Ignore the Johnsons, reap the whirlwind

I attribute the present state of American culture and politics to, back in 1980, people not listening to the anti-drug message of the Brothers Johnson.

Angel dust was, and is, some bad juju.

Things could have been so, so different today had we listened to some common sense advice and not trusted that dust. But we didn't, and now we must rely on legal weed and lethal opioids to dull the screaming of our brains as they react to the suck surrounding us.

The suck that came because "Don't trust that Dust" was just too flippin' complicated a message for we idiots to embrace 39 years ago . . . when we still might have had a chance in hell.

That is all.

How to create middle-age stranglers

May 30, 1966.

Buddhist monks were setting themselves alight as the war in Vietnam intensified apace. Surveyor 1 headed for the first soft lunar landing of an unmanned American spacecraft. The Klan was being the Klan in Denham Springs, La. -- which meant that Denham Springs was just being Denham Springs.

And "A WOWIE ZOWIE ZING-A-LING SWING-A-LING THING" had just hit Baton Rouge. The Teen-Age Rattler apparently was "the new fun sensation sweeping the nation."

The reaction to this, no doubt, from every person old enough in 1966 to have spawned a teenager was "Oh, joy." Note the lack of an exclamation point.

THE TEEN-AGE RATTLER was billed as being some sort of bad-complexioned, ill-tempered, bastard child of a hula hoop and maracas.

The "bad-complexioned, ill-tempered and bastard child" parts of the description are solely mine.

I gotta tell you that, as a 5-year-old kid in Baton Rouge on Memorial Day 1966, I would have loved this shit. My parents, not so much.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

For just a measly extra buck, you could buy a 45 single of the original Teen-Age Rattler song, "as recorded by the sensational Happy Four quartet." As opposed to the sensational Happy Four septet.

Considering that you could go down to the TG&Y dime store and buy a hot-off-the-record-press copy of the Beatles' "Paperback Writer" for something like six bits, I can't see the Happy Four's rattlin' wreck of a hack promotional song as much of a bargain.

THEN AGAIN, this is the 58-year-old me talking and not the 5-year-old me talking. On the other hand, the 5-year-old me had his share of Beatles' records. Until July 1966, that is.

July was the month John Lennon's "we're more popular than Jesus" interview hit the States, and Mama busted up my Beatles records. It was Louisiana; she was far from alone. Apparently, cracking up commie records from Limey purveyors of beatnik music was less inconvenient than actually attending worship services.

Not that I'm still bitter or shit.

BUT BACK to May 1966 and the Teen-Age Rattler.

At the time, the Teen-Age Rattler made no impression on the pre-kindergarten me whatsoever. As a matter of fact, I'd never heard of the things until . . . well . . . today.

My best guess is that the "Rattle in the morning . . . rattle at night . . . rattle anytime . . . it's dynamite!" sensation was a sensation in the same vein Donald Trump is sentient -- hardly.

After all, there DID come to be a Generation X. That could not have happened had the "greatest generation" quite understandably been driven to cut short the rattling lives of their rattling teen offspring.

Now let us speak no more of this. We wouldn't want to give rogue youth social-media "influencers" any ideas.

Does it get any more 1960s than this?

Does it get any more '60s than this 1967 Paul Mauriat LP cover? Inquiring minds, etc., and so on.

My gut reaction is probably not . . . which opens up all kinds of possibilities, being that this is an easy-listening album, not to mention visions of middle-aged Hef wannabes sporting ascots and wildly age-inappropriate garb. Which, of course, argues strongly for this being the most '60s thing ever.

On the other hand, I was 6, my parents had not progressed past 1955, and they made me get a crew cut. Complete with Butch wax.

So my opinion on this might be completely worthless. Alas.

One speaker + 10 watts = HOLY CRAP!

OK, so I have this 1957 Realistic tuner and amplifier. Vacuum-tube city, don't you know?

There's also a 1952 Webcor record changer, a Bluetooth receiver, a little utility mixer . . . and a Gough speaker enclosure built from plans sold by Welsh speaker-designer Jabez Gough in 1961. I've been highly impressed at the sound this cabinet gets out of a single 8-inch driver. Now I'm doubly impressed now that I've replaced the Electro-Voice Wolverine LT-8 triaxial speaker with an older (and heavier) E-V SP8B coaxial driver.

YOU'D THINK a two-way driver would be a bit of a drop-off from the three-way. In this case, you'd be wrong. The difference was marked, and for the better. That SP8B sings in that Gough enclosure -- good high end, great midrange presence and deep bass that's just the right amount of low end.

