Category Archives: Personal

Please help me promote my crowdfunding campaign for my book

Posted by Richard Handal on

BE-THE-MUSIC_front-cover-webI’ve gone live with my book project’s crowdfunding campaign on Authr.com. My book will be entitled “BE THE MUSIC : How Tori Amos Does It.” In addition to being able to pre-order eBooks, posters which have a photo of the wonderful Storyteller Doll sculpture Karen Sparks made for the book cover, and published thank yous by name are available as premiums on my Authr page. I need money to continue living where I am for an estimated six more months to finish writing my book, at which point, my investor from long ago will pay the costs of publication.

I’ve done huge amounts of research in many areas since 2000. I believe I have formed an understanding of how art works, and have devised methods to use to teach composers, performers, and listeners to have more fulfilling experiences with music, through using a careful study of Tori Amos, her family history, and her music.

I’ve become extremely mobility impaired over the last five years, and now I can only walk short distances with great difficulty using two canes. This rented house is set up so I can access most of my research materials despite my mobility problems. Should I need to move elsewhere soon, my materials would surely be more difficult to access. With as much work as I’ve done for this book, if I can’t get to my research books and other materials with ease, all my years of work could end up for naught. I’ve overcome a variety of obstacles over the years, including the slow, traumatic decline of my mother’s health, leading up to her death three years ago. Then I needed to hire a lot of people to clean out her cluttered house, and to help me set up this rented house with the research materials I had accumulated. All of this has been hugely complicated by my increasing lack of mobility, and was also expensive.

Please encourage your friends to check out my publisher’s crowdfunding site at: <http://authr.com/title/2677/be-the-music_.html>. I wrote a much longer biographical story which is on my blog. I hope those with time to read it and to check out the links will find it entertaining as well as informative.  🙂  The biographical piece is greatly tailored toward Tori Amos folk. Please find the address at the end of some of my pages on Authr. After an expected initial rush of interest by Tori Amos people, the intention is to continue marketing “BE THE MUSIC” mainly to music teachers so as to alter the way music is taught. A simple goal, is it not?

I hope many people will see the importance of this work, and will agree to support it at Authr.

Great thanks to anyone who helps publicize this. It’s going to be a great challenge. Each of you is my only hope.

Richard Handal

Thoughts on Providence, 11/30/99

Posted by Richard Handal on

Providence-1999

Date: Wed, 1 Dec 1999 17:32:25 -0500 (EST)
From: Richard Handal
Subject: Thoughts on Providence, 11/30/99

Hello:

I was moved to express a few thoughts on last night’s Providence show. This isn’t exactly a review, but anyhow…

Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Providence, Rhode Island, 11/30/99

“The whole air seemed alive as if the tongues of those great cold, hard metal things had become flesh and joy. They burst into being screaming with delight and the city vibrated. Some wordless thing they said touched something so deep inside you that they made tears come.”

—Emily Carr (Canadian painter, 1871 – 1945)

I’ve learned that there’s no way to know in advance from one show format to the next how Tori’s going to drive when she comes out of the garage. On the ’96 Dew Drop Inn tour she had a sports car, and proceeded to lead us at great speed through mountainous hairpin turns–pushing her limits and ours, seemingly daring herself to see how hard and how fast she could lead us without drifting over the edge of a cliff.

Those shows were often quite scary, and they came to seem sometimes like some sort of ritual testing ground of naked human emotion: How much feeling could she get in touch with, dig out and project toward to us? How much could she take, and how much could *we* take? She seemed to be keeping few secrets hidden, and on any given night anything and everything was fair game. I loved those shows with an abiding passion. Some of the deepest emotions I ever experienced in my whole life came around on that tour, and I never forget to this day how important all of that was and is to me.

The band shows last year and this seemed as if countryside jaunts in the family SUV. She used a more powerful one for the arena shows than she did for the smaller venues, but all were larger-than-life experiences, developed in no small part to impress with their pure might. Surely, she went off-road and utilized four-wheel drive over rugged terrain at points during these shows. Unlike some people, I loved the band shows a great deal, and to see how well she was ultimately able to pull off her vision of them gave me feelings of pride in her abilities as a talented and varied performer. And I liked having a few solo piano songs within the paradigm of a band concert. The shift at those shows between the types of instrumentation was pulled off in a way that seemed both casual and appropriate, and we got to experience the best of each world. For all their sheer force of energy, the band shows were approachable, engaging, welcoming, and often even joyous. I loved the hell out of the band shows.

