By Null
As a working-class kid, I’ve always had to work. I started working on a dairy farm when I was in elementary school. I didn’t get a paycheck, but my parents loved me, provided room and board, and keep me warm in a 100-year-old farmhouse in the wilds of Michigan. As with many families at the time, Reaganomics put an end to the dairy farm, and we had to escape the collectors in the middle of the night.
We landed in Arizona where I attended middle school. During this period, my only jobs were taking care of the lawn and making sure the pool was clean. The workload was considerably less compared to the farm, which was nice because it allowed me more time to obsess about music, become an avid reader, and explore the highs and lows of puberty enhanced social interactions.
High school found me back in Michigan. This time we didn’t live in vast farmland; we moved to one her small towns. When I finally received my driver’s license, I was able to get my first real paying job at a tiny, little drug store in our tiny, little town. It was around this time that the cornerstone and foundation of my world began to coalesce.
My meager paycheck would provide gas for my run-down Ford Escort. It ran on diesel, and I could fill the gas tank for about ten bucks. A full tank would last two weeks. I’d buy a few packs of cigarettes, a bottle of Pepsi, and a few glass bottles of Perrier. I would consume these while driving around listening to music or while sitting in my room reading. I began exploring the great novels in the canon of literature, fiction, philosophy, and poetry. I read history books. I continued to obsess on music. I discovered punk rock and realized that I wasn’t the only one whose heart the world was breaking. These books and albums changed my life forever. My friend, Jake, and I would drive to used bookstores in Ann Arbor to find cheap copies of books. The university kids read the deep stuff.
I had a few bucks leftover, so I would go through Alternative Tentacles and Discord Records catalogs. These were real, paper catalogs, which would show up in punk fanzines, or in the mail. I would send cash through the mail and receive brilliant punk rock cassettes a few weeks later by Alice Donut, NoMeansNo, Tragic Mulato, Doc Corbin Dart, Fugazi, Minor Threat, and the like. The punk kids played the deep stuff.
If I wanted to get my hands on an album by Joy Division, The Cure, The Smiths, and the like, Jake and I had to drive south, closer to the big cities, where we could find record stores. There weren’t any record stores in our small towns.
However, the small drug store where I worked contained an anomaly. Inconspicuously placed between allergy medicine and Dr. Scholl’s Food Pads was a wooden cabinet made specifically for housing about 100 cassette tapes. It was crudely painted black, and many of the slots were empty. The cassettes inside were secured by two glass doors fashioned with a lock.
At the time, a new album on cassette cost somewhere between eight and ten dollars. Most of the tapes in the case were marked at $4.99, while others were priced even cheaper; some were $2.99. I immediately assumed they would be crappy truck-stop knock-offs of questionable quality. To my surprise, there were many newer tapes and a plethora of classic rock titles by such artists as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and The Who. I assumed these were mispriced. As an employee of the drug store, I also received a 40% discount. It was a small town and there were not many people who worked at the store. I guess the owner, who was also the pharmacist, decided to show his gratitude toward his employees with such a generous discount. I’m pretty sure he was the richest guy in town; the rumor was owned his own plane.
I could buy these tapes for next to nothing, which was great for a high school kid on a budget. I still needed to send away in the mail for punk rock records and make the occasional pilgrimage to record stores in the big city. However, my classic rock knowledge was about to be greatly extended.
I already had most of the classic Rolling Stones albums from the 1960s. I had also made the decision that the last great Stones record was Exile on Main Street from 1972. The drug store case contained Emotional Rescue from 1980. I only knew David Bowie from the radio, but I was very curious. The drug store case contained The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, also from 1972. I had a few Beatles records, but lacked a general knowledge of their short output. The drug store case contained the unheard Magical Mystery Tour.
After I got paid, I took the key, which was kept under the cash register. I grabbed these three cassettes from the case and locked it back up. When I went to the cash register to pay for them, I was informed that I did not need to wait until I got paid. I could buy anything in the store, at any time. It would simply be subtracted from my paycheck. This cassette case was becoming more magical by the minute. I could buy a $2.99 tape for $1.79. A $4.99 tape would cost me $2.99.
After work, I drove home on a moonless winter night. The few streetlights and porchlights of the smalltown smeared colors across the wet and worn pavement. I threw Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust into the tape player and when the desperation of “Five Years” hit my ears, I took a turn down the back, gravel roads to allow side one to play out. I finally realized why the album was held in such high regard. A few days later, I learned that The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour almost functioned as a continuation of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The instrumentals where a surprise. I then listed to my first post-1972 Stones record, Emotional Rescue. I could take or leave some of the songs, but the fact that the song “Indian Girl” would have gone unnoticed had I not bought this cassette seemed tragic; it remains one of my favorite Stones songs and indicted that there were more juicy bits after 1972.
The following weeks were filled with school, youthful mixed emotions, dreams, and despair. I stocked shelves and logged inventory in the back of the store. The days went by. I walked past the meager cassette display and found that there were new cassettes. I assumed that when it was restocked, the cassettes I bought would be replaced with the same titles, following the logic that if someone bought Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars there was a good chance someone else would also buy it. If you sell all cans of Coke, you don’t restock, or replace them, with milk.
Yet, I found that Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, and the Stones’ Goat Head Soup were the new tenants in the drug store. None of these titles were there last week. I quickly grabbed all three of them. As I took the cassettes up to the front, I asked the cashier working that night who stocks the cassette tapes. “Oh, some guy comes in every week or so. We don’t have anything to do with it.” Curious. I wanted to ask more questions, but I didn’t want to jinx what I was hoping would be a pattern.
I continued on with my life. I devoured these tapes along with the tapes I continued to buy at the expensive record stores closer to Detroit and the punk rock stuff I ordered in the mail.
