23 – The Year of the Cat – Al Stewart – 1976

           The Year of the Cat - Al Stewart

           I love this song! Say what you will about his sibilant s’s, this is a great song by Al Stewart. This song got me into the rest of his work and I discovered he had a great historical sensibility. Who else has written songs about: the Night of the Long Knives (‘Last Day of June 1934”), about Hitler’s purge of Ernst Roem and the SA brownshirts; “Warren Harding”; Germany’s retreat from Russia (“Road to Moscow “); or a 10 minute song about “Nostradamus”?

It’s one of those songs that settles my mind and takes me to a specific day in June 1978…..

In 1977, upon graduation from Blackburn College, I had been offered a position as a grad assistant at Western Illinois University. At the end of that school year, in 1978, I was looking at coming back in the Fall for one more semester to finish my coursework, and WIU had extended my assistantship for that one semester, something they did not normally do.

So during the Spring of 1978 I saw an ad for a Summer school in England that was in Late Medieval/Early Renaissance History. I was interested in Medieval history, but did not have the foreign language background necessary to do original research at the graduate level. This was a six-week course in Medieval History at the University of Kent at Canterbury. My grandma fronted me the money for the course, about $500, and I paid for the flight to London, another $500.

I got on the TWA flight about 7:30 PM at O’Hare, sat down and belted up. I was a little scared, I’ll admit. I had never flown before. My family took few vacations and those we did tended to be in Wisconsin, within an 8 hour’s drive, or so. I purchased the state–of-the-art tubing called headphones, put the ends in my ears, and the first thing I heard was the 35 second piano solo that opens “Year of the Cat.” It settled me down right away and every time I hear it, it reminds me of that flight and that summer.

The flight took about 6 hours and got in to London around 2AM, Chicago time, 8AM London time. I then had to drag my two bags through customs, and the airport, to the tube (Underground) to Victoria Station to a train that took me to Canterbury. It was about 1PM or thereabouts, and I dragged the suitcases (I could find no bus, and didn’t have enough cash for a cab) about 2 miles to the campus, which was on a hill overlooking Canterbury and it’s beautiful cathedral.

I arrived at my college (there were four colleges that made up the University of Kent at Canterbury: Darwin, Keynes, Rutherford, and Eliot), which was Darwin and I was shown to my room, where I laid down for a while, my mind still racing (I had been up about 24 hours by then). I was still up several hours later when we (all the other US students) were feted at the Mayor of Canterbury’s digs.

About 2 hours into the shindig, after eating for the first time since the flight, 12 hours before, I was babbling to some Englishman about my master’s Thesis on the Civil War. It wasn’t until the next day that I remembered England had a Civil War as well and maybe I wasn’t making the sense I thought I was at the time.

What a great summer that was! The whole college was housed in one grouping of buildings, the dorm (single rooms), classrooms, dining hall, and (surprise!) a pub. You didn’t have to go into town (though we did do a couple of pub crawls in the six weeks I was there), just stroll in and get a pint. Of course, in 1978 the pubs in England closed at 10PM, but still, you couldn’t beat the convenience.

And the lectures! We had guest lecturers like Eugene Vinaver, who had done the translation of my copy of “Le Mort D’Arthur” and spoke off the top of his head brilliantly about the various versions of the legends of King Arthur (it turned out he was almost blind so notes wouldn’t have helped him much).

We had a lecture about an altar painting by Jan Van Eyck that is in a church in Ghent, Belgium. He’s considered a primitive, because he came before Michelangelo, but the detail in his paintings is incredible. As the lecturer told us, scholars have identified 30+ different kinds of flora in this painting.

The Summer School was broken into two, three-week sessions and on the weekend between the two; a group of us went to Bruges, Belgium. We took a train to Dover, then a ferry across the Channel to Ostend, Belgium, about four and a half hours away. Then we got on another train for Bruges. We got in around 2AM to our hotel and the Canadian student I was sharing a room with said, “Let’s find a bar!”  I said, “Sounds like a plan!” and off we went. We found a bar that was still open and we ordered Trappist, brewed in a Trappist monastery.

The bartender placed a glass before me that was black and cold! In England, the beer was never cold, since their ales were meant to be drunk at room temperature. In fact, in 1978, it was hard to find any drink that was served cold, even a pop.

I took a sip and it was glorious, maybe because it was 3 AM and we were a little loopy from the travel, but it was a strong, sweet taste, with a hint of chocolate or coffee, unlike any beer I have experienced since. There are a lot of micro brews in the US that claim to use the Trappist recipe, but none has come close to that brew from Bruges. The closest thing I have found in the US is an English import called Mackson Triple Stout (which I have not been able to find lately).

The next day, Saturday, we spent looking around Bruges, going into the Church of Our Lady, which has one of the few Michelangelo sculptures in Northern Europe; Old St. John’s Hospital, now an art gallery with several Hans Memling works, another “primitive”: and the Groeningemuseum, which had a couple of Van Eyck’s as well, a Hieronymous Bosch, and one particular painting I have never forgotten (though I forget the artist) of a man being flayed alive. I also remember on the backside of the Church of Our Lady was a urinal; fully exposed to the street I seem to recall.

(Holy Crap! You can find just about anything on Wikipedia. I found out who did the flaying painting, it’s Gerard David’s “Judgment of Cambyses, part 2”)

I also climbed the 270-foot belfry, which had a wonderful view of the market square below. I am afraid of heights and when I leaned out to take a photo of the square I felt as if someone was going to push me the whole time.

That night, we went to a restaurant where the menu was in French/Dutch. I had had several years of French, but I wasn’t sure what I was ordering. It was crayfish grilled in butter and it was pretty good.

On Sunday morning we got up early to catch a train to Ghent to see the Van Eyck altar piece we had had the lecture on, and we were able to go into St. Bavo’s church and go right up to it, looking for the various flora and fauna. Then they opened it up and we got to inspect the altar of the lamb up close.

Then we hopped back on the train to Bruges, then on to Ostend, then by boat back to Dover, where we stood in line for over an hour and an half at customs, then back to Canterbury by late Sunday night.

While at Darwin College, we received three separate tours of Canterbury Cathedral. The first was on the night we arrived, and was a quick walk around; the second was during the day and included a climb onto the roof and down into the crypt under the nave; and the last, and best, was at night when they turned off the lights inside the church and the floodlights were turned on outside so we could see the stained glass in all it’s glory.

