A single narrow road ran onto the island from one side. And from the other side, a single track of rail connected the island to the mainland via an old trestle bridge.

I had work to do in the factory, but I had arrived way too early in the morning to get into the still-locked building. Or, to want to…interesting weather was happening outside and I wanted to watch it. I knew the sky was blue up above the fog that surrounded me because I had driven into the fog as I approached the river. Since the sun had only been up for a few minutes, the shadow of the forest grayed out the view in all directions. The fog rose from the river all around the island and dispersed at about 50 feet aloft, slowly forming and replacing itself, as though the island was an unmoving bit of froth floating in the middle of a giant slowly boiling pot. As I sat back on the hood of my car, sipping the coffee I had brought, I occasionally felt the sensation of dropping down, as though the island was an elevator and the shrouding wall of fog was the shaft down which I was riding, together with my car, the parking lot, and the factory behind me.

It was during one of those moments of sensing motion that I heard a vague, plaintive, and distant sound. I thought perhaps it was a train’s brakes from across the river. This siding that once served what must have been a very busy factory must go somewhere, perhaps to a nearby train yard. But as the sound got a bit louder I knew it was something else, something I still did not recognize.

I considered that the noise, slowly increasing in strength like it was getting either louder or closer (but I could not tell) was from a factory across the river. I really wasn’t sure what was over there. This island and the surrounding area was once a thriving industrial zone. The factory to my back, built by the only corporate resident the island ever hosted prior to the state takeover, made dry cleaning fluid. In fact, this is where modern dry cleaning was invented, and for years, most of the dry cleaning fluid used anywhere in the US was produced here and shipped out. It would have been loaded into tanker trucks as bulk or into box cars in in crated carboys or barrels on the loading facilities along side the still standing factory, and shipped, train load by train load, down the siding, across the single track across the lonely trestle bridge, which was at the moment engulfed entirely in the ever rising fog, and onward.

And I think that is what I was thinking about when I realized that the sound was coming from a point very near the trestle, as though it was emanating from something just across the narrow river, on the track itself.

Interesting. A hand-cranked railroad cart that needed oiling? An old firetruck with a broken siren? A group of boyscouts with a dying hippopotamus?

No, no, not a hippopotamus. Too artifactual sounding. Too human-made sounding. More like the siren, like an old fashioned air raid siren. And as I listened, not only did it get louder, but I had the distinct impression that it was getting closer.

As it did so, I began to realize that it was actually some sort of music. A loud, droning, siren-like background with a smaller, but still strong, melody playing somewhere inside the drone.

And as I watched the bridge, and the fog waxed and waned but mainly kept its strength, still rising up out of the river valley below the trestle and rising fifty feet or so above, I could see movement. First, something moving back and forth like a pendulum. Then a few things moving back and forth, then two objects, down low at knee height, moving up and down alternately like…like knees, actually. Knees of someone marching. Marching on the tracks.

As the sound became even louder, I realized that all the back-and-forth, pendulum-like forms were tassels and cloths and the parts of a kilt and a big furry hat, and the knee-like objects were knees under the kilt, and the sound was indeed a bagpipe.

The piper marched, bag-pipe style, along the trestle bridge, stepping on each railroad tie perfectly and without looking down, playing the droning machine and the melody…some kind of fierce war music no doubt…as he approached.

He did not acknowledge my presence with any signal whatsoever, and there was no eye contact on his part. He marched to the near end of the trestle and off it, into the parking lot in which I sat, fifty feet in front of me. He stopped his forward motion but not his marching, keeping time in place and staring straight ahead, in full regalia, for several bars of the music, which at this point was very, very loud from where I sat.

I watched. I took a sip of my coffee. I took a drag on my Camel. I watched some more.

And he turned around and marched, at the same pace, taking a full minute or so, back onto the bridge, into the wall of fog, and into obscurity. Never to be seen again. By me. I assume he did this every morning, owing to the fact that he never once misstepped on the trestle bridge, which surely would have resulted in a broken leg, the stoppage of his pipes to be replaced by a lot of screaming and wailing. Even not able to see through the fog, if that had happened, I would have been able to tell by the sound.

Maybe.

I was trying to decide which episode in this loosely connected series of posts on music and me I would touch on this week. As I was looking over the list of ideas,  in the background was the Rachel Maddow show talking about the Stonewall uprising. Well, duh, I’ll talk about GJ’s.

