Guitarlo

By Arlo Hennings

Guitarlo is a compelling, and to the heart honest, memoir, Arlo Hennings takes the reader on a decades journey from his challenging childhood, blossoming as a poet, song writer, musician, agent, husband, father, son… to his current life in Indonesia where he continues to promote and create music. The inspiration that brought him

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hear2Ear Records and Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780692701096

Arlo Hennings

40 years experience in the music business, largely in the USA. His resume includes the following: venue management, musician, artist manager (Shawn Phillips), regional and international tours, studio engineer and producer, A & R director and co-publisher (PolyGram Music International). Now currently resident in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, he is manager of I Know You Well Miss Clara, and Consultant Advisor to the Music Division of PT Usaha Jasa Kreatif. This includes IndoJazzia, established as an international portal for Indonesian musicians.

Book preview

PRELUDE

I woke up with the jack boot of a SWAT team officer pressed down on my back. Choking from tear gas, I was picked up by my hair, handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police truck. This was not a 1970 anti-Vietnam War demonstration flashback. It was the year 2011 and I was under arrest for peacefully occupying a park with others who had lost their jobs and homes.

The news came that the company I was working for had sold out and the pink slip that followed ended my corporate career, which had lasted from 2000 - 2008. I was 54 years old and I took the shock with tentative confidence.

A person with a significant track record like mine wouldn’t be out of work for long, right? Two years and 700 resumes later, I found myself watching the illuminating documentary, Inside Job, about how Wall Street sold out Main Street and I realized how I’d fallen victim to the chaos created by corrupt banking practices, the greed of people like Angelo Mozilo, and the catastrophic results of policy decisions made by politicians.

The bottom line was: there were no jobs. I was now a member of the over 50 and out of work club.

Natural disasters uproot people’s lives every day: hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes, but my roof was blown off by an evil spreadsheet designed to rip off the working class. Writing letters to Congress or joining the Occupy Movement in a park in protest wasn’t going to save me from a soup line and a homeless shelter.

The blame game was not going to help.

My unemployment exhausted and health insurance terminated, I now existed on public means (again) limited food stamps and, to help pay the heat during the winter, energy assistance. I remembered my first welfare worker, Vape, laughing at me. He predicted this outcome 40 years ago.

My savings was running out and I didn’t qualify, for reasons never explained, to refinance the mortgage on my home.

Like my parents had wanted, I dropped rock ‘n’ roll and played the get ahead game called the American dream: go to college, get married, have kids, enjoy the same job for 20 years, retire and live happily ever after on Golden Pond? If you were educated or had a trade, kept your nose clean, managed your expenses and investments wisely you would be okay, right? My reward: tear gas and homelessness.

I lost the only long term home I ever knew in foreclosure as well as over 30 wonderful in-laws, the place where I had raised my daughter, neighbors and a billion memories fueled my last Minnesota campfire.

Furthermore, both of my parents had passed away a day apart only a few years earlier, my older brother died, and my sisters both suffered divorce, too. So, I really had no one able to step in and help make ends meet.

This was not the first time I faced limited options but, adding to my depression was the realization I had climbed to a level of success (again) only to learn the ladder was rigged?

Government mismanagement and corporate avarice blew away everything: job, house, cabin, pet, healthcare, car, self-esteem and any benefits or plans for my retirement. Even contact with my daughter would become a challenge; and then there was the even more frightening prospect of losing a reason to want to live. My beloved cat, Boo Boo, was adopted by my daughter. Hundreds of rare books in my library donated to charity, many of which I’d collected while I was earning my Masters degree in writing. Irreplaceable artwork from around the world, all of my clothes and basically anything I couldn’t carry, with the exception of my guitars, went into the great dumpster of life.

Cry in my beer….

I had learned to keep my history to myself or face the stereotyping that surrounds the water coolers of corporate America. Counting from when I left home at age 15, over 30 years, I’d managed to live at the American poverty line, working over 55 different jobs.

I celebrated a handful of glory moments while I watched my sand castle collapse. I’d published a book of poetry and a novella, released a double album of music, owned a recording studio, performed as a professional guitarist, landed a major label music contract and resurrected a former rock star’s career, and traveled the world with him on tours.

Being a stay at home dad was my proudest achievement.

