Musings on music

We woefully under-utilize one of God's greatest gifts

I occasionally consider categorizing Precipice posts in some fashion. I guess I could start by making use of the tags function. Maybe even create a sectioned-off front page that could direct readers to areas of particular interest. (Your thoughts on what I might do are welcome.)

There are a number of essays having to do with music in the archive. It might be helpful to some folks to have them gathered in one place.

The February 6 post from this year, “Art and Dissolution,” covers creative expression generally and grapples with the question of how we’re to reconcile the contributions of universally recognized greats with their wayward personal lives. I discuss the worlds of painting, literature and other fields, but, in specifically addressing music, I made this observation:

I sometimes reflect on an observation I made one day at a jazz improvisation workshop I attended for five years in a row a couple of decades ago. There were lots of kids as well as adults who attended it, and I happened to pass a young guy in the hall who was wearing a Charlie Parker tee shirt, that I’m pretty sure he purchased in the workshop’s bookstore. Now, the organizer of the workshop, one of America’s foremost jazz educators, was a clean-living guy, to the extent that he’d work diatribes against cigarette smoking into his holdings-forth on ear training and theory. And he encouraged attendees to listen to lots of Charlie Parker.

And who wouldn’t? Anybody with even a minimal degree of refined music appreciation understands that Parker was one of the twentieth century’s towering musical figures in any genre, and, in fact, a great artist from any form of expression. A genius.

But he was a junkie from the age of 16 until two years before his alcohol-related death at age 34. His personal life was a colossal mess.

At what point in history did human artistic expression become so intertwined with dissolute behavior?

Did it have anything to do with the drifting of art away from its religious moorings?

Last June, I reflected “On Entering Adolescence During the Tectonic Shift”. I posted a screenshot of a decidedly dated singing act called The Young Folk performing "Feelin' Groovy" on the Red Skelton Hour, 1968 and said this:

The photo accompanying this piece is a still capture from a video I saw on Facebook recently. Liberace and a vocal group I'd never heard of before called the Young Folk are performing "The 59th Street Bridge Song," better known as "Feelin' Groovy," a Paul Simon composition about taking one's time to be in the moment on a carefree morning. The television program is The Red Skelton Hour. Skelton was one of the last of the old-school comedians. He could be hilariously goofy, but he was never edgy, and he often took time on his show to offer his sincere thoughts about things like America's greatness.

The Young Folk's pants are something else, aren't they? It's clear that the squares were getting in on the last burst of flower power from the previous year's Summer of Love.

And consider the writer of the song. Simon had started out haunting the cubicles of the Brill Building, billing himself as Jerry Landis and fronting a neo-doo-wop group called Tico and the Triumphs. In 1964, he and boyhood chum Art Garfunkel got in on the folk boom, and much of his output took a topical and reflective turn.

The confluence of all these factors prompted me to share the video on my own page, with the caption, "A snapshot from the moment when our culture was on the cusp of the big changeover."

1968. The sunny vibes of the above-mentioned Summer of Love were giving way to New Left radicalism, manifested in such occurrences as the shutdown of classes and administrative-offices takeover at Columbia University the week before finals, and the riots outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. With Martin Luther King's assassination, the integrationist chapter of the civil rights movement came to a close and the rise of the Black Panthers filled the vacuum. CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite took the occasion of the Tet Offensive to opine to the public that America was bogged down in a quagmire in Vietnam.

The previous month, my post “The Laurel Canyon Scene Was a Cesspool of Hedonism, Self-Absorption and Nihilism” had the subtitle “They Were Supposed to Be The Sensitive Rock & Rollers; Hell, They Were As Feral As Any Other Kind.”

I discuss a documentary I show students in my rock and roll history class at Indiana University, as well as a then-recent interview in The Guardian with Graham Nash:

The subtitle of the documentary is “From The Byrds to the Eagles,” and I think that nicely puts bookends on the era. It starts in 1965, with the folk-rock era, continues throughout the country-fication of rock via the Buffalo Springfield and The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo album, and on into the wave of singer-songwriters such as Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, and John David Souther, and certainly act-management types and record company executives such as David Geffen, Elliot Roberts, and Lenny Waronker.

