Being Frank (22 page)

I assumed Frank was listening to music for his own entertainment, as a break from his labors, but actually he was playing it for my benefit — I think he felt it was his Christian (or pagan) duty to rescue my soul from
honky-tonk hell
. He loathed country music — that is,
white
country music for him, country blues, a
black
form, was another story entirely — and I think he was under the impression that I didn't know about any other sort of music. He was not correct; in fact, I'd been listening to what for lack of a better term is known as ‘classical' (i.e., chiefly the life work of dead males of European extraction) music since I was three or four. I'd even had a stab at performing some of it as a vocalist or percussionist. (I was too modest, or more likely ashamed, to admit these things to Frank.)

Frank was primarily interested in modern composers. He claimed he found Bach's structural approach interesting, but added that he couldn't really listen to much of the music. This made me decide his musical nature tended to be architectural rather than emotional; but just when I thought I had him pegged, he confessed, a little shamefacedly, that he loved some of Wagner's works. Hmm, I thought, that's still architectural, but you can't deny it has plenty of emotion in it, even if it's sort of on an adolescent level- Whereupon Dr. Zappa threw me yet another curve, and whipped out an album of Ravel's piano music that was so worn down the needle would barely track it.
Impressionism? Good grief!
Wisely, I ceased from further conclusion-jumping about Frank's underlying musical aesthetic. “If it sounds good to you, then it's good music,” shrugged the perverse Professor. Like some of his other observations, this seemed absurd on the surface, but turned out to be a tough theorem to refute.

But the most moving moment in the Mad Maestro's Music Appreciation course came when he played me Bartok's Third Piano Concerto. “The first time I heard the main melody in the first movement of this thing, I almost (
now don't laugh
) cried,” he said with a fierce shyness when he put on the record, just daring me to snicker. It was the farthest thing from my mind; when the theme in question came blasting out through the studio monitors, my throat and chest became so tight with tears — not of grief, but of awe — that I couldn't breathe. It seemed to me as if Bartok, in the first few minutes of that first movement, had personified humankind's highest and most exalted potentialities, thrown into noble relief against the shadow of modern horror and disillusionment. There aren't any words for that sort of thing; only music can describe it, and for me, the Third Piano Concerto still describes it more eloquently than anything else I've heard.

Looking at Frank, I saw that the main theme — a rapid, fluent cascade of notes in the Hungarian mode, first stated simply, then developed
into awesome multi-dimensonality — had entirely taken him over. There was none of the usual droll commentary this time. In a trance, his hand tapping out the rhythms on his knee, he leaned forward into the music, so intent on its every nuance that in the ashtray beside him his untouched cigarette slowly burned down to the filter. As the work progressed, he gradually disappeared into it, finally becoming one with Bartok's magnanimous universe, leaving behind the suffocating meanness and mediocrity both composers had struggled so much of their lives to escape.

I hope Frank is floating around somewhere like that now, only with some
expanded opportunities for glandular recreation
mixed in with the hifalutin stuff.

Then one night, with studied casualness, he asked me if I'd ever composed any “serious” music. I guess we'd progressed to the point where he figured I was ready to quit “
pooting around
” and get to work. I didn't know what to say; I didn't consider myself any sort of “serious” composer. Feeling quite embarrassed, I finally came clean about my experiences at El Camino, and confessed that I'd given up studying composition because it required a stability I seemed to, er, lack at the moment.

I had a tape of a piano composition, “Opus One,” which had earned me an A in my Composition class at El Camino. The assignment had been to build anoriginal etude from a pre-existing theme, and the theme I had chosen was the opening notes of the piano solo on Frank's composition “Little House I Used to Live In". By definition “Opus One” was a very derivative piece, and I was no longer sure what I thought of it, but I played it for Frank so that he could at least see I'd been involved in semi-serious musical study. To my surprise, he seemed to like it a lot. I guess it made him realize I wasn't really an ignorant
shitkicker/hillbilly-type person
after all, even if I did insist on wearing those
poot-stompers
. I suspect it also elicited another realization: the fact that his music was a real inspiration for me. That was something I'd never been able to put into words, but he could hear it for himself on the tape of “Opus One", and as much as he tried to hide behind that wry, ironic, Professor Pootmeister facade, I think he was actually
touched
.

After hearing the tape, he mentioned that if I felt like
whipping up a little something
, I could bring it along to the next Grand Wazoo rehearsal and hear what it sounded like. It took me about 24 hours before the bomb dropped, but when I realized what his offer represented, I turned into a tornado. I grabbed my L5 (which I didn't plug into an amp because I was
concerned about making too much noise) and Frank's big orchestra scratch pad, along with his Range and Transposition Guide, and began scribbling away during the daytime when he was asleep upstairs. I worked feverishly all day, every day, putting the guitar back in its place and hiding my day's work when Frank came down at night. Finally, a week later, on the night before the next day's Grand Wazoo rehearsal, I told him I'd jotted down a little piece, and if he'd been serious about his offer...

“What you got?” he asked.

Trying not to let my hands shake, I handed him the pages from the orchestra pad. It was a very little piece, maybe a minute and a half long, scored for oboe, bass clarinet, bassoon, trombone, marimba, guitar, bass guitar, and drums. I'd called it “Statement of Earnings.”

