In Old French, influence was an “emanation from the stars that acts upon one’s character and destiny.” In the 1300s, a “streaming ethereal power from the stars acting upon character or destiny of men.”
I’m peering into the wooden oversized console stereo in the family living room, watching a record turn under the weight of a tone arm and mid-range stylus—roughly seven centuries later, star power of a different origin. The bulky silver knobs are within reach—the one that makes things shiny in my head, the one that fills my stomach with a weight I can’t describe, the one that makes things too loud. Wes Montgomery’s on, I think, or maybe George Shearing.
•••
“C’mere.”
I’m in my older brother’s bedroom. He’s sat me down on his bed. Our parents are out of the house, and he’s inviting some friends over. “I just want to tell you. I’m probably going to get drunk tonight.”
I stare blankly.
“Some friends—you know Tom and Pat from school?—and some other guys. They’re coming over and we’re gonna make some sloe gin fizzes. And we’re gonna have fun, and I’m probably gonna get drunk. So. Just letting you know. Keep it quiet.” I’m already wondering what gin fizz is and what it looks like and what makes it slow.
Hours later, and the rec room’s pounding up through the bedroom floor. I sneak down the stairs of our split-level and gaze at a jumble of young guys and girls; some I know, some I don’t, a smoky moving mass of bottoms and bell-bottoms and flannel. Everyone’s holding glasses. Everyone’s laughing. They’re loud and talking to each other, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. I don’t want to stray much closer because I shouldn’t be here, on the stairs, spying. Boston’s on and “More Than A Feeling” is playing—I know that one—and later, when I’m back in bed, “Peace of Mind” and “Foreplay/Long Time” and “Rock & Roll Band” and “Smokin’” and songs by other bands, muffled, score something I’m scared of and wonder about: those hands around the girls’ hips, the leaping about, the leaning in, the smoking—if the songs make the guys do that or the other way around.
•••
“. . . influence is not influence. It’s simply someone’s idea going through my new mind.” (Jean-Michel Basquiat)
•••
I’d heard that Mike had gotten his hand down Mary’s pants at a party in her basement, that her white jeans were on so tight that you could see the outline of his hand underneath. A week or so later I see him coming out of Kemp Mill Records clutching an album, that one with the bright primary color paint splattered all over the cover. I want that.
•••
Raised as an only child, Kathryn Harrison grew up isolated, “the sole keeper” of her history. In “The Forest Of Memory” she writes of her past:
It is mine to do with what I will, to make sense of, perhaps, assembling the pieces into a coherent whole, a kind of narrative group portrait complete with background and foreground. Or to make into fiction, to invent a history that is possible, but untrue.
Alone, she wonders:
There is nothing that unfolded in the house of my childhood that anyone can confirm, or deny. Countless transactions, most without consequence, but some fraught with significance—primal, formative, determinate— lack any witness other than myself. In the abstract, my being free of siblings, of parents, of anyone who might object to my dissembling, or even take note of an untruth, might provide me a tempting invitation to reinvent history. But only in the abstract, only in theory. When I test the idea, contemplating how completely possible it is to rewrite my early years, it frightens me. What I feel isn’t freedom but a freefall, and what could check the speed of my descent? Humans agree that what we call “reality” depends on its being observed by at least one person. When a tree falls in my forest of memories and no one else hears it, has it happened? Is there a sound of one hand clapping?
•••
Contemplating growing up without siblings? I might as well consider infinity. The history created by my four brothers, my sister, and me is rich and, as in every family, paradoxically commonplace and unprecedented: I am Me in large part because of Them, a random generation of closely-related DNA gathering under the same roof.
Harrison’s concerns originated in family chaos, dysfunction, and abandonment. Her anxieties looking back stem less from How was I influenced? than from Who can corroborate me? But I also wonder on the absence of older brothers or sisters and how I would’ve navigated such blankness, how it might’ve shaped me. Often I feel bad for those without older siblings, not because they were spared the teasing and scolding, but because the initiation into aesthetic pleasure and critical thinking can originate in accepting or rejecting the influences of an older brother or sister, or three. Such influence is a kind of weather through which you walk, daily, until, years later, you recognize what stuck to you, what you can’t rub off, what you carry with you eternally. My brothers’ musical tastes and my own, their soundtrack and mine, was a crucial threshold for me growing up. The anxiety of influence, writ domestic, circulating from bedroom to family room and back again.
