by Paul Anka
I was the kid—and a singer to boot. Like kids in bands are today, the Southern boys were guitar mechanics. I barely knew one guitar from another. They’d tease me with questions like, “Hey kid, what’s the difference between a Stratocaster and a Les Paul?” Who knew? Buddy gave me an old acoustic guitar and that’s what I wrote “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” on.
Eddie Cochran was the other guitar slinger who had a huge influence on the next generation of rockers. Eddie Cochran became a rock hero in the sixties on the basis of “Nervous Breakdown” and “Summertime Blues.” In terms of attitude he was way ahead of his time.
On these big tours with as many as twenty different acts on the bill, I always had to combat the fact that I was a young unsophisticated kid, a little different from anyone else in the show and a little too successful for my own health. Kids can be cruel and they are even crueler in their teens. I’m not black, I’m not a Southern boy, and I was doing Canada and my own thing and was very outspoken, so the other acts started out with a real attitude toward me. They had no intention of becoming buddy-buddy with me, but despite that we ultimately became friends. As you can imagine it was a constant battle of egos, and I was their prime target. I was always thinking differently and I looked different. My ambitions were alien to them. Vegas and that whole Sinatra Rat Pack thing is what I aspired to, and they couldn’t identify with that at all.
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After playing in Pittsburgh, we headed into the southern United States to places that I had never been to or knew much about. In the late 1950s, the civil rights protests were happening and I saw horrendous scenes of racism firsthand in those cities that I’ll never forget. It was a depressing spectacle. On the tours we had white and black performers traveling together and this caused problems when we stopped at places in the Deep South.
On the way from Atlanta to New Orleans, police stopped the bus and segregated us, putting all the white performers on one bus and all the blacks on the other.
In Canada I hadn’t been exposed to any of that. I was disgusted by it. The magic of rock ’n’ roll may have brought black and white kids together, but it didn’t keep people from getting their heads cracked. Police dogs attacking defenseless blacks on the street, police spraying crowds with water hoses and swinging their clubs at protesters. We performed in cities where both audiences and performers were segregated, the black acts invariably treated like second-class citizens. The black performers could sing on stage, but offstage they encountered prejudice whenever they tried to enter segregated public places.
When black acts couldn’t get into hotels and restaurants we’d all eat and sleep on the bus. We couldn’t go to restaurants together, either. I had to go in and get food for my black friends. There were separate bathrooms for the black performers, who could only get to use them by going in through the back door, so what we’d do was slow the bus down, open the door, and piss outside.
I was the only white kid on the bus in some cases. The only redeeming thing about it was being thrown into that experience. Going down South and seeing how they treated black artists was eye-opening. Outside the realm of show business it was a racist world—North or South. For a young Canadian kid it was a scary time.
The black acts—Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, the guys who had a string of hits and had the most exciting acts—closed the shows. You wouldn’t want to follow these guys anyway. Black experience is what’s driven every decade of American music. Back then I didn’t have the experience. I had the hits, but the older black acts like Fats Domino had the chops. Anyway Irv would be the one to decide who closed the show—there was no argument about it.
By rights Chuck should have closed the shows, but mid-tour he bizarrely insisted he open the show. This puzzled everyone until we realized that if he went on early he could cruise the audience for girls while the other acts were playing. Chuck Berry was the guy, but touring got kind of funky for him because of the racial laws on the road. When we were in North Carolina, Chuck stopped the bus at a roadside café, and everybody piled out. The owner, backed up by some scary-looking patrons, shouted out, “We don’t serve niggers!”
“That’s all right, I don’t eat ’em,” Berry replied and everybody laughed. Nobody ate and the bus moved on. Buddy Holly always joined the protest; he was very vocal, as we all were. We would tell these bigoted restaurant owners, “If you won’t feed these guys, we’re not going to eat here, either.” Not that they cared.
At another show the son of the white mayor bought a ticket to the show and then found himself sitting among black kids. He went to the box office and said there must be a mistake and wanted to get another seat. But they told him, “Sorry, son, the show is sold out.” He asked for his money back.
