David McGee: He will never be the editor of a rock magazine again

By Steven Ward

If anyone ever writes a history on rock criticism and music writing, the names of Stanley Booth, Peter Guralnick and Nick Tosches will surely lead off the chapters on roots rock and American vernacular music writing. But if the author leaves out the name of writer David McGee, neither the chapter or the history of music writing will ever be complete. McGee has been writing about music since his college days at the Oklahoma Daily--the student newspaper at the University of Oklahoma. Like many kids growing up in the '50s, Elvis Presley changed McGee's life. After a cousin asked McGee to put his ear next to her tiny transistor radio one summer day in 1956, McGee heard the first strains of "Heartbreak Hotel." There was no turning back after that.

Since that time, McGee has written about rock and pop music for the now defunct Record World, Rolling Stone, Pro Sound News, Spin, and the short-lived but intelligent and lively Record (where he served as managing editor for the magazine's entire five year run).

McGee's superb Carl Perkins biography, Go Cat Go: The Life and Times of Carl Perkins, The King of Rockabilly, is sadly out of print. Go (Cat Go!) and find it at an out of print on-line dealer.

Although McGee has written about all kinds of popular music throughout his career, his specialty has always been country music and the music that sprang from the South in the '50s and collided to create rock and roll--country, blues, gospel, and bluegrass. Today, he is the country music editor at BarnesandNoble.com, an editor at Pro Sound News, and he's about to start work on the next edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide.

McGee has also finished the script for a Broadway musical based on the life and songs of legendary songwriter Doc Pomus. The musical, Save the Last Dance for Me, is scheduled to begin workshops in Minneapolis in June, with an opening on the Great White Way planned for early 2002. He is also collaborating with Pomus's daughter, Sharyn Felder, on a companion book to the musical. It will include previously unpublished transcripts of interviews McGee conducted with Pomus in the late '70s; powerful, poetic, intimate entries from Pomus's personal journals; plus reminiscences of Pomus by people who knew him best, including his brother, the noted divorce attorney Raoul Lionel Felder, his daughter and son, and musical soul-mates like Phil Spector and Dr. John.

As McGee says in the following interview, the rock music of today does not really move him like the music of his youth still does. That does not make him a bad guy, just one who couldn't edit a rock mag today.

Judge for yourself, but I don't think McGee is bothered by that at all.

Steven:   So what have you been up to lately? I understand you are the Country Music Editor for BarnesandNoble.Com. How did you get that job and what does it entail?

David:   I joined bn.com a few months before it went online. Apparently, I was recommended for the position by Alan Light, whom I had met when he was at Rolling Stone, and whose then-fiancée, now-wife Suzanne McElfresh, was the site’s pop music editor for about a year before she moved to another online publication. Apparently Suzanne told him bn.com was looking for a country editor, he gave her my name and number, and I got the job, which is a freelance position. It’s always heartening when someone like Alan, who is one of the best writers and editors around, gives you a vote of confidence.

Because bn.com is an online retail store, the job of all the music editors is to weigh in first on the major releases each week--the ones that sell lots and lots of units--and to try to keep up with worthy small label releases that we feel fans in each genre would enjoy knowing about. A good example of the latter was the 1999 debut album by the Groobees, whose principal singer and songwriter is Susan Gibson, best known for writing the Dixie Chicks’ breakthrough song, "Wide Open Spaces." I think Susan is going to be a major writer as time goes on, and the Groobees ought to be around for awhile too if they can find it economically feasible to stay together until they get established as a touring band. Right now they’re pretty much just playing clubs in their native Texas and surrounding states, but they’re a good, solid band and deserve a wider audience.

