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― 29 ―
II Moving to California: 1951Ben Johnston and Harry Partch in Gualala; Settling in San Francisco and Performing at the hungry i, 1952; Enrico Banducci, Impresario of North Beach; Beer, Bach and Beethoven: Sunday Afternoons at the hungry i; Working and Studying Piano with Laura Nast and Living in a Loft in "Pacific Depths"; Creating and Performing Concerts at Opus One, 1952; Exploring Scientology; Leaving Opus One and a Partnership, 1959 CrawfordHow did you get to the west if you were down to fifty cents? Pippin I thought you might wonder--[laughter] I sold my piano. One of the singers I played for needed a piano, and since she was about as poor as I was, I sold the piano to her for the price of a bus ticket plus ten dollars. Quite a nest egg. Crawford Your life is so marked by these marvelous turns. Pippin Yes, I know. Crawford Had you kept in touch with Ben Johnston? Pippin No, and I have no idea how he found my address. We had been out of touch for several years, and we've been out of touch a good deal since then, when he and Betty left California, first for Illinois, then for North Carolina. But we met again just a few weeks ago. He was here in San Francisco to do a piece of Harry's with the Kronos Quartet. They have played several of his own quartets, but this time they were playing a piece by Harry that Ben had transcribed. You know that Harry wrote entirely for instruments of his own invention and construction. Crawford Yes, I have read about them. Pippin Harry was a masterful carpenter and craftsman as well as a composer, and these were fabulous instruments, but ― 30 ―
unfortunately, because of their uniqueness, live performance of Harry's music is unlikely if not impossible. The original
instruments may exist, but I'm not even sure if they are in one place. And who is going to learn to play them? Even if someone
did--a group of people, rather--it would be difficult to transport the body of instruments into an auditorium. In fact, some
of the instruments were actually built into the house where he lived.
Crawford You probably know more about Harry Partch than anyone else. Pippin Ben knows incomparably more. My own contact with Harry was relatively brief. I had got my bus ticket. I got to San Francisco, where I stayed a couple of nights, by which time my ten dollars was sorely depleted. So I hitchhiked up the coast to Gualala, which turned out to be a general store which had closed up for the day. I understand that the area has been much developed since then. Ben and Betty had come down to meet the bus, expecting me to be on it, but I arrived an hour later, just as it was starting to get dark. Behind the store there was a winding dirt road leading up to the ranch, up and up and up, surrounded by spectacular redwood trees and ferns as big as our Eastern trees. California at its most outrageous excess. [laughter] It had been a wet season, so from someplace down below one could hear rushing water. An hour later it would have been pitch dark. As it was, I wasn't absolutely sure that I was on the right road, but there I was, pack on shoulder, walking uphill, and sure enough after half an hour or so there appeared a distant light on the far side of a clearing. I knocked on the door of a small house and to my vast relief Ben and Betty opened it. That was the start of three rapturous months in the most spectacularly beautiful place I had ever seen. Ben, Betty and I lived in one house, and Harry lived about a hundred yards further down the road in a house that he had reconstructed himself. His carpentry skills were not confined to musical instruments. So we were two families, so to speak: Ben, Betty and I, more or less of an age, with much in common, and Harry--of an older generation, slightly prickly, slightly cantankerous, who had forged a unique life and a unique art by fiercely and stubbornly going his own way. Crawford Was he alone? ― 31 ―
Pippin
Yes, and before Ben and Betty's arrival he had lived for about seven years in these gorgeous surroundings, but in almost total isolation. By this time, he was becoming increasingly restless and moody. He wanted to get to the Bay Area. And Ben wanted to go to Mills College to study with Darius Milhaud. Crawford Was Ben composing then? Pippin Yes, although I think that he found his real voice as a composer later on, when the music that he created was truly wondrous, original, and captivating as well. Crawford Have you done some of his work? Pippin No, because unfortunately for me, Ben has written mostly in the microtomic idiom. He's written a few pieces for piano, but always for pianos that had to be specially tuned, which makes performance somewhat impractical. Like Harry, he's not a very practical composer. Crawford Good that you have kept in touch. Pippin He's someone I'm most grateful for. He lives with Betty, another person I'll always treasure, in North Carolina, ironically not far from where I was born. On leaving the ranch, they both went to Mills, and I came to San Francisco. Harry got a houseboat in Sausalito, and I must say that I didn't see much of Harry after that. But I saw a lot of Ben and Betty, until they went back East. Ben got a teaching position at Champagne, the University of Illinois, where he stayed for a good many years, and eventually retired to North Carolina. Crawford Where had he gone after Richmond? Pippin He went to William and Mary College. He was in the navy for a while and played trombone in the navy band. Like most of us, he spent a few years trying to find the direction he wanted to go. This was provided by his discovery of Harry's music and his theories on music. Crawford Harry Partch constructed a scale with different intervals, hadn't he? Pippin Indeed. You know that the standard scale consists of twelve intervals that are not scientifically precise. Using the overtone sequence, it is a little bit off--an imperfection that Bach tried to reconcile in The Well-Tempered Clavier. Bach's ― 32 ―
solution has been more or less followed ever since. But Harry discovered or invented a microtomic scale of forty-three tones
to an octave, which means very, very tiny intervals indeed. One of his basic instruments, which he called the chromalodium,
was a variant of an organ, and it was tuned to this microtomic scale.
Ben had an extraordinarily sensitive ear. He could tune any instrument to the chromalodium, while I would have been lucky to get within the ballpark. Harry also played the viola, on which of course you can get any sort of intervals that you're capable of producing. He had also created several plucked instruments, which were mostly what I played. I believe that all of these instruments were designed to follow the subtle spoken inflections of the human voice. Crawford You were there to interpret his music? Pippin Well, no. My function was not quite so elevated. It was just to play the notes, to follow instructions. In fact, I must admit that while I liked the music very much, what I did was purely mechanical, and this I did not particularly enjoy. There was certainly no call, no room for inspiration. Playing the kathara, for example, consists of regulating a bar which controls the intonation, then giving a sweeping pluck across six strings, then relocating the bar, giving another pluck, and so on. It was not unlike operating a switch board. I also played the chromalodium, the organ-like instrument, which was a little bit more up my line. But to enjoy playing an instrument, you have to be reasonably good at it. And of course I was a rank beginner. There was no piano in Harry's place. Harry scorned the piano, of course, with its "artificial" intonation. But there were three houses on the lot and one of them was not occupied. That's where the piano went. [laughter] And it's where I started spending time. Crawford You find pianos in the strangest places. Pippin I found something else as well--an old-fashioned organ pumped by pedals. For the most part, the organ is an instrument that I am not fond of. I'm mostly familiar with huge, gargantuan organs that seem to have the subtlety of a bulldozer, without the definition. I've heard some recordings of Baroque organs that are delightful, but these big modern behemoths I just don't care for. However, during those months on the ranch, I loved playing this particular organ. It gave such a new slant ― 33 ―
on the Bach preludes and fugues, which lend themselves to so many modes of realization.
