My Back Pages, part 3

"Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now"

Bob Dylan - "My Back Pages" from Another Side Of Bob Dylan (1964)

Whew, that last post seemed pretty dark, don't you think? I could understand where you might get the impression that I had grown up in some Dickensian religious torture chamber or something, but that simply wasn't the case. Sure, religion helped to create boundaries and establish arbitrary parameters, and sure, some leaders abused their positions and passed off their personal biases as church policy, and sure, the membership was generally more concerned with being unquestioningly obedient than with evaluating the amount of truth that there may have been in what they were being told...

...but that doesn't mean that everybody was miserable.

Put it this way: imagine for a moment, that you grew up without knowing that chocolate existed. Other people knew about it, but, for whatever reason, it was decided that you needed to be "protected" from it. Maybe it was considered to have a potentially harmful influence on you or something. In any case, you grew up without it.

You know what? You would have grown up just fine. You wouldn't sense a gaping absence in your life that only the unknown qualities of chocolate could fill. There would be other things in your life that you would enjoy just as well in the absence of chocolate. You'd never know what you were missing, and it wouldn't matter. There would have been plenty of other things within the circle of your experience that you would have enjoyed.

So even though I was oblivious to the existence the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and any other legitimate, respectable rock music, I have to admit that I was doing just fine without it. And frankly, I seriously doubt that very much of it would have appealed to my sensibilities when I was a kid, anyways. In fact, I can remember when a classmate brought a KISS album to school back in the 3rd or 4th grade, and it didn't appeal to me at all. If rock music was ever going to find me, it was going to have to reach me through top 40 pop, and even that wasn't reaching me yet. I didn't even have a radio. Like I stated in a previous post, music was going to have to find a way to catapult itself across the various barriers in order to reach me, and traditional methods and traditional artists were not going to make it. And this is why I can't really cite any so-called credible rock musicians as being a key inspiration for me pursuing music. There was no exposure.

But there was one artist who made it through. And if I want to be honest, I simply have to admit it.

I think I'll take a deep breath here...

The person who made the biggest impression on me as a kid and probably made me want to pursue music was...




Donny Osmond.

There. I said it.


Now, I know what you're thinking, but hang on just a minute. Hear me out. And take a moment to acknowledge that it took some courage to admit this. Would any professional musicians have the brass cojones to admit such a thing in Rolling Stone magazine? I doubt it.

But Donny Osmond was just about the only person who could break through in my house at the time. In the absence of radio, my earliest exposure to pop music would almost exclusively be through television. In the pre-MTV era, that meant that I could only potentially be exposed to musicians that didn't scare the hell out of little old ladies, and who appeared on some of the tamest entertainment shows on TV before about 9pm - when I had to go to bed.

Both the Jackson 5 and the Osmonds had cartoon shows. The Jackson 5 were doing commercials for a breakfast cereal and had a tie-in promotion that allowed one of their songs to be packaged with cereal boxes in grocery stores. I think that the first pop song that I ever learned to sing was "Never Can Say Goodbye." I think my older sister taught it to me. I don't remember ever seeing the Monkees or the Partridge Family as a young child, but I don't know if this is just because I simply don't remember, or if they were forbidden for being, you know, too rock and roll. We didn't celebrate New Year's Eve with Dick Clark. We watched Guy Lombardo. You have to realize that in our house the primary cultural event of the week consisted of watching Lawrence Welk and Hee Haw back-to-back. When you grow up thinking that what you hear on Lawrence Welk and Hee Haw must pretty much representative of the music that mankind has to offer, then music isn't really such a big deal. It fails, shall we say, to ignite enough passion to make you want to go out and get a guitar. So in my earliest childhood, I didn't really think much about music. Didn't really care.

In fairness, the wall of musical prohibition was slowly starting to come down. At least a little bit. My older sister got some Carpenters records for Christmas one year, and somehow a couple of cassettes made their way into the house. ABBA Arrival and the Eagles Greatest Hits both received a lot of play on handheld mono tape decks. I'm pretty sure that the first Beatles song that I ever heard was "Ticket To Ride" - as performed by the Carpenters on their album Now And Then.

