LOOKING BACK,WITH NOSTALGIA, ON THE SOUNDS THAT HAVE FILLED MY LIFE

Or: What I like to listen to, because sometimes a combination of chords or a stray lyric or a notable rhythm can inspire some words for the next page.

Here’s an example:

In the book I’m currently working on, I have an older character, forced by dire circumstances to look back at some dangerous events in his youth. It is a tricky phase of life to capture on the page. One doesn’t want to aggressively impose ancient and maudlin on my guy; age and some infirmity should not needlessly cripple a character, just make it more difficult for them. At the very same time, one wants the act of remembering to fuel action. But equally, it needs to cloak the character in genuine perspective, so that the reader can readily identify with what he or she is engaged in. Under the best of circumstances, all this should create quite an emotional menu which, ideally, should energize the words on the pages. Age versus situation is a common enough trope in my stories. I am forever exploring the considerable psychology of these moments. My latest novel, Jack’s Boys, delves into this with a Vietnam vet, PTSD-suffering ex-Marine called on years later to act as he did when he was nineteen and in the jungle. So, did an earlier novel, a prize-winner that I am very proud of: What Comes Next? That book featured an older history professor suffering from Lewy Body Dementia who sets out with terrific determination to solve a crime he witnesses. But every time I decide to capture this aging but active state, it is a distinct challenge. There is an insistent voice – sometimes sweetly angelic, but, I think, more often devilishly demanding: Get the words, feelings and approach fresh.

So, the other day, while struggling with all this, trying hard to get the right tones and sensibility into the prose without stifling either plot or character, I took some time away from the computer for the daily sweat and exercise. I had the headphones on, the volume turned up and as seems fitting, I was listening to rock and roll.

In specific, The Kinks.
Oldtimers. Brit Rock. Ray and Dave Davies. Back from the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s.
And I heard:

“Standing in the middle of nowhere,
Wondering where to begin…
Lost between tomorrow and yesterday…
Between now and then.

And now we’re back where we started.
Here we go round again.
Day after day I get up and say…
I better do it again.”

What a great line: Lost between tomorrow and yesterday.
Says a whole lot. And creatively impressive, too, because the first instinct would have been to write it chronologically correctly, that would be yesterday followed by tomorrow which simply wouldn’t work nearly as effectively or seize the right beat. And, as I listened to the guys belt out the song, I saw my character taking shape on the page, because that single line in the song captured him perfectly.
So, later that day, eternally grateful for the British Invasion of the 60’s (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, The Dave Clark Five, The Animals, Van Morrison and Them, Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield… and so many others) back in front of the unforgiving computer screen, I wrote:

“Memory, he thought, is like the air. It can be ice cold or white hot…”