It was with a huge amount of trepidation that I attended the solo piano show last night in Providence. I didn’t think my nervous system these days could take a harrowing concert of the type the DDI tour came to exemplify. Frankly, I didn’t enjoy watching her having to bear the bulk of the musical burden on her shoulders then, and even just for her to have endured the wear and tear on her body as she did in ’96 took a visible toll on her as well. I mean to refer to more than just a physical toll, but an emotional and spiritual one as well. I don’t know what all she was going through out there on the road in ’96, but we saw enough of its effects on her as a person that I came to be quite concerned for her by tour’s end. And although I attended nearly three dozen DDI shows, merely by reading accounts of those shows and talking with people who were there, one could readily tell that bubbling beneath the surface, there was a lot going on with her that year. I was relieved when it finally came to an emotional and life-changing conclusion.

I was therefore extremely relieved when I attended last night’s solo piano outing in Providence. Yes, she had her lithe sports car, but instead of taking us out at a breakneck pace, she seemed a calmer, less furtive and more seasoned pilot than I had ever seen at a solo show. I am perfectly content not to have to follow her at top speed along dangerous curves. Being led with introspection down dark and winding country roads suits me fine. It’s more than enough for me to be able to accompany her on these journeys, no matter what their nature. It’s great to simply be with her, and there surely was plenty of her in this Providence concert.

Tori has shown that she can pull off a variety of show formats. She has nothing to prove anymore. Now seems to me to be an upcoming time off the road to regroup musically, and simply to live. I think that holds true for many of us, including those of us who go to the shows.

I believe she needn’t worry who’s going to be around the next time she emerges from her garage to take a spin. I’m confident that many of us will be there with our thumbs out hoping to catch a ride, waiting to see where she has decided to take us next. I continue to have an immense amount of faith in her musical sensibilities, and where they steer her on her personal musical journey. And I love her very much.

Richard Handal

Wallingford was dangerous

Posted by Richard Handal on

2001-10-14wallingford1b
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 14:25:04 -0400 (EDT)
From: Richard Handal
Subject: Wallingford was dangerous

Hello, Folks:

I’m starting to feel like an idiot when I talk about the concerts on this tour. I mean, I’ve seen lots of amazing shows since 1994, and as for public comments, I have always tended to discuss the better shows and to remain quiet about a concert unless it was either pretty damn good, or there was something special to mention. So, maybe I never left adequate room to describe shows that might achieve heights no show has before.

Such is my current dilemma. This Wallingford concert was so far off the scale of any show I have ever seen that there is no possible way to not sound like a flaming lunatic when discussing it. I know it wasn’t just my own distorted view of things, though. To a person—including friends who’ve seen twenty- or thirty-some concerts and one who, as myself, has seen a hundred-some—EVERYONE I saw afterwards was astonished at the sheer force of power and deep emotional expression of this concert. Folks were absolutely flipping out. There’s nothing like the high of seeing a show where she has just hit one out of the park into the next county, and looking at the faces of friends as their jaws are dragging the ground in amazement.

’97 Bonnie & Clyde was delivered with the most concentration of intensity of any night on this tour. Past the Mission began with huge, crashing chords on the lower register of the Boesey which were answered with supple, organlike tones from the Rhodes.

Then it was time for the first appearance on this tour of Sugar. This was not the lovely, soaring version of Sugar from the Dew Drop Inn Tour. This was essentially a piano reduction of the band arrangement from the ’98 and ’99 tours—sledgehammer powerful still with “just” the piano and her muscular chest voice. Wow. How fantastic it’s been when the old favorites have shown up on this tour for the first time! The (for me) long-awaited appearance last week of Little Earthquakes was a real breath-taking moment for me.

By the time she was into Doughnut Song with its increasingly strong repeats of “you can tell me it’s over,” I was shaking in my seat.

At this point I want to mention that this show had one of the necessary ingredients for an astonishingly good show—a great audience. Folks were darned quiet during the songs but explosively enthusiastic after they ended. Without this there’s no way she can do a truly top notch concert.

My notes for Mother say “tons of rubato but it still seemed natural, appropriate, and enhanced the expression.” I see I also noted how wonderful it was the way she had such wide-ranging dynamics, such as when she whispered “he’s gonna change my name” during this Mother.

