- I assume to elicit the involuntary sucking response. Even
though my cousins told me this horror years later, I like to
think that reality runs like a stream, except that time isn’t linear and the nightmare was a synthesis, Strauss and my uncle, Nazis both. And yes, I mean it. A man who sticks his cock in
an infant’s mouth belongs in Himmler’s circle of hel .
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Music 3
There was jazz and Bessie Smith. When I'd cut high school or
college and go to Eighth Street in New York City, I'd find
used albums. I listened to every jazz great I could find. My
best friend in high school particularly liked Maynard
Fergusson, a white jazz man. I went to hear him at the Steel
Pier in Atlantic City when I was a kid. (I also went to hear
Ricky Nelson at the Steel Pier. I stood among hundreds of
screaming girl teens but up front. The teens who fainted, I am
here to tel you, fainted from the heat of a South Jersey
summer misspent in a closed bal room. Still, I adored Ricky
and Pat Boone and, special among specials, Tab Hunter with
his cover of “Red Sails in the Sunset. ”) There was no gambling then, just miles of boardwalk with penny arcades, cotton candy, saltwater taf y, root-beer sodas in frosted-glass mugs; and sand, ocean, music. I listened to Coltrane, had a
visceral love of Charlie Parker that I still have, listened to
“K. C. Blues” covers wherever I could find them. When I was
a teen, I also came across Bil ie Holiday, and her voice haunts
me to this day - I can hear it in my head anytime - and with
“Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child” she sounded more
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Heartbreak
like a blues singer than a jazz woman; but the bulk of her
work, which I heard later, was jazz. It was her voice that was
blues. When her voice wasn’t blues, it meant the heroin had
dragged her way down and she couldn’t go lower. “Strange
Fruit” was worth anything it took from her, and so was “God
Bless the Child. ” I’m not happy with art as necrophilia, but I
think these two songs, and “Strange Fruit” in particular, were
worth her life. They’d be worth mine.
My brother, Mark, and I both had a taste for the Ahmad
Jamal Quartet. I loved the live jazz in the clubs, the informal
jazz I found live in the apartments of various lovers, and I
wanted to hear anyone I was lucky enough to hear about. I
craved jazz music, and the black world was where one found
it. There was a tangle of sex and jazz, black culture and black
male love. There was a Gordian knot made of black men and
Jewish white women in particular. Speaking only for myself,
I wasn’t going to settle in the suburbs, and New York City
meant black, jazz meant black, blues meant black.
Philadelphia, in contrast, had folk music and coffeehouses
with live performers. Most were white. I liked Dave Van Ronk
and in junior high school stole an album of his from a big
Philadelphia department store; or maybe it was just the bearded
white face on the album cover, an archetype egging me on.
My best friend in high school liked the Philly scene with its
scuzzy, mostly failed musicians and its folk music. I'd go with
her when I could because Phil y promised excitement, though
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Music 3
it rarely delivered. She and I flirted with a small Bohemia, not
life-threatening, whereas when I was alone in New York City
there was no net. In the environs of Philly I went to hear Joan
Baez, whose voice was splendid, and I listened to folk music
on record, Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Ramblin’ Jack Eliot,
who rambled in those days mostly in Philadelphia. These took
me back to Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Cisco Houston.
By the time Bob Dylan came along, I was uninterested in the
genre altogether until some friends in college made me sit
down to listen to Dylan soi-meme. Even then, it was his politics that moved me, not his music. That changed. It changed the first time because he was an acquired taste, and after
listening enough I acquired sufficient love of the music-with-
lyric to be one with my generation; and it changed the second
time, years later, maybe decades later, when his mar iage fel
apart and I found out that he had been a batterer. He lost
me. I can’t claim any purity on this, because I’ve never lost
my taste for Miles Davis, and he was a really bad guy to
women, including through battery. So I love ol’ Miles, but I
sure do have trouble put ing any CD of his in the machine. In
Amsterdam I met Ben Webster, but so did any white girl. He
was way past his prime, but he still played his heart out.
I remember the saliva dripping from his lips and the sweat
that blanketed his fat body or the visible parts of it. He’d sit
in the sun in Leidseplein; he always wore a suit; and he’d be
the Pied Piper. I wished he had been Fats Wal er, whom I’ve
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Heartbreak
rediscovered on CD. I heard B. B. King in concert a few times
there, and the Band once. I loved B. B., whom I met years
later, and I loved the Band.
But it was Bessie who came to stand for art in my mind. I
found her albums, three for 33 cents, in a bin on Eighth Street
while I was in high school, and once I listened to her I was
never the same. I don’t mean her kick-ass lyrics, though those
are pretty much the only blues lyrics I can still stomach. I
mean her stance. She had at itude on every level and at the
same time a cold artistry, entirely unsentimental. Her detachment equaled her commitment: she was going to sing the song through your corporeality. Unlike smoke, which circled
the body, her song went right through you, and either you
took what you could get of it for the moment the note was
moving inside you or she wasn’t for you and you were a bar ier
she penetrated. Any song she sang was a second-by-second
lesson in the meaning of mortality. The notes came from her
and tramped through your three-dimensional body but graceful y, a spartan, bearlike bal et. I listened to those three albums hundreds of times, and each time I learned more about what
art took from you to make: not love but art.
Before the compact-disc revolution, you couldn’t get good
or even passable albums by Ma Rainey, so she was a taste
deferred, and the brilliant Alberta Hunter came into my life
when I was in college and she was singing at the Cookery in
New York City, a very old black woman with a pianist as her
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Music 3
sole accompaniment. I would have done pretty much anything
to hear Big Mama Thornton live, and, of course, for me,
college-aged, Janis Joplin was the top, the best, the risk-taker,
the one who left blood on the stage. When I lived on Crete,
still col ege-aged, Elvis won me with “Heartbreak Hotel. ”