Ken Furie: Remembering Howie in New York and San Francisco
- Ken Furie
- 1 hour ago
- 11 min read
This continues our tributes and reminiscences about this site's founder Howie Klein. For others in this series, click on the tag "Howie" at the end of any of these posts.
Ken Furie, in addition to having known Howie since the 9th grade, is a NYC-based writer, mostly on classical music, and was, for a long time, a frequent and regular contributor to DWT. He says Howie encouraged him to write about whatever he wanted. Whenever Ken passed along a thought or a joke or an article he thought might interest or amuse his old pal, the response was always, "Why don't you write about it?"
by Ken Furie
This isn't a post, exactly, or maybe not even approximately. The fact is, it's still missing important parts. Like some of the stuff I learned from him while he was running Reprise, about the shocking ignorance, greed, and ineptitude of the corporate hierarchies above him, first at the Warner Music level, and above that, at the Time-Warner level.
(There are some neat stories, like the time the Warner Music high command decreed that every label in the group had to have a boy band, and for that year's annual confab each was to bring their boy band to show off for the assembled label execs. Howie, of course, didn't have a boy band or any intention of having one, so he brought a young singer he'd signed recently and was really enthusiastic about, and naturally afterwards her performance was all that anyone was talking about.)
This is also missing some personal stuff about his mom and his being gay and then me turning out to be gay.
When I mentioned to Tom that I've known (oops, my brain hasn't rejiggered to saying "that I knew") Howie since we entered the 9th grade in 1961, he wondered if perhaps I had a picture of us. I don't. I don't even have our high school yearbook, where I might have scanned Howie's entry. I think there was also a picture of him on the awards page with the female co-winner (all our awards were boy-girl) of Best Writer. But I can't seem to find it.
THE DAY WE STORMED THE U.N.
If I had a picture, maybe it could have been from the afternoon in the early '60s when a couple of high school kids from Brooklyn walked into the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, across First Ave. from the U.N. itself — in those days freely accessible to walk-ins — and Howie explained to the front-desk person that we wanted to inquire about the U.N. membership, as independent countries, of Ukraine and Byelorussia. This is a fact that (as far as I know) he'd stumbled across and wondered about. If so, that meant that in General Assembly votes the U.S.S.R. had three times as many votes as we did! Of course, even by the early '60s General Assembly votes didn't count for much, since it has no enforcement powers. Still, there was the principle of the thing.
I hadn't known about this, and the woman at the desk didn't know or care what this goofy kid was yammering about. She got rid of us by passing us back to a more senior Missionary. He also had no idea what Howie was talking about, and no interest. He just wanted us out of his life. Howie explained he just wanted to understand how this preposterous fiction had been concocted and why our government allowed it. The smug senior Missionary talked to us like a pair of goofy kids, pointedly not responding at all to any of what Howie was saying. Which ticked me off. Was he saying it wasn't true? Well, he wasn't saying anything — in part, I'm sure, because he didn't know anything about Ukrainian and Byelorussian U.S. membership. He stopped short of patting our tummies as he steered us toward the street door.
We crossed First Ave. and wandered about the public area of the U.N., where you were allowed to wander back then (we'd been there before, of course), then found our way to the subway and home.
THE NIGHT I DRAGGED HOWIE TO AIDA
OK, I didn't drag him. In fact, it was his idea when I mentioned, while we were both back in Brooklyn during the Christmas break of our freshman year in college, that I was thinking of trying to get standing room for the upcoming Metropolitan Opera season premiere of Verdi's Aida.
His whole body brightened, as it did when he heard about something that intrigued him, and he asked if he could come with. I thought, why not? Apart from the fact that I would be committing myself to actually doing it. I didn't do standing room at the Met much.
In those days Aida still mattered at the Met. It was the kind of opera that fit the scale of what the company could still do. And that season premiere, with a representative Met cast, marked the company debut of the 29-year-old conducting phenomenon Zubin Mehta, whether he was ready or not. I never knew what kind of impression the event made on Howie, just as I never knew, some 15 years later, when he put me up on a visit to San Francisco for the annual meeting of the Music Critics Association.
At that time, Howie was toiling away at his little punk-rock record company, 415 Records, which was starting to attract attention in serious music-biz circles. It was a shoestring operation. Howie was recording performers whose music spoke to him, and it was reaching fans who took it personally.