But, for me, the real change took place in 1976 when Donny and Marie Osmond were given a prime-time network variety show. By sheer coincidence, this was also about the same time that my mom received a stereo as a gift from my father. It had a turntable and an 8-track deck, and before long my mom went hunting for a handful of 8-track tapes in bargain bins, resulting in a minor collection of crap like Andre Kostelanetz and Ferrante and Teicher - artists whose music was selected based on the quality of, you know, being in the bargain bin with the rest of the music that nobody wanted to spend real money on.

I don't know what kind of ratings the Donny & Marie show received, but apparently they did well enough to stay on television for four years. We watched them for one reason: they were Mormon. They were the most famous Mormons in the world. They were the only famous Mormons in the world. And I guess that it was reaffirming to see some of ours make it in the seedy world of entertainment, and we probably felt obligated to support the show. I suppose that by watching the show, we probably felt that we were helping to promote the Mormon church in both the media and the larger culture, which made watching Donny and Marie the equivalent to doing some form of missionary work without having to leave the house or confront non-members face-to-face. And considering that Friday night television ratings were generally considered so poor that the industry commonly referred to Friday night as "the place shows go to die," there probably wasn't anything else on a competing channel that would have been any better than Donny and Marie.

I loved the show. LOVED it. Looked forward to Friday nights just so I could see it. Every episode featured a "Little Bit Country/Little Bit Rock And Roll" concert segment in which Donny & Marie would take turns performing songs from their respective genres. This, to me, was the best part of the show. I had never seen a concert, and the only musical performances I had seen had been limited to whatever I saw in church and whatever elementary school band or choir programs any of my siblings had participated in.

And suddenly, there was Donny Osmond setting off flash bomb explosions, playing guitar, or saxophone, or piano, or drums (and actually playing them all quite well), or coaxing insane sounds from futuristic synthesizers. He'd jump on top of the piano. He'd shoot bolts of electricity from his fingertips that would connect with his piano. And there was glitter and sparkle and energy, and week after week Donny Osmond blew his adoring, white conservative Mormon audience away with his talent and performance skills. Marie had the unenviable job of standing still and batting her eyes in a big, frilly dress, trying to hold the audience's attention with a slow country ballad immediately after Donny had destroyed his half of the set during a surprisingly blistering performance of Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein."

In spite of some awkward dance moves and questionable wardrobe choices (it was the era of feathered hair, wide collars and polyester), Donny Osmond was sort of a one-man delivery system for some seriously great pop and rock songs. Especially for kids like me who were not likely to hear these songs from their original sources. When you consider The Osmond's squeaky-clean image, and the attitude of the religion that they emerged from, a quick review of the songs that Donny played on his show seems practically subversive.

Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Travelin' Band." Sly and the Family Stone's "Dance To The Music." Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered." Steve Miller's "Rockin' Me." Paul McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed." Chuck Berry's "Johnny Be Goode." Plus a litany of songs by the Beatles. The first time that I heard all of these songs was when Donny performed them. And Marie was no slouch, either - a lot of her "country" songs were actually countrified versions of songs by the Beatles and the Bee Gees, or classics such as "I Only Have Eyes For You." It's no wonder that I started to love music when I watched the Donny and Marie show - they were drawing from a wealth of great songs. It may not have been respectable by the rock community, but it was showing me that there was some fun and exciting music to be found out there, and it was definitely a step up from Hee Haw. Marie even sang Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" during one episode - one of the songs that Lyn Bryson claims was written by Satan himself and which allegedly contains a subliminal message. And Bryson must have had an aneurism when Marie not only sang songs by Olivia Newton-John, but featured her as a guest star. Even the Osmonds must have thought that Lyn Bryson was a douchebag.

