Page 119 - WhyAsInY

anDries HuDDe, We salute tHee
forty-five. Not only could the true cognoscenti name the person or group responsible for the hit song, but they could also name the “label” that had distributed it and, more important and usually more obscure, the name of the song on the “flip” side. (For a brief and unproductive period, I aspired to be a cognoscente: I knew that the flip side of Danny and the Juniors’ “At the Hop,” originally recorded on the Singular Records label, was “Sometimes,” to which a pretty good slow dance could be had.)
I should not leave the reader with the impression that rock ’n’ roll was the only music that played a part in my life in junior high (and, no, we don’t count playing at, not truly playing, the clarinet). True, rock ’n’ roll played a dominant part, but, in 1958, at what was the height of the Cold War, a Texan named Van Cliburn surprised the world by winning the Tchaikovsky piano competition in Moscow. This was a very big deal in the United States, and Cliburn was given a ticker-tape parade in New York City. I remember getting caught up in the event as well and not only listening to his winning rendition of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Con- certo in B-Flat Minor on our radio, but also recording it and replaying it many times. I still get a bit of a thrill recalling the sound of the announcer introducing the live performance with the dramatically intoned words “Kirill Kondrashin mounts the podium. . . .” It was my first real experi- ence with classical music and, although I didn’t purchase classical recordings until I was a young adult, a love of classical music stayed with me through the years (as did a love of rock ’n’ roll). I had earlier attended a Young People’s Concert, one of a series conducted by Leonard Bernstein—I had also seen Bo Diddley at the Brooklyn Paramount—but what I took away from the concert was not the music; it was Bernstein’s podium presence and manner of addressing children. I should also note that Cliburn’s first name is not Van. It is Harvey, a fact that I was not aware of at the time. You can look it up.
But Buddy Holly (and hormones I guess), not Beethoven, was the glue that brought adolescents together as time went by in junior high. I don’t think that pairing up happened a lot before the ninth grade, as
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