For me, gangs weren’t about conflict or competition. They spoke to my natural impulse to belong to something. I remember getting busted as the ringleader for that one.
It was also the first time I really absorbed Latino music.
I had had a taste of it from the Zorro score, Connie Francis’s “Malagueña,” Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba,” Ray Barretto’s “El Watusi,” and the Champs’ “Tequila,” but the score of West Side Story is my favorite music of all time.
I loved the Sharks. There should be a football team called the Sharks. The New Jersey Sharks. Then we could have the Jets versus the Sharks!
I wanted to be Bernardo with his purple shirt. Pepe. Indio. I wanted to fuck Anita! The dance at the gym and the rooftop “America” scene blow my mind to this day.
Other movie music had a big impact on me too. I’m well aware of the influence of Ennio Morricone’s work from the Sergio Leone Westerns (“Standing in the Line of Fire” on Soulfire), but every once in a while I’ll write a riff and realize it comes from Miklós Rózsa’s score for Ben-Hur or King of Kings or Jerry Goldsmith’s score for The Wind and the Lion.
I wonder if Jimmy Page knows he got the riff for “Immigrant Song” from Richard Rodgers’s “Bali Ha’i” in South Pacific?
Or here’s a good one. Did you ever wonder where Morricone got the idea for that crazy opening riff in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? Check out the old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies. But let’s keep that to ourselves. What’s the statute of limitations for Austro-Hungarian ape-to-ape jungle communication?
Johnny’s estate might get ideas…
Contrary to popular scientific rumor, the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe did not happen ten million years ago. It happened on February 9, 1964.
To say that Ed Sullivan was an unlikely TV host would be an insult to the word “understatement.” Picture Quasimodo attempting to be cute. But stoned. On mushrooms.
He had a Sunday-night variety show that the entire family watched. Same room, same time, on the home’s only TV, black-and-white. I remember eventually getting a second TV for our rec room downstairs and the neighbors being awestruck by our wealth and decadence.
Ed made history on a regular basis, drawing something like sixty million viewers weekly. Every show that tried to compete with him failed, partly because other producers didn’t realize that people were not only tuning in for the entertainment; they were tuning in to hear Ed mispronounce really famous people’s names.
Still, he had a well-booked show, with acts for every age group and taste. The adults got Russian jugglers, Italian opera, Catskills comedians, and Broadway stars. Kids got puppets like Topo Gigio (an act Sullivan took part in), and Ed included something for the teenagers, usually the popular music of the day.
Much to his credit, he had welcomed black acts in the racist ’50s, when it wasn’t a regular thing.
Bo Diddley made an infamous appearance in 1955.
He had rehearsed “Sixteen Tons,” a middle-of-the-road pop cover at soundcheck, but when the show went live he launched into his first single, “Bo Diddley.” He got himself a hit single, a career, and a lifetime ban from the show.
A year later, Elvis Presley’s first Sullivan appearance rocketed him and the new genre of Rock and Roll to the top of the charts. There would be no looking back.
Some would argue Elvis’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was really the Big Bang of Rock and Roll. But it wasn’t mine.
As thrilling as Bo and Elvis might have been, America was not the least bit ready for that February night in 1964 when the act Ed had in mind for the teenagers turned out to be the Beatles.
It was my second epiphany.
The Beatles on Ed Sullivan had the cultural impact of a spaceship landing in Central Park. Except that we’d seen spaceships land before in movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still. There was no warning or precedent for the Beatles.
They were as alien as anything on that spaceship, completely unique, and in a way that could never happen again. You can only be that different once. Everything about them was special. Their hair, clothes, sound, attitude, intelligence, wit, and especially their accent.
But they were mostly different for one very big reason. There were four of them. They were a band.
