Clock

      The Golden Age begins when you learn that words can represent ideas and that these ideas are familiar to everyone or, at least, to your good friends, who all, for example, see what's funny about a shaggy dog story, and ends with the onset of irrational puberty.
       My good friends during the Golden Age, all classmates at Governor George Clinton School, were Eddie, Peter and Steve, and later, wry, shy Mark. We met after school to play card games and board games and word games and finally chess. (Peter and I learned to play chess from Rabbi Winters, when we went to his house for Bar Mitzvah lessons. Needless to say, while we were okay at chess, we fumbled through our Bar Mitzvahs.)
       On week-ends three or four of us took bicycle excursions, to the miniature golf course beyond the railway overpass, just past the field where carnivals set up once or twice a year and where I once saw an encampment of gypsies, or to Vassar College, where we enjoyed making pests of ourselves (not that we were delinquents; we knew that three loud, bantering, waggish 10-year olds touring the groves of academe for an hour on their bikes was bothersome enough), or to the old cider mill at the top of the really steep hill on Cedar Avenue which Eddie and Steve could manage to pump their way up but which defeated Peter and me, both of us overweight, who had to walk our bikes for the last hundred yards, with its musty museum of oddities – the most important and prominent of which was a rearing two-headed calf – with its room-temperature cider on the cusp of fermentation and sugary, dust-infused cookies, and with its old guest book opened to a page signed by Vassar student Edna St. Vincent Millay.
       If we gathered at my house, we would sprawl around my bedroom and have metaphysical conversations about whether time was the fourth dimension or if anything exists outside our individual observation of it, etc., or play kriegspiel (blind chess, which requires three chessboards, two chess sets and a referee who sits on the bed and keeps track of the moves of the two players, out of sight of each other on the floor on either side of the bed), or fool around with my tape recorder.
       An electrical engineer friend of my father’s had given me a professional Ampex reel-to-reel machine. It was about eighteen-by-sixteen-by-sixteen, weighed a ton, and spewed an ozone exhaust that hung in the room for hours after my friends had left. The thin, narrow magnetic tape frequently broke, but could be repaired, painstakingly, with a tape splicer – a small metal guide with a diagonal slit - an exacto knife and special splicing tape, insubstantial and often wayward. Unfortunately, if the tape reel dropped onto the floor and, defying the laws of gravity, balance and entropy, wobbled across the room, upright on its narrow circumference, there was no gadget for untwisting the twenty feet of quarter-inch-wide ribbon of caramel-colored film that trailed behind it. I once tied a pencil to the end of it and dropped it out the window hoping it would just spin its way straight. (Close, but
no cigar.)
       We would write and record radio plays which, we thought, were the height of wit, and experiment with sound effects, but we never used the tape recorder for music. Music was reserved for Peter’s house, where we lay on the floor in the Rosenbergs’ living-room and listened to records. The Rosenbergs collected classical records, pieces like Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from Mid-Summer Night’s Dream and Prokofiev’s March for Three Oranges that would fit on one side of a 12-inch 78, or Beethoven's Fifth on four records in the sleeves of a thick, heavy album. Then came 33⅓ rpm. The Rosenbergs' first LP acquisition was Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto with Horowitz and Koussevitzky.
      We didn't have many records at our house. Steve’s parents had a shelf of 78’s they brought with them when they fled the Nazis, Eddie’s parents collected Broadway shows, but although the large radio console in our den included an elaborate record changer, the only record I can remember being played at our house was Ravel's Bolero. 
       Everyone had a piano in their living-room, but the Rosenbergs’ seemed to be the only one intended for other purposes than for practicing piano lessons or playing "Chopsticks" and there always was some music open on its music shelf and a few music books scattered on its lid.  Once, mysteriously, a book of barbershop quartet arrangements appeared there. Inspired - there happened to be four of us - we chose the easiest, “My Grandfather’s Clock”. Eddie took the melody, Peter and Steve, tenor and baritone, while I sang bass.      
       We practiced until we thought we were good enough not to be made fun of by our friends and patronized by adults. From there we had planned to move on to a more difficult song, but singing “My Grandfather’s Clock” was so satisfying that we never got around to it, and besides, Mark's parents, always in the avant-garde, had just acquired a wonderful new board game called Scrabble.
       If you were to ask me to sing “My Grandfather’s Clock” today, I would sing you the bass line. If you asked me to sing the main melody, I probably could, but I would have to think about it for a moment.

       Here is a garland of six versions of this really, really boring song.

                                                                                                                                 
The Radio Revellers were a British group from the 1940's; this is from a children's album.

Harold Williams was "a leading Australian baritone and music teacher," according to Wikipedia.
Harold Williams was "a leading Australian baritone and music teacher," according to Wikipedia.
Harold Williams was "a leading Australian baritone and music teacher," according to Wikipedia.

Despite its tagline, Anita O'Day does not sing on the Gene Krupa track, alas.

Hara, Araki and Ueyama play a handbell version of the song arranged, I suspect, by Morton Feldman.

Crossroads is the hot-shot award-winning barbershop quartet.