After six weeks of classes I went back to London and got the train to Scotland. I had a Brit Rail pass for unlimited travel for 7 days and I was going to see Edinburgh, Dundee, and Elgin. The first night I stayed in a bed and breakfast in Edinburgh that cost 5 pounds, around $10, and I had a room to myself. For dinner I bought a pastie (a meat pie) and brought it back to my room.

The next morning at breakfast I met a man who was from Edinburgh, but had emigrated to Australia. He had returned to spread his wife’s ashes on Arthur’s Seat, a volcanic mountain that overlooks Edinburgh. We started talking and he gave me several ideas for sight seeing. I had several other sights to visit based on a letter I received in Canterbury from my Blackburn College History professor, Dr. M.G.R. Kelley, who had recommended me to Western Illinois for the Graduate Assistant program and had received his PhD. from the University of Edinburgh.

Consequently, I visited Edinburgh Castle, the Scott Monument, Holyrood House (where the British royals stayed when they visited Scotland), the unfinished National Monument (“Scotland’s disgrace”), and Arthur’s Seat.

I returned to my B&B that night and got into a conversation with Alex McWilliams, the Aussie expatriate, and I found out that he was an artist and had had a show in Australia. He had invented what he called stereoscopic painting, where he would paint thickly onto a hard, non-porous surface, then place a piece of paper on it, apply pressure, then pull it off, achieving a painting with an almost 3D depth to it.

He showed me a newspaper article from his show in Australia and it mentioned that the first of his stereo paintings was valued at $10,000. He reached into his bag and pulled it out to show me. He then signed and gave me three other stereoscopic paintings along with some of the commercial art he had done (travel brochures, sketches, etc)

We talked into the night, until the proprietor of the B&B asked us to quiet down, as other guests had complained.

The next morning, after a very filling breakfast, I was off to the northern coast of Scotland, to Elgin, the town after which my birthplace was named (though the Brits pronounce it with a hard “G”). I got into town, took some photos, bought some postcards of the ruins of Elgin Cathedral, and then got on the southbound train to Dundee, where I found another B&B for 3 ½ pounds.

When they showed me to my room, I saw there were two single beds. I thought nothing of it until the middle of the night when another man was shown to the room and, in the dark, he began to smoke. I have never been a smoker, except for a brief period in Grad school when I tried smoking a pipe. I had always enjoyed the smell of a pipe, my grandpa smoked one, but when it’s in your mouth the smell is not the same, and the taste is worse.

Then I saw myself in a mirror with a pipe and quit the next day.

After breakfast the next morning (and all the breakfasts in Scotland had been very substantial, enough to get me through the day until I bought a pastie to eat for dinner, I honestly can’t remember any other dinner I ever ate during that week. I know I didn’t go to any restaurants, maybe I had nothing?) I spent one day and night in York, England, visiting their beautiful cathedral, and then headed back down to London, where I stayed at a youth hostel (again for a very reasonable 3.5 pounds). The breakfast, however, was only a continental, fruit and cereal, nothing like the eggs, toast, bacon, sausage, tomatoes, and kippers, of the Scottish ones.

While in London, I spent one full day at the British Museum, one day at the London Tower, and one-day trip outside London to Hampton Court.

My favorite memory of that whole seven weeks was one night I spent in the pub on campus, reading the National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper parody, which I had brought to read (along with my copy of Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison).

There was a married couple form Tennessee, still undergrads, who sat with me that night and I have rarely laughed so hard and so long at anything, especially the “Swill Mart” flyer/insert by the great Bruce McCall. The English folk could not understand what was so funny. I almost peed my pants.

While in England I went to several book stores to stock up on books I could not find, or were out of print, in the US, by authors Philip K Dick, Harlan Ellison, and Ivan Turgenev. I ended up bringing over 30 paperback books back with me (adding a box to the two suitcases I was already dragging around. I also bought 2 bottles of mead (grape and apple juice fermented with honey) and several comedy albums of BBC radio shows (with Monty Python alumni John Cleese), including one album I have never played. It’s an album by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, “Derek and Clive”, which I’d heard was a truly scatological group of comedy bits.

After those last 3 days in London, I made my way back to the airport and flew home. “Year of the Cat” was still on TWA’s playlist as it remains on mine.

22 – We’re Not Gonna Take It – The Who 1969

We're Not Gonna Take It

This is the last song on the album Tommy, it was one of the first albums I remember listening to in my best friend Jimmy’s basement hideaway (it was the old coal storage room from the days when the house was heated by a coal furnace, the walls were painted black and there was crinkled aluminum foil on them as well. It was suffused with what I took to be the smell of pot. Or perhaps it was “…incense and patchouli” (foreshadowing another song coming up on Kaffred’s Zune!). At the time, 1969, I had not even had a beer, I was 14 years old). On a wall hung a painting depicting the Jefferson Airplane (a painting of an actual bi-plane, not the members of the group).

The Who were one of the first bands I sampled as I slowly dipped my toe into the rock genre, breaking away slightly from Paul Mauriat (‘Love is Blue”), Mason Williams, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and the Beatles. In my senior year at Irving Crown High School (now Dundee-Crown), 1971-72, I listened to Who’s Next in the school library. It had a system whereby you handed your cassette of music to the librarian, who placed it into a bank of playback decks and you were given a set of headphones connected to a wireless box that you tuned to your tape. It was monaural, but kind of neat.

A few years later, on a Sunday in 1975, my good friend Bob W.  and I went to Chicago to see the Ken Russell extravaganza of Tommy, in Quintaphonic sound (“It’s one more” than the quadraphonic home systems of the day). We took the train down to the Northwestern station and walked the 8-9 blocks to the Loop in a cold rain to get to the run-down Chicago Theater (this was before the 1980s rehab). And the almost empty theater throbbed with a soundtrack turned all the way to 11 (Wow! Two Spinal Tap references, from the same scene, in the same paragraph!).