Crawford Full keyboard? Pippin No less. And such a variety of colors--the cor anglais, the vox humana, the oboe d'amore, et cetera. All in all, I was blissfully happy and could have stayed up there in the clouds indefinitely, but after about three months, for various reasons, Harry wanted to get back to the Bay Area, Ben wanted to get to Mills, so I came here and here I am. Crawford And here we are. Do you think we should end it here and start with that next time? Pippin It does sound like the beginning of a new chapter. ― [Interview 2: November 27, 1996] ## ―
Crawford
Where did I leave you last time? Pippin I was just reaching my fourth birthday, I believe. [laughter] Crawford Well, then, let's bring you to California, to this part of California. Pippin I was twenty-five at this point, and my life was again a blank slate waiting to be written on. In leaving New York, I was convinced that I had relinquished any idea of becoming a performing musician. Now this is, I might add, a typically New York notion. [laughter] To my provincial mind it was clear that any musical career emanated from New York. New York was the central spoke of the wheel. There's some truth in that, especially for singers, many of whom do leave here to go to New York, hoping for a career, and some do find it. But in reversing the direction, I'd left that possibility behind me, and had little idea of what to replace it with. I thought vaguely of someday settling down as a teacher, not necessarily of music. In this era of the Korean war, one could be fairly nonchalant about earning a living. Labor was in short supply and menial jobs at any rate were easily come by. And sure enough, the very day after I arrived I got a job as a busboy in Moors cafeteria--a very nice one, incidentally, on Powell Street near Market. It's since been demolished, but one of its crowning features was a huge mosaic by Bufano, for which he was ― 34 ―
given free food for life. Really a most elegant cafeteria. [laughter]
I had little material ambition or concern, a frame of mind that was more typical of the sixties rather than the fifties. A pioneer of the "me generation," I was interested in self-exploration, in Jungian psychology and Zen Buddhism, in meditation, things of that sort. In retrospect, it's easy to be condescending, but basically it was a search for honesty and truth. Crawford When did those interests begin? Pippin To some extent during the lonely days in New York. In fact, it was one of my reasons for leaving New York, which seemed so hostile to the kind of contemplative life that I envisioned. My first months in San Francisco I was overjoyed just to be here. The air was so fresh. The flowers were blooming. At the same time, I felt perhaps a slight sense of anticlimax, too. There's a kind of poetry in the ugliness, in the stark contrasts of New York that still spoke to my Dostoyevskian side. San Francisco, in contrast, seemed almost too easy, too ordered, too agreeable. I would probably have a similar reaction if, through some unlikely twist of fate, I were to wind up in heaven. But on the whole I was very happy to take things as they came and I was not concerned about the future. After a few months, the old restlessness returned. The job at Moors was entirely too much of a drain on my precious time and energy. In those days, as I said, work was easily come by, and Moors was part of a chain of Foster's cafeterias--I think there were about twenty of them in the city. By phoning in the morning, one could almost always get work for the day. Crawford You had the right credentials. Pippin Well, no, they would have taken almost anybody. I found that I could live on two days a week's work. Rents were low--thirty-five, forty dollars a month--and working in the cafeteria, you'd get a couple of meals. But eventually I got what seemed the ideal job I'd been looking for, three hours a day, four days a week. The cafeteria on the eleventh floor of I. Magnin. Perfect! Crawford You were free. ― 35 ―
Pippin
Yes, the freedom was what counted. And thanks to a lucky accident--which I must say has been typical of my life here--I had met somebody who lent me a piano. He had bought the piano for himself, but found, like so many people, he really wasn't playing it, and he wanted somebody to use it. So he gave it to me as a long-time loan. Crawford Who was he? Pippin He was a doctor and his name was Ed Bartlett. He let me keep the piano for several years, as a matter of fact. I was happy to be practicing again, without any particular goal in mind, but for the best of all reasons: I enjoyed doing it. Then one decisive night, probably the biggest turning point of my entire life, a friend took me to a charming cabaret called the hungry i. Now the hungry i had very recently been taken over by Enrico Banducci, an expansive and gregarious Italian who was a singer and who played the violin and who loved classical music and who later became an extremely well-known icon of San Francisco. This was a midweek night, it was late, nobody else was there, and my friend and Enrico both prevailed on me to play the piano. Oh, yes! Enrico had just acquired a good piano and wanted to hear how it sounded. I had always been bashful about impromptu performing, however informal, but Enrico is a person hard to say no to. I played for half an hour or so. Enrico was overwhelmingly friendly and flattering (a weapon that can slay me every time) and right away asked me if I would be interested in coming back for five nights a week to play. He stressed that I was to play as little or as much as I wanted to, play whatever I wanted to, with no obligation to play requests. Crawford Why was that? Pippin Both of us knew that classical piano requests can usually be counted on the fingers of one hand, and neither of us wanted to hear the four or five warhorses over and over again. I pondered his offer. I knew very well that if I said yes, I would take it seriously, which would mean practicing all day. It would mean dropping my wonderful three-hour job, and who knows how long my appeal would last? So I pondered--for about five minutes! After all, this was a step in the direction that I still wanted to go, and it was an adventure. Crawford What was the atmosphere of the hungry i like? ― 36 ―
Pippin
Sheer magic! It was downstairs. The entrance looked like the entrance to a Paris Metro stop, with a wide flight of stairs that opened up into a charming room, odd-shaped but intimate, with a few large abstract designs on the walls. Directors' chairs were placed around low, small tables where people gathered around lighted candles. European was the adjective people always used to describe it. In the warm glow, it was not hard to imagine oneself in Paris or the dream city of one's choice. Enrico was absolutely true to his word. I was never pressured to do anything other than what he had stipulated. That is, I was to play what I wanted. And what I wanted to do was to play the greatest music ever written, and to get people to listen to a Beethoven sonata or a Bach suite, for example, under these informal circumstances. It seemed to me that this could be an ideal way to share music, both for the performer and for the listener. And suddenly the career that I thought I'd abandoned seemed to reflower in a way that I had never expected. At any rate, that was my hope. The hope was sometimes confirmed by the reaction of audiences that were friendly, attentive and responsive. But I must admit that more often it was a tug of war. People in a bar are so used to listening to the piano as a fairly neutral background. Crawford And so they would talk. Pippin Indeed. I never knew when starting out to play a serious piece what was going to happen by the end of it. Enrico did what he could to convey the message that silence was expected, but how far can you go in policing a cabaret? Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Nonetheless, my five nights a week continued for several months, and then I had an altercation with the Musicians' Union. It seems that I had briefly joined the union way back in New York five years earlier, and this was, I suppose, like an early marriage that's conveniently forgotten. [laughter] I had joined the union because I had been promised a job. I was accepted into the union after giving a satisfactory rendition of "Happy Birthday To You." The job never materialized, so I never so much as paid dues to the union. I just ignored it completely, no doubt assuming that it would simply go away. Far from it! The union got on my case and made a big fuss about it. I was hauled in for a hearing, and thanks to Enrico, a prominent judge, Judge Meekle, showed up to appeal on my ― 37 ―
behalf. Awestruck by my eminent advocate, whom I had never met before, they decided to punish me lightly, by cutting my work
nights down from five to two.
