Summer Music Writing Challenge

Border Music

To the south and east of us

When my parents bought our first record player — a portable model some time in 1963 — my Dad went crazy buying 33 and 1/3 rpm albums. His collection of 78’s was collecting dust and other unwanted substances down on a basement shelf in a finished room that would one day rot from the overflow of a single toilet (to learn more about that room, please read here):

Dad began haunting the budget record bins at Sears, K-Mart, and whatever dime stores he ventured into. He came away with cutout treasures: Al Hirt, Pete Fountain, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Sinatra, and occasionally he would find things my mother liked: Sammy Kaye, Guy Lombardo, and Sinatra again.

It wouldn’t have done me any good to beg for an Elvis record then, because Dad wasn’t going to waste any money on Rock and Roll (much later, I’d learn to spend his money for him via the Columbia Record Club). So I got to hear things like “The Darktown Strutter’s Ball,” “Tuxedo Junction,” Sing, Sing, Sing,” and “Moonlight Serenade.” I wasn’t a fan then, though as most things go, when I got to be an adult, I appreciated those tastes my parents held so dearly, the music of their lives.

One vein I loved immediately, though, was the sound associated with the various incarnations of bands using the moniker, “The Tijuana Brass.” Of course, Herb Alpert had the best known iteration of that “Latin” sound, and so as Dad kept buying and playing Herb Alpert songs — “A Taste of Honey,” “The Spanish Flea,” “The Lonely Bull” — I found myself falling in love with the beat, the brass, and the swanky and suave moods of places I could only dream of.

A year into our music discoveries, my parents bought a floor model stereo console that stacked twelve records at a time. They let me operate it, too, and left to my own devices, we heard a steady pace of Tijuana Brass.

It seems bold and daring of them, given the kind of ordinary people they seemed to be, but when Herb Alpert and his band came to town, along with Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66, my Dad bought tickets for himself and Mom, and they reveled together in the sounds of the Latin-American world, raving the next morning about how great both bands were.

I think now that I would trade my journeys to see Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Marshall Tucker, and my last Jackson Browne concert to have been there with my folks at the Herb Alpert show, back in the mid-1960’s. Of course, I wouldn’t have been stoned, but I might have worn my gold turtleneck “dickie.”

Maybe I put it together in the summer of 1970, the summer before I started high school, but of the many bands I had fallen in love with, in the top three had to be Santana. A friend had given me Abraxas the previous Christmas, and I played the hell out of it. So I can’t say for sure that listening to “Samba Pa Ti” or “Black Magic Woman” put me in mind of “The Lonely Bull” or Sergio’s cover of “The Look of Love,” but I surely felt the echoes.

One other strange reverberation: in the early-to-mid 60’s on Sunday afternoon TV, our local ABC affiliate would often air a musical variety show called “Latin Returns to Broadway,” and Dad and I, at least, watched it every chance we got. IMDB tells me that this show aired starting in 1964, was actually called “Broadway Goes Latin,” and starred Edmundo Ros, The Arnaldo Dancers, and Chi Chi Navarro. I remember being mesmerized by the dancing, and Dad always remarked about the incredible drumming.

Still, in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1970’s summer heat, dancing in general, much less to rhythms that forced you to use every body part, didn’t come easy or often. I know some in my crowd associated Santana with hard drugs, and pictures of the band could scare a person’s grandmother and vintage next-door-neighbor, who thought long hair on men was right only for members of Parliament (no, not Funkadelic).

In that summer, our local mall had just opened, and in it was Musicland, where a kid with $3.69 in his or her pocket could buy eccentric albums for all tastes.

My friend Jimbo and I spent many summer days at the mall, our bell-bottom jeans dragging its concrete surface, our bare feet screaming to everyone that we were wild and untamable 14-year old hippies. The mall had a “head shop,” too, a place called “Expressions,” where we bought coke snuff, “Rain” incense, and where I saw not only Dennis Hopper Easy Rider posters, but also that indelible Frank Zappa on the toilet “Phi Zappa Krappa” poster.

I spent a lot of money at Musicland, but I can’t remember any more which of the albums in my collection came from them other than Santana 3, Neil Young’s Harvest, and The Allman Brother’s Brothers and Sisters. I know when I bought them that I felt too cool for words (actually, my mother bought Harvest for me, probably because she felt sorry for me since I had had to cut my collar-length hair to be in a period play at school). I know now and likely sensed then, however, that my music expansion wasn’t as wide as Jimbo’s.

Maybe he had more money than I did, or maybe he was just more ready to take chances that I wouldn’t.

So when I went to spend the night with him one one summer evening, he showed me his latest purchase:

We listened to both sides of the the band’s debut record, but it didn’t have a hit song to hold onto, and speaking only for myself, I just didn’t know how to listen to these sounds. Sometimes I got the electric guitar, as on track two, “Warning Blues,” and the percussion kept both of us hopping for a good while.

But I’ll go on and admit here that somewhere along track five, we got bored enough to turn the music down and start calling the girls we liked, mentioning what we were listening to, and making plans for the school year to come, when new vistas would open to match our awakening sensibilities.

There was so much to awaken, after all, and we did our best to meet all ends.

I think of that night in Jimbo’s basement bedroom, where after Mandrill, we might have turned to the soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar, Led Zeppelin I, or perhaps Bloodrock (look em up if you dare).

Or we could have just turned on Jimbo’s vintage red Coca-Cola radio and let WSGN play on into the night as we talked and eventually fell asleep, as good friends do.

I had forgotten about Mandrill and the Afro-Cuban musical direction it/they were trying to take us. Fortunately, my memory is long enough to recover the world as it was back in that summer of 1970, as the incense filled our young hippie lungs, and our too-open minds, with desire, a “brand new beat.”

Thanks to Jessica Lee McMillan for the summer song writing challenge and to The Riff for sponsoring!