My
Musical History
I
can't say what music I first heard because radio or television played
constantly at my granny's home, which housed my mom and me, three aunts, and,
depending on military commitments, dad and an uncle. My first musical memory
involved hearing The Crabby Appleton Theme while watching Tom
Terrific cartoons from a wooden playpen in the middle of the living-room.
At the time (probably 1958) we lived in a log cabin at the intersection of Oak
Grove and Hiwassee roads. I remember sitting
with my youngest aunt on the high bank that led from the front yard down to Oak
Grove road as she practiced marching band songs on clarinet. One evening during
a storm the whole group, with me on granny's lap, sat around the living-room
listening to our huge wooden cabinet radio until a power surge fried the
electronics and permanently turned it into furniture.
Later
that same year, Granny moved into a new house on the Old Athens Road beside the western
entrance of Greenwood Circle.
The music there came from a 25 inch Philco b/w television, unknown brand radio,
and a Phillips Electro 45 rpm record player. As long as my teenaged aunts lived
in the house (the youngest one left in 1963), I listened to their records and watched
whatever the grown-ups watched on television. After seeing Elvis, I started
carrying around a plastic, toy guitar strung with four red nylon strings that I
plucked while singing mostly disparate lyrics and moving my legs in a way
(which I referred to as Elvising) that resembled the Funky Chicken. Everyone in
the family seemed to get a big kick out of it, so I did it a lot. While
visiting a friend in the hospital, I slipped away from mom, who later found me
doing my act in the room of some poor fellow recovering from the resent loss of
his legs. Mimicking The King's songs and moves always made me feel good, so I
wanted to spread that around.
The
King's music played an important part in the family's daily routine. My aunts
accumulated quite a stack of Elvis 45's, many of them reissued hits packaged
with two and sometimes even three songs per side. By stacking five or six discs
on the fat, seven inch, 45 accommodating changer, the girls could dance and
sing along for twenty or better minutes at a time. This sort of concert, as a
warm-up to The Mickey Mouse Club and American Band Stand,
took place in granny's living-room each day after school. We listened to hits
like (Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear, Jailhouse Rock, Love
Me Tender, and many others. The
drums between stanzas on Hound Dog drove me wild, but my favorites
included Trouble, King Creole, Crawfish, and Blue
Christmas.
Granny
programmed the morning concert. After everyone left for school or work, she loaded
a stack on the Phillips changer and sent it whirling while making beds, sweeping
floors, and washing dishes. If the stack finished before the chores, she
repositioned it and repeated the sequence.
Not a morning went by without the song One Night, possibly
her favorite, playing background to the housework. Elvis's impassioned vocal on
that cut is one of his all time best and still packs quite an emotional punch. I
always loved the line, "I ain't never did no wrong."
Everyone
in the house seemed excited when Elvis sang on TV. We watched the old Philco
set from couch, floor, or rocking chair huddled together, often eating homemade
fudge, wrapped, during winter, in blankets, or doing a little Elvising in the
wind of a two bladed window fan during warmer months. For me, if Elvis was on,
I was on.
But
Elvis's music wasn't all that got to me, and not all that my family owned. We
also had the songs Little
Darling and The Stroll, by The Diamonds, and another personal
favorite, 16 Tons, by
Tennessee Ernie Ford. I also have to mention Lloyd Price’s Stagger Lee, Sea of Love,
by Phil Phillips, and Run Samson Run,
by Neil Sedaka as songs I played repeatedly.
Aside
from the music we owned, one of my aunts often listened to the radio, especially
while sunbathing with her friends in summer, and I was never far away from
that. Also, the various styles of music on television, from theme songs to the
music performed on movies, specials, and variety shows, left their marks as
well. My memory is ignorant of most titles and genres, but I do remember being
fond of The Perry Como Show, and of course the myriad cartoons and kid
shows I consumed like a hungry-eared madman.
Then
an incredible thing happened—I got a record player for Christmas. Damned if that
didn’t make me happy. And, in addition to the player was a stack of records.
Now I’d already owned a few records, like The Chipmunks’ The Chipmunk Song (Christmas
Don’t Be Late) (I always liked the flip side, That’s Almost Good, by David Seville), and The Washington and Lee Swing, by Tom & Dan, but this new stack
was a mother-lode. The strange thing here, however, is that my memory has lost
most of those titles. The only ones that come to mind are Buffalo Gals and Little White
Duck, though there were many more. Some of the records were cast in a pale
blue vinyl, and nearly all of them had the 33 and a 1/3 type holes in the
middle, but I think they were all 45’s. Whatever they were, their rotation in
my playlist certainly wore the grooves thin, and the player went through two
needles and a repair or two before the arm finally detached and the player
could no longer be used. I’m not sure if it lasted even a year.
Phase 2
The
first phase of my musical history was all about discovery. I discovered music,
and then discovered a love for it. Phase two began between the years 1959 and
1961 with a more relaxed exposure to music. Around the time the record player
broke down, my mom and I moved out of my grandmother’s place and into a small
house at the end of the street. I still got plenty of tunes, especially Elvis,
as granny kept me while mom worked, but at home the television began to take on
a greater role.
Even
before learning to read, I was able to spell Harrigan because of the theme song
to a television show called Harrigan and
Son. The theme song for Bat Masterson
also rang inside my skull, and “Johnny Yuma was a rebel….” My grandmother
became a big Michael Rennie fan, so The
Third Man Theme played every time the show played (we even had a windup
music box that tinkled the theme). The incredibly apt Bernard Herrmann theme
for The Twilight Zone gave me spinal
chills. And, of course, Michael Rennie and Bernard Herrmann converge with The Day the Earth Stood Still, which
marked my first theremin experience. Not mentioning Route 66 would be a sin, and some of the past music sources like Ed
Sullivan and Perry Como still contributed, but this history is beginning to
bleed over into the next one (television), and before that, lemme say that the
music on tv helped my soul.
Always
interested in anything that looked like a musical instrument, I had played,
often mercilessly, a number of fake guitars and ukuleles (and believe this: for
sheer destructive prowess, Pete Townshend had nothing on me when the urge to
smash and bash took control) and other insulting fakes like four note
harmonicas whose reeds bent to uselessness with one single blow, and tiny
plastic replicas of violins and guitars, etc. that came stuffed with candy and
other junk, Chinese handcuffs and the like, into these mesh Christmas stockings
my mom bought every year. None of these really fostered anything but the most
superficial aspects of musical performance.
Mom
did get close when she bought me a red plastic melodica that I became
fascinated enough with, in fits and starts, to play at times. For a good year
or so, until the mouthpiece broke while in the toy box, I blew that thing as
soulfully as possible. There’s no way to gage the quality of the
improvisations, but since I had no special abilities and absolutely no
training, chances are they were probably weak.
Sometime
in this period I also got a kid’s drum set. It could not be compared to a
serious kit in any way but looks, in that it did look real enough, but
everything about it seemed to inspire failure. The bass pedal was made of a
thin strip of cheap tin attached to a wooden stick with a ball on the end of
it. The drum heads were made of a kind of strong cardboard (not strong enough
to withstand a determined beating), but it eventually went down like the other
toy instruments. Despite its shortcomings, the kit taught me that I was no
natural at the skins, even though I’d tried my best to imitate Little Ricky.
Phase 3
In 1960, my mother and I moved back
into my grandmother’s house. Like times before, something wonderful happened
when my aunt purchased a red and white colored stereo from the Western Auto. I
didn’t know stereo from mono or anything else, but a shiny new record player
was good news. Equally good was a cache of new music she had bought to fully
appreciate the stereo experience.
This was all, on many levels, a very
big deal to my six year old self. Just looking at the machine, with its tiny,
LP accommodating spindle, and dual speakers hanging from little hinges, was a
nearly religious experience. That I was not allowed, at first, to touch it,
made it even more godlike. The touching restriction vanished quickly, in part,
no doubt, to my constant needling to hear music.
One of the great LP’s she bought was
Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and
Western Music. Like everyone else, I loved Georgia,
but nothing compared to the opening of I
Can’t Stop Loving You. It gave me the same sort of feeling that several
Elvis songs had earlier. I was all in whenever it played.
Another of her noteworthy purchases
was The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.
Since I watched television, comedy was nothing new, but even my young ears
heard something different. A news writer from the local paper once commented to
me at a party that I had a sense comic timing. True or not, it is due in no
small measure to Bob Newhart. I listened so often that I learned many of the
entire routines by heart.
The stereo also allowed me to
revisit music I had lost touch with for a couple of years. Nearly all the
records I had previously enjoyed were still lying around, so I had a go at the
lot. In addition, my collection of kids’ records, useless since my player’s
demise, made another round. I felt like I was back on top.
My aunt and I grew very close during
that time. She baby sat me on Friday nights, which began with a trip to the
restaurant where my grandmother cooked the evening meals, and where she taught
me how to consume, in a mannerly way, my dinner. We didn’t have a car, so we
walked the mile or so to and from Maxwell’s Restaurant on Happy Top, at times
in very cold weather. When we got home we always fought over whether to watch Route 66 or The Flintstones. She also took me to The First Baptist Church,
where she taught a class in crafts, every Sunday. Eventually, as young adults
are wont to do, she left home for other vistas. Fortunately for me she left the
stereo behind.
*
When I began my schooling, in 1961,
my youngest aunt began her senior year in high school. Like my other aunt, she
was pretty cool, and I was always fascinated with her friends and the things
they listened to. As a member of the high school marching band, she played
clarinet and wore a soldierish black and gold uniform. She’d been a big Elvis
fan as a younger teen, and went through The Twist phase with everyone else in
American. Her boyfriend (later husband) liked the usual pop hits and all, but
he also had a real taste for R&B, especially The Platters. As usual, I dug
it all.
Record listening became secondary,
mostly because no new material was introduced into the house collection. For
satirical purposes, product commercials became an influence. Beer commercial
jingles lent themselves to clever
word substitutions. My best buddy from across the street was a witty wordster,
and between us many a tune was subjected to our often scatologically juvenile
alterations. The same treatment was afforded the ever changing flood of
television themes.
Near the end of second grade, in
1963, mom and dad moved to Norfolk,
VA to temporarily stay with my
oldest aunt and her husband in their military housing apartment while saving a
stake to get their own place. They left me with my grandmother to finish out
the year (just a few months), then mom took me on a bus to the great home of
the nation’s largest military base. I was quite excited about a long bus ride
and the chance to live in a city full of military personnel, ships, planes, and
more.
Living, at first, with my aunt and
uncle was ok, but with their four kids (later five), me, mom and dad, and my
middle aunt, the restrictive nature of the crowd made me feel like a sardine.
We finally got a place, to my delight, right on the beach. I could walk 50
yards from my back door and look out on the Atlantic.
About a mile north of our stretch of beach The Oceanview Amusement Park (home,
at one time, of the world’s largest rollercoaster ride, and old wooden thing
that scared the crap outta me the only time I rode it) colored the night with
reflective, carnivalesque light.
During that summer I mostly listened
to Top 40 radio, but another source of music was the jukebox system at the
restaurant where my mom, dad, aunt, uncle (who was also in the Navy), and my
future uncle (whose hitch was nearly over) all worked during the night shift.
While the radio played youth oriented songs (this was just before The Beatles),
the jukebox was a different animal. If any youth songs made it to the playlist,
they tended to be the softer in tone than some. Rather than combos thrashing
earnestly away, orchestral arrangements with lush strings and full vocals
prevailed. I regret that I have little knowledge of many of the titles on that
system (or the radio, for that matter), though I do remember the Nat King Cole
song, Those Lazy, Crazy, Hazy Days of
Summer.
As the summer drew to a close, I
became worried. My parents’ plan had been to bring me to Norfolk, show me a great time, spoil me a
little, then put me into the school system in the fall. The flaw in their plan
was that they had promised me the final decision on whether to attend school in
Norfolk or return to my grandmother’s to attend
school in Madisonville, TN. It really wasn’t a difficult decision.
Although there were many enticing things the city offered, I just neither dug
the people, nor the idea of being the other
in a foreign land. It was bad enough in Madisonville,
for if I am anything, I am other,
even in my own land. But at least in my hometown I knew where everything
happened, and unlike in any city, was free to roam all over the place.
Regardless of my parents’ feelings (and I won’t ever try to BS and allow that I
was immune from the emotional aspect of such a decision), it was the best move
for me.
*
I settled into life at my grandma’s
pretty easily. She wasn’t up my ass as much as my mom would have been, and that
was a blessing. In this slightly more relaxed atmosphere I was better able to
lie about the completion of my homework assignments. That left plenty of time
for the important things like television and my afterschool play activities. My
youngest aunt had married and left home (she and her husband lived in my
family’s house while mom and dad were away), and I had run of the granny’s
house.
At first the music I was exposed to
came mostly from television. Aside from the usual sources like Ed Sullivan or
some other variety show, I began to listen more intently to television theme
music than before. Some of that changed because of a friend of my middle aunt’s
who became a regular visitor at granny’s, and who was also an Elvis fan. She
brought by the great Doc Pomus song Surrender
performed by The King. Granny hated the song, but I liked it and wanted to
revisit the Elvis collection. After some snooping, I was able to find a cache
in a special, plastic Elvis folder that my youngest aunt had left behind. The
old Phillips record player was hidden nearby, so I started jamming right away.
I was unfamiliar with many of the
songs I found, and some of the 45’s had as many as six songs, three per side,
on them. Looking back, I suppose these were re-issues of some sort, packaged
for youngsters who didn’t own stereos. Whatever the case, they made me happy.
I guess Elvis made my grandmother
happy, too, because she had seen G.I.
Blues and Blue Hawaii while I
summered in Norfolk,
and since the stereo was still around, someone had purchased the LP soundtracks
to those movies. I played the Elvis titles, and the patriotic songs from a Johnny
Horton LP, in regular rotation.
Now anyone who lived in the south
between the early 60’s and early 80’s also had another musical source in the
telecasts of regional (and some nationally known) artists on Saturday
afternoons (I believe they were broadcast on WATE, Channel 6 from Knoxville,
though I believe they all originated in Nashville). The constant was Flatt
& Scruggs and The Wilburn Brothers, but there were also others like Porter
Wagoner and The Stonemans, all of whom played country music or bluegrass. I
really liked these shows, but they were a bit like soap operas in that if you
watched them only once a month you caught all the new music on tap because they
held onto the same playlists for at least that long. A few of these shows,
Porter Wagoner’s and Arthur Smith’s, for instance, found places in local
stations’ 7 PM time slots, so you really couldn’t miss them.
I must backtrack a minute to mention
my dad’s taste and influence. Dad was a country guy through and through. He
could play a little on guitar, and he sang several songs (his favorite seemed
to be Down in the Mines). Whenever I
rode with dad he always listened to some country station. When I was younger I
liked it, but liked it a little less so in my teens. Both he and mom fell in
love with the music of Jim Reeves, and I liked it, too. There’ll be more about
dad later.
Things went along at my granny’s
pretty much as I described for awhile. Granny loved country music just like my
dad, and we listened to a Sweetwater station with a country format as much for
weather and school information as anything else. I still got to hear a little
bit of new pop music on the radio of a gray 1951 Chevy parked in the family
carport. The Chevy had the kind of ignition that would turn without the key.
One day I turned it and the radio came on. I knew the battery would eventually
go down, so it was used sparingly.
My grades during that first complete
year with my grandmother took a nosedive. Some of the cause, I suppose, could
be attributed to the separation from the routines of my parents, but I’m
convinced that most of it had to do with competing interests. In addition to
music and television were the movies, comics, and toys. I assure you that no
homework assignment could possibly outshine any leisure pastime. The fun of the
world was all the diversion I needed.
Going to the movies on Saturday
afternoons might seem harmless, and in the big picture it was, but some movies
stuck with me past their view dates. I saw The Three Stooges, Elvis, and lots
of drive-in fare at the beautiful old Hollywood Theatre, right next to The Big
Chief Restaurant. Always attracted to smart mouthed dialog and jokes, I oft
carried wise guy lingo and manner home and to school after such a viewing
experience. Other influences included the people who came to town to see the
show. Of course I saw quite a few from my neighborhood since it was walking
distance away, and that meant that kids from all directions of walking distance
also came.
One was the coolest white guy in
town. To me he was perfection. He wore white clothing that matched his hair (which
was cut into bangs and were bleached platinum blond), smoked white cigarettes,
drove a white Stingray, and had the perfect girlfriend. Most of the guys on
screen couldn’t match his charisma. Not all the guys were Mr. Perfect, though.
Most were just regular folks in looks and behavior. Others were thugs or thug
wannabes. The girls, many with the still popular beehive do’s, didn’t make the
same type of an impression unless one of the more beautiful ones graced the
place. If that happened, and you could tear yourself away from watching her
long enough to look around, you’d likely catch the eyes of any guy there
stealing a glance at her as often as possible. God I loved going to the movies.
My grandmother gave me a lot of
grief about my smart mouth. Usually
this was an opportunity to take a dig at a friend of whom she disapproved, and
some of it must have been the audacity I exhibited in calling her on some of
her shit. She didn’t like to be called. I guess she could have stopped my
weekly cinematic excursions if she’d chosen, but the truth was that they were
as much a part of her routine as mine.
When Fridays rolled around and I
headed home after school I was usually pretty tired. Because of increased
homework demands, and especially my inefficient response to those demands
(often influenced by television programming), my school night bedtime was
around 11:30 PM (an incredibly late hour I was informed few years later during
a sixth grade visit to the principal’s office), so I really wanted to relax at
the completion of the school week. I might go out and play army with a friend,
but the play was subdued, and often I just watched The Early Show and waited around until dinner. That was followed by
the national news, and later, after Route
66, I watched The Twilight Zone
and Alfred Hitchcock. I usually made
it through the local news at 11, and sometimes through the first 15 or so
minutes of The Late Show before I
crashed.
Saturday was my grandmother’s day to
sleep-in, so I tried to get up as quietly as possible to watch Action Theatre at 7:30 AM. I really
liked the Commander Cody and the Lost
Planet Airmen serial which bookended whatever movie played. Since there was
no alarm clock that day, my actual waking times varied widely. Sometimes I made
the entire show, but sometimes I missed an hour or a portion of an hour. On a
few days I might miss the thing entirely (I always blamed granny for that), and
on equally rare days I got up early enough to see the test pattern before
sign-on. Anyway, after the movie I watched cartoons and waited for breakfast.
A lot of times my next door neighbors’
grandson, who stayed with them on Saturdays, would come over to hang out. In
truth, he was the person who got me started going to the movies in the first
place, so I owe him a lot. The movie started at 1 PM, so after lunch he and I,
or another friend and I (if no one was around I went alone), walked uptown to
see whatever flick was showing. Admission was 25 cents, so my grandmother gave
me 50 cents for the movie and popcorn (she sometimes even paid admission for
one of my friends). Now I don’t really care for popcorn, so that extra quarter
fed into another great diversion—comics.
My love of comic books began when I
discovered their existence. What’s not to like? Even before I could read I
bought them just to look at the pictures. I started out enjoying war comics,
especially Sgt. Rock, and what I
called scary comics, like Batman or Superman. The way the movies worked into
the comics was simple: I went to the movies, did not buy popcorn, then after
the movie went to search the comic rack at Tallent’s Drug Store across the
street from The Hollywood for two new titles. With the exception of Classics Illustrated comics, which were 15 cents each, all other comics cost
12 cents each, and a penny in tax for two, so I purchased two each week. The
end of the day was well on the way by the time I got home, so I spent the night
reading and/or watching TV until I went to bed.
Like most spoiled baby boomers, I
had a lot of toys, and like many boys of that time I had a lot of toy guns. I
had a hard plastic, red, spring loaded .45 that fired little suction tipped
darts and served me through several years of campaigns. I also had a shoulder
holster and a snub nosed .38 that fired plastic bullets when the shell was
powered by a cap. Mom got me a machinegun that, when wound up, would make rat-tat-tat
sounds at each trigger pull. I had a lot of the usual stuff, cars, Lincoln logs, Tinker
Toys, science toys, and lots of plastic soldiers, including Civil War armies
with two cannons each, and other things, too.
Until the late spring of 1963, I
received most of my toys as Christmas or birthday presents, with a few wild
cards thrown in along the way, but a large package filled with toys from mom
and dad appeared one day and changed all that and brought a new obsessions. One
was a plastic model of Frankenstein walking over a grave. I was in awe. I
didn’t even know those things existed. The others were large, green, plastic
soldiers with more realistic detail than I was accustomed to. There were other
things in the box as well, but who cared after those two?
And so it was that every six or
eight weeks the packages came. Frankenstein was followed by Dracula, The Wolf
Man, The Mummy, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The big soldiers also
continued, but now included Japanese, German, and Russian troops. I also
received my first WWII combat aircraft models in those shipments.
If all these things weren’t enough
diversion from school work and activities, there was the stumbling block of
girls in the classroom. Christ almighty, how could I be expected to do a
goddamned thing when surrounded by girls all the time? I couldn’t keep my eyes
off em. I thought about them all the time. For instance, during Math time I
might be in the midst of a sex fantasy about a classmate or teacher (we had
quite a number of good looking teachers), or might be mentally sodomizing some
beauty during Geography. I walked around with a boner for goodly portions of
each school day. So, as I said before, my grades plummeted that first year with
granny.
So, what do the toys and other
diversions, as I call them, have to do with my musical history? Nothing in the
narrow sense, but in the larger picture they were all part of the same pop
cultural exposure which led to the development of a personal critical aesthetic
I would use to evaluate all experience from then to now.
*
After Kennedy was shot, I fell into
a sort of depressed state. It wasn’t that I loved the man and what he stood for
enough to be horribly saddened by his passing, for at age eight I was not that
clear on the implications of the occurrence, it’s just that my pain was not so
specific. I knew it was bad and felt bad about it, but the issue for me was the
feeling of loneliness, of being left alone without a leader, of wandering
through a lonely country. LBJ seemed like some old bastard who would pick up a
dog or a child by the ears and laugh to the press about it, just like every
asshole who owned a business in my hometown might do. The lead colored November
sky just pushed my fears deeper in.
My mood shifted a bit by
Thanksgiving, and I had a great Christmas as my parents visited (and brought an
incredible entertainment center: TV, radio, and stereo record player in one
unit) and I got a load of new and interesting toys. After the holidays they
went back to Norfolk
and I went back to my usual activities. At that point I felt that the national
crisis had ended.
I met the New Year as a fresh off my
birthday nine year old. I greased my hair and tried to wear clothes that looked
semi-thuggish. Whatever it was, I was against it. Where did that come from? I
can’t write it off as easily as influence of the movies or television, though
they played their roles, but something deeper that increasingly made me hate
all forms of orthodoxy (I hate them yet). As far as getting along with the rest
of the world, there is no getting along with the rest of the world with that
sort of character. It put a big chip on my shoulder, but I couldn’t back down
from any intellectual (or anti-intellectual) stance that offended my aesthetic
sense. Right or wrong (often the latter), I couldn’t let anything go.
*
When it comes to TV viewing, I get
bored quickly and always have. This doesn’t mean that I can’t sit through a
show (though that was and is often true), but that I have followed very few
shows from the beginnings to the ends of their runs. By the time I had turned
9, granny and I watched Bonanza more
often than Ed Sullivan, which aired
opposite each other. I loved the Cartwrights (and Hop-sing) and all their
adventures. Bonanza had everything:
gun fights, girls, drama, and plenty of comedy. How could Ed, with the spinning
plate jugglers and Senor Wences, who had both appeared, seemingly, a thousand
times, possibly compete? He couldn’t.
On one particular week in 1964,
however, CBS had plugged Ed’s show more heavily than usual, touting an
appearance of a new group from England
called The Beatles. That alone meant very little to me except for the frequency
of the promotion, which caught my attention. When Sunday rolled around I was
divided, but my curiosity was aroused. I asked my grandmother if we might be
able to catch The Beatles on the Sullivan show. She showed little outward
interest, but said it would be all right, so I changed the channel and watched
Ed long enough to find out that The Beatles would appear near the end of the
show. I was totally taken aback by the screaming of the girls every time The
Beatles were mentioned. “I can’t stand that racket!” my grandmother said. I
switched back to Bonanza, with the
idea that I would occasionally check up on Ed.
Rest assured that I checked in often
enough to catch The Beatles, who I viewed rather analytically, almost more as
an examination and curiosity than pure enjoyment. The measuring stick for the
band’s performance was Elvis, who, for me as well as for The Beatles, was The
King. From amid the screaming I listened as carefully as I could to the set.
With the unusual mop-top haircuts mopping, Ringo’s nose nosing, Paul’s violin
shaped bass, and the “Yeah, yeah, yeahs” yeahing, I thought The Beatles were
pretty cool (ok, the longish hair appeared a little too girlish to my young eyes),
but I was not really bowled over by those early anthems, at least not that
night. No, The Beatles weren’t Elvis (weren’t they never), but I wasn’t ready
to merely write them off. I kept an open mind.
The Beatles’ performance might not
have blown me through the roof, but it shook the shit out of the elementary
school the following day. Seems that everyone was singing those songs. I heard
the “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” everywhere I went for the entire week. No one could
avoid it. I didn’t know what to think.
About the same time as that famous Sullivan Show, a number of Elvis movies
began to hit television. Those movies, some fairly recent, had apparently
outlasted their drive-in usefulness and were leased to ABC for its various movie
of the week slots. And even though I had to go outside and turn the antenna
toward Chattanooga
to pick up that network (the Knoxville ABC affiliate was a UHF station and we
did not have a UHF capable TV), both my grandmother and I watched Elvis films
that we would never have seen otherwise.
A week or so before Easter that year
I contracted the mumps. Other than the pain from eating anything sour or tart,
mumps didn’t seem that bad. I saw my doctor who suggested that I not jump
around too much. Huh? He warned that the mumps might fall if I wasn’t careful. Huh? Let
em fall, I thought, not realizing what that meant. The only thing about the
visit that interested me was that I was not to return to school until the
malady had passed. Thank you, doctor. Unfortunately, he also advised against
any travel, and I was supposed to head for Norfolk for the holiday (which in those days
meant Good Friday through Sunday). Heeding nothing, my grandmother and I rode
with my aunt in her new car to see my parents and oldest aunt and her family in
Virginia.
After a day or so in Norfolk I began to feel a
lot better. I became acquainted with my middle aunt’s boyfriend (I’d met him
the summer before), and enjoyed the stay. My parents took me to a little
amusement park on the beach, in pretty cold weather, and a day or so later to
the Oceanview Amusement Park where I rode the big
rollercoaster for the first, and only, time (so much for not jumping around).
Easter Sunday was a most beautiful day. My parents lived in a different house
than the beach place of the previous summer, and the entire family gathered
there for dinner, then went out to the backyard to talk while the kids played
in the 75 degree air.
About bedtime a storm blew in from
the north and totally changed everything, so that when I was awakened way too
early the next morning to return to Tennessee with my oldest aunt, grandmother,
and my four cousins in my aunt’s new Chevy station wagon, snow was falling
through the freezing assed atmosphere. Along with the luggage, my four cousins
and I rode in the flattened rear of the Chevy in the most horrible and
uncomfortable trip I have ever made. My body ached nearly all the way since
none of us could sit in an upright position in the flatted back area. There was
also quite a bit of arguing, whining, and fighting among the kids, and a nearly
constant series of angry admonitions from my aunt. The only thing that made any
of it bearable was when my aunt would play the radio and allow us to sing along
with The Beatles. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Phase 4
The school year played out and I was
glad to get out of Madisonville.
I wanted some different fun. The first part of 1964 had been cold and miserable
and I had been sick several times through the year. Summer couldn’t get there
fast enough. The trip back to Norfolk
didn’t tire me as it had before. Somewhere along the way my mom bought me a
plastic whistle clarinet. I wailed on it until my parents called for a halt. I
loved being able to play tunes, but complied with their demands and rested it
in the space beneath the back glass of the car. After a couple of hours I
decided to test my parents’ nerves and give the horn another go. The clarinet
had melted and was still quite warm to the touch. It looked like the first
draft of a Dali painting. The sun robbed me of the chance to create my own
compositions.
Entering from the west like a horde
of jealous marines, I hit the shores of Norfolk
ready to lay the entire town to waste. Horny sailors had nothin on me.
Actually, I had the same appetites for mischief as that randy crew. The austere
lives we lived in Madisonville
were gladly left behind, at least for the summer. The future looked bright. I
liked our house, our backyard, our neighbors…and I liked the music.
The British Invasion was in full
swing that summer. I was glad that my mom was listening to Top 40 radio in the
car because I really couldn’t get enough of everything playing. Her taste was
certainly different than mine, but we did like a lot of the same songs. I found
myself drawn more so to R&B (things like My Guy, by Mary Wells) than in the past, while mom liked the more
popish stuff by The Supremes and the like. She also liked Bad to Me, which, unknown to us, was a John Lennon song, and A World without Love, a McCartney song.
