No rednecks were harmed in the production of this photo.
Let me tell you about the time I married my sister Thing 1.
No, no—holster the Jeff Foxworthy redneck jokes. I grew up in Kansas, not the Ozarks. Thing 1 married someone else; I just performed the ceremony.
This was a bit of a surprise to my extended family, many of whom I hadn’t seen since my own wedding back in 1988. Most of them didn’t know I had been ordained.
Thing 1 had called me several months earlier to tell me she was engaged and asked if I would marry her. “Sure!” I said without thinking, which is my favorite way of speaking. I’d never officiated a wedding, and it never occurred to me how terrifying it might be to do my first wedding before my own family.
A week or so before the wedding, I purchased a minister’s wedding handbook, with sample ceremonies, vows, and so on. Thing 1 and Hubby 1, her fiancé, said they’d mail me some Bible verses they wanted included, and would I please throw in a little five-minute sermon? “Piece of cake!” I said.
Well, Thing 1 and Hubby 1 got a little busy, and they didn’t send me the verses. Not that I never procrastinate myself: At 3 a.m. the night before I left for Kansas, I sat at my computer, staring at a blank screen and desperately racking my brain for sermon ideas.
We arrived in Kansas City at 1:30 a.m. The rehearsal started at 6:30 that evening, and we hadn’t even started planning the ceremony. Best Half and I went to Thing 1’s apartment at 5 p.m., sat down with her and Hubby 1, and started putting together the ceremony.
The whole thing must have been a little weird for my parents. It’s one thing for your children to participate in one anothers’ weddings. It’s quite another for your son to marry your daughter, especially when, to be blunt, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
My mother had somehow gotten the impression that another minister (ideally, one who had done weddings before) was going to be involved. She was a little nervous when she realized I was flying solo, so to speak.
She came into the room while we were working on the ceremony and overheard me say, “Do I ask everyone to stand before or after I pronounce them husband and wife?”
“Why don’t you ask the other minister?” my mother interjected.
“What other minister?” I said.
Mom turned green.
“Hey, I’ve spoken at a couple of funerals,” I said. “A wedding’s hardly any different. How hard can it be?”
My jokes didn’t help. Later, when my mother popped in again and asked how it was going, I told her we were deciding what color war paint to use during the Native American part of the ceremony. I also said we were shooting for the grand prize on America’s Funniest Home Videos.
She didn’t spank me, but I think she wanted to.
I imagine her feelings were analogous to going to the hospital for brain surgery and having your doctor arrive in your room with one of your own children. You note with horror that your child, whom you clearly remember being unable to cut his meat into bite-size pieces even as a teen, is wearing a surgical mask.
“You’ve got to start sometime,” your doctor says to your child, pointing at you. “Why don’t you try this one?”
The rehearsal, of course, was a disaster. One of the groomsmen didn’t show up, along with two other people in the wedding party. Everyone else waited for me to direct things, which I would have been happy to do if I hadn’t left the wedding book and all my notes at Thing 1’s apartment.
Despite all that, I’d say the rehearsal exhibited all the stately dignity of the running of the bulls in Pamplona.
God is merciful, though; the wedding went off pretty smoothly. Best Half told me my voice only went up two octaves, and that from the back of the sanctuary she could hardly see my knees shaking at all. When Thing 1 came up the aisle with my father, I had to remind myself that preachers are not supposed to cry at weddings.
Hubby 1 said he and Thing 1 were honored to be the first[1] couple I ever married. He was wrong, though: The honor was mine, all mine.
Back in ’82, I went over to my friend Rob’s house one summer day, and for some reason he had a black laundry marker and a bunch of letter stencils, and he wanted to put some slogans on some shirts.
For some reason—quite possibly the same reason Rob had a black laundry marker and a bunch of letter stencils—we were wearing identical gray tank tops, and this all reeked of portentous foreshadowings.
Alcohol may have been involved.
We had one T‑shirt each, so first drafts and revisions were out of the question. Despite alcohol’s possible involvement, we had to do some adulting and settle on our shirts’ messages.
So we sat down and watched an Incredible Hulk rerun titled “Metamorphosis,” in which Bruce Banner lands a sound engineer position for a punk rocker played by MacKenzie Phillips, because if you need a sound engineer, everyone knows you look for an expert in gamma rays and cellular biology.
Someone slips Banner acid, so of course he gets scared, and we get to enjoy the Hulk staggering around trippin’ balls while MacKenzie Phillips sings her earsplitting hit song “Necktie Nightmare” in front of a gigantic pair of high-voltage electrodes shooting perfectly safe 50-foot lightning bolts across the stage, and the also-stoned fans think it’s part of the show, so MacKenzie Phillips ditches her punk bonafides to turn into Amy Grant.