All this from one 8-inch two-way speaker that was a "starter driver" for your average late-1950s "hi-fi nut" building his own speaker system. Go figure.

For me, though, it just sounds like my childhood . . . only in mono and probably a bit better than the 1962 Magnavox Stereo Theatre that defined "good sound" for a budding Baby Boomer audio geek.

I am sure a smartphone and earbuds serve a purpose. Actually, one good purpose my iPhone often serves is feeding Internet radio to the mid-century audio extravaganza.

I likewise am sure earbuds or "smart speakers" serve a purpose, whatever the hell that might be. Really, I'm sure they're just fine.

But, by God, they ain't this.

And now a word from our sponsor

That's a new low price for the Nostalgio, our best entertainment center with full stereophonic sound. You'll find full details on Page 299 of this year's Christmas wish book.

And, as always, 3 Chords & the Truth is absolutely free.

We now return you to your program.

You gotta do what you gotta do

“Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you.”

— Flannery O’Connor

Plunging into the ruined, moldy heart of a metaphor

Vintage FCC 'history card' for WJAR radio

Last month, an urban explorer trekked into the wilds of East Providence, R.I., in search of adventure and long-abandoned places.

Wielding nothing but a video camera and a respirator, "RnK All Day" brought his YouTube viewers along as he pored through the ruins of radio stations WHJJ, WHJY (94 HJY) and WSNE that once broadcast from the crumbling building at 115 Eastern Ave. He got more than he bargained for -- as did we.

What the intrepid archaeologist of urban abandonment found was a moldering, unsealed time capsule of mid-market AM and FM radio, circa 2002. It almost seemed as if, going on a couple of decades ago, the DJ on 94 HJY was playing Lenny Kravitz's latest CD while the talk guy on WHJJ argued with a caller about George W. Bush . . . and then the apocalypse.

The lights blinked. The phone went dead. A blinding flash. Someone spied a mushroom cloud in the distance.

Then everyone ran from the building, in a panic and in search of a fallout shelter. No one ever came back.

Yes, scavengers would go through the place from time to time. But they were looking for canned goods, cash and booze. Maybe some forgotten weed from the HJY wing. Broadcast electronics held no attraction for nuclear survivors worried more by the threat of irradiated zombies.

Fate had left these postmodern ruins amazingly intact, save for the smashed windows, some trashed rooms . . . and the mold that was everywhere.

THIS WAS the result of no nuclear detonation and the sudden collapse of civilization, though. This was another kind of apocalypse -- a corporate apocalypse.

There were no glowing zombies staggering through deserted streets searching in vain for human brains. The survivors of this apocalypse were the ones who brought it about -- the business-attired men and women walking crisply through cubicled offices in search of shareholder value.

Sometimes, they spat out glib clichés about "thinking outside the box" and "It is what it is." Other times, they merely moaned "EBITA! EBITA!"

A few years ago, one of this country's tens of thousands of "downsized" (or "right-sized" . . . or "redundant" . . . or "laid off" . . . or whatever) radio professionals -- I was told it was a disc jockey fired about 2003 -- cornered a regional program director outside the offices of a "station cluster." He just wanted answers to a few questions.

Would he ever feel useful again?

Was his training -- were his talents --  now useless?

The man in business casual was silent.

"Will I ever fucking work in my profession again!?"

Quoth the Craven "Nevermore."

Yet the suits could move three stations out of one building into another building with new equipment . . . and just abandon all the old. Utterly. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, at the time, of "utterly."

That waste represents "shareholder value," no doubt. Efficiency and belt-tightening, don't you know?

OK, I LIED about the tale of the questioning DJ. I don't know that it happened. I'll bet it probably did somewhere, however. I didn't lie about the apocalypse part. What's befallen radio -- and to a lesser extent, TV -- since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 ushered in the Lord of the Flies is an apocalypse. In ancient Greek, "apocalypse" meant "an unveiling." In modern English, it can mean a prophetic revelation . . . or an inferno . . . or a great disaster.

The tens upon tens of thousands of cashiered broadcasters say, "Take your pick, man. Hard to go wrong." And millions of listeners across the land might agree.

Once, WHJJ was a big deal in Providence. Before 1980, the call letters were WJAR, and for much of its history, it was a pretty big deal in the Northeast. After first taking the air in 1922, WJAR became a charter affiliate of the National Broadcasting Co., in November 1926.

