Keepers of the flame

Neil Young, among the great singer songwriters of our time, was on the stage of the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and told about the old guitar he held. Back in the early 70s when he was about to record Harvest, his breakthrough solo album, Young asked a friend in Nashville to find a guitar for him. The friend found a guitar, all right, the one that had been played by country music legend Hank Williams. It had a leather strap hanging down from the top of the neck below the tuning pegs. Young played it on Harvest and over the years, has played it along with his other choice guitars. He told of how the well-used instrument was once Williams’, and that after his time with it, somebody else would have it to play. He never talked of Hank Williams or of himself as owners of the guitar. He talked of it as if he and Williams were just its well known keepers because they both liked the sound it brought to their playing.

During that brief chat to the crowd and the audience watching the filmed documentary “Heart of Gold,” Neil Young’s thoughts were a reminder of how fleeting ownership really is. We may be fortunate enough to have temporary rights to things. We may tell ourselves we own a car, a house, a dog, a cat, all of our “stuff” that we use at our convenience. Sure, we may own these things in a legal sense. But we won’t own them forever. We will die, and those things will either be tossed or bought by someone, as the next round of thing keepers takes our place in the fluid ways of the universe. Nope, nothing is forever, and that’s a good thing. Everyone and everything has a birth, a life and a death, a space in time of togetherness between people, their environments and “things,” then, eventually, a parting of ways. When those windows of time end for whatever reason, including death, we sometimes are able to say goodbye, sometimes not. When the time comes, Neil Young and that magic music box once played by Hank Williams, will go their separate ways. The guitar may sit on a shelf and collect dust until it turns to dust itself. Or it will get a new life with another guitar player who will also play it for a time. That cycle will continue for the great old guitar until it can be played no more.

The ultimate cure for boredom

We’ve all heard of and seen footage of those adventurers that scale Mt. Everest, or any of the other mega mountain peaks around the world. “Because it’s there,” is the stock answer to why these people do these sorts of things. But it’s a reasonable question to ask. Why risk the very real possibility of losing your pulse on an adventure? Why do they want to trek to one or both of the poles? Why is it fun to risk drowning, or freezing to death scuba diving under the polar ice cap, or falling off a cliff? Why sign up for this stuff?

Peter Hillary is the son of the famed New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary, who along with his sherpa was the first to reach the peak of Mount Everest back in the 50s. The younger Hillary recently told a local audience of his life as the son of a famous mountain climber. Peter followed in his dad’s footsteps and managed to do him one better on Everest. He’s made it to the top of the thing and back not once, but twice. That’s not to mention hiking Antarctica on foot to the South Pole while pulling a ridiculously heavy sled of his supplies. He made the descent of K2, another famous monster mountain peak, during a storm. He’s fed pods of sharks.

So it’s clear, putting himself into extreme situations is in Peter Hillary’s blood. It’s a trait that calls upon him to find out for himself if he’s got the stuff to survive the nastiest of conditions that come into play while trying to reach life-threatening destinations. These are adventures most of us can’t imagine doing.

Hillary recalled scaling Everest and using his ice pick to gouge out a narrow shelf from the face of a sheer ice wall. That enabled him to get a toehold on the ice so he could sleep, suspended, upright in a sleeping bag. He talked of preparing soup to heat up while parked on the ice wall, and sharing the soup in the dark with his hiking buddy. It’s pitch black, freezing, he has to try to sleep, and try not to think about the fact that there’s an endless abyss below which means certain death if his tie lines come loose and he falls into it. And onto something unforgivingly hard at the end of the fall.

Another time, during the days-long trudge through the flat white cold of Antarctica, he was wracked with stifling boredom. To keep from turning into a blubbering maniac, he forced himself to think of family and missed loved ones. It worked.

An amiable, quick to joke, self-effacing guy in his 50s, Hillary doesn’t give the impression he does what he does to boost his ego and brag about what a manly man he is. It seems like he does it as an inner journey, a personal quest to test his will. On his treks, he has to overcome physical adversity and emotional challenges that come with scaling the ice of the tallest mountains in the world and other dicey, less than comfortable adventures. If he can’t push back nature's attempts to knock him around enough to surrender to its unforgiving forces, he won’t live to tell about it. He’s a bona fide adventure junkie bent on experiencing his life to the fullest.

