Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc.

by Howard Kaylan

  The snow falls deep out thar in the country. One day, my dad was doing something at the end of our driveway that I had never seen him do before. He was shoveling snow. It was amazing. I stood there all bundled up again and at rapt attention. He was cursing like—well, like he always did as this mongrel-looking pooch came from somewhere up the road and began to bark and snap at him. I heard the sound of the shovel, a yip of surprise from the animal, and yet more recognizable nouns from my father. Not more than two minutes later, this guy came along and asked, “What the hell is going on here?” To which I replied, “I saw my dad hit your dog over the head with a shovel!”

  “What?!” my father screamed. “Get in the house!”

  Well, he was sort of hidden from my view behind a snowdrift. I honestly thought he hit the dog. I really did. Dad never really denied it to me either. I don’t know how he weaseled out of the situation with the dog owner, but I got spanked. Big-time. And I was never allowed to forget it. Ever. Into my forties, I heard about the dog and the shovel. But you know what? I still think he did it. I saw my dad hit the dog over the head with a shovel. And I’m sticking to it.

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  About twice a year, Mom and Dad would shake my brother and me awake in the dead of night, dress us in our warmest sleeping-bag jackets, and cart us off to the train station. We would then board the 6 A.M. New York Central for a trip back to the city to visit Grandpa and his wife, who everyone called Tante. On one particular trip, we somehow managed to get tickets to see the filming of a television show in Manhattan. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. It was The Phil Silvers Show, or, as it was known at the time, You’ll Never Get Rich. I remember the episode vividly. It was the one where the troops in Ernie Bilko’s barracks convince the eternally bald sergeant that he is somehow regrowing his hair. I’ve seen that very show in reruns many times in the years that followed, and I swear to God, I can hear my nine-year-old self laughing a little too loud and a little too long. I loved Bilko and I loved showbiz.

  One second-grade afternoon, I got pissed off with everything and decided to run away. So I started walking toward school—the only direction I had ever gone—picking up empty bottles along the way. It was a two-mile walk to the town of Whitesboro, where I traded the many bottles in my paper bag for an ice cream sandwich, a Pepsi, and a Superman comic. It took me forever to get home. It was dark and there were no lights on Cavanaugh Road. My dad was pissed off. I got another beating. He was definitely getting better at this.

  Each day, I would ride that stupid yellow bus home from Whitesboro High School, where we little kids were tolerated on the town’s only campus, and rush inside just in time to watch Kate Smith on TV. I really can’t explain this one. Kate Smith was a coloratura soprano of amazing voice and girth. I swear, the woman must have weighed in at three and change. She had a daily variety show where she would warble “God Bless America” and her trademark, “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.” I hear that stuff now and I can’t believe that I was ever, ever into it, even as a fetus. But she was great. Kate was old-school, with a laugh to match her intake, and, for whatever reason, I needed her. You know when your body craves vitamin C and you’ve got to get your juice on? That’s what big old fat Kate was to me, music juice.

  The other television ritual that my family routinely enjoyed was Uncle Walt’s anthology program originally called Disneyland and later Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. Week after week, my brother and I watched as Walt supervised and thousands of workers built the fabulous resort destination from out of a Southern California orange grove. They dredged canals and turned farmland into Tomorrowland. Steamships and castles and cowboys and Mickey. Man, did I ever love Mickey! I wanted to be there more than anything else in the world. Mom showed me where Anaheim was on the big map of America and then she showed me the location of Marcy, New York. My heart sank. I would never get to Disneyland and that was all that there was to it. Uncle Walt was now handpicking a bunch of talented kids for his new Mickey Mouse Club show. There they were, rehearsing for Disneyland’s big opening day. They were going to be in the big Main Street Electrical Parade. Man, those little girls were cute. They all had their names on their shirts. I closed my eyes and tried to picture it, but the vision never did come. There was never going to be a Mouseketeer named Howie. I was light-years and 3,000 miles away. I wrote off my chances and got back to the reality of my snow-filled days.

