AS MOST MUSIC historians know, soon after Elvis became the undisputed King, Colonel Tom Parker hid him out for nearly the next two decades. The only time we were able to see him was at a rare concert or in one of those idiotic movies he began making, such as Viva Las Vegas, which featured Elvis singing and mouthing ridiculous dialogue while several dozen scantily-clad starlets cooed and wiggled. Today, Elvis movies normally are shown very late at night after the adults have gone to bed, so they won’t be embarrassed in front of their children.
However, the rock ’n’ roll storm that Elvis started did not subside after he took leave of the public. As a matter of fact, the music flourished and reached new heights, and when it got its own television show, our parents’ battle to save us from what some had considered a heathen sound was over. They had lost.
Dick Clark was apparently a very mature nine-year-old when he first appeared on “American Bandstand,” because that has been nearly thirty years ago and he still doesn’t look like he has darkened the doors to forty.
Bandstand. I wouldn’t miss it for free Scrambler rides and cotton candy at the county fair. The music they were playing was our music, and the dances they were dancing were our dances. It was live on television, and Philadelphia, from whence Bandstand came, was the new center of our universe. (Previously, it had been Atlanta, where our parents occasionally took us to see the building where they kept all the things you could order from the Sears Roebuck catalog, and to wrestling matches and gospel singings.)
Danny Thompson and I always watched Bandstand together in the afternoons. Danny was not nearly the geographical wizard I was (I had been born seventy-five miles from Moreland in Ft. Benning, Georgia, and had traveled as far away as Arkansas as the quintessential Army brat before my parents had divorced) so anything that had to do with where some place was, Danny asked me.
“Where is Philadelphia, anyway?” he queried one afternoon as we watched the kids on Bandstand do the Hop to Danny and the Juniors’s “At the Hop.”
“Pennsylvania,” I told him.
“How far is that?”
“Thousands of miles.”
“Wish I could go.”
“To see Bandstand?”
“See it up close.”
“Wish we lived in Philadelphia.”
“We’d go on Bandstand every day, wouldn’t we?”
Besides the music, Danny and I enjoyed watching Bandstand in order to select objects of lust from the group of Philadelphia girls who were regulars. I picked out a blonde with large breasts. Her name was Annette something-or-other. Danny picked out a raven-haired beauty named Shirley, who chewed gum; we could never tell exactly how she voted when she rated a record because in the first place she talked funny, being from Philadelphia, and secondly it’s difficult to discern what someone is saying when they’re saying it through three sticks of Juicy Fruit gum.
We spent hours discussing whether or not, at their advanced ages of probably sixteen, they were engaging in any sort of sexual activity off camera.
“Wonder if Annette and Shirley do it?”
“I bet Annette does.”
“Why?”
“She’s got blonde hair. Blondes do it more than other girls.”
“How do you know that?”
“My cousin told me. He said you see a girl who’s blonde, and she’ll do it.”
“I’d like to do it with Annette.”
“I’d like to do it with Shirley.”
“Shirley’s got black hair.”
“I’d still like to do it with her.”
“I’d give a hundred dollars to do it with Annette.”
“I’d give two hundred to do it with Shirley.”
“You don’t have two hundred dollars.”
“I could get it.”
“How?”
“Sell my bicycle.”
“You’d sell your bicycle to do it with Shirley?”
“You wouldn’t sell yours to do it with Annette?”
“Maybe I would.”
Of course, I would have. The desire to do it strikes young in boys, and the delicious idea of doing it with a Bandstand regular was my first real sexual fantasy (which must be accepted as proof of our parents’ fears that interest in rock ’n’ roll did, indeed, prompt the sexual juices to flow).
* * *
The music was good back then. There were The Drifters, and The Penguins, and Paul and Paula, and Barbara Lewis, and Mary Wells, and Clyde McPhatter; and Sam Cook sang about the men workin’ on the “chain ga-e-yang.” We had Bobby Helms doing “Special Angel,” and there was Jerry Butler talking about his days getting shorter and his nights getting longer. There were great songs like “A Little Bit of Soap” and “Duke of Earl” and Ernie Kado singing about his mother-in-law.
We danced and held each other close and took two steps forward and one back to “In the Still of the Night,” and later we shagged to beach music — The Tarns, The Showmen — and we twisted with Chubby Checker and did the Monkey with Major Lance. We had the soul sounds of James Brown — “Mr. Dynamite, Mr. Please Please Me Himself, the Hardest Workin’ Man in Show Business” — and Jackie Wilson sang “Lonely Teardrops,” and Marvin Gaye did “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” and Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs did “Stay.” And I don’t want to leave out Fats (Antoine) Domino and Chuck Berry and Joe Tex and Bobby Blue Bland and Soloman Burke and Jimmy Reed moaning over radio station WLAC, Gallatin, Tennessee, brought to you by John R., the Jivin’ Hoss Man, and Ernie’s Record Mart and White Rose Petroleum Jelly, with “a thousand-and-one different uses, and you know what that one is for, girl.”
