At 14, in true hippie fashion, my father stopped cutting his hair, started hiding an ash tray under his bed and picked up a guitar. Just a couple of years later, he watched my mother sing for her audition to the 87th St. Gang, their high school’s folk group. “He told them to pick me because I was cute,” she always chimes in at this point in the story. She got in and six years later married my father with flowers in her hair before they moved to San Francisco so he could try to make it big with his band. Had he succeeded, my parents’ early life would make a hit biopic, complete with stills of my mother in hotpants and my father’s face obscured by a massive beard.
But San Francisco only lasted a year, and soon they were back in the Kansas City suburbs. Also in true hippie fashion, my father gave up a few inches of hair for a real job. In the biopic, this is the part where he sheds his identity in favor of the oppressive house, kids, dog, etc. And while he now enjoys a tri-level home with a live-in mother-in-law and a grizzled Sheltie, he has not yet succumbed to an American Beauty-like fate.
As hard as music tried to give up on my father, he never gave up on it. This folly alone seems enough to demonstrate his intact idealism. Copies of his first, self-titled album, The Bentleys, sat for decades at our local record store in the last Kansas City hippie stronghold. I used to check on that album in high school, and it was always there, wedged between the As and the Cs, its black cover marred only by a small price tag with an even smaller price. Inevitably, the record store closed and we took all six or seven copies home as a tribute to my father’s undiscovered genius.
Throughout my childhood, as far as I knew, I was my father’s only fan. He, at least, was my first hero, my personal rock star, upstairs with a microphone and lyrics that were nearly incomprehensible to my four-year-old self. I begged him to play “that song with the white on one side and black on the other,” assuming he was talking about the color of the buildings instead of addressing Kansas City’s de-facto segregation. When he sang about Susie’s promiscuity and Martin’s bisexuality, I ignored what I didn’t understand and was left with Susie and Martin, a well-adjusted pair of friends. I expect his Gulf War protest number, “Blood for Oil,” to make a comeback any day now. These tunes, as much as Raffi or Disney sing-alongs, made up my childhood’s soundtrack, even if few ever heard them outside that upstairs room.
Last fall, though, after more than three decades of thankless gigs and local labels and anti-war lyrics, my father got a call. Josh Davis, a musician who has gained some fame as DJ Shadow, had miraculously turned up an old song of my father’s, “Hard On Me,” and sampled the guitar riff for a song on his latest album, The Outsider.
Playboy calls “You Made It,” the DJ Shadow song, “Coldplay-ish,” and while I am not a great fan of that illustrious group, I am a fan of my father. The Sundance Channel just picked up the song for an ad, and I love watching his half-grin as he quickly finds the station at the end of each hour on the off chance it might play. Transformed into an adolescent sure that he can make it, he has a new sense of purpose when he goes off to his friend’s basement studio for practice.
Here in the biopic, of course, my father would suddenly land a record deal and tour in a Lear jet with Neil Young. My mother would sing “Anticipation” alongside Carly Simon, and my college loans would be magically obliterated. None of this will happen. But it doesn’t matter. My dad is still a rock star.
