In 1965 my parents bought a house in Longport, on the opposite end of Absecon Island from Atlantic City. Longport, which was then still called “The Irish Riviera,” was across a causeway from Ocean City, another (Gentile) family-oriented South Jersey vacation spot. Ocean City was dry, but next to it was Somer’s Point, a veritable Bourbon Street to its Riyadh. My favorite Somer’s Point joint was Tony Mart’s because a highschool classmate of Max Garden’s tended bar there and let us drink for free.
Tony Mart’s booked rock’n’roll bands, and I knew from the subsequent literature that The Hawks played there before they became The Band, and I wondered if I’d heard them. Robbie Robertson’s passing triggered a lot of FB postings, and I learned that The Hawks were at Tony Mart’s the entire summer of ‘65. In fact, Robertson took Bob Dylan’s phone call inviting the group to New York in its kitchen. So I heard them once? twice? three times?
And they made absolutely no impression on me.
Talk about an eye (or ear) for talent.
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Meditating on this and other cards unplayed… If I’d bought them drinks, could I have become their agent, attorney, manager, even roadie, hitched a ride on their crashing-in–decade comet… made me recall that while at Brandeis I never took a course from Herbert Marcuse or Abraham Maslow or Maurice Stein or “Tuesdays With” Morrie Schwartz, all of whose thinking would have great influence on members of my generation. Nor did I hear Marcel Duchamp, whose thinking would have great influence on me, when he spoke at the Rose Art Museum my junior year. (In fact, I never entered the Rose Art Museum. In fact, I knew nothing about Marcel Duchamp except “Nude Descending a Staircase” and, as nudes went, I preferred “Playboy.”) And when the pre-“Freewheelin’” Dylan played the opening of the 1963 Brandeis Folk Festival, I did not attend. I had never heard of Bob Dylan until Pete Seeger mentioned him the next night.
Not to mention never exchanging a word, let alone pondering the same chemical equation, with Barry Sharpless, who went from a year ahead of me in a 350-student junior high/high school to winning two Nobel Prizes.
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People, like electrons, buzz around each other. Sometimes explosions occur. Sometimes one person’s explosion means nothing to anyone else. And major explosions for the many can mean nothing to anyone who shuts them out.
You may be surprised by how much can mean nothing.
The World’s Cup (Men’s or Women’s). The Sudan.
To give only some examples.