City Kid (13 page)

Through their writings and the work of the many critics they edited, I found new names to study—James Agee, Georgia Brown, Ralph J. Gleason, Dave Marsh, and many others. I'd haunt the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza, each writer leading me to others, each cinematic or musical reference guiding me to others. Back at Tilden for my last semester, I felt suffocated taking classes and writing notes. I'd gotten a taste of a world out there that I was anxious to get back into.

In the meantime I continued to read and learn. Two books of criticism entered my consciousness, altering my perspective, though they were very different from each other. Missing from my readings in new journalism and cultural criticism were black voices.
Rolling Stone
,
Esquire
,
New York
mag, the
Village Voice
, and other temples of quality writing had precious few African American writers. The work of the few who cracked these markets seemed a touch soulless, as if they'd left the race card out of their deck.

Then I came upon LeRoi Jones's
Blues People
, his 1963 meditation on race, jazz, and the blues. It was the first serious work I'd read about the nexus of black music and American culture by someone who had grown up steeped in it, and it reverberated with me. Through Jones I was given a context to understand John Coltrane as a musician and spiritual figure, as well as the aesthetic gulf between the R&B world I'd been raised in and the rebellious free jazz that inspired Jones. Later I would quibble with elements of his argument, but the idea that our music was in a constant struggle with the forces of capitalism to define its own direction struck me as right on (and still does).

While by the midseventies
Blues People
was a widely acknowledged classic, Greil Marcus's
Mystery Train
was published in 1975 and, for me, remains
the
essential book of rock criticism. Marcus's goal was to help us see rock music as an extension of, and even an addition to, United States history, one that shed light on many of its unspoken mysteries.

Marcus, like most white critics, loved himself some Elvis. My feelings about Elvis pretty much correspond with those of Chuck D, so the lengthy Elvis material didn't mean much to me. However, two chapters in the book turned my head: his exploration of the demonic lore surrounding Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, and a stunning portrait of Sly and the Family Stone. I hadn't heard of Johnson before, or the tall tale of him selling his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads. When I finally heard “Hell Hound on My Trail” and “Love in Vain,” Johnson's voice felt as ancient as a tomb, and so dark it was hard to hear any other music for weeks afterward.

Quite simply Marcus's chapter on Sly's rise and fall, his impact on white rock and black pop, and his many mysterious decisions was the single best essay I'd ever read about a black pop musician. It became the model I aspired to as a critic (and still do). It hit me that hard. I read the Sly chapter over and over on the IRT subway, wondering how many years it would take for me to pen something as thoughtful and nuanced about the music I loved.

In May 1975, just before my graduation, I did a farewell column for the
Tilden Topics
. Looking back on it now, it reads like a precursor to the work I'd do later. It definitely sets up where I was in the world back in May 1975.

It was a Wednesday morning in the late 1970s. I pushed myself out of bed, hearing the sounds of Miles and Monk in my head. As I looked out of my window at the presunrise darkness and the forlorn winter trees, I conjured “So What” and
Straight, No Chaser
in my ears to motivate me on an unforgiving day. I'd signed onto a history of jazz class that, due to its prime place in the curriculum of the fine Catholic university I attended, was scheduled once a week at 8:00 A.M. Determined to one day be the world's greatest music critic, I'd signed up enthusiastically, and then battled my common sense all semester to get to class on time.

Other than attending the St. John's jazz class this day would be typical of most others from the years 1977 to 1979, the years I traveled daily from East New York, Brooklyn, to Jamaica Estates, Queens, to Harlem, USA, to the heart of Times Square, and sites beyond. These were years when I spent a third of my day on an MTA bus or train, pursuing my dreams via the number 54 bus, the J train, the number 32 bus, the number 44 bus, the E and F trains, the D train, and the number 2 train home. I did homework on the buses. I wrote articles on the subway. I learned. I hustled. I made mistakes. I made friends. These were the years I studied the ways of magazines and record labels, gained role models and access to free tickets. I was an apprentice, and New York City was my mentor.

I'd won a scholarship to attend Oberlin College in central Ohio, via a competition presided over by legendary congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. A much smaller scholarship was available to me more locally at St. John's. My guidance counselor couldn't believe I wouldn't take the Oberlin offer and get the hell out of New York. But I wasn't gonna leave my mother and sister alone in Brooklyn. Moreover, I wasn't going to a school where the closest big city was Cleveland! Staying in New York to attend St. John's was absolutely the best decision of my life. New York may have been on the ropes financially, and in disrepute nationally, but it gave me an education impossible anywhere else in the world.

