Her seven is “The Beatles First Album.” I use quotations because The Beatles first studio album was Please, Please Me. The Beatles first album to most casual fans of the era was Meet The Beatles. Both are equally good. Both are equally influential. But, if The Beatles were to be included on my list, The White Album, probably influenced me the most, except while I was operating under the time-thought-given constraints, it dawned on me that no Beatles album made its way into the top twelve most influential/life-changing. Now don’t get me wrong, I loved The Beatles. I had a dozen of their 45s. 45s were cheap, albums were expensive. Besides, my sister loved The Beatles. This alone served to influence my seventh slot choice. When The Beatles began their meteoric rise into the stratosphere after coming to the U.S., another band from the British Invasion piqued my interest, The Dave Clark Five.
The Dave Clark Five was the bugaboo to my sister’s Beatles. I loved that the band had a sax and keyboards, instruments The Beatles lacked, like they needed it, chyeah. Every time my sister wanted an album, she asked my parents to buy it for her. If they did not oblige, she had a tantrum until they relented. I was not so fortunate. When I approached my parents about purchasing The Dave Clark Five, Glad All Over album, I was told I got an allowance. This is 1964 mind you. I was six or seven when this incident took place. I received 10 cents a week allowance. The dog crap in the backyard needed to be removed in order for my father to mow the lawn. This was my chore if I wanted to collect this kingly sum. The shovels I used were easily twice as tall as I was. Or it at least felt that way. It was a special treat if it rained beforehand, or I had missed a discharge from the week before. Like this duty, not to be confused with doodie, wasn’t unpleasant enough. My sister got twenty-five cents a week for doing absolutely nothing. I don’t know what lesson I was learning from this arrangement, but it certainly wasn’t save for a rainy day.
Glad All Over cost $3.89 at Harmony Hut down on Route 22 just outside Springfield, New Jersey. There wasn’t sales tax at the time. So I saved my lousy ten cents a week for the next thirty-nine weeks, and bought Glad All Over. I never let my sister play it. Ha! Take that! Talk about influencing my life . . . the circumstances alone certainly qualify.
My friend’s number eight wouldn’t make my number eighty. She had The Doors. She can keep them. Never a devotee of The Doors or The Dead. Make all the protestations you want. Tell me all the arguments for both bands genius. The words will fall on deaf ears. Sure, I like a song or two from each bands’ careers. But an entire album? That would be a “no.” My eight pick blew apart my chronology format. It was hard enough to pick the one album I did because the band represented three I so closely identified with. I had worn out two albums, two 8-tracks, and two cassettes of Dark Side of the Moon. If you need me to tell you the band, you’ve probably been living on the moon for the past fifty years. Wish You Were Here, which at the time, seemed like it was written just for me. Can you tell I had reached new heights in my drug choices at this point in my life? But when the smoke in my brain cleared, I decided The Wall should be the Pink Floyd album that had the most influence.
WNEW, a popular New York City rock station was running a contest. The rules were the station would play twenty Pink Floyd songs over the course of a week. You had to name the song, as well as the day and time it was played. You were required to compile this list and submit it on a postcard by the contest postmark deadline, which was forty-eight hours after the week of songs had concluded. If one of the songs was wrong, it disqualified the entire entry. If one of the days was wrong. It disqualified the entire entry. If one of the times was wrong, it disqualified the entire entry. Not a lot of margin for error. The prize at stake? An all-expenses paid trip for two, with first-class airfare, to London to see Pink Floyd perform the touring production of The Wall at Royal Albert Hall.
I submitted one-hundred correct entries. How do I know they were correct? The playlist was read back to the listening audience prior to announcing the winner. Why would I submit one-hundred entries you may ask, then again maybe you won’t, but I’m going to tell you anyway. Pink Floyd had already announced plans to do only twelve productions of The Wall in the United States. Seven were to be in Los Angeles, five at Nassau Coliseum, in New York, out on Long Island. Why would a band come all the way across the pond to do only twelve shows? I did not know why at the time, hence the one-hundred entries. I was intrigued. The show had to be so extraordinary, and such a grand production, it would have been nearly impossible to duplicate stopping in dozens of major cities. Not to mention the cost of such an extravaganza. At least that was what I was guessing. What did I know at the time? I was on drugs.
I did not win the contest. I was not the first entry picked with all of the correct answers, there were my one-hundred, and forty-eight other individuals who submitted multiple correct entries. I did receive a nice card congratulating me, a cool “Wall” t-shirt. I made sure to wear it the night I intended to see The Wall out on the island.
Tickets sold out rapidly, particularly by pre-internet standards. I was going to the show come hell or high water. It happened to be one of the coldest days of the winter that year. I don’t recall the exact date, but I do remember it was February. I owned a Corvette at the time. As was my rule, I never drove a Corvette I owned if the temperature dropped below fifty degrees. Normally, I owned a junker car for foul weather driving. I happened to be between junkers at this point in time. A friend of mine was kind enough to lend me his 1963 Chevy Bel Air. My friend said the only drawbacks of the car were no heat, and the front passenger side window only went half way up. The drive to Uniondale was a nightmare. My pre-concert adrenaline provided all the necessary heat I needed, for my date, not so much.
My date bitched and cried about the cold most of the drive. When we arrived, I still had to scalp tickets. Immediately after getting out of the car, we were approached by a scalper offering us seats somewhere on a mountaintop in Iceland for the tidy sum of $80 . . . a piece. I inquired as to his current mental state of instability. There must have been one-hundred people looking for tickets, and two selling tickets. Our odds were not good. I remained undaunted. My date cursed me, she was on the verge of hypothermia. I got us out of the wind by walking in between buses as we made our way to the arena. Suddenly, a man appeared from behind one of the buses. “You need tickets?” he asked. “Yes,” I apprehensively replied. The scalper told me he had two tickets . . . fifth row . . . $100 a piece. I had $250 on me. My date shrieked, “Buy them for god’s sake you asshole. I’m freezing.” I couldn’t disappoint my date by giving this substantial purchase some thought. Sold. Fifth row.
We witnessed, in my opinion, the greatest artistic performance I had ever attended. I still feel that way to this day. It was a truly epic production. A small plane crashed behind the wall that was constructed on stage block by block. When the plane burst into flames, the Uniondale fire department extinguished the fire. The guy in front of us, obviously in an altered state of consciousness, claimed to have seen god at several times throughout the show. At one point in the concert, an entire section of the wall dropped out to reveal Roger Waters sitting in a recliner, in a small scale living room, watching the ten o’clock news on channel five, all the while singing “Nobody Home.” David Gilmour played the guitar solo from “Comfortably Numb” atop a hydraulic platform above the wall. There was more, but you get the idea. Yes, The Wall is my eight. I'll post the final excerpt next week regardless of length. I can here the "thank goodness" utterances from here.
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