Mark Lindsay: The Loner by Dick Larsen, U.S.A.F.

From the Tiger Beat Archives, May 1970

A confident and assured Mark Lindsay of television fame is a far cry from the insecure, doubting teenager that I knew during our school days in Cambridge, Idaho!

As schoolmates together, Mark and I would often talk about what the future held for us. I was planning on college followed by a career in the military service. For Mark, his plans for the future were much more of an immediate thing.

AWAY FROM HOME

“I just want to get out of Cambridge and get down to Boise (the capital of Idaho) or someplace where there is something going on,” he used to say. “I don’t want to end up working on a ranch or running a tractor like the rest of the kids around here do,” he would add emphatically by throwing the rock against my father’s garage!

Despite his ambitions, Mark always seemed to be unsure of just where he wanted to go and how he was going to get there. He was full of plans and wild schemes to free himself from the dreaded trap of life in a small town.

Mark was always a dreamer and because of this was considered strange by many of the kids in our high school. With only 25 in a class and less than 100 in the entire high school, the only rule for survival was to conform to the existing standard. This was something that Mark just couldn’t seem to bring himself to do!

MARK WAS OPPOSITE

His very attitude towards conformity seem to stem from his burning desire to better his own position. If everyone was quiet in class, he would be noisy; if everyone smoked a cigarette during the lunch break, he would spurn the offer. He seemed to feel he could show everybody that he could make it on his own!

Mark was the center of trends and fads in the school, perhaps product of his own desire to be noticed and accepted. First it was the long hair. In the days of neatly cropped crew cuts, he was the first to wear his hair long.

This break from tradition prompted the school clique to coin the term “greaser.” Mark accepted this more as a compliment that a rebuke and carefully groomed his hair to even greater lengths!

CUT HIS HAIR

Within a few weeks the first crewcut was being quietly replaced with the shaggy edges of the DA (a geographical reference to duck) and before long, the crewcut was the exception rather than the rule. Judy fashion Mark cut his hair in a crewcut as soon as the long-haired look was in.

I don’t really know what brought Mark and I together. Maybe it was my own attitude towards the small town–I was determined that my bag was elsewhere. In any an event, we became close friends and sometimes confidants. Now, 14 years later, I am nearly through my ninth year military service and Mark is the brightest star on the music scene!

Mark’s recent smash recording of “Arizona” has a familiar ring to me when he sings of the small town saint. We double dated various times and Mark was always the back seat half of the duo. Not hard to understand when you realize his father could only afford a pickup truck while my family had just recently purchased a new car.

LOVE FOR WOMEN

His approach to women ranged from casual indifference to complete an undying love. He would be ready to fight, and did, if an unflattering remark was said about his current love, then would turn around and drop her as if she had never existed. He seemed more in search of friendship than love and this could account for his continued absence from the ranks of married stars on the scene today.

When Tiger Beat asked me to compile my reflection of Mark Lindsay, the teenager, I sat down for the longest time and tried to pin down a specific thing that stood out. Trendsetter, ambition, ladies’ man–all those ran through my mind. But that was just part of the Mark Lindsay I had known. Then a particular incident in our school days dawned in my memory like the harsh glare of the studio spotlight. Music!

START A BAND

Have you ever looked back on your life and wished you had done something differently? One day during lunch break, Mark and I were laying on the school lawn just watching all the girls going by in their skintight Levi’s and Western shirts, standard dress for the school.

“Let’s form a band and make some money,” Mark said. I was a fledgling sax player while Mark had fooled around with the guitar. “Come on Rich, we could get up a little band and play some of the dances and stuff around here,” he said. He went on to name the other guys we could get for the other places in the group.

In what must be the classic come back in the annals of rock music, I replied, “You must be losing your marbles. Who would want to pay to listen to you sing!” The bell rang and it was time to go. The idea was dropped.

IDEA DROPPED

Drop by me and at least but not by Mark. For several weeks afterwards he tried to get other guys interested in forming a band. But in the small town of 350 people, where the major occupation for school kids was working in the hay fields in the summer, the idea of forming a group was just as well received as if a little green man had dropped out of a spaceship and asked the same thing.

For Mark, his musical talents were in the meantime concentrated in the high school chorus. His voice was not the powerful, throaty tones we hear coming from every radio today. But it showed enough promise for him to be firmly accepted by Mr. Detienne, the course instructor.

But Mark had his eyes fixed on bigger things than a high school chorus. His ambition varied from a determination to run away and become a recording star to the ill-fated idea to form a group. At the same time he was considered by most to be simply a dreamer who would never turn out to amount to a hill of beans!

NOT IN A CLIQUE

Because of his dreams, he suffered unmercifully at the hands of guys in the inner circle at the high school. To really understand how a small school operates, you could compare it to a prison. There always a certain few who by virtue of their size, economical advantage or parental position seem to be the leaders. If you are accepted by the clique, you had it made. If not, life became a continual stream of abuse and harassment.

For Mark it was the latter. He was different, one strike; he had loads of ambition, two strikes; and the girls really liked him, three strikes and you’re out. It is still a wonder to me how Mark could have managed to put up with the little digs at his personal ability as a man and those directed at his family. But he suffered through without complaining, at least in public. In our own talks he often expressed doubts that he could. But he did and rose above it to become a success far greater than ever seen in a town where the biggest news in years was a rockslide that covered the highway during the winter!

Mark made his musical point when he entered the annual talent show in the spring of his freshman year. He not only won, he once and for all established himself as more than just an odd ball who didn’t want to be like everybody else. In my high school annual there is a picture of Mark as he looked on the stage. The photographer who snapped it couldn’t possibly have guessed that in just a few short years others would be training cameras on Mark as he performed on stage. But it would be television cameras in the pictures would be transmitted into millions of homes throughout America!

For Mark, the group he wanted to form back then had to wait for a while. Several years later after leaving Cambridge and making his way to Southern Idaho, Mark was to get his band. A small group of musicians decided to join forces and call themselves Paul Revere and the Raiders. Mark Lindsay was on his way.

Mark Lindsay is a powerful performer who commands respect throughout the music profession. But his small town living has made its mark. Listen to the words of “Arizona” very carefully. If you are writing a story about a girl from Cambridge, Idaho who wanted to get out in the mainstream of life, you could use the lyrics to the song.

Funny how life can be. I don’t think I will ever forget Mark saying to that youthful friend I was back then, “I have just got to make something of myself to show all those big shots in the clique.” And as those kids of 1956 wind their middle-class way blindly through their life of farming, store clerking and gas station minding, I wonder if they are laughing at Mark now. I’ll bet you ten pounds of Idaho potatoes to a copy of TIGER BEAT that if they are, it is out the other side of their mouth.