I really began to enjoy The Dave
Clark Five. For one thing, the production behind the band’s recordings gave
them a better fidelity than other artists. The mean snare sound that Clark had was closer to the sound ideal of Hound Dog than other productions where
the snare (the drums, even) was often hidden in the mix. The band didn’t hurt
itself with the hard stompin rhythms it churned up on the records, especially Bits and Pieces. I also dug The Beach
Boys’ I Get Around. That song hit
right in the middle of summer and was perfect, to me, in any auto riding
situation.
Yes, the summer of 1964 was a far
cry from the summer before. During the summer of 1963 we lived with my aunt and
uncle in military housing at a place called Hewitt Farms. I’d made a few
friends in those projects, and we played baseball, and occasionally a grownup
would lead a tour of the swamp that lined parts of the complex and housed the
infamous Grey Shack, which, because of quicksand in the swamp, all kids were
ordered to stay away from (though most had said, or lied, that they had been there).
I expected to see a hideous witch’s cabin, but instead found something that
looked like a playhouse. Big deal! Still, the word came down before I got there
that everyone had to leave Hewitt Farms before a wholesale remodeling of the
facility. At first you couldn’t see it so much, but as the summer wore on and
more people moved out, the place where I’d had so much fun became a ghost town.
At some point my relatives may have been the only people staying there. I know
we were the only ones as far as the eye could see. And though it was fun to
punch and knock holes in the brittle shingle-like siding of the buildings, or
to throw rocks through the windows of the apartments, overall the place started
to give me the creeps.
The house where my parents and I
lived did not, at first, seem as exciting as the place on the beach from the
year before, but time was very kind to the new digs. The house itself was
nothing to write home about, just a two bedroom place sided with the same kind of
brittle shingles as the buildings at Hewitt Farms. A fence surrounded the tiny
backyard and made me feel a little caged, but the area was shady and a fruit
bearing fig tree grew against the back fence. I spent most of my outdoor time
there.
We were also surrounded by
neighbors. The bunch that lived on one side was not very friendly, and though
they pretty much kept to themselves, I decided not to have anything to do with
them because they seemed kind of weird from what I was used to. On the other
side, in a tiny corner house, lived Pig, the sweetest woman in the world. I
don’t know anything about Pig, but we began to talk together shortly after I
moved in. As her nickname implied, she was a fairly large woman and could no
longer tend to her flower garden as she once had. One day she asked if I could
weed her flowers. We’d had gardens and flowers all my life (via my
grandmother), and I knew my way around growing things, so she paid me a quarter
to weed her flowers once a week. My mom got mad when I referred to the lady as
Pig, but Pig told mom that everyone called her that. We became good friends.
A guy much older than Pig lived on
the property behind the back fence. He was a nice old fellow who liked kids and
had enlightened me about the fig tree. I saw him nearly every day. He was
always very cordial and talked with me every time he came out into his yard. In
fact, he kept his lawn chair close to the fence.
Now I knew good and well that my
parents were going to spoil me that summer, because like the summer before,
they still held onto the notion that I might change my mind and stay in Norfolk for the school
year. I knew all along that wasn’t going to happen, but I decided to let them
take their best shots at bribing me. Because I had to quit a Little League
baseball farm team to go to Norfolk,
they had an uphill battle. I allowed them to lavish upon me anything they
could. They did a wonderful job.
Mom was a big believer in reading
and such, so I’d already been signed up for The Summer Weekly Reader before the
vacation started. One day an order form inside TSWR package advertized a batch
of Classics Illustrated Comics for a special low price. Up until that time I
hadn’t, mostly due to their 15 cent per issue price, bought many of that brand,
and when I did, I was usually disappointed by the more grownup, nee dull,
storylines, but the titles list touted Frankenstein,
Dracula, and The Hunchback of Norte Dame and made a deal I couldn’t refuse. I
marked the list and the order went out in the mail. Of course it was summer and I’d totally forgotten the
whole thing before the first issue arrived.
*
Dad joined the Marines in 1948 when
he was 17. He was raised and lived in the Steeke community of Loudon County
where he had taken numerous jobs after dropping out of school in seventh grade.
He apparently couldn’t find one he liked, hence the military. Other than boot
camp, I believe his first service was pretty sweet in that he was assigned to
the aircraft carrier The Essex for a
substantial cruise. He never really talked about his carrier experiences except
for two stories about a couple of drunken episodes, one where he got into a
fight with a fellow serviceman (which left dad with a broken jaw), and an ever
wilder story about leave in Cuba. He claimed to have no memory of the actuality
of the Cuban adventure other than waking up after a drunken night to find that
he was sharing a bunk with a large snake he had bought and smuggled onto ship.
That seemed to me very strange because dad feared snakes. Dad had some tattoos
on his arms, one of a naked lady talking on the phone, and a couple of others
on his shoulders (the name Dot was inside one shoulder design). I’m not sure
the two incidents are related, but I think they may have occurred on the same
evening.
The sweet duty, however, ended with
the Korean War. Dad’s tour began near the end of 1950 and lasted into 1952 (I
think the duration was 18 months). He spoke, as of most of his past, very
little about it. The stories that I remember, that he told me directly, were
scant many details. The important aspect of his experience turned out to be
that he was once sprayed by shrapnel, and another that he received a minor head
wound from a bullet fragment, neither of which yielded decoration. He said he
landed in Korea
in winter, near Christmastime, and that the temperature was the coldest he had
ever known. Not long into his arrival the North attacked at night. Dad was
totally unprepared. He said the enemy banged on drums and played a weird,
seemingly out of tune gaggle of pipes, whistles, flutes and the like before
launching their assault. He gave no real details of the fight, but was
horrified the next morning when three Americans who had gone missing during the
skirmish were located frozen into a solid block at the bottom of a huge hole
filled with ice. As in all wars, what 19 year old could possibly be prepared
for that?
After combat duty ended, he picked
up mom, who at the time lived in Loudon,
Tennessee, and took her across
country in 1952. Along the way they married, first in Mexico, then again when they reached San Diego, California,
where dad was stationed. Neither of them talked much about their courtship and
I have never had enough curiosity to inquire. Apart from that, mom left California to live at my grandmother’s, now in Madisonville, Tennessee,
after she became pregnant in 1954. Dad remained in the Marines and California (he occasionally came to Tennessee on leave, and once AWOL) until his
discharge in 1959.
Transition to civilian life was not
easy for him. He was used to living like the carefree, hard-drinking drill
instructor he’d been since 1952, so his return was bumpy. He got a job in
construction right off the bat, but his erratic behavior was scary and
destructive to the weak family unit. Sometimes he’d leave for work around 6 AM
and return drunk as a skunk sometime in the next early morning. After a fight
with my mom he’d sleep a little and go off to work. He’d then be good for
awhile before the same thing would happen again. After several months of this
routine he and mom divorced. I was sad and relieved at the same time. Not long
before I began school, dad took classes to become a mechanic. He eventually
started coming back around. One night we went to the theatre in Loudon to see Psycho. They told me after the movie
that they were going to remarry. I protested, not because I didn’t love my dad,
but because I didn’t want to revisit the shit we’d already been through. He
assured me that would not be the case, and it wasn’t.
The troubles weren’t over by a long
shot. Dad’s hard living softened, but he just didn’t know what he wanted to be
when he grew up (not unlike my own situation now), so he wandered around either
working in dead end jobs or moping around the house out of work. Finally mom
went to Norfolk
to work in the restaurant where both my aunt and uncle worked, and dad followed
a couple of weeks later. At first he worked as a short order curb cook with mom
(she and my aunt were carhops; my uncle made pizzas) at Freddy’s, but found
other work as an auto mechanic.
I began to bond with dad at the
movies in Norfolk
in 1963. We went to a drive-in near Hewitt Farms every Saturday night. The
first movie we saw was Dr. No. We
also saw and enjoyed The Longest Day
that same summer. This dad was someone I liked a lot. That was when I really
got to know him for the first time. He was still sort of a devil may care kind
of guy, but I was too, so we bonded.
When I returned to Norfolk in 1964, dad was riding high. He had
a good job repairing forklifts for Slick Airways, which had a contract to haul
things for the Navy. Often, when mom worked, I spent time on the naval base
while dad worked. I got to know an aircraft mechanic who took a liking to me
and would take me with him to sit in the cockpit of the planes while he did
repair and maintenance. How good can a kid have it?
Not only did dad have a good job,
but he also had a new car, a red, 1962 Ford Galaxy 500. We usually rode around
in jalopies held together with spit and prayer, so the Ford was a big step up.
Dad told me he really liked that car, even years after he’d traded it in for
another. When I rode with dad we always listened to country music because
that’s what he liked. I don’t know who any of the artists were (unless it was
someone I heard on television), and even though I wanted to listen to Top 40,
it didn’t matter. We usually had a great time.
*
Time with mom wasn’t wasted either.
Before my trip began, and during it, mom touted this place called The Giant
Food Market. I didn’t know what to think, I mean, how am I supposed to feel
about a supermarket, even a giant one? But the constant build-up had stirred my
curiosity, though I couldn’t believe, nor could she really convey, what was in
store. On the Monday of my second week in town the whole family arose early and
mom drove dad out to the base for his work, then she took me to The Giant.
Ok, it looked big from the outside,
but all the buildings there were bigger than in my hometown. The Giant parking
lot could have contained about half of downtown Madisonville, and when I entered the store
saw that the other half could easily be contained within. The darned place was
huge. The ceiling was twenty feet up, and the walls were about 150 yards apart.
Our excuse for being there wasn’t
grocery shopping but breakfast. A wall-less, open air restaurant section sat
roped off to the right of the entrance. Only a few places opened for breakfast
(others opened for lunch and dinner only), but the selection was impressive. We
ate at a diner like business that served food on Formica tables. I usually had
pancakes or scrambled eggs, and maybe cereal with fruit. I didn’t mind waking
early that day.
After breakfast we started to look
around and explore. One of the restaurants we walked past had an open flame
beneath a rotisserie that skewered an entire side of beef, just like I’d seen
in westerns. One path led through the diabetic section, which was nearly as big
as Sloan’s entire store in Madisonville.
The shelves of low cal stuff emptied into the fresh catch bins of the fish
market. I saw silver, beheaded fish better than four feet long. That day was
the first time I had encountered squid. “Whatta ya do with those?” I asked.
“Some people eat em,” mom answered.
We eventually wandered into the toy
section. Christ, they had everything there. I think mom bought me a mask,
flippers, and snorkel there that first time. I also stumbled onto the comics
rack. To my surprise, many of the titles were packaged in groups of three (for
only a quarter) inside a sealed plastic wrapper. The catch, of course, was that
the middle title, sandwiched between the other two, was a blind man’s bluff.
Still, at three for the price of two, the risk, especially since it was mom’s
money, seemed worth the possibility of a pitiful outcome. Well, here’s the
thing: the good part was that I got to read, over the summer, about two years’
worth of Spider Man, quite a few Fantastic Four titles, Ironman issues, and some other things to
boot. I got several issues of Teen Age
Hotrodders, and one or two issues of Space
Family Robinson. The down side was that Archie
Comics (not the worst, but not what I wanted), or Donald Duck, and sometimes a repeat of a comic I already owned
occasionally turned up in the mix.
Something about The Giant that I
discovered in subsequent days (I couldn’t see everything in one trip) was the
ice cream counter. They had one treat that I thought was the greatest in the
world. It was really a banana split, but instead of a plastic boat, it came in
a slightly hollowed-out pineapple. Eating one was usually a two try event. I
tried several times that summer.
I thought nothing could top The
Giant, but on the way home we stopped at a more meager department store (sorry,
but I don’t remember the name) which turned out to be as important as The Giant
because it had toys, especially models, baseball equipment, packages of comics
(same as The Giant), an arcade, and a large number of paperbacked publications
that I was interested in. I purchased several repackaged collections of Mad Magazine features, including Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, and
a couple of compilations of newspaper funnies. My Virginia model collection began there with a
couple of models and all the supplies needed to assemble and paint them. Before
the summer wound down I had put together two of the great air forces of WWII,
in that I acquired fighters of the US
and Germany,
and a B-17 bomber.
Monday was mom’s day off, and I
don’t think we missed kicking off the week in like fashion for the entire
summer. Sometimes after breakfast we’d go home for bit before heading to the
beach in the afternoon, or even to my aunt and uncle’s. On the way home we
usually had a Burger King meal, or sometimes stopped at Freddie’s because I
loved its spaghetti (still my favorite dish) and other food. I also tasted my
first Chinese food (always pork chow mein) that summer. There was too much to
do to ever be bored. Who needed baseball?
*
The Classics Illustrated comics
ordered earlier that summer arrived in three installments (I believe some
issues were on back order), so the house was cluttered with stuff for me to
read. My parents also purchased a set of Standard encyclopedias from some guy
who worked with them at Freddie’s. Like many people who worked at the
restaurant, the guy was in the Navy and had duty elsewhere, so he was selling
off all the loose ends. As part of the deal he also threw in a stack of
Playboys. Thank you, God! I fell in love many times over.
About midsummer, the gentleman who
lived behind us suggested I meet his grandson. Sure. The neighbor introduced us
and we started to hang out and toss baseball and stuff like that. He was a
couple of years and grades behind me, but was a pretty good kid. I introduced
him to Pig and she paid him to work with me in her flower garden. He wasn’t
really interested in comics or model planes, and I never asked him about
Playboys, so tossing a baseball was pretty much it.
One day he invited me to his house
for lunch and to play and whatnot. The kid met me in my backyard at the
appointed time. We walked down a couple of blocks and into a slightly more
isolated neighbor then cut through several backyards and finally penetrated a
wooded boundary into the kid’s backyard. About thirty yards from the tree line
and a little way downhill from the house was a beautiful, blonde woman hanging
up laundry. Every time she bent forward to pick a piece to hang her blouse
collar hung loosely enough to expose her breasts (she wasn’t wearing a bra)
quite convincingly. That heavenly vision nearly stopped me in my tracks. “Hey
mom,” the kid said. Mom? Christ, she looked like one of the Playboy girls. It
was all I could do to avoid hyperventilation. She had platinum blonde hair,
blue eyes, and a perfect body. The clincher: She had an Elke Sommer accent.
Yeah, all that and she was a Swede. Sveet.
*
Summer dripped away and I returned
to Madisonville.
It was like going back in time. Everything slowed to a crawl. I always felt, or
at least acted like I felt, world weary, like my mere existence was existential
bravery in the face of all odds. I hated looking so plastic and unfashionable
in my shiny new school duds and worked hard to knock the store bought smell off
em. I wore out the toes of my shoes in no time flat. I dipped my comb in
Vaseline Jelly and greased the shit outta my hair. I wore rings, yes, even
girl’s rings, for the damage they might do if I got into a fight. I’m sure I
looked like I was asking for one.
Other than that, everything went
back to the way it had been, and it pretty much stayed that way. Repetitions of
the same old routine as the year before and the year to come swept me along.
Music was really secondary to television, especially science fiction movies,
though I heard some great stuff on Tarzan
soundtracks. I regularly watched Sing
Along With Mitch, The Dean Martin
Show, Hullabaloo, The Andy Williams Show, and The Danny Kaye show, and of course the
Saturday country shows continued.
I went back to Norfolk one last time. It was sort of a bust.
We lived in a shitty location in a small upstairs apartment. The owner’s dog
hated me and once bit me. My parents did not try to bribe me because they had
in their minds returning to Madisonville,
and they eventually did. To me the years of 1964 through 1966 were nothing but
mushy simulations of the past. I really needed something new, and when the
gasoline is ready the fire will come. O youth!
Phase 5
Well, maybe I did skip a couple of
things. The Christmases of 1964 and 1965 were great for me, as usual, but were
unusual in that both seasons were unusually warm and more like spring than
early winter. Nearly all the Christmases I remember up to those years had been cold,
snow covered affairs like the pictures of Currier and Ives prints, save for the
sleighs. I went hunting with dad and my dog in 1964. Temps got into the 70s
that day. It seemed weird but pleasant. We had an 11 inch accumulation of snow
in early 1965, and another that knocked out a week of school just two weeks
after Christmas vacation ended in early 1966.
Both Easters, in 1965 and 1966, were
quite warm as well. One of them, I can’t remember which, was downright hot. I
was out in the yard imagining some sort of play when granny called me to dinner
(around 2:30 PM because we always ate in the afternoon on holidays). I was
drenched with sweet when dinner began. Beads dripped from my hairline and down
my forehead. Yummy ham and sides, though.
Another of those years, again I
don’t remember which, my aunt and her newish husband came from Ohio for the holiday. It
was good to see my aunt at Easter. She’s really the person I associate most
with Easter because she was around when I still believed in the Easter Bunny,
and she was an expert at putting together a professional looking basket. She
also had a collection of Easter eggs from various years (the oldest was from 1957).
A few times we watched the late night television Easter Eve fare which was
always a biblical epic teeming with scantily clad dancing girls. She probably
didn’t pay as much attention to the girls as I did.
Besides a pleasant visit, my newish
uncle bought a Buck Owens LP soon after arriving at granny’s. He must have
really liked it because he played the grooves smooth. I liked it too. The
record contained the songs Together Again
and My Heart Skips a Beat. We
listened to it every day. I thought it was great. They left the LP behind when
they went back to Ohio.
*
Because it had to happen, an
influential friend I made was a guy I met at little league tryouts. His name
here is CEP, and he was a very smart and interesting person. We shared two
obsessions in girls and comics. There was a lot to talk about while standing
around at first base (at the old railroad stadium) while kid after kid hacked
at pitch after pitch. I got a pretty severe sunburn that day, but I made
another good and influential friend. About two weeks after that first meeting,
CEP and his folks moved next door.
Throughout the summer we played
baseball (or, at least he did, on a different team than me, while, as usual
when I have to play nice with others, I was ostracized by my teammates and
retired), listened to music (Hanky Panky,
We Ain’t Got Nothing Yet, Summer In the City, and Along Comes Mary played loudly wherever we were), read comics, talked about
girls, and played hard while my new friend taught me how to be a football
receiver. I liked sports, what little I knew about them, and CEP said that
football was the gateway to the girls of our dreams. I was sold. I worked my
butt off learning the necessary routes I had to perfect. Other than a bad
throat infection I acquired about midsummer, it was a great time.
School began by separating us. CCP
was in Junior High while I was in 6th grade, and still attached to
the primary school. God, what a horrible year! My teacher, may she burn
forevermore in Hell, hated me (and several others) while seemingly bowing and
stooping to those students whose parents were well to do. The teacher was so
concerned with the possibility of the pollution of these better dressed
students by the ragtag bunch of the rest of us that she segregated them, with a
few exceptions, to one side of the room. It was like she was trying to protect
them, but I was never sure from what. It wasn’t from me because I liked most of
them. Maybe they hated me, but I didn’t detect that. Perhaps she worried about
the two black students in the class. They both seemed ok to me, though, so I
really don’t know.
Before going on, let me explain how my
particular teacher was not so unusual for that period. In fact, when I had
begun to notice the inequity of her attitude, I could see it all around. The
principal of the school certainly was on board with the idea that some students
were supposed to be treated differently. It was the same thing with coaches and
adults who sucked up to those children to score brownie points with the
parents. Teachers’ pets tended to be from richer families. My guess is the
practice continues to this day.
If that weren’t not bad enough (and
it was), 6th graders were allowed to join the junior high football
team. Yes, that is what I wanted, but the broken leg I received as result of a
clip administered to the backs of my legs by the brother of one of my friends
put a damper on everything. So for the next eight weeks I hobbled around on
crutches, my poor leg in a cast, the hopes and wishes of having the girls of my
dreams dashed by some miserable jerk-off.
Still, not all was lost. CEP turned
me on to The Monkees, which in and of itself was no big deal, except that it
started wheels turning in CEP’s head. Watching those cool looking guys and
their antics was like a powerful medicine. It all seemed like such a fun way to
live and be that one day CEP sprung upon me that we, he and I, should start a
band and live like The Monkees, or The Beatles, or anybody else in that line.
It was like a blow to the head via a 16 lbs hammer. Sure, I thought, why not?
They played music (which I loved), they made shitloads of money (which was not
entirely true, but I still liked it), and the girls seemed to love em (I’m in).
We started working and plotting then and there. Of course CEP was the thinker
between us. Then as now I was more of a manifestation of the Id than of
deliberate contemplation, so whatever CEP came up with was more than ok with
me.
“We’ve got to learn to play
instruments,” he said.
That made sense. To be a band we had
to play something, but what? Neither of us had musical parents nor owned instruments.
He wondered what I wanted to play. Hell, I had no idea. What about him, I
wondered?
“I wanna be a guitar player or
singer,” he said. I thought it was a good idea. “I think you ought to play
keyboards.” Keyboards. Wow. I had never really thought about that, even though
I owned a two octave Magnus chord organ that my folks gave me for Christmas in
5th grade. CEP urged me to learn on that and then worry with getting
other equipment later. Seemed like a good plan. We started hammering on our
parents for equipment right away. CEP scored first when his parents bought him
an off brand guitar, an Estey Magnatone amp, a Shure microphone, and a
tambourine for Christmas of ’66. It took me another year.
*
I became interested in joining the
Cub Scouts while in the fourth grade. A friend of mine whose dad was
scoutmaster invited me to a troop meeting. I became a member in late 1964. To
be honest, I was a little disappointed because the things I associated with
(and wanted most from) scouting, mainly knives and hatchets, were totally
absent from the program. “They do all that in Boy Scouts,” someone told me, so
I decided to wait it out. It was ok: I got to wear a nice uniform (with hat),
and consumed great refreshments every week.
Mom and dad returned to stay in
spring of 1966 and we moved back to our place across the road from my
grandmother’s house. About six months later, for my 12th birthday, I
got the most important piece of musical equipment up to then when my parents
gave me a transistor radio. For the first time in quite a while I was able to
listen to whatever I wanted, which at that time was WNOX in Knoxville, where the hits played 24 hours a
day. I was in heaven.
Five or six weeks after my birthday,
I took the leap and joined the Boy Scouts. I could reveal many details about
that experience, but the real point here is that I met a fellow scout who
became a great influence and friend. Since I can’t use names, I’ll call this
guy Tig, because he told me he had a Mattel Tiger guitar like the ones
advertised on TV (and because a beautiful girl he was in love with called him
Tig). I thought he was the second luckiest person around (a couple of brothers
in the scouts had Honda motorcycles, so I guess I thought they were luckier
than anyone on the planet). Actually, the friend who invited me to Cub Scouts
was the drummer in my second band, but that’s still a bit further down the road
from scouts. The news about the guitar made me wonder, and probably made me a
little jealous, too.
My Boy Scouting experiences did not
last that long. I went on campouts and other functions for a little over a year
before petering out after summer camp. To be clear, I’m not cut out for the
type of rigor that scouting required. I’m so not into authoritative
organizations that being told what to do by a peer is galling to me, and the
peers seemed bent on controlling us in a nearly National Socialist manner, so
out I go. By the time basketball season rolled around during 7th
grade, there was no time for Scouts anyway, so all’s well.
*
Going into 7th grade felt
like I imagine an anthropologist feels when first setting foot on a strange
land where an equally strange society might kill rather than allow study of its
culture. No kidding. Rather than the familiar faces I had been schooled with
until then, a new crop of people who had attended smaller schools infiltrated
when the small schools were closed and consolidated after a new high school had
been built. This was not all bad, especially when a new crop of girls was
factored in. As might be expected, of course, the new guys, hicks from the
hinterlands of the county, were a nightmare with their country ways and boorish
behavior. I can’t escape my own criticisms here because I’ve exhibited plenty
of the same shitty attitudes and actions toward my fellow humans. It’s the pot
calling the kettle black, but still, from my point of view, I was locked into a
situation where my worst impulses were unleashed to commingle with, to me, a
spate of unhip and largely stupid mindsets. It’s 1967, for Christsakes! What’s
wrong with you people? Didn’t you guys go through the same Summer of Love as
everybody else? Where’s the free love, the music, the antiauthoritarianism?
What was this?
Well, no matter what my classmates
were into, I had experienced the SOL, at least through the music. With my tiny
General Electric transistor radio I had a constant flow of music that turned my
bedroom into a fortress of solitude. Out in the real world, my parents’ living
room, I saw all the up and coming acts on Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, and The
Smothers Brothers. My folks had, on a trip to Knoxville to shop for school clothes, agreed
to buy me an album. It took most of the day to narrow down my possible choices.
I finally had to decide between Freak Out,
by The Mothers of Invention (two records for the price of one), and Strange Days, by The Doors. With Light My Fire still on my mind (and I
hadn’t even heard the long version of it), I took The Doors.
During the first week of school, a
circus that came to town around every two years, was visiting and setting up on
campus near the railroad tracks that ran closely past the primary and junior
high schools. A large number of students went over to look at the elephants
after lunch and before class. Great fun was made when one elephant cut loose
about 10 gallons of piss. A girls I though particularly cute looked like she
was about to bust a gut laughing so hard. Some circus guy standing there
whispered something into the elephant’s ear. Suddenly, another guy ran up and
without the hint of kindness roughly told the man to take the elephant away,
then told us to go away as well.
I was lucky enough to have Phys Ed
with CEP and a couple of other young men I knew, so I wasn’t totally alone,
though I often felt that way. About two weeks into the new school year I became
reacquainted and friendly with Brillo, who had been in my 2nd grade
class. We weren’t friends then, in fact, I thought he was uppity, though I now
realize that really wasn’t the case. I’d seen him playing a lap steel guitar
for a 6th grade assembly program, but had not been at all close to
him up till then. That changed in a flash. We became fast, nearly inseparable
friends for the simple reason that he got
me, or better, he got what I was
about. He was much the same, to my surprise, as I. For me, being around him was
like being hooked to a battery that amplified my most outrageous ideas and
behaviors. The teachers did not love us. I was blessed to meet someone like him
who was the perfect foil for my anarchy in that crazy school situation.
Big stuff happened on my 13th
birthday in 1967. After school, and to the dismay of my parents, I often walked
with CEP to his family’s business to spend a couple of hours listening to the
juke box and goofing off until near suppertime when I made my way home. On my
birthday I took the extra liberty of extending that time a little (it was my
birthday, what could anyone do), so supper was waiting at my grandmother’s when
I got there. I feel sorry for my parents because they really wanted to spend time with me while I unwrapped my presents and
enjoyed cake as I had on all my birthdays until then, but were disappointed
when they learned that I wanted to go to a dance instead of staying home (we
all must grow up and break free). I could see they were sort of hurt, but I had
no sympathy for their desires since it was my birthday and not theirs. I met up
with CEP and we cut out.
I’d been going to dances since the
winter before when a friend of mine, the same guy who got me started going to
the movies (man, I’m really in debt to that guy), suggested I go see a band
playing at the soon to be vacated high school. I went, danced, and loved the group.
Apart from the high school marching band, it was the first live music I had
experienced and I was impressed. I thought the band was great. Not long after
that first experience, the band played a talent show where the members’ new
equipment was unveiled. That was when I first learned I had a fetish for
musical equipment. I liked the old equipment, but the new was something else.
My friend’s brother had a new Gretsch Country Gentleman guitar, just like the
one George Harrison of The Beatles played, and a tall Toby amp that looked like
a washing machine. In The Beatles vein, the drummer had a set of Ludwig drums
like Ringo’s. The bass player bought a new Yamaha bass, and the
singer/guitarist/keyboard player got a new Doric organ, a Gretsch amp, and a
Gretsch Astro Jet guitar. All that opened my eyes and gave me a target to shoot
for.
The dance, held in the same room
where Boy Scouts had formally met just a few months prior, had begun before CEP
and I arrived. Tig, my old buddy from Scouts, played lead guitar. He had
graduated from the Mattel Tiger to a hollow body Fender Cordova electric guitar
and a Supra amp. Two of the other members were guys who I had over to my house
when I was still working on putting together a band a few months earlier. There
was also the singer who I would get to know very well a short time hence.
In some ways the gig was a bust.
There were a few pretty girls there (ok, they were the only girls there) and a
few guys. The band, Aftermath, played a several numbers, but it started to
become more of a social event than a dance, and more or less degraded into a
sort of jam session where a friend of mine, who had the same birthday as me,
and I sang the song Detroit City, at
least until the other singer turned off the amp we sang through. I didn’t even
notice. Sometime during the evening a fellow I almost knew came in and guest
sang Little Latin Lupe Lou. No one
turned off the amp while he sang. Little did I know that I would play in bands
with five of the nine guys who were in the room that night.
