The Drifters (47 page)

At any rate, on our second day of French, Madame Trenet and I discussed
Les Enfants du Paradis
, and she was so eloquent in her response to this notable film, and so gratified that I shared her high opinion of it, that we spoke for some fifteen minutes on the subject. She would not permit me to give my impressions in English, so I had to do with
‘le premier film du monde en mon opinion’
and
‘cette grande scène dans la nuit entre les trois amoreux.’
Where had my French words come from? Opera librettos, I suppose.

Her third lecture concerned French painting; her fourth, the grandeurs of the French theater; her fifth, French foreign policy; and in the middle of the last, when she was speaking of Bismarck and Thiers, the miracle that she sought took place: suddenly the random sounds she had been making for five days fell into orderly place and I perceived each sound as a word or part of a word. I suppose a light of recognition must have flashed across my face, for Madame Trenet halted her discourse on the perfidy of Bismarck and said in French, ‘Good, now we can start learning the language.’

She gave me a list of two hundred short words—
en, avec, de, sur, sous, mais
—that I was to memorize, and another list of about eighty phrases and sentences which comprised the bulk of casual conversation; these I was to start using immediately, and I was to introduce them to every possible situation, even if I had to distort what it was I had wanted to say. Finally she showed me how to get along with only three tenses—present and future, and a past in which the verb remained the same and only the participle changed—so that to this day I never say in French
I saw
but only
I have seen: J’ai vu. J’ai acheté. J’ai pensé.

Sixteen days after my first meeting with Madame Trenet, I gave a short talk in French to a Geneva club on winter in Minnesota. I was not a fluent success but I was understood, and from that moment I spoke French with assurance if not accuracy.

There was one additional feature of her method; at the end of the first week she told me, in French, ‘Here is a dictionary. Do not use it. But sit down and make out a list of the words that are important in your business … in English. The things you really want to talk about. Look up their French equivalents and memorize them. Then throw the dictionary away, because we have found that if you read French and guess at the meanings of words, you’ll do a little better in the long run than if you look up each word as you go along. What’s important, you’ll enjoy remembering it more.’

So as I said, one day I was sitting in the Alamo wasting time, and as I half-listened to the awful noise coming from the record player, I mysteriously heard, for the first time, the actual music and the words. The sound barrier was broken. What a moment before had been mere noise, now became a succession of individual sounds, powerful and with profound meaning. It was a song like ‘Nel Blu Dipinto del Blu,’ a cry from the heart, and the words were such as I might have uttered, for the husky voice of a troubled man lamented: ‘Someone left the cake out in the rain …’ I asked Joe to play the record again, and since the bar was doing little business, he did so, and thus I began my investigation of the revolution that music had sponsored while I was attending to other things.

Coming to the bar now became not an escape from the temporizing Greeks—who had still failed to collect enough
money to save their skyscrapers—but an adventure in sound. I listened to the records, watched the reactions of young people, and entered a world much more powerful than the world of marijuana, more persuasive than that of LSD.

When I finally heard the music, I was struck by how varied it was: what I had once lumped together as noise, now separated into a wider variety of sound than what I had known in my youth, and I began slowly to pick out selections in each category that seemed to me to have musical merit; with each discovery I moved closer to the world which the young people around me were inhabiting. Music thus became a passport to a terra incognita, and now as I look back upon those idle days in Torremolinos, they seem among the more productive of my life.

I found that I liked best the raucous visceral music of the groups with odd names like Chicago Transit Authority, Canned Heat, The Animals, and especially one called Cream. I understood what the pulsating guitars were trying to say, and although the words of the songs seemed not to matter, I did learn to appreciate full sound and pulsating beat.

