The Glass Man, a rock opera

Very near the beginning of Little Levity, in 2006, Tim, Fran and I (Lawrence) decided we wanted to do a narrative piece of music. Little did we suspect it would take nine years until it had its final form the CD release The Glass Man. The Glass Man is rooted in a couple things, maybe more – when you create you grab at many things scattered around you to build what seems good at the time (more on that in the story). 

Phil Henrickson saw me on line at Java Hut in Worcester and told me of the death of our former bandmate bass player John Richard. Tim and John grew up together and were very close friends, so Tim could tell you more about John and going to school or not together and the woods and how one went to the navy and one to the army. But for me, remembering back to the ’80s – we played as a trio a year, maybe two: John was a good, kind person and a passionate guy and a tiler by trade. And when he played, how do I say this? it was the right notes (he was a practiced musician), but what came through was his funny (he loved to laugh)-wild energy. And it was John who said “music or nothing.” And here I was now 15-20 years later learning of his still-very-early death. I had been at the time immersed in the golem of Prague story (I was painting monsters, planning a large, on-the-wall comic telling the golem story [some of these are here]) and reading Meyrinck’s Der Golem. And the novel’s bleak images and intertwined tales and this real-life tragedy comingled so that I wrote a proto-idea in song — I Am Here which originally had a story coda that kept rising and rising. This coda eventually became the basis of the rest of our rock opera. 

The gist of the story – the CD comes with an illustrated complete prose telling – goes something like this: a Worcester boy wanders into a glass shop and gets a job, and goes through an apprenticeship (thank you, Rick, for the setting and, Bob, for the early-life inspiration). He grows up. A woman visits the shop for a window repair and the protagonist is taken with her. He asks her to marry. He buys the glass business and it doesn’t go well, having been subsidized by pensions for some years (thank you, Carl and Marion). As the screws are turned, he works more and more so that the man and woman’s relationship is strained. But he can’t get ahead. And as he’s about to lose the shop, he drops a mirror he’s working on and in a moment of desperation he considers cutting himself with a piece of it to end his misery. But in that moment he sees his face and his work and elements of his whole life reflected in the same glass fragment and decides – it feels more like a driven madness – instead to assemble the broken remains, spare pieces and detritus of his work and build a glass monster. Does he think creating something like this will save him from foreclosure? Is he thinking at all? Is he nuts? You’ll have to listen to the disk and let me know.

To make this fittingly eleventh-year anniversary edition unique is the restoration of the love song Looking Through the Eyes of Love. It’s fruity and was cut for stylistic reasons, but maybe for narrative reasons it has a role. Without it the relationship honeymoon phase is under 3 minutes. Let me know.