Words Without Music: A Memoir (37 page)

Moondog had a contract at one point with Epic Records and made a couple of records with them. He was an artist, and a very individual one. He told me that he had lost his sight when he was sixteen, in a Fourth of July accident when some blasting caps blew up in his face.

After that, he said, “I was sent to a jerk-water conservatory to become a piano tuner.” He never did become a piano tuner—by that time, he had acquired his Viking persona, and he would cross the country playing music. He showed me his scrapbook, which was filled with articles about him. He became famous, and he came to New York and took up his place at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Fourth Street, near the entrance of the Warwick Hotel.

Moondog could write counterpoint, and he could sing, but he especially liked classical music. Listening to my music, he said, “You know, I like your music, it’s interesting. But you have to spend more time with Bach and Beethoven. Those are the two I learned from.”

When I asked him, “What did you learn?” that was when he told me, as I mentioned earlier, “I really was trying to follow in their footsteps, but they were such giants, that to follow in their footsteps I had to leap after them.”

That was Moondog, a giant Viking of a man so typical of some of the great characters who haunted New York in that era, leaping from footstep to footstep after Bach and Beethoven.

I STILL THINK OF NEW YORK CITY
as a powerhouse of a place in which human energy, imagination, and spirit are nourished. The work of artists who live here is inextricably bound up with the city. I think this was true for me at least until my fifties or sixties.

“What does your music sound like?” I’m often asked.

“It sounds like New York to me,” I say.

It is alchemy that takes the sounds of the city and turns them into music. If you’ve lived here, you know that.

In the 1970s and ’80s, when I went to Paris or London, or Rotterdam or Rome, people’s eyes would pop open when they heard my music, because they were hearing something that they wouldn’t have heard from Europeans. The music that I was playing and writing in those early years, that I was importing to Europe, was quintessentially New York music in a way that I always hoped it would be. I wanted my concert music to be as distinctive as Zappa at the Fillmore East, and I think I ended up doing that.

In this very same way, I was drawn to the jazz of Ornette Coleman’s and Lennie Tristano’s music, as well as to the sound of Bud Powell and Charlie Parker. During my last years at Juilliard, on many nights I would go to hear John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard. If he wasn’t there, I’d go over to the Five Spot and hear Thelonious Monk and Ornette. I considered all of them to be fellow alchemists, taking the energy of New York and transforming it into music.

There was a huge explosion going on in New York in the 1960s when the art world, the theater world, the dance world, and the music world all came together. It was a party that never stopped, and I felt like I was in the middle of it.

CAPE BRETON

D
URING THE TIME WHEN JOANNE WAS PREGNANT WITH JULIET
, the idea of finding a place outside the city to spend the summer months began to occupy me. In those days, concert work was still so sporadic that I could really take two months off. All I had to do was have enough money to eat, so I was looking for a place to go for July and August, since concerts happened mainly in the fall, winter, and spring, the opposite of today with summer festivals dominating everyone’s schedule.

My partner in this search was my friend Rudy Wurlitzer, whom I had met in 1954 in Paris. We had been friends from his days at Columbia University and mine at Juilliard. Rudy was one of the first writers I knew who had a successful book. His first novel,
Nog
, had just been published and he was writing a new one and also doing some work in film. He, too, wanted to find a place to work and get away from New York.

I’m sure the idyllic summers I spent at camp in Maine influenced me to head north, but the coast of Maine, or any part of the United States east coast, for that matter, was already too expensive. So on our first trip north, in the fall of 1968, Rudy and I drove into Canada, just south of Halifax, but we didn’t find anything we liked. The next spring, I was doing some plumbing work for the photographer Peter Moore—putting in an air pressure system so that he could clean his negatives before he printed them—in exchange for publicity photographs. When I asked Peter if he knew of any place where we could go, he said, “A friend of mine has a place up in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. It sounds to me that’s what you’re looking for.”

Cape Breton had been an unattached island until the 1950s, when a short one-mile causeway was built to connect it to the mainland of Canada. This little causeway turned into one road that followed the entire coast of the island. To me, that meant one thing: there would be very few people actually living there, and that would make it affordable for us.

