Crowd control: how audiences make music - On Political Books

Washington Monthly, March, 2004 by Steve Braun

In the "Development" section, O'Brien describes the early 1960s radio landscape that his father encountered as a DJ. This is the pre-Beatles American expanse of "vulgar fun," where the "Peppermint Twist" and shallow Brill Building pop "are what people's lives are dressed in." But as O'Brien flashes back and forth between his father's recreated world and his own child's-eye reminiscences, he often slips into stereotypes. American life then was a cartoon, he writes, replete with "oversized hilariousness, huge grotesqueness." He mentions MAD Magazine, Jerry Lewis, "big breasted blondes." It is an easy approximation of the 1960s torn from television listings, but it has none of the vivid secret life of his grandfather's band circuit or his dad's broadcasts. And he fails to use the era's musical chaff as counterpoint to the underworld that those bright tunes ignored--the gathering discord over civil rights, the Kennedy assassination and its contagion of violence, the swamp of Vietnam.

By "Recapitulation," O'Brien's approach grows ponderous. Typical are two essays called "Central Park West," both based on jazz tenor sax prophet John Coltrane's elegiac tribute to an Upper West Side warren of apartments and shops. O'Brien tries to weave a portrait of an alternate, personal New York, using Coltrane's ballad as starting point. But instead of the densely rendered worlds of O'Brien's father and grandfather, we get a stylized, static world full of imaginary characters whose internal lives are never fleshed out.

Still, though not every essay works, the best are able to convey some aspect of what it is like to be swept away by the soundtrack of American life. In doing so, O'Brien, like Wald, implicitly debunks music historians' glib adaptation of Thomas Carlyle's "Great Man" theory--that great music is solely the product of great men. Both Wald and O'Brien remind us of the importance of the synergy between the performers and their audiences. "It is all about the audience," Wald writes toward the end of his book. "Because all of those artists--like almost any artists, anywhere, anytime--did their greatest work when they were performing regularly for audiences that understood them and demanded their greatest work?

In a coda near the end of his book, O'Brien summons up a grace note to impart the symbiotic relationship between musician and listener, evoking both the lasting power of a remembered song and the audience's crucial role in shaping the music that flows around it. It comes in one of his final passages, a recollection of eavesdropping on a man who was walking down a road in New York's Hudson Valley, playing a guitar. The man strummed "a plaintive wordless ballad, for no one but himself." O'Brien, listening by accident, kept the moment alive, internally memorizing a sliver of performance that otherwise would have been lost to the air. For O'Brien, "it was as much as music--as much as the world--could be."

Steve Braun is a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.