Mayo Hall Talent Show Circa 1976 (The Red Speedo Incident)

 

A typical Mayo Party with Peter Hook, Francie Crawford and Me.

Recently a snippet from Tom Waits’ Nighthawks at the Diner played on my personal Apple Music station. Hearing Mr. Wait’s work through Phantom 309 jogged some cells in the old brain. My mind drifted back quite a few years to my time at MSU. 

Nighthawks was one of the first LPs I bought when I got to Michigan State in 1974. They didn’t have a copy at Wazoo Records across the street from Beggar’s Banquet, so I went down Grand River to State Discount and paid full price. Nighthawks was beat poetry backed by a jazz combo mixed with stand-up comedy and intense word play. The mix of it all fascinated me. Those two discs were listened to so many times that the needle wore through the grooves and turned the LPs into Slinkys.

Nighthawks would play a crucial role in my stage career as limited as it has been. When I was at MSU, and more specifically in Mayo Hall, we had an annual dorm talent show. One year a song on this LP became the basis for my performance. With Tom Waits leading the way how could I possibly go wrong?

The trail to the actual performance I gave was very twisted and tortured. My final act morphed from a couple of different ideas. The initial idea, and the one I still think reflected the zeitgeist of the time, was a street ensemble/chorus. The rough plan involved a group of untalented men standing around the stage beating trash cans. They would chant the core Anglo-Saxon profanity for sexual congress for a period of several minutes.

After I hatched this idea, word of the act spread through the dorm like wildfire. Everyone was talking about whether we would really follow through with it. The thought of 10 guys pounding university owned metal garbage cans and repeatedly chanting raw profanity actually happening reached and ultimately unnerved the dorm head. That this offense against civility might happen on a stage where earnest clear skinned girls sang Cat Steven’s Moonshadow shook the head Resident Assistant so much that Mr. Cadieux came to me personally. He asked me not to lead this ensemble. "Parents will be here. Do you understand?!!"

Leaving it up to my own moral compass; well, I would've followed through with the trashcan banging except the rest of my group wussied out. My idea was to perform like David Peel and the Lower East Side. Look him up on YouTube. His biggest hit was "The Pope Smokes Dope."

Left with time on the bill and a piano player who stuck with me I decided to do something. About two hours before the show I went back to my room and memorized the introductory rap to Waits’ "All My Friends Are Married." It is otherwise known as "Better Off Without A Wife." This Tom Waits classic has the immortal line, “I know a woman who's been married so many times she has rice marks on her face."

When the time came to perform I got up onstage and the piano player started playing. Joel had a way cool jazz style that I could work with. I had my finest Tom Waits driving cap on. One of the original group decided he wanted back in. Baaaad (Pronounced like the sheep noise - for legal reasons I can't explain the nickname's genesis here) Larry. Bad Larry sat on the back of the makeshift stage with his garbage can and a big piece of wood. He'd repeatedly bang on the garbage can in a rhythm determined by his direct personal connection to the cosmic rhythms. 

As Joel the piano player worked through the song I did the whole thing. I recited the rap trying to snarl and growl as Tom Waits would. I was aided and abetted in this by my cherished friend Jack Daniels. I moved on to the song and finished the entire wonderful ballad. I finished the song…but not without incident.

As I finished the last verse, the audience burst into laughter. Unsure of what was up I looked over my shoulder to see Bad Larry falling off the back of the stage. He ripped down the curtain (a couple of dorm bed sheets tied together) landing on an unsuspecting onlooker behind the stage. As the audience erupted in pandemonium I segued into the last chorus and on the spur of the moment began taking off my clothing. 

Off came my shirt and T-shirt which were promptly thrown into the audience. My shoes and socks followed next. Finally, I took my jeans off and swung them around my head. With some flourish I let them sail into the audience. Note to self: when throwing your clothes into an audience make sure you take your wallet out of your pants first. As I ran off the stage singing I'm better off without a wife, all I had on was a red Speedo. I know even then it wasn't a pretty sight.

