Reason to Believe

1.

The first singer I ever loved was my mother. I grew up watching her onstage, mostly in nightclubs and hotel or resort lounges throughout the Midwest. Sometimes she performed solo (with an accompanist or house band), and sometimes she had two men backing her, Lorri London and the Londonaires. She’d been singing professionally since she was five — on radio in the thirties with child contemporaries like Mel Tormé, as a USO singer in the wartime Pacific, and into the mid-sixties, after my brother and I came along. She grew old and died, but I can see her as I saw her then, before I fell hard for the women vocalists of my teens: Joni, Laura, Martha, Carole, Diana, Dionne, Judy, the Joans (Baez and Armatrading). My mother wears floor-length gowns, sequins or gold lamé, her blond wig is piled high, her make-up perfect. The Londonaires, straw hats twitching in their hands, kneel at her side. Little in my long performance-going life compares with the power of watching a woman sing onstage, during which I am a child again, enthralled with his musical mom. 

There’s a moment like this in David Adjmi’s Stereophonic. The play follows a band made up of two ever-imploding couples, one British and one American, and their manager/drummer. It’s a mad, maddening mess, coked-up, boozy, and argumentative. When they aren’t lounging or bitching or fighting, they play frags of songs in the raised “live room” beyond a wall of windows in the downstage control booth of David Zinn’s meticulous recording studio set. We sometimes hear them over speakers or through the open glass, and sometimes don’t. 

Diana, the young American singer/tambourine player whose star is quietly rising in the world outside this studio bubble, tentatively offers up a new “riff” from a scrap of paper. Under the watchful, critical eye of her boyfriend Peter, self-anointed producer of the album and the embodiment of the covert brutality of the era’s mellow men, she sits at the piano and sings: 

Sunday morning

And the light is fine

In the beating of a bird’s wing

I come alive

Suddenly, it’s as if the bird in the song has landed on a windowsill in the middle of a marital fight. Everything changes. All eyes turn away from the battle to some beautiful mystery of existence. The world grows soulful, endless squabbles and sleep-dep-druggy angst short-circuited by all that’s rich and wondrous. 

A couple scenes later, the most comically wasted member of the band interrupts his own manic monologue about the mind-blowing houseboats of Sausalito to say, simply, “I want to live in art.” The audience that has been laughing at the human comedy goes silent. I hear audible “Awws” throughout the house. How do we do that — live in art, in soul, awash in the beauty of clatter becoming music? How, when every moment of transcendence is followed by a hundred of fuckery, do we ever get it together to make song?

My mother was a glorious singer and a pretty dreadful mother. I won’t go into it here, having spent a share of my nonprofit earnings over forty years processing it with professionals. But let’s just say I’m drawn to the question I take to be at the heart of Stereophonic: How can such self-involved assholes make such beautiful music?

2.

I’m listening to the fifth Fleetwood Mac album, Future Games. The opening song, “Woman of a Thousand Ways,” floats from Spotify through my Beats, though I might as well be back in my older brother’s dorm room in Iowa, where I first heard it on a turntable. Fleetwood Mac was never my jam, even after Americans Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham joined (yes, “Landslide” is an exception), but the song has a Proustian effect, bypassing all critical faculties, tumbling me back through time. I’m fourteen again and happy to linger there. 

To heighten the nostalgia, I open a used coffee table book I bought online, a massive, gorgeous archive of the musician-turned-great-rock-music photographer, Henry Diltz. It’s a print museum of rock royalty, ‘60s through the aughts — Arlo to Zappa, Hendrix to Havens to Harry (Debby), Jagger, Joplin, and Jackson (Michael, circa ’71 — so young!), Cohen & Cocker & Cobain, Grace & Garcia, Woodstocks ’69 and ’99. Big bright full-foot-tall-foot-wide pages of colored photos that transport me to a world I dreamed my way into from age ten on, a dream as real as waking life, a dream that mapped my soul.

I flip pages of vivid, romantic portraits of David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash, including their first album’s iconic cover shot, and heart-throbbing portraits of young Joni Mitchell leaning out the casement window of a moss green shingled house in Laurel Canyon. We’re in the backyard of Canyon doyenne (Mama) Cass Elliot’s yard. Joni, in an orange short-sleeved sweater with blue stripes plays an acoustic guitar for Eric Clapton who sits cross-legged on the grass, curved over a pack of Marlboros; his lustrous locks and bushy mustache curtain his intense, listening face. David Crosby — turning Clapton on to Joni’s music in real time — leans astonished against a birch. A baby on the lawn stuffs something in its mouth, while Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees stands under a clothesline, filming them.

I stare at the group photo through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy from suburban Chicago. Youth, beauty, love, and music have suspended them there. The world seems a glorious place.

