|
Anyone over 35 knows how satisfying it is to be able to meet
up with a person who positively influenced his or her childhood
and say Thank You-- just Thank You-- to this person.
It brings that profound feeling in one’s heart of --
to use
Oprah-speak-- closure. Expressing that gratitude is probably
more rewarding to oneself than it is to the person thanked.
Such is the feeling I now have, as Digger asks me to jot
down a few notes about the British Sixties as it influenced
America. That is a tall order-- I was born the year Piaf died,
the year JFK was shot, and the very day American ex-pat poet
Sylvia Plath put her head inside a London oven; 1963:
Lord Profumo’s peccadilloes were coming to light; Ronnie
Biggs
did his thing; the Fab Four had conquered England and Germany,
but would not be well-known Stateside until a year later.
Dag Hammersjold dies.
Also, I was in rural, blue-collar South Texas... Parched
oil and
cattle country. An area where Anglo-Saxon and Celtic roots
spread as deeply as anywhere in New South Wales or
Rhodesia (however much BBC Radio 4 might now wish to disown
it, in today’s slavish adherence to political correctness).
An area
very, very far from New York City, Miami, Chicago, Hollywood
or
San Francisco. Far, indeed, from just about anything and everything.
Sort of the American homologue of Alice Springs, Bloemfontein
or
the Outer Hebrides. Pettus Texas.... can you visualize it?
Picture the black-and-white deserted, silent, dust-powdered,
Depression-era town, all monochrome sepia, surmounted with
endlessly high, wordless skies, as depicted in Peter Bogdanovich’s
films THE LAST PICTURE SHOW or PAPER MOON.
Where people drift solemnly through the amber-colored days,
ignorant of anything else "out there".
Now picture me, age three, my hair as black as the young
Prince of Wales, my skin as white, and my ears quite as big,
in the passenger seat of a dirty white, boxy 1963 Impala,
seats
plastic-guarded that nondescript 50’s ribbed industrial
viridian;
the green, tonic fragrance of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum
mingling
with the odor of Kents chain-smoked by my rotund, chintzy,
bosomy,
beloved paternal grandmother, who, at the wheel, her crepey
lips
daubed with "V-E Day" red paint (fast staining her
dainty yellow teeth),
trolled the sun-baked high-street towards the Piggly-Wiggly
to buy
some groceries, maybe stock up on Miracle Whip, Karo Syrup,
Sweet
‘n’ Low, and--- mustn’t forget--- three or
four cartons of Kent
Cigarettes (the ones in the white package with the little
metallic-gold turret symbol on it).
But I’m focused on what’s emerging from the gleamingly
lab-like,
silvery-chrome AM car radio: It’s Petula Clark singing
"Down Town"
(please note the correct spelling), a moment for which I’ve
been
waiting. The drama of that incomparable record becomes, momentarily,
my own drama, my soundtrack (please ask your Terence Davies
to film
my childhood, won’t you?).
Petula
From the hushed beginning of the song....
fat Eb major chords on an
obviously expensive concert grand, the kind my own fingers
wouldn’t
touch until age 20... the tiny, nearly inaudible click of
Pet parting her
frosty-60’s-pink lips to sing (into some formally glittering
cave, where?
The Albert Hall?)... to the ecstatic climax with its ingenious
pedal tones
and unabashedly warm and émouvant brass tutti , and the entranced
tribal chant of a dénouement, peppered with witty asides from
a
Harmoned cornet, a snooting sound which reminded my prepubescent
ears of my grandmother’s Hoover, the little steel elephant
I’d mount
and ride while she frowningly vacuumed the dingy beige pile,
Kent
dangling, pluming. It was bliss.
The Dave Clark Five
It was in this unlikely setting my love affair
with England began, and
continues to this day: my father’s two teenage brothers
were my
lanky, callow uncles, and they very generously gave my sticky
hands
free reign over their sizeable stack of 45’s and Lp’s,
maybe 100 of
each, and the clunky wood-and-metal Sears Silvertone Record
Player.
You remember those sitting room 60’s behemoths: real
varnished wood
encasing polished steel and rubber phonograph which pulled
out on a
carriage; cloth covered woofers protected by a criss-cross
of gold wire;
that odd smell of oil and seriousness the contraption exuded.
Dusty
Perhaps surprisingly, few of the artists featured
in this record
collection, so dazzlingly sophisticated and fragrant to my
senses,
were American: sure, there was some Glen Campbell, some Mantovani,
The Doors, The Lovin’ Spoonful, Chet Atkins, Al Hirt,
Frankie Carle,
Ferrante & Teicher. But the vast majority of these records
were
from the so-called British Invasion of the mid 1960’s.
The Herman’s
Hermits, Peter & Gordon, The Springfields, Gerry &
The Pacemakers,
Donovan, Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas, The Hollies, The
Bee Gees,
The Dave Clark Five, The Animals, The Zombies, The Honeycombs,
The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, Dusty Springfield, and, of
course,
every single imaginable recorded utterance of the Beatles
and the
Rolling Stones.
|
