Some Truth

This is a sad, but true story. Let me begin by saying that my Father always told me as a kid, "Keith, any man that uses bad words in his language only shows himself to be a person who isn't intelligent enough to use the greater amount of words that he could have, to express himself politely and properly." Well, an awful lot of what has happened to me in my lifetime cannot be expressed politely, and could not be recounted properly, or at all, without offending either my Father's or my Mother's Christian morals. I have not set out to write a pornographic story, my original intent being to teach about some of what one might need to know to become a sound engineer for popular musicians, and tell a bit about some of the bands I have worked for. My original intent has fallen somewhat to the wayside as my memories have unfolded themselves onto paper, and the truth of what has actually happened to me became the predominant theme to my writing the events down. Therefore, I forewarn you that all of these events, opinions and quotations are as accurate as I can possibly recall them, with the help of a lifetime of my notes and company records, and that this account has in it subject matters involving drugs, sex, loose morals and prostitution. Read no further if you fear for your moral character. I was born in Wilmington, Delaware in nineteen fifty. My first memory is of sitting in a sandbox and watching a spider crawl up my ankle, and then the pain of it's bite. I was later told that it had been a black widow, which were common in Delaware, where we lived at the time, and there had been some concern at saving my life. My next memory is of being out in the yard of the house we lived in on Strathmore Avenue in Dearborn, Michigan, while my Mother was hanging laundry, only to look around and discover that she had gone back into the house. The desolation of being a toddler left alone caused my jumping up to reach the door knob, and splitting my chin open upon connecting it with the bricks of which our house was built. The next memory that I can recall was sitting in the driveway on a blanket in the sunshine, and watching the neighbor boy across the street roll a tire down the slope of their driveway. That tire then rolled across the street and up the slope of our driveway, and struck me full in the face as I was trying to get up and out of it's way. It hurt enough to remember the incident. Now, just to prove how impossibly slow I was at learning painful lessons, my next memory is of watching the Saturday morning Big Top show on television at the age of two and a half, and being extremely impressed with a unicyclist riding around the circus ring. I was enough impressed to go running into the kitchen where Mom was frying bacon for Saturday morning breakfast, and insisting that she had to come see this amazing feat of balance. Mom said that it had to wait for her to get the bacon out of the pan. By the time she came into the family room, the unicyclist's act was finished. I was determined to show her the performer's accomplishment, and grabbing my sister's child sized broom, I climbed on the arm of the overstuffed chair I had been sitting in, and jumped off of it onto the top end of the broom handle which I had been holding upright. The result was eighty seven stitches to seal up the torn scrotum I suffered, a weeks stay in the hospital, and the Doctor telling Mom and Dad that he didn't know if I would ever be able to reproduce children. A few fellas have also found out that it does no good to kick me in my numb-nuts thinking you're going to stop me, because it doesn't do anything but make me angrier, as the damage to nerves left me with very little feeling there. But nevertheless, it didn't stop my testicles from working properly. Pretty dumb, though, huh? Music was important growing up in my family. Dad was an engineer who had tried desperately to design and complete an extremely powerful jet engine in conjunction with Excello Corporation and Westinghouse, during the war, but which he wasn't finally successful with, until nineteen fifty-six, while I was still five years old. The idea was solid, but the alloys the turbine blades were made of were too brittle to stand the pressure and vibration of the high R.P.M.s, until the right combination of metals were alloyed with the titanium. Mom had majored in English and journalism, and minored in French. They both loved to go out dancing whenever a big band was playing somewhere that they could get to and from on a weekend night, and in general they loved to relieve their stresses by listening to music. As a little kid, I didn't know anything about stress though. We always had a piano and Mom was a wonderful piano player, and even though she didn't like her voice, I thought it was beautiful. In the fifties, we had what was considered a high-end record player and sound system. That was before stereo systems were commercially viable, so it was mono. I remember getting my butt tanned at around four years of age, when Mom and Dad came in the living room to find me busily dismantling that huge old box of a record player. I had it pulled away from the wall so I had working room, and was taking out the screws that held the back on. I wanted to play with all the little men that I thought must live in the back of it when they weren't playing the music that came from it, and I knew where the tools that I needed were kept. Mom and Dad loved a variety of music; classical, musicals, of which I still remember, "Seventy-six trombones in the big parade" playing, big band, country and western, with Burl Ives singing, "You load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt," bluegrass and folk music. While my two older sisters were getting piano lessons, I wanted to play too, but everyone apparently thought I was too young. Instead, Dad came home with what I thought at the time was a guitar. It was red plastic, and had a picture of two cowboys sitting at a campfire on it, with one of them playing the guitar, and the other one with his mouth open as if singing, but it only had four nylon strings, where as a guitar has six strings, so it was actually a ukulele. However, it didn't sound too bad, for what it was, at least not to me, and I had a guitar as far as I was concerned. I remember Uncle Bill showing me how to tune it to "My dog has fleas", or what I learned in time was E,A,D and G. Uncle Bill also taught me to play, "She'll be Comin' 'Round the Mountain, When She Comes", "Red River Valley", "Home on the Range" and a couple of other songs on it. I loved that guitar for a couple of years, but eventually, well, I was a little boy, and it was plastic. Either I stumbled with it and broke the neck off, or I just found it with the neck broken off (?), I don't remember which. By then, we lived on a farm in Allen county, Ohio, out in the country, at the corner of Sunderland Road and Bice Road. We had no near neighbor kids, until when I was six. Then Cloren Mills, who worked for the Lima News, and his wife Betty, moved into a nice old farmhouse about a mile north of us on Sunderland Road, with their two sons, David and Daniel. Dan, as he preferred to be called, became my best friend throughout my youth. I didn't have any near playmates otherwise, except my sisters, and that was like pouring gasoline on a fire, as far as they were concerned. They wanted nothing to do with me, until it was time for me to take the blame, and the punishment, for something they had done, and then I had to be around for them to point their fingers at. Dad couldn't be fooled by their schemes, though, and often, he would bring home Radio Shack project kits for me to work on, which kept me quiet and out of the way of the women. By the time I was seven, I had built my first battery operated crystal radio, and run a wire for my antenna out of my bedroom window, which I then tied onto the sycamore tree out there. Suddenly, I discovered A.M. radio. There was no F.M. radio back then. I could only get a couple of stations well enough to hear, but the one I liked best was WOWO out of Fort Wayne, Indiana. They played all kinds of music, and I loved it all. I would stay up much later than my bedtime, sitting in the dark with my headphone on listening to the new Rock and Roll, the newest country, and the newest style coming out that they called MoTown, retuning the crystals when the interference became too strong. After getting into trouble again, at the age of nine, for taking my Dad's McCullough chain saw apart to use the engine on a go-cart I had built, I talked Dad into getting me bigger and better crystals, the lesser of two evils, which allowed me to tune in WJR and CKLW out of Detroit, Michigan. That was great, Mom was from Detroit, and my Grand Parents still lived around there, so it felt like a comfortable connection to them. I heard "Blue Velvet", "Soldier Boy" and "Johnny Angel" for the first time on that radio. The music I was being exposed to, however, influenced the direction in my life. 304 1.50/512345