GJ’s was a bar I lived over for a couple of years. The bar was on the first floor and I was on the fifth. Some of my most notable roommates lived there. I can briefly summarize. I moved there to live with my girlfriend, Amy, a girl I’ll call Junette and the niece of Henry Mancini. Junette was so loud when having sex that her boyfriend Mike wore earplugs and the police were often called by neighbors thinking there was a murder. Or wishing there was a murder. That was not her only annoying trait. Junette soon moved out and we had a huge party, playing Eric Clapton’s song “She’s Gone” over and over again. Police were called. Then Ms. Mancini moved out and took my girlfriend with her. The vacancies were filled by two people whom I’ll call Tashina and Ron. Tashina was a drop dead gorgeous bisexual African American model from NY with a shaved head (a bit rare in those days), and Ron was an authentic Cajun boy fresh from the Bayou near Baton Rouge.

One day Tashina asked to speak to me privately. “Honey, what do you do to get rid of crabs. Crotch crabs. Just tell me what to do and don’t tell anyone we had this little conversation, ‘kay?” I told her what to do.

Later that same day, Ron cornered me alone in the foyer. “Hey, my man, I do dee-claire I gotta bad, bad problem. How does a guy stamp out dem little bugs, dem baby micro-scopical crawdads down in the you know where, if you get my drift?” I told him what to do.

That made me laugh.

Then one day Tashina got a job back in the city and left, and that’s when Raheem moved in. Raheem was one of my favorite people ever and we became pretty good friends. He was a fugitive from the police, so I will not provide many details. Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you the most hair-raising story you’ve ever heard. Raheem eventually moved on as well, leaving a vacancy that was filled by a sequence of low-life felons and undesirables.

Eventually, The Cat moved in. Again, one of my favorite people. The Cat always wore black, had a D.A. haircut and was a full-blown bodybuilder and generally very, very scary person. His twin brother was exactly the same but not as built, and every time the two of them got together and had a few beers, they would get into a fist fight. This brings us downstairs to the first floor to GJ’s for a moment, because that is usually where that would happen. The two of them would end up out in the street about to punch each other, occasionally taking a swing but mostly posturing and dancing around each other long enough for the local detectives who were never far away to saunter over, flash a badge and separate them. Like clockwork.

Ron stopped paying his rent about two months before The Cat moved in, and after one more month of that, The Cat and I threw him out. Then another individual moved in, who was the actual nephew of Carlos Castenada. No kidding. He was a total dweeb and also forgot to pay his rent for a few months. He had a lot of cool stuff, so when we took all of that cool stuff and put it on the curb, I kept a couple of his cooking pots and utensils.

I could go on and on, but I won’t. Because it is time to turn to GJ’s. The reason for the link between GJ’s and Stonewall is simply this: GJ’s was for a long time the only openly gay bar in the city. Later, a gay club opened up, and still later a few other more or less gay bars opened, but GJ’s was it for a long time. Interestingly, the bar was not owned by anyone who was gay. GJ’s became a gay bar simply because…well, it just did. The right place at the right time. Half the bartenders were gay, the other half not, more or less. And the same was roughly true of the clientele. The important thing about GJ’s is that it was a comfortable place, where everyone knows your name, where everyone was always glad you came, where everyone, gay or straight, felt their troubles were the same. Like Cheers. But almost everybody was a freak. Half the freaks were gay, half the freaks were straight and the other half were just odd.

GJ’s had a jukebox with exactly two kinds of music on it: disco and good. PJ, who always dressed as a sailor for Halloween and worked three night shifts a week in the bar, would unlock the jukebox and reuse as many quarters as the machine would take and load up the play list with pure disco. Donna Summer got a little richer every time PJ was bartending. Alternately, Steve the Biker and Tex the Cowboy would take half their pinball money and load up the play list with non-disco songs, mostly Rolling Stones. The beer was good and it was all done in good fun.

Every now and then (and don’t tell anyone this part, please) closing time would come around, and we’d pull down the shades and turn down the lights and have a private party for the next couple of hours. If a anyone had to leave, they could not come back because the doors were locked. Relatively speaking, the parties were pretty tame most of the time. It was just like having the bar open, except certain things happened that otherwise could not happen and certain things did not happen that otherwise would. I’ll let you use your imagination as to what those things were; it will probably be more interesting than the reality.

On winter afternoons, Biker Steve, Mike (the guy with the ear plugs), Marylou and Sue (new girlfriend and local prostitute, respectively) and I would hang out watching the snow fall (those were wintry years, statistically) and waiting for people to get stuck. Then we’d pile out of the bar and push them free. Over the course of a snowy afternoon, that would get sillier and sillier until finally they were pushing us out of the snow.

