Albums that Mattered When It Mattered For Me

I wanted to pick several albums that stood out as stalwarts for me and my band of rockers in our high school days. Since it is these albums that christened my relationship with rock-n-roll, I think it is worth looking at what attracted me to the genre initially. For one, it was different from what everyone else was listening to in school. We did not have a rock station so access was limited to anything but traditional Mexican and Tejano music and to top forty stations. We felt like we were “it” since we had our own thing going. It helped that we had a few guys in our clique with older brothers who were really the ones in the know. Plus, we had a few guys in our circle who moved to the Valley from parts unknown and so they brought great musical knowledge (and cassettes) with them.

In junior high, I was in the band and played first chair trombone. I had also been playing baseball since little league and wanted to play baseball in high school. My band director got wind that I was planning to play baseball in high school and asked if I was planning to quit band. I said no, since I didn’t see a conflict because baseball season was in the Spring and not the Fall. He said that the Spring was for orchestra work and individual competition. I told him I didn’t want to compete. He said that this was a life decision I was going to have to make and if I didn’t want to commit, then I could turn in my instrument by the end of class. I said, “O.K. I will,” and he said “Good.” And that was the end of my musical career. A life decision at age 15.

Without a band period in my class schedule, I could add athletics and so I decided to play all three sports. I got to be good friends with all of the athletes in school. This is not a bad thing when you are kind of nerdy, scrawny and not so tough. I remember a few times when some kids would try to give me a hard time, I would happen to walk by the hall where the lineman from the football team would hang out. They’d notice the situation and ask, “Is there a problem here?” This only needed to happen a few times before people realize that you are not to be messed with…by association. My teammates probably won’t even remember this, but it is quite vivid in my head. When your a$$ is literally liable to be kicked, you don’t forget such things.

Being in athletics was key to my love of music because in the Valley, you have to travel via bus from 30 minutes to two hours (each way) for away games so there is a lot of time for playing and sharing music in boom boxes and Sony Walkmans (this was the early ‘80’s). Now, bus trips were not all fun and games when you are one of the scrawniest guys on the team. There was a lot of horseplay, and I (and others) definitely get messed with for entertainment. In my case, the horseplay typically stopped when I threatened to stop sharing homework answers. I must state for the record that such sharing was very rare and only done when my threats of not sharing were countered with serious threats of bodily harm. From experience, I can say that the look in the eyes of the person making the threat is usually a good indication of the seriousness of the threat. These are true survival skills that proved to be useful in the horse trading of the political world of which I would later become a part.

I was leading a double life as a teacher’s pet and semi-jock, two roads that each had their own benefits. There was most certainly an art to this balancing act as well as corresponding advantages. I could literally cut class without cutting class by participating in double the extracurricular activities. As a good student, I was part of the math and science teams that traveled to other schools for competitions. Between athletics and the academic meets and club meetings, I missed class a lot. But yet, I always had my excused absence slips and always received my perfect attendance certificates. Since my grades were never affected, nobody really seemed to care or notice. I greatly benefitted from the fact that teachers are overworked and, fittingly or not, were more concerned with those students not doing so well. It is ironic that the students who don’t want the teachers’ attention are the ones that get it.

I want to highlight a few albums from my high school days, but before doing so I want to say a little about my circle of friends and the mischief we got into. The albums listed above were those we often used to cruise the streets of our beloved Rio Grande City. We often would be cruising with my friend MC who had the coolest little car with the loudest stereo. We’d crank up the volume and make our presence known. Who knows if anyone gave a flip, but it felt good to be listening to our own music when others were listening to Top 40 or more traditional Tex-Mex or Norteño.

MC’s family owned one of the funeral homes in town which I supposed made it possible for both MC and his older brother to have their own cars. The typical members of the crew were Wile (pronounced “wee-leh”) and Big-O (who went to Stanford the same year I did). I assume MC’s knowledge of rock music was greatly informed by his big-brother’s collection. When we weren’t cruising around town, we’d be playing pick-up basketball behind the funeral home and, of course, cranking the rock music. It sounds like the scene was primed for a Night of the Living Dead ending to the story, but we never really succeeded in waking the dead. We were often around when the night shift workers had to abandon the game to do a “pick-up,” but it never really creeped us out for some reason.

I must say a little something about my friend Wile. He is anglo and has a “white-sounding” last name, was pale-faced, and had blue eyes. The thing about Wile is that he spoke Spanish almost as well as those of us whose first language was Spanish. He and his brother, JR (RIP), were in all the same schools and all the same classes as us, so how could they not speak Spanish? They had to adapt if they wanted to fit in. When my college buddies visited Rio Grande City during a break from Stanford, they met Wile. I recall them saying, he talks just like you guys do, accent and all. Keep in mind that this is not “real” Spanish, it is a Tex-Mex form of the language that is not quite English and not quite Spanish, but Spanglish. We lived right on the border with Mexico, so everything was mashed-up, language and culture included.

