Tales from the Attic: Music, my hidden college major

Sam Smith – Starting at Harvard College,  I had been initially as uncertain of my musical potential as I had been of my ability to cope with Weber and Marx. There were many musicians in the school, not a few with professional experience. Fortunately, people like that were so good they didn't play ordinary collegiate gigs.

As early as October 21 of my freshman year I had put together a gig at Briggs Hall, Radcliffe for one of mixers known as jolly-ups. According to a note from one Luci Weiss, our group was "the most vital interest of the party and unanimous opinion was that this was the best jolly-up that Briggs had ever had."  

It was a lot easier, though, just following the lead of Bob Brenman, later Dr. Robert Brenman, a saxophonist who had played several summers in the Catskills. This seemed immensely impressive and so it was with no little alacrity that I accepted his invitation to join a dance band he was forming.

For the next four years, our group worked the collegiate dance circuit. It also served as the house band for the SAE fraternity, which survived, despite Harvard's ban on such societies, hidden in dark, cramped quarters above a restaurant. In the place of fraternities, the college had final clubs, which were collegiate imitations of the Racquet, Metropolitan or New York Yacht clubs their members would soon join. Only about ten percent of the students joined final clubs and maybe another ten percent tried but couldn't get in. That left 80% of the college indifferent, a fairly healthy resolution of a potentially sticky problem at a school so obsessed with achievement.

SAE, despite the disapprobation of the university, tried hard to maintain the fraternity tradition, including the consumption of inordinate quantities of beer. With Charlie Kurzon noodling at the piano, Bob Nagatani on bass, and myself on drums, Brenman led us through his fake book (of the illegal sort then purchased for 25 bucks under the counter at a music store) inexorably starting with its first number, Over the Rainbow, and proceeding page by page through the long evenings. If there was one musical lesson I learned from Bob, it was that one could choose tunes as easily moving in strict pagination as one could by any more complicated system one might devise.

As the evening progressed, both audience and musicians loosened. Nagatani would start spinning his bass, I would bounce my drum sticks off the floor and Brenman would play Night Train lying on the floor with feet kicking in the air. The evening would inevitably close with a slow, soupy version of Good Night Sweetheart, within which Charlie deftly interspersed Brahms' Lullaby, although at that point it was hard to find anyone who noticed. Playing such gigs was as much a matter of stamina as skill. The major challenges included circumventing a proposed drunken vocal by a member of the fraternity or saving one's Gretsch pancake snare drum from the impending descent of an off-balance Harvard lineman. Our Crimson Crew was up to the job though, once playing at the Harvard SAE from 8 pm until 2 am, then packing our gear and traveling to Boston University, where we played at that campus's chapter of the fraternity until eight in the morning.

But there were other problems, as suggested by a note:

“Played for an hour at the Cafe Mozart with Don and Larry. We then went up to my pad where a party was in progress consisting of people I knew only slightly. Don had his date and another girl along. About a half hour later, Don passed out cold, so I laid him on Rocky's bed and took the two girls down to dinner. When we came back, Don was still sleeping so I opened all the windows in the room and the cold night air brought him around. One half hour later he was playing sax at a dance at the Harvard Crimson. . .

My drum set was damaged only once (although it was pawned at the end of each term to cover inevitable fiscal deficiency) and the proximate cause was not a Harvard lineman but an inebriated Harvard professor. I was standing in the kitchen of Professor and Mrs. John Kenneth Galbraith, who regularly hired a group I had put together for their spring party, when I heard a snap unlike any rim shot I had ever produced. I returned to the living room to find the mournful prof eyeing the large crack he had just created in the head of my beloved red pancake snare.

I had been in the kitchen listening to the Galbraith's cook tell me how she handled one of the most fearsome icons on the Harvard campus: English professor Perry Miller. Miller had come into the kitchen and caller her "honey," to which she had responded: "Don't you be callin' me honey, Mr. Miller. You call your wife honey but you sleep with your wife. You don't sleep with me so don't you be calling me honey." I decided the Galbraith's cook was among the bravest people in Cambridge.

There was plenty to keep one busy around the Square. One evening, several of us found a Volkswagon that seemed badly in need of not being situated on the sidewalk. We were engaged in lifting it there when a Harvard cop approached. The most composed of our number politely turned to the policeman and said, "Excuse me officer, we found this car on the sidewalk and are trying to return it to the street. Could you give us a hand?" Without a word -- because Harvard cops tended to come from that constabulary tradition that wasn't looking for trouble -- the officer helped us put the car back where it belonged.

Mount Auburn 47, which opened in 1958, was a coffee house located just around the corner from my entry at Adams House. Joan Baez got her start at 47 Mt. Auburn, later known as Club 47. The club would become increasingly famous with time, eventually becoming more important for folk singers than similar spots in New York. Reputedly an up and coming Bob Dylan sang there between acts, Bruce Springsteen was refused a gig there, Bonnie Rait hung out there, and Muddy Waters attracted the Cambridge police who, according to one account, "couldn't believe that the loud music could be coming from a place that only plays 'folk' music."

There was also Eric von Schmidt, with whom I even played a couple of practice sessions when he was wondering how guitar and just brushes on snare would sound together. But for me, the time was mostly about jazz. Just as the Harlem Renaissance has been treated mainly as a literary phenonenom, so it was with the beat era. After all, it is writers and not artists and musicians who get to tell the story afterwards.

Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk actually came to town, the former once playing most of a concert with his back to the audience and the latter once sitting silently at the piano as his partners turned the introduction into a endless bass solo punctuated by a single note on the keyboard.

"Play something," a man sitting at a front table demanded. Thelonious let the cigarette fall from his mouth to the stage and then kicked it onto the man's table. Rising slowly, he stepped down from the stage and began to circle the perimeter of the room staring blankly at his audience. Word was that he was taken to a hospital late that night.

We had been taught that if we crawled under our desks, we would be safe from The Bomb. Even our teachers lied to us. Yet, like Rick in Casablanca, it never occurred to us to try to change the world. When change finally did come, we would do what we did best. We adapted. From conventional sex to free sex to frightened sex, we adapted. From mass movements to monomaniacal interest groups, we adapted. From integration to nationalism to political correctness, we adapted. From communes to condos, we adapted. From Beatles to rap, from bongos to cell phones, and from Aquarius to apocalypse, we adapted. And given that these weren't our revolutions, we did it pretty well.

The one revolution that was truly ours, the civil rights movement, the boomer braggarts claimed for themselves. And, being the Silent Generation, we let them. Our virtue and our failing was that we would never enjoy the hubris of those older and younger than ourselves. Our virtue because we were modest enough to actually have learned something from what happened; our failing because the footing never seemed solid enough to permit us to do much with what we had learned. But at least we had music to keep us busy. 

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