My Blues Period
Aug. 30th, 2019 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dedalus_1947Oh, I could tell you how it feels
When you got a dirty deal.
I could even tell you how it hurts
When you been stepped on
And treated just like dirt.
Ask me why do all good things
Have to come to an end?
I don’t know.
Lord have mercy I don’t know.
You see
Ask me nothin’ but about the blues.
The blues is all that I was left with.
(Ask Me ‘Bout Nothin’ But the Blues: D. Robey & H. Boozier – 1969)
Last weekend Kathy and I traveled to Indio, California to hear Boz Scaggs perform at the Fantasy Springs Resort Casino. My friend Jim Riley had learned of the concert months earlier and asked if we wanted to join him there. I immediately said yes, because I’d never heard him sing live. You see, I didn’t become interested in Scaggs or his music until 1997, when I first heard his song “Ask Me ‘Bout Nothin’ But the Blues” on a mixed tape my son Toñito made for me as a Christmas present. That song, along with a score of others in different music genres, was intermixed between two long recordings he made when he interviewed me on his college radio program at George Washington University. I had flown to D.C. that Spring to watch him act in a Freshman performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and was hoping to take him out to lunch, when he suddenly invited me to watch his DJ radio segment. As we walked into the college radio station (really just a cluttered office with racks and stacks of CD’s and vinyl records, and a couple of microphones), he again surprised me by asking if he could interview me on the air. Although I was stunned and intimidated at first by the request, I have to admit that I was also a bit flattered and I said yes. I assumed he would ask me predictable questions about my profession as a principal and educator, and my role as a father. Instead he wanted to know if I was happy, and then followed up by asking me to describe the things, people, and activities that made me happy or brought me joy. These topics didn’t really elicit any clever or snappy David Letterman-type responses, so I decided to be honest and answered his questions as candidly as possible. It was only months later, when listening to the mixed tape of this interview and heard the song “Ask Me ‘Bout Nothin’ But the Blues” for the first time, that I realized my DJ son had become a connoisseur of the Blues, and that he suspected I was struggling with depression during that period of time.
I’ve come to understand that music appreciation is an evolving process, in which a person needs to be open to ALL types of music, even those genres they don’t like at first. I’m embarrassed to confess that I became a music fan of the Blues very late in life. I was a rock and roll and pop music snob in grade school, a Beatles and Bob Dylan snob in high school, and a folk-rock snob in college. Except for a few Motown songs and artists, I pretty much dismissed Country music, Rhythm and Blues, Blues, and Jazz, and was not particularly curious in learning anything about them. Luckily for me things started changing in 1995 when I was assigned as the new principal at Van Nuys Middle School and ran right into the Blues. Van Nuys Middle School was a do-over for me. It was my second assignment as a principal, and I wanted to avoid the errors and mistakes of my first. I had been pretty much full of myself at that school, believing that I was the best qualified educator to decide on matters of middle school reorganization and reform, and that I could administer the school from my office, without the need of interacting with and gaining the confidence and support of the parents, faculty, and students. Reorganization did take place during the three years I was there, but it came at the cost of alienating large parts of the school community and making for a unhappy school. Van Nuys offered an opportunity to change and to actually LEARN how to be an effective leader and maintain a positive and achieving school culture and community. The first thing I wanted to do was to identify the faculty leaders and influencers among the teachers and staff, and to learn their strengths, talents, and opinions.
I met and talked to all of the administrators and many of the teachers and staff during the weeks before the start of school, and they all had a lot to tell me. Certain influential individuals really impressed me: Kandy Lundbergh, the Head Counselor; Amanda Bageri, Magnet Coordinator; Dorothy Phillips, Magnet Science teacher and Chapter Chair; Ed Shenin, Math Dept. Chair; and, Jim Clemensen, Physical Education Chair and the P.E. Demonstration Program Director. One other person they all highly recommended to me was Marty Crowe, Counselor. They raved about Marty’s powerful charisma with all the students of the school, his effectiveness as their trusted counselor, and the respect he earned from all the teachers. Each of them also mentioned that he was a talented musician who sang and played the harp (harmonica) on a respected Blues band called Shades of Blue. Ultimately, of these six educators and counselors, two stood out for me because of their unique talents and interests – Jim and Marty.
