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.
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