Meanwhile, we got to laughing so hard Rob fell off the couch and I almost wet myself.
After the Hulk was finished with “Necktie Nightmare,” and after more contemplation and discussion, along with more of the possibly involved alcohol, we settled upon messages to stencil on our shirts, making them T‑shirts that would have helped Bill and Ted’s music to bring harmonic balance to the universe much earlier if Bill and Ted had been wearing shirts with the most totally excellent and bodacious stencils we created
With our new world-changing T‑shirts finished, and after some more possibly involved alcohol, we decided we needed to get out there and let the world see them. The T‑shirts, that is. Not the impressive pile of empty beer bottles.
So we hopped into my car, aka the legendary Charles the Deep Breather, and engaged in one of our favorite pastimes: Driving around and drinking beer while enjoying music generated by the vigorous pelvic thrusts of the renowned Pioneer SuperTuner and lustily pumped out through the inimitable Jensen 6x9 Triaxials.
As we cruised up Topeka Boulevard, we saw that the Kansas State Fair was underway, so we parked and wandered around with a couple of warm, overpriced state fair beers rather than the cooler full of ice-cold reasonably-priced beers waiting for us in Charles the Deep Breather’s back seat.
As we passed all the rigged games, a carny guy looking for someone to blow $80 to get a nasty-smelling imported teddy bear that was probably stuffed with asbestos accosted us.
Seriously? I mean yes, this is played for laughs on a TV show where everyone was in on the joke. But while teenagers can be abysmally stupid (watch any horror movie), no one would think an unshaven middle-aged carny with B.O. that could kill Godzilla was a nice fellow teen who wanted to discuss T‑shirts. Yeesh.
“Hey there, fellas!” he said.
Rob lit a cigarette and crimped an eye at him. “Yo.”
“Those are nice T‑shirts!” the carny guy said, looking as convincing as that “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme with Steve Buscemi, no doubt thinking the fellow kids said, “Why, there’s that groovy cat with the skateboard (or nasty-smelling teddy bear)!” rather than “Here comes Chester the Molester again–run!”
“DENTAL FLOSS TYCOON?” he said, pointing at me. “What does that mean?”
“It means I might be moving to Montana soon,” I replied.
“Oh, cool!” he said, the way you would say “Oh, cool!” to a guy carrying a chainsaw and wearing a space helmet who told you he was the lovechild of Carl Sagan and an alien from Proxima Centauri V, hoping to distract him long enough to make a run for it. “Does th—“
“Just to raise me up a crop of dental floss,” I interrupted.
“That’s inter—“
“With a pair of heavy-duty zircon-encrusted tweezers!” I interrupted again.
He gave up and turned to Rob. Apparently he wasn’t a Frank Zappa fan. The carnival guy, that is. Rob was a Zappa fan. Still is.
“What does PRO mean?” he said, sounding desperate.
Rob squinted at him again, taking another drag of his cigarette.
“Prostitute,” he drawled.
The carny guy turned on his heel and stomped away. I don’t know what got his dudgeon up; you’d think someone who travels with a carnival wouldn’t get offended at the word prostitute.
It wasn’t always like that, though. If you’re bracing yourself for a story about how I had to walk 10 miles to school barefoot, relax. What I mean is that you could buy T‑shirts when I was a kid that these days would make woke people pass out.
Take this charming, whimsical 1970s T‑shirt ad, for instance. Before Rohypnol, Jethro Tull T‑shirts were, alas, the only way a lot of guys could get laid.
The struggle is real.
Here’s the text:
Reprise leeringly invites you to win a T‑shirt that will
DRIVE THE GIRLS WILD WITH DESIRE!
You say you’re not making it with the local lovelies? That when you make Paul McCartney eyes at alluring little honeys in violet hip-huggers they respond by frowning and suggesting, “Jerk off, loser”? That even the offer of a seat next to you at a Led Zeppelin concert is insufficient inducement for a far-out nubie to spend part of the evening with you?
Then, fella, whatchoo need is a SUPER-OUTTA-SIGHT-JETHRO-TULL-T-SHIRT of the sort worn by the fullest-handed rakes everywhere.