So what was the music we were playing in GJ’s? Offhand, I remember a few songs: “Tonight’s The Night” and other songs by Rod Stewart; “Higher And Higher,” Rita Coolidge; “Dancing Queen” by Abba; “Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffet; “Hotel California,” Eagles; “Fly Like An Eagle” by Steve Miller Band (whom I just saw in concert a few months ago); “Stayin’ Alive” by The Bee Gees; “Lay Down Sally” by Eric Clapton; “Beast of Burden” by The Rolling Stone; various songs by Steely Dan; “Last Dance” by Donna Summer; and a lot of stuff by the Village People, Santana, some heavy metal and the Grateful Dead.

Those were the days. That music was kinda iffy.

The reason that hanging out with a bunch of temporarily insane Viet Nam vets fresh back from combat was a new phase in my own musical experience, aside from the fact that I’m obviously using music as a ragged thread to tie together utterly unrelated themes, is the importance of music to some of those vets, and to the era that was just winding down in the early 1970s.

Music was part of the Revolution, the anti-war protests, the hippie movement, all of it. One of my coworkers, the assistant director of the place I did archaeology, was a Rolling Stones fan. This big, scary guy all tough and shot up from the war, this thuggish guy from a tough neighborhood in New York where being Jewish meant you had to learn to fight, this guy who had the swagger walk down cold and carried a crowbar in the front seat of his car and knew how to use it, once told me that he “cried and screamed like a girl” when he saw The Stones at the ball park in New York.

“You saw The Rolling Stones live?”

“I cried like a girl, no kidding.” He was getting teary-eyed again as he sat behind the desk in his office, his head covered in most spots with randomly placed and pointy tufts of flaming red hair, and his smuggish face pointing nose first at the object held above the desk in his hand. He had used the intercom to call me into his office a moment earlier and was showing me an album he had just acquired…a Rolling Stones album…and was telling me about the concert and the album at the same time. I did not fully understand why we were having this conversation.

“So take this and fill it out,” he suddenly said, thrusting a small square of paper in my general direction, a piece of paper that looked like a postcard on one side and a form to be filled in on the other. “As soon as you can. Do it right now.”

So my boss had just forced me to join the Columbia House Record Club so he could get a free album by getting someone else to join. I had to pick five albums from this list of mostly totally stupid stuff. The bottom end of the picks I chose to give to my mother as a birthday present, and it was an album by Jim Neighbors, the enigmatic actor/singer. The other, at the top end of the picks, remains today as one of my favorite albums of all time, Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

So, now that I had albums coming, I had to get…a record player. So I consulted with Carl, and we managed to dig up a tuner and a record player and set it up in my room. I scavenged my parents’ old speakers from The First Stereo. I dug deep into the pockets and searched for change in the couches and got enough to buy a new needle (that’s the device that reads data off the album on the record player). And the records came and it was good.

The other benefit of the stereo was the built-in radio. Not very many months later, I moved from my parents’ house into my own place. My girlfriend at the time, Leslie, just recently told me (yes, we’ve “reconnected”) that she thought it was SO cool that her boyfriend had his own place. Now that I think about it, that would have been pretty cool for a couple of 16-year-olds. She reminded me that we would get together and tune in the radio to listen to The Fourth Tower of Inverness…indeed, we did. Now that I think about it, holding hands with Leslie and listening to The Fourth Tower of Inverness was even better than Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

Which brings me right up to the present. Since I mention my first girlfriend, I will also mention my last girlfriend, Amanda. There are a number of things that I’ve always liked but no one that I was “with” (as it were) also liked, or at least, such things were not important to them. For instance, I’ve always wanted to own a Subaru. No one I was “with” ever wanted a Subaru, so that never happened. Amanda strongly prefers Subarus. So now we have a couple of them. How cool is that?

As I say, there are a number of things like that with Amanda and me. And it turns out that even though she did not really know Joe Cocker when we first met, one of her favorite songs is “Feeling Alright”…the version done by Joe Cocker.

Amanda was somewhat ensaddened to learn that the song is not about feeling all right. It’s about how, “You are feeling all right because you’re a thoughtless bitch, and I’m distinctly not feeling all right at all. In fact, I feel trapped and I’m having nightmares and I dread the day you dump me for some guy with a different name, a different face” (I paraphrase).

