Music's Worth

If I'd been a rich little kid, I would have owned the world's greatest collection of 45 RPM singles.

As it was, ninety-nine cents was damn hard to come by. My mom refused to pay me for housework, of which I actually did none, but nevertheless. I had to depend on the generosity of my Uncle Arnold, who would flip me a nickel or dime once in a while when he was helping my dad repair machinery on the farm. It was hard to save these coins, however, because the creamery truck showed up once a week to deliver milk and butter, and those fudgsicles the deliveryman carried in the back were almost impossible to resist.

By age ten I begrudgingly agreed to "help out" around the house in exchange for a weekly salary of twenty-five cents. Thus I whipped some dust around with a rag and possibly dried dishes, although my memory is unreliable on this. (In my defense, I don't recall my older sisters helping out, either. They probably remember it differently, but I am correct on this. Mom never enforced chores; I think because if you want something done right, well, you know...)

Eventually I managed to save up a dollar and promptly traipsed off to Poppler's Music to choose one lone single. My decision was not easy. I really liked The Lovin' Spoonful and The Dave Clark Five, but I almost always came home with a Beatles single. Like this:

There were, of course, other ways to consume music; most often my way was by borrowing my big brother's singles and albums when he was away. I needn't actually purchase music, because my brother had everything; but there is something about owning, holding, admiring one's own personal records. 

Then there were birthdays. I always asked for singles. I knew about albums, of course, but I really wanted the hits. My brother did buy me albums for my birthdays. He bought me The Mamas and Papas and The Yardbirds. Those two albums were the sum total of my LP collection for years to come.

This was a single I asked my best friend for, for my eleventh birthday:

When we moved in late 1966, I got myself a real job (albeit still working for my parents) and my wages increased to seventy-five cents per hour. Since my dad was constantly getting sloshed and embarking on rambling road trips, and since Mom felt an obligation to follow and track him down, I was regularly left in charge of their motel. I was eleven-going-on-twelve, but hey, the money was good!

If Mom forgot to pay me, I dinged open the cash register and withdrew the wages I was due. Dahmer's Music was my new local record store. A couple of records I purchased with my hard-fought money:

I did buy albums, too, once a year, every September, for my brother's birthday. I owed him, after all. I only purchased Beatles albums for him. In my mind, I wanted him to continue his collection. He was married by then and didn't actually care that much.  I bought Sgt. Peppers and asked him later how he liked it. He said, "It's okay", which kind of hurt my feelings. Shoot, I wasn't rich and I'd only tried to pad his repertoire. But people, and life, move on.

Once my new best friend, Alice, introduced me to country music, I dove into it headlong. Dahmer's wasn't flush with country singles (or albums) and our local country station was firmly ensconced in the Top Forty. I did buy albums, but I was limited to the offerings racked in JC Penney's basement. Thus I made some unfortunate purchases. I bought a duet album by Ernest Tubb and Loretta Lynn that I listened to approximately two times. Penneys was into "old fashioned", which was not my taste, but they hardly cared. Who but a couple of thirteen-year-old geeks was browsing their bins anyway? Their basement was flush with matrons queuing up at the catalog counter to order damask draperies. Country albums were essentially worthless unless one zeroed in on greatest hits compilations, which I definitely did buy, when available.

Soon I took to listening to far-away country stations, WHO in Des Moines (which came in crystal-clearly after midnight) and sometimes WSM in Nashville on a cloudless night and WBAP in Fort Worth. Ralph Emery and Mike Hoyer and Bill Mack understood country music -- real country music -- and I heard wondrous songs that were never once spun on my local station. But I had nowhere to buy them.

The internet was still a woozy science fiction fantasy, and computers? You mean those gargantuan whirring, beeping cyclops they showed on Lost In Space? I had a manual typewriter.

In the wee hours of Saturday nights, when I was able to tune in to WSM, right after the Opry, there was a program broadcast from Ernest Tubb's Record Shop. I figured, well hell, that store surely must have every country record known to man. I found the address in an issue of Country Music Roundup magazine, and found my way to the post office to purchase a money order*.

*the way kids who had no checking account could buy things through the mail.

