Man! Did I get in hot water with my girlfriend over buying records! There was a dance coming up at the end of the year — a formal affair, held off campus at a posh country club. The real deal! My girlfriend Dorothea kept hinting that she wanted to go and I kept ignoring her because I couldn’t afford it. I was still paying my college bill at the time!
By the time the dance came around, I’d paid off Hiram but even if tickets to the dance had still been available, which they weren’t, I couldn’t afford it. In addition to paying for dance tickets, I’d have had to rent a tux, buy flowers for Dorothea, chip in on gas to get us there and back, and if we decided to stop afterwards for drinks or food, lay out money for that too. I didn’t have anywhere near that kind of money.
By the time the dance weekend came, the matter of going was settled in my mind. We weren’t going. Then on Friday, I got an unexpected paycheck. It was money I hadn’t counted on or budgeted for, which wasn’t a good situation for someone like me who tended to spend money as soon as it landed in his pockets.
I didn’t think of the dance or how Dorothea might feel about not going when everyone around her was going. Instead, I headed off to the record store in Garrettsville, one town over, to see what I could find there. It was the old fashioned kind of record store, where you could listen to records before you decided to buy them. I left with four new records under my arm.
I was meeting Dorothea after dinner that night. I looked forward to playing her my new records. How exciting it would be! We’d head for her club room, in the basement of her dorm, where we would listen to music and make out. What better evening could there be than that?
Only gradually did it sink in to me that Dorothea wasn’t as happy as I was when we met. Looking back, I see why but at the time I was clueless. From her perspective, we were seated in her frumpy club room in the basement of her all too familiar dormitory listening to my new records while upstairs her dorm mates were getting ready for the most exciting weekend of the year –with flowers, ball gowns, eat-out dinner and dancing to a live orchestra at a ritzy site. It wasn’t my grandest moment as a boyfriend. One could even say that I lacked consideration.
I don’t remember what one of the records I bought was but I remember the other three very well. One was a Hi-Los album, The Hi-Los Under Glass, the only Hi-Los record I ever bought. The Hi-Los were a quartet with a high tenor lead –he had a killer voice –and they sang jazz-inflected music. I liked them well enough but didn’t keep the record long. The truth is, as I will write in a later blog, though I sang in quartets from ninth grade on through the ages 28, and sang a lot, I never much cared for quartet music. It was the singing I liked–the opportunity for me to sing. I liked the work involved too: doing it right, the only way I ever liked to sing.
The two other albums I bought were Gerry Mulligan albums -what a surprise! One was his Paris Concert of 1954; the other, California Concerts, recorded in 1954 and released in 1955. I wore out my first copies of both and am now on second copies of both. They still sound great.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Gerry Mulligan: “Bernie’s Tune” (1954) –Bob Brookmeyer, valve tbn; Red Mitchel, b; Frank Isola, dr.
MUSIC & ME 