Larry Dorr and I had become close friends. We spoke several times a day and collaborated on every detail of our business operation. I was best man at his wedding and together we had built a multi-million-dollar business enterprise that was supported entirely by touring. Larry handled the bookings from his home in Boston and I ran the day-to-day operation of the band from my offices in New York. My company was called Antoinette Music Productions. After the financial meltdown I had survived in Toronto, I was determined to handle the money myself. All the expenses of running the band were paid from my office and I signed every cheque. Everybody got workman’s compensation, unemployment insurance, Social Security, et cetera. We were paying $100,000 a year in accounting fees alone. There were lawyers and agents and travel expenses, and Larry Dorr was wellpaid to manage his end of the operation. Then, of course, Bobby Colomby was still taking his slice off the top. I was right back to where I had been in the seventies except that now we had hi-tech monitor systems and top-notch soundmen and I wasn’t burning my voice out every night. That took a lot of pressure off me, but there was still a huge payroll to support and the band had to work constantly or it would fall apart. I’m not complaining—I personally made a lot of money. I lived well, built a healthy investment portfolio and eventually would put Ashleigh through college with the money I earned in those years, but it did take an enormous toll on my body. Wake-up calls at 3:00 a.m. to make 6:00 a.m. flights were a way of life for this band. After finishing a show at, say, 10:30, you didn’t get to bed until midnight, and that 3:00 a.m. wake-up call came early. The chances of flight delays and cancellations increase as the day goes on, and a missed flight can be catastrophic for a band on tour. The promoter doesn’t want to hear about your travel problems; he’s sold tickets and the people want their money back, and of course the band must be paid whether we play the date or not. So most mornings we would be waiting at the airport when the doors opened so we could catch the first flight out of town. When a musician began to burn out from this relentless schedule, we would just send in a replacement and the show would go on. There were literally dozens of musicians who passed through the band in those years. Sometimes I would be introduced to guys at the airport who would be in Blood Sweat & Tears that night.
Musicians came and went, but the production team remained constant. They were with me for nearly twenty years. They were the heart and soul of this operation. Musical director Steve Guttman was a brilliant musician with an extensive musical education. He was also a practicing psychotherapist in New York, which enabled him to be a steadying influence in the crazy world of eccentric jazz musicians and their sometimes-volatile lead singer. Taking up the baton in front of a symphony orchestra is a daunting task. Classical musicians can be ruthless if the conductor doesn’t have it together and Steve Guttman commanded respect wherever we went.
Tour manager B. Harold Smick III and production manager Frank DeGennaro had touring down to a science. Under their direction our shows ran like clockwork. Smick was from a wellto-do South Jersey family; his family owned a chain of lumberyards. He originally joined us as a soundman, but with his talent for business and organization he was soon promoted to tour manager. Smick was well-liked by the musicians and handled the band, the promoters and the business of touring with finesse and class. Frank DeGennaro was a US Marine, steady and dependable. He was a rock, a big guy with a busted nose that told you he’d been in a few scraps in his day. Frank had been a Marine Corps MP. He was one of those guys who never seemed to hurry and didn’t talk much. He just got the job done. Sometimes you can’t avoid contact with some real nutcases out on the road, but onstage or signing autographs I was never concerned. Frank and Smick always had my back.
My affection for these guys was largely the reason I stayed with the band for so many years. When you spend this much time with people they become an extended family. In fact, we probably spent more time together than we did with our own families. On tour you become a tight-knit group of friends moving through a constantly changing world of strangers. I stayed on the road years longer than I really wanted to and much longer than I probably should have, but these guys depended on me as much as I depended on them. Larry Dorr was a tough, hard-nosed negotiator and he worked tirelessly to keep the gigs rolling in. Steve Guttman was a good friend and confidant and he always provided an understanding ear when I was frazzled and frustrated and just needed to vent. Frank and Smick were both top-notch professionals who took a lot of pressure off me on the road. They shielded me from promoters and politics and kept the show running like a well-oiled machine. All I had to do was show up every night and sing.
