I sat in a Penguinarium in New Jersey with my penpal Andrew Horowitz. I was twelve, and he was fourteen. He fiddled with a plastic-cased glockenspiel and a green tape recorder while I read an old paperback biography of The Beach Boys with an Isaac Asimov quote in the back of my head: “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny. . . .’” Listening to Andrew play those shrill bells all day while penguins waddled in darkness cracked me up. In a good way. When Brian Wilson was working on Smile in 1966, he was making an album that would make people laugh. Pet Sounds had dark currents of emotion: teenage drama. Smile was light and effervescent– Spaghetti Westerns, raw vegetables, and pocket symphonies. Horowitz, despite his bizarre affinity for Penguinariums, would later attempt similar musical feats with a band comprised of a few of my friends: Tally Hall.
In 2008, after two EPs, a demo album, and an album released on Michigan’s Quack! label[1], a band comprised of five friends– Rob Cantor, Ross Federman, Joe Hawley, Andrew Horowitz, and Zubin Sedghi– released their debut album on Atlantic Records: Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum. Wonkiness and alliteration aside, the real Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum (in swinging Farmington Hills, Michigan) was a childhood mecca for the members of Tally Hall and myself. It was an electric dreamworld made of beat-up carousels, ominous robot fortune tellers, cotton candy, and model airplanes that flew around when the lights were off and the kids went home. Loose baby teeth. Hide-and-seek. Tickets for prizes. It was part “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”[2], part forgotten Ray Bradbury novel, and like every dream I could not remember upon waking up. MMMM is Tally Hall’s teenage canticle to our shadows– may we never forget them. They worked with music producer Chris Shaw (Bob Dylan, Weezer, Lou Reed) to make the album, and they even wrote and produced a psychedelic internet tv show to accompany their waggish work.
Oh, it’s dark whimsy. It shivers and hums– Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum. My friends, Tally Hall, beginning to work in brilliant accord with each other. They are melodies, and they are harmonies. They’ve become their lyrics and laughter. But I knew them well before all that.
I met Joe Hawley when I was six-years-old. Our parents knew each other, and he lived in a cavernous old house of crooked mahogany and dark paisley wallpaper. From my six-year-old perspective, his house was scary as hell. And his parents’ strange professions didn’t exactly put me at ease during those first sleepovers. Mr. Hawley was an old, and long-since retired, magician-turned-orchid hunter. Alone at 3 o’clock in the morning, Mr. Hawley would put on a cape, play calliope, and practice old tricks to a vinyl copy of Queen II in the Hawley family ballroom. Joe and I would watch secretly from the shadows. Joe’s mom was a research scientist in cryogenics– actually, that’s all she and my dad talked about. Occasionally, a sleek mechanical sarcophagus would spend the night in Mr. Hawley’s orchid-filled greenhouse, but it would never be in there long enough for us to look inside.
Joe got into making movies– capturing light and time, as he thought of it– when he was twelve. I was in one of his first films: Frozen Tentacles and the Orchid-Covered Gravestone. We co-wrote the script together in the summer of 1996[3]. In the film, I play a psychotic scientist who can become invisible or mutate into an Antarctic octopus at will. We shot the bulk of the film in graveyards. I drove a submarine made of cardboard, blue paint, and a telescope around cemeteries looking for “the graves” of old archenemies that I had killed– only to resurrect them and kill them again. We screened the film in Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum. It received mixed reviews.
Joe’s dad gave us a rare, bright red orchid in honor of our efforts. Joe’s mom said that she wished she could freeze the summer and thaw it out when we were all old and grey. While she was saying this in Joe’s kitchen, Rob Cantor stole the cardboard submarine from our film and later hawked it for a case of Hi-C Ecto Cooler, the board game Crossfire, and a battered Harmony acoustic guitar. To this day, we all agree it was a great heist and an even better trade.
Rob Cantor was one of those kids who had a monopoly on great ideas. In all seriousness, we became friends by haggling over the price of lemonade. He ran an amazing curbside stand– one of a multitude of business ventures he had going at the time[4]– that gave away free goldfish with every cup. I got all my pet goldfish by buying Rob’s “Patented Lemon Wondermiddel[5],” and one fish, a white-spotted Comet named Zinc, is still alive. To bolster his credibility, Rob even took to wearing fine hats (trilbies and bowlers mostly) and waistcoats everywhere he went. He even had a Purple Heart that he traded off of a retired General who lived in the neighborhood.
I worked at Rob’s stand for a little while during the sixth grade, but we didn’t become “best friends” until he fell out of an oak tree that grew next to his stand. He was finishing a new promotional scheme, hanging lemons with cinnamon dental floss from the oak’s highest branches, when he “slipped as to avoid crushing a Blue Jay’s nest.”