These eye-catching sartorial groovies, which are guaranteed to reduce even the haughtiest of lovelies to a mound of hot pulsating flesh, are a divine shade of yellow designed to to flatter even the swarthiest of complexion, are the three-buttons-at-the-neck style recently made all the rage by your sharper English groups, appealingly reveal the wearer’s fashionably skinny arms (being short-sleeved) and feature an enticing likeness of sexy Tull leader Ian Anderson somewhere in the vicinity of the right boob. Available in the splendid sizes of medium and large, they may be worn with equal success by members of any sex.
We, in our customarily fiscally unsound way, are giving 1,000 of these wonder away. Free!
All you have to do to win one of your very one is: 1) fill our coupons below; and 2) give it back to us complete down to the exact playing time of the first side of Jethro Tull’s latest hysterically acclaimed album (surely you don’t expect us to give you something without first trying to trick you into buying something first), which information may be gleaned from the album’s label, which you have to remove the cellophane to get to.
So why don’t you in a real hurry send us the required so that we can rush you a Tull T‑shirt that’s certain to transform you overnight into a churning urn of burning funk.
I like Jethro Tull and I do have fashionably skinny arms, but I’m not sure I’d like Ian Anderson sitting on my right boob. Also, do I want to be a churning urn of burning funk? I honestly don’t know. A churning urn of burning funk might be a slick-talking studly chick magnet.
A churning urn of burning funk could also be an overflowing Porta Potty doused with gasoline and set on fire.
In ’77, when I was in Catholic high school—and I must emphasize that this was not just any Catholic high school, but Hayden Extremely Catholic High School—the math teacher, Sister Rose Celine, called a guy named Brian up to do a problem on the chalkboard.
Awww–how adorable!
Now Brian had been wearing a hoody all day because he was wearing a T‑shirt that said “Your Problem Is Obvious” on the back, along with a drawing of someone with his head stuck up his ass. He’d been collecting snickers and giggles all day from other students.
But now it was the last class for the day and it was pretty warm out, so he shrugged off the hoody and left it draped over his chair.
And when Sister Rose Celine called him up to do a problem, Brian forgot about the hoody.
Just as he was about to pass by Sister Rose Celine, he realized why the rest of us were stifling giggles and whispering “Pssst!” at him, and without missing a beat he pivoted 90 degrees to the right, facing Sister Rose Celine, and sidled up to the board. He filled out the math problem with his left hand, facing Sister Rose Celine all the while.
“Very good, Brian,” Sister Rose Celine said. “You may sit down.” Brian began sliding sideways back the way he came as the muffled snickers neared a crescendo. Sister Rose Celine glanced up at us, then at Brian. Being a math teacher, she put 2 and 2 together and stood up.
And because nuns are terrifying, Sister Rose Celine didn’t yell or throw things or grab a ruler or anything like that. All she did was to quietly say, “Stop.”
Brian froze in place; everyone else stopped giggling. We stopped breathing, in fact.
“Why are you walking sideways, Brian?” Sister Rose Celine said.
Brian said, “…eep?”
“Turn around,” she said.
Brian turned and showed her the back of his shirt. She studied it for a moment and said, “Class, you will work on the rest of the problems in your books until the bell rings and class is over.”
She walked to the classroom door, opened it, and waited. Gulp. This meant Sister Rose Celine and Brian were about to visit the principal, Father Ax, a visit. Dead man walking.
No, that’s not a joke. His last name really was Ax. Father Ax was the principal and the school’s boxing and wrestling coach.
Clarification: Father Ax was principal of Hayden East, which was in downtown Topeka, across the street from the state capitol. Hayden East was for 9th and 10th graders.
11th and 12th graders, on the other hand, went to Hayden West, which was across the street from Gage Park. And the Hayden West principal was (I’m still not making any of this up) Father Santa.
And I just realized Father Santa looked an awful lot like Principal Carter in the movie Porky’s, and that the actor playing Principal Carter was named Eric Christmas.
Okay, I’m having a panic attack here. I’m gonna go lie down.
Don’t let the teeth fool you. He’s not smiling; he’s baring his fangs.
I didn’t attend Hayden after 10th grade, so while I have no direct 411 to share about Father Santa, I suspect he was even scarier than Father Ax. But let’s get back to Father Ax:
Father Ax was about 5 1/2 feet tall, 3 feet wide, and weighed about 220 pounds, all of it solid muscle.
Father Ax was not the kind of guy to have an avuncular chat with a wayward student and invite the wayward student to come see him if he ever wanted to talk.
If Father Ax answered the phone instead of Liam Neeson in Taken, Father Ax would not threaten to kill the kidnappers. The kidnappers would drop dead the instant Father Ax picked up the phone.
