My generation

Ben and Judy Sidran say the Madison Reunion is as much about the future as the past

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In 1961, Ben Sidran was a lanky, jazz-obsessed Jewish guy surrounded by Lutherans in his hometown of Racine, a place he remembers as “cold, dark, quiet and lonely.” UW-Madison was the only school the young piano player applied to because, well, he knew exactly what he was getting into. At the invitation of a UW student from Racine — and with the blessing of his parents — he had spent many weekends of his high school senior year playing frat party gigs at the Kappa Sigma house on Langdon Street.

When 18-year-old Sidran stepped out of his father’s big 1959 Plymouth and gazed upon the Henry Street rooming house where he would live his freshman year, he had a “moment of clarity.” His folks opened the car trunk and set about the business of unloading while a small airplane flew overhead, filling the air with a delicate hum. Sidran fell into a trance. “It was really quiet, and I heard that plane and I thought … I’m here. Okay, I’m here. I got out of Racine.”

Four years later a dark-eyed young woman from Long Island, New York, emerged from a plane at the Madison airport and stepped onto the tarmac. Unlike Sidran, Judy Lutrin picked UW-Madison sight unseen. She stood outside the terminal with a single suitcase in her hand, luggage she says was filled with “not one thing I wound up needing.” Before leaving LaGuardia that morning, Judy’s grandfather made a prediction: “She’s gonna meet some guy and get stuck out there.”

He was right.

Judy was the very picture of hip ’60s fashion in a mini-skirt and rabbit fur coat when she spotted Ben in his big white parka at the Memorial Union Rathskeller during final exam week that first semester. The two decided to grab lunch at Lorenzo’s, a steak house located at University and Park, where Vilas Hall is now. They talked for four hours. “I have no idea what we talked about,” says Ben. Judy remembers being “totally hypnotized.”

“We hooked up,” says Judy. “We definitely hooked up.”

Did they ever. Except for some time spent in England (where Ben earned a doctorate) and one year in Los Angeles, the Sidrans have never called any place but Madison home. In 1971, Capitol Records offered Ben a full-time staff producer position in L.A. But Judy didn’t like the vibe. She told Ben she wanted to move back to Madison for the summer so she could go to summer school. “And the summer has lasted 47 years,” he says.

“I definitely like living in a place that has a sense of community, and Madison’s community is very accessible,” says Judy. “It’s easy to be a part of it and contribute to it.”

And contribute she has. While working as a travel agent, she also served on several boards including Red Caboose Day Care, the YWCA and Monona Terrace. She is also a former president of Jewish Social Services and is currently on the board of visitors at the UW Center for Jewish Studies. And both Sidrans are deeply artistic. Judy is an expert weaver.

Right now, they’re in the full-time memory business, fine-tuning the many details tied to the mega event they created over the past 20 months called “The Madison Reunion.” The dang thing threatens to take over the entire city June 14-16 with a cascade of events including music, lectures, art exhibits and panel discussions. A counterculture Chautauqua.

Why a 1960s reunion? And why now?

“To me it’s kind of wrapping up our experience of being young,” says Judy. “And inviting people back who have not been back.”

For Ben, the reunion provides an opportunity to “have this conversation that we started 50 years ago.” He admits that the timing — four months ahead of the midterm elections — is an important coincidence. “The reunion is a way to think about who we are, where we are, how we got here, what did we leave behind, and what can we do about it? Those are the questions. It’s a party, but hopefully people after the weekend will be motivated in some way. To participate. To become active.”

Again.

Talking with the Sidrans about Madison life in the ’60 and ’70s is like having a front-row seat to a Time-Life documentary. There was hard work to be done back then but there was also fun to be had. House parties, music, the Terrace and playing in a co-ed volleyball league on the lakefront with their pal, soon to be the boy-mayor-of-the-city, Paul Soglin.

One evening the Sidrans recall bringing their then-preschool-aged son Leo to The Dangle Lounge, a strip club on East Main Street where Isthmus co-founder Vince O’Hern was bartending. “She’s taking off her bathing suit,” observed Leo, perched on a bar stool and sipping a kiddie cocktail mixed by O’Hern.

“Okay, we’re gone!” was Judy’s reaction.

The times they were a changin’ but the party never ended. On a warm fall day in 1963, Ben pulled his Vespa motor scooter to a stop on Langdon Street to watch a rock band perched on a makeshift stage where the Pyle Center is now.

“And here were these white, middle-class kids — I mean middle-class kids in the sense that they were wearing madras blazers and stuff,” says Sidran. “I heard the voices and they sounded so good together.” The musicians were Steve Miller on guitar, Boz Scaggs on bass and “a guy who owned a hamburger stand out in Monona on drums.” Ben pounced on the band members after their set.