Rob broke his collar bone, cracked seven ribs, and suffered a concussion from the fall. He was in the hospital for a month, and to this day, he swears he heard Strauss’ “Where the Lemon Trees Bloom Op. 364” play from a distance as he fell through the thick tangles.
I visited him almost every day. He got pretty good with that Harmony acoustic during his stay and was particularly delighted when I brought him the broken remains of a periwinkle-hued eggshell I found under his oak tree. One Saturday, I played him a tape that my penpal, Andrew Horowitz, had sent me. Rob didn’t care for it much. To him, it sounded like a bunch of prickly sounds arranged randomly, but something (whether it was the dog barks or the church organs or the shoes crunching leaves, I’ll never know) on Andrew’s tape got me to visit him in New Jersey the next summer.
When I first met Andrew’s parents, I thought they liked me more than he did. His mother said I looked “dapper” even though I was wearing a ripped Fresh Cream t-shirt and ill-fitting khakis. Andrew’s dad was a used car salesman. He’d take old beaters, fix ’em up new, and paint ’em wild colors. He’d work in his garage listening to old hot-rod records all day. Andrew’s mom designed board games[6]. She even helped Andrew’s dad fix up the family cars: a vintage finned Cadillac painted to look like a black whale and a VW van colored like the night’s sky.
I spent two weeks at Andrew’s place. He was quiet at first and mostly asked my opinions of his tapes. He would make little orchestral pieces by looping everyday noises from the neighborhood. His songs reminded me of the old Disney cartoon series Silly Symphonies. Mostly because they were bizarre and crazy: the sounds of buzzing bees, watermelon seeds being spit, wind chimes in a storm, and kids jumping into a pool were turned into little pop songs with Andrew singing softly over the cacophony-turned-melody.
Andrew’s dad drove us to the zoo every couple of days with sack lunches. We’d spend hours in the Penguinarium. Talking and listening. More listening than talking. I distinctly remember Andrew putting on Surf’s Up every night while we fell asleep. One night, while Andrew drifted off as “A Day in the Life of a Tree” played, I cried quietly and breathed deep breaths through my nose. I didn’t know how I could feel so old at twelve. It felt like I had been alive for a million years, and it felt like Andrew and I were little old men who somehow still had their whole lives ahead of them. I fell asleep missing my own bed and my younger brother. The next day, I helped Andrew record a song at the zoo outside of the lions’ cages. I wrote Andrew postcards and visited him twice more in New Jersey before we met up again in college. We were both lonelier kids than we ever let on and having Andrew as a friend helped me to appreciate how beautiful thoughts can be when you’re young and lonely.
Ross and Zubin, drums and bass respectively, were each a different type of childhood friend altogether. The kinds of friends who are mythic by their association to the most freewheeling childhood season: Summer. Ross and Zubin were the best of my best July friends. Though, they were (as most devastating duos are at their onset) archenemies when I first met them.
Up on a mossy pond near the strawberry-shaded banks of Lake Huron, Ross Federman had a chipped-up rowboat that any self-respecting ten-year-old would lust after. Before I was friends with him, I agonized over its whimsical knots and lacquered grandeur. It was small, but it was Ross’. Ross was a collector of sorts, and what he collected skirred over the pond waves with him. He had jars all over the boat filled with grass, sticks, and pet crickets. He named all of his crickets: Marshmallow, Oberon, James T. Kirk, Motorpsycho Nightmare, and Winston to name a few of his favorites. He had an old lantern mounted on an iron post that he claimed was from 18th century London, but I’ve always thought that to be one of his most winsome white lies. And (perhaps Ross’ coolest stockpile) old drums were tied around his rowboat’s hull– rusty snares, slashed-up toms, cymbals, and a shoddy timpani in back. Ross said that to the aquatic life, the reflected light of silver steel cutting across water made his boat look like shoals of sparkling fish. I didn’t really believe this either, but it was all just Ross’ percussive catamaran.
He said he found a drum graveyard in a patch of backwoods behind an old abandoned music camp. At a barbecue three years later, Mr. Federman told me that Ross bought every drum he could find on weekend trips to junkyards in Detroit.
But, for all his hyperbole and preteen perjury, I didn’t give a damn. Ross chewed bubblegum cigars while we fished. When all the stars came out, he’d play tambourine and bongos for his singing crickets as we drifted through black water– campfires and mosquitoes in the distance, occasionally kids with sparklers. He’d catch me a big catfish for my birthday and put it in the kiddy pool behind my cottage. He told my cousins it was an ancient monster, and when it eventually died, he’d bury it in my mom’s garden and hold an impromptu funeral service before we cut the cake. Unfortunately, Zubin did give a damn.