If we were to believe church leaders and crackpots like Lyn Bryson in their attempts to convince us that rock music was to be compared with something as dangerous as, say, heroin, then, for me at least, Donny Osmond was the gateway drug. Donny Osmond might not be regarded very highly by the so-called legitimate rock culture, but for myself and perhaps a handful of others he represents a critical cultural touchstone as someone who pointed the way for people like myself to discover some of the greatest songs and artists of the rock era. The path that eventually led me to Dylan and Lennon and Springsteen started with Osmond.

It wasn't long after Donny Osmond got me excited about music that the vista itself began to expand in a couple of ways. Like I mentioned earlier, the barrier was beginning to come down somewhat, and I managed to successfully petition Santa Claus for an AM transistor radio. It's funny, because I can pinpoint exectly when I received the radio by looking at the Billboard Top 40 charts. From Christmas of 1976 on, I know every tune on the charts. Prior to that, and the vast majority of what was on the charts was unknown to me (although much of the music of the 60's and 70's has been discovered by me since, through deliberate effort). I made a little bit of money watering a family friend's lawn, which I used to purchase a handful of 45's from the local drugstore. I had the "theme from Rocky" by Bill Conti, the Eagles' "Hotel California" with "Pretty Maids All In A Row" as the B-side, Alice Cooper's ballad "You and Me" (with "It's Hot Tonight" as a B-Side), Shaun Cassidy's cover version of "Da Doo Run Ron," "Enjoy Yourself" by the Jacksons (which I won playing "Toss Across" at a school carnival), Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke" and, I think, one of the singles from Fleetwood Mac's Rumours.

The following Christmas, I hoped for and received a handheld cassette recorder/player, a couple of tapes, and some blank tapes which I used to record songs off the radio. I now had the beginnings of a music collection, consisting entirely of Shaun Cassidy's album Born Late (a substitute, I suppose, for Frampton Comes Alive, which I had actually asked for), selections from Star Wars performed by the Electric Moog Orchestra (two guys with synthesizers and a drummer, a substiture for either the actual Star Wars soundtrack with John Williams conducting the London Symphony Orchestra or the cool disco and sound effect version by Meco Monardo, I forget which one I may have asked for - possibly both), and a greatest hits compilation of the Osmonds which included songs by the Osmond brothers as well as duets between Donny and Marie and solo tracks from Donny, Marie and (cringe) Jimmy. So my entire record collection consisted of less than three hours' worth of material that I played over and over and over again. I expanded my collection further by recording songs from a radio using a form of hit-or-miss scientific methodology in order to determine which volume settings for the radio and which recording settings on the tape deck would produce the cleanest possible recording - "clean" being relative, I suppose, to either listening to the radio inside of a room filled with the constant jarring grind of heavy machinery or cleaning one's ears with Q-Tips made entirely of sandpaper.

I suppose that it is important to point out that access isn't the same thing as acceptance. Just because pop and rock music was leaking into the house, and just because the degree of prohibition wasn't as severe as it may have been earlier, doesn't mean that pop and rock music were being granted acceptance and/or approval. The official word from church leadership was that rock was a destructive force, and parents were afraid and concerned.

