The little house in Dallas where we lived during the 1950s was only a few blocks from an intersection that marked a line between white and black neighborhoods. There was a convenience store there where I could walk to get a drink or pick up some groceries for my mother. The small five-room frame houses in our neighborhood were all aligned behind little lawns along paved streets with a curb, but just beyond the market, all that changed. The streets there were a tar-and-gravel mix with no curbs and no driveways and ramshackle, two- and three-room tarpaper shacks strewn among scruffy trees.
The difference was stark. Even as I had matured with this difference, it was hard to understand. Beyond an unseen line behind the market was a neighborhood of all poor black people; on my side of the line it was all poor white. We all knew we were poor and we knew we were black and we knew we were white but my child mind could not construct any reason why some people lived one way and not the other.
When the little kids in my all-white elementary school started using racial epithets and saying that some races were better than others, I recoiled. While it was only talk among children, it seemed to me as if the talk had leaked onto the playground from a broken sewer pipe, even as the children merrily splashed about in the effluence. I jumped away because it smelled bad and repulsed me. I could not understand subtleties then, but I could spiritually sense that something was terribly wrong and was disturbed by it. I was surprised that my refusal to swim in that pool cast me out of the kid society, away from the cool and cute. It hurt my feelings, but it did not change them.
Around the corner from the market there was a laundromat where my mother would do washing, and next to it a tiny bar with a big, loud jukebox. This was a place of curious wonder for me. I would stand at the door of the bar and listen to the music. I now know that it was mostly blues by Jimmy Reed and Bobby Bland, Lightnin’ Hopkins and other Texas bluesmen, but back then it was just music to me. I loved it from the first note I heard.
Another constant source of music was the piano and organ at a music store in the sprawling Inwood shopping center. In the plate-glass front of this music store, a man would sit and play a great monolithic organ, and the sound would be piped out into the parking lot through large speakers that hung outside the glass just under the eaves of the building. I would stand in this small sheltered spot, sometimes for hours, watching and listening to him while my mother shopped or did other errands. I thought it was the greatest music I had ever heard. He played “Tico Tico” and “Perfidia” and other kinds of movie and 1950s pop schmaltz, all of which sounded like angels singing to me.
It went unnoticed by me for several years that the man sitting at the desk-like organ playing “Tico Tico” had elicited the same response from me as Ike and Tina Turner singing “A Fool in Love.” In my youth this mixture was independent of context; it was all just music and all just perfect. To my delight it was never-ending. It was music in every direction of thought.
When I was fourteen, I applied for a job at the music store where the organist played in the window, and I was refused. Obviously I was too young, but I just started working there anyway, on my own. I came in one day, hung around, saw a broom leaning in a corner, grabbed it, and started sweeping up and organizing the storeroom. There was just enough of a bureaucracy that no one knew whether I had been hired or who I worked for or what I was actually doing there. I came in the next day, and the next, and they all got used to me. No one told me to stop, so I kept coming in, even though I wasn’t getting paid. There was music playing all day long, and that was plenty for me.
After a while I started selling records, interacting with the customers, and arranging the stock like a real employee. The staff finally figured out I was there of my own volition and not getting paid anything, and one day out of pity, the manager offered to let me take home some records as recompense—the new 45 rpm big-hole records. I could take home three a day. That was the only pay I ever got, but it was more music, so it was ample and I was grateful for it. My mother’s friends and even my mother were proud of me, because they thought I had a job. No one asked how much I made, not even Mom.
This established a pattern that would repeat over the years. I would just hang out where I wanted to, lend a hand where I could, and not worry about getting paid as long as I was where I wanted to be. This seemed right to me at the time and offered plenty of return for what it was.
I used the same MO in high school. Even though I was told that if I failed seventh-grade algebra I wouldn’t be able to move on, I somehow slipped through the bureaucratic cracks. As an invisible walking wounded, I stood in line at the new high school on enrollment day, filled out forms, enrolled in classes, handed in paperwork, and moved along.
When the time came, no one seemed to notice that I wasn’t going to the classes I had enrolled in—like algebra. I went only to classes that interested me, whether I’d enrolled or not. As long as I made it to a seat before the tardy bell rang, I was ignored, although I did find myself mysteriously “enrolled” in some of the classes I attended out of interest—at least the teacher would call my name to see if I was present. But apparently no one checked to see if I actually belonged there.
My self-designed school day consisted of three lunch periods, three choir periods, two speech and drama periods, and a homeroom. I also tried out for the school play, got the part (Andrew Carnes in Oklahoma!), and went to rehearsals. No one seemed to know that I was outside the system, askew on the rolls, getting no credits, and causing who knows what kind of havoc in the tax-revenue-per-student accounting.
