Tim Lawrence is a freelance music writer and Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London.

Hold On to Your Dreams

Duke University Press

Contents

Chapter One

Charles Arthur Russell-or Chuck-was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, to a Methodist father and a Quaker mother in 1922. Having graduated from high school, he attended Parks Air College until he was expelled for spending too much time in Missouri, where his Oskaloosan girlfriend, Emily Alsop, was studying liberal arts. During World War II Chuck joined the U.S. Navy, after which he was accepted into flight school and married Emily, who gave birth to their first daughter, Kate, in 1946. By then Chuck had enrolled at Iowa State University to study civil engineering, and as he supplemented his GI Bill income with a series of unglamorous jobs, Chuck switched programs before he gave up his studies in order to open an insurance agency in the fall of 1948. Chuck and Emily's second child, Julie, was born in 1949, and a couple of years later, on 21 May 1951, the arrival of their first son, Charles Arthur, marked the completion of the family. Although nobody remarked upon it at the time, it would later appear significant that he was born on the night of a full moon.

Like John Cage, Captain Beefheart, La Monte Young, Harry Partch, Steve Reich, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, and other maverick musicians and composers born in the United States, Charles Arthur ended up developing a bold aesthetic practice that appeared to bear no relation to his place of birth. Founded in 1835 by Captain Nathan Boone, who had been ordered to find some land and build a fort, Oskaloosa was situated in the heart of the Corn Belt, some sixty miles southeast of Des Moines, the state capital of Iowa. It matured into a small municipality of some ten thousand residents, which made it the third largest town in Iowa. In 1938 Fortune magazine ran a feature titled "Oskaloosa vs. the U.S.," having selected Oskaloosa as the subject because it was considered to be a perfectly typical town, and in 1950 the town was honored with a Freedom Foundation Award. Born the following year, Charles Arthur would later conclude that his idea of freedom could be best pursued elsewhere, and he ended up running away from home at the age of sixteen. Within a few years he was writing post-minimalist orchestral music, angular folk songs for the cello, and avant-garde disco-music that sounded strange to Chuck and Emily, never mind their Oskaloosan friends.

Yet although Oskaloosa was a conservative town situated in a conservative state, Charley (as he liked to be referred to) was also challenged with the task of escaping a conservative era. "With the help of the GI Bill, men were ushered into schools and professions that would boost their economic status," explains his sister Kate. "At the same time, the government, the corporations, and the media pushed for larger families, forcing women to give up their wartime jobs and settle for so-called woman's work. But it was also an era of hope." Having worked hard and seized his opportunities, Chuck flourished in his new insurance business, while Emily's parents, the owners of the largest department store in Oskaloosa, also profited from the postwar economic boom. Elsewhere in the United States, economics and culture moved according to a similar rhythm. "Although activists and liberals may have been disappointed at the slow pace of social reform after World War II, the attention of most Americans was so riveted on the astonishing new world of consumerism and prosperity that social issues-for the moment, at least-seemed relatively unimportant," writes the historian William Chafe. "Rarely has a society experienced such rapid or dramatic change as that which occurred in America after 1945."

Prosperity didn't make the Russells synonymous with traditionalism, and they revealed themselves to be significantly less conservative than some of their friends at their country club when they adopted plans (put together by Chuck's architect brother) to build a redwood home in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright. But they could find no reason to challenge other widely accepted conventions, so Kate, Julie, and Charley would return from school to find Emily curled up in a chair, reading the latest selection from the Book-of-the-Month Club, and when Chuck returned from his office a little later, Emily would cook up a casserole while he put on a record. Stretching to the end of the flat Iowan horizon, the only clouds that lingered were "lucky ones" (as Charley would write later in his song "Lucky Cloud"). "Life was getting better, and my parents, along with almost everyone else, embraced the new lifestyle," adds Kate. "Who wouldn't after fifteen years of depression and war?"

Relocating to Iowa City and then to San Francisco before settling in New York City, Charley would move farther and farther away from the calm, protected enclave of Oskaloosa, and each departure would add weight to his maverick credentials. As Michael Broyles argues, the tradition of the maverick musician lies at the center of "possibly the strongest and most sacred myth of American society, that of rugged individualism," and the "inability or in some cases conscious unwillingness of the mavericks to compromise has been precisely why their voices have remained clear, or at least why they were not overwhelmed by the predominant European culture." Charley certainly found it difficult to compromise, and he left the Midwest not in order to lead an equivalent lifestyle in another part of the country, but instead to find a different group of friends, a contrasting set of social expectations, and ultimately, a more vibrant music culture. "Oskaloosa is a nice-sized town, but it's certainly rural," comments Emily. "The opportunities in a community of this size for a boy like Charley were limited." Chuck adds that his son needed to leave Oskaloosa in order to pursue his dream. "Looking back, I don't think we would be talking about him today if he hadn't run away. If he had stayed at home, he might have become an insurance agent or something."

