Frank Houston

Prisoner of war, volunteer fireman, Saab dealer, General Electric PR man, Mark Twain on Mars — Kurt Vonnegut has been many things. As a novelist, he has been called many more: “impatient humanitarian,” pessimist, mad scientist, optimist, “amiable Cassandra,” culture hero, science-fiction writer. At his best, Vonnegut is a wizard, each novel a new Oz built to serve his larger purpose: to “catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and poison their minds with humanity.” In Vonnegut’s world, free will is an open question, life is poignant and pointless and kindness, even when it is a lie, is appreciated above all else. He has poisoned a lot of us over the years, but most of all, what distinguishes Vonnegut is that he makes the effort.

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On Armistice Day, 1922, Kurt Vonnegut was born into a German-descended family of Indianapolis architects. He studied chemistry at Cornell, but pneumonia forced him to leave without his degree. He served as an infantryman in World War II, an experience that would sorely test his faith in science and shape his literary vision. At 22, Vonnegut withstood both the suicide of his mother and his own capture at the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in the German city of Dresden.

Less than two months later, the Allied forces firebombed Dresden, an event around which Vonnegut would construct what is perhaps his best-known book, “Slaughterhouse-Five” — named for the building that held him while the firestorm raged through the streets. It would take Vonnegut 25 years to come to literary terms with the bombing of Dresden. After World War II, he married Jane Cox, and studied briefly for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He again left school without a degree, moving to Schenectady, N.Y., to work in public relations for General Electric. By 1950, Vonnegut had begun publishing short stories in magazines. On the advice of Knox Burger, the fiction editor of Collier’s magazine, he left GE to pursue a career as a freelance writer. Though much of Vonnegut’s work is an elaborate argument against the idea of luck, his timing was undeniably good. “In the Golden Age of Magazines, inexcusable trash was in such great demand that it led to the invention of the electric typewriter, and incidentally financed my escape from Schenectady,” he once wrote.

In a series of short stories, Vonnegut began sketching out his vision of a fractured and warped world. But it was still just a sketch. His first novel, “Player Piano” (1952), was warmed-over Orwell and Huxley, and escaped notice. Then in 1958, Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, died of cancer, just two days after her husband had died in a train crash. The Vonneguts took custody of Alice’s three eldest children.

Seven years after the artless “Player Piano,” Vonnegut seemed to find his voice — that voice — in 1959′s “Sirens of Titan,” a novel dense with riffs on military culture and free will. The opening lines:

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.

But mankind wasn’t always so lucky.

Less than a century ago men and women did not have access to the puzzle boxes within them. They could not even name one of the fifty-three portals to the soul.

Gimcrack religions were big business.

“Sirens” weaves a tale that is goofy, but rivetingly told: After driving his spaceship into a cosmic phenomenon (and narrative gimmick) called a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, an aristocrat named Winston Niles Rumfoord becomes no longer a man, but a “wave phenomenon” — traveling in an orbit from the sun to a distant point in the constellation Betelgeuse, and appearing on Earth once every 59 days.

Rumfoord gains godlike powers of telepathy. Because he can see the future, he foretells it for mankind. He taps an unlikely hero, Malachi Constant, to be the prophet of a new religion. After outlandish events that carry him to Mars and Mercury, Constant returns to Earth bearing a message of cosmic meaninglessness for the masses who have been told to expect him. The message is succinct, and very Vonnegut: “I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”

The novel was unique, but it did little to help Vonnegut ward off his first and most vexing label: science-fiction writer. Someone was missing his jokes. A decade later he would write, “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ ever since, and I would like out, particularly because so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”

In the novels that followed, Vonnegut opted for settings that were only slightly more earthly. “Mother Night” (1962) told the story of Howard W. Campbell Jr. — an American Nazi propagandist during World War II, double agent and “citizen of nowhere at all.” In “Cat’s Cradle” (1963), science is an agent of destruction, religion a comforting lie; the story is a parable about the end of the world, like most of Vonnegut’s work. “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” (1965) introduces some of Vonnegut’s recurring characters — millionaire Eliot Rosewater, who joins a different volunteer fire department every time he gets drunk, and Vonnegut’s alter ego, sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout. The novel brings this recurring message, from Rosewater: “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

Vonnegut packed several dozen chapters into books with fewer than 200 pages. Some critics scorned him, citing the influence of television or accusing him of pandering to youth with “dormitory profundity.” But Vonnegut explained it this way: “I find sections of my book constructed like jokes, and they’re not very long. And I suddenly realize the joke is told, and that I’d spoil the joke if I were to go past.” Vonnegut was perfecting the art of the tall tale. His put-ons had more in common with Mark Twain than with the head games of postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon or John Barth. Vonnegut created a fun house, but the message was not lost there.

In 1967, Vonnegut wrote about the new Random House dictionary for the New York Times Book Review. The first sentence could have been aimed at his critics: “I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway’s dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everybody can spell and truly understand.” At the time, Vonnegut was benefiting from the publishing revolution of paperbacks — the only form in which his books were available. But when publisher Sam Lawrence read the review, his firm, Seymour Lawrence, gave Vonnegut a three-book contract and agreed to republish his previous five books in hardcover. Soon Vonnegut could be found beyond the drugstore. He was headed for the ivory tower.

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Like the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” Vonnegut’s so-called masterpiece, “Slaughterhouse-Five” (1969), may not be his best work. But the book, a cathartic statement he wrote after a trip back to Dresden on a Guggenheim Fellowship, was huge: a profitable ticket to many a literature syllabus and that rarest of things, a popular and critical success. (It came in at No. 18 on the Modern Library’s list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century.)

In “Slaughterhouse-Five,” a soldier named Billy Pilgrim witnesses a massacre perpetrated by his own countrymen and becomes “unstuck” in time. Aided by the advanced extraterrestrial civilization that kidnaps him and places him in a zoo, Pilgrim comes to understand time as if it is a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, with all moments laid out on the range, coexisting in perpetuity. The realization that war, like life, can be brutal and nonsensical is greeted with a shrug: So it goes.

Also like the Beatles, Vonnegut found himself banned. “Slaughterhouse-Five” was burned in Drake, N.D. It was banned for its religious references in Rochester, Mich., and for its “foul language” in all of Kentucky. The outcry was hard to square with Vonnegut’s perspective on things: “You can teach savagery to people … They may need the savagery, but it’s bad for the neighbors. I prefer to teach gentleness.”

Writing in the Saturday Review in 1971, critic Alfred Kazin said, “Vonnegut is always at home with characters who are not with it in our kind of world, people whose total helplessness and inability to explain anything have indeed made them unworldly, extraterrestrial, open to mischief from outer space.” But Vonnegut himself was seen as being extremely with it. Published near the height of American involvement in Vietnam, “Slaughterhouse-Five” brought on a Vonnegut Zeitgeist: His name became identified with pacifism and black humor. He became a hip father figure to baby boomers, who made a campus hero of him. He took up a post at the University of Iowa writers’ workshop; at Harvard, there were 15 applicants for every slot in his class.

In a series of profiles, Vonnegut was hailed for spanning the generation gap. Never mind the fact that he told Life magazine that baby boomers were “the most conceited generation in history.” (“They’re bright, but I’m not sure they’re competent,” he added.) The new label stuck — “an articulate bridge across the generational chasm,” as the New York Times put it. What Vonnegut offered was indignation in the guise of whimsy. He was impatient with piety and sham, and he was funny about it. Vonnegut, however, was just as wary of labels as ever.

He was on the lecture circuit, capitalizing on his newfound popularity, when it hit him. After a speech, Vonnegut was asked what right he had, as “a leader of American young people,” to “teach them to be so cynical and pessimistic.” As he recounted in a 1974 essay, “I was not a leader of American young people. I was a writer who should have been home and writing, rather than seeking easy money and applause.” It was one of the many honest self-observations that would become part of his charm. Labels continued to accrue, but Vonnegut dodged them: “I have found that a humanist is a person who is tremendously interested in human beings. My dog is a humanist.”

In 1971, the dean of the University of Chicago showed “Cat’s Cradle” to the anthropology department, and Vonnegut finally got his master’s degree. He left wife Jane Cox the same year, moved to New York and settled into his celebrity. A play he’d written, “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” opened in Greenwich Village and moved to Broadway. By 1972, “Slaughterhouse-Five” had made him a millionaire.

But Vonnegut didn’t stop training his scientist’s eye on American culture. His reporting on the 1972 Republican National Convention for Harper’s magazine: “If I were a visitor from another planet, I would say … the two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people do not acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead. Both imaginary parties are bossed by Winners. When Republicans battle Democrats, this much is certain: Winners will win.”

