by Joe Perry
As a little boy, I would study a tattered black-and-white photo of his crew, amazed that my dad was once so young. He and his fellow soldiers looked into the camera with easy gazes. There was no fear in their eyes. They seemed relaxed about their mission, which, day after day, brought them to death’s door.
I saw my father as a man of quiet courage. His goal for his family was simple—a better life. Postwar America was all about optimism and economic mobility. The war had been won and prosperity was at hand. But prosperity had to be earned through skills forged in discipline. It took discipline to become a professional accountant. It took hard work for a woman in the 1940s to graduate from college. My parents lived disciplined lives. They were neither doting nor overly affectionate with their children, but they were dutiful and always present. Dinner was served on time. Bills were paid on time. We didn’t live beyond our means. We didn’t live on borrowed money. Education was valued. Education was seen as the key to greater prosperity.
My education became the first and greatest stumbling block, another reason why I longed to lose myself in the water and the woods. Like millions of other kids, I had a learning disability—attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)—that was neither understood nor treated. Reading was the only subject at which I excelled. I would much rather be reading James Fenimore Cooper than dealing with participles in French.
My poor school performance was puzzling because my parents saw that I possessed intelligence and curiosity. Marine biology became a passion. When I asked them to drive me to Boston to hear lectures by Jacques Cousteau, my first hero, they were happy to do so. They took me to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, a paradise for a kid in love with water. I was obsessed with learning from those men who explored the deep. I wanted to go deep. I was told that if I kept up my grades I could come back one summer and intern at Woods Hole.
That never happened.
My grades were below average. That became the great mystery of my childhood: Why was I having such difficulty at school? I was deeply frustrated. I wanted to present my parents with good grades. I sensed their ambition for themselves and for me—and I wanted to realize those ambitions. I wanted to please them. The fact that I scored high on IQ tests only made things worse. I didn’t understand why I wasn’t doing better, and neither did they. They hired tutors but the tutors didn’t help. I read things three or four times without retaining a word. I was always told to try and focus, but that never worked. At school, I felt like I was living under a cloud.
That cloud extended to another area of my childhood: my dad’s health. The chronology is vague and the memories blurred, but the specter of cancer entered my childhood at an early date. Somewhere in my young years my father went to the hospital. He was gone for an extended time. The man who returned had a dark beard, and I didn’t recognize him. When I realized the stranger was my father, I burst into tears. The ugly scar across his back where they had reached in to remove his cancerous kidney frightened me even more.
Relief from my own struggles at school came from a dreamlike body of water set inside the woodsy landscape of western New Hampshire. Three hours north of Hopedale, Sunapee is a pure glacial lake, a natural wonder of luminous clarity and pristine beauty. The first time I faced the lake, my heart sang. I was a quiet kid, often shy, and not given to outward bursts of enthusiasm. But Lake Sunapee broke down my reserve and had me jumping for joy. To my young eyes, it was an undiscovered world to enter and explore. From the outside it was magnificent, but from the inside—diving under and skiing over its mountain-clear waters—it became even more miraculous. Sunapee became a refuge, a friend, a different and exciting second home, a place that turned my mundane world magical. Its magic turned my life around. Even now, writing from afar, I long to see it sparkling under the summer sun or frozen solid under a white winter moon. Eight miles long and a couple of miles wide, the lake is dotted with eight islands and a shoreline that extends some seventy miles. There are small peninsulas and little lake fingers and sandy beaches wherever you look. The outlying forest is dense with vegetation and animal life. On a night in fall, breathing in the crisp, cool air, you look up into a sky crowded with a hundred thousand stars. In the morning, with the rising sun, you see a hundred thousand trees whose leaves are shimmering gold.
Coming to Sunapee as a child, I fell deeply and permanently in love. My love for the water and the woods never diminished. Later in life, I moved away, but I kept coming back. I couldn’t stay away from the place where, for the first and only time, everything made sense. Everything was right—the sky, the lake, the forest, the sense of calm, the feeling of natural order.
