Didn’t even know they’d died until I heard about concerts being held in their memory. Takes the chill off, a bit, to have a music show be the obit.
I ran into the eminent local band booster James Velvet last Saturday afternoon at Clark’s restaurant. (James greatly misses Clark’s Dairy, which closed last year, but has acclimated to the other Clark’s.) He mentioned that he would be playing the next night at the Outer Space, a multi-act bill in honor of Norman Cross.
I knew Norman a little, many years ago. I’d been deeply attached to a cassette album of his—bluesy pop tunes where the blues never got away from the pop. I played it nonstop at work and eventually sought him out.
We weren’t made to be friends, not even in an opposites-attract kind of way. Back then, he struck me as one of the most brash, overconfident people I’d ever met. When I was working in the press office at City Hall during the Daniels administration, I was asked by the mayor’s staff if I knew Norman Cross. He’d apparently called some sort of gathering of artists to hear the mayor’s proposals for the future (it was an election year). All I could tell them was that I knew Norman, that I knew he knew a lot of artists and had some standing in the community, but that also with Norman you never knew what to expect. I went along with the mayor’s contingent for the discussion, held at the old Artspace on Whitney Avenue. Only four or five people were there, none of them part of the sort of arts community I’m sure the mayor was expecting. The look of the faces of the City Hall folks was priceless—they were already chewing themselves out for letting this happen, had already written it off as a waste of time. But Norman acted as if this was exactly the meeting he’d intended. If he’d expected more people, or less, or a more structured encounter, he never let on. He badgered the mayor up close about what could be done for artists like himself. We all like to think that the average citizen should have the ear of civic leaders. Norman expected it.
He had all sorts of grand visions like that, some of which I considered ludicrous. Except he kept making them happen.
He built a home recording studio that has often been described to me by those who recorded there as just a wonderful place to work. He found galleries to show his artwork. Ultimately, while I came to learn that his pie-in-the-sky were nothing I needed to get worked up about. What I came most to respect about him was how he built himself a life where he could actively pursue his art. That he did so in New Haven is a credit to that city.
Norman had suffered from a host of mental and physical ailments in the years leading up to his death on March 6 the age of 61. Last year, the ever-supportive local musician and music-series host Frank Critelli (along with Shandy Lawson and Roger Arnold) helped Norman create his final album. Sunday’s tribute concert has passed, but I’m playing that album (Ain’t It the Truth) and digging in the basement for that old cassette.
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I celebrated Max Wilk in print back in 2004, with a cover story for the New Haven Advocate and Fairfield County Weekly recalling “When Connecticut Was Cool.” It acknowledged such Nutmeg-nurtured pop-culture legends as Max Shulman, Terry Southern, Walt Kelly… and Max Wilk.
I’ve been an admirer of Max Wilk for nearly my entire life, and never suspected how much I didn’t know about him until reading the obits following his death Feb. 19 at the age of 90. His jazz side, for instance.
I personally associate Max Wilk with The Beatles and with Broadway. I first noted his name when I was eight years old and plowing through the novelization of Yellow Submarine. Wilk was a co-author of the fab cartoon’s screenplay and the author of its book version. Over the years I’d find other reasons to read him: He wrote a novel on which a Jerry Lewis movie was based (Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River). He wrote one of the great books about the golden age of Hollywood screenwriters, with the greatest title: Schmucks With Underwoods. He wrote histories of the makings of the musicals Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music, both of which had New Haven try-outs at the Shubert theater.
Sometimes he worked the same interests a few different ways: He co-wrote the memoirs of famed agent Audrey Wood, then wrote a play about Wood’s relationship with Tennessee Williams. He wrote for television in the 1950s, compiled The Golden Age of Television: Notes from the Survivors in 1976 and wrote a dishy novel about the same era, A Tough Act to Follow, in 1985.
He seemed to have a handle on all the lively art forms of the 20th century. Including jazz, apparently. A lot of Max Wilk’s Westport musician pals are coming out to mark his memory June 9 from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Westport Arts Center Gallery. I’ve been the center a few times to review its gallery shows. It’s a cozy and progressive spot, a bastion of intimacy and subtlety in an town too often stereotyped as grandiose and stuck in its ways. Wilk railed regularly against the stodgy upper classes and the sheeplike middle classes, so the WAC will serve nicely. Info here.