And legendary NBC announcer Don Pardo (of Saturday Night Live and every-damn-thing-else fame) got his start at WJAR in 1938.

SO LOOK at the mysteriously, confoundingly abandoned studios, once the pre-ruinous home to the jewels of the Franks Broadcasting Co., Inc., beginning in 1980. Before Franks Broadcasting, the old WJAR was the pride of The Outlet Company.
 
Outlet owned WJAR for six decades. Franks owned it for a few years. Then it gets consolidatingly confusing until you end up at iHeartMedia, a crapload of assumed debt and -- how do they put it? Ah . . . yes. Efficiencies, economies of scale, elimination of redundancies and . . . "right-sizing." 

It sounds so much better than "You're fired." But it still means "apocalypse." And the abandoned, fully equipped ruins in East Providence still make for a hell of a metaphor for an entire ruined industry and an entire unraveling country.

What you hear wafting across the ether today is substantively denuded. The happy-clappy corporate speak of besuited Visigoths is risible -- especially if you jack up your eyelids with toothpicks, turn your radio on and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to the stupid in the air.

. . . and listen to th. . . .

SORRY. The program server had a bit of a meltdown, nobody's in the building after 5, and I had to drive in from home to reboot it.

Next time that happens, just go online and call up the iHeart station in (fill in the blank). It's playing the same damn thing -- probably at the same damn time. How're you liking those "economies of scale"?

The legions of former radio people -- the first casualties in the apocalypse, the ghosts inhabiting our East Providence metaphor in ruins, the men and women who have radio in their blood and nowhere to show it, the ones who talk incessantly about the old days on Facebook because there are no more new days -- they're not liking those "economies of scale" at all.

And they don't much care for your station, or for bombed-out radio studios full of perfectly good equipment being perfectly ruined.

Neither, I suspect, do they care for metaphors. Unfortunately, it seems as if metaphors are the only damned thing we have left in this sad, sad land.

Don't forget to call in your request to the studio line. No one will answer.

We dropped some brown acid, man

"To get back to the warning that I have received -- you may take it with however many grains of salt you wish -- that the brown acid that has been circulating around us is not, specifically, too good. It's suggested that you do stay away from that. Of course, it's your own trip, so be my guest. But please be advised that there is a warning on that one, OK?"

-- Chip Monck
Master of ceremonies,
Woodstock, 1969

Many odd and sometimes disturbing things about the 1960s and '70s, for those of us who came of age during those decades, can be explained or put into context merely by saying "It was the (fill in the blank)."

If that explanation does not suffice, blame the brown acid, man.

As we consider the person and "music" career of the late Tiny Tim -- seen here in a record-label ad from the June 8, 1968, edition of Billboard magazine -- I'm going straight to the brown-acid excuse.

Dude. Tiny Tim, born Herbert Buckingham Khaury in 1932, was the brown acid. Listening to Tiny Tim on your AM or FM radio . . . watching him on your 21-inch Magnavox . . . it was like being in the presence of an off-key castrato undergoing electroshock treatment.

Boy howdy.


MY UNFORTUNATE double- and triple-knit sartorial choices from the end of 1969 until marrying into a wardrobe-control regimen in 1983? "It was the '70s."

That Tiny Tim sold records and was all over network television and the radio, too? "The brown acid that had been circulating around us was not, specifically, too good."

Seriously. It was some bad shit, man.

You bet your sweet bippy, it was.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful!

It's April 15, the wind chill is something like 10 degrees, it's snowing and just west of here, there was a hellacious blizzard.

In other words . . . oh, what the hell.

Enjoy this bit of yuletide the way it sounded in the 1960s -- Christmas Day programming on KFAB-FM in Omaha, circa 1969. Alas, this aircheck of "Cloud Nine Stereo" -- 99.9 on every FM dial -- was recorded on a dual-track mono tape recorder back in the day.

In transferring the recording to the digital realm, I did what I could to get the most out of the audio.

I'm a wizard that way.

3 Chords & the Truth: Wonderful world of music

When the crazy gets to be too much, I get in a mood for the music equivalent of comfort food. I'll bet you do, too.

My happy place lies in the memories of radio when I could still count my age on two hands and a foot. My happy place is filled with all kinds of music . . . a wonderful world of music that's every bit as satisfying as a plate of fried chicken -- or pan-fried steak and onions -- with a slice of apple pie for dessert.

