The
Ballad Of Jim Shelley: My Life As A Failed Rock Star
By
Jim Shelley
Published
by Jim Shelley and Ain't Records at Smashwords.
Copyright 2012 Jim Shelley and Ain't Records.
ISBN: 978-1-4657-0626-3
Cover photograph by Amy Batman.
For
George and Louise.
Smashwords
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Table
Of Contents
Chapter
One: No Scars
Chapter
Two: The Girl Can't Help It
Chapter
Three: I Just Wanna Be Normal
Chapter
Four: Hit The Road Again
Chapter
Five: I Can't Hide My Love
Chapter
Six: The Big Sleep
Chapter
Seven: I'm Glad I'm Not A Rock Star
Chapter
Eight: Turn My World Around
Chapter
Nine: Don't Stop The Scream
Chapter
Ten: Dumb Angel
Chapter
Eleven: This World Is Gonna Let You Down
Chapter
Twelve: Never Be Like You
Chapter
Thirteen: Lost Puppy Flyer
Chapter
Fourteen: To Dream A New Dream
Chapter
Fifteen: Lost
Chapter
Sixteen: Waiting On A Busted Cloud
Chapter
Seventeen: River Of Blood
Chapter
Eighteen: Little Metal Toys
Chapter
Nineteen: Killing Time Again
Chapter
Twenty: The Music We Haven't Made Yet
“Don't you ever try to go into the basement again,” my mother scolded. “You're too little to be on those stairs alone. If you fell, you could really hurt yourself.”
“I won't, Mommy,” I promised. My mother had just walked into the kitchen only to discover me fiddling with the knob of the basement door. The stairs she was referring to were genuinely dangerous for a five-year-old like me to be using. Narrow, made of rough, splintery, unfinished wood, they didn't even have railing to hold onto.
Mom shot me one last warning face and went back into the den to finish her ironing while she watched her favorite shows, The Guiding Light and As The World Turns, on our little 13” black and white TV. Is this a test? I wondered. I walked around the corner leading into the den and stood and watched Mom as she folded a shirt and laid it on top of a freshly ironed pile of clothes in a basket at her feet. She hadn't even tried to shoo me out of the kitchen. I glanced back at the basement door. What fabulous mysteries must lay beyond it? Mom looked over at me. “Why don't you go upstairs and play?” she said.
“Okay,” I replied. I went up to the bedroom which my brother and I shared and pulled the box with my wooden building blocks out from under the bunk bed and began work on a skyscraper. At that moment a woman in a long flowing red nightgown with black hair that streamed behind her as though it were blown by a gentle breeze glided past the door. “Hi, Mommy,” I said. Hmmm...I didn't recall my mom being dressed in her bedtime clothes, of all things, at this time of day. Receiving no response, I jumped up and walked out to the hallway. There wasn't a sign of my mother. I went to my parents' room. No one.
Puzzled, I headed downstairs again. Mom was still ironing, engrossed in her soap opera. I padded past her back to the kitchen. She didn't even seem to notice me. This is a test, I thought. And I'm going to fail it. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I caught a glimpse of red disappearing behind the basement door just before it closed.
I hurried over to the door, opened it ever so quietly, and stepped onto the stairwell, contemplating my next move. I thought I could hear something shuffling about in the darkness below and moved cautiously forward to see if I could glimpse what it was making the noise. Was that the woman in the red nightgown motioning for me to join her? I took one more step, squinting to see, and suddenly I was floating in space.
When my head hit the concrete floor, there was a flash of brilliant white light, an electric shock shot through my body, and then...nothing. A moment or two later, I came to. Everything was spinning. I sat up and tried to figure out where I was. Running a hand over the top of my head, I could feel a large bump already forming. No tell-tale blood though. I heard faint voices and looked up at the open door above through which the pale yellow light of the world of the living streamed.
The TV. Soap opera. Mom!
I struggled to my feet, swaying unsteadily, and somehow found the strength to climb the stairs. Shutting the door behind me, I headed for the den, past my mother. She looked at me and smiled. She didn't suspect a thing. I grinned crookedly back at her and headed up to my room.
I felt peculiar. My head tingled as though sparks were shooting out of it in all directions. Everything around me started to vibrate. I had the strangest notion that the world was on the verge of shaking itself into a giant puddle of nothingness. Suddenly feeling very drowsy, I closed my eyes.
The next thing I knew I was sitting at the dinner table with my parents and my older brother, George, and my baby sister, Anne. Mom was saying something about Dad having special news to tell us. We all turned to look at him. “We're moving from the apartment,” he said proudly. “Soon we'll be living in a real house.”
“Our world is going to be different from now on,” my mom said. “It's going to be heavenly.”
All I could think about was that no one knew I'd nearly killed myself earlier that day chasing something that didn't even exist. How strange! You could structure an entire reality just by pretending it into existence.
My first musical memories, hazy at best, are of me sitting on the floor by my parents' bed listening to late '50s pop music dripping like honey from a cream-colored Bakelite table top Emerson radio which my dad had bought for my mom—his first-ever present to her—in the late 1940s. (I inherited that radio after my parents passed away. In fact, it is perched above me on my computer desk as I write these words. It still works and sounds damn good.)