On this particular morning I wobbled out of my mother's home on New Jersey Avenue and walked a block over to Pennsylvania Avenue, where, along with a batch of schoolkids and workers, I shivered as we waited for the number 54 bus to take us up Pennsylvania Avenue, the major north-south artery of East New York. At Livonia Avenue the bus went under the elevated IRT line, the same train that for years ran past my window at 315.

A couple of blocks up from the elevated train we rolled by Thomas Jefferson High School, which in the seventies was one of the roughest, toughest schools in New York, and known for NBA-QUALITY ballplayers (Sidney Green would rise from Jeff to the Nevada-Las Vegas Runnin' Rebels, to the Knicks) and for terrorizing kids from other schools. Even when I was in college I kept my eye on Jefferson students, female as well as male, because their fearsome rep preceded them.

Up past Liberty Avenue's A train stop, across Atlantic Avenue (and the bank that held my student loan), we navigated over to the J train, which held the distinction for being the slowest, most rickety subway line in the city. Back then most of the J stops in Brooklyn and Queens were elevated and without walls, so each time the doors opened a bitter gust of wind came through the train, blowing in tree leaves, rain, and sometimes snow. The cars were throw-backs, with no air-conditioning in the summer, except for small feeble fans, seats made of cushions that looked like kernels of corn, and all painted a drab industrial green. The whole experience was like being stuck in a Walker Evans New York City subway photo circa 1940.

As we rumbled through the unfashionable 'hoods of East New York and Cypress Hills toward Jamaica, I'd find a seat as far from the doors as possible and pull out a notepad. Starting in high school I became an inveterate scribbler, but it intensified in my college years. I had a little spiral notebook, so I could replace pages once the book was filled with my precious thoughts. I'd scribble in anything, though—black-and-white elementary school composition books, blank artist sketch pads, the backs of novels and textbooks.

Aside from documenting my teenage angst, this obsession had a very practical effect. I became a habitual, rather than instinctual, writer. That's not to say I've never been visited by a muse or got feverish with an idea. It happens all the time. But I don't need those things to happen. I write because I do. Rarely does a day go by that I don't put pen to paper, even if it's just to ask myself how I'm feeling. All the great musicians I've interviewed talk about woodshedding, playing for hours at a time, refining their chops. The same holds true for the workout regimen of great athletes. Gotta train those muscles. On the long rides to and from Queens, I trained daily with pen and paper.

Once the train arrived at 168th Street in Jamaica, I went downstairs and joined the mass of commuters at the bus depot. If Jamaica was the soul of black Queens in the seventies, then the bus depot was the heartbeat, where you boarded buses that connected Hempstead and Roosevelt with Cambria Heights and the white areas of Jamaica Estates, Corona, and Queens Village. There were white folks at the depot, but, by the late seventies, it was very much a black scene dominated by teenagers, who, despite the early hour, were already flirting and fussing in hormonal rampage.

The front and the middle of the bus toward St. John's would be jammed with adults, while kids ruled the back. Once past the bus's rear entrance you were in the smoking zone, with puffed Kools, Parliaments, and whatever other menthol brands they had gotten their hands on. The boldest among them started the day with a bit of reefer. One morning I saw a particularly progressive group with an expanding roach clip, so the holder could pass the joint down the line while never relinquishing control.

After people squeezed in from the E and F on busy Hillside, the bus rolled through Jamaica Estates, an area of large, leafy homes that folks in the smaller homes in Jamaica aspired to. After fifteen minutes St. John's appeared on the left side of the bus, up on high ground and ringed by huge parking lots that supported its commuting student body. While the lots were fine for automobiles, those wide open spaces created a vicious wind tunnel that made walking on campus in the winter a chilly nightmare.

After braving the cold, you reached a cluster of buildings, some Gothic, some nondescript and modern, that constituted the university campus. Thankfully, on this bitter morning, my jazz class was in the first building on campus, so that the shelter of its walls made up for its gloomy gray exterior. The jazz class was in the basement and taught by a bookish adjunct, a rather straight-looking dude who wore white shirts and a dark tie most mornings, like Miles's old pianist, Bill Evans.

Still, he was around thirty, which made him a youngster on St. John's teaching staff, and that he knew anything about jazz made him inherently hip at a very conservative place. I was already into Coltrane and Miles, but on those cold mornings I woke up to the energy of Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, the big band power of Ellington and Basie, the artfully enunciated sounds of Ella and Sarah Vaughan, and the eloquent syncopations of Monk.