Adam Sachs - Inherited Disorders - Stories, Parables & Problems

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The Strassberg brothers, though easily among the most talented of the Brill Building songwriters, were never able to reproduce the success of their late 1950s hits “Good Girl (I Need You Bad)” and “Lookin’ for a Woman,” both recorded by Big Jim Harrison and the High Flyers, in part, according to a recent biography of the brothers, because Harrison and other Brill Building singers grew concerned about the lyrical direction their love songs seemed to be taking. In 1958’s “Good Girl (I Need You Bad)” the Strassbergs wrote of a “Girl in Kansas City, standing five foot three / I feel a million miles tall, when she’s standing next to me.” By 1959, in “Lookin’ for a Woman,” they were writing about a “San Francisco baby, ’bout five foot five / toolin’ round the city, she’s gonna teach me how to drive.” Despite the success of these songs, which reached number three and number eight on the charts, respectively, Harrison declined to record their 1960 song “Drown You in Kisses,” featuring the lyric, “Love me a woman, almost six feet tall / big ol’ beard, she tossin’ me a ball / Yeah, gonna drown you in kisses, but don’t you fear / I’m gonna toss you a life raft, you and your beard.” That same year they approached an up-and-coming doo-wop group called the Sliders with a love song called “Bristly, Big, and Black,” which began: “Long Island baby, Hungarian American Jew / Six feet tall, taciturn, big ol’ beard too / Tuck me in, baby, the way you did way back / Her beard ticklin’ my cheek, bristly, big, and black / Oh yeah / Her beard was bristly, big, and black.”

The song failed to make the charts.

After the fiasco of “Bristly, Big, and Black,” the Strassbergs went into seclusion, as the biography recounts. Their music publisher, Brill Building legend Al Kushner, tracked them down eventually to a dilapidated trailer in the woods of Maine. They lived knee-deep in sheet music: hundreds of love songs about this tall, resolute, very reserved, sixty-year-old Hungarian American “woman,” almost metaphysically lonely, sporadically emotive but for the most part inscrutable, with her big scratchy black beard. Kushner told them: Boys, I know exactly where you’re coming from. I come from there, too. These are my kind of love songs, but they’re not the kind my singers wanna sing or America wants to hear. If you can write me one of those , though, if you can somehow harness this source of inspiration of yours and use it to produce a regular little love song, a song about romantic love, set to one of your snappy Strassberg melodies, I promise you I’ll make it a number one hit.

The Strassberg brothers worked through the winter and spring, and in June of ’62 they marched into the Brill Building with the music and lyrics for “Come Home in Your Woman’s Dress, Baby” (“Been leavin’ the door unlocked for you, baby / Last night I dreamed you appeared / So beautiful, so short, such a woman / A woman’s face, no beard / Tell me you love me, baby / Wearin’ that dress I can’t hardly bear / Tuck me in like you used to / Wearin’ your dress like a woman would wear / Come home in your woman’s dress, baby / I’ve been missin’ you, missin’ your nearness / Come home in your woman’s dress, baby / Been missin’ your face, completely beardless”). Lee Richards & the Robots took it to number thirty-nine on the Billboard Hot 100—a comeback of sorts, but not the comeback they’d hoped for.

Al Kushner summoned the Strassberg brothers to his office. I can do a whole helluva lot, he said, but one thing I cannot do is take a song about your father’s beard and turn it into a top-ten hit.

The song is about romantic love, insisted the older Strassberg. The romantic love a man feels for a regular woman, no beard.

No beard, said the younger Strassberg.

I have to let you boys go, said Kushner. I wish you the best.

The biography loses sight of the Strassberg brothers not long afterward. They’re heading out of Manhattan in a Volkswagen van, the younger driving, the older strumming a guitar in the passenger seat. Jim Harrison of the High Flyers saw them last. They waved to him at a stoplight up at Seventy-Ninth and Riverside, rolled down the window, sang him a couple of lines about an Austro-Hungarian immigrant with his Austro-Hungarian beard, his Jewish American convictions and his Jewish American fears, and then rolled up the window and turned onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, heading north. They were smiling, Harrison recalled some fifty years later. They seemed happy.

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Three philosophers dying in three adjacent rooms at the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center each believed he had cracked, at the last minute, an ancient philosophical problem, and each instructed the nursing staff not to admit his respective son until he’d written down the solution. The first philosopher believed he had located at last the seat of the soul (it was attached to the underside of the neocortex). The philosopher in the second room believed he had solved the problem of ethics, with a kind of modified Kantianism. And the philosopher in the third room finally understood, after a lifetime of cogitation, how a part is related to the whole.

The three sons, waiting in the waiting room, made a pact: when each was let in to his father’s room, he would raise no objections to his father’s ridiculous deathbed theory, thereby allowing his father to die with serenity and a sense of his life having had purpose.

The first philosopher’s son was admitted first. But he could not stop himself from immediately raising ten very vigorous objections to his father’s neocortical theory of consciousness, and his father died in a state of extreme agitation.

Then the second son was let in to see his father, the moral philosopher. For more than three hours he showed nothing but enthusiasm for his father’s ethical theory, but a minute before the old man died he suddenly posed a single devastating question, and his father died in a state of complete disillusionment.

The third son saw the first two emerge from their fathers’ rooms in tears, having seen off their fathers in states of extreme agitation and complete disillusionment, respectively. He knew that he, too, would fail to suppress his skepticism when presented with his father’s “solution” to a long-standing metaphysical conundrum. He was actually plotting his escape from the cancer center when the nurse opened the door to his father’s room and said he could go in now. Inside he could see his father holding up his left hand, eager to show him how the fingers, for example, are related to the fist.

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He had done everything possible to avoid going into his father’s line of work. He studied something radically different. He moved far away from home. Yet now, years later, not a day goes by without him seeing a pregnant dog and thinking: I wish I could help you. (His father was a dog obstetrician.)

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Late in life, Tom Browning, Ireland’s most famous deaf and blind man, published a slim but hugely moving memoir called My Father and Me , about the man who had raised him when he was a small boy. The sensorium of his memories is unique: rather than the sight or sound of his father, rather than their conversations, Browning recalls “the touch of his palm, sometimes smooth and dry, sometimes damp, sometimes smeared with cream,” or the “vast assortment of scents that indicated he was near — and he was always, it seemed to me in those days, near.” So marvelous was this little book, miraculous in its very existence, that no one had the heart to tell Browning that he was raised not by his father (whom he never met) but by the thirty nuns of Saint Clare’s Monastery, in Kilkenny. It was felt that this error did not diminish but actually contributed to, or was even exclusively responsible for, the book’s poignancy.