I don’t remember ever being a good student at school—which, by the way, was not a serious crime in Brooklyn. Going to university was not what people did or expected of their children. My appetite for information, or my “photographic memory,” as my sister called it, made me something of a nerd in the eyes of my parents and wider family, whose opinion was all that really mattered to me. Those who knew me best, and especially my older sister, thought I was brilliant, so who cared about what my math or science teachers thought?
I also have to thank my sister for the foundations of my musical education. Because she was six years older and we had to share the same bedroom, I heard the soundtrack to her teenage years, which partly explains how my ears grew up faster than the rest of me. The dominant fashion in the early fifties was orchestrated country, and Ann’s favorites included the stunning “Tennessee Waltz” by Patti Page, “Your Cheating Heart” by Joni James, and “Cold, Cold Heart” by Tony Bennett—the latter two of which were originally by Hank Williams. Another was “Goodnight Irene,” a Lead Belly song covered by the Weavers. Its B side was “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” a rousing, banjo-plucking tribute to the new state of Israel complete with a verse in Hebrew. Even my parents sang along to that one. I was only about nine or ten and wasn’t consciously listening, but all these old standards hung in the air like cigarette smoke and yellowed my eardrums for life.
My earliest memory of musical obsession was running home from the synagogue on Saturday to catch the week’s Top 25 hits on Make Believe Ballroom, a hugely popular radio show presented by Martin Block. I didn’t know there was such a thing as the music business, but Martin Block’s magic world of songs and scoops was like watching the conveyor belt rolling straight out of an imaginary song factory. One lasting memory was the way he doffed his cap to Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz,” which remained number one for thirteen weeks in early 1951. “How’s that for consistency?” asked the master of ceremonies, as if to say that durability was the highest value in music.
Whether I knew it or not, I was falling in love. It wasn’t just the lyrics I loved memorizing, it was the weekly thrill of the charts. Often, my father had to stay on at the synagogue, so I’d sit at the kitchen table with a notebook and pen and write down the show’s playlist with chart numbers and notes. Watching my obsessive behavior with some concern, my mother whispered to my sister in the next room, “What’s going to become of him?”
Ann, however, was my greatest believer and always reassured my mother, “Just you wait and see, Mom; Seymour’s going to be a big success.”
The unbearable weekly suspense of Martin Block’s chart was probably accentuated by the other weekly ritual of my father wanting me to keep Shabbos. When he came home from synagogue, I’d have to hide under my blankets and hold the transistor against my ear with the volume turned down low. In the intense atmosphere of a traditional Saturday, I’d lie there almost breathless, taking in every new tune and piece of news like it was life’s honey seeping through airwaves.
It almost bothers me to paint such a stern portrait of my father, because had he ever caught me, I doubt he would have ripped that radio from my ears. He was a gentle soul whose orthodoxy was vastly outweighed by my mother’s side of the family. Being proud traders of fine Italian produce, most of my family rarely ate kosher, didn’t rate Ashkenazi food, and only went to synagogue for special events. We were a mixed family. Our home was 100 percent kosher, but outside, my mother could be easily tempted. On Saturday afternoons, she would always hand me fifty cents and quietly slip me out the front door to catch the movie matinées. Father never forbade this or passed any comments. For the unbeatable value of forty-five cents, I’d get a soda, a hot dog, a bag of fries, a screening of Flash Gordon, and five color cartoons. This was Mother’s reward for my respecting Father’s piety.
Our big family gathering was not Friday-evening Shabbat but a big fat Italian lunch above the store on Sundays. On the way to Coney Island, Father would stop by a kosher delicatessen to take away a corned beef sandwich, which he’d politely nibble at the table amid a tangle of uncles, aunts, and cousins devouring Esther’s legendary spaghetti and tomato sauce. Pizzas from Totonno’s would arrive to whoops of joy, and Father, being good humored, always fit effortlessly into this almost Catholic riot. I’m sure scenes such as this weren’t uncommon in Brooklyn. Most Jewish families were a mix of Orthodox and secular. The unspoken rule was to let each other be and always put family harmony first.
