I can’t play any musical instrument, though I can, and do, often, whistle. Whistling has greatly influenced the kind of music I like. I mean, think about it. Just about every song from the 1920s through the 1940s had a melody, something you could whistle. And then came John Coltrane and many others who played a different kind of music. It was the kind of music that was technically amazing but entirely without a melody that could be whistled.
But I’m already digressing. I was born in 1959, so what am I doing talking about music from the 1920s – 1950s?
I lived in a small suburban village in Suffolk County, New York, called Brightwaters. My father worked in the city, 50 miles distant. His commute was 2 hours each way on a good day. Often, when he got home, he’d sit at the kitchen table and read several newspapers — whistling while he did so. He did this thing we called “double whistling” — which was just like a trill, just like a trumpet playing distinct notes rather than gliding up and down. He taught me how to do it. My brothers weren’t interested for whatever reason, so I had some special connection to our father that, I thought, they didn’t have. I whistled all the time. I still do. Well, you know, not all the time, but a lot. Sometimes I’m not even aware of it, which is definitely obnoxious, I’m sure.
In my parents’ room, there was one closet. In this closet was a box with the label, “Sunsweet Prunes.” It’s where my father kept his collection of 78s, records that he and my mother had purchased back in the pre-war years of 1939, 1940, 1941. Back when they were 16, 17, or so, the same age I was when I was buying records. There were lots of Benny Goodman records, along with Artie Shaw, Charlie Spivak, Glenn Miller, and Harry James. My brothers and I were never told to keep our hands off these records, so we took that as license to bring the ones that had the words “vocal refrain” on them (eww, yucky love songs!) to the driveway, where we’d throw them like Frisbees and watch them smash. (I could kick myself even now, thinking of that.)
There was one record that was inadvertently broken. It was the Wang Wang Blues by Benny Goodman. I asked for a replacement for Christmas of 1964. I didn’t get it.
One day in 1965 my father came home and announced that we were moving to Brooklyn. This was rather a surprise to my mother, who cried for the next two years as we got used to living in a rowhouse in a working class neighborhood that was nameless until the 1980s: Windsor Terrace.
Of course it was Windsor Terrace for decades, but nobody called it that. It was a term only used by hotsy-totsy real estate salespeople who wanted to add 10% to the selling price by reapplying to the neighborhood a highfalutin name. On the plus side, it was only steps from Prospect Park, and three blocks from the F train. On the down side, Prospect Park was at its nadir, with its broken pathways covered in broken glass and cigarette butts. The kids on the block were sons and daughters of longshoremen, cops, and people who worked at a very large industrial laundry nearby. Lots of alcoholism, sniffing glue, and drugs. The lucky ones were less visible: they stayed inside and studied their schoolbooks, became business owners and Wall Street types.
Some of us stayed inside and watched cartoons, listened to music, and dreaded school. Include me in that last group.
I still listened to the records in the Sunsweet Prunes box. I knew them all by heart. For Christmas 1970, I asked for a Glenn Miller record. This time, I got it. I still have it. Glenn Miller: A Memoriam 1944-1969. I can whistle every song on that sucker.
Then, one day, I heard “I Just Want to Celebrate” by Rare Earth. I bought it with my allowance money. My life was irrevocably altered. I was in sixth grade. It was 1971. And I was not allowed to have it.
My mother was born and bred Catholic. She was a True Believer, hoping that by insulating us from the terrible changes blowing through the late sixties, she could produce three True Believing boys. It was a doomed effort. She took the record from me and hid it. When she gave it back to me, half a year later, my taste had moved on, and I don’t think I listened to that record more than a few times after that.
By then, it was 1972, and I was in my room listening to WPLJ when they played a song, “Alison Gross” by Steeleye Span. I thought the announcer had said, “Steel Ice Band” so when I walked the few miles to Flatbush Avenue and Church Avenue (where the store Titus Oaks was located) I asked the guy for the new record by the Steel Ice Band. He gave me the new Steeleye Span record, “A Parcel of Rogues.” I brought it home and played it. It was rock, for sure, but I could whistle it. It wasn’t like anything else. It was folk-rock. There would be no going back. 
Something had changed at home. I think it had something to do with the moon landing and the presidency of Richard Nixon. My parents hated Richard Nixon. They both allowed us — encouraged us — to put up McGovern posters in all our front windows, which we did. My guess is that, as long as we didn’t play songs that said, in essence, “Please give me heroin and lots of it because I love drugs and being high” it was okay in her book. I think sociologists overlook the importance of those years, 1970, 1971, 1972, as being absolutely critical in a sea change in American attitudes.
