I interviewed Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sometime in early 1967.
I knocked on the door of their dressing room. Paul opened the door, all 5’3” (1.6m) of him, turned and called into the room, “Hey, Art, this guy looks just like you.”
Young Friends
Paul and Art were both 26, riding the tide of three straight hit singles: ‘Sounds of Silence’ (#1), ‘Homeward Bound’ (#5), and ‘I Am a Rock’ (#3). They were widely credited with inventing folk-rock, marrying the fun of rock and roll to the gravitas of folk music. No one foresaw that they were to become cultural icons.
I was 18, a music nerd away from home for the first time, at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA, “tryin’ to do like the Gentiles do”. No one foresaw how badly that would turn out.
Young Jeff
Art and I, it turns out, were both early sporters of jewfros, a coiffure in style amongst some young members of our notoriously nerdy tribe. We thought that if we grew long kinky hair, maybe we’d be able to jump as high as Dr J or sing as raunchy as Wilson Pickett. Spoiler alert: we couldn’t.
I recently turned 70. So I’ve been thinking (in addition to finishing my tax return and watching the new season of Ozark) about stuff like The Meaning of Life.
I am now officially old. This is a new state for me. Most of my life, I haven’t been old. It only crept up on me recently. How do I know that I’m old? Because of a 1968 Simon and Garfunkel song.
Old friends, old friends, sat on their park bench like bookends.
A newspaper blown through the grass falls on the round toes of the high shoes of the old friends.
Old friends, winter companions, the old men lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sun;
The sounds of the city sifting through trees settles like dust on the shoulders of the old friends.
Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventy…
Old friends, memory brushes the same years, silently sharing the same fears.
A time it was, and what a time it was, it was a time of innocence, a time of confidences.
Long ago it must be, I have a photograph.
Preserve your memories – they’re all that’s left you.
Jack Weinberg (sic), a harbinger of the revolution at Berkley in 1964, coined the phrase “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Our parents were over 30. Richard Nixon was over 30. We figured it must be true.
But as kids of 18 or 26, we were of course immortal. We could drink and drive, indiscriminately consume whatever drug was available, practice free and unprotected love whenever we could, stay up all night listening to The Stones and sleep through Logic class in the morning, with no repercussions. We were immortal.
Again, spoiler alert: It didn’t quite work out that way.
The Ohio National Guard shot four of us. We graduated (by the skin of our teeth, and only some of us) and had to Get A Job. We fell in love and tied the knot. We had babies. We signed mortgages. We turned 30.
And then 40.
And then 50.
And then 60.
And now 70.
Funny, she doesn’t look Jewish
As I said, this is new for me. Memories used to be ten years old. Then twenty. Now I have memories that are a lifetime older than I was when Paul said, “Hey, Art, this guy looks like you.”
I don’t know why I blame Garfunkel for that line. Simon wrote it, and deserves all the credit and all the blame. But it is who Art sings that B-part: Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench quietly? How terribly strange to be seventy…
Well, Art (Paul), I got news for you. You got it wrong.
I don’t sit on park benches. I don’t wear high shoes with round toes. My ‘overcoat’ is a spiffy leather jacket, and I ain’t lost in it. And for damn sure, no dust is settling on my shoulders. So screw you.
I got me a new soul brother, William Butler Yeats. At 63, he wrote:
Old Art
What shall I do with this absurdity— O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog’s tail? Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible—
Three months ago I started writing a novel. I’ve finished about a quarter of it, and I’m pretty pleased with the results. I’m determined to see it through to the end. It will be my first big work of fiction, after one stillborn attempt at a novel, one short experimental novel, one attempt that ended when I painted myself into a corner. No tragedy. As I learned very clearly from my playwrighting days (twenty plays in my forties, two a year for ten years), you learn immeasurably more from failures than from successes.
Old Jeff
See, that’s something I didn’t know at 18. I’ve actually learned something over this threescore and ten—a failure isn’t the end of the world. I wish I had known that at 18. And at 26. And at 40. It would have given me solace and confidence to grapple with the challenges of those daunting years.