Since the tours of the late ’50s always featured black performers, we tried to figure out ways to get around the absurd rules in the South.
When we performed in certain areas one side of the audience would be divided into two sections: blacks on the left, whites to the right, with a curtain dividing them down the center!
Even backstage the restrictions didn’t break down: the black performers had their section and we had ours. When we got to Birmingham, the chief of police came to check out all the performers because of The Crests. They had a hit with “Sixteen Candles.” It was a truly interracial group. The lead singer, Johnny Maestro, was Italian-American, and there were three blacks (including one female) and a Puerto Rican. As you can imagine Southern cops had a serious problem with that. When they came backstage, they were horrified to see whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans all mingling together. The police chief was apoplectic. “There’s a nigger on stage with white musicians!” he yelled. “We don’t abide that kinda behavior down here.” “What kind of behavior would that be?” Irv asked. The police chief just stomped out of the theater. Allen and Irv tried to protect the black kids from the worst excesses of racist cops, but it wasn’t easy.
It was right on the cusp of integration so everyone was pushing the boundaries from both sides. If you didn’t provoke the racist bullshit by defying their stupid rules, you weren’t really pushing the envelope—you were just acquiescing. The situation down South seriously aggravated the black performers, they’d do things to deliberately piss people off, like bringing white girls up to the room. That was either asking for trouble or the beginning of integration, depending on the way you looked at it.
The racist element only added fuel to the fire: rock ’n’ roll was the new plague and the press, even the so-called respectable press, exploited the situation ruthlessly. One of the worst incidents I remember was in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was a phony alarm—but when has that ever stopped the press? Most of the stuff you read about was instigated by the press. At that show Life magazine was trying to get kids to take off their shirts—they were actually paying kids to act up, so they’d have good photographs of a rock ’n’ roll riot. And once Life had started this nonsense, all the other magazines started trying to get kids to do the same thing and up the ante. They’d give them money and say, “Tear up the seat!” “Throw trash!’ “Start a fight!” “Take your shirts off.” They wanted to stage it. To show that rock-and-roll was running wild.
Back then we were getting criticized like crazy, they were all over us, saying, “This music’s abominable, it’s a menace, it turns kids into juvenile delinquents!” Allen and Irv got tipped off what they were up to and kept a close eye on the concerts to make sure that didn’t happen.
The white Southern boys and the blacks all smoked weed in those days, but it was never out in the open. Pot smoking was pretty much hidden behind closed doors—the window open, the wet towel under the door—because the managers strictly forbade it on the tours. They were all sneaking, hiding it. Everybody had to be very cool about it or you got thrown off the tour, but we all knew who was getting high and who wasn’t, for sure. Even as far back as Ray Charles, pot, cocaine, heroin, and all that stuff was around.
Frankie Lymon, he’d be shooting up in
the stall in the bathroom, you know, before the show, or late at night when nobody’s looking on the bus. He’d tie up, get high. We all knew what he was doing, it was so out there. Nobody said anything but you’d see it through the crack in the door of the stall. When they needed it, they needed it, that’s all there was to it. Nobody wanted to go cold turkey on tour. We all knew who in the cast was doing what. And it wasn’t just the black performers. Dion DiMucci, polite little Italian boy from New York, I remember him doing heroin, too. There’s so many times Irv or Allen Bloom had to go down to the local jail, bail him out.
Frankie Lymon died of a heroin overdose in the end. I saw that coming. It was stupid and self-destructive, but these guys were desperate characters. Frankie Lymon wasn’t the innocent-looking teenager you saw at the shows and on television. Which is why him singing, “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent” was such an irony. Try running a clip of him OD’ing, slumped over in a bathroom stall, with that lyric in your head. Great little performer, but real edgy—he was an arrogant little guy with a big overblown personality and a chip on his shoulder. He was going with Zola Taylor, one of the original Platters who were on tour with us—and she was just one of his girls. A junkie, a bit of a con man, but no matter—the girls loved him. Quite a few of the musicians that traveled with us were just whacked most of the time, too. He wasn’t the only one. Another of The Teenagers died of an OD in prison.
