The year 1969, in retrospect, was one of the biggest in
classic rock music. It was also the year my friends Sue, Mary Jane and I,
three 16-year-olds, signed up for summer telemarketing jobs. It was during
these working hours we perked up our ears, not for music, but the sounds of potential
clients’ unenthused one-word responses across the wire, and the lilting, if not
often monotonous, rhythm of our own voices as we repeated rote telephone
pitches. Our goal was to sell small plots of Wisconsin resort property to older
folks in the south Chicago suburbs, not an easy sell for a peddler of any age
or experience.
For escapism from the din of the phone center, the three of us would take our lunch break
together outdoors at the local snack shop’s picnic table. There, near the
corner of North and Harlem Avenues, we’d quickly wolf down our brown bag
lunches and purchase a pop at the shop counter to at least feign the impression
we were legitimate customers.
Once food was consumed, we moved on to our true destination,
Peaches Records, a few doors down from the snack shop. This record shop served
as our rock music “museum.” Our paltry paychecks from the telemarketing job
were needed to be spread elsewhere than on pricey record albums, for the likes
of school clothes and bus fare. After we entered the record store, we headed
straight toward the stacks.
With Sue and Mary Jane at my sides, one particular
afternoon I held up an album cover with the saffron yellow and fiery red
solarized portrait of a man dancing before us -- “Electric Ladyland,” the Jimi
Hendrix Experience’s third album. It was part of the ritual we undertook with
one another, showing off the most recent rock albums that we admired, like
auctioneers at an estate sale, presenting a beautiful object to bidders for
examination.
We all had our current favorites “of the moment” and took turns
with this show-and-tell game until our lunch hour was over. We would examine,
we would discuss, we would laud and fawn over, we would disagree, though we
couldn’t bid. It was like touching fine paintings, something the guards
wouldn’t let you do at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The graphics of “Electric Ladyland,” though colorful, weren’t
as visually psychedelic as the group’s second album, “Axis Bold as Love.” “Electric
Ladyland” featured large aforementioned solarized close-up of Hendrix singing.
The back cover photo flanked Hendrix with his fellow musicians, Mitch Mitchell
and Noel Redding, who were two white guys sporting Afros nearly larger than the
man’s himself. Their well-fitted garb was totally psychedelic, jackets jumping
with surrealistic cartoon characters, polka dot ties popping and brilliant neck
scarves furling, all which satisfied the freaky fashionista in me.
The album cover wasn’t what really attracted me to this
album. I, as many others were, found captivation in the originality of the
music. I had been enamored with Hendrix’ music since “Purple Haze,” a single 45
rpm record I purchased in 1967 while still a dooper at Taft High School. A
dooper, by the way, is a Chicago term for a collegiate, an acronym for “Dear
Old Oak Parker,” meaning someone who’s similar to a suburban Oak Park youth who
can afford Ivy League schools – and record albums – or, like me, a Chicagoan
from the northwest side who merely dressed like one with clothes snagged from
bargain basements and thrift shops. By 1969, my friends and I were “hippies,”
or at least hippies who toned down their outfits enough to get summer jobs like
the telemarketing ones, and still, evidently, trying to be all that in this Oak
Park record shop.
Double album “Electric Ladyland” is viewed by some as the
peak of Hendrix’ mastery of the electric guitar. In recent liner notes, it
read, “After Woodstock, Neil Young said that Jimi was ‘absolutely the best
guitar player that ever lived; there was no one even in the same building as
that guy.’” Besides Mitchell and Redding, a number of guest artists made cameo
appearances in various tracks on “Electric Ladyland,” including Steve Winwood,
Al Kooper, Dave Mason and Brian Jones. The most well-known song on the album is
by far “All Along the Watchtower” of which music and lyrics are written by Bob
Dylan. Hendrix wrote the remainder of the songs.
My personal favorite is “1983…A Merman I Should Turn to Be,”
which tracks at over 13 minutes. Some say it is the most psychedelic and
political song on the album, if not among all of Hendrix’ body of work. I
fantasized as a child about what it must be like to be a mermaid, influenced by
“The Little Mermaid” story by Hans Christian Anderson as well as the film “Mr.
Peabody and the Mermaid” with Ann Blyth and William Powell. In the Mr. Peabody
film, Blythe portrays a mermaid brought to land in order to try fit in like
everyone else. When it’s clear she cannot, she is mercifully returned to the
sea.
Hendrix wanted to be a merman, the male counterpart of a
mermaid. But he longed for it as a means to walk away from war and oppression
and straight into the sea “not to die, but to be reborn.” The title’s “1983”
was a year that Hendrix was destined never to experience himself. His short but
artistic career as a musician ended only a year after I held that record album
in my hands at Peaches Records, with his death in 1970.
