The author had failed to extract from his friends, the Blackburns, during two famously haywire interviews in 1974 the one simple story he had wanted most of all, that of their courtship and marriage while working for the famous Big Band leader, Fred Waring. Throughout the summer of ’74 mj was upset about this failure, since he thought the tale would be ‘worth millions if sold on the stock exchange’. He kicked himself, swearing he would ‘get that story one way or the other’. But the couple were barely talking to each other, let alone to him, and so could not be interviewed a third time.

Finally something came along, though, that took his mind off the fracas, and seemed to help shake loose the mental log jam that had caused the problem since the beginning.

Guru Garland of India had shown up in the West around 1970 as a thirteen-year-old genius, the picture of health and perfection. He zipped into London’s Heathrow airport off a direct flight from Delhi so dashing and impeccable in his white kurta, white dhoti and white and green lei of perfumy white gardenia blossoms, that people in the airport who experienced him walking past, wobbled in their spots. So dazzling and ahead of the pack was this master of spirit, that his strangely-dressed meditation instructors from India and his newly found retinue of hippie-looking Western devotees could hardly keep up with him, even if they ran as he walked.

Mj had not experienced the genius of the teen guru in person by the summer of ‘74, of course; but a TIME magazine article which mj’s friend Joey had sent him about the Indian whiz kid had reminded mj of things he had learned long ago, once upon a time, and then forgotten somehow. Such as the fact that life was full of duality and impossible choices, and therefore anyone as sensitive to ups and downs as mj lorenzo had been, since birth, would almost certainly HAVE to meditate on SOMETHING hypnotizing, or practice SOME kind of calming mental exercise on a regular basis, to ever achieve ANY degree of calm emotional detachment from the mess, or to retain a doctorly and professional poise.

Yet young doctor Lorenzo was ‘too busy’ (as he told Joey) and too professionally positioned, he thought, to drive for hours to a session where white-haired Indian disciples of a teenage guru could teach him the four techniques of meditation officially and properly; even though Joey, a very good friend of mj’s by now, seemed a fundamentally changed person for having done so, as mj had told Joey himself.¹

Joey was lucky to have had any free time at all for developing his inner self, as mj saw it. Joey had dropped out of college from debilitating grief and shock three years back when – during a period of just ten months, remembered forever by that generation – three individual and very young rock stars of preeminent ability and fame had – all three – ‘accidentally’ overdosed and kicked the bucket on combinations of drugs and alcohol, one after the other in separate incidents. Jimi Hendrix. Janis Joplin. Jim Morrison. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! And after a triple whammy as cosmic as that, and after abandoning higher education to deal with all the emotion from it, Joey had felt too crippled in his heart of hearts to work, of course, and way too under-educated in addition, naturally; since he had dropped out of college. But through all of the devastating months of emotional aftermath he had retained the cunning somehow to stay in touch with a Jewish mother who had sent him money whenever he had gotten so low down in spirits as to mumble a few words about not having any food.²

And meanwhile, with such time on his hands, Joey had succeeded in acquiring for himself a quite different sort of education by browsing or reading in a standing up position just about every single book in Baltimore’s one and only ‘occult’ – meaning ‘New Age’ – bookstore. And so, for these reasons and several more, Joseph ‘Joey’ Rosenblatt had been one of the very first and very few brilliant people around the planet who actually were free enough, and ready and ripe enough for the plucking, that when the young guru appeared, Joey could give himself up at once, heart, mind and complete body and soul, to understanding and passing along the Indian boy’s new way of seeing and doing things.

That helped explain why Joey (while also feeling he owed a friend like mj some help of such kind) had several times during the summer of ‘74 dropped hints over the phone as to how the guru’s secret meditation technique might work. Joey had never explained the technique outright, certainly; for promising to keep the secret had been part of what was required in order to be taught the secret in the first place. Keeping it a secret and not passing it on to friends protected the guru’s right and responsibility to make sure that followers learned his teaching in exactly the correct, very caring atmosphere he wanted them to learn it in. And in fact, in interviews in later years, Joey always said that ‘the wave’ which Dr. Lorenzo ‘misunderstood and took’ to be the guru’s meditation, and which the Dr. then used for the rest of his life, off and on, to calm his mind and spirit, was ‘the farthest thing imaginable’ from what the guru had actually taught. And yet ‘the wave’ would serve mj lorenzo as a calming device the rest of his life. And he never gave credit for his discovering it to anyone but the kid guru himself.

