Probably my biggest flaw with my family was my father – he was a Country music fan. But he was a Johnny Cash fan, so that helps. I grew up NOT being a Country music fan, this fate fell to my brother Dave. And he will tell you he has a broad range of musical tastes – he likes both Country AND Western music.

Growing up my parents listened to country music stations in the car. Even as a child my immunity system was already kicking in because I have no recollection any any country songs growing up – with one exception. In fact, I don’t remember any of my parents albums except this Johnny Cash album. No other songs, just this song – “A Thing Called Love.”

The Hi-Fi was a regular piece of furniture for many families that were into music or gadgets. We were a gadget family. We have a automatic card shuffle machine, a hand-held cigarette rolling machine, a digital clock when they first came out (not an LED display, the kind that flipped to a new number every minute) and a microwave – all in the early seventies! I’m pretty sure all that ‘high tech’ stuff came from my dad. I’m also pretty sure he wasn’t an audiophile, most audiophile’s aren’t Country music fans, yet we had a hi-fi like this one:

Just seeing these old pictures brought back memories of being a kid, laying on the floor next to the hi-fi listening to records, mostly little kid records or Christmas albums.

I remember pressing my finger on the orange glowing power light and watching how it lit up my finger.  I often wondered if I see my bones as the light shown through my finger, but all I could see the small red glowing fingernail.

So I would lie on the floor listening to this Johnny Cash album called ‘A Thing Called Love’. Looking at a red glowing finger and singing along to this song. As I searched for this song I could only remember fragments of lyric’s from the song – phrases like “he was six foot six”, “like a cream puff” and “brought down by a thing called love. Those were powerful images to me.

As a kid, all adults are huge. And if you ask most kids, their dad’s were all between six to seven feet tall. Some dad’s could actually grow to nine feet when two boys are bragging about them. And if you asked a kids about a ‘tall man, one that wasn’t a dad, they would say he was about eight feet tall – you know – like Frankenstein. Kids tend to like whole numbers. My dad was six feet, so six foot six with shoes would make sense – to me as a kid. In reality I think he wasn’t quite six feet, more like five feet ten or so.

Later I would find out “Like a cream puff” is not part of the lyrics and “brought down by a thing called love” is a paraphrase of the correct lyrics. This is probably why I had such a hard time finding the song. I often thought the line was something like “crying like a big cream puff” but the image of a grown man crying was what I really held in my memory.

To me, the image of a grown man crying is one of the most tragic. This is because in our culture men are not supposed to cry. We expect men to face adversity and hardship being stoic and emotionless. ‘No crying in Baseball’? For men there’s no crying period. 10cc said “Big boys don’t cry.” We do not get overwhelmed, we don’t cry out of frustration, we don’t cry because we’re ‘so happy’ (that’s when we usually yell things, like “fuck ya!”, “now that’s what I’m talking about!” or we strut around – whether we actually did something or not). Society looks to men to be the rock during chaos, the calm during the storm. The stereo type goes so far as we are seen as unemotional, uncaring and cold. Which make spoofs like Kevin Wu’s “Shed A Tear” so funny.

There were three times I remember my dad crying. The first time was when he lost his job and my parents were fighting about it. I don’t know, but my memory was that he had been drinking earlier that day. The third time was during dinner prayer when he skipped over our normal ‘God is good, God is great…’ and launch into a prayer to save his marriage and even that was more sniffles then anything. The second time was the worst.

I believe it was the Fall and later in the evening because it was dark outside. I was playing at the top of the stairs in the hallway outside the bathroom overlooking the living room into the kitchen. That’s where I would normally have my plastic dinosaurs commit suicide on the basement stairs or kamikaze onto one of my passing siblings. The phone rang and it was for my dad. I don’t remember any of the conversation from my dad except remembering he was crying – huge heavy sobs, the kind that hurt your back. I remember peeking from the upstairs and not being able to see him because he had moved into the darkness of the dining room. He had just found out his brother had died, my Uncle Ron, in a plane crash.

I had never seen my dad struck down like that before. The pain was evident, transferable. I heart physically hurt to hear my dad in some much emotional pain.  I couldn’t see him as I peered down from my upstairs perch but I imagined my own red eyes on his tears streaked face. I heard his hitched breath and his agonizing sobs. Later in life I would learn my dad wasn’t always the most stable of individuals. But at that moment, he was my dad – The Enforcer, the Rule-Maker, the Judge, the Fixer, the Bread-winner, the Head of the Family, the Man of the House. And he had been struck down with a broken heart, with in a loss I could only imagine but learn sooner then any of us knew. Dad was brought down by this thing called love.

I think my mom told us what happened and I couldn’t help thinking about my cousins and what they must be going through. Uncle Ron was Dad’s older brother and, in my recollection, I’m pretty sure that Dad and Uncle Ron got along pretty well, like brothers – brothers that enjoyed each others company.

In a God-like twist of fate, in what was a lifetime later, we learned of a huge coincident. After my grandmother’s funeral, I believe in the late 90’s, my father side of the family gathered at my Uncle Dale’s house. I met my cousins Mike and Jerry, Uncle Ron’s sons. Uncle Dale had the newspaper articles about the plane crash that killed his brother Ron in a scrapbook.

I was shocked to find the plane crash was in Watertown, WI. This was Desi’s mom’s hometown. Desi’s grandparents had a farm outside of Watertown. The pilot had a heart attack and someone was trying to land the plane in a farm field. If you know the area, you’ll know Highway 26, and the other roads in the area, are raised above the fields. A plane landing in the field would slam into the road’s embankment. Mike and Jerry said they driven up the next morning, Mike was 16 at the time, they confirmed that is what happened. We checked with Desi’s mom if they remembered a plane crash in the early seventies and they did not.

