Remain in Love Page 3

  On a trip with my mother to Kaufman’s Department Store in downtown Pittsburgh, while she was doing some other shopping, I headed for the record department. They had a huge selection, but I already knew what I wanted. It was the Beach Boys’ Surfin’ USA with a colorful picture of a surfer riding a gigantic wave on the cover. I had been listening to the track “Surfin’ USA” for months already on my radio and the DJ said it was from their second album, which had been released in 1963. So, that’s the one I got. To this day, I have never really surfed, although I did try once. But the idea and the theme of surfing had an enormous appeal to me then and still does. There’s just something about sets of curling waves and freedom and girls in bikinis and the music that goes with it that will never go out of style, even if Jimi Hendrix declared that it should.

  My other album purchase at Kaufman’s that day was the soundtrack to the film Goldfinger. I hadn’t even seen the movie but the combination of the picture of the nude gold-painted girl on the cover and the amazing title track by Shirley Bassey was enough to entice me to buy it with my hard-earned lawn-mowing money.

  Later in life, I had the great pleasure to meet Brian Wilson at a club in Ibiza, of all places, when Tom Tom Club was also on the bill. His Smile concert at Carnegie Hall gave me chills and brought tears of joy to my eyes. In Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club, we worked for years with Jeff Hooper, Shirley Bassey’s favorite Welsh soundman, the only soundman she’ll work with.

  3

  IT’S GOT TO HAVE SOUL

  In 1965, when I was about to enter the ninth grade at age fourteen, I left my home in Pittsburgh and traveled to the Northern Neck of Virginia, where I attended Christchurch School on the banks of the Rappahannock River near the Chesapeake Bay. Christchurch was an Episcopal boys’ boarding school where we wore coats and ties every day and observed very traditional Southern values and lifestyle. I liked most aspects of the school and quickly made some good friends. We listened to a lot of popular music in the dormitory. Many of us had portable record players in our rooms, which were more like cubicles without doors. Even the bathroom stalls did not have doors, which took some getting used to. You learned to avert your eyes and, if possible, your nose.

  Since I was a drummer without any drums, I really got into my record collection and was excited to share my thoughts and opinions about music with the other guys. I was mainly a Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Beach Boys fan. Some people preferred the Beatles because they were cute and some preferred the Stones because they were the bad boys. I enjoyed both bands and loved the Beach Boys for their positive teenage reinforcement. I was one of the few students at the school from north of the Mason-Dixon line and I guess my record collection reflected this, too, because one of my friends came into my room and said, “Goddamn, man! the Beatles and the Stones are queers! You need to hear some James Brown, Sam and Dave, Otis Redding and the Tams!” Then he added the Four Tops, the Temptations, and Jr. Walker & the All Stars. He was so adamant that I needed to be educated that he brought a stack of those very records into my room and proceeded to play James Brown: Live at the Apollo for me. Even over my tiny speakers, the band and the singer were undeniably immense. I got the message right away: it was a no-brainer. My friend then cued up a Stax record, Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul. I was amazed to hear “Respect” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” and especially Otis’s version of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.” Then he played some Motown Hits for me: “The Way You Do the Things You Do” by the Temptations, and “Shotgun” by Jr. Walker & the All Stars. These Motown hits were pretty pervasive at the time so I had heard them on the radio, but somehow, in my tiny dormitory room, on my little portable record player, they took on a new, more important meaning. I may have been looking for acceptance by my new Southern peer group, but I had no doubt that this black music was beautiful and sexy, and I was hooked. I came to realize that no white man could say “Hunnh!” like James Brown and I was a believer in the awesome power of what had come to be called Soul Music.

  Me at age fourteen.

  Something else was happening, too. A folk singer called Bob Dylan was writing big hits like “Blowin’ in the Wind” for Peter, Paul and Mary and “Mr. Tambourine Man” for the Byrds. He was a freaky-looking dude with a whiny singing voice that drove some people nuts. His defenders argued that he elevated the content of the popular song to real poetry. I was in the second group. The breakthrough for me was “Like a Rolling Stone.” When I heard it for the first time, I loved it from start to finish (and it was long, too). My friend and classmate Robert Murphy learned that Dylan was playing The Mosque, in Richmond, Virginia, and bought some tickets. Robert invited me home to the Berkeley Plantation in Charles City for the weekend. Located on the James River, it had been the home of President William Henry Harrison. Robert’s family lived in the guesthouse. His parents drove us to the show along with his neighbor, the adorable Betty Bagby from nearby Westover Plantation.

