Finding my music

My parents stood as a bulwark against Beatlemania when it crashed into the eastern seaboard in 1964. Out in the northwest corner of the West Coast, sheltered in suburbia, I felt nary a ripple. I was happy to listen to the music my parents bought, like Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass. As I’d sit and listen to one of their hits, like A Taste of Honey, I’d look uncomprehendingly at the woman on the cover of the album Whipped Cream and Other Delights:

Even at five, I knew there was something I was supposed to be feeling when I looked at that photo. Something. I’d hold the album varying distances from my face, squinting and staring as if that would crack the code. But . . .

Nothing.

Oh, well.

Meanwhile, outside of the confines of our living room, a force more powerful than Jesus himself reshaped the contours of American culture. Every teenage boy in America wanted to be a Beatle, stroked and ogled by every teenage girl in America, and every teenage girl in America wanted to merge her essence with one of those lovable mop-tops. Didn’t matter which. They all had magical powers, each of them, to transform the gangliest goose into something becoming.

Corporate America saw its opportunity, coal-hearted bastards. They began churning out reasonable facsimiles.

After the Monkees came the Archies—I had the lunchbox—the Banana Splits then Josie and the Pussy Cats and, finally, in 1970, when I turned 11, The Partridge Family. The Partridge Family was a sitcom about a family that was a pop combo. They traveled gig to gig in a multicolored bus—yet, somehow, managed to have a home life that resembled that of the viewers, all those pajamaed youngsters snug safely of their family rooms, cross-legged in front of the console TVs.

Like me.

The Partridge Family seemed “safe” to my mom. Their music brimmed with pep and puppy love—and probably prevented cavities. Yes, they had longish hair—but they had matching outfits! Meanwhile, real rock groups, the kind hippies listen to in their . . . opium dens, they let their freak flags fly. My parents had seen the photos from Woodstock.

That was the kind of music I needed to be protected from.

So, my mom, knowing I was an avid viewer of The Partridge Family TV show, bought me a Partridge Family album for Christmas of 1970. She had assumed I was past toys but didn’t really know what I was “into.” I wondered the same thing.

Thanks, Mom. (Two years earlier, I had thanked Santa and meant it. Last year, I thanked Santa because I thought it’s what she wanted to hear.)

What my mom didn’t know was that the real reason I liked the show was the actress Susan Dey. I didn’t know it either. I just knew I felt an extra unfamiliar stirring, something ancient—autonomic, even—every time she walked into the frame.

I admit it. I liked the Partridge Family album. Their melodies, though extra-vanilla, suited my pre-pubescent tastes, calling me to don an extra pair of underpants. The album featured the band’s chart-topper, “I Think I Love You.”

My first album! It never had occurred to me to spend my allowance on music. I’d just jump at the first whiz-bang thing I’d encounter, the kind of stuff manufactured by companies like Wham-O. Kid stuff:

• Super balls, which you could supposedly bounce over your split-level. (“It’s almost alive!” the advertisements proclaimed.)
• The Slip ‘N’ Slide. (“Easy fun, just run—and slide a mile!”)
• Super-Elastic Bubble Plastic. (“Blow giant multi-colored plastic balloons!”)

Then my friend Carson heard that I had the album, and he knew he must have it. He was one of the homosexual 10-year-old boys across America who felt an unfamiliar stirring whenever David Cassidy would walk into the frame. (Obviously, I didn’t know Carson was gay back then. Neither did he. We, the both of us—in fact, the whole neighborhood of boys—barely understood that there were actually men in the world who kissed other men on the lips. The word gay wasn’t in common parlance. Homo or queer, yes, though we really didn’t know what the words meant. We were just starting to grasp that we were going to have to have sex—which was undertaken bare naked!—with a woman eventually. The idea of having sex with a man—why not fly to the moon?)

