Wayside Wonders

Kenny was like the Fonz.  You know, the Fonz from Happy Days?  The cool guy, who was small, yet seemed tougher than everyone else.  He was cool.  Kenny was just a kid, as I look back on it now – maybe 19-20, but for a fifteen year old getting into his first ever job, he seemed to be in complete control.

Kenny was the dayshift/prep manager at Gianelli’s Pizza.  I had joined the coveted Saturday afternoon shift as the dishwasher.  I had heard about Kenny, but had yet to work with him.  I generally worked evening shifts after school or weekend nights.  I had just tied on an apron to start my shift and was scrubbing a few random leftover dishes from the previous night to run through the machine.  Kenny came around the corner, in faded Levi’s, and the black Gianetti’s t-shirt, hopped up on the counter next to me, propped his feet on an empty garbage can, revealing worn black Converse high-tops.  He had a Frusen Glädjé ice cream container in his hand.  Remember Frusen Glädjé?  It was the copycat fake Scandinavian fancy ice cream trying to horn in on the other fake Scandinavian ice cream, Häagen-Dazs.  It came in a pint sized plastic capsule container.  Kenny popped the lid off with the thumb of the hand he was holding the capsule with, while twirling a spoon with the other. 

“Did you eat a nutritious breakfast?” Kenny said without looking at me.  I assumed he was talking to me, since no one else was around.  I nodded my head side to side.  I had literally been in bed asleep 30 minutes ago, before rolling out of bed, getting dressed and walking the mile or so to work.  He poked the spoon into the container revealing a quiet crunch and scooped out a small bit of cereal into his mouth.  Between chews, he continued: “I expect everyone to be ready to go.  Get yourself one of these.”

That is where my training began.  Every moment with Kenny contained teaching moments.  Not all of it made sense at the time, and a lot of it still doesn’t make sense, yet I still feel like those lessons are still to come to fruition 35 plus years later.  Being the Saturday dishwasher really meant that I would be doing prep for the evening rush.  Saturday nights were the busiest and we would have to prep the cheese, the pepperoni and salami, cook the ground meats, and slice the tomatoes, mushrooms, onions and green peppers.  Everyone helped with prep, but dishes were light duty during the day, so it was mostly up to the dishwasher to get this stuff done.  I learned these trades from Kenny.  He was a master.  Everything he did oozed quality.  He was neat, efficient, and in his hands, all of the prep work was immaculate. 

I remember him showing me how to use the slicer.  He fastened on a big heavy metal tube and we poured about 10 pounds of raw yellow onions inside and turned the switch on.  The thing jumped to life with a stutter and then jolted violently back and forth.  I was terrified.  He tightened a knob on this jerking monstrosity to adjust the thickness of the slices.  We would collect the booty into a tub, seal it when full and date it.  Eventually, my intimidation with this beast wore off.  When slicing onions, the air of the entire restaurant would fill with that eye burning toxicity.  Often I would handle the run off by approaching the slicer with a makeshift blindfold.  It feels incredibly stupid in retrospect, but after learning the trade from Kenny, I had an intimate knowledge of that machine and total confidence.  It was like Jedi training.  I could mentally feel the machine.  I only learned years later that a 15 year old should not have been working the slicer at that age, nor should any of us been working 75 hour weeks during the summer like we often did. 

The stove tops near the slicer would be on simmer all afternoon cooking ground beef or sausage, which we would flavor with seasonings when ready.  Every so often, someone would have to check the meat by throwing the massive pot on the floor, and mashing and stirring the brew.  The meat mashers became our guitars.  Whatever horrible songs would absolutely blare from the one speaker transistor radio out of the dough room was generally emitting from KSKD 105 (an early Top 40 station with no DJs, which then became the hair metal leaning Top 40 station Q105), if there was a guitar solo, someone was likely performing it on the meat masher.  Kenny taught us the importance of this.  To be an effective performer, one could not simply put their hands in position and move their fingers around.  One had to play with passion.  One had to contort their face with pained expressions accentuating each note.  It was important to look like you mean it.

