by Peter Cates

Gerard Robichaud

Novelist Gerard Robichaud (1908-2008) was born in Québec, moved with his parents to Lewiston as a child, returned to Québec at 18 to study for the priesthood and practice writing stories during his spare time, but then left the priesthood to return to Lewiston in 1928 and over the next twenty years began developing further as a writer .

Maine Speaks contains a chapter, The Bad One, from Robichaud’s 1961 novel Papa Martel which easily stands on its own as a short story. The setting is a 1920s mill town, Groveton (strongly resembling Lewiston) and depicts a French Canadian family living in a very crowded apartment.

A local priest talks the parents into taking in a 17-year-old orphaned girl who’s been very difficult to manage. What gives this story a special quality is how the situation unfolds in a most unusual manner; how again people are so seldom what they seem; and how clouds have surprising silver linings.

The orphan Bad One Sophia ends up engaging the family and community in a most endearing manner while there are the elements of sly humor, local color, snappy dialog and unspoken attitudes that are the meat and potatoes of any good story.

In an interview, Robichaud summed up his own approach as a writer- “I wanted people to be better than they were after they read the story.”

A choice four lines of dialog between the family patriarch Louis and the priest Father Lebois before the parents make any decision:

“And this little girl?” Louis asked. “How old is she?”

“Just seventeen,” said Father Lebois sadly, “and already the boys chase her. It’s a pity, but she’s also very beautiful. “

“At seventeen,” Louis murmured, “everybody is beautiful.”

Tony Williams

Tony Williams (1928-1992) was lead singer for the Platters from 1953 to 1959 and contributed to the group’s extraordinary success with such hits as The Great Pretender and Jerome Kern’s Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.

In 1957 as a solo singer, he recorded a seven-inch 45 (Mercury 71158) of two selections – Let’s Start All Over Again; and When You Return, its melody being that of Danny Boy/Londonderry Air. And they were vocally top notch doo wop style arrangements.

White Heat

White Heat is a 1949 film noir classic starring James Cagney (1899-1986) as the psychopathic gangster Cody Jarrett, Margaret Wycherly (1881-1956) as the equally formi­dable Ma Jarrett and a superb supporting cast that included Virginia Mayo, Steve Cochrane, Edmund O’Brien, Fred Clark etcs. and astutely directed by Raoul Walsh.

Fritz Kreisler

Two acoustically recorded 12-inch shellacs present two violinists who shared the same birthday of February 2 and ex­changed greeting cards.

Fritz Kreisler (1875-1963) recorded Dvorak’s Humoresque (Victor Red Seal 74180) in 1919 and played with his justly famed unique delicacy and exquisite lyricism. In 1947, he closed his violin case for good.

Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987) recorded Sarasate’s splendid virtuoso piece Introduction and Tarentelle (Victrola Red Seal 74626) the previous year at the age of 17 and even then displayed the total technical and musical supremacy as possibly the greatest violinist who ever lived. Itzhak Perlman once commented that Heifetz again and again could do bowings and phrasing that he and other violinists could never do.

by Peter Cates

Gingersnaps

A 1956 seven-inch 45 (Kapp K-226X) features the Gingersnaps, four women from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, who had been friends in high school. They perform two novelty bubblegum pop songs, Gingerbread; and Lenny! Lenny! This record was for me an intriguing historic curiosity because, having been born in 1951, the ‘50s have remained an immensely fascinating time warp.

The father of one of the women was friendly with the Chordettes, also from Sheboygan, whose megahit records Mister Sandman; and Lollipop Lollipop each sold over a million copies in 1953-54 and helped these singers get bookings for concerts and recording sessions, although only this record and two or three other discs were released.

Musically speaking, the vocals and arrangements weren’t half bad, the women singing with sincerity, but the results were derivative and sounding too much like their fellow Sheboygans, the Chordettes.

Two other groups with the name Gingersnaps need to be mentioned to avoid confusion. One is an African-American blues group of singers from the Deep South who signed a contract with RCA Victor in 1945 and recorded a few 78s, the second consisting of musicians from Ukraine who started performing as an electronic rock group in New York City in 2019.

