10 – Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 – from Switched on Bach, 1968

           In 1968, as I wrote in my opening manifesto, my musical tastes were rather pedestrian. My faves ran the gamut from “Classical Gas” to “Love is Blue” (not a very wide gamut, I’m afraid). I even had myself convinced  (and told my friends in the 7^th grade at Algonquin Junior High School) that my parents were considering the purchase of a harpsichord so I could play the Paul Muriat opus. I was a tad naïve back then. I subsequently picked out the melody on a piano, one note at a time, a feat I can regale my wife with to this day (she teaches Suzuki piano to little kids who can play two-handed works by age 4, my six year old can play more complex pieces, so you know she is suitably impressed. Her eye rolling is audible.)

            My best friend from kindergarten through junior high was Jim D, who played guitar and piano, both pretty well as I recall. He is the only person I have ever known who had a quadraphonic set-up (with Bose speakers). I used to go over to his house and just listen to music. His tastes were much more eclectic than mine. He exposed me to the Who (“Tommy”, “Who’s Next”), Jesus Christ Superstar, Credence, and one day in 1968, he put on an album called “Switched on Bach” by Walter Carlos.

            It was the first time I had heard the Moog synthesizer and I was hooked. I loved it, and I began to search out other works of Bach as well. A few years later, Carlos (who was on his way from Walter to Wendy) contributed to the soundtrack of the first X-rated movie I ever saw (at 17), Stanley Kubrick’s  “A Clockwork Orange”. This soundtrack contains a glorious version of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” from his 9^th Symphony, with a synthesized choir as well.

            S-OB (as it’s known) was put together note-by-note onto a multi-track recorder, an incredibly tedious way to make music (I also have an album by Mason Williams, “The Mason Williams Ear Show” which came out 7 months after “The Mason Williams Phonograph Record” in 1968, which featured a song called “Generatah-Oscillatah”, which had been assembled the same way. This is among my 200+ albums awaiting digitizing).

            Interest in the synthesizer also got me interested in Emerson, Lake and Palmer, since Keith Emerson used one, most notably on “Lucky Man”, on “Trilogy”. (Esquire magazine back then called it “inept noodling” on the synthesizer). “Trilogy” is another album in my collection awaiting digitizing.

            That reminds me of our local FM station in 1972, WVFV, which broadcast from Dundee, Illinois, and was an all request station. I was working my first summer job, working on the janitorial crew at my high school, Irving Crown, now Dundee-Crown, in Carpentersville. We were systematically cleaning each room, scraping the gum off the bottom of each desk, then cleaning them, then cleaning the walls and windows, then stripping the wax off the floor, buffing it, then waxing and buffing it again.

            We had a transistor (Playboy definition, from one of the magazines my dad had stored in his closet at the time: “Transistor: the girl who used to be my brother”…. I don’t know why that’s the only joke I can remember, but there it is) radio tuned to WVFV where occasionally one of the cleaning crew would call in and request a song. It was the only station I recall hearing “DOA” by Bloodrock, about once a week. It was also the first station I heard Harry Chapin’s “Taxi” and ELP’s “Lucky Man”. 

            The highlight of my summer was when we changed all the 8 ft fluorescent light bulbs in the gym. They replaced them all each summer, so they would not have to change one, hopefully, during the school year, which would entail bringing out the scaffolding and potentially ruining the mirror finish we applied to the hardwood after we finished changing the bulbs.

            In the summer of 1972 there was a cliff near the school that overlooked the Fox River, about a half-mile away. Today, the football field and a housing project are located there. In 1972 there was nothing, the football field, Spain Field, was several miles away, across the Fox on Route 31 where today a strip mall resides with a China Buffet. We took the bulbs and threw them like javelins off the cliff, attempting to get them to land on their end, which would cause the tube to collapse straight down (like a controlled demolition of a high rise).

            I worked with a crew that included a young warlock who had an ongoing conversation with a spirit he claimed was watching over him and a group of men whose only commonality was that they were divorced and/or recovering alcoholics. I had been working after school with this crew since the basketball season had ended in March, dry mopping the classrooms and cleaning the bathrooms each night. It was the only time in my high school career that I entered the bathrooms, usually I used the toilet in the locker room, the main bathrooms reeked of cigarette smoke, which made me physically ill.

           

            What made the job interesting to me (even at the $2.75/hour it paid) was that I got to see behind the scenes, as it were, into the parts of the school that a student wasn’t usually privy to.  From the teacher’s lounge (another nicotine stained den, back in 1972) to the catwalks above, and tunnels below, the auditorium.

