by Nile Rodgers
The members of the commune cleaned, cooked, and shopped, while the people who just crashed there had to pay around two bucks a night for a bed, a gourmet meal (Woody’s partner Dave was a former chef), and whatever drugs were scored with the leftover money. The first night I crashed there, it was crowded, with maybe thirty people in residence.
Outside was cold, but inside Woody’s pad it was nice and warm, even hot. The rooms we slept in were filled wall-to-wall with mattresses. We all smoked weed from a giant hookah, and the smell of it was thick in the air. Up until then I’d never felt completely comfortable anywhere, unless I was alone. But I felt so relaxed at Woody’s that I slept as well there as I did on the subway.
Everywhere I looked, people were balling like crazy. Even I, the newcomer to the commune, balled a chick that was “splitting for the coast in the morning.” A few days later my penis was oozing puss and burning like lava was flowing through it. I soon found out it was gonorrhea, which was “really common” and easy to treat, according to James. “Hey, man, that’s the clap. You just get a shot of penicillin, and in a few days, you’ll be back in business.”
The man was wise. James Irwin and I soon became inseparable. We were certainly an odd couple. He was a big and tall white guy from Evansville, Indiana, and I was a skinny black hippie from the Bronx by way of L.A. and the Village. But odd couplings were a way of life for me at that point.
James taught me how to panhandle in ten languages (even sign language) and generally became my mentor. He was very attractive to women, even though he wasn’t especially good-looking (or at least I couldn’t see it). In fact, he was filthy, a street person’s street person. But he was smart, and I don’t mean your run-of-the-mill average-genius smart. I’m talking next-level, Stephen Hawking smart, but in the hippie’s way: He didn’t believe in adding specialization and discipline to his genius. He just knew a lot about everything. I’ve rubbed up against many people with exceptional abilities in my life, but James may be one of the five brightest people I’ve met.
He had Svengali-like power over me, but I was cool with it. He also had a kind of Messiah complex, but he was generous, loving, and munificent. And when it came to me, his munificence was boundless. Under his tutelage I got politicized, socialized, and sensitized. His liberal ideology tapped into the person that I always was.
At fifteen my appetite for knowledge and growth was insatiable. And with James as my guide, I started dabbling in a myriad of political organizations, from the antiwar “flower power” groups to the Yippies and the Black Panthers, not to mention religions, philosophies, and different martial arts disciplines. And all the while, I was adding to my panhandling income by earning some decent money playing the guitar around town. Not enough to make a living, but enough to keep going with it.
I BECAME AN EMANCIPATED TEENAGER, which meant I mostly slept on the subway and in crash pads. I learned many survival tricks that allowed me to live a prosperous life. For instance, if you finessed the rotary dial on pay phones just right, all the coins emptied out like hitting the jackpot on a slot machine. I was studying Hung Gar Kung Fu under Grand Master William Chung, and a guy I knew from my temple was part of the security at the Fillmore East, and he let me in with a phony press card. I saw any show that I wanted, including opening night in March ’68: Big Brother and the Holding Company, Tim Buckley, and Albert King, whose performance moved me unlike any I’d ever seen. I remember the base of my neck getting goose bumps and tears streaming down my cheeks when I heard Albert play the guitar. His instrument called to me like mythological sirens called homesick sailors at sea. Everything in my life was finally starting to make sense.
But life wasn’t all fun and games. On April 4, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, and just two days later young Black Panther Little Bobby Hutton was shot and killed. Riots broke out, but most of the demonstrations were for the most part peaceful. After the cycle of grieving and protest concluded, hippie life returned to “normal,” again a relative term.
STREET LIFE WAS CERTAINLY a lot more exciting than living at home with Beverly and whatever guy she was with at the time. She had left Graham’s house and started to date a fan club of guys that helped to support her and little Bobby, and me on the odd days when I’d come home. This typically happened after I had a bad acid trip or got sick. Like on the afternoon of June 3, the day Andy Warhol and I wound up in the same emergency room.
