Pinball (21 page)

The New Atlantis owed its existence to events in Osten’s life that occurred at a time when he knew what he wanted to be but could not decide how to bring it about. A major cause of his indecision had been his father.

Gerhard Osten had come to the United States from Germany to escape the Nazi persecution. A classicist by
training, he had specialized in the early Greeks, beginning with Pythagoras, particularly in their investigations relating mathematics to music. But he was not keen on devoting himself to a life of scholarly research or to teaching the classics in an American university, and he was wary of trying to be a creative artist. He believed that an individual risked being viewed as totalitarian if he was original enough to produce art, for the very act of imposing an image of the world on others demanded their approval or disapproval; it polarized people into friends and enemies, leading them to see art not in terms of its own merit but as an image of the artist. Just as a military hero was the product of a war, so was an artist a product of his art, able to say, after Alexander Pope,

“Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me.”

Thus, life and art necessarily became confused in the eyes of the audience, and any success the artist might have he would have to pay for with his happiness and with the happiness of those dear to him.

Gerhard Osten’s real love was classical music, which was to him—as it was to the ancient Greeks—as pure and abstracted from quotidian reality as was mathematics. More and more he began to feel that only through classical music could he, and others like him, be lifted beyond the memory of all the hideous events of his young manhood and the terrible destruction of his family in the Holocaust. Therefore, with the encouragement and financial help of two friends, Goddard Lieberson and Boris Pregel, who were musicians by vocation and business entrepreneurs by occupation, he had founded Etude Classics. From then on, music was Gerhard Osten’s country, and like the citizens in Aristophanes’
The Birds,
he was free to become anonymous and contented in that “land of easy and fair leisure, where a man may lounge and play and settle down.”

But under the glass top of his office desk Gerhard
Osten kept a letter written by a Jewish concentration camp inmate shortly before his death in the gas chamber.

We are in the company of death. They tattoo the newcomers. Everyone gets his number. From that moment on you have lost your “self” and have become transformed into a number. You no longer are what you were before, but a worthless moving number… . We are approaching our new graves … iron discipline reigns here in the camp of death. Our brain has grown dull, the thoughts are numbered: it is not possible to grasp this new language.

To Gerhard Osten, only classical music offered modern man the means to repair the part of him that had been brutalized by this new language of hate and despair.

Even though Gerhard Osten seldom talked about the events of World War II, Jimmy knew that his life under the Nazi yoke had been one of constant fear, flight, and hunger. Being forced daily to seek new hiding places, having to pretend not to be Jewish, living among strangers, he must have been filled with an unending sense of terror. He had made extensive notes in a series of small notebooks during that time, notes about his life as well as about music, but not wanting to upset his son by passing on to him the story of the horror of his earlier life, Gerhard Osten had always kept these notebooks locked up. Only once had Jimmy been able to glance at them, and then he saw clearly that the notebooks had been his father’s way of transcending the hideous events that surrounded him daily. What Jimmy read in the notebooks forever affected his relationship with his father. On coming of age, the son had made himself the guardian of his father.

Leonore Osten, Jimmy’s mother, had died when Jimmy was fifteen, and he remembered her as a frail, elegant woman. A promising pianist when she was young, she had given up all her hopes of a career when she married Gerhard Osten, who convinced her that the titanic efforts
required to achieve artistic success would destroy their chances of having a family. An invalid confined to her bedroom during the last few years of her life, she saw Jimmy only twice a year, when he was on vacation from the boarding school he attended in New England.

Thus, from adolescence on, Jimmy had had only his father for family, and he worshiped everything about him—his shyness, his soft-spoken manner, his refinement, his constant preoccupation with the sanctity of privacy—and in every way he could the boy emulated the older man.

In every way except one: Gerhard Osten detested rock. It represented for him victory of obsession over reason, emotion over logic, chaos over composition. By ruthlessly imposing itself upon the mass audience, rock ‘n’ roll was, for him, totalitarian in nature.

