Kenny Loggins was more than just that ’70s and ’80s rock-star heartthrob Mom used to play in the car on our drives to school, the market, and the bank—he was my unknowing teacher of Music 101 and an imaginary friend who came with me to nursery school every day.
“Kenny Loggins was in the nap room today,” Joanie, my teacher, would chuckle when Mom picked me up from the Blind Children’s Center.
One particularly rainy Saturday, Mom decided not to take me on one of her exciting market excursions during which she would let me ride in the shopping cart and hand me tomatoes, green and red peppers, onions, avocados, and all sorts of other fruits and vegetables, while pointing out their distinctive shapes, textures, and smells.
“Don’t eat them yet,” Mom would tell me. “We need to pay the nice lady first.”
Of all the Saturdays I had to be left home, this was the one I wished I had been sitting in the shopping cart the most. Mom came home that day laden with grocery bags as usual, but with an air she had whenever she was about to divulge a particularly exciting piece of news, like the cat who swallowed the canary.
“You’ll never guess who I met in the butcher section,” Mom said, her voice glowing with mystery.
I guessed Pearl Schneider, my mom’s best friend, since the Schneiders lived nearby. Then I guessed several of Brian’s schoolteachers, since it was not unusual for us to run into them at Gelson’s.
“No, try again!” she would say chuckling, her voice growing more excited and impatient with every one of my guesses.
“I give up!” I said finally, jumping up and down, unable to stand the suspense any longer.
“Kenny Loggins!” Mom said.
My heart did a cartwheel in my chest. “Kenny Loggins? In the market?” I shrieked.
“Yes, and I told him all about you, and how you and I listen to his music together all the time.”
Mom could not continue for several minutes as I bombarded her with questions. “Was he nice? What did his voice sound like when he talked?”
“Yes, he was very nice,” Mom said quickly. “He wants to give us tickets to his concert in a few weeks at the Universal Amphitheater!”
“We’re going to see Kenny?” I exclaimed, making sure my ears were not playing tricks on me.
“Yes, and there’s one more surprise. He wants all of us to come backstage afterwards.”
* * *
The minutes between the opening act provided by a comedian and Kenny’s appearance on stage felt like hours as we sat in our seats in the crowded amphitheater, and when the moment came, my five-year-old body felt as though it was being swallowed by a gigantic monster as the audience roared the most deafening, enthusiastic applause I had ever heard. The hundreds of speakers around us filled with the first dramatic notes of a synthesizer, which mingled with the continuous screams of appreciation and excitement from the audience, and then layers of sound from the guitars, bass, and drums added themselves to the texture.
“How’re you all doing tonight?” cried Kenny’s voice, and the applause grew still more uproarious in reply.
The excitement of a concert was almost more than I could bear. Kenny and his large band played all the songs I had heard almost every day, yet they were much louder, ringing with a spontaneous energy I had never experienced before. The crowd around me rose up out of their seats during all the fast songs, and people I had never met before grabbed my hands, urging me to dance to Kenny’s beats. In the middle of the show, we all settled back into our seats, and suddenly the large hall felt as though it had shrunk to the size of Kenny’s living room as he sat down with his acoustic twelve-string guitar and began to tell us stories about other concerts he had given, and the reasons he had written many of his songs. I finally got to hear his speaking voice, which was several octaves deeper than the high range he was completely at home singing in. He laughed easily too, and I was glad that he seemed nice.
The concert ended with an extended version of the song “Footloose.” The more people clapped, the more liberties the guitarist, drummer, and keyboard player took in their solos, and Kenny scatted vocal lines, urging them on.
“Let’s bring it home!” Kenny shouted, but after the final notes, the audience would not let him go, and Kenny obliged with two encores.
My ears rang as we made our way out of the theater to the stage door to find Arlene, Kenny’s assistant.
”Are you the Rubins?” asked a friendly voice, and a woman who smelled like vanilla perfume scooped me up into her arms.
“You must be Laurie!” she said as she led the way, still carrying me, to Kenny’s dressing room. I felt Arlene make several turns this way and that, leading us through many corridors, holding doors open with her one free arm for the rest of my family. The sound of people laughing, instrument cases snapping shut, and men asking, “Hey, you wanna grab a bite to eat? I’m starved,” emanated from various different rooms nearby.