But who cares what the song says. It’s how it makes you feel that counts.

Rest in peace! Uncovered by dust
Eternity shall bloom for you.
Rest in peace! In eternal harmonies
Your spirit now is dissolved.
He expressed himself in enchanting notes,
Now he is floating to everlasting beauty.

(Josef Weigl, for Salieri’s tomb.)

F. Murray Abraham as Salieri

I was newly divorced and 25, wandering through the streets of San Francisco looking for a new social circle. I chose to start in North Beach because of all the poets and artists who hang around in that area. This was a Saturday night and I expected Vesuvio Saloon to be overly crowded. I peeked in the window, and the crowd was for some reason sparse. There were plenty of empty stools at the bar, so I headed inside.

Vesuvio was a regular hangout for Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy (Dean Moriarty of On the Road,) back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This would have been before Cassidy and Kerouac died, of course.

It was here that Jack Kerouac once spent a long night in 1960 when he should have been on his way to Big Sur to meet with Henry Miller. Miller had written Kerouac that he enjoyed reading The Dharma Bums and would enjoy a visit from the emerging writer. Kerouac, however, had other plans. He continued to hoist drinks and called Miller every hour telling him that he was just a bit delayed in leaving the city. The two would never meet that night.

I found an empty stool and sat down next to an older gentleman. He was wearing a gray beret. We chatted a bit about the weather, then I asked his name. “Vincenzo,” he told me.

“Were you born in Italy then?” I asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I was born in Legnano. Does that mean anything to you?” I had to admit that it did not, since I am not an expert on Italy. I know where Siena is, I know were Tuscany is, I know where Rome is. But I had never heard of Legnano.

“Have you seen the movie or the play Amadeus?”

In fact, I had. I had thought that Tom Hulce made the character of Mozart come alive. I said that F. Murray Abraham had also done a convincing portrayal of Salieri. I just wondered to him whether or not Salieri had been too hard on himself. Vincenzo’s expression was pained. He told me that the play and the movie portrayed Salieri very poorly. Salieri was a magnificent composer and well-respected. He told me that Legnano, his hometown, was also Salieri’s hometown, and the people there had great pride in Salieri’s music and his influence on Austria’s musical history.

So, I asked Vincenzo whether Salieri had killed Mozart, and he told me it was a lie. The play, he said, took dramatic license to add to a biography of Mozart some deep conflict (even broader than Mozart’s conflicts with his own father). He said they should make a movie that tells the true story of Salieri.

I wonder whether there are a great number of people whose only knowledge of Salieri is based in the movie Amadeus.  How many people think that he was a hack who was jealous of the attention paid to Mozart?  If I hadn’t met Vincenzo at Vesuvio, I probably would never have looked into the story of his life.  Salieri was in fact recognized as a composer  of wonderful music.  He was a teacher  to Ludwig Von Beethoven, Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert and Mozart’s son, Franz Xaver.

The whole idea that Salieri hated or despised Mozart while loving his music may have started because of some political maneuvering by Leopold Mozart.  Leopold believed that Salieri was interfering with his son’s career in Vienna.  Composers survived by teaching music and through patronage by the royalty.  Securing good positions through the church and through the court often meant the difference between survival and starvation. If Leopold Mozart was indeed spreading this rumor, it is perhaps understandable, in that he would be protecting his son’s career and livelihood.

The confession of Salieri forms the backdrop and the narration of the movie Amadeus. Salieri confesses his hatred for both God and Mozart.  He hates God for giving Mozart such a gift for composing, yet allowing him to be a spoiled brat.  Salieri has been the good and honorable servant, while Mozart is an uncouth party-boy, loud and vulgar.  But the music…oh, the music is gorgeous and the feelings so moving that they can only have been placed in Mozart’s pen by the angels of the muse.

Salieri was no slouch and had no reason to be jealous on that score.  His were not the simplistic ploddings that the character Wolfgang mocks. His opera Tarare was well-received and loved in France and presaged the French Revolution.

The question remains as to whether or not he actually confessed to the murder.  I have read several articles on the confession, and they generally conclude that Salieri did no such thing.  The people who were with him declaimed the supposed confession.  Reading of this “confession” reminded me of the Lady Hope story that Darwin had made a deathbed conversion to Christianity.

Mozart’s final cause of death has been debated for many years.  Some claim that it was kidney failure, others claim a parasite.  These diagnoses are based reading descriptions of his symptoms through the backward glance of biographers, without the benefit of an autopsy.  Some of his symptoms are consistent with the idea that he was poisoned, but the weakness of this evidence should lead us to be more charitable towards Salieri.  The play is not slander; it is speculation with dramatic license.

