Makeup to Breakup

by Sloman, Larry

  My heart swelled">predicament.” s” to hear that coming from his lips.

  That was all I needed to hear. About halfway through that gig, I confronted my mother. I was in my second year of high school then.

  “I want to quit school. I want to play in a band and I promise you, I’ll make it,” I said.

  “You don’t have to give me a whole spiel,” she said. She really didn’t have a problem with me not going back to school. She knew I hated it. She knew that playing in clubs would keep me off the streets. And she remembered a pledge I had made to her one day when we were walking past Madison Square Garden: “Ma, I’m going to play that hall someday,” I vowed.

  My father went along with it, too. He hated the aggravation of me going out late at night, not knowing where I was, especially when I came home with cheap wine on my breath and an attitude.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I had a taste of Broadway, but after the gig at the Metropole was over I was back at the King’s Lounge in north Williamsburg, playing for the boys with the pinkie rings. One night a guy came up to me during a break.

  “I want my nephew to sit in and play,” he said.

  I was a cocky kid then. I had a Beatles haircut and I was wearing a black vest with a polka-dot tie and a white shirt and tight pants and Beatles boots.

  “Nobody sits in on my drums,” I dismissed the guy.

  He threw a fifty-dollar bill on my bass drum. “The kid is going to sit in,” he said firmly.

  And then he gave me a look that could kill.

  “No problem,” I said meekly, and pocketed the bill.

  It was harrowing playing at a Mob joint. I almost expected to see a bomb come in through the window. Every time the door opened and someone walked in, I was scared it might be a guy who was going to take a machine gun out from under his jacket and just level the joint. But one night in the summer of 1966, someone special walked through those doors. She was a tiny little thing with long, silky, beautiful black hair and a really cute face. I’d like to jump on that, I immediately">We talked between each break and she told me her name was Lydia DiLeonardo, a nice Italian girl. The next day was the Fourth of July, so I invited her to go to Coney Island with me. We got to the beach and I tried to be very cool. I lit a cigarette, the ash blew back in my eye, and I felt like an idiot. But once I got her on the sand, I was all over it. We were making out like crazy. I don’t think it was love at first sight, but we kept seeing each other. She would come down on the weekends and see me play. We’d go to movies and hang out.

  Eventually I asked her to go steady. Why not? She was really smart, going to school for bookkeeping. Back in Brooklyn, if you were going to bring a girl home to Mom and Dad, you wanted an Italian or an Irish or even a good Jewish girl. And Lydia to me was the Bella Donna, the Mother Mary. A real beauty. My parents loved her.

  Her parents were another story. They were real Italians from Sicily. They had three sons and Lydia. She took me home for a Sunday dinner one night to meet them and it was right out of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? The whole family was around the table, which had an abundance of food on it. Her dad was sitting at the head of the table with a gallon of homemade wine in front of him. Her mom and dad and her brothers kept looking me up and down. And they were seeing a skinny kid with hair down to his breast and they weren’t liking the picture one bit. I may as well have been black or gay. I was the enemy. They despised everything that my long hair stood for. What’s worse, I wanted to be a musician—not a dentist, not a car mechanic, not even a plumber. I was a bum in their eyes.

  But we didn’t care. After we started going steady, we had sex for the first time in Jerry Nolan’s mom’s bedroom. Then sometimes Lydia would cut school and come to my grandmother’s house and we’d make love in the daytime. We had to keep things undercover back then, because if her family had found out they would have killed both of us.

  And if Lydia had found out about Linda, she might have killed me. While I was dating Lydia, I was sneaking off to have fun with a foxy little blonde whose mother owned a funeral parlor. Linda was just sixteen, two years younger than Lydia, and I was crazy about her. I would take Lydia home, then sneak off to the funeral parlor where Linda and I would make out in the coffins, bizarre but true.

  When I wasn’t sneaking off to see Linda, I’d sneak off to see Jerry Nolan. Lydia’s parents lived just blocks from Jerry in Queens. After a date, I used to tell Lydia I was going home and then I’d go over to Jerry’s house. We both wanted to be famous and we knew that image was everything, so we’d sit in front of a tanning lamp, then give ourselves facials with the creams and lotions that Jerry had. Jerry had gone to barber school and he’d razor-cut my hair. We looked like two gigolos!