Crawford You mean to say that you can't let a union membership lapse? Pippin I think the idea was that I was playing in what should have been a union job and that I was not declaring it to the union. Enrico was paying me eight dollars a night, which I thought was a sumptuous wage, but when I was allowed back to the job, my salary was raised to eighteen dollars a night. Crawford Union scale. Pippin I thought it quite exorbitant. At the time, I found the union most intimidating. Basically, I was opposed to it. I was all for labor, but how do you unionize art? I later changed my mind. For one thing, the union became more flexible, less threatening. Over the course of a long career, they have been most cooperative, most understanding. Crawford Thanks to Jerry Spain? Pippin I give him much of the credit for changing the character of the union. I certainly regarded him as a friend, an ally. And I came to recognize that without the Musicians' Union, quite simply, music would cease to be professional. It would be confined to amateurs and to fanatics like myself. Back to the pre-Spain days. Being cut down to two nights a week was not entirely unwelcome. It allowed more time to prepare. I tried to make every performance up to concert level, and for that, you can never prepare enough. Furthermore, some people came to hear me almost every night that I played, so I had to keep them interested by constantly varying the repertory. So I was practicing at least eight hours a day. For several months I was learning a new piece every day, all of which I performed by memory. This capacity has diminished radically with age, but in those days I memorized rapidly. Often I would work on a new piece all day and perform it by heart that night. By a piece, I would count, say, a movement of a sonata. A sonata would count as three or four pieces. Crawford Did you go through the whole Beethoven canon? ― 38 ―
Pippin
Not quite. There are a few of the sonatas that I'm still not that crazy about. But I've played twenty-six of the thirty-two. Crawford Do you have them in your hands? Pippin They don't stay. This is usually true of things that you learn quickly. On the other hand, even the things that you gulp down quickly at that age stay with you better than the things that you learn at a far more painstaking rate later on. But while I was slaving away, the hungry i was undergoing a transformation. It was becoming hugely successful. I had started in November of '51. By the end of '52, the i had been discovered. Enrico had a real eye for talent, and several of the people that he brought in were enormously popular--Mort Sahl, Stan Wilson, Jory Remus. Later on, people that went on to extraordinary fame, like Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand. The list goes on and on. I became the sore thumb. I still had my two nights, but people would come to my nights expecting to hear Mort Sahl or Stan Wilson. You can guess their reaction. And so I was eventually let go. Crawford By Banducci? Pippin Yes, but he didn't cut me loose altogether. He suggested that they might be able to use me at The Purple Onion, a not too dissimilar place across the street. We tried this briefly, but I was sandwiched in between more popular entertainers, and was expected to play only short, flashy pieces, which was not at all what I had set out to do. And so it really seemed that things had come to an end. It was here, incidentally, that I made a decidedly unpromising debut as a narrator, a role that later on was to become so pivotal. I thought it might help focus audience attention, or at least convey the idea that they were expected to listen if I said a few words about the piece I was going to play. My remarks were going to be brief and to the point. But I had barely started when someone in the audience was distinctly heard to say, "Why doesn't he shut up and just play?" I took this advice for a good many years. As I said, it looked like the end, but chance again entered the picture. I had a conversation with Irma Kay, who was nursing her own vision of starting a musical comedy company on a semi-amateur basis. She was a gifted director and a gifted entrepreneur, and she was confident that she could bring it off and make a popular success of it. Sure enough, a few months ― 39 ―
later she acquired a place in much need of renovation on South Van Ness and called it The Opera Ring, where she indeed realized
her dream and kept it going for a good many years.
To me, she suggested that Sunday afternoon concerts in a cabaret would be appealing. I leapt to the idea. Thinking it over, the plan took shape. Each program would be in three parts. I would play parts one and three solo, and in the middle I would be joined by a guest--a violinist, a cellist, a clarinetist, a singer, whatever. This would add scope, an extra dimension, an infinite range of possibilities. I approached Enrico with the idea and he was all in favor of it. Let me point out, this meant many extra hours of work for him, and I'm sure he was already taxed to the limit. Irma had not yet opened the Opera Ring or she might have suggested that we do the concerts there. Enrico never mentioned the extra work, on a Sunday afternoon following a heavy weekend. And furthermore, he volunteered to provide a buffet--a wonderfully generous gesture. Well, I seemed to judge that everybody was living on an income comparable to my own, so I set the admission charge at forty cents, for concert and buffet. I got to keep the door take, from which I paid the weekly guest. Friends helped me with a mailing list and, by George, the concerts started with a bang. Nobody was more surprised than I. Borrowing a line from Charlie Chaplin's movie Limelight we called them "The Beer, Bach and Beethoven Concerts." [laughter] Later we changed it to the more sedate title, The Four O'Clock Concerts. And they continued to be successful. The weekly guest artists would draw in a number of people, and there were a good many regulars, so the room was packed every week. This was indeed the goal that I had envisioned more than a year earlier. Crawford How many people could the hungry i seat? Pippin With rooms of that sort it's always somewhat flexible. The room looked and felt pretty full with fifty people, but it could accommodate a hundred, or even more. The utmost that I could expect in terms of income would be about forty dollars. More usually it was closer to thirty, from which I paid my guest fifteen. Crawford And who were your soloists? Pippin At first I didn't know many musicians in the area, so my selection was chancy, based entirely on other people's ― 40 ―
suggestions and recommendations. Later on I became more knowledgeable about whom I could call on, but that first spring, the
soloists were of uneven quality. Nonetheless, I think that the programs were always interesting.
