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.

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 …