The Wrecking Crew (10 page)

When the issue of the school newspaper containing his first column finally hit the hallway stands, Altfeld rushed to grab a copy. He had picked “Come Go with Me” by the Dell-Vikings as his hit-bound song choice of the week. And he was sure the other students would soon be lining up to praise his oracle-like abilities in predicting the tune's success. That might go a long way toward helping him win some friends inside Uni's intimidating, clique-heavy social scene.

But when Altfeld opened the page to his column, he couldn't believe what he saw. Instead of the record he had carefully chosen—on a tip from his childhood friend Freddie Wieder back in Cleveland, where new 45s usually “broke” on the local charts several weeks before making any noise out west—someone had inserted the song “School Day” by Chuck Berry.

Incensed with the violation of his private domain, Altfeld let out a yelp of frustration and immediately took off looking for the culprit. Nobody was going to change his song pick without his permission. That went to the core of his very being. Besides, who in the school could possibly know as much as he did about the record business? Didn't the other students know he wrote for
Dig
?

When the journalism teacher, Mr. Wingard, simply shrugged and said, “Sorry, Don, it wasn't me,” Altfeld figured he had better check with the school's print shop. Maybe they would know what the hell had happened.

As Altfeld marched across campus to the tile-roofed building that housed the newspaper's giant Linotype machine, he was prepared to throw down the gauntlet. All 120 pounds of him. Yes, he might be the new kid in school and smaller than most, but words—his precisely chosen words—were at stake on this one.

Passing through the double-wide doorway leading into the busy print shop, Altfeld approached the first person he saw, a guy with his back to him, hunched over the big press, apparently tinkering with something. As the student worker turned to see who had just come in, he suddenly lost his footing on the slippery floor, did a half pirouette, bounced off the edge of the typesetting machine, and then fell flat on his face, scattering newsprint everywhere.

As Altfeld watched in amazement, his fellow student then just as quickly jumped back to his feet, dusted himself off, and said with a grin, “Hi there—I'm Jan. How can I help you?”

“My name's Don,” Altfeld said, duly impressed by the tall, good-looking kid's nimble recovery. “I write for the
Daily Warrior
here and somebody recently changed the name of the record ‘pick of the week' in my music column without asking me. Would you happen to know who that was?”

“Well, yes, I do—it was me, actually,” Altfeld's ink-covered schoolmate admitted, laughing. “Did you like it?”

“No, I hated it. Don't
ever
do that again.”

“All right, all right, no hard feelings. Okay, man? Don't blow a gasket. That was the first and last time. I promise.”

Altfeld, though feeling somewhat appeased with the semi-apology, still had his concerns. He didn't know this guy from a bucket of paint. And Altfeld had one more important question on his mind. He had to know the full identity of his perpetrator. It might come in very handy down the line, should there be a repeat offense.

“What's your last name?” Don asked.

“Berry,” Jan replied, with a larcenous twinkle in his eye.

“Well, Jan Berry,” Altfeld said, smiling, “maybe we'll run into each other again sometime. Under better circumstances, of course.”

*   *   *

Outside of their little encounter in the school print shop, there is little chance that Don Altfeld and Jan Berry would have ever met. At least not at Uni High.

Built in 1924, the school had become over the years the preferred educational destination for the children of the rich and famous. And many were classmates of Altfeld and Berry. Frank Sinatra sent his daughter Nancy there. Actor James Brolin (née Craig Bruderlin) held forth in Uni's drama department. Even the real-life Gidget (Kathy Kohner) graced the school's hallways when she wasn't off surfing with her pals at nearby Malibu Point.

With a well-defined and multi-layered social structure, Uni's students tended to hang out with those of like kind. There were the jocks, of course. And the surfers. Plus the hipsters, the thespians, the preppies, and the hard-core academic types. Sometimes a few in each group might overlap, but not often. Jan Berry, however, happened to be one of those exceptions.

Born to a well-to-do family in Bel Air, Berry grew up a child of privilege. His father, part of Howard Hughes's inner circle at Hughes Aircraft, made sure Jan and his siblings lacked for nothing. Berry also liked living on the edge, and he had an unusually strong competitive streak, something that drove him to become the best he could at everything he tried, legal or not. Berry starred on the football team. He raced street rods with his friends. And he maintained a solid A average in his courses—all the while regularly stealing hubcaps (and sometimes even purses) just for the thrill of it.

