Journey Into Sound

“Wow, look at that girl in the tub, she’s got no bikini!” I said jubilantly as I pointed at the photo in the paper sleeve which unfolded from the cassette tape holder. My 7-year-old eyes were wide open with delight, possibly my first attraction to the opposite sex.

So I thought.

My brother, eleven years my age, along with a couple of his accomplices burst out in laughter as they gave me a daunting reality check.

“That’s not a girl, it’s a guy! That’s C.C. DeVille, the lead guitarist of Poison!”

My face crumpled up like a brown paper bag. I took a closer look at the photo, squinting and adjusting my focus as couldn’t I make the distinction between the sexes. Why the hell was he wearing makeup and why was his hair long and tussled the way it was? These questions infiltrated my young, inquiring mind as the melodic guitars of Poison’s “Fallen Angel” filled his room.

I was too young to comprehend the feeling of embarrassment during this situation, but one thing was for certain: Music was my first taste of what it was like to be in love.

As a child growing up in the mid 1980s, we had a substantial assortment of music players scattered around our apartment. We had a record player, a few AM-FM radios, a rusting and overused 8-track player, and a couple of Boom Boxes. Anyone remember Betamaxes?
Damn right we had that too! Should have saved those if we knew it would make a comeback 20 years later along with neon colored apparel…

I have fond memories of sitting in our living room next to my Dad some afternoons and watching him sort through his vinyl collection of The Beatles I watched as the Fab Four’s faces quickly transformed from squeaky-clean gentleman to un-groomed Hippies.

It was like Michael J. Fox watching himself in the mirror becoming a wolf in Teen Wolf. He had them stacked up as I watched them tumble down like vinyl blocks and sounded like a deck of playing cards shuffling.

I would have been a Beatles fan at a very young age, but my heart took a gamble on the first song I ever heard on a set of speakers, which was Dream by the Everly Brothers.

My refuge was always sitting in the dining room with the lights off and listening to our 8-track player. I was still too young to attend preschool and I spent most quiet afternoons here.

I considered this my Xanadu.

We didn’t have many of those gigantic tapes resembling prehistoric stone tablets, but the one that got the most play was a blue cartridge with “The Everly Brothers” etched on it. I really loved their song “Dream”, and to this day it is still my favorite song of all time. I heard it enough times, and after countless hours of playback, the over-gluttonous machine ate the tape and it was stuck in its mouth.

Thankfully, I never got tired of it. However, the film became warped to the point where the Everly Brothers started sounding satanic like Freddy Krueger.

One would not usually associate Freddy Krueger with the Beach Boys, but when I was about 3-years-old my brother played a sinister trick on me. Nightmare on Elm Street had just come out and the song that I really enjoyed at the time was Cocomo. It was just such a serene song that always put me in a state of bliss.

Being the prankster he was, my brother thought he’d get a kick out of scaring the shit out of me. So right before the song came on, he decided to do a Freddy Krueger voice impersonation directed at me.

He said: “James… guess who this is! It’s Freddy Krueger!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

Then the tape made that sound warp noise that it does when it goes back into its original form after being taped over, and picked off with “…we’ll get their fast and then we’ll take it slow! That’s where I wanna go…”

That’ll tend to psychologically mess with a young child’s brain that’s still in development.
I was 3, so I was easily scared by things; spiders, dreams of dead relatives trying to take me away and most oddly, ancient Egyptians.

Yeah, tell me about it…

I think it might have been caused by a ceramic bust of Queen Nefertiti that would stare straight at me whenever I walked into the storage room. I was so scared of ancient Egyptians that when Walk Like an Egyptian by The Bangles came on MTV or the radio, I would absolutely cower in fear!

Then again, I don’t think anything was more frightening than my obsession of singing songs by The Supremes in the shower.

At some point in my toddler phase, I developed some strange ritual of placing a radio in the bathroom and blasting music as I took a shower. Many genres of music were covered during those 20 minutes in the bathtub; 60s Pop, 50s Rock n’ Roll, 80s stadium rock stuff… It just made for a relaxing experience.

One song that would always be in the mix was “Can’t Hurry Love” by The Supremes. Whether the music was good or bad or if my sexuality was in check at this point was totally subjective, but every night I was belting out at the top of my lungs, “YOU CAN’T HURRY LOVE, NO! YOU JUST HAVE TO WAIT! OHHHH…”

Of course, being the gullible child I was, I left the door open during this. Sure, there were times I set the smoke alarm off because I loved taking hot showers.

One time my brother, having timed the situation very well, placed his hand through the opening of the door with a small tape recorder and caught my performance on tape. After I was through with my shower, I walked out of the bath and found my brother and his friends laughing hysterically. When I stepped foot in his room, he rewound the tape and played it back to me in my utmost horror.

But perhaps I have saved my best for last.

My earliest and most sacred memory of music goes back to when I was very young; maybe between a few months to two years old. I remember being draped across my Dad’s hulking shoulders like a monkey. We were standing in between the dim dining room and the kitchen, where my Mom was making dinner. As we moved further in I was at eye level with the bright, round bulb of the lamp which seemed like I was going closer towards the sun. It suspended from the ceiling with a kaleidoscopic, glass shade.

As my dad bounced me up and down his shoulder, he sang to me in a deep, godly voice:
“Heeeeee’s got the whoooooole world, in his haaaaaands, he’s got the whooooole wooooooorld in hands…”

Looking back on it, I don’t know why I found it soothing, considering I realize now that he sounded like Darth Vader singing me a lullaby.

Or Mufasa from the Lion King depending how you look at it. Same person.

It must have been the combination of ultra-low vocal tones and the vibration from his diaphragm that relaxed me.

Now at 28 and a musician/songwriter for the last seven years, that is one thing that I fail to use when I sing: my diaphragm. But I think of all the singers who are successful in their careers who sound like they don’t. Mike Ness, Bob Dylan, Joey Ramone, Bruce Springsteen… You know, guys I admire who look and sound like they are holding in the need to drop a deuce when they sing.
But things might be worse; I could easily have become an alcoholic. Whenever I had a toothache as kid, my dad would dab a Q-Tip in a bottle of whiskey until it numbed the pain and I would eventually pass out. I grew a taste for it and would purposely rot my teeth out on candy just as an excuse to get drunk.

Nothing beats the feeling that music can provide for the soul. I’d say that you have to be dead to be completely numb to its wondrous powers, but then I just thought about Michael Jackson’s "Thriller" and “The Monster Mash” and decided to keep my mouth shut.

Signing off…