Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards

by Al Kooper

  Okay. Now you have a picture of the jungle. Let’s drop young Tarzan in and see what happens.

  1958-1964:

  BASICS:

  MOVING TO QUEENS,

  THE ROYAL TEENS,

  GENE PITNEY, COLLECE,

  “THIS DIAMOND RING,”

  AND THE CREAT BLACKOUT

  I popped out into the world in Brooklyn, New York, on February 5, 1944 (12:15 p.m. if you’re doing a chart). When I was four, my parents got in the Conestoga wagons with all their belongings and followed the brave pioneers to the “other” borough, Queens. Unlike Brooklyn, this was comparatively underdeveloped, new real estate and at bargain prices. Our initial Queens abode was upstairs in a two-family, attached home with my father’s brother and his family downstairs. As the corner lots got snapped up over the next five years, my parents got serious and took their life savings in order to buy a one-family home two miles further up Union Turnpike on 214th Street (number 80-07 in case the tour bus doesn’t stop there). After a premature birth claimed my potential sister, it became apparent that three people did-n’ t need that big ol’ house and we moved another mile up Union Turnpike to an apartment in a six-floor elevator building surrounded by two other six-floor elevator buildings.

  The area south of Union Turnpike was primarily low-income, World War II veterans’ housing in the area between Union Turnpike and Jamaica Avenue. The area above it was middle-class affluent from Union Turnpike to 73rd Avenue. It was right in the middle of these two factions that I really grew up from the ages of twelve to twenty-one, and where my mother resided until March 1998.

  Early on, when I was six years old, my parents took me to a friend’s home that had a piano. I had never had access to one before and sat down fascinated by it. In an hour, I was playing the number one song at the time, “The Tennessee Waltz,” albeit on the black keys. (You know, Irving Berlin only played on the black keys. I should never have integrated my playing!) My parents were impressed with this apparent gift from God, but alas, they could not afford a piano. A ritual began that day: If they were visiting someone who had a piano, I would tag along and sit and play for the entire length of their visit; if there was no piano, I opted to remain at home or was dragged along kicking and screaming.

  When I reached the age of twelve, my folks finally sprang for a spinet. Within a year, I had fallen under the spell of Elvis, and turned my back on the keyboard in favor of the guitar. It’s a good thing my mother was not aware of the post-partum defense!

  I started a kid band called The Aristo-Cats with some local lads in late ’57. We played temple and church dances for forty dollars split four ways. I played guitar and piano. Our parents took turns driving us to gigs. It was at this time I met Harvey Goldstein (soon to be Brooks) who was in a rival band, The Valentines.

  I stumbled into the professional music biz picture in 1957 at the tender age of thirteen. I’d gone to summer camp with this guy named Danny Schactman, a guitar player with a group that actually had a record out. The record was the original “Baby Talk,” which didn’t become a hit until Jan & Dean picked it up a couple of years later. Danny was two years older than I was. As a fledgling guitar “virtuoso,” I was fascinated by his comparative stardom and generosity with his guitar knowledge. We cultivated a friendship that lasted well beyond summer camp.

  Shortly before I was due to be inducted into the eighth grade, I spent a week at Danny’s house in Brooklyn. One day, we journeyed to Leo Rogers’ (his manager’s) office at 1650 Broadway. Leo Rogers was a man in his middle fifties who discovered and managed some of the more dubious one-hit wonders of that time. Leo subscribed to a comparatively underhanded style of doing business, and there were always students and stooges at his feet hoping to pick up the finer points of his locally legendary style. There was also an abundance of kids in my situation, dying for a chance to do anything for the experience it offered. We knew we were being taken advantage of, but our financial interests at such a formative age were strictly secondary. I was auditioned as a guitar player.

  The Aristo-Cats, 1958. (Left to right) Vampire Al, Joe Heyman (now a gynecologist), Bob Tannenbaum, Eric Krackow (now a Scientologist). (Photo: Lou Krackow.)

  “Okay, kid,” Leo said wearily, “show us your stuff.”

