32 Years

Today is the 32nd anniversary of my mother’s death. I’ve debated whether or not to write about it on the blog for the past 36 hours or so. I am and have been deeply reluctant to write about her – I don’t want to seem mawkish or significant. And I sure don’t want anyone’s sympathy – I’ve been blessed in a multitude of ways. But I write anyway, because so much of who I am as a music person is from her – both in life and death.

My mother, Gerda Pastor, was born in 1931, in a little village called Nowy Targ, in the southern part of Poland, near the Czechoslovakia border. Her father, Max, was a contractor who bought various foodstuffs in the Polish farmland, and then sold them to Polish army posts. He had been an officer in the Polish Army during World War I, and he built upon those contacts to create a successful business. Max was a gruff man, and while loving, the real warmth in the house came from my grandmother Bronia, who my mom adored. She also had an older sister, Helene, who she had an up and down relationship with.

My grandfather knew by 1938 that there was no future for Jews in Poland. Anti-Semitism was all encompassing in Poland – my aunt told me years later that it was “everywhere you went.” The epithet “Dirty Jew” was commonplace and accepted at all levels of Polish society, and it followed my family, and all Jews everywhere. So they decided to get out. My grandmother had relatives already in New York, and they agreed to provide a sponsorship so they could attain visas. The process was ongoing in September of 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland.

My grandfather had managed to get American dollars in anticipation of leaving Poland, and with those, he proceeded to bribe their way out of Poland. Carrying as little as possible (what survives are some photos and a Candelabra that is at my father’s house), they got one of the last trains out of Warsaw before it fell to the Germans. They traveled to Romania, and then to Yugoslavia, where they got on the S.S. Rex, which sailed for New York and arrived November 15, 1939 (ironically, my day of birth, 31 years later). My mother was eight years old. Much of their family was still in Poland, and would eventually be murdered in Auschwitz, a fact that haunted my mother until her dying day.

Settling at first in the Bronx, and then in Washington Heights, my family began to adjust to life in America. My grandfather went to work as a dishwasher in the luncheonette that was owned my grandmother’s relatives, and did so without complaint. Then he became a line cook, and eventually, he owned his own dairy restaurant. There was no “English As A Second Language” type of program in the school system back then, so my mother and aunt (my aunt was 14) entered school without speaking a word of English. Within 6 months, my aunt says, they both could communicate passably in English. They adjusted.

What is important to know about my mother is that she was exceptionally beautiful, and her beauty gained her entry into a glamorous and sophisticated world. Men wanted to wine her, dine her, teach her, etc. (Emphasis on the “etc.”) She came to have a love affair with culture – film, music (especially opera), and fine art. She became a stylist, and she also wrote for several New York based art magazines as well acting as an agent for Vincent Cavallaro, who would later become my Godfather.

She absolutely adored New York, and was the quintessential New Yorker – smart, sophisticated, sexy, urbane, and in possession of what my father later called, “a very wonderful and timely streak of vulgarity.” She dressed uber-stylishly. I’m not sure I ever saw her wear a pair of jeans. Dresses or slacks. And always high heels. She spoke several different languages and traveled often – to Italy (on several occasions), France and Israel (she was an intensely devout Zionist). Later on after I was born and she was in her 40’s, a male friend of a neighbor of ours said upon meeting her, “Oh, you’re the Femme Fatale from next door!” She batted her eyes at him – she loved it.

She met my father through her work in June of 1966. He was running a company that manufactured womens shoes, belts and handbags, and she came to consult as a stylist. My father fell in love with her at first sight. “From the moment I saw her until the day she died,” he told me after she was gone, “there was no one else.”

When my father proposed, my mom had a few conditions. One of which was to have a child. My dad already had two kids and wasn’t keen on another, but my mom said she wanted to bring a Jewish child into the world that would replace the Jews that had been killed in the Holocaust. He accepted her conditions, and they married in November of 1968. Two years later I was born.

