Lynnster’s Musical Education in Three Posts – The Beginning

Get a cup of coffee or your beverage of choice and prepare to sit a spell. We’re going to be a while here.

I pulled an all-nighter Thursday night working and had an hour or two to kill before starting the Friday workday, so I indulged a bit in a fave activity of hunting YouTube for music stuff I remember from the past but hadn’t seen in a while, or at least stuff from the same time period.

I started collecting some links and then, when I was finished, I looked at it all and just kinda went whoa. Completely accidentally, I had somehow managed to basically assemble all the pieces of the puzzle – or at least the major ones – of my lifelong addiction to music, which began as a very young child.

There are, of course, thousands of other associated pieces I haven’t collected here; virtually everything I have ever listened to helped to formulate my musical tastes and feed the addiction as an adult, certainly. One of my most beloved genres today, as an older adult, is Australian garage rock of the late Seventies and Eighties – but in the U.S., you didn’t hear or see most of that stuff back then, and I wasn’t introduced to a lot of it until the big boom of the Internet, years after the fact. But a lot of that old Aussie stuff was heavily influenced by both British and American punk rock, old British Invasion and American surf music, and the Motor City Sound in Detroit, so in a way, it was sort of all related to what I grew up with anyway.

But all these YouTube videos I have collected here in this and the next two posts – yeah, these are pretty much the very most major pieces that created the foundation of my music junkieness (and my own musicianship, occasionally) as a young adult through today.

In the final and third post, I have collected stuff I either witnessed on original broadcast or is from the same specific time period. The ones in this post and the next one, I obviously did not see at the time they were aired because as far as most of them are concerned, I wasn’t born yet (with the exception of the Raiders, in which case I might have just been born).

And most of this first group is way before my time, but it’s important I include them. I have often said that my biggest musical influence of all was my father, who was also sort of a music junkie in his time when rock & roll was still brand new. It was stuff from his collection I heard the most before I started making my own decisions about music (at three years old, heh). My dad had a tremendous stack of 45 RPM records and LPs and was a musician himself, as was my uncle, and my dad’s first cousin was a DJ on local radio for many years, and my mom’s a music fan as well.

I get it from all of them, but it was my father and I who were most alike in music junkieness of sorts. I just took it to the next level and eventually became way more deeply immersed in the addiction than he ever was. (And some might say far more out of control, given the amount of recorded music I have amassed and things I’ll do to see my favorites play live, like take off to L.A. or Chicago at the last minute.) ;)

Must start this off with The Man himself, Mr. Chuck Berry – blurry video, but this is my favorite. We had the original Chess CD in that stack of 45s, and it probably got played in my record player a decade and a half later as much as it did when my dad was a teenager (UPDATE 10/2009 – unfortunately, like many, this video got pulled from YouTube and the only replacement I found is just a sound recording with a single photo. Hopefully will be able to replace it with something better later if found).

My dad played piano as well as being a drummer, and monopolized the family piano as a teenager, learning how to play every single thing Little Richard ever did.

And I can’t very well write about my father and his monopolizing of the piano without a hat tip to Jerry Lee Lewis. I think we had every single he ever put out on the original Sun label in the Sixties on 45 AND a few 78s (!) as well. (I sold most on eBay a few years ago for a fair amount.)

Now, both my parents were Elvis fans, especially having both grown up in West Tennessee. In fact, my dad was such an Elvis fan and did such a good Elvis, he was picked to do Elvis in a high school musical presentation and was apparently legend for it ever after; last year, when I was having dinner with my dad’s cousin and his girlfriend (both of whom graduated with my father) and talking about that, the girlfriend leaned over the table towards me and said, “Oh, your dad WAS Elvis.” Dad’s cousin decried the fact that he had to sing “I’m Gonna Be A Wheel Someday”, while my father got to be Elvis. Hee.

So Elvis was king, but somehow I missed the Elvis fan gene. See above on associated pieces of the puzzle of influences; certainly that’s an influence, and certainly Elvis influenced many of my later influences. I just always liked Jerry Lee better. And my dad could do a pretty good Jerry Lee, too.

My parents were both in college in Memphis in the early Sixties and frequently went out to see live music, so they got to see a lot of the Stax and similar legends perform live back in the day. So a little bit of that appreciation of Memphis soul rubbed off on me too (and is probably the only reason I still have any love left at all for this city I live in and city of my birth).

