The Story of the "Candy Lady"

This article appeared in the June 22, 2012, issue of The Jewish Advocate, and is reprinted here with its permission.

Newton’s ‘Candy Lady’
The children of Oak Hill Park never knew of haunted past
By Jason M. Rubin
Special to the Advocate

We called her the Candy Lady.

By “we,” I mean the kids in my Newton neighborhood of Oak Hill Park in the late ’60s. It was a wordof mouth thing: Someone told you which house to go to and what to say. In return, she would give you a handful of (unwrapped) candy; my recollection is that the standard ration included mini-marshmallows and chocolate chips.

We didn’t know her name or her story, and we didn’t care. We just wanted free candy. And that’s what we got. All we had to do was ask. I think I may have gone only a few times, when I was 6 or 7. But the memory of the Candy Lady was always a sweet one to this now 49- year-old parent, and both my daughters have heard me reminisce about the mysterious woman who treated every day like Halloween.

In the naïveté of youth, I never questioned the Candy Lady’s methods or motives. If there was a Candy Lady in my neighborhood, I suppose I felt entitled to take advantage of the service. She didn’t seem scary. She seemed like a grandmother.

In fact, my own grandparents lived in the neighborhood, and every Halloween my friends and I would make sure to stop at their house. My grandmother, though, didn’t believe in giving candy to kids; instead, she handed out Red Delicious apples. A friend of mine told me that his mother wouldn’t let him eat his apple because it was unwrapped. I told him, “It’s from my grandmother; you think she put a razor blade in it? Just eat it now. It will give us energy for the rest of the night.”

To me, the connection was clear: My grandmother wouldn’t hurt a child; why would the Candy Lady?

In any case, no one ever raised a fuss about the Candy Lady. Maybe our parents didn’t even know about her; maybe there was an unspoken code that kids wouldn’t tell grownups about her. Or maybe in those days, people (my friend’s apple-fearing mom aside) just didn’t worry as much about life’s many lurking hazards. After all, seat belts were optional; the city would send out trucks in summer to fog our neighborhoods with insecticide; and we could go wherever we wanted as long as we were home for dinner.

Bertha Stern Sharton, the Candy Lady, in Vienna in 1932, and at her home in 1967.

A question on Facebook
Over the years, the Candy Lady faded from my memory. Though I didn’t live in Newton as an adult, I would return to the old neighborhood to see family. I remember taking my daughter to the playground once and glancing over at the Candy Lady’s house. Assuming that she had passed away, I didn’t attempt to knock on the door on my daughter’s behalf. She would have to be content with swinging on the same swings her father had swung on.

Years passed, and Facebook emerged, with a page dedicated to the neighborhood, Oak Hill Park Pride. It attracted people of all ages who had called the neighborhood home. For a reunion last summer, an Oak Hill Park Reunion page was posted. I wasn’t interested in attending the party, but I was intrigued by the photographs and memories that people posted. One in particular caught my eye: “Does anyone remember the Candy Lady?”

The question sparked considerable discussion and caught the attention of someone who once lived next door to the Candy Lady. At last, I learned the Candy Lady’s name: Bertha Sharton. And I learned that before she arrived in Oak Hill Park – about as idyllic a neighborhood as can be found in the Northeast – she fled the Nazis in Austria.

My interest was piqued, and I poked around to learn more about her. I spoke with her son, a retired doctor, and received information from his daughter-in-law and from various Internet sites (Google and Ancestry.com are invaluable to the amateur genealogist). Questions I had never thought before to ask now had answers. Here is the Candy Lady’s story.

A neighbor named Adolf
Bertha Stern was born on March 16, 1898, in the Hungarian village of Vágáshuta, near the border of what is now Slovakia. When she was a child, her family moved to Vienna. Her father, a furrier, owned a store on Stumpergasse Street – the same street on which an 18-year-old aspiring artist named Adolf Hitler briefly shared a room with a musician friend. When Hitler was twice rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts at Schillerplatz, he abruptly left.

Bertha worked in the store with her father. On the fifth floor of the same building lived a blond-haired, blueeyed Jew named Felix (the family has asked that his original surname not be revealed). Felix was born just four days after Bertha. Through proximity and coincidence, they met and fell in love. On March 19, 1920, they married.

Intelligent and talented, Felix earned a doctorate in music and philosophy from the University of Vienna. He was a pianist, composer and vocal teacher, and he served as professor of music and pedagogy at his alma mater. He also taught at the Pedagogical Institute of Vienna, where for at least part of his tenure the faculty included psychologist Alfred Adler, who along with Sigmund Freud was a cofounder of the psychoanalysis movement. Felix also attended law school in Vienna, but left before graduating.