You ‘sailed upwards into the sky on every in-breath’, was the way young Dr. Lorenzo had translated this hint immediately, ‘riding upward the front leg of a huge parabolic curve’, and you ‘sailed back down the back leg of the huge McDonald's M arc on every out breath’, never losing sight of your movement as you sailed up and down every last millimeter of this huge, heavenly, blue-sky-filling parabolic wave, lest your mind wander straight back to its usual unceasing crazy and worthless thought patterns. Such thinking was never allowed during meditation, naturally. No thinking was allowed at all, in fact, not even thinking about thinking, or thinking about NOT thinking. Nothing was allowed except sensing and riding that incredible curve, ‘the parabola-shaped wave’. Mj understood the guru’s meditation right off the bat in such a way, IN-correctly, as it would seem, from listening to Joey’s evasively vague description of it over the phone. And yet ‘the wave’ saved his life from confusion and chaos as mj’s Remaking pundits and Legs pundits all agreed.

The purpose of meditation was to halt and silence the usual hyperactivity of the mental apparatus, so that you could relax and finally just LIVE your life purely as life per se, experiencing absolutely nothing but the incredible life that was inside you. That was why you clung to the wave like you once clung to your mother's womb, rocked as her womb had been rocked by her own breathing in and out. You did it with the utmost all-out conscious devotion to your future better self, to your better inner self, your real self. And you did it knowing that life and sanity rode on the wager that this trick would save you from the craziness of your usual self, your constant crazy thinking. You watched your movement assiduously while you rode up and down, up and down, up and down, constantly erasing every single thought that ever attempted to pop up as you rode along that curve, up and down, up and down, by focusing your attention upon YOUR MOVEMENT ALONG THAT CURVE instead of upon the endless noisy thoughts inside your own crazy restless mind.

That was how it felt when mj first tried the guru’s meditation; and it WORKED IMMEDIATELY. His mind was relaxed finally for the first time he could remember. He experienced detachment at once, virtually; and got very excited. Enlightenment was upon him.

His whole crazy life would make sense any moment, just as it had made sense when he was a little boy; back when he had believed everything his parents had ever said he should believe, years and years and lifetimes ago; back in a strange eon when everybody who was anybody, including mj, and even including the President of the United States, more often than not, was a convicted, churchgoing believer not too different from John Calvin himself. That was back when everybody thought like everybody else who lived up and down the street. They thought that their own U.S. extremist-Protestant Christian religion, just as the English Puritans, and so many Bible-pounding Senators and preachers since the Pilgrims and Puritans, had said, would be the ‘light of the world’, and would guide the grand old U.S.A. toward showing the rest of humanity the tricks that the world needed for achieving true Christian moral perfection.³

But mj had tried to live like his parents for years and years, and his life had never done anything, from about 1960 on,⁴ age 17, but tear apart at the seams again and again; and so he now tried riding what he thought of as ‘the guru’s soft smooth wave’ for several weeks during the late summer of ‘74, attempting to bear the tension of life in general and of the Blackburns’ marriage in particular. And it WORKED for him. He bore the tension of their marriage better than he usually bore stress.

Lately Bill and Betty Ann’s once wonderful marriage had sat squarely upon the Pocono Mountains area of northeastern Pennsylvania about as attractively and usefully as the big messed-up-looking frostbitten tomato that sat squarely on top of their vegetable patch so early in the season, right now, down by Minisink Creek in back of their house. Neither the marriage nor the frostbitten tomato, nor mj’s life for that matter, had seemed very promising for quite a few weeks. And yet in late August, right after mj started focusing on ‘the wave’, during a good bit of every day and night, things started looking up again.

Bill quit working for Fred Waring and felt triumphant; even though he had found no other job or income yet. But he got himself appointed to the Monroe County Drug and Alcohol Board, thanks to mj. And Bill, when not looking for work, was spending every moment, now, trying to establish a halfway house for alcoholics. And he felt good about himself and optimistic about things in general. And finally he underwent a few importantly intense conversations with Betty Ann.

And then the phone rang and it was the call mj had wanted all summer. Things fell into place suddenly; maybe; hopefully; if he could allow himself to think it possible. The two wives, ‘the ladies’, ‘these women’, as Bill kidded, had decided that Bill, the best storyteller for leagues in every direction, should tell the Blackburn love story as mj had always wanted him to tell it ever since the beginning of their first infamous interview. To get that tale of Bill Blackburn’s on tape had been mj’s desire and plan from the start; and everything under the sun and moon, it seemed, had happened instead. But now Bill, with Betty Ann helping, would tell their wedding story for mj’s tape recorder, finally; and they would ‘renew their vows’ too, while at it.