My mother knew I left for school and came home from school at the right times, and that seemed good enough for her. She was working hard at two jobs just to keep the lights on and food on the table. She was distressed by my not having homework, but unless someone called from school about my behavior, which was almost never, she ignored my schooling, just as she never asked to see my paycheck from the music store.
It was fine with me. I loved the music and singing in the choir, loved the school play, and three sessions of lunch meant I got to socialize with people I liked. After a time, though, this was all wearying, as I saw distant graduation days and parties looming and knew I would have to bail or get busted. The far-off sound of a school band playing “Pomp and Circumstance” rang in my head, but with these words:
You’re ignomiously failing
You are really a jerk
You’re so far outside the system
You will never get work
You’re ignomiously fail-ing
You will never get wooork!
(repeat over and over until everyone gets their diploma but you)
I didn’t know what ignomiously meant and found out only later that it wasn’t a word at all, just a make-believe cousin of ignominy, but that worked for me because it fit the rhythm of the song. Ignomiously was legitimately pejorative; that much is certain.
I started rolling back my school attendance, and the music store quickly took over as the center of my world. I stayed longer and longer hours and took home all the hits, the R&B records, blues records, country records. I listened each night to one record after another.
My record collection grew and so did my circle of friends, including some great-looking girls and popular guys. They liked me and I liked them. I could get a date for the seasonal proms, which I went to, with the prettiest and most popular girls in school. How I looked and what they thought of me seemed in fine shape, even though my own sense of self was floating untethered in the mist.
I hung out with nerds and athletes alike, enjoyed the football games and the choir classes and rehearsals, all the time incongruously outside the system. But my public education was going nowhere, and I could easily see that the path I was on would lead to nothing down the line: no higher education, no college or technical school, or in the words of the surrounding adults, “no future.” I was not happy about this, but on the other hand I didn’t know what I was missing, so I didn’t feel sad about it either.
I had no doubt that music was the most important thing in my life, and I was getting an education in that. Every day, when I brought home the newest records, I learned a bit more, and my awareness of music and its reach began to expand. I was becoming more and more confident at telling the good from the bad. I stopped appreciating all music equally and realized there was a distinct type of sound and singing I liked, although I had no name for it. I was certain Fats Domino was a real thing—so was Chuck Berry and so was Little Richard—but I couldn’t tell anyone why. All of these men were outrageous on some level—far beyond the social norms of Dallas. They were heroic, unafraid of expression, and willing to go where music led them, so they became leaders for me. They were unofficially in charge of an artistic and cultural revolution. Normal and rock and roll were counterirritants.
Having these records from the top rock and rollers of the times was a type of intervention in my life. When Fats Domino came out with “Ain’t That a Shame,” I heard and felt the New Orleans sound of his piano in a way that let me recognize it anytime it was played. His singing-through-a-smile style, where the words rolled around the resident Creole in his voice, was a joy, and even with a line like “my tears fell like rain,” the whole tone and tenor of the record was uplifting. Fats was the real deal, and I knew it.
The lovely young girls from high school started to sort themselves in my life according to how they regarded the music I was listening to. Such distinctions then were not much different from how it is now in the world of pop music. There were recognitions of what one thought of as good music that served as passwords between friends, that meant entry into or exit out of social circles. I had my own personal inside source of music—the record store—that helped me curate friendships and figure out who to pursue and who not to bother.
This was the only real education I was getting, and it was deeply interesting to me. I started refining my ideas and came up with some concepts that remained useful for the rest of my life—so far.
I remember a date with a particularly attractive girl who I loved being with. She was so pretty, and I thought that was really enough. Being with pretty people made me feel pretty; I wasn’t trying to think much deeper than that.
On this date, however, a new dynamic popped up. I asked if she had heard “Ain’t That a Shame” and she said excitedly, “Yes! I have. I love it! Do you?” I said, “Yes, very much!” It felt as if I had just completed a marriage ceremony, like I was floating in some deep pool with her, mermaid and merman together in our own private lagoon.
She went on to say that she had the record, which surprised me, since I knew it had just come out. Then she asked, “Did you know that Pat Boone attended North Texas State University?”
I sat confused by this apparent non sequitur for a nanosecond, and then it dawned on me that Pat Boone had recorded Fats’s song and was getting a lot of airplay. But I hadn’t heard it. I didn’t listen to the radio stations that played artists like Pat Boone. When I explained that I was talking about Fats Domino’s recording, our lagoon split along two sides of a sandbar. Her side disappeared into the weeds, and my side felt very lonely.
