Practicing piano in the house near Mrs. Dyer’s, 1979
* * *
—
I had arrived. I trod up Mrs. Dyer’s porch stairs and rang the bell. I’d soon be going over boring scales and getting a lecture on how I needed to practice, and I’d have to fake my way through a child’s version of Mozart’s “Turkish March,” which I had neglected to practice. But an eleven-year-old can’t yet appreciate what technique is really for. It’s for later, when you need the skills to tell a whole story with just a line and some clues.
1979. THE SUMMER OF LOVE
Cultural Latency, Symbols, and Repetition
YEAH, MAN, IT WAS THE seventies. And the times they were a-changing, if perhaps a little more slowly in our parts than elsewhere. The cultural latency of the South often afforded my childhood the authentic feel and look of the 1960s, even though it was well into the disco era. The styles, the colors, the language, all felt a few beats late. That may be why today I sometimes find myself reminiscing about the sixties as if I actually grew up in them. In fairness, ideas and trends, especially in music, rarely land everywhere at the same time. Two towns just thirty miles apart can feel like they exist in different decades, and unless you grew up in New York, L.A., or London, you too probably felt that all the cool stuff happened everywhere else first.
Music that was too cool for the South often made its way to me under the radar, by way of a few friends whose families had money and traveled. They brought home glimpses of the future, like the first Sony Walkman I ever saw and the punk and new-wave albums that changed my life in high school.
Big-city trends often took a while to traverse the short distance to the surrounding rural areas, what we called “the county” (outside the city limits, but within the county line). When we lived in the county, the bus ride to school felt like time travel. Two worlds, side by side, existing in different decades. I’d board the bus in what looked like an early-sixties’ documentary about white Alabama and get off the same bus in the seventies, in full color, filled with post-civil-rights hippies, Afros, and bell-bottoms. Just ten miles away! A few years later, the county people would have the bell-bottoms too, and the city people would decide that school integration was perhaps too idealistic after all, dial it back, and yearn for the 1950s (I, personally, don’t understand the romantic appeal of the fifties).
The 1960s that we see in movies, where everyone is on acid and looks like Jim Morrison or Tina Turner, nearly passed us by down South. And what did make its way to us came late and watered down. The “Magic Bus” that the Who sang about never officially stopped in North Carolina. It just lost a wheel eastbound on I-40, which went rolling unnoticed past the WELCOME TO WINSTON-SALEM NORTH CAROLINA sign and hobbled to a halt just inside the newly automated doors of a grocery store called Food Town. And there in the cereal aisle, Chuck and I got an eyeful of our first grown man with long hair. Wide-eyed and suppressing giggles, we followed this poor man like amazed third-world children getting a glimpse of a shiny red sports car for the first time. We referred to him as a “boy girl.” Soon, more “boy girls” and their bell-bottom-wearing wives would proliferate, whizzing through Winston-Salem in Volkswagen Bugs and compact Japanese cars. Long-haired hippies had been around for years elsewhere. Had the revolution actually been televised, we would have only seen the reruns.
Clothing with words printed on it and bumper stickers weren’t so common until the 1960s and, in our case, of course, the 1970s. And when that trend reached our parts, many went way overboard just to prove we were up on the times. The bumpers and often entire rear panels of the boy girls’ vans were plastered with funny stickers that looked as though they’d all been purchased at the same place and applied on the same day. There were some really good ones, like NORTH CAROLINA, FIRST IN PAVEMENT—LAST IN EDUCATION (a play on our state motto on license tags, FIRST IN FLIGHT). VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS. And who could forget the classic EAT A BEAVER, SAVE A TREE. I actually didn’t know what was meant by that, but I laughed along with my parents anyway.
Soon a natural-food store appeared, which attracted pale, thin, unhealthy-looking ladies with long, braided gray hair, oozing of garlic. It was like a self-conscious Southern theme park version of Haight-Ashbury. I never saw these types outside of this particular shop. Did they change back into their street clothes in the bathroom when they left? There were buckets of oats, roots, and little glass tinctures with handwritten scribble. The word “mucus” was used. A lot. And I once heard a friend’s father introduce my friend’s mother to someone in the natural-food store as his “lover.” Were they trying to be gross?
* * *
—
The hippiest of hippies was an art teacher who knew that I was into music. She was kind enough to invite me to a party where she would be singing backup in a real live rock band! And so, at twelve years old, I was dropped off into this bizarre scene where teachers I’d known as Ms. or Mr. So-’n’-So by day were transformed into extras on I Dream of Jeannie or Warren Beatty in Shampoo, stumbling with their drinks through loud music and thick cigarette smoke. The backup-singer chicks for this real live rock band, who all seemed to be Forsyth County public school teachers, were swaying in a sort of lazy belly-dance type movement, staring into space, and singing nasal out-of-tune harmonies into the same mic behind a shirtless man who looked like he’d been rubbed down with baby oil, sporting a massive Afro and bandana. I later found out he was the principal of a neighboring school. A few of the female teachers I knew from school disappeared behind doors and later resurfaced, hair and clothes disheveled and giggling, on the arms of dudes with long hair and leather vests, no shirts beneath. The only male teacher I recognized was a driver’s ed teacher in the upper school. The smell of skunk swirled while the band played a song called “Stormy Is Force.” It was definitely their “hit.” The band was called…you guessed it, Stormy.
Stormy is force!
Stormy is force and thunder!!
All the while, nothing that could be seen through the heavy fog of this fake-wood-paneling home soirée would have indicated it was 1979 or that “My Sharona” could be heard playing from every corner on the rest of the planet. In this groovy pad it was the “Summer of Love,” and not in a masquerade party kind of way. It all seemed very new to them, and to me. And I didn’t see much of Mrs. So-’n’-So that night at that swinging teachers’ party, but I did learn she was a damn awful singer. As Stormy’s thunder squeaked through a Peavey tower all night, I borrowed the phone to call for rescue, by airlift if necessary. I waited for my mother at least an hour outside on the cul-de-sac. Had I known then that the literal translation for the French “cul-de-sac” was “the ass or bottom of the bag,” it would have given form to what I suspected Mrs. So-’n’-So was seeing up close at that very moment “backstage,” behind a thin bedroom door. I’d had my fill of the sixties that night. I was done with the Summer of Love. I wanted to go back to the future and watch Welcome Back, Kotter with the rest of the seventies.