Love It To Death

Love It To Death

Recently my mother tells me she gave away her records and roller skates when she got married.  “I thought that’s what a good wife did,” she says.

I think back to the nineteen sixties, to our home on the south west side of Grand Rapids, in the Kelloggsville School District, just about a mile as the crow flies from Home Acres, the small, nineteenth century business district most recognizable by the intersection of Division and 44^th Street.  I wait while my memory catches up to the factual data.  I recall there was a pharmacy called Shippy’s which burned; dad had some indistinct films of the fire.  There was also an old style five-and-dime called Ben Franklin’s where we often stopped, though I can’t remember what we could buy for a dime.  Up Division a little, there was a plaza with two stores; according to neighborhood legend, the helicopter Santa Claus was arriving in tangled in power lines there one Christmas.  Actually, it was Evansville, Indiana in the year 1967, but the neighborhood legends converted many stories into local events.  It seems irrelevant where it happened; these kinds of stories had power over us kids.  The fact remained; somewhere a hundred kids could never believe in Santa Claus again.  Regardless of the attempts to label the poor man as one of Santa’s helpers, kids think in extreme terms.  There was no more Santa, because they saw him crash and die.

I clearly picture mom, lying on her stomach, face in a pillow, on the living room floor, and listening to records on the stereo.  She is motionless as the music plays.  I strain to understand the scene.  Dad is at work, and it is evening, so I am probably in the fourth grade, aged nine, in 1968.  The music is the Everly Brothers hits, “All I Have To Do Is Dream,” and “Cathy’s Clown,” oldies by this time.  The day has come to an end and everything is quiet.  I feel like something is missing, but I don’t know what.  Scarcely more than a decade before, mom was single, riding in cars with boys, and listening to the high energy sounds of the new star, Elvis Presley.  Now, she is the mother of four boys with a part time job scheduled for full time.  Her cruising days are over.  Elvis is hoping to make a come-back after getting lost in Hollywood films mom has hardly watched.

At age nine, I have no idea what is about happen in our home.  Scarcely two years later, in 1970, Alice Cooper releases his album, “Love It To Death.”  It contains the hit song, “Eighteen.”  The shock rocker claims to have driven “a stake through the heart of the love generation.”  My brothers and I have no idea a love generation is taking place.  More correctly, that the entire love generation experience is just winding down to a slow, gasping death.  

My brother Dan launches my family into the future with the purchase of that same Alice Cooper album.  I doubt he understands the full implications, and I am sure if he does, he thinks it’s “cool.”  Dan begins to set up his sub-culture behavior in the home.  He doesn’t attempt to play Alice Cooper on the family stereo, at least not when any other person is home.  He takes to the basement, and occasionally barricades himself in his bedroom.  He owns a portable AM/FM/Record Player, about the size of my history book.  The single speaker is about the size of the top of a pop can.  The key is that it’s Dan’s property, his possession.  No one tells him what to do with it, so long as he doesn’t get in the way with it.  He doesn’t.  He chooses the path of passive resistance.  He begins to fade from view.  I go into his bedroom or the basement, to find him hunched over the record player, with a full sized album on it, nearly covering the entire player.  He calls me over to it.

As I come closer, I sense a change; Dan has done something momentous.  It takes me some time to grasp precisely what he has done.  In short, he has gone outside of our entire paradigm, outside my parents’ sphere of influence, and, like some adventuring tomb raider, has brought back a relic of a wider world.  It is shocking in that the relic is not what I expect.  It is not a token of stability and order, quite the contrary.  It is strange; dark and dangerous, it brings the revelation that the outside world is not safe and good.  Rather, it is a place of monsters and morbidly dangerous agents of evil.  If there is good in the world, we do not discern it from the Alice Cooper album.

“The Ballad of Dwight Frye” is playing.  Until this very moment, my conception of music has included a wide range of bright and hopeful strains, from church hymns to movie themes, popular classics, and the easy tunes of country and western radio my dad listens to.  The sounds emanating from the miniature record player are alien and dark, with difficult rhythm and vocals which imitate an insane captive of an asylum.  It seems wrong.  Dan beams with delight, despite the deeply melancholy song.  He instinctively senses he has made a valuable discovery.  He compels me to listen further, while he puts on a song called “Black Juju.”  I am not prepared for it.  It seems to be the product of dark magic, mesmerizing as it is frightening.  I have little or no frame of reference for the song, and eventually leave the room before it is finished.  I do not understand, but it is too late.  In spite of mom’s best efforts in shielding us from the outside world, successfully obstructing our view of the love generation, drugs, the issues of racism and equal rights, the changing role of women in society, war and peace in the Vietnam era, and new issues on sexuality, we have discovered our own culture.  Dan has opened a window that can never be shut.