Well....

Sitting at the bar realizing how lazy I am about composing "words of somewhat wisdom."   I wis I could say that Hemingway....Faulkner....Irving....went through that but to quote Mrs. Daniels ..."Zane, don't be facetious."  I have some ideas that have to be expressed....I've already talked of Steve and my high school love but there are ideas in my head I'm trying to grapple with....Cliff, Cyndie....and music of my life (70s and 80s....which does seem as important as the people I've known)

Shit, but music will always fit into my memories that I'll share here.   I love you all...more later.


...and to Lee Parks and his girls.....I owe you.....

Dont worry....there's more coming.     Just can't get my head around the concept now that I'm deep in it.

Okay….so, Glenn Frey died.   Time to fire this puppy up again.

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SCHLOMP!

or “Riding with the King (`Cuda)"

Schlomp:  verb;  A term from my teenage years .  1.   The vocalization of the sound of throwing a car from gear “D” to “1”; downshifting.    2.  The sound an 8-track cartridge makes when slapped into an under dash player.

When I first started writing this piece,  I only remembered “Schlomp” as the word  we shouted when Steve Parks threw his 71 Duster down into first (automatic, on the column…Honeysuckle yellow , 6 cylinder), but as I let my stream of consciousness roam and wrote on the back of cocktail napkins a poor—a VERY poor man’s— Faulkner pastiche,  I suddenly remembered the second definition of “Schlomp”: the sound an 8-track made when slammed into a Realistic (Radio Shack, $39.95) under dash player.

“Schlomp” and the orange cased “They Only Come Out at Night” was in and “Free Ride” the song of the moment for cruising down Mulberry Avenue.

“Schlomp” and Foghat’s “Fool For the City” was blasting “Slow Ride” as we took a bit faster drive down the backstreets around Serbin with  the plant’s omniscient clock ticking off the minutes of our teen years as we slid around the curve of Washington Avenue.

Forgive me as I fill in some background, identify the key players.

This group….Steve, Danny, and me…had been the geeks of Fayetteville Junior High.  Chess Club; paper football; penny tabletop basketball.   Girls……HAHHAAHHAHHAH; no way.  Movies every Thursday night at the Lincoln (Friday nights were for the cool kids with dates and hoodlums who went just to see how fast they could get kicked out; we wanted to see the movie hence , Thursday nights.)  Anything from “Song of the South” to “Blazing Saddles” to “The Last Picture Show” thanks to Danny’s Dad (“Big Al”) getting us in to the “R” rated ones.

High school hit us and the first half of Sophomore year didn’t change us:  We were still geeks- to label me as “fat” would be a kindness no one at school afforded me; Steve sported braces , glasses-but at least he had blonde hair; Danny was the coolest with a bit of skill at playing football an only a few pimples on his face.  BUT then we hit the age of 15 years and 9 months and LEARNER’S PEMITS  were obtained followed quickly thereafter with a real LICENSE!

I was first having been born in February; Danny, second, born in March.   Steve, hell, he was born in June but having two liscenced drivers at his disposal, and his own car (the aforementioned Honeysuckle yellow 71 Duster),  he became the go-to driver.  All he needed was licensed driver in the front seat….legal loophole?  Sure, but it played well.

Steve was our gearhead.  

He could execute any slide, drift  with aplomb.   He could make the Duster move like a Masseratti.  When driving around at night shining lights in the cars of “parkers,”  all we had to scream was “STEVE!  THEY’RE COMING AFTER US!!”    “SCHLOMP! “ our driver would scream,  and we’d be fishtailing down the road , the merry pranksters of “Rubber Circle.”

….and he had an 8-track.  

Okay.   I’ll really have to go into more depth for this at another time, but AM radio was the way we were fed our music.  This was just before FM took over.  There was a hollow mono sound as the music came to us “over the skip”… an echo down the wire.

8-track blew that away with that pulsing power of 4 watts and quality speakers replacing the paper coned factory ones.  You could install FOUR speakers in your car, buy a fader at Radio Shack, and you were surrounded by sound.  And, as I said, you were in control of the music….kinda.   