  I wailed out reasonable facsimiles of Link Wray’s “Rumble” and “Rawhide” on my Sears Roebuck forty-dollar black and silver electric guitar. To my surprise, it made everyone smile. (Later, I found out why they were smiling.) I was offered a job for that very night, backing a group called The Casuals. Since I was staying at Danny’s that week, I accepted. My parents would never have to know that their underage darling was consorting with hardened musicians long after he should have been home safely in the Schactman family guestroom. A group of us piled into a car and headed for the scene of the crime, a high school gym somewhere on Long Island.

  Even though my prior experience consisted mainly of playing along to the radio and Chuck Berry records, the gig was easy. In those days, the average set ran about twenty minutes. You’d play your hit, and whatever else was popular at the time (i.e., whatever songs the band happened to know).

  I had a cursory knowledge of the chords to the hits of the moment, so someone would just call out the key and we’d be off. Before the show you’d get an iridescent jacket and a bow tie (which never fit, not that it mattered; I usually looked like David Byrne with the Big Suit on) and the rest was pretty automatic. At the end of the evening, you might pick up fifteen dollars for your efforts. It seemed like heaven.

  From then on, whenever I had money in my pocket I’d become the phantom of 1650 Broadway. Hanging out at Rogers’ office promised an education more useful than anything junior high was offering, and when you don’t know nothin’, you got plenty to learn. If I was lucky enough to be hanging around at the right time, I might even get a shot at earning my subway fare back home for the week. Which is how I came to join The Royal Teens.

  The Royal Teens (managed by Leo Rogers) had scored one national smash with a cute little novelty item called “Short Shorts.” One day I happened to be in the office when the call went out for a guitar player. The only problem was that I wasn’t staying at Danny Schactman’s house that weekend, and so my parents had to be brought into the negotiations. I was fourteen years old at the time. Protective animals by nature, my folks demanded an audience with Rogers. Leo explained to them that the job was in Monticello, a four-and-a-half-hour drive from the city, and that he’d assure my safety by personally driving me home. Thus assuaged, my parents sanctioned the ceremonial donning of the iridescent jacket and bow tie, a move destined to fill them with remorse for many years to come.

  By the time we finished up in Monticello it was one in the morning, which already put the promised hour of my safe return well out of reach. We piled into Leo’s car, and I fell sound asleep. I awoke at 4:00 a.m. to find myself surrounded by five snoring faces, and the car pulled off the road in a cornfield. I shook Leo awake (he was the only one old enough to drive) and without a word he turned the key in the ignition and headed toward home as if he were on automatic pilot. God knows what he really was on! When I woke up again it was 5:30 a.m. and I was being dropped off in the heart of Manhattan, miles from my doorstep. Nothing to do now but phone the folks and brace myself.

  “Hi,” I said as casually as you can when you know you’ve already been tried and convicted. “We just got back into town and I guess I’ll be getting on the subway.”

  “Subway? Do you realize what time it is? Where’s Leo Rogers?”

  “Oh, he’s gone home....”

  For the next two minutes there was nothing but the sound of two mature adults going completely berserk on the other end of the line. When they regained partial control of their faculties, I was ordered to get my barely-teen-age-ass into a Queens-bound taxicab. Their treat.

  This is a scene that I’ve never been able to forget: Sitting in the back of that taxicab in the Big Suit, with my Sears guitar and cheezy litt
le 25-watt Ampeg Rocket amp in the seat beside me, watching the first sunrise I’d ever seen against the Manhattan skyline. Then pulling up in front of our house in Queens one step ahead of the milk truck. Passing my father on the front walk, he on his way to work, me just returning from mine. And that look on his face as he hurried past me, as if an inner voice was telling him, “Your son has been lobotomized by Martians carrying electric guitars. He’ll never be the same again.” It would have made a perfect portrait.

  Thus ended any pretense I might have had about leading a normal existence.

