Velociworld

To Soothe the Savage Breast

One of the great burdens of middle age is the spontaneous revisitation of the past when one is accosted by a trigger of an earlier fad, or genre, in music. We boomers, of course, deserve all the filthy brainworms we get, because it is always eventually leavened by a choice cut from the great '63-'82 era of rock and roll, all the surrounding white noise notwithstanding. I can tolerate Billy Don't be a Hero if my next brainworm is Dear Prudence.

What I find harder to tolerate is the genre music. We all know ad nauseum the perverse attraction of disco to so many of our former broheims. That was one hell of a way to lose a buddy. One day you're skipping college class with a friend, dipping your feet in the salt water off a floating dock, building a bong out of bamboo to try out that kilster hashish you just scored, and the next day he's found a polyester suit and a goddam dance partner. It was the stoner version of seeing the guy from Schenectady next to you in the foxhole taking a slug right between the eyes. Either way, that bastard was deader than hell.

It can get worse, however. If you were from the East Coast, or more precisely from the Southeast Coast, or more precisely from the Lowcountry, you had to put up with not one, but two waves of that crudescent filth known as Beach Music. The songs are all originally from the Sixties, of course, however there was a great resurgence, a revival retro if you will, in the mid-eighties, accompanied by that most vulgar form of touch dancing, the shag.

One first heard the songs as a child, while one was broiling upon the beach because Mom hadn't thought to put any Coppertone on one's delicate honkywhite or chocolatini skin. In my case, my poor mother had grown up in the Depression in south Georgia, so to her pale skin was not a mark of the doyennes of Versailles, it was the mark of the fishbelly white redneck. My mother was convinced lethal doses of ultraviolet rays prevented acne, pellagra, and the rickets. And if you did not believe her she would literally dose you with several grams of pure yellow sulphur, just to cure you of the smart-ass. Having seen the effects of the sulphur treatment upon my older siblings I, personally, was a believer.

So: there was the beach, and the amplification amplitude modulation radio, and rock and roll, R&B, and occasionally one of those fucking beach music songs. Ye know the songs; do not hide ye knowledge from me, lest I smite thee: Under the Boardwalk, Sixty Minute Man, 39-21-46, Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy.... Christ, I almost had to put my eyes out just typing them.

Well, you could ignore those songs as a kid, because something cool like Satisfaction would come on next. No, the problem was the revival. When you were in your twenties or thirties. Jumping Jesus, Savannah and Charleston and Myrtle Beach and even, Lord help us, Key West! were inundated with that vomitous shite. And the shagging! Roger me royally. It was the old early sixties touch dancing come back born again, like a zombie Arthur Murray, only with a couple of disco twists thrown in. I was too old by then to do drugs, so I turned to the bottle to soften the blow.

Blow... on second thought, I believe that was also the high water mark of cocainum, so there was that, too. You couldn't go to sleep so all you could do was sit at the bar and drink and drink and listen to beach music and wish you were a 28-day, 12-step Shaolin monk.

Thank God for parenthood. Parenthood is the R. Lee Ermey drill sergeant that slaps your ass out of bed and makes you man up, not least because you know old R. Lee has a grisly, hard penis he'll get you out of bed with if you don't straighten up. So parenthood gets you out of the bars, so you don't have to watch people shag to terrible songs. And dry-hump each other. (You know, the only downside to the seersucker suit on a Southern gentleman is the stain he may acquire in the crotch after gratuitous frottage. Very blacklighty, too. I don't seem to have that problem much, anymore).

Blacks make some of the most awesome music ever. Beach music ain't it. I'll leave you with two songs. One beach, one Eubie Blake. If you can't tell the difference, or prefer song A, please send me your address. I understand R. Lee is available now, and one damned horny Marine.