The Unfettered Critic – September 2023

Hi.

Terry here.

Paula has the month off—except that she rewrote, edited, and grammar-corrected this into readability, so, “Thanks, Paula.”

Anyway—recently I’ve been reminiscing about facts that seem, to me at least, stranger than fiction. For instance:

During the first two years of my life, the President of the United States was named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Really. During those years, my father was carrying a rifle in England and Germany at the president’s request. I was two years old when he came home and we met for the first time, an event I don’t actually remember.

As a toddler, I was near the same age as four other toddlers in England named John, Paul, George, and Ringo. My father didn’t meet them while he was there, and I haven’t met them here, there, or anywhere, although one of them was drumming in Jacksonville only a few weeks ago. Sixty feet from, and yet so far away.

Here’s another strange fact: I was in the eighth grade when Sun Records sold Elvis Presley’s contract to RCA Records. My dad didn’t like Elvis. My mother didn’t understand him. And my older brother was confused by him because he loved pop groups like The Four Freshmen and, especially, a ballad singer named Johnny Mathis. Me, I was still into Casper the Friendly Ghost and Woody Woodpecker. That changed drastically one freezing February North Dakota evening when I stepped into the local ice-skating rink’s “warming house” and heard Gene Vincent singing via a newly invented “transistor” radio. The song was Be-Bop-a-Lula. Never has anything affected me so profoundly, not the baby ducks I’d discover each spring by the creek that ran through our pasture, or the first jet-produced “contrail” that my buddy and I chased on our bicycles because we were sure it was Martians about to land nearby.

Be-Bop-a-Lula changed my life. That “jungle rhythm” shook me in a way that Elvis’s Hound Dog hadn’t. It opened my mind to “the-beat, the-beat, the-beat” that America’s teachers and preachers and parents quickly condemned. Chasing that sound in the way I’d chased that contrail led me to playing music in a series of bars, bowling alleys, ski resorts, and casinos, until I landed, and found a delightfully related career, in a place called Hollywood.

I’m waxing philosophic here, which is not the same as waxing your car (or your legs), because as I type this, I find myself, through no planning of my own, having just turned eighty-years-old.

Yeah, 80.

I have full(ish) hair. I have real teeth. I hike the trails. I know how lucky those things make me, and I recognize how luck has directed my life. I mean, I used to show up at a “dance,” pay a dollar at the door, and spend the evening leaning on the edge of some stage watching Roy Orbison or Jerry Lee Lewis, Conway Twitty or Bill Haley and His Comets—and happily deciphering what their fingers were forming on those fretboards and keyboards. And I still can sense how my family’s mild disapproval served to drive me in that direction. A lucky fact.

When Paula and I were settling into Jacksonville, the furniture truck arrived on 08/08/08. We wondered whether that number might be meaningful. A coincidence, maybe, but recently I’ve flipped it around to see that it reads 80/80/80, an engaging number that of late has been resonating in my mind.

But you know what else is strange? The only thing concerning me presently is what I’ll write for this column when I turn 90.

Fact, I swear.