I wrote long letters to the shop, specifying exactly which singles I wanted -- "not the fifties version, but the current recording by Mel Tillis". I tucked my money order inside and crossed my fingers.

That's how I eventually and joyfully received this:

And this:

Also this:

When music was hard to get, it meant more. 

Today I have tons and tons of songs on my hard drive, plus racks of CD's; not to mention my cache of fifty-year-old albums. And I never listen to any of them. But I would still get an ache in my heart if I could drop the needle on those obscure singles I strived so hard to procure. 

It's a truism that the more hard-fought a victory, the more it matters. When I click my mouse on an Amazon mp3, okay, now I've got it. I've downloaded songs that I've never once listened to. On the other hand, I played "We Can Work It Out" on my monaural record player approximately five hundred and twenty-three times, until the phonograph needle dug trenches in the vinyl. 

There is really no discovery now. No "you've got to hear this". Everybody knows everything and music doesn't matter because it's easy.

I cherish the times when I was forced to seek out music. When it was a victory to secure it. 

Now? Ehh. It doesn't really matter.

The Summer of 1967

My parents moved us in the gloomy month of December, 1966. Three kids, two of whom were barely toddlers; and me, an awkward, bashful eleven-year-old. Like most things we humans think will be magnificent experiences, reality is a letdown. Initially, in the late summer of '66, when my parents casually informed me we would be moving far away, I was elated. Country life had its virtues, but I'd experienced (tiny) city life by then, and I was sick of being isolated. All I had was my bicycle, after all, and it was a long trek into town on a bike.

In my fanciful notion of a new life, as I twirled down the dirt road on my bike, arms outstretched to the winds, I pictured a quaint town where I would window-shop, drop the kickstand down on the concrete, mosey into a little store and purchase an emerald frock. The shopkeeper would smile benevolently and perhaps pat my hand as I proffered my four dollars.

Reality was a sun-dimmed, dirty snow-pile parking lot and a musty apartment far from any town I could traverse on a bicycle. The motel my parents had laid down their life savings for was nineteen rooms laid out in a semi-circle with a cement speed bump smack-dab in the middle and a three-foot-high American elm holding on for dear life poked up through the concrete. Welcome to upward mobility!

The dank apartment attached to the motel's office had two full bedrooms with one microscopic bathroom between them. Thus, I became ensconced in a bunk-bedded room with two waifs sharing the bottom bed and me on the top. "My" room was so minuscule, I could extend my arms and touch the opposing walls.

I hadn't even met my new school yet and I was miserable. It was winter break, so I had approximately seven days to acclimate to my new home. I hated everything about it. Back in Minnesota, I had my own room (albeit shared with my tiny sister) upstairs, away from everyone, where I could play my records as loudly as I pleased, and nobody bothered me, ever. I had privacy. Now I could hear every snap of the bathroom tap; every time my dad got up in the middle of the night to fetch a drink of water.

I set up my battery-operated record player inside the three-shelf recessed closet in my room, stuffed my (two) albums in the cubbyhole above, and made believe that this was "home".

My best friend's brother had warned me that North Dakota was backward. When I spied my new sixth grade classroom, his words scorched my ears. I showed up in the tall-windowed eighteenth century chamber, settled into my third-desk-from-the-back, cracked open my fat World History textbook and pretended not to notice that everyone in the room was eyeing me. I looked around and didn't see one friendly face. It took a couple of months (which seemed like years) to find one single person who would deign to talk to me.

I desperately wanted to go back home. Sadly, "home" was now occupied by a family of strangers, which was an insult in itself. They'd probably changed things -- ruined my basement Imagine Land by turning it into a carpeted den or something. Replaced the breezy lace curtains in the living room with heavy damask draperies.

I ached to go home right up 'til the day a girl in my new classroom shot me a grin at something ridiculous Mrs. Haas had uttered, and I instantly realized this skinny blonde girl was somebody simpatico. And just like that, I had a best friend.

Life didn't suddenly become sublime -- I hated, hated my apartment (I refused to call it "home"). I hated the claustrophobia of being tightly packed among people I could barely tolerate on good days. I hated that I couldn't take a walk outside without running into complete strangers.

