Sep 8 2008

(08.09.08.odt)(later on 9-7-8)   I will now attempt to chronicle the events of my youth, as describes what I feel were influential in the make up of who I became as a mid-teen. Firstly: There was a living room in the house I spent the first five years of my life being raised in. Though their tinklings and tinglings were a regular daily accompaniment to the overall general ambiance of that household situation of my youth, I was not ,  under any circumstances, to be allowed to touch the two pianos in that living room with my toddler's sticky, dirty, snotnosed hands or fingers! But of course, I got in there a couple or a few times over those five years and put my dirty sticky hands onto the keys of those pianos; and got my hands whacked with ruler or baton and spanked by whomever discovered me perpetrating a 'no no!' and sternly cautioned to keep out of that room where all that piano music kept coming from as gramma's steady streams of piano students came, and played their lessons, and left after the hour. When the piano wasn't being played, there was recorded classical and opera music from the radio or record-player. One my earliest memories from that childhood was of having been hoisted up onto gramma's knee in her church seated at her organ and being allowed to actually touch the keyboard of the thing; and probably just as quickly set back down and ushered away with whomever it may have been who was my designated care giver and overseer in general.

     Aside from the two years that I spent in a San Francisco hillside apartment, '45 & '46 at 5 & 6, there was always one piano in the two Mill Valley houses that composed my homes through age 17, and for much of that time, it was gramma's 1925 Kimble grand piano, bought new in that year, because of her living situations were not yet ready for her to have it moved back into her teaching studio that her only surviving son, Sue Hanchett's father Ned came and built her a new one and high enough to stand over the occasional floods that would cover her yard in winter with a foot or two of water as the creek overflowed. This was down in and on the flats of Tamalpais Valley area of the city of Mill Vallley, but over in its own seperate valley, in the flood plain. Ned had been blackballed as a teacher by the house unamerican activities committee in 1954 and was employed as an iron worker on the building of the San Rafael-Richmond bridge across to the east bay area over about three miles of water and mudflats, and took quite a while getting his mom's new piano-teaching studio built on weekends and after work. He was doing this about the same time that I was ordered out of his house by Paul Fourman and forced to go and live with gramma for almost a year, part oof my thirteenth and some of my fourteenth year. This arrangement ended when I was apprehended by the Mill Valley police about five miles from gramma's house, driving her car at 3 AM in the morning and put into juvenile hall for the time it took—four days—for all concerned parties to figure out what to do with me and came to an arrangement with the authorities to take me back into the Fourman household, where I stayed until moving out onto my own in my seventeenth year. I had snagged a job at the downtown gas station and rented an upstairs apartment over the Lady Baltimore bakery across the street from the station and put in seventy-five and eighty hour weeks for a starting 85 cents-an-hour. A year later when I got married, I had been raised to a dollar and fifteen cents-an-hour. Whoopee! The next job was in a machine shop next to Gate Five, Sausalito, territory where I would, five years later, come to use as home territory, as it were, for the next seventeen years! Running drill presses and grinders or sanders, plus some assembly work of the parts I had been machining—for almost two bucks-an-hour! It was a machinists' union job, so the wages were actually pretty darn good for a young-married with a kid on the way. I had quit the gas station to go do this machinists' job, but got fired after maybe six months; probably just about the time Eden was born. Twenty-two more day jjobs ended me in give up mode and enscounced offshore in a boat and scowlingly grumbling under my (fig.) breath that the whole world can just go off and fuck itself for all I care—even though I really serious did care, no matter all the evidence to the seeming contrary that might be argued by others.

     Back to the musical experiential influences that grew my music self to where I was screaming and a hollering rock n roll at teen dances. I remember Paul buying Hilda a Hi Fi record player/radio for Christmas 1951, at age eleven, and I began exploring his and her collections of recorded music. Hers was all mostly boring non-graspable classical stuff—symphonies, operas, and arias of famous singers--to my young inexperienced ears. But, inexplicably, until I realized why and how they had come to be in her record collection, decades later, when I realized that I had been on her shoulders at a concert by Leadbelly, in San Jose in June of 1944 was why she had this eight-record (78s) hardcover bound book of Leadbelly cuts. Paul's record collection was smaller and had a few ribald yiddish songs, and some ribald Trinidad Calypso singers, and Enrico Caruso's arias. But the one record set I just loved listening to was of a french tenor's singing in french of the most intriguing melodiousness I had heard up until that time and I can remember the words of the first line of that song to this day: “Col-um-bel-la Columbella, ah te fed a mes amore . . “ The turning point in my musical attention spans came when my mom brought home a three-quarter sized Washburn guuitar she had bought for $3.50 at the local catholic charities used stuff store. I was probably about twelve, pushing thirteen at that point. In my parents' bookshelves, there was a Burl Ives Folksongs book that had guitar chords illustrated and the rest is history—mine, anyway. I quit the piano-lesson thing and retreated to my bedroom for the next couple years while developing my guitar chops and beginning to learn songs off of the radio; the first one was either Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues or Bill Halley's Rock Around the Clock, or maybe Hank Williams' “Hey, Good Lookin” (Wha'chu got cookin? How's about cookin sumpthin up for me?”) or “Jambalya” (an a crawfish pie, an a fille' gumbo. . .). By the time I had learned enough to get cocky enough to go and try to win talent shows or maybe even play at a high school rally on the big footbal-rivalry week's annual pep rally, which I did in early October at age sixteen-and-three months, I had begun learning vast quanties of the lyrics and chord progressions of dozens and then dozens more songs as the radio in those days played the hits over and over with enough regularity that I had no problem catching all the words over a day's listening with pencil and paper in hand, and guitar not far away. I kept up this commiting-to-memory of pop hits from off of the radio just about right up when I finally quit the biz in favor of a boatlife, hiding away from the cruel (or so I must have been thinking in my deeper down thinker in those first couple years on the water) world out there and drowning in my (supposed) sorrows over the dissolution of my relationships with that first attempt-at-family of mine.

     Going and playing and singing with my musical friends was my drug-of-choice to help ease the painfulness of my emotional being at that time, and get thoroughly distracted for some hours of time ona pretty regular at least bi-weekly regimen. The darn boat also sucked my attention and energies into more positive stuff, as well; and between these two aspects of my boatlife then, I was able to maintain a fairly reasonable amount of sanity and morality in spite of the grunginess of the existence of a boatman, plus the misery I was having to endure over the two year period in which my children slipped away from what grasp I may still have had left after all the bull-f___ing-shit that went down with that demise of the relationship with my highschool sweetheart and first sex-partner—I was her first s-partner too!

     And then I built a house on a barge and sold it to buy a more boaty boat and built a house in it. And then I got a hold of an even boatier boat and built a home, shop, and sailing rig onto it and lived in it until Francine showed up into my life and I started working my way through the three or four house boat or barge-like situations that we lived in during those years that we were together. And after we broke up and got the tug and the Sally Jo sold, (after building the treehouse in Hawaii while we were there) I built another house shack-on-a-float for us, you, I, and Jadene to live in up in Gate Six for those last three years on the waterfront. And still playing on a regular basis, the regular waterfront parties with my Redleg friends and boat oriented companions.