The Soul of It All

by Michael Bolton

  Mom did have a love for music. Whenever a singer would appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, she would say, “Did you hear that note? That was a high C” or “Did you hear the vocal variation there?” I believe her running commentary and the music she sang and played throughout our childhoods helped me develop a musical ear, a strong sense of pitch, and a passion for singing. Many people of my generation remember the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. What struck me and stayed with me from that landmark event was not just how the Beatles performed, but how I heard it. When I listened to that show and my first Beatles records, I found myself sharply focused on their harmonies and how their voices interacted. My musical training was limited to saxophone lessons at L. W. Beecher, my grade school. I never learned to read or write music properly, but, either through my mother’s commentary or something hardwired into my brain, I could visualize the notes in my mind’s eye. When I sang, those notes were there, playing on the screen of my imagination.

  Dad sang, too, by the way, but did it to combat his raucous children. Whenever we were traveling in the car and the kids became too loud or disruptive, my father belted out his brassy Ethel Merman rendition of “When you’re smiling, when you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you….”

  This was Dad’s peaceful yet persuasive method for telling us to shut the hell up. If we continued to fight or yell, Dad would sing so loudly and with such enthusiasm that we had no choice but to quiet down for fear of going deaf or insane or both.

  My mother was more passionate about music. She had an extensive record collection of show tunes, and like many women of her era, she was a big fan of the dashing Mario Lanza, an operatic tenor who became a movie star. Mom had a good strong voice, and she was always taking singing lessons in hopes of performing one day. She also dreamed of making it as a songwriter. She never made it, but if you wanted to practice armchair psychology and say that I am living out my mother’s dream, complete with my excursions into opera, go right ahead.

  The first time I can remember someone commenting on my singing voice was when I was around the age of ten. It was my mother who heard me singing along with the radio and said, “You have a very good voice, Michael.” It was my first good review.

  Time after time, those closest to me, and strangers, too, noted that my singing voice sounded nothing like that of a skinny white kid. It took me years to grow into my voice, and my parents always supported and encouraged me.

  Mom has been the biggest long-term supporter in my musical career. She still shows up at my concerts when they are within a hundred-mile radius of her home.

  She and my father always supported our musical pursuits, even when they struggled to support us financially. Orrin may be the only aspiring drummer to receive his first drum kit one cymbal, one drumstick, and one drum at a time. He claims it took a year or so before he had a full set.

  CHORDS AND DISCORDS

  My father died about seven years before I made it big as an artist, which saddened me because he had always encouraged me as much with my singing as with my playing baseball and running track. With his booming voice, he was a great cheerleader at my games. The same held true with my singing. He’d always say the same thing after hearing me perform. He’d stick out that big Jay Leno chin and say: “Son, you’re gonna be big, big, BIG!”

  He always gave me three “bigs” in just that way, and that’s how I hear him in my mind even today.

  My father’s faith in my talent helped me believe in myself. He and my mother were divorced and still combatants when they called a truce and teamed up to buy me my first guitar, a one-hundred-dollar Kay. I’d opted for the saxophone as my grade school band choice because I loved the rasp of that instrument, but there weren’t many sax players in rock bands other than the Dave Clark Five back then. I never really learned to play my rented sax, but that raspy sound seemed to find its way into my singing voice.

  My friend Johnny taught me my first three guitar chords, and I returned the favor by turning him on to his first joint. (It was considered a public service in those days, following the Beatles lyrics and hippie mantra that went: “I’d love to turn you on.”)

  I taught Johnny the proper procedures and techniques for inhaling, cautioning him not to suck in too much on his maiden toke. He performed admirably, though he bogarted the joint. That was my fault. I hadn’t included the lesson on pot etiquette. Still, Johnny was not impressed with the experience.

  “I don’t feel anything,” he said.

  Disappointed, he went home.

  He called me upon arriving.

  “People were staring and following me all the way home,” he said. “I could hear them talking about me.”

  I found it hysterical, given that he “couldn’t feel anything” from the pot when he left the house. I talked him down.

  Johnny and all my friends came to regard my mother as “the cool mom” because she didn’t buy into the reefer-madness mentality of most parents, though there were limits to her tolerance. Her coolness quotient in our eyes was established one day when she burst into my bedroom during a serious joint-rolling, pot-smoking session involving six or seven of my buddies, band members, and a couple of our girlfriends. None of us was more than sixteen years old. We had rolled massive joints using as many as eight sheets of rolling paper to create doobies the size of Cuban cigars.

  When the bedroom door flew open and my mother appeared, my friends freaked out. Everyone scrambled to hide the rolling papers, the bags of pot, and the joints. Our keyboard player was so frantic he plucked a burning joint from his mouth and put it in his shirt pocket, where it nearly smoked a nipple. Mom had to wait for the smoke to clear before she could identify all the suspects. She squinted down for a second or two before finding my face in the stoned crowd. Then she threw out an arm and opened her hand to reveal three of our giant joints in her palm.

  Buzz kill!

  Before any of my suddenly de-mellowed friends could speak or flee, my mother issued her decree: “Stop leaving these around the house!”

