Tape 4, Side B
[Begin Tape 4, Side B]
You’re absolutely right. Later on I read… The fifties has gotten the rap that it was the decade of dullness and conformity and Eisenhower, but not from where I sat; the last half of it anyway, it was all these movies, all these crazy movies comin’ out, and all this mad music from all over.
Were you still listening to jazz?
No, no. I really wasn’t listening to jazz ever, I mean not till later, but that’s when I heard my first bit of it, when my brother came out of the Korean War he had all these records, and I remembered that later, but I didn’t know what that was, and I wasn’t thinking of that when I started listening to the radio and playing things on the jukebox. But again it was more than just rock-and-roll because it still had this lingering hangover from pop music. ‘Ballad of Davy Crockett’ was so big at that time. That’s what happened to Your Hit Parade. You know Your Hit Parade was a TV show and they had their own staff of singers: Snooky Lanson, and Gisele Mackenzie might have been on there, but they would come on and sing the top ten hits of the day and maybe some up-and-comers, and they would be able to handle Perry Como [sings]: Find a ring and it goes round, round, round, or they might be able to handle even something like Guy Mitchell ‘Singin’ the Blues’ [sings]: Well I never felt more like… which was getting into country rockabilly stuff; they could do that, or ‘Behind the Green Door’ [sings]: There’s an old piano behind the green door…. But it got kind of silly. The top ten would change a lot, but then when things like ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett’ came along and rock-and-roll, things would occupy the number one spot or the same top-ten spots week after week after week after week, ‘cause the kids were buying the records. So you know they just got tired every week to see, they’re trying to run new changes on ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett’. They’d come out and they’d all have coonskin caps, or one of them would have a coonskin cap and [sings]: Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee… and they just went out of business when rock-and-roll started dominating the charts because they couldn’t do that, you know, they couldn’t handle [sings]: A wap bap a lou bop [laughter], or not even Elvis Presley or Fats Domino, they might have been able to do but it just wasn’t the thing.
Did you notice did they play black artists on the same… when they started playing rock-and-roll would they have Little Richard and Elvis Presley on the same bill?
Well by then when I was listening to it it was in St. Louis, and yep, they would. I mean I heard blacker stuff later on, and there was a whole world of race music and black music that wasn’t getting played on the mixed stations or the pop stations, and then there was all this… I mean doo-wop, all around the country there were these tiny little labels and sometimes they’d only pump out one or two records, and I didn’t discover this until relatively recently because from Down Home Music and KPFA they have these doo-wop guys, and they would collect all these records, you know, people you’ve never heard of, one record maybe, and they weren’t hits, so that was going on all the time, but all the big stars—the school I went to, Chuck Berry’s daughters went there, and they were listening to all that stuff, so whatever the black kids were listening to we were listening to too. Everybody at school--in St. Louis anyway--that’s the way it was; we were in that same bag. I don’t know if they liked Elvis Presley, but they certainly liked Chuck Berry, and we liked Chuck Berry. So it was all there. We didn’t know about payola then, so who knows what was driving what. Alan Freed always said ‘The hit’s in the grooves’, but he was getting paid too.
Was he one of the ones who was indicted, or whatever came down?
I’m not sure if he ever was. Lots were. But that was one of the hallmarks of that culture, of the kid culture of that time, was what was coming out on the radio, and everybody was listening to the same thing. It’s everything that you can pick up on an oldies compilation. Those things were all out there, and it just kept turning over, it was coming out over and over and over. I mean new stuff coming out all the time, and it was so rich and so varied. It wasn’t just songs about dating or whatever; there were songs about dances! [laughter] There were songs about clothes. All those songs about clothes: “A white sport coat and a pink carnation”, “An itsy bitsy teeny Weenie yellow polka dot bikini”, and ‘Black Slacks’: a whole song about pants! You know: When I put ‘em on I’m really rarin’ to go. [sings] Black slacks! They make me cool daddy-o/ When I put ‘em on I’m a rarin’ to go. And like you said, there were songs about cars. That was probably a little bit later. This was like fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven, fifty-eight. But sure. Then all those groups: The Platters, The Miracles—no, not The Miracles yet—The Platters, The Coasters. And weird things would happen, like The Everly Brothers. [laughter] And the promoters would be jumping on top of that, you know, just like after Elvis Presley there was Conway Twitty. This was before he turned into a country singer, he started out as a rock-and-roll singer.
Really?
Yeah. Conway Twitty… What was his big song? “Breathless” [sings]: You make me breathless…. Yeah, it was a big rock… And he had to have a funny name because Elvis Presley—that was the thing about Elvis Presley, that name was so funny. Elvis Presley! [laughter] That was the coolest thing at first about Elvis Presley, he just had that name. So then the promoters, you know, the adults were: Conway Twitty, we’ll go with Conway Twitty; kids like that too. [laughter] Twitty! Mrs. Twitty, can little Conway come out and play?
So that was a made up name? I thought it was too weird to be made up.
