The Blog Brothers

We grew up in a US time when horses were still used to deliver milk and baked goods, and collect recyclables (generically called ‘rags’ back then)… It was a slow time, when summer days were a week long, and to get from Saturday lunch to the starting bars of the first Looney Tunes of the Saturday matinee with 25 cartoons and cowboy double-feature took about 3 days.

There was no tv then, so all we could do in the living room was live. That was mostly at night. During the day, if not at school daydreaming out the windows we were always out playing, up to many miles away, on foot or bicycle, often taking our lunch with us. The radio was in the kitchen, for listening to after dinner or while doing the drudgery of homework while Mom did the ironing.

The only apparatus in the living room was the big clunky iron telephone you had to dial, then wait for the dial to roll clickingly back till you could whirl in the next number but there were only 5 numbers in those days, since there were about 2 billion people in the world and only a tiny portion in Albany. My Brady/McTeague grandfather, an electrician for the phone company, had one of the standing phones with the earpiece on a side hook and the dial at the bottom, like in all the old black-and-white fast-paced newspaper movies. “Get me the desk!” Things began to change palpably when the phone numbers started getting longer. Where I live now my number is 10 digits long, 15 or more if you’re calling from another country.

We had no Victrola, as phonographs (itself a neoarchaism now!) were called back then; the only person in the family who had a Victrola was my Robinson/Kelly grandfather, a NYCRR conductor, who had a then merely quaint wind-up one in his basement, with a big morning glory megaphone where the sound came out. Next to the whizzing green felt turntable it had a little metal cupful of playing needles like headless finishing nails that lasted about an hour and were attached to the tone arm by vising them in place with a knurled knob.

The living room in those days was where guests sat and chatted or Dad read the newspaper in the big red easy chair under the standing lamp by the window after dinner. On really rainy days when we had friends over or went to their house, we played in the living room: checkers, cards (War was a favorite), chess, Monopoly, Clue, Go to the Head of the Class… but when the weather was even remotely tolerable (in winter there were no limits) and we didn’t have measles or mumps or whooping cough we would never in a million years have stayed inside, we’d be out somewhere exploring, playing, finding stuff to do all day long, even into dark in summer, home only to eat then out again, except for the detested but implacable Saturday night bath.

Each of those days was about a week long. The school year was about a decade in length, but seemed longer. I remember one time at the end of summer vacation realizing it would be 9 months till summer vacation, an impossible duration, as time-distant as the Civil War, which had ended only 80 years before, when great grandma was a teenager. Then at the start of summer vacation, school was almost 3 months away, in the heart an essentially unending length of time, though we knew better.

Comics were a new thing then too, this was only a few years after the first Batman, the only copy in existence now a crumbling million-dollar item. I used to own millions of dollars worth of comics at today’s prices, bought them for dimes I got doing odd jobs in the neighborhood, original Donald Ducks, Little Lulu, Mad, Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel and all the many others, read ‘em and tossed ‘em in a pile, filled my wagon and went trading comics in the neighborhood.

It wasn’t a better world in many ways, there was more manifest prejudice, for example, and pollution was the norm– litter wasn’t even a full-blown concept yet (the word ‘litterbug’ was the winner of a contest to give the phenomenon a name), and though age and nostalgia likely play a big part in my perspective, it seems from here that many of the technoadvances we now enjoy have been achieved at the cost of time’s depth and richness. The journey is where the treasures are.

In a Tarzan movie I saw one long-gone Saturday afternoon, Tarzan is shown a movie on a screen set up in the big white hunter’s jungle camp; on the screen Tarzan sees a train rushing at him and panics. “That train in the picture can go from coast to coast in three days,” explains the civilized white guy. “What for?” asks Tarzan.

In so many ways, those were the days.

You’ve got me there, Bob (see previous post); but as I’ve been saying more and more frequently lately, it seems to be the names that go first. That means I’ve got a lot of nameless faces floating around in my head these days, but I’ve learned to cherish the memories, with or without the names. I do remember that face vividly, though, and also remember his parents - and that ‘50 Chevy - very well.

I also recall spending an afternoon fishing with him from a rowboat out on the still, cold waters of Brant Lake in the Adirondacks. He was a true character, full of piss and vinegar; and unless my mind is telling tall tales on his behalf, I believe he landed what looked to be a pretty good-sized smallmouth bass that day. Of course, I was far more excited about it than he was; perhaps it looked much smaller to him?

I have a much clearer memory, though, of the dart sticking out of the back of my hand at the Delaware Tavern than I do of the legendary “turkey” moment, for understandable reasons. Not only did it dampen my love for the world of darts (a tough blow for one raised in bars), but to this day I have mixed feelings about the memory itself.

It seems that initially the crowd of revelers greeted my childish mistake - foolishly reaching for darts on the board while someone sober enough to stand but too drunk to see, was about to launch his shoulder-fired missile - with a roar of laughter. Time and the blessed imagination of the Irish, however, have given me a better ending.

As I stood there staring at my impaled hand - Christ-like, virtually nailed to the board - I calmly reached up and drew out the offending projectile, jammed it into the bullseye, and walked slowly back to my seat, droplets of blood tracing my footsteps to the table.

The silence in the room was palpable; but its vacuum was suddenly replaced by a deafening roar of cheering, clapping and the stamping of feet, quickly erasing any vestiges of shame left in my heart. Clutching my bloodied hand with the other, and lifting my head to the onlooking crowd, I whispered hoarsely, ‘Don’t worry, my friends; it’s only a flesh wound.’

How do you remember it? Did I leave anything out?

