arrived in England and whose invitations to dinner I had never accepted. David had found me on the Internet and wrote to me, thinking that I would want to know that his father had just died.
Maurice Oberstein went on to have an illustrious career and was always respected as a gentleman in an ungentlemanly business. After his tenure as managing director at Columbia Records UK, he moved on to become CEO of Polygram International. He is credited with being one of the chief architects of the modern British recording industry. He died of leukemia in London on August 12, 2001, at the age of seventy-two.
In January 2007, I was in Sydney, Australia, playing at the State Theatre. When I arrived in my dressing room, I found a note from Derek Witt: “Remember me? We worked together.” I had not heard from him since 1977, so I called him when I was in London the following month. He had long since left the music business, and we had a nice long chat. He later sent me his photograph with an accompanying note that said, “I’m very happy with my lot in life.” Later that year, in November, the night before I was scheduled for brain surgery, I got a message on my cell phone that Derek had died.
Malcolm Eade is currently the vice president of international A&R for Epic Records UK. He is happily married with three children and is a grandfather. In our first phone call after twenty-six years, which left me in tears, he said to me, “I remember everything about you.”
Anthea Joseph died on Christmas Eve 1997 at the age of fifty-seven. She had been living alone with her two cats in the countryside outside London. She had ended her professional life in the music business as personal assistant to Obie at Polygram.
In 2009, my youngest daughter, Carrie, went to London for a short visit. She called me from Hampstead to ask me the exact address where I had lived, and then an hour later she e-mailed me a photo of herself, twenty years old, as I had been, standing in front of No. 3 Carlingford Road. A chill went through me; it was like looking at a photo of a time traveler who arrived where her mother had begun, with all the beauty, circumspection, and grace that I had longed for, and strained to glimpse.
Today, I can’t sit on a beach and look at the moon without realizing that my life is more than half over, and that the same moon that reproaches me now with my unlived dreams once drew me across the ocean with mysterious promises. My life was changed utterly by my six months in London. I often think that perhaps I didn’t stay long enough, but I’ve forgiven Dad for making me come home. It makes my heart swell just to think of it.
T he word “contrition” comes from the Latin word for “bruise” or “grind,” a derivation that makes perfect sense to me as a former Catholic. Something in the drone and the rhythm of the Act of Contrition—“ Through my fault, through my most grievous fault . . . , ” which I said to a man behind a screen in a dark confessional booth for so many years—was uniquely compelling. It took me many years to realize it wasn’t my fault, or even my grievous fault, however much I was drawn in by the swing of the words and the safe intimacy of confession. What all those anxiously droned Acts of Contrition chiefly accomplished was to break me down, bruising my sense of self permanently. Or so I thought. In any case, they had the immediate effect of making me withdraw from the truth about myself for a very long time. The truth about me, as it turned out, was unacceptable not only to Catholicism but to adults in general. The truth about me was not meant to fit into the system of convent school, religion, contrition, or punition. None of that mattered. I was a writer. It would save me.
One day in 1990, after I had finished my album Interiors and was beginning to write the songs for The Wheel, I went to my file cabinet and aimlessly pulled out a folder of papers my mother had recently sent me of my artwork,
Maurice Oberstein went on to have an illustrious career and was always respected as a gentleman in an ungentlemanly business. After his tenure as managing director at Columbia Records UK, he moved on to become CEO of Polygram International. He is credited with being one of the chief architects of the modern British recording industry. He died of leukemia in London on August 12, 2001, at the age of seventy-two.
In January 2007, I was in Sydney, Australia, playing at the State Theatre. When I arrived in my dressing room, I found a note from Derek Witt: “Remember me? We worked together.” I had not heard from him since 1977, so I called him when I was in London the following month. He had long since left the music business, and we had a nice long chat. He later sent me his photograph with an accompanying note that said, “I’m very happy with my lot in life.” Later that year, in November, the night before I was scheduled for brain surgery, I got a message on my cell phone that Derek had died.
Malcolm Eade is currently the vice president of international A&R for Epic Records UK. He is happily married with three children and is a grandfather. In our first phone call after twenty-six years, which left me in tears, he said to me, “I remember everything about you.”
Anthea Joseph died on Christmas Eve 1997 at the age of fifty-seven. She had been living alone with her two cats in the countryside outside London. She had ended her professional life in the music business as personal assistant to Obie at Polygram.
In 2009, my youngest daughter, Carrie, went to London for a short visit. She called me from Hampstead to ask me the exact address where I had lived, and then an hour later she e-mailed me a photo of herself, twenty years old, as I had been, standing in front of No. 3 Carlingford Road. A chill went through me; it was like looking at a photo of a time traveler who arrived where her mother had begun, with all the beauty, circumspection, and grace that I had longed for, and strained to glimpse.
Today, I can’t sit on a beach and look at the moon without realizing that my life is more than half over, and that the same moon that reproaches me now with my unlived dreams once drew me across the ocean with mysterious promises. My life was changed utterly by my six months in London. I often think that perhaps I didn’t stay long enough, but I’ve forgiven Dad for making me come home. It makes my heart swell just to think of it.
T he word “contrition” comes from the Latin word for “bruise” or “grind,” a derivation that makes perfect sense to me as a former Catholic. Something in the drone and the rhythm of the Act of Contrition—“ Through my fault, through my most grievous fault . . . , ” which I said to a man behind a screen in a dark confessional booth for so many years—was uniquely compelling. It took me many years to realize it wasn’t my fault, or even my grievous fault, however much I was drawn in by the swing of the words and the safe intimacy of confession. What all those anxiously droned Acts of Contrition chiefly accomplished was to break me down, bruising my sense of self permanently. Or so I thought. In any case, they had the immediate effect of making me withdraw from the truth about myself for a very long time. The truth about me, as it turned out, was unacceptable not only to Catholicism but to adults in general. The truth about me was not meant to fit into the system of convent school, religion, contrition, or punition. None of that mattered. I was a writer. It would save me.
One day in 1990, after I had finished my album Interiors and was beginning to write the songs for The Wheel, I went to my file cabinet and aimlessly pulled out a folder of papers my mother had recently sent me of my artwork,
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