My Musical Miseducation

 

I missed the boat on music, and it still rankles. Let me say up front that, had things gone differently, I would not have become a musical prodigy, a rock star, or even a lounge singer with a baby blue tuxedo and a coke habit. There’s not a music molecule hiding anywhere in my DNA. But I might have at least been musically literate. Or what’s audio equivalent of literacy?

Let me try to dredge up the relevant memories here. The impetus? I was listening to a song the other day recorded a few years ago by a band a friend played bass for, a San Francisco rock band. It was a side hustle. He was a distinguished chemist by day, now retired. 

I have another friend who works for the AP who in his spare time is a country music singer/songwriter. I went to high school with these two guys, a Jesuit school where we had no music program. There weren’t even any music extracurriculars. A chess club, but no chorus. No band.¹I had no clue at the time that either of these two guys was any more musical than I was.

Today, I confess, I’m jealous of John and Sam. I love music, which is a pretty mundane thing to say; everyone loves music. Even Donald Trump likes music (terrible music, but that counts). I bet Hitler used to whistle “Deutscheland Uber Alles” to himself while shaving every morning. I just wanted to establish my credentials as a member of the human race.

So where did I go wrong? I think it started with The Sound of Music. Julie Andrews, The Von Trapps. Do, a deer. 1965. I was in third grade, Catholic school. The Sound of Music was such a big event that everyone in the third grade went on a field trip to see it. Everyone except a handful of kids who couldn’t fork over the admission price (or maybe some of the others kids’ parents were Nazi sympathizers). I was among that handful. We sat for three hours in that echoing classroom staring at each other glumly.²And then had to hear in class the next day about how much everyone had loved it.

That would have been bad enough. But a couple weeks later, Miss G., our music teacher, started introducing the songs from the film into her music class. Every damn song from that film except “I Am Sixteen Going on Seventeen,³ which she probably considered too risque.

Everyone knew these songs and could sing them lustily because everyone had seen the movie.

I was lost.

I didn’t even know the songs were from the movie. All I knew was that we seemed to have moved on from “Pickin’ Up Paw-Paws in the Paw-Paw Patch” and “Sweet Kentucky Babe” (still a favorite of mine). I didn’t say anything, but I grew a chip on my shoulder. What the hell was an edelweiss, anyway?

Let us not dwell. Moving along to fourth grade. I was hospitalized in the middle of the semester for a couple of weeks after a delicate operation which shall remain nameless. Alright, it was a hernia. I don’t know how I got it. Maybe I hadn’t had my hernia shots.

But near as I can figure it, Miss G.⁴ took the opportunity of my absence to to teach musical theory to to the fourth grade from the ground up to concert master level. When I got back to music class she was quizzing everyone about notes and bars and keys and I don’t know, probably the circle of fifths and the pentatonic scale and mixolydian mode for good measure—all of which they answered quite knowledgeably and with confidence.⁵

I was lost.

I was thoroughly befuddled. Music class, which I had always enjoyed (I was a loud, enthusiastic singer who bobbed his head while he sang and had no ear whatsoever) suddenly involved written tests. Which I eked out D’s on.

Now I don’t want to make Miss G. the villain of this piece … but she is, sort of. Fast forward to…seventh grade? Eighth? I was twelve, in the throes of puberty, but my voice was not changing, going through those squeaks and squonks which are so hilarious to older listeners.

It didn’t have to.

I had always had a deep voice for my age, and no one seems to remember it ever changing. I must have had a child’s voice somewhere along the way, but if I did, my voice didn’t so much change as settle. Maybe it was a side effect of the hernia I don’t know.

At any rate Miss G. had a song, I don’t recall what it was, there was something vaguely Russian (read mournful) to the feel of it. Maybe there were cherry trees involved. She had her heart set on the class performing it in four-part harmony and I and one other boy were singled out to hold up the bass end of the deal.

I have just told you I had an unnaturally deep voice. I do not, however, have a bass voice. But I could pitch my voice unnaturally low and sound like Frogman Henry with a cold. Anything to please Miss G. and come away with a C- in music. A few weeks of work on that song (which seemed like months) and I had thoroughly wrecked whatever singing voice I had. Especially since I had the idea that I was now required to sing everything in that low-down Howling Wolf⁶ register.

(Of course, music at its heart is math, which I always sucked at, too. There’s no wiggle room in math like there is in writing, no nuance. Plus, in grade school arithmetic homework meant working on rough Big Chief tablets with stubby pencils. Writing was performed on creamy smooth white paper with the latest technology, the Bic pen. But I digress.)

I did attempt songwriting once, with the help of another friend from high school, a pianist who went on to become a professional church organist. I had written a poem and had a tune in my head that seemed to me to spell Hitsville. So we went through it, me trying to sing what was in my off-key brain, and him picking out the notes on piano with the patience of Job. We made good progress for a couple of hours when my face fell and I abruptly put a halt to the proceedings, telling Larry to close up the keyboard. I’d recognized the music. I was trying to rewrite Ave Maria.

There is an upside to this dour little story. At the age of thirty I taught myself to play guitar. Not well, but well enough to make me happy. At about the same time I wrote the lyrics to a tune by the lounge piano player at the hotel I tended bar at⁷ , which she recorded as part of an album which immediately sank into obscurity.

About now you’re wondering: Is there a moral, or at least a point to this story? Um, not really. But parents, if your kid bobs his head up and down while singing loudly on-or-off-key, it means he’s enjoying the hell out of it, and what else do you want for your kids? Let him bob.

^{1. Our sister school had a drum squad which played at our football games. The less said about that, the better. ↩} 

  ^{2. I finally saw The Sound of Music, onstage at a local college when I was in high school. I was a volunteer usher and saw it several times. I loved it. Then I finally caught the movie on television some thirty years later. So treacly I nearly died of diabetic coma. ↩} 

  ^{3. I’ve always had in the back of my mind that Rolfe, who sings this charming duet with Liesel and later becomes a Nazi, also sings the terrifying “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”—which is not even in the show but rather Cabaret. It should be in this show. ↩} 

  ^{4. Yes, Miss G. was the one constant in grade school, 1-8, the most humorless woman on a staff of mainly nuns not known for cracking wise. For all I know, she’s still there. ↩} 

^{5. Oh, I can throw out these musical terms, sure, but connect them to actual music?—pfft. ↩} 

  ^{6. I made Howling Wolf laugh once, one of my fondest memories. But that’s a story for another time. ↩} 

  ^{7. So, yes, I was Tim at the bar who’s a friend of hers, but I never gave her drinks for free. La-diddy-da, diddy-da. ↩}