Life on the road is surreal. One city becomes just like the next. It all blurs into an endless stream of airports, hotels, dressing rooms and stages. A full night’s sleep is rare, so the performers sleepwalk through the day, catching naps in airports, on the plane or bus, wherever they can, following the tour manager’s itinerary so that come showtime they can flip that switch and light up the stage for a couple of hours. After a few weeks on the road it doesn’t matter where you are anymore, and answering too many questions from the band just takes up too much of the tour manager’s valuable time. So everyone follows the crew from town to town and trusts that somebody knows where the hell we’re going. I had to laugh when a fan would come up to us in an airport and ask, “Where did you guys play last night?” The band would all look at each other with a blank look and turn to the road manager. You have to look at the phone book beside your bed when you wake up just to figure out what town you’re in, but the crew knows where you’re going and how to get you there. They’re up an hour before the band and don’t get to bed until after the business of the show is taken care of and everyone is tucked in for the night. When the musicians are catching a nap in the afternoon, they’re busy setting up the stage and preparing for sound check. They only time they get to sit back and relax a little is when the show hits the stage and all their hard work pays off. On the road the tour manager is king and the crew handles all the problems. All the musicians have to worry about is the show that night. A great crew makes the road livable, and I had one of the best.
Suzie’s Got Her Big Hair on Tonight
Tantilizin’ dress and high-heeled shoes
Suzie got a different attitude
Somethin’ happened to the girl we knew
The woman’s looking out for somebody new
You should have paid attention when she cried
You could have told the truth, but no, you lied
You should have paid attention, serve you right
Cause Suzie’s got her big hair on tonight
Suzie’s got her big hair on tonight
Suzie’s gonna shake this town up right
The way she’s lookin’ just might start a fight
Cause Suzie’s got her big hair on tonight
The woman’s lookin’ out for number one
The girl’s just tryin’ to have herself some fun
You should have paid attention, serve you right
Cause Suzie’s got her big hair on tonight
Lyrics by David Clayton-Thomas. Copyright © Clayton-Thomas Music Publishing Inc., 1999.
23
POMONA
In 1986 I bought a house in a pretty little suburban New York town called Pomona, and that would be home for the next eighteen years. My life during those years revolved around touring and I really needed a home base, not only as a centre for my business operations but to provide a sense of stability for Ashleigh, a place to call home in the New York area. I was playing only two or three concerts a week but they were all over the map. I could be in Germany one week and California the next. A full-time limo driver handled my airport runs and drove me to local gigs. Albert DiFazio had been the desk sergeant at the notorious Fort Apache in the Bronx. Albert was a highly decorated retired police officer, a thirty-year NYPD veteran who now moonlighted as a bodyguard and limo driver. He still carried a badge and a gun, and he was experience
d at security and crowd control. He was soft-spoken and polite but he was a cop in the South Bronx, and you just knew he wasn’t a man to be trifled with. Albert was with me for fifteen years and became like part of our family. He picked up Ashleigh from school and watched over her at concerts like she was his own daughter. Albert was a handy guy to have around. I’d fly into New York on a Monday morning with a briefcase full of cash from the weekend’s gigs. He would meet me at Newark Airport and take me directly to my office in Rockland County, where I’d do the banking and pay the bills. Once the money was safely tucked away in the bank and the paycheques had been signed, he’d take me home. I had maybe three days to relax, then Albert would pick me up at 3:00 a.m. on Friday and I’d do it all over again. This was my life for the eighteen years that I lived in Pomona. Hopefully, there would be time on my days off to drive up to Newport and see Ashleigh. If her school schedule permitted I could bring her down to New York for a few days, even take her on the road with me from time to time. By the time she was in high school she was an experienced road hand and Albert was like a fiercely protective uncle.
The house in Pomona was in the Ramapo Mountains forty-five minutes from Manhattan. It was a sprawling four-bedroom ranch-style bungalow on nearly two acres of heavily wooded land, set well back from the road on a quiet street with a long, winding driveway. I had the house completely renovated and built a forty-foot pool in the backyard. There was a billiard room with a turn-of-the-century pool table, a living room with a large stone fireplace, a super-modern kitchen. Ashleigh had her own room, and I converted one of the spare bedrooms into a small home recording studio. I built an extra garage on the property and was able to indulge my passion for high-performance cars. My friends tell me I have more fun detailing and tinkering with my cars than most people do driving theirs. We spent so much time in airports that being able to drive to a concert was a luxury. Anything within a six-hour radius of New York was an excuse for me to load the band on a tour bus and take one of my cars out on the road.
