Mike Akers
David, somehow this came up in discussion with Andrea today: I believe I am a creative person with a good imagination (don't we all). I believe I am fairly adventurous and like to take advantage of opportunities to experience new things. But I think that I was very fortunate to have you as my closest friend for the year we lived on Donald Street in Avondale. I had numerous adventures that I never would have had and thought and did things that would never have occurred to me then had it not been for you. The grand list of structures upon which we climbed and conquered comes to mind. The great trees we climbed also. Taking days to build a raft and carrying it solemnly down to Willow Branch Creek right where it runs into the St. Johns and launching it, boarding it and sinking with it is another. The construction of an elaborate underground room in your backyard and having our dads catch us at it one fine Sunday afternoon and demand that we fill it in is as fresh in my mind as this morning's breakfast. We were very smug doing it right under their noses as our families visited each other. Filling in only the entrance hole in the ground while covering the entrance to the room with a soft drink crate was a stroke of genius and defiance. I have often wondered if a future resident of that genteel establishment one day found himself standing in our underground lair looking up at the crater he made. You were and are a fine and inspirational friend. Your continued work with the Lifesaving Corps indicates to me that you are the same grand visionary with a bent for adventure that you were in 1957. I am proud of the life you have led and I am proud to call you friend. Your influence has remained with me all through the decades.
Mike Akers 3/2016
The Island Times April 2014, Columnists and Opinion, Through A Glass, Darkly
The Long Unwinding Road -- Part 3?
Jennie and Mike
Well this is part three of a two-part series. That statement, itself, is revelatory. There was a lot more to be said about aspiration without perspiration. I discovered early that success in my particular area of interest in the music business, that of being granted reverence, respect and room keys, was met by learning to play rhythm guitar and singing lead in a variety of genres. Interestingly, and unfortunately, I make no mention of needing to play great guitar or needing to sing great lead. No. It was pretty much covered with pretty good guitar and "He-hits-every-note lead." In the interest of accuracy, during the last couple of years of my ever-budding career, on the song "Only The Lonely", I could only hit the high F that Roy Orbison hit, about two out of three times. That is not a good ratio when you are performing.
If I played at a party, it was a get together with friends. If I played a party, I was the entertainment, and I got paid. The exceptions were non-profit charity events. So in college (where musicians played for free) I contented myself with playing at parties wherein I got to show off for my wife, which is always exhilarating, or if I was between wives, it was a chance to show off for a future wife or two; or for prospective candidates for that high office – sort of an informal vetting (or even a trial run setup) process.
The bluegrass parties were watershed events for an aspiring musician, occurring frequently, often six or seven times a year. The format was a romantic's dream. We gathered at someone's house or cabin in the swamps of north and central Florida. There was always plenty of food. The beer kegs were bottomless. Sleeping accommodations were sparse so we made do with couches, floors, porches, and vehicles, which ranged in efficaciousness from Volkswagen bugs to Volkswagen Campers. A hearty few took advantage of the plentitude of ground space, not all of it dry, depending on the location of the party.
At this point, in the interest of clarity, it is useful to arrive at a definition of the word hearty, as used above. In this case hearty means "having so immersed themselves in the dubious pleasures and benefits of the aforementioned bottomless keg, that they found themselves unable to move from the spot they currently occupied in order to locate sleeping space that wouldn't leave a Neanderthal stiff, aching, and grumbling." As illustration, I awoke one cruel Sunday morning on the porch of a cypress house that projected out over a lake to find that I was one of eight who had decided at some point prior to dawn that the floor of that porch was an excellent place for a hearty young lad (and or lass) to welcome "…the sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care." (The spelling is Shakespeare's.) The floor of the porch, the adjacent living room, and even the yard looked like the famous crane shot from Gone With The Wind of the bodies of the dead and dying, with the main difference being that several of the people in that movie scene were moving. One of that temporarily close-knit porch society was the chief surgeon at a major Florida hospital. That august personage was sitting up like a two-year-old on the rough cypress floor of the porch with a pained and bewildered expression. He called out in an obtrusively loud voice: "Does anyone know how to get rid of a headache?"
Present at these events were usually thirty or so musicians, and anywhere from fifty to two hundred partygoers, who constituted an audience. The audience was generously peopled with hippie chicks, who often considered the mere holding of a guitar the key to their kingdom. A confluence of situations including the advent of the pill, a peer mandate to wear as little as legally allowed (and sometimes less), and an equally demanding social requirement that they reject the entirety of their parents' values, all led to an unprecedented accommodating attitude in that sector of the population. It is an odd sociological fact that the counter culture subsumed the bluegrass music culture to an astounding degree. And these young women adopted, almost universally, a sunny, cooperative and inclusive outlook toward their social interactions, especially with musicians, that led to a delightful lack of discernment on their part, and many bad decisions that still affect some of them nearly five decades hence.
The tenor of the times also brought with it a certain casual attitude on the part of young female members of the counter culture toward monogamy (similar to male attitudes of the previous three millennia). Our parties often had some regional, national, and even international celebrities in attendance. Under normal circumstances, where I, the concupiscent young man, might find the party a fertile hunting ground, hippie chick wise, if there were a celebrity lurking about the place, it altered the game. It helped that the celebrities often brought their own romantic interests with them. This removed them from the arena of competition, in which they obviously reigned supreme. It did not, however, prevent the luster of being one of the lesser heroes from fading in their light.