Maybe that, in fact, the renewal of vows, was the real reason to do a third interview, not mj’s motive of preserving the story for posterity.

Dlune would come to the interview too, therefore, so as to help the Blackburns redo their vows. That was the other new twist. Dlune was wanting to hear the wedding story again, maybe because she wanted the love story to ‘stir her up romantically’, as Bill kidded his buddy, mj. Dlune COULD NOT WAIT – for some ’female’ reason lost on these two men who ASSUMED it had to be a crazy and hilarious ‘female’ reason, as they pretended, just so that they could laugh and laugh for hours about it, whenever they saw each other. Dlune could not wait: to re-experience the Blackburn wedding ceremony, and all of its storied trappings and troubled lead-up at the Warings’ ‘Gatehouse’,⁵ that day when Dlune had helped good friends say vows in Fred Waring’s living room. Dlune had been at the HEART of the wedding that day as matron of honor. Whereas mj, by comparison, had wandered about loosely and feeling lost on the outskirts, in a way, being the only one of the four friends not at the very center of the wedding ceremony.

And the plan sounded RIGHT somehow – finally – this crazily unusual kind of storytelling ceremony that the two women had dreamt up.

New mixes of things, even bizarre mixes of things, could flow as smoothly together as rock-hard blocks of frozen butter and rock-hard blocks of clotted molasses when heated in a pot together over a flame, if you just did the guru’s meditation and listened to him talking on tape on a regular basis. That was how Dr. Lorenzo eventually came to understand HOW IN THE WORLD the guru’s meditation had smoothed away so completely the discombobulated life he had been living, as everyone in the world eventually agreed it had done, starting in the late summer of 1974.

From now on, starting in late August of ’74, every time mj remembered that his body was breathing, he gave that parabolic in-and-out and up-and-down wave his full attention; and for some reason, oddly, many big things in his life happened more smoothly – as he came to believe with conviction over time – sometimes as smoothly and beautifully as flowers opening up. Some days, in fact, his whole life burst into bloom; and the dazzlingly beautiful smoothness ‘did not go unnoticed’, as he thanked Joey by phone.

It happened to have been, in fact, only several hours before mj’s upcoming third and last interview with the Blackburns when he said these words to Joey on the phone one Saturday afternoon, all about the ‘smoothness’ and the ‘melting together of hard blocks of butter and molasses’. And to illustrate his newfound ‘smoothness’, mj explained to Joey that Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians had just come through the Poconos on tour and Betty Ann had been asked to fill in at a concert in nearby Washington, New Jersey. Mj and Dlune had not seen their good friend, Betty Ann, for many weeks, not since the disastrous second interview, when she and Bill had verbally fought right in front of mj in a way he could never forget. So the Lorenzos had gone to the concert ‘just to see Betty Ann’ after so long. For Bill had been coming around to visit a little; but she had not. She had remained in hiding throughout the many weeks of their big extended ‘fight’.

And ‘the wave’ had ‘worked’ superbly for mj that night at the Fred Waring concert in Washington, New Jersey, as he told Joey, thanking him. He was beside himself, he was so delighted with the first half of the concert. Everything about Fred Waring took on a new significance. Every note and every emotion of the concert radiated a new kind of meaning.

Wacko, old-fashioned Fred Waring underwent a transformation in mj lorenzo’s mind, accordingly, from an ancient oriental chthonic wine god with a few devilish qualities, as the young doctor had perceived him during the first interview, to a more Western and modern messiah figure like Moses or Christ. Suddenly mj realized that Fred, who was elderly and in his seventies by now, but was still a ‘best friend’ of the recent U.S. President, Nixon, THOUGHT he was smart enough, with all that experience and wisdom and power he had accumulated over a lifetime, to help inspire a U.S. American nation that was hopelessly lost, and help direct a people who were walking around in a desert in circles, to find their way out of the desert into a Promised Land.

During the second intermission mj had decided to remain in his seat and meditate, he told Joey. He closed his eyes and followed the wave devotedly. Dlune floated into her seat next to him after spending the intermission backstage with Betty Ann. And then the house lights faltered and dimmed and the house went dark. A reddish high school auditorium curtain opened down the middle, scraping right and left and waking mj up from a ‘mesmerizing raft ride in his mother’s womb’, as Joey would put it for High Times later. Mj opened his eyes and the stage lights blinded him with a vision.