  When I met Lydia, I was still playing with the Barracudas. But that was getting old pretty quick. We were still playing instrumentals like “Tequila” and “Wipeout,” along with some Motown and some Beatles and Stones. I was pushing to play Procol Harum or Hendrix. But Carlos was older, twenty-four or so, and he just didn’t have that feel. He liked Motown but he wasn’t that crazy about the British invasion bands.

  Around that time I went to see my friend Joey Lucenti’s band and he had a guy named Pepi Genneralli who played a mean Farfisa organ. Pepi was a great-looking blond, blue-eyed Italian chick magnet. He wasn’t happy in his band either">We played all over the city. Trudy Hellers, the Night Owl, Café Wha?, the Purple Onion. We worked constantly, playing a month at each club. After a while, we all wore matching double-breasted suits and ties, and we looked sharp. We even got gigs out of town.

  Back in 1967, it was amazing how much hatred and disdain you could generate just by wearing your hair long and dressing like Jimi Hendrix. But I didn’t care. I wanted to look like a star all the time. Jerry called it “profiling.” We’d sit in his apartment figuring out what to wear so that people would stare at us. We were total nonconformists, total rebels. In a way, we had just graduated to a different gang.

  I’d leave my apartment wearing a purple satin shirt, gold pants, and a velvet jacket and walk to the subway. All along the way, the Puerto Ricans would whistle at me and call me puta, which means whore, or paco, which meant gay. They’d make kissing sounds and go, “Paco, paco, suck my dick, baby.” But I didn’t care. I was cool, as far as I was concerned.

  Coming home it was a different story. My parents had moved to Greenpoint and they lived over a bar. I was back living with them and I had a cool room. I painted the ceiling black and put stars on it so it looked like a galaxy. My mom and dad even grew pot for me on their roof—that’s how cool they were. (Of course, when I finally told them that that leafy green plant they were having so much fun cultivating was pot, they freaked out.) My dad would meet me at the subway at four in the morning when I was coming back from my gigs in the Village and help me with my drums. We had to push the drums fifteen blocks, and the Polish drunks who were coming out of the bars would ridicule me. If I didn’t have a gig, if I had just been clubbing in the Village, they would chase me all the way home and if they caught up to me, they’d push me around and pull my hair, pull out a switchblade and threaten to cut it off. I used to think, You motherfucker, five years earlier I would have fucking broken your knees with a bat. But now I wanted to be a rock star, so I had to endure it.

  I even got that shit on the road. One time the Sounds of Soul were playing in upstate New York and we got hungry. We pulled into a truck stop, and they sent me in to get some food. I sat down, ordered some hamburgers to go, and these two huge truckers sat down on either side of me. One of them leaned over to the other and said, “I bet you I could punch him so hard that my fist could come through his brains.” Then the other guy described what torture he’d do to me. They started calling me Goldilocks, and I freaked out and ran out the door. And they ran after me.

  Tommy was driving and he saw me running toward the van with these two huge truckers hot on my heels, so he started to take off. Meanwhile, Pepi opened the back door of the van and just
as I caught up, he grabbed me and pulled me in. We turned around and gave those two assholes the finger.

  The Sounds of Soul came to an end when our sax player, Tommy, got drafted and went to Vietnam. We were devastated, but we carried on. We wanted to play more originals, so we changed our name to the Brotherhood and began to slip some originals into our set. That didn’t go over too well with the uptown clubs.

  “What the fuck was that sh as far as I was concerned.e had ” it?” the owner would storm over to us after the show. “I told you guys I wanted to hear ‘Green Tambourine.’ ” And then we’d get fired.

  Nineteen sixty-eight was a great time to be a musician. You could see the greatest bands in the world play in the East Village at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East and at the Anderson Theater down the block. I’ll never forget sitting up in the balcony of the Fillmore and seeing the Jefferson Airplane. I saw the Who premiere Tommy there. I saw Hendrix, the Doors, Savoy Brown, Arthur Brown, Van Morrison. My brain cells would just blow up hearing all that great stuff.