On March 27, 1925, Bertha gave birth to the couple’s only child, whom they named Eric. In 1938, two weeks before Eric turned 13 and became a bar mitzvah, Hitler annexed Austria. On Nov. 9 and 10 of that year, the Viennese Jewish community – like those elsewhere in Germany and the former Austria – was ransacked during Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass.” Jewish homes and businesses throughout Vienna were vandalized or destroyed, including 95 synagogues.

Felix happened to be walking through the center of the city in the midst of the carnage. Seeing his fair features, a Nazi soldier assumed he was not Jewish and urged him to go home. While his family apparently came through the pogrom unscathed, Felix could read the writing on the wall. He had already seen the darkness coming during his travels through Europe as a professor and had applied for a visa before the Nazis took over Austria. The following March, Felix, Bertha, and Eric boarded a train and left Austria for London.

“I remember the tension on the train when the border police boarded and checked everyone’s papers,” Eric recalled decades later. “Only when the train passed into Holland could people let out a breath and cheer.”

The maid and the gardener
Felix’s brother, Hermann, and his wife, Selma, lived in London, and helped them settle there. Eric spent his 14th birthday in this strange new city.

Felix, the musician and professor, could only find work as a gardener. Bertha took a job as a maid. Their positions required them to live in the homes of their employers; Eric stayed with Hermann and Selma. Only on Sundays could all three be together.

But they hardly felt safe from Hitler. By summer 1939, Britain was gearing up for war and staging evacuation drills. Bertha and Felix’s hopes to find a new haven were dashed in September, when the German invasion of Poland triggered World War II. But one charitable group was still helping a lucky few find transport out of England. Weekly, Felix visited the charity to check whether space was available on a ship. One day, he noticed a man who didn’t appear interested in emigrating, but rather in snooping into the lives of those who did. Becoming suspicious after seeing the man on other days, Felix alerted the authorities.

As a result, the man was arrested as a suspected Nazi spy. In gratitude for Felix’s help, the government guaranteed him and his family passage out of the country. Now the challenge was finding a nation that would accept them.

Once again, a relative came through: a cousin of Felix’s lived in New York City, where he was a dealer in animal skins. Felix, Bertha and Eric set sail on the SS President Harding from Southampton, England, on Nov. 15, 1939. They arrived in New York nine days later. They would be among the last passengers of the President Harding; it was bombed by German aircraft six months later and never sailed again.

In America, Felix conceived a new surname for the family: Sharton. He took part of his original last name and added the suffix “-ton” as a tribute to George Washington. The Shartons stayed with the cousin for two weeks, but decided that their opportunities were slim in the refugee-packed city. They moved to Chicago, where Felix joined the faculty of a conservatory. In 1944, he was named head of the Music Department at Whitworth College. That year, the Library of Congress recorded his sole surviving, compositional credit for a piece fittingly called, “Verlassen” (“Abandoned”). In December, the Shartons became US citizens.

Facing the Nazis
With the end of the war in 1945, the family learned the fate of their loved ones in Europe. The news that her parents and many of her siblings were killed in the Holocaust scarred Bertha for the rest of her life. Felix’s mother was believed to have died in a concentration camp (his father had died before the war). Felix was able to help bring some of the perpetrators to justice. Answering an ad for people fluent in German, he was sent to Nuremburg to interview witnesses and assist prosecutors at the war crime trials. He left in October 1945, and returned to the States the following June.

Bertha, in the meantime, had leveraged her experience as a furrier’s daughter to work as a “fur finisher” – the person who puts the lining in the fur coat and does repairs to the finished product. Though living alone, she was busy and earning an income.

Over the following 15 years, Felix took various teaching jobs, including ones in Canada and England, while Bertha remained in Chicago. In 1963, just a year or so after retiring, he died at the age of 65 following a stroke.

The Candy Lady arrives
Now widowed, Bertha was alone in Chicago. Son Eric had moved to Boston in the ’50s to do his medical residency. By the time of his father’s death, he was a physician and with his wife, Joy, raising a family in Newton’s Oak Hill Park. When they purchased their home around 1960, the neighborhood was just a decade old. It had been built for returning veterans on an undeveloped tract next to Brook Farm, the 19th century Transcendentalist community.

Eric bought his mother a ranch house in the neighborhood, at 16 Chinian Path. Not long after, her third grandson was born, as was her reputation as the Candy Lady.

Next-door neighbor, Peter Boisvert, claims to have started the phenomenon. “She was living there widowed when we moved next door in 1964,” Boisvert said. “She taught me to play chess when I was about 7. She was fairly lonely; that’s why she liked being the Candy Lady.”

