School Daze

For years following The Great Record Massacre, and my torrid affair with "Crocodile Rock," music remained a background distraction to my other interests. The rare occasions when music did come into focus for me as the late 1970s wound down were fleeting instances always triggered by external factors, like, say, really awful made-for-TV movies.

Despite Paul owning a copy of Destroyer, I remember that my great enthusiasm for watching Kiss Meets The Phantom Of The Park had zero to do with Kiss' music and everything to do with their makeup, stage show and those absolutely bad-ass costumes (and the hope of seeing Gene Simmons incinerate some poor schlep with his spectacular dragon breath). Despite a few spins of the aforementioned Destroyer (as well as Love Gun and maybe Rock And Roll Over) while we were goofing off down in Paul's basement, I was just not at all entranced with rock music. Thus, Kiss remained ultimately cool in the image department alone ... at least until after I watched that movie the one and only time it was ever screened for a TV audience. Ugh.

While I remained completely and blissfully ignorant of nearly all contemporary music, I was becoming rather familiar with a lot of much older pop music thanks to good old fashioned well-funded public schooling of the mid-1970s. During my time at Northbrook Elementary School, music was not an elective course at all, but part of the everyday curriculum every bit as much as, say, Math or Science. As part of an indentured student chorus (the whole class experience, more or less, was learning songs and then singing/shouting the words as the teacher played her piano for accompaniment), I found this class to be at best a nagging distraction from reading or doodling, and having to learn the words to the University of Michigan Fight Song, "Oklahoma!," "The Fifty State Song" (the memorizing of which, to be honest, has come in handy every now and then over the years and still makes for a dandy parlor trick), "Daybreak" (aaaaagh!!), "Buttons And Bows" and sundry other family classics was a complete drag compared to reading up on poisonous snakes, the lining of the duodenum, or theories on the possible existence of extraterrestrial life.

Annoying on its own merits, music class really started to suck nose when it came to staging these inane Broadway-styled musical shows for our parents' entertainment: not only did all five grades at Northbrook have to take music classes, we were also forced to take part in music programs two or three times every school year (all of them staged in the mighty expanse of Southfield-Lathrup Senior High School, which sat right across 12 Mile Road). Worse, with so many performances to stage and only a finite amount of students in each grade level, there would soon come a time when your number would come up and you were chosen to take a more active part in the program than just standing there and hoping everybody else covered your ass when you forgot the words. Instead, you would have to come forward, leaving behind the faceless safety in numbers that was the choir, and either act in some kind of silly linking skit or join in a spotlight dance number in order to give the hundreds of parents out in the audience something to look at rather than three or four rows of neatly-dressed singing kids on stage risers.

After years of trying to keep myself well out of sight when it came time to look for new "volunteers," my number finally came up some time in fourth or fifth grade ... and to this day, I have anxiety-ridden memories of doing a near-mewling-with-stage-fright version of the Charleston while dressed in a silvery, winged-looking "fish" costume to tune of "At The Codfish Ball."

With Northbrook and that codfish costume safely behind me (the school had actually shut down for good directly after the end of my fifth grade year), I somehow made the incredibly retarded decision to take up an instrument and found myself signing up for Band class when choosing elective classes for sixth grade (which was also when I started attending Alice M. Birney Middle School).

About the only way this scatterbrained flight of fancy makes any sense in retrospect was that band class must have sounded like a lot more fun than, say, Home Economics. I hadn't shown much of an aptitude for cooking or sewing, so why not try playing a musical instrument instead?

Why not indeed.

To make things even harder on myself, I settled without much thought on the cornet as my instrument of choice (despite having an overbite that made playing it correctly an extra added challenge), and my parents, to their credit, actually went out and bought me a rather nice, shiny gold specimen along with with a velvet-lined carrying case. New instrument in hand, I then set about learning how to play the damn thing and that's where things went to pieces in a real big hurry.

