IT TAKES ME BACK

Take me back to Chicago
Lay my soul to rest
Where my life was free and easy
Remember me at my best

Take me back to Chicago
Where music was all I had
I tried to be good as I could
And sometimes that made me sad

Take me back to Chicago, to Chicago
Why don't you take me back
Take me back, take me back...

Lyrics from "Take Me Back" by Chicago

Music has always meant a lot to me. Even when I was little, before I realized that I too could be a musician. I spent hours on dark winter days playing my mother’s old 78-rpms on the console radio-record player we had back then. I recall that it was a lovely piece of maple-wood furniture with a speaker at the bottom, covered by a cloth screen, through which you could see the tubes glowing an eerie orange behind it. Doing their magic, in the days before printed circuits and transistors, to reproduce, endlessly, the sounds that great musicians, some living, some dead, had created one day in a studio far away.

On the left there was a narrow door, which, when opened, revealed two shelves to hold records. My mother’s collection was enormous, so only her favorites were kept there. The rest of her albums—big, heavy, scrapbook-like affairs to hold perhaps ten or twelve seventy-eights with one tune per side, were stacked high on a shelf in the spare storage closet. And finally, in the middle, the console featured two drawers. They rolled out to reveal two separate turntables, one at the bottom for 78-rpms and one on top for the much newer 45-rpms.

Seventy-eights stored every kind of music available from classical to swing, Dixie and country. The 45-rpm singles were newfangled and most often contained rock and roll and romantic ballads. My sister and I wouldn’t have any of those until later, when Whitie, my father, started buying them used and in bulk from Hank Perrin, a friend of his who leased and repaired jukeboxes.

However, the latest invention in data storage (which we just knew as music back then) was the 33-rpm LP (long play), which could hold entire albums on a single record! But we didn’t have any of those yet either. They had only hit the market in 1948, and upgrades didn’t happen nearly as fast as they do today. It was the fifties in Wapakoneta, Ohio, and buying an innovative new “hi-fi” on which to play LPs seemed like a luxury we couldn’t afford. By the time we finally got one for Christmas one year, my sister Darla was already studying music, and the first LPs she bought weren’t pop or jazz but classical: Beethoven’s Fifth, Brahms’ First, Schubert’s Eighth (The Unfinished), Greatest Overtures, and so on. It was amazing. You could get an entire symphony onto just one disk! I was enthralled. My very own first classical LP was the “Gay Paris” music of Jacques Offenbach, a Christmas gift from my Grandma Alice (Whitie’s mother). I treasured it and, at age about ten, loved it as much for the lively music as for the lovely legs, fancy garters and ruffled panties of the can-can dancers on the cover. 

But while I was younger, in the mid-fifties, it was the collection of jazz and swing that my mother, Reba Mae, had been accumulating since she started making her own money waitressing at seventeen. Paul Whiteman, Stan Kenton, the Dorsey Brothers (together and separate), Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters, Sinatra, Gene Krupa, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, all of the major exponents of what was generically called jazz, plus some real rarities, like composer George Gershwin conducting his Rhapsody in Blue, with his friend and greatest interpreter, Oscar Levant, at the piano.

It was amazing stuff, and I was addicted from the outset.

Those early days of digesting my mother’s seventy-eights instilled a deep love of jazz and swing in me, just as Leonard Bernstein’s Children’s Concert, sometimes televised on Sundays, encouraged me in my love of classical music. By the time I was old enough to play an instrument, I knew that I wanted to be actively connected to both musical genres.

I was fortunate enough to have a chance to indulge my love of symphonic music as an amateur percussionist—although I played everything, my specialty and first love were kettledrums (technically known as timpani)—with our extraordinarily good high school concert band, with the All-Area symphonic band, at an Ohio University summer clinic for gifted child-musicians—where I was head percussionist in both the symphonic orchestra under the direction of maestro Myron Pierce and in the symphonic band under the baton of the former director of the First Marine Band (known as the presidential band since the era of John Philip Sousa) Lieutenant Colonel William Santleman—and at the Ohio State University, where, during my first and only year there, I was the timpanist with the Buckeye Scarlet Concert Band.

