Very First Kid On My Block
So a couple of days ago, while setting up an outline for this blog, I found the first two rock and roll songs I ever bought and listened to in my entire life. Big whoop, right?
Well, maybe. Yet I “bought” these two songs on a 45 rpm single that required me to send in cereal boxtops to General Mills or something, along with fifty cents for postage and handling. It was 1969. I was three years old. You can thus imagine my surprise at finding both songs mp3 blogged elsewhere. After some file encoding and cleaning up magic, maybe I’ll share them with you.
The two songs were “recorded” by a fictional band of guys in big dog costumes called The Banana Splits.
It was a Hanna-Barbera kid’s show, both a live-action thingy and a cartoon for a while. I find it to be yet again more evidence that in my most formative years, I was doomed to a life of music geekdom. Check out the guitar in that picture. That sure looks like a Vox headstock. I’m just sayin’.
Toddlers today listen to utter crap for music. The Wiggles? Whatever, man. Barney? Seriously. At the risk of sounding like the grumpy ol’ geezer on the porch, back in my day, us toddlers listened to some great freaking music, dude! No really!
Check out these two songs. They’re silly and bubblegum and dorky as hell. It’s music for children though.
First up is “The Very First Kid On My Block”. I list it first because the sound quality is better, although these were recorded from scratchy vinyl, so that quality isn’t exactly sterling. This isn’t much of a song, but it does have a cool singalong chorus, and uses a phase on the vocal to nice effect. Compared to anything on “The Wiggles” though, this is “Gimme Shelter”.
Next up is a better song, with a horrible name and a worse recording. “I Enjoy Being A Boy” has a song title that sounds like it oughta be on a Culture Club retrospective, but what can you do? It’s a swell song, with all kinds of phase and delay and various studio gimcrackery, and it works in spades. Again, compared to “Barney”, this is “A Day In The Life”.
Listening to these long-forgotten tracks today, there’s little wonder in my own mind that I headed down a path to hopeless pop music geekdom. (Looking at the picture above, it could’ve been worse; I could’ve been The Very First Kid On My Block to have a furry fetish.) When the melody on both songs switches to the minor key in the chorus, there’s little doubt in my mind that these records pointed me irreversably down a path towards naming a Flashing Lights album as the best thing recorded in the last 5 years.
You want kids to stop buying lowest-common-denominator mall-trash music like Mudvayne and Nickleback? Hey, get ’em started in their formative years with cool music, not Barney.
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Let’s Go Alex!
That’s Afleet Alex. He’s my key horse in the 131st running of the Kentucky Derby later today.
If he wins, I’ll cash a small wager or two.
By posting his pic and my pick, I’ve guaranteed he won’t run a lick.
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Swimming Pool Music
I grew up a child of the seventies, the youngest (by 13 years!) of 4 brothers. Back around, say 1970 or so, my youngest brother Phil, had apparently saved up a ton of dough working at Ahmann’s Newsstand on Main St., and wanted to buy a huge above ground swimming pool for the family house. For some reason, my Dad consented to this, probably over the protestations of Mom.
There’s something in our family genetics that doesn’t allow us to do anything small or halfway. This was no ordinary above-ground pool; quite the contrary, this thing was freaking huge. Maybe 50 feet long, in a roughly oval shape, sort of shaped like the Indianapolis 500 raceway. Big. Four feet deep all the way. Dad built two decks onto it, with steps leading up to them. It was a helluva setup; every time I see the pool scene in The Graduate I get all sorts of weird period nostalgia for it, because that’s what it looked like.
So we had this pool. We also then had a bunch of my brother Phil and Steve’s friends, too. They’d open the basement window that faced the pool up so only the screen was on, put both hi-fi speakers on the window sill, and blast tunes. That’s my first memory of pop music being played.
I can still to this day hear certain songs and think of them as “swimming pool music”, from the association with this time. “Suite Judy Blue Eyes” for instance. Heck, most of the CSN (&Y) catalog were very big with Steve. Tommy was also in very heavy rotation. In fact one of the first songs my brothers were allowed to teach me to sing along with as a tiny tot was “Tommy Can You Hear Me” (much to my eternal relief that it wasn’t “The Acid Queen” or “Cousin Kevin”…)
My brothers weren’t the only ones enamored of swimming pool music, though. Dad was waaaay into music, in ways that I didn’t get then, and didn’t really understand until more recently. Dad had a huge collection of records, and if some of his tastes were a little regrettable, he did play a ton of Stevie Wonder (“My Cherie Amour” will always be Mom & Dad sunning on the deck) and Dionne Warwick from her Bacharach period (gotta give it up to my father: my Bacharach/Hal David fixation comes to me honestly).
Dad was really into the modern folk scene though–the stuff parodied in the movie A Mighty Wind? Yeah, Dad was into that. Peter, Paul, & Mary’s “Leaving On A Jet Plane” and their version of “Blowin’ In The Wind” were staples at the backyard pool. So too were Simon & Garfunkel (especially “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and the “54th St. Bridge Song”). Dad was never really into Dylan, but I think he was on Zimmerman’s side. Looking back, I think it’s pretty cool that a factory foreman and WWII vet in his mid-40’s living in the midwest thought that “Blowin’ In The Wind” was a great, great song.
I think its easy to lose sight of how we end up the way we do as humans. Too often, we’re too closely associated with the environment that made us what we are as adults to understand fully how those things affected us both above and underneath our consciousness. Dad died very suddenly when I was 8 years old, bringing this period of my life to a halt. I think that distance and separation gives me a little more perspective than I might otherwise have had. Looking back at him, I remember him dimly as a father who was serious and driven and grim-faced too often in my mind; a strict disciplinarian of blue-collar roots, a factory foreman and a church elder in a hyper conservative church. Remembering then that this same man obsessively played his Paul Robeson, Kingston Trio, and Simon & Garfunkel records at top volume–and would call me into the family room as a toddler to listen and sing along–well, that’s how I turned out the way I did, and I don’t think I’d have it any other way.
Thanks Dad.
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What is.
Let’s re-light this candle.
As you may be aware (looking at box-office numbers, though, there’s every chance you’re blissfully ignorant of it) a movie came out recently called Fever Pitch. This forgettable Drew Barrymore/Jimmy Fallon vehicle is a remake of a British film, in which the subject isn’t the Boston Red Sox, but rather the London-based pro soccer team, Arsenal. That movie is based on a wonderful memoir published nearly a decade ago by a writer you may know: Nick Hornby.
Rather than subject myself too much to the movie, I instead decided to re-read the book, and got inspired. Mr. Hornby wrote a brilliantly funny memoir about football, so doing a blog-memoir about my obsession with the St. Louis Cardinals seems a bit too much like carpetbagging. But…maybe if I did something along those lines about music? Hmm.
What this ends up as is anyone’s guess. What I hope to do is do some sort of memoir of a life totally absorbed with music (especially) and pop culture miscellany. It probably won’t arrive at many universal truths, and may not particularly funny, or perhaps even interesting. It is what it is–a chance for me to get some memories down in html type before I forget them completely.
Expect some nostalgia. Expect some stuff about the new. But as a guy named Malkmus once said, “Don’t expect.”
Popnarcotic 