Even though I was wrought with guilt that I couldn’t help provide for my daughter in her adult life, I had cut her umbilical cord at birth. I’d raised and protected her. From her first steps to her earliest shaky attempts at riding a bike to learning how to drive a car, I was there for her. I love her dearly and I hope she understands why I had to leave. One warm, autumn afternoon when she was little, I was sitting outside watching her play and I wrote this poem:

She Liberated Me from Time

As the leaves fell

Like old teeth from the dentures

Of earth’s yellowed skull

She sat there

Putting ribbons on the dog

Wearing a witch hat

Dressed in swimming trunks

And a pair of snow boots on the wrong feet

Together

We fill tiny tea cups

With the scent of summer’s fading light

I wanted to think my relationship with my daughter was more special than other dads because I’d raised her as a stay at home dad and the thought of leaving her was terrifying. What effect this loss would have on me would be played out later.

In a last desperate grasp for self-preservation, I took a hard look down the rabbit hole. I didn’t consider living in subsidized housing and minimum wage work an option. I was too old for the Peace Corp. Was there enough time to invest my meager savings in a new risky self-employment venture? What if it didn’t work? Maybe it was time to let go? Try something new? Return to the music business? Whatever I chose to do, the upside, my health was still in reasonably good shape.

My 23 years of life in the idyllic, middle-class, Lutheran, Prairie Home Companion world was over. It was time to sink or swim.

I sold my home, for half of its original value, to a young immigrant couple. Ironically, they came to America for a better life — the same reason I was leaving it.

In 2011,1 booked a one-way ticket to Bali, tried to wash the tear gas from my clothes, and backed up my life on an iPod.

There was a sense of freedom in being scared.

The unpredictable winds of change fingered my hair, the smell of lightning over a cornfield, the hunger for a dream over the sacred smoke of 10,000 campfires. A flute in my head played and filled the canyon lands of my skull with an ancient melody that sounded like how a boy once saw his life outside a bus window.

The jet was somewhere over the pacific before it dawned on me this was no dream. I watched a sun that didn’t set. I accepted a red wine from the flight attendant and began to gulp down the reality of where I was headed. All I knew about my destination was from a yoga musician I knew who lived there. He said it was cheap. Until I had a better idea of where I was going, it was a type of cheap that I could swing for awhile.

The trip was going to take at least 30 hours. I had plenty of time to sit there and stare out the window. Push the rewind button.

Critics said I was running away, I called it a reboot.

THE FIRST 13 YEARS

My earliest memory is of riding a train that caught fire. I was four years old, and my brother, Randy, was six. It was Christmas Eve, and our mother was taking us to her hometown in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, across the Allegheny Mountains from Pittsburgh. Coming down the mountain, the brakes on the train burned out. Thick smoke quickly filled our car, people began coughing, and my mom looked panicked.

A man in a soldier’s uniform said, Can I help you, ma’am?

My mom blushed, behind her bright red lipstick. She smiled and straightened her 1957 sheath dress- the kind with the big white collar and empire-waist pleat in the back. Thank you, young man, she replied.

The man, in his impressive, pressed uniform, covered my nose and mouth with a handkerchief, and Mom covered my brother’s mouth with her hand.

My honor, ma’am, he said, tilting his military cap.

Tears blurred my vision, as a thickening smoke burned my eyes, and I heard shouting about the brakes. I felt terrified, having thoughts that the train would fly off its tracks into the dark of night. The next morning I woke up to find my gifts under the tree. Randy and I were dressed as cowboys. The train and Santa’s reindeer had all stayed on track.

I was a Hoosier, born with a plastic spoon in my mouth; a bouncing Boomer boy who arrived one late snowy December evening in 1953.

Mom and Dad named me Gary, a short, comfortable name that traveled easily with me as we hop-scotched across Middle America. My friends and neighborhoods changed often in those suitcase-filled days. Dad, absent much of the time, moved us back to Indianapolis when I turned six.

That’s where the next big event of my life occurred, with the birth of my sister Cindi- the only blonde in our family. One day, a few years later, she asked me to get her some Kool-Aid. With cup in hand, I somehow walked directly into the burning end of my mother’s cigarette. My right eye swelled shut with hot ash. I collapsed to the floor, writhing in pain, while mom chatted undisturbed with a neighbor. I saw the neighbor with my one good eye pretend like nothing happened.

With a few exceptions, most of my memories from early childhood are a strange mix of mice running over my feet, and S&H Green Stamps. The mice were the unwelcome guests in the ratty dive that my dad had rented. We received the bonus stamps with our purchases at local stores. Mom licked them one by one, and stuck them into her collection. Books of stamps could then be traded for items at the Green Stamps redemption center. One September, after months of stamp collecting, Mom traded in her green boon for a pair of black dress shoes, and blue trousers. Those were my first school clothes.

