My brother Joe was really kind of my father. My actual dad, who I loved dearly, had become so fucked up by Air Force speed and drowning his hatred for the officers with beer. My mom was too busy working full time and managing the Washington state CREEP campaign (Committee to ReElect the President) for Nixon, sharing an office with Ted Bundy. (Yes, he was apparently a sweetheart.) Joe took care of me and took me to the Lynwood library on the back of his white ten speed, where we’d read anthologies of Buck Rogers and Mad Magazine comic strips and reprints. We listened to all kinds of music in the backyard as we started our comics company, but it was mostly this band, and especially this album, with its friendly mod sexiness, and joyous and sometimes melancholy power pop, inside jokes between the members of the band, campy novelty songs, and self-aware self-parodies. Discovering the Monkees in the 60s was a little like discovering Vonnegut in the 70s for me. Of course I watched the new series every Saturday, eating something like Quisp on a TV dinner tray. On our Joe-led journeys I’d bring every issue of 16 Magazine and Tiger Beat and other fan mags they were featured in and written about and most importantly photographed, and later afternoons in the park nearby the library I’d scissor out cool photos and images and make fumetti out of their visages. (Yes, and the Beatles too; I wasn’t clueless.)Then he would ride us back to the trailer, where he became an inspired Sandwich Guru by making us ridiculously experimental sandwiches, to get me fed but also to see how I’d react. All the while making me laugh. One time discussing the woods behind our trailer, we came upon a theory about the end of the world, involving the huge rock in the middle of the trees, the thirties we battled getting to our favorite spots, Factor One and Factor Two about the government which we were training as superheroes to fight. Once when we stepped over the creek into the woods, we were vxxed by a star of wasps, and ran back into our backyard and into our up-all-year tens set up there. We felt relieved till I started feeling stinging below my belly button, and pulled down my shorts to reveal a wasp attached to my soft white underbelly, which my brother plucked and stomped down hard on with his white Converse. He was genuinely angry at the little beast hurting his brother. Joe and I shared albums like these from the late 60s to the mid-70s, where he then mostly slid into Jethro Tull and Ten Years After, and how I was able to inherit music like the Tubes and Be Bop Deluxe from he and Jett and Jaime. But then Joe was chased out of the trailer by my mother as he was getting ready with Dippity Doo and cologne when she caught him with a lid on the back of the toilet in the bathroom. No more listening together, Joe met a beautiful blonde sigil who was into Christian rock and married her, but at least I was left with both their record collections to prime me for my own voracious music fandom.
The Monkees – ‘Headquarters’ by Chris Estey
