Several days of springlike weather trick us into thinking it’s time to do spring cleaning, so Lee and I decided it was time to tackle Charles’ room.
After Charles moved away, married, and settled into his new home in Vermont, his room here became a convenient place to store things: old computers, still and video cameras, other electronic equipment, cables, VHSs and DVDs that no longer fit in our downstairs entertainment center, camping equipment, books, and all the vinyl records we have collected through the years.
The records were taking up most of the space on the bookshelves Lee had purchased for her overflow book collection, and she was ready to reclaim the shelves. We had already moved the record rack back into the family room downstairs — a record display I had purchased from a store going out of business untold years ago.
Saturday was devoted to removing everything from the center of the room so we could get to the shelves. Sunday was the day to make trip after trip to bring down most of the records, sort and dust them, and choose which ones to put into the limited space at the top of the record rack. (My health tracker says I climbed 31 floors on the single-floor trips up and down. It is my way of getting in shape for hiking season.)
We still have eight stacks of record albums to decide where to put them or whether to discard them, and there remains one shelf of albums upstairs that I left until there is room to sort them downstairs.
Some of the musicians, bands, and groups I had totally forgotten about — Snopek, Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club, Eddie and the Hot Rods — and I had forgotten how many albums by other musicians of greater fame I had in my collection. Then there were the albums donated by Rick Hopper when he was divesting himself of some of the records he had collected in his radio days, and the ones — some of them never opened — that came to me through record clubs I had joined.
Music has always been part of my life, even though I never learned to read music or play an instrument well. I’m told that it all began while I was at an age where I still slept in a crib. When I heard Buzz Whittaker come on the air (he was owner of the Lone Star Ranch in Reeds Ferry from 1956 to 1983, and had a weekly television show on WMUR-TV), I would wake up, stand up, and shake the bars of the crib so excitedly that my parents were afraid I would fall out.
Brother Eddie was 10 years older than I, and a huge fan of Johnny Cash — a fandom that continued through the generations. When we learned that Johnny would be appearing at the Lone Star Ranch, we all drove down to catch his act. That was the period when Johnny was heavily into pills, and when he had not shown up for two hours, we left, disappointed, only to learn that he had showed up not long afterward. It was not until he and June Carter Cash came to Meadowbrook in Gilford that I finally saw him perform in person.
Eddie learned to play the guitar and even built his own electric guitar in a high school shop class. I remember him performing Elvis Presley’s “You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hound Dog” on the stage as a freshman. Later, after he married, built his own house, and was raising four children, we would join him for family sing-alongs, with my mother on harmonica, Eddie on guitar, and all of us adding our imperfect voices.
I didn’t have the fortitude to learn anything but the basic guitar chords, picked out a few piano pieces, and now do some dabbling with harmonica and Native American Flute. However, my love for music has extended beyond country and western music and rock’n’roll to include classical, jazz, blues, new wave, and world music — basically everything except Muzak, rap, and hip-hop.
The instrument that has always been my favorite in any genre is the saxophone.
If I were to believe in past lives, it would be because of a dream — the most vivid dream I’ve ever had. I was sitting in a drab room, at an open upper-story window where there was a slight breeze, playing a beautiful, haunting, and exquisitely sad tune on a saxophone while looking down at the street below. I awoke with tears streaming down my face and, for a few minutes, I could still hear that tune and continued to feel deeply sad. Had I been able to read music and write down the notes, I might have preserved it, but the tune was lost.
Where had it come from?
Perhaps that vision or memory is the reason I get so much joy from watching performers who obviously are enjoying what they do. When they are deeply into the music, exchanging looks with other musicians, or acknowledging the audience’s reaction, I share in that overwhelming pleasure — a sensation almost as overwhelming as the emotion that overtook me sitting in that window, playing that saxophone, whether it really happened or not.
Café Chatter
On ‘Too Warm’: And Newfound is not frozen! Should be 2’ thick after a frigid January….
— Paul Berton