The first song I can recall really liking is Elvis Presley's slightly bowdlerized 1956 version of Big Mama Thornton's “Hound Dog”. Though those times are little more than a dream to me now, I remember being held spellbound by artists such as Patsy Cline, Frankie Laine, the Coasters, the Platters, the Drifters, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, the Miracles, Patti Page, the Everly Brothers, Frank Sinatra, Buddy Holly, Peggy Lee, Dion and the Belmonts, and Ricky Nelson, among many others. I think I felt privileged to hear such an explosion of timeless music coming from so many brilliant artists.
My parents were what I suppose you'd call “musically inclined”. Both played the piano well; my mom also sang. She had even cut an acetate record in a local radio station's recording studio some time before I was born, when she was in her late teens or early twenties. She possessed a high, crystalline voice with a vibrato that could have cowed Jeanette MacDonald.
For some reason, however, after my parents built our home in Forest Hills (at the time, a brand new housing subdivision near Harrisonburg, Virginia, where my family and I lived), they seemed to forget their musical talents. I cannot recall either of them sitting down at the piano more than a handful of times, even though the piano bench was crammed full of sheet music from the '30s. '40s and '50s, nor can I remember either of them ever singing out loud.
Dad bought a Fisher monaural record console probably around 1960 which he installed in the living room. Listening to other people's music seemed to satisfy them. I guess they figured they had more important things to do than fool around with singing and playing. Mom would spin LP's or play the radio almost all day long as she kept house and I'd frequently sit right in front of the console and listen to artists such as Annuncio Mantovani, Jackie Gleason, Ferrante and Teicher, or Henry Mancini...musicians that truthfully I didn't really care for all that much. Still I listened. It was the sound that got me. To me, music—any music—seemed like some strange and wonderful gift from another world, a place definitely better than the one in which I lived.
The first time I thought about being a musician myself was probably in the early '60s when I was around eight or nine. I recollect standing on my bed with a pencil in my hand as a faux microphone lip-syncing to the J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers' cover of Wayne Cochran's “Last Kiss”. (You, gentle reader, might remember the song as having been performed by Pearl Jam for their 1998 Christmas single. Oddly, both Wilson's and Pearl Jam's versions—thirty-six years apart—rose to #2 on the singles charts.) As I crooned the words to an adoring phantom audience, I couldn't help thinking how cool it would be to be a real live pop star making thousands of young girls' hearts melt with just my voice and a bittersweet song.
Not long after we moved there, Forest Hills began to fill up with young professionals—doctors, lawyers, various businessmen—who were pumping kids into the world as if it were their patriotic duty. One of my friends, Phillip, lived in a house at the top of the hill and I'd go up there once or twice a week and hang out with him and other buddies in his tree house trading baseball cards, smoking cigarettes we'd bought from the vending machine at the Howard Johnson's at the bottom of the hill, and ogling Playboys swiped from our fathers' collections. We also played a lot of football and baseball in the back yard. Occasionally we'd head inside and go downstairs to his basement where he had a big color television, a plastic portable record player, and lots of board games.
Phillip's parents had stuck a big old upright piano against one of the walls. I doubt anyone used it much. I would occasionally push a key or two and wish I knew how to play.
Like many of the folks who lived in Forest Hills at that time, they employed an African-American maid. She was young and attractive and hip, and I'd occasionally talk with her about music. She always played the local pop station on the radio while she worked.
One day I told her I really liked Ray Charles. She looked surprised for a second, then glanced around kind of like a fox in a hen house stuffed with sleepy chickens and winked at me and said, “Come on.” Phillip and I followed her into the basement where she sat herself down in front of the piano on one of those old round leather seats that you could spin to make it go up or down in height. She took a deep breath and began pounding out the chords to Charles' great rave up, “What I Say”. When she let loose with the words, I just about fell off my feet. My jaw dropped so far down that a 747 could have landed in my mouth. I swear, I thought the room was going to catch fire. That was the first time I ever saw anyone perform rock and roll live.
That woman knocked me into a new world that afternoon. She might as well have taken me upstairs to bed and rocked my little boots.
I don't know when I first became aware of The Beatles, though I am pretty sure that the first song I heard of theirs was “I Want To Hold Your Hand”. I do remember some time in late 1963 riding to my elementary school in a crowded school bus, listening to the local pop station on my tiny transistor radio and arguing with a friend about the band's staying power. He insisted The Beatles would be lucky to make it through the coming year before they faded into obscurity.
“No, I think they're gonna stick around a long time,” I replied. I was certain about that. The Beatles were different. They had something that I'd never heard in any solo artist or band before them, though I couldn't precisely articulate what that something was. (What do little kids actually know? They mainly just feel.) Anyway, my friend and I rode the bus forty-five minutes each way to and from school every day, so the two of us had lots of time to discuss this latest pressing issue of the moment
“My dad said The Beatles are just another flash in the pan.”
“What's a 'flash in the pan'?” I asked.
“I'm not sure, but I think it just means they're not any good.”
“I don't know. They're cool. I think they're really good.”
They're “cool and really good”. That was about the extent of my critical abilities at the time. But what the hell more did I have to say about The Beatles to justify my love for them? Their music made me happier than anything I'd ever heard before. “Hound Dog” was thrilling. The doomed genius Buddy Holly's “Peggy Sue” was sublime. But “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was the newest, freshest, most alive thing created by humans that had ever blessed my ears.
“They're definitely gonna stick around,” I said.
“Ah shaddup. Your breath stinks. You need to brush your teeth,” he sneered.
