71 – My Little Town – Simon and Garfunkel – 1975

My Little Town - Simon and Garfunkel

                Another song that instantly takes me back to Blackburn College, December 1975. This song appears on two albums that came out at the same time; Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years” and Art Garfunkel’s “Breakaway".

                I bought “Still Crazy…” and Cat Stevens’ “Numbers” at a small appliance store that also sold albums on the town square of Carlinville, Illinois. I can still picture the interior of that store, but for the life of me I can’t remember the name. As I wrote in my post on “Novim’s Nightmare” (#50), I took both albums back to my dorm room and listened to each with my big red Koss, plastic headphones.

                I bought my first Philip K. Dick sci-fi novel, “The Martian Time Slip,” the novel where Dick posits that autism was an altered state of time perception, in a newsstand, also on the town square, whose name I also cannot remember.

                I can, however, remember the names of the two bars we frequented, Johnny’s, a beer tap, and the Loomis House, where I recall spending many an evening “Happy Hour” drinking whiskey sours to the strains of Kansas (“Carry On My Wayward Son” specifically). In 1975-76, Illinois still had a 19 year old drinking law, so we had that going for us.

                We mainly did our drinking in our dorm rooms, the college provided funds each semester to each dorm to put on some sort of shindig, it was usually a keg-dominated event.

                I also recall coming back after X-mas break 1975 (when my grandfather passed away in his sleep at 71, the first real experience with death in my life up to that point) and drinking rum and coke until I puked. I still can’t stomach rum drinks to this day.

                I also recall having a shotgun contest (where you put an opening in the bottom of a can of beer with your “church key”, put the opening to your mouth, and then pop the top, allowing the beer to sluice down your throat at breakneck speed. I held the dubious honor of being able to shotgun a 16 ounce highboy faster than anybody else could do a 12 ounce. I could open my gullet and suck down the beer in 5-6 seconds) with Tom W. 

                We each shotgunned 2 cans, and then I drove up to the IGA (pronounced “igga”) to buy another six pack. We each shotgunned 3 more, then, plainly drunk, in another of my brilliant driving decisions (see also #63 – “It’s Money That I Love”) I drove back to the IGA to get another six pack, which we then proceeded to shotgun. Tom surrendered at that point (I couldn’t even see my car by that point, much less drive it back to the IGA).

                I climbed up into my loft (my dorm at BU, North Hall, had large openings where the roofline of the second floor met the peak of the roof, where one could place a mattress on a sheet of plywood, reached by a ladder, which then opened up the floor of the room for a red leather couch and chair that I had bought at Accutronics when I left, along with a full sized refrigerator) and several minutes later I became sick and only made it out of the loft into the hallway before I did the technicolor yawn, made up of 8 beers and some corn I had eaten at dinner.

                I felt bad about leaving that mess, but I could barely walk, even after I vacated my stomach. I spent an hour curled around the porcelain throne before I could get up and crawl back up into my loft.

                Sorry, Stan. (the student janitor who had to clean it up the next morning).

70 - Don’t Be Shy – Cat Stevens -1971

Don't Be Shy - Cat Stevens (opening sequence from Harold and Maude)

                In June of 1978 I was preparing for my trip to England (see 23- Year of the Cat) to attend a summer school in Medieval History at the University of Kent at Canterbury for 6 weeks. One night, I happened to turn on HBO to see what movie was on (HBO was pretty much only running movies; they had not gotten into original programming much then).

                I looked at the screen and saw a house with beautiful woodwork. A young man in a suit had placed an album on a turntable and I heard music that sounded like the instrumental coda at the end of Cat Stevens’ Lilywhite (see and listen to 67), and the singer was Cat Stevens! This was a song I had never heard before and I thought I knew his whole catalog.

The young man prepares a note and pins it to his suit, then lights a match with a cigarette lighter (?) and lights several candles in front of an ornate, divided glass window, then, as the song ends, he steps up onto a stool and pushes off from it, his legs swinging slowly back and forth.

Holy Crap! This was Harold and Maude from 1971. I had heard of that movie years before, but I had never seen it. The description of a 20 year old boy’s love affair with an 80 year old woman had never appealed to me, even though it was described as a comedy. I remember the description in the HBO booklet that came each month with the schedule said that the movie had played for two years in Minneapolis. (Figures… I have a somewhat hair-brained theory about people from Minnesota, maybe it’s the water in the 10,000 lakes, which has produced such quirky, interesting people as the Coen Brothers, Chris Pratt, Garrison Keillor, Terry Gilliam, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Leo Kottke, Al Franken, Tom Davis, Prince, and F. Scott Fitzgerald).

