Through Alan’s Eyes
Chapter 3
On leaving Juilliard, my career was about to take a huge change of direction, if only temporarily. Already, I had developed a taste for the night life, playing piano and singing super-Oldies at Uptown piano bars for tips and drinks, in the young Al Jolson-like tenor he cultivated in his earliest recordings. As the evenings grew later, I made the rounds of the Village jazz joints, both to listen and to fill in between sets. There, at fabled places like The Village Vanguard and others, my interest in the uses of percussion as an independent end in itself, which had begun at school and in my contemporaneous independent listening to the work of Varese and others, expanded further, serving me well later in my compositional career.
At roughly the same time, Tim Aurthur’s sister Gretchen, who worked at Radio Pacifica WBAI-FM, dragged me upstairs one night to meet talk-show host Steve Post, whose program in those years still included musical segments. Within a short time, I was a semi-regular on his show, sometimes sharing part of a program with British musician and record-collector Ian Whitcomb and bantering back and forth on the subject of early Tin Pan Alley songs, the more obscure, the better.
As a result, the musical persona I was developing caught the ear and eventually the eye of Nick Perls, founder of Blue Goose Records and its parent company, Yazoo, which reissued old country blues recordings from the 1920s and ‘30s. In 1972, I signed a six-year deal with Blue Goose, conceived by Perls as the Yazoo for still-living blues artists, but which soon expanded to include other comic and old-time sounding music of various genres. Thus I joined the ragtime and blues revival of the 1970s, not only as a recording artist, but appearing in concert with such legends as John Fahey and Eubie Blake, who passed away shortly after his 100th birthday in 1983.
Early in 1974, Fahey induced Nick Perls to release me from my contract for long enough to record a double album of solo piano improvisations for his legendary Takoma label, then located in L.A. Strangely, the album, Morning Impromptus/Evening Bacchanals, was only released in a limited edition on eight-track tape (!) before financial difficulties forced the sale of Takoma to Chrysalis Records. Almost immediately, Warner Brothers Music invited Fahey to visit with an eye to signing him, which they did. John somehow persuaded them to take a look at me, giving me the opportunity to mingle with many people in the top echelons of the music and film worlds, even engaging poolside in a friendly, thoroughly profanity-laced man-to-man talk with venerable (though far from venerated) mogul and company chairman Jack Warner, then in his last years both with the company he and his brothers founded fifty years earlier and on this earth. After less than a week, though, the music division’s A & R people sent me packing back to New York and Blue Goose, where my name and success were still a known quantity. I turned out several more piano/vocal albums, with or without backup instrumentals, the last of them in 1978.
As a neo-vaudeville and blues performer, however, I am probably best remembered for my vocal/piano album The Duke of Ook, which hit the stands in January 1975. With a couple of exceptions, I wrote all the selections, either alone or with Tim Aurthur as my co-lyricist. My early-1900s musical stylings contrasted with our hip, double-entendre-filled lyrics to create what soon became an instant cult classic, especially with the college crowd and latter-day hippie set. It is sometimes hard for me to believe that The Duke has staunch adherents of all ages to this day, and though an overpriced air-mail order boot-leg CD was release in Japan a few years back, the first legitimate CD re-release is in the works even as I write these words.
I could say much more about my years as a recording artist and performer outside the concert-music arena, but I feel that this is not the place to do so; it would only deter me from condensing this period of my life so that I may continue with the overview of my compositional career. I will just detain you long enough to mention my brief and ill-considered marriage to a young Canadian fan who was under the false impression that my background in classical music could be her springboard to a career as an operatic soprano. When I failed to accomplish this feat on the first attempt, the relationship became rocky, was filled with many brief separations and reconciliations, and eventually ended with a Canadian annulment early in 1980. There were a few years when we didn’t speak, but eventually we re-established a largely telephone friendship which continues to this day. I bear no ill-will towards her because, in retrospect, she worked throughout our union (sometimes to my annoyance) and even at the end, never asked for a penny from me, at a time in my life when demands for alimony would have been extremely easy to make and probably quickly granted.
