The first time I understood that people on TV and the radio were real and lived in the same world as me was in the 8th grade when Karen Martello tried to sell me Harvey Jett’s guitar.
Harvey Jett was a lead guitarist in Black Oak Arkansas, one of the first Southern rock bands. Many old photos show them performing on stages decorated with Confederate flags. The lead singer Jim Dandy Mangrum would interrupt chaotic jams with an operatic rendition of “Dixie.”
BOA was the first rock band I liked. My father told us that rock music was garbage. I wasn’t a goodie-goodie so much as I believed that my father was an unchallengeable authority. I internalized his disgust for rock and refused to listen to it. I listened to Chet Atkins, Andres Segovia and Herb Alpert.
But my older brother Mark was rebellious. He had already become the world’s biggest Alice Cooper fan. One day he decided to corrupt me, to save me from being a prig.
My parents were out of the house. Mark trapped me in the living room with the family stereo. He put on BOA’s live record “Raunch and Roll” and turned the volume knob all the way to the right. That was inconceivable. Daddy might’ve pushed the levels up a little for a rollicking bluegrass tune, but no one turned the knob until it wouldn’t go any further.
Mark approached my corruption didactically. He had a pedagogy. He explained that you enjoyed rock music by making a face, bobbing your head, playing air guitar and otherwise jumping on the furniture. He demonstrated as the music blasted.
Classic kinesthetic learning. There are many things in life that your body has to learn first then your brain goes along for the ride. George Clinton said, “Free your mind and your ass will follow,” but, for me, it’s usually the other way around.
Then Mark got more didactic. He turned the album cover over to show me a photo of the singer. Jim Dandy is shoving a crazed grin into the camera. His face takes up almost the whole square. Hair falls across his wild eyes, which are slightly crossed. His nostrils are flaring. But the main thing you see is that he’s missing his front teeth. His bare gums almost look bloody, as though he just lost those teeth in a fight.
Mark urged me to appreciate how crazy and scary Jim Dandy looked and to associate these qualities with the squealing guitars and pounding drums.
Mark flashed his own evil grin and put the back cover in the living room window, so that Jim Dandy’s gap-toothed snarl was glaring at anybody driving down Keele Street in North Jackson. I was sure that somebody’s terrified mother would crash into the big tree across the street.
Before the second song, Jim Dandy delivers a little sermon. His voice sounds like gravel churning in an oil drum. Years later, I’m amazed to realize how much he sounds like Captain Beefheart. [This comparison is so obvious that I googled it and found this great piece that makes the same connection: https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-21-22-summer-1998/every-hillbilly-can-govern ]
Jim Dandy preaches:
Our generation basically consists of you and I
And we are misfits of mankind.
A girl in the audience screams “Alright!”
And mankind has lost its mind,
which we freaks have been desperately trying to find.You know, they strove to be stronger but simply ended up being a monster.
So I reckon we’re just mutants … of this here … monster.
A sneaky bass, a bit like Eartha Kitt’s “Fever,” starts thumping. Very menacing.
And just like that, I was a fan of rock music.
In the seventh grade, I started going to a tough school called Brinkley Junior High in West Jackson. The city bused us few white kids all the way across town in accordance with the forced integration map. I found out these two girls on the bus, Beth and Karen, would sometimes go up to the actual town of Black Oak and hang out with the band. The drummer was the now legendary Tommy Aldridge who went on to play with everyone — Ozzy Osborne, Whitesnake, Ted Nugent, Yngwie Malmsteen. He was from Jackson, so I think he was Beth and Karen’s connection.
Karen asked me one day if I wanted to buy Harvey Jett’s guitar. She and I already had a transaction history. I bought a bag of weed from her in broad daylight on the hill up Leron Avenue. It was almost all seeds. I was 12 and had no idea what to do with it. Nothing undermines your moral confidence as a father like remembering that you bought weed in the 8th grade.
I had already been playing the guitar for a few years. Passionately and obsessively.
I started out on a cheap classical guitar. But after Mark converted me to rock, I needed an electric guitar.
From somewhere in our house, a sunburst hollow body guitar with one very olde-timey looking pickup materialized. It looked like the sort guitar you’d see at the far end of a big jazz band in an ancient photo long before anybody played something besides chords. I lacked the technical knowledge to explain why, but I knew this wasn’t the sort of guitar you’d use to play with BOA.
