Bop English - Constant Bop

Constant Bop is a wonderful record! James Petralli is the lead singer/songwriter of that furious Texas progpunk band White Denim. There is a positive vibe that runs through the Denim music that, although the lyrics which have so far remained indecipherable for me, is undeniable. Not sure if it’s the Texas twang or James irrepressible personality, it just makes you feel good.

Denim is a kinetic force, masterfully cobbling multiple influences from roots music, to complex prog elements, to 60’s 70’s pop. This collection is much more a boundary-less pop feast.

Dani’s Blues is a trad Rock n’ Roll piano stomp so catchy that will one day it will be made ubiquitous in some Target commercial. It drives like TRex but it’s distinctly 60’s rock. The Question Mark and the Mysterians 96 tears, Vox organ lays down the counter melody to move the song along like an old radio commercial for Palisades Park. 

Throughout the record there is a hifi lowfi tension that draws you in. James mixes sweet pop do wop backing vocals with raging distorted guitar power chords… and it works! It’s a simple enough driving ditty that is densely complex. 

Struck Matches strums out like a Tom Petty RnR riff, then the driving toms pump it up. James builds a bubbling flood that captures the spirit of 80’s Rockpile (which captured the spirit of 50’s Buddy Holly et al) while being dense with swirling, careening disparate flourishes. It’s at once rootsy, genuine and psychedelic. It brings a smile to your face as it reveals layer after layer no matter how many times you hear it. This is a treadmill pulse racer.

Trying picks up the frantic pace where Struck Matches left off, but the rhythm becomes a shuffle that glides in like a summer breeze. With the heart of a Curtis Mayfield cut at it’s core this one just percolates. I only pray that one day a full on 12 piece band takes this out live. It’s built around a clever story of newfound love. James has so much facility in arranging, it’s scary. It twist and turns rhythms in such delightfully engaging ways with maracas, horns and driving percussion, all the standard hooks hit you in succession. Bop English is un-bounded by expectations. The songs go wherever they feel natural going. It all feels familiar, yet new. Classic pop pieces, timeless in appeal expertly executed.

Have I Got it Wrong is one of those tracks that starts out kitschy, but spins on a dime. A jazzy skip through some early psychedelia, that belongs in a period movie soundtrack montage. An echo-laden harpsichord ticks along while guitar harmonics ring out, careening left and right. Somehow these sounds, taken from some early 60’s cheesy sci-fi movie, belong. They sound cool. Then all at once it steps into a fast shuffle. Piano driven, The Raconteurs The Switch and the Spur come to mind as a sonic sister song, although James’ approach is much smoother. It still has sweeping power as he intones “Now where is that light, That you said would lead the way?” Echoes abound on every instrument, every effect swells and subsides to add a life pulse to the jazzy beat. What a trip!

Fake Dog starts out TIGHT! Relentlessly tight. James intones his best Sly Stone and it walks out some trippy swirls. The instruments squeeze and distort, pop and click bouncing inside the tight structure. The drumming is all jazz flourish as the vocal lines go synthetic. It drops to that basic drum pattern and a classic 60’s RnB wah…. and then launches into a pure ’67 Jefferson Airplane distorted guitar solo, but James sees fit to temper it with Brian May orchestrated guitar lines and then proceeds to strut off a distorted mess of a solo that screams raw electric.

Willy Spend an Evening follows, rising from the last blown amp, like Rockpile just came to the rescue. Is that Dave Edmunds? But wait, it twists all country orchestrated with a wonderful steel guitar and sweet vocals. THEN it RAVES up with a horn section? That Farfisa organ and Rockpile roots feel. All elements combine for a warm homey traditional country hoedown. I defy you to stand still through this!

Falling at your Feet again could be a Donovan or Hollies number if it wasn’t so modernly arranged! It has that seminal pop energy, but James mixes with the width of 70’s prog pallet. That is to say the track is ornately adorned with sweet earthy sounds that drip on you like warm honey. The birds that chirp along in the background, put you in a garden (Maybe Eden). Yeah there’s something etherial about this track. The slide solo at the end talks country, but evokes Steve Miller’s Joker…. and skipping over the hillside the birds chirp us goodbye. I don’t want to leave.