The documentary, while thorough, is rather a soft-pedal when it comes to the damage the people involved did to each other. There is a discussion by David Crosby about how when the drugs of choice shifted from psychedelics to cocaine, people’s egos and libido spoiled a lot of the hippie-ish vibe that the scene projected.

The Laurel Canyon scene was supposed to represent rock’s sensitive side. The songs were by turns introspective, romantic, and idealistic. The general message was that the world was progressing toward a more mellow day in which people would, by breaking the chains of convention, liberate themselves to be more in touch with themselves and each other.

To a great degree, the whole thing was just another show-business hype. The scene was, from the beginning, rife with hedonism and disregard for the consequences of casually breezing in and out of one another’s lives.

One of the most emblematic of the sensitive guys was Graham Nash. Originally a founding member of the British Invasion band The Hollies, he left that group and came across the pond in 1968 to form a trio with David Crosby, who’d just been kicked out of The Byrds, and Stephen Stills, fresh from the Buffalo Springfield’s breakup.

A quick note about Crosby. In 1968, he produced the first album by Joni Mitchell, who’d come out of Canada’s folk scene and was already making a name for herself as a songwriter. She and Crosby took up residence together for the better part of a year. Then Nash came along, was smitten with her, and she moved quite seamlessly into a relationship with him. Crosby didn’t mind. He always had a hot tub full of naked women with which to amuse himself, along with a stash of the best weed in the Canyon.

Nash was the sensitive guy’s sensitive guy, as indicated by such songs as “Lady of the Island” and “Our House.”

At least that was the image.

A recent interview of him in The Guardian reveals that there was a bit more to the story.

Let’s start with the kind of “spiritual” insight he gained from dropping acid:

Did acid also have a positive impact? “It did. I took less than a dozen trips in my life but I realised with the first one that here we are, this ball of mud whizzing at 67,000 miles an hour through space, on one of trillions of planets. I understood when I took acid that everything is meaningless. And because of that everything is completely deeply meaningful.”

A bit reminiscent of the line in “Imagine,” far and away the most awful song John Lennon ever wrote: “No hell below us, above us only sky,” isn’t it?

Graham echoes what Crosby had to say about the role of cocaine:

The early days were fabulous, he says. “We were in heaven.” But it didn’t last long. They were soon undone by rivalry, egos, excess and drugs. The band that harmonised so sublimely could not have been more discordant. “When we first started there were no egos. I think that came from all the cocaine we snorted. That’s what brought egos into it. There were an enormous amount of drugs being taken.” He runs through a typical day. “I’d get high in the morning and snort in the afternoon and I’d keep going till 3-4am.” Without drugs would the music have been different? “I don’t know, but we may have been able to make more music if we’d not been quite so stoned.”

Nash remembers the date he last took cocaine. “10 December 1984. We had finished a tour and there is the tour-end party. I walk into this room and see all these people smiling, and the smiles never made it to their eyes. It was only a mouth. And I realised I must look like all these people because we were all snorting coke. I stopped instantly and never went back.”

How about his motivation for wanting to meet The Mamas and the Papas?

Nash wrote such sensitive songs about women and relationships, but at times in the memoir he sounds like a priapic boor. I ask whether Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and Papas got in touch after the book was published. “No,” he says sheepishly. He mentions her once, saying that the only reason he went to meet the band was because he “wanted to fuck Michelle”. I wonder how she felt about that single reference, I say. “Well, I didn’t want to fuck John, I didn’t want to fuck Denny, and I didn’t want to fuck Cass. I wanted to fuck Michelle.” He pauses. “Now this was pure toxic masculinity. Completely.”

