Hey Lou

Best of Soul Train on DVD from TimeLife.  The Hippest Trip In America

So I had a rough night. Ugly thoughts of self came in and absconded with energy to do good productive things leaving me crawling around on the floor searching for roaches to fill one last joint so I could survive the night – metaphorically speaking.

Into the bed for channel surfing bed time story and I stumble across the above. Wasted again.

Tell me, did you ever have a Johnny’s Record Shop where you grew up?  I bought my first four 8-track tapes there.  In hindsight I think a couple of them where bootlegs, but to a boy about to hit seventeen it didn’t matter. I had music to stuff into that 8-track player that I got for Christmas.

Hidden under the seat of my mother’s Ford Pinto, ’72 version, I plugged in the Ohio Players’ Fire tape and let it fill the car with funky music through those 4 1/2″ wedgie speakers sitting on the back window sill. That little car was forever a party throughout that winter and into the spring.

I’d been making visits to Johnny’s record shop since my mid teens adding to my 45′s collection. I think I even bought my first rake afro pick there.  It was as much fun browsing the counters at Johnny’s record shop to see what stuff he had. He had them, but I couldn’t buy my roach clips there ’cause the majority of my visits were accompanied by a parent.

Didn’t matter. I would look up at the albums he had mounted on the wall racks looking like posters of all the soul stars of the day. Typically somebody would want to hear what a song sounded like and ol’ Johnny would be happy to put on an album or 45. That place sounded better than the soundtrack to any blaxplotation movie showing over at the Star Light Drive-in Theater.

Bah! Now it’s all iPods and dowloaded ringtones. Yeah, that’s stuff cool and to a 13 year old today it probably doesn’t matter, but there was a special magic in Johnny’s record shop.

We held Johnny in high esteem because he was a successful black entrepreneur in our town. Along with Bill Letts he was special in our community because he was a black man owning his own business.

Just like my family most of us owed our income to the Oldsmobile plants.  We went to work, paid our union dues and took home nice paychecks. Go to church on Sunday and try to be good citizens the rest of the week.

I grew up in my mid-western factory town singing “I’m Black And I’m Proud” and feeling every bit of those words.  Stood and proudly applauded my big sister as she walked across that stage and received her nursing degree from the University of Michigan becoming the first in our generation to earn a Bachelors degree.  I went to school, got good grades.

Wish I’d have taken that year off from studies instead of going straight from high school to college. MSU is a great school, but at the time I was burned out from hitting the books and needed to be out of the school environment for a bit. Never finished my freshman year.  Never did make good on the promise to go back and get that degree.

Going to work at 60+ hours a week between two jobs and bringing in extra dollars to help my mother handle the household bills was a good feeling, but as the years went on I’ve learned what opportunities I passed up.

I dunno. Guess, I’m rambling.  My written words, my art, about the only thing I’ve got left to offer this world.  I guess that’s why I want to give out a message.  Maybe speak a bit from the wisdom I’ve gained from all these years scuffling around this place.

Maybe I can pass on a little soul.

K

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