What Ever Happened to Easy Listening?

                What ever happened to easy listening music?  My wife and I were in a nice restaurant recently and the loud raucous music that was playing over the music system did not make for a pleasant dining experience.  It seems everywhere I go, in department stores, the  grocery stores, in restaurants, I am bombarded with the wild music of today, blaring above my head.  I remember when almost all restaurants and even the fast food chains played nice soft music in the background which made dining out a nice experience.  But it seems in the 1970s, it was decided to kill easy listening or so called “elevator music” from our society. Remember Montovani?  Probably never heard of him if you are under the age of 70.  I doubt there are any broadcast easy listening radio stations to be found.  Online you may be able to find some so called easy listening stations, but even that is questionable.   If you search easy listening on the online Accuradio site, it will give you “Smooth Jazz”.   Sorry, not a Jazz fan.  Even the SirriusXM radio I have in my car with its zillion channels doesn’t give me a true easy listening channel.  They wimp out with “Jazz/Standards” channels with Sinatra and music from the 40’s.  Sorry, guys, that’s not the soft strings of the easy listening music that prevailed in the 1950’s and 60’s.  Yes, the music industry made a successful coup to literally kill easy listening music in the 1970’s and that death is apparently permanent.  Oh, love those good ole listening days.

The "Picture Show"

                I received my local small town newspaper yesterday and what a pleasure it was to read an article on the history of the movies or the “picture show” as it was called in Cadiz, Kentucky over the years.  I was unaware of the long history of the movies being  shown in Cadiz from those early 1913 showings on the outside wall of the local grocery store up to their formal showing in an actual theater building,   My memories are only of the that theater building located across from the Christian Church. 

                At my house it wasn’t always called the “picture show”, it was more often simply known as the “show”. In the 1940 and early 50’s my dad would take me to the “show“ almost every Friday night.  I recall my youngest days in the theater when I was so short that we always had an aisle seat and I was allowed to sit on the armrest next to the aisle so I could look over the heads of others and see the screen.  The price of admission was 15 cents for kids and daddy only paid 40 cents to get in.  On Fridays and Saturdays during those days, there was always a double feature and I know I saw every Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Bowery Boys movie ever made.  In addition to the two features, there were the cartoon, the preview of coming attractions and the serials whose cliff hanger endings always left me breathlessly waiting for next week’s episode.  The movie started at 6:30 p.m. and we were usually out by 9:00 p.m.  It was hard to believe they could fit all that entertainment into that time period.

                The movie bill in the late 1940s and 1950 changed three times a week.  The double feature was shown only on Friday and Saturday.  Then a new single feature was shown on Sunday and Monday which included a Sunday matinee.  A different new single feature was shown on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights.  The midweek showings were eventually dropped and the theater was only open on Friday thru Monday.

                Later in the 50’s I was allowed to go to the show alone on a Saturday afternoon.  I remember all the Cadiz kids lining up at the box office to get in. If you got in early, you could get one of the prize seats on the front row.  I remember many an afternoon when the theater owner, Mrs. Smith, along with Roy and Sydney and their little sisters, would be late in opening the theater. The kids would anxiously look up Main Street for Mrs. Smith’s black Pontiac to appear, sometimes thirty minutes to an hour after the show’s scheduled opening time. She would finally appear and the kids would rush in to find their seats.  I always tried to save two seats for my cousins, Anita and Doris Clayton, who lived in the country and were always late in arriving.

                In the late 50’s I was allowed to go to the show at night alone.  I specifically recall seeing the movie, “Them” about giant ants. The movie scared me so much that when I left Main Street and had to walk home on Jefferson Street, which had no sidewalks, I would walk in the center of the dark street so the giant ants would not get me before I got home.

                When I turned 12 years old, which would be in 1956, I was so proud that I was old enough to be admitted to the theater as an adult.  I recall my first time of handing 40 cents to Mrs. Smith and being proudly one of the big kids.  I had heard stories that some of the local kids did not let her know that they had turned twelve so they could get in at the lower 15 cents price.  But for me it was a great rite of passage to be able to let everyone know I could go to the show as an adult.

                I remember Virginia Alexander taking over the theater in the early sixties and the great improvements she made.  The theater did not have a concession stand and only sold popcorn from a machine sitting in the small entry lobby of the theater.  But Virginia was responsible for the taking out of the last few rows of the theater and creating a true concession stand that sold not only popcorn, but soft drinks and candy.  Finally the Kentucky Theater was becoming a first class movie house.

                Sometime in the early 60’s the movie "Imitation of Life" was shown at the theater one Sunday and Monday.  This was a very popular tear jerking movie starring Lana Turner and had a subplot about an African American girl passing as a white girl and denying her mother.  There was only one showing on Monday night at 7 p.m. which I attended.  In those segregated days, blacks were not allowed to sit in the lower orchestra section but were required to sit in the small balcony. (As a kid, I always wanted to sit in that balcony which I thought would be a cool place to view the movie, but of course, I was never allowed to sit there.) At the Monday evening showing, so many blacks showed up to view the movie that the balcony was filled.  There were plenty of seats downstairs, but they were not allowed to sit there.  Virginia then told all the waiting patrons that if they would come back at 9 p.m., she would have a special showing the movie just for them.  I recall leaving the theater a little before nine and seeing the long stretch of African American citizens all lined up to enter the balcony so they could the special showing of "Imitation of Life".

                I absolutely loved the movies when I was growing up and would have done anything to have been able to work in the theater.  But that was not to be.  I remember how envious I was when two of my best friends did get jobs at the show.  My female friend and cousin Donna Francis was hired to work in work in the concession stand and another pal, Jimmy Woody, worked as a projectionist.  I was such a movie nut that Jimmy would give me short pieces of movie film cut when he had to splice reels of the film together as a projectionist.  I kept those treasured splices of film in a box much like a kid would keep baseball cards.

                Today, I rarely go to the “show”.  My son-in-law did drag me to see "Hacksaw Ridge" recently which was the first time I had been in a movie theater for over 15 years.  But I am still a movie fan, watching those movies on the big TV screen at home. HBO, Showtime and Starz are the primary source of my movie watching and of course I am a big fan of Turner Classic Movies where I can again watch those wonderful old movies I used to see at the “show”.

Memories of Movie Palaces of My Past

               I thought at first it was déjà vu, then I realized it was just old memories flashing back to my mind.  It was a cold sunny Sunday afternoon at around 1 p.m. when I opened the doors to the lobby of the recently renovated Capitol movie theatre in downtown Lebanon, Tennessee.  My better half and I were on our way to man the registration table for some live auditions for an upcoming show.    I was alone when I entered the theatre lobby and it was quiet.  But there it was-- a lobby like many of the old movie theaters I had entered on a sunny Sunday afternoon in my youth.  The marble floors and wall, covered with posters for upcoming movies such as Hopalong Cassidy, Shirley Temple, olds westerns and even James Bond.  To the left was the abandoned concession stand with its popcorn machine.   What was missing was the smell of the popping corn.  The old memories surged through me as I recalled the joy of my youth by attending a Sunday matinee in one of these small town movie palaces of the past.  I remembered the Alhambra Theatre in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, the Columbia Theater in Paducah, Kentucky and the theaters in Murray and Mayfield Kentucky whose names I can’t recall and of course those magical movie theaters in downtown Nashville, Tennessee.  All the places I had visited as a kid.  These were the places of pleasure for a young guy growing up as an avid fan of the movies. I closed my eyes and those old childhood memories were back.  I opened them and realized I was just in a newly renovated, but memorable, theater of my past.  Not déjà vu, I guess, but it brought a warm feeling in my heart and a smile to my face.