Friends from Ohio

We all found ourselves going to the same high school in Medina, Ohio. It was the fall of 1969 and we — me (Steve), and George and Chuck and John — were all in our freshman year and completely mad for the big rock and roll (still in its adolescence just like us).

So we formed a band, a primal quartet just like the Fab Four at whose name we genuflected. I played bass, George and Chuck on guitars, and John was the drummer.

And it gave us something to do in that one-horse town: the kind of place where the head cheerleader went to the homecoming dance with the star quarterback, where the town square had been carefully restored to its original Victorian appearance and—nota bene—our little town was the site of the first commercial beehives in all of America.

So go Medina Bees!

We rehearsed in St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church where my mother (devoutly) and I (reluctantly) and my dad (sort of vaguely) attended services, and where the new young minister, in his effort to “reach out to the young people,” had given us boys permission to play in the basement of the church. And play we did on Saturday afternoons, groping our way through something resembling 12-bar blues and stumbling into the easy magic of barre chords. By the end of tenth grade we had a list of songs, mostly originals because we weren’t good enough to do many covers, with the exception of an extremely unfortunate version of “Satisfaction” by the Stones.

Finally at the end of the school year, there was a “Battle of the Bands” event at the high school; four bands signed up to play, including us. Calling ourselves Ground Zero, we played OK, but came in dead last in the voting. But we didn’t get zero votes. I think a couple of us had girlfriends by then. Our girlfriends voted for us.

***

I first met our drummer, John Bannon, in the final months of eighth grade. In the mornings there was an amorphous free period before the start of classes when kids would meet in the cafeteria, sit at the tables and hang around, fool around. We talked about nothin’ but music and bands and John soon distinguished himself by tapping out on the table the unmistakable rhythms of the drum solo from Iron Butterfly’s “In-a Gadda-da Vida,” and it sure didn’t get much cooler than that.

I got to know him better by the sheer luck of living in the same benighted little neighborhood of Medina, sheepishly called Forest Meadows. We would meet in the mornings to walk to high school together, still talkin’ about bands and girls and stuff.

He was mesmerizing, almost intimidating in his intelligence and preternatural in some kind of wisdom. One morning when it had been raining, he stooped to pick up an earthworm that was attempting to cross the sidewalk and tossed it into the grass, probably saving it from being stepped on or cooked in the incipient sunlight. “Maybe we’re not the highest form of life,” he said.

***

At school, the whole quartet would sit together in the cafeteria and hang around, fool around, all of us queasy variations on male adolescence in America. I’d known George since we were in first grade and we’d been close since Jr. High. He was the other real genius in the group, a born comedian and the perfect foil for John’s musings which could slouch toward pontification. Chuck and I held the middle ground, a couple of sensitive poet types, we would pair-off and be best pals in the latter part of high school and after.

Holding court every day, we would review song lyrics, discuss amplification equipment, and critique the music that was played over the sound system in the cafeteria. It was a golden age of popular music in the late sixties and early seventies: the iconic Beatles, Stones and Dylan mixed with the newer strains of Jethro Tull and Yes. A favorite of ours was the song, “Layla” by Deric and the Dominoes with its million dollar guitar theme that blew your head off every single time.

John’s special favorite was a Boston-based band called Ultimate Spinach with their hypnotic, march-like ballad, “Your Head Is Reeling.” It was a band no one else had heard of, and it gave our conspiracies a certain gnostic cachet, and allowed us to more easily ignore the roiling ignorance of all that surrounded us.

The whole mad spectrum of humanity, most of it was represented en micro there in that lunchtime arena. Jocks and freaks, angels and archetypes. With the frozen-in-time absorption of figures in a painting, they ignored us entirely. And it was mutual, as we huddled together to parse the mysteries of melody and backbeat. Diagramming what we knew, and that we knew we knew. But none of this prepared us for John’s leaving us.

***

It was right after the smoke cleared form the Battle of the Bands that John’s dad got a job in Portland Maine. So, deus ex machina, John was going to Maine too. It was very sad, although John was actually pretty excited about getting out of stupid Ohio. We made a big ritual out of getting together for the last time and as we parted ways, he clenched his fist in the air and said, “Rock on…”

And we did, the three of us that remained. With no drummer, we quickly began to emulate the folk rock that was popular at the time. Acquiring acoustic guitars and fiddles, we began to write the inevitable songs, some of them not entirely forgettable.

