Out With The Old..In With The New!

Another chapter of "my life in music"! 1979ish???

After Mom died, things moved very fast for me. The first thing I had to deal with was selling our family’s house. This was the only house I had ever lived in, but big changes were flying at me and I had to deal with it. My sibs offered me the house at a fair price, but I felt I needed to break away. I was caught in a whirlwind and felt compelled to start my new life.

First off, my high school sweetheart and I immediately found a decent house to rent in an OK part of Charlotte. It was “across the train tracks” from my nice neighborhood, pretty redneck, but OK. It was a 3 bedroom house with a fenced in backyard for all of $250 a month. After my sibs and I took what we wanted from our house, we cleared it out and my girlfriend (Wynn) and I moved in together. Mom would not have approved of course, but I felt free and grown up. Change is good! My dog (“Caesar”) and Wynn’s cat (....”Kitty”..) probably weren’t too thrilled with the arrangement, but Wynn and I dug it. It was all so natural.

Of course, selling the family home had some very...unusual moments. We originally tried to sell it ourselves, but not much happened (with the exception of a neighbor coming down and seriously suggesting that we don’t sell to...”blacks” - we responded by telling him that we’re gonna sell to whoever gives us the money!), so we went with a couple of real estate agents. Poor souls.

Since my brother and sister lived out of town, I was left to handle it. The first call from the real estate agent went like this: “Hi Gil. Ummm...I showed the house today and I think you need to do some serious flea-bombing - we walked in and there was a black cloud of fleas that went up to about knee level on my clients and myself.” OK, no problem. The fleas were bombed.

The second call came one morning after a night when I let some friends park their cars in our front yard while we all went and enjoyed Charlotte’s Festival In The Park. The house was vacant, we still owned it, and there was no place to park at all during that yearly event (the same event that I saw all of those great local rock bands back in the day!), so cool! Why not?

When my buddies and I returned to the house, we discovered that all of the cars in the front yard had their tires slashed! WTF? Could it be a sinister message from our racist neighbor? Probably just vandals, but bizarre none the less. About 3 cars were left in the yard overnight - the owners would come back the next day to deal with it. The next morning I got another call from our poor real estate agent; “Gil...do you know there’s a bunch of cars in your front yard with their tires slashed? Looks pretty bad..” I think I freaked her out a bit when I replied that yes, I knew about the cars. They would be gone shortly.

The house eventually sold, and I gained possession of Mom’s Buick. Now I had my own home, a decent car, and my girlfriend and her cat were living in sin with me and my dog. Pretty sweet, and Mom would have been very pleased to know that our sinful living wasn’t for too long, due to the fact that my girlfriend and I went and got married! In Rock Hill! By a Justice of the Peace! With our best friends in attendance! And we were drunk!

It wasn’t a spur of the moment decision - we just weren’t religious and thought it would be neat to do it this way. The Justice of the Peace turned out to be a bit cranky and actually threatened to stop the ..”ceremony” if our party didn't start behaving in a ..... more respectful manner. Screw that! I’ve already paid you your $35! Where's my gift bag containing toothpaste and condoms! It was a lot of fun, regardless, and we liked the idea of being married. We also learned that even if you don’t invite family to the wedding, you can send out announcements and still get cool gifts! I’m sure my sibs were disappointed but we did it the way we wanted to, and at that particular time of my life, it just had to be.

Wynn and I also had the greatest jobs in the universe. We now both worked at Charlotte's coolest record stores! Wynn worked at the main store and when they opened a smaller satellite store on the other side of town, I got a job there. The 2 store “chain” was called New World Records and for a while at least, it was heaven and yes, another life-changer!

I don’t remember the exact dates when this happened, but during my time at the record store, I became aware that something was up with rock music. My primary love at the time was still prog and jazz-rock fusion, but it was becoming a real stretch to find decent stuff to listen to. As time went by, Jamie Hoover kept putting a bug in my ear about new wave and punk. I was also noticing that we were selling more and more of this type of music at the store. At first, I was really put off by it all. I thought it sucked. I thought the musicians couldn't play. It was more horrible than disco!

But one night I was at Jamie’s house and he more or less forced me to listen to the first LP’s of Devo, Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello and the Talking Heads. Holy crap!

It clicked. Boy, did it ever.