Will’s Music is a novel decades in the making. The just-out edition by New Jersey’s Figlo Press is a slight revision of an earlier version self-published nearly a decade ago by the author, Obie Yadgar. But the roots go back even farther to a 1966 short story never completed and based on a person the writer met in San Francisco.
Yadgar is a name—and a voice—familiar to many Milwaukeeans as the city’s most popular host on classical music radio back when our city had a full-time classical station. Implicit in Will’s Music is a sense of cultural loss running beneath the headiness of the novel’s love story.
Protagonist Will Baskin is a DJ on a San Francisco classical station contending with the demise of free-form radio and of local media ownership, experiences Yadgar knew well. “Although I loved radio in the beginning, in the end, I was tired of what radio had become,” he explains. “I always programmed my own shows. Towards the end, a computer programmed my show. I was playing Ravel’s Bolero three times a week!”
Not unlike his author, Will was a writer who fell into radio at a good time. The protagonist is more of a 19th-century romantic than a man of the 20th or 21st centuries. And he falls in love with Mariette, a dancer who sends him into a spin. “To me, if you love somebody you love that somebody heart and soul—more than your own life,” Yadgar says. “That’s the world of Will. He’s one of the biggest romantic fools. He’s idealistic, yet slightly bitter to see what happened in his own life—and to radio.”
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Yadgar will discuss Will’s Music at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 25 at Boswell Book Co.