3.  

First comes romance, then reality; first illusion then dis-. I’ve had a lifelong theory that those of us who were pre-adolescents leading up to and immediately following the “Summer of Love” — maybe especially those like me who had older siblings of Woodstock and draft age — were more deeply permeated by the Flower Power romance and stop-the-war rebellion of the times than those who trended through them as young adults. My theory was the cry of a once-impressionable, then-broken heart: I believed, with Jefferson Airplane, that we were “volunteers” in a new American revolution, and then they put out that top forty pablum as Jefferson Starship!!! I watched the radical hijinks of the Chicago Seven from a couple miles north as though Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were my heroic older brothers and then Rubin becomes a fucking yuppie! Did any of you actually believe what you were saying??? And if you didn’t, why did your faddish ways have to infect my “embryonic journey”???

David Adjmi has no such illusions, maybe never did. He doesn’t start in the garden or try to get back to it. He begins with a broken coffee maker and baggie of cocaine, the petty miseries of the miserable. He assumes that all relationships are negotiations between the supremely self-interested. David’s the maestro of meshuga, as he’s shown in play after play, his gimlet eye noting the mayhem humans wreak on each other, including the raw hilarity of his unhinged Syrian-Jewish family folk in Stunning and his crazy-diamond memoir Lot Six. Even his titles tip us off to the monsters in his attic: The Evildoers, Marie Antoinette, Caligula. 

And yet sometimes — suddenly — there is heavenly music. 

How do they do it? And how does director Daniel Aukin do it, orchestrating three-plus hours of human anarchy, mastering the minutiae of sound op sliders, snare drum screws, overlapping dialogue, and song bars played in different tempos through different speakers. Here’s a cast of seven singular actors, each going their own way through the year (or is it three?) of never-ending days and nights with no direction home and no windows to see (or jump) out of. “This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco,” to quote the Talking Heads on the aptly titled Fear of Music. 

How did these actors even learn to play these complicated riffs — sometimes dribbly and drug-addled, sometimes driving, occasionally divine? How did Will Butler, formerly of the Millennium-defining Arcade Fire, even write the songs for this nutso all-nighter nightmare? Did he compose whole songs and let his collaborators smash them into shards? Or did he thread the tunes through holes in the script? How did this creative company — including a design team as tight as any band — make any of this chaos cohere?

That’s the true magic of Stereophonic. Inverting my personal experience of the rock era through 1977: it makes illusion out of disillusion, creative romance out of hyper-realism. In other words, it makes theater magic: a living, breathing thing from words on a page, groupness out of a solitary writer’s imaginings. And for a moment — or for three-plus hours — we’re all together now. 

4.  

Final question: How can a group of gnarly individuals become a band? 

In middle school, I loved Crosby, Stills, Nash (with and without) & Young as much as I would ever love any band. Theirs was a sound I’d waited for — this fusion of four distinct, differently pitched, oddly timbred guys — Stills’ bluesy howl, Crosby’s ethereal harmonic musings, Nash’s buoyant pop tenor, and Young’s lone wolf nasal twang — into a folk-rock angels choir. This gang of four frontmen — four solo artists — destined to splinter and blow apart every time they came together. 

What is a collaboration if not separate people at the height of their individual powers melding into one? What is a nightmare if not the same group in perpetual conflict? If it’s impossible for a handful of gifted, culturally aligned music obsessives to come together, how can the world? How do “we the people” engineer a mix when technology shifts from one microphone to many, from mono to stereo to an infinite number of voices on an infinite number of digital tracks, all wailing over each other? 

Yet sometimes — in art as in life — to quote my almost namesake Todd Rundgren, “All the children sing/All the dancers start to sway in time/The orchestra begins to play/Somebody pours the wine…” 

P.S.

Confessional note. In 2001, a playwright-colleague and I served on an award panel and found ourselves allied in our excitement about a play by someone named David Adjmi. We were both blown away by it, the fearlessness, the theatricality, that voice that in its earliest incarnation arrived full-throated. Others in the room were deeply troubled by the play, even offended by it. The playwright and I, apparently, agreed on everything, at least everything to do with this fierce and funny playwright. We’d known each other a while, but now we noticed each other. It was a sign from the future, Elton John singing “Hello, baby Hello.” Reader, I married her (though not right away), a romance that, in its twentieth season, hasn’t led to disillusion. David’s play, by the way, was called Strange Attractors.

Todd London’s many books include This Is Not My Memoir with Andre Gregory, An Ideal Theater, Outrageous Fortune, The Importance of Staying Earnest, and two novels. He served as artistic director of New Dramatists for 18 years and was the first recipient of Theatre Communications Group’s Visionary Leadership Award.