Last Man Standing
I have never been as connected to music as many of my peers. I have only one recollection about popular music from my grade school days in the first half of the 60s. One day, my friends and I were playing baseball on a vacant lot (we actually did that quite a bit since ball fields were for organized little leagues and not for the scruffy sandlot gangs like us). One of the guys came running up and said that Bobby Goldsboro was staying at the nearby motel, according to the kid’s older sister, who was more in tune with the music scene. These were the days when Goldsboro was playing backup to another god of the pop/country music scene, Roy Orbison. At the time, Orbison had his famous Oh, Pretty Woman record out on the airwaves, so Goldsboro was clearly an up and comer. We somehow figured out what room he was in at the motel and knocked on his door. Imagine his pleasure at being awakened to find a gritty gang of sandlot ball players at his door asking him if he was really Bobby Goldsboro. He came to the door in his tidy whiteys, squinted out at us, shook his head, and closed the door. His reaction to us was pretty close to my general reaction to pop music.
In Junior High School I can recall several specific songs that resonated with me, but while others were using all their discretionary funds to buy 45s and Albums, I was more than satisfied to just hear the occasional song on the radio. The song that I remember the most is Lou Christies’ Lightnin’ Strikes, which I connect with learning how to ski at night on the 2,000 foot T-Bar slope of the Poland Spring Ski Area in Maine. Whenever I hear the song, I feel myself standing at the top of the upside-down ski slope with my clunky used wooden skis, deciding how I would get down the initial headwall (at least it seemed like a headwall to me). So, while I like the song musically, its really the memories that it invokes that make me like it. While I was busy doing non-musical things, my sisters were collecting 45s of all the latest pop hits, so I did occasionally play one or two when I was bored and home alone.
While I was in high school in Rome, my mind was on all manner of things other than music, especially motorcycles. Meanwhile, my sister Barbara was busy dating the lead singer of one of the most popular live rock bands in Italy, a group called Free Love. Can you imagine a better band name than that in the late 1960’s? To say Barbara was into Rock n’Roll music would be an understatement. All I can remember about music from those years was Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida album with its 17-minute repetitive rendition. That’s not entirely true, since I can also recall being intrigued by this new singer by the name of Elton John, whose third album, Tumbleweed Connection, was confusing to me since he was British, but singing about life in the old west. What’s interesting about that is that was all during the same time when the biggest names in Rock n’ Roll were groups like Cream, Led Zeppelin, Santana and The Doors, all of whom completely escaped me. While everyone was groovin’ on Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendricks at Woodstock, I was oblivious.
When I went off to college and spent a summer in a Cleveland Case Western Reserve fraternity house summer rental room without a TV, I got more interested in music. I got invited by a department secretary to go to a concert by some local singer by the name of Cat Stevens. I bought a cheap stereo with my summer earnings and some popular albums like Rod Stewart and Bread, and off I went to Cornell with those ringing in my ears. If I hadn’t heard of Rod Stewart before then, I would have had a great introduction to him that first semester since Maggie Mae seemed to play on the radio and in the student union constantly. During college, my friend Bob was a member of the Cornell Concert Commission, so I probably went to a concert or two, but it just wasn’t part of my agenda and I can’t even recall any concert in particular. It was impossible to be a college student and not have music around most of the time, but it simply wasn’t a big deal to me the way it was to other people. By the time I left college, I had a sampling of 60s and 70s pop and folk music in my ears and hard-wired in my brain, but if the brain has central and peripheral areas, music sat in the periphery.
While my upbringing was decidedly not music-focused, Kim found music to be at the core of her being as she grew up. She was the kindergartener who got busted during nap time in the girls room singing and dancing to herself. While I was studying development economics at Cornell, she was preparing to major in musical theater at Indiana University by being in all her high school musicals and choir (actually called The Singing Hoosiers). While I went on to a relatively musicless career in New York City banking, she headed out to audition in L.A., working as the personal assistant to the Whitesnake duo of Tawny Kitane and David Coverdale of Here I Go Again fame. From there, she went to New York where she alternated teaching drama and taking gigs in traveling Broadway musicals like State Fair, The Sound of Music, Showboat, Big River, Nunsense and Oklahoma. So, while she lived the life of music, I perhaps bought a 45, LP, Eight-track, cassette or CD or two over the years.
When Kim and I met, she was heading into cabaret and I was happy to finally bring music into my life by going to see her shows and the shows of her friends. I listened to the radio a bit now and then and always leaned towards the oldies and those artists who’s lyrics spoke to me. Those were Elton, Billy Joel, The Doobie Brothers and Meatloaf, among others. I always pretended to know what The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cream and The Doors were about, but I’m not sure I could name any of their songs. It was culturally mandatory that you liked their hard rock beat, but I mostly just pretended to know what it was all about.
Our new neighborhood friends have been nice enough to come at our invitation to hear Kim sing with her Encore choral group. We know that is not their natural inclination since we know that Mike and Melisa’s preferences run more to mainstream Rock n’Roll. So, it was just a matter of time until they invited us to join them at a concert with their favorite music. That happened this weekend with an Ocean Beach performance of a Cream and Doors cover bands playing on Sunday afternoon at a place called Winston’s. Given the mid-afternoon performance time and the lack of food service at the venue (plenty of bar service available), we brought in a late lunch from a nearby diner and were lucky enough (with the help of Melisa’s brother Len, who follows these bands closely) to get a high top table from which to enjoy the three hour show.
The music was good and resonated memorably (I guess I had heard it enough in my upbringing to recognize almost every song to some degree). While there were plenty of folks in attendance that were older than me, I was the oldest in our group. That made it curious to me that these late 60s bands resonated so much with friends that were younger than me since they peaked as bands while I was in my mid-teens. Such is the apparent power of Rock n’Roll. We particularly enjoyed watching this group of oldsters, decked out in their throw-back finery with sequined boots, hippy dresses and lots of peace symbols. They were grooving to the music as though they were in the mud of Woodstock with arms raised to the heavens and hips (real and artificial) gyrating to the beat. It was a fun outing and while this music was not the true music of either Kim’s or my youth, it was nice to share it with Mike and Melisa and finally helped me understand why Mike isn’t cutting his greying ponytail long after the COVID excuse has expired. That makes Mike the last ponytailed man standing in our hood.