Sex, Sex (We didn't do drugs), and Rock & Roll

Response to #58: Killer Rift

It's hard to think of any guitar riffing without stirring up the nostalgia of high school. My boyfriend and I both came from modest homes where we were well sheltered, fed, and clothed, but for entertainment we were on our own. We both held down part-time jobs as early as 14, and when we started dating, most of that money went collectively to CDs and rock concerts. It didn't matter who made how much or who worked how many hours, Rock & Roll was a shared effort.

A flipping of the radio stations alone, especially Classic Rock or Hair Nation on Sirius, is a walk down memory lane. Ok, it's more than that. Sometimes I can actually feel the surge of teenage hormones when I hear an Eddie Van Halen or Phil Collen (not Collins) guitar riff, or a Jack Russell or Sebastian Bach power ballad. And of course nothing gets the blood rushing like a Jimmy Page guitar or an effortlessly guttural Robert Plant moan. I can scroll through my iTunes catalogue now, and almost any heavy tune hosts a riff that transports me back to my hormonal teenage years, when little mattered more than good music and making out.

I thought of a few pop artists from my teenage years who had some notable riffs, though considerably softer than my rock faves. "It's Only Love" by Bryan Adams* and Tina Turner, "Big Shot" by Billy Joel, and George Michael's acoustic "Faith" made especially memorable with his ass shake in the video. And who can forget Michael Jackson's "Beat It," and "Black or White," only to be outdone by sister Janet with the riff in "Black Cat." A mere mention of Prince in this post is a dramatic disservice to his catalogue, but if you don't know the opening riff to "When Doves Cry," you must have slept through the 80's.

I can't possibly cover the likes of all the best classic rock artists who paved the way, so I won't even try. You know who they all are. I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention a couple of my favorite female rockers like Lita Ford, who doesn't really have a particular riff that stands out to me, but man did I think she was cool... and hot! Joan Jett was the rockinest (I know that's not a word) female guitar player. Every song stands out, but the most obvious and memorable of her riffs is in, "I Love Rock N Roll." I'm not sure how much the riffs of Alanis Morisette stand out to casual listeners, but as someone who followed her music long after the Jagged Little Pill album, her 2002 album Under Rug Swept hosts multiple faves. The first two songs, "21 Things I Want in a Lover" and "Narcissus" both have great opening guitar riffs that continue to jam through the songs.

It's difficult to draw one favorite out over another, even one band over another. If I am to drill down to my many rock-related memories, I'm drawn to the opening riff of Led Zep's "Whole Lotta Love," or Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher," which is alongside an equally notable drum intro by the way**. Either of these bands can yield a whole list of faves. There's a host of others from my alternative/grunge bands too, like "Man in the Box" by Alice in Chains and "Dissident" by Pearl Jam. Tom Petty has a catalogue of his own, with "Running Down a Dream," "Mary Jane's Last Dance," and countless others. And who doesn't remember the opening riff to Def Leppard's "Photograph?"

But if I'm circling back to my original thought, a riff that transports me back to my hormonal teenage years, when little mattered more than good music and making out, there are only two places to land, and that's with Great White and Tesla.

Great White epitomizes 80's hair metal in many ways. The boys in the band didn't wear make-up, but there was lots of hair, several power ballads, and no shortage of sexual innuendo. Actually, I don't even know if it was subtle enough to be considered innuendo! Most popular was their tune "Once Bitten, Twice Shy." How do you not remember the opening riff from that?  I'll tell you what though, the songs "Mista Bone" and "Rock Me" initiate a physical response in me that I can't even explain here for fear that sharing it can risk my reputation with someone who doesn't approve.

Tesla stirs up all the feels in me too. I've seen them in concert more than any other rock band, and I won't stop buying tickets to see them as log as they're still touring. Their music is the soundtrack to my love affair with my husband. Whether it's the melodic acoustic introduction to "Love Song" or "Little Suzi," that both get cut off the radio versions (and these videos-check out iTunes for the extended versions with acoustic intro), or the out-of-the gate heavy tunes like "I Wanna Live" and "Edison's Madison" (this one is serious metal), Tesla songs make my heart flutter and by cheeks flush with heat. It is the musical version of my adolescent libido.

So now that I have over-explained and tried and failed miserably to capture even the tiniest collection of guitar riffs in a world gloriously filled with more than I could ever do justice to, here is my guitar riff-inspired micro memoir...