Over the course of that summer I got to know the school building pretty well, though not as well as I got to know the building that housed two of my future work places, Accutronics and Bartlett Mfg. In Cary, Illinois. A building which no longer exists, like several of my other work places over the years (Tingstol, Dynacircuits, Amax Plating, and Chicago Etching. Though the physical building remains at North and Sheffield in Chicago, Chicago Etch houses a sports bar, I think, I haven’t been in there since I left it in 1991.)

It was my first real job, since I don’t count the 6 hours I spent as a dishwasher at Floyd’s, a long gone restaurant in Carpentersville. I picked a bad day to start, a Friday, fish fry night, and grabbing hot metal (pewter?) plates from the dishwasher, without gloves, had parboiled my hands by 10 PM when I finally worked up the nerve to walk out (claiming my parents were picking me up then) and then walking down Route 31, past Spain Field where Crown was playing a game that night, to a gas station about a mile away to a pay phone where I then called my folks to come get me. My paycheck, after deductions, was about $7.00 for the night.

8 - Heroes and Villains - Brian Wilson 2004

8 – Heroes and Villains – Brian Wilson – 2004

Heroes and Villains - 2004 - live

            “Heroes and Villains” was to be the centerpiece for Smile and Brian hoped it would be as successful as “Good Vibrations”, a number one hit for the Beach Boys. According to legend, it was composed on a piano he had set up in a sandbox in his living room.

Though this version is from the long awaited, reconstructed, non-Beach Boy, SMILE album of 2004, it always brings me back to 1975, when I was going away to school in Carlinville, Illinois, to Blackburn College. It was roughly a 5-hour drive from Algonquin and I remember listening to a radio show with Charlie Van Dyke, a history of the Beach Boys. (I could be wrong about the time frame, but since this whole exercise is one of memory and feelings and whether or not it was on the first trip down to BU or a subsequent one, it brings back the memory of that first trip, the first time in my life I was going to be truly separated from my family and friends at home).

            I was being driven by my folks, in the old Ford LTD we had at the time, towing a snowmobile trailer with my Honda CL350 strapped to it, my transportation for the first year in Carlinville.

            I think this radio show was part of the run-up to the first of the 15 or 20 “Brian’s back!” campaigns that have occurred in the past 35 years.

            The run-up may even have started as early as 1974 with the release of “Endless Summer”, a double album of early BB tunes that I bought based on a review in Rolling Stone. Other than the single of “Good Vibrations”, I had never owned any of the BB oeuvre.

            However, by 1975 I had purchased several more of the BB albums and had become a fan, and in 1976 Brian was on the cover of Rolling Stone in his bathrobe, standing on a beach holding up a surfboard. In August 1976 he appeared in a Lorne Michaels-produced special in NBC prime time and in one skit was “arrested” by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd for “failure to surf.” He was dragged out to the beach in the same bathrobe, with the same surfboard as the Rolling Stone cover (obviously the photo shoot for RS was done when the special was being shot).

            Hilarity failed to ensue.

            In November of 1976 he capped this particular comeback with the single most excruciating performance I have ever witnessed, on an SNL hosted by Jodie Foster.

            “Good Vibrations”, a masterpiece of pop that required 17 sessions in four different studios, amassing 90 hours of tape, at a total cost of $50,000, assembled piece by loving piece, was reduced to Brian, singing by himself, playing a piano in a sandbox.

            ARRGGH!!!

           

7 - I Won't Let You Down - PhD - 1981

           I Won't Let You Down - video

           This was the first album I bought because I had seen a video on MTV. Much more so than radio, I got my music exposure from MTV. Back in the day they only played videos, with some VJ interludes (Martha Quinn – babe and a half, Nina Blackwood – OK in a blowsy, biker chick kinda way). In fact, at the very beginning, there weren’t even commercials, there were random stock movie clips between the video clips, to fill the spaces soon to be filled with commercials.

            At the time MTV came onto our cable system I was renting a house form Mr. M., my boss at Accu, sharing it with a friend who ran a punch press there. The house was an old farmhouse that had been owned by what today would be called a hoarder. There were piles of newspapers making it hard to walk through the rooms, and I shoveled out piles of water soaked Fels Naptha (laundry detergent) in the basement.

