Rock'n'roll, fathers'n'sons

Taking son Ben to see the rock legends inspires reflections.

 

Stones bridge gap of generations

By Howard Goodman | Commentary 

Keith Richards picked up an acoustic guitar. Played that familiar Middle Eastern-like intro.
Then Charlie Watts beat his tom-tom: dumm dumm dumm dum-dum, dumm dumm dumm dum-dum.
My son Ben sprang out of his seat, his fist high.
"Yes!!!"
It was Paint It Black, a song way up in the pantheon of his very favorites, and we were hearing it live, just the way it sounded decades back, hearing it from the guys who wrote it and put it on tape and therefore into radios and stereos and the deep-memory places of our brains.
And I felt an irrational wave of fatherly happiness and -- is this allowed when speaking about the Rolling Stones? -- satisfaction.
This was Sunday night two weeks ago, and we were at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, sitting toward the back of the arena in $200 seats to see the Rolling Stones. A father and teenage son on a splurge to see the living legends.
Legends I first saw 40 years ago.
Turn the time machine way back to 1966. Paint It Black was a radio hit. I was 17 and I thought rock 'n' roll not yet the universal musical idiom, was pretty dumb.
I looked down on Elvis Presley and Beatlemania. My tastes ran to folk and Broadway musicals.
The dirty, loud excitement of the Stones changed all that.
Now Ben, on the day before his 16th birthday, was seeing the group that turned me into a rock 'n' roll fan those many years ago. A fairly obsessed, record-collecting, concert-going, radio-listening, lyric-perusing, music-press-reading, mad-dancing fan.
Unlike me at his age, Ben is a serious rock music devotee. He's already collected memories of greats in concert: Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Jethro Tull. He loves old quirky bands like the Velvet Underground, and new gutbucket bands he counts as personal discoveries: the Black Keys, the Hentchmen, the 22-20s.
This makes me unreasonably proud.
It feels good when your kid likes the same music you do. And to see that he understands why it mattered to you so much.
You expect that your kids will be hip to what's current: video games, cell phones, the Internet, Family Guy.
Yet you really treasure it when they appreciate the old: Casablanca, West Side Story, All the President's Men. James Bond. The Chicago Cubs.
Fathers used to pass on survival skills to their sons: how to hunt or fish, or build a house. In our tamer modern world, a father is more likely to pass on sensibility and attitude and taste.
So when my friend Michael the Attorney said we should surprise our boys with Stones tickets, he spoke to my sense of parental responsibility.
"Once in their life, they have to see the Rolling Stones," he said.
Just as, at least once in your life, you have to see Mount Rushmore.
The Stones weren't monuments when I saw them 40 years ago, on their fifth U.S. tour. The gatekeepers of culture were pretty sure that what they did wasn't even music.
They sneered. They were kind of ugly. Mick Jagger seemed like a gangly grad student trying look sexy
and not totally succeeding, banging a tambourine and dancing and braying.
"I see a red door and I want it to turn black ..."
The music was raw and dark and insistent. And giving in to the band and the crowd in Chicago's vast Arie Crown Theater, from a $7 seat in the last row, was way more fun than anything I'd ever been part of. The '60s took their dark turn before I saw the Stones again, in 1969 in Madison Square Garden. I was a college radical and the Stones were the dangerous figures of Street Fighting Man and Sympathy for the Devil, sorcerers who captured the zeitgeist of an America whose ghetto streets were burning, whose gunships were dropping napalm in Southeast Asia, whose idealistic leaders were assassinated.
No band was ever more urgent.
When I saw them next, in 1981 in Detroit, rock wasn't counterculture any more. And I wasn't, either.
Their show was a extravaganza of art direction and set design and celebrity worship. It was great theater, a good time. But the Stones were no longer central.
I didn't expect them to tell us what the era was about. They weren't breaking boundaries. They couldn't threaten the establishment. Kings of the concert business, they were the establishment.
Twenty-five years have passed since then, when they already were fighting against being a nostalgia act.
I kept my expectations low for this 2006 show. I was just hoping the aging Stones wouldn't creak too much and embarrass us oldsters.
I shouldn't have worried. In Sunrise they performed with more power and energy and high spirits than ought to be human.
"It's insane," Ben said as the Stones took their bows and left the stage. "They're like, the ideal of rock 'n' roll."
And then we were part of the exiting crowd that was singing "Woo, woo!" -- the background part in Sympathy for the Devil -- as we slowly filed out of the arena, a happy mass numbering thousands, young and old, who didn't want the good time to end.