Yes, I’ve learned a thing or two. But I also realize that there’s much more out there that I haven’t learned than what I have. But that’s cool.
So, yes, Art, I am officially old. But you know what? I have more of my jewfro left than you do. If you want to feel old, you go ahead. I have too much to do. That other guy from back then sporting a jewfro, Bob Zimmerman, transcended the clichés of the time. He was 24 when he wrote ‘he not busy being born is busy dying’.
So, yeah, on paper I’m old. But I’ve still got my creative juices, such as they are, flowing like an agitated mountain stream in spring, choked and rushing furiously with melted snow; and I’m going to be spending the next month thanking the Almighty for blessing me with the health and energy to channel these energies into a project that keeps me off the streets and out of my wife’s hair.
Soon enough, I suppose, I’ll be sitting on a park bench with dust gathering on my shoulders. But I have a sneaking suspicion that in my earphones I’ll be listening to The Who’s Roger Daltrey singing “Hope I d-d-d-die before I get old”.
I live in what I like to call the only non-Christian country in the Western world. We’re Jewish here, and we have a looong history of being different. In high school and college, half of my classmates and most of my neighbors were Jewish, but the subject was virtually unmentioned. Unmentionable. Obliquely noted only on a very few holidays, it was not something you talked about. If you weren’t ashamed of it, it was certainly nothing to strut.
Why would you want to be different?
Well, most of my friends chose that route, and they became less different than their parents (first-generation Americans) and grandparents (European-born, speaking English with a Yiddish accent). The Old World was left back there, Hitler obliterated it anyway, we are all Americans. Well, most of us.
Our grandparents had rescued us from Hitler, our parents had couched us comfortably in suburbia. But in the throes of the Vietnam War, the Chicago convention and Kent State, the American Dream was going sour. My entire generation sought meaning elsewhere – Molotov cocktails, drugs, alcohol, feng shui, communes, even dentistry. A perverse few even did a retro backflip into the religion of their forefathers. A substantial number of them – well, us – found ourselves in Israel, embracing and embraced by Zionism, Orthodox Judaism, and 10,000 miles distance from our nagging mothers. I even wrote a song about this very odyssey.
We Jews have our own calendar. The day starts at sundown (yeah, I know, that’s oxymoronic), the month starts with the reappearance of the moon (whew, I was really worried it wouldn’t show this time), the year on Rosh HaShana (Head of the Year), which occurs (according to our half-lunar/half-solar calendar) somewhere between September 5 and October 5 (except after 2089, when it will come no earlier than September 6 – let me tell you, this is one tangled can of worms).
Spirit in the Dark
The event is proscribed in the Bible (Leviticus 23:24 and Numbers 29:1) as a day of blowing the ram’s horn. Nowadays here in this Jewish country it’s a two-day holiday. Everybody puts on their holiday finery, buys a lot of flowers and newspapers, and gifts for the friends who are hosting them for a holiday meal. This year it begins at sundown Sunday and runs till Tuesday night. So if you start counting from tonight (Friday night, the beginning of Sabbath) and take into account that nobody does anything constructive on Sunday other than cooking for the next two days, that makes this a five-day bacchanalia.
For most folks here, five days of vacation and rest. For those of us who joined OAR (the Observe All the Rules club), it means the Day of Judgment, in which we’re called to account for our behavior during the past year. It’s the beginning of a ten-day period of soul-searching, climaxing in the Yom Kippur fast. In practice, Rosh HaShana is a 48- hour prayer marathon in synagogue, with occasional breaks for (a lot of) eating and (a lot of) sleeping and (a lot of) reading the newspapers. I want to tell you, 48 hours without screens is a very long time. Or, to put it more philosophically, “Life is short, but the days are very long.”
Some people, spiritually more highly evolved than myself, manage to engage the day in all its gravity. I overheard a young security guard at the entrance to the mall saying to a friend, in utter earnest, “It’s so frightening – on Monday we’re all gonna stand before The King in judgment. Scary, man!”