It also had a furnace that only heated the bedroom I used on the first floor and the dining room directly above it. The heat barely reached the unfinished second floor bedroom where my housemate slept. The living room had a fireplace that I tried to convert into a heater by putting a hollow-tube grate connected to a wet-dry vacuum in the basement and doors to close it off, but it could not begin to heat a 400+ sq.ft. room, in a house with almost no insulation and old wooden, single pane windows. And that winter saw the coldest day ever in my lifetime, the wind chill got down to 26 degrees below zero and my car (the '79 Mustang) refused to start. The only time it didn’t in the 6 years I owned it.

I was 27 years old at the time, my housemate was 23, I think, a divorced father of a little girl, and one time he set me up on a double date with a friend of the 16 year old he was chasing. She wanted someone for her friend and I said OK, 10 year age difference and all, but when they showed up I found out she was 14! It was a very awkward night for me, to say the least.

We had some lasagna and then we all sat down to watch some MTV.

“How ‘bout that Duran-Duran?” I started (I hated them, but thought they had a younger demographic).

“They’re OK,” she replied.

“How ‘bout the Buggles?” I tried again (They were my favorite).

“Not really,” she said.

And the excruciating dialogue went downhill from there. Obviously, nothing happened that night.

To return to Ph.D., I liked the video because the girl in it, who the lead singer stalked throughout the video, had legs that didn’t quit and I loved to watch her walk, which is pretty much all she was called on to do for the whole of the video.

6 - 1979 and 9 - Disarm - Smashing Pumpkins

6 – 1979 – Smashing Pumpkins (1996)

            AND

9 – Disarm – Smashing Pumpkins (1994)

1979 - video

Disarm - video

            As I sit here listening, I’m not sure why I have these songs in my playlist. I’m not a big Smashing Pumpkins fan (I do like Billy Corgan, the Karl Pilkington of rock), but I remember thinking, when I was downloading from Grokster in 2002, that I needed some songs from the last 10 years. I like the bell in Disarm. My tastes run, as you will see, to the 60s, 70s, and 80s for the most part, very little music since the 90s.

            I’m looking at the playlist and the most recent song is Viva La Vida, by Coldplay, a great song and one I repeat about 4 times every time it comes up in the shuffle (also another song with a bell, "more cowbell!!"). I can’t explain, but it gets me going every play and I sing along (when I’m alone in the car, which is most of the time in my daily 2-3 hour commute) at top volume.

            Maybe 1979 reminds me of what I was doing that year. After going to Western Illinois for a year and a half to finish the coursework for my MA in History (http://vufind.carli.illinois.edu/all/vf-uiu/Record/7278193), I came back to Accutronics in January of 1979 while I continued to revise my thesis and get ready for my defense of it. I was back as Production Supervisor (about 12K a year, not bad if you’re still living at home with your folks) and the first thing I did was go out and order a new Ford Mustang, the third Mustang I had owned, having had two 1968 Mustangs earlier in the decade that I had through college and grad school. I had even gone so far as to have the second one restored, replacing wheel wells and floorboards.

            I finally finished the revision of my thesis in mid-1979. My thesis advisor had also asked me to add some maps of the various battles the 36^th Illinois had fought in. This required me to find a book that was old enough such that the copyright had run out so I could copy the maps and insert them into the text.  This was in the bad old days, before word processing, when the whole thesis was typed. Western Ill. had certain specs for your submission, particular fonts that had to be used and rag content of the paper for the two copies you provided, along with the original. All three copies would then be bound, one went into the main WIU library, one went to the history department, and the third I got to keep.

            However, if revisions requested by my advisor, Dr. Victor Hicken, author of “Illinois in the Civil War” (http://www.amazon.com/Illinois-Civil-War-Victor-Hicken/dp/0252061659/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330711646&sr=1-6), were too extensive, i.e. added more than one or two words to a line, it meant that I had to re-type that page and every page in the chapter after the revision. So I tried to fit revisions as best I could to avoid this.

            When I started on my thesis, I spent several months visiting libraries in Northern Illinois, looking for local papers from the 1861-1865 time period. I finally settled on the Aurora Beacon, the Woodstock Sentinel, and the Elgin Daily News, because each had one or two correspondents from the regiment who wrote regular letters to the paper, describing what was going on in the regiment or had transpired in a recent battle.

