On a High Note

Photo courtesy of Jerry Hoffman

Music is my drug of choice. Coffee comes in a close second but music transforms my world on a daily basis. It once occurred to me that I listen to an average of 600 plus hours of music each year. It’s seldom if ever at home, almost always in a car instead. But everywhere I go, my music is playing. It’s been that way even before my old gang in the neighborhood introduced me to the ways of the world.

I once read about our own personal ‘music window,’ that is, that unique period in our young lives when music was paramount in extracting emotional responses from some song. For me that time began with my paper route starting in seventh grade and continuing on throughout high school.

Photo courtesy of Jerry Hoffman

My Motorola transistor radio was that special beacon to a world I hardly knew even existed. Those story songs dug deep into my consciousness and long-buried sensitive bones. The lyrics and lilting melodies emitted images I’d never seen in my mind before.

Photo courtesy of Jerry Hoffman

Do Wop was the beginning of this musical journey as I trudged through my neighborhood delivering newspapers. Morning and evening each day, in freezing temperatures and sauna summers, brought a repeat of old favorites and introduced me to the latest jukebox offerings.

I graduated from race music and vanilla flavorings in the U.S. Army. It took a recent German immigrant in San Francisco to introduce me to a whole new level of musical sophistication. Hans had been drafted just months after arriving in this country with his parents. The Presidio was his short stay before moving on to the language school at Ford Ord. The young man was smart, very sophisticated, and cultured. He used to read classic American novels with a thesaurus at his side.

One day he asked me if I wanted to go to a play in North Beach. It was at a small black box theater tucked in between two bars and a brothel. ‘Hell, yes,’ I answered, not really knowing what a black box theater was or what kind of play would go by the title of ‘The Fantasticks.’

 ‘Try to Remember’ was my graduation gift from pop to the classics. I began to listen to showtunes and other singer/songwriters from outside my very sheltered, limited mental musical collection. It opened a whole new world of music to me.

Then Bob Dylan came into my life along with a host of folk singers, Americana classics and historical beauties from the coal-mining hills swept me into another world that spoke directly to my wondering / wandering mind. Collectively, they spoke a language that resonated with the strange new world I was entering into in San Francisco, the whole hippie movement and social questioning that had just begun swirling around in my head. The music spoke of rambling and far-off places and exotic travel that only added to the fantastical images crowding my imaginative mind.

It sure as hell wasn’t Pat Boone or the other safe white pop singers that White America wanted me to listen to. It was race music, the blues, Gospel Music, the Appalachian classics, and edgy stuff that talked to my soul; even if I could never clearly explain it at the time.

By the time I got back home, Psychedelic music, folk-rock, country-rock, and a dozen other amalgamations of the same genre all bunched together to send my head a spinning with the volume up and the windows rolled down.

The rundown, ragged-at-the-edges Dinkytown became my haunt and the Triangle Bar my home.

Little did I know that for the rest of my life, I would immerse myself in that period’s musical library. My musical window has remained much the same as the years pass by. Fortunately, I’ve always been able to find great musical offerings from each decade to round out my collection.

Recently, I’ve discovered (remember my age and the fact that I’m slow) the wonderful offerings on YouTube. This has opened up a whole new kaleidoscope of musical offerings. Now that I’m toying with the idea of writing music myself for several of my plays, YouTube has helped my exploration of styles, sophisticated lyrical offerings, and rhythmic presentations.

I guess if you’re going to get high every day, soft tunes and hard rock isn’t a bad way to go.