There was no waiting on a DJ to play your favorite songs…although you had to find your song the cartridge; listen to it then click around the 8-track and wait for it to play again.   No rewind.  It might take 8 minutes and you had to listen to lesser tracks waiting.   But you’d get to your song.  (I won’t go into the songs that were separated over two tracks: fade down—”Kerchunk” as the cartridge advanced — then fade up to hear the rest of the song.   I cannot listen to Eagles’ “Already Gone” with out imagining  that change sequence during the guitar solo.   Oh and “Ina Gadda Da Vida” ?   Don’t get me started.)

Annnnnnnnnnnnyway….

“Schlomp.”

It was all about the ride…the “cruise”.   The passage down familiar streets and the soundtrack of the music of the moment.  On AM, the same songs came round every two hours; 8-track, well, you were “in control” so you could play “Iron Man”  until someone jerked out the cartridge and threw it out the window. (The car windows were always down: We were to cool for A/C and most of our cars didn’t even have it.)

“American Graffiti.”  I never understood the “Newsweek” article about how that movie had caused the rebirth of the car culture- “cruising.”  It had never died in Fayetteville.  It was only two years till Springsteen released “Born to Run”  a single that REALLY defined car culture.  We didn’t hear much Springsteen in Fayetteville back then; but years later, upon discovering him,  I connected because I had lived that life back in the 70s.

We were listening to the same old songs and driving the same streets….going nowhere but we didn’t know; more importantly, we didn’t care.

…but it all comes back to “Schlomp.”

Slapping in an 8-track.  Slapping the car down to first and fishtailing around the Washington Avenue curve.  It doesn’t matter.  It all comes down to the memories of friends on the streets of Fayetteville.

COMING SOON TO THIS THEATER

It's been far too long that I have ignored this blog. Yes, I can see the numbers and know that this IS just an echo down the wire. Nobody's reading it but is catharthic.....and maybe I've saved a couple of things from the dustbins of Fayetteville, TN history.

I have a couple of topics ready to go (two just need to be transcribed from bar napkins, loose receipts, and scraps of paper cobbled from the backseat of a "runner's car" ....ever seen a "runner's car"? You get the reference.)

So wait a bit.....thanks to Steve Parks and George Massey Sr for encouraging words. I won't let you down.

Eulogy for a fat man.

Bill Wilson

Say this name around the Fayetteville Square and a look of recognition will cross the faces of people of a certain age.
Bill was a friend of my father. A big man, overweight, usually unkept, her peered at the world through coke bottle glasses. To look at him, you would guess that he was the village idiot…
…but that was far from the truth. I remember him as an unqualified genius in anything he pursued.
He could fix any kind of electronic equipment that was brought to him. In seventies, he rose as the “go to guy” for installation of CB radios and 8-track players (necessities for cruising the seventies streets of Fayetteville). Someone had set him up in a shack behind Ashby Hardware. No windows; no A/C; no heat. You could usually find him there hunched over a crude workshop table, peering into the innards of some kind of electronic gewgaw, sweat dripping on his thick glasses, the smoke and smell of solder mixing in the close, dank air of that shack. In his stubby fingers, anything was fixable. He charged little if anything for his work usually asking his customers what they thought it was worth. Bad thing was, the customer never knew when he’d get it back; Bill was notorious for dropping what he was currently working on to start on something someone just brought in. And he took frequent short strolls down to the pool rooms for lunch, snacks, and long talks with his friends.
But the other side of Bill was the artist. He was a natural musician. Never took a lesson. But he could play the dobro as good as anyone on the Opry. He could play a wicked steel guitar; he’d even built the damn thing himself! He could make it moan when he played his favorites, Hank Williams’ melancholy love songs. And he could sit down at any piano and equal Floyd Cramer on his best day. My father records demos of his songs using Bill as backup either on piano or dobro. Over the years Bill fell in and out of local bands, a lot of them organized by my father. No money ever came of the bands; back then they played for the fun of it.
My first memory of Bill is easy: November 23, 1963. My father, Bill, and I were cruising the streets of Fayetteville looking for a payphone so my father could call his publishing company in Nashville; we still couldn’t afford a phone for our home. Finding an empty booth, my father made his calls while Bill sat in the car with me. Yet another side of the man was revealed---he loved kids and he loved to make them laugh. He started cracking jokes and singing Sheb Woley’s “Purple People Eater”; I was rolling in the back seat cracking up over Bill’s “routine.”
Phone call over, we headed back home, a bag of poolroom burgers for lunch. Inside our house, we turned on the television and there was the tragedy that defined a generation. JFK had been shot and shortly thereafter, pronounced dead. Nothing seemed funny any more.
I can’t remember exactly the year that Bill died. My mother called and told me. Not a lot of people had showed up at his funeral. Bill’s shack had been torn down long ago; he was living on welfare somewhere in Cotton Mill Village. You might see him every now and then driving around in his old Impala station wagon, the rear piled with junk. The ear of CBs and 8 tracks had given way to CDs and computers and I think those devices left Bill behind.
But he left a legacy with me. I can wire up a car stereo from watching him install my many 8-tracks that passed through my Vega. I’m pretty good with home stereo installation too. And every time I hear the moan of moan of Mark Knoffler’s steel slide guitar, I think back to the music that Bill could coax from his dobro….and I just drift away.

