While walking along the East River waterfront one evening, I met a wooden flute player named Roberto. He said he was from Seattle by way of San Francisco. He looked a little seedy, and Dennis, ever the hard-bitten, skeptical New Yorker, advised me not to trust him. (It turned out that Roberto was his street name. His real name was Robert, and he was white.)
Roberto said he was looking for musicians with whom to start a band. I said I played a little bass guitar, so I became the second member of the band. It seemed that most of the other musicians we played with were junkies, and therefore unreliable. To be sure, all addicts were bad, but none were as bad as the heroin addicts. As Dennis put it, "In New York, everyone hates junkies, but everyone is a junkie."
On one occasion, we played with a talented young blues guitarist who was from New York and who was a chain cigarette-smoking heroin addict. But I repeat myself. We were doing a song Roberto had written called "God Bless America," which is in 3/4 time and has no relationship, other than the title, to the eponymous song by Irving Berlin. For a few memorable moments, the guitarist, who was looking for a way into the song, played an arpeggiated version of the Berlin melody, which is in 4/4, over top. Amazingly, it worked, in a strange, but powerful, way. That's the kind of creative player this guy was. Unfortunately, he never came back, and we never did find a steady player to take over the lead.
Roberto had recently sold his eclectic San Francisco bohemian proto-flower-power songs to a local jeweler who was dabbling in the music business. I'm told that all businessmen like to think of themselves as artists at heart, and that the music business is filled with people like him. They're keenly aware that, although they may have money, they have no class, no refinement. We, a couple of ragged hippies from the tenement district, became his artistic class and refinement. From our side, the problem was that the businessman knew nothing about music. He dealt with us as if he were buying scrap metal at a warehouse in New Jersey.
I met the jeweler once, when we all went uptown to record a demo in his cramped studio space. I'm sure you can find do-it-yourself sleazeballs like him in all the creative centers like New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville.
Soon thereafter, Roberto met a talented jazz/blues keyboard player called Chuck, who played with us awhile. On one occasion, we all went uptown to the apartment of a clarinet player named Hopkins, another friend of Roberto's. After a couple of numbers, Roberto spotted a pretty girl sitting on the couch. Diane was polite, well-dressed, middle-class, in her early- to mid-twenties. I don't know what she was doing there — maybe she was a friend of Hopkins. We took a break from the music, and Roberto spent the rest of the afternoon coming on to her. To my amazement, she went for it. Roberto looked a good decade older than his thirty-six years. He had the perpetual look of a guy who had just hitchhiked from California, sleeping in abandoned warehouses along the way. In other words, irresistible to women.
Our drummer was classically trained and technically competent, I suppose, but in my opinion, he couldn't play rock-'n'-roll. For about fifteen minutes in the late 1960s, it was cool in certain uptown musical circles to be in a rock band on the side. His Dad was a Broadway musician who lived in the suburbs. We all went there once. It was awful — the sterile, isolated, detached houses with neatly clipped lawns, like on TV. There was a music room with a big picture window and a piano — a real luxury for us. We tried rehearsing a little, but nobody could get into the mood. It was like being in a fish tank. Then we had to deal with the mother, a typical middle-class housewife, who offered us Pepsis and tried to make small talk with a bunch of stoned-out hippies. It was painful for all parties.
The drummer was good with the other instruments, however. On one occasion back in the City, he picked up my bass during a break in the rehearsal and played a riff that turned my head around. It was a cool run up and down the fretboard with numerous accidentals, almost like a half-tone scale. Having learned a straight blues scale, I didn't know you were allowed to use that many accidentals. It blew me away, and my bass playing hasn't been the same since.
My favorite bass players were Chris Hillman of the Byrds and Paul McCartney of the Beatles. Hillman was a former bluegrass mandolin player and McCartney had moved from guitar to bass after the departure of their regular bassist from an earlier version of the band. Both Hillman and McCartney had broken new ground in bringing out the melodic capabilities of the instrument.
On the street, Roberto played a Chinese wooden flute, Chuck played an acoustic six-string guitar, and I followed along with a pair of wood blocks. In Chuck's absence, I would fill in to the best of my ability on guitar. Roberto sometimes brought Diane along. Her wholesome prettiness and big, toothpaste smile helped when it came time to pass the hat in front of the office drones.