The comfort music of 3 Chords & the Truth comes from the "misty water-colored mem'ries of the way we were," from AM radios playing Top-40 tunes, from the middle-of-the-road stations on the kitchen radio . . . from trailblazing weekend magazine shows like Monitor on the NBC Radio Network.

ACTUALLY, Monitor was about the only magazine show on network radio before National Public Radio borrowed heavily from the formula beginning in 1971. Only Monitor was much more diverse, ran hours a day all weekend long and played a lot more music.

"Grown-up music," to be sure, but some of it was pretty snappy. In a misty, water-colored mem'ry kind of comfort-foody way.

That's where we're going on the Big Show this week. It's not the first time. Probably won't be the last. Linus had his security blanket; I got this.

And now you got this, too. Enjoy.

IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Music for a time near the end of the world

It's the Big Show, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

We'll be right back, right after these messages

Cliquez ici if you want to print this out and hang it on your bedroom wall

When your brain is 18 and the rest of you is 56 . . . and something makes you think of Mike Douglas.

File under: "Things you'll have to explain to your kids."

How'd we stereo on radio before there was stereo radio?

The era of FM stereo radio began in June 1961, but the era of hi-fi stereo radio dates back to the 1950s.

But in the days before FM multiplex broadcasting, listening to stereo radio required two stations . . . and two radios, one AM and one FM. Or you could just buy a "binaural" AM-FM stereo tuner -- two dials, two tuning knobs, and in stereo mode, it would play AM and FM at the same time.

AM was on the left, FM on the right. (Unless, of course, it was the other way around. Or a complete free-for-all?)
 

What in the world would that have sounded like in, for instance, 1958? Let's take what we know about the capabilities of AM broadcasting and FM stations in the '50s, then see whether we can re-create the binaural AM-FM stereo experience.

It's November 1958. You're in Baton Rouge, La. It's 9 p.m. on a weeknight (Monday through Thursday), and you're in the mood to hear some WJBO "3-D" stereophonic sound on your new hi-fi setup.

ON YOUR NEW binaural high-fidelity tuner, your tune in 1150 on the AM dial. Left channel, check.

On the FM dial at 98.1 megacycles, you tune in WJBO's sister station, WBRL. Right channel, check.

Now it's time to sit back, relax and experience "music in three dimensions." For those of us back here in the future, the result sounds better than you would think.

Then again, so did AM radio in 1958. It's amazing what could be done with a wider AM bandwidth, owners who cared and well-engineered radios in listeners' homes.

I HOPE the following video demonstrates that, as I try to re-create what the WJBO-WBRL, AM-FM stereo pairing might have sounded like. I can't tell you how many times I redid this, trying to get the AM sound "right" . . . AM heard over excellent equipment, much better than what we're accustomed to today, from an era decades past.



I KEPT redoing this because I kept thinking, "No. This sounds too good. This can't be right."

And I kept saying this as someone who has a couple of AM-FM hi-fi tuners made in 1960 and knows that some amplitude-modulated stations, to this day, sound pretty decent on a true wideband tuner. This, despite the Federal Communications Commission -- in order to lessen interference and shoehorn more stations onto the dial three decades ago -- putting brick-wall limits on AM stations' frequency response out of the transmitter at 10 kHz.

A young person with good hearing can perceive frequencies up to 20 kHz. 

But in 1958, many AM stations' transmitters had a frequency response almost as good as FM stations. FM's big advantage was in improved dynamic range, a lower noise floor and, as Steely Dan sang, "No static, no static at all."

Below is a rough representation of the frequency response of the "AM side" -- the left channel -- of the video above.

YOU'LL NOTE that I rolled off the low frequencies, just like a typical AM signal, then sharply rolled off the high end right below 15 kHz. I also bumped up the equalizer curve here and there to "sweeten" the sound a little, as an engineer would have done with even the rudimentary audio processing of the day. I tried not to overdo it. After all, I was worried that it sounded too good; I still wonder what I missed.

Too, the AM channel is more processed -- more compressed and a bit "louder" -- than the FM track. The reason? The easy answer is "That's what AM does."

The longer answer involves an attempt to, first, mimic the lesser dynamic range of AM broadcasting and, second, reflect that AM stations were much more heavily compressed and "hard-limited," because loudness equals distance and listenability on the noisy AM band.

Oh . . . I also added some "AM noise" to the "AM side" of the recording. Not too much, I hope, and not too little, either.

On the "FM side" of the soundtrack, I frankly worry that the audio may be too processed. Alternatively, however, if I were a chief engineer or a program director in 1958 and my AM-FM combo was going to dive into the "binaural stereo" thing . . . I'd want the FM side to match the AM side at least somewhat for loudness.

