S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y Morning

Saturday mornings in the 70’s were just ripe with music. Kiddie show programmers had finally gotten into their brain that flower power kids of that time wanted music. We cared not who sang the music- animated bands that also solved mysteries, boy band wanna-bes or even costumed creatures who defied description. We wanted music!

I mentioned in an earlier post all about the Monkees, a pseudo manufactured boy band, supposed to answer American girls’ yearnings for the Beatles. Fronted by the ubiquitous Brit, Davey Jones, the Monkees were also comprised of Peter Tork, Mickey Dolenz and Michael Nesmith. Mickey had done some TV work, mainly in a show called “Circus Boy” which ran from 1956-1959. (His screen credit at the time was as Mickey Braddock.) Davey was the darling of British musicals, (and still has a large following- http://luvdavy.tripod.com/), Michael Nesmith would go on to bigger and better things (like Television Parts) and Peter Tork would produce a weekly love feeling down to the tips of my little white Keds tennies. I can remember sitting in front of the TV, swooning over these boys’ hilarious exploits, but feeling a little guilty because, somehow, even then, I knew they weren’t the “real deal”. Rumors abounded that the Monkees music was actually played by, dare I say, studio musicians.
From there we travel to animated groups like the Archie’s and Josey and the Pussycats. No need to pretend there, because you knew, sort of, that the cartoon people didn’t REALLY play music. O.K., it was willful suspension of disbelief for me at the time, but come on, folks, I was only a mere tot! I didn’t even know about lip synching yet. Still, I bought the Archie products, albums, comic books, paper dolls and even those plastic cling on toys, where you could change characters costumes. Merchandising was what the music was all about on Saturday morning, and I wasn’t yet savvy enough to know that I ought to enjoy the music for the sake of the music. At least, the Archie’s’ studio musicians had some sort of faux talent. This leads me to….
Ah, the Bugaloos, Lidsville, H.R.Puffenstuff, Sigmund and the Sea Monster…the whole Sid and Marty Kroftt bag of puppets, costumes and parlor tricks. We got hooked, didn’t we, kiddies? I suspect that the Kroftt Brothers took more recreational pharmaceuticals in one evening’s script writing than I did in my entire life. So intoxicating were the colors, the sounds, the smells….ok, so none of their shows was in glorious smell-o-vision, but …you get the idea. Each 30 minute show seemed like some precursor to the music videos we were to get hooked on when MTV reared it’s proverbial head in the 80’s (I promise, I will get to that in another post!) I saw firsthand how much these Kroftterama shows meant to people when I attended DragonCon, the premiere Science Fiction/Media convention in the southeast, back in 2006. The lines to meet members of the casts of Sigmund and the Sea Monster were some of the largest lines in the place, and boy howdy, I was right there with them! (I have the pictures to prove it, btw. To be posted later.)
Of course, the next progression from faux rockers is to real poppers, namely, er….here goes…Captain Kool and the Kongs and the Hudson Brothers. This was supposed wacky comedy, interspersed with music in the form of “bands”. Something you might not know is that these were actual musicians….ok, maybe not ALL of them, but.. Bert Sommer, who, played at Woodstock, for pity’s sake, was in Captain Kool, as was Mickey McMeel, formerly of Three Dog Night! (Captain Kool et all were also Krofft Creations!)The Hudson Brothers were all musicians, but the only thing I know that any of them have done since is that Bill Hudson was first married to Goldie Hawn, and fathered Kate and Oliver Hudson and then he married Cindy Williams from Laverne and Shirley. See, it really is all in who you know!
What my long winded ramble has been trying to get at today is that we are musically influenced by so many factors. I admit to being a devotee of all things Saturday morning musical and when I watch the cartoon fare of today, I am nostalgic for the razzle dazzle schlock of my teeny bopper days. Still, I have moved above and beyond all of that mess, right? But….if you should happen to hear about a Bugaloos reunion in the future, you will let me know…right?

What's It All About, Amy?

