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.

Thanksgiving At Home

I'm not a good cook. I learned how to cook out of necessity. As a young wife, I quickly learned that men don't appreciate peanut butter toast for dinner.

My mom, on the other hand, was a renowned cook. She used recipe cards sometimes, but just as reminders. She also was a short order cook at my Uncle Howard's diner for a time in the mid-sixties, so she really had to know how to juggle. Saturday nights, that place was buzzing and she was the lone cook and often the waitress, too.

The reason she also had to wait tables was because my cousin Karen and I were immune to working. Of course, we were age nine and ten, but that's no excuse. Karen could actually pull off waitressing if she set her mind to it. She was always someone who could flip on the charm. I, on the other hand, didn't even know what "charm" meant, unless it referred to Cary Grant on a black and white TV screen in Uncle Howard's apartment.

I tried waiting tables one weekend night when it suddenly dawned on me that things were really hopping and that the people in the booths were starting to act surly.

"I'll have a pepperoni pizza," the guy said.

"Okay, what do you want on that?" I asked.

"Uh, pepperoni."

I wrote "pepperoni pizza" in my best cursive on the pad, tore off the sheet and clipped it to the clothesline that fed into the kitchen. I pulled a couple of amber plastic glasses off the pyramid, stuck them beneath the Pepsi fountain, then dropped ice cubes inside. A non-moron would have thought to put the ice in first. With over-filled glasses in hand and Pepsi-Cola running down my arm, I delivered the drinks to the table, grabbed a couple of napkins out of the metal holder and sopped up the overflowing soda.

Then I retired. Forever.

One might ask, why didn't Mom school me in the ways of cooking and acting normal? I don't know. I think maybe she was just tired. She'd already raised three kids who were three years apart in age and she still had two toddlers at home. And here she was, cooking for Uncle Howard to refill the home coffers that were direly sparse. The best she could hope was for me to stay out of the way and not embarrass her.

I also accept my share of the blame. I was sorely disinterested in homemaking. Of course, I was a kid. But still, I understand there are young girls who like cooking and baking and sewing. And cleaning. None of those girls were me. I liked coloring. I liked creating things out of bric-a-brac. Kleenex Barbie dresses. I liked making things that had never before existed. I was a dreamer. A lazy dreamer.

As a grown-up I never once made Thanksgiving dinner. Everybody went to Mom and Dad's for Thanksgiving. I was charged with bringing a "dish", just like my older sister was. My sister-in-law possessed the "mom" gene, so she'd show up with my brother and their kids and dive right in to help get dinner on the table, while I nibbled on green olives from the relish tray. My offerings were sometimes good, sometimes putrid. Don't try out new recipes for holidays when you are invited to your mom's house. Bring buns.

Mom always had the other-worldly long table set up in the living room, covered with a starched white cloth. A few candles sprinkled the table and, of course, the Hallmark paper turkey with its wings spreading out by magic -- or by some kind of accordion-pleated slight of hand. The little kids always loved playing with that turkey -- Mom had to buy a new one each year -- little hands would make a wreck of it, scrunching it together, then flaying out the "feathers", then flattening them back again.

Her relish tray held black and green olives, baby dill pickles, and red and white striped radishes. She was the only one who ate the radishes. Once she finally sat down at the table, when everyone else was already primed for a second helping, she'd crunch on those radishes. She loved them. Nobody else could tolerate them.

While I grazed the relish tray, Mom sweated over the stove top. Dad dozed in his recliner, endeavoring hopelessly to keep up with various buzzes of conversation. The little kids tromped about in the basement, their tiny feet raising a booming ruckus and the occasional squeal.

I ventured into the kitchen a couple of times; made a couple of meandering swoops; the whiff of pie crust launching my salivary glands. Mom baked pies like an actual baker would bake pies. No Pillsbury ready-to-roll crust. She actually knew how to make pie crust. I tried it once. I apparently did it wrong. She made cherry and mince meat (which I still don't know what the heck that is) and pumpkin and pecan. Sometimes chocolate.