The Pennsylvanians, agleam in stiff white shirtfronts and black tuxes, and the ladies in gowns of many different colors, were a cut above anything else of their popular-music time. They were far too classy to be considered vaudeville any more, as they had been in the early 1920s, and way too serious to be college fraternity or Chicago speakeasy as in the later 20s. They were too choral to be 30s Big Band either, strictly speaking, and often too sacred-music to be Broadway, simply, yet too often lighthearted and impish to be traditional Protestant church either; even though Fred and his Pennsylvanians had spent fifty-some years concertizing in every single one of these types of venues.

Fred's ‘girls’, as he called them, radiated heavenly light; and the starched, spiffy men of the glee club looked to be just as devoted to Fred as any group of disciples of love had been to any spiritual master in the history of mankind. The piano sounded plucked for a second, like a harp from old bardic times; while Betty Ann, sitting at the exact center-point of the Washington High School stage and wearing heavenly light blue, looked like a madonna in a Raphael painting cuddling an infant Jesus; except that in her lap she cradled a seemingly miraculous electronic ‘Cordovox’, an accordion-looking instrument, not a baby, naturally.

And Fred stood front and center before this dazzling show scene, bestowing on his devoted, mostly-elderly audience his older-man (but still very handsome) countenance; then saying something to them; and suddenly turning his back on them and raising his hands, the two famous hands that had been omnipotent at creating perfection in choral sound for decades. And he masterminded and inspired – and himself created – every single little amazing human nuance in that auditorium for the rest of the concert and night, just as he had all night up until then, audience reactions and all:

I Hear Music!...

The Pennsylvanians sang their incomparable sound, and a harpist plucked an arpeggio. The famous combination of musical sound got warm applause indeed. It was Fred’s perennial theme song:⁶

I Hear MU-sic....

More devoted applause poured from the audience like hot sweet syrup from a bottle and now…, softly:

Sleep,.. Sleep,.. Sleep,...⁷

A hearty swell of fond approval filled the auditorium of fans who had stuck by Fred for the entire stretch of his seventy-four years in this world, and who remembered him with passionate nostalgia, now, therefore: fans from his days of Broadway and vaudeville and Hollywood movies; from State College and University of Michigan dances and Prohibition Chicago speakeasies; from radio through all the very sad World War II years; and from Sunday night prime-time television right after Sunday night church during the late 40s and 50s. And those fans sighed; moaned; and banged their hands together as hard as they felt was socially allowed so early in the third and last part of a Fred Waring concert.

How I love you true......

Soprano obligato floated a-way up there on top of it all, and the Pennsylvanians smoothed out that heavenly mother-sound with a loving, harmonious men’s hum:

Mmmmmmmmm-mmmmm..........

And mj’s third and last interview with Bill and Betty Ann Blackburn began the very next Saturday night, EXACTLY a week to the minute after the Pennsylvanians’ live road tour concert in Washington, New Jersey, had begun.

This was one of the most important reasons, as pundits thought much later, that mj lorenzo HEARD AND SAW such a real and magnificent concert in his head the night of the third and last interview.

The author had just experienced the impeccable artistry of Fred and The Pennsylvanians in concert seven nights back, in the flesh, and had been unable to get the incredible feel and appeal of that spine-tinglingly outdated, old-fashioned, hokey American music of theirs out of his nervous system since that night. He might have succeeded if someone had changed the subject to President Nixon’s tearful resignation, or had played Jimi Hendrix’ spine-twanging Star-Spangled Banner over the Blackburn living room sound system loudly enough to bring someone like mj lorenzo back to contemporary reality resoundingly; but Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians must be the only thing under discussion all night, they had sworn this time, all four, the two Blackburns and the two Lorenzos: how Bill and Betty Ann had managed to fall in love; get married; and enjoy their crazy honeymoon to the Nixon White House Christmas Concert: IN SPITE OF Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians with whom they had lived and worked, day in and day out, year after year after CRAZY, MIND-BOGGLING, DYSFUNCTIONAL AND INTERFERING year.

¹  See our ‘look’ at the Dr.’s second book, Tales of Waring, chapter entitled “The Hoha Theory,” for the Dr.’s own description of the day he and Joey Rosenblatt first met, in Washington, D.C., during the 1972 May Day anti-Vietnam War demonstration, and of the day they celebrated the first anniversary of their first meeting, exactly a year later. The chapter entitled “Vishnu’s Pulse” in the same work describes their phone interaction just before the first Blackburn interview, and how Joey possibly impacted that interview in a way that helped create the final product of the interview, Tales of Waring. The chapter “I Want That Book Stopped” in Tales of Waring offers more details of their early friendship from the point of view of Fred Waring and U.S. President Richard Nixon. (a look at mj lorenzo’s second book, Tales of Waring will be published at the present website in the near future.)