•••
Jean Paul Gaultier: “Always my collections are made of different influences.”
•••
Harlem, New York City, 1950s. A high school algebra teacher worries over the future of his younger brother Sonny, a restless kid with a criminal record who plays hard bebop, reveres Charlie “Bird” Parker, and who’s descended into the bedlam of West Village smack. Sonny can’t see his older brother as anyone but an irritating, arbitrating guardian, a buttoned-up gatekeeper who refuses to listen to arguments from the other side because it’s a hundred blocks south. Over the course of James Baldwin’s masterful “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator’s harsh judgments of his brother soften, due in part to his grief over losing his own young daughter (“My trouble made his real,” he acknowledges) and in part to a promise the narrator made to his mother. But mostly because of the surprising, redemptive power of art.
At the close of the story, the narrator, half-dubious, half-curious, agrees to go watch Sonny play at a club in the Village. Gazing at his brother at the piano and recognizing that the folks here aren’t smacked-out degenerates but are kind intimates, treating Sonny warmly, as if he’s family, as if he’s at home, and then being forced to redefine what home means, the narrator is transformed. “All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it,” he admits. Stable, secure in the solve-for-x formulas of his vocation, though cripplingly grieving for his torn-asunder family, the narrator discovers in Sonny’s environment a new appreciation for the discordant, improvisatory art form he’d scorned and willfully ignored, and for those inside it. The band’s playing “Am I Blue?” and the narrator’s under the influence:
And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours. I just watched Sonny’s face.
•••
“I don’t believe in learning from other people’s pictures,” says Orson Welles. “I think you should learn from your own interior vision of things and discover, as I say, innocently, as though there had never been anybody.”
My brothers John, Jim, and Phil, and my sister, Jane, were each born roughly a year apart from the other over a four-year span; I arrived four-and-a-half years after my sister, so their intimate bunker mentality was forged in an era I didn’t share. Leaving aside how this birth order may have shaped my independence or propensity toward seclusion, it certainly left me adrift on my own quiet island of musical taste—though their obsessions were on the horizon, near. Yes; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; The Eagles; Switched on Bach; Grateful Dead; tubular bells; Elton John; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; and America—these were in high rotation on the family stereo as I was growing up and tuning in. That you’ll find few of these albums in my collection now doesn’t mean they haven’t been imprinted in me.
Their tastes in music were, as mine were, informed by Casey Kasem’s weekly Top 40 show broadcast on WPGC 95.5 FM in Washington, D.C., and by magazines, late-night television, and the singles and albums that their friends, and friends of their friends, possessed. “One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters,” says George Herbert. But what about five siblings? Having older brothers and a sister guaranteed that as a kid I’d at least have an ear to the door of a room where songs about fucking or drinking or Satan weren’t whispered about in code on the playground at school but gossiped about openly, if often naively.
One particularly potent source of gossip was Billy Joel’s “Only The Good Die Young,” from his 1977 album The Stranger. My siblings and I attended Catholic schools from first grade through high school, and the tutelage we received in the church and in classrooms informed our daily lives, from wake to sleep, from the songs we listened to on the radio and on albums to the movies we hoped to see. When I wanted to see a new release, my parents would consult the Catholic Standard, the weekly Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C.’s, official newspaper that materialized on our kitchen table with solemn regularity. The editors at the Catholic News Service classified each new movie with a letter rating reflecting the movie’s morality and intended audience, from A-I for general patronage, to L for a limited adult audience, to O—the letter I’d both dread seeing and thrill to—for morally offensive. As I recall, these ratings were fairly ironclad in the house; my mom had great faith in the Standard’s standards, and though the ratings were meant as a guide, we lived by them.