His older sister, Sarah, was into rock music, so he snuck into her room—to the sound of trilling violins. He was sure Sarah was going to come in any second. He grabbed one of her albums randomly and brought it to me and offered to trade, breathing hard, as if he had run the entire way, and holding the album up to me upside down. It was Chicago Transit Authority, a double album, a rarity. Carson made a big to-do about how it was the record nowadays. He wanted that Partridge Family album bad.

I refused, not even bothering to look at the Chicago Transit Authority album. Carson, crestfallen, wound his lonely way back home.

The next day, my next-door neighbor, Eric, was over at my house. He was two years my senior, so, a teenager. I showed him the Partridge Family album, expecting him to be impressed.

“That is so uncool,’ he sneered. “Man, why do you listen to that?”

He was an expert on what it took to be cool. The month prior, for example, he had shown me how to trick out my Levi’s. Undo the hem at the bottom of the cuffs and create a frilly fringe of blue-white denim—and then split the bottom off the outside seam ever so slightly. I had tried it, and my mom became unglued.

“You’ve ruined a perfectly good pair of pants!” she cried.

I looked down at The Partridge Family album and then back to Eric.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“The Partridge Family doesn’t write its own songs,” he said. “They don’t even play their own instruments or even sing their songs. The people behind The Partridge Family, they’re using you!”

He was right. The music and the singing actually came from a band called The Love Generation:

The Love Generation was together only a few years, and its one claim to fame, other than covering for The Partridge Family, was that their song “It’s the Going Thing” had been picked up by Ford to advertise cars during football games. Ford was hoping that the unfamiliar stirring Americans felt when they heard the song was to rush out and buy a Mustang.

I’d been had.

I saw the Partridge Family was, like the X-ray specs, a gimmick. Something grown-ups had fabricated to fool children. Keep them quiet—like dangling your car keys in front of an infant. Just because they could.

That’s it. I’d learned everything I was going to learn from The Partridge Family. I won’t get fooled again.

So I called Carson and told him I’d had a change of heart.

Chicago Transit Authority—I could tell they were serious musicians. Their songs included recordings from political demonstrations and six-minute guitar solos. One of the songs on the album was called Free Form Guitar, and it consisted of five minutes of feedback and screeching distortion. I figured I thought it sounded like shit because I wasn’t cool enough.

That was all going to change, though. This music was mine. I saw the Partridge Family was music my parents approved of. The Establishment. The enemy.

I couldn’t get enough of Chicago Transit Authority, the songs on the album other than Free Form Guitar. I played that thing until I wore the phonograph needle to a nub. My dad walked by once when I was listening to Free Form Guitar.

“What the hell is that?” he said.

“It’s a song,” I said.

“That’s not a song,” he said. “It’s noise.”

I needed more serious music.

A man’s music.

I needed more. More, I tell you! Where would I find it?

As if the answer to an unspoken prayer, that’s when I saw an advertisement for the Columbia Record Club in the Parade magazine stuffed into the middle of The Seattle Times Sunday edition. The God of Manhood had placed it there in His beneficence:

12 ALBUMS FOR A PENNY!

So, I sat down and began choosing albums by bands that I had never heard of, other than Chicago Transit Authority, which ended up shortening its name to Chicago after the real Chicago Transit Authority threatened to sue. Just like The Man, who I now realized had been plotting my misfortune all along, always keeping us down, harshing our vibe. Being uncool.

It took some time on the internet, but I think I’ve pieced together what those 12 albums were:

Chicago II
Chicago III
Steppenwolf Monster
Iron Butterfly Metamorphosis
Iron Butterfly Live
Crosby, Still and Nash 1
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young Déjà vu.
Neil Young After the Gold Rush
Led Zeppelin 2
Three Dog Night It Ain’t Easy
Three Dog Night Captured Live
Santana Abraxas

My music! Mine!

Along with filling in my name and address, I had to check a box to say what kind of music I liked. I checked “Rock.” Duh. I got a stamp from next to the phone and mailed it off, not worrying about what I’d say to my parents when the package arrived. Why spoil the present? The future can go fly a kite. Somebody else’s problem.

