scott Monty and Burt Wolder. The subject, of course, is Sherlock Holmes and everything associated with the great detective and his universe. The show I heard today was an interview with author Nicholas Utrechin. He has just published a book called The Complete Paget Portfolio, which reproduces every single illustration that the great Sidney Paget drew for the Holmes stories when they originally ran in the Strand magazine. I enjoyed the podcast immensely, and it got me musing about things Sherlockian.

I’ve been a Holmes fan for a long time now, and I can blame Soupy Sales. One night when I was around 12 or 13 I happened to catch What’s My Line, a TV show in which celebrity panelists sought to determine the occupation of a guest. The mystery guest that night was a man who worked for  Abbey National, a bank whose headquarters occupied the address of Sherlock Holmes’s lodgings at 221B Baker Street in London. One of his duties was to respond to people who wrote letters to Sherlock Holmes.

During the course of the program, panelist Soupy Sales mentioned that Holmes used cocaine. This made me sit up and take notice. I hadn’t read any Holmes at that point, but I certainly knew who he was, and the idea that this fixture from popular culture might have used drugs surprised the heck out of me. It was like hearing that Tarzan had a drinking problem, or that Superman liked to kick Krypto the Superdog.

I set out to do a little research. On one of our bookshelves we had my grandfather’s copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles, a red-bound hardcover edition from the early 1900s. I pulled it down from the shelf and began reading. Like so many before me, and so many after, I was drawn immediately into the atmospheric setting of Victorian London, with hansom cabs and the clop-clop of horses’ hooves, and the mysterious bearded stranger following Dr. Mortimer through the streets. I could imagine the hushed tones of Dr. Mortimer’s voice when he said, “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” Above all, I was fascinated by the character of Holmes, who could learn so much from those little details that others overlooked, and his friendship with Dr. Watson, who was not the amusing dolt I had glimpsed in the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce movies on TV, but an intelligent, educated medical man.

There was one thing missing, though, in The Hound of the Baskervilles. There was not a single mention of cocaine. Soupy Sales must have been mistaken. But whether or not Holmes was addicted to cocaine, I was now hooked on Holmes. My middle-school library had a big omnibus edition of Holmes stories, so I checked that out and met for the first time people like Irene Adler (“To Sherlock Holmes she was always the woman), Jabez Wilson, Inspector Lestrade, Henry Baker, and the nefarious Professor Moriarty.

At some point I read The Sign of the Four. It began like this:

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff.  For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it.  On the contrary, from day to day I had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me at the thought that I had lacked the courage to protest.  Again and again I had registered a vow that I should deliver my soul upon the subject, but there was that in the cool, nonchalant air of my companion which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching to a liberty.  His great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience which I had had of his many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him.

Yet upon that afternoon, whether it was the Beaune which I had taken with my lunch, or the additional exasperation produced by the extreme deliberation of his manner, I suddenly felt that I could hold out no longer.

“Which is it to-day?” I asked,–“morphine or cocaine?”

Holy crap. Never again would I doubt Soupy Sales.

I wasn’t the only person intrigued by Holmes’s cocaine habit. Around the time that I discovered Holmes, Nicholas Meyer published The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, a novel in which the detective falls so deeply into addiction that Dr. Watson lures him to Vienna so Sigmund Freud can wean him off cocaine. The book was a huge best-seller and sparked a Holmes revival. I received a lot of Sherlockian books that Christmas. My grandmother got me The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.  I also got The London of Sherlock Holmes, The World of Sherlock Holmes, In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes, The Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook, and Sherlock Holmes Detected. I got Naked Is the Best Disguise, in which, if I recall correctly, author Samuel Rosenberg postulated that “The Adventure of the Red-Headed League” was really a metaphor about anal rape. There was a lot about Nietzsche in it, too, and syphilis, other things that were perhaps a bit above the head of a 14-year-old. I think it helped me realize that literary criticism could be a bit silly.

At some point I received the big, two-volume Annotated Sherlock Holmes. One of my favorite Sherlockian gifts from this time was The Return of Moriarty by John Gardner. It told the story of Holmes’s great nemesis, who did not perish at Reichenbach Falls, but made a non-aggression pact with his adversary and later returned to London to resume his criminal enterprises. The book captured a real sense of Victorian London’s underbelly and it seemed as though yellow fogs should have been swirling through its pages.

