california, chemo, yeah, yeah, yeah, but

I want to talk about Stephen Sondheim.

I'm holding you all hostage. I'm starting to get time to write, and will firehose everyone throughout the coming time.

but I saw Stephen Sondheim interviewed for two hours on my last night of vacation, by a very strange little radio host guy. Michael Silverblatt. kind of a large framed gay broadway fanatic, taken to extremes...soft spoken and eccentric...

he did shut up a lot...but I can't say I liked his introduction for Steve, which was, everyone wants to really know the artist, but you never can and you should stop trying, you wouldn't really want to know.

so...he does know the artist...or he doesn't and he's just pontificating...

but Sondheim comes out, and he's 80 years old, still the sharpest mind I've ever experienced. dates, names, sequences, all as if read off a teleprompter. it's like me talking about the 1967 CD's I made.

I would have preferred a two hour lecture to the interview. Silverblatt didn't piss Sondheim off, for which I'm grateful...in fact, Steve complimented him on some broadway trivia he knew, other times corrected him. (please...I need it, said Michael), and added, you'll see me make mistakes several times as the evening goes on.

I didn't.

he used his hands constantly, as if playing an imaginary visual instrument to underscore his thoughts.

he had the idiomatic touching-the-shoulder straightening-the-sweater stuff that most old people have because no one watches them much anymore, but this seemed like no one has dared to confront me about anything I do for the last thirty years.

I had heard a lot of the stories. a lot was explained...very clearly...by Steve for those who may not know the background...

I still got my planning the whole trip around it money's worth.

he was critical of other broadway lyricists, but only those who are dead and whose feelings cannot be hurt...and cannot argue back. about a tenth as critical as he was of his work.

"I feel pretty, and witty, and gay!" so this girl from the ghetto streets, suddenly she's reading Noel Coward?

"in Anyone Can Whistle, at one point the cast turns to the audience and becomes the audience, making fun of them. of course, we alienated the audience. Arthur Laurentis and I were the kids at the back of the class, making smartass comments. but there's a difference between smart and smartass. if you want to invite people in to see what you've done, why would you alienate them? the audience are collaborators, not victims."

(I think he's overstating, and gets away with more jokes at the audience's expense than he professes)

in the new book, Finishing The Hat, he presents his lyrics along with comments and a running criticism. he points out areas...especially in Saturday Night, his first musical...where each of seven cardinal sins for a lyricist exist in his songs. he says about Somewhere, from West Side Story, a composer friend calls it the "a" song, because the most important note of the melody lands on the least important word. "There's...a...place for us"

so he dishes it out to himself, and takes it.

but he says about Oscar Hammerstein's "Climb Every Mountain" ..."like a lark who is learning to pray"? how is that different from a lark who is actually praying? what are we talking about here?

he said Hammerstein had, someone counted, over 700 references to birds in his songs. and, added Sondheim, he must have written 500 songs.

later on, he said, a musical writer's imagination soars...then he caught himself..."a bird metaphor"

"Brisk, lively, merry, and bright, Allegro!" starts a Hammerstein song. Sondheim says...brisk?...and lively?...and merry?...and bright? and Allegro? you kind of said it with brisk. you're not giving a description as much as reading a thesaurus.

I'm telling you, you don't want to have an argument with the guy.

he told what, to me, was a compelling story about a gathering of songwriters...Harold Arlen, E.Y. Harburg...that he was invited to at the age of 22. he was given to believe all would be invited to play.

rather than shrinking at such an audience, he said he couldn't wait to show off...with three songs from his first musical, Saturday Night. He picked an engaging opening number, a romantic waltz, and then a show stopping 2/4. practiced all day. when his turn came, he played well, got polite applause, and sat down feeling very proud of himself.

Arlen sat down next to him ("with no bitchiness at all") and said, "you're afraid to write anything that isn't a blockbuster, aren't you?"

Sondheim thought of a Harold Arlen song, A Sleeping Bee, the opposite of a swing for the fences little tune, but one he'd have wanted to be able to write.

the comment changed his life.

I've had such gong sounders in my life. like when I played with Pete McCabe, probably the only genius I've ever played with, and said, "Pete, that guitar chord is the prettiest one I've ever heard. what is it, a G maj 9?" "Well", Pete said, "I just think of it as a D triad over a G."

the skies opened up for me. you can play one chord over another?

then...can you play a D scale over a G chord?

how about an A scale?

at a sentence, what I would choose to play changed forever.

it makes me think about how much more I would learn if I would expose myself to more critical geniuses.

clarity is just about my favorite drug...musically as well as in thought. the allure of the clean distinction is so strong, concerns about the smallness of its scale just vanish...to others, it's just unnecessarily picky.

a favorite Sondheim story of mine comes from Frank Rich, longtime Op-Ed writer at the New York Times and onetime gopher on the Sondheim musical "Follies".

he tells how the sheet music came back for a number for the show (which had been cut) and landed in Sondheim's hands. Steven saw that the printer had "corrected" his word "galop" (a kind of dance" and changed it to "gallop".

he hit the ceiling! of all the colossal nerve!!!

little gopher Frank tremolously got out, "Mr. Sondheim, sir, I believe that number is no longer in the show."

Steve gave him a big wink and a smile and whispered, "I know."

legend has it that the original working title of, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, was, Who's Afraid of Stephen Sondheim?

but it's consistent with the three guiding principles he sets forth in the book for lyric writing and other creative ventures:

God is in the details

less is more

form follows content

I used to say, the angels are in the details...God is kind of everywhere...

it's said Sondheim realized while flying over the Statue of Liberty that the top of it was decorated with extensive detailed filigree. yet, he reasoned, the sculptor would have to know that once the statue was up, no one would see it, flying not yet being on the menu.

but the sculptor knew it was there. and that was all that mattered.

I am occasionally called picky or obsessive or anal...but I'm one of those guys. I know what went into the editing, even if no one else ever does. but I also believe people respond to smaller things than they are conscious of, and sometimes in a big way. if you ask what's the difference between these two mixes, they can't tell you. but they know right away which they like better.

I'd rather put the effort in.

reading Finishing The Hat is everything I had hoped the interview would be but could not be. and yet it was crucial and wonderful and seminal for me to be in that room at that time. a lot of heaven and earth was moved to make it possible, and I am deeply deeply grateful.

I may not be done talking about it.

but I'll talk about med stuff next time. and soon.

p.s. I'm doing fine.