But come Memorial Day, I suddenly faced severe competition --lovely springtime weather. With long afternoons, it was not so easy to entice people into a dark basement on a sunny Sunday. Attendance dropped precipitously, but by this time I was ready for a break. I'd been going strenuously, relentlessly for a long time, and something else was looming. During the previous summer, among the people that came to hear me was Arthur Fiedler, conductor of the Summer Pops at the Civic Auditorium. More accurately, he had been brought to hear me by Joe Dyer, who was head of the city arts commission. And Fiedler came. I must say, it was one of my good nights. The room was packed, and the audience was quiet, attentive and enthusiastic. It was one of the nights that worked the way I had always hoped, and Fiedler was evidently impressed. I was engaged on the spot to play the Rachmaninoff Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini the following summer. Crawford Here, with the Pops? Pippin Yes, and the time was getting close. The performance was set for early August, and here it was the middle of June and I had not even started learning the Rhapsody. Now, this is insane. Looking back, I can still get cold shudders. This is the recurrent nightmare of any performer: you're unprepared but you've still got a week to get ready, then a single day, then you're on the way to the auditorium, and you've still not had time to look at the music. [laughter] Well, as I said, it's a recurrent dream--a theme with variations. And now it was actually happening! The dream was coming all too horribly true. So you can understand why I was eager for some free weeks in which to concentrate entirely on the Rachmaninoff. Crawford And you knew you could do it. Pippin Listen, there's nothing like ignorance. Ignorance is invaluable, irreplaceable. Yes, I was just stupid and ignorant enough to think I could. And so I did. Luck came again to my rescue. A friend suggested that I call Laura Nast, who was scheduled to play the Dohnanyi Variations on a Nursery Rhyme a week before I was to play the ― 41 ―
Rachmaninoff. My friend thought that Laura might welcome our getting together, so that I could play the orchestral accompaniment
for her on a second piano and she could do the same for me. So Laura and I got together, in fact many times. Without this,
God only knows what would have happened. My nightmare would truly have become a reality.
In addition to providing me with the absolutely essential practice, Laura was a fabulous teacher. She was only a few years older than me, but she was far, far better trained as a musician. I've told you about Citkowitz, my much revered teacher in New York, but his teaching had concentrated almost exclusively on the act of playing, not the music. My musical training had been haphazard and sparse. Laura took me in hand, opening my mind and ears to a new world. Our sessions typically meant first going over the Dohnanyi, which she had polished to a fare-thee-well. This took about thirty minutes. The next four hours were spent working out the Rachmaninoff, variation by variation, getting it into ice-cold rhythmical shape. As a result of her meticulous coaching, the performance was a great success and the reviews were glowing. In all candor, I personally thought that my performance was wretched. It was an experience I would never want to repeat. Crawford How so? Pippin Well, I knew from listening to other pianists that the sound of the piano in that cavernous space tended to be swallowed up by the orchestra. I came prepared to play loud. To my astonishment, far from overpowered, I could barely hear the orchestra at all. A bassoon over here, a horn over there, no cohesive sound whatever, almost as if they were simply tuning up in another room. Whereas the piano seemed to be at glass shattering volume, the bull in the china shop. I knew that this was deceptive, that I had to fight constantly not to succumb to what I was actually hearing. There was no sense of interplay with the orchestra, no sense of making music together. Just blindly charging ahead through the dark. At the end I felt that I had emerged from a tunnel. Crawford Would that have been Frankenstein reviewing? Pippin No, it was R. H. Hagen, who normally was an excellent critic; also Alexander Fried in the Examiner, and a critic for the Call-Bulletin. All three of them were enthusiastic, and they all three made much of my colorful background and the fact that Fiedler had discovered me in a North Beach bistro, triumph ― 42 ―
emerging out of obscurity, et cetera. I was happy that I had gotten away with it undetected.
Well, the result of this "triumph," the one that truly mattered, was that it virtually insured the continuance of the Four O'Clock Concerts at the hungry i, which I resumed a few weeks later. By this time I knew more about whom I could call on as outstanding soloists--sometimes members of the San Francisco Symphony, but more often from the members of a fine professional group known as the Little Symphony of San Francisco, conducted by Gregory Millar, who was also a fine singer. With first-rate soloists, the concerts were now certainly on a higher level. Crawford And there was nothing like them, I'm sure. Pippin Perhaps not. Oh, yes, I'd taken the bold, bold step of raising the admission price to seventy-five cents. [laughter] An almost hundred percent increase. I ask you, how daring can you get? I feel deeply indebted to Laura Nast, who later used her married name, Nicolaisen. She had helped me so much with the Rachmaninoff that I wanted to continue working with her. The task ahead of preparing a brand new program each week required all the help I could get. Laura was characteristically enthusiastic and suggested that I come to her house on Wednesdays. That would give me two days to prepare the new program to play for her and then three days to work on it after the lesson, so that by Sunday, with luck, it would be presentable. Incidentally, each lesson lasted about ten hours, for which she was paid five dollars, only because I insisted on paying her something. Crawford You weren't working in the cafeterias anymore? Pippin No, I'd stopped that the day I started playing at the hungry i. This was possible only because of another stroke of almost miraculously good luck. I had found the perfect place to live --a loft over a potato and onion warehouse in the former produce district. It has now become part of the Golden Gate redevelopment, a very swanky area. In those days, it was considerably less posh. At the foot of Pacific Avenue, we referred to it as Pacific Depths. [laughter] This loft had been discovered and inhabited by skillful and creative people several years before I came along. They had fixed it up with much imagination. Two kitchens, two bathrooms, any number of large separate rooms, and also a good ― 43 ―
deal of extra unused space where a handy person could even build his own living quarters.