I sat in the bar with the old man from Italy and thought about how much of our common knowledge of historical events is based on the plots of movies.  Talking to Vincenzo forced me to step back and question these assumptions that I myself make.  If I learn something from a movie, before I convict someone in my own mind, fairness dictates that I research a bit more.

I left Vesuvio that night, even with Kerouac’s ghost beckoning me to stay all night.  I had a cat to feed and care for and some reading to do on Salieri.

Vesuvio is at 255 Columbus in San Francisco, CA.  The menu includes exotic drinks, martinis and Anchor Steam Beer.

First, let me say right away that I was never in Viet Nam. To do that, I would have had to be Vietnamese, because I was too young even to be a Marine in that war. In fact, I have never been in the military. But during the very last years of that war, when almost all American soldiers had come home from Southeast Asia, I worked for a unit of city government that was funded by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a kind of WPA for returning vets.

I had turned 13 years old the week before I started working there, and that was a summer job that would turn into a volunteer position and eventually a year-round job. During this time, as was the case before and since, music was not really especially important to me, and I continued to have a very passive relationship with that particular fine art. But there were individuals who influenced my tastes. New people, whom you have yet to meet.

Since I came from a good Democratic family, I was eligible to go down to City Hall that June to get a summer job. I remember going into this big room with lots of people. This guy who I later got to know pretty well, State Representative Jack McEneny (this was before he had run for any office), got up in front of the group and demanded the attention of the hundreds of 13-year-olds who were in the room.

“OK, folks. Who wants to paint fences this summer! We’ve got a lot of fences to paint.”

About half the kids raised their hands. Those who raised their hands were escorted out of the room, I suppose to go and join the fence-painting crews.

“OK, kids, now let’s see a show of hands again. Who wants to paint curbs!!! We’ve got a lot of fine curbs that need paining!” And half the remaining kids raised their hands, and were duly escorted off somewhere.

“Kids…listen! Who among you wants to paint fire plugs! We need some really good painters to paint fire plugs!” and most of the remaining 13-year-olds, figuring that they had held out for the good job, raised their hands and were taken away.

And there were six of us left. We had been herded to one corner of the room, where we sat on gray folding chairs at a tattered oblong table and stared at each other. Mike. Jane. Jack. Some other kids I don’t remember. Mike was a funny-looking kid with a strange bone disease, and he would tell everyone he met that he had only a few years to live. We were to hit it off really well. He was very short and a photographer and specialized in what he called “nose shots.” Jane was very smart and nerdy. I totally got a crush on her. We would later do some nerdy stuff together, like hiking and going to bookstores. I don’t really remember the other three kids very well.

As we sat there, a large, imposing, dashing but scary man…large-framed, trim and muscular, long hair tied back and a huge mustache, a loping gait and a dueling scar…came over to us. He put one foot up on a chair and stared menacingly at us, dour-mouthed and severe in countenance. I was eventually to get to know this man as well as I know anybody, and I would learn that this stance of his … the dour chair stance … always came before a joke. Usually, the joke was entirely for his own benefit, and only rarely did anyone else get the joke.

(Indeed, as I think of it, I may have learned my own brand of obtuse humor from this man. But I digress.)

So this man, named Bob, stared at each of us kids–as we realized one by one that we had been left alone in this cavernous, now nearly empty room with him, and that he looked a lot like a pirate.

And he said:

“You six. Painting fences wasn’t good enough for you? Are fireplugs beneath you?”

We all kind of looked at each other and nodded. We might have been scared of him, but this trimming down process had left him with a half dozen 13-year-olds with attitude.

“Good,” he responded. “As of right now, you’re archaeologists.”

And that was the start of my career.

And a new phase in my appreciation of music. But I’ve taken up too much of your time already. I’ll pick this thread up at a later time.

… continued …

Art as Social Commentary

JR is a photographer who takes pictures of ”women affected by poverty and violence, and then past[es] blown-up prints all over their cities.” He “sticks his pictures to the sides of buses, trains, buildings, and pavement, transforming the towns in which these women live into testaments to their strength and forbearance.”

Sociological Images

Ghost in the Machine

In this series I showcase a number of portraits of musicians made out of recycled cassette tape with original cassette. Also included are portraits made from old film and reels. The idea comes from a philosopher’s description of how your spirit lives in your body. I imagine we are all, like cassettes, thoughts wrapped up in awkward packaging.