THAT'S IT for the technical and audio-geek minutiae. I doubt a normal person could stand much more.

Even if you're not a full-bore nerd like me, I hope you've still found a little fascination in this esoteric inquiry into one of the more forgotten aspects of hi-fi and broadcasting.

A phenomenon that births advertising like this (from 1959, after WBRL had changed call letters to WJBO-FM) -- not to mention a moniker like Soundascope Radio -- can't have been a total bust.

Feed your head, feed your head

Click on ad for larger version

Don Draper for Magnavox, 1963.

Click on ad for larger version

Don Draper for 3 Chords & the Truth,
after that one party in Malibu.

Banned in Baton Rouge

When I was a much younger man -- OK, not a man yet at all --  if you were really, really obsessed or pissed off about a local calamity, you always could write to ACTION, please! in the State-Times, right there in River City.

I'm talking a capital "AC" that rhymes with "WHACK" and ends with "SHUN."

Which, on Friday, April 20, 1973, is how we learned Paul McCartney was too filthy for Baton Rouge, and Chuck Berry missed suffering the same fate Fanny Hill did in Boston by this much.

Let's go to the microfiche:

OF COURSE, all those Baton Rougeans who thought the song "terrible" probably never get tired of hearing it today as part of the 200-song rotation on classic-rock radio. To be fair, though, the BBC banned it, too.

"Auntie" banned all the good songs.

But I've wandered a smidge. Anyway, the real significance of l'affaire Wings was that it meant that Baton Rouge was just getting warmed up.

JUST SIX years down the road, the motley metropolis sitting at the corner of coonass and redneck would face an existential cinematic threat that would require a full-bore Interfaith Inquisition to suppress.

The effort to save Baton Rouge from Monty Python's Life of Brian may have been one of the most complete examples of Catholic-Southern Baptist cooperation in the Deep South not involving fishing and the surreptitious consumption of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

And isn't that, when it comes right down to it, the genius of American civil society? Only under the authority of the state can Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists conspire completely enough to stick it to a bunch of heathen Limeys and their smutty, blaspheming moving picture. 

Damn straight, Cletus.

God bless, Boudreaux.

And always look on the bright side of life.

Tom Snyder's alive & well & wrangling hurricanes in Florida

TV legend Tom Snyder, of Tomorrow fame in the 1970s, died a decade ago at age 71.

Well, that's what he wants you to think.

But Revolution 21 has it on good authority that the impish, acerbic NBC anchorman and interviewer -- last seen enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke and wearing a tan leisure suit -- actually snuck off to sunny Florida in 2007.

But he didn't stray far from a TV camera and a microphone.

How?


WELL, we're not sure of all the how-tos and wherefores, but a highly reliable source at a Macedonian investigative-news website says the "death" and re-emergence of Snyder went something like this:

Tom Snyder

Snyder, about 15 years ago, stumbled across the Florida location of Ponce de Leòn's fountain of youth, reputedly located in a remote, uninhabited area somewhere between Cypress Gardens and Legoland. The whole "cancer diagnosis" was a ploy that allowed him, after preliminary planning, to disappear from the public eye. And with his "death," attention shifted away from the one-time media icon who did battle late nights with everyone from Johnny Rotten to Rona Barrett.

Sometime late in 2007, he made his way to central Florida. At some point, he immersed himself in the rejuvenating waters of de Leòn's lost wonder of the New World, then took up meteorology.

Tom Snyder, born again in the magic waters, took on the identity of "Matt Devitt," it is said. The old TV fixture -- once so ubiquitous and recognizable that Dan Ackroyd built a career parodying him on Saturday Night Live -- had undone most telltale signs of his old existence.

Matt Devitt

But not all.

He could lose the leisure suits and the cloud of smoke. He could lose the groovy '70s hairdo. He could lose the past several decades, and lose the public's attention. He could lose his old specialty and pick up a new one.

What he couldn't leave behind, though, was that voice. The mannerisms. His way with words. The impishness.

"Matt Devitt," WINK television weatherman. Yeah, whatever you say "Mr. Devitt."

We'll play along. But you're not really fooling anybody . . . Tom.

We've learned to recognize fake news when we see it. And we damn well know that Tom Snyder will never die. He'll just go to Florida and dunk himself in the old explorer's saving waters as needed.

But don't worry, Tom. We won't tell Rona where you are.

Pure Nebraska. Straight, no chaser.

