Chapter Excerpt (Available 48 Hours)

 

My Aunt Anna’s all-in-one Magnavox stereo and television was the size of a church organ that needed four stevedores to get into her apartment on Sip Avenue in Jersey City. The remote control wasn’t much smaller, with inch long, thick brown plastic buttons that needed two hands to push in. It never worked. Going from Channel 2 to Channel 4 was a wrestling match. At one point, when everyone finally realized the remote was never going to function, we’d still pick it up off the coffee table out of habit and carry it to the television, manually change the channel, and then put the remote back down. Anna loved listening to Elvis sing “The Wonder Of You” on that set.
  My Aunt Rosie and Uncle Larry had their stereo in the brightly lit front room of their Far Rockaway house on Beach 44th Street, and I can still see my uncle’s Tijuana Brass and Woody Woodbury records sprawled haphazardly with magazines and photo albums in the bookcase below the record player. There are records and songs in every one of my memories. The music always goes hand in hand with the event. I can’t help it. 

  Something as run-of-the-mill as a two-hand touch football game with a group of friends one Saturday afternoon in September of 1981, will forever be the day I bought both King Crimson’s “Discipline” and The Police’s “Ghost In The Machine” at Golden Disc Records on Bleecker Street. They had the British imports of both, a week or two before the U.S. releases. 

  We had been playing on Dominick Street, which never had traffic to get in our way, as it only stretched from Sixth Avenue to Hudson Street, with the east end blocked by Chelsea Park. I had placed the album bag on the steps of Chelsea High School while the game was taking place. I couldn’t tell you who won the game, but I will always have a snapshot of that record bag sitting on the school steps. Dropping the needle on Side One of “Ghost In The Machine” and getting lost in "Spirits In The Material World,” the first song on the album, will always take me back to Dominick Street. 

  The memories of growing up a music fanatic in both Greenwich Village and Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay in the 70s aren’t always romantic. The neighborhood guys where I lived in Manhattan weren't very forgiving of my hair, which was longer than most my age, and they certainly weren’t impressed with my not so secret love of all things Bowie and Bolan. 

   One afternoon, on my way home from school and my almost daily visit to one of the many Village record stores, three of these tree stumps in Keds followed me, throwing bottles, rocks and cans, taunting me with the creative cheer, "Fuck you, you Mott The Hoople faggot," until one of the bottles actually hit me. That last move sent all of us running in opposite directions, spraying across our neighborhood like those “scattering bees” fireworks.

  A worse day was when the same trio threw me against a car and grabbed the record bag out of my hands. It was 1976 and I had just purchased Patti Smith’s new single "Gloria." It had a great picture sleeve and a raucous live version of The Who’s “My Generation” on the b-side. They started flicking it around like a Frisbee. These were guys who thought “fatty embolism” was the guy who ran numbers on Mott Street. What was I expecting? They wanted answers to questions like “Who is this ugly bitch” and “What the fuck is this, another shitty record?” Was anything I said going to satisfy them? Still, I didn’t want to get my head busted in and yet, I couldn’t keep my eyes off of that Patti Smith 45. The safety of that record seemed more of a concern to me than the protection of my skull. It was three against one. Record or no record, I was going to lose. 

  They finally grew bored of me not fighting back. They just stared at me like I was defective. They picked a dud who wouldn’t throw a punch, which is all they really wanted. They woke up wanting to fight someone. It didn’t matter who or why. As long as you were slightly different, you were the ideal candidate for a “beatin’.”

   Doug, the dumbest of the three, flicked the record hard at my face, and cut my nose open. Now I’m bleeding and thoroughly disgusted, trying to contort myself so that the blood wouldn’t drip on the record sleeve, while also figuring out my escape. I needed to hide my records from these thick scumbags on Thompson Street, so I asked my grandmother to sew a pocket on the inside of my jacket, one that would fit approximately six 7” singles. Then I began taking different routes home, hoping to throw these animals off my scent. 

   Years later, all three separately “friended” me on Facebook. Fucking idiots. I did some snooping around on Facebook, trying to get an idea if maybe they had grown up. The first thing I saw on Doug’s page was his status:
  “Trump is MY president, you snowflake assholes. LOL!” 