I knew nothing about string gauge. I hardly even understood that you could actually buy new strings in a store. The strings on this guitar were super heavy and probably twenty years old, so I felt like I was playing telephone wires.
I didn’t have an amp and didn’t know how to play rock. So I had to play my Mel Bay Big Note songs like “Down in the Valley” and “On Top of Old Smokey” and imagine it sounded like Jimi Hendrix.
The worst thing about this old guitar was that it didn’t have a cutaway to reach the high frets. If you can’t play “Skip to My Lou” on the 20th fret, how can you feel like a rock star?
My rock-hating father finally allowed Santa to bring a Sears copy of an SG, the guitar with two devil horns that Angus Young plays in AC/DC, and a little amp.
It would be better for my story if I could tell you that this setup sucked and made the need for a “real” guitar, like the one I was maybe going to buy from Karen, more urgent. But once I figured out that I just needed to turn that knob on my little amp to 11 to make the speaker distort … rock was achieved. It helped that I had learned bar chords, the basic unit of rock. So even just playing one chord, rock occurred. It was rock critical mass. No greater rock was possible.
In some alternate universe, I never left that bubble of rock. I’m still there playing a crude version of “Purple Haze.”
But, in this reality, I bit the toxic fruit of ambition and couldn’t rest until I had a guitar with “Fender” or “Gibson” printed on the headstock.
Karen warned me that Harvey Jett’s guitar was pretty beat up and would probably require some work. But she was only asking the oddly specific price of $12. Not bad for a guitar used by a real rock band.
How bad could it be? Harvey Jett was a rock star. They handed him a new Les Paul every time he walked on stage, right? He tossed the “old” one in the corner. No doubt Karen’s guitar would be a step up from my Sears SG even if it wasn’t perfect.
Right before the transaction, coincidentally, BOA were on one of the late night music shows. Not only was this decades before YouTube, white trash folks didn’t even have cable. MTV was still a few years away. To see live footage of bands, if you were old enough, there would be midnight showings of movies like Pink Floyd at Pompeii or Hendrix’s “Rainbow Bridge.” At my age, all I could do was stay up and watch a variety show like The Midnight Special.
The band you wanted to see was always last. You struggled to stay awake through garbage like The Captain and Tennille or Leo Sayer and local furniture store commercials until finally Aerosmith took the stage. I would always pray that my father would stay out in his shop because he was such a buzzkill about rock music. But inevitably he’d come in just when the band was screaming and jumping around. I’d feel him standing behind me. This seemed to magically cause the band on TV to act even crazier, until I heard the inevitable comment like “Lawsy, that ain’t even music.”
One night I was beside myself because Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush were going to be on the show. The next-week-on Midnight Special teaser showed about five dazzling seconds of his guitar solo.
As usual, it looked like the act I wanted to see would be last. Damn! The later it gets the more likely it’d be that my dad would come back in the house right when Frank Marino was tearing it up. Finally, the band comes on blasting “Johnny B. Goode” modernized with fast, piercing 1970s rock guitar.
First verse then the chorus “ Go! Go! Johnny Go!” No sign of my dad. Second verse. Still no sign. Now the chorus again. And here comes the guitar solo that I’ve been waiting for all week. Here it comes. There’s the door to the shop. My dad clears his throat. Marino’s fingers are flying. But he’s also riding an invisible pony across the stage at the same time! Prancing. He’s making a mean-looking face and swirling his long hair.
“Huh …” I hear behind me. “I could do that.”
Anyways, one of those music programs featured footage from BOA’s tour. Documentary style. Super-8 footage of Jim Dandy waving a Rebel flag in front of the crowd, the band on the tour bus drinking Jack Daniels, shirtless Tommy Aldridge twirling his drum sticks.
I had been reading Guitar Player magazine and recognized that one of the guitarists was playing a Gibson ES-335. My TV was black and white, but I guessed that it was the same cherry red guitar in one of the photos on the album cover.
Was that Harvey Jett? Is that the guitar Karen was going to sell me? I now knew enough about guitars to understand that a 335 was a high-end guitar. It wasn’t just a Gibson. It was a fancy Gibson. It was better than a Les Paul or a Stratocaster.
Wow! Even if it needs a lot of work, it’s a damn 335!
Maybe.
