Most thrilling musical experience? My most thrilling musical experience was in Times Square, more than thirty years ago. There was a rehearsal hall around the Brill Building where all the rooms were divided into tiny spaces with just enough room to open the door. Inside was a spinet piano — cigarette burns, missing keys, old paint, and no pedals. You go in and close the door and it’s so loud from other rehearsals you can’t really work, so you stop and listen and the goulash of music was thrilling. Scales on a clarinet, tango, light opera, sour string quartet, voice lessons, someone belting out “Everything’s Coming Up Roses”, garage bands, and piano lessons. The floor was pulsing, the walls were thin. As if ten radios were on at the same time, in the same room. It was a train station of music with all the sounds milling around; for me it was heavenly. What would you have liked to see but were born too late for? Vaudeville. So much mashing of cultures and bizarre hybrids. Delta blues guitarists and Hawaiian artists thrown together resulting in the adoption of the slide guitar as a language we all take for granted as African American. But it was a cross-pollenization, like most culture. Like all cultures. George Burns was a vaudeville performer I particularly loved. Dry and unflappable, curious, and funny. He could dance too. He said, “Too bad the only people that know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.” What is a gentleman? A man who can play the accordion, but doesn’t. Favorite Bucky Fuller quote? “Fire is the sun unwinding itself from the wood.” What are some sounds you like?
1. An asymmetrical airline carousel created a high-pitched haunted voice brought on by the friction of rubbing and it sounded like a big wet finger circling the rim of a gigantic wine glass.
2. Street corner evangelists
3. Pile drivers in Manhattan
4. My wife’s singing voice
5. Horses coming/trains coming
6. Children when school’s out
7. Hungry crows
8. Orchestra tuning up
9. Saloon pianos in old westerns
10. Rollercoasters
11. Headlights hit by a shotgun
12. Ice melting
13. Printing presses
14. Ballgame on a transistor radio