This depth of being has held Judy in good stead. Her recent work on her own label, Wildflower, continues a career of beauty, depth, and meaning. Her voice is more radiant, powerful, and gorgeous than ever.
We finished Judith at deadline, the last day of the year. My job was to make a tape copy of the whole thing and deliver it to the producer, Arif, at his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Duke and I didn’t have any major plans for that night, so since we had nothing else to do, I asked him if he wanted to come along with me to make the delivery.
I had gotten to hang deep with Arif during the months of the recording. He was the rare exception to the rule that the most talented and accomplished among us were assholes. Arif proved you didn’t have to pull people down to make yourself look more brilliant. Arif was cultured, well-mannered, and real.
Mr. Mardin was truly musical. There’s a scene in the film Amadeus, about Mozart, in which the court composer, Salieri, plays a ditty he has composed for the young, up-and-coming genius. The composition is pedestrian, and you can hear the obviousness of its harmonic structure. Mozart sits down and riffs on the theme, and in a few moments, turns the exercise into music. That’s the magic that a guy like Arif embodied. He exemplified tastefulness at its ultimate.
The Mardins lived in a big, old pre-war building on the Upper West Side, one of those Manhattan real estate palaces consisting of huge multi-room apartments called “classic sixes” and “classic sevens.”
Duke and I were somewhat intimidated by the building’s stately dimensions and class, but we would never show it, knowing how to be cool. We sauntered in, telling the doorman where we were headed, me with my tape in an envelope, delivery boys with a difference.
We rang Arif’s doorbell. I assumed he would grab the tape, say thanks, and we’d run off into the night, gleeful at getting that close. An elegant, impeccably coiffed woman with caramel colored skin, coffee colored eyes and black hair came to the door. She had a welcoming smile. I told her my business.
She said, “Oh, we are getting ready for a party, but Arif will be here in a minute. Please come in. I’m Latife, his wife.”
Come in? Arif was one of those legendary cats Duke and I both idolized. Here was an opportunity not to be missed. We looked at each other quickly and stepped over the threshold. Latife rushed away, and we stood in the apartment’s foyer, breathing in the wooly aroma of antique rugs, absorbing the muted glow of golden light reflected off old wood.
Arif came dashing out. He looked like a falcon with a round head and a sharp beak of a nose. He wore a white shirt with an ascot and some well-tailored trousers. His black hair was slicked back over his mostly bald head, and his thin moustache added the final touch of panache.
He reached out his hand to shake mine, as if we were old buddies, and I introduced Duke, whom he greeted warmly. His deeply intelligent eyes and confident handshake eased our embarrassment.
“Boys, good to see you!” he said in his aristocratic Turkish accent. “Sorry it has taken a minute, I’m preparing for a party.”
Before I could make excuses and turn to leave, he said, “Come in! Come in! Do you have a minute? Please!”
I stammered, “Are you sure? I mean, we don’t want to get in the way, with your party and all that.”
“No, no,” he giggled. “Please come in.”
Again, shocked, we agreed. Our feet started to rise from the ground. We were being invited inside to hang out with Arif Mardin on New Year’s Eve? This was fun.
He brought us into his study and invited us to sit down. We sat on a couch facing floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with boxes of audio tape.
Both Duke and I knew a few things about Arif. He was one of the key people responsible for the “Atlantic Sound.”
Looking at the tapes, I said, “Wow, knowing the stuff you’ve worked on, you must have some amazing tapes here.”
This was all the encouragement Arif needed. Like a kid who has been asked to show off his toy trains, Arif jumped at the invitation to play.
“You want to hear some?” he said, clearly hoping we’d say yes.
We both nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah! Of course!” we said in unison.
He rushed over to the shelves and pulled out an outtake by the Young Rascals, saying, “You’ve got to hear this.”
The Rascals were a great ‘60s New York, blue-eyed soul band that had a string of hits including, “Groovin,’” “People Got to be Free,” “Beautiful Morning,” “How Can I Be Sure?” and Arif’s first production hit, “Good Lovin’.” It was thrilling to hear an unreleased track featuring Felix Cavaliere’s deep-feelin’ voice and organ, the Brigati brothers’ background vocals, Gene Cornish’s guitar, and the propulsive pop of Dino Danelli’s drumming.
