PLUNGING INTO THE NEW YEAR

The WABC Top 100 of the Year, played exclusively from the day after Christmas to New Year’s, was the 100 songs you spent the last year cheering on, hating or tolerating just to hear what was going to come on the radio next.

I have a CD with parts of Bruce Morrow and Bob Lewis’ shows from New Year’s Eve 1967 and the fun is in how random the playlist is. There are no algorithms here based on time of day or demographics. Sometime after 1 a.m. Bob Lewis plays To Sir With Love (#1), The Happening (#19), Somebody to Love (#55) and Winchester Cathedral (#77). While counting down to midnight, Cousin Bruce played, in order, C’mon Marianne (#73), Sunday Will Never Be the Same (#56), Pleasant Valley Sunday (#34), Portrait of My Love (#96), Release Me (#63) and To Sir With Love (#1). (Admittedly those aren’t great stretches of music, but it gives you some idea of how sprawling the playlist was. And apparently WABC’s broadcasting license was at risk if they didn’t play the number one song at least once an hour.)

I played Top 100 bingo. On a sheet of paper numbered to 100, I filled in the blanks as I heard songs played during the week. You could get the top 20 pretty quickly, since they were played most often, but I don’t think I ever ended with a complete list; there were always a few elusive songs that only seemed to be played when my radio wasn’t on.

As somebody, somewhere in the tri-state area was taping WABC that night so it could be played back on a computer in 2017, my family was visiting our friends, the Kannars, for a New Year’s Eve party. That afternoon I watched Green Bay edge Dallas in the final seconds for the NFL championship, although today the storyline is more about the weather the game was played in. Forecasts in Green Bay called for highs in the 20s, but overnight the temperature dropped nearly 30 degrees, from 13 above to 16 below. Factor in blustery winds, and wind chill dropped to 36 below zero at kickoff. (BTW, not a good month for Wisconsin weather. On December 10, Otis Redding was killed when his plane tried to take off in a sudden, fierce storm in Madison, 135 miles away).

New Jersey was having its own weather problems that night. Listening to the news on the WABC tape, it was snowing or sleeting depending on where you lived. The roads, said the newscaster, were “extremely dangerous.” When we left the Kannars’ party well after midnight, there were several inches of snow on the ground and no plows in sight as our Nova fishtailed home.

A day of eating crackers, dip and pepperoni put me in the bathroom when we got home and I promptly clogged the drain trying to flush too much toilet paper. It was nearly 2 a.m., tomorrow was a holiday, we had no plunger and only one toilet. A phone call to the Kannars. Yes, they had a plunger. My father and I were back on the road, where the plows still hadn’t come through. He didn’t seem happy with me as we swerved through the neighborhood. And while the party was long over, it didn’t stop him and Mr. Kannar from having a nightcap, while I sheepishly held the plunger and hoped to God it would work.

Finally back home, I anxiously stood in the doorway of the bathroom as my father plunged, then hit the flush lever. In the earliest hours of 1968, the reassuring whoosh of water making its way down through the house was a sound that was, for me at least, already at #1 for the year. 

LIVING WITH THE GIANTS, PART TWO

A couple of more adds to the last blog on favorite Giants from the past 50 years.  

FRED DRYER: The anti-Giant. On a team loaded with southerners and guys who worked as stock brokers or insurance salesmen in the off season, Dryer was a southern Californian who spent his time away from New York living in a van parked on the beach. He was vocal about the slipshod ways of the Giants organization, wouldn’t conform to front office dictates about hair and dress codes, and criticized the Giants’ sainted patriarch Wellington Mara. Whatever I said out loud, in my heart I knew the Giants were wrong in their inability to overlook the sandals and sideburns, and in letting that overrule the fact that Dryer was an exciting talent they could build their defense around. They traded Dryer as far from the beach as they could in 1972 (exiling him to the Patriots, back then the Siberia of the NFL). He went on to the Rams, All-Pro recognition and Hollywood.

