Guest Post: A Fan’s Notes
Bob Hillman: Impressions of a New Fan in Fragments
By Donald Sung
November 27th, 2019
I.
I met Bob and his wife Sarah this year at a party. On our drive back from San Francisco to Marin, my wife Sarah looked up his music on YouTube. The first song that popped up was called “Tolstoy,” which I naturally clicked on. Driving in the dark, I found myself deeply moved by the song:
Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy knew everything there is to know about you
Emotional makeup, political views
Everything there is to know about you
Down to the quivering lip and the look in your eye
When your father died
And you couldn’t quite say what you wanted to say
But you touched his hand and he knew you were there
He knew you were there
Listening to the song, I realized that just 3 years ago, I was driving on the same road—Park Presidio Blvd—around the same time at night, frantically trying to make it to my father’s deathbed in San Francisco in time. Except that this time, I was driving in the opposite direction.
Next time I saw Bob a couple of weeks later, I told him I was moved by “Tolstoy” and that on a personal level, that was pretty much exactly what I experienced on my father’s deathbed. He said he wrote the song 18 years ago after reading War & Peace – the song describes a scene where Pierre Bezhukov’s demanding father dies. I sensed that perhaps, he too had a difficult relationship with his father as Pierre (and I) did.
II.
I went to catch his gig the following week at the Make Out Room in the Mission. Once I got there, I was pleasantly surprised to see my friend, C., there. C. is dealing with the aftermath of a difficult divorce right now. Bob played “Tolstoy” in the first set, which was lovely. He came by during intermission and sat down with us to share a drink. I thanked him for playing the song, and he said “that was for you,” which was also lovely. I introduced him to C.
In the second set, Bob sang a song called “Valentine’s Day,” which (he told me later) was about a group of struggling singer-songwriters in New York City. They got together every week at Jack Hardy’s apartment on Houston & 6th Ave. to discuss their craft (in such an archetypal West Village fashion that they got their own New York Times coverage; Bob is featured near the end). One day, it was Valentine’s Day and only those people without dates showed up. The song was about them – a bit of a downer. And just as the song seemed to end in a bummer “life is lonely in NYC” kind of way, it miraculously segued into an upbeat, hopeful ending:
Steady as she goes
We can go far
Matter of time
Young as we are
Older than some
Holding our own
Having more fun
Running away
From a big hurt
Valentine’s Day
I have always liked songs that try to rise above the pitch-black darkness of life, such as depression, addiction, suicide attempt, etc., to end in a note of hope (cf. “Kill for Love” by Chromatics) but this song to me seemed much better balanced and less bipolar. Was that performance intended for my friend C.? I don’t think so – other than the standard introduction, Bob did not have any details of her personal life. C told me later that she was very moved by the song.
III.
The next time I saw Bob perform was at Amado’s, a nice bar in the Mission. I brought an old friend, K., who grew up in Iowa. I knew that after New York City, Bob spent a half a dozen years in Iowa and got his MBA while his wife was getting an MFA in Fiction Writing. Even before the gig started, I could tell it was going to be a great night out. Amado’s reminded me of a nice college bar in a small college town in the Midwest (maybe Oberlin), but slightly nicer. My friend K. said that he was on Valencia St. over 20 years ago with his wife on a date and the vibe on the street today reminded him of that day. The set was lively and light. One of the songs was about the Los Angeles Dodgers’s 1981 season that had Fernando Valenzuela as the opening day pitcher when the scheduled pitcher got hurt. It was a season of immense hope and optimism for the Dodgers fans, with Fernando as the talisman, culminating in a World Series title over the NY Yankees in 6 games. I tried to remember who was on the team at the time – Steve Garvey, certainly, Davey Lopez, definitely, and of course, the young Pedro Guerrero. The song was set on the opening day, the time of maximum hope. The sense of hope for the future reminded me how my life ahead must have felt to my college self in a small college bar somewhere listening to cool music. I tried to imagine K. and his wife on a date 20 years ago on the same street. My friend K. and Bob talked about the streets and street corners of Iowa City during intermission. On the ride back to Marin, K. said Bob was really a great poet who put music to his poetry.
IV.
I have not listened to all of Bob’s songs. If I had the time, I would be curious to see how the early songs compare to his post-corporate life (post-2016) songs. I knew that after getting his MBA, Bob got a corporate marketing gig at Clorox in the Bay Area, where he tricked many of us into buying more Formula 409 and Glad bags than we really ever needed. I am fascinated that his “sojourn in the business world” lasted so long, in the dehumanizing trenches of capitalism, 2.5X the duration of the World War I.
I clicked on the “Hypnotized” video from Some of Us Are Free, Some of Us Are Lost (2019) on YouTube and paused on the picture of a wasteland of abandoned airplanes in the video. The image reminded me of something I read many years ago by Walter Benjamin, a Marxist philosopher who said something to the effect that “derelict” or “waste objects” of culture provide a critique of the myth of progress in capitalism, illuminating the way history becomes stagnant even as it is driven by the transforming power of capitalism and technology. Percy Shelley in “Ozymandias” expressed a similar sentiment: that we experience history only by observing the derelict objects half reclaimed by nature.
Later in the song, Bob sings:
Concrete glass
Gravitational mass
Influential buildings
The following day
On the superhighway to the city
I wanted to cry
Maybe I also understand this feeling. I lasted over 25 years in the corporate world until recently, which is nothing short of a pure miracle (6X the duration of WWI). The early morning drives into the city in the dark always made me feel unsettled and anxious. In another song on the album, “Song for Sarah,” Bob sings an ode to his wife, who, “compelled by the necessity of earning,” must drive “onto the eternity of highways, where the wheels are always turning.”
Recent attacks on billionaires by Elizabeth Warren have put the spotlight on who is free and who is lost in this theater that we all call meritocracy. The desire to cry facing the monuments of capitalism reminded me of someone who actually cried on TV recently – Leon Cooperman, aged 76 and reported net worth of $3.2 billion (scroll to ~1-minute). A close friend, who passed away recently, worked for Cooperman; he once told me that Cooperman was the “exact opposite of a decent human being” (which I struck me because my friend remained stoic until the very end) so when I saw the video, I assumed it was yet another public display of man’s infinite capacity for inauthenticity. But now I wonder if Cooperman, in a rare unwanted moment of authenticity, also caught a blinding, frightening glimpse of history and wanted to cry as Bob did. “Reverie ends and I don’t blame my friends/But I might have been living a lie,” Bob sang in the song – I pretty sincerely hope that Cooperman, for his sake, realized this, even for a brief passing moment.
V.
Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history. –Tolstoy, War & Peace
The very first time I met Bob, I told him that while dropping my son off at the school, the driver behind me got impatient and whipped around, almost hitting my son. I don’t recall his exact response, but it struck me at the time as something thoughtful and compassionate, something along the lines of “is it worth the effort, trying to change or help a guy like that?” In a sense, I would say that he is doing just that: taking infinitesimally small units for observation of the individual tendencies of men and integrating them through his music, inside this impressive frightening calculus of capitalism.