Back to the question, what we do at bn.com is not music criticism--because bn.com hopes to sell these albums, the reviews emphasize the albums’ positive aspects. If something is truly egregious--in my department that would be any, oh, Brooks and Dunn album, for example, or a Tim McGraw release, or... well, let’s not go into each and every one--stuff that is so formulaic, so bloodless it really is beneath commentary or contempt--then I have the option of not signing my name to the review, or making it nothing more than descriptions of a few typical songs and getting out quickly. Does that bother me? Only a little bit. I would prefer simply not having to write about hack mainstream artists at all. But I’m used to this approach, because the first seven years of my professional career were spent at the music industry trade publication Record World, and keeping it positive was the rule of the day there.

The most satisfying aspect of the job is in being able to do interviews with the artists. I love talking to artists about their work, and the bn.com position allows me to do this on a regular basis. It’s always gratifying to cross paths with an artist like Clay Walker, who has multiple sclerosis but doesn’t make any issue of it, doesn’t ask for anyone’s pity, and keeps on finding ways to look for positive things in his life and career. Rather than cursing the hand he’s been dealt, Clay’s thankful for the blessings he’s received, and for that reason he reaches out to others similarly afflicted to help them understand how to cope with their illness and make the most of their lives. He also happens to make very good mainstream country albums--he’s one of the best selling artists of the past decade--that stay close to a gritty, contemporary honky tonk sound. The mainstream’s not in as bad shape as my colleagues in the press, some of whom know not of what they speak, make it out to be, but it’s not altogether healthy either. But Clay is an artist who makes you feel good about the mainstream’s prospects, and makes you feel good about being alive. I doubt I ever would have had a chance to meet him had it not been for barnesandnoble.com, and that makes up for having to write about Tim McGraw from time to time. In the past year I’ve interviewed, among others, Shelby Lynne, James Talley, Kathy Mattea, Trisha Yearwood, Cindy Bullens, Suzy Bogguss, Charlie Daniels, Hank Thompson, Wynona--all thoughtful, articulate artists with interesting histories--in Hank’s case, towering history--who make an effort not to paint by numbers when they go into the studio. Sharing ideas with people whose creative work has made an impression or even had a profound impact on your own life is the best part of the music writer’s life, as far as I’m concerned. If I could only do interviews and never write another review again, I’d be happy.

Steven:   How is this job different from print work? Do you think the advent of the Internet has changed music journalism for better or worse?

David:   I guess the biggest difference is that the online sites I’ve written for--Amazon and bn.com--insist on brevity. As you can tell from my answers, brevity is not my long suit. I’ve struggled with bn.com’s 150-200 word limit on reviews. I don’t think you can say anything useful about an album in 150 or 200 words; and when it’s an album like Shelby Lynne’s or Trisha Yearwood’s most recent efforts, which are very personal affairs, the restrictions are frustrating--there’s so much to deal with you can barely even suggest what’s there in a 200-word review. In those two cases I was able to follow up the reviews with interviews, so I did get an opportunity to get into some of the issues they dealt with on their albums and, I hope, do something worthwhile in support of two albums that I believed were as good as anyone was going to hear in the year 2000. The online retail sites seem to think their readers don’t have the attention span to endure lengthy reviews, hence the emphasis on the thumbnail, just-highlight-the-selling-points approach. Perhaps they’re right. I doubt many people log onto bn.com or Amazon hoping to find provocative writing about music or books or whatever it is they’re shopping for. At the same time, I believe you should respect anyone who visits your site, and offer some content with a little meat on the bone. Maybe, just maybe, your visitors then make a purchase they hadn’t anticipated when they logged on.

With regard to the emphasis on quick takes rather than in-depth commentary, the Internet is simply mirroring what’s been going on in the print medium for almost 20 years now--that is, shorter reviews, shorter features, shorter Q&As, shorter everything. Rolling Stone instigated and has bucked that trend over the years. In the early to mid-‘80s, when I was working there at Record World, Jann Wenner ordered that all reviews, other than the lead review and any other secondary highlighted reviews, be no longer than a certain word length--I believe it was 200 words at that time. Jann’s decree was one of many factors in Paul Nelson’s leaving, which I was there to witness up close and personal. I remember a couple of long nights in my office listening to, and I hope providing some support for, Paul in what really seemed an agonizing moment for him. When Anthony DeCurtis took over the section in the late ‘80s, the reviews ran a little longer, but still nothing like the length they were in the magazine’s early days. Now it’s back to the shorter length, and I don’t foresee that changing any time soon.

