I had started this post’s draft before I told Traci, my wife, about it : I had already drawn up the diagrams, and picked my list of neighbors and museum inductees, and wrote out more than 90 percent of the words, simply because I was elaborating on those musicians who meant something to me, personally.
When I told her about it, she said something along the lines of “Well, don’t I get a say in who our neighbors and museum inductees are?”, and I realized how she was correct in wanting a hand in that decision-making process.
I asked her who she’d like to see in the neighborhood and/or museum, she mentioned three names : Elton John and Phil Collins (both of British Pop) and George Strait (American Country).
Having already drawn up the neighborhood chart and museum list, I tried to see where I could squeeze them in, but I had already geographically added “houses that didn’t actually exist” to make room for those on my list that wouldn’t have fit in otherwise.
On top of that, I had a few more additions of my own that I couldn’t squeeze into the neighborhood, either. Among the unintentionally overlooked were the members of Fleetwood Mac : Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christie McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, and Stevie Nicks.
Moreover, not being a fan of anything other than single-family dwellings, I certainly wasn’t going to “build any apartment buildings” surrounding the park.
So, unless I “buy” more of the surrounding real estate, there will be no houses for them to move into.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t give their worthy names a mention and put them on the list of musicians who otherwise qualify for residence, but for whom, at the current moment, there are no available dwellings.
Nor does it mean, that they can’t put on a show in the band shell in the interim.
Folks, allow me to introduce eight future additions to the neighborhood : Elton John, Phil Collins, George Strait, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christie McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, and Stevie Nicks.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Comparing Parks
—A. Our Current Park
—B. My Old Park ( Ehlert Park )
II. Our New Park
—A. What I Do NOT Want ( Ravinia Style—Yuck!)
——1. A PROFILE View of the Three Main Layout Designs
———[a] Typical Layout of Outdoor Music Venues
———[b] Ravinia’s Layout—PROFILE View
———[c]. Ravinia’s Layout—GROUND View (Adding Insult To Injury)
—B. What I DO Want : If You Build It, They Will Come
——1.The Four Main Structures/Areas
———[a] The Band Shell
———[b] The Seating / Picnic Area
———[c] Concession Stands / Public Bathrooms Area
———[d] The Museum
——2. Naming the Park, The Band Shell, And Museum
III. Our New Neighborhood
I. Comparing Parks
A. Our Current Park
My wife, Traci, and I live by a decent-sized park : approximately two blocks long by one block wide.
Every day, the park gets used either by individuals walking their dogs, or kids playing on the swings, slides, and monkey bars, or even groups playing baseball on one of the two diamonds, or having a party in one of the two pavilions.
Occasionally, once to twice a year, the village even hosts a “Movie in the Park” night, where they erect a projection screen, and people picnic on the lawn watching whatever movie is being featured that night.
Outside of those activities, the park has never actually been used for any really huge events, such as concerts.
Although it’s rarely packed, it’s also rarely empty—there’s always someone, somewhere .
B. My Old Park ( Ehlert Park )
In contrast, would be another park that I used to hang out in constantly, when I was kid.
It’s called “Ehlert Park” and it’s located in a small suburb on the near west side of Chicago : Brookfield, Illinois.
Unlike our park, Ehlert Park (which is only slightly larger than ours) has been used for hosting events that would draw much larger crowds than our park would ever likely see. I saw various 70’s bands such as “The Guess Who”, “Rare Earth” and “Bad Company” play there.
Ehlert was also the scene of countless carnivals over the years, as well.
I took one of my first official dates there when I was 11 or 12 years old, as we went on all the rides, and played all the gallery games, and what-not.
As a kid musician, my imagination used to have me daydreaming that I’d one day make it big, and perform a concert in Ehlert Park (and the crowd goes wild).
Well, those days are long gone—almost 50 years ago, now!
But, if I could , would I still play a show at Ehlert Park?
Absolutely!
But, the park by my current house is much closer, although not quite as large. But that’s fine with me, since I wouldn’t need that much space.
In an ideal scenario, all the houses surrounding the park—except ours, of course—would be unoccupied, and I would be free to invite all my favorite musicians to live in these houses and create a MUSICAL COMMUNITY.
That brings up two questions :
[1] How would I set up the park to create a “Musical Theme” to the area?; and
[2] Who would I invite to live in this musical community?
II. Our New Park
Well, to begin with, I’m going to have to admit that, when it comes to architectural talents, I’m not exactly “Frank Lloyd Wright”, but the ideas, as depicted in the drawings below, should still suffice in giving one a rough idea of what my ultimate goals are.
My Musical Neighborhood
A. What I Do NOT Want ( Ravinia Style—Yuck!)
The one thing I do NOT want to do, is create another monstrosity like Ravinia Music Theater. It’s been at least 20 years since I was last there, so they might have fixed the problem by now, but, my guess is, they haven’t, because they don’t see it as a problem; in fact, they deliberately erected it with the problem as part of the design—they must’ve thought it gave the place it’s….”charm”, or whatever euphemism they use to describe the place.
Specifically, the glaring problem is that people on the lawn, are NOT ALLOWED to see the show—literally, NOT allowed!
How so?
Almost every outdoor music venue (that’s on an incline) such as the old World Music Theater (or whatever corporation it’s named after today) and, say, the former Poplar Creek, people on the lawn CAN see the stage ( albeit from a distance; and with binoculars, one can see up close, but at least the stage is visible, nonetheless) .
But Ravinia?
They punish their customers on the lawn, by DELIBERATELY PREVENTING them from visually seeing the concert (i.e., the stage AND the musicians playing on that stage).
RAVINIA TO LAWN CUSTOMERS : “Who do you think you are to expect to see the stage if you didn’t buy a pavilion seat? You bought a lawn ticket, so you will be punished by having your view blocked.”
“Wow! And you expect us to give you more business after this crap?” I wanted to say to the people who owned Ravinia in a letter of disgust.
I don’t know if the group of people I warned about wasting their money on Ravinia tickets, told their friends and spread the word, but I made sure that I never gave Ravinia a good review, and as long as the lawn’s view is blocked, I never will.
Nor am I required to.
“What a piece of shit those brains are that thought that nightmare up!” I would angrily gripe, when asked what I thought of Ravinia.
“They raised the pavilion up six feet higher than the lawn, and the wall that the chairs (under the pavilion) are mounted on are higher than the lawn people’s height. Unless the people on the lawn are 14 feet tall, their view of the stage is COMPLETELY and DELIBERATELY blocked. Wow! That’s retarded…or evil…or both.”
1. A PROFILE View of the Three Main Layout Designs
Per my depiction below, one can see ( i.e., in profile ) the arrangements of three typical venue designs :
[1] the upper left diagram is a typical layout you’d see at a venue where the stage is at the bottom of an incline like the aforementioned former World Music Theater in Tinley Park, Illinois, or the long-since-removed Poplar Creek Music Theater, formerly in Hoffman Estates, Illinois;
[2] the upper right drawing is what Ravinia provided for its second-class lawn customers; and
[3] the bottom illustration is a raised-stage design I’d likely use where the stage, seating area, and lawn are all on the same plane—raise the stage, NOT the pavilion.
Three Common Venue Layouts ( in profile )
[a] Typical Layout of Outdoor Music Venues—Aerial & Profile Views
In the Profile View portion of the the diagram below, it’s shown that the view of the people on the lawn is UN-obstructed, as they can see over the heads of those sitting in the pavilion; heck, they can see over their heads even if the pavilion crowd is standing on its feet, which happens all the time when they’re dancing in place.
Moreover, in the Aerial View portion of the diagram, the ability of the lawn audience to see over the heads of the pavilion audience applies throughout the entire span of the lawn.
Normal Layout—Aerial and Profile Views
[b]. Ravinia’s Layout—PROFILE View
Ravinia Layout, Profile View
In contrast, is Ravinia’s layout, where the raised pavilion’s obstruction of the lawn audience’s view is tantamount to erecting a 20-foot wall, with a banner that spans the entire distance of the pavilion that reads, “Sucka!”
I just can’t see that as “gratitude” on Ravinia’s part toward their lawn customers; it felt MORE like CONTEMPT!
It’s like going to a small breakfast diner, and sitting at the counter and ordering “just a coffee”, only to find out that the woman behind the counter that poured your cup of coffee, SPIT IN IT, to punish you for not ordering a complete breakfast.
That’s NOT how you thank your customers for patronizing your business.
It seems that Ravinia does exactly that–buy a pavilion ticket, or get insulted for just buying lawn tickets.
“I have an idea! How about NEVER buying ANY tickets for ANY show at your place? I like it. I think I’ll put that plan in place immediately.” was, and still is, my attitude toward that COMPLETELY UNGRATEFUL venue.
[c] Ravinia’s Layout—GROUND View (Adding Insult To Injury)
To make matters worse, a ground view of the layout, shows how FUTILE it was to try to “SNEAK A PEEK” down the aisles that separated the pavilion into sections.
Ravinia Layout—Ground View, Looking toward the stage (that you can’t see)
The aisles where the pavilion people enter the pavilion ( after returning from the bathrooms or concession stands or wherever) theoretically offer the lawn people an opportunity to sneak a peek at what little tiny fragments of the stage you’d expect to be visible from the sidewalk.
But no!
The pavilion’s roof has to be held up in the air by something physical—in this case, the roof support posts, which BLOCKED easily 60 to 70 percent of the view down the entrance aisles.
That means you have ONLY a “sliver” of space ( around the support poles ) to see fragments of the stage, right?
Wrong again.
THAT is where the Andy Frain or Ravinia employees stand.
THEY BLOCK the slivers.
So, the raised platforms block 90 percent of the view; the roof’s support posts block eight more percent; and the employees block the remaining two percent.
Percentage of view blocked = 100 percent.
You see NOTHING!
So, the Happy Yellow faces are, of course, the pavilion customers who can hear AND SEE the concert.
The Frowning Red faces are the angry people who realize they can’t see the show.
The Green Smiley faces are the Andy Frain/Ravinia-employed people making sure the lawn people are NOT enjoying the show, by making sure they can’t see ANY of it!
What REALLY convinced me to NEVER frequent that place again was when I was trying to sneak those peeks at the stage by peering into the pavilion entrances, I saw on ALL of those SUPPORT POSTS, large signs that simply had “NO!” in a font size I’m going to guess at 96, maybe larger, and then, a LIST of things NOT allowed, such as smoking, drinking eating, talking, photography….”
I couldn’t even finish the list, I was so taken aback by their idea of a “good” time at Ravinia :
[A] If you buy LAWN tickets, you can NOT SEE the show; but
[B] if you buy PAVILION tickets, you can NOT ENJOY the show!
“Hmmm…I don’t think I’m gonna make this mistake again.” was what I thought the VERY MOMENT I stopped reading the laundry list of “no-no’s”, as defined by Ravinia’s management.
B. What I DO Want : If You Build It, They Will Come
1. The Four Main Structures/Areas
I would definitely want to see at least four structures erected : [a] a band shell; [b] a seating/ picnic area; [c] an area for concession stands and public bathrooms; and [d] A museum dedicated to the memories of all those music-related heroes whom I would love to honor posthumously.
[a] The Band Shell
Starting with the band shell, it would obviously have to be raised a certain amount so people farther back in the audience could see the stage—since the farther back a spectator is—on level ground—the more the stage has to be raised to be seen from that spectator’s distance.
Although it’s the music, not the band shell, that I want to see as special, I’d be willing to commission some kind of mural that reflects the pre-1980’s era to be painted on both the inner side and the outer side of the shell.
Perhaps, a tribute to the bands’ album covers on the outer side, and portraits of the musicians, themselves, on the inner side, might be appropriate—maybe, with a Salvatore Dali-style presentation to the artwork.
[b] The Seating / Picnic Area
Having spent a good chunk of space in this post haranguing the designers of the Ravinia Music Theater for their “lawn customer”-hating layout of the venue, it’s obvious that I’d definitely want to ensure that the people on the lawn can still see the stage above the heads of those sitting in the the seating area—even if they’re standing up, and dancing in place.
[c] Concession Stands / Public Bathrooms Area
The idea of any kind of outdoor event not being accompanied by the availability food and drink is not much of an event.
Thus, concession stands offering food and beer and non-alcoholic drinks would be erected for sure.
Obviously, with food and drink going “in”, there’s eventually going to be the very same items coming “out”, so plenty of bathrooms would also be provided.
[d] The Museum
No one lives forever, even if they’re among the greats.
When they get to the point that they can no longer provide us with entertainment, because they “have left the building” for good, the way Elvis did, the least we can do is posthumously show them our gratitude for posterity.
So, some kind of tribute in the form of a museum would appear to be one appropriate way to show our gratitude for such contributions that will never be repeated by any other musicians.
2. Naming the Park, Band Shell, And Museum
Naming these three attractions is something I have not yet came to a final decision on yet.
If they were actual entities, and I had money to offer, I’d definitely do a contest and offer a prize to the contributor of the winning names.
But both being imaginary, and myself having no spare cash to offer, I’m going to be on my own in that pursuit.
Toward that goal, I want the park, the band shell, and the museum, to all have separate names, but, also be conceptually connected in some way.
That is the challenge.
I find the very idea of putting the name “up for sale” the way many theaters and sports parks are named these days more than offensive.
“Corporate Park” : doesn’t that just make you want to shoot the CEO of the corporation that “bought” the naming rights?
The music has nothing to do with Goliacorp’s banking services or life insurance offerings.
It’s a park, with amenities, that’s built for music—not banking or insurance—and needs to be named accordingly.
For the three entities I was thinking of names along the lines of :
[a] The Jam Shell…..for the band shell
[b] The Tributorium for the museum; and
[c] Magnum Park for the park (Originally, I toyed with the idea of “Magnum Opus”, which means “Greatest Work”, which is also my all-time favorite song from Kansas, but I subsequently decided to drop the “Opus” )
III. Our New Neighborhood
With the park being completely built, in all the relevant ways, it’s now time to magically move my favorite musicians into all the vacant houses.
Who would I love to see residing in these homes?
The multiple answers to that singular question are all in the neighborhood diagram under Section II, “Our New Neighborhood”.
For the most part, 99% of the houses are labeled with a single occupant
The exception to the “single occupant” listings are those who are my next-door neighbors, and/or living on the same block.
Specifically, our next door neighbors on both sides on our house are couples (i.e., Ritchie Blackmore/Candace Night and Robert Fripp/Toyah Wilcox).
This is because they are the only ones that I was aware of whose spouses were also musicians , whether their careers were in conjunction with, or independent of, their husband’s careers.
Either way, Candace and Toyah have these personalities that are so pleasant to me, that I felt their very personas needed to have a spotlight put on them, as well.
And…next to Robert and Toyah, is another unknown couple by the name of Martin Schnella and Melanie Mau, who I’ve seen on YouTube playing some covers (i.e., Yes’ “Onward”, and Kansas’ “Miracles Out Of Nowhere”) that I would never envision anyone else ever playing. When I saw them covering those songs, I immediately rubber stamped their membership into the neighborhood.
I. The Confirmation I NEVER Expected…But Was Glad TO Hear!
II. 70’s Standards Dropped
III. The Four Must-Haves!
—–A. “ALL” available keyboards sounds
———-1. TWO Ricks : Perfect Examples : Rick Wright & Rick Wakeman
———-2. The Exact Opposite
—————a. Piano-Only Players
—————b. Organ-Only Players
—————c. Synth-Only Players
—–B. They Have BOTH Guitars : Acoustic AND Electric—NOT Just One or the Other
———-1. Acoustics & The “Stays Acoustic Principle”
———-2. Electric Guitars & Effects
—–C. Great Lyrics & Vocals
———-[1] GOOD LYRICS—The Stories of : [i] Bernie Taupin/Elton John; and [ii] Neil Peart/Geddy Lee.
———-[2] GOOD VOCALS—Sing, Don’t Whisper, or Scream!
—————a. FOUR “ABSOLUTELY NOTS”
——————–[i] Lou Reed
——————–[ii] Ian Drury and the Blockheads
——————–[iii] ALL Rap—NOT ONE SYLLABLE
——————–[iv] Metal Harmonizered Tracks
—————b. STRONG, “DIAPHRAGMIC” VOCALS
——————–[i] Ian Gillan (Deep Purple )
——————–[ii] Burton Cummings ( The Guess Who )
——————–[iii]Ronnie James Dio (Rainbow ONLY)
IV. Conclusion
I. The CONFIRMATION…I Never Expected But Was Glad To Hear!
If it wasn’t for YouTube, I would have NEVER WITNESSED with my own two eyes and ears, that some of my PERSONAL HEROES in the realm of guitarists, had basically the SAME OPINION about 80’s music that I’ve had since the very day that “mu-sick” started getting played on radio stations in 1978.
In one interview, Jeff Beck was asked a question about some of the bands of the 1980’s, and his answer was , “Well, I’ve always been a bit derogatory about eighties music…“
My jaw dropped!
“Wow! Did he actually say that? Really?” I thought with relief that it “wasn’t just my imagination”, or some isolated case of simple bias on my part against an art form.
I also heard Steve Morse (Dregs / Deep Purple) call it “shit music“.
“Woo hoo! Another one! Wow! I’m NOT alone in my disgust toward 80’s music.” I thought rejoicingly. “I’m on a roll here!”
Then I heard Ritchie Blackmore say about punk, specifically, (but he didn’t elaborate on “new wave” or any of the other genres of that era) : “I don’t get it.”
Blackmore also mentioned that he was talking to Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull) and that he agreed (although I didn’t actually hear Ian say those words—but based on the music that Ian wrote, which is TOTALLY lacking in “punk” style, I can see that Ian never had any tendencies toward writing that style of…”music”; so, I’m betting Blackmore wasn’t lying; why would he?).
But that was FOUR heroes of mine, that confirmed my suspicions.
For me, there was something that PRE-80’s music had, that 80’s music not only did NOT have, but almost overtly fought against enthusiastically.
What were those missing elements, that the new fad bands were treating like a “leper” ?
II. 70’s Standards Dropped
Well, TWO bands SET THE STANDARD for me at that time:
[1] Led Zeppelin—with their FOUR albums: [a] II; [b] III, [c] IV; and [d] “Physical Graffitti“; and
[2] Pink Floyd—with their FOUR albums : [a] “Meddle“; [b] “Dark Side Of The Moon“; [c] “Wish You Were Here“; and [d] “Animals“.
NO, it wasn’t the “compositions”, per se, (although I did LOVE them—that goes without saying) but RATHER…
III. The FOUR “Must Haves”
Specifically, on all those albums there are FOURABSOLUTELY MUST-HAVES!
For me, when it comes to these standards, there can be NO NEGOTIATION at ANY time, for ANY reason, under ANY circumstance —even an UN-plugged act has PIANO, so, NO EXCUSE to not have “keyboards”—I’ve heard people try to use the “unplugged” concept as an pseudo-justification for NOT having a keyboard player.
No piano player? No show!
Anyway, the FOUR must haves are :
[A] they use “ALL” available keyboards sounds;
[B] they have BOTHguitars—acoustic AND (NOT “or”) electric;
[C] they have good VOCALS ; and
[D] They have good LYRICS
It’s not only entirely possible to have :
—[1] a good singer who sings shitty lyrics—since there is an OVER-abundance of those singers out there; but also
—[2] to have a a good lyricist who CAN’T Sing very well–they’re out there, as well.
To be able to do one but not the other is JUST AS BAD as NOT being able to do either. I don’t want to work with either one.
I NEED BOTH —good voice and good lyrics—otherwise I’m not going to show up for rehearsals, much less an actual public gig.
If ANY of those FOUR elements are missing, it’s an automatic deal-breaker right there, because I’m not interested in being bored to death for two to four hours per rehearsal or gig.
A. “ALL” available keyboards sounds
There are THREE “families” of keyboard timbres that I insist on : [a] Pianos; [b] Organs; and [c] Synths / Mellotrons.
Pretty much ALL of today’s workstations (e.g., Roland® Fantom 8; Korg® Kronos) and those for that past 30 years, contain ALL THREE families of sounds.
The usual sequence in their Preset banks begins with acousticpianos, then electricpianos, chromatic percussion, organs, orchestral sounds i (i.e., individual violins, violas, cellos, string sections, saxophones, trumpets, trombones, brass sections), then pads, then leads, then percussion, and then usually culminating with sound effects (e.g., wind; gun shot; guitar string squeak; etc).
Pick any normal sound and there’s an awesome chance that keyboard has that sound already in a patch, ready to go, or as an element that you can use to build and create your own sounds.
Everything, but the kitchen sink, is in that bank of sounds.
Ergo, there is NO NEED to buy MULTIPLE separate keyboards such as an acoustic piano; a Fender Rhodes; a Hammond B-3; and a Moog—essentially the better part of $20,000 in gear—not counting the Steinway!
Instead, ONLY ONE new $2,000 to $4,000 (or cheaper, if used) workstation and you’re good to go; and, if all those sounds are already in there, the tendency to NOT use as many as possible, is simply the keyboardist admitting that he or she ( albeit trained in technique ) is woefully lacking in creativity and imagination.
And there’s PLENTY of keyboardists like that. Not everyone can be virtuoso; some players are COMPLETELY AVERAGE.
And maybe creativity and imagination are NOT among a given player’s “priorities”; and that’s perfectly fine in the “eyes of God”, and very common indeed, but, to me, CREATIVITY and IMAGINATION are THE ONLY priorities—they trump technique, every single time.
In contrast, is the keyboardist who DOES use ALL the sounds because he IS creative enough to use them. That’s the keyboardist I want to jam with—I wish I could “build” my own “Rick Wright”
1. TWO Ricks : Perfect Examples : Rick Wright & Rick Wakeman
The Late, GREAT Rick Wright of Pink Floyd used ALL three in the span of just TWO songs : [1] “Us and Them”; and [2] “Any Colour You Like”, both of which are on “Dark Side of The Moon”.
On those two tracks, Rick BEGINS “Us and Them” with an organ that gets FADED in gradually; then, in the MIDDLE of that song, he plays an acoustic PIANO solo ( opposite a sax solo by Dick Perry); and, finally, going into “Any Colour You Like“, he uses a SYNTH for that solo.
ALL THREE in less than 10 minutes time.
I just can’t fathom how any keyboardist would “not want” that smorgasbord of timbres at his or her disposal to use.
But those types of “Nah-I’m-good-with-just-one-or-two-sounds” keyboardists are out there; in fact, they outnumber the creative ones to a discouraging degree.
I know, I’ve been looking for a creative one, for DECADES—and still no sign of one.
“Rick Wrights” are RARE!
Another “Rick” is Rick Wakeman of Yes. His song, “The Six Wives of King Henry VIII” used ALL the sounds in ONE song.
If I could play ONLY ONE song on the keyboards, THAT would be it!
