From Rock Music to The Rock Man: Half Asleep and Waking Up

I was twelve years old for most of 1971. Right now the year is like a quasar: shiny, mysterious, and moving ever-farther away. But back then, the Universe didn’t extend much beyond Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where I had a paper route, went to Scout meetings on Monday nights, and left behind the shores of Catholic school sixth grade toward the undiscovered country of public junior high. On that last day at Saint John’s, my mom picked up me and three younger siblings (unusual, since we walked to all our schools), and I caught my finger in the car door, leaving a swelling that lasted well into June. Memorable as that seems to be, it was one of the lesser events of the year.

One greater event was best appreciated by the kids: Bartlesville, with its two high schools, four movie screens, and a bison herd (well outside city limits), had finally merited its own McDonald’s restaurant. “Here We Grow Again” read the sign at the site, beneath the familiar double parabolas that till then had been fifty miles away in the Big City (i.e. Tulsa). My sister Nina was hired as one of the first employees. This led to an event as wonderful and unexpected to this growing boy as finding a copy of Mad magazine with a ten-dollar bill inside. In what would now be called a “soft opening,” families of the employees were invited to come and give the place and its people some live practice by dining in free of charge. Holy hog heaven, Batman! I finished my Big Mac, licked my fingers, and marched back to the counter to ask for a Quarter Pounder chaser. It was definitely my kind of place, even if for just one evening. The memory, and likely an ample dose of LDL cholesterol, will be with me to the end.

Nina had graduated and was heading off to college. This led to a reapportioning of living space at the house, so that my brother Neal and I no longer had to share a bedroom. While this brought the joy one would expect (Begone, bunk bed!), some of the changes were more subtle in their arrival. One of them involved the radio.

I had a Sears Silvertone clock radio, stately in its woodgrain-like plastic, that had been handed down to me (as was so much in my life then) from my brother Eric. With its elliptical analog face and slide-rule dial covering the full AM band, I now had the power to wake up at the hour of my choice and accomplish one of my life’s daily goals: to get up early enough to be the first one to the bathroom. And not only could I be roused from my slumber by music (or possibly news or commercials, but still better than a buzzer), but likewise I could set the device to lull me to sleep with such music, and shut itself off up to an hour later. O brave new world…

At about this same time, a three column-inch display ad showed up in the local paper. In what appeared to be hand-drawn outline text, it said, “Rock is coming to KWON in the nighttime”. KWON (serving Washington, Osage, and Nowata Counties) was at that time the sole local AM station in B’ville, broadcasting at 1000 Watts (250 at night) its programming of soft-pop music, live interviews of local interest, a Saturday morning radio want-ads show, network news on the hour, and Paul Harvey with his commentary and stories, all of which he claimed were true. Now, the influx of rock music into such a wholesome environment cannot have come lightly. The listening audience for local radio were largely hardworking people, children of the Depression, World War II veterans. For many, the term “longhair music” still meant Beethoven and Liszt. They might have decided that Elvis was basically a fine young man (he had served in the Army, after all, and had met with President Nixon in the White House), but felt comfortable listening only to his recordings of Gospel music. Changes were accepted reluctantly, if at all; not too many years later, a local man purchased a quarter-page newspaper ad containing his considered opinion of the metric system, declaring it impractical, expensive, and “illegal.” So why upset a smooth-sailing ship? KWON already had perfectly good late-evening programming, a parade of mellow big-band tunes called “Starlight Serenade,” which would soothe its listeners into pleasant dreams after a long day. Rock music grated on the ears, lured children away from their parents, talked about “love” without ever mentioning “marriage.” And don’t even get started on that profane “Jesus Christ Superstar” atrocity.

The radio station went ahead with it, likely prompted by some local advertisers, who saw their growing market of young consumers slipping away in favor of stations from Tulsa that played music they wanted to hear. And so rock music came to Bartlesville. Why, we even got a live concert from a nationally known band, Rare Earth, performing at our high school stadium. I didn’t attend, but it almost wasn’t necessary. From our house nearly a mile away, I could hear most of the music, including what seemed an endless version of their hit, “I Just Want to Celebrate.”

So at this point I had my own room, a radio, and a new world of music to listen to. To be fair, it wasn’t entirely new. My older siblings, Nina and Eric, had gotten there ahead of me, not unnoticed. Nina insisted on watching the The Lloyd Thaxton Show on TV after school a few years earlier, a dance music show that had the nerve to be on at the same time as our beloved Mr. Zing and Tuffy Show. Eric was the electronics whiz, who built Heathkit audio components and even his own light box. He had the family’s first FM radio, and recorded his own 8-track tapes. His music tastes were more influential to me (perhaps because they were louder); my fondness for “Madman Across the Water” goes directly back to him, and I still remember him introducing me to the fantastic drum solo in “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” Miss you, Big Brother.