But, even though she lived miles away and traveled a different bus route, my breath was lighter knowing I had a friend -- Alice.

My big brother was an apparition. Some days he was there; some days no one had any idea where he'd gone. He'd ostensibly moved to North Dakota with the rest of us, but he was his own man, at age twenty. There obviously wasn't room for him in our little dormitory, so he got a motel room all his own; exactly what I yearned for, but didn't possess the requisite number of years to claim. Fortunately for me, my brother was gone a lot, and the motel office had passkeys.

I slipped the lock on his door, dropped the phonograph needle on this 45 and exhaled:

I loved The Turtles, to the point that I memorized the number of times Flo (or Eddie) sang, "so happy together" at the end of the song. And no, Ferris Bueller didn't invent this song:

I loved this one even more:

I almost feel sorry for those who weren't yet born in 1967, because they missed songs like this:

...but not really. Maybe I'm not "cool", but I was at least alive (and kicking) when some of the best music of all time burst into being.

My brother was a carpenter and an entrepreneur, and he knew a good gig when it stabbed him in the eye. He hammered together a fireworks stand and perched it on the edge of our new motel property, placed his mail order requisition, and proceeded to rake in the bucks. 

By late June the sun was hot and I was barefoot, scorching my toes on the melting asphalt. My little brother, Jay, and his best pal Royle, pedaled up to the fireworks stand on their bikes and tried to wheedle Rick out of giving them free bottle rockets (he did).

Dad had invested in an outdoor swimming pool to drive new business, so I reveled in this new windfall. I slipped on an orange two-piece, donned my cheap plastic Woolworth sunglasses, tiptoed across the driveway in front of Rick's little kiosk and settled on a chaise lounge beside the turquoise waters, flipped up the volume on my transistor, and heard this:

And meanwhile, Felix sang this:

This song was so sixth grade:

Not to be outdone by Ray Kazmarek's organ riffs, Procol Harem showed they were no slouches. The only quibble I have with this track is that it unnaturally fades. They could have tacked on another 30 seconds or so, because it seems to end weirdly:

Another of my clandestine break and enters featured this song (which was, in fact, the only song by Herman's Hermits I ever actually liked):

Yes, I liked this one a lot. The Grass Roots don't get the acclaim they deserve. Aside from being the first live rock 'n roll concert I ever attended, these guys had scores of hits in the sixties:

The best thing Graham Nash was ever a part of:

God bless you, Neil Diamond -- you're still going strong -- and you had one of my favorite singles of 1967. I still remember that black and yellow BANG! record label:

So, while 1967 personally sucked mostly for me, I can still say that the music was awesome, and I was there.

So life, in essence, is a series of yins and yangs; searing pain and soaring heavens.

We take what we get and try to remember the joys.

It Was Fifty Years Ago Today

I didn't realize until tonight that 1967 was fifty years ago! My, how time flies.

Nineteen sixty-seven was a seminal year for me. We'd moved to our new home (or "house of horrors", as I prefer to call it) in December of 1966. As an almost twelve-year-old, I'd had a naive optimism that life in this new world would be superb. Just like me to act now and think later. Not that I was given a choice in the matter.

I was caught in that shadowy crevice between my old life and my new one. I'd left my very best friend behind, but my tiny mind discarded that reality in favor of the new, exciting life I'd conjured.

My brother was twenty years old and independent. He'd left someone behind, too, but he wasn't about to discard her. Thus, he traversed Interstate 94 about two hundred times that first year, to Minnesota and back, until he could bring his soon-to-be bride back with him permanently.

My brother was granted his very own room along the long back row of motel units; room number twenty, to be exact; while I shared a skinny cubbyhole and a set of bunk beds with my little brother and sister. My big brother was never around (see previous paragraph), so if I wanted (needed) a little me-time, I grabbed a pass key from the office and made myself at home in Room 20. It wasn't exactly like his room back on the farm. He no longer had a cozy nook for his albums; his new music center was a set of dark recessed shelves illuminated by a sixty-watt light bulb, directly adjacent to his bathroom. Nevertheless, I slipped "Pleasant Valley Sunday" on his turntable and performed my own version of the jerk in front of his vanity mirror.