The day before my first day of school, the chain on a swing had snapped, and I fell on my back. The nerves pinched and my legs wouldn’t move.

You’re not staying home to play, Mom hollered, as she walloped my hind end with a stick.

I can’t walk, I pleaded.

I was supposed to walk to school with my brother but he left without me. Mom got a neighbor to pick me up and drop me off. I stood in the hallway, unable to move as the other kids ran past me at the sound of the bell. Slowly, throughout the day, I began to retrieve control of my legs. By the next day, I was still sore but I could walk normally again.

The first grade teacher was older than Whistler’s Mother. A white knob on the wall behind her desk had a pair of dangling wires.

Rules are simple at School 66, the teacher warned. Follow them and you won’t get switched. She used the word switched to mean electrocuted.

The girl next to me started to cry.

On a different happier day in first grade, I wandered into the house of a schoolmate and discovered a piano. My fingers danced upon the white and black keys, while serenading magical melodies through my ears into my soul, suddenly turning me on to an amazing musical discovery from within me; an epiphany moment in my musical history that would cause me to be forever changed- my first sudden breakthrough and ah-ha moment- and I would continue to emulate and describe these most eternal musical truths within my being the only way that I could within my musical compositions and contributions which would become throughout and for the rest of my entire lifetime.

Do you like music? the boy’s mother interrupted my improvisational concert.

Without lifting my hands off the keyboard, I answered, Yes, I like it a lot.

The high notes sounded like the tiniest droplets of rain. The lower notes sounded like dark, heavy thunder under my bed during the darkness of night. The middle keys were a balance between the two sonic clouds. My small arms could span the width of several octaves, and it was on those keys where I grabbed the sunlight.

Late one night during an Indianapolis winter, I was asleep in an apartment or hotel (I didn’t know) and my dad woke me up. I hadn’t seen him in a very long time.

Here’s 10 cents. Go down to the street and get me a newspaper, Dad said.

I got as far as the lobby door and froze. I was too scared to go out and ask for a newspaper. My dad was behind me, and he took me out to the street.

We didn’t have jackets and I started to shiver.

John F. Kennedy elected president, the news vendor announced, read all about it. His voice was hoarse from shouting.

Hand him the 10 cents, son, Dad encouraged.

I gave him the dime and the vendor handed me a newspaper.

Say thank you, Dad urged.

Thank you, mister, I said.

I don’t remember how we parted.

The next memory of my dad came a year later. My parents were watching TV. I came into the room and complained that my groin hurt. My dad pulled my pants down and stared in shock. My testicles were the color purple.

What happened to you? Dad asked.

I fell on the bike, I answered.

It would appear so, he said.

Get a bag of ice, he told Mom.

She gave me the ice, and told me to place the bag between my legs, then go and lie down. That was the last memory I had of my dad for the next several years.

By the time I was 10 years old, I grew adventurous. One afternoon I got 50 cents from my brother to go see a movie. I walked by myself for several blocks to the local cinema. It was the bravest thing I had ever done. My brother said the movie was scary, and dared me to go. I looked up and read the marquee- Alfred Hitchcock’s, The Birds. I couldn’t imagine what would be so scary about some birds. I paid my two quarters to the woman inside the glass booth, and she slipped me back a ticket through a hole in the glass.

The cinema was empty, which made the gigantic screen seem even larger. Half way through the black-and-white movie, I was so petrified- I began to believe that what I was watching was real. I was too scared to get up and leave. The idea that nature could have its own consciousness, and a revengeful one at that, rattled my imagination.

On the way home, I carefully eyed the telephone wires, rooftops, and trees for any sign that a flock of birds might be gathering. My expression must have given me away.

You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Mom surmised. You went and saw that scary movie, didn’t you? she prodded.

I shook my head no, while immediately becoming suspicious of our pet parakeet. The bird was named Max and I thought he couldn’t be trusted.

Two years later, to my amazement, a new baby arrived one winter day in late December. My parents told me that she was my newest sister, Sue. We were now a family of four kids- two boys and two girls, the perfect balance. I didn’t know where Sue came from because I didn’t remember my mom being pregnant, or anyone bringing Sue home from the hospital. Suspicious of her identity, I mercilessly destroyed her comfort blankets.

