Let me at the onset state what becomes obvious very quickly early in the viewing of espisode 4 of Man and His Music, the public television show my father recorded as part of some of the first distance-learning efforts undertaken at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music: Dad’s not on top of his game here.  The show was recorded–the time stamp/clapboard material shown at the beginning indicates–on March 20, 1973, which was four days after my ninth birthday.  (Short pause here so that you can do the math.)  Perhaps there had been a traumatic incident at a birthday party.  UC was on trimesters at the time, and perhaps he was cranking out final exams for the winter term that week and couldn’t prep quite as much as would have been nice.  Whatever, this episode doesn’t sparkle (one of his favorite words of exhortation for the volunteer choirs he directed for 40 years) quite like most of the others.

Still, there are moments here that will bring a smile to those who knew Dad as professor, choir director, or friend over the years before his dementia started kicking in hard around 2008 or so.  How many times did I see that closed-eye, “What did I say that for?” look (at the 00:46 mark), rendered here when he starts titling the specific episode with the name used for the series itself?  And, oh, how often he poked fun at his baldness, which showed up pretty early in his life, here (12:10) contrasting the full-headed mane of Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s conductor, Thomas Schippers, with his lack of the same, and blaming this sad condition for keeping him out of the ranks of the great symphony orchestra conductors . . . all while smiling that captivating smile and giving his audience that familiar twinkle in his eye.

And there are bits and pieces presented here for all kinds of music lovers: clips of Leonard (Dad always called him “Lenny”) Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic Strings, some vintage photos of early Moog synthesizers (note the correct pronunciation: “MOH-g,” not “MOO-g,” despite the spelling), and another classic Dad moment (22:15) where he struggles to remember the most quintessential of all bluegrass instruments, the banjo.  Indeed, there are more gaffes in this episode than most, and in today’s world, they’d be re-recorded quickly and polished to a fine sheen, the same way the make-up folks polished Dad’s head for the cameras.

But like the producers of any good Dylan album–from Tom Wilson, to Bob Johnston, to Jack Frost, Dylan’s alias for all his self-produced 21st-century albums–Dad and the folks at WCET-TV left all these glitches in.  Dylan did so because he wanted the music to be raw and rough around the edges; Dad and PBS-Cincinnati did so because they had no budget to chase after perfection.  But the end result is the same, and in this age of Auto-Tune-d this and Photoshop-ped that, I’m glad for the results, warts and all, in these TV shows.  Happy viewing: https://youtu.be/k3HedrHezkM