Back in the front room: (…and back on vacation time once again, no worries [about when I post] here). I’d’ve skipped right past this one as cute but not one to relisten to. Our first two posters alone (Avid Fortuleo returned to his rightful position as right hand man to Sir Winstanley) was all it took to get me on board. Fortuleo, missed that rhyme rhyme-o the first time around-o, but I hear it and love it now. Disko Joe, I took a speed boat to a deserted island last night and ate dinner (lobster sashimi, lobster ceviche and grilled lobster Maldivian style all by my not-lonesome self while watching the sunset. Yes, I’m on an Island was played on the Bose speakers the resort had available during this wonderful event in honor of one of the greatest bands ever, one of the greatest threads ever and all my fellow Avids on this thread. It was anazing.
I guess I'm in Storyteller mode tonight, early '80s teenager edition with my earlier drum story already. That, combined with other recent posts by others here, triggered some additional memories and stories. Classic cars come up from time to time from some of our more knowledgeable car folks here, though I am absolutely not one of them and am out of my league on this subject. My first ride after acquiring my license at 15 years old in Sep 1983 was a hand-me-down blue 1973 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme similar to this one in this photo I found on the web. This thing was a gas guzzling tank and a source of never-ending bad luck either due to its decade-old age by this point or by user error/ignorance/stupidity (or all of the above). It was also the stupidest car I ever drove too, if that word can be applied to a car. Maybe some of our more knowledgeable car folks here (@DISKOJOE, @Rockford & Roll) can explain this one to me or if you've even heard of this. This car had a very peculiar "feature". If someone was sitting in the front passenger seat without their seatbelt fastened, the driver could not turn the key in the ignition! This was way before mandatory seatbelt laws were passed in the US. So, every time I had a friend sitting in that seat, I had to say to them "lift up", as in lift up your butt. They would say "what"? And I'd have to explain this stupid quirk of this car. Once the engine was running you could sit down there without fastening the seatbelt. My regular riders got used to this absurdity and knew to do it automatically, but what hell was GM thinking with this idiocy? The driver could start the car without the seatbelt fastened, and you could likewise have passengers such as kids in the back seats without belts fastened, but if a passenger was seated in the front without it, no start without the workaround butt lift. I think I read somewhere that this was only a one-year thing with these 1973 editions and was removed the following year. For good reason! I've never seen this in any other car in my life. Sheesh. WTF? Something else stupid happened later on. After a year or two of driving this thing, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, for no reason, the automatic transmission would not engage beyond first gear (or second, I can't remember exactly) while in Drive (steering column shifter). My aforementioned drum-hating Dad cursed me something fierce about having screwed up the car's transmission, yell yell yell, blah blah blah. I remember him driving it around and around the block in the neighborhood several dozen times as it got darker and darker at night trying to "fix" this. He finally figured out a trick that if you dropped it into Low 1 (or Low 2, again I can't remember exactly), and then reengaged into Drive, the gears would then shift. So, I had to resort to this action every single time from this point forward with this car. I ended up with a manual transmission car without having to use your left foot on a clutch pedal. Insane, right? My Dad was convinced I did something to make this happen, but all I had been doing was driving the damn car as normal as far as I knew. I've never heard of this before or since either. In January 1985 Florence, SC recorded several days of extremely low temperatures and its second all-time low temperature of 0 degrees Fahrenheit (-18 degrees C). I know some of you Northerners will scoff and laugh, but to this day this is the coldest temperature I have ever experienced in my life. But as a teenager at the time, it didn't faze me (I assure you it would now however!). I was a Junior in high school and school was actually cancelled during this cold snap if I recall correctly. Well back to the Blue Goose as my Dad called this 1973 Olds. As an inexperienced financially strapped teenager who was watching his money, I did not have this car prepared for such a temp drop. I had to save money for the more important things in life like music purchases, fast food, movies, and gas (this was just a few weeks before my Kinks journey began with the Feb 1985 purchase of the Word Of Mouth cassette if you've read my other posts). Naturally I couldn't be bothered with the extra expense of