Ricky. 8 Friends. 8 Songs.

In 1968, at the age of 12, I had my first best friend.

Ricky was different from me in a number of ways, but those ways were not as determined as the immutable ways that forged our friendship: We were the same age; we went to the same school; we lived in the same neighborhood; we were boys.

Ricky was taller than me, a gangly young man with a head of hair that looked like ripples on a lake. He wasn’t all that athletic in 1968, perhaps due to a 12-year-old frame that moved as if assembled by disparate parts. In football, coach plopped him on the O-line; I was the quarterback. I can’t remember him throwing a baseball all that well or ever having seen him skate. But he liked to play and I liked to play and play we did.

Our families were different. I had a mother and father of similar ages, and two siblings, a sister and a brother; Ricky had an older father, a younger mother and no siblings. His mother was glamorous, and the first person I knew to have a drink or two during the day. His father was quiet, and the first person I knew to have fought in a war.

Perhaps as a consequence of being an only child, Ricky knew so much more about so many things than I did. He took piano lessons and excelled at everything academic. He was a voracious reader of Hardy Boys; I could barely sit through an Archie comic. He was older than me by a month, yet worldlier than me by years. It was Ricky who told me how babies are made. He told this to me in shocking detail. It all seemed so plausible, yet unthinkable that my mother and father would ever consent to such behaviour. Without much in the way of a spirited argument against this revelation, I vividly recall asking in desperation: “Surely, that is not the only way a mom is given a baby?” To which Ricky responded: “Well, there is artificial insemination.”

Ricky knew so much more about so many things.

Ricky was also the first kid I knew who had a record collection, and not only 45s like Gary Puckett’s Young Girl and Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman, he had albums by groups whose music I’d never even heard played on the radio. I had no idea how Ricky came to know so much about music outside the mainstream, but it was cool and prodigious. Naturally, he had Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in his collection, but he also had a curious album called We’re Only In It For The Money by a curious band called Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. The album was most remarkable for its parody cover of Sgt. Pepper’s and its satirical title, a dig at the business of modern music. Ricky could talk about Zappa in ways that I simply did not properly appreciate. I found it all rather mean that this odd-looking man with the odd last name would make fun of The Beatles.

Some days, after school, I would go to Ricky’s and listen to music on his portable record player. Occasionally we would listen to an entire side of a single album, which required a lot of patience on my part, as I was a 12-year-old with a pinball in my head. My best friend had a much more tranquil brain. He would sit quietly, listen and consider. And when the record ran out of rotations, he would clean the album, place it in its underwear, slide the disc back into its sleeve, then return it to its designated place on the record shelf.

I wanted to be able to do that; to be so deliberate and poised. I rarely had the patience to even remove the record from the turntable, choosing instead to stack them until the pile got so high the top record would no longer spin at the required thirty-three-and-a-third revolutions per minute.

Of all the music I heard at Ricky’s, it’s Zappa I most dearly and clearly associate with my first best friend. The other stuff – Peter and Gordon, and Simon and Garfunkle, and Chad and Jeremy, and Sonny and Cher — never connected all that deeply with Ricky and Wayne.

Since those days, Zappa has repeatedly come and gone from my musical moods. Fifty years later, I still haven’t the patience to sit and listen to an entire side of Hot Rats, or Weasels Ripped My Flesh, or even Joe’s Garage. But when I’m out on a run and an old Mothers of Invention chestnut like Montana finds its way to the top of the shuffle it makes me silly happy.

Montana is my favourite Zappa song. It’s about a guy considering a move out west to grow dental floss. He imagines riding the range on a miniature horse called Mighty Little and trimming the crops with his pair of Zircon-encrusted tweezers. The song features a number of Zappa signatures, including some of the best guitar playing a guitar player could ever play. The coda is Zappa singing repeatedly the line “moving to Montana soon” followed each time by a cowboy crooning “Yiippy-Ty-O-Ty-Ay.”

As for Ricky, last I heard he was a successful textile salesperson in Winnipeg. Odd that for a 12-year-old who loved Frank Zappa.

Postscript: Life has a way of changing course. I contacted Ricky after I wrote this post. We hadn't communicated for 40 years. His late mother, who I referenced as having the odd drink during the day, earned a 25-year AA medallion in the early 1990s. Ricky, who I referenced as being an awkward athlete as a 12-year-old, went on to be the captain and MVP of the Loyola High School football team in his senior year. He was selected as one of the 12 Montreal high school football all-stars in 1973. He played football at Loyola college for two years before switching to rugby, a sport he played into his 30s. Today, He lives in Atlanta and has been married to the same woman for 38 years. They have two accomplished daughters, neither, I am assuming here, were conceived through artificial insemination.