My Music History Part 2

Part 1 ended with my talking about studying piano with Barry Goldberg.

Even as a teenager, I was listening to anything I could get my hands on. I was listening to rock, jazz, blues, classical, everything. Back in those days my best friend from high school was also a fanatical record collector, and we would spend our Saturdays going to every record store we could find in Greenwich Village and the East Village. We’d find all sorts of odd $1 bargains - and at $1 a record we bought stuff we never heard of just because we liked the cover or because there was some odd instrument listed in the credits. Then we’d spend Saturday nights at his parents’ house, listening to everything we’d bought and getting high. These were happy days - even though for some reason he had swords on his wall and at certain points in those evenings sword fights seemed like a good idea; um, uh, I never won.

The summer that I was 18, I convinced my parents to let me spend my bar mitzvah money to travel to London with a college friend for three weeks. I had a shit summer job that I hated and my parents felt sorry for me so they let me do it. (“Keep yourself clean” was my dad’s advice to me just before I boarded the plane.) We stayed in the cheapest places we could find - I remember the last place we stayed in cost 50 pence per night (that was US$1.20 back then), double decker beds in tents surrounding a building with lockers and showers. We spent the days seeing all of the major tourist things in London and hitting every record store we could find. We spent the nights going to see bands. We saw more than 70 bands in three weeks.

What were the standouts? David Bowie doing Ziggy Stardust at the Rainbow had to be Number One. Yes doing the world premiere of Close to the Edge in an outdoor show where the opening acts included Mahavishnu Orchestra, Gary Wright, and Lindesfarne was definitely another.

We also went to a 3-day folk festival in Chelmsford. The Strawbs, Al Stewart, Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, Stefan Grossman, and, um, The Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra, and “a whole lot more.” We arrived on Friday night to find everyone gathered in a tent with all of the performers sitting around playing 50’s rock songs. We slept in sleeping bags in a cow pasture - I was a lot younger then.

(The Strawbs at Chelmsford, my photo.)

Here’s the thing that kills me. We took the train up there and decided we would hitchhike back to London. Sandy Denny offered us a ride back to London. Sandy Fucking Denny, okay? One of the founding members of Fairport Convention. Not just one of the greatest singers of all time, she wrote Who Knows Where the Time Goes when she was just 19. She was 25 and gorgeous (and tragically would die just six years later) and she offered us a ride. In her car. With her. And her two dogs. Who knows where that time might have gone?

(Sandy Denny at Chelmsford, my photo.)

But …. it was not to be. My idiot friend was scared of her dogs and wouldn’t get in the car. I should have fucking left him behind. To this day I still wonder why the fuck I didn’t.

Anyway, now I’m back in New York City. I’m studying film at NYU. (I had Haig Manoogian as a teacher. Scorsese had him and loved him and dedicated Raging Bull to him. But I didn’t fare as well; Haig did not like my films at all. I should have taken that as a sign.)

More importantly, I wandered into the office of the school’s FM radio station, WNYU, and wound up with a Sunday morning DJ slot. I played some great music but I had no idea what to say in between the records. I got to be very friendly with the music director of the station, he got passes to see lots of shows in the clubs in Greenwich Village, and he usually took me along.

I remember seeing Jackson Browne in ‘71 or ‘72, I think it was at the Bitter End, and he was so nervous that he brought David Blue up onstage with him and left the stage, letting Blue do a few songs from his most recent album until Browne came back out. We got to know Alan Pepper and Stanley Snadowsky, when they were still booking acts at Gerdes Folk City, before they opened the brilliant Bottom Line music club. One night a band called Stories played at Folk City. We went to see them because they had the keyboard player from The Left Banke (Walk Away Renee). We were the only people in the audience (and we got in for free). They played a full set for us anyway. A year later they would have a number one record with their cover of Brother Louie.

I saw David Peel playing in Washington Square Park and brought him back up to the station to be interviewed. He liked the photos I shot of him and that led to my hanging out with his crew for a bit. (The UK music magazine Mojo ran one of my pictures when Peel passed away.)

When Cheech and Chong’s first album came out, we had passes to go see them live (Harry Chapin was the opening act) and got to go to the album release party. At the time they were billed as the world’s only Mexican and Chinese comedy duo so the party was at a Chinese restaurant with a strolling mariachi band. We sat at a table drinking and bullshitting with Harry Chapin (until his wife basically asked him why he was wasting time with college kids when there were so many more important people around). We got crazy drunk and then crazy stoned (I think it was with Cheech & Chong themselves though at that point it could have been Screech and Scrong for all I could tell). My favorite rock critic, Richard Meltzer was there. I asked him the secret to writing and he said he tried as much as possible to have one word end in the letter “s” and the next word start with “hit”. At that moment, it seemed brilliant. Before the evening ended, it was very possible that I threw up on Todd Rundgren’s platform shoes. Those were also happy days.