His next novel, “Breakfast of Champions” (1973), took aim at the slow rotting of the American dream. Local businessman Dwayne Hoover is going insane with “bad chemicals,” and Kilgore Trout lights the fuse with a story that convinces Dwayne he is the lone human in a world of robots. The novel is peppered with weird illustrations by the author, who yearns for “symbols which have not been poisoned by great sins our nation has committed, such as slavery and genocide and criminal neglect, or by tinhorn commercial greed and cunning.” The novel is blunt and heartbreakingly funny. Vonnegut himself appears near the end, as a sort of puppeteer. He offers this candid bit of mono-dialogue:

“This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself.

“I know,” I said.

“You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said.

“I know,” I said.

Honest talk of suicide emerges the next year, in a collection of essays, and again in his autobiographies. In his later novels — “Slapstick” (1976), an homage to his sister, “Jailbird” (1979) and “Hocus Pocus” (1990) — Vonnegut stands his thematic ground, dealing with human loneliness and resiliency, power and politics. The evolutionary journey of “Galapagos” (1985) brings Vonnegut to a culmination of his vision. Thanks to that Vonnegut staple — apocalypse — a group of tourists is stranded on the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin formulated his ideas about progressive adaptation. These lucky people become the progenitors of a new human race. Over time, their oversize brains shrink, sexual interests atrophy and their hands become flippers: All the physical traits that got humans into so much trouble are naturally deselected, gone.

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There are those who say Vonnegut lost it after the ’60s, but I don’t think so. It’s true that sometimes, in between the lines of prose, an agonizingly pessimistic and frustrated writer peeks through. Vonnegut didn’t flatter aging baby boomers by becoming fashionable; he didn’t sign on to the egocentrism of the ’70s, nor did he endorse the obliviousness of the ’80s. In life he continues to speak his mind, and his literature retains a manic spark. His fables are woven into a denser fabric, but the territory is familiar: Isolated narrators speak to us from perches in the not-so-distant future, at the end of the world.

Vonnegut married photographer Jill Krementz in 1979 and began opening up. In his two books of autobiographical sketches, “Palm Sunday” (1981) and “Fates Worse Than Death” (1992), Vonnegut deals with his depression and the burden of family suicide. He admits to his own attempt in 1984. He was found, full of pills and booze, before it was too late: “I went briefly nuts in the 1980s in an effort to get out of life entirely and wound up playing Eightball in a locked ward for thirty days instead.”

In “Palm Sunday,” Vonnegut also discusses film versions of his novels: George Roy Hill’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which Vonnegut enjoyed, and Mark Robson’s “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” which he despised. Hollywood has approached Vonnegut’s turf again and again, but so far, the results have been mostly disastrous. The author’s voice is missed in the translation to celluloid, and the stories comes off as arid, soulless. This spring, we’ll see if the trend improves any with “Breakfast of Champions,” starring Bruce Willis and Nick Nolte. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

In 1997, “Timequake” appeared. Vonnegut says it is his last original novel, though his publisher is planning a collection of the author’s early short fiction, called “Bagombo Snuff Box,” for this summer. An intertwining of fiction and autobiography, “Timequake” offers touching portraits of Vonnegut’s first wife and brother, who both died recently. The book also brings Vonnegut together with alter ego Kilgore Trout for one last laugh. At the end of a 50-year career, with 19 books to his credit, the last laugh is what it all boils down to: Nobody writes about doomsday better than Vonnegut.

He has never pretended to know the meaning of it all, but he did let Trout take a stab at it once. Seeing the question “What is the purpose of life?” scrawled on a bathroom wall in “Breakfast of Champions,” Trout has this ready answer: “To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool.”

It’s also a pretty nice job description for a novelist — at least when the novelist is Kurt Vonnegut.

Some of the earliest material, which is the least well known, may be the most captivating. There are engaging passages about Ringo Starr’s hooligan youth: “The gangs didn’t have names, but there were leaders. We were the Dingle gang. There were several gangs in the area, and you’d walk en masse to try to cause trouble; ‘walking with the lads,’ it was called. But all you’d do was walk up and down roads, stand on corners, beat someone up, get beaten up, go to the pictures … It gets boring after a while.” (The other Beatles reveal they were scared of Ringo when he first joined the band.)

The Beatles wound up being like a gang themselves; they stuck together. From their early days, when they were on a constant quest for new chords and new music (“That was how we found things out — by going on a bus somewhere to see a man with a record,” Paul McCartney says), their closeness was part of their ineffable formula. Their influences were nearly identical — chiefly, Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.” “We all knew America, all of us … there was no such thing as an English record,” says John Lennon. “America had teenagers and everywhere else just had people.” McCartney, for his part, seems almost mystified that he and Lennon were able to make hometown haunts like Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane world famous.

Lennon’s presence hovers over the proceedings. He’s given the first and last word, which is appropriate, because Lennon started it, Lennon finished it and Lennon’s absence seals the Beatles in their moment. “I was a bit of a John fan,” McCartney says. “I think we all were.”

As the studio came to feel more confining to Lennon than liberating (as had touring before that), it was his abdication of leadership that allowed McCartney to make decisions, a process that began with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and became complete with “Magical Mystery Tour” and “Let It Be.” In the years before Yoko Ono became Lennon’s infatuation, drugs (especially LSD) yielded a distracting introspection, and the resulting bursts of creative energy kept Lennon involved. The book points out — though we knew this already — that Lennon was the one who broke up the band. He had begun to leave, in his mind, in 1966. His statements make clear that by the time he found Yoko, John was already poised to jump ship.

“I was too scared to break away from the Beatles, which I’d been looking to do since we stopped touring. I was vaguely looking for somewhere to go, but didn’t really have the nerve to really step out by myself, so I hung around,” he says. “When I met Yoko is when you meet your first woman and you leave the guys at the bar, and you don’t go play football anymore, and you don’t go play snooker and billiards. Once I found the woman, the boys became of no interest whatsoever, other than they were like old friends,” Lennon recalls in a 1980 Rolling Stone interview.

The story becomes increasingly familiar as it heads to the inevitable ending — Lennon and Christ, George Harrison and India, McCartney and LSD — with the odd anecdotal gem or enlightened retrospective take. All four Beatles make equal contributions.

For me the real pleasure in reading the anthology came from the little moments that stirred the imagination: John and Paul in bowler hats, trying to hitchhike across France for John’s 21st birthday in 1961; John and Paul circa 1967 in John’s Rolls Royce — which had blacked-out windows, a microphone and an external loudspeaker — roaring through the streets of suburban London at 2 a.m., in pursuit of George in his Ferrari, broadcasting to the streets, “It is foolish to resist! It is foolish to resist! Pull over!” And then there’s the Beatledome, a fort the Beatles talked about building on the Greek island they were going to buy in the summer of 1967.

We learn that Lennon’s aversion to crippled people, visible in his humor in candid shots, is a reaction to a truly disturbing phenomenon, if you were a Beatle trying to keep your head: constant backstage visitations by the disabled. “When a mother shrieks, ‘Just touch my son and maybe he’ll walk again,’ we want to run, cry, empty our pockets. We’re going to remain normal if it kills us.”

There is an archival quality to the book; documentation is scattered throughout the pages, including a statement of the group’s 1964 earnings, just over 1 million pounds. Various Beatles were out to set the record straight at times: “There’s something I’d like to get straight because it is kind of historical,” McCartney says at one point, emphasizing that he didn’t push Stu Sutcliffe out of the group back in Hamburg, Germany.

The harnessing of so much of the Beatles’ personal effluvia, photographs and anecdotes in one volume is invaluable, if tiring. So much ink has been spilled about the band that maybe the only rational way to approach the era anymore is to just sit back and marvel, and the anthology is conducive to wonderment. As for the social significance of it all, the four of them seem to be just as baffled, and delighted, as the rest of us, emphasizing that it all comes down to good music by “a good, tight band.” The Beatles already wrote the only book you truly need to understand their moment — the songbook that lives and breathes on their singles and albums. The rest is just history.

The man who organized and thrived on all this madness was producer George Martin, whose relationship with the Beatles, always integral, was now entering uncharted territory. The aptly titled “Tomorrow Never Knows” closes the masterpiece “Revolver” with a tantalizing hint of the artistic statement Martin would help them realize next: “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

“It would be wrong to assume that the Beatles alone were responsible for this remarkable recording, or for the progressiveness which would be the hallmark of much of their future output,” Mark Lewisohn says of the song in “The Beatles’ Recording Sessions,” a day-by-day account of the group’s entire career that is definitive and required reading for serious fans. “George Martin was, as ever, a vital ingredient in the process, always innovative himself, a tireless seeker of new sounds and willing translator of the Beatles’ frequently vague requirements.”

