Triumphing over Repetition

After having not seen them for more than twenty years, I saw and heard Tower of Power at the Los Angeles County Fair in September 2000, and have attended every one of their concerts at that venue since. Every time I see them, I cry almost continually through their performances. Why? What is it about them that produces this extraordinary effect? For all effects must have causes, as Leibniz taught us.

It's something to do with the problem Keats took up in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale," whose voice "was heard / In ancient days by emperor and clown." I heard Tower of Power, and became a fan of their music, 27 years ago; their song, like the song of Keats's nightingale that found a path "through the sad heart of Ruth," found a path to my heart, then so young and--though I wouldn't have said this of myself then--so fresh and free, so innocently loving. In the words of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey":I cannot paint / What then I was. The sounding cataract [or the squealing tenor saxophone] / Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock [or the tall Funky Doctor, Stephen Kupka], / The mountain and the deep and gloomy wood, / Their colours and their forms, were then to me / An appetite; a feeling and a love, / That had no need of a remoter charm / By thought supplied, nor any interest / Unborrowed from the eye." Do I go along with Wordsworth to the next lines, the passage that shuts the door on these haunting reminiscences:

--That time is past
And all its aching joys are no more,
And all its dizzy raptures.

Is that time past? And do I faintly mourn, or murmur? As I'm dancing around, screaming, and singing along, is there another me standing beside myself, assessing, criticizing, passing judgement? Am I trying to make up in one evening for those years when, self-exiled, I nominated myself an outcast from life's feast?

Tower of Power's existence, and my response to it, is a testament to a triumph over the sterility of repetition. Kupka blows those baritone scoops with the same precision and freshness he always did; he refuses to despair or scream in protest against the necessity of eternal return to playing, for the three or four thousandth time, "Down to the Nightclub." Mimi still digs on James Brown, still tells us that you got to funkifize, still sends "You're Still a Young Man" out to all the friends of Bill W. Night after night, gig after gig, for 38 years.

Repetition and return are usually unspeakably oppressive, a cycle of crushing despair, rolling the stone up the mountain through eternity. Or it can be an occasion for joy, the particular and peculiar joy that inheres in working and working well, in saying to oneself, "I got it right that time." Most of our lives pass in numbing boredom or half-assed shirking, doing what's required to get by, satisfying the minimum in a state of limp anomie. Tower of Power aren't headliners--they play clubs and county fairs; they make a record every now and then. They're not famous--Stephen Kupka is in the phone book, for Pete's sake! I could dial his home number right now! I could drive to his house! Yet the members of this band appear to approach every concert with a professionalism that belies their modest position on the pecking order of show business fame. They're not trying to climb the ladder of pop music success. They're content to get it right, whether they're at Humphry's By the Bay, The Manitowoc Indian Casino, or the Los Angeles County Fair.

But I don't love them just for their professionalism or out of nostalgia. I love them because their professionalism affirms life, and they enact their affirmation of life in every show. I love them for their manifestly present, stubborn refusal to let their lives drift into bitterness and despair and self-loathing for not having "made it" (or for having once made it and then lost it).

In Middlemarch, George Eliot wrote that "the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." Despite their devoted following and the thousands of people who, over the years, have bought their records, Tower of Power is composed of individuals who, in the long run, will rest in unvisited tombs. But they have lived faithfully, and continue to do so. This is indescribably heartening to someone like me, to whom despair is a ubiquitous temptation because of the repetitiousness of my work (teaching) and the constant push in my profession to advance by trumpeting "the latest thing." There is redemption in doing something that takes great skill over and over and over again.