Singer-Songwriters seemed to spring up every month in the early ’70s: Kris Kristofferson, Jackson Browne, Gordon Lightfoot, Loudon Wainwright III, John Prine. Even Carole King, who had sung on her songwriting demos for more than a decade, was persuaded by Lou Adler to do an album. Which is still selling.
The one big difference between the traditional Folk singers and the new Singer-Songwriters was that the new acts all had hits.
In the ’50s, hits were a risk for Folk credibility. The Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” was so big it disqualified them as cool. Peter, Paul, and Mary got away with “Puff, the Magic Dragon” because it was rumored to be about drugs and with “Blowin’ in the Wind” because it was a protest song and put Dylan on the charts for the first time. That made them cool in perpetuity.
Folk music was never my thing, so I wasn’t paying close attention. Bruce was. He figured that he needed a Trojan horse to get into that mysterious fortress called the Business. And so he reawakened his Singer-Songwriter persona.
It was an honest persona. I had witnessed his Folk side in his room in Freehold. It suited his loner aspect, while being in a band forced him to be social, which was healthy.
But at that stage of the game, a Folk singer was not who he needed to be. He had spent too many hours rockin’ to stop now. And Pop hits were still a lifetime away. Now that he was signed, he immediately started assembling a band.
From Steel Mill, he took Danny on accordion and organ and Mad Dog, temporarily forgiven, on drums. He decided to use Davie Sancious and mentioned who he was thinking of for bass. “Oh, man,” I said. “He ain’t right.” The best bass player in town was Garry Tallent. He had always been my bass player. I didn’t want to lose him. But I also knew that it would be a small miracle if any of us found a way to break out of New Jersey. Bruce was going to have to be the horse we bet on. I suggested Garry.
“You sure?” Bruce said. I could tell that’s what he’d wanted to hear all along.
I would also be going up to the session, of course.
Just to see what Fate had in mind.
As we educated ourselves in earnest in that Upstage period, Bruce and I became obsessed with the honking tenor sax solos that provided the break in the middle of virtually every hit record before the Beatles. Where had they all gone?
The unintended consequence of the British Invasion’s dominance was that they put all their heroes out of work. The Drifters, Coasters, Doo-Wop, Little Richard—all the Pioneers—and all their sax players, King Curtis, Lee Allen, George Young, Red Prysock, Wild Bill Moore. Working their asses off one day, gone the next.
In our quest for our identity, we felt that if we could find that authentic sound, we could… we would… well, we didn’t know what, but it would somehow be cool by being so uncool, dig? The saxophone would connect us to the already-starting-to-be-forgotten past. Tradition.
We found a wacky white guy, Coz, a ’50s Sam Butera swing-type cat who could have come straight out of Louis Prima’s band. Fantastic. He had the right sound but looked exactly like William Bendix. And white wasn’t right. We kept looking.
Garry said he knew another guy who had played with Little Melvin and the Invaders. We piled into Garry’s car. We couldn’t all fit in mine, and Bruce didn’t even have a license. We drove into the woods—to this day, I have no idea where. A club suddenly appeared. The place was jumping, and we could feel the bass pulsing as we approached the joint. The whole experience already felt surreal, assisted by the ganja that had been passed around in the car.
When we went in, it was like one of those movies where everything stops and everyone stares for a second before the party restarts. We were the only white faces, but I was too intoxicated by the thick, sexy hashish-and-perfume-scented atmosphere to be nervous. Chicks danced on the bar in a haze of smoke. And wait! There it was!
That sound!
Funny how those little mysterious details occupied us. Like the tone of a saxophone. We were seeking energy from wherever we could find it, and pure, cool sound was life-giving energy, whether from our guitars or a sax. The road was strewn with the broken bodies of those who had searched in vain for it. The few who found it were sanctified. With the sudden unprecedented infinite fragmentation, the zeitgeist was losing its equilibrium. We needed something traditional to ground us.
That sound!
