Wet Bar Blues (Good Times, Bad Times)
The end of an era with my dad and Zeppelin.
Our old stereo now lived in a 70s-style wet bar.
As I dragged the chairs in from off the balcony and slammed the screen door, my dad slid a remastered version of Led Zeppelin from its crisp new sleeve, placing it gently on the turntable.
I watched his hands as they remembered the mechanics of the task, an old ritual.
It was the summer of 2014 and Jimmy Page, Zeppelin’s septuagenarian guitar god, was in the process of remastering the band’s entire catalog from the original analog tapes.
Over the next few years, Page, who believed Zeppelin MP3s sounded “ridiculous,” would reissue new mixes on vinyl with original cover art and sleeve designs, as well as deluxe editions featuring live concert recordings from back in the day.
Like holographic Pokemon cards — a hot commodity when I was in grade school — these vinyl releases would all be marked with a small silver sticker depicting the mythological angel Icarus writhing in pain after he flew too close to the sun — a symbol the band enacted in 1974 for their own record label, Swan Song Records.
By sending these refurbished recordings out into the world, Page was rehashing a vintage pastime, stoking excitement in the aging hearts of OG fans (including his own) while also trying to bond with a new generation.
And, in a way, my dad was doing the same.
Until now, he hadn’t owned vinyl for over 30 years. In the 1970s, my grandfather donated my dad’s record collection to the Salvation Army when he was away at college. Sometimes I dream of those albums drifting around out there in record stores and on other people’s shelves, maybe even on mine.
Regardless, it was reassuring to see. Investing in vinyl again for the first time since he, too, was a teenager, was forcing my dad to tune in during a dark time.
I was already a few years into collecting records, Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy being my first.
Throughout the second half of high school I’d amassed a short stack of vinyl — old and new — which I lugged up to college in a transparent purple IKEA cubby and played for curious homesick freshman like myself.
By the time I was done with finals and prepping to move back home for the summer, I noticed that my collection had magically expanded. Random stops at local flea markets and thrift stores resulted in a row of multicolored spines running along the top of my dresser, bookended by the foot of my bed and my roommate’s microwave.
While I was away at school accumulating records, my parents were seven hours south finalizing their divorce and dividing up their belongings, shedding nonessential possessions for successful open-houses and an imminent move.
Being back in my hometown without my home was strange.
In the room my mom rented for us in a hotel across town, I lived out of a suitcase and slept on the pull-out couch. You could say I had a newfound appreciation for my old house, but unlike the “Overview Effect” orbiting astronauts experience when viewing Earth from above, it manifested in a desperate nostalgia that would ebb and flow for years.
If my dad meant to lure me to his one-bedroom apartment with the new turntable he’d picked up from Best Buy, it definitely worked. And thank god. The most grounded I felt all summer may have been in front of that stereo, the two of us sharing a Harry’s pizza, spinning records.
On that first night, when the needle dropped on Led Zeppelin, the speakers let out a warm nostalgic fuzz.
My dad and I sank into our seats. The patio chairs, which for years lived in my family’s backyard, were a crisscross of plastic strips that imprinted Xs on our backs and thighs. Our bare feet sweat into the new wall-to-wall carpeting.
“Why don’t you go grab us a coupla beers?” he said, looking over at me.
I couldn’t tell if I’d heard correctly.
“Beers?”
“Yeah, there’s a case of Sam Summer in the fridge.”
I tried to act cool, but this was a first for us. I was still a few years from 21 and we’d yet to crack the cap off the formative-father-son-drinking-together-experience until now.
“Sure thing, dawg.” (Sometimes we call each other dawg.)
As I made my way toward the kitchen, two power chords rang out through the brightly lit apartment. John Bonham’s drums built and Robert Plant’s banshee vocals emerged, high-pitched and defiant, ricocheting off the bare walls.
My father sang along from his chair.