When I had first listened to the album, Tommy’s followers rejected his new religion in the end, but it kind of left his parents in limbo. In the movie, it was spelled out; the rampaging followers killed them. In fact, in the movie, Tommy’s dad was killed by his mom’s lover (she believing her husband MIA and dead), not the other way around as on the album. I actually preferred several of the versions on the soundtrack album, especially Jack Nicholson’s “Go to the Mirror” and Roger Daltry’s final reprise of “See me...Feel me”, sung as he climbs up a waterfall to the hilltop he was conceived (by Ann-Margaret, no less, and Robert Powell).

Another thing I recall about that trip was on the way home I picked up a Chicago magazine, because it had an article about Monty Python’s Flying Circus, at the beginning of their wildly successful run on Channel 11. It contained a photo of the group, with their names underneath. Up ‘til then I had always confused John Cleese and Graham Chapman (since they played the same sorts of officious characters and previous articles described them in general terms, not as specific ones, i.e. the pet shop customer in the “Dead Parrot” sketch  (the Cleese classic).

In 1975, the Chicago and Northwestern train station, with it’s huge, barrel- vaulted ceiling in the sitting room, was still in existence. Somewhere in our garage, I have a 2’ x 4’ slab of marble that came out of that wonderful edifice when it was torn down several years later in 1984. I used it for years (in my bachelor days) as a rather substantial coffee table, with cinder blocks at the corners holding it up.

Man! There’s a lot of parentheticals in this posting, even one parenthetical within another.  I’ll try to limit them next time.

21 – Video Killed the Radio Star – 1979

Video Killed the Radio Star - The Buggles

            I really can’t explain it, but his is one of my all time favorite pop songs. It’s one of the two or three songs that, when it comes up in my Zune, I have to play it 2, 3, or 4 times. It’s just a perfect, pick me up kind of song. It reminds me of the video (the first one played on MTV back in August 1981), which is cheesy, goofy, and everything I liked about early MTV, back when they actually played videos.

            What the song reminds me of is how I used to drive around the Northwest suburbs of Chicago back in the 70’s and early 80’s, in search of record stores with bargain and import bins that might contain an album from the band or individual I was currently listening to.

            I was living in Cary/Crystal Lake/Fox River Grove during that time period and I would drive to Skipper’s Music in Carpentersville, Apple Tree Records in Elgin, EJ Korvette’s in Des Plaines, Woodfield Mall with 2 or 3 record stores, FlipSide in Hoffman Estates, and Randhurst Mall in Mount Prospect

It reminds me of graduate school in Macomb, Illiinois, at Western Illinois University, when I drove up to Galesburg to go to Knox College to look in their library for information about a Medal of Honor winner in the Civil War from the 59^th Illinois (I can’t recall what info they had there to see, I guess a song can only bring back so much).

There was also a mall whose name escapes me now, with a record store with two albums that I could not afford at the time (I was making $210/month as a grad assistant, and $130 went to the rent). One was Circle Round the Sun by Leo Kottke, which I found 20 years later on Ebay, and the other was a Cat Stevens live album, an import from Japan, that I have not seen since.

It reminds me of a time when I got my music from the radio or MTV. That whole market is gone today. Radio, FM radio, is either oldies or classic rock, dominated. MTV/VH1 barely play videos, just dreck like Jersey Shore and Mafia Wives. I guess that’s why I don’t buy much music anymore. The last CD of music I bought was from Amazon.com, it was Roadsinger, by Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) and that was three years ago.

As I’ve noted before, I commute 2-3 hours a day now, but I only listen to the podcasts on the Steve Dahl Network, and I fall behind on some of them because there’s so much good stuff there. Steve does 5 shows a week, plus a Saturday “Blast from the Past”, best of Steve and Garry (Meier), which I listen to first. Then I listen to Matt Dahl and Brendan Greely’s weekly show, Dino Stamatopolous’ weekly show, James Van Osdol’s weekly show, and if I’ve caught up on all of them, I listen to the twice weekly Kevin Matthews podcast, fast forwarding through his political rants, which I find tiresome and intelligence-free. (I was a huge Kevin fan when he was on WLUP in Chicago, and was funny, but he’s turned into a faux libertarian, ain’t Ted Nugent a great guy, let’s get rid of all the politicians, sort of crank)

My music listening is rarely done in the car. During the summer I hook up the Zune to an amplifier in our garage that drives some outdoor speakers that we listen to when we’re out in the yard or at the community pool that abuts our property. (The pool was part of our property when the house was built in 1955, but the homeowners sold it to the Pool Club members in the mid-60s. Back then the pool had a diving board and underwater lighting, now pulled for liability’s sake in the litigious age. And parties were a weekly occurrence, to hear the folks who lived her back then talk.)

Why do things have to change so much, and not necessarily for the good?

20 - Walking on Broken Glass – Annie Lennox – 1992

            Walking on Broken Glass - 1992

             Wow, another guilty pleasure! A nugget ‘cause I dug it. I also enjoyed the video that went along with it. Starring Annie Lennox and John Malkovich, it also featured an actor I knew from “Blackadder”, who would later become fairly well known over here. It’s Hugh Laurie, “House”, in his sniveling fop mode that he does so well.

            Again, a reminder of Dynacircuits days in the early 90’s. I had a 90 minute cassette called Album Hits, that I listened to on my daily commute (about 1.5 hours round trip, Elgin to Franklin Park and back). This tape contained the single song from each album heard on the radio, usually, that led me to buy the album. I also had a tape called MTV Hits that contained the one song, typically, that had a video which moved me to buy the whole album or CD to get that one song. Many of these songs are now on my Zune playlist.

            Annie Lennox’s, Diva, from which this song came, was an exception. I had a separate cassette with Diva on side one and Lindsay Buckingham’s Out of the Cradle on the other side. I just realized I have no representative from this great album on the playlist (though the whole CD is on the Zune in its own folder).

            The only car with a cassette player is our family car, the 14 year old Camry Lynn drives the kids around in. My car, an eight year old Echo, only has an AM-FM radio, through which I play my Zune, with an FM transmitter.

            The only tapes we listen to in the Camry are kid’s songs. There’s one called Tuneland, “starring” Howie Mandel singing in an irritating faux kid’s voice. But, we all sing along to keep everyone occupied.

19 – Beach Baby – First Class – 1974

Beach Baby - First Class - 1974 

            No reason, just pure guilty pleasure explains why this faux Beach Boys is on my Zune. The group, First Class, was a couple of English guys who were trying to get a Brian Wilson-type, wall of sound, effect. And I think it’s pretty good.

