Herb Alpert versus the Catholic Church

Right now I am sitting in my front room drinking coffee and listening to Grant Geissman’s album Say That. There’s only one track I really like and that’s the title piece. It’s overly produced, a bit too slick, and way too commercial, but that’s my taste. It’s in the same class of music as Sadao Watanabe’s Rendezvous and Chuck Mangione’s Feels So Good.

Music tells you something about a person’s mind. The fact that my bother Lowell can sit for hours in his room listening to Fred Waring & His Pennsylvanian’s rendition of Inch Worm is proof of that.

A few years ago A&M Records released re-mastered CD’s of Herb Alpert’s early recordings from the 60’s including his Christmas album. The only album excluded was the much-maligned Volume Two, Alpert’s too blatant attempt to cash in on the popularity of his first album, Lonely Bull. That’s too bad because I liked that album, too.

I’m a Herb Alpert fan from way back.

Here’s a bit of Alpert trivia; in the movie The Ten Commandments, Herb is the kid who is pounding the drums as the Jews exit Egypt. No joke.

In the spring of 1965 my family moved out of Akron and into the suburb of Majestik Township. From the moment I arrived I experienced the indescribable frisson of freedom.

You see, the section of Akron I moved from was a Catholic neighborhood. And I was not a Catholic. Therefore I stuck out like a sore heretic. All my friends, it seemed, were immersed in Catholic dogma; it was all Father this and Hail Mary that. Despite being a protestant, I soon was thoroughly indoctrinated with the details of the Holy Catholic Church.

As my friends saw things, I was going to hell. That was a given. The nature of hell, as my best friend Mike described it to me, resembled the comic book version of Dante’s Inferno: lots of fire, pain and nudity (much like Woodstock.) If it seemed unfair to be sentenced for all eternity for the crime of going to Methodist Sunday school, well, that’s just the way it was. Convert, or attend a Torquemada weenie roast as the weenie.

My foreordained damnation was bad enough, but worse were the religious barriers between my friends and me. An invisible theological wall separated us. Most of my friends were named after some famous Catholic. Mike was named for St. Michael and his idiot brother Peter was named after Christ’s brother. And me? Was there a St. Carl somewhere that I was unaware of? Nope. I was just plain old, protestant Carl. Named after nobody.

Our schools started at separate times, had different holidays, and in the winter it seemed that the parochial schools had a more lenient closing policy. That January as I trudged past Mike’s house through eight inches of newly fallen snow, I pictured him comfortably watching television, fiddling with his Rosary beads, perhaps lighting a votive candle or two while he awaiting his phone call from the Pope to be blessed.

It seemed that my damnation had already begun.

And then, that spring, we moved away. In Majestik Township no one gave a damn where you went to church. Or, incredibly, if you went to church at all. The theological concerns of my early years evaporated in an instant. I was free.

I may have been a stranger, but I was no longer in a strange land.

Every day during the summer of 1965 I would bike around my new neighborhood. I carried a small notebook and drew maps of the various streets. I made friends with every stray dog that would wander my way. I had stumbled out of hell and into a green suburban heaven.

And while I relished my new situation, Herb Alpert was on the radio playing his trumpet. His upbeat, accessible music was the perfect soundtrack for my life at the moment.

This explains why I never took part in the youth rebellion that was exploding around me. The generational battle over Vietnam, free speech, free love and the rest of it was a war over absolutes. I had had enough of that crap.

Life goes on and points of view change. I’m no longer thirteen. But whenever I hear the clear notes from Alpert’s trumpet, I recall that incredible summer of pure release.

I think I’ll put on Herb Alpert’s Christmas CD. After all, it's almost Labor Day.

Next:
Rudy Zallinger and the Canvas of the Past