Dad's sole duty was carving the turkey. He was actually quite proficient at it. He could carve a turkey in about five minutes, with no spatter or greasy mess. He was like a private waiting for his orders. "Richard, come in here and carve the turkey." "Yes, sergeant! I'm on it, sergeant!".

Mom made the absolute best dressing. That recipe, if there ever was a recipe, is lost to the ages. She whipped potatoes in the big kettle with her hand mixer and stirred up home-made gravy. She baked sweet potatoes with a crumble of brown sugar and miniature marshmallows.

Her only concession to pre-made conveniences was Rhode's frozen dinner rolls and canned cranberry sauce. I actually once cooked homemade cranberry sauce, and to be honest, I prefer the grooved jelly roll that shimmies out of the can.

I will say that I'm a great dishwasher. I really excel. For some reason, though, I was always relegated to drying. My sister and I held our cotton towels in hand and dickered silently over who was going to dry the big blue bowl. I liked the dishes ritual, but I never knew where anything belonged. Mom, no doubt, spent the day after Thanksgiving rearranging her cupboards, redepositing items in their proper place, after I'd stashed the potato masher atop the Corning Ware and the carving knife in the non-knife drawer.

It's odd that a holiday that revolves around eating could mean so much. I had my boys around me; my big brother cracked wise. My sister-in-law was the daughter Mom never had, even though she had four of them. My little brother was cute and happy with his two boys around him, too. Dad strained to make sense of the cacophony of cross-table talk. Mom rose out of her chair on queue, replenishing platters and bowls.

Once the dishes were done, a deck of cards was pulled out of the junk drawer and a marathon game ensued.

Then we stopped to help ourselves to delectable cherry pie with homemade whipped cream and sometimes a dollop of vanilla ice cream and tall mugs of coffee.

Wide-eyed, hopped up on caffeine, I trundled my sleepy boys into the back seat of the car and we lazed our way down the dusky streets to home.

And next year would be exactly the same.

I miss "next year".

Autobiographies

I write about my life here on this blog a lot, mostly to try to make sense of it. I wasn't unique, growing up in a dysfunctional household -- every kid has his own story -- but my story is mine. I think I write a lot, too, because I was there, but I wasn't there; if that makes any sense. I was so busy trying to survive that I forgot to remember myself. This makes things difficult when I try to look back. Music is my prompt. Maybe that's why music holds such a dear place in my heart. It helps me remember me.

I wrote my autobiography and published it for a while. Then I unpublished it because I was embarrassed. I'm not really a sharing person. I wrote it for me and then realized that I told my story so well that it could be worth someone's time to read. Then I reconsidered. The point isn't to have somebody tell me that I write well. The point is to get the words down. If I was to re-write it for publication, it wouldn't be totally honest. I'm not on board with that.

I used to write songs. Used to. My husband is a songwriter and he doesn't understand why I am not flinging song after song out into the universe. Songwriting for me was a phase. I've had lots of phases in my life. I'd latch onto something and be completely immersed in it for a couple of years, sort of how my dad liked certain foods so much he ate them exclusively until he didn't. Everything is essentially finite. For years I made counted cross-stitch pictures; framed them, hung them on the wall, gave them away as gifts. Maybe for ten years in total. Then I stopped. I got tired of it. I don't know why. Crafting was a balm for me. Songwriting was like that. I did it for more than ten years, but I slowly slipped out of the need to do it. Now I don't do anything -- except blog.

The reason I bring up my songwriting is that I realized tonight that I wrote my whole life in my songs. Which leads me to wonder why I've spent so many hours putting words to paper. My husband put together a CD of our early stuff, songs I haven't heard in years. Most of them were autobiographical. Maybe that's why I stopped. Maybe I'd said all there was to say.

So, tonight instead of embedding my favorite top forty videos, I thought I would share some of my own.

I've written about the time I lived at my uncle's bar, Triple Service when I was nine years old and how that experience shaped me. When one is nine, pretty much any experience will shape them. As a farm kid, moving to a "town", which Triple Service actually wasn't in, was the absolute most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. And it granted me my life-long love affair with bars. Things like that imprint on one's mind. Had I moved to a restaurant that exclusively served spaghetti and meatballs, well, I would be in love with Italian cuisine. It doesn't take much for kids...

