I 'reviewed' the top ten rock singles at the National Record mart on Capitol Street--and came away numb.

Twitching.

Stunned.

To be a music reviewer, you have to be qualified.

My qualifications are about like a Chase Manhattan banker's qualifications for the Mexican war.

Consider that at age three or four I was provided by my parents with a phonograph and recordings of Enrico Caruso in his prime, Madame Schumann-Heink at her best, and others including Uncle Josh at the Boarding House (which is irrelevant of course).

We also had records of songs like Beautiful Ohio, Beautiful Dreamer, and John Phillip Sousa's King Cotton March with Semper Fidelis on the other side. And in the early Twenties I got to hear Sousa's band with him on the podium, in a concert in which he played King Cotton, among others.

I have always gone to concerts.

In years gone by I have heard  Paderewski and Liberace play the piano--at different concerts, mind you--and enjoyed them both.

And I can remember singing My Blue Heaven with the neighborhood kids at a 1933 New Year's party at which my brothers played the clarinet and trumpet, my sister the violin and my mother the piano, while the rest of us stood around the old upright and sang the melody of the top number-one song of the day.

I can still whistle "Just-ta-Molly and me-e-e-e-e-eee, and baby make three-eee, we're happy in my-y-y-y-y-y Blue-u-ue Heaven-n-n-n!"

I danced to the music of Paul Whiteman and his famous band at the beginning of the Fabulous Forties when Whiteman was considered the top popular music maker in the whole country.

I heard Benjamin Gigli sing in the Civic Center at New Orleans, and I have heard some of the finest jazz players jamming it out in the Bourbon Street bars of the French Quarter 'way down yonder.

For perhaps ten years I was critic and reviewer of the Charleston Symphony, the Charleston Music Players, and the Community Concerts, with some of the finest musicians in the world performing on the stage of the Municipal Auditorium.

I even wrote program notes for a couple or three concerts.

And then I covered the Light Opera Guild's first few years in Charleston as a musical group in the culture of the city.

So it would seem that I'm qualified to listen to the Top Ten Singles of today's most popular music.

Well, I'm not.

I simply can't appreciate it.

Can't hear the words for the racket behind the music.

When they played me the top ten singles on the Rock Scene Wednesday down at the National Record Mart, there was no way I could have learned the words.

Used to be, you could listen to a popular song and pick up the words first off.

No more.

In today's Rock, songs like "Start Me Up" with the Rolling Stones and "Urgent" by Foreigner and "Queen of Hearts" by Juice Newton, all sound remarkably alike.

The drums and the E-String guitars play the biggest part of the music, with the ta-ta-BOOP--ta-ta-BOOP of the drums predominating to the detriment of everything else.

It's like standing in a galvanized tin shower stall with the water running full blast in the middle of a busy machine shop with the noon whistle blowing and a full-grown pig caught under the showerstall door.

Don't get me wrong.

I like drums and drumming.

It's all that other noise that goes with Rock that turns me off.

"Here's Eddie Rabbit," says the young clerk at National Records, reverently placing another small black disc on the record player.

There was a jangle and a wrangle of cymbals as the record started--jang, di-jang! jang, di-jang! Jang, Di-Jang!

And then it came up louder and louder and a semi-male voice came in with (presumably) words--far off in left field behind the cymbals and an overanxious guitar that joined the brassy beat.

The words sounded sort of like a patter song from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, chanted in Gaelic by a man with a frog in his throat and his front teeth missing.

I thought, if that's Eddie Rabbit, give me a groundhog.

Christopher Cross came on the same way.

Started real quiet, with a high-pitched E-string guitar note, picked out plaintively and ringing. Thirty seconds of this monotonous note and the inevitable beat-beat-beat-beat-beat came on, with a clackety-clack woven into the drumming by some quirk of rim-shots on the snares or raps on the wood blocks.

And then came the vocal.

It was a fast and chattery voice, keeping perfect time to the beatbeatbeatbeatbeat, and now and then trailing up high and intense and stretching out into the death-yell of Geronimo when they threw him out of the airplane without a parachute, "yaa-a-a-a-A-A-A-A-A-a-a-aaaa-a-a-a-a."

The fanfare of high-voiced trumpets as Geronimo falls twenty thousand feet to his death is soul-jolting.

But then it stops--trails off, and the lumpy, thumpy beat starts over again, with the 'yammmmmm-yammmm, m-yammmmm-yammmmm-yammmmm' of the voice in the far background behind the bumps.

Thing that struck me in Rock is that the song doesn't come to an end.

The record stops.

Right in the middle of nowhere, it just trails off.

They cut the power down and down and down until it trails off like a battery going dead, right in the middle of a phrase or something.

Not one, but four of the Rock songs I listened to did that.

"Urgent" is a song that took me back.

Sounded like a benchwalking Holy-Roller having a hallucination while St. Vitus poked him with an electric prod. The noise of the other benchjumpers effectively drowned out any words that might have been.

Most of the sound was sort of like what you'd expect when a drunken hod-carrier alternately belched and hiccuped into a rusty saxophone in a band mill, with a leaky valve in the steam engine pulling the saw, and someone dropping broken glass into a tin tub on the off-beat.

"Queen of Hearts" by Juice Newton (and I understand that Juice Newton is a female) is a shouting piece.

It has cymbals and a fast bone-rattler in the background, jamming the words and adding the cluck and clatter of worn machinery to the dissonant caterwaul of the voice.

The number one Rock selection, "Endless Love" is grossy mis-named--it's the only rock piece they played for me that had an ending!

It ended with something like an ending, anyhow.

And I caught myself thinking, "You could almost whistle this thing--there's no melody, but you could maybe whistle the dragged-out phrasing, in a manner of speaking."

Not like you could whistle "Stormy Weather" or "Melancholy Baby" or even "If You Knew Susie Like I Know Susie"--but you could almost whistle it--I think.

I'd have to listen to it a long time to pick out the part that could be whistled, but the potential is there.

All told, my listening to Rock's Top Ten Singles wasn't a complete bust.

None of the singers could quite reach the esoteric timbre of the scream of a wild panther with his masculinity caught on a barbed-wired fence.

But they tried! They tried.