I Was a Teenage Existentialist #20 Music and The News

Mom says “Just use your Imagination.”

(Author’s note: I have been sick with bug for ten days, and am only now coming out of it. My family took good care of me, and now that I have given it to them, I will return the favor. It’s a drag, bout not very serious).

Mom was 44 when The Beatles came through, as recounted in the previous installment. I kind of vaguely knew something amazing was happening, because they were from England, they had long hair, and all the girls in New York were screaming. And again, those haircuts! I was in the Midwest, surrounded by butch, short-haired military haircuts. I did not know why, but I was 9 years old, it was 1964, the country had gone from WW2 to Korea, and every guy was expected to serve in the military at some point, so a butch haircut was expected, that’s what the athletes did, while long hair was not even considered. It was beyond our ken. I had no idea what I was looking at, except that this Beatles Thing was different, it was foreign, it was European, and it was everywhere. It seemed like it changed everything (We’ll see). We used to lip-sync to it in the basement with our friends, over and over. And it made music more important than anything, even TV.

Through these years from 9 to 13, I spent plenty of time in the living room, listening to music with Gary. It was too cold to go out in the winter, Norwegians were used to quiet winters, and because we were in a suburban neighborhood, we were isolated, nowhere near things like libraries or stores or things to do. You had to drive to do anything. No buses or city streets without a 20 minute bike ride or an hour’s walk. We were just killing time. We listened to mom’s jazz records, like Time/Life collections, covers of the hits; or the Tijuana Brass, or Bing Crosby; but my brother Bruce had a job at Dayton’s Department Store, he would also buy what was going on, The Beatles and Stones, and Bob Dylan because he was from Minnesota. The Early Stuff. The Times They Are a-Changin’, Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, and Highway 61 Revisited all registered in this time period. I did not appreciate how cool Bob was, of course, it was over my head, but I listened to it all. I took it in, it put me off of poetry for the next 50 years, because between Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, I understood poets to be no good if they weren’t writing songs (Ezra Pound would back me up on this). Songs had Meaning, songs Got to People where they lived, Songs Had Impact. You could hear songs in the car on the radio on the way to work, or on a portable radio at night, and talk about them with your pals. Poetry was hard to understand, read by English majors to each other, it had no shared experience element to it, no common reference point; they had No Impact, no audience that was visible. It was made for a rarefied atmosphere of people with goatees and berets and bongos, of which I was unacquainted. Poetry needed quiet and peace of mind, music just needed a passive, willing ear to give it a try on the way to somewhere else, songs had melody and harmony and a backbeat and a connection to the body in ways I could not even begin to fathom. The radio waves sent electrons shooting through my atomic structure. As Brian Jones said about John Lee Hooker, “The Earth shook on its axis.”

Radio wasn’t just the Sound Salvation, it was also exciting because it had big money in it. Every American has an eye out for The Main Chance, waiting to hear about the next Gold Rush. We loved the Beatles for all the right reasons as well as all the wrong ones. They were fabulous to hear, they looked very cool, girls went nutty about them, and they were getting rich. What else is there? Kids talked about songs in school, it was currency, you’d go to your friend’s house to hear it if they got a new record. Music was the Standard unit of measurement, the air we breathed, how we marked our place in the timeline.

Dylan was a countervailing force, more serious, more deeply affecting, less accessible. The folk boom was derived form the Civil War Centenary, and that was in the air when Bob was coming up. Serious stuff. I did not understand what Bob Dylan was singing about, but I knew it was cool, it was something special, it seemed really amazing. I understood Blowin’ in the Wind to be about the Civil Rights Movement, we saw Bob on TV with Joan Baez, his champion, the one who gave him credibility, at the March on Washington. Bruce played some guitar, and brought home a collection of Dylan songs so he could learn the chords, and I saw the lyrics for With God on Our Side that struck a deep sounding note:

“The cavalry charged, the Indians fell/

The cavalry charged, the Indians died/

Oh the Country was young with God on its side.”

And the closer:

“If God’s on our side, he’ll stop the next war.”

I got up in class, I think it was 5th grade, and read the lyrics; the substitute was a little agog. Too bad my teacher wasn’t there.

Dylan was Way, Way over my head. But I Heard It, I took it in, I knew it was Something, I understood that much. Different people had hits- The Byrds, the Turtles, Peter Paul and Mary of course, the Association. And a beautiful talented serious singer like Joan Baez would not waste her time on some no-goodnik unless he had something valuable. She broke the doors down for him. If a beautiful woman will advocate for you, then people will give you a chance. Beautiful women have better things to do with their time than advocate for a chump. She had street cred, and she shared it generously.

And Bob and Joan were Peace-niks. Folk music at the time carried a kind of moral purity, stretching from Woody Guthrie to Pete Seegar; and everyone wanted Dylan to be the next in line. There was a. hunger for moral leadership. But Bob just wanted to show them he was the best song writer ever, and when he went electric, he was briefly a rock player with Mike Bloomfield, which was like a divorce. He quickly went to Nashville to play country music and hung out with Johnny Cash, who was as much a spiritual leader as an entertainer. Dylan went from Folk to Blues-rock at the Newport festival, I heard about the purists freaking out because he could have been the next Pete Seeger— if he wanted to lead sing-alongs— but Bob just wanted to be the next Bob Dylan.

So Poetry did not Sing to me, I could not hear it or sing along to it when I read it. Poetry became an Alien Subculture to me. That’s a train I missed.

The Radio could reach right down into our nice inexpensively built house on 1.8 acres of lawn with a flat commercial roof on a leafy street in this new suburb of Minneapolis. We appreciated the peacefulness of our locale, the sense that crime could not find us here, that we had good schools, and if we mowed the lawn and paid our bills, we’d be okay. It was a sheltered, naive peace. Mom and dad had gone to college- they met in college, actually- and they Believed In College. College was the way up for the Norwegian Immigrant families who came here with just enough money to get a start on a farm, back when land was cheap and labor was cheaper. All my grandparents grew up on farms. My dad was the first in his family to go to college, and it got him out of the fields; my mom was second after her brother, and it meant she would escape small town life and stay in Minneapolis if she went to Augsburg College, a smaller Lutheran school in the city, which started as a seminary for Lutheran pastors, but found there weren’t enough candidates with college degrees, so they opened a college to feed student graduates into the seminary.

Mom was a City Girl; her mom Pearl (Torgerson) Olson was a teacher, she rode a horse out to a one-room schoolhouse on the prairie- cars were not common yet until the 20s- and teaching was an honorable profession for women who wanted a career, so m mom went to college to get a good teaching job. And that’s what we were all aimed at. Getting into College was the family preoccupation. School was embedded in the aspirations of White immigrant communities, Europeans believed in education. The paradox was that teaching was both a “Girl’s Job” like babysitting; but it was also an opportunity to make a difference in how the next generation was using its head, and there is no limit to learning, is there? You could not predict where it would lead when you discovered the life of the mind. Mom was crafty; she made sure I knew how to read by the time I was 4. She taught kids how to think for themselves, to have an open mind, to be confident in themselves, to be daring in their thinking. I remember when I was about 4 and I could not figure out how to do something, and mom said with a big, encouraging smile, “Just use your Imagination.” And I got it, right away, and I smiled too. And I think that’s how she taught. Her students loved her. Her students Learned.

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