Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629)

by Hynde, Chrissie

  I begged my friends to stay for the evening performance, so we goofed around the fairground looking at guys and greaser girls who we admiringly called “Rips,” until it was time for the second show.

  The sun went down and fairground rides lit up the sky in what remains surely the most perfect of all backdrops for any rock show as the band took the stage. The band didn’t disappoint the second time around, but then, halfway through the set, things got tense. Another fight was about to…hang on a minute…what the…? It was staged!

  I’d been totally duped. The fight was staged! How cool—how totally cool! Oh, how I loved a good con. That sealed it. There would be no turning back for me. I didn’t really imagine that I would ever get in a band, but I was now eternally devoted to the idea.

  —

  Now that I’d left Litchfield and was going to Firestone High School, time in the art room was my only sojourn away from academia. I had no use for history or learning stuff about the past—it was the past! Math terrified me. A dog had a better chance of understanding algebra. I just couldn’t concentrate on anything I wasn’t interested in. I was out of my depth in every class except art. I was good at painting and drawing and making things. My grades in art kept me from flunking out altogether. At least in the art room I knew my ass from my elbow. Just about.

  One Saturday afternoon, on one of our long-ass walks downtown, Nita and I wandered into some store that had probably been closed down and taken over by a church group. The sign in the window said “The Outpost,” and it was a down-and-outs’ refuge where two guys, older than us, unshaven and with long hair, were loitering. Hippies were still a new thing—a rarity on the streets of Akron.

  The good-looking one handed Nita a flower and asked if we’d like to go to a love-in. He was the first guy I’d ever thought of as beautiful. His dark eyes, long black hair, the flower, his talk of a love-in—I was smitten.

  His name was Greg Burnett. I would hang out in Summit Mall on Saturdays near Disc Records in the hope that he would show up. He did. He had a chopper and was an amateur magician who could pull a rabbit out of the top hat he sometimes wore. He made posters of bands, wore fringed moccasins and a fringed suede jacket like the kind they sold at Gilbert’s. He had his hair biker-style, brushed back, and had broad shoulders and slim hips; when sitting on his pretty motorcycle he looked like my idea of an angel. He was twenty—four years older than me. He was, in my eyes, perfect. He’d even been kicked out of a Catholic school, making him literally “too cool for school.”

  He’d pull up outside Firestone and rev his bike so that I, along with the rest of the student body, could hear it. I loved that sound and I loved him. It didn’t last long, though. I was to find out that love never would.

  —

  The songs that were on the radio at the time can still bring a lump to my throat.

  Richard Harris singing “MacArthur Park.”

  Jesse Colin Young, “Four in the Morning.”

  Tim Hardin, “If I Were a Carpenter.”

  A voice like Hardin’s spoke for muted hearts, and I was finding out that only music could ease the pain of a broken one.

  The far-reaching AM frequency meant I could get Nashville, Chicago, Detroit and beyond on my Westinghouse transistor radio at night. John R. from Nashville played B.B. King, “Don’t Answer the Door,” and the Mighty Hannibal, “Hymn No. 5,” a gospel song about a young black soldier bleeding in a trench hole in Vietnam. Radio was a lot more educational than school for me and my generation of dropouts.

  In the late sixties FM stations started going “underground.” The shorter-range FM frequency had better sound quality and had traditionally played what we called “dentist-office music,” the stuff our parents listened to. But when they went underground, radio really did become the voice of our generation. Commercial AM stations would never have played “Sister Ray” by the Velvet Underground, so we were finding out about shooting dope and alternative sexualities and all the stuff the adults didn’t want us to know about.

  Cleveland had WMMS—one of the nation’s first underground stations, with the best music and disc jockeys. Cleveland always led the way in rock—the name “rock and roll” was coined in the city by disc-jockey Alan Freed, and English bands used Cleveland as a testing ground. If anyone was going to “get it,” Clevelanders would. One thing you could say about backwater places that didn’t have much of a scene was that we had nothing to do except listen to the radio. We were all music experts.

  Billy Bass on WMMS was our guru and had free rein; if it was raining he’d play “Rainy Day, Dream Away” by Jimi Hendrix followed by “Rain” by the Beatles. There was no format.