With the exception of Phil Spector’s syrupy post-production on the “Let It Be” album, Martin produced every Beatles recording — from the first single (“Love Me Do”) to the last album (“Abbey Road”). Manager Brian Epstein, their most fervid salesman, may have given the scruffy Liverpudlians an initial gloss, but Martin gave them real artistic polish. He supervised the band’s transition from precocious boys to mature artists, harnessing all that wild genius into the most efficient and dazzling hit-making unit in modern pop.

In all he produced more than 700 recordings in a career spanning 50 years and genres as diverse as jazz, rock, classical, comedy and film soundtracks, with an unprecedented 30 No. 1 Beatles and post-Beatles hits to his credit in the U.K. Now known as Sir George, Martin may be the most influential and prolific record producer in history.

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George Martin was born on Jan. 3, 1926, in Holloway, North London. The son of a carpenter, he grew up poor, without formal musical training. He taught himself to play piano by ear, and at 16 started his own school dance band, George Martin and the Four Tune Tellers. From 1943 until 1948, he served with the British Fleet Air Arm as an observer in planes, rising to the rank of lieutenant. Paul McCartney later credited Martin’s legendary composure to his military service: “He pulled it all together — you’re ultimately responsible, you’re the captain. I think that’s where George got his excellent bedside manner,” McCartney is quoted as saying in Philip Norman’s “Shout!” “He’d dealt with navigators and pilots … he could deal with us when we got out of line.”

After his military service Martin studied composition and classical music orchestration at London’s Guildhall School of Music; his first job after graduating was at the BBC’s music library, where he further cultivated the clipped, upper-crust accent that belied his humble roots. He entered the music industry in 1950, as assistant to the head of EMI’s Parlophone Records, and was soon made responsible for the label’s classical recordings. He worked with artists like Stan Getz and Judy Garland, establishing himself as a jazz, classical and light music producer. But he also sought new markets, in an effort to shore up what was then known as EMI’s junk label. Martin produced a string of hit comedy records with Peter Ustinov, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and, most notably, the Goons.

In 1955, after a management shake-up led to his boss’s retirement, Martin was appointed head of Parlophone at 29, becoming the youngest manager of an EMI label. In 1960 the Temperance Seven gave him his first No. 1 hit in Britain with “You’re Driving Me Crazy.” After watching the rise of another EMI label’s act, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Martin was eager to acquire a pop group for Parlophone — just as Epstein was desperate to find a recording contract for the Beatles. Epstein had been turned down by major British labels Decca, Pye, Phillips and even EMI — twice. Martin scheduled an audition for June 6, 1962.

Despite feeling that the Beatles’ demo tape had been “pretty lousy” and “very badly balanced” and contained “not very good songs” by “a rather raw group,” Martin has recalled, “I wanted something, and I thought they were interesting enough to bring down for a test.” You know what happened next: He was won over by their Liverpudlian charm. “I liked them as people apart from anything else, and I was convinced that we had the makings of a hit group,” he told British music magazine Melody Maker in 1971. “But I didn’t know what to do with them in terms of material.”

Because Martin has a somewhat professorial demeanor, the obvious differences between him and the Beatles have always been played up, but in truth they had much more in common than it appeared. “I’ve been cast in the role of schoolmaster, the toff, the better-educated, and they’ve been the urchins that I’ve shaped. It’s a load of poppycock, really, because our backgrounds were very similar. Paul and John went to quite good schools. I went to an elementary school, and I got a scholarship for that, and I went to Jesuit college. We didn’t pay to go to school, my parents were very poor. Again, I wasn’t taught music and they weren’t, we taught ourselves,” Martin told Billboard magazine. “As for the posh bit, you can’t really go through the Royal Navy and get commissioned as an officer and fly in the Fleet Air Arm without getting a little bit posh; you can’t be like a rock ‘n’ roll idiot throwing soup around in the wardroom.”

Lennon was particularly impressed that Martin had recorded Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers from BBC Radio’s “The Goon Show.” “The Beatles instantly developed a rapport with George Martin,” Peter Brown, former director of the Beatles’ management company, writes in “The Love You Make.” Martin told them they needed to lose then-drummer Pete Best, and they did. Though only 14 years older than Ringo Starr, the oldest Beatle, Martin was light-years ahead of them in technical sophistication. “The various magic tricks that Martin could perform in the control room,” Brown writes, “made him seem like the Wizard of Oz behind his control panel.”

In the beginning, Martin was tough on the group. “As composers, they didn’t rate. They hadn’t shown me that they could write anything at all,” he told Melody Maker. “‘Love Me Do’ I thought was pretty poor, but it was the best we could do.” Martin saw the kernel of something, but even he had no clue just what kind of phenomenon he was about to help unleash. “The question of them being deep minds or great new images didn’t occur to me — or to anybody, or to them, I should think.”

When they laid down “Please Please Me” in February 1963, Martin told them they’d recorded their first No. 1. He quickly resolved to make a Beatles album, which he produced in a one-day session. “There can scarcely have been 585 more productive minutes in the history of recorded music,” Lewisohn writes. Known as a producer of live stage recordings, Martin tried to capture the manic excitement of a Beatles performance, even briefly considering taping at the Cavern Club. He got what he was looking for, particularly in Lennon’s larynx-gnashing finale, “Twist and Shout.”

In March, Martin was proved right; “Please Please Me” hit No. 1 on several lists. That year Martin would go on to spend an incredible 37 weeks at No. 1 as producer of the Beatles and other acts, including Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. By June, Parlophone was dominating the British pop charts, just 12 months after the Beatles auditioned.

In September, Lennon and McCartney played Martin a song they’d recently written in a hotel room. Martin suggested they bring the catchy chorus — “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” — up to the front of the song. “In ‘She Loves You’ George Martin had been able to incorporate in magic proportions all the ingredients of the three previous singles into one ineluctably attractive song,” Brown writes. “‘She Loves You’ didn’t climb the charts, it exploded with a fury into the No. 1 position, selling faster and harder than any single ever released.” It became the band’s first million seller.

For the next few years, Martin and the Beatles worked nonstop, churning out hit after hit. Unhappy with his EMI salary, he formed his own production company called AIR (Associated Independent Recording) in 1964 with producers Ron Richards, John Burgess and Peter Sullivan. Though under contract to make records for EMI, the Beatles continued to be produced by Martin. In the late ’60s, he oversaw the design and construction of AIR Studios in London, which became one of the most successful studios in the world.

Martin recently offered this appraisal of his job: “The producer is the person who shapes the sound. If you have a talent to work with — a singer together with a song — the producer’s job is to say, right, you need to put a frame around this, it needs a rhythm section to do this or that and so on,” he told the Irish Times in 1999. “He actually decides what the thing should sound like, and then shapes it in the studio. He may also be an arranger, in which case he may write the necessary parts … he shapes the whole lot. It’s like being the director of a firm.”

His input at the time consisted of crafting song structures, organizing beginnings and endings, harmonies and solos. He suggested a string quartet for McCartney’s “Yesterday,” then a radical idea for a rock group, and contributed the occasional harmonium, organ or piano part, including the Elizabethan-style solo on “In My Life,” which was cleverly sped up to achieve a quick, bright precision. He also wrote the orchestral scores for the Beatles movies “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!” (and, later, “Yellow Submarine” and, with McCartney, “The Family Way” and “Live and Let Die”). His role as Beatles producer, which had long since eclipsed all his other work, was about to gain a new complexity, thanks to new studio technologies (including four-tracking) and the Beatles’ desire to quit touring and devote themselves entirely to studio recording.

When Martin turned up at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios for the first time, he said during a recent lecture tour, recording devices were powered not by electric motors, which were too unstable to cut 78 rpm records, but by a slow-falling weight that descended from the studio’s roof to its basement. Records were heavy things that shattered if you dropped them. When the Beatles came along in 1962, things hadn’t improved much.

By 1965, “Rubber Soul” had gone far beyond the early live-performance albums. Rhythm, vocal and instrumental tracks were carefully layered over several weeks. The process, not to mention the music, altered the direction of rock. Martin was also bringing in more session players, changing the Beatles’ sound to reflect their leap in craftsmanship. Inspired by American film composer Bernard Herrman’s score for “Fahrenheit 451,” he composed a beautifully understated string accompaniment for “Eleanor Rigby.” (To hear just how understated, compare the song with Phil Spector’s gaudy orchestration of “The Long and Winding Road” on “Let It Be,” which horrified Martin and McCartney.)

