Blue Water (dto-dto, dto-dto)
Recognize it? Of course you don’t. How could you? It’s an
example of lyrics misheard in an earlier era – misheard, that is until
revealed to me quite recently. I learned quite by accident that in fact the
song is by The Who, “Who Are You?” (who-who? who-who?). It’s a pretty good
example, but just one of my failures to listen. There are many, many more.
As I slip quietly toward the final quarter of my time on this mortal coil, I
find I’m filtering the world very differently. Not different so much
as with more patience, though not with everything. Upon occasion I have
demonstrably less patience – like when I’m watching the news and they get
something wrong, or they haven’t researched deep enough, or are covering the
grand opening of Persephone’s Poodle Parlour instead of the impeachment hearings or
a house on fire. I digress.
Nor is it that I now have time to over-analyze things. Heaven
forbid anyone should reflect on the state of the world when there’s a scrap of
litter on the side of the road between here and the cemetery, or a housefly on
the window that needs to be snuffed, or firewood to bring in, or a sale on air
fresheners at Canadian Tire. So, I have had to categorize my reflections – my
regrets, for instance – for the sake of efficiency.
Yes, I’ve had a few regrets (too few to mention). That’s not
true but the phrase “Regrets, I’ve had a few” seems to roll right into “too few
to mention.” If you are of a certain vintage you may now be silently singing “I Did It My Way.” This leads me to my point in this confessional rant: my regrets
category for music. The most illustrative of my musical regrets is not Frank
Sinatra, but Neil Young.
These days – these being the 21st century – Neil Young is a
Canadian icon despite his U.S. citizenship. He has always been iconic, but he now has vintage on his side as well: vintage rocker. Back in the day – I
swear, I will not use that phrase again in this rant – I and my contemporaries
considered Neil Young to be a folksinger, alongside James Taylor, Gordon Lightfoot and Elton John. Don’t shoot me for that last one; I can explain. I
and my contemporaries were instead worshipping Grand Funk Railroad, Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane, The James Gang and the entire ensemble at
Woodstock, to mention but a few.
Oh, and Frank Zappa, the Mothers of Invention. And Sly and the Family Stone. Perhaps by now you’ve formed a picture of me and my
contemporaries. The pattern of wrinkles on my forehead are not just age and
stress, but the imprint of the faux-vinyl dash of Ed Savard’s 1966 Chevy
Beaumont, where I banged my head repeatedly when the radio broadcast news of
the sudden death of Janis Joplin.
My only departure from the late-sixties version of
head-banging music were for the likes of Karen Carpenter – who, I was convinced
one especially sotted evening, was singing directly to me and only me – and
Carly Simon, whose album cover, No Secrets, if not the music, held me spellbound for hours. Perhaps you see a pattern
there too.
There were other exceptions, but they do not serve my
purpose here. Oh, and Crowbar, and.... But back to Neil Young. Have you heard
lately, and by lately I mean in the last ten-fifteen years, his early songs
“Harvest Moon” or “Helpless”? Oh. My. God. They are wonderful. I get chills.
The way he melds harmony and discord speaks to my Id.
A few years ago, 2006 maybe?, I attended a Leonard Cohen concert with an old friend from high school days and nights. I knew of Cohen
when I was younger, but didn’t really get the fuss. Leon Russell made my music.
But in my fifth decade, under Cohen’s spell – when I could take my eyes off the
backup singers, the gorgeous and talented Webb sisters – I heard, really heard,
his lyrics for the first time. Really. The first time. Oh. My. God.
It’s not that they wouldn’t have spoken to me fifty years
ago – nearly – it’s that I wasn’t listening. I wouldn’t listen. King Crimson,
that was my music. My girlfriend at the time – despite being my first great
love – could not convince me to listen to Neil Young, or James Taylor, or Elton
John. I scoffed. I just didn’t get it. I mean, I memorized and performed the entirety of Alice's Restaurant Masacree.
I was too cool for that other stuff. Too ... I don’t know what. That was
chick music; My favourites bands were deep. Loud, but deep. Oh, and Country Joe and the Fish. Pretty shallow, eh? What did I think of Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank
Sinatra, and his cohort of crooners? Not much. They were of my parents’
generation. I did like Dean Martin when he had a summer replacement variety
show on TV but that had more to do with his tipsy shtick and his chorus of
dancing girls.