*
I must backtrack a bit. I’d
forgotten that I did have a couple of albums in 1966. My parents joined the
Columbia Record Club. The club was a great idea for those who loved music but,
like us, lived in a town where the pickings were slim when it came to buying
records. The deal was that the club sent a number of records for a penny or a
dollar as a teaser, after which the contract stated that 12 additional records,
one per month, must be purchased at the regular price. My parents allowed me to
choose some of the first batch and would allow me to choose a record every two
months or so. I was happy with that. Of course I liked my selections, and my
mom’s selections weren’t so bad either. She ordered The Dave Clark Five’s Greatest Hits, and a couple of Herb Alpert
records. Dad got Johnny Cash and other country records, probably by Jim Reeves.
Two of my selections, Paul Revere and the
Raiders’ Greatest Hits and The Blues Magoos’ Psychedelic Lollypop (a favorite to this day) brought many hours of
pleasure.
The summer after sixth grade was
little more than a long listening session. CEP had moved from next door to a
place about a mile away. I was accustomed to walking everywhere I went so that
was nothing. He and I and another guy, Lawman, who had not long lived in my
neighborhood, were big basketball players and music lovers. Many Sundays were
spent walking the three miles to and from Hiwassee College
where we often had the gym to ourselves. A lot of the rest of the time was
spent in my family’s living room listening to my small record collection.
Lawman really loved a Blues Magoos’ cover of I’ll Go Crazy, a James Brown song. CEP and I used these sessions to
pick through various songs we might want to do if and when we were able to put
together a band.
The local scene really exploded
during the Summer of Love. Not so long after school let out, Madisonville’s local band played a gig in a
laundry mat, and later performed a series of dances at the city swimming pool.
I loved those engagements. What could be better than listening to a band and
being in the pool with a bunch of high school girls? I don’t know how I stood
it. Another band, from Sweetwater, Madisonville’s
top rival in Monroe County, played the pool. CEP and I
screwed up the courage to approach the lead guitarist/singer and the keyboard
player and asked if they’d be interested in instructing us in those respective
instruments. The two guys, brothers we discovered, said sure, and so a time,
place, and fee were agreed to. We took a total of six lessons, enough to learn
a few songs and acquire chord charts for our instruments.
Along the way that summer CEP
invited me to stay overnight at the home of his cousin in the Mount Vernon community. The cousin’s mother
worked nights and we were left alone with just a very old grandmother in
charge. She went to bed early and two of cuz’s friends came by to hang into the
late night. We drove around a bit in the country before the other guys went
home. They were both great fellows and it was fun to be with them. After
goofing off in the yard until two or three a.m. we went back into the house
where, using CEP’s guitar (unamplified), cuz’s drumsticks, and an ironing board
as props, we mimed a few song playing from cuz’s singles collection. We felt
stupid afterwards, but all agreed that it had been fun.
As the night began to dwindle away
and we became tired and sleepy but unwilling to give up, something totally unexpected
happened. CEP was picking around on the guitar when he came up with a little,
nice sounding sequence. Damn! That sounded like a song. I got very interested
and moved close to the guitar. CEP standardized his creation until he had put
together a couple of parts. One of us came up with a line and we began to build
on it. In 40 or so minutes we had a fleshed out song. We were shocked, as much
because of the division of the invention as anything else. We’d always planned
to write songs as part of the big idea, but the plan had been that I would work
on the music and CEP would cover the lyrics. What happened was the reverse in
that it was me who supplied the lion’s share of the words. “You know, you’re
pretty good at lyrics,” CEP told me. I was very proud. The song, as could be
expected, was junior high in every aspect, but hell, we didn’t know anybody
else around who wrote, so we felt really good about it. We’re on par with The
Beatles now, we reasoned.
Several other bands came to Madisonville during the
summer and I saw and learned as much from all of them I could, though I still
liked the town’s local group the best. They had a wide playlist of radio hit
covers, and they had steps, lifted from Paul Revere and the Raiders I later
discovered, along with their dazzling equipment. Some of the songs they played
still impress me. They always opened with You
Can’t Sit Down. It was perfect. And the bass intro to Night Train, which they played at breakneck speed, blew me away.
They seemed very professional and I liked them very much.
*
Also during this period I discovered
the music press. It was near the end of sixth grade, before my keyboard
lessons, so though I still had pop music ambitions, all I had was a transistor
radio and my imagination as instruments. Contact with CEP had diminished since
his move across town and our schooling occurring in different buildings. On a
drizzly day in early spring I called him to catch up. He said he had learned a
few chords and had learned a version of the opening riff of The Stones’ Satisfaction. All I had to say was that
I’d heard some groovy songs, and had watched some fine television. After that
we talked mostly about girls until hang-up. I needed more information.
One day after school I was in the
drug store looking through the magazine rack. It’s the same place where I used
to buy comics, though by this time they had fallen out of favor with me, so I
can’t remember what I wanted, but found Song Hits, a magazine that had stories
about musicians and musical events, and contained lyrics to many of the hits of
the day. I hadn’t realized that such a publication existed. What a wonderful
thing! I could immediately see how song lyrics would be useful and time saving.
I bought it (actually, I might have bought one just a bit later because I
probably didn’t have any money on the day of discovery). I studied it
carefully. My two favorite songs at the time were Tell It to My Face and Happy
Together. The lyrics to both were inside. Pretty soon CEP and I were buying
copies every month.
Being far more thorough than me, CEP
found an advertisement for a cache of magazines that contained music and lyrics
to recent popular songs as well as articles about music and musicians. He said
we each needed $3.50 to make an order. That was a lot of dough for a kid in
those days, so I mowed lawns and clipped hedges (I was paid a dollar for a lawn
and the same for a hedge row) until I’d earned my share. We got the mags in
about a month. They were back issues of a title that I cannot remember, and all
the songs within were things that were formally popular on the charts, but for
the most part were still popular with us. Many of the songs would later be considered
standards. We’d struck big.
CEP and I split issues, and then
traded so we had the full benefit of our purchase. One thing I noticed was that
the articles tended to be harder edged and oriented more toward rock than pop.
Sure, a few popish songs were included (folkish songs too), but most info was
about bands rather than singers, which was perfect for us. I wish I still had
those publications, not to sell on Ebay, but to occasionally reexamine and see
what they would teach me now. Can’t keep everything, though. I doubt that many
issues survived the summer.
A week or so after seventh grade
began, CEP, Lawman, and I were going to a football game. We made a run through
town (about a two minute from the football field) before the game, and I bought
a special rock explosion issue of Hit
Parader magazine, which touted the new British Invasion and the new
direction in rock music. Now we’d been hearing this new direction all summer,
but now I’d positioned myself for the inside dope (that word being more
appropriate than I knew at the time) on the workings of it. So on the following
Saturday morning I sat in granny’s living room floor and alternated between Space Ghost on television and articles
about all manner of musicians and their groups. Some of the stuff I learned was
shocking (Brian Jones quoted as saying he didn’t believe in God), but most was
pure pleasure. The knowledge made me feel a part of the music world, and the
habit of reading such publications (Crawdaddy
and Rolling Stone a few years later) and related books has stayed with me to
the present.
The world began to open to me via
the music. I began to consider ideas that were very different than what I had
been brought up on, and I began to act accordingly through my questioning of
the status quo, even questioning the musical status quo. Something new was
happening and I wanted to be a part of it without knowing what that entailed.
From my standpoint, only one piece of the puzzle remained, but soon it would be
in place as well.
Phase 6
Madisonville’s best known band’s
purchase of new equipment set off something of a cold war-like equipment race
in the area when the members traded up from beginner to professional gear. (I
haven’t called the band by name because that’s part of its story and I don’t
want to step on it in case the members want to tell their stories themselves
[though I’d rather they hire me to do it].) Even some of those members made
quick changes. The keyboardist/singer switched from the Doric organ to a
Farfisa Combo Compact organ. The Farfisa was quite a sweet machine. Of course I
wanted on just like it, but discovered its cost and knew I had no hope. Oh,
well. Sometime afterward the lead guitarist traded the Toby amp for a Fender
Bandmaster, an amp on par with even the Vox amps The Beatles used. He also
added a fuzztone module that connected to the guitar via the out jack (and he
was a master of its properties), and later brought on a wah-wah pedal (he was
very good with that as well). The new equipment allowed for expansion into the
new sounds that were becoming standard in pop music.
When CEP and I had seen the band
from Sweetwater at the Madisonville
pool, the guitarist had recently purchased a Gretsch Country Gentleman. I
assure you that those GCGs weren’t cheap. I recall that they cost around $700,
which, in 1967 buying power, was quite expensive. The organist for that same
band had a Silvertone console organ. The organ had a very nice sound, bass
pedals, lots of voices, built in amp and speakers, including a Leslie speaker
(rarely heard except via Hammond organs: Booker T, for instance), but the darn
thing weighed a ton. A wonderful piece of equipment, though.
It was in this atmosphere that I
lobbied my parents for an organ. The organs that locals played were all I was
aware of, but I was on the lookout for anything that I might be able to play in
a band. I had practiced mightily on the old two octave Magnus chord in my
bedroom until I had the major, minor, and seventh chords down, and I had
learned a few songs. My parents were skeptical of my motives. “I’m just worried
that you won’t stick with it,” they said over and over. I knew I would, but how
can one convince another of that? I understand their concerns (though I didn’t
then) because my parents weren’t rich or anything close to it. That’s not a
slam. I’m not rich or anything close to it either.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend of
1967 my dear old mom and dad relented. We got up early the following Saturday
and my family, along with CEP, went to Knoxville
to see what we could find. The deal was that we’d shop for an organ in the
early part of the day, then go over to Atlantic Mills for Christmas shopping. We
prowled pawn shops and a couple of music stores on Gay Street. I saw an organ in the pawn
shop that didn’t impress me (though I’m sure it would have worked out just
fine), and I saw one of the new Fender organs (which impressed me very much).
After lunch, organ shopping ended and we headed west.
A couple of months before that day,
while at the county fair in Sweetwater, CEP and I had stopped by the Lee’s
Music booth and talked to a nice lady there. She had a stack of Fender products
brochures exhibiting guitars, amps, and keyboards, and those of several other
companies’ lines. She allowed us to take these. On the way out we ran into the
keyboard player from another Sweetwater band we’d met during our music lessons.
He’d just purchased a double keyboard Farfisa organ. Damn! We didn’t get to
hear the guy’s band, but the keyboard was impressive.
The weekend following the Knoxville trip, my parents and I stopped by Lee’s Music in
Athens, Tennessee.
Pay dirt! A sweet little red and black Tolex covered 49 key Gem organ awaited
me. It looked very similar to a Vox Jaguar organ (in fact, the Gem company
manufactured that product for Vox), and at $300 seemed a steal compared to
everything else we’d seen. Poor old mom and dad signed the papers and we took
it home. I was very happy. The deal was that the organ was a Christmas present
and I’d have to wait to take possession of it, but that just made it all
sweeter. Look out, girls, we’re already in your town!
*
Ok, so what kind of town was I about
to conquer? What sorts of rhythms regulated our human traffic? Well, if city
dwelling is a goal it will not be realized in Madisonville, even yet. Monroe Country, like
the counties surrounding it, is largely rural. I lived right on the edge of the
city limits. I walked about a half mile to and from school every morning and
afternoon. In those days, and for about 15 more years, there were still a few
small farms inside the city. I passed several to and from school. I lived on
the Old Athens Road,
just past a split point where a gravel road veered off between the Church of God
on the northern side, and Westside Baptist to the south. In the middle of the
dividing line was the neighborhood store. I lived about 50 yards west of that.
Since, like any small grocery, the store had dopes (soft drinks) and candy,
kids hung around there all the time. The store owner liked kids and tolerated
them.
I didn’t think of myself as a
townie, but I was not a country boy either. Other than vegetable gardening,
I’ve done no other farm labor. I’ve never milked a cow, never fed chickens,
never driven a tractor. The few times I hauled hay were miserable, and, after
1971, never repeated. I’m not saying I’m too good for any of that. The fact is
that I’m not good enough for it. I’ve seen guys carry two bales of hay, like
suitcases, at a time, when it was all I could do to hoist a single bale onto
the wagon. Even the girls, lust inducing as they were, out-toughed me. I wasn’t
a 98 pound weakling (more like a 110 pound version of it) either. I’m just not
cut out for that sort of labor.
The old neighborhood, where my mom
still lives, was Greenwood Circle,
which had been subdivided from the Greenwood Farm. Bits of the farm still
existed until the early 70’s when what became New Highway 68 bowled through the
giant red barn that appeared to be the last working remnant of the place. At
the end of the circle, behind the church furniture manufacturing plant, and
stretching a mile or so north and south between the railroad tracks and a creek
emanating from a spring fed pond, was a thin strand of woods filled with tall
pines in some patches, and myriad hard and soft woods along the way. My family
had done a lot of blackberry picking out there, and right in the middle of the
woods was a nice path where at one time (and I have no idea when that time was)
the railroad had routed through. An old abandoned cinder block building with
thick concrete supports inside was situated near the tracks. What it had been
is still a mystery to me. Some friends and I found a newspaper dating from 1954
inside the place nearly 20 years after that date. It was destroyed sometime in
the 1980s.
Pretty near the old building was an
old road that dead ended before reaching the railroad tracks. The north side of
the road emptied onto Warren
Street, very close to Greenwood Circle. In the late 60’s a
wooden bridge spanned the creek (the same creek that ran around behind the
primary school and football field) near a small, seemingly isolated house,
quite segregated from the other houses on the north end, though not so far
away. There was an older fellow (how old I can’t say since I was terrible at age
guessing then, but he was probably as old, or a little older, than my
grandmother, who was in her early 50’s at that time) living there. He was well
known all over town by his nickname, and I had often seen him in my
neighborhood as well as in the woods. I’d overheard people speak of him, and in
some code I wasn’t privy to (and still am not sure about) nearly always said,
“Well, he doesn’t bother anybody.”
Not very far from the old fellow’s
house, in a sort of enclave near the dead end, was what I had been told was an
Indian (Native American) graveyard. True or not I can’t say, but the ground
there was flat and not covered in trees, though surrounded by them, and there
were what appeared to be headstones of an old timey type like I had seen in
older sections of some cemeteries (there are a few in the Hiwassee College
cemetery), and so old that all information had been worn away from the stone
faces. I last walked down that street in 1985. By then the wooden bridge had
fallen, and the old fellow’s house (he was dead) was nearly gone. I looked for
the cemetery, but the location I’d remembered was covered by what appeared to
be a sewer project.
The town of Madisonville itself seemed pretty old. It was
a straight shot from Greenwood
Circle down Warren Street (which ran east and west
through it) into town proper. The landmarks along the way were nearly as
interesting as town. The first was a house (largely abandoned but still
standing, and for sale) across from the primary (or grammar) school. It wasn’t
the house that was so interesting (though at times no one lived there for years
at a stretch), but an underground garage right on the edge of Old Athens Road was
the fascination. The doors were always locked and that just made it more
mysterious and allowed for all manner of speculation.
Just feet away, right beside the
railroad tracks, was a wood treating operation. The fellow who worked there
looked like a clean shaven, shorter version of Abe Lincoln. He controlled a
boiler that occasionally let off enough steam to fog the control room and even
an area outside near a water spigot from which I had taken many a drink on my
way home after the movies. Though the building is gone, the site is now the
location of the Habitat for Humanity store.
I always considered the railroad
tracks as the town boundary. Immediately past them and beside a sidewalk
inclining upward was the Stickley property and mansion. The guy who owned it
had also owned one of the drugstores in town. He died not long after selling
the drugstore, and the grounds of the soon emptied house became largely wild,
so a strand of trees lined the sidewalk and obscured sight of the mansion,
which looked pretty spooky on a late grey afternoon or at night. In the fall,
hedge apples, many smashed or rotting, covered the walk and southern side of
the road there.
Across from the mansion, where the
street curved slightly right as it inclined toward town, was another country
type store. One of the owner’s sons was a friend of mine (also a drummer), and
an older son was a friend of my youngest aunt. Though truly a country store, it
was the first place in town with an Icee machine. Like some of the stores farther
out of town, a single gasoline pump was situated close to the outer wall
between the two doors of the business (of which one section served as storage,
but for some reason the owner switched out toward the end of the 60’s). The
store also played briefly into my musical history a few years later.
Madisonville rests on a flat spot atop a
hill. A total of four streets make up the main drags. The courthouse sits right
in the middle. Four traffic lights controlled (control, since that hasn’t changed)
automobile flow. The most important section for a kid was on the southwestern
side of town where its Mecca,
The Dime Store (actually, there were two of them, side by side, until one
bought out the other), offered almost anything anyone might want. It was an
amazing place. The store had the best selection of toys in town, but also sold
all manner of house wares, clothing, records, and the list goes on. It’s where
I did all my Christmas shopping, but the thing that fascinated me as a kid was the
candy counter. The greatest selection of delicacies known to humankind, more
than could be consumed in a lifetime, shouted to my eyes from glass encased
bins that revealed every single morsel. Because the candy was always fresh, the
aroma hit nostrils upon entrance. I don’t know if the candy was expensive or
not, but that didn’t matter because it could be purchased in any amount. The
price posted referred to an ounce, but the clerk scooped whatever the candy
into a set of scales until the weight matched the order. Anybody who could
scrape together three cents could get a nice treat.
On the southeastern side of The Dime
Store was where the taxis waited. There were two of them for awhile, but
finally just one. The cost to go nearly anywhere in town was 50 cents, a real
fortune then. Across from the taxi on one side and the courthouse a right angle
away was the drug store. A long Formica counter lined with stools took up about
a quarter of the business space. During a weekday many of the people who worked
in town lunched on sandwiches, soups, and chilli, and talked and gossiped along
that counter. A full service soda fountain and defacto ice-cream parlor served
sundies, milkshakes, and real fountain sodas, including the suicide (all soda
flavors mixed together in one cup), and that assured a crowd of youngsters following
school in the afternoons and during a goodly portion of Saturday. The drug
store was always a good place to see the prettiest girls in the town.
Madisonville was an exciting place to be on a
Saturday morning because that’s when the folks from the country came in to do
their town business. The hippest clothing store in town had a long picture
window featuring displays of the hippest clothing. Right beside that was a farm
supply store, from which emanated a pungent odor, and in front of which a long
line of geezers wearing overalls and holding open blade pocket knives whittled
small pieces of wood and gossiped as they spat tobacco juice onto the sidewalk
as people passed. At the end of that block crowds of people filed into and out
of the Bank of Madisonville.
The north side block across from The
Dime Store seemed to be happening as well. The Pure Station was situated on the
corner across from the courthouse, and a real old timey station (instead of a
hydraulic lift, it had a pit for oil changes) at the other end. Sandwiched
between those stations was a shoe shop with a real cobbler, quite unheard of
now, where bluegrass jams happened before closing time in the late afternoon.
In fact, with few exceptions, nearly everything was closed by the time the
matinee feature was over, though most of the country crowd had dwindled by
noon.
The other big attractions in town
had a slightly more adult flavor. These included the poolrooms, which, like
heaven and hell, were located upstairs and downstairs in different buildings
separated by a block. The upstairs room, heaven, had lots of natural light, was
large with plenty of tables and space, and had the only Snooker table in town.
Downstairs, hell, was small, cramped, dark and filled with a mere four tables,
one of which was used to play Amos & Andy, where, instead of shooting a
ball into a pocket, the object was to place certain balls into certain spaces
on a wooden platform, depending on whatever pill was drawn. I never really
understood the game but witnessed a lot of money passed during it.
Another sinful location was a bar
immediately below the upstairs poolroom. This is a little touchy because my mom
worked there for awhile. She claims the bar was as much restaurant as anything
else, and I can attest that all through my youth a kid could go in and come out
with the highest stacked ice-cream cone in town, so maybe mom was right. At
times the place took on qualities of the old west when some young men who
didn’t own cars rode horses or mules into town, often tying the animals to the
bar’s awning supports on the street by the public water fountain while they
went inside for a few brews.
Both roads heading out toward the
eastern end of town dropped steeply and passed the Sinclair station and marble
works on the southern side, and the city swimming pool on the northern side.
The biggest grocery store in town fell between the two roads which connected
with Highway 411. The Farm Bureau building, pretty close to the pool, had one
of the largest spaces in Madisonville,
and was the scene of many of the teen dances. If transportation wasn’t a
problem, a dairy dip business serving ice-cream concoctions and sliders was
located just east of town, and a mile or so past that was a drive-in theatre.
In terms of rhythm, Madisonville was then and is now quite slow.
I don’t mean that in a negative way, in fact, that’s really the way I like it. Just
like anyplace else, the town has its share of crooks, wife beaters, drug
addicts, drunks, and hell raisers, but no one seems in much of a hurry. And why
should they be? Monroe
County is the fifth
largest county, area wise, in the state. With mountains, rivers, rolling hills,
deep forests, and several lakes, it’s a beautiful place to live, so there’s no
reason to be in a hurry.
*
I forgot to mention that I actually
did purchase an instrument before my parents gave me the Christmas present of a
lifetime. In the summer between 5th and 6th grades I had
come across an acoustic guitar in the Khun’s Department Store in Sweetwater.
The price was $21. I wanted it and lobbied my mom to no avail. “Save for it,”
she said. I worried. Would it still be there if I waited? I went to work. I
first robbed my piggy bank (which was actually a tall, red, plastic replica of
a turn of the century outdoor lamp). Five bucks (I was never much of a saver).
I mowed the lawns and clipped hedges. Three bucks. I collected empty bottles
(my aunts contributed their empties to my cause) and sold them to the local
grocery store (that’s how kids made money then). Around five dollars. My
parents pitched in the rest (I’m sure I promised to work it off but probably
never did), and I bought it as soon as I could.
I’d already purchased a Mel Bay
chord book. “This is the hand,” a caption under the drawing of a hand
announced. No shit, Mel. I figured that much, but nothing else. “Gotta get that
thing tuned,” my dad said. Oh, man, how am I ever gonna do that? “Take it down
to the store and get the guy to do it for ya.” Great advice, dad. He was
talking about the guy who owned the neighborhood store, who not only liked
kids, but was also a crack musician. The guy could tear a guitar all to hell,
and was also a better than average fiddle player. I stopped by the store with a
banjo once, asking if he could play it. “No,” he said, “I can’t do nothing but
claw it like Grandpa Jones.” Sounded like playing to me, but I was no expert.
Anyway, he tuned my guitar and played a few riffs before I got away.
The guitar attempts did not go
smoothly. I did learn a few chords, C, D, E, F, G, A, and B, all majors, but
could not really play F or B cleanly. The strings really put a hurt on my
fingers. Dad told me I needed to toughen up the fingertips and strengthen the
digits themselves. He was right, but an additional problem existed, one neither
of us had the experience to recognize: the bridge needed adjustment. Were I
about to play slide it would have been one thing, but I don’t know if Paul
Anderson could have lasted against those raised strings. I was off to a rocky
start.
Not so long after getting the guitar
I accidentally broke a string. Man, I didn’t know what to do. I was green about
everything. There was no music store in town then, so I felt kind of stuck. I
don’t remember how, but I discovered that for small musical needs the place to
go was the drug store. Not only could a set of strings be bought, but even a
single string could be purchased. I went all the way by buying a replacement, a
new set of Black Diamond strings, and a set of nylon strings as backups. The store
sold banjo and bass guitar strings, picks of all kinds (I bought several types
of those), even straps. Even Hohner Marine Band harmonicas, like the blues guys
played, were carried.
Unfortunately, I never solved the
bridge problem, and so the guitar went into the back of my closet for another,
or no other day. I’m not 100% sure of what happened to that guitar, but I
believe I sold it to my cousin for five bucks. He never reported how the guitar
worked for him.
*
My parents were starting out after
dark in a sleet storm for some last minute shopping on Christmas Eve. I worried
I’d never see them again, but they said they’d be all right. I don’t remember
much about the celebration in the late afternoon (we always started around 4
p.m.) at my grandmother’s, but I recall that Lady and the Tramp was on television. I asked as my folks headed
out the door if I could set up the organ while they were gone, since I
officially would take possession the next day. They didn’t object, so I slowly
began to affix the stand to the organ’s lower body.
When it came to keyboard supports it
was a different game back then. Console organs, with their volume and bass
pedals attached to the overall cabinets, were all in one deals, but portable
organs were something else. Farfisa organ legs folded and secured under the
chasse and formed, when closed, a suitcase type box complete with a
suitcase-like handle for easy carrying. That’s a bit of a laugh because
carrying one wasn’t easy. I’m not sure how much the single manual, 61 key unit
weighed, but it was heavy, probably in excess of 75 pounds. My little Gem unit
was a different system. Like the Farfisa and many other portable organs, it
turned into a suitcase when the top cover was secured. The legs, however, fit
into an independent carrying case made of a plastic that was stronger and
tougher than the organ itself. Alone, the Gem wasn’t so heavy, but there were
two pieces to tote, so I guess it evened out.
By the time my folks returned the
organ was ready to go. Though I did not yet have an amplifier, I had
pre-borrowed CEP’s Estey so I could play a bit, which I had done before my
parents returned. I couldn’t really say what songs I took off on, but in all
likelihood they included 96 Tears and
Louie Louie, two songs that I sort of
knew. I’m sure my parents requested a tune and I’m sure I repeated one of
those.
I dutifully opened presents on
Christmas morning, but really didn’t give a shit for anything but the organ and
the LPs I got from my parents and CEP. I tried to look impressed and happy for
the gifts, and they really weren’t bad. As usual, I got a new crop of clothing
and maybe a couple of toys, and the albums I got included two by Paul Revere
and The Raiders, and one from CEP entitled, Groovy
Is…The Chords, which I still have. (The Chords were studio musicians and
singers contracted to reproduce covers of hits by other artists. I thought they
sounded quite good. In an aside, while watching The Disney Channel with my step
daughter a few years ago, I discovered through a Disney advertisement that such
recordings were still in production.) Who cared? I turned on the radio in the
living room and attempted to play along with whatever came up. I was able to
pick out a little of House of the Rising
Sun before my parents put a stop to my playing for awhile. I got back at
them by listening to my new LPs.
My little rig moved to my bedroom
before the New Year portion of the holiday, and CEP and I practiced, me at the
organ, he vocalizing, shortly thereafter (we also wrote our second song: My Baby’s the Lovin Kind). In the
meantime I practiced my chords and riffs and made sure I sat near the keyboard
players whenever I went to dances because that was as good as a free lesson,
and a goodly amount of my early repertoire was gleaned via that method. I
didn’t have to wait very long for a tryout with another musician. I didn’t
realize that keyboard players were kind of rare and at times in demand for
bands looking to expand sounds in towns like Madisonville. Know it or not, I was on my
way.
Phase 7
Like many of my contemporaries, I
was psychedelitized by the youth music and culture of the late 60’s. That must
mean that I smoked pot daily and gobbled down hundreds of hits of acid, right?
Well, no, nothing of the sort. First of all, I was a mere 13 years old when I
began to experience psychedelia. Much of the movement that spawned the
counter-culture had begun to wane before it got to Madisonville. Even though we had television,
things moved more slowly in those days. So, when I say I was psychedelitized, I
mean that the psychedelic sensibility was a perfect match with my own. It was
the thing I’d waited for my entire life, as though all my experiences had
prepared me for expanding my mind through the perception of new music, art,
fashion, and media. I didn’t need drugs to understand. The great misconception
is that anybody did need them. I’m not discounting the drug experiences of
anyone, and I’m not discounting drugs’ powers to influence perception, but
there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
The psychedelic experience is really
nothing more than breaking the surface of the conscious mind to get at the vast
store of everything that floats around in the unconscious mind. I made that
sound somewhat flippant, but it’s actually quite serious business because the
essence of each person, both the known and unknown, the seen and unseen, the
public and the secret, and all desires, loves, hates, frustrations, and fears
are all there. Some of it is beautiful and some is scary as hell. Why dredge all
that up, then? one might ask. Why not? It’s there regardless of its
examination. Ever wonder: Why did I do that? Believe me, the answer’s in there
somewhere.
What I’m laying out here is not the
easiest path. For one thing, getting toward the core of the mind’s essence
isn’t so simple. The big block is the chemical barrier between the two poles of
mind. That barrier thins during sleep and allows that unordered, uncensored, illogical
mess of dreams to invade perception. It’s pretty difficult to examine all that
while sleeping, and I think that’s where drugs like LSD became so important to
psychic explorers in that those drugs, too, thin the chemicals between the the
conscious and unconscious mind, and thus allow it conscious interplay. As in
dreams, crazy things sometimes become paramount to the experience. Then again,
sometimes every perception just seems funny (or sad, or whatever).
How then does music, or art, or
anything else open that door between the mind’s rooms? When experience jostles
or jolts or pitches the mind’s perception out of its narrow confines of
conscious self, the psychedelic mind is near. It’s not just for hippies, or
heads, or psychotics, but for anyone. It could land anywhere: in church, at a
concert, during a test at school, while making love. There’s no end to where it
could happen.