Ghost Town is sort of about Triple Service, too. In my early forties, I traveled back to Lisbon, North Dakota, to try to find it. The building was still there, but it was lost and forlorn. The gas pumps were no more. The building was a big white blob. The big red letters that spelled out TRIPLE SERVICE had been torn down sometime in the sixties. Somebody in town told me that the premises was now an Eagles Club or something. Well, when I traveled down the lonely road and finally found it, nobody was parked in the lot. I guess the Eagles weren't a burgeoning enterprise in Lisbon. The only remnant, the only shard that told me I was in the right place was the bulging propane tank that still squatted at the far end of the abandoned rectangle.

I wrote a song about my dad, too, once I finally reconciled inside my brain everything that had happened. It took me a long time, decades, to see things from a perspective other than my own. Actually, it didn't happen until my dad was gone. I was so proud of my dad for getting treatment (that took) for his alcoholism. I'd endured his first two failed attempts as a teenager and had eventually turned against him and banished him from my consciousness.  I gave up on him and owned up to the fact that he didn't give a damn about anyone or anything except Johnny Walker. Age has a way of bestowing wisdom:

Too, I wrote about my first real job and the new dysfunctional family I'd inherited. In our little microfilm office in the back of the Vital Statistics Department, three of us sat and traced over ancient birth and marriage records to ready them for filming. And we smoked and listened to AM radio. And Gordon Lightfoot sent a dire warning through the radio's speakers:

I wrote a lot of songs, most of which don't have accompanying videos, because I didn't much feel like creating them. Which leads me to my "lazy" song. I will not deny that I was a lazy kid. My husband played a VHS tape once of family memories, and there I was, lying back on a chaise lounge, my head propped on my elbow, looking for all the world like the most bored child in the world. I was mostly bored, I'll admit, but that's really no excuse for laziness. Apparently I was waiting for the world to come to me. It actually never did. 

I'm still waiting.

 

This was supposed to be a dub vocal, but we never got around to doing it right. I'll chalk it up to laziness:

 

 

This is my favorite song of all I've written.

You can take the girl out of sloth, but you can't take the sloth out of the girl.

Mel Tillis

The guys who write obituaries for newspapers are probably around thirty or so. Maybe forty at the most. Everyone knows that companies are in the midst of showing baby boomers the door. That leaves a gap when it comes to writing about someone's life, because these young guys (and/or girls) don't have a clue who Mel Tillis was. It makes me mad when I realize that an obituary consists of bits gleaned from Wikipedia. A life should mean more than that. Especially Mel Tillis's.

Country music would have been so much less if Mel Tillis hadn't come along.

When I first became involved with country music, I didn't know Mel Tillis. I might have seen "M. Tillis" in parentheses beneath the song title on a '45 single, but at that time, I only cared about who sang the song. Granted, I was only around thirteen, so I was as shallow as a...well, thirteen-year-old.

I didn't even know that the title song of my all-time favorite album (because it was Dad's all-time favorite album) was written by this Mel Tillis guy. Dad bought the LP in 1965, when I was still engrossed in the orange and yellow Capital '45's released by this group called "The Beatles".

Sorry, apparently they didn't make videos in 1965, but this is still awesome:

Seeing as how I was a remedial country music student, once my best friend Alice began schooling me in the ways of (good) country music, I caught up with this next song. Alice also was the person who taught me how to play (chord) guitar (I never actually learned how to "play"), and she taught me the intro to this song. 

Detroit City was released in 1963, and while I didn't listen to country music then, one could not help but be exposed to it, because the radio stations played an eclectic mix of musical styles. My cousin and I created a comic book about "singers when they get old". Bobby Bare was one of our subjects, but in our version he was an actual bear. Our comic was a huge hit among my Uncle Howard's bar crowd. Orders rolled in, but unfortunately we would have had to recreate the whole thing by hand over and over, so we sacrificed the big bucks (twenty-five cents) we could have made from the venture, essentially because we were lazy. 

