June 30 2022. This morning there were white lilies in the florist’s window. Lilies always bring him in. One could not wish for a more thoughtful and loving friend.
Early ‘80s, I’d been helping poets to tune their lines, and he got in touch. He had a beautiful Pleyel piano and a thing for major seventh chords, played a couple of his songs, nice baritone, swings. There was a lyric on the stand. What’s that? Have a go if you like.
We made an LP, a play, a cassette book, another play, a dance work, a musical, and started an opera about Oscar Wilde, hence the lilies. These are long projects; one lives with them always.
Scores were made by hand on paper then, with pencils and erasers and rulers. For the final draft and the players’ parts, you used a fountain pen. If the hand is lovely, the players will play well. Lyrics and dialog are typed on the Selectric. Programs and flyers are cut with scissors, pasted with paste, and xeroxed. Fold and affix postage stamp. We played uptown, downtown, out of town, Boston, Providence, Detroit, Chicago, LA, SF, Boulder.
Working with a poet, you memorize their stuff. It’s like having another mind. “Grashulations, finger print man” and “cool black jelly full of glints” have nudged me out of many a malaise. The territory is music hall, radio comedy, Flash Gordon, the funny papers, inter-war automatism, cowboy shorts, and jargon that he understood as confetti. We were from different planets but had these things in common, plus the tunes he’d loved in the 40s that my father sang in the 50s.
Summers in Vermont, the only obligation is to be at supper. Joe reads all day in the sun. Boxes of books come in the mail. Joe puts the perfect novel on your pillow before you arrive. Beneath the pillow is a quilt. At a town hall event, several ladies are selling their winter stitchery. Kenward buys all the quilts. It helps the ladies and makes the beds perfect.
He was phenomenally adaptable to showbiz circumstances. Black box, lecture hall, opera house, college gym, bat-cave recording studio, Fugs concert, you could take him anywhere. I see him at a table at the back of the house, the Bottom Line. It’s heavy drums and amps but he’s good-vibe attentive. Afterward he remarked on the head-bobbing.
As a collaborator he was a dream. Poets tend to be attached to their lines; music is to serve the lines or leave them alone. But Kenward came from opera, where poetry serves music, and from theater, these massively collaborative media. He liked complex forms, but if I asked him to simplify a stanza, or to repeat a particular metrical riff, or give me another quatrain like that one, or cut a lyric by a third, he did it, with great facility and nary a complaint. Wordsmith was his tag for the trade. I was the tunesmith. Now words fail. So long, Ol’ Pard.