“It’s Father’s Day, and everybody’s wounded”
– Leonard Cohen, “First We Take Manhattan”

During the halcyon days of public education, the grade school I attended boasted a fine music program that included, along with in-depth music instruction by a stern old lady who cared deeply about preserving the heritage of classical music, a full-scale orchestra with French horns and bassoons and all that. Why, in fourth grade, I chose to take lessons on the violin, I don’t know. I imagine that, because it was the instrument I most associated with orchestral music, I shrugged my shoulders and said something like, “Sounds good, sign me up.”

Although I quickly found classical music boring and the violin passé, I enjoyed learning about things like sharps and flats and quarter notes. And listening to the classical music we performed and the records our music teacher played helped me form, by the end of sixth grade, a theory of musical history that spanned the ages. It went something like this: Until rock ‘n’ roll came around, people all over the planet labored to create good music, and while all of them failed to produce anything exciting, credit should be given to all the musicians who preceded rock ‘n’ roll. After all, they made sure that music continued to exist until, finally, in the late ’60s, immortal musical icons like the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix delivered full-scale sonic annihilation, which was the apex of civilization. I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate it quite like that, but basically that was what I thought.

With time, my theory became more refined, but that one lasted a few years, and during that time, I was willing to share with anyone who cared to listen. One person who got an earful of it was my father, who wasn’t at all impressed. When he dropped a record on his console stereo, my father was seeking something other than sonic annihilation. Often, he gravitated toward the stereo during cocktails, and often his cocktail of choice was a martini. Why, when listening to records, someone would actually want to slip into chill mode, I couldn’t begin to fathom. Revisionist history suggests that working hard as an insurance underwriter and raising six kids were more than sufficient reasons, but years passed before I began to understand such things.

Usually, the music my father listened to was kind of loungy and kind of jazzy. His favorite artist was a flutist named Herbie Mann, and the album my father played the most by Mann was Glory of Love, which was actually more funky and groove-oriented than most records in my dad’s collection. The emotional centerpiece of the record came, however, when the band slowed everything down to play a slow, somber, strings-attached version of “House of the Risin’ Sun.” “That’s the jazziest music ever made,” my father would say of Mann on the nights when my parents entertained friends, and I listened carefully as I tried to figure out what “jazzy” meant.

Like many other parents at that time, my father and mother were also fond of some of the crooners, which I will loosely define as male singers who softly sang ballads, many of which were from the Great American Songbook. Seldom (never?) were such singers teenagers, and usually they were old enough to have teenage kids. Crooning was not a new art form, but plenty of crooners were still around in the late ’60, plus their old songs remained ubiquitous on the radio and in record stores. Although it wasn’t my thing, I gave credit to the crooners for one thing: Their music was extremely evocative. This was music for the cocktail hour, and when Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra or even Andy Williams sang, there was no question about their cocktail creds. Indeed, it was easy to imagine them holding a martini while they sang about love affairs that met with sad but poignant endings. To be honest, I still suspect that’s how Dino operated in a recording studio—please don’t tell me otherwise. In fact, tell me he had one in each hand, unless there were women nearby who oohed and aahed and held his martini as he held onto them.

Here’s another theory I carried around with me during the late ’60s: This was the first time in the history of the world that there had been a generation gap. Sure, parents and kids, especially teenagers, had argued since caveman days, but the late ’60s were different. So many of us kids were such brats that we felt as if we were part of a movement so broad that, if it didn’t quite exonerate you, it took a little of the edge off when it came time to dole out punishment.

Nowhere did the break in history seem clearer than on the male side of the Wilson family. My grandfather on my father’s side would tell us stories about his grandfather, Snort Wilson, who fought for the North in the Civil War, was imprisoned in Andersonville, and, during his tenure there, used a cannon small enough to fit on a mantel to shoot a fly off General Lee’s nose—at the general’s request, as it turns out. Against all odds, the small cannon not only survived, but sat on the mantel above Grandma and Grandpa Wilson’s fireplace. That story would take more explanation than we have time for, but suffice it to say that, in our minds and probably in reality, Snort Wilson was the baddest of badasses, the kind of guy that will never walk the earth again.

As his children (plus any neighborhood kids who happened to step on his grass) could testify, Grandpa Wilson was no granola-eating, Kumbaya-singing, tree-hugging pantywaist himself. In fact, for decades now, our family has measured people’s toughness by how much R.E. (Grandpa Wilson’s first two initials) they have in them. And while my father might never have the composure to shoot a fly off General Lee’s nose so accurately that, although the fly was toast, the general’s nose was unharmed, he was an ex-Marine who fought in the Korean War. Surely then, we were at a crossroads in the Wilson lineage, for at least one of the three sons seemed destined to become a ’70s version of a hippie. By high school, I had shoulder-length hair that was parted in the middle and wore bell-bottoms. Had Snort Wilson risen from the dead, walked in my bedroom, and saw me listening to Thirty Seconds Over Winterland while hanging a Bob Marley poster, surely he would have thought that all the work he did to save the Union was for naught.

Yes, folks, the world had changed; in my mind, for the better. But was there music my father and I both appreciated back when I was in seventh grade? He surprised me one day when he brought home Bridge Over Troubled Water—not that it was rock ‘n’ roll, but the people making the music belonged to the generation that was ruining things for the silent majority. After hearing it a few times, I decided that I liked it; heck, it seemed like the kind of thing anyone would like. That theory got put to the test one afternoon when Grandpa Wilson, my father, and I were sitting together in our family’s living room. It seemed only natural that, early in the conversation, my father should throw on a record.

“Here’s something you might like,” my dad said while dropping the needle.