Cut to the week before he arrived.
Rrrrrrrrrring.
“Yeah.”
“Bill Lynch.”
“What can I do for you, Bill?”
As if I didn’t know.
“Can I buy you lunch?”
We met at the Empire Diner. This was the early ’90s, when it was still good.
Bill spoke first. “Sorry about how the meeting went down,” he said. “I had a lot of politics I had to contend with.”
“I understand,” I lied.
“We’ve got a problem.”
“No shit? With that roomful of geniuses? I’m shocked!”
I liked Bill. I knew I was probably going to help him no matter what the problem was, but I was going to give him as much shit as I could in the meantime.
“So Mandela gets out of jail,” Bill said, “and starts his fundraising trips. Some airport, he’s going down the greeting line shaking hands, and one of the hands he shakes is Yasser Arafat’s. Somebody snaps a picture. Makes the front page of the Post. My Jewish money, which we were depending on, vanishes the next day. We are fucked. We’re going to be the only city that stiffs Mandela. And us with a black mayor no less!”
Oh, boo-hoo, I thought to myself.
But he was actually close to real tears.
“You got nothing?”
“Dick.” I’m translating.
You gotta love the hybrid language we speak in New York. It’s a combination of ’50s Jazz Hipster, Italian American Mafia, Ebonics, Spanglish, and Yiddish, regardless of one’s ethnic background.
“Oy vey!” I replied, Arafat reference intended.
That brought out a reluctant smile.
“Alright, let me think about it,” I relented.
Bill was a tough guy. His eyes were pleading. I didn’t like seeing him like this. I walked him out, and he delivered his parting shot. “It’s next week.”
“Oh good. You had me nervous there for a minute.”
One way or the other, I connected up with Bobby De Niro, Spike Lee, and Eddie Murphy. Drew Nieporent, De Niro’s partner in the Tribeca Grill, was also involved. I explained the situation.
They came in.
We sold dinner with Mandela at $2,500 a head times two hundred to get the $500,000 we needed.
Miraculously, because of those names on the invitation, we sold it out!
Smokin’ Joe Frazier came to the dinner. My good friends Jay Cocks and Verna Bloom were there. Marty Scorsese brought Ray Liotta, who was starring in his new film.
Mandela was supposed to be there at 7 p.m.
At 7:15 my phone rang.
Uh-oh, I thought. Here it comes.
It was Mandela’s guy. “Hello, my friend,” he starts. “I hear it’s sold out!”
“Yeah, baby.” I’m thinking, Don’t fucking do this to me. “The whole shebang cost us thirty-five grand. Everybody worked for free, Bobby and Drew took no profit.” Don’t even think about it, you cocksucker. “And I’ve got $500K in my hand waiting for you.” Go ahead, say it, motherfucker, say it!
“That sounds great, comrade,” he said. “That sounds great.”
Enough bullshit small talk. Say it.
“So listen, Madiba has had a long day and he’s very tired. So we’re going to skip the dinner.”
Man, why can’t I be wrong every now and then?
“Just curious,” I said. “Where are you right now?” As if I didn’t know.
“We’re at Harry Belafonte’s apartment.”
What a surprise. I knew somebody had been in Mandela’s ear telling him not to worry about those fucking white liberals—you can step all over them.
“OK, baby,” I said matter-of-factly. “No problem. I’ll just give everybody their money back.”
“What did you say?”
He suddenly wasn’t so cool, calm, and collected.
“I said I’m giving everybody their money back. I sold this as dinner with Mandela. If he can’t come, I understand. But everybody gets their money back.”
“You can’t do that! That’s ANC money!”
I had had enough.
“Just watch me, motherfucker! This is my fucking money until Mandela comes down here and spends some time and shows these people some respect.”
“Now wait a minute, comrade. Hold the phone.”
Murmur murmur murmur.
“Alright. He’s coming down. But he can’t stay all night.”