Phenomenal composition!
2. The Exact Opposite :
***** a. Piano-Only Players *****
Most of them are geared toward either some form of blues or jazz or honky tonk or lounge music, ALL of which definitely have a place in a good set list, no doubt, but they can’t be the ONLY sounds in the ENTIRE set; that would be, timbre-wise, super monotonous.
To be sure, piano-only players are just as talented as any other player, in terms of mastery of their technique, and I’ve seen many of them play some breathtakingly awesome compositions, with some of the most awesome riffs. I’m NOT denying that at all.
But even a hundred AWESOME riffs played USING THE EXACT SAME SOUND for all of them, is just plain yuck to me! It doesn’t work for me. It’s almost OFFENSIVELY BORING!
There MUST be some VARIETY in the timbres—use acoustic pianos sounds on some songs, and maybe electric on others. Maybe throw some tremolo on an electric piano to get that “No Quarter” sound; maybe throw in a delay on yet another tune, to give it some kind of rhythmic vibe.
Can’t just use “one sound” from start to finish—and many piano-players are completely fine with that limitation; I can NOT get inspired by being boxed in like that. I need to breathe!
***** b. Organ-Only Players *****
I have not encountered very many of these, but EVERY SINGLE ONE of them was either [a] Strictly blues; [b] traditional Jazz; or [c] gospel.
Not one—NOT ONE!—thought like Jon Lord (Deep Purple), for example, in the sense of piping their Hammond B3 into a Marshall® 100-watt head, for that “Machine Head” or “Made in Japan” sound.
They were ALL WAY TOO STAID and reserved in their attitude. There were ZERO ROCKERS! NONE!
Not interested, thanks.
***** c. Synth-Only Players *****
These are the WORST, since they either CAN’T or WON’T play any blues or jazz, when the Blues Scale is at the heart of at least a third of the set list I want to play.
These guys are “synth pop” types—and 80’s music is at the heart of THEIR art form.
Remove the 80’s element, and they’re dead in the water, because you just tore up their entire set list.
Telling them, “No 80’s” is like telling B. B. King, “No Blues”—it’s just not going to work without that KEY ELEMENT of the music.
So, ALL three timbre families (pianos, organs, and synths) ABSOLUTELY MUST be used in the music, otherwise, it’s not going to work for me.
B. They Have BOTH Guitars : Acoustic AND Electric (NOT Just One or the Other)
I have no official statistics to base this on, just a personal observation that MORE THAN 90 percent of garage bands do NOT have BOTH in their equipment list.
Some bands might start out with just an acoustic, and they make their way up to incorporating an electric guitar into their arsenal; but those, that start with an ELECTRIC, frequently do NOT add an acoustic to the mix later on. They started as ALL Electric, and they stay all electric.
Yuck! NO Thanks.
The ONLY TWO bands I dig that are electric only are King Crimson and Deep Purple.
All the others are just 3-chord (I-III-IV, for metalheads; I-IV-V, for blues, rock and country fans; Im-VII-VI for Pop bands), garage bands, and that sucks both ass cheeks.
I don’t want any part of those bands.
As previously mentioned, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd are BOTH known for producing albums that have BOTH acoustic and electric—and I will accept NOTHING LESS!
1. Acoustics & The “Stays Acoustic Principle”
Merely having an acoustic guitar in your arsenal, is NOT, in and of itself, some kind of an “achievement” in music, any more than having a spoon in your utensil drawer in the kitchen is an achievement in the “culinary sciences”—acoustic guitars, like spoons, are merely inanimate objects that have ZERO value …UNLESS you know how and when to use them, and how NOT to use them.
For instance, one thing that I’ve noticed metal bands are known for, is that most of them ( that have enough class to incorporate acoustic guitars into their compositions ), have this disappointingly nasty habit of ENDING EVERY ACOUSTIC song with a “screaming” electric guitar solo…almost never fails.
In contrast, would be Zeppelin’s “Going To California” or “Battle Of Evermore” BOTH of which STAY ACOUSTIC all the way through to the end!–there’s no “Stairway to Heaven” guitar solo at the coda.
To be sure, “Stairway To Heaven” DOES end with an awesome electric guitar finish, but the other two songs DO NOT follow suit—they STAY ACOUSTIC to the END!
Metalheads frequently have difficulty resisting the urge to “electrify” EVERY ENDING. Yuck!
I absolutely HATE THAT APPROACH!
MIX IT UP!
2. Electric Guitars & Effects
Because he’s a hunter, and OPENLY DEFENDS the SECOND AMENDMENT, I really like Ted Nugent’s attitude toward THAT stuff, but guns aren’t music or albums, which Ted also has been producing for decades.
But Ted’s MUSIC? Eh.
Don’t get me wrong, I grew up on his debut album with “Stranglehold“, “Motor City Madhouse“, “Just What The Doctor Ordered“, and “Storm Troopers“, and I have that album, and I LOVE that album—as far as Garage rockis concerned, it was a masterpiece. BUT….
AFTER that album? Nah. If you heard the FIRST album; you’re heard them all.
And that’s the problem, with a guitar that uses the SAME SOUND on EVERY SONG! It’s a MONOTONE that never changes.
That’s what I’m trying to avoid.
On the back of his debut album, in the liner notes, Ted mentions something along the lines that he does NOT use “any toys to mess up the signal”.
Well, those toys are what gives the guitar DIFFERENT sounds, for DIFFERENT songs with DIFFERENT moods.
Not “all” songs ( with an ELECTRIC guitar as the main instrument) have to be processed with as much distortion or overdrive or fuzz as possible., as though it was a death metal band.
Some songs call for a CLEAN guitar sound; others, with chorus, or flanger or , delay.
NOT “just” clean versus distortion—or worse yet, “only distortion”; THAT would definitely suck.
C. Great Lyrics & Vocals
What you sing and how you sing it are two completely separate concepts, since one can be either :
[a] a good lyricist who sucks at singing; or
[b] a good singer who can’t write decent lyrics.
Both types of people exist.
[1] GOOD LYRICS—The Stories of : [i] Bernie Taupin/Elton John; and [ii] Neil Peart/Geddy Lee.
For me, the ABSOLUTE WORST LYRICS OF ALL TIME! are :
[A]”Yeah, yeah, yeah, baby, baby, baby, come on, come on, come on, and rock me all night long”, or
[B] “Girl, you’re so fine.”
There oughtta be a law against writing lyrics THAT SHITTY!.
I hate that crap! I really do.
Although a given singer might be awesome in singing quality, those LYRICS take ZERO TALENT to write; so, to me, a “great voice singing shitty lyrics” is a joke—and there’s PLENTY of them out there doing just that.
If a singer is good at singing but not at writing lyrics, or vice versa, what’s the point?
The TWO exceptions I can think of where a person did not have both talents but was still OK, was EARLY 70’s Elton John, because he had a GIFTED person writing his lyrics : Bernie Taupin.
Take Bernie out of the picture, and Elton John sucked, big time.
The other band ? Rush.
Geddy had pipes to sing with, but WELL-READ Neil provided the LYRICS
I’ve actually boycotted one music-oriented magazine that I never bought in the first place, but I never had anything against it, either, per se, except that it never included any scores or tabs of songs like other magazines such as “Guitar World” or “Acoustic Guitarist” do.
This magazine didn’t : “Revolver”.
So, I never had any use for the magazine to begin with, but when I saw a particular article, I knew I’d NEVER dirty my fingers touching the magazine again.
The article ? Something along the lines of “Worst Lyricists of all time.”
Being intrigued, I grabbed the “ragazine” off the rack, opened it to the featured article, and one of the FIRST names mentioned, was Neil Peart’s.
“Seriously?” I thought to myself. “This weirdo probably had a Flock of Seagulls haircut and thought eighties music was “quality” writing.
Shaking my head at this person’s questionable assessments, I placed the magazine back in the rack with the very tips of my fingers, and, since this was pre-Covid, there was no bottle of hand sanitizer anywhere nearby for me to cleanse my hands of the contamination that is Revolver magazine.
But I made up for it when I got home by washing my hands thoroughly not for 20 seconds, but for 20 MINUTES—I didn’t want to take ANY CHANCES!
I can still almost smell the “sewage leak” that was emitted from opening that magazine’s pages. Gives me the creeps just thinking about it.
[2] GOOD VOCALS—SING, DON’T WHISPER, or SCREAM!
I’ve seen more than one ad in the musicians’ classifieds where a band is looking for a vocalist, and one of the most common “no’s” they list is “no screamers”.
On the one hand, I can relate to where they’re coming from if they’re trying to avoid a Motorhead-type, “Lemmy” singer, whose singing sounds like it’s VERY FORCED, and the veins in the singer’s bright red forehead are enlarged because the blood supply is maximized during the singer’s near-heart attack performance.
Unfortunately, the bands that usually stipulate their aversion to screamers, are usually alt-rock type bands where the singer BARELY sings.
What might be happening there, is the band is trying to replace their previous singer—who couldn’t sing, in the first place.
So, they’re trying to replace him with another singer who is VERY WEAK in the vocals department.
A WEAK singer is the goal. Why someone would want that, is beyond me.
***** a. FOUR “ABSOLUTELY NOTS” *****
[i] Lou Reed
One song where I found the singer’s vocals to be VERY UNpleasant was Lou Reed on “Take a Walk On The Wild Side” where he just “talks UN-energetically” while reciting the lyrics.
THAT type of singing just creeps me out.
I can only think of a few songs where the vocalist is “talking” and NOT singing, and it didn’t bother me.
Among them would be Commander Cody’s, “Hot Rod Lincoln” which is an AWESOME STORY to “recite”; and Charlie Daniels’ “Uneasy Rider”.
There might be others of that same genre that I’ve not yet heard, that I would otherwise like if I did encountered them.
But outside of those few possibilities, I’m NOT into a quiet, staid vocal track. Weak singers SUCK! Yuck!
[ii] Ian Drury and the Blockheads
Another one is Ian Drury and the Blockheads, “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll”. Although I really dig the phrase, itself, the way the band delivers the message is just downright UGLY!
Eh! Yuck! I absolutely hate that type of singing; it’s only one notch above Lou Reed’s singing—and, believe me, that minor elevation in status does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for raising that singing out of the hell it belongs in—Ian just gets to stand on Lou’s back; but it’s still VERY MUCH in hell, as far as I’m concerned.
[iii] ALL Rap—NOT ONE SYLLABLE
I’m not sure any elaboration is even necessary to explain my aversion to this “crap”—which, interestingly, rhymes with rap.
Yuck!
[iv] Metal Harmonizered Tracks
Although I’m not fully-informed on the subject of the Eventide Harmonizer, I’ve been told by a few people that metal bands love to use the harmonizer to “robotize” the vocal tracks, in a manner sounding similar to Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” (the “I am Iron Man”) part of the song.
I wasn’t wasn’t very big on that effect even when Sabbath used it; and I was even LESS interested when other bands tried doing the same thing—especially since, when Ozzy did it, it was only for the introduction to the song. and NOT the WHOLE song, which many metal bands have done. Yuck!
A friend of mine, Jeff, was in a metal band, and he let me listen to one of their tracks with the Harmonizer effect in full “robot” mode. What’s funny, is that Jeff was a short guy, like myself—5’5″—and, from his height, you’d get the idea that he sang in the upper ranges like Frankie Valli, but after listening to the harmonizered vocal track, you get the image in your head that he’s ten feet tall, and sounds like the devil, himself.
How deceptive of that device to portray someone’s “talent” as LARGER than it really is.
Another metal guitarist that I worked with, frequently had his band’s demo tape playing over his Bluetooth at his work station, and many, if not most, of the songs contained harmonizered vocal tracks.
Yuck! It’s unpleasant to hear one track; annoying to hear two; unbearable to hear three or more.
Sorry, so NO whispered “Lou Reed” tracks; NO punkified “Ian Drury” tracks; No “rap” tracks; and NO “metalized/harmonizered” vocal tracks—NOT on any stage I’m playing on.
* b. STRONG, “DIAPHRAGMIC” VOCALS *
On the other hand, although I’m not into Lemmy screamers, STRONG vocals are an ABSOLUTE MUST.
A WELL-PLACED shout here and there CAN serve to be very entertaining—just “screaming from start to finish” is a TERRIBLE recipe for music, as far as I’m concerned.
[i] Ian Gillan ( Deep Purple )
One vocalist who had INCREDIBLE RANGE was Ian Gillan of Deep Purple. When I heard him on their studio album, “Machine Head”, I was impressed enough, but when I heard him on their live album, “Made In Japan”, THAT RECORDING “SET IN CONCRETE” what I expected from a vocalist.
For example, Ian opens up “Strange Kind of Woman” with a screamed “Al-right!”, and guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, does his opening riff, and the song just unfolds with such smoothness, and rolls into this IMPROV’D noodling between Ritchie and Ian, toward the end of the song.
Whatever Ritchie plays, Ian copies with his voice, and vice versa.
Just an awesome performance! In fact, the WHOLE album is a FIVE star performance…on a FOUR-star scale!
[ii] Burton Cummings ( The Guess Who )
This guy, too! Wow! I just loved his singing. 98 percent was singing, but he, too, was known for well-placed shouts and screams—and he could also sing , softly without it being a “weak” whisper.
[iii] Ronnie James Dio ( Rainbow ONLY )
I wrote “Rainbow ONLY” because although his singing didn’t change when he went solo, the quality of his compositions SUFFERED GREATLY.
For me his solo “Holy Diver” stuff just didn’t compare (even remotely) to what he did with Ritchie Blackmore in the band Rainbow ( The three albums that set another standard for me were : “Long Live Rock And Roll”, “Rainbow Rising”, and “Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow”).
Although I will always be mesmerized by his vocal abilities, I lost all respect for his tastes in music, when, during one interview on YouTube, he held up a copy of “Rainbow Rising” and called it something along the lines of “self-indulgent crap”, and since THAT album is one of my ALL-time favorite albums, NOT liking it, strikes me as an assessment I could not relate to in the slightest.
To think that “Holy Diver” was better music than “Rainbow Rising”, took a lot of the shine off for me when it came to evaluating Ronnie James Dio as a song WRITER—he was still an awesome singer!
IV. Conclusion
So, that’s it. Those are my MINIMUM standards for being in a band.
I know, nowadays, having minimum standards is tantamount to “discrimination” (LOL—what a joke that mindset is).
But, having NO keyboards? ONLY one guitar sound? “Come-on-Baby-and-Rock-me-all-night-long” type of lyrics? Constantly whispering or screaming vocals?
Where’s the fire exit? I have to escape that nightmare!
IV. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS—EVEN SOME 70’s BANDS GOT INFECTED WITH THE 80’s DISEASE
V. NO GUITAR-ONLY GARAGE BANDS
VI. CONCLUSION
I. INTRODUCTION
The main reason I decided to write this TWO-part blog was because on two separate occasions, when the bands I played in were informed, in advance, that I did not want to perform any 80’s music, they somehow found a way to do exactly that anyway—and both times I deliberately “ruined” the performance.
The first time was just a rehearsal, and the second was an actual public performance.
1. The Rehearsal
One guitarist, Zach, said that, he, too, was not fond of 80’s music.
He could’ve fooled me.
At our second rehearsal, about four or five songs into the set, he said, “Alright, let’s do, Queen’s ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love ‘ “, and I immediately said, “That’s 80’s music, dude.”, to which he replied, “No, it isn’t! Came out in the seventies, like…seventy-eight, or seventy-nine.”
“Yeah, that is eighties music!” I countered, “just because it came out only weeks or months, or even two years before the eighties officially started, doesn’t mean it didn’t have that eighties sound! I’m NOT talking about songs that were officially stamped ‘released in the eighties’, or whatever; I’m talking about music that has that eighties sound; that sound that people who otherwise like eighties music will say ‘it fits right in’ with the mix. I mean, if you played Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’, or Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, that’s immediately going to be deemed non-eighties; but ‘A Crazy Little Thing Called Love?’ That’s very eighties-ish! Fits right in!”
My remarks really seemed to sour the moment. There were other “non-eighties” 80’s music in his collection of CD’s—and I didn’t want to do any of them!
To this day, I still don’t think he understands what I meant by “80’s music”.
It’s NOT a “time stamp”; it’s an era of music or attitude of how to write music—an attitude I can not take seriously.
It’s like being asked to consider Sesame Street a show meant strictly for adults, when the exact opposite is obviously true—it’s meant for young children, and yet, you’re supposed to pretend that you still believe it’s an adult show.
I just can’t fake it, that “I believe”, because I don’t, and I never will; nor will I consider 80’s music “adult” music, when it was meant for 9-year-olds.
That is way too younga target audience to shoot for.
I prefer young adults who think maturely about compositions—and wearing flower pots on one’s head while singing, “Whip it good” is not my idea of adult material.
2. The Gig at Tailgaters in Oak Lawn, Illinois.
In another incident, halfway through a set, a singer who I didn’t really know, ( but who invited me to sit in for a guitarist who was not present), introduced the next song as the Romantics, “What I Like About You”, and when I heard that title, I was pissed , and I leaned over to the rhythm guitarist’s ear and shouted over the din of the bar noise, “This is your song. I don’t play shit like this.” and I turned my guitar’s volume down to an inaudible level and just pretended to play along.
Needless to say, the lead singer, cut the set short, and went to the bathroom, while we all went outside to go smoke (since Illinois prohibits indoor smoking, everyone goes outside to puff), and a few minutes later, the lead singer came outside to smoke, too, but instead of hanging out on the drivers side of my van, while I talked to three other people, he decided to go talk to another guitarist on the passenger side of my van.
While I was talking to my little group, I was completely unaware that the singer was now outside, too, and I ragged on and on about how new wave, punk rock and 80’s music, as a whole, sucked the biggest donkey dick, and he heard every word!
“You know what gets me?” I said to the bass player, “If this was nineteen eighty five, or whatever, and you used the term ‘Classic Rock’, the bands that were popular then— eighties bands—went out of their way to be identified as not being ‘classic rock’ . They’d feel insulted, and say, ‘We’re not classic rock! That’s dinosaur music! We’re the Talking Heads, or we’re the Sex Pistols. We’re punk or new wave or metal or, whatever, but we’re not classic rock! Yuck!’ BUT…nowadays, when The Drive on the radio says ‘ Home of Classic Rock’ , what do they play? Right. Bands from the eighties—Talking Heads, the Romantics, the very bands that HATED what we called Classic Rock back then. ‘Zeppelin? Beatles? Yuck!’ So, to radio stations, Classic Rock is not a ‘style‘ of music, it’s an age; if it’s old, it’s ‘Classic Rock’. It makes me puke when I hear people use that fucked up logic. Really pisses me off. And then they play Talking Heads? Devo? B-Fifty Twos? The Romantics? The Ramones? I mean, absolute garbage music…!”
Having heard enough “through the grapevine”, so to speak, the singer, walked over to our crowd (with the other guitarist in tow), looked right at me, squinted like he was “Clint Eastwood” or something, took his last drag, threw the cigarette on the ground, stomped it out, and walked away from me without saying a word.
In other words, the other guy was going to finish the set.
“Whew! No more eighties music to deal with.” I thought contently, realizing that not getting invited to finish an eighties set, was WAY MORE “dodging a bullet” than being “punished”.
The point is : people get alienated when I unleash my hostility on the subject of 80’s music.
There’s a simple fix to that : don’t invite me to play it, and you won’t hear me insult it. It’s not complicated.
The LESSON :
Classic Rock does NOT include 80’s music where I’m concerned.
If anyone needs a more-detailed definition of what I consider to be 80’s music, this post will answer that question.
II. ALL OTHER ERAS WILL BE CONSIDERED
If I could travel in a time machine, and go as far back as thousands of years into the past, and listen to the music of various cultures, I’m pretty confident that I’d find bits and pieces of music from all eras that I’d probably be agreeable to emulating in my own band in modern day times.
The use of unorthodox scales as used by such geniuses as Robert Fripp, Jimmy Page, and Ritchie Blackmore, has always intrigued me to the point that I wanted to emulate their musical M.O.s.
If I went back to the year, say, a random number like 3532 B.C., and I could go see “Gunther and the Cavemen” at Bedrock Stadium, I’d probably be fascinated by either their “idea” of percussion, or maybe their use of a primitive flute-like instrument.
Each era I visited would undoubtedly cause me to turn my attention toward the music and listen to particular aspects looking for inspiration in writing new music.
III. JUST NOT 80’s MUSIC
But there is one particular era of music that I find almost “offensively” stupid, and that is, what I refer to as “80’s music” by which I mean music made popular between 1978 and 1989—that is, all of the 1980’s plus the last two years of the 1970’s : 1978 and 1979.
Why ’78 and ’79?
Those were the years where : [A] new wave; [B] punk rock; and the birth of [C] hair metal were “born” on the commercial radio waves-=–and no I don’t consider Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple “heavy metal”, but rather hard rock.
In fact, I think calling Zeppelin or Purple “heavy metal” is an insult—and an undeserved one at that.
[A] New Wave
My first exposure was to new wave, when my friend’s (Jimmy) younger brother (Bobby), and his friend (Davey) were raving about some new band that was “awesome”, and they invited us over to Davey’s house to go check them out.
We went. Oh, how I wish I hadn’t tagged along. That sucked!
We walked into the rec room at Davey’s house, and he put the needle on the record, and then next thing I know, I’m listening to stupidest music of all time!
“You can Whip it! Whip it Good!”
“What the fuck is this shit?!” I’m thinking silently to myself, not wanting to be rude, but, man, listening to garbage like that made it difficult to resist walking out, which I soon did—pretending that I “suddenly remembered” an errand I had to take care of.
Walking out that door was literally, a breath of fresh air!
When Davey asked me a few days later, what I thought of the band, I had to be honest—but cordial— in my assessment of that “music”.
I told him , “not my cup of tea, Davey.”
“Seriously?” he asked as though it was a clinical “fact” that the music was good. “You didn’t like ’em?”
“Seriously? You did?” I wanted so bad to say to him, but I found a way to escape that conversation, too, and I made it a point from that day on to avoid Davey like the plague.
Nice dude, but I don’t want to talk about music with him…or worse, actually listen to it!
I was in high school, so there were lots of kids talking about this new music, which, according to the tone of their conversations, was very much to their liking.
95 percent of those bands had the same formula in their band names : “The” plus a NOUN—TheB-52’s, TheShoes, TheTubes, and TheTalking Heads.
Yes, I’m fully cognizant of the fact that 60’s and 70’s bands also had “the” bands : The Beatles; The Who; The Rolling Stones etc.
But they were more than “a cut above” the 80’s bands in my book.
If the word “The” had been followed by a more laid back name like The “Marshall Tucker Band,” or The “Steve Miller Band”, I would’ve thought that was normal, But, the “Objects”? Yuck!
