Through them I attended press parties and learned you could judge a good one if the buffet featured fantail shrimp and rare roast beef. I learned to refer to records as “product,” and that free promotional records could be sold in bulk for cash to retailers. I learned that most music-business lifers were cynics and dreamers who knew that payoffs could make hits yet still believed in the transcendent power of music. From them I got my first taste of the backstage stories and secret history of American music that never ended up in the pages of Billboard, and rarely anywhere else.
My first Billboard piece was a profile of Evelyn “Champagne” King, a strong-voiced teenager from Philadelphia who had a disco smash with “Shame.” That was followed by an interview with Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, the bass and guitar duo behind Chic, who’d go on to have impressive careers as producer and writers. Radcliffe Joe gave me those first two gigs, which gave Roman the confidence to begin assigning me concert reviews. While Radcliffe had me covering the emerging disco scene, an area none of the vets at Billboard cared about, Roman sent me out to review music from the industry’s other bastard genres—heavy metal and blues-based guitar rock.
So my black Brownsville self was soon found reviewing British blues-based rock bands like Foghat, Bad Company, Foreigner, and Hot Tuna (and silently thanking my Spring Creek friends for the ear-splitting education a few years back). There was one double bill I’ll never forget—AC/DC opening for Ted Nugent at the Garden. Those two combined for a night of sonic sludge my eardrums have never forgotten. I took to buying packets of tissue paper to stuff in my ears whenever Roman sent me out. Billboard afforded me a real schizophrenic existence. One night I’d find myself at a gay disco in the West Twenties reviewing Sylvester. The next I’d be at MSG, surrounded by white kids in football jerseys shooting off firecrackers as Bad Company did an encore.
As I turned in my copy, I’d start harassing Roman or Radcliffe for my next assignment. Between the Am News movie screenings, the Billboard music reviews, and actually studying for St. John’s tests, my nights were full during those hectic years. Once I had my assignments, I’d call around to line up some dates.
As my adventure in Vegas suggested, through my access to events I met older, more sexually active women. I didn’t get any handsomer or dress any better (style never being one of my strong suits), but I became a more exciting date.
I’ll never forget going to LeMoche, a big disco on Eleventh Avenue, to review the female disco trio First Choice, and spotting this big-bodied sister standing in front of me. She was tall, with wide hips and nice shoulders and sexy strong legs. Her hair was slicked back and tied into a small bun. When she turned to talk to her girlfriend, I saw her face—she was light brown with a wide mouth and sweetly protruding lips. I smiled. She smiled. Her name was Evelyn. She was Jamaican, lived in Flatbush, and had her own apartment. Most important: She thought I was cute.
At this point in my life I’d never actually spent the night at a woman’s house, since none of my girlfriends had had their own places. Evelyn, god bless her, changed all that. I remember she had a tidy little Flatbush apartment in the era when West Indians were pushing out the Jews and Italians.
She had a small sofa, but what I really fondly remember is her silver beanbag, which was cool to watch TV in as well as being a sex enhancer. Evelyn and I discovered a variety of ways to get busy using that beanbag on our first night together. I remember how both confusing and liberating it felt to wake up in a strange bed, to smell her perfume in the sheets, to see the beauty products in her bathroom, and to shower using her soap. The fact that this was my first overnight visit with a woman wasn’t lost on my family. When I stumbled home that next afternoon, as bleary-eyed and tired as I’d ever been, Andrea took one look at me, said, “It’s about time,” and then started laughing.
My maturation as a sexual being came at the tail end of the sexual revolution. Though the sixties is still associated with the “free love” period, the looser morals that were unleashed carried over well into the eighties. In the now distant pre-HIV era, condoms were optional. I carried condoms, but only used them if the woman insisted, and a great many women didn’t. They’d use the curved plastic diaphragm, which I sometimes helpfully inserted for them. Or they used the IUD, a stringy, weird contraption that, if not put on properly, could pop your penis in the head. A few women, Evelyn included, utilized pills inserted in the vagina that would dissolve and generate a green sperm-killer foam. This stuff was a real joy killer, since the foam would sometimes slide into my tip and burn like hell. Moreover, once this stuff dissolved there was no oral sex for her, since it tasted like disinfectant.