Jim Clemensen had moved beyond the typical P.E. teacher profile and was the driving force in making his department a model-demonstration program throughout the city and state. The goal of the program was not simply to teach sports and exercise, but to inculcate physical fitness practices for life, employing the newest California State Guidelines for Physical Education and the most efficient methodology. All of his teachers were on board, and they soon modeled cutting edge teaching practices to the entire faculty. Jim also made P.E. fun. His jogging activity was not simply having his students running around a track but challenged them to run and catch rubber chickens that they tossed to each other in the air, and then be able to take and log their pulse rates from beginning to end. He also developed a Circus Unit for the 6th grade classes, teaching the athletic and finesse skills and talents one would see demonstrated in a circus – arm and leg strength, balance, and movement. Students would measure and grade their own progress, and the culminating project was a juggling demonstration. Watching students’ progress from awkwardly tossing and trying to catch floating scarves, to confidently juggling three balls in the air was amazing, and I asked Jim to teach me as well. I struggled for months, with Jim giving me encouraging tips along the way, until he suggested a strategy, he employed with his students of playing Marty’s Blues CD as they practiced. So, I purchased the album Shades of Blue from Marty and started listening as I practiced juggling. Jim was right, my juggling improved, and listening to the music sparked my interest in the Blues.
Marty was the type of hands-on, bi-lingual counselor that every school should have – a fearlessly, child-centered counselor and advocate, who also had the complete trust of the faculty. He took every opportunity to interact with students throughout the day. He would greet students each morning at the corner intersection of the school and wished them well when they departed for home at the end of the school day. It was his corner, and he was always there to speak with students – checking on their day, their concerns, and their problems. During lunch and recess he wandered about the school yard and playing fields, again interacting and checking on his students. Teachers and students always knew where to find him. After listening to his CD for a while, I finally asked Marty to become my Blues guru and started borrowing some of his Blues albums, so I could get a sampling of different musicians, sounds, and styles. I soon found the Blues to be an acquired taste that kept expanding – the more I listened, the more I liked it, and the more CDs I bought for myself – and I began hearing in its rhythms and lyrics the original roots and influences of Rhythm and Blues, Rock and Roll, Country, and Jazz. Of course, I started my collection slowly with the standard modern musicians – B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, T. Bone Walker, Charlie Musselwhite, and Keb Mo – and then began reading about the origins and lives of the early Blues Musicians. It was like a musical archeological dig, I kept discovering more and more artists with their distinctive sounds, and I bought more and more CD’s. Adding to this excitement with my discovery that when I mentioned this new musical interest to my children, friends, and relatives, they admitted that they were closet Blues fans as well, and we started comparing artists and information. I made KJazz, 88.3, “America’s Jazz and Blues Station”, a favorite station on my car radio and listened whenever I drove. Through this station I also learned that they sponsored an annual 3-day Blues Festival on the Cal State Long Beach campus every Labor Day weekend. It even seemed as if the Blues were conspiring to entrap me when I went to my first Blues festival in 1998 and ran into Marty who also happened to be there that day.
My first year at Van Nuys Middle School was a blissful honeymoon period, where I avoided hubris and my previous mistakes, and had the trust of the faculty. In my second year, however, I experienced the subversive influence and mayhem a small band of zealous parents could cause when directed by a pair of disaffected and angry staff members, the Title 1 Coordinator and her husband (This was my first lesson that it is never wise to have a husband AND a wife at the same school). The 1996-97 school year was a pyrrhic war against an onslaught of false, malicious, and slanderous charges from these parents who besieged the district superintendent, claiming that the school was being ruined, and demanding my removal. Entries in the daily journal I kept at that time stretch from September 22, 1996 to April 17, 1997 and chronicled my solitary struggles and the steady deterioration of my physical and psychological health as I battled the insubordination, defiance, and undermining efforts of these two staff members. It was a gradual campaign of slander and innuendo, which grew and grew because the accusations were so outrageous and so incredible, that reasonable parents, teachers, and administrators began wondering if there weren’t SOME grounds for suspicion. It was during the Spring of that school year that I traveled to Washington D.C., was interviewed by my son on his college radio station and discovered that he was very aware and concerned about my anxious and depressed condition.