Alfred Tennyson

Alfred (Lord) Tennyson (1809-1892) published a book length poem In Memoriam in 1850 as a tribute to a close friend Arthur Henry Hallam who died from a stroke in 1833, at the age of 22. The poem was not only a powerful elegy about the loss of a friend but also a critique on the “modern age” in England during the age of Queen Victoria (1819-1901) when religious faith was increasingly seen as being replaced by hard cold materialism, prosperity and scientific progress. Thus a certain cynicism and despair among more sensitive souls was on the rise.

This cynicism and despair is touched on quite brilliantly and astutely in some verses on the life of a couple who have been married for decades and these verses just might resonate in the world we live in today:

“These two-they dwelt with eye on eye,
Their hearts of old have beat in tune,
Their meetings made December June,
Their every parting was to die.

“Their love has never passed away;
The days she never can forget
Are earnest that he loves her yet,
Whate’er the faithless people say.

[But then this note of marital happiness is pretty much destroyed by the next verse in which there is so often one spouse who loves still and is no longer loved in return, just co-existing, and getting the raw end of the deal. The cold fish husband in the marriage is still living with the loving wife, he still loves her, but he’s just not showing it any longer. ]

“Her life is lone, he sits apart,
He loves her yet, she will not weep,
Tho’ rapt in matters dark and deep
He seems to slight her simple heart.”

Tennyson implied a certain sarcasm about the oafish husband being “rapt in matters dark and deep” and seeming “to slight her simple heart.” This poet conveyed a tough yet needed realism about marriage among our ancestors, the perils of living under the same roof for decades and the suffering so often occurring between husbands and wives having to live under that same roof. And he articulated these thematic concerns with power and eloquence.

by Peter Cates

A childhood memory

Among my many childhood memories were the innumerable Sunday drives, when gas was inexpensive, down to Pemaquid, Rockport, Port Clyde, Belfast, Owl’s Head, St. George.

One particular memory is of the humongous rock quarries in St. George and it was brought to mind when I was browsing in Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present (1995, University of Maine Press) and came across a paragraph on the beginnings of the quarry industry during the early 19th century:

“Maine’s granite quarries were first opened by local companies using local capital. These were usually small firms with fewer than twenty-five employees. The business was fiercely competitive, as was the construction industry generally, and wages and profits fluctuated widely. In the second half of the century, the industry was stabilized through two developments. During the 1870s, the federal government issued lucrative contracts for public buildings, known as “fifteen percent contracts” because they guaranteed that amount of profit to the builders and, by extension, to the suppliers. Several large quarry owners gained a monopoly over these contracts and profited heavily. ”

Needless to say, greed increased with the wealth and relations between management and labor deteriorated.

Dean Martin

Dean Martin recorded two quietly wistful ballads – Dreamy Old New England Moon; and Three Wishes – on a ten-inch Capitol 78 that was released in April 1949. What particularly enhanced Dino’s decently professional singing was the exquisitely crafted arrangements of Paul Weston who directed a studio orchestra consisting of some of the best strings and woodwinds session players to be found on the west coast and a backup group of harmonizing women.

NCIS Hawai’i

Though not quite on the same level as the Mark Harmon original, NCIS Hawaii’s first seven episodes for season one have proven entertaining. Vanessa Lachey as Jane Tennant, the lead agent for the Pearl Harbor branch of the Navy Criminal Investi­gation Service, had conveyed commendable presence.

Episode 5, Gaijing, which deals with the murder of a visiting Japanese officer, has an unusual plot twist. A woman who was close to both the victim and his girlfriend who had been murdered the previous year is the prime suspect because of what seems to be a psychopathic personality disorder. It’s the surprising plot twist that gave this episode unusual merit.

Madeline Zima’s performance as the suspect was quite extraordinary in her development of this character.