Bonnaroo, the new Woodstock

One of the things I can legitimately brag about is the fact I actually attended the 1969 Woodstock festival. Really. My teenage son is a music lover in the same way I was. So to take him to this generation's equivalent of the massive camp-out/rock'n'roll show, I couldn't resist.





AH, MEMORIES OF WOODSTOCK COME FLOODING BACK
Date: Thursday, June 16, 2005
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

The mud smell was familiar.

I recognized it from 36 years ago. The same mixture of sulphury earth, rainwater, sandal leather and foot sweat was Woodstock 1969, intact.

The scent of patchouli and marijuana was the same, too.

And so was the descent into a life of grime: The lack of showers for five days, the revolting Port-a-Sans, the problematic sleeping.

Ah, yes. That brotherly feeling of bonding with thousands, all getting gross together.

I was living it again, this time with my 15-year-old son, Ben.

He holds an enthusiastic, if exaggerated, reverence for the fact that his old man attended the original Woodstock Festival, the 400,000-strong crest of the counterculture.

So, obliging and music-loving dad that I am, I was glad to take him to the closest modern equivalent, a festival in Tennessee called Bonnaroo.

Bonnaroo is an annual event, created in the spirit of the old Grateful Dead. The fourth rendition began Thursday evening and ran practically non-stop until midnight Sunday. About 80 bands played on five stages on farmland 65 miles south of Nashville. About 80,000 people set up camp.

Everyone seemed to be 20, wearing tie-dye and capable of dancing for hours at a stretch.

"I haven't seen anyone as young as me," Ben said after we'd walked around awhile.

"I haven't seen anyone as old as me," I said back.

Woodstock was notable for the kindly vibes amid disaster conditions. That, and the killer lineup (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, et al.).

I remember one day's diet consisting solely of dry oatmeal and water.

But at the well-organized Bonnaroo, there was plentiful pizza, shish kebob, chicken teriyaki and local barbecue. You could even get the comfort of a morning latte.

At Woodstock, the apotheosis of the Generation Gap, we were rebelling against established American values.

At Bonnaroo, my son and I were bonding generations. Reveling without rebelling, I showed him how to decline the friendly offers of intoxicants. We did this party drug-free.

The music was great. And Bonnaroo did retain that Woodstock warmth.

A last errand

I was always close with my father, and when he died I wrote this tribute.






A DAD WHO GAVE HIS FULL ATTENTION -- AND HIS LOVE
Date: Sunday, August 29, 2004
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY


The last real errand I ran for my dad came when he sent me to the library to find F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in large-type print.

This was his last-gasp effort to try to read. For at least six weeks he had been unable to make out words on the printed page, having fallen victim to cataracts and then an operation that didn't prove to be the cure that he'd hoped for.

For a lifelong reader, a man who kept a constant stack of books by his bedside -- juggling most of them simultaneously -- this was an unimaginable curtailment of his quality of life. It seemed the thing that was finally cutting off his joy of living, forget the dozens of pounds of weight he'd lost in his 10-year battle with colon cancer or the weakness that kept him from walking to the dining room at the North Shore Retirement Hotel.

His eye doctor had suggested large-print books, and he was running with that idea. So three Fridays ago I was in the Evanston, Ill., public library for the first time in many years. And thinking what a full-circle experience it was.

Because almost 50 years ago, going to the Evanston Library was our Saturday ritual. We'd pick up a stack of books to read that week and return the stack we'd plowed through the week before. He and I, and my two sisters as they grew old enough to come along.

In my recollection, we did this every week. We'd go to the library and to Charley Moy's laundry, where he had his shirts cleaned and lightly starched for work, and to the Huddle in the Orrington Hotel for milkshakes. Some years there were YMCA swimming lessons, which never took for me but always ended in the most delicious chocolate marshmallow ice cream cones.