Of all my friends in Tally Hall, Zubin was, and is, the most cryptic. I never knew his siblings or parents, and his presence in Summer was chimeric– like smoke coming off a burning marshmallow or the faint perfume of chlorine from a pool that you’ll never swim in. He kept a fort in the burnt-out basement of an abandoned cottage on the far side of the pond. You know the cottage: overgrown, half a roof, missing windows, courted by adult rationales and kid-spread monster stories. In this rooky cellar, Zubin told stories with no words.
On sticky grey afternoons when you could smell a storm in the air, Zubin would invite friends to his hideout. Thunder rolled gently, and “The Umbrella Gang,” skinny pond-goers seeking sanctuary, would fill the basement. It held the essentials: a red metal cooler filled with ice and soda in glass bottles, Zubin’s grandpa’s stand-up bass, a battery-powered blue plastic record player, Zubin’s record collection, countless flashlights and umbrellas, and Zubin’s grandpa’s WWII sleeping bag. Kids would sit on towels and ride out the storm as Zubin played his grandpa’s bass to Motown records. To Zubin, bass melodies told the truest stories that could be told– more pure and expressive than even a song’s lyrics. To Zubin, Ross was no storyteller. Ross was a liar. He’d tell me this again and again when I was the only subterranean gangster to weather a storm with him. During one storm where I was convinced thick lightning was going to crush us both, I made him stop playing along to the appropriate Temptations cut “I Wish it Would Rain” replacing it instead with The Marvelettes’ “Beechwood 4-5789.”
We never found out who did it, but there have been many speculations over the years. At the tail-end of a lazy drizzle in August 1998, Ross heard a cannonade. He found his boat on fire, sinking, and with a hula-hoop-sized hole in its hull. One of The Umbrella Gang had sunk the leviathan with a pair of Genuine M-80s. I still remember Ross’ impromptu eulogy– itself a bastardized A. W. Pugin quote: “There is nothing worth living for but Christian Architecture and a boat. And I’ve never been able to recognize Christian Architecture.” Out of respect and associative responsibility, Zubin and other members of The Umbrella Gang dove in, salvaged what they could, and moved it all down into Zubin’s cellar[7]. Ross’ unnamed wreck still lies in its crypt of seaweed. And in the newly shared summertime hangout, it was only a week before Zubin and Ross turned their animosity into a sparky rhythm section. “Provocateurs at harmonious odds.” That’s what Andrew made of the situation when I wrote him about it.
And that’s Tally Hall’s mini biography. Later, my friends met in college, formed a band, and played wonky rock-and-roll for everyone. They wear color-coded ties that serve as indicators of individual chromatic interests and, more importantly, reminders of ideas, humor, and humourous ideas. “Making people laugh and smile is the only thing worth getting out of bed for,” Joe told me a long time ago. And, as far as my personal accounts go, it reminds me of a quote from a book I once borrowed from Joe’s dad, The Amateur Magician’s Handbook: “Memory is an internally edited record of interest (not of attention, much less of ‘events’)” (Hay 3). These are my most heartfelt and ridiculous memories of Rob, Ross, Joe, Andrew, and Zubin. It’s when my friends were electric and red-blooded. And my interests and old recollections become new again whenever I listen to Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum or see Tally Hall play live. They recreate the memories and emotions I’ve wrote down in this biography at each and every show.
Talk to them after a show. You’ll see that they believe in you as much as they believe in themselves, and with that, you’ll have known them just as long as I have. They drove me to think only my wiliest thoughts and smile at times when near everybody was lionizing practicality and dead dreams.
Their songs are dreams of themselves dreamt in the lifetimes of an instant. Their songs are songs to transform your world... as they’ve transformed mine. I’ll always be “looking through glass eyes/ giv[ing] it a few tries” (“Good Day” Horowitz).
To conclude, I’ll paraphrase a quote Abraham Lincoln should have said in 1865: “Imagine if the great War Between the States were fought with songs instead of guns– bands instead of battalions. The casualties would have been aesthetic growth and the outcome would have been an unimaginable tomorrow. A better tomorrow in all ways. A tomorrow with better music. A tomorrow with more living than dead. A tomorrow with a freedom so wild that it’s almost inconceivable.” Lincoln on psychotropics. Lincoln listening to Pet Sounds alone on a train writing an anachronistic address for 1966 Gettysburg. Just a stovepipe hat, a Stratocaster, and an absurd and beautiful daydream draped in colors that managed to seep through the sepia of hypothetical histories.
Dedicated to: The Slurpee, 1967’s frozen carbonated beverage of wonder Millard Fillmore, infamous Know Nothing & our 13th President and Marvin Yagoda, an old pharmacist with the best cure you’ll ever know
BERNIE J. MICHAEL grew up and went to school with TALLY HALL. He is a member of THE ROYAL LIONS and, currently, continues to dream and learn at the UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR.