Monday, October 09, 2006

The Sex Pistols, race relations and the Voice of Baton Rouge High

The previous post about Louisiana got me to thinking. Thinking about growing up blue collar in Baton Rouge and the world of possibility that, for the first time, blew wide open in a Technicolor frenzy of Dreaming Big for an oddball teen-ager at the Maggot School.

The Maggot School is what White Trash Nation called Baton Rouge Magnet High School throughout my tenure there from 1976-79. It was the place where all the geeks, brainiacs, musicians and thespians could be weirdos together in relative harmony and contentment. Hey, at BRHS it was good to be a Thespian.

If Student X had admitted to being a thespian at Broadmoor Junior High, I garon-damn-tee you someone would have beat that person up and administered an enthusiastic version of the Toilet Water Taste Test. And the boys would have been even more vicious.

Shiiiiiiiii podna, you just as well had put on an ascot and admitted to being a Homo sapiens. Or, better yet, called Junior Martinez (pronounced Marton-ez) a Homo sapiens.

Anyway, Baton Rouge High, by the 1975-76 school year, was a struggling inner-city school whose halcyon days had gone the way of poodle skirts, B-52s (the hairdo, not the band) and "separate but equal." Then someone had an idea.

First, take an inner-city school.

Add:

* Admission requirements.
* High grades required to stay.
* College-style declared majors.
* Diverse student body.
* Focus on academics and performing arts.
* College-prep curriculum.
* Policy to ship discipline problems back to High School Hell.

Then mix well. Let settle. Result: Damn fine school.

Nevertheless, my parents were leery (I'll bet you can guess why), but I got to go. Miracle of miracles!

Well, Baton Rouge High had -- and still has -- a radio station. A real, honest-to-God, student-operated, over-the-air FM radio station -- WBRH. And thus, the Mighty Favog learned everything he needed to know in high school.

But the college degree was nice nevertheless.

ANYWAY . . . let me tell you about when WBRH introduced Baton Rouge to punk rock in 1977.

I found out about the Sex Pistols on Weekend, the NBC newsmagazine that preempted Saturday Night Live once a month back in the day. In this case, "back in the day" was, I reckon, spring 1977. Anyway, it seemed that the Pistols were about as pissed at the world as my teen-age self, they could rock and -- best of all -- they terrified polite society as much as anything I had seen in my 16 years.

Unfortunately, they had no American releases. And their new British single, "God Save the Queen," had been banned by the BBC. "God save the queen, the fascist regime / They made you a moron, a potential H-bomb . . ." I can't understand why the BBC would do that. The ban had to have just killed the great BBC host John Peel.

I didn't care, I didn't know how, but I had to have the new Sex Pistols 45 (for those of you under 30, that's 45 vinyl record, not .45-caliber handgun). Today, you'd just go online and get it from Amazon.co.uk. Back then . . . no Internet.

For that matter, no PCs, either, unless you had money (lots) and electronics skills (lots).

But I did have an ace in the hole: Aunt Ailsa. The war bride (WWII) from England. Who was going back there on vacation. Who bought me the UK single of "God Save the Queen" (B-side: "Did You No Wrong"), possibly in a "Do you got the stuff?" transaction at some back-alley British record store. At least I'd like to think so.

That fall, I was enrolled in Radio I. I wasn't allowed an air shift yet; back then you first had to get a federal license -- by passing an exam. But I knew bunches of people in Radio II who were on-air. Soon, the Sex Pistols were on the Baton Rouge airwaves, via the 20-watt blowtorch signal at 90.1 FM.

One fall afternoon, I was sitting in with Charles, a junior, during the afternoon rock show. He was skeptical of the Sex Pistols, but played it and asked for listener feedback. What feedback you get from a high-school FM blowtorch (that is, not a bunch) was decidedly mixed.

After a week or so of playing Baton Rouge's one copy of a Sex Pistols record, we did get some strong feedback. It was from the licensee of WBRH, the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board. And it went something like this: We don't know what the hell that is you've been playing on the radio station, but we want you to cut it out. NOW!

The radio instructor and general manager, John Dobbs, liked his teaching gig. The 45 was confiscated, and the Sex Pistols faced the same fate at WBRH that the lads did at the BBC. Banned.

I did retrieve my record from The Iron Fist of the Oppressor, but only after I agreed never to bring it back. It sits, carefully preserved in its famous picture sleeve, right behind me in a plastic file box, along with all my other 45s from Back in the Day (and a few from Right Now).

Now, Charles was -- is? -- an interesting guy. Think of Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties a good five years before there was a Family Ties. Only African-American . . . or, as was the polite term then, black.

It was probably in the spring of '78 that I was again hanging out with Charles in the WBRH studio, playing the likes of David Gilmour, The Fabulous Poodles, Toto, the Cars, Journey and Queen. Maybe some Commodores -- Brick House, baby! -- and Parliament/Funkadelic.

Well, that day, obviously not enough "Brick House" or "P-Funk."

(Flash. Flash. Flash. Hey, radio-studio phones flash; they don't ring. OK?)

Charles: WBRH!

Caller: Hey, man, why don't you play some n****r music, man! ("N****r" = Not Polite Term for African-American -- then, now or ever.)

Charles: Uhhhhh, excuse me, but I happen to be black.

Caller: Oh, uhhh, oh . . . oh, I'm sorry, man! How about playin' some BLACK music for me, man!

Charles: I'll see what I can do. (Slams phone down.) Redneck son of a bitch!

I don't think the guy got his "n****r music" played, man.

I wonder whatever happened to Charles. Last I heard, he was living with a gal in Vegas. And Charles, a committed Objectivist and atheist, apparently had an almost-brother-in-law who was a Catholic priest.

Always thought I was a smart ass, I did. Seems God has me beat, though.

Now, I think there was a point to this post when I started it. But now it will have to do as a "slice of life" musing.

Maybe it's just like life, particularly the Christian life. The point -- and the fun -- isn't always in where we end up in this world, but rather in how we get there. Heaven, ah reckon, is the only "Don't miss!" destination out there.


P.S.: WBRH and its (relatively) new AM sister station, KBRH (the old 1260 WAIL), really, really need a decent website. And web streams. Then again, the school board really needs to make the women's room in the gym look Not Bombed Out, and to figure out it has a responsibility to buy the school such trivialities as, oh, I don't know . . . DESKS?!? The BRHS Alumni Association website has the damning pictures, as an inducement for alumni to pony up.

I wish it were more of an inducement for alumni to shame the EBR School Board into doing its job and shame Baton Rouge taxpayers into caring about public education.

But that's just me.


1 comment:

KeepDurhamDifferent! said...

lol, I had to beg, borrow, and steal to find my way to the Pistols show in Dallas circa 1978. And it still didn't work -- had to settle for seeing Black Flag at the Kiwanis hall in BTR circa 1986.

John Dobbs lived on my street, used to see him walking his basset hound and smoking his pipe every day (not to mention at the school I attended). I'll never forget the time he hired me to mow his grass, and then tried to pay me by the hour and not by the job. I was so angry I only took care of his lawn for another two years afterwards.