HARRY CARSON: I’m sitting in a lounge area off the Giants locker room, working up the nerve to walk in, corral some player and interview him. And then Harry Carson walks in, sits across from me and starts talking, and talking, and talking, about how a chiropractor was helping him deal with his midseason aches and pains, and about a television interview he was going to be doing with Jayne Kennedy, and God knows what else. I only had to ask him a question or two and my article wrote itself. Thanks, Harry. (He was a pretty great player as well).

TERRY JACKSON: Jackson was starting at cornerback as a rookie when he came into Dresher’s Office Supply, looking to have business cards made. I played it cool, didn’t make a big deal about who he was and certainly didn’t ask for an autograph. We designed the card and I had the printer add an image of the Giants’ helmet, which he liked. Jackson said he would send some other Giants over for cards, but it never happened. I should have asked what he intended to do with the cards. Maybe use them to introduce himself to the opposing team on Sunday afternoon?  

GEORGE YOUNG: The Giants’ general manager credited with building the championship teams of the eighties hosted a luncheon for NJ business executives on the weeks following Giant home games and my Uncle Nick would occasionally attend and invite me. Young’s public persona, built up through appearances on Mike and the Mad Dog, was that of a sort of football savant/curmudgeon. In person he was a big, rumpled guy, who seemed to sweat a lot, but he possessed a dry wit and the luncheons were usually pretty entertaining. During one Q&A, Uncle Nick asked Young if the Giants were interested in signing a local-boy linebacker named Rob McGovern, whom the Patriots had cut that morning. Young seemed taken aback by the question, and after the luncheon he made a beeline to our table. “Is McGovern really available?” he asked. And how did Uncle Nick know? (He was friends with McGovern’s parents). Leaving the luncheon, I wound up following Young’s car out of the parking lot. At a light I could see him wiping down his face with a towel, probably wondering how the backyard grapevine worked better than the NFL waiver wire.

BILL PARCELLS: Two scenes that stand out. One is the December 1990 game when Parcells checked himself out of the hospital that morning to coach despite being in obvious pain from a dislodged kidney stone. It was a cold day and he looked absolutely miserable, but it was one of those moments of truth, of setting an example for the team. They won a division title that afternoon and Parcells checked back into the hospital after the game. The second was a soundbite on a TV interview in late December 1986. The Giants were crushing opponents and the Super Bowl just felt inevitable. An interviewer asked Parcells about how he was celebrating the holiday and he responded, “Christmas? I hadn’t noticed.” Right on, Bill. Let lesser coaches worry about decorating trees and buying presents. Here was a guy who was obsessed with winning a title. And he was a Giant.

LIVING WITH THE GIANTS

It’s been a rough year for the Giants, but nothing like the Seventies when they won only 50 out of 124 games.

I drove a Toyota Corona through most the decade. It probably wasn’t that great a car to begin with, since everybody back then called them “Toy-motors,” but I really beat the shit out of it. It was covered with dings and scratches, it tended to overheat in the summer and when it was cold, you needed to have the manual choke pulled out. Great tape deck though.

At some point a Giants bumper sticker came into my possession and I proudly stuck it to the rear bumper. If must have been summer, since I was driving with the window open, and while waiting for a light, another car pulled up next to me. I was likely staring at the engine heat gauge when the guy next to me yells, “The Giants? Ya gotta be kiddin’ me” and drives off with the light change.

I decided I wouldn’t wear my fandom on my sleeve anymore, while also acknowledging that this beat car I was driving was somehow a metaphor for the Giants’ current condition. When I got home, I peeled off the sticker and tossed it. .

After hitting the 50-year mark of being a Giants fan this past September, here are a few of my favorite players:

HOMER JONES: My first sports crush. Fast, 6-4 and a terror to cover. In these days of silly, often

fussy and pre-meditated touchdown celebrations, Homer invented the spike. When he crossed the goal line (as he did 14 times in 1968), he threw ball down. Nothing flamboyant, just a flick of the wrist, as if to say, “I don’t need this anymore.” I went to an autograph-signing session at Korvettes and stood in absolute awe while he signed his name for me. I still have it.