The reason you hear all those jokes about Chuck Norris being so tough and also about how Bruce Lee killed Chuck Norris in a movie is only because they were both way too smart to even joke about fighting with Father Ax.
Father Ax had a large paddle in his office made of 3/4‑inch oak. It was labeled “Board of Education.”
Father Ax was a Vietnam vet, but he was not rumored to have been a Navy SEAL or in Special Forces or a sniper. Father Ax was rumored to have taken the Board of Education to Vietnam and singlehandedly ended the war in less than a week.
Father Ax had no interest in, patience for, or mercy upon any wiseass churnin’ urn o’ burnin’ funk T‑shirt, and even less for the student wearing it.
The next morning, everyone was whispering about poor Brian. No one knew what transpired in Father Ax’s office; Brian wasn’t talking about it and everyone else was afraid to ask, although we did notice Brian wincing whenever he sat down, so we assumed Brian had had a talk with the Board of Education.
Anyway, Mom and Dad had 4 children, but I was the only one they sent to Catholic school. I have no idea why.2
First Sister didn’t care; She’s three years older than me, so we never saw each other in school.
Thing 1 and Thing 2, on the other hand, are a year younger than me, so when I was sent off to Extremely Catholic school, they welcomed not having to say yes, that weirdo is our brother but he was adopted because his birth parents dropped him on his head a lot.
A little Extremely Catholic high school wouldn’t have hurt them, though. I mean, thanks to Sister Rose Celine and Father Ax and Father Santa, I stayed out of trouble (or was careful enough not to get caught). And thanks to Brian’s terrifying fate I especially avoided provocative T‑shirts (at least until after graduation).
Secular public school, on the other hand, deprived Thing 1 and Thing 2 of important, nurturing, eternal values; values like corporal punishment, sheer terror, and fluency in raunchy slang and raunchier T‑shirts.
And so one summer when they were maybe 13 or 14, Thing 1 and Thing 2 went to Worlds of Fun with some friends. Worlds of Fun was okay, but it was really just Acres of Fun.
Be that as it may, it was still fun, and that evening their friend’s mom dropped them off; they were sweaty, dirty, sunburned, overstimulated, greasy, and sugary from eating junk food all day. Job well done, Worlds of Fun.
Mom was sitting on the couch reading a magazine while Dad and I watched a movie. She said, “Go get a shower before you sit d…”
She trailed off as she glanced up and saw what Thing 1 and Thing 2 were wearing. They’d saved up their money and bought matching T‑shirts. And this is what was printed on their matching T‑shirts:
I laughed so hard it made me snort and then hiccup; Dad was shaking his head and trying unsuccessfully to look stern.
Thing 1 and Thing 2 were still looking happy, but a little puzzled.
Mom folded down the page she was reading, set the magazine down gently, and said very quietly, “Where did you get those shirts?”
Uh-oh. She sounded just like Sister Rose Celine. I’d forgotten: Mom and Dad had both graduated from Hayden Extremely Catholic High School in 1958. Back then, things weren’t as kind and forgiving and touchy-feely as they were 20 years later when I was there.
“We got them at Worlds of Fun,” Thing 2 said. “Um… is something wrong?”
“They had those shirts at Worlds of Fun? They let you buy those shirts at Worlds of Fun?”
Thing 1 and Thing 2 have this thing they do. They’ll glance at each other; maybe one of them will raise an eyebrow and the other one will shrug. It’s like all the hand signals in baseball, except instead of a short message like “Walk this asshole,” they exchange an ocean of info in the blink of an eye.
“Didn’t your friend’s mom say anything?” Mom asked.
Thing 1 and Thing 2 glanced at each other to discuss their strategy. It’s important to note here that Thing 1 is a practical, take-action type, while Thing 2 is more introspective and philosophical.
“Well, no,” said Thing 2. Meanwhile, Thing 1 quietly left the living room and headed down the hall.
“I see. Do you know what that means?”
“What what means? Oh, on the shirt? It’s, uh…”
By now Dad and I were desperately trying to keep straight faces. Mom glared at us for a second, and looking back I just now realized this situation was eerily similar to a famous scene in the movie Porky’s:
A group of horney—I mean, horny—guys were caught peeping into the girl’s locker room showers. One them sticks his, um—can we please call it a tallywacker?—he sticks his tallywacker though the peephole and almost gets caught by Girl’s PE Coach Beulah Balbricker.
Balbricker wants Principal Carter to arrange a lineup of naked teen boys so she can identify the scoundrel. Meanwhile, the Boy’s Coaches Goodenough, Brackett and Warren are desperately trying to keep straight faces as Principal Carter says no, a short-arm inspection is absolutely out of the question.