I have eclectic tastes in music.
Look at my music library – either on my computer, the playlists on my cell phone, or stacks of antique cd’s that are scattered around the house in various bookcases and you might find: Hard Rock. Soft Rock. Acid Rock. Headbangers and Heavy Metal. Rock-a-Billy. Country and Western. Alternative. Classical. Opera. Acoustic guitar. Southern Folk. English Folk. Nordic folk. Electric Folk. Gaelic. African. Jazz. And maybe even a few songs that defy category. Vangelis? Miles Davis? Bela Fleck?
(No rap. No techno. Sorry. Not for me.)
I feel sometimes that my listening moments have helped steer my writing career. At a minimum, I have admired the subtlety and simplicity of many lyrics, because so often, like poetry, they cut directly to the emotional core of the matter. And I sometimes toss in odd and disparate references in my stories to songs: A serial killer who sings along with The Rolling Stones in Midnight Rider as Mick growls, “stick my knife right down your throat and it hurts…” Or a middle-aged woman contemplating tossing herself into a fast-flowing and deep river, remembering The Jimi Hendrix Experience cover of Bob Dylan’s great All Along the Watchtower because the energy the trio (with arguably the greatest ever rock guitarist) bought to that song is the energy she seeks as she makes her decision. Or a disaffected teenage girl who wants her parents to leave her alone, so she listens to 2 Chainz and other Trap Music which I can’t stand, but that is because I’m in the generation of folks (unfortunately read: old and stodgy) that my teenage character is trying successfully to draw away from.
When I was young, right through teenage, I was little different from my young character in Jack’s Boys. I used music and books to combine rebellion and escape. Street Fighting Man and Lord of the Flies. Mix in some tangled long hair, a cigarette dangling from my lips (quit that, thank goodness, when I was 21) and faded blue jeans (bell bottoms — what were we thinking?) and I was on my way to the next anti-war demonstration. A funny moment that I can still easily picture: My mother and father coming into my room while I was listening to The Rolling Stones great album Begger’s Banquet with Mick singing the haunting No Expectations alongside Brian Jones’ mesmerizing slide guitar work and having them say, “What is that? Hawaiian music?”
(“No, Mom and Dad, Brian Jones is not the same as Don Ho…”) As a teenager, you can’t respond to that sort of generational ignorance. (They liked Count Basie, Jimmy Dorsey and the big band sound from WW2). You just toss up your hands in despair and hum some of The Who’s anthem to youth and frustration. My Generation. The words stick in your head: “… Hope I die before I get old…” Easy to imagine when you’re young and fierce and invulnerable. Now that I’m older… well, let’s just say that sentiment is no longer shared.
But as I grew up, music and words seemed interconnected in my life. An example: I was stuck in my dorm room at the boarding school I’d been unhappily shipped off to. I had an old turntable and scratchy speakers and when I re-read the entirety of The Lord of the Rings for perhaps the third time at age seventeen instead of doing any number of actual school assignments for bona fide classes, I played – over and over – Ravel’s Bolero. Now I can’t read or listen to either without thinking of its partner.
This intertwining of words and music started early for me.
For Christmas when I was 10 or 11, I was given two presents (not counting socks of which I had plenty and red unwearable sweaters):
A cheap bedside radio that only played AM stations.
A copy of The Looking Glass Book of Short Stories.
These two gifts shifted my life.
More than 60 years later, I still have that book. Have carried it everywhere I’ve lived. It is falling apart now, but the tales within are as fresh as when I first read them. Oscar Wilde and Ambrose Bierce and William Faulkner, Twain, Saki, Poe, Lord Dunsany, Shirley Jackson, Chekhov and many others. They introduced me to the notion that there were many ways, forms, styles that could all be designed to convey a story. They were fresh with originality and subtlety. On occasion, they made me tear up (“The Rocking Horse Winner”), sometimes they made me need to stifle a laugh (“The Canterville Ghost”) and every time they made me think as hard as a child could about words and their power (“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”). Best gift, ever.
The radio was different.
I tuned it to the best rock station around and would often lay awake in bed late at night waiting for the “Now we’re gonna count down the top ten!” cycle to bring up some song. That’s where I first heard The Tokens sing The Lion Sleeps Tonight (which has a very interesting backstory) and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons doing Walk Like a Man. And that tinny, almost inaudible radio was where I first came to appreciate Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Richie Valens – who could be a pre-teen, on the verge of rebellion and not love Not Fade Away and La Bamba? So, when years later and Don McLean sang “The day the music died…” I knew what he was saying. His 1971 hit song was American Pie. But he meant Clear Lake, Iowa, 1959.
The influence of that radio was less obvious but almost as important as the book. Taken together, it was where I got my first tastes in expression.
Just as I was drawn to words, so was I drawn to sound.

Age 15, back at that mightily hated boarding school, walking down the corridor of my dorm and wondering whether I could manage to flunk out that semester which would mean I could finally go home to where there were sports I was good at and girls in short skirts and significantly better food, I heard the blasts of three chords on an electric guitar, followed by a rising crescendo of lead notes.
I immediately knocked on the door that barely muffled the sound.
That was how I met my lifelong friend Marty.

