Page 35 - Tales the Maggid Never Told Me

Blood Libel

though I was getting trained in the Western classical tradition, rock
and roll was all around me. Plus the Old Country songs and stories I
imbibed with my mother’s milk, as it were. So in terms of absorbing
all the information around me in the environment I would say I was a
very good student.

S: Were you involved in any of the 1960s turmoil?

B: You mean the hippies, the civil rights movement, psychedelic
drugs, Eastern mysticism, communes, anti-war protests, things like
that?

S: Anything that was significant to you.

B: Well, I was pretty young and therefore impressionable in some
ways but not in others. You have to realize that a lot of those things
were going on somewhere else in the country. I rarely went into
Manhattan, and when I did it was to go to a concert or the museums
midtown. Certainly I didn’t venture down to the East Village. What
really struck me was the revolution in music. Influences from all
around the world were breathing new life into the tired old rock
formats. All of a sudden you could hear Asian modes and
instrumentation in Top Forty tunes. I hadn’t been paying attention to
the Beatles and the British invasion at first. They seemed like
imported knock-offs of rockabilly and rhythm and blues. Then their
hard-edged sound melded with the strung-out surfer sounds of the
West Coast and every kid with ears knew the musical cosmos had just
opened up. The sky was the limit. As for the rest of it, all that social
activism and life-style rebellion, it was already getting to be old news
when I went through late adolescence and it didn’t have any
profound effect that I can see in me.

S: Did you have any conflicts with your parents, Mendel?

B: Not that I recall. As long as my brother was going to take over
the bakery when he retired, my father didn’t really care what I did in
life. My mother just wanted me to be happy. They weren’t oriented
toward the usual professional life most Jewish parents wanted for
their male offspring. My brother and I didn’t have much to fight

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