Bruce looked at me with the same expression Cristoforo Colombo must have given his first mate when, after thirty-six death-defying days on the ocean, they spotted naked indigenous chicks sunbathing on Grand Bahama beach.
We met the sax player at the break. He was gigantic. He should have been intimidating but he wasn’t. High as a kite wouldn’t be an accurate description because kites don’t fly as high as he was. We told him to drop in at what was to be a short-lived residency at the Student Prince on Kingsley some night, and that was about all the conversation any of us was capable of.
He was even bigger in the light. He even looked like King Curtis. He was just so authentic, we couldn’t believe our luck. Afterward, I asked Bruce if he’d caught the guy’s name.
“Clarence,” he said. We laughed about that. I don’t know why. Even his name was authentic. “Clarence Clemons,” Bruce added.
So Bruce, who’d been signed as a solo guy, immediately pissed off John Hammond, everybody at Columbia, and his new Manager Mike Appel by telling them his thing was having a band! With a sax player! Named Clarence!
By the time I walked into the studio, the powers that be were in no mood for a second guitarist. Who needed the extra expense? And I was nervous enough as it was. I’d practiced a bottleneck part on “For You.” I happen to be real good with a bottle—Duane Allman went out of his way to complement me when we played together—but the atmosphere was impossible. They gave me maybe two takes and said forget it.
That was it. I was out.
My best friend was on his way.
But he’d be making the journey without me.
By that point, I had been a bandleader for seven years. So being rejected from Bruce’s new band shouldn’t have been that big a deal. Even if I didn’t want to front, I could just find a singer and start a new band, right?
I didn’t.
I was a bit depressed that Bruce hadn’t stood up for me. But it was more than that. I liked the idea of being the guy behind the guy. The Underboss. The Consigliere. I wanted to make Bruce the biggest star in the world, and I knew I had certain instincts that complemented the few he lacked.
Plus, it really did feel like the train had left the station. The Renaissance was over. Most of the ’60s groups were being replaced by caricatures and hybrids. We were such fanatical purists that we didn’t appreciate groups like Aerosmith, who were a combination of the Stones and the Yardbirds. Why take them seriously when we could go see the real Stones and Yardbirds? Who could have imagined that a decade later we’d be desperate for a band to have the good sense to combine those two bands?
There was financial stress as well. I had never paid off the big Sunn amp and the van I bought to carry it around. It was my first rancid taste of the horror of owing money, around $2000, as I recall.
Depression? Debt? Destiny? Whatever the reason, I quit.
My whole family, all my uncles, were in construction. My father called my Uncle Dick and got me a job.
The Calabrése laborer in my blood was ready to jump body and soul into my new life. Maybe I could fit into society after all? My religion of Rock was filled with ungrateful infidels! Who needed it?
I got a cool used Dodge Charger and listened to Imus in the Morning every day on my way to work for two years.
I started as a flagman, standing in the middle of the New Jersey Turnpike or Route 287 directing eighty-mile-an-hour morning traffic from four lanes down to two. Then I raked two-hundred-degree blacktop in ninety-degree heat. Carried bricks and bags of mortar. Reinforced bridge abutments. And worked my way up to the jackhammer, which permanently rattled what Rock and Roll had left of my brain
s.
On weekends I played flag football. One Sunday, reaching for a flag, I dislocated the ring finger on my right hand. Despite on-field surgery (it’s still bent), I couldn’t work the jackhammer.
So much for the straight life.
Now, let’s see, what would be a good way to exercise my finger?
six
Vegas!
(1973)
We need to teach our students how to think, not what to think.
—THE UNWRITTEN BOOK
Shazam!
As if by wizardry!
A cloud of purple smoke and there I was…
… playing a Wurlitzer electric piano, exercising my inner Banana and my dislocated finger simultaneously.
Youngbloods. Never mind.
The band included some ex-Mods. Not the English kind, but the Rumson kind that was part of the Holy Trinity of Jersey groups, along with the Clique and the Motifs. Both the Mods and the Clique had asked me to join them a year or so before. That respect made me feel like I’d finally made my bones. Locally anyway. I don’t know why I didn’t join one of them.
