9 Songs That Made Me Want To Get Into Music

On Valerie Day’s podcast, LIVING A VOCAL LIFE, she asks every guest a couple basic questions. They’re the bookends of the show. The first one is, WHAT IS YOUR FIRST MEMORY OF SINGING? That usually happens between the ages of three and six. At the end of the show, Valerie asks, IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME AND SAY SOMETHING TO YOUR YOUNGER SELF, WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE? What would you say to that kid?

So much to say…

Everyone chose around age fifteen. We all have our own version of what that was like. To go back and talk to my younger self was always my ULTIMATE SCI-FI FANTASY! [I wouldn’t mind going back and helping to produce some of those NU SHOOZ records, too…kid do you really need four tambourine parts?]

All of the guests on Valerie’s podcast said basically the same thing. They told their fifteen-year-old incarnation;

YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL
YOU’RE NOT CRAZY
THIS PATH IS OPEN TO YOU
THAT PATH…

…MAYBE NOT SO MUCH

Everybody said it. I found that fascinating.

Oh…

If I could only go back and tell my kid self what the dead-ends were…but we’re not allowed to do that. It’s the PRIME DIRECTIVE, like on Star Trek or any Time-travel story. You’re not allowed to interfere with the past. And I get it. Our younger selves had to make their own mistakes…to learn from them.

But we have this longing to go back into the past and say, “Hey baby, relax. It’s alright. You’re beautiful. You’ve got a thing on that piano, or yeah, DANCING is not a stupid career if you’ve got the dance in your bones.”

I had a lot of dead-ends.

I thought I wanted to be a Pathologist because of a book I read. You wanna go back and say, “No, get your hands on a guitar as soon as you can. There’s MUSIC in your head.” But you’re not allowed to say that because you’re on the deck of the Enterprise, and you’re not allowed to communicate with that rogue planet.

My own journey into music was slow but constant. There was a Tom Lehrer record on the turntable when I was five. I played it over and over and picked up a lot of unsavory lines I didn’t understand.

THE GUY WHO TOOK A KNIFE
AND MONOGRAMMED HIS WIFE
THEN DROPPED HER IN THE POND
AND WATCHED HER DROWN.

[Note: I picked one of the cleaner ones here.]

The Golden Age of Sixties music was happening all around me. Herb Alpert and the Kingston Trio and Bobby Darin. Uncle Tony was a professional trombone player. He had a striped jacket and straw boater for his Dixieland gigs. From age seven to around age eleven, I just played army. I fought in both the European and Pacific Theaters, of course. Then I wanted to be a Scientist and spent all my spare cash on beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks.

I didn’t really want to be a scientist. I was into the theater of it. My laboratory was a stage set.

John Smith, military school. 6th Grade.

I moved to L.A. in the summer of ’66. Herb Alpert was on the radio playing ‘Taste of Honey.’ I could imitate his trumpet solo. My mother asked, “Do you want to play a musical instrument?” Nah, I said, mostly because it was her idea. It would be another five years before I picked up an instrument and fourteen before I had a band of my own.

But for all the dead-ends, there was this constant gravitational pull toward a life in music.

Plaintive chord changes thrilled me before I knew what they were. Go listen to ‘Tears of a Clown.’ Do it right now, and see if you don’t get a few tears of your own.

I could probably list a hundred songs that changed my life in some way. This is a list of songs that tipped the scales toward a life in music and away from Pathology.

HERE ARE NINE SONGS THAT MADE ME WANT TO GET INTO MUSIC

...which kinda turned out O.K.

---

1. “I Was Made To Love Her” Stevie Wonder

I remember where I was when I heard this. Squeezed into the back of a V.W. bug. We were on our way to go swimming in some Ohio lake. It was the summer of ’67. My introduction to Soul Music?

No, there was one before that.

2.) “Natural Man” Lou Rawls

Maybe that was my introduction to Soul Music.

No. I think there was one before that.

When I was seven years old, that would have been 1962, I got the measles. In those days, they said the measles could make you go blind.

