SPELLBOUND

The real black magic of my youth? The music
from the ‘phonograph,’ the medium of the séance…
lights all lowered for atmosphere, the campy
ember-burn of the vacuum tubes casting their
gypsy candleglow upon the wall behind… and 

me, sitting there in the dark all by my little
lonesome, letting the instruments and voices
snake-charm me down into those midnight
grooves right into someone else’s jealousy…
letting them conjure up in me somebody 

else’s pain and blues… letting them possess me
with someone else’s yearning… and then, well…
I’d find myself in somebody else’s skin… in
somebody else’s emotional blue suede shoes…
in somebody else… 

so yeah, small fry
though I was, it was
me giving Peggy Lee that...
"Fe-ver… in the morning, yeah…
fever all through the night…"


Kids today... are born right into this 'There's-an-App-for-That World'... where there's a TV in every room, where everything is instantaneosly Google-able, and every one of their friends is always just a few texting strokes away. I'm pretty certain that they must look upon us of my generation (I'm mere days away from sixty-four!!!) as Neanderthals right out of Gary Larson's The Far Side (even though I'm probably just kidding myself there, as it's possible kids today no longer know what The Far Side is/was). And I'm pretty sure that they pity us, who had 'nothing to do' back in the old-timers' days...

The one thing though that all generations have in common is that each one has their own brand of music. The kids can usually 'buy' that, even though they look upon their elders' music preferences as... way beyond pathetic (as did I once... when I was a kid).

As a high school English teacher I often exploited the topic of music in the attempt to bridge the generation gap, and that worked to an extent... even though I was talking to a bunch of souls that seemed to have no way of imagining (or 'grokking') a Pre-Stereo World... the world I hailed from.

I used to entertain myself (at their expense) mostly to maintain my sanity. For instance, I would make it a point  to tell the ever-gullible freshmen, "Yeah. We had CD's when I was a kid, too. Only thing was though... they were made out of wood, so you had to be careful, because you could get splinters..." The oddest look would invariably come over them... and eventually somebody usually asked, "But... I don't get it-- I mean, how did they work, though?" 

I will never forget the night that Stereo came to my town of Dover-Foxcroft, Maine.  My dad was a radio/TV repairman at a department store in town called A.T. Gellerson's. I write about it in a chapter of my upcoming memoir, due out who knows when? Here's a little excerpt...



All right— one last memory:

 Us kids, Mom even, and Dad back once again behind the locked doors of Gellerson’s two hours after closing, this time to witness the new wonder called Stereo Sound. Some of the store salesmen have brought their families along to this unadvertised event, as well. I’m wondering what this new-fangled phenomenon really is, and if it deserves all the hype it’s been getting in the press and the influx of ads in the papers. I’m skeptical. How good can it be? Is it even necessary? After all, we’ve already come as far as we can come, right? Because everybody knows Hi-Fi’s the cutting edge. I mean, after Hi-Fi…what’s left? Can you improve clarity past perfection?

We ‘invitees’ shuffle around the coffin-size console ensconced in the middle of the showroom floor, waiting for the demonstration to begin. Tip-toeing about in a store locked up for the night puts a delicious, almost-criminal edge on the evening. The fact that it’s dark out adds a spooky flavor. We whisper while we wait, as if at the library.

She is a beautiful piece of furniture, the ultimate mahogany centerpiece for any living room… far too expensive to ever find a home in our house. I’m feeling pretty privileged to be here, realizing that tomorrow at school I’m going to be the exclusive ‘authority’ on all things stereophonic.

Finally, the festivities begin. “We ready?” asks a salesman. People nod, and some mutter that we are. We’re definitely not a game show audience. “Well then, ladies and gentlemen… hold onto your hats!” Yeah, I’m thinking, sure, right, bring it on, as the man plops the demo record down onto the turntable, drops the needle, and…

The Voice from the speakers suggests that we all “close our eyes and enjoy a game of ping-pong, already in progress…” Oh yeah, like, THAT’LL be a blast, listening to ping-pong, for crying out loud. Well… might be a little better than GOLF, but…

PLOK!the inimitable sound of a hollow plastic ball swatted by a ping-pong paddle left…

…then, striking the right side of the green wooden table, and back-handed…  KaPLOK!

kaPLOK! …backhanded from way over here at the left

                                                                                                now right side … kaPLOK!

kaPLOK!over here on the left…

                                                                                                                           kaPLOK!

kaPLOK!

Unable to believe what our busy ears are ‘doing,’ most of us pop our eyes right back open to discover… our own, eerily-grinning heads swiveling back and forth in unison as if by remote control… first left, then right, then left, then right… and it feels… I don’t know… creepy… sort of like that scene from The Body Snatchers where Kevin McCarthy watches from his hotel window as the zombies gather mindlessly in the town square after dark to receive the next truckload of body-snatching ‘pods’ from outer space. Well, that’s a stretch, but we have gathered… our heads are being controlled… and the whole shebang feels pretty ‘extranormal.’

Stereo, however, has arrived in central Maine with a flourish, and suddenly we are, to a man, instant stereo zealots!

See, to me, technology is like magic. Or if not magic, then at least science fiction. It’s practically the only source of real wonder in my life, and it gives me a reason to think… to hope that, yes, anything is possible. I mean, what will technology give us ten… twenty-five years from now?

 Just consider the simple record player, for instance. It’s an audio time machine. You lower some needle down onto a rotating vinyl platter and Elvis’s voice, recorded in a studio two years ago, sings right out, “You ain’t nuthin’ but a houn’ dog… jus’ a-cryin’ alla time!” like he’s right in the room… like an echo trapped for all eternity in a bottle…

Our home’s always had a phonograph. Ours is an ancient box filled with glowing, cucumber-size vacuum tubes, and a 78-rpm turntable as wide as a dinner plate fitted on top. It’s no hi-fi, and definitely no stereo. There’s always been the set of records too: big black ones for Mom and Dad, and the smaller yellow or red plastic ones for us. I’ve grown up pretty much wiling away the hours listening to the bottled-up echoes from people and times past and, like that famous RCA dog, eyeballing the needle surfing the endless grooves. Consequently, I’ve developed quite a habit, a lifetime dependence on recorded music. Of course, I’ve moved on past the little-kiddy musical soundtracks of Disney’s Peter Pan and the like.

So when Dad, one day, comes toting somebody’s recently-repaired, unbelievably swank stereo into my bedroom and orders me to play it, I don’t have to be told twice. In fact, I go right out and buy Johnny Otis’s new 45, “Willie and the Hand-Jive,” kicking off the Golden Days of Dad using me to test his customer’s record players, to make sure he’s gotten all of the bugs out. I’m no technology wonder boy, not by any stretch of the imagination. All I know how to do is plug them in and play them. “Play this for a few hours,” he’ll say. “See if the sound cuts out.” To me, he says this, the lazy son who obsesses on rock and roll. He’s just getting me off his back about buying us a decent stereo. Keep bringing home these super-duper ones, and what’ll I have to complain about? (But anyway, if you’ve ever hauled your ailing, high-fidelity pride and joy off to his shop, chances are pretty good that it ended up in my bedroom for a day or two before you got it back. If that is the case, then thank you very much because I’ve got a pretty good collection 45’s and LP’s going— just nothing else to play them on.)

So Dad’s job keeps me in the thick of things electronic, and there’s always new and better stuff coming out by the month: hi-fi, then stereo, television, then maybe someday color television, tape recorders… Dad gets to do the work. I get to play.