The dough room was an isolated long hallway that was parallel to the front kitchen, which was out in the open public area.  The dough roller would make a lot of each size of pizza dough and store them in a two-sided refrigerator, so the pizza makers could grab them from the other side.  They worked the day shift.  I never knew who the dough guy was, but he was cool.  He had long sweeping bangs, wore surf shorts and band t-shirts, wore a lot of those fluorescent colored rubber bracelets around his wrists, which were all the rage in my mind, and was always covered from head to toe in flour.  He reminded me of Peter Zaremba from The Fleshtones.  He and Kenny would nod to each other occasionally, but otherwise, they never seemed to communicate.

One of the things I appreciated most about Kenny is that he wanted everyone to know how to do everything.  He would spend the time to make sure you were comfortable at each stage of learning.  When I was taught how to put together a pizza, it was simply having me learn all of the toppings for the combos on the menu.  The business had no limitations for toppings.  We didn’t weigh ingredients or count pepperonis or anything like most places.  People just piled on a lot of stuff and the result would often be a mess leading to a pizza that would have burnt crust and a doughy middle.  Kenny taught moderation.  His skilled hands would wrap around the pizza and each effort would be a perfect balance of toppings and little to no run off.  He guided the toppings onto the pizza looking like a potter working the wheel.  He was an artist.  He insisted that we shout orders and commands randomly.  He had seen a restaurant TV commercial that had all of the chefs shouting back and forth with urgency – likely displaying the busy yet smooth running kitchen.  Know what you’re doing, and look like you mean it.

Over at the ovens, it was the same thing.  Kenny had the ability to cook the pizzas to the perfect crispness and taught us what signs to watch for that would signify when a pie was ready to pull.  More importantly, Kenny took me aside out at the ovens one afternoon and showed me what to do during any downtime.  There are some open minutes after putting a pizza into the oven.  Again, our kitchen was up front.  The crew worked away right behind the counter where the customers placed their orders.  The wall by the ovens displayed pans representing all of the pizza sizes available.  Below these was a stool – about knee high.  He put one foot up onto the stool and leaned into his upraised leg.  With his arms crossed casually over that leg, Kenny looked out towards the counter and did a subtle one finger wave and a head nod.  It gave me chills.  He looked like a movie star hero.  Kenny was teaching me how to do this.  It took a lot of practice, but I began to get the correct nuances.  This, he taught, was the proper way to acknowledge our fans.

It didn’t take long to become a devoted disciple of Kenny’s teachings.  As my skills increased, the training led to more excursions.  One afternoon, Kenny took Nick and me outside and had us lug a 50 pound bag of onions up and down the hillside out front of the building by the Gianelli’s sign.  The landscaping was more fitting to the high desert with its red lava rock and big sagebrush and Idaho fescues, than what one would generally see on the constantly damp and dreary coast.  This military style training wound up bringing in a few curious customers.

As the Christmas holiday neared, Kenny had Nick and me out on the roof of the building stringing lights.  The slippery roof was incredibly hazardous with the coastal wind whipping us around and blasting the driving rain into our faces.  As I look back on it, it feels like maybe Kenny was trying to kill us.  It felt different at the time.  I was terrified of heights, but he instilled in me a confidence that I didn’t know I had and felt I could accomplish anything.

On another outing, Kenny, Nick, and I, suited up in our Gianelli’s shirts, took a handful of pizza pans down to the beach access (D-River Wayside) and tossed them about like Frisbees.  When not engaged in some sort of acrobatic diving catch, we would employ the casual ‘stud’ wave to any curious on-lookers.  The local kite shop, who employed teenagers to fly kites on the beach as advertisement, were getting annoyed at our invasion.  We were a curiosity who were taking attention away from their wares.  We began planning to make our own t-shirts, as we were now known as the Wayside Wonders.