So they gave me a pair of kid-sized sunglasses...

And not crappy ones.

Legit horn-rimmed Marcello Mastrioni SHADES!

And they gave me something else.

A BABY BLUE TRANSISTOR RADIO in a brown leather case embossed like a pair of brown wingtips.

And I remember the first song that came out of that radio.

3.) “Java” Al Hirt

[Yeah, I know it doesn’t count as a Soul tune.]

What was playing that answer lick?

“Da-boo-dat

Da-boo-dat

Daba-dooby-aba-dat”

To my seven-year-old ears, it sounded like rubber bands. It took me twenty years, no lie, to figure out that they were tenor saxophones.

Now we jump forward a couple years.

4.) “Mother Popcorn”
James Brown

There was this black family that lived down the alley, Frank and Amanda Miller and their six [count ‘em...six] kids. Two of them were deaf/mute. My mom worked three jobs, so they kind of took me in. Frank was building a supercar in the garage, a ’49 Plymouth with T.V., C.B. Radio, a refrigerator, and shag carpets; the kind of ride Curtis Mayfield would have called a ‘Gangster Lean.’ Frank worked at the Naval shipyard over in Long Beach. He brought home all kinds of wires, meters, and parts pulled out of old battleships and destroyer escorts. Amanda, meanwhile, was taking care of the six kids.

So...one day, she comes to me and says

“I’m goin’ to the record store. Tell me two songs you want.”

She bought me two 45’s.

5.) “Love Makes a Woman” Barbara Acklin

And this was the other one.

[By the way, Amanda Miller taught me how to dance the Popcorn.]

6.) “Say a Little Prayer”
Dionne Warwick

Eighteen years later, we got to meet Dionne Warwick on the Solid Gold show. I chickened out of telling her that I was thirteen and loved her stuff with Burt Bacharach. She was really tall. So was Marilyn McCoo.

Maybe THAT was my introduction to Soul Music.

7.) “More Love”
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles

8.) "Tears of a Clown”
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles (see above.)

9.) "Nina y Senora" Tito Puente

There was so much Latin music going on in Portland in the ’70s. This is a sample of what was playing in our apartment around 1977.

Oh, But I left out...

10.) “Bread and Butter”
The Newbeats

Some early New Orleans soul…love that piano part. ‘Judy in Disguise’ is another piano part like that.

And the song that made me switch from Pathology to Music

11.) “Message To Love” Hendrix/Band of Gypsies

Four bars of that song and I was hooked.

That’s what I gotta do with MY life.

[Oops…there were more than nine.]

A girl named Leanne gave me a broken guitar from her parent’s closet. The bridge was dangling from a single string. Of course, the first thing I did when I got home was…pose in the mirror, like Hendrix in Life Magazine. The next thing I did was try to learn to play, and I didn’t miss a day for the next fifty years.

So…

That fifteen-year-old worked it out for himself. And maybe the dead-ends are important. Maybe they add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. They add up to who we are now.

What songs influenced you?

Photo by Valerie Day

R.I.P. Tina Turner

We need to mark the passing of Tina Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock in 1939. A long-time resident of Zurich, Switzerland, she left us at the age of 83. Most people know her string of Mid-80s hits, ‘Private Dancer,’ ‘Simply the Best,’ etc. But Tina was a powerhouse all through the 1960s. (The first single I bought with her singing was ‘Nutbush City,’ in 1969.) The words ‘Icon’ and ‘Iconic’ are so overused. Here they apply…and more.

Tina Turner was a real person.
A giant onstage, in person, she was tiny.

Nu Shooz played two dates with her in the summer of 1982. She’d left Ike a few years before and was fighting her way back up the Show-biz ladder. The tour was called ‘Catch a Rising Star.’ She’d turned the Ike and Tina Revue into something more Rock, something lethal. Tina, fronting three long-legged girls, legs made even longer by the highest heels.

She was playing small venues.