Frank looked at the title and grinned, the humor not lost on him. “'statement of Earnings' —
hmm
.” He ran his eye down the score, analyzing it. Without further comment, he said, “You better copy the parts,” and gestured toward a stack of blank charts and a copying pen. I stayed up until seven the next morning, writing out each separate part and transposing the horn charts. Because I hadn't been able to use the piano to compose on, the harmonic structure was almost medieval, based on the way a suspended chord sounded on the guitar. In my inexperience, I had written passages that made for impossible fingerings on some of the horns, and in my haste I'd copied in a bunch of wrong notes, It represented the very bottom, dumbest level of sub-student work, and Frank obviously recognized that the minute he looked at it, but he also knew that the only way I'd learn anything was if I was directly confronted by my own mistakes

In the afternoon I waited until Frank had been gone half an hour, then headed down to the Temple of the Grand Wazoo with my precious bundle of charts on the seat beside me. I almost didn't make it to the rehearsal: I was woolgatheing so bad that I ran a red light as I was making a left turn at the intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights, only narrowly avoiding intimate involvement with an RTD bus and a couple of BMWs. As I went puttering off down Sunset, I vaguely wondered what all the squealing brakes were about back there.

I took a seat in the front of the rehearsal hall and waited while Frank ran the band through several numbers. Usually every aspect of the rehearsals was fascinating to me, but not today, for some reason. It seemed like a fucking
eternity
. Finally, though, Frank motioned me up to the conducting stand. “Pass out the parts,” he said.

I went out and handed the players the charts. Then I came back and spread my master score across the stand. Immediately, the musicians began to shout questions and complaints at me. “This note is out of my range,”
"This run is all little finger,” “Is this an E-flat or an E natural here?” Frank shot me a wry look. “
Does this kind of life look interesting to you
?” he mugged. I answered as many of the questions as I could, and then Frank mercifully stepped in and explained to them that this was my maiden effort in the orchestral realm, so they wouldn't keep bugging me.

Then there was another little problem: I'd written the guitar part for Frank; in fact, the whole piece was based around his most characteristic harmonic element, both as a guitarist and a composer — the suspended chord, a chord with no major or minor third, just modal tones. I started to hand him the chart, but he shook his head and told me to give it to Tony Duran, the Wazoo's rhythm guitarist. I tried to explain that the piece had been conceived as a little concerto for him and chamber orchestra, but he still wouldn't play it. Probably because there was a guitar solo in the piece, he didn't want to have it thrown at him in front of all the hotshots he had working for him. What if he made a complete ass of himself playing something that stupidly simple? (He knew his limitations as a musician, and mine as a composer, I had to admit.) I'd just have to be satisfied with employing him as
celebrity page-turner
while I conducted.

“Here you go,” he said, handing me his baton. “Count it off.” And he looked down at my score —
my
score — and waited.

I counted off four bars for nothing, then raised the baton. My God — there it was —
my opening chord
. I felt as if I'd just created the heavens and the earth. No drug could produce an intoxication as powerful as this. There were a million things going on at once, and I couldn't keep track of them all — I didn't dare, or there would have been a mass derailment. Right off I noticed that the voicings stuck out and sounded much more eccentric played on the different horns than they had as notes on the guitar. Dimly I began to understand that writing for timbre and texture was a whole art I didn't have a clue about. Whoops, here we were al the bottom of the first page. Frank flipped it and we went on. The marimba player fluffed the ostinato in bar 38;the oboe hit a series of truly ugly D-sharps (my copying mistake coming home to roost —
ouch!
);here came the guitar solo, Top of page three, bar 76, drum solo, damn, should've made that eight bars instead of four. Christ! why hadn't I realized that that syncopation was an eighth note, not a sixteenth? Oh boy...it's the grand finale, every instrument for himself, let ‘er rip! Wow! That's the wildest-sounding thing I've ever heard in my life! And finally the coda, the head again, sounds like the goddamn gates of Heaven are opening and the saints are rolling in!
Yes
...oh Lord, God, yes!!!

I cut off the last bar with a flourish and lowered the baton. There was a little applause from a few of the people who hadn't been playing. Nice
folks, I thought, knowing I hadn't deserved it. I handed the baton back to Frank, who nodded at me gravely and made a little bow, and stumbled to the back of the hall, completely swamped by sensations. It had only taken a minute and a half, but that 90 seconds had unrolled like a scroll into eternity. Now I knew what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
I was going to spend it waving a white stick at a bunch of men and women in evening clothes in an empty concert hall while they turned my little dots-on -paper into masses of very dense air
.

People were talking to me, asking me questions, but I didn't comprehend and couldn't answer. I mumbled something, went out and got into my car, and drove around for hours, the music still ringing in my ears like the roar of the ocean.

It was approaching the time when the band was going to leave for Europe. The tour wasn't along one, just four or five dates, and I got the feeling Frank would have been willing to take me along as music librarian, if I'd asked him. But when I checked with the bureaucrats downtown, I learned that a passport application took nearly a month to process. There wasn't enough time for that. I cursed their red tape, but there it was.