A few weeks later, the pattern continued. The Beatles’ Abby Road showed up, along with Bowie’s Pin-Ups and The Stones’ It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll. In addition, John Lennon’s last two albums—Double Fantasy and, the posthumous, Milk and Honey—made an appearance. This is where I acquired a soft spot for Yoko Ono as she presented herself in the domestic period with Lennon and the looming sadness of his murder.
The weeks that followed presented me with Bowie’s Station to Station and, my introduction to his “Berlin period,” Heroes. John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, and Mind Games also showed up in the consecutive weeks. I fell in love with these albums and equated them with the more “radical” lyrics of the political punk rock I was devouring in unison.
I was experiencing an explosion of art and ideas. I was beginning to grasp the ideas of humanism and radical politics in my reading of literature, philosophy, and history. I was making an outline of the canon of ideas, not only intellectually, but also musically, as far as popular, Western music was concerned. When I went to the big record stores to get the new R.E.M. release, I was also picking up titles by Violent Femmes and The Doors. I also began filling out the missing records in my Beatles, Stones, and Bowie collections. I needed to fill in the missing gaps, which the “mysterious drug store cassette dealer” failed to fulfill.
I came away with a new appreciation for The Stones albums post-1972. Many of them lacked the excitement and fire of their 1960s records, but they made up for it with a world-weary nonchalance, which had its own defeated and depressing charm. It extended my Stones appreciation all the way to 1980.
I became well versed in all The Beatles albums and most of Lennon’s solo albums, the latter of which contains gems that no one seems to ever mention.
The awkward, other-worldliness of David Bowie became something I embraced. His “rock band period” from 1970-1973 is great. The band is on fire. The strange Station to Station has become one of my favorites, and Heroes is the best of his “Berlin period” with the uncomfortable, insular, and claustrophobic Orwellian lyrics.
Shortly before I quit the job, The Who’s Who’s Next and a few Neil Young tapes showed up, as well as Bob Dyaln’s Greatest Hits. Let us not forget Pink Floyd’s Relics and Works compilations, which introduced me to their early recordings. These were the parting gifts from my “tape fairy-godfather.” There were other titles I bought over my time working at the drug store in this sleepy, small town. The years have taken some of these memories from me, as my life has been filled with digesting seemingly endless amounts of music and art.
Later in life, when I would talk with other music junkies about jazz, punk rock, metal, and what-not, I was often surprised at my extensive knowledge of these monumental bands in the classic rock canon. It seemed a bit unusual. As I said before, I was a working-class kid. The only reason I was able to fill my obsession with these artists is because I got it all for dirt cheap. It felt as though they were gifts; the drug store made no money from me.
Music and the recording process have always been magical to me. We could not stream music on the internet. If we bought a cassette tape, we listened to it. Even if we were not fond of it, we still listened to it. Some of the albums we learned to love over time. When we dislike an album, we had tons of reasons why we didn’t like it, because we listened to it a lot before we passed it on to a friend at school. Though music seems to be available to almost everyone now, it has also diminished in value. It can be deleted in a second. If it isn’t adored immediately, it can be replaced or eliminated in the second. Patience and understanding are both skills.
The last week I worked in the drug store, the pharmacist asked me if I could deliver some prescription drugs to an old lady. I was a bit surprised by this request, but I acquiesced. I took the paper bag full of prescription drugs and the directions scribbled on a piece of paper by the pharmacist. I headed down long country roads surrounded by cornfields. It was a hot and humid day. The sun was blinding. I kept checking the address on a piece of paper. I was sure I was lost.
Finally, I came upon an isolated and timeworn farmhouse. I walked up the creaky porch and knocked on an old door with a tattered screen. A lady appeared who was hunched over at the waist. She moved slowly and made grunting sounds, embodying the pain it took for her move. I wanted to open the door and help her, but I did not want to diminish her dignity. I didn’t want to be presumptuous. I wanted to honor her space. She opened the door and walked over to a small kitchen table. The house smelled of old skin and unwashed fabric. I wanted to grab a chair and help her sit down. She took the bag of meds and sat at the table. She motioned to the other room and asked me to bring her a pile of mail in a voice that sounded like “sandpaper and glue.” She was difficult to understand.
I walked into the other room and found a large dinning table covered in papers. The whole table was covered in mail, but I didn’t want to bother her, as it was clear that every movement was a chore. I heard her get up and shuffle over to the 1950s refrigerator. I scanned over the plethora of papers on the table looking for what would be an obvious stack of new or unopened mail. My eyes fell upon a letter wishing her a happy 100th birthday. It was signed by President Ronald Reagan.
The Dead Kennedys flashed through my mind.
I immediately wondered how or why this woman was living alone. I found a stack of unopened envelops with postal stamps. I grabbed them and walked back into the kitchen. She pointed at a letter opener, which shinned like a silver knife on the table. I picked it up and began opening her mail. She didn’t need to tell me. I put the opened envelopes on the table and asked if she wanted me to remove the contents. She shook her head “no,” and pointed at a jar of homemade pickles. I picked it up and opened it. She then pointed at the door and gestured for me to leave without a word. I immediately worried about how she would get the large, open jar back in the refrigerator or even get the lid back on. I asked if there was anything else I could do for her. She grunted at me and pointed at the door. It weighed on my conscious to leave her, so vulnerable in an uncaring world. I followed her wishes and walked reluctantly out the door, across the creaky porch, and sat in my car. It felt strange to leave this lady in her 100-year-old farmhouse alone.
I lit a cigarette, which I was too young to buy.
Patience and understanding are skills.
I started the car and the cassette began to play.
John Lennon’s voice sang, “God is a concept through which we measure our pain.”
I backed down the long driveway and headed out into the vast wild farmlands of rural Michigan.
