WHERE THE RIVER IS WINDIN':

Adams had every reason to go to New York. It was almost his home. After a childhood bouncing around from city to city because of his dad's job with the "telephone company" (there was only one back then), the future composer's father finally got transferred to AT&T's downtown Manhattan headquarters.

Adams was developing his skills as a rock drummer at the time, and made full use of his new home base, gravitating to the local musician hangouts--buying drumheads and equipment at Sam Ash or Manny's Music, listening to the eccentric street musician Moondog on 6th Avenue, and checking out clubs in the Village.

Then things took a turn for the worse--such a precipitous decline that, in retrospect, it's surprising Adams ever recovered from them.

"One evening in 1968 my dad came home and announced that the company had transferred him to Macon, Georgia," Adams recalls in his memoir Silences So Deep. "I felt as though the world as I knew it was coming to an end. Both my parents were alcoholic. In Georgia, their drinking escalated. So did my rebellion. . . . I never graduated from high school."

There aren't many good career options for a high school dropout in Macon, Georgia. Yet somehow, against all odds, Adams was able to convince California Institute of the Arts to accept him as a student.

It helped that Cal Arts was, in the minds of many, a new and unproven enterprise, one of the last visionary ideas of Walt Disney. The creator of Mickey Mouse had helped mastermind the merger of two struggling institutions--Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and Chouinard Art Institute--a marriage that led to the founding of this new school. After his death, others helped out; but in those days, it seemed less like a college, and more like an extension of Hollywood, where Adams lived during his student years.

Yet even this step forward proved short-lived. Adams's father complained about his son's choice of such a peculiar institution. When dad announced that he would no longer pay the bills for Cal Arts, it looked as if Adams would, once again, end up as a dropout. But he exercised his ingenuity and persuasive powers, somehow managing to secure a degree after only two years.

If he had just stayed in Hollywood, Adams would almost certainly have enjoyed a successful music career. I can practically hear those soundtrack albums playing in my head. Adams was already making his name, and showed tremendous promise. Lou Harrison praised one of his pieces. He won a small grant. He made valuable contacts with other composers.

But instead, John Luther Adams returned to Georgia for a while, then took a job as a ranch hand in Idaho.

Few would have predicted a glorious career of any sort for Adams at that juncture. He had already made too many bad decisions in his short life--and he was about make an even worse one.

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