As Fate would have it, and she usually does, the drummer in the bar band I joined for physical therapy happened to be the cousin of one of the Dovells. You know, “Bristol Stomp,” “You Can’t Sit Down,” two of the greatest recordings ever made. They needed a backup band for the oldies circuit, which was touring the country and would play the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas.
That’s all I had to hear. Vegas, baby! My first Mecca!
Not only was I a Rat Pack fanatic and Mob aficionado, but I was a gambler. I had John Scarne’s Complete Guide to Gambling near me at all times like a Bible. Scarne was the mathematics genius who figured out the odds of every casino game. He was banned by one casino after another for card counting (which is why blackjack now has a multideck shoe), until he finally wore them out and they hired him.
It was his math that would have encouraged Meyer Lansky to clean up the corruption when Batista made him gambling commissioner in Cuba in the ’50s. Lansky realized the house didn’t have to cheat to win. They just had to keep gamblers gambling.
So, let’s see… socks, underwear, Scarne—I was ready. And I went on the road for the second time. Gingerbread. Remember? My grandfather’s guitar?
The whole idea of “oldies” was at its peak in 1973. CBS-FM, the first station to create the format, ’50s and early ’60s music, had started in ’72. American Graffiti would lead to Happy Days. But an ex-DJ, Richard Nader, was probably most responsible for what became the “Rock and Roll revival.”
Nader started as a DJ, then worked at the Premier Talent Agency. Instead of embracing the British Invasion, he was pissed off that it was putting his favorite artists out of business. So he quit and started promoting oldies shows. A documentary about them, Let the Good Times Roll, came out in ’73 and fueled the nostalgia obsession.
It was perfect timing for me.
I couldn’t relate to anything going on in contemporary music at that time: Singer-Songwriters, Prog Rock, Heavy Metal, Glam. It was a good time for me to go back to school and complete my education.
I led a four-piece behind the Dovells that also performed as the opening act. Arnie Silver and Jerry Gross were original Dovells. Mark Stevens came soon after as comic relief. Arnie did the bass vocal parts and looked like James Dean. They were like big brothers to me. They old-schooled me in the ways of ’60s-style romance. Like putting cologne on one’s balls for the blow jobs between sets. It was a different time.
The Dovells wanted to open with a medley. Jerry had sketched it out, and I finished it off. It gave me a chance to actually play those classic records, which taught me more about them than hearing them a million times.
During that year, on the circuit, I met everybody that ever mattered. Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Gary US Bonds, the Shirelles, the Coasters, the Drifters. I was warned to stay away from Chuck Berry, but everyone else was friendly. The Drifters’ guitar player, Abdul Samad, showed me some riffs and taught me about Arabic astrology. He did everybody’s charts backstage. Lloyd Price, perhaps the most respected artist of them all—Little Richard had replaced him when he was drafted—taught me that if you wash the lubricant off the rubber you come slower. You know, life lessons.
I was having a great time, but the artists were all mostly miserable. They hated being called oldies acts. Many of them were in their prime, having regular hits when the Beatles arrived. Bam, over. Just like that. Tragically put out to pasture in their thirties and early forties by the British artists who loved them the most!
The atmosphere was invigorating. The spiritual power of the pioneers, stronger than they knew, scrubbed away any memory of my short construction career and replaced it with the new energy of a musical rebirth.
I figured since I was immersed in my own version of an adult education course, I might as well go all the way and see if I couldn’t figure what was wrong with my songwriting.
I’d been writing for years and could never find my way to anything I was happy with. I decided to stop whatever I’d been doing and analyze it.
Where in the Rock world did songwriting begin?
I decided it began with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. They had written countless classics. “Hound Dog” for Big Mama Thornton. “Jailhouse Rock” for Elvis. “Ruby Baby” for the early Drifters and then Dion. “Stand by Me” for Ben E. King. And most of the Coasters’ hits.