There were other relationships, but eventually he settled down into a 38-year marriage that produced three children. But, alas, he found a better lay a few years ago, so that ended. The offspring from the marriage don’t speak to him anymore:

Nash left Susan Sennett, his wife of 38 years and the mother of his three adult children, for Grantham in 2016. (In his memoir, he referred to Sennett as the love of his life, and wrote dotingly of his children and grandchildren.) Now he says he feels as if he has been born again. In 2018, he told Event magazine: “My sex life is insane. It’s better than it’s ever been.” Today, he describes their relationship in different terms. “My life has changed because she won’t stand for any of my bullshit. You tell stories or you do something, and she says: ‘No, that’s not the way it is; this is the way I see it.’ And invariably she’s correct. So I’ve got someone in my life who will love me in spite of my weaknesses.”

What are those weaknesses? “Oh, I don’t know.” For younger women? “Not necessarily. I’m trying to live the best life I can, and I want to do that until they close the coffin.”

But even here the story is complex. I read that his children fell out with him after he separated from Sennett. What happened? “They didn’t realise that I had divorced their mother, not them. So they don’t want me in their lives, and …” He trails off.

All three of the children? “My daughter is a little friendlier than my boys.” That must be tough, to be cut off from them, I say. “It’s terrible. So I’m doing remarkably well considering everything.” Does he think they were so angry with him because of the separation or the age difference? “I don’t know. People have to live their lives. People become who they are, and I realise my kids are not the people I thought they were, that my fatherly eyes glossed over their shortcomings.”

Does he hope there will be a reconciliation? “Actually I don’t. And that might seem awfully strange as a father, but it’s too painful. I can’t live my life in pain. If they don’t want me in their lives, that’s their choice. I don’t agree with it, but I will honour their choice.”

Suddenly the mood has changed. I stare at him, trying to work out what he is thinking. I seem to be looking at a man with the implacable resolve to follow his heart and live his rock’n’roll life to the last. But I also seem to be witnessing the desperate melancholy of an elderly man aware of all he has lost.

What a charmer.

In February 2021, I offered some observations about the Jeep commercial Bruce Springsteen made for that year’s Super Bowl. I’m going to excerpt rather generously from this one, to bolster the overall point I intend to make here. (Hang with me.)

Weigh-ins on the Super Bowl night “ReUnited States of America” Jeep commercial have ranged from “what’s with the choice of a flaming leftie to be the spokesperson for an effort to reunite the country?” to “Quit reading so much into it. It was just an inspiring and uplifting little message.”

Those in the former camp tend to have Trumpist leanings to some degree, as evidenced by their mentioning of all the times over the last five years that Springsteen has made clear his views of the Very Stable Genius, perhaps most explicitly when he said he’d be on the next plane to Australia if Trump won re-election.

Jeep had actually been after Springsteen since 2011 to do a Super Bowl commercial. The late Sergio Marchionne, who was Jeep’s CEO until his passing in 2018, had a thing for landing pop-culture icons, and had succeeded in getting some, ranging from Bob Dylan to Eminem to Clint Eastwood, over the years. Still, he couldn’t get Bruce’s manager, Jon Landau, to ink a deal.

His successor finally did. It seems that the concept - the chapel in Kansas, the stark weather, the emphasis on the notion of meeting in the middle - was what sold Landau.

Springsteen actually started out shying away from overt political pronouncements and causy activism. He began wading into those waters by joining the roster of performers at the 1979 “No Nukes” concert. He soon was letting his leanings show quite overtly. After Reagan’s election, he was direct in his disparagement of the fortieth president. He didn’t take kindly to Reagan using “Born in the USA” at rallies.

It was an odd choice for the Reagan campaign to use. Once one looked past the bigness of the arena-rock sound that gave that song the power to instantly exhilarate, it was pretty clear that it was about how the Vietnam experience had damaged a lot of returning participants in that conflict. Its focus was on the nation’s shortcomings, not exactly what Reagan was otherwise emphasizing in his campaign. (Not that political campaigns have ever looked too far into what the music they played at rallies were actually all about. What, for instance, is the reason for playing the Village People’s “YMCA” except that it brims with that exhilaration factor?)