But I had the privilege of earning my living for almost a decade as a jazz drummer. Included in the repertoire of the groups I worked with over those years was everything from New Orleans-style Dixieland and classic swing to avant garde and fusion music. To my surprise, since I was a jazzman at heart, I grew ever more attracted to “fusion”, the crossover of jazz and rock. And although I collected LPs of both modern jazz and Dixieland, I also began being seduced by the fresh new sounds of the jazz-rock hybrids: Chicago, Blood Sweat and Tears, Chase, Ramsey Lewis, Caldera, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Weather Report, and so on. And although we did a lot of straight commercial jazz in the places and in the bands I played with, the youngest of us were all starting to experiment with the bold fusion music sound.

By the time I was in the Army Bands in the early seventies, fusion music was solidly ensconced on the music scene. And for the year that I was assigned to the 72^nd Army Band at Ft. MacArthur in Los Angeles, before being reassigned to the 30^th Army Band in Germany, we played a lot of it with the stage band and jazz combos we formed. This was no martial music cum commercial gig. The Vietnam draft was still in full swing, so many of the conscripts and three-year Regular Army musicians I worked with, had been, just weeks before, playing on Hollywood sound stages or in LA nightclubs. And many of the others, like myself, were culled from the music scene in the heartland. If you were a musician and had to be in service, this was the way to do it.

But first, we all, and I mean all, had to attend the Army Element of the Navy School of Music in Norfolk, Virginia. When I say all, I mean even guys like my then-best friend, Paul Dickey, who had a doctorate in liturgical music and could have given master classes in harmony and theory to the entire teaching staff at that training facility. Oddly enough, even with all of the highly-educated monster talents that surrounded me there, I was “accelerated out” and awarded a “Meritorious Spec 4” rating. (For those unfamiliar with Army ranks, specialist 4 is the same pay grade as a corporal but is given to those with some specialization other than or in addition to combat). So with only about three months in the Army, I had already advanced four pay grades. I can only put this down to the facts that I was a competent percussionist in concert, marching and stage band, I had extensive training from my high school days—as a student and afterward as an instructor—in precision marching drill, and I had worked in a music store where I learned a great deal about instruments, parts and inventory.

This gave me some latitude since although I had to attend performance classes—basically band practice—and percussion lessons, with a guy who was a brilliant performer but, unfortunately, a less than adept teacher, I also had a regular job in the instrument issue department. Since I was treated as staff rather than trainee, I got more three-day passes than the regular students did. My then-girlfriend (later to be wife), Virginia, was studying at Bowling Green State University back in Ohio, so every time I could get a few days off, I would fly back on military standby—which meant hanging around an airport in your uniform until you could grab a no-show’s seat on a plane—spend a pleasant twenty-four to thirty-six hours and hitch a flight back.

Anyway, I got to thinking about this a couple of weeks ago when I was working out. Whenever I do that, I always accompany the training with “my music”: Billy Joel, Joe Cocker, Linda Ronstadt, Eric Clapton, Joseph Cotton, and so on. But lately, I’ve added some of my old fusion music favorites, since on a trip back to Cleveland a couple of years ago, I went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and bought up every CD album I could of great fusion bands that I’d once collected on vinyl but now had no place to play them. The preponderance of that less than frugal purchase was made up of early Chicago and Blood Sweat and Tears.

I mention all of this, because, in spite of my musical bent, I never cease to be amazed at just how powerful a trigger music is for memory. For someone like me, perhaps as powerful even as smell or taste. For instance, I can never hear Emerson Lake and Palmer without seeing my Army buddy Dave Zeiss, standing in his barracks cubicle at Ft. MacArthur in front of his Pioneer stereo with its impressive woofers and tweeters, hollering, “Hey, Newland, get your skinny ass over here. You’ve just gotta hear this bitchin’ sound!” And then standing there counting the beat out for me like a symphony conductor, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two, as Greg Lake set the crazy new rhythm for the EL&P innovation, Tank. This was new, different, experimental and we were intoxicated. Zeiss introduced me to it, and it’s Dave I see when I hear it. Not a memory. I see him, with his ornery face and crooked comical grin, just as he was then, even though we never saw each other again after that year almost fifty years ago.

So just like that, the other day when I was working out, I put on an early Chicago album, and just as soon as the first chords of Fancy Colors played, in my mind, it was 1970 and I was on a road trip with another Army buddy, this one from the School of Music, a wiry, rangy, tow-headed kid called Jim Farley. And as the album played on through Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is, Waiting for the Break of Day and a slew of other early Chicago hits, the drive kept playing out like a road trip movie in my brain.

