Drive-In Memorial Days

Memorial day is the time to take a trip. Always has been and always will be. I can link Memorial day with endless hours on the road passing through all sorts of small towns, nestled on the fingers of innumerable country and state routes all over the country. I always have liked the back roads, away from the super highways packed with millions racing to their destination. In my mind, the backroads are like a slide show of real American history because I can see the images of how a town was, the traffic leading to and from, and the small mom and pop stores that defiantly clinged to their businesses to spite he K-marts and Wal-marts that haven't deemed the local communities worthy of an utter onslaught, bringing the iron rule of total comsumerism, seeking slaves to chain to their form of economics, granting a discount in exchange for identities for more efficient marketing. I've seen the Orv's Gas and Snacks of the world fade on distant horizons and taking the COLD BEER signs on the side of the buildings with them. Orv never cared who the hell I was, it wasn't his business. He business was selling Gas, COLD BEER and Snacks.

I guess that is why it was so great to slick out of my local area this weekend to hit Mendon, MA. Why? Because this is the home of the Mendon Twin Drive-In! The wife and I dig Drive-ins the most. They are great! The Mendon Twin had more people actually out of their cars, setting in lawn chairs and partying than any place we have been in the past. There were ice cream faced kids running around everywhere tossing frisbees and footballs. It didn't matter what was playing on the screen (In his case it was "The DaVinci Code" & "RV") because the atmosphere was great. It was everything I remember a Drive-in should be.


The Mendon Twin Drive-in was built in 1953 and opened on June 14, 1954. The drive-in has been in operation for 46 years. Which explains the feeling of authenticity that this place has. If there was such a thing as drive in bingo, I think that I could have cleaned up. Why? I saw it all: Families leaving after the first movie, teenagers moving into the back seat, prepubescent snack bar hang-out crowd, The pervasive aroma of stronger smokes coming from the vehicles parked in the back row (someone must have lit up a stogie).

All in all the whole deal was great fun. We got there at 7:00 PM and didn't leave until 1:30 PM. That's some entertainment dollar value! If you aren't buy on Memorial day, or any other traveling weekend for that matter, you should get to know this country and go off the beaten path.

Guitar Ex Machina

I had always been interested in the guitar. My dad bought me one when I was 6. It was a smaller scale steel string acoustic, and I think it was a Hondo. It that age I can remember my dad picking on an acoustic with a black pickguard, always picking and experimenting, and he'd laugh when he made a run that made musical sense. I went for lessons when I was 6, in the evenings at the local junior high. Needless to say, I had met a lot of older kids there. Pimply face young men and women, dressed like a Salvation Army had thrown up. We worked out strumming some John Denver songs and old folk tunes. The steel strings ate up my 6 year old fingers. I brought my guitar in for show and tell one day. And that is the last I can remember of that guitar.

When I was 10, a neighbor had moved out and left me a gold color Les Paul style guitar. It was bad timing because I had just seen a series on the history of Rock & Roll, in which The Who had played predominately. I was 10, I had a guitar, and I had a driveway. My friends watched on (in horror) as I tried to recreate a proper guitar smashing. My friends knew, that if my folks knew what was going on, it would be my hide. I thought it was the cool thing to do at that moment, and the Les Paul created a gentle and graceful arc above my head. In an instant I started to batter that guitar against the driveway, adding small amounts of progressive damage. A knob flew off, wood splintered, and after a long while in the hands of a 10 year old, the neck yielded and I claimed victory. Victory over what, I don't know and since the neck was though body construction, I had to put out a great effort. It was a very unreasonable sweet smelling, warm, fall afternoon. I knew then that as long as one person knows what the most unreasonable cool thing to do in any given situation, Rock is not dead. Rock is not cool, Rock is the final result and expression of cool. Pete Townsend had made it look so easy, but let me tell you, getting total destruction on a solid body instrument requires a great deal of determination. I remember my folks coming out to see what was happening in the driveway after a long while, and the expressions on their faces when they saw the devestation. Both asked me in turn, "What did you do?!" and the response from my sweaty, red, beaming child face was, "Ain't it cool?"

I don't recall much of that day with clarity after that. It's like the volume was turned down.

I went to work the day I turned 16. I worked in the buffet department of an Airport Sheraton hotel. I set up rooms for business meeting, reunions, weddings, seminars, diet clubs, secret societies and proms. I actually got to set up my own prom, and barely evaded working it and tearing it down. Anyway, I bought another guitar with my first paycheck. I had wanted one for a while, but after the Les Paul Incident I can see why I was on my own. I bought a star shaped Crestline with a single humbucker. I got an amp with the next paycheck, a small 20A Gorilla. My next job was learning open chords. Then I decided I would learn one song totally and completely. Thank god for the three chord wonders of ACDC and The Scorpions. I started to learn a few tunes. There was a bass player named Phil that taught me the power chord an a plethora of Rush tunes. My buddy Alan taught me that you could play whatever you damn well pleased and a great exercise was to play with records and try to play the song without actually playing the notes of the song. After a year or longer I was playing in two bands, one being informal band, that I now call Orkfitz, (but could have been called Rat Scabies) playing a type of Acid Metal that actually sounded a lot what Jane's Addiction would be putting out some years later. The other was a band called Mantis that existed in the attic of Max's parent's house. It was a trio that played hair metal stuff. Both these bands taught me small amounts about what I was seeking and that was the communion of music. Sometimes you can hear a piece of music and it moves you on an emotional level, but when there is a group of musicians in a free form jam that are reading each others minds, well the effect I unlike anything this world has offered up to me.

I joined the military after a while and never had the chance to seriously play for about 6 years. I had to be co-erced into buying a guitar, and it opened those doors back up I thought had been shut a long while ago. I still play, but it's never going to be like it was when I was 18 and 19, a true acolyte searching for truth, naive and open faced, and hard at work with the band digging up experience.