Boston

Growing up in a household that listened almost exclusively to classical music, I had scant exposure to what was currently popular. Sure, the occasional Beatles tune would sneak through the defenses and my mom had a Carpenters record that she really liked and she also liked doing housework to an album of Andre Kostalanetz playing easy-listening instrumental versions of Chicago songs (not exactly what I’d call popular, but not exactly classical either). But for the most part, I had a strictly classical upbringing. And I enjoyed classical music, and still do, but I was pretty sure that there was more to music than a bunch of dead white European men.

Not that there was much evidence to the contrary. When I was seven, my mother moved the two of us to the woods of northern Michigan so she could take a job at the Interlochen Arts Academy as the resident ballet instructor. It was a job she wasn’t entirely qualified to take – having the ballet bug implanted in her by a chance screening of The Red Shoes when she was a little girl, she devoted her life to being a ballerina and had taken thousands of hours of classes, but had never taught any of them. Still, she knew more about it than those who hired her and so she got the job and turned out to be more than capable, soon running the department and staying on for over a decade.

Interlochen was a strange place – an island of “culture” in the vast empty north woods. But the culture they taught and revered was of a classic European style. There were five general areas of artistic expression that were taught and, by extension, validated: music, visual arts, theatre, dance, and creative writing. The boarding high school also had an intensive college-preparatory academics program, but all the areas of study remained as they had been codified by the school’s founder, the visionary Dr. Joseph E. Maddy, who founded the National Music Camp, an intensive eight-week summer program, at Interlochen in the 1930s. Out of that popular and famous program grew the Arts Academy, opened in the 1960s to a much smaller group of boarding high school students (IAA usually had between 300-400 students while NMC accommodated thousands of students from age seven through college and beyond). But, consciously or not, the programs of study rarely ventured out of the 1930s definitions. There was no film or video department. The dance department taught ballet and modern (the latter sometimes begrudgingly), but that was it – occasionally a jazz dance guest teacher would pass through, but it wasn’t considered part of the core curriculum, even though that’s ultimately where most of the dancing jobs are. And, although both IAA and NMC had killer jazz bands, the focus was clearly on classical music. Popular music as it was practiced after the 1950s (i.e. rock ‘n’ roll, etc) was universally ignored, if not reviled, so although I knew there was such a thing out there, I never really got to hear any of it.

In eighth grade, after I had starting forging my own trails in music appreciation – almost all of which were symphonic synthesizer albums by the likes of Synergy, Tangerine Dream, and Vangelis – I decided to find out what this “rock” music that my peers seemed to enjoy so much was all about. The trouble was how to get any of it. For some reason, I rejected out of hand the primal source of popular music that has instructed millions, if not billions, of kids on the standards and practices of rock: the radio. It wasn’t that there weren’t popular music stations around, it just never really occurred to me to explore them. In our house, the radio meant the classical WIAA, with a transmission tower a literal stone’s throw from my back yard. When, a year or two later, I did start to listen to the radio, I discovered that my instincts were right, it was largely a vast wasteland of crap and drivel (this was about the time that Debby Boone was tearing up the charts with her execrable You Light Up My Life). I didn’t have money to spend on albums – or singles even – and, more importantly, I had no idea where to begin. Being an only child, I had no older siblings whose collections I could peruse, so I had to borrow somebody else’s older sibling. And the someone I chose was Melissa, one of my friend Mel’s four or five older sisters.

