#2
Dear Nigey --
I was struck by your remembrance of that evening, that hot steamy August evening in 1971. If I didn't have a tape of it I wouldn't have remembered any of it, and of course I have to thank our dear Doctor for supplying it to me as I'd lost track of it many years ago. It's true, one lost all sense of time there in the BASEMENT, you know. Frank was such a night owl. I'd show up there at eight or nine in the evening, go into the basement and come out again at seven the next morning, and it seemed to go by so fast. There was an electric current in the place, but maybe that was the sensation of all my synapses overloading, my brain cells popping. That electrical force field enveloped anyone who went into his lair, which perhaps inhibited me from talking more. Truer to say I was there to see him, not the other way around. I was there to seek his counsel, an audience as it were with the King, and when one seeks audiences one is respectful, watchful, and observant.
More specifically it was my intention that my silence provoke him into talking, because how he talked was just as important as what he chose to talk about. Whether he acknowledged it or not, there was far more than just a strictly informational exchange taking place which is something I know for sure that Frank never counted on, never thought I was capable of doing, though I was just applying the tools he'd disclosed to me in his music and approach to time. You were asking what Frank had to teach me, and that was a way of looking at and examining time. Though I was a historian without portfolio, having left grad school six credits short of a Masters because I couldn't hack the system, I was still vitally interested in the process of history, how it was, how it moved, how it was transcribed, how it was passed on, how every new generation had its own way of dealing with its history, etc.
Frank had a unique way of looking at contemporary history which was non linear but highly visual and evocative. Like all great artists, he had an essential command of form in orchestration, but not only concertos and string quartets, etc. what the "serious" composers who went to school had, but also deep knowledge and understanding of the more public and common American forms, popular songs and tunes in all varieties from the blues tradition to the pop/rock three minute format (ironic that he spent so much energy trying to make a "hit"). Like any other artist he learned about his tools, in his case musical forms, then how to use them, and then how to innovate within and without those forms. A writer knows that there are certain ideas which only work as a short story, a novel, a poem, a treatment, etc.. So also did Frank learn how to use forms to his own effect to comment on American life. His audience had to be equally as nuanced to pick up on what he was doing with the kinds of music and the juxtapositions of forms. He wasn't just throwing it out to you, you had to catch it too. Such a method was belied by his presentation style, which appeared offhanded and casual, by his personal presentation of who he projected he was for his audience; again, he was almost too smart for his own good, but that's for Posterity to calculate, and I'm not writing in the Posterity mode yet. And where he should have been openhanded, he was closed, tightfisted, because of his own expectations about how people were supposed to react. He presented himself as a populist and mined that vein of popular music which he could parody, true, but it worked to his disadvantage it undercut and trivialized his own deep reverence for the forms themselves. Doo-wop, a cappella singing, was one of his special loves and in his early music period he had fun, but eventually he became too "serious" about having fun. Instead of letting his listener experience it for himself, he eventually sought to run his audience's noses in it, demeaning their own highly specialized tastes which he himself had catered to: "See, this is a joke here". Eventually his music had an overbearing quality to it, less playful, more frantic the more successful he became (he never was a mega hit here, but in Europe he walked on the waters, but then again Europe has traditions of supporting "serious artists"). Instead of presenting material to his audience, he pandered to their tastes, but that's another matter entirely and out of place here as I was talking about history.
If this is all too intellectual for you, please excuse, but then again Frank brought out those ideas in me. Maybe that was his special talent to the people who encountered him. Sometimes he brought out the wrong things, sometimes he wasn't sure himself what they were, maybe he was as much a victim of forces beyond his control as everyone else only he just didn't say so. Whatever the reasons, at that time, I was a sponge to learn how to translate those insights into the writing of history, and the problem I set out for myself with the writing of his biography was how to use *his* tools to write *him*, his characteristic story in his characteristic time signature. My job as a biographer was how to present a history as a piece of living time. I didn't know how to do it when I started, so I took off on what I extrapolated from his music and what sense of the man I had when I was in his presence. Since I was interested in "getting the story" I had to restrain myself, I had to allow him to disclose himself whatever way he choose to do it, so that's why you perhaps thought that I was too silent. After all he wasn't interviewing me, and if he was, I suspect that he would have done the same to me in order to get a sense of who I was and how I thought. Frank's problem was that he was like everyone else but he didn't cop to it, that although he could teach, he could not learn and that was a fatal flaw from my point of view now, that he couldn't get any satisfaction about what he was teaching and that he didn't consider what he was doing in the larger scheme of things as a collaborative project. Which was what the culture was about, community. Here was a spokesman for the community who had disdain for it. Now that's a neat trick, isn't it?
