Rock 'n' Roll Dreams

To understand me you have to understand my story. I had an idyllic childhood of backyard adventures and playground heroisms. I grew up in the 60's watching the trembling lift-offs and cool blue splashdowns of the Astronauts, first in Mercury, Gemini, and finally Apollo. I remember the front porch conversation of the neighbors after Bobby Kennedy was killed, peace signs, baby sitters that were hippies, beads, and bellbottoms. I remember the excitement of the times without being a part of it. When I was a boy I wanted to be an astronaut so my mother enrolled me in all these classes at the planetarium but all the mathematics were a drag when all I really wanted to do was look at the stars. My father was military even after he wasn't. When I was a kid we had lived in a typical white picket fenced in house, several of them. Eventually settling in a suburb of Chicago, so I could identify with Morrison. His father too was military and the family had been Navy nomads moving around the country at every change of assignment. Like the young Jim Morrison, I retreated into books, one subject leading to the next. Curiosity was my only guide it was formless, without direction.

In high school I got a taste of the Rock 'n' Roll lifestyle I was a roadie for a band, although it was more a ruse to get into parties. Through a friend of a friend I met the band at a party and they asked if I could help bring their equipment in, I said “sure!” and being the resourceful guy I am, and wanting to keep my party schedule full I asked where the next party was they were playing at. I showed up at the party and brought in the equipment, and that lead to a summer’s worth of parties, but I never took out any equipment when the party was over, I was either too busy making out with a girl or throwing up, nothing was ever said about it.

The summer between high school and college I followed the band around because of Cassie Leighton, the beautiful apple cheeked ministers daughter who was ‘in love with the snake’ who wasn’t me, it was the leather jacketed new lead singer of the band. That summer the band played sweltering outside gigs, the phosphorus flash of smudge-pots as he struggled to read lyrics off a notebook he had stashed on-stage.

After high school I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It was one of the more liberal of the liberal arts schools. The town had a counterculture post hippie feel to it. In college I started hearing songs I remembered from my childhood. I asked around and discovered the songs I liked were The Doors. I read everything I could find out about The Doors. I became enamoured of Morrison. I saw my reflection in him, a disaffected youth who had some problems with his parents, who didn't want the world imposing its rules on him. I discovered the legendary Rock 'n' Roll stories I'd heard as a kid were Jim Morrison stories, like a band was getting on a plane and a groupie tried to board the plane and someone asked her what she did and she answered "ornament", or a rock star in a restaurant orders one of everything on the menu just "to see what everything tasted like." I started reading all the same books Morrison had, Nietzsche, Blake, Kerouac, Huxley, Ginsburg, seeing a path in the wilderness I was in. It became my real education. I dressed in black jeans, and reenacted everything I'd read about, I did balancing acts, took stage dives, I hung off balconies, and drank to excess trying to find the palace of wisdom. I became a minor hero, someone to invite to your party to make it interesting, then an object of ridicule.

After graduation, I wanted to do post graduate work, but my parents pulled the plug on the money. They refused to pay for any more schooling insisting my choice be practical, get a job with the education I had, and to pay for any further schooling that way. I liked the lifestyle in Madison so much I didn't leave. I guess I subconsciously chose nothing, but got experienced in everything. The atmosphere was stimulating, nonjudgmental, and there was an acceptance of a range of thought leaning towards the experimental. It was around this time I met Colt and his wife Jessie, I used to hang out at their second floor apartment smoking hash. They were newlyweds, their furniture was all new looking, like it had all been bought from the pickings of wedding envelopes. Colt was a good looking guy with long blond hair, always wore a buckskin jacket and behind one of the couches in the living room stood his guitar case, he looked like a cross between Custer and Eric Clapton. Jessie was a pretty blond who always wore white billowy blouses that were popular in the 70’s. And when she looked at Colt her eyes gleamed with admiration, she had obviously hitched her star to Colt’s, she unflaggingly believed he was the next Eric Clapton. They were contemporaries, the first married couple I knew working towards their Rock 'n' Roll dreams, but I didn’t know how to get there, yet.


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Chapter III: Post-Graduate Work