Well...damn. That pretty much killed the discussion then and there, although I had brushed my teeth that morning and I was pretty sure my breath didn't stink. But if you can't beat a ten-year-old in an argument, just hurl a couple of personal insults at him. Even if you're a ten-year-old, too. You're guaranteed some sort of evil victory every time.
Still I knew The Beatles weren't a flash in the pan. And I did know why they were so good. They played their guitars loud. They liked to yell. They had cool hair cuts. They even had a drummer named Ringo. And all the girls loved them. They definitely had staying power.
And they were from England, dammit.
I was born on February 9, 1964 a little after 8 P.M.
All right, I know. Not really. But you see, that was the night The Beatles played the Ed Sullivan Show (a popular vaudeville-influenced variety program that ran on CBS for years) for the first time. President John Kennedy had been assassinated little more than two months before and the shock of his death still hung over the nation like a huge black veil. I recall fairly well the day Kennedy was shot, but I can remember the night the Beatles played Ed Sullivan oh so much more vividly. They yanked that dark caul of misery off the country's noggin and replaced it with a big ol' party hat.
My mom and dad and I watched Sullivan just about every Sunday night. Ed's acts ran from comedians to puppets to jugglers to crooners to the occasional pop group...something for everyone, both young and old. I'd known for a couple week that The Beatles were set for an appearance on the show, and as THE Sunday rolled ever closer, 8 o'clock was pretty nearly all I could think about.
Now, of course, I'd heard The Beatles on the radio and noticed one or two grainy pictures of them in the newspaper, but to see them live in our living room on our 19 inch black and white television? Man, that was a whole 'nother thing. And that's why I say I was really born February 9, 1964. After The Beatles had wrapped up the last of their five numbers that night with a pounding rendition of the revolutionary “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, my head and heart were spinning like gyroscopes. Nothing would ever be the same for me again.
I feel sort of sorry for kids these days. It's like there's no such thing anymore as the “shock of the new”. Nowadays it feels like everything's been done. Music, movies, TV shows, poetry, and what have you...it all seems sort of second-hand, recycled, even if it's so-called brand new. Art has lost much of its transformational powers. Can any teenager today understand what it was like to see those four young Englishmen playing “She Loves You” and suddenly realize that the sounds you were hearing, the things you were seeing, were irrevocably changing the realities of your life in a way you could not hope to comprehend? The Beatles were the warmth of a sunny spring day and I was a butterfly bursting out of his cocoon. Laugh or scratch your head in puzzlement...that's the way it was.
I guess my story is pretty similar to those of the millions of other American youngsters who watched The Ed Sullivan Show that evening. My dad was parked in his recliner cursing the noise and mocking the girly haircuts The Beatles sported while my mom sat on the couch pretending to read a magazine and tapping her foot to the music ever so lightly. I was sprawled out on the floor about five feet in front of the TV screen so I could get the full effect of the band's performance. After the last song was over and while the girls in the studio audience were still going nuclear, I turned to Mom and blurted out, “My birthday's in three weeks, would you take me to People's Drug Store tomorrow after school to get the new Beatles album? Please, please, please!”
Mom cracked open a crooked little smile and said, “We'll see. Maybe.”
Meanwhile, Dad was still ranting about the god awful din he'd just witnessed. “I don't see how they call that music,” he groused. “Worst bunch of garbage I've ever heard in my life!” Then he got up and went to take a dump. That's known in some circles as a symbolic act.
The next day at school I noticed something peculiar. All the kids were talking about The Beatles's appearance on Sullivan from the night before. While most of the boys were putting the Beatles down as sissies, the girls all turned dreamy eyed any time someone mentioned John's, Paul's, George's or Ringo's name. I thought about that for a little while and then decided I was going to ask for something else besides a new basketball or baseball bat for my next birthday...a guitar.
When I got home that afternoon and trudged off to my room to change into my regular clothes, Meet The Beatles! was lying on my bed. God bless the very large hearts of good moms everywhere.
Forty odd years after its release, Meet The Beatles! is largely just a batch of misty memories of days long expired to me, though still a memorial to reveries that would leave at least one dreamer dreaming for the remainder of his life. I rarely listen to that album anymore, but I do make a point of playing every Beatles record in chronological order once a year. Meet The Beatles!, once so ground-breaking, sounds rather quaint now. (Which is not to deny the still-fresh, gloriously infectious music of every single one of its tracks.)
One day some time near the end of my career as a teacher at Harrisonburg High School, I was patrolling a library computer lab with a class of ninth grade English honors students when one of the girls who was sifting through various web sites to gather information on a research paper about the pop punk band, Green Day, inadvertently came across a video of The Beatles playing “I Want To Hold Your Hand” on The Ed Sullivan Show. She watched blankly for a moment, then looked at me and burst out laughing. “Is this what you listened to when you were a kid, Mr. Shelley?” she giggled.
“Yes, as a matter of fact. Why? What's so funny?”
“Oh my gosh, this is so hilarious. My mom likes this stuff, too.”
“Yeah? Well, tell your mom she's got good taste.” At this point, the girl was almost choking on her laughter.
“I don't think so! I can't believe you liked The Beatles. They were so...CORNY!”
“Corny! Corny? This is some of the greatest music ever! Look...if it wasn't for the Beatles, all this junk you listen to now...”
Then I stopped myself. “Uh...I'll be back in a moment,” I mumbled.
