April 2012:

Life Lessons from Me and Rudy Vallée

I have a friend who says one shouldn't dwell on one's mistakes. I certainly can see the wisdom in that, and I plan soon to really take it to heart. But before I do I want to bathe (somewhat) in my "mistakenhood", if that's a word. Because I've learned some big things from mistakes, believe me. Here's one: don't be condescending, you'll always be sorry. Here's another: the nature of condescension is such that you don't always know when you're being condescending. And so it sometimes happens no matter what your good intentions are. But that's for another day, right now I'm talking about overt condescension, which a lot of us (I, I'm afraid) can find almost irresistible.

Condescension is born of fear, which we all possess to some degree. Born of unacknowledged fear, I think, because once we acknowledge fear in ourselves it takes away all need to condescend, at least for a while.

I used to tell audiences what I was thinking. I think it was a subconscious recollection of Confession, a Catholic ritual that either does some good and is healthful for the subconscious or is an awful deception, a nasty trick played on us by unhappy clerics, I'm not sure which. Maybe it's both, what the hell. But the Catholic Church sure got me used to confession, that is, the notion that other more "official" people can relieve you of your guilt if you've done something that doesn't sit well with your image of yourself. And that once you tell your transgression and subject yourself to a little bit of ritualistic tedium (five Our Fathers, five Hail Marys) then everything's cool and you're good to go, you're shriven, like you've just got a spiritual tuneup and you can drive out of your moral garage with no smoke trailing.

So there would be these moments I would be on stage and, because there is this tradition in the kind of music I do that you should now and then talk to the audience, it would occur to me to tell the audience just what I was thinking about at the moment. Or maybe I should say: what was lately weighing on my mind. I didn't do this much, only now and again. For hey: this is not necessarily a good idea. (For one thing, I have learned, keep learning over and over, that there are rituals everywhere and it's incumbent on you to discover what they are, and act them out the way others do. The lesson of "Dexter", I think. Isn't it cool when television drama makes you think?) Me getting too straightforward, I found, made the audience nervous. Nervous, it seemed to me, exactly to the ratio of my honesty. So I learned, and a good thing, too. So now here's where I can be frank, or Michael.

So one of the big advantages to having the privilege of growing old is that you get new, presumably cooler viewpoints that would not have been afforded you if you were too soon dead, yeah? And oh yes, you get to look back and see these big mistakes. Of yours. The gift of growing old, and it is a wonderful gift, no question.

So Barbara and I lived in West Hollywood in 1970, in a little apartment, in a little apartment complex with a little pool, on Genesee, and we were recording at Universal Studios for at least seventeen years that winter and we went to see Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks (By Hook or By Crook - 1972, YouTube) at a club in Santa Monica and the opening act was Rudy Vallée and his piano player. You can look up Rudy Vallée on Wikipedia, there isn't space here for all the guy accomplished but you're welcome to take my word for it he was heavy in the 20's and 30's, many many hit records, at one point the number one singer in the country. And he was up there conducting his piano player and singing these tunes that all sounded like "Honey Pie", you know what I mean? And opening for Dan Hicks, who was, to be sure, very hot at the time, especially in CA. And Rudy V'd be telling the piano player now speed it up, or slow down, watch my hand, and are you sure that's the right key? etc.

And B and I are in the audience and I'm finding his whole thing so droll and being so amused at Napoleon in rags...and I distinctly remember thinking why doesn't he give it up? the times have so passed him by and he's so old, and gee, I wonder if it could be that he really needs the money? Well, God knows we'd heard of him, and had this picture of him hanging out with Sophie Tucker and Eddie Cantor etc. in some vaudeville heaven where people are maybe dead and maybe not, but I certainly pitied him there I gotta say and of course didn't understand what he was getting at musically at all, and read my lack of understanding as his lack, and was generally amused and perhaps a little contemptuous of him and his whole schtick because I was young and pretty and would always be and he wasn't and would never be, and I played the guitar but he had to hire a schlocky piano player and give him directions during the show. But mostly I gotta say it was that he was old. It seemed to me that he should just quietly get out of the music business because he was just so old, just too old, and it wasn't hip to be old. It was depressing, and I thought he should have seen that, and saved me the trouble of having to perceive it for him...

So maybe you know where this is going. I looked it up recently and Rudy Vallée was about a year younger at that gig than I am now. And I haven't had any hits at all. But I do get to listen to Mr.Vallée on Youtube. He's awfully good. And he's so young.