This was new. Until then, the music business had been made up of individual pioneers like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley; Doo-Wop singing groups like the Cadillacs, the Dubs, the Channels, and the Jive Five; Soul groups like the Temptations, the Contours, and the Miracles; and instrumental combos like the Ventures, the Surfaris, and the Tornados. The Four Seasons and the Beach Boys were bands to some degree, playing live and recording with session guys, but they felt anchored to the past, the Beach Boys with their silly high school sweaters and the Four Seasons looking like your Italian uncles.
For me, the first true rock star was Ricky Nelson on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet when I was eight or nine. I’d look forward to him performing at the end of the episode and be disappointed when he didn’t.
Before the Beatles, there had been only one true Rock and Roll band, the Crickets, who had inspired the Beatles to pick a bug for their name. The group released some records as the Crickets and some as Buddy Holly to get twice the radio airplay. And even though it was the same band all along, because of his shocking early death, it was Buddy who would be remembered. I was proud that in 2012 we finally got the Crickets and a bunch of other deserving sidemen into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The Beatles changed the world literally overnight. There were no bands in America on February 8, 1964. There was one in every garage on February 10.
What was the attraction of bands?
A band communicated something different from what an individual communicated. An individual was all about me, me, me. One personality. One spotlight. You fall in love with that guy or you don’t.
Bands communicated Friendship. Family. The Gang. The Posse. The Team. The Squad. And ultimately, the Community. Each kid now had four or five choices about who to relate to. It was like the Three Musketeers (more heroes of mine), but better. All for one, and one for all!
My brother, Billy, was born seven years after me, four years before my sister. The gap was too large to let us share many experiences, and I regret I didn’t find a way to spend more time with them.
The main thing I remember is arguing with my brother about which show to watch during dinner. He wanted I Love Lucy and I wanted Star Trek. Kind of ironic that his first movie when he went to Hollywood was playing an alien on the bridge of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and I ended up loving Latino music probably first introduced to me by Ricky Ricardo!
But my brother and I had one amazing moment. We slept in the same room. At night I snuck my transistor radio under the sheets. One night, on came “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the Beatles’ first hit single in the United States. The American record company had turned down their first four singles, all of which were hits in England. Finally, the English parent company, EMI, urged on by Manager Brian Epstein and Producer George Martin, demanded Capitol Records release “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
I was listening. Billy was in the next bed listening also. When the chorus came, and the band hit those incredible high notes on the word “hand,” we both burst into laughter. The Beatles communicated the one thing America needed after the assassination of JFK, the one thing that transcended the seven-year difference between me and my brother—unbridled joy. So among other things, I thank them for that moment.
For me, bands weren’t just the week’s teenage fashion trend or a new type of music or even some way to rebel against the paradise our parents had given us.
This was the beginning of life for me.
Suddenly everything started to make sense. Thank you, I thought. This is my species. This is my race. My ethnic group. My religion. My language. My creed. My purpose. This is me.
There was only one slight problem.<
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The Beatles were a little too good. A little too sophisticated. Yes, they were exciting, and just liking them felt like membership in a new tribe. But no matter how good my imagination was, I couldn’t really imagine doing what they did.
They were perfect. Their hair was perfect. Their suits were perfect. Perfect harmony. They all sang lead!
This problem would be solved four months later, on June 3, 1964, when I had my third epiphany.
Dean Martin was guest-hosting The Hollywood Palace, a Sullivan-like variety show with rotating hosts on ABC, the night the Rolling Stones made their American television debut.
I witnessed my past meet my future.
In addition to being Italian American and a fan of Dino, both with Jerry Lewis and in his solo career, I would use his relationship with Frank Sinatra as my future role model in the E Street Band.
That night, Dino made fun of the Stones. Relentlessly. Callously. Obnoxiously as possible. He did it when he was introducing them and after they played a raw cover of Muddy Waters’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You.”
“They’re going to leave right after the show for London,” he said. “They’re challenging the Beatles to a hair-pulling contest.”
This pissed everybody off except me. Bring it up to Keith Richards to this day at your own peril!
Of course Dino made fun of them! He was supposed to! They were new! Young! Loud! Spitting in the face of tradition! Everything his generation despised.
