Fifty years on . . . and the music never stopped.

Stephanie Berger

Yes, time definitely flies. Left to right are the young Patrick Noonan ’77, ’84MBA, John Houshmand ’77, and Jonathan Levi ’77. View full image

Stephanie Berger

Yes, time definitely flies. Left to right are the young Patrick Noonan ’77, ’84MBA, John Houshmand ’77, and Jonathan Levi ’77. View full image

Courtesy Jonathan Levi ’77

Noonan, Houshmand, and Levi in 2023—still together, still performing. View full image

Courtesy Jonathan Levi ’77

Noonan, Houshmand, and Levi in 2023—still together, still performing. View full image

Gene Mahon

The band Laurasia—-Noonan, Houshmand, and Levi—-with singer Galen Brandt ’75 on Nantucket in 1976. View full image

Gene Mahon

The band Laurasia—-Noonan, Houshmand, and Levi—-with singer Galen Brandt ’75 on Nantucket in 1976. View full image

Courtesy Jonathan evi ’77

A Laurasia reunion at Noonan’s 2019 wedding in Atlanta. The band is joined by Galen Brandt and, at bottom, singer Laura Teller ’77. View full image

Courtesy Jonathan evi ’77

A Laurasia reunion at Noonan’s 2019 wedding in Atlanta. The band is joined by Galen Brandt and, at bottom, singer Laura Teller ’77. View full image

Robert Tobey

The fuzzy photo is on the band’s latest album cover. The toddler is Levi’s daughter, Rebecca ’07—-now the lead singer on the album. View full image

Robert Tobey

The fuzzy photo is on the band’s latest album cover. The toddler is Levi’s daughter, Rebecca ’07—-now the lead singer on the album. View full image

Stephanie Berger

The band Laurasia, taking a stroll in New York City. When you’ve learned how to make music, you never want to give it up. View full image

Stephanie Berger

The band Laurasia, taking a stroll in New York City. When you’ve learned how to make music, you never want to give it up. View full image

It was the first day of orientation, 1973. September, or it could have been August. Air conditioning hadn’t been invented, and the windows in Durfee were open with the optimism of youth. I had just bagged the bottom bunk in my double, spreading my backpack and violin case on the mattress, when I heard the sound of a guitar from the Old Campus side. Three floors below, a guy was sitting with his back against a tree, legs out in front of him. His hair was black. It was long. So was his beard. He was playing “Friend of the Devil” by the Grateful Dead, the twelve strings of his guitar descending along a G-major scale in octaves that cut through the new air of Old Campus. Cross-legged, in a circle of thrall around him, sat three adoring fans.

It was zero hour: before the beginning of classes, before the beginning of introductions. The curtain hadn’t risen. None of us had friends. None of us had enemies. We were faceless, gradeless, not even freshmen, drawn to the promise of lux and veritas with a common faith in possibility and nothing to lose. I opened my violin case and grabbed my fiddle. Although I had played with a jug band in church basements and secular parties during high school, I was more of a Mozart and Mendelssohn kind of a guy. But the music of the twelve-string guitar, the overripe heat of late summer, the long black beard, the trees of Old Campus, and that cross-legged circle of adoration propelled me down the stairway. You can do that, my feet told me.

As I landed on the ground floor, another door opened. Another long-haired guy with a guitar—as blond as the tree guy was dark. Companions in arrogance, we shuffled down the steps of the center entryway of Durfee and claimed places for ourselves in that magic circle. Without invitation or introduction, we began to jam.

Mathematics to the contrary, late summer ’73 was still part of the ’60s—only a baker’s dozen of years after the Beatles’ first gig in Hamburg. Nixon was president, despite Watergate. The Vietnam War had twenty more months to run until that last helicopter took off from the top of the US Embassy in Saigon. Stevie Wonder, the Beatles, Marvin Gaye, the Stones, Jefferson Airplane, James Taylor, and Joni’s tribute to a Woodstock that was just yesterday were the amniotic music that surrounded us at zero hour. We Elis were all the same at birth, more tie-dyed than buttoned-down. On one Edenic autumn night, 1,300 of us dropped our bell-bottoms and streaked around Old Campus, united in anonymous sexuality, innocent of knowledge.

That first day of orientation, John Houshmand ’77, the black-bearded twelve-string player, and Patrick S. Noonan ’77, ’84MBA, the blond folk-rocker, and I played late into the hot night as the circle around us grew. In the following weeks, we began gigging, giving concerts. First at the Libra Festival on Cross Campus, a typically ’60s celebration of astrology and sun. Then on an all-night show at WYBC, at a variety of clubs along the coast in Cosey Beach and Madison and up in Waterbury. And as we played songs by the Dead, the Airplane, Tim Buckley, and even Elton John, we began to write our own music. They were songs that acknowledged that we had brought something from our individual pasts to the party, melodies that drew from the Iran of John’s father, the Midwest of Pat’s childhood, and the classical music that I had just left behind after a gap year at conservatory in London.