For all his rebellious tendencies, however, Charley never left the experience of his childhood in Oskaloosa entirely behind. As a kid, he loved to listen to Chuck tell stories about the wind and the high seas of the South Pacific, where he had served on a minesweeper, and Chuck's passion for music was another formative influence. Milling around the stereo, Charley would have heard Chuck select a range of classical composers, including Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, and Vivaldi, while on other occasions his father would opt for the songs of Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, or Bessie Smith. More often than not, however, Chuck would pick out some jazz from his collection of three to four hundred LPS. Dave Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Ahmad Jamal featured regularly, as did Leonard Bernstein's What Is Jazz?. Instrumentalists who played with "real rhythm," such as Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, and Fats Waller, raised the temperature, as did the full-throttle Dixieland of Bob Crosby and his Bobcats, Tommy Dorsey, and Jimmy Rushing. When Chuck was in the mood for something calmer, he favored the more sophisticated playing and writing of Duke Ellington, Jimmy Giuffre, and Teddy Wilson, along with the musicals and film scores of Andr Previn. This music continued to run through Charley long after he thought he had left Oskaloosa behind.

Emily's musical influence might have been even more profound. Having played the bass viola in her younger years, she took up the cello around the time Charley started to go to school, and when she wasn't practicing in the family's music room, she would sit down with Charley and talk about classical music as it played on the stereo. More musical than his sisters, Charley took up the piano when he was in second grade, aged six, and soon started to play by ear. His first tutor, Cecil Penniston, one of a handful of African Americans who lived in Oskaloosa, focused on theory, after which Raymond Comstock, who led the high-school orchestra, concentrated on getting him to read music-specifically because this was something Charley believed he could avoid. In the fourth grade Charley thought about switching to the trombone, but chose the cello when he was told he could join the school orchestra straight away (rather than wait a semester) if he opted for a stringed instrument. That decision deepened Charley's musical bond with his mother, even if the two of them ended up fighting over access to the cello until Chuck bought his wife a $650 replacement. When he reached sixth grade, Chuck and Emily agreed to let him travel alone to Des Moines in order to take private classes at Drake University. Acknowledging Charley's progress and talent, the school asked him to compose music for its production of The Emperor's New Clothes, which was performed in the spring of 1966. After someone complimented Charley on the music he replied, "Just wait till I finish it."

Charley's musical progress couldn't paper over his shortcomings, however, and as he grew older Chuck and Emily began to worry about his social skills. Unlike his father, who was an athletics enthusiast, Charley preferred dinosaurs, Erector Sets, astronomy, fish, puppet-making, and magic to sports, and he broke his arm attempting the high jump on one of the few occasions he tried to be more athletic. Charley's refusal to take sports seriously became a major source of friction, especially with Emily and Kate, who feared it would mark him out as being irredeemably different from other boys, and some fierce battles ensued. "He was named exactly like my father, and it seemed like he had to be like my father," says Kate, who attempted to play the role of mediator when arguments broke out, but usually ended up backing her parents. Having made Charley run laps around the backyard pond when he went through a chubby-boy phase, Chuck took to admonishing him for being a "poor sport" when he reacted badly to things not going his way, and although the barb was delivered with ribbing humor, it always drove Charley crazy. "At that moment when he really needed us, I think we failed him to a certain degree," adds Kate.

As Charley's adolescent angst deepened, an aggressive rash of acne erupted over his face and back, and it's possible that the success of Kate (who was outgoing, creative, and flamboyant), Julie (who blossomed into a popular homecoming queen), and Chuck (who became mayor of Oskaloosa in January 1964) compounded his sense of being an outsider and maybe also a failure. Morose and timid, awkward and dreamy, self-absorbed and self-conscious, Charley was an outwardly square kid, and although he was undoubtedly bright, his cleverness could be irritating. The owner of an unpleasant temper, Charley also required only the mildest provocation or mishap to go into a sulk or a rage, and he became something of a loner. "He was abnormal from the point of view of the all-American boy," says Chuck. "He was different, and I think kids made fun of him." At this juncture nobody could have imagined that he would only come into his own in downtown New York; even less that he would manage this with many of his personality traits intact.