Evelyn, as my first true mature lover, taught me much, and after a while she was suggesting that I move in with her. Evelyn was thirty, and I was about twenty-one, so I was in neither the financial nor psychological space to do as she wished. Our parting was bittersweet, since she wanted more than I knew I could give. I have to admit, this would not be the last time I’d part with a woman over my inability to give my heart.
After I’d used Billboard’s phones to make my personal calls, and listened to the gossip about Springsteen, or debated Steely Dan’s latest effort, I’d go through the staff writers’ pile of reject records, stuff as many as I could carry into a bag, and head out into Times Square toward the IRT subway home. I’d usually wait until after rush hour was over, and the commuters had thinned out, so I’d have room to pull out my notepad and start scribbling again. I had a long subway ride ahead of me from Midtown Manhattan, way out to Pennsylvania Avenue, the third-to-last stop on the New Lots Avenue line.
On my ride home, I was writing when a newspaper blew against my leg. I looked down, and, whoa, it was the Am News. Even more ironic was that this particular crumbled bit of newsprint contained three bylined stories by me; all my work on the subway floor, looking as disposable as a candy wrapper.
Unfortunately, this accident would come to foreshadow my immediate future. When I graduated from college in June 1979, my future looked good. I had income from two steady writing jobs (plus freelance assignments coming in) and access to all the cool free stuff I could handle. Plus, I was still living at home, so I could save money. I felt like my postcollege years were gonna be sweet. Then reality hit me hard, real hard.
THE WHITE LINES THAT BIND
The Pink Tea Cup is an anomaly, a soul food restaurant in the heart of the West Village that has survived for decades. When I first started eating there in the late seventies it was on Bleecker Street near Grove. I’d get an order of fish with greens and macaroni and cheese to go, and then carry the meal in a brown paper bag west toward the piers. These were the glory days of the gay liberation movement, so I kept my eyes to myself, not wanting to suggest to any of the friendly gentlemen who strolled its curvy streets that I wanted to hook up.
About a half block from the piers, where transvestites ruled and truck drivers snoozed, and blow jobs were the coin of the realm, I walked into a garage with my soul food feast. Sitting in the booth where drivers checked in before parking their cars was Nelson Elmer George. Throughout my college years and into my early twenties, I tried to bond with my father. My mother, who’d heard me whine and even cry about not having a father, reluctantly encouraged me, knowing it might help me become a man but worried I’d eventually be disappointed.
As I said earlier, my first really vivid recollection of my father is our weird trip to Harlem, where I got my first inkling of how, if not why, he got his hustle on. The irony was that I’d become something of a hustler myself, roaming the same nocturnal boulevards in search of money and fulfillment. The huge difference was that nothing I would do, or even seriously contemplate, would come close to crossing the line between the legal and illegal. To paraphrase Rakim, “I knew the ledge.”
One of the things that came out of my visits was an article in the Amsterdam News called an interview with Mr. C., and it was billed as the reflections of a small-time drug dealer, which it was. The article
was a way I could justify hanging with Nelson Elmer to myself—I was finally getting something tangible out of him. It was a way for him to explain his life to me, which he very much wanted to do.
Apparently my father’s life changed in 1957, the year I was born. Unfortunately, the turning point in his life wasn’t my birth, it was his first visit to a Harlem after-hours club on 122nd Street called Cary’s. “It was in the basement of a building,” he told me. “I came with a friend who was known there. They were very careful to see if you had any weapons before they let you in. There was a bar section, and people were sitting and drinking and smoking reefer, which seemed to be the main feature of going to this type of place. I was always a fella out in the street as well as being a working man. So I became acquainted with all the ways people made their livelihood. I met all the hustlers and all the hustles.”
