This week readings by Cantwell, Filene and Marcus were truly a wonderful blast back into the past. Although I was about as far from the typical Loretta Young prodigy as one could get, I was certainly touched by the flavors of sound created in reaction to the midnight train, American race for first place in arms proliferation. All this with a raining back-drop of Annette Funicello and the Mickey Mouse Club, Mighty Mouse, Rin Tin Tin, Circus Boy, Dean Martin and plastic curtains, plastic tile, lath and plaster houses with dirt basements and, yes, half-dug fall-out shelters from the previous owner of a turn of the century one-bedroom.
I remember hearing Bob Dylan’s music played at the old Peony Park giant swimming area in the west part of the city. The ghostly instrumentals fusing with his own fleshy voice became a surreal memory of sorts that clashed with stiff, bouffant hairstyles and Brylcreemed boys. No amount of water could coax even one hair to fall out of place. A perfect, starched imaginary set of plastic figurines in Barbie Doll swimsuits danced and pranced in the sun. Nothing made sense until Dylan segued into Beach Boys Help Me Rhonda—a much more appropriate sound track until the gears switched back again. And The House of the Rising Sun made my summer sun all the hotter with images of dead bodies in some East Asian conflict on yesterday’s six o’clock news, and all the flirty beach blondes teasing the soon-to-be Viet Nam sacrificial lambs (who did not have a clue). The House of the Rising Sun, lead singer of the Animals, Eric Burdon suggested the song came to him by way of an English pub. Said to have originated from a sixteenth-century English folk song about a brothel, the song somehow found equal relevance in 1964. It was Viet Nam and the “house” was everything that built the conflict. Transplanting location to New Orleans, the song sent a somber warning to that generation:
There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God I know I'm one.
With its ominous minor chord arpeggio, it picked-up where Dylan left off. The sound of the times wrestled at opposite ends of the continuum. The residue of Donna Reed debutantes facing off with the merging voices of Stephen Stills, Neil Young and acid rock anger turned me off and sent me back home to music that made sense to me, looked like me, and held the uncanny power to turn the knob off on the old Silverton television where the Huntley-Brinkley report sent regular, nightly chills down my back as I sat cross-legged on the linoleum floor watching the civil rights movement explode along with Viet Nam. Plastic transistor radios and 45 records of a comfortable familiar: Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, James Brown and Etta James—cried honestly and made us smile. I didn’t realize then what a weird, white world was forming around me. At the time, I thought it was just a cacophonous community that rallied a little too much around what Grandpa referred to as “foolishness”. I didn’t know it was a serious life style that burned the edges of my world with a caveat of forebodings that felt, sounded, tasted like finger nails of a loutish arrogance scratching against the chalkboard of society.
Ah, what memories are elicited in sound and song.
And yet, I am a product of that era with ties to the music for better or worse. It defines and represents a moment of time I was witness to and hence, I take ownership of it. It comprises who I am today--who all of us from that era are today.
ReplyDeleteS Rocha