Coach Brackett says, “Mr. Carter, we can just call the police, and we have ’em send over one of their sketch artists. And Miss Balbricker can give a description. We can put up Wanted posters all over school: ‘Have you seen this prick? Report immediately to Beulah Balbricker. Do not attempt to apprehend this prick, as it is armed and dangerous. It was last seen hanging out in the girls’ locker room.’”
At which point everyone, including Principal Carter completely loses it, and Miss Balricker stomps out. I still admire Nancy Parsons, who played Miss Balbricker, for keeping a straight face. I would have had a stroke.
This all happened years before Porky’s was released. And it’s worth noting that Thing 1 liked Porky’s so much she had a personalized license plate saying “PORKY1” for a number of years.
But I digress. Thing 2 was trying to come up with a definition for horney that would would keep her and Thing 1 out of trouble, especially since they didn’t know what it meant anyway.
“It means,” Mom started. “It means, uh, well.. *ahem.* When someone is “horney,” it means they’re… um… sexual. I mean, excited in a sexual way.”
Thing 2 ruminated on that for a few seconds. “Sure, I’ve heard that,” she lied, “but it’s kind of like the word ‘crazy.’ There’s ‘crazy,’ where you see things and stuff, but it’s also like, you know, ‘wild and crazy guy.’”
“So what’s the other meaning of horney?” I managed to choke out between snickers. Mom glared at me again, and I realized I might have to explain how I knew what horney meant if I didn’t shut up. So I shut up.
Thing 1—who is, as I said, the practical take-action type—came back down the hall, saying, “Hey, what if we just wear them like this?”
She’d hitched her jeans up as high as she could, then tucked in the Smile If You’re Horney shirt so tight it was stretched out of shape, so instead of this:
It looked like this:
And we all—Mom, Dad, me, Thing 1 and Thing 2—we all lost it as thoroughly as the coaches in Porky’s.
It’s not fair. Whenever Thing 1 or Thing 2 got into trouble, they’d do something to make Mom or Dad laugh and they’d get away with it.
“Go take a shower,” Mom said, picking up her magazine. “Change clothes and bring me those shirts.”
Thing 1 and Thing 2 surrendered with dignity, glad they were off the hook.
And by “surrendered with dignity,” I mean “executed a strategic retreat to discuss flanking maneuvers.”
The next day, when we were all called to the kitchen for dinner, Thing 1 was last to arrive. She strategically executed a not-quite-late arrival, during which she showed up just as Dad was about to repeat Mom’s chow call, meaning everyone would be waiting to see what was going on.
She stepped into the kitchen, wearing the “Smile If You’re Horney!!” shirt that she’d been ordered to destroy, and said, “Hey Mom! How about this?”
She’d secretly rummaged through Mom’s sewing supplies and found some embroidered letters, one of which she’d sewn onto the offending shirt. And this is what it looked like:
Dad, who heroically managed to keep a straight face, said, “Smile if you’re CORNEY?”
Golf clap to Thing 1. I’m still in awe.
I don’t remember if Mom and Dad let Thing 1 and Thing 2 keep the shirts.3
I owe John Denver a debt of gratitude, and not just because he did us all a favor when he accidentally killed himself in a plane crash.
No, wait. That’s entirely too snarky and cynical, even for me. Denver was an amazing songwriter, musician and performer; really he was. Let’s just say my relationship with him was a bit rocky4 for a few years.
Our story begins with Denver’s birth: John Denver was his stage name; his given name was Henry John Deutschendorf Jr., and he was allegedly born in 1943, in Roswell, New Mexico.
Based on his given name and place of birth, there are only two possible conclusions that can be drawn:
He was a Nazi, and smart enough to get out of Germany a few years before his compatriots, change his name, get a fake birth certificate, but not hide in South America, or
He was an alien who got stranded on Earth, like E.T.
I’m firmly in the alien camp, and here’s why: No Nazi could release 33 albums of award-winning music without a single tuba or accordion appearing in any of his songs.
And maybe he died in a plane crash. Or maybe it’s like Elvis in Men in Black, and he just went back home.
But as further proof I offer his album covers. About half of them were, I believe, coded distress signals to his home planet. He was trying to “phone home,” to coin a phrase.
No, really. Check out these highlights:
John Denver Sings, 1966:
Looks like a collage of Most Wanted mug shots. But Denver was still learning how to mimic humans; it’s possible he thought Most Wanted meant Most Popular.