Flickr

Frans Lanting Photography

Taco Bell Launches New ‘Morning After’ Burrito

Hot on the heels of last week’s FDA approval, on Monday PepsiCo subsidiary Taco Bell launched its controversial “morning after” burrito, a zesty, Mexican-style entree that prevents unwanted pregnancies if ingested within 36 hours following intercourse.

The Onion

Inside Just Born, the manufacturing factory of marshmallow Peeps

Chicago Tribune

Archie Green, 91, Union Activist and Folklorist, Dies

Mr. Green, a shipwright and carpenter by trade, drew on a childhood enthusiasm for cowboy songs and a devotion to the union movement to construct a singular academic career. Returning to college at 40, he began studying what he called laborlore: the work songs, slang, craft techniques and tales that helped to define the trade unions and create a sense of group identity.

NY Times

Amy Bennet

Street Musician – Minneapolis

Before dawn in Minneapolis, David McGee loads his cello on to his bike and rides to the Farmers Market. David and his cello have put smiles on the faces of Twin Cities music lovers for over 10 years.

Current

During my personal musical eclipse, after the novelty of the stereo and before I ever met Carl, my brother had a band. This was eventually to become a sort of secret band. He and at least some of the other band members had regular jobs, like working for the state, etc., and I’m not sure whether everybody they worked with knew that on weekends they would go home, dress in shiny white lamé suits, and play rock and roll at one or two high schools.

The name of the band was to become Adrenalin, and the logo was an anatomically correct heart with a fist jabbing into it.

Their contract stipulated that a) no one was allowed to go near the volume controls or to complain about the noise, and b) the band members would not leave the stage. This was a compromise that worked in the sorts of venues they played in, mainly high schools. The big fear among high school administrators was that the band members would wander around among the students snorting coke and shooting up heroin during the breaks. By remaining on stage, they would assure the school principal that this was not happening.

I only saw them play once. My friend Carl and I went out to the Berne Grange Hall, up on The Heldeberg, one evening to see them. I remember my brother, in his white lamé suit, holding up a Jimmy Hendrix album and saying, “If any of you can tell me who this is, you win the album.” (Silence.) “OK, now we’re going to play a song by this guy.” (Silence.) They play the song. No one knows. Adrenalin gets to keep the Hendrix album for one more week. At least.

Of course, that was during the eclipse of the 1960s, the period after the 1960s when people were forgetting about the classics but before the first of many revivals. Dylan, Hendrix, Joplin, The Stones were all either inactive or freshly dead and largely forgotten by 13-year-olds. But of course, that did not last.

So for seventh grade, I went to a new school, and not far into the first semester, I met Carl, who was to become my best buddy for several years, though somewhat off and on. Carl was musical. He played the guitar acceptably well and was into collecting albums.

Both he and I were working-class kids in a school where almost everyone else was noticeably better off. Many of the kids in this school had professorial or otherwise professional parents. Carl’s parents were divorced, which was kind of odd in those days, and his father, with whom he lived, worked at the Motor Vehicles Department. My father had a nascent career as a civil servant that had not quite taken off yet. Carl had an older sister, June, who was old enough that she was never around. In fact, Carl’s home was almost always empty, and Carl had a handful of ways to get into the house even when he did not have a key (which was most of the time). So many days we’d leave school and head over to Carl’s, break into his house, and settle in for some music listening time.

Carl was into Neil Young big time and a few other musicians. Jackson Brown was pretty big for him. Over time he built, with quite a bit of help from me, a stereo made of multiple different components. We learned to solder. We built the speaker boxes in shop class. We got kits and parts from Radio Shack. Every couple of months, some component or another would be yanked out and replaced, and the old component cannibalized for parts.

Some time in there Carl and I added a new element to the mix. Beer. We would save up until we had one dollar, then we’d go to the corner store and buy four one quart bottles of Hedrick’s Beer. One gallon in total. Then we’d bring that back to Carl’s place, listen to music, and finish off the beer.

Sometimes they’d be out of Hedrick’s so we’d have to get Dobler, which was almost identical inside but two pennies more outside. If we were short on funds, we would end up with only three quarts and change.

Beer was for the bedroom, where we’d listen to music, but if we went to a concert, we’d bring wine. It was easier to transport and did not go flat after opening. Boone’s Farm. One dollar a bottle.