But then there was footage of the very end of the tour. Amidst the cacophony of Aldridge flailing the drums and Jim Dandy screaming, the two lead guitarists, both letting their instruments squall with feedback, adopt courtly medieval stances and raise their guitars by their necks like literal axes and touch the bodies. A formal gesture. Like two gentlemen meeting in the mists of dawn to engage in battle. Then they both swing back their weapons and … CHONG!!! … smash them against each other.
The jerky footage that follows makes it clear that the ensuing ritual of destruction involved burning my 335.
When I met Karen on the same spot as our previous drug deal, my hopes were not high. The guitar was indeed a 335. Or rather it was a blunt object that had formerly been a 335. The pickups had been melted. All the knobs and hardware were missing. The frets were gritty from being scorched. Most of the surfaces looked like they had been scrubbed with burning sandpaper. What Karen was holding looked exactly like a guitar that had suffered all the abuse documented in that film on TV.
What paint was left was indeed cherry red. The back was in okay shape except for a big crack from smashing into another guitar. A magic marker H followed by a squiggle and a J followed by a squiggle confirmed the instrument’s provenance.
It hit me that, yes, this was the guitar I saw on TV. This was it. It was the guitar on the album cover. I had been listening to solos played on this very guitar for a couple of years. But this fact struck me as a kind of disappointment. Duh. Of course, a human being named Harvey Jett had played this guitar.
BOA were just people who lived up the road in the next state.
The world lost some magic in that moment.
You have to get older to have a sense of awe that restores some of that magic. If you put Dorothy’s ruby slippers in my hands now, I would be speechless. These humble little props became a universal icon. A myth. These are the actual shoes. The less impressive they looked, the more ratty, the greater my sense of awe would be.
But if Karen had put those ruby slippers in my hands there on Leron Avenue, I would’ve been disappointed. Just because they were actual shoes that existed.
When you’re young, the magic lingers until something makes you think factually about the myth. Santa died for me when one of my siblings finally noted that we didn’t have a chimney. To be forced to think about which door or window Santa would use to break into our house confronted me with the absurdity of the whole story.
There was a utility closet in the hallway with a narrow vent in the ceiling. This was the closest thing to a chimney, so maybe Santa squeezed through.
The funny thing is that the idea of a fat adult squishing through a narrow vent isn’t what demystified Santa Claus but rather the image of him struggling down around the big water heater and stumbling over our vacuum cleaner.
And to think that Dorothy’s magic slippers were obviously just some red shoes some lady wore for the camera would’ve been a buzzkill.
And suddenly realizing that Harvey Jett was just some guy up in Arkansas was deflating.
I guess that’s why I didn’t buy the guitar. $12 was two and a half lawns I’d have to mow in the Mississippi heat. Why waste it on a useless piece of junk? Why waste it on something that had no magical charge? A dead object.
If Karen contacted me out of the blue now and told me that Harvey Jett’s old guitar was still in some attic down in Jackson, I’d be tempted to pay a lot more than $12 to get it. Not because Harvey Jett was some big star. He really was just some dude up in Arkansas who was in a band that did okay for a few years. The band didn’t even reach a million in sales. Their top hit only reached #52. And Harvey Jett found Jesus and left the rock star life long ago. He passed away quietly at 73 in Kentucky a few years ago.
But these anticlimactic details would only add power to the myth. They would only make the scorched former guitar more talismanic.
The humble anonymity of an old Civil War canteen makes it more real that some random kid dipped it into a cool stream that’s still flowing down a mountain in Tennessee. The banality of the object paradoxically conveys the reality of war.
Harvey Jett’s guitar would be a real link to a lost age of rock. Long-haired guys standing at the edge the stage playing duel lead solos. The 60s and psychedelia were over. No more peace and love. But the punk rockers hadn’t started wearing their “Fuck Pink Floyd” buttons yet. No CBGBs. No slick bands like Foreigner or Boston. Just shirtless guys jamming in the sun at big outdoor festivals where girls in bikini tops straddled their boyfriends’ shoulders and waved their hands in the air. The songs were about drinking and fighting.
I don’t think Karen was too hurt that I didn’t buy the guitar. She didn’t know anything about guitars. My reaction made her realize how bad a shape Harvey Jett’s guitar was actually in. We both had a good laugh about it there on the street. Damn! Look at this piece of shit!
It would take many more years than I expected to get a name-brand guitar. I suppose that this was the practical lesson of that afternoon. You can’t buy a Gibson ES-335 for 12 bucks.
Kenny Nowell 