Sex, Sex, and Rock & Roll: A Micro Memoir

We drove side by side with the windows down and silent stares between us. Sweaty and disheveled, we had been scooted along by a cop who found us fogging up the windows in the parking lot of a local park. After the concert we could barely contain ourselves, couldn't make it home so we pulled off the road. Now our thoughts in a vacuum, but the whooshing of the blustery wind through the car and the sound of heavy metal like lava in my veins, had my every nerve-ending engaged and hyper aware. He pulled into a parking spot outside my home, and we walked to the door unable to keep our hands off each other. Only 25 feet from the car to the door, we stopped two or three times to kiss. Giggling, drunk only on hormones, I fumbled with the keys desperately trying not to wake my mom while I unlocked the door. She was upstairs, likely asleep long before we arrived, and waking her would mean delaying our impulses. This was a routine we were pretty familiar with. Barely able to stand on our feet we were so anxious to get inside, our clothes dropped like bread crumbs from the door to the living room, and we stumbled to the carpet in the living room just below my bedroom. Downstairs was somewhat safe. We had a staircase and the ceiling between us and my mom, and a solid concrete floor covered with thick-pile berber carpet beneath us. No squeaky furniture. No creaky floors. Rock and roll still coursing through our veins, he played me like a rhythm section while I dug my teeth into his shoulder to keep from waking my mom.


Notes:
*I think Bryan Adams was undervalued as a guitarist. He was largely successful on the pop charts in the 80's and then he became a soundtrack singer. But I saw him in concert three times and what made his concerts rock, was that he played rock guitar.

**I'm really not interested in any conversation about whether this video was "inappropriate." It was a different time and none of us thought anything of it. Right or wrong, no matter. It was all about the music and we loved it!

Alanis Bonus! I found this while I was curating my links- even though "Ironic" doesn't make my favorites list of Alanis songs, she sounds great and thought I'd share.

Tesla Bonus! Tesla acknowledges all the bands that have influenced them over the years. They did an awesome album of covers called Real to Reel on which they recorded some of their favorite covers, on old school analog recording. These two are beautiful songs- Teslove:  I Love You originally by Climax Blues Band, and Thank You originally recorder by Led Zeppelin (the guitar solo in Thank You is such a perfect stylistic crossing of Zep-Jimmy Page and Tesla- Frank Hannon).

Roll Over, Beethoven

Response to prompt #58: Killer Riff

Roll Over, Beethoven

My Tribute to Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry 1.0

I was in third grade when the Beatles took America by storm. Late winter 1964, my dad brought home The Beatles Second Album for us. I knew their songs like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You,” but I was not prepared for the guitar riff that started the album:

Da da da da da da da

Da da da da da da da

Da da da da

Da da da da

Da

Da

Da

Da

This was not the Beatles I had heard before. It took me by surprise, and it was an education. One look at the disc told us who the songwriter was: Chuck Berry.

 

Who the heck was Chuck Berry?  I’m sure I just thought he was some white guy. I also didn’t know who Beethoven and Tchaikovsky were either, but my brother was able to explain to me who they were, and what was meant by “Roll Over, Beethoven.”  I, of course, wanted to get into the Lennon & McCartney songs, so my appreciation of “Roll Over, Beethoven” was not immediate. It was pure rock-n-roll, and I wasn’t there yet in my young life.

Chuck Berry 2.0

In high school, Chuck Berry had a hit single with “My Ding-a-Ling.” By then I knew a bit more about him – at the very least that he was black – and that he was a revered rock-n-roller. As someone that was more into 1960s and 70s rock music, I still was not impressed. I just seemed too old school.

I recall hearing complaints about Berry’s song, how it made a mockery of who he had been in the past, how young people couldn’t appreciate him, and all that rot. I didn’t care one way or another.  The sexual innuendo of the song was not lost on me, and besides, “My Ding-a-Ling” was a fun sing-a-long with my friends in the car. I am first to admit, it did nothing to help me understand his importance.

Chuck Berry 3.0

In the early 1980s when I started dating Jim, I began to learn more about the music from the 1950s. Jim is not a baby boomer, so his frame of reference on music is different than mine. We used to go see a cover band called Earthrise, and one of the songs they would regularly do was “Johnny B. Goode.”  Jim taught me how to jitterbug to that song, and it became our thing. (We also jitterbugged to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock-n-Roll,” a tribute to the very music I liked to ignore.) In this way, Chuck’s music started to have a small influence in my life – a way to connect to the man I love and have some fun together.  You can’t be sad or blue when you’re jitterbugging!