actually putting anti-freeze in the radiator of this car. So, all I had in there was water, which of course froze solid, and it took several days to thaw out, which made me incapacitated as a driver for a while. Again, my Dad let me have it in no uncertain terms and rightfully so. Stupid, but as an idiot teenager I wasn't following the weather forecast on a day-to-day basis in those days and it had never gotten anywhere near that cold to that point in my life and in fact has not come within 10 degrees of being that cold here since. Another time I was leaving school and was taking one of my neighborhood friends home with me this day and the car Konked out right as we pulled out of the school parking lot - out of gas. No cell phones in those days, but we were just off of school grounds on the side of the road. Trudged back to the school to call home hoping to get Mom but got Dad instead. Of Course. Needless to say, I have never run out of gas ever again to this day over 30 years after his passing. I know this is a lot of you-had-to-be-there stuff but I'm laughing hysterically while remembering all of this as I'm trying to type it out. I'm not spitting out red wine since I don’t drink wine and there is none in the house, but I’m coming close with the beer I'm imbibing. I laughed hard reading Rockford's snow deliveries and doughnut stories . One of my best friends from those days (sadly now deceased) had a Jim Rockford brown Pontiac Firebird and there are many great stories there (going through fast food drive throughs in reverse, having the passenger door bent forward by another car moving forward right beside it due to a bumper-to-bumper catch, trying to perfect the Duke Boy hood slide, etc.) Good fun Sunday stuff that I think most of us have experienced at some point in some form with various unique (but equally similar and hopefully funny) stories where no one got hurt and that you can only smile and laugh at the absurdity of it all in hindsight.
Back In The Front Room Ray entertainingly moves the story forward as he relays stories of Dave's flying fingers, spirited home jams and cops and neighbours keepin' a knockin'! The most evocative parts for me are dad's Dave praise and group encouragement and especially the moments the band is joined by harmonica filling out the sound or a scitterish guitar solo spews forth! Mark i don't think everyone wants to spoil people's fun but have learned over the years it was moreso they really did need to relax or sleep! I recall several episodes from the late 80's that include illegally using a school hall and on the 2nd night the police turning up after our Cream renditions melted the homes across the street. Another time at home I was blasting away alone at 3am awhen somehow I heard the phone ring. I pick it up not thinking it would be related to my guitar volume and the voice on the line simply said; "Could Jimi Hendrix give it a rest?) A few years prior I got my 1st electric guitar and amp and though I was barely proficient i followed up on a trick in Guitar Player Magazine's flexi page from one forgettable shredder named Brad Gillis. At home I turned all amp controls to 10 and the guitars to 0, stood right in front of the speaker cone and depressed the whammy bar as I hit the strings and slowly brought up the volume on my guitar knob. Well it was like an earthquake crossed with an explosion of feedback and as this was happening my mother watched (and later relayed to me) the increasingly alarmed, dismayed, disbelieving and horrific expressions on several adult neighbours faces as I persisted for over a full minute with extreme feedback and distortion. All of these victims would never have been sympathetic to my playing in the front room instead feeling there was No Room for such I'll advised Richter Scale Rehearsals!
We had our own "Don't Forget Your Toothbrush" on Oz tv a couple of decades back and I don't know if I feel better or worse seeing it originated in the UK as I found ours to be dire!
I'll probably have to import one from Discogs. The postage costs are putting me off though. Perhaps it will get a UK release next year.
Nothing to add to Back in the Front Room, everything has been very cleverly said. Mark, I hope you're OK ? My only contribution today will be linguistic. You know that "cliché" is a French word, easily recognizable with its accent on the "e". The accent is an inconvenience for English users who tend to overlook it. "Cliche", without an accent, is also a French word, but it's slang for diarrhea. And since I've remained a 4-year-old at heart, judging by the fact that my kids cease laughing at my jokes as soon as they turn 5, I don't need much more to be happy.
You drove the boat and the meal was prepared for you there and alone? Sorry trying to Konflate the Kontext of all this Karma!
Great bouncing back story, @markelis. I hope you'll be singing "I'm an Art Lawyer Lover" soon. I'd advise against using the "come to Daddy" line, though…
I can just imagine you picking up a shy 1st date in her streett and then telling her to get in and lift her butt!