There was something so “fabricated” (for lack of a better term) not only about their music, but their bands’ very personas.
Even bands that didn’t follow that format sucked : Duran Duran; Rick Astley; U2…
I don’t want to be reminded.
If I didn’t like listening to their music, why in the world would I want to spend any time elaborating on them?
Next anomaly.
[B] Punk Rock
Even worse than new wave (and I didn’t think that was possible at first–boy, was I wrong!) was Punk Rock!
More “The” bands….
“The Sex Pistols” (what absolute GARBAGE!); “The Clash“; “The Ramones“; “The Romantics“—ad nauseum!
Listening to that shit was like having the “bed spins” when you’ve had too much to drink : you’re praying to your god to be removed from the misery!
“I’ll do anything! Just make it stop! Please! I’ll convert…!”
That night on stage at Tailgaters really demonstrated my discomfort with that “art form”.
[C] Hair Metal ( The Beginning )
Some Hair metal was the only genre of those three that actually took talent : the musicians were no ‘slouches”; they were accomplished in the realm of technique, (guitarists could shred; drummers mastered double kick drums; vocalists had pipes to sing with), BUT….
Their songwriting sucked! At least, for me it did.
It was like watching large-sized weight lifters using phony weights.
“They’re strong enough to do the heavy lifting! Why don’t they do it?” I often wondered when I’d hear the more talented of certain metal guitarists turn their compositions into a mere “finger exercise” with a drum machine and a singer.
Only John Petrucci of Dream Theater and Liquid Tension really applies the principles that metal guitarists should be using. Amazing guitarist, he is.
But the so-called metal guitarists that started the genre, the repertoire they’ve chosen are all lame by comparison.
For example, if you took “Eruption” and “Spanish Fly” out of the Van Halen catalog, there would be absolutely nothing (zero) for me to listen to, since those were the only two songs I liked from them—and guess what, “Spanish Fly” is pretty much Eddie by himself, and so, is “Eruption” with the minor exception of the bass and drums used for accents, but no singing.
They’re not “Van Halen” songs, they’re Eddie tunes.
Eddie was awesome with technique, but, sucked at song writing.
The same with Iron Maiden and all the other 70’s metal bands.
In fact, I think most bands were a step down from Maiden—Motorhead, Judas Priest…
I’m not even going to waste any time on researching band names from that genre.
Suffice it to say that I just had no use for that music either.
[D] Official 1980’s
The bands that disappointed me to no end were :
U2—at the VERY TOP of the list; Bon Jovi; Motley Crue; Guns and Roses ; Duran Duran; Elvis Costello; The Talking Heads; The Dead Kennedys; Prince; Madonna; Michael Jackson; Depeche Mode; The Cure; Tears For Fears; Cindi Lauper; REM; Poison; Run DMC; The Eurythmics; Whitesnake; Culture Club; Wham; George Michaels; Inx; The Bangels; Pet Shop Boys; Ratt; New Order; Joy Division; Hall & Oates; The Beastie Boys; Dokken; The Human League; Simple Minds; John Cougar Mellancamp; The Boys; The Bees; ….
You’re probably thinking, “You might as well not even turn the radio on.”
Exactly!
And I didn’t.
Time to put on LPs and cassette tapes—CD’s were still kind of new, and most releases were for newer music—one was way more likely to find a CD of Prince or Madonna, then a reissue of, say, Deep Purple’s “Machine Head”.
So, CD’s were NOT a priority for me and my library until they started issuing GOOD music.
[E] THE ABSOLUTE WORST of 80’s Music
[F] THE COSTUME BAND
By the “costume” band, I’m referring to a band that many people liked—Kiss.
There’s no need for any in-depth elaboration except the two-fold statement that ; [1] their catalog of music was so unremarkable; and [2] the super-silly costumes failed to conceal that fact.
I would’ve been embarrassed to don the costumes, and the music didn’t move me in the slightest.
So, not interested in anything they did, either.
V. Invasion of The Body Snatchers—Even Some 70’s Bands Got Infected with The 80’s Disease
If I was to say that I WILL play music from the bands of the 70’s. I’m referring to the songs they played in the 70’s, and not the absolute garbage they recorded in the 80’s.
[1] ZZ Top went :
—FROM “Lagrange“, “Jesus Just Left Chicago”, and “Just Got Paid“;
—TO “She’s Got Legs“, “Tube Snake Boogie“, and “Sharp-Dressed Man“;
It’s NOT the “same” music—something changed, and NOT for the better.
—FROM “Meddle“, “Dark Side Of The Moon“, Wish You Were Here” and “Animals“,
—TO “The Wall” and “Momentary Lapse of Reason“—(“The Wall” actually was released in the 70’s, but it was OBVIOUS Waters was trying to capture a sound that would appeal to those embracing the new sound of the “80’s” music that was on the horizon—and I preferred the cuts that were heavily influenced by either Gilmour’s vocals, or Gilmour’s guitar work—I thought Waters’ vocals were horrible—I hate the way he sings —plus, neither [a] Roger without the other three, or [b] the other three without Roger, worked. They all needed each other to make it work. They all sucked when they were no longer together);
It’s NOT the “same” music—something changed, and NOT for the better.
There’s a night-and-day level of difference between these two very-different eras of music, by the same bands, and it really blows my mind when I hear people say, ” I don’t hear the difference.”
“How can you not?” I think to myself as I compare their apparent inability to detect what I see as glaringly obvious differences, to a color-blind person not being able to see the difference between fluorescent orange and dark gray, in a “how-can-you-not-see-the-difference?” mindset of shock!
But, somehow, they don’t. One could metaphorically “rewind the tape” several times, and they’ll still say, “Nah. I don’t hear the difference.”
“How is that possible?” I’ll always wonder.
V. NO GUITAR-ONLY GARAGE BANDS
Lastly, this final group is not 80’s music , per se, but it does have the veryunpleasant attribute of being a “guitar-only” band—no keyboards; no sax; no flute; no violin; no “nothing”, just guitar, bass, drums, and vocals.
For me, when it comes to guitar-only groups, I might as well be stuck in an elevator where someone just farted—my eyes are watering, and there’s no escape.
If I walk into a bar, and I see a band set up to play, and I see either :
[A] NO keyboards; and/or
[B] ONLY “electric” guitars, and NO acoustics—I’ll leave if I haven’t already paid a cover charge; I might still leave if it was only a small charge such as $5 , or whatever, but, $10, or more, would be kind of a waste of money to throw it away like that.
But if I see a band like THAT, I know I’m going to be assaulted with UNCREATIVE guitar-based THREE-Chord garage rock, and I find that VERY DEPRESSING.
I KNOW the set list is going to be something along the lines of : ZZ Top (“She’s Got Legs” ); Georgia Satellites (“Keep Your Hands To Yourself“); Tom Petty (“Don’t Do Me Like That“); Neil Young (“Rockin’ In The Free World“), Ted Nugent (“Cat Scratch Fever“); Stevie Ray Vaughn (“Pride and Joy“), Dire Straits (“Sultans of Swing“); Doobie Brothers (“China Grove“); Mountain ( “Mississippi Queen“); Black Sabbath (“Iron Man“), AC/DC (“Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap“); Aerosmith (“Walk This Way“) ….
I could NOT sit through THAT set list.
I KNOW I’M NOT going to hear :
Pink Floyd (“Us and Them/Any Colour You Like“—needs Keyboards and Sax, and I don’t see any on stage); Led Zeppelin (“Battle of Evermore“—needs mandolin, and I don’t see THAT on stage, either; or “No Quarter“—needs keyboards ); Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (“Deja Vu“, or “Suite Judy Blue Eyes“—Needs acoustics AND THREE-part Harmonies); Styx (“Castle Walls“—Needs KEYBOARDS), Kansas (“Magnum Opus“—needs VIOLIN and KEYBOARDS); Alan Parsons (“I Robot“—DEFINITELY NEEDS KEYBOARDS); The Who (“Baba O’Riley“—NEEDS KEYBOARDS AND VIOLIN); Steely Dan (“Aja“—needs HORNS, KEYBOARDS, and TALENT )…
NOT gonna happen with a guitar-only band.
Well, you get the idea, with JUST guitars, NONE of those songs are likely to be played. And I can’t stomach guitar-only music for more than a few songs at a time; then I need my fix of keyboards, violins, saxes, flutes, mandolins, banjos, and pretty much all other instruments.
VI. Conclusion
So, that’s my “allergy” list : I’m allergic to those songs and genres that I just can’t stand.
No 80’s music, and no guitar-only garbage, I mean garage bands.
I can’t “apologize” for not liking something that is arguably inferior in quality.
So, bring on the keyboards, the acoustic guitars, and the saxes, and let’s see where that takes us.
Here I am, six months after being laid off at the onset of the pandemic in March of 2020, and I still don’t have a job.
What’s the problem?
I’m viewed as “too old”, that’s why?
And that’s wrong! Because I’m not too old—except to HR employees who are younger than me, who are convinced that DELIBERATELY IGNORING AND AVOIDING anyone over 40, is a “good” thing, when it’s NOT!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. WHERE’S THE RIOTS? II. SENIORS DEFINED III. WHAT’S MY BACKGROUND? IV. A RARE CALL V. THE BIG MOVE—AND WHY IT WAS NEEDED —–A. THE ANGRY CUSTOMER PHONE CALLS VI. SHE PUT HER FOOT DOWN AND DEMANDED THE BIG MOVE VII. THE RECRUITER’S POST-INTERVIEW CALL VIII. THE REAL MESSAGE
I. WHERE’S THE RIOTS?
In all the craziness of the violent leftist mobs of the last few years, I’ve heard or seen them protest all kinds of “isms” and “phobias”, from racism and sexism to homophobia, Islamaphobia, and whatever other real and/or imaginary injustices they’ve tried to dream up.
But I’ve not yet seen hordes of seniors (peaceful or otherwise) flooding the streets chanting “Hell, No! We won’t go! We’re not slobs! We need jobs!” or something along those lines demanding some degree of parity when it comes to being considered for the job market.
I’m sure many (and for their sake, hopefully most) seniors want a job simply because they want to get out of the house, and it’s not a matter of “survival” to land those jobs. .
Perhaps 11 months or three years of not working while retired has them going stir crazy and they’re just looking for some kind of human contact, or whatever. They are in search of the luxury of socializing with other people.
In contrast, there are undoubtedly some seniors (perhaps a huge number or even a majority of) which actually need the jobs to make ends meet, in which case, the jobs are not a luxury, but a necessity.
II. SENIORS DEFINED
However, when I say, “seniors” who am I actually talking about?
75-year-olds? Centenarians?
Not necessarily. But if they’re ready, willing, and able to work, then, THEM, TOO, yes!
Otherwise, I’ll give you a hint.
I walked into a White Castle about a month ago, ordered a couple of sliders and a large order of fries, and when I paid my bill, and got my receipt, I noticed the cashier had given me a “senior discount”.
“But I’m not 75 years old; or even a hundred. I’m 57.” I thought.
Granted, I am mostly gray-haired, so I’m not likely to ever be mistaken for a 22-year-old, that’s for sure.
And…I’m always receiving junk mail from AARP, which, I suppose, makes me a “senior” citizen, to some extent.
Hey, don’t get me wrong : I’ll take a discount wherever one’s offered; I don’t feel any compulsion to tell someone, “Oh, no! I insist on paying full price. I don’t want to save any money! “
But, the cashier obviously saw me as a “senior” and acted appropriately by applying the discount to my purchase. The nerve…
However, the term, “senior citizen”, though, seems to conjure up images of some slow-moving, hard-of-hearing, white-haired old lady, slightly bent over with a cane or walker, shuffling her feet, and saying, “What’s that, Shunny? I didn’t quite hear what you just said?”
But, I would assume, that the vast majority of people who are SOCIALLY deemed “senior citizens” are STILL of WORKING AGE …AND THEY NEED A JOB
I know that to be a fact, because I’m one of them.
I’m a senior, and I have bills to pay, so I, too, need a job.
But, here I am, six months after being laid off at the onset of the plannedemic in March of 2020, and I still don’t have a job.
III. WHAT’S MY BACKGROUND?
Customer Service in a construction-oriented business.
Specifically, I spent 18 years selling pipe tools to electrical, plumbing, and pipe fitter contractors.
My employer was a small business—a mom-and-pop tool distributor.
We sold not only general construction tools like power tools, such as circular saws, drills, grinders and rotary hammers, but also specialty pipe-fabrication tools, such as benders, threaders, cutters, rodding machines, and pipe carts.
Where we ran into a problem was in the realm of competition from the much-bigger fish in the pond.
In the field of general construction tools, we were constantly undersold by the big box stores of Home Depot, Menards, Loews, and slightly more recently, Harbor Freight Tools; and in the realm of our specialty tools, we were getting killed by the industrial distributors of Grainger and McMaster Carr.
Regardless of the competitor, the 18-volt XRP Dewalt tools we sold for $99 with one battery, the big box stores “gave away” at $59, with TWO batteries; the $8,000 Ridgid® 4-inch threader we sold, was available at Granger for $5,799.
What purchasing agent is going to cut us a P.O. for eight grand, when the item he or she is looking for is available for $2,200 less elsewhere?
It’s time to turn the lights off, lock the door, and go home when your competition has created that wide of a gap between your prices and theirs.
We couldn’t compete on those terms.
If the difference was, say, only $500, maybe—MAYBE—we could still probably get the deal in some cases, where we had a close-and-long-historied rapport with the customer, because we were also a service house.
So, if the unit hiccuped, for whatever reason, and needed repair, we could personally pick it up from the job site, repair it and return it back to the job site within days if the required parts were in stock, whereas the cheaper guys usually didn’t have any in-house repair staff.
Ergo, they were cheaper on the purchase end, but they couldn’t help their customers when the product was down, and needing repair.
But a gap of a thousand bucks, or more? That was just too large of a gap for any purchasing agent to ignore, and choose us anyway, despite the huge GLARINGLY OBVIOUS “non-savings” in the price.
Our buying power of “ONE pallet of tools” (which still cost us several thousand dollars) was NO MATCH for Home Depot’s TRUCKLOAD of the same tools.
This “David” was not going to slingshot shot his way to victory over this “Goliath”.
We cried, “Uncle!’, and went home.
18 years! And then, goodbye!
Ever since we closed our doors at Recco Tool & Supply, I’ve been having some difficulty finding PERMANENT employment.
Yes, I have found employment since Recco closed, but the last company I last worked for, laid off FOUR people (at the onset of the plannedemic), of which I was one.
Moreover, that company, also passed me up initially (I’m too old), but, they turned to me when the guy they chose instead of me turned out to be an alcoholic who got CAUGHT DRINKING ON THE JOB, and ultimately ended up going to jail due to a charge that he kidnapped his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend, when he didn’t want her to leave him.
In any case, PRIOR to finding that job I had gone on an interview that really taught me that “older people need not apply” in this world of 22-year-old HR clerks, who want to staff the office and warehouse with people their own age, and no old fogies…like me.
IV. A RARE CALL
After having almost ZERO responses to my résumé, imagine my elation when I got a call from a recruiter who told me that Wheatland Tube (at 43rd and Western Boulevard in Chicago) was looking for a customer service agent (this was between August 2017, and March 2018).
“I wonder what these people saw in my résumé that enticed them into calling me?” I wondered, in hopeful anticipation that this tap on my shoulder was a sign that someone was finally going pull me out of the raging undercurrent of the unemployment waters and save me from financial ruin—which I was very close to..and which I am very close to AGAIN, thank you very much.
The only thing that I could think of was that my résumé showed lots of PIPE experience, and Wheatland Tube is a pipe manufacturer.
My background should be right up their alley, correct?
You’d think so.
So, the woman at the recruiters office, told me the particulars of who to see, and when to see her.
Then, I went to the interview.
I walked in through the front door (on Western), which led to a small lobby area that had an inner door, that was locked and remotely opened through a buzzer, once you picked up the in-house phone and alerted whoever you were there to see that you had arrived and was ready to be buzzed in.
After hanging up the phone, I was buzzed into the inner sanctum, and I believe I had to go up a flight of stairs.
I only saw two people once I was in ( what I presumed to be) the Customer Service Department—and they wern’t in their 50’s, or even 40’s…maybe 30s.
The interviewer met me en route to her office, and she closed the door behind us as we entered.
The ususal exchange of “Nice to meet you” and “have a seat”, etc, unfolded as she began the very relaxed conversation—I was hoping that was a sign that I was likely to get the job.
Especially, given the way the recruiter had portrayed Wheatland’s “excitement to interview me”, which led me to believe, I was this close to hearing, “Can you start Monday?”
What got me about this whole interview was that the woman spent a good deal of time explaining to me how important the “Big Move” was.
V. THE BIG MOVE—AND WHY IT WAS NEEDED
According to the woman who interviewed me, what the big move was all about was relocating the customer service department from one location to another.
Specifically, what she told me was that prior to their department being located on Western Boulevard ( where we were at, at that moment in time), it was downtown, in the heart of the city.
She admitted, that since she lived out in the Frankfort area, going to the downtown location was actually quite convenient since all she had to do was take the train downtown.
But…
A significant problem they had FREQUENTLY encountered was one of accuracy in quotes on AVAILABILITY.
On more than one occasion, a customer would call to check stock on a quantity of a given product, say, half-inch EMT and some 2-inch rigid, or whatever; and I can just see the series of frustrating phone calls going down something along the lines of :
A. THE ANGRY CUSTOMER PHONE CALLS
“I need 100 pieces of 1/2″ EMT and 20 of two-inch rigid.” says the customer.
“Lets see…” the CSR (Customer Service Representative) says as she taps away on her keyboard, checking the inventory system.
“Yep! Looks like we got ’em both!” the CSR exclaims.
“Great! I’ll send my driver, my P.O. is 14U24ME.” the customer adds before hanging up.
20 minutes later….
Ring!
“Wheatland Tube. This is [fill-in-name-here]. How can I help you?” the CSR greets the inbound caller.
“I forget who I talked to, but someone told me 20 minutes ago that you had all the pipe I ordered. But, now, my driver’s there, in the dock, and he’s calling me, telling me that your warehouse guys are tellin’ him there is no pipe in stock! Do you have the stuff, or not? If not, I’m gonna need to call Allied Tube, ’cause I need this stuff today!”
Unbeknownst to the customer, the CSR’s were NOT in the same building (in fact, they were MILES AWAY from the warehouse) and completely unable to verify with their own two eyes, so they were WHOLLY DEPENDENT on the eyes of those physically in the warehouse, so they could visually check.
“Let me put you on hold for a second, while I look into it, OK, [Fill-in-name-here]?” the CSR says, pressing the hold button.
While the CSR has the customer on hold, she’s got to contact the warehouse ( whether that’s by phone or through some inter-company radio system, is anyone’s guess) to find out who erred in verifying the non-existent product.
Maybe the pipe was actually there at 10:20 AM, or whatever, when the customer initially called, but another employee came along at 10:32 and pulled the pipe for some other customer who had called prior to the current customer, BOTH of whom are in the dock, now, but only one of which is going to be receiving what they came for in the first place, and the other leaving empty-handed.
Not the best of customer service stories; and if you tally up enough of them, you know you have a serious problem that needs immediate attention to solve A.S.A.P.
I’m sure miscommunications like that happen all the time in every industry; it’s just a matter of implementing a system that solves the problem as thoroughly as possible, and having the CSR department physically in the same location as the product would be a good start.
So, that’s what the interviewer told me.
VI. PUT HER FOOT DOWN AND DEMANDED THE BIG MOVE
She told me that she went to her superiors and DEMANDED that the CSR department be relocated to the warehouse to prevent the COMMON PROBLEM of errors in verifying inventory for customers—especially those who are literally en route to pick up the product NOW!
“Granted!” the Great Oz thundered much to her satisfaction.
It was done! The CSR department was now relocated from downtown to the near southwest side of the city at 43rd and Western.
All good now.
She must’ve spent a solid 20 minutes explaining the need for such an important logistical maneuver.
“The only drawback to the move,” she said, “was that me living out in the Frankfort area allowed me to take the train to work. Now, I gotta drive to work and…ya’ know, dealin’ with traffic, and all that other crap.”
This was NO SMALL SUBJECT throughout the interview.
However, a day or so later, the recruiter called me.
VII. THE RECRUITER’S POST-INTERVIEW CALL
“Hi, Floyd.” said the female recruiter, “Yeah, I got some bad news ….Yeah, they’re , uh, gonna pass on hiring you…they’ve decided to move the CSR department out to California.”
“The state of California?” I asked all shocked by what seemed like “fake news” to me.
“Yeah, that’s what she was sayin’.” the recruiter replied.
“Huh. She spent a good solid twenty minutes explaining to me why they absolutely needed that CSR department at the Western Avenue warehouse. That just doesn’t sound right.”
“I dunno. That’s, uh…just what they told me to tell you.” the recruiter said, starting to sound uncomfortable with my doubt on Wheatland’s excuse for nor hiring me.
The recruiter could have said, “They’re going with a more-qualified candidate, and I wouldn’t have questioned it.
But…
“They’re moving the CSR department to the state of California?”
Come on, that sounds far-fethched.
If that’s true, it is what it is.
If it’s NOT….
VIII. THE REAL MESSAGE
As far as I’m concerned, the woman at Wheatland Tube, might as well have screamed at me, “You’re too old to work here! Get the f— out of my office, before I call security”.
But she didn’t; that’d make her anti-old-people bias WAY TOO OBVIOUS, and then I’d have a legitimate complaint against her. Maybe not, who knows?
But no. She kept her unfairness camouflaged in the cloak of polite conversation—the way the pros do it.
My favorite teacher was Joe Callahan—the Boys P.E. Teacher, at Lincoln Elementary, who was actually a drill sergeant who used his G.I. Bill school money to get a teaching credential, and kick our butts into manhood.
Our last year with the previous PE Teacher was some guy named, Ketza (?) whose idea of P.E. was 10 jumping jacks, then, playing kickball on the blacktop in the parking lot.
Well, that all changed when Joe showed up.
“Yeah, that’ll make a man outta ya’.” was Joe’s attitude toward his predecessor’s M.O.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. FIRST CONTACT II. SOME OF OUR FATHERS APPROVED III. JOE’S BIIGGEST INTANGIBLE GIFT TO US—SELF RESPECT IV. JOE’S CREATIVE EXERCISE REGIMEN—CARDS, COCA COLA, LAUGHTER & “BRIAN” V. PUNISHING THE GROUP—NOT JUST THE INDIVIDUAL VI. JOE’S TANGIBLE GIFTS TO US—SPORTS VII. JOE’S “INSPIRATION” REGIMEN—REWARD VERSUS PUNISHMENT VIII. The 12’O’CLOCK GYM CLASS IX. PARENTS (AND MAYBE TEACHERS) THAT DID NOT APPROVE OF JOE’S M.O. X. JOE’S SHORT-TERM MEMORY XI. JOE’S LONG-TERM MEMORY XII. AUGIE
I. FIRST CONTACT
I’ll never forget that day when I “encountered” him in roll call on our first day with him as our new teacher, outside on the blacktop.