And it was totally lost on me that “Johnny B. Goode” starts with the same basic guitar riff as “Roll Over, Beethoven.”

(This video is from 1969, and has Davey Jones of the Monkees introducing Chuck)

Chuck Berry 4.0

This great rock-n-roller died in 2017.  It didn’t really cause more than a blip on my radar.  Perhaps I thought about “Johnny B. Goode” and the good times the song brought. Perhaps not. I think I put a photo of him doing the duck walk with his guitar on my Facebook page.

It has only been in the last year I’ve started to fully appreciate the man, the music, and what he created artistically and culturally. I know see him at the top of my musical heap.

Chuck Berry 5.0

Along with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones were huge fans of Berry’s. In fact, I have a book here waiting to be read called Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination by Jack Hamilton, featuring Chuck and Mick on the cover looking at each other.  In the chapter entitled: "The Rolling Stones and the end of the 1960s", Hamilton is discussing the Stones song “Gimme Shelter”:

“Gimme Shelter” is an explicitly violent piece of music. The song begins with the quiet, tremolo-laden guitar intro, playing a straight-eighth-note figure that’s little more than a decelerated version of the propulsive guitar introductions made famous by Chuck Berry in the 1950s on hits such as “Roll Over, Beethoven” and “Johnny B. Goode.”

The work of Berry is everywhere. This is just one example. I’ve come to believe that no matter what form of rock we enjoy, his influence is in there somewhere. That is legacy.

Chuck Berry 6.0

I really didn’t know how to end this tribute to Chuck, and my slow realization of his importance in the music that marked my youth and beyond.  Leave it to poet Billy Collins to help me make a connection.

This week  I read his poem “November,” in which he says:

How foolish it is to long for childhood.

This caused me to think: What do I long for from childhood?  My first response was Nothing. 

But then I thought of the day in 1964 my dad brought home The Beatles Second Album, and we put it on the stereo in his bedroom. I realized that if I could go back to one moment in time, it would be moment I heard that opening guitar riff of “Roll Over, Beethoven” for the first time. I would love to know what I really felt at that time, as it was the clarion call for all to come.

Yes – if there was a moment I could revisit, it would be that one.

I would spend years thinking the Beatles were the be-all and end-all. But they and the Stones and many other acts knew that there would be no Beatles or Stones without the likes of Chuck Berry and others from the mid-1950s.

I’ve often told people I was born the same year as rock-n-roll. However, I have to admit, I wasn’t fully appreciative of what that meant. It has been a lifetime of learning what the true significance.

It was a true revolution.

And leading the way was a man who at the time didn’t even have full rights in our country.

Mr. Chuck Berry.

 Some notes on Beatles albums.

In the early years, the American versions of the Beatles albums were different than the UK versions, and boy am I now grateful. "Roll Over, Beethoven" was on With the Beatles UK version, buried in the middle of the album somewhere. It was the opener on The Beatles Second Album in the United States, a title that does not even exist in the UK catalog.

Here are photos of our original album, complete with places we had to tape the cover together. I cannot imagine how many hours I must have spent looking at this cover, front and back, while listening to the music.

 

 

More notes on Beatles version

Until I found this video on YouTube, I didn't even think about the fact that my favorite Beatle--George--does the singing and the awesome guitar work on this song.  Oh, my heart!

Beatles recorded version:

Birthday Dinner

Response to Prompt #57, Nontraditional Traditions. I just let this flow, so any weird punctuation (or lack thereof) is just really mirroring my thoughts, the way the words wanted to come out. I resisted the urge to change any of it, to "fix" it.  The flow of memories--while not always reliable--doesn't need to be fixed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

     In my youth, birthdays were celebrated with family--my mom's family to be exact, the only family I truly knew since my dad's family had migrated south to sunny Florida before I was born, most likely to escape the dull gray sky that enveloped the Michigan landscape for months on end. But, I can't be sure. I never asked. I just knew them as the Florida grandparents and aunts--and eventually cousins, relative strangers who were surprisingly bossy when we visited once a year.

     I think my only party at an actual venue was my first. I've seen the picture of my unnaturally white-faced great aunt and mom on either side of me while I sat in a highchair, face smeared with frosting.  Another with my dad in a red and white striped old-timey hat, white button down, and bow tie, the uniform at the Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour where he worked--again I'm assuming--his second job. My dad always had a second job and sometimes a third, to make ends meet, to feed his family without having to stand in the welfare line, a phrase he spat out with disdain, even though he was a social worker.