Since the music came over the radio in the evenings, it was only natural that I’d be listening to it at bedtime (9 p.m. in those days, or 8:30 on Saturdays because I’d be getting up at 3 a.m. to deliver newspapers). I’d turn the little switch on the clock radio to 60-minute shutoff, turn out the lights and that was it. Now, I can’t say with certainty that the songs I heard  in half-slumber affected my dreams, but the images they brought stayed with me and made me wonder. Why was someone apologizing to Uncle Albert?  The idea of “heads across the sky” was disturbing, and to this day I don’t know what that vocal noise is in the split second after “The butter wouldn’t melt so I put it in a pie.” Then there was The Who’s lyric “They decide and the shotgun sings the song.” That was pretty jolting, even in a time when every day’s top story was about the Vietnam War, which seemed to have been going on all my life and always would be. And I had no idea what was going on between Rod Stewart and Maggie May, but it didn’t sound pleasant. And no, Lee Michaels, I did not “Know What you Mean.” The songs “Draggin’ the Line” and “One Toke Over the Line” made no sense to me. “Riders on the Storm” sounded downright creepy (Dorian mode will do that, I learned years later in music theory class), though it had nothing on Bloodrock’s “D.O.A.”

In general, I reconciled myself to not ever understanding what a lot of the lyrics meant; in the case of some songs like “Roundabout,” that was just as well. Sometimes just the harmonies or instrumentation intrigued me. The fast keyboarding in “Won’t Get Fooled Again” seemed downright impossible. The horn harmonies in “Temptation Eyes” had a slightly off, and therefore alluring sound. And the bands Chicago and Chase got my attention with their prominent use of trumpets, an instrument I actually knew how to play. Since the evening programming was largely Top 40, I heard these songs over and over, usually when half-asleep. Maybe their influence was much like sleep-learning, something Eric told me he’d learned about in psychology class.

This is not to say that this influx of loud, incomprehensible and therefore dangerous music heralded a decline of civilization in the heart of Green Country. KWON radio stayed in business, broadcasting from its studios in the Caney River floodplain. Local standards were maintained. About two years later, when Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” hit the charts, Bartlesville listeners heard the song with the word “crap” scissored out of the first line (literally, by the sound of it).

(A side note—it’s easy to forget nowadays that songs back then, even big hits, had a limited life on radio. And once they were gone, they were gone. A song that tickled—or assaulted—the ears a dozen times a day for a month or two might then not be heard on local airwaves for years. They were still available on records or tapes, but even those might get hard to find. Just a few years later, a radio station here in Tucson wanted to play Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” on Thanksgiving Day, but discovered that they no longer had a copy, and appealed to listeners for someone to bring one to the studio. This vanishing music circumstance led to a generation of listeners who might have wondered for decades afterward if they had really heard a song called “Back When My Hair Was Short,” or just imagined it. As the Boomer generation aged into mass marketability, oldies stations popped up, and now you don’t have to search hard to find the tunes of your past, including those you wish had stayed buried. Looking at you, “Piña Colada Song.”)

But while rock music was shaping my semi-conscious brain, something else appeared to me, on TV, that affected me more than I would realize for a long time.

In early February, 1971, just days after my twelfth birthday, the ABC Movie of the Week brought an unusual offering. It was a full-length cartoon, titled The Point. Outside of Disney, and the annual Charlie Brown specials, cartoons in prime time just weren’t happening, not since The Flintstones had ended about five years earlier. And in the previews I could see that this one had a very modern, very artistic look about it. So at 7:30, my homework completed (presumably), I took my place in front of our 19-inch black-and-white television to see what this was about.

It started with a framing narrative (sorry, that’s my creative writing degree talking) of a man putting his young son to bed. The son told his mom that he would turn out the lights once his program was over.  Wow, this movie was about me! The father, voiced by some actor named Dustin Hoffman, talked about how kids used to like having their parents read stories to them, and chose a book from the shelf. He began reading, while his son stared at a blank TV screen by the bed.

The tale took place in what was called The Land of Point, where everything and everyone had an actual physical point on them. Not sharp points, except maybe on the buildings, but pointed protrusions all the same. One day, a baby is born in the village with a cute, round, point-free head. The parents, who named their child Oblio, loved him dearly, despite the comments from all their neighbors and friends. When Oblio is old enough to go to school, his mother makes him a pointed hat to wear, so that he would appear more “normal” and therefore acceptable to the other kids. And so Oblio’s life seems a happy one, playing with his friends and his ever-faithful dog, Arrow.

