Last night, my husband and I watched the movie Pirate Radio. Great film, great cast. It is about music, specifially the music that stirred up the airwaves in the US through the 60's and was, apparently, outlawed in England at the same time. I never knew this, and find it interesting to note that during one of the most fertile periods of British music, the people of that country could only listen via a ship parked in the North Sea broadcasting from outside the purview of the British Government.
It really is a fun movie, but this is not to be a movie review. The music of the 60's wallpapered the background of this film so that by the end, we were wondering if the filmakers had picked a dozen or so of their favorite songs and built the plot of the movie around them. One of the songs, The Letter, by the Boxtops, made my husband pause the movie and tell me a story about being a teenager picking up his date (he grew up in Memphis) at the home where she was babysitting, which happened to be the home of Boxtop member Alex Chilton. On the wall in the house was the gold record for The Letter. Good story, true story.
As we put dinner dishes aside before resuming the movie, we both started singing that song. The words came slowly back to me, and reminded me of my own story. I didn't tell it to Jon, because I wanted to write it here, and sometimes telling a story out loud dissipates the necessity of writing it.
This story starts in the Music Building of Ohio University, 1976 or so. I had just read "Even Cowgirls Get The Blues" and was enamored of the idea of goats as traveling buddies. I walked into a practice room where a friend was talking to a slightly built, older bald guy (by older, I mean 31 to my 21) where I announced that I wanted to walk across the US with a goat. I was just goofing around, sort of, but this statement started me on an alternate path. The man in the practice room was named Erasmo Switzer. He was from California, and was in Ohio to record an album of his original songs at a studio in Chillicothe where he knew the owner. I signed on to play cello on this album, and we got to be friends over the following summer. Somewhere in that summer, we decided to buy a school bus and become a traveling band. Just the two of us.
This wasn't a whim. I had wanted to live in a school bus for years. Maybe since I had read The Boxcar Children as a kid. Erasmo had already had experience living in a bus. It was the 70's, after all, and he was 10 years older, had already lived his own hippy fantasy.
So we bid on a 1966 Chevy school bus, 35 feet long, and paid I think 700$ or so for it. It ran like a top, had NOTHING wrong with it, and between working on the album and working around the studio to make a little money, we converted the bus into a pretty slick home where we lived for the next couple of years.
January of 1977 was one of the coldest I had ever experienced, especially as I now lived in a tin can with nothing more than a little woodburning stove for heat. As the snow piled up around central Ohio, we decided to head west, to California, his home, and a crazy new life for me.
First stop, San Bernardino (his parents let us park the bus in their driveway), where we tried the showcase circuit in LA. The Troubador and The Palomino stand out as places we played and had people listen to us. But we didn't have enough focus to our act. That's what we were told. And this makes sense to me now. Erasmo had all these songs he had written, and then also a bunch of random songs that he just happened to like. They weren't any particular genre. And I really only knew my classical music, and the several mountain folk-y tunes I had learned in Ohio.
After 6 months of this, and when the smog started backing up against the San Bernardino Mountains, we headed to San Francisco, where Erasmo was entering school at SF State. I got a job as a bicyle messenger and we lived a romantic year in that beautiful city as part of the counterculture underground vehicle dwellers that populated parking lots and curbsides in those days. Our music together suffered here, mostly because I got distracted by other interests. I started fooling around with watercolor painting and writing and just absorbing this cool life.
Erasmo's Album (as the finished product was called) started with an original pressing of 1000 records. We sold as many as we could, but never got rid of them all. He had borrowed money from some wealthy friends in Oregon to make the album, and by the next winter he was feeling the pressure to pay them back. Instead of paying them back directly from album sales he arranged to work for them on their ranch. So off he went with the bus to Halfway, Oregon, leaving me in San Francisco to finish out the job I now had as a teacher's aid at Lucinda Weeks Center. I sublet a nifty apartment in the Sunset a few blocks from Golden Gate Park, and indulged in a fertile few months of writing songs and trying out open mikes on my own.
In July I took the train up the coast and across the top of Oregon, through the green lushness west of the Cascades into the arid scrub of the east. I remember seeing plumes of smoke where forest fires raged, and stepping off the train in Baker, Oregon, being hit with 104 degrees HOT!
That summer was spent on the ranch, Hooker Flat, overlooking the mountains of Idaho and seven miles over rough dirt roads from the nearest town of Halfway, population: 350. Erasmo, in preceeding me there, had already built a reputation for his musicianship. This was a place full of college-educated transplants from all over the country, living in tipis and yurts and log houses and berm houses, stunning the locals with their strange ways. They were hungry for live music, and Erasmo was able to provide that. When I joined him in July, we picked up our instruments and played wherever and whenever we could. We met other musicians there, a young biology teacher at the middle school who was a very skilled guitar player, and a high school kid who could play drum set. Now we had a band. We called ourselves Northwest Passage, and played parties and gatherings of all sorts all around northeastern Oregon. We developed a loyal following. It was a good time.
The songs Northwest Passage played were the same strange mix of songs we had tried in LA, but here, they worked. We played rock songs, some jazz standards, originals and mountain folk songs. Our audiences loved it.
And here is why this story means something to me now. Many of the rock and pop songs that our guitar player and Erasmo knew were ubiquitous on the radio in the 60's and early 70's. But I didn't know them. I had never listened to pop or rock radio, and so the only versions of these songs I knew were what I learned from my bandmates. This was a time before iTunes and youtube and Guitar Hero and all the ways kids have these days of accessing music from the past. We didn't even have a record player, and had left stashes of records with people around the country, thinking we would return one day to collect them.
The Letter was one of the songs we played. I didn't know where it came from. I just knew how we played it, and sang it. I know that song gave me heartache, and I loved the harmonies and mood of it. It wasn't until last night that I learned the name of the group that originally recorded it, as I sang in with my husband in the kitchen in 2011.
