THE SOUND OF ONE OAR ROWING

If you marvel at my verbal fluency, know also that I was an early reader. I can recall being pulled out of my first-grade classroom to demonstrate my reading skills to another class. When a lady teacher asked how it was that I learned to read so well, I replied that it was because I read comic books. And it was true! I found it easy to correlate the printed words with the cartoons, and I found the stories of Carl Barks (who, not Walt Disney, actually drew the Donald Duck comics) more interesting than the stagnant work of ol' Beatrix Potter, and the stories of John Stanley were uproariously funny when compared to those of Dr. Seuss, which even during such a vealy period, I dismissed as idiotic.

The schoolmarms were aghast at my preference for comic books, and I was never again called upon to demonstrate my ease and celerity with the printed word. A few years later, I discovered Mad magazine, but by then my conduct was so deplorable that the schoolmarms had given up on me and assigned me to the class of incorrigibles. This only seemed to confirm the antiauthority bent of the humor magazine, and even today I sincerely believe that any man worth listening to spent his years from 11-16 being liberated by that magazine of subversion.

As much as I deprecate American culture, I actually believe that Rock & Roll is great music—the louder the better. I was in attendance that night on Zenta New Year when the MC5 recorded their infamous Kick Out the Jams album at the Grande Ballroom, and I was also present during the recording of Full House by the J. Geils Band. I can't say that my feeling of pity is genuine when I consider someone who never went through the coming-of-age ritual of Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll, because there is something repellent about someone who was too weak and frightened to rebel and too cowardly to engage in youthful risk-taking behavior.

As I've said before in these screeds, it appears to me that classical music has become the refuge of such intellectual cowards—the type that Wm. S. Burroughs called "the goody-goods." Classical music has been usurped by people who are afraid of life and cling to old music because it is a sanctuary from the risks of the unknown. For them, classical music is safe by virtue of being old and because there is nothing unexpected or unexplored there, and the more they hear La Bohème and the Grieg Piano Concerto over and over again, the more secure they are in their cocoons. The air of the concert hall is the stuffy atmosphere of a museum, not the heady breeze of Schumann's Spring Symphony, and it now also lacks the ozone of Brahms' Quintet in F-minor, and the nitrous oxide of Rossini.

But just as pathetic as the repressed minority is the majority of people in North America who listened to the same rock music as I did during adolescence, but who somehow never advanced beyond that level. One of the great mysteries of modern society is how most people advance quickly to adolescence (a stage at which they're quite adept) and then stop all development. Thus we have the bizarre spectacle of 40-year-old men still wearing a mullet hairstyle and grandmothers getting tattooed. A sort of biological imprinting takes place, and whatever music happens to be popular when an American is 18 will then become part of his or her identity for the rest of his life. There is an aversion, even a genuine hostility, for the style of music which was popular before his adolescence and also whatever became popular afterward.

I don't recall the teen years being the best time of my life, so why is it that the majority of Americans cling to this period? Other cultures respect and honor their elders, but in America, everything after the age of 25 is an anticlimax, a sort of milling around in the stadium of life after the big concert or the big game. Thus, no adult American has any interest in trying new foods—any dish that wasn't a part of their diet by the age of 14 is regarded as food only on a theoretical basis— like agar-agar or tree bark is. Any member of society seen eating quiche or Brussels sprouts would be regarded with horror—as if they'd resorted to cannibalism.

It never occurs to most Americans that anyone would listen to progressively more sophisticated music as they age, or that one's musical horizons might expand. To listen to something new and unusual or something exotic or complex is seen as a sort of betrayal of one's youth, because abandoning the music of one's adolescence might be construed as an admission of error. If you were wrong about Alice Cooper, then what else were you misguided about? How much easier it is to maintain the surreal fiction that nothing has changed.

Thus it is that millions of middle-aged Americans recently flocked to stadiums to attend reunion tour of Simon and Garfunkel. Not to hear any new songs, of course—that Paul Simon's skills as a songwriter have, hopefully, improved over the years is of no matter. What is important is just the opposite—it is preferable that the performers haven't improved at all over the years—because if your teen heroes are better than they used to be, then it implies that they weren't very good before, and your youthful enthusiasm was thus misplaced. The less the music has changed, the better the audience likes it, and if the original performers aren't around anymore, audiences will pay to see their impersonators.