   I gave him credit for spelling “LOL” correctly.

   Brooklyn was a little more open minded. The bullies of Sheepshead Bay didn't care what music you listened to. It was all very random in The Bay. There were these teenage girls, inseparable sisters, who would change personalities with the street lights. On Saturday, you'd partner up with one of them and happily play doubles paddle ball against the graffiti covered walls in the schoolyard of P.S. 254 on Avenue Y and East 19th Street. Then on Sunday, that same girl would greet you with "Get the fuck off my block, asshole!" The cuter one could crush big olive oil cans under her chin.
  My Uncle Al in Sheepshead Bay had both Toots & The Maytals “Funky Kingston” and the New Orleans classic “The Wild Tchoupitoulas” when they were 99 cent cut-outs in the bargain bin and not some vintage classics that now sell to vinyl fetishists for $50-$100, depending on where you’re shopping. Little did I know just how important “The Wild Tchoupitoulas” would become to me thirty years later when I am finally introduced to the Crescent City.

   Uncle Pete in Manhattan offered everything from Frank Sinatra and Led Zeppelin to Tom Jones and Bob Dylan. I had two of the best record collections at my fingertips all for the price of a few subway tokens. Neither uncle was concerned with me playing their records. I knew what I was doing, carefully removing each record from its jacket. 

  I was a very young commuter, as my parents had split soon after they got married. They were just kids themselves; children of 16 and 19 with a newborn. What did they know? My father first went to the Bronx, then eventually Sheepshead Bay. My mother stayed on Broome Street. I got the best and worst of both worlds, often finding myself in the care of people I didn’t know very well, like a co-worker of my Uncle Pete named Irving, who was a jeweler. 

  My uncle built trophies and engraved plaques. Irving was an older guy who supplied the gold plates to the trophy shop among other duties, like bringing in business from community centers and Yeshivas in his Brooklyn neighborhood. When my uncle got too busy at his job to occupy my time, I’d end up riding shotgun in Irving’s van as he made pickups and deliveries to various Hasidic neighborhoods in downtown Brooklyn. It was a strange childhood. 

  “Wait in the car and I’ll be right back.” Irving would then disappear into a shop or building, while this 8 year old sat alone in the passenger seat of a shitty white VW bus double-parked on 13th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn. Irving’s son Marvin also worked at the trophy shop, and I ended up in his care once or twice, until he was shot dead in a botched robbery in that same Borough Park neighborhood, while driving that same shitty white, VW bus.

   My father’s parents lived in the same apartment building as I did on Broome Street, two floors below. I’d run up and down those flights twenty times a day. 

My grandfather’s record collection consisted of anything he found for a buck on Canal Street. He found some great stuff occasionally, but mostly records like Broadway cast recordings and a relentlessly unfair number of Mario Lanza records. He bought the Rolling Stones’ “Got Live If You Want It” for me. That was my first Stones record and definitely not the best introduction to the band. I thought it was unlistenable, so I just stared at the cool cover.

 My neighbor Frank lived one floor below me in that Broome Street building. He also possessed some of the coolest records I had ever seen, including British pressings of The Hollies and The Beatles, as well as choice albums by Thin Lizzy & Deep Purple. He had a great Pioneer 424 receiver and he loved to listen to it with the bass knob pointing at 12 o’clock and the treble knob turned up all the way to the right, so every record made you feel like you were getting your teeth drilled. We’d spend hours in his bedroom. He played DJ and I’d soak up the music.
  I’d ask Frank during every listening session if I could borrow a few records to listen to on my stereo, one flight up. He always said no, explaining how he never lends his records to anyone because something always happens. I didn’t relent, and then Frank finally did, trusting me with two or three gems at a time. 

   The first records he let me take upstairs were Deep Purple’s “Stormbringer” and the debut album by Kiss’s Casablanca label mates, Angel. That afternoon, I scrubbed up like a surgeon, took a deep breath, and carefully placed Frank’s copy of “Stormbringer” on my turntable. About 90 seconds into the first song, the lights went out in our apartment, and I heard the tonearm screech along Frank’s minty record. Thank you, New York City blackout of 1977. 

