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.