Face the Music: A Life Exposed (8 page)

The funny thing was that while I had always been extremely wary about opening myself up by bringing songs to the band, I found it easy to play them for people I didn’t know. But even though some of the people were very nice and encouraging, nobody signed me.

I still had a lot to learn about my craft.

I
found myself hanging around Middle Earth, the head shop, and often I visited the couple who owned the place at home in their nearby apartment. We would shoot the shit and hang out, and I’d play my acoustic guitar. They had a friend in the same building who also played guitar, and some days I’d go to his place and jam. I never called first—I just showed up at their places.

I smoked pot sometimes, and it was kind of fun sitting on the floor thinking of ridiculous things, suddenly becoming a genius and philosophizing about life on other planets or about the bark on trees. It wasn’t very productive, and I realized that if I wanted to write songs, I couldn’t spend time smoking pot and eating sandwiches. I still had a goal.

Socializing with older people, though, became an outlet for me. It kept at bay some of my neurosis about socializing with kids my own age. And it could be on my own terms—it wasn’t like I had to see these adults at school every day. Around the same time I became friends with a woman down the block named Sandy. She was married to a guy named Steven, had three kids, and was in her mid-twenties. I started hanging out with her and her husband—like the couple at Middle Earth. I spent a lot of time with them. It was great not to have to be at home all the time.

One day when I was hanging out with Sandy, she said, “I have something to tell you.”

Okay . . .

“Steven left me.”

“That’s terrible!” I said, and gave her a big hug. We wound up holding each other on the sofa. And then . . . she led me into the bedroom.

Whoa, what’s happening here?

This is awesome!

My sexual technique was nonexistent, but I’m sure Sandy appreciated my enthusiasm: I was a human jackhammer. Or a love gun. At that age, just taking my pants off got me excited. Having someone else there was a bonus.

Up until that moment when I slept with Sandy, sex had seemed like something that would be impossible to find. This changed everything. Luckily for me, Steven didn’t have a change of heart about leaving her, so I started to drop by Sandy’s house more and more. Her door was only a few steps from my own, and now it was the entrance to a sexual fun park, with a thrill ride like nothing I’d ever experienced.

These rendezvous could be pretty late because we waited for her kids to go to sleep. One night I called my house from Sandy’s and told my mom, “I’m going to be late.” Again.

“Honestly, Stan, what’s going on?” she asked.

“Mom, she has a lot of problems.” My mom knew that the couple had split up and seemed suspicious of our connection, but she didn’t really want to know the truth.

Once I understood that I had some sort of appeal as a young man to older women, my situation changed dramatically. The only thing my dad had ever said to me about sex was that I’d be on my own if I ever got someone pregnant. Sex, I was taught, was deviant and unclean. But, man, did I want it. And once I got it, man, did I like it. And now, getting it this way, I didn’t have to deal with any intimacy issues I would have to work through to persuade a girl my own age to have sex. I couldn’t handle that. No way. I still saw intimacy as invasive—I didn’t want anyone inside the psychological fortress I had built around myself. I did not want to be close to anyone. But now, I realized, with older women, I could enjoy the act and then immediately hit the road.

Do it and get out
.

And that suited them just as well as it did me. The floodgates were open.

Soon enough, another woman from the neighborhood saw me with my guitar and asked me whether I knew somebody who could give her son guitar lessons. She was a divorcee.

“Well, gee, I can give him lessons,” I said.

I spent her thirty-ninth birthday in bed with her. I was seventeen.

My instincts and hormones drove me into more and more situations like that. It was like a drug. And what a great drug. I now had access to something magical, without having to let down my guard and deal with a meaningful relationship or any kind of real intimacy. I never had to worry about anyone wanting more from me emotionally.

I didn’t see any rules; I never considered the ethics of what I was doing. If somebody’s wife wanted to sleep with me, hey, that’s fine because she wants to do it. The fact that someone else was often involved meant nothing to me. That was
their
issue, or would be. If a woman made herself available, that was good enough for me.

