City Kid

by Nelson George

  The only two women in editorial were a study in contrast. Marie was an attractive, smallish receptionist who by day had to type memos and answer phones. By night she was a music columnist for the paper, feted by publicists and ass-kissed by R&B crooners. My presence at the Am News and growing interest in music would be an irritation to her, so we were never very friendly. Much nicer to me was Evonne Smith, who was the managing editor when I joined the staff as an intern. On a day-to-day basis she gave me assignments and made me feel welcome.

  However, this was not a courtesy extended to her by the male staff reporters who worked under her. The old dudes at the Am News constantly challenged her authority, as if having a female boss was an insult. That Ms. Smith was a Muslim who wore her head wrapped may or may not have distressed the guys, but it certainly made her the target of off-color jokes, especially from the surly Tex.

  The executive editor for much of my tenure at the Am News was James Hicks, who, in the civil rights era, had been a courageous, award-winning reporter. He’d been the one who allowed me to intern there, and, eventually, get paid for my work. But, aside from those two very good deeds, Hicks was an absentee manager who floated in and out of the office. Whatever fire he’d once had in his belly had clearly burned out by the late seventies.

  The Am News was one of the many black institutions that had been energized by the civil rights movement, yet since then had struggled to find a mission. The place felt irredeemably trapped in the past. This malaise was bad for our readers and disappointing for the staff, yet fantastic for me. There were huge gaps in the Am News’s coverage, and I was able to exploit them. There was no one doing long-term reporting, so I was able to do a long take on the state of black studies at various city universities. There was sports coverage, especially of black college sports and street basketball, but little fresh reporting on major league baseball, the NBA, or the NFL.

  Fortunately for me, I covered sports under the guidance of Art Rust Jr., a former NBC sports reporter and author of a trailblazing book on the Negro Leagues. Art had fallen on hard times professionally, and so worked part-time as sports editor at the Am News. Art unleashed me to go do profiles of everyone from Yankee pitcher Luis Tiant to New York Giants receiver Louis Gray. Though I enjoyed the opportunity to sit in the press box at Yankee Stadium, and to meet some legendary veteran sportswriters, I didn’t actually enjoy the sports world. Too many locker rooms filled with surly, naked athletes. Too many jealous white reporters passing judgment on well-paid black men. In the reporters’ greenroom at Yankee Stadium, where food and booze were free, I saw many famous bylines well lubricated by the third inning, and I found that disgusting.

  What made the journeys to Yankee Stadium a bit easier was the presence of Willie Randolph. In a few short years my Tilden projects neighbor had made the leap from Brownsville’s stickball games to the Pittsburgh Pirates, to manning second base at Yankee Stadium. When he joined the club via trade in 1976, Willie instantly solidified the infield and gave the Yankees top-of-the-lineup speed that made them pennant winners. Knowing there was someone I knew in that very intimidating locker room was comforting.

  After all, this was the era of “the Bronx Zoo,” where winning baseball and outsized ego were the norm at Yankee Stadium. But there were limits to our friendship. In the middle of one of those Reggie Jackson-Billy Martin blowups that marked the Bronx Zoo era of Yankee baseball, Art sent me up to the stadium to get Jackson’s reaction to the booing, and to some racial epithets being yelled from the stands. When I told Willie what I wanted to ask Reggie, he begged off. Even though Willie wanted to help me, he knew messing with Reggie over something this sensitive was not a good way to keep in his hot-tempered teammate’s good graces.

  I understood. After all, I was the reporter. If there was a tough question to ask, I needed to do it myself. So I walked slowly over to Jackson’s locker and, haltingly, introduced myself. The burly, bare-chested superstar studied me like an insect on glass. So I asked, “Do you think the fans’ reaction to you is racially based?,” trying to ask a potentially explosive question as inoffensively as possible.

  Jackson stood up and yelled at me: “You’re a black man, do I have to explain it to you?” Well, no, he didn’t. He said something else equally harsh (but truthful), and then turned his back on me. End of interview. I took down his replies, and then got the hell out of there. With some massaging by Art Rust, this “interview” ended up as a front-page headline in the Amsterdam News. Something like “Jackson Blasts Racist Fans.” Welcome to the world of journalism, kid.

