Peter Himmelman: His father-in-law’s Bob Dylan, he sounds something like Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen, and he davens at the Chabad shul in Santa Monica.
Twenty-five years ago, the Rolling Stones couldn’t appear on the “Ed Sullivan Show” until they changed the chorus of their “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together.” Since then, American television has chilled out some. But as rocker Peter Himmelman learned in November, there are still some things you can’t say on network TV.
For starters, take the phrase “niggers and Jews.” Himmelman appeared on NBC’s “The Tonight Show”; his “taxi song,” which contains the offending phrase, didn’t.
The song, otherwise untitled, appears on Himmelman’s fifth and latest album, “Flown this Acid World.” It describes a disturbing airport cab ride in Minnesota with a white supremacist driver. The hate-filled hack professed deep admiration for Hitler and abounding abhorrence for Jews, matter-of-factly declaring he believed Jewish men were directed by the “Tamlud” (sic) to rape 2-year-old Christian girls.
Himmelman, a 33-year-old Minneapolis native, chose not to reveal to the driver that he was a practicing Jew and the son-in-law of former Minnesotan Bob Dylan, born Zimmerman. Instead, he milked the experience for this lyric:
He told me he had a dream
To go to a place free from niggers and Jews.
“Austria?” I asked out loud
As I stared down at my shoes.
And he said, “that’s exactly right.”
He said, “Hey man, ain’t you proud to be white?”
In his song, Himmelman fears for his wife, his children and a Holocaust survivor he davens with because they have to share the planet with such loathing.
Yet despite his own revulsion that night, he refrained from confronting the driver, and actually tipped this “cut-rate A-ree-yan” a few bucks.
Five years ago, Rolling Stone magazine heralded Himmelman with the same fervor it used in greeting Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” album. Time christened him one of music’s “New Troubadours.” Stereo Review declared Himmelman to be “on the same plane as Elvis Costello, Graham Parker and Bruce Springsteen,” and suggested he was “nudging his way toward Dylanhood.”
These were heady words. And although his first solo album, “This Father’s Day,” and those that followed did better with the critics than at the cash register, Himmelman remains as confident of his breakthrough potential today as when he was a cocky, 17-year-old kid playing in a Minneapolis reggae band.
There are signs of progress: His latest album is doing better than earlier ones, which sold about 150,000 apiece; a recent North American tour was a success; he wrote his first movie score for the recent “Crossing the Bridge,” directed by Mike Binder; and he’s been invited to Washington to play at a Young Democrats’ inaugural party.
What can you say about an artist who chose “Gematria” (the mystical search for meaning in Hebrew words based on the numerical values of their letters) as the name of his second album? Who initials his album portraits with the Hebrew letters beit-heh (for b’ezrat hashem, “with God’s help”), a traditional blessing? Who used to appear on stage naked save for a shower curtain, and whose earliest hit was called “Baby, Let Me Be Your Cigarette”?
Although Jews are abundant in the pop music business, few place study and observance of Judaism at the core of their craft. Himmelman became observant in 1985, after encounters with his “main connection,” Rabbi Simon Jacobson of Brooklyn. He prays daily at a Chabad synagogue near his Santa Monica, California, home, and has done at least one fundraising “Telethon” for Chabad.
But he has his own view of religion. “The real question,” he says, “isn’t when did I become religious, but rather when it was taken away from me.”
Maybe the problem, he adds, was that it is illegal “to discuss God in public school. Nobody in my house did, and the last place you ever talked about God was in your synagogue.”
Although he thinks the Lubavitcher rebbe is “cool” and “the most fascinating human being on earth,” Himmelman rejects being tagged an adherent of any particular strain of Judaism.
“To me,” he says, “it’s a set of rules given by God to Moses and you don’t have to keep them all. You don’t have to keep kosher if you don’t want to. Who cares? It’s your business.”
Nor does he usually wear a yarmulke on stage, “because it flies off my head. I don’t like bobby pins.” But his head’s always covered, though.
And Himmelman hasn’t performed on the Sabbath since at least 1987. At the time, recalled his cousin Jeff Victor in a recent interview with the Minnesota Monthly magazine, “he used to be like Jimmy Swaggart” in his self-righteousness.
On tour, “we were all scrunched into the front of the tour bus and he was in the back with his gefilte fish and matzah and his religious garments. And when he wanted to speak to one of us, it would be almost as if he would summon us into his quarters and would blow Torah into our eyes.”