I explained that Fats wrote the song and had recorded it first, with a great band out of New Orleans. She had not heard the Fats Domino version but promised she would listen, and a few days later I brought my record over to her house.
I assumed she would love the Fats Domino version and that it would be a new light for her. I was so wrong it hurt. As the record played, she listened in near horror. She sat dead still and stared at the player.
I explained that this record was part of the new music coming out of the South, out of New Orleans and the Delta, and it was changing everything. It was rock and roll, and the great rock and rollers were players like Chuck Berry and Fats Domino and Little Richard. She drew a line at Little Richard as if I had thrown a bolt into the fruit pie she was eating. She allowed that she liked Elvis a little but thought he was “animalistic and crude” and that he didn’t really need to do all those hip gyrations since he really was handsome enough “on his own.” Little Richard was a mutant in her eyes. “What is wrong with his hair?” she asked.
I withdrew, and as her front door closed behind me I had the impression that her perception of Fats had created a barrier to her appreciation of his own version of his own song. Then it slowly dawned on me that maybe it had little to do with Fats or Pat. Perhaps her dislike of the Fats record came from, among other things, the fact that she heard Pat’s record first. I realized that her initial impression of “Ain’t That a Shame,” as sung by Pat Boone, probably created a barrier between us as well. I named this “first impression” hypothesis “Boone-ing”: when a person can’t get past their first impression of a thing, perceiving it as the standard for all other versions simply because they experienced it first. This became a lesson to myself. First, to be aware of Boone-ing when it happened in my own thinking, and second, to beware of it.
Of all the records that came through the record store door, one in particular stood out. It was a seminal record for me, in part because of an extraordinary connection I made as I listened to it for the first time.
The record was “Bo Diddley,” sung by Bo Diddley. When I first heard this one song, I was impelled to buy the LP, with twelve songs on it. That record revealed many of the intricacies of the aesthetic foundation I had been forming, and they would be a special part of my musical life from then forward.
There was poetry in the way the music of Bo Diddley came about. One remarkable element was the way the band was arranged. There was the usual bass and drums, an occasional piano, but the core of this band was Bo on guitar and vocals; Jerome Green, who played maracas; and Peggy Jones, who sang and played rhythm guitar along with Bo. They were inspired players whose playing might be uneven but was always powerful and to the point.
Bo and Peggy—later nicknamed Lady Bo by an adoring audience—crafted a rhythm style between them that was infectious and irresistible to me. It had a pulse that was like a cantilever between the first beat of a bar and the last—a skip—that has to be carefully parsed in order to be analyzed but is dead easy to feel. Once one feels the bones of this rhythm, it becomes commanding and contains everything from metabolism to metaphysics.
I instantly recognized it as being from the same kit bag that Uncle Chick used for cussing. The cadence of Chick’s speech had the same infectious pulse that Bo Diddley’s and Peggy Jones’s guitar playing did. I don’t think Uncle Chick and Bo Diddley’s band would have stayed alive in the same room with each other for very long, but for me, my own bud / buda dudda / buda dudda / du-du was complete now with the unlikely and unforeseen connection of this basic rhythmic element. The confluence of the phonology of Chick’s swearing and the musicality of Bo’s playing shaped a landscape of musical thought I would build on for years, even when I wanted to play songs like “Beyond the Blue Horizon.”
I could never have played in Bo’s band, but oh how I wished I could.
There was a club in the late 1950s in Dallas called Louann’s that was a hangout for dancing and drinking and carousing. It was mostly for the throwaway evenings of drunken college kids, but the musical acts that played there would become the stuff of legend, some of the most famous players in rock and roll history. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Ike and Tina Turner all played there, and these were the secondary acts.
The club’s headliners were the big country acts of the time, like Ray Price. Strangely, the biggest act in Louann’s history was Lawrence Welk’s polka orchestra, which drew over six thousand people—not that the club could seat them.
When the acts that appealed to me came through Louann’s, I would go if I could. One night I went to see Bo Diddley.
Bo Diddley’s record was my first impression of Bo Diddley, so Bo was Booned for me. Now I wanted to watch him and Peggy and Jerome doing live what I had only heard them doing on record—to see if it was real.
When they took the stage I could see that this was a band of the strangest and highest order. Bo created an astounding presence, with his low-slung homemade guitar, his white sport coat and bow tie, and his band all in red plaid jackets with bow ties—except for Peggy. She was in a skintight one-piece gold lamé suit and stiletto heels. She was attached to a low-slung electric guitar similar to Bo’s. They were playing through Fender Reverb amplifiers. Before they played a note, their presence made the whole room crackle with electricity.