There were a thousand singers for a thousand songs. It was truly an enchanted time. But then ever-so-slowly yet ever-so-suddenly, it changed. It seemed that one day Buddy Holly died, and the next day The Beatles were in Shea Stadium.
I’m not certain what it was that caused me to reject The Beatles from the start, but I suspect that even then I saw them as a portent of ill changes that soon would arise — not only in music, but in practically everything else I held dear.
The Beatles got off to a bad start with me because the first thing I heard them sing in 1964 was “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” and it was basically impossible to do any of the dances I knew — the Shag, the Mashed Potato, the Monkey, the Pony, the Gator, the Fish, the Hitchhike, the Twist, or the Virginia Reel— to that first song. About all you could do to “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” was jump and stomp and scream, which, of course, is what every female teeny-bopper at the time was doing whenever The Beatles struck guitar and drum and opened their mouths.
Also, patriot that I was, I stood four-square against the importation of foreign music, just as I have since stood steadfastly against the importation of Japanese cars and Yugoslavian placekickers. The only materials we really need to import from foreign countries, in my way of thinking, are porno movies. It doesn’t matter that you can’t understand what anybody is saying in those movies anyway, and I like the imagination of, say, the French when it comes to doing interesting things while naked.
But the British? I still have problems with them, especially with the current royal family. I’m sick and tired of Lady Di getting pregnant, I don’t care if Prince Andrew is dating Marilyn Chambers, and every time the Queen comes to the U.S., she is always getting offended by something a well-meaning colonist has done to her. I wish she would stay in Buckingham Palace and give the Cisco Kid his hat back.
Even then, I didn’t like the way The Beatles looked. I thought their hair was too long, I didn’t like those silly-looking suits with the skinny ties they wore, and Ringo reminded me of the ugliest boy in my school, Grady “The Beak” Calhoun, whose nose was so big that when he tried to look sideways he couldn’t see out of but one eye. Grady was a terrible hitter on the baseball team because his nose blocked half of his vision.
Soon after The Beatles arrived in the U.S., I started college. At the fraternity house, we were able to hold on to our music for a time. The jukebox was filled with the old songs, and when we hired a band, we had black bands whose music you could dance to and spill beer out of your Humdinger milkshake cup on your date. The Four Tops and The Temptations, The Isley Brothers and Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, and Percy Sledge (which always sounded to me like something that might clog your drain) were still in demand at college campuses — at least all over the South. A few white bands were still in vogue as well, the most notable of which was The Swinging Medallions. They sang “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love,” and even now when I hear that song, it makes me want to go stand outside in the hot sun with a milkshake cup full of beer in one hand and a slightly-drenched nineteen-year-old coed in the other.
But the music, our music, didn’t last. At least, it didn’t remain dominant. Elvis’s music was switched to country stations, and every wormy-looking kid with a guitar in England turned up in the United States, and rock ’n’ roll meant something entirely different to us all of a sudden.
I didn’t like the new sounds or the new people who were making them. I found The Rolling Stones disgusting and The Dave Clark Five about a handful short.
Suddenly came the dissent associated with the Vietnam escalation, and with that came hippies and flower children. And one day I found myself (just as my own parents had done when Elvis peaked) condemning modern music as the hedonistic, un-American, ill-tempered, God-awful, indecent warblings of scrungy, tatooed, long-haired, uncouth, drugged-out, so-called musicians.
I didn’t know Jimi Hendrix was alive until he overdosed and died, and I thought Janis Joplin was Missouri’s entry in the Miss America pageant.
All the new groups had such odd names. There was Bread, and Cream, for instance. And there was Jefferson Airplane and Iron Butterfly and Grand Funk Railroad and a group named Traffic. I wondered why so many groups were named after various modes of transportation. I theorized that it was because those performers had all been deprived of electric trains as children.
I expected the members of musical groups to wear the same clothing when they performed — like white suits with white tails — and to do little steps together like “The Temptation Walk.”
These new groups, however, apparently wore whatever they found in the dirty clothes hamper each morning before a performance. T-shirts and filthy jeans seemed to be the most popular garb. Some, of course, performed without shirts. I found this to be particularly disturbing, since I have no use whatsoever for any music made by a person who looks as if he has just come in the house from mowing the grass on an August afternoon and his wife won’t let him sit down on the good furniture because he’ll sweat all over it and probably cause mildew.
