Waves Passing in the Night

In the history of astronomy, there was a conjecture in the 1760s that the planets orbit the sun in distances that can be described by a simple rule: 

Raise 2 to the power of the planet in sequence:

Multiply that by 3.

To that product add 4.

Divide that sum by 10. 

You get a measurement in “astronomical units” i.e., Earth-distances. And it is almost correct. After Mars, before Jupiter, there needs to be a planet Number 5. Then Jupiter is 6 and Saturn 7. Seeking Planet 5 led to the discovery first of Ceres in 1801, then Pallas (1802), Vesta (1807), and so on; and we are still finding asteroids in that gap. 

Today, the “Titius-Bode Conjecture” is ignored by serious astronomers. It is accepted as an accident of algebra that any small distribution can be described by some formula of arbitrary simplicity. 

Waves Passing in the Night:
Walter Murch in the Land of the
Astrophysicists; Bloomsbury, 2017.

Walter Murch found it compelling. Murch is a musician. He was born in 1943; his family was literate, artistic, and economically comfortable. Young Murch was fascinated by sound and by age 12 he had his own tape recorder. Decades later, he received Academy Awards for working on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, American Graffiti, and other films. Murch found a deep truth in the Titius-Bode Conjecture. To him, it is evidence of the Music of the Spheres: something that we perceive caused by something deeper, more subtle, that we do not. 

Murch’s biographer, Lawrence Weschler, loves his subject. Weschler is more than fair to Murch’s detractors. No serious astronomer agrees with him. They will not even read his papers to refute them. This is not about medieval geometry: Murch has extended his theory to include wave mechanics as applied to gravity. That led one scientist to ask: “Why do our interplanetary spacecraft not detect such disturbances?” It is a cogent question. 

I snagged this book from my city library’s “De-acquisitioning Bookcase.” (25 cents each, all with their library call numbers on them. What would Eratosthenes say to that?) I took it down because of the title, but it fell open to Ernst Chladni and his waves in sand on a vibrating steel plate. When I worked at the Hands-On Museum in Ann Arbor, this was a learning station in the gallery. I referred to it often when explaining fireworks in the kitchen to mixed audiences. I would say, “We can imagine electrons as little balls with minus-signs orbiting a nucleus, but it is more helpful to think of them like those standing waves of sand, as probability distributions.” 

So, the book seemed complex, over-arching, challenging, and probably wrong, but certainly interesting. And it is all of that. 

Weschler lets Murch do his own advocating. Aside from the necessary explanations, Weschler just points the reader to Murch’s website and other works. For a thin book (150 pages), it stands on eight pages of references. It seemed like a good way to get lost and if I had more time, I might follow that path. 

For now, I am happy to have reinforced my belief that the universe is not merely knowable, it is comfortable. And there is sound in space.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

G. H. Hardy’s “Apology”

Elisha Loomis and the Pythagorean Proposition 

Imaginary Numbers are Real. Pegasus is not. 

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers 

A Musical Joke

I found the book by serendipity, misshelved among works on Typography in the UT Fine Arts Library. I brought it home and then opened it to read:

“I often find that the humorous, joking aspect of music is missing in many performances, even in those of accomplished artists. It seems that people feel uncomfortable allowing the great work of music to be anything but sublimely serious.”  

“… crescendo does not automatically mean either agitato or accelerando. In many cases, quite to the contrary crescendo is an indication of the music becoming broader, more majestic, more dignified. If an alteration of timing is justified, such instances may call for allargando rather than an accelerando. Similarly, diminuendo should not always be taken as an indication of calming down, connected with rallentando. I can think of many examples of diminuendo that indicate, in fact, an increase of activity, albeit of a fantastic, visionary order, sometimes accompanied by an accelerando (see passages in a variety of works by Scriabin, for example).” Boris Berman, Notes from the Pianist’s Bench, Yale University Press, 2000,  pages 146-149, passim.

About 1988 or so, as a local newspaper reporter, I attended a concert duet for harp and voice. It was nice and all, a range from “classical” (perhaps Bach and others much later), and at least one modern piece, probably two. The last was “The Owl & the Pussy Cat.” I did not know the piece then and had to search for it now. It was the Edward Lear poem. I am not sure if the music was Stravinsky or another. The audience did not entirely suppress its giggles as the soloist sang about her lovely pussy. Not knowing the Lear poem, I, too, was surprised but having grown up with the Cleveland Orchestra under the baton of George Szell and his assistants, Louis Lane and Robert Shaw, I learned well to suppress all emotions while in the audience. After the concert, the harpist replied something like, “Nonsense. After all doesn’t ‘scherzo’ mean ‘joke’?”  A light went on – Es gang mir ein Licht an: In German, das Scherz means “joke.” The word must have come from Italian because the Germans would never have invented the word on their own.