Yeah, sure, it was Herb Johnson* or something like that; no, Elvis’s was. So you know they would answer, they would try to come up with something—you know promoters have always been the same, and record people, they’re just, they’re in it for the money. The Everly Brothers cranked out a couple of hits, and then they came up with The Kalin Twins; they were brothers too. They had some big hits in the Midwest. ‘When’ was one of their big hits. The groups would start copying one another. But there was just some fantastic great music that still holds up today.
What kind of radio did you have? Did you have a radio in your room at the…?
I don’t remember. I was thinking about it. I must have had a record player too because I remember clearly shoplifting records [laughter]. I remember the first record I ever stole. I wasn’t that much of a thief, but I had to have some records, you know, and some of them were just like the movies, whatever you could get, you got. So the first one I wound up with was ‘Happy Birthday, Baby’ by The Teddy Bears. You know that song Phil Spector wrote about his father dying.
I didn’t know that background on it.
No, no. Wait a minute, I got that mixed up. Maybe that’s a flip side. No. What’s that song about…? No, that’s not it. That is the first one but that’s not the song I’m thinking of. ‘Happy Birthday, Baby’, by The Teddy Bears. Did they do another song? Oh, ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’, that’s the song that Phil Spector wrote about his father. It might have been the flip; that’s why I got them mixed up. I don’t know. But that’s the only record I remember having. I must have bought more, you know those little portable record players with the great big…
So you bought some and you stole some and however you could…
45s: the little record with the hole in the middle to match the one in your head. [laughter] The little record with the big hole in the middle to match the one in your head. That’s what they used to say.
That was a promotion?
That was a Firesign Theatre I think. [laughter] Well I could just sit back and close my eyes and start rattling off all these old songs, but I liked the novelty songs too. My favorite kind of song though—what was on the radio--I was starting to get interested in parodies of all kinds because of Mad Magazine. And Mad Magazine, there was another thing that came out of the fifties that’s just… talk about mind blowing.
Do you remember when it was EC Comics, before the Comic Book Code Authority or whatever it was called came in?
Oh yeah. I remember the very earliest Mad. When it was published by EC Comics I think the code had already hit, and I never saw any of those comic books with the bleeding skulls and the... They all had to do with nude women scientists [laughter]. All those, you know those kind of shrieking horror movies with corpses dismembered and all: didn’t see any of that, so I think the code had already hit by then, but Mad wasn’t dirty, I mean it wasn’t scary or anything like that; it was just nuts; it was just wild. And the best thing about it was they would do these parodies of other comic strips. I mean comic strips or comic books like ‘Superduper Man’ or ‘The Lonesome Stranger’, or… I just thought all that stuff was great, because all that stuff was the background that we were presented with, and here were these wild men making fun of all that stuff. So I liked the records that made fun of other records, and I also liked this kind of record, they would take snippets from other records and weave it into a phony story. For some reason I just thought that was a trip. You know like ‘A Flying Saucer’ I think was one of them, and a flying saucer would come down and they’d go and ask the alien a question and he’d go [sings]: A blue, blue, blue suede shoes.
Yeah, I remember those.
Those were good.
You’d mentioned before comic books, and I’m curious: did you have particular ones you were into?
Yeah, comic books were a big, big staple, a big way of having fun. You know you could trade ‘em. You could deal with the other kids on that level, swap ‘em, trade ‘em, share ‘em with your friends. But again, like the movies, I’d read any damn thing. I’d read the girl comics: Katy Keen, and the model comics. I’d read anything, sometimes even comics for little kids: Mickey Junior or whatever. I never liked the Disney comics. I’d read the super hero, Superman, Batman, they were okay, but Captain Marvel, that was very different. Yeah, that was very different. The style was different, and it was quirky. I started liking the quirky things, the off-the-wall things. Plastic Man: he was the best. You know Plastic Man? The style was very different than the other comic book heroes, and the dialog was different, but Plastic Man he…
Was he that stretchy guy?
Yeah, he could stretch through a keyhole. He could instantly, if he needed to disguise himself he could assume the shape of a chair or whatever, but it would look like Plastic Man, Plastic Man’s red and yellow stripes; and Plastic Man wore these great big shades, these big wraparound visor shades, and so the chair would have those on them; and how the crooks didn’t know that that was Plastic Man, I don’t know, but that was just part of the fun. It wasn’t serious like Batman and Superman were sort of serious and normal. And cowboy comics, classics comics, I’d read all of them too, but they weren’t that interesting, those crazy comics. The Popeye comics were good because they’d have other things besides Popeye in them. They had some crazy things. I liked, let’s see, there was Nancy and Sluggo. Nancy and Sluggo comics were great ‘cause—remember these two little kids, Nancy and Sluggo? She had an aunt but she didn’t seem to have… she seemed to be on her own. Sluggo had nothing, you know, there was no Mr. Sluggo or, it was just Sluggo, this little kid with a stubbley head and a black turtleneck. And what was that other one? Nancy and… Little Lulu. Little Lulu; occasionally she would have these episodes that were almost psychedelic. She would, I don’t know, she would ingest something or recite a spell and she would go into these trips…
Kind of like those Betty Boop…?