  It also ended my officially endorsed career as a musician. Leo Rogers was shit-listed, and from then on I was forced to operate undercover. The capper to the incident was that I didn’t even get paid for that gig! It turned out to be my “audition” for The Royal Teens.

  I continued my clandestine romance with rock ‘n’ roll as a member of The Royal Teens. Whenever a job would pop up, I’d have to invent a reason to be staying overnight at a friend’s house. I’d be playing in Boston, and my parents would be convinced that I was only around the corner. With an intricate network of liars covering my tracks, the deceptions usually worked. Still, my parents must have thought it odd that their son was so preoccupied with staying overnight at other guys’ houses.

  In those days there were no Elton John albums to take home and share with your parents. Rock ‘n’ roll was the line of demarcation, and the life-style attached to it had to be led surreptitiously. I embraced it all: black leather jacket (mine was actually brown—one of many such concessions), rolled-up sleeves, greasy hair, and engineer boots. I would’ve had sideburns if I could’ve grown them. A “soul patch” had to suffice: a line of hair grown under the bottom lip à la Ray Charles or Dizzy Gillespie. That I could grow.

  Naturally my parents weren’t buying any of this, so I was forced to keep a stash of contraband clothing in a friend’s garage. I’d wake up in the morning and get dressed, bid my parents good-bye, and head directly for that garage, where I’d really get dressed for school. On more than one occasion, my mother would “happen” to be driving by the bus stop, spot me dressed illegally and bust me. I think she made a point of driving that route every morning. But her plan wasn’t enough to stop me; I smuggled my clothes into school and changed every morning in the bathroom. Super-Punk!

  I worked hard at an aura of toughness, but if actually faced with a fight, the facade wouldn’t have lasted longer than the first punch. Luckily, being a musician had its advantages. The bad guys knew us and they left us alone, to paraphrase one of Brian Wilson’s songs and that’s pretty much the way it was. If I didn’t push the tough-guy pose too far, I’d never get called on it. This explains how I managed to pass through the New York City public school system in one piece.

  The one time I couldn’t avoid a fight, neither my mouth nor my guitar could’ve saved me. I was on my way home from a gig in one of New York’s innumerable lousy neighborhoods and had all the arrogance beaten out of me by three black youths in a deserted subway station. I’d recently begun an infatuation with black music, and the beating was as much psychic as physical. “Hey,” I kept wanting to scream, “if you knew how much I liked Jimmy Reed, would you do this to me?”

  “Who the fuck is Jimmy Reed, whiteboy?!” would probably have been the reply.

  To become an accepted member of The Royal Teens’ inner circle, one had to suffer an initiation as the butt of many practical jokes. State of the art was the put-on. Like we’d be driving home from a show, and one of the guys would turn and say, “Hey, let’s be honest, fellas.” That was the tipoff to the routine; the only one who wasn’t in on it was the intended mark. “How many times a week do you jerk off?” Like they’re in the habit of unlocking their most private secrets just to kill some time on the drive back from a gig. Each guy would pick a number and do his own confessional. “Now come on, you gotta be really honest, that’s the whole point of this,” doing a straight-face setup on the poor schmuck. So you’d blurt out your awful truth, and they’d take it every bit as seriously as they’d taken their fabrications. Then they’d let you sit for a couple of hours, feeling good about the bond of intimacy you’d created, until one of them would turn and casually say, “You know that thing we did back there about jerking off? Well, we all made up our answers.” You couldn’t do anything except sit there red-faced, in a puddle, thinking “Oh shit,” over and over again all the rest of the way home.

  Another favorite on the mental cruelty hit parade was a game called “Who’s The Star This Week?” One of the guys would pop the question in the dressing room, well within earshot of the newest member, who’d go for the bait immediately. “Well, every week,” we’d explain, “one of us gets to be the star and can tell everyone else in the band what to do. That means Leo, too. Like last week, Al was the star, and he had Leo shine his shoes right before we went on stage. Leo can’t ever be the star, ‘cuz he’s the manager and that means he’s always the star. That’s why we set up the star system.