Was I a 24/7 “uncontrollable kid” with an attitude problem? Not exactly. But, I did have my moments of being aggravatingly incorrigible with some teachers.
Joe changed that, too. LOL.
On the very first day of P.E. class, Joe lined us all up on the black top, and I was approximately in the center of the first row.
Exactly like a drill sergeant would do in boot camp, he was loud and unapologetically brash in introducing himself to us, as he’d put the tip of his nose against the tip of our noses, and we’d smell his breath while he looked each of us right in the eyes and shouted at the top of his lungs with comments like, “You will NOT be cream puffs! You will NOT be sissies!; I’m going to turn you into real men…You maggots! …You ninety-eight-pound weaklings…If ANYONE kicks sand in your face, you REMOVE HIS FACE! Got it?!”
By the time he was within three or four students of introducing himself to me, I coughed, and a little phlegm came up, so, I spit it out on the blacktop.
Bad move!. LOL
Joe skipped the other students and came straight toward me and stuck his nose in my face.
“What’s your name, maggot!” he inquired pseudo-angrily.
“Colbert!.” I said quietly.
“What?! I can’t hear youuuuu!” he pressed on with the “Drill Sargeant” act.
“Col-bert!” I repeated loudly, while “crapping in my pants”.
“How would you like to lick that up with your own tongue…Col-bert!?!” he said presenting a “threat” as a question.
“No, sir!” I replied.
Anyway, you get the idea of what kind of M.O. he had planned on using with us :
“Welcome to Fort Lincoln!, Private, First Class!”
II. SOME OF OUR FATHERS APPROVED
In retrospect, that was awesome! But…at that INITIAL moment in time? Many didn’t think so.
Truth be told, the first week was admittedly a major shock, since we weren’t accustomed to that.
Those of us with fathers who were proud to serve in the armed forces ( my father was a World War II vet, who fought in the European theater) really liked what Joe was teaching us. It must’ve drawn up memories of their boot camp days at Fort Bragg, or wherever.
Judging from how the boys who complained about Joe’s gruff style were talking in class the next day, I can easily envision that some of them came home after school, and complained to their fathers, “Dad! He’s too rough on us.”
“Well, it’s about time someone taught our boys to be men.” I can just hear the unsympathetic replies. “Teachers are teaching our kids to be limp-wristed, hippie-type, pinko commies”….etc.
I can also just see the leftist-thinking pseudo-“intellectual” Norman Lears of society trying to portray such gleeful acceptance of the “rough-and-tough-and-hard-to-bluff” educational paradigm for our boys as a product of “ignorant Archie Bumkers”; and., hilariously, the notion that the anti-thetical “there’s-nothing-wrong-with-being-a-pacifist-sissy-Michael Stivics” of our society as being “intelligent”, or even, “heroes” by some collosal stretch of the imagination.
You’d NEVER see the writers of leftist TV shows advocating the wholesale espousal of such values (at least, NOT in regards to patriotism or love of “country”) as : courage; bravery; gallantry; valor; heroism; intrepidness; nerve; or simply having BALLS, as a good thing, but rather as a dying anachronism of outdated patriotism and misguided loyalty to an oppressive system keeping down the very people who are defending it—-the way socialists today defend their own lock downs, while deeming those who protest in favor of being free to leave their homes as “selfish”.
But, not on Joe’s watch. Those were ALL good values that should be inscribed above the doorways of all schools, for all students to see all the time—coming and going.
III. JOE’S BIGGEST INTANGIBLE GIFT TO US—SELF RESPECT
As previously noted, prior to Joe’s arrival at Lincoln School, we had no sports teams, or any real calisthenic programs, or any real self-respect, or discipline, or even any potential of ever becoming real men, in the physical sense of “prowessness”.
Some, but not all, of the boys were, essentially “girly” men, in that they would not at all be capable of defending themselves against a bully, whether that be in a school yard fight, or anywhere else for that matter, not because of a lack of physical strength ( I suppose we all had the capacity to inflict harm on others if we really wanted to) but rather a lack of COURAGE to stand up and fight back, instead of the cringe-worthy “I-won’t-fight-back-so-please-don’t-hit-me-’cause-I-FEAR-a-bloody-nose” response that was standard protocol of Lincoln School “boys”, pre-Joe !
We weren’t all “girly men”. There were a few “bad boys” of which I was not one of them, at that time.
One of the boys, had frequently bullied most of the other kids in class. On more than one occasion, he grabbed me in a headlock, and would give me a noogie.
Initially, it wasn’t Joe Callahan that taught me to fight back, but my own brother, Jim, who was two grades ahead of me.
Up to my admission to him that I was being picked on, he never saw the kid, Ron Bowlen, do anything to me.
But he said, “If I ever see him picking on you, and I don’t see you fighting back, I’m gonna help him beat you up. ‘Cause I don’t want a sissy for a brother.”
Then, it happened.
I was in the 4th and 5th grade hallway, when Ron went through his routine, got me in a headlock, began his noogie, when I heard, “Hey!”
It was actually a teacher shouting to get Ron to stop his bullying, but, I thought it was my brother, so, I went “Gonzo” on this kid. I was swinging my fists wildly, but I don’t think I connected one time. They were all misses! But, Ron, just stood back, with his eyes wide open and the look on his face was one of “WTF! This kid’s crazy!”
LOL!
He never bothered me again.
Afterward, we didn’t exactly become friends the way I did with my friend, Jim Spolar, when we got into our fight, but Ron, from that day on, would nod to me with a look that said, “You’re OK, you pass. I’m not gonna harass you anymore!”
I was actually more afraid of my brother, then I was of Ron, or any teacher—well, except Joe, of course. I just needed to be startled into that epiphany; and startled I was!
But Joe’s message to us was that “male prowess without moral guidance leads men to become thugs without conscience”.
I didn’t really understand that until I was much older. But it was a good point to remember and live by.
Us? Punks? Not on Joe’s watch.
But men? Yes! That was his goal!
And, for the most part, he succeeded—i.e., until some parents complained.
IV. JOE’S CREATIVE EXERCISE REGIMEN—CARDS, COCA COLA, LAUGHTER & “BRIAN”
Joe established a calisthenics regimen consisting of ULTRA-challenging exercises that we were so unprepared for.
He “inflicted” on us such joys as “Chinese sit ups”; “Fingertip pushups”; “Back-handed push ups”; “one-handed” pushups; regular pushups in the “50-plus reps” range; he even made us crawl across the SMOOTH gym floor on our bellies (i.e., with no shirts on).
We even weight-lifted.
One of Joe’s signature “skits” ( for lack of a better term) was he’d say stuff that was designed to make US LAUGH….
BUT…
We were supposed to resist the urge to laugh, else…punishment.
He’d tell us stories how his son, Brian, who was a few years YOUNGER than us, would be able to do various exercises with no strain versus us “weaklings”.
While he had us in a particular exercise, he’d walk around us with a monologue of sorts.
“My eight-year-old son, Brian, makes you all look like cream puffs! When he gets up in the morning, I don’t even let him go to the bathroom, until he’s done his one hundred jumping jacks in his underwear out on the front lawn!”, he’d say, or something along those lines. “Did you do your jumping jacks in your underwear on the front lawn this morning, you maggot, Spolar!”
Of course, you’re NOT supposed to laugh, but, you would, because you couldn’t help it.
Joe made it sound funny.
“Did you just laugh, Botzenhart?” he’d say.
“No, sir!” Gary would say, trying to fight off the urge to laugh.
“I could swear I heard you chuckle.” he’d counter.
“No, sir!” Gary would repeat holding his pushup or sit up.
“How ’bout you, Brewer? Did you hear him laugh?” he’d persist, trying to get us to just bust out laughing at the top of our lungs.
“No, sir!” Chris would say, holding his position.
“You’re not lying to me, are you…you cream puff!” he’d continue onward, while he’d stick his face in Chris’, while Chris tried hard not to let the funny faces he made, trick him into laughing out loud. “I hear a hundred pushups in your future!”
He also played this “game” of cards with us.
He’d walk out of his office in the gym, with a bottle of Coke (it might have been a Pepsi; I forget—but it was definitely a cola) in one hand, and a deck of cards in the other.
“Ah, Crap! Here we go.” was what each of us was thinking when we saw that soda-and-deck-of-cards set up because we knew what was coming next.
Whatever exercise we were doing, the deck of cards dictated what the quantities of repetitions were going to be; in other words, if he pulled a Two (of ANY suit—clubs, diamonds, hearts or spades) then we’d do “two” pushups; if it was a “10”, then ten pushups; a “jack” was 20; “queen, 30; king, 40, and the dreaded Ace, 50…you didn’t think the Ace was going to represent “one”, did you?
But if he pulled a really low number like two, he’d make sure those two were NOT easy.
He almost made us WISH he HAD pulled an Ace of 50 fast pushups, instead of only two, REALLY SLOW ones, that lasted an uncompassionate five minutes!
Joe was very creative that way.
He’d say “Down”, and we’d lower our bodies toward (but NOT in contact with) the floor for the downward portion of the pushup. BUT…
He would NOT say “Up” right away.
Don’t be silly, that’s too easy.
Instead, he’d keep us in the down position while he’d walk around us, taking his wallet out and sliding it under our bellies at random, to see if our bellies touched his wallet, and if it did, it was “punishment” time FOR EVERYONE, NOT just the person who “failed the test”.
V. PUNSIHING THE GROUP—NOT JUST THE INDIVIDUAL
So, we were all cognizant that the failure of an individual, meant punishment for the group—VERY “BOOT CAMP”.
Boy, did THAT change our mentality!…and Fast! LOL!
We all became “Jack LaLanne” overnight.
When our bodies were first subjected to his merciless “adjustment” of our physiques and stamina, we’d go to our post-P.E. classes, with our hands LITERALLY shaking from the fatigue; but that was short-lived as each week we’d LITERALLY get stronger and stronger, and what seemed like a godless amount of exercise to do THIS week, was child’s play by next week.
He was building us up rapidly.
VI. JOE’S TANGIBLE GIFTS TO US—SPORTS
Joe established two things that no prior teacher had :
[1] team sports—basketball and wrestling( I lost ONLY FOUR matches in my three years on the wrestling team—-This is where I pat myself on the back…LOL); and
[2] contact sports —boxing and Shotokan Karate.
VII. JOE’S “INSPIRATION” REGIMEN—REWARD VERSUS PUNISHMENT
When he started the team sports, we became the Lincoln Leopards in all our sports activities.
We never had sports teams. This was all new to us.
His philosophy was “reward for success; punishment for failure“.
For instance, if we WON a wrestling tournament, he’d literally take us ALL out to ( ALWAYS ) Ponderosa Steak House (how a teacher could afford that, who knows?). BUT….
If we LOST…
We would want to consider transferring to a new school, because we did not want to go to class for fear of the punishment that awaited us—and punishment there was; LOTS of it! Guaranteed.
“Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” should have been the sign above the gymnasium door.
HUNDREDS of jumping jacks; running LAPS around the school’s outer perimeter for the whole hour; or the dreaded “100 Chinese Situps”.
We all felt like we were smack dab in the middle of the Flames of Hades, with the demons laughing at our pain.
Those were the longest gym classes, that made many feel like there should have been a law against that kind of treatment.
But, in the end, it was all good.
Thank you, Joe.
VIII. The 12’O’CLOCK GYM CLASS
Another treat for those of us who were school sports-oriented was the Twelve’O’Clock Gym Class, which was for those select few who were considered the elite in their chosen sport.
The trade off with that class was that if you chose it, you actually ended up shortening your lunch hour by 15 minutes.
Specifically, the normal routine was that at noon time, ALL students would go home for lunch, and they’d get a full hour : 12:00 PM to 1:00PM.
But those who chose the noon-time gym class, got to leave school at 11:15AM and had to be back at school at noon, while all the other students were going to lunch.
Our little clique consisted of my best friends, Jim Spolar, Chris Brewer and myself.
We’d spend our 45-minute lunch walking two blocks to Ogden Avenue, where there was a hot dog joint called “Jimmy’s”, where the owner handed out these gargantuan-sized bags of LIMP-AND-GREASY fries—and I don’t mean that as an insult. That’s a compliment! To THIS DAY, I STILL LOVE “limp-and-greasy” fries…I don’t like crunchy fries.
Jimmy’s set the standard for me. When you saw the bag, the bottom was soaked in grease and they TASTED AWESOME!
Anyway, we’d inhale our lunch and hurry back to school and wait for the bell to ring, as the doors flew open and the normal crowd rushed out the doors to go home for lunch—and we rushed in!
Frequently, during the reward classes ( vis-a-vis the “punishment” classes), we’d play either Floor Hockey, or a game called “Killer Ball”, which was essentially, dodge ball, with fewer rules, and a lot more aggression.
When it came to Floor Hockey ( I don’t know why I remember this, but I do) , one of our players, Gary Botzenhart, had this signature catch phrase when he’d take shots he knew he’d make : “Cash in your chips!”
Score!
LOL!
The 12’O’Clock gym class was a BLAST!
Thanks, Joe!
IX. PARENTS (AND MAYBE SOME TEACHERS) THAT DID NOT APPROVE OF JOE’S M.O.
There were some parents ( and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if there were some teachers, too) that did NOT like Joe’s militaristic approach to teaching P.E.
As mentioned before, in addition to team sports, we also had CONTACT SPORTS: boxing and karate.
It was all handled appropriately with the mandatory wearing of certain protective gear during participation in those activities such as headgear; boxing gloves; cups; knee pads, whatever the situation called for.
There were no bare-fisted “fights to the death” or anything over-the-top like that; but some kid got a bloody nose, and it was all over with.
“F— you people!” I felt like saying to these pieces of shit parents, “That’s fine, if your sissy ass kid doesn’t want to participate, it’s NOT MANDATORY in the first place; it NEVER WAS! COMPLETELY OPTIONAL. But, to tell ALL the other kids (that weren’t injured—the WHOLE GROUP) that they can’t participate, either, because it’s “too dangerous” is the death knell of cultural manhood. No kid ever died of a bloody nose, unless he had pre-existing medical problems, which has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the kids that weren’t getting hurt in the first place.
Lumping them all together like they were a monolith of identical needs is so very “collective”-minded and leftist in their cultural retardedness.
I don’t think they wanted the education to be a physical one, in the first place, depite the word PHYSICAL in the term “physical education”—-NOT GENDER INDOCTRINATION!
Instead, they found themselves, uncomfortable with his “turning-boys-into-men-via-physical-challenges” approach, as though all they wanted him to do was indoctrinate us with a politicized “sex education” class, that was geared to tricking us into being a group of PATHETICALLY skinny-armed, SUPER MEEK, vegan-like, lefist-thinking, bloody-nose-fearing pacifists like the “Michael Stivics”, that Hollywood’s liberals yearn to see as a role model OFFICIALLY recognized by the educational establishment, so they can assure themselves of a non-stop and steady supply of obedient ninnies in the future.
Real men and women tend to question authority because they know “authority” is ANTITHETICAL to FREEDOM!
The less authority there is to obey, the more freedom you have. Duh!
Yes, I have heard leftists argue that “less is more” when it comes to their interpretation of societal freedom. Their perversion of logic NEVER ceases to amaze me.
At any rate, in the pursuit of providing us growing boys with GOOD MANLY ROLE MODELS, the ONLY other male teachers available as “role models” were Misters…Garzoni, Sheers, Lane, Ketter, and Morris in ascending order of “maleness”—i.e. Mr. Morris was way more male than Garzoni was.
With only Callahan and Morris to guide us into manhood, taking Callahan out of the picture, pretty much guaranteed, we’d stop producing resilient “Rambo’s” and start churning out “Woody Allens” that acted like “Richard Simmons”—i.e., frighteningly emasculated boys—somewhat like the laughingly ineffectual police force in the fiction-comedy “Demolition Man” where the police don’t know how to take down a violent criminal (played by Wesley Snipes) because they were never trained in how to handle VIOLENCE.
Can you imagine that ? Men who don’t know how to handle violence?
Wow! I can’t fathom that there ACTUALLY ARE people who WOULD try creating a “male” that RUNS FROM VIOLENCE, because he’s too scared to fight it—a FRIGHTENED PERSON is a “civilized” person, and a brave person, is a dangerous person, according to retarded leftists.
The point is : Callahan was not wrong in molding us into men; the parents who stopped him WERE WRONG!
The world will NEVER RUN OUT of BAD GUYS!
NO POLICY can EVER PREVENT them from existing in the first place.
And for them to exist, while simultaneously having NO MEN to fight them off (because the “new man” has been scared away from using violence to stop violent beings, and where the weak MUST surrender if they don’t want to die) , is BEYOND IRRESPONSIBLE!
Wow! I can’t believe ANYONE would think like that.
But Callahan’s departure was proof that they do!
X. JOE’S SHORT-TERM MEMORY
Joe, being a P.E. Teacher, would likely rub shoulders with other P.E. teachers at team sport events and the like.
That being the case, at some point in time throughout his career, he became acquainted with a P.E. Teacher by the name of Evans (I don’t remember Mr. Evans’ first name—I want to say Bill, but I could be a mile off.).
In any case, somewhere within my first month of my Freshman year, Mr. Evans stopped me, after class one day, and said, “I was talkin’ to your ol’ gym teacher, Joe Callahan, and he said you’re a good wrestler. Do you think you’d be interested in maybe tryin’ out for the team?”
The fact that Joe REMEMBERED me only 5 MONTHS later was not exactly astonishing.
Anyway, I was game, mainly because I didn’t want to disappoint Joe by not continuing on in my wrestling “career”.
But, I was also interested in earning some money, because as a young musician, I needed LOTS of gear such as guitars, amps, pedals, etc—all of which cost way more money than I had in my non-existent bank account that I hadn’t yet started, and that meant getting a part-time job.
The two-fold problem I was encountering was that :
[1] it would be difficult to to be on the wrestling team, if I had a job to go to after school; and
[2] technically, I wasn’t old enough to get a job (in many, but not all, cases, the law required a student to be at least 16 years of age), because I was only 14 years old.
But there was ways around that brick wall.
You had to lie about your age, for starters—which was easy for me since :
[a] most employers in 1977, weren’t too adamant about getting proof of an employee’s age; and
[b] my biological predisposition to growing facial hair at an earlier age than most other boys, made me “look” like I could be 16 years of age, with a “peachfuzz” moustache and sideburns.
“Here’s your paycheck son.”
“Thanks, boss.”
I had to choose between the two : I chose a job. And wrestling was history.
XI. JOE’S LONG-TERM MEMORY
In contrast to Joe’s 5-month, short-term memory, which checked out fine, his five-YEAR long-term memory did show a glitch in the system.
Specifically…
Back in the spring of 1982, my sister, Linda, was living in Cicero and she called me up out of the blue one afternoon, to tell me that my old gym teacher from Lincoln, Joe Callahan, had just moved into a house about four doors down from her place.
“Really? Joe Callahan?” I asked.
“Yeah.” she replied, “The next time you stop by over here, maybe you’ll want to stop over by Joe’s and say ‘ Hello ‘ to him, or whatever!”
She didn’t have to tell me twice.
At that time, I was dating my daughter’s mother—we never did get married—and I told her about him, and asked if she’d be interested in taking a ride with me to go see the guy, and talk about “old times” at Lincoln School, or whatever.
She was game. So, we got into my truck and rode to Linda’s house.
En route, I bragged to Nancy (my girlfriend) about my almost perfect record, and how it was Joe who got Mr. Evans to want me on his wrestling team, so I ended up making it sound like I was some “legend” or somethin’.
Anyway, we got to Linda’s house , and we spent some time over there, and then she walked us out onto the public sidewalk to point out which house was Joe’s.
With that, Nancy and I walked the four-house distance, and started walking down his driveway.
Standing at the side door, was, you guessed it, his son, Brian.
As Nancy and I walked down the driveway, Brian, who was using his key to unlock the side door, opened the door, and looked at me and said, “Can I help you?’
“You must be Brian.”: I said, not knowing if Joe had any other kids since he never mentioned anyone other than him.
He acknowledged that he was, and I explained to him who I was—a former student of his dad—and that I just stopped by to say hello.
“Yeah, he’s back there.” Brian replied pointing to his dad by the garage, “I’m sure he’d like to hear from you.”
There he was. The MOST INSPIRING teacher I ever had : Joe Callahan!
With my chest held high, and my pride riding on the winds of past glories, I marched toward the garage with Nancy by my side, and as I got closer and closer to Joe, I could tell from the look on his face that he had NO IDEA who I was.
In his defense, the last time he saw me (5 years ago at that time) I was kind of a long-haired stoner-looking kid, trying hard to grow facial hair and look older than I really was.
But now, I had short hair, and I had shaven off my peach fuzz, because I was trying to impress my then-girlfriend’s father, who I did NOT impress when he first met me, because I still had the long hair and peach fuzz. So, I cleaned up to curry whatever favor I could from her father.
In any case, Joe did not recognize me at all.
“Hey, Mister Callahan, long time , no see!” I said reaching out to shake his hand, convinced from the look on his face that he was clueless about who I was.
He forgot my name, and as soon as I said it he (at least pretended) to remember me.
Amazing! Five MONTHS, and he remembers me.
But, five YEARS, and I was forgotten.
Again, in his defense, he went from (I believe) TWO more years at Lincoln, then got a job at St. Joes in either Lagrange, or maybe Western Springs.
Either way, to go from a small grade school of less than 100 kids per year, to to probably over 200 PER YEAR at a high school , multiplied by two or three years there, and we’re talking about having taught somewhere between 500 and 700 students since the last time he saw me.
It would have been arrogant on my part to assume that my face would stand above the crowd for any lengthy period of time.
XII. AUGIE
Lastly, about the only negative memory I have about Joe is actually an “uncorroborated” story from a close friend of mine, Augie, an Hispanic kid, who claimed that Joe had said some uncouth things regarding Augie’s ethnicity.
Because Augie was my friend, I knew that he wouldn’t just make that up out of thin air. Especially back then, in the 70’s, when there were no trends (like THERE ARE TODAY) of false allegations of racism and what-not, because the teacher didn’t hand out an unearned grade of “A”, or whatever.
I knew Augie and his sisters and his dad (I don’t ever remember meeting his mother, though) and they were all super awesome people.
There had to be some truth to that. But, as far as I knew , Joe never said any of those things when any of us were within earshot. Maybe that was the plan. I don’t know.