I am not sure whether the dorm head thought this was better than the originally planned performance. We never spoke of it.

My pants were eventually returned to me by NPR’s own Don Gonyea. Bad Larry decided he needed some air so he set off for a drive. Bad Larry got arrested for drunk driving and spent the night in the Mason jail. Me I was okay.

I guess this is just a way of saying I've always had a soft spot for that LP and fond memories of dorm talent shows. 

Below are Mr. Waits' intro to and rendition of Better Off Without a Wife. 

 

   

  

How George Carlin Helped Me, uh well, Get Laid at MSU

Roughly What I Looked Like in 1974

"Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language and there are 7 of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is! 399,993 to 7. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous to be separated from a group that large.

All of you over here, you 7, baaad words!

That's what they told us they were, remember? "That's a bad word!" No bad words, bad thoughts, bad intentions, and words.

You know the 7, don't you, that you can't say on television?

"Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits."

Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that'll infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war."

The Seven Dirty Words, George Carlin

In October 1974 George Carlin played Michigan State as one of the homecoming activities. My memory pegs the date as October 19 or so. Mid-October is really the most enjoyable time to walk MSU campus.  

October weather is warm enough that a light jacket is all you need at night and a long-sleeve shirt is fine during the day. October dayare sunny days. The critical thing about the tenth month in East Lansing is that hundreds of tree varieties' are turning color. Those colors include orange and yellow, deep purple and bright red and a whole color wheel of other shades.

In mid-October midterms were still a week to a couple of weeks away. Back then the drinking age was 18 so with no pressure from exams you could hit the bars. Weed was plentiful so you could smoke bowl after bowl. Back then it was an age of golden twilights and thoughts shaded in amber.

On a whim, or maybe out of my lonely desperation, I asked my coworkers from Kurly Kustard in Ocean City, Anne and Larry, and Anne's cousin Sarah, to come out for a visit. To my surprise they said yes. Ah the hubris of youth. On a whim they drove across Pennsylvania and Ohio via the turnpikes.

My roomie Nate the Great was absent over the weekend. So were the two guys who lived next to me. Everybody who was leaving said, "Go ahead and use the room," and gave me their keys. In 1974 we were young, we had a joy of life, but we didn't have a dime. So, the open rooms saved a motel bill.

Anne and I took my room and Larry and Sarah my neighbor Don's room. All I remember are a few bits and pieces of what we did that weekend. There is a clear memory of a walk along the Red Cedar looking at the ducks. Anne's just then beginning here career as a birder had her Audubon book fall apart. The book was old and back in those days the glue holding the pages in paperbacks didn't last very long, a few years at most. Not solidly bound to the volume, the pages of the field guide, the pages flew away. Rushing with adrenaline we chased wet pages of that birder's field guide down the river bank.

Back then, all those years ago, Sarah shared an apartment with Anne in East Lansdowne. If memory serves me well, Larry had a passing interest in Sarah, but I might be wrong about that fact. If you haven't figured it out from my prior writings, I clearly had a thing for Anne. As for her, well she did not have as strong an interest in me. I don't think she knew what I was or what to do with me. 

As a first term freshman I did not realize what a big deal homecoming was. MSU had 40,300 students at the time and had been churning a quarter of that number out each year for at least 15 years. Yeah, that is a shit ton of alumni and they all wanted to return to campus and relive their glory days. They would wear earlier iterations of the school colors with images of earlier versions of the school mascot. Homecoming was huge and things happened like concerts and marching bands and parades.

In a joint decision we all decided we would spend Saturday evening at a concert. This required preparation. As I recall, Sarah was strait-laced. As a result, Anne and I had to lose her and Larry for a few minutes, we had a need. The short time we were apart let us blow a joint or three to prepare for George Carlin. Carlin performed at the MSU Auditorium. He competed with a Dave Loggins concert on campus. Loggins was a one-hit wonder, but "Please Come to Boston" is still something I hum when it comes on the radio.  