  We had nosebleed seats, but that didn’t matter to us. Betty sat between Robert and me. I think all three of us were terribly horny. Dylan teetered out onstage all dressed in black, wearing pointy Beatle boots and sunglasses. A single spotlight followed him to the center of the stage, where he sat on a tall stool and played a set of his famous folk songs. His music was direct, moving, and for the most part very serious. After playing his original version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” he teetered back off the stage for an intermission.

  When Dylan returned, it was with his full electric band, including Robbie Robertson and some other members of the band. You have probably heard that Dylan was booed and vilified for making his move to electric music at the Newport Folk Festival, but that did not happen the night we saw him. The audience greeted each new song with cheers, and by the time Dylan counted off the intro to “Like a Rolling Stone,” the crowd, ourselves included, were in love with this guy. We were fans forever.

  Years later, in 1990, after Roy Orbison died, Roy’s widow, Barbara, asked us to play a fund-raiser at the Universal Amphitheater, in Burbank, California, to help build a homeless shelter in Roy’s name. Tina, Jerry, and I accepted her invitation with pleasure and performed “Sweet Dream Baby” as Shrunken Heads. The headliner was Bob Dylan with the original reunited Byrds. While we were watching their set from the green room on a video monitor, Bob’s big security men came in and said, “Everybody out! Bob’s coming in and doesn’t want to see anybody!” Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Wendy & Lisa, Iggy Pop, Patrick Swayze, and a host of other great musicians, including Tina and Jerry, got up and left the room. I decided to stay. I wanted to meet Bob. Because I was wearing a blue blazer, I think Bob’s people thought I worked there and didn’t shoo me out. When Bob strolled in, he asked me casually, “Hey, man! Where did everybody go?” I told him his people had kicked everybody out and Bob said, “Oh, shit. Even Emmylou?” “Yes,” I said. “Even Emmylou.”

  4

  BACK TO PITTSBURGH

  After two years at Christchurch School in Virginia, I felt like going home to my family. I had learned valuable lessons about how to be a person of honor who tells the truth, how to be a gentleman, and to not always believe other boys’ tall tales of sexual conquests. Still, I needed to expand my intellectual and artistic horizons. I enrolled as a day student in a boys’ preparatory school called Shady Side Academy in the Pittsburgh suburbs. It had a reputation for creating community leaders and sending its graduates to the better colleges and universities. By this time, I had my driver’s license and my parents bought me a sea-foam-green used Ford Mustang so I could commute back and forth to school. Having my own car was certainly a thrill. This was the autumn of 1967, following the Summer of Love. Culturally, things were heating up, even in Pittsburgh, which had long been conservatively provincial in outlook. Businessmen and professionals still wore gray flannel suits and fedoras to work. Even young married women dressed in matronly outfits. The “swinging sixties” never really reached the adults of Pittsburgh, but there was an awakening am
ong the kids. On any given night, and especially on weekends, the hippest young people would flock to Walnut Street to see and be seen. For those old enough to drink, there was the Fox Café and the Encore Club. For the rest of us, there was Village Pizza and a coffeehouse called the Loaves and Fishes sponsored by the Calvary Episcopal Church. The Loaves and Fishes had open-mike nights and poetry readings that really appealed to me. It was also a center for anti–Vietnam War activism. You could have an espresso or a glass of cider and hang out all night listening to young poets and folk singers. Some nights were truly electrifying. I never read any of my own poetry there, but I tried to look the part wearing my denim jeans and work shirt.

  At school I was happy to have some excellent and challenging teachers. Several come to mind, like David Britton, a graduate of Middlebury College, who skied, rode a motorcycle, and taught English, including a course called Adolescent Rebellion. The latter was of great interest to me. We read Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe, Allen Ginsberg, John Knowles, J. D. Salinger, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X. My parents were mystified by some of these selections, especially by a book called Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing by A. S. Neill, about a progressive “free” school. But they were pleased with my enthusiasm.