A fond memory of my mother involves the “Electric Ladyland”
album. Our local department store in the neighborhood strip mall, Turnstyle,
featured a flyer advertising select albums on sale for only a dollar. Most
record albums sold for about six or seven times that amount at Peaches Records.
“Electric Ladyland” was one of the albums featured in the Turnstyle photo. I rushed
to Turnstyle only to be told by a manager that the array of albums pictured
were for marketing purposes and that “Electric Ladyland” itself wasn’t actually
among those on sale for that price.
When I came home and told my mother my disappointment, she took
a close look at the flyer. My mother, Evelyn, had married my father during the
Depression era. With money tight, they lived with my grandmother the first five
years of their marriage, trying to scrape together enough to get their own
place. They postponed starting a family, as well. During World War II, my
mother did things like save cooking grease in cans and gather slivers of soap to
ship to facilities using it to make munitions, from what my sisters told me.
She was one to count every penny, use every resource and
read the fine print. She strived to get the best out of every deal, receipt,
coupon and warranty. That was the way women from her era worked things to feel
a tad more financially secure. My mother eventually became a widow and had to
fend for herself, my two sisters and me on her own. As a result, she wanted to
make sure I never had it too easy, that I might be independent and strong, as
she had learned to the hard way.
With the “pull up your bootstraps” modus of her
working-class stance, she usually let me fight my own battles and issues,
whether win or lose. So I was a bit surprised that, with flyer in hand, she
uncharacteristically decided to take up the cause. She took off her apron,
threw a chiffon scarf over her dark curly hair, straightened the cuffs of her
polyester pants as she slipped marshmallow white flats onto her feet, then grabbed her car
keys. “Cindy, let’s go,” she said. “Go where?” I said. “To Turnstyle,” she
said. “Mom, really?” I said, as I slipped into the seat next to her and she
drove off.
Once inside the store, she approached the manager. Yet he,
too, told her that he couldn’t sell that particular album at that price. She
wouldn’t let his proclamation immediately dissuade her. My mother raised her
voice and, pointing a finger forcefully at the page in the flyer, said, “Sir, I
see ‘Electric Ladyland’ pictured right here in your ad, and I want ‘Electric
Ladyland’ for the price advertised. I don’t want any of those other albums on
sale. I don’t want The Turtles ‘Happy Together’ album. I don’t want ‘Polka
Favorites.’ I don’t want Dean Martin’s ‘Gentle on My Mind.’ I already have that one. I want Electric
Ladyland!”
The manager sincerely apologized for the inconvenience. Hands
on hips, his bald head glistening, his protruding belly battling three of his
shirt buttons, the manager nonetheless held firm to the notion that he could
not sell the album for a dollar. “You have to give it to us,” my mother
demanded. Everyone was looking. He looked exasperated. Then someone called him
away to answer a phone call.
Ultimately, my mother had as little success as I. But I was touched that she went as far as she
did to try to get some justice for me. And to hear my Dean Martin-loving, Depression-era
mom demand a psychedelic album and reprise the words “Electric Ladyland” at the
top of her voice, militant against this bait-and-switch in a public forum
struck me as righteously incongruous as well as tremendously precious, dear,
odd and sweetly funny. While I didn’t land a copy of “Electric Ladyland,” and
the idea of how my mother and I had joined forces only to lose this small
battle together made me proud of her, and feel loved by her.
Decades later, after my mother was gone, I gathered with my own small family as we
celebrated our usual Christmas stocking ritual for the holidays. By then, I had
nearly forgotten about the album. When I spied a gift that my 20-something
musician son, Julian, had tucked into my stocking, I thought it was a book. As
I tore open the wrapping and uncovered the box it was in, I saw that it was
none other than a CD version of Jimi Hendrix’ “Electric Ladyland.” Two years
before, during a family visit to the Rock & Roll Museum in Cleveland and
inside the Hendrix exhibit, I had told Julian about the episode at Turnstyle
with my mother and me.
So happy to receive the album, I wished I was able to call
my mother to tell her I finally got it, although that was no longer possible. Once
again, I was deeply touched by a family member who made a personal gesture for
me in regard to the album, this time my son. I wept, and told him that this was
one of the best Christmas gifts I ever received.
Since then, it has turned out to be more than a mere rock
album for me. Every time I play it, I walk hand-in-hand with the living and
dead, with the musical and otherwise, with the caring and savvy of my mother,
son, Sue, Mary Jane, and Jimi, too, right into Electric Ladyland.
(Excerpted from a memoir in progress: "The Year of 14 Jobs")
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"I want the Jimi Hendrix Electric Ladyland album!" demanded my Depression-era mom