I hoofed it out of the room and down the hall to the teacher's lounge and took a dump.
February 29 (my birthday—I'm a leap year kid!) fell on a Saturday in 1964. I had nearly worn out my copy of Meet The Beatles!, having already played it dozens of times in the three weeks since the Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. The band had performed on Sullivan again, 16 February and 23 February, and Beatlemania had spread across the nation like some weird strain of flu that actually made you feel light-headed and giddy; I'd contracted a raging case myself. Anyhow, I had indeed asked my parents for a guitar, though I didn't have the slightest notion what kind I wanted, and the morning of my birthday I got one—an acoustic Silvertone that my dad purchased from the Sears in Harrisonburg. It being Saturday, I had the whole weekend to myself and my new ax.
The Silvertone, unfortunately, was a piece of crap. The strings seemed like they hung about a foot off the fret board and I could barely play a clean note. Also, I had wanted an electric guitar, though I hadn't possessed the good sense to actually ask for one, and getting “just” an acoustic felt sort of like asking for a Maserati and getting a Volkswagen. I didn't know the first thing about playing music either, so all that made for a pretty frustrating experience with my first musical instrument. After the birthday celebrations were over, I spent an hour or two on my bed trying to plink and plunk little solos that would run up and down one string, but I didn't know a single chord, of course, so I couldn't play any real songs.
Back in 1964, rather than ask my mom or dad to drive me into town, I would often just take off on my own. It wasn't really all that far of a walk to get to downtown Harrisonburg—maybe a mile and a half, mostly following the railroad tracks that split the town in two. This was years before malls and urban sprawl, and once I made it to the heart of the city I could spend the day drifting in and out of five and dimes such as Grant's, Penny's, and McCrory's, as well as a Sears, the public library, and Whitesel's Music, all of which sat within a city block or two of each other.
If I happened to have a few dollars in my possession, I could catch a matinee at one of the two movie palaces close by and afterwards treat myself to two hotdogs and a bottle of Coke, all for 75¢ at Jess's Quick Lunch (still the best hotdogs on the East Coast.)
On this particular early Spring day, however, I had a single purpose in mind: buy a chord book. I knew they existed because the older brother of a friend of mine owned one. He was a folkie and listened to Peter, Paul and Mary, The New Christy Minstrels, The Kingston Trio and the like, all of whom I found intolerably square now that I was a rock and roller, never mind that I would learn how to play on the primary instrument of most folk musicians—an acoustic guitar. (To this day I write almost all my songs on an acoustic.) But I figured folkie or rocker, you probably used pretty much the same chords.
I headed into Harrisonburg straight for Whitesel's Music and found Mel Bay's GUITAR Chords, which was a thin catalog of basic guitar chords arranged in photo diagram form. It cost me $2, a huge sum back then, but I had to make the sacrifice. I would just have to forgo the matinees and hotdogs for a couple weeks and hope my dad could find me enough chores to do around the house to get my finances back in order. But what the hell—it was all for art, wasn't it?
I couldn't get home fast enough. Probably ran most of the way. Rushing to my bedroom, I picked up my guitar, opened up my chord book and exhausted the rest of the afternoon learning three chords—A, E and D. I got damn good on the E. Within a couple weeks, I'd learned Am, A7, B, Bm, C, C7, Em, F, G, and G7 as well and, to be honest, I haven't really learned many more in the forty years that have passed since those red letter days. Not that I ever found much of a need to do so. Once you can hit ten or twelve good chords on your guitar, there's not a whole hell of lot more you need to know. (Johnny Cash once famously said, “I know about four chords, and they’ve always worked for me.” And who am I to think I could surpass Johnny Cash in anything?)
I passed a lot of time trying to learn songs off Meet The Beatles!, but never did enjoy much success at it. Their stuff seemed to have been written in some sort of code that I would never be able to decipher. It didn't take all that long to come to the understanding that it probably wasn't in the stars that I was ever going to be much of an instrumentalist. I had all kinds of good musical ideas and feelings in my head, but they always seemed to take a wrong turn on the way to my fingers.
But if technical prowess wasn't going to be my thing, that was okay. I knew the Beatles were angels from God, but I also intuitively understood that they weren't even close to being the world's greatest players. Something else made them what they were. It was style, youth, a sense of humor, and more importantly, great songs and a bracingly original sound. I had the youth part down and I could be pretty funny when I wanted to be, but my idea of style was whatever my mom bought me to wear to school. I was going to have to work extra hard on the song and sound parts of the equation.
One of the more marvelous inventions of the late '50s was the shirt pocket transistor radio. I and most of my friends each owned one; they were the iPods of their day. You weren't nothin' if you didn't have a transistor radio where I lived, so if you hadn't saved enough dough from doing chores or your parents wouldn't spring for one (they weren't cheap back then, either), you'd have to hike into town to a department store or over to the newly erected Drug Fair in the Cloverleaf Shopping Center just off the new clover leaf interstate intersection and cash in a five-finger discount.
Most of these little buggers sounded terrible, but the music producers of the pop explosions of the mid-'50s and early to mid-'60s such as Phil Spector, Micky Most, Don Kirshner, George Martin and Leiber and Stoller understood that the bulk of their audience was made up of teenagers and preteens like me, so they would mix their records to sound good on the tiny speakers of our transistor radios.
