Saturday Jams at Jerry Lee’s are Therapeutic

Jamming at Jerry Lee's Music Store

If you have ever joined our therapeutic jams at Jerry Lee’s Music, you know that these sessions are not only fun, they also take many of us back to the soundtracks of our lives. During last Saturday’s Jam at Jerry Lee’s Music Store, just hours before Jerry’s threw an epic 2017 Oyster Roast and Low Country Boil party with Smokestack as musical guests, I started a chord progression vaguely looking for Light my Fire by the Doors. Somehow however my hand played a different rhythm and phrasing between the A chord and F#m and out came “Itchycoo Park.” Co-jammer Ricky Perry looked at me and smiled: “I loved that song. What was the guy’s name who sang it.” I thought about that for minute, shame growing, as my aging brain was trying to find the compartment where the name was hiding. I knew that I always knew him as one of rock’s greatest voices; I also remembered that he sadly passed way in a house fire in 1991 in London; I knew his face, his song, his Pete Townsend-like guitar playing and the name of his band: The Small Faces! Yet I couldn’t pull out his name until a day later: Steve Marriott, A Force of Nature.

‘Itchycoo Park’ was one of the soundtracks that paved the paths of my youth. ‘All or Nothing’ was another, ‘Lazy Sunday Afternoon’ and “Tin Soldier” yet other ones. Cover bands in the sixties easily and capably covered the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals and many of the other early superstars, but covering a Small Faces song was almost impossible. Not because of the musical skill, although solid and exceptional; it was that voice wrapped around daring melodic changes and chord constructions, that made them stand out. Ironically enough, in 1967 that voice may have been the reason why their music was more appreciated by “insiders” then the general audiences. It was simply too hard to mimic, like Zeppelin’s Robert Plant or Journey’s Steve Perry.

“What did we do there, WE GOT HIGH!”

Funny how he put that line in this song and got away with it. In 1967 testing the limits society could handle was big, and believe me those limits were being tested every hour of the day. And when the Beatles came along and blasted all doors open, there was no stopping, unleashing the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane and a handful of others to introduce hard rock, psychedelia, Woodstock and the Grateful Dead to the world, almost overnight.

Kind of similar in today’s world is the internet. It didn’t exist in the 1980s, and then, almost overnight, it did. There were no websites, no apps, no hardware, and then ‘snap’ it was all there. Since those days, via punk, grunge,  we’ve now landed in the formulated corporate rock era of the internet, with the Big Four (Warner, Sony, Universal and EMI) more worried about their profits than us. Tom Petty experienced some of that change in the early eighties, when his record company wanted to charge us extra for his new album, and Tom said: “Damn the Torpedoes”, just when disco came along to decimate an early revival of corporate rock.

I don’t know what exactly will be the tipping point that kills Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon in our lifetime? Greed and deceit probably, considering that all monopolies ultimately will sacrifice innovation and creativity for monetary gain. But really, I don’t know, yet it’s funny how the establishment always corrects aberrations. If you are interested in learning a bit about the deplorable mess the music industry is in today, I suggest a side trip to Wikipedia.

Steve Marriott was the lead singer of the Small Faces, before they lost that modifier and changed lead singers and became only the “Faces,” fronted by Rod Stewart, and Marriott became a hard rocker in Humble Pie, before experimenting with Peter Frampton in that outfit, before some more milestone albums “Smokin'” and “Thirty Days In The Hole.”

And what blew my mind was, I knew not only every lyric, but every inflection. Because that was our entertainment. It’s how we spent our days. Sure, we watched television in those days as we moved from black and white to color TV, but there were few channels and it was all dumbed-down to mass audience mediocrity. Hasn’t changed much since, if you ask me. But our music then was honest, it was for us. That’s what today’s younger generations don’t understand about those years! For a little while (sadly), the ‘lunatics’ had taken over the asylum and we caught the musical references, it was our language, raw and uncensored.

And then came “Sunshine Of Your Love“ and “Foxy Lady” which waited a year to appear on AM radio, at a time when only the clued-in were listening to FM, when albums truly burgeoned, when testing limits was the ethos and guitar gods created.

