I spent her thirty-ninth birthday in bed with her. I was seventeen.
My instincts and hormones drove me into more and more situations like that. It was like a drug. And what a great drug. I now had access to something magical, without having to let down my guard and deal with a meaningful relationship or any kind of real intimacy. I never had to worry about anyone wanting more from me emotionally.
I didn’t see any rules; I never considered the ethics of what I was doing. If somebody’s wife wanted to sleep with me, hey, that’s fine because she wants to do it. The fact that someone else was often involved meant nothing to me. That was their issue, or would be. If a woman made herself available, that was good enough for me.
The husband of the couple who owned Middle Earth seemed captivated by a girl who came in to the store a lot. Then one night, at a party at the couple’s apartment, he started hitting on that girl. I think the couple was moving in the direction of an open relationship anyway, but that night the wife seemed upset about her husband going off with another person. So I wound up in another bedroom with the wife and a German shepherd that seemed as interested in me as she was.
Hey, these people are all adults.
I didn’t want a girlfriend. I didn’t want a relationship. That was scary. But I could still get what I craved in a completely unattached, unemotional way. And situations that might have seemed intimidating to others—there was, after all, a chance that somebody’s husband might want to cut off my balls, as my dad had been threatened, or even kill me—seemed ideal to me.
I didn’t confide in anyone. I continued to exist in my own little world. But sex was now one of the forces that drove me. It didn’t matter where or with whom. I remember inviting myself to a party at a neighbor’s house one night. I just walked in. They were using one of the bedrooms as the coatroom—throwing all the guests’ coats on the bed. And I ended up taking a woman into that room and screwing on top of all the coats. A few people came looking for their coats as we were going at it, and they were absolutely aghast. But I didn’t care. Boundaries as far as what was appropriate simply did not exist to me. Where I had been alone with my music not long before, now I had sex. Sex! The beast had awakened in me.
Another time a girlfriend of my sister’s slept over at our house, and I tried to crawl into bed with her. She pushed me out of the bed. The next day my sister told my mom. I thought it was hilarious. In fact, it was a bonus to me that my parents were put off by my behavior. That just made it all the more appealing.
I saw music differently now, too. When I saw Led Zeppelin in Corona Park, in Queens in August 1969, in front of fewer than two thousand people, the sexuality of what they were doing was palpable. The show was in the New York State Pavilion from the 1964 World’s Fair, a strange semi-open-air facility with a mosaic tile map of the state on the floor, a multicolored Plexiglas roof above, and flying saucer–shaped forms perched on columns nearby. Jimmy Page’s sound hit me with the same impact that Beethoven had when I was a little kid. He wasn’t just a great guitar player, he was a visionary who composed and pieced together sonics to perfection. Led Zeppelin took a music form that was by then familiar—blues-based rock—and made it into something new, and something all their own.
Robert Plant sang like a banshee—I didn’t know anyone could sing like that. I’d seen Terry Reid and Steve Marriott, who had sort of laid the groundwork for what Plant was doing, but Plant was better, more commanding, more magnetic, more consummate. He created a style that didn’t exist before. And for all his qualities as a singer, he was more than just a singer. Robert Plant was the physical embodiment of a rock god. Nobody looked like that. He was an archetype in the making. I remember the next time I saw the Who, Roger Daltrey had grown out his bouffant hairdo into long curls—aha, he wants to look like Plant, I thought. Everybody wanted to look like Plant and sound like Plant.
Everything on that summer stage was stunning. It was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a religious experience.
I had gone to the show with David Un, whom I still saw sometimes, and afterwards I said to him, “Let’s not even talk about that. Let’s not talk about the show because anything we say will cheapen it.”
I’ll never, ever, see something this perfect again.
Music, I knew, still represented my salvation and the ultimate solution to my deep-seated insecurities. I wanted the validation I had felt playing in front of crowds. While the Post War Baby Boom hadn’t made a penny, we had played some gigs at places like the Beehive; I also liked playing the showcases at publishing companies. So I started playing with Matt Rael again, the little brother of Jon from the Post War Baby Boom. I had played with Matt a lot a few years before, and now we both cranked up our Fender blackface amps and started experimenting, sometimes joined on drums by Neal Teeman. Often, we turned all the tone and volume controls on the two amps all the way up and created a trebly wall of noise.
We managed to score a few gigs at a hippie venue called the Bank, in Brooklyn. The building was the headquarters and home of some sort of commune, spread over several floors of an abandoned bank building. One of the floors was covered in hay, and kids could get donkey rides there. We played on another floor, creating a loud wall of noise, our guitars screaming nastily. Matt didn’t even face the audience for most of the performances.
It was fun to be playing again, but clearly this wasn’t the group I was going to bet my future on. Thoughts of the future began to eat at me as the end of high school loomed. I was coasting through senior year and had to think about my next steps. The pressure I began to feel wasn’t about money per se. What bothered me was that other people were laying the groundwork for their future security. They were making plans to go to college and learn trades. I wasn’t.