I still have all those books, and many, many more. One of the first Holmes books I purchased myself was the Penguin paperback of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. It cost $1.25, a bit pricey for me at the time, but worth it. On the cover was a photograph of a recreation of Holmes’s sitting room at 221B. (Years later I would see that same sitting room at the Sherlock Holmes, a pub in London.) I filled out my collection of the original stories with the Berkeley Books paperback editions, which also had pretty cool illustrations on the covers and cost a much more economical 60 cents.

At this point in my life I have a big bookcase in my office filled with Holmes books. They have started to spill over into another bookcase, and I have filled a couple more shelves with books downstairs. I still have my grandfather’s old copy of the Hound, as well as one I picked up at a used bookstore in York, Pennsylvania, for $3.50 and discovered was a first American edition. I have a lot of pastiches, in which authors other than Conan Doyle try their hands at Holmes stories. Some are good, but many are not. I have books in which Holmes meets Dracula, Dr. Jekyll,  the Phantom of the Opera, Harry Houdini, Theodore Roosevelt, Father Brown, Jack the Ripper, and the Martians from The War of the Worlds. I own several books about Holmes in the movies. I have a Sherlock Holmes cookbook, a Sherlock Holmes crossword book, and a Sherlock Holmes pop-up book. I have reference books like The Encyclopedia Sherlockiana, and several Sherlock Holmes biographies. My favorite biography is Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street by William S. Baring Gould, which I bought on a remainder table a long time ago for $2.49. I have books about Holmes’s London, as well as any number of collections of Sherlockian essays. As someone once said, “Never has so much been written by so many for so few.”

Over the decades my fascination with Holmes has ebbed and flowed, but it never goes away. I read something Sherlockian every now and then. I recently finished Mycroft Holmes, the novel co-written by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. While it is without a doubt the finest Sherlockian book ever written by an NBA superstar, it left me feeling underwhelmed. There was too much action, too many explosions, too much derring-do. It had the same flavor as the Robert Downey, Jr,. Holmes movies. They were entertaining enough, but it wasn’t the Sherlock Holmes I grew up with. On the other hand, I loved the BBC’s Sherlock, at least until it went off the rails in the last episode, and I also enjoy the CBS series Elementary. I am not a purist, but if you’re going to mess with the recipe at least come up with something interesting.

Purists might complain about the way Sherlock and Elementary place Holmes and Watson  in the modern age, but that’s nothing new. Arthur Conan Doyle set one story, “His Last Bow,” on the brink of World War I. Until Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce starred in The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1939, film adaptations put Holmes and Watson in the modern world of telephones and automobiles instead of telegraphs and hansom cabs. After making two period films for Twentieth Century-Fox, the Rathbone/Bruce team abandoned the Victorian era to fight Nazis in the 1940s.

Holmes himself has evolved—or at least our perception of him has. Pastiche writers used to portray him as a superhuman thinking machine, but today’s interpreters often make him a victim of his own intelligence, a neurotic, broken genius who needs Watson to keep him grounded. That interpretation goes back at least to The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. (But Billy Wilder’s great and woefully overlooked 1970 film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, also gave us a damaged detective.) Jeremy Brett’s Holmes on British TV in the 1980s became more and more neurotic as the series went on, possibly because Brett battled mental illness in real life.

I think Conan Doyle might have blanched at these interpretations. His Holmes was not superhuman but neither was he a sociopath. He wasn’t an unshaven slob like Robert Downey, Jr. or, to an extent, Elementary’s Jonny Lee Miller. (Conan Doyle’s Holmes had “a cat-like love of personal cleanliness”). He did use cocaine but eventually stopped. But the image of a man whose towering intellect raises barriers between himself and the rest of the world seems to strike a chord in our own neurotic, broken 21^st century. That’s one of the great things about Holmes, I guess. He’s amazingly malleable to many ages and circumstances.

Neurotic and broken it may be, but at least the 21^st century has podcasts like I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere. And phones as smart as Holmes with which to hear them.

Lifesaver

Today is a cold December morning, but the song that fills my ears flashes me back to a warm spring day on the cusp of summer, sunlight strobing through green leaves overhead as we drive along the Pond Road outside Manchester, Maine. My brother, some friends and I are on our way to go water skiing, and “Listen to What the Man Said” by Paul McCartney and Wings is playing on the eight-track in my brother’s Ford station wagon. It must have been late May or early June 1975, and I was ecstatic to be out of school and on the way to the lake, not least because I had just escaped what would have been, without a doubt, the worst humiliation of my young life.