He said that he, his sister and a friend would bring Bertha gifts of dandelions, daisies, and buttercups. In return, she gave them candy. No doubt, they told others of their successful transaction. As word spread, more kids would ring Bertha’s doorbell and ask for candy. Delighting in the young visitors, she never turned anyone down.

Her grandson, Rick, who was born in 1956, recalled that he and his brothers felt a bit jealous of the competition for Bertha’s attention.

“We always disliked the neighborhood kids because they disrupted our time with her when they rang her bell,” he said. “As we got older, we began to realize how much joy she got out of it and how much the kids looked forward to receiving treats from her.”

A sweet legacy
It’s not clear whether Bertha first called herself the Candy Lady or the sobriquet was bestowed by her sweet-toothed young friends, but without doubt more people knew her as the Candy Lady than as Bertha Sharton. And yet her reign as the Candy Lady probably only lasted a few years. By the 1970s, parents were more permissive, and kids were able to get candy for themselves.

Bertha continued living in Oak Hill Park into her early 90s. She spent her final years in a nearby nursing home, where she died on Aug. 16, 1999, at the age of 101. She is buried in West Roxbury, just about a mile from where she dispensed delight. Dr. Eric F. Sharton retired in 2000 after serving as chief of medical staff at Faulkner Hospital and later as medical director of the Massachusetts Peer Review Organization.

At age 87, the son of the Candy Lady still lives in Newton with his wife, Joy – though now in an apartment building where only a few children ring the bell on Halloween.

Putting the Fun Back in Funeral

Dear John: Had a great time at your funeral. Wish you were there. Well, I mean of course you were there, but you were out of commission. Quite a bit better behaved than you normally would be at such a function. All these people – me included – got up to talk about you and you never had a chance for rebuttal. It was sweet revenge for years of being drawn into discussions, debates, arguments, and headlocks with you (most of which I lost, particularly the headlock incident).

I like funerals anyway. I always learn a lot about people that I didn’t know. Like you wanting to learn to play the bagpipes. Hopefully I was able to shed some light on your life and personality that others hadn’t been aware of. Don’t worry, I didn’t talk about the time at the lake or many other stories that would have required indecorous language or self-incrimination. Just some good times we had and good advice you gave me once. Once.

The other things I like about funerals are that you get to drive through red lights on the way to the cemetery and the food afterwards is always good. The only negative thing was that I left without having procured a date. You’d think someone there would have been willing to comfort a mourner.

But all in all I appreciated the details. Like the plain pine box you now call home. No sense getting one of those expensive silk-lined numbers; you’d just burn a hole in it with your cigarette. Also liked reconnecting with people from the past. You had a knack of changing jobs, pursuing and then rejecting new interests (hello, bagpipes?), and moving with some frequency. But one thing you never altered or abandoned were your friends. You didn’t just keep in touch with people, you kept involved with them.

So now you’re gone, which means there’ll be much more room around the table at the Tahiti lounge. We’ll miss you a lot, but we’ll also talk about you a lot. It’s like you’ll still be there, except you won’t chip in on the bill. Kind of a win-win, if you ask me.

Anyway, since you’ll never reach the age of 49, I’ll tell you what you’re missing. For one thing, your friends start dying. That part’s kind of a drag. But the good thing is that life goes on, as in your barely three-week-old granddaughter. If she hadn’t been born prematurely, you never would have had the chance to hold her. Early comings, early goings. Somehow things work out – if not for the best, then at least for the pretty good.

In closing, it’s not goodbye, John (though this is a Dear John letter); it’s ‘til we meet again. Then you can rebut me for eternity. As long as you buy the drinks.

So long, buddy. Thanks for the laughs.

Jason

Levon Helm: An Appreciation

I once began a story. Actually, many times I've begun many stories, but this one in particular was always sort of for my own enjoyment. It probably dates back to the late 1980s (I can't locate a copy of it). The working title was The Triumphant Return of Chip Chumley & The Champions, the story of a not very successful high school band that gets back together (socially and musically, each presenting challenges) to play their 25th high school reunion. It was a fantasy borne out of my own failed band aspirations.

Without getting bogged down in the details of the plot and the various character assassinations I'd planned, there was a scene early on when the band members were in high school and the drummer was asked to also handle lead vocals (I myself was an aspiring singer and lyricist who suddenly found myself taking drum lessons because the opportunity had been offered to me). The drummer isn't feeling sure about this and the others try to convince him that there was in fact a proud tradition of singing drummers (and in fact, there is, more than I knew at the time I was writing this). The dialogue went something like this:

Band member: What about Ringo?

Drummer: He's not really a singer.

Band member: Micky Dolenz of the Monkees!

