On the scale of ridiculously awesome jobs in this world, teaching a university course about the Beatles probably ranks somewhere between afternoon-nap technician and senior Jessica Alba concubine. Not only is there never a shortage of students signing up for music professor Steve Schick’s signature winter quarter Popular Music class, but those with lucky registration times get to take part in one of the most enjoyable credit-for-knowledge transactions available to UCSD undergrads: listening to their enigmatic orator rhapsodize hilariously about such familiar realities as John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s evolving songwriting dynamics or the effects of stereo recording on “Help!”
Why does Lennon’s voice sound so rough on the last track of “Please Please Me”? That was covered in week two. From whom did the band basically steal to write, “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”? — question number 33 on the midterm. And don’t forget your listening journal for the final, where you’ll have to write down all the thoughts you had while listening to Sergeant Pepper’s this week.
While it may seem — to your parents, anyway — that such seemingly light fare deserves no place in a lecture hall proudly displaying the periodic table of the elements, the man in charge has both the credentials and the vision to check those prejudices at the door.
“The Beatles are in essence irrelevant here,” Schick said. “What is relevant is the way that human beings engage music — this thing that you can’t touch, that doesn’t hold still, that the instant you play it it’s gone — the way they engage that experience and the way they engage other people through that experience. The way two people who may never have contact with each other share something important if they find that they love the same music.”
As a percussion authority invited to premiere new works in concert halls all over the world, Schick has had a long career to think about loving music. After completing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Iowa, Schick earned a Fulbright scholarship to study and teach in Germany, where he received his advanced credential. After living in Washington, D.C., for several years, Schick went to Fresno State, where he taught for eight years before coming to UCSD in 1991.
“When I broke away from my [farm-owning] parents’ express wishes that I become a doctor and started to become a drummer of all things, a percussionist eventually, and I thought, ‘If I don’t succeed, I’ll be back to seeing turkeys before the year is over,’ it was an amazingly powerful motivation,” he said.
UCSD’s music department has a worldwide reputation for innovation, especially in contemporary music, which is often masked by the larger university’s pre-eminence in math and science.
“If you want to come to an institution that embraces the act of creation of music, whether it be by a composer or an improviser or a music technologist, you might find a handful of alternatives in the world, but probably not,” Schick said. “This is the place you would come, and this was always what I knew about it.”
The music department doesn’t have a bigger presence on campus simply because its work is largely too radical for mass consumption, Schick argues — and that seems to be partly what he likes about it.
“It was that moment when I saw that percussion was this enormous world with respect to traditional cultures, all kinds of noisemakers and the possibility to invent” that took him beyond being a mere drummer, he said.
“Percussion as a classical instrument, as a solo instrument, is younger than I am — that meant that as a graduate student we were in a real way creating the discipline,” Schick said. “I suppose it was akin to being at the beginning of the technology boom — you just had to be there.”
The tension between the ubiquity of the Beatles’ music and the relative obscurity of his normal work is partly what keeps Schick teaching this class nearly ever year he’s been at UCSD.
“If I were teaching a course on popular music from what I know about popular music, it’d be a very bad course,” Schick said. “What I’m really trying to do is show a possible way of thinking about music and using that as the source. It’s not at all different from the way I would I think about the newest piece of percussion music that I have to play in a premier concert two months from now. [But] I can’t really talk to 450 people about those kinds of things.”
Maybe he could, if he talked about them as energetically and colorfully as he talks about the Beatles. It’s not unusual for the ever-dapper Schick to get the whole of Warren 2001 chuckling heartily during his sarcastic and frequently self-deprecating lectures while unpacking the profundities of such deep lyrics as, “She was just only 17/ If you know what I mean.”
A world-class performer helping music-dumb undergrads see the pitch-shifted giggles and reverse guitar solos in “Tomorrow Never Knows” as clouds floating across a droning, drum-and-bass landscape: Not such a bad way to bring home the bread, as Schick will readily admit.
“I could have become a doctor. I could have become a lawyer. I could have become something real and done something real — helping sick children or defending the rights of the poor. Instead I became a drummer. [So] how can that be translated into something public and helpful? The teaching and importance of the Beatles class is a response to that question.”