   I thought Frank would put an end to lending me his records, but he understood when I said, “The blackout wasn’t my fault.” Though he did reply, “How do I know that?”
  Another friend of my Uncle Pete’s, Carl, turned me on to Roy Wood, long before I heard of The Move or realized he was a co-founder of the Electric Light Orchestra. Carl also played a record for me that blew my mind. It was funky and sleazy, like punk rock you could groove to. That record was Prince’s “Dirty Mind,” and because of that discovery, I got to see Prince at a small club called The Ritz in the East Village, three years before “Purple Rain” made him a legend. Carl also loved Todd Rundgren as much as I did, and that pretty much sealed the friendship. 

  I couldn't escape it all if I tried, so I never tried. I dove head first into everything around me. At ten years old, I had friends who were twenty years old. While my grammar school friends were watching “Star Trek,” or figuring out if it was Professor Plum in the den with a lead pipe, I was sitting in Madison Square Garden watching Led Zeppelin and David Bowie. 

  One 8th grade day, three of us agreed to bring in some records we loved for a teenage show and tell session, hoping to impress each other with our tastes in music. It was my idea and it took some selling, as neither Jay or Patrick seemed particularly into it. We met after school at Jay’s house on Morton Street. I still remember my two choices: Ian Hunter's first solo record and the Beach Boys "Sunflower." I would have done just as well bringing one of my grandfather’s Mario Lanza records. All I got in return were stares and a few contemptuous snorts, as if I hadn’t been friends with these guys for ten years. The look of horror on my best friends’ faces as I gave a brief history lesson on Ian Hunter and Mott The Hoople was both priceless and heartbreaking. 

  Their records included Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” Elvis Presley’s “Moody Blue,” which everyone seemed to want because it was pressed on blue vinyl, and Olivia Newton-John’s “Greatest Hits.” This was supposed to be an enjoyable event, but sitting and listening to music seemed foreign to these two. They were fidgeting and seemed somewhat disoriented, as if abducted by aliens. I’m not even sure they liked their own records. It was hard to tell. 

   I dug them all, or at least a few songs off of that late career Elvis record. Why did my records make them angry? I’d seen happier faces on kids getting Rubella shots. 

I ended up being alone more than I wasn’t. The friends I had in grade school were decent enough friends, as long as I behaved the way they behaved. If I played stick ball or a board game, we’d all have fun and laugh. If I mentioned David Bowie, or if I wanted to take a walk to Discophile Records on West 8th Street to see what new 45’s they got in from England, they’d walk the other way, disgusted. They weren’t bad kids. They were just boring kids who had zero interest in music, which made it very easy for me to have zero interest in them. In retrospect, I guess I was the weirdo.

  When Harry Belafonte died in 2023, I immediately dug out the “Calypso’ album. I thought listening would be a nice tribute to both he and my grandfather, as he loved that record the way I loved "Rubber Soul." I hadn’t listened to it in ages, but seeing the cover sent a flood of memories from my head straight down to my legs. 

  My grandfather would always play “Day-O” for me and the two of us would sing it so the entire building could hear us. But there were a few times when I caught my grandfather listening to the entire record. 

  We were in the living room watching the Yankees play, and he got up between innings. I assumed he went to relieve himself, or get his cigarettes from his den. But he was gone a bit longer than expected. When I got up to see what was going on, I found him in his room, door ajar, sitting calmly with his eyes shut, upright in his chair, savoring the island sounds of Harry Belafonte singing “Jamaica Farewell” and “I Do Adore Her.” 

   He did this on more than one occasion. Whatever it was that triggered the feeling, the need to suddenly get lost in music, he acted on it, quietly.
  He was listening right.

   Even now, as I creep into my 60’s, music dictates everyday. I plan vacations around it. I take it with me wherever I go. Holidays need playlists. Train rides, plane rides, road trips all need a playlist. Some days, when I sleep a bit later than my natural 6:00 AM wake-up, I think about the time I lost staying in bed that I could have used to listen to one more record.