Off To See The Elephant

Forming the Rock

At the risk of this series turning into click bait - allow me to indulge as I go back to the beginning for a little bit…

Forming the Rock

My birth was an accident. I come from a musical family, conceived in the summer of ’69 and born in the spring of ’70 to Robert and Barbara Swan in Berlin, Wisconsin. My brother, Tom (seven) and sister, Cathy (five) were starting to grow up, and then along came me! My mom was planning to get her Masters in Musical Performance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and when she found out she was pregnant again, she ran up to the attic and cried. “It was a long day of painting on a hot day, I was really tired, and your father took advantage of me.”

This sounds worse than it was. Mom had unfinished business. She was a serious student of classical piano with a fallback degree in primary education. This degree got her work out west, where she lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, as I do now, back in the late 50s. She taught kindergarten at the Alvarado school in SF, and also down in Pacifica at one point but the main reason she moved out here was to study with Egon Petri, a famous pianist who was nearing the end of his life by then, in Oakland, the city I now call home.

Petri was a purveyor of a particular style of play and teaching that involved learning excerpts of actual music, as opposed to a heavy weight on technical studies. This is how I would turn out to approach music.

In her early twenties, Mom was offered admission into the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, but she turned it down because she said she was too old. Later that year she got hepatitis which she blamed on bad food and moved back home to Oshkosh, Wisconsin to recuperate. She ended up staying and marrying my dad in 1961, whom she had met on a blind date before her journey to California. They settled in Berlin. Much as she says she was glad to go home, it’s also clear that she regrets not pursuing her studies in music with the same level of intensity and settling down so soon. Things might have gone differently had it been ten years later.

Berlin (pronounced BUR-lin) is your typical small town in the Midwest. It is located on the Fox River, which is an important link from the Atlantic Ocean into the St. Lawrence Seaway through the Great Lakes and, ultimately, to the Mississippi River. Founded in 1848, the same year Wisconsin became a state, it’s about twenty-five miles southwest of Oshkosh, where my mom was born and raised, and twelve miles from rival town Ripon, the birthplace of the Republican party. Berlin had a sign for a while advertising it as the Fur and Leather City, which made sense historically given its proximity to the Fox River, New France, and the North American fur trade. In more recent years it has settled into being a bedroom community for the larger towns downriver such as Oshkosh and Appleton.

Oshkosh was the big, almost unfathomable city to me as a kid with its fifty thousand people. Mom’s mother, Genevra, was a high school English teacher, and her father was a mortician. Grandpa Ollie was an avid outdoorsman; and was known in his circles as a master of the craft of carving decoys. Pulling pranks was also a specialty. In the days when my uncles didn’t know how to tie their own ties, my grandpa was happy to tie them, but there was a catch: they’d have to lie down on a table.

That mischievous lineage is the most likely to have lead me down the path to playing rock and roll music. Any ability to be studious, which happened eventually after I outgrew being the class clown, can be traced to my grandma Kay and my grandma Nev. Kay received her PhD in French back in 1938 and to this day is the only known member of my family to have earned that distinction. My education was not so accelerated.

Here I am in 1981 screwing up the only family photo where everyone else looked perfect:

(Top Row, L-R: Dad, Cathy, Tom, Mom; Middle, take a wild guess; Bottom Row: Grandma Kay, Grandma Nev, and Grandpa Ollie)

When Mom settled back home after her odyssey to Northern California, she had some misgivings about Berlin and pined for more culture that a bigger city could offer. All that aside, and despite her initial fears of another small child derailing her goal of getting her Masters in Music for Performance, she received her diploma in 1976.

She got a Masters in Musicology soon after that and became involved in the Berlin community by fundraising for a Steinway concert grand piano to be donated to Clay Lamberton Middle School through a series of benefit concerts over two years.

My dad, born and raised in Berlin, played the flute in high school and played in the University of Wisconsin Marching band under the direction of Ray Dvorak in the late 40s, but music wasn’t his focus. He finished his economics degree in three years and then studied law for one year before deciding he could do without pleadings. He then moved back to Berlin to work for my grandpa Barney at the Truesdell Fur Company. “Diamonds don’t keep you warm,” my dad used to say. Kids, I’m sorry about all the animals.

Rounding out our musical family, my brother played the trumpet, later getting his business degree, and my sister played the french horn but got her bachelor’s degree in Art. Both of my siblings also went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as would I. We never did play music all together in a jug band or anything, but my exposure to music started really early.  