Author’s note, added the following day: I was lying in bed last night, about to drift off to dreamland, when suddenly the ceiling above my bed opened up to reveal a vast midnight sky filled to overflowing with glittering stars. From deep within a bank of silvery clouds came a voice, saying “Bobby! Bobby! Bobby Van Buren!” Then I fell into a deep and restful sleep until the room was once again full of sunlight. Morpheus always seems to do his best work in that twilight zone between wakefulness and the semicoma of deep sleep.

In the beginning the music was formless and void,
and a great emptiness went forth across the airwaves.
All that could be heard therein was Patti Page,
Theresa Brewer and Frankie Laine.
Then God said, “Let there be rhythm, let there be blues!”;
and His spirit went forth across the airwaves
in the form of Chuck Willis, Ray Charles and LaVerne Baker.
And God saw that what he had made was good, very good;
and He began to replace the old with the new.
Thus God had provided man with soul,
and from that day forth, man and his descendants
would groove upon the earth. Then God rested,
for He had grown weary from all the dancing He had done.

It must be difficult for younger people who’ve lived their entire lives in the aftermath of that glorious earthquake, to have any sense at all of what it was like living in a world without Soul, an entire universe void of Rock and Roll. It must seem to them as though it had always existed, but it didn’t. There was a time…

… back in the late 40s and early fifties, when I was a young boy, not long before those sonic booms arrived, that there would be an occasional hint of the approaching storm* coming from radios and jukeboxes, but those intimations were mere anomalies; the first few pieces of a grand mosaic. Those were still innocent times; I was still an innocent child, singing along with Mitch Miller and the Gang, or barking in time with the song, How much is that doggie in the window? (arf! arf!) Really. I’m not kidding. We all did. Until we were saved by Rock and Roll.

Until that magic moment I simply didn’t know what I was missing; but looking back, I can see that it was nothing less than two worlds passing in the midnight hour. The earlier world had its charms, and precious little in the way of threats or dangers. The war had ended, we had won, our fathers had returned as heroes (those that were lucky enough to come home; my father was one of them), and we lived our sunny days in a nice, comfortable home in a quiet neighborhood. If we were the Cleavers, I was the Beaver. We were alive long before Beavis arrived, in a time when no one in the land was called Butthead. Like I said, it had its charms.

From the day I arrived on this earth, I had always found my greatest joy and comfort in music. Even as a little boy, I could be found singing and dancing around the house like a musical whirligig. Songs eminated endlessly from the big radio in the living room, when radios were still furniture; songs like Peg O’My Heart by the Harmonicats, or Ghost Riders In the Sky by Vaughn Monroe. Being Irish, of course, I had the added good fortune of spending much of my youth in bars, listening to all the latest pop tunes of the late 40s and early 50s, my face pressed against the glass chamber of the jukebox, as if longing to somehow get inside, to be closer to the source.

When Rock and Roll hit the planet, though, for me it was like an earthquake. As God and good fortune would have it, I was twice-blessed: for this new, pulsing and throbbing sound was let loose upon the land at the same moment that my hormones kicked in. I was 13 in the Year of Our Lord, 1955, when I first heard Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets blasting forth from the speakers outside a tavern on Nassau Lake where our family had rented a cabin for the summer. My brother and I were in the midst of one our endless, effusive displays of brotherly love, tenderly pitching rocks at each other in the dark, when our world suddenly shifted on its axis. Life would never be the same.

It was only later that I learned that Rock and Roll was created by simply putting a white face on a form of music that had been around for years, a genre once known as “race music,” later to be marketed as Rhythm and Blues, primarily to black audiences. Blissfully unaware of any of this, I was content with this exciting new sound, until I began to hear the real thing.

Little Richard burst upon the scene with Tutti Frutti, Fats Domino hit with Ain’t That A Shame, Chuck Berry sang Maybelline, and by that time I was clean outta sight, somewhere near seventh heaven. From that point on, there was a flood of Black Rock, later morphing into Soul, from Bo Diddly to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Johnny Otis, Jackie Wilson - it just kept comin’, like the rain that lifted Noah’s Ark. I was already in a state of ecstasy, gladly skipping over Elvis, Eddy Cochran and Gene Vincent in search of Huey “Piano” Smith singing Rockin’ Pneumonia & the Boogie Woogie Flu, or Speedo by the Cadillacs, spinnin’ that radio dial.

By the time we were old enough to drive, we started heading out to Thatcher Park at night to park at the overlook, and with a clear sky between us and Buffalo, NY, we could catch WKBW and listen to the finest of musical diamonds in their purest form: rough, raw, sexy and thumping with a groove like nothing else on earth. It was the beginning of soul music, brother, and we were pulling it right down outta heaven.

Ray Charles, James Brown, Johnny Ace, The Impressions, Barrett Strong, The Falcons, Howlin’ Wolf, Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, Hank Ballard, Maurice Williams, Sam Cooke, Smoky and The Miracles - we would sit until late into the night with the top down, staring at the stars, radio blasting, talking only between songs.

Like many things in life, it is almost impossible to describe what those moments were like. Suffice it to say that it was like discovering a whole new world, a sparkling new universe. Perhaps Van Morrison said it best: it stoned me to my soul, stoned me just like jelly roll, stoned me just like goin’ home….
And, man, was it good to be back home.

*That inkling could be heard in songs like How High the Moon by Les Paul and Mary Ford in 1953, Earth Angel by the Penguins, and Sh-Boom by the Crew-Cuts in the following year, 1954. The widely-acknowledged breakthrough song was Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets the following year, in 1955.

•Photos, from the top: Patti Page at CBS Studio 50 in NY, Doris Day, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Chuck Willis, Laverne Baker, and, last but not least, Little Richard.