I’ve begun to wonder if my musical regrets aren’t somehow
connected with a music memory from my formative years – pre-Beatlemania. It was an event that surely scarred me for life, or at least sent my music tastes off the deep end.
One summer afternoon I was invited to Paul Godfrey’s house
for a record party. Paul Godfrey lived two streets over, and across the street
from Beth Trueman. My friends at that time also included Mike Tomney, Mike
Hosford and Ralph MacDonald who lived on that street. Our end of the village
only had three streets in those days. We were all roughly the same age in years,
but evidently not the same age with respect to music, as I am about to reveal.
Paul’s house was a split level (side-split) and had a family
room (wreck-room we called them in those days; I mis-heard that too). Their wreck-room
had a big entertainment console complete with built-in record player
(pre-stereo), and was big enough that kids could dance.
We did have a record player in our house, but it was one of
those portables you’d see in Elvis movies like Kissin’ Cousins, or in Beach Blanket Bingo. It was a two-tone affair of red and white leatherette with detachable hinges so you could take the cover completely off. From time to time, our parents would drag it out from their
bedroom closet, pop the lid and let us spin a few records – and perhaps cavort
around our living room while they tried to teach us to cha-cha-cha or bossa
nova. On the occasion of Paul Godfrey’s party, they actually allowed me to take
a stack of our records and the red-and-white
portable record player three streets over. Such was their trust in me. A trust
betrayed so many times in later years I was somewhat surprised to get birthday
cards from them.
Let me jump ahead just a couple of weeks in order to better
set the stage for my account of Paul Godfrey’s record party. My first record purchase – the
first record ever bought for me (under supervision, of course) and considered
mine – was a 45 rpm of Nat King Cole’s “Rambling Rose.” Don’t get me wrong –
that man’s voice could melt chocolate, but this was 1962. I was not yet eleven.
It was 1962. Think about that while you give it a listen.
Paul Godfrey’s record party was THE pre-teen social event of
the summer in our neighbourhood, interrupting the daily routine of scooping
frogs eggs, making slingshots and playing hide-and-seek. It might have been the
second most important event in my
summer had I understood what a certain girl meant when she invited me over to
play doctor. That’s another story. Oh, and Jethro Tull, “Thick as a Brick.”
Every home on all three streets was represented – except of
course the spinster and her brother, the Baptist preacher and the house with
all the curtains drawn. The number of records contributed seemed immense. There
were dozens of 45 rpms, fanned out rather cavalierly, I thought. A splash of
those yellow plastic centres lay next to them. For readers younger than 55-60:
the 45 rpm singles had a centre hole about 38 mm in diameter, but the record
had to fit on a 7 mm centre post on the turntable. The plastic discs mitigated
the discrepancy.
Next to the 45s was a veritable mountain of LPs – long play
record albums – as they were called in those days. They had multiple
recordings/songs on both sides of a disc about 25 cm in diameter. The hole in
the centre of an LP was tailored for the post in the turntable. With the right
attachment, you could stack several LPs atop a taller post, and the machine
would drop them one at a time to play. Pretty cool when it worked, though
audiophiles frowned on it lest it scratch their albums when they dropped.
This was more than fifty years ago, so I’m not going to
pretend to remember the selection of records at the party. Google imagines they
would include: Elvis Presley, The Big Bopper, The Beach Boys.
As it turned out, I did get to use my parents’ red and white
portable record player. That’s because Paul Godfrey didn’t want my records to
be played on his machine. He thought they’d be too heavy. And by heavy, I don’t
mean Wagner, or Tchaikovsky or Deep Purple; I mean heavy, as in weight. His machine
couldn’t play the records I contributed to the party. See, his machine couldn’t
play 78 rpm records; mine could. My machine was from a previous generation of
audiophiles – as were the records. If we were to hear my
records, we would have to use my player.
Have you ever been in a situation – like, after a few drinks
on an empty stomach – when you say something or do something that at first has
everyone speechless, and after a moment of silence everyone bursts into
laughter, in unison. Welcome to my pre-teen dance party debut.