It was a weird and restless spring, that sophomore year of high school. I would have been fourteen, almost 15, and just a flesh sack of raging hormones and insecurities, like most teenage boys. It was an odd spring for other reasons, too. My high school had been receiving a slew of bomb scares that quarter. Someone would call the office, claim there was a bomb in the building, and hang up. We would evacuate the school so the police could bring in dogs and conduct a thorough search. If it was late enough in the day, we would get sent home. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it created kind of a stop-start feel to the education process. There was also the growing fear that the school year would get extended to make up for the lost time.

People today forget how many bombings and bomb scares there were back in the late 1960s and 1970s. I recently read a book, Days of Rage, that detailed the efforts of far-left groups to make major social changes by blowing things up. There were hundreds of bombings—everything from army recruiting centers to the offices of big corporations. The Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol were hit. The Weather Underground accidentally demolished a brownstone in Manhattan when their bomb maker set off the explosive device he was working on. There was even a bombing in my home town of Augusta, when someone planted a device at the headquarters of Central Maine Power in May 1976. They were strange days indeed.

So there I was, sitting in sophomore biology class with the end of the school year tantalizingly close. It was already an uncomfortably warm day and promising to get worse. We had no air conditioning in Cony High School—this was Maine, after all—so the windows were open, but it made little difference. The air hung hot and heavy. And our teacher was talking about sex.

Specifically, he was talking about the human female reproductive system. He discussed eggs, uterine linings, mucus membranes, the menstrual cycle, blood, fallopian tubes. (Fallopian tubes? That sounded like something Scotty would have used to reach the engine room on Star Trek.) It was classic high school discomfort, sitting in a room with your classmates—many of whom were equipped with fallopian tubes and everything else—while pretending not to be deeply embarrassed and self-conscious. Was the room, already stifling, getting even hotter?

Apparently it was, because beads of sweat appeared on my forehead. I felt positively clammy. And then, at the edges of my vision, I sensed an effect like that on Star Trek when people used the transporter. My sight was slowly becoming pixellated, starting at the edges and gradually taking over my eyes, as though my consciousness was getting beamed out of my body.

With a growing sense of horror, I realized I was going to pass out.

I was panic-stricken. I was going to faint in biology class while my teacher was talking about the female reproductive system. Within minutes the news would flash all over the school. “Did you hear that Huntington passed out in biology class? Right onto the floor. Couldn’t handle the sex talk.” I would have to drop out of society and become a hermit. I would need to wear a paper bag over my head whenever I appeared in public. I would be shamed, mocked, and  jeered. Children would point at me in the streets and laugh. Everyone would make fun of me. I would never, ever live it down. My life was going to become a living hell as soon as I hit the floor.

The more the panic grew, the worse I felt. What could I do? As my vision clouded over, I considered putting my head between my knees. I heard that helped when you were about to faint. But, no. That would just attract attention. “Are you okay, Tom?” the teacher would ask, and everyone would hoot with laughter as I headed off to see the school nurse. Maybe I could just put my head on the desk. Nope. That would be just as bad. I had no options. Nothing. I was doomed. Doomed! I could barely see by this point. I was going down . . .

And then the intercom crackled into life and the disembodied voice of the principal granted me deliverance. “Students and faculty, please evacuate the building,” it said. Someone had called in a bomb scare. I was able to lurch to my feet and stumble out of the room with the rest of the class—pale, sweaty, not looking at all well, but still conscious and with my dignity somewhat intact.

Within the hour we were speeding down the Pond Road, windows open, Venus and Mars on the eight-track player, Lake Cobbossee beckoning, and all was right with the world. Thank you, anonymous bomb scare caller. You saved my life.

Let Us Now Praise the Tijuana Brass

Truth be told, at present I do not have anything by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass on my iPod. It was Frank Sinatra who got me thinking about the band the other day when I heard him sing “Sunny.” That’s a song I knew from The Brass Are Comin’, a 1969 Tijuana Brass album I used to own.

Is it possible to overestimate the impact of the Tijuana Brass in the 1960s? They were huge and ubiquitous. You heard them on the radio, in chewing gum commercials, in movies, and on game shows. They sold millions and millions of albums. Recently I saw an article about a record store that pretended to sell nothing but copies of Whipped Cream & Other Delights. The concept is not that far-fetched. Released in 1965, the album sold six million copies, and the cover—an attractive woman wearing nothing but the title dessert topping—entered pop culture iconography. It seems like every middle-class American home had a copy of the album in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Wayne Campbell described Frampton Comes Alive!: “If you lived in the suburbs you were issued it. It came in the mail with samples of Tide.”