I didn’t like drug songs and anti-war songs, and I didn’t like songs that were often downright explicit. Even The Beatles just wanted to hold somebody’s hand. The new groups, however, wanted to take off all their clothes, get in the bed, smoke a bunch of dope, and do all sorts of French things that have no business being watched, discussed, or sung about outside a porno flick on the sleazy side of town.
The only piece of raw rock ’n’ roll we ever knew about before The Beatles came along was a song by The Kings-men called “Louie, Louie,” and we really weren’t certain that what they were saying about “Louie, Louie” wasn’t just a rumor.
It was basically impossible to understand the words, except the part which went, “Louie, Lou-eye, Ohhhhh, baby, we gotta go.” After that, it sounded like, “Evahni ettin, Ah fackon nin.”
The smart money had it, however, that if you slowed the record down from 45 RPM to 33 RPM, you could make out some of the words and that the song was really about doing something quite filthy. Naturally, we all rushed home to slow down the record. I still couldn’t make out any of the words. It simply sounded like I was hearing the bass portion of “Evahni ettin, Ah fackon nin.”
I made myself a vow never to spend money on any of this new music. But as naive as I was concerning what was taking place in my once placid, sensible world, I was bound to break my vow. I did so by attending an Elton John concert... completely by mistake.
I was dating a girl who was several years younger than me. I was in my late twenties at the time, but she could still remember where everybody sat in her high school algebra class.
“What do you want to do Friday night?” I vividly recall asking this young woman.
“Elton John is in town,” she said.
“He’s somebody you went to school with?” I asked, in all honesty.
“You’ve never heard of Elton John?” she said, an unmistakable tinge of amazement in her voice.
“Well, I’ve been working pretty hard and....”
“Elton John is a wonderful entertainer. You would love him.”
She was a lovely child and had big blue eyes, so I managed to purchase excellent tickets for the Elton John concert — third row from the stage.
I had never been to a concert by anybody even remotely connected with modern rock music. As a matter of fact, the only concert I had been to in years was one that Jerry Lee Lewis gave. “The Killer” came out and did all his hits, and everybody drank beer and had a great time. I didn’t see more than a dozen fights break out the entire night.
What I didn’t know about attending an Elton John concert was that Elton didn’t come on stage until his warm-up group had finished its act. I don’t remember the name of the group that opened the show, but I do remember that they were louder than a train wreck.
When I was able to catch a word here and there in one of their songs, it sounded like the singer was screaming (as in pain) in an English accent. One man beat on a drum; another, who wasn’t wearing a shirt, played guitar. They were very pale-looking individuals.
“What’s the name of this group?” I tried to ask my date over the commotion. I heard her say, “Stark Naked and the Car Thieves.” I thought that was a strange name, even for an English rock group, so between numbers I asked her again. Turned out I had misunderstood her; their real name was “Clark Dead Boy and the Bereaved.”
“So what was the name of that song?” I pursued.
‘“Kick Me Out of My Rut’,” she answered. I was having trouble hearing, however; my eardrums had gone into my abdomen to get away from the noise. I thought she said, “Kick Me Out on My Butt.”
After the next number, I asked her to name that tune, too.
“It’s called ‘I Can Smell Your Love on Your Breath’.”
That’s what she said, but what I heard was, “Your Breath Smells Like a Dog Died in Your Mouth,” which sounded a great deal like “Kick Me Out on My Butt.”
Finally, Elton John came out. He wore an Uncle Sam suit and large sunglasses.
“Is this man homosexual?” I asked my date.
“Bisexual,” she answered.
That must come in handy when he has to go to the bathroom, I thought to myself. If there’s a line in one, he can simply walk across to the other.
I had no idea what Elton John was singing about, but at least he didn’t sing it as loudly as did Stark Naked and the Car Thieves.
As the concert wore on, I began to smell a strange aroma.
“I think somebody’s jeans are on fire,” I said. “Do you smell that?”
“It’s marijuana,” said my date. “Everybody has a hit when they come to an Elton John concert.”
I looked around me. My fellow concert-goers, some of whom weren’t as old as my socks, were staring bleary-eyed at the stage. Down each row, handmade cigarettes were passed back and forth. Even when the cigarettes became very short, the people continued to drag on them.
Suddenly, down my row came one of the funny cigarettes. My date took it in hand, took a deep puff, held in the smoke, then passed it to me.
“No thanks,” I said. “I think I’ll go to the concession stand and get a beer.”
“Go ahead,” said my date. “It’ll loosen you up.”
