Pastor Miller

I remember Pastor Miller preaching at Barclay Heights Community Church. We met in the lodge of an old YMCA camp on Esopus Creek near Glenerie Falls. When the lodge became our permanent home, we changed the name of the church to Glenerie Chapel.

I remember Pastor Miller praying; his opening prayers were nearly the equal of his sermons. These were not pithy, punchy, sound-bited perfunctories; his prayers were ten minutes of engagement with God on matters of the day, from local to global.

I remember Pastor Miller’s velvet singing voice. It reminded me of a baritone Andy Williams with a bit of Mel Torme. From where I sat, singing seemed to be pure pleasure for him.

I remember Pastor Miller telling us about Christ’s Passion during a springtime Sunday night service thirty-some years ago. One of the other teens ran out of the lodge, weeping – overtaken by the description of what Jesus had endured for him. I ran after him and listened to his story.

I remember Pastor Miller’s Christianity including humanness. He didn’t try to portray himself as saintly; he wasn’t aloof from his congregation. He wasn’t afraid to laugh.

I don’t remember when Pastor Miller invited me to call him “Bob”. The truth is I never really got used to it. He was simply “Pastor” to me.

I remember Pastor Miller saying he thought I’d become a pastor someday. I didn’t like that, and I fought it for a long time. But over the years, his was among a small number of voices through which God conferred that calling to me. I don’t wear it as comfortably as he did but I try to be true to my legacy.

Today, I’m remembering to remember because it’s the day of Pastor’s memorial service. I wish I could be present. He and his family are very much on my mind. I’m praying they feel the support of their communities as they find their way forward. I’m praying they know they’re not carrying his memory alone. And I’m praying they find grace today to celebrate him with all their might.

Freight Elevator

I used to produce music in a third floor office space, tucked behind the freight elevator of an old brick warehouse in Seattle. It was south of Pioneer Square, kitty-corner to the Kingdome.

Since I routinely schlepped my gear out to studios and editing suites, it was the freight elevator that made the third floor space feasible for me. It opened on both sides: into the main hallway and into my office.

The seasoned elevator had another fine virtue in addition to saving my back. The west wall of my office was exposed brick, which was perfect for funky urban chic. But there was nothing but the Alaska Way Viaduct between those bricks and the afternoon sun. Clear summer days were brutal...

The only remedy was to slide open the heavy door and send the elevator all the way down past the loading dock to the basement. The shaft fell through unremembered histories into the sediment of blue collar workdays. It was a well of hardworking ghosts and cool air. Both helped me meet more than one deadline.

surface noise

an industrial diamond
extracts Villa-Lobos
from spirals lathed into black vinyl

thirty-three and a third
revolutions per minute

surface noise and Segovia

five junior composers
trade hometown stories
over Peak Freens and Red Zinger

Porch Piano

Unboarded for summer
June bugs thumb heavily
Against rusted screens at night

Cigar clamped in his unshaved smile
Cocktail nearby
Eyes the color of sea foam

His right hand pets a melody
While the left strides
Between chord comp and bass line

From a never-tuned piano
Whispering, Stardust, and Blue Hawaii
Drift nightward like spirits

Groucho

In the Mid-Seventies, I sang and played guitar in a high school rock band called “Storm”. We were dedicated; we rehearsed three nights per week, and we drummed up our own gigs. We built a strong reputation and worked hard to keep it. Our set-list provided a four-hour, danceable, concert-like experience.

In addition to school dances throughout the Mid-Hudson Valley, we played just about any other gigs we could find: Fourth of July picnics, birthday parties, Christmas parties, pool parties... even a Halloween party at the Sawkill Firehouse.

Given the occasion and the era, it made sense that we would play the gig decked out as KISS. As the front man, it fell to me to be Paul Stanley. I didn’t have the chest hair for the role, but I thought that big black greasepaint star might look pretty damn cool painted over my right eye.

As with many of the best-laid rock-band plans, it was a girl that caused this one to go awry. Her name was Leslie; needless to say, she was beautiful. She was also smart. Honestly, she was out of my league. But she was a sophomore and I was a senior, and that evened things out just enough.

Leslie’s grand vision for the Sawkill Firehouse Halloween Party of 1976 was that she and I would attend the event as Harpo & Groucho Marx. It will hardly come as a surprise that my bandmates did not welcome the idea with enthusiasm. Peter Criss on drums, Ace Freely on lead guitar, Gene Simmons on bass, and Groucho fronting the foursome just didn’t strike them as a commanding lineup. But Leslie’s leverage was significant, so that is exactly how we appeared.

“I want to rock and roll every night and party ev-er-y-day…”

While I threw myself into being the Paul-Stanley-est Groucho that ever strutted a stage, Leslie was cavorting with a guy named Joe. He was a confirmed lover-boy, rarely solo, but uncharacteristically dateless that night. I watched them chatting, and laughing, and dancing… And then I watched them leave together. She honked her little bicycle horn and waved to me as they exited. I couldn’t blame him really – she was adorable in that curly yellow wig.

Through the lens of retrospection, train wrecks often seem so cleanly inevitable.

Zeroing

Two lava lamps rehearse their unhurried ballet on either end of the big console’s monitor shelf. Studio A is dark beyond the heavy, slanted glass wall that separates it from the control room. I can just make out the shadowed contours of the grand piano. Chrome hardware and brass cymbals glint faintly from the drum booth at the far end of the room.

It’s noiseless out there tonight because this is a mixing session. Basic tracks were recorded a month ago, and overdubbing finished up last week. Now the separate pieces – drums, vocals, guitars, more guitars, piano, strings, finger snaps – wait on parallel strips of two-inch 24-track tape for the engineer and I to shape them into four minutes of integrated beauty.

Each track will want some degree of doctoring, ranging from merely adjusting its relative level, to patching it through a pitch-fixing box. One track might trigger a digital sample of a different sound altogether. Mixing is an intuitive interplay of science and art.

Just as we’re about to get going, the engineer pushes his chair back from the mixing board and shakes his head. He mutters something about interns. The patch bay hasn’t been cleared, and the knobs and faders haven’t been returned to unity. This was the intern’s job following the previous session.

“Zeroing the board” is standard protocol in good recording studios. It’s achingly tedious to undo someone else’s settings, and it’s a momentum killer. An engineer assumes each session will begin with a clean slate.

This offers an analogy pertinent to spiritual health. It’s possible for the fragmented bits of a soul to be shaped into a life of integrated beauty. Periodically zeroing one’s interior is what’s called for. That’s when the Engineer loves to get to work.