The first night we opened for her at a hotel in Eugene, Oregon. She was playing every gig she could get. Her band was razor sharp.

This story has been told many times, so here’s the short version. Our sound man, David Grafe, liked to bring his daughter Heather along on parts of the tour. At the hotel in Eugene, I forget the name, a dispute arose between Tina’s people and the hotel management. People are running around setting up gear, plugging in wires, and there’s this argument going on. Tina approaches eight-year-old Heather and says, “We don’t need to be around for this. Let’s go find some ice cream.”

Now that’s the way I’ve been telling the story for forty-one years. It turns out I had it all wrong. They went out and bought CANDY. After everything this woman had been through, she was a most compassionate person, someone who saw an eight-year-old girl who could use a treat. Tina Turner embraced Nichiren Buddhism after she left Ike. She said it was a source of Inner Peace, but she loved her candy.

The next date was in Portland.

After the Eugene show, our band and Tina’s broke down all the gear, packed up, and headed an hour North. Both buses ended up at the same gas station in Lebanon, Oregon. Tina’s people jump out of the bus to get snacks. A window slides open. Someone sticks their head out and shouts, “Tina wants FIVE MILKY WAYS.”

The gig in Portland was at Starry Night, a way bigger venue. That was when we really got to see the show. She did a long monolog as the band brought ‘Proud Mary’ to a slow boil. We’d heard it the night before in Eugene. It was the same in Portland, word for word. Tina invested that speech with the same power night after night, like a great actor, like Olivier doing King Lear.

Her music director was a chubby little guy named Kenny, who played the heck out of the piano and could sing EXACTLY like Tina. In fact, he sang her parts while she and the girls were doing the shimmy shake out front. Of course! There’s no WAY you could stay in tune and dance like that. Backwards and forwards and in heels.

After the ‘Catch a Rising Star’ tour, Tina’s star did rise. Just four years later came her massive string of hits, her star turn in ‘Mad Max,’ her status as one of America’s great voices, The Queen of Rock and Roll. Her star continued to rise and rise…straight to the Milky Way.

NU SHOOZ TIME MACHINE: Soul 45s

A while ago we asked the question, What would you like to see on our website?

The universal answer was (of course,) more stories about the ‘good old days.’ Some stories we’ve told over and over, like writing ‘Should I Say Yes’ in a full-blown [pun intended] tornado.

Is there anything left to say?

Valerie and I sat down and brainstormed, and came up with a pretty good list. We’ll take them in the order that they occurred to us. Here’s story #4.

---

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio.

The ‘Best Location in the Nation,’ or the ‘Mistake on the Lake.’

Choose one.

I was raised by kind foster parents, the Sheldons, till I was ten. That summer, they shipped me and all my belongings out to L.A. to live with my mother. The first thing we did was go to Taco Bell, where she turned me on to Mexican food. They didn’t have that in Cleveland in 1966. (It’s off-topic, but Taco Bell at that time had about six items, and they all cost 24 cents.)

We rented a tiny house in San Pedro, the Port of Los Angeles. My mom, she insisted that I call her Dorothy, worked three jobs. So I was suddenly on my own. That suited me fine.

Wandering the neighborhood, I met a half-Filipino kid named Michael. I wouldn’t say that we were exactly friends. For a while, he used to beat me up when I got off the school bus. Gradually, I got to know the family, Betty, a single mom, and Michael’s older brother, Philip.

Philip was a follower of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. He turned me on to the black A.M. station, KGFJ 1230, “The Sound of Black America.”

Back in Cleveland our musical tastes ran more toward Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, and the Baja Marimba band. (Uncle Tony was a professional trombone player.)

For Christmas I got a portable radio complete with a three-speed turntable. I carried it everywhere and became an overnight convert to the Church of Soul Music. KGFJ was a window into another planet. This was the Golden Age of Soul. Motown, Stax, and regional labels like King and Brunswick were putting out their greatest work.