I won’t tell you how challenging that prayer marathon is for me, because My Better Half reads this and she likes to try to picture me with a gray beard swaying in rapture.
I will confess that my two regular synagogue buddies and I occasionally exchange during breaks in the prayer a word or two (or a few trillion) about such spiritually lofty subjects as the new officially released boxed set of Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Z and D and I grew up with Lesley West’s Mountain more prominent in our landscape than Mount Sinai, and we all made a similar journey to the same pew in the same synagogue saying the same prayers for 72 hours that our great-grandfathers did in Eastern Europe. That’s a very gratifying concept, but great-grandpa was hardwired in a way that we’re not. Our attitude to spirituality is somewhat wry, to put it mildly. So it’s at times like this, with Divine Judgment hanging over our mortal souls, that Z and D and I and our like reach into the bag of cultural resources on which we were raised for a booster.
And there’s nothing more boostful than Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles’ rendition of her ‘Spirit in the Dark’ as performed at the Fillmore West on March 6, 1971. The folks up on the stage grew up singing their hearts out in churches in Detroit and rural Florida. The kids in the audience occasionally visited Temple Beth Israel in Squirrel Hill or Shaker Heights.
The 3-night gig was a big one for Aretha, her commercial popularity burgeoning. Jerry Wexler put her on stage in front of a white audience singing popular white songs (Beatles, Paul Simon, Stephen Stills) mixed with pop soul (‘Respect’, ‘Dr Feelgood). He replaced her road band with A-level studio musicians King Curtis and his band The Kingpins (featuring Billy Preston) and The Memphis Horns, with Aretha’s regular backup singers.
On the second night, she spontaneously brought Ray Charles on stage to duet with her on ‘Spirit in the Dark’, a quasi-spiritual she’d written and had a hit with a couple of years previously. She sings the song, then disappears off-stage, then returns with The Genius: “I discovered Ray Charles”, she quips, a reference to Flip Wilson’s Christopher Columbus 1967 skit in which “Queen Isabel Johnson” tells Chris that he can have “all the money you all the money you want, honey — You go find Ray Charles!” And shouting/testifying (drunk) from the dock, “Chris gonna find Ray Charles!”
God
We’ve written before about Aretha and about Ray. As Ray said, “There are singers, then there is Aretha.” She calls him “The Right Reverend Ray”.
The gig was documented in the album “Aretha Live at Fillmore West”, not one of her big hits, but gaining respect over the years. It includes a recording of part of the second night’s version of ‘Spirit in the Dark’ with surprise guest Ray. “I actually saw Ray a week or so earlier and told him what I was doing at the Fillmore but I didn’t think too much about it – until the night and there he was in the crowd. The next thing I knew he was up onstage and we were singing ‘Spirit.’ It was really a fantastic show and one that I’ll always remember.”
In 2005, Rhino Records released a 4-CD box set, “Don’t Fight The Feeling: The Complete Aretha Franklin & King Curtis Live At Fillmore West”, but the version of ‘Spirit in the Dark’ there is from the first night.
The entire duet with Ray is recorded in video, all 25 minutes of it. Technically, the quality is low. Musically, it’s sublime. Do yourself a favor, watch it all. Then watch it again. Watch it just before Rosh HaShana. Watch it just before Christmas and before Aid al-Fitr. Watch it before Martin Luther King’s birthday. Watch it before your own birthday. Watch it on your cat’s birthday. Just watch it.
Aretha is ostensibly singing about God, but it’s one very gritty God: Are you gettin’ the spirit in the dark?/People movin’ oh and they groovin’/Just gettin’ the spirit in the dark/Tell me sister how do ya feel?/Tell me my brother, how do you feel?/Do you feel like dancin?/Get up and let’s start dancin’/Start gettin’ the spirit in the dark./Riiiiide Sally ride/Put your hand on your hips/Cover your eyes/And move with the spirit.
Ray may be singing a church tune, but he’s doing it across the street in a honkey-tonk: Every time you get a girl singing with you, can you feel it deep inside?/When my woman wake me up in the morning, she give me the spirit/I gotta find me a woman tonight, ‘cause I feel the spirit.