Actually, I feel that drugs in
general, and what I call the mind drugs, LSD, mescaline, MDMA, marijuana,
psilocybin, and others, in particular, have gotten a bad rap. I’m not saying
there isn’t danger in using these drugs, but I am saying that not a single one
of them will, by ingestion, kill a person. That’s true. I’ve heard of people
ingesting doses of LSD a hundred times greater than necessary to achieve its
effects who have lived to tell the tale (I’m sure these people spent unpleasant
hours coming down, but did not die). The reason is that none of these drugs
have a toxicity level great enough to induce death. Period. Not one of the mind
drugs is addictive, either. Don’t take my word for it. Something else to
remember is that it isn’t the drug that causes hallucinations, but is the mind
which produces all those. The drugs just open the door.
A proposition that I reject is the
idea that such drugs destroy human will or restrict the mind. That is, frankly,
bullshit. The image of a stoner lounging around the couch with a bag of potato
chips in one hand and a bong in the other while watching television might at
times be true, but it isn’t the entire story. I’ll quote a reggae song I once
heard while showering: “I like marijuana because it puts me into a deep
meditative state.” That pretty much nails it.
But that’s enough of that. I’ll
mention more about drugs later. Back to where I was going in the first place,
concerning the psychedelitization of my mind via various influences of the late
60’s, I’m sure the process took some time. It’s not like I woke one day and I
was a flower child, but gradually new insights accumulated until I began to
look at and even experience things in a different way, and all without a trace
of drug or alcohol. When my mind became ripe for a jolt, it came. For instance,
I might be listening to the radio and a song would somehow go directly to the
core of my brain. That led me to reevaluate another song or image or piece of
writing or personal interaction in the vein of what I’d learned from the
previous (psychedelic) experience. I guess that made me a kind of weird little
puppy (that was confirmed by the way I was occasionally treated at school, at
football practice, in church, or in my neighborhood, though I’m the first to
admit that other factors played into the equation as well), even if no one
really thought of me as a puppy.
I began, quite accidentally, to
listen to bands whose music had within it the possibility of transformation.
Like many another, one of the first for me was The Beatles. Paperback Writer hit me like a brick. Hello Goodbye, I Am the Walrus, Strawberry
Fields—god almighty! All of them blew my mind. What about The Doors? That
music took me closer to the meaning of life and death much more dramatically
than anything I had experienced in church. Even The Beach Boys got into the
act. Listen to Smiley Smile and it will
all be obvious. And The Animals’ San
Franciscan Nights said it all: “Strobe light’s beam/creates a dream. Walls
move/minds do too.…”
*
One thing the years have taught me
is that almost nothing develops in a vacuum. I’ll go so far as say that nothing
does because in music, as anything else, even the most original and
iconoclastic artists have their antecedents, even if their music is radically
different from what their influences played. I read an interview with the
members of the great avant-garde band Tuxedomoon where they talked about their
influences. The members of the band were roughly the same age as me, and yet I
was surprised to discover that they listened to and enjoyed many of the same
groups and artists that I loved. They all listened to Cream, Hendrix, Blind
Faith (one Tuxedomooner played violin, just like Ric Grech of Blind Faith),
Traffic, King Crimson, and a few others. To my ears, Tuxedomoon sounds little
like any of its heros, but that’s the point. The opposite is true, too. Take
the case of Little Richard. Without knowledge of his influences he sounds
totally original, but take a listen to Esquerita, a performer with whom Richard
performed on the underground gay circuit in the 40’s and beyond, and it’s easy
to see where Little Richard came from.
When the student is ready, the
teacher (or cliché) will come. True or not I can’t say, but that’s the way it
happened with me. Many of my teachers were the musicians I listened to on radio
and LP or saw on television, but a cherished few were available flesh and blood
who came into my sphere as if thrown there by divine fate. One of the first,
and greatest, in my life was Billy D (he’s known by many nicknames, but I won’t
tell). Five years my senior, he seemed the top of the world to me. When I met
him he’d already played in a band and had a long list of artists he listened to
or owned music by who were great though largely unknown to me. And though I
have oft diverged from some of his musical ideas, at least as much of what I am
musically (and in many other aspects) came from his influence. We formally met
in 1968.
I’d seen Billy D around town for
many years, and knew his two younger brothers. Sometime around 1964, as I
passed by on my way to the movies, I heard a commotion coming from the basement
of the Presbyterian Church. I looked in to see a horde of kids running wild
with nary an adult in sight. Amid the chaos, Billy D sat at the piano and
tinkered around. I made some comment about where he learned what he was
playing. He answered in such a way that at the same time self-depreciating and
cutting to the quick the weakness of my assertion about what he knew. Enough
said. I headed for the movies. Our meeting four years later was a bit
different. He not only seemed to respect me, but was genuinely interested in my
music equipment and possible playing ability.
Musically at that time, BD presented
himself as a singer, and that’s what I thought after having seen him sing Little Latin Lupe Lou at a dance on my
13th birthday just a couple of months before, but he seemed to be
really interested in learning the keys. I told him where I lived and invited
him to come over to the house sometime and I’d show him what I knew. To my
surprise he showed up. Over the course of a month or so I showed him the chords
and some of the songs I played. He got pretty good pretty quickly. I figured he
wouldn’t have much use for me after the impromptu lessons, but that was not the
case. Like Brillo, or CEP, or any of my close friends, he understood me, got my
personality, and seemed to enjoy my company. We became best of friends. In a
rare twist, my parents trusted and liked him nearly as much as I did. He owned
a car, and though my parents were leery of my travelling in one, as long as he
was involved they were perfectly fine with wherever we wanted to go.
Billy D also helped me by going to
the town hero band’s practices, learning the songs and keyboard parts, and
teaching them to me later. That was mightily helpful, but in addition to that,
he opened his record collection and his vast store of influences to me. I also
turned him onto what I liked and owned. Our time together began to take on the
look and feel of a musical partnership, but was also an incredible friendship.
*
After a good bit of practice alone
in my bedroom, I got a call in April from a guy I had met through Billy D. The
guy was a guitar player who had played in Billy D’s former band, and in a
legendary group that eventually yielded the lead singer and keyboard player
from Madisonville’s
high school hero band. The guy wanted to get together with one of my
classmates, a drummer who had brought me into Cub Scouts, and me to pick a
little and see what we had. The dude must have been desperate if he called me,
so I guess he was. He suggested a time, and said he’d come around and pick me
up for the jam. I agreed.
The guy and the drummer arrived at
my house exactly when he said he would, and hauled me and my equipment over to
a professional garage owned and operated by his father. In fact, his father was
a great and well known bass player who had played in bands, many of them
country, for longer than I’d been around, and I found it a little weird that
such an old guy knew most of the songs that I wanted to play.
After father and son tuned-up and we
got a volume level, the guitar guy ran through a couple of titles before we
attempted Little Latin Lupe Lou. My
end of it was a total disaster. I jumped out at about three times the correct
tempo, and threw in the wrong key to boot. God it sounded bad. I had not until
that very moment realized that songs could be played in more than one key,
though I’m sure most of the songs I played were far from their originals. The
guy stopped us and told me to slow down a little. I wonder what his father was
thinking. We tried again, but I just couldn’t get it. I think we finally tried Louie Louie with limited success. All
the excitement I felt at being asked to jam with real people was gone when I
returned home. I felt like a horrible failure (and it wouldn’t be the last
time), but the guitar guy was not overly critical, and in fact quite kind. He
advised me to play along with some records or the radio to work on the tempo
problems. He said he’d call me again.
I’d actually been to a proposed
music practice at Tig’s before I got my keyboard. The plan had been for me to
play the family piano, Tig the guitar, and CEP was supposed to sing. We tried a
couple of things with no success before the practice degraded into a bullshit
session, which wasn’t unpleasant, but also wasn’t music. Oh well. CEP and I saw
Tig later that evening at a football game. No future practice was mentioned.
*
I spent the remainder of the spring
and most of summer vacation of 1968 cribbing music and dabbling on my keyboard.
I was able to master many chords and used the books CEP and I had ordered to
get the changes to several songs. I borrowed CEP’s guitar for awhile and worked
on strumming along with several songs, some from the books. The band
Steppenwolf, with its song Born to be
Wild, caught my imagination. Later that same summer I heard Magic Carpet Ride in a bedroom at my
grandmother’s while listening to WLS from Chicago.
The phase of signal wavering in and out of my little transistor GE gave the
station a psychedelic effect all its own.
The Doors’ album Strange Days, purchased the summer
before, became something of an obsession. I repeatedly listened to it, learned
as many of the lyrics as I could (divining lyrics is an important skill in a
cover band), learned pieces of some of the songs (I jumped right on Unhappy Girl), and tried to discover the
meanings of the lyrics. Jim Morrison once remarked that many of his songs
created within him a gloomy feeling. I feel much the same about Doors’ songs.
Local radio, something that had only
existed for a year or so, also did its share in my education. WKYZ in Madisonville had a signal
so strong my friend said you really didn’t need batteries to receive it. That
was a good thing. They played a Top 40 format, much like Knoxville’s WNOX, but
in those years what might now be termed progressive music (or psychedelic music
as it was then known) regularly made the Top 40 lists. One of the announcers at
WKYZ was a guy I knew from Boy Scouts. He played pretty much what was on the
list, and was a most entertaining listen, especially since he was very good at
mixing the music he played.
Just down the road in Englewood, at WENR, a
similar type of format prevailed, except on Sunday afternoons when the jock
there was allowed to go absolutely wild with music choices. For some unknown
reason, the guy could play anything he wanted, so he played LP cuts and groups
that had not exactly made the Top 40. I heard Hendrix, probably for the first
time, Janis Joplin (Big Brother and the Holding Company), Cream, and many more.
The difference was that the songs the guy played tended to be harder and longer
than a lot of the regular fare. For me the local radio scene was very exciting.
On our annual shopping trip to
Atlantic Mills, I was allowed by purchase an LP. I chose People: I Love You. I’d heard the song I Love You (an almost exact cover of The Zombie’s version), and
like any keyboard player was impressed by the dual organ and electric piano
lead before the last stanza and chorus. For my money the other songs were just
as interesting and I still listen to them, and a few others, now. The song that
really got me, though, was You Keep Me
Hanging On by Vanilla Fudge. It was the epitome of psycedelica (as was the
album from which it came), and I learned a lot about arrangement and composition
(and the song People Get Ready) from
the band’s efforts.
As summer wound down, I met an
interesting fellow who lived on Oklahoma
Street, not far from CEP’s family’s business. Lawman,
CEP, and I had been hanging around with a couple of good looking girls who
lived on that street (one of the poor angels had recently been involved in a
bicycle accident that damaged a couple of her front teeth), and one day when
the visit broke up, instead of going home the usual way, I went another way down
the street just to see what was happening there. As I walked along, I saw a guy
playing a guitar outside a silver camping trailer in the middle of a shady lot.
I walked up and introduced myself and we talked for awhile. He had a decent
finger picking style (I had not encountered that type of playing locally before
then) and as he played I realized he knew a suitcase full of songs. The guy’s
name was Crawfish (not really), and he had at one time been the singer for the
most popular band in Sweetwater. We hit it off pretty good and he invited me inside
to pick through his record collection. Man, Crawfish really had a stack of
singles. He played several for me, and even loaned me The Doors’ Light My Fire backed with The Crystal Ship. I later met Mrs.
Crawfish (the trailer was their home) and had dinner with them (she invited me
because she thought she had hurt my feelings when she became emotionally
unglued in my presence upon hearing the news about Crawfish’s draft induction
notice). In a strange aside, late one night Crawfish heard a knock at his door.
When he answered, the knocker attacked him with a knife, putting three slashes
across his stomach. A few nights later someone knocked on the door at my house,
but dad scared away whoever it was (though one night about a week after that,
as I was about to go to my grandmother’s house, a tall man was standing next to
a tree in the empty house next door until my dad spooked the man, who then ran
away).
Lawman and CEP came down to my house
one night and invited me to stay overnight at Lawman’s while his parents were
away. My parents were skeptical, but Lawman, whom they really didn’t like so
much, and CEP, whom they dearly loved, convinced them that Lawman had his
parents’ permission to host us. Off we went. Other than making a lot of noise,
we really didn’t do much of anything except talk about girls, make a few crank
phone calls, insult each other (I took most of the brunt of this), and watch The Joey Bishop Show. We did this for
several nights before kind of tiring of it. Around Thursday night, Lawman and
CEP showed up once again, but this time they wanted me to bring my organ up to
Lawman’s place to jam with Billy D. Hell, yeah! I shot outta there like a
bullet. Nothing one was going to stand in the way of my chance to jam with
Billy D.
We had one really big problem, which
was that we had guitar, organ, and microphone, but only a single amp. Normally
that would not have been a problem since many of the amps we had seen had two
channels with inputs for two different instruments in each channel. Most of the
bands around used the spare channel of the bass amp to sing through, but CEP’s
Estey had three inputs labeled Low, Medium, and High, and we weren’t sure the
amp could accommodate us all. Long story short, it did. Problem solved.
The first song we tried was one
Billy D called Jumpin Ditches, but
which I now know to be entitled Baby What
You Want Me to Do (amazing that my first serious song was a blues). We went
through it as far as we could. When we hit an impasse, Billy D said, “When we
get there again, try this.” I don’t remember the exact instructions, but when
we got there again, we took BD’s advice and it worked. We went over the song
several times until it began to sound sort of slick. Damn, I thought, how did that
happen? We tried a few other songs, and in every case ran into some glitch,
but Billy D always knew what to do to smooth it over. I guess Lawman was
feeling left out, so he grabbed a couple of pots and pans and banged on them
while we played. It still sounded good. It was fun. We played again the next
night, and actually began by sounding better than the night before. Holy moly!
The act of playing music with others had me completely under its spell.
Phase 8
The 1968/1969 school year was set to
begin. When the lazy days of summer dwindled to the last lazy day of summer
vacation, my mom said she’d spring for me to go to the pool. That sounded good.
I liked swimming in those days but had been only a couple of times all year. A
big chunk of the reason for that was a severe sunburn I got in the days leading
up to and just past the 4th of July. It was one of those hard headed
things. Sometimes I amaze myself with my reason, and then other times that my
thick-skullishness (which is never consciously realized until after the fact)
is cause for horror (and proving the ancient idea that the wise man and the
fool are the same guy, or as former basketball coach Al McGuire once said, and
I’m sure my quote is kinda faulty, “I’m 90% bullshit and 10% genius, but I use
that 10% 75% of the time.”). The thickheaded adventure began at the pool where
I swam for hours without sunscreen. The next day I went to Watts Bar
Lake on a family
outing. I took too much sun again. A couple of days later I fished with my dad
for about 2 or better hours on the rocks at Watts Bar. Game over. I was burned
out, but after a month or so out of the sun, I had completely healed, so I was
pretty excited about and the chance to see the many good looking girls in their
swimsuits one last time for awhile, for it was also the last day of the pool
season.
Fortunately, it was not a typical
pool day, in fact it was a cool, cloudy, even gloomy afternoon. I know it makes
me a weirdo, but that’s the very kind of day I like. The walk to the pool was
unbelievably pleasant and I moved slowly, enjoying the scenery. Instead of
veering right toward The Dime Store, I took the left fork by the front side of
the First Presbyterian Church, its tall trees, all summer shade, beautiful
stained glass windows, and never locked front doors offering pedestrian traffic
a haven from an unexpected shower (several loaner umbrellas leaned against a
corner by the outer door) and a sanctuary for prayer or a quiet moment. That
church created the most peaceful location in the city limits. First
Presbyterian, like Madisonville
itself, sits atop a slight incline, but is bordered on all sides by different
streets, so it seems almost like a tranquil island.
I crossed the street facing First
Presbyterian’s front door and steps to the edge of the Kefauver Mansion.
It is a beautiful mini version of Gone
with the Wind ambience. The mansion then was painted a very clean looking
white, and several of what I call Elvis columns supported an awning over the
front porch. The smallish grounds around the mansion were then, and are still,
shady during most of a summer day. I thought a weeping willow grew there in the
60’s, but I’m not sure. A walnut tree grows and produces next to the sidewalks
at the western corner of the property. I remember the place as being empty most
of the time, but also remember a lady living there occasionally during some
summers.
The side of the street I took was on
the same side as the pool. I passed the TV repair place, which was crammed full
of dusty picture tubes, components, a wooden cabinet or two, and several hollow
plastic portable set bodies. A hardware store neighbored with the TV place.
Bicycles were stored in the basement, which was much darker and spookier
(especially the staircase) than the rest of the store, and the Coke machine
would spit out a green, six ounce glass bottle for five cents (cheapest in
town). An elegant jewelry store rested between the hardware store and a bargain
store. The light inside was the most unusual looking illumination in town, and
it landed perfectly so as to create a twinkle on the edges of every stone and
sets of every ring in the place. An old craftsman repaired watches and added a
ton of class by wearing glasses with an attachment clipped to the frames that
wielded several magnifying lenses which allowed him to choose between or to combine
and move them into place to aid his work. I also liked the bargain store. It
carried a little of everything, especially clothes. I liked going up the wide, airy
staircase to the tiny landings where stacked boxes of shoes piled up on shelves.
Left of the street corner, about half way down the block, was Hell (the
downstairs poolroom).
I crossed at one of the four traffic
lights. As was usual for a weekday afternoon, town was largely deserted. A dry
goods business, with the third best toy selection (in the basement) in town,
took up one corner, a car dealership another, and the skinny Post Office
stretched between them. I looked right. Across the street, the shady side of
the courthouse, with the discrete basement entrance to The Soil Conservation
Office, run for several generations by the same man (for whom my mom worked awhile),
seemed frozen. I crossed the next street and descended a steep hill and began
another climb until I got to the road that separated the pool from the Farm
Bureau and Co-Op businesses, where I climbed another hill to the pool entrance.
The pool was beside the park, and
just up the hill from the Little League baseball diamond, which was surrounded
by tall trees on two sides and bordered by a front yard past the home run
fence. Most of the black people in town lived near the park. Before black
people were allowed to play with the others, quite a crowd would gather in that
front yard to watch the white kids play. I also vaguely remember that the
swimming pool had, for a summer, become a private club that not only kept out
the blacks, but me as well. All that had evaporated by the time I raided the
pool on the last day of the 1968 summer season.
I was slightly disappointed that
attendance was scant. The great bikini parade I expected never materialized. To
spoil it all, the lifeguard was a guy. Shit. Had I wasted my money? Admittedly,
nothing existed for a sun worshiper, and some of the kids there occasionally
looked cold. I probably caught a chill or two as well, though the temperature
was in the 80’s and the water wasn’t all that bad. Still, I believe nearly
everyone there expected to see someone who wasn’t there.
During that final swim session,
though, a strange bond developed amongst those present. Unlike on a sunny day,
except for those having refreshments, everyone was in the pool at the same
time. The atmosphere became very friendly. We all pulled together, swam,
played, and socialized without crowding anything. I heard many happy sounds and
jokes. When the pool day ended, I walked away with an illumination and golden inner
glow.
*
Opening day of the 68/69 school year
unfolded into a sunny, hot afternoon. Then as now, the first day was shortened.
I believe we got out by 11 a.m. Two of my black friends followed me home after
school had let out. I’m sure my neighbors hated that I hosted black people in
my home, especially since my parents weren’t around. One of the guys had been
in my home many times. We’d been friends since I was 10 years old. Both the
guys were (still are) great fellows.
There was no big deal for the
longest time. We goofed off and listened to the radio and the like—the usual
stuff. For a reason unknown to me, one of the guys kept picking at the other
one nearly all day. He rode everybody sometimes, mostly in an irritating but
good natured way, and I couldn’t honestly say that anything was any different
that day, but then the knife appeared. The knife was an old steak knife with a
tape wad for a handle that was inside an old trunk my parents had been given.
Many things could be said about my
dad, but boy was he good at shining shoes and sharpening knives. He’s the only
person I’ve known who took a hobbyist’s zeal to those activities. He could easily
make a piece of shit shoe look like patent leather, and, depending on his
objective, he could really put an edge on a blade. When he finished a project
his whit stone would be grooved away where he had circled and pulled the blade.
He constantly spat on the stone (he spat on the leather when working on a shoe)
as he swirled the blade sharp. The edge produced seemed to be translucent,
almost like a dangerous halo.
I don’t remember exactly how the
knife came into play, but one guy had it and the other one wanted it. The guy
with the knife kept telling the other guy he was going to get cut if he didn’t
leave him alone. The radio from the big triple play stereo pumped out the hits
as their argument escalated. The guy who didn’t have the knife would not leave
it alone. “Comon, man, lemme see it,” he repeated and sort of hand wrestled the
knife holder. “I’m warning you, dammit! I’m gonna cut you, goddammit!” the
knife holder said
I was relieved when the phone rang.
I thought if I removed myself as witness to the action everything would be all
right. “Is this Kim Frank?” someone on the line asked. “Yeah.” All the time
“Get away from me!” and whatnot continued in the background. “I’m looking to
put together a band to manage and heard your name around. You interested? I
thought we could call it Captain Frank and the Troopers or something.”
“No, no, I don’t think that’ll work.
I don’t sing or anything. I’m just an organ player,” I said. My two friends
didn’t stop. They kept arguing and wrestling in the entrance to the kitchen.
“I’ve been playing with some guys. We’ve got a few songs, but we don’t have a
set of drums so there’s not much more we can do.”
“That’s no problem; I got a set of
drums,” the phone said. “You guys can use my drums.”
I couldn’t believe it. I felt as
though a band had been delivered me as if by divine assistance. Then I heard,
“I told you, goddammit!” and saw the guy who wanted the knife rolling wildly on
the floor. Blood streamed from an angled slash across his right wrist.
“I gotta go,” I told the phone. I
tried to quickly explain what had happened. “Call me back.”
I went to the bathroom and got some
first aid stuff. The First Aid course I’d taken from the rescue squad via Boy
Scouts came in handy. I knew exactly what to do, but had never encountered a
wound that severe before. The slash was pretty deep and nearly five inches
long. I called my mom at work, and she came home and took the guy to the
doctor. She later remarked that the guy had a lot of guts because he never
whimpered at all while the doctor stitched the wrist.
I wasn’t sure the potential manager
would call back but he did. He made his pitch and I told him I’d relay the
information to the others. With a set of drums I might actually be able to play
in a real band. I told CEP and Lawman right away. They seemed pretty excited,
especially Lawman who would have a drum set rather than pots and pans to bang
on.
Finding Billy D was a little
tougher. He owned a car and could have been anywhere, so I had to wait around
for him to show, which he did before dark. I told him about everything that had
transpired. “What’s they guy’s name?” Billy D asked. “Elmer Ripp” (not a real
name) I said.
“Oh, shit, man…don’t you know him?”
Billy D said.
“No.”
“He’s a queer, man.”
“What?”
“He’s a queer. He got me over to his
house to listen to records when I was 12. He put the moves on me. He started
pissing on the stove in his living room, and I said, ‘There comes my daddy,’
and took off out the door. Elmer got drafted and I hadn’t seen him around in a
long time,” Billy D said.
“That’s too bad,” I said, “we could
really use the drums.”
“Well, hell, maybe we still can use
em. We’ll just have to be careful, that’s all. Let’s go over and talk to KK.”
“Ok, but what’s he got to do with
it?”
“We need a drummer.”
“What about Lawman?”
“He’s ok on the pots and pans, but
if we’re gonna get drums we gotta get somebody who can play them.”
We got a solid commitment from KK,
and I was left the task of putting together a practice. My parents had the only
spare room amongst my band mates’ folks, so I lobbied my parents for its use.
Billy D, KK, and I went to Elmer’s to pick up the drums. We talked for awhile
before hauling the set to my folks’ place. The rig consisted of high hat,
snare, bass, one mounted tom, and a single cymbal (the size of a ride cymbal)
which served as ride and crash. It was the most Spartan set I had ever seen,
but it fit perfectly into the corner of the room where space was going to be
tight no matter what. By the next night we had all the equipment in place and
conducted our first practice. Elmer dropped in and met my parents (who loved
him right away) and listened to our hacking. He seemed strangely satisfied. We
decided to call the band Mook’s Session.
*
As obsessed as I was with the new
band, plenty of outside influences intruded on what might have been band time.
For one thing, at least for three members of the band, there was school. Now
except seeing girls and my friends every day, I hated every moment of school. I
could never reconcile the rights the school system took to require anything of
me. I did as close to nothing as I could get away with, but that didn’t stop
the prodding and complaining by the minions of the state charged with turning
out workers bees, or better, grist for the mill. Let’s be honest, the schools
aren’t teaching anybody how to get rich. For all the mythology this country
spreads about how anyone can be anything, school systems mostly prepare
students to be proles (as Orwell called them): unquestioning labor resources
for people richer than them. A look around Madisonville will plainly illustrate that the
wealthy of the town are the offspring of the previous generation’s wealth. Some
of the legacies are as tight-fisted as their parents, who built their
businesses with their hard earned capital, but did not feel obliged to spread
the profits around to those who provided the muscle and time to assure the
business’ success. When people worth millions pay employees no more than eight
or nine dollars an hour, even to long term employees, without regular raises,
then something is wrong with the system. The schools are on board with that
nonsense, and do no more than feed it. Educators tamp down any individual
impulse, while at the same time touting the greatness of a country that allows
unfettered individualism. I wish I’d gone to school in that country.
To me then, the only worthwhile
activities the schools offered were music and sports. I wasn’t really
interested in the marching band, which the junior high didn’t offer anyway, so
I gave sports a go. CEP was playing on the high school team while I played with
the junior high. Madisonville
had a new high school coach. He had played football at UT, and I think he
coached there as a graduate assistant. I was surprised to find that he had been
a wingback in college because he was so big. The man stood about 6’3” tall, and
I don’t know about his playing weight, though he looked pretty fit to me, but
he must have weighted 210. That’s nothing now, but the players were smaller
across the board then, and he was big for a back. His wife was my 8th
grade art teacher, and was among the most beautiful women I had seen.
Practices on both levels were
miserable, though I wouldn’t trade our practice for what CEP endured. The high
school team ran through its fundamental drills at a good clip before taking a
run around the huge practice area. Two freshmen never seemed to make the entire
run and ended up walking about a third of the way each day. After that the team
did form tackling and some block and hit exercises. It looked brutal to me.
The junior high team started a few
weeks behind the high school team. Our practices weren’t picnics either, but at
least we didn’t have to risk getting creamed by a mean senior. The ring finger
of my left hand was permanently damaged after repeated injury. Football’s a
rough assed game, but a person can get nailed in any sport. A fellow in my
class broke his arm in 6th grade football and again in 8th
grade basketball. He had never been seriously injured playing baseball. Injury,
like everything else in life, is beyond control.
School and football sucked up a lot
of time, and we were trying to put together a band. Three nights a week the
band, and sometimes even the manager, squeezed into my family’s spare (bedless)
bedroom to work on crafting a gig. The noise quickly drove my parents crazy. I
can’t see how they were able to enjoy life with us around. After some
wrangling, Billy D was able to procure the room where Tig’s band had played,
and where The Boy Scouts had formally met, as a practice space. The freedom was
good for everybody.
One night Elmer dropped by to inform
us that we had a gig. Some young girl he knew was having a birthday party and invited
us to play. We agreed to do it, but thought it was worth $20. He said that
would be ok. We had only a couple of practices to get ready, so the band went
to work. The party was scheduled for Friday night, and the only reason CEP was
able to perform was because the football team had an open date. Everything fell
right into place.
It took only two cars to haul the
band and equipment to the gig. Actually, transportation could have been managed
in a single vehicle because nearly all cars were huge in the late 60’s. I had
not been out and about too often in the wilds of Monroe County, so I really
have no idea where the engagement took place, though I believe it was in the
midst of a great sea of farmland in western Vonore (possibly in the Lakeside
Community). I don’t remember seeing any houses near the one we played, which
was an older style of house, probably built in the late 30’s or early 40’s,
like I had seen on other farms (many of them still exist today). I guess we
were a little late because night had already come on and the party seemed to be
in full swing when we pulled in.
The kids attending the party were
closer in age to CEP and me than the other guys. The idea that any of us might
get laid (the real reason I started with music in the first place) did not
cross my mind. The excitement of getting to play to other humans was
overwhelming in itself. I’m sure we checked out the chicks, but mostly stuck to
the tasks of setting up. In some ways I envy the simplicity of the band’s rig
because all we needed was one electrical extension cord with two female outlets
to power the entire show.
Our stage was a narrow porch, and we
had to squeeze into about half that space to allow folks to get into and out of
the house, so people nearly brushed KK whenever they passed, and since they
were kids they passed a lot. I didn’t realize it at the time but this was my
first lesson about stages, meaning that some of those I played on over the
years were no bigger or better than that porch. There were no fancy lights, in
fact, there was but a single naked bulb shining from an overhead outlet. The
entire scene was very Spartan, but I was happy to be there.
We were anxious and didn’t waste any
time. As soon as the equipment was fixed and powered, we launched right in.