Leopold Stokowski

A 12-inch acoustically recorded shellac of the concluding part three of the Overture to Wagner’s opera Tannhauser had Leopold Stokowski conducting the Phil­adel­phia Orchestra in one of the most exciting performances to be heard when the horn was used for recording instead of the microphone. Stokowski not only drew extraordinary playing from the orchestra but achieved the most vivid sound from the still crude horn technology.

Stokow­ski’s other discs from before 1924, when Victor developed the electric microphone system, were also quite vivid in sound. And he would live long enough to record with stereo and four channel microphone set ups before he passed away in 1977 at the age of 95, and with a recording contract until he reached 100.

by Peter Cates

Joyce Butler

In an 1995 textbook anthology, Maine, the Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present, the late Kennebunk historian Joyce Butler provided an essay on family and community life from 1783 to 1861.

A few items:

Saco was originally Pepperelborough, “a rough lumbering town.”

The missionary Paul Coffin considered Union “a place for young men to make themselves.”

A tradesman in Falmouth bought 7,800 acres between the Saco and Ossipee Rivers in 1787 for under a thousand dollars, a purchase that later became the town of Hiram.

Dancing, Blind Man’s Bluff, and backgammon were some of the social activities enjoyed by the wealthy classes in Portland.

A 15 year old teenager from Denmark, Rufus Porter, walked the 106 mile round trip to Portland to seek his fortune.

Richard Wagner

Parsifal was Richard Wagner’s last opera and given its world premiere in 1882 at Bayreuth, the opera house in Germany that was built to the composer’s specifications and to this day is a mecca for opera lovers.

It has a plot centered on a mythical King Arthurish knight, Parsifal, and his search for the holy grail (During the 1970s, Monty Python did its own version of this holy grail search, resulting in a very hilarious film.) and runs five hours, quite a lengthy evening.

The opera has provoked extreme reactions in its history – composers Gustav Mahler and Claude Debussy found it the greatest experience of their life while Igor Stravinsky and novelist Mark Twain detested it.

I myself enjoy the music in this opera and have not bothered to follow the story line, being of the belief that appreciation of the music should come before trying to figure out the plot and its characters. When the music is firmly in the listener’s mind and heart, then further study is fruitful.

During the last month, I listened to three different recordings of Parsifal, each of them of exceptional merit. The first one is from 1950, and features Vittorio Gui conducting an Italian language production at La Scala in Milan with tenor Africo Baldelli in the title role and the legendary soprano Maria Callas as the significant woman Kundry.

The second set, from 1973, presents Sir Georg Solti leading the Vienna Philharmonic with Rene Kollo as Parsifal and Christa Ludwig as Kundry. #3 from 1981 has Herbert von Karajan directing the Berlin Philharmonic, Peter Hofmann’s Parsifal and Dunja Vejzovic’s Kundry.

Good news for thrifty listeners- all three recordings can be heard on YouTube.

Al Hibbler

Jazz singer Al Hibbler (1915-2001) recorded a 1954 ten inch lp of six selections for Columbia Records House Party series with Duke Ellington and his orchestra and gave performances to be savored slowly; they included two Great American Songbook classics, Don’t Get Around Much Anymore and The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise, which was frequently heard during the dark days of World War II.

Nancy Wilson

Nancy Wilson (1937-2018) appeared on a memorable 1970 episode of Hawaii Five-O, Trouble in Mind, as a nightclub singer with addiction problems. Even in that role, she conveyed wonderful stage presence singing with a small combo.

A 1991 Co­lumbia cassette, With My Lover Beside Me, is an album of songs by lyricist Johnny Mercer and singer/composer Barry Manilow. As with her numerous other albums, this one comes highly recommended.

by Peter Cates

Dylan and Vee

At a 2013 concert in St. Paul, Minnesota, Bob Dylan paid tribute to Bobby Vee (1943-2016), who was in the audience. Dylan played piano as part of Vee’s backup band for two gigs in 1959 and the two singers had remained friends and performed together on occasion over subsequent decades.