  I had a very interesting French teacher named Antoine Cordahi, an Egyptian Jew who had fled Nasser’s regime to come to the USA. Mr. Cordahi was something of a dandy who wore black silk suits with purple shirts and Beatle boots. He also taught Music Appreciation, which I loved. This was the first time I heard Debussy, Satie, Herbie Hancock, and the first rock opera, Tommy by the Who. The course was a real turn-on.

  In September of 1968, I signed up for classes in Studio Art. My teacher was a young painter named David Miller. It’s no exaggeration to say that this man changed my life. He taught drawing, painting, and collage. But more importantly, he instilled an appreciation of contemporary art in me. Dada, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism—he was passionate about all styles of art and his passion was contagious. He was and still is a very humble, friendly, and unpretentious person. He had studied at the Chicago Art Institute and then earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. By the time we met, he was already a very accomplished painter.

  When I first walked into Miller’s class, which was held in a big studio in the basement of one of the dormitories, he asked me, “Are you the son of Colonel Frantz?” I told him I was and he smiled and said, “Colonel Frantz is a good man.” He told me he was in the Army Reserve and served as an aide to one of my dad’s fellow officers. This was during the height of the Vietnam War. Most of my friends shunned and even disdained the military, so this was a very welcome and bonding connection to make.

  Mr. Miller opened my eyes to the idea that anyone can be an artist. He taught us that, if you want to, you can call anything art. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain was, in fact, a urinal. Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing was just that, a drawing by de Kooning that Rauschenberg spent painstaking days carefully erasing. Then there were Andy Warhol’s soup-can paintings. A single painting of a Campbell’s soup can is one thing, but a wall of thirty such paintings becomes a major statement that art is to be found in our everyday lives. This was a revelation and another great turn-on for me.

  Around this time, I read W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence. The book is very loosely based on the life of painter Paul Gauguin. It’s the story of a London banker who decides to abandon his humdrum existence in business, and also his wife and children, to become a painter, first in Paris and, eventually, in Tahiti. I had been thinking a lot during this time about how to escape the existence that young men in my position were expected to lead. We were being trained to be leaders in business or law or medicine. Neither we nor our parents ever expected that we would lead the life of a full-time artist. As much as I loved rock and roll and playing music, I was not convinced that I had what it takes to be a great rock and roller. Those guys came from London or Liverpool, Memphis or California. I was from Pittsburgh. I did not feel cool at all. But wait, maybe I could be a painter! Andy Warhol was from Pittsburgh and he had become the most famous, coolest artist alive!

  So, under David Miller’s immensely talented influence, I became an artist. It was as if a switch flipped in my brain. I would study art and I would live in the art world. No banks or business for me. I would create my own future and damn the consequences! I still remember the day I had this epiphany. I was seventeen years old.

  In addition to the theory and philosophy of contemporary art, David Miller taught us basic studio skills, like how to stretch and prime a canvas and how to mix paint so that it doesn’t end up looking like mud. “Never use a color straight out of the tube or jar. Always add a little bit of white or another color to make it your own,” he said. Then he said, “Don’t hesitate to mix media. Like Rauschenberg, make transfers from color magazine images by wetting the paper with turpentine, laying it on the canvas, and rubbing the back of the paper with a blunt stick until that photo of Brigitte Bardot or JFK is transferred onto your canvas, then paint around or on top of that. Have music playing while you work. It will inspire you.”

  One assignment Mr. Miller gave us was to copy a famous painter’s masterpiece. Probably because I was a horny teenager, I chose one of Renoir’s voluptuous nudes. I did my best to copy the painting faithfully in oil and spent days working on it. The pinks and yellows and flesh tones were sexy to me, but the image itself was stiff and had none of the breath and life of the original. I expressed my disappointment to Mr. Miller and he came over to my easel, took a look and asked, “Do you mind if I try something?” I told him to please go ahead, and he took my brush and painted two big squiggles across her face. Suddenly, the painting was better and much more interesting. I loved this!