Sentimental Wilderness begins like Tull’s Thin Ice of a New Day then wells up with some good old melotron and then drops down thick with a bass line that is more foundation vibration than traditional baseline. It’s like English country meets urban SUV and it WORKS! The patterns build and weave a joyous print. I almost feel like I could hear the handclaps and chorus of “I want to live in America, I want to live in America” from West Side Story at one point! It’s got this chugga-chugga percussion thing going along with an urban SUV sub woofer all the while singing about the Constitution! Holy coleslaw, there so much influence shredded into this thing it’s a wonder it doesn’t turn to mud! Instead it’s genius!

The Hardest Way hits me in the feels. I’ve lived these lyrics in more than one life. Like a piece of machinery the song clicks on with the rhythm of a typical busy couple’s day. A piano warbles through a spinning leslie, that gives it an old time feel. The guitar line moans underneath, setting up the all too busy, tense couple’s dilemma. It’s the mundane workings of the day that add tension and the music reflects it with a terse piano rhythm. The background vocals surge angelic while a harpsichord like pixie dust sprinkles, and a George-Harrison-like guitar solo kind of reminds them that they still have love for each other. It’s a beautifully sincere longing song.

Long Distance Runner could have dropped out of the Donovan catalog save the reggae swing. The chorus is right on the “Hail Atlantis” fault line. How James incorporates such authentic old-timey sounds is amazing!!! And that he freshly applies them into these new/old compositions with such facility amazes me. 

The whole album bursts with invention, swings just right, is crafted like one of the producer greats of the 70’s had their hands in the mix and yet sounds new and fresh. I have listened to the collection on repeat for months. I am confident that it will deliver like classic XTC has over these last 25 years. There are also a bunch of other tracks from these traveling circus sessions (enough to make a double album) that will hopefully one day see the light! I sooooo needed this after the long cold winter we just had. Put this on in the backyard and barbecue! You’ll love it!

You can hear it here.... 

http://www.thelineofbestfit.com/news/latest-news/listen-to-the-world-premiere-of-bop-englishs-debut-album-constant-bop

But you should buy it IMMEDIATELY!

Digital: http://smarturl.it/ConstantBop
Vinyl: http://smarturl.it/ConstantBopVinyl
Stream: http://sptfy.com/ConstantBop

Me and my Klipsch

I have always loved music for as long as I can remember. From my first transistor radio, surreptitiously hidden from my folks under my pillow at night in ’65 to my Dad’s “Lloyds Stereo”, which to my young ears sounded like a restaurant, because that was the only place that I had heard more than the one speaker that was on our previous “Victrola”.

From garage bands, to concerts, to scratched records and badly worn 8 tracks I found myself always wanting better. By the third year of my nomadic college career I found myself at Syracuse University. While in a local record shop near campus, one spring morn, I heard some crisp, clean sound like I had never heard before. Despite the store being 20 feet by 75 feet with 15 foot ceilings, two relatively small speakers filled the establishment with awesome sound. They were Heresies. The storeowner informed me that a venue down on Erie Blvd., Erie Sound, was the place to go.

That week I hitched a ride, and walked into a super hi-end audio salon, that also sold grand pianos. Undaunted, I walked up to the 50-something-plaid suit-wearin’-salesman and told him of my quest. By all rights he should have shown this pony-tailed-ripped-jean-sportin-no-money-havin-college-no-goodnick the door. He was either a really nice guy or it was a really slow day. He treated me to a taste of my future, when he indulged me by piping some Ella Fitzgerald through the Klipshorns that were on the floor. My hair stood up on end and my heart was won over, and I was certainly no jazz fan at the time. He gently wiped the drool from my mouth and brought me back to reality informing me that for a mere $450 I could have my own little piece of the Klipsch legend, and that if at any time in the ensuing years I wished to trade up, with full trade-in value, I could eventually work my way up to the magnificent Khorns. I barely had money for food, never mind stereo equipment, but I rationalized that books were an expendable item so the purchase was made.