I don't doubt that my own love of reading came from those excursions and his example. I know that it was from his reverence for writers that I grew up thinking that writing was the most honorable of professions.

I know that he had wanted to be a writer himself. As a Chicago teenager in the 1930s, he had in fact edited the Roosevelt High School Rough Rider. But World War II and life's practicalities denied him his chance. I know that I chose to go into journalism in part to fulfill that dream for him. Not that he ever asked me to. And not that I didn't love that dream for myself. I was just lucky that my talents, such as they are, coincided so well with a career goal that had my father's great respect.

I knew even at a young age that those Saturday outings were unusual. That it wasn't expected for a father to take time each and every week just to be with his kids.

All my life I've heard about fathers who were too busy for their children, and I knew -- even in the 1950s, when the absent suburban father was the nation's cultural norm -- that I had something different. I had a dad who gave me his full attention, as well as his love.

Clarence Darrow Day

This story's personal. My dad passed his hero-worship of Clarence Darrow to me, and I tried to pass it on to my son Ben. It all came together on one particular day.





COMING FULL CIRCLE ON CLARENCE DARROW DAY
Date: Sunday, March 21, 2004
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY


You can never know what's in a name, but you can hope.

My wife and I gave our younger son the middle name of Darrow. We did it mainly to honor my father, who long ago had taught me to appreciate the iconoclasm, intelligence and courage of attorney Clarence Darrow.

If that would inspire Ben to emulate Darrow's willingness to stand up for the unpopular, the underprivileged and the underdog, so much the better.

Darrow was the controversial Chicago lawyer who represented labor in the bloody struggles of the early 1900s, who defended the freedom to teach evolution in the 1925 "Monkey Trial."

Against tides of hostile opinion, Darrow kept the wealthy thrill-killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb from the death penalty. He won acquittal for Henry Sweet, a black man accused of murder when a mob tried to block his family from moving into a white Detroit neighborhood in 1925.

He was idealistic and cynical, honest and conniving, an orator who could wring tears from juries (judges, too) as he paced the courtroom floor, his thumbs jutted behind suspenders. He became an American archetype, portrayed on screen by Spencer Tracy, Orson Welles, Henry Fonda, Kevin Spacey.

I've known Darrow stories for ages. They are part of my patrimony, handed down from a man who was neither an attorney nor a teacher, but a Chicago-area businessman with an active intellect and a sheaf of idiosyncratic opinions.

Every March 13, for some 30 years, my father has dropped whatever he was doing to drive down to Chicago's South Side, to a lagoon just south of the Museum of Science and Industry on the old grounds of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, perhaps the most wondrous of history's World's Fairs.

Darrow lived near this spot, and for decades he'd stroll to a vaguely Japanese bridge across the lagoon to talk, think or be interviewed. When he died in 1938, his ashes were scattered there.

The famous agnostic mocked all notions of an afterlife or reincarnation. But he joked that if he were ever to come back, friends should look for him at 10 a.m. on the anniversary of his death.

Since 1957, a hard core of Darrow loyalists has done just that: gathered at that bridge on that anniversary, not really expecting to see Darrow come back to life, but to rededicate themselves to causes he championed. And so keep his spirit alive.

Year after year, my father, Carol, joined the academics, biographers, civil rights attorneys and liberal aldermen and judges who would say their few words about Darrow and how he'd still find plenty of things to kick about if he were around.

And they'd toss a wreath onto the lagoon, usually to watch it skid on the mid-March ice.

Fourteen years ago, the tribute took place just a couple of hours after I called my father to tell him of the birth of a grandson.

A boy, I told him. We're naming him Benjamin Darrow.

Would you believe today is Darrow Day? he answered.

I hadn't known.

Flustered, excited, he hurried off the phone to get to the event on time.

My father is 82 now. He has been battling cancer for a decade.

This year, he turned terribly sick. So sick that one doctor recommended we line up hospice care.

When I saw that March 13 this year would fall on a Saturday, I told my father that, whatever happened, he should know that Ben and I, for the first time, would come to Chicago for Darrow Day.

Our Louisianan

Here's another family story, about a death and a birth and the consolation in continuity.






THE MEMORY LIVES ON OF A BELOVED REDNECK
Date: Thursday, December 25, 2003
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

On this morning given to pondering the miracle of new birth and the promise of ongoing life, I have a story to tell.