While the going gets extremely tough on Hillary’s chosen path, the rewards are otherworldly, spiritually charged encounters most humans can only glimpse through photos or footage: looking out from the peaks of the world’s tallest mountains, witnessing the snow and icescapes of the North and South Poles.

As Hillary told his image filled stories of red zone adventure, it occurred to me what his worst fear has to be. He wants to avoid it more than losing footing on a sheer ice wall, and dangling like a hooked fish over an endless abyss. He’ll do anything to keep from being overtaken by one dreaded feeling: Boredom.

Putting himself to the test in all his expeditions has kept him away from the mundane, make-a-buck world many of us wade through for years on end with 9 to 5 jobs. Except for long stretches of trudging to the South Pole, he’s managed to put the slip on tedium, boredom, and the awful state of regularly going through the motions, that many of us do all our work-a-day lives.

For Peter Hillary, a good day at the office is doing what it takes to stay alive to tell the stories of his adventures. It’s a tough job. But the benefits – a life lived to its fullest -- aren't too bad.

I can play this, but I’d rather play that

Arturo Sandoval is one of the most facile and passionate trumpet virtuosos who ever blew the instrument. At a recent San Francisco concert, however, the fun loving musician confessed something to the audience. He prefers playing the piano over the trumpet. He’s been playing the trumpet for 50 years – he’s 61 – and over those years, his marriage to the brass horn has been nowhere near as easy and as fun as the much easier to play piano.

“I’ve gone through a lot of pain, with my lips with THAT,” he says, looking toward his trumpet, sitting to his left on the stage, upright on a stand. Continuing to refer to his horn as “THAT,” he says it has been a difficult partner to perform with over the years. He told of its most annoying habit. It almost always cooperates without protest to his rigorous high and low-note playing demands in rehearsals. Then, when it comes time to perform on stage in front of live crowds, to his dismay, his trumpet is often a cranky, unwilling partner in producing the notes he wants from it.

“Play nice tonight,” he says he’ll cajole the instrument. He then stands bolt upright, frowns and shakes his head defiantly as if he’s the trumpet, refusing to play nice for the concert. He then slumps, sighs and shakes his head.

He says in Cuba where he grew up, the piano was considered the instrument of choice -- for girls. If a boy said he wanted to play the piano, “Everybody said, Uh oh…..”

“A piano is so nice,” he says. “It plays nice all the time, the way you want it to.”

He then sits down at the grand piano on stage and plays his version of “As Time Goes By.” He coaxes a beautifully nuanced and personally styled rendering of the standard. The audience hears every note in quiet awe of Sandoval’s fluid piano play.

When he switches gears into percussion and conga driven dance music, Sandoval rips it up on a waist high electric keyboard and dances while he plays. He’s a ham and isn’t afraid to show his musical talent, which is easy to see, is big time. He scats in his own trumpet-like style and playfully hits the lowest lows and the highest highs on his trumpet that are not only fun to hear, but hard to believe he can reach.

When he takes the lead on an up tempo “Cubop” number with his band, Sandoval generates a fusillade of artfully controlled, yet fat notes that flow from his horn, soaring above the rhythmic textures of his band. And when he slows down to play a ballad alone on the quiet stage, a sound as pure and rich as poured honey flows from his horn, a soulful power that fills the room. Listening to him play a beautiful solo song, it’s easy to forget the breath control it takes to produce the clean sustained notes he crafts through his horn.

Sandoval does a tune with his record producer sitting in on the drums. After the tune, his producer takes the mike and tells the crowd he walked out of Macy’s a couple hours earlier and on the sidewalk saw an 11-year-old kid playing Moon River on a trumpet. He told the kid his father in law, Henry Mancini, wrote that very song. He talked with the kid’s mom, then left to walk back to his hotel.

“I thought to myself, hey, Arturo Sandoval, the world’s greatest trumpet player, is playing here tonight.” So he turned around and walked back to the kid and his mom and told them to be at the theater 15 minutes before the show. Then he introduces the kid and waves for him to come on stage. With a few nerves, the kid plays most of Moon River serviceably, and stops a few times, because of trouble with his mouthpiece.

