Should Have Been a Rock Star- Badfinegr-promise and tragedy

In the early winter of 1970, I remember sitting on the big Yellow school bus, windows fogged by an Oklahoma November cold spell, when I heard a song that made me perk up. Straining to hear over the laughs and jabber of the early morning bus ride, I leaned close to the black circle speakers mounted high on the bus wall, listening for something familiar..
The sound I was hearing made me excited and optimistic. Th song was “No Matter What.” It sounded to me as if it might be the Beatles, risen from the dead!
The summer of 1970, I had talked my dad into taking me to see the Beatles movie, “Let It Be” at the local Criterion Theater. There was only one theater in the town closest to us, and the shows changed every three days. So, when I saw in the paper that the movie was playing, I went into professional beg mode quickly.
Dad, who a few years before, had forbade me from buying Beatles LP’s, had softened on them, saying that at least he could understand what they were singing. And, he had taken Kathy, my sister, to see Elvis movies. I had managed to get Mom and Dad to take me to see “The Yellow Submarine” a year and half before, and the Beatles Cartoons had played on our TV for a couple of years of Saturday mornings.

The music, I loved. The movie itself, scared me. I could watch as the once fun loving moptops slowly wound down into breakup on the big screen in front of me .It was depressing and exhilarating at once. The music was beautiful… “Let IT Be.” “The Long and Winding Road” and “Get back” echoed through the run down theater, and I soaked in every chord and line.

Then the news came out. Paul had announced he was leaving the Beatles. He had a solo album ready for release… “McCartney.” And for an obsessed fan who went to bed each night, Beatles music playing on the lonely record player, it was a stunning moment. The Beatles were no more.

I pouted for months. I reread the fan magazines. I sorted through he albums, but nothing seemed good enough while knowing the four form Liverpool would never again play for me.

Then, it was on that November morning, a spark came back. I was excited! I caught my girlfriend Debbie at school with the news, ‘I think the Beatles are back!” I found my record collector pal Jerry and we pontificated about the possibility of a reunion!
I was in high spirits, waiting for another chance to hear the song.. In Kiefer Oklahoma, circa 1970, the chance of hearing a new tune was limited. There was no Music Television. There were a few variety TV shows that sometimes had a guest rock band. Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand”: wasn’t on till Saturday. That meant waiting, and scrolling back and forth between the two pop AM stations, KAKC and KELI, hoping to hit on the song.

The next hearing came that very next morning, once again on the way to school. The crackly bus speakers hissed the opening power chords and a McCartneyish voice sang ‘No Matter What You Are!” to my great delight.

But, the awakening came at the end, when in a lull of noise; I was able to hear the DJ list the band as “Badfinger.” Not the Beatles, but some unknown sound-alike band! It was a let down.

As I listened more to the tune, despite my disappointment that it didn’t signal a Beatles reunion, it grew on me. It was a great pop song. It had a catchy riff and was no doubt Beatles influenced. I found my way to the 5 and dime store in Sapulpa, and bought the LP, called “NO Dice.” The fact that the cover was a semi-clad girl didn’t hurt my desire to own it either.

Every time I first bought an LP, it was a religious ritual to hear it. I opened the plastic wrap, opened the foldout, if it happened to be a foldout LP, which this one was. It revealed a late afternoon picture of the band in the setting sun. In fact, one of the members looked a lot like Paul McCartne6y to me. In fact, when I bought the LP, I found another Badfinger LP ( soon to be in my collection as well) called “Magic Christian Music.” I saw three of the members pictured on the back of that LP and a 4th as a shadow across the picture. I thought… “Hmm… maybe the reason they sound so Beatleish is because Paul is secretly in that band??” In fact, the title song had even been composed and produced by McCartney!

As I looked over the disc, read the titles, writers names and song lengths, I noticed that Geoff Emerick was the producer, along with Mal Evans, both longtime Beatle collaborators. The LP was also on Apple Records, owned and operated by the Beaytles. The sound was making sense.

Beatles or not, the LP stood up on its own. It was a rocking, and melodic album. It ranged form rocking pop songs like “Love Me Do” and “No Matter What” to bluesy love songs like “Without You, “ that later Harry Nilsson would turn into a mega-hit remake. IT blended well with their earlier LP “The Magic Christian,” a partial soundtrack for the Ringo Starr movie of the same name. Paul’s simple, but catchy, movie title song, “Come and Get It” followed by power pop love songs like “maybe Tomorrow” and “Carry On Till Tomorrow.”