Okay, time for another tangent. Through an amazing series of coincidences, I have met almost all of the Osmonds without having made any effort to do so. In 1987 I had taken a year off from college to work parking cars and handling luggage at the MGM/Bally's Grand hotel in Reno, Nevada. The Osmond Brothers (Merrill, Jay, Alan and Wayne - and yes, I know all of their names without having to look them up in Wikipedia, and I even know the names of the deaf non-musical brothers Virl and Tom) were playing at a festival in the area and stayed at the hotel. They handled their own luggage and parked their own cars and none of us hotel employees got tipped for anything for the duration of their stay. When I returned to college in Southern Utah, I was working graveyard shift at a Comfort Inn when Jimmy and his father George (yes, you should be amazed that I even know the parent's names - the mother's name was Olive) pulled up in a motorhome and asked if they could park their vehicle behind the hotel in order to get some shuteye. A few years later, I was working at the Hollywood Palm Hotel in Hollywood, California when Donny Osmond came in to settle the bill for an ill-fated artist named Tony LeMans that he was working with. Unfortunately, Mr. LeMans had damaged a table in his hotel room in a drug freebasing accident, and Donny ended up having to pay for the damages. Since he had essentially paid for the table, he asked if he could take it with him. I couldn't think of a reason why not, so my one experience with my childhood idol Donny Osmond was helping him load a freebase-damaged hotel table into his convertable. Tony LeMans, a talented up-and-coming musician on Prince's Paisley Park label, would be dead within a year or so from a motorcycle accident. In December of 2009, my brother and sister in law gave my wife and I tickets to see Donny and Marie at the Flamingo in Las Vegas (where we were celebrating New Year's Eve), and I was extremely excited to finally see them perform, but they cancelled their performance at the last minute, claiming "illness." Interestingly, they appeared the very next night on Dick Clark's "New Year's Rockin' Eve" in New York City, leaving me disappointed and even a little pissed off. So, for now, Marie remains the elusive Osmond whom I haven't met - and now, my fond recollections of Donny and Marie are tainted by the feeling that my (perhaps) once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see them perform live (and perhaps "complete the set" by meeting Marie) was cancelled and then lied about in order to troll for publicity with Dick Clark on the other side of the continent. Waaaah! Waaaah!

End of tangent.

The other way in which my musical vista was about to expand was through the opportunity to actually perform music. This was sort of a mixed blessing, and sort of a curse as well.

My earliest experiences performing music were, sadly, pretty negative. I can remember botching up a glockenspiel solo during an elementary school Christmas program and feeling so embarassed that I spent the rest of the program in shame. I got "gonged" during a 5th grade talent contest for singing a Donny Osmond song (of course) while standing perfectly still and not actually performing it (I was gonged by my teacher, for whom the notion of listening to a Donny Osmond song in its entirety must have been excruciating). I also remember performing a lip-synch with a couple of my friends at a church talent show. We took first place, in spite of the fact that we performed "Greased Lightning" and were quite oblivious to the lyrics rhyming "shit" and "tit," and were quite ignorant as to what it meant for a vehicle to possess qualities that were so "supreme" that "the chicks will cream." Ideas which, I suppose, would have seemed hardly appropriate for a children's church function.

There is one experience, however, which had a more profound and lasting impact upon me, and stands apart as the single most negative performing experience of my childhood. And it wasn't damaging as a result of my having performed poorly, but as a result of having performed well.

By way of explanation, an allegory: If you place a crab by itself in a bucket, it will work and claw and keep trying new things until it makes its way out to freedom. If you put several crabs in the same bucket, howver, none of them will escape. It's not that they won't attempt as diligently as the solo crab, but that they interfere quite maliciously with each other's progress. Whenever one crab gets close to escaping, the others will effectively pull him back down. In crab culture, no individual crab is allowed to succeed, and any attempt to do so is thwarted by the efforts of the other crabs. A status quo of equinamous mediocrity and denial of freedom is thus strictly enforced.

It was this crab-like metality that hit me hardest. I was never the type of person who sought any and every opportunity to throw myself before an audience. Not really. I never actively pursued every chance to be part of a show, or auditioned for every play. Auditioning is nerve-wracking and can even be terrifying, and it takes a lot of courage to get over one's innate fears in order to audition for a part. Even to this day, as accomplished as I have become as an actor, I don't bother to audition unless I am particularly interested in a specific show, and usually for a specific role within that show. I never audition just to be part of whatever show I can possibly get into. That just isn't my way.

