POCKETFUL OF POWER
In the genre of Personal Essay
Pocketful of power was a marketing phrase for the Motorola portable transistor advertised in our Toronto Daily Star newspaper. I am two, nearly three years old and encouraged to sound out the big letters.
“P O P pop!”
Pop music. By its very nature inauthentic, even fickle, disposable, but to this small child, real and tangible, a force that can banish the dark, swirling Clouds of the Unsaid (what the adults aren’t telling you) that gather on the ceiling until there’s no space and billow towards any corner in the house reassembling for a later approach.
It’s such a small thing, the transistor radio, but it had an impact because popular music developed fresh genres for a burgeoning new demographic. It’s just an oblong, plastic box that fits in your shirt’s top pocket or jacket. It screeches an ungodly static, until suddenly, the dial lands on a radio station and summer breezes that taste of sea salt arrive in snowy, cold Canada via my brother’s transistor radio from the groovy new The Beach Boys band. I swoon and sway to the sun-drenched sweeping vocal harmonies and giggle at the tap-tap-tap of the drum part. (Apparently, they forgot to pack Dennis’s drumsticks for the studio.)
“Twist!” says big brother, “Twist!”, showing me how and telling me to sing the chorus with added gusto, and certainty, like we do for the last verse of a hymn. This is the ‘Surfing Safari’ single and marks their signing to Capitol Records (1962) the enthusiastic disc jockey explains.
Let's go surfin' now
Everybody's learnin' how
Come on and safari with me!
The Cuban Missile Crisis is imminent. The Beatles just met George Martin. (That will prove to be an ominous meeting for The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, who would feel he competed with the UK combo for most of his career.) Betty Friedan is writing The Feminine Mystique in which she will announce that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle. But we’re off surfing with our honeys!
And I have a mum. I thought she was gone but no, she’s calling us for breakfast, pancakes. Life is confusing, the questions I don’t know I have, remembering the names of our seven cats, twisting well with little legs, but here comes something familiar, like say, the vocal harmonies of The Chiffons but different in tempo, texture and phrasing. And when one great pop song’s gone here comes another one because the transistor radio is on.
The first commercial transistor radio hit the stores in 1954, the Regency TR-1. From then through to the mid-60s brands like the Sony TR-63, Emerson, Motorola and Sony invested heavily in new consumer electronics. Mobile listening, as has been well documented, separated the teens and young adults from their parents by their listening choices and habits. Portability was the main selling point thanks to the technology, a tiny transistor inside the magic box that received the radio waves and amplified the sound, less fragile than older components. It used smaller batteries, not previously available on the market. My brother’s transistor radio had a golden dial that I was bursting to turn, out of bounds to this toddler. It was forever summer in the transistor radio, The Beach Boys perfecting their style of Surfin’ Pop with one hit after another, and The Mammas and Pappas single ‘Californian Dreaming’ “in good old USA”.
It's a world oblivious to Vietnam, the existence of the Civil Rights movement, or the Kennedy Clan so toddler-appropriate, but I’m not the target. That will be my kin. Like the artists on our transistor radio, my brother’s musical background came from brass bands, choirs and classical music. The record companies aimed to sell their product, record players, and 7” singles and albums made by their latest vinyl pressing machines. Radio play was the big target because it sold records, just as the publishers of sheet music previously courted the big music halls and their stars. Perhaps it’s always driven by the technology?
My very long hair is cut into a basin-bob for a family photo, which involves the arrival of a photographer, an assistant, dustsheets, bright lights and heavy boxes that thud and click. And following instructions. The adults sit on either end, daughter next to father, son next to mother on a bench they’ve provided.
We’re going to the other side of the world where the kangaroos and koalas live. That’s keeping our folks busy. I’m told I may see Santa surfing at Christmas and it’s hotter than California all year round, and my brother isn’t coming with us. He encourages me to keep twisting and singing as if the world was made for me because it tires me out.
What are honeys? (Some honeys will be comin' along)
“Girls.”
What’s a Woody? (We're loadin' up our Woody with our boards inside)
“A car,” he grumps. He’s suddenly looking after me a lot.
“A special car with a long open-top back boot, and with wooden panels along the sides,” chirps up Dad.
“Like she’s going to understand.”
“She won’t if we don’t explain properly,” he whispers, budging up smelly Susan, our beagle, to make room for himself on the sofa with us.
“Daddy will point one out to you when we see one. “
I nod. The Clouds of the Unsaid loom, waiting for their moment. Perhaps my brother’s not coming because he is cross with all of us? Even Susan’s coming.
It’s the age of the big jet and the cartoon series The Jetsons (1962-1963). The former is a miracle for Salvation Army missionaries like my dad and the latter beats The Flintstones (1959-1966) any day. The Boeing 747 does not come onto the scene until the decade’s end. I think of little else except climbing into the enormous 720-passenger freight aeroplane and exploring. I get a certificate at the end for crossing the Equator.
It is a heat unfamiliar to me and I haven’t seen anyone with a surfboard off to the beach in their Woody but at least everyone is outside with their transistor radios on. Even before our luggage arrives (by boat), including my very own trunk that I helped pack, I’m used to the heat. You don't have to go inside to get warm. I have two of my brother’s childhood A. A. Milnes’s poetry books that I like to take into the back garden to read. I can recite off by heart The Good Little Girl. Today’s choice also comes from Now We Are Six because now I am six.
Waiting at the Window reads the little colonial girl aloud:
“These are my two drops of rain waiting on the windowpane/I'm waiting here to see which the winning one will be/Both of them have different names/One is John, and one is James”.
