Dick Wagner
Dick Wagner
Richard Wagner, the German, is arguably the most influential
writer-composer-arranger to have impacted the Western world of music during the
19th century, and, with Lennon-McCartney set temporarily aside for history to
have its cool say, the greatest writer-composer-arranger of all time.
Pronounced "Vahg-ner," not Wagner, this man from Leipzig,
Germany wrote musical operatic scores for large orchestras which astounded
audiences with what then amounted to a "wall of sound," so deep and so resonant
and so powerful that critics of the day coined the term "chromatic" to describe
it. What they were trying to say was that Wagner's music transcended the realm
of the acoustic and auditory — sounds you can hear — and elicited in addition
sensations which were visual, and visceral, and emotional, with the result that
listeners would often report out-of-body, epiphany-like experiences by which
they would say their lives had been changed, forever.
My mother, the then-recently-retired Dorsey big band singer,
Connie Gates, would regularly solace herself with the playing of Wagner's
Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal, using 78rpm records, and at a time
of night when her eight-year-old son had just been sent to bed. She did
this on purpose, sensing then what we now know about the programmable nature of young,
growing neural networks. She was right. I can still hear faint strains of this
music, at night, just when my recollections of the day's events are gently fading into
black.
I have since learned that others — including personalities not just of
illustrious reputation, but of dubious reputation, including the King Ludwig II
of Germany, and the dictator Adolf Hitler — have had similar reports to share
about their near-dreaming states.
Each of these guys was a great Wagner fan. This has at times simultaneously worried and impressed me.
In any case, all this should explain my reaction when I was told, by
my rock 'n' roll studio manager, that the premises had just been booked for a
month's time, and
deposited in cash, by a group of well-known music business "movers and shakers"
on behalf of Tim Curry — the artist fresh off his startling success with The Rocky
Horror Picture Show — these movers and shakers captained by the acclaimed
musician-composer Michael Kamen, from New York City, and by his friend and colleague
from the midwest, Richard Wagner.
"Richard Wagner?" I asked.
"Look," she said. "Here's his brand new LP." And, sure enough, that's what it
said: Richard Wagner, right on the cover.
And so it's less remarkable still that I would find an
opportunity, shortly after the arrival of the entourage one day in 1979, to have
a word or two with Dick Wagner about his German namesake, Richard Wagner. I
found such an opportunity in the kitchen of the farmhouse, shortly after dinner
one night. There was the clatter of dishes and the humming of a dishwasher and
muffled sounds coming from Control Room A, where a 24-track tape of basic tracks
was being readied for overdubs. We were filling our glasses, my guest and I, in
front of the mirror hanging over the bar by the cassette deck.
"Dick," I said, "you share a name with one of the world's greatest
people in music. You've got to have some thoughts about that. You're Richard Wagner, too."
"Not so loud," Dick said. "Got a piano player in the band who's
Jewish. She'd flip out hearing us talk about that German."
Ah, the opening! The opportunity to delve in and actually
talk about things — to think — in rock 'n' roll. This was a fast
pitch that had just whizzed by, thunk, into the catcher's mitt, and I had to be
careful. In fact, we had a very serious rule binding on employees at the
recording studio, and that was that there should never be any discussions with
clients, who were paying us to be in residence at Long View Farm, on any
possibly incendiary subjects such as politics, religion, race or — yes
— even philosophy. They hadn't come all the way here to hear us proselytize
on behalf of our favorite guru. We were show business professionals. However,
having been the one who made that rule, I felt free to break it, just this once,
and I did.
"Gotta' get past that part, Dick. Sure, the guy had some
opinions on what should happen when you get "delivered" by a musical experience,
and an appreciation for purity of blood line and national identity figured
towards the top of his list. Unfortunately. But the rest of the list is
interesting. And what motivated him is interesting. Basically it was the
missing female."
This last remark caused Dick's eyes to widen, and he took a long
drink out of his glass, glancing around nervously. "Like I said, not so loud.
What about this missing female business?"
"Mainly, that the male player alone is flawed, lacking and
incomplete. That he needs to be made whole, to be delivered, to be redeemed. And
that redemption is something that only the application of female energy can
bring about."
