1968 ~ Caught Between Two Musical Worlds

I was thirteen in 1968, transitioning between seventh and eighth grades, which was kind of a dead zone, really. Long gone was the heady anticipation of graduating from elementary school, yet I had a million years to go (it seemed) to finally transition to the new high school building and be "grown up".

My junior high was probably one of the oldest buildings in my little town. Back in 1910 or so, it had served as the high school ~ black and white portraits of stern long-ago high school principals adorned its sanitarium-grey walls. From the outside it resembled a prison.

And yes, this was our gymnasium (minus the fallen plaster, which would have been dangerous for playing dodge ball):

I had to take the city bus to get (almost) to school, because the school district had not yet established bus service all the way out to my home (in its defense, there were only seven kids who lived in my neighborhood). Last stop on the city bus route was the old Prince Hotel, which was one of those post-World War I hostels that featured tufted burgundy armchairs with gold buttons, as well as spittoons in its lobby; and housed derelicts and Spanish-American war veterans who from their vestibule repose liked to ogle adolescent girls; and its lone desk attendant was older than death and just as lively.

The school's dress code prohibited pants (for girls, I mean), and our dresses were audaciously short; so on minus twenty-degree winter mornings, I'd alight the city bus at the Terror Hotel and commence my six-block tramp along slippery sidewalks in my mini-dress, faux-rabbit coat, plastic knee-high snow boots and no hat (hats were for sissies), clutching my US history and earth science textbooks and three spiral notebooks.

All to frost-bittenly arrive at a place I didn't want to visit for six-plus hours, but an argument my parents (such as they were) were not of a mind to debate.

My only saving grace was that I had a best friend, albeit one who crazily loved country music (one has to take their best friends wherever they find them). A year or so before, I was grooving to The Rascals and Three Dog Night, and now here I was, taking a crash course in the idiosyncrasies of honky tonk.

By now I pretty much got it. I'd figured out who I liked (Merle, Waylon, Tammy) and who I didn't (Glen, Conway, Sonny James). I'd long known who Buck Owens was, but I also learned about new artists like David Houston and Dolly Parton.

Unfortunately, 1968 was a weird year in country music. The worst singles hit number one, while (now) classic songs languished far below on the charts.

My best friend Alice and I agreed that this song reeked. I've always hated political songs, especially those that preach (and which ones don't?) Our main objection to this single, however, was that it was barely country. That, and the fact that it was played on the radio all the time. "Stab 'em in the back, that's the name of the game" ~ we enjoyed making fun of that line. Plus the whole, "Daddy hates Mommy and Mommy hates Dad" really didn't need to flow out of my speaker. Unless my speaker was spewing my own personal reality.

And this song garnered way more fame than it deserved. Again, there are so many things to hate about this song, but the old standby, "overplayed" is number one. I never realized until I studied more of Tom T. Hall's songs that he rarely wrote choruses. Sure, he had refrains from time to time; but I think the absence of a chorus has caused his songs to not age well. Listeners like something they can latch onto. Most people who sing along to the radio mess up the verses comically, but they always land the chorus.

Great songs like this only reached #10. Marty Robbins was a conundrum ~ difficult to pigeonhole. On the one hand, he truly loved his western ballads, and on the other, he could be truly soulful. It seems Marty never once gave an insightful interview, so fans will never know why he wrote the songs he did, or if he even ever thought about it.

I came to appreciate this song later. At the time I frankly wanted twin fiddles and steel guitar.

And this was only number twelve? I won't get into the whole history of me and Merle and this song, but you can read it here. If I hadn't looked at the 1968 charts, I would have sworn this was the number one single of the year.

Twenty-one? Really? Tammy had appeared on the scene in 1967 and had many hit singles before alas, "Stand By Your Man" became both a phenomenon and a punchline in '68. In hindsight, one can pinpoint when a promising career began to stagger downhill, although it's not Tammy's fault that she wrote a song everyone latched onto. The same thing happened with Lynn Anderson, who I loved until "Rose Garden" vomited onto the scene.