What I remember most about her in those years was her warmth. It was enveloping. When she was joyful, she could light up a room, and her laugh came from deep down within her, a soulful laugh. (My father loves to tell the story of how when they saw Mel Brooks’s “The Producers” in 1968, my mother the Holocaust survivor laughed so hard during the “Springtime For Hitler” scene that she peed in her pants.) She was physically demonstrative, generous with hugs and kisses for all.

She became devoutly religious as she got older, and I can remember how she would light the candles every Friday night to usher in the Sabbath. She would cover her eyes and say the prayer, and in those moments, she seemed almost taken by the spirit. I can see now that she was communing with something – maybe God, maybe the memories of Poland, or maybe just a spirit that she was attuned to. When she would tuck me in at night, we would always sing the “Shema” together, and it was done with an immense amount of love, but with more than a hint of sadness in there too. I didn’t know it then, but it was my first introduction to soul.

Her sadness became a real darkness at times. For whatever reason, she took the burden of the deaths of six million Jews upon her in some fashion, and it led her to drink. My dad told me well into my adolescence that I once asked him, “Why does Mommy act so different at night then she does during the day?” He traveled a lot for work then, so her drinking scared him to death, as she was responsible for looking out for me. It scared me too. I knew she loved me a lot, but the darkness she was enveloped in made her seem unreachable to me at times, and like all little kids, I blamed myself. And then I got angry and I diminished her in my mind. Every night when my dad would walk in the door, I would be thrilled – it was though the cloud above the house lifted, and I felt completely safe again.

I don’t want to make too much of her drinking. It was there and it happened, but we were a very happy family. I was very happy. I never wondered for a second whether my parents loved me. I could feel their adoration. And I adored them.

Saturday, March 19, 1977 started as a gorgeous, brilliantly sunny day. It had snowed several inches the day before, severely enough that they shut my 1st grade class down about an hour or two after we had arrived. I watched my usual Saturday morning cartoons – The Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner show, followed by the Shazam and Isis hour on the little black and white TV in my room, played outside in the snow, and then got dressed.

At around 1pm we left in my father’s rust colored Dodge Dart to go to the library. He drove, I sat in the passenger’s seat so I could be his co-pilot, and my mom sat in the back seat. We were all in good moods. None of us wore seat belts. A few minutes after 1pm, we were traveling through an intersection when we were struck at full speed by another car that ran a blinking yellow light. We spun out and crashed into a telephone pole.

I remember vividly looking to my left, and seeing my father moaning and writhing, his eyes closed, in obvious agony. His moaning was an unbearable and frightening sound, but I was so disoriented that everything occurred to me in the moment as surreal. I had slammed stomach first into the glove compartment, but was strangely not in much pain. I was just scared, stunned and in shock. I heard sirens arrive quickly, and a policeman emerged to help me get out of the car. When he pulled me out, I turned to the right and saw my mom, unconscious, her head resting against the right window, a trickle of blood coming down her ear. I took the policeman’s hand and was led to a waiting ambulance. There was a crowd of onlookers at the scene, the looks on their faces both horrified and concerned. I turned around one last time and looked at the car, twisted and mangled beyond recognition.

My father, fortunately, suffered relatively light injuries (a broken rib and a black eye), but my mom never regained consciousness. While I underwent surgery for a ruptured spleen that the doctors detected after shortly after arriving at the hospital, the doctors told my father that while I was going to be fine, my mom had suffered massive brain damage from her head slamming into the window at the moment of impact, and she wasn’t going to make it. They had to tell him three times before it registered. She died a little past midnight on Sunday, March 20, 1977.

Even now, 32 years after, I find it difficult to really be with the enormity of what happened that day. But obviously, one part of my life ended on that day, and another one began. I soon forgot what my mom’s voice sounded like, and I can’t recall it consciously, but there are times that I’ve dreamt of her (I like to call it “getting a visit from her”), and when she speaks, it’s her authentic voice. She’s there within me, always.

