Hush
I thought I heard her calling my name
I had a Norelco Compact Cassette player. Yup, that’s what it said right on the tiny machine about the size of a shoebox, but much thinner, with a speaker on top and a drawer for the cassette below. Eventually they changed the name to Philips and dropped “Compact” but back in ’68 8-tracks were just taking hold, no one thought the cassette would make inroads, never mind last.
And it came with a microphone that looked like nothing so much as a sex toy, but recording friends was a novelty, the machine’s main function was to record music, after I went to Radio Shack to purchase the proper connectors. Yup, back before it was a going out of business cell phone store Radio Shack was the home of odds and ends, you could find a cable to do anything, like the one I used to turn stereo into mono, that took the outputs of my all-in-one Columbia box and turned them into one plug I could connect to the Norelco.
This was long before people borrowed albums to record to save money, to make mix tapes for friends, most people didn’t have any albums, they had mostly singles and the radio was their main source of music, imagine that, sitting at home, waiting for your favorite track to come on!
Which is what I did. But with my hand on the triangular Norelco button, which I pushed to RECORD whenever I heard the notes of my favorite tracks on WDRC.
That’s right, the hip FM in Hartford, which my box could get, I was not limited to the New York sounds. And I was an album guy, and there were certain LPs I knew I’d never own, there was nothing worth owning other than the hit, but I wanted to be able to hear that over and over again, on the go, those tapes traveled everywhere with me, they’re up on my wall right now.
Hush, hush
My goal was to get it perfect, my reflexes got quite good. But I’d still get the deejay talking over the beginning and the end. And those tracks on my cassettes, on no-name brands long before the advent of Maxell, became part of my DNA.
There’s nothing like getting behind the wheel of your own machine. Hearing the sound pouring out of the multiple speakers. Yes, yesterday was one of those days that everything sounded good, the oldies and the newbies. But I was driving on the 405, deep into darkness, and I heard this.
First it was Steppenwolf, whose “Magic Carpet Ride” I also had on cassette.
And some songs you’ve heard so much you think you’re immune.
But I just bought a new amplifier, the old one burned up, and the bass was pumping and suddenly it was 1968 all over again, Deep Purple’s “Hush” sounded brand new.
There’s that Ritchie Blackmore screaming intro, back before we knew his name.
And there’s the groove. And it’s not Ian Gillan. But it is Jon Lord.
That’s right, the singer is Rod Evans, long before anybody could conceive of “Smoke On The Water.” And the record came out on Bill Cosby’s Tetragrammaton Records, but what seals the deal is the organ. As if Felix Cavaliere pushed up the volume and fought with Gene Cornish for attention. There were no limits on “Hush.” Heavy metal had to start somewhere, and most people say it was Zeppelin, yup, that’s what was metal before speed and screech, but it took bands pushing the limits, taking us to the stratosphere, to get us there.
So I’m parked, sitting in front of Felice’s house, and I’m enveloped in that sound, of Jon Lord squeezing the keys, it’s like I’m in a spaceship that’s about to levitate.
And it felt so good!
P.S. The song was written by Joe South. I heard “Games People Play” too much to like it back then, and it was contrary to the edgy rock which was suddenly starting to dominate, but I can hear its greatness now.
P.P.S. The original version was done by Billy Joe Royal, yes, the maestro of the boondocks, now that’s a song I love. And if you listen to the original, which made it up to #52 on the chart, which means most people never heard it, you’ll hear the framework of the Deep Purple hit, but that’s all. Who do we credit for Deep Purple’s take, Joe Meek’s compatriot Derek Lawrence, whose memory has been lost to the sands of time?
P.P.P.S. The entire Deep Purple debut album was cut in three days. You see greatness is about catching lightning in a bottle. Labor long enough and you can get it perfect, but perfect is rarely a hit, not one that sticks, because perfect eliminates humanity. That’s right, once upon a time we went to the gig and expected the performance to be different from the record, do that today and the audience boos.
P.P.P.P.S. Come on, it sounds like a band, a cohesive unit that you can only marvel at, that you can’t penetrate, like Stonehenge. We bought songbooks, we learned how to play these songs at home, but we could never get close, because the musicians were Gods and their tracks were the Torah.