            I remember hearing it in 1974 when I was running a punch press at Accutronics. I started there making $2.63/ hour as the shear operator. Shearing laminate sheets into smaller process panels, 12x18, 16x18, etc. My job duties also included unloading trucks that delivered copper covered laminate, the base material of every circuit board, that came in 36x48 or 36x72 inch sheets on pallets of 100 sheets or more. Laminates came from numerous suppliers, most of which no longer make laminate, e.g. GE, Westinghouse, Norplex, Cincinnati Milacron, Glassteel, and Dynamit Nobel.

            Another part of my job was to unload 15-20 55-gallon drums of ferric chloride acid, the etchant used to remove the copper from the laminate in the areas without traces. After removing the barrels of fresh acid, I moved the barrels of spent acid and copper-contaminated rinse water back onto the truck for disposal. Several years later we became part of a lawsuit after it turned out the guy we were using to dispose of this toxic waste was dumping it in a site that was not up to code and was leaching into the ground water.

            After 3 months of doing this I signed a posting and became a punch press operator at $3.05/hour. Several months later I became the punch press supervisor and then, just after my first anniversary, I was made first shift supervisor. I had just turned 20.

            Running a punch press is why I now have tinitus and permanent hearing loss in the upper register. In 1974, OSHA regulations had not been fully implemented at Accutronics and the punch press operators wore no hearing protection and, indeed, most of us had radio/tape players blaring next to us while we ran the press.  Placing the circuit board into the press opening, onto registration pins, then pulling both hands out to hit the two switches to start the punch cycle.

            Much like the place in Indiana I was almost employed at in 1983 (see song #3), we did not have pull-backs either. In fact, to show our quickness, we would trip the press (which would initiate a cycle of the ram that would not stop until it came down with 38 or 65 tons of pressure and cut the outside of the board and punch all the holes into the part) touching the ram as it was in its downward movement, before it bottomed out and returned to the top of the cycle.

750 times an hour on the 38-ton press, 500 times an hour on the 65-ton press.  (We didn’t touch it that many times, just when we wanted to impress the girls who walked by to other areas of the plant).

We were idiots.

In a future posting (at my current rate of posting about a year, but hopefully, not) I will write about how, 34 years later, I came to be running and setting up a punch press again in the same building (and maybe even post a video of me doing both, if I can figure out how to get a video onto this blog).

18 – Sleepwalk – Leo Kottke – 1981

            Sleepwalk - Leo Kottke

           This is Leo Kottke’s take on the Santo and Johnny instrumental from 1959. (Man, I didn’t remember Leo’s was from so long ago, 1981, it’s closer in years to the original than to today!). My folks had the Santo and Johnny album and I remember it being played in our house in Algonquin.

            It brings back memories of playing albums and 45s on our “Hi-Fi”, a blond wood box that predated our Monkey Wards stereo in the “antique” trunk. (See: Here Am I) I especially remember the thick, black and red plastic tube spindle that you placed over the thin metal LP spindle to play 45s.

            Novelty 45s and instrumentals, such as “Please Mr. Custer” by Larry Verne (“I don’t wanna go!” “Forward, Ho!” “Nooo!”) from 1960, “The Epic Ride of John H. Glenn” by Walter Brennan from 1962, the “B” side to “Old Rivers”, “Ringo” by Lorne Greene (1964), “the Stripper” (1958) and the theme to “Bonanza” by David Rose.

            We played LPs like “Bonanza,” a soundtrack album from 1961 with each of the stars singing (I could be wrong about this, I may need to get it from my mom to verify), and a group of comedy albums such as “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” (1960), “The First Family” (1962) with Vaughn Meader as JFK, “Inside Shelly Berman” (1959), and “My Son, the Folk Singer” (1962) with Allan Sherman.

            A couple years later I used this stand alone RCA player to listen to my first albums, “This Diamond Ring” and “Everybody Loves a Clown” by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, “A Hard Days’ Night,” “Help!” “Revolver”, and “Rubber Soul” by the Beatles, and my first comedy albums by the great Bill Cosby, “Bill Cosby is a Very Funny Fellow, Right!” (1963), “Wonderfulness” with the classic “Chicken Heart” bit (1966), “Revenge” (1967), and “To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With” (1968).

            I did seem to have bent towards comedy in my early listening that matured into Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Tom Lehrer, The Firesign Theatre, Monty Python, Albert Brooks, Martin Mull, and the National Lampoon albums in the 1970s. I don’t think I’ve bought a comedy album since Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album, though I now subscribe to the Steve Dahl Podcast Network, which gets me great comedy from Steve, Kevin Matthews (when he gets his head out of his “Libertarian” ass), Dino Stamatopolous, and the Matt and Brendan Show,

            Musically, in the late 60’s I was into Paul Muriat and Mason Williams (after the early infatuation with the Beatles and Gary Lewis), but I also recall buying all the Chicago albums, especially the hugely awaited “Chicago at Carnegie Hall” LP set from 1971. At $10, it was quite a purchase for a 16 year old with no income besides lawn mowing, etc., but it came with 4 self-indulgent albums, plus two large posters of the band, a poster of Carnegie Hall (on my wall at home, I was/am an architecture geek, I wanted to write my master’s thesis about the White City, the Columbian Exposition of 1893, but could not find a topic that an advisor at WIU would buy into, since I had no architectural history background), a voter info booklet, and a 20-page booklet about the group.

            Reminds me of another story…at Blackburn College there was a guy who lived in my dorm who was a bit of a neat freak, his colognes had to be arranged on his dresser just so, His clothes were all neatly folded and placed in the drawers, and he had a huge poster of Chicago (not the one from the album, but one he had bought at a concert) and had it on his wall. My friends came into his room one time to move things around, just a little, then had the bright idea to sign the poster. Tom W. signed it “To BJ, All the Best, Love, Chicago” in black magic marker. When BJ came back to the room and saw this he went ballistic and we never goofed with his stuff again.