Take Me to Tomorrow, 1970:
What’s he doing here, stalking the Unabomber? It sure looks like he’s peeking into the Unabomber’s cabin. And that soulless, blank stare could have belonged to Jeffrey Dahmer.
But the title’s the clincher: Take Me to Tomorrow. Yeah; that’s an alien asking the Unabomber if he can build a time machine or maybe a warp drive engine.
Whose Garden Was This, 1970
Some people can get away with bare-chested portraits. John Denver was not one of them. Especially not when his scrawny, pale geek chest was superimposed over some ancient relic looking a lot like the alien ship in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Aerie, 1971
Denver cuddles with his pet vulture and watches the sunrise. He appears to be shirtless again.
Or given the album title, maybe it’s an eagle and they’re sitting in the eagle’s nest. Which would make Denver an eaglet.
This is getting creepy.
Farewell Andromeda, 1973
Definitely a cry for help. He’s staring off into space with a bunch of ghost animals sitting on his hat, and somewhere along the way he stole Kirk Douglas’ chin.
But now we at least know which galaxy he was from.
Denver released some new material over the next ten years or so, but mostly he coasted on greatest hits and holiday albums, until…
One World, 1986
Neptune’s nose nuggets! What the hell is he doing? Standing on the surface of the Sun?
(Now we know where James Cameron got the idea to kill both Terminators in a bathtub of melted steel at the end of T2: Judgement Day.)
Having now proven John Denver was an alien, lemme loop back to the part about how I owe him a debt of gratitude.
In September 1975, Denver released Windsong, the cover art of which looks mostly human. The tracks did include a couple of alien hints, such as “Looking for Space” and “Fly Away.”
In Windsong, Denver also sang a song to a boat. Not a song about a boat; a song to a boat. It was titled “Calypso,” which was also the name of a boat owned by famous oceanographer Jacques Cousteau (not to be confused with the bumbling detective in the Pink Panther movies).
Yep—“Calypso” was a love song to the boat of the same name, complete with nautical sound effects: seagulls, waves, bells ringing, cabin boys getting buggered, crew members puking over the rail; all that fun stuff.
First Sister and Mom had both been hopelessly in love with Denver ever since he released Rocky Mountain High, but Mom went thoroughly insane over “Calypso.” She wanted to listen to “Calypso” All. The. Time.
I can’t criticize her for that; we’ve all gotten obsessed with a song or album and played it around the clock. It’s easier when you’re stoned, but still. I was 12 that fall; I liked John Denver too, but not quite at the Beatlemania level Mom and First Sister did. Thing 1 and Thing 2 liked him too, but without any screaming or fainting.
Mom had bought the album, but she also bought the single for “Calypso.” It was the B side of “I’m Sorry,” which you should consider dramatic foreshadowing.
Like this, except uglier.
And every morning when Mom rousted us all out of bed to get ready for school, “Calypso” was already on the record player in the living room. (Remember the huge TV-radio-record-player consoles popular at the time?)
She would put the single on the turntable, put the little arm doohickey in the middle so the record player played the single over and over, wake us all up, then bustle around like a Stepford wife, humming and singing and fixing breakfast so cheerfully it tempted me to stick a finger down my throat, barf on my breakfast, and claim I was sick so I could go back to bed.
It wasn’t just the abominable cheer, though. It was “Calypso.” I liked the song at first. But it usually took everyone about 45 minutes to get up, have breakfast, apply teethbreesh and get out the door. During which time “Calypso” played at least a dozen times.
After a couple days of this, I hated waking up, I hated “Calypso,” I hated John Denver, I hated Jacques Cousteau, I hated Jacques Cousteau’s stupid boat, I hated the record player, and I hated breakfast. My sisters didn’t seem to mind the song, but I have the attention span of a squirrel on crack, so it didn’t take long for me to get tired of “Calypso.” I didn’t want to ruin it for everyone else, so I didn’t say anything.
I’m not sure how many days we breakfasted to “Calypso”; maybe four or five. But one morning, 10 minutes into yet another “Calypso” marathon, Dad got up, went into the living room, opened the record player lid, and scuttled “Calypso” with that glorious teeth-on-edge SKVRRRRYK! sound of a record being terminated with extreme prejudice.5
Dad came back into the kitchen, grabbed his lunch box, kissed Mom and wished us all a good day, and left for work as my sisters and I sat openmouthed in shock.