Now, there's nothing wrong with comic books, and I'm glad that they helped improve my reading skills. Likewise, what would the USA be without Rock & Roll or Mad magazine? There is in itself nothing wrong with being young, and teen idols like the Beatles sang some delightful songs for 12-year-old girls. But why are the majority of Americans apparently incapable of advancing beyond that which is created and marketed for juveniles? For someone who is now approaching the age of 60 to still be listening to "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" is nothing short of deranged and is comparable to a 12-year-old purchasing denture adhesive. Whenever the PBS television network in the USA asks for donations, they broadcast performances of music that was popular in the 1950s or '60s, and as I view the pathetic spectacle of retirees attempting to act like teenagers, I realize that these people became stuck. They advanced to a certain level of sophistication but no more. And if the newspapers can be believed, the situation is even more alarming than I'd first suspected, as the number-one movie in America is now "The Cat in the Hat." It appears that the most advanced members of society made it to adolescence, but the majority never made it past preschool.

In such a situation, is it any wonder that the arts in America are so stagnant? Here we have 95% of the population stuck in adolescence, and the remainder never experienced adolescence at all. The remarkable thing about this situation is that music, even pop music, has not always wallowed in such a quagmire. At one time, not so very long ago, pop musicians graduated to more sophisticated music and their audiences sometimes followed them. Before World War II, the most popular musician in America was the King of Swing, Benny Goodman. Even during harsh economic times, young people purchased his records in astounding numbers and his concerts regularly sold out. The big-band number that is still most performed and imitated today is the Goodman Band's rendition of the Fletcher Henderson arrangement of "Sing, Sing, Sing." But then Goodman broke-up his big band and graduated to a more sophisticated type of combo jazz which included Lionel Hampton on the vibraphone. By the 1960s, Goodman had abandoned jazz performance and went on to a regimen of classical music, earning the respect of symphony musicians by mastering the most difficult piece of music for his instrument, the Nielsen Concerto for Clarinet, Op. 57. Also in Goodman's repertoire was Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto. Earlier, he had approached both William Walton and Béla Bartók about composing works for solo clarinet.

In the 1950s, the dominant force behind pop music was the celebrated song writing team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. They wrote all of the novelty hits for the doo-wop group, The Coasters; they wrote "You Ain't Nuthin' But A Hound-Dog" for Big Mama Thornton and it was made into a hit for white audiences by Elvis Presley; their hits, though far too many to list here, include "Kansas City," "Riot in Cell Block Number Nine," "Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots" and "Smokey Joe's Café." But by the late 1960s, Leiber & Stoller were through with youth music, and they instead applied their prodigious talents to writing an album of songs about growing old for the late Peggy Lee. This album, Mirrors on the A&M label, featured the cynical and pensive hit, "Is That All There Is?" as well as a haunting song about the murder of Ramon Navarro, "The Tango." Leiber and Stoller had graduated from Rock & Roll, and in 1978 Joan Morris and William Bolcom of the University of Michigan School of Music recorded an album of their new songs for the Nonesuch label.

In the present day, pop musicians seem content to continue wallowing in whatever they were first doing to achieve public attention. HRH Paul McCartney, former bass player with various teen attractions, has attempted to write serious music, but the result has a puerile and insipid quality, and next to it, the offal of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webern sounds esoteric. Joe Bouchard, the former bass player with the amazing Blue Öyster Cult has attempted a few serious scores, but as for the majority of popular entertainers, they have no more interest in doing anything sophisticated, because their job involves creativity to about the same degree as a backhoe operator does. Anything novel or unfamiliar would be regarded as a cheat by audiences who pay to hear the hits, all the hits and nothing but the hits.

One would think that the more intelligent and imaginative members of society would become jaded with hearing the same music year after year, but apparently this is not the case. An example is Steve Jobs, CEO of the fabulously successful Pixar Animation Studios, who still uses the threadbare ditties of the Beatles to demonstrate his new Apple software. Even if a few adventurous souls are receptive to something different, they will never be exposed to it, because the public airwaves have been commandeered by an industry that markets only to adolescents, and each month that market becomes more and more restricted and uniform. The result is that the majority of the population considers music to be something on the level of drag racing, and the more serious people simply lose interest in it.

There is, once again, nothing wrong with comic books, bubble gum, Rock & Roll, spiked hair, skateboards or the other implements of youth, but there certainly is a problem with a society which finds itself unable to advance beyond such things. As the murrain of American youth culture engulfs the world, whole cultures and traditions will be exterminated leaving only one giant pimple.