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 7th 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 9th 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.
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