So in the summer of 1969, JoAnne and I drove up to Cape Breton with Juliet, who was about eight months old. Once there, we rented a house with no heat or running water for eighty dollars for the whole summer. I wasn’t working that much, but I did write some music, and JoAnne was reading Beckett and thinking about his plays, and both of us picked and ate blueberries, which were everywhere nearby. That was the summer that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. JoAnne and I were lying on a blanket with Juliet outside our cabin, looking straight up at the moon, listening to the CBC broadcast on a transistor radio as Armstrong said his famous line, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” It was completely surreal.

“JoAnne, he’s up there,” I said. We just couldn’t believe it.

Going around Cape Breton, looking for property, talking to people, I met a man named Dan Huey MacIsaac who told me, “There’s a place down on the other side of Inverness, an old campsite, but no one’s been there for a while.”

Dan Huey had been one of the carpenters who built the camp—fifty acres with a big main house and eleven A-frame cabins, right on the shore. There had been a dispute between the American owner and some local people about the property, and the American shut the place down. The following spring, I persuaded Rudy to come with me to check it out, and we agreed to make an offer. I had some cash from a small share of a property I inherited from Uncle Willie, who had recently died, and Rudy had some cash from a film job, so when we found out the owner of the camp, Mr. Coulter, was actually in New York, we drove back home, met with him, and made the whole transaction for twenty-five thousand dollars right there in his office across from Grand Central Station.

We would spend our first summer on the new property in 1970. The whole Mabou Mines theater company came up to rehearse
The Red Horse Animation
, and I was able to finish composing
Music with Changing Parts
. It was the first of many productive summers. Along about June every year I would buy a used station wagon, usually a Ford Falcon (preferably white), which almost always was good enough for the road trip from New York City to Cape Breton and back. That first year it was just JoAnne, Juliet, and myself. The next year we had Zack with us, plus a border collie named Joe.

Right away our artist friends began to visit. We had taken down three of the eleven A-frames and put them back together at one end of the land for Rudy’s house, still leaving eight for guest housing. Over the next few years, the video artist Joan Jonas, the painters Robert Moskowitz and Hermine Ford, the writer Steve Katz, and Richard Serra all came to visit us, and within a few years they all had places of their own nearby. The photographers Robert Frank and June Leaf found a house a little farther away near the town of Mabou, and Peter Moore’s friend Geoff Hendricks, the artist from the Fluxus movement who had preceded us there by several years, was nearby on Collingdale Road. There were enough of us for a poker game or a beach party and, at the same time, we were separated enough so we could be left perfectly alone to work as we pleased.

Cape Breton, for those who are open to it, is a somewhat austere but deeply beautiful place. There, you are truly in the north. That little finger of land reaches up and above the greater mass of North America, pointing almost directly toward the North Pole. It is not unusual to see the northern lights on a summer evening, and the sky is still light until well after ten p.m. The nights can be cool and the days never more than warm.

Inverness, our nearest town, had a co-op grocery store, a post office, a few gas stations, several churches, a high school, a pharmacy, a drugstore, and a racetrack for harness racing every Sunday afternoon and Wednesday evening. It also had a waterfront lined with boats and lobster traps. It was home to two or three thousand people and eventually had a hospital as well. After a number of summers there, when I first arrived at the co-op to go shopping after being away for nine or ten months, the townspeople, who by then were used to seeing my family and me, would say, “Welcome home, Philip.”

One of the best things about Cape Breton was my neighbors. John Dan MacPherson had the farm on the main road, just behind our place. In fact our fifty acres had been part of his farm before he sold it to the people who were thinking of it as a home and campsite for tourists. It had never had a real season, however. The place had been shut down for eight years until Rudy and I came along and bought it.

John Dan, I believe, was happy when we came along, thinking that perhaps the campgrounds would finally open, bringing instant prosperity to the little parish named Dunvegan. That didn’t happen but, as it turned out, he liked us pretty well anyway. It wasn’t long before I got to know his life story. He came from a big family, a dozen or so brothers and sisters—quite common in that part of the world. As one of the youngest, he left home early. He told me that he had traveled all over the world, working from place to place. At the age of fifty, he returned to Cape Breton to marry, settle down, and have a family, and over the next thirty years he had twenty-one children. I met him when he was in his midseventies and several new ones came along after that. He made his living fishing, farming, and cutting trees for pulp, and in the course of a long lifetime he had accumulated an astonishing amount of knowledge and wisdom.

