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During the holidays we exchange gifts, but how many of them we give or receive are what we really needed? One of my favorite songs, which has an interesting story behind it, takes this question head on. To give you the whole scoop might take awhile so heat up some hot chocolate or your winter beverage of choice and I’ll fill you in.
Half way through third grade my family moved from Lawn Dale Drive to the corner of Harvard Avenue and Fourth East. The two addresses were three hundred miles and what seemed like an entire world apart. On Lawn Dale drive I had friends, on Harvard Avenue I had relatives. On Lawn Dale drive I played on the OK Food Center Jets little league baseball team. On Harvard Ave. I played for SORENSEN’S FURNACE CLEANERS. That was our sponsor AND our name. Not the Yankees or the Dodgers or the Braves or any cool baseball team names. The Furnace Cleaners. The only thing that kept my fellow Furnace Cleaners from feeling too bad about it was the fact that the year before we were sponsored by MAGICAL CHEMICAL TOILET SUPPLY. I’m not making this up.
When the other kids are on teams like Prudential Insurance or SAFEWAY and you’re one of Sorensen’s Furnace Cleaners it can affect your self esteem in not so subtle ways. You find yourself branded by an association you didn’t even pick, and it rubs off on you. At nine you’re not grateful that somebody’s Dad ponied up the money so you could even have uniforms and be a team. You just think the baseball gods have decided to play a cruel joke on you because you deserve it.
To counter the low self esteem I found myself searching for anything and everything I could find that would build me up somehow. It was tough finding “that magic esteem building thing” because I wasn’t really very good at anything. And then someone magical moved in next door.
He was a concert pianist who looked to me like Clark Kent, but I could see past the glasses and I knew he was really Superman. Anyone who doubted that changed their mind when they heard him play Liszt. He was so incredibly cool, and made classical music more exciting than Elvis singin’ rock ‘n roll. Not only did he play the piano with the skill and passion of a Greek god, he wasn’t a wimp in the rest of his life. He jumped out of airplanes for the National Guard. He had strong arms and even stronger hands and a pretty wife and he became my piano teacher.
At my first piano lesson my hero teacher told me that I had music inside of me that was just aching to get out, and that the only reason anyone put up with the pain of practicing the piano was so they could let that music out. He gave me an example of what he was talking about.
“Suppose you’re feeling sad,” he said. “And you want to express that sadness before it eats you alive inside.” Then he played a haunting passage from Chopin that almost made me cry.
“Or maybe your angry or frustrated or just plain mad. It’ll kill you if you keep those feelings locked up”….Then, my Hero/Piano Teacher played an extremely intense piece by Beethoven.
“And what do you do if you’re just so happy you think you’ll explode?”
I would have said something about running over to the park and playing baseball with my friends but sitting on that piano bench next to my teacher all I could think of was how great it would be if I could express my joy in music the way he could.
He started playing an amazingly exciting piece that felt like pure melodic joy. Then he said, “You’ve got all that music locked up in you.”
“Really?” I couldn’t imagine anything so wonderful being buried inside my nine-year-old frame, but if he said it was true, then it must be.
“Your hands are like the gates to a prison that keep the music locked inside, and learning how to play the piano is nothing more than unlocking the gates.”
Being a military man, my teacher believed in discipline and practicing scales with him was like going to boot camp for fingers. He was tough as nails and didn’t let me get away with anything, but he was never mean or degrading. He just expected a lot, and it would have killed me to let him down.
The first piece we started working on was a Tarantella by Mendelssohn.
“Do you think a kid my age can play something like this?” I asked.
“No ‘kid’ music for you, Michael. There’s nothing you can’t tackle if you’re willing to give it your all.”
My definition of ‘giving my all’ at the age of nine was a bit different than my teacher’s. We spent six weeks just on the left hand of the first page. Six more on the right, and three more putting them together — with feeling. It took something like 8 months before I was able to play the entire piece, memorized, of course, and with the coloring that brought a smile to my teacher’s face. Eight months for one piece. Seemed like a long time to work on a song that didn’t last three minutes. The next one took almost a year. By the end of my second year of studying the piano I had three pieces I could play in public. What I lacked in quantity I made up for in style.
I didn’t know a lot of other kids my age who were working on Rachmaninoff. (I could play, never could spell it). It did WONDERS for my self esteem, and didn’t hurt my baseball either. Something about working hard at something and seeing the results sort of spills over to everything else in your life.
The problem with playing a few difficult pieces really well at a young age is that people think you’re really, really smart. Some sort of prodigy who was destined for greatness. The other problem is that you start believing it’s true.
I decided that I must be special in some way because nobody else my age in a seven block radius of Harvard Avenue and Fourth East would even pronounce Rachmaninoff, let alone play his music. That was good enough for me. I set my sights on becoming a concert pianist. This lasted until my teacher took me to a concert, featuring a world classic pianist.
