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Continued from page 53 know, is that it’s not easy. No matter where it is, we go, “Everything is hard.” When we start up it’s hard, and it gets harder. But there’s a desire, there’s a drive that we all have, and it comes from within. No one ever says, “You’ve got to be a musician, it’s the family tradition.” [laughter] We do it because we believe we have something inside that propels us to do what we want to do. It moves us to our instruments—the piano, the keyboard, the synthesizer, the computer or whatever—and then ultimately we want to share it. We want to share it first with friends and family, then we want to share it with the world, and that process is always difficult. Even with people with the greatest successes, everyone has songs that no one knows, and everyone has songs that we have written that we would love for the world to know. It’s difficult to get into doors sometimes; it’s difficult to get past secretaries into see the right people. But the one thing that we all have to have is perseverance, like you said. And the perseverance to believe in the dream and to go for it is really I think what brings us all here. And you did persevere. Just to give the audience a little background, I had the great pleasure of having a three-hour lunch with Charlie about three weeks ago. Listening to his stories is kind of like having somebody tell you the best bedtime story you’ve ever heard in your life. Anyway, before the lunch, I went to pick Charlie up at his house, and he’s got a separate building which is his studio and his office and workspace. Charlie happened to be on the phone scheduling a flight to a concert in D.C. But his room is just filled with stuff from his life and career… It had the feeling of a room that was occupied by a man whose life was filled with riches, you know what I mean? Not monetary, necessarily, but there are pictures of him with the Clintons, birthday cards from presidents, and every kind of award you can imagine—his incredible history. I felt like I was in a museum, and I’ve been in some of the best museums in the world. I didn’t want you to get off the phone, because I couldn’t stop walking around your room looking at the books you love and the family photos. You can learn everything you need to know about a person by looking at his stuff. And the one thing I noticed in your workspace was that the family photos were the most important thing. Very important to me. I have to tell you, as you know, I worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger before he decided to go into politics. I worked with him in the only movie he ever directed, called Christmas in Connecticut. And when I met him for the first time, I went to his office—of course he’s got the extraordinary array of pic51

tures and photographs—and I was looking around and I asked him about a couple things that he had on the walls. And eventually he came to my house and he did the same thing, he looked at all of my photographs. Anyway, he came to one photograph of myself and my wife with Ted Kennedy, who was his brother-in-law and he said to me—I won’t try to repeat his accent, you all know his accent very well—but he asked, “You like to hang around Democrats?” [laughter] And then he said, “I do too. I’m married to one.” So Charlie grew up in the Bronx, and his father was a window cleaner. He was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but his parent we able to pay for piano lessons. He started at age nine, and once he got into high school, he was playing in Latin bands. He would play in the Catskills with these Latin bands, probably wearing those ruffled sleeves and doing the Ricky Ricardo stuff. Anyway, he was fortunate enough to have a piano teacher who recognized his talent and recommended that he go to France to study under the legendary Nadia Boulanger. If you know who she is and you read this book, you too will cry, I promise you. I’m really delighted. She was the most important person in my musical life, and an extraordinary woman. This book is a love letter to her, really. It really is a love letter to my teacher. It really is. Not to disinclude your family, but Nadia is so central to the book, and she is considered to be the top composition instructor of the last century. She taught, among many others, Aaron Copeland, Quincy Jones, Phillip Glass and, of course, Charles Fox. The book is partially a collection of letters that Charlie wrote home to his parents, and he’s so polite. I noticed a couple of the letters in which you wrote, “Dear Mom and Dad, today I had this class and I studied this or that and the challenge was intense, but I really worked hard on it. Can you please send money?” [laughter] It is really adorable. It is this chronology; you watch him grow up through these series of letters. It’s just amazing. I’ll tell you about those letters if I could. I didn’t start off saying I want to write a book about my life, I didn’t know there would be any interest. But what happened was we found these letters from when I lived in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger for two years from 1959 to 1961… Actually, Susan King of the Los Angeles Times said when talking about my book that it reminds her of Paris in black-and-white, you know, ’59, ’60. Anyway, I wrote a lot of letters, voluminous letters. There was no contact with my parents with the telephone because I couldn’t afford to call and I didn’t have a telephone. But I wrote, not like tweets or emails today, but long letters describing my life in Paris, the composers I met and this extraordinary teacher. I wrote to them at least two or three times a week, and I

wrote to them as though they understood what my music was all about, which they didn’t and they couldn’t, but they enjoyed hearing it. So we found these letters in a shoebox in my mother’s house only a few years ago. She had preserved and kept them and put them away. They were kind of a portal, looking back at the past. The curious thing was when I started reading those letters it was like no time had passed. I hadn’t forgotten anything that I wrote about, so it they only served to remind me of that which I never forgot in the first place. Anyway, a lot of the letters are in the book in truncated form. We left out the things that wouldn’t be of any interest to anyone. But the book is about my life in music starting when I was younger. I wrote about it until 2006, which is when I put my pen down. Maybe there’s another book in me one day. I hope so. I’d buy the second one too. Earlier, I talked about perseverance. Charlie just mentioned it. As with all successful people, you’ve really paid your dues many times over. In the book you write: “There’s nothing romantic about being a student and starving in Paris, or anywhere else for that matter. As an adult I’ve always observed the Jewish high holy days, but have never fasted on Yom Kippur. There were too many days that I fasted against my will for it to have any religious significance for me.” [laughter] I’ll make sure to tell your rabbi that. He knows. [laughter] What gave you the will to persevere when so many others would have given up? As I said before, this was my life. My life was music, I always knew it. I didn’t know exactly what the focus of my life would be in music, but it was all I was really interested in. I started studying piano, like most people do at an early age, but I do remember when I was learning pieces, I would come running home from school to practice—I liked to practice; I liked the sound that came to my ears when my fingers played. Now, if I look at a piece of music, I hear it. But then I had to play it for my ears to hear it, and I enjoyed the practicing. I had a pretty normal upbringing. I went to a high school called Music and Art in New York. It’s a fantastic school that merged with the school from the movie Fame— Performing Arts—and became the LaGuardia School of the Arts. I’m still very involved with the school. I put on concerts for them; I go back to speak to the students. There was no songwriting class in those days, but there is now. There are about 30 to 35 songwriters. I can’t believe they didn’t have a songwriting class. It’s a pretty extraordinary school. I mean, I got interested in things. You mentioned the Catskill Continued on page 55

Recording - January 2012

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