Really?
“I’m sorry, sir, but I still don’t get it. They’re coming from Southeast Asia to take over New Jersey? For what? Our tomatoes? I just cannot buy that. They land on Bradley Beach, I’ll be the first one there, but I ain’t going halfway around the damn world to shoot people just because you say so. All due respect.”
He stared at me for a long time. I figured, I’m going to jail. It wouldn’t be the first time. The first time was when the local cops planted marijuana on me to try and get the only freak in town off the streets. Luckily, my parents believed me when it was discovered they had loaded the wrong brand of cigarettes. Soon after that I started smoking weed. I figured if I’m already being punished, I might as well do the crime.
Finally…
“OK, son.”
“Check those boxes in the right-hand column,” he said, “and I’d better see you on Bradley Beach when the time comes.”
I said, “Yes, sir, you will, sir.” And that was that.
Maybe he knew I was trouble. Or maybe I was the small fish that got thrown back into the pond.
I didn’t have to hide in a college or run away to Canada. I was free to pursue my impossible dream.
But what were the odds of a kid from New Jersey becoming a Rock star? A million to one?
No. Worse.
three
Upstage
(1968–1970)
You don’t want to piss off anybody from New Jersey. They’re already pissed off by being from New Jersey.
—THE UNWRITTEN BOOK
High school was a drag.
Who cared about the Peloponnesian War when John Lennon was inventing feedback for the intro of “I Feel Fine”?
Just ring the damn bell and let me get to band practice.
Contrary to our most delicious fantasies, in New Jersey the girls chasing the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night would prefer the sports guys for another five years.
We were at rehearsal one day at Joe Hagstrom’s house when he came running in with a music magazine. He opened it, pointed, and declared with shock, “Look! Rod Stewart is white!”
“Get the fuck outta here!”
“It must be the way it’s printed.”
“The Equals all looked white too.”
“I’m telling you,” he said. “He’s white.”
The issue wouldn’t be resolved until Stewart came onstage at the Fillmore East.
The Fillmore East was a miraculous Rock oasis that Bill Graham had opened in early 1968 as the East Coast sister to the Fillmore in San Francisco. It was right in the middle of the Lower East Side, Second Avenue and Sixth Street, and the rent must have been right because it was a neighborhood of bikers, dealers, winos, homeless, junkies, and panhandlers.
Graham was a tough, controversial guy, a German Jew whose mother sent him to France to escape the Nazis. He ended up in San Francisco, where he helped invent the new Artform of Rock performance.
He called himself a Producer rather than a Promoter, and rightfully so.
His vision elevated the performance part of our Artform to its highest evolution, a level that, regarding three-act theater bills, has never been equaled.
The shows were a total immersive experience.
You entered a funky but chic chandeliered lobby leading to the main room, which held around twenty-five hundred of the first velvet seats we’d ever seen.
The Fillmore East usually had three acts per show, two shows a night on Fridays and Saturdays. The amazing Joshua Light Show, named for the Engineer and Lighting Designer who created it, Joshua White, was projected on the full-screen back wall. We had never seen anything like it. No one had. Between acts, Graham showed cartoons and newsreels.
The shows were curated by Graham’s eclectic but exquisite taste and both reflected and influenced the open-minded hippie era of the late ’60s.
Some typical Fillmore East bills:
March 8, 1968 (opening night):
Big Brother and the Holding Company
Tim Buckley
Albert King
April 27, 1968:
Traffic
Blue Cheer
Iron Butterfly
January 9, 1970:
Ike and Tina Turner
Mongo Santamaria
Fats Domino
Unbelievable, right? For five dollars or less!
Anyway, such was the state of Rock journalism circa 1967. We weren’t even sure what color our Rock stars were!
At least until May 2, 1969. The Jeff Beck Group, Joe Cocker, and NRBQ. And I feel quite confident positively confirming it now. Rod Stewart is white.