Around 1967 Alice and I were excited to see Bobby Bare in person, but thanks to a freak winter fiasco, we never got to. We ended up going back to her house and watching the local TV broadcast of Bobby's performance. 

A lot of my musical history is tied up in Detroit City, and it was all thanks to Mel Tillis:

The very first song I ever wrote went like this:

1967, you taught me how to play

All those Merle Haggard songs

Man, he had a way

And the intro to Detroit City

I remember it today

You were my hero then

You still are today

So, again, it all started with Mel.

Much like I traveled back in time to capture songs like "City Lights", I didn't quite catch that Mel had written this hit song from 1957. Was Mel around forever? 

I never understood why this guy named Webb Pierce was considered the Hank Williams of the fifties. Pierce didn't even write his own songs! And he was rather an awful singer, but apparently the "nasal" sound worked for him. In the fifties, who was the competition? Pat Boone? The only thing I know about Webb Pierce is that he had a guitar-shaped swimming pool and he was a renowned asshole. Regardless, Mel Tillis wrote this song and Webb should have thanked him for it, but apparently that wasn't Pierce's modus operandi:

More my style was this single released in 1967:

And seriously, all this time, I had no idea that a guy named "Mel" had written these songs.

So, when did I become aware of this Mel Tillis guy? In the mid-sixties, I began hearing songs on the radio by someone who had a different sort of voice. He was no Ray Price. He sang like the words were stuck in his gullet. I was judgmental. The songs were good, but I was perplexed by the singer.

Eventually, as more of this guy's recordings got played by the DJ's, I became used to him.

In 1970, I got hooked. This is one of my favorite recordings ever.

 In the mid-seventies, Mel's career took off. He was still writing songs and still writing hit songs, like:

By then, I'd bought his live album, and it was hilarious. I never knew that Mel Tillis stuttered! Of course, if you read the various obituaries, that's practically all that is written about him.

Yea, Mel Tillis was funny. And Clint Eastwood and all the Hollywood set loved him. 

This might have been from a Clint movie, or maybe not, but I think it was:

This one, I'm pretty much convinced is from a Clint movie:

Here's one more (Mel did it better):

I'm going to guess that the most famous song Mel Tillis ever wrote was this next one. It would have been nice if Kenny Rogers had tweeted a few words and had thanked Mel for his career, but whatever. I'm not going to judge the propriety or impropriety of not acknowledging.

Mel Tillis was with me all my life and I didn't even know it. I didn't know that Mel was wrapped up in my musical belonging. 

Pay it forward, they say.

Mel paid a lot of artists' ways.

Mel Tillis is wrapped up in my musical memories. Ir's not everyone who can encompass a person's life. I wanna cry just thinking about him. And I truly miss him.

Thank you, Mel Tillis, for things I didn't even know you taught 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.

That Time My Mom Was On The News

I was thirteen in 1968 and living large in my very own room. By then I'd resided in the outskirts of Mandan, North Dakota for one and a half very long years. Life had not been good. We moved to Mandan and to the "business" in December of 1966, smack-dab in the middle of the school year. What could be better than stepping through the doorway of an alien sixth-grade classroom and seeing twenty strangers eyeing you suspiciously? It took me a couple of months to find a friend. I made some missteps along the way. A hard girl in the school yard deigned to speak to me. I can't even remember her name; I think she dropped out sometime around ninth grade and was never seen again. Another new girl started sixth grade the same day as me. Anne Nelson was a supercilious dweeb, and I would never have been friends with her, regardless of our coinciding start dates. Nevertheless, she seemed to find a friend right away. At least when I finally found one, I really found one. Alice and I would trip through the next six years together; always together.

By the end of junior high, I was musically confused. I still listened to Top Forty radio, but I was dipping a toe into the world of country, thanks to Alice; a world that still didn't seem natural. The musical world, too, was confused; schizophrenic. Country hits were hitting the top forty -- not the good hits, but essentially the absolute worst singles of all time. In my first very own room, I listened to songs like this on my transistor:

And one of the worst songs ever:

Of course, if you name your band the Lemon Pipers, you deserve all the scorn that is heaped upon you.