Arif was dancing. With the enthusiasm of a twelve year-old, Arif said, “Do you hear that? These guys cooked. Wait. If you think that’s something…”
He impatiently rifled through the shelves, intent on finding something he really wanted to play for us. His wife, Latife, came in. She carried a silver tray with an array of tan-colored morsels.
“I made these for the party and thought you might enjoy some.”
Arif, distractedly, said, “You must try my wife’s Turkish delight.”
Duke and I said thanks, and each grabbed one of the round, soft balls.
While that was going on, Arif had found the tape he was looking for. He threaded it onto his reel-to-reel tape machine and hit the play button. I put the sticky Turkish Delight into my mouth just as the track found its groove. Everything hit all at once. Now I knew what my jazz cat friends were talking about with heroin. The sweetness exploded in my mouth and the funk exploded in my ears. The Greeks talked about the food of the gods, ambrosia, the ideal taste, the perfect combination of ingredients, and here it was on my tongue. Through the speakers, down my ears and straight into my belly, the queen of soul, Aretha Franklin, was singing her petunias out, playing her gospel piano with backing by the Muscle Shoals rhythm section that played on so many Atlantic Records hits, on a track no one had heard, played by the guy who was there and made it happen.
Arif was in a transcendent state. He beamed, swaying his hips from side to side. He looked at us with tears in his eyes, nodding, as if to say, “you get it, you get it!” In that one moment we shared the secret of the universe and the word was one sweet, funky, turkish yes.
Latife had left the tray, and I couldn’t help but reach out and put another one of those magically addictive confections in my mouth. I feared the second could not match the first — it rarely does — but this was the time it did.
I don’t know how much longer I swirled in this psychedelic euphoria, or what else Arif played for us. From then on, it all became a blur.
But the moment stays with me forever. What this lovely man did for two boys from the depths of Brooklyn on that night transformed me fundamentally. He taught us what it meant to be really cool. When you are that good, you don’t have to lord it over others. You can be not only magnanimous, but a genuine human being as well. The thing I saw in Arif that night— no matter what he had achieved, what family he came from, or what his talents were —was that he was at heart a fan. He was a fan of the Rascals and Aretha, just like me and Duke. I’m sure that what made him such a great producer and arranger over his half-century career was that he was a fan of all the acts he worked with. I’m sure he was a fan of the Bee Gees whom he pushed to stellar heights, and a fan of Norah Jones, his last great triumph, not long before he died in 2006. In fact, I’m sure that Arif was a fan of life.
What he taught me that night is that that’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to be classy by sharing all I had with anyone open to receiving it. I wanted to take in the whole damn thing, everything that was going into my mouth, ears, eyes, and hands, and find the beauty, the sweetness, the funk in it, and sway my hips from side to side, saying to whoever is with me, an unequivocal, euphoric, turkishly delightful, yes.
TRACK SEVEN
> Too Much Too Soon: The New York Dolls
I was hanging at the front desk at “322” with Lana, the receptionist, between sessions. In walks a guy about seven feet tall. He’s got hair in that poof-spikey seventies rock post-Keith Richards mullet-esque style, but it’s blondish and longer and more outrageous than anyone ever. He’s a giant because the soles of his boots must be nine inches high. He’s got a minor gut, but this doesn’t stop him from wearing a skin-tight shirt with the occasional loose sequin and skin-tight shiny satin gray pants. His scruffy, black platform boots go up to right below the knee.
Like a freaky Frankenstein’s Monster, he lumbers up to the reception desk, and says, thickly, “Hey.”
Lana says, “Hey, Killer, what’s up?”
In unmistakable New Yawkese, he says, “Yeah. I’m here for the session.”
In a history of legendary chicks at the front desk, Lana was one of A&R’s best. Some people, they just had the natural cool for the gig. Un-flummoxed, with a perpetual wry smile, she tossed her straight-black hippie hair back and snuck a raised-eyebrow glance at me.
