Heads and Tails

In my youth I always honored the estimations of my older brothers when it came to the arts, and therefore my tastes rarely aligned with those of my classmates. In the fifth grade this was exemplified by my allegiance to singer-songwriter Harry Chapin, especially his Heads and Tails album, which featured “Taxi,” the coolest song in the world. At age eleven I could readily identify with a footloose cabbie who took his tips and got stoned. “Taxi” was a long song—much longer than what my big brothers called “that bubble-gum crap they play on WHB”—but I committed every word of it to memory.

I tried like the devil to recruit my friends to the Chapin Club, but it was a no go. They were hooked on “Bennie and the Jets” and “Love Will Keep Us Together” and the other five or six songs that cycled on the AM airwaves. Their resistance, of course, only made Harry seem all the more impressive.

One Sunday I scanned the TV listings for the week ahead and saw that Harry was the featured performer on “Soundstage.” I don’t recall what night “Soundstage” ran, but it was likely late in the week—Thursday or Friday. No analogy can capture just how anxious I was for that air time to arrive, but this one may come the closest: I felt the way a pair of virginal newlyweds must feel at the hotel’s front desk when the clerk is all thumbs and cannot figure out the computer.

The night of the show, I went into an empty bedroom and placed the microphone of our Emerson tape recorder near the TV. In all likelihood I was violating some sort of copyright code by recording in this fashion, but I’m pretty sure the Statute of Limitations applies here, so back off.

As zero hour neared, I grew increasingly afraid that “Soundstage” would get pre-empted by a President Ford speech on inflation or a bulletin announcing the death of Walter Brennan or something like that, but at the appointed time Harry’s head filled the screen. He sat on a wooden barstool and sang “Taxi” and “Any Ol’ Kind of Day” and eight or nine other songs. He looked anguished at times, blissful at times, contemplative at other times. His bed of curly hair flopped around as he underscored certain guitar strokes with thrusts of the neck. The veins on his forehead grew more pronounced by the minute.

That was the fastest hour of television to date.

Immediately I replayed the cassette tape so I could relive the experience. By pasting my ear against the recorder I could make out the songs, yet too often I also heard the neighbor dog, Satan, howling away, as well as our toilet flushing and my own throat-clearings.

During that general time period, I wrote a song lyric about a retarded fellow down the street whose house had burned to the ground. It was a song that expressed the opinion that we should not burn down the homes of the retarded. Crazy Jack hadn’t actually died in the fire, but I took some poetic license, as this refrain implicates: “And the question was passed/From father to daughter/Could a whole town be charged/For manslaughter?”

I recognized that such a lyric of moral outrage was perfect for my idol, who had an affinity for writing songs of moral outrage, so I sent it to him for his immediate use. A couple years later I got a response from his publicist. She said Harry enjoyed the song but, regrettably, would be unable to use it.

By the time that response arrived, Chapin had gone bubble gum with “Cat’s in the Cradle,” and my feelings for his catalog of work were lukewarm on my most charitable of days. Receiving the rejection slip, therefore, was like getting turned down by an employer you didn’t want to go to work for in the first place—which is something that’s happened to me about a dozen times, by the way.

Sadly, Harry was killed in an auto accident on Long Island, New York, in May of 1981. He died the week of my high school graduation, and the timing of it really made me stop and think.

These days, “Cat’s in the Cradle” remains as Chapin’s musical legacy for the mainstream. Mostly, though, the title is invoked for laughs at parties and happy hours where really cool people gather.

Classic Rock

Something that happened on a Saturday in 1981 forever sticks in my craw. It was probably the first warm day of the spring, and I turtled along in the stacked-up traffic near the city’s hot spot, Bannister Mall. With all four windows down, I listened to a tape called Angry Young Them, by Them, a band of British rockers led by Van Morrison. The song “Mystic Eyes” played at a volume just boastful enough for a neighboring car to enjoy. At a traffic light, a station wagon filled with teens was equal to my Cutlass, and though I never looked explicitly in that direction, I could tell there was a lot of agitation inside that wagon. The traffic light was long. “Mystic Eyes” turned into “If You and I Could Be As Two,” and meanwhile the unrest in the car beside mine intensified.

Then a voice addressed me: “Hey, you.” I did a slow Oliver Hardy-like turn of the head to let the caller know I wasn’t easily bossed around. He, the driver, had underachieving whiskers and wore a ball cap. Five or six carbon copies of himself crowded the wagon. He smiled and said, “Ah, you like your bubble-gum music?” His passengers went apeshit with laughter.