The only thing my father insisted on was Talmud Torah classes for my bar mitzvah, which was standard procedure for twelve-year-old boys. After school, I’d walk to the synagogue and sit down beside other fuzzy-faced prepubescent boys from around the neighborhood. Our teacher was the inspirational Rabbi Rosenfeld, something of a mystic who’d recently discovered a branch of Hassidic Judaism called Breslov. These were the teachings of Rebbe Nachman, an eighteenth-century Hassid who had developed revolutionary ideas about happiness that had resonated among Jews in feudal, czarist Russia. It didn’t matter if you were poor or oppressed; by choosing to be happy, no matter what, you would slowly take control of your life. As well as certain philosophical ideas, Breslovs emphasized joyous rituals like singing and clapping.
Needless to say, such Jewish evangelism was lost on a lot of Brooklyn mothers who clamored around my father, because as vice president of the shul, he was the one person who could rein in the strange new teacher. “We only sent our son to Hebrew school to get bar-mitzvah’d,” they’d complain. “I didn’t want him to become an ultraorthodox!” Twelve-year-old sons were coming home still wearing tzitzit and yarmulkes and would sit silently in their bedrooms observing Shabbat, while in the living room, their fathers were watching TV and pigging out on popcorn. In his jovial way, Father would reassure all these concerned mothers that their sons weren’t being brainwashed. A bar mitzvah was an education in the principles of Judaism, and yes, it was a rite of passage when a son stops acting like a kid and gets working for the Man Upstairs. It was not just a gold-framed photo for Mom’s dressing table.
I’m sure such debates were common in the midfifties, a boomtown era when a growing majority of Jews were second- and third-generation Americans who wished to keep their Jewish identity but ditch all the heavy rituals. My father’s crew running the local synagogue was skeptical of this “secular” fashion. To them, Judaism wasn’t like an old song you mumbled along to; you learned the words and understood what they meant. You either lived Judaism or you didn’t. And if a twelve-year-old came to his local synagogue to learn the religion of his forefathers, he was going to be taught properly by teachers who cared. What that young man did with his life thereafter was his own business.
On the day of my bar mitzvah in March 1955, I remember so clearly being escorted to the synagogue by my future brother-in-law, Martin and his father, Lou Wiederkehr, racked with fright. My father was already there at 7:00 A.M. It was the Saturday before Passover, and the building was packed to the gills with the entire neighborhood, including my entire extended family squashed into the front benches. I stood petrified on that stage for almost two hours as our community leader, Rabbi Kahane, read from Prophets and pulled out various passages about sacrifices, tithes, and the duty of charity. When my big moment came, I stepped up and sang the long Shabbat HaGodol, trying hard not to look at my mother choked up in the front row.
My voice was changing, and so was America’s. “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” was number one that week, a novelty folk number about a comic book hero who chopped down trees, ran for Congress, and “died at the Alamo.” Down South, a kid called Elvis was starting to make noise on Sun Records, still just a local stir that hadn’t reached New York, but in every big city, R&B was already the fast-growing craze among white teenagers. Then, just a few months after my bar mitzvah, my sister got married and left home. Suddenly, I was alone in my very own bedroom, a man in God’s eyes, just as my balls dropped and rock and roll began erupting. And that’s when everything started to spin
out of control.
I had already been exposed to doo-wop like “Gee” by the Crows, “Sh-Boom” by the Chords, and “Hearts of Stone” by Otis Williams and the Charms in 1954, but when I heard great rhythm and blues, I was hooked for life. The first hits I couldn’t stop playing over and over were “Ain’t That a Shame” and “Going to the River” by Fats Domino. Another obsession was “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Joe Turner. Whatever sound first hits you like a bolt of lightning at that mutant, mumbling, blanket-staining bar mitzvah age is generally what will tune your ears for the rest of your record-listening life. For me, it’ll always be doo-wop and the raw sounds of Chuck Berry, James Brown, Sam Cooke, Little Richard, Hank Ballard, Ivory Joe Hunter, Lloyd Price, Johnny Ace, Ray Charles, Little Willie John, and without doubt, my favorite of all those early rockers, Fats Domino.