Rich Mankiewicz- RIP

           I work with an engineer whose husband works for the same company my friend Rich Mankiewicz did. Rich had relocated to India to oversee a board shop there. Making conversation several weeks ago I asked whether she had ever met or heard stories about Rich, one of the great characters I’ve had the pleasure to work with in my career in printed circuit boards. She had not, but a couple days later she came in and said, “You know, I asked Bob (her husband) about Rich and he said he died just last week in India.”

            I was stunned. I had heard nothing! Evidently he had suffered a heart attack and died, at 55, which is 2 years younger than me. They had videotaped his funeral pyre and shown the tape to employees at the plant here in Rolling Meadows.

            My last contact with Rich was a little over two years ago when I had emailed him photos of our daughter, who we had just adopted. He sent back two photos, one of a very pretty Indian woman, who he said he planned to marry, and the second of the motorcycle that was his main mode of transportation. H also stated he did not plan on ever returning to live in “Amerika”, as he called it.

            Over the next week or so I called several people ho had worked with Rich, to see if they had heard anything and only one had, probably because he still worked in the PCB industry, for another Indian-owned shop.

            You have to have known Rich to understand his “Amerika” comment. He claimed he was a fascist, but I think he just had an authoritarian streak. His comment, whenever we discussed the lack of commitment we found in most workers was, “What we need are some heads on stakes!” It has remained a running joke since then (the mid-90s) between Oscar Salazar and me.

            He had walked away, or been fired form, most of his positions over the years. He was a self-described Eagle Scout- Mexican gun runner- heroin addict, and the latter caused him issues with several companies as would be expected. He was fired once, from Dynacircuits, I think it was the 3^rd or 4^th time he had worked there, because he slapped the union steward’s husband for smoking on company property. A smoker himself, Rich didn’t like other people doing what he couldn’t, and he could be very caustic in his comments.

            But I must admit I had more on-the–job fun with him than almost anytime in my career. When he was promoted to Quality manager at Dynacircuits, after Lar, the Dancing bear, was asked to leave, Oscar Salazar, Rich, and I would sit in his nice big office (it had been the office for one of the original owners. it was connected to another large office by a bathroom with a phone next to the commode: real classy!) and play trivia games. Rich was one of the few people who had as much trivial knowledge as me, and Oscar would just sit back and laugh as Rich and I tried to stump each other with pop culture questions.

            When he left Dynacircuits the 2^nd time, for Tingstol, his main goal there was to become a VP so that he would get a company car. I have never known Rich to own a car in the 20 years I knew him. He drove a Jeep at Dyna, but he made the payments to the girl he was living with at the time, and when they broke up, she kept the car.

            Rich finally got his company car, a Taurus station wagon, but several months later he walked out of Tingstol after getting into an argument with the owner. It was a cold, rainy November day and Rich had to walk to a bus stop in Elk Grove Village and ride a bus back to his hovel (I never saw it, but he shared a house with another addict) in Oak Park.

            Rich was also one of the few co-workers my wife has met over the years, as I wrote in an earlier posting. We got together socially with co-workers at Dyna, but he scared her with his intensity. At the time, about 3-4 years into our marriage, I had expressed a whim of mine to establish a “Randyland”, a man cave, as the kids today say, in our 105-year-old Victorian in Elgin.

At one get together, Rich took this and ran with it. He came up to Lynn several times that night and kept going on about coming over the next weekend to begin construction of “Randyland”. Lynn looked at me with a frozen smile, “Yeah, sounds good.”  I knew it was the alcohol talking (another Rich weakness) and the “Randyland” never came to fruition.

Anyway, I always kind of felt that I had Rich to thank for the set-up I eventually got in the house we moved to in 1998. A really nice video/stereo room with ample storage for my books, albums, VCR tapes, and DVDs.

            Vaya con dios, Rich, and thanks.

17 – If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out – Cat Stevens 1971

 If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out

            This song is one of two Cat Stevens wrote for “Harold and Maude.” I was late getting to that movie, I didn’t see it until 1978 and it had come out in 1971. I guess it was the description, “death-obsessed 20 year old falls for 80 year old woman” that kept me away for so long.

            It’s played twice during the film, once, sung by Ruth Gordon’s Maude, and again….SPOILER ALERT…. after Harold has run his Jaguar hearse off a cliff following Maude’s suicide. The camera pulls back and pans up from the crumpled wreckage to the top of the cliff where a lone figure, Harold, is plucking the song on a banjo given to him by Maude, then Cat’s voice comes in and the song ends the movie on a glorious, life-affirming note.

            If you’ve never seen it, go out and buy it or get it from Netflix (I just got my Blu-Ray, Criterion Collection edition, that came out on the 12^th). Don’t let the thumbnail description put you off. It’s full of funny stuff and it has a great selection of Cat Stevens’ songs. There’s seven songs from “Mona Bone Jakon” and “Tea for the Tillerman”, plus two written specifically for the film.

            I saw it on HBO in 1978 (more on that coming up on “Kaffred’s Zune”), but did not get the full impact until I saw it at the Parkway theater in Chicago several years later in a double feature with “Where’s Poppa”, another black comedy starring Ruth Gordon, that, though very funny, pales in comparison with “Harold and Maude.”

            When I saw it on a full sized screen, for the first time I saw what Harold saw on Maude’s arm as they sat overlooking a harbor. It’s a number tattooed on her forearm from a concentration camp. Nowhere else in the film is it mentioned she is a Holocaust survivor. Up to that point, you see Maude as a sprite (AKA “Manic Pixie Dream girl” in a Wikipedia entry, "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures."), teaching Harold the ways of the world with humor and insight, but that shot brought a gasp from me. On TV, you can’t see the tattoo (on my 19” anyway).

            Harold, being death obsessed, goes to funerals (it's where he meets Maude, she does the same for other reasons). At the first funeral in the film there is a close-up of the casket as it is going into the hearse and until I saw it on a big screen, I didn't see the brand of casket, an Elgin!  At one time Elgin was a hub of manufacturing: watches, bikes, street sweepers and caskets. Now we make burritos and lattes.

            In the late 70s and early 80s there were two theaters in the area that ran older films. The Parkway in Chicago changed its double feature daily, while the Varsity, in Evanston, changed their double feature every 2-4 days.

