White Bicycles

by Joe Boyd

  Revelations exploded out of the TV set daily: no New Jersey radio station played music like this, at least not before we had to start our homework in the evening. The years 1954 to 1956 were the great cusp, when black music was discovered by white teenagers and sold millions of records. The horrified guardians of the nation’s morals feared the underclass world it represented and the miscegenation implied in its rhythms; major record labels hated it because they didn’t understand it, putting them at a disadvantage with buccaneering independents like Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic, the Chess brothers, Lew Chudd of Imperial, Morris Levy of Roulette and George Goldner of Gone.

  The world revealed every afternoon fascinated us. I had a crush on a duck-tail-hairdo’d girl from South Philadelphia named Arlene, who wore sleeveless blouses and tight black skirts. During one roll-call, Horn asked a boy named Vinny to explain the diagonal bandage across his cheek. In the deepest of Delaware Valley accents (the home city is ‘Phiwy’ and you dance on the ‘flaw’) he said: ‘Wew, uh, Bawb, I ran into a daw.’ The next morning in my seventh-grade classroom we felt very worldly speculating about the length and type of blade responsible for Vinny’s wound.

  We were respectable middle-class kids. There were a few DA haircuts and raised collars in our class, but they weren’t really serious, at least not Philly-serious. Princeton kids would never perfect the dance steps and clothing styles paraded on Bandstand. The bourgeoisie can only borrow its culture from below and above – and America never did have much of an ‘above’. The sullen insouciance of the Italian kids was intimidating enough, but we had no hope of matching the swagger of the vocal quintets as they walked onstage, or the shake of the head that freed their processed hair to tumble over their foreheads, or the snap of the fingers as they crossed their feet preparatory to an elegant spin as they ooohed and waahed behind the lead singer.

  Horn delegated the chart countdown and the interviews to a rota of regular girls, always blonde and built. They were calm and professional while making announcements from the tacky podium (no waving to friends or giggling) and completely at home interviewing dangerous-looking pompadoured black men in sharkskin suits. It was not lost on us that these were probably the only occasions on American TV in 1955 when white girls and black men could be seen in such close physical proximity (Bandstand dancers being almost entirely white, of course).

  At the close of every programme the charisma-free Horn would thank the guests, the technicians and his producer, Ernie Mamarella. We loved the name Mamarella. I would like to think we caught its curvaceous resonance, but it probably just sounded funny.

  One afternoon early in the summer of 1956, we were stunned to see a small unremarkable man in Horn’s place. He followed all the show’s rituals without once mentioning the host’s name. At 4.30 he simply said, ‘This is Ernie Mamarella saying so long until tomorrow.’ Speculation began on the school bus the next morning and continued between classes. After lunch, a group of us were talking in the hallway when Pat Fischer, a clever black girl with reddish pigtails, overheard our conversation. ‘If you want to know what happened to Bob Horn, you better get yourselves a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer,’ she said, and disappeared into science class.

  After school, one of us went to the news-stand while the rest grabbed a booth at the local luncheonette. We examined each page until we came to the headline reading ‘Disc Jockey on Morals Charge’. The position atop the podium could be earned, it seemed, by visits to a motel with Bob. Horn was accused of statutory rape and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

  Sixteen years later I was living in Los Angeles and running the music department of Warner Brothers Films. Ted Ashley, the company president, asked me to ‘take a lunch meeting’ with some famous TV producers who were pitching a series of music films. When I heard their names, I could barely contain my eagerness. In an Italian restaurant in Hollywood, I asked Ernie Mamarella about that day.

  News of Horn’s arrest had arrived late in the morning, he said, leaving him no option but to fill in. Afterwards, the station bosses announced they were pulling the show. He pleaded and cajoled, pointing to its minuscule budget and remarkable ratings. They agreed to give him until noon the following day to find the most clean-cut, above-suspicion, white-bread, all-American disc jockey in God’s creation. Mamarella told me he drove all over Greater Philadelphia that night interviewing one leering, seedy, unshaven DJ after another. He was on the point of giving up when someone suggested a late-night jock in Reading, an hour north-west of the city. He arrived about two in the morning as Dick Clark – the other half of my 1972 lunch date – was spinning records for local insomniacs.