My parents began talking about buying lakefront property to build a cabin. They proceeded with the usual Perry MO: Save until the money is there; do not buy on credit; do not live above your means. After carefully surveying the region, they chose a prime piece of property—it featured a hundred feet of lake frontage, in an undeveloped area. It provided one of the best views on the lake. A foundation was poured. A shell was built. Because my grandfather also did some building, my dad used his tools to do a lot of the work himself. My parents were young and athletic and skilled at manual labor. My mom did the painting. It became a family project, and within a year or two we were living in the cabin. Because there was no water or heat, it served us only during the warm months. We closed it up during winter. But eventually we winterized it—a complicated operation that required running a pipe thirty feet out to the lake. The pipe had to be buried four feet down, below the frost line. I helped Dad dig the ditch with a pick and shovel, a job I usually hated, but I loved this one. I loved anything that would enable us to spend more time at Sunapee and work alongside my dad.
As a resort area, Lake Sunapee had a rich history. There had been many ups and downs. When I was old enough to hang out, I saw the remnants of the forties and fifties. Those were the old hotels that were bustling during and just after World War II—the days when Benny Goodman’s and Glenn Miller’s big bands stopped off to play on their way from New York to Montreal. When I was a kid, those same resorts, in various stages of decay, were still around. There was a decrepit theater, an old skating rink, a variety of old buildings rotting away. At the same time, there was a feeling of excitement from a new generation of kids who hung out at the harbor. The hot spot was an ice cream parlor/burger joint packed wall-to-wall with teenagers, their hot rods parked outside. Some old-money kids cruised up in their parents’ classic Chris-Craft speedboats. The yacht club was still up and running and a focal point for Sunapee’s high society.
My mother, an instructor for the Red Cross, taught me to swim. I took to it immediately. It makes sense that water meant security, because Mom taught water safety and had certified most of the kids in our cove as open-water swimmers.
Water-ski shows in the harbor attracted big crowds. In trying to imitate the fancy tricks, most times I’d wind up on my ass with a nose full of water, but I would keep trying until I mastered it. I was able to pull off most every trick in the water-ski manual—from two skis to one ski to no skis at all. Driving the boat as her son tried mastering these tricks, my mother demonstrated limitless patience. I saw water as the source of endless amusement. And then came that dark day when water became linked with death.
Friends and I were watching a water-ski show filled with the kind of danger and daring that I loved. It was a weekend when my relatives had come to the lake for a family barbecue. The proceedings were interrupted by a loudspeaker announcement: “There has been an accident. A doctor is needed. Will a doctor please come to the dock immediately?” I didn’t think much of it. No one in the show had suffered a fall. The accident must have happened somewhere else on the lake. After the show had ended, my sister and I went back to our cabin, where we saw a police car in our driveway. The atmosphere was quiet, cold. A crowd of people was down by the waterfront talking to my family—my parents plus cousins, aunts, and uncles. Dad quickly took Anne and me aside.
“Kids,” he said, “something awful has happened.”
I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to know. I stayed silent.
“Your grandfather had an accident. He fell from his boat. We’re afraid he’s drowned.”
I remember asking the ridiculous question “Is he all right?” and feeling stupid afterward. But the words had come out and I couldn’t take them back.
“I’m afraid not,” said Dad with what felt like emotional detachment, a quality I inherited from him. “We can’t find your grandfather. He’s gone.”
I wanted to ask where he had gone, but I knew. Gone meant dead. Drowned meant dead. Later I heard how, in spite of the rough water, my grandfather had insisted on going fishing in a canoe. Someone said he’d been drinking. Patrol boats went looking for him. It was two weeks before his body turned up.
For the first time I faced the fact that a person can be here one minute and gone the next. My dad’s dad was a strong presence, a man who did nothing to hide his immigrant demeanor. He wore big black work boots, heavy jackets, and frayed shirts. He spoke with a thick accent. The father of eleven children, he lived the life of a workman. As I got older, I heard stories about how he was actually an alcoholic who could turn violent against his wife and kids.