Crawford An ideal place for a colony of artists. Pippin Indeed it was. Now the total rent, divided between about ten people, was one hundred dollars a month. The space could have easily accommodated more than ten, but we wanted to maintain a degree of privacy. Crawford Was there some socializing? Pippin Oh, absolutely! They became very much my family, but more of that later. Oh, dear, we may not reach my sixth birthday! [laughter] Crawford We're not in any rush. We don't want to miss a detail! Pippin The loft, as I said, was nicely fixed up, but it was sparsely furnished. Each person had to provide his own furnishings, of which I had none, not even a mattress. I slept on the floor with a sleeping bag. Buying a mattress a year later was a great event. I could afford the luxury on account of a well-attended all-Chopin recital. Crawford You couldn't have had a piano up there. Pippin Oh, but I did! This was a necessity. No, I would never have moved into the loft if I could not have taken the piano. One of the great advantages of the loft was that it enabled me to practice at all hours, which was exactly what I did. Naively, I had the holy mission complex: this is what I am put on this earth to do. And people knew when they moved in that they would have to put up with my incessant practicing. And they did. They did. [laughs] Crawford Were they all artists? Pippin In a broad sense. Students of life, certainly. But they respected my dedication and they realized that if I was going to do what I was doing, this was the way I had to do it. Perhaps I should say they respected my right to believe this. So let's see, where were we? Crawford We're in the loft. Pippin Yes. The existence of such places, rare even then, was one of the things that made it easier, that made it possible to be an artist in those days. One could live with almost no money, ― 44 ―
though there were weeks when I lived almost entirely on baked potatoes and Brussels sprouts.
Crawford But you didn't suffer. Pippin I did not. One reads about the oppressiveness of poverty. But with lots going on, poverty can seem irrelevant. Of course, I had no financial responsibilities to other people. I was not bringing up a family. My situation was anything but hopeless. Though I was certainly dead poor, I never felt destitute. Yet I was never quite free of the weekly anxiety: what if no one shows up for the concert next Sunday? It kept one on edge. And one week it actually happened! This was a few years later, on a rainy winter night. Embarrassingly, it was a solo recital. Worse yet, it was the first of a series of four. Crawford What did you do? Pippin Oh, I played the program! It was what I had come there to do. There is something oddly reassuring about reaching a point where you can't go any lower. I must have played quite well, because the next three were well attended. The gods were listening. Crawford Doing what you want to do is such a luxury, we think. Did it seem so then? Pippin The greatest luxury in the world. I was fully cognizant of that, and would not have traded it for anything else in the world. So the Sunday concerts continued throughout the winter, and the hungry i continued to flourish. So much so that when spring came, the hungry i moved to bigger quarters just a block away, on Jackson near Columbus. This was the month of May, '54. I moved with them and continued the concerts there for several weeks. Maya Angelou was one of the featured artists in the evenings. She sang and danced, privately claiming that she was no singer and could no longer dance. Whether this was true or not, she was captivating both as a performer and as a person. Little did I know it, but the next chapter in my life was about to begin. After moving out of the charming basement where it all got started, the hungry i discovered that they were stuck with a four-year lease on the space they had vacated. It so happened that I had a friend named Win Aston ― 45 ―
who had been attending the Sunday concerts regularly for several months and had volunteered his services to help out with
things like ushering and whatever was needed. He had recently become unemployed.
He suggested that we take over the vacated room and start a new place with a new concept. I approached Enrico. He gave us the okay and seemed relieved to have it off his hands. At the time, hi-fi was something of a novelty. It was Win's idea that we install hi-fi equipment and play classical records. I believe it was my idea to have live concerts every night, in addition. I was hoping to go further yet--besides the concerts, to create a place for public discourse--speakers, readings, coordinated conversations on art, literature, politics, subjects of general interest. The room was small enough to become an interactive forum. We would perhaps have three live concerts a week, and the rest of the time would be devoted to programs of broader interest. And when there was nothing live, we would play records. Well, I was much taken with the idea. Looking back forty-five years later, I can't help feeling that life does slow down somewhat. [laughter] Crawford It doesn't seem so. Pippin I don't go out much now, and have little idea of what the nightlife of the city is like. But at that time, nightlife was ebullient, and North Beach was the center of it. There were many places of interest, and people tended to make a night of it, hopping from one barroom to another--from the hungry i to The Purple Onion, from Vesuvio's to The Black Cat. Conversation flourished and interest in classical music was rampant. It was this lively carnival atmosphere of people out exploring that spilled over into our new venture. But what to name the place? Win, bless him, said, "We've got to wait until the right name pops up." And so we waited namelessly. We waited and waited, and one night somebody casually said "Opus One." Our eyes lit up. Crawford You knew. Pippin That was it. The name suggested a beginning. It suggested innovation. It also suggested that more would follow. I must confess that the plans were soon revised and scaled down to a more modest level. I soon realized that if we were going to have a program on topics of interest, it would have to ― 46 ―
be handled by someone other than myself. We settled for three live concerts a week--not a small undertaking.
