CONFESSIONS OF A ROCK AND ROLL JUNKIE

For some of you this will not come as a shock, but for all of my life, (well, maybe since I was about 14), I have been a rock and roll junkie. My habit first started with the first radio I ever owned that was a gift from my grandpa.
Back then the songs were innocuous enough, even though many parents were disturbed by the beat, and the gyrations of the singers as they performed on stage. Elvis Presley’s famous ‘moves’ were even banned from view on television. He could not be shown from the hips on down. Looking back, it seems almost laughable considering today’s dancing is nothing short of pornographic. Have you ever watched the “grind”?
Anyway, some of my favorites of the day were the first R&R artists like The Marcells, The Platters, etc. Then came the surfing craze, and guys like Dick Dale, The Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, The Marketts, The Surfaris, and so on became top dogs. The driving beat of the bass guitars and twang of the ‘surf’ guitar sounds were stirring, and fun. The Beach Boys could harmonize like no one else. Oh, let me not forget the great Chantays, who did “Pipeline”, one of the all-time greatest surf pieces ever written. Being the backwoods boy I was, I had no idea the Pipeline was a famous surfing spot in Hawaii.
Well, their glory was short lived. Not long after they rose to the top came the “British Invasion”. My first memory was a huge hit called I Want to Hold Your Hand, and She Loves You by the Beatles. Then, almost simultaneously came the Rolling Stones with Satisfaction, and the world was on fire with Beatlemania, and Stones fever.
We just could not get enough. In high school, we donned “Nehru” jackets to look like the Beatles, and their famous long hair kicked off for decades the long hairstyles I still disdain to this day. I never took that up. To this day only the Stones are intact. Even the Beatles self-destructed in time due to over-blown egos, a common problem in so many groups of the time, even in Motown groups.
Talk about Motown….Motown had some lovely songs, even great music and great performers. But I did not like it enough to spend my hard earned bucks on their records. Mainly, I just could not identify with them.
Then came the Vietnam war, and music began to change. Rock and Roll turned to hard rock, and later, heavy metal. Folk music, also a popular genre on college campuses (campaii?), turned to protest songs, and so did a lot of rock groups, too. The war and drugs soon had a new style of rock music being played.
Being the idealistic young man I was, I never associated myself with those kinds of people and therefore never bought into their music……ever. I was serving in the air force by then, and felt it was my patriotic duty to stand by my country. Liking or buying their music was like casting a vote for their ideals, which to me were unsavory. Besides, stupid songs like Puff the Magic Dragon and Blowin’ in the Wind by Peter, Paul and Mary left me cold, and nauseated. Were it not for its hallucinogenic implications, Puff, to me, sounded like it belonged on Sesame Street, not on the Top 40. I mean, c’mon, do lyrics like


Little Jacky Paper loved that rascal, Puff.
Would buy him wings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.
.. actually move or grip you? Only if you are tweaked on marijuana! Which is what the song was all about, anyway.
In the late 60’s an American band came along that captured my imagination. What’s more, they were home-grown from L.A. Their first big hit was Light My Fire just about the time I was enlisting in the air force. Of course, I am talking about “The Doors”.
It wasn’t until 1968 while I was stationed in Japan, that I bought for the first time their album, The Doors. It was not until then I had anything to play theirs or anyone else’s albums on. The plain and simple fact was, until that time I was not making enough money to purchase a record player, amplifier, and speakers, much less a full-size, reel-to-reel tape recorder. Not long after arriving in Japan, I bought said items, and my music collection was soon growing.
Soon after The Doors, I purchased Strange Days, and a little later still, I bought Waiting for the Sun. I already had many albums from days of working before I joined the air force, by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and even Bob Dylan’s Highway 61. Before I left Japan I had an eclectic collection of rock music albums. Amongst which were The Cream, Iron Butterfly, Beautiful Day, The Human Beinz, Jefferson Airplane, and maybe some others that have long ago slipped my memory.
The Beatles collection I had was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, and Abbey Road. After Abbey Road, the Beatles called it quits, but not until after they cut Let it Be (which I could not stomach). Some of these items were given away, which I regret sorely for now they could fetch a fair price by collectors.

And how could I leave out the first and only "heavy metal" band I ever liked? I discovered the Led Zeppelin one night in a Tokyo discoteque (sp.?) just before I was to ship out to Vietnam. I was amazed to see Japanese rockin' out to those sounds. I can't remember which of their songs they were playing, but their sound caught me up, and I loved it!

