Rock’n’Roll Heart, by Martha Thomases (with special guest Pennie Ruchman) – Brilliant Disguise

May 7, 2011 Martha Thomases 16 Comments

Counting on our fingers and toes, we have determined that we’ve been friends for 36 years. Nearly four decades. That’s longer than we’ve known our various spouses. That’s longer than many of you have been alive.

We’re friends for too many reasons to count, but one of those reasons is that we both found ourselves in rock and roll. Dylan and Springsteen, Janis and Joni, we both find solace in rhythm and harmony. And a back beat, you can’t lose it.

Rock and roll is supposed to be music for outsiders. It’s what dweeby kids do while the popular crowd plays football or cheerleads for the football team. Popular kids don’t need to pour out their deepest feelings in rhymes and chords (and if they do, they don’t tell anyone, because then they wouldn’t be popular). Popular kids don’t need to scream in frustration or flail around with their bodies.

We weren’t popular.

When we first met, in the fall of 1975, disco topped the charts, but glitter made the magazines. David Bowie, Lou Reed, Mott the Hoople, Roxy Music, the New York Dolls – it was gender-bending glam, fueled by feminism, gay pride and a disgust for convention. If you read CREEM or CRAWDADDY, or the music section of the VILLAGE VOICE, these were the bands you had to hear.

We were in college in Ohio, right outside of Cleveland. Then, as now, Cleveland was a great city for rock and roll, blue-collar and industrial. The Agora was the place to go to hear the bubbling-under bands we read about. Martha heard Patti Smith there and it changed her life.

Our tastes weren’t – and aren’t – the identical. Pennie loves the Grateful Dead, while Martha only likes them sometimes. Martha loves Rufus Wainwright, Pennie not so much. Because Pennie plays guitar, she pays more attention to those skills, while Martha tends more towards sensitive singer-songwriter types. We both love Bruce and Hendrix, and more than we can count.

(Here comes the bridge)

Martha came to visit this week. When I was driving to pick up Martha, what comes on the radio? “My City in Ruins.” My head awash in memories. This of all weeks when THAT man met his fate. I spun backwards. It was 5 am, my time. September 11, 2011. I was in Las Vegas working. Martha was living in New York not far from the twin towers. Someone at work told me to turn on the TV in my office.

My father was on the 36th floor of one of the towers. Martha’s son Arthur was in high school not far from the scene. I called Martha. We were both frantic. She hit the streets looking for Arthur and my father. Arthur was home by noon, walking up the West Side Highway. My father, no sign.

I spent the next eight hours anxiously hoping. When I talked to my father, it was with waves of relief. And it was that song, this week and Martha that brought all this home. The song that followed: “The Ties That Bind.”

Funny but in the ten years since, my father has broken those ties. But, Martha has remained a constant reminder of the power of unconditional love and acceptance. Isn’t that what some of our favorite music is about?

Do kids today feel the same way? Looking at it from the outside, today’s charts seem too fragmented, too manufactured. Someone who becomes a star from a reality show may be a skilled performer, but isn’t using original material. Rap and hip-hop (at least what us old folks here) could just as easily come from the marketing department as from the artists who started the movements. Rock bands (again, from our old fart perspective) seem to be jumbles of influences, not original sounds.

But old farts aren’t supposed to get it. Each generation has to find art forms that piss off the parents. We’re cool with that.

We don’t have to like the same things to be friends. We don’t have to believe in the same things to be friends. Instead, we’ve lived very different lives but learned parallel lessons: that our various experiences make us more interesting and valuable to each other.

Any old way you choose it.

Media Goddess Martha Thomases is visiting her pal in Battle Creek, Michigan. Some things never change.