Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) by Donald Fagen Page A

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Finally, just when things were starting to look up, Tina’s book came out, followed by the film
What’s Love Got to Do with It
.
    Now the poster boy for spousal abuse, Ike started to fight his way back. He reconstituted the Kings of Rhythm and came out with a book of his own,
Takin’ Back My Name
(“Sure, I’ve slapped Tina . . . We had fights and there have been times when I punched her without thinking . . . But I never beat her . . . I did no more to Tina than I would mind somebody doing to my mother in the same circumstances”). Obviously, there was something Ike just didn’t get about the whole hitting problem. In his comeback shows, he had a series of surrogate Tinas come out in Tina-type outfits and sing Tina’s songs. It seemed like he still couldn’t figure out why she was gone. And yet he soldiered on, releasing two respectable albums, the second of which,
Risin’ with the Blues
, won a Grammy in 2006.
    How did Ike make out with the Crossroads Devil? We’ll never know. Faust, in Goethe’s version, does horrible things, especially in regard to his honey, Gretchen. At the end, he’s about to be thrown into the yawning jaws of hell when a posse of angels comes to the rescue, singing:
    He’s escaped, this noble member
    Of the spirit world, from evil
    Whoever strives in his endeavor,
    We can rescue from the devil.
    And if he has Love within,
    Granted from above,
    The sacred crowd will meet him
    With welcome, and with love.
    I’d like to think Ike’s version came out the same.

Class of ’69
    In his teens, my cousin Richard Cohn was an amateur magician. All of us kids would freak out when he’d perform at our birthday parties, pulling rabbits out of hats and coins out of our ears. (Later, he became a playwright and illustrator and changed his name to Dalt Wonk.) Since he seemed to prosper during his four years at Bard College, I applied as well. I must have been accepted on the basis of the great personal charm I displayed during my interview, because my high school grades sucked.
    S ituated on the lush east bank of the Hudson River just north of Rhinebeck, New York, Bard College was built on the former estate of its founder, John Bard, who’d wanted to establish a finishing school for Episcopalian ministers. By the 1960s, Bard had drifted, somewhat, from its theological origins. Now an infamous “progressive” school, it attracted a strange mix of applicants ranging from desperate suburban misfits with impressive verbal skills but appalling high school records (like myself) to pink-cheeked, short-sleeved-shirt-wearing “churchys” who were looking forward to contemplative nature walks and French horn sonatas in Bard Hall. There were private-school girls from Long Island and Connecticut in tennis whites, “red diaper” babies from Manhattan and a small contingent of droll, perpetually baked hipsters from the D.C. area. In 1965, Bard’sstudent body numbered about six hundred students, total. There were no fraternities.
    On a dark, drizzly morning, the first day of school, my father and I loaded up the trunk of his Olds Dynamic 88 in preparation for the drive to upstate New York. When he turned on the ignition, the Top 40 station was featuring “Like a Rolling Stone.” That morning, we’d had a nasty argument when he’d refused to let me drive up alone in my own car. Feelings were still raw. Dylan’s six-minute-plus majestic rant seemed, somehow, to validate my adolescent rage.
    As the song played on (forever, it seemed), I looked over at my father sitting behind the wheel and couldn’t help hearing the music through his ears. I was certain that what he was hearing wasn’t a latter-day Beat masterpiece; it wasn’t music or poetry at all, just self-indulgent noise. I couldn’t help giggling to myself when I thought of a then