Charley wasn't completely friendless, however, and it came as some relief to Chuck and Emily when he struck up a friendship with Kent Goshorn, who had been "kind of impressed" when he saw Charley react with laughter rather than tears after breaking his arm at the high jump. Although Goshorn was used to hanging out with what he calls "jock types," he shared Charley's interest in the arts as well as his frustration with life in Oskaloosa, and they started to get together for music-listening sessions when Chuck and Emily went out on a Saturday night and the house was theirs to claim. During these evenings Goshorn would regularly pick out "British invasion" rock, while Charley would select a mix of classical music, folk, and jazz. "I would go over to his house to trade records, and trying to be precocious, I would bring out Bob Dylan or James Brown or something like that," Goshorn commented later. "Arthur would bring out Stravinsky and John Coltrane." At the same time, Charley also attempted to influence the taste of his parents, who didn't appreciate rock and roll. "[Chuck and Emily] had a stereo system and the speakers went into their bedroom," recalls Goshorn. "Charley would play the Rolling Stones at very low volume when they were sleeping to 're-programme them,' so he said."

Entering into the countercultural spirit of the era, Charley and Goshorn also read poetry, smoked pot, and grew their hair long, and when the high school authorities started to quash this modest wave of oppositional culture in the fall of 1964, Charley refused to conform. "Come on, Charley," Chuck and Emily would say. "You can't rock the boat too much." But the rocking had only just begun, and during 1965, Chuck's second year as mayor, Charley started to spend time with a group of older boys and young men who bonded around a commitment to rock and roll, folk music, and the arts, as well as a willingness to experiment with marijuana and LSD. "To me it was a spiritual awakening," says Leon Van Weelden, one of Kate's former high-school sweethearts and an established member of the group. "Having grown up in a conservative, fundamentalist religious community and family, it was an opening for me to see life through a totally different lens."

Appearing in black jeans and a white shirt, and demonstrating a preference for music that the rest of the group found uninteresting or incomprehensible, Charley became an awkward presence. "Some people saw him as a kind of nuisance," recalls Van Weelden, who had been a dedicated sports enthusiast until he tried acid to the accompaniment of Eastern music and the Book of Dao. "He was a goofy little kid and we weren't sure whether he was cool enough to hang out with us, or trustworthy enough to keep his mouth shut, or stable enough not to get into trouble one way or another." Possessing the right combination of determination and intellectual flair, however, Charley was allowed to stick around, and in 1966, the group judged him to be ready to trip. "There were times when he would do marijuana or LSD for two or three days in a row and every weekend," adds Van Weelden. "He sometimes went to school while he was tripping. He was pretty indiscriminate and really didn't have any boundaries at that point. It was a blessing and a curse. It allowed him to explore without judgement. It helped form who he was."

Chuck's and Emily's tolerance reached its limit during this period. Although they didn't discover he was experimenting with LSD until later, the realization that he was reading Timothy Leary-one of the key philosophers of the psychedelic movement-left them deeply worried. When they realized he was smoking marijuana, a relatively unknown drug at the time, they booked a session with a psychologist. Charley's sophomore-year grades were disappointing rather than disastrous-he received a middling mixture of Bs and Cs, plus a D for P.E.-but Chuck and Emily believed he could do better and remained troubled by his disobedient, slothful, belligerent demeanor. Tempers spilled over eventually when Charley refused to cut his hair and swore in front of Emily, which prompted Chuck to "bounce him on the floor" (as Chuck puts it). The Russells were both furious and distraught that they had lost control of their wayward son, while Charley's overriding concern was to escape from Oskaloosa.

Iowa City

The Russell family had always traveled around. Languid summers were spent in Minnesota, where Emily's parents owned a cabin by one of the state's ten thousand lakes, and it was there that C. C., Emily's father, taught Charley how to drive a boat and fish. Cutting through Texas, the Russells also went on a road trip to Mexico and headed to the Gulf of Mexico before they made their way to Acapulco, where they came face to face with the Pacific Ocean. On a subsequent holiday they went to Chicago, where they visited museums and journeyed on the subway in order to witness the city's tenements and slums. Chuck and Emily had built their home in the Midwest, but they wore UN-tinted spectacles and wanted their children to see the world.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Hold On to Your Dreamsby Tim Lawrence Copyright © 2009 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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