  Every Saturday, I’d go to Disc Records at the Summit Mall and trawl through the album bins (and keep an eye out for my guy with the motorcycle). That’s when I first saw Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention.

  I looked at the gatefold cover for twenty minutes—it was a lot to take in. “Freak Out!” was not an expression I’d heard before. What did it mean? Probably a surfing term like “bummer”—coming off your surfboard. I knew that one. Freak Out! I took the album to Danny Smoot, who worked behind the counter, and he played a track, “Help, I’m a Rock.”

  I leaned up to the speaker. What was going on? This was like some kind of Beat poetry put to rock music. Even Terry, the jazz purist, would dig this. Rock meets jazz on psychedelics. It was something I’d never heard before. I had to take it home and call all my friends and tell them. The only way you’d hear about anything was by searching it out, because none of it was available to those who didn’t have the ears for it. The underground scene was fertile and rich, exploding with experimentation and antiestablishment sentiment, and it spoke to us, not our parents.

  You could only see a movie at the theater when it came out, and then you would never see it again. Sometimes a horror or sci-fi film was on TV, but that was about it. Ghoulardi, the alternative persona of Cleveland newscaster Ernie Anderson, was our other guru, who showed all the cool films on his TV show every Friday night. He had his own language and we idolized him, a Beat version of a ghoul. (One day his son Paul Thomas Anderson would be a big-shot film director.)

  Rock stars were more important to us than actors. Actors were from an elite world, distant to us, but rock and roll was everywhere we went. Rock stars spoke our language.

  Firestone was an ongoing torment, but only two more years with good behavior and I’d be out. I could not fail and get held back, but I still flunked Algebra 1 three times, including summer school. Summer school? Talk about punishment! What child-hater dreamed that one up? They eventually “waived” the course and let me graduate.

  Vietnam was hanging over our heads. Guys were making a mad scramble to get accepted into college so they would be exempt from the draft. If they had brought in conscription instead of that elitist “draft” system (which the privileged could dodge easily), the sons of politicians would have had to go and things might have been different. If rich kids had been conscripted, the war would have been less divisive. Only the poor had no choice and got sent over. Some volunteers were from affluent backgrounds, no doubt, but no one we ever met—except for Bob Mosley from Moby Grape. When we heard he volunteered we were all shocked.

  Every parent who wasn’t living under the poverty line had spent their entire life saving up for their children’s college education. That was what all American parents did if they could. My “mandatory conscription” theory is one I hold in retrospect only. None of us thought that way at the time. We believed there was never an excuse for war and objecting was the only reasonable response.

  Nobody got a scholarship unless they were a real little straight-A student, and they weren’t common. I never met one. Government grants like in England? Nobody had ever heard of that—it would be like socialism! “Christy—you don’t get something for nothing,” as my dad would so often declare.

  Terry enrolled in Kent State University (KSU) and stayed there until the possibility of go
ing to Vietnam passed. All we could do, other than stage protests, was to stand back helplessly as those who did get drafted, average age of nineteen, got sent over to drop napalm, bomb villages, ride around in helicopters and get killed in what we saw as an insane war that absolutely none of us understood the objective of. The entire youth population was polarized because of it, and it led us away from our childhoods and our parents. The generation gap became untraversable.

  We watched the bomb strikes on television and it got worse every day—and even worse on acid. You had to be careful not to watch the news if you were tripping, and we all were. And so were the soldiers over in Vietnam. No surprise some of them came back so traumatized they’re still holding out in chicken sheds.

  Our resolutely antiwar sentiments were reflected by thousands of bands across the nation—bar bands who switched overnight from playing stuff like “Farmer John” and “Louie Louie” to psychedelic desert music while we danced frenzied under strobe lights. Every song on the radio had an antiestablishment message that only we could decipher. Our parents had no idea what it was we were doing, and we saw them as one with the enemy.

