The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [118]
It’s like Mel Brooks’ great line as the 2,000-year-old man [in a Yiddish accent]: “There’s something bigger than Phil.” You can’t help but see it when you deal with nature in the extreme. Like when you’re bodysurfing on Maui and a storm suddenly makes a ten-foot wave come at you. It gives you a sense of your mortality. Or it’s when you see something incredibly beautiful. I get it when I see Zachary changing. Here’s this being who is you but not you slowly growing and forming opinions of his own.
It stems, too, from a sense of horror at things that go on in the world. The planet’s climate is changing at such a drastic rate, causing the worst blizzards and droughts in history. Now there is an incredibly large hole in the ozone layer. Like Shakespeare said, this place is such a delicate, fragile firmament. It’s a one-in-a-billion crapshoot. And we’re fucking it up.
Einstein is your idol, isn’t he?
Yeah. Good old Al. [Chuckles] Imagine Al doing stand-up. [As Einstein] “So, it’s relative. Does that mean I have to make love to my mother? No, I’m keeding, please! I gotta go. . . . I came back to make a bomb. Nagasaki! Who’s there? It was a joke! Hey, I gotta go!” Wasn’t he wiiiiild?
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
by Jonathan Cott
November 29, 1990
You once said: “I am a fanatic music lover. I can’t live one day without hearing music, playing it, studying it or thinking about it.” When did this obsession begin?
The day in 1928 that my aunt Clara, who was in the process of moving, dumped a sofa on my family—I was ten years old at the time—along with an old upright piano, which, I still remember, had a mandolin pedal: The middle pedal turned the instrument into a kind of wrinkly sounding mandolin. And I just put my hands on the keyboard and I was hooked . . . for life. You know what it’s like to fall in love: You touch someone and that’s it. From that day to this, that’s what my life’s been about.
At first, I started teaching myself the piano and invented my own system of harmony. But then I demanded, and got, piano lessons, at a buck a lesson, from one of our neighbor’s daughters—a Miss Karp. Frieda Karp. I adored her, I was madly in love with her. She taught me beginner’s pieces like “The Mountain Belle.” And everything went along fine until I began to play—probably very badly—compositions that she couldn’t. Miss Karp couldn’t keep up with my Chopin Ballades, so she told my father that I should be sent to the New England Conservatory of Music. And there I was taught by a Miss Susan Williams, who charged three dollars an hour. And now my father started to complain: “A klezmer you want to be?” To him, a klezmer [an itinerant musician in Eastern Europe who played at weddings and bar mitzvahs] was little more than a beggar.
You see, until that time, neither my father [who was in the beauty-supply business] nor I really knew that there was a real “world of music.” I remember his taking me when I was fourteen years old to a Boston Pops concert, a benefit for our synagogue, where I fell in love with Ravel’s Bolero, and several months later to a piano recital by Sergei Rachmaninoff—both at Symphony Hall. And my father was just as astonished as I was to see thousands of people paying to hear one person play the piano!
But still he balked at three-dollar lessons for me. One dollar for lessons and quarter-a-week allowance—that’s all he allotted for my music. So, I started to play in a little jazz group, and we performed at . . . weddings and bar mitzvahs! [Laughs] Klezmers! The sax player in our group had access to stock arrangements for “St. Louis Blues,” “Deep Night” and lots of Irving Berlin songs; and I’d come home at night with bleeding fingers and two bucks, maybe, which went toward my piano lessons.
Now, my new teacher, Miss Williams, didn’t work out—she had some kind of system, based on never showing your knuckles. Can you imagine playing a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody like that? So I found another teacher . .