My love and appreciation for music, for literature, for art and beauty – that’s her. What I heard in soul music from the moment I first heard Otis Redding - that deep sadness along the irrepressible joy, sometimes apart, sometimes entwined – well, that’s an experience of life that I understood, and understood young, probably too young. Soul music, at its best, is an acknowledgment of the harshest blows that life can give, coupled with an indominitable resiliency and will to keep going.

That will to keep going despite it all is why Springsteen’s music has meant so much to me, why the line “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive” from “Badlands” is one that never fails to move me to the core of my being. And it’s why I have so little listening of much of the post-modern music (yes, I’m talking to you, indie rock) that is at the vanguard of music today, so much of which is more head than heart, that takes its risks in the realm of form instead of emotion, revels in distance as opposed to connection, that in its cool, drains much of the joy out of song and performance.

When I’m in the studio with an artist or when I’m writing about a piece of music that I love and want you and everyone else to love and appreciate, that’s my mom within me. And it’s how I do my best to honor her memory, and keep her being alive. My mother used to quote a line from Puccini's Tosca, which declares, “I lived for art and I lived for love.” What else are you going to live for?

Download: Louis Armstrong - "West End Blues"
Download: Bruce Springsteen - "Across The Border" 11/26/96, Asbury Park, NJ

The Sacrilegeous Etta James

It goes without saying that gospel music is a fundamental building block of soul. Some of soul’s most iconic artists – Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and Al Green – sang gospel, were raised in it, or left secular music to go back to it. Simply put, it was part of the fiber of their being. And the importance of the church in African-American life has been historically paramount – especially during the years of Jim Crow and segregation.

Etta James was trained in gospel, and perhaps that’s why hearing her 1973 cover of Randy Newman’s “God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind)” was so shocking to me the first time I heard it – it was the first time I ever heard a gospel based soul artist be sarcastic about God.

Newman’s original version, on his epochal album, Sail Away, is sung with a weary and almost regretful detachment. Etta sings it with a knowing and burning anger. When she sings in God’s voice, she sings with a mocking relish toward her subjects that is almost sensual – caressing each syllable like she was curling up next to someone in bed after a long and immensely pleasurable night. It's a remarkable cover.

As the critic Robert Christgau wrote, “To hear this gospel-trained ex-junkie turn 'God's Song' into a jubilantly sarcastic anti-hymn is to know why pious blacks consider blues devil music.” At the very least, the song reinforces my belief that if there is a God, She’s a hottie with a very evil sense of humor. That’s my kind of sacrilege.

Download: Etta James - "God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)"

Cain slew Abel Seth knew not why
For if the children of Israel were to multiply
Why must any of the children die?
So he asked the Lord
And the Lord said:

Man means nothing he means less to me
Than the lowliest cactus flower
Or the humblest Yucca tree
He chases round this desert
'Cause he thinks that's where I'll be
That's why I love mankind

I recoil in horror from the foulness of thee
From the squalor and the filth and the misery
How we laugh up here in heaven at the prayers you offer me
That's why I love mankind

The Christians and the Jews were having a jamboree
The Buddhists and the Hindus joined on satellite TV
They picked their four greatest priests
And they began to speak
They said, "Lord, a plague is on the world
Lord, no man is free
The temples that we built to you
Have tumbled into the sea
Lord, if you won't take care of us
Won't you please, please let us be?"
And the Lord said
And the Lord said

I burn down your cities-how blind you must be
I take from you your children and you say how blessed are we
You all must be crazy to put your faith in me
That's why I love mankind
You really need me
That's why I love mankind

King And Queen

Ruminations On Jerry Wexler

Jerry Wexler was one of my heroes. As I got into soul music in my late teens, it seemed as though the credit "Produced by Jerry Wexler" was on every album I bought. Aretha Franklin. Ray Charles. Sam & Dave. Wilson Pickett. The Drifters. And on and on. In possession of an obsessive mind, I soon began reading pretty much everything I could about him, and as I made the decision to be in the record business, he quickly became someone I aspired to be.