At least, I never heard anything bad go down between Augie and Joe, verbally, or otherwise. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, and that is very possible, since I wasn’t looking for stuff like that. Who knows?
Augie was special to me because he, (like three other Hispanic kids before him) befriended me when I had no one else to turn to.
Kindergarten:
When I was in Kindergarten, I lived in the 26th & Komensky and 26th & Karlov neighborhoods on Chicago’s near west side.
At that time, in 1967 and 1968, there was an heavy influx of Puerto Ricans, into the neighborhood, and whose children I hung around with frequently—mostly out in front of the house; never really leaving the block, or anything, like that, except, maybe, to go to the “OLD SCHOOL” drug store [Tom] Cerkez Drugs Store, on the corner at 26th & Karlov, where they SERVED CHOCOLATE MALTS for 25 cents! (or, was it 50 cents? It might’ve been 50; but even that sounds kind of high for 1967 or 1968).
When I wasn’t slammin’ malts at the drug store, I was playing with the kids that lived next door and across the street.
Eventually, some of their culture started to rub off on me and I started asking my parents if they’d buy me clothes (shoes, shirts, etc) that the Puerto Ricans wore.
LOL.
My parents thought that was cute.
“I think my kid’s Puerto Rican.” my dad often joked back then.
Third Grade (Francesville, Indiana) :
Then, in third grade, I lived out in “the country” of Francesville, Indiana, where we lived on a farm and there were NO KIDS for me to hang out with.
BUT…at school, Ricky Rodriguez, a Mexican kid, who the other kids didn’t really talk to, befriended me.
We’d sit together at lunch time, and we’d talk in class; but once the school day was over, and I was returned to my home in “Outer Fucking Mongolia”, I was back to having no one to play with.
7th Grade — Augie Martinez
In 7th Grade, I made the “mistake” of SCORING HIGH on my aptitude tests.
Why was that a mistake?
Because all my closest friends were in the “MID-IQ” classes.
In 6th grade, I was with my friends that I hung out with; but in 7th grade, my aptitude scores catapulted me up a notch on the scholastic scale, and suddenly, I was sitting in class with all the “brainy nerds”, who I didn’t feel comfortable with.
Except Augie.
“Hey, man.” Augie said, “You’re with us now, huh?”
“I don’t know’.” I replied, “According to my class schedule, this is where I’m supposed to be.”
I looked around and I saw class mates like Lorraine Mockus and John Kozik—kids who I thought were future Mensa members. That’s not who I was. I was a “Regular Joe” destined for the flannel shirt work force.
I did not feel comfortable at all among them.
But Augie put me at ease.
“Hey, they wouldn’t’ve put you here if they didn’t think you could cut it, Floyd!” he reassured me.
Initially, I found his reassurance somewhat comforting. In fact, I think I went to Augie’s house once or twice to study for science classes. Walking into his bedroom, I seem to remember he was really into Albert Einstein big time—which INSPIRED ME to put up an Einstein poster in my dorm room in my Freshman year at the College of Santa Fe .
The Poster was a quote :
“Great Spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
To me, that was so spot on.
Anyway, Augie befriended me when I felt all alone in a class of kids, who I felt socially, culturally, and educationally estranged from.
So, when Augie told me that story about Joe, I was bummed out a bit, because Joe was the only teacher I felt molded by; and Augie was the only kid in the “brain class” that I felt comfortable with.
I wish I could’ve time-traveled my way back to Lincoln School, and get Joe and Augie to not dislike each other. But who am I? Right?
Mr. Morris, on the other hand, the industrial arts teacher, was also a cool guy, but we did not have him every semester like we had Joe every semester—hence, the greater likelihood of forming a relationship with a teacher one is around more frequently.
In closing, allow me to offer my apologies to Augie , …
Note : This post is actually an expanded edition of a Facebook post from a year ago.
Table of Contents
I. A NEW NEIGHBORHOOD—AND A NEW LIFE…WITH FRIENDS MY AGE!
II. THE SIGHT OF SNOW
III. THE LILAC PRIVACY FENCE
IV. FRESH PAINT & OLD SCHOOL RADIATOR HEATING
V. MOWING THE HUGE LAWN
VI. THREE INTERESTING POINTS
———-1. A CONTROLLED BURN ———-2. LIQUOR FACTORY ———-3. RESTLESS SPIRITS ——————–(A) THE DOGS ——————–(B) THE INTERCOM ——————–(C) THE DART BOARD ——————–(D) THE DREAMS
VII. THE POSITIVE MEMORIES
———-1. THE SONGS ———-2. PETS & FRIENDS ——————–(A) Rusty ——————–(B) Frieda ——————–(C) FAHRENHEIT ——————–(D) JIM SPOLAR
———-3. MY FAVORITE TEACHERS
———-4. MOM’S SUNDAY MEALS
VIII. THE DESIRE TO RETURN THERE—FOR EVEN JUST ONE DAY!
I. A NEW NEIGHBORHOOD—AND A NEW LIFE…WITH FRIENDS MY AGE!
This is the house we moved into in mid-December 1972.
It was just before Christmas, and I knew that after the holidays I would commence the Second (Winter-Spring) semester of 4th grade at Lincoln School—Mrs. Hutson’s Class.
In our move into Lyons, we had moved :
[A] FROM—-an area of farmland of Francesville, Indiana, where there were no kids my age. Not one (outside of school, that is) not even close; miles away in any direction was the minimum for me to travel, if I wanted to go hang out with anyone (my age or not) , so I had no one to hang out with :
[B] TO—having three kids exactly my age on both sides of my new home: next door to the east were the Rank boys, both in 4th grade, as well; and next door to the west, was Kelly Ehlo, also in 4th grade.
Wow! I couldn’t believe my luck.
They weren’t three miles away in town; they weren’t three blocks away; they weren’t even three houses away. They were right next door—on both sides of the house.
I just can’t say “Wow!” loud enough to show my amazement at such luck, and what a welcomed change that was in my life!
It was also the house where I established my first best friend, Jim Spolar, who lived two blocks away on 45th Place, and, who I sadly discovered in January 2018, had recently passed away from lung cancer.
The property was originally surrounded by literally 8-to-10-feet tall, very thick Lilac bushes, which gave our house a lot of visual privacy—i.e., in the warm weather months, when the bushes were in bloom, you couldn’t see into the yard from the street. It was like a privacy fence made out of bushes.
I thought that was so cool.
But, then, in the spring of 1974, my dad—with the help of one of his friends who had a back hoe or ditch witch—decided to pull the bushes out and visually expose the property.
Also, when we first moved in, my father did a lot of interior painting, so, to this day, every time I smell fresh paint, I’m immediately taken back via “Memory Lane” to that house and so many reminiscent thoughts go through my head.
The same thing goes for the smell of a newly-booted-up heating system.
Unlike modern houses with Furnace-based ducted heating systems, this house was very old school radiator-based heating—heck, the one room on the back porch had no heating at all, and both my sister, Nancy, and I had taken turns using that room as a bedroom.
In any case, the house hadn’t been lived in for a while, so when my father kicked on the heat for the first time, there was this unique smell in the air.
Even so, conventional furnace heating has it’s own smell when you first kick it on for the season, since what you’re really smelling is the forced-air release of all the dormant dust in the duct work.
So, fresh paint and the smell of “new heat” (radiator or furnace-based) brings back memories.
The Beatles, “Rubber Soul”
Another trigger is hearing any song off The Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” album, since we played that record frequently while my dad painted (NO! My dad was not a Beatles fan; he was a Big Band, Glenn Miller kind of person. The Beatles album was just simply the ONLY record we had to play on the turntable, so, we played it a lot).
So, when I hear, “In My Life”, “Run For Your Life”, “Girl”, or “I’m Looking Through You”, I might look like I’m in the room with you, but my body is an empty shell, because my mind is 40 miles away, and 50 years in the past, as I’m “breathing in the smell of the paint and the heat” while singing, “There are places I remember…In my life, though some have changed…”
V. MOWING THE HUGE LAWN
We rented this house for a whopping $160 a month(!) from Jack Kennedy, one of the original owners of Unique Plumbing (now on 47th St in Brookfield).
The house sat on what was actually the equivalent of two plots. Being that the house was situated in the center of that area, it had two huge side yards that really should’ve been mowed on a rider, but took about two hours to do with a walk-behind.
Push Mower ( Image Source : Counselling ON PIXABAY )
Although we had a gas-powered mower, my dad also had—as a backup, should the gas mower be on the fritz for whatever reason—one of those NON-motorized “push mowers”.
Man, did that suck mowing with that S.O.B! That was a three-hour exhausting “push fest”, taking breaks every 20 minutes or so, especially on murderously hot days!
After the final lease had expired, one of Jack’s sons, ultimately ended up tearing that house down and building his own home on half the lot, AND the other half had a two-flat apartment building erected on it —there was that much ground to mow!.
“Gas mower, good; push mower bad”.
8650 W. 44th Place : Then ( 1970’s ) and Now ( 2021 )
VI. THREE INTERESTING POINTS
Although my immediate family moved out in 1979 or 1980, my sister, Linda, and her family moved in for the remaining 3 or 4 years before that house was taken down.
1. A CONTROLLED BURN
The Lyons Fire Department (with Mr. Kennedy’s blessing, I’m sure) used that house ( during the take-down process ) in a controlled burn, as an exercise for the department’s Fire Cadets.
Reaction to Fire ( Image Source : dreamstime.com )
Although there was nothing ominous or accidental about the fire, I’m glad I was not there to see it go up in flames. I have so manymemories attached to that place, that watching it burn would have been like watching my memories burn along with it.
Pre-Development Praries ( Intricate Explorer @ unsplash.com ) LinkImage Address
This was one of the first houses on the block when it first went up—at least, that’s what Jack told my parents.
44th Place was just a prarie in the early 20th Century when the house was built.
And…the house had some undocumented history, as well.
Still Equiupment ( Image Source : studerhistory.org )
For instance, it was reputedly used by Al Capone’s men (I doubt Capone, himself, ever visited the place, being that I’m sure it was only one of many “establishments”) for liquor production during Prohibition.
When we first moved in, in December 1972, there was a bunch of liquor-production equipment in the basement, like the glass version of the 5-gallon “Hinckley Schmidt” bottles ( only smaller—likely 1-gallon containers ) and various flasks that looked like they were utilized in the making of moonshine or whiskey or some other celebratory concoction.
There was even more severely-damaged equipment out in the remains of the dilapidated garage behind the house, which was soon afterward, torn down and hauled away; and finally,
3. RESTLESS SPIRITS
Although the picture makes the house look almost haunted, that’s purely unintentional since the pic is actually a gray scale scan of a photograph I no longer have. The picture was in color, and looked a lot “warmer” in tone.
However…
There is an ominous element to the following stories:
—–(A) THE DOGS
Frightened German Shepherd ( Image Source : Article “Help your anxious or fearful dog gain confidence” at animalhumansociety.org )
Throughout our six years in that house, we had two different German Shepherds, BOTH of whom did not like being downstairs in the basement at all!
Rusty, the first dog, was a German Shepherd / Australian Sheep Dog mix, and Frieda was a pure bred.
Both dogs reacted uneasily when in the basement. Their hackles would go up and their ears would be downward as they looked around, and they couldn’t wait to go back upstairs.
What they saw, heard or sensed was beyond our capacity to detect, which, of course, was probably very fortunate, for us, since we’d probably never get any real rest, if we spent our every moment in bed trying to sleep with one eye open, waiting for the boogeyman to pounce on us in our most vulnerable moments.
That has to be unnerving for dogs or cats to realize that their owners are not sensing something that they can’t help but notice.
In one of my other posts, titled, “My Favorite TV Shows : Paranormal / Hauntings“, I elaborate on a YouTube video that’s based on a TV documentary called “A Haunting in Georgia” where there’s a segment of the video where the family dog is barking at something his owners couldn’t see or otherwise sense.
As the owners are wondering “What are you barking at?” the dog’s probably thinking, “What? Are you blind?! He standing right there! Don’t you see him?!”
And they don’t. There’s absolutely nothing there to the human eye; but the dog is snarling viciously as the unseen ( and, as far as the dog is concerned, very threatening ) entity.
Who knows what kind of anxiety humans would endure if we sensed those very unnerving things our pets are terrified of.
In our case, there was a door that separated the basement from the back porch stairway and they’d just sit by that door waiting for someone to open it, so they could dart up the stairs as fast as they could!
—–(B) THE INTERCOM
Table Top Intercom ( Image Source : Artucle “Home Controls Adds Chamberlain Wireless Home Intercoms” @ homecontrolsblog.com
Being a two-story house, my parents decided to buy a plug-into-the-wall intercom system so we could communicate between the floors without having to shout at the top of our lungs at the back porch stairway.
One afternoon, there was no one home (everyone was out doing something, somewhere) except my dad, Earl, a die hard skeptic WWII vet. He was the type of guy that if you tried to tell him a ghost story, he’d just grin and nod at you with one of those “you’re-an-idiot-if-you-believe-that-story” look on his face.
In any case, he was downstairs in the basement just doing odds and ends, and he heard someone say something as clear as day on the intercom.
“Yeah, I’ll be up in a minute.” he replied as he finished what he was doing, not having absorbed a single word of whoever was speaking.
He then walked upstairs expecting to encounter someone but there was nobody there.
He looked around the kitchen, and walked into the living room, peaked into the bedrooms, but there was no one in any room.
He, then, walked out onto the front porch to see if whoever was speaking on the intercom might have, by chance, just simply walked out there for whatever reason—but, again, no one on the front porch, either.
He then walked to the edge of the porch and looked down the driveway to see if anyone had drove up, but the only car in the driveway was his own.
Dad Talking to Kids ( Image Source : “Family listen to father while talking in garden” @ dreamstime.com )
Later on that day, as each of us returned home from wherever we were at, he inquired to each of us, “Did you come home around, I dunno, one-o’clock, or so? And then leave again?”
Each one of us said, “No, I was [somewhere else].”
From then on, my dad would always talk about that day in casual conversation with his friends in a way that he doubted his own skepticism, so to speak.
He’d conclude that story by smiling, shaking his head, and saying something along the lines of, “..and I’ll be…! I know I heard someone say something! But I went upstairs and there wasn’t anyone home.”
At that point in time, you could—metaphorically, speaking, of course—almost hear the “horror movie, scary music” playing in the background, when he told the story.
—–(C) THE DART BOARD
Dart Board ( Counselling @ pixabay.com )
In the basement, at the front of the house, there was a pretty large room that my brother, Jim, and I shared as a bedroom.
In the center of the south wall was a door that initially ( when we first moved in) was nailed shut.
On that door, we hung one of those ( corkboard[?] ) dart boards.
One evening, during a thunderstorm, Jim and I were playing a game of darts when we were called to come upstairs for dinner.
We finished our game, and all the darts were IN the dartboard. BUT…when we came back downstairs after dinner, all the darts were on the floor, at the foot of the door.
We just looked at each other like, “Oooookay”, and we’d always talk about THAT day the way my dad would talk about the “intercom” day.
—–(D) THE DREAMS
Bad Dreams ( DarkmoonArt_de @ pixabay.com )
In all my years in this life, in all my dreams, I’ve never had any dreams of any of my former homes…except this house; and every dream takes place in the basement; and all of them are less-than-heartwarming.
There’s nothing outright violent or bloody, but they’re always only very slightly ominous about them in that there’s always something really cold about them—there’s an obvious total lack of love or friendship; I’m alwaysalone; and I always end up on my back looking up at the ceiling, in a manner similar to someone who might have died in that spot ( similarly looking up at the ceiling in his or her last moments in life on earth), and that person’s spirit is telling me where he died, although, not necessarily “how” since no images of pain or blood or injury are conjured up; but a “feeling” that the person never left alive somewhat underlies the emotion behind the dream.
Dead Gangster ( Image Source : Bill Maisano @ pinterest )
If the house was, in fact, used for the “criminal” production of liquor during prohibition, it might have been the scene of a death or two—perhaps a shootout between law enforcement and some of Capone’s men? Maybe one of the “bad” guys, was accused of spilling gang secrets to the wrong people, and was killed by his own cohorts as punishment. Who knows?
It’s just definitely NOT a “happy, happy, joy, joy” feeling to the dream—far from it.
Despite the dark side of those stories, I also have far morepositive memories of that house.
One of the most common triggers that elicit memories is music. In my case, like many people who hear a song and are reminded of “better times”, this house is the house where most of those positive memories are stored.
1. THE SONGS
The songs that trigger time-specific memories for me are listed below showing what grade those songs remind me of.
6th Grade Songs7th Grade Songs8th Grade SongsAlbum Cover “Frampton Comes Alive” ( Source : My Collection )
One guitarist whose music I for forgot to include in the 7th grade chart was Peter Frampton, whose live album “Frampton Comes Alive” (with my favorite Tracks “Do You Feel Like We Do?”, “Show Me The Way”, “Baby, I Love Your Way”, and “Lines on My Face”) left such an indelible mark on my soul for the love of live music.
But, if I hear “Show Me The Way”, I’m automatically catapulted back almost 50 years, sitting on my un-heated, back porch bedroom, playing that song on my BSR® turntable, blaring out of my 50-watt Aircastle® stereo system (which I later blew up by trying to use it as a guitar amp! LOL).
It doesn’t work very well, nor does it work for very long, should anyone contemplate doing the same thing—sans real amp.
You’ll eventually burn the stereo’s transformer, and end up tossing the unit in the garbage can. I know. That’s what happened to me when I tried it.
Home Stereo ( Image Source : Mais Hasanov @ pinterest.com )
I just now wondered : Do they even sell stereos anymore? Or, has the digital revolution made the AM/FM Home stereo a dinosaur of a concept with the alternative being nearly “unlimited space” to store mp3 audio and mp4 video files, and play them via Bluetooth-based audio/video systems?
The next time I stop at Wal Mart, I’ll have to go over to the electronics section and see if they have any “stereos” anymore. Now that I think about, I walk past that section all the time, and I just don’t remember seeing anything “stereo”-looking at all on the shelves.
I’m sure those kids behind the counter in the electronics sections probably never heard of “Marantz” or “Kenwood” or “Scott” or or any of the other names known “in the day”.
But, I digress.
2. PETS & FRIENDS
The two pets we had during our residence at this house, were two dogs : (1) Rusty—a German Shepherd / Australian Sheep Dog Mix; and (2) Frieda—a pure bred German Shepard.
—–(A) Rusty
Growling Dog ( Ruslanchik @ Dreamstime.com )
Rusty spent the first four or five of her six or seven years of life out in the country where there were no other people, so when we brang her to the suburbs, where there’s people everywhere (compared to the rural area) she was not used to that, and she was NOT a friendly dog. We had to put her in the bedroom when company came over.
—–(B) Frieda
Frieda, on the other hand, was far more manageable, but she wasn’t exactly the “Welcome Wagon” when strangers approached the front door, either, as we had a close call with the mailman on one occasion.
Interestingly, when I mentioned that BOTH dogs were apprehensive about being in the basement, where their hackles would go up, indicating fear, or whatever, I had one “friend” who both dogs instantly disliked, and it was not a matter of just their hackles going up, but rather their teeth being shown, and mean growls being heard, as well..
Both dogs sensed there was something really wrong with this dude; and it makes me wonder when animals sense something, do they ever get the feeling that their owners are not sensing the same thing? Do our dogs ever say, “What? Are you stupid? Why you hangin’ ’round this guy? Let me do you a favor and bite him for ya’.?….”
Maybe dogs don’t “think” that far. But, they’re awesome “warning systems” when it comes to certain people with hidden or ominous agendas, that we humans aren’t “detecting” on our own.
—–(C) FAHRENHEIT
Marty Feldman as “Fahrenheit” ( Image Source : “Terry Jones , “Marty Feldman and ‘Jeepers Creepers’: Why Terry Jones is celebrating the comic on stage” )
The “friend” in question was a person we nicknamed “Fahrenheit” for certain reasons. When we’d shorten his name to a one-syllable utterance, we’d called him “Fair”, for short.
He kind of looked like Nicholas Cage with Marty Feldman eyes, but I couldn’t create such an image for this post since my pre-XP® morphing software doesn’t want to run in the Windows Vista® OS, and it seemed like too much work creating the image online somewhere.
In any case, when Fair was around, both dogs were enraged(!) by him somehow.
I know for a fact that he was mean to other dogs, but he was never mean to my dogs, not because he was “nice” to them, but simply because he could never get near them—no one could.
They just knew he was a bad entity.
I firmly believe that dogs can “detect” or sense bad people, and, in the end, I found Fair to be a bad person, too, on many levels, in fact; but we hung out with him, mainly because he always had a car, and that gave us the freedom to pretty much go anywhere we wanted without having to depend on someone’s parents to lug us around from Point A to Point B and back.
Trust me, I will do a post on Fair, too. There is a ton to elaborate on, where his role in our lives was concerned.
He’s definitely not a “25-words-or-less” topic; it’s more like, “25-pages-or-more” if I was to lay it all out for you. He was a character, and a demonic one at that.
Jim was my best friend in grade school, although we didn’t connect until the summer between 5th and 6th Grades.
The incident that brought us together, was a “fight” between us.
Specifically, we were on a Field Trip literally days before the last day of 5th Grade.
Instead of taking us to an educational outing (e.g., going to Holsum bread or Coca Cola to watch them make bread or bottle soda, like I had done in previous field trips) this was a purely-for-fun trip, and it was only blocks away from school—at Ehlert Park, in Brookfield.
The teacher was Miss Ciccio (who, the following year, got married and became Mrs. Uhler [?]—I’m bad with names ).
Anyway, here we are almost at the end of the day for our field trip, and Jimmy starts approaching people asking them if they want to slap box.
He wasn’t finding anyone to take him up on his offer. He must’ve approached four or five classmates before he got to me.
Finally, when he got to me, I wasn’t interested, either, because I really wasn’t a fighter. But somehow we just couldn’t avoid each other and he took a couple of swipes at me.
“Come on, Colbert. Let’s box.” he kept saying as he did his boxing “dance”.
I didn’t want to do it—slap box, that is.
So, he took a couple more swings and he grazed my cheek.
That stung.
So, I returned fire, but not with an open hand, but with a clenched fist.
Crack!
“WTF, a–h—! That’s not a slap, that’s a punch!” he said as he tried to do the same.
The next thing I know, Jim and I are really going at it with punches, not slaps.
Of course, every time kids see a fight in the school yard, they like to shout out “Fight!” to get everyone to notice and gather around and watch it happen.
Well, that also attracts the attentions of teachers, who like to break up fights, which Miss Ciccio tried to do, by saying, “Now, break it up, boys!”—warnings, which we, of course, being boys, completely ignored and continued on in our hand-to-hand combat.
