PART ONE: In which we meet our champion, watch him pull off a girl’s bikini top, and then break free from the shackles of Bing Crosby et al.
You like stories, don’t you? Here’s one..
There was a scrawny little kid, a deeply sensitive sonofabitch. White kid, grew up in a place that seemed to value little else besides luxury cars and rankings of all asinine variety and who-knows-what.
He sure as shit couldn’t make sense of about 97% of what he took in outside of his own house.
But anyway, he had one helluva little pump in his cavity – beating, beating in there – and it was like a little engine.
But it was also like a magnifier, and maybe even most of all – a compass.
This last function, while certainly the most rarified and crucial, took a great deal of calibrating to get working just right.
There were misfires along the way.
At first these functions didn’t mix well at all. The magnifier enlarged all the wrong things, probably because the compass was pulling him in all these erroneous directions.
For a while anyway. Well, he would learn.
But there was one way in which his little pump always worked flawlessly – right from the very beginning;
it always zeroed him in very quickly on what he liked.
There was a teenage counselor at the day camp one summer when he was very young, five years old, tops. Female.
Well before he knew what it was, he was drawn to this sunny-faced nubile bubbler like a moth to an arclight, constantly by her side.
Later he would only have two vague memories of this early moment: the excitement he felt vibrating him in the young woman’s presence, and her bright-eyed smile.
The very same smile that turned to shock one afternoon by the pool as she realized her young barnacle had unwittingly pulled the string to her bikini top.
This was completely innocent. He was just excited.
And then, always, there was music.
During the soft, shimmering formation of consciousness, way before future memories were taking root, the sound of his mother’s singing voice would soothe him into slumber.
Words in a foreign tongue he would never know the literal meaning of, in a minor key that spoke of the ages, that her mother had sung to her a generation before, the sound of which would remain with him his entire life.
He would play for hours with his brothers around the plastic Fisher-Price record player, astonished at the very real magic that occurred as they placed the arm on those little, thick plastic discs.
And all the great kid stuff of the time – Free to Be You and Me, Really Rosie.
And beautiful acoustic folk records. These also memories from before memory – Roger Whitaker, Peter Paul and Mary, The Weavers, Pete Seeger.
His childhood home was filled with music, thanks to a loving mother who was a lifelong devotee, and a sometime musician herself.
But on the kitchen radio it was always the popular singers of the 40’s and 50’s, classical, show tunes, folk songs. Mom had no taste at all for rock and roll.
But rock and roll was out there.
Before too long it was probing and pulling at his compass. From the outside world it utterly fascinated him.
And it felt a bit taboo, off-limits in his household, and dangerous to his young mind, which only made it more enticing. Little by little he found it.
Watching Mtv with the neighbor kids’ older sister at their house – completely dumbstruck at Springsteen’s Born In The USA, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, U2’s Joshua Tree.
And the thrill of hearing The Police, Culture Club, Duran Duran coming out of his friends’ parents’ radios. It would shiver his pint-sized body, car-pooling through suburban New Jersey.
The years of elementary school into middle school into high school were marked by a constant flow of Sony Walkmen and Discmen, worn out one after the other by near constant listening.
Each night furtively falling asleep under the covers, and every bus ride to and from school, filled with Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever, Guns ‘n Roses’ Appetite for Destruction, INXS Kick, The Travelling Wiburys Vols. 1 & 3.
And then later, Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual de lo Habitual, Pearl Jam’s Ten, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magic, and the list grew.
The albums began to define his young life.
TUNE IN TOMORROW (just click the email you’ll be getting) FOR PART 2 of The Only Listening Boy in New Jersey, in which our hero finds the great Misty Mountains, Pigs, “jazz” and… (uh-oh).. wimmin.
You can also DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE GIFTS RIGHT NOW. (But I do recommend you come back and finish the story, it’ll add such layers of meaningful, um.. meaning to your experience.)
(You’ll also have a chance to download the free gifts tomorrow..)