There must have been a dozen of us kids in Forest Hills around in those days, all of us within two or three years of one another, but the most daring, maybe three or four of us, got into sneaking out of our bedrooms late at night and rendezvousing with our radios in our secret meeting place at the top of the hill several times a week. We didn't get into much trouble. Mainly we'd just roam the neighborhoods gabbing about the sort of junk young kids talked about back then—the latest records, sports, parent troubles, and so on. Sometimes we'd puff on a cigarette or three. (Just about all the grown-ups smoked, so we did too. It really wasn't a big deal.)
After school would close for the summer, we were allowed to camp out in tents in our backyards. One of my buddies, Marshall, had an in-ground pool and when it was warm enough we'd occasionally swim there late at night. I can recall a particular late evening lying in a beach lounger on the concrete patio surrounding the pool listening to my transistor (we didn't call them “radios”, we called them “transistors”) and staring up into the blackness while hundreds of meteors streaked across the sky. Life was so full of magic back then.
When we got a little older, we'd wander down to the bottom of the hill to a Phillips 66 gas station where the owner had sort of a used car lot going. He always had at least five or six junkers parked there and we would climb into one, turn on the ignition (the owner would leave the cars unlocked with the keys in the ignitions; in those days you could trust people to treat your stuff with respect) and just sit and listen to the console radio, maybe drink a Coke and feel good about ourselves. Sometimes we'd even turn the cars on and drive them around the lot, but we never took them out on the road. Whatever we felt like doing, our beloved rock and roll made up the soundtrack of our nights together.
One night in the summer of '64 when I'd sneaked out yet again to meet up with my boys, my younger sister woke up screaming that she heard a boogie man outside her window. I reckon it was probably me falling into a bush or something. After comforting my sister and assuring her nothing weird was going on, my dad went into my room to check on me and found out there were just a couple pillows sleeping under my sheets. That shut down the nights of roaming glory for a while because the next day my mom called all the other moms and told them what was going on.
The jig was up, but it really didn't matter. Before too long some pretty girls entered the picture and changed everything.
Chapter Two: The Girl Can't Help It
She was the most beautiful human being I'd ever seen in my thirteen years on this planet. And it turned out she loved The Beatles every bit as much as I did. She lived in Forest Hills, though I'd never met her before. Suppose I was too busy playing football and basketball to notice that she and her family had moved into a house at the top of the hill, just two houses down the street from Phillip's place. The first time I saw her I was sitting in the back of the bus on the first day of school my eighth grade year just staring absentmindedly out the window. When the bus pulled up to the stop for the 'circle kids', there she was with some other girls clutching a couple books to her chest and looking maybe a little apprehensive about being the new girl. She climbed onto the bus and plopped herself down on a seat near the driver. I asked my buddy sitting beside me who she was, but he'd never seen her before.
I don't know what it was about her that threw me for such a loop that day, but I couldn't get her out of my mind as I sat through one interminable class after another. No doubt part of the attraction equation consisted of her angelic face and already extraordinary figure, but there was something more about her that intrigued me that I couldn't put my finger on. I just couldn't wait for school to end so I could see her again on the bus ride home. When the last bell sounded, I sprinted to my bus and sat down near the front. She came bouncing down the sidewalk with a friend (a sweet girl named Libby with whom I was friends and who lived on the circle as well), climbed onto the bus and stood for a moment trying to decide where to sit. Finally she and Libby plopped down in the empty seat just in front of me. Libby turned and looked at me and flashed a brief inscrutable smile. “She likes The Beatles,” she half whispered and giggled. I could feel my face redden. Libby paused a second and added, “And The Rolling Stones, too.”
Sweet Jesus, I was shit-faced in love.
The girl was not only gorgeous, she had impeccable musical taste! I'd never met a female who could somehow relate to both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. I didn't think the good lord had deigned to put such a creature anywhere in the world, let alone right here in my little old neck of the woods. How could anyone not love The Beatles? But the Stones? Even your mom could appreciate John, Paul, George and Ringo's fresh-scrubbed, witty kid next door sort of image, but the Stones were dirty, mean and nasty. Their songs were about hearts of stone and gettin' your kicks on Route 66 and 19th nervous breakdowns, and other wicked things that nice young American boys and girls weren't supposed to know about. No one's mom liked Mick and Keith! And if the new girl liked both bands...holy crap!
Suddenly I could feel the foundations of my world trembling.
And that's when she turned her head and said hi.
“Hi! I'm Laurie,” she said. The words floated out of her mouth like silver feathers.
Sweet Jesus, I was shit-faced in love.
“I—I—I'm Jim. You like The Beatles!”
“Yes, I do! They're neat. I like John. Who do you like?”
See, back then everyone had a favorite Beatle. Kids could spend hours discussing why John or Paul or George or Ringo was the “best”. Who you liked most said a lot about what kind of a person you were. Paul was cute, super-talented, and happy-go-lucky. George was intense, sarcastic and inscrutable. Ringo was the scruffy, devil-may-care type, just along for the ride. But John was...well...John was John. The deep one. The wit. The leader. He was intense. Different. John was a well that no one could ever plumb the depths of. I liked George a lot (and he was a pretty deep well himself!), but John was my favorite.
“I like John, too! He's the coolest!”