Yeah, kind of like that, yeah; she’d go into these other-worldly trips. So I liked that part of it. And you know I was always drawing myself and there was another kid at the home who was really talented and we’d work up our own comic strips.
Did you make books out of these?
Yeah, just like Crumb! If I’d stayed with it, who knows, I might be out there begging on the sidewalk like Maxon Crumb.* But I never could repeat characters very well. I could draw all sorts of stuff but…
You always wanted to move on to the next thing?
Yeah, I don’t know; I just never could repeat.
How did I guess…
Yeah, monkey mind. I could just never, from panel to panel I couldn’t repeat the same characters, or I could’ve if I’d studied but I didn’t want to.
But did you kind of keep sketchbooks and draw; you drew a lot, huh?
Yeah, I drew a lot and took art classes at school and painted and that sort of stuff.
So you did study it a bit then.
Yeah, I took classes in school. I remember the ceramics class I took, you know, with the wheel and the pottery and all that.
It sounds like a really rich existence actually, you know.
It was, and you know in retrospect I can’t complain. I can’t complain about a damn thing. And you know the best part of it was I didn’t have a mother and father around. These people who were in control of me, I didn’t have any reason to please or not please them. I just wanted them basically to leave me alone so I could do whatever I wanted to do, and when they didn’t I tried to find ways around that, and that’s how I got into trouble, I guess. There was probably some element of making trouble for its own sake, you know, as another creative venture [laughter]. You know I don’t remember it exactly like that, but I didn’t have any pressure or anything; I was completely… and they left you alone to do that sort of stuff; like I told you there was that one kid who never came out of his room. Who knows what he was doing in there; he was working on his own projects. I don’t know, but they didn’t much care about that. As long as you didn’t throw water on ‘em [laughter]. So the fifties were rich! And you could buy Mad Magazines. That was one thing; I wasn’t even supposed to have any of those Mad Magazines. That was one of the things you shouldn’t do, you shouldn’t have any of those Mad Magazines or any of those bad comic books, but you could get ‘em, and there were no room searches or anything like that.
The people from the home said that those were bad, bad influences on a boy?
Yeah, that’s right. And you know at the home they had all these different kids who were all doing different things. One guy there he was like the captain of the high school football team, and he went around with his letter jacket on all the time, and strength and physical prowess was a big thing at the home because there was a certain amount of pecking order, especially with the boys, and he was the strongest boy of them all but he was the sweetest person, you know, one of the purest people I’ve ever met.
Really?
Yeah. He never got into altercations. The only time he would exercise his strength is when one of the other kids started messing with somebody else, or when he saw that there was a power imbalance or something like that.
Really?
Yeah. And he took a liking to me and there was this one guy there, he had… there were fifteen-, sixteen-year-old boys, and he’d developed a huge amount of stubble on his face—he had to shave: he had to shave!—and he liked to get the young boys down and rub his stubble on their face. Yeah, that was his greatest pleasure, and he was doing that to me once and it had gone on for minutes and I was yelping, and suddenly he was just kind of lifted off and thrown aside [laughter]. Yeah, and he said [softly imploring]: “Don’t do that.” So he was like the third strongest kid, and there was one kid, I think I mentioned him before, he was the one who would physically attack some of the adults there. He was really—I mean he had the appearance of great strength, and he was, he was strong, but this other guy, Doug, the football guy, he could just sweep him aside. He would just go envelop him and wrench his arms around his back and drive him to the ground and sit on him, you know, with no fanfare at all, this guy who was—he messed with me a couple times, he was really strong, this other guy. So it just goes to show you, I don’t know what.
Where did you end up in the pecking order, or maybe not end up, because it probably evolved as you got older, but did this kind of thing happen much, getting picked on?
Not at the home; sometimes at school it did, but I sort of, you know, I could make people laugh, and I could scoot around a bit.
What do you mean? You were quick?
Well I was kind of slippery. Kind of slippery, ‘cause maybe I could see things coming and so I’d stay out of it.
Was the school tough compared to the home?
Yeah, well I think only in a normal sort of kid way, but in the home there were rules, there wasn’t supposed to be any fighting and there was a smaller population and it was difficult to do anything really rotten, and anyway you knew you had to wake up and there’d be the same people again and, who knows, maybe all the little kids would get together and beat up on you or something like that [laughter].
Like the Lilliputians.
But there was a sort of… there wasn’t a real strong, I mean in the ‘we’re all in this together’ sense, but there was a sort of connectedness, kind of an informal family deal. And in a way some of the kids looked out for some of the other kids. You know we all helped each other with schoolwork and that sort of stuff. There were huge group study sessions.
Really?
Yeah, yeah, we had to do well in school.
Or… were there consequences if you didn’t?