I’d been enjoying the last days of spring with a fair-weather (or weekend) hippie named April. She lived at home and we’d just met that night, Tuesday, June 2, at the hippie musical Hair. After the show we went to hang out at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, when two guys approached us and said they were on leave from the military. “Can you help us score some grass?” they asked. We took them to a few of our East Village haunts and partied until the wee hours. Then they invited us down to a pad in Little Italy.
While there, they somehow slipped STP (a very powerful hallucinogen, called DOM nowadays) into one of my drinks. I started tripping my brains out and didn’t know why. I was quickly losing control. Given I was an old hand at tripping, I initially thought this was one of those fabled flashbacks I’d heard about. But it wasn’t—it was much stronger than most heavy trips—and I started freaking out and ran outside. The heartbreaking part is, I later found out that they gang-raped April after I left her alone in the apartment. I’d later find her living on the street because she decided to run away from her parents’ home after the incident. I think she was ashamed to face her folks.
I don’t remember how long I ran around tripping that day, because I was fading in and out of reality. At a police call box near the corner of Second Avenue and Houston Street, I phoned the cops. I was taken by ambulance to Columbus Hospital, a few short blocks away, panic-stricken and rapidly going mad. Even in my extreme psychotic state, I noticed dawn had just broken. I looked down at my arms. My skin had the texture and color of a lizard’s. So like any self-respecting reptile, I spread my fingers wide and tried to catch flies with my tongue.
The atmosphere in the ER was almost festive. The doctors and nurses seemed to be having the time of their lives. There were few if any other patients. Hours passed in the blink of an eye, and it was now the afternoon. Suddenly, apropos of nothing, I was whisked out of the way as a gurney smashed open the ER doors; it was bearing the body of a bloody Andy Warhol, by now one of the most recognizable and important figures in the Village scene. A crowd of people surrounded him and I became irrelevant. Though my head was still a little twisted, my heart told me Andy needed help more than me. I later read that Andy actually died on the operating table, but emergency surgery brought him back.
After the drugs wore off, I called my mom, and was released to her a little after midnight. Sober now (sort of), I felt angry about being kicked out of the ER bash.
(I actually got this resentment off my chest years later, at a dinner party where I was seated next to Andy. I shared this story with him, and he couldn’t have been more gracious. Later that night he wrote very flattering words about meeting me in his diary, which you can read after finishing my book.)
FOLLOWING THE LIZARD/WARHOL INCIDENT, I moved back to the Bronx with my mom. Hippie James moved in with us, too. Two days later Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed. That Saturday there was a peaceful gathering in Central Park in sympathy for Bobby, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Hutton. The climate in the country was hot. People were protesting, rioting, rebelling, and organizing. From my teenage perspective, it felt like something important was happening in America, and I felt the need to help. Oppressed groups were finding their voices, and I was finding mine.
James and I grabbed the D train to Columbus Circle, where people had started gathering. I was happy to be back with my ever-growing hippie family and to be part of this thing called the Movement. I wasn’t sure which affinity group would ultimately win my soul, but I knew this would work itself out in time. For now, I was happy to be with exciting, motivated people who felt
like family. You don’t usually get to choose your family, but I did and I chose wisely. Finally I fit in. I went back to living on the street. Back to crash pads, panhandling, jamming, demonstrating, balling, tripping, and the Twenty Cents Hotel, until I panhandled from a woman named Cinda Firestone.
Cinda was an heir to the American tire empire, and she had a heart of gold. So much so that she let many street people live in her Park Avenue pied-à-terre. One of those people was me. Cinda was an artist with a political consciousness. She made the film Attica, which documented the infamous prison massacre. Cinda proved that the Movement touched people in every class. What was happening in America was happening on every socioeconomic level.
My first dive into full-fledged activism came when I joined a unique section of the Black Panther organization: the lower Manhattan Section of the Harlem Branch of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. My entry into the group was another case of hippie happenstance.