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  When I was in third grade, Mom was absolutely convinced that Dad was having an affair with the lady next door, Jennie. My parents would scream at each other for hours at a time and my brother and I would hide in our double-bedded room and play records. The best thing that my folks ever did for me was to sign me up for something called the Children’s Record Guild. Every month I would receive a new record that I could play on my very own record player. Now my dad could listen to his Lou Monte albums and the hits of his generation in absolute peace. And I could crank up the volume on some space travel adventure or Davy Crockett or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I think Dad was having that affair with Jennie. They had that look when they were around each other. Jennie’s husband put up a chain-link fence and bought an enormous boxer dog.

  A few months later, I skipped a grade and we moved away. I was suddenly thrust into fourth grade. I knew no one in my class or the next grade either, and I really didn’t care. Those Disney songs and Kate Smith saved me. Those wonderful recordings were my only safe place as a kid. That and my newfound joy of cooking. Of course, those activities were no substitute for actual parental contact. If only my parents had spent a little more quality time with my brother and me. I was already the youngest old bachelor I knew.

  THREE

  Westward, Toward the Matterhorn!

  I was the world’s luckiest kid. My father had been offered a job with General Electric in Los Angeles. I was going to Disneyland! It was a miracle. The household was frantically packed and my father traded the ’47 slope-backed Chevy for a 1951 slush bucket model with four doors. This was the kind of car in which a family could drive across the country in style. Westward, toward the Matterhorn, ho!

  The journey took two weeks. We stopped in DC; at Carlsbad Caverns, in New Mexico; to visit my mother’s sister in Phoenix; and, finally, in Sin City, USA. See little Howie in Las Vegas. We had dinner show tickets to see Jack Soo in Flower Drum Song. It was amazing and hilarious. This is a great many years before he was in Barney Miller. Allan and I had Shirley Temples with little red umbrellas in them. We walked down the then sparsely developed Vegas strip and literally wandered into the best show in town without knowing it. Seeing it changed my life forever.

  The show was in the lounge of the Sands Hotel, so my dad didn’t mind. He didn’t have to come up with any cover or minimum charges for a lounge show. In we walked. We spread ourselves out at a tiny table for four just as the house announcer introduced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Sands Hotel is proud to welcome to the stage Sam Butera and the Witnesses with Louis Prima and Keely Smith!”

  Louis and Keely invented a style of cabaret that my singing partner Mark and I later adapted (all right, we took it, okay?) and still use in every single performance. Louis would clown it up, big-time, while the lovely Indian maiden, Keely, would stand as stiffly as a mannequin and sing in her mesmerizing style, seemingly oblivious to her husband’s mad antics. Only eight or nine short years later, those two fat front men in the Turtles were cashing in by doing the very same thing. If you don’t know who they were, maybe you remember David Lee Roth’s big hit “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody”? That was a note-for-note cover of Louis Prima’s arrangement. Seriously, if you’re still drawing a blank, get a DVD or go on YouTube and check out their nightclub act from the ’50s and ’60s. They were amazingly ahead of their time. Hey, Sinatra loved them. The whole business loved them. They molded me.

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  We arrived in L.A. with no place to live, so we spent the first months of my tenth summer stay
ing with my cousin Beebe and her family in Panorama City in the central San Fernando Valley. Right away, we went to Disneyland. I was not disappointed. I had arrived. It was like I had accepted my new, sunnier state quite naturally. Zip-a-dee-do-dah. We found an apartment in Culver City, not far from the airport, and my dad continued to be a G.E. employee. Our place was tiny and upstairs in a ten-family unit. My only solaces were a teenager named Judy who lived downstairs and taught me how to roller-skate, and Johnnie’s, the takeout restaurant on the comer of Sepulveda and Washington whose sign proclaimed it the Home of the Original French Dip Sandwich. Johnnie’s is still there. It rocks. I lost no weight in Culver City.

  We stayed there for a year. My dad hated G.E. and luckily landed a gig with Hughes Aircraft. We moved about five miles south to the suburb of Westchester, where LAX is located. And into a real house, at 5994 West Ninety-Sixth Street. The entire area is now airport parking. I pass my former home site every time I rent a car from Hertz. It’s weird.