Yet the water in which he drowned continued to call to me. Maybe it was a way of daring or defying death, but in the aftermath of what happened to my grandfather I plunged deeper into Lake Sunapee. Water was my element. I didn’t want to come up. I wanted to stay submerged in silence.
Back in Hopedale, the woods close to our house held another kind of silence. No human talk, just rustling and chirping and scampering over leaves. I stalked through the bushes with my BB gun, a gift from my parents, a lever-action copy of a Winchester. I loved that gun. I loved my dog, a trusty beagle. I loved hunting chipmunks and squirrels and birds. I loved honing my skills as a junior woodsman. I couldn’t articulate the term, but I had visceral knowledge of what it meant to be self-reliant. I hadn’t yet read the New England writers and thinkers who had turned their dialogues with nature into philosophies, but their thoughts were in my blood. As a solitary creature in a forest where my problems in school didn’t matter, I felt at home. Wild animals lived in these woods. And so did I.
SOUNDS
There was the sound of my father playing “Turkey in the Straw” on his harmonica. There was the sound of my great-uncle strumming his Portuguese ukulele. The instrument, a small guitar with four strings, had a delicate and beautiful shape. They called it a cavaquinho. Later I’d learn that its history went back to the Grecian lyres that were supposedly gifts from the gods. The mythology cut deep. The sound caught my ear, held my attention, and excited my imagination. I leaned in to listen. I wanted to touch the instrument and see how the strings worked. I wanted to get right up next to the source of the sounds.
The most compelling source of music, though, came from the family who rented the other side of our duplex. They had two teenage boys who were sixteen or seventeen when I was six or seven. The sound of their electric guitars pierced through the common wall that joined our homes and entered my heart. The sound spoke to me in much the same way as the water and the woods. The sound said, Come here. Come closer. I have what you want.
Sometimes I’d sneak over and watch the guys play. To a little kid like me, their slicked-down James Dean/Elvis Presley black-leather-jacket look was exotic. Their guitars had the futuristic shapes of moon rockets or the fins of an El Dorado. One of their friends, another greaser, beat out a rhythm on a snare drum. They played Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day,” the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” and Bill Haley & the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock.” I can’t say whether they played and sang in tune, but to me they sounded good. All I can say is that hearing them rearranged my heart. As a young boy, my heart sought solitude. Now, suddenly, my heart sought companionship in the form of music. The idea that three souls sitting around a room could create this kind of conversation without saying a word was not simply appealing, but overwhelming. I yearned to do exactly what they were doing.
It wasn’t entirely the music, and it wasn’t entirely their look. It was both. They went together. The music they played and the outfits they wore were not designed to please their parents. Both their image and their sound had sharp edges of defiance. They were cocky enough to take on the garb of the rebel without a cause. “I’m gonna rock around the clock” meant I don’t give a shit about doing my homework. “All I have to do is dream” meant Fuck mowing the lawn and taking out the trash.
I saw that it would not be difficult to adopt this look. It was just a matter of a white T-shirt, jeans, and gel for my hair. I also felt that the music, even as it captivated my heart, did not intimidate my mind. It seemed pretty simple and even possible that, were I to pick up a guitar, I might be able to start making similar sounds. In short, at this preteen age, I had a feeling that I could both walk the walk and talk the talk. I just had to try.
I approached the tasks—to adopt the look and learn the sound—in stages. It was relatively easy to convince my mom to let me wear jeans rather than khakis and a white T-shirt instead of a plaid shirt. But in these early years I saw that I had some unexplained interest in flair. I wanted to make a fashion statement of my own.
It wasn’t anger at unreasonable parents or an uprising against an unjust world. I didn’t harbor resentments. But I was beginning to realize that I had little interest in fulfilling the expectations of the world into which I was born. For example, when my Italian grandfather put me in the barber’s chair to cut my hair, I said, “I need sideburns like Elvis.”