I'm amazed at your powers of recall about that evening so long ago, and yet, I was wearing a work shirt and jeans and cowboy boots, but then again I wore that same outfit for more than 10 years. The jeans eventually would run away and I had to organize search parties to bring them back alive. I don't remember that cigarette business, it sounds like something I'd do, but then again I don't have the same eye for details that you have.
As I said, *who* I was to him was less important than *what* he projected to me, what I could do for him. If he was as canny a judge of human-beingness as he claimed to be (or prided himself on being), he would have adjusted his persona accordingly to present what he wanted. But he was too clever by half; I didn't try to do anything in essence, he did it all himself and I just checked and noted it, reflected it. I know that for a time people remarked on our similarities in looks I got quite good at "conducting" in his inimitable manner, but I was never enthralled by how he conducted those who allowed themselves to be conducted. THAT was unhealthy. Still, he taught me how to see even if he was incapable of seeing it himself. As one of his former guitar players told me at the time, the late guitarist for Little Feat, Lowell George," He brought a lot of people along, but he fucked a lot of people up too," and that's about as honest an assessment as can be had.
If you were going to tangle with him and live, you had to have a strong sense of who you were because his presence was so overwhelming, so powerful that it was easy to get sucked into his orbit and never get out. However if one did, there were great illuminations to be had. I had and have mine and even if at least for me he stopped doing "it" years ago, nevertheless he set something off vital in me which goes far beyond the constraints of his ego to a place where he desperately wanted to be but failed to reach.
David
Dear David --
Your perception of Frank is profound, all the more so since it seems to have been etched on to your soul with, or through, great pain. Those of us who loved him were bound to suffer, but in your case, you also enlightened other people through your hardwon insights into Frank and the cosmic pitfalls of his life. You went through the fire with him, but emerged, like Prometheus (and unlike Frank himself, unfortunately) to shed light and banish darkness.
It's really quite interesting comparing our two methods of describing and defining Frank and his work. When I began writing Being Frank I had one aim: to bring him back alive, so to speak, for myself, and for others who were missing him as I was, or who maybe never had had the chance to know him at all. For me, the honest way to accomplish that objective was to recreate the Gestalt of my experience, replay my 'time' with him which was, in the end, *his* 'time' as much as mine. That process had to be accomplished from the inside out -- from my interior to the external 'reality' of describing my 'time' with him. And yet, although I was the narrator and in a very real sense the controlling factor in the narrative, my final goal was to present Frank as he was. He was entirely different to different people, depending on their point of view, but in the end, as your viewpoint contrasts with mine, but doesn't conflict with it, he was remarkably consistent. Just as you were able to place him in his social, historical, and cultural context, I think I succeeded in defining who he was as a human being, and how he exerted such control on external 'reality'. In the end, he radically transformed us both, in different ways, and we have become spokespeople for a vision which he engendered, even if he may have been unaware of the consequences of that act.
But having said that, Time moves on, and in another sense Frank was just a blip on your radar, as he was on mine. Our lives existed before him, and they have gone on after him. I feel there are many stories yet to be lived, and told, in our lives. There could be a story we share *besides* our long-ago involvement with Frank. So let's move on into the future, and seek new levels of understanding. The past is finished, to all extents and purposes, but the future remains infinite, and though we may rail at old FZ, we should give the devil his due and admit that he at least partially showed us the way into that universe.
Love,
Nigey