It sounded like dialogue from a Chester Himes novel, except for this man in a garage mechanic’s uniform enjoying his macaroni and cheese, this wasn’t a hard-boiled narrative but his life or, at least, his version of it. When I asked him about Pete Smith and he told me he was also known as Joe Robinson of the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, or Clarence Robinson of Far Rockaway, Queens, I realized that his identity had been as fluid as his job status.
In the years since he and my mother separated, Nelson Elmer had been a merchant seaman, a doorman, a short-order cook, a onetime bar owner (apparently his partner, a woman, shot at him), and a low-level coke dealer. “I sold cocaine because it meant quick, easy money,” he said. “I sold only cocaine. Exclusively. Never marijuana. Never anything else. Cocaine meant fast money. Nice clientele, clean clientele. Selling any other drug, you run into the scum of the earth, and I didn’t want to be bothered. With cocaine, you only deal with kings and queens and heads of state. Just worked with blacks, too. Never sold a grain to a white man. Nothing. They were bad news to me, baby, especially when it comes to drugs.
“Because I usually had a regular job somewhere, I was never forced into dealing with heavy drugs. Cocaine was my gravy money. I’d spend a few hours every day selling it. But mostly I worked, so they came to me, and not the other way. People called me because I had good stuff. I sold in bulk, and didn’t want to see twenty-five dollars or thirty dollars anytime. I bought my stuff wholesale, then sold it at up to 100 or 200 percent profit. I always sold it in large amounts, never small. In Harlem, my deals ranged from $250 to about $300.”
We were speaking about the drug world before crack, a Super Fly world of cozy clubs where adults did their business in peace. That world was already disappearing in the early eighties, as angel dust, heroin, and aggressive young dealers were escalating the violence. In his mind Harlem had “got real mean.” Nelson Elmer viewed this “heavy drug scene” with worry. Just as the music uptown was shifting from disco soul to beat-oriented rap, the drug scene was undergoing generational change too.
In relating his gangster tales my father provided me with a great unintentional “just say no” lesson. It started with his observations about “bag followers.” These were “girls who like cocaine but have no money, so they hang with a dude until they sniff up his blow, and then move on to the next sucker.” Then, without remorse, Nelson Elmer told his son, “I had two women in bed with me and some coke on [the] night table, and decided I’d rather have a blow than get blown.”
Young and horny as hell, I figured any substance that could overwhelm a man’s sex drive was to be avoided at all cost. On the heels of the tragedy of my mother’s friend Eddie Sawyer, and my father’s story, I have never allowed a line of coke near my nose. So I could never say that this man never did me any good.
Over time he’d show me more bits of his world. One evening he took me with him uptown. We hit the Big Track, a Harlem gaming joint where there was action twenty-four hours a day. We stopped at a bar near Esplanade Gardens where a thriving numbers operation was headquartered, and he went in the back to do a little business. We ended our little tour at a ragged tenement building just around the corner from the numbers bar.
Up two flights was an apartment with a red door. Nelson Elmer knocked. A dark face peered through the peephole. After being scrutinized, we were granted entry into a room awash in red. The lights, the carpet, and the bar were all red. Our host was named “J.C.” He was a balding brown man in a chocolate-colored suit and a black turtleneck. He and my father were old running buddies from many Harlem nights, and I enjoyed watching Nelson Elmer’s casual camaraderie, though it struck me that these dudes were closing in on the end of their good times, and he seemed to know it.
He said that he was gonna retire from his fun part-time gig. Number one, his connection had gotten busted, and he “could no longer get what I wanted. See, that’s why having a job was so valuable. I didn’t need to go to somebody else ’cause it wasn’t my entire livelihood. When you’re in the street, you always need backup of some kind. Besides . . .” He paused. “I have been feeling some vibrations. Nothing certain. Just enough to make me feel nervous, and when you get nervous in the street you definitely have to go. That is no place to be nervous.”
