Sonic Youth.

In 1972, several months after I completed one of my first musical compositions--"Heavy Metal," in which ambient sounds were melded, on magnetic tape, with the gurgling sequences of a primitive synthesizer--my new wife, Hawley, and I set off for California. At the time, aspiring composers typically pursued postgraduate study in Europe, learning the latest styles of twelve-tone music and soaking in the great traditions of the past. But the California that I'd been reading about in books by Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, and the beats appealed to my contrary state of mind. I was twenty-five and had spent my entire life in New England, growing up in East Concord, New Hampshire, and attending Harvard for six years. I was eager to strike out on my own. "Heavy Metal" had been a defiant farewell gesture of sorts; it probably owed more to Stockhausen and the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" than it did to Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

After an eight-day drive across the continent, Hawley and I took up residence in the Bay Area. San Francisco housing was too expensive, so, in exchange for a free apartment, I took the humiliating position of assistant manager of a building just off Berkeley's famously eccentric Telegraph Avenue. Outside on the narrow street, Cal students in slacks and windbreakers mingled with aging hippies and street people muttering to themselves. Adolescent runaways with greasy hair lounged on the sidewalk, begging for spare change, stray mongrels at their side. Street venders sold hash pipes and Vietcong flags that smelled of verbena. For a buck, a street poet would improvise a verse for you. Ancient VW vans chugged and farted up the street, their doors and panels painted with Sanskrit phrases.

On occasion, I'd drive over the Bay Bridge to San Francisco and hang out in the cafes and bookstores in North Beach. Late one night, while sitting in a bar there, I saw Allen Ginsberg walk in. He was alone and appeared to be looking for someone, but he seemed good-natured enough for me to swallow my nervousness and go up to him and introduce myself. I asked him for William Burroughs's address; I wanted to send him a copy of "Heavy Metal," whose title was an homage to Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid--a character in Burroughs's novel "The Soft Machine." Ginsberg peered at me through thick eyeglasses, whipped out an old-fashioned fountain pen from a cloth book bag, tore a piece of paper from a notebook, and handed the pen and paper to me. He dictated Burroughs's address in London. "Send it to him," he said. "He's always interested." (I never did. When I attempted to make a copy for Burroughs, I discovered that my original tape had disintegrated in its box.)

My plan was to live as a proletarian worker by day and an avant-garde composer at night. I took a job on the Oakland waterfront, working for a dingy clothing-import business called Regal Apparel. My days were spent in a sprawling, drafty warehouse not far from the Bay Bridge. I was a "lumper"--a member of a team of men who climbed into the back of shipping containers that had been packed in Singapore or Seoul and unloaded them by hand. Each container held tons of "drygoods," usually cheap clothing. I personally handled most of the Bermuda shorts worn by Richard Nixon's Silent Majority during the summer of 1972.

I returned from my long workdays at Regal Apparel exhausted and in no mood to spend the evening composing. Hawley, a jazz violinist who had taken a job teaching yoga at an Oakland health club, often came home from work at nine o'clock to find me asleep on the sofa. I wrote no music for a year, and by midwinter I was falling into a depression. California was enchanting, but the prospect of surviving on a grinding minimum-wage job was enough to make me consider returning to graduate school. I ardently didn't want to become a university composer, but I felt caught in a crisis of my own making.

By the following spring, I was on the verge of returning to Boston and Harvard when a friend and fellow-composer, Ivan Tcherepnin, called me and said that the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was looking for someone to teach composing and to direct the school's series of new-music concerts. The two faculty members who had been organizing the concerts had recently resigned, and the school's president was desperate to fill the post. The day before, the rusted-out floor of my Volkswagen had collapsed on the Ashby Avenue freeway ramp as I was driving to the warehouse, and I had suddenly found my seat scraping along the pavement of Interstate 80 while I frantically headed for the shoulder. It seemed as emphatic a message as any that I needed a change. I took the job.

In those days, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was based in a former home for unwed mothers in the Sunset district. In a city that was otherwise full of piquant character and stunning vistas, the Sunset district was oddly bland: one had to know it well to ferret out a decent ethnic restaurant or a bookstore. But the school was a place of pulsing, chaotic excitement. Students sporting wild hair and dressed in baggy jeans and sandals wandered through the hallways, and, every morning at 8 A.M., the practice rooms began emanating an Ives-ian cacophony of pianos, trumpets, drums, double-basses, and singers.