  For Americans, the denouement of this story lies at the heart of our popular culture. Clark, his white shirt collar outside his blazer, his smile as bright as a toothpaste commercial, started work the next day. Within six months, the network was pumping the show into every market in America. Arlene, Vinny and their friends became teen icons. For the next three decades, American Bandstand beamed an ever blander version of popular music into millions of homes, making hits, creating stars and homogenizing the dance steps and fashions of American youth.

  The WFIL-TV studios were in North Philadelphia, a few blocks from the now derelict station where express trains used to stop before turning west towards Chicago and St Louis. Alighting passengers descended an iron staircase to the then-noisy immigrant streets below. Clark and Mamarella told how they rented an office above a barber shop opposite that stairway. Brill Building men in snap-brimmed hats and dark suits would catch the 11 o’clock from New York and join them for lunch at the coffee shop next door, bringing briefcases stuffed with cash or contracts giving Dick Clark Productions a share in the publishing rights to the B-side of a new single. That afternoon, their records would be played to millions of teenagers across America. In those days, ‘payola’ was considered just good business. (It still is, but the methodology is more subtle.) The smart money – the big money – was on white stars and safe music.

  In a used bookstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico, many years after my encounter with Clark and Mamarella, I came across a fevered but well-sourced history of the events of the summer of 1956 written by Stanley Blitz, a fan of Horn’s. Clark, he claims, had been waiting in the wings at WFIL radio, not out in Reading, and the rape and drunk-driving charges that cost Horn his job were a set-up. WFIL-TV was part of the media empire of Walter Annenberg, later Nixon’s ambassador to London, and Mrs Annenberg evidently hated the kind of music Horn played. The deeply religious station manager was also revolted by Horn and his hipster ways. By the time he was found not guilty of molesting the girl, Horn was a forgotten man in Philadelphia, although not by the many Bandstand ‘regulars’ who wrote to Blitz of how much they loved him and how the show had lost its soul with Clark.

  My brother and I were appalled by Dick Clark from his first day on air. Before long, prefab rockers like Fabian and Frankie Avalon started edging out the doo-wop groups. In a year or two, the rock’n’roll era was over, replaced by chirpy corporate pop. Like most non-conforming kids, we began to look further afield for our musical adventures.

  Chapter 2

  THERE IS A NAÏF SKETCH from the 1820s of apprentices at a New York market watching black kids ‘dancing for eels’ on overturned stall tables. The white boys lean forward, fascinated by the exuberance of the dancers. Warwick and I and a few of our friends were like the boys in that old drawing, leaning towards a culture we sensed held clues for us about escaping the confines of our middle-class upbringing and becoming male sexual beings. For Christmas one year, my maternal grandmother – a woman who didn’t know Louis Armstrong from Louis Napoleon – accidentally gave me one of the great compilation LPs of all time, RCA Victor’s Encyclopedia of Jazz, with tracks by King Oliver, Duke Ellington and Sleepy John Estes. From its first spin, we were completely hypnotized by it.

  When Warwick and I began listening to old blues and jazz records, the fraternal fighting that had marked our childhood c
eased. Fellow obsessive Geoff Muldaur moved to Princeton soon after and the three of us would spend long afternoons exploring singers, soloists or genres by playing every relevant track in our collections. The artists appeared in our imaginations like disembodied spirits in front of the hi-fi speakers as we listened.

  When I returned to Princeton at the end of the 1960 summer holidays prior to my first semester at Harvard, Warwick and Geoff were full of excitement. They had discovered a Philadelphia radio station with a late-night jazz and blues show hosted by Chris Albertson. We were not alone! The revelation on the previous week’s broadcast was that Lonnie Johnson was alive and well and working as a cook in a Philadelphia hotel.

  That weekend we played track after track from Johnson’s long discography. Born in New Orleans at the turn of the century, he came up the Mississippi to St Louis and began a career as a crooning blues singer. His music evolved from country blues in the 1920s to an urbane Chicago style in the ’30s and slick ballads in the late ’40s. He was a brilliant and versatile guitarist who recorded duets with white jazz star Eddie Lang and cut dazzling solos with Louis Armstrong’s and Duke Ellington’s orchestras. Listening to his seemingly numberless recordings, we tried to absorb the notion that he was just an hour and a half down US Highway 1, living in obscurity.