Well, that’s not quite fair. Google “Haydn joke” - https://www.therightnotes.org/haydn-s-humour.html Other composers also used the unexpected to surprise the audience. For one thing, from the chamber music of the Enlightenment to the huge civic halls of our time, many of the listeners are players if not performers themselves. When the Beethoven Sonata op. 31. No. 3 opens with a cadential harmonic progression, they get the joke, or so wrote Boris Berman. I don't understand it. 

Previously on NecessaryFacts

Rachmaninoff 

Music Makes You Braver 

Austin at Night 

World War II Sweetheart Dance 2019 

 

TOMMY JAMES AND THE SHONDELLS AND THE MOB

You are known by the company you keep. When Thomas Gregory Jackson became Tommy James of the Shondells, he was already on a career arc that included the most popular musicians of his (our) generation at that time and also drew him into the circle of Morris Levy’s Roulette Records which was a subset of the Mafia crime families of New York and New Jersey. 

Though his own family moved in his early years because his father was a hotel manager, basically, Tommy James came from Niles, Michigan. So, this could be the story of Bob Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band or of Joe Walsh and the James Gang, or a dozen others from the 1960s who lived anywhere between Pittsburgh and Chicago. I did not know all of his gold records. Some I had to listen to on YouTube. His early hits echoed in my memories of times and places over the two weeks in which I was immersed in reading this. 

 

Tommy James’s autobiography is unassuming and revealing. 

  

Me, the Mob, and the Music:
One Helluva Ride with Tommy James
and the Shondells 
by Tommy James with Martin Fitzpatrick,
Scribner; Simon & Schuster, 2011.

The title comes from a statement by Morris Levy after the first hit song: You’re in for a hell of a ride (pages 62-63). In the wake of that chart topper, Thomas Gregory Jackson became Tommy James. The name “Shondells” had no special meaning except that several pop groups had similar names: Rondels, Del-Tones, Delfonics, etc.

 

For much of his career, he lived in residence hotels and apartments. And of course, he was often touring, playing in town after town, city after city. I was surprised that even though he grew up in the hotel business, he seemed never to have used any special knowledge to garner a room upgrade, off-hours room service, or anything else. 

 

It took him a long time to come around to being a parent and he did not do very well at it. Abandoning his wife and child, it took about 90 pages before he called home, even though his wife was living with his parents from the very first. (Her family was opposed to the marriage because they were opposed to the pregnancy.) 

 

It was interesting that he absorbed the Mob mentality. After several scenes in which Morris Levy threatened people, Tommy used the same language and tone when he felt that Gene Pitney had taken his music. 

 

Hubert Humphrey wrote the liner notes for the album Crimson and Clover (page 165). This was a time of protest and very few young musicians were aligned with the Establishment, not even with the Democrats and certainly not with the Republicans. On another matter entirely, I once read that Barry Goldwater said that listening to Hubert Humphrey was like trying to read Playboy with your wife turning the pages. So, the story here of Tommy James giving Vice President Humphrey amphetamines struck a responsive chord. Humphrey said that he got a lot of work done that night. I can only imagine. 

I have to confess that I did not know until I read it here that Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago arranged for ballot boxes to disappear, thus swinging the electoral college votes from Illinois into the Republican column, contributing to the Nixon victory. Daley was furious because at the convention, in a speech nominating George McGovern, Sen. Abraham Ribicoff denounced Daley's administration for the "Gestapo tactics" of the Chicago police department.

 

Some years after that, eventually, Tommy James found his religion, realized that he was always a Christian, and had himself placed at the Betty Ford Clinic. 

 

Hit Songs I Know

Hanky Panky 

I Think We’re Alone Now 

Mony Mony 

Mirage

Crystal Blue Persuasion

Draggin the Line

 

Mentioned in the book, these songs I did not know but found on YouTube. 