  The rough treatment I received from Jackson was just one of many things that turned me away from sports journalism. For all my fan’s awe of players’ skills, and deep respect for reporters who wrote well on tight deadlines, there was an insular narrow-mindedness in the sports world that wore on me. Plus, I was more interested in what was happening in the South Bronx, a few blocks from the old ballpark. I covered the Yankees for the Am News during their back-to-back titles in 1977 and ’78, the same years I was first discovering hip-hop in the city’s parks and neighborhoods. What happened within the stadium’s walls seemed a galaxy away from life outside on the BX streets.

  While continuing to love sports, and to write about that world often over the years, I’d always be wary of how isolated it felt from the world beyond its boundaries. Ironically, the insular nature of movie reviewing and actor profiles, which could be as removed from the real world as George Steinbrenner’s team, didn’t turn me off. It didn’t hurt that all media movie screenings and premieres were great free dates. The movie biz subsidized my love life during my college years, turning my skinny ass into a good date.

  I was at a preview screening for Star Wars at the Loew’s Astor Plaza, which had the audience rocking right from the opening crawl; Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Apocalypse Now, at the magnificent Ziegfeld Theater, which has the best sound system in the city; Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, at Cinema I across from Bloomingdale’s; Saturday Night Fever and The Warriors, in the Gulf & Western building screening room (now the Trump Tower). I was also at the legendarily horrific premiere of Michael Cimino’s expensive bomb Heaven’s Gate at Cinema I. One of my favorite films was American Gigolo, with its mix of materialism, sexual proficiency, and spiritual confusion that immediately spoke to me. I was awed to meet the director-writer Paul Schrader (who also penned Taxi Driver) at a press junket.

  The best perk of my Am News years was a free trip to Las Vegas for a junket promoting the football flick North Dallas Forty. We out-of-town critics were put up at the M-G-M Grand Hotel and I, somehow, was awarded an amazing room with a burgundy platform bed with leopard trim and a huge overhead mirror. This monstrosity even had a goddamn gate around it. The bed was big enough for five couples to copulate separately and in peace.

  So I spent my days in Vegas desperately trying to get women to come see my bed. Got a sista from Detroit to check it out, but only received a friendly peck on the cheek. I lucked out when I encountered a randy black woman broadcaster from Baltimore. The lady was about ten years older than me, but, I guess, couldn’t pass up the chance to screw in that sick bed. I, in fact, became her Amtrak boy toy for several months, heading down to Maryland to lay up in her red waterbed.

  The reason such a perk-filled gig was available was the unimportance of black film in the late seventies. The blaxploitation era had ended a good two years before I showed up at the Am News. While I was at the paper only a few black-themed Hollywood titles were released, with the lackluster The Wiz (starring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor) and a few Pryor vehicles (Which Way Is Up?, Greased Lightning) constituting the feeble highlights.

  On occasion a substantial work like Brothers, a fictionalized account of the relationship between the revolutionaries Angela Davis and George Jackson in the sixties, somehow sneaked through the system. Mostly I looked out for the odd juicy black part (Stan Shaw in the World War II drama The Boys in Company C) in an otherwise all-white f
lick. What ultimately made the film gig important in the long run, and as educational as anything I learned at St. John’s, was my introduction to a community of emerging film archivists and independent filmmakers.

  Just as I had with music, I made sure I read as many texts on black film as possible. Sadly, unlike jazz and R&B, the library was small: Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, a survey history of the black image in motion pictures, was the gold standard, followed by Thomas Cripps’s Slow Fade to Black and Black Film as Genre. There were a few collections of blaxploitation-era essays, and some photo books available, but that was basically it. The most provocative writings were those that depicted the work of pioneering filmmakers Spencer Williams and Oscar Micheaux, who made films in the prewar era expressly for Negro audiences.