I don’t know what Chuck was doing because whatever he did, he did in his limo, but there was always something going on with him. We’d be driving from New York through Pennsylvania, on our way to Ohio, but we had to let him take off ’cause he was wanted in Ohio for something or other. Transporting minors across state lines or just to harass him for dating white chicks. He’d show up again in Phoenix. He’d picked up this sixteen-year-old girl, we’d drive up the West Coast, across Canada, the girl’s still with him. They arrested him in St. Louis, put him in jail. I mean this stuff—minors, blacks with white girls—that went on a lot, but Chuck was permanently on the prowl.
Buddy Holly loved “You Are My Destiny” with its big Don Costa production. He’d taken his own song style as far as it would go and he was looking for something different. “I need to change my arrangements and try what you’re doing with your songs.” He wanted to leave The Crickets and move on. He asked me to write a song for him—and I did. That’s how I came to write “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.” The direction he wanted to go in was to add string arrangements to his songs, develop a lusher, sweeter sound behind his vocals. The whole focus of “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” was to do it with a big band, with violins and horns, a big, plush orchestral sound that would frame his voice, impart a more romantic aura to his songs—like a movie soundtrack. That’s what that was about, which, in retrospect is pretty funny because it was Buddy’s rougher, guitar-band sound that would inspire the next generation—certainly not lush orchestrations!
By the time of that first tour, which ended just before Thanksgiving of ’57, we’d all gotten comfortable with each other. I’d seen Irv in action and I was impressed. If I were going to continue in this business I needed serious representation. “Destiny” had just taken off and I told him, “I’m not going to work for you again ’til you become my manager.”
“Let’s talk in a few weeks,” he said in his I-gotta-think-this-through-and-so-do-you manner. “We’ll see what we can do,” he said. Now he only had me under contract for one tour; there was no other deal signed beyond that. I went home and within the next week or so my dad called him and said, “Look if you’re comfortable working with Paul, and I know you are, he wants you to manage him.”
My father and Irv met at a restaurant in New York. We all sat down and went over everything. He wanted, first of all, to make sure that was what I wanted to do with my life, that the one hit I had wasn’t just a whim. I, for my part, wanted nothing else. I wanted to dive in head-first and not even come up for air.
Irv was very smart. He said, “He’s going to make mistakes. Everybody does. Let’s have him make them far from home. When he gets back, he’ll be a giant.”
Irv had his own inimitable vibe. Always dressed in silk suits, a cigarette dangling from his mouth—he loved his cigarettes—he never needed any sleep. He was up day and night, worked very hard, and sold what he believed in. He was a salesman in the sense that he could persuade you to see things through his eyes. A true believer. Smart, shrewd, and aggressive, but also very trusting. Irv was the first guy to take me to a tailor and get me a suit before I started out on tour. He took me to a famous Italian tailor, where they created some sharp suits.
Between tours I lived with Irv and his family. His home life was not all that pleasant. His wife was a schizophrenic. They knew that she was very sick but in those days they didn’t have the antipsychotic drugs they have today. She would rage at Irv almost daily. She resented the amount of time Irv spent at work, seven days a week. His idea of quality time with his son was to take him to the store with him when he went to work. Irv’s wife didn’t resent me, she resented the time he spent on my career.
Because I was away from home a lot and was a minor, Irv became my legal guardian on the tours. When I was in the States during time off between tours I’d stay at Irv’s. I spent a huge amount of time at his house and at his apartment in Washington. I shared a room with Irv’s son Kenny. I was seven years older than he was so I became the big brother Kenny never had and was probably as annoying as any biological sibling.