But what the undeniably gifted and hell-bent Jan Berry liked more than anything was popular music. Whenever he and Don Altfeld ran across each other at school, the odd couple found themselves chatting more and more frequently about current songs, radio station playlists, and how to go about possibly cutting a hit record of their own. Little by little, without realizing it, the unlikely duo from vastly different ends of the high school social spectrum became the best of friends.

During the spring of his senior year in 1958, Jan Berry formed a singing duo with a fellow classmate named Arnie Ginsburg. One afternoon, they decided to record a simple song in the Berry family's garage on an AMPEX two-track reel-to-reel tape recorder. Written by Ginsburg and called “Jennie Lee,” the doo-woppish recording featured Jan and Arnie on vocals, with Don Altfeld banging out the rhythm on a children's metal high chair. With the help of a local producer who loved their rough demo, the trio subsequently reunited at a small studio called Radio Recorders, where Berry and Ginsburg recut their vocals on state-of-the-art equipment. Released by tiny Arwin Records, the song surprised everyone involved by making it into the national Top 10.

Suddenly Jan & Arnie (who would soon change their name to Jan and Dean when Dean Torrence stepped in to replace Ginsburg) had a serious singing career on their hands, with Don Altfeld helping them write many of the songs. And the studio musicians they began to use like Glen Campbell, Carol Kaye, and Hal Blaine, along with several other Wrecking Crew players—including a garrulous second-generation Italian-American guitarist born in the misty shadow of one of the Seven Wonders of the World—would in short order become central figures in helping Jan and Dean evolve into an internationally known rock-and-roll hit-making machine.

*   *   *

Living in predominantly blue-collar, rough-and-tumble Niagara Falls, New York, during the mid-Thirties meant many things to many people. For some, it meant going hungry. For others, it meant working two and three jobs just to keep a roof over their heads. For still others, it meant mind-numbing factory work with little chance for advancement. And for virtually everyone, it meant long, frigid winters, punctuated by unbearably humid summers.

But for little Tommy Tedesco of 307 12th Street, life on the American side of the famous falls couldn't have been any sweeter. Because for Tedesco, it meant becoming the best hustler in the neighborhood.

With the swift and deep Niagara River providing a cheap, abundant source of electrical power as it dumped its contents over three massive sets of falls, a variety of industries began to dot the town's landscape during the late nineteenth century. First came Occidental Petroleum, with its chemical might. Then the Shredded Wheat factory arrived on the scene, with workers toiling long into the night feeding wet, cooked grain through giant grooved rollers, helping to fill America's cereal bowls the next morning. Carborundum, too, set up shop, producing large quantities of heat-resistant silicon carbide to be used in the electronics, automotive, and diamond-cutting industries. Factories meant jobs, and most men were grateful for the opportunity.

But for a boy with a natural aversion to manual labor the same factory jobs that employed his father, uncles, cousins, and brother—and put food on his family's table each night—were something to be avoided at all costs. In fact, any kind of job was anathema to the eleven-year-old Tommy Tedesco.

“Tommy, why don't you go down to Mrs. O'Shea's restaurant on Fall Street and ask for a job washing dishes?” his mother inquired early one summer day.

“I'm too young. They won't hire me,” Tommy replied, hoping that his mother would let the subject slide. “Besides, I wanna play baseball with my friends.”

“You can play baseball another time. Go down there today and tell her I sent you,” she directed.

Tedesco knew it was pointless to argue. Italian mothers were not used to taking no for an answer. Especially his.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said.

Later that afternoon, as a dejected Tedesco slowly made his way down to the small, slightly run-down restaurant near downtown Niagara Falls, he kept wondering how he was going to get out of working there—or anyplace else, for that matter. The busy restaurant catered to those in need of a quick lunch during the workday or an inexpensive place to take their dates on a Saturday night. And Tedesco knew that the kind of foot traffic they generated probably meant a whole lot of filthy dishes were already stacking up with his name on them.