Mom and Dad weren’t perfect; they disagreed or argued occasionally. They never had any serious drama or the kind of fights that make the kids hide under their beds. If anyone had said they wanted to listen to something else, Mom would have been happy to put on something else. She isn’t the selfish type of person who wants what they want, but doesn’t care about anyone else. She loved “Calypso” and found it joyful and uplifting and she wanted everyone else to feel joyful.
And Dad rarely raised his voice, much less lost his temper or started breaking things.He’d obviously had his fill of “Calypso,” but I think he was just being ornery and silly when he stopped the record.
I do know he didn’t scare any of us; we were just gobsmacked, and it took about 3 minutes for the incident to become a family joke: Someone would turn on the TV or ask Mom or Dad permission to play a record; the rest of us would yell, “Not ‘Calypso’!”
So yeah, John Denver got a lot of airtime in our house.
A few years before The Calypso Incident, a song on one of Denver’s alien-art albums caught my attention: It was Farewell Andromeda, and the song title was “Please, Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas).”
It’s from the perspective of a little boy whose Christmas memories were of Daddy coming home at midnight Christmas Eve and passing out under the tree, or his mom smiling bravely and shooing the little boy upstairs as his dad arrived home, laughing and hollering drunkenly; the implication being Daddy’s going to be smacking Mommy around a bit.
Here’s an odd thing: I thought the song was hilarious. I was 10 and when the song played I thought it meant Daddy was up too late assembling gifts and fell asleep under the tree. I pictured Daddy as a lovable doofus, not a violent alcoholic.
There’s an old saying, rumored to be a Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” It almost sounds like a blessing until you think about it. Thanks to World War II, for example, the 1940s are far more interesting than the 1950s.
I had no frame of reference with which to understand “Please, Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas)” because my childhood was not interesting—no violence, no alcoholics, no abuse. Nothing interesting at all.
I’m boring, but that’s not a bad thing. Sometimes boring is good.
I guess it’s not John Denver who deserves that debt of gratitude.
I still wonder if he was an alien, though, what with all his bare-chested weird album cover art.
There’s a posthumous collection of his best music that came out in 2004, 7 years after his fatal plane crash. It’s even titled as such: John Denver: Definitive All-Time Greatest Hits.
This offered a priceless opportunity to define his body of work and career, to shape his legacy once and for all, so here’s hoping they chose cover art that avoids the weirdness of some of his earlier albums, and—
This post is about a song by The Righteous Brothers. I don’t know if they really were righteous, but I do know they weren’t brothers, so I guess I report, you decide. If you’re the churlish tl;dr type who can’t wait till the end of this post to hear the song, it’s down at the bottom, but if you skip the whole post like that you can’t be my friend or come up in my tree fort anymore.
If you’re under 45, chances are the only time you’ve been exposed to the Righteous Brothers was in the movie Ghost, or possibly in Top Gun.
In Ghost, The Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” plays while Demi Moore is sculpting a vozz, and Patrick Swayze sits down behind her and the vozz gets ruined and they get slimy wet clay all over themselves.
In Top Gun, The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” plays on a jukebox once or twice, along with the fighter pilots singing “Great Balls of Fire” and Kenny Loggins singing “Danger Zone” and the pilots playing half-naked volleyball and flying around really fast and in general sloshing buckets of sweat and testosterone off the screen and all over the audience.
The Righteous Brothers were were a hugely successful white crooner/extremely white doo-wop duet in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. And since this post is about The Righteous Brothers, I’d like to talk about The Partridge Family.
The Partridge Family was a TV show about a fictional musical family loosely based on the real musical family The Cowsills, who not only had a hit with the song “Hair,” from the musical with the same name, but also got me very confused when was a kid, because it seemed to me that if a cow has sills, it should also have windows.
So anyway, The Partridge Family was neither a family nor a band. It was a TV show with a bunch of actors pretending to be a band that didn’t exist, except they did kind of exist because you could go to Woolco or Sears and buy 45 RPM singles labeled The Partridge Family, even though the songs were performed by David Cassidy with a band of generic musicians, which conspicuously lacked a 10-year-old bassist and a 7‑year-old drummer.
My dad hated The Partridge Family. He also hated The Jackson 5, The Osmond Brothers, The Carpenters, the Monkees, The Righteous Brothers, and Bobby Sherman (who, on a side note, originally leased the custom-built Boeing 720 that Led Zeppelin used and was seen in the 1976 film The Song Remains the Same, which was about a Led Zeppelin concert in New York City in 1973).
Dad did not hate any of these musicians for their music. As far as he was concerned, they were just noise. Dad was like Bob’s wife, who worked at Bob’s Country Bunker in The Blues Brothers and who, when asked about what kind of music she liked, replied, “Both kinds: country AND western!”
