The Handbook / Chapter 21
A Life in Music | Brock
It took 38 years for me to get from college graduation to a career in education. I might have arrived sooner except I was busy with a career doing what I’d dreamed of doing since I was a kid. The story starts on a summer afternoon in 1963.
EXT: Close-up on a Plymouth Suburban station wagon kicking up dust on a dirt road in northwestern Connecticut.
PERSONAL STATEMENT #3 | BROCK
The instant the Beatles’ She Loves You came on the radio, I leaned over the front seat, grabbed the radio knob, and turned up the volume. My father immediately turned it down. I lunged forward again and jacked it up. This time, my father lowered it and ordered me to cease with the nonsense. He shot a concerned look at my mother. I begged them to turn it up, even slightly. I pleaded. I cried. My mother obliged with a few precious decibels.
I was ten. I’d never heard the song, nor heard of the band, but those three minutes changed me. It awakened in me a hunger for music that would never go away.
We were driving home from summer camp where I’d been for eight weeks. My parents had come to pick me up a month before but I prevailed upon them to let me stay for a second session. I can still see my father writing a check for $250 to Camp Wawa Segowea.
We made one stop before returning home. I entered the record store armed with an advance on my allowance and purchased the 45 single along with the yellow squiggly plastic insert.
My life has two parts— before and after hearing that song. In its wake, every free moment was devoted to music. I saved the money I earned from taking extra lawn mowing jobs until I amassed the $100 needed to purchase an acoustic guitar. In a few short weeks the neighborhood lawns in every direction were shorn close and I had raw fingertips from the constant pressure of metal strings.
I found others who had been captured in the alien invasion. We listened to the LP for hours, singing along and playing air guitars. In the months that followed, I mastered a sufficient number of chords to strumble through all twelve songs on Meet The Beatles.
In eighth grade, I met an odd kid who lived up the hill named Paul. His dad worked at IBM like mine. Paul was a bit remote and had a strange affect but it was rumored he could play electric guitar like Jimi Hendrix.
I managed to get myself invited to his house after school. There, in the corner of his room, was a new red Rickenbacker and guitar amp. I only needed to hear him play a few notes to know I’d found a lead guitarist. We began asking around school for leads on a drummer and bass player. Word came back that Bob had been given a set of drums for his birthday and Richie’s parents would supply amps, a PA system, and a basement. We’d have to overlook Richie’s near complete lack of musical ability but new Fender guitar amps made that seem like a swell bargain.
I agreed to play bass and we were off. We even had a name, The Clique.
With the attention of teenage girls at stake, we had competition. They were called The Web and they were probably no better or worse except we had Paul and they didn’t. When both groups met at a Battle of the Bands in the cafetorium, Paul played solos that staggered the audience and my Paul McCartney imitation was more than passable. We took first prize.
A year later, Paul got arrested for auto theft and driving without a license. Worse yet, his parents had turned him in. He had a series of convictions and was never seen in school again. Our band was done.
I went solo at 14.
But suddenly the world had a Joni Mitchell and a Paul Simon in it. Then a Randy Newman. I couldn’t believe my luck. You could get by with a guitar and voice. And if you played the song a 100 times, you could make it your own.
I had my tonsils taken out and the surgeon snipped off my uvula too by mistake. Turns out you don’t need one.
End.
When Jackson Browne released his first album in 1972, the space inside me that held music was carved even deeper. I felt how much music could mean. I believed myself to be a songwriter, holding concerts in college common rooms and dining halls. My songs were mediocre but I didn’t know and wouldn’t be discouraged. The thrill of writing and performing fueled me forward. I was well enough thought of that I was hired as the opening act for Fairport Convention and Taj Mahal at Harvard’s Sanders Theater. Taj invited me to open for him at Wellesley, Skidmore, and a handful of other local colleges.
PERSONAL STATEMENT #4 | BROCK
Sometimes it’s a blessing to be clueless.
If I'd known how far I had to go, or how many things that could go wrong would have to go right, I might have given up. But I had no idea. The destination always seemed just around the corner.
Making music is its own reward. Writing songs fills you with an energy that can’t be gotten any other way— even unremarkable songs like the ones I was writing. I was a Harvard student with an inflated sense of myself. Okay, that’s redundant. After a couple of years of gigs around campus, I saved up some money and booked a recording studio in Boston. We recorded four songs. My roommates suggested I send it to a record label. My lovely girlfriend, Joy, the daughter of a Beverly Hills psychologist, was also supportive of my musical aspirations. So in the fall of 1974, I sent my demo off to Elektra/Asylum Records in Los Angeles, the label to which my heroes, Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell, were signed.
Blessedly clueless.
The assistant to the head of Artist & Repertoire liked my tape enough to put it in the pile for her boss to hear. How I came to know this will have to wait. The boss, Charlie Plotkin, was traveling and sometimes took weeks getting around to listening, if he listened at all. Charlie’s wife was a PhD student in psychology, studying with a Beverly Hills psychologist, Dr. Mike Horowitz, Joy’s father.