With my popularity as a performing and recording artist (not to mention the time left on my Blue Goose contract) quickly waning as the 1970s drew to an end, my realization, always lurking under the surface, that I was allowing my primary goal of composing to atrophy, came to the fore again. As fate would have it, I stepped back into those waters one toe at a time as unexpected opportunities to compose background music for the legitimate theatre presented themselves. By that, I am not referring to musical comedy by any means, but rather to dramas which required some sort of musical background, be it acoustic, electro-acoustic, or electronic to heighten the intensity of the scripts and, occasionally, the performances. Of these, the most significant were probably “R”, a ‘surrealistic murder mystery’ by C.V. Peters, seen at New York’s Playwright’s Horizons and Westbeth Theatres in 1977, and the semi-autobiographical “Public Lives” by Julia Cameron, later of fame as the author of “The Artist’s Way” and its companion books, which was presented at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey in 1983.
To tell the truth, for more than a decade I had become the wandering Jew, lost someplace in that no-man’s land between the worlds of pop and blues and an under-world in which I tailored my compositional skills to fit the specific expressive needs of contemporary theatre. In a sense I was working far closer to the more cutting-edge film scores of today than the musical comedy scores of years gone by. I was surrounded by but not yet quite ready to jump headlong into my own artistic truth, the “concert hall within.” I could hear with my own heart, soul, and mind, my music, which I had been seeking after and moving toward, sometimes by leaps, often by baby-steps since student days. Though it was sometimes difficult for me to fully grasp at the time, my “hiatus” in these other musical worlds of the 1970s and early 1980s was to play a large and invaluable part in forming the underpinnings of my life’s work when considered as a whole.
When the composer’s pencil, the painter’s brush, the sculptor’s chisel or the writer’s pen lays still for a long period, there is generally a compelling reason, be it a life-changing event, a shift in priorities or the realization that perhaps the would-be artist is not really an artist after all. Unless he has reached the point by which the dual tests of repeated failure to progress creatively alternating with long periods of abstinence from work, has all but borne out this last supposition, chances are that he will eventually return to his craft, hopefully having gained a degree of personal maturity which was previously absent, and the courage and confidence to forge onward. I believe this was true in my case, though I never completely laid my pencil down but let it be diverted to other purposes for reasons that today seem more frivolous than not: adding to my own repertoire of pop songs for use as a cabaret performer/recording artist, or crafting a theatrical background score to manipulate the emotions of the audience in dependably predictable directions. In all honesty, the ten years beginning in 1973 saw only a trickle of art songs which may be considered music qua music, find its way from my pen onto paper, and even these had a secondary, extra-musical reason for their existence. Other than these, I add some of my theatre music to the list only by virtue of the fact that I made use of “contemporary” or “serious” musical techniques, including electronic and electro-acoustic elements to help express an emotional gamut running from tenderness straight through to terror. This was probably most evident in my music for Julia Cameron’s Public Lives (1983), especially in the first act’s surreal final scene as the narrator/protagonist stands helplessly by while her pre-school-aged daughter faces unimaginable horror as the Merry-Go-Round she boards for a gleeful ride soon carries her to a premature death when a boa-constrictor wraps itself around her leg, literally choking the life out of her. To achieve the sense of chilling fear utilizing the musico-dramatic skills I had at my command, I used the 1890s-vintage Hurdy-Gurdy tune “Days of Heaven”, played initially in strict waltz time, later growing multi- layered and distorted nearly beyond recognition with the use of the Yamaha DX-7 (in the early ‘80s still a relatively sophisticated electronic instrument), and finally raised to a fevered, chaotic pitch by manipulating the synthesizer’s dials, echoing the screech emanating from deep within the hapless mother’s soul just before the stage goes black and silent.