“He needs to shake some hands—at the very least the hands of my three partners, Bobby De Niro, Spike Lee, and Eddie Murphy, whose sponsorship made this a success. And he needs to make a speech and show some gratitude for this fucking money. And there had better be an attitude adjustment because, correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember owing you a fucking thing!”
And come he did.
In the only conversation I would ever have with him, Mandela asked me what he should say. I’d heard he had a good sense of humor, so I thought he was fucking with me. But he wasn’t.
I told him to open with a joke.
No, I didn’t. I told him we’d been using “Keep the pressure on” as our slogan to strengthen his negotiating position with the government so they’d keep their promise of a fair election. “Yes, that’s good,” he said. And he gave a nice speech.
And that, my children, is this week’s lesson showing that no good deed goes unpunished.
The ANC got their money.
David Dinkins wasn’t embarrassed.
New York City wasn’t embarrassed.
Bill Lynch owes me a big favor.
Smokin’ Joe Frazier made two cameo appearances on The Simpsons.
Goodfellas came out and became a big hit.
Mandela went home and was elected president.
All in all, an unusually happy ending.
Just wish I’d gotten a picture.
But guess who did?
The next morning, as Mandela’s plane was taking off, I opened the papers to see his arm around a little guy with a big shit-eating grin.
I guess Paul Simon got over that whole scary dangerous Communist thing.
twenty-three
Seven Years in the Desert
(1991–1997)
There’s a bad storm coming,
I believe it’s coming our way,
The air is thick and cloudy,
The sky gets blacker every day,
The rebel children are waiting,
Their time is coming soon,
They face no future gamely,
They’ve got nothing left to lose…
— “SAINT FRANCIS,” FROM BORN AGAIN SAVAGE
Only part of me came back from the desert. The rest of me remained there, forever wandering, searching for… what?
The ’90s were a lost decade.
For the first time in my life, I had no clear mission.
I’d lost my way, and as usual I wouldn’t find it; it would find me.
Mostly what I remember is walking my dog for seven years. Staying connected to little Jake was the one thing that kept me sane. Studying him, learning from his natural instinct to live in the moment. Giving him the best life I could while cursing a God I knew didn’t exist for giving the greatest creatures on earth such horrifyingly short life spans.
Maureen helped by keeping me fantasizing about ballet and Broadway.
I’d blown my life twice at that point. First by leaving the E Street Band, and then by treating my solo career as a purely artistic endeavor.
It was an exhilarating ride while it lasted. I felt like I was finally doing what I was born to do, or at least was on the right road, embracing the life of an Artist and beginning to fulfill my destiny. But who was paying the bills? It was a bit unsettling at that stage of the game to still be looking for a steady job.
Spoiler Alert. I’m still looking.
The decade was spent walking my dog and doing occasional favors for friends. Cell phones didn’t exist yet. Can you imagine such a thing? But I was
easy to find.
Steve Weitzman, (in)famous for booking the legendary club Tramps, called and asked me to produce an album for a Nigerian artist named Majek Fashek.
The connection was Jimmy Iovine. I had smart friends. Some of the smartest in the business. Jimmy was one of them.
He had hooked up with Ted Field, who had an independent film company called Interscope and started a record division. No surprise, given his history of success—Patti Smith, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, Dire Straits, U2, etc.
He started off doing Rock records. They all bombed.
This told Jimmy one simple thing: if he couldn’t break a Rock record, then Rock was over. Even though there would be another minute of commercial success in the form of Grunge, it was on the way out, and Jimmy knew it.
I clock the Rock era from “Like a Rolling Stone” in 1965 to Kurt Cobain’s death. Thirty years of universal bliss. Cobain marked the last time an audience would invest in an artist emotionally to that degree. It was just too painful.
Iovine saw some action in the Salsa-meets-Disco world, but it wasn’t his thing. It was too late to learn Spanish. He was from Brooklyn. He was still working on English.
He looked around. What was next?
Hip-Hop!
Uh, yeah, the name had caught on.
Jimmy signed Tupac.
