By 1978, my mother had settled down with a groovy mustachioed guy by the name of Bob. Bob was a good egg. He had an enthusiasm for my sister and I only a man who hadn’t raised us could have. He lavished us with praise and showed genuine interest in the things we did, especially my sister’s burgeoning sports career. When he moved in, he brought with him all sorts of records we’d never seen or heard before: Marvin Gaye, Rod Stewart, Queen, Eagles. One night, we even spied what we later told my dad were “funny cigarettes” in a box under the coffee table. Bob was a groovy dude and since my mother had checked out in the parenting department, it was nice to have the guy around.

I continued to advance on the guitar despite having stopped my lessons. I was able to pick up songs by ear fairly easily. It wasn’t like I was listening to Genesis at the time, so it wasn’t tough to play KISS using “cowboy chords.” I remained utterly flummoxed by what I later learned to be “distortion.” I figured out enough to know that I needed an electric guitar. I don’t remember how the subject was broached but, sure enough, Groovy Bob bought me my first electric guitar. It was a Vantage, just like the one pictured above, and with it, I was going to rock.

Once I’d gotten the guitar home, it took me a few hours to work out the fact that the electric guitar alone was not enough. I needed something to, I don’t know, amplify the sound somehow. I managed to rig up a way to plug the guitar into my stereo. Blasting the stereo through the headphones made the headphones distort. (I didn’t have them on my head. I used them as a very crude amplifier.) I played that electric through my rigged-up headphone amp for at least a year. I inched a little bit closer to the holy grail.

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As I descended the creaky steps down to the basement of the guitar store, I looked at the yellowed posters on the walls. Surely, the men on these posters were guitar gods, but I didn’t recognize any of them. None of them had bat wings or spiked codpieces, just more muted browns and mustaches. Always with the mustaches.

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I don’t remember asking for a guitar for Christmas. My friend Brian had an acoustic that I played every time I went to his house. I would lay it across my lap and play the theme from “Peter Gunn” using my thumb to fret the strings. (At that time, I thought I was playing the Blues Brothers music, not Peter Gunn.) I don’t know if Brian’s mother alerted my mother or what, but on Christmas day 1978, my mother brought a large, black case out of her bedroom and laid it on the floor next to me. I eagerly popped the latches and hauled out a brand new acoustic guitar. It was a Conn—a budget brand that she’d bought at Hauer Music for about $300.00. That was a lot of scratch for a single mother in 1978, even if she was getting a whopping forty bucks a week in child support from my father.

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After my dad left in 1974, things started to get a bit groovier around the house. And by “groovier”, I mean “creepier”. My mother showed renewed interest in music—no doubt spurred by the mustachioed dudes she had begun to date—and my sister and I had begun buying music of our own. Our music wasn’t the problem—my sister loved John Denver and I loved whatever pop confection was popular at the moment. (The first 45 I bought was the theme from The Rockford Files. Pretty tame stuff.) No, it was my mother’s music that gave me the creeps. Nearly everything she listened to engendered a sort of free-floating angst in me. Looking back, perhaps it wasn’t actually the music. Perhaps it my newfound status as a first-generation “latchkey kid”, or the nascent signs of what would much later be diagnosed as chronic depression. Perhaps it was post-divorce trauma. Perhaps it was just my mother giving me the creeps. Regardless, “Afternoon Delight” can give anyone the creeps, not just ten-year-old boys.

“Rubbin’ sticks and stones together
makes the sparks ignite
and the thought of rubbin’ you
is gettin’ so exciting!”

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Back on the RRC blog, I began an autobiographical account of my life—more specifically, my life with music. I want to continue it here, so I’m going to repost the first four parts that appeared over there. Here’s part one.

I’m bad with dates. Not only can I not remember specific dates like my mother’s birthday or my work anniversary, I can’t remember significant eras. “When did I move to Maryland? Sometime in the late nineties?” Ask any literary scholar and they will tell you that remembering dates is among the top five skills of successful memoirists. I don’t even remember if there was a time when I remembered dates, that’s how bad I am with dates. So, if I specify a date as “somewhere between the Reconstruction and 2000″, forgive me.

My earliest musical memories are murky. Born in the mid-sixties as I was, I have vague recollections of men in v-neck sweaters and women in cocktail dresses singing along with Mitch. I remember a lot of Lawrence Welk and television theme songs on my grandparents’ big console sets. AM radio seemed to be dominated by Burt Bacharach and Herb Alpert. To this day, whenever I hear muted French horns or syrupy strings, I cannot help but smile with a sense of wistful nostalgia–nostalgia for a time that may or may not have existed. Remember, this was the “turbulent sixties”. To a four-year-old, however, it was merely daytime or nightime or Christmas.

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