            I would get the flyer for each and make my plans to see the films each had. I enjoyed Francois Truffaut films and Werner Herzog films (that final shot in “Aguirre, Wrath of God” with the monkeys chittering around Klaus Kinski on a raft in the middle of a South American river still haunts me). The Parkway would have a Worst Film Festival every year and it was great to see the horrible movies with a full house.

There’s nothing like an audience to make the experience, I almost wet myself laughing at the trilogy of “Plan 9 from Outer Space” (lovingly re-created by Tim Burton and Johnny Depp in “Ed Wood”), “Robot Monster” (the director couldn’t afford a real costume so his “robot” was a guy in a gorilla suit with a space helmet on his head), and “Reefer Madness” (just plain funny, unintentionally).

I went through a phase in the early 1980s where I wanted to purchase or run a movie theater like these two, even going so far as driving down to Auburn, Illinois (about 4.5 hours south of Chicago) to look at a theater/coffee shop building. I did some research and found there were 4-5 small colleges within a 50-mile radius or so form Auburn that I could draw from, I thought.

However, the owner wanted $80,000 dollars for the building (I was working at Accutronics at the time after getting my MA from Western Illinois, making about $22,000/year) and I knew nothing about how to go about procuring older films or running a projector and I also knew that VCRs were becoming more popular and more and more obscure movies were becoming available. In fact, I think that building became a video store; it never reopened as a theater.

I think it was one of my better decisions to not purchase that albatross, though if I won the lottery tomorrow, and didn’t have to worry about running out of money, I’d seriously consider buying an old movie palace and fixing it up and running the movies I’d like to see on the big screen again. Movies like “Days of Heaven”, “Close Encounters”,  “Day for Night”, my favorite Truffaut film, “Apocalypse Now”, “Heaven’s Gate” (I know, but I liked it), Abel Gance’s “Napoleon” (I was lucky enough to see it at the Chicago Theater with a full orchestra in 1980(?)), ”Blade Runner”, “The Music Man” (guilty pleasure!), “Help!” (first saw it at the StarView Drive-in, in Elgin, long gone), and, of course, the Star Wars and “Lord of the Rings” films.

So, until that day arrives, if anyone out there would like to sponsor me….

16 – Margarita – Steve Dahl – 1992

            Margarita - Steve Dahl and the Dahlfins

            This is my favorite song from Steve Dahl. It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years since it came out. It’s the best of his non-parody songs and benefits, I feel, from a great production by Joe Thomas, who was a friend of Steve’s in the 90’s. Joe Thomas also produced Brian Wilson’s 329^th comeback album a few years later named “Your Imagination”, with a title song with lyrics co-written by S.R. Dahl.

            The only lyrics of Steve’s left in the song are the lines,

“Another bucket of sand
Another wave and the pier
I miss the way that I used
To call the shots around here”

Over the years since, Steve has played a version of the song with him singing all his lyrics. He has a way with words, obviously (30+ years in broadcasting), and many of his are better.

            The CD of  “Your Imagination,” when purchased at Best Buy, also included a bonus CD with an interview of Brian by Sean Lennon and also included a glorious version of “In My Room” from a concert he did in St. Charles, Illinois, when Brian lived there in the 90’s next door to (or across the street from) Joe Thomas. On it, Brian harmonizes with Bruce Johnston (once and future Beach Boy), Timothy B. Schmit (Eagles), Christopher Cross, and Jim Peterik (Ides of March).

            “Margarita” is Steve’s story song about the invention of the margarita (duh!).

            As I wrote earlier I have been a fan of the Stever (and Garry Meier and Bruce Wolf) since the early days of his “Rude Awakening “ show on the Loop in 1979. I have been a subscriber to his podcast ($9.95/month for Steve’s daily podcast and twice weekly podcasts form Kevin Matthews, cheap!) from its start. I enjoy his take on everything pop culture and family related.

            He is the quickest witted broadcaster and I am one of the few who look back on his post-Garry days with Bruce Wolf with fond memories. Bruce Wolf was the second quickest wit in broadcasting (don’t care for him as much today in his right wing nutball incarnation) and it was a joy to listen to them as they riffed off each other, rushing to be the first with the best hilarious comment on some news story.

            No one challenged Steve for quickness, though his current co-host/sidekick, Dag Juhlin, shows a lot of promise. There are times when things are flying so fast and furious that Steve doesn’t even hear Dag’s funny asides.

            Just the other day, in their bashing of Jim Belushi’s recent column in the Chicago Sun-Times, “Bullsh-t”, Dag said in response to Steve’s claim that Belushi had filed a copyright on the term “Pillanoid” from his column, Dag said, “ He should trademark “Belush-t”. That’s pretty funny, but Steve never acknowledged it as he and Brendan Greely bounced comments and laughs off each other.

            It reminds me of one of my funniest lines that no one ever heard. When I was in my second year of community college, I was taking a night class in Western Civilization and one night we heard a loud “Whoooo!” from down the hall. The teacher said, “Oh that’s Mr. Clark (or whatever his name was, it was 38 years ago), I saw him wheeling a toilet into his class. I don’t know what that’s all about.”

            Now in 1974 I hadn’t been exposed to Steve Dahl or David Letterman, so I didn’t have the wiseacre in me, to say anything out loud, but in my mind I said,  “Cold seat.”  

15 – Here Am I – Mason Williams – 1968

            Here Am I - Mason Williams

          I love this song from the same album that gave us “Classical Gas”. Mason Williams, head writer for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, has some great, “heavy” lyrics.

As the universe spins

To a desolate end

In the Doldrums of Destiny’s Sea

So should I accept being

As reasonless as

The firmament’s futility

…but here am I holding your hand

In a garmentless promise

Of nothing we stand

With only the raiment of time

It is ours to endure

Or endear and end up

Embracing what ever we find

…and here am I holding your mind

            I don’t know how seriously to take this, but I always liked the instrumental break that follows the verses, a loopy, very sixties sound. Swirling strings, French horns, and electric guitar. On a best of Mason Williams CD I have, they cut off this last part, the best part I think, as a sixties time capsule, but I also have the CD of “The Mason Williams Phonograph Record”, which has the complete song for my Zune listening.

            When I hear it I am back in the basement of our house in Algonquin, which had two garages under the west end of the house, one of which my dad had converted into a pool room, housing our Sears pool/ping pong table. The walls were peg board, painted dark blue with fluorescent colored plastic daisy stickers on them. Yeah baby…. psychedelic!!!!