  Through the archival efforts of the scholar Pearl Bowser, you could catch screenings of Micheaux’s work on occasion in New York. I recall seeing Body and Soul, Paul Robeson’s feature film debut, at an unheated old Harlem landmark, the Renaissance Ballroom on 137th Street, and was amazed that there was this world that had existed outside the history books of American filmmaking. Working as a cinematic traveling salesman across the back roads of America, Micheaux had made a living with his films for decades, sustaining himself on guile and hustle.

  The late-seventies equivalent came walking into the Am News office to meet me one day in 1978. Wearing a round Afro, a substantial beard, and a very serious demeanor, a young man named Warrington Hudlin introduced himself, his fledgling organization, the Black Filmmakers Foundation, and the contemporary African American independent-film scene.

  Where Micheaux was a carnival barker, making films that seethed with color and class conflicts, and the shame of illicit sex, Warrington introduced me to films that were earnest, political, and avowedly arty. Warrington’s own meditation on working-class rituals, Streetcorner Stories, a cinema verité documentary, or Charles Burnett’s neorealist drama Killer of Sheep, had nothing in common with Micheaux, blaxploitation, or anything Sidney Poitier had ever made.

  This new black cinema, sadly, existed only in museums, film festivals, and on college campuses. Virtually none of the films I was seeing and writing about got a commercial release. At best they might be grouped in a festival with white-themed independent films (like the American Maverick series in the East Village), but even that was rare. (Burnett’s Killer of Sheep didn’t get a commercial release until 2006!) When I wrote about these works there was often griping at the Am News, since, unlike Hollywood dreck, these folks weren’t gonna buy an ad unless it was purchased for a museum screening series. Better for me to use our film news hole to write up the James Brolin vehicle The Car, perhaps the worst movie ever made, rather than Roy Campanella Jr.’s short film Pass/Fail.

  At this time even white indie film was still a relatively new idea, so the thought that there could be a black cinema outside Hollywood was not simply foreign to the cynics at the Am News, but downright ridiculous. My biggest challenge was not to accept the defeatism of the paper’s staff. Meeting people like Warrington and the other black indie filmmakers was crucial in allowing me to see possibilities, and not limits, in the future.

  After I’d turn in my stories and pick up assignments from Mel or Art, I’d walk down one flight to the comptroller’s office to turn in my time card. Though I was technically an intern receiving college credits for my work, I’d also arranged to get paid for working at the Am News. It never came to more than $120, and sometimes was as low as $89 in any given week, but for a twenty-year-old college student in 1977 or ’78, that was good money.

  However, my treatment by the Am News comptroller was rarely respectful. They’d never pay me in time to cash the check at a bank, always after 3:00 P.M. So I’d have to go across the street to the nearest check-cashing place. A check-cashing place in Harlem circa late seventies was a spectacle, filled most afternoons with minimum-wage workers, public assistance folk, and everyone scrambling to make ends meet. There were always one or two dudes lingering around to see who left the cashiers’ window with the fattest roll of bills.

  After stuffing my money deep in my pants pocket, I’d walk across 125th street, past Bobby Robinson’s long-running record store (he’d sign Kool Moe Dee’s Treacherous Three and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five to Enjoy Records, the label he ran out of the back room) and the Charles’s Gallery nightclub (where Russell Simmons saw Eddie Cheeba and first got turned on to rap music), before I went down into the BMT station for the A train downtown.

  It was about 4:00 P.M. and time to switch gears. I’d been a St. John’s student and Am News staffer. Now I was to adopt the third persona of my apprentice years—Billboard magazine stringer. On the A train down from 125th Street I’d look into my book bag to make sure I had any concert reviews or stories I had written for Billboard, checking again for typos and misspellings. By the time I got off at Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, I was ready to navigate the streets of the not so great white way. There were peep shows up and down Eighth Avenue, including the huge Show World sex emporium between Forty-second and Forty-third streets. On Forty-third off Eighth was a beat-down diner I frequented along with hookers, cops, and New York Timesmen.

