A rakish band of Stanford professors and their cronies is rocking out through tune after tune in a university rehearsal space on a hot spring afternoon. No, this is not your typical rock band — its founding guitarist-songwriters are professors of literature, scholars of Dante and the French Enlightenment. But Glass Wave, as the group calls itself, settles into a snarling, chicken-scratch groove for a song it has recorded titled “Lolita,” as lead singer Christy Wampole crouches and moans:
Now that Mother’s gone away,
you think that you can have your way.
So you stroke my fevered lips
with your filthy fingertips.
Yes, Wampole — a doctoral student in French and Italian literature — is singing the scared thoughts of that Lolita, the 12-year-old who grows sexually involved with middle-aged Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel.
Composed by rhythm guitarist Dan Edelstein, one of the band’s two professor-founders, “Lolita” is part of this band’s singular new project of rocked-out high art: “Glass Wave,” its new self-titled CD, which contains 11 original tunes inspired by Western literary classics. It seems custom-built for, say, a middle-aged NPR-style audience — though Glass Wave’s hope is that young non-readers will be drawn to literature through songs about Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Homer’s “The Odyssey,” Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and even Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”
Call it a new kind of classic rock.
“We’re transporting these literary works into the terra nova of rock,” says Robert Pogue Harrison, the group’s other founding guitarist-songwriter.
With his white linen jacket and Roger Daltry mane, Harrison — chairman of Stanford’s Department of French and Italian — is the very picture of a patrician rocker. He is 56, author of half a dozen books, including one on the subject of forests in the Western imagination — and frightened that literary culture is vanishing. Hence, the new album and his hope that the “special magic powers” of rock might help revitalize interest in the classics among digital-age high school and college students.
As the band huddles to discuss its recording project (available on iTunes and from Amazon, with samplings available at www.glasswave-band.com), electric bassist Tom Harrison — Robert’s 54-year-old brother and a professor of literature and film at UCLA — says, “The literary arts are in decline. People don’t read anymore. So this is a tribute to the culture we teach. It’s an ideological statement.”
“I’d say it’s a salvage operation,” says brother Robert.
“Or a cultural transmission,” Tom adds.
“This literature, if it gets lost — what happens then?” asks Colin Camarillo, 22, the group’s fatback drummer and a student at West Valley College, where he leads the rhythm section in the jazz big band. The grandson of a friend of Robert Harrison’s neighbor, he has been thinking about the proper tag for Glass Wave’s musical style: “It’s not exactly rock. Or funk. I just call it ‘Stanford.’ “
Harrison has toyed around with other monikers. “Cerebral rock.” “Novel rock” was a good one, with its double meaning.
He and brother Tom grew up playing in rock bands in Turkey and Italy; their father was a Kentucky businessman who moved overseas and married. They’re into ’70s art rock: Gentle Giant, Pink Floyd.
Edelstein, 35, gigged as a guitarist in rock bands — one was called “Google Plex,” years before there was a Google — in Geneva, Switzerland, where he went to high school and college. Also a pianist, he is a devotee of Beethoven’s late sonatas. Wampole, 32, grew up in Texas, has lived and studied in Paris, and is trained as a cabaret singer.
“We’re sort of fusion,” she says. “We have classical music, a couple of progressive rock guys, a jazz guy and a cabaret singer. What kind of a crazy combination is that?”
Glass Wave — the name comes from a verse in Ezra Pound’s “The Cantos” — goes back two years to an Introduction to Humanities course that Edelstein and Robert Harrison were jointly teaching.
“I remember joking that maybe we should rock out some of these epics,” Harrison says. “And Dan’s dad, who happened to be around, said, ‘You know, if you do that, that’s the one thing the students will remember from the course.’ “
They gave it a try, and Wampole — Harrison is one of her doctoral advisers — happened to be on hand to observe. “They kind of had their guitars hidden in the wings,” she remembers. And when the professors began to play, “the students just got out their cell phones and started to film. I think the enrollment doubled the next year.”
They played the Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues” with new lyrics, turning it into “Inferno Blues,” all about Dante’s ride through hell. They tore through “Gilgamesh Blues,” an original, which has the Mesopotamian epic as its literary inspiration and Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House” as a musical one.
Neither of those made it onto the album, as it turns out, but Edelstein and Harrison became classically prolific. In “Creature,” Harrison’s distillation of “Frankenstein,” the monster is spurned by humankind:
He turns aside.
He dies inside.
The monster cries.
He cries inside.
Edelstein, an assistant professor in the French and Italian department, actually set his new words for “Lolita” to a tune he had composed more than a decade ago for a funk band in Geneva. In the past, he says, writing lyrics had been an almost “banal” or “arbitrary” process. But the new project allowed him to narrow down the subject field to what he most loved, literature, and to craft words that would allow him to teach through his songs.
The songs on the new album, he says, “let us narrow in on critical aspects of the books, which is what we all do when we teach.”
Lyrics to one of his songs, “Nausicaa” — a flowing ballad, somewhere in the realm of Jefferson Airplane’s “Wooden Ships” — are written in the voice of a minor character in “The Odyssey.” Edelstein points out that this character — Nausicaa, daughter of a king — “makes only a fleeting appearance in ‘The Odyssey,’ which only hints at an unconsumed erotic tension between Nausicaa and Odysseus.”
Harrison interjects: “Their relationship was sort of hidden. Dan brings out something latent in the source text, as he would in class.”
In October 2008, the band began its 15-month recording process, overseen by Jay Kadis, audio engineer at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, whose career as a rocker/guitarist goes back to ’60s bands in Oakland. With Kadis producing, the CD was puzzled together: In order to record her tracks, Wampole twice flew in from Paris, where she was doing research for her thesis on late 20th-century French and Italian essayistic fiction.
Edelstein had his own distractions: He was going through the tenure process and writing a book on the Enlightenment. And his wife was pregnant with their daughter Anais.
“Hectic,” he says.
The group doesn’t plan any extensive touring, as day jobs would get in the way. But it would like to record at least one more disc, the next perhaps devoted to works of Edgar Allan Poe.
“Each song is like a bubble that comes from the champagne,” Tom Harrison says. “It’s responding to these great works of art that we love so much.”
“It’s giving the dead an afterlife,” Robert Harrison says. “The literary dead.”
Contact Richard Scheinin at 408-920-5069.
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