CV Rick

Road Music with Weird Harold

Despite all I've said about Weird Harold, there was one thing you could really count on - - Great Road Music.  In this recurring segment, we're going to relive a bit of those tunes that took us across the Great American Prairie at over a hundred miles an hour. 

I don't claim that this is the best music ever made, or even that it's superior to other songs produced at the same time.  All I'm saying is that it sounded fantastic in Harold's rolling stereo system at a crystal clear 105 decibels (measured for clarity at many stereo contests).

A couple things you need for great road music:  Anthems and brilliant vocals.  Lynyrd Skynyrd gave both of those in quantity.  Every song was an anthem and Ronnie Van Zant was hands-down the best Southern Rock Vocalist. 

We listened to the Greatest Hits Album so many times that the lyrics are burned into my subconscious.  My lips start syncing as soon as a song begins, not one of them is unfamiliar.  Hate Freebird as much as you'd like – make fun of it, hold up a lighter and scream it out, but it's indelibly ingrained on a generation. 

We hit the entrance ramp to the “one-two-three” and the opening chords of Sweet Home Alabama. It's the first song I remember where an open challenge from one musician to another is made.  Canadian Neil Young is also a fantastic singer, but Van Zant takes him to task for putting down the band's home state:

Well I heard mister Young sing about her
Well, I heard ole Neil put her down
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A Southern man don't need him around anyhow

 

Weird Harold, Episode 5 of 5, Tragedy

As with all things, both good and bad, our time with Weird Harold is coming to a close.  It's not that there isn't anything left to say about him, I could tell the anecdote about how Harper came over with a copy of Tchaikovsky and blew out the safety circuits on both of Harold's home speakers. We could explore the time when he hosted the Halloween Party, but that's really Pam's story, not Harold's, so we'll see Harold in a cameo sometime down the road.

You know what I really remember most about Harold?  It was his hands.  He was an average-sized guy with average-sized hands for the most part, but his fingers were abnormally bulky, so when he made a fist, the hand closed and became a mallet.  Sausage digits with a gold band around his left ring finger that looked embedded in the flesh as if it were put on before he'd grown up and now was fused below his first joint.  That's what I remember, more than his curly black hair or vacant brown-eyed stare, or his ever-present K-SHE St. Louis Rock Station t-shirts with the logo of a pig.  So, where were we?

Caged in a small town, transportation by shuttle bus, there was no trouble to get into for the next two weeks.  Up till now, you'd think that the two of us were alone in Great Falls, Montana, but we weren't.  An entire squadron of jets and mechanics and pilots accompanied us on our grand adventure and they were rapt with interest regarding the car wreck.  Questions and answers went like this:

How'd we survive?  Seatbelts.  (not the dumb luck of drunks and fools)

How fast were we going?  Maybe five or ten over the speed limit.  (telling the guys we knew that Harold wasn't speeding would have been a sure-fire rip through the thin web of lies)

Not a scratch on you, and the car is almost totaled?  “Not true,” I denied.  “Look, right here, there's still a bump on my forehead and this that looks like a fishing hook puncture through my hand had to have been caused by glass.”  (okay, humor me.  They did.)

Weird Harold, Episode 4 of 5, Weird Harold's Grand Am

The first week in Great Falls was quite the marathon of working, fishing, and drinking.  We found several great streams and took the First Sergeant out twice, then Friday came and we hopped in the Grand Am and went for another weekend jaunt. 

I haven't adequately described the Grand Am for you.  It was a rolling blue stereo.  Harold waxed the car every week and he was always adding something, wiring new components in or changing configurations.  The simple fact that he didn't become a car-stereo engineer is proof that destiny is a dead concept.  This was 1986 and some of the components that I'm going to describe were cutting edge back then.  Like I said earlier, the system was Alpine.  He had mid-range speakers in both doors, in the ceiling in four places, at the driver's and passenger's feet and two on the rear deck.  Directional tweeters were set in rows of three above each door, and he had double bass vents in the trunk. It was the first car stereo I'd seen that played CDs, but that wasn't enough for Harold.  He had a six-disc changer in the trunk operated by remote control from the dash.  He'd also wired an interrupt circuit into the system so that when the radar detector went off, it'd briefly mute the stereo.  That was a good idea when traveling over a hundred miles an hour with 110 decibels of AC/DC blasting through the system.

The Grand Am's speedometer only went up to eighty-five, so in order to tell how fast we were going, we'd count it out by cruise control.  Every bump of the control would increase the speed by one mile per hour.  We'd count it and then make sure that the car felt like it'd accelerated before doing it again. The previous record had been 114, but we broke that running on a long downhill straightaway.

Weird Harold, Episode 3 of 5, Road Trip

It was a dead-dark night, clouds obliterating the stars and moon when we topped a hill doing one-hundred twelve miles an hour.  A drizzle kept the road wet and the first sign of any people we'd seen in fifty miles was the firey pillar of a burning car in a wheat field and the shaking sillhouette of a naked woman standing in front of it.