This was my moment of decision. I had never tried marijuana before. I had never even seen any up close, but now here I sat holding some, listening to a bisexual Englishman wearing an Uncle Sam suit sing songs I didn’t understand. I was completely lost in this maze and wanted to bolt from the concert hall and go immediately to where there was a jukebox, buy myself a longneck beer, and play a truck-driving son by Dave Dudley — something I could understand.
I looked at the marijuana cigarette again. Would I have an irresistible urge to rape and pillage if I took a drag?
It was very short. “You need a roach clip,” said my date.
“There’re bugs in this stuff?” I asked.
“When a joint is short like that, it’s called a roach,” she explained, pulling a bobby pin from her purse. “Hold it with this.”
I took the pin in one hand and clipped it on the cigarette I was holding in the other.
“Take a good deep drag and hold it in,” said my date.
“Suck it or send it down,” said somebody at the end of my row.
I continued to look at the roach. The smoke got into my eyes and they began to burn. Suddenly, to my horror, I noticed the fire at the end of the roach was missing. It had become dislodged from the clip and had rolled down between my legs. I quickly reached between my rear and the seat cushion to find it, lest I set the entire arena aflame.
“Hey, man,” yelled the insistent one down the row, “where’s that joint?”
“It’s down here,” I said, stooping over like a fool with my hand between my legs, searching for what was left of the marijuana.
“Groovy, man,” he said. “I never thought of sticking it there.”
Mercifully, Elton John finally completed his concert and I was free to leave.
“Well,” said my date when we were in the car, “wasn’t he great?”
“Save the fact that I burned a hole in the seat of my pants, burned my eyes from all the smoke, and lost partial hearing in both ears from attempting to listen to a nuclear explosion from the third row back, I suppose it wasn’t all that bad.”
“Good,” she answered. “Let’s go hear Reggae next. What do you think of Reggae?”
“I think he’s the most overpaid outfielder in baseball,” I answered.
That was our last date.
* * *
I honestly didn’t think that the music and the people who made it could get worse than it was during the seventies, but again my naiveté was showing. What currently is regarded as “rock” is totally beyond me, especially when I’m switching around on my cable TV and come across one of those music video things.
In the first place, I don’t understand what anybody is singing about. I heard a song on a video channel that was, appropriately enough, entitled “Radio.”
The lyrics went like this:
“Radio. Radio. Radio.
Radio. Radio. Radio.
Radio. Radio. Radio.”
An eleven-year-old child with a stuttering problem, I’m convinced, wrote that song.
Secondly, I do not understand what these people are doing when they’re singing their songs on videos. I see people dressed like chickens, people singing while standing on their heads, and people — perhaps I’m using that term too loosely — diving into swimming pools filled with green Jell-O while they’re still singing those songs. Every video I’ve ever seen has reminded me of the nightmares I have after eating too much Mexican food. It’s music to throw-up by, I suppose.
I thought the names of the groups and the names of the songs were strange in the seventies, but the eighties have brought total insanity to popular music.
There are groups now like ZZ Top, The Cars, The Dead Kennedys, the B-52’s, Run D.M.C., Duke Jupiter, Blond Ambition, Wall of Voodoo, The Cramps, The Razors, The Swimming Pool Q’s, Modern Mannequins, Future Reference, The Divorcees, The Pigs, The Fabulous Knobs, Outa Hand, Late Bronze Age, Go Van Go, Riff-Raff, St. Vitus Dance, Kodac Harrison and Contraband, Subterraneans, Corn, and Wee-Wee Pole.
Wee-Wee Pole? Now, somebody had to think of that name, and my imagination runs in all sorts of directions considering what prompted such a title for an alleged musical group. What comes to my mind first is this scene: There are a few guys snorting airplane glue or something in the back of their van, and one of ’em says, “Hey, why don’t we start a band?”, sort of a modern-day version of Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy saying to Judy Garland and the gang, “Hey, why don’t we give a show?”
Two other guys think this is a terrific idea, despite the fact that none of them has any musical talent whatsoever, which is no longer important if you want to start a band. The first order of business is to figure out what to call yourselves.
Before they can decide on a name, one of the guys indicates he needs to go to the bathroom, which reminds the others they need to do the same. So the entire group goes outside the van and begins to wee-wee on the first thing they see, which happens to be a telephone pole. The rest is history.
I seem to notice a pattern in names for rock groups today. The names usually either have to do with some sort of animal (The Pigs), something that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever (Run D.M.C.) or something totally distasteful or vulgar (The Dead Kennedys and The Cramps).
