The Love You Save
When I think about my childhood it’s often accompanied by bubble gum pop music. I remember and cherish the bookend weekend one-two punch of the hyped-up psychedelics of the Jackson 5 cartoons on Saturday morning and then the boys performing in the flesh Sunday night on The Ed Sullivan Show. I, like many young Black boys of the time tried to sing and dance like Mike. He was a bona fide wunderkind. The J5’s stellar string of hit singles in the early 70s, from the delirious “The Love You Save” to the sublime “Got to Be There” often competed with my beloved Beatles for turntable space.
Initially I’m not aware that The Beatles are a real group, as in them being real people, for I am first exposed to them as a toddler watching them on their own Saturday morning cartoons. My favorite record by the group is Revolver. On that cover are comical collages and line drawings of who could be The Beatles. The Sgt. Pepper album looks like acid dosed animation as seen in a dream, with its explosion of color and two sets of Beatles to contrast and compare. Magical Mystery Tour is more of the same. Going on a family trip to see the movie Yellow Submarine further propagates the idea of the band as animated phenomena. How could a kid not think these musical avatars were supernatural, otherworldly, and not just four guys from England?
Aside from a boyhood attraction and attachment to Paul McCartney, my first real serious fan boy crush was on teen idol Bobby Sherman. Not so much from watching him weekly on ABC-TVs Here Come the Brides but more for his sugary AM radio hits “Julie, Do Ya Love Me” and “Easy Come, Easy Go.” The latter had traded in so heavily on sunny Beach Boy like harmonies that every time I heard it blasting out of my little Coke can emblazoned transistor radio, I thought I’d died and gone to White boy Heaven. I was even jealous of a little Black girl in my first-grade elementary school who proudly boasted a baby blue Bobby Sherman lunch box during recess, kissing the thermos between bites of her tuna sandwich and Ruffles potato chips. I tried to one-up her with my colorful lunchbox trumpeting the travels of the Yellow Submarine, but I was quietly covetous of her prize.
Though Mom indulged and encouraged my boyhood pop fascinations, Dad saw them as a treasonous abomination. I can imagine the horror felt by this Southern Black jazz man now in New York City, the epicenter of all that is cool, birthing this boy child who skipped and shimmied about the home in the throes of musical ecstasy, not moved as he was by Billie or Bird or Diz or Duke, but instead annoyingly yammering the mindless choruses and uninspired Muzak of this or that cardboard cut-out teen idol and British flavor of the month. Dad was a jazz purist (read: snob) who maintained till his last days that ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was ghostwritten by Delta bluesmen who never got their due.
That is not to say I ignored or neglected his musical influence. The jazz that Dad played at home was not on a phonograph, though thanks to Mom we had hundreds of records, but rather on his huge upright bass. When he propped up the instrument, tuned up, and began playing the music rumbled through me, like my heart were exploding from too much joy and every drop of blood were pulsing in, up, around and through me with each pluck of my father’s thick brown fingers on those coiled strings. He would show me scales and runs but I never grasped them for wonderment while watching him wrestle deep sonorous sounds out of this strong, thunderous, curvaceous brown beauty named “Kay.” Romancing her, showing his baby son, who worshipped White fakers spouting la-la-la lies, real heart and soul.
Dad alternated between a cigarette and a joint as our lesson progressed and I could just see him at The Village Gate or in Birdland as he leaned in, eyes half-closed, brow furrowed, seeming to communicate with the bass while receiving information from the great elsewhere. From Kay, from the other muses, from God Himself- in the zone, in a place where not even the disappointment of his baby son’s Anglophilic leanings could touch or disturb.