Weird Harold and I had managed to convince the First Sergeant to let us drive from Minot, North Dakota to Great Falls, Montana rather than fly with the rest of the squadron.  We'd used the promise to take him on a fly fishing trip during a training TDY (temporary duty) and we swore to stay out of trouble to get the special exemption.  Then we'd promptly stocked the Grand Am with beer, sandwiches, tackle boxes and fishing poles. 

Road trip!  Remember those days, when driving was as fun as arriving?  Loud music and beer and hundreds of miles of blacktop, rest stops wherever you could pull over, hard-breaking whenever the radar detector chirped.

We only had until Monday morning to report for duty, so we took off right from work on Friday in a packed car and changed out of our uniforms on the road.  We planned on getting as much fishing in as possible before reporting to the Montana Air National Guard Base on Monday morning.  That's how we ended up floating over that hill to the surrealism of a burning car and a naked woman in the rain. 

Harold locked up the brakes and we slid right on by for over a quarter mile before a he executed a beautiful Dukes of Hazard U-turn and we got back to the spot. 

Weird Harold, Episode 2 of 5, The Bull

After the DUI Harold was grounded so to speak.  He wasn't allowed to drive for six months and he wouldn't let anyone, including his wife, drive his precious Grand Am.  One would think that just walking between work and home, being stuck on an air base, trouble would be delayed.  Of course the only ones who would think that would be those who didn't know Harold.

On an air base, housing is segregated by rank.  Mid-level enlisted live in two-story four-plexes, Senior enlisted get two-story duplexes, junior officers get duplexes with little circle-driveways, and senior officers get ranch-style individual houses with patios.  Harold was junior enlisted and was lucky to have even gotten a base housing slot.  He lived on the far edge by the fence separating fields and pastures from a his dinky prefab residential neighborhood: small single-story duplexes with paper-thin walls. 

One day in the Spring Harold invited me over to help him make Beer Chili and get ready for a party he had planned.  A dozen of our friends and/or significant others were coming.  When I got there, in the morning, Harold and his wife were already fighting.  Cindy had a temper and her screams were just at that pitch to feel like knife blades cutting down your spine.  Harold had planned the party and bought the beer, but he'd neglected to tell her anything about it.  From what I gathered, listening to her yell, between more new speakers for a car he wasn't able to drive and the party prep, he'd spent the last of their money till payday.

As the fight wore down, Cindy came out with their daughters, said hi to me as if I hadn't been in the front yard listening to the whole thing, and stormed off down the street leaving the stupid party to her stupid husband and his innocent friend.  Harold, true to his character, didn't think anything was wrong.  "She'll come back," he said.  "She loves me too much to stay angry."

Party prep wasn't about decorations or table setting or even cleaning the house.  For Harold, party prep was drinking a lot of beer, listening to the Dire Straits, and stirring the chili every fifteen minutes.  On the path to inebriation we went.

 

Weird Harold, Episode 1 of 5

When I was in the military I had a friend, Weird Harold.  He was one of the most interesting characters I've ever known.  He was bright and funny, and sometimes the stupidest man on the planet. 

Weird Harold had a beautiful wife, she had long, straight blond hair down the middle of her back.  Her cheekbones were high like signposts toward deep brown eyes.  He also had two cute-as-a-button daughters, little blondies, both of them too young for school. 

But his one true love wasn't his wife or those girls, it was his car.  He had just reenlisted and had gotten a $20,000 reenlistment bonus which he used to buy a car, a 1986 Grand Am.  But he didn't pay cash for it.  What he did was pay enough to get a loan and then poured all the rest of the money into improvements like new tires, chrome rims, and a four-grand Alpine stereo system. 

Harold would take his Grand Am to loudest stereo contests and win prizes.  He knew everything about acoustics, and would spend hours each week adjusting speakers and testing levels.  He'd also drive around with his stereo blasting over 110 decibels with his two beautiful daughters sitting in the back seat.  Remember that stupidest man comment earlier?

Fishing was his other love.  He'd go fishing anytime, in any weather.  One time he found this great fishing spot and convinced me to go with him in the middle of the winter.  I thought it would be Ice Fishing, but that crazy Harold had found an unfrozen lake in the middle of North Dakota in the dead of winter.

We took his little fishing boat and put it in the steamy water.  We drank a lot of beer and fished all night, from the time we got off work until we were ready to go back to work the next morning.  The only problem was that the fish were kind of soft and mushy, and that was while they were alive.   

So, we started the motor and headed to shore, and that's when we saw the flashing lights near the Grand Am. Pulling in, we were met with three security guards and two police officers.  It seemed that fishing in the power plant's pond wasn't exactly legal, and the fish weren't exactly safe to eat. 

What a ruckus we'd caused. 

Remember about Harold being stupid? Well, when he got in the car to drive back to base, in front of the policemen after being scolded for the fishing, he got his first DUI. I was trying to warn him, but he was too busy being buddy-buddy with the cops who were standing there in disbelief that this guy who'd been drinking beer all night on the lake was going to drive away in front of the police.

More on Harold tomorrow.

- rick, the trouble years

Next Episode - Weird Harold and the Bull