The husband of the couple who owned Middle Earth seemed captivated by a girl who came in to the store a lot. Then one night, at a party at the couple’s apartment, he started hitting on that girl. I think the couple was moving in the direction of an open relationship anyway, but that night the wife seemed upset about her husband going off with another person. So I wound up in another bedroom with the wife and a German shepherd that seemed as interested in me as she was.

Hey, these people are all adults
.

I didn’t want a girlfriend. I didn’t want a relationship. That was scary. But I could still get what I craved in a completely unattached, unemotional way. And situations that might have seemed intimidating to others—there was, after all, a chance that somebody’s husband might want to cut off my balls, as my dad had been threatened, or even kill me—seemed ideal to me.

I didn’t confide in anyone. I continued to exist in my own little world. But sex was now one of the forces that drove me. It didn’t matter where or with whom. I remember inviting myself to a party at a neighbor’s house one night. I just walked in. They were using one of the bedrooms as the coatroom—throwing all the guests’ coats on the bed. And I ended up taking a woman into that room and screwing on top of all the coats. A few people came looking for their coats as we were going at it, and they were absolutely aghast. But I didn’t care. Boundaries as far as what was appropriate simply did not exist to me. Where I had been alone with my music not long before, now I had sex.
Sex!
The beast had awakened in me.

Another time a girlfriend of my sister’s slept over at our house, and I tried to crawl into bed with her. She pushed me out of the bed. The next day my sister told my mom. I thought it was hilarious. In fact, it was a bonus to me that my parents were put off by my behavior. That just made it all the more appealing.

I saw music differently now, too. When I saw Led Zeppelin in Corona Park, in Queens in August 1969, in front of fewer than two thousand people, the sexuality of what they were doing was palpable. The show was in the New York State Pavilion from the 1964 World’s Fair, a strange semi-open-air facility with a mosaic tile map of the state on the floor, a multicolored Plexiglas roof above, and flying saucer–shaped forms perched on columns nearby. Jimmy Page’s sound hit me with the same impact that Beethoven had when I was a little kid. He wasn’t just a great guitar player, he was a visionary who composed and pieced together sonics to perfection. Led Zeppelin took a music form that was by then familiar—blues-based rock—and made it into something new, and something all their own.

Robert Plant sang like a banshee—I didn’t know anyone could sing like that. I’d seen Terry Reid and Steve Marriott, who had sort of laid the groundwork for what Plant was doing, but Plant was better, more commanding, more magnetic, more consummate. He created a style that didn’t exist before. And for all his qualities as a singer, he was more than just a singer. Robert Plant was the physical embodiment of a rock god. Nobody
looked
like that. He was an archetype in the making. I remember the next time I saw the Who, Roger Daltrey had grown out his bouffant hairdo into long curls—
aha, he wants to look like Plant,
I thought. Everybody wanted to look like Plant and sound like Plant.

Everything on that summer stage was stunning. It was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a religious experience.

I had gone to the show with David Un, whom I still saw sometimes, and afterwards I said to him, “Let’s not even talk about that. Let’s not talk about the show because anything we say will cheapen it.”

I’ll never, ever, see something this perfect again
.

Music, I knew, still represented my salvation and the ultimate solution to my deep-seated insecurities. I wanted the validation I had felt playing in front of crowds. While the Post War Baby Boom hadn’t made a penny, we had played some gigs at places like the Beehive; I also liked playing the showcases at publishing companies. So I started playing with Matt Rael again, the little brother of Jon from the Post War Baby Boom. I had played with Matt a lot a few years before, and now we both cranked up our Fender blackface amps and started experimenting, sometimes joined on drums by Neal Teeman. Often, we turned all the tone and volume controls on the two amps all the way up and created a trebly wall of noise.

We managed to score a few gigs at a hippie venue called the Bank, in Brooklyn. The building was the headquarters and home of some sort of commune, spread over several floors of an abandoned bank building. One of the floors was covered in hay, and kids could get donkey rides there. We played on another floor, creating a loud wall of noise, our guitars screaming nastily. Matt didn’t even face the audience for most of the performances.