  I was still in fourth grade. Six weeks later, I was bounced up to fifth grade. My teacher was Mrs. Koontz, who nominated me to appear on this television program on the local CBS television station along with three other panelists from my grade. We were to compete with another fifth-grade class from somewhere else in Los Angeles, and the winning school would receive a TV set. The show was broadcast live on a Sunday afternoon, and the host was a very well known local news anchorman. I was nervous. I couldn’t speak. I froze. I answered no questions. My school lost. I was the goat. I was Charlie Brown. I was depressed and humiliated in front of my parents and the world. But afterward, Mrs. Koontz took us all out to lunch at the legendary Brown Derby. I wasn’t hungry for the first time in my life. Then Mrs. Koontz forced me to order their famous Cobb salad. It was the first time that I’d ever seen an avocado. Since then I’ve loved avocados. So the day wasn’t a total loss.

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  We all had to pick a musical instrument to learn. It was a school thing and a great one at that. My uncle Lou had been a violin player, so my father pushed me toward the rosin and the bow. I couldn’t do it. Next, I wanted to be a trumpet player. They were the loudest in the band and always got to play the melody. Plus, the case was small and I was already too lazy to want to drag around anything larger. But I sucked on trumpet. It made my cheeks hurt and I sounded awful. Then I found the clarinet and it came naturally to me. My fingers felt exactly right on the keys and, after I’d practiced my embouchure for a few weeks, my notes actually outnumbered my squeaks.

  I took clarinet lessons from Mr. Art Ferguson at the nearby Westchester Music Center for five years. The man was a saint. I joined the Westchester Youth Band under the directorship of one tough lady, Fern Jarris, and learned to march in formation and read much off of tiny lyre-mounted sheets of music. We marched in every parade held in Southern Cali without fail and won tons of awards. We wore purple and gold with giant Ws on our chests. We would practice behind the music store. My parents came to almost every parade.

  There was this trumpet player girl in the band. She was twelve years old too. She was adorable and somehow familiar, but I couldn’t place her face. I would just stare at her. She was the one who finally got up the courage to talk to me, wandering over at a break during rehearsal to introduce herself. Her name was Sherry Alberoni, but she was also known as Sherry Allen. When she put on her T-shirt and went to work she became Mouseketeer Sherry. Yes, oh yes, oh yes! We hit it off. We went on little-kid dates to the movies and for burgers. I would often ride my bike past her house and sit there for hours just waiting for her to look out her window or wave to me. I wrote a song for the two of us and we practiced with a backup band and performed “Sort of In Between” at the band talent show. She was great and really sweet to me. And suddenly I didn’t feel like such a nerd. Got a little respect from the kids in school too. Only twelve but mack pimpin’ already! I saw Sherry recently at some concert. She looked terrific. We shared a moment of something bigger than the two of us, and then she was gone.

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  During the daytime, I was all study and serious, but after school the animal was changing. I had been given one of those newfangled Japanese transistor radios, and with its help I would while away the summer hours mowing the back lawn or lying on the hammock, gazing at the clouds and listening to the Dodgers.

  Sometimes it was difficult to hear the game on the tiny speaker, so I would twist the dials for the best possible reception. But the only station that came in with any volume at all was this bizarre rhythm and blues station called KDAY at 1580 on the AM dial. KDAY was the coolest thing I had ever heard. With the assistance of Art Laboe and other rock radio pioneers, I was introduced to the Spaniels, the Del-Vikings, the Crests, the Marcels, Fats Domino, and Jerry Lee Lewis. I had found my music. Some part of me already knew. Now, school days couldn’t end early enough. I would rush home, crank the set to channel 7, and anxiously await Dick Clark and his American Bandstand. Now I had a new goal. I had to get on that show, even though it was still broadcast from Philadelphia at the time.

  I was still ripping the labels from the records I truly loved and replacing the artist’s name with mine—Howard Kaylan.

  I would play disc jockey in my room and introduce my songs with lines like, “Here’s the new hit from Howard Kaylan—this kid’s going places.” Stuff like that. My folks left me alone a lot.