The 64

I taught American History for seven years. I made the base of my instruction from the “famous Man” theory---the leaders, good and bad, shaped history. But I had fallen under the spell of Howard Zinn early on and I built around the timeline of the Famous the “Zinn view” that it was the sweat and blood, the strife and the triumphs of the common man that built this nation.

Well….we’ve lost something. The common man doesn’t count anymore. He simply feeds the Machine with his tax dollars and those inside the “Beltway” blithely play their games, each victory and triumph for their side but not…no, never…for the benefit of the common man. And it’s partially our fault; we, as the common men, have lost our voice, our will to rise up and challenge the nonchalant powerbrokers.

The absorbing selfishness of the iPhone has destroyed the community of the partyline. The DJ on the local radio all request show has vanished replaced with the programed banality of corporate radio. The fear of “strangers” has shut us behind our doors and the community of Fourth of July on the Square has died. The streaming movies to our cloistered dens have killed the drive-in.

Subtlety is not one of my strong points: COMMUNITY IS GONE.

So, while I still have my mind, I want to capture the last days of the community. Admittedly, these memories are mine and are colored accordingly…hopefully not with whitewash but the soft watercolors of fondly remembered times. A few with the harshness of black and white photographs. Pictures of my hometown, Fayetteville, Tennessee, found on the `net flash me back; iPod playlists carefully researched and titled “WEKR”, “WAAY”, and “WLS” awaken memories I had long ago relegated to being “grown-up.”

My memories of times (I have to admit) long past; but I hope you’ll bear with me, gentle reader. And if any of this stirs you, share yours and travel back down the roads of yesterday. I would like this to be a living document and, barring any wanton use of electromagnetic pulse, one that will last.
Let’s start with the basics. Each has its own special place in my growing older….I can’t say that I’ve grown up. Each one are building blocks for who I am at this moment.

The Highway 64 Drive-In

I don’t know the basics-when it opened who owned it-but I remember my history of the place. My first memory is going to see “Dr. No” and from then on, my father was hooked and we saw every James Bond movie at the 64 until we went to the “walk-in” to see Roger Moore’s foppish Bond replace Sean Connery’s hard edged agent (Yes, I know Lazenby was in there too but even at that early age I only had eyes for Diana Rigg in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”). Now, my mother, god bless her, she had to see every Elvis extravaganza and with every new one, I developed a crush on Presley’s co-star…each lasting only as long as the next Elvis flick. That explains a lot about me: my movie role models were Bond and Elvis. Later on, my father tossed in a spicy dash of Sergio Leone’s Eastwood spaghetti westerns. It’s a wonder I ever developed any appreciation of the reality of male-female relationships.

