My Musical Education

My 11th birthday was a warm autumn day in October 1976 and I had received enough money from various relatives to afford a copy of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album. My mother took me to Montgomery Ward’s, which sported a miniscule record section right by the entrance. As I entered the store, I noticed a blue velvet rope around the record section.
SHIT.
 Those records might as well have been in Soviet Russia; I forgot it was Sunday, and thanks to Texas’ nonsensical Blue Laws, I couldn’t buy records on Sundays. In Texas, until 1985, you could not buy appliances such as washers and dryers, nor could you buy entertainment like records on Sundays, because religious leaders and lawmakers had decided that your time and money would be better suited to church activities. Most stores weren’t even open on Sundays. I bought my copy of Sgt. Pepper the next day, but most of my excitement had worn off by then. Eleven year olds can be very fickle.

I added my new record to my small “beginners” collection, which consisted mainly of 45s. My Beatles record was my second LP bought with my own money. The first had been Fly Like an Eagle by the Steve Miller Band. Steve was a Texas boy and received loads of airplay on my favorite radio station, KZEW-FM in Dallas. My 45 rpm records were mainly soul, disco and pop faves, like the Monkees and KC & the Sunshine Band. I was about to enter junior high school and I knew that “the big kids” (12 years old and older) listened to LPs. I was too young to have bought the Beatles music when it first came out and I wasn’t even born when the appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, but everyone I knew of all ages loved the Beatles. My uncle Larry had moved back to our hometown from California and his wife Debbie had all of the Beatles LPs, purchased when she was a kid. They decided to move back to California, so they gave me a waterbed and most of Aunt Debbie’s Beatles LPs. I was thrilled to bits and those LPs still have pride of place in my record collection.

I’ve been a collector for most of my life. When I was a child, I collected stuffed animals (I never liked dolls) and colored or unusually shaped bottles, which seemed to be found at every store back in the 70s. As a teenager, I developed my insatiable urge to collect books and records. I had been playing music since 5th grade, when we were allowed to pick which instrument we wanted to play in the junior high band. My first choice was “glockenspiel”, but percussion instruments were not considered lady-like, so I ended up playing a rented flute, riddled with worn spots where many young fingers had tortuously shrieked out Vivaldi sonatas over many years. I also played my grandfather’s old guitar every weekend I was down on the dairy farm he owned.

My first memories of records were from my early childhood. My grandfather had several Bob Wills “record albums” (from when 78rpm records came in what resembled a photo album) which he would play for me on the hi-fi in their living room. “Take Me Back To Tulsa” and “Cherokee Maiden” were big favorites. My grandfather idolized Bob Wills. He even wrote Bob a letter when the Western Swing King had a stroke and he was so proud when Bob wrote him back. He probably felt the same way I did when Rick Nielson from Cheap Trick answered my fan letter with a couple of personalized guitar picks.

My parents divorced when I was 5 and my mother and I ended up moving to some very sketchy apartments in east Dallas. In the morning when she went to work for the bus company, I went to Catholic school first grade (even though I wasn’t Catholic; that’s a whole other book). When she left for her second job in a department store, I went to the babysitter, a nice Mexican lady with several kids my age. She would play her Mitch Ryder and Ike & Tina Turner records for us and let us jump on the bed; plus she made Kool-Aid, which my Mom couldn’t afford. Despite Mom working two jobs, we were very poor and many times we didn’t have enough food to eat. Mom could make ketchup packets and hot water into “tomato soup” and make it sound exotic. One night, Mom was sick so she didn’t go to her second job. I was running around the apartment driving her crazy when I noticed some commotion coming from the other end of our building. An ambulance crew carried a Mexican man with a butcher knife stuck to the hilt in his chest out of my babysitter’s apartment. Mom and I moved back to my hometown the next week.

My hometown didn’t have a record store and we were too poor to afford records anyway, so whenever I liked a song I’d heard on the radio or see a band I liked on The Midnight Special, I did chores on my grandparents’ dairy farm in order to earn money to buy the 45rpm single. My grandmother would pick me up from school on Fridays and we would go to the grocery store. I would stand at the magazine rack with my nose buried in an issue of Creem or Rolling Stone while she shopped. Mimaw would buy me a magazine and some Little Debby Banana Twins and I would do chores like help out Papaw at the dairy barn milking cows or baling hay, or clean up the kitchen after supper and give Mimaw a manicure. Greenville did have an 8-track tape dealer, a happening place with a mansard roof, wrought iron railings and lots of zebra print wall paper. As far as I knew, 8-track players were in cars and it would be a few years before I had one of those. What I did have was a cheap plastic kids record player that my Mom had given me for Christmas. I could find the current Top 40 45s at the local department store and whenever I could dredge up 79 cents I would buy one I liked.

I liked most songs on Top 40 radio back then, so it was easy to pick. I would gaze longingly at the LPs and 8-track tapes. My uncle was fond of visiting garage sales every Saturday morning and he bought a huge box of 45s (some even in picture sleeves - drool!). He let me pick out the ones I wanted, so I chose “Strawberry Letter 23” by the Brothers Johnson, “Popcorn” by James Brown, “Potential” by the Jimmy Castor Bunch and some other fab old funk and soul favorites. I had a soul fetish anyway because I watched “Soul Train” every Saturday afternoon. American Bandstand wasn’t broadcast on the Dallas ABC-TV affiliate after 1970. We also had “Fiesta Mexicana”, plus “Cowboy Weaver and His Radio Ranch Hands”, not to mention the “Porter Wagoner Show” and “Hee Haw”. My musical tastes were and still are all over the map.

From my reading of the current rock periodicals, I knew all about Iggy Pop, the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith, but had no idea about where to find those records. They didn’t have them at the Greenville Library, but the librarian did tell me of these wonderful places called “record stores” where you could find LPs and 45s or 8-track tapes of all different types of music, most of which you couldn’t find at Montgomery Ward’s or Sears. Some you could even listen to before you paid for them, just to see if you liked them enough to buy them. Whenever I would see my father who lived in Garland (a suburb of Dallas), I would beg and plead for him to take me to “Peaches”, a store the librarian had told me about, but he wouldn’t do it: “Hell no, it’s full of hippies” was his reasoning. Mom wouldn’t take me to Peaches either because she knew she couldn’t afford to buy me anything, so my consolation prize was a visit to the then new Town East Mall.

I wandered around the food court and the mall stores dejected, but then I saw it in neon, on the lower row of shops: Disc Records: A REAL LIVE RECORD STORE. I told Mom I would be in there, so she could leave me while she shopped. I was in heaven: records everywhere, plus posters and more music magazines that I had ever seen. I couldn’t afford to buy anything that time, but I pestered Mom whenever we were within a 10-mile radius of Town East Mall. One December, Mom had told me I could pick out one LP for my gift. I was in a Doors phase then, so I held up the only copy of “Morrison Hotel” under the Doors placard so Mom could see it as she stood up by the registers. Before I realized what was happening, a woman quickly snatched it out of my hand. Horrified by the turn of events, I quickly spun around to see where the “thief” went, but she had it paid for and out the door before I saw her again. I had to console myself with “Waiting For The Sun” instead.