As I entered my senior year of high school, I was blossoming into the full-blown hippie I would be for the next few years, or the rest of my life depending on how you’re counting, and my father told me to cut my hair or get out.
So I moved in with my first girlfriend, Susan. Very straight. Very smart. Very cute. The star actress in school. It must have been her theatrical sensibility that attracted her to a freaky nascent underground underdog Rock and Roller. Her mother was a widow and an alcoholic, one of the few adults I could relate to even a little bit. I liked both of them a lot.
Being the school freak meant I was the last guy in high school to have sex. Or at least it felt like that, hanging with guys like Mark Romanski, who knew how to talk to girls, something I never did figure out. I heard he ended up in the CIA. That might be a rumor, but he was a clever Robert Culp type. I hope I’m not blowing his cover.
I finally had sex at a party with Susan after close calls with others. It was terrible. Couldn’t get the rubber on. Couldn’t get it off. Once I moved into her place, we got quite good at it. It was a little kinky because we’d do it in her mother’s bed while she was at work.
Then I got kicked out of school because I didn’t live at home. Or was I kicked out of the house because I’d gotten kicked out of school? I felt bad for my mother, who was caught in the middle, so I went back home and—forgive me, David Crosby—cut my hair.
Oh, the humanity!
It was traumatic. I even saw sorrow in my mother’s eyes. The only good that came out of it was that, since my hair was cut, I figured I might as well join the wrestling team to exact revenge on a kid who had a gang that had been bullying me. The whole thing was over in a day. I joined the team, selected him as an opponent, smashed his face on the floor, broke his nose, and started growing my hair back.
After I reluctantly and meaninglessly graduated from high school (the irony of my giving keynote addresses at education forums these days isn’t lost on me), I hooked up with a working band from the Boston area. Gingerbread, I think the name was.
The experience only lasted about three months and was notable for only a few things. I met my second girlfriend, Vivienne, who was French and twenty-five and began my appreciation of older women. Every young boy and girl, of legal age of course, should begin their sex lives with older lovers. It should be treated as an apprenticeship just like anything else. It would be so much more enjoyable. Young kids having their first sex with each other is always pathetic. Mine certainly was. Older cultures used to do that for the boys. But probably not the girls, unfortunately. Society has always been deathly afraid of truly unleashing a woman’s sexuality because they know it is infinitely more powerful than a man’s.
The diner we ate in had a little jukebox attached to each table, and we played “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” by the Bob Seger System and Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” every day.
The only other event of note from that experience was that my Grampa Lento’s National acoustic guitar with the resonator was stolen by the other guitar player in the band. I couldn’t prove it, but he had been drooling over it, and then one day it was missing.
I was very upset and told Nana Lento. All I had left was a guitar strap, and she asked for it. I’ll never know for sure whether she did it or called her sister Zeze in Boston, but an Italian conjurer was approached and issued a maloik on whoever took
Sam’s guitar. (It’s like a goombah hoodoo thing. Every ethnic group has one.)
Cut to forty years later, an E Street Band show in Pittsburgh. On my way to the stage stands Joe Grushecky. “Hey,” he said, “I know who has your grandfather’s guitar.”
“What?!? Don’t you fucking leave!” I said as they pulled me onstage.
The story went something like this. Joe was at a funeral, and the widow came up to him and said, “I heard you know Stevie.” Yeah, he said. “Well,” she said. “I have his grandfather’s guitar.”
Turns out the maloik really worked. The scum that stole it died. Slow, I hope. Then the guy who got it from him died. Then the guy who got it from him died. At that point, the widow wisely concluded it was time to return the thing from whence it had come.
My name and address were on a card in the compartment, and the original thief never bothered to take it out. So I got the guitar back.
Gingerbread got boring. The gigs dried up. I moved back with my parents for a minute. And then one night I went to see Bruce play at Le Teendezvous in Shrewsbury, one of those teenage Jersey nightclubs. The Castiles had broken up by then, and he was with one of his new bands, Earth or maybe Child.