Yeah, if you didn’t then you’d have to be supervised. You’d have to be supervised while you did your homework. Your privileges were restricted, and maybe, if I remember correctly, they actually had some outside tutors come in for some of the kids. Apart from having nothing to complain about—[in an exaggerated indignant voice] other than the restriction of one’s personal liberties—just the opposite, you know, they did a good job, at least while I was there.
We’re certainly not getting any horror stories about a Dickensian institution here.
No. My brother has some horror stories. That was later on, the second time around.
Were conditions different for him?
I think they were different. I think things were a little different, plus he had more problems than I did, maybe learning problems or developmental problems, that sort of thing, and I didn’t have any of those sort of problems, I was just, like I say, as long as they didn’t make me work too hard I could do all that school stuff. But I didn’t take any of it to heart. It was neither odious nor a great source of fun to go to school, it was just another thing, one of the things you had to do. But that changed a little bit when I got out of grade school. So now here I am, I’m out of grade school. I thought I was gonna have to go to Soldan High School, which was the high school right in the neighborhood. It was just a block or two from the grade school, and I always remember it as this huge, big foreboding brick prison-like, fortress-like building. I’d been in there a couple of times with all these gorillas and thugs, you know, wandering the corridors.
That was the impression you got, or do you think it was actually pretty much correct?
Probably it wasn’t like that. It just seemed like all these hulks, you know these brooding, monosyllabic mouth-breathers [laughs]. I just didn’t relish the idea of going there. I thought it was also more serious; high school, your permanent record, it’s going to be on your permanent…. What was that other thing they used to tell me? Oh yeah…the other thing that I started believing about myself. Your ego is composed of what people tell you about yourself. One of the things they told me was that I wasn’t performing up to my potential. I wasn’t exercising… However they say that, bastards. So I thought, you know, well they’re going to make me do that in this high school, but I wound up not going there because of the conditions that I described earlier where they saw my grade school graduating picture and there were only two or three white faces in it, so that was it: everything changed.
So racial panic set in among the...
That’s the way I remember it, you know, it could have nothing to do with that. It could have been on the books for years that they were going to make this change, but that was the story I always heard. It was the received wisdom I think—all the kids believed it, so who knows. Some of the kids were more connected to… Some of the kids had more, the older kids especially, they had more information about the background workings of the home, stuff that I didn't even pay any attention to at all. And by then there also was an assistant superintendent hired. There was always a superintendent of the entire grounds and a matron for the children’s home and a matron for the old people’s home. So they imposed this other level, an assistant superintendent, and he had a son about our age, and he was the source of a lot of the info that was… yeah. He was kind of a nerd, and you had to give him something. But he didn’t live in the home, he lived in an apartment building. He was a real nosebleed; he was a real sad sack. I don’t even know if he went to the same school that we did, but he was our age.
And you could get information out of him.
You could get stuff from him, yeah, as I remember, and some of the older kids may have heard stuff from their parents too, you know we didn’t have these conduits, I didn’t have these conduits of information, but that’s the way I looked at it. So all the kids that were going to high school were bussed out to Clayton, Missouri, Clayton High School, which is a suburb of Missouri. Pretty wealthy, as I remember it, and I was telling you before, a lot of Jewish kids, which I’d never, I’d never met no Jewish kids before. That was real new, and a lot of well-to-do kids. First, there was some other thing I wanted to mention because it popped up: When I was going to this gifted school, occasionally I would get rides home with one of the kids and his father. His father was a musician or an organist or something at one of the universities nearby and he drove this old Morris Minor. And you know he was very tweedy, he always had a scarf and a three-piece suit. He was an academic but he was also a musician of some kind, and sometimes we’d have to go into the university. It might have been the University of Washington, which is there in St. Louis, I’m not sure, but we’d drive in this Morris Minor and wait there while his father did whatever he did sometimes. I think I can remember hearing organ playing, but we’d wait in this little office and play around. So I just threw that in as something I remembered as another experience outside the home life I had, and the thing about it was the way this kid spoke to his father that really sticks in my mind. I just could not understand it. He was always raggin’ him up one side and down the other and whining about how this didn’t happen and that didn’t happen, and you know he was one of these gifted too so you know he could really talk. But it was the way he talked to his father and his father didn’t…
So it kind of surprised you that the father didn’t handle it differently?
Well not only that. I remember thinking clearly, jeez, you know, something like--and this is about as maudlin as I ever get—If he only knew how lucky he is to have a father. All these kids that I lived with every day, they didn’t have fathers and mothers, and when their fathers and mothers came over, they didn’t talk to them like that. But I think I might even have asked him one time: How can you talk to your father like that? And he said: Oh he doesn’t mind, or something like that, and he probably didn’t. He probably didn’t. They got along okay that way, but that was real odd.
It sounds like though neither of them knew better. The kid didn’t realize, hey, if you didn’t have a father, and the father sounds like he didn’t realize that he didn’t have to have his kid talk to him that way.
Yeah, I mean in my experience you got smacked [laughter] for that kind of thing. It’s like kids who call their father by their first names. I never understood that either.
We’re just about at the end here.
Are we gonna keep goin’?