Farley and I weren’t close friends. We didn’t hang out. But we were both percussionists and so spent a lot of time in drum-lines together. When you’re in the Army, you’re with people from all over the country. So when you meet up with somebody from your own neck of the woods, there tends to be a natural bond beyond the general one provided by the uniform. That’s what happened with Farley and me when he found out I was from Wapakoneta and I found out he was from Troy, down by Dayton and less than an hour from my home town.

Anyway, there was this time when we both had a three-day pass at the same time. He asked me if I was going home and I said yes. He said, “I’m flying home and then bringing my car back down to Norfolk. Want to come along and help me drive?”

“Sure!” I said, since I was always up for driving. I hadn’t had a car of my own since I joined the service. I still drove, but in my friend Paul Dickey’s Olds 98. He and some other friends and I went a lot of places together in the Norfolk area. Paul hated to drive (and was a terrible driver) and I was the only one he trusted to drive his big shiny Olds.

I liked Farley. He knew how to get around the Army chickenshit. His old man had been a lifer, a now retired infantry master sergeant. Farley didn’t like being in service and had no intention of following in his dad’s footsteps, but he was in his element on a military base. Even though I outranked him, he had a lot to teach me about getting by in the Army.

So Farley and I hitched a military standby to Dayton together. He introduced me to his dad at the airport. I impressed him by saying, “Pleasure to meet you, Master Sergeant Farley,” and then I introduced them to my folks who were waiting for me.

We set a time to regroup, synchronized our watches and Farley said, “See you Sunday.”

There was no Google then, no driving instructions, no ETA for road travel. Farley had just looked at a map, reckoned the distance “as the crow flies” and said, “I figure eight and a half hours tops to get back.”

I had no idea so said, “Okay,” but then added, “Sure you don’t want to leave a little more time, just in case?”

“Nah,” he said, “We’ll be okay.” Then he laughed and said, “I’ve got a real fast car!”

We both had a great weekend with family, friends and girlfriends. I drove my mother’s car up to BGU to see Virginia and drove her down to Findlay for dinner at the Ft. Findlay Hotel restaurant and nightclub. It was one of the nicer clubs I’d played in before joining the Army, and a great place to eat. We dined on sirloin and Champale and dreamed. It was a romantic late autumn day and evening that made it all the harder to go back to Norfolk.

Sunday at home was great as well. I got to see Whitie and Reba Mae, my little brother Jim, who was a very cool, very hip fifteen then, and my sister Darla was down from her home in Cleveland as well. Reba Mae made us all a big family breakfast with eggs and pancakes and bacon, after which Whitie invited us all, as was his custom, to go to church, even though he knew Darla and I would decline. And when he and my mother got back after services, there was wonderful beef, potatoes and carrots in the crockpot for lunch, with lemon pie for dessert, and we all ate as a family.

My father and I were getting along better than we ever had before. It was something about my being in the Army. We’d never really had much in common before. At best, there was always a tense truce between us. But the military was an equalizer. He was a veteran tech-sergeant and I was an Army spec 4. There were things we shared that others didn’t. We were finally on common ground.

It was Whitie who drove me down to meet Farley in Troy. On the way down, he said, “Do you ever think about staying, Dan.”

“What?”

“Staying in.”

“The Army? Hell no!” I said. And then added, “Why would you ask that, Dad. You hated being in the Army.”

“Well, it was the war. But it wasn’t all bad. Sometimes I think it was stupid to leave. I’d have been retired by now with a good pension and medical coverage for the whole family. There are worse jobs.”

“Not really my thing,” I said.

“You’ve got a couple more years in uniform. You may change your mind. Think about it.”

At Farley’s, Whitie helped me get my duffle out of the car and then gave me a hug. That wasn’t a common thing for him to do back then and it took me by surprise.

“I love ya, buddy,” he said, and I got an instant knot in my throat because it had always been hard for me to think he did.

Farley shook hands with his dad, gave him a comical salute and said, “See ya, Sarge!”

His car was by the curb and ready to go. It was a ’64 Impala, a kind of bluish pigeon-grey. It had been spring-jacked a little in the back and had dual chrome exhausts and mag wheels. He even had a pair of giant, fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror. It had a three-twenty-seven engine and had been fitted with a Holley four-barrel carburetor. It was a sweet ride and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.