If I’m ever gonna finish writing this I best skip to Imagine. She had supposedly told someone in New York that she would play it there, and of course last Tuesday was the anniversary of John Lennon’s birth so why she skipped it there and brought it out in Wallingford I don’t know, but the effect was staggering. She prefaced it by saying something like “If you could help me sing this it would be good.” Perhaps eighty to a hundred folks streamed down to the stage area and formed a warm cocoon for the performance of what HAD to have been THE most overwhelmingly emotional version of this song—ever. I know this sounds like bloated hyperbole but I’m not kidding. Remarkable. She also slipped in a change once to make the line into “a brotherhood of man—and woman.”

The first version on this tour of Mary and then Twinkle, and we were done.

The brother of a friend of mine had a ticket to this show but didn’t attend because the last several shows had already taken their toll and he didn’t think he could take anymore. He made a wise decision to skip this show, because surely, it would have at least put him into the hospital. So, if you’re feeling none too stable these days and have tickets for a show yet to come, steel yourself before you go with a barrel-full of resolve at the very least. Yikes. I’m not even sure how much more of this I can take and I ought to be used to this by now.

Be seeing you,

Richard Handal

Where Would Music Be Without Tori Amos?

Posted by Richard Handal on

Where Would Music Be Without Tori Amos?

Amos pushed the envelope for musical innovation and confessional lyrics. Why didn’t we notice?
posted on March 12, 2014 at 3:56pm EDT
Sady Doyle, BuzzFeed Contributor

A long overdue encomium. Much thanks to Ms. Doyle. There’s just one bone I want to pick.

I have no idea why people ever believed Tori was copying Kate Bush. She has strongly denied it.

When I was seventeen years old — which was, I’m 30 now — um, people started coming up to me while I was playing in the clubs and saying to me, “God, you sound like Kate Bush.” And I would say, “Well, who’s Kate Bush?” So this happened for about, I don’t know, a few months. And I finally heard her work, and I didn’t think I sounded exactly like her. I felt like there were moments, but stylistically and the writing-wise things were very different. Um, I think she’s incredible and she gave a lot to music. She was quite a front-runner. But I try not to study her work too much, just because I was already getting compared to her um, thirteen years ago.

Some people genuinely believe Tori was lying as if she were trying to avoid admitting “the truth.” That’s astonishing.

Tori Amos grew up super close to where I lived, going to junior high school eight blocks from me in Silver Spring. I knew and even played music with some of her musician friends. If Kate Bush was known to anybody I was friends with before Tori turned 17, she certainly wasn’t a favorite musician of any of them. Kate Bush was not an artist who sold a ton of records where Tori and I lived in the 1970s. Tori would have likely needed to listen to WGTB or WHFS to have heard her on the radio in the ’70s. GTB was a rogue experimental station with a weak FM broadcast signal out of Georgetown (which might explain the comments of bar-goers when Tori played in Georgetown clubs). Its tag line was “WGTB: One nation, underground.” Tori certainly wasn’t listening to that station, especially in Rockville and Potomac. She probably heard HFS from time to time, but it’s difficult for me to imagine her living on their musical diet as presented by Cerphe and Weasel. I did listen to HFS constantly for years, and if I ever heard Kate Bush on there, she certainly was not played with great repetition.

No one has ever explained to me why Tori Amos would want to copy Kate Bush’s music. Tori Amos is a serious, trained musician. No serious, trained musician has any interest whatsoever in copying the music or sound of anyone else, unless overtly as a rare and/or amusing nod of respect. In the early days of learning one’s instrument one often plays to recordings and tries to match them note for note, but it isn’t to copy them in public performance nor to copy the style of the artist as if it were one’s own. I’ve known a ton of musicians for more than 40 years, and none of them ever copied another musician hoping to “borrow” the style as their own. Further, Tori Amos began writing songs when she was quite young, and she considers herself a composer above all else. Composers steal from many musicians not just one. The only way such stealing from many artists can be avoided is to not have heard them in the first place. The only such composers I can think of off the top of my head are Harry Partch and Carla Bley, although Ms. Bley came to often write brief humorous references to well known compositions by others.

Casey Stratton sounds so much like Tori Amos he is effectively a tribute artist. That’s not what we’re talking about. No one ever accused Tori of sounding nearly identical to Kate Bush at every turn. At least if they have I’m unaware of it, and it’s preposterous.

Sometimes Tori has sung in a tiny girlish voice one could say reminded one of Kate Bush when she, too, would sing in a tiny girlish voice. What is one to say to that? How much effort must a musician invest  to sound specifically unlike every other musician, simply to avoid risking an accusation she is trying to copy her? Seriously? People also live within categories of psychology, and no musician can reinvent the wheel every time she composes or performs—nor should she.