Among those fans was a high school kid named Jimmy, who started helping Howie out — and because he had the know-how, set him up with his first computer. The fan correspondence was alphabetized under first names. Young Jimmy would eventually work his way up at Apple, still nursing his passion for music, and was able to get Howie to understand that ventures like Apple Music were going to change the way music was listened to and distributed, and it would not be to the advantage of the record companies' stranglehold on music distribution. Howie understood. When he left the music business, he watched all the record companies failing to understand what Jimmy had: that their world would never be the same.
Anyway, back to my SF visit. The SF Symphony's new music director, the U.S.-born Swede Herbert Blomstedt, was re-grooming the orchestra in the Austro-German tradition he understood well. He scheduled a lot of Beethoven in his inaugural season, and I wound up with an extra ticket for a performance (in the still-newish Davies Symphony Hall) of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, something that for me is always an event. I invited Howie to join me, and I think he did, but again I have no recollection of his reaction. (By the way, Zubin Mehta turns 90 in April and Herbert Blomstedt turned 98 in July. They're both still conducting. Herbert B. is forced to cancel a fair number of concerts, but people understand. And he manages to perform a lot of concerts, and from broadcast recordings I've heard, quite powerfully.)
It's curious. Music was at the center of both our lives, mine and Howie's, but there was hardly any overlap in the music that mattered to us. Still, we always respected each other's passion, and during his time as president of Reprise Records, I loved hearing stories of both sides of the business: the passion of finding and nurturing performers whose music he believed in, and the horror and grind of dealing with the many layers of corporate bureaucracy above him, first at the giant Warner Music conglomerate, and above that at Time-Warner itself.
But to finish up the Aida story, I had forewarned Howie that at the Met male standees were subject to mandatory neck inspection to make sure there was a tie in place. Never mind that it was a wintry December 29 — if you wanted to get in, you had to open your overcoat and remove your scarf to prove your tie-worthiness. Over the years I've occasionally mentioned this moment to people who knew the grown-up Howie who was about as "no tie" a guy as you can imagine. It always brings a laugh.
A FEW MONTHS AFTER THE MET AIDA . . .
Unlike our college winter breaks, our college spring breaks didn't align. I was on a trimester calendar that sprang us well before Howie's more traditional spring break. So he invited me out to SUNY Stony Brook, which is what Stony Brook University was known as then.
He's written (sorry, "he wrote") a lot about his Stony Brook time, when he was making all kinds of contacts in the music business, mostly in the forward-aiming sector of it, and scoping out the possible performance situation at the school, drawing both on officials sources and sources he pretty much improvised himself. When I arrived onsite, he was in his element — pretty much in charge of the joint.
In high school — and remember what an enormous school JMHS was — I knew mostly people who were in my classes, which was the case for most of us. Howie, however, knew lots of people. He always knew people. That was certainly the case at Stony Brook. Probably everyone who's familiar with Howie's writing knows how he was bringing performers to campus who within not too many years would be household names, at least in the kinds of households that interested Howie. I guess he had been exploring the NYC music scene already during our high school years, but that wasn't part of the world we shared.
In the years to come I would get to see more and more of this world he'd already inserted himself in. I remember, for example, the excitement with which he introduced me to Sandy Pearlman, whose name I'd been hearing a lot from him. It was obvious that Sandy was somebody really important to him. As Howie moved in and around the music world, and later the political world, it was never long before he seemed to know everybody, and was on good terms with them — at least the ones who mattered to him.
BACK TO THOSE HIGH SCHOOL DAYS
Howie often seemed to forget that we'd only known each other since 9th grade. He kind of lumped me in with the kids he'd been through 8th grade with at Brooklyn PS 197 (which was also Bernie Sanders's school; Ruth B.G. arrived at Madison from PS 238 — I don't even know where that is). My Uncle Ralph, my mother's baby brother, had started school at PS 197 when it opened and wasn't finished. According to the stories I heard, the kids attended school in "chicken coops" thrown up in the future playground.
So, while my mother had, in fact, grown up in an extended version of this very neighborhood — when my grandmother was visiting us and went shopping with my mother on Kings Highway, a number of merchants she'd done business with decades before recognized her and greeted her like long-lost family — I was a transplant to the city.
