Like Father, Unlike Son

My Decade with London Records during the British Wave and how it Saved Me from the Undertow of Child Abuse

Garrison Leykam
Connecticut USA

 2012 Garrison Leykam All rights reserved

Preface
1964 was a magical year for me, as it was for the 73 million viewers of the Beatles first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9th. The broadcast drew an estimated 73 million viewers, at the time a record for US television. The audience was primarily composed of screaming hysterical teenage girls but, in front of the family TV in our house, it was just The Beatles and me. The look and sound of rock & roll would forever change as John, Paul, George and Ringo sang and played All My Loving, Til There Was You, She Loves You, I Saw Her Standing There and I Want To Hold Your Hand. The arrival of The Beatles in the U.S., and their subsequent appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, marked the start of the British Invasion. Six years from that landmark television broadcast the British Wave would catch me in its undertow. I would begin a decade-long career with London Records that would prove to be not only the most exciting time of my life but my psychological and physical escape route from an abusive father who was on a track to deny me my love of music.
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Three years before The Beatles landmark appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Dr. C. Henry Kempe, a pediatric radiologist, proposed the term "battered child syndrome" to refer to the collection of injuries sustained by a child as a result of repeated mistreatment or beatings. The following year The Journal of the American Medical Association published the landmark article "The Battered Child Syndrome" by Dr. Kempe in which battered child syndrome became "maltreatment," encompassing not only physical assault but other forms of abuse, such as malnourishment, failure to thrive, medical neglect, and sexual and emotional abuse. I was unaware of Dr. Kempes article at the time of its publication but I had been living with the abuse he described for long as I remember. My father was out of the house on February 9th, 1964 attending a party with my mother. I was safe for a brief while with him out of the house so I turned up the television volume and sat on the floor as close to the screen as I could get with a huge smile on my face caught up in the musical frenzy created by The Beatles. For this one hour I could experience my love of this new sound of rock and roll without paternal reprisal. I was alone with The Beatles. Like new friends, their music was a welcome salve to the wounds I endured at the hands of my father for whom music was to be cut out of my soul lest it keep me from achieving his, not my, goal of a career in the Army. The Beatles appeared on three consecutive Sundays in February 1964 to great anticipation and fanfare as "I Want to Hold Your Hand" had swiftly risen to No. 1 in the charts. The following week's show was broadcast from Miami Beach where Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) was in training for his first title bout with Sonny Liston. The occasion
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was used by both camps for publicity. On the evening of the February 16th show a crush of people nearly prevented the band from making it onstage. A wedge of policemen was needed as the band began playing "She Loves You" only seconds after reaching their instruments. They continued with "This Boy" and "All My Loving" and returned later to close the show with "I Saw Her Standing There" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand." On February 23rd The Beatles were shown on tape following Eds intro performing "Twist and Shout" and "Please Please Me" closing the show once again with "I Want to Hold Your Hand." I missed both shows. Turning the TV set on in the living room with my father home to watch the Fab Four would be not only forbidden but I would run the certain risk of his disapproval, the consequences of which would be too physically painful to tempt. From 1964 to 1966 the United Kingdom would send a stream of hits across the Atlantic to America through the musical door opened by The Beatles. Peter and Gordon, Britains version of the Everly Brothers, would score hits with A World Without Love and I Go To Pieces. The Animals House Of The Rising Sun was a monster hit as was We Gotta Get Out Of This Place. The British Wave kept rolling in with Manfred Mann ("Do Wah Diddy Diddy"), Petula Clark ("Downtown"), Freddie and the Dreamers ("I'm Telling You Now"), Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders ("Game of Love"), Herman's Hermits ("Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter"), the Rolling Stones ("I Can't Get No Satisfaction"), the Troggs ("Wild Thing"), and Donovan's ("Sunshine Superman"). Each one topped Billboard's singles chart. Cream, The Jeff Beck Group, The Dave Clark Five, Gerry & the Pacemakers, Herman's Hermits, The Kinks, The Moody Blues, The Small Faces, Van Morrison & Them, The Who and The Yardbirds; these were my heroes whose
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recordings I kept in a box under my bed away from my father. I would later write and record about my hidden cache in a song called Arms of Rock & Roll in the debut CD by The Garrison Project. The rebellious tone and image of American rock and roll and blues musicians had become popular with British youth in the late 1950s. While early commercial attempts to replicate American rock and roll mostly failed, the traditional jazz-inspired skiffle craze, with its "do it yourself" attitude, was the starting point of several British acts that would later be part of the "invasion." Lonnie Donegan, who is credited with singlehandedly popularizing skiffle in the UK, had a top 20 US hit with "Rock Island Line" during the 1950s and a top ten US hit with "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight?)" in 1961, both re-recordings of songs already known in the U.S. for several decades at the time. Young British groups started to combine various British and American styles. This coalesced in Liverpool during 1962 in what became known as Merseybeat, hence the "beat boom". In 1962 "Telstar", an instrumental by The Tornados, became the first U.S. number 1 single by a British rock act. Also that year, the folk trio The Springfields featuring Dusty Springfield cracked the U.S. top 20 all of which prepared the stage for The Beatles and the British Invasion. I was excited each week to look at the Billboard, Cashbox and Record World music charts to see which British acts were vying with each other for the top rung and to be #1 with a bullet. But, there was another set of statistics publicly known which had an even deeper impact on me and have continued to grow and reflect the reality of an escalating crisis within families: A report of child abuse is made every 10-seconds
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 More than five children die every day as a result of child abuse.2 Approximately 80% of children that die from abuse are under the age of 4.1 It is estimated that between 50%-60% of child fatalities due to maltreatment are not recorded as such on death certificates.3 More than 90% of juvenile sexual abuse victims know their perpetrator in some way.4 Child abuse occurs at every socioeconomic level, across ethnic and cultural lines, within all religions and at all levels of education. Children whose parents abuse alcohol and other drugs are three times more likely to be abused and more than four times more likely to be neglected than children from non-abusing families.8 Not every suspicion or occurrence of child abuse gets reported to child protection services (CPS) agencies so the even harsher reality is that the statistics above probably underrepresent the number of children who actually suffer from abuse or neglect. And, unfortunately, statistics are a cold representation of the frequency of occurrences of child abuse without portraying the emotional pain and trauma of any single incident and the psychological and physical impacy upon the victim. The British Invasion of music and my decade with London Records were my personal escape from my own experiences with child abuse. Like Father, Unlike Son is a much-needed and long overdue catharsis of my experiences with an abusive father that I have kept to myself for decades. For my own children, I spent their growing up years conscious of what I had undergone as a child myself with the single intent of making sure
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they never felt unloved or hindered from evolving into the magnificent young adults they are continually becoming. Like Father, Unlike Son is my attempt to fill in the blanks for all the other questions my children no doubt have about me based upon being absorbed with not being my own father while forgetting when and how to be a father myself. For lovers of music and historians of the British Wave, I have tried to give you a glimpse of what it was like to work inside London Records, the behemoth of record companies during the seventies. I hope from the depths of my heart that Like Father, Unlike Son will help raise the awareness of child abuse among readers and maybe even spare one child from ever knowing what Ive known firsthand. If one abusive parent reads Like Father, Unlike Son and it triggers him or her to seek help and spare their own child the torture and aloneness I know firsthand so well than I will have achieved my aim as an author. For my daughter Morgan Alexandra and my son Christopher Kyle, Like Father, Unlike Son is my written legacy to you. It is the story of my life that you have never known because I couldnt share it until now. I watched myself make mistakes as a father while you were growing up never being able to understand why I did the things I did until undergoing years of psychotherapy. Throughout my life I have been caught between seeking love to ease the emptiness left by the withholding of my own fathers love and making sure that you never experienced the same abusiveness I did. Up until now my life has been a trap between needing what I never had while holding back on all of me with you out of fear that somewhere inside me were the seeds of my father as yet unfertilized which I had to make sure never had a chance to take hold. I hope that