Crawford You played the programs? Pippin Two nights I played solo for somewhat over an hour. The third was a Sunday Night Concert involving other people, in which I sometimes participated and sometimes did not, though I always did the planning. These chamber music concerts were on a fairly small scale, a lot of duo recitals--cello and piano, piano four-hands, flute and piano, what have you. But we also ventured into trios and quartets for various instrumental combinations. There was one onerous restriction: we were not allowed to include vocal music, as we had no entertainment license. The mysterious law of the land had decreed that instrumental music did not qualify as entertainment, but if you opened your mouth to sing, you were an entertainer. Crawford Was that a union rule? Pippin I'm not sure. Just an ABC [Alcoholic Beverage Control] licensing law, I think. In later years we would have probably overlooked the law and just gone ahead and taken our chances, assuming that an evening of Schubert lieder would not bring the law crashing down on our heads. But there were several anxious people involved who said, "Oh, no, no, no, you mustn't risk it." So we didn't, much to my regret. One of our first concerts presented Harry Partch--Harry grumbling, as usual. [laughter] "How can I give a concert? I can't bring my instruments down. All I can bring is some records." I said, "That's quite enough. People have so little chance to hear your music." So Harry consented to do two performances, both of which were packed to the gills, despite the unprecedented dollar admission charge--all of which went to Harry. He definitely had an enthusiastic following, and of course, deservedly so. He spoke and he played records, and because he was an excellent speaker and an arresting presence, not to mention the rare opportunity to hear his music, I'm sure that his audience was well satisfied. The truth is that if his music is to be heard at all, that's the way it's got to be--through recordings. Crawford And people would come to hear recordings. Pippin Yes. But Harry was not pleased. Despite the warm response, he tended to feel exploited, misunderstood and neglected. He was ― 47 ―
an angry man. One sometimes felt that he was hostile to the music of all dead composers, and thus resentful and contemptuous
of those who wanted to keep their music alive.
The great Odetta gave a couple of programs. This was before we realized that we were breaking the law in presenting a singer. Her voice at the time was likened to three trombones in unison. [laughter] My two solo programs--actually one program given twice--was divided into two halves. Every week I would change one half of the program, so that essentially I was learning a new program every other week. And all by memory. A grueling schedule, but I had to keep the regulars happy. As you can imagine, I was more than willing to let other pianists share in the Sunday night programs. Meanwhile, a new discovery was about to open up a new era. Now you will notice that I have mentioned a number of discoveries, none of which originated with me. Nor did this one. Lloyd Gowan, who played flute and piccolo in the San Francisco Symphony, casually suggested that we do a program for flute, oboe, cello and harpsichord. He told me that there was a wealth of music for this combination, and that it would make a delightful and unusual program. This was literally my introduction to Baroque chamber music. Baroque music became tremendously popular, not to say ubiquitous, ten or fifteen years later, but in '54 I think that the vast musical public was as unaware of it as I was. The repertory for small ensembles is enormous, music by Telemann, Vivaldi, Marcello, Rameau and a host of others, not to mention Bach and Handel. Much of the music is of extremely high quality and of a style that might have been made to order for an intimate place like Opus One. The character of the music tends to be buoyant, animated and exuberant, with contrasting slow movements of melting lyricism. In short, music of enormous appeal, as the next decade was to demonstrate. From that point onward, we gave a Baroque concert about once a month for almost every conceivable combination of instruments, and at every concert we had to turn people away. We could have done Baroque concerts every week, but I did not want Opus One to be a place exclusively identified with Baroque music, crowding out everything else. Nonetheless, we were. Crawford Identified with Baroque music? ― 48 ―
Pippin
For decades afterward, "Oh, yes, I hear that you do Baroque music" was the standard comment. ## Pippin But now let me tell you of the idea that I came up with all on my own. Yes, I actually came up with an idea. Crisis loomed. Suddenly, I don't remember why, in order to continue doing what we were doing, we were required to serve hot food. I suggested that we serve oatmeal. Crawford Oh, no, I can't believe that! Pippin So if somebody, possibly from the Alcoholic Beverage Control, came in demanding something hot, "Oh, yes, we have the most delicious oatmeal!" [laughter] Crawford Of course, that increased your clientele immeasurably. Pippin Well, I don't know how many orders we got for oatmeal, but for several years a box of Quaker oats remained on the back shelf and we could sit back complacently as law-abiding citizens. Crawford Could one order a drink? Pippin Oh, yes, people did drink beer and wine during the concerts, but they were served only during the intermission, not while the music was playing. Crawford So this wasn't like the hungry i? Pippin On the contrary, the hungry i maintained the same policy during the concerts. But no oatmeal. Crawford Oh, that's ingenious! This was your idea. Pippin That was my idea, yes. That one I claim credit for. [laughter] Going back a bit, I want to tell you more about Laura Nicolaisen. I went to her every week by bus, arriving at her home in Brisbane by noon. The lessons lasted invariably until ten o'clock, and during that time she would take fifteen minutes off, while still listening, to slap dinner on the stove. It would be consumed in fifteen more minutes, then back to the piano. Her poor husband! Crawford Oh, marvelous! ― 49 ―
Pippin
An inexhaustible fountain of insight and encouragement. And she would have given this for nothing, instead of for the five dollars that I insisted on paying her, presumably for one hour. Crawford That's remarkable. What happened to her? I never heard her play. Pippin She died prematurely of cancer in 1980. She had terrible struggles, a multitude of health problems in the last ten, fifteen years of her life, but she continued to play and gave a number of recitals at Opus One and later on at the Old Spaghetti Factory. A remarkable pianist, but because she had less patience with herself than she had with other people, she was an even more remarkable teacher. She continued teaching, incidentally, until three days before her death. I stopped taking lessons with her after about a year, for various reasons. But we continued to see each other, and gave a number of four-hand programs together, where she was again the teacher. Crawford Was four-hand music popular then? Pippin We liked to do it at Opus One partly because it was popular nowhere else. It doesn't seem to fit the normal concert format. There are a few duo-piano teams that, as the name implies, play music for two pianos. But there is a far richer treasure of music for four hands at one piano, and this is seldom heard. Music by Mozart, Schubert, Dvorak, Brahms, Bizet, Debussy, and many others. Music peculiarly suited to Opus One--a cross between a living room and a concert hall. Crawford How did you advertise the concerts? Pippin The newspapers gave us a free listing every week, and we did put out fliers, but we had no publicity budget, and certainly no publicity machine. And no newspaper reviews. Nonetheless, we got good audiences. In retrospect, it seems amazing. My solo recitals, two a week, continued for nearly three years. Crawford How you could do this! Pippin Believe me, I was a zombie most of the time, going around in a trance. Crawford Do you have a list of what you performed? You must have run through nearly the whole repertoire. ― 50 ―
Pippin
