Music in the marrow of life

For some people, maybe, music -- whether popular, classical, jazz, funk or world -- is merely background sound: It’s aural wallpaper or ear candy at the banquet of life. For others, though, music is a vessel for total immersion, a subject for intense scrutiny, a source of unique beauty and special knowledge -- less an accompaniment to life than the stuff of life itself.

Listeners (and readers) of the latter sort will recognize kindred spirits in Geoffrey O’Brien’s “Sonata for Jukebox” and Jonathan Schwartz’s “All in Good Time,” works very different from each other in style and intent that overlap and interpenetrate each other like complementary tunes in a transcendent American medley.

O’Brien began exploring the nuances of that medley as a youngster -- an infant, even. Music was in his blood, as gradually becomes clear in his book’s 15 essays, written in an idiosyncratic manner that mixes the analytical and the highly personal to extraordinary effect.

O’Brien’s maternal grandfather led a dance band in eastern Pennsylvania during the 1930s. O’Brien’s father, Joe, worked in New York radio for most of his life, evolving from an all-purpose announcer of the 1930s into a well-known “morning man” on the AM band throughout the ‘50s. O’Brien grew up surrounded by many musics, and in one dazzling chapter he evokes all the tantalizing siren songs in his childhood home on Long Island: jazz, opera, folk ballads, TV theme songs, commercial jingles, Broadway show tunes, the spoken music of his actress mother rehearsing dialogue, the cool airborne spiels of his father on the radio, “doing what decades of radio experience have enabled him to do: read the weather report as if it were a form of poetry, a free-verse improvisation....” The youngster lured by these sounds grows into a critic able to explicate all sorts of music in unexpected and illuminating ways, teasing out perceptions, capturing subtleties -- as demonstrated here by extended pieces on the “return” of Burt Bacharach, on the canon of the Beach Boys, on the folk music revival of the 1950s and ‘60s.

Written by an East Coaster, that Beach Boys piece is maybe the best exegesis ever of our archetypal West Coast “school of Brian Wilson,” describing it as “a new kind of Handel, a Bach chorale for freeway ... full of concealed sorrows and eccentric reveries ... like being in church and being at the beach in the same instant.” Such chapters, marvelous as they are, are merely brilliant. The heart and soul of this breathtaking book by O’Brien are the selections that center on family and friends: evocative pieces of writing that seem almost to constitute a new genre, certainly a new sort of memoir: as dense with detail and echoing allusion, as full of catchy and telling hooks, as an abandoned Beach Boys masterpiece or a collaborative novel by the Three Johns (Cheever, O’Hara, Updike).

These personal selections culminate emotionally with a piece woven around a beautiful girl named Susie, whom O’Brien falls for in the 10th grade, to the tune of “Surfer Girl”; stays friends with during the “new rock” years of their adolescence (when “the music seemed ... the solution and dissolution of every perplexity”); and who comes to an eventual tragic end. That end prompts another friend, a former rock bandmate of O’Brien’s older brother, to “inevitably” write a song about this young woman to whom songs (from “Surfer Girl” to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”) had always somehow clung. “Right away I have a premonition that this song isn’t going to go away,” O’Brien writes. “I’m going to be hearing it for the rest of my life, over breakfast, while waiting to take money out of the bank, while preparing for takeoff.... Musicians who weren’t born yet the day she died will open their sets with it. Rock critics will resent its success.... [I]t will find new applications, finally even coming to seem like an appropriate record to play in commemoration of the attack on my city in September 2001....”

One of O’Brien’s key themes throughout is how music can freeze time, catching the past in a never-ending present. But when this particular song enters the world, he finds, it doesn’t evoke memories of his late friend but rather displaces them. “In any case,” he thinks, “music brings back nothing.” Yet later he returns to the notion and fact of music as solace, as source and depository of memories, primal and personal. In a moving coda, the author describes a scene around a table in a house where his family gathered in knowledge of the imminent death of O’Brien’s mother. Here, after eating and drinking and talking, the O’Briens began to sing.

“Our culture, it turns out,” O’Brien concludes, “consists at its deepest stratum of whatever songs or parts of songs we can remember. It’s a lifeline.” And O’Brien lists some of the timeless songs his family threw as a mutual lifeline into the air that night: “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” “Mean to Me,” “Am I Blue,” “April in Paris,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “The Way You Look Tonight” -- and “Dancing in the Dark.” That last tune, published in 1931, is the melodic work (with lyricist Howard Dietz) of Arthur Schwartz, father of Jonathan Schwartz, author of “All in Good Time,” a book miles away in style from O’Brien’s but in its own way striking and memorable.

Well known for his long-running New York radio program celebrating (among other things) the Great American Songbook, Schwartz too grew up with music. Born in New York, he spent formative years in Southern California, where his father worked as a movie producer and songwriter. The Schwartzes lived in the Hollywood Hills and then in Beverly Hills, where party guests included Judy Garland, Johnny Mercer and Yip Harburg.

Left in the care of a housekeeper for long periods while his parents went east on Broadway business, lonely Jonathan pretended to broadcast a radio show in his bedroom, spinning discs by Judy, Artie, Bing -- all singing only songs written by his father. “I loved him so much,” Schwartz writes of his suave and talented dad, “particularly when he was on the piano bench.”

It’s a strange and sad, if superficially glamorous, life the Schwartzes lived, as poignantly evoked by their only child: “Evasions

As Jonathan grows into an uncertain future, he finds increasingly elaborate ways of hiding himself: creating an alternate persona (“Robert Delvecchio”), who doesn’t have Jonathan’s insecurities; drinking larger quantities of alcohol (which he began sampling at age 10). He has healthier escapes too: writing short stories, singing professionally, finally broadcasting on the radio for real.

Thus ensue the incidents of a lifetime (and a memoir): an on-again, off-again, on-again acquaintanceship with Frank Sinatra, estrangement from his dad, then loving realliance: “I vowed to conquer the world for him, to bring him pride in his son, to make him happy.” There are also the Manhattan club gigs, the popular radio shows, the publication of four books, three marriages, other relationships, two children. There are alcoholic excesses, suicidal temptations and an ambivalent stint at the Betty Ford Center. Finally there is the death of his dad, who never had that final smash-hit Broadway show.

“All in Good Time” is a compelling chronicle, filled with affecting scenes. It has the somber, shadowy beauty of the Arthur Schwartz song catalog (remember the gorgeous “Haunted Heart,” as sung by Jo Stafford? Sinatra’s “I See Your Face Before Me”?) as played on piano by the author with his “Stravinskyed” left hand. It’s the music that ties these scenes together, that commemorates the bad and the good.

The book ends with a touching account of a January 2001 Lincoln Center tribute to the music of Arthur Schwartz, supervised and hosted by Jonathan Schwartz, conducted by Jonathan’s half-brother, attended by Jonathan’s appreciative children. Afterward, alone in the night, the author meditates: “I heard my father playing the piano, confident, fearless. The sound of my blood.” Geoffrey O’Brien also writes: “The song is the place where perfection stays.... Songs suspend time.” As do books, when they’re as good as these. *