Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- Jody Reynolds “Endless Sleep”- Billy’s View

 

 

A  YouTube film clip of Jody Reynolds performing the classic Endless Sleep

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

A while back, maybe four or five years ago now, Sam Lowell, from the old neighborhood, from the Acre, the run down, run-downest if there is such a word,  low-rent, low-rentest ditto on the such a word,  section of North Adamsville where he grew to manhood and where he like at least two generations of young men before him lived the hard-bitten sullen life of a corner boy in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor started writing up some remembrances from the days, from the time that rock and roll entered his testosterone-infested head, gave the first jail-break notion that something new was coming. (Frankly Josh had not thought that thought, had not been that wise to the world that he could sense the music shift that grabbed hold of him and millions of others was to be the precursor of greater upheavals. That swami task was left up to the late Peter Markin who at the time was ragging everybody about what was coming although nobody on that corner gave, as an expression of the day said it straight, a rat’s ass about the vague futuristic musings of a guy who read too many books and who held onto about two thousand obscure facts like they were the “Word.”)

Sam had, as he thought about the matter recently tried might and main to think about exactly when he got the rock and roll bug and which songs were key to that bug.  He knew that it was not Rock Around The Clock, the classic by stray-curly hair big bopper Bill Haley and his sexy sax-driven back up crew, the Comets. Knew too that it had nothing to do with Elvis since he was both too young to do anything but sulk over the fact that he, Elvis, got all the girls, had all the cars, and all the dough in the world and that all the young bud girls in the neighborhood had crushes on him. They would not even speak to a guy like Sam since he refused to wear sideburns, refused to swivel his hips, or rather couldn’t, not without doing bodily injury, and had the most pitiful sneer in the world that the girls did nothing but laugh at much less try to wipe a sneer off his face liked they dreamed of doing to Elvis (and locally Pretty James Preston who had their hearts all a-flutter). So like all good writers he started making things up, making stories up centered on some of the songs that he knew were important at the time and how he remembered them.

Sam had titled his little pieces- Oldies, but Goodies….., or some variation on that idea since after a fifty year or so hiatus they were in fact now old, now called classics, classics of rock and roll just like when he was a kid they talked about Mozart and Bach and guys like that as musical classics and were dismissed out of hand when Mister Lannon, the music teacher at Adamsville Junior High, tried to entice his charges with a little what he called culture. Yeah, right, Mister Lannon. Sam remembered with a sidewinder chuckle that Markin had shouted out in class one day that Mister Chuck Berry had called it right when he told a candid world that Mister Beethoven had better move over and tell members of his crew as well that there was a new sheriff in town. For his transgression he spent a few afternoons doing penance when he refused to apologize for his outburst. (Everybody had called him Markin in junior high school he would not be knighted with the moniker “the Scribe” until high school after Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boy night came up with that designation for him)      

So this is another tongue-in-cheek commentary, the back story if you like, in the occasional entries under Sam’s headline going back to the primordial youth time of the 1950s with its bags full of classic rock songs for the ages. Of course, any such efforts have to include the views of one Billy, William James Bradley, the central character in the series and the mad hatter of the 1950s rock jailbreak out in Sam’s “the projects” neighborhood. Yah, in those days, unlike during his later fateful wrong turn trajectory days, every kid, including his best friend Sam lived to hear what Billy had to say about any song that came trumpeting over the radio, at least every one that they would recognize as their own, the ones they would flip out over.

This song, Endless Sleep, came out at a time when Sam’s family was beginning to start the process of moving out of the projects, and, more importantly, at a time when he had begun to move away from Billy’s orbit, Billy’s new found orbit as king hell gangster wannabe. Billy was a kid of “no middle,” he was either going to replace Elvis as the teen idol of the universe or he was going to get what later would be called his “fifteen minutes of fame” and be the next Red Riley, the legendary bank robber and young men of neighborhood hero. Sam had begun by then to be at the start of his  24/7 reading at the local public library branch phase in lieu of being Billy’s accomplice on various, well, let’s call them capers just in case the statute of limitations has not run out. Still Billy, king hell rock and roll king of the old neighborhood, knew how to call a lyric, and make everybody laugh to boot. Here’s what Sam remembers of Billy’s take on Endless Sleep. Oh yeah Sam says wherever you are Billy he is still pulling for you. Got it.

JODY REYNOLDS

"Endless Sleep"

(Jody Reynolds and Dolores Nance)

The night was black, rain fallin' down

Looked for my baby, she's nowhere around

Traced her footsteps down to the shore

‘fraid she's gone forever more

I looked at the sea and it seemed to say

“I took your baby from you away.

I heard a voice cryin' in the deep

“Come join me, baby, in my endless sleep.

 

Why did we quarrel, why did we fight?

Why did I leave her alone tonight?

That's why her footsteps ran into the sea

That's why my baby has gone from me.

I looked at the sea and it seemed to say

“I took your baby from you away.

I heard a voice cryin' in the deep

“Come join me, baby, in my endless sleep.

 

Ran in the water, heart full of fear

There in the breakers I saw her near

Reached for my darlin', held her to me

Stole her away from the angry sea

I looked at the sea and it seemed to say

“You took your baby from me away.

My heart cried out “she's mine to keep

I saved my baby from an endless sleep.