Ball of Fire

Say I Am

She

Sweet Cherry Wine

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Austin at Night 

South by Southwest 2013 

Rachmaninoff 

Music Makes You Braver 

State Guard Song “Texans Serving Texans”

Rachmaninoff

My mother was more for Chopin and Liszt and we had a lot of that, especially as sheets and books, but also on 33-1/3 LPs, eventually in stereo. So, growing up, we had at least one Rachmaninoff, the Preludes and Variation on a Theme by Paganini, perhaps. And also the Second Piano Concerto. But I never knew that until I read Atlas Shrugged in high school and my 11^th grade American history teacher told me that that particular work was one of Ayn Rand’s favorites. I listened to it often while reading Atlas Shrugged through twice. To me, it is the soundtrack for the book and the soundtrack that the movie should have had.

Rand mentions it and Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto in The Fountainhead, at the beginning of Part IV. We see an anonymous young man in the woods. Recently graduated from college and seeking a path for his future, he responds to the beauty of the world around him and yearns for something within himself to answer the promise in the music. 

 

Rachmaninoff was an icon in the society in which Rand matured. In Dr. Zhivago, Yuri, Lara, Komarovsky, and Pasha are all at the very fine party in a sparkling home, while in the background, Rachmaninoff plays for the guests. 

 

It is not that I don’t care for music (see Hallelujah here), but that I have a slight hearing deficiency. The piano worked well enough for me because you hit the key and you get the note. As open instruments, the coronet and French horn were impossible for me. In the third grade, we took a “music readiness” test in which we had to identify higher and lower notes; and once they got close, I could not tell them apart. But music is a language; and I am good at languages, dialects, and accents. I have two cassette tapes, Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff and Gershwin Plays Gershwin. You can hear covers all over YouTube and the performers are accomplished professionals. But these are not just different performers with their own subtle interpretations. They are the right way to play the music because there is no substitute for creation.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Labor Day Celebrates Productivity 

Love, Loss, and Redemption in Atlas Shrugged 

Autobiography of a Worker 

Reflections on the Passings of Comrades 

Katyusha and History as a Science

Beware of historians who quote each other. It was a forgotten lesson that I remembered in pieces while commuting about ten years ago. 

When I was in junior high school, I watched different early morning lectures before going to school. “Sunrise Semester” was the paradigm, but there were others. In the ninth grade, I worked through an entire set on the history of communism. As I remember it now, the sponsors were Harvard University and the Marshall Law School, but the clues have proved impossible to follow. 

 

At the same time, I was on the school newspaper staff and I met a girl there who was a senior. I don’t know why she liked me, but she did talk to me. I told her about the tv lectures and I showed her my notes. She got a hall pass from the teacher and took me to the library. We went to the 900s where the history books were. She pulled down three. “That’s the one,” I said. She opened them all to their bibliographies and pointed to the names of the other authors of the other books. “They just quote each other,” she said. “That’s not history.” Her name was Kathy. Like many in the neighborhood, she was ethnically Russian. I knew her as Kathy; she once said, “My name is Katyusha but I am not an anti-tank rocket.” I had no idea what she meant. A few years later, I was working as a messenger at what we still called City Hospital but which they rebranded as Cuyahoga County Metropolitan General Hospital. Running labs, someone called my name. She was in for something minor, an appendectomy perhaps. We said our hellos and smiled to each other, but her mother was there. The next time that my rounds took me to her ward, she was gone. 

 

But I remembered the lesson and Google having been invented, I looked for “Katyusha.” Of the several versions, I like this one. I had to nod to the old veterans on camera at about 1:50 in. 

 

Varvara - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4v1nDa7tLY

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

A Chronology of Recent Historical Periods 

Bringing Philosophy to Athens: Aspasia of Miletos 

The Texas Navy

Newton versus the Counterfeiter 

Murray Rothbard: Fraud or Faker? 

Music Makes You Braver

That is a tag line for the music of Two Steps from Hell founded by Thomas Bergersen and Nick Phoenix. When I was working as a clerk-typist (information specialist) for the Texas Military Department editing, distributing, and sometimes writing plans, procedures, and policies, I searched out music on YouTube to put in my headphones in order to keep out noise while I tried to concentrate. I found their album Battlecry. I signed up for the channel and bought access and then a download for that, Skyworld, Invincible, and Unleashed.

Katica Illényi delivered a full-bodied performance of Vittorio Monti’s “Csárdás.” (I find it acceptable that the best Hungarian dance would be written by an Italian.) It is just the first half of this YouTube video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF9uQI-SRv4
She also has a violin performance of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 a work usually scored for the piano. (At least, that was Liszt’s intent.)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMU4SO7rp5w

 

Speaking of things Hungarian (such as my maternal grandparents), serving in uniform, I identified with this guy, whatever his mission was that day. 