I remember going on Saturday nights. Dressed in my pajamas and carrying in a giant 24 ounce glass bottle Pepsi and our own skillet-popped popcorn, we were treated to a double feature. During intermission , everyone got to play bingo. I never won but I always got to honk the horn when the voice from the window speaker box asked “Did everybody like that first movie?” Bingo over, the second feature started and I was asleep before the title credits ended.

You could always tell when there was a “good `un” playing at the 64. Cars would stretch from the ticket booth back west over the Norris Creek, past the Hyde-Out. Going east, they lined up past the Co-Op. People took alternating turns into the creek gravel road that led into the drive-in. “Road rage” had not been born yet. The lines were always there for a Bond or Elvis picture; but we never had to wait on the shoulder of 64 because, for those movies, we were always first in line.

The projectionist’s name was Herman, a distant cousin of my paternal grandmother. He would stroll out to our car and talk about the movie. One memorable night, “In Cold Blood” was playing and he informed us that “those guys” in the movie had passed though Tennessee after their bloody night in Kansas. I made damn sure both back doors on our sedan were locked.

We never went to the concession stand unless we ran out of coke. The few times I went, I was fascinated by the comingled smells of popcorn and hot dogs. I loved the posters for future features (an art form in itself) and those same posters were copied on the coming attractions handbill that was given out at the beginning of each month. I’d beg my father to make plans to see any Jerry Lewis picture but to no avail. “Jerry Lewis is nothing without Dean Martin” (he made a point to see all the Dean Martin westerns and the Matt Helm movies). He also had a particular aversion to Phyllis Diller…so we missed a couple of Bob Hope pictures.
There were some swings and a slide for kids right down under the screen. There were coated in so many layers of enamel that they HAD to be safe; the thick coats felt like rubber. Same goes for the metal lawn chairs that lined the front of the concession stand for those customers that just didn’t want to watch the movie in their car and have a little gossip time too. The old speaker boxes, two per pole, were clunky and tinny sounding, and it was a common occurrence for viewers to drive off forgetting they were still tethered to the pole.

Part of the 64 that never changed was the mosquitos. A small creek off to the right provided fertile breeding ground for them. No matter how hot it was in the summer, windows would stay shut tight during the height of their season. During the winter months when the 64 ran on a weekends only schedule, windows stayed up and heaters ran…..some cars ran their defrosters but for an entirely other reason. Yep, those cars tended to sit on the back row. As a kid, I always wondered why anyone would want to park way back there. Even angled up toward the screen by the parking humps, the screen was no bigger than a TV screen from back there.

By 1974, I was still going to the 64 but I was in my own car with my girlfriend. I finally discovered the secret of the “back row” parkers. The movies were still great but I must confess that the plotlines are mixed up with the memories of passion that passed for love in the front seat of a `72 Vega. Time was taking its toll on the 64 and the beginning of the end was the completion of the Thorton Taylor By-pass. The four lane provided a convenient loop around Fayetteville but the road brought with it a fully illuminated intersection parallel to the screen and the Little League fields across Highway 64. Both brought the dread “Glare”—the monster that the 64 couldn’t fight. The 64 put up a valiant fight choosing to run the feature twice. The lights tended not to be doused til nine o’clock ruining the film’s first half; the owner generously rolled the movie again so the audience could see the missing hour.

One hot August night in 1975, I went to the 64. A few cars were scattered through the parking lot; my girlfriend and I pawed over each other as “Get the Fox”(?) a sleazy “erotic” spy thriller unspooled on the screen. The next morning, the Fayetteville Central football team packed up two yellow busses and drove off for training camp. Head manager, I got to ride in Coach Evans van. Passing the 64 on the way out of town, I smiled at the memory of the night before. Little did I know…
Coming back the same way five days later, we rolled past the 64’s sign and just like that, a part of my growing up was gone. End of August, the 64’s marquee read “Closed for Business”. Not closed for the winter; closed for good. Nothing could have prepared me for that. My first bitter taste of growing older.

A domino down….and many more to follow.