She sing-songs the words as lizards wriggle back and forth over her suntanned legs. The irony escapes her, but something else is stirring: why couldn't it be Jane and John, James and Janet or even Judy and Joan?
Inside the front yellow hardcover my mother has written “Dear David, I hope you love poetry as much as me.” The concept of my mother as a real person not just a face in a photograph is beyond me.
Later, as a brooding teenager, living in New Zealand, despairing because it turns out it is impossible to hide from an earthquake, it was amusing to find all the family photo frames had tumbled to the floor during our first experience of a strong tremor. The glass had shattered in the frame for the Farewell Canada photograph. I watch my dearest stepmother pick it up saying “I must put this in a safe place until we get a new frame.” I was glad. I hated that photo. But I had a rare inner thought, how tragic for my brother to say goodbye to a mother he knew he was never going to see again. How little I had understood at the time.
As far as my experience of how ‘that’ went I kind of got the gist when she did not return for my birthday and then, Christmas. By now I am bored with my dad saying “Look Ngaire! Santa surfing!” every year when we drive past a stream of posters advertising Christmas fairs and events, or Christmas sales. There is no instinct to climb into the old blue car and drive through the yellow landscape. The dark, heady scents and bold colours of suburban shrubs and flowers, the space, the land and sky, and the horizon where they meet are my nest.
I have just made a thrilling discovery: sometimes words don't need an ‘s’ at the end to be plural. Most exciting, though, our neighbour, Petticoat Pam, as my dad calls her because she's always in her back garden in her slip, has a transistor radio. The static and fuzz of her tuning the dial gets my attention, creeping nearer to the fence in silence hoping to catch a glimpse of the coveted device is thrilling. I want to see that dial, its size and colour are key for me.
The transistor radio is my teapot, my wardrobe to another place. And the songs got sweeter over the years: ‘Leavin’ on A Jet Plane’ (John Denver, 1966), ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (The Beatles, 1966), ‘Superstar’ (The Carpenters, 1969), ‘Knock Three Times’ (Tony Orlando and Dawn, 1971).
It’s a period in popular music legacy that impacts the progression of the music industry - technology and popular music remain inextricably linked. The era reflects the beginnings of song composition in the studio, its product its purpose from the outset, heading straight out from a new type of radio show and a new breed of (male) disc jockeys. In a way, the dark days of wizardry, hairy men and the psychedelic rock genre which followed - and why punk had to happen – were more honest.
When I am neither in North American climes or Australasian, but in my own time and place, a feminist music journalist, powered by injustice and seeking authenticity, I make a toast to popular music and thank the genre for its massive betrayal. Where would I be now without it?
“Stay angry” says the inscription inside my Angry Women (1991) book gifted to me by Lida Husik, an artist with the New York Shimmy Disc label who I put up during a tour.
Bloody right.
Sometimes I think I can hear the screams of Karen Carpenter being dragged out from behind her beloved drum kit to be a frontwoman; a female pop star. What did she have to hold on to? What were you supposed to do with your legs? You know that only one of The Beach Boys could surf, right?
From the off, I was shown I was ‘other’ to the action. I was “waiting with a smile” (‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’), a honey (‘Surfin’ Safari’), a groupie (‘Superstar’), thankfully ‘Knock Three Times’ by Tony Orlando and Dawn survived deeper scrutiny because I still love singing that song. But there was no escaping my options for womanhood. I was a passive admirer or listener, a temptress, a good or a bad witch, an angel, a goddess, decoration and darn good at twisting. And “Yay! I get to be a girlfriend one day.” Lesbians are invisible and male homosexuality is illegal, meaning we do not see it and therefore it does not exist. Concepts of bisexuality were tired but better than the ones based around Freud’s 19th-century denial of its existence at all.
But I am meant to be celebrating: first home all to myself for me and my cats, plants, records, and books. There is a landing on the stairs wide enough to fit a bookshelf of considerable size and a chair and floor cushions. The flat is at the top of a Georgian house in London NW5. My childhood trunk is sitting in front of me. It’s been stored in the shed of a friend of Dad’s for the last 20 years until I had my own home.
It is more magnificent than I recall. A sturdy and solid thing with my name on it in large white lettering, black with brass fittings that clack when they open and shut. Before that even happens, fond but forgotten memories of transatlantic travel when you are small in the 1960s Jet Age flood in, the smells and stadium-sized airports, sitting in the cockpit waiting for the pilot to sign your Junior Jet Club Logbook, and collecting all the little free packets of things and stashing them…
An uncomfortable churning feeling comes with the thought of opening the trunk and not just staring at it. We waited an exceptionally long time for the trunks and tea boxes to reach Australia by sea, and then two of my favourite toys were missing, now I remember. I was immediately distracted by the magical appearance of a brand new 7-inch vinyl single, “It’s an Open Secret’ from the Salvation Army group the Joy Strings, powered by the formidable Joy Webb. The mixed-gender band made it to the UK’s Top Ten official charts and subsequent television appearances. I would toast Joy Webb, but that would be disrespectful because Salvationists are teetotal.
I find the Farewell Canada photograph. There is a massive gap between myself and my brother. Both adults are at either end of a cushioned bench, as I remembered it, and my basin-bob haircut is more appealing in this decade, but the gap is significant. I cannot believe anyone has not mentioned it before. I have wriggled over to get as close to my dad as possible. It never was a Farewell Canada family photo, instead, it’s a farewell family piece of memorabilia, a moment in time marking an occasion. We would never be all together again. Perhaps I had known exactly what was going on after all? On the other hand, maybe the Clouds of the Unsaid swept into my bedroom at night and whispered into my ear,
“Dump those two.”