In Greenwich Village there was a group of guys who dressed “in uniform” and called themselves Panthers. They used intimidation to collect small amounts of drugs and money from tourists and fair-weather hippies. They relied on the media portrayal of gun-toting Black Panthers to coerce their victims. I’d seen these Panther-looking guys in the community, but I didn’t know about their crooked extracurricular activities. They preyed on my idealism. They got me to give them money and get donations from the various peacenik and antiwar groups that I was affiliated with. They enlisted me. I thought it was really cool that these guys wanted a hippie in their ranks.
One day a notable article appeared in The Black Panther newspaper. It said all Panthers in the New York area had standing orders to show support for the widow of Malcolm X, Sister Betty Shabazz, at a rally in Harlem. I asked the bogus Panthers what time we were going to the rally. They told me they had direct orders from the Central Committee to stay underground. But I followed the orders in the newspaper.
When I arrived at the Harlem Branch at 2026 Seventh Avenue, I told the officer-of-the-day, Jamal Joseph, I was from the Greenwich Village Panthers. He assigned me to a detail. On that detail I saw people whom I knew to be real Panthers from my neighborhood, and they asked me what section I was in. I told them. They instantly realized it was the crooks they’d been trying to track down, so I led them to the shakedown artists. We issued them a cease and desist. I soon won favor of the section and was not only welcomed, but promoted to subsection leader.
Our HQ was a beautiful Twenty-first Street Chelsea town house located next door to the home of actor Anthony Perkins (Psycho) and his girlfriend, my future photographer and friend Berry Berenson. Our colorful ranks were comprised of mostly biracial brothers, if that is the current politically correct term. At the time we called them mulatto.
Most of the brothers were from the Village and had white mothers and black fathers. Some claimed more elaborate heritage: The section leader told us his Sioux name was Yellow Kidney. We knew him as Andy Steed. Our group was more dedicated to community service than armed revolution. We worked doubly hard at everything. We marched when we could have taken the train; if we had to paint the storefront, brother Steed actually art-directed and painted the Panther logo.
We were model Panthers. We studied the literature diligently, and worked overtime on the “Breakfast Program.” There was credible information that hungry children were at a disadvantage in school, so we fed them. FBI head J. Edgar Hoover deemed it “the single most dangerous program in America.” Ironically, the program was eventually adopted by public schools nationwide.
Though I only stayed in the party a few months, my tour felt much longer. It was during the height of the FBI’s successful initiative to destroy the Panthers, called Cointelpro, an acronym for the illegal “counter-intelligence program” that would ultimately crush the organization and result in my leaving. The party was infiltrated with a number of agents (who interestingly enough have since apologized and become lifelong friends with many of the Panthers they set up).
IT WAS 1970, and in a very short while I’d gone from being a wide-eyed hippie to a wide-eyed, ex–Black Panther seventeen-year-old servant of the people. Then, on one truly eventful night, a needy member of “the people” turned out to be my father.
I’d just attended the Marx Brothers Film Festival at the Thalia Theater with my then girlfriend, a radical Israeli activist named Ilana. When we left the theater, a crowd had gathered to try and help a man who was lying on a phone booth floor at the corner of Broadway and Ninety-fifth Street.
I recall making my way through a crowd and seeing the man’s feet extended out of the phone booth into the gutter. I looked up from his feet to his face and realized the man lying in the street was my dad. I was completely shocked by my father’s condition. He was a total derelict. Had he been a complete stranger, I’m sure I would’ve been twice as effective at comforting him until the ambulance arrived. Instead, I recoiled and returned passively to the crowd and listened to his familiar babbling about my mother’s wedding day desertion. I was so traumatized by this scene recurring that I shut down emotionally and became completely detached. But not so detached that I didn’t take note of the ambulance and the name of the hospital he was being taken to.
Ilana never knew I had any connection to the guy.