Even though my dad was a traveling salesman, and I thought she could be from anywhere, it dawned on me she had a striking resemblance to Dad. Satisfied that Sue had survived my interrogation, I declared a truce. We shared breakfast cereal and popcorn while watching Walt Disney. However, for the rest of my life, she would never forgive me for burning her blankets.

Dad never seemed to make his sales quota, so every few years he uprooted the family in search of new territory. Finally, when I was in the middle of fourth grade, we settled down in the Minneapolis suburb of Burnsville, while Dad enjoyed a long, winning sales streak until that very sad night that, once again, would uproot us all.

One evening the police found my dad face down in a country road ditch- no where near his car, which was found running at a deserted intersection. He had a large, grease-covered lump on the back of his head. After the accident, a red linoleum chair became part of his body, while Dad passed his days chain-smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes, and watching Lawrence Welk’s champagne music reruns on TV. My dad’s hospital bills and his inability to work landed the family in bankruptcy-like the game of Chutes and Ladders that we kids played, where with the roll of the dice we went down the slide to climb back up.

Our five years in the American Dream was over. We vacated the newly built, two-level, 5-bedroom house with its finished basement and big yard with a nice green lawn and gardens. The golden new bowling alley- would become those parts in my game board of my life’s memory bank. Once again, my brother and sisters and I would be hauled away like used furniture and return to the struggling, low-income, blue-collar world of the inner city.

Before my father’s accident, a bug bit me one Christmas when I opened a box and found a telescope inside. It was bigger than a common pirate spyglass, sporting a two-inch-diameter lens, complete with tripod. The magnification couldn’t read the surface of Mars but it could take me to the moon. I’d climb out of my window and up onto the roof to scan the heavens for life.

Many a night, I laid there on my rooftop zooming-in on the moon, looking for any secrets that only I could be entrusted to know. The moon’s face opened up to me and revealed all of her wounds. I noted the size of every crater and the length of their shadows across the lunar soil, aka moon dust.

After the wonderment of the night sky turned me into an insomniac, my interest turned from outer space to inner space. For my 11th birthday, I received a 48-piece microscope set. I could now, for the first time, peer into the laboratory of life at super magnified levels of blood, dead skin, and the body of an ant. The set came complete with glass slides, Petri dish, sample vials and tweezers. Wearing my mother’s white church gloves and a lab coat fashioned from a bed sheet, I turned my microscope loose upon nature. Nothing would escape my scrutinizing lens.

Is anybody in there? I queried, while examining a piece of human hair.

The fighting between my parents intensified with the growing bills. We needed books and clothes for school. Utility bills piled up and mortgage payments lagged behind.

What did you spend the $25 on? my dad shouted, as he tried to balance the checkbook, while scrutinizing every entry.

I bought school supplies, my mother cried.

The fighting lasted until the wee hours of the morning.

I’m going to punch Dad in the face if he doesn’t leave Mom alone, Randy said, as he lay in bed next to me.

Every word from my parents flowed through the floor like it was made of paper. My brother was on the swimming team, and he’d started a cool rock band. A whole lot was riding on his future. I didn’t know what to think. Instead, I dreamed of going on an adventure, or running away- so, I figured out how to do both.

My first travel machine was handmade from one of the many moving boxes left behind by my mother, who followed dad on his endless pursuit of a job. Using a flashlight, I crawled into a packing box and began to design the controls of my ship.

First, I drew a screen with a black crayon. Below the screen, I inserted sewing spindles for control knobs. With a butter knife jabbed through the box, I made a good sturdy throttle. Since my machine could travel much faster than the speed of light- just raising the knife slightly upwards shot me across the Milky Way in a blink of an eye, and in a slightly lowered position I slowed down enough to observe life on other worlds. The last component missing was a steering wheel. I extracted the part from a broken riding lawnmower I found in my parent’s garage, and mounted it into the cardboard wall below the screen. My control panel was similar to the design of the dashboard in my father’s 1966 Thunderbird.

A simple blast of a Cracker Jack whistle announced my departure. Inside the box, I traveled to the gates of Asgard and to the center of the subatomic universe. Time was irrelevant as my machine could also travel back through time to the lower Jurassic or forward to the homeland of ancient aliens. I could escape in that machine, too. When the fighting between my parents got to be too much, all I had to do was enter the coordinates for another dimension and I was carried away until I could no longer hear the violence.