RON JOHNSON: Homer was traded to the Browns for Johnson and I learned that when one door closes, another opens up. Until Johnson arrived, the Giants relied on lumbering white fullbacks who, as they used to say, could be timed for the 40-yard dash using a sun dial. As luck would have it, Johnson worked in the same office building as my mother and Mom arranged for me to interview Johnson for the high school newspaper. He answered my well-meaning, if sometimes cringe-worthy questions (like did he know anything about homosexuality in NFL locker rooms; I really asked that) thoughtfully and honestly. A year or so later I saw him in the record department at Korvettes, flipping through jazz albums, thus concluding my Korvettes/Giants circle of life.

LAWRENCE TAYLOR: The absolute pleasure in knowing that the greatest defensive player in the history of the league was ours helped make all those losing years (almost) palatable.

ELI MANNING: Here’s the list of Giants quarterbacks for the ten years between Phil Simms and Eli: Dave Brown, Danny Kanell, Kent Graham, Kerry Collins, Kurt Warner, Jesse Palmer. Eli’s consistency and durability kept us from wandering the wilderness looking for a quarterback, a reality that has defined the fortunes of way too many NFL teams, sometimes for decades. Along with the two Super Bowl wins, Eli saved us from being the Jets.

ODELL BECKHAM: Non-Giant fans hate his haircut and histrionics. They’re also scared shitless when their team has to cover him.

Otis

How did two white 13-year olds in the middle of suburbia discover, and bond over, Otis Redding? Me and McKenzie did. It’s not like we heard him on the radio. Otis’ music played outside the Top 40, so WABC didn’t touch him. Neither did WMCA. We might have caught him on WWRL, between breaks in the storm of static that made listening to New York’s R&B channel a challenge, but I doubt it.  

What I think drew us in was an album cover. We had a habit of going to Korvettes or Modells, with their monster record departments, to flip through looking for records that struck us as “different.” We’d hold them up to get the other guy’s reaction, and sometimes buy them (49 cents from the cut-out bin) if they invoked the right response.

McKenzie bought a record by Sister Rosetta Tharpe; we liked saying her name, but didn’t care for gospel music. Olatunji’s Drums of Passion, a field recording of African chants and drums, worked for us. We played it to death and were thrilled when Santana covered one of its songs. Hey, someone else bought this record too.

The album cover that may have hooked us was Otis Redding’s Dictionary of Soul. As a recruitment poster for dopey, impressionable kids, it’s perfect. But the music, on that record and all the subsequent ones we bought, hit us square. Gutbucket blues. Imaginative horn arrangements. Otis’ voice, moving from pleading ballad to all-out roof raisers. Referring to himself in song in the third person – and as “Big O” yet. The “got-ta, got-ta” and “Lord have mercy” asides.

And the songs. Aretha had taken “Respect” to the top of the charts. The horn-driven “I Can’t Turn You Loose” (better known today as the Blue Brothers’ theme). Pain In My Heart, covered by the Stones. Otis mined Depression-era Tin Pan Alley for “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out” and “Try A Little Tenderness,” covered BB King (“Rock Me Baby”) and the Beatles (“Day Tripper”), then returned the favor to the Stones with “Satisfaction.”

We played Otis’ duet with Carla Thomas, “Tramp,” over and over. I had a friend who memorized some of Bill Cosby’s album routines, and he’d recite them as we walked home from school. “Tramp” was funnier than Cosby and not nearly as long-winded.

Otis’ fame grew beyond the two blocks in Hackensack where me and McKenzie lived. Otis played Scandinavia. The Hippodrome in London. The Monterey Pop Festival. The Whiskey A Go-Go. Then, with his star steadily on the rise, it crashed.  

McKenzie and I were having one of our stupid lover’s spats when Otis died. We weren’t talking and then we passed each other in the hallway between classes. We actually said, “Otis,” to each other almost simultaneously.