“Who are you?” asked Miller. “I’m your new piano player,” said Sidran.

So began a musical relationship that, among other things, led to Sidran and Miller co-writing the Steve Miller Band hit, “Space Cowboy,” the royalties of which paid Sidran’s way through grad school at the University of Sussex in England where, of all places, he earned a doctorate in American Studies. Music was his living but, if you ask Sidran, grad school saved his life. With the help of an admittance letter written by UW-Madison history professor Harvey Goldberg, grad school was Sidran’s student deferment ticket out of the Vietnam War.

Before all that, back in Mad Town, Boz Scaggs says he dug playing with Sidran but also appreciated learning from him. “I remember Ben taking me over to his pad and introducing me to the recordings of the great pianist Horace Silver,” says Scaggs, checking in from San Francisco where he’s made his home since 1967. “That’s a gift that lasts forever, and is at the core of our long friendship.” Scaggs’ performance on Friday night of the Madison Reunion is just a few weeks ahead of the release of his new album, Out of the Blues.

The guest list for the gathering reads like a who’s who of Madison artists and intellectuals from the day. The first phone call the Sidrans made to test the waters for the concept (which they say was largely Judy’s idea) was to former Daily Cardinal editor, now veteran network political journalist Jeff Greenfield.

Greenfield, who lives in Santa Barbara, California, met the Sidrans through Ben’s sister Maxine, a fellow reporter at the Cardinal. He immediately caught the Sidrans’ enthusiasm for the reunion.

“What is appealing,” says Greenfield, “is the sense that we lived together through intense times, want to remember, to reunite and — in this case — to reflect on a period that had powerful highs and lows. If the years in Madison changed your life, as they most certainly did in my case, it’s a kind of homage to a place and time that shaped the decades that followed.”

Folk music superstar and Madison native Tracy Nelson will also be here and will perform in Shannon Hall on June 15. She, too, has direct ties to the Sidrans. In fact, Nelson was convinced Ben was just trying to get into her pants when they met on State Street and he asked her to come over to his place. In actuality, it was another case of the young Sidran wanting to share what he knew. When they got to Ben’s apartment he put an Aretha Franklin record on the turntable and turned it way up. “I heard her [Nelson’s] voice and I said, well, you gotta hear rhythm and blues,” Sidran says.

Nelson says she hopes that the reunion will be invigorating. “I hope that being reminded of the activism of the 1960s might be an extra incentive to the young people who are getting out and speaking to the mess we’re in now,” says Nelson. She’ll travel up from her Nashville home, where she’s currently putting the finishing touches on a multi-disc retrospective.

David Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and associate editor at The Washington Post, wasn’t immediately sold on the reunion idea when the Sidrans contacted him. “I tend to get the heebie-jeebies in crowds of like-minded people,” says Maraniss. “For some reason it makes me anxious. But I would do anything for them [the Sidrans].” Maraniss and his wife, Linda, spend every summer here; they call it “Camp Madison.”

Maraniss will be a panelist on the session titled “The State of the 4th Estate” and will moderate the panel discussion, “What’s Left of the Wisconsin Idea?”

For all of the deserved hoopla associated with the Madison Reunion there are some in town — as well as skeptics across the country — who will ask: Who needs a dumb old ’60s reunion, anyway? Among those critics is former Bill Clinton advisor Paul Begala, who chastised baby boomers in a scorching essay he wrote for Esquire titled, “The Worst Generation.”

Here’s how he said it: “The baby boomers are the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in American history.”

Begala speaks as a boomer himself. As for Madison millennials — and we’re waving to some of you riding by in the Epic shuttle van — all this “talking ’bout my generation” can cause eye rolls. Some believe the boomer generation caused as many messes as it solved.

Boz Scaggs feins indignation at the suggestion. “I thought the millennials liked us!” he says.

Counterculture spawn Leo Sidran, 41, the aforementioned kiddie-cocktail-sipping toddler at the strip club and son of Judy and Ben, has thoughts about this. Leo pursues his own music career these days from his home in Brooklyn, New York. He won an Oscar for a song that appeared in The Motorcycle Diaries.

“I don’t know if I think the boomers caused as many problems as they solved because what happened in the ’60s clearly needed to happen,” Leo says. “But I have thought for a long time that once the generation that believed you should ‘never trust anyone over 30’ got into their 30s and 40s, they were a bit lost and they had no real role models to turn to.”

