26 July, 2015 Houston, TX
It was a chilly Saturday night in
Washington, D.C. Just after I had gone to bed, my mother realized to
her chagrin that she had forgotten to wash my clothes for me to take
to boarding school, and I would need to have them prior to her taking
me there mid-afternoon the following day. So, unwilling to go off and
leave her 9-year-old son alone in the apartment for a couple of
hours, she had no choice but to wake me up and have me go to the
laundromat with her.
Our apartment was too small to
accommodate washer and dryer, so we had to use coin-operated machines
at a laundry on Pennsylvania Avenue – just a few short blocks away.
We walked in and Mom and I began loading up a couple of machines,
then feeding it detergent and coins, and then settled down to let the
washers do their stuff.
Now, there is nothing more BORING to a
kid than a laundromat after midnight!!! I would have gladly sat down
and read the telephone directory instead of coming here, but I had no
choice in the matter. So I walked around the place, bleary-eyed, checking it out.
It wasn't very big, and I soon found that it was furnished with a
JUKE BOX!! Well, there was a positive thing, I thought. I could bum a
couple of nickels from Mom and at least have something to listen
to... and so I did.
I looked at the many selections
available and did not recognize much of anything as I scanned the
little cards on the display. I repeated the process and stopped at a
song that rang a bell: “Blue Moon.” I remembered it from a couple
of years back, I guess. It was a soft, slow song, crooned by Elvis
Presley.(NOTE: Blue Moon was on the B-side of Just Because, released in 1956.)
OK, I thought, that's it! And with that, inserted my nickel!
It quickly clattered down through the mechanism, and when that noise
stopped, the jukebox commenced another series of clickings, whirrings, and other
noises, and I watched fascinated as a device skimmed along atop a
rack of some fifty 45rpm vinyl records that the box contained, then it
stopped, a device moved into the stack, and retrieved the disc containing
the desired song, placed it onto a turntable below, and the tone arm
deployed and descended, and the familiar hissing and ticking of a
vinyl record being played came through the large speakers of the box.
The place was void
of people except my mother and I, the street outside was deserted, too, and the only noises to be heard
were the soft rumblings of the washers. My mother had sat down to relax and had
already begun reading a book; all was calm - all was quiet. I waited with eager anticipation to hear Elvis, but that's not what got played at all. Neither of us were prepared for what
happened next.
♪♫☼♪♫
Suddenly, the speakers of the jukebox
exploded with the strangest noises I had ever heard in all my nine tender years:
This guy started off the song with something like “Bawmbabba
bawmbabba dang-da-dang-dang ...” just this CRAZY stuff blaring out
of the juke box on Pennsylvania Avenue at 2 o'clock in the morning!!♪♪♪♪♪
If I was startled at this wailing
cacophony, my mother had nearly been knocked out of her chair – the
night's silence and her literary concentration completely shattered with this
strange song. My mother for silence did quickly beg, but all in vain,
since jukeboxes have only one volume setting: “HIGH!!”
Neither she nor I could do a thing but
let the phonograph needle deal out its worst, and pray that it was a
short song. It was only about three minutes, although it seemed like it went on for an hour!
My mother was fit to be tied, and asked me why on earth I chose such
an oddball song, out of all those on the playlist.
This was one question I was very much
prepared to answer. I selected “Blue Moon” because I knew it was
a soft song, crooned by Elvis... and how was I to know there was a remake, Doo-Wop
style?? It was an honest mistake. Besides, and in defense of silly
songs, there were many, many goofy songs out around the time, such as
the Chipmunks' “Witch Doctor”, whose main chorus was “Oo-ee-oo
a- a, ting-tang walawalabing-bang” and another song that sang of a
“one-eyed, one-horn, flying purple people-eater,” and yet another
that went “Once upon a time, the goose drank wine and the monkey
chewed tobacco on the streetcar line; the line it broke, the monkey
got choked, and they all went to heaven in a little rowboat!” So
this one fit right in!
The laundromat was located on the
bottom floor of a multi-storey apartment building, European style. My
mother feared that at any minute the people upstairs would descend in a
rage and bawl us out and call the cops on us for playing the music so
loud, but, happily, no-one showed up. We continued the laundry chores in silence. The dryer later buzzed and the
clothes were now ready. Basket in hand, we walked the quiet, deserted
streets of Washington, D. C. toward home – the funny song still
resounding in our ears!!
When I got to school Sunday, I excitedly told my schoolmates of the funny song that blared out “Bomb-bomb-bomb, Nag-nag-nag, Yu-koneeyak – badak!” (which is what it sounded to ME like, and as I described it) and everybody thought it was a hilarious experience to startle my mother and wake the neighbors with a loud jukebox playing at 2 am!!
EPILOGUE:
Now, we didn't know it then, but
we had just heard for the very first time a runaway hit song that had only
been released a few short weeks before. On February 15, 1961, an
unknown rock-n-roll group calling themselves “The Marcels” were
sneaked into a Pittsburgh, PA, recording studio, did two takes of the
song within ten minutes and quickly left. A promo man there heard the
recording and took it that very night to WINS radio station, where popular DJ
Murry K loved it so much he played it on the air immediately.
Within days, this unknown band who
covered a previously-known song in a radically different style, had a top hit on their hands! Within
a few weeks of release, the song hit #1, (bumping an Elvis song
to #2!) and stayed there for three weeks!
Little did any of us know that this
very song would be an anthem of sorts for a genre of music much later called
“Doo-Wop”, and would be considered one of the finest examples of
that style. Fifty years into the future, and oldies station still
play it, along with many other tunes we heard when they first came
out on our little transistor radios - over WEAM radio, Washington,
D.C.