When they played, something started up like a powerful engine, different than with any other players I had heard. There was something fundamental in their beat heard live; it was as if Bo pulled everyone up, and the audience changed physiologically. I remember a feeling in my chest, like I was about to break into laughter. They were their own constellation in their own space. The cantilever that Bo and Peggy created in their rhythms made space for itself, just like the art of Marcel Duchamp and Richard Hamilton, Hendrix and Lennon.
The maracas mixed in the legacy touch of Latin claves and a drop of Southern hambone, so when Peggy and Bo added the thunder from their guitars, the result was a pulse that made everyone move, that made me want to sing, that sat me straight up and held me there. When the thunderclaps started pausing in tight syncopation with the drums, the rhythm roared like a wind-driven rainstorm on water. Floating. And when Bo sang “I look like a farmer, but I’m a lover!” I knew exactly what he was singing about, what he was saying. Bo and Peggy and Jerome were the first iteration of the Jimi Hendrix Experience in my life, the first time I kissed the sky.
When Bo played live that night, I heard music for the first time that matched what I heard in my head. Up till then, I heard lots of music that came close but wasn’t ever really complete. This was not only complete; it was infinite, and it was real.
The twelve songs on that first Bo Diddley record from 1958 became my foundation in rock and roll. When I played my solo section on the first Monkees tour, it was Jerome Green holding eight maracas at Louann’s that I would emulate in homage.
By the time I started going to Louann’s, school had passed on, which is to say it had died for me. I had to get out of town and away from all my friends’ graduations and parties and what to me was my high school’s funeral. So I chose the Air Force. I thought I would sign up and fly silver jets, and be removed from the cadaver of school, taken out of a mysterious city and led to a glamorous life where surly bonds were surely slipped.
I went into basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, and to my curious fortune, Aida and Chick had just moved nearby. However, basic training allowed me no time for leaving the base and I knew early on I had made a mistake in joining. It would not go well for me or the Air Force unless I fixed this.
My notions of the military had been shaped by the movies, but in the actual Air Force the men who succeeded at military life were cut from much different cloth than I was. They were leaders, some were real heroes, and they were focused on the discipline and regimens of a fighting machine. I knew nothing of this kind of life. My battles were all in my head.
The leader of my troop (I’ll call him Ray) pulled a few of us together one morning at 2:00 and asked us to go with him as his attendants to a fight he was going to have with a guy who had tried to bully him earlier. Ray was military top to bottom, a big guy, and he seemed very comfortable inside the military life. He looked sharp, and he was a natural leader. He and I had become friendly, so I agreed to go, with the idea that I would only watch. We walked side by side toward the parade grounds with the other men. I asked Ray how big the guy he was fighting was, and he said he was big.
Ray took the guy out with a couple of swift hits, and after the monster crumpled, Ray gave him a cookie and put him on a leash. The guy agreed to be Ray’s bodyguard, and Ray took another giant step up the military ladder in the eyes of all of us. This was who I wanted keeping America safe.
A few weeks later I went to my CO and said I should probably go before anything bad happened. I explained that the longer I stayed, the worse it was going to get for both me and the Air Force.
He was a young captain and said that he would not want me to go under a cloud. So he offered me a general discharge under honorable conditions, but not before offering me a job that almost made me stay. My scores on the various aptitude tests I had taken while joining the Air Force were impressively high—which probably said a lot more about the tests than it said about me—so the CO offered me an assignment to an intelligence unit, a small team that traveled around the world in its own plane. It was a sweet deal, but I passed. I knew it was not to be.
The Air Force would be better off without me.
Buh dahdah / be buh da duh da / ba da da.
Not exactly Bo Diddley, but close enough.
Dallas was not the place to show up with an early general discharge from the military so soon after World War II. I hunted around for a place to hide, and Aida suggested I might like to try San Antonio College, a community college close to her and Chick, where she could provide some support. While in the military I had gotten my GED, so at least I would qualify for admission. My mother thought this was a great idea; Chick, not so much.
Chick’s drill-sergeant days made me an object of derision for him. The fact that I didn’t hunt and watched the halftime show instead of the football game made him pretty certain I was a sociopath—and probably gay, which to his mind was the worst of all afflictions.
College still seemed like a much better idea than the military, if I could get in. More significantly, I had gone to see Hoyt Axton, a popular folksinger, play at a folk club in Oklahoma City while I was in the Air Force, and watching him, I started to think I might be able to do that—to sing and play folk songs. What did it matter that I couldn’t play the guitar, couldn’t sing very well, and didn’t know any folk songs? I would be going to college and hanging out at the student union with pretty girls and singing folk songs. They would like me. I might even figure out a way to get a cool car.