But you know, looking back on it now, I think Jann, who has brilliant instincts as an editor and has always been more attuned to the little seismic movements of the culture than is ever acknowledged, realized that the days of the discursive review were numbered with the advent of MTV and its emphasis on news briefs and videos cut quick on the eye. Now a whole generation of music critics has grown up knowing only the short take, at least in the mainstream press, where the only money is to be made. That form is as natural to them, I suppose, as the long form is to my generation. What all this boils down to--the short form, that is, whether it’s in a print magazine or on a web site--is a diminished dialogue with the readers. I don’t get a sense of today’s average music fan being engaged with music writers in the way my generation connected with the most prominent writers in Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy and Creem. There are many reasons for that, but one reason is that the short form review doesn’t allow for much of a point of view or distinctive style to be established. Would Lester Bangs have become Lester Bangs if he were starting out today? Not in the mainstream press. Maybe on the Internet, if he had his own web site, but not in the mainstream press.

Steven:   You grew up poor in the South. Can you give me some more bio background information? Where you were born, went to school etc.

David:   I was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and raised in Tulsa, where the family moved when I was four. My dad was from Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, my mother from Carbon Hill, Alabama, but she spent part of her childhood in Hazen, Arkansas, where her parents had moved the family to start a small cotton farm. The farm failed, eventually, and they returned to Carbon Hill before she started high school. I still don’t know much about my dad’s family or background, except that his father was a Methodist minister, and my dad, apparently, fell out of a tree when he was a kid, landed on his head and was never the same again. He was something of a hobo, or wanderer, and one day found himself in Carbon Hill, a little town about 50 miles north of Birmingham. My mother was working as a waitress at a little restaurant there--well, everything in Carbon Hill was and is little--and he swept her off her feet. She once told me he was some kind of silver-tongued devil. Among the things he claimed to her was that he had been a country and western singer in his time. His sister later told my mother that my dad couldn’t carry a tune if his life depended on it, which doesn’t mean he didn’t ever try to be a country and western singer. Suffice it to say there is no record, other than his word, of him ever having been a country and western singer. So they got married, and their plan was to move to Memphis and start a family there. Off to Memphis they went, and rented a room in a little dive of a hotel across the street from the Peabody, the plushest hotel in the south. The second day they were there my dad went out ostensibly to look for work and never came back. My mother tracked him down in Fort Worth, Texas--he had showed up at unannounced at his sister’s house a few days before my mother called. My mother then took her son by her first marriage--her first husband had died of a heart attack at a young age--to her sister’s home in Little Rock, and then hopped a train to Fort Worth and dragged my dad back by his ear.

At that point it appeared he became an honest man, because he never strayed again. They moved to Oklahoma City, where I was born on December 19, 1948. I don’t have many memories of Oklahoma City, except that the boarding house we lived in was next to a railroad track on the outskirts of downtown OKC, and my mom or dad would take me down to the tracks so I could watch the trains go by. I remember the air being fragrant with the sweet smell of the new railroad ties, how the ground shook when the train rumbled by, the engineers smiling and waving at me from their cabs. My mom and dad owned a small restaurant in town, but I have no recollection of where it was located.

