Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself Page 5

  We were told that when (I don’t think he ever mentioned an “if anywhere) the call came to Mr. Evans’s office (probably directly from Washington) to inform him that the bombs and missiles were on the way, we would be hastened back to assembly for further instructions. At that point, a decision would be made on whether or not to close school and send us home. In the event we could not safely evacuate, we would remain at school and be given subsequent assignments as to where we would bed down for the night.

  That idea caused a great stirring of interest among the boys. Would we get to sleep near the girls? Could we slip around and perhaps catch them in nothing but their underpants? Bring on the bombs and missiles. Mr. Evans quickly dashed our hopes, however, by stating that the boys would be herded to the gymnasium, while the girls would sleep at the other end of the school in the cafeteria and the student activities room, where the Coke and candy machines were also located, damn the luck.

  He instructed us to bring canned goods to store in our lockers the following day, presuming there was one, in case the school ran out of food and we had to spend the winter inside the building waiting for the fallout to subside. Students also were to bring blankets and soap, an extra toothbrush, and a change of clothes and underwear. The sacks of clothes and underwear were stored on the stage in the assembly room. Having been shut out of actually getting to see our female classmates down to their skivvies, a group of us went for the next best thing and sneaked into the assembly room during the post-lunch rest period and went through the sacks trying to match girls with panties and bras.

  The possibility of an attack did lose some of its glamour, however, when Mr. Evans further announced that as long as a single teacher survived, classes would continue and gum chewing would remain a capital offense.

  The attack never came, of course, but we did find out that Gayle Spangler, who always was going off to Atlanta on weekends and was allegedly keeping company with college boys and going to wild fraternity parties, had a pair of panties with the 1962 Georgia Tech football schedule printed on the crotch.

  John Kennedy was hailed as a conqueror after backing down the Russians and their missiles, but the triumphant mood of the country was short-lived. One moment Camelot was there, and the next it lay in bloody ruin.

  It was the autumn of my senior year. November, 1963. I was changing morning classes. I had just finished Spanish, which I hated. I particularly hated those silly records they played to us in Spanish class.

  “El burro es un animal de Mexico, Espana, y Norte Americana, tambien. Repeata, por favor.”

  Thirty students with heavy Southern accents would repeat: “El boorow ez uhn anymahl de Mexeecoh, Espainya, why Gnawertee Amuricainya, tambiann.”

  I was strolling down the hallway toward geometry class. Something was happening. The teachers had come out into the hall and were herding students into classrooms.

  “Don’t go to your next class. Come into my room. Quickly,” said a teacher to me.

  The halls were cleared. There was an eerie silence. Is the place on fire? Have the Russians decided to attack after all? Has somebody been caught chewing gum? I noticed the teacher sitting in the desk in front of me. She was holding back tears.

  The voice. I had heard that powerful voice so many times, but now it seemed to crack and strain.

  “Your attention, please,” said Mr. Evans over the intercom. “We have just received word that President John Kennedy has been shot in Dallas. We have no other word at this time. May we all bow our heads in prayer.”

  I can’t remember Mr. Evans’s prayer word-for-word. It’s been more than twenty years. But I think I can still manage its essence:

  “Gawd, Our Father. We beseech Thee. A brilliant young leader has been shot. He is a man we love. He is a man we trust. He is our president. Our Father, we beseech Thee now to rest Your gentle hand upon this man and to spare him, O Gawd. Spare him, so that he can continue to lead us, to guide us, to keep us safe from our enemies, to show us how to make our country even greater, to bring justice to all our people, to make for these students, who soon will go out into the world alone, a safe and shining place to live and work and grow fruitful. Spare John Kennedy, O Gawd. Spare our beloved president. Amen.”

  We raised our heads. No one spoke. Some of the girls cried.

  “Maybe it’s not true,” somebody finally said.

  “It’s true,” said someone else, “or Mr. Evans wouldn’t have stopped classes for it.”

  All doubt then faded. It was true.

  We waited. I don’t know how long we waited. Maybe it was seconds. Maybe it was minutes. Finally, the voice came back again.