You couldn't call it a Christmas story, for that holiday is not the tradition of our family, and this story is personal. But its meanings are open for anyone, and you are invited to pick your own.

It begins with a man named Lee Rubin.

Around his adopted town of Lafayette, La., he stood out for his red hair and for being a Jewish New Yorker who had drifted south and reinvented himself as a red-necked Louisianan.

He was a stubborn and independent guy who, in his younger days, could be counted on to start a barroom fight or drive his pickup into a ditch at the end of a hell-raising Saturday night.

When I met him, about 15 years ago, he was taking pride in a prodigious beer belly. And he was getting ready to marry a woman he'd met in Mexico named Maria Teresa and to bring her to the United States to live with him in Cajun country.

They wed. They had a son. And Lee settled down into an irregular domesticity. He worked weeks at a time offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, helping energy companies figure out how to get their drill bits down to where the oil was.

On the job, he was a respected engineer and decision-maker.

At home he became a board member of his synagogue, a small but stubborn group with roots in Lafayette dating back to 1869.

He was my wife's younger brother. But he was distant from us in some ways that went beyond geography, and we didn't connect with Lee and his family very often.

That would change this year.

Silent battle

I wrote this as an exercise at the Poynter Institute, in a workshop on persuasive writing. The assignment was to write about something personal, and this was a subject I'd never committed to paper before. The piece was a big hit with the editorial writers and columnists at the workshop, so I offered it to the Features department when I got back to Fort Lauderdale. Our paper ran it, and so did the Chicago Tribune. I heard from many readers for months afterward, thanking me for describing their own situation or giving me suggestions for cures. By the way, my hearing is better than it was - another attempt at surgery, in September 2008, had happy results.






WHAT'S IT LIKE TO SPEND MOST OF YOUR ADULT LIFE FIGHTING TO HEAR EVERYDAY SOUNDS, THE SHOUTS AND WHISPERS THAT MOST OF US TAKE FOR GRANTED? LISTEN . . . AND LEARN.
Date: Sunday, March 16, 2003
Edition: Broward Metro Section: HEALTH & FAMILY Page: 1E
Byline: By Howard Goodman Staff Writer

Listen. If we're going to talk about this, you'd better speak up.

If you don't, I'm afraid I'm not going to hear you.

I wear a hearing aid in each ear. They're pretty well-hidden in the thickness of my hair, so maybe you didn't realize it.

But no day goes by without my hearing problem being a problem.

My man Koufax

In learning to be a columnist, I had to get used to the idea of using my own feelings and memories as material. That's very different from the journalism that I was taught to practice. This column won the Sun-Sentinel's readers' poll for their favorite commentary of the year:






LEFTY'S LEGACY: FIGHTING FOR WHAT'S RIGHT
Date: Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

I was about 10 years old, sitting in the box seats with my dad at Wrigley Field, cheering for the visitors.

The Dodgers were my favorite team, though I was a Chicagoan who had never been to Brooklyn or Los Angeles. I loved their lore, their soul, their exquisite heartbreaks against the Yankees.

Out of the bullpen in the late innings, the Dodgers called on this kid Koufax.

"Oh, I've heard of him," I told my father. "He's really fast."

I'd heard right. Tall, gangly, strong, the young Sandy Koufax threw the fastest balls I ever saw.

And they were balls, not strikes. Koufax kicked his big right leg high, stretched it impossibly far, uncoiled his long left arm and sent the ball sailing into the backstop.

A couple of years went by. Koufax learned control. And dominated baseball as perhaps no pitcher ever has.

In four incomparable years, 1963 to 1966, he pitched four no-hitters, including a perfect game.

He led the Dodgers into the World Series three times. And in 1965, he refused to pitch the Series' opening game because it was Yom Kippur.

Out of respect for his forebears and the sacrifices they made for their beliefs, he wouldn't play that day. He taught a couple of generations of Jewish kids that some things were more important even than the World Series.

Long into adulthood, many of us -- even the doubters and disaffiliated -- would consider it sacrilege to work on the High Holy Days because of Koufax's unforgettable example.