No, really.
It was April 1975, and the good doctor organized a cocktail party for his soon-to-be-graduating students. Charlie and his wife responded to the invitation with their regrets. They would be sailing that weekend.
The day before the party, Charlie’s wife called my future father-in-law asking if they could attend. A typhoon was forecast, cancelling their sail.
The following day it rained steadily, but inside the doctor’s modest home the conversation was lively and the outlook sunny. At one point, Mike found himself chatting with one student’s husband who happened to work in the record business. How interesting, the doctor told him, my daughter’s boyfriend is a songwriter. When Mike shared the boyfriend’s name, Charlie felt he'd heard it before. He was almost sure of it. His assistant reminded him the following Monday, and it all came back. That’s the guy whose tape I wanted you to hear, she scolded.
It takes more than a village. It takes a typhoon, or at least the threat of one. The storm itself never materialized but it had already worked its magic.
I was completely unaware of this at the time, of course. Like I said, clueless.
On the day of my last exam senior year, I walked back to our apartment on Harvard Street. Joy and I had moved in together and haven’t been apart since. I glanced at the mail slot and saw a piece of paper folded in the slot. It was from Charlie. He was in Boston and wanted to meet.
Of course, I thought. Doesn’t this happen to everyone on their last day in college?
He came to our apartment later that night. Although he didn’t offer me a record contract, he did critique my songs and invite me to look him up if I got to Los Angeles.
I had to work for a few months to fund the trip but in late July my lovely, and deeply tanned, girlfriend, now wife of 46+ years, picked me up at the airport and drove me to her parents’ home where I’d been invited to stay for a month.
A few months later, thanks to Charlie, I was hired to tour with Linda Ronstadt. Joy got a job at the Los Angeles Examiner as a copywriter.
I was shocked to learn about the many serendipitous events that had made it possible. I hadn’t had a clue, of course. What a blessing.
End.
The person who deserves the most credit for steering the universe toward my auspicious California beginnings was that assistant to the head of Artist & Repertoire and Charlie’s sister, Laura, who remains one of our dearest friends to this day. If she hadn’t put my tape in Charlie’s hand twice, things would have evolved very differently.
The sadist had done his part making sure I played soccer. The meteorologist got the forecast wrong causing the cancellation of Charlie’s sailing trip. Laura’s persistence worked magic. Now it was time to rely on hard work rather than any more impossibly good luck.
So began our life in Los Angeles. I kept my childhood allegiance to the Yankees but gave myself over to southern California completely. Everything about it was seductive. The climate was nearly perfect every day. I made myself at home in the same Beverly Hills house where the fateful conversation between Joy’s father and Charlie had taken place. Her parents were as hospitable as could be expected when their daughter’s musician/boyfriend is helping himself to the refrigerator’s contents and who knows what else.
I called Charlie and was invited to visit him at a recording studio a few nights later. There I’d meet Andrew Gold, the voice and pen behind the hits Lonely Boy and Thank You For Being a Friend, and someone who would become the center of my musical life for years to come. He was the most naturally gifted musician and came by it honestly. His father was Ernst Gold, composer of Exodus, and his mom was Marni Nixon who voiced Eliza Doolitle in the film version of My Fair Lady. Over the following three years, I did a series of tours around the world as a member of his and Linda Rondstadt’s back-up band. For a few months, we shared the stage with the headlining Eagles. At one point I looked out at 65k fans at Seattle’s Kingdome and appreciated how lucky I’d been. It was grad school for rock & roll and perhaps the most fun job a person can have right out of college.
We moved into a small house just over the hill from the Hollywood Bowl where strains of live music would sometimes waft in. We sanded the woodwork and ornate stenciling emerged that had been hidden for decades. A ‘66 navy blue Ford mustang, Dan the Man, was parked outside.
The vegetation was lush and exotic. Outside the leaded back picture window, flanked by two enormous blue agaves, towered an eight-foot cactus. In December it would explode in red Jurassic blossoms which I adorned with Christmas lights. The doorway was topped with a blanket of bougainvillea. The air was perfumed with jasmine. For someone accustomed to months of shoveling snow, it felt like paradise.
We were taken in by a group of transplanted artists and musicians who became good friends. Lucy’s El Adobe, a Mexican restaurant across from Paramount studios, became our second home, its owners Frank and Lucy Casado our adoptive parents.
I was welcomed into a cohort of studio musicians and singers, lending background vocals on various albums and commercials. Andrew invited me to team up as producers for his third album. It was a more manageable life than one spent on the road and effectively ended my career as a touring musician.