There were lots of local gigs to be had. BS&T had a loyal fan base in New York State, New Jersey and New England. Nearly every year we played the New York State Fair in Syracuse, and we had regular bookings at the Atlantic City and Connecticut casinos. Upstate New York was fertile territory for the band. We played often in Albany, Buffalo, Syracuse and Rochester. This was always a good reason to drive on up to Toronto and hang out with Bill and Doc. There was a great jazz club in Toronto called the Montreal Bistro, which featured world-class jazz and good food and was a meeting place for the Toronto music community. Doc played there regularly, and whenever he did I’d drive up to Toronto for a few days to catch his set, sit in with him and maybe take in a hockey game at Maple Leaf Gardens.
I drove to Aurora every year to spend Christmas with Bill and his ever-expanding family. I’ve always maintained that there’s no Christmas like a Canadian Christmas. It’s the biggest holiday of the year in Canada, and Christmas at the Puglieses’ was always a joyous occasion with a huge, brightly lit tree, piled high underneath with presents. Their lavish home was a riot of festive decorations, with kids and toys everywhere. Bill and Linda had five children who grew up and married and had kids of their own. Twenty or more family members for Christmas dinner at the Puglieses’ was not unusual.
I developed the habit of celebrating Christmas twice. I’d drive to Canada a few days before Christmas and spend the first part of the holiday with Bill and his family, visit my parents in Schomberg, then return to New York to have a second Christmas and ring in the New Year with Ashleigh. That way Ashleigh would have Christmas in Newport with her mum, then a second Christmas in New York with her dad. It meant a lot of driving for me over the holidays, but I never minded that. We may have been apart for much of the year, but Christmas was special—it was worth the extra effort to be a family for a few days.
I always loved seeing my mum at Christmas, and I know my visits were the high point of the year for her. I’d bring her up to date on Ashleigh’s progress at school and she always wanted to hear about my travels around the world. Her face would light up when I told her stories about my trips to exotic countries like Japan and Australia and concerts in places like Las Vegas and Hollywood. She had given up her career in music to be a wife and a mother and had worked as a secretary for most of her life. Her travel was limited to a couple of weeks a year at their cottage in Muskoka. After they retired, Fred bought a huge forty-foot motor-home and they would make annual 2,000-mile drives to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and back. I believed this was more Fred’s fantasy than Freda’s. I think he always wanted to be a longdistance trucker with a Cat diesel and a CB radio. Ten-four, good buddy! She went along with it because it made him happy, but my mum would rather have seen a Broadway show or travelled to London or Paris. Freda was a bright, artistic woman with an enormous curiosity about the world. I think she lived vicariously through the exploits of her wandering son.
Over the years I brought my parents to special events like the State Department send-off in Washington, DC, and our opening at Caesars Palace. Once I flew them to Los Angeles to see me perform at the Hollywood Bowl. Fred came along grumbling and pretending to be unimpressed. He was happier trudging through the woods with his guns and his dogs. My mother loved the excitement of show business and all the eccentric, creative characters who were my friends. My dad thought they were a bunch of “kooks and weirdos.” I’m so glad I had the chance from time to time to let my mum experience what life was like outside of Fred’s world. That glamorous week in Hollywood hobnobbing with movie stars and celebrities was the happiest week of her life.
Freda died in 1990 after a long painful battle with cancer. I visited her in the hospital often during her last months, driving from New York to Toronto almost weekly to be with her. I would hold her hand and sob quietly, and she knew I was all right now, that somehow her troubled son had come through it all and was now a respected artist and a good father to Ashleigh. I think that gave her some measure of peace. I was backstage before a concert in New England when the news of her passing was brought to me by Larry Dorr. I’d been expecting this day for months, but when it finally came I was devastated. Larry offered to cancel the concert. No one could have blamed me under the circumstances, but cancelling was out of the question. There were 5,000 people out there, and Freda would never have wanted me to disappoint them. My music was my mother’s gift to me and she was so proud of my accomplishments. She would have been angry with me if I’d cancelled a show because of her. That’s the kind of selfless woman she was. A few days later when I spoke at her memorial service I told the congregation, “This was a woman who never knowingly hurt anyone in her life. God, I wish we could all say that.”