Then, in the ballsiest move since Don Corleone’s deal with Barzini, he decided to distribute Death Row Records. And somehow lived to tell about it.
There’s street smarts, super–street smarts, and then there’s Jimmy Iovine.
I had to shake my head in wonderment! This Italian kid from Red Hook, Brooklyn, which half the Mob called home and where a black man would never dare to walk down the block, became the king of Hip-Hop.
The same year he signed Tupac, he signed Majek Fashek. I ended up producing a great album for Fashek, Spirit of Love, an example of how deep Reggae had penetrated African consciousness.
Nobody heard it.
Gary Gersh called with another production job. An Austin, Texas, super-type group that included my friend Charlie Sexton. I was good at making individuals into bands, and Gary knew that.
Charlie was and is one of the great guitar players, but everybody kept trying to make him a Pop star, just because he looked like James Dean. And OK, he happened to drive a ’49 Merc, but that was beside the point. He had never made the record he deserved, and I knew I could help him do that.
The band, named Arc Angels after their rehearsal space, was Charlie, another Austin guitar player and singer, Doyle Bramhall Jr., backed by Stevie Ray Vaughan’s rhythm section, Double Trouble, Chris Layton on drums and Tommy Shannon on bass.
I thought the job would be nothing but fun.
It wasn’t.
I get along with everybody. Because my life got off to a late start, I am constantly preoccupied with songs and scripts I haven’t written, shows I haven’t produced, hotels and clubs I haven’t built, not to mention a detailed unrealized political agenda, so I don’t have time for petty conflict. I never start fights, and never even engage in arguments if I can help it. I have to be nonconfrontational, because I’m too extreme. My Calabrése blood has infinite patience until it doesn’t, and my Napolitano blood is always ready for a fight to the death over the slightest insult. It’s all or nothing at all with me, which most of the time means nothing. I’m too busy to look for trouble. It has to find me.
For some bizarre reason, it found me during the Arc Angels in the form of Doyle Bramhall Jr. Every suggestion was an argument. He never liked anything I said. Didn’t laugh or smile once.
Maybe he thought I’d favor Charlie. Maybe he wanted somebody else to produce. I don’t know. He didn’t want to talk about his problems, and frankly neither did I.
The adversarial zenith came midway through recording, when I suggested that a solo needed a more Bluesy, melodic approach rather than the jumble of psychedelic noise he was making. He sneered. “What do you know about the Blues?”
Ooh—once in a while I still see that face in my dreams.
I bit my tongue. Hard. I didn’t bother to explain that by the time he was six years old I had learned, absorbed, and used onstage every guitar lick on every album by Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, B. B. King, Albert King, T-Bone Walker, Jimmy Rogers, Jimmy Reed, Hubert Sumlin, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, Fred McDowell, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Slim Harpo, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Reverend Gary Davis, John Lee Hooker, and Otis Rush—whom I discussed at length with Stevie Ray Vaughan when I picked him to open for me at Rockpalast. The only licks I hadn’t played were Freddie King’s, and that was because he’d pulled a gun on me when I was a kid.
I had to make a decision. I had promised Gary and Charlie a great record, but if I beat the shit out of this obnoxious motherfucker, it was going to significantly decrease the chances of success.
Anyway, I somehow managed to ignore him, pretend I was a peace-loving professional, and make a great album.
The Arc Angels broke up just after the record came out.
Nobody heard it.
A guy named Allen Kovac called to say that he had taken over as Meat Loaf’s Manager when Meat had fallen out with Jim Steinman. Would I write and produce a song?
I’d met Meat Loaf when Steve Popovich defied the industry’s conventional wisdom and worked relentlessly for a year to break him. He was a sweetheart of a guy. Happy to help.
I can write a song for whoever asks. No problem. It usually comes to me within a few minutes. If it’s a script, the song comes as soon as I read it. If it’s a film, as soon as I see it.
But a week went by… and nothing. I analyzed the problem.
Meat Loaf was very popular.