At the break, Bruce said, “You heard about this place Upstage?”
I hadn’t.
“It’s amazing. Down in Asbury. Open 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. All ages. Ask for Margaret.”
All I knew about Asbury Park was Convention Hall, where we saw the big bands, and the Battle of the Bands on the roof of the Howard Johnson’s where Tim McLoone’s is now. We won.
Down I went to check out the Upstage Club.
At the door was Margaret, looking straight out of the ’50s, probably in her forties, the owner Tom Potter’s wife and the lead singer of Margaret and the Distractions.
“Bruce told me about you,” she said. “If you’re as good as he says, you’ll get upstairs in no time. Now go in, but don’t tell Tom I let you in for free.”
The beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Upstage was above a Thom McAn shoe store. You climbed a tubular black staircase lit with colorful iridescence to get to the lower floor of the club. That was the café, reserved for auditions and Folk singers.
If you were designated as worthy, you moved up. That meant another long staircase up to the main room, maybe two or three hundred capacity, distinguished by, and locally infamous for, having the amps and PA system built into the black-lit psychedelic walls.
It was the place bands came to jam after the bars closed at 3 a.m., back when jamming was all the rage.
I vaguely remember having to build a band out of whoever was sitting around in the café that day for the audition. One of my first encounters would end up being one of my lifelong closest friends, a soft-spoken, southern-boy bass player named Garry Tallent. I introduced myself and said I was there to audition. He volunteered to play with me.
Big Bad Bobby Williams, the three-hundred-pound biker and drummer with the Distractions, a larger-than-life character in every way, volunteered to play the drums.
We did “Hi-Ho Silver Lining,” “Shapes of Things,” and maybe a Blues thing like “Rock Me Baby.” All Jeff Beck, who was everything to me at the time (and pretty much still is). I’d be forever grateful to Jeff for introducing the world to Rod Stewart, who would be the reason I would become infatuated with Sam Cooke.
I graduated upstairs immediately. As I met more of the Upstage guys, I found out there was a scene in that part of Jersey that I knew nothing about. Bands like the Storytellers (featuring the impish Danny Federici on organ), Sonny and the Starfires (with the lanky and hyperintense Vini Lopez), the Bank Street Blues Band (with the cynical, peripatetic John Lyon), the Blazers, the Moment of Truth (also with Vini, and with Garry Tallent), Norman Seldin’s Joyful Noyze, etc.
Sprinkled throughout, sometimes playing with one band, sometimes with another, were hot local guitar players like Billy Ryan, Ricky DeSarno, Sonny Kenn, Bill Chinook, and Paul Dickler.
In those years, the guitar players ruled because the guitar had become temporarily omnipotent. Hard to imagine now, but for a few years the guitar players were more important than the singers.
Rod Stewart worked for Jeff Beck. Robert Plant worked for Jimmy Page. No shit. Jimi Hendrix’s group was called the Jimi Hendrix Experience for a reason, and not because he happened to be the singer. There would be one more example of this ten years later with Van Halen when Eddie gave the guitar its last evolution.
I became one of the kings of the jam, along with Bruce, Ricky, and Billy.
If you jammed all night at Upstage, you made five dollars. The few of us that led the jams got fifteen dollars for four or five hours onstage.
I only worked three nights a week, but I lived off that forty-five dollars a week for quite a while.
When Bruce wasn’t commuting back and forth to Freehold, he was sleeping on the beach or in the surfboard shop of his second Manager, Carl “Tinker” West. I had dropped by once or twice, maybe we rehearsed there with one band or another, but I thought the place was toxic. Literally. The chemicals used to make the boards smelled poisonous. So Bruce and I got an apartment together on Fourth or Fifth Avenue in Asbury Park.
One big loft room. Two mattresses on the floor. Not much else.
We were the original odd couple, as he immortalized in a speech he gave decades later when I was honored by Little Kids Rock.