Arlene stopped at a door and whispered, “This is it,” before knocking.
“Yeah, come on in,” said Kenny’s voice.
Arlene allowed Mom, Dad, and Brian to head in before us. All three of them introduced themselves and told him what a great concert it was.
“And this is Laurie,” Arlene said, placing me on Kenny’s lap. All the questions I had been dying to ask him melted on my lips. I had wanted to know how he could sing in harmony with himself if there was only one of him, and how he could sing in that high voice mom told me was called falsetto when he had such a deep voice.
“You can ask Kenny all those things when you meet him,” Mom had told me over the past several days. Yet words seemed to fail me.
“Laurie’s your biggest fan,” Mom said, breaking the silence in which I was supposed to address Kenny.
“Was this your first concert?” Kenny asked, smiling down at me.
“Yes,” I said, not ever having heard my own voice sound so small.
“What did you think? Loud, huh?” Kenny laughed.
“Yeah,” was all I could say.
* * *
Kenny was in the company of many composers who contributed to my music education. My dad’s love of gadgets often resulted in new stereos with impressive speakers that would boom through the house, and the recordings that seemed to do the speakers justice were orchestral recordings of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, Mozart’s greatest hits, and a compilation of Chopin waltzes played on the piano. As the speakers boomed in my chest during Dad’s demonstration of his latest purchase, I’d sit on the living room couch, the music pulling me into a trance with its timbres of the different strings, winds, and brass sections, the ebbing and flowing movements through different keys and dynamics. Then there was the one instrument that could sound like an entire orchestra, and Mom explained that just two hands playing the piano at a time could make all that sound pour out.
“Soon enough, you will be starting piano lessons,” Mom said as she buckled up my car seat for our daily journey to the Blind Children’s Center. The thought of me being able to make the same ringing, loud and boomy, or soft and fluttering sounds that so mesmerized me excited me to no end.
One Monday, instead of being picked up from nursery school by Mom, I was led into the music room.
“You must be Laurie,” said a lady with a bright, excited voice. “I’m Robin.” Tapping a wooden piano bench, she said, “Come sit next to me.”
Robin let me explore the large keyboard in front of me. I played all the notes I could reach and began sliding my fingers over the keys, laughing at the sound they made.
“These keys,” Robin said, placing my hands on the wider, flatter keys, “are the white keys. And these,” Robin placed my fingers on the narrow, taller keys, of which I noticed there were fewer, “are the black keys.”
She placed my thumb on a note she called “middle C,” and continued to position my fingers on D, E, F, G, and so on. As she had me play each note and taught me its name, I memorized the sound the way one would remember the shape of each letter in the alphabet. It wasn’t until years after my first piano lesson that I learned the ability to place the sound of each note with its name was somewhat unusual.
Several weeks after hearing Kenny Loggins singing his song “Meet Me Half Way” in concert a half step lower than when he sang it on the album, I said to Robin, “It was in E-flat last night. Not in E natural.”
“How did she know that?” Mom asked Robin.
“What do you mean how do I know that?” I asked incredulously. “Doesn’t everyone know that?” Each note on the piano sounded like a different set of colors to me and reminded me of flowers and birds singing. The flats and sharps sounded darker, and reminded me of nighttime.
“Laurie, not everyone can hear the difference in the notes,” Robin explained. “It’s called having perfect pitch.”
* * *
Though I went to Francis Blend from kindergarten through third grade to learn to read and write in braille, I got the benefit of a musical education that Mom and Dad could not have predicted. Mrs. Tavis was a soft-spoken, middle-aged woman who lived, breathed, and ate music. Room 16 might have been a regular classroom in its appearance, but the recordings she played while we were inside, such as Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, where the various animals are played by different instruments to represent their unique sounds and personalities, transported me into a concert hall.
Her classroom was filled with every orchestral instrument in a symphony, and she made us hold each one in our hand, giving us a chance to learn how it’s played. She assigned an instrument to each of us, and though we were the most tone-deaf orchestra known to man, she treated us like professionals. Because I had never seen what an orchestra looked like on TV or in concert, I had only had the experience one would have listening to a record or a tape. When Mrs. Tavis showed us how to hold a violin, and how to blow into a flute, a clarinet, or a tuba, I began to understand what it must be like to see a real live orchestra performing, and I fell in love with music all over again.