Well, when I was in about the 3rd or 4th grade, I quite uncharacteristically tried out for a singing solo in a school music program. I sang the part pretty well and was assigned the solo. The music teacher was very encouraging, and I was both pleased and proud. On the playground, however, I found myself mocked and ridiculed by my male classmates, and whatever pride I had obtained as a result of the audition was soon replaced by shame. Apparently, singing wasn't considered a very masculine activity according to the parameters defined by the 3rd grade male playgound society of John C. Fremont elementary school in Carson City Nevada in the mid-1970's, and the crab culture of the playground made it clear that my successful audition was an act of deviance from societal norms which demanded censure. Succumbing to peer pressure, during the next rehearsal for the music program, I intentionally sang my part so poorly, and to the amazement of the music teacher, that my part was taken away from me and given to another student. Confused and humiliated, I shed tears knowing that I had just given up something that I wanted to do by pretending that I wasn't as good at it as I actually was, having been shown that I would be ostracized by my peers if I was to demonstrate whatever meager talent I might have had. Unfortunately, this notion of there being a stigma attched to singing, at least for men, remained with me for years and affectively prevented me from singing in front of an audience for almost 12 years, when I finally got built up the courage to audition for a musical during my sophomore year at college. This also explains why I went through high school writing songs that I was too ashamed to show to anybody, and unwilling to admit any interest in music beyond buying records at the store. Crabs in a bucket. I have to give a lot of credit to my friends in college for helping to rehabilitate me, helping me to shed the idea that the desire to create and perform music was something that any self-respecting male should be ashamed of.

I did get one other opportunity to perform music during elementary school and junior high that is worth mentioning - the opportunity to learn an instrument and play in the school band. Even though my parents were encouraging each of their children to learn how to play an instrument, and even though we were all supposed to be able to select which instrument we wanted to play, the end result was somewhat less than satisfying. My older sister Vynette was already well upon her way toward becoming a gifted piano player. My older brother Derek was becoming a talented and enthusiastic tenor saxophonist (whom, at the peak of his ability, performed a dynamic solo at the closing gathering of the Nevada legislative session, doing kicks, leaps and splits while dressed as an MX missile), and my older brother Trevor had started off playing trumpet but switched to trombone. When it was my turn to select an instrument, I stated that I also wanted to play saxophone. Well, that idea was voted down primarily because one of the siblings was already playing sax. My next choice was the French horn - just because I thought the instrument looked amazing. This was voted down because it was too expensive. Perhaps a flugelhorn like the one Chuck Mangione plays? No the instrument was too rare and odd. As it turns out, my opportunity to choose a musical instrument devolved to having the freedom only to choose an instrument that one of the neighbor kids had abandoned, which we could get for cheap, and which was damaged. This was how I gut stuck playing a goddamn clarinet.

Man, I hated that thing. It was a piece of crap to begin with, and the bell of the horn was broken and couldn't be repaired even with super glue. No matter how many times I may have been told that the clarinet "was just like a saxophone," it WASN'T just like a saxophone. It made a thin, reedy little sound compared to the throaty roar of a sax. The saxophone was a sexy, seductive instrument full of energy and passion. The clarinet, by comparison, was uptight and Calvinist. The only recognizable player of the clarinet since the big band era was the dullest, most personality-devoid cast member of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra, which says something. At an age when awareness of the opposite sex is blooming, to be stuck playing clarinet is not unlike being branded as a eunuch. To hold the instrument was demeaning. To play it was emasculating. I hated it. Women could easily be attracted to a guy playing saxophone. Women don't think particularly pleasant thoughts while looking at a man playing clarinet. They think about taxes or insurance or aluminum siding, but nothing even remotely sensual. For a heterosexual adolescent, the clarinet is phallic in the worst possible way. Girls would watch a male clarinet player bring his instrument to his mouth and simply assume that clarinet players weren't interested in women. Having to play the clarinet during one's pubescent years is about as appealing to the opposite sex as, I suppose, having leprosy.