First up: “Zena, Zena, Zena,” by the Weavers – a 1940s folk
group singing an even older Jewish folk song. Through the beauty of
21st-century digital technology, you can pick up a snippet of “Zena, Zena,
Zena” with this link. You might even like to let it play as you read on. As you
do, try to picture me, a gangly, freckled, red-headed, sun-burned, not-yet-eleven-year
old – in 1962. Just don’t try to take a sip of your coffee as you do.
Next up: The Page Cavanagh Trio (though I long thought it
was The Mills Brothers): “All of Me.” (“why not take all of me”). Now the
beauty of this 78 rpm was that, unlike “Zena, Zena, Zena,” it was two-sided.
“All of Me” (“why not take all of me”) had a B side: “The Three Bears.” As in
“Once upon a time, in a neat little cottage, lived the three bears,
tch-tch-tch.” We had danced (in a hybrid fox-trot-cha cha cha-jive kind of
precursor to so-called dances as yet unimagined) to Elvis Presley, from Paul
Godfrey’s collection. We had gyrated to Chuck Berry, from Beth Trueman’s house,
and The Beach Boys from Ed Savard’s. But from my house? “While they were out
a-walkin’ through the deep woods a-talkin’ came a little girl, with blonde
hair, tch-tch-tch.”
In retrospect, I take some comfort from recognizing that
music tastes change as we mature, but I doubt that The Weavers were part of the
taste evolution experienced by my peers at that time. In maturity, my musical tastes have actually
evolved to include classical and opera, of all things. I find myself in sparse
company, so I’ve come a long way. I missed the popular music of the 80s and
early 90s, mind you – on account of marriage, family, chronic underachievement – a fact that
precludes my winning at music trivia. I even went through a period of serious
appreciation for country and country rock, thanks to a number of years living
in the Rockies. Waylon and Willie collaborations still come to mind when I meet
anyone named Amanda, or when I look in the mirror “in total surprise, at ...
the age in my eyes.” Ian Tyson echoes when I pause in awe overlooking a verdant
glen “since the rain.”
I’m not sure when I started to appreciate music as an
aesthetic, or when I came to learn from my regrets, but it may have been when
my then-teenage son, Jonathon, started playing guitar, and we started hauling
him and his friends around to both attend and play their punk music shows.
Those experiences brought me to the realization that what we were witnessing
was about more than music, or indeed the disruption of music as we knew it. It
rattled my fillings, of course, and the double-peddle base drum drowned out all
lyrics but the shrillest of fits, but I came to regard it less as their going
through a “phase,” or a music evolution, and more of a change in attitude. It
impressed me greatly just how much mutual respect those youngsters displayed no
matter how, shall we say, ungifted their fellow performers were. While it
sometimes seemed to me that being less-than-gifted harmonically, was part of the
disruption, I was blown away by the way that young people supported and
applauded each other, and clearly respected each other’s courage to perform.
This leads me to my latter-day music regret: lack of
appreciation for music performance as an aesthetic, and the sheer courage and
enjoyment it engenders, whether a little off-key, or a little forgetful. There’s
an important lesson here. Whether or not I can carry a tune in a bucket – I
can’t – I must learn to admire and respect the courage and enjoyment that
comes from performance. It’s not a competition.
Grade-school Christmas concert performances are a
celebration of the courage of the little ones, if not of musical convention –
they’re as much about character-building and mutual support as they are about
little Chrissy’s ballerina outfit. I’m not drawing parallels between said
Christmas concerts and the Tuesday night ukulele club at the Outtasight Old
Folks Home, well, maybe one parallel: how deserving of praise are the
performers for joining in, and how important it is for youngsters and oldsters
alike to learn to play and engage with music – however that music moves them.
Oh, and Joe Cocker.
There you have it. I’m still “thick as a brick” sometimes, and I won’t be
attending any James Taylor concerts anytime soon, but have promised myself to
exercise more patience in the face of performance, to keep my somewhat insular
comfort zone – that snooty inner need for order and harmony – in check. I want to be
more supportive, more appreciative, and to recognize who is on stage (“who-who?
who-who?”).
=30=