[End Tape 4, Side B]
You’re absolutely right. Later on I read… The fifties has gotten the rap that it was the decade of dullness and conformity and Eisenhower, but not from where I sat; the last half of it anyway, it was all these movies, all these crazy movies comin’ out, and all this mad music from all over.
Were you still listening to jazz?
No, no. I really wasn’t listening to jazz ever, I mean not till later, but that’s when I heard my first bit of it, when my brother came out of the Korean War he had all these records, and I remembered that later, but I didn’t know what that was, and I wasn’t thinking of that when I started listening to the radio and playing things on the jukebox. But again it was more than just rock-and-roll because it still had this lingering hangover from pop music. ‘Ballad of Davy Crockett’ was so big at that time. That’s what happened to Your Hit Parade. You know Your Hit Parade was a TV show and they had their own staff of singers: Snooky Lanson, and Gisele Mackenzie might have been on there, but they would come on and sing the top ten hits of the day and maybe some up-and-comers, and they would be able to handle Perry Como [sings]: Find a ring and it goes round, round, round, or they might be able to handle even something like Guy Mitchell ‘Singin’ the Blues’ [sings]: Well I never felt more like… which was getting into country rockabilly stuff; they could do that, or ‘Behind the Green Door’ [sings]: There’s an old piano behind the green door…. But it got kind of silly. The top ten would change a lot, but then when things like ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett’ came along and rock-and-roll, things would occupy the number one spot or the same top-ten spots week after week after week after week, ‘cause the kids were buying the records. So you know they just got tired every week to see, they’re trying to run new changes on ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett’. They’d come out and they’d all have coonskin caps, or one of them would have a coonskin cap and [sings]: Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee… and they just went out of business when rock-and-roll started dominating the charts because they couldn’t do that, you know, they couldn’t handle [sings]: A wap bap a lou bop [laughter], or not even Elvis Presley or Fats Domino, they might have been able to do but it just wasn’t the thing.
Did you notice did they play black artists on the same… when they started playing rock-and-roll would they have Little Richard and Elvis Presley on the same bill?
Well by then when I was listening to it it was in St. Louis, and yep, they would. I mean I heard blacker stuff later on, and there was a whole world of race music and black music that wasn’t getting played on the mixed stations or the pop stations, and then there was all this… I mean doo-wop, all around the country there were these tiny little labels and sometimes they’d only pump out one or two records, and I didn’t discover this until relatively recently because from Down Home Music and KPFA they have these doo-wop guys, and they would collect all these records, you know, people you’ve never heard of, one record maybe, and they weren’t hits, so that was going on all the time, but all the big stars—the school I went to, Chuck Berry’s daughters went there, and they were listening to all that stuff, so whatever the black kids were listening to we were listening to too. Everybody at school--in St. Louis anyway--that’s the way it was; we were in that same bag. I don’t know if they liked Elvis Presley, but they certainly liked Chuck Berry, and we liked Chuck Berry. So it was all there. We didn’t know about payola then, so who knows what was driving what. Alan Freed always said ‘The hit’s in the grooves’, but he was getting paid too.
Was he one of the ones who was indicted, or whatever came down?
I’m not sure if he ever was. Lots were. But that was one of the hallmarks of that culture, of the kid culture of that time, was what was coming out on the radio, and everybody was listening to the same thing. It’s everything that you can pick up on an oldies compilation. Those things were all out there, and it just kept turning over, it was coming out over and over and over. I mean new stuff coming out all the time, and it was so rich and so varied. It wasn’t just songs about dating or whatever; there were songs about dances! [laughter] There were songs about clothes. All those songs about clothes: “A white sport coat and a pink carnation”, “An itsy bitsy teeny Weenie yellow polka dot bikini”, and ‘Black Slacks’: a whole song about pants! You know: When I put ‘em on I’m really rarin’ to go. [sings] Black slacks! They make me cool daddy-o/ When I put ‘em on I’m a rarin’ to go. And like you said, there were songs about cars. That was probably a little bit later. This was like fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven, fifty-eight. But sure. Then all those groups: The Platters, The Miracles—no, not The Miracles yet—The Platters, The Coasters. And weird things would happen, like The Everly Brothers. [laughter] And the promoters would be jumping on top of that, you know, just like after Elvis Presley there was Conway Twitty. This was before he turned into a country singer, he started out as a rock-and-roll singer.
Really?
Yeah. Conway Twitty… What was his big song? “Breathless” [sings]: You make me breathless…. Yeah, it was a big rock… And he had to have a funny name because Elvis Presley—that was the thing about Elvis Presley, that name was so funny. Elvis Presley! [laughter] That was the coolest thing at first about Elvis Presley, he just had that name. So then the promoters, you know, the adults were: Conway Twitty, we’ll go with Conway Twitty; kids like that too. [laughter] Twitty! Mrs. Twitty, can little Conway come out and play?
So that was a made up name? I thought it was too weird to be made up.