From there the experience becomes kinda fuzzy because the excitement of playing
kind of dominated my sensibility. I remember, though not specifically, quickly
learning to cover a bum note or phrase. I watched Billy D a lot. He was a master
compared to the rest of us, and he was the calming reassurance that I needed to
keep me in line. He knew then what I didn’t learn until later, which was that a
band could play a song totally wrong, or even mess up a goodly amount of it,
and, as long as the music continued, few people really noticed. Of us, only
Billy D knew that the people listening most closely to the music are those
playing it. Everyone else is talking, dancing, or playing spin the bottle.
After hacking our way through a set,
we took a break. The break is very important because it allows contact with the
outside (non band members) world. One reason for the break was for the birthday
girl to blow out the candles on her cake. I went into the house seeking Elmer.
He had cornered a woman who looked to be about the age of my grandmother. She
seemed very nice and invited the band to have a piece of cake. I don’t remember
eating any cake, but who knows? I reminded Elmer about the $20, and he went straight
for the nice woman. That made me feel a little embarrassed because the
household didn’t seem like it could withstand the fee. Now, I don’t want to get
into a who was poorer contest since so many of the well to do in Madisonville
seem to go out of their ways to not appear rich, while at the same time
bemoaning their expenses or how they merely scrape by, but my family was not
well off. However, to me at least, my family appeared to be better off than the
inhabitants of that country place.
Without another word the band went
back to work. We must have been getting tired because mistakes began to pile
up, not to the point of disaster, but definitely noticeable to us. Again, no
one else seemed to care. I really began to feel bad about asking money for the
product. The only selling point was that everyone in the band was giving
maximal effort, and why not? Comon, I didn’t know shit from shinola. I thought
it possible that the band might be discovered even at such an inauspicious
occasion as that young girl’s party. How totally naïve I was—an amoeba in a
drop of experienced water.
The party was beginning to break up
before the second set was over. As the equipment was being dismantled and
loaded, Elmer slipped each one of us a fiver, the $20 we had requested. What if
he hadn’t? What could we have done about it? I guess the band members might
have felt a little duped, but we would not have had the experience of playing
live without that party. Other than a little gas money for Billy D, we could
have lived with nothing. I found out later that Elmer had actually sprung for
the $20.
I rode back to Madisonville with Billy D and KK. We stopped
at a drive-in, a very popular young person hangout on weekends (then as now,
there was really nothing for youth to do but hang out), and we stopped for some
of its tasty treats before calling it a night. In the car a couple of spaces over
from us three guys in the car seemed to spontaneously crack-up with laughter.
“We should fake doing the same thing,” KK said. “Crack-up on three,” he said.
He counted, we cracked. At first our laughter was faked, but the zeal which we
had thrown into the performance really
made us bust up. We were still giggling when our treats came.
Overall I guess I felt pretty good
when I got home. I told my parents all about it, then repeated the story to my
grandmother (I usually stayed overnight at her place on the weekends). Before
bed I watched television a little while and read some of a Scholastic book
entitled 101 Elephant Jokes I’d bought
at school. My spinning head continued to spin for a couple of days.
*
Football was rough and I loved it. I
felt mean going into the first game, against Tellico. Like the first gig, it
was my first live action football contest. I couldn’t reason how they could
possibly beat us. I figured they knew they had no chance. Well, we won, with
very little thanks to me. No one criticized my work as a tight end, though I
could charge myself with plenty of blame from there, but I was a joke as a
defensive end. My idea had been to go after the ball and make every play I
could. My job, on the other hand, was
to protect the flank. My most spectacular play of the game was to run down a
loose running back and cream him with a flying tackle to save a touchdown. My
heroics sound great except that the play got outside of me in the first place,
and not for the first time during the game. Great running by our all-everything
fullback was the big difference. A lesson awaited me.
At practice on Monday, the coaches
didn’t seem too happy that we had won. They were particularly sour on me.
“We’ve brought in someone to help you,” they said. I attest that I needed help.
Not long afterwards, a car drove up and a guy named Ox (this is nearly his real
name) stepped onto our practice area. I couldn’t believe Ox was going to be
working with us. He was a football god, a monster, the biggest, toughest guy
around. I’d seen him up close during a basketball game (a lefty, he played
center for The Mighty Tornadoes) at the old high school gym when I was in 6th
grade, and he was the starting tight end and linebacker in football for several
years through the 1967 season. He stood about 6’4”, and weighed around 220lbs.
Actually, I liked Ox’s no bullshit
approach. He was very clear about what he wanted. We started to rebuild the
defense that day, starting from scratch. Two new guys, students who had failed
7th grade the year before, had joined the team. They were big, mean
boys who added much needed muscle to the interior of the defensive line. I
thought Ox was gonna kill us, but that wasn’t the case. I’d heard people say
that Ox was a dummy, but that’s not the Ox I knew. Temporary coach Ox taught us
our jobs in minute detail, and he explained the overall plan in exactly the
same way. A week before a home field rematch with Tellico, he drew a diagram on
a chalk board in the varsity dressing room that showed the entire scheme of the
defense. He looked at me. “All you do is go there,” he said, and made several
emphatic swipes with chalk, “and don’t let anything outside of you. When the
play turns in, D’ll take out the blocks, and DD’ll put the make on him. You understand?”
“Yeah, I understand.”
“Ok,” he said, “I want yuns to
understand one more thing. If you don’t do what I tell ya, I’m gonna whup yuns’
goddamned asses! I ain’t bullshittin ya, I’ll whup yer goddamned ass. You sure
you understand that?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t let him get outside. Don’t
let him get outside,” Ox said, tapping the board with the chalk.
I knew he wasn’t going to have to
whip my ass. I totally understood the defense and how it worked, having been
first taught practice then theory. The work paid off when we shut out The Bears
19—0. I had to fight off two blockers on every play, but was somehow able to
hold my ground the entire game. I told the coach they were killing me, and he
said he knew that, but I’d just have to hang tough. It worked out.
We were beaten by Englewood a couple of weeks later when our
coaches decided to take the team off the field and leave before the game ended.
A horrible mess ensued after that, and the team was unable to finish the
season. I tried out for and made the basketball team. I’d made the team in 7th
grade and was ready for some playing time. Everything looked good, but there’s
always trouble ahead.
*
My parents got tired of Mook’s
Session and threw us out. We were able to rent the room that had been the Boy
Scout meeting place, and in which Tig had played a gig (and Billy D had sung).
It was neat having a room that allowed us to mill around town at night. I
remember having a lot of fun there because we could experiment with the music
and be loose in our behavior in ways we couldn’t at my parents’ house.
Band practice had begun to become
problematic due to the workload of school, football, and band. I’m amazed now
that we stuck with it as long as we did. We were on fire with music, though.
Psychedelic music was in full flower and we all listened and happy to hear it. Journey to the Center of the Mind by The
Amboy Dukes was playing while I talked with Elmer the first time. Billy D and I
loved Donovan’s The Hurdy Gurdy Man.
A guitar player named The Truck (not
his name) who lived a block from Elmer somehow sat in with Mook’s Session a few
times. He had a couple of nice guitars and a fuzz device that allowed him to
get a Henry Vestine (Canned Heat) sound. We had jammed in his parents’ kitchen
one Saturday morning and asked him over. The addition of another guitar player,
one who expanded the range of lead options, made for a bigger sound, and he
filled in a few times when CEP couldn’t practice. Before long, however,
tensions arose in the band, mainly between Billy D and The Truck. We tried to
lock out The Truck one night, but he pulled the lock apart with a single tug
(he was a massive fellow). One night while The Truck was playing a lead during On the Road Again, his guitar stopped
working.
“Blowed a fuse,” The Truck said.
“That’s the best thing I’ve heard
all night,” Billy D said.
The Truck let the comment sink in
and lit a cigarette. “You wanna make something of it, D?”
Billy D turned and looked at me. “Green Onions,” he said.
“We can go outside, D,” The Truck
said.
“Play it,” Billy D said.
We launched in, but The Truck
unplugged his gear and carried it out. At the end of the school week, report
cards were released. I did shamefully. My parents wanted me to quit the band or
football. Both things pretty much ended at the same time. I held onto the
practice room key for quite a while. Billy D took the key and went to square
things with the landlord. Mook’s Session had ended. A lot of pressure fell off
my shoulders.
Phase 9
Even though Mook’s Session
disintegrated, I was still obsessed with music, and Billy D and I were still
friends. I spent a lot of time with both BD and KK aside from my basketball
obligations, which basically amounted to three practices and a game each week,
so there was always a long weekend. Not so long after Mook’s Session, Billy D
told me he had purchased a Doric organ. He said it was nice, and I was excited
about it. He invited me to stay overnight at his parents’ place, located above
the Little T in Vonore, after the Friday night football game.
I don’t remember anything about the
game, not even who Madisonville played, but Billy D and I went to the dance,
the first one held in the gym of the new high school, where the hero band (now
to be referred to as The Heroes) played. For some reason there was a thick
tension in the air. The Heros seemed to play everything with more intensity
than usual, but I’ll never know the outcome because Billy D and I headed for
Vonore after the fourth song.
Everyone was asleep at Billy D’s.
Perfect. We spent the rest of our waking time listening to Otis Redding and
quietly playing that sweet Doric organ. Billy D showed me the chords to These Arms of Mine, and sang as I
played. I hoped there was a chance to start another band, but Billy D had other
plans. He told me he was about to audition for The Thumbers, a band based in
Tellico Plains. That seemed kind of curious to me. I’d seen The Thumbers when I
was in 6th grade. They were really good musicians, but lacked the
slick polish of The Heroes. They seemed more country, more raw. I didn’t know
how I felt about that.
About four or five months after my
first jam session, the same guy, AB, called again and invited me around to see
his band. I was still playing with Mook’s Session. I saw no harm in taking a
listen. I didn’t know who AB’s band was, but when I got there discovered it to
be The Thumbers. I had seen The Thumbers nearly two years before when the band
played for two straight weekends at the old high school. One of the players used
a Silvertone guitar with amp built right into the carrying case. I didn’t see
that guy around on this particular trip, and learned later that he had been
drafted.
A couple of Thumber members had
attended a Mook’s Session practice a few weeks before. I hadn’t thought them
impressed enough with me or any of us to engineer a heist of an MS member, but
that must have been the case. The Thumbers’ drummer was a fellow I had met
before. He was close to my age and had played Little League during the season I
had played. He had a most unorthodox style in that he played this little beat
that never varied from song to song. I didn’t see how I could play with a
drummer like that. They didn’t exactly invite me in, and I went my way.
Not long after the demise of Mook’s
Session, AB invited me to a jam session featuring himself, a drummer from a
Sweetwater band, and the rest of The Thumbers. The thing didn’t kick off for
many hours after the proposed starting time due to the tardiness of everyone
involved. The two original members of the group said almost nothing through the
entire jam, and appeared agitated about something. The next time I saw Billy D,
he was playing with The Thumbers. AB was no longer with the band (he, too, was
drafted), but the drummer I thought couldn’t play began to sound very good
after Billy D got ahold of him. I was sent back to the spare bedroom at home to
continue practicing.
*
I put a lot of passion and sweat
into my basketball. Other than that, I felt kinda lost at school, though I’m
not sure why. It wasn’t the rigor of the courses because my terrible grades
were mostly due to inattention. The truth is that I could have done most of the
work without batting an eye, but I hated the shit and did only enough to
continue playing. Some of it was that I didn’t have a girlfriend (I have no
idea what I’d have done with one if any poor girl had been stupid enough to
have me), and I’m not really sure what the rest of it was.
Some of my distress was because my
best friend, Brillo, and I were no longer in the same homeroom, so a lot of the
support for my anarchy had been removed. That didn’t stop us. Brillo was a
teammate in basketball, and a fellow music lover. We loved most of the same
things (and girls) from the year before, so the authorities really couldn’t
keep a lid on that pot. We spread our madness as often as we could.
As basketball season wound down,
Brillo and I began to explore the possibility of joining forces in a musical
venture. Brillo already had a band of sorts in that he and another of my
classmates, Eric Wolf (mostly not his real name), had been singing and playing
guitars accompanied by a device called a Rhythm Master, which produced a
variety of thin, tinny beats. Brillo and Eric had played a couple of parties,
but I had not witnessed them at work and play. In fact, I only vaguely remember
them playing a command performance for me in Brillo’s basement, and do not
remember a single title from their playlist. I was, however, impressed enough
to say that I was in if they wanted to put together a band.
Brillo had been playing a rather
ragged Epiphone guitar for awhile, but he got a new Gretsch Country Gentleman
and the same Toby amp that The Heroes had owned. Eric, the brother of The Hero’s
lead guitarist, got a 12 string guitar for Christmas. One of Brillo’s
neighbors, Crazy Crowbar, a fan of The Beatles, bought a Hofner bass and a
mismatched Supra amp and Baldwin cabinet. A
friend of ours from school, the same guy who got me into Cub Scouts, and with
whom I participated in my first jam, who owned a set of drums, came on as the
drummer. Brillo’s family provided a spare section of their basement as practice
space and we were off.
It’s difficult for me to remember
most of the early practices. Our routine was that we met at Brillo’s after
school and played basketball (part of Brillo’s driveway served as a court, with
goal attached to the front porch roof) until everyone showed up. The practice
got cranked up around 4:15 or so. After an hour or more Brillo’s family had
dinner, and the lot of us usually ate there. That must have cost a bundle.
After dinner we played for an hour or so before everyone went home.
Progress was slow. Brillo and Eric
had the most playing experience, but none of us had done all that much of
anything, and Crowbar was starting from scratch. We went over songs hundreds of
times (like any other band) in an effort to put together a song list. The band
needed 40 to 45 songs to complete the three hour dance format that became
standardized around the area, and that took a lot of work. Every member was on
the lookout for songs to match our skills. At the same time we didn’t want to
be like anyone else, and tried to build an interesting list. There was great
experimenting, especially via jamming, which we really didn’t know how to do,
so it was really experimental.
Brillo’s older sister had one of the
coolest 45 singles collections I’d ever seen. She had everything. The first
time I’d heard any Cream song aside from Sunshine
of Your Love was her copy of that same single, with SWLABR on the flip side. She’d collected quite a number of
psychedelic songs that had recently fallen off the charts. I believe she owned
a few old Beatles discs, including My
Bonnie (on the Vee Jay label). The record collection and the player were in
the basement near the pool table, so all got a lot of attention.
Listening to music is one thing (a
very good one thing), but listening as study is something else, not unlike the
reading work of a poet, or the viewing work of an artist. In fact, music, at
all levels, is an art. Some of the artists are natural players gifted with
perfect pitch and, to those (including me) who are less gifted, incredible
technical abilities. These players come in all stripes from innovators to
composers to the largely uninterested. Some of them are smart as hell, and
others are dumb shits from the word go. The vast majority of us, though, are of
average intelligences and playing abilities. The one thing we all have in
common is that we are listening students.
So the new band was a listening band
that often listened together as a band. The members were as interested in
experimental listening as we were in experimental playing. That, of course, led
to a strange experience around the record player in Brillo’s bedroom one
afternoon. We had been rehearsing, but decided to take a break and listen to
the Hendrix album Electric Ladyland.
We had been lately discussing the possible properties of psychedelic music and decided
to put it to the test. Crowbar, familiar with meditation techniques, suggested
we spread out and find comfortable sitting position. Someone dropped the disc
and Rainy Day, Dream Away (one of
Brillo’s personal favorites) warmed up. By the time 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be) began we had all closed our
eyes and were clearing our minds enough to let the music carry us along. No
drugs were involved, and yet I tripped, as I believe everyone else in that room
did that day. Like any enlightenment, the immediate states of mind (which made
my head feel ten feet wide) were temporary, but something from that experience
stayed with me forever, and even though I’d had a few epiphanies in similar
manners before, losing myself in the music that day was special. Practice was
deemed officially over and we all went our ways.
Listening did not stop, however. As
in so many other things, Billy D had taught me the ultimate importance of close
listening and study. One of the first trainers he put me through was assisting
him in procuring words from records. Billy D was friends with the lead singer
and keyboardist for The Heroes and was able to borrow his copy of Are You Experienced by The Jimi Hendrix
Experience. I worked on Fire because
at the time a band called 5 X 5 had covered the song and made it a hit. The
Heroes played it and Mook’s Session wanted to as well. We had to wear the
grooves thin to put the lyrics together. Even after the hours spent, the song
never made it to the playlist.
Brillo listened daily to his Hendrix
collection of Electric Ladyland and Axis: Bold as Love. He and I often
listened together. I didn’t own either of those albums and was glad to listen
to Hendrix whenever possible. The first two Led Zeppelin albums eventually made
their ways into Brillo’s collection, and they were big influences. Steppenwolf
was another huge influence on me and Brillo. He owned The Second and At Your
Birthday Party. Brillo loved the suite (which John Kay described as a
history of the blues) that followed 28
and Magic Carpet Ride on Side Two of The Second. I loved that, too, but I
liked some of the goofy songs like Don’t
Cry and Around and Down from the
album At Your Birthday Party.
*
Several names were bandied about, a
few of them used, at least temporarily, before the band (and to some extent the
band’s parents) decided on a final name. The first name was The John Birch
Society. No one in the band knew much about that organization, but we thought
the name absurdly cool sounding. Brillo’s parents did not like the name so we
changed it. Let’s face it, we didn’t have any real attachment to it. The only
problem with losing the name was coming up with another. The pressing
complication was that we were soon about to play an engagement. Eric came to
the rescue by quickly pulling The 2001 Electric Vacuum out of his ass on the
night of the show (a talent show held in The Little Theatre of the new high
school). He had a black light poster with those words on it and reasoned we
might get a bit of tie-in recognition from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. For what it’s worth, I don’t remember what
songs we performed that night. I think we played two or three numbers. That’s
all washed away now.
The band had a powwow the next week
and put its noses to the grindstone and came up with the name The House of
Representatives. I still like the name because of its openness. One could
assume that the name referred to that legislative body of the US government,
but we thought also that the House could choose its own causes to represent.
The band’s messages were mostly we like and lust for girls, and we like to
experiment.
Some of the songs in the playlist
were starting to come around. After I had finally learned to sing it, we got a
pretty hefty arrangement, with lots of room for extended jamming, out of She’s Not There, a hybrid cover of a
cover extracted from The Zombies via The Vanilla Fudge. The band also sloshed
its way through plenty of mindless pop ditties for the pure and simple reason
that the ditties were easy to arrange and play, and added quantity to the
playlist. I believe a few songs came from the Mook’s Session’s set, and quite a
few came from The Heroes because Eric’s brother taught him the basic changes
and arrangements. Big Brother once came to our practice and helped us iron out
some problems we were having with Proud
Mary. After awhile, though, Brillo really came into his own when it came to
learning songs. We kind of felt unstoppable.
The House of Representatives played
its second engagement at another talent show, held this time in our junior high
gym/auditorium. The band holed up near the eastern side of the home bleachers
and watched the acts before and later after us. A brass quartet that played a
classical piece won the show, but in a fuck you moment The H of R had procured
the auditorium for a one hour free concert following the talent show. The band
finally had enough material for a performance exceeding an hour and planned to
show it off.
Actually, the talent show went
pretty well. We played Groovin, Time Is Tight, and 1, 2, 3 Red Light during the competition. I thought we sounded
pretty good. I know we looked cool. A guy who played trombone in the brass
quartet, and who was the singer in Tig’s band, told me he thought we sounded
good, and that he’d stayed for the extended set. He sat-in on drums during an
impromptu jam one Sunday afternoon at Brillo’s (following some spirited
basketball). He was a much better drummer than the fellow who played for The
Representatives, but he didn’t own a set of drums.
For whatever reason, the band members
decided that our vocals were not up to standard. I ran into Crawfish one day
and invited him over to sing. He had somehow managed to get out of the draft,
and so one afternoon he came around to check us out. His singing sounded pretty
good. Crawfish added a lot, including a few useable songs, to The House. He
agreed to join.
Trouble reared its head immediately.
In a nutshell, Brillo’s parents didn’t like the idea of this older guy playing
in the band. Since they owned our practice space we really couldn’t hold out
against them. Arguments followed. The best Brillo’s parents could come up with
was that since Crawfish was married, and older than us, anyone who might have
seen him entering the house might think he was there to see Brillo’s older
sister, who was already engaged to be married herself. Yeah, so what? “It just
looks bad. It could spoil our daughter’s reputation.” This sort of logic fell
on my brain like a thud. My view, then and now, was that’s the problem was with
the nosey bastards who might be unable to mind their own businesses while The
House of Representatives did the people’s business in the basement. What
another thought was quite a ways from the concerns of the members of the band,
ready, smart-assed lads all. “Eat me!” we said often.
Of course now I realize that what
Brillo’s parents didn’t like was that a 26 year old married guy with no visible
means of support wanted to play in a band with their son. The parents,
especially Brillo’s mom, kept trying to make the incident into some sort of
moral or religious test. That smelled like a rat to me. All the guy did was
sing. He didn’t try to hump Brillo’s sister, he didn’t try to get us on beer or
cigarettes, and he didn’t offer or try to sell us any dope. Still, Brillo’s
parents wouldn’t budge until they got their ways. We compromised by agreeing to
dump Crawfish after a party we had been engaged to play at the end of the week.
The parents didn’t like it, but they agreed.
The party was a typical teen affair,
not so unlike the birthday party of my first gig. To be honest, I don’t
remember whose party it was or what the occasion was. The band looked wild.
Eric had procured the upper part of a high school marching band uniform and
looked for all the world like John Lennon on the Sgt. Pepper’s cover. Brillo wore his mom’s handprint on his left
cheek. Crawfish told me Brillo’s mom blew-up because Crawfish was still going
to sing, and tried to keep her son from playing. Brillo didn’t say much that
night.
The Crawfish incident had really
pissed me off. If Brillo’s parents had a real reason why we shouldn’t have
played in a band with Crawfish, well that would have been different, but what
they laid out was bullshit and we all smelled it. I was much more interested in
the band deciding who would play in it. I really didn’t think it was their
place to interfere. What’s next? They going start selecting our material, too?
We were all about freedom, not this nonsense.
School was about to let out for the
summer and we had used the talent show to finagle a dance at the junior high a
few days after classes ended. The principal told us he would announce the
dance, and he did, not over the intercom, but in person when he blocked the
front door as students were heading out after receiving final report cards. Nothing
like that personal touch, I guess.
The dance was poorly attended and we
made three to five dollars each. However, it was still quite successful in most
ways. We sounded pretty good and the people seemed to have a good time. Hell, I
even saw my mom dancing during a song played near the end of the gig. Another
thing was that we had endured a three hour performance. Even though friction
was building within the band, we were all still on speaking terms and felt like
we were finally ready to take on the big bands in the area.
*
The music scene around Madisonville suddenly changed.
While I was playing and trying to build a fan base as a member of The House,
Billy D and The Thumbers started to make noise. Having a keyboard in the band
widened The Thumbers’ playlist to around a hundred or more songs, far more than
needed for any gig I’d ever seen. The Thumbers could play songs from 1964 to
that present. I was amazed when Billy D came around to show me some of the
songs he and the band played. The drummer of the band, with some guidance from
Billy D, had gone from that strange little beat he used to always play, to a
bass pedal jockey who could play just about anything (and beat the shit outta
the skins to boot). But the real change came with the opening of The Pug-a-Nut,
a music and dance club operating out of a former body shop on old Highway 411,
slightly north of Madisonville
(that building, repurposed often from clubs and game rooms to several
restaurants, was torn down around the end of September 2011).
My understanding here may be faulty,
but I believe that Billy D’s older sister and her husband were the adults
behind the scene of the club. I think they bailed not so very long after the
club began, though the Pug-a-Nut operated for a long time after that. I hadn’t
seen Billy D for a month or more before the Pug opened, and once things got
going I didn’t see him for awhile longer.
When I heard about the club, I
didn’t figure there would be much difference in the scene. The Thumbers were
mountain boys and I thought Madisonville
to be a little more white bread uptown acting to embrace them. I figured that
Thumbers fans would turn out and that the former world order run by The Heroes
would continue on.
The Heroes had a really good thing
going. After the pool gigs of the summer of 67, The Heroes moved down the hill
to the Farm Bureau building. With the help of their parents, The Heroes
operated dances and used the building like an impromptu teen club. The drummer’s
dad, a thick bodied, stern-faced man who always wore overalls (not unlike any I’d
seen hippies wear, though I doubt he realized his attire was, at least in some
attitudes, cool) sat at a card table just inside the door (I think the table
was also outside sometimes, too) and collected a dollar from each of those who
requested admittance. The bass player’s dad, who was a member of the auxiliary
police force, wore his uniform and stood next to the money man.
The Heroes’ moms worked the inside.
Sitting behind a table and armed with plastic cups, a couple of coolers of ice,
a few cases of twelve ounce bottles of Coke, and a change box, the proud mamas
chatted together, smoked cigarettes, and sold refreshments (and collected about
66% profit per bottle of beverage sold) at a dime a pop to the patrons inside the
often overly warm hall. This Coke money purchased a PA system for the band, and
eventually paid for some kind of reverb or echo box that enhanced the band’s
vocals (three, and later four, great harmony singers).
*
This family type atmosphere, and the
wholesome appearance and reputation of the band were the reasons for its
success. On the upside, parents trusted that their children would be safe
there. Crowds for the late 1967 dances were very strong and seemed to me to
only increase as the year passed. In 1968 The Heroes played for many
consecutive weeks to crowded houses, the culmination being the free Christmas
dance of that same year. That was a packed house. Even though I attended Heroes
dances nearly every week, there were scores of faces there I’d never seen
before, and the overall atmosphere was a bit more rowdy for whatever reason.
I’d seen a few other bands at the
Farm Bureau. One band, with the brothers who gave lessons to CEP and me, played
there twice with a new six, and sometimes seven piece group on stage at the
same time. The lead singer, a new member, had not been long out of the army
when he joined The Cowls (not a real name). Along with him, his brother also
sang and played harmonica and 12 stringed guitar, and every once in a while his
wife would join for a few duos with her husband lead singer. The addition of
these players increased the band’s song list to about a hundred songs. The old pop
song list had been waded up and tossed. This new version of The Cowls covered lots
of Bob Dylan and other slightly more obscure but more challenging artists. The
guys that taught us left not long after the new people came aboard.
I also saw a band from Athens, The Rotts (not a real name), who played at the FB
a few times, once at a gig sponsored by an Athens radio station. One of the players in
The Rotts told me that when the members had inquired about the possibility of
renting the FB for a solo venture, they were accosted by The Heroes’ parents.
“We thought we were going to have to fight The Heroes’ parents just to play
here.” They guy told me. I don’t recall the band playing Madisonville after that.
Somewhere along the line there was a
battle of the bands held in the Madisonville
High School gym. Four
bands competed for a chance to on to another level of competition. A band from Athens was very slick and
good, and had a neat playlist. There was another, less polished band. The band
wasn’t pitiful, but was green. I was a little disappointed with The Heroes’
set. They were unusually nervous and appeared to me to be pressing too much.
The guitar player’s chord popped off the fuzz box as he danced during Land of a Thousand Dances, a killer most
nights, (which, with its wonderfully primitive beat, was executed to perfection
by The Heroes’ drummer), and he somehow got behind on Hooked On a Feeling. Other bands might have crumbled, but the guys
pulled it back together and finished strong.
The Thumbers followed The Heroes and
played a very laid-back, professional sounding set. Billy D played MC from
behind his recently purchased Farfisa, and I marveled at his smoothness and
ease with the audience. It appeared to me that the band had no set list for the
evening and chose instead to select numbers on the fly. I thought the band’s
set was very effective. Now, I don’t want to take anything from The Heroes (I
loved The Heroes then and still do), and even though the judges deemed The
Heroes the winner of the contest, I thought it was the third best band that
evening.
Problem, the band from Athens, exhibited good
technical musicianship and delivered a glitch free performance. The Thumbers
had two musicians who were better than anyone in Problem, and both bands gave
slicker performances than The Heroes. The glitches killed a lot of The Heroes’
momentum. I don’t want to imply that the guitarist singlehandedly spoiled the
show because sometimes when bad stuff happens it keeps piling up. I’d seen the
guitarist dance as he had done that night many times before without a single
incident. The stars just didn’t line up for him at the battle. But maybe they
did, since his band won. I want to go on record by saying that when it came to
getting great, full, psychedelic sounds, The Heroes blew everybody else away.
The guitar player was among the very best fuzz tone and wah wah jockeys Monroe County
ever produced, so please realize that I’m not trying to slag anybody. I’ve
never played a glitch free gig.
The free Christmas dance was about
the end of the run for The Heroes. When The Pug-a-Nut opened it took about
three weeks for The Heroes’ crowds to vanish. I was shocked. I went to a dance
at the FB one Saturday night, and with CEP and Lawman turned out to be one of
only four guys there. The Heroes’ girlfriends and about two others girls made
up the crowd. The band members packed up and left without performing. Same
thing happened the next week. Crowds are fickle.