All these originals weren’t just singers; most wrote their own songs and pushed their routines to the very edge—literally, like Fats, who pushed his piano around the stage, or Little Richard, who ran in and out of camera, or Chuck Berry, who strutted about like a duck. I had no idea, of course, that stage theatrics were all part of the black vaudeville traditions that had mixed up with the evangelism of rhythm and blues. All I knew, aged thirteen, was that nobody else on TV was daring such crazy antics.
I had to collect all these records, so I began selling ice cream or lugging deck chairs on the beach, which turned out to be an education in itself. In those days, if you could have held Manhattan upside down and shaken it, Coney Island is what would’ve dropped out. A summer heat wave could draw a million in one day—people as far the eye could see, crammed like sardines into the amusement parks, all over the beach, all the way down waist deep into the water. And I mean everybody: kids of all ages, mothers, fathers, senior citizens, sailors, soldiers, fortune-tellers, shoeshiners, thousands of blue-collar Romeos showing off to young ladies dolled up in bright red lipstick—every face of American life, swimsuited, bare-chested, overdressed, drunk, sunburned, asleep under newspapers, the lost, the found, and the still looking. Later in life, if I ever needed to visualize The Public, all I had to do was think of Coney Island on a hot summer’s day.
Surf Avenue was the main subway terminus where all these swarms of people poured in. It was also the main drag for bars and curbside vendors. And like the choice of rides in the parks, there was every variety of steaming, greasy, sticky street food, most of it disgusting but perfectly edible when you’re thirteen and carrying a pocketful of change. When it came to food, variety was the name of the game in Coney Island, which had inherited the “world’s fair” tradition of the nineteenth century. Stalls sold everything from fried clams and crabs to knishes, sauerkraut, kebabs, chow mein, pizzas, hamburgers, crinkle-cut fries, steamed corn on the cob, roasted peanuts, waffles, doughs, cotton candy, toffee apples, marshmallow sticks, root beer, malted milk, and slices of fresh watermelon or pineapple. Hot dogs, or “franks” as we Brooklyn insiders called them, were even invented on Surf Avenue when the parks opened in the late nineteenth century. Some bright spark realized that a bread roll was the handiest way of serving frankfurters to passing crowds at ten cents a pop. A squirt of mustard, a funny name, and bingo!
For those of us who lived nearby and could get odd jobs, it was like growing up beside the circus. My grandparents had witnessed Coney Island’s golden age in the twenties when wealthy Manhattan families would stay the night in plush hotels. The rich had long since moved down the Long Island coast, but in the fifties, Coney Island still had magic, albeit of a more working-class flavor. When I was a kid, Woody Guthrie lived just a block off the beach, where he wrote “Mermaid Avenue, that’s the street where all the colors and the good folks meet.” He was so moved by Coney Island’s carnival atmosphere, he also wrote a collection of kids’ songs, even a few tributes to Jewish culture.
On a busy day, I could make up to ten dollars on the beach—serious dough for a teenager—which I of course squirreled away into one of my secret holes. I make it sound easy, but I promise you, it was exhausting and embarrassing work wearing a heavy ice cream box in flesh-melting temperatures. To buy records, there were a few stores in Brooklyn, but for a full selection of R&B, I’d take the subway to Record Shack, or Bobby’s Happy House in Harlem, and later Cousins’ in the Bronx. In those days, the 45 and 33 formats had almost taken over, but many R&B records were still being pressed as 78 ten-inches—big heavy biscuits made from a substance called shellac, the precursor to vinyl. I much preferred the 45 RPM speed.
The first step in any teenage ambition is to fake the persona you wish to become; the next is believing it yourself. I started taking my new records to my grandparents’ on Sundays and jiving like Martin Block to any cousin or aunt who’d listen to me. I’ll never forget one Sunday lunch when my great-uncle Morris heard my plans to take over American show business. He smiled, gave me some sound advice, and put his finger straight on that idea of durability that Martin Block had referred to about “Tennessee Waltz.” Uncle Morris may have been an olive oil importer, but he understood how New York operated. “Anyone can get into show business for a while,” he warned, “but the true kings of Broadway are all about staying power.”
It was time for me to investigate the machinery behind Martin Block’s Make Believe Ballroom. I knew that Billboard compiled his charts, so on one of my city expeditions in the summer of 1956, I called into Billboard’s office, which was part of the Palace Theatre on Forty-Seventh and Broadway. “Excuse me, ma’am,” I said to the lady at the front desk. “I’m really interested in your charts and was wondering if you need interns.”