Do you think money grows on tress? Dad screamed. You spent too much. This is your fault.

A lamp crashed against the wall. Furniture tumbled. A body made a loud thump as it landed on the floor. Gasping for words, my mother screamed, Stop it! You’re hurting me. I will get a job. Scratching my dad’s arm, she hollered, Get off of me.

I watched helplessly, and then ran.

The next day was Sunday. Mom tried her best to show the neighbors that we were a good, God-abiding, Christian family. Before my memory could recall, Mom had us baptized under the Lutheran seal of approval. The four of us dressed in our best clothes, and she drove us to the only church in the area. If I refused to participate, I would be locked in my room for the day. Given the option, within my juvenile perspective- the Holy Bible was better than solitary confinement. During that summer we attended church, Randy became an altar boy, and my sisters colored religious comic books. I was placed into Sunday school.

Why do these people from Jesus’ home village have nice haircuts and clean clothes? I thought they were poor shepherds,I inquired of the middle-aged, suburban, white lady Bible teacher.

I don’t know, she shrugged.

People didn’t look like that 2,000 years ago, I protested, "Is there proof any of this really happened?

My remark was ignored, and more storybooks full of detailed drawings of bearded men with canes and sheep were placed into my hands for homework. I thought I had enough homework to do from regular school, and didn’t like the idea of getting more.

What is all this for? I questioned.

After Sunday school you will be confirmed so you won’t go to hell, the teacher explained.

Watching my parents duke it out was, by any description, living in hell. No point in trying to say I wasn’t going there. The summer ended with one less confirmed soul, and I never attended a church again.

One morning, Mom and Dad stepped out. My brother and sisters sat at the dinner table together eating cereal.

I’m not going to move, Randy protested, splashing the Wheaties out of his bowl with a spoon.

If you’re not going, I chimed-in, than, neither am I.

Where are we going? Cindi asked.

Not true, was all Sue could say.

Any hope of staying vanished when the house filled up with moving supplies.

When I outgrew the inside of a Mayflower mover’s box, I became fascinated with railroad tracks. There were tracks not far from the house and I would walk the rails, balance myself on one rail, or place a penny on a rail to watch a train smash it to twice its size. I studied the graffiti on the passing train cars. Names in strange languages in colorful red, white and blue designs like Zapata Lives! were spray painted over the doors. Who were the people who wrote their names on the train and where they came from? The rails seemed to go on forever, and there was great delight in the feeling of looking down the tracks and imagining them to be the throat of eternity.

The tracks beckoned me to take longer bike trips.

Each day, I peddled further down the road on my sky blue Schwinn Country Roamer. My wonderful bicycle, complete with its muscle handlebars and fabulous silver-ribbed stingray fastback seat, carried me into the next neighborhood, past the woods, and beyond.

My walks in the woods became longer, too- more like scouting missions to find a lost civilization. Even in the winter, I trekked out into the woods, taking note of wind direction, sunlight, cloud movement, and peculiar prints in the snow- until my feet froze and I was in dire need of shelter.

Fort building started one winter when I made an igloo out of the snow. I sat within my shiny icy dome, illuminated by my camping lamp, dreaming of polar bears snorting, whales surfacing, and the call of a snowy owl. Next, I built a year-round retreat in the rafters of our garage. From that vantage point, I could spy on my father. I remember seeing him leave and return at all odd times of the night.

My next engineering feat took me up into the trees. High above the ground, my lofty tree shack provided a magnificent view of the Minnesota River valley and an artificial lake called, Black Dog, where I speared for carp. I was also high up enough to see further across the valley and out to the edges of the city.

One afternoon, I noticed that the city was on fire as a great cloud of smoke engulfed the buildings below. Later, over dinner, my father talked about something called nigger, and how people were rioting, destroying buildings, and should be shot.

Finally, seeking to be invisible, I went underground during the spring season, after digging an elaborate self-sustaining Earth pod, and furnishing it with a sleeping bag and supplies; including: Snickers bars and soda pop. The explorations became more elaborate and complex, as I added a canteen, Boy Scout compass, and a bow; whereby I fearlessly shot arrows at the sun.

The following year in fifth grade, I was sentenced to sit in the hallway for disciplinary reasons. My behavior had been deemed disruptive.

In the hallway, I channeled my creative energies into drawings on paper; furious, fantastic, intricate sketches of undersea worlds. The drawings were ripped from my hands and crushed into a tight wad by the principal.