After a warm greeting by Mrs. O'Shea (“How's your mama doing? She's a
wonderful
woman, you know”), the lead dishwasher handed Tommy a stained, tattered apron and told him to get busy scraping whatever food he could off the plates and utensils before dropping them into a giant sink for washing.

“Don't break anything, either,” he growled.

On about the sixth dish, as an increasingly depressed Tedesco contemplated making a run for it out the back door, he suddenly had a brainstorm. Maybe I really
am
too young to be doing this, he thought. Is it even legal to hire eleven-year-olds?

Early the next morning, Tommy fairly skipped as he headed down to the local Board of Labor office. Time to put the plan in play.

“Excuse me, ma'am,” he said as he stood on his tiptoes to see over the long wooden counter. “My name is Thomas Tedesco and I'd like to get some working papers.”

A thin, gray-haired woman peered suspiciously over her reading glasses at the young face in front of her.

“Working papers?” she asked. “How old are you?”

“I just turned eleven.”

“You're too young to work,” she said firmly. “In Niagara County you need to be at least fourteen.”

“What'll I tell my employer, then?”

“Your
employer
?” the woman gasped. “What's their number? I need to call them right now. You're not to go back there.”

Hallelujah! The plan had worked. Good-bye, dirty dishes. Hello, baseball, sunshine, and a life of leisure. Sorry, Ma …

An eleven-year-old hustler was on his way.

*   *   *

A wholly unexpected thing happened to Tommy Tedesco on the way to turning fifteen. He discovered the guitar. Or perhaps it discovered him. Either way, the kid actually had some talent and it showed. He also developed a seriousness about practicing that ran counter to his usual preference for avoiding any endeavor that took physical exertion.

As his guitar-playing skills improved, it slowly began to dawn on the tenth-grader that something as simple as a piece of wood with six wire strings attached just might be his salvation from a probable lifetime spent in close proximity to the most horrific four-letter word he knew in the English language—“work.”

Deciding to see if he could actually make some money from his new avocation, Tedesco put together a trio with his high school pals Angelo La Porta (accordion) and Ralph Vescio (bass). Tedesco then banged on practically every club door in the greater Niagara Falls area, begging the owners for a chance. “Please, mister, give us a try. You won't be sorry,” he would say. “If you don't like our act after the first show, you don't even have to pay us.”

Using the charm and chutzpah that came so naturally to him, Tedesco finally secured the fledgling trio's first paying job at Cutt's Hotel Delaware in nearby Tonawanda, where they were to receive the princely sum of twenty-five dollars per night, split three ways. They worked six nights per week for the first two weeks and thought for sure they had hit the big time. The crowd loved them, the manager loved them, and it looked like fat city for the foreseeable future.

But at the beginning of the third week, some unexpected news came their way: the hotel had burned to the ground the night before. No more gig. No more money.

Despite this devastating setback, for Tedesco it also provided the clearest of revelations. You really
can
make money by being a musician, he realized soon after the fire. This guitar-playing thing was the best hustle yet. No heavy lifting or boring shit to do.

From then on, Tommy became so serious about learning to play the guitar that nothing else mattered. He practiced day and night, sometimes all the way until he had to leave for school the next morning. Sometimes even until his fingers bled. It was going to be his way out of Niagara Falls and away from the slow death of factory work. It had to be.

*   *   *

By the early Sixties, just as rock and roll was beginning to take permanent root as the dominant form of popular music in America, Tommy Tedesco finally fulfilled his cherished dream. Through single-mindedness and, yes, through the dint of hard work—there was
that
word again—he had managed to turn himself into one of the most sought-after guitarists around. His impeccable acoustic and electric playing could be found on everything from the Academy Award–nominated
Spartacus
soundtrack to most of Spector's singles to the groundbreaking
Twilight Zone
series on CBS, with hundreds of other important rock-and-roll, jazz, film, and TV credits in between. There was no style the heavyset guitar virtuoso with the outré personality couldn't make his own, no music notation he couldn't read. Every producer in town wanted him, especially those who cut rock-and-roll records. But it hadn't always been that way for Tedesco.