Ah, the memories. New Riders of the Purple Sage concert. Lebanon Valley Speedway. Three quarts of Boone’s Farm. Under the bleachers. Puking like a dog. Those were the days.

My life for several years could have been characterized as having Carl as my best friend to whom I would always return between episodes of other things, periods of being linked up with other people, a girlfriend here, a marriage there, a new job now and then. And Carl’s stereo was always there, ever evolving, never being really all that good but never costing all that much, never quite working perfectly, never quite being broken. Right up until the end.

… continued …

That lying bastard Nixon was on the way out; the Vietnam War was teetering—no, marching along—the dull edge of America’s recently broken sword, its crippled conscience; and Buddy Holly was a fond memory of clichés that no longer held currency for post-baby-boomers born to the Brady Bunch and a hemorrhaging, less than blasé–faire, OPEC-induced, capitalist economy in crisis. So Don McLean’s slightly quivering troubadour voice was like the faint sound of a skeptic generation birthed under fire as he wavered out “Bye Bye, Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry….”

Dry, like gin, which was both a card game and something the big people drank when they played it, and good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye, because quite awhile ago, rock-a-billy Buddy Holly bit it in an airplane crash, or maybe it was the few other things that had come up since that made folks want to drown in a stupor of melancholic nostalgia: houses with many stars in the windows, ex-soldiers robbing liquor stores during bouts of PTSD, or those burned out projects in South Chicago where the poor people lived.

I didn’t comprehend the Buddy angle from the song then because I was only six or seven years old and seatbeltless in the front seat of a Plymouth Ambassador station wagon, bound for the old-fashioned soda and ice cream shop in Hebron, Illinois, just north of Chicago. I had no sense of old history like that, and ”the big hill” occupied my thoughts then, as my father had made a big point of emphasizing how big I had gotten, now that I could climb the big hill. The world was big; I was getting bigger, too. I knew that much.

The big hill and ice cream were synonymous for time spent with my dad. My garbage-hauling, mostly-clean-clothes-on-the-weekends dad, my soul-music-loving, Otis Redding-singing dad had turned up the radio to a type of music I had never heard him play before: American pop. At least I thought I had never heard him play it, because at that age, memories of sitting in a black-people soul-music bar and watching Dad dance with women who weren’t Mom made the impression that music was all about “grooves,” slides and “ass shaking,” not this new sound of seventies rock.

As McLean was singing from the chrome-lined dash, I realized that I had heard that song once before, on a radio that Dad had pulled out of the garbage on one of his routes. The radio, maybe a Delco or an RCA, had been painted red, white and blue after the fashion of the war-protesting hippies. When my dad picked it out of the trash and asked if I wanted it, it could have been a pony or a brand new Red Rider BB gun, but it wouldn’t have had the same pull on me as it did as a radio, because having a radio of my own was like owning the news and the songs and the words of the world, all in one box, just plug it in. Mostly, it was given to me by my dad who I seldom saw in the daytime, what with him being a late-night hard-drinking bar-brawling gangster and all.

I remembered hearing that song, all by myself in my bedroom just the day before. From birth to six years old, the only sounds I heard during my afternoon naps, or my playtime in my room, was the faint sound of airplanes droning off into infinity, the neighbor kids playing outside, or a sibling coming and going to school, and Mom, banging pots in the kitchen. But the day I got that radio was the day I heard what became my first favorite song, and the world made sense to me somehow, because I had a red, white and blue radio, and a song coming out of it that echoed an American national identity. My dad gave that to me.

My formative years were sprinkled with the assassinations of every leader that my Irish father held up as examples of “good men who believe in something and will fight for it.” John, Bobby, Martin—all of them were my nascent heroes, and I had watched them die on TV like everyone else did, but it was Don McLean on that radio that brought it home to me—I was an American, and we were all grieving for something.

I was thankful because I was with my dad, and we were driving, and I wasn’t at all afraid of the Holy Ghost when I was with him, and I felt like a grownup when I realized we liked the same song. I thought “this must be man stuff,” and I was a little man, getting bigger like my Dad John, or the President John, Bobby, Martin, or Buddy. And that line, “the father, the son, and the holy ghost caught the last train for the coast,” reminded me that the church, or all the kings and all the horses and all the men, couldn’t put them back together again, “the day, the music died” or thereafter.

The Real CMF is best known, at least under that name, as an internet gadfly. When Quiche Moraine asked him to make sure he could comment pseudonymously in comfort, we didn’t expect anything like this. We’re honored to have received it, though.

