Got The Wings Of Heaven On My Shoes.
A story about Road Trips and The Bee Gees.
Hello friends! Thanks to the extra long weekend, I neglected to send out a Monday update this week, which I can only apologise for. To make up for it, here’s one of our very favourite stories from our old friend Dara McGarry.
Dara was a part of our first Hidden Tracks cohort, and has gone on to tell stories on the OneTrackMinds stage three times.
Here’s a recording of her telling this story at Wilton’s Music Hall in June 2021.
Over to Dara:
My Dad loved taking road trips. When I was a kid, most Sunday afternoons we’d get in the car - a navy blue Buick - and drive to see family. Or maybe we’d hit the junk sales. Or maybe we’d go see a barn, which was my least favourite because, well, it was a barn. A barn without any animals in it. And actually, it was sort of falling over. Sometimes, we would just drive nowhere in particular. For my Dad, it was always about the journey. He loved driving, and for him, life is one big road trip with a good soundtrack.
Back in World War II, he was an electrician in the Navy on a minesweeper, the boats that precede a mission to make sure there aren't any mines waiting. It was a horribly dangerous job and music was a welcome distraction from the constant threat of death.
After the War, he became an engineer and inventor. He worked on the Saturn 5 rocket that launched all the Apollo missions into space and took man to the moon. He invented a welder for the Alaskan Pipeline, as well as a vacuum cleaner that cuts your hair into glorious 70s layer cut AND vacuums the hair up at the same time. But his most widely used invention was a pressure cooker that revolutionised Kentucky Fried Chicken.
All of the men who worked for KFC in the 60s wore the famous "Colonel" tie which featured a "Colonel tie tack" which was a tiny head with the bow tie and an even tinier tie tack on THAT tie. Even Colonel Sanders himself wore it. The Colonel was wearing a tie with a tiny version of himself wearing a tie, wearing a tie - like an infinity mirror.
I was around 3 or 4 at this time, and every night, my Dad would bring home a bucket of chicken that had been tested that day in the new pressure cooker. And that’s what my young diet consisted of - Test Chicken. Fun Fact - the batter was made with the 11 secret herbs and spices (if you ask me, it was the Jamaican ginger and white pepper that made all the difference) and the recipe was so secret it was kept in a safe to which very few people at the company had the code. Nowadays you can just Google the recipe. Not so secret anymore.
When I was a bit older, in the 70s, we upgraded to a Chevy Van. I felt so culturally relevant when we got that car, like I suddenly belonged to the time in which I lived. There was hope and possibility that I could invite lots of friends to go places, maybe even go camping! But in the end, my Dad just used it to haul around large things he found at junk sales. The van had an 8-Track tape player which also made me feel like we were living at the cutting edge of modern technology. We had amassed a collection of 8-Track tapes from all the junk sales along the way on our travels. It was mostly my Dad’s music - Big Band swing stuff from his youth in the 1940s. Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller. Not cool.
But there was one stand out tape: Ray Conniff Plays the Bee Gees.
It was like disco, but performed by the Morman Tabernacle Choir and backed by an overly-caffeinated string section. It was my parents’ introduction to disco. Not that they ever hit Studio 54, but they would have been ready - they had the 70s haircutting-vacuum machine don’t forget.
It was so incongruous to have this one album of diluted disco in a sea of big band records. But he loved it, and he played it until it broke.
Around that time, he upgraded to a blue El Camino with a cassette player. Which meant he had to get new tapes. So he splurged and bought The Bee Gees Greatest Hits performed by the actual Bee Gees. This became such a favourite in our family, my Mom even bought the vinyl so we could listen at home. I suspect she just simply wanted to see bigger pictures of Barry Gibb. She liked his hair. It was the 70s and he had a layer cut that looked like it had been cut with the vacuum cleaner. That album defined not only our road trips but our family for over a decade.
Years later, my Father was diagnosed with Grade 4, inoperable, Glioblastoma. It was a Monday, June 9th in fact, and it was his 85th birthday.
He was devastated.
And he knew he was about to lose the thing he treasured most, his brain. The genius was losing his brain. On that day, he told me that he had done everything he wanted to do, seen everything he wanted to see. He was proud of his journey and he was ready for the end of his road trip.
10 weeks later on another Monday afternoon, the Hospice nurses told us that it was time. They told us that playing music was a good idea, so we went out to the car to get the collection of music that was next to the stereo. By now of course, it was all CDs. And in the collection, there was Benny Goodman, there was Glen Miller, and there was The Bee Gees Greatest Hits. We got the CDs and put them on rotation on a little boom box. My brother and I settled in for the vigil, armed with the morphine kit, since they said he was in pain. We didn’t know what to do or what to expect. We held his hand and spoke in gentle tones to him. We played his music, softly, and continuously. I made coffee as the day turned to evening, which turned into the early hours of the morning.
It didn’t register at first, but at one point near the end, we realised that we were playing the song Staying Alive. To someone who was not really staying alive. As it got to the chorus (“Stayin’ Alive, Stayin’ Alive”), I looked at my brother. "Life goin' nowhere, somebody help me." Our eyes widened. Was this really inappropriate??? But Dad loved that song, and at that moment, it just happened to be incredibly accurate. Should we stop playing it? No. We let it go. We let him go.
Later, when we were going through his things, I found his diary. And in it, he said one of the things he most hoped for was for his memory to live on through his inventions. So if you have ever watched the Apollo missions on TV, or eaten a KFC, or had your hair cut into a glorious 70s layer… with a vacuum cleaner, then you, like me, are helping to keep the memory of my Dad staying alive.
Stayin’ Alive
Written by Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb and Maurice Gibb
Performed by The Bee Gees
Taken from the Album Saturday Night Fever, released on RSO in 1977.
Listen on Spotify and Apple Music
Dara McGarry
Originally from Nashville, Dara grew up surrounded by country music and fried chicken. Starting out her acting career as Patty Duke's sidekick in a TV Movie of the Week, she expanded her horizons and moved to Chicago, where she starred in a video game commercial as a baked chicken, and then to LA where she worked for Disney Feature Animation on such films as Tangled and Frozen. But it was her love of all things British that brought her to London where she is now Director of Outreach for DNEG Animation.
Wonderful story about wonderful human beings ♥️