Mom says that on my third birthday, she took me to a piano recital at Ripon College and a member of the faculty picked me up to show me a tuner. The blips and flashing lights were fascinating to me, she said. I threw a temper tantrum when it was taken away. By the way, Ripon happens to be the college that Harrison Ford was famously expelled from three days before graduation in 1964 for failing to complete a thesis on the playwright Edward Albee. He must have been afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Anyway, Mom also says that I never went anywhere without my record player. As a three-year-old, it was my security blanket. When I was seven, she asked me if I wanted to take violin lessons. It didn’t take her long to realize that I was getting awfully restless and disruptive sitting on a stool in the basement of the graduate music library while she was reading the latest Journal of the Musicological Society, so “yes” was a no-brainer. They did not have Ritalin back then.

I took lessons on campus at the University in Oshkosh and was taught violin by the Suzuki method. We spent the first few months practicing how to hold a violin, using a Froot Loops box with a ruler sticking out of it. The Suzuki method was unconventional, and more about ear training than sight reading, a valuable experience at a formative time in my life, something I would appreciate later on; but most of my contemporaries were kids who had started when they were three and could play circles around me by the time they were my age. I didn’t enjoy myself all that much as time wore on, but I stuck it out until I was ten. There was no orchestra in my junior high school in Berlin anyway, only band. So, I followed in my big brother’s footsteps and took up the trumpet from then on.

The trumpet I use to this day was originally Tom’s: a silver Vincent Bach Stradivarius. Another pragmatist in our family, Tom gave it to me in 1983 after he gave up band to concentrate on his business major in college. Most of the other kids in seventh grade still had bronze-colored Bundys, so my silver Bach trumpet definitely stood out (well, maybe not in this photo):

I was fifteen when my family uprooted itself from the town it had lived in since about 1908 and moved to the Chicago area. Dad’s fur business in Berlin fell upon hard times in the recession of the early 80s and by 1984, some local investors came in to bail the company out from bankruptcy. After that, my dad saw the writing on the wall, and it just so happened he was talking to an old Chicago friend in the industry he knew from their days on buying trips to New York. Out of the blue he asked my dad if he’d be willing to come to work for him. So off to Chicago we went.

In a sense, Dad was returning us to the Swan family roots in this country. My great grandfather emigrated from Cork, Ireland to Chicago in the 1880s and became a policeman. Family legend has it that Thomas Patrick Swan had a great singing voice but was also a heavy drinker. He was killed in 1902 shortly after being placed on the worst beat in town for drunkenly blowing the whistle on corrupt fellow cops one too many times while off duty. And the rest of the family moved to Berlin to escape the perpetrators of the crime who later said, after they had been caught and put in jail, that when they got out one day they would “get” my grandpa Barney -- so the story goes anyway.

We moved to Villa Park, a working-class suburb twenty miles due west of Chicago, three days before my sophomore year in high school started in the fall of 1985. Our house was right down the street from the factory that made Ovaltine. A Christmas Story, anyone? Son of a bitch...

I had a hard time meeting any friends right away. Tom and Cathy were out of the house by then, so my only companions were my albums, tapes, musical instruments, typewriter, tape recorder and thoughts that soon turned to fantasies of rock and roll glory.

It was around that time that I started teaching myself how to play guitar. The one laying around was a cheap one given to my brother for Christmas, 1977, the year I started violin. By 1985, it still had the original strings, but only four of ‘em. I tuned those strings to whatever sounded good. That guitar certainly helped build up calluses on my fingers – the action, or distance from the string to the fretboard, was very high. You could drive a Mack truck through the space in between.

1977:

1985 (Wearing the finest furs Truesdell’s had to offer):

Tom’s stamp on my musical upbringing also included records and tapes he would bring back from college. The first tape I popped in changed my life: Talking Heads, Fear of Music. He also left me his stereo, tape deck and record player he had bought in Madison when he moved out to LA after he graduated.

I started writing “song” lyrics around this time, but the music and melodies for these songs was mostly a clouded, vague idea in the back of my head that was never really developed. I never sang them out loud; I would just type the lyrics on my Smith Corona typewriter and stick them in a Trapper Keeper, fantasizing that I could work on them later once I bought a Yamaha DX7 keyboard, a Roland 808 drum machine and a Tascam Porta studio.

I also loved prog-rock, and I suppose a turning point on guitar would have been when I bought a book of songs by Genesis. I realized I needed to buy new strings. I also realized there was no way in hell I would learn prog-rock as a beginning guitar player no matter how many long winter nights I listened to “Selling England By The Pound.” I just studied the little pictures of the strange chords I could figure out and gradually started putting them together my own way. I would soon rationalize my inability to learn other people’s songs by saying that I wanted to do something original. The action on that guitar didn’t help. I gave myself plenty of excuses, and never did learn a lot of covers. Once I developed my own playing style on guitar and was technical enough to try, I didn’t really want to. I felt like it was a waste of time.