There was a brief moment in the 6th grade when the band instructor asked for volunteers to play percussion for one or two songs in our otherwise percussionless repertoire, and I tried out for, and won, the coveted slot for bass drum. This was a HUGE relief, as playing the bass drum was SO much cooler and more masculine than playing the clarinet. And I was pretty good at it. For a white kid in sixth grade, I had surprisingly decent rhythm. Rehearsals were fun, and I looked forward to the moment when I could lay down the clarinet and assume my position, mallets in hand, behind the bass drum. Things went quite well as we prepared for our upcoming performance, until the band instructor casually mentioned how well I was doing on the bass drum to my father. This information was not welcomed joyfully. Apparently, playing a drum was not to be considered the same thing as learning how to play an instrument, and my father told the band instructor that I was to play the clarinet and the clarinet exclusively. At band practice later that afternoon, the instructor took me aside and told me the news, and I had to watch as my fellow bandmates eagerly competed for the suddenly and mysteriously vacated, and highly sought, position behind the bass drum. Despite the fact that drummers are needed in every conceivable form of music, and that drummers thus have a multitude of opportunities in which to continue to play throughout their lifetimes while the clarinet is essentially an archaic instrument with comparitively fewer opportunities to play in considerably fewer genres - almost none of them cool - I was thus resigned to playing nothing but that goddamn black wooden stick that I wished thousands of times that I could simply snap in half over my knee. Edward and Alex Van Halen's father plays clarinet, and even performed a guest solo on a Van Halen album. And even THAT doesn't come close to making the clarinet respectable. And the elder Van Halen's performance is probably the only clarinet solo that has been recorded since the 1940's, which gives you some idea of how in-demand that instrument is. Learning how to play a clarinet in the 1970's was about as useful as learning how to hitch a horse and buggy. Yeah, there might be a few people left who consider it a valuable skill, but those of us who don't live among the Amish tend to have little call for it. Did you know that they make clarinets out of plastic now? What is this, Fisher Price's "My First Instrument?" Could you even imagine an instrument manufacturer attempting to pass off a plastic trumpet or a plastic trombone? Of course not - those instruments require the unique properties of metal in order to resonate in the appropriate timbre. But you can make a clarinet out of plastic. What does this tell you? That the sound of a clarinet is inconsequential. It's timbre isn't considered unique enough to protect by demanding that they even be made from natural materials. It's just a friggin' clarinet - they may as well make 'em out of cardboard. Make 'em out of compressed dog shit, for all I care. Nobody would know the difference because its a worthless instrument that nobody particularly likes or listens to or cares about. Have I mentioned that I hated that thing?

I never ever practiced playing the clarinet outside of band class, and yet my band instructors always told me that I was one of the best players. I haven't touched a clarinet since about 1981, but I still remember all of the scales and fingerings in my head. I could pick one up and play it right this second. Yay for me. I choose not to. The only benefits the instrument ever gave me were the friendships I made with Rick Trimmer, John Gee (who taught me how to play Xanadu-era Electric Light Orchestra songs on the piano before class) and Linus Adler, who were also trapped playing clarinets, and the fact that the clarinet section was placed directly behind the flute section, which meant that I was able to stare at the butt of a gorgeous girl named LaNie, whom I was obsessed with for years but terrified to speak to, for hours as we marched over mountains of horse and elephant shit in the Nevada Day parade. Ahh, youth.

Interestingly, many of my first significant experiences with music and my first serious experiences with the opposite sex are sort of connected. The first love note that I ever wrote to a girl I mostly plagiarized from the spoken-word middle section of "Are You Lonesome Tonight." I only knew the Donny Osmond version, and had no idea that it was, you know, one of Elvis Presley's biggest hits and one of the most well-known, deeply-engrained ballads of our culture. It must have been baffling for the recipient to read that she had "lied when you said you loved me, and I had no cause to doubt you, but I'd rather go on believing your lies, than to go on living without you." Yeah, I clearly had no idea what I was doing, but I guess that that wasn't such a big deal because I was so shy around girls that any attempt to express affection or attraction was usually followed by my being too timid to even speak to them for, well, the rest of my life. And that was even if they responded well!

If music is one of the greatest forms of communication, I found myself frustratingly mute during my years in Carson City. I had a desire to espress something through music, but I didn't really know what I wanted to say or how I wanted to say it. But until I figured that out, I found a way to immerse myself into the music that I loved while also exploring new music.

I got my own radio show.

To be continued...