I’ll tell you why this rankled me. I had never listened to bubble-gum music or, for that matter, the popular music of the day. From age nine forward I was, in my own fashion, a musical snob. Unfortunately, I was not the kind of precocious snob who listened to classical music and Gershwin and Cole Porter and Rogers & Hart, but instead I was more like the kind of snob a John Cusack might portray in an independent movie. I liked the stuff my older brothers liked, music by heady singer-songwriters who were rarely played on FM radio and never on AM. Meanwhile, I lived with the fear that classmates as well as strangers assumed I was into all of those arena-rock bands that had one name—Kiss, Journey, Heart, Boston, Yes, Styx, Kansas, Queen, Rush, Foreigner, Missouri.

Despite my resistance to it, the popular music of the day had an undeniable presence, as it always does, no matter the era; it played at high school mixers, for instance, and in shopping malls and restaurants, on television commercials, and in other kids’ cars. Therefore, I always had a working knowledge of what the crowd listened to and talked about.

I knew, for example, that Boston was too arrogant to tour, and that Steve Miller rhymed “Texas” with “facts is,” and that Kiss had a sensitive ballad called “Beth” that a popular senior couple reportedly played over and over while doing it. I’d of course heard the rumors about Rod Stewart needing his stomach pumped after a night of historic debauchery with the boys. I was fully aware that Joe Walsh had destroyed the Eagles and that because Jackson Browne was in love again his next album might really suck. I knew Bob Seger kept getting mistaken for a woman in one truck stop after another, and that cat scratch fever had nothing to do with cats, and that the fellows in Kansas were claiming I consisted of dust particulates. Meanwhile, across the state line, Missouri had a song whereby the road-weary rocker sings “Girl I want you but I just gotta go.” (My advice then as now is this: Stick with the girl; you need her more than the airwaves need you.)

Now, from this safe distance of twenty-five years, I sometimes dial up the classic rock station, as an amusement of sorts. KCFX, known as “the Fox,” is our city’s version of the cookie-cutter classic-rock station, and though I listen only periodically and with a pronounced amount of ironic detachment that I make sure is apparent on my face, I seem to hear the same twenty songs over and over, despite the station having fifty years of classic rock to cull. Curiously, whenever a caller wants to hear one of those twenty songs—“Hey, would it be remotely possible to play ‘New Kid in Town’ for my buddies and me?”—the dee-jay acts like the station could lose its license over this: “Ohhh, Jeez. Gosh, let me see. I think that is permissible.”

Last March, a friend and I set out to predict the ten songs KCFX would play in some randomly chosen hour. This friend, who now lives on the East coast, had been wary of radio rock in his teens as well and, like me, occasionally dips into it today. After fifteen minutes of thought, I devised my own list, as follows:

• “Bohemian Rhapsody,” by Queen
• “Heartache Tonight,” by the Eagles
• “Main Street,” by Bob Seger
• “Spill the Wine,” by War
• “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” by Meatloaf
• “The Best of Times,” by Styx
• “Roundabout,” by Yes
• “Cold as Ice,” by Foreigner
• “Layla,” by Derek & the Dominos

I felt good about my selections until I saw my friend’s, and then I felt like the kid who orders a Mister Misty at the Dairy Queen only to catch an eyeful of his brother’s banana split. His list made my list look sick, and I was sure he’d gotten nine of the ten correct. (Nine was the maximum possible in his case, because for his tenth choice he listed a jokey song.) Here, then, is his list of nine:

• "All Right Now" by Free
• "The Boys Are Back in Town" by Thin Lizzy
• "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf
• "Reeling In the Years" by Steely Dan
• "More Than a Feeling" by Boston
• "Carry On, My Wayward Son" by Kansas
• "Life's Been Good to Me So Far" by Joe Walsh
• "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" by BTO
• "Barracuda" by Heart

A night or two later I bellied up to my kids’ portable CD player and tuned in to KCFX. In between promotional announcements for a national dee-jay team called Bob and Tom (or was it Rick and Dom, or Whacks and Wayne), the station played these ten songs in this order:

• “Fat Bottom Girls,” by Queen
• “Love is Like Oxygen,” by Sweet
• “Black Dog,” by Led Zeppelin
• “Angel is a Centerfold,” by the J. Geils Band
• “Fame,” by David Bowie
• “Stand Back,” by Stevie Nicks
• “Here Comes My Girl,” by Tom Petty
• “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” by Traffic
• “Night Moves,” by Bob Seger
• “Foolin,” by Def Leppard

I shared this list with my friend. I had envisioned a rollicking dialogue in which we’d jabber about each song as a representation of some memory or moment. Alas, neither of us could think of a single anecdote or association that pertained to any of these songs. I don’t know if that was the consequences of having rejected radio rock back then, or more a matter of not having gotten out of the house much. At any rate, the telephone line that connected us halfway across the country that night transmitted little more than vocalized pauses and strategic throat clearings.

