And Learn All You Should Know

One of those songs, #5

Occasionally I do posts on old songs and where they fit in my life. The first one was about the Four Seasons’ “Rag Doll,” and then I did one about Glenn Yarbrough’s “Baby The Rain Must Fall,”  then one about The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” then one about “We Built This City.” For this one we dissolve to me in 7th Grade…

I was a pre-teen in the late 60s and not a particularly plugged-in one, culturally. We’re used to thinking of young kids as fashion-forward, cutting-edge, and onto what’s happening in the popular arts, especially music, way before even the critics and young adults. And maybe back in my childhood days there were some tweens (a term we didn’t then have, by the way) who knew everything that was going on — excuse me, going down — and had the first issues of Creem and MC5 and Velvet Underground albums and who knows, maybe even got high or tripped.

Their folks probably had money. I was growing up in a working-class neighborhood and went to a little Catholic school with uniforms and I can tell you none of us were into that stuff. St. Patrick’s actually had square dancing classes — the kind Henry Ford spread around to keep kids from getting into black music. Certainly if anyone under 18 had access to weed they would have been caught and sent away somewhere.

But that stuff didn’t really even exist for us. Being on top of pop culture took money, in a way that I don’t think it does now. Without money you were stuck with the monoculture, which back then was pretty mono. We had the three networks and maybe, for the adventuresome, PBS (excuse me, educational TV); our parents got Life and maybe Time — they sure weren’t subscribing to Saturday Review or Ramparts, and I don’t think I saw a Rolling Stone till I got to college.

We heard what was on the radio, which was a treasure chest, for sure. But we didn’t hear what wasn’t on radio, or rather what wasn’t on the AM dial. We didn’t hear albums unless we went out and bought them and by and large we didn’t. I had a nice little collection of singles but my Mom had more LPs than I had. I’d heard a lot of Beatles but I had never heard Sgt. Pepper. These things were more or less legends to us, like the Big City or rock concerts.

And thin as my pop-culture feed was, my culture-culture feed wasn’t so hot either. I got good grades — I’d better! — but that was just a matter of jumping through hoops; as far as the arts went, I was on my own. I’d never seen a play or been to a concert of any kind. I’m not sure I’d have appreciated them if I had. After we learned how to diagram sentences I don’t think we even had English classes; we were given a bunch of book report forms off a pad and told to fill out and submit a couple a month.

I haunted the local library and read whatever I could relate to but I didn’t have any help with what you might call the difficult passages, which was most of it. My Antonia, for example, I just couldn’t read. I knew the words but nobody was around to show me what the literary devices were about, or how to read characters and incidents, and it just lay dead on the page to me. Portnoy’s Complaint, however, went down a treat, even after I realized it wasn’t going to be really dirty. (The Jewish humor pulled me through.) How I wish I still had the book report I turned in for that.

But some stuff got through to me.

Evenings, while Mom and my sister watched TV in the living room, I’d sit at the kitchen table doing homework and listening to the clock radio that was on top of the fridge. For some reason I couldn’t work with the AM radio playing — too much talking, maybe, or the loud, bright tunes demanded too much attention. So I switched to FM, and found some college station that did the early-FM, free-form-ish thing. The DJs played long cuts and some jazz and folk tunes that were a little weird but for the most part interesting without being distracting.

One day in spring 1969 the station announced it would play The Who’s new record Tommy in its entirety on a certain evening. It was going to be played straight through because, we were told, it was a rock opera.

Even then, having never heard an opera of any kind outside Bugs Bunny and Marx Brothers travesties, I knew opera meant something grander than, say, a musical comedy, or whatever it was Jackie Gleason and the June Taylor Dancers were doing. It sounded far more grand than a bunch of hippies bashing away at their instruments on Hullabaloo while other hippies danced behind them.

My ignorance did not prevent me knowing it was pretentious — but my ignorance did prevent me from knowing pretentiousness was bad. In fact, and this was a tendency I must admit I held onto for many years afterward, I was excited by its pretentiousness.

And it was a two-record album. TWO RECORDS. The part of me that would later spend eight hours in a college auditorium watching Syberberg’s Our Hitler practically swooned.