            I am sitting against one of the walls where I have created my first set of headphones, made out of two speakers from the earpieces of two phones, tied together with string, hanging from a nail on the wall, connected to our Montgomery Ward record player upstairs, which player was housed in a trunk my mom had “antiqued”.

In the mid-60s “antiquing,” meant painting the surface with a greenish paint, then after it dried smearing it with a cloth with a brownish paint, to give it an “old” look.

            My dad worked for Illinois Bell as an installer/repairman and had installed phone jacks in every room of the house. Some outlets were disconnected and I wired them together and connected them to the speaker outputs so I could take my “headphones” to my room or to the living room or to the pool room and listen to the record player.

However, since most albums were only about 20 minutes per side, you got a pretty good workout running to the player and turning over the album (unless you put a stack of albums onto the spindle that dropped them one at a time onto the turntable).

14 – The Dutchman – Steve Goodman – 1971

            The Dutchman - Steve Goodman

            This song reminds me of my grandfather, because my mom always called him a stubborn Dutchman, though he was not senile like the one in the song.

“When Amsterdam is golden in the summer,
Margaret brings him breakfast,
She believes him.
He thinks the tulips bloom beneath the snow.
He's mad as he can be, but Margaret only sees that sometimes,
Sometimes she sees her unborn children in his eyes.”

I always mist up a little on that line. Obviously, my grandparents had a child, my mom,

but I always wondered whether they wanted more, my mother being born during the Depression and my grandfather having lost his job as an engraver with the Elgin Watch Case Factory. I know they struggled to make house payments.

In fact, Home Federal Savings of Elgin (long gone, having been absorbed by State Financial, who was absorbed by Associated Bank) allowed them to make interest-only payments for several years so they could keep their home, something unheard of in today’s banking system.

The song also reminds me of my first concert. In 1972, Gary K. and I (the same Gary K. of the straight razor in my previous post) drove in my 1968 Mustang fastback to a coffee house in Rockford, Illinois, called Charlotte’s Web, to see Steve Goodman.

I was surprised to see how short he was, with such a deep voice. He was 5’4” or so, I think. His first song was “The Dutchman” with its mellow guitar opening. I knew he played the guitar, but was surprised (again?) to see hear how well he played, on that song, and throughout the show. He did all his hits as well. “City of New Orleans” (I always liked his version more than Arlo Guthrie’s) and “Lincoln Park Pirates”, the song that first got me interested in him.

In recent years the Cubs used his “Go Cubs Go” after every home win, but it always reminds me that he died four days before the 1984 Cubs clinched their first post-season appearance since 1945. He was only 36, and he was a true fan.

I consider myself a true Cubs fan as well; take that for what it’s worth. However, I had my 14-year-old heart broken in 1969 and it never really has recovered, even with post-season appearances in 1984, 1989, 1999, and 2003.

In 1969 I attended my first and only opening day, and attended five more games that summer with a group of 4-5 other guys. I don’t think today’s parents (me Included) would let their kids go to a Cubs game by themselves like we did.

First, we would save up about $10 or so, mowing lawns, etc. Then, on the day chosen, we would wheedle a mom into driving us the 8 miles to Barrington to drop us off at the Chicago and Northwestern station for the $4 (round trip) train ride into the city. From the downtown Northwestern station, also long gone, we would walk 4-5 blocks up to the Loop and go down into the subway to catch a train to the Northside which dropped us off ½ block from Wrigley Field.

Back in the 50s-60s and 70s the Wrigley’s kept 22,000 tickets for sale on the day of the game. You could literally walk up to the gate, buy a ticket, and go in. There weren’t a lot of advanced sales.

In 1969, a ticket to the bleachers was $1. On opening day, we splurged and bought grandstand tickets, which were $1.50.  At this point we probably had $3-4 left from our $10, and since pop, or a Ron Santo pizza, or a hot dog was around 50 cents each, and a program was 25 cents, which would last the game. 

On that particular opening day, Cubs superstar Ernie Banks hit two home runs, but the Cubs were still losing in the bottom of the 10^th (I had crumpled my program up into a ball, you can see it now with the creases) when pinch-hitter Willie Smith came up with a man on and hit a home run to win the game. The Cubs that year led from game one until the middle of August, when they collapsed and the Amazin’ (god that still sticks in my craw to type that) Mets came form 9 games back to overtake them and eventually win the division by 8 games.

During that season I bought all four daily Chicago newspapers (Chicago Tribune, Chicago Today, Chicago Sun-Times, and Chicago Daily News) almost every day and cut out the articles relating to the Cubs and taped them into scrapbooks (I ended up with two, at least, I’ve never been able to look at them since I sealed them in plastic after the end of the season).

I lived and died with each win or loss. Two of the games we attended we sat in the bleachers with the Bleacher Bums, who wore yellow construction hats and had cheers for certain players or to get a rally going, or to celebrate a home run.

As July leaked into August and the once robust lead was dwindling away, I even went so far as to make a voodoo doll (it came with a MAD magazine) with a little “Mets” sign around his neck, and I pierced it daily with pins and needles. It didn’t help.

The worst was a game in August,  the Cubs played in New York and they blew a late

inning lead when the Cubs center fielder (and my personal hero, after Don Kessinger, that season) Don Young caught a fly ball, then ran into the outfield wall at Shea Stadium and the ball fell out, allowing the tying run to score. The Cubs went on to lose, and Ron Santo blasted Don Young in all the papers the next day. The pressure was getting to him and to the rest of the team, it appeared.

            1969 was the season when Ron Santo started to jump up and click his heels after home wins, as he ran to the clubhouse that was in the left field corner of Wrigley Field. Some people say that that was what kept him out of the Hall of Fame during his lifetime. If that is what stopped some Hall voter from voting for him during his lifetime (he finally got in 6 months after he died last year), I pray there is a special place in hell reserved for him. Statistically, he was as good a third baseman as Brooks Robinson, but Ronnie never appeared in a post-season game throughout his 15-year career.

            The next time I let the Cubs get to me was the 2003 “Bartman” game where with only 5 outs between them and their first World Series appearance since 1945, they totally collapsed after a fly ball that was arguably catchable, was touched in the stands by a poor kid named Steve Bartman.