  “Students and faculty of Newnan High School,” Mr. Evans began, “President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is dead.”

  The class idiot was Harley Doakes, whose father hated Kennedy because he had wanted to desegregate the schools. When Mr. Evans announced that the president was dead, Harley Doakes cheered. Somebody in the back of the room threw a book at him and called him a stupid son of a bitch.

  * * *

  Nothing was the same after that. Ever again. I trace my world going completely bananas back to that single moment when the shots first cracked in Dallas.

  What, if anything, has made any sense since? John Kennedy was dead and we were left with Lyndon Johnson, who was low enough to pick up a dog by its ears. He proceeds to get us involved up to our ears in Vietnam, and when he finally decides he’s had enough, here comes Nixon again. Why wouldn’t this man just go away?

  I had all sorts of trouble trying to decide who I wanted to be president in 1972. Picking between Richard Nixon and George McGovern was like picking between sores in your mouth or a bad case of hemorrhoids. I wanted Nixon out, but I didn’t want McGovern in.

  McGovern was the hippie candidate. I had been raised a patriot. I reluctantly voted for Nixon. I admit he did a few things. He opened China, although I’m still not sure what good it did. If you’ve seen one Chinese urn, you’ve seen them all; I still don’t know how to use chopsticks; and I never did like sweet and sour pork.

  It was under Nixon that Vietnam finally came to a merciful end, of course, and there was that marvelous, moving moment when the POW’s came home, but it was impossible for me to put heroic garb on Richard Nixon. There always was the nagging feeling each time I saw him or listened to him that he was somehow putting a Bobby Entrekin shuck on me.

  Watergate was all I needed. There I had been a decade earlier — a high school senior with a crew cut and even clearer-cut ideals and values. Then the president is shot, and next comes Vietnam, and then somebody shoots Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King is gunned down, and another assassin puts George Wallace in a wheelchair for life. And on top of that, we find out the current president is, indeed, a crook (not to mention a liar with a filthy mouth) and he’s run out of office practically on a rail.

  I no longer had any idea what to believe or whom to trust. I was nearing thirty, and practically every sacred cow I had known had been butchered in one way or another.

  Nothing was the same anymore. I had seen students burning campus buildings and students being gunned down on campuses by National Guardsmen.

  I had been divorced once by then and was working on a second. Half the country was smoking dope. Gasoline was four times what it had cost before. Men were growing their hair over their ears and wearing double-knit trousers.

  And they weren’t singing the old songs anymore, either. In fact, it was soon after the death of John Kennedy that the music headed somewhere I didn’t want to go.

  If Elvis was a break between me and my parents and my roots, then it was The Beatles who forced me back toward them.

  5

  Where Rock ’n’ Roll Went Wrong

  AS MOST MUSIC historians know, soon after Elvis became the undisputed King, Colonel Tom Parker hid him out for nearly the next two decades. The only time we were able to see him was at a rare concert or in one of those idiotic movies he began making, such as Viva Las Vegas
, which featured Elvis singing and mouthing ridiculous dialogue while several dozen scantily-clad starlets cooed and wiggled. Today, Elvis movies normally are shown very late at night after the adults have gone to bed, so they won’t be embarrassed in front of their children.

  However, the rock ’n’ roll storm that Elvis started did not subside after he took leave of the public. As a matter of fact, the music flourished and reached new heights, and when it got its own television show, our parents’ battle to save us from what some had considered a heathen sound was over. They had lost.

  Dick Clark was apparently a very mature nine-year-old when he first appeared on “American Bandstand,” because that has been nearly thirty years ago and he still doesn’t look like he has darkened the doors to forty.

  Bandstand. I wouldn’t miss it for free Scrambler rides and cotton candy at the county fair. The music they were playing was our music, and the dances they were dancing were our dances. It was live on television, and Philadelphia, from whence Bandstand came, was the new center of our universe. (Previously, it had been Atlanta, where our parents occasionally took us to see the building where they kept all the things you could order from the Sears Roebuck catalog, and to wrestling matches and gospel singings.)