  However, there were already obstacles in my young path, namely, my impending bar mitzvah. My folks were twice-a-year religious, so this going-to-Hebrew-school stuff was brand-new to me. It was a pretty easy thing: I would just walk to classes after school at the now defunct Airport Junior High. This huge guy named Les would harass me every time I walked there, but since another bully, Dale, used to beat me up when I walked home in the other direction, I never felt strongly about making a choice. Dale would resurface later in my life, and Les was the guy who taught me how to smoke. Once he realized that I wasn’t running from him anymore, he gave up and offered me one of his Marlboros. We’d sit on the stairs of some apartment building, shielded from the street, and pretend to be hoods. We weren’t. Les was fourteen. It must have been sad. I rocked at my bar mitzvah, but I abhorred all the hoopla and I jumped off the organized-religion train that very day, never to return.

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  Another school friend, Harvey Miller, persuaded me to get into shoplifting with him at the store where he used to buy his own cigarettes. He told me to watch what he did and to copy him exactly. It was all going to be fine. I strolled through Jet Liquors about five steps behind Harvey. He’d put a pack of baseball card bubble gum in his jacket and wait for me to do the same, but I just couldn’t. Harvey started to whistle nonchalantly. It only brought attention to us. Who were we kidding? There went a package of corn nuts into Harvey’s jacket and still I couldn’t do it. Then Harvey picked up a carton of milk from the cooler and waltzed out the door. The automatic bell dinged loudly and the proprietor looked up just in time to see me place a dill pickle wrapped in wax paper in my jacket pocket. I got nabbed. He called my parents and told me to stay out of his store forever. Then Harvey walked in and pretended to be shocked at my predicament. But the owner recognized him. Seems Harvey’s dad and the dude were in the same lodge. Harvey’s parents got the call and he was admonished too, and I suffered the indignities of a criminal for a damned pickle.

  But the pattern that was to follow paved the way for my higher education. Elated by the buzz of the capture, and buoyed by my parents’ reaction of unbridled laughter at any subsequent mention of the word pickle, I began my mini life of crime. I am not proud of this; I am merely reporting the facts. I graduated to records. The first 45-rpm single that found its way into my pudgy little paws was “Tossin’ and Turnin’” by Bobby Lewis. It only cost eighty cents—I started small. The first album was Ray Charles’s Genius + Soul = Jazz. Thanks to KDAY, I had heard this remarkable man’s two latest hits, the novelty “Hit the Road Jack” and the cool instrumental “One Mi
nt Julep.” I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that they were by the same guy. I thought you either played or sang. I didn’t know you could do both. In any case, I had to have his album. I loved that album. Still love that album. I walked into Westchester Music like a forty-year-old. I had a folded newspaper in my hand. I put the album inside when Fern’s son Dave Jarris wasn’t looking. I strolled out. Clean. I can’t speak for Internet pirates, but I can tell you this: Nothing sounds as sweet as your first stolen song.

  It’s not like I stole every record that I owned. I did have a paper route. Twice a week Dad would help me fold paper-thin copies of the Westchester News-Advertiser in which my mother wrote a community service column. I’d hop on my trusty two-wheeler and schlep the rags through the neighborhood and then collect a quarter each from the residents who took pity on me. It wasn’t bad, actually. I was good for about twenty-six big ones a month. And, back then, that bought a lot of Kingston Trio and Bobby Darin. (I won a radio call-in contest once. KRLA gave me two tickets to see Bobby Darin at the Coconut Grove. I took Mom as my date and we sat at the same table as Tony Butala of the Lettermen.)

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  Dad just didn’t get the music I was devouring. When it came to comedy, though, sometimes we spoke the same language, but not always. He thrived, as did my mother, on our Sunday afternoons spent listening to Stan Freberg’s brilliant radio satire. I’d laugh myself silly, sometimes almost enough to forget about the impending boiled meat or tasteless chicken dinner. My father’s laugh was infectious and I really never heard enough of it. He shared my love of Ernie Kovacs and Sid Caesar, but he never understood why I never laughed at Red Skelton, who scared me. Victor Borge I got. Every morning, Dad listened to Bob Crane on the CBS station and he was truly hilarious. Danny Kaye made Dad laugh. Jerry Lewis didn’t. I love Jer. He never got Soupy Sales either, and no one, in my opinion, was funnier—or a nicer guy—than Soupy. I was president of the Soupy Sales Fan Club when I was fourteen. Five years later, I was in Soupy’s apartment, higher than I had ever been. Life is full of possibilities.