My big sister’s radio

by David Benjamin

“If you don’t like rock ’n’ roll./ Think what you’ve been missin’./ But if you like to bop and stroll,/ Come on down and listen./ Let’s all start to have a ball./ Everybody rock ’n’ roll!/ Oh, baby, rock … ” —Danny and the Juniors

MADISON, Wis.—With the possible exception of the Mad King of Mar-a-Lago, Taylor Swift might be—at least for the next fifteen minutes—the most famous person in the world. However, my familiarity with her derives only from football and airport congestion. I know that her main squeeze is Travis Kelce, who plays tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. And I became palpably aware of her celebrity last year because the European air terminals through which I passed were thronged with “Swifties” commuting from concert to concert, following her world tour and going into debt to buy plane fares, hotel rooms, tickets and merchandise.

But I’ve never heard the girl sing.

Which I know she does well. Plus, she’s pretty, smart, charming but enigmatic and a marketing whiz. I like her, if only because the Mad King hates her.

But I’ve never heard the girl sing.

I probably won’t, unless, of course, she pops up on the background muzak at my coffee joint. This Swiftless void in my life represents a choice I made sometime in the 1970s, when I relegated the vicissitudes of pop music to a background hum.

However, music—a huge part of my consciousness—has been running through my head all my life. Pop, in particular, snuck up on me, thanks to my big sister Peggy, who was addicted to an AM radio, plugged in beside the bathroom mirror, that played the Top Forty on WLS in Chicago, jockeyed by Dick Biondi, to whom my kid brother Bill and I irritably applied an alternate surname—Head.

We were irritated because every night from eight to midnight, Peg occupied the lavatory, greasing her face, rolling up her hair and performing mystical cosmetic rituals sacred to teenage girls in the 1950s, all the while worshipping at the 50,000-watt altar of Dick.

Despite my pique, Peg’s radio got to me, especially as puberty set in. I discovered that I possessed enough innate rhythm to avoid embarrassment at sock hops in the Franklin School gym. I learned that I like to dance and that Little Eva, Chris Montez and the Orlons, if useless for anything else, were great to dance to.

Also at the Franklin School, there was a music teacher who took it as her mission to enlighten kids like me about how far back in time American rock ’n’ roll stretches. She talked about minstrelsy after the Civil War. She explained Scott Joplin’s compositions in ragtime, which led to “stride piano” variations by Fats Waller in songs like “Honeysuckle Rose” “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Dinah.” The last of these became jazz on Thelonius Monk’s keyboard—an evolution that revealed to me the extraordinary, ever-changing context of American music.

After my music teacher tickled my fancy, I harked to the Madison Public Library, where I repeatedly checked out The Music of New Orleans, recordings by blues hunter Samuel Charters. I played this Folkways LP so often that I could sing along with the Mardi Gras “Indian” tribes of the Lower Ninth …

Oh, dey comin’ an ‘dey jumpin’,
Tooway bockaway.
Oh, dey comin’ an’ dey runnin’!
Tooway bockaway.
De red white ’n’ blue got de Go-olden Band …

On the same record, I listened raptly—amazed—to a street musician named Frank Amica playing “Liebestraum” hauntingly on a six-string guitar in an empty attic in the French Quarter. These aural adventures warped my tastes for life. I danced to rock ’n’ roll, but I heard in the Beatles and Bob Dylan strains that went all the way back to the Gospel hymns of slavery and the oral legend of John Henry. I knew the truth about Stagger Lee and the significance of Highway 61. I stuck with rock all through the Sixties, but recognized the jazz influences in harmonies by Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the Electric Flag.

Rock ’n’ roll, of course, was my source because it was all around me, it was popular, it was danceable and I wanted, in the words of the Beach Boys, to “dance, dance, dance.” I was flooded with the excess energy—physical, sexual, cerebral—of adolescence. But curiosity steered me into music that wasn’t popular or contemporary. I was possibly the only kid in town whose meager record collection included records by the Kingston Trio, Dave Brubeck, the Monkees, Billy Stewart’s startling interpretation of Gershwin’s aria, “Summertime,” and “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Modest Mussorgsky.

I figured out, by and by, that the pop stars of the moment—and the songs they rendered on WLS—really were momentary. By the time I was in high school, Johnny Ray and Patti Page were already prehistoric and Eddie Fisher was a laughingstock. I suspected the same fate would soon befall Bobby Vinton, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Vee, Fabian and Frankie Avalon (although the latter lingered on, conjoined to Annette Funicello in all those preposterous Beach Party movies). Most pop songs, after all, linger as long in the American musical canon as they last on the charts. I mean, we all know “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”, written by Carole King and recorded by the Shirelles in 1960, because the poetry is brilliant and the melody is adaptable to genres and arrangements that go far beyond its pop origins. It has become a “standard.” On the other hand, who remembers—and what other artist has ever covered—“Rockin’ in the Graveyard,” recorded in ’59 by Jackie Morningstar (although it’s a fun song and the video is a gas)?

And then, there was Tiny Tim.

Eventually, everyone recovers from the hormonal overload that had us dancin’ to the music when we’re sixteen. The commonest and most sensible response—because we’ve got jobs to do and kids to raise— is to just stick nostalgically with the music that gripped our senses at their most vulnerable and keep listening to the music we loved when we were kids. Heck, I do, too.

Some of us, like me, expand our musical interests. My turn to jazz continued my education, captivated my wife and led to personal encounters with some of the great musicians of our time. I never got to shake Sinatra’s hand, but I shmoozed with Bucky Pizzarelli and I sat next to Liza Minelli at Birdland (whose version, by the way, of “New York, New York” is way better than Sinatra’s).

There are also music lovers who try, as they age, to surf the tides of pop music and stay up to date with the idols of the moment, however ephemeral they might be. I don’t quite understand their motives. They seem to want to keep up with the interests of young people but they usually don’t know any young people with whom to discuss their musical interests, or, if they do know some young people—probably their own children—they’re trying to bond with kids who regard grownup interest in their interests as lame, creepy, phony, suspicious or all of the above.

Once, a middle-aged friend, who took pride in her hipness to the latest trends and pop celebrities, asked me if I liked a particular young, pretty chanteuse whose moment of fame summoned memories of Marianne Faithfull (in her Mick Jagger bondage) and foreshadowed the fanstorm of Taylor Swift.

I had heard the singer to whom my friend referred. I said, simply, “No.”

I think I broke her heart. For some reason, from me of all people, she wanted approval for her taste not only in pop music, but for her futile pursuit of a youthful self who wasn’t worth pursuing. As a grownup, she was more interesting than she had been at sixteen—or twenty-six. I knew that. She wasn’t sure.

Her lesson, by which I try to live, is to try to keep my musical tastes to myself—except, well, when I’m writing about how I keep my musical tastes to myself.