Late one Saturday afternoon, as our shift was winding down, Kenny was sitting on that counter where he liked to eat his morning cereal, he looked exhausted.  He was tussling his hair and taking deep gasping breaths.  This was about the time that Kenny announced to us, that he was packing up his young family and moving to California.  It was an uncomfortable emotional moment.  He continued to look spent as he described to us all of the effort he had put in to this job.  “Sometimes you tell the day, by the bottle that you drink,” he continued.  After a beat, we realized that he was mimicking his favorite music video: “Wanted Dead or Alive” by Bon Jovi, which was the ultimate example of how to look like you mean it.

I continued to work at Gianelli’s all through High School.  Things were never the same after Kenny left.  Several months after he moved away rumor had spread that he had become the head chef at some fancy restaurant in the Bay Area.  This was no surprise to any of us.  All of us who had learned from Kenny tried to keep the teachings alive, but it didn’t translate.  None of us had the Fonz-like charisma.

A couple of years later, one busy evening, I was working the ovens and standing out by the size display pizza pans and a fan.  I was lost in thought.  I looked out at the building crowd hanging around the front counter queuing up to place their orders.  A pretty tourist girl with a Slippery When Wet t-shirt and tight jeans with slits cut into the thighs caught my attention.  She was looking at me, even though I looked like a few discarded clumps of leftover dough balled together, rolled through some pubes, and stuffed into an Echo & the Bunnymen shirt.  I locked my gaze on hers and gave her a slight nod, along with a little finger wave.  She smiled. 

* Wayside Wonders drawing by Arlon Gilliland

Forever Young

Over the years, my obsession with music has led me down a path of often unconsciously steering conversations towards the topic of music.  I apologize to all of my closest friends.  I don’t mean to.  It just happens.  It’s frequently near the forefront of my mind.  Several times, after steering a conversation toward music, one sentiment I’ve heard many times both in passing, in heated drunken discussions, and in one on one thoughtful chats – it generally goes something like this: “They don’t make music as good as they used to,” or “music was much better back in the day.”  You know you’ve heard something along these lines said, or maybe said before.  These types of statements always get my blood pressure to rise, my nostrils to flare, and an inner voice to remind me to take a deep breath.  Listen, I get it, music often makes a bigger impact on people when they are younger.  It’s new and fresh and speaks to us in different ways.  Over time, most of us drift away from music.  Life becomes more complicated.  We get jobs, have families, and have various crises and triumphs.  Our horizons are broadened.  Our priorities change.  The reason such statements eat at me is that there is always good music being made.  There’s more of it coming at us each year.  It may not always be groundbreaking.  It may not change our lives like it did when we were fifteen.  It may seem foreign and uncomfortable.  But some group of people somewhere are being drawn to it.  They are finding inspiration and freedom and joy from it.  This is a good thing.  The past year or so has been fantastic for me personally, despite closing dangerously in on the age of 50.  I haven’t been introduced to this many new artists since I was frantically devouring all things music in my early twenties.  A simple reminder that the music is always out there.  It’s just a matter of having the will to find it.

Since last summer, I’ve been listening weekly to the Big Takeover Radio show put on by the music ultra-fan/aficionado Jack Rabid (available on Real Punk Radio each Monday).  The last month or so, Jack has been celebrating the music year of 1979 – marking its 40^th anniversary.  There seems to be a limitless amount of incredible songs from that year – a lot of which I have retroactively discovered.  While listening to these sets the last few weeks, I’ve found myself thinking about great years in music.  Obviously, ‘79 was a good one.  It was when the punk explosion was still occurring around the globe, but also merging into post-punk.  It was when tiny independent labels had been popping up everywhere and creating a truly exciting underground scenes that would prove to be massively influential still to this day.  At the same time, when seen from the macro scale, 1979 was a terrible year in music.  Music sales were slumping to a disturbing degree.  There’s not a lot of hit music from those days (78-80) that has been very lasting.  It’s kind of a dead zone between the soft rock of the 70s and the video driven pop of the 80s.  However, percolating underneath the mainstream were hip hop, punk, noise, goth, industrial, dance and post-punk music.  Not yet finding a wide audience, but the sources of tons of amazing and exciting music.  Still, having said that, I’m certain that there are multitudes of people who love the hits of 1979.  These are the songs they may hold up as the high standard that all future music would be compared to.