Otis died at age 26, one year short of membership in the half-baked concept of the “27 Club,” but he had the brightest future – and the clearest head – of anyone on that list. When his plane went down into Lake Monona in Madison, WI 50 years next month, we lost so much. He had just written and recorded an introspective song unlike anything he had done before called “Dock of the Bay.” He was said to be listening to Dylan and wanted to cover “Just Like A Woman.” He wanted to remake a bunch of his old songs, speeding up the ballads and down-shifting the fast ones.

I used to travel to Madison frequently for work. Once, we held an offsite at a conference center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, with a terrace that overlooked Lake Monona. Although the weather there is normally mercurial, it was a warm October day and I spent quite a bit of time on a bench staring out at the water. It felt like a pilgrimage.

McKenzie and I went our separate ways a long time ago. I’m sure that by now he’s forgotten about Olatunji and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But I’d like to think that if he ever finds himself in Madison, and the weather is right, that he would park himself on that same bench. The dock of the bay.

REVISITING THE MOST INTERESTING MAN IN THE WORLD

There was a time when Stephen Stills could have been king. He was the de facto leader of the Buffalo Springfield, a band that may not have sold a lot of records but, for all the right reasons, was considered by many the American Beatles.

After he folded the Springfield, Stills was chosen by Al Kooper to play on the Super Session album, his name on the marquee as large as that of Kooper and Mike Bloomfield. His genius was all over the first CSN album, writing or co-writing five songs, singing, playing lead guitar, bass and keyboards, and producing. As CSNY, they cut a second album with Stills contributing “Carry On” and “4+20.” CSNY played Woodstock and had the sense to get out of Altamount before the sun went down.

The crown was his for the taking. Then Stills started making solo records and some cracks began to show.

The songs on his first record seemed overshadowed by the list of pals who dropped by to play (Hendrix, Clapton, Ringo – referred to in the liner notes as “Richie”). Stills cut one song drunk and credited Jose Cuervo Tequila for the performance. He wasted his solo spot on Four Way Street with a dumb, piano-pounding rant, pretentiously titled “America’s Children.” His second solo album offered a few choice moments (“Change Partners,” “Marianne”) but you got the impression he was spending more time going over the contact sheets for his album cover shoots than writing better songs. (Stills’ album artwork generally portrayed him as the most interesting man in the world, riding horses, climbing mountains and gazing handsomely out a jet window).

Stills formed a new band called Manassas, with a double album that sounded like Buffalo Springfield 2.0 and it was easy to conclude that maybe being a member of a band was better for him than working solo. But by the CSNY reunion tour in 1974, his contributions almost seemed like an afterthought, marginalized by brighter, smarter work from his band mates. In 1976, he and Neil Young toured together, with promises of the old gun-slinging guitar battles of the Springfield; midway through the tour, Young quit, leaving Stills to ride it out alone.

His hubris drained, Stills began to seem more like a victim. He made a point of covering Young songs on many of his subsequent records, a decision that was always a head-scratcher. While Paul McCartney has spent the past decades explaining how he and John Lennon were creative and visionary equals, Stills spent nearly the same amount of time reminding us he couldn’t keep up with Young anymore.

Stills’ long road back to relevance took him here recently on tour with Judy Collins. While his voice comes off a little rough at times, it’s still strong and he’s kept his sense of humor. The show reinforces what we’ve always known. He has written some great songs: For What It’s Worth, Bluebird, Questions, So Begins the Task, Suite Judy Blue Eyes; and that he’s an excellent, underrated guitar player, economical and muscular. A long, trippy solo on Bluebird was a highlight, where his playing seemed to transcend the moment.

Sharing the stage with a sympathetic musician like Collins seems to suit him. He’s in a similar situation with his blues band, the Rides, where he and Kenny Wayne Shepherd take turns singing lead and soloing. Stills may no longer be the most interesting man in the world, but working as a cog in a larger musical machine plays to his many strengths.

A SUMMER PLAYLIST

A couple of thoughts while commuting and listening to a playlist from the summer of ’67 (in alphabetic order, although the playlist is on shuffle).