There were no male faculty present to assist in the breaking up of the fight, but Jimmy and I ultimately ended up “ceasing-and-desisting” in our physical attacks on each other, and the next thing we knew….
We were friends; inseparable friends in fact.
It’s funny how that works—“Violence brings friends together”.
Doesn’t sound quite right, does it?
But, in some cases, that’s EXACTLY how some friendships begin. That’s how OURS began!
Jimmy and I did everything together in 6th, 7th and 8th Grades, and then drifted apart in early high school.
I almost included a section on my favorite teacher, Joe Callahan, our P.E. Teacher, but there were so many awesome things to say about him, that it essentially tallied up to being a post all by itself ( “Joe Callahan—P.E. Teacher Extraordinaire“).
So, I will save comments about Joe for his own post.
For now, suffice it to say that Joe and Mister Morris (our industrial arts teacher) were my Favorites.
My mom liked to make sausage gravy on Sunday mornings for breakfast. Most common is for people to use “bisquits” for their meal, but we just used plain ol’ white bread, and that was just fine by me.
I’d break up pieces of both pork sausage AND bacon in my gravy.
I also recall the mid-autumn evenings when my mom would be making one of her family-favorite fried chicken dinners, with dumplings or patatoes and corn.
The windows—especially in the kitchen where she was cooking, and also in the adjacent living room—got all fogged up while we sat in the living room watching a Family Classics movie with Frazier Thomas on WGN-TV Channel 9, as I wondered if I’d get my homework done before Monday morning classes at Lincoln School.
VIII. THE DESIRE TO RETURN THERE—FOR EVEN JUST ONE DAY!
There are times, though, that I wish so much that I could go back there and reminisce—on the front porch, in the yard, and in my old bedroom, and play with Rusty and Frieda and call my friends and say, “Come on over”, or “pick me up, too”, etc.
I could write a book on the myriad other memories that make me wish that I could go back there, even for one day!
But that’s hard to do when the house doesn’t exist anymore.
There are two attributes about dreams that I find interesting : on the one hand, the first one is one that I think pretty much everyone agrees with; while, on the other hand, the second, is one that frequently gets dismissed as intellectual nonsense that is not supported by any empirical evidence, and some folks will even roll their eyes at you, suspecting you of possessing a low I.Q., if you admit you even mildly believe in any claims of the second attribute’s validity.
Specifically…
Attribute #1 : Dreams Ignore Physical Reality
It’s funny how dreams seem to violate many rules-of-reality, and yet, we never really question the validity of those reality-ignoring violations while we’re smack dab in the middle of that dream while it’s in progress.
For some people, they may find themselves flying like a bird over an open field; or perhaps, they somehow traveled from Point A to Point B (a distance, that, in reality, is, say, a dozen, or even hundreds, of miles apart from each other) in the flash of a second—faster than if the U.S.S. Enterprise had teleported them between the two locales.
One moment, they’re at home in their kitchen, talking on the phone with their mother, and in the blink of an eye, they’re at the ball park, waiting in line at the concession stand, talking to their boss; and they don’t even second guess the irrational component of that faster-than-the-speed-of-light journey, nor the fact that the boss isn’t even likely to be found at a ball park since he or she has no interest in sports. Again, dreams don’t care about reality.
For me, personally, one dream that I recall as being completely reality-ignoring, occurred approximately seven or eight years ago.
I dreamt that my father and I were down in some basement, that, in retrospect, was neither my basement, nor any other basement I’ve ever seen before—but, at that time, during the dream, I didn’t question my unfamiliarity with the room, and I unsuspectingly worked on, completely oblivious to the fact that I had never been there before.
We were working on some kind of do-it-yourself “manly” type of project of which I do not recall the details since the dream didn’t seem to last long enough—or, at least, I only remember a few seconds of it—to clearly indicate what that project was.
What I do remember was that we were both standing around a rather large table, and I needed the hammer which was beyond my reach, and yet, was well within his. I asked him to hand it to me, and he did.
There was nothing positively elating or negatively ominous about the dream–it was completely neutral from an emotive perspective.
In fact, the reality-ignoring quirk about the dream was the fact that my father had been dead for more than 20 years at that time (i.e., he passed away in June of 1989, and my dream took place somewhere in the early 2010’s).
Yet, after all these years of him being dead, I’m standing in the same room with him, and I saw nothing out of the ordinary about his presence.
I didn’t excitedly hug him, like one would expect someone to do when they’ve re-encountered a person they love and haven’t seen in over two decades. Nor did I freak out and think, “Wow! You’re supposed to be dead! What are you doing here?”
Nope. Instead, I just plugged along in a completely nonchalant manner, as though there was nothing unusual about watching him stand there and talking to me, as though he never died in the first place.
The reality of his chronologically-distant passing was not relevant to his presence in my dream.
Dreams ignore reality, and I’m sure, pretty much everyone agrees with me that, although not everyone’s dreams become far-fetched, they all bend the rules to some extent.
Attribute #2 : Dreams Foretell Future Events
This is the one that I’m expecting most people to doubt, but that’s just fine with me since my acceptance of what happened to me, is not contingent on others believing it, too.
I was there. I saw it happen. I know the truth of the “what”, but I never understood the “why” or “how” the events unfolded as they did—in almost perfect sequence.
This is the one that I see as being problematic in expecting others to believe in, but I have no way of explaining the eerie similarities between the details of my dream during the night of March 9th, 1990, and the actual unfolding of events during the very next evening—March 10th.
I had been dating a woman (I’ll change her name to protect her privacy) named “Michelle”, who had recently graduated with a teaching credential and was teaching the French language to a junior high school out in the far west suburbs.
On the one hand, Michelle was so conservative in all of her ways, especially her sense of fashion ( e.g., a fur coat, and white gloves on, whenever climate permitted) that, in comparison, she made Queen Elizabeth look like a tramp.
Michelle frequently told me that when she got her first house, she wanted a gazebo in the back yard so she could wave to all her friends (the way a queen waves to her subjects) at back yard parties.
Katherine Hepburn was Michelle’s idol. She thought Miss Hepburn was breathtakingly beautiful (an assessment which—with all due respect—I could not relate to in the slightest) and she further thought that Spencer Tracy was the ideal man, which made him the perfect match for Miss Hepburn .
On the subject of sexual morés, to say that Michelle wanted to save herself for marriage would’ve been an understatement. After third base, there was a mile-tall electric fence, fortified with armed guards, en route to home plate.
Her “prize” was safer than it would have been if it had been stored at Fort Knox.
On the other hand, I was completely the opposite.
Spencer Tracy, I was not. Not even close.
I was way too “James Dean” (i.e., tee shirt; jeans; leather jacket; played in a rock band; smoked cigarettes; smoked pot; drank beer and vodka tonics; I wasn’t afraid to have a potty mouth when I thought it was appropriate; and, in contrast to those people who like to have a cigarette after sex, I wanted to have sex after every cigarette.
Michelle even once half-jokingly stated to me, “You are governed by your id, Mister” if that gives you any idea of how she saw my testosterone-induced relentless pursuit of her virginity.
We were polar opposites of each other. We were a total mismatch for each other.
Nowadays, an entity such as EHarmony would definitely NOT put us together.
For that, and a variety of other easily-foreseeable reasons , Michelle and I had been hitting some rough spots in our relationship, and I was enduring a pretty significant case of anxiety-induced insomnia as a result of the ongoing conflict between us. I even went to my primary to see if he could prescribe me something to bring the anxiety level down a notch or two, to help me sleep, which he did, and it did help.
Until I got my hands on that pharmaceutical assistance, I was finding myself all-too-often just lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, for hours on end, fading in and out with my eyes wide open, and never really entering any deep REM states of sleep.
Every morning I was feeling light-headed and dizzy and experiencing mild-but-long-lasting headaches for not having enough sleep under my belt, which I’d have to quantify at less than two full hours of shut eye per night, and essentially none of that was REM sleep. I was just barely drifting off because I was so fatigued.
However, with the medicine, I was able to fall asleep and enter into REM sleep and I was having some vivid dreams, and the night of March 9th, was certainly no exception.
THE FRIDAY NIGHT, MARCH 9TH DREAM
A pre-dream side note : In real life, I was driving my recently-deceased father’s full-sized 1983 Chevy Caprice, since my much-smaller 1987 Chevy Nova had been totaled in a black ice-induced, rear-end accident just two months earlier (on December 30th—the day before New Year’s Eve) out in Streamwood Illinois. It was an accident that Michelle was with me during.
We were both fortunate, in that neither of us were injured in the slightest. The car got totaled because the trunk got rammed into the back seat—so, off to the junk yard that car went.
In any case, in my March 9th dream, my immediate family (i.e., my mother, two sisters and one of my two brothers—the other brother residing out of state, in Ellensburg, Washington at the time) and I were en route to go see my widowed paternal grandmother, Nellie, who, again, in real life, actually lived with my mother at the time, but, for whatever reality-ignoring reason—in the dream—lived on her own in her own single family dwelling….as usual, in a house I had never seen before, and I didn’t question that detail, either.
In the dream, we took two separate cars. Why? I haven’t a clue. I drove, by myself, in my father’s Caprice, and everyone else drove together in a separate vehicle.
It was nighttime. and the weather was cool and wet in a heavily-foggy, mist-like environment.
Adding to the list of things that happen “for some unknown reason”, we also failed to park right out in front of Grandma’s house, but instead parked something like a full two blocks away—eerily outside the outer perimeter of a cemetery, although not any specific cemetery: just a plain ol’ graveyard
We parked together, and exited our vehicles and I momentarily, stood there in the dark, foggy environment, staring in apprehension, at the super tall wrought iron fence that bordered the burial ground.
We then began the two block trek without any umbrellas, and the precipitation began to increase in intensity from a mist to a light drizzle, getting us all wet in the process.
Characteristic of most dreams, we magically went from being two blocks away in the rain, to suddenly already being inside my grandma’s kitchen in the blink of an eye, and I never questioned the irrationality of our incredibly fast journey.
Back then, we were all smokers (every single one of us—Grandma, Ma, Linda, Nancy, Jim, and myself; not one of us was a non-smoker) and I was Jonesin’ for my nicotine fix; and yet, oddly, we weren’t allowed to smoke in Grandma’s house (go figure), so I decided to go outside, by myself, and have a smoke.
Her house was a slab-based, one-story, brick-built ranch, located in a stereotypical union-labor, working class neighborhood, of manicured lawns, where every driveway was populated by a relatively new domestic car, truck or van. There were no abandoned-looking homes or rust bucket-looking vehicles anywhere to be seen. It was overall a very comfortable environment—outside of the somewhat ominous “foggy, rainy night” theme of the dream.
I stepped outside and now the precipitation had increased from a light drizzle to fairly heavy raindrops. I was standing under a small awning, which really didn’t afford me much protection against the wind-blown drops of rain hitting me in the face.
I put my cigarette in my mouth, and went to light it up, only to discover that my disposable lighter wasn’t working, it was out of fluid. Each flick of the wheel generated sparks, but no flame.
“Damn!” I thought to myself as I realized I had to go back inside and borrow a lighter from someone
I, then, quickly realized that I had mistakenly closed the locked door behind myself and soon discovered that I couldn’t get back inside. I began to knock for someone to come and open the door, but no one came.
Suddenly…
A very distraught Michelle (represented not by herself, but rather by a life-sized cardboard cutout of her body; a cutout that actually had physical clothes draped over it) had cartwheeled itself from the public sidewalk, across the front lawn, and over to me, just off to the side of the concrete step I was standing on—and the face on the cutout was animated enough for her to be crying and saying some uninterpretable syllables.
Despite the gibberish being spoken, it was clear that she was visibly upset about something—more than likely, many things.
In the meantime, I just stood there, almost in a state of horror, staring at her as she cried on and on.
Then, the cardboard cutout, itself, collapsed—under the weight of the drenched clothes on soaked corrugated paper—and fell to the ground leaving nothing but a pile of wet clothes.
Suddenly, the real Michelle, similarly upset and crying, walked up (from out of nowhere) and pointed disappointingly at the pile of clothes on the ground, as she bent over, picked them up, and walked away from me.
Watching her walk across the lawn, with her back to me, really shook me up, and then I turned to again to knock on my grandmother’s front door.
What initially began as a calm knock, quickly morphed into a desperate and rapid pounding of my fists on the door, in addition to a lot of panicked door bell-ringing—much like the outro of the old Flintstones cartoons where Fred is pounding on the door shouting, “Wilma!”, but she never answers the door.
And then, I woke up, staring around the bedroom, somewhat relieved that it was only a dream.
THE SATURDAY EVENING, MARCH 10TH REALITY
We hadn’t broken up yet. In fact, we hadn’t even had an argument in more than a week at that time; and yet, there was something inherently fragile about the environment we shared. I couldn’t read her mind and tell you what was going on in her head, but I felt like I was constantly walking on eggs, in fear of cracking the otherwise delicate shell of our emotions toward each other.
Michelle had called me around 10:00AM that day to say “Good Morning” and also that she wanted to talk about a few things, which was a meeting I was looking forward to.
Finally, the late afternoon arrived, and Michelle (who was from the Elk Grove Village area) had come to my place in Brookfield. She parked out on the street, came in, and we sat in the kitchen for a few moments, deciding what we wanted to do, and we decided to go have dinner at a place called Copperfield’s in Berwyn, which was located along the south side of the Burlington-Northern tracks in between Oak Park and Grove Avenues.
We ended up driving to the restaurant in my father’s Caprice.
We had our dinner and I was having my mandatory after-dinner cigarette, and Michelle blurted out, “Ya’ know, I haven’t seen my grandparents in a while, in like way more than a year, or so.”
The only family members of hers that I had already met were her parents and her three step brothers.
Her father’s current wife was actually his second marriage, and she had three boys of her own, all of whom she lived with in a multi-level single family dwelling on the far west end of Elk Grove off of Meacham Avenue and Biesterfield Road.
Michelle was not at all close to her biological mother, so not only did I never meet her, but Michelle deliberately avoided talking about her, and I knew not to inquire about any details.
But I was game to meet more of her other family members, if that was a sign that she had long-term plans for our relationship.
“Where they at?” I asked in anticipation.
“In Winnetka.” she replied.
“Isn’t that like a real ritzy area with rich people?” I pressed on.
“Yep.” she laughed, “With U-shaped driveways, swimmin’ pools and movie stars.”
“Well, you point the way.” I added, “I’m not sure where we’re going.”
“Not a problem, I do.” she said giving me an affectionate kiss on the lips.
A few minutes later, I paid the bill, left a tip, and out the door we went.
Being early March, it still got dark relatively early, by 7:00PM, or so. By the time, we left the restaurant, it was already dusk and getting darker as we drove down the street.
It was also lightly misting out, and there was a hint of fog at ground level, which I could see in the beams of my headlights.
Several miles westward, on Ogden Avenue in the Western Springs/Hinsdale area, was the entrance ramp to get onto northbound Interstate I-294 (i.e., The Tri-State Tollway)—the fastest way to get up to the northern suburbs.
On the one hand, with Michelle being a non-smoker, she would always ask me to open my car window a tad when I’d smoke, so that the car’s interior wouldn’t fill up with smoke, which I was always happy to do for her.
On the other hand, I knew that it was going to be at least an hour’s drive, so, I knew we’d be in the car for a while.
Although I was not exactly a chain smoker, I was undeniably a “slightly-more-than-a-pack-a-day” type of person, and even though I just had a smoke a half hour earlier at the restaurant, I lit up another smoke, anyway, for the long ride.
I normally used Bic® lighters almost exclusively since they were so dependable, whereas those cheapie, Scripto® and other off brand lighters frequently failed to fire up on the first strike even when they have a full chamber of butane, and which also seemed to exhaust themselves so much more rapidly compared to Bics.
In this case, all I had on me was one of those see-through, Amber-colored Scriptos, which was visibily down to a sixteenth of an inch of fuel, whereas it would be more like two full inches had it been a new lighter.
Being so low on butane, it sparked two or three times before it actually generated a flame.
“I’m gonna have to stop at a gas station en route and buy a new lighter.” I commented as I succeeded in lighting my smoke, and I placed the soon-to-be-exhausted lighter back into my shirt pocket along with my pack of smokes, realizing that the in-dash cigarette lighter didn’t work. (Blown fuse? Bad element? Not sure. I only know that pushing it in, never caused it to heat up or pop back out ready to be used).
Anyway, once we got to Willow Road, she told me to take that eastward, toward the lake (as in Lake Michigan), which I did.
Throughout the entire ride on Willow Road, I don’t remember ever seeing a single gas station, except one, I think, and it was closed for the evening. It was definitely an older building that looked like it rarely had customers to begin with. Very old and Mayberry-ish looking.
Anyway, we took that all the way until it ended at a “T” in the road, at (what I believed to be) Sheridan Road.,
She instructed me to turn right ( going southbound) and I did and there was an entrance to a beach area nearby. But that was 30 years ago, so I forget how close or far the beach entrance was to the T in the road.
Again, it was all foggy and dark out just like in my dream. There was even a wrought iron fence around the parking area , but unlike the fence in my dream, which was super tall, this fence was only about five, maybe six, feet in height , or so; not toweringly tall like in my dream; and it wasn’t a cemetery, but, rather, the parking lot for the beach.
Suddenly, Michelle realized that she wasn’t as sure about her whereabouts as she initially thought she would be once we were in the area.
The gates to the beach parking lot were not closed, so it was possible to pull into the parking lot, which she asked me to do.
“You got a map in the glove compartment, don’t you?” she asked as she opened the compartment door, and pointed at the lot. “Pull into the parking lot so I can check out something on the map. I forgot if we should’ve taken a left or a right at the ‘T’ in the road.”
I pulled into the lot—albeit with that same sense of apprehension I had in my dream, since the fog had literally limited visibility to only about a dozen feet, or so—and that was only where my headlights were aimed. Outside of the beams of my headlights, there could’ve been a Dracula or serial killer standing almost within arm’s reach of the car, and we wouldn’t have seen them until it was too late.
“Lock your door.” I said to her as I locked my door, and looked around in all directions keeping an eye out for any possible dangers lurking in the foggy mist.
Michelle grabbed the map out of the compartment, turned on the interior dome light, unfolded the map, and ran her finger up and down the section pertaining to the Winnetka area as she searched for the destination she intended to reach.
Then, it dawned on me (in that pre-cell phone era) that Michelle never used the pay phone at the restaurant to call her grandparents to tell them that we were coming up for a visit.
“Ya’ know, now that I think about it, you never called them to let them know that we were coming up to see ’em, did ya’?” I asked her . “I mean, should we just pop in on ’em out of the clear blue. They could be in their PJ’s gettin’ ready for bed, for all we know.”
“Hardly necessary.” she replied, “Since they went to bed a long time ago.”
I looked at her all confused.
“They’re dead.” she added, clarifying that otherwise important detail.
“So, we’re going to a…cemetery?” I asked.
“That’s usually where they keep dead people.” she quipped.
I just shook my head at the irony of how all those crazy little parallels were coming about—my grandmother and her grandparents; the fog, mist and rain; the wrought iron fence.
“Looks like we’re good. We’re going in the right direction. I just wanted to make sure.” she said, finally locating our destination on the map, as she refolded the map in put it back into the glove compartment.
I wasted no time in pulling out of that eerie, fog-filled and completely unlit parking lot, and we continued on in our southbound direction.
We finally reached the cemetery where her grandparents were buried, and we pulled into the outer driveway, that was outside the vehicle entrance gates; and there it was : that much-taller-than-me wrought iron fence that was almost identical to the one in my dream.
By the time we arrived there, the wind had kicked up, the rainfail had increased to a drizzle, but the fog was beginning to decrease in intensity. Maybe the wind and heavier rainfall helped dissipate the fog. Not sure why. But the relative increase in visibility decreased the creepiness of walking around in the dark. But significantly increased the wetness factor.
In this case, the gates to the cemetery were closed, but there was a wide open area where pedestrians, or anyone on a bike, could easily enter the premises.
There was a spot off to the side where we could park and not be in anyone’s way, so I pulled into that spot, killed the ignition, and proceeded to exit the vehicle.
“Wait!, I want to show you something.” Michelle said, as she pulled out of her suitcase-sized purse a small brown paper bag that was all rolled up, which she unrolled and then pulled out a necklace that her grandmother had given to her before she passed away.
“Look. Isn’t that pretty?” Michelle asked me as she handed it to me for my appraisal. “My grandma gave that to me before she passed on.”
I smiled and nodded affirmatively as I pretended to agree, since I’ve never had even the slightest interest in jewelry of any kind : rings; earrings; neclaces; wrist bands; heck I don’t even wear a watch.
In any case, after we both expressed our visual appreciation for the necklace, I handed it back to her, and she put it back in the paper bag, rolled it up, put the bag back into her purse, and then proceeded to exit the vehicle.
She slung her purse over her shoulder as she stood up outside the car, waiting for me to come around to her side of the car and meet her.
I walked around the front of the car, toward her, and in her special, classy way, she grabbed my arm as we walked side-by-side toward the cemetery entrance .
We only got about a hundred yards past the entrance point when she suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, and she momentarily stared down at the ground.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, ever-so-sincerely, realizing that she was deeply preoccupied with certain unknown concerns and wondering what thoughts were going on inside her head.
She slowly raised her gaze from the ground and looked into my eyes and said, “I’m not really sure where exactly they’re buried. It’s been a few years since I was last here. In fact, I was only about twelve or 13 years old, when I last came here with my parents.”
But I could sense that a lack of knowing the “exact spot” of her grandparents headstones was not the only thing on her mind.
“And?” I said, hoping she’d be more honest and open about what she was thinking.
“And what?” she said, pretending to have nothing else on her mind.
“Well, there’s obviously something else bothering you.” I said putting my arm around her and gently kissing her on the lips as the wind kicked up and tossing a handful of raindrops at both our faces.
Visibly uncomfortable with the sudden change in weather conditions, she enclosed the two collar flaps of her fur coat around her neck to stop the wind and rain from running down her chest into her cleavage, and she then turned away from me, and started walking back toward the car, and said, “Let’s get outta here. We’re never gonna find their graves. I don’t know why I dragged you up here all this way in the first place.”
“That’s fine. That’s not a problem.” I said, as I began to follow her back toward the car. “I just wish you’d tell me what’s really on your mind.”
“We’ll talk in the car.” she replied as she continued to walk hurriedly as the more-frequent wind gusts continued to throw more rain in our faces.
For several strides, we walked side-by-side in silence without saying a single word to each other, as I tried to figure out what the magic words were that would get her to open up and start talking.
She then took her purse off her shoulder in search of a kleenex to wipe her runny nose, which she did.
