Face the Music: A Life Exposed (5 page)

Harold’s friends Eric London and Jay Singer, whom I knew casually from glee club and scouts, soon joined. Eric played bass in the school orchestra and just plucked the same instrument as a stand-up bass. Jay, who already knew how to play piano, had recently gotten an electric keyboard—a Farfisa organ. Harold got another kid he’d gone to Hebrew school with named Arvin Mirow to be the drummer. It turned out that I recognized him from glee club, too. Then I suggested we talk to Matt Rael, who lived next door to Eric. So Matt joined as the lead guitar player. Matt and I were the only ones in the group whose parents weren’t doctors of one kind or another.

Harold and Matt lived in houses as opposed to apartments—their places had basements. Matt’s older brother Jon already had a band, too, and his parents were pretty tolerant about noise. Harold’s mom didn’t mind the noise, either, and we’d have the Schiff’s basement to ourselves, so that was where we set up first. Harold’s basement was finished—the walls were lined with knotty pine wood paneling, there was a linoleum floor, and even a window. There was a door to the backyard, too, which was below street level.

Harold and Matt would plug both of their guitars into one amp, and my vocals went through the amp used by Jay Singer’s keyboard. I often banged a tambourine as I sang—that was something you saw singers on TV do a lot. Eric just had to pluck the bass as loud as he could. We ran through “Satisfaction,” by the Stones, and other songs by British Invasion bands like the Kinks and the Yardbirds. And to take advantage of Jay’s Farfisa sound we learned “Liar, Liar,” by the Castaways.

I loved it from the start. And even though all the kids had vague dreams of being rock musicians at that time—given the frenzy over the Beatles and the Stones—their parents had their lives planned out for them. These kids were going to become dentists and optometrists like their parents, and for them the band was a lark.

But I kept telling them, “I
am
going to be a rock star.”

Matt Rael and I started hanging out a lot at his house. In addition to practicing together, sometimes we got to sit around during rehearsals of his brother Jon’s band. Matt and I played music so much at his house that his mother eventually proposed a deal: if we refinished an old bookshelf she had bought upstate, we could officially call the basement our practice space. So we stripped the white paint off that old bookshelf and kept playing.

Matt’s parents were sort of proto-hippies. His mom had actually sung on the first Weavers recordings and was friends with Pete Seeger. She had babysat for Woody Guthrie’s children. By the time I got to know his parents, his mom was still booking prominent folk and blues musicians for hootenannies in Manhattan—people like Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Lead Belly, as well as Seeger.

I listened obsessively to the radio and knew the pop hits of the day, but at Matt’s place I was exposed to his parents’ amazing collection of folk music. They had tons of country blues and old-time music and lots of contemporary folk by the likes of Bob Dylan, Eric Andersen, Tom Rush, Phil Ochs, Buffy St. Marie, and Judy Collins. Eventually I pulled my acoustic guitar out from under the bed, and Matt showed me some chords. Then I took a couple lessons from a woman who had placed an ad in the local paper. The first song I learned to play was “Down in the Valley.” Soon I had a harmonica around my neck and was trying to mimic the folk music I now knew from Matt’s house.

The band continued to practice, too, and that summer of 1965 we got our first gig. There was a mayoral election that year, and John Lindsay’s campaign had a local office in our neighborhood. It was housed in a storefront—just an open room with bright lights. Harold was volunteering for the campaign, distributing pamphlets—I think he thought it was something mature and cool to do. And one day the guy in charge of the office was talking about some kind of party or rally, and mentioned they needed entertainment. Even though he hadn’t been talking to Harold, Harold piped up: “Um, I have a band.”

They invited us to play at the event. I guess it looked good for the Democratic Party to have neighborhood kids playing. We didn’t get paid, and not many people were there, but still, it was a gig. My first gig!

Sometimes when the band practiced, I got Harold to show me barre chords on his Fender Mustang. The basics came pretty easily, but if I had realized then how long it would take me to become a somewhat proficient guitar player, I probably would have given up on the spot. At the time, though, it just drove me on; messing around in the basement was fine, but I wanted to get an electric guitar of my own and get serious. I started taking the subway into Manhattan whenever I could to scour the music stores on 48th Street for affordable guitars.

Those trips into town became pilgrimages for me. Between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, independent music stores lined both sides of 48th Street. And a block up, on 49th Street and Seventh Avenue, was a sandwich shop called Blimpie’s. I’d get a sub sandwich there, or a Texas chili dog—covered in gooey yellow cheese and chili and onions—at Orange Julius, and then I’d wander the music stores. Back then you weren’t allowed to touch anything. If you wanted to play an instrument, they asked, “Are you buying today?” And if someone didn’t look the part, like me, they’d say, “Let me see that you really have the money on you.”

So those trips to 48th Street were not about playing but about soaking in the trappings of rock and roll: drum kits, guitars, basses. And once in a while I spotted a musician I recognized from TV or from the music magazines I was starting to collect. I was in heaven.

As junior high progressed, I started skipping school more and more to hop the bus to the subway and head for 48th Street. I would arrive early in the morning, before the shops were open—so this Jewish kid would go sit in a pew in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on 49th Street and Fifth Avenue, and wait. I also found a record store a block from the cathedral, called the Record Hunter, where they let you listen to records. They had banks of turntables with headphones, and you could have them open anything up and play it. That became my idea of a perfect day—waiting in the cathedral for the record store to open, listening to music, having a chili dog, and looking at guitars.

Exploring closer to home, I found that if I took the southbound Q44 bus from my apartment to the last stop in Jamaica, Queens, there was a huge, two-story record store called Triboro Records. They had thousands of albums. And since it was a predominantly black neighborhood, I was able to pick up things I had not been exposed to before: James Brown, Joe Tex, and Otis Redding, as well as black comedians like Redd Foxx, Pigmeat Markham, and Moms Mabley. I didn’t always have money to buy something, but just being able to hold the records and look at the covers was enough to make it worthwhile.