Well, the piano repertoire is enormous, far beyond the scope of any single person. But I am still amazed that the level of interest held up for so long. Crawford It had to be of very high quality. Pippin Well, certainly as high as I was capable of. But in playing so much and under such constant pressure, I was never, never adequately prepared. Yet I almost always played better than I had a right to expect. It was easy to get into the music because I never got out of it. Crawford Never got stale? Pippin Anything but. In later years, when I'm playing far, far less in public, I have plenty of time to polish and perfect, and yet my rare performances are almost always a disappointment. They fall short of what I can actually do. I like to think that these disappointing performances are still an improvement over the half-baked early performances that went so well. But who knows? Crawford Perhaps they were more spontaneous back then. Pippin I hope that what they lacked in polish was compensated for by the intensity of the moment, by sheer involvement. And when you perform so much you do become relatively fearless. Crawford Do you have any recordings? Pippin Thank God, no. I suspect that a recording would bring bitter disillusion. I like to think that some of these performances were inspired. So let's leave it at that. Crawford Okay, we'll leave it there. Pippin Well, this came to an abrupt end. [laughter] Crawford And no doubt serendipitously. Pippin No doubt. Though it didn't seem so at the time. It came to an end when I cut my thumb. I cut it quite badly opening a tin can, and ripped a nerve. I still feel tingles, forty-some years later. My right hand was put in a cast, where it stayed for several months. Maybe I just wanted a vacation. [laughter] The next episode I speak of with some ambivalence. I became involved with Scientology. ― 51 ―
A lady named Audrey had come to town, a matronly, good-natured, down to earth, wise woman, and a true believer. Win was instantly taken with her, and put himself in her hands. She was quite willing to take over. He had been having problems, mostly because of alcohol. Crawford Was he a musician, or just someone who loved-- Pippin No, not a musician. But he was very responsive to music, and in a fairly short space of time--can one say that?--he had become very knowledgeable. He had a sure instinct, a sure taste, a fine feeling for music, and felt frustrated that he could express his love for music only by listening, rather than by doing. He also had a wild side with wide emotional swings, exacerbated by drinking. Audrey took him in hand and the drinking problem ceased almost immediately. This considerably ratcheted up my interest in Scientology. Audrey started giving informal classes to a small group of recruits--an introduction that consisted mostly of wholesome common sense about responsibility and taking control of one's own life. Summer was coming on. Win, full of enthusiasm, had decided to go to Washington, D.C., to study Scientology. I was out of commission, on a forced vacation from the piano, so I decided to go as well. Crawford The doors of Opus One were closed? Pippin Not at all. Let me backtrack a bit. Win had many strong points, but financial management was not one of them. Although the Opus had done quite well even from the beginning and had taken in lots of money, the money was even more freely spent. Nobody knew exactly how, because the bookkeeping was chaotic. Within a year, we were deeply in debt and bankruptcy appeared imminent. To his credit, Win realized that things could not continue under his own erratic management, so by his own initiative, he brought in a third person to take charge--Lenwood Payne was his name. Len was the ideal person for the job--intelligent, calm, quiet, but firm. He put Win under a strict allowance and within another year the debts were under control and we were even in a position where Win and I could go off for the summer. Till then I had drawn no money whatever from the Opus. I was paid the same rate as other musicians for performing two or three times a week, and that was it. ― 52 ―
I left for Washington expecting some disability insurance money which failed to materialize. Win was drawing a weekly check from the Opus. Now the disturbing fact, which I learned a good deal later, was that Len was also sending money to me and I never got it. Crawford What happened? Pippin I presume that a check was sent to Win with the stipulation that part of it was for me. Perhaps this was not stated clearly enough. Crawford Or perhaps Win heard you say, "I don't need money." Pippin Oh, dear! How words can come back to haunt you! But you may have hit the nail on the head. "If Donald is so careless as to come to Washington without carefully providing, he must be taught a lesson. It would be a disservice to come to his rescue." Tough love indeed! Crawford Let's look at it charitably. Pippin Oh, let us do that. Except that things happened later on that made me regard Win with considerably less charity. For the moment, we were both much preoccupied with Scientology. Crawford Washington was the center? Pippin It was at that time. Let me add that I was much drawn to it, despite an initial prejudice. It did not change any of my basic beliefs, but it did reinforce them. L. Ron Hubbard, its founder and creator, was there. He is or was a phenomenal person, an endless, bubbling fountain of ideas, ideas that I came later to feel were largely fantasy masquerading as science. But the therapeutic techniques that he espoused seemed sound and simple. Whether they were actually therapeutic I'm not so sure. The people involved, both faculty and students, were strong, intelligent, appealing and forthright. The atmosphere was brisk and bracing--and during a Washington summer! It was one of the tenets of Scientology that each person was totally responsible for himself and his destiny, which I daresay was one of Win's justifications for withholding money from me. They tended to carry this idea to extravagant lengths. If you were downed in an airplane crash, or if a bridge collapsed under you, it was your own doing. Nonetheless, it's nice to have people err on the side of taking charge of their own lives. ― 53 ―
Throughout the center, there was a pervasive cheerfulness, which I believe is characteristic of cults--people united by shared beliefs, who feel that they are on the cutting edge of truth, an avant garde, hoping to pull the rest of the world in the right direction. A fairly rigorous training program also tends to keep the level of energy high. Crawford A physical program? Pippin No. Not in the sense of gymnastics or calisthenics. But physical perhaps in the more basic sense of coming to terms with one's body and one's relationship to the physical universe. Learning to touch, to feel, to grasp, above all, learning to be in present time, to use their expression. All of this I could go along with, but some other aspects of Scientology made me leery. Like most cults, it was founded on the worship of its leader, who was in fact a strong and impressive personality who often said the right things. I disliked the spirit of militancy, the popular science jargon, the pervasive salesmanship, the supernatural claims into which I had no direct insight, and most of all what seemed to me to be the confusion of spiritual and psychological development with power--power over other people, power to manipulate. After a few months of absorption I let go of it altogether. Crawford You have been interested in Jungian psychology, which contains elements of Eastern faiths as well. Pippin I've always felt, and still do feel, that playing the piano is an excellent approach to Zen Buddhism. Or vice versa. [laughter] Win and I returned to San Francisco in late August, and disaster soon struck. The building above the magical room called Opus One, the scene of almost my entire concert life, was sold. The room was never again to be used for public assembly. It would be used for storage. A crime! On account of fire laws, there was no chance of its being reconverted into a new Opus. Although it seemed that being so close to the street with such a wide stairway and with so little inflammable material made the fire risk minimal, still it did have only one entrance, not two. The city powers were willing to let stand a going concern, but they would never relicense it to a newcomer. Now we're at the end of '57. We had to move, and this required raising money. The rent for Opus One had been one ― 54 ―
hundred dollars a month, a modest sum that allowed a somewhat relaxed approach to business. But any place that we hoped to
move into would be vastly more expensive, and would require the purchase of a costly liquor license. We would have to become
more efficient.