An older woman strides into the room and sits down at a phone, dials it, then looking over at the swinging young man says, “I suppose you think that’s very funny, Harold.” She ignores him as she makes a phone call canceling a hair dressing appointment with “Renee”, then, on completing the call, ignoring a gasping, twitching Harold, she says, “Oh…Dinner is at 8, Harold. And do try to be more vivacious.”

This is going to be pretty good, I thought. I hadn’t known much about the plot especially the various “suicides” Harold stages for his mother. They are elaborate and funny in a somewhat creepy way, though why he stages them is not explained until later in an emotional talk with Maude.

The next scene starts with Harold attending a funeral service in a small church (is that Cat Stevens there in a pew? It is!) where a sprightly old lady offers him a licorice candy and tries to engage him in conversation. Harold looks stricken as he tries to avoid her.  Then a marching band strikes up as the casket is placed into the hearse outside and there’s a close up of a coffin and it says “Elgin Permaseal”. Hey, my hometown!! In 1971, Elgin still had a little manufacturing left, among them the coffin business. JFK was transported from Dallas to DC in an Elgin casket.

As I continued to watch, I was pulled in. There were 7 Cat Stevens songs from “Mona Bone Jakon” and “Tea for the Tillerman” and another one I had never heard before, “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out.”

It was funny and ultimately life affirming and touching as Maude draws Harold out of his shell and away from his mother. A wonderful film. And it wasn’t until I saw it on a revival theater screen that I saw something that explained a lot about Maude. A quick shot of the concentration camp number tattooed on her forearm.

It was the first film I rented when I got my first VCR later that year. Rented at one of those little Fotomat kiosks where the first tape rentals were made from.

It remains one of my favorites.

69 – Mona Ray – Leo Kottke – 1974

Mona Ray - Leo Kottke

                As I wrote in my opening post (“What’s all this then?”), I came to Leo Kottke after reading  an interview in Stereo Review with Cat Stevens in 1974 where he gave Leo a shout out as an influence. The next time I went to Skipper’s record store in the Meadowdale Shopping center (home to Carson,Pirie, Scott and Weiboldt’s department stores and the Wintergarden indoor ice rink, all long gone), I specifically looked for Leo Kottke.

They had several Kottke albums in the Folk section: Ice Water, Greenhouse, 6 and 12 String Guitar, Leo Kottke/Peter Lang/John Fahey, and the one that caught my eye, Dreams and All That Stuff.

On the album cover a 29 year old Leo is seated next to a guy in a flannel shirt and Mortimer Snerd-like mask. I don’t know what the hell is going on; Leo seems to be laughing at something as he looks over at his friend.

So, of course, I bought it.

When I got home I opened the album and placed it on my Garrard Zero100 turntable and dropped the tone arm. Mona Ray is the first song on the album, so it was my first exposure to Kottke and it was so cool!! It is a beautiful song and it sounded like 3 or 4 guitarists were playing at once (It turns out Michael Johnson played a second guitar on it, but still…) with gracefully interweaving melodies.

And each song that followed was just as good, and some of the titles (“When Shrimps Learn to Whistle”, “Vertical Trees”, “Taking a Sandwich to a Feast”) seemed to go along with the cover photo. And anyone who’s seen Leo in concert knows his between songs patter is unlike any other. He’s funny and self-effacing and sometimes the story goes nowhere, but is funny none the less.

Back then I would listen to the album once or twice, then I would make a copy on my Sony (then Advent, then TEAC) cassette deck to play and also to play in my car. At that time, I had a 1967 Austin-Healy Sprite, with no radio, just a Radio Shack cassette player.

But, on my second or third playing, I dropped the tone arm and created a scratch which popped every time I played it and that pop remained when I made my cassette copy, so for 20 years, until I got a CD of the Best of Kottke, I always heard that pop and I still expect to hear it when I play my clean version.

My bedroom, when I lived at home, was above our garage and it was on the same electrical circuit. I still have a cassette of James Taylor, I think, where in the middle of a song, my dad came home and turned on the fluorescent light in the garage and the “zap-zap” became a part of the song.

Dreams and All That Stuff, and Mona Ray in particular, remains my favorite Leo Kottke album, even though it has no vocals, “Geese farts in a fog” he famously referred to his voice on the liner notes to the Greenhouse album.