In the following weeks I must have been an unbearable jackass, raving about the sound from the Heresies, because April fools day, my roommates staged a phony robbery while we were out and my precious Heresies appeared to have been taken. They let me mourn for an hour or so and then invited me upstairs for a beer. Happy-happy-joy-joy as I opened the door they cranked some Supertramp on my setup Heresies! Sound salvation.

Over the next 2 years I left college, moved back to Jersey and out of boredom and a misplaced sense of creativity I rounded the corners and added foam grills to the H’s. I painted them black and began upgrading my audio setup. By ‘78 I was ready to upgrade to the LaScalas. I called Erie Sound and made arrangements. I must say, they were quite benevolent. Do you know that they bought back those H’s, as mutilated as they were, for full value trade-in toward my new LaScalas! Changing the world, one upgrade at a time.

It just so happened that a friend of a friend of some college buddies was having an end of semester party up at Syracuse. This was all I needed to help me entice some road trip cohorts. We loaded the pickup and of course brought my entire setup and a box of albums, since to actually wait until I got back home to hear the setup would require delayed gratification, a concept that was all too foreign to me at the time. So we planned to treat all the party guests to my new Klipsch LaScalas. Only one problem. We neglected to tell them!

So when we pulled into the driveway and began unloading these massive speakers the entire neighborhood was up in arms. Our hosts had become hostile. We had a short confab amongst ourselves and came to the only logical conclusion. We would hijack the party.

I remembered a grass and stone amphitheater in a local park that I had discovered in my years at SU. We gave the hosts our ultimatum/suggestion, grabbed the kegs and announced the move. Mind you, I hadn’t been there in two years I didn’t even know if the amphitheater still existed. It did. We get there, unload, setup, find the electrical hookup and, wonder of wonders, we have “juice”.

The amphitheater consisted of an uncovered sixty foot stone stage, seventy five foot semicircular grass floor area leading to five stone fronted grass floored terraces all lined by the natural hill and pine trees. Just incredible acoustics! On a summer day back in the twenties I’m sure three or four hundred people could enjoy some summer stock or an instrumental ensemble. Of course we’d be having none of that. Armed with 2 kegs and two Lascalas, we cranked up the volume in one of sweetest spots I have ever partied. The sound filled the natural bowl, spilled over into the surrounding park and the small band of Jersey invaders multiplied their numbers until a hundred fifty or so enjoyed the sound. As each group of newcomers came over the hill, the inevitable reactions ensued; “We thought a band was playing!”, Are you with a radio station?”, “Are you giving away tee shirts?”. These refrains I would hear time and time again over the years. Eventually our original hosts were drawn to the park, they brought the chips and dip and it became quite the event, with the amazing LaScalas center stage!

I know that the audiophiles in the house are cringing, what with taking these beautiful pieces of sonic furniture into the elements but, back at home in Jersey, I felt the need to share the legend. Like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, I tried over and again to recreate that SU event. I had a brainstorm that summer when I discovered that my little brother had a friend who lived “near” the local grammar school. We ran a series of extension cords from this friends’ house, through the backyard, through the woods, across the field, to the setup. Well over one hundred yards. We did that “frisbee In the field” thing to “Houses of the Holy” before the police showed up. It was time to get my own place.

By Spring of ’79, in my new place, the upstairs of a two family, we staged our first and only toga party. We had no furniture, so to fill the apartment; we went garbage picking and gathered a bunch of mattresses. The LaScalas had become a budding legend and we packed sixty toga’d guests into our apartment. As I put on Stanley Clarke’s “The Dancer”, a favorite of ours, back in the day, an old friend of mine, John Stec, began to, oddly enough, “do The Stec Dance”. It was a strange amalgam of West Virginia flatfootin’ and the brooms in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. Of course, no one could resist such a performance and we all began to follow suit. A train developed and chugged throughout the apartment, down the stairs, past my irate neighbors, down the block, until the last of all sixty people could no longer hear the music. Two hundred yards away, we all watched as the police surrounded the building, bullhorns drawn, telling my empty apartment and beautiful LaScalas that the party was over.

