The Inner Game of Music
I did have a few lessons with Georg Gruenberg who lived on San Francisco’s Nob Hill. The cousin of the great Beethoven interpreter Artur Schnabel, he was known as “the preparer” at the Berlin Stern Conservatory in the 1920s.
Chapter 9: Crush
Come on over,” said the extroverted one. She and her twin sister had a large playhouse in their backyard. They were highly sexualized and talked about “shooting the wad.” I got the idea of something like an ejaculation. Their twin bounty blinded me to any idea of how to close the gap. I waited for them to take the lead. I’m sure the star football player didn’t hesitate to advance for a forward pass.
My mother saw me with two different girls and remarked, “those were some ‘Mutt and Jeff’ girls you were walking with.” I lost all interest in those girls.
For mom, at age ten, I was her ideal son. After that I could not be controlled by the many spankings. One day I just laughed hysterically —it no longer hurt, and I got spanked no more.
When I was ten, my mother, standing in the kitchen with a large knife, weeping: “Just kill me.” These scenes with dad drove me out of the house and into the woods. I resolved never to fight in my own relationships, and fighting went into the bag.
I was sixteen, and my parents had been fighting. My mother standing in the swimming pool fully clothed. She is calling for me. In the night the water is lapping, reflecting the yellow lights around the pool. She refuses my father’s hand. So I have to go and take her hand and draw her out of the water. Robert Bly would say she had given me her "Hero." My mother and I were psychically connected, and she always knew when I was in trouble, sending me money when I was broke. She loved me inordinately and not in a good way.
My father also gave me his Hero. One of my brother’s Cockatiels got loose in the house and was wounded by the cat, which had taken it under my parents’ bed. My father, the WWII bombardier, had to call me to rescue the bird, which I found already dead.
I inherited a loud mouth from my dad. Of course, seeing this feature in his son incensed him. When I was seventeen (the day of the moon landing), we were at the dinner table. I said “Ah, that looks fake,” and he replied, as he had been doing recently, “I’m gonna punch you.”
I had had enough. I stood up and said, “Go ahead!”
He looked a bit startled but he held back. I punched him in the chest. Maybe it was necessary for me to stand up—I got my warriors back—but the “pain body” in his psyche was transferred over to me and became mine. I went into life with a heavy pain body. If I walked into a bar or pool hall, all the men with heavy pain bodies would turn and look at me. My pain body attracted violence.
At this time, both parents were engaged in paltry affairs. My mom would meet hers at a local bar called Tiddly, and Dad’s was at work. He was recently retired from the Air Force selling real estate in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. He was also having heart attacks at his desk, according to the secretary.
The folks were on the verge of a breakup, and no one was giving much thought to my future. The default solution was American River Junior College.
We were both nineteen and going to “High School with ashtrays.” She wore tan corduroys, unlike the other girls, and flannel shirts—Pendleton’s. She was blonde, blue eyed, strong; half tomboy and half radiant earth mother. I asked June to a Delaney & Bonny concert. We ended up sitting in my car, a convertible—as rain drummed on the canvas roof above. Bucket seats are not conducive to closeness. Neither one of us knew what to do to start the conversation—we just sat there for a long while.
With my eighteenth year came the decision regarding my future. My piano teacher wanted me to study with Charles Rosen, pianist and author of works on Sonata form, in New York.
Music seemed to be the proper career for me, and California did not offer the schools, the institutions or the audiences. The world of classical music was centered in New York.
Chapter 10: The Inner Game of Music
It was a milieu I found very simpatico—Northern California in the Hippie days, the birthplace of the counterculture—and in truth I have always carried that culture with me.
If I had looked around more thoroughly, I might have found a more nourishing field of endeavor than the stodgy world of the music conservatory. Carlos Castañeda had a profound effect on me, especially Don Juan’s maxim to “live each day as though it were your last.” But without any contacts in the burgeoning field of shamanism and alternative, back-to-the-land ideas, I regarded the influence of Castañeda as a danger and could see no practical use for it, even though I had psychic abilities. I could deal out the cards and stop on the Queen of Spades 98 times out of 100. I could change the card: 10 of Diamonds, King of Hearts. In my college archery class, I made my buddy very upset by hitting the bullseye and never missed. “Cut it out,” he urged. I actually had to quit that class because of my unerring aim, despite the fact that I had never wielded a bow before.
My friend and I shared an interest in history; we created a Current Events club at our school. His sister was fifteen, I was three years older. She would ride me around the dining room table. Her mom, a recluse, would talk to me as she did with very few. Those bumpy rides around the table must have been more powerful than I realized. At the age of fifteen a girl is developing a woman’s body; her emotions are haywire. Those new feelings are overwhelming her intellect, and she is likely to fall in love with the first bouncy boy. Her older sister intervened, warning me not to take advantage of the responsibility of opening a young girl’s heart. Advice which I totally rejected.
