Musical Interlude Nos. 2 & 3

The Barbecue Blues

LINER NOTES

It's too hot to have opinions.

It hit 90° F last weekend (32.22 C), which is uncomfortable for Seattle. It's been much hotter elsewhere: in Seville, Spain, the temperature reached 40° C (104° F); parts of Southern Italy have hit 45° C (113° F ); Sanbao township in Xinjiang Province in Northern China recorded 52.2° C last weekend (126° F). Phoenix, Arizona today is 43° C (109° F).

Summer reminds me of Italy where I lived six years in Naples as a kid. In my recollection, I spent every summer weekend at Bacoli Beach in the Miliscola region on the Tyrrhenian Sea about 20 kilometers drive from Naples. I can still smell the dank and slippery bathhouse there: rubber flip-slops, half-dry swimsuits, olive oil and tomato pizza slices, breezy salt air, wet concrete in the shower room. I can feel myself, 8 years old, traversing the shallows barefoot and bareheaded sloshing through knee-high water on rippled light brown sand.

Naples was a very poor city when I lived there in the late '50s through the early 1960s. But it was very picturesque. From our apartment on the bluffs of Via Manzoni, we looked straight out over the bay and downtown. We looked down at the Castel dell'Ovo, the old fortification built by 12th Century Normans that juts out into the Bay of Naples and where Virgil allegedly buried a magic golden egg whose shell supports the castle and the city. Across the bay, over the old castle, we had an unobstructed view of Vesuvius. Sometimes, Vesuvius gave off a puff of steam. The whole area is volcanically active. The Campi Flegrei, the Phlegraean Fields, consists of many caldera that, altogether, are deemed a super-volcano. One day, so they say, it will all erupt again.

Naples was a musical city. Everyone, poor and rich alike, sang. They sang at all hours, at home and at work. Opera was the folk music of the people. The wealthier folk dressed up and sat in the loges. The mass of the population sat in the lower level cheap seats. They came as they were in everyday work clothes. They did not come to be seen; they came to listen. Occasionally, fearlessly, they interrupted and reproached the musicians and singers mid-performance -- even demonstrating for them (to cheers, whistles or hissing) how the music should be performed. This was their music! They demanded that it be played as it ought to be played! Arguments ensued. There was singing from the stage and counter-singing from the audience. They shouted from the gallery to the box seats to the orchestra pit to the stage. Musicians and performers argued and shouted back and argued among themselves. The orchestra director shook his baton and gestured and yelled back at the audience. Emotions got hot. It was participatory culture, very democratic, very noisy. Then they reached a consensus. Everyone applauded. The show went on. A good time was had by all.

My father loved opera and popular Italian music, but he couldn't sing or play anything. He said that he had been standing next to an ammo dump that exploded during World War II. Since then, he said, he couldn't hold a tune due to the tinnitus in his ears. Instead, he bought 33 rpm vinyl records. One day at the Naples flea market, he bought an old Victrola wind up gramophone. But he over-cranked the spring and it broke. After that, I would stand on a small footstool, put a record on the platter, drop the steel needle and spin the record by hand. I put my head directly into the brass bell of the gramophone to listen to Verdi and Rossini and Nilla Pizzi and Domenico Modugno.

So when I was a kid growing up in Naples, I was inspired to make music. The next door neighbor owned an upright piano. She offered to give me lessons at $5/hour.

The first time I sat down at the neighbor's piano, my parents came to watch. I sat on the wood bench, my feet not quite reaching the marble floor. Then, excitedly, I pounded the keys as hard as I could. "What is that?!" my father anxiously wanted to know. I was composing, I explained. It was a song about thunder and lightening!

Thus ended the piano lessons.

However, my father then brought home an electric Farfisa Pianorgan. It had 34 keys on the right and bass/chord buttons on the left. It actually had an electric bellows that blew air over metal reeds. It sounded asthmatic, a little like an accordion, but in the shape of a small combo organ. It had a couple of great features in my father's mind, however. It was quiet. And it had an "off" button.

I never did learn how to play the piano although, some day, I will. In school, I studied a bit how to play the viola and the trumpet and then the French horn. By the time I was a teenager, the French horn was definitely "out" and guitars were a thing. Electric bands were in vogue from California to Nashville to London. The music scene was still pretty democratic, not commercialized and packaged as it is today. Everybody played something and everyone imagined himself performing on stage. Everyone was a rebel, or so we imagined ourselves. My brother had a cheap Kent label electric guitar and soon I had my own off-label, generic sunburst semi-acoustic. Of course, it was a piece of junk and I don't remember what happened to it. But I continued to play the guitar, trading up and sideways, buying and selling new and used instruments. If the guitar wasn't a piano, at least it was portable (I could and did take it with me to college). Plus, unlike a piano, your fingers press on the strings of a guitar and you can bend them. Woo-hoo!

It's hot in Seattle. We cook outdoors all summer. This first song is The Barbecue Blues. It's just a 12 bar composition in E minor of finger-picked tropes and fret board doodles meant to loosen the left hand.

The second song is an original from another season and another time. I call it Popsicle, after my father, because it's quiet!

I finger-pick these two songs on a Gibson SJ-200 acoustic guitar with standard tuning and Martin Acoustic SP Phosphor Bronze (light) strings. The guitar has an interior Fishman Humbucker pickup that feeds through the output jack hidden in the bottom strap button. I recorded these pieces straight to Audacity on my desktop computer. Audacity is an open source software platform for audio recording and editing. I have not applied any special effects to these songs. I recorded them straight from start to finish. That preserves the blems, fat finger mis-picks and spontaneous flourishes that might happen intentionally (or by accident). Recorded in one shot, these are more like live performances, unpolished and personal.

If ever I played these in Naples, I expect the audience would remonstrate with me how they should be played better.