My dad liked this song. He was always a sucker for instrumentals:

"News" was what showed up on my TV screen. I wasn't overly invested in "news". The Viet Nam War had been going on for so long that nobody paid attention to it anymore (sadly). Around April, this song became popular:

And sometime in April, Walter Cronkite announced on the CBS Evening News that Martin Luther King had been shot. To be frank, I knew little about the man. I was thirteen. I surmised, however, from Cronkite's somber tone that MLK was somebody important. They were searching for a guy, James Earl Ray, who had fled the scene.

In 1968 everybody wanted to be a good citizen. A random traveler who had checked into Mom and Dad's motel thought he spotted a guy (traveling with a blonde) who he was sure was the absconded shooter, and the traveler called in a tip. Thus, a local news crew showed up in our office to interview Mom. It was one of those news stories that wasn't an actual story. Yet, they they were, sticking a camera in Mom's face, asking her questions as she fidgeted behind the check-in desk. I sat in the background, entranced and amused by the spectacle. They should have interviewed the guy; the moron who saw spooks around every corner, instead of putting Mom on the spot. Yet, that was Mom's only claim to fame -- being interviewed on KXMB for a tale about an innocent tourist who just happened to look kind of, sort of, like a notorious killer. I don't remember what Mom said, but if it had been me, I would have been flummoxed. "Uh, yea, the guy checked in and I gave him a room key. That's about it, really."

Needless to say, the man who'd been fingered wasn't James Earl Ray. Plus, he drove a Cadillac, and what self-respecting assassin owns a Cadillac? Come on. A Dodge Dart, maybe.

As April wore on, most likely the worst single of all time became (surprise!) a hit, and we settled back into our lives, as they were, and I contemplated how a song so putrid could hit Number One:

By the summer of that year, my big brother had enlisted in the National Guard so he wouldn't get shipped off to Viet Nam. He had a new wife and the two of them lived in a basement apartment in downtown Mandan. Rick's new wife, Kathy, asked me to spend the week with her while my brother was away at Guard camp at Fort Ripley. I'd never actually lived in a town, ever. I could actually walk places! Where I chose to walk was to St. Joseph's Catholic Church. I was steeped in mysticism then, most likely because I was searching for a lifeline (it didn't last). One Friday night, sharing the double bed with Kathy, snoring away contentedly, I felt a hand on my shoulder. "Shelly, they're saying on the radio that Kennedy was shot! At first I thought they were talking about John Kennedy, but..."

We got up and turned the radio dial louder.  The announcer was speaking in hushed tones, a rustle of shouts in the background, from far away in Los Angeles. 

Sometime around three a.m. I fell back to sleep, with dreams of this song snaking through my brain:

A benign song for an insane time.

The year ended for me, and ended my love affair with rock and roll, with this song. But I guess, all in all, this is 1968:

Awards And Things

I haven't watched the CMA Awards since roughly 2001. Honestly, I don't know Luke Bryan from Jake Owen (seriously, I don't). I only know who Blake Shelton is because he had some minor hits early in the 2000's, when I still listened to country nominally, and when Blake still had extra-long hair. 

The CMA's were a decades-long mainstay for me, from the time when, as a teenager, I purchased a money order and mailed it to the Country Music Association in Nashville in order to become a voting member. The CMA's vetting process was rather rudimentary in the late sixties. I think I told them I was a radio executive or something. I take credit for putting Merle Haggard over the top in 1970 (not really; it was Merle's year).

Ever since I stopped listening to country music, I've satisfied my fleeting curiosity by reading next-day recaps of the awards show. 

So, I hear that Garth Brooks won Entertainer of the Year award this year. Did I fall asleep and wake up in 1992? How pitiful does country music have to be to be forced to reach back in time and bestow its highest award on an artist who was relevant twenty-five years ago? I wonder if Garth still climbs ropes on stage, or does he now shuffle in grasping his walker? I hear next year Charley Pride will be in contention. This is no knock on Garth, but more so an indictment of today's country music. This is what happens when you clutch "relevance" and sacrifice "music". 

