My name is Linda Lou McCall. I have worked in the record business all of my life. In addition, I was a "Band Wife" for over 20 years to Con Funk Shun founder and drummer, the late Louis A. McCall. I have worked with artists as diverse as The Delfonics, Con Funk Shun, MC Hammer and Eminem, spanning almost four decades. But I am also a writer and a photographer and consumer rights activist and, above all, a mother to two great children. And I have a whole life that many of my closest friends are not aware of. Nothing perverse or kinky or criminal. Just a good time.....which started when I was in college.
While at Howard University in the late 60s, I started keeping a large photo-journal. I called it "The Loose Book". The name derived from the way my fellow students referred to me - "Linda Loose". "Loose" was a slang world of the late 1960s - after the staid, button-down and boring 1950s and 1960s, we were finally FREE to express who we were, particularly women and African-Americans. In one short summer of 1968, we went from "fried, dyed and laid to the side" hair to huge nappy Afros. No more bras, slips, and garter belts! We were LOOSE! On Friday nights, my roomies and I left with our respective paramours for a weekend of "fun, but not in the sun". I kept a packed bag with a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and a change of clothes. My still best friend Nancy A. "Bird" Williams christened it my "Loose Bag". Soon just about every self-respecting woman had one. What could be worse than returning home on a Sunday afternoon, just as the city was getting out of church, in white "pleather" Go-Go boots, a faux-leopard mini shirt topped with a gold lamé halter top with your Afro-puffs in disarray and 48-hour old breath reeking of over-proof Jamaican rum? A well-stocked "Loose Bag" would avoid this problem! LOOSE was the way to go in the swinging 60s and 70s!
My "Loose Book" contained diary-type entries, poems, jokes, short stories, musings, dreams, hopes, and a few disappointments. It wasn't long before one book had turned into two. Since I was a photo-journalist for Howard University's newspaper and yearbook, photos of my fellow students. One journal turned into two, which made their ways around the campus. My first "Loose Book" was eventually lost - someone borrowed it and passed on to someone else who did the same. I was heartbroken. Surprisingly, after being gone for a year and a half, my Aunt Barb *, called my mother to say that she had come into possession of a large "scrapbook" with a bunch of pictures that she thought that I might be interested in. Aunt Barb, who was always really cool, didn't dare discuss the contents of "The Loose Book I" with my "square" mother, who would have thought that I was wasting my parents' hard-earned money at college playing, rather than studying. Somehow, my book had made it around Washington, DC, to my aunt's neighborhood on the complete other end of the city! Once more in my possession, I never let "The Loose Books I & II", nor any of my many photo albums, out of my sight again. They have traveled from Washington to Memphis, TN - from Memphis to Vallejo, CA - from Vallejo back to Washington - then to New Carrollton and Gaithersburg, MD - from Maryland to Fremont, CA, then down to Studio City and North Hollywood - back to Washington, down south to metro Atlanta, GA! Talk about frequent-flyer miles!
After almost 40 years and almost 15,000 miles, they are coming apart at the bindings. They are now barely held together with Scotch tape and rubberbands, sequestered in my bedroom closet, safe and sound.
In the years since I graduated, I have run into many old friends whose pictures were in my "Loose Books". Since they didn't have memoirs of that time in our lives, I gave many of the photos to them. Fortunately, since the advent of scanners, I am now able to make a scan of a photo before I let it go, keeping a copy of the original for myself. Even with the loss of dozens and dozens of my original pictures, I still have many hundreds, if not over a thousand, photos, left to be saved on disk.
Since this is a new time with new technology, I thought that I would began "The Loose Book" again - online, where I don't have to worry about my thoughts "self-destructing" over time and where I can share with a much wider audience.. So come on back from time to time and let me share my thoughts and decades of photos. I hope to see you here often. And don't be surprised if the website looks different from time to time. . Thanks to the ease of SANDVOX, the Mac web design software used here, I can change the face of "The Loose Book" with the click of my mouse! Oh, yeah, you will see that I am a very "wordy" person, but I have trouble proofreading my own stuff. But I hate typos! If you see something here that I have overlooked or misspelled, please email me. I need all the help I can get!
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Thanks for your patience and support,
* My Aunt Barb, Barbara Jean Weldon Brice, passed away on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 after a long and brave battle with breast cancer. My mother, Ella W. Bolden, is her oldest sister. My Moms was the first in her family to move north from Birmingham, AL to Washington, DC. Aunt Barb came up and stayed with us in the mid-1950s. A great beauty, she later married a couple of times and has five surviving children and seven sibling (she was preceded in death by her parents, two children, and one brother), plus many other relatives all over the country. Her husband died just last month. My dear Moms is suffering from second stage Alzheimer's disease but she feels the loss of her "baby sister" very deeply. Aunt Barb will be missed by her huge loving family.
WHERE MY GIRLZ AT?!
Dr. Jennifer F. Kelly
B.J. Reed
Cheri Wells
Virlynn Atkinson
Sheila Thomas
Denise English
Angeline Hartmann
......& MY GUYZ......
Perry Michael Allen
Anthony "A.D." Daughtry
Isaiah Perkins
Ainsley Patrick Duncan
Cedric A. Martin
Paul Harrell
DeWayne Holmes
Jay King
Jerry Hamilton
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