A Love Letter in 78 RPM

One night, when I was about fifteen, while looking at my father's stereo in his apartment, I had remarked that his record player had "just two speeds". Mr. Subtlety Himself responded, "Well, who wants to listen to pissin' 78's?"

I, ever the complacent one, said nothing, preferring to keep my then-pastime of collecting and listening to 78 RPM records part of my secret world that was sequestered from the rest of humankind. Collecting these ten-inch pieces of shellac was an extension of my ongoing appreciation of, forgive me, "old music".  

Somewhere in my pre-teen years I became hooked on big band sounds through hearing them on the radio (leading to my lifelong love of jazz). When I was old enough to be home alone without a babysitter on Saturday nights while my mother went out boozing, I would often tune into the big band show on CFCA 105FM which began in the early evening and went well into the wee hours. Although Glenn Miller was a personal favourite, these young ears otherwise couldn't decipher between a Tommy Dorsey or a Harry James: it was the overall sound, ambiance and mood that appealed to me. My tastes would soon extend beyond swing, into what would be classified as popular music of the 1930s to the 1950s.

Other than a couple of Beatles 45s and Jerry Lee Lewis' "Breathless" on 78, I never had a rock and roll album until I was eighteen. As an example of how much of a Luddite I was, here are some LPs I got for Christmas during my teen years, procured from the cheap bins at Woolworth's:  The Glenn Miller Story; Enoch Light and the Light Brigade; Al Hirt. When we were required to do an "all about me" project for my Grade 9 French class, my mother suggested that I should tell about my love of Glenn Miller and big band music. I instantly vetoed that idea, stating that my classmates would think I was nuts if they read that. (In hindsight, I wished I had put it in, just to scare the shit out of them.) Yes, while my peers were listening to "Tom Sawyer" and "Highway To Hell",  I was learning the lyrics to "Have You Got Any Gum Chum" by The Crew Chiefs, or "Just To Be With You" by Eddie Fisher.

While there were plenty of these vintage sounds to be heard on the radio or on 33 RPM, I also became interested in 78s upon seeing a stash of them in my friend Todd's father's record collection, thinking they looked cool, and added these to my "search" list in those Saturday morning yard sale journeys. In the summer before I was to begin Grade 10, I spent an entire week's worth of allowance money on a small standalone record player, bought from a yard sale by my mother's friend Rae (the resale queen, who was always making a buck with buying and selling). It had four speeds: 33, 45, 16... and 78! All right!

My two "big hauls" of 78s were also performed during these eight weeks away from school. The first was when I spent another entire week's worth of allowance money on an album containing ten 78s in its paper sleeves, found at an antique shop in the sticks. (I even got to choose which platters out of dozens to fill it with!) Later in the season, my former Grade Five Teacher, and fellow yard sale freak, had a sale of his own. (Noticing a pattern here?) In his garage was a huge wine box full of 78s, marked with the sign, "Free for the taking!" I grabbed them all, and boy was it fun trying to balance a heavy box of records on my ten speed back home... downhill!

Although I collected 78s and comic books foremost because I enjoyed them, my secondary reason for doing so was for their future increasing value. One afternoon, while browsing through an antiques price guide in the "reference only" section of the public library, I was tickled pink to discover a listing for a Sir Harry Lauder side, which I owned. Its estimated value? Ten bucks! Woohoo! In a haphazard attempt to preserve these records for posterity, I had also made paper sleeves to hold them in, from a huge roll of newsprint I had acquired some time before.

What about these sounds possibly appealed to this young man who was conceived decades after they were in vogue? A lot of this stuff was already out of style before my parents would have even graduated high school! As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I've always been enamoured of "old things": architectural art deco design, the look of antique cars, and of course, old movies, TV shows, and books. Perhaps the adoration simply resulted from seeing much of this still around in my hometown during those influential years, and consequently, they still felt "in the present". The older generation, who came of age when all of this was new, was still the dominant workforce, and continued to keep it alive. For instance, a favourite downtown newsstand-novelty store, with its trademark creaky wooden floors, still managed by the same owner after forty years, constantly had this type of music playing from the store's PA system.

A greater truth, perhaps, is that the chief appeal of these sounds was the nostalgia they instilled in me. However, nostalgia is a selective process, where one solely recalls the good things of a past era. The time our parents referred to as "the good old days", from which this music originated, was also rife with economic hardship and war. These sounds took me back to what I nonetheless believed to be simpler times, full of the same virtue, hope and old-fashioned values evoked in their melodies.

One's teenaged years encounter numerous psychological and physical changes as they advance, and likewise, one's tastes change with the same rapidity. Although I still enjoy that music to this day, it wasn't long before my concentration shifted to paperbacks (previously discussed here) and eventually, film.

In time, that yard sale record player drew its last breath, and when I finally started listening to comparatively modern music, I had purchased a stereo including a record player with only (gasp!) two speeds. The 78s, once a significant part of my youth, were unplayed for years, until I decided to include them in my own yard sale during my early 20s. They sat on the driveway in a box which had I marked with tongue in cheek, "Free to a good home".  The fellow who picked them up told me that in his country house he had a windup Victrola to play them on, so yes- to a good home they went!

Oh. And what, you may ask, was the first rock and roll LP (if you could call it that) I bought at eighteen? The soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever.

Winter Hibernation: Reading Pile #1

Here is a list of books I plan to read while we're snowed in this winter. The subtitle of this entry (Pile #1) is not superfluous, as there is another pile of magazines and pulp-related stuff I also intend to get through, and will list here at a future date. Reviews of what I've read will be added to this blog, or to  The Eclectic Screening Room, if I ever get that thing started again.