By April of that year, I was dreading going to school. Every day promised a new catastrophe, a new crisis, or another emotional scene of defiance and confrontation with one of the opposing staff members or their minions. I could only compare my feelings to the “battle fatigue” that bomber crews experienced during World War II after countless missions over flak infested skies where they were sitting ducks for enemy fighter pilots and anti-aircraft guns. Finally, on one Friday night as I was driving home the emotional toll caught up with me. Highlights of the week’s conflicts flashed through my mind, and when I arrived home, I just sat in the car, without moving, for about 30 minutes. I felt shell-shocked and depressed. I was comatose – just sitting there, gulping deep breaths, closing my eyes, and then opening them to stare off, vacantly, into space. I was paralyzed and unable to think or make decisions. I felt helpless and overwhelmed by these never-ending problems and the constant realization that they were being taken “over my head” and delivered directly to my superiors. Feelings of failure and inadequacy welled up like a giant, black wave, and then came crashing down over me. I only had one wish – I wanted to feel competent again. I wished I could once again act with confidence instead of reacting with doubts, fears, and uncertainty. That evening Kathy finally stepped in and, by telling me all that she had been observing in my actions and behaviors, put a mirror to my face and let me see for myself what I had become in the course of the year. I wasn’t sleeping through the night; I was experiencing gripping aches and pains in my back, neck and chest which were recurrent; I was coming down with constant colds and coughs; I had stopped jogging and exercising, replacing a healthy routine with daily cocktails at 6 o’clock, and drinking wine with dinner; I had developed an uncontrollable and annoying twitch in my upper eyelid; my handwriting had deteriorated so badly that my secretary (who had worked with me for 4 years) could no longer decipher it; and I was always so sad, that not even my daughter Teresa’s animated talk after a high school basketball game could cheer me. Kathy told me that she loved me, and would do anything to help, but if I could not recognize the symptoms for myself there was no hope. I was stunned, but not blind. I called Employee Assistance the next day and scheduled a psychiatric assessment the following week. The psychiatrist confirmed what Kathy already knew and I suspected; I was clinically depressed and had been for a long time. By the time I opened Toñito’s Christmas gift in December of ’97 and listened to his mixed-tape of my interview with him, along with the song “Ask Me ‘Bout Nothin’ But the Blues”, I had already accidently discovered that the Blues were a crucial part of my recovery therapy. My prescription for health became medication, counseling therapy, jogging, diet, and the Blues (although not necessarily in that order). In effect, the Blues became the soundtrack of my eventual recovery.
I came to love the Blues because the music seemed to resonate with me during that time, and the stark lyrics from the songs I heard seemed to hold a personal meaning for me. Boz Scaggs’ rendering of “Ask Me ‘Bout Nothin’ But the Blues” was one of those songs that seemed to reach out and grab me by the throat. It seemed he was singing my life and my feelings through his words. Marty once theorized that people listened to the Blues because it was one of the simplest but emotionally intense genres of music. By shunning the complex chord progressions and rhythms of classical, jazz, and more sophisticated forms of rock and roll, he said, blues musicians were forced to make their music more compelling by playing it with feelings from their own life experiences and suffering. Blues comes from the soul, and it is the hardships of life that formed this style of music, and as such it cannot help but inspire one to feel something deep inside. Johnny Winters, another noted blues musician, once said “You gotta’ live the blues if you ever wanna play the blues”. Of course, not all blues songs are sad ones, but I think the “sadder” songs work best because they help us feel better when we are down or depressed, as I once was. It’s as though the singer knows exactly what we are feeling, and he holds out the promise of our getting better. Such was the case for me, and I will be eternally grateful of its restorative power.