And we bowed our heads and followed the requisite rites of passage: Learned to drive, got part-time jobs, continued courting girls, each of us in quest of one who would make a man of us. I dated Sue Rademacher, daughter of boxer Pete Rademacher who fought Joe Louis and lost. I dated Susie Hoops whose mother gave me a guinea pig. I dated, courted Jennifer Lynn Smith whose initials were mine in retrograde. (We got married later, and in the ideal world her story would be told elsewhere.) I worked as a wash-boy at Gallucci Chevrolet and in the summer helped around my parents house, mowing the lawn, drowning in ennui and choking on a large, mostly conceited, teenaged angst.

***

What saved me was discovering the Incredible String Band. I was the first and likely last on my block to buy their new record entitled “U: A surreal parable of song and dance performed by the Incredible String Band and the Stone Monkey” Inside there were photos of the band surrounded by a British Museum’s worth of exotic instruments and a dance troupe of cool hippie chicks so luscious I could barely stand to look. The lyrics were everything I’d ever wanted to hear: a svelte blend of Celtic myth, Arabian Nights and a sly Buddhist subtext. The music was simply the music of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings come true. Forget the Ultimate Spinach, this was true esoteric knowledge, and I was smitten instantly and deeply.

I searched and found out they had made a lot of records, and from that point on, nothing else would do. Like an elvish Lennon/McCartney, there were two songwriters: Mike Heron offered melodies so pure and memorable that they must have sounded at Eden’s gate. But it was Robin Williamson’s songs that made me feel like I had found a spiritual home. He was a minstrel telling stories through song, and in the brave new world of here and now (there and then), it required a new way of telling. His multi-sectioned song structures (recall John Lennon’s “Happiness is a Warm Gun”) brought home the emotional warp and weave of the text in ways that were new, yet maddeningly familiar.

I was painting my parents’ house one summer day and I had the stereo speakers from my bedroom facing outside. Robin’s “Mad Hatter’s Song” was playing and as I listened, I felt myself swept up, caught up in it in some deep new way. I stopped painting as the song reached its final section:

But I am the archer, the lover of laughter, and mine is the arrowed flight.
I am the archer and my eyes yearn after the unsurlied sight.
Born of the dark waters of the daughters of night,
Dancing without movement after the clear light.
O’ Pyrhythian fate be kind
In the rundling and trundling rickshaw of time…
And at this point my heart rose up…
Hooked by the heart to the Kingfisher’s line…

…and I imploded. It was some touch of deep insight, some light kiss of satori, a smidgen of kundalini uncoiled. I was never the same, hooked by the heart.

And I was ready to go to Maine to see John Bannon.

***

We had kept in touch. We had sent letters filled with lyrics and feverish speculation.

We had sent records of our latest discoveries: the String Band of course, as well as Walter Carlos’ Clockwork Orange soundtrack, O’ my brothers. We had sent tapes of us, the trio, playing our latest stuff. Cause we had plans, the biggest: Immediately on graduation we would hit the road to tour the country and play gigs as a first step towards a nearly inevitable stardom. We were so convinced of this that none of us bothered to apply to college for the fall, and we spent much time trying to win John over to our cause.

John’s parents had equally big plans for him, which included applying to Bowdoin College for the fall and then law school and then, et al.

But we were undismayed; we still practiced at the church on Saturdays and then on some Saturday nights we would call up John in Cumberland Foreside, Maine and get crazy:

Come with us, JB!” “George sounds like Jimmy Page!” “We’ll be famous!” “Goose is wild”

Stuff and nonsense, but we did make a plan to go visit John during our Spring Break vacation that year.

It was by now 1973, and in our last year of school, there was a spilt schedule at Medina Senior High. Big tough seniors like us got out of classes at noon, and we eagerly worked part time jobs to save money to sustain our obsessions. We bought some stupifyingly big PA speakers a to go with the excruciatingly small amp we had to power them. We criss-crossed the Cleveland metropolitan area (“take Warrensville Center Road!…”) in quest of the perfect vehicle for our fantasy journey. We finally purchased a big blue, piece of junk box van twice and thrice too big. But it was no time to be thinking small.

There was no overestimating our foolhardiness and naivete, but we were nonetheless ready for yet another rite of passage: Road Trip.

***

We hit the road on a Friday night and headed north through Cleveland and got on Interstate 90 across a little piece of Pennsylvania and then across the seemingly endless stretches of New York State. We must have slept in the truck, because I recall us at a rest stop the next morning hunkered over a cookstove, grimly attempting to cook blueberry pancakes from the mix that we had purchased in such high spirits only days before.

How long ago that seemed now in the harsh light of our first real time away from home.

But we kept going, and of course the landscape changed after a while. After crossing the Hudson and into Massachusetts, it began to seem like we were on a real journey of some kind and the profound energy of being such men of the world sustained us through the hard parts.