Drummer: He wasn't really a drummer.

Band member: Karen Carpenter?

Drummer: Are you kidding me?

Band member: Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.

Drummer: Yeah, but he wasn't that great at either singing or drumming.

Band member: I know: Levon Helm.

Drummer: Yeah, OK. Levon's cool.

Truth is truer than strange fiction, and Levon Helm of The Band was indeed cool. And today, he passed across the great divide, a victim of cancer. He rejoins bandmates Richard Manuel, who hanged himself in a hotel room in 1986; and Rick Danko, who died in 1999 after years of substance abuse accompanied by massive weight gain. The Band was one of those unique groups with multiple lead singers; oddly, of the five members, the three who handled lead vocals are all now gone.

Also oddly: Richard, Rick, and Levon all died 13 years apart from each other.

In the late 1960s, The Band were an oasis of Americana roots music, though only Levon was from the USA, the others being Canadian. His Arkansan drawl brought authenticity to songs about hard times and risky ventures and his earthy drumming came from Dixieland and the Delta. Their sound influenced such diverse artists as Eric Clapton (who quit Cream upon hearing their first album, realizing that he'd had it all wrong) and Elton John (whose Tumbleweed Connection was directly inspired by The Band's first album, Music From Big Pink).

It's always a sad thing when we lose an artist, but Levon's death seems to be eliciting an extra degree of emotion. Unlike Manuel and Danko, who battled and lost to their own personal demons, Levon was seemingly fit and constantly upbeat. He remained active musically and also appeared in films, filling the screen with his personality no matter how modest the role. He'd been fighting cancer for several years (one thing the rock and rollers took from the Rat Pack was a love of whiskey, cigarettes, and stage-door ladies) yet had a full concert schedule right up to his death. In fact, I was to have seen him tomorrow in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Of course, we always have the music but even better, we have The Last Waltz. Though the Martin Scorcese-directed documentary film was at the heart of a long-running feud between Levon and guitarist Robbie Robertson, it provides not only brilliant musical performances but also revealing glimpses of the band offstage, without the greasepaint or the impulse to please the audience. Here we see the all-too-human Levon Helm talking about his initial experience being in New York City:

"You just go in the first time and you get your ass kicked and you take off. As soon as it heals up, you come back and you try it again."

Passing away at age 71, Levon Helm had plenty of time to try things again. It's not a tragedy when a person reaches the three-score-and-ten years he's supposed to be allotted. But what we've lost is an artist and a man with such love for the music, such respect for the audience, and such enthusiasm for and dedication to his art. At the end of the day, whether it's a love song or a sad song, music is about feeling more alive, more fulfilled. It can be used for political purposes but it's ultimately a social thing, a way of binding together strangers as a temporary community of toe-tappers, thigh-slappers, and sing-alongers who just want to feel a little better than they did right before the drummer counted off the first song.

That was Levon Helm. He was cool.

Statehood vs. Status Quo: Who Sets the Conditions for a People’s Freedom?

Though the Lincoln-Douglas debates are rightly considered the apex of competitive political discourse in American if not world history, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are all but non-existent, still I find parallels with the elegant yet forceful antebellum rhetoric of The Great Emancipator and The Little Giant, and the bold if futile recent actions of Palestinian President Mahmoud “Abu Mazen” Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu.

On Monday, October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, nearly four years before Abraham Lincoln would traverse the state in a series of debates with Stephen A. Douglas, the future President rose from the audience of a Douglas address to invite the crowd to return after their supper, at which time he would deliver a prepared response (Douglas and Lincoln had arranged the dual appearance ahead of time, and Douglas had negotiated a one-hour rebuttal following Lincoln’s remarks).

“The repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the propriety of its restoration, constitute the subject of what I am about to say,” Lincoln began. The Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery in the western territories north of the parallel 36° 30’ north and cut through present-day California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and the Oklahoma panhandle, had been in effect since 1820. The actual compromise was that Missouri would be admitted as a slave state even though it was above the line, and Maine would be admitted as a free state.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, designed by Douglas and signed into law by President Franklin Pierce on May 30 of that year, effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise and replaced its imaginary line with the concept of “popular sovereignty,” in which settlers of a territory would decide for themselves whether to establish it as a free or slave-holding state. The act resulted in political chaos, with the new Republican party eventually rising from the ashes of the fractured Whigs.

Passion – and empathy
But in 1854, all that was on Lincoln’s mind was that slavery was no longer on the road to extinction – he had hoped to starve out the institution by confining it to the lower south, where cotton would eventually destroy the soil in which it grew. Minus that crop, he was certain, the need for slaves would disappear.

