11,400. RUDIMENTS, PT. 535

RUDIMENTS, pt. 535

(play me them 88's)

I've had five pianos in my

life, and that's leaving, I

think, one out, along with

the plank of wood that my

father had painted up as

a piano keyboard initially,

back when I was 6, which

then became my starting

concept-piano upon which

I'd 'silently' practice the

week's lessons and not hear

until at the piano teacher's

house each Friday. Very

weird, but we did get a

piano, within, I guess, a

year. Maybe if being deaf

was cool enough for old

Beethoven it was supposed

to work for me too; 'cept he

didn't 'start out that way.'

I'm not sure my folks even

knew about any of that

anyway. It gives a whole

new meaning to the idea

of 'tone-deaf,' and, yeah,

I can just shrug and say,

'Well, that's how I learned.'

The piano thing has always

weaved a strange thread

through my life : the silent

starting of music, and the

train crash, which of course

happened at age 8 on a

return trip home from

Claire Avenue, Woodbridge,

where my first piano teacher,

a Miss Frank, lived, with her

mother. Yes, yes, her first

name really was Ann. Not

sure if there was an E or not.

(music joke too?)...She

eventually, both her and

her mother, relocated to

Atlantic City where she'd

taken a teaching job at some

music academy. I never saw

her again until, one day, after

my mishmash of death and

recuperation from the train

accident, she came over to

the house all blubbering about

seeing me alive again, wishing

me love, laughter, and life,

and checking to see if I still 

had ten fingers. Piano teachers

worry about things like that.

-

We did finally get a bar-room

piano that my father had

filched up somewhere for

25 bucks. I forget how it

got to the house, but they

waltzed it in. It spent its

initial time in the basement.

My next piano teacher, a

Mr. Novak, he came to the

house once a week and we

rattled on. He wasn't much

of a guy, to me, and I never

really got on much with him.

He stopped coming, I guess.

The next guy was the coolest,

and I stayed with him the

longest. I'd ride up some

street in Woodbridge, along

Rahway Ave., on my bicycle,

right over the same tracks where

I'd gotten creamed before. I

never gave any of that a second

thought and, as a kid, never

cared much to be aware of or

re-visit the scene of that mess.

I've written a lot of this piano

lesson stuff before, way back,

so I won't drag kit all back out.

-

Sometimes I feel that I view a

lot of this life stuff through the

prism of a piano viewpoint. The

manner of it all now is vastly

different  -  synthesizers and

artificial notes and all that  - 

but the essential basis of piano

musicianship is, I'd suppose,

clarity, poise, steadiness, and

tuneful strength. That's a

pretty primitive point of view

and it would get me laughed 

out of court, probably. But

it's how I feel (take it from a

guy who learned on a silent

board). The piano war out 

there that's always going on

is a war against guitars. Isn't

that weird? Guitars, electric

or not, have taken over in

the minds of the vast majority 

of people, the defining grid of

what a 'music' is supposed to be.

The piano, by rights, ought hate

the guitar. It's all wrong of course,

but we live now in tribal ways,

where the strongest and loudest

noise around the campfire does

tend to get and fixate the tribal

attentions. So, the guitar wins.

But everything else is wrong,

so why not that too. People

who don't know what they're 

talking about will talk about 

what they call 'Music,' and they'll

assume you share all their points

and considerations. Even though

it's not true. You can read all this

guitar crap  -  about open-tuning,

the joys and powers of chords

and riffs, the power of bass and

the drive of rhythm. The Velvet

Undergound, let's say, Lou Reed,

held in highest honor  -  all D-note

crap. Drone D, with flitting inner

notes in between, and a steady.

bound beat and bass beneath it.

Maybe it's nice and all, but none

of that's ever what it's cracked

up to be. There's no purity. The
best guitar stuff I've ever heard 
is by guys like Django Reinhardt, 
or Enrique Granados or  Juaquin 
Rodrigo, or Manuel deFalla; but 
that's all pretty much different stuff
too. When Ritchie Havens broke 

on the radio scene, about 1966,

with 'High Flyin' Bird' he was

played up as a poor Harlem kid

who came up playing open-tuned

songs on street-corners. It was

all bullshit, but it sounded like 

a good story. Damned business

people, to sell records they just

make shit up. What if I told you

the entire world was like that?

-

A guitar allows you to bend notes.

Like bending the truth. Like a lie.

You can't do that on a piano. You've

got a note. And that's what you've 

got - the only thing you can work

with is its singular, notational,

purity in consort with the next,

note, or if fused into a chord, the

next internal shift of that chord.

Then that unit makes its own

whole, and you can shift the

whole, maybe, into its next

segment. But no bending. 

No lies. It's all truth. 

-

I used to be more interested in

piano stuff that I was in normal

boy-kid stuff. I played a lot of

baseball in the early years, but

even that was just recreational

blow-off time, pretending I

was a more normal kid than 

I was. My head was more stuck

in the unseen declarations of

a music that, perhaps, only I

was hearing  - and it's still

like that. Around myself, I

never hesitate. Around others, 

I'm always in hesitation. Why

that all is, I never know. There

used to be a phrase in use about

school and outside and all, about

other people taking responsibility

for you. When you were out

by yourself. 'In Loco Parentis.'

It meant like 'in place of the

parents.' Stupidest idea in the

world, because now it's all

allowed the state to take your

kids from you, lock them in

daytime school buildings, put 

a cop-car outside, and freeze

your kid in place so they can

fill the head with their crap.

Crap only as they see it through

the approved, dictatorial ends

of the psychotic mass of today's

society. If I had a kid today, 
I'd probably smother it with a
pillow and save it all the trouble
of later. But anyway, what I

was saying, 'Music' and its

theory, early on, took the 

place  of parents to me. In 

Loco Parentis indeed, and 

my parents  -  I don't think  -  

weren't exactly loco.

-

So the sum total of my life 

now, is, having never gotten a

thing from anyone else, a deck

chair on the Titanic, or a nice

porch seat in a place called

Shithaven. You know Beethoven

basically means 'Beet Haven'  -

I guess some family lineage of

some Kraut village heavy on

the beets. What that tells you

about Shithaven, for me, I'll

leave to you.

-

Getting back to music (boy, do

I ever get off track), the jazz

guys that I started hanging with

in those night-lofts, they kept

to their own points of view about

music, hardly even calling it

that. I wasn't really even a

part of them. To begin with, I

was a young, stupid white kid.

These guys were already in

their 30's, wired, wise, mean,

angry, drug-addled, and 

sometimes nasty too. Violence

was the edge of their outer

limits  -  like a fiery solo, a

run with crazy notes, a twist

and a fill. I never contradicted;

I just did what they wanted  -

cigarettes, get some coffee,

let their crazy and beautiful

women in, while admiring them

too but keeping my filth-trap

shut. Learning on two feet is
two-fisted learning. Those guys

would punch with notes, they'd
blast their crazy solos over and
atop everything, the sound would
crawl the walls and shiver your
spine  -  sometimes you could
feel it in your blood-flow. To me, 
a lot of it was just too-much: crap,
crowded, noisesome. Like any
other social music, just there to
keep the chatter building. I
tired of it; some of that jazz
was just too much.
-
Social music? Boy isn't that a
strange phrase? What else is it ever
supposed to be? I always wondered.
Jazz? Nightclubs? Cocktail Lounges?
Seduction scenes in old noir movies?
None of that had anything really
to do with me, and I sure never did
want that anyway. All through life
it always seems the intense and
the personal always get dragged
away and are the first to go. Like
tourists, flying to Spain, everyone
just ends up with air-headed babble,
and happy for it.