アルバム"Songs For Ageing Children"の解説で、ローレンス・ブロックは、こんな風に書いている。
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Oh, I do like that phrase.
Not only because it captures the collective echo of the album's song's but also because it provides something of an excuse for me to be writing these lines. For while I know precious little about music in general, or these songs in particular, I do know the singer. I know him well and I have known him long.
We met in the summer of 1956. We were ageing children then and we are ageing children now. Most things don't change. There have been a few changes, of course. In those days the draft ale at the Old Landmine was a dime a glass. Richard Nixon was a retrospectively reassuring heartbeat away from the Presidency. ("Race you up the stairs, Ike!") No one admitted to liking any popular songs. Everybody had an elaborate scheme for avoiding the draft; we never realized that the Peacetime Army emphatically did not want us in the first place.
There was singing every Sunday afternoon at Washington Square. For all I know there still is; the greatest measure of change lies in the fact that I do not know one way or the other. I do know the park didn't have a fence around it then. I don't know if the world was better or worse, although, at the time, I hardly suspected we were then living throuqh our Good Old Days.
I don't think our personal lives were a hell of a lot different. We make more money now, but don't hang onto it any longer. We drink a better grade of whiskey, and it takes a little more to get us off than it used to, but we do our drinking in the same sort of bars.
We have gotten married and unmarried. We have lived a few lines into our faces. The years have made us a little wiser or a little more foolish, and I am not at all certain which. It seems to me that we have fewer answers then we once had, but that may be balanced out by our having forgotten some of the questions.
I find it rather more difficult, albeit more pertinent, to write about Van Rank as a musician. Since the first time I heard him sing I have been so unabashedly a fan of his that it is embarrassing. I have never been in a mood that I did not want to listen to him. There is an enormous temptation for any artist in any medium to give a little less than his best. There is considerable security in so doing; when you fail, you can succor yourself with the knowledge that your talent is greater than your imperfect display of it. Most people never even realize they're doing it. I'm thus very much partial to those artists who always give you the very best they've got, who always put the throttle on the floor.
There is an unmistakable quality in their performances, to the point where one could list a few who are not enormously talented to begin with, but whose commitment transcends their lack of talent, When they are also talened, and knowledgable, and aware, and sensitive, they really make it all work.
Seventeen years. We've been to a few of the same schools since then, for whatever good they did us. We have seen one another in every imaginable condition, occasionally even including sobriety. I trust it will properly embarrass David to read that I deem him a gentleman and a scholar in every sense of both words.
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