Woody's Place, Ocean View, Virginia, 1973

  Woody's     

9545 11th Bay
Ocean View, Virginia
(1973)

Turn your sound on...

You walk through an innocence-enough looking entrance of a mundane white clapboard duplex in a somewhat rundown beach neighborhood, immediately turn left to the street-front apartment entry, and your world changes as your senses are assaulted. Your ears pound with Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’ coming from a screaming 240 watt Sansui quadraphonic amplifier equipped with a reverberation amplifier and 6 hard-wood-encased speakers stacked nearly to the ceiling in two pyramids. Simultaneously, your eyes are battered by a strobe light supported by a 4-ft long black light, making the ‘black-light’ posters on the wall spring to life – shocking the ever-lov’in-shit out of you... Concurrently, your nostrils pick up a slightly-sweet thick aromatic fog that drifts through the room in layers - eddies follow each person as they move in a stroboscopic illusion of slow motion. WTFO...

Eyes blinking in sync with the strobe & Floyd, you realize the place is packed with party-animals. How in the hell can they get this many people in one room?

Adjusting your senses the best you can, you put a few names with some of the stroboscopic faces – Shorty, Slick, Bo, Glenda, Rita, Pete, Gayle. Others, seemingly strangers but only because you can’t immediately recall their names. Given time, the names will come…

Birdman Berry offers you a chair he saved from the destruction in the kitchen, telling you the stereo sounds best if you sit ‘right here’. MJ-Foghat passes you a ‘refreshment’. Inhaling, you pass it on to Coyote. Diane offers you an almost-cold can of Shaffer (East-Coast-Coors) beer. The stereo DOES sound good – damn good. Each bass drum beat and bass guitar cord vibrates your chest to your very core. You look to your right and see ‘Griff’ drilling holes with his eyes, through a black-light poster of a Viking-massacre. He is as far away, and in other time, as the Vikings…will he ever make it back???





Wayne yells your name over the pounding beat, pointing to the ceiling, he screams, “Hey, look at that!”. You glance up, only to see a giant black spider the size of a fucking basketball hurtling towards your forehead. You scream %$#*&^@$%#) and erupt out of the chair like THE ROCKET @ Oceanview Theme Park. The living room explodes into laughter - loud enough to drown out the 4 boys of Floyd. Dumfounded and still gasping for smoke-infused-oxygen, you look at the spider – a fucking plastic spider hanging on a thread about five feet from the floor. Though you can’t see the tread through the smoke, you realize it must be tied to the massive man-made spider web that adorns the ceiling from corner to corner. Charlie, TR, Jewels, and Snake have tears in the eyes they’re laughing so hard…




The front door opens and, with an ever-so-slight fresh-air breeze, in walks Cathy, Gus, Stash, Bags, Ole, and Joe. Funny, everyone seems to know everyone. The 6 are followed by a somewhat short bra-less knockout in a loose fitting almost see-through top laughing with a West Virginia-twang in her voice.

You eventually gather your wits and glance over at the back of the guy sitting on his knees, fucking with the stereo. He’s hunched over the turntable. He abruptly starts threading a real-to-real tape into the Akai quad tape deck. The stereo equipment, with all their knobs, gages, and lights looks like a bloody cockpit in a fighter jet. His hair is a dark brown mop and he’s wearing Navy-issue black rimmed glasses. His blue jeans are bleached white from the knees down. He’s shirtless with broad lean shoulders and a dark golden tan. Slightly on the shy side, he’s got 'womanizer' in him that stretches a country mile...




Once the tape real kicks in and he's changed channels on the amp, he turns, and with a twinkle in his eye, laughs with an infectious grin and proclaims,

“Wait'll you hear this shit…”
Then and ONLY then,
do you realize you're at --- Woody’s Place
                    

         Woody - 2009                               Woody - 1976                       Woody - 2019

                                                            

                     

Go To Woody & Stereo (Jan 1980)



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