Blowin' in the Wind

Long, straight blond hair: who doesn’t want it? I spent my senior year in high school growing mine out just past my shoulders, getting ready for college—and now I’m here I think I look at least moderately cool in my madras shirts, wheat jeans and penny loafers, that long, straight, blond hair blowing in the wind. But do I want to be Mary, or that Surfer Girl the Beach Boys sing about with such longing?

“Surfer Girl” better suits the world of fraternity parties I’ve fallen into, even though Bloomington is about as far from an ocean as you can be. But, making my way to the Commons alone, I often peer down the stairs into the Kiva, where the Beatniks hang out, smoking, drinking coffee, reading poetry, and talking about Serious Things. Thin, soulful-looking guys with beards, girls with Mary hair, like mine, perch on bar stools with their guitars and sing woeful, apocalyptic songs: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

And a new one that just came out—“Eve of Destruction”—which I love.

Steve thinks it’s stupid and melodramatic.

He thinks the people who hang out at the Kiva are weird. “Baggers,” he and his friends call them, after the green army surplus bags they sling over their shoulder. “Goddamn Commies,” they say.

We almost argue about this, but don’t.

The thing is, I know that my idea of Beatniks—or Baggers—is a ridiculous mix of Maynard G. Krebs, on the “Dobie Gillis Show;” Kookie, the hip parking lot attendant in “77 Sunset Strip;” “Hootenanny,” and sneaking down to Greenwich Village with some friends on a high school trip to New York last year, ecstatic to discover Bleecker Street, where there were real Beatniks and music drifted into the crisp autumn evening from the Bitter End, The Village Gate, the Café au Go Go, places where I knew the grooviest folk singers played.

Nonetheless, part of me daydreams of dressing in black and heading down to the Kiva to listen to bongos and revel in the coming apocalypse. The other part, the girl I became the very first day I got to campus, says, “Are you out of your mind?

I follow the music into the Commons, where the jukebox is always playing the Beatles, the Supremes, the Beach Boys, the Four Tops, the Righteous Brothers, Martha and the Vandellas.

Sonny and Cher, “I Got You, Babe.”

And admit to myself that, at least right now, all I really want to do is dance.

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Where Were You When This Song Was Playing on the Radio?

Who hasn’t felt that weird slippage of time that occurs when a song comes on the radio and, all of a sudden, you’re in a whole other time—in a car, your teenage bedroom, a classroom; at a dance or football game; on a picnic blanket, making out by a lake—and that song is playing, the person you were then is listening to it. The jolt of pure emotion you feel is so real, so visceral that you feel disoriented when the song is over, not quite certain who you are now. If music is in a novel, the reader hears the song as it played in her own life at the same time she’s hearing play it in the characters' lives, and this triggers memories and emotions that complicate and deepen the novel’s effect in a way that the author could never predict or hope to understand.

Novels trigger all kinds of time travel, connecting us to moments in our own past and coloring our impression of the story on the page. In fact, all things being equal, the nature and quality of time travel a novel evokes in us may explain why we fall in love with some books and only admire others.

Of course, I didn’t know it then, but An American Tune began on September 12, 1965, the day I arrived in Bloomington to begin my freshman year at Indiana University. That evening, I walked to the Union with a bunch of girls I’d just me. We got Cokes, then sat down in the Commons to check out the scene. A friend from my hometown came through the revolving door with some of his fraternity brothers, and they stopped at our table. We chatted. One of them invited me to a party the next night—the guy I would eventually marry.

I don’t remember what song was playing on the jukebox, but the song that takes me right back to that moment is “1-2-3,” by Len Barry, one of those goofy, before-the-revolution songs of the early sixties. Maybe because it was the song that always seemed to be playing on the jukebox that fall when I hung out at the Commons or just passed through it on my way to class and I couldn’t get it out of my head. Maybe because Steve fairly quickly confessed that he had fallen in love with me at first sight and persisted in assuming that I would fall in love with him, too—until I did.

“One two three/Oh, that's how element'ry/It's gonna be/Come on let's fall in love/It's easy (it's so easy)/Like takin' candy (like takin' candy) from a baby.”

Oh, my God, I thought, typing them. They’re so sappy. It’s embarrassing. Nonetheless, here I am again, that girl walking through a door, into the rest of her life.

Today, the 47th anniversary of our first date, seems a good time to launch a series of blog posts about the music in An American Tune—little meditations about how my own American tune morphed into the American tune of a girl I might have been.

When you read these meditations (and the book, please!), I hope they’ll transport you to moments when the same songs songs were playing in your life. If they do, it would be so cool if you would share those memories here.