A separate set of cruising buddies were some of my baseball teammates. Baseball was the only varsity sport that I played. I gave up football and basketball in 11th grade to “focus on my strengths.” Wile was also part of this crew which included Redman and Melman. Big-O played baseball, but he was not part of this set of cruising buddies because this was a crew of drinking buddies. Big O was a straight shooter. He was even more of a straight shooter than me. This crew tended to act a little more crazy. We’d dress-up in camouflaged clothing, sneak into Fort Ringgold (where all public school buildings were located), and would just have fun out-running security. Dodging security was the whole point of the exercise. The point was not to vandalize or steal anything. Not sure what would have happened if we’d have been caught, but I’m glad we weren’t.

Now, this crew of drinking buddies was very goal oriented. It was not just about the drinking. One fun activity was that we would take the plastic letters from the convenience store signs to spell the names of the girls we liked. Then this collection of letters would be delivered to the unsuspecting young ladies. We also frequently held target practice as we cruised around town. We’d select a target somewhere along the route and every time we cruised near the target, someone would fling an empty bottle at the target. One of my proudest moments is when we picked the “Dr. Beardsley” sign as the target, and I was the first to hit it dead-center. As I like to tell it, I hit the target “right in the Dr. Beardsley.” It sounds painful when you say it that way. Thank goodness the sign was made out of thick, unbreakable plastic and not glass.

The most surreal moment that the drinking crew was involved in is when we all dressed up like “kickers” (i.e., in country-western attire, cowboy hats, cowboy boots and all) so that we could sneak-in to a bar at a hotel that we knew has a side door that was not monitored. The plan worked to a T except that there was one hitch. My mom, who never went out for a drink, chose this very occasion to go out with her friends for a drink. They happened to choose the very bar WE snuck into for THEIR late night excursion. When we became aware of this fact, we snuck out of there just about as fast as we had snuck-in (at least that’s what I think happened). Tweety was my other best friend, but he neither drank, nor played basketball nor liked cruising in a tightly packed car full of guys to listen to music at decibel levels that literally may have caused harm to our ear drums. Needless to say, he was one of the smartest of us all. I would argue that he was THE smartest, although I graduated closer to the top of our class. He attended an Ivy League school while I went off to the West Coast to Stanford. I almost attended Dartmouth instead of Stanford because that was the university he opted to attend. I didn’t keep up with Tweety much when we went off to college, but I do want to acknowledge him for sharing his musical knowledge and writing my Salutatorian speech which was very well received.

Not only was Tweety smarter than all of us, but he also had a greater knowledge of rock-n-roll than us. Like MC, Tweety had an older brother and, thus, had access to a higher knowledge of rock. It was almost as if they both had access to an oracle. Tweety turned me onto Rush, Triumph, Metallica, Queensryche, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin. He is the friend who told me about the Corpus Christi rock station whose signal was audible at night time. My contribution to the musical exchange between me and Tweety were the likes of Dokken, Motley Crew, Quiet Riot, Ratt, etc. Probably not the same league (with all due respect to the artists), but it was a good combination of new rock and classic rock.

Tweety really did seem to have access to a higher power. At our young age and in the early 1980’s, he could already appreciate Dylan. He also knew that Letterman was the best late-night talk show host, which of course he was for the longest time. I couldn’t stay up late enough to watch the evening news, much less to watch Letterman. So Tweety would have to give me the Letterman play by play each morning. He could also tell when a “pretty young thing” had that hots for me. Such signals were invisible to me for some reason. I was never very adept at wooing members of the opposite sex. I’m still amazed that Theresa married me, even after I made one faux paus after another during the courting period.

When I quit football in 11th grade, Tweety and I would sit in the bleachers during the Friday night games and do the play by play announcing of the football games, like they did on Sunday afternoon NFL games and on ESPN. We were good at play by play. I know this because the people around us would often chuckle. And it was a great time to be a Rio Grande City Rattlers’ fan, because those two years were both years where we made the playoffs. We actually took our color commentary on the road! I still remember the playoff game our Junior year: “Vela takes the snap at his own 20 yard line, fakes the handoff to Cantu, drops back to pass, has a Fernandez open along the near sideline. Nothing but daylight between Fernandez and the end zone. Vela launches the pass (the entire stadium goes silent while the ball is in the air) … and it is just off the fingertips of Fernandez (a collective sign of disappointment from the Rattler fans). What a golden opportunity, folks! You’re not going to get too many chances like that, not in the playoffs. No sir-ee!” I may have gotten the names of the players wrong in the re-telling of these actual events, but you get the gist of it. We lost that game 19 to 13 so the above play was important indeed.