When you got a dirty deal.
I could even tell you how it hurts
When you been stepped on
And treated just like dirt.
Ask me why do all good things
Have to come to an end?
I don’t know.
Lord have mercy I don’t know.
You see
Ask me nothin’ but about the blues.
The blues is all that I was left with.
(Ask Me ‘Bout Nothin’ But the Blues: D. Robey & H. Boozier – 1969)
Last weekend Kathy and I traveled to Indio, California to hear Boz Scaggs perform at the Fantasy Springs Resort Casino. My friend Jim Riley had learned of the concert months earlier and asked if we wanted to join him there. I immediately said yes, because I’d never heard him sing live. You see, I didn’t become interested in Scaggs or his music until 1997, when I first heard his song “Ask Me ‘Bout Nothin’ But the Blues” on a mixed tape my son Toñito made for me as a Christmas present. That song, along with a score of others in different music genres, was intermixed between two long recordings he made when he interviewed me on his college radio program at George Washington University. I had flown to D.C. that Spring to watch him act in a Freshman performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and was hoping to take him out to lunch, when he suddenly invited me to watch his DJ radio segment. As we walked into the college radio station (really just a cluttered office with racks and stacks of CD’s and vinyl records, and a couple of microphones), he again surprised me by asking if he could interview me on the air. Although I was stunned and intimidated at first by the request, I have to admit that I was also a bit flattered and I said yes. I assumed he would ask me predictable questions about my profession as a principal and educator, and my role as a father. Instead he wanted to know if I was happy, and then followed up by asking me to describe the things, people, and activities that made me happy or brought me joy. These topics didn’t really elicit any clever or snappy David Letterman-type responses, so I decided to be honest and answered his questions as candidly as possible. It was only months later, when listening to the mixed tape of this interview and heard the song “Ask Me ‘Bout Nothin’ But the Blues” for the first time, that I realized my DJ son had become a connoisseur of the Blues, and that he suspected I was struggling with depression during that period of time.
I’ve come to understand that music appreciation is an evolving process, in which a person needs to be open to ALL types of music, even those genres they don’t like at first. I’m embarrassed to confess that I became a music fan of the Blues very late in life. I was a rock and roll and pop music snob in grade school, a Beatles and Bob Dylan snob in high school, and a folk-rock snob in college. Except for a few Motown songs and artists, I pretty much dismissed Country music, Rhythm and Blues, Blues, and Jazz, and was not particularly curious in learning anything about them. Luckily for me things started changing in 1995 when I was assigned as the new principal at Van Nuys Middle School and ran right into the Blues. Van Nuys Middle School was a do-over for me. It was my second assignment as a principal, and I wanted to avoid the errors and mistakes of my first. I had been pretty much full of myself at that school, believing that I was the best qualified educator to decide on matters of middle school reorganization and reform, and that I could administer the school from my office, without the need of interacting with and gaining the confidence and support of the parents, faculty, and students. Reorganization did take place during the three years I was there, but it came at the cost of alienating large parts of the school community and making for a unhappy school. Van Nuys offered an opportunity to change and to actually LEARN how to be an effective leader and maintain a positive and achieving school culture and community. The first thing I wanted to do was to identify the faculty leaders and influencers among the teachers and staff, and to learn their strengths, talents, and opinions.
I met and talked to all of the administrators and many of the teachers and staff during the weeks before the start of school, and they all had a lot to tell me. Certain influential individuals really impressed me: Kandy Lundbergh, the Head Counselor; Amanda Bageri, Magnet Coordinator; Dorothy Phillips, Magnet Science teacher and Chapter Chair; Ed Shenin, Math Dept. Chair; and, Jim Clemensen, Physical Education Chair and the P.E. Demonstration Program Director. One other person they all highly recommended to me was Marty Crowe, Counselor. They raved about Marty’s powerful charisma with all the students of the school, his effectiveness as their trusted counselor, and the respect he earned from all the teachers. Each of them also mentioned that he was a talented musician who sang and played the harp (harmonica) on a respected Blues band called Shades of Blue. Ultimately, of these six educators and counselors, two stood out for me because of their unique talents and interests – Jim and Marty.