From the time Jimmy first heard rock as a boy in boarding school—he had never heard it at home, for his father would never have allowed it there—he was struck by an overpowering desire to create such music, to speak to others through it in a big, rich, compelling voice such as he, Gerhard Osten’s son, for whom seclusion and circumspection were the inherited principles of life, could hardly dream of possessing or displaying.

Because of his growing need to listen to this kind of music and his fear that he might hurt his father by his love of it, he chose to go to college in California, far from home but close to San Francisco, where the rock culture had exploded and still flourished.

He enrolled at the University of California at Davis, where Karlheinz Stockhausen, the master electronic music composer, had once been a lecturer. Osten was particularly impressed by Stockhausen’s
Counterpoint No. 1
, a work in one movement for ten instruments, in which he fused six different timbres, winds as well as strings, into the single timbre of the piano. Osten was fascinated, also, by Stockhausen’s experiments with synthetic composition of sound and aleatory music—music composed and performed to a great extent by chance. In such music—aimed at the inseparable partnership of composer and instrumentalist—the composer selected keys and tempos by
dice throws or by computer and the performer could decide on the order in which to play the principal sections.

Still his consuming love was rock. He collected every rock record and tape he could find, and when he ran out of space he transferred it all to cassettes. But his dormitory room was still not big enough to hold the cassettes and the equipment needed to play them. As his passion—and his collection—grew, he became more and more afraid that his father might surprise him with a visit and learn of his obsession, so with some of the money he received from his mother’s trust, he rented an attic from an elderly widow who lived near the campus and moved his tapes and stereo equipment there.

During his freshman and sophomore years he drove to rock concerts and festivals all over California, and at the same time he devoured all the literature covering the history of rock. He became an encyclopedia on the subject. He knew every song by every rock group, from the Jefferson Airplane to the Rolling Stones, from Elvis Presley and Otis Redding to David Bowie, and he could describe every musical happening in Berkeley or Haight Ashbury or Los Angeles over the past twenty years, down to the psychedelic slides and the stroboscopic light shows. He saw the Beatles’ films and the film of the Monterey Pop Festival, watching the thousands in the audience stand up and dance to the music of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix; and with each viewing he understood more forcibly something his father could never accept: that rock was much more than a part of the record business; it was democratic in nature, a necessary part of the broad, popular culture of a free society, a way of life in itself—something classical music had never been or aspired to become.

Over a period of two decades, rock, the new music, had come of age. More and more the rock audience had learned to perceive rock as a serious form of musical expression, something worth listening to as well as dancing to, and the new singers and bands had responded in kind, creating music that was way beyond hootenannies and folksy rock stuff—music as good in its way as the
classical music his father loved so much, music which was subtle, complex, and intellectually demanding.

Because of his knowledge of electronic music, Osten studied with particular care rock electronics, especially the guitar improvisations of Jimi Hendrix. He noticed that some groups, such as the Velvet Underground, had initially used electronic techniques to convey the psychic effect of the drug experience—as in the song “Heroin”—or to produce the new, heavy, thick sound of hard rock—as in “Sister Ray.” In the song “What’s Become of the Baby?” on their album
Aoxomoxoa,
the Grateful Dead modified keyboard and percussion sounds, mixing and symphonizing natural and artificial tones by means of electronics. They modulated the human voice electronically and built an entire vocal ensemble from the sound of a solo singer by recording the singer’s voice and then playing it on top of itself at specified intervals. As Osten listened to the works of other rock musicians who favored electronic effects—Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Pink Floyd, Brian Eno of Roxy Music, Rick Wakeman of Yes and Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer—he became aware of their original use of electronic technology in multitracking, the mixing together of several separately recorded virtuoso solo performances, frequently with adaptations of motifs from classical music. He also studied such artists as Tangerine Dream—the German group of keyboard players who used synthesizers and other electronic instruments to create a uniquely rich, innovative, avant-garde music.

