Air guitar is my life. I can play with the best of them. Clapton may be god, but I can pound the opening licks to “Layla” perfectly, every time. I chop down the edge of that mountain on “VooDoo Chile (Revisited).” My slide makes even George Harrison’s guitar weep.
Inside my car, I sing like Paul McCartney. I wail like Wilson Pickett. I scream from the depths of my soul on “A Little Help from My Friends,” just like Joe Cocker. The music surrounds me. The automatic, power brakes and driver's seat is my stadium to rock, and I’m gonna Rock and Roll all night.
Thank goodness for the tunes. Thank goodness for the imagination. What was it Twain said? “God gave us an imagination for what we are not and a sense of humor for what we are.”
I’m sure someone in another car, perched at the stoplight in the adjacent lane, has looked, thinking I was contorted in pain… not realizing that Brad Delph and I were doing a duet on “More Than a Feeling.” As they stumble in to class, my students, catching a glimpse of my momentary escape by power chording the song playing on the radio, must think their history teacher has lost it.
The trouble is, I was meant to be a rock star, or a writer for the Rolling Stone. I was meant to stand in the middle of mega-watts of feedback that melted the faces of the fans in the first 30 rows and then melt their hearts with the most tortured of love songs and end on just the right note. I was meant to sail through the air like Ted Nugent, windmill like Pete Townshend, and weave an epic song like “Yes.”
Reality is a tough thing. I look a hell of a lot closer to Meatloaf than I do to Robert Plant…. Not that Meatloaf can’t wail with the best of them, mind you. I would be more at home in the lineup of Bachman Turner Overdrive than I would in the Black Crowes. At least C. F. Turner was a defensive tackle in college, and I was an offensive tackle. No one is going to be throwing their panties on the stage for the beefy guy.
There are a couple of other problems that hold me back, probably even bigger than wearing 2X shirts. I can’t play or sing worth squat. Okay, so I’ve always been a big guy, but so were Randy Bachman and Leslie West. Look at the lead singer for Blues Traveler! Even Elvis sold records and sold out shows during his fat period. But they could all sing or play. It’s a big obstacle.
I sang in the church choir some as a kid. Maybe it’s because in a church choir, especially in a really little one, every one is too polite to tell you that you sound like a badly tuned bagpipe. Or maybe I could sing once, and the story that I tell about losing my singing voice is true? You see, my sophomore year in college, while pulling out to lead a sweep, I took a big shot in the throat from the defensive back. My voice box swelled. My throat clicked for two or three months every time I swallowed. I spoke with a hoarse whisper for a long time. It sucked. Maybe I could sing before that, and it wasn’t my imagination or desire to be Paul McCartney that made what I heard of myself sound good.
Maybe.
Then comes the guitar playing. I wanted to play guitar all my life. We ended up finding an old guitar somewhere when I was a kid. It wouldn’t stay in tune. Pretty soon, some of the tuning keys broke. But I would strum on it hoping I would turn into a virtuoso.
It didn’t happen. I agonized over that guitar as my grade school buddy, Larry, got a guitar and got lessons. He learned how to play and pretty soon even had an electric. I was so jealous, but thought it was cool as we went through High School that Larry played in bands and stuff. I could tell you who wrote all the songs, who sang what, and how long the song was…but Larry could actually play it.
Guitar lessons wouldn’t have been a big priority when I was a kid. Hell, we used water from a well till I was about eleven. Our house was heated by one stove in the living room. There were eight kids in my family. I was the oldest of the second batch - three older than me by at least ten years and four younger. The irony is that my youngest sister, Jo, went on to be in marching band, which we didn’t have when I was in school, and got a degree in music education.
In college, I finally got a chance to learn some guitar. It was like a dream come true when I found I could take guitar lessons as a part of my academic courses. Mrs. Powers was my teacher. She was actually a classically trained violinist, but taught guitar as well. Imagine the look on her face as we met and I told her I wanted to study rock and blues guitar. Over a period of two years, I managed to learn some, but still wasn’t much of a player.
I did manage to play with Larry a little. Once, we even put together a few people, including my aunt and sister, to play a couple songs in church. Larry played his electric and I played a standard. We did Clapton’s reggae version of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and some other song that I don’t remember now. Then, life got busy. The guitar gathered dust.
So it goes for the would-be rock star. Frustrated.
But, my car is still my personal concert hall. There, I can play with the best of them and sing like Lennon’s tortured “Cold Turkey.”
I remember riding in our car, on the way home from church late at night. Sleepy. Mom and Dad would sing hymns in the front seat as we drove down the country roads to our small house nestled in forty acres of Oklahoma hillside. It was something soothing and protective at the same time.