  When we weren’t out watching local bands, of which there were at least a few in every city in America, we congregated in hippie pads, dorm rooms or biker hangouts to smoke pot, surrounded by antiwar slogans, “Hallelujah the Pill!” free-love posters and psychedelic multi-band concert announcements from places like the Fillmore West and the Avalon Ballroom. Posters that promised spiritual healing, poetry and rock music:

  KRISHNA CONSCIOUSNESS COMES WEST

  SWAMI BHAKTIVEDANTA * ALLEN GINSBERG

  THE GRATEFUL DEAD * MOBY GRAPE

  BIG BROTHER & THE HOLDING COMPANY

  MANTRA * ROCK DANCE

  SUNDAY JAN. 29 AVALON BALLROOM 8 PM

  Even posters were a new thing, formerly the domain of Hollywood, show business and the circus. Now, any bedroom could be transformed into a hippie palace with a few posters, lava lamps and a radio. Black light optional.

  Zap Comix enlightened us with satirical insights and pornographic images that we regarded as liberating. Anything that was socially taboo was “right on” to us. We relished anything or anyone defying boundaries and generally being obnoxious with a capital “O.”

  “Free love” was more a state of mind than “sex” to little virgins like us, and we thought the main objective, “to be free,” was to be free from inhibition and love your fellow man. But the so-called sexual revolution was upon us, and in the spirit of non-conformity we would conform to it. With the aid of the Pill, sex was to leave the discreet place where it had been having a relatively quiet life and become something akin to sport—losing its mystery in the pharmaceutical takeover.

  The most potent factor in the sixties’ descent into chaos was the birth-control pill. Never mind LSD—a passing fad—the Pill was king, and like Cher it needed no second name. The Pill was changing society beyond recognition, with the entire family structure about to alter unrecognizably. Sex was becoming a recreational lifestyle choice. If you were to mention the word “procreation” you’d probably get thrown out of any protest, commune or crash pad for being a bummer. Only a straight person would think like that.

  In the name of women’s lib, women were becoming like men, and that was good news for me because I wanted what the boys had. In thinking we were in charge of our own sexuality, now we could say “yes” instead of “no.” Now we could fuck and run like they did, even if it didn’t really suit our nature.

  Did being like men liberate us? Of course not, but to hell with the finer points, we were having our cake and eating it! We could now have it away with total strangers and not worry about getting knocked up or ostracized, just like the guys. Words like “whore,” “slut” or “loose” were replaced with “free,” “hip” and “groovy.” Clap clinics burst at the seams from coast to coast, while pharmaceutical companies rubbed their hands together and raked in the profits of free love.

  There were books written on whether women had vaginal orgasms or not; orgasms were becoming an industry in themselves. Porn seemed like an underground joke and hadn’t yet overtaken every art form ever invented. We weren’t serious about anything except getting high and being free. (The tab was running, though.)

  Me, I still just wanted to listen to bands, play records with my friends and smoke pot. I thought sex was, like becoming “a woman,” something to put off for as long as possible.

  Vietnam raged on. It tore through the collective psyche like Zorro’s sword signing his “Z.” The whole country was reeling.

  As for you, Akron, the center of the universe; your axis was tilting.

  6

  TESTING, TESTING…ONE TWO, ONE TWO

  Cleveland, Ohio, was a testing ground for new products. I guess if a “new improved” toothpaste didn’t fly, it wouldn’t be the dent in a company’s reputation in “the Mistake on the Lake” that it would be in the Big Apple.

  Bands would do warm-up shows in northeastern Ohio to try out underrehearsed new material on hayseeds, who they thought wouldn’t know if they crapped out or not. But although we weren’t a major city like New York or San Francisco, we had the best radio in the land, so we were at the ready when someone like Todd Rundgren came to town, or Jethro Tull or Lindisfarne. Billy Bass, our resident disc jockey at WMMS, played “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on heavy rotation while the rest of the nation was still pottering about to “Cherry, Cherry.”

  A band thought they were safe to roll into town jet-lagged and hungover, get a few rooms at Swingos, run through a set and start a course of antibiotics while working up to the important major cities, trying out the lights and running order on us, who didn’t know any better. But that “us” included me and my girlfriends. We made it happen. We willed them to be great. We blew them like dandelions back out to take their seed around the nation.