Yeah, sure, it was Herb Johnson* or something like that; no, Elvis’s was. So you know they would answer, they would try to come up with something—you know promoters have always been the same, and record people, they’re just, they’re in it for the money. The Everly Brothers cranked out a couple of hits, and then they came up with The Kalin Twins; they were brothers too. They had some big hits in the Midwest. ‘When’ was one of their big hits. The groups would start copying one another. But there was just some fantastic great music that still holds up today.
What kind of radio did you have? Did you have a radio in your room at the…?
I don’t remember. I was thinking about it. I must have had a record player too because I remember clearly shoplifting records [laughter]. I remember the first record I ever stole. I wasn’t that much of a thief, but I had to have some records, you know, and some of them were just like the movies, whatever you could get, you got. So the first one I wound up with was ‘Happy Birthday, Baby’ by The Teddy Bears. You know that song Phil Spector wrote about his father dying.
I didn’t know that background on it.
No, no. Wait a minute, I got that mixed up. Maybe that’s a flip side. No. What’s that song about…? No, that’s not it. That is the first one but that’s not the song I’m thinking of. ‘Happy Birthday, Baby’, by The Teddy Bears. Did they do another song? Oh, ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’, that’s the song that Phil Spector wrote about his father. It might have been the flip; that’s why I got them mixed up. I don’t know. But that’s the only record I remember having. I must have bought more, you know those little portable record players with the great big…
So you bought some and you stole some and however you could…
45s: the little record with the hole in the middle to match the one in your head. [laughter] The little record with the big hole in the middle to match the one in your head. That’s what they used to say.
That was a promotion?
That was a Firesign Theatre I think. [laughter] Well I could just sit back and close my eyes and start rattling off all these old songs, but I liked the novelty songs too. My favorite kind of song though—what was on the radio--I was starting to get interested in parodies of all kinds because of Mad Magazine. And Mad Magazine, there was another thing that came out of the fifties that’s just… talk about mind blowing.
Do you remember when it was EC Comics, before the Comic Book Code Authority or whatever it was called came in?
Oh yeah. I remember the very earliest Mad. When it was published by EC Comics I think the code had already hit, and I never saw any of those comic books with the bleeding skulls and the... They all had to do with nude women scientists [laughter]. All those, you know those kind of shrieking horror movies with corpses dismembered and all: didn’t see any of that, so I think the code had already hit by then, but Mad wasn’t dirty, I mean it wasn’t scary or anything like that; it was just nuts; it was just wild. And the best thing about it was they would do these parodies of other comic strips. I mean comic strips or comic books like ‘Superduper Man’ or ‘The Lonesome Stranger’, or… I just thought all that stuff was great, because all that stuff was the background that we were presented with, and here were these wild men making fun of all that stuff. So I liked the records that made fun of other records, and I also liked this kind of record, they would take snippets from other records and weave it into a phony story. For some reason I just thought that was a trip. You know like ‘A Flying Saucer’ I think was one of them, and a flying saucer would come down and they’d go and ask the alien a question and he’d go [sings]: A blue, blue, blue suede shoes.
Yeah, I remember those.
Those were good.
You’d mentioned before comic books, and I’m curious: did you have particular ones you were into?
Yeah, comic books were a big, big staple, a big way of having fun. You know you could trade ‘em. You could deal with the other kids on that level, swap ‘em, trade ‘em, share ‘em with your friends. But again, like the movies, I’d read any damn thing. I’d read the girl comics: Katy Keen, and the model comics. I’d read anything, sometimes even comics for little kids: Mickey Junior or whatever. I never liked the Disney comics. I’d read the super hero, Superman, Batman, they were okay, but Captain Marvel, that was very different. Yeah, that was very different. The style was different, and it was quirky. I started liking the quirky things, the off-the-wall things. Plastic Man: he was the best. You know Plastic Man? The style was very different than the other comic book heroes, and the dialog was different, but Plastic Man he…
Was he that stretchy guy?
Yeah, he could stretch through a keyhole. He could instantly, if he needed to disguise himself he could assume the shape of a chair or whatever, but it would look like Plastic Man, Plastic Man’s red and yellow stripes; and Plastic Man wore these great big shades, these big wraparound visor shades, and so the chair would have those on them; and how the crooks didn’t know that that was Plastic Man, I don’t know, but that was just part of the fun. It wasn’t serious like Batman and Superman were sort of serious and normal. And cowboy comics, classics comics, I’d read all of them too, but they weren’t that interesting, those crazy comics. The Popeye comics were good because they’d have other things besides Popeye in them. They had some crazy things. I liked, let’s see, there was Nancy and Sluggo. Nancy and Sluggo comics were great ‘cause—remember these two little kids, Nancy and Sluggo? She had an aunt but she didn’t seem to have… she seemed to be on her own. Sluggo had nothing, you know, there was no Mr. Sluggo or, it was just Sluggo, this little kid with a stubbley head and a black turtleneck. And what was that other one? Nancy and… Little Lulu. Little Lulu; occasionally she would have these episodes that were almost psychedelic. She would, I don’t know, she would ingest something or recite a spell and she would go into these trips…
Kind of like those Betty Boop…?
