Forty five years or so ago, I went to the local movie house to catch this T.A.M.I. movie

WCGreen

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Sun Mar-28-10 01:15 AM
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Forty five years or so ago, I went to the local movie house to catch this T.A.M.I. movie

Edited on Sun Mar-28-10 01:18 AM by WCGreen

in a saturday matinee.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/arts/music/21TAMI.html?scp=3&sq=T.A.M.I.&st=cse

Added link on edit

It was 50 cents to get in before 6:00 and my brother and I saw dozens of movies at this starting to be dilapidated movie house. It was called the Homestead theater. It straddle the border between Cleveland and Lakewood, the town we lived in.

I couldn't have been more than seven or eight at the time. A few months back we had watched in collective awe shared with any American under 18 as the Beatles crackled and popped through the 16 inches black and white on it's last leg Zenith we owned. At the time we were, as a family. between prosperity, as my mother would put it.

I remember her watching us watch the Beatles and saw how much joy we were getting from the show. She loved Mantivanti and had a mess of old records from the Big Band era that she would put on every know and then. She didn't understand rock-n-roll but she knew it was important to us and so she made sure we had as much of it as she could afford.

We went to the theater that day when rumor spread through the elementary school play ground that the Beatles were going to be in the movie that was playing at the Homestead that weekend.

We had seen A Hard Days Night and I mean seen because we couldn't hear anything what with all the girls screaming and carrying on. I have to admit I was pretty scarred as it looked to me, a scared seven year old, that the place was going to explode any minute. But it was the Beatles and the show went on and nobody got hurt and so I knew it was safe.

The show opened with Chuck Berry and he looked old, to old to be in Rock-n-roll. From there on it was a collection of faces behind the songs we heard on the radio. And then James Brown came on and, well, it was his being led off the stage and then he came running back out several times schtick. Reading the story in the NYT, I see it was four times and that his song lasted for 18 minutes. I was impressed. It made me see that there was rock-n-roll beyond the Beatles.

But more important it showed me and hundreds of other kids that music can transcend all sorts of barriers. Little by little the barriers between the races were being chipped away.

I do remember when my Dad came back from one of his ill timed job hunts, this time in Mexico, next time somewhere out west, and was complaining about niggers this niggers that. It was then I started to fall away from my dad. I still loved him but I was starting to loose respect for him little by little. Later on in his life he came back more my way of thinking but still he clung on to his old mind set.

All I am really trying to say is that a whole mess of stuff was going on. From the late forties when Jackie Robinson ran through the color barrier in baseball to James Brown mesmerizing a generation of young white kids with his version of rock-n-soul. These were the people who laid the groundwork that leads right on up to the white house now.

American history is wonderful and dangerous and frustrating and precarious but somehow it just keeps moving on.