Impassioned as Lincoln was about the repeal of the Missouri Compromise – in a short campaign biography he wrote in late 1859, Lincoln noted that after several years working in his successful law practice, “I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again” – he took the platform that night armed with logic rather than vitriol, even saying at one point:

“Before proceeding, let me say I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up.”

Lincoln and Douglas were both speaking about self-government and self-determination that day. For Douglas, those terms meant that the free white settlers of a territory could decide for themselves the nature of their society. For Lincoln, they meant that all people living within the boundaries of this nation have a voice and the right to rise to the level of their ambition and ability without government-imposed impediments.

The U.N. General Assembly: What’s good for the goose…
On May 14, 1948, ninety years after the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel – Israel’s “declaration of independence” – was announced to the family of nations. It reads, in part:

“On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel [“land of Israel”]; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable. This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.”

Israel and its citizens have been defending this right with their blood for 63 years.

On Friday, September 23, 2011, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas stood before the United Nations General Assembly and asked that Palestine be granted independent statehood. Members of the Israeli delegation left the hall as Abbas rose to speak. His proposal is unlikely to get far in the U.N. Security Council since the United States holds veto power there, but his stake, now planted, will not easily be removed.

So now let’s see how language from one era has resonance on another.

“…[M]asters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.” Jews understand what it means to be strangers in a strange land. They know of longing, of the sweet taste of freedom, of the unceasing desire for self-determination. Lincoln understood that this was all that slaves desired, to be masters of their own fate. But would a racist country – racist both North and South (it’s worth noting that Abolitionists were a fringe group and largely anarchic; though history has been kind to them, they were far from pragmatic) – let them be free on the same land in which they were enslaved? Lincoln eventually thought not, as he conceived an ill-designed plan to ship freed slaves to Liberia.

“They are just what we would be in their situation.” Lincoln’s empathy is acknowledged to be nearly superhuman, particularly in the context of his time. This simple acknowledgement of his, though, is not well understood by many Jews and by the Israeli government in particular. Benjamin Netanyahu possesses neither the empathy nor the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln. He seeks to claim disputed lands by building settlements on them in violation (so say the U.N. Security Council and the International Committee of the Red Cross) of the Fourth Geneva Convention (Netanyahu, needless to say, does not concur).

While Lincoln appealed to “the better angels of our nature”, which he knew existed among his friends and his enemies both, Netanyahu effectively thumbs his nose at his friends (the U.S., to the tune of $3 billion a year) and gives the finger to his enemies. He is provocative, obstinate, and arrogant, which plays well to the hawks at home but which has cost Israel as much good will over the last few years as George W. Bush did for America following 9/11. On the international stage, Israel is now seen as the aggressor, the tyrant. It can’t be surprised that Abbas brought his case to the U.N. given that he and Netanyahu cannot come to terms even on the conditions that would only bring them to the negotiating table.

The fiery trial: then and now
“In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve,” Lincoln told Congress on December 1, 1862. After years of bloodshed, countless deaths of innocent civilians, instability that strengthens the resolve of terrorists, it has to be clear to all parties that the only way to assure the long-term security of Israel is to enable the establishment of an independent, autonomous, and internationally recognized Palestine.

In that same address to Congress, Lincoln noted, “The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.” If Benjamin Netanyahu wants to be remembered, nothing will assure his place in history more than in assuming the mantel of peacemaker.

The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel closes with the following: “WE EXTEND our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.”

Sixty-three years later, it’s time to make good on this promise.

Thirty Years On, King Crimson’s Discipline Retains Its Power

King Crimson, Discipline. Released September 22, 1981.

In the Jewish community, a boy comes of age at his bar mitzvah, which typically occurs at age 13. For me, that was 1976. Disco was at its height and bad fashion was the only fashion there was. But at 13, I didn’t care so much about the rather desolate cultural landscape into which I was thrust. At 15, however, I did begin to care. In just those two years, the insipid simplicity of disco was replaced by the inspired simplicity of New Wave. But simplicity was not where my head was at. I’d begun doing certain things recreationally and my brain was excited by more complex and sophisticated music.

By 1979, I was firmly a fan of “progressive rock,” most specifically the music of bands such as Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Yes, Pink Floyd, ELP, The Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Genesis, and Rush. These bands would more or less align themselves with the credo that appeared in the liner notes of Gentle Giant’s second album, from 1971: “It is our goal to expand the frontiers of contemporary popular music at the risk of becoming very unpopular.” Applying instrumentation not typically found in rock music (such as violin, cello, and flute), technology (such as synthesizers and various new gizmos), lengthy compositions, and album-length concepts, progressive rock was never radio-friendly, though some groups like Yes, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Rush did manage to become quite popular, often through a somewhat more accessible tune edited for radio that managed to slip through the programming gatekeepers.