I saw him quite often working in the woods between our two houses. One day he was pinning a tree he had cut down to the ground with wooden pegs. He had taken off all the limbs, but it still had all its bark. He was getting ready to build Rudy’s house, he said, and needed some poles, which he called “round lumber.”

“What are you doing, John Dan?” I asked.

“Getting ready for the full moon. That will be in a couple of days.”

He answered all my questions with the soft Scottish-inflected accent common in Cape Breton.

“What does the full moon have to do with the trees?”

“I need to take the bark off to make the pole clean all around. When the moon is full, it will pull all the sap in the tree to the surface and I can pull the bark right off.”

I tried to get there to see him when he would next be working again, but I missed that moment. When I got back to that spot a few days later, I found six to eight poles stacked there, all free of bark and ready for use.

Another time, walking with him in the woods, I had a question: “Tell me something, John Dan. I’ve been coming up here for a number of years now, and I notice that on the twenty-second or twenty-third of every August there will be a big storm. Why is that?”

“That’s the day the sun crosses the line.”

“The line?”

“Yes, the line. That’s when fall begins.”

I now understood that he was referring to the equinox and the “line” must be the equator. From that far north, the sun would appear to move toward the equator a little earlier than we’re used to farther south in New York.

“And?”

“That’s the day the sun begins to get weak and will allow a corruption to come in from the southeast.”

Apart from the natural poetry of his language, I would ask myself, Are these the kinds of things that grown-ups are supposed to know? I knew none of them.

Again, one day we were walking in the woods. We came to a big tree with a sizable trunk and branches reaching up through the natural canopy. We stopped there for a moment of silence. Then he said, “Now that tree there. A millionaire could come up from New York and try to buy that tree. But he would never have enough money.”

He paused for a moment as we contemplated his thought.

“And those children of yours. They’re little now, but it will seem like tomorrow when, one day, they will be driving up here in a big car,” and then with a sweep of his hand which took in our surroundings, “and all this will be just a dream.”

With that he turned and walked off into the woods, leaving me standing there alone and speechless.

John Dan wasn’t the only one I hung out with. Father Stanley MacDonald was my immediate neighbor. Angus MacClellan had about one hundred acres next to me and had given one acre to Stanley, where he built a small house, right on the water. It was a beautiful spot and Stanley, in the days before he retired from the Church, would manage to be there every week. He was a great reader and had by far the best library on the road, and that included Rudy’s library and my own. He had taken up an interest in Jung and had even gone to the Jung Institute in Switzerland for a summer course. The archbishop in Halifax didn’t care for him much. Probably he was too much of a freethinker.

Stanley was from around there, but the family had moved to Sydney, on the other side of Cape Breton, where his dad had opened a bakery and where all his kids—a baker’s dozen or so—had worked. Stanley had been the priest of St. Margaret’s Church just up the road from us, at Broad Cove. He had been there for years and knew everyone on the road for miles around. The archbishop couldn’t get rid of him, but he assigned him to a very small parish in North Sydney, about ninety miles away, and it was there that, at his invitation, I visited him one Sunday morning. There were only ten or twelve people present, and they were sitting in small groups up and down the center aisle. I was somewhere in the back. After the regular service, Father Stanley gave his homily (sermon). It was very simple and straightforward. The theme was the pervasive suffering of life from which no one escapes. He began speaking (and not from notes) at the small pulpit in front of and below the altar. Leaving the pulpit, he began to walk down the aisle, stopping in front of each of his parishioners, pausing in his movement but not in his speech. He spoke to each one of them in turn, then, reaching the end of the aisle, he turned around, and continued talking, pausing, and speaking until he arrived back at the pulpit. His timing was exquisite and he ended his homily exactly at the moment he finally turned to again face his entire congregation.