Tale 24
I Was Like a Novelist
(Lore-ing a Cretan Bull)
Hercules taming the
Cretan Bull[1]
“Bill had lored people with catchy heart-throb stories...
like... a circus sideshow pitchman...
lored them in with a fairy tale,
to come to Fred’s live shows across the country,
the way Hercules lured and sweet-talked and
tricked
the Cretan bull.”
“You never told
me that story before, mj said. “You’ve never told me a lot of
your Fred stories, I bet.” Bill could go on all night with
them, and it was worrisome.
All night? All
year!
Bill sipped and
said, "I was like a novelist when I first came up here. I had
to study the man, mj, before I could create interest in him. I
had to get out press releases that said more than 'Fred Waring
was a Boy Scout'."
That's all they
had, apparently, until Bill promoted the myth – rightly, as mj
saw it – that Fred and Poley had been the original Tom and
Huck of U. S. American twentieth century pop music. That myth
was true.
Bill had lored
people with catchy heart-throb stories. He’d been like a
huckster, a ballyhoo artist, a circus sideshow pitchman, a
carnie barker. He lured them in, people like mj’s parents, Rev
and Jo Lorenzo. He lored them in with a fairy tale, to come to
Fred’s live shows across the country, the way Hercules lured
and sweet-talked and tricked the Cretan bull. Fittingly, in
his public relations handout for radio stations there was an
ox:
Even animals
succumb to the Waring sound. Once when the glee club sang
"Bless This House" from a
Technically it
was a cow, not an ox or bull, and immediately mj felt charmed
by the vignette and terribly
sorry for such a musical cow. Like him, she loved music and
fine things, when so much of life was like wading in your own
and everybody else’s cow flop. He connected to the crazy cow
instinctively, in a way that had nothing to do with reason,
yet in a way that he could not ignore, and before three swipes
of a cow’s tail, Tat tvam asi, as they said in India,
This was that! It happened. The Ox was a cow was a
bull; and mj was not just one but all three. He was hypnotized
by a master bull handler in ancient
Hindus who had
created the expression ‘Tat
tvam asi’, would not have appreciated Kierkegaard very
much, with his insistence you had to choose ‘either’
this ‘or’ that in life on the rational basis that you ‘could not be two
things at once’. Kierkegaard had claimed you
therefore had to make ethical choices in life and that such choices
were irreversible;
and then Sartre and everybody else had taken off from this
garbanzo on their grueling path of ‘existential choice’. Such
hard-ass thinking and decision-making had pervaded the thought
airwaves of Western civilization since the nineteen thirties
and forties, affecting all the existentialists like Camus –
and mj lorenzo too. But according to what Hindu thinking was
claiming, as young Dr. mj was just beginning to understand
from Joey and from reading Jung, Joseph Campbell and others,
it looked as if it might be more correct to say that
EVERYTHING and EVERYBODY was really at least two things at
once, routinely. This struck a note in mj lorenzo, for sure.
In the end he felt more at home with it than he had with
Sartre all the years he had tried to admire Sartre. Because he
had disliked exclusivist thought patterns and religions for
several years now, ever since he had realized one day that
every one of them, with their arrogant better-than-thou
superiority, promised to be a serious threat to humanity. And
anyway, all night long it was happening to him, wasn’t it? At
the moment he was not one but FOUR things at once: mj lorenzo;
the oxcart ox; Hercules’ Cretan bull; and the Amish
family’s Waring-music-loving cow; all at the same time.
In ’74 mj
lorenzo did not yet care as much as he would care later, that
the Buddhists in the writing program at Naropa Institute in
Boulder, Colorado, might condemn
‘allusions’ like these in a writer’s books, ‘allusions to outside
schemata’ such as religions or philosophies. It
was against Naropa writing
rules,
according to the young college-age students there, who would
inform him of the fact years after this interview, when he
‘audited’ classes in the adult ‘continuing education’ program
there, in his late 40s, and it was ‘against everyone else’s ‘rules’ too’
by the late 1980s and early 90s, as they would claim. But
tonight he didn’t care because he didn’t know such people yet.
