Early Music

I used to go through my Mothers record collection when I was young. Her taste ran from Barbara Streisand to Frank Sinatra to Herb Albert. There was one l.p. that I will never forget though, and that was "Have a Marijuana" by David Peel and the Lower East Side. I used to play it on the sly before my Mother came home from work, songs like; "I like Marijuana", "Show me the way to get stoned", and the greatest song ever, "Up against the wall Motherfucker". Up 'til that point, I'd never heard a song with the word "Fuck" in it. I made a plan to sneak the album out of the house and share it with my friends.

I took the record to school in a brown paper bag and showed it around during recess and then brought it over to my friend Cody Alexander's house for a listening party. A group of us ran up to his room and started blasting the l.p.. When we got to "Up against the wall Motherfucker", we began dancing and singing along as loud as we could get and threw each other against the wall as a sort of "tribute dance". What we didn't notice was Cody's Mom Nell, knocking at the door ,asking what all the fuss was about. The door opened and she saw us running around screaming out the final chorus. She snatched the record from the player and threw the disc at the wall, smashing it into 140 pieces. I kicked the album jacket under Cody's bed before she could see it and stood there with the others as she tore us all a new asshole.

I wondered what I would do. Of course my Mother would be looking for the record after I went to bed that night to give it a listen. The next day I went back to Cody's house and looked for the sleeve under his bed. It was gone. His older brother Roy had gotten ahold of it and hung it up in his room with 4 huge tacks. After some negotiation, I was able to buy it back for 2 dollars and change. I snuck it into my place and slipped in a Bette Midler record into the sleeve, buying me some time and hiding my crime. Years later when I confessed to her about what happened, she laughed and told me it was a joke birthday present from one of her girlfriends and she'd never put it on since then. Up against the wall Motherfucker indeed!