this book answers many of the questions that I know you must have of me. I love you.
Sources 1. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Childrens Bureau. (2010). Child Maltreatment 2009. Available from http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research /index.htm#can 2. United States Government Accountability Office, 2011. Child maltreatment: strengthening national data on child fatalities could aid in prevention (GAO-11-599). Retrieved from http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11599.pdf 3. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families Administration on Children, Youth and Families Childrens Bureau.Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities 2009: Statistics and Interventions. Retrieved from http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/factsheets/fatalit y.pdf 4. Snyder, Howard, N. (2000, July). Sexual assault of young children as reported to law enforcement: victim, incident, and offender characteristics. Retrieved from http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/saycrle.pdf 5. Long - Term Consequences of Child Abuse and Neglect. Child Welfare Information Gateway.Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2006. Retrieved from http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/factsheets/long_t erm_consequences.cfm 6. Fang, X., et al. The economic burden of child maltreatment in the United States and implications for prevention. Child Abuse & Neglect (2012), doi:10.1016/j.chiabu.2011.10.006 Retrieved from:
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http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0 145213411003140 7. Harlow, C. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. (1999).Prior abuse reported by inmates and probationers (NCJ 172879) Retrieved from http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/parip.pdf 8. Parental substance abuse. Retrieved from http://www.childwelfare.gov/can/factors/parentcare giver/substance.cfm 9. National Council on Child Abuse and Family Violence. Parental Substance Abuse A Major Factor In Child Abuse And Neglect. Retrieved from http://www.nccafv.org/parentalsubstanceabuse.ht m 10.Swan, N. (1998). Exploring the role of child abuse on later drug abuse: Researchers face broad gaps in information. NIDA Notes, 13(2). Retrieved from the National Institute on Drug Abuse website: www.nida.nih.gov/NIDA_Notes/NNVol13N2/explorin g.html