Laurie and Libby laughed and looked at each other and laughed again and turned away and laughed some more. But I knew they weren't laughing at me. They were laughing because it was good to be young and beautiful. To be alive at the moment just as The Beatles were about to change the world. To ride the same school bus as a boy who liked John the best. I laughed, too. The three of us laughed together.
Sweet Jesus, I was shit-faced in love!
I don't know how many thousands of hours I spent with a transistor radio plastered to one ear. Every night from the time I was nine or ten till my early teenage years, I would lie in bed with the radio under the pillow so I wouldn't disturb anyone else in the house listening to music till the very wee hours, seven nights a week if I could. It's a wonder I ever made it through a single day of school without falling asleep. My favorite disc jockey early on was “Cousin Brucie” on New York's WABC, though it wasn't too long before I switched my allegiance to Ron Riley at WLS and, much later, the legendary Ron Britain and his Sunday night show on Chicago's WCFL, “The Subterranean Circus”. Great “jocks” (the term we used to describe music show announcers) like Riley and Britain were able to create a theater of the mind that I found endlessly more interesting than most of the junk on TV. In the early evening when the sun had gone down and radio waves could more easily bounce off the ionosphere, I could pick up all the great rock and roll shows from Chicago, Nashville, New York and Boston clearly.
When the so-called British invasion hit America's shores in 1964, one fabulous English band or solo artist after another found their way onto the airwaves...the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, The Who, the Yardbirds, Dusty Springfield, the Dave Clark Five, Manfred Mann, the Hollies, the Mindbenders, the Moody Blues, the Spencer Davis Group, the Small Faces, Donovan, the Move, the Troggs, the Animals...jeez, they just kept coming. The funny thing was all these groups were simply recycling classic American '50s rock and roll and rhythm and blues as well as '30s, '40s and '50s blues and adding touches of British dance hall, pop and folk, then feeding it all back in a new, fresh hodgepodge to a generation of young Americans who were almost completely ignorant of the music's largely American origins. But who the heck cared? I certainly didn't. I knew little or nothing about Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Big Joe Turner, Fats Domino, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, or John Lee Hooker. More's the shame, I suppose for me, though it wouldn't be long before my older brother began to educate me in my American musical roots.
The love affair I fell into with radio in my childhood has never waned. I got my musical education from AM radio. I still rarely watch television but unfortunately there just aren't many great radio DJ's these days, though satellite radio is doing a decent job of bringing them back. But the golden age of radio passed long ago. I guess that's why it's so difficult to convey to younger people today the excitement that I felt listening to the best jocks of that era and the tidal wave of brilliant pop music that they rode into our ears, brains, and hearts like young Apollo's on golden surfboards of sound.
The culture of the young wasn't so splintered back then. In the mid-sixties, in the course of an hour on any popular radio station in America you could hear all kinds of artists—young or old, black, white or brown, American or international, country, jazz, pop, rhythm and blues, soul, rock and roll, or folk-oriented—it didn't matter as long as the song was good. And I'm glad of that because even now I can listen to just about any style of quality music you can throw at me and dig it. Just as importantly, I have no compunctions about incorporating different genres into my own compositions. Sticking a bridge that sounds like something out of an old Buck Owens tune into the middle of a hard rock song seems natural to me. Too many younger people today have rigid, narrow tastes. Of course, everything goes in circles and what's old is new again. I suspect that one day there'll come a new generation not too dissimilar from my own that will once again embrace every type of music from jazz to country to metal, as long as it's good.
It's funny, too, how during my youth singles were king, then faded in popularity, and now have come back to reign in the form of mp3's. During the late ‘50s through the middle ‘60s, pop music was all about 45 rpm records. Kids didn’t buy many LP's (although that would begin to change in the latter part of 1965 with the release of Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, the Byrds' Mr. Tambourine Man and The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, among others) because most pop albums consisted of one or two hit songs surrounded by ten or twelve throwaway tracks. And now here we are in the twenty-first century in an iPhone world where few people seem to possess the attention span necessary to make it through an hour-long CD—fat with filler or not—and the single rules again.
Some day things will swing back in the other direction, though in what medium is anyone’s guess. But somehow there's something missing from today's music. Maybe it's the raw newness of rock and roll when it was just coming into its own as the favored musical genre of its time that can never exist again, regardless of whatever great artists might emerge in the future. Maybe the naivete of its willing audience helped to create a unique moment in time that can't be recreated; maybe you really can't go all the way back—just part of the way. I'm glad I was fortunate enough to be there pretty much at the beginning when a great record album was like a supernova shooting us all out into a future lighted by a culture that seemed brighter than any sun.
Laurie and I began to hang out a least for an hour or two almost every day of the week. She rode the bus to and from school (back then just about everybody in the county took a bus to school) with me and we'd sit in the back along with everyone else around our age who lived in Forest Hills...and there were a lot of us. She was the first girl I ever had a crush on and easily one of the two or three coolest girls I've ever known and we talked about music all the time. I'd often walk up to her house after school and we'd either sit on her lawn or hang out in her room or go for hikes in the forest (all innocent fun...really) and talk about the latest Beatles or Stones or Who record. Back then bands worked really hard. I guess because there weren't nearly as many rock and roll groups around, it seemed as though the competition was tougher, so if you were in a successful band you were either in the studio recording new music or on the road promoting your latest record. I mean....get this: In 1964 alone, The Beatles released seven albums (in their various American and British variations) and fourteen singles. How's your favorite band today stack up against that track record? It was a great time to be young and love rock and roll.