Yeah, kind of like that, yeah; she’d go into these other-worldly trips. So I liked that part of it. And you know I was always drawing myself and there was another kid at the home who was really talented and we’d work up our own comic strips.
Did you make books out of these?
Yeah, just like Crumb! If I’d stayed with it, who knows, I might be out there begging on the sidewalk like Maxon Crumb.* But I never could repeat characters very well. I could draw all sorts of stuff but…
You always wanted to move on to the next thing?
Yeah, I don’t know; I just never could repeat.
How did I guess…
Yeah, monkey mind. I could just never, from panel to panel I couldn’t repeat the same characters, or I could’ve if I’d studied but I didn’t want to.
But did you kind of keep sketchbooks and draw; you drew a lot, huh?
Yeah, I drew a lot and took art classes at school and painted and that sort of stuff.
So you did study it a bit then.
Yeah, I took classes in school. I remember the ceramics class I took, you know, with the wheel and the pottery and all that.
It sounds like a really rich existence actually, you know.
It was, and you know in retrospect I can’t complain. I can’t complain about a damn thing. And you know the best part of it was I didn’t have a mother and father around. These people who were in control of me, I didn’t have any reason to please or not please them. I just wanted them basically to leave me alone so I could do whatever I wanted to do, and when they didn’t I tried to find ways around that, and that’s how I got into trouble, I guess. There was probably some element of making trouble for its own sake, you know, as another creative venture [laughter]. You know I don’t remember it exactly like that, but I didn’t have any pressure or anything; I was completely… and they left you alone to do that sort of stuff; like I told you there was that one kid who never came out of his room. Who knows what he was doing in there; he was working on his own projects. I don’t know, but they didn’t much care about that. As long as you didn’t throw water on ‘em [laughter]. So the fifties were rich! And you could buy Mad Magazines. That was one thing; I wasn’t even supposed to have any of those Mad Magazines. That was one of the things you shouldn’t do, you shouldn’t have any of those Mad Magazines or any of those bad comic books, but you could get ‘em, and there were no room searches or anything like that.
The people from the home said that those were bad, bad influences on a boy?
Yeah, that’s right. And you know at the home they had all these different kids who were all doing different things. One guy there he was like the captain of the high school football team, and he went around with his letter jacket on all the time, and strength and physical prowess was a big thing at the home because there was a certain amount of pecking order, especially with the boys, and he was the strongest boy of them all but he was the sweetest person, you know, one of the purest people I’ve ever met.
Really?
Yeah. He never got into altercations. The only time he would exercise his strength is when one of the other kids started messing with somebody else, or when he saw that there was a power imbalance or something like that.
Really?
Yeah. And he took a liking to me and there was this one guy there, he had… there were fifteen-, sixteen-year-old boys, and he’d developed a huge amount of stubble on his face—he had to shave: he had to shave!—and he liked to get the young boys down and rub his stubble on their face. Yeah, that was his greatest pleasure, and he was doing that to me once and it had gone on for minutes and I was yelping, and suddenly he was just kind of lifted off and thrown aside [laughter]. Yeah, and he said [softly imploring]: “Don’t do that.” So he was like the third strongest kid, and there was one kid, I think I mentioned him before, he was the one who would physically attack some of the adults there. He was really—I mean he had the appearance of great strength, and he was, he was strong, but this other guy, Doug, the football guy, he could just sweep him aside. He would just go envelop him and wrench his arms around his back and drive him to the ground and sit on him, you know, with no fanfare at all, this guy who was—he messed with me a couple times, he was really strong, this other guy. So it just goes to show you, I don’t know what.
Where did you end up in the pecking order, or maybe not end up, because it probably evolved as you got older, but did this kind of thing happen much, getting picked on?
Not at the home; sometimes at school it did, but I sort of, you know, I could make people laugh, and I could scoot around a bit.
What do you mean? You were quick?
Well I was kind of slippery. Kind of slippery, ‘cause maybe I could see things coming and so I’d stay out of it.
Was the school tough compared to the home?
Yeah, well I think only in a normal sort of kid way, but in the home there were rules, there wasn’t supposed to be any fighting and there was a smaller population and it was difficult to do anything really rotten, and anyway you knew you had to wake up and there’d be the same people again and, who knows, maybe all the little kids would get together and beat up on you or something like that [laughter].
Like the Lilliputians.
But there was a sort of… there wasn’t a real strong, I mean in the ‘we’re all in this together’ sense, but there was a sort of connectedness, kind of an informal family deal. And in a way some of the kids looked out for some of the other kids. You know we all helped each other with schoolwork and that sort of stuff. There were huge group study sessions.
Really?
Yeah, yeah, we had to do well in school.
Or… were there consequences if you didn’t?
Yeah, if you didn’t then you’d have to be supervised. You’d have to be supervised while you did your homework. Your privileges were restricted, and maybe, if I remember correctly, they actually had some outside tutors come in for some of the kids. Apart from having nothing to complain about—[in an exaggerated indignant voice] other than the restriction of one’s personal liberties—just the opposite, you know, they did a good job, at least while I was there.