  On Wednesday afternoon the streets were filled with folks exiting Broadway matinees, vendors legal and illegal hawking wares, and the hurly-burly of folks doing their everyday dance. This wasn’t the post-Giuliani Disneyfied Times Square. In the Times Square of my memory there were not yet any Starbucks or megastores but plenty of pimps, break dancers, and three-card monte players. At 1515 Broadway, right around the corner from the Astor Plaza Theater, Billboard’s offices were up on the forty-third floor. In contrast to leaping up the long staircase at the Am News, I floated up in a modern Midtown elevator. I’d be buzzed into the office by the receptionist, then walk down a flight to Billboard’s editorial and advertising offices.

  Sitting at a desk in the production area office was my great benefactor, Robert “Rocky” Ford Jr. I’d met Rocky in the fall of 1976, when I went with an old high school pal to see Graham Central Station headline a show at the Upper West Side’s Beacon Theater. Sly’s ex-bass player Larry Graham had organized a hot band of his own that had a funky instrumental out called “The Jam.”

  When we got up to the theater at Seventy-fourth Street and Broadway, we found that Graham’s gig was part of a concert series called California Soul, aimed at branding Burbank-based Warner Bros. Records in the black music biz. Aside from Graham Central Station, Al Jarreau, Ashford & Simpson, George Benson, and other recent signees were performing during this weeklong showcase. Warner Bros., like CBS and RCA, was intent on creating an identification with black music buyers that Motown, Stax, and Atlantic had organically.

  However, the economic forces at work in black music weren’t yet my concern. I was there to dance and look at girls. Which was what I was doing when Graham Central Station closed with “The Jam.” I was sitting in the back of the orchestra and, like the entire crowd, I rose to dance in my seat. Well, everyone but one guy. Through the sea of gyrating bodies I spotted a man with a big Afro sitting down and writing in a reporter’s notepad with a lighted pen. Whoa! A real rock critic in the flesh.

  Once the show ended I pushed and shoved my way through the crowd, trying to find the brother in the Afro. On the sidewalk outside the Beacon I saw him, and, to be honest, he was an odd sight. He was extremely light skinned, with a big head adorned in metal-framed glasses, a bushy mustache, a light-colored jacket, jeans, and black-and-white saddle shoes, like someone in a Happy Days episode.

  Despite his eccentric appearance, I approached him and his sexy, dark chocolate girlfriend and introduced myself. Robert “Rocky” Ford wrote reviews for Billboard magazine, though his nine-to-five job was working in Billboard’s production department. His date was a woman named Gail McLean, who was polite but clearly irritated at my intrusion. Rocky gave me his card and told me to send him some of my reviews.

  T
hrough a friend, Martin Baskin, I’d actually published a couple of record reviews in the Pace University newspaper (the editors never knew I wasn’t a student). One was of the O’Jays’ Family Reunion and the other of Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years, both of which remain two of my all-time favorite records. I also sent him a few of my Am News clippings. Rocky liked my writings, and invited me up to Billboard’s Times Square offices, which had a spectacular view of Broadway and out to New Jersey, where they were building the new Giants stadium.

  Just as heady as the view through Billboard’s big picture windows were the staggering amount of records casually lying around. At each writer’s cubicle, and in glass-enclosed editors’ offices, was enough vinyl to fill J&R Music World several times over. Almost every record released got a mention of some kind in Billboard, and the staff writers took their free goods for granted. As a vinyl-hungry college boy it was stunning to see all that music just lying underfoot. Those visits to Billboard were like trips to vinyl junkie heaven, and I never left without 45s, 12-inches, cassettes, or albums under my arm.

  At first I was a mascot, just happy to be there. Eventually I got to know the editors and the staff, an eclectic group of music heads, serious journalists, part-time flacks, and full-time eccentrics who, along with Rocky, showed me the music-biz ropes. There was Adam White, the future editor-in-chief, a taciturn Brit with an encyclopedic knowledge of Motown soul; Roman Kozak, a balding punk rock connoisseur with a hard-on for the Plasmatics’ Wendy O. Williams and a love for spicing his iced tea with alcohol under his desk; and Radcliffe Joe, a pipe-smoking, blazer-wearing West Indian cherub, who served as disco editor. Either by example or by giving me assignments, these gents granted me entry into the world of the record business and music criticism.