Now, says Victor, who still plays keyboards with Himmelman, “he’s eased up a lot, and lets us be who we are.”
But Himmelman hasn’t eased up on himself. His lyrics grapple seriously and somberly with issues of faith and meaning; eschatological musings about the arrival of the Messiah mix with ponderings over the prospects of personal obliteration.
He seeks salvation in family, and writes lovingly of his wife, Maria, and their two children. They were married in 1988. The adopted daughter of Dylan, Maria was a preschooler when the folk-rock legend married her mother, Sara (Shirley H. Lowndes).
Himmelman seems to be trying to protect the privacy of his family no less than his father-in-law does. He recently turned down a People magazine profile because he wouldn’t have his wife and children photographed, and because he wouldn’t discuss his relationship with Dylan.
When I visited him on Christmas morning in the cluttered studio tucked behind his house on a quiet Santa Monica street (they moved to California four years ago), Maria, dark-haired with glasses, was preparing Sabbath dinner.
Asked about his wife, now in her early 30s, Himmelman says that if I have any questions, I’ll have to request an interview with her directly, but he can already tell me she’ll refuse.
And when I wondered if he and his father-in-law had found their mutual rediscovery of Judaism a source of commonality, he would only say, “we have been known to wax about it from time to time.”
Explaining his reticence, he says: “There’re some things I will do for my career, and a whole lot more I won’t.”
Peter Himmelman grew up in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park, which had a Jewish population large enough to earn it the nickname “St. Jewish Park.” A number of Jewish graduates from the local high school went on to fame and fortune.
“There was Tom Friedman, the New York Times correspondent,” recalls Himmelman, “all the guys in Prince’s band, also the head writers of (TV’s) ‘Saturday Night Live.’”
Many Minnesota neighbors were interested in ice hockey. Himmelman, who wasn’t, hooked up with a reggae band, and later got his own local TV show under the screen name of Sussman Lawrence—a name he used when he formed his own band in 1975. The band’s one album, “Hail to the Modern Hero,” got a positive review in Rolling Stone magazine, but was trashed by local Minneapolis critics as “too Jewish.”
About that time, Himmelman’s father David—an ex-Marine once kicked out of an entire school district for slugging a teacher who’d called him a “filthy Jew”—contracted a fatal lymphoma.
David Himmelman had always supported his son’s musical enterprise (“My mom, Bev, still worries that I didn’t go to college. Her fear is that I’ll be playing for quarters”). So it’s appropriate that the musician’s first real break came from a Father’s Day video Sussman Lawrence made in 1983, before David died. The video found its way to MTV, and in turn begat a long-term record deal.
His father’s death was also a milestone in his drift toward Jewishness. He’d been into Transcendental Meditation, but chanting mantras as his father lay dying in the next room, Himmelman thought to himself: “Man, this pursuit of numbness can’t be a Jewish thing.”
The “taxi song” may not have made it to NBC-TV, but it has been greeted enthusiastically in some unexpected markets. Himmelman isn’t surprised; he’s discovered an openness to Jewish imagery and ideas in Middle America because—unlike on the East and West coasts—Jews remain an exotic, largely unknown quantity.
The trick, says Himmelman, is in the packaging. As long as you don’t actually use the dreaded “J” word in your lyrics, you’ll be all right.
“There is something about the media portrayal of what it means to be Jewish in this country,” he complains, “that just takes the testosterone out of a man. I wish someone would tell me why it’s cool to take your date for Cajun shrimp Jambalaya but not for gefilte fish.”
On tour in Eugene, Oregon, an audience of 5,000 broke into an impromptu horah after the bandanna-shrouded rocker, his tzitzit flapping behind him, brazenly encored with “Havah Nagilah.”
In Iowa, a crowd of dancing non-Jewish fans were dumbstruck as he sang of his Jewish anxiety in “taxi song.” Although his ride ended with a tip for the cabbie, the conversation that night filled him with rage.
“The thought of ripping his neck out certainly occurred to me. On the other hand, the guy was bigger than me,” reflected Himmelman. “But I also thought that, hopefully, in a couple of months I’m going to be playing a song about it on TV while this guy is picking his nose in some bar.”
Though the song never got past the NBC censors, Himmelman remains undaunted. Word is that Arsenio Hall, the syndicated late-night rival of the “Tonight Show”’s Jay Leno, wants him to perform the “taxi song” on his own ultra-hip talk show.