While I played and sang at a few weddings and parties, a life-changing event was unfolding. In late winter of 1973, I was teaching and had just started seeing another teacher who would eventually become my second wife. Further, I discovered that a new teacher at our school, Jennie, had a stunning voice. It was clear, powerful, exquisitely accurate, and best of all, beautiful. Jennie and I got together, musically, almost immediately. We worked up an act, which involved her going "oooooh" in harmony while I sang lead. She did not like to sing lead so, with the exception of six songs, I sang lead for all of every show we ever did. For musical reasons I don't really understand, Jennie made me sound better than I actually was. I was pretty good but her beautiful voice in the background made us a good band. By this juncture I was twenty-five, had a two hundred and sixty song repertoire and a knack for reading a room.
Our first nightclub (dive) date was on a Saturday night, fortunately. I say "fortunately" because I sang approximately seventy-five songs during our five-hour show. The following day I got together with some friends to sing and play a little. I had to drop everything almost an octave since the high end of my voice was completely gone and the low end added more than half an octave. My voice sounded like Lucifer practicing croaking like a frog. Our next gig was the following Thursday. Since I am not a total fool, I cut the number of songs back to between fifty-five and sixty. To fill in the gaps, I chatted with the audience, and pretended to tune. The audience member most likely to flirt or chat with me usually surfaced pretty quickly in a set. I preferred flirtations but I kept that activity under control. Hyper-focus on tuning is the mark of great instrumentalists, among the ranks of which I am noticeably absent. However it is useful to take up a little voice resting time without staring silently out at a group of strangers who are paying to hear you make noise.
Early in our careers when Jennie and I recorded our show through the sound system, we discovered (to our great astonishment) that a second alcoholic drink, of any kind, seriously impaired the quality of the show. My hit-every-note voice assumed a much more casual relationship with the right note. The second cousin of the right note began to appear with alarming frequency. However a notable difficulty with not drinking during a show is that drunks in the audience want to buy the singer a drink and they get bellicose if he doesn't act like they just offered to pay his alimony for ten years. Since, as a part of my act, I am holding thousands of dollars worth of delicate, beautiful, irreplaceable Martin guitar, the notion of defending my tee-totaling honor against a belligerent drunk seemed like a good way to spend years pursuing an impecunious barfly through the court system in the futile attempt to get him to replace the guitar he probably thought cost seventy-five dollars when he smashed it. The solution to this was to become effusive with joy at offers of a drink and order a gin and tonic. The bartender, by prior arrangement, brings me a Diet Sprite, thus making everyone happy: the drunk because the singer took him up on the drink; the bartender because the drunk just paid a well drink price for a soft drink; and me because I didn't get drunk or fat – at least not then.
Like any job, there were some standout incidents (a girl knife-fight, a drunk lady dancing with and falling off the stage with a one-hundred-pound speaker) but for the most part it involved reporting for work, doing the job to the satisfaction of the employer, getting paid, and going home, albeit at 3:30 AM. It strikes me as more than passing strange that I never missed a show due to illness. There were many times, especially after the births of my two sons, that I didn't particularly want to go out on a Friday or Saturday evening, but once I got there, wherever there was, I always enjoyed doing the show. We had a following among a group of young professionals that lived in one concentrated area that catered to them. They came out a lot when we played bars and even at some public events, we would see them. One night a large contingent of them, maybe twenty-five, came in to the bar where we were playing. One of them, a beautiful little blond about my age (thirtyish), was anticipating with considerable anxiety some sort of surgery on Monday so she decided that cataclysmic intoxication was the route to solace.
As her blood alcohol level climbed to dizzying heights, she began commenting after every song. That is she made a sound after every song like the opening James Brown scream in his hit song "I Feel Good" except that her voice was clearly feminine and high-pitched. My best textual representation of that sound is Aaow! After the first set (roughly an hour), she added to the "Aaow!" by commenting on my singing and appearance. She focused on my eyes, which were possibly vaguely ornamental but were certainly not very useful. This escalated as the night progressed. It just happened that that was one of the nights that my lovely, classy wife chose to attend. The "Aaow!"s and so forth increased in intensity and volume until the blonde started announcing plans to dance with me at the break. At one point, Jennie's brother went over to her and told her my wife was there, to no effect. My wife left after a couple of sets and went home. Jennie kept rolling her eyes and trying to get me to take a break so she could visit the ladies' room. I refused and we continued on. They waited me out. We closed the bar at 2:00 AM and the owner announced that it was a private party. I danced one dance with her, we broke the sound system down and I headed home.
Arriving home at around 3:15 AM, I crept into the darkened master bedroom, where my wife lay serenely beneath the covers, apparently asleep and unaffected. I quietly disrobed and headed for the bed, taking great care not to awaken her, each step carefully chosen and slowly taken. As I reached for the cover to climb in, from beneath the covers a piercing, shocking sound sundered the still night: "AAOW!"
Rats.
By Michael Gordon Akers
Michael Gordon Akers is a novelist and former school principal.