Badfinger became my Beatles replacement. Sure, the solo Beatles started releasing separate LPs, but Badfinger seemed to capture the spirit of the Beatles in the best way. The release of their 1971 LP “Straight Up” was a masterpiece with George Harrison and Todd Rundgren both producing half of the LP. There is no better pop song than “Baby Blue” and “Day After Day.”

I would continue to follow Badfinger through their change in record companies as they left Apple due to the legal disputes between the ex-Beatles (Beatles suing each other!! Unheard of!) The worst news came in 1975, my fist year in college when I read in “The Rolling Stone” that Pete ham, lead singer and guitarist for Badfinger had committed suicide.
The band had made two great albums for Warner Brothers, but was hardly promoted. Apparently, their manager dicked them too. Desperate and depressed, Ham hanged himself.

No more Beatles. No more Badfinger.

In the summer of 1976, I saw Joey Molland, one time of Badfinger ( the one I thought looked a lot like McCartney) and his new band, Natural Gas, open for the Peter Frampton tour that also included Santana and Gary Wright. Natural Gas was short lived, and Molland reunited with Tom Evans, Badfinger bassist and Ham collaborator to make another Badfinegr Lp. I actually saw their band on tour in Tulsa after the LP release and then again a year later after the release of their second ( “Airwaves” followed by “Say NO More.”) Then tragedy again struck and Tom Evans committed suicide too.

I always thought it was such a tragic loss. Pete Ham and tom Evans made songs that rang out with a real sincerity. They were pop classics that went through the business meat grinder and their psyche was not able to take the impersonal battering of the business.
I still love their music, but even as I sing along in the car, I feel a sadness for the men who wrote those songs.
Mike Gibbins, drummer for Badfinegr, continues to play for other bands and in studio. He even made a couple fo solo LPs. Joey Molland has moved to the US and plays across the country, and released a few solo records and Cds.

I remember finding out about you

ev'ry day my mind is all around you

looking out from my lonely room.

Day after day

“Day After Day”- Pete Ham

I should have been a rock star- The Nuge

The “Nuge”

In college, our heavy metal god was none other than the Motor City Madman, Ted Nugent. I had started buying his albums after I first heard the song “Great White Buffalo” on one of the local Tulsa FM stations. At that time, Ted was still part of his original band, the Amboy dukes.
The guitar amazed me! It was so frickin’ fast! I immediately bought the album, “Tooth, Fang and Claw” and listened to him play the guitar like a Wildman. I read up on Nugent in the Rolling Stone and a few other mags like Creem. He was a wild man of nature form the jungles of Detroit. He didn’t rink and he didn’t take drugs, he just played like one demon possessed.
Listening to Ted play was a cross between running through the woods naked, ready to kill dinner with your bare hands and holding on to both ends of a high tension electrical line!
I finally got to see Nugent at an outdoor concert in Tulsa and then at several other venues in both Tulsa and Wichita. He would swing onto the stage like Tarzan, dressed in a loincloth with his wild hair flying everywhere! He played the guitar like he was using it as a weapon! He rattled off in-between songs in his Nuge speed talk.
“This guitar can knock the balls off a charging Rhino at a hundred paces!” he screamed as he launched into one of the new songs he was playing for the crowd that night. Those songs turned out to be off an upcoming album “Free For all.”
At some show,. The Nuge would even shoot a flaming arrow form his legendary bow. The story was that he hunted and killed a lot of his own food. I could imagine him creeping through the forest, knife clenched between his teeth, crazy look of frenzy in his eyes.
One story said that at one concert, a man in the front began waving a pistol around as Ted played onstage. Apparently, the Nuge continued to wail as the man was subdued by security. It only added to his mystique.
In our dorm room, Nugents songs were blasted at sonic frequencies, straining the capabilities of my poor speakers that drove us into air guitar mob mentality! We jumped around the room, wind milling on imaginary guitars, knee drops into solos, and screaming jumbled lyrics with a pre-game passion. Gutty, our stocky defensive back would climb atop the desks, leaping from one to the other in the midst of “Stranglehold” or “Free For all’s” driving rhythm. He would rub his groin against our second story window as he mimicked the solo from “Cat Scratch Fever” to passer by girls below.
Ted Nugent’s music appealed to us on an athletic level. It was filled with the same abandon and fierceness that it took to survive on a college football field. The meek and mild were soon ground under by the survival of the fittest attitude that every successful football player lived by. It was hit or be hit. It was tooth, fang and claw to beat the guy across from you or be pulled slowly and painfully over the hot coals in the next film session as the coach played and replayed your failed efforts. It was a free for all every time the ball was snapped.
Nugent represented that to us. He was abandon and wild. He was the rhythm to which our collective drums beat. It was his guitar solo that pulsed with our heart rate. His scream was our adrenalin. We knew a kind of call of the wild, and it happened every Saturday on the gridiron. We left there bruised and bloodied, licking our wounds or bursting with excitement from a successful hunt.

