Tag: Pop Music

THE GIFT

As a child, I was so spoiled at Christmas time it was embarrassing. See, Mom had grown up in the abject poverty of The Depression. She hadn’t gotten doodly-squat at Christmas when she was a little girl. One of her personal legends was the Christmas when the lone present she received was a coat hanger personally decorated by her older sister. And damn… she’d loved it. Yes, I know. It kind of makes you want to cry, doesn’t it. And it sounds made up, like something right out of the musical, Annie. It wasn’t though, according to my dad who eventually rescued her with a wedding ring. Now, how’s that for a family legend? And he hadn’t had any picnic himself when he’d been a kid, either, but he’d fared a whole lot better than she had.

The sad thing is, she’d gotten somewhat psychologically bent by all that poverty. And as a result, beginning on New Year’s Day (if not earlier) when January had already begun chugging slowly toward the following December, she was once again the volunteer soldier in the lifelong war against poverty-stricken Christmases. Not only for us, her kids, but for all of her nieces and nephews, regardless of what faraway states they lived in, all of whom were living in some degree of poverty themselves. Meanwhile, at home, our Christmas trees were alwaysburied alive in bright holiday-wrapped presents, large and tiny.

So I was lucky, right? Honestly, in retrospect, a little bit too lucky. The bounty of our Christmases wasn’t all that great for my character development, if you must know. Not that I needed any help in that department with the bad genes I’d somehow inherited. I just became more and more all about the getting, getting, getting despite the fact that I was already getting,getting, getting. And I’d get such great gifts. We all did.

For instance, I got a beautiful Lionel train set. I’ll never forget that. It was a dream come true. You’d set it all up on the living room floor and then… you were the engineer. But, and here’s the rub, there were only enough tracks to for a tiny little oval. The beautiful engine and the realistic box cars would go whizzing round and round, over and over. Round and round. Over and over. And you know what? That gets old in a hurry. And why weren’t there more tracks, is what I wanted to know. I wanted a figure-eight railroad. (OK, I probably wanted enough tracks to lay down rails going from room to room all throughout the ground floor of our house.) And then, you had to keep taking it all apart and putting the pieces back in the box again, ‘cause you couldn’t just leave it on the living room floor forever, right? It was a small living room. So that quickly got old as well.

I suppose I should tell you about the cool Lone Ranger ring I got. It was silver and featured a small embossed rendering of the Lone Ranger astride the rearing stallion, Silver. Yes, the very ring under which I brainlessly jammed a pebble between it and my ring finger just above the knuckle, where it got stuck, causing my finger to swell all up. All I can remember now is the horrendous emergency car ride to some old guy’s house, a guy who had some kind of a power saw.

Most Christmas gifts were basically toys and clothing. They didn’t have Amazon gift cards back then. Clothes were just clothes. The toys were appreciated of course, if only for a little while. Why? Because they’re just…things, aren’t they. Days or months later you haul them out of the closet and look them over and you discover they’re the exact same old objects you tired of a long while back. Things. Things that you’d gotten oh so used to, ho-hum. And maybe you’d play with them one more time but…you’d find yourself just going through the motions somewhat.

And yes, I do realize now what a petulant, ungrateful little jerk I was.

As far as gifts go though, I hit the jackpot in 1956 on my tenth birthday. What I got wasn’t a thing. Well, of course it was a thing. It’s just that it was so much more than a thing. A gift that could, and did, keep on giving. Day after day, year after year. It was nothing expensive at all. Small, plain little box— perhaps 10 by 4 by 4 inches. A metallic blue. But I swear, it changed my life. Bent my life like a glass of water bends a ray of light passing through it. And I’m so gratified that it did. Even today.

I got a radio for Christmas that year.

Now when you hear the word radio, you have to keep these things in mind because this was the mid-1950s.

So first of all, to turn it on you first had to plug it into a wall-socket. It wasn’t portable.

