Words Without Music: A Memoir (33 page)

The first jobs I started with Jene were putting up walls with sheet rock. This was heavy work. Then Jene and I began to do some plumbing, which neither of us knew very much about. There was a plumbing supply store on Eighth Avenue near Eighteenth Street, where we would go for supplies and advice. The guys behind the counter thought it was a joke. We’d come in and say, “Look, I have this part here—it goes into a sink, right?”

“Ah, okay,” they’d say. And then they would go and get me the new part and hand it to me. They’d look at me, just laughing.

“Now what do I do?” I’d say.

“Well, you take this out, and you gotta get some washers to fit here and there, and then you put this in . . .”

They would talk us through it. I would take the part back to the sink we were putting it in, and I’d try and make it work.

We taught ourselves basic bathroom plumbing in this way. Very basic. Basins, toilets, showers, and tubs. Soon we learned to sweat pipes and hook up hot water heaters. We did whatever the guys who sold the parts could tell us. We bought pipe cutters, because in those days we were using galvanized pipe, so we actually had to cut the threads into the pipes. We spent a couple hundred dollars on a pipe cutter where we would hold the pipe and put a ratchet on the end that had a blade in it. We turned the ratchet on the pipe by hand and literally cut the threads in. If we’d had more money, we would have bought an electric pipe cutter, but that would have cost three or four hundred dollars.

We weren’t good at first, but it wasn’t that complicated, either. Later, with the switch over to copper pipes, it became much easier, except that the copper pipes had a tendency to leak more than the old galvanized pipes. Most people would not pay for brass pipes, which are softer and easier to work. The galvanized pipes would only last nine years—after that they would become so encrusted inside that problems with the water pressure would develop. The brass would last up to twenty years, and with the copper, there was no limit. But the copper was more delicate. If it wasn’t unrolled properly, it could end up with a dent, and the damaged part would have to be removed. There were ways of getting around that, but basically it took a higher level of skill. The next thing that came along was PVC plastic, but by then I was done with plumbing.

There was a young man, Sandy Rheingold, who had a little storefront on Prince Street right off West Broadway. He was friendly enough and sat outside his place in jeans and a T-shirt. He wasn’t an artist, just a young fellow who was doing plumbing. Strictly speaking, Jene and I should have been apprenticed to a licensed plumber, spent six or eight years working for him, and then he would bring us to the union and introduce us. We would be allowed to take the test and we’d be entered into the union and we would become licensed plumbers. That would have been about an eight- to ten-year process for most people. We weren’t ready to do that at all.

One day Sandy saw us walking down the street carrying our pipes and said, “Hey, you guys, you do plumbing?”

“Yeah, we do.”

Of course, that was only partly true.

“I’ve got a plumbing place here. You want some work?”

So we went to work for Sandy. I worked for him for about three years, and that’s where I learned how to handle lead, which became useful later on, when I started working for Richard Serra.

Sandy taught us how to melt lead and how to set up a lead bend and install a toilet. The lead bend was a tube with a right angle. The bottom of the lead bend, which ran horizontally under the floor, fit into a four-inch cast-iron pipe. There would be a little bit of a hub where the four-inch pipe overlapped the lead bend, and within that hub, you would pack in a good amount of oakum (a fibrous material commonly used to caulk wooden ships) using a hammer and a wedge. Next you needed the snake, a rope made out of asbestos, which you would wrap around the lead bend where it fit into the cast-iron hub.

If you did it right, you would end up with a little bit of an opening there at the top of the asbestos snake. Then you would take a ladle and dip it into the pot of molten lead you had sitting nearby on top of a small propane burner, and you would pour the lead into the opening left by the snake. The lead would run around it, and the snake would keep it from dripping out of the hub. When you had gotten enough lead in there, you stopped and let it cool down. Then you would take off the snake and take your hammer and a smaller wedge, and pack the lead in all the way around. You did that about three times, until you had packed a solid lead collar around the pipe, which would give you a watertight connection.