Maybe Brother Ray can find The Spirit in a honkey-tonk or at the Fillmore West, but me and Z and D, we’re going to be in our neighborhood synagogue, and if we do any singing it’s gonna be a whole lot more bowdlerized than Ray’s. What can I tell you? We didn’t grow up in Rev. Franklin’s church. Well, we didn’t grow up in Grandpa’s shtiebel either, but each of us decided that those are the roots we choose to embrace. Not drugs, not Moonyism, not Fillmorism. We’re gonna sit in shul for three days and be bored out of our minds and try real hard to reconnect with where we came from and seriously ponder our destiny for the coming year. And maybe here and there we’ll even sneak in a little schmooze about Aretha and Ray’s ‘Spirit in the Dark’.
I’ve just returned from Vocalmente 2018, my seventh European a cappella festival in ten years. My vacation and musical-spiritual retreat of choice. We come together, we devotees and practitioners of forward-looking close harmony vocal music, in Fossano Italy or Aarhus Denmark or Västerås Sweden or London England to hear concerts, attend lectures, participate in workshops, sing some very cool music conducted by Peder Karlsson and Merel Martens, record with Bill Hare, drink beer, and socialize.
The afterparty socialization is of course the main attraction. There’s no distinction between the stars and the commonfolk, everyone hangs together, because that’s part of the ethos that defines our little cult–unaffected love of the music and each other. You meet someone who’s become an old friend over the past ten years. You meet someone you chatted with briefly a couple of times, have lunch and get close. You meet new people from exotic places like Paraguay or New Zealand or Portland. You meet people, amateurs and professionals, who know your music from back home (in my case the rock choir Vocalocity) and whose music you have been following for years now (like the Finnish Rajaton or the Italian Cluster).
It’s a tribal gathering, members young and old drawn together by love for this thing called ‘modern a cappella’ or ‘contemporary a cappella’ or ‘rhythm choirs’ or whatever. In the five days since it ended, social media have been choked with participants’ overwhelming love, photos and videos, and post-partum depression. There was a whole world of palpable love generated there. So thanks to Erik Bosio and the whole team and warm, beautiful Fossano for a great, great job, and to Tobia Hug for starting the whole thing.
So you’re sitting after the concert, drinking beer with some great Dane, and at the next table are sitting the six members of the rising start vocal group Accent, singing of summer in full-throated ease. Just for the fun of it.
Erik Bosio
Way back in 2011, some kids met while hanging around on the street corners of the YouTube channels of old vocal jazz groups. One was from the US, two from Canada, one from the UK, one from France, one from Sweden, all musicians, all freakishly good singers. These 20somethings shared a rare love for a special kind of old close harmony music. Here’s their version of how they met.
They checked each other out, found that they were kindred spirits separated only by distance. Being millenials, they knew how to do things on the interweb that elude or mystify the rest of us analog-bred humans–like forming a vocal group without bothering to meet physically. They started by making clips like “Get Away, Jordan”, a cover of the American gospel-jazz group Take 6; or ‘Too Close for Comfort’, in the style of The Hi-Lo’s and Singers Unlimited, American vocal jazz groups of the 1950s and 1960s respectively, both led by Gene Puerling.
Remember, they had never been in the same room. It’s a new world, Suzy Creamcheese.
Then in 2014 they were invited to a music festival in Sweden, where they met, rehearsed, and performed their first gig. If you think we live in a post-miracle world, just watch the clip. Their first gig.
Since then, their reputation has been growing. They continue to meet at gigs, rehearsing for a few days in hotel rooms each time, currently a couple of times a year.
Accent were at Vocalmente, performing on the final night of the festival. Stars, for the meantime within our community; soon, I assume, worldwide. Because they’re so good. And cool. And cute. And fun. And they sing like six gravity-defying supermen, precise as laser surgeons, enthusiastic as eleven year-olds on a roller coaster.
