Music wise, ’69 was a heck of a year for us.
The fall before, preparing for my language exam in Latin, I audited a course on Vergil. It met twice a week and we came to every class with a translation of eighty lines of the Aeneid. The class was taught by taught by Erich Segal, who was a big deal on campus because though he hadn’t published Love Story yet, only his book on later Roman closet comedy, he’d been one of the script writers for the Beatles movie, Yellow Submarine. One of the characters in the movie was the Nowhere Man, who wrote footnotes with his feet. He was supposedly modeled on Jeremy Y. duQ. Adams, one of my advisors and a close friend of Segal’s. Jeremy did look a bit like the Nowhere Man.
I finished all my course work that spring and passed my Latin exam and my written and oral exams, and was awarded a travel and research grant for a year’s study in France and Spain. The night of my orals, we went to Wolsey Hall to hear the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich presenting an evening of Russian music. Two weeks later, we heard Vladimir Horowitz in the same hall. His program included something by Scriabin and some Chopin.
Summer came. We were busy packing for Europe. Esther went to New York one weekend to visit her cousin and I stayed behind to usher for Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, again performing at Wolsey. My post was in the first balcony, up front next to GIANT speakers. Joplin was stationed on my side of the stage: I could see everything she did. She was phenomenal and Big Brother was way better than I had figured they would be. I’d expected a sloppier, more psychedelic version of the Grateful Dead, but they were actually much more blues-based. If anything, they sounded more like Jefferson Airplane than the Dead. Joplin had a whole case of those hotel-sized bottles of Southern Comfort (24 to a case) by her side on stage. After each song, she’d down another bottle or two, then move on to the next song. I’m sure she ingested something additional in the green room during intermission. I don’t know how she stayed on her feet for the second set.
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Two weeks later, Hendrix played at Wolsey. I refused to usher for that show because I didn’t want to miss a thing. We had bought seats three or four rows back in the second balcony, front center, and Larry and Diana went with us. The music was so loud that our tail bones and chest bones vibrated in time to the beat. We had to stuff Kleenex in our ears to cut down the pain. But it was worth it. Hendrix did all his signature stuff: bashed his guitar into the amps until he punched a hole in them –the crew had replaced all the good speakers and guitar with shopworn versions of them beforehand– and set fire to his guitar with lighter fluid. One of the things I liked about his music was that for all the sound and fury in it, it was tight. His bassist, Noel Redding, was really a guitar player –he learned to play bass guitar to be in Hendrix’s group– and he played interesting lines behind Hendrix. Mitch Mitchell was an amazing drummer who played rock like it was jazz. And Hendrix –well, Hendrix really could do anything on guitar.
Before we got to Hendrix, we suffered through two warmup groups, neither of which liked at all. The first was a group of weedy Englishmen who looked and sang like Herman and His Hermits, a soppy group to start with, and one I never cared for. Second up was a local talent who played rock- inflected folk –or was it folk-inflected rock? His name was Cat Stevens.
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In September, we headed off for Europe. In Paris, we heard Jeanne-Marie Darre’, who played on a record Esther had of a Saint-Saens piano concerto. Soon after, we went to a concert by the incomparable Arthur Rubenstein, who was playing his way through Chopin’s entire solo piano music in a cycle of concerts.
Because of Rubinstein, we couldn’t go to another concert the same evening where Miles Davis and Cecil Taylor played on a double bill. Esther’s cousin Ruth did see it. Lucky her!
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One other event from that time, which isn’t musical at all.
’68-’69 was a year fraught with tension. More and more soldiers were dying for less gain in Vietnam. At home, Nixon won a close fought election (a 100,000 votes difference) against Democrat Hubert Humphrey, hammering him on Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam. (Do you get my point?) There were eight underground newspapers being distributed in New Haven alone and there were demonstrations everywhere about everything. That summer, New Haven had its own demonstration. It was on the Commons, protesting the arrest and pending trial of several Black Panthers, Bobby Seale the best known of them, for the torture-murder of an undercover police agent.
(I was serving jury duty in June 1969. My concern was that I’d be empaneled for the trial and never get to Europe in the fall to enjoy my hard earned year abroad on a travel and research grant. As it happened, Bobby Seale’s case didn’t come to trial for a year and when it did, the jury couldn’t reach agreement. The judge asserted that in the current political climate, it would be impossible to impanel an unbiased jury. The case against Seale was never retried.)
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Every year, Yale sponsored talks by internationally famous speakers. In the fall of 1968, it was philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who kicked off the academic year with his patented Hegelian-slash-Freudian critique of capitalist-consumerist society. He was immensely popular on campuses then. I had tried a couple of his books and decided they weren’t for me.
Hannah Arendt was next. Then B. F. Skinner, who attracted so large an audience that they piped his talk to two ancillary meeting rooms to accommodate the overflow. I didn’t hear either. I would have loved to but I was too busy preparing for exams.
I did get to hear Norman Mailer, though. He had published Armies of the Night the previous year, a hilarious account of an anti-war rally in Washington where the perpetually pugnacious Mailer got into a fist fight with Paul Goodman. The book won the Pulitzer and National Book Awards. It was the Real Thing, New Journalism on the move.
I got there early because I knew it’d be crowded. I ended up sitting in the front row of the balcony, a prime location because I looked right down on where Mailer would speak. Mailer came on stage, stumbling or maybe it was shuffling his way across the stage to the podium. He had no notes with him but did bring along a large mug that was filled with a dark liquid that didn’t look at all like coffee –no steam rose from it and when he sipped from it, he didn’t seem troubled by heat. His talk was a disjointed string of reminiscences and statements, all with an edge to them that seem directed against his audience. He rambled on for half an hour, then gave way to an unexpected attendee –Muhammad Ali, who read some truly awful poems and left to riotous applause. Back in the bully pulpit, Mailer launched into a tirade against pussyfooted liberals, the Eastern elite, and fancy types at elite (get it? goy) universities like Yale.
He eventually ran out of steam and it was time for questions. Silence descended. Mailer took another swig from his mug, refreshed during the break, and jeered, “What’s the matter? Don’t any of you have anything worth saying to me?” I stood up. He called on me and I said, “The trouble, Mr. Mailer, is that everyone here admires you. We’re not your enemies but you seem determined to paint us as though we were. It’s like you want to provoke an outbreak here so you can write it up for your next piece in Esquire.” A pause. Mailer took another swig from his mug. He looked up and said, “Fuck you.”
That, dear friends, is my one-time exchange of words with that master word-worker but not always nice man, Norman Mailer.
The exchange made it into the paper. Not what I said. What he said.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
MUSIC & ME 