  She then tossed the three joints into my lap, turned, and walked out, slamming the door on our small band of astonished scofflaws.

  “Michael, man, I can’t believe your mom didn’t bust us!”

  If anyone else’s parents had caught us with the pot, there would have been serious hell to pay, so I felt a certain pride in my mom’s go-with-the-flow attitude. She didn’t encourage our marijuana use, but she felt we were doing what was typical for the times. Mom also preferred that we smoke at home rather than in public, so she didn’t want to drive us out of the house.

  I appreciated her attitude, but I took all the (hemp) rope she gave me and ran with it.

  Credit: Friedland Family Collection

  Chapter Three

  Band of Brothers

  When members of my generation reflect on the sixties, they often speak of a powerful sense of liberation, of boundaries disappearing and rules being broken. For some, this meant wandering the planet. For others, it meant experimenting sexually, smoking pot, or flouting the school dress code by growing long hair and wearing blue jeans.

  The Bolotin brothers did all that and more. We ran wild.

  Again, I followed Orrin’s lead. Tall, charming, witty, and very funny, Orrin was perfectly cast as a Greenwich Village hippie heartthrob. He had a string of beautiful admirers, some of them older than he and many of them wealthy, including fashion models, actresses, flight attendants, and at least one Playboy Club bunny. (Her name was Lolita, and she took him home from a party and kept him.)

  I first went to Greenwich Village to visit my brother, but I quickly joined the circus. In those Age of Aquarius days, the Village was like a rock festival every day of the week. Clubs that had featured jazz, folk, and poetry readings transitioned to the venues of choice for artists like Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, the Mamas & the Papas, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Carole King, Carly Simon, Roger McGuinn, Joan Baez, Richie Havens, John Prine, and Melanie. Many of
them lived in the Village, too. I may have run into them, talked to them, heard them perform, or even befriended them back then, but the fog of those years will likely never lift.

  I do recall that in those exuberant times the Village was so overrun with hippies, musicians, and kindred free spirits that straighter-laced tourists were piling onto double-decker tour buses and paying to ride through its streets to observe longhairs in the wild. For the male voyeurs aboard the tour buses—and teenage boys wandering the streets—I’m sure the biggest attraction were the females, who tended to wear gauzy tops and no bras.

  Orrin went native in the Village, and I wasn’t far behind. Our mother was probably grateful to have a few days of peace and quiet in the apartment. My father berated her for letting me roam for days at a time, but what was she going to do, kick me out of the house because I was never home? My mother always considered herself an artist and a songwriter, and she was attracted to the Village and its creative energy, too. She also thought that my brother and his friends were there to watch over me, so that gave her some comfort. Really, though, she had no idea where I was, what I was doing, or how far I had strayed beyond the fringe.

  My vagabond ways began around the age of twelve in those days of crashing with friends, friends of friends, and total strangers, mostly in New Haven and Greenwich Village, where some young hippies we knew had sublet an apartment. We had shelter, and we foraged for food or panhandled for change on MacDougal Street.

  One major draw to the Village for me was the presence of my teen crush, Cory Morrison. She was one of those irresistible hippie girls, blonde and blue-eyed with a dazzling smile. Cory was closer to Orrin’s age, and, though she claimed to “adore” me, I suspect she merely tolerated me as sort of a tagalong little brother who made her laugh. I worked hard at making her laugh, but I had convinced myself that I could win her heart once I grew taller and had some facial hair.

  Cory had dropped out of high school and immersed herself in the music and mayhem of Greenwich Village. She lived in some rich hippie’s studio apartment with seven or eight other girls. I was the only boy allowed in this wild girls’ camp. They thought I was harmless because I was younger than all of them. I may have been relatively harmless, but I wasn’t blind. Believe me, I hung out with them as much as possible. For fun we’d throw eggs at people from the roof of their building. The neighbors weren’t amused when the cops showed up and went door-to-door in search of the flying omelet pranksters.

  Cory was also my grifter partner in the Village. She’d come with me when I panhandled for pizza money. I’d collar wealthy-looking women on the street and tell them that I needed money so I could send my sister home on the train to our sick mother. Cory was a good actress, so we ate a lot of free pizza. I always reveled in the fact that Cory told me I was her favorite Bolton brother. Orrin usually got all the girls back then.

  I gave her photos of me and wrote on the back, “I love you and not like my mother and not like my sister, but YOU!” Unfortunately for me, Cory’s fondness was more sisterly. She never gave me more than a kiss on the cheek, but she did help pierce my ear with a sewing needle and ice cube one night, marking another big step in my quest to conform to nonconformity. She was certainly a major attraction for me and a reason to hang out in the Village, where every night was an adventure.

  I was young and indestructible until I wasn’t. One night I was hanging out in front of Cory’s apartment when a police squad car with two officers in it pulled up. One asked me what I was doing. I told him I was staying with some friends. Something about that reply inspired the other officer to get out of the car and pat me down. When he turned to say something to his partner, it dawned on me that there were three little pills in my pants pocket. Someone had just given them to me, and I had no idea what they were, but I was fairly certain they weren’t baby aspirin. The police officers departed, but I feared they might return, so I quickly downed the three little pills.