The next category was so good, by any standards, that I was surprised at myself for not having discovered it earlier. These songs were the lineal descendants of the ones I had enjoyed as a college student, and cynics who ask, ‘Where are the lyrics today?’ obviously never listen to the present crop. There was one in particular, about a group of young musicians trying to keep their heads above water in California:

Busted, disgusted/Agents can’t be trusted …

I don’t see how you could distill more of youth into six words. I grew very fond of this song—since the Alamo was open seventeen hours a day, it was inevitable that any given number would come up at least six or seven times, the popular ones, up to twenty—and every time its deep-throated, lovely guitar chords echoed through the bar, I anticipated the blending of the youthful voices as they sang their complaint. When I asked Joe what the name of the song was, he said condescendingly, ‘ “Creeque Alley,” ’ as if everyone knew that. I thought he must have made a
mistake, so I looked at the jacket, and there it was, ‘Creeque Alley.’ Some of the other titles were worse.

In this group of singable songs I discovered such delightful compositions as ‘Up—Up and Away,’ ‘Go Where You Wanna Go,’ ‘Little Green Apples’ and ‘Dedicated to the One I Love,’ but after I had heard them for a while I found myself hungry for that solid hammering of the more or less wordless songs featured by Cream and The Animals. I remember how pleased I was when I found one that combined the best of both styles, a thundering guitar-and-organ bit with great lyrics, ‘The House of the Rising Sun,’ but when I commented on it, Joe told me, ‘It’s an old New Orleans song. Older than you are.’ Well, it was enjoying a lively reprise.

I was surprised to find myself looking forward to records by two girl shouters; as a college student I hadn’t much cared for such music, but now it seemed in tune with the times. Aretha Franklin was quite popular with the habitués, and I grew to appreciate her heavy, sensual grumblings, but it was Janis Joplin who won my heart. Her protest ‘Women Is Losers’ seemed both timely and universal. Sometimes when she belted it out I would see older men in the bar nodding their heads; that had been their experience too. I liked almost everything Miss Joplin did, in a fascinated sort of way. Her raucous voice was the antithesis of music but it was contemporary and compelling.

There were also what one might call occasional nuggets, songs tucked away in albums that were otherwise useless, but carrying a wallop that was immediately recognized: ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix,’ ‘Spanish Eyes’ and ‘Gentle on My Mind.’ Of course, anyone who listened carefully could enjoy nonsense bits like the one which was very popular that spring, ‘Harper Valley P.T.A.,’ but at the end of a couple of weeks of intensive listening, I found that there were two types that I truly liked, as much as I had liked any of the music of my youth: songs like ‘MacArthur Park,’ which told about the cake melting in the rain, and the deep gutsy hammering of the guitar-and-drum groups.

But as I listened to this flood of music, I began to hear things in it that had escaped me in my first excitement over its excellence. I was disturbed that almost universally—even in songs recorded in England—the singers felt they had to imitate illiterate southern crackers. I took the
trouble to find out where some of the singers had been raised, and they came from a wide variety of northern sites, not to mention England, but when they got before the microphone they lapsed into the snarl of a southern cotton-chopper angry at the world. The literate man or the educated woman had no place in modern music.

I was also impressed by the fact that so many of the songs glorified gangsters, hoodlums, dead-enders and degenerates. Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, the fugitive on his way to Phoenix, the boy in the death house trying to get a last word to his girl, the girl ridden by dope, and the young outcasts daring the pigs to sic ’em were the heroes of this generation, and I often wondered what the effect was going to be of this constant incitation to revolution.

I had been listening for some time before I caught on to the fact that so many of the songs glorified the results of taking drugs: marijuana, LSD and heroin appeared to be the new religion, and I wondered how a child of thirteen who played such records constantly could come away with anything but a determination to try drugs at the earliest opportunity.

As for sex, it was rather fun trying to decipher what new procedures the latest songs were advocating; music sponsored an underground which spread the word as to what the lyrics of the latest song intended. This was a youthful folly which reminded me of some children I had known in Boston while working there. They were enchanted by a new television series called
Batman
, in which an ostensibly normal young man from a wealthy family who lived in a mansion on the edge of town was, in reality, a phrase much used in such circumstances—Batman, the avenger of evil. Every little boy and girl I talked with was convinced that only he or she knew that the fine young man was Batman, and when the children whispered to me, ‘You know, he’s Batman,’ they were honoring me with one of their most precious secrets. They knew and I didn’t; the young people in the Alamo behaved exactly the same, except that their knowledge was more heady.