The 36^th Illinois, also known as the Fox River regiment, since the companies came from towns along the Fox River in North Eastern Illinois, fought in many of the Western theater battles, Pea Ridge, Stones River, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and the Battle of Atlanta. Then, when Sherman marched off to the sea, through Georgia, the 36^th was sent back up to Nashville, where they suffered more casualties. (The 36^th suffered the highest % of KIA of all Illinois regiments, I seem to recall)

The Aurora, Woodstock, and Elgin libraries each had the newspapers on microfilm and for 10 cents a page, I could get a negative image photocopy of the letters I found. I then cut each letter out and mounted it on a page of loose-leaf filler paper and recorded the date and a synopsis of what the letter covered, then placed them in order by date, making 5 binders for 1861-1865.

Then a friend from my early Accu days who was attending the University of Illinois, majoring in Engineering, Bob W., got me a copy of the 36^th Illinois’ 800 page regimental history, which I used to outline the movements of my regiment and I began to write. After a month or so, I had to return the book to the U. of I, and my mother called to tell me that someone in Algonquin had a copy which they would let me use (it was a pristine copy that they let me keep and I still have it next to my thesis on the bookshelf at home).

Each night, between 10PM and 4AM I would write, describing troop movements, battles, etc., pulling description from the letters written home to the local papers. While writing, I listened to Bach, Kottke, and ELO. I would try to write one page per night, minimum. I write very small and using narrow lined paper, one page was about 700 words. At that rate, I wrote one chapter each week for 5 weeks (typing the pages up each weekend) and turned them in to my advisor.

Anyway, back at Accu I worked on getting my thesis in shape and moved out into an apartment in Cary with my books and new $800 VCR (and $300 in blank tapes). One night, my friend Mike C., the Quality manager, had me over to his house for dinner. I packed up my VCR (remember, in 1979 these were bulky as a box of rocks) and two six packs of Leinenkugel bock, and showed up at his house.

After a nice dinner, and several beers, we settled down to watch tapes from that new-fangled HBO, “National Lampoon’s Disco Beaver From Outer Space” and a Robin Williams special (this was before I burned out on him and he became an annoyingly overbearing stand-up to me). After several more beers, Mike and I decided to go looking for a former friend from Accutronics, Mike U., who we had not seen in 3-4 years, at some local bars.

It was now after midnight on a Wednesday and we started in Cary at a bar, having more beer there, shooting some pool. Then, when the bar closed at 2AM, we decided to drive down to Fox River Grove to a bar in a bowling alley (or a bowling alley in a bar, it had only 6 lanes, I think) and as we started out, a Cary cop lit us up. Mike pulled over and reached under the seat, pulled out a .45 and handed it to me, telling me to put it in the glove compartment.

I did as I was told.

When the cop came up to Mike’s window, he hadn’t seen our little game of hot potato, thankfully, and Mike put on one of the finest performances of sobriety I’ve ever seen. He got off with a warning and we continued on our merry way to the bar/bowling alley where we stayed until 3:30AM or so when we decided we weren’t going to find the other Mike and we had work in 3 hours so we’d better call it a night.

After returning to Mike’s, I loaded up my car and drove home for about 2 hours sleep, then got up and went in to work at 7AM.

Mike didn’t make it in that day.

When I was 24, I could pull off that kind of stuff. Not so today.

5 – God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind) – Randy Newman 1972

 God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)

            I was first exposed to Randy Newman, as I wrote earlier, by David Steinberg’s version of Political Science (Let’s Drop the Big One), and had bought all his available albums by the time I went away to Blackburn College in 1975.

            When I first showed up at Blackburn, I was assigned to the cleaning crew of the Student Den, B.U. (as it is known) being a work/study school, where everyone worked 15 hours a week to help pay for room and board. At the time, the mid 1970s, the cost to go to BU was comparable to the cost to go to a state school. A state school had low tuition and fees, high room and board costs. Due to the Work Program, BU was the opposite, and it’s smallness (600 students) and exclusivity (you were supposed to be in the upper quarter of your high school class with a “B” average) were the draws for me. (Though when I finally got there I found out that they had taken more than 90% of applicants)

            After meeting and working with Mike H. in the den the first few days, I was transferred to the Dining Hall (Ding Hall in BU parlance). As a pathologically shy person, I had thus far only made the acquaintance of Mike H. and my roommate, Al A. (“Big Al” as he became known), a farm-raised, well meaning, but, ultimately, exasperating fellow.

            Al was one of those people who cover their insecurity with bluster. I soon came to know to take everything he told me with a brick of salt. For example, he told me he was a starter on his high school basketball team, but when I played a gentle game of one-on-one with him the first week on campus, I knew by his lack of skills that that could not be so. I had been on the basketball team in high school, usually riding the bench until the game was in hand, but could easily out-shoot and drive him.

