Garage Painting Music

 by whiteray

I suppose it might have been earlier in the month, but I think it was a sunny morning in late August 1970 when my dad presented me with a couple of paintbrushes, some turpentine, some rags and a couple of gallons of white paint. The west side of the garage needed painting. 

Actually, I imagine the entire garage needed painting and he was presenting me with the west side as a test: The south side of the garage was fronted by rose bushes, the east side held a door and a window and had a begonia bed in front of it, and the north side had the overhead door. The west side was just wood. If I could handle a blank wall without mishap, I might be trustworthy enough to be let loose on one of the other three sides. I was not, one might guess, particularly adept at handyman-type chores. 

Why do I think it was August? Because as well as the paint, the brushes, the turpentine and the rags, I took with me out to the garage that morning my RCA radio, the one that had been my grandfather’s, the one I’d brought up from the basement about a year earlier as I answered the siren call of Top 40 music. I opened the overhead door, ran an extension cord around to the back of the garage and provided myself with some entertainment as I painted. 

And one of the records I heard that morning on the Twin Cities’ KDWB was one of my favorites at the time, a record that was sitting at No. 16 on the station’s survey fifty-two years ago this week: the “Overture From Tommy” by the Assembled Multitude. (It still is a favorite of mine; it popped up not long ago while I was putting away dishes, and I found myself using a soup ladle as a mallet for air chimes when the real chimes come in at the forty-nine second mark.) The record would peak at No. 12 on KDWB a week later; nationally, it went to No. 16 in the Billboard Hot 100. 

The record was a cover, of course. The “Overture From Tommy” was originally recorded by the Who for its rock opera Tommy, released in May 1969. That was before my pop epiphany the following summer, so when I was painting the garage, I didn’t know the original. Having heard the original many times in the fifty-two years since, I still prefer the cover version, and somewhere along the line, I found a copy of the Assembled Multitude’s only album, which I quite like. 

As it happened, the Assembled Multitude wasn’t really a group. It was a collection of studio musicians from the Philadelphia area gathered together by producer Tom Sellers. As Wikipedia notes: “Many of the musicians in the ensemble were regulars at Sigma Sound Studios, where the album was recorded. Those musicians became the backbone of Philadelphia soul, working with producers Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell, and artists such as The O’Jays, Billy Paul, the Stylistics, and Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes.” 

I recall bobbing my head to the record as I painted that morning, happily refraining from using my paint-laden brush as an air chimes mallet or a conductor’s baton. I was trying to be responsible and careful as I worked. Nevertheless, by the end of the morning, when I had finished the job, there were a few spatters of white paint on the radio’s brown casing, spots that were still there in 2004 when Mom sold the house on Kilian Boulevard and the radio was removed from its spot by the workbench in the basement (where it had returned after I got a new radio in 1972.)

Here’s the Assembled Multitude’s cover of the “Overture From Tommy.”