Talking to Phil was always a delight. A fun journey. He saw it as an opportunity, to lead and to follow, to divert and focus, to wonder with awe and to laugh. Dylan had just come out with Shadows In The Night, his album of standards, and Phil was entranced by it. I remember him saying he felt it was Dylan’s dream album, the album he always wanted to make, just being a pure vessel of song, and with reverence for the art and craft that makes a song a timeless standard. Being with him in those moments I always felt the happy sensation of new synapses connecting in my brain – that I was making new connections, broadening my understanding – which is actually the opposite from the usual sensation one gets these days with so many people who bring far less information and insight, not more. It was heady and exciting – and sitting at dinner that night at Tequila – on Magnolia in Burbank by the school over quesadillas – I recognized how lucky I was to know him – and few other people like him – who exist at this high altitude of artistic understanding and enlightenment. Far above petty concerns.
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That conversation began in the parking lot, carried through dinner, through our show, and into the night. I figured it was a conversation that would continue for years to come. Of course, I was wrong.
In the last years of his time here, he told me of two major projects he had hoped to complete. One was an orchestral song cycle inspired by and all about Beethoven. The other was his life-story.
Being someone who writes books, I speak often to people who tell me of the book they hope to write someday. Very few of these people ever write a book. Not because they have no story to tell, but because it’s a big undertaking. To really do it.
But Phil realized both dreams. He wrote a wonderful, intimate, funny, sad, fantastic and romantic autobiography with the great friend and co-author S.E. Feinberg, called What’s Exactly The Matter With Me? Subtitled: Memoirs of a Life in Music.
He also finished his Beethoven album, My Beethoven, and it was a masterpiece. Again it seemed very much like the kind of project one could work on forever and never complete, yet he did complete it – and it is miracle music. It’s a song cycle by a genius about another troubled genius, lovingly weaving in Beethoven’s famous music into the arrangements.
My first question in our show was just a joke, designed to get him to giggle a little and lighten everyone up before we swam in deeper waters. Knowing of his twin obsessions for both Dylan and Beethoven, I asked him – between those two – who was greater? I acknowledged that Dylan, clearly, was the superior harmonica player, but who was greatest overall?”
His eyes lit up when I asked this. Of course, he knew it was a joke, but one he liked! And he proceeded to carefully compare both – explaining the streetwise side of Louie Beethoven – as he called him – most people didn’t know. And he discussed the impact on his psyche – and that of the world – of Bob Dylan and his songs. It is an explanation that was pure Phil: funny, informed, unique and way smarter than most of the other humans.
“I had climbed the mountain, by His grace, after falling off it more times than I can count, and I got to watch the show from that unique and marvelous vantage point. May God bless us all with an unselfish heart and mind so that we may make each day better than the one before for each and every one of us.
“Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu. May all beings in all the worlds know peace and happiness. “
*****
REVIEW OF
My Beethoven
By P.F. Sloan
By PAUL ZOLLO
I shouldn’t be surprised that his new album is a masterpiece. After all, this is a man who has created masterpieces many times over his remarkable career. But when I first heard that P.F. Sloan had been working for years on a song cycle about Beethoven, it struck me as perhaps a quirky obsession that wouldn’t lead to great singable songs, the kind he’s famously written for years, but to something else.
In fact, this is very much something else. And it is remarkable and very great. He’s created a brand new masterpiece – an orchestral love-letter to music, and the troubled geniuses who aim daily for eternity, towards masterpieces. But living your life for eternity, while still needing to tend to earthly details, becomes the ultimate challenge, and one this songwriter understands.
Sloan, a musical prodigy who was famously misunderstood by his own family and then by the music industry itself, clearly has a powerful connection with Beethoven. But rather than minimize or flatten the greatness of the maestro by writing songs, he’s created a symphonic song cycle of much power and range which does justice to its subject. It’s a masterpiece built on the music, and the life, of this man who made masterpieces. It celebrates music, and what it costs humans who create it so fully, and are ultimately transformed by their own creations.
In addition to being known as a great songwriter, he’s famous as a guitarist who can come up with the perfect guitar riff, whether it’s the intro to “California Dreamin’,” which he played, or the great arch riff of “Secret Agent Man,” also his. Yet here he’s on a Bosendorfer grand piano, and with rich pianistic revelry throughout . And rather than bass and drums, we have full orchestra on almost every song, scored beautifully and conducted by Sloan.
The result is remarkable. Complex, quite amazing songs – each echoing with much love the emotional dynamics of Beethoven , from pure sonorous contentment to clashing, dissonant fury – and also the famous harmonies and melodies. The title song “My Beethoven (Canto)” borrows moments from “Fur Elise” and other famous Beethoven compositions, woven with much love and care into the whole. And the wonderful “The Joy of the Ninth” brings new and wondrous words to the famous melody of Beethoven’s final masterpiece, one of the most beautiful and beloved tunes of all time.
Sloan was invariably compared with Dylan when he was young – and it was fair, as he loved Dylan and wrote songs, like “Eve of Destruction,” that were inspired by Dylan’s unchained expression. In the same way, Beethoven loved, and was compared always, to Mozart, even considered a Mozart wanna-be. So the parallels abound. Yet rather than obscure the work, this connection enriches it – Sloan clearly is close to the subject. Close to the pure sumptuous beauty of his symphonic instrumental music – songs without words – and to the aim towards the divine, towards perfection that is superhuman – and the pain that comes in attempting to attain it.
Like Beethoven writing any of his masterpieces, this is work of great ambition. It’s about the pain of being human – imperfect – yet conscious of the great joy and beauty even humans could create. It’s all there in “The Joy of the Ninth,” when he explains that humans must work hard – beyond hard – to approach music that reflects the divine: “I never asked for the lord’s help and he never asked for mine.”
This is audacious stuff. It’s a work of much majesty. Unafraid, awesome, troubled and beautiful and full of genius, like Beethoven, and almost overwhelming it its reach. Nobody but P.F. Sloan could have created this. It’s taken me a long time to be able to write about this, because I didn’t know where to start or end, like reviewing Hamlet. Some things cannot be capsulized into simple language, and this is one. It’s beyond words. Give it a listen, and you’ll know what I mean.