  But the best was Steve Paul’s nightclub, the Scene. All us young musicians would hang out there in the peanut gallery and wait for all the stars to come in and jam. One night I went there with Jerry and I saw Hendrix jam with Buddy Miles and Johnny Winter. My fucking balls hit the floor. One night Janis Joplin walked in with Jim Morrison after they had played a double bill at the Fillmore and Janis pulled a bottle of Southern Comfort out of her bag and kept topping off the glass of bourbon she ordered.

  Another time, Steve Paul had managed to get his hands on an advance copy of the Beatles’ White Album. When I first saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, I was not that crazy about them. I loved the Stones then. But then I really got into the Beatles and their lyrics, and they changed my life. I started to wear a Sgt. Pepper hairstyle, I grew a mustache like Paul McCartney’s, and then I got into the Lennon image, all in white with white sneakers and my hair long and straight down with the wire-rimmed glasses. Waiting for a new Beatles album was like waiting for a gift from the gods.

  They locked the door at midnight and Steve Paul came out and said, “Shut the fuck up, everybody.” You could hear a pin drop in the whole nightclub. And he played that album from side one to side four straight through and it was like God was speaking through those speakers. We took those songs to be law.

  We would make our own music too, informally. Every Sunday we’d meet up at the fountain in Central Park and there’d be people jamming with guitars and bongos, people talking about music and politics, passing around joints.

  All of this propelled us toward wanting to do more originals. By then, Pepi and I had connected with a guitar player named Kevin Reese and a bass player named Peter Shandis and we started a band called Nautilus. Pepi and I were the best musicians in the band; we kept the foundation solid. I wasn’t the front man, but I sang most of our songs. Kevin was half black and half white with green eyes. He was gorgeous. He couldn’t play that great, but he reminded me of a young Hendrix and he had great stage presence. In those days, it seemed that how you looked was almost as important as how you played. And he looked great. And so did Peter Shandis. He lived in the Village, and that was impressive in itself. He was a true hippie nonviolent love child, with one of those Byrds-type haircuts with the bangs. Great image, not so great a bass player. So we played the same club circuit, only with a heavier British Invasion–based sound.

  We gigged all around the East Coast, but one of our mainstays was a club on Forty-second Street and Third Avenue called the Headliner. One afternoon in the fall of 1969 we were rehearsing there and this guy walked in accompanied by a knockout babe. He was in his thirties, blond, with thinning hair but really built, easily a two-hundred-pound guy. He had a bulldoggish look about him, like he was a as far as I was concerned.e had ” guy you didn’t want to cross. His girlfriend was a little bit younger, a flaming redhead with a gorgeous face and a knockout body. He introduced her as Kathy and said his name was Jack O’Brien, which was odd because he looked about as Irish as I was.

  But what immediately captivated us was that he said he was a close friend of Bob Seger, whose group, the Bob Seger System, had just had its first hit. He had helped produce the album and he was tight with all the music people in the Detroit scene, he told us. He and his girlfriend were living in New York now and he wanted to get involved with a group, maybe manage them like Brian Epstein had done with the Beatles, or maybe even sing with them since he was also a singer. He said he had heard us play and he liked what he heard.

  So after buying us a round of drinks, he invited the band up to his penthouse apartment to continue the discussion. I took one look at his huge diamond ring, his gold Rolex and gold jewelry, and Kathy’s even bigger rock and I knew he was the real deal. This was the jump connection we so desperately needed. We followed him past his doorman and up to his pad. Looking out the big picture windows, we saw a spectacular view of the cityscape. And we were lapping up everything he was saying. “I’m gonna get you guys a deal, you’re great,” he enthused. “First of all, we gotta get you a decent PA system. Then we’ll go out to our place on Long Island and you guys can hole up there and write and rehearse. I’ll be coming out periodically and I’ll sit in with you. We’ll put a show together and get a deal. And don’t worry, I’ll pay for everything.”