  When I was fourteen we got a ride from a benevolent parent to Cleveland to see the Rolling Stones. Bill was wearing a yellow blazer and royal blue trousers and Keith, yellow trousers and royal blue jacket. They’d swapped the suits around. Did they think we wouldn’t notice? Think again, you skinny, pockmarked, would-be R&B artists parading about in your exotic English threads in front of us in our homemade bell-bottoms wanting desperately to look like you—we noticed!

  Puffy-eyed Brian with his tartan boots and Vox Teardrop guitar. How could anyone forget that? Mick bowing, a sweeping gesture, at the end of “Lady Jane.” Mid-song, Bill plucked a note out of the air that had been launched at the stage by some screaming hairdresser, neatly put it in his breast pocket and resumed playing, without missing a beat. I bet she got a call later.

  I sat embryo-like in the balcony, unable to scream, talk or budge—utterly mesmerized. I walked up as close to the stage as I could after the house lights went up, and ripped a little hole in the staging so I would have a fragment of the show to keep. I saw some folded notes that hadn’t made it to the stage, like confetti on the floor, and pocketed them too. I saved them, and I would often take them out of my jewelry box and wonder who the girls were that had scribbled their phone numbers, hoping the band would intercept them. The underground sisterhood.

  Standing in the foyer, looking at the others who had come from all corners of northeastern Ohio was an integral part of the experience. It was like a secret society. Not everyone needed to see the Rolling Stones in the mid-sixties, but you could spot those who did a mile off in their modified clothes and carefully studied haircuts. For us elitists it was a chance to catch a rare glimpse of the few who shared our passion: guys who’d got their girlfriends to undo the outside seams of their jeans and sew industrial-sized zippers up to the knees; chicks who’d been up all night sewing paisley inserts into their jeans, making them wide enough to sweep the ground. Everyone wore “hip-hugger” dropped waists, which was a new look that anybody who was a servant of rock had to feature.

  Fifteen minutes before arriving at a gig, in the backseat of whoever’s car I was in,
I would pull out my makeup bag and open a trial-sized bottle of Bonne Bell, an astringent cleanser which took all the oil off a face like paint-stripper. I’d have some cotton balls in my kit to aid the process, then, with a face like a freshly sawn log, reapply a pale foundation and take extra care to cover my lips in it. Having lips wasn’t the look. Then I’d get some more eyeliner on and blot it all with powder. The thought of any shine seeping through the thick mask was abhorrent bordering on phobic, and I checked a mirror every ten minutes to make sure I still looked like I’d been dead for the last five hours. I thought I looked cool, too cool for school. My bangs strategically hid any acne threating to appear but there was no need to fret, as it was immediately eradicated by the constant scouring of Bonne Bell, probably the closest thing to a DIY face peel there ever was. The word “pimple” still makes me shudder, and I thought the mark of civilization was when I heard the English refer to “spots”—much, much better.

  The Akron Civic Theatre was one of those classic grandes dames that still graced every self-respecting city in the USA. Even urban-renewal planners hadn’t the heart to tear them down. Gloria Mays and I went there to see a soul review when we were fifteen. Gloria had come in to Litchfield from another school and was a soul fan like no one else I knew. On the bill was Peg Leg Moffett, Gorgeous George and a long list of other acts, but the big draw was Jackie Wilson.

  Gloria and I got there first and went right up front, in the middle, best seats in the house. By the end of Wilson’s set, girls were in a state of ecstasy. Maybe soul audiences always got worked up like that, but it was definitely more nuts than any rock show I’d been to—more of a baptismal kind of thing.

  Being the only two white people in the audience didn’t faze us, but near the end of the show I got a frightening premonition as one of Wilson’s crew came out into the front row, grabbed a girl from her seat and took her to the lip of the stage, where the noticeably drunken singer was lying facedown, one leg dangling over the side, crooning into a drenched microphone. The stagehand then delivered her to Wilson (a former boxer who’d switched vocations after discovering he was a lover, not a fighter), who took her head in his hands and planted a big wet kiss firmly on her mouth, holding the position long enough to incite hysteria throughout the entire hall. The sound was deafening and not unlike the soundtrack of a “dinosaurs rampaging damsels” type sci-fi/horror film. But instead of fleeing for the exits, these damsels were throwing themselves at the stagehand, screaming: “Me next, baby! Me next!”