  Danny Thompson and I always watched Bandstand together in the afternoons. Danny was not nearly the geographical wizard I was (I had been born seventy-five miles from Moreland in Ft. Benning, Georgia, and had traveled as far away as Arkansas as the quintessential Army brat before my parents had divorced) so anything that had to do with where some place was, Danny asked me.

  “Where is Philadelphia, anyway?” he queried one afternoon as we watched the kids on Bandstand do the Hop to Danny and the Juniors’s “At the Hop.”

  “Pennsylvania,” I told him.

  “How far is that?”

  “Thousands of miles.”

  “Wish I could go.”

  “To see Bandstand?”

  “See it up close.”

  “Wish we lived in Philadelphia.”

  “We’d go on Bandstand every day, wouldn’t we?”

  Besides the music, Danny and I enjoyed watching Bandstand in order to select objects of lust from the group of Philadelphia girls who were regulars. I picked out a blonde with large breasts. Her name was Annette something-or-other. Danny picked out a raven-haired beauty named Shirley, who chewed gum; we could never tell exactly how she voted when she rated a record because in the first place she talked funny, being from Philadelphia, and secondly it’s difficult to discern what someone is saying when they’re saying it through three sticks of Juicy Fruit gum.

  We spent hours discussing whether or not, at their advanced ages of probably sixteen, they were engaging in any sort of sexual activity off camera.

  “Wonder if Annette and Shirley do it?”

  “I bet Annette does.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s got blonde hair. Blondes do it more than other girls.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My cousin told me. He said you see a girl who’s blonde, and she’ll do it.”

  “I’d like to do it with Annette.”

  “I’d like to do it with Shirley.”

  “Shirley’s got black hair.”

  “I’d still like to do it with her.”

  “I’d give a hundred dollars to do it with Annette.”

  “I’d give two hundred to do it with Shirley.”

  “You don’t have two hundred dollars.”

  “I could get it.”

  “How?”

  “Sell my bicycle.”

  “You’d sell your bicycle to do it with Shirley?”

  “You wouldn’t sell yours to do it with Annette?”

  “Maybe I would.”

  Of course, I would have. The desire to do it strikes young in boys, and the delicious idea of doing it with a Bandstand regular was my first real sexual fantasy (which must be accepted as proof of our parents’ fears that interest in rock ’n’ roll did, indeed, prompt the sexual juices to flow).

  * * *

  The music was good back then. There were The Drifters, and The Penguins, and Paul and Paula, and Barbara Lewis, and Mary Wells, and Clyde McPhatter; and Sam Cook sang about the men workin’ on the “chain ga-e-yang.” We had Bobby Helms doing “Special Angel,” and there was Jerry Butler talking about his days getting shorter and his nights getting longer. There were great songs like “A Little Bit of Soap” and “Duke of Earl” and Ernie Kado singing about his mother-in-law.

  We danced and held each other close and took two steps forward and one back to “In the Still of the Night,” and later we shagged to beach music — The Tarns, The Showmen — and we twisted with Chubby Checker and did the Monkey with Major Lance. We had the soul sounds of James Brown — “Mr. Dynamite, Mr. Please Please Me Himself, the Hardest Workin’ Man in Show Business” — and Jackie Wilson sang “Lonely Teardrops,” and Marvin Gaye did “Stubborn Kind of Fellow,” and Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs did “Stay.” And I don’t want to leave out Fats (Antoine) Domino and Chuck Berry and Joe Tex and Bobby Blue Bland and Soloman Burke and Jimmy Reed moaning over radio station WLAC, Gallatin, Tennessee, brought to you by John R., the Jivin’ Hoss Man, and Ernie’s Record Mart and White Rose Petroleum Jelly, with “a thousand-and-one different uses, and you know what that one is for, girl.”

  There were a thousand singers for a thousand songs. It was truly an enchanted time. But then ever-so-slowly yet ever-so-suddenly, it changed. It seemed that one day Buddy Holly died, and the next day The Beatles were in Shea Stadium.

  I’m not certain what it was that caused me to reject The Beatles from the start, but I suspect that even then I saw them as a portent of ill changes that soon would arise — not only in music, but in practically everything else I held dear.