Ironically, Whipped Cream & Other Delights was one Tijuana Brass album my family did not own. But we had others. In fact, it was thanks largely to the influence of Herb Alpert that I became a trumpet player.

Initially, my parents had three Tijuana Brass albums: The Beat of the Brass, which accompanied a TV special of the same name, What Now My Love? and Sounds Like Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. For Christmas one year I got the cassette tape of Greatest Hits. I also acquired South of the Border. I remember my father took me downtown to Day’s Jewelry, which sold stereo equipment and records, and helped me pick it out. Dad wanted that album because it included “The Girl from Ipanema,” one of his favorite songs. Later I got The Brass Are Comin’, the soundtrack to another TV special.

I remember times when Dad would come home from work and we’d sit in the basement and listen to the Tijuana Brass as we waited for supper. He’d sip a cocktail—probably a Manhattan—and I’d lie on the sofa (real Naugahyde!) and daydream about how cool it would be to play the trumpet like Herb Alpert and really impress the girls in school. I especially liked The Beat of the Brass, despite the clunkers that ended each side. Both featured Alpert’s vocals. One was “Talk to the Animals,” complete with kid chorus. The other was Burt Bacharach’s “This Guy’s in Love with You.” I thought it was pretty sappy song. For years I was mystified by the line, “My hand . . . I shaved it.” What kind of bizarre love ritual was that? Years later I realized Herb was singing that his hand was shaking. So it’s a good thing he wasn’t shaving.

I wasn’t there for the vocals. I liked the band. I really  can’t tell you why. It certainly wasn’t great jazz. Alpert was a perfectly good player and he had a nice, bright tone, but he wasn’t pushing any boundaries. The songs were mostly covers of pop hits or Broadway tunes, things like “Monday, Monday” or “If I Were a Rich Man.” They were catchy, as were the arrangements, and it was all pretty easy to digest. I liked “Zorba the Greek,” the way it sped up and slowed down and sped up again; and the irresistible “Tijuana Taxi,” and the melancholic “What Now My Love?” I admit the Tijuana Brass songbook is a little cheesy, but it’s easy to like. It’s good cheese. I liked it then and I still do, although now my affection for the music is tinted by nostalgia.

When I was in fifth grade—this would have been around 1970—a man arrived at school to speak to the students. His name was Mr. Griffin. As I recall, he was somewhat short, a little stout, and had glasses and a Van Dyke beard. Look up the word “professor” in the dictionary and you might find his picture. This real-life Harold Hill came to pitch the idea that we should lease instruments from him for a very low monthly fee, and that eventually we would own them. It was a no-brainer. At the time my mother was pushing for me to take piano lessons—we had a piano in the living room—but I was not interested. The piano wasn’t cool. I went home from school that day and told my parents I was going to play the trumpet, and that it really wasn’t going to cost them much.

That’s how I ended up with a nice gold Conn trumpet in a gray plastic case. Shortly after I picked up the instrument, my fifth-grade teacher asked me to stand up and play something for the class. I think I tackled “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” I attacked it with gusto and thought I sounded pretty good. No doubt my classmates listened to the squawks and bleeps coming from my trumpet with expressions of shock and horror. Some may have burst into tears. I don’t recall any girls swooning.

Portrait of the trumpet player as a young man. I blame Herb Alpert for this.

I got better. I obtained a few big books of music and learned some Tijuana Brass favorites, including “Tijuana Taxi,” which I played incessantly. I played the trumpet through elementary school, junior high, high school, and into college. Probably the high point of my trumpet career—not counting the time my high school dance band played at the Maine State Prison—was when my college jazz band had a gig in New York City at an alumni dance at a swanky club. It was my first visit to the Big Apple and I got quite a rush playing with a band in a Manhattan high-rise.

If I had possessed the talent, I would have liked to be a musician. But I didn’t. I became a good trumpet player, but not an especially talented one. I had no ear and lacked the ability to ad lib. I may have been good, but I was no Herb Alpert.

Then again, who was? The guy has had an amazing career. Everyone knows that he’s the “A” in A&M records (Jerry Moss is the “M”), but a research tool I found on the Internet called Wikipedia has told me so much more. Did you know Herb Alpert co-wrote “A Wonderful World” with Sam Cooke? That the famous gang of session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew played on the first Tijuana Brass albums? That the band had albums in Billboard’s top 10 for 81 consecutive weeks? This Wikipedia thing also informs me that the woman in the yellow dress with whom Herb kanoodles on the covers of the South of the Border and What Now My Love? was Jerry Moss’s wife. I did not know that.

