Between coming home from Pulpfest and meeting Mike Nevins and Steve for dinner, another long search came to an end. Propped against my front door was a package from Classic Vinyl in Gaithersburg, Md. It was not a total surprise, since I had mailed payment for it at the end of the previous week, but seeing the package there was reassuring and made me feel rewarded for hard work and effort.
My parents played many classical music records when I was a child, especially in the house on Third St. in Marietta where I lived until I was six. Part of my love for classical music came because my parents watched NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report every evening, instead of Walter Cronkite and The CBS Evening News. (The Huntley-Brinkley Report's closing theme was the second movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.)
When I was an adult, my mother told me that she first began to suspect I had some type of clinical depression because, after school, I showed little interest in playing outside or watching TV. "You'd just eat your snack, and then go up to your room and put on Vivaldi and stay there until dinnertime."
Although I could identify my favorite Vivaldi composition if I heard it, I could not remember its title. I do remember that, on Sunday mornings, while my mother slept in, my dad and I would remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy (Exodus 20:8) by having pancakes or French toast instead of cold cereal, and by playing a record of Vivaldi's Gloria. But I loved one instrumental piece so much I took it from the record cabinet of my parents' Magnavox console and kept it in my bedroom, where I could play it on my orange and white monaural General Electric phonograph.
My desire to find this recording began anew in December 2009, when the church featured the Gloria as part of the winter concert. That triggered the memory of the instrumental piece I so loved, and I checked out a six-disk Vivaldi set by Deutsche Grammophon, and, after going through the entire recording, could not find it.
This did not deter me. I could physically describe the album. I knew it was from the Musical Heritage Society. Its cover featured no graphics--just a list of the works on the album and the personnel. It had blue letters against a white background. The other side of the album cover was blank--just black, with nothing on it.
The piece's being instrumental made it more difficult. If a song's title eluded me, I could always log onto Lyrics.com and type whatever phrase I remembered into its search engine, and the song would pop up in front of me.
Besides remembering the album cover, I remembered that the bassoonist was named Anthony Checchia. (I had a rudimentary knowledge of the instruments of the orchestra due to playing and replaying my Vanguard Everyman Classics record of Peter and the Wolf--incomparably narrated by Boris Karloff--until it was marred and scratched.) Earlier this summer, I Googled his name, hoping to find the album, or at least something that would trigger a distant memory of the title of the piece. Much to my delight, I found out Checchia is alive and well, artistic director of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. (The album came out in the mid-1960s, so I was not taking for granted any of the performers were still alive.) I emailed Checchia in Philadelphia and, to my delight, he replied a few days later. He thought he knew the record I described, but was in Vermont overseeing the Marlboro Music Festival, and would not be able to go through his personal files until he returned to Philadelphia in September.
I went back to Classic Vinyl and Googled Vivaldi's and Checchia's names, and found an album that I thought may be the one I wanted. I was wary, because it cost $26 (not including postage), and it may not be the right one. Finally, after some emailed conversation with the owner of the site, I bit the bullet and mailed him the $26 money order.
I held my breath when I unpacked the record Saturday evening and put it on my turntable. I put the tone arm to approximately where I remembered my favorite piece being, set it down...
...and it turned out I hit paydirt! Indeed, it was the recording that I remembered. I was 99.8% sure when I turned the album cover over and saw the black side, but I wasn't sure until I heard my favorite Vivaldi piece for the first time in over 40 years. (By the way, its title is "Concerto in G Minor for Flute, Oboe, Violin, Bassoon and Figured Bass, P. 403.")
When in search of a book or music title, I will leave no
My St. Louis friend John Bilgere, whom I met at a Unitarian youth conference in Michigan in 1979, has an encyclopedic knowledge of rock and pop music from the British Invasion until the end of the 1980s. One day, bored at work, I had an earworm for a song from 1974 in my mind. I emailed John:
In 1974, there was a one-hit wonder that I heard on the radio quite frequently. I can't give you the title or the artist, because the song was completely in Spanish, so I think the title probably was, too.
Any idea of who that might be, or what the song is?And John did not disappoint! A day or two later, I checked my incoming email box, and he had written:
The song which you speak of is possibly "Eres Tu" by the Mocedades (key of E flat). Another one, which did not make many waves in the U.S., was "Jesuscristo" by Las Fresas Acidas (1972?).I pulled up "Eres Tu" on YouTube, and John had been right. My Spanish fluency consists of counting from 1 to 20, thanks to many afternoons watching Sesame Street until I was a teen, so I would not have been able to identify the song otherwise.
The pre-Internet days were much worse. When my parents gave me a record player for my fourth Christmas, they also gave me an Apple single of The Beatles' "Hey Jude." I was happy to receive this, along with The Archies' "Bang-Shang-a-Lang" and Mary Hopkin's "Those Were the Days." There was another recording I wanted, but, since it was instrumental, I did not know its title.
I would not know its title until the summer of 1990. That summer, I worked as a medical billing clerk for a company contracted by Christ Hospital, and we kept WRRM-FM (Warm 98) on the radio in the office. One day, while typing the prices for rhythm strips and EKGs into the database, I heard the song that I had liked so much as a preschooler. I heard it from the transistor radio of a teenage girl sunbathing in the next yard while I had been playing outside. Warm 98, like many other stations, now posts its playlist on its Website, but this was several years before anyone had heard of the Internet. I stopped what I was doing and called the station. I didn't get the DJ on the line, but I asked the receptionist who answered the phone, "What was that song you just played?" She put me on hold, and she came back on the line in seconds. The song was "The Horse," by Cliff Nobles and Company. I jotted that in my pocket notebook (I had started the habit of always having a notebook and pen handy my final months in Athens), and then began to plague record-store owners in Cincinnati with requests to find it for me. Even PhonoLog's three-ring binder on the counter didn't yield any results, and I was all prepared to pay for an ad in Goldmine. Then, one day I lucked out. In a St. Vincent de Paul (where I also bought most of my clothes), I found a Billboard compilation album from 1968 which featured "The Horse." (When "The Horse" was the number-one song, the number-two song was Mason Williams' "Classical Gas," maybe the only time when instrumentals held both number-one and number-two spots.)
Of course, my neighbors were not happy that I had this stroke of luck, and they prevailed upon me to use headphones for my many replayings of the song!
I like to think of myself as a generous type, so I now share with you the earworm of "The Horse."
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