In the first verses of “A Thing Called Love” has the lyrics “but I saw that giant of a man brought down, to his knees by love” and that summarizes what I saw that night. In our walk from childhood to adulthood it is these realizations, these moments of awareness that spur us along to becoming adults ourselves. I attached my male duty within the face of tragedy to this song.

But that’s not what this song is about. The song is about the power of love, even in the face of the strongest man. And this is the beauty and tragedy of art. The artist intends and the viewer interprets. And within that Walk of Life a child can grow, and a man can remember.

You can’t see it with your eyes, hold it in your hands
But like the wind it covers our land
Strong enough to rule the heart of any man
This thing called love

Do you remember the first song you ever heard? I mean the first song you recognized as a commercial entity on the radio. Mine was “Those Were The Days” by Mary Hopkins.

I’ve always been morning person. As a child, I would wake up, crawl into my parents’ bed with my dad. My mom would already be up getting ready in the bathroom. When she was done, she would go downstairs to make my dad’s breakfast – which consisted of coffee and oatmeal.

While Mom was getting ready, Dad would lay in bed having his morning cigarette with the clock radio playing. Most of the time, I would crawl in on Mom’s side while Dad faced the western window, which was usually dark or beginning to gray with the morning light.

When the room was darkest, it would always be lit by a crack of light coming from under bathroom door. With that I could see the smoke dance softly between Dad and the western window. The lit tip of Dad’s cigarette would magically dance up to the darkness of the ceiling. I would nestle under the sheets and blankets and squeeze up against Dad. Sometimes he would reach around and pat my leg but most of the time we laid together listening to the clock radio.

Dad would lay in bed propped up on his right elbow smoking. Occasionally knocking his ashes in one of those old beanbag ashtrays that he kept in the bedroom. The clock radio sat in the headboard of their bed with its analog face and its glow-in-the dark painted hands staring back at us. I would watch the second hand tick around its face from the bathroom light, while I was laying in mom’s pillows under the sheets and blankets. And cigarette smoke continue to rise and slowly curl around Dad and I.

When this song would come on, I remember wondering what ‘days’ she was singing about. The song was released in August of 1968. That would have made me 5 years old. The mandolin gave the song it’s ‘old country’ sound. I hadn’t learned about Europe yet, but I knew about the dreaded gypsies from my monster movies and they always played this kind of music – the music from the ‘old country’. Of course, that depended if that particular monster movie had enough budget to waste on gypsy music from the ‘old country – most didn’t.

I thought the woman in the song sounded sad. Obviously things were not going well for her. As a kid, it seemed adults always thought things were so much better in the past. Yet when I saw them, they seemed pretty happy – to me, a five year kid. This woman seem to be thinking of the recent past – because she was still young, or so she said she was.

There were lots things I didn’t know about this song. For example, that it was the first single from the newly formed Apple label that started by The Beatles. That Paul McCartney produced the single. And that Mary Hopkins covered the Byrds’ “Turn Turn Turn” for the flip side.

As I kid, I was learning that music existed outside of our church. That it was more than just commercial jingles, or interludes on our favorite sitcoms and morning cartoons. I learned that I could come back tomorrow morning and the clock radio could play this song again. And I would think about the sad girl and the old days.

And in this realization, as the song played and I would follow the smoke trail from my dad, to the window, to the clock radio and through the darkness of the room. And I would watched the little red tip dance from my dad’s face to his extended arm. My dad must have been very tired in the morning because occasionally he would miss the ash tray. When it was his turn to get into the bathroom, he would leave the bed and I would take his place. Next to me would be burn holes in the sheets where he had missed the ashtray with his red tip. And I would finger the burn holes, despite my mom constantly telling me not to.

Eventually I would traipse downstairs into the kitchen where Mom would be making his oatmeal. I would sit on the bench that dad had made for all us kids to sit around the kitchen table. I would talk to my mom and our days would begin. I don’t remember hearing that song any other time but those mornings, or maybe it was the fact that those memories were just so strong.

One of music’s strongest features is how it can capture memories. So when we hear that song that memory is released. And in the release a desire to relive it is passed through to the song. Most music people, which I consider myself, will seek out that song so they can relive that memory. Thus begins a music expedition, a quest. Back then you were only given hints – some times a brief melody or a few lyrics. mere clues to what the song is called. Some music expeditions will last for years. Some as short as talking to a friend at a party. Nowadays, these expeditions are solved with a google search or app. The enjoyment of this expedition has been lost in this internet age.

For me this particular expedition lasted 17 years. While I eventually found out is was a song by Mary Hopkins, it was not easy to get a copy of the single. My expedition ended when I explained to my friend Ralf that I was on this expedition for this song. And as we were discussing our first musical memories at his house one evening and I told him about “Those Were The Days.”

He knew the song very well.  He said “My parents used to play that song all the time all the time. My dad’s old tailor buddies would come over and they would all be singing it, especially my mom. Hold on.” And he left the room and reappeared minutes later holding the original 45 in his hand – “Here ya go.”

I had not heard the complete song since I was child. We played in Ralf’s room that night and I was transported back to those early mornings as a little boy. The fact that Ralf and I would smoke while we listened to music just completed the transformation. Turning his den to a bedroom of seventeen years ago, with smoke curling in the dark.

And it opened a new perspective to me on this song. I could picture Ralf’s parents and their friends all gathered in a room, in an apartment somewhere on the East Coast, singing their hearts out, as the evening wore on and the drinks loosen their voices. And the next morning, in a little tri-level home in Des Plaines, Illinois a little boy and his dad laid quietly listening to that same song.

Those were the days, my friend.