*
Things began to change for The House
of Representatives. Urged on by the drummer, Dusty (not his real name) and his
family, the band loaded up, and with our families, drove to the Knoxville studios of
television station WATE and auditioned for a spot on Cas Walker’s Talent Parade. Both CEP and I were big fans of that
show, and The Heroes had appeared, as had that band’s lead singer (who appeared
twice as a guitarist/singer, and won on his second try), but I just didn’t care
about playing it. I don’t know why.
Dusty’s stint with THOR is a hard
luck story. He knew more of what playing in a band was about (the girls) than
the rest of us horny idiots. Problems arose because the idiots foolishly took
the playing of music seriously. Dusty wasn’t so serious in that way. The
beautiful neighborhood girls, neighbors of Crowbar and Brillo (one was
Crowbar’s sister), often attended practice, and that threw Dusty into a
tailspin. He sometimes drifted off time during songs while trying to flirt with
the girls. The rest of us didn’t care that he talked to the girls, but going
off time was a sin. He wasn’t serious
enough (as if a 14 year old can be so serious), so he was already on the way
out before we took that Knoxville
trip.
Walking through the Greystone
studios was like touring a shrine. The sets for all the shows were spaced
throughout a large, underground area. The ship shaped bleachers that housed
kids attending a Saturday morning show featuring Popeye cartoons. The news set
was not far away, and a fairly small spot surrounded by curtains made up the
Talent Parade location.
I don’t remember any other
performers that day, but I know we auditioned for host Hop Edwards on Sunday,
got accepted, and were scheduled to play on the following Thursday evening’s
show. Just like that. I started warming to the idea of playing on television,
but what could THOR do? We spent some hard thinking and rehearsing time trying
to come up with something good. Dusty had been told that he wasn’t going to
remain in the band, and none of us thought we would win the competition, so we
went for something really safe, and lame, by choosing Sleep Walk to launch our television careers. Brillo tried to get me
to sing on telly, but I was too scared of screwing up.
When the band arrived at the studio
on Thursday night, the newscast was still going on. That was very interesting
for me to see, even though I was totally distracted about performing in an hour
or less. We were rushed in and stuck into our little covey and stood around
until Hop introduced the band and the cameras pointed at us. We knocked off
Sleep Walk, went home, fired Dusty, hired a new drummer, and discovered we had
won the competition. What a shock! The Heroes hadn’t even won. We were a bit
stunned.
Dusty’s dad telephoned and asked if
his son was tossed out of the band. When he got the answer he didn’t want, he
threatened to pull the plug on the entire Talent
Parade thing. None of us really cared, which made him even madder. On Talent Parade, if an act won, it was
invited back for an encore the following week, and then to compete against
other winners after a cycle that played out every six weeks. With its new
member, THOR showed up for the encore. While standing behind the organ in the
glare of lights, I saw Dusty and his family enter from the darkened far end of
the studio. They sat on the bleachers of The
Good Ship Lollypop while the show went on, topped off by Wipe Out, a song equally lame to the one
of the previous week, to feature the band’s new drummer. It must have felt like
a kick in the teeth to Dusty, and I guess that’s what it was, and I have to say
that I’m sorry we did him that way. He was one of the hardest workers when it
came to putting the band together and was shown the door after a triumphant
moment he’d been instrumental in engineering. Shit like that always hurts, but
the band continued.
Bolstered by television fame, THOR
was booked to play a dance for The Young Republicans at the Farm Bureau in Madisonville. Like all
dances at the FB at that time, it was poorly attended, though the band was paid
$25. That performance was followed with another at the same venue a week later,
but this time sponsored by THOR, and thereby responsible for the rent. Like the
YR gig, this one generated no revenue and the money we’d made the week before
was spoken for. That’s what we had decided to do with that money, though we’d
foolishly hoped to make a couple of bucks.
THOR finished its obligation to Talent Parade soon after that FB gig. We
stopped at a restaurant and celebrated on the way home. Brillo’s dad wondered
who would be paying for our dinners, but Brillo said he’d take care of it.
“Where’d you get the money” I asked. “It’s the rent money for the Farm Bureau,”
he answered. We giggled and enjoyed our deserts.
*
The Pug-a-Nut became the center of Monroe County’s
musical universe. Within three weeks of its opening it had destroyed The
Heroes. Saturday night crowds packed both parking lot and dance floor. Quite a
few people from Tellico Plains had drifted into the scene. More than half of
The Heroes’ patrons skipped out, and the rest just stopped going to dances
altogether.
In some ways The Heroes’ public
image had begun to work against them. For one thing, the members still wore
matching suits. I don’t see anything wrong with doing that, and The Heroes had
some great band suits, but hippie fashion, which was just coming to
Madisonville, cast a dim light on the appearance of the conformity that
matching suits screamed. After the trip through the Battle of the Bands competition, The Heroes
got a one-off record deal, but the anti-marijuana song they recorded sounded a
thud, released, as it was, when pot started to gain a local market share.
That’s a shame because the song had an honest to goodness hardcore psychedelic
sound. The song was kind of tricky to play as well, and I’d have to label it a
tour de force of a do it yourself ethos. I wish I owned a copy.
The Thumbers were cut from a
different cloth. There was nothing slick about the band or its members. The
Heroes sported well kept short haircuts, whereas Thumbers members’ hair had the
length and look of the early Beatles’ styles, down to these hats (like I’d seen
The Beatles wear) worn by the guitarist and bass player. Band members dressed
sort of like The Stones, and sounded a bit like them as well.
Also like The Stones, The Thumbers
weren’t very good at psychedelic music. I guess they just never really had an
ear for it. Not that they didn’t try, because any band who had a playlist
derived from radio (all of the bands did) couldn’t avoid a few far-out numbers,
and The Thumbers did successfully execute some types of those songs, but for
whatever reason the guitarist (who was and is a gifted musician) could never
manage that big, fat, smoothly dirty fuzztone sound. I don’t remember if the
guy owned a wah wah pedal.
With the new power that came with
capturing the entire local music market, The Thumbers could have hogged up the
scene to themselves, but that’s not what happened. In fact, The Thumbers went
out of town a lot and really didn’t play The Pug-a-Nut that often, so a steady
stream of new bands came into Madisonville
as result of the club. Although this was bad news for The Heroes, overall I
thought it was good to bring new blood into town. I don’t know if The Heroes
were ever offered a spot at The Pug-a-Nut, but I don’t believe they ever played
there. To them the war was on.
The Heroes had an important ally in
the editor of the local paper who lived up the hill from The Pug-a-Nut (and
right across a couple of streets from The Heroes’ lead guitarist) and began a
one man crusade against the club, its employees, its owners, its patrons, and
even the highway it resided on. He hinted that alcohol was being illegally sold
there (and had pictures of piles of empty beer cans swept up behind the Pug),
and that the club was a smaller portion of a larger organized crime syndicate
that operated along Highway 411 North which he dubbed “Sin Strip.” His stories
mostly scared off many patrons and put doubt into parents’ minds all over town.
Neither my parents nor CEP’s wanted us to go there. I know we weren’t the only
ones.
After a long absence, Billy D came
around to see me. I asked him about the stuff in the paper. He said it was all
bullshit, as I had figured in the first place, and that The Pug-a-Nut was a
safe and fun place to be. I recall that he also talked to my parents, and
before long I had permission to catch an act there.
I went one Saturday night shortly
after school had ended for the summer. I was impressed with the place, and I
could instantly see how it had beaten out the digs for The Heroes, even though
The Nut had only shortly before been an auto body shop. The place really looked
and functioned like a teen club, and one thing that stood out was the gaming
section. I remember a pinball machine, and maybe there were other machines,
too. In fact, the first thing I did there was play pinball. For one of the few
times in my life I hit for about 30 games. Don’t get the wrong idea: it wasn’t
one of the gambling machines that paid off (like the ones I had seen in the
poolroom and at truck stops). No, the game at The Nut was purely for
entertainment.
The band booked for that evening, a
fairly interesting group from Athens,
Tennessee, ran through an entire
set while I was trying to play off the games I’d won at pinball. Every time I
played them down, the machine would hit again and I’d have another 10 or more
games to burn. I finally lost count of the number, but I’d won the lot on just
two quarters I pumped into the slot. I think I got bored and eventually left
games for whomever to enjoy.
Billy D’s Farfisa was on stage that
night, even though the band playing had no keyboard player. After watching for
a set, I asked the band if I could sit-in for a number. They agreed. Near the
end of the night I took the stage for a tune. The song I attempted with the
band was a cover of The Grass Roots’ Midnight
Confessions, which had a perfect organ part to show off on, but
unfortunately for me, I didn’t know either song or organ part. It was, simply,
a disaster. The band hated me, the crowd hated me, and I felt like a dumbass.
Well, such is life. At least I had fun a pinball.
*
Tensions in The House of
Representatives began to boil over in several ways. One was that Eric kept
trying to shove us toward being more like The Heroes. He got into the habit of
saying we might be playing a song wrong because it wasn’t the way The Heroes
did it, and other nonsense like that. Again, I loved The Heroes, but I didn’t
want to be The Heroes. After a blow-up along those lines, I was surprised that
KK, the drummer from Mook’s Session, commented to me that he’d heard that I
thought my band to be better than The Heroes. “Hell, man,” I said, “there are
other bands on the planet.” He didn’t seem to think so. That was when I
realized that everyone from Madisonville
was expected to love The Heroes no matter what. Hey, I loved The Heroes, but
then as now thought there was room for alternative opinion. I didn’t give a
shit what anyone else thought, but found out that anyone who has an opinion
that isn’t part of majority rule might get pounced on. All that shit just made
me mad because I’m totally against orthodoxy in all its nasty, narrow minded,
self aggrandizing concern. Eat me! The Pug-a-Nut had proven that The Heroes’
crowds wanted something new, but KK seemed to hate The Nut, and I guess he
hated Billy D, too, because their friendship waned around that time.
Near the end of summer THOR hadn’t
played anything but another free party, even though the members worked like
demons to build an interesting and different kind of playlist. I like rehearsal
and being with the guys and all, but my idea was that bands should play for
other people, and my band just wasn’t doing that.
The final straw that sent me out of
THOR was additional interference from Brillo’s family. One afternoon Billy D
called to ask me if THOR would be available to play a Tuesday evening slot at
The Nut. I couldn’t believe it. Billy D said he knew we were a little green,
and said that Tuesday nights were generally lightly attended but that the band
had some appeal due to the Talent Parade
telecasts, and he thought it would be a good opportunity for us. I thought so
too, while warning him that Brillo’s parents just weren’t going to go for it,
though I would give them a chance to debate.
I immediately called Brillo and laid
it out. He seemed interested in the idea and said he’d bring it up right away
and let me know at rehearsal later that afternoon. I got to Brillo’s around 4
p.m. I heard everyone talking in the kitchen. I asked Crowbar, in front of
everyone, if they were debating The Nut’s offer. “No,” he said, “that was
decided hours ago. We’re not playing.” I was pissed. “That stuff in the paper’s
all lies,” I said. “I’ve been there. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.” Brillo’s
parents didn’t care, and that was it. Fuck it! I thought to myself, I’m outta
here.
The part that got me then, and gets
me even yet, was the sheer horror of Brillo’s family that people of wealth from
the First Baptist Church
would look down on other people of wealth from the church whose son might be so
bold as to play a venue owned by commoners. To me that’s as constipated as humanity
can get, and is one of the reasons (certainly not the only one) I hate the
church (all churches and religions) and its orthodoxy to this day.
Long story short, I left the band not
long thereafter. I was getting ready for my freshman year in high school, and
to play football, so I just wasn’t going to try to hustle for rehearsal time if
the band wasn’t going to play gigs when they were offered on a silver platter.
I know we once tried to play again after that, but it was dead and I really
didn’t care. I was ready for something new.
Phase 10
High school was something new. I’d
already been practicing football for a couple of weeks before classes started,
and I can assure anyone that there are few things worse than two-a-day football
sessions. Getting up early was the worst part for me. I’ve always enjoyed the
night life. No, that doesn’t mean I was out tomcatting all hours (I was only 14
then), it’s just that I’m not a big fan of the daylight hours. Nothing but
official stuff happens during the day, and if there’s anything I hate it’s
everything official. I still don’t understand why school has to begin as early
as it does (hell, it starts earlier now than when I went). Having been in the education
business off and on for quite a number of years, very little of education makes
sense to me. I’m living proof that one can learn next to nothing in high school,
make horrible grades throughout, and still succeed in college. Intellectually,
high school was (still is) a waste of time. Had it not been for the girls it
would have been a total waste. Still, I was looking for gridiron glory and was
willing to play at least some of the game to get it.
One of the things used to scare
freshmen was the so-called freshman punch, a palm delivered blow to the
forehead to show who was boss. I’m no tushhog, but I drew the line. Asshole
that does that to me, I allowed, would have to fight. I decided that I’d
probably get my ass kicked, but there’s some shit that people cannot be allowed
to do. Look, I had to go out there and play against guys bigger than me (5’11”
and 110 lbs) everyday, so what’s a little more? Turns out that the freshman
punch was never administered to me or anyone else. I don’t know why the
practice ended, but it did.
I somehow managed to have the single
worst schedule in the history of Madisonville
High School. For the
mandatory four classes and study hall, I had a total of two teachers, both of
whom hated my guts (I didn’t like them, either), and that was it. As shameful
as my grades were in junior high, they started out even worse in high school.
To say that I was an unmotivated student is an understatement. I didn’t give a
shit about any of it at all. Other than being a total babe fest (sorry girls,
ladies, whatever, I don’t mean any disrespect, but I couldn’t help but love you
all), high school was total bullshit. I wasn’t interested in what it offered.
Football, too, was a bit of a drag.
The politics that surrounded players and playing took my innocent ass off
guard. I had seen it in action before, in the classroom in lower grades, but
the practice seemed, in some ways, to be even more prominent at the higher
levels. How so? Well, then as now, the rich kids get breaks and the benefits of
the doubts that others just do not. Of course those of wealth always looked
well groomed and nicely dressed. Few of these students flirted with hippie
ideals and fashion, or even music (at least until some aspect from that culture
became mainstream). And I can’t say that the kids themselves were all assholes,
some of them were then and are now friends of mine, so my complaint isn’t
against them so much as the system that treats them differently. The part that
pissed me off was that the rest of us were supposed to acknowledge and agree
that we were of a diminished quality from the wealthy. This was supposed to
prepare us for subservient roles to better serve those who could buy the rest
of us.
*
As much as I fumbled around in the
classroom and on the football field, my life as a music listener became richer
that year. Brillo and I remained good friends even after I had left the band,
and I often ended up in his basement listening to some of his records. Brillo often
became obsessed with some band or album and would play the grooves thin when he
found something he liked, so we listened to Led
Zeppelin for a couple of months. I don’t know that I was any less obsessed
than Brillo, it’s just that I noticed his obsessions more than I realized mine.
Like everyone else, I listened to
the radio. Lots of big music came through the tiny speaker of my transistor
radio as I listened to WKYZ in Madisonville, WENR in Athens, and the granddaddy
of them all, WNOX in Knoxville. I couldn’t argue with or fault the Top 40 at
that time because the psychedelic period had confused the singles charts and
all kinds of things hit and were played. I’ve heard that some stations in the
south wouldn’t play black music, but that wasn’t the case where I lived. Stations
around here seemed to play just about everything except the most progressive
music, and even that was played if it hit the charts.
Near the end of 8th grade
several of important things happened to my ideas. One came from music class.
The guy who taught music played with The New York Symphony Orchestra for a
number of years before settling in Athens,
Tennessee to work a family farm
after his stint with NYSO. I’d experienced his classes once a week through 7th
and 8th grades bored out of my mind as he played the classics of the
Classics. Most of it fell heavily upon my tin ear. There was just nothing there
I could approach. I had no use for any of it as far as I could see. To some
extent I still feel the same way. Things like Bach (who is a master) just
sounded like a lot of busy work to me. Neither could I connect with Beethoven
or Mozart, though I admittedly had not had a fair sampling of their output.
Most of the Romantic Period, especially the early part, also fell with a thud
on my eardrums. In fact, I have a theory that one could take a random sampling
of recordings of that period’s music, put any number of them onto a turntable,
drop the needle at random, and only the ardent fan could decipher the
difference from one to another (I feel pretty much the same way about some
heavy metal and a lot of rap). But one day, near the end of the school year,
the teacher played Igor Stravinsky’s The
Rite of Spring. It sounded strange and interesting to me. I looked over at
Eric (who was in my homeroom that year). “This is kinda cool,” I said. The
music not only caught my attention, but sort of blew me away. The music teacher
is long since dead, but I thank him because he unknowingly changed my life that
day.
I also thank my uncle who was kind
enough to give me a cast-off stereo record player. That was a really big deal
because it allowed me to listen to records in my room rather than the living
room where the record player was attached to the television set. My parents
weren’t at all interested in giving up viewing so I could dominate the air
space with sounds they didn’t want to hear. This freedom meant that I needed
something to play on the machine, so I seriously went about building my record
collection. My parents were responsible for starting my collection with the various
record company selections, and had bought me several Smothers Brothers discs,
and also the first Vanilla Fudge album. Although I rarely had enough money at
any one time to purchase an album (at $3.27 a pop), I was often able to scrape
up enough dough (called bread then) for the occasional single (usually at 75 to
95 cents each), and my collection included as many as I could afford.
My junior high and high school singles
collection was not very large, but at least kept me in music I wanted to hear.
I’m a big Canned Heat fan and at the beginning of 8th grade bought On the Road Again from the singles rack
at the dime store (which is the only place I found that sold current singles in
Madisonville).
The hit side of the record is wonderful, especially the opening chimes and the
constant buzzing drone that pushed the music along, and the added bonus of the
flip side, Boogie Music. I later
bought Going Up the Country, backed
by One Kind Favor (a standard,
covered by Bob Dylan, though I didn’t know any of that then), with its big
fuzzy leads, sent me on. I also bought a Vanilla Fudge single of Take Me for a Little While, backed with Thoughts, and a kind of obscure single by Cream of Anyone for Tennis backed by Pressed Rat and Warthog. There were a
few more (I recently fished them out of my collection to make sure I had all
the titles correct), some of which were procured in packages of three, much
like the comics of years before, that my mom bought for about a buck each.
When I had enough money for an LP, I
bought it from one of the local drug stores (the only one that sold records),
which always seemed to have many of the latest releases. Of course this stream
of new titles drove me crazy because I wanted nearly every LP I saw, and when I
had enough money would stand before the rack for quite a while thumbing through
the titles and looking for the perfect record to purchase, but always leaving
behind at least 20 others that I desperately wanted. The care I put into the
selections rarely left me disappointed.
*
Football at Madisonville High School
was hellish in 1969. First of all, the turnout for the team was low, around 33
to begin the season, and one guy who earlier quit was allowed to return four
games into the season. Two starters went down with season-ending knee injuries,
and numerous problems plagued the team along the way. Some days there weren’t
enough players at practice to scrimmage. The head coach was brand new (as in
just out of college), and the assistant was really the head basketball guy (and
not a bad football coach). Nearly every starter was brand new from the previous
year.
A huge problem was the schedule. The
former coach, who had played at UT, wanted little Madisonville to play big teams in the area
and had signed to play them. The 1969 season was the first where schools were
classified according to student population, and there were three classes, A,
AA, and AAA. Madisonville
was in class A, the division for the smallest schools, but we were slated to
compete against several AA opponents. This was compounded when the principal
cut a deal to add a tenth game after the schedule had already been printed and
distributed to the community (in one page calendar form with schedule at the
top of the page and 12 months in tiny print under that).
Hell took off on the team in the
very first game, a 69-8 loss at Maryville.
CEP, the new starting quarterback, took a real beating that night, as did
everyone, though he seemed to take the brunt of the pain. I got into that game
near its end, playing defensive back, which I never before played. No big deal
until I had to go back to receive a punt (also something I’d never done
before). No surprise to anyone, including me, I muffed the punt and a Maryville player scooped
it up and ran into the end zone to complete scoring for the evening. During the
replay on the radio the next morning, I was misidentified as someone else.
Thanks, and I mean that.
The team limped along throughout the
season. Poor CEP got pounded in nearly every game. Already mostly demoralized,
The Golden Tornadoes were unlucky enough to walk into the game at Bradley County
on its homecoming, and were defeated 48-8. Near the end of the game, CEP ran
around left end. The ensuing tackle tore off his helmet and broke his nose.
Damn! It happened right in front of where I was keeping a safe spot on the
bench. The coach offered to send me into the game, but I had accidently left my
shoes in Madisonville
and did not have proper equipment to enter a game. I really wasn’t too sad
about that.
A hard loss came in a 3-0 game at
Copper Basin decided on a late field goal (I’d never seen a field goal in high
school before), but the granddaddy of all losses came via a 78-0 drubbing on
the Madisonville field by arch rival Sweetwater, whose starters took us apart,
handed us to their second team, which did the same thing, and then went to
third team players before the end of the first quarter. Madisonville players were lucky to escape
injury.
Unfortunately, the team still had to
travel to Jefferson County and play that tack-on game
the principal had arranged. I caught some virus that laid me low that week and
could not dress for the game, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise due
to a weird change in the weather. In 1969, unlike now, the high school season
started a bit later and ran past Halloween (Madisonville
won on its home field 12-7 against McMinn Central on Halloween night), so in
the third week of November a battered Madisonville
left town for JC. When the bus stopped at a traffic light before getting out of
town, the time and temp display at the bank (now a restaurant) flashed 18
degrees.
Jefferson
County is northeast of Knoxville, and a long way
off. Before reaching even Maryville,
the bus broke down and parked in the lot of the Gilded Mirrors business (it’s
still there), and we were forced to wait for a replacement bus. That was bad,
but the real shock was yet to come because when the team arrived in Jefferson City, about an
inch of snow covered the field and the temperature was 9 degrees. It was truly Madisonville’s version of
The Ice Bowl. No one was really prepared for 18 degrees much less 9. Since I
didn’t dress out, I gave up my gloves, but even with all gloves collected and
given to starters, some players had none, and most only one.
My parents and CEP’s parents drove
together to the game but did not get out of the car. There were only two people
in the stands (Crowbar’s parents) on either side of the field, no bands, and
only Madisonville
cheerleaders (with whom I huddled in the JC Rescue Squad’s vehicle) in
attendance. It was a horrible, horrible night in which The Golden Tornadoes
went down 34-13 to close out the season. The only bright spot was a team dinner
on the road after the game. Do I long for those days again? Are you kidding me?
*
Along with listening and playing
(all at home), reading was just about as important. In my freshman year of high
school I loved the band Cream best of all. I owned a couple of singles by them,
and in early fall I bought a greatest hits album (it’s the one with an
unfinished painting of fruit on the cover) at Big K in Athens, which is where
my mom worked at that time. Cream had been a non entity for awhile, and like so
many things before and since, I was playing catch-up on my musical education. I
can’t remember where I got the information, but the music press talked up a new
band called Mountain. The band’s producer, second vocalist, and bass player,
Felix Pappalardi, who was also Cream’s producer (and often played accompaniment
on such instruments as Swiss hand bells, mellotron, and trumpet with the band,
and who had produced the great Youngbloods’ song, Get Together) had begun a band with a guitarist named Leslie West
(and had produced West’s album Mountain).
I thought it sounded like something I might like.
Like everyone else in the world who
listened to Top 40 radio, I heard the band’s single, and only hit, Mississippi Queen. I bought a copy of
that record at the Dime Store. Actually, I kind of tired of MQ, but was fascinated by the flip side,
The Laird, which in some ways
reminded me of the more eccentric songs of Cream (As You Said or Passing the
Time, for instance). That just made me hungrier for an extended play
artifact. When the album finally came to the drug store rack in Madisonville, as usual, I
didn’t have the money, but hoped I was the only one who noticed it until I
became rich.
OJB, a friend who had been the
vocalist for Tig’s band Aftermath, was in pretty much the same boat as me as
far as relative wealth was concerned, and, like me, has his eye on Mountain’s
album Climbing! I don’t remember how
the money came into my hands, but when I had enough, I purchased the album and
went quickly to my grandmother’s house and played it on her little monophonic
GE record player. I still love that record. On the back cover was an
instruction that the album was to be played loud. I managed as best as I could.
At any rate, I had gotten there before OJB, who not long afterward asked me if
I had beaten him to the punch. I told him with glee that I had. He called me an
asshole in a good natured manner and we went our ways (though I had a smile on
my face). That’s the way it was then. If you didn’t hurry you could miss out,
as Tig had when OJB got to Santana
before he could.
It was all in the game, and the
music press was part of that game, as were television shows (The Tonight Show, The Red Skelton Show (saw Iron Butterfly
lip-syncing In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida on
Red’s show), and various variety shows that featured a pop slot or were
dedicated to youth music), and the radio. Many of the stories in the music
press, even about music or groups, had as much to do with the alleged cultural
aspects of the music and its presentation as the impact of the sound itself.
Sorry, but that stuff always left me cold. I could never see how growing a
beard or getting a haircut or wearing certain clothes had anything whatsoever
to do with what came through the speakers or across the airwaves. To me that’s
just part of the cult of personality that I find largely meaningless. I read
interviews with musicians that mentioned various points of view, but I couldn’t
see what any of that had to do with me or with sound. A friend of mine told me
that for years he ordered and drank scotch and coke because he’d read or heard
somewhere that The Beatles liked that drink. I don’t know how to approach that
kind of reasoning. Another friend and mentor told me he listened to classical
music (classical not of that particular period, but of that genre) because he
wanted to be a cultured person and that’s what cultured people listened to.
Again, that seems like the cart before the horse. I listen to music that I like
and I don’t care where it’s from or who does it, and I don’t care what another
thinks of me because of what I prefer. Life’s too short for any of that
nonsense. If I can’t be myself, what’s the point in continuing? I’m not here to
impress anybody but me. If others dig that, great. If not, ok. I’m still me no
matter what.
*
So, what does a freshman do after
membership on a football team that went 3-7 and was used as punching bags for
the entire season? Go out for basketball, of course. Small schools like Madisonville usually had
some combination of athletes that played two or all three of the sports
offered. I tried out for and made the B-team in the 1969-1970 season. It was a
great experience. Many of the guys from the 1969 junior high team also made the
roster, along with a couple of others who had not played, and the rest were
sophomores who landed there for a variety of reasons. I believe everyone tried
out for the main varsity team, and we were the 12 (later to be known as The
Dirty Dozen) who were sent down to play the other cast-offs of other programs.
What The Dirty Dozen lacked in
finesse, we made up for in assholism. We were rough and mean and not likely to
be pushed around. That we didn’t win a lot of games didn’t seem to matter to
any of us. We always played hard, though not as dirty as the nickname implied.
The lot of us were experienced cussers, and we cussed nearly all the time, even
in minor flaps, or for no particular reason. Several of my best friends were
members, three of whom were former band mates and another was a future one, and
we liked playing on that team.
The varsity started out slowly, too,
losing three games by the first week of December, in one case losing to a much weaker
opponent. But I had great hopes for that team. It had great size, depth, and an
experienced backcourt, including a crafty and skillful point guard. The lead
guitarist of The Heroes had finally become the starting center for the team. At
6’5”, he, too, was a highly skilled ball handler, and he had mastered classic
pivoting and footwork. He also had a deadly weak side corner jumper. Like the
team, he started slowly early on, but when he heated up I wondered why he hadn’t
played much the year before. The previous team had a frontcourt of senior
starters, all fairly tall, big guys. The starting center had been the starting
center on the football team. The star of the show was a 6’5” fellow who played
close to the basket. He had very good court sense and had an accurate mid-range
jump shot. Some of his points came on tip-in of misses. The poor guy did occasionally
disappear in some games; however, the new center always showed up.
A game was scheduled for the evening
of the last day of classes leading into Christmas break. Though the B team
didn’t have a game, I went to support The Tornadoes. The usual game crowd was
mightily thinned that night. I sat in the stands with my coach where we
commented often on various technical aspects of the playing during the game,
which was a Tornado victory. I spoke to the principal on my way out, and left a
nice feeling. The next week, on Christmas day, snow started falling a little
before 11 a.m., and didn’t stop until a blanket of six or seven inches covered
nearly everything. A little after midnight the gymnasiums at Madisonville High School
and Tellico Plains High School
(near duplicate designs, and build by the same company) collapsed under the
weight of snow. A hard freeze gripped the land for a few days and I wondered
what was going to happen.
*
I got a pretty good haul for
Christmas. Apart from the essentials like clothing, of which I remember little,
my parents bought me Are You Experienced,
by Hendrix, and Goodbye, by Cream,
and Near the Beginning, by Vanilla
Fudge. I wore them out. My grandmother commented that she “couldn’t stand” the
Cream song I’m So Glad, because I
played the album a couple of times per day, and often listened to one side
while dozing off to sleep for the night.