Unfortunately, 1979 was not a great time to enter this genre. Gentle Giant was working on its final album, continuing a recent trend of ever more commercial-sounding releases. King Crimson had disbanded in 1974. Yes lost its singer and keyboardist following a creative nadir of an album called Tormato. Pink Floyd was riding high with The Wall, but significant personnel changes were on the horizon, as they were with The Moody Blues and Jethro Tull. ELP was gone. Rush was doing well on the radio, which to some extent cut into their prog cred, and an exciting new band called U.K., comprising two ex-members of King Crimson, broke up after only two albums and two tours.

So it was that I turned my back and ears on the current music scene and instead became obsessed with the music of 1967-75. To this day, my younger colleagues consider me “the ‘70s guy.” Even when entering college in the fall of 1981, I was decidedly anti-anything that had to do with ‘80s music or fashion. There was, however, one thing that helped me bridge the gap between the past and the present: the sudden and surprising reappearance of King Crimson.

Unbeknownst to me, guitarist Robert Fripp, the group’s leader and only constant during its initial run from 1969-74, had approached drummer Bill Bruford, who had been in the last incarnation of the band, which lasted from 1972-74 (and on U.K.’s first album, as well as being the original drummer of Yes and serving short tour stints with Genesis and Gong), with the idea of doing a project together. Fripp, who had been working with the likes of David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno, and Daryl Hall, wanted a somewhat funkier drum sound, with less emphasis on cymbals. Bruford had just gotten a Simmons electronic drum kit. Together, they began to sketch out a sound.

Bassist Tony Levin, who had played on Fripp’s first solo album and was a mainstay of Gabriel’s band, was recruited, as was Adrian Belew, an innovative guitarist who had brought interesting sounds to Frank Zappa and the Talking Heads. These two additions were notable in that they were the first Americans to be members of King Crimson (though the band was not yet called that), and they brought with them a host of electronic goodies: Levin the Chapman Stick, and Belew an assortment of pedals and gizmos that enabled him to mimic the sounds of wild animals. Not only that, but never before had another guitarist slung his axe alongside Fripp, an acknowledged master of the instrument.

Fripp dubbed the band Discipline and they began gigging as such. Eventually, Fripp concluded that this band was, in fact, the reincarnation of King Crimson. The name was minimally more marketable (though the band had its cult following, it had been seven years since they last were heard from), but more significantly, it raised the expectations for the outfit.

From my dorm at college, I heard that a new King Crimson album – titled Discipline – was afoot and even more exciting, the band was set to play at the college that spring. I couldn’t imagine what the new Crimson would sound like. My friend Marc, back home in Newton, Massachusetts, bought the album before I did and we listened to it together for the first time over the phone. It was unlike anything we had heard before. Yes, there was a Talking Heads rhythmic influence, the production values were of its time, and it was unquestionably progressive. But the front line of Chapman Stick and the twin interweaving guitars created a unique sonic jigsaw that could only have come from something called King Crimson, even as it distinguished this edition from all previous ones.


I bought the album as soon as I could and played it often. I became very familiar with the seven cuts. But as the concert approached, I began a relationship with that album unlike anything I have ever had with any other recording.

I was a member of the student group that produced and promoted concerts on campus, and one of my responsibilities as a Publicity Department volunteer was to set up a record player on a table on the Campus Center Concourse and play the records of artists who were appearing, give out information, and answer questions. Typically, I had other volunteers I would schedule for when I had classes, but at this time for some reason I can no longer remember, extra hands were hard to come by. Therefore, I manned the turntable for long stretches over a three- or four-week period.

What this meant was that I heard Discipline in full probably four or five times a day for weeks. The first interesting aspect to that is that I never became sick of it. There always seemed to be new things to discover in it. The other thing is that I found the varying tempos and timbres of the album seemed to match perfectly the rise and fall of activity within the Campus Center. In between classes, students would rush through with a cacophonous din of conversation, shoe clacking, and the beeping rustle of retail transactions all around me. But then it would clear out and serenity would take over. Fast, slow, loud, soft, organic and electronic, Discipline had it all, and it truly became my soundtrack for that period of my life.


Ultimately, the concert came and it was a glorious experience. In the meantime, 1981 also saw Rush come out with its masterpiece album, Moving Pictures. In 1982, Asia, a supergroup comprising exp-members of Yes, King Crimson, and ELP, debuted to much commercial acclaim. Yes rocketed to the top of the pyramid in 1983 with 90125. It seemed progressive rock was back with a vengeance. But when Crimson disbanded again in 1984, the genre again appeared on the verge of extinction. Groups still plied their trade, but more often than not the music was a series of trade-offs between the echoes of the glory days and a more commercial, current sound that alienated as many old fans as it did win new converts.