Much as I believed in myself, there were no guarantees about making a career in music. Kids in my neighborhood were following their parents into medicine or law. Meanwhile, my hair was below my shoulders and I was an aspiring rock god. The percentages, I knew, were not in my favor. I spent countless scary nights sitting up thinking, What the hell am I doing? No matter how sure you are of yourself, you’re going to have some dark moments of doubt. Your self-belief gets questioned, even if it doesn’t disappear.
I lay in bed, thinking. I had a plan. Sort of. It was more of a goal than a plan, really. I had something I knew I was working toward, and something I was gambling on. But there were no milestones along the way to check off—it wasn’t like working toward becoming an optometrist.
What if? What if I don’t make it?
The fears came at night.
Eventually I plotted out a scenario of last resort. I would work for the phone company. That was a well-paid union job with good benefits. And if I could get a job as a phone installer—and they were advertising for them at the time—I would be able to work on my own, away from people, away from any bosses. I could do that. I would drive around in a van and install phones. On my own.
9.
Matt and I began to argue at rehearsals. I thought that we were just messing around more than creating something or moving forward. I also felt that he should face the audience instead of his amp when we played gigs. Things came to a head one day when Neal and I asked him to turn down his amp while we were practicing.
“Turn down!” we shouted.
“No!” Matt shouted back and kept playing, as loud as he could.
So Neal and I called it quits. We walked out, and the group was done. Matt and I remained friends—even started working together as taxi drivers—but I think it was a relief for him in some ways not to be playing with us anymore.
Of course, I wanted to keep playing, and since I’d been turned down when I went solo to the publishing companies, I felt a band was the right way to go again. Neal, who was working part-time at a recording studio by now, heard from a friend of his about a guy named Steve Coronel who played lead guitar. So we called Steve and got together, worked out a few covers, played a few of my originals, and started b
ooking gigs.
The band with Matt had never had a bass player, but Steve wanted to bring one in. “I know this other guy,” Steve said.
The guy’s name was Gene Klein, and he and Steve had played together as teens in a band called the Long Island Sounds. Gene was living somewhere out of town now, Steve said. He was apparently a few years older than I was and had already graduated from college. I didn’t care whether he lived in Sullivan County or Staten Island; if there was a possibility that we’d be moving toward creating a real band, I was all for it.
One night I went over to Steve’s Manhattan apartment in Washington Heights, not far from where I had lived as a little kid. Steve’s room was painted black. And in the room was a big, burly guy.
“Stan,” said Steve, “this is Gene Klein.”
Gene had long hair and a beard under his double chin. He was very overweight. I was pretty stocky back then, but this guy was huge. He was wearing overalls and sandals and looked liked something from the then-new country music TV show Hee Haw.
Gene made it clear right away that he didn’t see us as his musical equals. He played some songs for us that I thought were sort of goofy. Then he challenged me to play one of my songs, so I played something called “Sunday Driver,” which I later retitled “Let Me Know.” He seemed completely thrown that someone besides John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Gene Klein could write a song. It was a moment of realization for him—here was another guy who wasn’t famous who could actually write a song. He was visibly taken aback. He mumbled, “Hmmmm.”
I was annoyed that he saw himself as operating at a level that qualified him to pass judgment on me—as though all that mattered was his approval. Particularly because I hadn’t thought much of his songs, the idea that he was judging me seemed arrogant, condescending, and ludicrous. He made it clear that he felt himself to be judging from a higher plane, and I didn’t like that at all. Gene, of course, had no clue about my ear, which was covered up by my hair, but I was preprogrammed to dislike being scrutinized and judged. It wasn’t a nice thing to do as far as I was concerned, and I wasn’t eager to work with the guy.
Another night, Steve, a bass player named Marty Cohen, and I played a free gig at a coffee shop on Broadway and 111th Street called Forlini’s Third Phase. The place was lined with Styrofoam, and we played with a bunch of amplified gear. We played some originals and some covers, including Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen,” and the crowd got into it. Gene came to that gig, too, because Steve had borrowed some of his gear, and he was clearly impressed.
At some point after that, I answered an ad in the alternative weekly the Village Voice for a guitar player. When I rang the number, I found out the guy who had placed the ad, Brooke Ostrander, was the keyboard player in a band looking for a lead guitarist, not a rhythm guy like me. That was the end of that.
But not long afterward, Gene called me and asked whether I would come over to New Jersey and work on a demo tape his group was trying to finish. He wanted me to come for a day or two. I agreed. Strangely, it turned out the group was working at the home of their keyboard player, Brooke Ostrander, and this was the same band Brooke had placed the ad about. Brooke was already a school music teacher. Gene, too, bragged about some white-collar job he had that paid five dollars an hour—a fortune at the time. They had a home tape recording machine as opposed to something fancier that might be used in a studio, but we worked all day. Toward the end of the night, Brooke and I smoked some weed using a big fish-shaped bong. I was absolutely out of my head, and with the workday done, we listened to Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull until it occurred to me that I didn’t know where I was sleeping that night.
“Come on into the bedroom,” Brooke said to me.
