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.
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