In south Louisiana, where I was born and raised, you have Cajun music at Fred's in Mamou on Saturday mornings.

In way-rural eastern Nebraska -- by way of a couple of gravel county roads and a winding dirt one, if you're coming from the nearby metropolis of Brainard  (population 330) -- there's a polka band at the Loma Tavern on Sunday evenings.

You don't stumble across Loma, an unincorporated hilltop village of 30 souls, a handful of houses, a church, an empty hardware store . . . and the Loma Tavern. No, you have to look hard for Loma.

Ever see the 1990s cult movie, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar with Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze and John Leguizamo? The fictional Snydersville, the middle-of-nowhere burg where they get stranded, is really Loma. And the bar is the Loma Tavern, which used to be the Bar-M Corral.

If you didn't know that before you find your way to the Loma Tavern, you'll know it before you leave.

Anyway,  in this stretch of Nebraska -- Butler County, like many stretches of Nebraska -- you have two kinds of people: Czechs and more Czechs . . . though I did see someone who copped to being German. And on this seasonable spring evening in Little Bohemia, 13-year-old accordionist Addie Hejl (pronounce Heil) was fronting the band for the first time. Then again, she's only been playing for a year.

Sounds like she's been playing for 20 but, no, just a year.

BEING FROM bayou country and having been force-fed a Saturday-night diet of Lawrence Welk during my formative years, I am not unfamiliar with accordions. Or -- thanks again to Mr. Welk -- polka music.

But polka is a Midwestern thing. In eastern Nebraska, polka music on small-town radio stations every Sunday afternoon is akin to Cajun music on small-town Louisiana radio stations every Saturday morning. I think, truth be told, that the DNA of folks on the Czech and German plains of this state has developed a polka mutation, much as my swamp-Gallic DNA has the extra Jolie Blonde chromosome.

The shared trait of the two mutations is the accordion. That and little roadhouses in the middle of nowhere that, on warm and lazy weekend evenings, become the center of the musical universe. Ask Addie Hejl, who still is eight years shy of being able to knock back a legal cold one.

When I was still eight years shy of being able to knock back a legal cold one, I, too, found myself in a few centers of the musical universe in parts of southeastern Louisiana more familiar to bullfrogs and bream than actual people.

A few of them, to tell you the truth, made the Loma Tavern look like the Cocoanut Grove. One in Whitehall -- in deepest, darkest Livingston Parish -- had a drop ceiling . . . with the bottoms of beer cases substituting for tiles.

I REMEMBER sitting at a table drinking my Coca-Cola as my parents and my aunt and uncle sat and drank their beers. It was a quiet Sunday evening -- not much going on except for another 45 dropping on the jukebox.

It was Tony Orlando and Dawn's "Knock Three Times."

Hey girl what ya doin' down there
Dancin' alone every night while I live right above you
I can hear your music playin'
I can feel your body swayin'
One floor below me you don't even know me
I love you . . .

Oh my darling,
Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me
Twice on the pipe if the answer is no
Oh my sweetness,
Means you'll meet me in the hallway
Twice on the pipe means you ain't gonna show

AT THIS, Aunt Ceil looked up at the ceiling.

At the cardboard beer-case bottoms that were the ceiling. At the Budweiser and Schlitz and Dixie and Falstaff and Miller High-Life "ceiling tiles."

"Knock three times on that ceiling, and the damn thing'll fall on you," she deadpanned.

I don't think Coca-Cola blew out of my nose, but it had to have been close. That may have been when I decided that Aunt Ceil was -- by far -- the funniest person in Daddy's German-Dutch-Irish family.

I THOUGHT of these things as I stood in the back of a century-old country bar in Nebraska listening to a teenage accordion wunderkind and a couple of guys a generation and two older playing polka music -- things half a country and a lifetime ago made present here and now by musical ties that bind.

As I looked across the tavern, through the dancing couples and toward the band, I saw something else entirely. I saw Mama and Daddy, alive again and younger than myself, two-stepping across the dance floor to a country band in Killian, La. I saw a time when a little honky-tonk between river and swamp seemed like a big thing to a kid.

To me.

The thought of trying to explain to strangers why a 50-something man was crying in the back of a little bar in Loma, Neb., kept the tears -- and humiliation -- at bay.

Maybe geezers like myself could be forgiven for thinking that, maybe, 13-year-old girls instead should aspire to play in a Runaways tribute band. Call it the Queens of Noise.

It's just that those accordions will get you every time.

Every. Damn. Time.