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| Composer of ‘Hair,’ Choirmaster of My Life | Composer of ‘Hair,’ Choirmaster of My Life |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Well over a decade ago, Galt MacDermot, a personal hero who died this week, walked into my Greenwich Village apartment with some sheet music, shook my hand and sat down at my piano. I was reeling. To me this wasn’t just the man who wrote the music for “Hair.” This was the underappreciated Grammy Award-winning wizard whose other soulful melodies and unabashed lyricism first spoke to me in my youth and became the choirmaster of my life. | Well over a decade ago, Galt MacDermot, a personal hero who died this week, walked into my Greenwich Village apartment with some sheet music, shook my hand and sat down at my piano. I was reeling. To me this wasn’t just the man who wrote the music for “Hair.” This was the underappreciated Grammy Award-winning wizard whose other soulful melodies and unabashed lyricism first spoke to me in my youth and became the choirmaster of my life. |
| He leaned in and banged out a perfect tune to go with some lyrics I had written and sent him weeks earlier with a script about what it’s like to be childless and watching the pageant of parenting in New York. I had found his address in the phone book. I still don’t know why he had bothered, but that is the occasional magic of life in creative New York, I guess, and he had generously offered to come to collaborate on a cold winter day. His hair was whiter than the piano keys but his face was bright and the way he attacked the song with vigor, hair flopping, hands bouncing, made me feel in the presence of someone younger, not decades older than me. | He leaned in and banged out a perfect tune to go with some lyrics I had written and sent him weeks earlier with a script about what it’s like to be childless and watching the pageant of parenting in New York. I had found his address in the phone book. I still don’t know why he had bothered, but that is the occasional magic of life in creative New York, I guess, and he had generously offered to come to collaborate on a cold winter day. His hair was whiter than the piano keys but his face was bright and the way he attacked the song with vigor, hair flopping, hands bouncing, made me feel in the presence of someone younger, not decades older than me. |
| I’d been working on an ill-fated revue with an actress friend. Various composers had contributed melodies for our lyrics. None were of MacDermot’s stature, at least in my mind. | I’d been working on an ill-fated revue with an actress friend. Various composers had contributed melodies for our lyrics. None were of MacDermot’s stature, at least in my mind. |
| I had fallen in love with his music 30 years prior, in 1971 when I went as a junior high school kid to see the Broadway production of “Two Gentleman of Verona,” a bawdy romp full of sexual innuendo, mocking self-regard and anti-war jabs. I remember the diverse cast, funky choreography, John Guare lyrics and motley funkadelic costumes. | I had fallen in love with his music 30 years prior, in 1971 when I went as a junior high school kid to see the Broadway production of “Two Gentleman of Verona,” a bawdy romp full of sexual innuendo, mocking self-regard and anti-war jabs. I remember the diverse cast, funky choreography, John Guare lyrics and motley funkadelic costumes. |
| But what hit me hardest about the show that beat out “Follies” and “Grease” for a best musical Tony Award were those melodies. Uplifting, many with a Latin inflection, they weaponized joy and sounded as much like soul and mambo as show tunes, and were at least as good as the songs from “Godspell” and “Pippin” that were contemporizing Broadway theater around that time. | But what hit me hardest about the show that beat out “Follies” and “Grease” for a best musical Tony Award were those melodies. Uplifting, many with a Latin inflection, they weaponized joy and sounded as much like soul and mambo as show tunes, and were at least as good as the songs from “Godspell” and “Pippin” that were contemporizing Broadway theater around that time. |
| I bought the album and sheet music with the sexy cartoon graphic, and played the songs over and over. At a time when so much music could be so harsh, there was a humane harmony to that score, suggesting, like in “Hair,” a diverse but melded community of searchers that appealed to an isolated kid in white-bread suburbia. I sang the songs in the shower and while I walked to school, worried about bullies and gym class. As a lonely college transfer student in 1980, I bonded with a fellow student who sang from “Two Gentleman” with me: “You can’t love another without loving yourself,” we’d belt. He later became a psychoanalyst. | |
| A few years after that, MacDermot had another show up at the Public Theater, where “Hair” had premiered decades before. “The Human Comedy,” an adaptation by William Dumaresq of the bittersweet William Saroyan novella about a California family during World War II, brought me to tears. It wasn’t from sadness, although it was a sad tale about the nicest people. It was rapture, really. Somehow those surging melodies conjured the lives and souls of a more innocent America — with children waving to hobos on passing trains and telegraph poles rising into the horizon, full of “messages from places afar,” many of them devastating ones from the War Department. | A few years after that, MacDermot had another show up at the Public Theater, where “Hair” had premiered decades before. “The Human Comedy,” an adaptation by William Dumaresq of the bittersweet William Saroyan novella about a California family during World War II, brought me to tears. It wasn’t from sadness, although it was a sad tale about the nicest people. It was rapture, really. Somehow those surging melodies conjured the lives and souls of a more innocent America — with children waving to hobos on passing trains and telegraph poles rising into the horizon, full of “messages from places afar,” many of them devastating ones from the War Department. |