In my NEW place, an old 20’s style house, with no human neighbors, my Klipschs and I had found the perfect home. The house had an eighteen by twenty four by twelve foot living room with a fireplace at one end and a stage dining room at the other end. The numbers at each party grew from holiday to holiday. Somehow the Klipschs always inspired some mania and their reputation grew.

At one particular party, my cousin, upon watching me duck-walk through the crowd with my stringless-fender-knockoff, to the just released George Thorogood album, pulled me aside and remarked that he didn’t know that I played guitar. In his defense, the combination of the raw sound of GT, and the perfection of the LaScalas fooled even me. I really should have learned to play more than just air guitar. We were never in short supply of audience or performers in the air guitar army inspired by the Klipschs. The pure, powerful sound does something to a crowd. I have witnessed the strangest combination of bikers, preppies, blue and white collar men and women, drop their guard and throw themselves into Buzbee-Berkely-esce proportions of air guitar at the chest thumping Klipsch sound.

For two years my Klipschs and I hosted some of the most awesome parties from house to dancehall. New Years Eve 1981, after renting a local church hall (the house was reaching it’s limits), spending thousands on accoutrements, we were informed, by the monsignor that we would have to leave, immediately! Someone, unassociated with our party, had trashed part of the church. It was only ten o’clock, and I had one hundred fifty paid guests. I realized that there was only one answer. Pack up the LaScalas and head the 15 miles back to the house. We announced the move, asked for the crowd’s cooperation, and do you know that one hundred and fifty people on New Years Eve, drove the fifteen miles to the house without a peep, just to hear the Klipshs. We even gained a number of people who just happened to see this caravan of cars and decided to investigate. I swear, I’ve got testimonials to prove it.

That era ended, Labor Day Weekend, at eight AM the morning after, when I awoke to the dulcet tones of Van Halen One. As I cleared the sleep from my eyes, to hear my name being called by the man in the black shoes, inches from my face, I noticed my dilemma. Somehow, I was naked in a sleeping bag, on my front lawn, all the windows and doors open, the debris of two hundred Klipsh fans scattered about and my LaScalas singing me a wake-up song. The landlord, who lived in California, had chosen this day to have his first visit. It was time for my LaScalas and I to move on.

I eventually met a girl that would become my first wife, and in a last act of bachelor bravado, decided to upgrade once again to the “Holy Grail”, Khorns. AAAhhhhhh!!! (That was angels singing).

Over the years the Klipsch sound had infected quite a few of my crew, so I rang up the gang at Erie Sound and planned another road trip. This time we rented a U-haul trailer and not only traded in the LaScalas for Khorns but, bought seven pairs of Heresies for family and friends, which to this day, twenty years later, sound as brand new.

In the ensuing years as my family grew, my budget shrank and my listening habits changed. My Khorns and I made fewer public appearances. Barring the occasional family function, or hall party, we had but a few adventures.

On a hot summer night in ’88, we rented a generator, hired a roadie, and took the Klipsch show to the Meadowlands Arena. We staked out three or four parking spaces, bought off a security guard and threw Klipsch-sized tailgate party before a Jimmy Page concert. I had built a hinged plywood corner for the Khorns and made the most important modification one can make to ones Klipschs. I ADDED WHEELS! Oooo my achin’ baaack! No more.

For two hours and two hundred yards before the show we entertained questions that I had heard so many times before. “Are you a radio station? I thought there was a band playing! Are you giving away tee shirts?” They always expressed amazement at the clarity and accuracy of the Klipsch sound. A buddy of my brother, made the commitment and bought a pair of Khorns and we did a number of events together over the years. Mind you, I never did this stuff professionally. It was all for the love of music and the urge to share the Klipsch ambiance.