  In my junior year, when it was time to apply to colleges, Mr. Miller floated the idea that I should go to a good art school, or a university with a good art department. This made complete sense to me. But when I told my parents, they spoke to Mr. Miller and begged him, “Please don’t suggest to Chris that he should go to art school. How will he ever support himself?” It was a fair enough question, but Mr. Miller was very persuasive. He told them, “Well, you know, I’m going to recommend that Chris apply to the Rhode Island School of Design. It’s not just any art school. It’s the Harvard of art schools.” Because my father had graduated from Harvard Law School, and because of Harvard’s elite reputation, my parents suddenly thought, “Oh, the Harvard of art schools? Well, that sounds interesting.” That autumn, I visited RISD with my father. I had applied to the early decision review. When it was time for my interview with the director of admissions, a charming baby-faced guy by the name of Bruce Helander, he asked me how I was doing. I told him I loved the school, but that I was a little nervous about whether I would be accepted or not. He looked at me with a big smile, laughed, and said, “Don’t worry, Chris. You’re going to get in.” I later found out that he called Mr. Miller and said, “We’ve accepted more of your students over the past few years than any other school in the country. Not only that, when they arrive here, they are really well prepared. I don’t know how you do it, but you’re doing something right.”

  When the letter of acceptance arrived, I felt like I had hit the lottery. When you think about it, in many ways, I had.

  * * *

  I made some great friends at Shady Side Academy. Fritz Shiring was an excellent guitarist and a fun guy who drove a boss red GTO. His father, a doctor, had passed away at a young age and his mother welcomed us kids to hang out at their house listening to records and playing music. John Dixon played bass guitar and styled himself like the White Album–period John Lennon. Together, he and Fritz had a band called the Villagers that I would watch with fascination as they rehearsed in Fritz’s basement. They played early psychedelic hits from bands like Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and the Rascals. Jake Turner was an aspiring actor, a skier, and a s
urfer during his summers at Beach Haven, New Jersey. Martin Walrath and I bonded over a mutual love of the blues, which was enjoying a renaissance thanks to British bands like the Rolling Stones and the Animals reintroducing us to the form. I clearly remember listening to James Brown’s “Cold Sweat” for the first time on Martin’s home stereo. Dan Arnheim was a cheeky yet brilliant writer and actor, and Bill Oppenheimer, from Mobile, Alabama, regaled us with stories from the Deep South. Doug Day was a bright and awesomely talented folk singer who never lacked enthusiasm for any form of artistic expression. Pat Hannah was a friend who gave the best parties and possessed a vast secret knowledge of Pittsburgh society. Pat was just beginning what would become a fabulous vintage-car collection.

  While Shady Side was an all-boys’ school back then, we did have some really smart and fabulous female friends. Some went to private school and some went to public school. They were mostly brilliant, too. Ellen Dwyer, who died much too young, would go on to study history of art at Yale, then followed up with more study of the decorative arts at the Winterthur Museum, and, finally, the Carnegie Museum, before landing in New York City as a leader in estate sales at Cartier. I first met Ellen in a special coed poetry class our schools had arranged. I wish she had taken better care of herself. Sandy Hazlett was also a poet. Her father was one of the founders of the International Poetry Forum, where she and I heard and met Robert Lowell, Claire Bloom, Anne Sexton, James Dickey, Mark Van Doren, and Judy Collins. Today, Sandy is a published poet herself. Susie Finesman was a fashion-forward young woman who moved to New York, got a great gig at HBO, and later started her own literary agency in Los Angeles. Marina Posvar, whose mother was a Metropolitan Opera star, moved to Pittsburgh when her father, a classmate of my father’s at West Point, became the chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh. Marina became a very fine actress who now does work on behalf of cancer patients and is a two-time survivor herself. Rebecca Litman—whose father, Lenny, was a film and culture critic for the Pittsburgh Press—went to art school in San Francisco and then moved to New York, where she became part of the downtown music scene, and is a longtime right-hand person to composer Phillip Glass. Lisa Dodds was a person that every guy I knew had his eye on. Her own mother told me, “I told her, if you’ve got it, flaunt it!” Lisa was a total rock and roll fan and was the first person to play me a Led Zeppelin album as she danced around the room in hip-hugger jeans. She studied at RISD for a while, too. I don’t mean to imply that they were girlfriends of mine—my girlfriend lived in Kentucky—but they were all good friends who were both interesting and beautiful.