* * *
The excitement of meeting Kenny Loggins did not subside, and his concerts became an integral part of our adventures. Many of our trips to Lake Tahoe were motivated by concerts Kenny was giving at Caesar’s Palace, and the spacious green room backstage with several fluffy couches became as familiar to us as a second home. The members of his band were becoming old friends, and we grew accustomed to seeing several of the same groupie families who had also taken to building their vacations around Kenny’s concerts. Dad’s love of gadgets led him to cameras, and he became Kenny’s unofficial photographer. He also donated toys from his company to Kenny’s “Toys for Tots” Christmas telethons, which we attended every year in Santa Barbara. During school breaks, the families of all the band members would accompany them on tours, and Mom, Dad, and Brian would tell me, when I was still too young to start skiing, that they had an exciting afternoon skiing several slopes in Lake Tahoe with Kenny and the gang.
During one of Kenny’s summer tours there, we were invited on a waterskiing excursion with Kenny, all the band members, and many of their wives and kids. As our speedboat loaded up, I heard Kenny’s voice, and realized that he and his oldest son were in the boat with my family and me.
“I want to ski, too,” I announced as Mom, Dad, and Brian were getting sized for skis.
“But Laurie, you’ve never gone waterskiing before. We’ll have to get you an instructor some time, but not today,” Mom said.
“There’s a first time for everything,” Kenny chimed in, and with that, I heard him step out of the boat, followed by his brisk, purposeful footsteps scraping on the gravel. Moments later, he was back.
“Laurie, this is Scott,” Kenny said. “He’s an expert water-skier, and he teaches people how to get started.”
Shocked at how Kenny had seemingly pulled this man out of thin air, Mom and Dad shook his hand in introduction.
“Nice to meet you, Laurie,” said Scott’s young voice.
Brian had the first turn, and from the boat came the enthusiastic cries that were my running commentary of what was going on. The “whoas” told me that he had wobbled or fallen into the water, and the exclamations of “Way to go!” told me he had gotten steady on his feet and was sailing flawlessly on the water as the boat pulled him along, its motor revving up and going faster and faster.
“Your turn, Laurie!” Kenny shouted over the engine as Brian climbed back into the boat.
Scott helped ease me into the water and handed me a plastic handle, which connected me to the boat. At first, the boat moved slowly, and Scott held me around the waist, allowing me to experience the rush of the water pressing against my legs.
“Now try to stand up,” he said.
“In the water?” I laughed.
“Yes, you can do it.”
I made several attempts to move my legs into a standing position, but the water was fighting me violently. My legs first turned into jelly, and then felt as though they had become as light as twigs that moved this way and that so that they were forced out from under me, and I tumbled onto my back. I began to laugh as I spluttered and blew water out of my nose.
Several more clumsy attempts followed, but then my legs seemed to take control of the situation, and Scott’s hands were loosening their grip on me just the way a parent’s would on a child starting to get the hang of riding a bike.
“You’re doing it, Laurie!” I heard Brian shout in the distance as the whooshing sound of the water crescendoed and the boat quickened its pace. My body relaxed and I noticed it slowly elongating and growing lighter as though I were walking on air. The water was carrying me on its surface like a glider, and all I had to do was enjoy the ride. Then, as quickly as it had started, it ended, and some invisible force threw me into the water, and I was panting and snorting water again. For one brief shining moment, I had done it! I had skied on the water!
“I know I didn’t stand my first time,” Kenny was saying breathlessly as Scott and Dad helped hoist me back into the speedboat.
“How did you do that!” Brian asked.
“It’s not about seeing,” I explained. “It’s all about feeling the water.” “And waterskiing,” I thought to myself, “is like the fast movement of that Mozart piano sonata I want Robin to teach me.”
* * *
I was eager to play Bach inventions and Mozart sonatas on the piano, but I found learning the detailed fingerings to be tedious. I preferred serenading Robin with my own vocal renditions as she played the pieces she was about to teach me.
“I think Laurie would much prefer voice lessons,” Robin told Mom after several years of me not practicing. “Maybe she’d practice singing more than she practices piano.”
Mom met Liz Howard when she was having a manicure. The back room of the salon with its three manicure/pedicure stations also served as a weekly social hour for its regular customers. As Mom waited her turn, she was able to glean enough conversation between Elba, the manicurist she had been going to for years, and the client Elba was finishing up with to deduce that Liz was a voice teacher.