The list (in no particular order):
Curtis Harrington: Nice Guys Don't Work in Hollywood
John Szpunar: Xerox Ferox- The Wild World of the Horror Film Fanzine
André Bazin: The Cinema of Cruelty
Peter Rainer: Rainer on Film
Michael Helms: Fatal Visions- The Wonder Years
Peter Biskind: My Lunches With Orson- Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles
James M. Cain: The Cocktail Waitress
John Hamilton: Beasts in the Cellar- The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser

Earl, Part One

For the rest of the year, this blog will intermittently feature pieces that will serve as testing grounds for a longer format project I'm working on, featuring my experiences as a youth in 1983, for future publication in book form. This is one of them.

"Earl" was born on Saturday, September 17, 1983. He was 56 years old and unemployed. As for the "real" Earl who inspired this creation, I have no idea of his life story. It was during the Delhi Harvest Fest, a weekend-long celebration of the year's tobacco harvest (the area's best known crop). My father was a member of the Lions at the time: they had a food booth down on the main street right by the big beer tent. On that Saturday, I was helping out at the stand, taking people's orders and running cash. In mid-afternoon, I took a break, and wandered into the tent. (Even though they served beer, kids could still go in there during the daytime.) The joy of finally getting out to do something that day made me less introverted than usual, and I was nodding "hello" to people as I went in. The only one to return my nod was Earl, who was sitting at one of the picnic tables inside, drinking one of the several beers I would see with him that afternoon.

This guy was probably in his fifties, with short grey hair, chipmunk face when he laughed, plaid red flannel shirt, blue work pants, blue trenchcoat and a sharp pair of slip-on leather shoes. Why was it that all the boozers back in the day always wore nice shoes? I guess they still had dignity, one way or another. While I was standing over at the roulette wheel, still keeping an eye on this fellow (then as now, I was fascinated by "character" people), Earl had asked Al the bartender to buy him a beer. Al said no. Earl replied, "Well I bought you one three years ago."

I'm not sure who else heard this remark, but I laughed my ass off over it, and still spent most of the weekend convulsed in laughter at the mere thought of it. That night, I was with my father, his new wife and several of their cronies to see the Elvis impersonator, Glenn Bowles, at an event put on by the Lions. At one moment when everyone else but me in our party was up dancing, I had my head in my arms on the table still laughing. People sitting nearby turned to smile at me. They thought I was laughing at the woman with the huge rear end on the dance floor who was making a spectacle of herself gyrating all over the place. Nope. I was still thinking of Earl's comment.

Anyway, back to that afternoon. I learned that his name was Earl because Al's wife Judy (who was running the roulette wheel) called him by name to tell him to sit down and drink his beer or else she'd have the boys throw him out. At that remark, Earl proceeded to dance around, snap his fingers on one hand (beer in the other), and sing. Looked good on the drill sergeant. Another time I had seen Earl with a beer, and asked him, "Where'd you get the money for that?" His response: "Bummed it." Later that afternoon, I had seen him sitting on a picnic table outside the tent looking much more serious than before. As far as I know, that was the last time I ever saw Earl- however, at the next two Harvest Fests, while still working at the food booth, I may have seen him. In 1984, he may have been eating a hot dog in the tent; and in 1985  he may have asked me personally if they were serving beer in the tent next door. If either gentleman was indeed Earl, he obviously didn't remember me from that afternoon in 1983, but I certainly didn't forget him. And if he had, he certainly wouldn't have known how much of a mythical figure he would have become in my own creative output during those two years.

This brief encounter was all the inspiration needed to give birth to Earl's fictional counterpart- with much creative license of course. "Real life" Earl's visage, wardrobe and love of beer (especially paid for by someone else) were imbued into the character of Earl Taylor. After spending some weeks thinking about it, the script for the very first "Earl" adventure began at about 11 PM of Thanksgiving Sunday, when I was supposed to have had my rear end in bed before the big car ride commencing in a few hours. Tough turtle soup- creativity doesn't work 9 to 5. In fact, some of our greatest ideas come during that semi-conscious midnight state of delirium when inhibition and reason are tossed aside for whimsy.

The result was a comedy-drama set during that very same Harvest Fest weekend, combining the previously mentioned "Earl" vignettes with my own experiences, and -you guessed it- a lot of creative license. I had even written in my father and myself as minor characters. Within about two pages of script (things move fast in a Greg Woods Joint), Earl Taylor loses his job, his car and his girlfriend, and is threatened with eviction if he doesn't cough up some rent money pronto. Screenwriting 101 would dictate that Earl would spend the rest of the story trying to make rent and win back some of his self-respect. This scenario would have none of that- Earl simply didn't give a shit. All he cared about was who he could con next for a free beer. The story arc then was just a series of vignettes in which Earl and his pal Walt blurred from one party to the next on this boozy weekend. In more responsible hands, this would be a realistic look at an alcoholic whose only motivation is the next drink. To a naive fifteen year-old scriptwriter however, this story was about defiance.

Perhaps to my young eyes, Earl was a Chaplin for the modern age. In this sense, he was an outlaw figure who resisted authority in any fashion: cops, employers, and especially landladies- forsaking all responsibility for pleasure and spontaneous freewheeling adventure. Earl Taylor was conceived at the height of another economic recession, and for me, in some cockeyed way, he represented the freedom that most people wouldn't have dared.

This, and subsequent stories, chronicled the adventures of Earl and his pals raising hell on the mean streets of Delhi: boozing, gambling and bringing institutions to their knees. My conservative mother knew about the "I bought you one three years ago" story, and that I was writing all these "Earl" stories, but she was less than thrilled that I was making a hero out of "some drunk that you met". (During the Christmas season of 1983, I had even made a 1984 "Earl" calendar, with a different picture for every month depicting our hero in some zany misadventure. No, this calendar didn't display in the kitchen.)

(to be continued...)