When the kid finishes to big applause, Sandoval leans down to him with mike in hand and says, “You’re lucky. Go backstage and give them your address and I’ll send you a new trumpet.”

Sandoval doesn’t seem to be hung up on trying to prove he’s the best trumpet player on the planet, which he very well could be. He just loves to play and hear music. And in his joyful playing, he simply gives listeners music of emotional highs and lows few musicians can muster. He just plays like a ravenous monster and lets his audiences decide for themselves how good he is.

Step up, do something

When he anchored the NBC Nightly News, I always liked Tom Brokaw. With his big baritone voice, he seemed like a genuinely nice guy. Like other big name network anchors of his generation, he got one of the world's few highly paid jobs reading news copy because he looked and sounded good on TV. Even though for years, he seemed to have trouble saying his Ls. Most TV news anchors around the country are pretty faces, but they're mostly pegged as airheads, or “blow dries,” for their perfect hair yet seemingly thought-free heads. But Brokaw always came off as a worldly, brainy guy.

Dan Rather at CBS and Peter Jennings at ABC were the two others that competed with Brokaw in the days of yore when national networks were the kings of broadcast news. Like Brokaw, Rather and Jennings got their nightly network TV news reading jobs because they fit the desired image the network bosses wanted for good ratings: Earnest, handsome newsmen, nice friendly guys that wanted to get and read to you the newest news they could from their chairs in front of the cameras.

But neither Rather nor Jennings ever had Brokaw’s winning combination of brains, movie star looks, compassion, and friendly wholesome neighbor-like demeanor.

Rather always came off as a little dumb, like the guy who always says, “What’s funny?” after a hilarious punchline is delivered and everybody else is laughing. And he always seemed annoyed, like he constantly wanted to get up from behind his desk and punch someone.

Jennings always seemed like he was trying to be an aristocrat on the air. His style was to have rolled up sleeves to show he was really on the job and working hard, and a haughty, yet smooth delivery. A lot of people liked his schtick, others didn’t. He didn’t rub me the wrong way, but he seemed just a little too full of himself with his occasional knowing smirk and nod to the camera.

Not that any of this broadcast past matters now.

These days, these three once powerful news networks don’t hold sway over the nation any more. They, along with newspapers, are now within a sea of competitors in the “news” dispensing arena all fueled by the onset of the Internet. So these days, old retired network news anchors are either retired, or dead. They are, for the most part, irrelevant artifacts of news broadcasting history.

But Brokaw has tried, like Walter Cronkite, the most credible national TV news anchor that overlapped with Brokaw’s pre-Boomer generation, to remain relevant in his gray days. After Brokaw retired from showing his earnest, handsome face and perfect hair on national TV most weeknights, he wrote books.

His latest effort was a book of personal stories from veterans of World War II. Brokaw, in what was essentially a pitch to buy his book, recently told a local crowd a few anecdotes from it. The book points out that this was a humble, selfless bunch, reluctant to talk about their life-wrenching experiences. This generation gave without a whisper of complaint, all they had to serve the country, and help it win World War II. Yet it has been largely unappreciated, Brokaw contends, by later generations like the Baby Boomers.

Brokaw called on the crowd to take a cue and follow their elders’ example of selfless service to their country. Volunteerism is a critical need right now, he said, which is a time, in his mind, that is as critical to our country’s survival as winning World War II was then. The U.S. is no longer the world’s unchallenged economic power, he said, noting China and India as big new rising players in global commerce.

He meanwhile lamented the history of violence in American politics and how easy it has remained for crazy people to buy lethal handguns.

Brokaw asked the crowd to reach out to any families they know whose sons and daughters are serving in the military. They are paying a big price for all of us, he noted, adding they could use a lot more help and good will from their fellow citizens.

Brokaw offered plenty of food for thought for his audience to chew on. He showed that while his old job may be all but irrelevant these days, he is not.

Mark Eric Larson has written two books of essays, "The NERVE...of Some People's Kids," and "Don't Force it, Get a Bigger Hammer. To read, visit: 
http://www.scribd.com/Mark%20Eric%20Larson/shelf