  A borrowed phone directory revealed Johnson, Lonnie at a North Philadelphia address, the blackest area of the city. We dialled the number. ‘Is this Lonnie Johnson? The Lonnie Johnson who recorded “Blue Ghost Blues” in 1938? Yes? Would you come to Princeton and play a concert next week? Yes, I think we can manage fifty dollars.’

  We looked at each other in amazement: we had booked Lonnie Johnson! We commandeered a neighbour’s large living room and ordered our friends to attend and bring a dollar each for the kitty. When the day came, we borrowed Geoff’s father’s Rambler and headed for Philly. Outside a downtown hotel, a neatly dressed grey-haired man stood by the kerb with a guitar case and a small amplifier.

  Lonnie seemed as pleased to see us as we were to see him. He told of returning from a European tour in 1951 to find that his girlfriend had run off with his money, guitars and record collection. Rock’n’roll was coming in and he didn’t have the energy to fight it; he hadn’t played a gig in eight years. When we reached rural Pennsylvania, Lonnie marvelled at the fireflies in the summer twilight, the trees and green lawns; it had been years since he had been out of the city. He answered our eager questions and laughed gently. When we ogled a girl walking beside the road he added to our teenage lexicon of essential phrases by warning us to beware ‘the fuzzy monster that causes all the trouble’.

  When we got to Princeton, the room was full. No one had the faintest idea who he was, but as soon as he picked up his guitar all were entranced. At first Lonnie brushed off requests for blues and sang standards like ‘I Cover The Waterfront’ and ‘Red Sails In The Sunset’. ‘White people always think Negroes just play the blues. I can sing anything.’ There was a beautiful black girl sitting on the floor by his chair and he started singing to her, flirting shyly. As the evening went on and everyone relaxed, the music grew more intense and Lonnie began playing his old blues. Our friends and their parents edged closer to Lonnie’s chair in the middle of the room; none of them had ever heard anything like it.

  We collected $100 for him and he was so pleased he took the train home to save us the drive. The following year he would start performing in coffee houses for the young white audiences he met for the first time that night in Princeton. He made a few LPs for Prestige Records, was reunited with Ellington at a New York Town Hall concert, moved to Toronto, where he had the support of some devoted fans, and died in 1970 having added yet another chapter to his remarkable fifty-year career.

  For me the experience meant more than just the music and the man: we had imagined something and made it happen so everyone could hear. It was the perfect sequel to the moment a few months earlier when, on a baseball field at Pomfret, my Connecticut boarding school, I had been forced to conclude that I would never star for my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates. Events of the spring season – a lowly .143 batting average, for example – meant that on the Friday before Spring Dance Weekend I was catching fly balls in the outfield while Saturday’s starters took batting practice. My girlfriend wouldn’t even get to see me play! As I pondered this depressing fact, someone in a nearby dorm turned on a radio and the new Fats Domino single, ‘Walking To New Orleans’, echoed across the field.

  In that instant, I made a connection that had previously eluded me. It now seems obvious that jazz and blues begat rock’n’roll, but there wasn’t much literature on the subject in those days. Warwick, Geoff and I saw our listening sessions as nerdish and unsexy and not to be discussed in front of outsiders. At parties, like normal teenagers, we jitterbugged to the fast ones and insinuated our knees hopefully between girls’ legs during the slow ones. The contemporary and the historic seemed unrelated. But that spring afternoon, all was suddenly clear: Fats Domino is descended from Jelly Roll Morton. Rock’n’roll is the blues! Popular music is the same stuff I listen to in my room all the time, only newer. I can be a record producer!

  Why a record producer? I had grown up listening to my other grandmother play the piano. Mary Boxall Boyd studied in Vienna with Theodor Leschitizky and assisted Artur Schnabel in pre-First World War Berlin. In the radio transcriptions that remain, she can be heard playing emotional versions of Mozart that sound like Beethoven and Chopin Nocturnes dripping with ritardandos: a true Victorian. From age three, I would sit under her grand piano while she practised. She viewed me as a soulmate, the other musical spirit in the family. Despite her Cincinnati upbringing, she thought of herself as a European manquée. She had returned to America twice to marry, and both marriages had turned out badly. (Mitigated, of course, by the second having produced my father.) She felt marooned in a cultural wasteland and drew me into viewing myself in the same light.