My thought is that Sarah had only seen Carlin doing his hippy dippy weather guy thing on Carson. When we all agreed we would go see Carlin I assumed she would be ready for his more mature schtick. She wasn't. She really wasn’t.

The four of us were sitting in the cheap seats up in the balcony at the MSU Auditorium. Two of us were stoned and simply saying, "Hello," would send us into fits of giggles. We would be liquid with laughter once Carlin got started.

Carlin almost immediately started riffing on what would happen if all the couches gave up every silent fart that had passed into them. Anne and I laughed just riotously.  Sarah offered a few polite guffaws and Larry squirmed. My assumption is that the squirm came because Larry:

·       a. Knew Anne and I were stoned and he wished he was because this would be so much better, and

·       b. Wanted to laugh but didn't want to offend Sarah and hurt his chances for the evening.   

Things spiraled from there. By the time Carlin got to the part about how fucking was so nice that fuck you should be our greeting in lieu of hello I was about to pee myself. Sarah at that point had her jaw clenched closed and Larry was squirming.  On the other hand, Anne and I laughed riotously at both Carlin and the Sarah/Larry situation. 

When it was over, we headed back to the dorm. If my memory serves me well, and it may not be because I was indeed quite high, Sarah was on a tirade about blue comics, Larry had his head hung down and Anne and I couldn't look at each other without giggling. 

Sensing she didn't want to argue about the merits of blue comics I grabbed Anne and we ducked into my room. Me, I think that it was because of the whole fuck you riff that Anne engaged me in forenesia (mercy fucking) that night. Forever the Grateful Dead's "Wake of the Flood" will bring a sly smile to my face. Couldn't lose my virginity without music. 

Thanks to George Carlin I lost my virginity. George where ever you are, whatever space your molecules now occupy, I thank you for that.

There is a coda to this story. I will always remember the call from a hysterical Anne telling me that Larry was being taken to jail in Ohio for speeding. Yeah, that was a thing in Ohio back in those days. The Ohio State Troopers would pull you over and shake you down for whatever cash they could wring out of you. Apparently the smokies got enough dinero that the trio's trip home was only slightly delayed.

 

Thirty Seconds Over Munn Ice Arena with the Jefferson Starship

The Jefferson Airplane crashed after Woodstock, or at least the band mates made a rough landing. Splinter projects shot out of the damaged fuselage. First came Hot Tuna (so named because RCA records wouldn’t let you put Hot Shit on a record jacket), then followed Jefferson Starship. Hot Tuna was Jorma and Jack's bluesy side project, the Starship was Paul Kantner’s baby from start to finish. 

Jefferson Starship released its science fiction concept album Blows Against the Empire LP in 1970. Paul Kantner in this side project wrote anthems, anti-government songs at his full powers. Blows was a loosely told story about escaping this world. The journey required hijacking a Starship and moving on to what better places might be out there in the universe. Blows Against the Empire was the ultimate hippie dream, people moving onward and outward carrying the highest ideals. These included free love, free sex, a true sense of community and good drugs. 

As a fifteen-year-old I loved Blows Against the Empire. Blows was a battle plan for my life. Sex, drugs and rock and roll, what could have been better I ask you? Smoke a little Columbian weed and the album gets trippier and trippier. All over the disc were weird electronic noises. If you had smoked enough pot and started staring at the phosphorescent stars glued to the ceiling in your room, you were truly on that stolen starship.

Over the next four years the Jefferson Starship, nominally a side project of the Jefferson Airplane languished. The Airplane put out a couple of mediocre albums and continued to fight among themselves. But in 1974 out came Dragonfly by the Jefferson Starship.  The music on Dragonfly was pretty amazing stuff.  From all appearances the Airplane had crashed and burned for the last time. Paul Kantner picked up his space/futurist fantasies with a couple of new folks on bass and lead guitar. Dragonfly rocked and rocked hard.