She kindly called out Billboard’s charts man, Tom Noonan, who was no more than thirty years old and surprisingly friendly. Knowing that I was far too young to get a job, I explained that I just wanted to copy his archives as a sort of school project. To my delight, he pulled out a pile of bound volumes, made space on the corner of a desk, and let me copy away in my left-handed scrawl.
I doubt anybody cared about my project, not even my mother. Fortunately, Tom Noonan let me come in during the holidays and after school to delve further and further backward to the very week I was born. I just kept copying and copying, learning names, watching Tom, and basically seeing how long I could last. Who knows what he and the other writers inside Billboard were thinking. Most of them were poor, unmarried music fanatics who practically lived in the office. Whatever sick obsession I had, they suffered from, too.
Lafayette High School was a giant four-story building on the west side of our neighborhood and had about four thousand kids. It’s not that I didn’t find the lessons interesting, but compared to Billboard or selling ice cream on Coney Island, the classroom felt like a straitjacket. I always sensed there was something different about me, but it took me a long to time realize what it was. I don’t know what makes a person gay; I just remember standing on the side of the field, staring at our school’s best athletes. Because I couldn’t play sports, I just presumed it was normal to be so awestruck by other guys’ strength and agility. I wasn’t turned off by girls, and I had no problem picking out the pretty ones, but I was also becoming aware of the special camaraderie between guys that I think even the straightest of men can recognize is so strong. As the teenage merry-go-round started to spin faster, all these threads laced into an ever-tightening attraction, but it wasn’t something I let myself think about. All I knew is that it would kill my father if he ever found out.
My eureka moment was watching Ricky Nelson on TV performing Fats Domino’s “I’m Walking.” That’s when I knew. There was nothing camp in my mannerisms, no giveaways. If I ever got called names at school, it was because of the pranks I used to pull, like pretending a tiny transistor earphone was a hearing aid so I could listen to music during class. I knew I was tragically clumsy and something of a weirdo, but I also knew that the coolest thing about me was my record collection. Our school produced a lot of baseball players, including Sandy Koufax, Dodger Hall of Famer, but there’d actua
lly been one pop star who’d graduated in the forties; Vic Damone was his name. He proved it could be done, so I just wanted other kids to know that I was riding into whatever stage-lit sunset Fats Domino and Ricky Nelson were singing in. I don’t think anybody suspected I was gay, because in that era of Eisenhower and Doris Day, homosexuality was not something people would suspect, not even us dirty-mouthed Brooklyn brats. Even for me, it was buried so deep, I truly believed that if I ignored it long enough, it might go away, like the hiccups or a door-to-door salesman.
My secret probably caused me isolation, but I can’t say that anything specific hurt or that I suffered. It was only when the music began flowing through me that I could feel something medicinal happening. I suddenly felt better without ever knowing there may have been an unwellness in the first place. I’d lie on my bed studying the small print on the sleeves: King, Apollo, Mercury, Aladdin, Excelsior, Atlantic, Miracle, Sun, Chess, Vee-Jay, Modern … all these castles and flags from across the land. Whether I was sitting at my desk in school or eating dinner with my parents, the only place I wanted to be was nearer the source of it all.
My obsession for records didn’t seem to overly worry my parents, because a young man had to learn a trade, and officially, I was an intern at a respectable New York publication. The guys at Billboard had even given me a press card, which enabled me to bullshit my way into shows like Hank Ballard, Jackie Wilson, Lloyd Price, and others at the Brooklyn town hall. Plus, I was taking home scoops, like the day the Country Music Association paid a visit to the Billboard editor, Paul Ackerman, to complain about Elvis being put on the country chart. Paul Ackerman was an amazing teacher. He would tell me things, like the time folks from the Country Music Association came up to complain about Elvis Presley’s Sun records hitting the country music charts, which in those days only ran to about ten or fifteen positions. They said to him, “Paul, you know this is nothing but nigger music.” He felt ashamed that he didn’t just throw them out of his office, but those folks carried a lot of weight. Paul was a sensitive intellectual and a true crusader for R&B and black people.
Siren Song_My Life in Music Page 3