Conflict soon comes, of course. The evil son of an evil Count tries to bar Oblio from a game of triangle toss, because, well, the no-point thing. Oblio sees this as unfair, and claims he and Arrow can beat the Count’s son in a one-on-one of the game. Oblio wins, the Count’s son is humiliated, and the Count seeks to avenge his son. The count goes to the King, and reminds him that the one law in the town is that everything and everyone must have a point. Right. The King reluctantly agrees and allows the Count to take Oblio to trial. Oblio is found guilty because “the law is the law,” and he and Arrow are banished from the Land of Point out to the Pointless Forest.

(Now, I don’t remember whether I got all teary-eyed at this point, but I’d like to think that I did, because the idea of banishing a child away from his home and parents is a tragic thing, and reacting strongly to that is part of who I am.)

So Oblio assures his parents that he will be all right, and he and Arrow head out to the Pointless Forest. That’s where the real story begins. This is a journey tale, not unlike Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which the main character meets others along the way who affect him and indirectly teach him things about life.

Shortly after arriving at the Pointless Forest, Oblio and Arrow meet the Pointed Man, who has three faces and points going every which way. Arrow is not too sure about this character (and anybody I knew would have been terrified), but Oblio politely introduces himself to the Pointed Man and asks him for advice on which way to go. The Pointed Man (who in Shakespeare’s day was Puck) tells him a number of confusing things, concluding that “A point in all directions is the same as no point at all.” Besides being a capsule description of vector physics, this admonition is food for thought about a person’s own moral compass. No doubt more than one Sunday sermon sprang from this tidbit.

The Pointed Man vanishes as mysteriously as he appeared, and Oblio and Arrow proceed further. Soon they encounter my favorite character, the Rock Man. He’s a laid-back, smooth talking hepcat (I’ve since learned that his voice is patterned after Beat comedian Lord Buckley, who has now joined my list of revered long-dead raconteurs). He advises Oblio to take things easy and enjoy life, and let go of his obsession with finding a point in things. “You don’t have to have a point to have a point.” How many pieces of advice do you remember from age 12? This is one of mine.

Oblio and Arrow encounter still others in the Pointless Forest, including three billowing ladies who personify the phrase “dance like no one’s watching,” and a Tree Man who invites the two to join his leaf manufacturing and distribution empire. The Pointed Man appears several more times, each time declaring Oblio’s adventures to be “Pointless!”, leading to Oblio asserting himself and his experiences all the more. The Pointed Man’s point, like the character itself, may not always be visible, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Not surprisingly, Oblio’s story ends happily. And for me, one of the most touching moments comes when the father puts the book back onto the shelf, and is leaving the room, when his son stops him to thank him for reading that story. It’s a minor detail, but I actually recalled it a few times many years later when reading stories to my own sons.

Although the director and animator of the film was Fred Wolf, it’s really the brainchild of Harry Nilsson, who conceived the story and wrote the accompanying music. In a unique achievement for a TV movie, one of its songs (“Me and My Arrow”) actually charted and was heard on the radio for much of the year. The film appeared a couple more times on television, but it was over twenty-five years before I saw it again.

So what is it from this 74-minute film that has stayed with me over the decades? Many lessons took years to sink in, but they were all there in the Pointless Forest. One is that everyone has something to teach you. Everyone has a point, you might say. Another is that fear shouldn’t prevent you from being kind. Oblio encountered characters that ranged from unusual to bizarre, yet he greeted them all warmly and spoke to them as friends. The only times he ever showed fear was when he worried for the safety of his best friend Arrow. I don’t claim to have achieved such casual bravery, but I certainly aspire to it even now. David Bowie expressed it simply the following year in his lyric “Turn and face the strange.” I posted those words on my classroom wall, as much a reminder to me as to my students.

Also, I didn’t have a dog of my own at that time, but the loyalty and friendship between Oblio and Arrow showed me the possibility of something more precious than any material wealth. “Me and My Arrow” has played many times in my head when I’ve been with my dogs.

And a final lesson comes from the rock music as well as the Rock Man. Sometimes you have to let your guard down, give your caution and cynicism the night off, and just let things wash over you like the rain. I didn’t set out to “discover” this music that was new and jarring. (My tastes at the time were mostly light classical and Tijuana Brass; yes, believe it.) But in letting it in semi-consciously, accepting it unquestioningly the way we accept absurdities in our dreams, I opened myself to new choices for my musical tastes. I could decide later–and did–which ones I liked and disliked, but first I had to give it the chance to enrich me however it might. As the Rock Man put it, “Dig me, taking it all in.”

That year, on the threshold of adolescence (and its cathedral, junior high school), an animated film on network television imparted to me that things in life, even if they lack sense, fairness, or comprehendible lyrics, all potentially have a point. Dig it.