Little did I know that when the Suits at the Columbia Record Club pulled my application from the envelope they’d chortle to one another.

Another sucker!

Six to eight weeks later, a Saturday, the mailman knocked on the front door. As evidence that this whole thing was orchestrated by God, it just so happened that I was the only one home at that time. What’re the odds? There was always someone hustling or bustling about, fixing meals, watching the news so don’t bother me, or girl stuff. Me, I was just sitting there wondering: What are jobs exactly? I mean, how do you get money out of it?

I took my box into the living room, where our phonograph was, and tore into it.

A holy light of Discovered Manhood shone down on me and heaven’s lone organ exhaled a triumphant note because a stray angel had sat down on the keys.

My music!

In no particular order, I began listening to the albums. As I’d listen to each album, I’d pore over the art on the outer and inner jacket, the same way I’d read the back of the cereal box while spooning my breakfast into my cereal hole, back when I was but a child. Here’s the art for Steppenwolf Monster:

Here’s the art for Santana Abraxas:

I knew my parents must not see these albums.

Roughly a month later, a Saturday again, I was home alone when the mailman came to the door and handed me a package addressed to myself. It was from Columbia Record Club, hapless tool in the hand of God.

I crossed my myself—just kidding—and opened the package and it was an album, sort of a “sampler” from the Columbia Records, including some songs from the albums I had already received.

Hmmm. They must have made some kind of mistake, I thought, absently shoving the packaging and its paper contents into the trash—someone else’s problem.

I sat down and listened. I enjoyed Killing Floor by the Electric Flag, A Piece of My Heart by Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, not so much White Bird by It’s a Wonderful Day, which I found uncool.

A month later, a Saturday again, I was home alone again when the mailman came to the door and handed me another package from the Columbia Record Club addressed to myself. Another rock sampler album.

That’s strange.

This time I looked at the accompanying documentation and noticed it was a bill, both for this sampler album and for the first one as well. I was on the hook for $20, which I didn’t have.

I called the phone number for the Columbia Record Club and talked to a nasal woman who bobbed up and down in a boundaryless sea of nasal voices. Wank, wank, wank. She explained that when I joined the club I agreed to receive monthly shipments unless I expressly told the club otherwise. She drawled the word as if she wasn’t too sure I’d understand it at full speed, being just a child. I didn’t remember reading that. I don’t remember reading anything except 12 ALBUMS FOR A PENNY!

The next day, Sunday, I opened Parade and found the Columbia Record Club ad and there it was, at the bottom corner, in really small type—the all-but-hidden strings.

The next day, Sunday, I opened Parade and found the Columbia Record Club ad and there it was, at the bottom corner, in really small type—the all-but-hidden strings.

I’d been had.

It’s known now as negative option billing. The phrase didn’t exist in 1970. In the 2000s, the Federal Trade Commission required that any club offering a negative option plan in the Internet Economy must clearly and conspicuously indicate minimum purchase obligations, cancellation procedures, the frequency with which members must reject shipments, and how to eventually cancel a membership when they enroll new members.

No such rule was in effect, evidently, in 1970. Advertisers were allowed to roam the airwaves unconstrained by fact, trolling for children who wanted desperately to prove they were adults. They’d throw out phrases like “scientifically formulated” and we didn’t stop to ask what they meant exactly. They must know what they’re doing. We didn’t think to ask why the stomped-flat Whopper we’d buy at Burger King never looked anything like the fluffed-up tower of steaming beef portrayed in their advertisements. They told us Listerine cured dandruff—and we believed them. They had no shame. They had the Flintstones shill for Winston cigarettes, for God’s sake.  Fred and Barney lit up and watched Wilma mow the lawn with a turtle.

I wanted to ask, “What do I do?” but I realized I had no one I could ask. My peers were as stupid as I was. Teenagers wouldn’t acknowledge the question. And our parents would say, You did . . . what?”