Mick Jagger was a different kind of front man.
There was something about his casual attitude that contrasted with the Beatles’ formality. And he didn’t play an instrument.
Most white bands just stood there and played. Their guitars functioned as a wall between performer and audience. A front man with no guitar who moved and danced was a black thing. Jagger and Eddie Brigati from the Rascals were big exceptions to the white-guy rule. Fronting liberated the performer to be the receiver of the energy as well as the transmitter. The Preacher, the Medicine Man, the Mambo, the Houngan, the Mystic, the One Possessed by the Spirit. More intimate. More sexual.
What changed me forever was probably the one thing that galled Dino the most.
Mick Jagger didn’t smile.
How dare he display that ungrateful attitude as the Keepers of Traditional Showbiz generously granted him a national audience?
I suddenly understood. I didn’t have to be perfect. Or even happy! Just look at them. It wasn’t that they were ugly, but they were decidedly… simian. You couldn’t have called the Beatles “traditional.” They changed the world too much for that. But they were conventionally attractive. The Stones were more primitive. Even their clothes seem to be an afterthought. They were the first punk band.
The Beatles showed us a new world; the Rolling Stones invited us in.
It was the spark that would ignite a new way of thinking for me. A world without rules. Without limitations.
Where work isn’t alienated from one’s identity but is one’s identity.
The concept of a job as unpleasant labor was instantly transformed. It was a “job” that could be satisfying, rewarding, and fun. Something that you would do for free. And you could get rich doing it? And get laid?
I was so in.
Goodbye school, grades, any thoughts of college, straight jobs, family unity, and American monoculture in general.
The Beatles/Stones exacta would change everything.
My religion had gone from Catholic to Baptist to Rock and Roll Pagan.
Society has never recovered.
And neither have I.
two
The Source
(1965–1967)
You’re only as cool as who you steal from.
—THE UNWRITTEN BOOK
Here they come! Run for your lives!
It had started in the ’50s, with Americans as economically supersecure Kings of the World. The horny wartime generation filled fresh suburbs with a new subspecies whose evolution stopped somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. They couldn’t crank them out fast enough. It didn’t take long for this phenomenon to be given a name. It was, as a Roger Corman poster might have read, The Attack of the Teenagers!
Represented by the shocking and revelatory ingratitude of Marlon Brando’s Wild One, the disaffection of James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause, the cynical wisdom of the Beat Poets, and the unprecedented integration of the races in Elvis Presley’s Rock and Roll, the teenager came fully formed for maximum adult aggravation.
Free, fresh, fearless, and too arrogant (or naive) to know (or care) that there were rules that had governed the previous thousand generations of young people, out they came. Not only with unprecedented discretionary money, but with unprecedented discretionary time to spend it.
The marketplace had to sprint to keep up.
Rock and Roll Records! Transistor Radios! Compact Mobile Phonographs! Cars! Clothes! Guitars! Bikinis! Hula-Hoops! Princess Phones! Pantyhose! Yo-Yos! Birth Control! Drive-In Movies! Malt Shops! Comic Books! Roller Skates!
The bounty was infinite.
But the freedom of the teen life was not. Those pioneering Rock and Roll fans made an impact, don’t get me wrong. They set the cars-girls-beach-booze template. But they made a big mistake.
They grew up.
A few would keep their Doo-Wop 45s as a memory of their short but sweet liberation, but most became the society they were rebelling against.
We wouldn’t be so easy.
By the time our generation came along, Rock and Roll wasn’t a temporary social phenomenon anymore. It wasn’t rebellion anymore, or even showbiz. It was a lifestyle.
Something new. And very troubling to the status quo. And guess what. We weren’t going to grow up.
Ever.
My first band was the Mates.
Just in case the world didn’t realize how influenced we were by the British Invasion.
