My LP collection is a hodgepodge. I’ve got an obscure album from the Red Crayola and I’ve got the entire catalog of Men At Work. I’ve got a box set of Tex Ritter and a 12″ Lilli Vanilli single. When folks come over and rummage through the lot, I get a little on the defensive (especially if they start at the M’s). I’m not always ready to admit that this goofy collection is representative of my musical passions. But the truth is that it does represent who I am perhaps not so much as a musician but as a person –wishy washy, goofy, a music lover, open-minded and someone who came of age somewhere around the year 4.5 billion (earth time).
I think often of our representation through music. This came into the forefront recently reading this article about Rio’s ganglands. As the journalist rides through one of the atrociously crime-infested favelas, the lyrics blaring through the alleys is representative of the prevailing local attitude –”you’re not worth the dick you suck. Dick you suck, dick you suck.”
This line of thought always brings me to the people in my life whose entire lives are now open to me for reflection, particularly my grandfathers who both lived into their nineties and are now both dead.
My mother’s father was a poor German catholic who moved from Germany to Argentina somewhere near year 4.5 Billion and some seventy odd years before I discovered Men At Work. He wandered up to Texas some time before war broke out with a stint in Mexico for whose government he studied U.S. gang-fighting tactics (some of the coolest pics of my grandfather show him firing a tommy gun).
I’m not exactly sure what he was doing in Texas when he met my grandmother and neither did the U.S. government who soon put him in an Oklahoma concentration camp. My grandfather undeniably had Nazi sympathies but no affiliations at the time. Nevertheless he stayed in U.S. concentration camps for most of the war…sort of a weird ironic family history there. In the last year of WWII he was given the choice to stay in the camp or get shipped back to Germany. He chose the latter; and they let him go, along with my aunt (his daughter) and my grandmother (in whose belly sat my mother).
Two weeks after arrival in Germany, the village they lived in was bombed and the entire village population fled into the hills –my grandfather carrying a mattress over his head to protect his little family.
When the war was over he worked for the Allied government for a while. I understand he got involved in some funny business. He didn’t stick around long though until they moved back to Texas.
In Texas my grandmother did most of the stable work – she was a grade school teacher. My grandfather wandered around trying to get different bizarre engineering projects off the ground, the brainchildren in many cases of former Nazis many of whom lived in the Colorado mountains and who he visited often. Stuff like: generating power from ocean waves, and flying saucers.
Eventually he ran a metal perforation plant on Houston’s North side. The financier of this operation was a secretive German, I never met and who was only referred to as “the colonel.” I worked at this plant every Summer and eventually lost a finger joint to the plant. The plant did well for a while, no thanks to my grandfather really. This was during the oil boom and it was hard not to be successful at the time in Houston. Sometime in the late eighties the plant failed entirely and this was largely due to my grandfather’s ability to run something into the ground. My grandfather spent the rest of his life retired in the Texas Hill Country, filling out Publisher’s Clearinghouse sweepstakes forms (except for the time he was interviewed by an Australian journalist about that flying saucer in his garage).
As interesting as my grandfather’s life is, his was in many ways a huge failure. Especially for him, I imagine, the giant Germanic failures of his lifetime were part of a shattered world view from which he never recovered. And this is what comes out in my grandfather’s musical self.
He was not, in fact, a musical person. He didn’t sing or whistle tunes or play an instrument. But he liked to air drum – not like a kit, but like a marching snare. He liked to describe the big sound of a marching band. The boom of the drums, the blaring trumpets. This descriptive talk thrilled him and he did it a lot. To me it’s really the memory of a failed disastrous culture filled with “what if’s” that my grandfather must have mulled over and over in his head and in his letters.
Nice post. Thanks. And, uh, I love Men at Work. Tex Ritter and the Red Crayola aren’t too shabby either.
I don’t know how any life which involved a UFO in the garage could be considered a failure.
I also love Men at Work, sadly.
“UFO” – not exactly. It was mostly identifiable and it didn’t fly but it was an object. But yes, his was a fascinating life though I’m not sure he took much comfort in that. I think he always had to pull a few fast ones and stuff his pockets just to get by in this world. He got some lucky breaks but didn’t do much with them and I always wondered if his complete lack of melody wasn’t due to a heavy weight on his back.
John – also in the M’s but not an embarrassment, one lovely silk-screened Mike Gunn record. And thanks for the compliment, although reading it back now –the post could have used some editing and a clearer direction.
I only know the Men at Work hits. What records are essential?
Hell, I’m fairly embarrassed about a couple of the Gunn records for that matter. As for editing and clear direction. You are well aware of my glass house so I’ll just move on.
Speaking of editing and direction, pretend the last two sentences I wrote up there actually were one, and thus made sense.
mrshl – I don’t think I’ve ever read Men at Work and essential records together before but if such a thing exists it’s not much use since they only have three records anyway. You’ll really want to hear all so you can compare the writing styles of big hitter Colin Hay with that of his sometimes partner Ron Strykert to that of the musical virtuoso Greg Ham.
Greg Ham plays all the memorable instruments including flute and sax. His lyrical style is truly hammy. He only has one song on the first album, “Helpless Automaton” about a robot with feelings –I think, I really don’t know what he’s talking about. But he takes over the forgettable final album. Don’t make me listen to it to find out how culpable he is for that failure.
Wait, he was sent from the US to Germany in 1944/5?! Was there a prisoner exchange or something, or how did that work?
He wasn’t a POW so to speak. He was interned like the Japanese on the West Coast. It’s little known history. The last camp they had him in was in Corpus Christi. My aunt made one of my cousins do a high school report about it and was very surprised at how difficult it was to collect primary sources.
Apparently they gave him the choice to stay in camp or be shipped back to Germany. He had no way of knowing when the war would end and he was bored stiff: as depicted in this sketch that his bunk mate drew.
I posted the sketch on NAP in the year 4.5 Billion. The text is sort of mock Encyclopedia.
thanks a lot for that little known piece of history. Really.
Empathy, or whatever…. ain’t u too harsh on your grandfather? A colorful life is a success in my book. One usually has a lot less control than he thinks on his life.
a.s.o.
bridelice – you have a point, maybe I am being harsh although I could actually be a lot harsher. My own painful feelings regarding my grandfather aside I have always appreciated him very much on a certain level. I mean, b/w photographs with a fedora, tommy guns and federales? (I really need to scan those) –not to mention my own cherished experience working in a metal perforation plant in my junior high and high school years. But I meant it more in how he might have seen himself, not that he acted like a failure –he acted like Baron Von Münchhausen, minus grace and wit.