February 1963 Cavalier Magazine Reviews "I Ain't Got No Home"

Cavalier Magazine, a very poor Playboy imitation, published a brief but effective review of "I Ain't Got No Home" in February, 1963. I had never seen the magazine before, but several pages rang some very loud bells. If, as I did, you scoured the back pages of magazines like Popular Mechanics and Popular Science for cheap stuff you could send away for, every month you saw ads like these.

Oh, how I wanted to draw. I once read an article by an artist who took his lunch outside every day in a park and spent an hour drawing. People would come up to him and say, "I wish I could draw like that." He would reply. "If you spent an hour a day doing it, as I have for XX years, you could." But I don't think I could have, regardless of how many years I spent making my feeble sketches. Even with a professional artist in my genes and a mother who was quite good, if not quite good enough. Nope, I could not do it. I spent many hours....but I did never send away for this, though I saw it and offers like it, in innumerable magazines. I knew they had to have something to work with, and that something was missing from my clumsy right hand.

Two things I could do, though, were spend money and acquire LPs. I am certain I was, at one time or another, a member of nearly every record club that ever existed. In college I had an excellent symbiotic realtionship with the Record Club of America; every fall they got a brand new membership from me with my brand new box number, and I received another 10 records for a dollar each, or whatever their introductory offer was. The fun thing about this two page ad is the incredible variety of music offered. I have written elsewhere about how much diversity there was in popular music before the British Invasion pretty much silenced all other forms of musical expression. In 1963 The RCA Record Club assumed that readers of this cheesy skin magazine would choose classical, musicals, jazz, pop and country.

For the true completist, here is the Table of Contents from this issue. While there are some famous names here, after having read several pages of this issue, I am pretty certain that this was stuff rejected by better periodicals and published here at a discounted rate. Whew....there was not a single article I could read all the way through!

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