While she was wiping her nose, I felt that I didn’t want to cause her any nausea in the car with cigarette smoke, so, I figured I’d try to get in as many drags as possible before getting in, so I put a cigarette in my mouth, grabbed my shitty Scripto lighter which, like I mentioned before, still had some fluid left in the chamber, and flicked it and flicked it and flicked it and flicked it, and all it did was frustratingly generate one flameless spark after another and finally it lit up, but (damn!) a wind gust came along and blew out the flame before I could light my smoke.
“Son of a f—– bitch!” I exclaimed in anger at the lighter’s failure to generate a usable flame.
Suddenly, Michelle, while putting her used kleenex back into her purse had somehow inadvertently ejected that necklace-containing paper bag out of her purse, and it fell onto the ground in a shallow puddle of water, and immediately got soaked, just like the cardboard in the dream.
“I got it!” I said to her as I saw it hit the ground.
I bent over, picked up the wet bag, and handed it to her, and, as she took the wet bag from my hand, she looked at me, and started to cry without saying any words, and walked away toward the car.
Just like in my dream the night before.
I put my cigarette and lighter back into my pocket and went to reach out and hold her and comfort her, but she refused my attempt, and walked away from me and toward the car and said, “Take me home!” (although she meant “take me back to my car” since her car was back at my house in Brookfield).
There was no denying that she she was more than “just merely upset with me”. I could feel it in my bones that she wanted to break up.
I walked ahead of her and opened the car door for her, and she got in, and then I got in and we sat quietly in the parking spot with the car not running for about five minutes as I tried to think of something to say that would make everything right.
But I couldn’t think of a single syllable that would’ve helped one iota.
Ever-so-quietly, she said, “Let’s go back to your house.”
I self-deceptively took her statement to ambiguously mean that once we got back to my place, we’d go inside and talk things out. But the entire ride home was almost in complete silence, and I put on the radio not out of a need for entertainment but a need to cover up the dead silence that was taking place between us.
Once we parked in front of my house, Michelle just sat there in the passenger seat, quietly trying to think of what she was going to say to me. And she finally spoke.
“Ya’ know, I think we should…take a break…from each other…for a while.” she said with long breaks of silence in between sets of words.
I just sat there in listened with my heart breaking with every syllable she spoke.
When she finished her speech, she kissed me on the cheek, exited the vehicle, got into her car, and pulled away .
For the next several weeks, she wouldn’t take any of my calls.
Although we did get back together in mid-April, our reunification lasted only for three more months as we broke up for good just before the Fourth of July.
I should’ve known Katherine Hepburn and James Dean would not have been a likely-to-workout relationship.
We were supposed to go to Milwaukee for the Bastille Day celebration in mid-July, but we never made it that far.
In closing, I think the parallels between my dream and the events of the following evening are just simply too hard to explain.
Anybody who has been around a place ( home, work, or school, etc.) for a long period of time, knows what it feels like when it’s time to go…for good.
For instance, the last day at an old house before moving into a new residence; or, the last day at school before graduating ; or, the last day at work on retirement day.
They all leave people reminiscing —some by quietly smiling reflectively; others by loudly shedding tears of joy regarding bittersweet moments—as they clean out their desks and/or lockers…for the very last time, knowing that they’ll never be there again as residents, students, workers, or whatever.
Come Monday morning, they’ll be somewhere else—the house will be empty, with no furniture inside; the locker at school will be assigned to another student; and the desk at work, will have empty drawers, and nothing but a lone telephone (and maybe a desk lamp) on the desktop—no family pictures; no coffee mug; no creature comforts.
It’s like the last episode of a well-liked TV show : all the faithful viewers gather around their TV sets to view the very last episode of that show to be made.
The Last Episode of M*A*S*H
They say that when M*A*S*H aired its series finale back in 1983, it had garnered one of the largest ( if not THE largest) TV viewing audience(s) in broadcast history. I think I read somewhere that “Cheers’ ” final episode also brought in a super large crowd of viewers
In any case, the final moment of the final M*A*S*H episode, shows Hawkeye (played by Alan Alda) , sitting shotgun in a helicopter as it rises into the air, and he’s looking down on his now-former-roommate B. J. Hunnicutt ( Played by Mike Farrell) as B.J. rides down a hill on a motorcycle, and Hawkeye sees a message that B.J. had left him spelled out in boulders on the ground below : “Goodbye”.
Hawkeye momentarily dons a reflective look on his face, as he leans back in his seat, and the camera shows the chopper flying off into the sunny foreground, and the show’s theme song begins to play.
That’s it. The End!
No more M*A*S*H.
No more seeing these people ever again—at least, not as cohorts in a Mobil Army Surgical Hospital.
Heck, they may not ever talk to each other again. Or even have an idea of where anyone would be 10 or 20 years from that time.
As far as the UN-scripted, post-M*A*S*H Hawkeye is concerned, we can only imagine that when he awoke the next morning, he didn’t wake up on a moldy, smelly, green flannel-covered cot in an un-insulated tent ( unofficially referred to as “The Swamp”), where the first thing he’d otherwise see would be one or both of his tent mates ( B.J. and/or Winchester ) , and then, presumably off to “The Mess Tent” for slop and slime masquerading as breakfast.
Instead, he’d raise his head off a clean pillow either in his own bed in Crab Apple Cove, Maine, or in a hotel/motel somewhere stateside en route to home.
Waking up and looking around, there’s NO B.J. cracking jokes, NO Winchester complaining that everything is beneath him; NO Col. Potter bestowing his wisdom on someone asking him a question ; NO Margaret or Frank pointlessly trying to hide a relationship that everyone already knew about , NO Radar or Klinger announcing anything over the camp P.A. system. NO sound of helicopters or jeeps coming or going picking up or dropping off patients or supplies, NO people wearing olive drab uniforms with rank insignias sewn to them; NO “war blood” to clean up.
Instead, civilian clothes and the smell of bacon frying up in the kitchen is likely what his next day experience would have started like.
A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT existence—in 24 hours!
However, prior to that moment of the episode-and-series-ending departure of the show’s two final characters, the writers had given pretty much all the other actors ( in ascending order ) a chance to exchange “goodbyes” among each other, to dramatize the relationships that had formed over the years.
It’s been a while since I watched that episode, but I remember they started with all the helpers, supply clerks, then nurses, then the company clerk, etc, and then they worked their way up the food chain .
First it was something like Rizzo then Klinger then Winchester, Houlihan, Potter, etc, and finally, B.J. and Hawkeye,
Then, the top two went their separate ways.
Totally FICTIONAL people, yet, I was actually sad to see them go.
The Last Episode of Barney Miller
The final episode of the Barney Miller show also exited in a similar manner.
They started out with a large group of former characters ( victims and criminals, alike ) that, after hearing the word that the 12th Precinct was closing, actually stopped into the squad room to say goodbye to the detectives who had either helped or arrested them in the past.
Somehow, though, I would not envision that someone who got sent to jail, would be interested in socializing with the officers who arrested them in the first place. But that’s just me, I suppose.
One by one, everyone left the squad room until there was just Barney and his top three detectives —Wojo, Harris, and Dietrich, played by Max Gail, Ron Glass, and the late Steve Landesberg, respectively.
The three detectives offer to take Barney out for one last drink together, but in his perpetually-aloof way, he declined the offer ( twice! ) and the three detectives finally exit the squad room.
Barney looks around, momentarily reminiscing about some of the other former police officer characters like Fish ( played by Abe Vigoda) and Wentworth ( Linda Lavin ) who also had their funny moments.
Finally, ( with a screen wipe that implied some time had passed by—whether that be five minutes or an hour, who knows?) there’s Barney, all by himself, standing there, with a small cardboard box filled with his personal belongings ( office knick knacks, coffee mugs, family photos, and what-have-you ) and he takes one last look around the squad room, heads toward the squad room door, opens it, reaches for the light switch, turns off the light, closes the door behind himself, a farewell salutation from the show’s producers is displayed on the screen, and the audience applauds……for the VERY LAST TIME.
NO ONE says, “See you tomorrow,” because they know that’s not going to happen…ever again.
They could waste their time and show up the next day just for “reminiscing-about-happy-sad-and-bittersweet-moments” purposes, but the building would be likely locked up, or if it was open, most of the lights would be off, and all the hallways and rooms darkened, and the silence would be deafening.
The finality of it all is just so unsettling for me.
Again : FICTIONAL people, that I will miss dearly.
I raise this fictional “Last Episode” issue simply because of a VERY REAL “last episode” of my own.
The Last Episode of “Recco Tool”
Specifically, the company that I started at in 1998 finally went the way of the dinosaur, and became extinct in 2016.
The myriad reasons for our demise is another story for another article, but today, suffice it to say that, like Hawkeye and Barney, I had seen so many faces come and go while I worked there; and to know that my face was one of the THREE FINAL SOULS to inhabit this company’s payroll, was somehow, like I said, unsettling for me.
I’ve sat at three different desks over the years.
I could easily do a Barney Miller and reminisce about all the things that have occurred over the DECADES, and the people that made those things happen.
But many of the people that once inhabited a work station at this company are now deceased.
The original owner, Wes, passed away going on 14 years ago this November; Harry ( our shipping clerk) , and Bill ( one of our drivers ) both have passed away within the past ten years.
Of those that are still alive, most probably would NOT feel any deeply-felt connections to us here; but just having known their names and faces, has me thinking that I’ll always remember them.
I wasn’t the Hawkeye or Barney Miller of our company—more like a Radar O’Riley who outlasted everyone who worked here, except the owner’s son, who became the owner upon his father’s earthly departure in 2006.
Call me a sentimental fool, but I was constantly reminiscing about the “good ol’ days” even before my final day at the company.
We all saw the rapidly-approaching curtain call.
The phones LITERALLY were’t ringing anymore. There were no customers walking in off the street or contractor pickups; there were no cars in the parking lot, except, of course, the three employee vehicles—the owner, the repair guy, and yours truly.
Missing was the fume-spewing, rumble of diesel engines as trucks come and go picking up repaired tools and dropping off broken ones ; there was no sound of the two large overhead doors opening and closing in the process of interacting with the customers’ pickups and dropoffs; There was no sound of a radio, or two, playing in the background; there was no sound of employees talking and laughing.
The place was dead quiet.
Everyone was gone, and I frequently stood alone, momentarily reminiscing, in an empty, unlit, echo-filled hallway as the business sun set on the company….for the very last time.
“There won’t be a tomorrow.” I thought to myself, as I remember that the very last sound I heard was the sound of the very last paycheck being printed, and the printer, itself, being turned off…for the very last time.
Listening to the silence, one could easily hear a pin drop.
I followed my boss to the front door as he opened it, offering me the opportunity to be the first through the doorway, and he followed me through, closing it behind us, sticking the key into the lock one last time, turning the key, hearing the click of the tumblers, and knowing the door is locked…for the very last time.
He momentarily stared at the key and silently contemplated reflectively, then put the entire key ring into his pocket since his keyless, remotely-started vehicle was already running with a pre-air conditioned interior for the 19-mile ride home from work….for the very last time
Actually, Mike did come in regularly for another month afterward to tidy up loose ends, but our exit was the true finale as a company opened to the public.
He looked at me, and reached to shake my hand—for the very last time.
“Well, Floyd?…Here we are. This is it, brother. It’s time to go home from here…for good. I can’t say, ‘ See ya’ Monday’, ’cause, well,….ya’ know…”
“Yeah. ” I quietly replied trying to fight back a tear or two, ( looking around the soon-to-be-abandoned-looking-and-weed-infested-and-fenced-in parking lot, remembering all the vehicles that called this place, “work”…and all the different vehicles I drove throughout my years of working here….’ Barney Miller-ing’, the paking lot, so to speak.) “…I’m gonna miss this place.”
He silently nodded in agreement as I let go of his hand, and I walked off to my car in this parking lot…for the very last time.
“Take care, Floyd.”
“You, too, Mike.”
I walked over to my car, got in, started it up, and revved the engine to ensure a full, complete start on the first try—since, in my experience, cars that don’t start successfully on the first attempt, almost always glitch out on the second attempt, making me a bit nervous that it might NOT start at all.
For me, I’ve always had a “Hope Diamond” type of bad luck with all the cars I’ve had in the past.
It either starts on the first attempt ( VROOM!) OR….. I go into panic mode.
My officially-now-ex-boss looked over at me, sitting in my car, making sure that my car started ( HE KNEW MY LUCK! ).
I revved the engine again, he heard it, and nodded, acknowledging that he knew it was running.
I normally closed the gate at night. But that day, for obvious symbolic and sentimental reasons, he wanted to do the honors; and so, I put the car in gear, and slowly pulled out of my parking spot—for the very last time.
I honked the horn and waved…one last time, as I pulled out of the parking lot and out onto the street …for the very last time.
And I drove so slowly—I deliberately put on my flashers so I could go as slow as possible—so I could glance into my side-view mirror, and watch my boss CLOSE AND LOCK THE GATE on the parking lot…for the very last time.
Zoom! Zoom! Cars passed me on the left as I crawled along the road peering into my mirror, watching ever-so-intensely.
“Click.”
From a block away, I could almost hear the sound of the lock’s shackle grab the tumbler—for the very last time.
“It’s Official : we are closed and out of business….for good…..I’m never coming back.” I couldn’t stop thinking.
Having seen the final deed done (i.e., locking the parking lot’s gate) , I turned my flashers off, and watched Mike get into his Ford Escape, and then, I resumed a normal speed, as I pulled away from work….for the very last time.
I continued to drive somewhat slower than my usual five-miles-over-the-speed-limit driving M.O., hoping that my now-ex-boss could catch up to me in traffic, so I could say, “There’s goes my boss—hopefully NOT for the very last time….since I still need a boss, or, at least, income of some sort.”
In closing, the first part of the journey home had me wishing—sentimentally, of course—that I could have left a message spelled out on the roof or hanging on the fence for all to see : “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen”.
2. Equalizers : With Free Reverb—Whether You Want It Or Not
3. Multitrack Recorders—“Rocky The Flying Squirrel” & Fostex The Flying Multitrack
4. Amplifiers—That Die Like The Terminator (Impedance Is Important)
5. Power Supplies—Polarity Is Important, too)
6. All Things Must Eventually Come To An End—Like This Post And Other Things.
1. Cassette Decks—That Are Really Radios
1970’s Monoaural Cassette Player
Here’s a story about a young boy’s inquisitiveness about how cassette players work :
Back in 1975, when I was 12 years old, I had a monoaural cassette recorder/player very much like the one pictured above.
One day, the unit’s wheels stopped “moving”—i.e., pressing the “play” button generated a hissing sound, coming out of the lone speaker, so I knew there was current flowing in the circuitry; but the tape wheels would not move (e.g., no play, fast forward, or rewind).
So, I turned the unit over on its belly, removed the five or six tiny screws that held the back plate on, and removed the plate, to expose ALL the electronic guts of the machine.
My goal, of course, was to see if there were any immediately-visible reasons to indicate why the wheels weren’t moving (perhaps a large rubber band inside had snapped, or the hamster died or whatever).
I learned MANY years later that there were two types of drive systems—direct drive and belt-driven; but I was NOT aware of those aspects at that time; I was just a clueless freckled-face kid with a screwdriver and a boatload of questions of “how things work”, or why they weren’t working.
Instead of seeing any glaringly obvious causes for the cassette deck’s refusal to operate correctly, all I saw was a circuit board with a billion solder points.
With the unit still plugged into the wall’s live electrical outlet, I started poking around with my screwdriver, randomly touching solder points with an inquisitive “I-wonder-what-would-happen-if-I-touched-THIS?” experimental approach.
You’re probably thinking I’m going to say that I caused a spark and got shocked. LOL. But no.
Instead, at approximately the 15th or 20th “touch” I suddenly heard……RADIO.
Specifically, the “W-C-F-L” station identification musical jingo. LOL.
“Wow! A cassette deck can also be a radio!” I realized as I kept touching and untouching that particular contact point.
I would later learn that a variable rheostat, and some additional current-modifying components like resistors and capacitors, were the only things needed to turn a cassette deck into a radio, as well.
But, I decided to just buy a radio instead. Much cheaper that way. LOL. I wasn’t going to try to convert my cassette deck into an AM transistor radio.
2. EQUALIZERS (With Free Reverb—Whether You Want It Or Not)
Radio Shack Stereo Equalizer
Another piece of gear that had presented me with questions was a Radio Shack® stereo equalizer that, in its last days, started to ADD REVERB to any signal passing through the unit.
How?
I have no clue.
The EQ itself, did not contain any reverb features—hence, NOT EVEN a BUTTON to press to “engage” a reverb effect.
Nor, did I have a reverb unit in the chain.
Just a turntable, the equalizer, and a cassette deck that I monitored through HEADPHONES, NOT SPEAKERS and nothing else. There were neither amplifiers nor any effects hooked up.
Yet, with only a turntable, an equalizer, and a stereo tape deck, I was somehow generating “reverb”—and lots of it; too much, in fact.
Moreover, the unwanted effect was NOT adjustable in any way (e.g., choices between “large hall”, “small room’, “spring reverb”, “early reflections”, etc).
The effect had an extremely long decay (i.e., longer than 8 seconds) which made it very “long tunnel”-like in its effect.
I started to notice the problem, when my sister, Linda, asked me to record her a couple of Elton John tapes—in this case, “Goodbye Yellowbrick Road” and “Elton John’s Greatest Hits, Vol.1.
I booted up the system, put side one of the first album on, and I saw the two VU meters responding WITHIN range , and that’s usually indicative of a good, strong signal, so, I didn’t bother to put on the headphones to verify the “quality” of the sound being recorded, and instead, I just walked away to go upstairs go take care of other matters while side one played and was recorded on tape.
20 minutes later, or so, when I came back down the stairs into the basement, a moment or so after the album side had already finished playing and the turntable’s arm had automatically returned to it’s non-playing position in the cradle, I had to rewind the tape back a few seconds, to VERIFY that something was recorded, and that the signal was not too strong or two weak.
But the moment I pressed the “Play” button, I heard what I thought was a LIVE recording—you could hear a heavy dose of reverb—even though the albums were studio recordings, notlive.
“Huh. Wow! Where’s that effect coming from?” I kept asking myself while I stared at the unit, completely dumbfounded by “how” it was happening.
I had NO standalone “reverb unit” hooked up in the system. In fact, at that time, I’ve DIDN’T even have any reverb units in my arsenal of equipment—I never did. I still don’t!
To be sure, I have TONS of reverb effects at my disposal, but they’re all part of a multi-effect unit that has other effects, as well, such as modulation effects ( chorus, flanger, resonator, etc) and delay units, but nothing like say, the Yamaha REV500 which was, at that time, a high-end standalone unit
In any case, the EQ’s “unintended” reverb effect was unmistakable; you couldn’t “not” hear it.
I was so perplexed.
I then connected the turntable directly to the cassette deck, and Presto, noreverb!
Returned to the previous 3-way setup, and there it was again. LOTS of Reverb.
“What the…?” was all I could think of as I stared at the EQ.
“How in the heck are you adding an effect that you don’t even officially offer?” I wondered as though the unit could somehow telepathically answer my question.
Unfortunately, the effect was so intense, that it made the studio recordings sound NOT like live music from a stage, per se, but rather like a band playing down a very long tunnel.
It was an ugly sound that killed all clarity, including making the vocals ( hence, the lyrics) difficult to hear—almost like those recordings where the vocals have been digitally removed from a recording for Karaoke applications, but the band is still “playing down that long tunnel”.
So, I disconnected the unit, and never used it again—well, I couldn’t, unless I wanted a ton of unwanted non-complimentary reverb added to a mix, which, of course, I wouldn’t want.
3. Multitrack Recorders—“Rocky The Flying Squirrel” & Fostex The Flying Multitrack
Fostex X-15 4-Track
One four-track unit that I had back in the mid-1980’s, was the Fostex® X-15, which generates two stories I’d like to share.
A. “Coming To An Expressway Near You.”
The X-15 had a pretty cool feature that no other unit (that I was aware of) possessed at that time in the history of portable multi-track recording equipment : it could be operated via either :
[a] alternating current (AC—plug into the wall); or
[b] direct current (DC—battery-operated).
The only real negative to the battery-use option, was that the unit used something like six or eight “D” batteries (I forget the exact count—it’s been more than 30 years now—but I know it was not a tiny” three AA-Battery setup).
In any case, because of the fact that the unit would drain those batteries ultra quickly, I didn’t use the battery option at all at home (and you’re probably going to laugh when I tell you where I did use the battery option—my buddy, Jim [R.I.P., Jim] , laughed).
Specifically, at that time, in the spring and summer of 1989, I was living at my parents house on Elm Avenue in Brookfield, Illinois, when my father was incapacitated from a stroke triggered by a brain tumor (i.e., brain cancer).
When my parents first moved into the house, my father was healthy (or so we thought) and his bedroom was up on the second floor; but after he had his stroke, and he was largely paralyzed with aphasia, going up and down those stairs was no longer an option, so, we set up his bedroom in the dining room on the first floor with one of those hospital beds bestowed upon us from the American Cancer Society (Thank you, ACS).
My studio? Was directly below him in the basement.
Since I never really recorded with amps and microphones, and instead elected to go direct into the recorder NON-acoustically, and use headphones to monitor the recordings and playback, “noise” was never a problem.
But, when it came to vocal tracks, that was something that could not be recorded in a way that my father wouldn’t hear the noise, so, I really couldn’t record vocal tracks in the basement.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have a garage either.
So….
I’d wait until dark, because I didn’t want to be seen, I’d pack the X-15 with the batteries, and load up my 1987 Chevy Nova (it was identical to the Toyota Carolla of the same year—it was a Chevy/Toyota venture) with the recorder, a microphone, and a modified mic stand that was taller than those mic stands used to record drums, but shorter than a typical mic stand for a vocalist standing up. Somewhere in between, thanks to a Sawzall.
I’d set up the stand in the passenger section of the front seat of the car, position the mic to reach my face while I sat in the driver’s seat, and put the recorder in record mode, on pause.
Then…onto the expressway (LOL) .
Yep, you guessed it, I did my vocal tracks while driving down the highway.
Ok, you done laughing yet?….
I know, when I told my lifelong buddy, Jim, that story, he just busted a gut laughing at the top of his lungs, and said, ” I can just see it if you ever make it famous, your concert promotions will entail posters that read “Floyd…Coming To an Expressway Near You!” and everyone else joined in on the laughter.
It’s difficult to deny that the joke was pretty funny.
Anyway, the reason that I didn’t want to be seen, had nothing to do with a fear of looking “silly” or anything like that, but rather a fear that, if a cop saw me in the plain light of day, with headphones on while singing, and driving down the expressway at 60 miles-per-hour, he would’ve been likely to pull me over for “distracted” driving, a charge that didn’t officially exist back then (I don’t think) , but in actuality, I’ve seen cops pull people over for all kinds of reasons like having the radio blaring too loud, or whatever, and I just didn’t want to give any officer an opportunity to take away my only avenue to recording vocals uninterrupted.