We’re certainly not getting any horror stories about a Dickensian institution here.
No. My brother has some horror stories. That was later on, the second time around.
Were conditions different for him?
I think they were different. I think things were a little different, plus he had more problems than I did, maybe learning problems or developmental problems, that sort of thing, and I didn’t have any of those sort of problems, I was just, like I say, as long as they didn’t make me work too hard I could do all that school stuff. But I didn’t take any of it to heart. It was neither odious nor a great source of fun to go to school, it was just another thing, one of the things you had to do. But that changed a little bit when I got out of grade school. So now here I am, I’m out of grade school. I thought I was gonna have to go to Soldan High School, which was the high school right in the neighborhood. It was just a block or two from the grade school, and I always remember it as this huge, big foreboding brick prison-like, fortress-like building. I’d been in there a couple of times with all these gorillas and thugs, you know, wandering the corridors.
That was the impression you got, or do you think it was actually pretty much correct?
Probably it wasn’t like that. It just seemed like all these hulks, you know these brooding, monosyllabic mouth-breathers [laughs]. I just didn’t relish the idea of going there. I thought it was also more serious; high school, your permanent record, it’s going to be on your permanent…. What was that other thing they used to tell me? Oh yeah…the other thing that I started believing about myself. Your ego is composed of what people tell you about yourself. One of the things they told me was that I wasn’t performing up to my potential. I wasn’t exercising… However they say that, bastards. So I thought, you know, well they’re going to make me do that in this high school, but I wound up not going there because of the conditions that I described earlier where they saw my grade school graduating picture and there were only two or three white faces in it, so that was it: everything changed.
So racial panic set in among the...
That’s the way I remember it, you know, it could have nothing to do with that. It could have been on the books for years that they were going to make this change, but that was the story I always heard. It was the received wisdom I think—all the kids believed it, so who knows. Some of the kids were more connected to… Some of the kids had more, the older kids especially, they had more information about the background workings of the home, stuff that I didn't even pay any attention to at all. And by then there also was an assistant superintendent hired. There was always a superintendent of the entire grounds and a matron for the children’s home and a matron for the old people’s home. So they imposed this other level, an assistant superintendent, and he had a son about our age, and he was the source of a lot of the info that was… yeah. He was kind of a nerd, and you had to give him something. But he didn’t live in the home, he lived in an apartment building. He was a real nosebleed; he was a real sad sack. I don’t even know if he went to the same school that we did, but he was our age.
And you could get information out of him.
You could get stuff from him, yeah, as I remember, and some of the older kids may have heard stuff from their parents too, you know we didn’t have these conduits, I didn’t have these conduits of information, but that’s the way I looked at it. So all the kids that were going to high school were bussed out to Clayton, Missouri, Clayton High School, which is a suburb of Missouri. Pretty wealthy, as I remember it, and I was telling you before, a lot of Jewish kids, which I’d never, I’d never met no Jewish kids before. That was real new, and a lot of well-to-do kids. First, there was some other thing I wanted to mention because it popped up: When I was going to this gifted school, occasionally I would get rides home with one of the kids and his father. His father was a musician or an organist or something at one of the universities nearby and he drove this old Morris Minor. And you know he was very tweedy, he always had a scarf and a three-piece suit. He was an academic but he was also a musician of some kind, and sometimes we’d have to go into the university. It might have been the University of Washington, which is there in St. Louis, I’m not sure, but we’d drive in this Morris Minor and wait there while his father did whatever he did sometimes. I think I can remember hearing organ playing, but we’d wait in this little office and play around. So I just threw that in as something I remembered as another experience outside the home life I had, and the thing about it was the way this kid spoke to his father that really sticks in my mind. I just could not understand it. He was always raggin’ him up one side and down the other and whining about how this didn’t happen and that didn’t happen, and you know he was one of these gifted too so you know he could really talk. But it was the way he talked to his father and his father didn’t…
So it kind of surprised you that the father didn’t handle it differently?
Well not only that. I remember thinking clearly, jeez, you know, something like--and this is about as maudlin as I ever get—If he only knew how lucky he is to have a father. All these kids that I lived with every day, they didn’t have fathers and mothers, and when their fathers and mothers came over, they didn’t talk to them like that. But I think I might even have asked him one time: How can you talk to your father like that? And he said: Oh he doesn’t mind, or something like that, and he probably didn’t. He probably didn’t. They got along okay that way, but that was real odd.
It sounds like though neither of them knew better. The kid didn’t realize, hey, if you didn’t have a father, and the father sounds like he didn’t realize that he didn’t have to have his kid talk to him that way.
Yeah, I mean in my experience you got smacked [laughter] for that kind of thing. It’s like kids who call their father by their first names. I never understood that either.
We’re just about at the end here.
Are we gonna keep goin’?
[End Tape 4, Side B]
posted by epikles at 4:35 PM
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