I was born in Massachusetts in 1959, and before I turned one my father was offered a CBS fellowship in Communications at Columbia University, so he and my Mom moved to New York City with their infant child just as the 60’s were beginning. Within a year my Dad was tapped to head up the new PBS/NPR radio station WRVR, which was located at Riverside Church on Riverside Drive. Soon my sister Jenna was born, and we lived our early childhood in Manhattan.
During this first decade of my youth, my father held many staff parties at our NY apartment and country house in Connecticut, and I regularly visited the radio station as a boy just one block from where we lived.
The people I met on my Dad’s staff were always unique personalities and frequently had creative talents, interesting viewpoints, and engaging stories to tell.
When we moved to San Diego in 1970, my Dad used to tell this joke which he credited to Neil Simon:
When it’s 102 degrees in New York, it’s 78 in LA.
When it’s 2 degrees below zero in New York, it’s 78 in LA.
There are 6 million interesting people in New York, and 78 in LA.
This joke seemed to speak to both the relief we felt when we escaped the stress and pressures of inner-city life in the 60’s, and the culture shock we felt as we settled into a totally new world.
As I look back on my process of finishing growing up in California, I see how my attraction to interesting and creative people was ingrained from my earliest youth.
And I met many…
During my Freshman year in High School I qualified for Honors English, which I realize now was my weakest subject at the time. Thank goodness I got in that class though, because I immediately realized that the students would be the best part. There seemed to be one of every type in there, a Christian, a stoner, one bespectacled nerdy type, the studious Architect, kids so gifted and funny that they wrote long story scripts just to satisfy their creative urges. Everyone in that class (over a 3-4 year period) was so distinct and non-average in their way, even the social types had something going.
We had a fairly large High School, so I might not see these students in my other classes, but one exception was Ken who was also in my PE class. Our PE was in the morning, and we would “dress out” and then wait for 20 minutes until the distracted PE teacher would show up and put us through whatever sport we were supposed to learn.
During this time I would find Ken sitting in the bleachers talking casually about music or a movie, and there was always something intriguing about his comments. I almost immediately became Ken’s friend, and it was a big relief having someone smart to talk to during any class.
I was already a musician then, and I remember disrespecting Alice Cooper and David Bowie when they first came out (people my age might remember they were almost coordinated together in the media that first year). I was a Beatle and Neil Young fan in 1973, and I considered these new guys an empty novelty, capitalizing on androgyny as a gimmick. Even Cheech and Chong did a parody of them during a late-night TV skit, and I didn’t pay any attention to the music.
Then Ken showed up at my house with an armload of Bowie records; this was late 1973 or 1974, when Bowie was already finishing his Ziggy period as the rest of the world caught up, including radio. Ken generously left those records at my house for months, and I went wild as I listened to them. The kicker came when my guitar teacher Jack came over to give me my lesson and flipped out with me as we played each album. Pretty soon Jack had the cassettes playing in his car, and I felt I was on the inside of something amazing.
I might have thought that Ken would continue to lead me to the next big thing in Pop, but instead he moved on to large Wagner opera box sets and Van Der Graaf Generator albums, which led to more and different discoveries. Then came the Fellini and Bunuel movies and other foreign art films, which he would take me to at the smaller art cinemas. I discovered the composer Nino Rota from this, and that music became one of my escape hatches from the dead-end I was feeling from corporate rock in my later teens. Then in 1977 Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, The Ramones, and The Sex Pistols saved us with a new and exciting direction, and we were off and running. Most of my musician friends were not quick to pick up on the new music; they were still wondering how to compete with Boston and Kansas records, and this only hardened my rebellion.
Knowing Ken led to a social nucleus that included Wiley and my sister Jenna, and several other friends who changed me forever. (Matt and David).
Ken had an instant recognition of genuinely creative things, (and he was deeply funny when suffering the aesthetically mundane). New music would normally take me weeks to digest and sort through, but Ken would immediately understand when the rules had changed. For years having him for a friend was a constant flashlight as I discovered my next source of interest…
In our late teens Ken started to slowly turn his attention from films to 20th century art, and this opened up a new source of both exciting creative influences and some controversy. Challenging the audience was a common ground with the new music I was participating in, and the art world often had the same goal. Clearing the room sometimes became a source of pride…
There were times when Ken would transmit his personality on simple occasions like giving Xmas gifts or DJ’ing an informal party that gave a special feeling I can’t quite describe, but that I never saw anyone else ever do again. It was like receiving a private message…
Another example of his indescribable impact was one time when he held a piece of paper up to the color TV as we watched a show in the middle of the afternoon after school. He would cover only a certain part of the screen, then change it. We saw things we never expected; I remember Jenna and I were floored, the effect was devastating. He often did a similar thing with the radio, choosing the stations seemingly at random and playing with the volume in unexpected ways.
One time as I was getting off work late at night from my job as a dinner house waiter, I exited through the back door with another artist friend, and we heard a sound coming from my car. Ken had set up a windup record player and rigged some kind of broken recording with several visual props chosen for the moment and set them in and around my car, with the door wide open. He and Wiley laid in wait and flashed his car headlights on us at the precise moment, like a film noir movie.
Art didn’t just imitate life, it became it, and there were powerful moments I will never forget, such as the time one of our closest friends over-ingested several drugs and caused a scandal as he acted out loudly with a frightening expressiveness. He roamed through the backyards and the foothills where we lived ranting wildly and uncontrollably until we finally had to call his family to come get him. The quality and content of his rant was so compelling that it caused different reactions among us, including the mixed feelings of acute admiration and total fear.
This same close friend would do things like not wear clothing as he went to gas his car at the big box store (Fed-Mart), playing it straight as he paid the attendant, and not for candid camera type laughs either. The years of popular streaking were long over and forgotten by then, and our friend’s well-deserved credentials as an art guerrilla were apparent only to the fewest insiders.
After College almost every one of my friends moved from San Diego to another city. Ken moved to New York, a city we had discussed many times, and continues to live there today. I have no doubt that the people who know Ken now appreciate he’s there, and my guess is they are discovering their own insights from his unique ability to see art and the world itself in the flow of its time and context.
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