In the summer before I headed off for my freshman year at university Dragonfly was constantly on my turntable. With the Nixon era winding down during the summer of 1974 I found myself working at an ice cream stand on the boardwalk by the magnificent Atlantic Ocean. Over the course of that summer, I would drink a bunch of beer, smoke a bunch of joints and often end up at the end of the island in the sand dunes making out with a fellow Jefferson Starship fan humming the tune from All Fly Away.

Summer has ended. Off to university I headed. I think in other tales I have detailed the culture shock of being in Michigan and being a native New Jersey-ian. But I had made it through two terms as they were called, Michigan State University was governed by a quarter system rather than a semester system, and part way through a third when I got a wild hair. 

In the spring term of 1975, the Jefferson Starship appeared and played at Munn Ice Arena on the campus of Michigan State University.  I bought two tickets to the show in the hope of finding a date. No luck. I had to sell them. After I called my friend Larry, everything changed. Larry was a Drexel co-op student working in New York. Larry worked at an ice cream stand with me in summer 74. We talked on the phone from time to time back then. One night I told him about my ticket dilemma. Bad Larry told me to hold onto both tickets. He was going to call me back.

Larry called me back. He had purchased an airline ticket to East Lansing and was coming out to the show. I was stoked. Fucking A as they would say back in that day. Larry arrived midday the day of the show. In a true showing of Michigan hospitality my hall mate Darvon had made up some brownies for the show out of some primo Columbian. A few beers later Larry and I along with Darvon had each consumed about a quarter of a pan of magic brownies. Off we rushed to the show and to universes far beyond our own.

By the time we got to the show Larry and I were as they say nowadays tripping balls. We were so fucked up we could barely function. The Starship had an opening act. There was a woman rock/punk singer out of Detroit at the time. Her name was Suzi Quatro. We didn’t get Suzi. We got her brother Michael. Michael came out wearing a black Druid-like robe with a large metal canister around his neck. As the band played bombastic Styx like riffs Michael took the canister from his neck and swung it around and around. Eventually he aimed it right at the floor and …

FLASH, BANG BLINDING LIGHT, screams and moans from unsuspecting very, very high concert goers.

When that canister hit the stage about 6 flash pots ignited and seemed to explode.  I can’t remember anything else from his performance except that my ears were ringing and my retinas were burning.  Mercifully the set while bombastic was relatively short. 

Minds completely blown away, unhinged even, Larry and I focused on the platform as the Jefferson Starship took the stage. Paul Kantner led the band in the big hit (well #83 on the Billboard charts) Caroline. Marty Balin was there and the vocals were flawless. Marty, Grace Slick and Paul just rocked the joint. The set list was awesome including Volunteers, Mexico and Have you Seen the Saucers. It was one wonderful song after another. 

And then the concert was done and Larry and I were still flying. We were in a lower orbit but still far above the atmosphere.

And I wanted to see my sort of girlfriend.  She lived in the Philadelphia suburbs 600 miles east.  With regulated airfares the cost of a single round trip ticket to Philadelphia was about $72 bucks that day. LP records cost $2.99 each. To make this happen I would have to simply stop buying about 24 albums over the next six months. 24 albums in 1974 could have been the entire rock and roll catalog that changed rock music. However, the balance between the chance of getting laid by a grand gesture versus 24 albums, no brainer. Still raging high we headed out to the airport and caught the first plane we could ride to Philadelphia. 

Once we got to the airport I think we took a cab to a train. From there we took the Paoli local up to East Lansdowne. Luckily, although I don’t remember doing it, we called my girlfriend at some point. Her plans had been to slip away for the weekend. But just about back to normal we found her at home when we knocked.  I believe the greeting was “What the fuck are you two knuckleheads doing here?” We then explained the synchronicity of being blasted away at a Jefferson Starship concert with the wonder of her soul touching us both. We also explained how the only result had to be our cosmic road trip to her door.

