Rattle & Hum

Yesterday I solved a riddle that bothered my ears on and off for nearly 40 years.

When I was a little girl, Friday nights on ABC gave you The Brady Bunch and Room 222 during the 8 to 9 p.m. "family hour." The second show was a "dramedy" set in Walt Whitman High School in Los Angeles. Since my two older brothers were on the verge of junior high school, the whole secondary education thing was something that intrigued me. This show ran from 1969, when I was 7, to 1974, when I turned 12.

History teacher Pete Dixon (Lloyd Hanes) tries to be a mentor and advisor to all of his students, helped by a counselor (Denise Nicholas), who is also his squeeze, and a flighty student teacher (Karen Valentine). Their leader was the pragmatic principal, Seymour Kaufman (Michael Constantine). Being the late '60s and early '70s, there was lots of stuff about Vietnam, rebellion, drugs, dress codes and more freedom for teens.

It also had this swingin' theme song by Jerry Goldsmith and Benny Golson. If you watch the YouTube clip below, you'll hear it, along with the mystery that annoyed my hearing and almost made me plug my ears.

Overall, this is an elaborate TV theme, sounding like it was done with an entire orchestra. Aside from a couple nice solos by a flute and a trumpet, you hear strings, brass, other woodwinds and drums.  That reflected the music of the 1960s and '70s, where you heard a lot more "real" instruments and musicians, and not just one DJ sitting there with a computer and a synthesizer playing everything, as how music seemed to drift toward too often in the 1980s to the present. The song also goes on a lot longer than today's themes, which are rushed things that are maybe 20 seconds long so the networks can pack in a few more commercials.

What I didn't like about this theme song is that strange sound that went off at certain points in the theme, that sounded like a combination of a gourd and something spinning.  (My ex always did say I was way oversensitive to certain sounds.) I blocked the theme song out of my head and forgot about it for like 15 years, until some TV station either locally or on cable rerun Room 222 when I was in my mid-20s.

And Joe Cocker's verson of "Feelin' Alright", as well as "Crazy Train" by Ozzy Osbourne also had that rattly thing, along with, it seemed, the soundtracks of a million other TV movies and low budget drive-in stuff.

As an adult I figured what I was hearing was a percussion instrument, but which one?

One time my ex and I were down at the Detroit Thanksgiving parade, and we had this marching band nut next to us, who screeched every time a high school band went by. She also seemed to know every band instrument that had ever been made. I asked her, and nothing. She didn't know. 

It wasn't a guiro, which is a long, oval shaped hollow thing from South America and looks like a gourd or a hardened loaf of bread with grooves cut into the side. It is played by scraping a stick along the grooves in time to the music. You can hear a guiro in the opening bars of The Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter."

I Googled "percussion instruments," looked at images, searched for a directory of common band rhythm makers. Still nothing.

Until I went searching again for that musty old high school genre series, Room 222, and found the clip above. In the comments below the video, someone pleaded, "Cowbell? I don't hear a cowbell. But that friggin' Vibra-slap thing has got to go. Couldn't they have found a different rhythm instrument?"

And that was it. Nearly 40 years after the show, I learned that the vibraslap -- that is the most 

common spelling; Vibra-Slap is a trademark -- is that annoying percussion thing in the theme song. Along with the guiro, it seemed to be a popular choice for jazzy or Latin soundtracks in my youth.  Indeed, Wikipedia says, "The vibraslap was a ubiquitous part of jazz or pop-based film scores, primarily action films and television series, in the 1970s and early 1980s."

Rock and Latin musicians and bands have used it on and off since the 1960s. It basically is a box, shaped like a cowbell (which is also itself a funny instrument, as we learned in Saturday Night Live). There is a set of teeth or pins inside. A steel rod has the vibraslap's body at one end and a wooden ball at the other. The ball is smacked against the body to make the teeth rattle, and the body makes the sound resonate. You hit this thing often enough, and you could drive someone insane.

The vibraslap is descended from the jawbone, which is exactly as it sounds -- an animal's jawbone, often from a donkey, horse or other equine creature, which was played by scraping the teeth with a stick or rattling them.

I also learned that the first season of Room 222 will be out on DVD by the end of March. I could buy it and grit my teeth once again as the theme song rattles with the vibraslap -- or just hit fast-forward as any experienced zapper can.

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Rotten Apple of the Day: Being that I am the Biggest Apple Hater in the State of Michigan, once in a while I will post things that represent the craziest, most fanatical and worst of the Mac Cult. 

This is very old (from 2006), but this guy with the Fruit Museum in his basement that looks like IKEA and the Apple Store crashed into each other, still shocks me with its corporate devotion. He even has the iPod Dancing Silhouette Freaks on the wall, for crap's sake!

Young man, I will be praying for your soul to be freed of this ridiculous devotion. After all, I don't have a basement museum to Ford, even though I like the company. Besides, how would I afford an old Mustang, and how the hell would I get it into the basement?