Cool Mornings

Morning is opening like a yolk.

            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 8^th 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 7^th and 8^th 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 8^th 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.