The next morning I went downtown and found their first two albums in a records shop. They were cut in Japan and had Japanese writing and labels on them, but they were outstanding in quality. I recorded them onto cassette tapes and bought a Sony car stereo player for cassettes.As soon as I got home to the states I installed the stereo in my '70 Mustang while I was in Arizona going to a special school for weapons specialists in preparation for duty in Vietnam. Every weekend I drove that car at max speed home to California and blasted the Led Zeppelin music on my stereo the whole way to Riverside.

In those days records were large flat discs that had to be spun on a turntable called a record player. An arm with a diamond-tipped needle on one end, rode on the disc between grooves that were engraved with analog tracks that ‘tickled’ the needle. The needle was imbedded in a cartridge in the arm that was wired to a pre-amp, which then had to have either a stand-alone amplifier or an incorporated amplifier if it was so-built.
The groove had two tracks, the left being the stereophonic left channel, and the right was the right channel. Eventually, the record wore down by the constant friction from the needle. Great pains were taken to balance the arm so as to only touch the record with enough tracking force that would play well and not skip; all this to preserve the longevity of the disc.
For this very reason most of us bought tape decks, which in those days had two reels to reel off and take up a tape onto which sound signals could be magnetically recorded. Thus, we preserved our records and played them only as often as the tapes could last.
It finally came time for me to move on to a little country in south-east Asia called Vietnam, where my rock music collection came to an abrupt halt. What did Vietnam have to do with what records I bought, you may ask? I don’t know, but I think it had something to do with being in love with and engaged to my future wife. Easy Listening soon became the theme of a lot of my music, and besides, my wife had no background at all in the rock and roll music of later years. Mexico was a romantic music country, and my wife loved love songs. She liked the old rock and roll and pop singers from the U.S. like Vic Damone, Neil Sedaka, Pat Boone, Elvis Presley, Dion, and the like. They were heart throbs not only in the U.S., but around the world, and the young Mexican women, it seems, were no different.
After coming home from a war, and getting married, it just didn’t seem appropriate to be listening to hard, or classic rock. My nerves needed soothing, so it was easy listening or elevator music on the Stereophonic FM band for a long time.
Then, years later, easy listening music stations began to die off. It seems they were losing their $hirts, and big money bought them out to promote what was then called underground FM. It was a place where hard rock could be played in full stereophonic sound, which had heretofore been the domain of the AM radio band blasting in flat, monophonic signals. For audiophiles, that just would not do!
Mostly the junk they played in the beginning was hard or acid rock, but before long a few stations, thankfully, came up with a new format called classic rock. Soon thereafter in some metropolitan areas a few Oldies stations sprang up. What a blessing this was for me! Not only could I hear my old favorites, but my classic rock, as well. My wife loved the Oldies format that was on K-EARTH (KRTH) 101.1 FM. It is a station today that still thrives.
Then came the amazing compact disc, and before you know it I was buying my old collection in digital form. Nerves soothed, and sick of easy listening music, I latched on to the new format and soon had a cool collection of CD’s filled with my favorite music.
However happy I was to have them, the one group I have enjoyed playing over and over again was The Doors. With renewed appreciation I enjoyed Jim Morrison’s sultry crooning in songs like Moonlight Drive, End of the Night, Wishful Sinful, Riders on the Storm, and Yes, the River Knows. I also love the sound of the bass guitar player in Twentieth Century Fox, and the classical guitar sound of Spanish Caravan. I really cannot explain what the attraction is that keeps me coming back to this band’s sound. They were unique with the usage of the keyboards (electric piano, and electronic organ), unlike so many other bands that were mostly clanging guitars and drums only, like the early Beatles were.
Believe it or not, some of the songs have a soothing quality in them, like the softness of Riders on the Storm with the falling rain and rolling thunder mixed in, or like the haunting sound in You’re Lost, Little Girl, and the melancholy of Yes, the River Knows.
Over the years, the Doors have stayed on the top of my preferred classic rock list for this reason. Their sound uniqueness has outlasted all other super groups before them or since.
Finally, on a sad note, on July the 3rd, 1971, at the age of only 27 years, Jim Morrison died in his apartment in Paris, France, a victim of his own excesses. To this day his parents have not been able to claim his body for an American burial. The French government, in all their typical weirdness, has declared Jim Morrison and his gravesite a national treasure, and refuses his grieving family the right to take him home. Like France needs another national treasure!