When I was four we moved to Tulsa, where one of my mother’s sisters lived with her husband and young son. They had told her the future was in Tulsa. We lived in a rented duplex on Route 66, 11th Street, near the Arkansas River bridge, right next to a motorcycle repair shop that became something of a hangout for me when I five, six years old, before I started school. The summer before I started second grade my folks had put away enough money to buy a little house on the north side of town--literally the other side of the tracks, in an area my aunt and uncle found so frightening that they eventually stopped visiting us altogether. It was, in fact, the same neighborhood that Larry Clarke chronicled in his acclaimed book of photo essays called Tulsa. He took intimate photos of guys in and around my neighborhood who were shooting speed all the time and really living the thug life, and passing it on to their kids, who were my age. I first saw that book in the mid-‘70s and finally understood why those guys I lived around were so mean, hating for no apparent reason. Riding your bicycle on their blocks was an incredible act of courage, because all they wanted to do was pummel you--they didn’t even care about taking your bike, they just wanted to beat on somebody. The adult men were beating on their wives and girlfriends and kids, the kids were beating on other kids. But there were a lot of other families in the neighborhood who were like ours--went to work every day, went to church every Sunday, and had done nothing wrong save for being part of what is now called the working poor. My aunt and uncle didn’t seem to see that side of the neighborhood; I have no recollection of ever hearing anything but the most sarcastic comments about our neighbors, our house, my clothes, you name it. It was through them that I came to realize how bad off we were. My uncle was a racist Post Office lifer, my aunt was a religious fanatic housewife whose only contribution to my life was in changing me from left-handed to right when she saw me printing with my left hand. This was before I had started school, and I had taught myself to read and to print while in her care during the hours my parents were at work. She said the left hand was evil, and I should always do things with my right hand so I wouldn’t go to hell. The effect of that was to make me ambidextrous, which came in real handy when I started playing sports, especially basketball. And to this day I don’t believe my soul is going to suffer because I sometimes do things left-handed instead of right. Despite their best efforts to pull me onto the righteous path of their own design, I made lifelong friends in my Northside neighborhood--the three guys I grew up playing ball with, listening to rock ‘n’ roll with, chasing girls with, and growing up with in every way through high school remain my best friends on this planet, and I made sure to thank them in the acknowledgements in my biography of Carl Perkins. And all of those guys have turned out better than my aunt and uncle’s pampered son. So let’s hear it for the north side of Tulsa.

I learned many years later that one of the reasons my parents left Oklahoma City was that my dad had drank up all the profits from the restaurant and left the family in dire straits, so Tulsa was seen as a place to start over. Funny thing is, our home never had alcohol in it, and I never saw my dad drinking or even smelled alcohol on him, ever. But the family’s fortunes didn’t improve much in Tulsa. My mom worked as a bookkeeper at The 1800 Restaurant on the south side of town--the other side of the tracks--and then for a lumber yard owned by the same fellow who owned the 1800. My dad opened another restaurant of his own, downtown, on First Street, behind the Greyhound Bus Terminal, on Skid Row. I’ll say this for my dad: he was a lousy businessman, an habitual liar (he once told me he had played in the New York Yankees’ farm system, although no one in his family ever knew about that, any more than they knew about his country and western singing days), and a shiftless, irresponsible man who may well have fathered and abandoned children all over the country during his many wandering years--maybe I should mention that when I was born he was 65 years old, so he had had the opportunity to sow a lot of wild oats before my mother tamed him--but he was one hell of a good cook. As a child I used to hang out in his First Street restaurant when I wasn’t in school, and he would fix me whatever I wanted to eat. That guy could make the best breakfasts you ever ate, and his burgers were to die for. I have no idea where he picked up that particular talent, but it was one thing he could do well, without having to embellish the truth a whit. He was also a big-hearted, good-hearted guy. When his Skid Row buddies would come in hungry, he would always give them something to eat, even if they didn't have any money, which, apparently, they rarely did. One of the important lessons my dad taught by example was loyalty to and compassion for his friends; he should have taken better care of his business, and maybe our family wouldn't have struggled so much, but he never turned his back on a friend who was hurting. There's no question in my mind that he saw himself in those guys living on the fringe on First Street, and knew that if it weren't for my mom he would probably be among 'em. She imposed discipline on him that he didn't possess himself.

