REVIEW POTPOURRI: Looking back

by Peter Cates

Looking back

After I received my Bachelor of Science degree in English in May 1973, from the University of Southern Maine, I was now qualified to teach that subject at the secondary high school level. Soon I would discover that job openings were scarce in Maine so I worked as a menial laborer on Dad’s construction crew while still living at home.

Leisure activities:

Reading 20th century novels by Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust and Knut Hamsun, with the occasional nod to John Steinbeck, Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday.

An unsuccessful attempt to study a cheap paperback translation of the Book of I Ching because a very lovely woman friend recommended it highly – I later found out that it was not only a favorite of the hippie counter culture but also Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler.

Listening to records.

Going out to Waterville’s legendary night clubs to drink beer and hear loud live rock bands. Those night clubs included the still existing Chez Paree, on Water Street, the You Know Whose Pub, on the Concourse, and the no longer existing Black Cat Tavern, on Kennedy Memorial Drive, and the Factory, a basement dive next door to the Hotel Emma.

One event was a Beach Boys concert at Colby College (At that time, my favorite album of them was Surf’s Up while I considered earlier ones such as Pet Sounds, Beach Boys Live and Surfin’ Safari overrated.). I remember the stage being surrounded by security guards, whose parameters were then destroyed when the group immediately invited everybody to move closer.

Memorable records from that summer included the original Broadway musical A Little Night Music from Stephen Sondheim; Pierre Boulez conducting the New York Philharmonic in Bela Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra; Sundown Lady from former Brazil 66 lead singer Lani Hall; Bruno Walter’s powerful recording from the 1940s of the Mahler 4th Symphony on the inexpensive reissue label Odyssey; the premium priced LP of Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer and Kindertotenlieder movingly sung by baritone Hermann Prey; the pop rock collage Wings by Latin-American composer Michel Columbier with contributions from Bill Medley of Righteous Brothers fame, Paul Williams and the above-mentioned Lani Hall; and the brilliantly eloquent Fritz Reiner conducting the Chicago Symphony in Ravel’s Alborado del Gracioso, Valse Nobles and Sentimentales and the Pavane for a Dead Princess.

(All the above music is accessible on YouTube).

Around late June, I came down with a week-long case of the summer flu and could barely move. The misery was compounded by a heat wave, only alleviated by my sick room being located on the shady side of the house. I then had a lot of time to think about what I really wanted to do with my life and decided that I was not exactly ready to settle down to village life.

I called the above-mentioned woman friend who happened to live in Boston and asked if I could stay in her apartment for a few days while looking for a job, preferably in a record store. I hopped a Greyhound and, within three days, landed a job in the record department at the downtown Jordan Marsh department store, thinking at the time that I was the first East Vassalboro Cates to work there, only to find out from Grammie Cates that Grampy had worked in the book department 67 years earlier (Having graduated from Haverford College, in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where South China’s own Rufus Jones was teaching philosophy, Grampy had decided that he too wasn’t yet ready to settle down to village life.).

To be continued next week.