It also had an eight-track tape-player, which was a super-cool accessory at the time. And like me, he was a fusion music fanatic. Over the weekend, he had bought some new Chicago and it was going to be our background from here to Norfolk until we knew every drum lick by heart.

At the outset on that Sunday evening, we were both in high spirits and the Chicago sound filled us with a kind of euphoria as we drove along smoking and joking and laughing. We stopped at a greasy spoon for delicious hamburgers and bad coffee. And a couple of hours later, we stopped again at a truck stop for good coffee and better pie.

“Want me to drive?” I asked.

“Sure. Mind if I catch a few zees?”

“No, go ahead. Music bother you?”

“Nah,” he said, “I can sleep through a mortar attack.”

I felt powerful behind the wheel of the Impala and at first I was just enjoying the music and the ride. But then, as we drove through the mountains of West Virginia toward Virginia, it started turning chilly and very dark.

The road wound and doubled back on itself again and again through the mountains in the middle of nowhere, and now it was starting to snow. A late autumn snow. Not much was accumulating, but it was coating the road with a slick icing and the combination of a light rear-end and a very powerful engine meant that I had to be very careful on the sharp curves not to fishtail into a slide and spin out. Chicago played on and Farley slept like a baby as I struggled to stay on the road.

We were making very poor time and I kept wondering how much further it was, precisely, to our destination.

The Impala got mileage similar to a Sherman tank and we had already stopped to gas up a couple of times before Farley turned the wheel over to me. Now, as we came out of a particularly dark, tortuous and desolate stretch, I saw a truck stop up ahead and decided to stop. The Impala needed gas and I needed coffee.

Farley woke up when I pulled up to the pump with the lights of the truck stop shining bright through the windshield.

“Where are we?” he asked, rubbing his eyes and yawning.

“Damned if I know.”

“What time is it?”

I pulled back my sleeve and looked at my Bulova. “Wow, three-thirty! Four and a half hours till formation.”

“Are we in Virginia?”

“I think so.”

“Damn, what were you doing while I was asleep, Newland, coasting?”

“Don’t even ask. You missed out on a doozy of a stretch in the middle of an ice and snow storm, in the middle of the mountains.”

“Well, let’s fill up and go inside and ask where we are,” he suggested.

Inside, it was warm and friendly. We sat on stools at the counter and the waitress brought us coffee without our asking.

“Something to eat, boys?” she asked. Farley said he’d have a burger and I asked for rhubarb pie.

When the waitress came with it and warmed up our coffee, Farley asked, “How far are we from Norfolk?”

“Norfolk?” the waitress said, looking at us as if we’d asked how far we were from the ninth circle of hell. “Danged if I know, honey. Just a second, I’ll ask one of the drivers.” She moved down to the other end of the counter and, addressing a three-hundred-pound guy in denims, engineer boots, wide red suspenders and a black Stetson with a swatch of bright red and green feathers on the side, she said, “Hey Buck, any idea how far from here to Norfolk?”

“Who wants to know?”

“These Yankee boys down here.”

“You goin’ to Nawfuck?” he asked.

“Yes,” Farley said. “Are we very far?”

“What’re you drivin’?”

“That Impala out there,” Farley said pointing out the plate-glass window.

“Well, I’d say, if ya kick ass, you got about five hours to go, maybe a little less.”

“Five hours!” we cried in unison.

“Hey, ain’t my fault,” the big man said. “That’s just how far you-uns are.”

The waitress was back to give us a warm-up. “More coffee?” she asked.

“If we can get it to go,” I said. And then we were paying, tipping and out the door.

Now Farley was driving and it was scary, because he had the pedal to the metal on the straight-aways, and that Impala would really go!

“Hope to hell a cop doesn’t stop us or we’ll be screwed.” I said.

“Me too,” said Farley, “but we’ve gotta make time or our ass’ll be grass and the ‘Top’ will be the lawn mower.”

He was right. We had a new first sergeant. He had replaced a kindly Filipino master sergeant bandsman who cut us a lot of slack. Except when it came to our appearance. When we were looking a little shaggy, he’d hand us a dollar bill and say “You got dollah, get fresh haircut.” But the new guy was all Army. A typical infantry first sergeant and twenty-five-year war-hardened veteran who must have been paying some penance to be sent to babysit with a bunch of musician trainees. He didn’t like us much, and the feeling was mutual.