Lifelong is probably not the right word. We don’t see each other very often, and don’t communicate much. Haven’t spoken in a couple of years. But he goes into that small category of friends that one would drop everything for at a moment’s notice. This sentiment is based on sharing miserable years at that boarding school decades ago. It is an intriguing psychological dedication one develops to someone who is not really in your life but is prominent in a shared memory. Soldiers experience this. Frat brothers and sorority sisters too, I suppose. Climbers huddled together on a freezing mountaintop. Sailors lost together at sea. Foreign Legionnaires marching across a scorching desert (see Beau Geste —not the remakes, but the 1939 original with Gary Cooper). It is an emotional element to some of the friendships I made as a journalist, when we were tossed together, united in the intense task of getting out the paper daily.
A unique category.
I don’t know if Marty was the best electric guitarist I have ever heard – after all, I have been in the audience when Jerry Garcia and Jimmy Page, Mick Abrahams, Duane Allman, Jorma Kaukonen, Eric Clapton and Pete Townsend let their fingers dance across a fretboard – and that’s only a partial list. But Marty was right up there with them.
He started with a Fender – that was what I heard walking the corridor. But soon he had a beautiful Les Paul with a crystalline sound that sadly got stolen not long after he went to Yale. A New Yorker, he introduced me to electric blues. Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King – the amped offspring of the great Robert Johnson. We listened to Paul Butterfield, The Blues Project, Cream and John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers. There was little doubt in my – and many other guys at that school’s minds – that Marty could have been a rock and roll genius and made a career out of it. Faced with that choice, he’d examined the drugs, sex and often heartbreaking world of rock and instead opted for the safer decision of the Ivy League and then medical school and subsequently became a renowned surgeon, where he routinely saves lives. On the one hand, a great decision. On the other… well, who knows? But that was all in his future. When we met, it was about music and loneliness and frustration and the overall malaise of being sent off to that harsh boarding school existence.
For me, in those years, music became a combination refuge and adventure – just as did the stories in all the many books I devoured when I should have been doing requirements.
Like all those stories, I started to find music everywhere.
Eclectic – as I said – preferences.
My three favorite places:

The Mooncusser. A hole in the wall coffee shop on Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard Island. Sadly, gone too soon. Now tee-shirt and souvenir shops. I heard Tom Rush there for the first time. Joshua Gone Barbados and Wasn’t that a Mighty Storm. I was seated perhaps five feet from the stage. Hard to express just how much energy Rush performed with – especially using a knife blade over the strings on that second song. Perfection. (Also heard the great Pete Seeger on Martha’s Vineyard – but he commanded the Oak Bluffs Tabernacle, an outdoor arena filled to overflow. I can still see him, alternating during his set between the banjo and the guitar, eyes closed, head raised to the heavens, voice soaring, when he covered Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall…).

The Cellar Door. In Washington D.C.’s Georgetown section. Corner of K Street and Wisconsin Avenue. I am a little unsure, to this day, why they consistently let me in, because I was substantially underage – and at age 16 there was no way I could pass for 21. It too, was sort of a hole in the wall. Seated about 150 tightly. Tables and seats around a small proscenium. Like The Mooncusser, the performers were so close you could reach out and touch them. In a city devoted to politics and power, it was a haven for something very different. It was where I heard John Hammond – blues extraordinary and guitar work that was exceptional and the stirring Dave Van Ronk (“Cocaine’s for horses, not for men… They say that it will kill me, but they won’t say when…”). And many others – Taj Mahal and Doc Watson and a very young Joni Mitchell…

The Fillmore East. Lots has been written about this fabled spot. Along with CGGB’s and The Blue Note, the Fillmore (like its San Francisco brother) dominated music in the city. I loved its dangerous but intimate funkiness. Surviving walking a few blocks around the East Village late at night was a challenge back then. (Now, million-dollar apartments, expensive clothing boutiques and high-end art galleries that cater to Wall Street people with too much money and no idea what to do with it…).