It was fun to be playing again, but clearly this wasn’t the group I was going to bet my future on. Thoughts of the future began to eat at me as the end of high school loomed. I was coasting through senior year and had to think about my next steps. The pressure I began to feel wasn’t about money per se. What bothered me was that other people were laying the groundwork for their future security. They were making plans to go to college and learn trades. I wasn’t.

Much as I believed in myself, there were no guarantees about making a career in music. Kids in my neighborhood were following their parents into medicine or law. Meanwhile, my hair was below my shoulders and I was an aspiring rock god. The percentages, I knew, were not in my favor. I spent countless scary nights sitting up thinking,
What the hell am I doing?
No matter how sure you are of yourself, you’re going to have some dark moments of doubt. Your self-belief gets questioned, even if it doesn’t disappear.

I lay in bed, thinking. I had a plan. Sort of. It was more of a goal than a plan, really. I had something I knew I was working toward, and something I was gambling on. But there were no milestones along the way to check off—it wasn’t like working toward becoming an optometrist.

What if? What if I don’t make it?

The fears came at night.

Eventually I plotted out a scenario of last resort. I would work for the phone company. That was a well-paid union job with good benefits. And if I could get a job as a phone installer—and they were advertising for them at the time—I would be able to work on my own, away from people, away from any bosses. I could do that. I would drive around in a van and install phones. On my own.

M
att and I began to argue at rehearsals. I thought that we were just messing around more than creating something or moving forward. I also felt that he should face the audience instead of his amp when we played gigs. Things came to a head one day when Neal and I asked him to turn down his amp while we were practicing.

“Turn down!” we shouted.

“No!” Matt shouted back and kept playing, as loud as he could.

So Neal and I called it quits. We walked out, and the group was done. Matt and I remained friends—even started working together as taxi drivers—but I think it was a relief for him in some ways not to be playing with us anymore.

Of course, I wanted to keep playing, and since I’d been turned down when I went solo to the publishing companies, I felt a band was the right way to go again. Neal, who was working part-time at a recording studio by now, heard from a friend of his about a guy named Steve Coronel who played lead guitar. So we called Steve and got together, worked out a few covers, played a few of my originals, and started booking gigs.

The band with Matt had never had a bass player, but Steve wanted to bring one in. “I know this other guy,” Steve said.

The guy’s name was Gene Klein, and he and Steve had played together as teens in a band called the Long Island Sounds. Gene was living somewhere out of town now, Steve said. He was apparently a few years older than I was and had already graduated from college. I didn’t care whether he lived in Sullivan County or Staten Island; if there was a possibility that we’d be moving toward creating a real band, I was all for it.

One night I went over to Steve’s Manhattan apartment in Washington Heights, not far from where I had lived as a little kid. Steve’s room was painted black. And in the room was a big, burly guy.

“Stan,” said Steve, “this is Gene Klein.”

Gene had long hair and a beard under his double chin. He was very overweight. I was pretty stocky back then, but this guy was huge. He was wearing overalls and sandals and looked liked something from the then-new country music TV show
Hee Haw.

Gene made it clear right away that he didn’t see us as his musical equals. He played some songs for us that I thought were sort of goofy. Then he challenged me to play one of my songs, so I played something called “Sunday Driver,” which I later retitled “Let Me Know.” He seemed completely thrown that someone besides John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Gene Klein could write a song. It was a moment of realization for him—here was another guy who wasn’t famous who could actually write a song. He was visibly taken aback. He mumbled, “Hmmmm.”

I was annoyed that he saw himself as operating at a level that qualified him to pass judgment on me—as though all that mattered was his approval. Particularly because I hadn’t thought much of his songs, the idea that he was judging me seemed arrogant, condescending, and ludicrous. He made it clear that he felt himself to be judging from a higher plane, and I didn’t like that at all. Gene, of course, had no clue about my ear, which was covered up by my hair, but I was preprogrammed to dislike being scrutinized and judged. It wasn’t a nice thing to do as far as I was concerned, and I wasn’t eager to work with the guy.