Our four years playing together at Yale as East River (named after New Haven’s, not New York’s) were expansive. One of our older classmates, Rod Alberts ’75, produced our first album at a studio he owned in Kansas City. We made the trip out and back our sophomore year in the middle of a February blizzard, returning to New Haven in a broken-down International Travelall—a jeep-like car you don’t often see now—with strep throats and high fevers. The next day, my brand-new girlfriend, Galen Brandt ’75, who led the Slavic Chorus as a student, accompanied me as nursemaid to our first gig on the island of Nantucket at a whaling bar called the Brotherhood of Thieves. Within twenty-four hours, she had become our lead singer.

Galen’s soprano corralled our wilder instrumental experiments. (Music professor and composer Maury Yeston ’67PhD once commented that he understood the self-abusive title of a tune we had composed—for strings and gamelan-inspired copper pipes—called “How Monks Go Blind.”) She brought a sound that was recognizable to fans of Pentangle and Fairport Convention and made us think we might actually have a future. During our breaks from college, the Brotherhood and the Nantucket of the 1970s gave us the opportunity (playing four hours a night, six nights a week), the energy (clam chowder and French 75s: gin, lemon juice, syrup, and champagne), the wild inspiration of open marshland, endless surf, and a community of dreamers, all drawing us to write and to coalesce into a real band.

At the height of our ambition, in the summer after our junior year, we were offered a record contract by a West Coast producer. The only catch was that he wanted us now. We’d have to go to L.A. without passing Go—without finishing our senior year at Yale. Galen (who had already graduated) was all for it. John and Pat were ready. I had other plans. The son of a professor of philosophy, I had no option but to stay in school, get my BA, and follow a graduate fellowship to study at the University of Cambridge. I invited the three of them to my house on Elm Street next door to Rudy’s Bar. Over an inedible dinner of overcooked spaghetti with garlic powder and butter, I quit the band. It was September 1976. The ’60s were over.

And that, like many collegiate experiments, might just have been that. Galen went to New York, Pat to Boston, John to Nantucket, and I to England with my fellowship and pretensions. Eventually John began crafting furniture out of fallen trees in the Catskills. Pat got a PhD from a school in Boston and a professorship at Emory University in Atlanta. I started writing novels and operas and eventually followed bread and circuses to Rome. No longer a single unit, we became different people, our futures radiating in directions dictated by character and chance and forces we could never have imagined in 1973.

But something in our music kept us in touch as friends, and something in our friendship drew us and our instruments together whenever geography permitted. John and Pat and I returned to the Brotherhood on Nantucket for several more summer gigs, joined by the virtuosic sax and flute player Paul Lieberman ’78, who steered us away from our new-agey ways and into the world of jazz. We recorded a few more albums. We played music at John’s first wedding on a farm in the Catskills, and more recently, on a Nantucket beach, at a makeshift memorial for Pat’s first wife. Every five years, we found our way back to New Haven to perform at our reunions—with Paul and another classmate, vocalist Laura Teller ’77, and, most harmonically for me, at our fortieth reunion with my daughter Rebecca, back at Yale for her own tenth reunion and singing a few of our songs that she had heard all her life.

Over the years we performed with other brothers and sisters—Pat with the virtuoso banjo player Béla Fleck, John with the genius jazz cats Scott Lee and Jamey Haddad. I formed a fusion quartet in England with another Yalie—Jamie Snead ’76, a pianist—and the Colombian bassist Chucho Merchán, who went on to play with The Eurythmics and Pink Floyd. Paul lost himself in Brazil for a few years and returned with a wife and a grounding in Latin American music that served him well as he gigged with drummer Jaimoe and The Allman Brothers.

But there was an understanding between John, Pat, Paul, and me that we had never quite found when we were playing with others. Musical improvisation requires technique, of course, as well as cold, hard hours in the woodshed. But the greats—and I’m writing this in the wake of the death of the saxophonist Wayne Shorter—pull their improvisations out of books they’ve read in the middle of the night, streets they’ve walked in foreign cities, dreams they’ve parked away in secret portfolios, and the unseen antennae tuned to the frequencies of their fellow travelers on the bandstand.

We weren’t in that company. But atheist that I am, I remember an argument with a West Coast rabbi. He claimed there was no transcendence without a belief in God. I told him the story of a winter’s night in the Brotherhood of Thieves. Nantucket Sound had frozen over. There were only a couple of dozen people in the bar, mostly fishermen staring into the misty vodka and cranberry of their Cape Codders. In our icy corner, the four of us were playing the Rodgers and Hammerstein standard “My Favorite Things.” We swung through the head, trying to think more of John Coltrane than Julie Andrews. I took a solo on violin, Paul followed on soprano sax. And then we began to improvise. Afterwards, over French 75s at a back table while the waitresses counted their tips, none of us could point to what ignited the music.

But about a minute into the improvisation—John on bass, Pat on guitar, Paul, and me—we began to feel a mutual musical levitation, the new phrases inventing themselves, guided by a common gyroscope. And then liftoff. Thirty miles out at sea. Transcendence.

You can’t riff the same way twice, as Miles and Heraclitus said. Fifty years on, part of us still wants to get ourselves back to the garden, despite all the knowledge we picked up at college and beyond that makes the journey impossible. But once you’re hooked, even fifty years after that warm September—or was it August?—you’re still listening, playing, looking for that high.