TRANSCRIPT
One of my favorite musicians is Woody Guthrie. He wrote “This Land Is Your Land.” He wrote a bunch of wonderful kids’ songs. He wrote a bunch of great talking blues. He’s been a real inspiration for me.
Well, about ten years back, I got a hold of his biography by the author Joe Klein. While I was reading it, I started finding, “God, there’s a lot of things about this guy I really don’t like.” And it was very kind of confusing, and I really had to think about it.
Well, one is he had a first wife, and I think he had three kids with her, and he abandoned them. Just completely abandoned his family and left his wife in poverty. I don’t think he ever saw his kids again. I don’t think he sent them any money. That was the first one I thought, “Dad, this guy who I loved as a musician, who I respect even as a children’s musician, was a horrible father, very clearly.”
Then he went and got a new wife and started a new family, and his son, one of his sons, was Arlo Guthrie, the famous musician. Well, there was a story about Woody Guthrie walking on the beach, I think at Coney Island, where he lived, and Arlo was crying. But Woody Guthrie was in a very deep conversation with some adult friend of his, and Arlo Guthrie was about three years old. Well, Woody Guthrie got really annoyed. And what he got annoyed at was that Arlo was crying. He was distracting him from his important adult conversation. So he picked up a handful of wet sand and he stuffed it in Arlo Guthrie’s mouth.
And Arlo… it was like I read that, and I’m like, “This man is evil. This man is evil.” And this was related later, I guess, to the biographer, either directly or indirectly, by the friend who was right there who saw it. I guess Arlo didn’t even remember it, probably, or maybe he did, I don’t know. But it just made me think, as an example, how do I reconcile the fact that some great artists, great musicians, great writers that I really loved could be horrible people? Or just maybe they weren’t altogether horrible people, but did horrible things.
I recently interviewed Alice Miller’s son. Alice Miller being my favorite psychologist, favorite psychology writer, who wrote all about the connection between childhood trauma and adult trauma and adult acting out behavior, adult mental health problems. Now, brilliant, wonderful. She said amazing things. She had a few flaws here and there, but overall her thesis was spot-on, fantastic, head and shoulders above the rest of the mental health field. Yet the more I learned about her, and the more I put together the pieces, and certainly after meeting her son and talking to him, I learned she was kind of a dreadful person in a lot of ways. She did a lot of horrible things, was hypocritical, dishonest, was probably not the best therapist herself, and was a really rotten mother, a really horrible mother, even when he was a child, also when he was an adult. And I struggled to reconcile this.
It’s happened with other people too. Another example was Tchaikovsky. I love the music of Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony is one of my favorite symphonies of all. It’s just beautiful. I love the Nutcracker. I think the Nutcracker is simply brilliant. Yet while I was reading the biography of Tchaikovsky, I learned he was a pedophile. It was like he was having sex with boys, young boys that he hired to be his servant, and then he was having sex with them. And it’s like, yeah, this is a different era. This was a different time and place. This was in Russia 100 years ago or 150 years ago. But some… what? It was like I stopped and I think, “Whew, I love the music of this guy who is disgusting.”
And I think I come here to make this video to try to explore how I make sense of this. How do I reconcile it? Do I still like Tchaikovsky’s music? Do I still like Woody Guthrie’s music? Do I still like the psychology writings of Alice Miller, knowing that she tortured her son? And this is where it’s confusing because at some intellectual level, maybe some emotional level, I like them less. But at some level, I still feel like I love their work. I can’t help but… there’s something about it that’s so beautiful.
And it’s like, so some part of me, in a strange way, does separate the beauty of the work, the beauty of the expression from the sick sides of the person, from the disturbed sides of the person. And then I think it comes down to looking at myself. Am I perfect? Have I behaved perfectly throughout my life? Have I always behaved in an upright, ethical manner? The truth is no. Especially when I was a kid, I was a traumatized kid. I was confused. I was stuck in a very screwed-up, messed-up family that really did a lot of harm to me. And I acted that out. I expressed it.
There’s actually a Freddie Mercury song, Freddie Mercury who somehow got AIDS and died very young through his own acting out misbehavior, one could only imagine. But he wrote a line in the song “We Are the Champions,” and it goes, “Bad mistakes, I’ve made a few.” And it’s like, yeah, I’ve made mistakes too. I’ve made bad mistakes, and I’ve made a few. Not a ton, thank God, but a few. And it’s like, does that take away from the good things that I do? And I have to ask myself that.
And then I think, like, well, I look at everybody, and I think everybody’s made mistakes. Everybody’s done bad things. But does that let people off the hook? Does that mean because everybody’s done bad things that they should be forgiven, they should be let off the hook? And I think really no, because I don’t let myself off the hook for some of the acting out things that I’ve done, some of the bullying, some of the meanness, some of the cruelty that I did when I was a kid, replicating what was done to me.
But for me, the things that I was ashamed of, the things that I am ashamed of, the things that I felt and sometimes still feel really guilty about, for me those are for me my times, my wake-up call. The fact that I feel guilt, the fact that I feel shame, it’s my wake-up call to look at myself, to study myself and say not just what did I do, and that’s important to know what I did, but also to know what was done to me that put me in a position where I could do those things. What was done to Woody Guthrie? How was he abused? What was done to Alice Miller? What was done to Tchaikovsky?
And then that’s another side of it. A lot of times their biographers don’t go that much into what happened to these people. But from what I remember thinking about it off the cuff, Tchaikovsky was abandoned multiple times. He was sent away. I think one or both of his parents died. He was rejected. He had to… he was forced to do all sorts of things he didn’t want to do. And he went to a boys’ school. Probably he was raped, you know? He probably blocked it out. He probably never wanted to talk about it, probably never shared about it publicly. But that’s probably what happened to him.
It really makes sense what happened to Alice Miller. She never shared about it in her lifetime. It wasn’t until her son Martin Miller came along and wrote his biography of her, which thankfully is now in English, where it was like the world got to see, yeah, she was a horribly abused Holocaust survivor. She came from a screwed-up family. She wasn’t allowed to be herself, and she had to live through torture in the Holocaust, literal horrible, horrible things. And it really contributed to her being very screwed up.
What happened to Freddie Mercury? I’m not sure. I really don’t know what happened to Woody Guthrie in his childhood. Well, I know his mother had a horrible genetic disease that he actually ended up inheriting. What is it called? Huntington’s chorea. She had that, and she went crazy before his eyes and really degenerated into someone who was raving and out of control and ultimately died from it. And I don’t think his father was such a wonderful guy. His father actually participated in the lynching. I think it’s on Wikipedia. I think this is where I read it.
The lynching of two black people in Oklahoma in like, God, what was it, like 1900 or 1910, something like that. Hung them from a bridge. One of them was a teenage boy, and I don’t think they’d even… one was an adult woman, one was a teenage boy. If my memory holds correct, this is Woody Guthrie’s dad. It’s like these people didn’t come from the healthiest place.
And then what happened to me? Well, I came from a crazy family in a lot of ways. I was manipulated. There were horrible sexual boundaries. I was abused. I got beaten up as a kid. I was lonely. We moved a lot. I had that… I got uprooted. I lost my friends. I had to regain new friends. I really was unstable in a lot of ways. I really had a very legitimate reason to be insecure in so many ways.
Now, does that justify what I did? Does that justify what all these other people did that was really unhealthy behavior? I don’t think it justifies it, but it helps explain it. And for me, explaining it for myself too, what I’ve done is part of my healing process. But the real thing is to grieve what I went through. The real thing is to really clearly know what I went through and to regain my feelings around the traumas that happened to me.
And by regaining my feelings, regaining my anger about being abused, my sadness, my hurt, the feelings of loss that I went through, the horrible feelings of abandonment that I went through, the feelings of injustice. By being able to reclaim my feelings that I wasn’t allowed to feel when I was a little boy, by reclaiming those feelings, I am able to heal. I’m able to grieve. I’m able to become a whole person again, a person who’s not split off and acting out in unconscious split-off ways. And that way, my life is much happier, much healthier now.
And ironically, I’m also a much more free, open, honest, and creative person because I’m not all stuck with all this muck and morass inside of myself from how I’ve been harmed.
Now, I wonder this: awesome. What about artists who are very, very split off? And in a way, they’ve been psychologically killed in their lives, in their childhoods, in so many ways. But the only place they were allowed to remain alive was through their art. I wonder if this is the case with Tchaikovsky. If he’d had a more loving, regular, healthy, nurturing childhood, if he was more safe and secure and he didn’t experience traumas and abandonment, would he have become such a great musician? It’s possible he wouldn’t have. It’s possible he would have just had a healthier life.
But I also wonder this: what about the idea that if some of these artists, writers, musicians had not been so abused, if they’d had a chance to really work out their traumas, actually their art could have even been that much more wonderful.
[Music]