Dec. 7, 1974: Tom Constanten

 

The quickest mind I’ve ever encountered – in a league with Robin Williams – and the only guy I know personally who’s in the Rock ‘N Roll Hall of Fame. 

Dec. 7, 1974

Creative Associate with Modern Ideas 

TOM CONSTANTEN IS A MAN of many manias. Television, for one. You open the door to the back stairway going up to his third-floor flat in Buffalo’s Parkside area and there he is, sitting on the lower steps, engrossed in a TV story.

          Such steadfast studiousness does not go unrewarded. Since moving here from Oakland in September with not much more than his wife, Sea; their half-coyote dog, Guinevere; an 11-year-old car and a color TV set (he had to leave his 1895-vintage piano behind), he’s discovered that one of his longtime passions is on two channels back to back.

          It doesn’t matter that he’s seen all the 15-part episodes three or four times each. Everything stops for “Rocky and Bullwinkle.”

          “Tom’s addicted to ‘Bullwinkle,’” Sea confides. “He has to watch it every day, no matter what.”

          A fine fixation for a composer in residence this year among UB’s Creative Associates, you might figure. But figure again.

          Here’s a man who studied here and in Europe with the world’s greatest living classical composers, then spent two years playing keyboards with what was then an up-and-coming San Francisco rock band called the Grateful Dead.

          Suddenly “Bullwinkle” seems to be just one more of the many facets of Tom Constanten. Besides, it isn’t his only obsession. There’s sports. He’d like to know how to get Buffalo Sabres hockey tickets.

          Nevertheless, he’s been busy here, even though his appointment doesn’t require him to teach classes, perform or do much more than simply hang around and compose.

* * *

“THIS IS THE only place in the country I know that’s doing this,” he says. “The purpose of it is to create a position for people who could make good use of it. If I was at some other school, I’d be trying to organize something like this,”

          It’s a welcome respite from living gig to gig for a serious composer like Tom.

          Since he left the Grateful Dead in 1970, his career has been a patchwork of activities:

          Composing, performing and arranging for the Incredible String Band; composing and performing in an off-Broadway musical, “Tarot”; composing the score for the film “The Love Song of Charles Faberman.”

          He was to have composed the score for a movie version of “The Teachings of Don Juan,” but author Carlos Castenada nixed the film idea.

          Here he’s been performing with the Creative Associates. First at an Oct. 2 concert in Baird Hall, once with CA pianist Joe Kubera, a couple weeks ago on a CA trip to Central Michigan University.

          There’s talk of him hosting a show on WBFO-FM in January.

          Furthermore, he’s composing. Wife Sea says Tom will dream music in his sleep, then leap up in the middle of the night and write it down.

* * *

THESE DAYS he’s putting the final touches on a percussion piece entitled “A Giraffe of Whyne” for tomorrow night’s CA Evening for New Music in the Albright-Knox Art Museum’s auditorium.

          It’s laid out in a four-dimensional cube with a piece of music at each of the intersecting lines.

          The percussionist (or percussionists) can go from one adjacent piece to another. But he isn’t allowed to jump around randomly like the pianist in Stockhausen’s 19-segment “Piano Piece No. 11.”

          And unlike the Stockhausen piece, which ends when the pianist plays the same line three times in a row, “A Giraffe of Whyne” simply ends when the percussionist decides it’s done.

          Another of Tom’s passions is revealed in the title of “Giraffe” and all through “Bullwinkle.”

          “I’m a connoisseur of stylish puns,” he reports, glancing back from what he calls the gargoyles of St. Listerine’s Church, a view he can’t stand – twice a day.

* * *

ANOTHER THING about “Bullwinkle” is how it builds up fantastic schemes, tall as toothpick towers on the table of an all-night diner, then blows them all away in a single, sudden turn of the plot.

          Like the composition Tom scored for various instruments with a computer. Pages and pages and pages of programming that took two weeks to devise. Then punch a button and zap! There it was, complete to the last note in three minutes, 23 seconds.

          “It’s logic,” he says.

          He learned computer logic from the Air Force, having logically enlisted in the face of the draft in 1964. They stationed him in Las Vegas, where his father is captain of the waiters for a big casino. He lived at home.

          Math was one of Tom’s passions when he was a kid. “I was a typical brain in high school,” he says.

          He skipped seventh grade. He started studying astral physics at Berkeley when he was 17, then dropped out to study under noted composer Luciano Berio at Mills College. Because music was his other passion.

* * *

WHILE THE REST of Las Vegas thought classical music ended with Stravinsky, Tom got into modern guys like Stockhausen and Berio.

          Heads shook in tolerant befuddlement when he debuted with Antonio Morelli and his Orchestra as pianist and composer at the age of 17.

          He was the star among Berio’s star students at Mills, brighter even than roommate Phil Lesh. When Berio returned to Europe, Tom followed. Then he went to Darmstadt, Germany, to study with Stockhausen, Boulez and Pousseur until the scholarships ran out.

          “My mind was so clogged up I couldn’t really write for another two years,” he says. “You’d think up something new and Stockhausen would say: ‘I did that in 1957.’

          “The only way to keep your sanity is to say since everything’s already been done, I’ll do what I want to do.”

          Back in the Bay Area, he collaborated with Lesh in the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s “Music Now” concerts and kept up contacts while in the Air Force, meeting wife Sea on one of his leaves.

          “She was living in a house with a whole bunch of crazies from Nevada,” he says. Originally from Chicago (and originally named Catherine), Sea came to Haight-Ashbury when the hippie craze was still in early flower, then watched it get inundated in 1967.

* * *

LESH, MEANTIME, who used to hate rock ‘n roll, was with the Grateful Dead, playing bass.

          “He took up bass because that was the element the band didn’t have,” Tom says. “They invited me in because they figured I would add something to the group.”

          He did keyboards with the band during its most experimental period and you’ll see his face on three Grateful Dead album covers – “Anthem of the Sun” (for which he wrote “We Leave the Castle”), “Aoxomoxoa” and “Live Dead.”

          “The band was the best thing I could think of doing at the time,” he says.

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: Tom Constanten – Fancier of fine fixations.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: Tom did indeed get to have a show on WBFO before his year with the Creative Associates ran out. I also introduced him to my astrological twin, Jack Dumpert, a major Grateful Dead fan, which has led to a long-standing connection.

Whenever a tour brings him this way, including that time at the Seneca Niagara Casino in Niagara Falls on a bill with Starship in 2006, we’re on the guest list and go cheer him on. His set invariably will include “Cold Rain and Snow.” Jack and I were due to have dinner with him before he appeared with a Grateful Dead tribute band at the Sportsmen’s Tavern on March 18, 2020. Unfortunately, Covid-19 canceled that one, but he promises that he’ll be back.