Secondly, the broadcast voices and music received were amplified by 3, maybe 4, glass vacuum tubes. So when you turned your radio on, the vacuum tubes would first begin to glow, getting warm and then warmer, till they were radiating an orange glow (which you could never actually see without taking the back of the radio off). The innards of radios were like little ovens back then. Due to the fact that the tubes had to really get red hot in order to amplify the stations’ signals, you always had to wait almost a full minute before the thing would actually start working , unlike today where everything is instantaneous due to the invention of transistors.

Thirdly, almost all radios ran on AM back then, and mine was no exception. With FM, you can listen to your music clearly regardless of the weather; but with AM, any thunder storm 25 miles or so away would be breaking up your programs with unwanted static crashes that could drive you nuts.

And fourthly, with FM you could only pick up stations within about a 30-mile radius, all depending on the height of the stations’ antennae. With AM, especially at night, you can pick up stations thousands of miles away, but with one problem: stations with relatively weak signals would tend to fade in and out, which could also drive you nuts if you were trying to listen to a faraway baseball game.

We had a table-top radio in our kitchen. Mom usually kept that on throughout the day while doing her housework, and I listened too. WABI out of Bangor was always playing the top-40 hits of Johnny Cash, Ricky Nelson, Peggy Lee, The Big Bopper, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly. And man, didn’t I just think WABI’s top DJ, Jim Winters, was real-deal cool! He had such a deep voice and he knew everything about the artists. I was gonna grow up and be a DJ myself sometime, for sure. Along with a number of other things.

Funny thing about Jim Winters. He’d host the sock hops over at The Crystal Ballroom, the old renovated church out on South Street. The Crystal was off limits to me because “that’s where the high school crowd hung out.” So who knew what tings might be going on over there? Not me. I didn’t. Not my mom either, but… she could just imagine. But I’d watched a dozen high school rock and roll flicks at Center Theatre, and they were siren songs to me. So one Saturday night, my rug rat buddies and I pedaled our bikes over there and slipped in while Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” was blaring from the loud speakers. So exciting! So forbidden fruit! I know my heart was pounding.

Well, the first thing I noticed was, wow, the great big crystal ball slowly revolving from the ceiling, lighting up the darkness with twirling fireflies of red, green, and blue swimming about the hall. I’d never seen anything like it!

The second thing that hit me was… oh my God, was that him? Yes it was! There he was himself! Jim, the DJ, Winters! But wait, it couldn’t be. What, this was the DJ I’d been putting up on a pedestal all this time??  Holy cow! He looked like some… creepy car salesman. And his head was way too big for his little shoulders. And partly bald? I was aghast.

Thirdly, something stated happening that made me nearly faint from a combination of forbidden-fruit ecstasy and fear. Winters was suddenly announcing over the loudspeaker, “At this time, all the young ladies who’ve signed up for “the Golden Garter Beauty Contest” should now approach the stage.” WHAT? WHAT WAS THAT? And before you could say Sodom and Gomorrah, a line of high school beauties had formed up there amid a raucous roar of hoots and catcalls and wolf-whistles. And holy-moly, didn’t my knees tremble as my eyes followed Young Lady #1 as she marched coyly up to the waiting chair, took a seat, hiked up the hemline of her skirt, and displayed for God and everybody to see… some frilly little lacy elastic encircling her thigh maybe 3 inches or more above her knee! I mean, What would her mother ever think!? And then I thought, Jeez, what would my mother ever think if she knew where I am and what was going on?! Here, a timid little Sunday school voice from my one of my shoulders gasped, “Tommy! You must run home now! This instant!” while the carnival barker voice that lived on my darker shoulder reasoned, “Oh come on, kid. What your mom doesn’t know won’t hurt her… right? No, Stick around. We’ll skedaddle soon, I promise.” Now, I’d heard the word “garter” before, but I had no clue what one actually was until that dizzy night at the Crystal Ballroom!

But I digress. We’re talking about, what… oh yeah, the radio I got as a gift. OK, back to that.

So I imagine you’re probably thinking, OK, you got yourself a radio. What’s the big deal? Because, like, getting a radio today is nothing. But hey, I’m here to tell you that for a ten-year-old in 1956, it was a very big deal. Especially since I was I was transitioning right then from the age of late prepubescence to the age of near puberty. And the songs I was getting interested in were about that mysterious world of guys and girls and… garters and stuff? And sure, we had the kitchen radio. I just couldn’t hear it so well from my bedroom for one thing.