The New Year began a little rocky
due to the uncertainty at school concerning the demolished gym, a separate
building connected by a covered walkway between it and the main educational
side. The area looked like a mini war zone, as though a bomb or missile or huge
meteor had landed on the building.
The Pug-a-Nut had also crashed, at
least as a business. There was some inner controversy, but I don’t remember
anything about that. I’d also heard that Billy D had gotten married. Wow. I
didn’t see that coming. With those developments I figured for a return to the
earlier status quo, but The Heroes were still kind of on ice, partly because of
the guitarist’s basketball commitment, but there may have been other reasons as
well. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who missed the dance scene.
One Friday night, CEP, Lawman, and
another guy, TP, who had just gotten out of the army, showed up at my
grandmother’s house. “Comon, we’re going to a square dance.” A square dance?
Were they kidding? The optimal word is “square” and all the negative
implications the word implies. Why go to a square dance? I wondered. “Be a
lotta women there,” Lawman said. Really? I was having trouble grasping that
concept. I was a youth music guy moving increasingly toward the more
progressive side of that genre, so I just couldn’t see how this would be any
fun. “I want you to meet my girlfriend,” Lawman said. I grudgingly consented to
go.
The particular square dance was
held, I believe, in Athens,
Tennessee. There was a band that
played sort of down home country type songs, and every few numbers a guy would
jump up behind the mic and start the calling. I’d seen similar things on
television, but didn’t understand them any more than I understood an auctioneer
babbling away. One problem that evening was that just a few people showed up,
and so the squares were constantly lobbying CEP and me to join in. It seemed
pointless to me since I had no idea what the calls meant, nor how to execute
any of the moves. Still, the pressure finally got to us and we tried a couple
of the call events, to a mostly mixed success rate, though the results were
more inept than disastrous.
When the next week rolled around,
same thing. Lawman and CEP, minus TP, wanted to go to a like event in Lenoir City, Tennessee.
“They’ll be a lotta women there,” Lawman said. “Yeah? That’s what you said last
week,” I answered. “I’ll bet your girlfriend will be there, though.” “She’ll be
there. She said one of her friends would be there, too.” We went.
The dance was held in a fairly huge
hall, which appeared to have some gymnasium-like qualities, and I recall it
being referred to as a community center. The crowd, unlike in Athens a week earlier, was overflowing, with
both dance floor and bleachers packed to the gills. I couldn’t believe it. Even
more unusual to me was the crowd mix of all ages of people dancing together. I
also noticed that young people danced the square and everything else. In that
respect the event was very interesting to me. Best of all was that Lawman
didn’t lie: lotta women there.
To the people who know me this may
come as a shock, but in truth, I’m quite shy, at least when I first meet people.
I also am not a big fan of mass events or crowds of any kind. I have a friend
who likes to go out with a crowd of people to dinner. He’s not happy unless
several couples and whatever singles want to join in. And though I’ve gone to
many such occasions with him and his posse, I feel mostly like retreating like
a turtle into my shell because I never feel as though I hear or say anything
that isn’t on a totally superficial level. No, I much prefer one on ones or
just another couple to a crowd, especially since I’ve gotten old and find it
difficult to decipher dialog over the din of loud music and hubbub in some
restaurants. The same is true of parties, where I will often latch onto some
poor soul and stick with that person for the entire event, or even of family
(and I love my family and friends), or church dinners, or nearly anything along
that line. Perhaps this marks me as selfish, but I don’t mind spending time
alone. Since I’m such a loudmouth around people I know, it may be difficult to
see me as I see me, which is as a pensive, introverted personality. In that
light, much of my time at public events is spent as an observer, so the idea
that there would be a lotta women at the square dance was more about experiencing
the event through my eyes and ears than in a more interactive manner.
When the music and dancing began, I
just roamed around for a long time. Every so often I’d sit with CEP in the
bleachers, then I’d roam about a bit more without asking anyone to dance, and
without any appreciation for the music. I fancied myself suffering, feeling
sorry for myself and the pitiful conditions I imagined myself subject to, and
wondered why I’d let Lawman and CEP talk me into a second foray to
Squaresville.
About two hours in, I tired and went
back to the bleachers for a sit behind where Lawman and his girlfriend and her
friend sat. Lawman’s girlfriend turned and asked me if I had met her friend. Of
course I hadn’t, so she made the introduction. I don’t remember the girl’s name
(nor Lawman’s girl’s name, either), but I can remember how she looked, and I
thought her quite attractive. I sat next to her and talked for awhile before
asking her to dance. I’m incredibly white when it comes to rhythmic movement
and there’s no way in hell I could ever impress anybody with that, but I wasn’t
so removed from the rest of the pack, at least that night.
The dancing went on for a few songs
before we retreated to the bleachers as another call dance started up (some of
those songs had lasted 15 to 20 minutes in a sort of unconscious and boringly
repetitious homage to lengthy rock songs). Lawman’s girlfriend’s friend and I
talked together for the rest of the evening. I found her interesting to talk
to, and again thought her to be good looking (her hair was frosted a little).
She revealed that she was a sophomore at Greenback High School
(I guess Lawman’s girlfriend was as well), and before we left the two girls had
invited us to play basketball with them early the next morning (Sunday).
I felt a somewhat conflicted about
the proposed basketball trip. First, I’d have to get up early and venture into
the cold to play on someone else’s home court. That was a lot to ask. Then
again, I knew that the girl I’d met and I had gotten along better than I would
ordinarily have expected. Usually the girls seemed to leave me behind for CEP,
so I was in unfamiliar territory. Lawman and CEP had definitely noticed the
good vibes and had teased me (ridden me like a horse, in fact) all the way
home, and I figured that they’d use any additional ammo generated by such a
trip to ride me further (my skin was so thin in those days) because they knew
the teasing really got to me (I’m no better in that I have picked on others in
the same way). But I still hadn’t decided until the next morning when the
fellows came by to pick me up. I begged off and they split. I figured that
would be the end of it, but CEP came back by after the game. “She asked where
you were. She’s got the sweet ass on you, man,” he said. That was kind of what
I’d figured, but wondered if I’d made a mistake in not going. We’ll never know.
*
If playing gigs was the standard,
then my freshman year in high school was a total bust. Football and basketball
took their tolls on my time, as did the never ending quest to keep my head
bobbing above water in the classroom, and I could never garner enough interest
from anyone to get a group together. I felt sad about it all, and walked around
in a mostly depressed state. The only thing to be happy about was my growing
record collection. I put every nickel into bringing home new music. Mom’s job
at The Big K figured mightily into the equation when she’d had first crack at a
stack of albums and bundled packs of singles a night before they officially
went on sale.
As might have been predicted, some
of the selections were busts, though I don’t fault my mom because she was
running blind. That she scored as well as she did was a miracle, all things
considered. An album that stuck to the present was After Bathing at Baxter’s, by Jefferson Airplane. I’d read a lot
about the album when it had been current (a few years before), but had never
heard it. I also got a couple of singles by The Doors, and one of the greatest
singles ever released, The Memphis Train,
backed with I Think I Made a Boo Boo,
by the incredible Rufus Thomas. He soon had the nation prancing with his hit, The Funky Chicken.
I’d dodged the coach and pretty much
stayed out of the way rather than playing football in the spring. I never liked
playing in the cold, and I figured a musical opportunity might come my way and
I didn’t want to miss that, so football was a memory. I had no intension of
playing the next year or any other time.
Billy D came around to invite me
into a new group he was about to join. He had left The Thumbers, who were
themselves going through some sort of change, and was thinking of singing with
a new group. To my surprise, The Truck drove us over to the first practice. In
fact, The Truck was a little surprised to see me because his plan was for Billy
D to play the organ, since he already had enlisted another guy to sing. We
drove around for a couple of hours waiting on the bass player to get home so we
could set up and practice. I think we ran through a single song when the guy
arrived.
No one contacted me for two or three
weeks after that, but one night The Truck dropped by to haul me to practice.
When I asked about Billy D, everyone in the car laughed. “He’s gone,” The Truck
said. “Whatta ya mean, gone?” I asked. “He’s in the National Guard. He got
married and joined to stay out of the draft.” This was news. I wasn’t ready for
it. I’d always had Billy D to fall back on, to direct me when I was in a fix. I
didn’t know what to do. The band rehearsed a few times, then fell apart. I
liked all the members, and the rhythm guitarist seemed to want to mentor me,
but there really wasn’t enough of anything to hold the group together.
The local music scene played possum
for a while. I saw The Thumbers playing at the Gudger Community Center
as the house band for The Gudger Jubilee, a local radio show. The band’s former
guitarist, on leave from the army and still in uniform, played on the night I
attended. When he was discharged, The Thumbers bought some large, padded Kustom
amps and a PA system and morphed into a Creedence Clearwater Revival-type cover
band.
After basketball season, a very
successful campaign which included the school’s first win over McMinn Central,
an 18 game winning streak, and the first trip by Madisonville to the regions of
state tournament (The Heroes’ guitarist was the big man on team), The Heroes
regrouped for its last gigs. I believe The Heroes played a time of two in the
high school cafeteria, and I recall, though I might be a tad mixed-up, that the
last two gigs were played in the newly rebuilt gym in the late spring. As I remember them, the band’s performances
were laid back and effective. Some songs from the past like Lonely Too Long and You Keep Me Hanging On came out of mothballs, and sounded sweet to
boot, and the note for note version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
proved what the band members were made of. The Heroes did not survive the
graduation of the drummer and guitarist (the bass player had graduated the year
before but played with The Heroes while attending a local college).
Around that same time Tig and I had
become closer friends and spent a goodly amount of time talking about and
listening to music. Three bands we always agreed on were Led Zeppelin,
Steppenwolf, and Vanilla Fudge, especially the Fudge. To us the Fudge seemed
the perfect band due to the members’ abilities to play airy, atmospheric
passages and still deliver a blow to the head whenever one was called for. Both
Tig and I liked Oh, Well, by
Fleetwood Mac, a shortened version of which had charted on Top 40 radio.
I wanted to play in a band with Tig,
but he was already in a band. Two of the band’s members, the drummer and
bassist/keyboardist, came from the high school marching band. The lead vocalist
and co-lead guitarist used a strange, rag-tag assemblage of equipment. He used
a Hagstrum guitar (a brand I had only seen in advertisements a few years
earlier featuring The Mothers of Invention), a decent Fender amp, and some kind
of bullhorn PA system which delivered a harsh, metallic vocal tone. I’d once
jammed with the guitar player, but nothing came of it.
*
Tig had turned 16 and had been
regularly driving for a few months when, in early summer, we discovered that
Vanilla Fudge would be playing at a racetrack east of Knoxville.
Of course both of us were excited nearly beyond our capacities to contain
ourselves. We plotted carefully how we would raise ticket money and how we’d
get to the place. A big sale would be our parents. I was only 15 and had rarely
been allowed outside the county, and Tig was little older and had no practical
experience driving in the big city. But it was the Fudge coming, so we would
pull out all necessary stops to make the trip happen.
Things really went better than we
had hoped. We were quickly granted parental consent, and the concert cost, I
believe, was around four dollars each. Great. My dad worked in Knoxville and gave us directions, which he
assured us were easy to follow, and that the location was easy to find. Tig’s
folks allowed him to use the main family vehicle, equipped with an eight track
tape player. Everything came together.
We got rolling a little early on the
night of the concert in case we took a wrong turn or in some other way got
lost. New Interstate 75 had not yet been completed, so everyone from Madisonville took Highway
411 to get to K-town, which meant also that going through town during rush hour
was a necessity to get to the concert. My dad had stressed that all we had to
do was stay on the road to Virginia
and we couldn’t miss the place. As coincidence would have it, we stopped at a
convenience store to make sure we were on the correct road, and ran into my dad
who just happened to be there. He confirmed our location, and not long
afterword we parked in the racetrack lot.
I was expecting a scene like Woodstock, but except for
the occasional long haired boy, the crowd looked about the same as one at a
high school football game. Tig and I bought tickets and were allowed through a
narrow, gated passageway. We found an isolated spot on the bleachers and
prepared for the crowd to come that never came. Not only were the seats largely
unfilled, but no one even sat near us. The majority of concert goers had
settled on spread blankets arrayed near the stage.
The opening act was a local band
that mostly did covers from Grand Funk Railroad’s first album, On Time. The singer had long hair and a
headband, but the get-up was a wig and he removed it after the first song.
Despite the phoniness of the beginning of that presentation, I thought the band
played well and sounded good. Tig and I heard a great commotion at the
entrance, almost directly under our seats. The disturbance turned out to be a small
gang of young men who had stormed an unguarded gate and climbed over the locked
door. One of the voices sounded familiar and turned out to be Billy D’s younger
brother. After getting lost in the crowd, he spotted us and came over and
talked for a little bit (offering us some “grass”) before disappearing again
into the crowd.
The first big league band on the
bill was Cat Mother & the All Night Newsboys, who had recently made the
charts with a song called Good Old Rock
’N’ Roll. I don’t know what the deal was, and I really didn’t care, but the
band never played its hit that night. Instead, the crowd was treated to a
little over an hour’s worth of heady, progressive music. I was very impressed
with the flute playing that figured into several songs. Cat Mother’s persona
for the show was laid back, but the music was intense. I really liked what the
band did.
Before the second act could take the
stage, a conflict began to emerge. A big part of Tig’s and my getting
permission to go to the concert in the first place was our promise to be home
near midnight. Well, Cat Mother hadn’t left the stage until nearly 9:30, and it
was around 10 p.m. when Blue Cheer came on. I wanted to see the entire set and
so did Tig, so we dug in. I had always liked Blue Cheer since their 1968 cover
hit of Summertime Blues. The band
played more covers than I had expected, including the Cream songs, Politician and Sitting On Top of the World. Blue Cheer played some hard-assed
music and Tig and I decided to stay in hopes of hearing the Fudge after them.
That was not to be because the next
band to play was Big Brother and the Holding Company. Don’t get too excited.
Janis was already long gone and had been replaced by a harmonica player.
Neither Tig nor I expected too much from the band, and we really didn’t get
that much, but the front man was unlike anything I’d ever seen in that he was
great at talking to the audience and adding an additional angle to the show.
That night was the first time I had ever heard anybody say “fuck” on stage
(quite often, as I recall). The set lasted for nearly two hours.
Since we’d been there that long, Tig
and I decided to stay on. Vanilla Fudge finally took to the stage at 2:00 a.m.
It was a strange Fudge, too. Instead of the four piece lineup (we knew that the
drummer and bass player had already left to form Cactus), five guys, one a
singer, made up the group. The band launched right into a long piece. I was
tired but loving it, while at the same time worried about what would happen to
our asses when we got home. We left while Vanilla Fudge played its third song,
a cover of the Spencer Davis Group’s I’m
a Man. The time was around 2:30 a.m.
On the way back home Tig remarked
that he had never been awake that late at night before. What was worse was that
we got turned around and drove by several landmarks several times each before
getting back on track. When we finally reached my parents’ house, everybody
was, predictably, still awake. By then it was getting toward 6 a.m., and my mom
said Tig’s parents were insanely worried. Mom called them and prepped them with
the story that we told her, that Tig and I had become lost (we let on that we
had been lost for nearly six hours instead of a shade over three. Everyone was
so relieved to have us back that there was no talk about grounding or any
punishment, and as far as they were concerned we were still trustworthy and in
good standing.
Phase 11
My second year of high school
started much like the first in that I again played football. It was, as usual,
a bad decision on my part, even though I got the chance to play quarterback
(again on the B team). Most of the B team duty and direction was given over to
two guys who had played on the team the previous year. It was a bad decision by
the coach to allow those guys that power. Both guys had powerful dads, and that
probably played into the coach’s decision, though neither guy was mature enough
to handle the responsibility. I don’t know what eventually happened, but both
guys lost interest or something and they were gone long before the season was
over. So was I. No, I didn’t do the honorable thing and quit, I would
occasionally attend a practice, but most of the time I just hid out in the
restroom to make a break for the busses when the bell rang. Whatever love I’d
had for football and the team spirit of things was gone, and it never came
back. The idea that I was supposed to help and support guys who wouldn’t give
me the time of day started to eat at my craw, so I took a fuck it all approach
and that seemed to work best for me.
Billy D was home from basic training
(he’d spent six months on active duty to begin his guardom) and I believe
attending barber school. His marriage had already broken up and he was looking
for something to do. He still owned a Farfisa organ, and had collected a
guitar, a fuzz tone, a small amp, a mic and stand, and a set of drums, and
lived with his mom, step dad, and two younger brothers. We often jammed in
Billy D’s bedroom. The Thumbers’ drummer had begun playing guitar, so Billy D
and I would back his seemingly endless stream of improvised licks. “I don’t
wanna play drums no more,” he said, sitting on the edge of Billy D’s bed while
picking away on some guitar he’d borrowed. “Listen to this.” He played a lick.
“That’s Stephen Stills,” he said. “I just love the way he does that.” He
replayed the lick and added a variation. “Stephen Stills, man.”
We got to jamming pretty regularly,
and were mightily influenced by The Live
Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, especially the song, Dear Mr. Fantasy. The guitar guy had
heard Stephen Stills jamming with Bloomfield and Kooper on the Super Session studio album. Several
times when I’d ditched football practice I headed over to Billy D’s to get in a
living room jam before his parents got home. We seemed to be moving toward a
band, at one time even inviting two former Heroes to join us. I don’t know why,
but I was surprised that the former Heroes were fairly terrible at the art of
jamming. Those guys, the bass player and drummer, were really swell fellows,
and we were lucky that they actually accepted our invitation, but they worked
better within a tight framework where everyone knew what was coming at all
times. Our approach was a bit looser than that, to the point where at times no
one had any idea where the music was going, but maintained the faith that
everything would eventually work itself out, and even if it didn’t, the jam
would be a fun ride.
No band came out of those jams, but
I did get an offer to play a gig with Tig. Two members of his group had
departed, so he and the drummer, Ears, replaced them with vocalist OJB, me on
organ, and The Third on bass. The band rehearsed in a spare room at The Third’s
house. Tig, The Third, and I were members of the high school football team. The
Third was the starting tight end and defensive end, and he and I had always
been friendly. Along with CEP, Lawman, the head coach, and several others, I
had played football in his backyard many Sunday afternoons during my freshman
year. The House of Representatives had borrowed The Third’s amplifier for
vocals and guitar when we’d played the Farm Bureau a couple of years earlier.
I don’t remember the name of that
band, but we played a Thursday night gig in the gym of Hiwassee
College in Madisonville after that single practice. Ears
had this enormous Whitehall
drum kit with double bass drums, and his Wipe
Out-ish drum playing on our rather lame version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida seemed to excite the crowd, especially when OJB
put his head into a hollowed bass drum front as Ears stomped the shit out of
them. A small number of patrons formed a semi-circle around the band to groove
with OJB’s Jim Morrison-like behavior. When the song was over, rather than
allow the crowd to cool, we pulled the one ace from our deck by playing a not
half bad cover version of Steppenwolf’s The
Pusher. I had never heard another band play that song (except for
Steppenwolf, I haven’t heard anybody do it), so I guess we were the first. The Pusher still had a lot of power
then, and the college kids liked it, I think, because the Hippie ethos had
finally penetrated the mainstream of a little place like Madisonville,
Tennessee, even though it had been largely over for a couple of years in the
major cities. Whatever the reason, the band was well received that evening, and
I felt very good about the experience.
Tig got us to practice at The
Third’s twice for a scheduled dance at the Farm Bureau following a Friday night
basketball game. I don’t know what happened, but OJB, The Third, and I were all
sacked before the week was out, and the two former members rejoined for that
engagement. I was a little ticked-off at Tig, but I was playing varsity
basketball and didn’t really have time to devote too much effort to a band.
I had surgery on a broken finger
around that same time and could play neither basketball nor music. I fell
deeply into an intense depression and moped my way through everything. My
family knew something was up, but I couldn’t tell them anything because I
didn’t know what the problem was. A gnawing mental grind stayed with me to a
greater or lesser extent for many years. The agony wasn’t something I grew out
of. As time has worn on I have become better able to deal with internal
chemicals running amuck. I finally learned to accept such things as part of my
own normal life-cycle. Do I feel better? Sometimes.
My finger healed and I was able to
rejoin the basketball team and finish the season. The local dance scene had,
after too long an absence, sort of come back around. The lead singer for The
Heroes formed a new band and began to gig in the area again. Instead of weekly
engagements in Madisonville,
the new band often played at The National Guard Armory in Sweetwater. The core
of that new band was the bass player, his brother keyboard player (playing a
very sweet Hammond B-3 organ amplified by two Leslie cabinets), and the guitar
player, all of whom had been members of a well known Vonore High School band, The
Jewels. When that band dissolved, the three members and drummer had worked up a
goodly number of Booker T and the MG’s tunes. The new band, The Blues Blogs,
had absolutely nothing to do with blues, and played, to my disappointment, too
much bubblegumish Top 40 fluff, along with some Carolina beach music, and the Booker T songs,
which somehow stayed on the playlist. The singer once told a friend of mine
that I should mind my own business when I had given some friends a less than
stellar review to the band. I understand his consternation with my appraisal,
but if you can’t take the heat, you know, but that’s not the point. The real
point is that The Blues Blogs didn’t have the love of the high school as The
Heroes had, and that even a nobody like me could put a little jitter into the
fabric of things. Look, no offense, but what I thought was that with such a
group of fine musicians, including horn players (rare around Madisonville in
those days), the band could stretch its muscle by playing something a little
more challenging than Hitchin a Ride.
I still liked The Blues Blogs and never missed any chance to see a performance.
I don’t know whatever happened to The Blues Blogs, but after the early spring
of 1971 I never saw nor heard of the band again.
*
Right at the end of the 1970-71
basketball season, I got the chance to attend my second ever concert. I can’t
remember why I got so excited, but when I learned that Savoy Brown had booked a
stop in Knoxville,
I couldn’t wait to see the concert. The strange part is that I didn’t know
anything about the music of SB, and was basing my excitement on a review of the
band’s newest album and singer. There were to be two other bands, The Grease
Band, who had been Joe Cocker’s band at Woodstock, and Faces (formally The
Small Faces), who I had not heard anything from since Itchycoo Park in 1968, on the bill.
I had scraped up enough money to buy
tickets for Billy D, who would be doing the driving, my cousin, who was
supposed to be BD’s date, a girl named Ruby, who was supposed to be my date but
allegedly came down with some ailment and didn’t make it, and me. We went out
to my cousin’s and ate with my aunt and uncle. My cousin allowed us to listen
to her copy of Jimi Hendrix’s Monterey
Pop album. We also listened to the Otis Redding side of the same disc. We
left about an hour and a half before concert time.
I bought three first balcony tickets
at $3.50 a pop, and we waited outside The Knoxville Civic Auditorium until the
doors opened. The crowd milling around near us was certainly groovier looking
than the bunch I’d seen at my first concert the previous summer, but by the
time we had found our seats I could see that the auditorium less than half
full. I hoped like hell that the small size of the crowd wasn’t because the
bands were going to be shitty. I read the rock press a lot and I didn’t know
much about the bands and I figured no one else did either. I kept an open mind.
Just like my first concert, an
unannounced opening act warmed up the crowd. I don’t remember the guy’s name,
and hence have no idea of his place in music, but he was in my eyes a fairly
average folk singer, and probably a local act. I’m sure I watched him while
listening intently, yet no lasting impression marked itself in my brain.
Same’s true for The Grease Band. To
be perfectly frank, they were terrible. I don’t mean that the members couldn’t
play. Everybody had heard the band backing Joe Cocker in Woodstock (one of the
highlights of the film), but whatever fire exhibited during the movie was
absent in Knoxville.
I could see a Hammond
organ on stage and was excited about what might come from it, but nothing ever
did, save for one song that sounded like Three Dog Night’s Out in the Country.
Never assume. I didn’t expect much
from The Faces, and thought that Savoy Brown had better be good lest I was out
time and money. I watched the crowd between acts. Smoking was allowed at the
Knoxville Civic Coliseum. I wondered if we’d encounter the demon weed. Tobacco
was all I could identify. The crowd seemed as restless as I felt. The opening
acts were busts and nearly everyone probably thought so.
The first thing I noticed about The
Faces was that two of the band members, tall, skinny fellows full of pep, had
the most unusual hair styles I’d ever seen. The hair designs looked like
English shags with fountains of spikes exploding from the crown. It was a
different world. The first number began with a solo slide guitar part (I’d
never heard a live slide since Brillo played one in grammar school). The blond
singer opened his pipes and let out the voice of god. He and slide man (Ron
Wood, current long time guitarist for The Stones), traded off for a bit. The
singer, Rod Stewart (I’m not sure I caught his name that night), said, “But
she’s my girl,” and the band launched into a measured RNR explosion. The crowd
went nuts at the song’s end. I clapped and yelled, but was also in shock. I’d
never heard the likes of The Faces. I expected some warmed over 60’s stuff and
got hit square in the face with the 70’s.
Rod was totally different from
anything I’d seen or heard. Besides the great voice, he also had a winning
manner as a front man. Unlike the guy in Big Brother, Rod didn’t have to say
fuck to make a statement. He also had this little shuffling dance he did when
Ronny cut to a lead. While the band played Maybe
I’m Amazed, Rod put his arm around the bass player’s shoulder like a best
pal or brother might do. The entire set looked like the band was having a great
time and was glad to be there. The Faces rocked and rocked and were called back
for three encores during a set that lasted nearly two hours.
At that point I figured we’d really
be in for big doings with Savoy Brown. Of course, being average and only 16
years old, I didn’t know the ways of the world. I didn’t know that the bands on
a bill were lined up as much by seniority as talent (which is why Led Zeppelin
opened for Iron Butterfly and later Vanilla Fudge on its first trip to the
states). I thought the best band took the top spot, but I was wrong.
Not to be unfair, Savoy Brown was
very good. The band members were good players and the musical direction was
that of a progressive rock n roll group. The band’s leader and lead guitarist
was named Kim, and that caught my interest, too. The musicians came on full of
fire (they had to after The Faces) and warmed up on two pretty decent numbers.
The third song was very dramatic with a longish section of excellent scat
singing. But just when I was about to be won over, Kim Simmons bid the
auditorium farewell and the band left the stage. The crowd, small as it was,
got rowdy, felt, as did I, cheated. Some official looking gentleman took the
stage and announced that we had to leave. A chant of “Hell no, we won’t go,”
filled the room. After several warnings of dire consequences by the poor fellow
charged with verbal crowd control, Savoy Brown took the stage again. It was
easy to see that the band wanted to go home, and the song it played was nothing
more than an instrumental three chord shuffle that was half-heartedly executed,
but enough to dupe the crowd into standing down and heading for the exits when
completed.
We dropped my cousin off in
Strawberry Plains and headed toward home. Billy D had an eight track player in
his car and we were able to listen to Santana
on the way back. As we sailed through Greenback, I went nuts when Soul Sacrifice came on. Anyone following
the car might have thought that I was having some sort of fit with my bobbing,
weaving, and spasms. A lot of it was an exaggeration on my part designed to get
some reaction from Billy D, but partly because good music has the power to
pitch one outside the usual boundaries of normal existence. I got home around
1:00 a.m.
*
Just a little before my second
concert, mom and dad announced to me one evening that mom was expecting a
child. That news was a shock. Mom was 37 years old, and I thought she was too
old to have another baby. I immediately went across the street to talk to my
grandmother about the news. I’d figured that she already knew it, but was taken
by surprise that she didn’t. I’m not sure she really believed me. It was true,
however, and my sister was born in July of 1971. Her birth brought a whole new
layer to our existences, especially since Crystal
was born with severe cerebral palsy.
Mom was born in 1934. My
grandparents lived in Louisville, Tennessee at that time, but I believe mom spent a lot of
her early youth in Kentucky,
where her daddy and several of my grandmother’s relatives worked in the Lynch
coalmine. She was one of five sisters (one died in infancy) living under the
same roof with many of granny’s said relatives. Sometime along the way the
family lived between Madisonville
and Vonore, where granddad was from, and sometime before or shortly after
granddad was drafted into the army, the family lived in Loudon, which is where
my grandmother had spent a lot of her childhood.
Granddad left for the service in
1944, on the day his fifth child was born. Before that year was over he had
trained, shipped to Italy,
been wounded and captured by Germans, and died a POW. Mom was only 10. Granddad
was only 34. He was posthumously awarded The Bronze Star and Purple Heart. The
war had been over for several years when his body was returned to the family
for burial.