All You Need Is Love - The Beatles

Not their best effort by a longshot, but even when they miss, they still get a piece of the bulls-eye, with a universal consciousness statement for that summer.

Cold Sweat - James Brown

I don’t know, was this as revolutionary to R&B as Sgt. Pepper was to pop? While the single fades out on Maceo Parker’s sax solo, the album version (called Cold Sweat, Parts 1 & 2) charges on for more than seven minutes, marking the birth of funk and a sampler’s paradise. JB quotes “Funky Broadway,” then goes through nearly his entire lexicon: “S’cuse me while I boogaloo,” “Sometimes I clown, back up and do the James Brown.” He calls out six times to “Give the drummer some,” then follows the drum solo with “Funky as you wanna be.” He tells drummer Clyde Stubblefield to “Double up on it” and the rhythm picks up. With the end in sight, he asks the band, “Can I count it down?” and he just, to paraphrase one of his earlier song titles, goes crazy. It’s his solo now, screaming, groaning and fading out with “I just can’t stop singing.” No doubt he needed to be hosed down afterwards, it’s that crazed. It was, as with Pepper, like nothing else. The brilliance of the long version was hidden away on Brown’s Cold Sweat album, a slapdash affair which sported one of Brown’s typically hideous covers and included versions of “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “I Loves You Porgy.”

Come On Down to My Boat - Every Mother’s Son

This one has to be on Bruce Springsteen’s jukebox, either at home or in his head. The fisherman’s daughter that everybody else ignores. Cutting the rope that keeps her tied to her father. Escaping in the singer’s “little red boat.” Someday they’ll look back and it will all seem funny.

Fakin’ It - Simon and Garfunkel

How many songs include little plays, with dialogue and sound effects, that move the story along? “Leader of the Pack” and “Living for the City” did it well. Here, the singer – who may have had one bong hit too many – makes the mistake of looking at himself critically in the mirror and sees a tailor scurrying about with a measuring tape and scissors in a cobblestoned and thatched-roof reverie. We’re suddenly thrust into an Irish Spring commercial to the accompaniment of recorders and pipes. Five months after Strawberry Fields Forever, the song bears its stamp with the striking guitar chords and drum pounding that open and close it.

Heroes and Villains - Beach Boys

Maybe Brian Wilson was right in canning “Smile.” It’s good, but aside from Good Vibrations, none of it is as good as this.

Ode to Billie Joe - Bobbie Gentry

Is the mystery what Billie Joe threw off the bridge, or why the singer’s family is so indifferent and insensitive around the kitchen table? By the last week of the summer, this was #3 on WWRL’s Soul 16.

Reflections - Diana Ross & The Supremes

Easy to be distracted by the electronic noises and the vaguely trippy lyrics, but it’s the bass groove that’s really the heart of this song.

Twelve Thirty - The Mamas & The Papas

While Scott McKenzie sang about the “gentle people” of San Francisco, The Mamas & The Papas invited you to Los Angeles, actually Laurel Canyon, where people “say good morning and really mean it,” not like that dingy, broken New York City. But when you get there, just steer clear from that creepy Manson guy who’s been hanging around lately.

A Whiter Shade of Pale - Procol Harum

I rooted for this to make #1. On WABC, it sat at #2, blocked by “Light My Fire.” Across the dial on WMCA, however, it went to #1 for the first two weeks of August. On the R&B station WWRL, it sailed it into the Soul 16 on its “When A Man Loves A Woman” organ and reached #3.