I give you the masters, Booker T. & The MGs, featuring the awesome guitar of Steve Cropper and bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn, who can still often be found playing around here and down in the Tunica casinos today. If they look familiar to you for some other reason, it’s probably because you saw them in The Blues Brothers movie with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd years later.

And another personal favorite and this song will always mean Memphis to me as well as the previous one – Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn are featured in this video as well with Sam & Dave:

You may find it curious I have included these next two videos in this post. My aunts were teenagers when I was born and huge Beatles and Monkees fans – and later, Bobby Sherman, David Cassidy, etc. – so I get a lot of that from them and yeah, The Beatles are definitely a big influence for me, but I’m not including them in these posts because in truth, there are other groups from the same time that were really a more major influence on me. And goodness knows I love me some Monkees.

Anyway, we have more or less now established that my then-teenage aunts were boy crazy schoolgirls with mad crushes on various teen idols. Probably the only other band that they crushed on as much back then as The Beatles and The Monkees was Paul Revere and The Raiders. You might not know that the legendary hit songwriting team Boyce & Hart originally wrote “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” for the Raiders, who recorded what in my opinion is a better version of the song – which, of course, later became a huge hit for The Monkees.

Yeah, sure, the Raiders were big teen idols of the Sixties, thanks in part to appearing on the TV show Where the Action Is every day after school hours, and being not only cute, but goofily humorous. They were also excellent, excellent musicians; in the liner notes of Raiders anthology CD The Essential Ride (an excellent compilation that really showcases how good they were throughout their career), Letterman show bass player Will Lee hat tips longtime Raider Phil Volk as his inspiration for learning how to play bass.

Anyway, yeah, my teenage aunts had various Raiders posters pinned to their walls in worship and all their records, alongside John, Paul, George, and Ringo and Davy, Micky, Peter, and Mike, and god knows who all else.

But my dad had their first album – which, for me, that’s instant rock & roll cred right there. Practically from birth, I remember it playing in our home and playing often.

Point to note here – my dad didn’t buy a whole lot of “new” rock & roll in the Sixties. He bought later albums by the rock & rollers he grew up with like Elvis & Jerry Lee; both my parents were into folk & Dylan;  a handful of rock/pop like Creedence and Blood, Sweat & Tears;  but by the later part of the Sixties and thereafter, he pretty much stuck to country and latter-day albums of his favorites from the Fifties.

The fact that my father bought the first Raiders album when it came out (and quite possibly before his boy-crazy teenage sisters had even discovered them) is really rather stunning. I’m guessing that, as a drummer himself, he was somewhat drawn to Mike “Smitty” Smith’s drumming style, but I know there was something else beyond that for him to have picked that one album up, out of all the other thousands of rock records that came out that same year that he didn’t buy. Which makes me appreciate the Raiders even more – like I said, instant rock & roll cred for me right there.

Consequently, sharing the Raiders’ Essential Ride compilation with him on a long drive through Alabama and Mississippi in the early part of this decade was the last “musical moment” we shared together before he passed away, and really the only one we’d had in a very long time at that point.

To date, Paul Revere and The Raiders have yet to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. It’s a downright shame.

These videos are both from 1966, so I was either born or almost at the time. This first video is really blurry and is also a lip-synched performance, but probably one of their earliest TV appearances and the song’s the only YouTube video I found from that first album (UPDATE 10/2009 – this video had been removed, but I was able to find a much better copy of the same performance):

This one’s a little later but is a better video and a live (or mostly live) performance (and be sure to check out the extremely young looking actor Michael Landon introducing them) (UPDATE 10/2009 - Well, like many, the video I referenced before has been removed and I couldn’t find another copy, but thanks to bassist Phil Volk’s son Brian, who uploaded this to YouTube, here they are on The Hollywood Palace show in late 1966. This is one of my favorite Raiders songs anyway, “The Great Airplane Strike”, so thanks, Brian, for uploading it!):

UPDATE 10/2009: I just found this video of a 1979 reunion show (which I remember watching when it was first on) with the original five Raiders – Mark Lindsay, Phil “Fang” Volk, Drake Levin, Mike “Smitty” Smith, and Paul Revere – which is just so much fun, I just had to include it. (RIP Drake & Smitty.)

Next post, I start coming into my own… stay tuned.

Advertisement