So thanks, Herb, for getting me to play the trumpet. It was fun, except for all the damned practicing. The trumpet became an essential element of the way I saw myself. I was a trumpet player. I was a band kid. I was a musician.

I still have the trumpet. Just the other day I took the case down from its shelf in the closet and opened it up. The old familiar smell of valve oil immediately sent me tumbling back through the years. The trumpet lay nestled on its nest of bright-red artificial fur. I needed to find a rubber band to keep one of the spit valves closed, and the tuning slide was stuck and wouldn’t budge, but the trumpet remained playable. I lifted it from the case, inserted the mouthpiece, put the instrument to my lips, and played. It sounded terrible, but I was a musician again, even if it only for a few minutes.

 

The Summer of Fantastic

Today I set the Wayback Machine for 1975: The Summer of Elton.

I turned 15 that summer and for my birthday I received a copy of Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, which had been released in May. It became a large part of my soundtrack that year. It was, of course a vinyl album. This morning I loaded the digital equivalent—a huge batch of 1s and 0s that, through some magic of technology, became music—onto my iPod. And through another magic, this one of the imagination, I was transported back 42 years.

Elton John was huge that summer. Time magazine put him on its cover when Captain Fantastic came out. The album was a collection of autobiographical songs about the time when Elton (“just someone his mother might know”) and lyricist Bernie Taupin worked as struggling songwriters. It debuted at number 1 and stayed on the top of the charts for weeks. Its only single, “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” was ubiquitous on the radio. Elton played the Pinball Wizard in Ken Russell’s film version of the Who’s Tommy that summer, and his version of the song got a lot of airplay, too. He was, in the words of another 1970s icon, kind of a big deal.

I can’t recall when I became a fan. My best friend, Bill, was one before I was. He owned Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player and one day he came over to the house with his brand-new copy of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. It was a double album and a big investment at the time. I remember being somewhat shocked by it—“Jamaica Jerk-off” seemed kind of dirty and the illustration for “All the Young Girls Like Alice” a little daring. Bill was always a little more risky in his musical tastes than I was. He liked Alice Cooper and Grand Funk Railroad, and he told me how horrified his parents were when they saw the cover of Edgar Winter’s They Only Come out at Night. I was pretty conservative—Chicago and Steely Dan were more in my line.

My family had Elton John’s Greatest Hits, but Captain Fantastic was probably the first Elton album I owned. It came with a lyrics booklet; another booklet called “Scraps” that included photos, clippings and a comic outlining the careers of Elton and Taupin; and a fold-out of the album cover art.

Ah, yes, that album cover. There was a lot going on with that cover, all kinds of strange creatures and semi-human figures. Amid all the grotesques there was some kind of naked bird-faced women, with bare breasts and pubic hair. And below that was what appears to be a broken pot taking a shit. Here’s the official explanation from Eltonjohn.com:

“The album cover art by Alan Aldridge features images of Elton, Bernie and the band (animated elements of the artwork were used in a 30-second television commercial celebrating the release of the album). The front panel shows Elton breaking out of a dangerously dreary cityscape astride his piano while the back of the cover shows Bernie writing in a somewhat protected pastoral bubble. Keen-eyed fans can also identify Elton’s first music publisher Dick James and Bernie’s then-wife Maxine in the intricate illustration. Even more subtle is a visual reference to the This Record Company, one of Elton’s early record labels, which constructed their unofficial slogan, ‘Turning shit into hits…’ out of anagrams of the word ‘this.’”

Needless to say, there was plenty going on in that cover to amuse, titillate and baffle a 15-year-old.

I no longer have the copy I got for my birthday. I think I sold it when I had to jettison possessions before relocating from California to Maine after college. That’s a shame, because the album cover still bore the indentation of something I wrote when I had the sheet of paper on top of it. I sometimes thought of playing detective by placing a white sheet of paper over the cover and carefully rubbing the side of a pencil back and forth until I could read what I had written back in 1975. But I never did and now it will forever remain a mystery. I don’t think it’s much of a loss.

