We moved from Ithaca, NY, to Utica, NY, in 1978, sixty to ninety miles from low central to high central New York. In the 1800s, Utica lay along the path of the old Erie Canal and into the 1950s was still a moderately thriving textile manufacturing site. Then the textile trade moved south, the mills closed and Utica slipped into a steady decline which still doesn’t seem to have ended. When we moved there, it was Decline City. For example, when I got there and first had to stay at the Y, I was excited to see a cinema multiplex a block away. At least I could pick up a movie at night when my work was over. But it had closed. Over the years, a lot of things closed. My favorite restaurant those first months was The Gatsby. It offered a great lunchtime buffet which always sold out but the restaurant closed anyway in less than two years. That’s because when the work day ended at the nearby county office building, everyone –I mean everyone- retreated to the burbs, and nighttime –with alcoholic drinks at a markup– is when restaurants need to make their profit. No profit, no restaurant. Bye bye Gatsby.
I was in Utica for my first administrative, as opposed to teaching, job, director of special programs at the newest and least defined college in the vast 64-unit hundreds-of-thousands-of-students State University of New York (SUNY) system. I must have been a shock to the system in my first days there. My hair was long, I had a bushy beard, and I was an unalterably arts and sciences type in a school that was in the process of defining itself as a college of “technology,” whatever that meant in a low tech valley with a predominantly low tech workforce. It was SUNY Upper Division College when I went there. A year later it was the College of Technology and a few years later SUNY Institute of Technology. To be blunt, it was a startup school for people like me, who didn’t have past experience or formal training for most of the jobs we filled in its exceptionally fluid administrative structure. Its weaknesses were for me a strength, though, because in an unstructured environment, I had more opportunity to strut my stuff and work outside my job title experimenting with new things. I was able to grow into my jobs –I had four different jobs in the first five years– without interference, even –most of the time– without oversight.
My first meeting with the college president set the tone for the place. Bill K. had been a fighter pilot in World War II and still wore a crewcut. His doctorate was in vocational-technical education, a field of study I hadn’t even know existed until then. Rumor was that his dissertation, taken at Cornell, had been a lesson plan for a high school course on how to teach some field like auto mechanics.
He invited me to his office my second day at work. We were still in temporary quarters, our offices fit in wherever they could. My office was down the hall from his, just a few hundred feet away. We even shared a coffee maker with him. When it was time for my appointment, I told his secretary I was there and sat and waited. Fifteen minutes later, she ushered me into his office. He was turned away doing something I’m sure was of momentous importance – it certainly occupied his attention because he didn’t even look up to greet me. I waited another five minutes before he turned around, pulled out my folder and started reading from it out loud. “Hiram… NYU, history (he put emphasis on the word “history” and it didn’t sound like a compliment) … Yale (an even heavier emphasis)… history (almost a sneer)… taught at Wells College (he wasn’t impressed by that either).” He paused for effect, then launched into a tirade: “Well, now you’re in the world of real people with real education … (a LONG pause) …… none of your goddamn fuzzy-headed intellectual stuff.” He turned away and the interview was over.
My standing with him wasn’t helped when that winter I was the first person in our part of the building to make it to campus after a heavy snowstorm. I was still wearing the sweatshirt I’d worn when I shoveled out our drive. The heat had been off in my office so I hadn’t taken it off. I remember that sweatshirt fondly. It was pale blue and it had a large drawing of Micky Mouse on it, holding his hands out in a Dah Dah! sort of pose. The president arrived shortly after I did and he passed my office on the way to his own. He glanced in, saw my sweatshirt, rolled his eyes, moved on without a word.
Fortunately, not long after that, he discovered something he liked about me, which was that I worked longer hours than my office mates and thus was there when he needed information after hours and no one else was there to give it to him. Within a year, we were copasthetic. I may have looked hippy but I manufactured product. I worked for Bill until he retired. We never agreed on anything but he liked that I worked hard and smart and I liked him for being honest and upfront. Smart he never was but his tics kind of grew on me. At least, he wasn’t a Suit.
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Music? I’ve written about the Springsteen concert already.
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The legendary jazz tenor saxophonist J. R. Montrose, who grew up in Utica, occasionally still performed there. Esther, Jeremy and I heard him play with a pickup quartet. The bassist was Teddy Kotick, who’d played with Parker. Montrose was phenomenal, a big toned sax player whose sound paralleled that of Sonny Rollins but with an approach that was an amalgam of super-modern John Coltrane and upgraded swing players like Chu Berry and Coleman Hawkins. I owned one record by him, The Cry, with Tommy Flanagan on piano, and he was known for a recording session with Mingus, Pithecanthropus Erectus, which I now own but didn’t then. (He didn’t enjoy working with Mingus. He seems not to have liked constraints. If he hadn’t been such a lone wolf, he might have been an influential player in jazz. As it was, he left behind isolated gems of music.)
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I don’t remember who I listened to on record then, except for Gary Burton, on whom I had a fixation. I especially liked his quartet albums with bassist Eberhard Weber, who didn’t so much create solo melody lines as sound pallets for other performers to float on top of. (Vide Burton’s Passengers and his 1974 Ring [with a quintet, not quartet], which has an outstanding rendition of Weber’s “Colours of Chloe.” Weber’s solos sound like the love songs of a beached whale.)
I was hot on Ralph Towner too.
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My longterm love affair with The Band ended some time around then, not so much because I didn’t like them any more as because they no longer existed as a group. I switched my allegiance to the Talking Heads, whose double live album The Name of This Band Is the Talking Heads (recorded in 1977 and 1979) was released in 1982. Speaking in Tongues (1983) was released a year later. I scarfed that up too. Esther saw the Heads in an Ithaca nightclub in 1978. Sigh! And I didn’t.
In 1980, the Chronicle of Higher Education experimented with an Arts and Culture supplement. It soon folded but before it died, its reviewers introduced me to Blondie (I thought Debbie Harry was hot [she was]) and ska –specifically the first US releases of the English Beat and the Specials. I also listened to X, a truly great punk band, and the Blasters, a great band with a mediocre lead singer (Dave Alvin) that played bedrock r ‘n’ b. A decade and a half later, in California, I heard bassist John Doe, from X, play in duet with Alvin, from the Blasters, on guitar and vocals. Later yet, Alvin recorded the best of the cover songs on the sound track for the TV series, Justified.
On a whim, I bought a 10-inch LP of Germany’s counter-rock star Nina Hagen. I liked it so much, especially “TV Glotzer (Punk Stars on Rock),” that I brought Jeremy the Nunsexmonkrock (1982) album for his twelfth or thirteenth birthday.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Gary Burton, “The Colours of Chloe” (1974)
Talking Heads: “Once in a Lifetime” (2005)
Blondie: “Heart of Glass” (1975)
The English Beat: “Mirror in the Bathroom” (1980)
X: “The Once Over Twice” (1982)
Nina Hagen: “TV Glotzer (White Punks on Dope),” live 1978
MUSIC & ME 