Do you remember the first album you ever selected? Before you answer that, if you are under 30, and some of you are, an album, also called vinyl, is that big, black shiny plastic disk your parents might have lying around the house. It’s played on something called a turntable and uses a needle to make music out of the grooves on the album. Fab, huh? No, I don’t believe that people really don’t know what an album is, except, mayhaps, my students and they are only 6. Also, I say “selected” because many of us had benevolent parents/siblings/aunties that took us to the record store and let us pick our first genuine self-owned music. The first albums I ever own were not albums that I picked out. The neighbor girl gave me a copy of the “Archies”, with “Sugar, Sugar” and “Bang-Shang-A-Lang” on it. She also gave me copies of the “Brady Bunch” and the “Partridge Family”. They were well meaning gifts at the time, but alas, my poor neighbor did not know my musical secret….
Time for a true confession…I know…a bit early in the blog, but…..deep breath….I’ve never told anyone this before….
I WAS A PRESCHOOL HIPPIE! (Sigh, that’s a relief!) It all started on a fateful trip to Baltimore when I was, prolly, 4 ½. We went to visit some cousins, because that was the sole and total reason to visit Baltimore for me in those days. I was the only Southern born relative and somehow, that made me special enough to get away with things. We had gone to see Cousins Lucille and Sydney, who had a son, my cousin, Perry. Perry was probably 14 at the time, and I am not sure what he was bribed with, but he allowed me, for one grand evening, to “hang out” with him in his room. He was playing music…and I was enraptured. This was not the music that I heard on the radio in Mommy’s car, nor the music that was played at home. The sound was far more…dare I say it…raw. The woman singing sounded like she was in pain, hurt deeply, right down to the core of her soul. I moved closer to the speakers, inhaling deeply, hoping to take it all in. Who was this creature? What could I do to sound just like her? Here’s a clue..it’s 1969. Come on, come on….it was Janis. Pure, simple, raw…Janis. I wanted more.
The next selection on the turntable blew me away even more. “What makes THAT sound?” I asked Perry. “Electric guitar,” he said and collapsed back into his haze. My nursery school teacher played the guitar. Lots of them did back in the day, but her guitar did not sound like THAT. The sounds were scary and fabulous and terribly wicked and gentle all at the same time. I know now that I wasn’t just hearing someone play guitar, I was eavesdropping on a love making session. I was too young to get it then….and that was my introduction to Jimi Hendrix.
When we got home to Atlanta, all I wanted was to hear that music again. My parents were properly horrified when I mentioned the names of the artists I had heard in Perry’s room. I was relentless, however. It was a long torturous nag session until finally, in a fit of despair, my mother went to Woolworth’s, (where we bought our records in those days) and bought me….drum roll please….a Monkee’s album. Don’t get me wrong. I had a big, ol’ nasty jones in those days for Peter Tork. I didn’t miss the Monkees on Saturday morning. (A later post, I assure you) but the Monkees weren’t JIMI.
Where was I? I started out asking about your first album purchase, and I haven’t even told you mine. You’ve got to be thinking now that my first purchase was some radical departure from the bubblegum rock sweeping the good old USA, but alas, you’d be wrong. My father took me to the shop and vetoed several choices in my first official exposure to censorship. I ended up buying a double album retrospective of the Beatles called, “Rock and Roll Music” and a copy of Leo Sayer’s “Endless Flight”.
Now you know that the answer to all musical questions on this trip isn’t pretty, friends. Luckily, we’re just getting started on the journey!

All My Loving....

