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!