I don’t remember much about the time we spent there. We ate we hung out we were the three amigos from the summer before again. I really couldn’t tell you if I got laid. Really, I don't remember. But it was all good.

And then the flight back. It was a direct flight from Philadelphia to East Lansing. I think we stopped in Flint. As we flew there were maybe 10 people on the flight and there was a meal. The stewardess as we approached Lansing came up to me and gave me about 8 fried chicken meals on melmac wrapped in Saran Wrap to go  She told me this was the end of the route for the night and they would throw them out if I didn't take them. It might have been because I weighed 135 pounds at the time.

But then I called up the dorm rats and they came out to pick me up. Five guys showed up in a big old boat of a car, I think it was an old Impala. When I got in everyone got a chicken dinner and I got handed a beer and a joint for the ride back to the dorm. 

I shared this with my friend and he remembered one nuance.  According to Bad Larry the plan in the wee hours of the morning was to go to the Kentucky Derby but morphed into a flight to Philadelphia. My guess is there was a direct flight east and back in those days it took a bit of planning to get to Louisville.

.

 

On Reading Porn in Public 1977 Mayo Lounge West

When I attended the Michigan State Universe in the mid-1970s the world was a different place. We still had hope for the future. We still held the notion dear that we as a people were evolving toward a nation where gender and race would no longer be limiting conditions. We fully believed that literature’s finest moments were just ahead. Clearly this upcoming explosion in quality writing was evidenced by the outstanding  letters submitted to Penthouse magazine. 

On one occasion several of my fellow MSU students and I pursued a public reading of one of these remarkable works of art. We did this on a warm and sunny fall afternoon in the public lounge area of our dormitory. Our simple goal was to promote this uniquely evolving form of great literature. We just didn’t understand how the Pulitzer literary prize committee failed to acknowledge the talent of these gifted writers year after year.

We picked a letter at random from the September 1976 issue of Penthouse magazine. The particular topic involved was a stacks assignation.  Penthouse letters had a number of recurring themes, trysts with a friend’s fiancée’ (or mother), couplings in elevators, and finally encounters with persons with differing personal attributes.

Letters on library stack assignments were particularly interesting to us because undergraduates were mostly barred from the research stacks at our university. At the Michigan State Universe undergraduates were expressly forbidden to be in the ‘research stacks, the place where scholarly journals and quarterly publications were all neatly arranged in university bound color coded volumes. Titles like The University of Alberta Journal of Hydrological Data Assessment were arranged neatly shelf after shelf, row after row, floor after floor. Only serious scholars were allowed to wander there among that mixture of thickly bound material and dust, each title having its own unique smell.  

Because of the serious reverence for the knowledge in these books very few undergraduate students got there. (There was a back way in but that is a different story). Master's and doctoral degree candidates were allowed to roam these oft vacant realms. Decrepit professors could cruise up and down these aisles. Their numbers were sparse and the stacks remained very quiet day after day, week after week. A pencil left on the floor in an aisle separating journals could remain there untouched for days. 

It was the near vacant nature of the storage space for these learned treatises that gave rise to the stack assignation stories. These stories followed a pattern. First, the narrator specified why they would be in the stacks, always stating that they had a deep and scholarly interest. Next the teller of the tale (always a male) would find out that someone else was in the nearly deserted area. Given it was Penthouse the writer would find a comely member of the opposite sex lingering between the rows of books. Of course, the person discovered would be observed doing something suggestive. I won’t dwell on the wild variations of the suggestive activities but assume it was something like leaning over a sorting cart in a short skirt exposing lace fringed silk undergarments. Invariably this would lead to a discussion of gymnastic sex worthy of the pliable nature of Olga Korbut’s limbs.

