2000-10-23 - 23:39 MDT

October 23, 2000

Beast ?

I was never, or even thought I could be -- a dancer, my clodhoppers shod a pair of stuttering feet. But the music, oh the music stirred my very soul. I was lucky too as Dad and Mom had a varigated assortment of phonograph records. Sound reproduction in its almost basic form. Orthophonic, I think they called it. A needle in the record groove wiggled the arm attached to a diaphragm which fluctuated the air in the horn causing slightly amplified sound to emerge.

As soon as my parents decided I was old enough to be trusted with the Victrola the music world was mine, I must have wound it up at least three million times, I exaggerate, a million and a half times. Wore out boxes of phonograph needles and a few records. Although I could barely play a harmonica and was the only kid who could sit and read a book while the rest of the class sang -- deep, deep in my very being the magic of music swelled and vibrated.

The first radio sound I ever heard was from the earphones on my uncles crystal set, later from Dad's three piece Atwater Kent radio, the speaker, the radio itself and the battery box. By the time I was old enough to pilot the radio it was a Cathedral, Philco table model radio. Not too long after that I was allowed to come home after school, boy, I had my own real truly Yale lock door key.

The first thing I would do when I got home was turn on the radio, then go take a leak or get a drink of water -- sometimes both. Most days the radio kept me company and I "got with it" into the then modern music. With the popular stuff there was also cowboy music, hill billy and folk music. . . . . now it seems to be all country western -- the "Somebody done somebody wrong song," type of thing.

On Saturdays Mom would be working and Dad would be off, I would do my chores and the time would come when Dad and I would listen to the Texaco Opera and shortly after that would come the spiritual program of singing, led by, "The Elder Solomon Lightfoot Mischaux," "From the banks of the Potomac." they were wonderful, moving and uplifting spirituals dating back to slavery hymns on up.

Jiggy stuff or serenades all mixed together, Caruso pieces, Neapolitan Nights (which I believe was the theme introducing the once a week program announced by Don Ameche). Old, new, if it was melodic I belonged to it. I can still hear the "Pepsi Cola, hits the spot, twelve full ounces thats a lot, nickel, nickel, nickel," song. Some of those old jingles caromed around in my skull for hours. But there was room for Santa Lucia, Ciribiribin, Flow Gently Sweet Afton, America The Beautiful and of course all the beautiful Christmas music and my very favorite then was the same as it is now, Silent Night.

So, music moved me greatly from an early age, but the depths stirred in me didn't become evident to me until the first time I marched in a parade with our ROTC unit. That day I began to realize that the things I had read about young men being stirred enough by the music that they blindly signed up to serve were valid. The big drums were the heartbeat urging the brass on to heights unimaginable to me before. It was the proof of the theory to me, the demonstration of the enchantment of music.

I have been shaken, stirred, spurred, tormented into tanglefoot attempts to dance but finally learned that I could very easily keep in perfect step in the parade.

Other people play it, but is it made to soothe the breast of this Savage Beast?

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