Given the desperate financial circumstances we were in, my mom often apologized for not being able to buy me more toys at Christmas, always with the hope that one day things would change for the better. I have no memory of my dad ever offering an apology for or explanation of our situation, but after I got interested in rock 'n' roll he began buying the used records off his restaurant's jukebox. So although Christmases were meager, throughout the year--once a month or so, sometimes more often--he would bring home to me these used records as presents. This was 1956-57. At first they were all 78 rpm discs--all blues, country, R&B, doo-wop, pop and early rock 'n' roll. Elvis, all the Sun guys, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Jo Stafford, Tony Bennett, The Cadets, Frankie Lymon, The Moonglows, on and on, all on 78. Then the 45 became the dominant format. I still have some of those records, and a few of them in picture sleeves--Jerry Lee Lewis's "High School Confidential" single, his "Great Balls of Fire" single, a rare Sun EP of Jerry Lee's, Elvis's "All Shook Up," the Elvis EP A Touch of Gold, and a few others. The only 78 from those years that still survives is Gogi Grant's "The Wayward Wind," one of my favorite records of all time. Obviously my parents weren't influenced by all the talk of rock 'n' roll making juvenile delinquents of America's youth. A couple of years before she passed away my mom told me she liked it when I was listening to those records because she always knew where I was. I can tell you honestly that I never heard a discouraging word from either of my parents about rock 'n' roll, the rock 'n' roll culture, the artists, whatever, any more than I ever heard them say a harsh word about blacks, even at the height of the Civil Rights Movement when things got a little scary down south. I think they believed that if they taught the right values in the home, and gave me a chance to build a foundation for a spiritual life, that everything would fall into place. I didn't learn about my dad's follies until I was grown and married and on my own, so as a child I wasn't carrying around any baggage about what he had done. To me he was a benign but benevolent presence who had once played second base in the New York Yankees' organization, who loved politics, boxing, music, movies, Jimmy Durante, the great Jewish comics who were all over TV in its early days, and passed his time reading the newspaper, smoking a pipe and fixing me wonderful southern meals, heavy on collard greens and vegetables of all kinds, when I got home from baseball, football or basketball practice.

After all this stuff about my dad, maybe I should add that the positive force in our home was my mother, who had the strength of character my dad never possessed. She was born into deep poverty in Guin, Alabama, started picking cotton to help support the family when she was five, six years old, walked five miles to and from school, rain or shine, cold or hot, was one of the first children in her entire family to graduate from high school, buried three husbands and a son, and remained true to her faith right to the end of her life. I mean, she was a role model--a soft-spoken, gentle, but iron-willed and deeply spiritual Southern woman who knew right from wrong, didn't agonize over shades of gray in moral issues, and taught me from a young age to be truthful, to judge people not by the color of their skin but by their character and heart, to work at every job as if it's the most important job in the world, to respect the rights of others, to respect yourself and stand up for your principles--to "be good," as she always put it. It was a lot more important to her that I grow up to an honorable man than a wealthy one--in fact, in a household with very little money, I don't recall her ever saying anything like "Maybe one day you'll be rich." It was always moral and spiritual instruction I got from her. Maybe because at a young age I told her I wanted to be a writer she figured I would never be rich anyway, so better work on the other things.

Steven:   Did you know you wanted to be a writer early in your life?

David:   Absolutely. When I was in fourth grade at Celia Clinton Elementary School I read Dickens’ Great Expectations in a single day over Christmas break, and when I finished it I knew I had found my calling, trying to move people with words. Once I started writing my own short stories, I discovered an unexpected benefit: I was and am a quiet, rather reserved person, and writing gave me a chance to express some ideas and feelings that might otherwise have remained contained. I was always pointing toward short stories, books, plays. Although I read a lot of the rock ‘n’ roll magazines in my youth, it never occurred to me that a living could be made writing about this music, even though I was reading about it regularly. Dig was far and away my favorite, but I also liked the Song Hits magazines that reprinted song lyrics; and the owners of a neighborhood candy store called The Flattop would allow me to put certain magazines in layaway and pay 10 cents a week until I had paid them off. In that way I nabbed a couple of great special issues, one on Elvis--with a flexi-disc on the cover that featured an interview with Elvis--and another that was evenly split in coverage of Elvis and James Dean.