“My daughter has been told that she should take voice lessons!” Mom said. And that next week, I had my first voice lesson in Liz’s home studio.
As Mom and I waited in the living room, we could hear the results of Liz’s work, an impressive teenager singing “All I Ask of You” from The Phantom of the Opera in a pure, silvery soprano.
“Oh, I want to sound like her!” I breathed with excitement.
“Hi, sorry to keep you waiting,” said a woman emerging from the studio. Her voice was friendly and thick with a New York accent, and something in her tone sounded painfully honest, more than a little dramatic, and like the kind of person who would say, “Dahling, let’s do lunch,” the way they do in the movies.
“This is Jenny Kwan,” Liz said, introducing us to the student before me. “Jenny’s going to do big things, aren’t you, Jenny?” Liz said proudly. “You just wait; she’ll be Kim in Ms. Saigon in the near future, I can feel it.”
“You sounded wonderful,” Mom said.
“Thanks,” said the girl, gathering up her car keys.
“Come on in,” Liz said enthusiastically, ushering us into her studio. The room echoed with the benefit of wood flooring and high ceilings. It felt twice as large as our living room with lots of empty floor space, a baby grand piano, and a fancy tape machine called The Singing Magician, which allowed you to record yourself while playing a karaoke track to a song. There were folding chairs lining the wall, which could be set up in rows for studio recitals or classes. The place had the strong smell of lemon-scented cleaning solution, and the floor was slick as though it had been recently waxed.
“Okay, Laurie, tell me a little bit about yourself. What do you like to sing?” Liz asked as she closed the door with an echoey boom.
“I don’t know,” I said shyly. “I like Cats, you know that song ‘Memory’?”
“Oh sure, a lot of my kids like to sing that,” Liz said. “Well, let’s see what you sound like. Have you done much singing before? You know, in a choir, or solo in a talent show?”
“Not really,” I said. “Just at home.”
“She likes to imitate the opera singers my parents listen to on PBS,” Mom said. “It sounds like it comes naturally to her.”
“Wow, you like opera?” Liz said, sounding as if her whole face had just lit up. “Opera is my thing. That’s what I sing. Most of my kids like pop and musical theater. Do you think you might want to sing opera?”
“I don’t know,” I said, giggling nervously.
“That’s okay, let’s start with the songs you know you like first. But we won’t do any singing for a while until we vocalize you.”
She led me through a series of scales, making me sing on a nasal “aaaaaaaa” and then a peculiar “ow ow ow ow,” which was supposed to get my sound to be resonant. I felt my voice stretching like a rubber band as she warmed me up higher and higher, the sound getting harder and harder to produce, making my face grow red.
“Why does it feel so hard?” I asked, feeling out of breath.
“Because you’re not used to this,” Liz explained. “It’s like doing exercises for your body. Sit-ups and push-ups are never fun in the beginning, but they make you stronger.”
* * *
Mom got us tickets to see The Phantom of the Opera downtown at the LA Music Center. To see Phantom live is to be brought into a whole new realm, a whole different time. As the auctioneer recounts the story of the Phantom and leads us into two hours of flashback with the magic word, “Gentlemen!,” the theater erupts with sound as the organ plays the first chromatic notes of the overture, which fills the entire theater with the enormity of the music’s force. The sound system and the orchestra penetrate the soul, and take you on a journey via Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music into the 1800s as the curtain opens. You watch Christine, the little chorus girl, whose voice blossoms into the unexpected ringing opera, and you see her struggle to stay part of the real world while being pulled down into the fantastical, seductive, and yet lonely world of the Phantom. You feel the Phantom’s pain as he grapples with his monstrous appearance and the way the world looks upon him with horror, hate, and revulsion. He holds love in his fingertips, but it is hanging by a delicate thread. And then he dissolves into nothingness with grief when he loses Christine to a seemingly brighter world and the handsome Raoul. As you listen to the Phantom’s music box at the end of the show playing the theme of “Masquerade” and you hear him crying with the despair of losing his last bid for happiness, your heart breaks.
“It’s not fair,” I sobbed in my seat, as we applauded the cast during their bows. “If I were Christine, I wouldn’t have left him alone like that.”
“Laurie, it’s just a play,” Brian said. “That sadness is what makes the drama of the story.”