And then he was gone. Quit at age 31, after winning 27 games in 1966, rather than risk permanent damage to an elbow rent by arthritis.

Sandy Koufax became a willing ghost, a legend who resisted the limelight.

"Sandy is somebody," his biographer, Jane Leavy, has said, "who craves his anonymity."

My parents as I never knew them

Every now and then, I wrote a column that was just about my life or my family. This one was especially sweet. My sister had discovered a cache of love letters of my parents' that none of us had ever seen, and they told a story all by themselves. After it ran, I was contacted by several people who recognized my parents from the old pictures we ran of their young selves. Amazing.






LOVE LETTERS AS PERFECTLY DATED AS A FEDORA
Date: Thursday, November 28, 2002
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY

My sister Susan found the letters when cleaning out my parents' house last summer. They were tucked back in a little-used cabinet in the basement, a neat bundle of carefully folded stationery that no one had seen or touched for decades.

They were from 1947, the summer before Carol Goodman and Miriam Gutman, both of Chicago, were married.

Finding them was a revelation: a window flung open to that time you cannot know, the time before you were born, when your parents were young and had the dreams and desires each generation thinks are theirs alone -- and which certainly never can exist in the orderly, responsible people who are your parents.

Carol -- the male name was common in his parents' Hungary -- was 24, just out of uniform from World War II. Miriam was 21, working as a legal secretary in the Loop. They met at her family's apartment on the North Side where her older brother was hosting a veterans' meeting.

Carol fell for the pretty dark-haired girl immediately. She took a little longer, inconveniently being engaged to someone else.

But soon she was making other plans. "I realized that your dad would always make me laugh," she'd say.

They became inseparable -- except for nine days when he traveled to Denver to visit his beloved older sister Gene, who'd moved there 14 years earlier. You did that, back when Denver's air was clear, if you had tuberculosis.

It was his first trip West, the first time either of them would fly on an airplane.

In those days, a long-distance phone call was a major event. A stamp was 3 cents, air mail 5 cents.

Miriam and Carol wrote nearly every day, long letters on heavy-bond paper and monogrammed onionskin, filled with chat and jokes and -- most surprising to us kids -- open expressions of love.

I look at these letters, and I can see by the handwriting that it's the same two people I've always known.

But I don't recognize this giddy version of them, this young pair so dreamily in love, intent on putting every thought to paper.

In contemporary slang as perfectly dated as fedoras and padded shoulders, they enthuse about the whole wide world opening before them.

Alaska in an RV

A travel piece. The whole family went on the road, and it made for a funny trip.





ALASKA BY RV: A PRACTICAL WAY TO TRAVEL A CHALLENGING STATE
IT'S A LESS COSTLY, LESS DAREDEVIL MODE - WITH PLENTY OF HOOKUPS.
BYLINE: Howard Goodman, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
SECTION: FEATURES TRAVEL; Pg. T01


ON THE ROAD IN ALASKA - Wind lashed my face, cold rain cutting icy rivulets on cheeks chapped raw, as my weary team lunged onward and our sled - plied with foodstuffs, camp gear, precious serums - forged toward the white-blurred, unknown beyond . . .

Well, no, that's not actually how I traversed Alaska.

Picture, instead, a cushioned vinyl seat, a steering wheel, a bed with sheets and pillowcases, a cupboard full of Lays Baked Potato Chips, an Aqua-Marine IV toilet - all of it moving at nine miles to the gallon.

Ellen, my wife, is in the passenger seat, checking our progress against The Milepost, a 754-page guide to just about every roadside attraction in the Great White North. My stepdaughter,
Rachel, is on the couch, writing in her journal. My stepson, Mike, is curled up in the rear bed with a book on the wilderness and Soundgarden on his headphones. Rachel's boyfriend, Tal, and my son, Ben, are playing cribbage at the dining table.

We're doing Alaska family-style, in a rented recreational vehicle - a 1993 Ford Jamboree Rallye - carrying most of the comforts (and a lot of the chores) of home with us as we go from mountaintop to salmon stream to shoreline. In the biggest state in the union - Texas times two, plus change - the six of us are spending two weeks in a 27-foot-long, 18-foot-high, 7 3/4-foot-wide RV.

We have hearkened to the call of the mild.