Thinking back on this now, I can only cringe when I think of the horror my parents must have felt after purchasing this undoubtedly-expensive musical instrument and realizing even more quickly than I did that I was absolutely terrible at it: I couldn't have made a sound approaching "melodic" with this thing even if you'd held a gun to my head. Worse, I had no ear whatsoever for "hearing" music at the time and even less of an eye for reading it, yet there I was in a class full of kids who were actually, you know, serious about learning whatever instrument they had chosen while I spent most of the class time banished to the "practice room" trying to figure out how to hold down a D-flat.

I was never what could be called a "popular" kid at Northbrook, but I had a lot of friends during those years as very young kids are rarely picky when it comes to playmates (as long as it's not girls, of course) and that was fine by me. This started to change, however, once I started at Birney. Probably due to the much larger student population, that first year of middle school seems to take the minor annoyances of fifth grade and multiplies them exponentially in size: the one asshole in the schoolyard that you never had an easy time playing dodgeball with suddenly turns into ten separate assholes, for instance. Being a smaller and skinnier (not to mention far more of a bookworm) than the average sixth grader probably didn't help matters much, either. That's not to say that I didn't slowly drift into a new group of friends over those three years, but it seems like that was when I first got a real taste of the caste system that dictates who you can and can't hang out with once you are out of elementary school.

While the above was guaranteed to make life a bit more, uh, interesting during my years at Birney (or at least until whenever I'd get my own growth spurt happening), the added daily embarrassment of being completely unable to learn the cornet was making a mildly uncomfortable situation a thousand times worse: I was out of my element and fully aware that I'd made a terrible mistake. Getting through that course (as far as I got through it) was excruciating and I began to dread Band class even more than participating in the old Northbrook Elementary school programs. How I finally managed to get myself out of that disaster eludes my memory right now, but I'm pretty sure my total lack of aptitude made it a cinch for the course teacher to pull some strings and get me the hell out of there around midway through that school year. So much for that idea ...

From that disaster, if memory serves, came relative stability: I was moved from a "learning to play and read music" class into more of a straight-up "music education" course. Instead of playing instruments, the focus was on on the big names in classical, different movements in jazz and popular music, and some dabbling in more contemporary styles along with some more rudimentary "music vocabulary" lessons here and there ("ok class, this is a treble clef, this is a meter, this is a quarter note" etc.). This was all a bit boring and musty for my tastes back then, but far less daunting than band class.

This music class (and sixth grade itself) was finally overwith as we rolled into June 1981, and despite the occasionally interesting bits, I was still anything but enraptured in music as a whole. Having to learn this material to obtain a passing grade was a big enough downer, but there was also the unforeseen REO Speedwagon factor to contend with: I'd had no idea who these REO people were at Christmas of 1980, but by June of 1981, I was actively wishing they would take a long walk off a short pier at the nearest convenient opportunity.

Here's what happened: the teacher of the Music Ed. class would often accompany discussions on various musical forms with some music on his little cassette tape player: a wide array of tones covering Beethoven, Canned Heat, Bill Haley and points in between. Perhaps to keep us on our best behavior, the instructor would often let the class have the run of the tape player when there was nothing else to do on a given day. Since hardly anyone had much of a reason to carry them to school in those pre-Walkman days, this generally meant we'd end up hearing the same songs from the teachers' record collection over and over again. You can probably see where this is going by now ...

Indeed, it seemed that the tape player was always taken over by a female classmate whose full name escapes me (Amy Something-or-other), but whose passion for REO Speedwagon's then-current Top 5 single "Take It On The Run" was so incredibly unrelenting that we must have heard the bloody thing around fifty times in class that year. To this day, this very dated slice of undeniably catchy arena rock puts me right back at my desk, books stacked in my lap, watching the clock with impatience as the last minutes of the school day melted ever so slowly away.


NP David Gilmour Tüvé Teszi A Gitárját Egy Jó Hangért (Frankfurt 3/18/06)