Dylan, who had performed with so many legends in concerts, described Vee as “the most beautiful person I’ve ever been on the stage with.”

One could point out a world of difference between Bobby Vee’s Rubber Ball and Bob Dylan’s Mister Tambourine Man; it would also be a waste of time and space. Instead one admires the tribute from one American music statesman to another.

The interest in Bobby Vee came after recently listening to a Liberty seven-inch 45 record of two of Vee’s megahits back in the very early ‘60s when he and two other Bobbys, Rydell and Vinton, were bombarding the Billboards and airwaves.

The songs, Run to Him; and Walkin’ with My Angel, were written by Gerry Goffin and his ex-wife Carole King, they being famous for But Will You Love Me Tomorrow. And both songs were given superb production work by the Liberty records founder Snuff Garrett (He signed to the label singer Julie London and Alvin and the Chipmunks) with some of the finest session players in the business and the Johnny Mann Singers doing backup.

Even more impressive was Vee’s singing with a beautifully projected vocal register, clear articulation, characterful phrasing and vibrant warmth. Not only did I listen to my very good copy of the 45 but also to the remastered sound, derived from the original source material during later decades, to be heard on YouTube which had outstanding sound lacking in the old 45s.

I also listened to Youtubes of Vee’s very captivating hits, Rubber Ball, and the classic The Night Has a Thousand Eyes and several others that weren’t quite as good as material but were still given top notch arrangements.

At the 2013 concert, Bob Dylan sang an early hit of Bobby Vee, Suzie Baby, and it can be heard on YouTube, along with Vee’s original recording. I actually liked Vee’s better. Dylan’s own singing at the age of 72 just wasn’t what it used to be but it was an important historical moment.

The two singers did critique each other’s musicianship in a pithy manner:

Dylan – Vee “had a metallic, edgy tone to his voice and it was as musical as a silver bell.”

Vee- Dylan “played pretty good in the key of C.”

Bobby Vee died in 2016 at the age of 73 from Alzheimer’s which he had been suffering from for several years. His wife died the previous year from a kidney ailment.

Lorin Maazel

Conductor Lorin Maazel (1930-2015), for good or bad, has been one of the most fascinating individuals who ever directed a symphony orchestra. He succeeded George Szell (1897-1970) as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra in 1971, staying ten years before becoming director of the Vienna State Opera and, as far as I am concerned, successfully followed perfectionist Szell’s very hard act.

In 1976, Maazel and the Clevelanders recorded a set of the Brahms 4 Symphonies, Haydn Variations and Tragic and Academic Festival Overtures. It was reviewed in high fidelity along with another set of the Symphonies and 2 Overtures but lacking the Haydn Variations that was released the same year and featured Eugen Jochum (1902-1987) leading the London Philharmonic.

Both sets were trashed by the record critic whose ears, as far as I was concerned, were screwed on wrong. I own shelves of different Brahms Symphonies and I have found that both Maazel and Jochum conducted very exciting performances that brought out the balance of rip-roaring romantic emotions in Johannes Brahms’s own psyche and the sternly crafted architecture that this composer imposed, based on his admiration of the 18th century examples of Bach, Handel and Haydn.

The sets remain among my favorites. Both Jochum and Maazel conveyed a love of this composer’s inspired music but brought a differently personalized individuality to the performances, unlike some conductors of recent years who copy cat each other with dull performances and wouldn’t let themselves go emotionally if their lives depended on it.

There are, however, some annoying quirks in Maazel’s conducting of these pieces – a ridiculously fast tempo in the last movement of the 1st Symphony, some limp phrasing in the first movement of the 2nd movement that drags it out and, at odd moments, a ho-hum manner with phrasing and detail.

But these annoying moments are few. All in all, a set worth seeking out for the curious listener.

During Maazel’s Cleveland years, he recorded prize-winning sets of Prokofiev’s complete Romeo and Juliet ballet and Gershwin’s complete Porgy and Bess, along with a really good Beethoven 9 Symphonies that was pretty well ignored by the critics.