| “Beautiful music is in the air,” a gospel chorus sang with dark hope. I hear it to this day. | “Beautiful music is in the air,” a gospel chorus sang with dark hope. I hear it to this day. |
| That show went on to Broadway. It was well reviewed, but didn’t last long. A revival more recently didn’t take off, either. “Two Gentleman of Verona,” revived in Central Park in 2005, didn’t catch on, even with its gorgeously diverse cast. And there were many other forgotten shows with penetrating music that MacDermot wrote, along with soundtracks, albums and a lilting lullaby, “Cover Up My Head,” sung by the McGarrigle Sisters, soulful Canadians like him. It’s another of his songs that cracks open my heart. It also makes me feel, I dare say, grateful to be alive, although it would be safe to add that you would be grateful not to hear me singing it. | That show went on to Broadway. It was well reviewed, but didn’t last long. A revival more recently didn’t take off, either. “Two Gentleman of Verona,” revived in Central Park in 2005, didn’t catch on, even with its gorgeously diverse cast. And there were many other forgotten shows with penetrating music that MacDermot wrote, along with soundtracks, albums and a lilting lullaby, “Cover Up My Head,” sung by the McGarrigle Sisters, soulful Canadians like him. It’s another of his songs that cracks open my heart. It also makes me feel, I dare say, grateful to be alive, although it would be safe to add that you would be grateful not to hear me singing it. |
| Words, it is said, make you think, but music makes you feel, and because MacDermot always makes me feel so much, I’m a hopeless and sentimental admirer. But then, when prolific artists are so talented but not so well-known, our devotion to them is even stronger, isn’t it? The author Nick Hornby once put obsessing over music this way: “And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don’t like them as much as I do.” | Words, it is said, make you think, but music makes you feel, and because MacDermot always makes me feel so much, I’m a hopeless and sentimental admirer. But then, when prolific artists are so talented but not so well-known, our devotion to them is even stronger, isn’t it? The author Nick Hornby once put obsessing over music this way: “And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don’t like them as much as I do.” |
| I don’t know that the death of this musical magician will draw more attention to his work. I hope so. I see some of it available digitally. Meanwhile, I’m glad to know I still have a CD player in my car and that when driving I can wrap myself in the tunes of a man so humble and hardworking that, as if from the ether, he appeared to set music to my lyrics one day all those years ago and several before he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2009. | I don’t know that the death of this musical magician will draw more attention to his work. I hope so. I see some of it available digitally. Meanwhile, I’m glad to know I still have a CD player in my car and that when driving I can wrap myself in the tunes of a man so humble and hardworking that, as if from the ether, he appeared to set music to my lyrics one day all those years ago and several before he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2009. |
| I think about the open-minded generosity he showed by throwing himself into a project with an unknown. He had come to my piano from his home on Staten Island, not an easy trip for a man in his 70s. For no reason other than the spirit of process and collaboration, he’d written the perfect tune to go with my imperfect song. That spirit of willingness, the wanting to try, the urge to keep composing one joyful tune after another, that was his private gift. But it’s also a communal one because you can hear it in his melodies, each one unassuming and inspired. | I think about the open-minded generosity he showed by throwing himself into a project with an unknown. He had come to my piano from his home on Staten Island, not an easy trip for a man in his 70s. For no reason other than the spirit of process and collaboration, he’d written the perfect tune to go with my imperfect song. That spirit of willingness, the wanting to try, the urge to keep composing one joyful tune after another, that was his private gift. But it’s also a communal one because you can hear it in his melodies, each one unassuming and inspired. |
| His is the music of hope. He didn’t just let the sunshine in. He created it. | His is the music of hope. He didn’t just let the sunshine in. He created it. |
| Mr. Morris is the author of “Bobby Wonderful” and “Assisted Loving.” | Mr. Morris is the author of “Bobby Wonderful” and “Assisted Loving.” |
| Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. | Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. |