My Music History Part 3

In Part 1 I wrote about getting into music, playing in a kiddie orchestra at Carnegie Hall when I was 14, and my friendship with Barry Goldberg. Part 2 detailed the 70+ bands I saw during my first trip to London in 1972 and my days as a college radio DJ. In this part, things are going get darker.

I graduated college in June, 1975, with a degree in Mass Communications. I returned to my parents’ apartment in The Bronx hoping to start some kind of career in the film industry. I got my first two jobs relatively quickly - production assistant on a blaxploitation horror film called The Devil’s Express and assistant cameraman on a XXX film called Rollerbabies. It wasn’t much but, like the guy shoveling elephant shit at the circus, as least I was in show business. (I’ll leave those stories for another time.)

After getting those two jobs quickly, I hit a dry spell. I couldn’t get another film job so I ended up doing all sorts of crap temp jobs to get by. I filed index cards (!) at the Physicians Radio Network, I worked on the loading dock at a film lab, I did income tax preparation (for one day) - basically anything I could get to keep working. With the summer of ‘76 approaching, I decided that I should get a job as a summer camp counselor because not only would that get me out of the city for 8 weeks, I’d get room and board and some pocket money. I got a job as a counselor in a camp in the Poconos. Aside from being assigned to a cabin with 10 or 12 kids, I staged and directed the camp’s musical production that year (West Side Story) and I met my first wife (a counselor in one of the girls’ cabins).

(Which reminds me of something summer-camp related that I left out of a previous installment. By the time I was 15 my music fandom was already so deeply embedded within my psyche that I snuck away from summer camp and hitchhiked into Monticello, NY, just so I could buy the Blind Faith album the week it was released rather than wait another 3 weeks until I was back in NYC to get it.)

At the end of the summer, driving back to NYC, I turned to my future ex-wife and said, “Look, we’re going to get back to the city in the afternoon, my parents will be gone, we can fuck in an actual bed for the first time. But … I haven’t been in a record store in two months and if we go back to my apartment first, that’s all I’ll be thinking about. If I can stop in just one record store on the way home, I’ll get it out of my system. Is that okay?” Yes, I actually said that. And even more unbelievably, rather than jump out of the car, she said okay, which probably goes a long way towards explaining why we got married.

Now I’m 22 years old and working a variety of shit jobs and still living with my parents. I am working constantly, just not at what I want to be doing. And every spare dollar I earn is spent on records. For me, every Saturday is the same. Morning to night, I’m searching through the racks at record stores for anything and everything. Mostly I was going to shops in Greenwich Village and the East Village, but I’d also get to Brooklyn fairly regularly and somehow I found a store at the tip of northern Manhattan selling shitty clothes and British import records. At a buck a record for used albums and a couple of bucks for promo copies, my collection is growing quickly.

One thing that I remember about 1976 was hearing punk rock for the first time. After years of listening to a ton of prog, I was really ready for “two or three chords and a shit ton of attitude.” I had been reading about the Sex Pistols and bought the Anarchy in the UK single and just loved it. I walked into a record store and they were playing The Clash and I knew it was them without anyone having to tell me. I discovered the Stiff Records label, because it had Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe, and I would buy anything that label released. When Costello moved to Radar Records, I bought everything from that label too.

In 1977 I managed to get a job working for director/cameraman Bob Gaffney. At first I was brought in to edit the house reel, then I did some production assistant stuff on a shoot, then I was asked to fill in for the receptionist when she was on vacation, and somehow that led to them offering me a full time job. Mostly I ended up doing a lot of pre-production planning/assistant producer kinds of things back in the office. There was this job for Shell that led to my getting to sail on a supertanker and shoot footage for a documentary. Bob had a working relationship with Stanley Kubrick for many years (he had worked on Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and Barry Lyndon, as well as being the producer for the never-completed Napoleon), and that meant that I got to do a little pre-production stuff on The Shining and even had a chance to talk to Kubrick on the phone a couple of times.

The steady job with a decent salary meant I finally had enough money to move out of my parents’ apartment, rent my own place and get married. Our first apartment was a 300 square foot studio with a loft bed on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I had custom record shelves built and one wall of the apartment was lined with these shelves - perhaps 10 feet long and 6 feet high. Even after I got married, every Saturday was still spent digging for records. We couldn’t afford to go to too many concerts but there was always money for Springsteen - and we followed him from the Bottom Line to Central Park to the Palladium to Madison Square Garden and eventually to Giants Stadium. I can’t recall everyone I saw in those years but I remember seeing the Pretenders, U2, ABC, and even ABBA (a friend worked at a record company and was able to get us passes because the opening act was the Thompson Twins). A lot of shows at the Bottom Line, I can’t even begin to remember them all. An especially memorable evening was B.B. King and Miles Davis at the Orpheum Theater, just a block away from where we lived.