A lot of the criticism of the Jeep commercial has had to do with the fact that Springsteen has strongly bound up his persona with his native New Jersey, and here he was in a cowboy hat in the windswept middle of nowhere.

Some of us have not forgotten the strong New Jersey identification, and it makes the current trappings seem off.

His first album was called Greetings From Asbury Park, and the song “Sandy” off his second album is about a guy telling his girl that they ought to admit to themselves that they’ve outgrown the boardwalk scene. The 1975 Newsweek cover story about him when Born to Run came out emphasized Bruce’s handiness with a pinball machine.

But then he expanded his scope and set about making himself an explorer of the American landscape generally, delving into locales such as the Utah desert and the plains of Nebraska. One sensed that he was trying to insinuate himself into the lineage that included Walt Whitman, John Dos Passos and Jack Kerouac. He and and Mary - the girl in “Thunder Road” - had definitely left the front porch and were now out on that open highway.

He was growing older as this was happening to his artistic direction, and the theme of regret over having not taken that open road, about opting to get a union card and settle for life among high school classmates in the hometown also came in for exploration in songs such as “Glory Days.”

So he was simultaneously examining those who did settle the vast interior of the continent, as well as those who stayed in their gritty communities back east. The common element was a backdrop of bleakness, a message that America was a place of exhausted possibilities.

Something else that happened after the first two albums - certainly after the third one - was that the music became a lot more simple. The charm of Asbury Park and The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle was the busyness of the arrangements, the grit of Clarence Clemons’s tenor sax delivery, the Latin flourishes, the tempo changes, the surreal imagery in the lyrics, and a general regard for atmospherics.

Those albums, consisting of extended cuts, were relegated to FM cult-favorite status, but he was building his reputation as a bar-band powerhouse as he relentlessly played clubs up and down the east coast. It was when he took on Landau as manager that the push to make him an arena-rock draw really began.

By the time of the Born in the USA album, he was wearing his penchant for a stripped-down yet huge sound on his sleeve. The title song is boneheadedly simple, a shift back and forth between a I chord and a IV chord over an unwavering, basic beat, with a melody line that doesn’t stray beyond the fourth, fifth and sixth scale tones of the key he’s in. In short, it’s as repetitive as a tune can get.

He seems to think that there was some kind of profundity to this immersion in simplicity, that a limited palette somehow made a greater range of thematic possibilities open to him.

I, for one, just found it mind-numbing.

But even when I look back over the entire arc of his career, including those first two albums, something becomes clear: he’s always been full of himself. In his early days, he was clearly aspiring to be some kind of encapsulation of rock’s development to that point. He’s always been out to make the Great American Rock Album.

So that’s why this Jeep commercial works for a certain type of viewer. Bruce gets to be full of himself in spades. That appeals to those who are likewise full of themselves, talking a good line about an underlying American essence that can be detected if one first repents of all the country’s supposed sins and its inherently tarnished institutional underpinnings. We can celebrate what really makes America great once we’ve dispensed with what our square old history teachers drummed into our heads.

You get to be patriotic if you first demonstrate contrition for what you’ve come to see as a phony image peddled by those who had utter disregard for the Little Guy in whom all American nobility rests.

He mentions freedom during his narration in the commercial, but it doesn’t come across as being borne of any deep understanding of the conversation throughout our history about what that term means.

In July 2020, during the fever pitch of the nationwide urban unrest that followed George Floyd’s murder, I posted the essay “The Layers of Significance of One Night Stand! Sam Cooke Live at the the Harlem Square Club”:

Sam Cooke was the king of smooth. He was impossibly handsome, always impeccably dressed, and had a stage presence that looked effortless to achieve. During the period of his peak fame, from 1957 to 1964, he produced pop music that featured a crooning style of singing that gave him the crossover appeal of a Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine or Johnny Mathis. He had an understanding of show business down pat. Watch him explain to television show host Mike Douglas how he views working a room.

