Meanwhile… I'm Still Thinking

My father came from a musical family – all of them sang, nearly all of them played instruments, many were classically trained.

My mother’s side was different – her tone-deaf father used to sing “Rock-A-Bye-Baby” to make his kids laugh themselves to sleep, and her mother was a yodeler who liked to sing along to western and bluegrass 78s. My mom took as much advantage of that gene as she could and wound up being a really good singer. Her voice was (and is) clear, on-key, unaffected and happy, and among the many things she taught me possibly the most enduring was how to harmonize.

We spent hours on the front porch listening to Everly Brothers 45s and getting the parts right – sometimes she was Don, sometimes Phil, and I took the brother that she didn’t. Pretty soon I was able to harmonize to records that only had one vocal and I started singing that way with practically everything I listened to (still do). There was a lot more she would teach me in the 17 years I spent with her, but those days sitting on the toy chest listening to “Devoted To You” are still among my happiest memories.

Thanks for everything, Mom, and Happy Birthday!

Last Friday night I actually played my first live show in three years, as a part of David Bash’s International Pop Overthrow. Gary Pig Gold, Jeremy Lee and myself (we call ourselves “Next Big Thing”) did a short set of half originals, half covers, sometimes on stage and plugged in, sometimes not… and it was just plain great.

Musically, I was barely there: I had spent a good part of the week getting over the flu catching pneumonia, and in my still pseudo-delirious state I forgot most of the words, forgot how to play all four of the chords we actually use in our songs (that’s a lie, but you get my meaning) and pretty much refused to play any guitar leads because my fingers were acting like little aliens. Gary and Jeremy were charming and amazing, though, and we not only got through it, we nailed it.

The thing is, I saw a LOT of friends and acquaintances I hadn’t seen in a very long time, and realized how much I miss them. It’s my own fault for not keeping in touch with so many extraordinary people, and it’s my own fault that I only play live once every three years. Gotta do something about it…

…and Happy Anniversary to my still mostly getting along parents, who got married while Stan Freberg’s “St. George and the Dragonet” was #1 on the Billboard charts. Legend has it that someone came to their reception in a coffin, but I’ve yet to see a clip of it on Youtube, so it couldn’t have actually happened. Amazingly enough, the #1 song in the country both before and after the hitching was Les Paul and Mary Ford’s “Vaya Con Dios”, which means “Go With God” (and a huge keeper, by the way). Coincidence? I don’t know, but they’ve lasted together quite a while after digging themselves that kind of musical hole.

Anyway… Bloody Mary in hand: here’s to Jules and Carolyn.

Being born and raised in the United States (like I was) doesn’t necessarily make anyone American except on a birth certificate – what’s far more important culturally is what you watch on TV every morning. You’ve got to figure that for three hours or so every day a Canadian kid is getting a completely different set of life experiences than their counterparts in the States.

I actually don’t know what other Americans watched on weekday mornings – I guess Captain Kangaroo was common to both cultures, but after that things were quite different. Canadian kids’ morning shows were very quiet and gentle (the after-school shows were another story, and I’ll talk about them another time). Lots of conversation, storytelling, music and lo-tech puppets. At least one show (“Chez Helene”) was bilingual, with the puppet doing all of the English heavy lifting while human Helene spoke French. Based on body language alone I don’t think they ever argued despite the language barrier, although it would be pretty hard for me to tell if they were.

Of all the shows on Canadian television the one with the most profound influence on me, and presumably all of Canada was “The Friendly Giant”. On a typical show you’d come to his castle, where he’d have a few little chairs by a fireplace for you to virtually sit in. Some days we’d get a concert from musician cat puppets, but usually he’d be joined by Rusty the Rooster and Jerome the Giraffe and he would read them (and us) a story. There’d be a short discussion about what the story meant in the grand scheme of things, and then The Friendly Giant would say goodbye to us all. At the end of every show he would take out a recorder and play the melody to “Early One Morning”, an old English folk song about longing and unrequited love. I never heard the words until years later, but the sadness of the song was unmistakable and runs through my head whenever there is an emotional goobye in my life.

“Early one morning, just as the sun was rising,
I heard a maiden singing in the valley below.
Oh, don’t deceive me, Oh never leave me.
How can you use a poor maiden so ?”

There is simply no way that the thousands (millions?) of children that heard that song every day could NOT be different from the ones who didn’t. The show and the music influenced what I think, the melodies I write, the emotions I feel when listening to a certain type of song and the way I treat other people. I’m quite sure that even though “The Friendly Giant” is long gone, the influence of this show is still being passed on from generation to generation north of the border, and you should keep all of this in mind the next time you meet a Canadian – they’ve got a different set of wiring inside.

The Franklin County Fair happens in Malone every year in August, and is an annual highlight in a place where highlights are few and far between. For me the Fair was extra special, because my father was usually the radio station guy that interviewed the performers that played there at night, and I was his helper. Helping generally meant sitting in the same room without coughing while the interview was being taped, and I was pretty good at it. I got to meet a lot of people that way, mostly old country guys that were near the end of the line (Roy Acuff comes to mind immediately) and some Rock and Roll types that had seen their day in the sun come and go, like Johnny and the Hurricanes.

The interviews took place in what I remember to be a long, skinny, partially underground building built behind the stage with windowless, divided stalls that served as dressing rooms for the performers. I have no idea what the purpose of the building was for the other 51 weeks of the year, but I can’t imagine that it wasn’t used for something.