(One of the more insane things I did around then was buy a completely broken Wurlitzer jukebox. I don’t recall how I got it home. I do recall that it took up a lot of space in a 300 square foot apartment - even more so when I’d open it up and yank out bits and pieces and spread them on the floor and try to guess what was what. I don’t remember how long I had the beast but at some point I got someone else to take it off my hands.)

Another fun night was when I got invited to the premiere and premiere party for Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps film. There are two things I remember about that night. The first is that I sat behind Meat Loaf so I could barely see the screen. The second was seeing Ian Hunter standing all alone at the party. I went up to him and used a line I got from a friend. “I don’t want to disturb you, I just wanted to thank you for all the pleasure your music has given me through the years.” He smiled and asked, “I hope you know who I am.” I replied, “Well, if you’re not Ian Hunter, I’ve just made a fucking fool of myself.” He laughed. We stood there talking for awhile. Then I made the mistake of telling him that I was such a fan that I even liked the Overnight Angels album. It turns out that was a conversation-killer. He just looked at me, shook his head and walked away.

I was also trying my hand at writing. The best-known magazine to publish my reviews on a vaguely consistent basis was Trouser Press. I certainly wasn’t giving R. Meltzer or Lester Bangs any reason to lose sleep but it was nice seeing my name in print.

However, after 3 years working for Gaffney, I was really fed up with the job. For some reason they made me the business manager for the company, which meant that I wasn’t going on shoots anymore. I was doing crew payrolls and office bookkeeping and stuff that I really hated. I looked for a way out. I tried getting into the unions - cameraman, editor, director - and had no success. It was clear that I wasn’t getting anywhere I wanted to be in film or TV. I was increasingly miserable and needed some kind of change.

As Gaffney’s business manager, I was able to hire an assistant. I hired a woman who told me during the interview that she lived in the same building as Miles Davis, so I thought maybe I might get to meet him. Also, she was one of the least attractive women I had ever met, so I also had this idea that people would know I hired her for her skills and not her looks. Months later, one night at a party, she was pretty freaking drunk, she went up to my wife and said, “I love your husband, I really want to fuck him, but I like you so I won’t.”

She knew how miserable I was at work and how I was looking for a way out and she introduced me to this guy she had recently met. He was English, had just moved to New York, had a songwriting contract with Capitol Records, and was looking to put a band together. I listened to a tape of his songs and thought they were fabulous, actual well-written songs that I liked and thought had some commercial potential. We met, we hit it off, and I left my job at Gaffney’s to take on the role of band manager.

This turned out to be one of the worst decisions of my entire life.

P already had a friend who also played guitar and wrote songs and they found a drummer and a keyboard player. I bought them equipment and rented a rehearsal space for them in The Music Building. I also gave P a small weekly allowance, since he legally wasn’t allowed to work in the US. Mostly I financed all of this on credit cards. (Yeah. Now I know.)

Meanwhile, in order to support myself and my wife, I started working for a cousin. He had a shop on Amsterdam and 123rd Street selling TVs, stereos, and air conditioners. Some of his clients were from the Columbia University area. Many of them came from the projects north of 125th Street. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough. One unexpected advantage of this location - when the band announced that I should always have a pocket full of cocaine in case a record company exec or a DJ came by, it was pretty easy for me to find around there.

I had a friend who knew someone who worked at the Record Plant and we got free after-hours studio time, which was enough for them to make a four-song demo tape.

(Sidebar: One night my wife and I went to see Franken & Davis (of SNL fame) doing a live show, I can’t remember who else was on the bill. I’m sitting there looking around and I realize that Pete Townshend is sitting behind me. We’re back to back. People are going up to him and talking to him and he’s being chatty and friendly. I’m kicking myself for not having one of the demo tapes with me. “What kind of fucking manager am I anyway?” Finally I think of something clever to say. I turn around, he’s gone. I scan the room, there he is standing at the bar talking to David Bowie, surrounded by security guards.)

The first place I took that tape was CBGB’s. I walked in there one afternoon and the legendary Hilly Krystal was at the bar. He listened to about 30 seconds of the first song and said, ok, we could have the opening slot on Wednesday.