Steadily and systematically, Osten taught himself to play the instruments favored by rock stars—acoustic guitar, harmonica, electronic organ. He imagined that if he mastered these instruments, as well as synthesizers that could generate their own tones, as well as modify other voices and instruments, and if he learned the techniques of threading several sound sources into a recording device, thereby creating musical montages, he might actually succeed in becoming a one-man musical event.

In time, after he had gone through dozens of musicians’ guides to independent record production, it seemed
only logical to him to transform the rented attic into a practice studio. There he sang, played, and recorded by the hour, hoping that, one day, he might even manufacture his own record matrices and create his own—Jimmy Osten’s own—musical tradition. The old widow never disturbed him, nor he her. She was a victim of muscular dystrophy and spent most of her life in front of the turned-up TV set in the living room of the spacious house.

He had always been vaguely aware that he had a pleasant singing voice, but by the time his innate reticence allowed him to admit even that to himself, he had learned from his reading and listening that in order to succeed, a professional singer needed more than a nice voice. He had to make a forceful impact on listeners. Only a well-trained singer could produce controlled sounds with a distinct individual quality.

He began avidly to study the acoustics of the human vocal apparatus and to try out all the recommendations for developing a singing voice. He learned that most pop singers could neither darken their sounds nor open up their throats fully, and so they had to depend entirely on electronic amplification. In order to enlarge his own voice, he patiently trained himself to sound as if he were yawning and speaking at the same time; and to darken his tone and give it a slightly operatic quality, he did exercises to expand his pharynx and lower the position of his larynx.

He persevered in this way for many months and eventually mastered all the available knowledge that might apply to his own situation. He familiarized himself thoroughly with his musical instincts, with the articulation of his vowels, and with the limitless variations in sound recording made possible by electronic technology. By the time he finished college, he had no doubt about his talent; he was even ready to bank his life on it.

One thing worried him tremendously and would continue to worry him, and that was the dark, violent side of rock. He saw
Gimme Shelter
—the film of the famous Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, California—every time it was rerun, and he stared in horror as the Hell’s Angels, hired by promoters to police the event, turned it instead
into a display of brutality and terror that left one young black man dead and scores injured He hated the fact that two of his idols, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, had died of drug abuse at the peak of their creativity and popularity. Osten had read that after Hendrix’s death, all his notebooks and letters and private tapes, together with other personal belongings, had been stolen, and that soon after the theft the most intimate facts about him had surfaced. Devon Wilson, Hendrix’s girl friend for whom he had written many of his best songs, was a heroin addict known to be notoriously promiscuous with both men and women; she was later killed in an unexplained fall from an upper-story window of the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Michael Jeffery, Hendrix’s closest business associate, died in the mysterious explosion of a commercial airliner. Many others in Hendrix’s immediate entourage also had died, or been killed, or gone insane. There had been other tragedies as well. Mama Cass of the Mamas and Papas; Brian Jones, an original member of the Rolling Stones; Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the Doors; Keith Moon of the Who—all had died young, and in all cases the circumstances of these deaths were mysterious and frightening. Was rock a political force, subversive in nature? Was Plato right when he wrote in
Republic:
“A revolution in music endangers the whole fabric of the most important societal conventions”? Thrilling as rock culture was, it was riddled with an excess of human trauma, and at Altamont it had even lost the dignity its collective ethos had gained at Woodstock. At Altamont also, this culture had revealed the madness it could inspire. Heavy drugs, cult worship, and maddening, suffocating lack of privacy had become ever-present dangers in the rock world—dangers that seemed almost inescapable to Osten as he contemplated making a career of rock. Every day he would come across dozens of newspaper headlines full of preposterous, excessive and hostile claims and dreadful insinuations about rock stars, their lives, their lovers, their families, their agents, managers and bank accounts. Any one of these headlines could wreck one’s life. Once a rock performer’s fame and notoriety turned him into a public person, the
constitutional statutes which under the First Amendment guaranteed the freedom of the press allowed its reporting about a public person not to depend on the truth of the facts. Thus, even false, defamatory and factually untrue reporting was constitutionally protected, as long as the reporter wrote it in good faith and claimed to honestly believe his reporting was true.