“Joey, you’re not old enough for sideboard,” which is what he called them.
“Well, give me sideburns anyway.”
My grandpa chuckled, but I didn’t see it as a laughing matter. I didn’t get the sideburns and hated the buzz cut that my parents insisted upon. Those sideburns were important to me. So was clothing. I had to have a peacoat. When my parents said no, I remained adamant. They wanted to know why I had to have a peacoat. I couldn’t say, but it was a look that I needed. I hated wearing the uniform of button-down shirts and neatly pressed trousers. My clothes had to represent my spirit, and my spirit, now excited by music, was curious and unsettled.
The music in my house was the usual middle-class fare of the fifties—the sound track from South Pacific and Carousel, the pop tunes of Patti Page, background music with sweet little melodies, flaccid rhythms, and harmless messages. Easy listening, though, was not easy for me. I wanted something harder and stronger. When my parents saw that my initial encounter with the Portuguese cavaquinho had led to my interest in the guitar, they suggested the piano instead.
There was a spinet in our living room and I was encouraged to take lessons. Nothing interested me less. The piano was safe, the guitar dangerous. I wanted the guitar. I had heard other kids practicing scales and dealing with sheet music. I wanted nothing to do with notations on a page. I had no interest in memorizing scales. That felt like torture. I was looking for thrills. Thrills came from a guitar. I wanted the guitar—and that deep, unfettered music. Rock and roll hit me below the belt before I knew what below the belt meant.
I didn’t get a guitar for a long while, but music kept calling me, especially the music I heard at dance parties. As I sat in the corner and watched, I saw the effect that the rhythms and rhymes were having on my peers. I loved rock and roll the most but noticed how ballads affected the girls. They were a perfect excuse for close dancing.
I got a Heathkit radio that made me hunger for a guitar even more. At the end of the fifties, when I was approaching ten, I searched for and found the songs that got me going. I heard “Hound Dog” on the radio and saw Elvis on television. When his songs came on the air, I heard girls whispering and giggling. I knew that his sound was thrilling them. Elvis was daring and dangerous. His mystique was magnified by the fact that our parents found him unacceptable. Elvis’s music was
great, but I didn’t find it transformative. The music that really rocked my world came from Chuck Berry.
As a grown man who has come to appreciate good books, I look back at this period and consider Chuck Berry the Ernest Hemingway of rock and roll. He was strong, simple, and manly—a force of nature who created a musical lexicon all his own. He broke it down to the most essential elements. He had two voices—his singing voice and the voice of his guitar. His singing voice was insistent and compelling, the storytelling voice that let you know that Johnny B. Goode never learned to read or write so well but he could play a guitar like ringing a bell. Well, I wasn’t the best student at school and I sure as hell wanted to play a guitar like ringing a bell. The guitar voice was the voice of his heart, his rhythm voice, the fuel that made the song blistering hot.
One month I was a kid fantasizing about being Jacques Cousteau and the next I was a kid dreaming of being Johnny B. Goode. It was an easy transition because they had something in common: They were mysterious strangers, gunslingers who stood outside conventional society. They had places to go and stories to tell. I had wanted to follow Paladin, the gunslinger in the TV show Have Gun—Will Travel, as he chased down the bad guys with his sharp wit, wisdom, and, of course, a six-gun. Now I wanted to follow along with Chuck Berry as he led me into rock-and-roll music, any old time you use it, with a backbeat you can’t lose it. He was the pied piper luring the kids with something far more seductive than a flute. He had his rough-and-ready guitar; he had the rockin’ pneumonia; he needed a shot of rhythm and blues; he said, “Roll over, Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news.”
As the fifties turned into the sixties, I was knee-deep in rock and roll and rhythm and blues. Just the sound of those words was enough to get me going, running back to the Heathkit to get a load of Chuck Berry’s playing and Roy Orbison’s singing. At the same time, my BB gun let me pretend that I was Paladin. Now I had to have a guitar of my own so I could become Johnny B. Goode.