But when I was 19, something weird happened. I was driving my parents’ car in downtown Manhattan late at night, totally sober and straight, I think I was running late for a midnight DJ shift at the station. I ran a stop sign and t-boned another car at a pretty fast speed. My parents’ car was totaled. I smashed my head on the steering wheel pretty hard and ended up in the emergency room. Following this accident, I could no longer play the piano properly. I couldn’t lay down a bass line with my left hand while soloing with my right. It had all gone to shit, literally overnight. Was this something real or was I psychologically looking for an excuse to stop playing? I’ll never know for sure. But what I do know is that after the accident, I was convinced that I didn’t play as well as I did before.

In the fall of 1973, I transferred from NYU to Emerson College in Boston. That meant the end of piano lessons with Barry Goldberg (though we’re still in touch to this day) and the end of being a college DJ (I totally flubbed the audition for Emerson’s station). But something else came along.

The “Bill Graham” of Boston at that time was a guy named Don Law. He basically had a lock on music concert booking in Boston, producing shows at the Orpheum (2,500 seater), the Music Hall (5,000 seater) and the Boston Garden (15,000 seater). I found out they were looking for people to be ushers at the Orpheum. I got the gig and that meant every Friday and Saturday night I was going to concerts - for free.

Even better, within a few months I was promoted to head usher (there were 4 of us) and that meant I got paid $20 per concert. Getting paid to go to concerts? This might have been the best job I ever had. Plus I could go around my dorm and ask, “Who wants to go see Linda Ronstadt tonight?” I also sometimes got to work shows at the Music Hall or Garden - for the Eric Clapton show at the Garden, I got to work backstage. (We all raided his dressing room when he went on stage, there were fricking CASES of vodka stacked in there.)

Over the next year and a half I got to see just about everyone who came to town - I wish I kept a diary so I could remember everyone saw live in those years. King Crimson. Van Morrison. Steely Dan. Bonnie Raitt. Aerosmith more times than you could shake a stick at (if that’s your idea of a good time). Kiss (the loudest band I ever saw - until I saw the Clash at Bonds). Dr. John. Roger McGuinn. Little Feat. The list goes on.

After reading this New York Times review in December 1973:

Bruce Springsteen has delivered another stone, howling, joyous monster of a record. … The Springsteen Six — Clarence Clemons on sax, Danny Federici on organ and accordion, Gary Tallent on bass and tuba, Vinnie Lopez on drums and David Sancious on piano and Bruce on guitar—can play anything from a circus march to a classical dirge, often within the borders of the same piece. The album is a mad excursion from rhythm and blues edged in jazz to rock and roll touched with folk and funk; it swings like crazy, it drives home the torrent of his words to perfection. Each piece (you can't really call them “songs”) is a world in itself, any one alone worth the price of the album. … Can you imagine what his third album will be like?

I ran out and bought Springsteen’s first two albums and pretty much agreed with that Times critic right away. I saw that he was going to be playing at a small club in Cambridge, Joe’s Place, and I went to that. January 6, 1974. (Here’s a really good sounding bootleg of that night.) It was a small club, maybe it fit a couple of hundred people, I had to stand in the back, but that was the night he became my number one favorite.

Just a few months later, May 9, 1974 to be exact, Bruce did two shows opening for Bonnie Raitt at the Harvard Square Theater. I went to the late show. It was supposed to start at 10 PM but didn’t kick off until around 11. Bruce, as the opening act, played at least two hours. The audience didn’t want him to leave the stage; you could see Bonnie dancing on the side of the stage and motioning him to keep going. That’s the night that Jon Landau wrote the famous “I saw rock and roll future” review.

But tonight there is someone I can write of the way I used to write, without reservations of any kind. Last Thursday, at the Harvard Square theatre, I saw my rock'n'roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.

It was also at some point in 1974 when I made the decision to stop being a musician. I felt that I couldn’t do both film and music and I had to make a choice. Progressive rock was huge back then and I knew I was no Rick Wakeman or Keith Emerson. I figured if I stuck with music the best I could hope for was to work cruise ships or weddings but that maybe I could go further with film. So I quit playing music, but of course I didn’t quit loving music.

(When I started writing this, I thought it was going to be a single post. Now it looks like it will be three, maybe even four. The story is gonna turn quite dark soon. Stay tuned!)