My experience with Sandra Falon (see chapters 3–5) altered the way I looked at life and changed beliefs that I had once taken for granted. The manner in which she lived and the people she associated with prompted me to see things from a different point of view. Because of my background, this change had an impact on the music and art that I made but it wasn’t until years later that I began to understand how strong the influence had been.
I was brought up in a very close-knit Italian family. We immigrated to the United States in 1961 when I was 5 years old. Although living in America, my understanding of the world was closely connected to Italian culture. Even after having been here for years, I still felt like a foreigner living in a foreign country. This began to change when I turned 10 or 11 and started listening to Rock & Roll. I eventually grew to love performers like Elvis, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. It’s odd that these early Rock & Rollers were a gateway into American culture but nothing else, before them, made much of a dent.
One of the beautiful qualities about America was that it once created a Pop Culture that had substance. For me, the great icons of American movies and music weren’t just discardable commodities. They mirrored the culture in an artful and meaningful fashion. To consider Elvis or Hank Williams or Billie Holiday or Marilyn Monroe or James Dean as mere entertainers undervalues the importance of their contributions. Of course, that is exactly what they were but, for America, they also acted as ambassadors of the culture to the rest of the world. They and others like them were part of what made America uniquely American.
Pop Culture, however, has never been much of a substitute for real life. I was a teenager in the early 1970s and the lingering effects of the ’60s were still pervasive. My view of things was shaped not only by my parents’ traditions but also by the temper of the times. Being sheltered, as I was, in the environment created by my family and perceiving the outside world almost entirely through the filter of the Pop Culture of the day gave me a false view of life. It may have been a view, and a circumstance, shared by many of my generation.
I went to art school and adopted all the ideological clichés implied in this type of education. The prevailing thinking was that society consisted of institutions that needed to be either marginalized, changed or eliminated. The bourgeoisie was foremost on the list, as was religion, the power structure and anything else that didn’t align with the accepted viewpoints of the day. Validation of these ideas could easily be found in the books and magazines I was reading or I was told to read by my instructors and friends. It was also implicit in the Pop Culture of the time. When you’re young, it is often a knee-jerk reaction to rebel against the old but, in the 1960s and ’70s, rebellion was turned into a business/political model.
Growing up in a comfortable, advanced society can sometimes mask certain harsh truths about the world. I can’t presume to speak for others, but this was undoubtedly true of me. My upbringing, my education and my personality contributed to a naive and gullible sensibility about life. It was not until I met Sandra Falon, and those around her, that I began to see things in another way. I can’t point to a specific incident or moment that initiated the change, but rather, it was the cumulative effect of witnessing so much degradation and misery that forced me to reconsider my past assumptions.
Many would have read it differently but, finding myself drawn into the subculture of addiction, I became increasingly sensitive to the presence of real, palpable evil on a personal level. I began to sense a kind of corruption of the soul; that of mine and those around me. It permeated the environments in which we lived and how people carried themselves. It was also evident in the way society itself enabled the corruption to flourish. There are those who don’t believe in the concept of evil; who view it is a chimera. My intention here is not to convince anyone of anything. I am only relating the experiences I had and how it felt living through them.
Ultimately, my views about right and wrong and about society and the individual shifted. I no longer thought that solutions to life’s woes were necessarily attainable through, let us say, worldly methods. That is why the music I was listening to at the time – the pre-Rock era Blues, Jazz, Country and Folk tunes linked to a more traditional past – had such resonance for me and influenced the type of songs that I wanted to write. Without being entirely aware of it, I had discarded the fashionable ideologies of the day for a sensibility that was founded on an odd kind of cultural conservatism. This is not to say that I lived my life any differently, as will be evidenced in the coming chapters.
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© 2013 by Maurice Mattei
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