“Ide Születtem” by Hungarica

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC53QRC-jjw

 

My brother’s band, Styrenes, recorded “Minstrel Boy” as a mock, but I liked the energy (and Paul’s brogue). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IgRq4AZXcg

I think that the Hans Zimmer version is the best modern instantiation. Written for Blackhawk Down, it goes well with a similar yarn, Battlestar Galactica. We were fans of the first three seasons, though Ron Moore’s post-modernist sense of life took the plot and theme  into entropy. Minstrel Boy/Battlestar Galactica

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdVN1P16L8o

 

The performance of “Men of Harlech” from Zulu is iconic. “Very good, mind ye, but they have no top tenors.” Of all the versions I listened to, Charlotte Church’s performance takes the prize.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZmrS_w6s7s

 

One May Day, I went looking for The Internationale and following links, I ended up at “Minka.” It was a song that we learned (in English) in grade school. Our neighborhood was very ethnic. When the teacher passed out the sheet music, one girl said, “Our dog’s name is Minka!” and another girl rejoined, somewhat saddened, “My mom’s name is Minka.” 

 

Minka with Ukrainian lyrics and English liner notes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYrGI0FncYc

A more modern theatrical rendition here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3EwoLkwq_o

 

Arturo Toscanini conducts The Internationale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OPvWFDzDlA

Billy Bragg version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAw0Ri4FSdM

Oddly enough, in We the Living, Ayn Rand describes the song in positive words. What she hated about communism was communism. For her the October Revolution was a betrayal. She was all for modernism, globalism, and an end to nationalism and racism.

 

Also misunderstood, I believe, is our own national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner. We sing it as a dirge. It drags the hearse down the street and the carriage is a travois. It should sound like this: 

1814 Version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvVtFD9Na0I

It was set to a drinking song for a reason. We celebrate a victory. Drink to it!

“The Anacreontic Song” Soloist: Jacob Wright Conducted by Jerry Blackstone from the University of Michigan’s American Music Institute.  “The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine!” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l-n64NWHS4

 

When I was very young my heroes were cowboys, of course, and they were men on their own, not members of large groups. I liked Gene Autry. (“Whoopee-tie-aye-ay! I go my own way ... Where you sleep out every night and the only law is right.”) “Back in the Saddle Again.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt18gd6OSHk

 

“The Ballad of Paladin” here: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgvxu8QY01s

 

Being on your own is fine until it is not. Of the very many versions of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” I sent this one to Laurel. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izz0_qEl_-E

 

Previously on Necessary Facts 

Postmodernism 

After Action Report: Heartbreak Ridge 

Financing a Revolution 

Rebels: A Well-Regulated Militia 

 

Hallelujah

I learned of the song from The West. Wing episode where Secret Service agent Simon Donovan is killed in a convenience store robbery. The song plays while White House Press Secretary C. J. Cregg sits on a bus stop bench and cries. It has had many cover artists. The best version is by Jeff Buckley. Different lyrics have been written by Leonard Cohen, creating more versions. I was insulted when I heard it again in Shrek.

I've heard there was a secret chord

That David played and it pleased the Lord

But you don't really care for music, do ya?

Well it goes like this: the fourth, the fifth

The minor fall, the major lift

The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

 

Hallelujah (Jeff Buckley Official Video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8AWFf7EAc4

Well, your faith was strong, but you needed proof

You saw her bathing on the roof

Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew ya

She tied you to the kitchen chair

She broke your throne and she cut your hair

And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

 

Well baby, I've been here before

I've seen this room and I've walked this floor

I used to live alone before I knew ya

And I've seen your flag on the marble arch

And love is not a victory march

It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

 

Well, maybe there's a God above

But all I've ever learned from love

Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya

And it's not a cry that you hear at night

It's not somebody who has seen the Light

It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

 

Well there was a time when you let me know

What's really going on below

But now you never show that to me do you

But remember when I moved in you

And the holy dove was moving too

And every breath we drew was hallelujah

 

You say I took the name in vain

I don't even know the name

But if I did, well really, what's it to you?