Uh-oh.
That was one of the longest walks I’d ever taken. I wasn’t sure what to do. But when he opened the door, I saw two beds in the room. Phew! Thank you, Lord.
Working with Gene like that, I could see that we had some things in common. His family were Holocaust survivors. He was smart and serious. Even though he and Brooke were working in New Jersey, Gene turned out to live only about fifteen minutes away from me in Queens. It also turned out that he’d had a band upstate during college, and they had played live quite a lot. He had a lot to offer. He could sing well and play bass well. He could write songs. Perhaps most importantly, Gene was focused.
One thing I had figured out by then was that talent, like everything else, was just a starting point. What counted was what you did with it. I knew I wasn’t the most talented guitar player or the best singer or the best writer, but I could do all of those things, and I had a complete vision of what it was going to take to succeed—a vision that included working, working, working.
Gene wrote a lot of very odd songs. Maybe it was because he was originally from another country? I wasn’t sure. He had one called “Stanley the Parrot” and another called “My Uncle Is a Raft.” He even had one called “My Mother is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.”
Um, okay, that’s a bit weird.
Still, the more we played together, the better it got. Gene and I liked the same kind of music, and we could sing harmonies well together. I decided I wanted to work with him. I could see a bigger picture now, and despite his idiosyncrasies—as an only child, teamwork was not Gene’s strong suit—we both were intelligent enough to know how to harness ambition. And after all, it would be a lot easier to slay the dragon with a second person to help.
As we continued to rehearse together, Steve Coronel ended up joining us, too, and we slowly started to become something more and more like an actual band.
10.
In June 1970 I graduated from the High School of Music & Art, finishing just a few dozen people from the bottom of a very sizable class. I was, in fact, amazed that I had graduated at all, given how little I showed up to class.
Graduating was a mixed blessing. I was glad to have school behind me, but I was scared shitless about being drafted. The Vietnam War was in full swing, and the last thing I wanted was to be drafted. I didn’t need to go to Vietnam any more than I needed to take acid.
During years of building fear, I had managed to accumulate some medical documentation of various problems—like back pain and other things I’d seen a doctor about. One day I went down to Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan with my draft card for induction. They reviewed my records and quickly dismissed me. All my fears, the years I spent anguishing over being sent to Vietnam, had been for nothing. I told my parents the great news, how I had taken all my medical records to prove I wasn’t fit for service. They looked at each other quizzically and said, “Didn’t you know you can’t be drafted?”
“Why?” I asked.
“You’re deaf in one ear.”
Aha.
Shocked, I thought of all the times I had brought up the subject of the draft during high school. Every male approaching draft age was concerned with what was to come. I had made my fears clear to my parents on many occasions. That was one fear they could have laid to rest for me if they had ever told me I was ineligible for the draft.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” I asked.
They turned to each other, looked back at me, and shrugged their shoulders. Ten more points for my parents.
It was true that I couldn’t tell the direction of sound, but I had never put two and two together. And nobody else had ever put two and two together for me.
At that time, New York state had decided to make college available to any resident, and I thought that despite my bravado about making a career in music, I had better apply to the city college system. I had already stacked the deck so much against myself—maybe this new opportunity could be the safety net I might still need.
Since I hadn’t taken any of the preliminary tests and I had terrible grades, I was admitted to Bronx Community College. I got a student loan and promptly used it to buy a second-hand blue Plymouth Fury to replace my broken-down Rambler.
When I showed up for the first week
of classes, I didn’t think many of the people looked like what I considered “college material.” They probably thought the same about me.
Despite the change of scenery, college quickly proved to be a continuation of everything I had hated about school. I still had the same basic problem: I couldn’t hear well enough to follow what was going on. And it wasn’t as if classes took up an hour a day; I was supposed to be there nearly all day. And then there were assignments on top of that. When I thought about the time I would have to devote to college, I began to see it as an obstruction. I was willing to put that much time—and more—into reaching my goal, but this wasn’t helping me do that. In fact, it was detracting mightily from it. It made it impossible. And for what? I was never going to succeed in the classroom. It was just a waste of time, and time, I reasoned, was the most precious thing I had.
This is just more of the same. I don’t belong here.
This is not for me.
I thought about the new band, the fact that I was no longer going it on my own. I thought about the ideas I had discussed with Gene—about getting a full-time rehearsal space. Sure, Gene had grown up an only child, his mother telling him he was God’s gift to the world, and Gene believing it. Sure, he had his quirks. But then again, we had real chemistry, and the two of us together were much stronger than either of us on his own. We had a battle plan.
This is not for me.
To leave yourself no Plan B is a dangerous thing to do. But going to college was taking away from my focus. For a band, focus was success. I needed to live it twenty-four hours a day, not just nights and weekends. Wasting time at Bronx Community College was sabotaging what I was trying to accomplish. I had my Plymouth now, which meant I had transportation to get to and from rehearsals at all hours.
This is not for me.
After the first week of classes, I never went back.
Part II
Face the Music: A Life Exposed Page 6