 [Fade]

Endless sleep, endless sleep

*****

Billy back again, William James Bradley, if you didn’t know. Sam Lowell’s pal, Peter Paul Markin’s pal too but Sam was always my best friend, although I don’t know if we every shook on it or mentioned it during the years his family and mine lived in the projects, you know how hard boy guys are, so yeah his pal from over at the Adamsville Elementary School and the pope of rock lyrics down here in “the projects.” The Adamsville projects, if you don’t know. Sam, who I hadn’t seen for a while since he told me his family was going to move out of the projects and who had developed this big thing for the local library and books lately, came by the other day to breathe in the fresh air of my rock universe-adorned bedroom when we got to talking about this latest record, Endless Sleep, by Jody Reynolds. All the parents around here, at least the parents that care anyway, or those who have heard the lyrics screaming from their kid’s plug-in blaring radio (that’s why they invented transistor radios-so parents wouldn’t, or couldn’t, catch on to what we are listening to- smarten up is what I say to those kids still on plug-in mode, for christ’s sake) about the not so subtle suicide theme.

Yeah, like that is what every kid is going to do when the going gets a little tough in the love department. Take a jump in the ocean, and call one and all to join them. Come on, will yeah, give me a break. It's only a song. Besides what is really good about this one is that great back beat on the guitar and Jody Reynolds' cool clothes and sideburns. I wish to high heaven I had both.

But see the pope of rock lyrics, me, can’t just leave this song like that. I have to decode it for the teeny-boppers around here or they will be clueless, including big time book guy Sam Lowell who cycled all the way over here from a across town to get my opinion on the lyrics since he was confused about what was happening, why a girl would jump into the ocean over some slight by a guy, when there are millions of guys around or why a guy would put himself in danger by trying to rescue such a bimbo and not let old Neptune have his way with her.

Naturally Sam has to these days show how bright he is with all those books under his belt like he is not doomed like the rest of us to toil for our meals and knowing all that stuff won’t as my mother always says bring home the bacon. Has to spout some crazy theory backed up by some weird thesis, whatever that is. That foolish theory is really what is going to make the difference between us here. We had a battle royal over this one. See, Sam always wants to give big play to the “social” meaning of the song, whatever that is, you know where the thing sticks in society, at least teeny-bopper society. Yah, and Sam is also the “sensitive” guy, usually. Like always pulling for the girl to get her guy back, or at least go back to her old boyfriend for some back-up love, like he wanted the whole fucking world, yeah I swear what about it, to know about when we went round and round about the whereabouts of Eddie in the great song Eddie My Love. Or the time he had a kind thing to say about the dumb cluck of a bimbo who went back to the railroad track-stuck car to get some cheapjack class ring in Teen Angel (although he agreed, agreed fully, with me that the dame was a dumb cluck on other grounds).

Here though I am the sensitive guy, if you can believe that. Here’s why. It seems that Sam has some kind of exception to the “social” meaning rule, the positive spin rule, the hand-wringing if you ask me about sappy girls when it comes to the ocean, to the sea, christ, probably to some scum pond for all I know as the scene for suicide attempts. Apparently he is in the throes of some King Neptune frenzy and took umbrage (his word, not mind I don’t go to the library much) at the idea that someone would desecrate the sea that way, “our homeland the sea” was the way he put it. Like old Neptune hasn’t brought seventy-three types of hell on us with his hurricane tidal waves, his overflowing the seawalls, his flooding everything within three miles of the coast, or when he just throws his flotsam and jetsam (my words, from school, from vocabulary, from the voice of old biddy Miss Winot but I like them) on the world’s beaches, hell, on local teeny Adamsville Beach if it came to that, whenever he gets fed up. So I have to defend this frail’s action, and gladly.

You know it really is unbelievable once you start to think about it how many of these songs don’t have people in them with names, real names, nicknames, anything to tag on them. Here it’s the same old thing. Sam would just blithely go on and on and make up names to fill out this “theory” but I’ll just give you the “skinny” without the Sam literary touches, okay. Rather than calling the girl every name in the book for disturbing the fishes or the plankton like Sam I am trying to see what happened here to drive her to such a rash action. Obviously they, the unnamed boy and girl, had an argument, alright a big argument if that satisfies you. What could it have been about? Sam, wise guy Sam, wants to make it some little thing like a missed date, or the guy didn't call or something. Maybe it was, but I think the poor girl was heartbroken about something bigger. Maybe boyfriend didn’t want to “go steady” or maybe he wasn’t ready to be her ever lovin’ one and only. Let me put it this way it was big, not Sam’s b.s. stuff.

Okay she went over the edge, no question, running down to the sea and jumping in. On a rainy night to boot. Hey she had it bad, whatever it was. But see old Neptune, Sam’s friend, maybe father for all I know, is taunting said boyfriend, saying he is taking his baby away. Well, frankly, and old wimpy Sam dismissed this out of hand, those are fighting words in the projects, and not just the projects either. And the girl, given the cold and what that does to you when you have been in too long is forced to taunt her lover boy, trying to bring him down too. This is the part I like though, although Sam would probably take umbrage (again), the boyfriend is ready to reclaim his honey, come hell or high water. Yah, he’s taking his baby back, and taking her no questions asked, from that nasty relentless sea. Chalk one up for our side. Yes, Billy, William James Bradley, is happy, pleased, delighted and any other words you can find in the library that this story has a happy ending. Sam be damned.