But it was “Strawberry Fields Forever” that put Martin’s ingenuity to its most crucial test. Written by Lennon while he was in Spain making a Richard Lester film called “How I Won the War,” two versions of the song had emerged in the studio. One was a heavy amalgam of psychedelia inspired by the San Francisco music scene, the other softer and more traditionally Beatlesque, with trumpets and cellos. Lennon ended up liking the beginning of the first version and the ending of the second. Problem was, they were at different speeds and a semitone apart in key. Martin eventually solved this conundrum by speeding up one and slowing down the other, splicing the halves together into a seamless whole. With “Strawberry Fields,” “George showed us once and for all that the recording studio itself was a musical instrument,” producer Tony Visconti recently told Billboard. “This track was the dividing line of those who recorded more or less live and those who wanted to take recorded music to the extremes of creativity.” The “Sgt. Pepper” sessions had begun.

Inspired by a circus poster he’d found in an antique shop, Lennon wrote “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” telling Martin he wanted to smell the sawdust in the ring. The producer obliged him, procuring sounds of old Victorian steam organs. He put them all on one tape, had it cut into 15-inch sections, had the pieces thrown into the air and joined back together as one; some were backward and some were forward. The unusual sounds permeate the background. To get the song’s wildly atmospheric whooshing effects, Martin next played chromatic runs on a Hammond organ at half-speed, the same trick employed for “In My Life.” “I was quite pleased with that,” Martin told Melody Maker. “It was a sound picture thing, and I was doing really what I’d been doing with Peter Sellers.”

The real circus came in the form of one legendary session for “A Day in the Life.” With 24 bars to fill between Lennon’s verses (“I read the news today”) and McCartney’s middle eight (“Woke up, fell out of bed”), the duo suggested “a tremendous shriek, starting out quietly and finishing up with a tremendous noise.” Martin booked a 41-piece orchestra and scored chaos for it to play. He began each instrument at its lowest note and, at the end of the 24 bars, had it hit its highest note related to an E chord. Martin told the musicians to do whatever it took to get from point A to point B. A gaggle of celebrities was on hand, including Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Donovan Leitch and Mike Nesmith. McCartney brought in funny hats and fake noses, “and I distributed them among the orchestra. I wore a Cyrano de Bergerac nose myself,” Martin told Melody Maker. “Eric Gruneberg, who’s a great fiddle player, selected a gorilla’s paw for his bow hand, which was lovely. It was great fun.”

“Pepper” was released in 1967. Four years had intervened between the Beatles’ first, nine-and-three-quarters-hours album session for “Please Please Me” and “Sgt. Pepper,” which clocked in at 700 hours. From that collaborative peak, the Beatles began slowly going their separate ways; though Martin’s role didn’t change fundamentally, everyone was having less fun. During the White Album (“The Beatles”) sessions, Lennon and McCartney isolated themselves from each other; all four Beatles were rarely in the studio for recording together, a process much the reverse of their earliest days.

By the time the Beatles got around to “Get Back,” a literal attempt to go back to their rock ‘n’ roll roots (later retitled “Let It Be”), they were a mess, as evidenced by the 1970 film of the sessions, whose lone highlight is the famous rooftop set. The sessions were shelved, to be later reproduced by Spector, who for all his wall-of-sound artistry couldn’t do much to salvage the tracks. The band then decided to let Martin do some actual producing, and they were graced with a suitable finale in “Abbey Road.”

In the ’70s and ’80s, Martin produced albums by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, America (seven albums), Jeff Beck (two), Neil Sedaka, Jimmy Webb, Cheap Trick, Kenny Rogers and Paul McCartney (“Tug of War” and “Pipes of Peace”). One of the best of these, Jeff Beck’s “Blow by Blow,” was an artistic success and a bestseller that hit No. 4 in 1975. Martin opened an AIR Studios in Montserrat in 1979; it was destroyed when a hurricane ravaged the Caribbean island in 1989. In the mid-’90s, Martin returned to the vaults and to his familiar role, unearthing and preparing previously unreleased Beatles tracks for the three-volume Anthology series. The first volume entered the U.S. album chart in December 1995 at No. 1.

He was knighted in 1996, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys the same year. A year later, Martin produced his 30th No. 1 hit in the U.K., Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind 1997,” a charity single recorded after Princess Diana’s death that became the bestselling single of all time and, in Martin’s words, “probably my last single. It’s not a bad one to go out on.” The same year, in response to the second of two volcano eruptions since 1995 that had further devastated Montserrat, Martin put on a benefit concert for the island with McCartney, Eric Clapton, Elton John and Sting.

After five decades in the music industry, Martin bowed out of record production in 1999 with “In My Life,” a collection of Beatles songs recorded by comedians like Robin Williams and Jim Carrey and musicians such as Jeff Beck and Phil Collins. (Beck’s version of “A Day in the Life” was nominated for a Grammy award in the best pop instrumental performance category.)

Martin is still with his wife of more than 30 years, Judy Lockhart-Smith, his former Parlophone secretary. One of his four children, Giles, has also entered the business. In an interview on the promotional site for “In My Life,” Martin made him sound like a chip off the old block: “You’ve got to get on with people and you’ve got to lull them into a kind of sense of security and you’ve got to get rid of their fears, you’ve got to relate to people, and he certainly can do that.”

Martin may not be producing records, but he isn’t exactly retiring; he still oversees AIR Studios, and last year he became chairman of the advisory board of Garageband.com, a new Internet music initiative designed to seek out new talent outside the confines of the corporate record industry. The Beatles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988; Martin finally made it in 1999, alongside Sir Paul McCartney.

In not only chancing his career on the Beatles — then “an industry joke” as Martin has put it — but also giving a voice to their every musical whim, Martin has rightfully been referred to as the fifth Beatle. Martin blends giddy enthusiasm with cool intelligence and eloquence. His contributions to Beatles lore are intriguing and articulate; in documentaries such as “The Compleat Beatles” and throughout the marathon “Beatles Anthology,” he is mesmerizing when he leans over his mixer and calls forth individual tracks, be they orchestral swells or lone, spine-tingling vocals. He had the front-row seat.

I was on hand when Martin brought his lecture tour, “The Making of Sgt. Pepper,” to New York’s Town Hall in 1999. Each time he introduced a song, from “Penny Lane” through to “A Day in the Life,” there was a round of applause, and Martin would say, “Yes, that’s a great one,” or “Really marvelous, isn’t it?” — as if, all these years later, he was as truly amazed as all of us have always been. At one point, after he’d given an introduction to “Strawberry Fields,” a frenzied audience member shouted “Amen!” Martin replied, “Amen.” Walking out into Times Square on a cold winter night, I marveled at how it had been exactly 35 years and 10 blocks from this spot that Sir George’s boys blew down the doors and called in the invasion from Ed Sullivan’s stage. “They say if you can remember the ’60s, you weren’t there. Well, I was there,” Martin had assured his audience. Some of the audience had been there too, but even the younger ones knew exactly what he meant when he said, “It all happened so quickly, that flowering of genius so long ago.”

A few years later Robert Moog, a graduate student in physics at Cornell
University, published a magazine article explaining how to build a
theremin, offering do-it-yourself kits for $49.95. Orders poured in, and
Moog sold 1,000 that year. “We had $13,000 in the bank,” he
recalled recently, “a humongous cache of wealth for a graduate student
back then!” The windfall enabled a career that helped bring electronic
music out of the realm of novelty acts and university labs. A decade
after the first RCA machine, Moog introduced the first widely adopted
electronic instrument — the synthesizer that bears his name.

When Moog (rhymes with “vogue”) unveiled the Moog music synthesizer in
1965, his engineering skills combined with a bit of business luck to
radically change the way music was made. Synthesizers went from being
computers to instruments that could be found in any music store. The
flowering of rock music may have come via Leo Fender, Les Paul and the
Gibson
Guitar Co., but the innovative music of the early 21st century owes far
more to Moog and his imitators and successors.

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Growing up in the ’40s in Flushing, Queens, Moog suffered the usual
cruelties boys
inflict on the smarter, more introverted members of their tribe: “I was
the class brain,” he recalled in one of several e-mail interviews. “I
knew I was smarter than they were, so they felt compelled to beat me up
periodically to keep me in my place.” He spent a lot of time with his
father, who liked to dabble in electronics, and started his own
electronics projects. He built his first theremin with the help of a
hobby-magazine article at age 14. “I was hooked,” he recalled. Five
years later, Moog published his own do-it-yourself theremin article.