Laurie wasn't your typical tee-hee teeny bopper. She could hold a conversation with anybody when it came to music. Actual (as far as memory allows) conversation from 1965:
Laurie: Have you heard the new Beatles single?
Jim: You mean “Roll Over Beethoven”? Yeah. George sings it. I like him 'cause he's not like a show off or anything. But he has a neat voice. And I like how he plays guitar. It's not like the way regular people play guitar. It's different.
Laurie: Yes, you're right. I like George, too. But I mean the new single. It's “Twist and Shout”.
Jim: Oh yeah! But that's an old song.
Laurie: I know. But have you heard the B-side? It has a really cool song called “There's a Place”! It's better than the A-side. It has the best words. They're not the same as in most songs. I like when John says, “There'll be no sad tomorrow.” It makes me feel good.
Jim: Oh. That song is off Introducing The Beatles! I love the words that the Beatles write. They're better than everybody else's. I don't why but they just are.
Laurie: You know what? Every time I hear a good song, I get shivers and I want to dance right there wherever I am. But people would think I was a nut if I did. Would you think I was a nut if I got up and danced every time the Beatles were on the radio?
Jim: No way! I would get up and dance with you.
Laurie: I bet you wouldn't. You'd laugh at me.
Jim: I bet you I wouldn't laugh at you! And I'd hit anybody in the nose that did.
Laurie: Ha! You are so funny, Jimmy. Do you want to go inside and get a Coke?
Jim: Yes. Would you marry me?
Actually I didn't say that last line. But I was thinking it just about every time we hung out. Man! One of my closest friends was not only a beautiful, smart girl, but she could talk about B-sides! How cool was that!
When summer rolled around, we all began to hang out at the pool. Our parents would drop us off early in the afternoon with a couple dollars which would be more than enough to get a drink, a cheeseburger with fries, and a candy bar...for me usually a frozen Zero or Three Musketeers. We'd swim a while then walk over to the grassy hill near the pool and sit on our towels, listen to the radio and gossip and talk about music, movies and TV, and sometimes make vague, but innocent, sex talk. By the time, Laurie was twelve or thirteen, she looked like an eighteen-year-old. I'm not going to lie about it...she'd drive me crazy with her little green and yellow bikini. She liked me, too. You can tell those sort of things, you know, even when you're barely a teenager. But I didn't try anything with her. I was a proper Brethren (The Brethren were sort of a slightly less straight-laced version of the Mennonites) boy who kept his carnal desires to himself.
Of course, I sit here and read what I've just written and I realize how totally naive and laughable this all must sound to someone in his teens or twenties. The world today is harder than a diamond and meaner than a rattlesnake. Hell, we've got kids these days who are full-fledged pimps and drug dealers before they're ten. I guess if you haven't had about a dozen sex partners by the time you hit the ninth grade you're some sort of loser. But I'll take those days when I was just some starry eyed, fresh-faced Opie from Mayberry in love with a sweet girl with a smile that could light up Forest Hills for a whole night all by itself.
But sometimes I do wish I would've had a little less of the Brethren Church in me...
John Lennon was the template in my quest for rock and roll stardom. Although I began to tell people that George was my favorite Beatle, I said that because most kids liked either John, Paul or Ringo best and I could sort of separate myself from the crowd if I claimed to champion “The Silent One”. (Silent! That's funny. I don't know how George ever got that nickname because if you've ever watched the old black and white films of the group doing press conferences in '64 and '65 you can see for yourself that George had as sharp a wit as anybody else in the band with a touch of sarcasm that was every bit the equal of John's.) In reality, however, I admired John the most. He possessed the most amazing rock and roll voice I'd ever heard. It was a combination of honey and gravel and it knocked me for a loop every time I heard it. And, of course, he wrote cool songs that stood quite far apart from most other British or American pop artists of the time that I was aware of, not counting Paul—at least on occasion—and perhaps Ray Davies and Jagger/Richards on their best days.
I really didn't know how to write a song and I still couldn't play a guitar worth a darn, so I spent hours listening to rock and roll records, standing in front of the stereo strumming my guitar, more or less doing my glorified air guitar act and practicing my stage moves for the day when I'd make my breakthrough to the big time. When I wasn't doing that, I was sitting in the basement drawing album covers and coming up with fake song and band names, as well as liner notes about what an incredible musician and world class heart throb I was. (I wish I had those drawings today, but along with the comic books and baseball cards I owned back then that would be worth tens of thousands of dollars today, they're all long gone. I remember a few of the band names I made up: The Big Beats, The Rock and Roll Kings, The Rhythm Dogs, and The Living Ends. Pretty cheesy, but I'll bet you anything there's been a band in the last forty years that christened itself with one of those names.)
I kept trying to get good on my new guitar, but my fingers just didn't seem to want to cooperate, and in truth I wasn't much for sitting around and practicing chords hour after hour. I could strum the basic chords, but that's about it. I guess I was lazy. Eventually, out of frustration, I stopped drawing album covers and fiddling with my acoustic and began watching sporting events on television. By this time I was also attending the varsity football and basketball games at the local high school I'd be attending before too long. Everybody did. It wasn't hard to want to be like those stallion-like athletes that all the cheerleaders seemed to swoon over.
