Early memories of music, Part I

I know a dark secluded place
A place where no one knows your face
A glass of wine, a fast embrace
It’s called Hernando’s Hideaway, Ole!

Hernando’s Hideaway was the first record I ever remember hearing as a child.  It was from a Broadway show of the early fifties called "The Pajama Game" and it was our signal that the cocktail hour had officially started at our little bungalow by the sea in Kahala a sleepy little neighborhood of Honolulu; just past Diamond Head.  It was my mother’s theme song.  I picture her wearing brilliant red or black chinese pajamas, her black hair swept up with lacquered chop sticks in the back, a cigarette holder in one hand and a martini in the other, waiting to greet her and my father’s guests for the evening.

Much to our sorrow, her light was extinguished at an early age and within a year a bright new bulb, our stepmother Jean, had been plugged into the mom socket.  She brought a new regime to our sad little household of three including new music.  Annie Get Your Gun, Finian’s Rainbow and The King and I took the place of the mystical hideaway and the music of our beautiful, exotic mother, who was now referred to as ‘old mama’, faded away.

As I fell in love with my new mother, so too, did I fall in love with her music.  She and I sang about the lazy little still just beyond the hill with my papa sittin’ in the moonlight.  So count your sheep, mama’s singing you to sleep with a moonshine lullaby (Ethel Merman in "Annie Get Your Gun".  Thanks to a Mr. Finian, (Finian's Rainbow) I learned that the lord made Adam, the lord made Eve, he made them just a little bit naive, and that anything you can do, I can do better...anything you can do, I can do too.

Those old pre-vinyl monophonic records were played on a wooden hi-fidelity victrola with one speaker that sat on a low table between the dining and the living room.  Since stereo hadn’t been invented yet I didn’t know any better and those songs, echoing through our living room, reverberating off the polished stone floor, sounded like Broadway opening night to my ears.

When I was about ten or eleven I was given a small transistor radio.  It wasn’t much larger than a pack of smokes and it had a white twisted double plastic wire coming out of it that ended in a glass bead you stuck in one ear.  Every night that summer I lay in bed at night and listened to radio music. Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket.  Blame it on the Bossa Nova, the dance of love.  I’ve got a lucky penny and a mustard seed but a warm and tender love is all I need.  When this old world starts getting you down.  I climb way up to the top of the stairs...upon the roof.  A haunting, androgynous "Danke Schoen".   The popular songs of that summer were transmitted through that little glass ear piece directly into the  deepest recesses of my brain.

One day, a distant relative passing through town came to visit.  He was young and handsome and he sang and played the guitar.  That first night after dinner, he pulled out his guitar and started to sing and play.  "The fox went out on a windy night, he prayed to the moon to give him light, he had many a mile to go that night before he reached the town-o".  To hear someone, sitting in front of me, singing and playing the guitar filled me with such joy that I burst into laughter and couldn’t stop.  I was soon sent to bed for my behavior, but not before I heard the fox tell the geese and the ducks that "a couple of you are gonna grease my chin before I leave this town-o."

I don't listen to contemporary "music", if you can call it that.  It doesn't seem too musical to me.  Often profane lyrics over heavy percussion sampling other people's songs doesn't seem to musical to me.  I sometimes feel sad that today's kids will probably never know a dark secluded place called Hernando's Hideaway.  Ole.  Love &Kisses, Mickey da Mayor