Next, you had to connect the top of the lead bend, the vertical part, to the metal flange to which the base of the toilet would eventually be bolted. To do this, you had to trim the top of the lead bend and flatten it down over the flange. To make a solid connection to the flange, at this point, hot lead, as I learned, had to be “wiped” onto the flange itself.

Traditionally, brown paper was used for wiping, the reason being that plumbers in the 1950s and ’60s would go to work with their lunch in a brown paper bag. When they got to work, the first thing they would do was to eat their lunch, at eight thirty in the morning, no less. They did that so they would have a brown paper bag with which to wipe the lead. You absolutely had to do it this way, using the brown paper bag, or you were considered a complete sissy, and even a fraud.

In short, you held the paper up and you dipped it into the lead. The lead was hot, so this all had to be done very quickly. You wiped the lead around the lip of the flange, let it cool, and then placed over it a wax gasket that would provide a seal between the flange and the base of the toilet. We never used gloves, asbestos or otherwise, to do the wiping. Maybe they sold them, but I never saw anyone use them. The brown paper bag was all that protected your hands. In the beginning, Sandy sent an older plumber out with us to teach us how to wipe the lead, but after we did a few toilets with him, we could do it ourselves.

Because Jene and I knew a lot of artists, and because Sandy lived there, we were mostly working in SoHo. One fellow wanted a big, oversized walk-in shower made completely out of lead. It was quite awkward, but we did the whole thing by wiping lead pieces together. We also connected pipes to the big water tanks that held the water on top of the buildings. But mostly we put in hot water heaters or basins. Kitchens, I learned, were easy: we would frame the kitchens, put up the walls, run the water lines from the wall risers, and run the waste lines into the four-inch drains. You could put a kitchen together in about six to eight days. I was working for a lot of people in those days who knew I was a musician, but no one held it against me.

My day jobs would continue for another twelve years, until I was forty-one. I never considered academic or conservatory work. The commitment of time and probable relocation to a far less interesting place than New York completely ruled out a teaching job. Of course, I was never offered a job anyway, and when I finally had a conversation about it, not even an offer, I was already seventy-two years old and unwilling to consider it at all.

IN THE SPRING OF 1968, JOANNE WAS PREGNANT,
and she and I began attending Lamaze classes. For her first experience of childbirth, she wanted a natural childbirth, but she wasn’t prepared to do it at home, so we went for months to the training sessions to develop the breathing technique. The idea was that if you did the Lamaze method, the child would be born without having to give the mother an anesthetic that would get into the child’s bloodstream.

In October, JoAnne’s contractions began fairly close to her due date. We were told to wait until the contractions were within two-hour periods, and that took a while. First there was a contraction, and then another one, and then maybe she didn’t have another for four or five hours. There were a number of days like that, but we knew it was coming.

At that time there were not that many hospitals that would allow the husband to come into the delivery room, but we did some research and found one that would. When the contractions were coming regularly and close enough together, we went to the hospital. I had to be disinfected and dressed up like a doctor from head to toe. I stood beside JoAnne, and we began doing the breathing exercises together. By that time the contractions were coming maybe every ten minutes, but then things slowed down. We started off with no anesthetic, but as the hours went by, it was clear that the birth wasn’t going to happen soon, and at some point the anesthetic was used. In the early morning the baby came out, a girl with a lot of hair on her head. JoAnne stayed in the hospital for a couple of days.

One of those mornings I came into the room and JoAnne said, “I’ve got the name.” She’d been reading Shakespeare, and the name was Juliet. We took baby Juliet back home to West Twenty-Third Street.

Juliet was the first baby born in the Mabou Mines troupe. It goes without saying that there was a lot of excitement in the house. Not long after, Ruth and Lee had Clove, and on our first tour a couple of years later, we took both girls along, staying in peoples’ homes because there was no money for hotels. It worked out fine, because the kind of people who would invite a theater group like ours to perform were equally capable of inviting us to stay with them. In 1976, when we toured Europe with
Einstein on the Beach
, both Juliet and our son, Zack, came on tour with us.

