Backgrounds
My father had three loves in his life, aside from my mother and myself — baseball, horse racing, and music. He loved the feeling of the bat when it came into contact with a baseball. He enjoyed playing the sport until the age of fourteen when he contracted rheumatic fever and was kept under blankets midsummer in Michigan to sweat and recover. He missed enough school to drop out during the eighth grade. Following this setback, he learned to play trumpet and continued on to become a fine musician. An interest in horse racing began around 1946, back when expert handicapping meant profit, a time before computer applications drove the odds on a good horse down to favorite status, when catching a long shot for good money was routine. My early memories include stacks of four inch thick racing chart books and piles of racing forms. The chart volumes were handsomely bound in reddish maroon hardcover. This might explain my lifetime preference for this color.
Dad’s interest in baseball and horse racing were consuming hobbies, but the thread that wound through his whole life was music and his devotion to it by playing trumpet and listening to great jazz. My own musical exposure until the age of thirteen was confined to that landscape, of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong color and rhythm. Dad’s dichotomy of people? Musicians and squares. “Musician” was a broad description of those who “got it” having less to do with proficiency on an instrument and more with having an open attitude toward the possibility of transcending social standards of quality. In this way “musician” was a pre-Beat yearning for understanding and beauty. As to “square,” include the rest of humanity.
It is here that a critical distinction be made between music and lyrics. This became clear to me one night during a leave from the service. Dad and I were sitting at the bar of a small tavern and talking, as we often did, about music. On the jukebox a song popular at the time, “A Horse with No Name”, began playing. After a few conversationally quiet moments I gave it some praise. Dad responded, “Kind of monotonous isn’t it?” — a perceptive remark as this song, after all, only uses two chords. “But the words are kind of neat”, I said. Then came his response, a question that set my view of music for the rest of my life. “What do words have to do with music?”
What do words have to do with music? These words ring in my brain each time someone says they like a song, usually a song with virtually nothing musically original, a song in which musicians act as a background drone for a singer who can barely stay on key. The widely accepted notion of popular music is that songs are the words. That sound of note variation in the background could just as easily be the hum of a multi-speed blender or living room fan.
Am I saying that words and music can’t at least complement one another? Yes, but on a cumulative emotional level. The best example is in the multi-media art form of motion pictures. A film’s story, already engaging the audience’s attention, is intensified by the musical score. At times, the story itself is subjugated to the music, usually to sell a soundtrack album. Think ‘Top Gun”. On rare occasions the musical background takes center stage with the visual element actually complementing the music. During the docking sequence in “Interstellar”, the viewer sits stunned in a receptive state as the Hans Zimmer’s score immerses the listener for minutes of thoughtless magic. “2001” contains similar moments. Something about science fiction?
Aside from the examples above, story and words dominate the public perception of popular art. Easily accessible, popular music is the gateway of choice for public entry into art in its broadest sense. Relative to the next section on lyrics, know that my purpose is not to coerce the commonly accepted taste into a form I find more acceptable. That would be confusing me with my domineering father. But the fact that I find what passes for lyrics to be an insult to common sense, an affront to pretensions of anything poetic, and, more, passes through the listener’s mind with the impact of a night light.