It was funny, but not unusual that my listening to the Nuge declined as I left college football. Was it that my attitudes cooled while others still listened to his music? Was it I had changed so suddenly?
Maybe it was that I had been there and done that. I identified with it then, but my life had changed from participant to coach or spectator. The adrenalin I used was a different one.
I had also changed in another way. In the last couple years of college, I had been reading more and more eastern philosophy. I was introduced to novels of Kurt Vonnegut. I really felt like I was becoming more of a whole person; more compassionate, more philosophical, less Darwinian.
I have now coached football for 24 of the 31 years in coaching. At one point sixteen years into the journey, I got out and really didn’t miss it then. In fact, I was having a little bit of a conscious problem with teaching kids in such a violent sport. The 7 years I was out made me realize more than ever that I could coach it and not be like the Neanderthals that give physical sports a bad name. I didn’t have to be the caveman coach, but I could teach them to love it for the sheer joy of competition with others and the battle against their own limitations.
I still listen to Ted from time to time. I still love to hear “Hibernation” and driving guitar of “Stromtroopin”and “Dog eat Dog.” But the adolescent sex jokes of “Cat Scratch fever” and “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” have little appeal for me now.
Ted, of course, went on the be a spokesman for the goals of the N.R.A. and even conservative talk radio. He still promotes guns and hunting. Me. I became more of a tree hugger and liberal. I don’t hunt. I became a vegetarian and I mediate.
What person watching from the sidelines in those early years would have ever guessed that Captain Crazy would turn out more peace and love than “Dog Eat dog?”

Music Zen Moments – American Pie

Music Zen Moments – American Pie

It was Mayfest time in Tulsa. Every year, downtown Tulsa blocked off a large section of the business district and Main Street for Mayfest. There were tons of art vendors, food, and several stages spaced among the streets for local and some national music acts.
We always made it to Mayfest, just to wander the booths, listen to some of the local bands and eat food from the participating restaurants. There were plenty of beer vendors in the one time each year you could walk down the main mall in Tulsa with a cup of semi-cold beer in your hand.
The main stage, surrounded by trees and a small park area, always had the biggest draw bands. Country acts, and some rising or long time national acts would play there to a moderate sized crowd. There were lines of folding chairs and sometimes people with their own lawn chairs strewn around the perimeter of the area.

Ashley and I made a point to be in the crowd the year that Don Mclean played Mayfest. I had been a fan ever since the seminal album “American Pie” hit the airwaves in 1971. That song, “American Pie,” caught literally everyone’s imagination with its poetry and imagery. It made those of us who followed the history of Rock music listen carefully to figure out who or what each of the lyrics referred to. Was the “Satan laughing with delight” a reference to Mick Jagger at the Altamont concert where, during the singing of “Sympathy for the Devil” a member of the Hell’s Angels stabbed a guy to death near the front of the crowd? Was “Helter Skelter in the summer swelter” a reference to the Manson murders that were supposed to have been inspired by the Beatles White album?
Mclean came on stage to a roar of applause and calls. He set out through a beautiful set, enhanced by the perfect early May Oklahoma day. The sky shone a peaceful pastel blue behind him and his band as he crooned though hit after hit. Roberta Flack was right when she wrote about him in her song, “Killing Me Softly.” “Strumming my pain with his fingers. Singing my life with his words.”
Don’s smooth voice sang “And I love her so,” the haunting “Vincent” and his cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” He chatted with the crowd and small kids danced, uninhibited at the front of the stage as he played and sang. As the end of the show neared, we all waited for “American Pie,” but at the same time wishing it would delay because we knew that would end the show.
“Long, Long time ago….” He began, as he quietly strummed his guitar, and the crowd erupted! The audience stood, en masse, moving toward the stage to sing, along with its creator, the anthem of a generation of fans.

“American Pie” is a song that, at over 8 minutes in, length, was one of the longest songs to top the pop charts in 1972. The Beatles had a number one with the 7-minute “Hey Jude” in 1968. But, on that early evening in down town Tulsa, the minutes flew by as the crowd sang out; unaware of others who might look on, when the unfortunate happened.