What Dad hated was their faces. He also hated 3M, the company that produced Scotch Tape, and the magazine Tiger Beat.
Cowsills and God?
Tiger Beat profiled young musicians and actors as long as they were safe-looking relatively short-haired guys (which is why Led Zeppelin and Alice Cooper and The Doors never appeared therein).
Scotch Tape sold the tape my sisters used when they scissored Tiger Beat into confetti once a month in order to tape headshots of that month’s dreamiest teen idols all over their bedroom doors, then rip them all off to tape up the head shots from the next month’s issue, which was rapidly stripping the finish off the doors.
After school one day my mom asked me to go fetch her cigarettes from her room. The cigarettes were on her nightstand; as I picked them up I glanced at a 45 RPM single next to the cigarettes. It was a single by The Partridge Family titled “One Night Stand.”
I was 9 and not too sharp on the subtler nuances of grammar and spelling, so when I saw the single “One Night Stand” on the nightstand, my first thought was Why would anyone sing a song about a piece of furniture? 6
So I grabbed the single, along with the cigarettes, and asked Mom why The Partridge Family had a song about a nightstand, which led to an awkward, unsatisfying explanation about how a one night stand was when two people went to go see a movie together, but then decided not to see any more movies together.
I never did find out why the single was on Mom’s night stand.
Fast forward two years to the summer of ’74. I was 11 and had vaguely figured out that a one night stand was a very brief romance, and the reason the guy and the girl didn’t want to see any more movies together was because they didn’t like kissing. Prepubescent me understood that, because girls were yucky and kissing was stupid.
We vacationed in Colorado that summer. The Righteous Brothers had just released a song titled “Rock and Roll Heaven,” and it was getting heavy airplay, at least once an hour all the way there, all day every day we were there, and all the way back.
If you’ve never heard “Rock and Roll Heaven,” it’s a tribute to the legacy of musicians who had passed on, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jim Croce, Bobby Darin, and Otis Redding.
I didn’t get most of the references other than Jim Croce and Janis Joplin; “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” had been a big hit the previous year. Joplin had appeared on the Tom Jones variety show, which my mom loved (and I snicker a little bit now, but at least she didn’t throw panties at the TV).7
I also recognized the reference to “Light My Fire,” but I’d seen Anthony Newley singing it on a variety show and I thought it was his song.
I loved “Rock and Roll Heaven” on its own merits; still do. But what made it so cool at the time was the chorus:
If you believe in forever
Then life is just a one night stand.
If there’s a rock and roll heaven
Well you know they got a hell of a band!
Part of it was the puerile thrill of someone on the radio singing the word “hell,” which was still mildly naughty, but what made the biggest impression was that for the first time I can remember, I connected with lyrics that used a simile to touch on a much deeper truth: Compared to eternity, life is short. Blink-and-you’ll-miss-it short. And maybe someday those who touched our lives but have since passed on—well, maybe someday we’ll see them again. And in the meantime we can remember them by celebrating their lives and legacies.
MTV didn’t exist in 1974, but thanks to Midnight Special and American Bandstand, you could occasionally see a music video or live performance of hit songs.8
I didn’t know “Rock and Roll Heaven” had a music video until the other day, when I stumbled across it on YouTube. And just like that, a song I hadn’t thought of for more than 40 years was back, with all the influence and emotion it generated back then.
So I now present to you, all the way back from 1974, The Righteous Brothers’ “Rock and Roll Heaven.”
Time travel can be brutal, though: In this case, try not to think about how unbuttoned shirts and bell-bottomed leisure suits and lapels wider than your shoulders were once unbearably cool.
During our ’74 summer vacation, Dad found “Rock and Roll Heaven” annoying, even though The Righteous Brothers weren’t Tiger Beat material, and he kept tuning to something else when it came on. I would yell, “Turn it back on! I love that song!” from the back seat.
Here’s the text:
Based on his given name and place of birth, there are only two possible conclusions that can be drawn:
John Denver Sings, 1966:
Take Me to Tomorrow, 1970:
Whose Garden Was This, 1970
Aerie, 1971
Farewell Andromeda, 1973
One World, 1986
So anyway, The Partridge Family was neither a family nor a band. It was a TV show with a bunch of actors pretending to be a band that didn’t exist, except they did kind of exist because you could go to Woolco or Sears and buy 45 RPM singles labeled The Partridge Family, even though the songs were performed by David Cassidy with a band of generic musicians, which conspicuously lacked a 10-year-old bassist and a 7‑year-old drummer.