But there was much more to Sam Cooke than the image a cursory acquaintance provides.

He was born in 1931 in Clarksdale, Mississippi - in the same town and year as Ike Turner, interestingly - and grew up in Chicago. His voice and looks allowed him to rise in black gospel circles to the point of being chosen to be the new lead singer of the nationally revered Soul Stirrers. The group became the cash cow of Art Rupe’s Specialty Records’ gospel roster. Cooke kept after Rupe (a white man) to let him sing secular pop. Rupe relented in 1956, but after one record, Rupe shut down the cutting of the next one in mid-session when he walked in and saw white background singers.

The session was for “You Send Me,” which became the record that launched Cooke’s secular stardom.

Cooke and producer Bumps Blackwell took the players and singers down the street to a small studio to finish the record, which was released on the Keen label. Its success brought Cooke to the attention of RCA Victor, which signed him.

That record was the prototype for the formula Cooke employed on his hits for the rest of his career: smooth crooning, simple chord progressions, generally heavy on a I-VI-IV-V sequence, arrangements more in keeping with a pop, rather than an R&B, designation, and lyrical content geared toward an adolescent audience.

Along the way, going back to his gospel days, Cooke’s appeal to the ladies brought complications into his life. He had at least three out-of-wedlock children in addition to the children he had with his second wife, Barbara. It’s pretty well established that there was a sexual component to his friendship with the very young Aretha Franklin, whom he knew through her father, the legendary Baptist minister C.L. Franklin.

None of this affected his image throughout his life, and was still overshadowed in the aftermath of his sordid death in late 1964 by the outpouring of grief, particularly among black Americans, who saw him as an untouchable icon.

Until 1985, the public’s understanding was that Sam Cooke’s only live album was Live at the Copa, recorded in July 1964 and released in October of that year. It’s a dazzling showcase of what Cooke could do. The material ranges from standards (“The Best Things In Life Are Free,” “When I Fall In Love”) to old sing-along favorites (“Bill Bailey,” “Tennessee Waltz”) to topical material (“Blowin’ in the Wind,” “If I Had A Hammer”) to blues "(“Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”) to his own hits (“Twistin’ the Night Away,” “You Send Me”). The introduction is given by Sammy Davis, Jr. and Cooke’s own band is supplemented by the Copacabana house band. The result is mightily swinging, but polished, in keeping with what the public was familiar with.

One Night Stand! Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club is a much different kind of record. It was recorded in early 1963 at a small venue in Overtown, the historically black neighborhood in Miami. The introduction is done by a raucous emcee looking to stoke audience fervor.

RCA Victor shelved the album at the time, and its grit was precisely the reason. Cooke was on the cusp of a level of stardom that the company didn’t want to jeopardize. It was only released when a producer came across it in 1985.

The first tune, “Don’t Fight It,” sets the tone. It’s an uptempo number that alternates between a I-VI back-and-forth and a twelve-bar blues form. Cooke is serving notice that it’s going to be a night for cutting loose. (“Baby when you’re dancing near me / with your cheek close to mine / and you begin to feel a funny thrill / movie’ up your spine / don’t fight it.”) The set list is heavier on his own hits than Copa. But even the standard, “I Love You (For Sentimental Reasons),” written by the black songwriter Deek Watson of the Ink Spots, is preceded by a streetwise introductory soliloquy that makes some dark assumptions about relationship dynamics (“Fellas, I want you to remember one thing. When somebody tells you about something your girlfriend has done, or your wife has done, don’t go home a hittin’ on her and all that stuff.”) that is repeated nearly verbatim eight years later by B.B. King on his album Live at Cook County Jail in the lead-in to “How Blue Can You Get.”

But it’s Cooke’s vocal delivery that is the big difference. Songs that are delivered with pop silkiness on the original studio recordings, or on Copa, are rendered with an uninhibited gospel-rooted rasp. It’s the way he sang to such audiences when he’d tour the south. There’s a strong sense that he knew it was the thing to do to give a different kind of show when he was among his own people.

