Carl Gardner, Dead at 83.
The death of Coasters lead singer Carl Gardner this week at the age of 83 brought to light again an awareness of how much those early rock and roll singers of the late 1950s mirrored the angst of my adolescent generation. They didn’t simply speak our language, they sang it, and they put it all into a rocking beat that spoke to our most puerile yearnings.
Take out the papers and the trash, or you don’t get no spending cash. If you don’t scrub that kitchen floor, you ain’t gonna rock and roll no more. – Yakety yak. – Don’t talk back.
So much of it was about getting enough money go out and all the “stuff” we had to go through (work) to get money. To those of who grew up with parents who lacked both the aspirations and the means to make things easy for us, work or crime were the only two ways to access cash. Fortunately for me, I had parents who frowned severely upon crime as an acceptable option to financial independence.
Chuck Berry was another of my other lyrical mentors in the song Too Much Monkey Business:
Workin’ in the fillin’ station, too many tasks. Wipe the windows. – Check the tires. – Check the oil. – A dollar gas. – Too much monkey business. – Too much monkey business. – I don’t want your botheration. – Get away. – Leave me.
Of course, Eddie Cochrane also sounded the “do I really have to work” hue and cry with Summertime Blues in the summer of 1958:
I’m a gonna raise a fuss, I’m a gonna raise a holler – about workin’ all summer just to try and make a dollar. – Sometimes I wonder – what I’m gonna do, but there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.
Somehow, and no doubt aided by the values and circumstances of our East End Houston families, most of us got the work ethic message without any tinge of entitlement to a life in which we took it easy while others worked to support us. Today you have to wonder how widespread that value remains. among today’s generation.
I’m not talking about the “work smart” folks who see labor only as something to do until you invent the net Facebook billionaire industry upon the sands of the Internet beach. I’m talking about the coming of people who view work as a choice, not a ball and chain master of life. How many people coming up today in this climate still see work as a desirable way to focus one’s productive efforts? Or is it now mostly all tied to “get rich quick and then quit work” ambitions – or simply finding a way to entitle one’s self to support from the public coffers?
Perhaps, we’ve come a long way from the Yakety Yak complainant days. Perhaps not. When it comes down to our ideas about career work, however, it seems to me that we have taken something of a veer away from the lifetime commitment notion that my 1950s generation embraced.
Do you like the road we seem to be taking with jobs and work today? Or am I simply imaging a difference that really isn’t there? What I see today is way too much political and cultural emphasis upon entitlement and less willingness to working for anything that isn’t tied to some kind of “get rich quick” scheme.
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Tags: work essay
The Pecan Park Eagle 
June 14, 2011 at 6:47 pm |
Today people expect too much too soon! Newly weds think they have to have a house, new car, entertainment money, big t.v., etc. Teens have to have all the latest electronics. Even the poorest have to have the newest cell phone!! People eat in front of the t.v., gulp down fast food, and lack manners. Soon marriage will be obsolete! Family life has crumbled, and happiness is not easily reached. Materialistic people in a materialistic world! Thank heavens I grew up dancing, playing canasta, swimming, listening to records, enjoying outside, and family life. I had a great time, and wish that people today could have spent one night in the 50’s and see what the world was like then!!
June 15, 2011 at 11:27 pm |
Bill: I was a Wild Bill Haley (Hailey) and the Comets man, circa 1954-55. Wayne Williams