It was a period of transition, from ditties to opuses. We had FM at home, but not in the car; you could go to the show, but if you went to a diner with a jukebox, you were subjected to AM hits. That’s what bugs me about a world where everything boils down to statistics. All this b.s. comparing the Hot 100 of today with yesteryear’s. I don’t care how many #1s Mariah Carey has, none of her tracks will ever be as ubiquitous as the hits of the sixties. Not because she doesn’t have great pipes. NO!  BECAUSE EVERYBODY WAS LISTENING! ’Scuse me while I kiss the Sky!

They were not listening in the seventies. Ignore the singles chart of that decade, it’s mostly irrelevant. It started changing when acts like Queen and Meatloaf produced opus epics like Bohemian Rhapsody and Paradise by the Dashboard Light and music became a visual story attraction. Hence the charts of the eighties were more correct, because for a while MTV unified our listening, before the internet blew it apart in the nineties. Today’s billboard charts are littered with electronic crap with little edge, and few shared references, because we’ve all become scattered, we live in a Tower of Babel society and no one gets the references, society has been blown apart, it’s not only fake news, but the tyranny of choice.

Looking back I’m trying to figure out what got me off the most and decided that it probably was the chorus. When the Beatles sang “She Loves You”, we answered “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”. When Blue Cheer introduced us to Summertime Blues we belted “Lord there ain’t no cure for the Summertime Blues”. Remember the syrupy ditty ”Build Me Up Buttercup”? The key to the song was the “bah-dah-dah.” We sang it, we were the chorus, that was our job, to sing the background vocals, that was our role. Over time we learned the verses, the choruses themselves, but mostly we waited to fill the accents, to become part of the songs.
Yes, we were part of them and they were part of us. That was the difference between then and now. As a song grew on you, it became you, but it took time. Today there is no time, just impressions measured in sound bites and popular platforms.

So we have music today, and hits, but they’re not the same, they speak to fewer, have a remarkably short shelf life and are conduits of cash, as opposed to being truth spoken to an entire generation. Hip-hop dominates younger listening, but it’s a subculture as opposed to the culture itself. As for pop, it’s so irrelevant it’s already starting to fade in a marketplace that increasingly struggles with lines between Country and Pop.

Many songs of the sixties still have that quality that connects, which is why I wanted to write and post this story. A bunch of us “old and younger jammers” connected during last Saturday’s jam, over music that was painted under our lives, wherever the years took us.
I spent the sixties across the pond in Western Europe and even though we were up to date with much of the music that came from the US, some of the magic of that era and its performers never made it across the water in those days.

When Ricky Perry smiled hearing the opening chords for Itchycoo Park, I realized I’m enjoying our Saturday afternoon jams to connect and find new underrated heroes like Jerry Jeff Walker and John Prine. We talk about southern hard rockers Mountain and Felix Pappalardo’s incredible rock voice; we talk and play some stuff from Kansas which never made an impact in Europe and live shows we have seen and remember over the years. I learn from every jam and use the marvel of the Internet to learn more about singer/songwriters that could have been heroes to me back then, if the world would have been smaller. Of course in Europe we knew for example Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen and Jim Croce, but Walker, Townes VanZandt, Tim Hardin or John Prine were completely unknown.

Prine, whom I learned about through Jerry Lee playing The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness”  during jams (ironically enough from the album titled “German Afternoons”) writes songs about war, lost veterans, lonely people, old people, a sad homemaker, flag-waving to prove patriotism, fishing, and family and the singular American experience. John Prine writes songs too about Love, big time Love, about a beautiful country, about finding humor in our differences. He writes songs about the America that welcomed me 37 years ago and that I find back during those great Saturday afternoon jams at Jerry Lee’s Music Store.

John will be performing at the Florida Theatre in Jacksonville on December 13. There are still some tickets available. John is 71 now, so see him now while you still can.

A couple of Party Pictures are added. Come join our gang on Saturdays for some therapeutic jams at Jerry Lee’s Music.

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