1963 was a racially charged year in America, of course. August saw the march on Washington at which Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have A Dream” speech. About a month later, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, by Klan members, occurred.

But it was a year of black crossover success in music. Non-black America went in for the Motown sound, the Sam Cooke sound, girl groups such as The Ronettes and The Chiffons, and jazz greats such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Oscar Peterson and Wes Montgomery, in a big way.

It seems pretty clear that these artists, as well as the producers and arrangers they worked with, had some sense of fine-tuning the balance between “sounding black” and being marketable to a wide audience.

What happened in American society in the intervening decades to make the shift to an in-your-face declaration that “this music is for blacks and whether whitey likes it is not of concern to me”? To return to the question I posed in the post entitled “Color,” why did black music not find a place among the threads in the American cultural fabric that seemed like such a promising possibility 50-plus years ago?

The fervor of the audience participation on the Harlem Square Club record may provide us some insight. That audience wasn't just there for the uplift of sanctification. The material, and Cooke’s delivery, made that clear. Cooke exuded the sexuality that was the source of so much tumult in his personal life. The album makes clear that in an atmosphere that felt comfortable to those who liked their black music unvarnished, unbridled sensuality was the point.

Then there’s the piece I wrote for Ordinary Times last April entitled “Confessions of a Rock & Roll History Teacher”:

For a textbook, I use Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947 – 1977 by James Miller. In the early years of Rolling Stone magazine, Miller wrote record reviews, and he edited the first edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll in 1976. He went on to write for myriad other publications on a broad array of subjects, and did some teaching. In the 1990s, he realized his take on the subject of rock history had undergone some changes, which prompted him to write Flowers.

It’s not the kind of book most rock-history teachers would use as a text. It doesn’t claim to be comprehensive. Each chapter is a vignette about a specific instance that is fraught with implications about the subject at hand. There’s one about the circumstances under which Little Richard recorded “Tutti Fruiti” at Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans in 1955, one about Brian Epstein wandering into the Cavern Club in Liverpool in 1961 and seeing The Beatles, and so on. He also only takes it through 1977, as he feels that everything that’s come along in rock since then is a derivation of some sort of what developed before then.

One semester about fifteen years ago, two ladies sat in the back of the classroom every week. I assume them to have been friends outside of class. They did pretty well on tests and papers. On the last night of class, one of them raised her hand and said, “We’ve read Miller’s book, and we’ve concluded that he doesn’t like rock and roll,” which led to an interesting discussion about whether one has to like something to become a historian of it.

On my final exam, I ask this question:

4.) In Many Years from Now, Paul McCartney’s memoir, he says:

“One of the things that’s hard for people to realize is that we were on the cusp of the change-over between showbiz styles.The thing we were doing, rock ‘n’ roll, was to become an industry.Probably because of us.The Beat Boom.We opened it all up in America and once America gets hold of a thing, it’s a thing.We weren’t looking to build a huge industry, which is what happened, there was none of that.It was just being in show business, that’s how we looked at it.We thought, this is what it’s like now so we’d better get ready for it, it’ll probably be like this then.But of course it all changed and we were the ones that changed it.”

How did rock and roll fit into the overall landscape of show business prior to the Beatles and how was the overall entertainment industry affected by rock becoming an industry unto itself?

Sometimes the answers are fairly insightful; sometimes they dismayingly miss the mark.

There are certain sociocultural shifts that have always been hard for me to convey, and more so as time goes on. For instance, I’m constantly trying to more effectively impress upon students what kind of phenomenon The Ed Sullivan Show was. It ran on CBS from 1948 to 1971, and aired on Sunday nights. American families would clear off the supper dishes and gather in the TV room to watch it. It was a true variety show. Guests included Broadway show casts, circus acrobats, Jewish standup comedians from the clubs along 52nd Street, and, from 1956 on, rock acts. Something for every member of the family.