Did The Beatles not learn to sing harmony due in part to inspiration of the Everly Brothers? Did they not also “borrow” generously from others and succeed in forming their own style of creating and performing music?

There seems to be a psychological imperative among some listeners that they presume the first player with certain sounds is being copied by a second player the listener hears, if the second reminds them of the first. I wish those who feel this way would come to understand there’s a lot of aural illusion going on in such things.

Hip to the Wind by The Hydrogen Jukebox—live in a club, 2002

Posted by Richard Handal on

20021019_HJ-party_01

20021019_HJ-party_02

I never spoke of this publicly before because it could sound self-serving, but here in the year after the year of the selfie, what the heck. Some friends of mine in the now-defunct band The Hydrogen Jukebox wrote a song about me in late summer 2000. It’s based on a visit I paid them in their dorm suite at Temple University in the spring of 2000. I had been visiting friends in New York and had a giant box of CDs with me plus various accoutrements in a shopping bag. They had one fellow who would do bizarre, impressionistic monologues, and I insisted on taking them to Tower Records where they were required to purchase a Lord Buckley CD. It came to be their most popular live song through several band incarnations and arrangements, and much dancing would take place whenever they started to play it.

My friends moved into touring around the world full-time with their sideshow troupe as the Squidling Brothers.

In late January 1973, I went to visit my father and his family in San Salvador for three weeks. This is just one story from that trip.

Posted by Richard Handal on

My father had a business associate Herbert, who was a wacky kind of guy. I was 16, and along with one of my half-brothers who was around 12 at the time, Herbert came with my father and me to Guatemala City for two days. It was a 45-minute flight from San Salvador. Herbert and my father were going to talk to the president of the Guatemalan congress about my father starting to do some business there. My father sold commercial electrical supplies, and was a partner in a company doing major electrical construction projects such as wiring apartment buildings, a new soccer stadium, building substations, and even wiring towns for the first time. Soon thereafter my cousin who was the head of the Salvador Communist party would come along and blow up such things, but that’s a different story.

We went to a cabaret nightclub in the first night for dinner. The show band was a seven-piece with horns, and led by an attractive, charismatic female singer. She would walk around among the dinner tables when she didn’t sing from the stage. When she got near our table, Herbert called her over and whispered into her ear. She came around our big round table to stand next to me while the bright spotlight shone on both of us as she first spoke, then the whole nightclub erupted in applause before she sang to me. Herbert seemed awfully proud of himself, and my father was laughing.He explained, “Herbert told her it was your birthday and asked her to sing you this song,” a hit down there at the time, Te Traigo estas Flores.

Of course, I was horribly embarrassed, because if there’s anything I don’t want it’s to be the center of attention. Soon the hell was over with and we finished dinner. We stopped at the town square in the rented car on the way back to the hotel, and there were two competing mariachi bands who swarmed over to our car. Herbert called one of them over to him and spoke. They all came around to my rear window on the left side of the car and started singing this song to me—again. Once again I was horribly embarrassed.

We got back to San Salvador, and every time over the next couple of weeks whenever we went out and Herbert could find a mariachi band at an outdoor café at lunchtime or anywhere, Herbert told them it was my birthday and requested Te Traigo estas Flores for my “birthday,” which they would all then proceed to sing directly to me.

trumpets-hell

(go to 44:15)

I was sound asleep in my room the night before flying home early in the morning when I was awakened by loud singing. I couldn‘t figure out for the life of me why it was so loud or where it was coming from. My father opened the door after about a minute and the familiar song Te Traigo estas Flores was suddenly much louder still. A mariachi band was in the next room. My father had gone into downtown San Salvador and brought a mariachi band back to serenade me goodbye from the next room while I was in bed on the final night of my visit. How he got them all into his Mercedes with their instruments would have been the big story of the night, but there were no photos, so I was left to imagine it. Did the one guy hold his giant bass guitar out the window while they were all piled into the car? I could never figure that out. They sang Te Traigo estas Flores first, maybe another 40 minutes of other songs, then Te Traigo estas Flores again at the end before my father took them back down the mountain into town again to leave them where he got them.

I picked up a 7-inch 45 RPM disc of this song in a record store down there one day.

http://www.videoclip.bg/watch/638053_lucha-villa-te-traigo-estas-flores-1973