Kashmir (Led Zeppelin). 40 Songs for 40 Years, 1975

By the time I was three, my dad had taught me how to use his fancy stereo, reasoning that I was less likely to break it if I knew what I was doing. The idea was solid (I did indeed treat his stereo with respect), and it turned out that the stereo was an excellent babysitter. In a stroke of genius, my parents used our reel-to-reel tape deck to record my favorite music on a 7” double-length reel, which gave two uninterrupted hours of playing time on each side. I’d get on my rocking horse, put on my dad’s headphones, and rock along to my favorite music. I usually fell asleep before the tape was done. Dad later described this discovery as “like finding money in the street” (I was evidently kind of a high maintenance kid).

I remember Mom taking me to buy Physical Graffiti (the record on which this song appears) as a gift for my dad; it was probably a Christmas present. I loved the intricate album cover, which featured the façade of a building with cut-outs in place of the windows; depending on how you inserted the record sleeves, you could see the album title or other interesting pictures.

If the cover was great, the actual music was even better. My favorite song was Kashmir, and Dad would bounce me on his knee as we listened. Each section was carefully choreographed with its own distinct bouncing pattern. The best part was the chorus, where Dad would pull out all the stops, making funny faces and bouncing me as vigorously as possible while I nearly collapsed with laughter. It’s fortunate that Dad was in good shape because all this bouncing took a lot of stamina: the song is eight-and-a-half minutes long, and I usually wanted to listen to it over and over.

Everything’s Got ‘Em (Harry Nilsson). 40 Songs for 40 Years, 1974

This song is from The Point!, which is by far the coolest record I listened to as a preschooler. I loved the story; I loved the melodies; I loved the lyrics. I even loved the cover art. I fervently wanted to have a triangle-shaped hat just like the main character, Oblio. When I rediscovered the music of Harry Nilsson many years later, I caught a lot more in the lyrics (some of which probably didn’t belong on a kids’ record in the first place), but I give Nilsson credit for not condescending to his audience; he made a great record for kids or otherwise. This song shows off Nilsson at his best: a catchy melody, an unconventional metric structure, and a fantastic arrangement by George Tipton. I think that the best songs on this record can easily hold their own with the best of Nilsson’s work.

The Riddle Song (Joan Baez). 40 Songs for 40 Years, 1973

My first musical memory is the sound of my mother singing lullabies to me, and she had a pretty wide repertoire of folk songs (of which The Riddle Song is the most vivid for me). When I listen to Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Buffy Sainte-Marie records from the late sixties and early seventies, it’s a little strange, because they all sound like they’re covering my Mom.

Mom also played guitar, and I think this gave me the earliest idea that playing an instrument was a cool thing for a grownup to do; I still feel that way. Hearing this song reminds me of being rocked to sleep, and I think about it every time I sing to my kids. I hope they have happy memories of me singing to them, too.

Introducing 40 Songs for 40 Years

It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.—Frank Zappa

It’s quite possible that playing and listening to music have consumed more of my waking hours than any other activity. With my fortieth birthday now uncomfortably close, it seems like a good time to remember the songs that mattered to me along the way.

I don’t even begin to claim that these are the best songs from these years (although I might make a case for some). I don’t even claim that all of them are good. That said, each of these songs was the most important music in the world to me at some point in my life, and I think that counts for something.

So here is my musical photo album, with one song per birthday. It’s all there: the cute baby years, the awkward adolescence, the experimental college years, the uncertainty of young adulthood, the settling down into a family of my own.

Clyfford Still and the value of technique

I don’t play accurately—any one can play accurately—but I play with wonderful expression.

Algernon Moncrieff in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Portrait of a Man (self portrait?)

by Jan van Eyck

Nobody looks at a Jan van Eyck painting and says, “I could totally paint that. I can’t believe this is in a museum.” There are obviously lots of things about van Eycks that make them worthy of study and preservation, but the most obvious—to anyone who’s tried to paint anything from life—is just how technically accomplished they are. You don’t just pick up a brush and start painting like that.

Things are a bit different in the modern wing, especially among the abstract paintings. Blank canvases, huge blocks of color (often applied quickly or mechanically), splatters, no discernable subject. The cliché grumpy response to these paintings is, “my kid could paint that.”

Making something that looks like a Rothko or a Pollock is a lot harder than it looks (try it sometime), but that’s not really the point. We can grudgingly admit that it might take practice to splatter the paint just so, but that still doesn’t seem nearly as difficult as learning to paint like van Eyck.

But why do we care about technique at all? Why does it matter if a painting is technically sophisticated?

One theory holds that work of art derives value from the effort that went in to producing it. The final painting serves as a record of the artist’s intent, attention, and effort. If that’s true, then sophisticated technique acts as a multiplier on that effort. A large, detailed oil painting might take more than a hundred hours to paint, but it takes thousands and thousands of hours of practice to be able to paint that way.

But technique isn’t really about providing evidence of practice. When we say that someone has good technique, what we really mean is that they can reliably use their tools to achieve their intent. And that’s another source of discomfort with abstract painting. It leaves open the nagging question: Is this what the artist really wanted to paint, or is it just that this limited technique is all they’re capable of?

A last-minute trip to Denver left me with some time to spend at the Clyfford Still Museum, which opened this past November. Clyfford Still is one of the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism (along with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and others), and I hadn’t been especially familiar with his work. Both the museum itself and the exhibit are fantastic, and I’d recommend them to anyone.

The museum’s inaugural exhibit is a chronological overview of Still’s painting career, and it opens with a few things he painted in his twenties. The exhibit traces certain motifs—especially the figure—through 50 years of his work, but I found that his early work served another important function for me.

PH-77 (1936) by Clyfford Still

© Clyfford Still Estate

Photo: Peter Harholdt

From a purely technical perspective, his early paintings are very solid. Without realizing it, seeing his technically accomplished representational work gave me the freedom to experience his later abstract work with an open mind. I also delighted in finding evidence of his painterly skill, especially in his work from the 70s, which uses subtle gradations of color to create the impression of movement in a very sophisticated way (which completely fails to come through in an image on a website; you’ll have to take my word for it and see for yourself).

Clyfford Still Museum

Photograph by Raul J. Garcia

Seeing it yourself is good advice in general. Most of the canvases are huge—Still intended them to be immersive, almost environments in themselves—and no reproduction is going to convey that feeling. If you go, I’d love to hear what you think.