My mom, a piano teacher who had many, many students over the years, tried to teach me that instrument as well, but double-bar sight reading was beyond my grasp, and I was too impatient. I learned enough from her to know where all the notes were, but I couldn’t sit still long enough to stand the thought of taking lessons from her on an extended basis. I would bang out piano chords on my own, my mom would tell me to play softer so I wouldn’t knock the piano out of tune, and then my dad would walk in the room and tell me that I sounded a little like Dave Brubeck. I played the black keys a lot, and so did Brubeck, apparently. Maybe I was playing in 5/4 time by mistake.

I also had a fascination with tape recorders as a kid. My sister Cathy helped me figure out how to press “play” and “record” at the same time on my mom’s Panasonic when I was five years old. I’m pretty sure this was the model:

That simple, two-finger act opened up a whole new world to me. By age nine I tried out being a DJ. I put the tape recorder next to the speaker of my clock radio and then stopped the tape when the song was done, erased the DJ, and pretended I was the DJ. “That was ‘Call Me.’ Sung by Blondie.” Lots of the songs would be interrupted by “MOM, shhhhhh, I’m TAPING!” One of my “stations” was WSHI-TV. For some reason I didn’t make the connection that I was not on TV.

It took me a while to bring together all of the things I’d been doing as a kid creatively in silos. I had lyrics with no music, music with no lyrics, and played instruments that were either literally impossible to sing at the same time with, like the trumpet, or I was not ready to try. Back in Berlin I was tape recording, but mostly soliloquies about how bummed I was that I didn’t get to “screw those chicks” I met at the Rainbow’s End Roller Rink that weekend.

I would sing, but only when I knew nobody was listening. In elementary music class I’d purposely sing out of tune to fit in with the other boys, because none of us could sing the songs in the lower octaves yet but we didn’t want to sound like we were “singing like girls.” I got over that a little later.

I was also learning to perform, in a way. When I got to Junior High, I established myself as a class clown. We had an English teacher whose name was Mrs. Wildermuth. Many kids across a generation or two called her “Miss Wilderbeast,” behind her back. I’m sad to say I blurted it out loud, in front of the whole class. I’d do anything for a cheap laugh. I am ashamed to admit I might have been the last straw, she retired not long after I passed through. It was becoming clear that I needed an outlet to stay out of trouble.

Music was the only thing that channeled my hyperactivity and appetite for attention into something positive. Starting in seventh grade, I joined every possible musical outlet that the school provided, including “swing choir” as one of the youngest boys to pass the audition. I’m convinced there’s still video footage out there somewhere with me as a five-foot runt in my tuxedo with a cummerbund struggling to dance to the theme song from “Flashdance.” What a feeling!

I also played trumpet in the jazz band.  I forget exactly how I learned how to swing. Probably from my dad, who had a lot of jazz records from the 30s and 40s. And I did have a good ear. Miss Sidie, my band director in seventh grade, seemed to have enough faith in my abilities to have me walk all the way up front of the entire band to play a trumpet solo. I was the only soloist asked to do this in a concert. Maybe she thought that my reputation as a class clown meant I was not afraid to perform. She was right. I almost tripped on a mic cord on the way out, but didn’t miss a note.

This is the pic, same trumpet as I have now. Pretty sure I had my mom tape this concert too. Trust me, I look more scared than I felt. And I still remember that solo to this day:

While I was getting poor grades and detention slips, I managed to win second place in the school spelling bee. But instead of politely asking Mr. Ziemann to please repeat the word and use it in a sentence, I’d make a funny face and rudely say “What?!” And then I’d correctly spell the word while the kids in the audience were still laughing.

I loved to perform! Stage fright would come later. When I moved to Illinois, I felt like a fish out of water at first and it would take me a little while to get some confidence back. Willowbrook High School had a really great music program, especially the Symphonic Winds Ensemble. I also had private instruction for trumpet once a week, so I credit this program for developing my skills on horn, and for helping me gain confidence in myself as a player. But there was only so far I was willing to go when it came to the traditional, classical route. There was too much of a divide between that and the music I really wanted to play.

Finding a band like Beulah, where I could use each and every one of my abilities in some form or another in one place, would take another ten years. From the beginning I felt I needed to play with other people in order to put it all together. I aspired to the vague idea of “rock stardom” by the time I turned sixteen, but it took me a year or so to actually take the first step towards doing something about it. And it wasn’t by buying a Yamaha DX7, an 808 and a Tascam Portastudio, it was by starting a band with people I’d just met and telling them I’d be a great lead singer.  I had no idea what the fuck I was doing.

[Next chapter here.]