It was me on vocals, along with Tom Boesch, my best friend growing up, who would turn me on to Bob Dylan, and two richer kids from the other side of the tracks, John Miller and Kerry Hauptli. Tom’s father’s job was silk-screening, so he created our Beatles-like bass drumhead, complete with a logo, which immediately elevated us above the other local bands.
It was the beginning of the methodology I would adopt for the rest of my life: dive in and learn on the job.
We did a residency at what would become the locally infamous Clearwater pool in Highlands and then faded away for reasons not remembered by me.
The first song I ever sang in public was Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”
Here is a typical setlist in my handwriting that John kept:
The next thing I remember is joining Buddy Norris’s group the Shadows. Cool name. I didn’t know it was stolen from England. I wonder if he did.
Around here it gets kind of hazy, but either Buddy invited me to the band rehearsal or John Miller, our former Mates bass player, did.
I met Buddy because he lived at the top of the biggest hill in Middletown, a few blocks from my house. My Aunt Angie, who spoiled her children and occasionally me, had bought me a brand-new thing called a skateboard. It was invented so that landlocked teenagers could enjoy the surf craze the Beach Boys had started. There was even a hit theme song, “Sidewalk Surfin’,” by Jan and Dean. Jan Berry, after trying and failing to write a skateboarding anthem, had asked Brian Wilson and Roger Christian to rewrite the Beach Boys’ “Catch a Wave” with different lyrics, which they did.
In addition to lead guitarist Buddy, who greatly resembled Ricky Nelson, and John Miller on bass, the other guys were neighborhood kids, too: Bobby McEvily on drums and Chris Plunkett on rhythm guitar. I brought in Bruce Gumbert who, like every other accordion player—and there were many—had traded it in for a Farfisa or Continental compact organ after the Dave Clark Five did The Ed Sullivan Show.
For a couple of years there, Rock TV was spectacular. It started in the ’50s when Soupy Sales had the first TV Rock
show in Cincinnati. Then Alan Freed had a national show, The Big Beat, until Frankie Lymon jumped off the stage and danced with a white girl.
Rock shows exploded for our generation. There must have been ten of them on TV every week in 1965. We had American Bandstand, Hullabaloo, Upbeat, Shivaree, Where the Action Is, and Hollywood a Go Go, plus the shows hosted by DJs like Murray the K, Clay Cole, Jerry Blavat. Not to mention the variety shows with Pop segments: Ed Sullivan, The Hollywood Palace, The Red Skelton Show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Dick Cavett Show, Mike Douglas in the afternoon, Merv Griffin at night.
Impressive, no?
The Shadows made our TV debut, and finale, on Disc-O-Teen on Newark’s Channel 47. Every local station had their own American Bandstand (band lip-synching, kids dancing), and ours was hosted by John Zacherle, a horror-movie host / Rock enthusiast nicknamed “The Cool Ghoul” by his friend Dick Clark. My future wife, Maureen Santoro, a Newark native, danced on the show all the time, so it’s possible we overlapped.
We got on Disc-O-Teen because we won a local contest. It felt like a taste of the big time.
Rock was not only on radio and TV, but everywhere else. Our generation had more places for teenage Rock bands to play than ever before or since. We had beach clubs, high school dances, VFW halls, even teenage nightclubs like Le Teendezvous. Hullabaloo clubs, named after the TV show, were franchised around the country. The three in our area created a circuit, Middletown to the north, Freehold to the west, Asbury Park to the south, and the beach clubs to the east completed the square. Or more like a trapezoid, in this case.
As a result, the dozen or so bands in our area that got out of the garage were constantly running into each other. Nightlife in those days consisted of two things: playing with your band or going to see some other band.
What else mattered?
There were great local bands. The three biggest were the Mods, with the Lillie brothers, Phil Watson on guitar, and Ray Belicose on drums; the Clique, with the Talarico brothers and Jimmy Barr on guitar; and the Motifs, with Walter Cichon, who looked like a Native American Eric Burdon and would later die in Vietnam.
Unrequited Infatuations Page 3