Avid Streett, you are correct in that peculiar feature in your ‘73 Olds. My father’s ‘73 Thunderbird had the same feature that prevented you to start your car without buckling up first in the name of “safety”. So many people complained that it was soon dropped. I believe it was called the interlock function. I remember when you used to see cars like your Olds all over the place. In fact, I believe that the Olds Cutlass was the best selling car of the mid 1970s. Now, Oldsmobile itself has been gone for nearly 20 years now and all you seen now are SUVs. “Where have all the Oldsmobiles gone, where have all the Oldsmobiles gone, Cutlasses and 442s, Vista Cruisers and Tornadoes too Where have they all gone?”
Thank you, Avid Street! You've got some classic fireside fodder here. Early morning laughs are a very good thing. I haven't even had my first coffee. Just took our dog for a walk and I was late. We usually go out around 5AM and I decided to give myself an extra hour today - nice. One of my dear friends had a '69 Cutlass and that brings back more great memories. Another had a '75 Monte Carlo. We used to have to crawl under the vehicle and hit the starter with a pipe to get it to turn over. This happened to us one night when we were going to a high school formal. Yikes! I'm glad @DISKOJOE had that car nugget for you. An interesting feature. It's funny how we named cars back in those days. I don't think kids do that any longer? My friend who wrecked his dad's Caddy had a sister with a Vega we all called Scooby-Doo. She was not a good driver. Hit the fire hydrant next to their drive an easy 6 times in the couple of years she had that car. I had a mishap where I bled my brakes and lost the bleeder valve, so we just used a regular machine bolt to tide me over. Brakes went out pretty quickly. Learned that lesson. I enjoyed your drumming post as well. My middle brother loved that Yes album. I'm thinking it's the one with the Buggles guys on it? Good free form Sunday to all. Mark, I hope you feel better soon.
An entirely different type of story…but this is one that I mentioned upthread, that I received from childhood friend who sent me her (now in her 90s) mother’s memories of living in Japan as an American (arrival in 1955) in the 1950s: *Breakfast cereal was unknown so waited for “don-don” man with a strange machine that popped rice under pressure in a wood-fired stove. The popped rice was released into a screened cage. Neighborhood kids would bring their own small cups of rice to have him pop it for a treat. I procured his services twice a year to pop pillow cases full of unpolished rice, barley and wheat for breakfast cereal. (All the neighborhood would gather to watch the unusual spectacle). —-end—-(I found a photo by googling) Puffed rice man working over drainage channel - Google Arts & Culture
No you didn’t, Avid Zeki. Actually that’s pretty fascinating. I wonder if the “don don” man still exists in Japan. Also, I hope Our Headmaster is OK. Hope he’s resting up.
No…or I doubt it. I never saw any such thing. I was intrigued by that account for many reasons. Did other westerners have that done? Was “don-don” man a regional name? A term coined by her mom? Her kids? The neighborhood kids? (I’m pretty certain that ‘don-don’ (pronounced with a hard “o”) is the sound of popping, like pop-pop). I asked my elder siblings but none of them could recall seeing such a thing. (Though their lack of interest never ceases to amaze me. ). In any event, really creative way to come up with a American-style breakfast cereal in a region/time when it was unavailable. Edit: Japan isn’t a third-world country anymore. You can purchase more snacks than you can shake a stick at at any convenience store (which litter the countryside). Kids aren’t going to be bringing out rice in little cups.
It’s pretty interesting. It’s like a variation of the ice cream man going through the neighborhoods. I was just reminded of a childhood memory of a guy going through my neighborhood in a small truck offering to sharpen instruments w/the sharpening machine located in the back of the truck.
Exactly. The ice cream man. And…as a matter of fact (!), she has a sharpen-saw story, too. A pretty funny one.
IT's definitely the best way to learn I reckon. After I could play chords and a few songs, and sing along with myself, I wanted to go further, and I would find albums at concert pitch and jam with them. My three main albums I would jam with were Eric Clapton Just One Night, George Benson Breezin and Miles Davis Kind Of Blue.... It took me years to figure out why I could only jam with half of Kind Of Blue lol I reckon even today, if Clapton rocked up to town and was playing the Just One Night set, I could sit in, as long as he gave me some leads
Lol, I don't know how to get the special characters on here I definitely do have a potty mouth, but in this instance it is merely an inability to use the special characters.... wherever they are
I'm fine cheers mate... I mean free hallucination, how can I complain.. I'm mainly concerned that the wife is sick now, and she's supposed to have her morphine pump changed on Tuesday, so now it's a race around the clock to try and get her well for the surgery.