It started to seem to me that learning how to play a musical instrument or writing a song or somehow figuring out how to be a rock and roll star was a lot harder than sinking a jumper or running a kickoff back for a touchdown. I knew I wanted to be good at something and if I couldn't learn the language of musical success perhaps I could be a gridiron or hard court standout. I had always enjoyed playing sports in a little boy sort of way, but as all of us kids began to knock on the gates of teenage-dom, the sandlots and asphalt courts began to take on a new importance.
Sports gradually became a very big deal in my life. We had enough boys living on the hill plus enough friends who lived nearby that we could get a baseball, basketball or tackle football game up just about any day of the week. The round ball was king, though. We did play football or baseball often enough when they were in season, but basketball was year-round. I got to be pretty good at sports—especially basketball, at least compared to the rest of the kids I knew personally—and began to wonder if I might not be decent enough to make it as an accomplished high school athlete. My brother, who was four years older than I, was already a fine football player and I could feel the expectation radiating out of him and particularly my dad that I'd go the athlete route as well.
Though I certainly didn't stop listening to music, it began to take second place in my life to sports. If I wasn't outside snagging a rebound or catching a touchdown pass or belting a triple, I was parked in front of our new color TV watching the Green Bay Packers or the New York Yankees or the Washington Bullets. But I think somewhere in the depths of my soul I knew I wasn't really all that great at any sport, at least not compared to the truly gifted athletes in the city and the surrounding county, and that music was the friend—the lover—who in the end would prove to be the one thing I could always count on to never let me down.
Unfortunately, I had to let music and myself down before I'd realize that.
At some point in time when I guess I was pushing thirteen, I took my Silvertone, wiped a smudge off the pick guard, stuck it in my closet and forgot it existed. Then I’m pretty sure I ran outside with my basketball and spent the next three or four hours shooting hoop. My frustrations with learning the guitar well enough to play along with the songs I heard on the radio had gotten the best of me. I suppose I had decided that, at least for the time being, the extent of my participation in music would be as a listener, not a musician.
Of course I didn't completely turn my back on music; I continued to listen to the radio whenever I had the chance and for my birthday my parents bought me a small portable stereo record player on which I would spin the records I still purchased in town whenever I had a little money that I’d earned from doing chores.
Sometimes when I was broke and some new vinyl came out that I had to have, I’d cadge my mom into buying it for me. She didn’t seem to mind too much; she loved music herself enough to know that the latest Beatles album was truly important to me and wasn’t something a boy should be denied. And records were relatively cheap anyway. Back then you could purchase a 45 for 49 cents and an album for $2.99, although at the time I rarely bought long players other than those by The Beatles and the occasional greatest hits compilation.
I was no different from most kids. Since a single was considerably cheaper than an LP and with a single I knew exactly what I was getting for my money, I tended to gravitate towards purchasing them myself. I still recall quite vividly the first time I actually bought records with my own money. One Saturday in the summer of ‘65, I headed into Harrisonburg to Grant’s (which seemed to have the biggest stock of rock and roll vinyl at the time) to buy The Beatles’s “Help!”, the Beach Boys' “Help Me Rhonda”, and the McCoys' “Hang On Sloopy” with money I’d earned mowing the lawn (this with one of those ancient push rotary mowers—no motor, kids—and for which my dad would pay me fifty cents.) I must have spent an hour perusing the plywood record bins, looking at the artwork on the front of the sleeves and the information on the back before I made my decision as to what to buy. In the years to come, one of my favorite things to do would be hanging out for hours in a record shop browsing through the albums. What a wonderful, now largely lost, communal experience that was!
Buying a single or an album was more than a monetary transaction; it was an investment of time and experience. I cherished the ritual involved in rushing home from a store with my new treasure, holding an actual material object in my hands...tearing off the cellophane wrap, devouring every detail of the artwork on the front and back covers, re-reading the liner notes, then removing the record from its sleeve and carefully placing it on the turntable of the record player which had real knobs and levers...not some virtual button that doesn't even really exist to obtain something you can't actually see or feel and probably won't even listen to more than three or four times, if at all.
One very important event that I neglected to mention earlier occurred when I turned twelve. Up until then, though technically I lived in the county (probably 100 feet from the city/county line, I’d always attended city schools. Many of my friends were from the city and I considered myself a city kid. A month before I was set to begin seventh grade, my mom and dad informed me that from now on I was going to attend school in the county. My brother went to Harrisonburg High School and for some reason they allowed him to continue there until he graduated, so their decision didn’t seem fair to me. I found out later that the city had started charging families $50 a year for county children to attend its schools. I think even today I feel a little angry that my parents wouldn’t ante up the money allowing me to continue in the city system. But then, all the other kids on the hill ended up in the county as well, so at the time it hardly seemed like the worst thing in the world that could happen to me.
In the fall of '65 I joined a county flag football program. I was a guard on offense and a tackle on defense and did pretty well, though our team (the “West”—we had shitty green uniforms that I hated) went 2-4. My coach told me that I could be a good football player and that I ought to go out for the junior varsity team when I hit eighth grade. That winter, I also participated in the city’s recreational league basketball program. I was the center(!) on our team and had an even better season than I’d had in football, finishing up as my team’s leading scorer and rebounder. We even took first place in the season-ending tournament. I scored the winning basket in the championship game. You remember stuff like that, you know, as inconsequential as it might seem to other folks. And it all ends up in the hopper where you churn everything into the stuff that becomes your songs one day.