Craig Safan - Early Life

Early Life

Craig Safan was born in Los Angeles, son of an L.A. native Eugene Safan, who owned a downtown jewelry store. Safan’s father was a B17 bomber pilot during World War II who met his mother, Betty Torchin, in Laredo, Texas while stationed there at the Army Air Force Base. She was a piano virtuoso who had studied at the Cleveland Conservatory.

Safan began picking out tunes when he was 5 or 6 years old. Growing tired of classical music, Safan’s mother hired a teacher for him named Helene Mirich Spear who taught "popular" piano, who had young Craig improvising in his first lesson. Besides being a jazz pianist, she also played classical violin, so as well as the improvisation, she worked on technique by having him play Scott Joplin and Zez Confrey pieces.

"While in middle school I was going to an LA club called Shelly's Mann Hole and hearing all the great jazz pianists... Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Hampton Hawes, and more," Safan recalled. Afterwards, Mirich would transcribe Monk's solos for him to play. "I was a very straight kid from a nice Jewish family whose idols were mostly junkies but I didn't really understand that at the time."

After this experiential background in jazz, Safan found his way into classical music indirectly. "I never studied the classics," he said. "The first piece of classical music I ever studied was Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and that was because I read about it in Leonard Bernstein's book The Joy of Music. So my musical education has been sort of backwards – Joplin to Gershwin to jazz to Stravinsky."

At the age of 15, his family moved from Los Angeles to Beverly Hills, and Safan began attending Beverly Hills High. "It was a big transition," he recalled. "I knew no one and it was a very social, rich school. But I had music and art to save me."

Moving from jazz to rock and falling in love with the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, Safan joined a jazz quartet as well as a rock cover band. He had begun writing his own songs at the age of 13, and continued writing throughout high school. He also became interested in fine art and graphic design. "I was art editor of my high school yearbook and was probably the only high school kid with a subscription to Graphis Magazine," Safan said.

Safan never considered a profession in music, and was being pushed by his parents to become a doctor or lawyer. But he realized his ambition was to become some sort of artist. He enrolled at Brandeis University in Boston and became a Fine Arts major, thinking he would become an architect. But during those years he spent more and more time writing music, and he composed four original musicals while at Brandeis. And, since he knew pop music and could write music, he arranged several albums for Reprise Records. "I never went as far as becoming a music major, but I wrangled my way into the electronic music studio and spent untold hours playing with the setup there," Safan said. He also took a class in orchestration from experimental composer, Alvin Lucier. "He not only taught me how to write for all the conventional instruments, but how to listen and create sounds from everything around me, and how to be completely open as to what 'music' means," Safan recalled. "This became very important to me in scores such as Stand and Deliver where I created an entire percussion library from found objects and Wolfen, where I experimented with new composition techniques."

Upon his graduation in 1970, Safan was awarded both "Best Drama" and "Best Music" awards from Brandeis. More significantly, he was awarded a Watson Foundation Fellowship which allowed him to live in London for a year and write music. During that time he mostly wrote pop songs and worked on musicals, his intentions still to become a songwriter.

But when his year in London ended, he returned to Los Angeles and then struggled to earn a living writing songs. Karla Bonoff sang one of them on her first album, and he arranged songs for artists like Dirk Hamilton, Rod Taylor, and Emmylou Harris while working part-time in his father’s jewelry store. During that period he became friends with producer Charles Plotkin (he would later to produce Bruce Springsteen), who had built a small recording studio in Hollywood. With his brother Mark, Safan became part of Plotkin’s stable of young singer-songwriters. Also in that group were Wendy Waldman (daughter of composer Fred Steiner), Andrew Gold (son of film composer Ernest Gold) and Peter Bernstein (son of Elmer Bernstein). Also around the studio were Linda Ronstadt and Jennifer Warnes (who Craig played piano for). Safan also wrote songs with lots of other writers such as Amanda McBroom.