demoralize, or damage anybody. . . . So all of you who have ruffled my feathers and done me wrong for being an inquisitive child or an oversensitive pain-in-the-neck artist, remember, just like they said about Mongo in the movie Blazing Saddles, if you shoot Steven, you’ll just make him angry.
When you’re young, you experience everything for the first time, and because it’s happening to you so matter-of-factly, it just is . . . and you argue your way through it. In midlife, you question fucking everything, and so much energy is wasted questioning the whys of it all. You want to find that angel of thunderstorms that will put out your internal fire. You start to believe that you made it through six decades because there is an angel on your shoulder.
That’s why I’m a songwriter—because I’ve lived through the changes of not knowing ANYTHING . . . to knowing EVERYTHING . . . and now at sixty-three I’m back to NOT KNOWIN’ NOTHIN’. And when your mind is free of so-called knowledge, it is now set free to use its imagination. Like Albert Einstein once said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Radio plays your song; the melody is so catchy that it crawls inside of the people listening and changes their Everything. They start singing it! You got into them. You made love to them. You got into their soul . . . and vice versa. It’s like Vuja Dé, and that’s when the miracle manifests . . . you’re trading faces, places, spaces, and graces.
Father of four children (loves of my life), a songwriter, got a doctorate at Berkeley and another one at UMass, Boston, a poet, a painter, a drug addict, and a person who learns something new on a daily basis, from the Malibu Home for the Recently All Right to having dinner with Sheikh Nion in Abu Dhabi . . . and now . . . an author? You gotta be kidding! RoMANtics. SeMANtics. Exotic, neurotic, you got it! Does the noise in my head bother you . . . yet? Yeah, really? I’d say we’re off to a good start.
S.T.
Peripheral
Visionary
I was born at the Polyclinic Hospital in the Bronx, March 26, 1948. As soon as I could travel my parents headed straight out of town to Sunapee, New Hampshire, to the little housekeeping cottages they rented out every summer, kind of an old-fashioned bed-and-breakfast deal only it was 1950. I was put in a crib at the side of the house. A fox came by and thought I was a cub, grabbed me by the scruff of my diaper, and dragged me into the woods. I grew up with the animals and the children of the woods. I heard so much in the silence of the pine tree forests that I knew later in life I would have to fill that void. The only thing my parents knew was that I was out there somewhere. They heard me cry in the forest one night, but when they came up to where I was, all they saw was a big hole in the ground, which they thought was the fox’s den. They dug and dug and dug, but all they found was the rabbit hole I’d fallen into—like Alice.
Trow-Rico Lodge and the lawn I was mowing when Joe Perry drove up, summer of ’69. (Ernie Tallarico)
And like Alice I entered another dimension: the sixth dimension (the fifth dimension was already taken). Since then, I can go to that place anytime I want, because I know the secret of the children of the woods; there’s so much in silence when you know what you’re hearing—what dances between the psychoacoustics of any two notes and what reads between the lines is akin to the juxtaposition of what you see when you look in the mirror. My whole life has been dancing between these worlds: the GOAN ZONE, the Way-Out-o-Sphere and . . . the UNFORTUNATE STATE OF REALITY. In essence, I call myself a peripheral visionary. I hear what people don’t say and I see what’s invisible. At night, because our visual perception is made up of rods and cones, if you’re going down a dark path, the only way to really see the path is to look off and see it in your peripheral vision. But more on this as we progress, regress, and digress.
When I finally got pulled out of the rabbit hole, my parents brought me back to the third dimension. Like all parents they were concerned, but I was afraid to tell them that I have never felt more comfortable than being lost in that forest.
In Manhattan we lived at 124th Street and Broadway, not far from the Apollo Theater. Harlem, man. If the first three years of your life are the most informative, then surely I needed to hear that music, and I was inspired by the noise coming out of that theater. It had more soul than Saint Peter.
A few years ago I was back at the Apollo, and saw the park where my mom had pushed me in my carriage. My first visual memory is from THAT PARK: trees and clouds moving above my head as if I were floating above the earth. There I am, a two-year-old astral-projecting infant. At age four, I remember going to get a gallon of milk with two quarters, walking with my mom hand in hand through passages and corridors of the basement of our building and through tunnels into the adjoining building where the milk machine was. I thought I was . . . God knows where. I might as well have been on Mars. Ah, it was the mysterious world of childhood, where someone is always leading you by the hand through a dark passageway and into a brand-new world just waiting for the child’s overactive imagination to kick in.
My mother lit the fire that would keep me warm for the rest of my life. She read me parables, Aesop’s Fables, and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. Children’s tales and nursery rhymes from the eighteen hundreds, nineteen hundreds: “Hickory Dickory Dock,” Andrew Lang’s The Nursery Rhyme Book, Hans Christian Andersen, Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo. So great! Never mind the “Goose That Laid the Golden Egg!” My mom would read me all these stories every night at bedtime. But one night when I was around six, she stopped.
Happy days—Mom and me and Crickett, my Toy Fox Terrier, 1954. (Ernie Tallarico)
“You gotta learn how to read ’em yourself,” she said. Up until then I’d been reading along with her as she pointed to the words. We did this for months until she knew I kinda had the idea, then suddenly there’s no Mom looking over my shoulder. She just left the book by my bed and I became distraught. “Mom, I wanna hear the stories. Why won’t you read to me anymore?!” I said. And then one night I thought to myself, “Uh-oh, now I gotta get smart.” Naah. . . . I’ll just become a musician and write my own stories and myths . . . Aeromyths.
Mom used to tell me of a man she’d seen on the Steve Allen Show, in 1956 when I was eight. His name was Gypsy Boots. He was the original hippie, a guy who lived in a tree with hair down to his waist and who promoted health food and yoga. Gypsy was the protohippie. In the early thirties he had dropped out of high school, wandered to California with a bunch of other so-called vagabonds, lived off the land, slept in caves and trees, and bathed in waterfalls. I was totally seduced by that lifestyle. Boots’s message was this: As primitive as his world seemed, he wanted people to think that he would live forever. Hey, he almost did, dying just eleven days before his ninetieth birthday in 1994.
Next in my life came a bohemian composer named Eden Ahbez, who wrote a song called “Nature Boy” (which my mom heard on a Nat King Cole record). He camped out below the first L in the Hollywood sign, studied Oriental mysticism, and, like Gypsy Boots, he lived on vegetables, fruits, and nuts. My mom sang that song to me before I went to sleep. I’ll never forget how it made me think that I was her nature boy.
The song tells the story of how one day an enchanted wandering Nature Boy—wise and shy, with a sad, glittering eye—crosses the path of the singer. They sit by the fire and talk of philosophers and knaves and cabbages and kings. As the boy gets up to leave he imparts the secret of life: To love and be loved is all we know and all we need to know. With that Nature Boy vanishes