  The next thing I knew, I was on another planet.

  Friends found me wandering the streets in a daze. Fortunately, they showed an astonishing level of concern and responsibility by refusing to leave me in a gutter on Bleecker Street. Instead, they kept pouring coffee down my throat and walking me all night and into the morning. I don’t remember much beyond some flashing colors and a series of restaurants speeding by on wheels. My friends reported that I was very amusing except when I was nonresponsive and nearly comatose. The scariest part occurred when I ran into my mother on the street just as the brain-bending drugs kicked in. She was in the Village visiting a friend. I told her I was just hanging out, doing fine, and that I’d be home in a couple of days. Little did she know that even as we spoke a purple haze was descending upon her son.

  The next day, I ran into some people who’d encountered me during my unplanned trip into the cosmos. In honor of my state of mind they’d given me a new nickname: “Spaceman.” Looking back, I’m thankful I didn’t wind up in a hospital or a grave that night.

  The Village wasn’t all peace, brother. More than once my peace sign was returned with a pointed weapon and: “Gimme all your money, hippie asshole.” New York’s finest muggers, thieves, and thugs saw the hippies as fair game. Given my age, slight build, and penchant for wandering the streets in an addled state of mind, I must have seemed the fairest of all. Bad guys threatened me and, on more than one occasion, pointed lethal weapons at me.

  One night a friend and I were walking around the East Village, which wasn’t yet Trump territory, when two thugs grabbed me and put a large knife to my scrawny neck, which had yet to attract its first hickey. The mugger threatening to slice my Adam’s apple explained with great sincerity that he wanted all of my money. I emptied my pockets to show him that I had all of four dollars. For a moment I thought he might cut my throat just for wasting his precious crime time.

  That was a very up-close-and-personal brush with violent death in the Village. I also had more of a communal near-death experience in the same neighborhood a year or so later. There were seven or eight of us at an impromptu party on East Fourteenth Street. I can’t even remember if I knew the resident of the apartment or had just wandered in with some nomadic hippie friends looking for a party. We were chattering away when the door flew open and in walked two guys who definitely were not from the hippie tribe. These weren’t flower children, unless you are talking about the flowers displayed at funeral homes and cemeteries. They were in bad suits that fit too tightly, but it’s not like anyone would ever tell them that. I don’t want to stereotype anyone, but they appeared to be distinguished graduates from the wiseguys school of bone breaking and body dumping.

  When they came in the door, there was a distinct mood swing. We went from stoned to scared shitless before the lock clicked back in place. The two party-crashers grabbed our panicked host and shoved him into a back room. They slammed the door, and the ensuing conversation was heated and loud.

  Someone in our group suggested that the guy who lived there owed money to the wrong people and they’d sent a strong-arm collection service. In our little sector of the apartment, conversation grew hushed. I’m sure I was not the only person trying to decide whether a mad dash for the door would be a wise move or a dead end, with dead being the critical word.

  A few other fretful souls talked about making a run for it, but no one could summon the courage to actually bolt for the door. The predominant fear was that if the bad guys shot or beat our host, we’d all become witnesses and maybe collateral damage. We mulled this over while the yelling in the back room went on for about an hour. Then the shouting subsided and our host walked out, looking much the worse for the wear. He tried to calm us, but he looked terrified: “Everything is okay, but you all have to leave now.”

  We did not let the door hit our terrified hippie asses on the way out.

  Other New Haven guys my age were looking forward to their first year in high school and getting their driver’s licenses. I lived in an alternate universe. There was no normal
in my life. No routine. The temptation is to call those years a rite of passage, but really I was a lost boy. There was no passage for most of the people I was running with. They weren’t preparing for careers or working on their dreams. They were getting high as much as possible with whatever drugs were available. Some of them were hard-core and dangerous to be around, and quite a few of them didn’t make it.

  My love of music, my family and friends, and definitely some form of divine intervention saved me. My voice was a gift, people said, and performing obviously was my greatest joy, but I could not express that gift or experience that joy if getting high continued to be the focus of my existence.

  BAND OF BROTHERS

  Aside from Orrin, his record collection, and local musicians, my major musical influences in those wilding years were the Friedland brothers, Marc and Ribs, whose dad, Bob, owned Quality Plumbing Supply. Our parents and grandparents had been friends. My grandfather Izzy Gubin was a plumber, too, so their family knew him through business. We had bowling bonds, too. My father and I were avid bowlers and so were the Friedlands, whom we often saw at the local lanes. We didn’t become close friends until I was twelve years old. We first bonded over music at a teen party given by Jimmy Rozen, who was then a member of my first band, the Inmates. I walked into a room at the Rozen house during the party and was astonished to see Marc, whom I’d known only as a big bowler, playing a guitar while he held it on top of his head. I’d never seen anyone—at least no one who lived in my own zip code—pull off that Jimi Hendrix feat.

  That’s when I learned that Marc had given up his ambitions to become a professional bowler. He’d gone to a big concert where he realized there were many more hot girls following rock bands than bowlers. Since then, he’d become as obsessed with music as I was. Marc had been taking guitar lessons for a year, but he was a natural who learned to play any instrument you put in his hands.