Regardless, number twenty-one is good:

I found a new favorite singer in '68. I feel like whenever I post a Faron Young live performance, I have to apologize. Faron was a superb singer, but a real drag to watch live. I somehow convinced my dad to drive us up to the State Fair one year to see Faron in person. Dad, and surely Mom, didn't want to go, and sitting in the bleachers during his concert, I wanted to crawl under my seat and hide in embarrassment. It wasn't (I don't think) that Faron was tipsy; I just think he didn't give a damn about singing a song straight. Maybe he'd been around so long, he said, "screw it". But trust me, his live performances and his recordings were eons apart. Nobody was better in that era.

This single wasn't from 1968, but I think David Houston deserves a mention. Nobody remembers him now (well, I do), but David Houston was huge. Not only did he have many top solo singles throughout his career, but he recorded hit duets with both Tammy Wynette ("My Elusive Dreams") and a newcomer, Barbara Mandrell. In 1968 alone, he had four top one hundred songs. As life marched on, I sort of forgot about David Houston, until I learned he had died at age fifty-eight from a brain aneurysm. Houston is one of those artists that this blog is about, because some of us don't forget.

Country duos suddenly became a thing around 1967-1968. There had been duets before, but I don't think the CMA's had a category for Country Duo before these two folks got together  (before then it was "Vocal Group", which was rather awkward when only two people were involved). Then, suddenly, duets were everywhere. I remember hearing a song on the radio for the first time and saying, "I think that's Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty!" And thus duos were off and running. 

But it was these next two who dominated:

Here's another one of those forgotten artists ~ Wynn Stewart. Wynn was a pioneer in the Bakersfield Sound. Buck liked him; Dwight plays him on his "Bakersfield Beat" Sirius channel. I liked him, too, and my dad really liked him. Dad thought this next song was the bomb. It's not from '68, but Wynn had two top one hundred hits that year (and props to this video featuring the awesome Don Rich):

This is most likely my favorite song from 1968. Mom had shipped my little sister and me off to Texas to stay with my big sister while things were "disheveled" at home. I loved it there and didn't want to come back. We'd stay up 'til the early morning hours playing Scrabble, drinking Dr. Pepper, and listening to Bill Mack on WBAP. Johnny Bush was a newcomer and there was a lot of talk that he was trying to be the next Ray Price. I didn't care ~ I loved this song, and I still love Johnny Bush. Unfortunately, I can't find a decent live performance video, but here's the song in all its glory:

Overall, I wasn't too sad to leave my pop world behind ~ it was simply an adjustment. I liked the stability of having a friend with a semi-normal family, and I'd thrown my heart into country music. There was so much to discover ~ like traveling to a foreign country for the first time. In '67 I was still on the fence about music. By 1968, country had claimed me.

That Year My Dad Forgot About Me

I've always liked bars. Not sterile hotel "bars", which are essentially lobbies with bottles of booze, but real honky tonks. An observer of life could do no better than to grab a corner table in a tavern, order up a Miller on tap, and sit back and watch.

When I resided on South Fourteenth Street, I one night found a little nook a couple blocks up the cracked sidewalk. It had a juke box and a dart board and a bunch of people who'd somehow staggered their way in. The establishment was tucked inside a skinny crevice between two white-brick factories, one skip past the Burlington Northern railroad tracks. That's why I liked it. It was out of the way; a private spot that only the absolute best alcoholics knew about. That's how a bar should be, if it was to call itself a respectable bar.

I've had a couple of bars in my life. There was my Uncle Howard's bar, Triple Service, where I lived when I was nine years old, and where I was introduced to the ways of life. Then there was The Gaiety, my dad's place. The Gaiety was a bit too fancy for me -- its outside sign had a cocktail glass with an olive bouncing out of it. The Gaiety, though, had all the accouterments of a proper bar. It was dark and musty. It was off the beaten path. Only the best drinkers could find it. And thus it was exclusive.