Most of the incident was subsequently tucked away in that place where I have stored many things too painful to fully recognize. Almost forty years later, though, as a result of working on this book, I started thinking about Ilana and how much I’d love to hear her account of the story, knowing it would probably be very different than mine.
I always say that there are no coincidences in life—only the appearance and illusion of them. On June 25, 2009, Michael Jackson died. I’d just finished doing an interview about my relationship with the deceased King of Pop for the BBC News, when I looked down at my BlackBerry and saw a message via my website from a woman living in London, who identified herself as—you guessed it—Ilana. She had seen me on the evening news and had no idea of my whereabouts or my career in show business until that moment.
We caught up on our last four decades and I found out Ilana’s version of this story. She never had the slightest idea that the man lying on the street was my dad, because I had detached myself so well at the initial incident. She told me that she actually remembered being at some hospital, but didn’t remember the story I told her about how I found out that my estranged father was even hospitalized.
When I was much younger, I watched a television show called The Naked City. The tag line was, “There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them.” Out of the eight million people living in New York at that time, what were the odds of me running into my father on the street twice, ten years apart, in a similar alcoholic situation? My father gave me a present every time I encountered him. I believe the biggest present he gave me was his gift for music. The day I found him lying in the street, he gave me a stronger suit of emotional armor. David Bowie once told me something like “If you come from art, you’ll always be from art.” I assume one could apply this simple existential statement universally. (If you come from shame, you’ll always be ashamed; if you come from fear, you’ll always be afraid, etc.) I came from a great many things.
Though the father I’d come from gave me disappointment on that day (maybe in myself as much as him), many times before, he’d given me kindness, open-mindedness, and music.
A few months after I found him in the gutter, he would die, and I’d turn pro.
IN 1970 I WAS SPENDING time playing in a band called New World Rising, which I’d started with another Black Panther guitarist named Tom Murray. He went to the famous Stuyvesant High School, where I’d been going (though not officially) since I ditched Columbus High. In those days certain city high schools were “liberated territory.” A popular slogan of the times was, “The streets belong to the people” (“and so do the sidewalks!” I and my group of Stuyvesant radical friends added). Under
the United Federation of Teachers, so did the schools. Teachers had solidarity with students. We were treated more like the way I believe college students are treated. If you wanted to learn, they wanted to teach.
Since I’d picked up the guitar twenty-four months before, I’d been playing all the time, and there were teachers all around me. The night I ran away from home, my guitar escaped with me. Many hippies played guitar and I picked up lots of tips from them, and my technical faculties had improved exponentially. By the time I met Tom, I’d become a fledgling composer. We needed an ensemble to perform our compositions, so Tom and I put an ad in The Village Voice for other musicians, and New World Rising/Smoking Gauge (our name when we played purely blues) was formed.
NWR was a good band. In mid-August 1970, our first manager, Graham (my brother Bunchy’s father), set up a showcase gig for us at an Upper West Side club called Ungano’s. Graham was hooked up. He had personality, pretty young girls, music connections, and lots of drugs, especially coke, which was more cherished than platinum in those days. He knew the club’s owners because he was a skilled carpenter who’d done a lot of work for them, and they owed him a favor or two. Though Ungano’s regularly featured unknown bands, this payback was a huge opportunity for us because we’d be playing four nights straight. We thought this was our big chance to break out—we knew there’d be a ton of music industry people in the house.
While setting up our gear, we were told that the Stooges would be stopping by and their friend Alice Cooper would be there, too. I hadn’t heard very much of Alice’s music at the time, but lunchroom gossip had it that he was the reincarnation of a witch with the same name. This gig was starting to feel really important. We were so excited we couldn’t set up quick enough.
Out of the clear blue sky, the Ungano brothers, who owned the club, insisted that we sign a management contract thicker than War and Peace before they’d let us play. We refused. “We don’t think our situation is quite that complex,” we more or less told them.