Two Thirds of the way through the song, the entire sound system died. Suddenly McLean’s voice was silent. Suddenly his guitar was no more. Suddenly his band ceased to exist.

The amzing thing was this….th song did not stop. The crowd continued on with the song, their voices blending, as it wafted through the warm evening air. Mclean, with a shrug, stepped to the front of the stage and began conducting the crowd as they sang through the last verse and chorus.

"And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The church bells all were broken.
And the three men I admire most:
The father, son, and the holy ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.
And they were singing,
"bye-bye, Miss American Pie."
Drove my Chevy to the levee,
But the levee was dry.
And them good old boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin', "this'll be the day that I die.
"this'll be the day that I die."

At the end, Don Mclean, bowed and gestured to his band as the crowd rose in applause. The concert had been spectacular, but it was that electric glitch, that coincidence of technical failure that made this concert more than what it seemed on the surface. The crowd, all united in one voice, just for a few moments, became something bigger.

Zen Music moment - Queen II

Zen Music Moment – Queen II

It was the summer of 1974. I had just graduated from school and was working at a construction job during he summer before I left for college in Kansas. I worked during the day, swinging a sledgehammer or pulling wet concrete (Mud), and in the evenings, I ran and lifted to get ready for my first season in college football.

At night, after working out, I would pile several LPs on my turntable, and drop into bed, tired and weary. The albums would play one after another as I drifted into sleep, waiting for that next day to arrive. I had a huge album collection, so the variety was never ending, but as my time was occupied, I became restless.

On a Saturday afternoon, carrying my new wealth in my back pocket, I stopped at TG&Y, five and dime to browse through he record bins for something new to listen to. I was, along with my friend Jerry Reale, a constant visitor to record stores and variety stores, and knew most LPs by sight. I considered myself o connoisseur of the modern rock genre at the ripe age of 18.

It was in those racks that I ran across something I had never seen before. The cover intrigued me. The album was called “Queen II.” I assumed that “Queen” was the name of the band. The cover was mostly black, with the 4 members of the band in poses that reminded me of the old “Meet the Beatles” cover, but this record had a darker, almost more sinister looking cover.

On the flip side, the song titles were about White and Black Queens, fairy fellas and an Ogre battle. The era of progressive rock was no stranger to medieval or mystical themed music, but this seemed to stand out in a rack of other LPs that seemed less than exciting. I was drawn to the cover itself.

I bought the album, and took it home. I unwrapped the cover and opened the foldout. Inside, a field of white displayed an almost androgynous band, also dressed in white.
As usual, I took the LP out of the sleeve, looked at the song titles and length of each cut. Then I put the album on the turntable, picked up the lyric sheet and lay back to listen to and critique the band.

What I heard caught me completely off guard. Guitar rang out like orchestral movements. Background vocals that rang out like operatic pieces and a melting of each song into the next like melted butter blending into a cake mix.
I had heard “Yes” and I had heard “Emerson Lak and Palmer.” I had listened to “Deep Purple” and the “Beatles,” but this album was the best mix of them all. It had the multi-layered complexity of “Yes” and “Pink Floyd,” and the powerful guitar of Deep Purple. Then it flowed form my poor sparkly speakers like side two of The Beatles “Abbey Road.”

I felt then like something I would experience only indirectly when I had a baby son. The first time we feed baby Fletch a spoonful of ice cream, his face lit up in ecstatic confusion, still holding his surprised mouth open as the frozen sugar treat melted and filled his taste buds. That was what I felt as the music drifted around me. I felt like the monster in “Young Frankenstein” as he grasped at the air trying to catch the sounds when he first heard the music of the violin.

It was the first day of a love affair with eh music of “Queen.” In college, we would turn out the room lights and listen to the complex, dizzying verses of “The Prophet’s Song” We would sing parts of “Bohemian Rhapsody” while lying in a cloud burst, camped under the stars. “Thunderbolts and Lightning, very very frightening…”

There are only three albums I ever bought because of the cover. I dared the others because of the great surprise I received form risking a buy on “Queen II.” The other two were Meatloaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” and Toto’s first album. I was not disappointed in wither.

On such a breathless night as this
Upon my brow the lightest kiss
I walked alone
And all around the air did say
My lady soon will stir this way
In sorrow known
The White Queen walks and the night grows pale
Stars of lovingness in her hair