My Khorns outlasted my first marriage and played at both of my weddings, and will make an appearance at my daughter’s wedding this summer. They sound as awesome and clean as that first day in Syracuse, when I fell in love. The company, its’ product, their policy of upgrade and guarantee is extraordinary. In ’88 before my first wedding, I blew a tweeter. (No, that’s not why the marriage ended!) A simple phone call to Arkansas, and at no cost, a replacement was delivered, no questions asked. Never in all my life have I found a company that stands behind their product so fully. Where can you trade-up and get full value for a years old product toward the upgrade purchase? I’ll tell you, nowhere but Klipsch.

Whether it was entering upon that unmistakable sound at a restaurant in New Orleans, or a dance club in Jacksonville, I would never be surprised that it turned out to be Klipsch speakers. Throughout the years, Klipsh has been such a character in my life’s stories, that when I came upon this contest on December 13th, I was compelled to share. All that I shared is true and accurate as nearly as I can remember. As evidenced by the wonderful stories on this site, Klipsch is quite the wonderful phenomenon. Thanks for letting me share. Thank you Mr. Klipsch.

The Puke Helmet

So we’re at this house party in 1977, ya see. (think , “That 70’s Show” for those of you born after 1985) George and I sneak away into the garage to go “under the rock” (that’s where we kept it in those days). We were known as “El Ka-bong and Dr. Destructo” for the amount of mayhem, and carnage that seemed to follow us. So we sneak surreptitiously through the kitchen to the debris-filled suburban garage. Minding our own business, blowing a joint and pondering the universe, we are rudely interrupted by some underclassed drunk. Ya know, “Hey dude, what’s happenin’, I’m sooo drunk, my girlfriend says..., When I played football, I...., I could beat you guys....on and on.”

“SHAAAAAD-AAAP!” George says, as he palms the guy’s face and shoves him into taking a seat on some newspapers behind a green garbage can. Bumbed out for the moment, he relents and leans over the open can, elbows on the edge, hands cupping his forlorn face.

Peace and quiet! That’s better. Now where were we? We continue our ever-so-important discussion until “Timmy” the drunko-boy begins to heave. In a flash of comic brilliance, George grabs a full-faced motorcycle helmet from the shelf. You know, the kind with a solid jaw piece and a full windshield. He spins and proceeds to pop the helmet onto our drunken victim.

If I may digress for a moment, each of us in our youthful transgressions, fell prey to the abuse of those around us, if we had the audacious stupidity to pass out or lose control of various bodily functions while in the company of our mischievous crew. Once you have been the recipient of such brotherly concern as tying your laces together, magic markering up your sleeping face, having shaving cream squirted up your nose,etc., you learn to control your drinking or at the very least to crawl off into a hiding place to escape the torture. We all painfully learned this lesson in our own way.

It was survival of the fittest.

It made for a sharp crew, and at the very least an entertaining interlude ‘til we lost interest. NEVER, I repeat, NEVER show weakness or ARROGANCE in front of the crew. (Drunks are tailor made for this, God knows I learned the hard way!)

Back to “Timmy”, our arrogant drunk. As the helmet slides on with a “shwop”, Timbo barely reacts. One beat, two beats, he realizes something’s amiss. He stands bolt-upright. His hands are still on the sides of his face.....IN THE HELMET!

He wobbles unsteadily from the waist as he tries in vain to loose his hands, panic sets in, his eyes widen as realizes his dilemma. He dry-heaves again and his eyes bug-out in pure terror. He seems to say “Pul-eeease” (a-hah, I know what you’re thinkin’) George and I look at each other, shrug, it’s definitely too late to do anything now. We turn back to Puke-head just in time to see his face disappear behind lunch, dinner and 13 beers.

His initial thrust was so hard that it shot out of the back of the bottom of the helmet, like two chum jets. It was one of the strangest things that I have ever seen. And except for the splat on the floor it was silent.....kinda like it would be in space.