What, ultimately, can we take from this experiment? The experiment disabused me of the notion that the Fox only plays twenty songs. Clearly, this classic-rock station plays thirty.

Malts

After a Royals game in 1975, my brother Joe and two of his buddies visited Wimpey’s, a hamburger joint on Troost Avenue that was a hangout, if not a city-wide destination. They’d been to Wimpey’s a hundred times before, but that night one of the teens was disgruntled by the quality of his chocolate malt, so he stepped outside and heaved the cup at the front glass window and shouted “This malt sucks!" His pals inside had no choice but to grab for their food and drinks and scurry out, their long hair flying behind them.

Inside that car that sped away on Troost, I imagine the offender was both congratulated and censured; no doubt there were explosions of laughter and loud words spoken with the kinds of exaggerated inflections that are peculiar to such a moment—all of which played against the backdrop of an Allman Brothers eight-track tape.

Then the offender said this: “My bi-nocs!” The fool had left his father’s expensive binoculars on the customer countertop.

When the boys returned, the proprietor, Sam, was in the parking lot spraying down the mess. Somehow he resisted the urge to train that garden hose on them.

“You kids think you’re so funny,” he snarled into the car window.

He was right. But it was a safe call. Most high-school kids think they’re so funny.

I’ve heard that story a couple dozen times, and it continues to puzzle me, for I always thought Wimpey’s malts were delicious. They were as thick as pudding and therefore long-lasting, a welcome contrast to the watery, grainy shakes you’d find at McDonald’s. They were so thick, in fact, that when I dipped my stubby french fries into them the way a normal person dips his fries into ketchup, they often broke apart, only to reveal themselves later at the bottom of the cup as I dredged for the last vestiges of viscosity.

While the Wimpey’s malts were good, the best I ever had were blended in a certain Baskin-Robbins on a dozen or more occasions in 1985. But my malt-drinking buddy and I paid a steep price in both dollars and nervous energy. A large malt ran about three-fifty, an expenditure we took seriously because our hourly wages were equal to that sum.

Worse, the pair of adolescents who were always behind the counter believed that making malts was beneath them. They were ten years younger than us, looked like Eddie Haskell, and weighed fifty pounds each, but we spoke to them like low-level street soldiers might speak to the Godfather on the day of his daughter’s wedding. We’d even rehearse in the parking lot. I’d paste on the kind of silly grin that people affect when they’re introduced to Jimmy Carter, and I’d say, “Yes, could you be so kind as to concoct a large chocolate malt for me, using equal portions of chocolate and vanilla ice creams?” And my drinking buddy, playing the role of either Haskell, would park his hands on his hips and say, “I could lose my job because of this.”

They were always saying they could lose their jobs if they obliged any request we made. If we wanted more malt powder, less malt powder, a new straw, we were clearly putting their jobs on the line.

We suffered these surly kids only because each had the Midas touch when it came to blending malts. But they did not appreciate their special talent. Imagine if George W. Bush rolled his eyes every time someone dark-skinned got tortured—that’s how odd their behavior seemed.

No longer are there interesting ways to describe good food and drink. If you doubt me, watch the Food Network for a couple hours. I won’t dwell on how good those malts were, but I will spend a moment on their metaphorical significance. They simply represented all that was good on this earth, up until our straws began making those sad, sad sounds that prophesied the end was near. These noises were at first abrasive and rather belching in nature, but too soon they turned frightfully asthmatic as the southernmost points of the straws danced their desperate dry dance on the tiny round dance-floors. At that point, neither of us could think of anything outside of man’s inhumanity to man.

One night we got dizzy from spending half a minute inhaling nothing but the ghosts of malteds past.

“Now what?” said my friend, looking as glassy-eyed and wobbly as Ted Nugent looks at his breakfast table each day.

“Well, we can’t order another one or those kids might get fired,” I said.

“Those phonies. They’re nice to the cute girls but never to guys like us.”

