My Mother, My Defender

I was thinking today as I wrote a post about the Top Ten Rock & Roll Albums over at the Emmaus Theory about how I used to play Rock & Roll in a little garage band back in the 1970s. And we were actually a garage band. We practiced in my garage.

Funny thing. When we practiced in our garage, our neighbors were not at all appreciative of our musical prowess. Or maybe it was the volume of said prowess. Regardless, our little band eventually knew nearly the entire police force of Burleson, Texas, on a first name basis.

Now don't get me wrong! We didn't jam late into the evening. We practiced after school. Mid to late afternoon. But our neighbors were not pleased. We must have interrupted Donahue or their stories (as my grandmother used to call her favorite soaps). So when we'd start playing, they'd call the cops. Sometimes we didn't even have to actually play. One time we tried an experiment. We opened the garage doors, stood in the garage and played our instruments unplugged. No sound actually came out of us. But nonetheless, in ten minutes or so, the police car pulled up in the driveway. When the cop got out and we weren't producing any noise, he just grinned. We told him about our experiment and he laughed. The cops were all quite cool. They'd talk about our instruments, about what we played, about the kind of music that they liked, about school, about sports. Then they'd tell us to crank it down a few thousand decibels

But somewhere along the line, my Mother's motherly instincts kicked in. Mom wasn't a huge fan of our grungy and loud Rock & Roll, but she was a fan of her son and his friends. So after about the one hundredth visit by the cops, Mom's patience wore thin. I came home from school one afternoon accompanied by my long-haired entourage, ready to practice, and there it was! A HUGE sign draped across our house. Eight inch tall letters screamed out at the neighbors something along the lines of, "HIS MUSIC MAY BE LOUD, BUT AT LEAST HE'S NOT DOWN ON THE CORNER SMOKING DOPE AND HAVING SEX WITH YOUR DAUGHTERS!!!"

I had three reactions. The first was the normal teenage reaction of sheer embarrassment at having my Mommy come to my aid. I tore down the sign. My second reaction was sheer relief that my Mother believed that I wasn't "down on the corner smoking dope and having sex with" the neighborhood girls. My third reaction, which came a bit later, was a kind of secret pride that my Mom was cool enough to defend her son's noisy musical interests in the face of neighborhood scorn. She may not have cared for the rocky and raucous noise which emanated from the garage, but this was her boy and his friends that were making that noise, and if someone wanted a piece of him they were going to have to deal with her!

My friends actually thought it was kind of cool, too. They joked for months afterward, any time a threatening situation arose, that they "could always get Kear's Mom to kick that guy's tail."