Wow! Someone actually read what I wrote last night. I am sure it is my shameless self promotion on Facebook, but I have strutted around my house this morning like Astor’s pet horse! Enough about my strutting and …..on with the show.
Anyone who has known me for a nanosecond can tell you that my favorite band of all time is/was/shall always be the lads from Liverpool. I was a tad young for the whole Beatlemania experience, but I caught the bug nevertheless. They seemed to always be around, those 4 mop tops from across the sea; in the music I heard at home and in travel, on the magazines by babysitter read, on the lips of every womangirl I knew between the ages of 8 and 80. The girls and boys who babysat me on the Saturday nights that my parents went out to take a break from their precocious little sponge girl, always brought something having to do with music with them. Maybe they would play the latest music on the hi-fi, or turn on Bandstand or Hullabaloo, or bring a guitar, all the while, not realizing that I was, indeed, listening to EVERYTHING. The Beatles were always at the forefront of whatever what happening musically. However, I did get a good, healthy dose of the Animals, Cream, Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits and other bands, whose name I didn’t know for another decade. But, as usual, I digress and have travelled away from the Fab Four. Shame on me.
Common question #1- Who’s your favorite Beatle? As someone else put it to me not long ago, “Paul was the handsome one, John was the intellectual one, George was the shy one and Ringo was the funny one.” I like all of those qualities, mind you, but for me, now as it ever was, intellectual won out, and I was smitten with John Winston Lennon. Something about those glasses, something about his way with a snappy comeback, maybe because he WASN’T as pretty as Paulie, made me want to do things to John, even at 4, but I had no idea what those things were.
So, yes, the Liverpool Lads have always held a fascination for me. By giving them “all my loving”, they actually turned me on to other music. By giving me a firm musical foundation, I felt like I could experiment and listen to other genres without being “untrue”. I made alliances with people, often based on their musical knowledge and taste. Some of the people I met along the way have formed the backbone of my very existence, musically and otherwise.
I am sure while the Beatles were trying to reach “the toppermost of the poppermost” they had no idea their musical fingers would reach across the ocean to Atlanta, Georgia and mold a self-deprecating round girl 40 years hence! Ah, the power of music!

Let Me Introduce to You..The Act You've Known For All These Years...

Why am I posting a blog anyway? Until yesterday, the idea of me posting a blog was akin to the idea of me smoking a salmon. As in, actually rolling a salmon in rolling papers and lighting that mother up. This whole blog thing has actually started because of my continuous posting of music on Facebook to the delight of some and annoyance of others.

Before I become a “blogger” or a “bloggie” or a “bloggoddess”, you should know a few things. I do have a real, full time job. I am a professional dyslexic and therefore, I spell things as I hear them. Feel free to correct my spelling at your own abode. The most important thing, though, is that besides my kid- I have one who is almost 10- I love music more than anything in this world. My life would only be better on a near constant basis, if I was followed through my every day routine with a never ending soundtrack.

But, you didn’t come here to hear about me. I’m really not exactly sure why you came, but one can guess it was for the music. So, without further ado…here she goes…..

I don’t actually remember a time when music wasn’t in my life. My mother was unable to drive anywhere without the radio on when I was a tot. First song I remember hearing and recalling? Easy….The Associations song, “Windy”, followed closely by “Winchester Cathedral”, then Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. I am sure these were all of WQXI radio..in Atlanta- the setting for most of my life. At home, there were Beatle albums, early Streisand, lots of Henry Mancini and romantic instrumentals, a bit of Petula Clark, some Harry Belafonte, and soundtrack, soundtrack, soundtracks. The hi-fi played a lot in those days and I was known for stealing my mother’s cha-cha heels and doing a mean Frug in the living room. It was the mid-60’s, my parents were too old to be hippies, too young to be middle aged and little did they know, but they were raising a musical sponge.

What none of us knew at the time though, was that I came by my love of music honestly. It was part of my DNA, but having been adopted at birth, my parents didn’t know much about my DNA. That “wasn’t done” in those days. It would take me years to find out about the genetic component to my love of melody, harmony and irony. We’ll get to that some other time.

Since those halcyon days of childhood, I have had the chance to “suck up” music across the spectrum, regardless of genre, gender bending, thumping bass, nationality, playing ability, or couture. My goal here is to share the music, the history, the times with people…and mayhaps, someone out there might even read this, thus putting my frustrated writing talents to better use than simply calling myself, modestly, “the best unknown writer of the 21^st century in my own mind”.