The Grateful Dead in a midnight show at the Fillmore:
Bob Weir (to the audience): What do you want to hear?
Audience: Saint Stephen!
Weir (a little miffed): Come on guys. You can hear that on like, a dozen albums…
Audience: Not the same as live…Please…
A nod to Jerry Garcia. A glance towards Phil Lesh. Garcia’s opening chords and: “Saint Stephen with a rose, in and out of the garden he goes…”

Never forget it.

When I was in college, I was wildly fortunate to know other terrific musicians. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen lived down the hall from me. They went on to some success as Steely Dan. (Their song “My Old School” is about some intriguing events at Bard College). I lived above Terence “Boona” Boylan, who recorded several records, wrote many songs and was in some notable groups – especially with his brother, John Boylan, who graduated before me, but came back from time to time and was a thoroughly nice guy. I could always tell when Boona was entertaining some young lady, because invariably his turntable was playing Alias Boona his first and best album. John went to L.A. and came to manage the great Linda Ronstadt, produce many of her records, help launch The Eagles and was a fixture in the Laurel Canyon music world he later celebrated in some fine documentary film work. Also, my tennis playing, occasional guitar strumming classmate Billy Steinberg. He too headed out to Los Angeles following graduation, where he wrote hit tunes for Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Pat Benatar and others. My first year on the tennis team with Billy, our courts were up close to the center of campus, and whenever we had a match, people would stick speakers in their windows, and we would play to all sorts of diverse sounds. Imagine the sort of backhand I could unleash to Purple Haze. Or the type of come-from-behind win the final point accomplishment when In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (sort of an anthem back then and unlistenable to now) was blasting.

After college, in my formative years as a young reporter covering crimes, criminals, more than a few dead bodies, occasional gunshots and the iron of prison bars, music was always at my side. Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band when I worked in New Jersey. After I moved to Miami, the wonderful, now sadly departed Jimmy Buffet before there were such things as “parrot-heads.” I heard Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention and once snuck up to NYC to one of the rare shows the immensely talented but deeply troubled John Fahey performed. The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death. His influence on guitarists is well-known to anyone who ever plucked the strings of an acoustic, but less known by the public even with his canonization on Rolling Stone’s 100 best guitarists list.

As I reflect, the words The Grateful Dead sang come to mind, as they frequently do for many in my generation:

“What a long, strange trip it’s been…”

Books and music. To drift into cliché: hand in glove.

I never wrote about music, or who I’d seen or who I heard. But sounds were always with me when I constructed language for a page.
So, fast forward decades and…
…. Here is something gratifying for any author:
I was giving a talk in Bogota, Colombia, at the wonderful book fair they hold annually in that city. La Feria de los Libros is like similar gatherings in Monterrey, Guadalajara, and most notably, Buenos Aires. In Europe, they often have themed celebrations – my favorites include what the Germans call Krimifests because they are devoted to crime writing. In the U.S. we have the comparable book fairs in NYC, Miami, L.A. and Austin, Texas. Wherever they take place, these festivals are jammed with the young, the middle-aged and the elderly all of whom exhibit a deep and abiding love of books. The fairs draw millions. The enthusiasm and dedication to appreciating words is simply palpable. But there I was in Bogota, with perhaps 700 folks in the audience. I was blabbing on about how to create suspense and tension in prose while not ignoring parallel social issues, but weaving them in, and I had the bright idea to ask the audience what they did when I dropped a literary reference onto a page. Did they examine the reference? Happily, almost all the hands went up. They checked them out. Wonderful. I persisted, then, asking about musical citations I slid into prose (like that serial killer singing along with Mick Jagger). Even more happily – the same number of hands soared. They listened. And to my great delight, many of those hands were from younger readers – the type who probably adore the aforementioned 2 Chainz and have probably never really contemplated what Jimi Hendrix did for Rock and Roll, but who might someday consider his influence when they listen to his unique left-handed guitar solos.
Anyway, I thanked the audience. And then the moderator said, “Someone should put together a playlist of Mr. Katzenbach’s musical references…”
This got a laugh from the audience.
But it was a nifty idea.
That noted – I’m far too lazy to go back through my own writing past and find every musical reference in each book. I probably should remember each and every one, but, alas, I do not. So, instead, I’ve decided to create a new playlist.
Call this: An odd collection of Musicians, their Songs and Lyrics that have colored my stories. Remember what I said about re-reading The Lord of the Rings and listening to Ravel’s Bolero? Same deal here: These are tunes that are rarely mentioned on the pages of my novels, unlike Hendrix or Dylan or The Stones or The Beatles, but ever present, nonetheless. This is an erratic, not complete by any means, list, with some notations and some explanations. So, here are some of the rhythms of my life. Let me start with a special group that has been around for nearly 50 years:

Steeleye Span.
If there is an angel in heaven with a better voice than Maddy Prior, I’d be surprised. With Peter Knight on violin, Steeleye Span covers folk and antique music from England with electric intensity. Their biggest hit in the 70’s was All Around My Hat which is still infectious today. YouTube has old clips of them from their beginnings (lots of hair, paisley, tight jeans and flowing sundresses) and a 2014 Australian concert where they do Seagull (now gray-haired, heavier and dressed less flamboyantly) which is about as perfect a rendition as I’ve ever heard.

In the same vein:

Pentangle.
Bert Jansch and John Renbourn and Jackie McShee. Two extraordinary guitarists and a crystalline voice. Their 1968 live album Sweet Child is a template for great musicianship.

Moving along:

Ali Farka Toure with Ry Cooder.
Exceptional stuff… and just about anything by Ry Cooder is exceptional. He has a wide-ranging and universal touch, but for fun listen to him do Billy the Kid. The theme to the edgy film Southern Comfort is his, as well. Which leads me to…

Chris Smither.
Not exactly country, sort of New Orleans influenced rockabilly. His cover of Buddy Holly’s Love’s Made a Fool Out of You is one of the best covers of Holly’s music ever. Also, for fun listen to Tulane which has a genuinely feminist side. And, of course, Seems So Real is immensely intense and one of my favorites among many favorites.

One could not do wrong to listen to his contemporary John Prine (sadly covid victim) if only to hear Paradise. Political, as is Turnpike Troubadour’s’ song Blue Star.

Or… for that matter James McMurtry (son of the great Lonesome Dove author Larry…) whose extensive discography has a real outlaw edge to go with some great, raucous guitar work. Red Dress, Choctaw Bingo, See the Elephant and We Can’t Make It Here are some of my favorites.

I’d say the same nice things about John Hiatt. Many songs, but I particularly like The Wreck of the Barbie Ferrari which has a truly dark vision. And my son-in-law turned me on to Tyler Childers whose Whitehouse Road has a similar edginess. Steve Earle gets played frequently in my house, especially When the People Find Out, Telephone Road and the duet he did with Marty Stuart called Crying, Waiting, Hoping…

Or The Gourds. Their cover of Snoop Dogg’s Gin and Juice is famous, but Eyes of a Child and El Paso seem closer to their nature.

Little Feat seem spiritually adjacent to these guys with some of their tunes, but hard rock-ier with others. Fat Man in the Bathtub and Rock and Roll Doctor along with Feats Don’t Fail Me Now make me wonder why they aren’t as revered in the Southern Rock tradition as The Doobie Brothers, The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd and others. Maybe they are, I just don’t know it. I hope so.

And, while we’re not exactly in the Hard Rock world…

Triakel a Nordic group with the haunting Alla Gossar. (Not possible to listen to this just once…)

Hedingarna in the same category.