An offer from MCA Music allowed me to transition to songwriting full time. In collaboration with a dozen other young writers, we cross-pollinated our way to covers with an assortment of 80’s and 90’s artists. One such record was Automatic which I produced for the Pointer Sisters. Its rise to the top of the charts got me a meeting with Quincy Jones who hired me as a staff producer. Working in the shadow of a great musician and producer like Q was a shot of creative steroids. The horizon was hoisted again.
Following that lovely and brainy brunette to Hollywood turned out to be an inspired choice. And then 25 years had passed.
I had worked with many of my musical heroes who exceeded sky-high expectations. I somehow managed to work as producer and songwriter with Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder who proved to be even more gifted and inspiring than I imagined. A quick google search will show the hundreds of songs I had cut over the decades. It will also spare me having to list them, and you having to read them, here. I was very lucky and worked hard, a nearly unbeatable combination I highly recommend.
It was luck alone that made me the Santa Monica neighbor of a very talented jingle producer named Mark Vieha. He lived around the corner and behind his home he had installed a small but mighty recording studio. Over the span of a decade, I sang on hundreds of commercials. Mark wrote the bulk of them but I was occasionally tapped to compose them as well. I sang lead vocal on a national campaign that stood out for its reach and durability, Mac Tonite for McDonalds. A search on YouTube is worth a giggle. I called myself a songwriter but I lived for those jingle sessions. Horizontal money, we called it. And I’d need it as it turned out.
With the invention of the mp3, file sharing was an inevitability. Songwriter royalties dropped steadily over the next few years. The precipitous decline in record sales and the arrival of Spotify in 2011 signaled a seismic event about to topple the industry.
PERSONAL STATEMENT #5 | BROCK
You need to make a change.
I heard myself say it but didn’t remember having spoken. Since there was no one else around I evidently had. Plus, there was no one else to whom it could have been directed. Stranger still, it wasn’t the first time it had happened. I was either losing my mind or desperate to get my attention.
Finally I heard it.
It didn’t take long to decipher its hidden meaning. I was a fifty-something songwriter grappling with an industry that had been in decline for a decade and was now in its death throes. Kids who used to buy records were now posting mp3s to each other, reducing royalties to practically nothing in the process. Top 40 radio was in a deathmatch with something called a streaming service and broadcast royalties were in freefall as well. There wasn’t any question what the outcome would be— the music business as we knew it was done.
Okay, I get it. I need to make a change.
Switching careers isn’t necessarily a sign of failure. Sometimes it’s a success to survive in an industry long enough to see it run its course. The music business has plenty of company. Technology was causing disruption elsewhere, everywhere. Now I found myself confronting a different question: If not this what and if not now when?
I slept on it. I woke up and decided when was now. Joy and I talked it over and she was open to a change. When I suggested admissions work, specifically Harvard, she didn’t think it ridiculous. The thought of moving back east, where we met, had its appeal.
I hadn’t chosen arbitrarily. Harvard depends on an army of alums to interview the ever-increasing number of Harvard applicants each year and I had been a volunteer for three decades. A respectful relationship had developed with the office in Cambridge by my running the local committee in southern California for years.
I composed a letter to Dean Fitzsimmons in the admissions office. I asked if my applying as an entry level admissions officer would cause either him or me any embarrassment— to please let me know if so and I’d forgo it. If they were only hiring kids right out of college, why bother? I explained my predicament along with my motivations and mailed it off.
To his credit, he called as soon as it arrived and said that, although he thought it was insane to leave balmy Santa Monica for a frequently frigid and inclement Cambridge and work for a pittance, he would not deter me from applying for one of the five open positions. I got the feeling he was not put off by the audaciousness. His laughter suggested he was at least amused.
I scraped together a resume that had exactly no relevant experience save my having interviewed on behalf of the college and hit submit.
In early July I got a call from the Director of Admissions with whom I had a less close but warm relationship. She asked me point blank— Do you seriously want to come work with us? Will you be willing to move to Cambridge? Are you aware of the salary? When I answered all in the affirmative, she wasted no time in instructing me to report for duty the last week of August.
I had gotten into music because it felt so vital to my happiness. I worked in every facet of the industry that would have me. I built a life, a family, a house, and a career. For thirty-five years I got away with work that felt like play.
My heart knew before my brain that it was over. It waited patiently until it could take no more. Then it went over my head, straight to my mouth, to say what needed to be said.
You need to make a change.
End.
That’ll have to do for my story. I want to get back to yours.
By now, I very much hope, you have some ideas knocking around and maybe one is standing out from the rest. Don’t be afraid to get going. There’s no better test of a topic’s potential than outlining and writing. The act of writing will loosen nearby memories and related feelings. If you feel yourself opening up, if you sense a whirlpool forming and the perimeter expanding, keep going. It’s an odd and wonderful blend of conscious navigation and unconscious surrender to get at your most creative outpourings.
But just in case you’re still unsure of what story to tell, I know one more spot where it might be hiding. It might be the last place you look.