Moog’s mother, meanwhile, gave him piano lessons and made him practice
hours every day in the hope that he’d become a concert pianist,
“klopping” him if he “didn’t practice right.” He found refuge in New
York’s prestigious Bronx High School of Science, where he “actually
had some friends who were as nerdy as I was.” Later, at Queens College,
Moog finally developed what he called “a medical-minimum amount of
social grace,” and even started dating.

After getting some exposure to the liberal arts at Columbia
University’s Engineering School, Moog began graduate education in the
engineering physics department of Cornell University. He took eight
years to get his Ph.D., largely because of his part-time hobby: building
theremins and other electronic instruments. The degree came in 1965, a
year after Moog launched his synthesizer business.

Moog built his synthesizer in 1964 after a composer told him about the
need for user-friendly electronic instruments utilizing new
solid-state technology. The Moog was modular: You used patch cords to
select your waveform (the sound’s timbre) and frequency (pitch), and
plugged in the interface — a keyboard, instead of the binary
code on paper that had defined the first RCAs. Moog’s engineering
wizardry did the rest.

Significantly, Moog’s was the first synthesizer to use
attack-decay-sustain-release (ADSR) envelopes, set with four different
knobs, which control the qualities of a sound’s onset, intensity and
fade. Like many of his designs, Moog’s envelope generators became a
basic component of later synthesizers. The sound was monophonic — one
note at a time — but that was enough, since studio recording techniques
could create whole orchestras from single notes by the late 1960s.

RCA synthesizers, intended for an elite market of labs financed by
universities and record companies, had cost $100,000 and up. In 1967 the new
Moog sold for $11,000. It wasn’t the only synthesizer around; many
experts also commend Donald Buchla’s modular synthesizer, built around
the same time. But the Moog became prized for its utility and elegance,
making Moog the name that brought synthesized music to the masses.

“I remember seeing it as a teenager and thinking, ‘I gotta get my hands
on it,’” says Jeffrey Hass, director of the University of Indiana’s
Center for Electronic and Computer Music. “I wasn’t alone. It had a
tremendous impact on many people and brought electronic music to many
composers, both popular and academic.”

The synthesizer also boasted the voltage-controlled lowpass filter that
came to be known as the Moog filter, capable of making a variety of
full horn, string and vocal timbres. The filter was patented in 1968,
much to the envy of the competition, who “ate their hearts out,” Moog
says. They “all came up with voltage-controlled lowpass filters, but
most of them sounded like shit, if I do say so myself.”

The Moog’s biggest break came in 1969, when musician Walter (now Wendy)
Carlos had a huge, Grammy-winning hit with “Switched-on Bach,”
popularizing electronic music with Moog-made renditions of Johann
Sebastian Bach. Canadian pianist and Bach interpreter Glenn Gould
said that Carlos’ Fourth Brandenburg Concerto was “the finest
performance of any of the Brandenburgs — live, canned or intuited –
that I’ve ever heard.”

The Beatles introduced a new Moog in the majestic “Because,” on “Abbey
Road,” the last album they recorded. The instrument was somehow perfectly
suited to the layered, atmospheric vocals and John Lennon’s ethereal
lyrics. In 1971, Carlos brought the Moog to cinema, scoring Stanley
Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” with electronic Beethoven whose gleeful
perversity helped lend the movie its malevolent sheen.

Still, these were products of studio recording. It took musicians with a
talent for excess — such as keyboardist Keith Emerson — to tote the
enormous Moog setup, a towering box of electronics, onto the stage
for live shows. Ever mindful of utility, Moog next introduced the portable,
performance-minded Minimoog. Rock-oriented musicians like Jan Hammer showed
that the synthesizer could be used as an expressive lead instrument.
Jazzers like Josef Zawinul used the instrument to “add new colors to the
traditional sound world of jazz,” says Doug Keislar, editor of the Computer
Music Journal.

“It was really the advent of the Minimoog that saw synthesizers take
off,” Keislar says. “The Minimoog showed that there was a significant
market for portable, cheaper synthesizers.” Or as Moog put it, in
typically dry fashion, “By 1974 or so, having a Minimoog would make it a
lot easier to get a job playing the local Ramada Inn.”

The Minimoog became the gold standard. “He hit it so right, everyone
realized that was the way to do it. So everyone did it more or less the
same,” says Joel Chadabe, author of “Electric Sound: The Past and
Promise of Electronic Music,” who has known Moog since 1965. “Underlying all
this
was a basic quality. The sound of his instruments was really good.”

A century after Thomas Edison reproduced the first recorded sound, the
synthesizer began to spread into musical genres from the avant-garde to
jazz. In 1977, the instrument took a central role in emerging forms of
electronic music, with Donna Summer’s hit dance single, “I Feel Love,”
created almost entirely on Moog synthesizers, and German band
Kraftwerk’s “Trans Europe Express,” an album of purely technological
music.

“The spirit of the times was very exciting,” says Chadabe, who also
serves as president of the Electronic Music Foundation. “You could start
a basement business and really have an impact. Later on the real
businessmen came in with their accountants and financial planning and a
lot of capital, and the business matured.”

Moog admits he didn’t have much of a head for the business end; his main
goal has always been creating useful technology. “My transition from
scientist to entrepreneur?” he asked in an e-mail. “Some would say that I
still haven’t made that transition,” he joked. “I suddenly found myself
in a growing business and I didn’t know how to run it,” Moog wrote of
his early days. “I didn’t know anything at all about business back then.
I didn’t know what a balance sheet was. I didn’t know what cash flow
was. So the business survived as long as it grew, but as soon as a
contraction occurred, I ran out of money.”

In quick fashion, Moog’s family business was bought out. The
Micromoog was the last synthesizer created by Moog to bear his name.
After musical instrument manufacturer Norlin took over his company,
including synthesizer design, Moog spent the rest of his days at the
company designing guitar effects, guitar amplifiers “and similar small
electronic stuff.” He left Moog Music in 1977, blaming corporate politics
for his
departure.

When the Polymoog went into production in 1976, Moog says,
“reliability-wise it was a disaster.” It had been created by Norlin’s
new head of synthesizer design, David Luce. And why did Luce design
synthesizers for Norlin while the man they were named for “was assigned
to the technological provinces”? Just like his school days in Queens,
Moog says, it came down to social skills: “Luce liked to go out and drink
and socialize with the Norlin brass, and I didn’t, or maybe couldn’t.”

The first digital synthesizer, the Synclavier, had come along in 1975.
Digital sound synthesis, invented in the 1950s, became an affordable and
popular technology in the 1980s. Soon digital sampling, computers and
MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) standardization swept
through electronic music, transforming the landscape. While the 1960s
and 1970s were the heyday of analog synthesis, a sound many musicians
still prefer, computer-synthesized sound now had the technological edge.

Moog largely eschewed the digital music revolution, though he had played a
part in it. In 1978 he moved to North Carolina to launch Big Briar
Productions and began making effects modules and control devices for
electronic instruments. One of the first projects was an attempt to create
a keyboard instrument that could be played as expressively as a violin. At
the International Computer Music Conference in 1982, he introduced the
multiple-touch-sensitive keyboard, developed with John Eaton of Indiana
University. In addition to responding to the downward motion of a key, the
keyboard also sensed the horizontal position of the finger playing it,
opening up new dynamic possibilities.

Later, at the behest of artists, he made a flat touch-plate
interface. “Artist feedback drove all my development work,” he
recalls, listing examples dating from the beginning of his career:
“The first synthesizers I made were in response to what [composer] Herb
Deutsch wanted. The now-famous Moog filter was suggested by several
musicians. The so-called ADSR envelope, which is now a basic element
in all contemporary synthesizers and programmable keyboard isntruments,
was originally specified in 1965 by Vladimir Ussachevsky, then head of
the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center. The point is that I
don’t design stuff for myself. I’m a toolmaker. I design things that
other people want to use.”

While Moog’s Big Briar inventions have not had the sensational impact of
the first Moog synths, they are creative, futuristic visions of
alternative methods for playing electronic instruments. “Unfortunately,
the trend is toward user interfaces that are simpler, not more complex.
Most people don’t care enough about the increased possibilities for
expression to sacrifice years of their lives mastering an instrument,”
says Keislar. “They want to press a button and hear music come out. As a
result, such systems are probably destined to remain experimental, even
if elegant.”

Big Briar also makes effects modules such as the “moogerfooger,” which
mimics analog synthesizer timbres, one of which (Big Briar
Moogerfooger Model MF101 Lowpass Filter) is based on the Moog filter.
In 1997 Moog came out with a theremin (the Ethervox) based on the
electronic instrument from the 1920s but featuring both a MIDI interface
and a sound module that can re-create a theremin performance from MIDI
data.