Even before granddad died the family
had led a hard scrabble existence, and nothing changed after he was out of the
picture, so mom was used to living on the edge. In fact, she’s lived like that
in one way or another most of her life, including all of my childhood, and at
times beyond. I can’t say we were destitute, especially since we had a house to
live in, but the thin times were very lean. I think we were lucky that we
processed a lot of our own food. In 1960 I remember granny and company buying a
bunch of chickens for the freezer. My impression was that my family had
expected the chickens to be packaged. They weren’t. The poultry waited with
bound legs in the carport. In less than an hour granny had set up a makeshift
block, got out the old, dull ax, and started chopping heads. With help from
neighbors a packaging line was established from block to freezer. The operation
took all day, but we ate chicken for a couple of years.
I can honestly say that my mom is
both physically and mentally tough. If there was ever anyone equipped to handle
the challenges of having a special needs child it’s my mom. She and my
grandmother drove Crystal to physical therapy in
Knoxville
several times a week for several years. Mom had to organize with other special
needs parents to push like hell to make the school system obey the law with
regards to handicapped children. One county school superintendant once remarked
to my mom that if the state required him to jump eight feet but he could only
jump three, what more could be done? Well, more was eventually done, but not
without constant pushing against the reluctance of those in power.
I think that my sister’s living
nearly 38 years is as much a testament to mom’s iron will as any other factor.
On a daily basis mom had to clean my sister’s immediate habitat and body, dress
her, often several times each day, prepare and feed my sister all meals and
snacks, as well as do all the usual tasks necessary to run a household. There
were lots of other things too, as in all lives, and she handled most of them
pretty well. If I had a hat on I’d tip it to her now.
*
Word that Steppenwolf was coming to Knoxville got me excited.
Steppenwolf had the coolest look of any band in the world (though I’ll confess
that there was no shortage of cool at that time) and played a rough and ready
kind of music soaked in distorted guitars (including slide), rock solid
drumming, inventively clever Hammond organ (and other keyboards) playing,
and
shouted out by a gravelly voiced singer whose songs delivered timely political
messages which ranged in tone from the humorous (Don’t Step On the Grass, Sam), to the very serious (Draft Resister and From Here to There Eventually), and all delivered with a little
extra jab to the teeth of the establishment. The arrangements and playing in
many of Steppenwolf’s songs also displayed a wide eccentric sound and manner.
All in all, it was my kinda band.
Along with Billy D and Tig, I’d been
spending a lot of time with my friends Luke and Hook. We’d been buddies at
school and beyond for a few years (I’d known Luke since grammar school,
especially 6th grade), and as we approached our late teens were
vigorously working toward the contradictory ideals of becoming hippie
anarchists. We had practiced those ends as often as possible with various acts
of anarchist defiance including a brief concert for our English class
(rearranging lyrics and anything else to bend three cover songs to our ends),
and several sessions on the railroad tracks near Luke’s house where we would
unload torrents of rocks against the windows and bodies of automobiles hauled
through the unprotected air in open sided train cars. I always felt damned good
when we’d damaged a Caddy or another vehicle.
We started calling ourselves, and
the others who hung around with us, The Crabs (after, yes, those crabs) because
we were the unwanted, the cast outs, the shunned, the not ready for anything
players. And yet, none of us really wanted to be establishment darlings. We
wanted society girls (because they looked good and dressed so well), but the
rest of the scene was a big, fat drag to us. Hook’s poem said it best: “I’ve
said it before and I’ll say it again,/It’s not a lie, it’s not a sin,/But we
are Crabs, we’re tried and true,/ And if you don’t like it—fuck you!” Hardly
upscale political discourse, though it captures the essence of Crabdom.
Along with our Crab pal, Cowpuncher,
and my former band mate and football teammate Crowbar (he could drive), we took
off for Knoxville
way earlier than necessary. It was just past midday when the expedition got
started, and along the way stopped at Rose Music. I saw the first Magic Chord
organ that day, as well as the apple of my then eye, a Hammond Porta B organ.
It was sweet. I thought of all the worlds I could conquer with a keyboard like
that. I was glad we’d stopped. We messed with the keyboards and wore out our
welcome before getting back on the road.
Crowbar parked on a bridge between Gay Street and the
Coliseum. There were still hours to spare, so we walked up to Gay street to see
what was happening, which, in a word, was nothing. I don’t think I’ve been on Gay Street on a
Saturday afternoon since that lovely April day, so there’s nothing to judge it
by, but it was darn near deserted as we roamed the streets. In fact, the only
people we saw on the street at all were former US Senator Albert Gore, Sr. and his
wife walking alone on the other side of the street going away from us. That was
the first time I had encountered a famous person in the wild (not the last,
either). When we got up even to the elderly couple, Cowpuncher yelled, “Give em
hell, Brock!” (Bill Brock had defeated Gore a few months earlier), as a good
Crab might be expected to do.
The celebrity hubbub wore quickly
off and our little knot of assholes started back toward the Coliseum. This
little knot of assholes did have definite anarchist tendencies, and I assure
all that not a one of that crowd was above hurling objects for amusement, but
our true aims were gentler than that. In truth, we’d all bought into the
reality that love was the key to happiness. The Beatles told us that, and we
loved The Beatles. The Christian religion (I believe that all The Crabs, at
that time, were Christians) told us that, too. The political leaders of the
country, then as now and forever more, said it, urged it on us, nearly insisted
on it while at the same time waging a pissing contest war with the Soviets in
Southeast Asia (using the native population of Viet Nam and America’s drafted
poor as punching bags), and that great sore thumb of a contradiction riled the
ire of the average Crab. Hell no we won’t go! But would we?
Playing in a band with Crowbar was
the most fun thing. He was totally pure in his approach. The first time he
played his brand new Hofner Beatle Bass was at a band practice. Brillo and I
would point out the chord changes and direct him toward the root note of each
change. There was no slappin or flappin or freewheeling: it was all root note
banging at a more or less primal level. And though Crowbar’s, all our,
influences were immediately from the psychedelic era, he was punk, all punk,
and nothing but the punk, the living embodiment of rock ethos and
demonstration. I’m serious. Crowbar had no choice but to go straight at every
song that came up. He’d had no time for lessons or study, and not being a
natural musician in the traditional sense (Does it count that he played French
horn in the high school marching band?), he just took the path of least
resistance. He never objected to any outrageous idea, and by his basic nature
was prone to experiment. But that’s the essence of rock music: anybody can do
it. It’s campfire music with amplifiers; however, instead of sitting around a
pit full of burning wood and plucking on a guitar or thumping on a tambourine
while passing around a bottle and howling to the sky, the bandsmen gather in
basements and garages and spare rooms to assault life with guitars, basses,
drums, keyboards, singers, and occasionally horns, until the players become
proficient enough on a selection of songs to play in other basements, garages,
and spare rooms and howl at and share whatever with whomever shows up. That’s
all there is to it. I don’t belittle great players and playing, I love them and
that, but no one has to be great to play. It takes all kinds to make a band.
Steppenwolf was not just a cool
looking band, but a political band as well. As were many others at that time,
the band was firmly anti-establishment, against the Viet Nam War and the
various hypocrisies of modern politics, and was pro pot. The members of
Steppenwolf were crack studio players who knew their ways around the blues and
country music. Their songs were often very eccentric, at times even comic, due
as much to musical arrangement as lyrical expression. Consider the example of
the evolution of elements that sprang from The
Pusher. The earliest version I’ve heard of Steppenwolf’s cover of Hoyt
Axton’s iconic anti-drug anthem was a jammy, 21 minute version that came from the
Early Steppenwolf LP (recorded when
the band was still know as The Sparrow). Instead of the tight arrangement of
the song that made it onto the vinyl of the Steppenwolf
album, on Early Steppenwolf it begins
with a tribal drum part supplemented by a wooden sounding flute. That goes on
for awhile before evolving into The
Pusher. The drum/flute piece was later recreated in the studio and released
as Mango Juice (from At You Birthday Party), and parts of two
songs, Round and Down (which begins
with a heavily tremoloed guitar playing Wildwood
Flower) and the huge hit Rock Me,
were seemingly derived from those ideas. Even as late as the Monster album, those same techniques,
such as displayed on the tricky song Draft
Resister, continued to appear.
Though kinda tired after the long
wait, I was excited by the time we had taken our seats. The opening band was a
group of local short hairs who won over much of the audience with a cover of Okie from Muskogee, wherein the word ball was emphasized to some comic
effect. Damn me for saying it, but the band (I don’t remember its name) was
just to regular and square for my taste. I thought the band played pretty well,
and produced a rather seamless show, but I wanted edge, and the band had none.
I saw several fellow Madisonvillions
during the changeover between the bands. A pair of football (one basketball
also) teams of mind and Crowbar’s came walking by. “How’s it goin, queers?” I
said to them. A security officer in a police uniform stood between me and the
guys so that I didn’t clearly see him. The guys stopped dead in their red faced
tracks. As the guys passed by I heard the cop say, “He must know em,” to a
female usher also standing there. I stayed quiet during the remaining
intermission.
After the stage setup was complete,
before the band came out, John Kay, the lead singer and slide guitar/harmonica
player, walked onto the stage wearing dark sunglasses, black leather pants, and
a collarless pullover with a raised replica of Saturn across the chest, and
fiddled with something on the stage floor. Since no spotlight came on, no one
was quite sure it was Kay, but when a cheer finally went up he acknowledged the
crowd with a wave and left the stage.
Two Dan Armstrong Plexi guitars
waited suspended from a metal stand. I’d seen several pictures in a paperback
about The Stones of Keith Richards playing a Dan Armstrong. The guitars were
single pickup deals with bodies made of a clear, heavy, acrylic material. The
sound system also impressed me. The bands of the concert I’d seen at the
Coliseum a little over a month before had used the house PA (the sound rained
down from metal speakers hanging from various rafters), the same as an
announcer for a hockey game might. Steppenwolf stacked a wall of speaker
cabinets on either side of the stage.
The members of Steppenwolf appeared
relaxed and ready to play when they took the stage. The album the band was
touring to support was Steppenwolf 7
(Cowpuncher gave me a copy for Christmas), and the opening song of the show, Foggy Mental Breakdown, opened Side Two
of that LP. Between songs John Kay talked to the audience, and while he tuned a
guitar (the Dan Armstrongs belonged to him) someone yelled out for The Pusher. “We’ll get to that in a
minute,” Kay said. The crowd went nuts (I told you the song had power.).
The concert, including encore,
lasted about ninety minutes, during which time the band played 11 songs. The
lineup was the same as on the 7
album, and the players were very good. I was surprised that Kay played slide
and second lead guitar as much as he did. He wore and utilized a device called
The Bag that acted like a filter, similar to a wah wah pedal.
The 1971 show was a triumph and I
really enjoyed myself. Hook and I have revisited that day in conversation many
times since.
I nearly forgot that I also saw
Denis Yost and the Classics Four performing during a late afternoon concert at
Hiwassee College, in my hometown, not so long after the Steppenwolf show. I
didn’t have particularly high expectations of the band, primarily because DY
hadn’t had a hit in awhile, but I went because I liked the past hits.
Seems as though the concert was to
begin around 5 p.m., so I went to TAP’s house to wait it out after school. TAP
wasn’t home, but I waited around hoping to catch a ride to the college. None
materialized. I ended up hoofing my way to the auditorium. It was a packed
house and several people from my high school attended. The show was good, and
the band, especially the sax/flute player, played well. Yost’s needling of the
audience about being hicks was all done in a good humored way, and his singing
sounded just like the records.
I ran into Tig, who gave me a ride
home after the show. We talked about jamming and playing gigs, and listened to
the radio. The Sugarloaf song Tongue In
Cheek sailed out the windows of the Tig family Buick.
Phase 12
Tig and I began to jam more often
together until I became the keyboard player in the remnant of his old band. The
singer I’d previously replaced got tossed again, and the guy who’d played
keyboards moved over to bass. What a waste. The Cobbler (not his real name)
could play rings around me with just his thumb. The Cobbler had a musical gift,
and instantly played any instrument he happened across. He also allowed me to
use his incredible double keyboard Whitehall
organ (from which The Cobbler could coax a symphony) and was game for any crazy
shit the band conceived. OJB came on as the singer and brought a wide open fuck
you attitude that suited the rest of us very well. We chose Juicy Root
(suggested by Hook) as the band’s name, and began to practice in earnest.
I think one of the reasons Tig and I
had started to bond was that we like a lot of the same music. We sort of
competed to out-trump each other on album and artist finds. I really got him on
Johnny Winter. I remember playing him
Be Careful with a Fool. He got me
with Derek and the Dominos (though he
confessed he’d had the album, via the automatic function of his family’s record
club contract, for several weeks before realizing that Eric Clapton, one of
Tig’s favorites, was Derek). We were also huge fans of Vanilla Fudge (as stated
earlier).
Another reason we were such good
musical buddies was that I loved (still love) great guitar playing. Until 1971
my favorite instrument wasn’t organ but guitar, especially if pushed loudly
through an amp and/or other devices. I could list many reasons, but I think
mine closely resembles Frank Zappa’s when he described the electric guitar as
the most blasphemous thing on the planet. “It spews blasphemy,” he was quoted
as saying. Whether mean, ugly, smooth, sweet, raw, or refined, the guitar just
cannot be suppressed. But it can be used for good or ill, right? Hell, no. The
power of a guitar to possess a human soul should never be underestimated.
The summer of 1971 was the Summer of
Love in Madisonville.
The sight of young, longhaired males became more common. The hippie ethos and
fashion flooded into town in all directions at once. Marijuana, despite the
efforts of crusading editors and overly zealous police chiefs, appeared in
commercial quantities for a growing marketplace. Total acceptance of the
tenants of hard, improvised/extended song parts flew because the range of what
was considered dance music had widened because of this new attitude. Face it, The Pusher is hardly a club mix, but
people stood and stared as a little band of high school geeks hacked away, so
bands could get by with quite a bit. Needless to say, for good and ill,
personal expression became important.
*
Near the end of spring, quite apart
from Juicy Root, I heard Emerson
Lake and Palmer’s
song Lucky Man on a car radio. The
synthesizer got to me. I’d heard Switched
On Bach (both Crowbar and The Cobbler had copies of it), and limited use of
Moogs by The Beatles and The Doors, but synths had never been stuck up in my
face the way ELP did it. I read a magazine interview with the band and decided
I had to have Emerson Lake and Palmer.
I bought the album, and though it was vastly different from what I expected,
and pretty different from Lucky Man,
I grew to love band, album, and synthesizer.
Discovering ELP was a step toward
moving me into the position of becoming a bigger fan of progressive music.
Shortly after discovering the synthesizer, I also discovered Bill Chandler’s
show, Till 2, on WUOT in Knoxville. Chandler’s
taste was pretty wide, including many of the progressive bands around in the
early 70’s, and I enjoyed listening to the show, especially since nearly every
night I sat up late after everyone else had gone to bed. The radio couldn’t be
louder than a whisper or my parents might wake. The low volume actually forced me
to pay closer attention to the music than if played at a regular level while I
fiddled with something else. Chandler
introduced me to King Crimson and Frank Zappa. I listened intently nightly.
Somehow I came to join The Record
Club of America. I talked it over with my parents before doing so, and they
were ok with it since the number of required purchases was very low (I think
just three records), and the club gave each member three records for joining.
One of my first purchases was Let It Bleed,
by The Stones. That one’s definitely a winner. The records the club offered
were little more expensive than from the drug and dime stores in town, and the
selection was much better.
At the beginning of summer The RCOA
ran a membership promotion whereby three records would be awarded to anyone who
signed another to a membership. The idea struck me that if I really went to
work I could get a large pile of records. My goal was to sell 10 memberships,
but my drive petered out at 9. Still, 27 vinyl discs would boost the shit out
of my collection (at that point becoming respectfully large), so I happily sent
in the order and waited for my prizes. The wait was short and several packages
arrived over the course of a week or so. It was better than Christmas. As can
be expected, some of the titles were duds, but most were exactly what I’d
wanted. I got the ELP album, a Uriah Heep LP, the greatest hits of The Buffalo
Springfield, and more. I listened for hours every day.
*
Quite out of the blue, in May of
1971, I was suddenly invited to join a gospel group. The baritone
singer/guitarist and leader of the group owned a recording studio, and that’s
where I was taken that cold spring evening. Why they members of the group chose
me is a mystery yet. I’m no fan of gospel music, but I was fascinated with the
idea. The singers were all kin, two sisters, a brother, and the oldest lady’s
son (sang tenor, played bass). A classmate of mine played piano, and another
classmate (an incredibly good looking girl) was the bass player’s girlfriend.
The band had recorded an album at the studio, which was released on the
studio’s label. I’d heard the main singer, the oldest sister, sing harmony on a
demo Billy D had made of My Sweet Lord.
The rehearsal took place at the
studio. I struggled on my little Gem organ to learn the songs, and was nervous
that they wanted me to play the next day, Decoration Day, at Hopewell Springs
Baptist Church.
I knew I’d be terrible because I didn’t really learn the changes or the song
titles, but that’s rock n roll. The important thing, however, was not the
rehearsal, nor the group, nor the gig, but what happened when practice broke
up.
The young people and the sisters
left, but I stayed behind with the leader and tuned his guitar. We’d not been
at it long when one of the sisters burst in and announced that bass player and
crew had wrecked on their ways home. We quickly lit out.
I don’t remember much about the
crash except that it happened on a straight, level stretch of Niles Ferry Road.
My classmate, the piano player, banged her knee under the dash, and the other
classmate had a panic attack. The injuries were determined to be minor, and no
ambulance was called.
While the wreck was processing
round, I spied a girl standing in the driveway of the house in front of which
the crash had occurred. Damn, she looks good, I thought to myself. I wondered
how I could get to know her a little better. It was getting up toward 10:30
p.m., so I approached the girl and inquired about the use of her telephone to
call my parents. She led me into her kitchen and I saw her in the light, then I
saw the light. I flirted with her through the whole of the phone conversation
with my mom, and talked to her every second until the wreck cleared and all
headed home. She’d told me she planned to be at the church the next day.
I played the church gig, but no
girl. In a way I was glad because my playing had been not merely bad, but
erratically bad, lagging, a total mess. The band should have fired me on the
spot and put me before the firing squad as the closing entertainment to
Decoration Day, but to my surprise seemed nonplused and invited me back for
another time. All I could think about was the girl.
I began to feel sorry for myself and
thought I’d somehow blown the chance to impress my personality upon the life of
such a good looking, unsuspecting girl. Something like that could never have
happened in Madisonville, where I was just too
well known, but in another town (Vonore) a chance existed. For a change I
didn’t just give up, but pushed ahead until I got her phone number and talked
my way into her life. Not only was she a babe, but a cheerleader, too. Hell, I
hadn’t been within ten feet of a cheerleader since that cold football game my
freshman year, and dating one was not going to happen, but Vonore was an island
of dreams.
My new little girlfriend was a music
lover, a piano and guitar player, one of the top students in her class and
school, a cheerleader, a Christian, and a model citizen, about half the things
that I wasn’t. Somehow most of the opposing sides were planed away for a number
of years before everything fell apart. The entire thing, with its rough and
smooth qualities, was part of growing up. I hadn’t quite done that by the end
of the romantic run.
*
I was out of the gospel gig after
the second performance, an afternoon event at a nursing home, and was more or
less free to pursue my girlfriend and spend more time on Juicy Root. Actually,
things started to heat up on the band front after Tig bought a new Gibson SG guitar
and an amp with twin cabinets that stood nearly eight feet tall when one
cabinet was stacked atop the other. It was an impressive looking rig. Tig and I
had become very close and hung out while listening to records, or rode around
in his car (which had an 8 track player through which we listened to a stack of
cheap 8 tracks Tig had bought from the Kayo service station). Things were
getting very groovy during the Madisonville Summer of Love.
We got hold of the guys who’d been
jamming with us, The Cobbler and Ears, and added OJB as lead vocalist and began
to practice. The guys were really swell and fun as band mates. We concentrated
first on songs we all knew, then worked our ways out toward learning new and
potentially popular songs. Rehearsals had not been going on very long before
Tig announced a couple of gigs at Hiwassee College, where Tig’s dad, and a
bunch of his relatives, worked. Tig’s dad was the financial manager of the
college, so anything to do with money passed through his office. Hiwassee held
camps for high school marching bands every summer. Lots of wonderful young
girls, many my own age, came there. That’s where Juicy Root came in. The band
was hired to perform at two dances, both held in the gym, on consecutive weeks.
I think we made $75, or $15 for each member, for each show. That doesn’t sound
like much, but in 1971, $15 had about the same purchasing power as $100 now, so
the members were pretty happy about the gigs.
The turnout for the first of the two
dances was the biggest crowd I’d played for at that time. I enjoyed performing,
but overall the band sounded uninspired. Who knows why things like that happen?
When we played to a much smaller crowd the following week, the band perked up
and managed a good, enthusiastic performance. Not that it really mattered since
none of the people attending knew us nor would likely ever see us again. That’s
show biz.
*
Just like the summer of 1967, great
music was everywhere during the Madisonville Summer of Love in 1971. Via the
Record Club of America I was able to catch up on some really incredible stuff
I’d missed the first time around. Buffalo Springfield comes immediately to
mind. I had its Retrospective: The Best
of…album and listened to it throughout the summer. I’d heard For What It’s Worth and had seen the band
perform it on The Ed Sullivan Show,
but when I got a taste of the other music I was knocked to my knees. The songs Rock and Roll Woman, Mr. Soul, Kind Woman, and On the Way
Home inspired my greatest appreciation, but Bluebird and the mind blowing Broken
Arrow rank, in my mind, among the best of a type of rock that presents a
band in the studio role of chamber orchestra, turning the five piece and
sidemen into double their number through overdubbing. The Moody Blues, using
the studio and a Mellotron, took the idea a step further by producing the sound
of an entire orchestra, not unlike the Phil Spector Wall of Sound (King Crimson
went so far as to use multiple Mellotrons and a horn section and a piano to
bring that concept to the live stage [check out the new surround sound mix of Lizard to get an idea of what the band
was after]).
Albums from former members of
Buffalo Springfield, Stephen Stills and Neil Young, also soaked up a goodly
amount of my listening time. Stephen
Stills produced the great radio hit Love
the One You’re With, and also contained one of the last studio performances
by Jimi Hendrix, and overall was backed by some of the best singers and
musicians from American pop music (and Ringo, too). The song Black Queen, with Stills singing while
accompanying himself on guitar, knocked me over, too. Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush, on the other hand,
employed a more campfire/folkish approach to achieve its effects (though on
songs like Southern Man, Young
churned out some fairly gritty, almost freeform guitar). Of course both Stills
and Young played in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young which was another group
I’d been listening to for awhile. I owned the first two albums, and borrowed Four Way Street for an extended period.
Billy D had a copy of David Crosby’s If I
Could Only Remember My Name, and I really got into that weird musical
combination of the highly structured vocals smacking into the incredibly loose
arrangements and execution of the accompaniment. Crosby employed members of The
Grateful Dead, The Jefferson Airplane, Santana, all of CSNY, and singers to
make the record happen. I think it’s a masterpiece.
My pal Luke came into the equation when
he mail ordered a Warner Brother’s/Reprise sampler entitled The Big Ball. The album was released to
promote new acts (it sold at the bargain price of $2 for a two record
collection), with an emphasis on progressive music from folk influenced acts
like Tim Buckley, Joni Mitchell, and James Taylor, to hard rockers like Neil
Young, The Faces, and Fleetwood Mac (and the nine minute version of Mac’s song Oh Well), to wild fringe acts like
Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, The Mothers of Invention, and Ed Sanders
(with his great anthem to American values, Iliad),
and even an edited jam of Turn On Your
Love Light by The Grateful Dead. It was just the sort of album to attract
The Crabs (its songs reaching out like inviting pubes) who latched onto it and
the anarchy it promoted (strange, since the release was designed to stimulate
capitalist responses [which, at least in my case, was successful] that it
contained such subversion) without hesitation. The Crabs passed the album from
member to member as though it contained secret instructions for the destruction
of the status quo. Rocked, too.
Another bombshell whose fragments
hit The Crabs was Hooker N Heat. Not
only did John Lee Hooker’s singing and playing prove to be highly influential
to me and my crew, but his commentary between the songs on that release is
nearly as important as the music, and perhaps more influential than almost
anything else to a troublemaker like me. After living in a family where women
ran everything, I was glad to hear old John Lee say, “You talk too much,
woman.” Now there’s a man who knows something, I thought. Everything John Lee
said was a revelation, a mind blowing expression of common sense and life
experience. Quoting John Lee after a night of hard living, I once told my
grandmother, “Whiskey and women’s just about wrecked my life.” “You better stay
away from em, then,” she said without batting an eye. I guess there’s plenty of
wisdom to go around.
*
Word that Sugarloaf was coming to
Knoxville got around. Both Tig and I were excited about the possibility of
seeing the Green Eyed Lady band with
the big Hammond organ sound. The band also had a newly released album, Spaceship Earth (which I had received,
along with the album Sugarloaf, from
The Record Club of America as part of the 27 titles I’d worked for), and had a
song, Tongue In Cheek, that had
received some local airplay in the late spring. The band had also brought on a
new member for guitar, vocals, songwriting, and performance tricks, which
widened the scope of its progressive sound.
Several friends planned to see
Sugarloaf, but Tig informed me a few days before the concert that he would not
be able to go because he had misplaced his driver’s license. That put me into a
bit of a panic about how to manage transportation. I eventually made plans to
ride with CEP and another friend. However, a final obstacle, the fact that CEP
had a baseball game that would surely overlap with the concert, stood in the way
of complete happiness. CEP said he’d bail as soon as he was assured he’d have
no playing time. I had to go with that.
CEP had also come to my
transportation rescue a couple of months earlier when he drove me and Luke and
Red (we were all football teammates) to see the movie Popcorn at the drive-in. Largely forgotten now, the film was a type
of grab bag expose of youth culture and those strains of world cultures that
were thought to influence western youth culture. I didn’t care for the cultural
possibilities, but the lineup of musical acts, The Stones, Hendrix, Vanilla
Fudge and others seemed impressive, and I was impressed, but more with the
sudden, inexplicable juxtapositions of action and content (displaying a vague,
if even existent, narrative thread) than the merits of most of it. Shots of
Hendrix playing Hey Joe were used as
a sort of lip sync for the studio recording. During the song, footage of a
funeral and cremation, possibly taking place in India, was edited in with the
Hendrix footage. The Rolling Stones’ contribution was a promotional segment of
the band, wearing make-up, including lipstick, doing Jumpin Jack Flash. I’m sure plenty of fag jokes flew about the car.
The Fudge played, with real sync audio, but only briefly, meaning only a
fragment of The Beat Goes On filmed at
some shitty looking beach gig with the band facing the ocean. After the movie,
while driving across the road to get refreshments at the A & W, I heard
Alice Cooper’s 18 for the first time.
CEP picked me up at my parents’
house on the early evening of the Sugarloaf concert. Before the car had even
begun to move away from the driveway, my foot felt something under the driver’s
seat (I sat in the back behind CEP, who was driving). It turned out to be Tig’s
wallet, lost at some unknown time, which included his driver’s license. The
poor bastard. I gave the wallet to CEP as we headed toward Sweetwater, where
CEP might be called upon to pitch in the baseball game.
We sat through the vast majority of
innings before CEP asked the manager if he would be playing. When the manager
said he didn’t think so, it was off to see Sugarloaf, even though the concert
had started long before we left Sweetwater. The crew reached Chilhowee Park
long after dark (past 10 p.m.). No music was playing behind the walls of the
outdoor stage, though the sounds of crowd noise filled the air. No one waited
to take tickets at the entrance so I walked into the little arena. Hook and
Winnie were already there, as were Tig and his girlfriend. “Thought you lost
your license,” I said. “Came in the mail today,” he answered. “I found your
wallet in the floorboard of CEP’s ride,” I told him.
Hook told me that Sugarloaf was
taking a break. The members came onto the stage about 15 minutes after I
arrived. The band began with Mother
Nature’s Wine and played several extended numbers, and one which featured
the organ player on drums trading off with the other drummer. The music was
very good and expertly played, and when those two elements come together it
always leaves me inspired, and I left inspired that evening.
*
The rest of the summer rolled on by.
Juicy Root practiced often, though without playing another gig. Various
routines I allowed myself to indulge often led to boredom. Solitary walks to
town, shooting pool, and many other senseless adventures couldn't eliminate my
brooding. I hungered for physical contact with my girlfriend, but for reasons I
never understood, she refused to reveal my existence to her parents, so our
love was kept alive mostly by the telephone. The few occasions we got together
left me with a feeling like Satori for many days afterward.
Several brooding songs on the radio,
and in my collection, aided my perceived affliction. After two notorious
camping adventures with Hook, Billy D, and Cowpuncher, I heard songs
immediately after both occasions that sent me into a funk. One was Rings, the 1971 hit from Cymarron, which
I heard at Billy D's, and the other was The Doors' Riders On the Storm, which I heard at home just after talking to my
girlfriend. Heaven and Hell are not objectives for the afterlife, but entwined
here on earth. "Into this world we're thrown...."
*