As I watched the game at home I became apoplectic as well, I kept saying, “That’s it! Now it starts! They’re going to blow it again!”  Visions of 1969 and of the ball going through Leon Durham’s legs in 1984 ran through my head. Lynn tried to calm me down, but I left the house and sat in our car in the garage, occasionally turning on the car radio as the collapse unfolded. Lynn was a little worried because she didn’t know where I had stormed off to, not thinking to look in the garage.

When the game was over, I came back in the house and put it from my mind. Even though there would be another game, another chance to get to the World Series, I knew it wouldn’t happen and, of course, it didn’t.

Fatalism is part and parcel of the Cubs fan’s life.

I hope they make it to the World Series some day, because on that occasion I will open my scrapbooks on the 1969 season and show them to my son and daughter, should they care about baseball at that future date.

13 – ‘Til I Die – The Beach Boys – 1971

'Til I Die           

            This song was a partial comeback for Brian after his late 1960s meltdown and disappearance from the band. It appears on the Surf’s Up album. Inspired by a late night trip to the beach where Brian contemplated his place in the vast universe (“I’m a cork on the ocean…How deep is the ocean…How long will the wind blow”)

            I had read about the song in article from November 1974 in Rolling Stone, which called it “…a crazy amalgam of Berry, Bach, and barbershop.”

            I guess it was the barbershop that caught my interest and sent me to Skipper’s to buy the album (which remains un-digitized, I got the song from Grokster I think).

            When I was in junior high school, I was in a barbershop quartet, actually a quintet. My voice back then was not that special, but I did have a larger range, and Mr. Iddings put me in with four other guys because I could sing all the parts (or he felt sorry for me because 3 of the other 4 were among my best friends).

            So they called it a barbershop quartet plus one, me being the one. We practiced before school began and I remember we had hall passes we taped to a piece of cardboard (not having access to lamination back then). 

My mom was also working at the junior high around that time, washing and drying the towels for all the gym classes for District 300. I remember seeing her down in the lower level of the school as a van dropped off canvas sacks of wet towels which she placed in one of two industrial sized washers, then dried them in a big dryer, then placed them back in the sacks for pick up. It was ungodly hot in the fall and spring, warm and toasty in the winter, but backbreaking nonetheless.

For one concert we got hold of an actual barber’s chair, and also, unfortunately, a real straight razor. During one song we lathered up Gary K. and then somebody (I don’t think it was me, but I may be suppressing the memory) used the straight razor to remove the lather. Being 13-14 years old at the time and none of us  had ever shaved before, we noticed rather quickly that the lather was turning pink, due to Gary’s bleeding.

As the song ended, we took a towel and wrapped his throat as we took our bows and ran to the bathroom to clean him up. None of the cuts was deep, but the straight razor was quickly taken away from us.

It’s funny, but I was quite the singer, in grade school, junior high, and high school, I was in acapella choir in high school, choir and barbershop quintet, in junior high, and in grade school I was in several talent shows (they had one every year at Eastview Elementary in Algonquin).

In 5^th grade I tried out for a solo for a song called “Minstrel Man”

            I want to be a minstrel man,

            I want to dance like no one can,

            I want to fill the throng with zest and song,

            I want to hear the music of a minstrel band,

I want to parade down every street,

And smile at everyone I meet,

I want to tour all over this great land,

In a first class minstrel band.

            Why do I remember every line? Jeez, there’s a bunch of drivel locked up in my head!

            I didn’t get the solo (Gary K, who we would later lacerate in the barbershop quintet, did) but I was in the backup troop that had canes and straw hats that we twirled and waved.

            The year Mary Poppins came out 1964, I was one of three chimney sweeps that sang and danced (with black soot on our faces and push brooms in hand) to “Chim Chim Cher-ee”. The year before that I was in and improv ensemble of 4^th graders who acted out the battle of the bands between the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five. I was the drummer for the DC5 and as a foursome of 4^th graders in Beatles wigs, lip-synched and air-guitared to a 45 on a record player to “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” We (the DC5) rushed out and pushed them off the stage and took their wigs, as we lip-synched and air-guitared to “Glad All Over “.

           

Such cutting edge satire! We killed!

In 8^th grade I had a very brief thespian phase. I was in two plays. The first was Huckleberry Finn, where I played the sheriff in my great grand father’s frock coat and whiting in my hair to make me look older.

In the second play, I can’t recall the name at all; I replaced the male lead when he quit to play football or something.  All the girls were 9^th graders (Freshmen) and I was an 8^th grader about 2 years younger, emotionally, and scared to death of girls. Before the first performance, one of the girls asked me to take off my glasses, to improve my leading man looks I suppose, and I stumbled through the performances, never seeing anything very clearly.

At the end of the play I had to hold hands with the leading lady, and I remember she wore gloves, my hands were so sweaty. At one point in the play I had to laugh, and it was so fake that half the audience imitated it.

This led to two of the greatest embarrassments of my young life. After the play was over one of the girls had a cast party at her house and they played Spin the Bottle. I was 13 and all the girls were 14 or 15 and I had major crushes on every one of them, but when the bottle spun to me, I couldn’t do it…I froze...The games, and the party, were over.

The next year I was now a Freshman, the cock of the walk. In fact we were the last Freshman class at Algonquin Junior High School, because the next year it became a middle school, and the freshmen came with us to Crown High School, they never got to be cock of the walk.

When they had tryouts for the theater club, a different teacher than the one who had cast me the previous year now ran it. And when I showed up to the first meeting, I found that we were supposed to have an audition piece. I didn’t have anything prepared, so the teacher/ advisor said, “OK, dance like Goldie Hawn on Laugh-In”. This in front of all my peers and several other teachers. I said I couldn’t do it in front of a crowd (for a theater club?). I’ve never been a dancer, before or since.

They sent out all the kids, leaving the advisors, and I still couldn’t dance like a go-go dancer. I was humiliated. I never acted again.

Indeed, when I was in high school, I was required to be in the chorus of a play or two, because I was part of the choir. I was supposed to sing and dance in the chorus for “Oklahoma”. I attended several practices, but when the play ran, I had my mom write me an excuse to get out of it. I had no problem singing in an ensemble, but I drew the line at do-si-doing in the background of a musical.