I admired and identified with him tremendously. He was an intellectual misfit, voraciously reading and loving the work of American writers like Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald - yet he was an underachieving student. His identified completely as a Jew, yet he was a vociferous atheist. He distrusted authority, but he spoke with certitude of taste. His opinion was not just another opinion. He did not suffer fools at all. And, of course, he had amazing taste – able to see greatness in artists no matter what the style, no matter what the genre, no matter what the era. It’s a long and varied road from Joe Turner to Ray Charles, from the Drifters to Wilson Pickett, from Clapton to Led Zeppelin, from Dr. John to the B-52’s and from Willie Nelson to the Gang of Four, but Wexler was able to discern what was special about all of them as musicians and as people, not always in that order, and then he guided, prodded, cajoled, begged and inspired them to create their best work.

Of course, it the triumph he shared with Aretha Franklin that Wexler will be most remembered, and lionized for. He took a supremely talented woman who was hyped as the greatest jazz voice since Billie Holiday - then completely miscast as a singer of pop and lite jazz, and under his watchful eye, had her recreate herself as the most important female vocalist – musically, culturally, spiritually – of the second half of the twentieth century. How did he do it? He created the space for her be herself. “I just sat her down at the piano and let her be herself,” he later said. What an marvelous thing – letting someone be themselves. (And believe me, I’ve worked in the record business long enough to know that letting someone be themselves is the unfortunately, the exception rather than the rule.) If soul was the musical expression of a race of people ready to affirm who and what they were and demand what they wanted (which resonated universally), than Aretha was the epitome of that expression. The miracle of soul music (and Wexler’s legacy) is that it is an affirmation valuing personal authenticity that will resonate as long as people listen to music.

When I had my first interview to be an intern at Atlantic Records in the early 90’s, my vision of Atlantic was what it had been in the mid-60’s. I was bursting at the seams with excitement and tremendously naive. I remember excitedly asking the H.R. person I was talking to, “Does Jerry Wexler still work here?” She smiled, a look of, “I don’t believe this kid,” and told me that he had left the company over 15 years previously. I loved interning at Atlantic – but I was working on Winger, Skid Row and INXS - not the Drifters, Sam & Dave and Donnie Hathaway.

My second summer at Atlantic, I interned for Jerry’s son, Paul Wexler, a wonderful guy, and we became friends. (Paul – if you’re reading this, email me – I’d love to reconnect.) By my second summer in the record biz, I knew enough that I had to play things cooler. When I found out whose son Paul was, I didn’t approach him and go, “Wow! You’re Jerry Wexler’s son! Tell me everything!” I just did my job for him and we began to talk about our mutual love of the Grateful Dead (Paul turned me on to the great Binghamton, 5/2/70 show, a legendary one in Dead-lore) and other artists. The best compliment Paul gave me was one day a couple of weeks into my internship, when he said, “You know your stuff.”

Eventually, Paul talked to me a bit of what it was like to be Jerry Wexler’s son. It wasn’t easy. Jerry was on the road for most of Paul’s childhood, and when he was home, it was all about him and the business. Jerry was opinionated to the point of arrogance, even with his kids, so when Paul would play some early Rolling Stones (consisting of covers of many songs that Jerry had produced in their original versions) or the Grateful Dead, Jerry often would irritably inquire, “What are you playing this shit for?” And being the son of a famous/legendary father is never uncomplicated. Paul told me a story that when he met Eric Clapton, Clapton shook his hand and said, “tough act to follow.” I learned that there was a great price paid for all of that success. And I knew it left its mark because Paul never referred to his father as “Dad.” It was always “Jerry.”

(This was in the early 90’s – judging from the tone in which Paul spoke of his father in the obituaries today, I am guessing that they got closer in the past 15 years before Jerry’s death. I certainly hope that was the case.)

Jerry Wexler was a giant of American music. It's almost impossible to gauge the impact he had. But whether it's the legacy of Aretha in singers like Mariah & Christina (Jerry hated Mariah - thought she oversang), the term R&B itself (Jerry invented it), the legacy of Stax, the rise of Southern Rock and so much more, Jerry Wexler was a contribution to it all.

What a thing to be.

