My Show Business Career
In 1959 I heard Lloyd Price’s recording “Personality” on the radio. It’s the first song – aside from lullabies and patriotic tunes like “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “This Land is Your Land” and “This Is My Country” I’d learned in elementary school chorus – that reached right inside and changed me. It swung hard (before I knew what swing was) and it had a choppy call-and-response between Price and the chorus that got under my skin (“PER-son-AL-ity WALK! PER-son-AL-ity”). At seven years old I didn’t have the money to purchase a copy (my allowance was ten cents a week and 45s cost several times that, and I spent my dime a week on comics), nor did I yet even have a clear sense it was possible to buy records. My parents owned a hi-fi and a small collection of Broadway show and light opera albums, but it wasn’t used much and I certainly wasn’t allowed to touch it myself.
I would listen to the radio waiting for that song, and get a thrill – a visceral, body-awakening thrill – when it came on. My head would bob during the verses, and then snap to the side for each interjected “Walk!” or “Talk!” in the chorus. I would spend my days with the song pleasantly stuck in my head, and would sing it to myself sotto voce on the school playground.
It was a kind of heaven to be so immersed in a song, to feel it in my body, to love every shred of it, anticipate the next encounter on my tiny transistor radio. I now know this is where my obsession with music really starts, and my conviction that, as Brian Wilson has said, “music is God’s voice.” Looking back on my life, this is where I made a commitment that no matter what happened – and at that point I probably wanted to be a fireman or a baseball player – I was always going to be around music. It was magic. One day I was a typical little boy of the fifties, interested in cowboys and sports and superheroes, and the next I was vibrating with The Beat!
I don’t know if it would have mattered to me if I’d found out Price was black. I hadn’t had much contact with Negroes at this point, living in an all-white neighborhood (and when I entered Pacoima Junior High in 1964 they were still segregating the classes, even though the school had a majority of Latino and black students). At the time I didn’t know anything about black culture. Now I can see the record straddles the line between black and white styles, with Price playing jazz hipster, pop singer, and Chitlin’ Circuit smoothie at the same time. (If I’d heard the massively amazing — and even better — “Stagger Lee” before I discovered “Personality” no telling what additional vistas Price might have opened up for me. I got there eventually, but finding blues and jump might have happened sooner.) I think “Personality” was a good place to start, with a record that was non-threatening and fun, and also a highly-accomplished piece of audio, precise and clear. It had a built-in element of surprise in the syncopation, and brought me at least a hint of experiences far beyond the sunshine of Southern California. It had soul.
Other records came along that knocked me over – “Be My Baby” and “Blowin’ In the Wind” and “In My Room” and “Nadine” – and eventually it dawned on me it was possible to play music as well as listen to it. I begged my parents for guitar lessons. After a while they relented, rented an acoustic guitar from a music store, and paid for my weekly sessions to learn the basics. I stuck to a practice schedule and built up my calluses for a year, playing exercises from the Mel Bay instruction books.
In late 1965 my parents bought me my first electric guitar, an electric hollow-bodied 1965 Gibson ES 175-D, sunburst finish. It cost them an enormous amount — $250 — which they paid off in installments of $10 a week. It should have cost double that, but a rich dentist – was there any other kind in the baby-booming sixties? – had bought it new and sold it back to the store after six weeks when he realized he didn’t have time for music lessons. (I still have the guitar. An on-line search indicates it’s worth about $4,700 today, but I will never part with it, or the used Gibson tube amp I got about a year later.)
The guitar came from the same place I took lessons, Stringland Music Studio on Sepulveda Blvd. in Mission Hills (the building’s still there but the business closed decades ago). My teacher was named Bob Mariotti, an old guy (was probably 30) who really knew music theory and only tolerated rock & roll because he had many young students. He wanted me to play real music like jazz standards, and taught me all the complicated chords and songs like “Desafinado” which didn’t reach me as much as The Dave Clark Five. I used to know how to construct diminished ninths and so forth, but I’ve forgotten it all now. My new electric guitar was the same model played by Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Herb Ellis & Howard Roberts, so his suggesting my parents buy it for me was part of his plot to improve my taste. I did eventually manage to prevail upon him to teach me some rock technique, and I still have many of my sheet music books with his scrawled “good” or “needs more work” with the full date (so I know exactly when I mastered Carl Wilson’s guitar lines for “Little Deuce Coupe” – Sept. 23, 1966, just after my 14th birthday).
Of course, I wanted to be a rock and roll star, and recruited a couple other would-bes from my junior high classmates, one of whom was a handsome guy and a pretty good drummer (forgotten his name) who owned decent equipment and had access to a car (!) since he was older and had a learner’s permit (!!). We didn’t have a bass player, just another guitar player, to round out the trio. (I remember thinking bass players weren’t really necessary because you couldn’t hear them much and they were just guitars with fewer strings weren’t they?) The rhythm guitarist (forgotten his name too) was a freckled red-hair-afro’d kid who I let in the band because he could play “Gloria” with the guitar behind his back. No kidding, that was the reason. I was the singer and lead guitarist and I picked the songs (“Glad All Over,” “Do You Believe In Magic” etc.). We called ourselves “The Cavaliers” because that name was already written on the bass drumhead (that was the drummer’s previous band’s name) and we didn’t have the money to change it.
We rehearsed in the drummer’s living room (his mother made us sandwiches), and only played a few gigs, two of which I remember well. We played on a stage at a community hall in Sepulveda during a swap meet, and I remember looking down at the ladies going through piles of secondhand clothing on long tables while I tried to impersonate my hero John Lennon during “Run For Your Life” and “Girl.” I had some problems playing the guitar that day because it wasn’t too light in the place, it was hot and dusty, and I was wearing my “Jim McGuinn” green-tinted square Ben Franklin-style glasses in order to look cool. . .but since they weren’t prescription (I’ve worn pretty thick glasses since 5th grade) the guitar neck was somewhat blurry and I missed a couple chord positions here and there. Nobody noticed, because nobody cared that we were playing while they looked for bargains. I think we got paid $5.
The other gig is very important to me. We were playing as entertainment at a boy scout luncheon held in the junior high auditorium, and people were actually paying some attention (there were parents and kids – about 50 people – listening to us after dessert), and we actually heard some applause, including during the red-head’s “Gloria” shtick. . .and then about halfway into our show my father walked up on the stage while we were playing, walked over to my amp, and turned it down. While we were playing. (WHILE we were PLAYING!) (WHILE WE WERE PLAYING!!!) I was too petrified and angry to turn it back up.
After our twenty minutes, which I played in a seething fury, I confronted my dad, asked him (politely, with teeth clenched) how he could have embarrassed me that way. He said rather indifferently “some people thought it was too loud” and that was that. He had no sympathy for me at all (and certainly didn’t think it had anything to do with “artistic expression” or any of junk). In those days, I thought parents had a RIGHT to do stuff like that, and even bringing it up to my dad was a triumph of nerve to me. He’s 87 now and we get along fine, but it still rankles. . .writing this down I re-experience the physical sensation of humiliation and rage. . .I’m still not ready to forgive him for that one.