Year in and year out since they had opened their Kerouac-ian
Buddhist writing school, the Beat poets in Boulder led by
Allen Ginsberg had complained that a red wheelbarrow was a red
wheelbarrow was a red wheelbarrow, and that all U.S. American
writers of any merit and of any hip, up-to-date good sense
would reflect that awareness in their writing, or risk being shunned. But
the fact was, mj was living Tat tvam asi this
very night, during the entire interview, the whole night long,
so had to
report it as it was,
or he would have been a dishonest storyteller. And when he met
the Naropa Buddhists years later and showed them this kind of
writing, as much as he loved and admired them all, he had to
differ with them. Because for some very sincere people in the
world, a red wheelbarrow was NOT just a red wheelbarrow, and
an oxcart was NOT just an oxcart, as they should have figured
out by now, if only out of respect for their Hindu and Jungian
and other brothers. And furthermore, and by the way, he liked
to point out, hardly any pack of writers in the U.S.A. had
ever alluded
to hidden religious meanings and other ‘outside schemata’ in
their writing as much as the Naropa Writing School Buddhists
had alluded to Buddhist and other outside notions, all along,
ever since day one, starting right from Kerouac and Ginsberg.
The pot had been calling the kettle black since day one,
constantly. So there.
In the one-volume collection of Allen Ginsberg’s lifelong
poetry[2]
oeuvre, as a good example, there were so many allusions to
outside subjects and schemata which an average reader would
not understand, that Allen and the editors had felt forced to
include pages and pages of thousands of footnotes explaining
all of the esoteric, coded, religious, political, and other, allusions in
his poems.
“Your writing is too
analytical,” one of the college-age full-time undergrads had
said in a Naropa writing class one day. “It’s not luminous,”
agreed another. But was that student being luminous himself?
That was the question. Dr. Lorenzo had no idea, because at
that point he had no idea what the Buddhists meant by
‘luminous’; and later, even after looking up the word in the
dictionary, even for the rest of his life, in fact, he still wasn’t
sure in what way exactly they meant ‘luminous’, because
although they had thrown the word around, they had never
explained it, and what was that but referring to ‘outside
schemata’?
“Thank you for
illuminating me,” he thought later he should have said. “I
feel duly and royally ill-luminous-sated by your whiz-dumb.”
No. It was a
major moment for mj lorenzo the night of the first interview,
when he realized and accepted that he was the bull, the ox and
the cow, all three, even as insulting and self-deprecating as
it sounded at first. It calmed and humbled him to recognize
there was a kind of bovine significance about him, ridiculous
or not. It gave him a kind of confidence he could not explain.
It made no sense at first; yet it seemed to clarify something
essential about him.
He looked at
Bill puzzled. "Is it that Fred fascinates you?" he asked.
And the
question christened Bill’s second brief course of
psychoanalysis, which would last the rest of the night. The
goal of mj’s psychoanalysis of Bill would be to get him to
return to work with Fred; for young Dr. mj was just now making
this his mission for the night.
"No," said
Bill. "I've been that way since I was a little boy; being
raised around farmers; and this Indian thing: American Indians
are very strong on telling stories."
Mj knew about
Native Americans. He was married to an ‘Indian’, as Bill
called himself and his Native American people. And Dlune was
certainly a storyteller. She could spin –.
"And as a
little boy –," Bill began.
"But why Fred?"
mj wanted to know. For, the psychoanalysts who had trained him
would have insisted on knowing that. He was on a roll,
finally. His Freudian analyst teachers would have been proud
of much of what he was doing, but scandalized by the rest; for
the contractual terms of the analysis were not acceptable in
the least. There was no contract whatsoever
between young Dr. mj and Bill Blackburn for treatment; and
this broke a sacred, unbreakable psychoanalytic rule. The
desire for analysis ALWAYS had to arise from the patient, not
the doctor. The goal
of analysis, as well, ALWAYS had to come from the patient, not
the doctor. And furthermore, Bill was not a patient at all. Mj
was about to ram a course of psychoanalysis down the throat of
a friend,
without even warning or informing him that he was doing so. So
it was scurrilous, virtually; some might have said.
But in fact,
and on the other hand, Bill knew so little about
psychoanalysis he was barely aware of what mj was doing, and
all the less damaged thereby. And going over Bill’s head in
this way certainly had its advantages. Mj’s analytic approach
to Bill’s stories, being a format unfamiliar to Bill, put the
Huron attack off guard pretty much from here on out. It
weakened it, affording mj more power and evening up the two
sides energy-wise, so to speak.
Years later the
Dr. condemned the act of psychoanalyzing friends without
permission. He quit doing it because he found it lonely and
boring, and preferred friends’ conscious
participation in any effort at understanding themselves; but
he admitted that in younger days he had given in to the
temptation at times. And at this moment in the interview, as
he explained later, given his limited experience in the world,
and the pressured, confused, high-stakes circumstances of the
night in question, young Dr. mj had felt desperate to come up
with some stance that would serve as a counterbalance to
Bill’s runaway oxcart. And, unannounced psychoanalysis was the
best trick he had been able to come up with, at that desperate
moment.
