was the beginning of my musical journey: singing three-part harmonies with Janice and Alice Anne and strumming those ukuleles in the backseat while my parents bickered in the front seat.
“You’re going too fast, slow down. Do you have to be the first car on the highway all the time?” griped my mom, Alice. But she knew the answer: of course! Ninety-five mph was the typical speed for one of our trips down south.
We didn’t care, though. My sisters used to try to “pants” me in the backseat, hit me, kick me, tickle me, and of course, I loved every minute of it.
“Stop, it girls! Jimmie, would you rather be up here with us or tortured in the backseat with your sisters?”
My answer was simple: “Tortured in the backseat with my sisters!” You see, this wasn’t torture at all. Having all that attention focused on me set the stage for my strong desire, obsession if you will, to be a performer.
1 My passion for those old Sun Records sides of Johnny Cash extended forward to 1966 when I convinced The Ides of March to work up and record a Byrds-influenced rendition of Johnny’s “Train of Love.” It was recorded at the same session that spawned “Roller Coaster” and is only being released now on The Ides’ 50th anniversary set.
I ALWAYS CRAVED the spotlight. As time went on, I became more and more comfortable in the limelight, and then actually needed it to feel like myself.
My sisters, in a way, were the ones who raised me. With my dad busy at work adjusting relays at our local telephone company, Automatic Electric, and my mother doing community work (she volunteered at the Piggy Bank Thrift Shop, a resale store that sold donated clothes and items) in South Berwyn, it fell to my sisters to mind “Fatboy,” as they often called me. My belly was so big at age five that I used to lift it up and throw it down like I saw the bullies do in the cartoons I loved. It was the move they’d make when they came “harrumphing” into the room. Because of the many years between us, I was like an only child, but they made me feel like a golden child. I had so much more in common with them than with my parents. They made me feel loved and they doted on me. They laughed at my jokes and treated me like a rock star even before I learned to play the guitar.
“Fatboy” with my dear and gorgeous sisters, Alice Anne and Janice—Oceanside Miami Beach—Cavalier Motel, 1955.
My parents made me take piano when I was seven. God, did I hate practicing! Mr. Ulrich was my unfortunate tutor. He was ancient and smelled like mothballs. I was never prepared with my lesson and one day he finally looked me straight in the eye.
“You really don’t want to do this, do you?”
“Uhh, not really, Mr. Ulrich,” I stammered.
When my Uncle Raymond would visit, my mom would say, “Show your uncle what you’ve learned on piano.” I would reluctantly play my scales, but when he started yawning I realized that this wasn’t cool. Then Alice Anne would launch into “Clair de Lune” and Uncle Raymond would be all smiles. Piano lessons were a chore. I wanted to play songs!
Just like my dad before me, I’m an ear person. I never liked reading those ants on the page called “notes.” Never cared about theory or avoiding parallel fifths (apparently a no-no in classical composing). I quit piano lessons after one long year at the ripe old age of eight. By that point, I knew enough to work out the chords and simple melodies on my own. Soon I began to fashion those chords into primitive songs. I would perform those four or five simple chords mimicking another of my early rock ’n’ roll heroes, Jerry Lee Lewis, which included standing up and kicking away the piano bench as I’d seen him do on TV.
I developed a style that is known as a “writer’s piano.” For me the piano is mainly a tool for writing songs. The keyboard for me has always been more about mood than technique or fast runs. A few years later I’d use the guitar in a similar fashion to bring out the rock side of my songwriting.
There’s something so peaceful about sitting down at the piano because it speaks to my soul and inspires me to write about romance and beauty. When I want to rock, though, I crank up the guitar through a Marshall amp and feel a different kind of majesty.
Janice and Alice Anne were polar opposites. Janice was the popular girl in high school. Even though I was twelve years younger, I kind of sensed that she was hot stuff. Very attractive, very happening, and smartly dressed in her form-fitted skirt and cashmere sweater, Janice collected a closet full of the latest styles and a dazzling array of boyfriends. She actually modeled dresses for fashion shows for the upscale Wieboldt’s department store in Oak Park, Illinois, where she also sold ladies’ hats.
Not that Alice Anne wasn’t popular, but she was more conservative and perhaps not the trendsetter that Janice was. For some reason Alice Anne did not really resemble the rest of the family. Once when we grouped together for a family photo in Miami Beach the photographer shooed her aside shouting, “You, at the end. Just the family, just the family!”
Janice had a mad crush on a high school dropout named Al Kovarik, a slick-looking, James Dean type of guy from the tough Chicago suburb of Cicero. He was my favorite of all her boyfriends because he looked cool and drove a ’56 chartreuse and black Mercury Monterey convertible complete with spotlights, blue-dot taillights, and power windows. He would take me and Janice out cruising, some nights stopping at Big Boy, a burger drive-in on the main drag on Ogden Avenue in Berwyn. He’d let me order a double Big Boy and a chocolate milkshake… once he even took us to the drive-in movie way out on Cicero Avenue to see Apache. I drove them both crazy putting the power windows and power antenna up and down all night long as they were trying to make out.
Sadly, Janice made decisions with her heart, not her intellect, and her boyfriends tended to be left of center, nontraditional types.
She married the last in that line, a burly trucking magnate whose name could be seen silk-screened on the gravel trucks going to and from the local limestone quarry in Lyons. One of his big Mack trucks bore the name “Miss Janice” on the hood. But things were far from rosy between them and Mother and Dad had to intervene when Janice wanted a divorce. (In my parents’ day people mated for life! Divorce was a sin.)
Perhaps because of the marital discord, Janice became a closet drinker, hiding bottles of wine all around the house and spending time in rehab centers. I remember as a child feeling powerless at calming the battles that raged between them. Even though her husband loved her and funded her every whim (archeological digs, her vast collection of African art), money could not make up for a certain emptiness and growing aggression between them.
A lifetime chain smoker, Janice finally found peace on December 20, 1994, when she succumbed to emphysema-induced heart failure at age fifty-seven, leaving behind a heart load of precious memories.
She came to me in a vivid dream the day after she passed. “Jimmie, don’t worry about me. It’s wonderful here.” In my reverie she was restored to the teen queen Janice in her cashmere sweater and pearls long before life got the best of her. From that dream on I felt totally at peace.
Poor Alice Anne (nicknamed “AA”) was often the brunt of my mother’s sharp-tongued sarcasm, saying she looked like an Indian squaw while Janice would always come out unscathed. If Mom’s tactics created competition between the two of them, I sure never saw it. All I saw was a lot of love between them.
The contrast between Janice and Alice Anne was never more apparent than on the family 8-millimeter movie clip where Alice Anne couldn’t stay upright for even a millisecond