In the dayyyys of my youth
I was told what it was to be a man
His voice was soft, low, and in tune, just like it was when I was a child. He used to sit on the edge of my bed and croon “I’ve Been Working On the Railroad” until I fell asleep.
Now I’ve reached the age
I’ve tried to do all those things the best I cannnnn…
Good times, bad times
You know I had my share
When my woman left home with a brown-eyed man…
The apartment still smelled like the last tenant, an octogenarian smoker whose death made way for oatmeal-colored carpeting, fresh paint and the lingering scent of a well-used ashtray. I wondered if the people who moved into our house could smell us too.
To get to the kitchen, I had to pass the long oak table my parents and I used to sit at every night during dinner. My dad also had the game chest Mom picked up on a family trip, and the two cream-colored club chairs with olive stripes that used to face the television.
A framed portrait of my grandfather as a younger man leaned up against the wall.
I stared at it for a while. His pale-pink face was clean-shaven, his dark hair combed neatly and parted down the side. Clear, focused eyes. A mirror image of my dad when I was young. Some mornings before school before the sun was up I’d catch a glimpse of him in the hallway, glistening and professional and ready for work.
He stopped singing and yelled over the music. “Yo! Ya get lost?”
“One sec!”
The kitchen was a large empty room wrapped in metallic gift-wrap wallpaper, as if duct tape had been pulled taught and applied in perfect diagonals. The fridge purred. I opened the door and the amber bottles inside shimmered in the empty white light.
Aside from a case of beer, there was nothing but condiments. A tube of French’s yellow mustard, Heinz ketchup, and a little thing of Tabasco with a red crust lining the crease in the cap.
When I was a kid and something was lost, my dad would tell me the same thing: Think back to when you last had it. Retrace your steps.
We would do it together, marching up and down the house in search of sunglasses and keys, CDs and action figures. And after a while, there it’d be, the missing object flattened beneath couch cushions or wedged deep within a jacket pocket, somehow still intact and back in my palm.
But this practical act of search-and-rescue no longer seemed to work. I wasn’t interested in finding a lost object. I was searching for a moment in time. A whole era that no longer seemed to exist.
As a kid, it was always my job to set the sonic tone for dinner. I’d sift through our family’s communal CD collection, located in a cabinet underneath the TV, and load a spontaneous assortment into the disc changer: Rom-com soundtracks, classic rock anthems, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Greatest Hits, Haddaway’s “What Is Love” — the mix would drift out while we ate and chatted about our days.
Now I couldn’t remember when we’d divided up the hundreds of CDs? Packing up the house was a dizzy gray-blue blur. My stack now lived in the backseat of my car, I knew that, and my dad’s assortment was laid out above the turntable in a neat row, drawing, for the first time, a clear distinction between what had always been his and what hadn’t.
Unfortunately, in my quest to reclaim a life that was melting away, a time when our belongings — the CDs, the speakers, the furniture — were all together under one roof, I’d found something of my dad’s that only beckoned more questions.
Cracking the cap off our first father-son brewski, I couldn’t tell if I should bring it up. My discovery. Two wads of cash: crisp pale green paper asphyxiated by thin rubber bands, stuffed into his sock drawer.
A historically predictable engineer, my dad had grown mysterious, forfeiting his 9pm bedtime for a nightlife I tried to imagine from the mattress set up against his living-room wall. When nothing convincing materialized, I got squirrely and started opening drawers.
When I found the bills, they felt like lead weights. Hundreds lined the outside of each roll.
Theories started to multiply in my head. My dad’s double lives. But I still couldn’t figure out how to ask about the money and wouldn’t for years to come. At this point, it all felt too exhausting. I wanted to know the truth, but I wasn’t ready to try.
So the two of us raised our bottles and cheersed. To a new ritual.
Seated in front of the record player, drinking slowly, we sang the final verse of “Good Times, Bad Times” in our heads (Sure do wish I was at home…) and stared at the album cover, a doomed German blimp bursting into flames.
For the next 42 minutes, my dad and I enjoyed ourselves, listening to songs we already knew.
