By Gary Topping–
I admit it: I was a pretty weird kid. I knew it at the time and was unrepentant. Still am.
I rarely listened to popular music. I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s when popular music evolved from “How Much is That Doggie in the Window?” through “Rock Around the Clock” to Elvis Presley and eventually to the Beatles in the 1960s. Much of it I held in contempt, some of it I tolerated, and a little bit of it I liked. But I never spent a large part of my time listening to it, nor do I to this day. Of all the things available to me when I drive my Jeep, I use four-wheel drive more often than the radio.
My dad had an interesting—though undisciplined—collection of classical music on 78 rpm shellac records (I still have them, but no way to play them) which eventually grew to include 33 1/3 monaural vinyl and later even stereo LPs. He had an uncle who was an opera buff and loaned me his collection of Met recordings. When I myself began to study music, I added a love for jazz to my classical interests. I loved the Basie big band, but most of my interest was in the past-swing era of bebop and what was called at the time “progressive” jazz. These guys were virtuoso instrumentalists, much better than anything in the pop world, playing over complex chord progressions.
Part of my life as a musical hermit, no doubt, was my general revulsion to the larger culture of the day. Appearances were everything: my parents felt compelled to dress up anytime they went shopping, even to the grocery store. Political life was dominated by the likes of Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles—old bald men in gray suits chasing Commies. I still have a distaste for politics dating from then.
Amazingly, it was popular culture that pointed a way for me a way out of that world of schlocky music, schlocky politics, a phony social standards. It began with “Easy Rider”: just get on a motorcycle and ride away from it all (well, admittedly after scoring a big drug deal, which I wasn’t about to do). Then there was “Five Easy Pieces,” where Jack Nicholson escapes from the sterile values of an obsessively musical family and a ditzy redneck girlfriend by abandoning all his possessions and hitching a ride on a log truck at a gas station somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
Mostly, though, it was Carole King. Like almost everyone in the late 1960s I listened to her magnificent “Tapestry” album with its engaging cover photo of her by a window, barefoot and with two cats. Talk about laid back! She sang about ditching phony and dehumanizing social demands and just adopting natural relationships with each other.
How about, for example, “So Far Away:
“You’re so far away.
Doesn’t anyone ever stay in one place anymore?
It would be so fine to see your face at my door.
You’re so far away.”
Or “You’ve Got a Friend:
“You just call out my name,
And you know wherever I am
I’ll come running, to see you again.
Winter, spring, summer or fall
All you have to do is call
And I’ll be there.
You’ve got a friend.”
That was it: I was a Carole King hippie. I didn’t do drugs, sex or rock and roll, but I could be a friend.
Being a friend won’t be enough to save the broken world we’re living in. But it’s a start. One could do worse.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles. Signature Books recently published his latest work titled D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian.
