Oh Lord won’t you buy me a break from the political insanity!
This recording is probably the most instrumental thing I’ve ever put up here. My old Yamaha has different organ and piano functions. I like to mix them up. I notice that the best sounds on this segment come from the traditional acoustic piano sound, for instance at around 1:05 and 4:30.
While I make no pretense of being qualified as the future leader of a Marxist movement or socialist state (any more than I am pretending here to be a professional musician!), I really like this statement from Bob Avakian: "If you don't have a poetic spirit—or at least a poetic side—it is very dangerous for you to lead a Marxist movement or be the leader of a socialist state."
Poetic side, sure. I’d nominate also musical side, artistic side, dancing side, humor side, natural side/natural intelligence…
I basically just put sounds on my phone recorder when I walk over to my ancient piano and listen later to what I recorded. The ones I save as audio files and put up here are among the minority of these little sessions that I actually kind of like. (I have no idea where that A minor thing [second tune] came from; just a mixture of sounds over the decades.)
I’m guessing that most of us recall our families of origin as a mixed bag, containing both positives and negatives. One of the real positives in mine was music. My father Dave Street was a self-taught brilliant jazz pianist who might have worked professionally in that field but for some very serious health issues that steered him towards academia (third choice after music and journalism). My mother Jane Freed/Street, a schoolteacher, studied classical piano against the protests of a teacher who said her hands were too small in Aberdeen, South Dakota. She also had a beautiful singing voices and sang in choirs until near the end of her life.
My parents met working at the DeKalb (Illinois) Chronicle newspaper in the 1950s. He had been the cub reporter there since high school. She (three years older) was hired there after being fired for giving away a surprise party in the society page of the local paper in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. My father and his sax-player pal Jim Wilkins had been turned on to jazz (which never sunk in with me even the influences are clear) via radio and a local record store and would drive into Chicago on Roosevelt Road (this was long before I-88 or even I-5) to hear the be-bop greats on 47th, 55th, and 63rd streets (South Side). That would have been around 1955-57. My mother Jane Street sang with the Street-Wilkins Combo, which used to play Polish and Finnish weddings around DeKalb and Sycamore to make some money when not doing jazz.
This musical side made them quite the hit at parties. I have a very fond memory of my mother singing the old Steve and Eydie tune “Our Love is Here to Stay” on top of a piano with my father accompanying on the keys.
They made me take piano lessons (with the very tolerant Mrs. Oppenheimer on 57th Street), which I hated until we moved to New York and they took me to two Broadway musicals that knocked me out — blew my mind, actually: Hair and (actually) Jesus Christ Superstar. I bought the sheet music to both and found myself happy that I could read and plunk out versions and discover the blues scale in so doing. Ironically enough for and my family of origin’s atheism, this (LOL) is the song that first made me want to play music:
Well, actually before that this:
I skipped right past Dylan (writer of “One More Cup of Coffee”) until my 30s. Nobody listened to Bob Dylan in our Eight Track players in our cars in the parking lots of Ann Arbor, Michigan or in the pot-hazed dorm rooms of Northern Illinois University (a school where I would soon discover the country’s most Marxist history department) in the mid-late 1970s. It was all Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, the Stones (emphasis on sociopathic “Midnight Rambler” Stones not so much the more human “Angie” Stones), Ozzie, Pink Floyd (sometime my pick as the greatest band ever), The Who (close), Aerosmith, Kansas (“Carry on My Wayward Son” had religious status in the dorms), and more (Bob Seger was huge in Ann Arbor, he went to the high school I got booted out of there (so did Iggy Pop) - Pioneer High (ugh)[1]. Loud and heavy was the thing.
It was my son who as a junior high student got me to listen to Bob Dylan. Also got way into Dire Straits and, well, Springsteen at the same time. How cool is that?
This nine minute recording snuck in truncated intros to LZ’s Stairwary to Heaven and to JCS’s “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”
Note
1. Going to the alternative Community High School (“Commie High”) there was a Godsend (oops, I mean a really good thing). The teachers were hippies and New Left radicals “from the Sixties.” Gym class was a Puerto Rican guy from NYC who had once been in the US Olympic trials taking five of us for ten mile runs all over A2. Literature class was me telling a teacher I wanted to read novels by Black US writers, him giving me a list and telling me to come back to talk to him after I finished each one. I even got to get some credit towards graduation by learning some blues from my old man, who was coming out of a nasty ‘bout with alcoholism — a bout that had inspired my uncanny identification with Huck Finn, which took form in the one good thing that happened to me at Pioneer: getting an A+++ along with the excalamation that “Paul You are an Incredibly Talented Writer!” in big red letters across my version of a new ending to my favorite novel among the ones she had assigned in the 11th Grade American Lit class.
Community High had a big stigma in 1975-1976. I am told it is now the hot school a bunch of U-Michigan profs want to get their kids into on the way to the Ivy League/MIT/ University of Chicago, Stanford, etc. Quite a turnaround :)
Family blues note: I have a very fond memory of my father taking me to hear BB King at the Hill Auditorium after things cleared up. That would have been 1976. Besides the great playing and singing the main thing I remember about BB King was his remarkable rapport with the audience — the best I’ve ever seen. Same when my wife, son and I saw King in Merriville, Indiana around 1999 or so.
Some Blues in G, an A Minor Something, and "One More Cup of Coffee" in C