Reflecting on the waves of synthesizers and musical innovation that
followed in the Moog’s wake, the inventor says the instrument “has
introduced a vast array of new timbres and textures to the available
palette of musical sound” and fostered what he calls “sound design.”
Much of contemporary music, Moog points out, “has as much to do with
sculpting complex, slowly evolving sounds as it does with ‘playing’
fixed-timbre musical sounds.” Moog’s quotation marks underscore the
plasticity of the concept.

While some have credited Moog with helping to foment a
“democratization of music,” he will hear none of it. That societal shift
came about thanks to “cheesy Casio and Yamaha keyboards that sold for
$100 to $500″ and were “small and portable and battery-powered, so you
could take them to a party or to the beach,” he says. “I see these
devices as being on a branch of music technology that is completely
separate from the analog synthesizers of the 1970s.”

His newest project is an “interactive piano” that manages to be both
newfangled and old-fashioned. Designed with David Van Koevering, who
helped to market the first Moogs, it is housed in the fine finished wood
of a concert piano, but instead of strings under the lid, there is only
a speaker. A touch screen the size of a laptop’s takes the place of
sheet music. The piano has 128 sounds, including a digitally sampled
Steinway grand, and 256 tracks for recording. It will transcribe any
composition onto the screen as fast as you can play it. Connect to the
Web and download MIDI files to play along with in a kind of instrumental
karaoke. Hook up a CD burner and make copies of your symphony, or print
it on sheet music for that authentic touch. Its educational software is
far more forgiving than was Moog’s mother.

Institutions as varied as the University of Miami and the New York
Islanders use the $8,000 (and up) piano. But unlike Moog’s synthesizers,
the instrument is aimed more at musical tradition than musical
innovation. “Before the radio and the phonograph, people made their own
music, for themselves and for each other,” Moog says. “People regularly
got together to sing, play [music] and dance with each other.
Now, most of the music is recorded, and a lot of that is listened to by
solitary people, isolated from their surroundings by headphones.” Moog
hopes that in the near future, “people will get tired of being in their
own little boxes, and they’ll come to understand that they would be a
lot happier if there were more social music making in their lives.”

These days, Moog is accorded the respect and admiration of a great
American inventor. In the fall of 1994, when the excellent documentary
“Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey” had its debut at the New York Film
Festival, Moog was greeted by warm applause when he was recognized in
the audience by the film’s director, Steven Martin, during a
post-screening Q&A. If most musically inclined people have some
familiarity with the Moog, that’s because Moog became a de facto
leader when it came to introducing electronic music technology into the
public consciousness.

Moog also helped forever alter the creative process of music making.
It’s easy to forget that music was once an elite art, the province of
those who could liberate the scrawl of notes on a page through
specialized and sometimes highly technical mechanical expertise. Today,
Danny Elfman, who composed the scores for the “Batman”
movies, “The Simpsons” and countless other productions, has an advantage
Beethoven and Mozart probably never dreamed possible: creating full
orchestration with technology instead of sheet music.

For Moog, it all goes back to his initial, sustaining fascination with
the theremin: “Leon Theremin’s original designs are elegant, ingenious
and effective. As electronics goes, the theremin is very simple. But
there are so many subtleties hidden in the details of the design. It’s
like a great sonnet, or a painting, or a speech, that is perfectly done
on more than one level.” The statement equally applies to Moog’s own
marvel of engineering.

Stepping into this miasma of greed and paranoia, Joni Mitchell performed her
song “Woodstock” in a lilting, melancholy soprano that seemed to float
somewhere above her piano, as beautifully incongruous as a seagull hovering
over a landfill. But after the song, a whacked-out man named Yogi Joe
grabbed the microphone and began shouting. After he “was thrown off the stage by her security, much to her
dismay,” documentary director Murray Lerner recalls on the recently released
DVD, “the crowd began to boo and become unruly.” Yogi Joe spouted off
backstage about being the “head of the official committee to paint the fence
invisible,” but Mitchell had the unenviable task of quieting the belligerent
throng. As she later told British music magazine Q:

It was a hostile audience to begin with. A handful of French
rabble-rousers had stirred the people up to feel that we, the performers,
had sold out because we arrived in fancy cars … backstage there was all
this international capital — bowls of money, open coffers … So, with my
chin quivering, fighting back tears and the impulse to run, I said, “I was
at a Hopi snake dance a couple of weeks ago and there were tourists who
acted like Indians and Indians who acted like tourists — you’re just a
bunch of tourists. Some of us have our lives involved in this music. Show
some respect.” And the beast lay down. The beast lay down.

The crowd noise turned into applause. Mitchell ended her set smiling,
triumphantly belting out the last chorus of “Big Yellow Taxi,” which
contains notes separated by nearly three octaves: “Don’t it always seem to
go/That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?/They paved
paradise/And put up a parking lot.” Lerner remembers Mitchell as “masterful
… receiving a standing ovation and thunderous applause from the same
crowd” that had been heckling her a few minutes earlier. The prescience of
Mitchell’s songs and her nervy performance created a stirring, fleeting
moment of true artistic transcendence. Only a year earlier, she had fled the
indifference of a crowd less than half the size, in Atlantic City, N.J.
Mitchell’s music seemed to save the day, but the same tension — between her
personal art and its public performance — would always remain.

Throughout her career, Mitchell has bemoaned celebrity even as she enjoyed
its fruits, never overlooking the irony of the situation. As pure an artist
as one is likely to find in commercial music, she has continually withdrawn
into her poetry, painting and relationships — her life — only to
return again with new sounds, new songs, new virtuoso performances. “You felt her
life was inspired,” singer Natalie Merchant has said of Mitchell. “She made
you want to live an inspired and exotic life.”

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Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson in Alberta, Canada, on Nov.
7, 1943. Her father was a grocer; her mother was a schoolteacher who “raised
me on Shakespeare as other parents quoted from the Bible,” Mitchell once
recalled. A few years after her birth, the family moved to Saskatoon,
Saskatchewan, where she attended public schools. As a 9-year-old
suffering from polio, she sang to fellow hospital patients. Mitchell
had three bouts with death, but the ravages of the disease would one day
play a crucial role in her musical artistry.

In 1976 she recalled her luck in having “one radical teacher” who “drew out
my poetry.” After writing an epic poem, Mitchell got it back covered in red circles, with “clichi” written next to phrases such as “White as newly fallen snow” and “High upon a silver shadowed hill.” Legions of Mitchell fans can thank the teacher for this bit of dead-on advice: “Write about what you know, it’s more interesting.”

She took piano lessons for a few years, taught herself ukulele and then
settled on guitar with the help of a Pete Seeger instruction book. A painter
from an early age, she enrolled in art school, but left at the end of her
first year, in 1964, heading to Toronto to try her luck as a folk singer.
Mitchell wrote her first song, “Day After Day,” on her three-day train trip
east to see a performance by Buffy Sainte-Marie.

She worked days at Simpsons-Sears department store to pay the rent. Playing
the Toronto coffeehouse scene at night, she met folk singers Tom Rush and
Chuck Mitchell. She married Mitchell in 1965 after a courtship that lasted
36 hours, according to one report. Rush and Mitchell would be the first of
many singers to make standards of Mitchell’s tunes.

The first of these, “The Circle Game,” had become familiar to crowds in
Toronto, and later Detroit, where the Mitchells moved, years before she
recorded it. She wisely set up her own publishing company and named it
after her own private mythology. “Siquomb” stood for “She Is Queen
Undisputedly of Mind Beauty.” Though the company was later renamed Crazy
Crow Music, many of her loyal fans still describe Mitchell with her own
fanciful acronym.

At night, after performing, the Mitchells hosted all-night poker games
attended by Gordon Lightfoot and Sainte-Marie, but their marriage was
crumbling. Joni left Chuck and moved to West 16th Street in New York,
capturing her newfound sense of freedom on “Chelsea Morning”: “The sun
poured in like butterscotch and/Stuck to all my senses/Oh, won’t you
stay/We’ll put on the day/And we’ll talk in present tenses.” Her idols began
covering her songs, including Sainte-Marie (“The Circle Game”) and Judy Collins,
whose “Both Sides Now” became a Top 10 hit.

In 1967, country singer George Hamilton IV cut Mitchell’s “Urge for Going,”
a moody song ostensibly about the loneliness of winter, inspired in 1965 by
the diminishing opportunities for folk singers in the wake of Bob Dylan’s famous
electric conversion. “I get the urge for going/But I never seem to go,”
Mitchell wrote. Hamilton’s version peaked at No. 7 on Billboard’s country
singles chart. (She didn’t put the early tune on an album until “Hits,” in
1996.)