²  Jimi Hendrix died September 18, 1970 at age 27; Janis Joplin died October 4, 1970 at age 27; and Jim Morrison of The Doors died July 3, 1971 at age 27.

³  Dr. Lorenzo in later years tended to stress the fact, in his lectures, interviews and writing, that the English colonies which became the USA had been settled principally by Calvinists and people of other ‘extremist-Protestant’ sects or denominations which were much closer to Calvinism in their theology than to any other kind of Christian thinking including Lutheran or Catholic. Calvinism, therefore, was the USA’s common denominator. It lay at the heart of the ideology and world-view which had created the United States of America and its Constitution and government and capitalist free-market economy. And that Calvinist world-view, which was a total view, meaning religious, political and economic all in one, had caused Americans, from the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock right up to the politicians of the 20^th and 21^st Century, to believe that America had been chosen by God to serve as ‘a light on a hill’, a beacon of democratic, economic and spiritual hope for mankind, an example of the closest thing to moral perfection which the human race had yet produced in a single people. Often when discussing the topic, the Dr. would refer interested parties to the 20-volume Annals of America, Volume II, Chapter 25, “American Destiny,” especially section 1 of that chapter (p. 536), entitled “A CITY SET UPON A HILL: AMERICA AS AN EXAMPLE FOR THE WORLD.” It began: “That America and the Americans were chosen by God to set an example to the world was a proposition firmly asserted by the first New Englanders, and reasserted by many of our countrymen down to the present day. Gov. John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was one of the first to affirm it, and in so doing he used an image that had long been evocative.” That ‘image’ was the one used by Christ in his Sermon on the Mount, when he said (Matthew 5:14-16, King James version), “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” The Annals of America, Mortimer J. Adler, Ed., Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1968. See also, chapter 23 of the present work, entitled: and yet another kind of propundity's 'look at' mj lorenzo's fourth book, question number 23.

⁴  During his ‘Remaking year’ of June 1970 to June 1971 (age 27-28) mj lorenzo reviewed the contents of his personal 1960s diaries chronologically, as the year progressed, and incorporated portions of them – and his reactions to them – into his first book, The Remaking, which described his ‘Remaking’ trip and year. The depressed contents of the journals became part of his explanation for why he had needed the ‘Remaking’ trip (and its year off from medical training) in the first place; for the journals were prima facie evidence of: how ‘crazy’, mixed up, depressed and depersonalized he had remained throughout so much of the 60s; and how many different kinds of potential solutions to his dissatisfied state he had tried up until 1970 with little positive benefit.

⁵  The Warings (Fred and Virginia) called their restored antique wealthy-estate horse barn ‘The Gatehouse’; and everyone in the Poconos referred to it by that name; just as everyone in Great Britain knew of the Queen’s residence in London as ‘Buckingham Palace’. In the old days, before Fred bought the entire estate (in the early 40s), including its already famous ‘Shawnee Inn’ and golf course and other buildings, the ‘Gatehouse’ lay at the main entrance gate to the Worthington estate. Over the years it had served the estate as cow barn, horse stable, carriage house and – apparently – also as a kind of ‘gate’ or guard house, guarding the entrance to the estate property. For more details see: Virginia Waring, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997 (paperback, 2007).

⁶  The song, “I Hear Music,” was composed by Fred Waring around 1944, as the theme song for his new 10 A.M. daily radio show. It remained his theme song, along with “Sleep,” until he died in 1984. On Decca’s “The Best of Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians” credits for “I Hear Music” are listed as: “Fred Waring – Roy Ringwald – Jack Dolph.”

⁷  Fred’s other theme song, “Sleep,” was composed by Adam Geibel. On the Reprise album, “Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians in Concert,” the credits are listed as “Geibel – Waring – Ringwald.” Waring in this case means Tom Waring, Fred’s brother, who wrote the words, added a soprano obligato, and generally helped adapt it from Geibel’s original, for Fred to use on his radio show starting in 1930. “Sleep” remained Fred’s theme song, along with “I Hear Music,” until he died at age 84 in 1984. He first recorded “Sleep” for Victor Talking Machine in 1923. Over the decades Ringwald and others helped adapt it to Fred’s needs of the moment. During the 70s a typical live concert would open with a few seconds of “I Hear Music’ and then a few seconds of “Sleep,” and would always close with just “Sleep,” just as the old radio show had, and other Waring concerts even before that.