"Well," Bill
said, "aren't you interested in what you do at the drug and
alcoholic abuse center, in why somebody becomes an alcoholic?"
"Yuh," mj said.
“Every day I listen to tales about addict patients; but not
about my boss.”
Bill glared
like a bullfighter aiming a banderilla. He said, "If you're
listening to somebody that was renowned!"
"But you said
as soon as you came here you were interested." Mj lowered his
horns and charged. "He was your boss!"
Bill dodged,
planting a strike. "NO! My job was promotion.
At first I was just dealing with him in
"Go back," mj
said, slowing him down. Bill was showing weakness at last,
giving mj a chance to shine at last. This
was allowing his shrink-y doctor instincts to kick in. "Go
back to what you were saying, 'As a little boy'." Something
had happened when Bill was little, no doubt, that made him
misjudge his boss now, misunderstand a male in a superior
position. Freudians loved to dig around for things
like that. If you dug around slowly, studied the patient in
depth and pampered him, you could come up with ideas that
would help your patient save his job. He'd be happy with his
boss again. He'd forget the cow flop and remember the fairy
tale, and finally tell it. And you’d be rich, or at
least renowned
like Freud and Jung, from all the books you wrote about
successes psychoanalyzing cooperative patients who had wanted
your famous help.
"The family,"
Bill said, "would tell stories, and as a little boy I got to
understand everybody by listening to the stories of what they
did." The bull charmer swerved. He eyed mj. "And one of the
reasons I got Fred in New York, to produce – before I
came up here to work – is that he was legendary; for a
lot of things. But especially for firing his producers."
Mj tried to
focus on this flashing cape: Bill, at Decca, had listened to
his co-workers’ stories about Fred Waring, and studied those
stories. That was interesting.
Bill said, "I
was told by the head A and R[4]
man at Decca, he says, 'You think that Decca's done you a favor?' He
says, 'I'll give you three
minutes in that studio.' I said, 'We'll come out with a
bitch of a record'! And he says," Bill glared, "'Well, HEY,
you're goin' in with the
master'." Bill rose off his seat on one arm and
grabbed a hanky out of his back pocket. "I said, 'Well, that's
more reason'. He said, 'I don't mean master musician,
I mean the master SONufabitch'!
And I talked to all these guys that'd dealt with this man, and
every one of them told me, 'God help you'!"
Bill wiped his brow.
"Well," Bill
said, "we set the ground rules the minute we got in the studio
and it was beautiful. I never had a hassle with him as far as
recording." Bill Blackburn had set the ground rules, that is,
not Fred; as he would explain later in the evening.
"Mmmm," said
mj. Where was this taking them?
Betty Ann
finally looked up from stitching a hole in a sock on Sewing
Day. "You never went through a recording with him when we did
fifty-five takes on one song."
"No, you see."
A toreador's
bugle rattled the windows. Violins wept with a tinny old radio
sound, and there was a violent band intro. Soft strings held a
wavering note mysterioso as a tenor gushed a serenade:
Gra-nahhhhhh-dahhhhhh...
(
Mj checked the
press release for the latest bull.
President and
Mrs. Eisenhower were fans and warm friends of Waring as were
Jimmy Walker,
"Well," mj
asked, fed up, "why would Fred let you leave now? If he could
keep the U.S. President as a friend, he could keep you." Why
would Fred want to scuttle the part of the fairy tale that
included Bill and Betty Ann? It had been Fred’s fairy tale
too, hadn’t it?
"Of course,"
said Bill. "You've got to understand."
Mj said, "He
could offer you more money."
"Mj, I've set
and tried to explain this a hundred times. I don't think I'm
gettin' it across."
He had not explained
it. That was the problem. He'd misled his friend by telling
him half a story. Now it was a wearing game, a labyrinthine maze
without his help. He had to realize it.
Or was it that
Bill had indeed told mj the other side of the
story, as Bill claimed, and it had gone in one ear and out the
other. Mj lorenzo could be a bit dumb back then, and
head-in-the-mud, ostrich style, when it came to understanding
and accepting the world around him for what it was, sometimes;
and especially, maybe, if he preferred living in a fairy tale
fantasy.
The bugle
struck again. Gra-nahhhhhh-dahhhhhh...
Mj glanced at
the release:
And Al Capone
was a devoted fan, as was Doug Fairbanks, Sr.
He pawed the
earth, glowering. "But he's kept you as producer longer than
he's kept anybody else," he said. "That doesn't fit."
Bill was giving
him space to operate finally; and after being suppressed for
so long, he was exploding with confidence and ideas.
"No he hasn't."
Bill stuffed the hanky back in his pocket.