Jim Clemensen had moved beyond the typical P.E. teacher profile and was the driving force in making his department a model-demonstration program throughout the city and state. The goal of the program was not simply to teach sports and exercise, but to inculcate physical fitness practices for life, employing the newest California State Guidelines for Physical Education and the most efficient methodology. All of his teachers were on board, and they soon modeled cutting edge teaching practices to the entire faculty. Jim also made P.E. fun. His jogging activity was not simply having his students running around a track but challenged them to run and catch rubber chickens that they tossed to each other in the air, and then be able to take and log their pulse rates from beginning to end. He also developed a Circus Unit for the 6th grade classes, teaching the athletic and finesse skills and talents one would see demonstrated in a circus – arm and leg strength, balance, and movement. Students would measure and grade their own progress, and the culminating project was a juggling demonstration. Watching students’ progress from awkwardly tossing and trying to catch floating scarves, to confidently juggling three balls in the air was amazing, and I asked Jim to teach me as well. I struggled for months, with Jim giving me encouraging tips along the way, until he suggested a strategy, he employed with his students of playing Marty’s Blues CD as they practiced. So, I purchased the album Shades of Blue from Marty and started listening as I practiced juggling. Jim was right, my juggling improved, and listening to the music sparked my interest in the Blues.
Marty was the type of hands-on, bi-lingual counselor that every school should have – a fearlessly, child-centered counselor and advocate, who also had the complete trust of the faculty. He took every opportunity to interact with students throughout the day. He would greet students each morning at the corner intersection of the school and wished them well when they departed for home at the end of the school day. It was his corner, and he was always there to speak with students – checking on their day, their concerns, and their problems. During lunch and recess he wandered about the school yard and playing fields, again interacting and checking on his students. Teachers and students always knew where to find him. After listening to his CD for a while, I finally asked Marty to become my Blues guru and started borrowing some of his Blues albums, so I could get a sampling of different musicians, sounds, and styles. I soon found the Blues to be an acquired taste that kept expanding – the more I listened, the more I liked it, and the more CDs I bought for myself – and I began hearing in its rhythms and lyrics the original roots and influences of Rhythm and Blues, Rock and Roll, Country, and Jazz. Of course, I started my collection slowly with the standard modern musicians – B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, T. Bone Walker, Charlie Musselwhite, and Keb Mo – and then began reading about the origins and lives of the early Blues Musicians. It was like a musical archeological dig, I kept discovering more and more artists with their distinctive sounds, and I bought more and more CD’s. Adding to this excitement with my discovery that when I mentioned this new musical interest to my children, friends, and relatives, they admitted that they were closet Blues fans as well, and we started comparing artists and information. I made KJazz, 88.3, “America’s Jazz and Blues Station”, a favorite station on my car radio and listened whenever I drove. Through this station I also learned that they sponsored an annual 3-day Blues Festival on the Cal State Long Beach campus every Labor Day weekend. It even seemed as if the Blues were conspiring to entrap me when I went to my first Blues festival in 1998 and ran into Marty who also happened to be there that day.
My first year at Van Nuys Middle School was a blissful honeymoon period, where I avoided hubris and my previous mistakes, and had the trust of the faculty. In my second year, however, I experienced the subversive influence and mayhem a small band of zealous parents could cause when directed by a pair of disaffected and angry staff members, the Title 1 Coordinator and her husband (This was my first lesson that it is never wise to have a husband AND a wife at the same school). The 1996-97 school year was a pyrrhic war against an onslaught of false, malicious, and slanderous charges from these parents who besieged the district superintendent, claiming that the school was being ruined, and demanding my removal. Entries in the daily journal I kept at that time stretch from September 22, 1996 to April 17, 1997 and chronicled my solitary struggles and the steady deterioration of my physical and psychological health as I battled the insubordination, defiance, and undermining efforts of these two staff members. It was a gradual campaign of slander and innuendo, which grew and grew because the accusations were so outrageous and so incredible, that reasonable parents, teachers, and administrators began wondering if there weren’t SOME grounds for suspicion. It was during the Spring of that school year that I traveled to Washington D.C., was interviewed by my son on his college radio station and discovered that he was very aware and concerned about my anxious and depressed condition.
