We were there at the beginning...

A girl I went to high school with is organizing a reunion this August, Karen is a retired sales executive living in Denver and she is certainly, as we used to say in our days at Central High, a good shit.

Karen asked me to pull together some musical memories from our teen years, from the days long before she drinks and enjoys an extremely dry martini on a daily basis. 

Karen spent her school days under the eyes and the thumb of her father, who was the principal of every damn school she attended from elementary through high school as Karen moved through the school system, so did her dad's career path. Or as she told me, “Do you have any idea what that was like?”

Karen’s father was my principal in Jr. high and high school, so I do. Then again I didn’t have to ride to school with him every morning either.

At Central, Karen’s dad hired, as his assistant, a big thug named Loberg as his enforcer. Mr. Loberg’s entire focus was on keeping high school boys on the straight and narrow. His specialty was the “dress code” and anything he perceived as a “bad attitude.” To say his views were narrow would be an understatement. Some of my classmates got to know him later in life say he was a hell of a guy. I read his obit a few years ago and apparently, he was. Oh well.

I’m wandering away from the subject at hand. Loberg used to call me on that from time to time, so did Karen’s dad when he booted me from 9^th grade English for not turning state’s evidence on just who started a fight during class. I tried to explain to him if only the teacher had used her authority instead of running screaming from the room it would have been over in a few seconds because neither of the participants knew a thing about fighting. He didn't buy it. I was the only one who paid a price and had to retake 9^th grade English in summer school. It turned out going to summer school was a good thing, but that’s another story.

Research shows that musical taste and preferences begin to develop at 10 years of age, when I was 10 when all my classmates were 10, there was one rock and roll record on the Billboard charts for the entire year, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”, slim pickings I’d say. It was number 2 for the year, the number one song? Perez Prado’s “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White”. The “Ballad of Davey Crockett charted 3 times by three different artists, Bill Hayes(?) Fess Parker, who played Davey in the movie, and good old Tennessee Ernie Ford, TEF also had a hit with “16 Tons”

In ‘56 things chang1956 added, a lot, Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, The Platters, Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins, Fats Domino, Little Richard, The Diamonds, The Cadillacs and some guy named Johnny Cash. There was still a lot of tunes charting that my mother and her friends liked, but…

57 added the Everly Brothers, the Diamonds, Ricky Nelson, and more. The Bobbettes, a black girl group from New York had a crossover hit with “Mr. Lee”.

58 added Richie Valens to our record collections with “Donna” and “LaBamba”, Little Anthony and the Imperials and more and more black artists were getting played and we liked it, in fact, we decided we liked Fats Domino and Little Richard singing their own songs better than Pat Boone doing vanilla versions of them. We weren’t ready for Etta James, but we were getting closer. Etta’s “I’d Rather Go Blind” would have scared the crap out of us. Maybe?

We watched “teen movies” with black groups like the Satins singing to an all-white audiences in a night club filled with young, sophisticated honkies. I.B. Johnson said to me, “Black kids like me used to laugh our asses off at those movies, cuz we knew way no in hell the Satins would be playing at Sardi's in New fucking York.”

As we moved on we got Dion, the young Beach Boys, "Baby it's You" by the Shirelles, Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson, and the Miracles, Mary Wells singing "Two Lovers" We wanted better songwriting and we got it from Smokey and Carole King and Bob Dylan. Imagine a teenaged girl from Brooklyn writing songs like “Natural Woman” and “Will you Still Love Me Tomorrow”…

We should be glad Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys told his domineering old man to piss up a rope when he wanted Brian and his brothers and cousins to sing like the Four god dammed Freshman.

We were on the cutting edge of change, the Baby Boom Generation, our open-minded approach and acceptance of music of all kinds opened the doors for musicians of our generation from all over the world and changed the soundtrack of our lives for the better. Think the Beatles, The Stones, Santana, Eric Clapton, the Byrds, Linda Ronstadt, Neil Young, Van Morrison, they fill a book. One of our classmates Dick Peterson founded Blue Cheer. Dick is considered the "Godfather" of heavy metal bass. RIP Dickie.

 I’ll never forget the night Tom Micklin and I were riding in his mother’s Oldsmobile 98 at 1 in the morning, we were seniors in high school drinking illegal beer. Somehow we found John R “waaaayy down south in Dixie” on WLAC in Nashville on the radio and heard BB King for the first time, he was singing, ‘You’ve Done Lost Your Good Thing.” John R followed it up with teenaged Carla Thomas singing “B-A-B-Y” when the song finished we lost the AM skip. Damn...