He struggled to get free and we lent a hand. In the end, he was shaken but relatively unscathed. Needless to say, he stunk and nobody at the party wanted to talk to him after that. I’m sure that if we x-rayed his head we would find bile-laden food particles in his cranium. His hair looked a lot like that messed-up-just-got-outta-bed-thing that’s so popular today (except with peas in it).

Was that wrong?

JOYCE!

I love to "yank" people. Y'know saying something outrageous, delivering some awful statement, just to get a reaction. I love the look on their faces. I have a much greater appreciation for the elderly and my own safety nowadays so I keep the yanking to a harmless minimum.

I come from a long line of pranksters. When I was a kid I used to work with my dad at his Kielbasy shop (polish sausage to the uninitiated). On the way home one hot summer day we had to deliver a large fresh meat order so we stopped to get a block of dry ice. I don't know if any of you youngsters know what dry ice even is, but, it is frozen carbon dioxide, super cold and a 20 lb slab could cool a whole box of meat and evaporate into a gas so, as it breaks down, it turns directly into carbon dioxide gas rather than a liquid, so it doesn't make everything soggy even on the hottest summer day.

Remember, it was the sixties pre-Viet Nam boom, where here in the States, a monkey could run business and profit. Well even with 8 kids my old man did pretty well. He had just installed a heater in our 20 x 40 cement pool, so that we could swim well into the October. (he hadn't gotten the heating bill yet - do you have any idea how much it costs to heat 22,000 gallons of water!) needless to say, we used it for only one season.

Anyway, we arrived home, and my dad says, "Watch this".

We come around the back of the house. All the kids (our own and the neighborhood kids) are milling about, waiting 'til my mother and her best friend at the time, sipping afternoon cocktails in the kitchen, will "watch" them in the pool. This was a means of torture that my mom would use on hot summer days in order to get us to do our chores, or perhaps to just piss us off to get even. There would never be any unsupervised swimming allowed, but nobody said anything about being sober. Like refugees the kids were gathered around the gate into the pool area. My dad carrying the box of dry ice, gets them all pumped up to see something cool. He dumps the dry ice into the pool which proceeds to vaporize at a rapid rate seemingly boiling the water. All the kids are running alongside the pool following the block as it floats toward the deep end.

From her vantage point in the kitchen, my mother and her friend spot the kids running in the pool area. This was FORBIDDEN. NO ONE goes in the pool area until there was adult supervision!

They both come out of the kitchen, ready to admonish the kids and add another half hour delay until they would be allowed to swim. As they notice my dad, standing in the pool area, in a flash of comic brilliance, he bellows in his most intimidating tone , "JOYCE! HOW HIGH DO YOU HAVE THE HEAT IN THIS POOL TURNED UP??!"

They both look at the gas bubbling up from the water and damn if it doesn't look just like boiling water. Well my mom's jaw dropped! Her friend dropped her cocktail glass and bolted toward the pool gate, "screaming, "OH MY GOOD, GET THE KIDS AWAY FROM THE EDGE!" Both her and my mother, scrambling frantically to grab the kids away from the 22,000 GALLONS of "boiling water" ..... from a friggin' pool heater.

My father starts to laugh uncontrollably and my mother realizes that she's been "yanked". Her friend, however, never really gets the joke and grabs her kids and does not come back to our house that summer.

My First Concert

In 1967, I was in 7th grade, and I knew very little about the music scene (or anything else for that matter), other than that I really loved music. Up until the year before, I actually thought that the older guys across the street that had a cover band and played "Purple Haze" in their garage WERE famous and on the radio. My sister and would sit on the curb that summer, in the evenings, as these guys cranked it up! We would sit and listen and watch them practice along with a light show (flashing colored lights) as we were not allowed to go across the street. They'd play all the popular "acid rock" of the day and we'd think it was sooo cool.

The spring of 1968, I was in St. Agnes school, and a couple of my buds had older brothers and sisters that turned them on to some cool music. Remember, FM music had barely begun. Going to someone's house to hear Johnny Winter or Big Brother and the Holding Company, singing grungey blues songs was not what was part of the mainstream culture like it is today. I had a little transistor radio, and I'd listen to the Beach Boys, Tommy James and the Shondells, the Brooklyn Bridge etc. Pretty lame mainstream Pop music. I really started to form my musical opinions at around this time.