On this foundation of lightweight gangster tales a détente grew between us. But the hustler in him couldn’t be abated. At one point he wanted us to become a father and son process-serving team. His argument was that we could make quick cash and hang out together. Instinctively, I thought that that was a gig that could easily go bad. Serving the wrong man on the wrong day could be a very unpleasant business. Ma, as usual when it came to things related to Elmer, just laughed when I brought it up. She wasn’t going to let that happen. This era of good feeling between my father and me would unfortunately be short-lived.
Perhaps it could have been the beginning of a strong father-son connection. After all, we shared DNA, looks, and an attraction for nightlife. For years I had thirsted for his company, feeling a primal need for a father and hoping, through him, to perhaps understand myself better. But I was in my twenties now. I had my goals to pursue and my own journey to take. Whether my father had been around when I was six or thirteen didn’t matter now. What mattered were the decisions I made.
As a child, your parents define your world. As an adult, your decisions define your character. Between my mother, my peers, and the people I was encountering as a journalist, I was developing my own view of the world and, it hit me, I didn’t need my father’s. Over the next thirty years our contact would be brief and, mostly, superficial. It would no longer be his fault. It would be my choice.
NYC EARLY EIGHTIES
I graduated in June 1979 from St. John’s University. The seventies had been a rugged time for my hometown. The Bronx was burning—literally. The city had basically gone bankrupt under the burden of unchecked municipal spending, institutional corruption, and an eroding tax base. Every night Johnny Carson made jokes about muggings in Central Park, helping poison the city’s image around the country. Every great crime film of the era (The Godfather, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Shaft) painted the place John Lindsay had labeled “Fun City” as a cesspool of unrest and suffering.
Yet, on those same streets, new dreams were being hatched and old ones fulfilled. My peers and I, about to enter adulthood under throwback president Ronald Reagan and aggressive mayor Ed Koch, were going to help reinvent New York by dreaming big and working harder than we’d ever thought we could. The transition from the seventies to the eighties can be defined by one word: ambition. It burned in us and lit up everyone I knew. This wasn’t civil rights movement “we shall overcome” optimism, but a desire to take advantage of all the doors that that struggle had opened. Oliver Stone, who wrote Scarface, and then wrote and directed Wall Street, captured the aggression of the era, and of my reawakening city. Though I have never done cocaine, there’s an anxious mania for movement that the drug instills that I felt all over New York. For good and bad, the city’s 1970s financial despair was turning into a 1980s of greedy productivity. I never snorted the drug, but I did partake of the frenzy around me.<
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Looking back through my notebook pages from the era, I see I ached to do something, to be someone, to make my name mean more than it had when my father and grandfather were the only Nelson Georges in the world. I’d roll around my bed at night frustrated if I felt I hadn’t worked hard enough, or anxious if I thought I hadn’t worked well. I’d think there was a white writer out there who was already out ahead of me, who could afford to relax, and I’d jump out of bed and start writing. I don’t think I was at rest the entire decade. The dawn of the eighties would inaugurate a new era in my life, and, happily, in the city I loved.
It was also when my troubles began. Within months of my graduation, my sister announced that she was pregnant, which meant I needed to move out so she could have my room for the baby. Then, one afternoon that summer, there was a letter waiting for me when I came to the Am News’s office. It said that due to budget cuts I was being laid off. Of course I was devastated. I tried to put a happy face on it. I’d started as an intern, so I suggested that I still write for the paper—after all, the perks were what really made it so valuable.
The management team that had allowed me into the Amsterdam News had been fired. The old-school reporters at the paper, who had Newspaper Guild protection, didn’t stick up for me, nor were they particularly upset that I was out. So whether I was being paid or not being paid, I was no longer going to be allowed to write for the Amsterdam News.
At least I still had Billboard. After all, wasn’t that the better gig? I went up to their offices one day later in that first postcollege summer, and was told that I was now banned from the publication. The LA-based editor-in-chief had sent a memo to New York stating that I used “black English” in concert reviews, and that I misspelled the name of Weather Report’s Joe Zawinul in a review.
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