  The Beatles got off to a bad start with me because the first thing I heard them sing in 1964 was “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” and it was basically impossible to do any of the dances I knew — the Shag, the Mashed Potato, the Monkey, the Pony, the Gator, the Fish, the Hitchhike, the Twist, or the Virginia Reel— to that first song. About all you could do to “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” was jump and stomp and scream, which, of course, is what every female teeny-bopper at the time was doing whenever The Beatles struck guitar and drum and opened their mouths.

  Also, patriot that I was, I stood four-square against the importation of foreign music, just as I have since stood steadfastly against the importation of Japanese cars and Yugoslavian placekickers. The only materials we really need to import from foreign countries, in my way of thinking, are porno movies. It doesn’t matter that you can’t understand what anybody is saying in those movies anyway, and I like the imagination of, say, the French when it comes to doing interesting things while naked.

  But the British? I still have problems with them, especially with the current royal family. I’m sick and tired of Lady Di getting pregnant, I don’t care if Prince Andrew is dating Marilyn Chambers, and every time the Queen comes to the U.S., she is always getting offended by something a well-meaning colonist has done to her. I wish she would stay in Buckingham Palace and give the Cisco Kid his hat back.

  Even then, I didn’t like the way The Beatles looked. I thought their hair was too long, I didn’t like those silly-looking suits with the skinny ties they wore, and Ringo reminded me of the ugliest boy in my school, Grady “The Beak” Calhoun, whose nose was so big that when he tried to look sideways he couldn’t see out of but one eye. Grady was a terrible hitter on the baseball team because his nose blocked half of his vision.

  Soon after The Beatles arrived in the U.S., I started college. At the fraternity house, we were able to hold on to our music for a time. The jukebox was filled with the old songs, and when we hired a band, we had black bands whose music you could dance to and spill beer out of your Humdinger milkshake cup on your date. The Four Tops and The Temptations, The Isley Brothers and Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, and Percy Sledge (which always sounde
d to me like something that might clog your drain) were still in demand at college campuses — at least all over the South. A few white bands were still in vogue as well, the most notable of which was The Swinging Medallions. They sang “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love,” and even now when I hear that song, it makes me want to go stand outside in the hot sun with a milkshake cup full of beer in one hand and a slightly-drenched nineteen-year-old coed in the other.

  But the music, our music, didn’t last. At least, it didn’t remain dominant. Elvis’s music was switched to country stations, and every wormy-looking kid with a guitar in England turned up in the United States, and rock ’n’ roll meant something entirely different to us all of a sudden.

  I didn’t like the new sounds or the new people who were making them. I found The Rolling Stones disgusting and The Dave Clark Five about a handful short.

  Suddenly came the dissent associated with the Vietnam escalation, and with that came hippies and flower children. And one day I found myself (just as my own parents had done when Elvis peaked) condemning modern music as the hedonistic, un-American, ill-tempered, God-awful, indecent warblings of scrungy, tatooed, long-haired, uncouth, drugged-out, so-called musicians.

  I didn’t know Jimi Hendrix was alive until he overdosed and died, and I thought Janis Joplin was Missouri’s entry in the Miss America pageant.

  All the new groups had such odd names. There was Bread, and Cream, for instance. And there was Jefferson Airplane and Iron Butterfly and Grand Funk Railroad and a group named Traffic. I wondered why so many groups were named after various modes of transportation. I theorized that it was because those performers had all been deprived of electric trains as children.

  I expected the members of musical groups to wear the same clothing when they performed — like white suits with white tails — and to do little steps together like “The Temptation Walk.”

  These new groups, however, apparently wore whatever they found in the dirty clothes hamper each morning before a performance. T-shirts and filthy jeans seemed to be the most popular garb. Some, of course, performed without shirts. I found this to be particularly disturbing, since I have no use whatsoever for any music made by a person who looks as if he has just come in the house from mowing the grass on an August afternoon and his wife won’t let him sit down on the good furniture because he’ll sweat all over it and probably cause mildew.