Into this landed an uninvited guest. Released as a single, “Only The Good Die Young” was, I quickly discovered, anti-Catholic. More specifically, it was a paean to getting up a good girl’s skirt. I’d learn much later that the Catholic Church–affiliated campus radio station at Seton Hall University had banned the song for its satiric lyrics hostile to spiritual purity, sexual chastity, and church teachings. Other less-secular-leaning stations had joined the protest, and soon the song reaped the predictable rewards of infamy: it rocketed up the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, peaking at number 24.
“You Catholic girls start much too late,” Joel sang, and though I was a bit young to get it, I got it, especially as the song became incendiary under my parent’s watchful eyes. I think Jim bought the album, but I believe we weren’t allowed to play it in the house—or, at any rate, we were strongly discouraged. But I heard it: when my brothers’ friends would come over to play it out of range of my parents; I heard it on the radio; mostly I heard it in my head when at night in bed I’d score the changing postures of the girls at school from playful to assertive, virginal to whatever-was-next, the glowing horizon of bras and underwear, romance and sex, just there and just out of reach. The panting insistence in Joel’s song—which he wrote about a crush on a girl in high school back at Levittown, Long Island, where he grew up— was murky language to me, but one it seemed that my older siblings were speaking already, or knew enough stray words of to claim as their own. Joel smirks: “I might as well be the one.” To do what? I wondered. My siblings were closer than I was to understanding, to dealing with the song’s winking carpe diem, and this glaring distance between them and me hurt, producing a chest-tightening anxiety that I’d never catch up with them.
•••
The change happens before you’re aware of it. At the public pool I’d been underwater in the shallow end, looking through giant goggles at undulating legs and arms and hips, a world that looked like the one up on the pool deck, but strange, surreally quiet except for muffled laughter and the unfathomable sentences spoken in the air over my head. A few minutes later, absorbed, I’m watching the leaves stuck in the drain and look up to see my sister and brothers turning away. Hues Corporation’s “Rock The Boat” or Wings’ “Listen To What The Man Said” is playing on the radio next to you, and that’s it: a moment is scored.
Black light posters, harmonies, hormones, songs behind closed doors: these are the moving parts of the time machine my older siblings constructed. I go back to an era when their albums and the overheard conversations about them were tantalizing, alluring signposts for a future I’d yet to comprehend, a blurry place where my sister’s face changed from innocent to complicated as she listened to James Taylor or yelled “Firehouse! Whoo!” with our KISS Alive album or sang along to Elton John belting out “bitch!” When her boyfriend broke up with her, following a mammoth, silencing snow that had fallen all over the eastern seaboard, she joined us in the front yard the next day, wiping away tears and half-confidently, half-morosely grabbing a shovel to help, re-entering her changed world. I wonder now what song she listened to that night, or that morning, in her heartache. I know her album collection, and so I could guess. When the decade tripped dangerously into its last couple of years and into the next, and Phil started bringing home Sex Pistols, Ramones, Jam, and Clash records, I heard them with the same ferocity he did—only I couldn’t yet avail myself of the world outside of our house as he and his friends did so freely, donning vintage thrift shop suit jackets and skinny ties, drinking, driving, turning up the car stereo, eyeing the New Wave chicks, sniffing the air for mayhem and anarchy.
•••
One morning sometime in the late 1970s, I staggered into the kitchen where my family, in ones and twos, sat for breakfast, and announced that I’d listened in the middle of the night as DC101 played Boston’s “Don’t Look Back” into Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven” and that I now understood the meaning of life. I hope my siblings laughed at me. I’m sure they did.
•••
Athens, Ohio. First Street. My neighbor and some friends of hers are out on her front porch. I walk past and hear a song coming from their house that I’ve never heard before, and can’t place. In the few moments it takes to reach my front steps the music seems to have moved from sweet to ferocious to anthemic to desolate and back again. The singer’s great. The riffs are loud, but clean. “Who is that?” I yell from the street.
She smiles beatifically at me. “It’s Nirvana!”