Gaelic Storm who can get your blood going.

Natalie McMaster and her violin.

Wake the Dead.

The Toasters.

The English Beat.

Toots and the Maytals.

Winterpills.

And there are those who defy category:

The David Wax Museum whose Yes, Maria, Yes should energize anyone not on their deathbed. The same is true for Guesthouse and Persimmon Tree.
I would add to this non-category category Jeremy Sherman the guitarist, especially his West of the Pecos album. And Leo Kottke with so much material it is hard to pick examples, but Accordion Bells and the tune he did for Terrence Malick’s movie Days of Heaven (the young Richard Gere and Sam Shepard) The Train and the Gate are both haunting. And John Fahey if only to hear Spanish Two-Step.

Strangefolk and The String Cheese Incident are favorites of mine. As is Paul Westerberg especially Waiting for Somebody. And more country, Little Big Town and Lyle Lovett.
And Rodney Crowell who was Emmy Lou Harris’ muse and performs Say You Love Me which I play over and over when I need a blast of energy.

And finally:

Rock.

As in: What I snobbishly consider real rock and roll.

Music that has been at my side echoing through decades.
An admission: I was never a true, obsessed, screaming teenage Beatles fan (Sergeant Pepper notwithstanding) although I have much of their music. They were so influential it is hard not to consider them the soundtrack to growing up. I can still recall first hearing Love Me Do on that tinny bedside radio and nearly sitting up straight. But I always preferred The Rolling Stones because of their rebelliousness. 19th Nervous Breakdown and Paint It Black.
But these guys led me to so many others:

The Yardbirds.

The Animals.

Blodwyn Pig.

Cream.

Jeff Beck.

Jethro Tull.

The Who. (I saw them smash their instruments on stage at the completion of Pinball Wizard, which might be one of the most exciting ends of concerts ever…)

Traffic.

Blind Faith (4th row, Madison Square Garden on their only tour. Eric Clapton looked aloof. Stevie Winwood hunched over and intense).

Jefferson Airplane.

The Grateful Dead.

CCR.

CSNY. (Especially Stills and Young solo works).

The Band.

Genesis.

Pink Floyd.

Led Zeppelin (at the Royal Albert in London. Jimmy Page solo on stage doing Black Mountain Side, which was his re-interpretation of Bert Jansch’s take on the traditional Irish folk tune Down By Blackwaterside. Soaring sounds live…)

Procol Harum (Just listen to Power Failure…).

And two guys who passed far too soon…

Tom Petty. Too many wonderful songs to mention. You Wreck Me can get anyone to their feet.

Warren Zevon. Same as Petty, but who doesn’t love Werewolves of London (“…His hair was perfect!”)?

I need to stop. Every time I write down a name or a group, I hear notes in my head. Every time a chord progression comes to me, I feel like I need to add another name to this already too long list. I have left out many that have riveted my music history and many that have been at my side as I wrote one story or another. J.J. Cale? Janis Joplin? Grin doing See What Love Can Do? What about Humble Pie and their showstopper I Don’t Need No Doctor? Each missing name is like a knock on the door of some memory, demanding: What about us?
If I could, I would honor everyone.
Best to end (can’t smash my guitar like Pete Townsend and swing the Microphone above my head like Roger Daltrey) with what almost, but not quite, started all this for me:

Key of A.
Open E, Open A and Open D.
Begin:
A-D-A
E-A-E.

Do those, and you’ve played Buddy Holly’s Not Fade Away.
Covered by just about everyone, because there is originality in every approach. The same rhythm, same chords, same words (mostly) but unique every single time. A different stamp from Steve Stills, Stevie Nicks, James Taylor or The Rolling Stones or The Grateful Dead and probably every garage band that ever started up filled with possibility and dreams. A good lesson to keep in mind for any writer.

Amherst, Massachusetts
July 2024