Then, on an altar boy trip to the Jersey Shore that summer, ( yes I was Catholic School Altar Boy - what a disappointment I turned out to be -sheesh!)



I spent $8 in quarters on the spin wheel on the boardwalk, almost my whole savings, to win a $3 album. It was Iron Butterfly, Heavy.

Look, this was pre-Zeppelin, although Page and JPJ were in my ears in some of my favorite POP songs like Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man. Since I was into Iron Butterfly before Led Zeppelin, the whole LZ is a rip-off of IB type controversy, and who would outlast who, raged even then. The Zep rose and Butterfly flew off into obscurity.

Anyway, that spring I heard for the first time, the music-changing epic called In-a-gadda-di-vida. It was 17 minutes long, a whole album side. And it was a hit! I thought it was a really cool song, In a garden of Eden, baby! Get it? It was heavy, trippy, had a massively inane drum solo in the middle, and exploded at the end like a pre-Dazed and Confused. In my naivete, I tried to share this music with my Bucket-Headed Dad, (think Ralph Kramden of the Honeymooners). Being a good Catholic boy, I tried to pitch the whole Garden of Eden angle. He was havin' none of it. I still remember playing it for him on our console phonograph with stereo speakers, 4 inches apart behind the cloth. I used to sit between the speakers to get the full effect. On some of the older scratched records, the needle would skip so bad that we used to put a bottle of modeling paint on it to weigh it down. Eventually the weight of the needle smoothed out the scratches AND THE GROOVES so that all you could hear was white noise.

So in class one day, my buddy Jay says that Iron Butterfly was playing at the local high school. Cream had just played there, last month and Chicago was up-coming. There was no such concert scene outside of major cities in these days, although looking back it seems almost unreal. Tickets were $3 and I had saved up for whatever. I bought the ticket and that night raced home to get permission to go. I told my Dad and Mom and they hit the ceiling. "You spent $3 on a CONCERT TICKET!!! $3 DOLLARS!!! And this crap music!!!!" and on and on and on... my Dad, the ever-creative disciplinarian, finally relents, and gives me permission and a ride to the high school. BUT, I was told, " If you are going to a concert you'll dress nicely, respectfully..." He made me wear a suit and tie. I can still remember it, orange-brown jacket with some sort of plaid or striped tie, nice shoes and my short "opie" haircut.


(that's me on the left)

Just AWFUL! I do remember as he dropped me off a couple of blocks from the school, all the kids walking toward the gym, all hippie-decked out. Me with my suit on (I took my Jacket off, and draped it over my shoulder to try to be cool). I even loosened my tie.

Once inside I could not find my friends, so I just sat in the balcony on the floor, legs hanging over, arms draped through the metal rail. I must have looked the oddball, with all these stoned out hippie chicks, biker dudes, beads and bell bottoms and me in my near orange brown suit jacket. IB wailed away, with one of those colored-water-in-vegetable-oil-psychedelic-light-shows that were the rage in the day. At the end of what has become a legendary 45 minute Innagaddadavida, the flashpots explodes and flames leapt upward lending to the sinister tone. The look of horror on the Nun chaperone's faces was priceless, no matter how "down with the kids" they were trying to be. Between that and the reefer that filled the gym (I had no clue at the time. I couldn't understand why these hippies needed to burn incense wherever they went. How annoying!)

It rang in my head, for days after, but it put the live music bug in me. I didn't go to any concerts really until 3 years later, when I saw Slade. Of course I saw the mighty Zep twice, once in 75 and again in 77, but my only regret from those innocent days was that I didn't get to see Jimi Hendrix. That's the story,

PS The last major act to play at that catholic high school was Black Sabbath, my sophomore year in high school. I wanted to go but I had a baby sitting commitment. What a MAROON!