If this is such a hot item, I would like to get into the business of naming rock groups myself. I likely could make a lot of money doing it, perhaps even start some sort of service. You send me twenty bucks, and I’ll come up with a name for your rock group that will embarrass your parents to the point that they’ll wish they’d come along when birth control was more widely accepted.
For groups that wanted animal names, I’d have Hog Wild and the Pork Bellies, Rabid Raccoon, Dead Dog and the Bloated Five, and Squid.
For names of rock groups that didn’t make any sense whatsoever, the selection would include Oshkosh Ice Cream, Polished Cement, Snarknavel, and MDC Gravel.
In the totally disgusting and vulgar category, you could select from Umbilical Dan and the Chords, Potato Poothead, Battery Acid, Rat Poison, Willie and the Warts, and The Dingleberry Five.
You don’t think things could ever get that weird with modern music? Of course, they can. Of course, they will. We’ve already got Michael Jackson, who sings a lot higher than Mahalia and probably lost his other glove doing something strange with Brooke Shields. (I once opined in another forum that if they ever made a remake of Gone With the Wind, Michael Jackson would make a perfect Butterfly McQueen’s “Prissy.”)
And then there’s Boy George and Culture Club, of course. I’ve seen more culture on buttermilk.
Recently I heard a great curse: “May the next skirt you chase be worn by Boy George.” What I want to know is, Does he shave his legs and have a period?
I have a theory about where all these people who make today’s rock music came from. Remember when you were in high school and there were always a bunch of kids who were really thin and wormy, back when “punk” meant somebody who had a lot of zits and hung around playing pinball machines and never got asked to parties and never had dates and never played sports?
Well, they all grew up to be rock stars. That’s what happened to them. It’s the revenge of the nerds.
As much as I despise today’s rock music, I must admit that it is even more popular with today’s youth than Elvis’s music was with my generation. I base this statement on the fact that I could go fifteen minutes to eat or to take a bath or to walk to school or to ride a bus without listening to my music. Kids today can’t do that, so they have given the term portable radio an entirely new meaning. I’m talking about, of course, the Sony Walkman and the Ghetto Blaster Age that we are presently living through.
The Sony Walkman, I can take. Some adults even use these machines (which mercifully include earphones so nobody else will be disturbed) to listen to educational tapes and soft music that will put them to sleep in airplanes. I cannot resist the urge, however, when I see somebody tuned out of the regular world and tuned in to a taped version to ask, “What’s the score?”
But ghetto blasters — which generally are about the size of a five-hundred-watt radio station — are something else entirely. Young people should be allowed to listen to any sort of music they like, but I shouldn’t have to listen to it with them.
When I hear indecipherable music played two decibels above the sound the 4:15 flight to Cleveland makes when it takes off, it makes me nervous, unable to concentrate. And it eventually makes me angry enough to take the ghetto blaster from which the noise is emanating and stomp on it, even if doing so might mean having to defend my life against the owner, who suddenly has been deprived of something to get down on the street and dance on his head to.
Young people play their ghetto blasters on city streets where people with jobs are trying to have nervous breakdowns in peace. They play them on various forms of public transportation. They play them in fast-food restaurants or any time there is somebody else around to offend and render deaf.
There are laws against cursing in public, against spitting in public, against wee-weeing on telephone poles in public, and there should be laws against playing ghetto blasters in public.
* * *
This calamitous change in music, that began in the late sixties and has continued to the point of today’s strange lyrics and stranger people, left me with a choice: Either I could totally change my tastes and my way of thinking and follow this metamorphosis, or I could look elsewhere and hope to find musical solace for the soul in another area.
I was lucky, in retrospect, to have had that second choice. The rock ’n’ roll I knew was gone; I had absolutely no taste for music sung by fat ladies with high voices in a language I didn’t understand; I have never liked any music where any part of it was made by an oboe or flute; I didn’t mind a little Big Band now and then, and I could enjoy Sinatra on occasion, but that was my parents’ music. Were it not for yet another choice, I might easily have become a musical orphan.
The war in Vietnam and the war against it at home were raging, and Americans had to pick a side. There were doves and flower children on one side and hawks and the guys at the VFW on the other. One kind of music raged against the war, while another kind was saying, “Love it or leave it.”
It was Merle Haggard who gave me my new musical direction. They used to say of Merle Haggard that he did all the things Johnny Cash was supposed to have done, such as serve time in prison.
It really didn’t matter. Merle sang it sweet and from the heart, not to mention through the nose. He sang, “When you’re runnin’ down my country, Hoss, you’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me.” And he sang, “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muscogee,” and what I heard, I was drawn to. Now, pop open a longneck and let me tell you the rest of the story ... the best of the story.