By late Saturday night we were almost there and we managed to convince ourselves to get off I-95 and take Route-1 from Old Orchard Beach south of Portland. In the middle of the night we followed that circuitous road through Portland and then the actual Cumberland Foreside neighborhood where John lived with his parents, a stone’s throw from a breathtaking overlook view of Casco Bay. It was so late when we arrived that all we could do was roll the truck down near the overlook and fall asleep the three of us exhausted in the front seat. We let the sunrise wake us.

That Sunday morning we trudged miserably up the hill to knock on John’s door to see if after all, this John Bannon wasn’t a figment of our seriously overheated imaginations. But he answered the door, his mother hovering in some complex way nearby. We came in for breakfast and it was all just too funny. We soon segued down to the beach where the big blue truck presided.

It was a moment of the purest hilarity and certainly the apotheosis of all the hanging around, fooling around we’d ever done, this time against the heroic backdrop of the Maine coast which was splendid, even there in relatively low-key Cumberland Foreside.

The sky was a newly invented shade of blue, and the ocean was deeply engaged in rendering its approximation of infinity.

With all this, the trip began to take on a certain hyper-reality that would only crescendo through the course of the week.

But fooling around was all well and good. We had a concert to play.

***

Before John left Medina, he was saying stuff like, “This is gonna be a snap…” in reference to the impending challenge of assimilating into a new high school environment starting junior year. And he made good on what he said. Far from the near pariah status he “enjoyed” as part of our clique at Medina, he had quickly become something of a celebrity at Cumberland High School, based on his intelligence of course, but also a nascent social bravura which had won him a seat on the student council, as well as prominent musician status based on his guitar playing which he had begun to develop even before he left Ohio. John was playing acoustic guitar to great local acclaim and would always finish his performances with a dreamy piece entitled — with profound knowingness — ”The Song I Always End With.” From this snappy vantage point, it was a natural thing for him to arrange to have us perform at a Dollars for Scholars event.

In another stunning leap of poetic literalness, we were advertised as John Bannon and His Friends from Ohio, and the pressure was on to come up with a show worthy of such hype. We rehearsed at — surprise — a local church and quickly fell into a daily routine of playing in the morning, drive the big blue truck to McDonald’s for lunch and then playing all afternoon.

Somewhere along the way, we were introduced to one of the local celebrities in the form of a young woman named Phylis. And a lovely form she was in a celtic, light brown hair kind of way. It was clear that she had, let’s say, an affinity for musicians. I was not shy about beginning an inquiry into the nature of said affinity, and we soon struck up a little romance infatuation, thickening the plot in a scenario already reaching a floodtide of metaphysics.

Back at John’s house, evenings were spent in the basement where we slept that week. John would sit on the stairs and hold court, sitting in judgement of the opinions offered from below. John was gonna run for president someday, etc.

I soon grew restless with this scene and, given that I had someone to be restless about,  I took off one evening (earning Mrs. Bannon’s wrath the next morning) and went to find Phylis. It was a pure moment that night: I was still a few weeks shy of my eighteenth birthday. I was far from home, a rock star on tour even sort of. It was a clear translucent night in Maine, beautiful beyond language, and I was going to see my girl. We got to know each other a little better that night, in the almost-Biblical sense.

The stage was set for the concert next evening.

***

We had three sets in mind: originals, 12-bar blues jams, and then more originals. We played in the gym and the whole audience sat on the floor, fanning out in front of us where we had set up our incalculably big PA speakers.

After years of rehearsing in church basements, we were ready. The stars aligned to meet us; we rose to the occasion and rocked. It was a long, long way from that first performance at the Battle of the Bands, and we enjoyed ourselves as only eighteen year olds living their dreams can enjoy it: Full out, full on. In the pocket. I can still remember the feeling.

***

Along the way in the first set, always on the lookout for a way to err on the side of excess, I stepped up to the mic and said, “I’d like to dedicate this next song to someone I met coming up here…Phylis.” At that, there were a few catcalls from the audience, but I ignored them and plunged into the song, whatever it was.

And it sure worked the magic on Phylis, perhaps too well.

After that set, we took a break before the rhythm and blues, and she came up to me and said, “You want to go to the apple orchard?”

Somehow I already understood that the apple orchard in question was the place where kids like us went to get The Luck Which Passeth All Understanding.

So, I replied, “Sure Phylis, but not right now…”

“No, we should go now…”

“But I have to play the next set…”

“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the apple orchard with me right now, Steve?”

“Well, I…”

“Please?…”

Hooked by the heart.

by Steve