Problems started to develop pretty quickly. It was an effort to get them to rehearse more than a couple of times a week. They got upset with me because I wasn’t getting them more gigs. I explained that I needed to work full time to support myself and them, and since they weren’t working why the fuck didn’t they go out and look for gigs? “Well, what’s your job then?”

And then, it got worse. The two guitarists had a falling out and suddenly one band became two. It was getting messier and messier. I continued to get them into CBGB’s and a few other downtown NYC spots. But they hated to rehearse, they didn’t want to go out and get their own gigs, their songs were good but the arrangements were way off. Finally I got someone from A&M Records to turn up for one of their shows. I called him the next day. “They’re okay. But they’re at least a year away.” I thought about it and realized (1) he was right, they were too rough and not enough ready and (2) I didn’t have the energy, desire or money to go through all of this shit for another year.

We sat in a room. We got in an argument. I quit. I walked out. The only member of the band who ever paid me back anything was the keyboard player. I never saw a penny back from the rest of them.

As for what happened to them - after they changed their name a couple of times, they somehow got signed by EG (who also managed King Crimson, ELP, and Roxy Music). They put out a 5-song 12 inch EP on A&M Records in 1984, it didn’t chart, and as far as I know they faded into obscurity.

(At some point, I forget exactly when, I had a meeting with Peter Baumann. He’d been a key member of Tangerine Dream during their classic years, but now he was running a record label called Private Music. As it happened, I liked almost everyone on that label. Almost everyone. He asked me if I had any interest in managing Yanni, and, no, I definitely did not. I didn’t care for Yanni’s music and it was also clear that I wasn’t cut out to be managing musicians.)

I was in debt to the tune of five figures. (Within a couple of years I had to file for bankruptcy.) For reasons I won’t go into, I couldn’t take working for at my cousin’s store anymore. I quit the store around the same time that I quit the band. I started going to a radio/tv electronics engineering school 4 days a week and driving a taxi 3 days a week. It was another bad decision.

My father’s brother had been a NYC taxi driver for maybe 30 years and I thought he was nuts. I did it for a year and completely understood. I had to drive 5 AM to 3 PM and it was stressful, especially in the many long stretches when I was driving empty and couldn’t seem to find a passenger. Some days I only cleared $20 or $30 in those 10 hours.

(Also sometime around this period I was doing some work at Mark “Moogy” Klingman’s studio, editing some stuff for public access cable, probably doing some camerawork too. Moogy of course had a long running association with Todd Rundgren; I never mentioned my earlier encounter with Todd.)

Driving the taxi, I picked up four celebrities in a year. I stopped to go to a video rental store, rented Taxi Driver, which had just come out on VHS, drove a few blocks and who gets in the cab but Harvey Keitel? I think I scared him a little. I picked up Roberta Flack; she didn’t talk at all. I picked up Mariel Hemingway; lousy tipper.

And I picked up Bruce Springsteen. (This would have been close to June 12, 1982, because he was in town to play at the Rally For Nuclear Disarmament in Central Park on that day.)

I’m driving east on 57th Street and I see him standing on the corner, arm out, hailing a taxi. I look around and realize there’s no empty taxis between me and him, I’m going to pick him up. And then I tell myself, there’s no way that’s him, I don’t have that kind of luck. I stop, he gets in, he tells me where he’s going, I hear his voice, I turn around and scream, “IT’S YOU!!!!!!!”

He laughed. I tried to think of something reasonably intelligent to say to him. I told him that what I heard in his songs was that as long as you can hold onto your dreams, there’s still hope; that I was down at the moment but his music inspired me and kept me going. He was very chatty, asking me a lot of questions about what it was like to be a NYC cab driver. I told him about all of his shows that I’d been to since that night in 1974. I also told him that what he really needed to do was to release a home video of an entire concert. “Really?”

I have to confess, since I had him in the backseat of the taxi and since we had a good conversation going, I took him the long way around to his destination, but finally we got to where he was going. The meter said $4. Should I have offered him a free ride? Fuck no. I was dirt poor and every penny counted. I remember what I said - “You don’t need to tip me but please can I have your autograph?” He signed a piece of paper for me (that I still have, of course), handed me a $10 bill and told me to keep the change.

Coming up …. celebrity encounters at The World of Video, I open NYC’s first CD-only store, I start working in syndicated radio in a venture funded by the Grateful Dead, and more. I should mention that I’m going to be traveling for the next month (3 weeks in Beijing, a week in Hong Kong) so I may not be able to post anything here until I return.