“Arthur Killer Kane, bass player for the New York Dolls, meet Glenn Berger. Glenn’s going to be covering tonight’s session.”
I looked at the clock. It was four in the afternoon, and the session was booked for seven. That meant they probably wouldn’t start till ten.
I reach out a hand. He shakes it limply and mumbles, “Yeah man, hey.”
Back on my seventeenth birthday, October 12, 1972, I went to see the Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center, in the old University Hotel on Broadway between West Third and Bleecker in the Village before the whole building collapsed a few years later. The Dolls were the band to see in NYC at that time. They were a bridge between glitter, glam, and punk. They were trailblazers, one-of-a-kind, harbingers of the scene to come. They dressed in trashy drag, played ridiculously loud, and blasted onto the scene with the first track on their first record, “Personality Crisis.” This was a free show on a Thursday night, their last at the Mercer Arts before going on their tour of England.
After the show, my girlfriend, Betty, who had hair as crazy as mine, gave me the ultimate birthday present. It was a good night.
So I’m looking at Killer Kane, putting it all together with the first time I got laid.
Lana, with a perfect combo of sardonic wit and compassion in her voice, said, “Killer. The session won’t be starting for hours.”
He stared at us blankly with his mouth open, looking like he was about to drool. A paramecium had to have a better functioning brain than this dude. He scrunched up his nose and kept silent for a minute. Then said, “Ya gotta TV?”
Suppressing a laugh and knowing the A&R rule of never saying no, Lana, as if she were consoling a toddler, said, “Wayyyll, let me see what I can do.”
With her usual flair, she got on the horn and called upstairs to see if we could secure a TV and a place to watch it. For those of you reading this in the mid-teens of the twenty-first century, I suppose it is fair to remind you that there were no smart phones, computers, or even cable TV at this time, so a real TV screen hooked up to some antenna was the only thing possible to entertain this empty-headed lunk for the next five hours, and we didn’t just have one lying around.
The thought popped in my head, Hey Killer, if you want I can lend you a coupla bucks and you can check out the peep shows on Eighth Avenue … But as usual, I kept my mouth shut.
The band were cutting their second and, little did we know, final album (with the original lineup), to be titled Too Much, Too Soon. The eponymously titled first album was produced by Todd Rundgren, my teen idol. The album became a cult classic but didn’t sell too well.
This album was being produced by girl-group legend Shadow Morton. Shadow had written and produced some of my most beloved hit singles, including “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” by The Shangri-Las and “Leader of the Pack,” a tragic song, which featured sound effects of a motorcycle crash.
The engineer was one of my favorites, Dixon Van Winkle. Dixon sported a walrus moustache and round gold glasses at that time. He was a tuba player who had been spotted by Ramone at the Rochester School of Music and was invited to come down and enter the playpen of A&R. He was deeply musical. He was tight with the rest of the Rochester crowd who were the most elite studio players of the time, including drummer Steve Gadd and bass player Tony Levin. My favorite accomplishment of Dixon’s was the track he cut with these guys of the Bacharach/Carpenters tune, “Close to You,” done in the style of Spike Jones, with lots of kazoos, squeals, breaking glass, goofy percussion, and sneezes.
As early as Killer was, that’s how late the rest of the band arrived. With nothing to do but wait, Shadow and Dixon, who got along like engineers and producers tend to do, sitting side by side at the console in the same soup of trying to herd these street cats, started drinking hard long before anyone showed up.
One by one, the band straggled in with an extended coterie. To the last of ‘em — lead singer David Johansen, guitarists Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain, and drummer Jerry Nolan — these guys were no joke. Like Killer, the band dressed in their satin drag 24/7. They and their entourage immediately started trashing the place. As the band coagulated into some kind of congealed mess, they plugged their instruments in and futzed around, warming up, while I ran around, moving a mic, replacing a broken set of cans. Killer had twin Marshall stacks, six feet high, for his bass setup. When he banged a note on his bass, my legs shook like plucked rubber bands, and they gave out from under me.