So on the appointed night and hour I got my homework done early and just sat there at the table listening.

The funny thing is, though I had come expecting grandeur, what I remember about the experience was how modest it sounded. All the songs on Tommy sounded as if they’d been recorded in the same room and in the same way, with only slight changes in the mix and outboard effects. The vocals seemed always a little distant — no soul-man choking up on the mic, none of the garish audio effects or brighteners of top-40 hits. It was subdued, even formal. I imagined the band playing the songs straight through in something that resembled the black, boxlike places trimmed with velvet that I thought legitimate theaters were.

I missed some of the nuances of the story that radio night — what was going on in “1921” totally escaped me, as did the relevance of “Eyesight to the Blind” and “Sally Simpson.” I could tell that Tommy was deaf, dumb, and blind, and that this made him prey to abuse; that his loved ones were trying to fix him, and that he did get fixed, but there was something about his repair that damaged him in another way. (I think my model for this understanding was Frankenstein.) And in the end he was in some way obliterated — not by the disappointed campers, but by the rejection of the world — that is, its rejection of him, and his rejection of it.

Like I said, I wasn’t advanced, and at the end the “See me, hear me/Listening to you” refrain, which I remembered from earlier in the album, sort of confused me, because I knew the words couldn’t mean the same thing as they had in “Go To The Mirror”; Tommy wasn’t expanding into the world, as he had been in the earlier song, he was receding from it.

But I also felt it was alright that I was confused — which was huge for me because, as an intellectually precocious but terribly backwards poor kid, I desperately wanted to know what was right and certain about things; what else was the point of learning? Yet I understood — or at least had faith — that the repetition and the change in meaning was intentional.

I had seen in my young life a lot of contradictions; hypocrisy, lies, and the painful gaps between what the TV said was love and what love was in the world, and between what my faith said I ought to want and what I wanted. But I think this was the first time I came across the idea that something could be one thing and also another, which I later learned to call ambiguity. (If they’d shown me something like this earlier, I might have had an easier time with God In Three Persons.)

I was picking up something else. I felt the loneliness in Daltrey’s high, cracked notes, and saw that when the band picked up the refrain, as they had in the earlier version, that his loneliness was not relieved; on the contrary, they just took Tommy’s loneliness and made it into a bigger loneliness. They were the voice, now — the big voice. They had been backing Tommy up, adding different character voices as needed, and now they were coming together to help him put his story to rest. Their repetition of Tommy’s words elevated their solitude, the way our group singing at the Mass we still went to on Sundays was supposed to give voice to our faith, and the way feelings were given voice, I would later learn, by what the Greeks called the chorus.

At that time kids across America — very different kids than me, mostly older — were going to rock concerts. A few months later a quarter million of them would be at the one at Woodstock. (I asked my Mom but she wouldn’t let me go.) They were adopting the idea of a secular communal ritual, and whole industries and reams of millenarian bullshit would grow out of that. But they were getting, as it were, the deluxe experience — the consumer culture 60s version. I was getting all this from a radio speaker no more than five inches across that sounded like shit.

Maybe if I were one of the rich kids who had a Marantz receiver and Acoustic Research speakers, I would have heard something richer, something more viscerally exciting, something that would have gone well with the weed the rich kids were smoking and it would have given me body rushes and I wouldn’t have listened so attentively or thought about it so hard. Maybe that would have changed what I heard and what I thought Tommy was — maybe I would then have just thought of it as a bunch of cool tunes from my happy youth in a country that thought it was getting groovy but was actually just getting richer and more reactionary, and I would have gotten rich and reactionary with it.

But I didn’t. I wasn’t raised by rich college professors, either, nor given tutors and a classical education. I had to glean what I could from the junkpiles of commercial art. But I’m happy with what I got and even proud of its crummy provenance. In fact, sometimes I wonder about this: Back in the day producers used to do second playbacks through little speakers to make sure the kids listening through transistor or car radios didn’t miss anything important. But what if the small-speaker version, in its condensation, actually offered something that the more “faithful” big-speaker version missed? What if our handicaps, the things we can’t see or hear or say, can actually become an advantage?

There’s no definitive explanation, but I think you could say that’s how I became a punk rocker.