And, Mom and Dad could sing. It came from their hearts.
This was the early sixties and music was going through some big, big changes. My mom might have been singing “Mary Ann, down by the seashore sifting sand” to us, but on the AM radio something was bubbling.
Grandpa would give us a fifty-cent allowance in those days. Usually, I used it to buy every sort of comic book known to man and devour them with this insatiable urge. But when I heard the Beatles, I was hooked. There was a purpose for my money.
We had an old car parked, dead and lifeless in the pasture. It became a storage place for old newspapers. When I finally became aware of the beatles, I spent hours and hours digging through the old newspapers, looking for bits of old news about the Beatles, touring here or flying there.
I would talk about rock and roll. I wanted my hair to look like the Beatles. Now, the Beatles, circa 1965, really didn’t have long hair by today’s standards, but for a kid who had used Butch Wax in his flat top, it was a revolution. Of course, Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me grow out my hair, and neither would the school. My grandma tsked-tsked the idea by saying “ Now, Charles, you don’t want to look like a girl, do you?”
The cruelest blow to my pursuit was when Lennon made the headlines with his “We’re More Popular Than Jesus” comment. I had managed to talk Mom and Dad into joining a record club for me. But I wanted Beatles and after Dad heard about Lennon’s comment on our little black and white TV, he said “Whatever you do, I don’t want you spending your money on Beatles records.”
Crushed.
But when you’re eleven or twelve years old and want something, there’s a way to get it. We drove into Tulsa for one of our rare trips into the big town. Tulsa was about twenty miles away, but it was like a whole country away for me. Dad worked there every day, driving into the three to eleven shifts at the Tulsa post office. We went to Kiefer, a town of less than one thousand, for most things. Our house was in the country between the old oil boom town of Kiefer and Sapulpa, a bigger town of around ten thousand, give or take a few. Sapulpa was where we went for groceries on Mom’s weekly foray for food.
Dad took us to a new shopping center on the southwest side of Tulsa. It was a pretty amazing place to me then, but nothing compared to what a mall is today. It was all one store, like an extended five and dime, and even had a concession inside. It was something just to wander through, but I knew what my mission was. I took my little brother, Tim, who was five years my junior, and found the record section of the store. There, wrapped in slick clear plastic, were the Beatle albums that I lusted after with all the powerful d4esire a twelve year old can muster.
I had a moral dilemma. My dad didn’t want me to buy anything by the Beatles, plus, I found I was short on cash anyway. But I wanted them, and they didn’t look bad or harmful or evil on the album covers. They looked happy, and I knew those grooves were just waiting to be opened up by our actual diamond tipped needle at home. Beatles singing to me, unleashed through a diamond and electronically amplified through a single sparkly speaker on the left side of our RCA record club portable phonograph.
I was so nervous, but I set to work. Guilty, but determined, I smoothly convinced Tim to kick in some of the allowance he had saved so that we could both share the new Beatles album. “Something New” was the album, an American release that contained cuts from the “Hard Day’s Night” movie and others culled from the first couple of British releases. Tim agreed, and with contraband under arm and Tim’s hand in mine, we headed toward the cash register with a watchful eye out for Dad.
We paid and I nervously looked around, checking for Dad’s approach as the clerk, almost painfully slowly, slipped the album into a brown bag. Elated but jittery, we took the bag and walked toward the exit. There, we ran into Dad, seemingly oblivious of our purchase. I was frozen with worry. After all, I was proud to be a good kid. I always did what Mom and Dad wanted. I was a “pleaser.”
Dad looked at the package we were carrying and asked, “Charles, what did you buy?”
Here was my moral dilemma. Do I lie to my Dad and take a chance on roasting in hell? I could almost feel the fires licking at my heels. Do I tell the truth and take the risk of embarrassment by having to take it back and then being punished for breaking the rules? Suddenly, like a vision from heaven, I was inspired.
As nonchalantly as any kid could be in this situation, I simply answered “Aw, just ‘Something New.’” Then I tugged Tim along to keep any other conversation from revealing my not-quite-truth comment. “I hadn’t lied,” I rationalized. The name of the album was, after all, “Something New.” I just didn’t give any extra details.
I kept the LP hidden until we arrived home so that Tim and I could sneakily open the wrapper and pull out the dark black vinyl circle. The label from Capitol Records was black in the interior, with a rainbow band circling the album credits. Hungrily, I read and reread the song titles and the writer’s names, and memorized the various lengths of the songs. I knew we could play the record because Dad and Mom really didn’t know the Beatles from any other pop band of the time, or so I thought.
We played the album over and over.
I was hooked.
No comments:
Post a Comment