But that’s as may be. The fact is, for 30 of my 48 years, King Crimson’s Discipline has been an album of unique emotional and visceral power for me, one that is by turns terrifying and tranquil, and as complete as it is complex. To Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, and Bill Bruford: Thank you.

Remembering Marc Rains, March 5, 1963 – August 29, 2001

Ever play a game called Which One Am I? You take an ensemble of any kind and identify which character or member is most like you. You can also play it by matching characters with other people you know. I’ll do it now to give you a sense of who my friend Marc was:

• The Big Chill: William Hurt’s character
• Doonesbury: Zonker
• Crosby, Stills & Nash: David Crosby
• Dead Poet’s Society: the kid who changed his name to Nuwanda

I think you get the idea. Marc was a bit of a rebel, a free thinker. Uncomfortable with authority, he never wanted to have to answer to anyone. We all got high back in the day, but whereas it was a purely recreational activity for the rest of us, for Marc it was a Statement of who he was and what he believed in, which was, in a word: freedom. He dreamed of a world with no hassles, just hedonistic pursuits. He wanted to suck out all the marrow of life, one joint at a time.

He wasn’t all about drugs, of course. He was also very interested in creativity, especially music and writing. In fact, while I had known Marc since kindergarten, we didn’t become close until junior high school when I somehow found out he could play the organ and he somehow found out that I had been writing lyrics. We would get together at his house, steal some of his parents’ booze, and I would sing my lyrics while he wrote down the notes I was intending to sing.

Eventually he wanted to express himself through writing as well. He would start something, get stuck, and give it to me to finish. I encouraged him to keep working through the blocks. There was one piece of his that I liked a lot and he gave it to me as a present. Except for all the things he owned, like records, he wasn’t about ownership.

I know what you’re thinking, what a hypocrite. Yeah, well, it’s not easy living the life of a nonconformist iconoclast. For one, you need money to eat. So he took a job, but it was a job he could live with: at a record store. He never went to college with the rest of us; in fact, he never finished high school. All through elementary school, he always had the most extraordinary record of absences from school. Some of this was because of health problems that plagued him all of his short life. But by the time he got to high school, he just couldn’t be bothered with schedules, homework, and responsibilities.

He did, however, go to high school. He would show up in the morning and park himself in the cafeteria, where he would stay most of the day, striking up conversations with whomever happened by. Connecting, that’s what he really valued, more than sitting in one desk-chair in one classroom for 50 minutes, then sitting in another one in a different classroom for another 50 minutes, and so on.

Though we were very tight in junior high and most of high school, things started falling apart as college loomed closer. We were moving in different directions, meeting different people, having different experiences. The one thing that kept us connected was music. I remember in 1981, my freshman year in college, he bought the King Crimson album Discipline, which was the first album by the group since 1974. It featured a new lineup and we were curious what it would sound like. He called me up and we listened to the album for the first time together over the phone.

Eventually, his health problems became quite serious. He had a kidney transplant. Within a few years, he needed another one. In spite of his condition, he wasn’t living a healthy lifestyle and for some reason, he eventually took up cigarettes. He used to say that he didn’t want to live to age 40, but that was when we were stupid teenagers and we thought 40-year-olds were decrepit hags who shat themselves. Still, it seems he knew he was living on borrowed time and didn’t want to waste his remaining years going through the trouble of being healthy.

But he was also very useful. He took the experiences he had with dialysis to become a dialysis technician and more importantly, he would counsel and console kidney patients who were going through what he had gone through. He met a woman he loved and got married. He had two daughters. He was very happy. Though we both lived in Massachusetts, we were basically on different ends, me in the north, he in the south. We didn’t see each for long stretches, though we communicated by phone and email on a semi-regular basis.

At some point, there were issues with the second kidney surgery, and his pancreas was damaged. He had to have a gaping hole in his back for a long time. I visited him in the Intensive Care Unit. I was going to see David Crosby in concert and he asked for a shirt. When I went back to the hospital to give it to him, his room was empty. I was chilled, but it turned out that he was transferred to a regular room. I went there and he was sleeping. I left the shirt on his bed.

In 1997 or 1998, he had a stroke. He was only in his mid-30s. The next time I saw him, I didn’t recognize him. He had lost a lot of weight, had not much of an expression on his face, and moved slowly. It was at the shiva of a friend’s mother. I helped him get some food, and we talked about what was going on. He had been through so much, but he was optimistic. He loved his life. He loved his family. He had a lot of joy and a lot to live for.