Where do you think drawing cartoons will get you? he roared, Your hair is over your ears and you’re growing a duck tail. The principal pulled my shirt collar. I’m issuing you a citation, he continued, If you get three citations, it equals one misdemeanor. The penalty is expulsion from school.

Perhaps the problem wasn’t me. Maybe it was Mr. Francis, my teacher. I entered Sioux Trail elementary school in 1964, the first year the school opened. Everything smelled new from the chalkboard to the urinals. My class was evenly divided between boys and girls. I sat in the front row, on the far left aisle. My teacher was new, as well, that being his first year teaching.

Mr. Francis was of average height, sporting short brown hair with one Brylcreem-sculpted wave above his forehead that was large enough for surfing. He wore a purple dickey bow tie with a black flannel business suit, and men’s cologne — none of which enhanced his appearance or body odor. His square chin jerked forward like a pecking rooster, as he limped on his artificial right leg. Every step on his bad leg made a fart-like noise that was a never-ending source of class jokes.

I can’t pinpoint exactly where the breakdown occurred between Mr. Francis and the class. I think he was simply too slow and conservative for modern, middle-class students who found his military-tactics teaching style to be quite awkward, and something I decided to deem impossible for myself and fellow student-body to adapt into our school’s already-established way that we were used-to, which he did not fit into. His was oriented around discipline, versus our usual system of accountability-based leadership.

Although, I didn’t start the rebellion- I played a leading role. The class grew increasingly unmanageable when Mr. Francis refused to let us visit the gym during our gym period. We needed to run around, play marbles, kick a ball, and burn off excess energy. Instead, Mr. Francis had us hide beneath our desks, and play atomic bomb drill. The girls in skirts refused. I thought we needed to respond with a shot across the bow; i.e., a ballistic missile launch.

I chewed off the largest piece of paper I could soak in my jaw. When it was soggy enough, I rounded it like a cannon ball and hurled it at the blackboard. The spitball made a loud whack as it struck the chalk board next to our drill sergeant. The class broke out in a roar of laughter.

Mr. Francis spun around abruptly on his bad leg. Who threw that? he screamed. I was ready for retaliation. The tips of my chair legs were reversed so one self-propelled kick ejected me across the floor like a pilot from a cockpit. Mr. Francis tried to slam my desk into my chest. Unfortunately, the classmate behind me took the full brunt of the impact while I went sailing. So, Mr. Francis sent me off to the hallway. After ripping up my drawings, the principal stepped in to finish the class, and we never saw Mr. Francis again.

After revolving-door visits to the school counselor, all authorities reached consensus: whatever I had bothering me, I would eventually grow out of it.

If not, perhaps medication could temper him, I overheard the counselor tell my parents. He also mentioned re-ha-bi-li-ta-tion- a new big word I didn’t understand.

My behavior must have become more tolerable to them, because I don’t recall being forced into taking anything to calm me down. Instead, I discovered a new outlet for my rambunctiousness: rock ‘n’ roll.

After watching my brother’s rock band evolve from my parent’s basement to screaming girls at parties, music became a passion, and I began to pursue my musical aspirations by taking up the clarinet. It was a dismal failure, however, despite my efforts and enthusiasm. Daily I would stand in the yard, torturing our neighbors by blowing so hard into the reed that it made a horrible dying-duck sound. I couldn’t sit still long enough to learn to play properly (a problem that would last throughout my life). I needed to jump around while I played.

Pete Fountain’s Bourbon Street was a clarinet record that demonstrated you could play the instrument, while swaying back and forth at the same time. However, it still wasn’t enough- I wanted to dance and play with the instrument like a gymnast (I wasn’t aware of Pete Townsend yet). I found the ticket in my brother’s guitar. By watching my brother play, I learned three chord masterpieces like I’m Not Your Stepping Stone by the Monkeys, and while I strummed the chords I jumped about the basement like there were ants in my pants. I was out of tune, and I didn’t care because it was loud! Soon, my brother’s albums like the Young Rascals, Dave Clark Five, and the Kinks found themselves at the bottom of my new record collection. The new psychedelia and Progressive rock groups of the era like Hendrix, Cream, Fever Tree, The Mothers of Invention, and the Doors were in constant rotation. The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band pointed the way to something, what I didn’t know.

By 1967, when I was 13, Mom started to pack the house for the big move and I swapped enough bottle-refund pennies, Kool-Aid stand nickels, and lawn-mowing