The Rock Star

The Rock Star

“If you’re not having fun, you’re doing something wrong.”

Groucho Marx

My uncle Jack was a contractor, the youngest Eagle Scout in his troop, the mayor of La Canada, and one of the finest people I’ve ever known. He built a guesthouse for our family friends around the corner, Dick and Jane Kelsey. Yes, those are their real names. They all loved to go out to dinner with my parents, Harry and Mary, and Dan and Cam Gross, also friends from the neighborhood.

Speaking of names, you may have noticed it seems that nearly everyone in my family is named Mary or John. If you’re keeping score, we have nine Marys (if you count variations), eight Johns, three Harrys, and three Sterlings, so far. Uncle Jack was a John, but because of his gregarious nature, all the grownups called him Uncle Chatty.

Anyhow, my cousin John was working for his dad, Uncle Jack, on Dick and Jane’s guesthouse one day, and he came over to say hi. When John arrived, I asked him if he knew that that very night was the last of six sold-out shows by Led Zeppelin at the Forum in Inglewood.

He did, and five minutes later, we were cruising down the 405 in my ’69 Karmann Ghia, with no tickets, but we had a dream.

We got to the concert after it started, and no one else was in the parking lot of 10,000+ cars except for one lone scalper with two awesome twenty-dollar tickets. We felt like celebrities as the ushers led us to the sixth row from the stage, dead center. The concert was terrific, loud, and wild!

I need to tell you a little backstory here. You may recall that many of my cousins had Model A Fords that were in various stages of restoration or decay, depending on how you looked at it, and that we took occasional summer trips on back roads in the West, past many farms and ranches, dotted with grazing cattle.

Well, our Model As rolled along at about forty-five miles an hour, with no radio, phone, or air conditioning. With nothing to do but shoot the breeze, we got a little bored here and there and started looking for diversions. So, we decided to see if we could attract the attention of the cows.

It turns out that is pretty hard to do. Grazing cattle don’t respond to yelling, pounding on the side of the car, or the distinctive sound of the Ahooga horn on a Model A Ford. Believe me, we tried, and nothing worked. Miles and miles of cows just kept chewing the grass and ignoring the monkeys going by in the old cars.

Somehow, I began to think about my friend Todd’s dad, who had been a cameraman at CBS and had a vast collection of old movie shorts. One of these featured Joe E. Brown, a famous comedian who had a distinctive way of saying hey. He stretched it out, so it was more like “Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey!”

I decided to give it a try but threw my own twist into it. It started out quiet, slowly becoming a super loud, “HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYYY!!!”

And to our surprise, every cow in the field stopped chewing, raised its head, and looked up at us. Every cow in every field looked up at us after that.

They didn’t stampede or appear frightened. They had more of a “what the heck was that?” look on their faces. Well, we named it “the cradle call” and had a lot of fun with it, until we got so hoarse that we couldn’t speak.

Back at the Led Zeppelin concert, the crowd went wild as Robert Plant and Jimmy Page rocked out on stage. And at the end of a song, my cousin John suddenly gave an extra loud cradle call. Robert Plant turned around and yelled “Heeeey!” right back at John in response.

So, next time you’re at a concert and want to get the attention of a rock star, or perhaps get thrown out of the venue altogether, or if you’re just out driving through the country, and you see a herd of grazing cows, well, now you know what to do. And I’m sure you’ll have fun doing it, because we sure did.

-Hank