Fred made his
bugler do it again. The brassy repetition was nerve-wracking.
Mj said, "He
hasn't fired you like he did the other producers."
"Yeh, but he's
had people around 'im thirty-five years."
"Yes," mj said.
"But you are a producer, and you said no producers talked back
to him like you did." Bill had said that. Fred should have
fired him, obviously, but was neurotic like everybody else in
the world, just as the Freudians said. So he'd kept Bill
around for weird unconscious reasons. Mj’s trained Freudian
gut sensed it. Fred and Bill had a love-hate working
relationship, and the hate had gotten the upper hand recently,
but in fact Fred still needed
Bill for neurotic and emotional reasons. Mj wanted to say
this, but Betty Ann distracted him.
"I don't think
Fred's even thinkin' –," she said.
"'Bout me
leavin'," said Bill.
She nodded.
"No," said
Bill, "I don't think he is either."
Mj was
frustrated. "You've spread the word," he said. "Apparently it
hasn't sunk through his skull or something."
Betty Ann
kicked a foot nervously. "He might think it's a conspiracy, a
way to get more money."
She was no
help, either. They were dodging him.
Fred did a
fifty-fifth take on the bugle in ‘
He looked at
the paper handout again.
Arturo
Toscanini was an outspoken admirer of the Waring singers;
Henry Ford Sr. sponsored them on coast-to-coast radio so
that millions could share his taste.
"'Cause Fred
could never think," Betty Ann took off her half-lenses and
grew in her seat, "that someone would want to just leave him!"
She thought this comment cute.
But: mj could
‘never think’, either, that someone would want to ‘just leave
Fred’. "But why would you?" he said, irritated. They'd
poked and prodded enough. He wanted meat.
...I'm fall-ing un-der your spell!...
belted the tenor.[5]
He frowned:
"When you've said he's mellowed!" It was time to pop Bill's
hot air bubble, deflate it onto his easy chair cushion, and
find out what baloney was in that bubble. Anybody who quit a
man worth writing a book about, as they had all agreed Fred
was, deserved a thorough exam.
...And if yooou could speeeak,
what a FAScinating taaale you would teeehll!...
Fred came to
the end of the piece. The tenor gulped a lungful of air for a
tripleforte uvula-buster. He finished by trumpeting:
Ro-man-tic aaaaaaaaaaa-AAAAAAAAA.A.A.A.A.AAAAAA-a-and—...
There was a
vocal glissando down to –
...gay!!
Then a raucous
tailpiece: the floor shook and mj’s drink fandangoed along the
table toward Bill's.
All the
Pennsylvanians, old and young, smiled and socked it viva
voce:
Olé !!!
So why don't
you join the crowd when Fred Waring's all new Young
Pennsylvanians appear at the .....(name of
amphitheater)..... on ...(date of show)...?!
[1] Alice Low. Macmillan Book of
Greek Gods and Heroes. Illustrations by Arvis Stewart.
[2] A collection of most of Allen Ginsberg’s poems can be found in Allen Ginsberg: Collected Poems 1947-1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). The Dr.’s own copy of the collection, Allen autographed for him on the title page, one day at Naropa. And on the opposite page, using a ballpoint pen, Allen drew a picture of the Buddha.
[3] Bill Blackburn’s first contact with Fred Waring had occurred when Bill had bravely volunteered to take on this intractable monster musician no one else at Decca Records could handle, or wanted any more, and produce Fred’s records. Later, when they had gotten to know each other better from producing records together, Fred hired him directly, and Bill began working directly for and under Fred and his Organization, as their Promotions and Publicity man.
[4] From the internet, June 6, 2018: “A & R stands for Artists and Repertoire. It is the division of a record label that is responsible for talent scouting and the artistic and commercial development of the recording artist. It also acts as a liaison between the artist and the record label.”
[5] ‘
My singing goes gipsy when you make me sing.
“The idea that someone or something could MAKE you
sing,” said the Dr. (in Nov., 2018) to the student body of
his great niece’s Chartertech (High School for the
Performing Arts) in
(When some of Dana’s schoolmates told him they had NO
WRITING PROGRAM, the Dr. asked Sammy to set up one of his
after-school reading clubs, of which there were thousands by
now, 2018, all over the world, but mostly in North America
(Canada, USA and Mexico). Sammy’s clubs originally popped up
in indigenous and other areas of non-dominant ethnicity, but
in the eighties and nineties they caught on in other kinds
of high schools, including private, and also colleges and
universities. Dr. Lorenzo’s books were almost always a
predominant part of their reading project, and each club
kept in touch with Sammy or his appointees for assistance
with interpretation, etc.)