  Of course it was always the new chump’s turn to be the star, and you could see him swell up with imagined authority. When Leo ambled into the room, the kid would unknowingly deliver the punch line. “Hey, Leo,” he commanded. “Bend over and kiss my ass before I go on tonight!” Leo would stand up there in total disbelief, suddenly developing a suntan that Coppertone couldn’t have matched. When all the blood reached his brain, the top of his skull would blow off. “What the fuck izza matter wichoo,” he’d scream. The kid would usually opt for the nearest exit with his tenor sax between his legs.

  When faced with an interview or the presence of somebody we didn’t like, we had a bit where we’d jabber in mock Chinese. When a normal person (in those days we called them squares) was confronted with a number of potentially dangerous looking adolescents ranting in tongues, his first impulse was to be someplace else. Which was precisely the point. It was like a square alert, a defense against a world none of us felt much a part of when we put on those iridescent jackets. But squares were such easy targets that we only used these tactics in self-defense.

  There were times when cheap laughs were the only remuneration we could expect. I was lucky to average ten dollars a night. So when The Royal Teens’ comet showed signs of cooling off, I took my ass elsewhere: to 1697 Broadway and the offices of Jim Gribble.

  Though he never seemed to be a manager in any active sense of the word, Jim Gribble manipulated the fortunes of some of the legendary local doo-wop heroes, among them, The Passions (“Just To Be with You”) and The Mystics (“Hush-a-Bye”). He was an imposing figure—a hefty 6 feet 4 inches, 250 pounds, and a slow, deliberate talker in the John Wayne tradition. In contrast to the authoritarian Leo Rogers attitude, he was incredibly patient and seemed to take genuine interest in his musicians, though it was perfectly understood that his patience would be suitably rewarded if they happened to make it big. Jim Gribble was never as successful as Leo Rogers, most likely because he lacked that razor-sharp killer instinct, but his office certainly offered more possibilities. At the ripe old age of sixteen, I was writing songs and hustling my ass into whatever sessions I could, and Gribble’s office provided a much more receptive atmosphere in which to peddle my flesh. Gribble, you see, was always very kind-hearted about your exploitation. He’d throw a token ten bucks your way for piano accompaniment at one of his several daily auditions, or sometimes just when you looked like you needed it.

  The point of connection at Gribble’s was a kid about my age named Stan Vincent, who did whatever needed to be done, from emptying ashtrays to arranging to sometimes even producing a session. Though he didn’t always get credit for his studio tasks, I zeroed in on his position as exactly what I was looking for myself. Having youth and musical aspirations in common, it was natural that we became friends. And by hanging out with him, I was assured a bit of work here and there. It’s even conceivable that in the course of our relationship we taught each other a thing or two. Stan later went on to write and produce “O-
o-h Child” by The Five Stairsteps, one of my favorite singles.

  You have to wonder what sort of a young man takes a full-grown guitar Into a twenty-five-cent photo booth with no inhibitions. New York City, 1960. (Photo: A. Photo Booth)

  I’d get out of school at noon and go directly to Gribble’s office. (The official schoolday didn’t end at noon, but mine did.) There’d be people crowding the waiting room and spilling out into the hall, each one with a hustle they hoped was better than the one that hadn’t worked for them the week before. Guys with guitars. Guys with songs. Guys with pretty faces and no talent. Guys with nothing going for them but their mouths. You were in competition for everything, from your seat in the outer office to your gig at the afternoon’s demo session, and the point of the game was to make yourself as conspicuously available as possible. The oldest profession in the world.

  It didn’t matter that you ran the risk of making the same nothing for playing at a session that you could just as easily make by sitting at home watching the Knicks game; what we were all grasping at was the opportunity for involvement. My philosophy was that you couldn’t afford the luxury of trying to be in the right place at the right time. You had to be every place at every time, and hope that you might wind up anyplace at all. As I look back, I see myself at sixteen as someone who had ten percent talent and ninety percent ambition. At age 54, I see myself with the equation completely reversed!