Mike and I have been friends since meeting in third grade in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. We were reunited in seventh grade — junior high school — when my family moved back to the south side of town, where we first met.
Mike was one of my closest friends at Farnsworth Junior High School, a fellow music nerd. We liked a lot of the same songs we heard on WOKY, the Mighty 92, then the biggest Top 40 AM radio station out of Milwaukee.
(We also were in junior high band together. Mike was an excellent cornet player and I was a dreadful cornet player. I innocently ratted him out one day when our band teacher, Mr. Henckel, saw me using third valve for notes usually played with first and second valve. He asked me where I learned that, and I told him that Mike had taught me that. Mr. Henckel was not amused. That’s Mike on the left and Mr. Henckel on the right when we were reunited in October 2008.)
But I digress.
Mike had a birthday earlier this month. Whenever Mike has a birthday, I always think back to his 13th birthday in October 1970. Seventh grade. There was no school that Friday — teachers had an in-service day — so Mike had a party in his basement. There were girls there, including Debbie, on whom Mike had a big crush. It likely was my first party with girls in attendance. That was a big deal.
I had to get a birthday present for Mike. I knew it had to be something something music.
At 13, the only group I really knew well was Creedence Clearwater Revival, so I bought Mike their “Cosmo’s Factory” album, which had come out that summer and had sent three singles to the Top 40.
At the time, I had Creedence’s “Green River” album, one of the first LPs I ever owned. It had come out in the summer of 1969, but I don’t think I got it until sometime in 1970, before I bought “Cosmo’s Factory” for Mike.
Fun fact No. 1: I really would have liked to have bought “Cosmo’s Factory” for myself, even though I had its three Top 40 singles — “Travelin’ Band,” “Up Around the Bend” and “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” — on colorful Fantasy Records 45s that my brother and I played the bejeezus out of.
Fun fact No. 2: I eventually bought “Cosmo’s Factory” for myself, though it isn’t seared into my head in the way the ‘Green River” LP is seared into my head.
Fun fact No. 3, and the most fun of all: Mike still has the copy of “Cosmo’s Factory” that I gave him in 1970.
“Cosmo’s Factory” has Creedence’s 11-minute cover of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” on it. We don’t hear that enough these days, so here you go.
Fun fact No. 4: Mike also noodled around with photography. If you’ve made it this far, please enjoy one of our, uh, creative efforts. I seem to be demonstrating failing to navigate a dead end, or being dumped at the Sheboygan lakefront. This is probably from 1971.