For a variety of reasons, generally, music has its greatest impact on us in our younger years.  In our teens and twenties we begin to truly develop our own tastes and begin to make our own decisions.  This is when we kind of break free of our parents influence, and the peer-induced influence of what’s acceptable, and begin discovering things on our own.  This is why I truly believe that so many people find it easy to dismiss new music later in life.  It’s not what they cut their teeth on.  To a certain extent, we’re all guilty of this.  Jack Rabid was 17 in 1979.  There’s a reason, beyond the plethora of incredible music released that year, it’s that he was exposed to this music at just the right time.

In 1986, my mom bought me what turned out to be, I think, a ten year subscription to Rolling Stone magazine for my birthday.  Not too long after I began receiving issues, in came several special editions marking the magazine’s 20^th anniversary.  There were best of lists of albums, singles, and tours, I believe.  I learned a lot about rock’s history and took advantage of these issues to investigate a lot of older music and discover more about the history of this stuff I love so much.  I began asking my parents, aunts, uncles, teachers, or anyone older, what it was like when rock-n-roll was new - when it all was considered taboo and dangerous.  Maybe 1956 was the greatest year of music.  I was curious about when Beatlemania hit, and the resulting British invasion – maybe 1963 was the greatest year.  Or what was life like in like 1967 when the pop charts reflected what was popular and sometimes what was the most cutting edge and creative – a concept foreign to a child growing up with fully market researched and analyzed commercial media.  What I learned pretty quickly is that most people really don’t pay attention to this shit.  Pretty much everyone dismissed my questions with ignorance, or complaints about the constant screaming that would drown out the Beatles when they performed live, or with my Mom trying to convince me that she had been a drag racing “hood.”  It was around this same time that I read something about the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) considering a true music fan as someone who purchases more than one album in a year.  This concept blew me away!  It didn’t make sense.  How could anyone survive with a long list of music that they need to have?  I have fully come to realize that music’s importance is very individual and often very limited and transitory for a high percentage of people.

My search for the greatest year of music was quickly abandoned.  So, the question I began to ask myself is what is my favorite year for music?  It’s not so straightforward.  I will never forget the uncommon power of 1985, when I first went all in on music.  That was the year I got a job and began spending all of that income on records.  These records slowly began collecting alongside my dozen or so records I’d gained access to as a little kid.  Yet, the following year, ’86, found me with a CD player and I began to learn about music beyond the Top 40.  I mean, I will forever know albums like The The’s Infected, Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration, Pet Shop Boys’ Please, and New Order’s Brotherhood better than I know my own social security number, because they were new and exciting and I only had about fifty albums in the old collection, so I played them all the time.  I mentioned earlier that the past year has been an especially great year for music, for me personally, because of a renewed vigor of discovery and exposure (see explanation here).  I could toss in just about any year, because there’s been meaningful music that has swept over me, and captivated me for a variety of reasons.  For example, 2003 was a rough year of health issues, but defiant, loud, and angry albums by The Lawrence Arms, T.S.O.L., and Killing Joke helped drag me through those medical problems with an indomitable spirit. 

