Largely true confessions of a classical music nut...

Johann Sebastian Bach (Wikipedia)

Written by Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/5-3-25 It’s not exactly Bob Dylan or Prince, I was thinking as, arms waving, I conducted a large symphony orchestra. Resounding through the concert hall was the second movement of Beethoven’s sixth symphony (the one with the great thunderstorm). The concert hall was our living room, with nobody home, the CD player blaring. My own Homegrown Music Festival.

 

I wouldn’t dare do such a thing if anyone was watching. Enter the men in white coats. (They’ll be back!)

 

Can’t help it though. I’m a classical music nut, have been since childhood, a proclivity that has survived through dozens of musical genres I have listened to during my long life, including the estimable Mr. Dylan — more on whom later.

 

I was in my teens in high school when Elvis hit and he changed everything in popular music. I thought he was great, even though I maintained my suppressed love of classical music in my high school years, attempting to be “cool” (and failing). Brahms is great, but not cool, like Chubby Checker.

 

Before Elvis, much popular music could only be looked upon today as “sappy.” The 1950s radio was humming with such songs as “How Much is that Doggie in the Window (arf-arf)” and “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane” (tribute to a newborn). How about “On the Baby’s Knuckle or the Baby’s Knee, Where Will the Baby’s Dimple Be?” Great questions of our time. Or that time, I guess. Oh, can’t forget “The Shrimp Boats are a-Comin’, There’s Dancin’ Tonight.” But not the “Peppermint Twist.”

 

I always had classical music to fall back on though, earworm-wise.

 

It goes back a long way in my life, to fairly early childhood. There was a lot of classical music in my growing-up home because my mother was an accomplished pianist who played it on our piano. Plus, we had recordings of some of the great composers.  Bach was big, Bing not so much.  

 

Once as a child I was on a program in our church parlors in which Sunday school kids were interviewed. I was six or seven years old. When they got to me, the adult interviewer asked me several questions and it came out that I liked music. 

 

“What kind of music do you like? I was asked.

 

“Certainly not Shostakovich,” was my response.

 

People in the audience roared with laughter in appreciation of this rebuke of a Russian composer. One woman hugged me. It was when the Cold War was heating up right after World War II and anything anti-Russian was appreciated in America. 

 

At that moment I decided I would grow up to be president of the United States but it turns out I had to settle for living room maestro. Ironically, later in life I grew of appreciate Dmitri Shostakovich’s music, although I’m not that crazy about trying to spell his name. Google knows how.

 

Still, the music goes on and on, as do the years. I thought the folk singing Kingston Trio was pretty cool in the early ‘60s and also embraced some jazz — Shearing, Brubeck — but classical music from the romantic era (largely 19th Century) has remained my staple although I also can also go for baroque and dip into the 20th Century. Remember that century?

 

Beatles? I missed being a fan, but they have their moments. What about rock ’n’ roll? It can’t be avoided. If it could, I would. I once I wrote “I’ve got a right to hate the blues” in a column and got hate mail. Prince is huge, but not for me. My rain ain’t purple. Sorry, kids. (My own kids, great fans.)

 

Can’t forget Country/Western. It’s tuneful, I admit. I once wrote a Country/Western song called “It’s a One Woman Kitchen/She’s Out There Cookin’ All the Time” that went over big in the doghouse.

 

Moving on in the world of music: What about hip-hop? Many of my generation are hopping to their orthopedic surgeons to see about getting new hips. Being a registered geezer, that’s all I have to say about that genre. (Don’t tell my grandchildren.)

 

Why all this now? Bob Dylan has suddenly reappeared in our lives with a recent concert in Mankato, Minn, that has received quite a bit of attention in his home state, as has the movie about his early life, “A Complete Unknown.” Saw it. Liked it.

 

Being such a stuffy classical music guy, it has taken me a long time to appreciate Dylan’s art but I have come to realize he is a brilliant thinker, a gifted poet and a talented musician with a plain singing voice for conveying his thoughts. Grand opera it ain’t, though.

 

Dylan’s ability to stay in the public eye and maintain his enormous popularity for 65 years while seeming not to care is unique. He has never sought glory in his birth town or where he grew up — Duluth and Hibbing. If I had done that well, I’d have demanded a ticker-tape parade.

  

My sticking with classical music in these troubled times can be upsetting though. In a restless overnight dream, I failed to pull the drapes while conducting the massive Gustav Mahler Second Symphony (titled “Resurrection”) and somebody must have seen me waving my arms and reported it.

 

Glancing outside in my dream I noticed two strange men approaching the house. They were wearing white coats. That was okay, though. “I’ve always trusted the kindness of strangers,” as Blanche said in “Streetcar” when they came to get her. (Oops, don’t get me started on theater.)

 

Rrrrring went the alarm clock. I was resurrected.

 

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.

Beatlemania: When the Beatles were said to be in Duluth...

By Jim Heffernan

"One Sunday 1965, give or take a year in either direction, this incident occurred in a Lutheran church in Duluth’s West End neighborhood:"

The recent marking of the 30^th anniversary of Beatle John Lennon’s assassination, plus widespread mention of what would have been his 70^th birthday, has sparked a memory of the time the Beatles were said to be in Duluth. Emphasize “said to be.”

I recounted this many years ago in my column in the Duluth daily newspaper, but it bears repeating, I believe, just for the whimsy of the situation as well as the fact that only a couple of people would remember that earlier column, and I am one of them.

It was early in that era in America known as the time of Beatlemania, and it was manic where the “Fab Four” were concerned. The Ed Sullivan Show appearances, the national tours (including at old Met Stadium in suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul) all contributed to the frenzy remembered today only by folks now viewing with disdain some of today’s trends in popular music as they move inexorably into grandparenthood and beyond.

One Sunday 1965, give or take a year in either direction, this incident occurred in a Lutheran church in Duluth’s West End neighborhood:

Each Sunday, as the congregation was settling into the pews and choir members were clearing their throats to open the service with the somber “The Lord is in His Holy Temple,”  the minister, before mounting the pulpit, would review the day’s register of out-of-town guests and other visiting non-members who had signed a guest book in the narthex.

Then, during the announcements portion of the service, he would welcome the visitors by name and, in the case of out-of-towners, their home cities.

What the minister didn’t know on this Sunday was that some teenagers in the congregation had signed the four Beatles’ names into the visitor’s register and – no surprise here – the minister, then in his mid-60s, didn’t know the four Beatles from the Three Stooges, two turtle doves or a partridge in a pear tree.

So, come the less formal part of the service, announcing such things as upcoming potluck suppers, the minister also launched into his welcome of visitors from far-off Liverpool, England: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.

It was one of those terrible moments for anyone speaking before an audience when some members of the audience burst into laughter and the speaker doesn’t know why.

I wasn’t there (hooky from church that Sunday) but it was described to me by family members who were. Wish I had been. Missed the guest preacher who repeatedly implored: “Make a noyful joys unto the Lord,” too. And the Sunday the minister – not the Beatles one – missed the chair behind the pulpit and fell head over heels backward, his robe flying.

I should have gone to church more often.  


Note: There's a new book out about the Beatles Minnesota concert: One Night Stand in the Heartland by Bill Carlson. Also youtube has footage of the Beatles MN press conference and you can check that out HERE.