Music elicited emotional reaction

It was Dec. 20, 1967, 50 years ago last month.

And I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was home from college, and my parents had been out for the evening, probably at a company Christmas party of some sort.

I was alone, watching the 11 p.m. news on the old Zenith black and white when they came in.

And I was pretty much distraught when they came in to let me know they were back and to say goodnight.

I’d just learned that Otis Redding had died in the crash of a small airplane en route to Madison, Wisconsin.

My dad, I remember vividly, scoffed that I was having an emotional reaction to some entertainer he’d never heard of.

They headed off to bed while I stayed up, waiting for some new detail or — miraculously — word that Redding had somehow survived the crash of that Beechcraft into that freezing lake.

Looking back, I understand my father’s reaction.

Why in the world should I, a white college student in small town Indiana, give a care in the world about a soul singer from Georgia?

But then, I doubt that he’d ever listened to Otis.

He might have heard him. My older sister Linda had given me a copy of “Otis Blue” for Christmas the year before, and I had played it repeatedly on a rinky-dink portable record player that I’d bought with money from my paper route.

So he might have heard Otis Redding. But he had not listened to him.

In today’s media-saturated culture, where anything new that happens on one side of the world is outdated a few minutes later when it reaches the other side, it’s hard to explain how pop culture — TV, movies, books, but especially pop music — functioned in those days.

The world was simply more parochial than it is today. It was as if we were all on an endless series of archipelagos, islands of this or that enthusiasm.

To be sure, there were places where pop culture merged together: The big three TV networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — and their daily and nightly offerings. But far more often, the rest of the world seemed exotic, different and perhaps unknowable.

That was especially true when it came to pop music.

Choosing a favorite radio station was like choosing a special diet or a political party or maybe even a church.

WOWO out of Fort Wayne could be counted on for a bland mix of teenage pop when it wasn’t promoting the twangy sounds of The Little Red Barn. When its deejays went out into the field to host record hops, you could depend upon something safe, something backwards looking, something that wasn’t going to raise any alarms.

There was a Dayton station that was a little bit sharper, a little bit hipper.

On a good night, there was WLS out of Chicago, surprising the kids in the cornfields with music and quips you would never hear on WOWO.

And there was CKLW, broadcast out of Windsor, Ontario, and home of the coolest music that Motown could produce.

A handful of us — Klop and Smitty and I — discovered WLAC, broadcasting out of Nashville, and heard “John R” the deejay play records that only a few years before would have been categorized as “race music,” as segregated as the rest rooms and bus stations of the south.

It was into that mix that my sister Linda gave me “Otis Blue,” and the music grabbed me by the ears and never let go.

To say it changed my life would be an exaggeration. But not by much.

It certainly set the stage for my sadness that December night 50 years ago when I heard the news.