My father’s musical ability was nonexistent.  When he would get a little drunk, he’d listen to his My Fair Lady album over and over.  The other day we went to see My Fair Lady performed at the high school.  I was afraid I was going to have a problem with that, but it was okay.  No cold sweats, no feelings of doom, nothing.  But I digress.

I was born into a home that had no TV or stereo.  There was a period of time when there was a TV in my grandmother’s home, which luckily for me was the apartment upstairs.  Then we got one downstairs eventually.  But still, I’m digressing. That had nothing to do with music.  I know that I was born into a home without a stereo because I remember quite well when we got the stereo.  It was a big deal. There was a stereo cabinet, which was manufactured without any holes in it for wires to go.  So a hole had to be cut in it.

There were to be two input devices, one a turntable and the other a tape recorder.  Since this was the days before “aux,” there needed to be a pair of switches.  It had to be a pair of switches and not just one, because they were mono switches, so there needed to be two of them.  We’re talkin’ stereo here.  These switches were mounted inside the stereo cabinet.  The tape recorder was reel to reel.  We also had a wire recorder, but there was no music for that, so we didn’t hook it up.  (And when I say “we,” I mean my brother.)  The speakers were twenty-something inches high and maybe 15 wide and very thin for speakers, and they were positioned at either end of the Eero Saarinen-style couch.

The rug in the living room had squares as part of its pattern, 11 inches on a side.  So we used the squares to locate the center between the speakers.  We put a chair there, and we would take turns sitting in the chair and listening to the sound effects record.

A train coming from one side to another.  A pin dropping on one side then the other.  A voice coming right from the middle even though there was not a speaker right there.  The voice was saying “Hey, there’s no speaker right here, but you hear my voice like there is a speaker there. Isn’t stereo amazing!” Stuff like that.

We had a total of about fifteen albums.  One was a Vaughn Meter album.  One was the aforementioned sound effects album.  Then there was Tubby the Tuba and Mary Poppins.  Those were mine.  Then there was Bolero, which fascinated me because there was a semi-naked lady on the front, facing away, and I could tell but not prove she was not wearing underwear.  I had no idea at the time why I found that interesting.  Then there was Al Hirt and there was Daktari.  I loved the front of the Daktari album.  Does anyone remember that?  We had an album of JFK speeches.

I cannot place the arrival of the stereo in relation to the acquisition of the JFK speech album in relation to the assassination of JFK.  I have some pretty detailed early memories.  I have early memories that are earlier than humans are supposed to have according to some theories of neural development, and that I can prove are not reconstructed memories (of course, some people believe that can’t be proven, but they are wrong), but I do not remember everything and some of my early memories are untethered to an accurate timeline.  There was a Life magazine from the election season showing a picture of JFK sitting on a big giant drum.  There was the Vaughn Meter album. There was the JFK speech album.  And there is the memory of being sent home from school, everyone crying, and the specter of death and violence that accompanied that 48-hour period that stretched out to become part of our national consciousness for the next 20 years.

It was some time after the stereo, by a few years, that I acquired my very first album.  The Tubby the Tuba and Mary Poppins albums were wearing quite thin, and they were not really mine. They were just among the albums that seemed to come with the stereo.

Every September the church had a “bazaar,” in which rides were operated by men with “Prisoner” or “Convict” printed on their shirts, and various gaming booths were set up.  Every year I saved up seven or eight bucks to blow on the bazaar.  One year I put a dime on a number for a spinning carnival wheel and won.  I got to pick among three or four albums.  I picked the Sonny & Cher album with “I Got You Babe” (Look at Us).  When I brought it home, everyone in my family yelled at me because each of them thought I should have brought home a different album.  The thing is, they each had a different opinion as to which album I should have brought home.  But they were all absolutely certain that Sonny & Cher was not the one.

In retrospect, this was a traumatic event.  It caused me to shun the entire musical experience for years thereafter.  Now that I realize the effect this had on me, I think I’ll sue my family.

So sometime in there, probably because of this traumatic event, my personal interest in music went dormant.  This is probably why I can not really play an instrument.  There was a violin, briefly.  Later I learned to do a bunch of riffs on the base and could accompany others as long as they were not very good.  But that’s it.  The stereo moved with my parents when I was 13 (and I moved with them as well), but I was not one of the kids who had a stereo or an album collection.  In fact, in this way I found myself contrasted with many of my friends.

But that was okay, because I had Carl.

… continued …