We sat in the balcony in what was sort of like box seats so we could see the pianist’s fingers fly across the keyboard. It was spectacular. The performance was flawless and the crowd went wild. On the way home something occurred to me. Someday, I thought, that amazing pianist would get old and his fingers wouldn’t be able to play those melodies. Eventually, I realized, the skillful technician would die and his performances would fade from memory or possibly be forgotten altogether. But the music he had played wasn’t going to die, It was immortal, somehow.
The one who writes the music lives longer than the one who plays it. These were the thoughts of my eleven year old brain.
My practicing changed after that. During these marathon sessions of perfecting one classical piece I started improvising on the melodies created by the masters. What if Mozart had done this right here? What if Chopin had tried this? I played around with alternate tunes, only to discover why we loved the melodies they had written. But I was on a different path and abandoned the dream of performing classical music on a concert stage. Rather, I thought I’d try to make a contribution that would outlive me. I tried writing songs.
My first song was about Sunday Dinner. Not exactly a subject worthy or Beethoven or Brahms, but it was something I knew well and was willing to work with. I wrote this song during what may one day be referred to as my food fetish period.
The tune for this song wasn’t much. Half stolen from other melodies that had caught my eleven-year-old fancy. But the words are worth mentioning.
Inspired by my mother’s Sunday dinners which were almost always roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, carrots and peas and green Jello something. The fruit inside varied from week to week, but the lettuce arrangement it sat on and the white topping was always the same.
Staring at that Sabbath tradition I wrote these lyrics, on a paper napkin next to my fork.
TWAS VERY, VERY GLOOMY FOR THE CARROTS AND PEAS THAT DAY
THE POTATOE DAM HAD BROKEN AND THE GRAVY CAME RUSHING THEIR WAY
THEIR COLORING WOULD BE RUINED
THEIR DESTINY WOULD BE
CHOKING, COUGHING, DROWNING IN THAT DARK BROWN SEA
BUT THEN FROM UP ABOVE
THE BIG FORK STABBED THE MEAT
HEROICALLY PLUGGED UP THE DAM
THE PEAS DIDN’T SUFFER DEFEAT.
With the stunning success of my first song (I was asked to sing it the next week for my grandma) came a string of other hits. I re-wrote the lyrics to Roger Miller’s King of the Road for my Boy Scout Troop and followed that up with a Halloween Trick or Treat Song that increased my candy per house ratio 400%. Next stop, immortality. I just needed to keep writing.
I wrote songs for everything from school pep assemblies to skits at the church fundraisers. I wrote songs of love for girls I had crushes on and songs of heartbreak when they didn’t care if I ever sang to them. I wrote my teenage angst and my deepest feelings and those songs became my friends and a part of my family.
Some of these songs were written for the piano, and others with a guitar from the Sears & Roebuck Catalog Santa brought me for Christmas. I remember the nights when I would lock myself in the downstairs bathroom and sing my songs in front of the mirror. For some reason, I only chose the nights when my parents were out and I was baby sitting my little sister and she was asleep…at least I thought she was.
On one of those nights when my overly curly hair had a particularly cool wave in it, I sang my heart out into that mirror and dreamed of being a star. I dreamed of my hair always looking just like it did that night, and of thousands of fans who hung on every word and every chord of every song. I tried to plump my pillows in a position that would enable me to sleep all night without messing up my perfect hair. But, of course, it didn’t work. In the cold light of day my hair kinked up like a wire ball, my songs didn’t sound as cool as they did with the reverb of the bathroom, and the thousands of fans in the mirror were off doing something else, like going to school or hanging out with their friends.
It was in those moments that the best songs of my youth were born. Those vulnerable, real life, who am I moments. These were the songs that comforted me, and talked back to me, that let me know I wasn’t alone.
Over the course of the next thirty five years a little part of me always thought the dreams of singing to the mirror in the bathroom would come true. That I’d be a major talent on a big time record label with a ga-zillion adoring fans. Didn’t happen the way I dreamed. I found some friends who have let my music be a part of their lives and they’ve been kind enough to buy enough copies to help me pay the bills so I can work on more of those real life, vulnerable, who am I songs. I’m grateful beyond words that I didn’t become the star I dreamed of being because a part of me knows it could have destroyed me. I’ve had the extraordinary blessing of not getting what I thought I wanted, but what I need.
ALL I EVER WANTED, ALL I EVER DREAMED OF
EVERYTHING I HOPED AND ALL THE THINGS I PRAYED FOR
COULDN’T HOLD A CANDLE TO WHAT I’VE BEEN GIVEN
I’VE BEEN GIVEN WHAT I NEED
Listen to What I Need here.