Then when the Beatles hit, I became an avid reader of 16, when it was edited by Gloria Stavers. Even after I got involved in team sports in grade school and continued on to the Division 1 University level, I never lost the desire to be a writer. So when I came down with tendonitis in both knees during my freshman year at the University of Oklahoma, I took it as a sign. I had played football, baseball and basketball on school teams since grade school, always a starter, always a key player on my team, and had never suffered an injury that kept me out of a game. So when I came down with an injury that not only kept me from playing but actually made it difficult to walk, I said to myself, This is a message to get on with your life’s work. I was invited to come back to the OU basketball program in my sophomore year, but by that time I had met and come under the influence of the man who became my writing mentor, William Foster-Harris. He was a crusty old fellow at that time, in his late 60s or early 70s, and had been at Oklahoma a long time--the joke was that they had built the journalism school building around him. He was an expert on the Old West, had worked as a young man at the Tombstone Epitaph in Tombstone, Arizona, had consorted with some of the notorious gunfighters and lawmen of legend, and was close friends with the great western writer, Louis L’Amour, whose work he introduced me to, and with John G. Neihardt, author of Black Elk Speaks, a book Foster-Harris advised me to read and absorb; he knew that Native American culture and philosophy had exerted a strong impact on the way I viewed the world, and sensed that Black Elk Speaks would get right into my bloodstream. He was right, as usual. In addition to classroom lecture, I had one-on-one sessions with him that required me to write a new short story every week and bring it in for him to "edit." What he did was to take a red pencil and rip each story apart--he wrote as many words in the margins as I had written in the story, and there were angry red streaks all over the manuscripts from changes he had made.

I endured this for two years until I finally worked up the nerve to ask him if he would tell a student to consider some other course of study. He answered that sure, he was always up front about things like that. So I asked if he had just been humoring me all this time, and he pointed out that I wasn’t paying attention to what he had been doing. He explained that all those red streaks and the margin commentary were meant to instruct me in matters of structure. "You’ve got the one thing that can’t be taught," he said, "and without it you can’t be a writer: Imagination." That was an enormous boost in confidence, but he had really put me through some trials and soul-searching, but it was all for the good, because for those two years I really worked hard at writing better short stories and stretching my imagination, if only to please Foster-Harris and come out of a session not feeling like he’d blown a hole through me with a bazooka. He wrote a wonderful book on fiction writing called Basic Formulas of Fiction, which was our text in the professional writing curriculum at that time. The title is deceiving: Foster-Harris’s theories about writing were rooted in Aristotelian philosophy, and his book elucidated those theories and provided practical instruction in clear thinking and, hence, clear prose. I loved that man, and was sorry he didn’t live to see me published in Rolling Stone. For me he had picked up where the instruction of Eddie Sutton, my basketball coach at Tulsa Central High School before he began a college coaching career that has placed him among the legends, left off--same emphasis on self-discipline, nose to the grindstone, practice makes perfect, take pride in who you are and what you do, prepare properly and things will take care of themselves.

Funny to look back on it, because my father wasn’t much of an influence in my life, but at key points I’ve had these larger-than-life father figures enter and change my life. First it was Coach Sutton; then William Foster-Harris, and shortly after I started writing for Rolling Stone in 1975, the songwriter Doc Pomus befriended me and became, really, the father I never had and the wisest sort of guide through the treacherous waters of the music business.

Steven:   When did you discover rock and roll and what artists were part of that experience?