The irony of our current political predicament is not lost on Maraniss. “What a mixed bag the baby boom generation is! In the ’60s we pushed America forward on civil rights and human rights and peace. And now, after all these years, people in their 60s and early 70s, especially the men, are the reason Donald Trump is president. The voting statistics make that point irrefutably, and pathetically.”

Ben Sidran is less concerned with what members of other generations think than what they do. “The millennials — they didn’t vote and they didn’t vote, and we are where we are now.” Sidran is referring to stats that show a comparatively lackadaisical turnout among millennials at the polls. Pew Center and Brookings Institute research shows 18- to 29-year-old voter participation in 2012 and 2016 at 50 percent of eligible voters. Contrast that with the boomer vote that hovered at or above 70 percent for both presidential elections.

That said, Sidran sees hope in the recent street-level activism among youth. “But will they vote? It’s not enough that you post it on social media. You have to get up and vote. One of the things that the ’60s was about was getting up and doing it. You personally go there.”

Greenfield cautions against too much generalization when it comes to generations: “Are we talking about boomers who protested the war, or who fought in it, or did both? Are we talking about boomers who engaged in Dionysian revelry, or those who were repelled by much of it? The revolt against discrimination of many kinds is an unalloyed good. Who remembers that in the mid-’60s no black person or woman or Italian had ever sat on the Supreme Court. No black person had ever served in a cabinet or the U.S. Senate, and in professions, from the law to journalism to Wall Street, the ‘right’ gender, race, last name and religion were essential.”

Despite the progress Greenfield points to, Madison Reunion panelist Gerald Lenoir says there are miles to go before we reach the promised goals. Lenoir is the former executive director of the Black Coalition on AIDS in San Francisco. He is currently the identity and politics analyst for the Haas Institute in Berkeley. And he participated in the UW Black Student Strike in 1969.

“That mass movement gave me a sense of agency and optimism that changed the course of my life and I would say the lives of the 500-plus black students attending the university then,” says Lenoir. “We knew we were making history and despite repression from the police and the National Guard, we knew that we would win.”

But Lenoir says we still live in a society deeply troubled and divided over issues of race. “Liberal and progressive whites need to understand how pervasive and pernicious racial bias and structural racialization still are in U.S. society,” says Lenoir. “White privilege, racist ideology and implicit biases play a major role in dividing the 99 percent and eroding working-class unity and cross-class solidarity in confronting white supremacy and economic inequality.”

Lenoir will be a panelist at the session titled “Radical Pedagogy.” (Lenoir will also speak at a concurrent teach-in organized by local activists who feel the perspective of the radical left is underrepresented at the Madison Reunion.)

Greenfield adds that the ’60s serve as a study of contradictions. “The form that some protest took — burning down neighborhoods, planting bombs, carrying the flag of the nation we were fighting — had serious consequences that harmed the causes the protests were supposed to support. So, as with every generation, it’s a mixed bag.”

These trade-offs, the paradox of history, the lessons learned and ignored, are themes that could be directly lifted from the 1960s lectures of someone who will be present in spirit only: the late UW-Madison history professor Harvey Goldberg, the man who sheltered Sidran from the Vietnam War by helping him get accepted to the University of Sussex. An entire panel discussion will be devoted to Goldberg on June 16, totally befitting an unwitting mascot for the turbulent times.

“Harvey Goldberg let me know that what I was thinking about obsessively was important, and that I should continue to think about it — music and how it affects culture and how history is all around it,” says Ben Sidran. “Harvey was an absolute inspiration, and to this day, when I go on stage, part of what I do is Harvey Goldberg.”

Judy Sidran agrees: “He related to everyone as if they were important in relation to the past and history.”

Amid all the serious matters being discussed around the reunion table, it would be an oversight to fail to mention the Sidrans’ ability to enjoy a good time. That’s the “party” portion of what they labeled a “party with a purpose.”

Nelson certainly gets that part. When asked what she’s most looking forward to she says, “Getting together and playing with old friends in my home town.” Then, in what is most directly in the spirit of the times — then, and now — for all working musicians, she adds, “And I think I may make some money.”

Until the reunion weekend rolls around, the Sidrans get the last word on the “purpose” part. “There are people out there where being here was a significant part of their lives,” says Judy. There’s some urgency because no one is getting younger; over the past year, a half dozen Reunion panelists had to step down due to illness. “This is it,” Judy says. “This is really it.”

“This idea of being able to bring the intellectuals back and have events is to make the statement that, for me, the ’60s weren’t just about politics,” says Ben. “They were about art and culture and music and journalism and writing and history.”

Then there’s the personal motivator for Ben: “I love a production.”

Editor's note: This article was corrected to reflect the fact that Ben Sidran earned his doctorate in Sussex, England, not a master's.