He was charming and talented.
But there was one thing he wasn’t.
Meat Loaf was not an Artist.
So what was he? I asked myself.
An actor! I answered.
Aha, I thought! I’m not going to write him a song; I’ll write him a show!
Of course, I didn’t intend to make the Meat Loaf project my life’s work, so rather than conceive of a show from scratch, I went in search of a classic that could be adapted.
Meat Loaf was big. Freaky. Kind of awkward in his own skin. He must have been made fun of his whole life. His nickname was Meat Loaf, for crissake!
So with whom in classic literature did he have the most in common?
Bada bing!
Quasimodo!
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame!
Freaky fucking book.
I don’t know how it was a hit in 1831. Netflix must have had a slow month. But let me tell you, Victor Hugo definitely had issues. Here’s the CliffsNotes version:
An evil fifteenth-century priest wants to fuck an innocent peasant girl who tries her best to avoid him. Meanwhile, a soulful hunchback dude falls in love with her, but she becomes infatuated with some shallow soldier type. The priest gets pissed, and ready for this, he hangs her! Like, by the neck until dead.
Hitchcock’s Psycho and then some!
Maybe that’s where he got the idea.
And how’s this for a happy ending? The hunchback whacks the priest, finds the girl’s dead body, lies down next to her, and starves to death so he can spend eternity with her.
Now is that a hit, or is that a hit?
I guess compared to cholera and bubonic plague, it must have qualified as comic relief.
On top of that bizarre plot, the book takes an endless digression, even worse than one of mine, discussing the cathedral in excruciating detail. Very weird, until you remember the book was actually titled Notre-Dame de Paris 1482.
The comings and goings of a bunch of fatally flawed humans will always be temporary, but Notre-Dame Cathedral is forever (or at least until some asshole sets it on fire six hundred years later!). Which makes it the first existential novel, doesn’t it? Beats Dostoevsky by thirty ye
ars at least!
Anyway, I rewrote it with a happier ending—not a high bar—wrote half the songs, and demoed them with Mark Alexander playing everything and a Meat Loaf soundalike singing. I was quite proud of it. A whole new genre for me, and a step in the theatrical direction I wanted to go. I delivered my masterpiece and… silence.
After a few days, Allen and I met. “Meat doesn’t want it.”
“What?”
“He can’t sing it.”
“What is he talking about? I wrote it specifically for his voice, in his key, with melodies in his range.”
“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “I think the demo guy intimidated him.”
Intimidated him?
He was imitating him for fucks sake!
Allen shook his head.
No-go.
I thought fuck it, another six or seven songs and I’ve got a Broadway show. Several Producers loved it and were considering it when Disney put out its animated Hunchback of Notre Dame. The Producers assumed Broadway was the next stop, since Disney owned part of it, and ran for the hills.
Nobody heard it.
Kovac had another idea, a reunion record with Southside. Sure, baby. I got nothing but time.
I had seen the Jukes recently, and they had played a knockout new song Southside and Bobby Bandiera had written, “All Night Long.”
So I knew I had one good song.
I love a challenge. Hearts of Stone had grown in popularity quite a bit in the fifteen years since we’d worked together. Could I beat it?
I wrote a comeback song called, imaginatively, “I’m Coming Back,” even though Southside hadn’t gone anywhere. It was probably more about me than him.
I wrote something that included Southside’s father, who I always liked (Ernie Kovacs, I swear), called “All I Needed Was You.” It was based on Somebody Up There Likes Me, Paul Newman as Rocky Graziano.
I got a nice melancholy song from Bruce, the kind I could never write myself, “All the Way Home,” and to complete the Jersey reunion vibe, I even got Johnny Bongiovi involved, doing a duet on “I’ve Been Working Too Hard.” It was his title so I tried to give him credit, but he wouldn’t take it. Very honorable guy. Even when he stole my logo in his early success, he freely admitted stealing it from me. See, that’s all we need. A little credit.
Unrequited Infatuations Page 24