Or consider how the grownup press in the United States first reacted to The Beatles upon their 1964 revival. While reporters had been charmed at the press conference at JFK airport, their music and appearance were routinely panned, and no one expected them to have anything like the impact they’ve come to have.

My sister is eight years older than I am. She graduated high school in 1965. She’d cut her musical teeth on “Runaway” by Del Shannon and “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” by Curtis Lee. At the equivalent age, I was into the Hard Day’s Night soundtrack, and in short order, Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan and Anthem of the Sun by the Grateful Dead. The sit-ins and teach-ins of her college years didn’t really affect her small liberal arts campus. By the fall of 1970, when I started high school, an underground newspaper was being distributed. My buddies and I were reading Do It by Jerry Rubin.

The great upheaval of Western civilization was a fait accompli by the time I turned 18. Feminism, environmentalism and radical chic had gone mainstream. Led Zeppelin concerts were a commodity.

It’s all shrouded in the mists of antiquity now.

Okay, that kind of sets the table for more recent thoughts on this subject.

My high school class is having its fiftieth reunion this summer. A number of people who had been in local bands back in the day, from various classes on either side of ours by a few years, and who, in some cases, live in the hometown, but in others reside elsewhere, set about forming a band to play at some point during the weekend this coming August. I was enlisted as a guitarist.

Song suggestions came in fast and furious from the players, as well as from people in our class. There was a particular text thread that extended long into the night, replete with oohs and ahs over mentions of The Eagles, Eric Clapton, Chicago, Jackson Browne and such. I found it noteworthy that all the participants in the thread were women, but I’ll leave any musing about the significance of that for another time.

The reunion organizing committee had enlisted a DJ for the night of the official proceedings, but members of this fledgling band and some class members began looking for some downtown venue that might host us on Friday evening.

It didn’t work out, and the reunion-band idea was abandoned.

Quite frankly, I was relieved. I’ve never had any interest in playing covers of rock-pop tunes, and I really wasn’t looking forward to slogging through three hours of early-1970s material.

I take music very seriously. It came along a lot later in human development than sex, obviously, but, either performed or experienced properly, it ought to offer us comparable glimpses into the sublime. And I don’t have narrow parameters. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and “Ain’t That Peculiar” by Marvin Gaye qualify as examples of what I mean.

Counterarguments to this position run along the. lines of “Isn’t this all a matter of personal taste? Some people like Motown, some like Helen Reddy. A 2020s kid can be quite sincere in asserting that Lana del Ray speaks to her inner being.”

I had this to say about that in an Ordinary Times piece back in January entitled “Notes on the Delicious Art of Arguing”:

Arguments where matters of taste are involved, such as the relative merits of two musical acts or two movies, are a little trickier. You have to have given some thought to what your aesthetic standards are and why you arrived at them. General rule: leave your feelings out of it.

Ah, standards.

Here’s where we are: most people don’t give much thought to applying standards to music. Their relationship with it is much too passive. It’s aural wallpaper that just happens to them, and some of it catches their fancy. Why that is so is not of much importance to them.

When I go into places of business that engage with the public - banks, dentists’ offices, retail establishments - and hear the content being broadcast on the local classic-hits station, I thank God in heaven above that I no longer report to a workplace where I’m subjected to that aural equivalent of Polar Pop all day long.

I get more dismayed than I probably should when I discern, from social-media posts, what the music tastes of people whose intellects I admire, turn out to be. These are good writers, think tank scholars and the like, and what turns them on musically leaves me aghast, frankly.

I’ve gone pretty long here, and you’re a busy person. And the title of this piece promises “musings,” not firm conclusions. But I hope I’ve started a conversation.

We are an aesthetically starved culture. We have lost sight of one of the greatest gifts God bestowed upon us: the joy of making and listening to a human activity that can put us in touch with our innate nobility, a nobility that exceeds the bounds of space and time.