I often stole money from the dish my dad kept on the top of his dresser where he threw his spare change at the end of an eight-hour work slog. Why do I put up with shit like this? I want to be a kid again. It was mainly pennies and nickels, though, certainly nowhere near $20. And I couldn’t very well put it in an envelope to the Columbia Record Club, now could I?

There was nothing for it. I had to tell my parents, my mom. Don’t tell Dad! I explained to my mom the intricacies of negative option billing and she narrowed her eyes at me.

What was she going to do with me?

“You should have asked us before you signed up for this thing,” she scolded.

“It was only a penny!”

“But it wasn’t!” she said. “You agreed to buy a new record every month. Where were you going to get that money?”

“I didn’t agree to that!” I protested.

“Yes, you did,” she said. “You just weren’t paying attention, as usual. Being irresponsible.”

What I wanted to know: Was she going to tell Dad?

The question she didn’t come right out and ask was, “When are you going to grow up?”

I could see the wheels turning in her head. How to deal with this so that the boy learns this lesson, in particular, and learns the larger general lesson: Grow up.

I could see the wheels turning in her head. How to deal with this so that the boy learns this lesson, in particular, and learns the larger general lesson: Grow up.

Here’s what she’d came up with. She wouldn’t do a thing. She’d let me stay on the hook for an album a month. I’d have to pay for it, and the only way I could pay for it was to use the weekly allowance they gave me. I didn’t earn the allowance—they gave it to me because, one, they loved me, and two, they were trying to teach me The Value of Money—but I coveted it, as it allowed me to buy all sorts of useless shit, like X-ray Specs from a comic book. Sea Monkeys.

No more useless shit? Why not just cut off my legs?

Eventually, my mom had to call the Columbia Record Club people and cancel my contract, which was easier in the long run than telling me to do it myself again and again and again. That would go nowhere. To their credit, the Columbia Record Club didn’t put up much of a fight. They’d figured they’d ridden this mule as far as it would go. No reason to be greedy. Keep on the customer’s good side. I was liable to screw up again. Stupid kid.

She could have just trashed all the albums I’d received from the Columbia Record Club, but she could tell: I’d tasted autonomy and I wasn’t going back. The damage had been done. The Beatles had won. All she could do was ameliorate the effects of popular culture on me.

I could grow out my hair, but only down to the middle of my ears. Anymore and I’d be tempted to experiment with drugs. I could tack blacklight posters on my bedroom wall, but I couldn’t buy a blacklight. Too hallucinogenic.

So I took my child’s watercolor set and painted a normal light bulb deep purple. The heat from the light bulb just baked the watercolor paint to a diamond-hard haze.

“You’ve ruined a perfectly good light bulb!” my mom cried.

In hindsight, she realized she never should have bought me that Partridge Family album. That’s when everything went to hell. What was she going to do, though? She knew that sooner or later I’d be sucked into the maw of the adult world. The captains of industry were pitiless and pragmatic and I had value only to the extent I could be leveraged. Herself, she would love me unconditionally for who I was—but she couldn’t hold my hand 24/7. She knew she’d never stop worrying about me. It was fate. To this day, she panics if I don’t answer the phone.

She’ll be the lone person to speak out on my behalf when I’m called to account for my career as a serial killer.

“He’s not perfect by any stretch,” she’d say to the reporters shoving their recorders at her. “But I know in my heart of hearts that he’d never do something like that.”

“What about the bloody footprints?” a reporter would throw out.

“Well,” she’d say, fingering the top button of her cardigan, “I know it looks bad. And the prosecutor, God bless him, is just doing his job. But John is presumed innocent. That’s what makes America the greatest country on the face of the earth. God bless America. True, he never picks up after himself and, yes, he shouldn’t have worn un-pressed trousers into the courtroom, but I know that if John buckles down, he’ll live up to his potential. He’s really a very talented boy!”

Thanks, Mom.   

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