After I saved money for a year, and added the money I got for my fourteenth birthday, I went to 48th Street one day and walked into a music store called Manny’s. Eying a guitar, I said, “Can I see that one, please?”

“You buying today?” came the response.

“Yes.”

“Show me the money.”

I plunked down all the money I had. And the man behind the counter handed me the guitar I was going to buy: a three-quarter-size, two pick-up Stratocaster knock-off built by Vox. It wasn’t much of a guitar, but it was the one I could afford—it was cheaper than anything else because it wasn’t full-size. And besides, I knew nothing about guitars and could barely play.

But now I
really
had my ticket out.

I
began to try to write songs as soon as I had the electric guitar. Somehow it just seemed like the natural thing to do—playing the instrument and writing songs went hand in hand. Whenever I heard songs I liked, I tried to emulate them. One of my first attempts was an homage to the Who’s “The Kids Are Alright.”

I also studied the song structures of Brill Building writers like Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Songs with a verse, chorus, and bridge, with great hooks; songs so catchy you knew them already by the time the second chorus arrived. They were about melodies and telling a story.

Harold Schiff’s basement band had stalled, but Matt Rael and I jammed together constantly once I got my guitar. Sometimes a kid named Neal Teeman would join us on drums. We called ourselves Uncle Joe and continued to add songs to our repertoire. Matt was having problems of his own, however, and at some point his parents enrolled him in a private school in Manhattan.

My hair was really long now, but it was very curly. At the time, I hated the curls because the style was straight hair. So I’d buy a relaxer cream called Perma-Strate—it was available in nearby black neighborhoods. Perma-Strate smelled like ammonia and heavy chemicals, and it burned your scalp like nobody’s business. You had to apply it to your hair, comb it back, let it sit, and then comb it forward. On occasions when I left it in too long, my scalp would bleed. Sometimes I’d iron my hair, too. Anything to straighten it out. The mother of another kid I became friends with, David Un, called me “Prince Valiant” because of the look. My dad, meanwhile, had taken to calling me “Stanley Fat Ass.”

I’d met David Un at Parsons junior high, and his family, like Matt’s, were nurturing and artistic. His dad was a painter, his mom a teacher. Like me, David had really long hair. Sometimes when I skipped school to go into Manhattan and haunt 48th Street, he went with me. He was big into music, too. David and I also started mixing as best we could with the budding counterculture.

One day, walking down Main Street in my neighborhood, I noticed a new shop called Middle Earth. It was a head shop, selling water pipes and glass bongs and all sorts of drug paraphernalia. The people behind the counter inside had long hair, too.

Maybe I would fit in here?

I didn’t fit in with normal people, that was sure, but here, right in my own neighborhood, was an alternative. I started to hang out there and talk with the owners as well as a few of the customers who came and went. It wasn’t about the drugs—though I did start to smoke pot once in a while—it was about seeking acceptance. To an outcast, or someone in a sort of self-imposed exile, Middle Earth felt comfortable. Eventually I started taking my acoustic guitar to the shop and playing it while hanging out.

One girl in my school, Ellen Mentin, treated me with an extraordinary amount of patience and understanding. I trusted her enough to try to explain some of my inner demons, but hinting at my problems didn’t reduce my anxiety. Ellen wanted us to become a normal junior high couple—go to the movies together or whatever—but I was incapable of doing things with her in public. It felt too risky, too suffocating, too claustrophobic.

“Be-in” at age fifteen in Central Park . . . blissed out with a little help.

What if someone started making fun of me while we were together?

I also couldn’t understand why she wanted to be with someone like me—with or without the long hair, I was a freak after all. I even asked her, “Why do you like me? Why do you want to be around me?” It made no sense to me at all.

Ellen and I stayed friends, but being with someone who was steadfastly caring was all but unbearable. Even riding the bus together to go see a movie involved risks I couldn’t get myself to take.

My dad decided to give me his version of the birds and the bees around that time. Out of the blue, on one of our walks, he said, “If you get someone pregnant, you’re on your own.”

Did that mean I’d be out on the street at age fourteen?

Great
.

I barely knew how to get someone pregnant, but now I knew it was a one-way ticket to getting thrown out.

As if I’m not already on my own.

I spent the bulk of my time
on my own,
at home, in my room, shutting everything out and immersing myself in music—listening to my transistor radio, playing guitar, reading music magazines. My mom, feeling guilty about the way my sister’s plight was consuming all her time, also bought me a stereo.

I became an avid follower of Scott Muni’s radio program,
The English Power Hour,
one of the early
FM
radio shows to highlight the latest sounds from the UK. In the spring of 1967, Jimi Hendrix, who had moved to the UK, was dominating the English scene and charts, and his music started to filter back to the States on shows like Muni’s. When his first album finally arrived, it hit me like an atom bomb.

I loved to put the
Jimi Hendrix Experience
album on my new stereo and lie down and press the big speakers against both sides of my head. Even though I was deaf on the right side, when I pressed the speaker against my head, I could hear through bone conduction. I also painted my room purple and strung a set of flashing Christmas lights along the ceiling. I played my guitar and looked at myself in the mirror, lights flashing, and tried to perfect jumps and windmills like Pete Townsend of the Who.

But perhaps the greatest effect Hendrix had was on hair styles. His hair was teased up in a huge puff, and soon Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page had done the same to their hair. Suddenly that became the look. I remember the first day I blew out my hair. No more Perma-Strate for me. As I emerged from my room and got ready to leave the house with my hair now exploding around my head like my heroes’ hair, my mom said, “You’re not going out like
that,
are you?”