David:   I remember that day as vividly as if it happened yesterday. It was the early summer of 1956. I was on vacation visiting my grandparents in Guin, Alabama, where our family used to go for about two weeks or so every summer during my childhood. At the time we were there, my mother’s sister and her family were visiting from Flint, Michigan, where they lived--her husband worked in the GM auto plant up there. Their oldest girl, my cousin, was 13 or 14 then; I was seven. She carried a little transistor radio around with her all the time, but I never paid much attention to it. Then one blistering hot, humid day she and I were sitting on a hill of scorched earth next to my grandparents’ corn field, when suddenly she got worked up about something coming on the radio. She held that little transistor up to my ear and said, eagerly, "Listen to this! Listen to this!" It was Elvis singing "Heartbreak Hotel." I’ve been trying ever since to articulate what I felt when I first heard Elvis’s voice, but I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that I went out of my grandparents’ shack one person and came back in another. Something fundamentally changed in me when I heard "Heartbreak Hotel." I heard Elvis saying, in effect, to be fearless in your individuality, to follow your own muse, to be unafraid to be a non-conformist; understand, I was a young kid; I didn’t understand those ideas in that way, but I got a clue, in the way that kids do, just instinctively. I remember running back into the shack and asking my grandmother if she had ever heard of Elvis Presley and her answering, rather dismissively, "Oh, that’s that boy from Tupelo." Mind you, my grandparents had no TV, no telephone, no indoor plumbing, heating by wood stove, no air conditioning, no fans, but they did have a battery-powered radio. So I guess she must have heard and heard about Elvis on a country station. She always had the radio tuned to old-time country music and gospel stations, but Elvis must have sneaked in there somehow.

Hearing Elvis opened up the world for me, and I started paying attention to the artists I was hearing on the radio. So while I was still in Alabama that summer I found out that a lot of the country music I had been listening to was being sung by the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers and Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams; that the gospel artists I was hearing were groups with names such as the Dixie Hummingbirds, a particular favorite of my mother and grandmother, the Sensational Nighingales, the Blackwood Brothers, the Soul Stirrers, and so on. When we got back to Tulsa after that visit, I started toying with the dial on our radio and found a great rock ‘n’ roll station, KAKC, and basically took up residence in front of that thing for the rest of the summer. The universe of rock ‘n’ roll revealed itself, and I was hooked. At this time I still had not seen a photograph of Elvis or any of the artists whose music was electrifying and energizing me. That came later, when I went with my mother to the grocery store and saw a music magazine on the rack. I still remember the cover: a big picture of Elvis, from the cover of his first album; smaller pictures around the border of Ray Charles, Al Hibbler and LaVerne Baker. Somewhere in this time frame I also saw Elvis on the “Ed Sullivan Show”. Suffice it to say I did my best to become the Hillbilly Cat. I was in pretty deep. I had hair back then--few people are left who remember seeing me with hair on my head--and for some reason my folks let me grow it pretty long, so I could get the ducktail working. When I was in fourth grade my mother bought me my first pair of white bucks. Those were my shoes for the entire school year, because we couldn’t afford more than one pair a year, so you can imagine that those bucks weren’t very white come May when school was out. But I loved them, they were the slickest shoes I had ever seen, and I kept powdering them with that bunny bag, but it was a losing proposition when you had to wear them rain or shine.

I also took to doing impersonations of Elvis at school. Every Friday was talent day in our music class, and the teacher allowed any student to demonstrate his or her musical ability. So I started lip-synching to Elvis records. I practised at home, in front of a mirror, for hours, perfecting the moves I saw Elvis do on “Ed Sullivan” and in his early movies. I mean I had him down--and tell you what, that footwork came in handy when I started playing football and basketball. I became a cause celebre in my grade school. Girls would chase me at lunchtime, and I had to have a teacher escort me around the playground to stave off the mayhem. When I would do my Elvis impersonation on Fridays, the students in other classrooms in the wing adjoining ours would congregate at the windows watching me--I mean it was madness.