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Sad Stories of the Death of Kings

Barry Gifford’s Sad Stories of the Death of Kings is a series of vignettes that, in the beginning, feel random, but glue themselves together in your mind as you read until, by the end, you’ve got a picture of a time and a place and a kid’s life in it

The late fifties/early sixties is the time, Chicago is the place, and Roy is the kid.

It’s a time and place I remember well. I grew up in Hammond, Indiana, about forty miles from Chicago. When I was a child, there were occasional excursions to the city—school trips to the Field Museum or the Museum of Science and Industry and family outings to White Sox games or to see the Christmas windows at Marshall Fields and Carson Pirie Scott. My mom worked at Carson’s, in Hammond, and once a year we drove into the city for their annual employees’ day, when the store was open on a Sunday only for their employees and families with special discounts galore.

My English grandparents visited us in 1957, when I was ten, and I remember driving along the lakeshore in early evening after we’d picked them up at Midway Airport feeling so proud when they said how lovely it was. Thrilled by the way they said it, in their wonderful English accents.

My friend Linda’s dad worked in the city and when we were in high school sometimes he’d let us drive in with him on Saturday morning and drop us off in the Loop. It was too early for the Carson’s or Marshall Fields or—our favorite—Krochs & Brentanos Book Store to be open, so we’d get Cokes at the soda fountain in Walgreens and hang out there for a while. We never had much money to spend, but we loved to browse the big department stores, and look at the books and stationery in Krochs & Brentanos, the sticks of sealing wax in a dozen colors and the gold stamps, each with a letter of the alphabet on it, meant to press into the hot wax over the sealed part of the letter so the recipient could tell if someone had opened it. A boyfriend, preferably, though neither of us had one. Late in the afternoon, we’d walk over to the Randolph Street station and take the South Shore home.

When we got drivers' licenses, sometimes a bunch of us girls would sneak off for a night on the town in somebody’s parent’s car. At least once an evening, stopped at a red light, someone would yell “Chinese Fire Drill” and we’d all jump out of the car, run around it, and get back in. All the better if the light changed in process and people started honking. We’d head north, past the building we knew housed WLS radio, where Dick Biondi was spinning the tunes turned up full-blast on our radio.

But the absolute best thing was Old Town. It was the closest thing to Greenwich Village that the Midwest had to offer, with its mix of beatniks and down-and-outs and young city people out for the evening. Wells Street was one big traffic jam in the early sixties and we’d cruise from one end to the other and back again, radio blaring, flirting with carloads of boys doing the same thing. Then we’d get out and thread our way through throngs of people on the street, stopping here and there to listen to the folk music we could hear coming out of the clubs we were still too young to enter.

Sad Stories of the Death of Kings brought all this back to me—and more.

“Fruit boots,” for example.

“Style of shoe popular in the 1950’s and 60’s, ankle-high suede shoes with crepe rubber soles conventionally known as desert boots. English Mods embraced desert boots made by Clarks and their popularity spread to the U.S. where they were labeled “fruit boots” because of their perceived popularity with perceived homosexuals.” (Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.)

Of course, I was clueless about what “fruit” meant at the time. Not to mention “queer,” which was a word we used regularly to describe someone or something weird or uncool.

(“Don’t you ever let me hear you use that word again,” my father said, truly upset, when I called my brother a queer at the dinner table one night. “Why?” I asked. But he wouldn’t tell me.)

“There they are,” Jimmy said. “I told you she’d be here.”

Standing halfway down the block were two girls, both wearing black scarves around their heads, navy blue pea coats, short black skirts with black tights and black fruit boots. One of them was smoking a cigarette.

“Bad Girls,” said Roy.

“I hope so,” said Jimmy Boyle.

I wasn’t a bad girl. I was too scared. But I knew those girls, and Barry Gifford got them just right. He got everything right.

If you grew up in the Chicago are in the fifties or sixties and you want your kids (or, gasp, grandkids) to know what it was like, or if you’re a Social Studies teacher who wants to bring that time alive for your students, introduce them to Sad Stories of the Death of Kings. The cool thing is that it comes in a special young adult edition.

How cool is it that Seven Stories Press figured out that this book, like so many good YA books, is equally compelling to kids and adults. We adults get our own edition, with a grittier image on the cover.

Though Gifford wrote the book for adults, he likes the idea of dual editions. “I thought, why not? I’m happy to have this double-barreled publication,” he said. Seven Stories asked him to change only one sentence. The new sentence ended up going into both editions.

I hope Sad Stories of the Death of Kings will be wildly successful for two reasons. One, because it’s a really good book and two, because success might mean good things for YA authors writing books that appeal to older readers as well as young ones.