Because my mother was surprisingly permissive, I was allowed to ride the subways alone — an out-and-about explorer, guided always by my Five-Borough Pocket Map and the current subway map. One of the ways in which Howie and I fit together was that we're both Map People. Somehow or other, we'd both drifted into a passion bordering on obsession for maps and geography.
Eventually, of course, Howie became a champion traveler. He wrote extensively about those post-college travels, when he knew he couldn't return to Brooklyn, and the country was now Richard Nixon's America, still mired in Vietnam — thanks in good part, I think it's been established, to the obstruction of candidate Nixon, who made sure that no resolution would let Hubert Humphrey to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
As Howie launched his world travels in the famous van, we were able to keep up a bit by mail. He was a moving target, but I was sitting stock-still. His travels obviously involved geographical pursuits and discoveries that he knew I would have interest in, and we also showed each other some ways in which we didn't see the world the same way.
When he settled in Amsterdam, that was a great opportunity for me to visit, and I got to see a bit of the city through his eyes as well as from my own curiosities. I made sure, for example, to schedule myself for a number of evenings in the Concertgebouw (which just means Concert Building), possibly the world's greatest concert hall, not coincidentally home to what may be the world's most beautiful orchestra.
In Amsterdam, Howie (a) knew lots of people and (b) was in charge. He was managing a macrobiotic restaurant. I had known nothing about that, and learned way more than I would have wished. I came home with a wretched siege of some kind of respiratory affliction, and I still had to return to work the following day, having parceled out the vacation time to max out the globe-trotting. It took a couple of weeks to return to something like normal.
I DON'T WANT TO PASS OVER THE HIGH SCHOOL DAYS ENTIRELY
Poised as we were to entering school at JMHS, that wasn't exactly where we wound up. The Main Building was so jam-packed with students — even on triple shifts, it could accommodate only the 10th-12th grades — for us this meant going to the Annex, the top floor of a public school about a half-mile eastward. For Howie, this added an extra travel burden because his family had moved out of what was properly the Madison HS district, which meant not only getting official dispensation to remain with the kids he'd gone to school with, but traveling an even greater distance to get to the Annex.
NYC high schools seemed at the time determined to fail their students, enmeshed as they were in bureaucracy that had little to do with learning, there were teachers who made a lasting impact. For both Howie and me, the life-changing encounter at the JMHS Annex was our English teacher, Chet Fulmer.
To begin with, Mr. Fulmer didn't want us arranged in classroom rows. He had tables set up ringing the room, so we were all looking out at each other and at him. And he made it clear from the outset that he meant us to begin to discover what it meant, truly, to "think." He expected that none of us had actually engaged in actual thinking, and all of our classwork with him was aimed at opening us up to the truth — and the potential for beauty — of the world around us. "In a hundred years," he would say, "we'll all be dead, and nothing will matter except our record of truth and beauty."
Some years later, we heard the horrifying news that Mr. Fulmer's wife and two children had been killed in some horrible accident (vehicular?). Well, nobody said life is fair. He was a great teacher, and altered the course of the way my mind developed.
Howie was almost as excited by our 10th-grade English teacher, Isabel Kliegman, who was young and dynamic and driven by the energy and idealism of making a difference in her students' lives. For me it was my own 10th-grade English teacher, Miss Tannenbaum (her name was Deborah, but it's hard to think of her except at Miss Tannenbaum), who made a breakthrough in helping me see the real and literary worlds as they are and how they interconnect.
It was also in those high school years that I got to know Howie's family. I only met his father a couple of times (when I was at their place he usually wasn't there) before he died, leaving Howie's mother to finish raising him and his two younger sisters. I haven't had contact with either Michelle or Fern in however-many decades, so I still see them in my mind as they were back then. I never knew exactly, but I always assumed there was 2-3 years between each of the siblings. Michelle was always problematic; Fern was bright, very much like Howie, and seemed always buoyant and sunshine-y.
A couple of decades ago, after dinner during one of Howie's periodic NYC visits in his Reprise years, we were strolling around the Upper East Side — he must've wanted to try a restaurant in the area and always finagled me onto his corporate expense account — when he mentioned that he still had to think of a gift for Fern ... for her 50th birthday.
Did that ever hit me! I told him how much trouble I was having imagining this. Apparently he was having even more trouble. "Baby Fern," he said, musing.
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