    The "parties" I remember were not filled with balloons and streamers and friends and games and clowns or princesses at kid-friendly venues. They were family gatherings with a table full of food and a cake my talented aunt crafted--I even got a Barbie cake one year much to my mother's chagrin that I would even ask for such a ridiculous cake, an obvious sign she was more cut out to be a boy mom--either at our house or my grandparent's house on the lake, my sisters and a gaggle of cousins running wild over the expansive yards once we were kicked out of the house for being too rambunctious, warming ourselves in the sunlight  in the middle of June, warm enough to form sweat on your lip without being drenched, flags adorning everyone's homes--it was Flag Day after all.  (Later I would be teased by kids that my birthday was on "Fag Day," and even though I had no idea what they meant, I would burn with embarrassment, knowing by their laughs it was something I should be embarrassed about, much like my last name, Schulert, easily converted to Sherbet. "Annmarie Sherbet with her Fag Day birthday," they would taunt. Why are kids such assholes?)

    "Dad, why does everyone have a flag up today?" I remember asking while we drove down the streets where flags were gently blowing in the breeze. I remember his answer, the answer I was conceited enough to believe for years, "Because it's your birthday and everyone is celebrating." Typical dad answer.

    Fast forward to Florida, away from the comfort of sprawling yards, perfect mild June days, the gaggle of cousins, the aunts and uncles I had know for years, the grandmother we left behind, my grandfather,Bampa--really a second dad--rotting in a grave in Michigan, birthdays morphed into something smaller. Still no friend parties--it just wasn't the tradition in my house. I don't remember celebrating with the Florida family--the family I felt disconnected from, cousins who were babies as I was entering puberty, grandparents I regarded with odd curiosity since I really only spent once a year with them from age 1-10. All of our houses were cramped with small yards and no one to run around with anyway except my sisters, but I was getting too old to run around in yards, at least in my opinion. My Florida grandmother commented more than once, "You popped out an adult; you never really acted like a child." How would she know? I'm sure I seemed that way to her when she saw me once a year, uncomfortable  and afraid to misbehave in her house with her rules and her threats to spank us when we did act silly.

    Without my talented cake-making aunt, my mom resorted to cake mix from a box to make a special flag cake, decorated with white frosting from a can, blueberries for the stars, and strawberries for the stripes. To this day, I am not a cake fan--I wonder why?

     What I do remember is the birthday meal. Any other day, my mom had meals planned out  in advance, no questions like "What is everyone is in the mood for?" Meals were presented, and we were expected to eat them and appreciate them, and in retrospect, I do. Meals were how my mom showed her love. But, strict budgets kept us on a tight food rope, no rummaging for snacks at all hours. I also appreciate the act of sitting down and eating together every day--until my first job interrupted that schedule. But, when home, we sat at the table and ate together.  This is one thing I kept up as long as I could  with my own--even if some nights we ate without John because of his long work hours. Sundays were sacred, even after the kids were older. Alyssa used to come over even after we moved her into her townhouse. Sunday suppers, my Michigan grandmother, Mum, would call them.

    Back to the birthday meal. On your birthday, you got to choose whatever you wanted to eat for dinner. I remember almost always choosing lasagna. There were two things my mom rarely made, claiming they were too time consuming and tedious: mashed potatoes (?) and lasagna (which I get). Even though her lasagna wasn't traditional (although I had no idea at the time) with its cottage cheese filling (according to my mom an acceptable sub for ricotta--which was probably more expensive) pepperoni and black olive topping, I still loved it. I remember my mouth watering as it baked, checking on it as it sat for the requisite 15 minutes after being removed from the oven, watching that timer like a hawk.

    The best part was--brace yourselves here--the hunk of cold lasagna I would eat for breakfast the next day. Even when my parents buckled and bought a microwave, I would scoop out the largest piece I could find and eat it with my hands, as if it were a piece of pizza. My mom would get so irritated, but she allowed it, even though I wasn't the birthday girl anymore.

    My own children had birthday parties, sometimes at venues, sometimes at our house. They weren't elaborate affairs, but we did have two sets of family and our friends when they were little and then just their friends as drop-off parties became appropriate. Sometimes, they even had two--a family and a friend party. One thing they always did get was the birthday dinner of their choice, often at a restaurant, but hey, they still chose. It was their special day, no flags flying, but celebrated nonetheless.