By April of that year, I was dreading going to school. Every day promised a new catastrophe, a new crisis, or another emotional scene of defiance and confrontation with one of the opposing staff members or their minions. I could only compare my feelings to the “battle fatigue” that bomber crews experienced during World War II after countless missions over flak infested skies where they were sitting ducks for enemy fighter pilots and anti-aircraft guns. Finally, on one Friday night as I was driving home the emotional toll caught up with me. Highlights of the week’s conflicts flashed through my mind, and when I arrived home, I just sat in the car, without moving, for about 30 minutes. I felt shell-shocked and depressed. I was comatose – just sitting there, gulping deep breaths, closing my eyes, and then opening them to stare off, vacantly, into space. I was paralyzed and unable to think or make decisions. I felt helpless and overwhelmed by these never-ending problems and the constant realization that they were being taken “over my head” and delivered directly to my superiors. Feelings of failure and inadequacy welled up like a giant, black wave, and then came crashing down over me. I only had one wish – I wanted to feel competent again. I wished I could once again act with confidence instead of reacting with doubts, fears, and uncertainty. That evening Kathy finally stepped in and, by telling me all that she had been observing in my actions and behaviors, put a mirror to my face and let me see for myself what I had become in the course of the year. I wasn’t sleeping through the night; I was experiencing gripping aches and pains in my back, neck and chest which were recurrent; I was coming down with constant colds and coughs; I had stopped jogging and exercising, replacing a healthy routine with daily cocktails at 6 o’clock, and drinking wine with dinner; I had developed an uncontrollable and annoying twitch in my upper eyelid; my handwriting had deteriorated so badly that my secretary (who had worked with me for 4 years) could no longer decipher it; and I was always so sad, that not even my daughter Teresa’s animated talk after a high school basketball game could cheer me. Kathy told me that she loved me, and would do anything to help, but if I could not recognize the symptoms for myself there was no hope. I was stunned, but not blind. I called Employee Assistance the next day and scheduled a psychiatric assessment the following week. The psychiatrist confirmed what Kathy already knew and I suspected; I was clinically depressed and had been for a long time. By the time I opened Toñito’s Christmas gift in December of ’97 and listened to his mixed-tape of my interview with him, along with the song “Ask Me ‘Bout Nothin’ But the Blues”, I had already accidently discovered that the Blues were a crucial part of my recovery therapy. My prescription for health became medication, counseling therapy, jogging, diet, and the Blues (although not necessarily in that order). In effect, the Blues became the soundtrack of my eventual recovery.
I came to love the Blues because the music seemed to resonate with me during that time, and the stark lyrics from the songs I heard seemed to hold a personal meaning for me. Boz Scaggs’ rendering of “Ask Me ‘Bout Nothin’ But the Blues” was one of those songs that seemed to reach out and grab me by the throat. It seemed he was singing my life and my feelings through his words. Marty once theorized that people listened to the Blues because it was one of the simplest but emotionally intense genres of music. By shunning the complex chord progressions and rhythms of classical, jazz, and more sophisticated forms of rock and roll, he said, blues musicians were forced to make their music more compelling by playing it with feelings from their own life experiences and suffering. Blues comes from the soul, and it is the hardships of life that formed this style of music, and as such it cannot help but inspire one to feel something deep inside. Johnny Winters, another noted blues musician, once said “You gotta’ live the blues if you ever wanna play the blues”. Of course, not all blues songs are sad ones, but I think the “sadder” songs work best because they help us feel better when we are down or depressed, as I once was. It’s as though the singer knows exactly what we are feeling, and he holds out the promise of our getting better. Such was the case for me, and I will be eternally grateful of its restorative power.