  A few days later, Jack called and told us to get a U-Haul van. We met him and he told us to drive to some parking lot where he made us take the license plates off two cars and put one of them on our van. As tough as I was, I had never done anything like that in my life. It should have been a tip-off to us that Jack wasn’t who he appeared to be. Then he had us pull the van in front of Manny’s music store on Forty-eighth Street, where Kathy was sitting in a limo waiting for us. Both Jack and Kathy were wearing wigs that day and it struck us as a little strange, but we didn’t think much of it. And we certainly didn’t give it a second thought when two guys who worked at Manny’s schlepped out this great Altec Lansing PA system and helped us put it into the van. Then Jack gave us some pills that were like speed and downers at the same time. After we got the PA to Pepi’s dad’s warehouse, I felt so weird I thought I was going to die. I crashed big-time, but I still had this lingering feeling that something was really weird.

  We took all our equipment, including Pepi’s B-3 Hammond organ, my set of drums, two big amps, some big Fenders, and the PA system, and drove out to Jack’s house on Long Island. It wasn’t a mansion by any stretch of the imagination, but the house was nice enough and he had a big basement where we set up our stuff. We started working on songs and Jack would come out every weekend, drop off some money for us, and listen to the stuff.

  “Whaddya got?” he’d say, and we’d play him the songs. “That’s pretty good,” he smiled. We kept asking him to sit in and sing, but he kept putting us off. “I don’t feel like it this weekend, my throat is bugging me today. Next time,” he’d say. “But keep practicing. I like what I’m hearing.” Then he peeled some cash off his roll and dropped it on the table. This went on for months and months. I was seeing Lydia then, and she’d come out occasionally to visit, but we were consumed with our music. This was our big break bottle of Dom Pérignon would ever and we certainly weren’t going to fuck it up.

  After about five months of this, some doubts about what we were doing began to creep in. Every time we’d asked Jack to sing with us, he had some excuse. And we were getting cabin fever. We all wanted to get out and gig and try out the material we had been writing and rehearsing. Plus we started questioning just who this guy Jack really was. Every time he and Kathy would come out to the house, they were driving a different luxury car. And they’d retreat into their room, which had a huge padlock on the door. Plus it didn’t take a brain surgeon to realize that both of them were cranked up on meth most of the time.

  We wanted to confront Jack, tell him that we wanted out of there, but we were afraid to bring the topic up. One day, just before Jack and Kathy were due out, we all smoked some
weed and Pepi decided that he was going to talk to Jack. That night, we were all sitting around the dinner table. Me and Pepi and Kevin and Peter were stoned on pot, giggling, but Jack and Kathy were tweaked out on speed.

  “Look, Jack,” Pepi suddenly said. “We’re getting tired of this shit. We came here to make it, but all we’re doing is rehearsing in the basement. We want to get out of here and play.” The table immediately grew silent. Pepi went on a bit more about how we were just going to leave. Jack just sat there and stared at Pepi.

  “Really?” he finally said. And then he picked up his glass and threw it at Pepi, hitting him square in the forehead. The glass shattered and Pepi began to bleed profusely.

  “Anybody else got something to say to me?” Jack stared at Kevin and Peter and me. We were in total shock. I’ll never forget his piercing, weird eyes.

  “Hey, man, that wasn’t cool,” I managed to protest.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he snapped at me. “You ain’t fucking going nowhere. That’s the way it’s gonna be. My way or no way.”

  The four of us freaked out.

  Jack and Kathy retreated into their locked room, and when they came out, Kathy was wearing a wig and an outfit that made her look like a fifty-year-old woman and Jack had a mustache that made him look completely different.

  “You guys just stay here and play,” he said, and then they left.

  I called Lydia and said, “We’re going to get out of here. My buddy told me about a gig up in Kennebunkport, Maine. We could be the house band for this fraternity, and they’ll pay us a salary. We’ll live in the back of the bar, they’ll feed us. We’ve just got to get out of here—this guy Jack is dangerous.”

  We snuck out, rented a truck, loaded it up, and took off and drove up to Maine. We were thinking, “Wow, we’re free, we got away from this fucking guy, thank you Jesus! That’s the last we’ll ever see of Jack.”