I decided I would write a Leiber and Stoller song for Ben E. King and the Drifters.
First, I wanted to find a completely original chord change. Nothing crazy, just a new combination. I finally settled on G–D–E minor–C, otherwise known as 1–5–6–4. It must have been used somewhere, but I couldn’t find it anywhere.
I wanted a universal theme, so I went with heartbreak. Your girl has walked out. Your once-happy sanctuary has become a cold, lonely place. “I Don’t Want to Go Home.”
Ben E. King came directly from the Sam Cooke school, so I wrote a Cooke melody, imagining the Drifters doing a call-and-response for the verse. I designed a split structure, verses and bridge like Frank Sinatra talking to the bartender in “One for My Baby,” choruses a desperate delusional drunk talking to the girl in his head.
Man, I liked it. I felt like I had unlocked one of the secrets of the universe. I learned that day what I would teach forever in my songwriter master classes: when you get stuck writing for yourself, write a song for somebody else. But I didn’t have the courage to give it to Ben E. King. He was friendly, but he was Ben E. Fucking King!
Between out-of-the-way hotels and clubs, we did arenas with the big Nader shows.
It was at a Madison Square Garden soundcheck that I heard Little Richard give what had to be one of the greatest performances of his life. And nobody saw it. It was the peak of his Jive years, when performances consisted of him performing a song or two and then jumping up on the piano, taking his shirt off, and waving it around, doing everything but singing.
For whatever reason, that afternoon, he felt like singing. He did an hour of Gospel, Country, Blues, Rolling Stones (“Jumpin’ Jack Flash”!), songs he would never do in a show. He had the greatest voice I’ve ever heard, almost unrecognizable from his Rock records. It would encourage me to go back and discover his early Gospel records later, but that day it was quite a revelation.
I also caught a miraculous Bo Diddley performance that just for a moment took him back to his prime, although it took a weird-ass time machine to get him there. For most of the year, most shows, he was good but mostly going through the motions. Then, somewhere in the Carolinas, we were both hired for a high-society coming-out party for some rich sixteen-year-old girl. I’d never heard of a coming-out party, unless it was a gay dude celebrating self-liberation. But down south it signified some kind of adulthood. Like a redneck bar mitzvah, I guess.
I don’t know if all coming-out parties were at nine o’clock in the morning, but this one was. And at that gig, I saw Bo lose twenty
years and suddenly come to life. Surrounded by a hundred sixteen-year-old, very healthy southern girls exploding out of their Alice in Wonderland ball gowns into the hurricane of puberty, Bo gave one of the finest performances of his life. Every move, every lick, every trick made a reappearance, and he invented some new ones. After that, he went back to still great but legendary autopilot and stayed there for the final thirty-five years of his life.
On the road that year, the Dovells turned me on to Bruce Lee. I had never heard of him, but they took me to see Enter the Dragon just after he died. Wow. I was hooked. Whenever we were in a city with a Chinatown, I made sure to catch a kung fu movie.
I decided the actor most likely to replace him was a guy named Jackie Chan, who did all his own unbelievable stunts. He didn’t make an English-speaking movie for a long time, and when he did he favored comedies, which disguised his true mastery. I had taken some karate but after that year I switched to kung fu, and even learned to fence and box because Bruce Lee recommended it and had included techniques from both in his Jeet Kune Do style. Didn’t stick with any of it long enough to get really good, but it was fun.
Out on the circuit, I also got the news that I’d lost my grandfather Sam Lento, the man who taught me how to play guitar. It was my first big personal loss, and it hit me quite hard. I wondered then, and still wonder, why I hadn’t asked him more about his life. Two deeply personal memories stand out: going with him to the Italian section of Boston, where the pushcarts still existed in 1955, and going with him to see The Godfather when it opened, where he leaned over to translate the Italian-language parts. I felt the pain of the news of his passing in my very soul. I still feel it. I could barely function for days.
Years later I would think back on moments like that and decide the brain must have a built-in limiter. And it works both ways.
Unrequited Infatuations Page 7