the original Peyton Place, where, oddly enough, Tom Hamilton was born. But then again, it all makes perfect sense to me now.
On Sunday nights, Dad would give recitals at Trow-Rico. People from miles around would come over to hear him, and my grandma, my mother, and my sister would play duets. All the families that came up had kids, and Aunt Phyllis would holler, “C’mon, Steven, let’s put on a show for them!” Downstairs from the piano room was the barn’s playroom: Ping-Pong, a jukebox, a bar, and, of course, a dartboard. There was also a big curtain across one corner of the room that made a stage where my aunt Phyllis taught all the kids camp songs like “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” and the “Hole in the Bucket” song. I would pantomime to an old 78 recording of “Animal Crackers.” It was an evening of camp-style vaudeville. For the finale, we hung a white sheet in front of a table made from two sawhorses and a board. Someone from the audience would be brought back to lie on the board, and behind them a giant lamp cast shadows on the sheet. My uncle Ernie would perform an operation on the person lying down, pretending to saw him in half and eventually pull out a baby—quite horrifying and hilarious to the audience. It was all very tongue-in-cheek but certainly the beginning of my career.
We must have done a hundred and fifty or more of those shows over the years. I was a serious ham. I’d do cute things kids can get away with—especially to adoring relatives. It was like something from a Mickey Rooney movie. I’d learned all the lyrics to that song “Kemo-Kimo.”
Keemo kyemo stare o stare
Ma hye, ma ho, ma rumo sticka pumpanickle
Soup bang, nip cat, polly mitcha cameo
I love you
And then I’d add something like “Sticky sticky Stambo no so Rambo, had a bit a basket, tama ranna nu-no.” What the hell was that? The beginning of my love for real out-there music and crazy lyrics.
Before I got involved in doing chores at Trow-Rico, before I discovered girls and pot and playing in bands, I had a great life in the woods with my slingshot and BB gun. As soon as we got up there, I’d be gone in the woods and fields. And I never came back till dinnertime. I was a mountain boy, barefoot and wild. I walked through the woods, looked up at the trees, the birds, the squirrels—it was my own private paradise. I’d tie a stick to a rope and make a swing from any tree branch. I was brought up that way, a wild child of the woods and ponds. But of course, nobody believes that about me. They don’t know what to think when I say, “You know, I’m just a country boy.”
1961—we all gotta start somewhere. . . . (Ernie Tallarico)
No waves, no wind. If you go into a recording studio that’s soundproofed, something just feels wrong to your ears. Especially when they close the door—that’s sound deprivation, it’s anechoic, without echo, without sound. Not so in the woods. In that silence I heard something else there, too.
I lost all that mystery when I was on drugs. Coming out of that din I was able to feel my spiritual connection to the woods again. Drugs will steal you like a crook. Spirituality, over. I could no longer see the things I used to see in my peripheral vision. No periphery, no visions.
I used to go up in the woods and sit by myself and hear the wind blow. As a kid, I’d come across places where the woodland creatures lived. Tiny human creatures. I’d see mossy beds, cushions of pine needle, nooks and crannies under the roots of upturned trees, hollow logs. I’d look around for elves, because how could it be that beautiful and strange and nobody live there! All of this tweaked my imagination into such a state that I knew there was something there besides me. If you could sleep on moss that thick it would be bliss. I’d smell that green grass. I would see a natural little grotto in the woods and say to myself, “That’s where their house must be.”
A few years ago I found a moss bed for sale at this lady’s little store in New London. The place was full of nature stuff—and had a big wooden arch in front and giant bird wings. The bed is made of twigs, with a moss mattress, grouse feathers for pillows, a wooden nest, an ostrich egg cracked in half with a little message on it, and the prints of the fairies that were born on the bed. We kept it in the house so my two children, Chelsea and Taj, would see it and just know that fairies were born on that bed. They’d say, “For real?” and I’d say, “For real.”
I bought the two fields I used to go walking in. I haven’t gone out into the woods lately to see if they’ve been touched; I’m afraid to find out if it’s all still there as I remember it. But I grew up with these creatures. I was alone in the forest but I was never lonely. That’s where my first experiences of otherness came from, of the other world. My spiritual ideas didn’t come from the Lord’s Prayer or church or pictures in the Bible, they came from the stillness. The silence was so different from anything I would ever experience. The only noise that you heard in a pine tree forest was the gentle whistling sound of the wind blowing through the needles. Other than that, it’s just quiet . . . like after a fresh snow. . . . It really quiets down in the woods . . . cracking branches . . . nothing. It’s like when I took acid—I felt the wind brushing against my face although I knew I was in the bathroom and the door was closed. This was Mother Nature talking to me.
I would walk through the woods and walk and walk. I would find chestnut trees, fairy rings of mushrooms, bird’s nests made with human hair and fishing line. I would imagine I was in the jungle in Africa and climb up on the gates at the entrances to the big estates and sit on the stone lions (until someone shouted, “Get down from there, kid!”).
That’s where my spirit was born. Of course I got introduced to spirituality through religion, too, from the Presbyterian Church in the Bronx and my choir teacher, Miss Ruth Lonshey. At the age of six, I learned all the hymns (and a few hers). I fell in love with two girls on either side of me in the choir. And of course they had to be twins. I remember being five and sitting next to my mother in a pew at that church, looking up at the altar that held the Bible and a beautiful golden chalice, with the minister looming over it. There was a golden tapestry that hung down to the floor with a crucifix embroidered on the front. I was all wrapped up in the tradition of getting up, sitting down, getting up, singing, sitting down, praying, singing, praying, getting up, praying, singing, and hoping all this would take me somewhere closer to heaven. I thought for sure God must be RIGHT THERE under THAT altar. Just as I’d thrown a blanket over the dining room chairs to create a fortress, a safe, powerful place, kinda churchlike, with the added bonus of imagination. WOW, all of this combined together in one beautiful moment of ME, feeling GOD. But then I’d met Her once before in the forest.
I would walk in Sunapee with a slingshot in my back pocket over the meadow and through the woods until I got lost . . . and that’s when my adventure would begin. I would come upon giant trees so full of chestnuts that the branches would bend, bushes full of wild blackberries, raspberries, and chokecherries, acres of open fields full of wild strawberries in the grass—so much so that when I was mowing the lawn, it smelled like my mom’s homemade jam. I would find animal footprints, hawk feathers, fireflies, and mushrooms in the shape of Hobbit houses that I was told were left by Frodo and Arwin from Lord of the Rings. Incidentally, those were the same mushrooms that I would later eat and that would magically force my pen to write the lyrics to songs like “Sweet Emotion.” In choir, I was singing to God, but on mushrooms, God was singing to me.
I pretended I was a Lakota Indian with a bow and arrow—“One shot, one kill”—only I had my BB gun—“One BB, one bird.” Me and my imaginary buddy Chingachogook, moving silently through the woods. I was a deadeye shot; I’d come back after an afternoon of killing with my slingshot and Red Ryder BB gun with a string of blue jays tied to my belt. That part wasn’t imaginary. I had watched every spring how blue jays raided the nests of other birds and
