Now, Benny Jay is as wired in to the Brother Culture about as much as any white man ever has been. I assumed he'd been in the groove from childhood on. Sadly, he wasn't. Benny Jay later admitted that way back in 1973, he was still listening to Top 40 songs on WLS and WCFL.
In the 60s, these two seminal Chicago rock 'n' roll radio stations had introduced me to Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Jackie Wilson and the Chambers Brothers as well as blue-eyed soul brothers like the Rolling Stones, Tommy James and the Shondells, the Young Rascals and others. I still listen to all of them to this day. But by 1973, the two radio titans had grown stale, reflecting the state of pop music at the time, and my radio dial never again came near either AM 890 or 1000. I refused to listen to the unbearable crap they were playing. To illustrate, here's a list of some of the top songs of 1973. Read it and try to refrain from retching:
- "Tie A Yellow Ribbon 'Round The Old Oak Tree," by Tony Orlando and Dawn
- "The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia," by Vickie Lawrence
- "Little Willy," by Sweet
- "Half Breed," by Cher
- "Wildflower," by Skylark
- "The Morning After," by Maureen McGovern
- "Diamond Girl," by Seals and Crofts
- "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," by Bette Midler
- "Funny Face," by Donna Fargo
- "The Twelth Of Never," by Donny Osmond
And some people think waterboarding is torture. Poor Benny. He says it wasn't until he went away to college that his musical horizons broadened. He became infatuated with Jimi Hendrix, among many others. Now, I can take Jimi Hendrix or leave him (well, to tell the truth, I'll leave him, period) but that's a matter of taste. At least he turned a youthful Benny Jay away from Tony Orlando and Dawn.
Our conversation got back to that first concert I'd attended. My pal Whitey and I took the No. 72 North Avenue bus from its western terminus at Narragansett Avenue seven miles east to Halsted Street, where we picked up the No. 8 bus and headed south another 57 blocks to Bridgeport and the Amphitheater. The ride took a good two-and-a-half hours but we both loved War. The song, "The World Is A Ghetto," was a brilliant, haunting, 10-minute-long masterpiece. Whenever it came on the radio (by this time, I'd become an habitual WGLD listener - the low-watt Oak Park station that later gave way to WXRT) I became lost in it, cranking the volume up to Nigel Tufnel's mythical 11. A bomb could have gone off next to me but I'd take no notice.
Neither Whitey nor I were familiar with Parliament but by the time its opening set was finished, we'd become diehard fans. Since we were a couple of half-broke Northwest Side teenagers, we could only afford cheap seats. We sat somewhere near the upper boundary of the troposphere and viewed the proceedings through a dense haze of legal and illegal smoke. We got back home to Galewood around 4:00am, proud of ourselves for our sojourn into the big, black inner city.
"How many white people do you think there were at the Amphitheater that night?" Benny asked.
"I'd say two - Whitey and me," I replied.
"So, you were the only two white guys in the whole place, and one of you is named Whitey!" Benny exclaimed, roaring. Then, he added a correction. "Three white guys - you forgot War's harmonica player, Lee Oskar."
I congratulated Benny Jay on his knowledge of War. Thank the gods, dumb luck or modern pharmacology, his listening to Donny Osmond hasn't resulted in brain damage.