When Nevermind was released in the fall of 1991 I was only vaguely aware of Kurt Cobain’s band. I’d looked the other way when their early Sub Pop records were issued, because I hadn’t been ready yet for their tuneful howl. What I heard my neighbor say was nirvana, with a lower-case n. In the way we instantaneously make sense of a complex moment and its scope, it felt like what she had described for me was a feeling, a place, made of roar and stillness, to where she’d been transported, a spiritual instant. Not much later, when Nirvana took off commercially, I made the critical appellative correction, but the influential exchange on the street had imprinted itself in me. That was less music I heard walking by her porch on an ordinary sunny day in autumn than a state of being.
•••
The summer between my junior and senior years at the University of Maryland, I took on a three-hour weekly summer show at WMUC 88.1 FM, the campus radio station. I’d be playing jazz. I’d had a rock & roll show for a couple of years already, and was steadily moving beyond the post-midnight graveyard shifts, when Dave, the music director, asked if I’d consider the summer gig. I’d little experience with jazz music, but I said, Yeah.
Or maybe I’d requested the show. I’m somewhat baffled by the whole blurry episode now, considering just how green I was, my “taste in jazz” having been informed only by the Dave Brubeck records my Dad had bought in the 1950s and often played in the house while we were growing up. Later there was George Shearing, Al Hirt, a Wes Montgomery LP or two—but no Dizzy, no Coltrane, no Parker, no Miles. Nothing on Blue Note, nothing on Savoy.
Rather, I’d tune in daily, fanatically, to the now-defunct WHFS free-form music station housed for many years at 102.3 FM in Bethesda, Maryland, and later at 99.1 in Annapolis, an unprecedented, twenty-four-hour education in vernacular rock & roll history. My favorite DJ there was Jonathan Gilbert, aka Weasel, who had the late-afternoon shift, and whose late Friday sets I’d listen to, master classes in selecting, pacing, and celebrating songs that celebrated the weekend and all of the liberating promises music makes. There were other great DJs there—among them “Cerphe,” Milo, Meg, Adele Abrams, Susan Desmarais on the weekends, the laconic Bob, or “Bob Here”—but Weasel, a chirpy-voiced music maniac gifted with an encyclopedic knowledge of rock & roll, a love of both the cheery AM-radio era singles format and seldom-played R & B, New Wave, Punk, and alternative album deep cuts, and a quick-fire wit, was essential, a lifetime curator of my taste. Occasionally I’d wander onto local country and blues radio stations, too, and on some gray, tiring drives home after classes, up slushy, heavily trafficked University Boulevard, past strip malls and low, beaten-down red brick garden apartments, I’d tune in to WPFW at 89.3 FM, the Washington, D.C., jazz station, and listen under cloudy skies to a foreign tongue.
•••
My jazz influences were mostly imagined, imaginary. Those songs I’d listen to while driving—propulsive yet seemingly formless, lengthy, difficult to my untutored ear—made me think of the insides of the wealthy homes and apartments on upper Connecticut Avenue or Georgetown in Washington, D.C., lived in by the kinds of people whom I imagined listened to jazz music rather than to, say, the Dead Kennedys or New Order. Red wine, walls of bookshelves, dimmed reading lamps, New Yorker magazines, multi-course suppers. The rich, urban voices of the male and female DJs spoke for these cardboard cut-outs that I’d placed in sophisticated, unassailable environments; they were older, smarter, more dimensional than I. These images had to come from somewhere. Perhaps stray glimpses from movies, television shows, a friend’s father’s den, an ad in a magazine gathered in my brainpan over time to narrate a story that never occurred. I’m fascinated by the way the imagination creates a dynamic stage set with so few resources: when I read the opening sentence of any account, fictional or otherwise, I instantly picture the protagonist; yet how do I do this when the sentence is merely “He arrived at midnight” or “She walked into the bedroom”? I wonder which “he” it is that I imagine, and why him. And if she’s wholly imagined, where do I get the parts to assemble her? When presented with little more than a silhouette, we grab the nearest brush and palette we can find, and go to work filling in. Alone in our heads, intuitive, without the tutelage of siblings or friends, I wonder what influence are we under then.