That Christmas, in 1961, my mother and stepdad gave me a guitar that I took to San Antonio College with me. Ten days later, I played my first concert, a paid gig for a group of young, attractive graduating nurses, all female. I’m glad I wasn’t in the audience, because I would have been embarrassed for me.
It sounds prodigious, teaching myself guitar and giving a concert in ten days, but it wasn’t. I simply stayed in my little college apartment and hacked away twelve hours a day. Ten days later I had been playing for 120 hours, more or less. My colleagues at school who played guitar showed me some folk songs, and I tried my hand at making up a few. The music was so much fun to play that I became totally immersed in the practice and lost all track of time.
By the time the opportunity to play for the nurses came around, I was ready, with about twenty minutes of folk songs and no reasonable fear. The nurses loved it. I made a joke about the banquet food that got a laugh, my first from an audience. That put me and the audience at ease, so I pressed on, ignorant of any standard of entertainment other than my own. I did fine, got paid, and decided to do more. I wanted to learn to play better and learn more songs, but even the folk songs I heard and wanted to play were out of reach for my level, so I started making songs up.
The lyrics came first—or I should say, nonsense syllables came first while I banged on the guitar. And I mean literally banged, like a drum. I had to make up the melody according to what I could actually play on the guitar, but the lyrics would flow from rhythm and sound. The nonsense syllables would spontaneously form words, and even a rhyme sometimes. From there, a meaning would start to come into focus, and the song would more or less sing itself to me. Then I would quickly record what I had on a tape recorder, write the lyrics down, and commit the song to memory, where it would live as an actual thing.
The lyrics, rhyme, and melody came easy this way—not to say they were any good, but only to say they were easy for me to cobble together. What was hard was playing. I was not a very good player and was pretty sure I would never be, so I learned to lean more on the writing and develop it.
I was just writing whatever popped into my head. This was valid, but I realized later that it was not the same as writing from a point of view or developing an idea with a specific purpose in mind. It was a cross between singing and spewing, and while it made for some pretty good tunes and simple love songs, it was not really the same as framing an idea with music to express it.
But in the early going, none of that mattered. What mattered was the same thing that had mattered for years: How do I look and what do people think of me? Cars and women.
A great piano player said to me once in a rehearsal, after a spectacular rendition of a difficult song, “Man, we can get lots of chicks with this.” I wasn’t sure whether it was a joke or not.
I came up with some good ideas about how to make money playing music, and I even managed to get myself a very cool car: a 1959 white Bugeye Sprite. It was just the car I wanted and would be perfect for bopping around. And it was the car, the guitar, and the songs I was writing that attracted my future wife, Phyllis.
Phyllis was literate, and her literacy saved me from illiteracy. Suddenly there were real and meaningful words to the Bo Diddley beat of my life. She had blasted through high school and enrolled in San Antonio College when she was sixteen. I knew almost nothing about her except that I was drawn to her intelligence and grace. She was a petite brunette with lovely features that made her photogenic as well as attractive in person. Most important, though, she was a terrific girlfriend and a better wife.
We shared the clumsy moments of getting to know each other, but we found each other’s shortfalls funny—actually, she had none I could see, but I still found her amusing, and I had plenty of shortfalls for both of us, so she was laughing all the time. She sang and knew something about folk music but not the singers. When she introduced me to the songs of Bob Dylan, she pronounced his name Die-lan. Later, when we got a dog, she named the dog Dielan as a recognition of her naïveté.
I had no sense of poetry or literature, but since Phyllis had enough for both of us she lifted me up. She was the first one who told me I was a good songwriter. It had never occurred to me.
I had no idea of poetry as an academic pursuit, but I knew Bo Diddley backward and forward, and I wanted to go at least that far with rhythm. Every rhythmic intricacy was embedded in that pulse, and I could transfer that to every sonnet and phrase with a little twist here and there to make it fit. I learned early to keep all that to myself. I listened dutifully to discourse on prosody, but none of its lessons played finer, louder, or more sublimely than Bo.
This is not to say poetry was worse than Bo. Phyllis would open a door onto the whole world of literature and music and art; these would come alive for me as I got hold of the deeper spiritual sense available through education and study. Unfortunately, that door was opened when I was in my twenties, in Los Angeles—where I would learn that Hollywood is a no more suitable environment for an autodidact than the cockpit of a space shuttle.