  I took lessons from her until I was thirteen, but never thought of myself as a musician. Listening, however, became part of my being. I had a confident opinion on anything I heard. I loved my parents’ 78s of Marlene Dietrich and Bing Crosby and seized on both rock’n’roll and pre-war jazz and blues when I turned twelve. In the spring of 1960, I had just finished reading Sam Charters’ The Country Blues, in which Ralph Peer, the pioneering producer who travelled the South recording blues and country singers for the Bluebird label, was portrayed in epic terms. In that Eureka! moment, it was clear to me that producing records was not only something I could picture myself doing – listening for a living! – but it would make the Pomfret School starting nine jealous and impress girls. From that day on, I had no doubts: I would be a record producer.

  Chapter 3

  ONE PREJUDICE WARWICK, GEOFF and I claimed to share was a contempt for white blues singers. What could be more ridiculous? When I returned to Harvard in early 1962 after a semester off working for a record company in Los Angeles, I walked into the Café Yana one evening and who should be on stage, singing Lonnie’s ‘Mr Jelly Roll Baker’, but Geoff! I was astounded. His voice was full of the timbres and signature decorations of our vocal heroes: Johnson, Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones, Don Redman of McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. I was so shocked it took me half the set to realize he was actually very good. It was a betrayal, but a forgivable one.

  The following autumn I took the meagre profits of my record distribution enterprise (wholesaling small blues and folk labels around Boston; the warehouse was under my dormitory bed) and booked one of the newly rediscovered rural blues legends, Sleepy John Estes. I rented the wood-panelled dining room at Harvard’s Eliot House: my first concert promotion. Warwick and Geoff demanded to get in on the act. Eager to re-create the vivid drive with Lonnie Johnson, we planned to pick up Estes and his harmonica player Hammy Nixon on Friday night at the Cornell Folk Festival in Ithaca, New York (their first appearance in front of a white audience), and drive back to Cambridge on Saturday. My vehicle being an unreliable
old banger, I blew most of the potential profits renting a car for the occasion.

  We got lost on the Cornell campus and by the time we arrived the show – a double bill of Estes and Doc Watson – was over. At the post-gig party, the two men – both blind – sang old hymns shared by the white and black communities of the rural South. We noticed a dark-eyed beauty with a long black braid accompanying the Watson party on fiddle or keeping time with a set of bones. Geoff was too shy to talk to her, but swore he would marry her. It was the young Maria D’Amato, later Maria Muldaur, singer of ‘Midnight At The Oasis’, my biggest hit as a producer.

  After a restless night on a faculty apartment floor, we were woken at sunrise by Sleepy John and Hammy anxious to hit the road. They were dressed in threadbare clothes, clutching cardboard suitcases held together by string. We were on the highway in a few minutes, breakfastless. As we passed through Syracuse, Hammy glanced at a clock reading 8.45 and yelled, ‘Stop! There’s a bar over there, and I believe these folkses open up about now.’ Our hopes of hearing stories about Robert Johnson or the Beale Street Sheiks disappeared down the bottles of bourbon we were obliged to buy for each of them. They were drunk by 9.30 and out cold by ten.

  I may as well have drunk a few bottles myself for all the acumen I showed when we got to Cambridge. I arranged a spot for them on the live radio broadcast that evening from Club 47 to plug the Sunday night concert. They were so amazing that the local musicians insisted on throwing a party in their honour. Eric Von Schmidt gave them each another bottle of whiskey and we invaded a large house in Newton belonging to a girl whose parents were wintering in Florida. They played for hours, people kept giving them drinks, and eventually they both passed out. At the height of the soirée, there must have been two hundred people there, the core audience I was counting on to buy tickets. By Sunday morning they had all heard their fill of Sleepy John Estes and just wanted to stay home and recuperate. All agreed it was the best party of the year but I lost a fortune – over $100.