I was careful to leave his room the way I'd found it. I smoothed out the bedspread that I'd sat on in between mirror performances. I placed his records back on the shelf in the exact order in which he'd arranged them. I'd had years of experience with this ritual; it came second nature to me.

Then I slumped back to the "house" and did my best to ignore everyone who lived there.

Adults who relocate to a new space in the world don't even consider the things kids worry about. Moving to a brand new school in a brand new town, I fretted about how lost I would be amidst the subject matter. I'd had a bit of exposure to a new school when I was nine and had moved with my mom to Lisbon, North Dakota for part of the school year. St. Aloysius had been woefully behind. I'd felt like a complete fraud when the nuns proposed to Mom that I skip a grade. I'd always been good at memorizing and that was essentially what made me look so smart to the St. A's sisters -- I'd already committed to memory everything they were teaching.

But, now, would the Mandan school system be far ahead of where I'd left off? What if I flunked and had to repeat the sixth grade? Add to that the reality that I would need to keep my head down and not make eye contact with a bunch of disdainful strangers. I was a jittery wreck.

Mandan was big on world history. A big fat textbook with crisp white pages of stories about the "Slovakias" and a study sheet crammed with foreign words. And science. A subject that made me question why God was punishing me. I'd been so good; had gone to confession every week just like He had decreed; had made up "sins" just to have something to utter to the priest dozing inside his little velvet-lined box. I'd done everything He'd wanted me to do -- ate fish sticks on Friday -- and this was my reward?

There was not one subject Mrs. Haas taught that gave me a sense of relief. My only saving grace was that I could spell. Mrs. Haas was big on spelldowns. Every week she'd line everyone up on opposite sides of the room and challenge them to spell words. I soared. My only real competitor was the other new girl who'd shown up in Mrs. Haas' classroom the same day I did. But I vanquished her, too. Take that, Becky Weeda!

I also had to endure the indignity of taking the city bus home from school. The Mandan School District didn't have bus routes that stretched out to the boondocks. Thus, I had to hike six blocks from the elementary school to the Prince Hotel in downtown Mandan to wait for Mister Paul to pull his big blue and white bus up to the stop to take me home.

Crazy people rode that bus. There was a guy who was always sitting in the front seat -- a guy who had some kind of neck stitch. He would crick his head to the right over and over and over again while he jabbered to Mister Paul. There was a seemingly sophisticated twenty-something girl who boarded the bus every day as I was wending my way home. One afternoon she had donned Jackie O sunglasses, and complained incessantly to Mister Paul that she'd recently suffered "snow blindness". I think all of these people were insane.

I sat in the middle row, far removed from the regular eccentrics. There were, at the most, five of us riding the route, and that included the driver. Mister Paul was always nice to me, though. He had a job to do, and I think he understood that as a twelve-year-old, these freaks freaked me out. I really liked Mister Paul. The following year, as I stumbled into seventh grade, I had an English teacher who was also named Mister Paul. He was a foppish dilettante who I was aghast to learn was the son of my kindly city bus driver.

I felt like I spent my life on a bus.

To my astonishment, somewhere between December and February, I acquired a friend. Mrs. Haas' classroom was a test of my memorizing skills. I couldn't really tell Glenn from Robert. I learned quickly that Russell was a big doofus, because every time Mrs. Haas called on him, he coughed up an inane response. As a sixth grader, I feigned condescension toward Russell, but today he would make me laugh. He was rather endearing in his naivete. A North Dakota Gomer Pyle.

All the girls were pale Germanic blondes, which made me stand out even more freakishly, with my Irish red hair. The blondest of the blondes was named Alice. I sat in the row next to hers, a couple of desks forward. Prim Mrs. Haas uttered something one morning that struck me as ridiculously funny, and I had no one with whom to share my amusement. I happened to glance back and saw the blonde girl grinning at me. Every friendship I've ever formed in my life was based on humor; a bond with someone who "got it". From that day forward, this girl Alice would be the best friend I ever had.