As a kid, I could make myself at home inside The Gaiety anytime I wanted. I was thirteen, so I didn't make myself at home there too much; only when I was bored with riding my bike around the big circle that surrounded Mom and Dad's motel. I had recently learned how to play guitar, and I knew that The Gaiety had a little stage with a microphone, and I was kinda bored one day, so I decided to stop in and give the regulars a show; demonstrate my prowess with forming C and E chords. It was summer and the July sun had already baked my skin and nobody fun was around to hang with.

And that day I just needed to spill and to give a big FU to my dad.

See, my dad was never around. We'd almost forgotten about him. Honestly. We were bewildered the couple of times he staggered through the kitchen door. I'd once known my dad, but now I had no idea who he was. And he sure didn't know me. He actually didn't even know I was in the room. The Gaiety was only twenty steps away from our little apartment, but for Dad, it was like being banished from heaven and thrust into Purgatory to have to deign to step inside our little family dwelling. He only did it out of a woozy sense of obligation. Mom no longer cared if he showed up at all, my little brother and sister treated him like a visiting stranger, and I chose to ignore him. I was damn sure not going to show him how much it hurt me. Not that he would have noticed. Unlike the little kids, I'd known Dad as a hero; the man who'd taught me about music because he loved it so much.

And now he'd betrayed me. Everything that came before was a lie. You couldn't trust anyone, because people flat-out lied. They portrayed themselves as one thing, but they weren't that. And they didn't care.

I'd been carrying around a giant suitcase of resentment for two years. Granted, I now had a best friend, but friendship and guitars didn't wipe out the hell Mom and Dad had put me, a kid, through. Snubbing my parents was only a band-aid. It would take me about thirty years to rip the band-aid off. Lucky I didn't know that at the time.

Clad in a sage blouse with tied straps and corduroy shorts; barefoot, I walked in the back door of the Gaiety, nonchalant; carrying a big beige acoustic guitar with steel strings. Somebody had left it in a motel room (people were always leaving stuff behind and I was always confiscating that stuff). I hadn't yet saved up enough dollars to buy that red Stella I'd been salivating over in Dahner's Music's window. That cream-colored behemoth stung my fingers, but I'd long ago learned to strum through the pain.

I turned the knob on the amp that powered the microphone, pulled up a backless stool, sat down, bent the mic stand toward me, flipped the pick out from between the frets of my guitar and began my show:

Granted, I hated that song, but it was a crowd-pleaser.

This song wasn't from 1968, but it was an old standby, and I figured the drunks would like it:

An impromptu lounge performance would not be complete without this next song. As an added bonus, I knew all the chords:

Merle really knew how to reel the hard-core drinkers in. I knew this one would be gold:

It wasn't easy to sing all the parts of this song, but I plunged on ahead:

I didn't sing any "women" songs, because I knew I wasn't a good singer. I understood my limitations. Nevertheless, I put on a really fine show. Trouble was, all the sports-shirt wearing patrons kindly ignored me, including the guy behind the bar who was fizzing up drinks -- my dad. I didn't even get a smattering of applause. I got NO applause. Granted, the after-work guzzlers were no doubt puzzled about why some random pre-teen had shown up to give a performance, but the polite thing would have been to clap, at least half-heartedly. 

I don't remember ever being embarrassed by my kids. They were never brazen like I was, admittedly. But even if they had been, I would have offered an "attaboy". Courage deserves its own reward. My dad pretended like he didn't know me. 

I, for one, was satisfied with my one-woman show. In the moment, I chose to ignore my complete lack of acknowledgment. I hefted my freakish guitar out the back door I'd come in, carried it back to my room, and lay down to take a nap. 

I'd like to ask Dad what it was about that day that dismayed him. Maybe it was that I infringed on his lair. Maybe he sauntered off to The Gaiety to get away from troublesome burdens, like his family. Maybe I was wrong to infiltrate, but I was thirteen and full of piss, and I needed to do this.

Dad, you may be interested to know that I took my three chords and eventually wrote some songs of my own -- one, in particular, about you. 

You never know what a kid might turn out to be.