High School began in 1973. I was a nervous 14 year old who, when he wasn’t whistling, was biting his nails. I was exploring all different kinds of popular music, one day going over to a girl I had the hots for and saying, “I can sing “Stairway to Heaven,” whereupon she replied, “That’s nice, but I don’t like that song.” Well, that was it for my idea of music being the fastest way of getting a girlfriend. (It made me more nervous.) I kept on going back to folk rock or just plain folk music. I heard Ralph McTell’s song, “Streets of London,” and it became one of my favorite songs. I kept looking for stuff that sounded like that.
However. And then. But.
This nervous kid, me, found that he was liked. I had friends. I have no idea if they knew how nervous I was all the time, but lots of pot and occasional bottles of crappy beer that we bought at a local deli (Top Spot) that didn’t care if we were underage made me forget how nervous I was. We shared music as we shared joints. We’d bring our records over to Luke’s house. Luke Gordon and I were friends from 1973. We listened to Genesis, Jethro Tull, Neil Young, Renaissance, Bruce Springsteen, and above all, the Kinks — all the while still playing my 78s when I had a chance. Folk rock was still what I was looking for — and there were elements of that in all the bands I liked.
Then came 1977. High school ended for me, along with lots of friendships. It was my personal low point, a sad state I shared with New York City. I was determined to like some different kinds of music. Determined. So I walked over to a local library sometime in that year and took out “Songs Without Words” by Felix Mendelssohn, a 1953 recording by Walter Gieseking. I was blown away. I friggin loved it. Today, I have the LP, the CD, a cassette tape, an mp3 and m4a of that recording. 
In my first semester at college, I had all my records with me in my dorm. My roommate had one or two, and one of them was Tony Orlando and Dawn. You guessed it: we were incompatible. One late afternoon as Luke and I wandered the campus, we heard “Apeman” by the Kinks blasting from the second floor window of another dormitory on campus. Some maniac had turned his gigantic speakers out to be heard in the Quad. We both knew we’d met a friend. We ran up the stairs, down the hall to his door, and introduced ourselves. As it happened, his roommate was a perfect match for mine, and this guy was a match for me. We switched roommates. He was Glen Kalen. He also introduced me to the music of Leo Kottke, who I have seen a few times in concert. Glen was a dear friend for the next 40 years, and he never stopped listening to his favorite Kinks album, Lola. Glen died in 2024. I always see his face and hear his gentle voice whenever I play This Time Tomorrow.
In that first year — 1977 — was the beginning of the punk era. Basically I was a pretty conservative kid from a Catholic family in Brooklyn, and no matter how I tried to change that or to prevent people from finding that out about me, I knew it to be true — and maybe that was always true, and maybe that was the reason behind the friction in my head that caused all that nervousness. I listened to a lot of music, but I loved only the
same stuff I’d loved when I was 14 (with the exception of Mendelssohn, and, later, Chopin and Beethoven.) The bass player from Steeleye Span was also the bass player for Fairport Convention, and so I bought Fairport Convention records. The guitarist for Fairport was Richard Thompson, so I bought Richard Thompson records. The friends I knew in those years all started diving into the same stream, and our musical taste was enriched by every new discovery, every purchase. Steve Schaffer and Gabe Sonnino were becoming connoisseurs of the same kind of music I liked. It was a lucky break.
To this day, I still listen to the same music I listened to when I was 5: Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw. In 1984, I fulfilled a lifelong wish and saw Benny Goodman at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and got to shake his hand. And I saw Stephane Grappelli in 1986. I’ve expanded my taste, of course, so that now my collection of old 78s consists more of music from the late 1920s and early 1930s than from the late ’30s or early ’40s. And I have kept up my interest in the German language, so I’ve discovered a good number of excellent German musicians, though it’s pretty impossible to share my love of these recordings with anyone who isn’t similarly conversant in German. But on any day, you might find me listening to Jethro Tull. Or Richard Thompson. Or Benny Goodman. Or The High Hatters. Or Leonard Cohen. Or Udo Lindenbergh. Or Wolf Biermann.
As my friend Arnold put it: “When I put on an album today, it isn’t just background sound. It’s a visit.” Absolutely true. It’s a visit to a world wherein one nervous kid has always been able to escape, sometimes with friends, often alone, but always assured that somewhere in that sound was everything I ever needed to hear.