In the end, not that anyone asked, I think I’ve decided that 1992 has been my favorite year of music so far.  It slots in with the age of discovery.  I turned 21 that spring.  I was well on my way when it comes to developing my interests and tastes as far as music is concerned for what has turned out to be a long time love affair.  I had begun trying to write about music.  I had survived a physically and emotionally rough year in 1991, and music felt bigger, brighter, and more important than ever.  A big part of that is because the so-called shoegaze scene was absolutely on fire (great records by Ride, Pale Saints, Catherine Wheel, Kitchens of Distinction, Curve, etc.), so there were new UK import EPs and albums to buy every week, along with a healthy stateside indie scene (Velocity Girl, Small Factory, Swirlies, Versus, Unrest, Pavement, Chainsaw Kittens, etc.) where I could mail-order records directly from the bands or tiny labels.  I found myself acquiring a lot of indie pop and punk records that way.  I remember spending $8 of my last $10 till payday on the brand new single “Goodbye” by The Sundays, when I spotted it on display a record store on my way to the grocery store for food.  Bob Mould unleashed Sugar’s blasting debut, Jawbreaker appeared with the “Chesterfield King” single, Australia’s Underground Lovers astounded me with their Leaves Me Blind album, and 4AD Records continued their US invasion with Belly and the hypnotic Red House Painters.  Even the Cure impossibly followed up Disintegration (supposedly their genius finale) with a solid album, and Your Arsenal showed that Morrissey was not yet finished.  I could go on and on.  Pretty much all of the music that I love from that year still sounds fresh and vital to me to this day.  In 2003, I purchased a recordable CD player.  It’s just like an old school dual cassette deck, but instead you could burn CDs – one to the other.  Since I couldn’t sleep anymore, I set about a project where I would make a compilation disc to represent each of the years of my music fandom.  Of course, I started out with 1992.  I made a list of songs that was ten notebook pages deep – never repeating a band – of great songs for the disc.  I made one disc with 18 songs, labeled it “1992a” and stopped the entire project there.  It was too much! 

In the end, I hope that I never reach a point that I give up the search for new music.  That search and discovery of amazing music has saved my life several times over.  I do not want to be hunkered down with my arms around an Alphaville “Forever Young” 12” single saddened that I never made it to prom and wondering why they don’t make teenage ballads like they used to.  I am looking forward to years ahead that are brightened with music that rivals and exceeds that exciting music year of 1992. 

What has been your favorite year of music?  Why?  What made it special?

Breakout

Over the last month or so, I've been really enjoying reading some my friends' Top 25 album lists on Facebook. It never ceases to amaze me how powerful music can be to everyone, especially during those teenage years, when our scope of reference is smaller and it's so easy to live and die with every single event in our lives. So many of these lists I've read are dominated by the records, CDs, tapes, downloads, etc that were discovered during our ages between 14-24. I often find it sad that so many people lose that same intimacy with music as we grow older. I understand it, because life changes; priorities change; and the impact of singular songs or albums becomes slighter as we realize that there's not a lot that we haven't heard in some form before. Music from those years stays with us longer too.

About a month ago, I grabbed my dusty copy of the debut Pet Shop Boys CD (Please) off the shelf and threw it in the player. I hadn't listened to this album in at least 19 years. Hearing the opening drum machine of the song "Two Divided by Zero" made me realize three things: I knew every nuance of this album despite not hearing it in ages; it immediately brought back images and moments from the past into vivid detail; and finally, it sounded fresher than anything I had listened to for a long while. I suppose it makes sense that I would remember every nook and cranny of this CD, because when I bought it in 1985, I had about 20 other CDs in my fledgling collection.  Now, when I get a new CD, it has to compete with a couple of thousand, along with the endless soundtrack of songs that float through my mind - most of which I would never consider purchasing in any form. For example, I still devotedly go out and buy the latest music from the Cure, but it gets shelved quickly after a few listens and there's certainly no rush to get it. I remember driving to Salem of all places on a sunny early summer day in 1987, so I could get the Cure's Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me the day it was released. I drove straight back home (I also remember picking up a copy of that debut Concrete Blonde record along with it! Great day!)and listened to it in it's entirety - only coming out of my trance long enough to flip the records over when it was time.