Even though I was on the road constantly, I still found ways to spend time with Ashleigh. Newport was only three hours away. It’s a beautiful, historic old town and a great place for a kid to grow up. She had a loving family in Newport, her dad and his band in New York and an extended family in Toronto. She’s a bright, inquisitive girl and was exposed to music, theatre and the arts from an early age. Most of my New York–based musicians played Broadway shows, so orchestra seats were readily available to us and we attended first-run Broadway shows together at every opportunity. Annie, Les Miz, Phantom of the Opera, all the top shows were a regular part of her upbringing. As she grew older her love of music, film and theatre intensified, and after graduating high school in Newport she enrolled at SUNY Purchase, a New York State college with a fine theatre arts program. Her interests were now focused on media production and creative writing. She moved to an apartment in Nyack, just a few minutes from my house in Pomona and convenient to her college just across the Tappan Zee Bridge. We spent a lot of time together during those years. I loved having my daughter close by, and a girl has to have a place to do her laundry.
There were a few women in my life in those years, but nothing really lasted. I had casual girlfriends, an occasional flight attendant who would pass through New
York and spend the night before winging off to wherever flight attendants go. There were girls I would meet on the road and fly into town for a couple of days, but their tickets were always round trip and after a few days of dinners and shows in the city they would go back to their lives and I would return to mine. Actually, I preferred it that way. My life was all over the map, and in the few days I had at home I valued my privacy and the time I could spend with my daughter. But there were a couple of ladies who rocked my world during the years in Pomona, and I can’t leave them out because each in her own way affected the person I am today.
There was Maggie, who I met on tour in Australia. She was a voluptuous red-haired Aussie beauty, a magazine model from Melbourne. She was a great girl. Maggie came to live with me at the house in Pomona. We got along well. I never had an argument with her in all the time we were together. She was beautiful, bright and looking to settle down. After a year the only way Maggie could remain in the US was to become a resident. The best way to accomplish this was to get married, and even though I adored Maggie and was very happy with her, marriage scared me to death. I was already a three-time loser and I knew the futility of trying to maintain a marriage with my crazy lifestyle. So Maggie went back to Australia. I missed her when she left. She was easygoing and comfortable to be with, the kind of girl you can sit in front of the fireplace with all evening and not say anything or feel that you have to.
Then there was Suzanne … my mid-life crisis. A hot young lounge singer from Kentucky, Suzie was a born-again Southern Baptist and was one of the most sexual creatures on God’s green earth—slim and petite with a tight perfectly formed body, beautiful, volatile and demanding, with a sexual appetite that was simply amazing. I met her after a show in Owensboro and an hour later we were tearing up the bed in my hotel room. She lived with me in Pomona off and on for the better part of a year. She would move in with me and a month later she would move out. She hated New York. It was Sodom and Gomorrah in her sexy little fundamentalist Southern Baptist mind. It was full of homosexuals, heretics and heathens, and, unfortunately, most of them were friends of mine. Suzanne was brought up in a small Southern town where all community life revolved around the Baptist church. She was raised in the church, and she couldn’t function without it. But in the bedroom she was a total sexual animal, wild and uninhibited. The bouts of wanton lovemaking were followed by dark, moody periods inevitably followed by outbursts of anger and recrimination. It was an emotional roller coaster, but the sex was incredible and, God help me, I was becoming addicted to it. She could be incredibly loving when she wanted to and just as difficult when she didn’t. Suzanne was a very conflicted girl. She desperately wanted to be a star, but living with me was about as close as she would ever get to that dream. Musically she just wasn’t all that talented. Her evangelical side was racked with guilt about living in sin, and of course that was all my fault too.
Blood, Sweat and Tears Page 20