In the metamorphic stage of our friendship, though, I still had to deal with "home". Which essentially meant getting off the bus, tromping silently through the motel office, past Mom hovering behind the check-in desk, alighting in my shared bedroom and slamming the door behind me. My conduit for obtaining music was my transistor radio and a battery-powered record player. My latest '45's were the cloud-blue Turtles hit:

I even had this one (I don't know why):

Probably my favorite single at the time was on a yellow label with a revolver that shouted, "Bang":

Speaking of The Turtles, I liked this one even more than Happy Together, despite what Ferris Bueller might say:

Nobody ever mentions the Grass Roots, but in 1967 they were a phenomenon. This was my favorite:

I didn't have a lot of '45's. I had some miscellaneous Paul Revere and the Raiders singles. Paul Revere and the Raiders was a good band -- in concept -- but not an actually good band. I liked them because I thought Mark Lindsay was cute. At twelve, cuteness is of supreme importance. I tacked photos of the band (from Tiger Beat Magazine) up on my wall. The most nicely arranged archive of a band that I never really liked.

I did buy this one, but I don't know why. Roulette Records had a psychedelic orange label that would make one dizzy if they stared at it too long. This song was something my little sister could appreciate more than me, and yet I bought it:

As ashamed as I am now of the singles I plunked down money for, at least I can say I never dropped my pennies on the counter for songs like, "Up, Up And Away". So, in retrospect, this one doesn't look or sound that bad:

Those basically sum up my paltry record collection.  

My after-school schedule consisted of trekking my way down the driveway, pouting through the "family gauntlet" (which truthfully only consisted of my mom), burrowing behind the door of my birdhouse bedroom and reposing on the bottom bunk to the same six-pack of '45 records. 

In time, my little brother and sister would appear from wherever they'd been cavorting, and would sometimes expect me to let them in the room. This dispensation was granted only rarely. They got used to it. I did let them sleep in there, for God's sake. Depending on the night's TV schedule, I may give a cursory glance to my homework early, while the evening news was on the television in the living room. If it was Monday, I parked myself in front of the big TV -- directly in front of the TV -- to catch the latest Monkees episode. I was in love with the Monkees -- for the longest time, before I had an actual friend, they were my best friends. Of course, they didn't know that...or me.

TV was a hugely important part of my life. Ironically, television was basically awful in 1967. Laugh-In, The Dean Martin Show, Green Acres, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C, Petticoat Junction, Family Affair. Just awful, corn-pone shows. Yet I watched them. What else was there? Those bastard Hollywood producers really thought the audience was a bunch of rubes. Or they knew we had no choice, so they didn't give a damn. The best thing on TV in 1967 was on too late for me to watch, except for Friday nights -- The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

Wednesday nights I had CCD, which meant I missed nothing except my pride. Sitting behind a long table with my fellow hostages in the church basement, pretending to pay attention to Father Dukart "teach" us things, thinking, hmmm...Father is kind of cute...not grasping why he paid so much attention to the boys' side of the room. After class the boys squealed like little girls about a stupid new TV show, some space thing they called "Star Trek". Yawn.

I remember 1967 as dark. Dark and gloomy. Wintery; cold. My only goal was to get through. Step by slogging step.

Music-wise, even the top hits were gloomy. Cynical. Sure I remember my poppy songs fondly, but my transistor droned on with songs like this one, over and over:

I have no idea what that song meant, if anything. But it annoyed the hell out of me. And don't even get me started on Jefferson Airplane.

If I'm going to remember the year, though, I'd rather remember the music that was good; not the craptastic Summer of Love twaddle. (P.S. The summer of love was a scam.)

So I like these:

(Sorry for the summer of love nonsense footage, but it's still a good song.)

I made some faux paus in '67. I badgered my soon-to-be sister-in-law to barter away some long-forgotten '45 for this one, which is an awesome song and a classic:

This song I danced to in front of my brother's mirror, and I stand by it yet today:

This song sums up 1967 for me:

I know what you're thinking -- Aren't you missing some songs, Shelly? Yes, but those songs are for another time, another post. No, I haven't forgotten Jim and I haven't forgotten Felix Cavaliere.

And I'm well aware of the Whiter Shades and the Judes, but the songs featured here are how I remember 1967. Feel free to do your own retrospective.

These songs got me through.

And that, after all, was my goal.