•••
Clyfford Still would seem to agree with Hopper. “My work is not influenced by anybody,” he says.
•••
I threw darts. I began my first set with Brubeck’s “Balcony Rock” from my dad’s scratchy Jazz Goes To College album. (I hear the opening notes now, as I write.) While the song played I’d grab from the overstuffed jazz shelf any album that looked similar in vintage—cover graphics that weren’t too far out or contemporary, say—place it on the other turntable, drop the needle, and listen through headphones. If the song fit in tone or mood, or at least shared a similar time signature, I’d cue it up. Most of the cuts I played were long, so I had plenty of time to explore unfamiliar albums while I was broadcasting. I was acquainted with the names of—maybe—a third of the artists I’d play. The experience was utterly thrilling. Unable to lead with any substantial knowledge of jazz history or musicians, influenced by what I imagined a jazz show should sound like, haphazardly matching the aesthetics of sleeve art or record labels or the size of the band, I led with intuition and wild surmise, leaping across decades and styles and trends, Louie to Chick to Herbie to Monk and back again.
I’d named my regular radio show “Innocent Startings,” reflecting my then-obsession with Colin MacInnes’s novel Absolute Beginners, and this show I dubbed “Innocently Jazz Startings,” proceeding in my mash-up to go blind and trust hunches. Undoubtedly I insulted the intelligence of the one or two genuine jazz fans among the dozen listening to my show on campus or on the fringes of the College Park, Berwyn Heights, and Greenbelt neighborhoods where the 15-watt signal struggled to penetrate. My sets were ersatz, and tacky maybe, certainly naive and unlearned—and yet I trusted that the linkages among eras and expressions, the transitions among unfamiliar songs might cohere. More knowledgeable about jazz now, I’d probably be embarrassed by the set lists, if I could locate them. I might have a cassette of one of the shows downstairs, but I’d rather not know. I’m going to believe that, conjuring influences on the fly, improvising, I made something whole.
•••
“Rock & Roll might not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them.”
That’s Pete Townshend. I don’t remember when I read the quote, but it stuck, is reaffirmed at every sweaty show I enjoy or lonely night with tunes I endure. (Today’s show-and-tell example courtesy of Shuffle Play is the Monkees’ terrific “Teardrop City.” About as low as I’ve felt in a long time, the singer laments, but good luck keeping still while you sympathize with him.) Townshend also observed that “Rock & Roll is fun songs about sad stuff.” At least I’d always thought he’d said that; I’ve since seen it attributed only to the novelist Mary Jo Parker. In the flux of influences I give this truism— borne out in my music collection, within sorry relationships, and on long, aimless drives—to Townshend, a man I’ll never meet yet will always trust. Anyway, it’s in the air above my head and under my moving feet now, eternally, whoever said it.
•••
At Saint Andrew’s the Apostle, a local rock group is plugged in. It’s the early 1970s and I’m sitting with dozens of other seven- or eight-year-olds on the cold floor of the All Purpose Room across from the principal’s office and the bathrooms. I’m looking at the three grown-up men in front of me and their girlish, shaggy hair, tight striped pants, red-and-purple shirts with ruffles, their bright white smiles. This power trio had been invited to play at school, men with guitars and amps among the nuns and lay faculty. I don’t know why they’re here beyond the novel entertainment value; through the fog of memory one of them’s talking about safety, about getting out of your bedroom window in case of a fire? Or is he talking about polluting, and not to do that. Some of the girls are sighing; many are smiling and giggling with each other. The amplification cuts through the blur and I’m there, just down the hall from church, darkened now at mid-week, scared of and enthralled by the tiny amps and the sudden huge noise they make, the immediate thing in my head of physical sound, the glossy treble up into my sinuses and sparking behind my eyes, and a hand on—in—my chest. I’m a sonic boy.
Joe Bonomo was named the music columnist for The Normal School in 2012. His books include Field Recordings from the Inside, Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Conversations With Greil Marcus, and, most recently, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing. He teaches at Northern Illinois University and appears online at No Such Thing As Was. Visit Joe on Twitter and on Instagram.
Photo by Kaboom.