Of course, when it came to who was Oscar and who was Felix, he lied. When there was no more room in the sink for the pile of dishes, we moved.
Along with Johnny Lyon, Albee Tellone, and Johnny Waasdorp, I got an apartment where Cookman met Kingsley. Johnny Lyon had worked in the post office and played harmonica. Albee was a Singer-Songwriter and guitarist. Waasdorp, who had started the Rogues and then replaced Phil Watson in the Mods, was a brilliant guitar player who switched to piano, gaining the moniker “Hotkeys” in the process. Bruce would stay there sometimes too.
We used the time together to really dig into the roots of Blues. As one of the bedrocks of Rock, Blues music was present in whatever we did. We were introduced to it through the Rolling Stones, but many of the lead guitar developments in Blues Rock came from the trio of guitarists who passed through the Yardbirds.
The first, Eric Clapton, defined modern lead guitar, both in the Yardbirds and in bands like John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and Cream. He influenced everybody who plays a solo to this day. Clapton’s successor, Jeff Beck, founded the Jeff Beck Group, which introduced us to both Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood (on bass at the time, brilliantly) and redefined the guitar player / lead singer relationship. And finally came Jimmy Page, who created the ultimate Hard Rock archetype, Led Zeppelin.
Right in the midst of that, Jimi Hendrix took it all to some new cosmic place. The only other guitar players of similar stature, representing Blues tradition rather than the progressive English style of playing, were Mike Bloomfield with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the lesser-known Danny Kalb with the Blues Project.
At Cookman and Kingsley, we traced the genre back from the white cover versions to the black originators.
We listened incessantly to Little Walter, Fred McDowell, Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Son House, Elmore James, and Muddy Waters. We also started playing cutthroat Risk and Monopoly in our plentiful spare time.
The early signs of a logical part of my brain I wasn’t yet conscious of, and which would come in handy later, began to appear. I realized the way to win at Risk was to capture Australia first.
I had also figured out that the key to having a winning pro football team was the offensive line. They were the most important players. Not the quarterback, the running backs, or the wide receivers. Not any of what are still insultingly referred to as the “skill” players. It’s the “unskilled” and probably lowest-paid offensive linemen that make the difference.
Our Monopoly obsession would continue onstage when we formed Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom a few
months later.
One afternoon, a few of us dropped acid and went to see Yellow Submarine in New York.
Acid, of course, was lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD (why not LAD?), and it was still a new thing in East Coast hippie culture. The drug, a strong hallucinogen, had been discovered by Albert Hofmann in 1938 in Switzerland, was used in experiments by the CIA on unsuspecting victims, and found its way to hippie gurus like Timothy Leary, Owsley Stanley, and Aldous Huxley.
I know it’s probably hard to believe now, but my generation didn’t do drugs to escape from reality. We were seeking enlightenment, the broader understanding of the universe that the Beatles were singing about in songs like “Love You To,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and “The Inner Light.” And believe it or not, LSD wasn’t illegal nationally until 1968.
Acid affected the mind in ways that gave the user a shortcut to understanding the basics of Eastern philosophy. Think of it as the hippie Google.
I only did three trips, but the second and third were redundant. The first one revealed to me the three truths that would link elementary school science to metaphysics and that remain the basis of my spiritual knowledge to this day:
Everything is alive (preons, the tiniest particles in the universe, are constantly in motion).
Everything is connected (for every action, there is a reaction).
Everything is forever (matter changes form but can never be destroyed).
Yellow Submarine was not only a Beatles cartoon but an incredible work of Art. Returning to childhood was an essential goal in the hippie philosophy as the seeker sought to release the ugliness of the spiritually bankrupt, materialistic adult society. We hippies were trying to get back our sense of wonder and enjoy the beauty of being alive.
As we watched and tripped, all the secrets of the universe were revealed to us. The inherent yin-yang conflict of positive and negative energy talked about by Joseph Campbell, which would be the basis of Star Wars, was there. And a lot more.
Unrequited Infatuations Page 5