This particular evening my father was interviewing Sonny James, who was pretty popular at the time and seemed to be a really nice guy. His band members were all floating around and they were pretty friendly as well. One of them came up to me, said he needed a lemon before going on stage, gave me a dollar and asked me to go find him one. My first thought was that a candied apple might be a lot tastier and easier to find at a fair but I didn’t ask questions, just ran out the door and began my quest. I visited a few hot dog stands on the grounds but had no luck at all, not even suggestions of where to go. Then it came to me – about a half mile up the hill from the fairgrounds was Sansone’s Fruit Stand, and fruit stands were known to have lemons, even in upstate New York farm country. I ran as fast as I could to Sansone’s and sure enough, they had lots and lots of lemons! I bought two of them for a dime, got my change and ran back down the hill, bag in hand. I don’t remember needing to talk my way back onto the fairgrounds – I must’ve just run through the gate and nobody bothered to stop me.

As I got closer to the grandstand area I realized that I had failed in my mission – the band was on stage and playing, and I immediately started to panic. I was sure the guy thought I had walked off with his dollar, and worse yet, he was acting really strangely on stage. He was looking more and more uncomfortable by the second, was tapping his foot with his knees pressed together and was looking around to the other band members for some kind of help that would never come. Finally he took his guitar off and (to the gleeful howls of the audience) ran off the stage altogether… apparently to urinate. At that point I was quite sure that he had needed the lemon as a kind of anti-pee treatment and that I’d ruined the show. A couple of minutes later he came back on stage in a less agitated state and the rest of the performance went on without incident.

After the show I ran backstage and handed the guy the bag of lemons and his change. He thanked me, told me that it was no problem I was late because he sang just fine without the lemons and now he would have some for the next day’s show. He let me keep the change and off I went. I still felt bad that he had embarrassed himself in front of that huge crowd but knowing that I hadn’t contributed to it certainly helped.

A few years later Sonny James again played the fair, and this time I watched the show from the grandstand. Sure enough, my guitar playing lemon-eating friend was up there, happily doing his job, until he ran off the stage mid-set to… pee. Probably for the thousandth time, but this time with a delighted audience member that now understood a few things a whole lot better.

There was a guy in my class that was a thief. Fortunately, I seldom brought anything to class that I wasn’t wearing, reading or chewing so I wasn’t a particularly good target. That said, two things were stolen from me in grade school.

One was a Green Hornet glow-in-the-dark ring with a hidden compartment just right for hiding a capsule of cyanide in case I was captured by the Russians. It had been my father’s – he had saved it since he was a kid and gave it to me when The Green Hornet became a TV show. I can’t begin to tell you what a cool ring it was… did I say it glowed in the dark? Anyway, I brought it into class, showed everyone, stuck it in my jacket pocket that was hanging on the back of my chair and went to lunch. When I came back from the playground it was gone. That night I told my father that his Green Hornet ring had been taken, but he seemed to think that it hadn’t been stolen at all and that I had “traded it for something”. “Like what?”, I wondered nearly daily for the next thirty-five (or-so) years, until I finally brought the subject up with Dad. I had the image of that ring and his reaction to its disappearance burned into my psyche and on this particular day I said “Hey Dad, do you remember that Green Hornet ring you gave me?” His answer? “Nope”, he said, and that (as they say) was that.

The other item that got stolen from me was a Decca promo 45 of “I Can’t Explain” by The Who. Two things about this single I should mention. First of all, I always played the B-side of any record hoping that I would find a diamond in the rough that would double my pleasure, but the B-side of this record was a particularly nasty song called “Bald Headed Woman”. Incredibly awful… how could it even be the same band? Probably the biggest A-side/B-side quality discrepancy ever by anybody. The other weird thing about this record was that when I finally got a copy of it again (on “Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy”) it simply didn’t sound at all like I remembered it. The guitar chords that begin the song just seemed to have sounded a lot “bigger” (whatever that means) on the single. Maybe it was because of the record player I was playing it on, or maybe it really was a different version that I had. I’ll probably never know.

I was at a bar in Malone last fall with my sister and this guy comes up to me and says “Hey, remember me? Great to see you! You get up here much? Been a long time! Yeah… I just got out of rehab and got a divorce so I’m freed up for the first time in a long time! Wouldn’t it be great if we could hang out whenever you come home?” I was smiling and doing my best to carry on a conversation, but the whole time I’m thinking “Where’s my record and my Green Hornet ring you son of a bitch?” Funny thing is, it’s entirely possible he was never the thief to begin with. Maybe one day I actually WILL hang out with him at a bar in Malone, and after a while I’ll ask him “Hey, do you remember that song ‘I Can’t Explain’ by the Who?”, and he might just say…

“Nope.”

My dad used to bring home duplicate 45s from the radio station he worked at. As he usually got home long after I had gone to bed, he would leave a little stack of singles on my portable record player for me to find in the morning when I got up.

I spent a good portion of my life playing records on that little machine, but the only thing I remember about it now is the blue fabric with metallic threads on the front. Even though it had a spindle on the turntable so that you could stack records up and play a bunch of them one after the other, I preferred to listen one at a time, A-side first, B-side second. I felt that it was my duty to the records (and, I guess, my dad) to listen to both sides of all of them. I even had a rating system and would stack the records I liked into the order that I liked them. Whenever I played a record, it would move up in the stack so that my favorites always stayed on top.

After a while I knew that it was pointless to listen to yet another Bert Kaempfert or Jackie Gleason Orchestra single, but I did it anyway just in case it happened to be something I’d play again. We got in a lot of 45s from Decca and Capitol, so I was always one of the first people in America to hear anything new by the Beatles, Beach Boys and The Who (among others). The really fun part of the whole endeavor was telling my dad which ones I liked and he would play those on the radio instead of some of the typical top-forty stuff. Other DJs were probably getting paid off to play certain songs, but my father played songs just to make me happy when I listened to him at night.

I still think deep down in my heart that “I Can’t Explain” by The Who was played for the first time in America on WICY in Malone, New York by my father, at my request.