So I plugged my new radio into the wall socket and tucked it away on the floor, right under the head of my bed in easy reach. That way I could just be lying there, reach down, and fiddle with the station dial to my heart’s delight, bringing in the music from the out-of-reach, nearby city stations. But when it got really dark, like when I was supposed to be sound asleep, I found myself reeling in DJs in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and amazingly sometimes as far away as California. I’d never realized what a small-town redneck Jim Winters really was.

But… regardless of all that, I now had… a night life.

When Paul Anka was singing, “I’m Just a Lonely Boy,” then I was that lonely boy. When Elvis was “All Shook Up,” so was I. When the Everly Brothers were frantically trying to “Wake Up, Little Susie,” I was feeling frantic about what I was gonna hafta tell her old man, waiting on us at her front door. And I was getting hip to the ways in which “Love Is a Many Splendid Thing.” But itching to find out what was going on behind “The Green Door,” though I suspected it was probably more of the same (or worse) as what I’d witnessed going on over there at the Crystal Ballroom. And yes, I knew what it was like to be “The Great Pretender,” even though when I listened to Peggy Lee, there was no pretending that I was coming down with “Fever.” Face it, I was in the onset of going batshit girl crazy. But… “what a lovely way to burn…”

Of course the sad thing was, I didn’t have a girlfriend, nor did I have any real clue as to how to get one. I was the shortest kid in my class, after all. And I was deadly shy around girls. One girl I had a crush on stood a foot and a half taller than me. An amazon. So I was doomed. Doomed to be a listener. Just a dime a dozen listener of love songs. And in that capacity, what I did do is get myself a little notebook. Kept it under the bed right next to the radio. Then night after night after night, crawling slowly up and down the dial from 55 to 160 khz, I sampled all radios stations I could find, searching for just the right ones, finding any and all songs that would try to have their way with my bleeding, lonely heart. I’d enter the call signs of the best stations into my log, along with the frequency points on the dial so I could easily find them again, plus each DJ’s name, a listing of the song titles I’d heard and fancied, and the artists’ names. I was becoming quite the bookkeeper. My all-time favorite stations and DJs  were WMEX (AM) in Boston with Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsberg at the helm, and “Cousin Brucie” of WINS (AM) New York.

I had a few cronies very much like myself in this regard, and we’d swap our gleaned info next day on the playground. I had it bad. We had it bad. And then, afternoons after school, my notebook and I would stroll down to the neighborhood convenience market where I’d stand in front of the magazine rack, surreptitiously (lest the proprietor catch me) lift one from the display, and hurriedly scrawl as much of the desired song lyrics as I could manage from the two or three pop song magazines that would publish them. I couldn’t afford to buy one on my allowance.

So yeah, I’d become a bookkeeper, a miserable scribe, a lonely hearts chronicler of heartfelt doo wop. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and, sure enough, I was on my way to becoming the hopeless, lifelong romantic I am to this day.

I can clearly remember one particular night of listening when my ears particularly perked right up. The DJ du jour (no, make that DJ de nuit) announced that he was about to play a brand new song, that this would be the song’s exclusive debut, to be performed by a brand new, up and coming group calling themselves The Elegants! Desperately I clawed my little log out and pencil out from among the dust bunnies under the bed. I mean, it was well past midnight and the whole town I languished in was probably sound asleep, so it was like being Superman’s sidekick, Jimmy Olsen, getting a scoop for The Daily Globe! The song title was titled “Little Star,” and opened with the forlorn line, “Where are you, little star…?” It was such a sad song. Another song by some sad and lonely soul like myself. Where was my little star? Next day on the playground, all puffed up with self-importance, I (numero uno, the self-appointed president of our Lonely Hearts Club) altruistically enlightened my sad disciples with the new found data. As it turned out, “Little Star” did reach #1 on the Billboard Charts, stayed there for one week, and spent 19 weeks in the Hot 100. Unfortunately it was doomed to become just a one-hit wonder for The Elegants.