There's a blaze of light

In every word

It doesn't matter which you heard

The holy or the broken Hallelujah

 

I did my best, it wasn't much

I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch

I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you

And even though

It all went wrong

I'll stand before the Lord of Song

With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Irene Louise Babos Marotta Joseph 

Happy Birthday, Paul 

World War II Sweetheart Dance (2019) 

Love Actually Quote-Along 

 

Irene Louise Babos Marotta Joseph

Today would have been her 86^th birthday. My mother left me with two enduring learning points.

• Good music is cheap and cheap music is expensive.
• It does not matter how much money you have as long as you are educated. 

5th Grade Buhrer School
Miss McGovern, 1941

There were many others. She was given to maxims, glittering generalities, and statements of opinion as fact. From my point of view, she had about 12 or 13 good years, and then slid downhill for about 25, though she enjoyed a couple of counter-trend peaks. After she died, we cleaned out her apartment and two salient facts gave me pause:

• She had no mirrors (except for the one that is standard in the bathroom). When we were kids, we used to make Transylvania jokes about being Hungarian; maybe it was not so funny. 
• We found a candle that had been burned at both ends.

 

c. 1964

Mom played the piano and owned a couple of them over the years. She taught my brother, Paul, and me to play, though I soon stopped because he eclipsed me. Nonetheless, I learned to read music, and later did not learn to play the coronet and French horn. We had classical (mostly Romantic) music on high fidelity 33-1/3 rpm records. Interestingly enough, Mom was supportive of rock ’n’ roll. Mindful that good music is cheap and cheap music is expensive, she still paid for 45s of hit songs from Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, mostly at my brother’s request. I was not much for pop music until 1966, when I had my own favorites.

Cleveland Dental Manufacturing 
is now a residential loft space

Her best years started in 1956 to 1961 working for Walter S. Smith’s Cleveland Dental Manufacturing Company. Cleveland Dental did some overseas business, and Mom brought home envelopes with foreign stamps. She tried to get us interested in stamp collecting, but neither of us had much passion for it.

When Mr. Smith retired she worked a year or so more for the new president, but after the sale to Cavitron, she found another job. She then went to work for Dr. Robert Morgan Stecher who had offices at Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital from its days as City Hospital. He was not a practicing physician, but an academic researcher whose passions included early horses and the genetics of arthritis. He was independently wealthy. His father, Fred W. Stecher, was a pharmacist who invented Pompeian Massage Cream  and built his home in Lakewood on a natural gas well that brought lease income.

 

No longer interested in politics.
City Hall Chambers 1998.

Working for Dr. Stecher broadened her horizons. She took us to the Cleveland Health Museum, bought me memberships in the Natural Science Museum, and split season tickets to Severance Hall with neighborhood doctors. (Our home was two blocks from City Hospital. Some of the rentals, ours and others, went to interns and residents. I benefited from a lot of extra-curricular education and exposure to the research labs at the hospital.)  She wrote Dr. Stecher’s international correspondence and prepared his journal manuscripts. Their office was next to the hospital library; and I bought some discards for a dime each.

After Dr. Stecher retired, she worked as an office temporary until she met her second disastrous husband. That marriage lasted no longer than the first, but the comparison is between the harsh voyage of the Mayflower and the gaiety of the Titanic.

When it became clear that neither Paul nor I was going to graduate from college, she took over management of our sister’s education and got Kelly through Baldwin-Wallace with a major in English and a minor in Biology, including a field trip to the Galapagos Islands. Mom did not live to see Paul and me go back to graduate with honors.

However, she did participate from the audience in the Cleveland punk music scene hanging out with Paul’s band, and billing herself as “Irene Styrene.”  

Her last job was as a full time administrative assistant at Cleveland City Hall. By then, she had lost her passion for politics. Forty years earlier, she had sent me to school with a Nixon-Lodge pin and the next time around, it was AuH2O in 64, which is how I ended up in Young Americans for Freedom in 1965, and ultimately wrote a blog.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

World Peace Through Massive Retaliation

Happy Birthday, Paul

The First Dagny

Dagny Two Point Oh

Tarzan, the Amazons, and My Mother

Song: "Texans Serving Texans"

Texans Serving Texans
Lyrics by PO3 Michael Marotta
Music by PO3 Rodney Buckwalter

We are Texans serving Texans.

We are volunteers for you.

We are the Texas State Guard.

We’re the red, white and blue.

The Lone Star shines within us.

We are equal to the task; yes, it’s true.

Your community is in our care.

To republic and union we are true.

Second verse: 

We are Texans serving Texans.