By the time Zack was born three years later, in 1971, it had become common for the father to be in the delivery room. This time we didn’t do the Lamaze classes, as JoAnne wasn’t so convinced that it had been that helpful. We also did not have the time. I was working full-time and so was JoAnne, who had both theater and housecleaning jobs to do. If JoAnne wasn’t available, because of having a rehearsal, I would be her substitute. The pay wasn’t bad, you could get maybe thirty-five or forty dollars for cleaning an apartment, and if you did two jobs in a day, it would be about eighty dollars, paid in cash. It wasn’t a lot of money, but we didn’t need a lot of money, either. A quart of milk was thirty cents, and if you smoked, a pack of cigarettes cost about the same.

We knew the second child was going to be a boy, and we named him Wolfe Zachary Glass, Wolfe coming from my uncle Willie Gouline, the same uncle who paid for my trip to Paris when I was seventeen and sent me bits of money during my years at Juilliard. Uncle Willie’s Yiddish name was Wolfe, with Willie being an Anglicization of that.

While Zack’s birth was not the same process as Juliet’s, it was no less extraordinary. The beginning of a life and the end of a life are both huge transitions. There’s nothing greater. I didn’t know much about the ending of lives at that time, but I learned about beginnings with my children.

THE PHILIP GLASS ENSEMBLE,
as it would come to be known, began to take shape because I needed musicians who were willing and able to play my music. No doubt I had been inspired by Ravi Shankar, who was the ultimate composer-performer. When I came back to New York, I began by calling up friends from my Juilliard days, first Arthur Murphy, and then Steve Reich. Both were composers. Arthur had come out of a twelve-tone and jazz background, and Steve, from what I knew of his recent concerts, was “phasing” musical phrases against themselves and producing extraordinary and beautiful music. He had begun working with tape machines, playing the same music on two different tape recorders. Since the recorders were playing at slightly different speeds they began drifting, and Steve heard new patterns of music emerging. Most people wouldn’t have noticed, but Steve understood that something new was happening. The development of that idea became the basis of his early pieces. He did a piano phase and a reed phase. He went to Africa, and when he came back he began working with drumming. By then he was fully equipped to develop a whole body of original work.

Jon Gibson, who had played in my first concerts, was also one of the founding members of the ensemble. So now I had Jon playing saxophone and Arthur and Steve and myself playing piano. Almost immediately we were joined by Dickie Landry, another saxophonist, who arrived from Cecilia, Louisiana. A year later, Joan La Barbara, a singer with a
beautiful
voice, added her talents to the ensemble. Richard Peck, a friend of Dickie’s, yet another Cajun from Louisiana, came up from the South. He became the third saxophonist and stayed with us for the next forty years. Michael Riesman, who began with us in 1974, became the music director in 1976. From then on, he was responsible for rehearsals, auditions of new players, and, in recent years, many of the arrangements of music that were taken from other works of mine. Significant additions to the ensemble over the years have included singers Iris Hiskey and Dora Ohrenstein, Mick Rossi, Martin Goldray and Eleanor Sandresky on keyboards, Andrew Sterman, Jack Kripl, and David Crowell on winds, and Lisa Bielawa, singer and keyboards. Lisa expanded the role of the “lead singer” to include chorale preparation for the 2012 production of
Einstein on the Beach
that was produced by Linda Brumbach and her Pomegranate Arts company. Over the years Linda has taken on responsibility for booking live performances and many new productions. All the players in the ensemble have been composers in their own right. Dan Dryden, who has been mixing live concerts for the last thirty years, became the archivist of the ensemble’s many concerts and recordings. Steve Erb served as stage mixer.

From the outset, the ensemble rehearsed one night a week, using the top floor of the Twenty-Third Street building as our rehearsal room. I had a very simple rule: the ensemble was dedicated to the music that I was writing. I would play the music of other composers in the group if they organized a rehearsal of their own. But any time they came to my house, there was only one music we were going to play, and that was my own. That was a very radical idea at the time. What normally happened was that three or four composers would get together and form a composers’ group, and every time they did a concert, everyone had a piece on the program. To me, this was a prescription for disaster. The programs would always be the same, and there would always be hidden agendas. I was not interested in investing any time in anything like that.