(Image by Joe Haupt)

There was a black family who lived up the alley from our house. With Dorothy gone all the time, I started hanging out there. Frank and Amanda Miller had five kids. Two of them were deaf/mute. Frank was building a supercar in the garage, a souped-up ’49 Plymouth. Amanda taught me how to dance the ‘Popcorn.’ I could go on and on about them, but anyway…

One day Amanda says, “I’m going to the record store. What song do you want?”

I chose, Say A Little Prayer, recorded by Dionne Warwick.

And she bought it for me, my first Soul 45.

Others would follow. James Brown had a new single out every other week. I loved Smokey and the Miracles, The Four Tops, and The Meters. A new record would come out of my portable radio on the morning trip to school. As soon as school was out, I’d get 69 cents in my sweaty paw and run down to the little black record store, Jesse’s Records, on Gaffey Street.

Fast forward twenty years. 

Our band, Nu Shooz, is appearing on Solid Gold, and the host is…

Dionne Warwick!

My first Soul 45. 

The camera’s rolling. The red light is on. 

She says, “Now here’s Nu SHOOZ, with I CAIN’T Wait.”

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012)

Maurice Sendak died this last Tuesday.

Of all the famous people we met during the NU SHOOZ years, he was the one I was most excited about. I have a picture taken with him in the green room at Good Morning America. Our appearance never aired due to some crisis in the World, but it didn’t matter. I got to meet the guy that wrote ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’ Maurice Sendak gave us a masterpiece that will live forever. Meeting him was the thrill of a lifetime. Martin Scorsese said the best art tells us about what it’s like to be human. ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ does that and more. We are all MAX. Thank you Maurice Sendak.

Go where the Wild Things go.

Mahavishnu and Music As Mating Ritual

Photo by JJ Harrison

In the jungles of New Guinea there’s a species of bird called the Bowerbird.  To attract a mate, the male Bowerbird builds an elaborate love nest.  The door is made of woven grass.  Its graceful shape beckons.  He’s got Marvin Gaye playing on a cassette deck.  Let’s get it on.

But he’s not done yet.

Now the intrepid male goes out and collects a wild array of stuff, shells, bottle caps, bits of colored plastic, the shiny wing feathers of beetles and arranges it around the perimeter, marking out a circle around the front door.  This whole time he’s barely eating or sleeping.  He’s wound up tight.  He’s burning calories like a madman.

When the nest is just right, the male Bowerbird breaks out in song.

Four notes over and over.

If he can keep up a steady beat, any female within earshot knows he’s got good genes or whatever.  Probably they aren’t thinking about genetics at all.

What strange birds are we?

I read an article in Scientific American Mind about music preferences in humans.  Different personality types prefer different levels of complexity in music art and literature.  Extroverts love mainstream pop, they love magazines, and Mark Rothko.  Introverts love dissonance, byzantine novels, and Albrecht Durer.

Extroverts want their expectations fulfilled.

Introverts want to be confused.

These are gross generalizations, but see if they ring true for you.

(You’ll see where I’m going with this in a second.)

We were having dinner at the Bombay Cricket Club with our niece Elizabeth and her husband Don.  He was talking about when they were first dating.

“Elizabeth asked me, ‘what kind of music do you like?’ Don said, ‘I like this and I like that, and…um…I like a little country.’ I was embarrassed about it, you know? Then I look at her CD collection and it’s like country, country, country.”

At this point in the story Don gives me this look like, ‘Yup…that’s when I knew.’

Zip back 35 years, to 1975.

I loved the Mahavishnu Orchestra.  No girls liked this stuff.  It was jazz-jock music for psychos.  Music for Introverts.  No girls had even heard of them.

Then I met Valerie Day.

Not only had she heard of them, she saw them play at the Paramount.

Yup.

That’s when I knew,

She was the one.

Bye for now.

~JRS

Nu Shooz Band

P.S.  Weirdly enough, it was "Birds of Fire" that became "our song".  How's that for my unconscious mind starting this blog with a bit about birds?

P.S.S.  Was music a part of YOUR mating dance? We’d love to hear from you! Please leave a comment below...