Summer Song Writing Challenge

Today’s the Day

Another number for the road

Yesterday, in preparation for today, my brother sent me a text message with a link to The Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four.” It’s a song I’ve loved for fifty years and more. I didn’t own “Sgt. Pepper” until the summer of 1972, when I bought it from a Woolworth at Western Hills Mall, Midfield, Alabama.

The rest of that shopping trip was more nefarious, as I used the package with my prized album to cover a shoplifting moment in J.C. Penney’s where I grabbed a copy of Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, little knowing that in another thirty-two years, my wife would give birth to our second daughter.

Whom we named Layla.

“We go round and round and round in the circle game.”

So happy birthday to sixteen year-old me, who got away with a stupid act, and now to sixty-four year-old me who still can’t believe that I’m here, with “Vera, Chuck, and Dave,” the grandchildren who sit only metaphorically “on my knee.”

Such a long way, it seemed, to sixty-four.

“Mellow my mind,” Neil Young sings, “make me feel like a schoolboy on good time.”

Turning sixteen was a good time. My parents held a party for me with my friends, something they did throughout my teen years, and along with cooking burgers on the grill — served with baked beans, potato salad, slaw, and a homemade Apricot Brandy birthday cake — they presented me with what I wanted: a copy of Alice Cooper’s latest album, School’s Out.

Which I proceeded to play for the next few weeks at maximum volume, surely causing my folks to wonder about and doubt the value of raising children in a loving and comfy home.

Later on, my mother would claim to admire old Alice, with his boa and fake hanging and heavy eye shadow.

Hhhhmmm.

Fortunately, Dad hated the sound, and it’s always good to know that some things in the world don’t change, because both sixteen and sixty-four — and what a time this year is — are quite intimidating when you think about them too deeply, or even not much at all.

Certain birthdays you can’t forget, or at least the basic parameters stay firm. In these summer birthdays, my friends and I tried to hold our group together as best we could. It’s hard for anyone to tell you how fast and with such sudden eruption that your solid group can fall under some lonely bridge.

Neil Young again:

“My life is changing in so many ways I don’t know who to trust anymore. There’s a shadow running through my days, like a beggar going from door to door.”

I heard that one, too, at age sixteen, and though I couldn’t explain how profoundly it was true for me — how does a teenaged boy get to the seat of his emotional/hormonal state? — I surely felt it, and just as surely wore that record out. It still sits in my collection downstairs: a precious prize and testament to “getting through and on.”

When I turned nineteen in 1975, Alabama had recently declared that the drinking age could properly be set at that specific age-marker. Why nineteen? Because, of course, we who arrive there are now mature human beings, most of us having successfully negotiated our freshman year in college.

So, at another cookout my parents gave for me, there we were, my friends and me: Jimbo, Jim, Jane, Fred, Don, and maybe a few others.

This is where some details emerge clearly, leaving others behind in the brown summer haze.

After we stuffed ourselves with burgers and hot dogs — feeding my old dog Sandy some morsels under the table — my friends gave me my birthday presents. I wish I remembered what everyone gave me, but two, at least, I think I have right. Both of the givers read my stories regularly, and so if I’m mistaken, I hope they’ll correct me.

When people ask me what I want, my standard response — then, now, forever — is books and records (I know, with iTunes, Spotify, etc., album giving is a lost art, so maybe a specially selected playlist can be our substitute).

Jimbo usually got me a book, so maybe this nineteenth year it was John Fowles’ The Magus. If so, Wow.

Jim and Fred found the albums I wanted, and the two choices, I hope, say as much about us in this summer of 1975 as I trust anything can.

Fred gave me our love, Neil Young’s brand new release, Tonight’s the Night. Even for us, though, at this time of life, that album was a tough sell. It’s pretty bleak, as the album cover shows:

Of course, Neil had lost two close friends and band/roadie mates: Bruce Berry and Danny Whitten, both to drug OD’s. The album had no hit — nothing strange for a Neil record, though some had been spoiled by “Heart of Gold.” And while After the Gold Rush had no real hit either, there was something beautiful about that record: love songs and dreamy poetry to allow listeners to float on, high or not. Sure, “Southern Man” acknowledged truths many didn’t want Neil to bring up in a rock and roll album. Fortunately, he doesn’t tend to listen to the masses.

The only tune I liked immediately on Tonight’s the Night was “World on a String,” the jauntiest song on the record. I opened and played it for everyone, and we all looked at each other, but not in celebration. We were in my bedroom with its mahogany four poster bed and matching bureaus and dressers. A funny place to hear Neil, but everything there, except the stereo sitting on an orange bushed velvet trunk, I inherited from my grandmother who passed the summer before.

We didn’t make it to what eventually became my favorite song on the album, “Albequerque.” It was way down on side two, after “Roll Another Number for the Road,” which we also didn’t hear that night, but lived out later.

Jim handed me his gift then, and when I opened it, I found The Jefferson Starship’s Red Octopus. This was a sort of reunion album of the old Airplane, or rather, former Airplane lead singer Marty Balin had rejoined officially, and led the band to fame with the FM hit, “Miracles.”

Man, that electric piano!

Balin and Grace Slick had always complemented each other’s voices: his, mellow and wanting; hers, forceful and even scary-daunting. The Airplane had been just a few moments ahead of my time, and I hoped in this summer that the Starship could help me align with the drug-rock of that earlier decade.

Without Jorma and Jack Cassidy, though, they never had enough to pull it off.

Still here we were, listening to such a beautiful and lush sound, back in the days when FM radio seemed a revelation; when our lives, which had led us to this point, seemed ready to unfold in accordion dreams.

We listened for a few minutes more, and headed out to a place we could all congregate, because still not everyone in our group was nineteen. So maybe it was Pasquale’s Pizza, which served draft beer, or Jaws Lounge, which served other things. Maybe we listened to juke boxes full of those same silly love songs, or maybe after getting stoned, we played air hockey and foosball.

What I remember most is that we rode around, as always. We had a few weeks left of summer before we’d disperse again. And while this wasn’t technically our last summer together, in too many ways, it really was.

For there were endings out there, and none of them so miraculous.

Thanks again to summer writing challenge guru Jessica Lee McMillan, for the inspiration, and to Noah Levy for publishing!