The last email I have from him was sent to me on January 1, 2001. Typically optimistic, it reads:

Happy new year,
Well, I made it thru every thing they did again! My right side feels a little alien but its getting better every day. I have to go 6 weeks infection free and then they'll start looking at putting a permanent access back in my body right now I have a catheter sticking out of my neck which drives me a bit crazy, but they still get to dialyze me with relative ease, and I still have a right arm so all in all things are OK I guess.
How is all by you? A nice holiday? I hope!
can't keep arm in this position for typing for to long talk to you soon!
Love to all!
Marc

Next thing I heard was that he had died. He was being prepped for open-heart surgery and went into cardiac arrest. It was August 29, 2001. He was 38 years old. He’d fulfilled his prophecy. Less than two weeks later, 9/11 happened. It seemed that everything was falling apart.

Marc’s final request was to be cremated and have his ashes spread over the golf course we used to sneak onto and party at in high school. He told his wife to contact me and have me plan it. It was sufficiently moving for me that it inspired me to write an essay and a one-act play about the experience. With his unusual request, he had managed to bring together a number of friends who had become estranged over the years.

A few years later, his wife called me and asked me to take his records. Going through them was like watching a documentary of our lives. I remembered where and when he had purchased those albums and gotten those autographs. I remember listening to them with him. I remember how much they meant to him.

Two years ago, I got a message from his oldest daughter who found a letter I had written to her mother after the funeral. I had promised her I would help with the girls. But I had one of my own and a rough marriage, and I never kept my promise. I’m now Facebook friends with both of his girls; I’ve helped them restore and retain memories of their father and they’ve helped keep his spirit alive for me. Marc always was all about connections – and second chances.

I’m thinking of you, buddy. Damn, but you would have loved Facebook. And seeing how your girls have grown. And me? I’d love to write one more song with you. One with a chorus that keeps on repeating and never fades away.

Late thinking on early adopting

Recently, I was out with a friend and I received a call on my cell phone. Shucking my clamshell-styled telecommunications device, I took the call. After I hung up (in truth I was hung up on but that's another story), my friend marveled that I still have a flip phone. Everybody else, it seems, has some kind of Star Trek gizmo that they poke and stroke every few minutes to get information they don't really need except that it's fun to poke and stroke a device.

The fact is, I was the last person I knew to get a flip phone in the first place. I used to have a basic little flat thing that if I held the ear part to my ear, the mouth part rested at the top of my jowl. Considering that a number of my friends think of me as being somewhat of a mumbler, that phone never was all that practical for me.

What I find interesting is that I've become such a late adopter. I used to be just the opposite. I had one of those Cellular One bag phones in the '90s and I distinctly recall calling people from my car and saying, "Guess where I'm calling from? MY CAR! Isn't that so cool?" Back then it was. But that was probably the last time I was cool.

CD players became available between my junior and senior years of college, and when I moved into my senior-year apartment, I was rocking one of those beasts. I was, in fact, the first of my friends to own one. It was big, expensive, and had none of the features my friends' CD players had when they got theirs several months later. But I was proud to have one first. Only trouble was that music stores had maybe 40 CDs to choose from. Before long that all changed, of course. And by the time I got my second CD player (only a year or two later), the landscape was forever altered, and I was just another one of the masses who were making vinyl obsolete (for a little while anyway).

Another great technology I adopted early was a CB radio. Mine was about the size of a small radio station. I knew about five or six people who also had CB radios, and after school we would get on the air and talk funny to each other until we got bored. In retrospect, there was no good reason for me to have a CB radio. There were no smokeys I was evading in my Newton, Massachusetts, neighborhood. But it was cool to say "10-4, good buddy" and if you knew that 10-100 meant you needed to take a leak, you were pretty happening.

But of course, CB radios went the way of 8-tracks (had one of those, too) and I guess after all this time I've come to realize that there's no great advantage to being an early adopter of anything. Things always get thinner, faster, cheaper, and more powerful in their second generations than their first. Over the last several years, it was mainly my financial situation that kept me jumping on anything new; now it's more a case of replacement fatigue. I'm tired of upgrading.

Case in point: I took my daughter to the phone store the other day. Her phone and mine are on the same account and i had received a message saying that one of our phones was due for an upgrade. We went in and learned that it was my phone. My daughter, whose phone slides and glides and glows, was crestfallen. So I let her have my upgrade, and now hers is more like the Star Trek ones. I still have my flip phone. I can use her upgrade in November, at which point phones will probably be in our shoes a la Maxwell Smart. Keeping up with the Joneses is impossible enough for me; I'm not even going to try to keep up with society's joneses.