The rest of the playlist: A Girl Like You (Young Rascals); Baby I Love You (Aretha Franklin); Baby You’re A Rich Man (Beatles); C’mon Marianne (Four Seasons); Dandelion (Rolling Stones); Funky Broadway (Wilson Pickett); Groovin’ (Young Rascals); I Was Made to Love Her (Stevie Wonder); The Letter (Box Tops); Light My Fire (Doors); Little Bit O’ Soul (Music Explosion); My World Fell Down (Sagittarius); Pleasant Valley Sunday (Monkees); Purple Haze (Jimi Hendrix); Society’s Child (Janis Ian); Somebody to Love (Jefferson Airplane); Soul Finger (Bar Kays); There Is A Mountain (Donovan);To Love Somebody (Bee Gees); We Love You (Rolling Stones); White Rabbit (Jefferson Airplane); Windy (Association); Words (Monkees)

COMMON THREADS

There may not have been as many mission statement songs on the charts as during the summer of 1967. One, Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco, was tied to a specific place and time. Others, while a bit more generic, caught the zeitgeist flush: Get Together, which floated around the bottom of the Billboard Hot 100, then reappeared as a top ten hit in 1969, and All You Need Is Love, the template for Imagine.

A more subtle anthem from that summer was the Monkees’ Pleasant Valley Sunday, with a guitar sound borrowed from the Beatles’ Revolver album and lyrics that rejected consumerism and suburbia. Carole King and Gerry Goffin, who wrote the song, lived on Pleasant Valley Way in West Orange, NJ and whether the lyrics are a diary or a dramatization, the street truly featured “rows of houses that are all the same,” although it’s been awhile since I’ve driven through it..

Pleasant Valley Way exits off I-280, which connects I-80 to the north with the New Jersey Turnpike 18 miles away, and marks about the last spot where people worry about their lawns before the highway cuts through urban East Orange and Newark. In the early sixties, Janis Ian and her family were among the diminishing number of white people living in East Orange. Her Society’s Child, also from the summer of 1967, felt and sounded like a Shangri-Las song; teenage angst about parents who disapprove of boyfriends. For the Shangri-Las is was a wiseass who drove motorcycles. Janis, on the other hand, was facing down her parents and classmates for dating a black kid.

The song starts defiantly, but eventually the singer gives in to the taunts and smirks, and tells her boyfriend in the last line, “I won’t see you anymore baby” and then, hopefully, gets away from her parents and East Orange, maybe to keep an appointment with a man from the motor trade.

Society’s Child entered the Billboard top 20 on July 17, the same day the Newark Riots more or less ended and the National Guard tanks turned around and rumbled back to Fort Dix. It’s been said that one of many contributing factors to the riots was the construction of I-280, as rows of houses that were not the same, many of them historic Victorians, and commercial buildings were demolished. Newark, the most populous city in New Jersey, is only about 26 square miles, much of that airport, trucking depots and salt marshes. Building the highway, which spans ten lanes across at some points, squeezed its residents further until they were practically living on top of each other.

Living some 25 miles from the riots, my friends and I agreed to not ride our bikes anywhere near Passaic Street, which we saw as the dividing line that set the boundary for the “black section” of town. My father, a fireman, said orders from above were that if a house caught fire and black people began to throw bricks at the firemen, they were to let it burn.

The lyrics to Pleasant Valley Sunday were kind of cartoony, but I understood where the Monkees were coming from. To me, suburbia meant safety. It was home. With time, we began to ride our bikes past Passaic Street again, into the neighborhoods where the houses were a little more rundown, the lawns thinner. There were nasty dogs, who barked and jerked their chains when we rode past. In September, I’d begin middle school, sharing classes with more black kids than ever before. Nobody threw any bricks. And nobody dated anyone from the other side of Passaic Street.

RESCUE FROM GOTHAM CITY

By the first months of 1967, I was pretty much done with my obsession of 1966. With each passing episode of Batman, my enthusiasm dwindled as the dialogue grew campier, the plots dopier and the guest villains grew ever more fossilized. Even so, a few weeks before Christmas I’d seen the Justice League playset at a downtown discount store and it jumped to the top of my list. With its well-painted and sculpted figures of Batman, Robin, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash and Aquaman it was an impressive set. On Christmas morning I lined them up in my room and … nothing happened. I felt silly about the fuss I’d made wanting it and with time everything wound up in a box in the attic.