It was necessary to raise money, and it turned out that I was the only person who succeeded in doing so. A dear friend named Rebecca Weinstock lent us three thousand dollars, and my brother, who lived in the area at the time and had always been strongly supportive, lent a thousand. Another friend, named Lou Ellingham, had just inherited ten thousand dollars at the death of his father. He was planning to go to Europe for a year. He offered to lend us a thousand on condition that we return it when he got back a year later and would no doubt be strapped. We were only too happy to accept money on almost any terms. But a disturbing issue had come up that truly pushed my panic button. Out of the blue, Win warned me that he was thinking of discontinuing the concerts. This was a rude shock. He seemed willing to dispense with what I regarded as our entire reason for existence. I had no interest in getting involved with a bar whose sole purpose was selling liquor. The fact that he would even consider it was a serious jolt. Crawford Did he change? You said that he loved music. Pippin And still did, I believe. But this was partly Scientology at work, or at any rate his take on Scientology. To be a real person you had to throw your weight around. In the past, he had professed over and over again that he and I were equal partners--a mutual understanding that I had never put to the test. Now was the time! I reminded him of this basic agreement and that he couldn't discontinue the concerts without my consent. This sent him into orbit. "Where did you get the idea that we were partners? Me, going in with another person? Investing three, four years of my life?" [laughter] Crawford So that was the end of that chapter, no doubt. Pippin Thus the chapter ended. But it was clear that the next chapter would have to be started on a sounder basis. Despite ample reasons for distrusting Win, I still felt that the three of us --Win, me and Len--had worked together reasonably well. We were sort of a balancing act. Len and I together could cope with Win's more erratic moments, which alternated with moments of depth and lucidity. He was dynamic, the sort of person who ― 55 ―
made things happen. We needed him. But we also had to exert some reasonable control.
We agreed to borrow money, but only if we could have a written agreement that the three of us were to be partners henceforth. Len and I would each be assigned 30 percent, Win 40 percent. These percentages, let me add, were entirely symbolic. Well, Win had no choice but to accept the terms, because there was no other money. A wiser person than I would have known that the battle had not ended. It was just beginning. We moved to a place just two blocks away, on the corner of Jackson and Montgomery. It was larger than the room we were leaving and it lacked the charm and the personal touch. But it served. And the personal touch might evolve in time. But from the outset, Win fiercely resented the constraints of partnership, however symbolic. He was determined to bring the whole thing crashing down, so that he could pick up the pieces after the crash. He was quite frank about this and his behavior certainly confirmed it. Nonetheless, despite daily conflict and growing animosity and frustration, life continued and the concerts did go on. The new location was still called Opus One, but it was a far cry from the place where I had felt so much at home, the place with which I felt so strongly identified. Except for the concerts, I now distanced myself as much as possible. Letting go was easier than I expected because a rich life was developing elsewhere, in my loft above the potatoes and onions. I had been joined there by an old friend from college, Bill Quinn, a person of extraordinary depth and magnetism, who brought with him an old friend of his, Kerwin Whitnah. They were both brilliant; they were both great talkers. And they disagreed enough to make for a constantly scintillating back and forth. ## Pippin Other congenial, like-minded, younger people, notably John Casey and Willie Ortiz, were drawn into the mix to which they both added immeasurably. We developed a warm family relationship, always sharing the evening meal, which would go on for hours. Wine and conversation! Their capacity for both was somewhat greater than mine. But when it got too much, as it frequently did, I would fade off and go back to the piano. Their talk and my music became the twin ingredients of a good ― 56 ―
life. All in all, a sweet compensation for the disappointments of Opus One, which had turned into a perpetual scene of devastation.
I suppose the final straw was when Lou, the friend who had lent the thousand dollars on condition that it be returned within a year, did indeed come back broke as he had predicted and wanted his money back. Win, who claimed to have no recollection of the agreed upon condition, was adamant that Lou not be given priority. Other creditors were clamoring for money as well. To me it was obvious that we were under a sacred obligation to repay the money to Lou as soon as possible. Not to do so was a total violation of trust. But Win could be formidable, and such a conflict seemed to invoke the full force of his inner powers. It was a maddening situation. And so after much agonizing, I decided to abdicate, to renounce my claim entirely--a step that I would have taken long before except for the money that I had borrowed. But now I felt that I had a better chance of repaying it if I were not weighted down with further debts that the Opus was likely to incur. On the final night of 1959, on the eve of the next decade, Len and I both ceded the Opus to Win. Crawford Was the money ever repaid? Pippin Ironically, yes. And in a manner befitting a comic opera finale. Several months later, Opus One became a hot property, thanks to a national chain of Bunny Clubs--called so, I believe, because the waitresses were dressed like little bunnies, clad mainly in fluffy little tails. They were viewing the location with a covetous eye--not the bunnies but the bosses--and eventually bought up the lease for a handsome sum. The money went into escrow, so perforce the debts were paid, and the visionary concept of my youth became a Bunny Club. After surrendering to Win, I did not leave Opus One immediately. In fact, it was my intention to stay on, to continue the concerts, hoping that Win, happy in his new preeminence, would be more docile, more cooperative, easier to work with. I had been getting a salary of fifty dollars a week. He now offered me twenty-five dollars. I protested, we haggled, eventually he said, "All right, you win, have it your own way, here's the contract." The contract said twenty-five dollars. [laughter] Crawford And you didn't take it. ― 57 ―
Pippin
I did not. Instead, I started to explore for other venues. My dream for Opus One was dead, but there had to be a comparable place around where I could put on concerts. There were two promising possibilities--one was a place that had just opened not far off, called The Arenas. An extremely attractive room along cool, classical lines, circular, not unlike the original Opus. And just the right size. "This is it!" I thought, especially as the owner seemed so amenable to the idea. Then he added, "Of course we'll be serving food and drinks." I said, "Fine. Before and after, or during intermission." He said, "I mean during the performance." Crawford So it wasn't the right place. Pippin No, it was not. |