Well, there we were in our mixed gender, mixed race group, sitting in Mayo Hall's western lounge. As I have said we decided to promote public awareness of this great literary form through a public reading. We would accomplish this by handing around an open Penthouse neatly concealed in another mass market publication like Time. Each of the 12 or so of us would read a single paragraph out loud. We continued to hand the magazine to the person to our right until the letter concluded.  

The first people to read got off relatively unscathed in the endeavor. The first two or three paragraphs of these letters, and they were long missives, described the writer’s work assignment, the locale of the action within the rows of dusty cobweb covered books, and the pink silk underwear of the soon to be member of the Olympic fornication squad.  

Readers four through ten were given the yeoman’s task of reading the descriptions of the sexual athleticism of the writer and his brave cohort. Readers four through ten also got to use the wild and varied adjectives and adverbs contained in the tale. Moist, sweaty and wildly are about the safest of those words to recount here. These determined orators also got to use the action verbs like thrust, and all its variants, voicing them in stage voices that would have made Sir John Gielgud proud. Hand gestures would accompany the narration, mostly staging directions (although sometimes they would be graphic representations of particularly difficult to understand maneuvers outlined in the letter's text). 

I mentioned this was a public reading. I did mention this was in a ground floor lounge of a dormitory.  What I did not mention was that this ground floor suite of rooms had been occupied that year by a bunch of clean-shaven, short haired young men whose purpose, at that moment in their collective lives, was to proselytize to the world at large what they believed was the proper route to salvation. To those who went to university in the 1970s these were the gents who stood out on the corners of the center campus. They handed out small green copies of their sacred religious texts one day a term. These were folks who did not drink, dance or smoke. They also did not believe in sex standing up because it could lead to dancing.

Now as reader seven was in a grave and serious tone describing a sexual maneuver that had about the same difficulty as a gymnast performing a double salto tucked with two full twists, a stranger approached the circle unnoticed by most. The listeners were really engaged in listening to the reading, enrapt perhaps. The telling had captured their late teen/early twenties minds. Their heart rates were elevated and there may have been stirrings in their loins. The listeners were hanging on every word that was spoken with faster and shorter breaths.

At this moment, when the narrator described two people hanging nude from what must have been an industrial grade light fixture, a young clean-cut gentleman continued his approach from the monasterial region of the dormitory. The reader having seen the approaching stranger stopped his reading midsentence and closed the Time magazine thus hiding the Penthouse and its racy cover. The excited listeners looked confused but then they saw the approaching stranger too.

Coming to a halt dead center in the half circle of literary enthusiasts, this gentleman (let us call him Barry) produced a religious text from under his arm. Barry opened his sacred book and asked the listeners if they would mind if he read what he believed were holy words related directly to what he saw as a universal plan of salvation. All twelve pairs of eyes focused on the floor. Indistinct mummers were heard but there was no overt or unambiguous refusal to Barry’s proposal. Taking this as acquiescence, Barry spoke with passion. As he spoke the blood that had been pooling in specific places among the twelve listeners dissipated. Pulses slowed and breathing returned to regular rates. Barry’s stump speech was short and sweet, 3 minutes maximum. At the end he gently closed his book, thanked the listeners and walked off with a strong steady stride away heading for the lounge of the east side.

When Barry was gone the then reader, who had quietly closed the Time/Penthouse combination left the magazine closed.  Giggles came gently at first. Then came sheepish and guilty laughter. Then people fell out of their chairs with guttural laughter and flushed red faces. I think Barry’s departing comment that the part that burns most in hell is the part that you sin with struck a chord with us.  

We did not return to our public promotion of literary talent on this particular day.  Maybe it was shame, maybe it was guilt, but we just didn't pick up where we left off. Instead, we wandered on to other activities like campus movies and cruising through the local downtown looking for posters to decorate our rooms. Some people might have picked up incense or market spice tea.  Others wandered down to the river to feed the ducks. 

Penthouse’s letters never received the literary plaudits we felt they truly deserved. I think we can only blame ourselves for not further promoting public awareness through additional public readings.