This is the first in a series of short posts revealing the true reasons I took up writing. Or at least the ones I’m gonna tell you.
It was New Year’s Eve, 1973, I was nine years old, and spending the evening with my grandparents.
Improbably, instead of Guy Lombardo and his fuddy duddy Royal Canadians, the television was tuned to the first-ever "Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve," which would become the Guy Lombardo of its time, but upon its inauguration seemed impeccably cool.
On a stage in the foreign land of New York City, Three Dog Night was singing their immemorial (and only) hit, "Joy to the World," resplendent in miles of gnarly hair, gnarly moustaches, bell-bottoms, jean vests, and other post-60s crap clothes.
(If you don’t remember "Joy to the World," you were born after 1965 or have had a successful lobotomy that removed all the annoying, awful, shitty music from your head. You know the song I’m talking about, which had nothing to do with the Christmas carol of the same name:Jeremiah was a bullfrog/Was a good friend of mine/Didn’t understand a word he said/But I helped him drink his wine.)
I really didn’t care about Three Dog Night or the music — I was desperately trying to stay awake until midnight. Then my 70-something grandparents, who were watching with something approaching horror, said something I’ll never forget:
"They’re just a bunch of hippies on drugs," my grandfather said.
"That’s right," my grandmother said. "Hippies on drugs. They’re hippies on drugs."
Their voices creaked with age and resentment, distrust and incomprehension. They all but waived their crooked fists at the television set. Who were these damn kids, with their strange clothes, hair, and music? They were on television! They were taking over! The world was falling apart!
"Oh…just look at them. Hippies on drugs."
"They’re just all hippies on drugs!"
Though I didn’t want to be a hippie on drugs, my grandparents’ utterances made Three Dog Night extremely cool. Better still, I knew that what had happened was meant to be repeated.
When I related the story to my friends, nobody thought it funny or interesting. But wasn’t important — I just had to tell someone, whether because it would raise my status among my peers or that I wanted to share it. I had to tell somebody, it just had to get out, it just had to be told.
Now residing in the "Where are they now?" file
On its surface, it’s not much of a story, but an anecdote: once it’s been read, there’s no reason to read it again. (Many of you probably don’t even find it amusing.) But I couldn’t shake its persistence, nor could I ignore the fact I was dying to tell others.
I discovered that I liked telling stories, but what I really liked was telling stories that illuminated a larger truth — my grandparents’ old-fashioned, square attitudes reflected in their dislike of hippies on drugs, for instance. Or stories that simply entertained others in some way. And though my aptitude as a verbal story-teller was limited, I found that when it came to the written word, I had a few skills, and that I really enjoyed doing it (present barren output notwithstanding).
I still haven’t found a place for this encounter; the closest I came was in my novel, when the narrator, at age 13, sees Kiss and The Ramones on "Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert," much to his grandmother’s horror.
But it’s a story, however small, that I still want to tell, one of many that usually end up on paper. In a way, I’m still nine years old.
Yes! I have a file like that in my head, too. All the little things that you know will fit somewhere, one of these days. . .
I’m sure you can use that somewhere but more important is the feeling it continues to evoke in you after all these years - a visceral emotion you can tap into when writing.
Never had that “music as rebellion” thing as a kid, probably b/c my parents were big into the Stones and the Who and were way cool when it came to music.
Cool memory, and really cool how it showed you the value of stories, at least to yourself.
Okay, first off Three Dog Night had a number of hits. They still tour regularly. I saw them about for or five years ago against my will and actually wound up enjoying it.
I think this sounds wonderfully familiar. Not the incensed grandparents but the desire to express what you saw and what was significant about it. I like that you’ve stressed not only wanting to tell the story but wanting to “show” what the story meant at the same time. Isn’t that what all writers stuggle to do, again and again, each time they start work on a new anecdote or sentence.
folk i was raised on 3 dog night, black sabbathy and sky stone, what u know about that
You have to stay nine years old to be able to recall this story with such tenderness. The only thing that really grows up is our vocabulary.
CP
oh i love it! i was born at the end of 1964 so we probably share a lot of similar memories. i do remember three dog night unfortunately. i think we writers have a giant space in our brains full of these excruciatingly detailed memories. and the older we become…the greater this space becomes until it takes over other brain functions like how to do simple arithmetic.
Now see, now you’ve made me go look up Three Dog Night, or hope you’re happy. I remember their hits, but not a whole lot else and I barely bothered with their episode of VH-1’s “Behind The Music.”
I didn’t know that they were like Joe Cocker and Manfred Mann, taking other people’s song and surrerptitiously making them their own.
What a great story. I love the image of your grandparents, shaking their fists at the hairy three dog night hippies.