            I was 6’3” and 195 lbs soaking wet in high school, but in 1970-1972, at my school, at least, that meant I could only be a center. A center played with his back to the basket and never, and I mean NEVER, put the ball on the floor. If you did, you found yourself on the bench so fast your head would be spinning. You were expected to keep the ball over your head and you could pivot and pass or shoot if you had a lay-up or short, 4 foot shot. That was it.

However, I had been playing with friends who were all guards, and my heroes were Pete Maravich (of the uncanny ball handling skills) and Bill Bradley (who came into the pros as a 6’5” guard and could shoot from outside with the best) and I could actually shoot from 15-20 feet away, though I was never allowed to. It wasn’t until I went to college that I was allowed to do what I knew I could, which was drive like a demon (my other hero was Earl “the Pearl” Monroe) and shoot from outside and I became an intramural “all star” after showing my skills off a little to my dorm mates in several pickup games.

Anyway, back to “Big Al”, in the mid 70s having a TV in your room (at BU, at least) was a rarity. I had a 12” portable black and white I had purchased 4-5 years earlier when I had sold my CB base station (We were into CB in 1969, several years before it became a national craze, “We got us a Convoy!” Call letters KBY-6317), which I had purchased with the proceeds from the sale of my Fender electric guitar when I gave up the guitar in 1968. I think I had one of only 2 or 3 TVs in the whole dorm of 20+ rooms. However, I rarely watched it those first few weeks, as I acclimated myself to life away from home. Al watched it more than I did, mainly sports, especially Monday Night Football. Later, people told me they had assumed it was his, because he watched it so much. During MNF he would pontificate on strategy, etc. as I studied at my desk.

One day I was going down the hall to my room and heard the strains of a Randy Newman song, sung by someone other than Randy Newman (I think it was “Dayton, Ohio, 1903”). I stuck my head into the room and asked, “Who is that singing? It doesn’t sound like Randy Newman.” Wes W. looked up from a book and said, “It’s Nilssen Sings Newman.” Cool! (for me, anyway). And I struck up a conversation with Wes and his roommate Tom W. and a friendship was formed. It turned out that Wes and Tom were good friends with Mike H. who I had started to befriend at the student Den. And they were all friends with Kevin K., who became my roommate after the first semester. All four had moved to Challacombe (North) Hall from Butler Hall to get away from the rampant partiers.

Randy Newman, therefore, served as an entry into friendships that in Kevin and Mike’s cases, at least, I still try to maintain, 37 years on.

Though North Hall housed few choirboys, it did occupy a niche between the party dorm (Butler) and the jock dorm (Jewell), where most of the varsity soccer and basketball players lived (BU’s fall sport was soccer, they did not have a football team).

We had our fair share of Dean’s Listers, and we won the men’s Intramural trophy both of my years at BU, and several after I left. Our touch football team was untouchable, our soccer team was so good I scored a goal in one game and I played goalie (Our halfbacks were so good the ball rarely even came into our half of the field, and they covered for me to let me go forward to score a goal). We played the varsity soccer team in a practice game (where they had to play one-touch, then pass) and won 1-0.

We had enough good players to put two teams into the basketball league. The “A” team won every game but one, never by less than 20 points, our “B” team won every game except the two where they played the “A” team. The only game the “A” team lost was when we only had 5 guys available and 4 of us fouled out. At one point it was 2 on 5 and we were still only 3 points down, but when the 4^th guy fouled out, the remaining player had no one to inbound the ball to, so we stopped the game and forfeited.

After basketball season we had Hoc-Soc, played in the gym, which was slightly larger than a basketball court. Hoc, as in hockey, since they could check you into the bleachers that folded up into the side walls; Soc, as in soccer. The walls and ceilings were in bounds. I played goalie on that team as well, and saw a lot more action, since the wall behind my goal was inbounds, so that any miss bounced right back out to the area in front of the goal. In all other intramural sports the varsity players could not play on their sport’s team, but in Hoc-Soc they allowed the soccer players to participate and they could kick hard! One game I had 5 penalty shots, kicked by varsity players, and they hit them just to my right and hit the same spot on my right thigh such that the bruise I got from the stops lasted more than a week.

More about Big Al later, but things began to come together at BU for me, and I did watch TV on the weekends. And in October 1975, a new show came on: Saturday Nite Live, and it became another means for us to bond..