in which we discuss my father’s bizarre relationship to music and the rest of the world.
My father was autistic. Straight up. Not gonna sugar coat that one, folks.
(that’s dear old dad, at about 20)
He couldn’t handle all of the different layers of sound and meaning and words and sound in pop music, and didn’t listen to it at all. Couldn’t stand it, actually. Most pop music would cause him to get somewhat catatonic, or curl up in the fetal position in his armchair and start rocking back and forth. Or run away, or get angry.
My mother married my father in 1966, so her consumption of pop music stopped that year, given my dad’s issues. In the 80s, when I was starting to become aware of the music world outside of classical, the only bands she could name were The Beatles (good) and the Rolling Stones (satan).
Despite my dad’s issues with pop, he loved music.
Loved. It.
It was one of the only ways that he could express emotions. Art, architecture, dance, film all did nothing for him, and in fact, in many cases, would also send him into catatonia. So classical music it was.
Dad had thousands of classical music records, reel to reel tapes, and CDs. He had the best headphones money could buy at the time, and he built his own sound system, including speakers, from scratch. I spent many hours with him in his basement workshop, silently sanding mahogany panels for the subwoofers he was building, or watching him solder components together. Quality time, autism style, I guess.
I have no idea how he knew how to build the speakers, as he didn’t work from plans at all. I guess just made it up? Maybe he took apart some speakers when he was younger? Maybe he looked it up in a library, memorized the plans, and built it from memory at home? No clue. He was a genius, or idiot savant, and could easily memorize HUGE swaths of text, including various languages, without any issues at all. He just had massive issues expressing himself. Words, sounds, concepts and emotions didn’t really connect for him (no wonder I’m so into semiotics), so speaking his native language of English was tough for him, even though he could read and write in something like 30 different languages.
Once Dad finished the speakers, he put them in the living room, where they sat as gorgeous, highly functional pieces of furniture. Art, maybe? No clue. He then fiddled with the sound system, and the EQ board he had for our home system for hours, getting the levels, which were completely imperceptible to me, exactly right. He’d put a record on, blast it, stand in various spots in the living room, go back to the sound system, lift the needle off the record, fiddle for a bit, and then repeat. For days. I think I heard the same snippet of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty something like 95 times over the course of a week.
Do you all know about the concept of the Golden Ear? I’m betting that my dad could have schooled all those motherfuckers. Then again, maybe he was just completely insane. Both are distinct possibilities. Who knows how my father’s brain worked? I was probably the only person who came even remotely close to understanding him, and he’s still a complete mystery to me.
We were constantly taking trips to the giant Tower Records store in Washington, DC, so Dad could lock himself into their classical music listening room and purchase new recordings. He was so happy when CDs came out, because their sound quality was much clearer for him. I guess the absence of the snap and crackle of vinyl made the experience even more pure for his incredibly sensitive brain.
On one notable occasion, my father purchased a CD of Bax’s Spring Fire from Tower, which he was incredibly excited about, as it had been years since he’d last heard the piece played, and apparently had a hard time finding the recording. When we got home that evening, he popped the CD into the player, and out came the sounds of the Talking Heads’ Psychokiller. Apparently the CD had been mislabled with Bax and was actually a recording of Stop Making Sense. I thought my poor father’s head was going to explode, but he actually found it funny, and went back to the store where he convinced the guys in the nice quiet, glassed-in classical enclave to pop the disc on, which immediately cleared the room.
(quick note: after numerous years of living with my dad, it became easier to read his emotions. Even when he couldn’t express them, I got pretty good at sussing out what he was feeling, thus being able to describe him as happy and/or excited)
Our house was constantly filled with classical music. Dad would get home, put on a record, and sit in his armchair with a beer, a book, a cat, and listen. It was kind of awesome.
Except that he liked either music playing in the household (with no one talking) or silence. Makes things difficult for a little kid, but I somehow adjusted.
We also went into DC to the Kennedy Center and to Vienna, VA to Wolftrap for performances on a regular basis. He’d spend days researching the best seats in the house, or location on the lawn for sound quality.
From a very young age I was able to sit still and listen to whole orchestral movements without fidgeting or freaking out. Probably because of the model of connecting emotionally to the music that my father presented me with. Either that or I was scared of my dad. Maybe some of both. I guess I got some of his obsession with good sound quality (hence, the deviant audiophile thing), but it really blossomed into a love of sounds of all sorts, and dad, for whatever reason, couldn’t handle most noises.
Really long side note:
As a teenager, I forced my dad to interact with pop music again. He still hated it.
However, when I was 19, I was at home drawing or painting with VH1 on in the background. We were out in the middle of nowhere in Oregon and couldn’t get any decent radio stations. My father couldn’t handle MTV, so VH1 it was. Mariah Carey’s song Always Be My Baby came on, and my father sat there, stony faced, watching the video, before getting up and stomping out of the room.
Two days later, my dad and I are hiking through the wilderness, and out of NOWHERE he starts singing the “doo doo doo’s” that open the song. I picked up the harmony, and we sang for a few minutes together, dogs at our side, filling the silence of the Oregon Coastal Range.
One of the most surreal moments of my life, and there were many, given my parentage.
(Dad died in 2006. RIP)