Mitchell fled New York for California, settling in Laurel Canyon, a favored
retreat of artists and musicians near Los Angeles. She met David Crosby, who
later said, “Right away I felt as if I’d been hit by a hand grenade. Her
voice, those words … she nailed me to the back of the wall with two-inch
spikes.” When Mitchell began recording her first album for Reprise, new
admirer Crosby was chosen to produce it.

As any guitar novice knows, fretted chords are the first enemies of the left
hand, requiring dexterity and a strong index finger to stretch across and
hold both the bass and high strings. Mitchell had found these chords
especially challenging, but her solution to the problem transformed weakness
into strength: “My left hand is somewhat clumsy because of polio. I had to
simplify the shapes of the left hand, but I craved chordal movement that I
couldn’t get out of standard tuning without an extremely articulate left
hand,” she told Joe Smith in “Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular
Music.”

She learned open blues tunings in C and G, picked up D modal and began
stitching chords together with interesting results. “The tunings were a
godsend … they made the guitar an unstable thing, but also an instrument
of exploration, you could put the feeling into a new tuning, you had to
rediscover the neck, you’d need to search out the chordal movement … It
was very exciting to discover my music. It still is, to this day.”

As Acoustic Guitar magazine noted in 1996, “Her guitar doesn’t really sound
like a guitar … A guitarist haunted by Mitchell’s playing … can’t find much
help in the music store in exploring that sound: what she plays, from the
way she tunes her strings to the way she strokes them with her right hand,
is utterly off the chart of how most of us approach the guitar.” Her
repertoire grew to encompass so many tunings, in fact, that Mitchell has
long relied on an archivist, Joel Bernstein, to maintain the official book
of tunings and chord shapes that individuate her songs; he even has to help her
relearn some of the older tunes now and then.

Mitchell’s first L.P., “Joni Mitchell” (often referred to as “Song to a
Seagull” because of her cover painting), established her personal
songwriting style and (encouraged by Crosby) unique arrangements. Boldly, it
did not include her best-known material, but her follow-up album, “Clouds,”
featured “Chelsea Morning” and “Both Sides Now.”

Mitchell recorded “Clouds” while living with new lover Graham Nash, who
meanwhile was inspired by a day of antiquing with her to write “Our House”
for his new band, Crosby, Stills and Nash. (In another example of Mitchell’s
knack for leaving art in the wake of her sometimes messy personal life,
Crosby wrote the ethereal “Guinnevere” after she left him for Nash, though
it was also said to be partly about his former girlfriend, to whom he was
returning.)

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In 1969, Mitchell was invited to Woodstock, but because her handlers were
afraid she’d miss a scheduled appearance on Dick Cavett’s talk show the following Monday, she did not journey upstate. Yet her absence created a sense of longing that was essential in writing the festival’s anthem.

She was stuck in a hotel room while her peers made history at Max Yasgur’s farm:
“The deprivation of not being able to go provided me with an intense angle
on Woodstock,” she later recalled. “Woodstock, for some reason, impressed me
as being a modern miracle, like a modern-day fishes and loaves story. For a
herd of people that large to cooperate so well, it was pretty remarkable and
there was a tremendous optimism. So I wrote the song ‘Woodstock’ out of
these feelings, and the first three times I performed it in public, I burst
into tears, because it brought back the intensity of the experience and was
so moving.”

Mitchell’s absence from the festivities was more than a necessary irony. It
symbolized the paradox at the root of Mitchell’s art — detachment coupled
with an uncanny ability to connect. “The wonderful thing about being a
successful playwright or an author,” she told MacLean’s magazine in 1974, is
that “you still maintain your anonymity, which is important in order to be
somewhat of a voyeur, to collect your observations for your material. And to
suddenly often be the center of attention …
threatens the writer in me. The performer threatened the writer.”

Mitchell toured with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the supergroup du jour, and soon headlined on
her own. But she still had a hard time reconciling her art to enormous,
sometimes indifferent crowds. After a performance at London’s Royal Albert
Hall in 1970, she announced that she was quitting live appearances. Distance
became a common refrain for the artist who was once described as a “Hans
Christian Andersen Snow Queen.”

Her next album, 1970′s “Ladies of the Canyon,” further showcased her
musicianship. The arrangements — already well beyond most singer-songwriter
material — were becoming more sophisticated and intriguing. Songs like
“Rainy Night House” have inventive chord structures underlying deceptively
simple melody lines. Mitchell included some “hits” — “Woodstock” and the
swooping, soaring “Big Yellow Taxi,” which contains one of the few 22-note melodic spans in popular music.

“Blue,” released in 1971, contains many of the same guitar and piano motifs
as earlier albums, but the songs have more depth, introspection, raw emotion
and nerve than anything Mitchell had done before. The album and title song
were said to be named for then-current beau James Taylor, though she has said
little about the album’s romantic provenance.

Widely considered a masterpiece, “Blue” reached No. 15 on the charts. On
“Carey,” Mitchell’s layered vocals blend perfectly with the masterful
up-tempo, open-tuned strumming of guest guitarist Stephen Stills; Taylor is on
hand for the gleaming “California” (featuring the pedal steel of Sneeky
Pete), “All I Want” and “A Case of You.” “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” a
song about hope in the face of disillusionment that works on another level
(like most Mitchell songs) as a parable for the end of the hopes of the
’60s, closes the album with an elegiac sense of loss:

Richard got married to a figure skater
And he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator
And he drinks at home now most nights with the TV on
And all the house lights left up bright
I’m gonna blow this damn candle out
I don’t want nobody comin’ over to my table
I got nothing to talk to anybody about
All good dreamers pass this way some day
Hidin’ behind bottles in dark cafes, dark cafes
Only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings and fly away
Only a phase, these dark cafe days

By 1974 Mitchell stood alongside Stevie Wonder as Rolling Stone’s Artist of
the Year. Critics had applauded “For the Roses” (said to be a possible
farewell to the business at the time of its release) and “Court and Spark,”
her first all-electric L.P. Experiments with jazz followed, foreshadowed
perhaps by Mitchell’s sparkling cover of the 1952 Annie Ross song “Twisted”
(“My analyst told me/That I was right out of my head”). The backlash wasn’t
far behind. Critics were taken aback by Mitchell’s 1975 jazz album, “The
Hissing of Summer Lawns,” even though jazz-inflected chord phrasings had
appeared in songs as early as “The Arrangement” and “Blue.”

Her next album, “Hejira,” returned to familiar form — songs of personal
journeys backed by a mellow, acoustic-jazz sound, with bass accompaniment
from Jaco Pastorius and a little harmonica from Neil Young. The album finds
Mitchell again striking universal themes — restlessness, doomed love and
mortality — with self-deprecating honesty and humor: “There’s a gypsy down
on Bleecker Street/I went in to see her as a kind of joke/And she lit a
candle for my love luck/And 18 bucks went up in smoke.” The atmosphere
is one of withdrawn brooding; Mitchell has admitted to using a lot of
cocaine at the time: “Altered consciousness is completely tempting to a
writer. I did some good writing, I think, on cocaine [but] it kills your
heart — takes all your energy, puts it up in your brain.”

Subsequent albums met with mixed reviews, some deservedly so, but Mitchell
has never lost the artist’s hunger for originality. Of her 1979 album
“Mingus” (which she has often defended), Mitchell noted, “It hammered the
nail into my coffin which said: Mitchell is dead on pop radio, she’s a
jazzer.” It took her a while to shake her image as a beret-wearing jazz
dilettante, but at least she could count Charles Mingus as an
admirer. The music on “Mingus” was a collaboration, requested by the great
jazz bassist and composer.

By the end of the ’70s, the reluctant superstar was flying on her own private
Lear jet. After again threatening retirement, Mitchell returned in 1982 with
“Wild Things Run Fast,” for friend, former roommate and longtime record
executive David Geffen’s new label. (It was a replay of 1972, when Geffen
brought Mitchell to Asylum Records, which he started with Mitchell’s former
manager, Elliot Roberts.) She married bassist Larry Klein, who played on the
album, the same year. (They divorced in the early ’90s.)

The “comeback” (every artist, it seems, must have one) came a decade later
with her 17th album, “Turbulent Indigo,” in 1994. Released on Reprise, the
album earned her two Grammys and a new outpouring of accolades. The title
cut was a response to the Canadian Council of the Arts, which had invited
her to speak at its annual conference, whose self-described goal was to
“make van Goghs.” With characteristic candor, Mitchell had told the group,
“A lot of great art comes out of mental disturbance. How are you gonna teach
that?” (“You wanna make van Goghs/Raise ‘em like sheep … What do you know
about/Living in turbulent indigo?”)

