In The Beginning

I fell early for music but it didn’t stick as much as I wish it had. As a 5 year old we had a box set, The Golden Record Library: A Music Heritage For Children. 12 records! I listened to them all, but the one that had the folk songs captivated me. Sports, however, captivated it me more.

Never did it cross my mind to actually learn to play an instrument. I was too obsessed with playing baseball, football and basketball, exploring the outdoors, and collecting rocks, fossils, coins, cards, Hardy Boys and Tom Swift books. I didn’t pay much attention to music once I was old enough for sports. My mom wanted me to take piano lessons, but after I was booted from the 5th grade choir for singing off key, and fearing that it would cut into my sports time, I passed.

My dad had some friends in grad school that had a folk band in the vein of the New Christy Minstrels. Despite living in a cramped 2 bedroom campus apartment, he offered the group a place to practice. I look back on it now and remember mostly being annoyed that they were so “loud” and I couldn’t not hear them. I wasn’t ready.

Then came the JFK assassination, and life turned somber. We watched the TV for about three days straight, including seeing Oswald shot live on TV. It’s odd how a child’s sense of time is so different from older folks. It was only weeks after JFK that The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan for the first time, exploding onto everyone’s awareness as if an antidote for the JFK grief.

My parents, though, gave them a “yuck” thumbs down, and my brother Mike and I watched, not really getting it. I think I went back to sorting baseball cards before they were even done playing. The next day, in my 6th grade classroom, that’s all anyone was talking about, especially the girls. I was hopelessly lost and held onto sports a little tighter.

Christmas brought a brand new Arvin Transistor radio, shiny red with an earphone. For the first time, I had my own radio. In Charleston, Illinois, we could get St. Louis and Chicago baseball games and I was in heaven, listening to every pitch, memorizing the rosters and batting averages. Obsessed.

The only problem with baseball was that it didn’t go all year. In 1965, the NBA was unimportant. The NFL only played on Sundays. So there were many nights with no sports to listen to. I started hearing rock ‘n roll on WLS and WCFL and was embarrassed that I liked a lot of it. I hid under the covers when the parents came to check on me so they wouldn’t find out I was listening to rock, but my fears were unwarranted.

The next year, for my birthday, I got a basic record player with built in (horrible) speakers, and a small pile of 45’s. I’d already started buying 45’s and playing them on the family console; I’m sure this was strategic so the records would be played in my bedroom away from them.

By this time we lived near Terre Haute, out in the country. We made frequent trips into town to go shopping, mostly at Sears, Penney’s, Woolco and Topps, plus the local Roots and Meis department stores. Each had a record section and I began to accumulate 45’s; it was a slow pace though because at 77 cents apiece, my allowance didn’t stretch too far. Kmart sometimes had 3/1.00 45’s, packed in plastic so you could see two of the three records. As I listened more, I realized that was a pretty good deal, even if there was a drill hole through each record’s label. Most of them were “last year’s model”, no longer sellable at full price. I assumed this is where old records went to die and I did my best to salvage as many as I could afford. Sometimes that hidden record was decent, often it was the “worst” of the three imho.

Typically the family would make a pilgrimage to Indianapolis at Christmas time to do serious shopping, leaving many fond memories to peruse. A visit to Lyric Records in Southern Plaza made a more lasting impression. This was my first real record store visit. I flipped through a bin of 45’s and saw many records that were hits but they were no longer available at any of the department stores. I had a list in my head of some records that I had missed out on, so I asked the clerk how things worked. “You have older records! Do you have Little Red Riding Hood by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs? In a flash I had my own copy, and the knowledge that that records lived on past their department store lives. You just had to go to the right place. And that changed my life in ways I never could have comprehended back then.