I used to think that country would cycle through its bad periods and become good again. It happened so many times in my life. Just when I thought country was done, it surprised me. The mid-seventies was a bad time; an approximately ten year period of bad times, but then some artists who hadn't forgotten country music showed up on the scene and breathed life into it again. Even back as far as the sixties, in the period of Chet Atkins' slickly-produced middle-of-the-road singles, with the Anita Kerr Singers oohing and ahhing in the background of every song, Merle showed up and put the Nashville sellouts in their place. 

Now I think country is gone for good. 

In the western town I called home for most of my life, pretty much everybody listened to country. If somebody asked a random person, what's your favorite song, they might answer, "In My Life" by Collin Raye. Now, in the oh-so-sophisticated metropolitan area in which I live, nobody listens to country music. Nobody actually listens to music at all. A co-worker the other day, however, outside on a break, said, "I think I'll go back to listening to my old-time stuff, like Harper Valley PTA." In the eighteen years I've worked for my company, that was the first time I ever heard anyone say anything about country music, and what she said was a reference to a 1960's throwback.

Which brings me to the 2017 CMA's. 

I understand that Brad Paisley (who also is a bit long in the tooth, to be honest) did one of his famous parodies, this one implicitly criticizing the President. Really, Brad? Know your market, Brad. I'm not that big a Paisley fan to begin with, but for sure I won't be purchasing any of his albums now. But if it makes you feel good, Brad, knock yourself out. I understand there was a bit of controversy this year when the CMA decreed that the awards would be a "politics-free zone". I guess Brad didn't like that, so Brad went his own way. I personally endeavor to not offend the person who is signing my paycheck, but whatever, Brad. The last "political" moment I remember from the CMA's was when Charlie Rich torched the card naming John Denver the Entertainer of the Year. At least Charlie's gesture had purpose; meaning. John Denver wasn't a country artist and was an interloper. Brad Paisley simply doesn't like the President's tweets. Here's a suggestion, Brad: Don't read them.

Some other people, too, won some awards, but since I don't know them, I don't actually care.

And speaking of Harper Valley, PTA:

The inductees into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame were recently announced. In the "Non-Performing Songwriters" category, there is Bill Anderson. This was most likely news to Bill, since he's actually been performing since sometime in the early sixties. He has a band and everything. That's what happens when you don't do your research. 

Nevertheless, Bill Anderson has written some classic (classic!) country songs; such as:

You're welcome, Brad Paisley:

Proof that Bill Anderson was a "performing" songwriter:

In the "Performing Songwriters" category (in an upside-down world), we have Tom T. Hall. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Bill Anderson was more of a performing songwriter than Tom T. ever hoped to be, but let's not quibble.

Here's my beef with Tom T. Hall ~ he doesn't represent the epitome of songwriting. For one thing, he apparently disdains choruses. A chorus is the lifeblood of a song! Trust me. One can write the most inane dribble, but if they write a good chorus, all is forgiven. Tom went his own way, though. Every single song that Tom T. wrote is notable for its lack of a chorus. Such as:

Everybody hates this song, and with good reason:

I will admit that I purchased a Tom T. Hall album in the late sixties. Somebody told me to do so. I think it was called, "A Week In A County Jail". One of the tracks on the album was this one (note the absence of a chorus):

The only song I ever liked that Tom T. Hall wrote:

Then there's the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The Hall of Fame says, you're somebody. You're really somebody. You've arrived. It's not easy to be a Hall of Fame inductee. You have to pay your dues. You have to slog through brittle bone-chilling December towns and put on a show for people who just want to see what you have to offer. They're not necessarily sold on you; you need to prove yourself. 

I saw Alan Jackson in concert. He was no Randy Travis, but he sure had the songs. I got as much out of an Alan Jackson concert as I would have by staying home and playing his CD's ~ he wasn't what one would call a dynamic performer. He didn't climb ropes. He was George Strait without the charisma. Don't care. He still had the songs.

If for nothing more than this song, he deserves his place in the Country Music Hall of Fame:

Thus ends my recap of awards and things. The good news ~ Bill Anderson. The bad news ~ Brad Paisley and his political biases. The retro news ~ Garth Brooks. 

The more things change, they really, seriously, don't.

I like the continuity.