Yet I realize that I still get that excited about new music. Maybe I am in a state of arrested development, but I find myself counting down the days till I can go track down the new Camera Obscura album, or the new Doves, or the second LP from Great Northern, or I find myself wondering if and when a new Lawrence Arms CD will be out. My enthusiasm is constantly being replenished by new music, or discovering new-to-me old music, or a fresh look at old favorites. Like right now, I'm listening to a song that I find myself pulling out of the archives about once a year on a sunny day, when I need a boost, or if I want to maintain some positive momentum, or when I decide to do some Spring cleaning: "Breakout" by Swing Out Sister. Today, I need a boost and this old 12" single is providing it. What could be better?

Vertigo

Not too long ago Jeff and I were discussing the most important songs or albums in our lives. It was an entertaining conversation, but I’m a sucker for that kind of thing. The most time and effort I put into any school assignment (aside from a failed attempt to understand Kepler’s Harmonies of the Planets) is when I took a recording engineer class and we were asked to write about our top five albums of all time. There are so many moments that came to mind during the discussion – from one of my earliest memories of being scared as a two year old by the opening heartbeat and screams of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” while my dad cranked it on his HiFi, to the 2003 Killing Joke LP that spoke to me so strongly that it helped me find peace with my declining health. How could I forget moving the needle around Blondie’s “Parallel Lines” from their hit “Heart of Glass” to the way cooler and addictive “Hangin’ on the Telephone” in 1977? Or when I bought my first New Order album just because the cover is so damn mysterious and beautiful? Or along the same lines, when Bill said that I should buy the Joy Division album with the white squiggles, because he thought he remembered hearing it at Charlie Taylor’s party one time? All of these are moments are of great importance to me personally in defining my tastes and impacting the quality of my life, but what is truly the most important album of them all? To answer this question, I have to look at things differently than I normally do. When I finally narrowed down an all-time top five for that assignment, I think I managed at that moment (1992) to combine my most listened to records with those that helped shape my interests and found ways to expand my horizons. Interestingly, I don’t think any of those are the most influential album, mainly because each one is an individual artist or band. My decision isn’t based on what I’ve simply listened to more than any other either, but how it led me to many of my most listened to albums of all time. What is this magical album? “The Vertigo Sampler,” a double LP released in Canada in the spring of 1985.

The day I found this record is still burned vividly in my mind. I found the record at Driftwood Mac (often referred to as “Butthole Mac”) in Taft on a warm but showery spring day in 1985. My parents had dropped me off there while they took care of some errands on that end of town. I was just becoming an avid music consumer, but was limited by not having an income outside of a weekly allowance for chores. I had been into our towns only record store once or twice before and was a little scared of the Mike, the hippie that owned the store. I wasn’t so sure about the random display of the small selection, or of the proliferation of psychedelic HP Lovecraft posters on the yellowed walls. However, I quietly continued on to search the records on display and avoided eye contact with hopes of avoiding any conversation with Mike. After all, I was stuck there until my parents swung by to pick me up anyway. Moving from A to Z, I didn’t find anything I wanted, but I did see a gray double album in the Various Artists section that was priced at $5. I picked it up to examine it. It included ABC’s “Be Near Me,” which I already owned a 45 for. It had a couple of Big Country songs and I liked what I had heard of them, but most significantly, it had what was called a “World Remixed Version” of Tears for Fears’ first LP single “Mad World.” For five dollars I decided I had to buy it!

When I finally put the needle down on the record, I went straight to this remix of “Mad World.” No matter how hard I tried to convince myself otherwise, there seemed to be no remix. It sounded the same as the version I already owned. Despite this disappointment, I listened on, and little by little the songs sunk in. I heard the Boomtown Rats, The Icicle Works, Cocteau Twins, The Cult, Gene Loves Jezebel, Tones on Tail, Colourbox, This Mortal Coil, and complete unknowns Rubber Rodeo and Zerra 1. What did this collection do for me? It exposed me to several new artists. During the next year, I am certain that I bought 40 albums directly due to their exposure on the Vertigo Sampler, which in turn allowed me access to the artists that inspired them and so and so on. It is truly the most important album in my life, even if I’ve only listened to it a few times since the 80s.