As if on cue, a pair of pretty girls half our age approached the store. We sped toward them in a high-kneed gait, like British comedians would, and waved paper money and shouted “Girls! Say, girls!” Those pretty girls must have suddenly remembered they had a lot of homework to do because they turned and fled, leaving us with a diminishing view of the soles of their sneakers.

At some point, something must have cost the surly Haskells their jobs, or else they chose to work elsewhere. At any rate, after the boys were gone, the quality of malts spiraled at that store. One fall night, we polished off our runny drinks in about nine seconds flat and didn’t even bother to exercise our straws against the soggy bottom.

“Now what?” he asked, dispirited.

“Dairy Queen’s only ten minutes away.”

He looked at his shoes. “Has it come to this?”

It had.

Back before we discovered Baskin-Robbins, and decades before there were custard stands and creameries on every corner, a Dairy Queen was a welcome sight. The day I passed my driver’s test, my first destination was, of course, McDonald’s. I was sixteen and therefore hard-wired to make that sad choice. But my second trip, the next afternoon, was to the Dairy Queen in the Waldo community a few miles west of my home. I ordered a medium chocolate malt, and for the next two or three years I made that same purchase just about every day. I’d like to say there were cute girls behind the counter who drew me there on such a regular basis, but that would be a lie. The malts were why I came.

As I bring to a close this homage, allow me to describe an incident from the middle 1980s. One frosty evening, at the Minsky’s restaurant in Watts Mill, my malt-drinking buddy and I shared a large pizza that was festooned with Italian sausage and red onions, accompanied by industrial-sized sodas. Afterwards, while in the parking lot, with our belt-buckles loosened and pounds of masticated bread dough gassifying within our stomachs, we agreed that nothing would hit the spot so much as a large chocolate malt, and we knew there was a Baskin-Robbins not far away.

As I sat in my car a half-hour later, I recalled a favorite saying of my grandmother’s: “I’m so full, I couldn’t drink a thimble full of water.” Warily, I lifted the plastic lid and peeked into the cup to see just how much malt remained. Imagine my shock and agitation when what I spied within that cup were Ethan Brand’s furnace and Shylock’s ducats and Gatsby’s Daisy and Yoric’s skull and even Jon Lovitz’s devil, which was especially agitating because the evening predated Jon Lovitz as a featured player on “Saturday Night Live,” much less a regular cast member.

With trembling fingers I replaced the lid and asked my friend to take a look inside his cup. “What do you see?”

“Peacocks,” he said with a shiver. “And I do believe they are Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks.”

I nodded soberly. “Maybe it’s time we take a step back.”

The drive to my home was tough. We were so full that the very idea of respiration struck us as highly distasteful. We sat in a grim silence as my car proceeded north on Holmes Road. It was the kind of tense silence most often found between young felons who suddenly realize it wasn’t such a good idea to kill that neighbor kid a few minutes ago, and who both suddenly realize it was the other guy’s idea in the first place.

Then I don’t know why I put this out there, but let the record show that I did: “You know what’d go down good right now? A big greasy plate of onion rings.”

Now I remember why I put it out there. Even in my misery I hoped to make him laugh.

Indeed, his first response was to laugh, and it was a response that triggered my own laughter. But these laughs devolved into moans as we each focused on our own visions of greasy rings piled one atop the other. Suddenly, red and yellow spots danced before my eyes. I rushed to lower my window and noted my passenger doing the same. The pizza and the soda and the malt and everything I had eaten since the sixth grade now conspired towards liberty. I suspended my head out the window like a dog even as I hastened my dash home.

In troubled moments like that, when the sweat builds on the forehead and the saliva pools beneath the tonsils, even the most uneducated among us might find himself engaged in an interior monologue that owes much to Elizabethan prose styles: “O damn ye dissembling Dr. Pepper! Thou cursed shards of parmesan and thou divers boluses of leavened yeast, I entreat thee remain in thy hallowed repose for nigh on three or four minutes—depending on the caprices of these traffic lights—till I reacheth my most private and sanctified chamber.”

My friend tucked his head back inside and swallowed very hard and then called to me: “How’s a plate of sweet and sour pork sound right about now?”

We replaced our heads into the chilly air once again.

“Or a nice big bite of butter?” he proposed, green of face.

“Or, I called out, “a stick of butter dunked into a bowl of melted butter.”

“Speed, friend, speed,” he begged.

Rest assured that we made it home safely, somehow, where we soon split a six-pack of beer and chatted about television or something.