Had we been living in a Native American tribe a century before, we two would have been partners for life—and I would have been trained to be a shaman. But there was nothing for me in that arid suburban existence. I looked around and saw no prospects. My brother stayed and became a truck driver. The Post Office always held a fascination, and as a little tyke I always asked my Dad to lift me up to the counter so I could see what was going on. “Nothing,” he said.
We visited a department store and Missy was pointing out all the consumer goods she wanted. I made a big scene to underscore my poverty and lack of prospects, which she thought was funny. I had no means or desire to support her materialism with the artifacts of industrial capitalism.
Instead, I was discovering the marvelous sound-world of J. S. Bach—the gateway recording by E. Power Biggs. When I took the college entrance exam, throughout the duration of the test period I had that organ music playing in my head, and the sound and flow of it helped me to sail through with flying colors, placing in the 93rd percentile overall.
I got an AA degree at American River where a fellow musician introduced me to the world of baroque music. His friends played and/or made baroque instruments (harpsichords, baroque flutes and oboes, with the shop floor ankle-deep in fragrant wood shavings). I also fell in love with the music of Brahms, and Mahler became a huge influence.
My piano teacher was a married lady in her late twenties. I fell in love with her too, though I never told her this until later. There was no way I could imagine she might reciprocate my feelings, but she actually had a crush on me too, which we managed to express playing Mozart Piano Concertos. She had a Siamese cat with an owlish meow, and her house was piled-high with excess furniture, books, scores and just a bare path to the two grand pianos. There was a peculiar smell to the place. Maybe it was her pheromones … or it might have been the cat.
She urged me to get out of that cultural backwater and study music in New York. So when I found myself spending hours each day on the phone with Ina, things all pointed in one direction. I said goodbye to my parents, packed one suitcase and one briefcase, and got on a plane for New York. I was very sad to leave my folks. My dad, who never expressed such feelings, managed to say, “I love you” and shed a few tears. On the plane I also cried, even though I believed, as we were taught, “men don’t cry.”
I was leaving my world behind for a strange new one. I would miss the cool rainy days of winter, the endless scorching hot summers, with afternoons in the pool and evenings sleeping under the stars, hanging out with friends, working on cars, listening to music, smoking pot and generally acting wild and crazy.
Gray Scott: You and all our pals delighted in satirizing the rest of the world—over-the-top slap-stick self-entertainment which knew no bounds... Parents, teachers, siblings, classmates, world leaders, entertainment figures, animals... no one was safe, not even the lady across the street.
Mrs. Stilson, the street busybody, attempted to spy on whatever was going on. So you, Kevin, decided to give her something to make her spying really worthwhile. I met you around the corner, got in the Red Flame, then you drove in reverse back to your normal parking spot in front of my house, we got out and walked backwards into my house, making backwards conversation with exaggerated backward motions of our heads and hands, like a backwards silent movie!
Another time we packed some tools into your car, headed out onto the road, then faked a breakdown at a stop sign. After a few "audience cars" accumulated behind us, we piled out of the Red Flame (with exaggerated silent comedy motions), opened the hood, and began thrashing around under the hood with a hammer, saw, and pry bar, threw out a few pieces of junk that we stashed in the engine compartment, then leapt back into the car and sped off!
And the classic prank of one of us acting retarded, on an outing with his "normal" friends. The "retarded" guy would then do any disruptive thing, uttering "Freddy speak," while the rest of us would try to restrain him and move him along.
We were not exactly nerds or outcasts, but not the "In Crowd" either. We were the tolerated middle, making fun of all, just to laugh among ourselves at a world that we didn't fully understand and never would. Like the Peter Pan resistance.
You once said in an off-hand moment at age 16 (reacting to the way some adult had treated you), "What am I? I'm not a boy... and I'm not a man. I guess I'm just a JERK!" You aptly voiced how nearly every boy felt at one time or another, whether they could articulate it or not.
When you got the Beatles "Yellow Submarine" album, "It's Only a Northern Song" came on:
If you're listening to this song,
You may think the chords are going wrong,
But they're not, we just wrote it like that
You laughed insanely and leapt around at the distorted music and lyrics, saying, "This is the greatest rock song of all time! This will drive the Rubes crazy!!" I think you could picture yourself leading us all in a song like that, with baffled and offended people all around us! That song was exactly suited to our off-beat humor, especially yours as a budding avant-garde musician.
I departed to take a job at SPI in New York, meeting my boss and his girlfriend at La Guardia airport. To special friends, I was known as “Zeke.”
Excerpted from Kevin Zucker's unpublished memoir The Inner Game of Love.