We had come down out of the mountains by now and the snow and ice had turned to rain, which was good, but torrential rain, which wasn’t. There was a grey tint of a new day in the sky when we sailed past a still sleeping Charlottesville, a good two and a half hours out.

When we reached Richmond, it had stopped raining, and dawn was shining through a narrow crack on the horizon, with an hour and a half left to go. I was at the wheel again—Farley was exhausted from driving hell bent for leather for several hours straight and putting the Impala through its paces without flipping us over or fish-tailing off the road. I was doing over ninety, but Farley was still saying, “Come on! Get moving! We’re not gonna make it!”

“We need gas,” I said.

“No time. Don’t worry, we’ll make it without filling up.”

“Not at these speeds with that four-barrel.”

“Just fucking drive, man, and let me worry about that!”

It was zero-eight-hundred when I turned in and approached the guard post at the gates of the Little Creek Naval Base. That’s when the Impala choked on its last vapors of gasoline, coughed, spasmed and died twenty yards from the entrance. Farley and I pushed it off the road onto the berm, locked it and jogged up to the gate. We were in civvies. They didn’t know us from Adam. So the buck sergeant in charge said, “Is that your vehicle, sir?”

“Yeah,” said Farley, “but we’re late and it’s outa gas.”

“IDs please,” he said. And when he saw we were a spec 4 and a PFC, he said, “You’ll have to get that fucking vehicle outa there now.”

“Come on, man, give us a break,” Farley pleaded. “We’ve been driving all night and we’re late for formation. I promise I’ll get some gas and get it out of here as soon as we check in.”

The sergeant looked dubious, but finally, he sighed, handed our IDs back and said, “I’ll give you till ten-hundred hours, then I’m having it towed to the impound.”

“Thanks, Sarge,” Farley said, “I appreciate it. You’re a prince.”

“Get the fuck outa here,” the sergeant replied.

Now it was a mad dash across the base to our barracks. Formation was in the day-room and was already underway. When we rushed in breathless and disheveled, still dressed in our civilian clothes and fell in next to our well-groomed, freshly shaven companions in their starched and pressed fatigues, the first sergeant was reading announcements from his clipboard. When we fell in, he stopped midstream and clamped an icy blue-eyed stare on us for a moment, Then he went on reading.

Would he give us a break? We hoped. We prayed. Then he was finished and said, “All right, gentlemen, fall out!” And the congregation wandered off in different directions and lit up smokes on the way to their daily routines. We thought we had made it, but then the top sergeant barked, “Newland, Farley!”

We turned, came to attention and said, “Yes, First Sergeant!”

“Explain yourselves.”

Farley said, “No excuse, First Sergeant!”

But I quickly intervened and said, “We’re sorry, Top. We drove all night and ran out of gas. I guess we miscalculated the distance. That’s why we’re a little late.”

He stared at me, unblinking, and then he said, “You are not a little late. You are fucking AWOL! And I will have your asses swinging from a flagpole.”

We waited for days for the other shoe to drop, but nothing happened. We thought maybe if we just didn’t mention it anymore it might go away. But finally, we couldn’t stand the suspense any longer and went to talk to our platoon sergeant, a sergeant first class who, besides playing a mean trumpet, was also a decorated combat veteran, to ask him if he knew if any action was being taken. He was wearing his dress greens with a chest full of medals that included a bronze star and a purple heart, as well as a foreign service award from the South Korean government. He liked us both. Me, because I had made Meritorious Spec 4, Farley because he knew Farley’s dad.

“The Top was madder than hell at first,” he said. “But I’ve been talking to him, which is why nothing’s happened so far. He’s talking some bullshit about busting you both and jailing you for thirty days, but I figure that’s all it is—bullshit. I wouldn’t worry if I were you.”

But we did keep worrying for a while, Farley because he figured his old man would kill him, me because I didn’t want to lose my stripes or serve thirty days in a military stockade.

In the end, however, it all blew over, and the Top started treating us no worse than he treated anybody else. And besides, we were soon off to our next posts.

The point is, I never hear those old Chicago songs now that I don’t remember that trip, like a video clip seared into my brain. I see tall, lanky Farley, his cherry Impala and every curve on the dark snowy road from Ohio to Norfolk. I see us stalling out at the gate of the base and running like crazy to at least make formation in our civvies, even if we were late. And the whole time, those tunes are playing in my head.

It really takes me back.