I had lost interest in Elton by college, anyway. After Captain Fantastic he began the long, slow decline that led to The Lion King. He ditched the band he had used for his biggest albums and things just weren’t the same. He’s still a big tour attraction but he’s not the big deal he used to be. In 2006 he released a sequel to Captain Fantastic, called The Captain and the Kid.  I’ve listened to it on Youtube and it seems fine. A friend burned me a copy of the album Elton did a few years ago with Leon Russell. I thought it was okay, but nothing to write a blog post about. Times have changed. In today’s fragmented pop-culture marketplace, can any artist capture the public attention the way Elton did in the 1970s, or the Beatles a decade before? I doubt it.

Because Elton was huge back then. He had a lot of hit singles, but was also known for his outrageous glasses and flamboyant costumes on stage. I thought the glasses could be pretty funny, but I wasn’t so wild about the pictures I saw of his campy live performances. Maybe it was amusing when he dressed up like Donald Duck, but to my 15-year-old self the antics just undercut the music. It was only rock and roll, but I didn’t want to laugh at it. Any gay subtext just passed right over my head (Elton wouldn’t come out for a few more years). To me, the onstage antics just seemed a little silly. They embarrassed me a bit. When you’re 15, it’s easy to get embarrassed.

A few years ago I heard an interview with Elton on the radio. I was impressed with how self-aware he seemed. He admitted that it had taken him a long time to grow up, that he had been self-absorbed and immature into his 40s. He said he was essentially jolted into maturity after he got to know Ryan White, the teenager from Indiana who had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion and eventually died from the disease. White had been thrust into the spotlight when his high school refused to let him attend classes because of his illness. After I listened to the interview, I had a renewed respect for Elton John.

He also talked about the ways the recording industry had changed. At one point he had been the biggest star on the planet; now he couldn’t even be sure if any of the surviving record stores would stock his latest releases. In this context, writing songs for Disney made sense, although I still found it hard to accept that they guy who did “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” also wrote the songs for The Lion King. But I’m willing to let it go.

When I played Captain Fantastic this morning, though, it was 1975 all over again. The acoustic guitar that opens the title track immediately shot me 42 years into the past. It was the summer of my first, sort-of, girlfriend, a relationship that took place largely over the telephone. It was a summer of bikes. My friends and I rode our bikes everywhere—all over town, and sometimes to the next towns over. It was a summer of comic books, swimming and boating on Lake Cobbossee, and “One of These Nights” by the Eagles.

It was also the summer of Jaws. The movie was also kind of a big deal back then. I saw it several times that summer and devoured two books about it, The Jaws Log by Carl Gottlieb (one of the script writers) and The Making of the Movie Jaws by Edith Blake. I still have both of them, and my copy of The Jaws Log contains newspaper clippings I cut out about the movie and sharks. I bought the single of the movie theme and later splurged to get the entire soundtrack album.

Two of the clippings from my copy of The Jaws Log. I found them in the National Enquirer’s August 12, 1975 issue.

A view of the sinking Orca doing what it did best, from the back cover of The Making of the Movie Jaws.

That summer my family went on a trip to Martha’s Vineyard, where Jaws was filmed. We could see the decaying hulk of Quint’s boat, the Orca, on the edge of Menemsha Harbor, so my brother and I rented a small sailboat and paid it a visit. This was the “sinking” Orca, the one used when Sheriff Brody has his final face-off with the big fish. We sailed out, climbed aboard, and took some pictures. I understand that the boat was later taken onto dry land and allowed to rot away. Outrageous! Now only the memories remain.

Me on the Orca.

Me again.

My brother, Charlie.

Sirius Radio recently reminded me of another relic from 1975, the hit single “Mr. Jaws.” This was one of those “break-in” records, where a narrator asks questions and the answers come in the form of snippets inserted from current hit songs. (Example: Q. “Mr. Jaws, before you swim out to sea, is there anything else you would like to say?” A. [War] “Why can’t we be friends?”) It is, in a word, terrible, but the single managed to swim its way up the Billboard charts all the way to number three. People at the time found it funny. I find it encouraging that, in a mere 42 years, we have evolved as a species to a point beyond this.

There’s another bright side. When he recorded his classic comedy album A Star Is Bought in 1975, Albert Brooks used records like “Mr. Jaws” as inspiration for his own “Party from Outer Space.” Brooks recorded the album, he said, in an attempt to get airplay on every possible radio format. He aimed “Party from Outer Space” at the AM dial. In an attempt to save money on royalties, though, he decided not to use snippets from real records. He just made them up. Now that’s funny.