Longtime and/or serious readers of Growing Old With Rock & Roll might remember The Bathtub, the first full-length entry in the blog back in 2012, that served as a kind of "origin story" to the rest of the proceedings.
Rather than just posting a link, I've decided to reprint the piece in its entirety here.......
I was 13 years old in October 1965. Eighth grade just was not working out. I had been a shy, book-reading child, now hormones were kicking in. I loved rock & roll but I just knew I was NEVER going to know how to talk to girls. (This was years before I got ahold of a guitar.) One really bad Saturday night I decided to kill myself. I had it all worked out. I had seen a movie just that week about a guy getting electrocuted when a radio fell into the bathtub he was in. (I was a very impressionable child.)
After everybody had left for the evening (my mom and dad were working their second jobs; my sister was on a date; my brother was at the bar) I went around the house and found a radio with a power cord long enough to reach the bathtub. I ran the bath, plugged in the radio, settled into the warm water, said a little prayer for forgiveness, and let the radio drop. What I hadn't factored in was that although the cord was long enough to reach the tub, I hadn't filled it full enough. Right when the radio hit the water the plug pulled out. I got a nasty shock, I was seeing big purple and black blobs in my field of vision, but it didn't kill me.
I lifted the radio out and laid there in the water a few minutes to let my head clear. I got out and ran some more water in the tub until I was certain I had the right water level for the job at hand. I plugged the radio back in and what was playing? "Get Off My Cloud" by The Rolling Stones. I stood there naked, dripping and chilly, eighth-grade skinny, and listened to the entire song. Right at that moment I quite literally loved that song more than I loved life itself. And then a thought came very clearly into my head: "What if the next Rolling Stones single is even BETTER than this one, and I never get to hear it?"
I set the radio down on the sink, got back in the tub, took a bath and went to bed. If "Danke Schoen" by Wayne Newton or "Roses Are Red" by Bobby Vinton had been playing at the moment I plugged that radio back in I'd be dead now. Long live The Rolling Stones. So began a life of rock & roll.
© 2012 Ricki C.
Employing research tools available on the InterWideWeb I've managed to figure out the exact date of that suicide attempt; using the date of the Bob Dylan show I saw two weeks later, a calendar of October, 1965, and the Billboard chart rankings for "Get Off My Cloud" by The Rolling Stones, among other signposts.
That date was Saturday night October 30th, 1965, right around 9:15 pm.
I was 13 that night. I'm 73 now.
Here's what's happened in between.
ME AND DAD
My dad figures heavily in my Life of Rock & Roll. There are entire blogs about him in Growing Old With Rock & Roll. I'm going to link one here, but it's not integral to this part of the narrative, so feel free to just circle back to it later.
Looking back on that suicidal Saturday night I realize how selfish an act it would have been. It would have very nearly killed my dad, I think, if I had gone through with ending my life. He would have felt like he failed me somehow. But he had ALWAYS encouraged me in anything/everything I had ever wanted to do. He had never once made me feel like the disappointment I imagined I was to him. I wasn't an athlete. I was not yet a musician. I really wasn't really much of anything but a friendless 13-year old kid who read a lot of books, listened to a lot of 45 rpm rock & roll records alone in the basement, and didn't know how to talk to people.
In 1967, within two years of surviving that night dad bought me my first guitar, an acoustic; then my second, a beat-up secondhand electric Stratocaster knock-off that looked exactly like the guitar Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock, a guitar I loved with a passion. In 1968 I joined my first rock & roll band.
Dad died of a heart attack in April, 1970, less than two years after that.
One night in 1990 - after I had debuted my solo acoustic rocker act - I played a show opening for Willie Phoenix. Afterwards a bunch of my fellow musicians, their girlfriends or wives, and a sprinkling of friends & strangers were sitting around a big table at Bernie's Bagels. I was talking about how dad had been the entire reason I ever survived to become a rocker but died before he could ever see me actually play a show. A girl I had never met said, "Weren't you talking onstage about being Catholic?" "Yeah," I replied.
"Well then, given everything you're supposed to believe in, don't you think he's seen EVERY show you've ever played?" she said quietly.
I never saw that girl again in my life, but I thank her to this day for that question.
THINGS THAT WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED IF I HAD DIED OCT 30th, 1965
(in no particular order)
I would never have written a song.
I would never have tasted shrimp.
I would never have heard an Elliott Murphy song.
I would never have seen every Bruce Springsteen tour from 1976 through a couple of years ago.
I would never have learned to worship Mott The Hoople in general and Ian Hunter in particular.
I would never have kissed Joyce. I would never have kissed Marilyn. I would never have kissed Linda. I would never have kissed Jodie. I would never have kissed Teresa. I would never have kissed (and married) Pat. I never would have kissed Kim. I would never have kissed Mary Jo. I never got to kiss Jenny, but goddamn did I want to badly. I never would have kissed Sharon. I never would have kissed (and married) Debbie, my little love.