In 1997 Mitchell was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and
reunited with her long-lost daughter, Kilauren Gibb, whom she hadn’t seen
since putting her up for adoption in 1965. In a typically confessional
moment, Mitchell had already memorialized Kilauren in “Little Green,”
written in 1967 but revised on “Blue”:

Child with a child pretending
Weary of lies you are sending home
So you sign all the papers in the family name
You’re sad and you’re sorry but you’re not ashamed
Little Green have a happy ending.

Today Mitchell is revered by the countless female artists whose careers she
enabled — especially the recent proliferation of confessional
singer-songwriters. But whatever their angst level, few can hope to equal
Mitchell’s command of her instruments — guitar, piano, voice — not to
mention her facility with lyrics, melody and arranging. “In many ways she is
as influential as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie,” Bonnie Raitt told VH1
in the network’s 100 Greatest Women of Rock ‘n’ Roll, where Mitchell came in
fourth. Male songwriters and even guitar gods are equally enamored of her
skills. “She brings tears to my eyes, what more can I say?” Jimmy Page has
said. Elton John’s songwriting partner, Bernie Taupin, once noted, “On her
level, there is nobody who can touch her.”

These days, the icon of 1960s wanderlust spends her time in Bel Air, Calif.,
New York and a stone farmhouse in the wilderness north of Vancouver, British
Columbia. At 51, Mitchell said her “bleeding years” were behind her. “Now I
have rich people’s problems, and you can’t make songs out of rich people’s
problems … I feel lighter than I ever have right now. I want to write some
songs that are less dramatic … I want to sing with a smile on my face.”

Mitchell’s latest album, “Both Sides Now,” finds her coming at jazz from a
new angle, trading the beret for the chanteuse’s dark lipstick and
cigarette. She takes on standards like “Stormy Weather” with pop
arrangements far more lush than the spare sounds of her early career. If
anyone has earned the right to cover, it’s Mitchell, who has rarely done so
in the past, though countless hundreds of artists have covered her songs.

It must be said that Mitchell’s voice does not soar to the heights she
routinely reached 30 years ago. The original “A Case of You,” from
“Blue,” is an exquisite piece of guitar arrangement topped with the
glissandi of a vocalist at the top of her game; Mitchell lets her voice
linger over the many syllables, creating an elegant languor. The new version
begins noticeably lower — an octave lower, adequately
demonstrating the shift in her range. Mitchell’s voice is occasionally off
the mark, and you miss the old heights and delicate precision. But in its
edgy, clipped delivery — Mitchell sounds like the lifelong smoker she is –
we discover that her lower timbres now have the most resonance.

Mitchell’s new version of “Both Sides Now” (covered more than 50 times) has
a new authenticity. The ambivalence of her lyrics, composed when Mitchell
was in her 20s, now seems laced with apt weariness and hard-earned
wisdom: “I’ve looked at life from both sides now … It’s life’s illusions I
recall/I really don’t know life at all,” she sings, and what comes through
is the sound of a voice deepened, in every way, by time.

Seventy years after Gertrude founded the Whitney Museum of American Art in
Greenwich Village, some of her descendants are openly talking about removing
the family name — and, more importantly, a sizable portion of its money –
from the institution. The rift is over a work of art by Hans Haacke, called
“Sanitation,” which was commissioned by Whitney director Maxwell Anderson
for the museum’s upcoming 2000 Biennial Exhibition. The installation
apparently links Mayor Rudy Giuliani to Nazism, highlighting his
denunciations of the recent “Sensation” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of
Art.

“Sanitation” reportedly consists of quotations — including three from the
mayor about his opposition to “Sensation” — printed in the Fraktur Gothic
typeface favored by Hitler’s Third Reich. Beneath the quotations, according
to the New York Times, Haacke will place a row of eight to 12 garbage cans, each
fitted with a speaker playing the sounds of marching troops. The 2000
Biennial Exhibition opens March 23.

According to the Post, Haacke’s art has the Whitney “bluebloods seeing red”:
Feuding family members include Marylou Whitney, so angry she wants to
disinherit and strip the family name from the institution; Gertrude
Vanderbilt Whitney Conner, who called Haacke’s work “a horrible thing that
desecrates the memory of all Holocaust victims”; and Flora Miller Biddle,
who disagrees with her relatives, writing in a letter, “‘Sanitation’ … is a
wholly legitimate and powerful work.” Biddle’s daughter, Fiona Donovan, also
signed the letter.

“It is regrettable that so many have chosen to lash out at an artist who has
consistently been a voice of social conscience,” writes Biddle, who like
Conner is a granddaughter of Gertrude Whitney. “This country should allow
the free and unfettered expression of ideas through art.”

If you think the rarefied Whitney clan was horrified to see itself depicted
on two consecutive front pages of Rupert Murdoch’s loud-mouthed Post — “THE
QUITNEYS,” followed by “WHITNEY FAMILY FEUD” — well, not exactly. The saga
began largely in the New York tab’s pages, thanks to an “exclusive”
interview obtained by Gershe Kuntzman with a “tearful” Marylou,
daughter-in-law of Gertrude. “They’re trying to do what the Brooklyn Museum
[of Art] did, which is raise ticket sales with disgusting art,” Whitney told
the Post. “So why don’t they change their name to ‘The Sensation Museum’ and
get my family’s name out of it?” The 73-year-old heiress to the $100 million
family fortune is also threatening to take the museum out of her substantial
will.

This time New York’s mayor has decided to sit out the funding fracas,
telling a news conference, “The real concern of the city has to be when
public money is being used. If this is privately funded, and I believe that
it is, then the governmental objection to it passes away. The government has
no right to intervene.” But the pugnacious Giuliani couldn’t resist taking a
swipe at the art: “There is an issue here about demeaning the whole
historical and contemporary importance of the Holocaust,” he said.

Gertrude Whitney studied sculpture in New York and Paris, opened a
Village studio in 1907 and in her career created public sculptures in
Washington, New York, Saint-Nazaire, France, and Palos, Spain. A
great-granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the American shipping
and railroad magnate who acquired a personal fortune of more than $100
million, Gertrude’s father (also Cornelius) was a financier and art patron.
At age 21 she married Harry Payne Whitney, heir to an oil and tobacco
empire. Fortunes merged and multiplied.

A year after New Yorks’ Metropolitan Museum of Art spurned her offer to
contribute her entire collection of American modernist artists, Gertrude
founded a museum of her own. The Whitney, as it is known, opened in
November 1931. The museum moved uptown 12 years after Gertrude’s death in
1942, first to West 54th Street and finally to West 75th Street and Madison
Avenue, where it still resides.

The Whitney dynasty also had strong connections to the arts, as well as
politics, publishing and entertainment. John Hay (“Jock”) Whitney was a
multimillionaire publisher, financier, philanthropist, horse breeder and
internationally ranked polo player. He invested in Broadway plays and used
his financial muscle to help David O. Selznick obtain the screen rights to
“Gone With the Wind” before its publication. He served as U.S. ambassador to
Great Britain from 1956 to 1961. He acquired the New York Herald Tribune in
1958 and tried to revive the newspaper until it ran out of steam in 1966.

Jock was also interested in art; he was a trustee of the New York Museum of Modern
Art from its inception in 1931 until his death in 1982.
Like many of his relatives, he also had one of the finest art collections in
the United States. The Whitney family has held some of the world’s most
valuable art, including works by Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Picasso, Monet and
Renoir.

It’s hard to imagine what the Old Guard Whitneys would have made of the work
of Haacke, who has taken on tough pols like Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher. Haacke is also known for creating a giant pack of cigarettes
called “Helmsboro,” with the words “Philip Morris funds Jesse Helms” printed
on each one.

Anticipating the stink over “Sanitation,” Whitney director Anderson
released a statement Friday defending Haacke’s work, citing a 30-year career
that “has consisted of unceasing assaults on authoritarianism in any form,
and of exposing the hidden vestiges of Nazism in Germany and Austria.” But
even Anderson admitted, “I personally recoil at the likening of these
contemporary public figures to Nazis and regret the pain that this is
causing many.” The Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham
Foxman, has also taken issue with the museum for its plans to display the
work.

In response to her niece and grand-niece’s letter, Marylou Whitney said, “The museum
is free to associate itself with trash, but I have a right not to associate
myself with it.” The $1 million she had planned to give the Whitney this
year will now be re-directed to the institution’s cousin, the Whitney
Gallery of Western Art in Cody, Wyo. “My checkbook is out right now.”