Being that Interlochen was such a small town, one’s choice of friends was pretty limited. I was very lucky to have three great people my age who lived within easy walking distance of my house. Lenore, who was in my class at the local elementary school, and her brother Karl (a year younger) were the kids of the Academy’s German teacher (does anybody teach high school German anymore?). They lived in faculty housing about a block from my house and we became great friends. But Lenore was the oldest (of four) in that family, and knew as little about rock as I did, so that wasn’t particularly helpful. My other best friend, Mel, who was also in my elementary school class, lived in the other direction, through the State Park (her father helped run it), also an easy walk through the woods. There were a couple of other kids our age around that we were friendly with, but the four of us were largely inseparable for quite a few years, from the time I moved into the neighborhood in fourth grade until halfway through high school, when I moved into the dorms at the Academy and made a whole new set – and class – of friends. Karl and Lenore and I were all “faculty brats”, attached to the Academy, but Mel was a local, a subtle but significant distinction. For although we were all locals to some degree, the faculty brats inhabited the rarified air of the Academy bubble, which stood in direct contrast to the real local community. We were in the community, but not of it, and, although that distinction was largely lost on us as children, it became more palpable as we grew older.

At any rate, Mel (short for Melody – although she’d beat the crap out of you if you called her that) was the youngest of five or six girls (I never could keep a straight count) – and youngest by quite a stretch. Her nearest sibling, Melissa, was several years older than her and her other sisters had already left home, or were in the process of leaving. In one of those strange family quirks, all of the members of that family had names that began with “M” (Melody, Melissa, Mel, Martha, Maureen (maybe a couple more), and if you wanted to stretch the point, Mr., Mom, and the two dogs Mindy and Magic). When I was around, only Mel and Melissa were still in the house, and Mel was pretty unapproachable. So I went to Melissa and asked if she would be so kind as to let me borrow a couple of records so I could hear what this rock stuff was all about. She carefully considered my request and dug through her collection and let me borrow three records that would serve as an appropriate introduction to the wondrous and exciting world of rock ‘n’ roll: Foreigner’s first album, Nazareth’s Greatest Hits, and the Peter Criss solo album. Right away, I understood what was so appealing about this music: the beat, the beat, the beat. By this point, having listened to synthesizer music for a while, my ears had become accustomed to electronic sounds so the textures of the electric guitars didn’t scare me as much as they used to, and a lot of the screaming seemed unnecessary (but kind of cathartic for my blossoming teenage angst), but it was the incessant thumping heartbeat and splashing cymbals that really caught my attention. The marriage of those two strong attractors – the sonic possibilities of electronic synthesis and the tribal explosion of drums – was still a few years away, so I contented myself with buying that which I truly loved, synthesizer music, and getting my rock fix by slowly borrowing my way through Melissa’s recommendations, from the sublime (The Cars), to the ridiculous (did I mention Peter Criss?).

It wasn’t until a little more than a year later, when I had left the local junior high to start taking classes at the Academy (although as a “day student” (I went home at night while everybody else went back to the dorms where the real action was)) that I heard a rock record I liked so much that I had to have it for my own. I was a freshman, by far the smallest class in the school (there were ten times as many seniors as there were freshman), and I had started taking acting classes, although I wasn’t very good (that’s putting it charitably). But I was good at, and interested in, theatre tech, so I spent a lot of time hanging lights and painting sets and whatnot for the many theatre and dance productions that took place throughout the year. One day, I was up on a ladder at Grunow theatre, the rat-infested tinderbox that the drama geeks called home, focusing lights and adjusting gels, while other techies moved sets around and adjusted the seating. As was usual, somebody brought a tape deck so we’d have music to listen to while we did our work. The music that came out of that box was unimpressive and forgettable (drama geeks, as if they weren’t annoying enough on their own (and they were), had a mind-boggling penchant for show tunes). Like most of what I heard those days, it just rolled right off me, in one ear and out the other.

But then somebody put in a tape that caught my attention. The band had all of the power that I was learning to appreciate in rock, but it was a lot more polished than what I usually heard. And the music itself was considerably more sophisticated – almost classical in its construction. On top of all that, the electric guitars had a heroic, soaring quality that I had never before encountered and the whole effect was incredibly uplifting and optimistic – almost mythic in scale. After a couple of songs, I shimmied down the ladder to see what was playing.

It was Boston.