“He was still beautiful on the inside. Isn’t that what should count?” I continued through my tears.
The next day, I wrote to Michael Crawford, who played the Phantom, and told him he had a new fan. I sent the letter fearing the worst, that it would get lost in a vast black hole full of fan mail that never would get responded to. My nights were filled with dreams, in which I was seeing Phantom, and they made an announcement that the actress who played Christine was unable to go on, and they needed someone from the audience to sing her role. I came forward to volunteer and went on as her understudy.
“Liz, I think I want to sing opera now,” I said at my next lesson.
“Really? Why the change of heart?”
“Because I want to play Christine one day,” I announced.
I learned “Think of Me,” Christine’s debut aria, which changes her from chorus girl to leading diva, and I sang it anywhere people would listen.
* * *
“Laurie!” Mom said excitedly, two weeks after I had sent my letter to the Phantom. “I have something to read to you.” She began, “Dear Laurie, I received your very sweet letter, and am so delighted you enjoyed the show. I am touched that you feel so deeply for the Phantom’s trials and tribulations, and that you are inspired to sing Christine’s songs. I know you have already seen the show, but I have arranged for my secretary to leave you and your family four tickets to see the show again, and I would be honored if you would come to say hello to me backstage afterwards.”
Before Mom could finish reading, I began to scream, and the countdown began for the thirty days until I would meet Michael Crawford.
* * *
Backstage of the Ahmanson was a series of doorways that led left and right to different wings. Michael’s secretary showed us past the costume room, a series of dressing rooms, and the orchestra rehearsal room where musicians were nosily putting their instruments away. We met Michael in the makeup room where a woman named Tiffany was peeling layers and layers of makeup off as if his face were the center of an onion.
“Laurie!” Michael said. “Give the Phantom a kiss!”
I stood in the doorway with Mom beside me, shaking like a leaf. Mom took my arm and ushered me forward to stand beside his chair. Before I knew it, he had thrown his arms around me in a bear hug.
“Did you like the show this time, dear?” he asked.
“It was good,” I squeaked. “Good!” I thought. “It was wonderful. What’s wrong with me!”
“Would you like to feel his scars?” asked Tiffany. She handed me what felt like a stencil made out of sponge.
“That thing is glued to my face,” Michael said with a sigh.
I stood there dumbfounded, as Mom, Dad, and Brian voiced all the things I wanted to say to him. Tiffany handed me the wig he wore and told me that it took almost an hour to remove the makeup he had to wear for the show every day. My mouth remained agape with amazement during our entire visit.
“Come back and see us again,” Michael called to us as we left the room.
And we did just that, thirteen more times before he had his last performance as the Phantom. In the meantime, Liz began teaching me not only songs from Phantom, but arias from real operas, and that was the beginning of a long journey into classical music.
* * *
Further involvement in school and work forged a distance between Kenny and my family, but the last month with him contained the best adventure yet. Arlene announced that Kenny needed a children’s choir for two of the tracks on his soon-to-be-released album, Leap of Faith. Both Brian and I joined the choir. A few rehearsals in the basement of a church to learn the part were followed by a trip to the studios of Capitol Records. Several takes of the chorus were recorded, and we sang the four-part harmonies that emulated a gospel choir in a song called “Conviction of the Heart” about saving the environment. When Kenny and the producers were satisfied, an announcement was made.
“We need five of you to record little scat solos for another song, ‘If You Believe.’ Would any of you kids like to audition?” Excited whispers broke out around me. We were called, one by one, into a smaller studio and were given headphones in which we were able to hear the band playing and the backup choir singing.
“Just improvise,” Kenny told us.
“Believe! Yeah, yeah!” I sang at the top of my voice, thinking of Whitney Houston.
After all of us had scatted our fill, Kenny announced that I and four other kids had been selected to have our voices heard on the album. Now I finally understood how Kenny Loggins, Michael Jackson, Madonna, and all the other singers of the time were able to produce several tracks of harmony. As Kenny had me start and stop, recording engineers were turning knobs and raising levels on fancy mixing boards. Never in my wildest dreams as a four-year-old dying to ask Kenny so many questions did I envision receiving a brand new CD, tearing off the shrink wrap, and listening very carefully for the sound of my own voice in harmony with that of Kenny Loggins.