"Fucked-up male made whole by the lady in the sky," Dick
offered.
"Yes," I said. "Not so loud."
In the weeks and months to come, Dick Wagner and I became fast friends. We
found ourselves in a seeming automatic agreement on all matters involving activities
scheduled at the studio, and flew around in the twin-engine Cessna to weekend
ourselves in a big city nearby, or to fly his session-musician friends back into the countryside for
days at a time, during which there would occur little sleep for anyone involved.
We had a great time during these heady days of the 1970s, and laughed loudly
together as we spent large sums of money and a great deal of energy making music
for the music industry as it then existed, billing out our expenses as best we
could to the record companies, but even in the midst of this great amount of
clamor, and excitement, I for one couldn't stop thinking about the other Richard
Wagner, the German, and the music that he made a hundred and fifty years earlier. My two
Richard Wagners had a good bit in common, I began to realize, as I learned more
about each. Each was in very clear servitude to the missing female.
On the one hand we had the creation of fantastic, musically chromatic
episodes involving hundreds of trained symphonic players playing to audiences of
thousands in Berlin and Dresden and Herrenchiemsee and other places, reducing these crowds
to the wringing of hands and loud weeping — all this wrought by the
power of the romantic rhapsodic artist, Richard Wagner the German, rendering homage to an unnamed Goddess missing —
that's what his operas were about. And, on the other hand,
a hundred and fifty years later, we have here in the countryside of
Massachusetts the pleadings of a sweet American man in his early thirties, able
to express in music that same homage so powerfully as to bring himself to tears while tinkering away
on the keyboard of a Steinway piano, or while yanking stadium-grade acoustic
tumult out of the wire strings and metal frets of an amplified Stratocaster
guitar.
In both cases, tears. And the joy which accompanies tears shed in the
creation of works of art which the artist himself may not yet fully understand.
Professional philosophers should become the owners of rock 'n' roll recording
studios with great forethought and caution, or not at all.
"You going to bed so early?" This was Dick Wagner
speaking, sitting on
the cat bench in front of the fireplace, one night about midnight. The session
had shut down early. Tim Curry had put down a rough reference vocal on I do
the Rock, and didn't like it, and went to bed. Mark Parenteau, the
celebrated disk jockey from WBCN, in Boston, had just swilled down what was left
of his drink, made his apologies, and made his exit. Everybody else was down in
the game room, watching videos.
"Come here for a minute, I want to talk to you."
I approached the cat bench, eager to please.
"It's that missing female business. Can't get it
out of my mind. I'm seeing it everywhere, now that I'm looking for it. Not just
in that German, not just in my own stuff, but everywhere. Take Layla,
for example. Filling in that void, with music. Making an appeal, using a guitar.
You know what I mean?"
"Redemption hungry," was my
off-the-cuff reply.
"Right," Dick said. "And you know, I'm beginning to think
that the music itself is the reply we're seeking. When I hear it, when I hear
the notes I just played, and when they sound good — that's it for me.
That's what the appeal from out there is all about. Makes me want to boost the reverb a notch, and get
into it more. For me, that's the message back...
"Listen," Dick continued. "They're all outta' here. It's
still early. Let me play you a few tunes on the piano. Piano demos. Couple
of them are songs for Tim. We need a quick tape of them in any case. It's what
we've been talking about. You game?"
I was game, and that's what happened that night in North Brookfield. Dick
went into the studio, and sat down behind the Steinway. I went into the control
room, emptied out the ashtrays and put a reel of 2" tape on the tape machine.
The piano was already mike'd. All I had to do was bring up the faders and ask
Dick to talk to me a bit so I could set the levels. He had the headphones on, so
he could hear me. He could also hear himself in these same headphones, and the
piano in these same headphones, and just a wee bit of natural echo
which had been added in for effect. And effective it was. A Middle C on the piano struck sharply
by Richard Wagner would sail courageously out into time — his message back, ready and
waiting.
If You Love Me, Leave a Message on my Service
These Days
Editor's Note: the recording
artist was unable to complete either of these songs to his satisfaction,
overcome emotionally, just like his namesake the German would appear to be so
often, by the overpowering but very welcome
message back.
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