As I saw Johnny Thunders about to windmill his guitar, I swiftly swooped a pair of unused headphones off the floor, shoved them on my head, and stuck the plug in my pocket. I didn’t want my head to be singing a 1K tone for the rest of the week. It was still awesomely loud, and I’m sure I suffered some permanent damage.
The control room was barely better, with the monitors cranked to eleven. But loud was what these speakers were for. Out of the noisy mess something started to happen and we chaotically cut that old doo-wop novelty tune, “Stranded in the Jungle.” I loved that song.
Meanwhile, back in the jungle … the lyrics went, and these monkeys were throwing their banana peels all over the place. Lana stayed late at the front desk but gave up trying to be an agent of control and joined the debauchery. (She had a debauched streak anyway. At a party at my loft in Tribeca, she and my girlfriend of the time, another A&R staff member named Helen, invited me for a threesome during the revels. Unused to such invitations, I foolishly demurred.) Broadway Max would be chagrined when he came in the next day to see the mess and destruction, but what were any of us to do? This was rock and roll apotheosis, The Who squared, you’re not nobody unless you’re playing it to die, and most of the Dolls ended up doing just that, too much, too soon. (Billy Murcia, the original drummer, died in 1972; Johnny Thunders died in 1991; Jerry Nolan in 1992; Arthur Killer Kane, in 2004.)
At about 3:45 a.m., unable to create any order out of this mess, Shadow and Dixon drunk as shit, after flying in jungle sound effects of chimpanzees and screeching birds, decided to bail. They turned to me and slurred, “You take over. We’re leaving,” and weaved their way out of the control room, out the studio, and onto Eighth Avenue into the New York spring circus, circa 1974.
I didn’t really have much of an idea of what I was doing at that time, but no one seemed to give one flying crap, and I had no choice anyway, so I took the big seat at the console and manned a few guitar overdubs and a background vocal or two. I was feeling puffy anyway, having done a few toots in the downstairs bathroom. I needed it for sustenance.
It’s all a bit of a blur, as sessions at four a.m. could prove to be. This, though, did contribute to the development of my chops, and the cachet (to say nothing of access to cheap studio time as an up-and-coming post-schlepper) that led me to record a few seminal pre-punkers of my own. Some sleazy chap named Stan with a few dollars that I wouldn’t want to know where they came from worked me into cut
ting tracks for a band called The Harlots of 42nd Street who sometimes opened for The Dolls.
Stan invited me for a production meeting at the Continental Baths. I thought, cool, I’d never been, and had always wanted to check it out. The Continental Baths was a gay bathhouse in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel, an ornate gem of a building on 73rd and Broadway. The place put on shows, and Bette Midler and Barry Manilow, among many others, built their fan base there. At that time the Upper West Side was fairly raunchy. You just wouldn’t walk between Columbus and Amsterdam at all if you wanted to live. The Ansonia, long since renovated, now costs a pretty penny. Then, you could live there for nothing.
I descended the stairs, entered the post-Roman decadence with everyone hanging in their towels, and searched for the Harlots’ manager. I saw a guy with hair in a ponytail down to the middle of his back. He was fully dressed in this den of near and total nudity. As we had a drink, I checked out the scene and scrutinized this guy. He seemed like an innocent-enough lower-tier music biz producer. Whatever his scam was, when he was done, he convinced me to talk Max into giving us a “weekend rate,” so we could record the band.
Stan put out a single, with “Cool Dude and Foxy Lady” on the A side, and “Spray Paint Bandit” on the B side. I did a decent job, considering that The Harlots sucked in just the right way and so did I. Nothing happened with the track and the band faded into oblivion until being resurrected on the internet, where anything can find 50,000 fans, even people who like to have sex with furry stuffed animals.
We didn’t do a lot of punk stuff at A&R — our studio was too expensive. One exception was Television, who cut their great first album, Marquee Moon in studio R-2 with Andy Johns at the helm. My total punk career consisted of mixing a single for a band called Harry Toledo, and then I cut a single for Harry’s girlfriend’s band, Janis and the Bumble Bees, with a cool tune called “B Movie.”
Never Say No To A Rock Star Page 11