Then in fourth grade I fell in love with a beautiful strawberry blonde girl named Jackie Higgs, who more than anything loved seeing me do Elvis on talent day. One day we had a spat, and to punish her I retired Elvis. I quit doing the impersonations, just walked away in my prime, all to spite a woman. It was then that I started playing sports full time and left the rock ‘n’ roll world for athletics. But I never stopped absorbing that music--my dad was bringing records home for me, and the music was shaping my life. Remember, a lot of those early vocal groups were cutting songs written by the great American pop songwriters of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s--literate standards with lyrics that were exquisite poetry to my ears. I was also reading voraciously by the time I was in second grade--in the summers I would check out six novels at once and read them all in a single day--so between the literature and the smart songs, I was building a vocabulary and absorbing some great poetry, developing a facility for language and starting to use it writing stories for myself, and writing and drawing my own comics. I was also hearing in that music a moral code that buttressed the lessons my mother was teaching in our home--lessons about respecting yourself and respecting others. I believe that’s the subtext of a lot of early rock ‘n’ roll, R&B and especially doo-wop songs: respect, tolerance, unconditional love.

I’ve named a bunch of artists who shaped my early musical sensibility. Elvis was by far the most important, but shortly after I discovered him I found out that in Memphis, a town that obviously looms large in my history, had a record company in it called Sun. Every summer my mom and dad would drive from Tulsa to Guin, Alabama, to visit the relatives, and after I found out about Sun I put up such a fuss about seeing it that they went out of their way to drive down Union Avenue until they found it. I remember my dad saying, "Little ol’ building don’t look like much." Every Sun record my dad brought home to me sounded like the greatest thing I had ever heard--that would be Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee, Johnny Cash, Billy Lee Riley, Warren Smith, primarily. But I was also immersed in all the other styles of music that were bubbling up in the wake of rock ‘n’ roll, and I loved a lot of different types of artists, some new, some from earlier generations. I couldn’t wait for Jimmy Durante to sing a song on his TV show; I was completely nuts about Jo Stafford, and I played the 78 of her hit "On London Bridge" to the point where it almost wore out; Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys played in Tulsa every Saturday night, and every home I was in, including mine, seemed to be ringing with western swing, whether it was on the radio or via Leon McAuliffe’s local Saturday afternoon TV show; and though doo-wop wasn’t big in the Southwest, KAKC would play it late at night; I remember sitting in front of the TV with tears in my eyes at the end of an episode of “I Love Lucy”, when Lucy, Desi--Ricky Ricardo--and Bob Hope performed a beautiful version of "Thanks For the Memories," with Desi singing his verse in Spanish.

In the mornings when my mother got me up for school, when I was in elementary school--this would be from ’56 through ‘61--she would turn on Jimmy Dean’s early morning TV show, and I’d see all the top country stars of the day; when I was in junior high and high school, Saturday afternoon was the occasion for Porter Wagoner’s great afternoon TV show, and that’s where I first saw the young Dolly Parton, Mel Tillis and Porter himself. Needless to say, Saturday nights were Grand Ole Opry nights, at least until “Gunsmoke” came on TV. And all around this--on the radio, mixed in with the rock ‘n’ roll, pop and country songs; in the magazines; occasionally on TV; in the movies--were the great black artists. Louis Armstrong was beloved by my family, and it seemed at times that he was as much a presence in our home as those of us who actually lived there. Ditto Nat King Cole. I could go on, but you probably get the idea that I was right smack in the middle of a musical melting pot, growing up in a time before there were these repugnant consultants who narrowed and whittled radio playlists and segregated black from white. I guess most people feel that the time they’re growing up in is the best time, but imagine an era when the artists on the front line were Elvis, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Clyde McPhatter, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ruth Brown, Rosemary Clooney, Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb, Fats Domino and so forth. They were all exciting, all different, all inspiring in the way they seemed to me to be the very best at what they did.

David McGee interview, part 2