Recording while being parked was not a realistic option, it seemed, because I didn’t know where I could go, to park, record my tracks, without being seen and interrupted by bypassers.
Specifically, on the one hand, if I was to, say, pull into a parking lot at a mall when it’s open, my car might blend in with the hundreds of other cars in the parking lot with me, but there are shoppers everywhere walking through the parking lot either leaving, or returning to, their cars, so, I was only going to encounter other shoppers walking through the parking lot and witnessing some dude singing into a microphone, inside his car, with the windows closed, and no audible music to hear along with the singing—just the singing alone.
I wouldn’t want to be “on stage” in that way.
On the other hand, if I went into those same parking lots after hours (with no customers around), I’d be the only car in the lot, and I’d stick out like a flashing neon sign, and surely, mall security police, doing their rounds, would undoubtedly see me parked there, and then come to investigate the reasons for my presence, because I’d understandably look like I was “up to no good”—someone loitering after hours? Always suspicious.
Either way, it would have been either daytime customers or nighttime police/security that would be interrupting me…constantly.
So, the one place that I knew no one would bother me, is when I’m moving—especially at high speeds like 60 mph or faster; and, in the dark of night, when fellow drivers can’t see through closed windows—especially tinted ones).
The MOST PRIVATE recording studio on wheels that you can get.
B. Not “Bats in the Belfry” But “Squirrels In The Basement”.
I had opened this post with the story of a monaural cassette deck whose wheels stopped moving. That unit was a direct drive unit—i.e., the capstans were driven directly by a tiny motor.
But, the X-15 was belt-driven. I found that out, when , just like the mono deck, the wheels stopped moving, and I took off the back plate to investigate if the problem was “user-serviceable” or not, and fortunately, it was.
Immediately, I saw the broken belt just laying against the circuit board , which, if it wasn’t broken, would’ve measured approximately three inches in diameter.
Not having any rubber bands of the same size just laying around the house , I ended up going to a place in Berwyn, Illinois that is now defunct, but I think it was called B&W Electronics which was on Cermak Road (22nd Street).
I ordered the EXACT belt from them and picked it up about a week later.
I put it on, and despite being the exact belt spec’d for that machine, it fell off the drive system frequently, and I got tired of taking out and putting the machine’s back plate screws back in, so I decided to just put the unit back together with no screws, so that every time the belt fell off, it was just a matter of flipping the unit on its face, wrapping the belt around the motor pulley, and laying the unit face up with its underside inside the backing plate, and continue working.
My “no-screws-installed” approach cut my downtime from five minutes to 20 seconds per incident; that was a major time-saver.
Here is where it gets kind of funny—I say “kind of” because it wasn’t funny at that time. In retrospect, though, it’s difficult to not laugh when “cute” animals are involved.
The way I had my studio set up was NOT like a stage with all the gear spread out, but rather, more like the cockpit of an airplane ( i.e.,I was completely surrounded), where everything was squeezed within arm’s reach—keyboards, recorders, effects units, guitars etc.; and pretty much everything was shoulder-high if you were standing in the middle of it all.
Specifically, what happened was one evening, I had my headphones on, and I was playing on my Yamaha SY22, and suddenly…..
The big bushy tail of a squirrel walked right past my face along an eight-foot long 1″x8″ at shoulder height in the basement.
I freaked out (i.e., being that most people don’t have squirrels in their basement—so I wasn’t exactly accustomed to having my face come within six inches of the razor-sharp claws of non-domesticated rodent) and I tripped over the cord that was going from the mixing board into the inputs on the Fostex.
When I tripped on that cord, I ended up inadvertently yanking the X-15 off the table and as it was airborne, the backing plate (i.e., with no screws in it to keep it attached to the unit) fell away immediately to the floor, while the rest of the unit took a less direct path, and flew about ten feet or so, in my direction, and when the exposed circuit boards of the unit hit the concrete floor in the basement, I saw sparks fly from the unit’s underside, and I knew that wasn’t good.
Sure as shit, when I stood above the unit, it showed that Track 1 was in record mode–permanently!
Pressing the stop button, and disarming the track would not turn the led lights off. Track one was now in permanent record mode. The X-15 was now a three-track unit.
I took it to a one-man operation who worked out of his garage in Brookfield near the tracks at Prarie Avenue, and when I walked into his place, I saw hundreds of pieces of gear, which were all current units waiting ahead of me.
I was not confident that I’d get the unit back quickly, but I didn’t see any other options, since the unit was no longer under any kind of warranty, and I wasn’t aware of any Fostex-authorized service centers in my area.
And I was right. In fact, not only did it take forever (about three months) , when I got it back it was NOT fixed.
Why not?
The guy told me he couldn’t get his hands on the parts since the unit was no longer in production, and no vendors that he dealt with had access to Fostex parts.
So, the unit came back to me in the same condition it was when I dropped it off—broken.
As far as the subject of the squirrels is concerned, they got into the house, when the roofers forgot to patch a hole in the side of the house they left.
We called the Humane Society of Hinsdale, and they brought us several non-lethal traps to catch them, and they worked.
But, I’ll never forget the sight of that unit “surfing along the concrete” with sparks flying out from underneath.
It literally took me about a year to get up the “courage” to retire the unit to the great landfill in the sky. It was heart-breaking to throw it into the garbage can.
It was nowhere near the pain of losing, say, a family, pet, but it had sentimental value attached to it in other ways.
4. Amplifiers—That Die Like The Terminator (Impedance Is Important)
The particular piece of gear that I’d like to elaborate on in this section, didn’t even belong to me, but rather, the company that I worked for in the mid-90’s : The Soundpost—a three-store chain of musical instruments (i.e., guitars, keyboards, drums, and P.A. systems mostly—everything a garage band needs to get started) located in the three Chicago suburbs of Lagrange, Evanston/Skokie, and the headquarters, in Mount Prospect, all of which closed for good in the early 2000’s, because of the competition from the Guitar Center (and I might be wrong—but I think Sam Ash was also on the Chicago scene in the mid-90’s) : what we sold for $99, GC gave away for $49. Any informed person who wanted to save that $50 knew they weren’t going to buy from us.
In this case, a young kid approximately 15 years old ( I don’t think he was even old enough to drive a car yet) came into the store looking for a beginner’s setup, and he was walking around the guitar department just scoping things out, when I walked into the room and he explained to me what he was looking for, and the answer was simple. He needed the beginners rocker setup which entailed :
[1] A “strat” style Fender Squier (Squiers also came in “Tele” styles, as well) ; and
[2] a Fender Champ Amp, which was a tiny either 15- or 20-watt single-speaker combo amp for beginners.
I believe we sold the two pieces together as a kit, for around $159 (whereas GC, always had us beat by $60—$99, when their promotions were on) and we had one setup in the front window for the general public to see, which is what brought a lot of young guitarist-wannabees into the store in the first place.
Fender Champ Amp on top of Marshall 4×12
In any case, it was obvious from the fact that he had neither a thick wallet in his back pocket nor any monied parents standing right next to him, that he probably wasn’t going to be buying anything that day anyway. He was simply window shopping from inside the store.
But there was nothing else going on on that dead day, so I was game to play along this kid’s imaginary shopping spree, just to keep me busy and help time pass by much more quickly.
He told me his price range, and our $159 setup in the store front window was exactly what he needed.
So, I grabbed one of the Squiers he was looking at, off the wall hook, and walked it over to a The Champ Amp that was sitting on top of a Marshall 4-by-12 cabinet, plugged it in with a 1/4″ instrument cable, turned down the volume to a low setting , flipped the power switch on, handed him the guitar, and said something along the lines of “Check it out, man. I gotta go to the storeroom for a second, and I’ll be right back, and let me know what you think of the setup.”
With that, I walked away to give him a couple of minutes to fiddle around with all the buttons and knobs on the guitar and amp and decide if he wanted to go with that kit, or something else that I might not have anticipated.
When I returned to the guitar department, he was pretty much doing the exact same thing he was doing when I left : touching snobs and listening to things.
Not knowing any chords or scales, there really wasn’t anything that he could do to “operate” the gear in any “playing” sense, so, I walked over to him to bring the kit to life, by actually playing something for him to listen to.
Next to the Champ / Marshall display, was another amp bottom, with an effects pedal on it that a previous customer was checking out, which we had not yet had a chance to put back in its display.
That was convenient. I plugged the guitar into the pedal and the re-routed the pedal into the Champ amp, so he could hear how it all sounded out of the setup we were using.
I forget the exact model of effects pedal, but I think it was a Digitech® and I seem to remember the letters RPG or something along those lines. The cool thing about that pedal is that it had built-in accompaniment (i.e., drums and bass patterns to jam along with) and there was this one patch that had a “galloping” drum and bass pattern that was similar to UFO’s, “Lights Out”, so I pulled that patch up and started to jam along in A Minor pentatonic, and the kid’s eyes opened up like, “Whoa! WTF! Wow! That’s what I’m talkin’ about! I just gotta gave it!”.
“I wonder what that would sound like coming out of that Marshall on the bottom.” the kid inquired.
Here is where the story gets “funny” :
Growing up, my understanding of amps was pretty much limited to : [a] “a 100-watt bottom can handle a 50-watt head; but [b] the opposite is not true, that a 50-watt bottom can take a 100-watt head, since the 100-watt head could blow the speakers that are rated for only 50 watts.
My understanding was limited to the output of watts (power). What I was not familiar with, was the opposite: “resistance”, or “impedance” which is measured in Ohms.
What I didn’t know at that moment in time, was that even though :
[1] The 100-watt bottom was in no danger of being hurt by the 20-watt amp;
[2] the 20-watt head was in danger from the 100-watt bottom.
How?
The impedance load was not correct for that application. When I plugged the amp into the bottom, the mismatch of the impedance loads, burned the head within 10 seconds, or so.
If you remember one of the last scenes in the original Terminator movie, the character, Sarah Connors, finally terminates the terminator by crushing him in some hydraulic machinery, and says, “You’re terminated, Fucker!” and when the terminator finally “dies” you can see his eye ( lit up brightly like a red LED ) slowly fade to black.
The Terminator was dead.
Well, that’s exactly how the LED on the Champ amp faded to black when I plugged that tiny head into the high-powered bottom.
The LED was bright red, but when I started to play the guitar, the sound got fuzzy, and died out almost immediately, as I watched the red led die out slowly.
Then, there was nothing. No sound; no LED.
“Hmm. What happened there?” I wondered as I gave the amp a smack on the side of the cabinet just to see if something shorted out, or whatever.
It was pointless. It was dead. We had plenty other Champ amps in stock, but this one was going nowhere, at least, as far as a sale was concerned.
Unfortunately, the kid didn’t have a penny on him, so that was a “no sale” anyway.
My assistant manager later told me to write up the amp as a “defect” and send it back to Fender for warranty replacement, even though he knew it got fried as a result of an employee who didn’t understand impedance loads, as they related to relationships between amp heads and bottoms.
Well, now I know. LOL!
Terminated Champ Amp
5. Power Supplies—Polarity Is Important, too
Lastly, back in the pre-internet days, classified ads came in the form of printed newspapers , in this case, the Trading Times ( I wonder, is the Trading Times even around anymore?).
I used to peruse that periodical on a weekly basis just to see if there were any “deal of the century”-type of sales going on in regards to the equipment I sought.
In this particular incident, I saw a synth for sale : a Korg Poly 800, which, was being sold by a private party somewhere in the Bensenville area. So, I went and bought it from some guy, who gave me the wrong (unbeknownst to me) power supply. It had the correct power rating, but the polarity of the keyboard was the exact opposite of the polarity of the power supply—i.e., what the keyboard defined as the red lead, the power supply defined as the black lead.
When I got the thing home, plugged the power supply in, and turned the unit on, it got blown up that very second : a $300 purchase fried the moment I plugged it in. Talk about a short life span; and unlike the Champ amp’s “slow” fade to death, the Korg’s was immediate–the digital readout got real bright, as the elements that form the characters in the screen flickered mometarily and shut off.
“That’s not good.” I thought to myself as I shook my head in disappointment having not heard a single sound from the keyboard before it’s electronic demise.
So, I ended up taking the unit to a place called ATS (Advanced Technical Services) which was located up in Schiller Park, who ended up keeping it for almost three months by the time I got it back. They did great work, it just sucked that I had to wait so long to get it back repaired.
I knew it was not going to be a quick turnaround once I saw all the equipment ahead of me—it made the guy I took my Fostex to, look like he had “no customers” compared to these guys. There was a shelving rack that went almost to the ceiling, and those items, were still waiting to be looked at.
Anyway, by the time I got it back, they had supplied me with a new power supply that was correct in power specs and polarity settings, and explained to me what had happened—i.e., why the unit got smoked in the first place.
.
Korg® Poly 800 Synth
6. All Things Must Eventually Come To An End—Like This Post And Other Things.
Over the years, I’ve had so many pieces of gear that there are some I don’t ever remembering having in the first place.
I was looking at some old photos taken back in the day, and I’ve seen things in certain pictures like particular acoustic guitars, and thought, “Who’s is that?”only to realize it’s sitting next to gear I do remember having. So, It must’ve been mine. I just don’t remember having it.
I’ve also had gear that I do remember having, but I don’t remember ever selling, trashing, or otherwise lending out to someone.
One minute I had it; the next, it was gone.
“Where did it go?” is a question I’ll probably never find the answer to 30-plus years after the fact.
I also remember building a purple velvet-covered 6×10 cabinet (with six 100-watt Jensens, I think they were called “Celestions”, if memory serves) when I was in either late 8th-grade or early high school, that I had blown up more than once.
The speakers had to be re-coned, as they called it, probably four or five times at approximately, $60 a pop ($10 per speaker—in the late 1970’s dollars— at The Music Stop, in Lagrange on Lagrange Road about a block south of 47th street, on the east side a Lagrange Road—it’s been gone for decades!).
I also tried to pull a ” Jimmy Page/Roger Fischer/Alex Lifeson” by incorporating a violin bow into my guitar technique, but I never quite got the hang of it the way those pros did, so, that idea fell by the wayside—even though I still have a violin bow should I ever want to experiment with that technique again in the future; and I do—I just want it to sound awesome , and not like crappola.
If you ever listen to Alex Lifeson’s violin-bow-on-a-guitar solo on “By-Tor And The Snow Dog” on Rush’s live album, “All The World’s A Stage”, that was the sound I wanted to emulate with my violin bow.
For a while, I thought the guitars had special curved bridges to make the strings in the middle (i.e., strings two through five) more accessible; but no. There’s nothing “modified” about those guitars to make the violin bow more usable.
Below is a linked video to a YouTuber by the name of johnny crank, who used a violin bow on this recording—and he just happens to have on a Led Zeppelin tee shirt for the occasion. But you get the idea of what I was trying to do.
But the pieces of “gear” that I miss the most, aren’t the instruments, speakers or tape recorders, but rather the musicians I used to jam with.
Specifically, there were three musicians that have long since departed life here on earth.
Danny
The first one was a drummer by the name of Danny Masicka, who was a year older than me, and although we jammed regularly throughout my 7th and 8th grades in Junior High, by the time Danny got into his sophmore year in high school, he ended up transferring to a different school and ultimately hooked up with musicians that were a little more accomplished in their achievements in the way of having played out professionally (i.e., for money) which we had not yet achieved : all our jam sessions were impromptu arrangements at house parties, whereas Danny’s new band mates were playing at Youth Centers and the like.
Even though we hadn’t played together in 30 years, Danny and I still kept in touch, and talked on the phone probably once every two or three weeks between 2010 and 2016.
Sometimes, I wouldn’t be available to answer the phone when he’d call, so he’d leave me a message and hang up.
Well, I saved a few of those messages, which lets me hear Danny’s voice, even though he’s gone forever.
Danny passed away in 2016 or 2017. His phone number is somebody else’s now.
Recently, I “talked” in a Facebook private message with one of his sisters, Lauren, and I asked her whatever became of Danny’s drum kit (thinking that if it was still in the family somewhere, if I could buy it from them, for sentimental reasons). But, unfortunately, Lauren told me that the drums were sold with his house after he passed.
Mark
Mark was our bass player back in the same band with Danny.
Although I was nowhere near as close to Mark as I was with Danny, after our band dis-banded, I ended up rubbing shoulders with Mark far more often than with Danny, because Mark’s circle of friends were geographically closer to me than Danny’s were.
Mark hung around the Lyons area, where I lived and knew a lot of other people; whereas Danny’s friends were in Oak Park, where I didn’t know a soul and I never traveled to, without an official need to.
After Danny split for his new band in Oak Park, Mark and I didn’t have a drummer, which really didn’t affect Mark for very long, since he soon joined a group that was headquartered just a few blocks from his house, with a guitarist by the name of Scott Riskie (not sure of the correct spelling of Scott’s surname) who had a band that, utilmately ended up calling themselves “Rescue” (I think—again, it’s been decades since then and a lot of details have gotten fuzzied along the way ).
They had been together for many years, throughout the eighties and into the nineties, and I remember seeing them play at a bar called Franik’s in Berwyn, on a Saturday night.
Then, in 2005 or 2006, Mark passed away.
I was working the day of his wake at Tower Funeral Home in Lyons, but I made it there on time to pay my respects.
Jimmy
Jim Spolar. was my best friend throughout grade school.
We had done so many things together—especially in the realm of substance abuse.
We started smoking cigarettes with each other; we started drinking alcohol with each other ; we started smoking weed with each other; we started having girlfriends; and a whole lot of other cool things that I’ll save for another post.
If there was a “first” for everything, Jim and I did it together. We were inseparable; and I miss those days.
We even started playing guitar with each other.
First I got an acoustic, then Jim immediately asked his mom to buy him one, too, and she did.
Jim and I sat in his back yard plucking away on our six-strings for hours at a time.
But, exactly like with Danny and Mark, high school spelled the end of a relationship I thought was going to continue on unabated .
But that was not to be.
The problem was not any conflict between Jim and I, but rather Jimmy was not a good student ( his grades suffered from Day One—and so did mine, but I’ll save the details on that subject for another post ), and showing up for “daily failure” had him understandably “down in the dumps” from the moment he set foot inside school; and, as expected, he seemed to be “elated” when he’d leave.
But Jimmy was not looking to improve his academic standing, but rather to eliminate it from his life entirely, ( he ended up cutting out of school way more often than he attended ) and ultimately ended up simply quitting school, even before he was legally able to do so, yet.
But, back in the late 70’s, school authorities did not make “too big of a deal” out of chronic truants. They must’ve figured that the other students were better off without such disruptive influences sitting in the same classroom as those students who actually wanted to learn something.
Within the first two months of Freshman year, Jimmy started to hang out with this other dude, who was about three or four years older than us.
If I remember, his name was Kenny Eisman (again, spelling of surname? Not Sure) who was from Riverside, whose residents went to a different high school—in this case, Riverside -Brookfield, or “RB” as they were called.
That didn’t matter anyway, since Kenny was not in school, either.
One morning, though, for whatever reason, Jimmy did show up to school—with Kenny, and his acoustic guitar.
Kenny sat down on the school’s front lawn, closer to the student parking lot, where he played a series of tunes—and very well, I might add.
Plus, Kenny could sing. That was something that none of us could lay claim to—Danny didn’t sing; neither did Mark, Jimmy, nor myself.
Then, Jimmy suggested to Kenny that he allow me to play a couple of things on his guitar, trying to introduce me to Kenny and his group of friends.
At any rate, as the weeks went by, and the early-autumn weather turned from “late summer” temperatures of 70’s and 80’s, to early winter temps of 40’s and 50’s, Jimmy and Kenny decided that since they were not in school, anyway, they might as well go out to California and become “rock stars” by playing on the seashores, since “that’s where all the talent scouts hang out”.
No, they never actually said that, but Kenny talked about playing out in that fashion, and I just couldn’t see how their paths would cross with decision-maker, record label executive types, who would somehow theoretically “take notice” of their musical talent, and catapult them into fame and fortune.
I, myself, was so unsure of my own abilities right here in the near-west suburbs of Chicago, where all my family live, the last thing I wanted to do, is go be even a bigger loser 2,000 miles away in California, where I had no family to turn to, should something bad happen and I needed some degree of familial support.
So, I didn’t quit school, and go with them, and instead, I remained behind, as they hitched a ride to California. They didn’t even have their own car to travel to California in.
They were so unprepared for the trip from the very beginning; and I couldn’t see myself accompanying them—especially not in their car-less “nomadic” way of traveling to Cal.
But that didn’t matter to them; they had a dream, and they were going to try to achieve it.
Although they did come back the following spring, I believe they went to California one more time after their initial trip, and them returned again for good.
But those two trips built a gap in our friendship, and I hadn’t seen Jimmy for probably 10 more years until the late 80’s nor early 90’s.
We resumed our friendship for sure in the early 90’s , because I remember attending many band-type parties at his house—that he inherited from his divorced mother who had passed away.
And, then, somehow we drifted apart again, probably in the late 90’s, and I ran into him only one more time since then.
My car was in the shop, so, I had to walk to work, and since Jimmy didn’t have a car, he also had to walk to work.
By some strange coincidence, we were both walking along Gage Avenue—I was walking southbound, and Jimmy, northbound.
Amazingly, even though he was a solid two blocks away ( where you can’t see any details of someone’s face ) from where I was at the moment I noticed someone was walking toward me, I could tell it was Jimmy—from his walk.
He had this unique style, that was unmistakable to identify from even two blocks away.
As we got within a few houses of each other, he realized who I was, and when we got within arm’s reach of each other, we shook hands, and even hugged.
Although I never saw Jimmy again, I did talk to him on the phone, when, another friend of mine, Bill, said he saw Jimmy, talked to him, and got his cell phone number for me.
The first time I called him, I had not yet been diagnosed with cancer yet; but the second time I called, it was a good two years later, or so, well after my treatment ( chemo, radiation, and tumor-removing surgery ), and I just called to tell him that I “made it” —i.e., I survived.
I think, I called him one more time after that, probably somewhere in 2015, or so, but I got his voice mail, left a message, and never heard from him again.
Then, in January 2018, a friend of mine, Kim, on Facebook, PM’d me that she saw Jimmy’s obituary on the internet.
“What? He died?” Wha…whaddaya mean?” I thought frantically before I clicked the link, only to see that the service was at Tower Funeral Home (the same place Mark was waked at), and there it was : the ugly truth.
Jimmy was gone.
So, no Danny; no Mark; no Jimmy = no fun in life.
I actually have a copy of Jim’s voice on tape, too, but I’d have to dig through maybe a hundred cassette tapes to find it. It’ll be worth it, once I do it.
In any case, in the end, I just want to say I miss you guys. Life is no fun without you.