As it is with most people on the planet, I don’t believe I could feel whole without music. Music has become such a major part of my life. It soundtracks me every step of the way.  A sad example: when I was a sophomore in high school, my steady girlfriend (yes, it took me that long to finally acquire one of those) gave me my ring back and just flat out and out dumped me. She’d found somebody else, alas. I was devastated. So what did I do? Sat in my room all day pitying myself for a whole month, that’s what. All the while wallowing in my Johnny Cash 45 rpm record collection. There were so many songs to choose from. “Guess Things Happen That way.” “Home of the Blues.” “Cry, Cry, Cry.” “I Still Miss Someone.” “Thanks a Lot” “Walking the Blues.” I mean, oh what an epic pity party that was! But… Johnny helped me pull through, didn’t he. Yes, he did.

Now it’s odd, but in what I call my jukebox brain today, random lyrics get automatically triggered by almost anything anyone says. I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse, but I find it entertaining, personally. Often during conversation among friends, I find myself just coming right out singing a couple of triggered song lines. However I’ve had to learn over time that it’s usually a lot more polite to try to stuff these little outbursts down inside because, understandably, some people can find this Tourette’s-like and, well, just a tad annoying. Just ask my wife.

Now I made the claim earlier that the little radio gift I received bent my life, changed it, and in such a good way. Oh sure, I realize if I hadn’t received my little blue box right then, the music would still have found me, would still be a big part of my life. But it came at a good time. It was something I hadn’t known known I needed, but as soon as it arrived it immediately became an integral part of my emotional life. It definitely filled some gaps.

See, my bedroom was my little fort. Just as the bedrooms of teens today are their fortresses of privacy, their domains. But one of the biggest differences is that my fort didn’t have a smart phone in it. (Hell, it didn’t even a have a phone of any kind in it.) And before 1953 our family didn’t even have a television in the house, let alone one in my bedroom. So I didn’t have some screen to stare down into during every minute of my free time. Those distractions were totally non-existent. Our 1950s “social media” was a physical hang-out, the lunch counter at Lanpher’s Drug Store, right after school got out every afternoon. It was comprised of real face-to-face kids, nothing digital or virtual about it. And for a half hour to forty-five minutes, you’d load up on all the school drama gossip and then  head home. Where maybe you had some chores to do first, after which maybe you’d hang out on the family phone for a bit…but you weren’t allowed to live on it. You’d have dinner, maybe do some homework (maybe not, as was often the case with me), but eventually you’d retire to your room.

My bedroom was a quiet, peaceful sanctuary after 9:00 pm or so. I could be alone with my thoughts. Maybe I’d had a rough day and my thinking might’ve gotten hung up on dwelling on what’d happened, so I’d spend some time licking my emotional wounds. Maybe I’d spied some new girl in school that had caught my eye, and I could sorta daydream what she might be like, and what maybe she liked, and OK, wonder if I might ever be one of the things that she could possibly like as well (probably not.) Maybe I’d work on building my model airplanes, or dabble in trying to write out my feelings in a poem or two. But it was my time, me time. We kids had a lot of me time back in the fifties. It was built right in.

And then my radio showed up. AM. Mono, not stereo (stereo wouldn’t be available for a few years, so I didn’t know what I was missing). A plain, homely little thing. But it was a conduit. A conduit to worlds I hadn’t discovered yet. Emotional worlds. It was like a little ride on of the amusements at the carnival, me being the only kid there. I could just strap myself in, and ride any old time. It was a new adventure, one I would never tire of. Rock and roll. Then rock and roll turned to folk songs, which in turn became protest songs, and I was on my way.  All because of a little inexpensive AM radio my parents had given me as a gift.

Today, I have Sirius XM. It’s great, it really is. I can stream songs from just about any genre and any time period. So I’ve got it all now. But you know what? It’s great, yes, but it all seems so easy. Too easy. The truth? All these modern-day streaming abilities feel too convenient. It’s a convenience that, I dunno, sucks the serendipity right out of it.

Oh well…