Banana Pudding

Here's three more.

Banana Life

I'm doing another two weeks of art. I'm also getting ready for football season. Yippy!

The Last Musical Banana

Today's is the final installment of musical history for a couple of weeks. I'll be posting art for the next two weeks while I write more.

            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.”

Don't Slip

Beware: a frank sexual passage will appear in today's post. If that offends, please don't read until tomorrow. Also, there was no natural break from yesterday's post, so the story continues without transition. 

            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.

More Monkey Music

Thanks to all friends and readers who have commented the last couple of days. Thanks for reading.

            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.

Still Swinging

Thanks for all the response from yesterday's post. I'm kinda overwhelmed. No better way to follow that than with another.

            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.

Monkey Music

I'm taking a break from art this week to bring five days of my musical history. I have not, nor shall I, list the names of any but the very famous. Try not to get too confused, and I'll attempt to make everything as clear as possible.

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.