We are volunteers for you:

Aiding civil authorities,

The defense force of our state.

We work to achieve; we are prepared.

We transport, shelter, and protect.

On water or land, search and rescue,

Hosting Web, and radio too.

 This past May 21-24, I attended the annual training exercise of the Maritime Regiment as an instructor for WebEOC. In addition to my primary duty, I was able to meet with Petty Officer Buckwalter and the band. The band worked on the music and we refined the lyrics. The band played the melody for the Awards ceremony on Saturday the 23rd.  Gen. Brian Smallwood asked to hear it again. He liked it. The lyrics here have not yet been approved by the Judge Advocate General. 

I also sent these cadence calls to my instructors from last year's Regional Basic Orientation Training. These calls are also not yet approved by the JAG.

CADENCE CALLS

We are Texans serving you.

State Guard is Red, White, and Blue.

 

Faithful, constant, strong as steel.

Train and drill and gain in skill.

Union and Republic true.

Equal to the task we do.

Transport, shelter, food, and care.

We achieve. We are prepared.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Primary Leadership Training
Community Emergency Response Team
Evaluating a Dive Team
Texans Serving Texans 

Happy Birthday, Paul

My brother is in the hospital getting a Dacron aorta.  A simple arm strain injury at work led him to discover that we have the same genetic defect: coarctation or stenosis of the aorta and a bicuspid valve.  Mine was corrected by surgery (just the pinch, stretched, not Dacron; and not the valve) in 1956.  Medicine has improved. Certainly people have.  No one ran marathons in 1956; and he has run several.  Lately, however, he could not make three miles, so he says that he should have known…

 

After he started working on this,
and was living in California, Paul took acting lessons. 
After a lifetime on stage, he said the lessons helped.
He performed the work in clubs several times.  
Sketches of Dorian Gray trailer

The sibling rivalry we accepted as normal as children would not be tolerated today.  My being three years older and often 150% of his weight, it just was not fair.  When I went off to college, he had more growing space.  He also signed up for the wrestling team, picked a fight with me, and pinned me in one move.  So, that settled that. 

Episode One

He qualified for Cleveland Public Schools major work (“super normals”) program, which I did not.  Also, he actually practiced the piano, which I did not.  He had the insight to choose the violin while I picked the coronet.  So, he could get over his mistakes quietly, which I could not.  He became a musician. 

"Grey Haired Rats" -- Playing piano in a rock band sucks. I've had just about every kind of electric piano ever made. They all stink. More than once, I've had to play some strange approximation of a piano provided by a stupid promoter. One time the piano was 175 feet from the stage. (No you can't move it). Once the "piano" was actually an organ (Hey, it's got keys, what's the problem?) On top of that, keyboard instruments were ridiculed by just about everyone in our crowd it seemed. Too much like British prog-rock or worse, the Doors. Peter Laughner once told me pianos are OK, sometimes, but the pedals are only for squares.  -- THE STYRENES
 by Paul Marotta, Scat Records liner notes here.

We both held many jobs over the years.  He spent more time selling and less time on trucking docks, but, as Ayn Rand said, all work is an act of philosophy.  Eventually, he made vice president at New World Records, and even got a seat on the board before he was fired.   The Nineties were an interesting time.  We thought they never would end.  But they did, on September 11, 2001.  

Episode Two

Work got hard to find, so in 2005, my wife and I returned to school to complete the four-year degrees we never needed before.  When Paul saw how easy it was for me, he returned to earn a bachelor of arts in literature at Purchase College in the SUNY system.  He needed the vacation from life.  His wife had died far too young from cancer.  He was uncentered.  Time out for school was a good choice. 

He spent some time in California.  Now, he is in Massachusetts.  He has a new significant other - and a new heart.

Episode Three

You can browse for “Paul Marotta”, though like “Mike Marotta” you will find many. We are not dentists.  These YouTube links will help. 

• The Styrenes perform "OneFanzine Reader Writes" on Glasgow TV show The Beat Room in 1998.
•  The Styrenes perform "Drano InYour Veins" and two others at Pirate's Cove, Cleveland, 1979.  (The sound is not good.  The Dancer is easier to follow.)  
• This fan posting of  “Drano in Your Veins” has better fidelity.
• The Styrenes - All The Wrong PeopleAre Dying
• In C By Terry Riley - A 'rock' orchestration by The Styrenes - Part 1
• The Styrenes in Wikipedia here.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

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The First Dagny