Old Friends
Friday night at the afterparty, I’m schmoozing with my Grammy-winning buddy Bill Hare, and they’re sitting at the next table singing. Accent, these guys we’ve all been watching for hours on YouTube, our jaws dragging on the floor, sitting at the next table, singing for fun. Then Saturday night at the afterparty, they just picked up mikes and started singing in the courtyard of the early XIVc castle for the fun of it. Because they can. For the pure joy of being young and ridiculously talented and good-looking and together with your buddies and making mind-bogglingly good music. This is how good they sounded and looked.
But just as much fun was watching them jumping around and whooping and hollering and leading a parade of dancing kids to the front of the stage where The Real Group are performing.
So one night Accent is dancing (in the rain) with abandon at the feet of their role models, The Real Group. And the very next night, The Real Group is gazing from the audience at these young ‘uns on stage – perhaps not jumping in the air like 25-year olds (except for Peder Karlsson, of course), but gaping speechlessly like the rest of us.
Anders Edenroth, last of the original TRG members still singing with the group, said with pride that Accent had invited him to their hotel room for their rehearsal that afternoon,” a VIP perk”. Accent said with awe that their legendary hero had graced them with his presence at their rehearsal. The passing of the torch, generation touching generation, live and in person in Fossano, Italy.
I’m still floating from the experience. I know that all my a cappella buddies who were there are still floating as well, each back in his own home territory. But we’ll keep in contact through Facebook and YouTube till next time—the Aarhus (Denmark) A Cappella Vocal Festival, AAVF, May 2019, where many of us will meet up again, hug and sing and listen to remarkable new music. And again we will generate a whole lot of unadulterated love, and feel lucky to be part of this wonderful, unique community.
Here are some more postings on related topics (for extra credit):
Last week I talked about Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ ‘Ooh Baby, Baby’ from a very personal angle. But the song just wouldn’t leave me alone (yes, it’s infectious as the bubonic plague), so I did some snooping, and discovered a few things.
One is that Smokey really does have an uncommonly beautiful voice. I knew that was true, but somehow I always wind up absorbed by the gestalt of his recordings, not him as a vocalist per se.
Another is that he’s abused ‘Ooh Baby, Baby’ horribly in a slew of embarrassing glam celeb duets that I very strongly recommend you not listen to: with Lucy Lawless (lawless indeed, there really should be a law against such demeaning appearances); with Ashanti (her plastic singing oudone by her affected hand gestures and ludicrous slinky walk); with Darryl Hall (all forced joviality, carrot-up-the-ass smiles); and even with Linda Ronstadt (whose schlocky 1978 cover of the song made us swoon for years. But neither she nor her treatment have worn well – here her floozy appearance is rivaled in bad judgment only by the stage set, with both Smokey and Linda concentrating more on avoiding tripping and stepping on each other’s toes than on singing the song).
But the discovery that’s been haunting me for days is this one, a spontaneous, honest homeboy and girl moment. Aretha Franklin (b. 1942) Smokey (b. 1940) grew up in the same Detroit ‘hood, knew each other since forever. Here she’s the featured guest on a TV show called Soul Train, and Smokey’s a guest of the guest. Watch the banter, the comfort and immense mutual admiration. Watch the emcee challenge Aretha live on camera to come up with a Smokey song. Look at the total focus with which she engages the task, bestowing on it both gravitas and the most serious of fun.
Listen to these two remarkable voices, velvet and steel. A magical meeting in a magical song. It’s not chemistry, it’s alchemy. Their emotion is palpable. As has been mine for these several days now. So will yours.
No matter that they botch the harmony at the end of the second verse. No matter that they omit the third verse entirely. At the beginning of the second verse (3’00” in the clip), Smokey takes the solo in the most transcendent, celestial voice produced by an earthbound human; then Aretha graces it with her blue note ‘mmm-hmm’, and it’s as miraculous as the rising of the sun.
Unrehearsed, glitzless. Watch it and say a little prayer of thanks for being present at the creation.
Old friends, winter companions, the old men lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sun;