I was so full of electricity coming off the road, I would be bouncing off the walls. I’d be up all night, and given my natural proclivity for pranks I’d get into a lot of mischief. While Kenny was sleeping I’d put gel in his hair, paint his face. He’d wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and he’d have spiked hair; there’d be blue dots all over his face. Remember that well into my twenties I was still a kid because I’d missed my childhood by going into show business so young. But at Irv’s house I knew I could get away with almost anything so I could always be a kid there.
Because I was a kid I felt I had to prove myself, and Irv was the ideal person to help me do it. I was perfectly in synch with Irv—and he got me fame and money beyond my wildest dreams. I remember the time Irv booked me into Freedomland, a theme park in the Bronx built by the master developer William Zeckendorf—who built half of New York—where top acts would perform in the summer. It was Zeckendorf’s idea to hire me and Irv got me the fantastic sum of $100,000 for one weekend’s work, an unheard amount of money—it was the highest amount an artist was ever paid in history up to that time. It was so huge, in fact, that when Irv called GAC (General Artists Corporation), my talent agency, to write up the contract, the agent thought it was a mistake and wrote it for $10,000. Irv went berserk, but it got fixed, of course. Part of the documentary Lonely Boy was shot at Freedomland, where you can get the essence, the feel of the time, the frenzy of the girls, crying, going crazy—pre-Beatle, pre-Beatlemania.
Before Irv became my manager, my agent Buddy Howe at GAC had been my mentor. Buddy was a great guy and helped me immensely in the early part of my career, but Irv was something else again. He was an original, everything he did was an innovation—there were no templates for pop music yet. Irv was the first manager of pop acts to think globally. He planned my first European and Japanese tours. He was always someone who wanted to break open new frontiers. And because of Irv, I was the first American pop artist to tour behind the Iron Curtain.
The music scene began to take off overseas when “Diana” became a hit in Europe and a lot of other places around the world. Then “You Are My Destiny” became a smash in July 1958. My next few records all took off internationally, too. Between the ages of seventeen and twenty, I toured Chile, Paris, London, Belgium, Japan. That became my lifestyle; I was a travelin’ man.
I went on my first European tour, opening the Trocadero Theatre in London on December 7, 1958.
In England, I met the singer Helen Shapiro, who was then fourte
en. I wrote and produced a song for her, but given her age that’s as far as the romance went. There was no swapping spit. It was the reverse of the situation with Diana.
“Teen idol” was the new word. With rock ’n’ roll came a new set of clichés—and problems. I got mobbed in Paris. There’s a photo of me trying to get out of a car, but can’t because of the crush of fans. It was just a sea of people pushing toward me, mostly screaming girls. You might say, well, what’s so bad about that? But a crowd is a crowd—it’s a mindless crush of bodies and is a very scary thing to be in the middle of.
The minute I got back to the States in January, I was out on the road again with Buddy Holly and The Crickets, Eddie Cochran, The Rays, Royal Teens, Danny and The Juniors, Hollywood Flames, Mello-Kings, The Shepherd Sisters, Margie Rayburn, and The Tune Weavers on an Everly Brothers tour.
The Everlys didn’t have their own band. They would pick up musicians in the towns we played, unlike The Crickets—Buddy’s band traveled with him. I didn’t have my own regular band, either. When I performed I was just trying to transpose the sound of my records to a performance situation. I would pick up a band, we’d rehearse together, and they would go on tour with me. Very unlike the concept of what was to come in which the band became a fixed entity in rock ’n’ roll and you got to know who played drums, who played bass, who played lead. I didn’t get my own permanent band until I got a little older and started playing the clubs.
After the Everly tour I headed out with Jerry Lee Lewis and Jodie Sands with Buddy and The Crickets on Buddy’s Hawaiian tour and after that his ten-day Australian tour before returning to Hawaii for another performance.
It was crazy how much touring we all did, but who knew if it was going to last? The critics were saying that rock ’n’ roll was a novelty and would quickly fade away. Believe it or not, it could have easily happened that way, too. Phonographs weren’t exactly a household item—especially for teenagers. Also, there were very few places where rock ’n’ rollers could perform.