I would never have seen a picture of Lou Reed in a black t-shirt and altered my wardrobe forever.
I would never have fallen for Joe Strummer and Tom Petty, my polar opposite rocker discoveries of 1976.
I would never have read a book by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
THE TEN BEST YEARS OF MY LIFE
From the dawn of the 21st century - 2000 to 2010 - I served as the road manager for Hamell On Trial, a solo acoustic rocker whom I have often detailed/explained as "a four-man punk band rolled into one bald, sweaty guy." We traversed the entirety of America - from sea to shining sea, as it were - 5 or 6 times in that ten years, hitting 44 of the 48 contiguous United States along the way. (And Hamell played Alaska, but the promoter wouldn't pay for me to go along.)
It was the best of times with no worst of times. Ed Hamell was a solo acoustic act; we traveled in one car with an amp-stack taller than he was, two guitars and our luggage. Ed did not EVER want to see daylight. He would stay up 'til 5 or 6 in the morning while I slept 2 am to 8 am. I'd wake him up at 11 am in whatever Motel 6 we were in in whichever city, he'd shamble into the car and sleep until soundcheck in the next town, then go back to the car to sleep some more. I'd instruct the opening act to let me know when they were 3 songs from the end of their set, then head back to the car with a can of Red Bull, wake Ed up, and he'd head into the club to tear things up with 90 minutes of some of the best music I've ever heard in my life.
Then, if need be, Ed would drive all night to the next city while I slept in the passenger seat. He'd wake me at 8 am, and again - if need be - I'd drive the rest of the way to the next tour stop.
The next day we'd do it all again.
For ten years.
It was heaven.
Watershed
Five years into that process - 2005 - Colin Gawel came into Ace In The Hole Record Exchange (my day-job throughout the traveling years when I wasn't on the road) and asked if I might be interested in touring with his band Watershed as a merch person & guitar tech when I wasn't out with Hamell.
My first reaction to that job offer was, "Who died?" I'd been a fan of Watershed since 1990, 15 years earlier and they had exactly the same band line-up (with one drummer change) and exactly the same road crew that entire time. It turned out longtime roadie Rob had finally had enough of the almost-constant traveling Watershed indulged in and got a straight job.
I got in that van with Colin, Joe, Dave, Herb & Biggie, and never looked back.
I have that job to this day, 20 years later.
THINGS THAT WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED, part two
I would never have met and worked for Willie Phoenix, who improved my songwriting by about 85%.
I would never have marveled in silent wonder at the guitar playing of Mike Parks; one time in 1970 when I was still in high school, then countless times in the 1990's & 21st century with Willie Phoenix & the True Soul Rockers and The League Bowlers, when I was lucky enough to serve as his roadie.
I would never have met Jim Johnson, a Rockin' Gibraltar of a drummer.
I would never have met John Vincent, my guide & mentor into the Columbus solo acoustic scene.
I would never have met Dave Blackburn - my high school best friend - who taught me everything I know about music, and whom this song is about.
WINDING UP
Okay, let's start winding this up. The last twenty years or so of the story have been pretty well covered in this blog. I have grown old with rock & roll as the title implies. And that's not necessarily all hearts & flowers.
I sometimes look back in 2025 and question my behaviors. In my late 20's in the early 1980's I used to fly to Boston on People's Airlines on weekends just to see a band called The Neighborhoods. I now sometimes find it difficult to muster the will to drive 13 miles to WORK A GIG with one or the other of Colin's bands at Natalie's Grandview.
In my 30's and 40's I would work 40 hours a week - 9 to 5 - at a catalog showroom (a class of retail store that doesn't even EXIST anymore) called Service Merchandise; unloading trucks and pulling orders, relatively hard physical labor. I would then roadie for Willie Phoenix from 7 pm to 4 am on Friday and Saturday nights; saving Sundays to roll out of bed at noon, not get dressed, and watch NFL football for up to 10 hours. And then do it all again the next week.
Nowadays I find it a lovely day when I can watch birds & squirrels outside my living room sliding doors and spoil the local geese with cracked corn paid for with my Social Security cash.
My sainted Italian father died at 56. I am now 73. I have outlived him by 17 years, the exact same amount of time we had together before a heart attack took him away. What if guardian angels really exist and dad has been mine for all this time?
I live in Ohio. I play the guitar. Not because I want to, because I HAVE to. I have to.
I still write songs.
I still play gigs.
And I still say, "God bless Keith Richards and The Rolling Stones for saving my life in that bathtub."
It's been 60 years. It's 9:15 pm.
Richard Cacchione at 13
Ricki C. is 71 years old and has two drawers full of black rock & roll t-shirts, which he wears incessantly. He also has a hand-tooled leather hippie belt from 1972 that still fits. He has congestive heart failure and prostate cancer and KNOWS that all this rock & roll nonsense has to stop someday.
But not yet.
blog © 2025 Ricki C.
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