Depressed somewhat by these thoughts, I was sitting in the bar one day when Joe dug deep in his pile of records and came up with ‘Michael from Mountains,’ a song so crystal-pure and simple, so beautifully sung by a girl with a natural voice, that I felt exalted by the good feeling it produced.
What was it? Only an unpretentious song about a young girl who watches a strange boy from the mountains and the things he can do with nature. She has a premonition that one day in the distant future she may know him very well. It was one of the realest songs I had ever heard, something that Schubert might have written. I asked Joe to play it again, but the singer had got into only a few bars when one of the soldiers protested, ‘Hell, that’s an oldie,’ so Joe switched to something newer. The song had been written the year before.

On my walks down the beach to the center of town I regularly passed the Brandenburger and occasionally stopped in for a drink of German beer. In doing so, I became vaguely aware of a yellow Volkswagen camper that stayed parked along the sea front, and one afternoon as I was leaving the bierstube, I happened to catch the Volkswagen in a new light and saw that a portion of its top opened up to admit air and sunlight, and the idea struck me: That’s what they must mean when they use the name pop-top. I walked over to the bus to see if anyone was inside. No one was, and when I peered through the curtained doorway to see how the interior was arranged, a German tourist from the Brandenburger left his table on the lawn and walked across the sand.

‘You look for something?’ he asked abruptly. He had a Prussian haircut and spoke English.

‘I just wanted to see …’

‘The car is not yours,’ he said in reprimand.

‘I know it isn’t,’ I fumbled. ‘But I was just wondering …’

‘Better you leave it alone,’ he said. ‘The owner not like it if you …’

‘I’m just looking at it. See here, is it your car?’

‘No. But I watch it when the owner’s gone. So please move along.’

It has always amazed me, in my work around the world, how Germans can make other people feel morally inferior. Like a prospective thief I left the Volkswagen and continued my way to the Alamo, where I found Britta arguing with the American soldiers over something they had said.

‘What’s the matter with you nuts?’ she demanded, standing over their table.

‘President Eisenhower himself said it,’ one of the soldiers insisted.

‘Then he didn’t know what he was talking about,’ she snapped.

‘Isn’t there a very high rate of suicide in Sweden? Isn’t the country morally degenerate?’

‘I’m not a Swede!’ she said defensively.

‘Isn’t Norway just as bad?’ the soldier asked.

‘Where do you get such ideas?’ she asked, dismayed.

‘President Eisenhower said so, in a speech.’

She turned to me and asked, ‘Who tells them such nonsense? That Sweden is degenerate?’

‘Don’t you publish sex books?’ the soldiers pressed. ‘With colored illustrations?’

‘That’s Denmark,’ she snapped, heading back toward the bar.

But another American repeated, ‘Isn’t it true you have a lot of suicides?’

Britta threw her cloth on the floor and turned on her tormentors. Lately she had been badgered at least once a day about Sweden’s high rate of suicide. She now came to me and asked pleadingly, ‘Explain to these barbarians that Sweden is a civilized place.’

‘We know it’s civilized,’ the first soldier said. ‘What we want to know is why it’s so degenerate.’

I knew that many Americans accepted this judgment, so I suggested that they take out pieces of paper and jot down some numbers which had impressed me years ago and which, more than any other evidence I had ever heard, kept me from making damnfool statements about other nations and other cultures.

‘I remember the report very well,’ I said. ‘It came out about 1950 and showed that Sicily had more murders per capita than anywhere else in the world. Everybody got into the act and wrote essays about how the Sicilians were natural criminals. Some fanciful theories were developed and widely circulated. Sicilians were shown to be the worst people in the world, and we had the figures to prove it.

‘A couple of years later another research team made a similar study about suicides in Sweden. Very high. Definite proof that Sweden had more suicides than any other nation, and again we had a whole raft of ingenious theories about why Sweden was so corrupt. It had to do with socialism and lack of individual challenge, and that’s where President
Eisenhower got into the act. In a speech he proved that Sweden was pretty degenerate.