Tosh Berman
Family friend
The Hirschman family is like a pinball running amok in a machine, and you are unsure where it will hit or land. I have never been in such great existence and intelligence as that entire family. It was the first time I realized that there was someone in my presence who was more intelligent than me. I would be in awe if they weren’t so inviting and open as people. There is Jack Hirschman, poet, teacher, Communist, and one of the most engaging conversationalists on this planet. Ruth, his partner in crime at the time, was a force of great significance, and during their relationship and after, she worked at KPFK radio station and went on to invent the landscape of KCRW. But as a mere kid, my attention was on their son David. I believe we are the same age, and he had a little sister, Celia. David and I share a strong love for music.
When the grown-ups were in our living rooms, we went to each other's bedrooms and deeply discussed record albums and live shows. David was the first person that I spent time with whom I could talk about the deep subject matter of music. We spent much time reviewing the L.A. Times Calendar section, seeing what concerts lay ahead of us. David was into everything, and my critical and snobbish ways were bubbling at the entrance of our teenage years. We didn’t talk about sex; we talked about Jimi Hendrix. Maybe that was sex to us at the time, but David had a connection to getting tickets to concerts. I often went to these shows with him, but I only remember seeing Elton John at the Inglewood Forum. It was the height of the Elton era of those hit albums that everyone loved. But yes, we did go over albums to seek out secret messages in the song, but even more critical, somewhere on that album cover was something in code, that needed to be cracked.
Jack and Ruth exist on a vinyl record called In Conversation: Wallace Berman (Editions Muta), recorded by Hal Glicksman, an art collector and curator, who secretly recorded my dad Wallace chit-chatting with Jack and Ruth in Topanga Canyon in 1968. One of the fantastic things about this recording is hearing my dad’s voice, which I forgot how he sounded, and Jack mentioning Boris Vian in passing, who, decades later, I devoted a great deal of time and expense publishing all his major titles through my TamTam Books. David was also there, but he immediately went upstairs to see me in my bedroom to discuss more critical issues, such as who is a better guitarist: Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix? So he is not on the recording, but the listener can eavesdrop on Jack and Ruth’s fantastic presence in a room.
A death in the family and a divorce can change the social world around a couple. When Jack and Ruth split up, I lost contact with David and Celia, and Jack left for San Francisco, where he had the great chapter two (or three) of his life. Ruth stayed in Los Angeles and became an inventor of a culture that is very much the radio station KCRW. If you live in Southern California, it is impossible to avoid KCRW.
One of the great things she did for the station was produce Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm, a magnificent 30-minute radio show on hardcore literature. Still, the ties that bound us together were never broken, just been stretched by time. Wallace did numerous book covers for Jack’s poetry books, and from time to time, I saw Jack here and there in San Francisco and when he visited Los Angeles. He remained tight with a family friend, Russ Tamblyn, during and after my father’s death. To me, Jack and the poet David Meltzer are the most genuine Beat-era poets and thinkers. They never cashed in their culture but helped expand it by keeping in tune with the world as it marched on. The essence of Jack never changed. When I first met him as a child, he was a boho poet-professor at UCLA, and then later, he became a boho poet-communist. He follows his true path as well as Ruth did with her career and genius in broadcasting.
David passed away as a young man, and that is a painful thought. Like a stuck record repeating itself repeatedly, we still argue the merits of some forgotten electric guitarist in our bedrooms.