On a Saturday night that February, the host of the Hollywood Palace for that week – Van Johnson, one of those show business relics who would also play a villain on Batman, the totally forgettable Minstrel – introduced a pair of promo films by the Beatles. Penny Lane was crisp and upbeat. Strawberry Fields Forever spooky and syrupy. Watching those videos was, for me, akin to the moment when the bat flies through the open window in Bruce Wayne’s study.

I bought the single (with the picture sleeve) and carried it around like a house key, bringing it to school in my binder. Then, eight months after getting the Justice League playset for Christmas, I turned 13 and got a transistor radio. More bats fluttering through an open window.   

The strongest signal sat in the middle of the dial, WABC. Thumbing all the way to the left brought in WMCA, with a larger playlist than ABC, but their DJs seemed like older guys to me. At the opposite end of the dial was the staticky R&B of WWRL. Flip over to FM and there was WBAI, which felt hip but kind of boring, and by the fall, WOR-FM, one of the first ‘progressive’ rock stations.

I watch Batman today and enjoy it, as long as the guest villain isn’t the Minstrel. And while the Batman metaphor works for me in a personal way, a second -- and more universal comic book comparison -- is that the Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever single would be to Sgt. Pepper as Silver Surfer is to Galactus: a herald arriving in advance of cosmic upheaval. In the eighties, I sold the Justice League playset to a guy who owned a local comic book store for $250. It goes for thousands of dollars today in mint and for all I know, it’s changed hands a dozen times since. The timing around getting the toy was all wrong for me. I hope whoever has it today is getting something out of it.

PEPPERLAND

My copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, brought home 50 years this summer, still sits in my record collection, which today is a time machine frozen in the year 2000, which was probably the last time I bought vinyl.

I say “brought home” because I didn’t buy Pepper. Back then, if you had enough quarters and patience, you could win albums at the spinning-wheel games of chance at the Seaside Heights boardwalk. My father would whip a buck out of his wallet, lay it down on 5, and the kid working the booth would change it into quarters. One quarter would go to me, to place on my choice, a number or a symbol.

The old man had impossibly good luck on the boardwalk and we had the records, boxes of candy, cartons of cigarettes, AM/FM radios and stuffed animals to prove it. Of course, 5 came up and my mother mentioned a Tony Bennett album. I was only 12, but I kept my cool. I looked my parents in the eyes and said, evenly and unemotionally, “Sgt. Pepper. I gotta have Sgt. Pepper.”

The kid behind the booth, probably a college student making some summer money, handed it over and said to me, “Good choice.” My parents and sister in the lead, I kept a few steps behind as we made our way down the boardwalk. A gang of teens, probably locals, walked past. They were hanging with girls and not their parents. And one of them saw what I was carrying under my arm, nodded and said to me, “Great record.”

I was with my parents. No doubt dressed like a nerd and wearing glasses. I probably had sunburn. But I now belonged, the latest member of the community called Pepper Land.

I played that record incessantly and knew every moment of it the way I knew any other essential corner of my 12-year universe: the streets of my hometown, the faces of my plastic soldiers, Fantastic Four plotlines. In high school, when I had to write an essay dissecting a popular song, I went with She’s Leaving Home. An easy A. When I bought my first expensive stereo, with the giant EPI speakers that sat on the floor, Pepper was the first platter that went on. Guesses on what was the first CD I bought or the first time I smoked weed  and purposely set up a soundtrack that would fit my mood?

I waited too long to order my copy of the 50-year anniversary deluxe edition of Sgt. Pepper and wound up buying it from a dealer in London on eBay. With economy shipping. Each day I come home from work and look around. So far, mostly just catalogs and credit card solicitations.  

It would have been so much easier to get in my car and zip down the Garden State Parkway to Seaside Heights. Find the right booth, the one playing Lovely Rita at this very moment, the one near the guy who sells lemonade with the giant plastic lemons hanging in his stand. Lay down a buck on 5 and listen to the wheel tick as it spins. Then, as it slows down, your heart beats faster. Another winner.