Getting Heavy... with Ferrante & Teicher

A formative twin-piano blast from my musical past

Happy New Year, JTL Gang!

Before we get into the first Jagged Time Lapse post of 2023, I’d like to thank all of you who have subscribed to this Substack since its launch at the end of August. Knowing that there’s an audience for my wide-ranging musical ramblings and deep-dives into my interview archives has been a really wonderful motivator during these last four very difficult months; some mornings, save for the hungry cries of my cats (like Angus, whose photo above has nothing to do with this post, but I had to include because it’s just so damn cute), this has been the only thing that could actually get me out of bed. Now that I’m settled in my new pad and feeling a lot more focused and positive about the future than I’ve been in a while… I just wanted to let you know that YOU, dear reader, have played a significant role in helping me get to this point.

That goes double for my paid subscribers, whose support buoyed me through some very rocky financial waters in the final third of 2022. As a full-time freelancer, I’m never entirely sure when the payment for an assignment is going to hit my bank account or my mailbox, so it’s been more helpful than you can know to have a little extra income dripping in on the side every month.

So to that point, just a reminder: For $5 a month or $50 a year — basically the cost of buying me one beer or coffee on a monthly basis — you can upgrade your subscription and have access to extra content like Bobby Womack battling the dreaded Gonga-Rea while Sam Cooke looks on laughing, previously unpublished interviews with guitar legends like Dennis Coffey and Angus Young, or chapters from my musical-memoir-in-progress, like the one about the time I saw Billy Joel on the 52nd Street tour. And now that I’ve got my office space (and my head) together again, there’ll be a lot more of all of the above coming down the pike… so if your New Year’s resolution is something like, “I’d really like to read a lot more cool music content and buy Dan a beer or a coffee every month,” hoo boy have I got you covered!

And now, we return to our regularly scheduled program…

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The gymnasium at Burns Park Elementary School was a big wood-and-brick rectangle embedded in the very the center of the old school building. Save for some climbing ropes and a couple of basketball hoops, it was a pretty spartan affair, one which probably hand’t changed much since the place was originally built in the 1920s. Whenever the damp and/or chilly Michigan weather precluded the possibility of having gym class outside, we played dodgeball and floor hockey in there. Or sometimes our gym teacher Mrs. Wolfe and her assortment of student teachers from the nearby U of M would pull out a bunch of mats, traffic cones and pommel horses, and we’d have “gymnastics day,” which basically meant us running and jumping around all these things while they played records on one of those indestructible old Califone turntables.

I hated gymnastics day. Though I was never a particularly good athlete, I always enjoyed the competition of dodgeball and floor hockey; but running around and doing jumps and somersaults and cartwheels and trying to stand on our heads? I just didn’t see the point. Plus, I could never do a proper somersault, and a cartwheel was totally out of the question. So if I knew in advance of an impending gymnastics day, I would often feign mild illness or injury so I that could hang back in the classroom and read or draw, which seemed to me like a much better use of my time.

The one positive aspect of gymnastics day was the music. It was a strange grab bag of stuff — Julius La Rosa’s “Eh, Cumpari” and Hot Butter’s “Popcorn” were the two songs most regularly spun during my first and second grade gym classes — but I didn’t care. At the age of seven, I knew nothing about music other than that I loved to hear it, sing it, and dance to it, and gymnastics day at least allowed me to hear records for an hour or so during my school day.

The one LP that I really remember getting a workout on gymnastics day was a 1960 compilation from United Artists called Original Sound Tracks and Hit Music from Great Motion Picture Themes. Usually the gym teachers would just play a song or a two at a time while we cavorted and stumbled — to this day, whenever I hear Al Caiola’s marvelously twangy rendition of “The Magnificent Seven,” I think not of the classic Western it hails from, but rather of my uncoordinated attempts to leap over a pommel horse.

Sometimes, though, the teachers would just let an entire side of the album play, just to give us a longer, unbroken soundtrack for our gymnastic activities. Side One of this particular album led off with Ferrante & Teicher’s booming “Theme from Exodus,” which always stopped me in my tracks. It seemed so big, so rich, so important, that running around the gym was about the last thing I wanted to do while it played. I just wanted to sit there and listen.

One gymnastics day, I did just that. I plopped down on the mat nearest the Califone, and pretended to tie my sneakers while I concentrated on absorbing the ominous minor chords, the swelling choruses, and the bombastic orchestral arrangement. Not that I could have described any of it in such terms at the time; all I knew was that the music was carrying me away, and I completely loved it.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the student teacher approaching. “Oh crap,” I thought. “She’s going to tell me to get up and get moving.” But instead, she simply crouched down next to me. “Pretty heavy, isn’t it?” she said. We sat there and listened together until the song was done.

This brief moment from nearly 50 years ago came rushing back to me on New Year’s Day. I was chasing the sunset home from Kingston while listening to WIWS; the station was hitting a serious early 60s instro/soundtrack groove, and Ferrante & Teicher’s “Theme from Exodus” popped up right in the middle of it. And while listening again to F&T’s portentous twin-piano tinkling, I realized that that moment in the gym with the student teacher was probably the first time I ever really “talked” about music with another person, even if my response to her question wasn’t much more than a nod and a quiet “Yeah.”

My friends and I would enthusiastically discuss cartoons, monster movies, MAD magazine, Wacky Packages and G.I. Joe accessories in those days, but music wouldn’t become a topic of conversation for us for at least a few more years. Music at this point was something we just absorbed without comment.

In music class, our school’s music teacher might give us a little background on what a song we were singing was about, or who wrote it and when; but while I found that stuff interesting, it didn’t really speak to the connective or potentially transportive aspect of the music that I was picking up on. Why did certain songs move me, and not others? I had no idea.

But this moment in the gym changed all that for me, or at least began to. There was something so beautifully profound and affirming about an adult not only recognizing that I was lost in the music, but also sitting down to get lost in it with me. Also, while “Heavy” was a word or expression I’d heard adults use a lot in the early ’70s, this was the first time I’d ever heard it applied to music. And it made total sense to me — the track was heavy, full of weight and import and darkness and emotion. I didn’t realize until much later that the Ernest Gold-penned theme was from a film about the founding of the State of Israel, but I definitely didn’t need to see the film or even know of it in order to be flattened by the sheer heaviness of the track.

“Heavy,” of course, is a word I’ve used countless times since then to describe music, especially of the metallic variety. But that was the moment where, thanks to an attentive student gym teacher whose name I probably never knew, it entered my vocabulary as a musical adjective, as well as my first key to understanding the effect that certain music could have on one’s imagination and emotions.

In 2003, I was interviewing ZZ Top’s Rev. Billy Gibbons for the first time, and our lengthy conversation turned to his band’s electronics-heavy ’80s phase, a period that proved incredibly lucrative yet seemed to distance them from their bluesy roots. The good Reverend made no apologies for it, however; and even though ZZ Top had steered away from keyboards and drum machines on recent albums, he spoke of his continued enthusiasm for the darker end of synth-pop. “There’s some Depeche Mode stuff that’s heavier than Black Sabbath,” he sagely told me. ZZ Top’s publicist, my friend Bob Merlis, shot him a quizzical look, but I knew damn well what he was talking about. Three decades earlier, Ferrante & Teicher — and a kindly student teacher — had showed me that you didn’t need guitars to be heavy.

(What’s your favorite song that’s heavy despite not having loud guitars? Feel free to shout em out in the comments!)

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