The Ecstasy of Aretha's Live at the Fillmore West

In February of 1971, Aretha Franklin played Bill Graham’s fabled Fillmore West auditorium in San Francisco. Touring behind the great Spirit In The Dark, Aretha was nervous to be playing in front of, as she called them, the “flower children”; the fans of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Country Joe and the Fish. She needn’t have worried. Aretha’s talent was at an higher level than the San Francisco bands she thought she was competing with. Atlantic recorded the shows, and from them came the epochal Live at the Fillmore West, released in the spring of 1971.

Live at the Fillmore West is on very few lists of “Greatest Live Albums Of All Time.” It’s understandable to an extent; the first side of the album is significantly flawed, with questionable song selections (“Eleanor Rigby,” Bread’s “Make It With You,” Stephen Stills’ “Love The One You’re With”) that are obvious attempts to play to the sentiments and musical sensibilities of the crowd. Despite being the Queen, Aretha’s insecurities are legendary – and the first half of the album features them all. The songs all work to a degree – but that’s because Aretha has the gift of being able to make almost any song sound good.

“Don’t Play That Song” begins side two, and it’s clear as the Bernard Purdie’s drums crash in, that this is a different experience altogether than what we’ve heard so far. The crowd roars upon hearing the first familiar notes from Aretha’s Fender Rhodes. She is no longer trying to meet the audience on their turf. Instead, she envelops the audience in the transcendent power of her music. The tempo is hard and fast; Purdie pushes the band, the horns swing and Jerry Jemott’s walking bass lines are a thing of beauty. The real stuff has arrived.

“Does anybody here feel like hearing the blues,” Aretha asks before going into a titanic version of “Dr. Feelgood.” The crowd roars in affirmation – this is what they’ve been waiting for. “SING IT,” a woman screams, as Aretha begins the song, toying with the phrasing masterfully as she picks out lines at the keyboard. Aretha milks every syllable – drawing out the affirmation, the sensuality and her own overwhelming power. “RIGHT ON GIRL! YOU GOT IT,” a voice shouts – but Aretha doesn’t need their encouragement. She’s in a state of ecstasy – totally out of herself now – and you can hear her and the audience merge into a single being. If you wanted a musical definition of soul, this would be it.

What’s even more ridiculous is that “Dr. Feelgood” isn’t the high point of the album. That would be the monstrous version of “Spirit In The Dark” that she performs with Ray Charles. “I discovered Ray Charles,” Aretha exults as she leads Ray out. It’s clear that Ray isn’t completely familiar with the song – but as he warms up, it doesn’t matter. He finds his place in the song, making up his own lyrics and starting to brag a little. Aretha has him take a solo and as the band begins to percolate behind him – it goes to another level.

“Can you feel the spirit,” Ray asks the crowd repeatedly, and they roar. He toys with the line, bringing the intensity up and down and hearing him, it’s awe-inspiring. The horns play a beautiful riff, the congas groove and the entire band swings. “I gotta find me a woman tonight, because I feel the Spirit,” Ray sings with a laugh, and in that moment, he brings it all back home, combining the pleasures of the flesh with the ecstasies of the spirit, knowing that they are entwined – a knowledge that is the gift of soul music to the world.

“I just want to say before we leave that you have been much more than I could have ever expected,” Aretha says, thanking the audience as begins the finale, a beautiful version of Diana Ross’ “Reach Out And Touch (Somebody’s Hand).” She just sings the chorus over and over again, exclaiming her love for the crowd, the horns blaring and Purdie laying down incredible drum fills. The song is a somewhat treacly plea for brotherly harmony, but in the moment, Aretha makes it profound and even possible.

Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic executive who produced both Ray and Aretha, said that when he was at the Fillmore shows and saw Aretha and Ray playing together, he cried like a baby. Live at the Fillmore West is a miraculous document of that moment and of one of the greatest artists of all time (in any medium) at one of her peaks. If you are into knowing what true greatness is, in any medium, buy this album.

Buy the expanded version of Live at the Fillmore West at the Amazon mp3 store