To overcome the noise of the street, you needed to play loud. You were competing with sirens, taxis honking, the din of a thousand vehicles. You needed to cut through the city noise with a noise of your own, one that was powerful, compelling, and consistent. As they say in the business, righteous.
People would sometimes come up to us and ask if we wanted to play at their private parties. Musicians who had done such gigs warned us that they weren't much fun.
When Diane wasn't with us, we usually put a hat on the sidewalk. If you were off that day, you might get a few quarters here and there. If you were on top of your game, however, if you got the rhythm going, then change and dollar bills would fall from the sky like a rain shower. People would sometimes leave us food or even an occasional joint or piece of hashish wrapped in tin foil.
The cliché about New Yorkers being the toughest and most discriminating audience in the world is true. They've seen and heard it all. If you're no good, they'll walk right by you, barely acknowledging your presence. But if you're good, they're the most generous and open-hearted audience in the world.
On one occasion, we were playing in front of a skyscraper on Sixth Avenue when a young woman came up and stood a few feet in front of us. Her smile was so intense that I almost fell over backwards in mid-number.
On another occasion, a snickering police officer who was walking by kicked our hat, scattering our change over the sidewalk. If I could have gotten away with it, I would have shot him and his partner in the back.
The evil cops notwithstanding, the street is a compelling place to play. You can reach everyone there, not just those who can afford to buy tickets and not just those who are in the mood for formal, structured entertainment.
Americans, unique in the world, see the street player as just slightly above a panhandler or bum. In American musical culture, street players are okay only if they later redeem themselves by cutting an album with a mainstream label. Most people don't think of street music as a legitimate form of expression in its own right and on its own terms. This is how conditioned we all are by the commercial culture, an oxymoron if there ever was one.
On the contrary, there are many wonderful players out there. Some choose to go commercial and some don't. Many prefer the street, which is a far more direct and democratic way to reach the public.
Good music is where you find it.
I didn't know much about drugs, except for the occasional joint and maybe a toke or two every now and then off the hash pipe. Dennis told me that when you're on LSD, you can see all the "trips" that people are on. I later discovered how right he was. You see all the personas, costumes, and characters that people put on. It's frightening and funny, like a grade-B horror/comedy movie.
Roberto got his hands on some organic magic mushrooms in powdered, capsulized form, and laid a couple of hits on me. We all agreed that this particular batch was unusually subtle. Maybe it was because it was my first trip, but I've never since had drugs that good. I dropped late one afternoon after a rehearsal, when the music was still fresh in my ears and most of the instruments were still lying around the apartment. I picked up the bass and started to play. The sound was mesmerizing.
I had briefly played a couple of musical instruments in school and sung in my junior high school choir, all with limited success. Whatever reading skills I may have had, I had long since forgotten. My silver flute teacher told my parents that I had the best tone he had heard in a beginner, but that my sense of rhythm was terrible. On the other hand, I loved to listen to rock-'n'-roll and wanted to learn how to play it.
Roberto usually gave me the bass lines to his songs. He would play them on the bottom four strings of his guitar, which are tuned an octave above the four bass strings. I'd usually play the lines just as he had. He criticized my playing as too robotic, which it was.
To keep time, I had to count, "one, two, three, four," in my head. I was playing with my head, a big no-no in the emotional world of rock-'n'-roll.
At a certain point in the mushrooms trip, the rhythm in my body took over and I was able to play a steady beat without thinking about it. Everything I do today rhythmically comes out of that trip.
Our culture prohibits drugs, with about as much success as it had with the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s. Traditional cultures have taken a more sophisticated approach. The shaman or medicine man would administer, monitor, and coach the psychedelic sessions. They didn't try to stamp out drugs, or punish or incarcerate their way out of a substance problem.
On a subsequent trip, I wrote down a quatrain, the first two lines of which I've forgotten. The last lines were:
It cannot be expressed in any language
It is expressed in only one language
I say, "wrote down" because my understanding was that the thoughts themselves had been around from time immemorial, from the ancient mystics to present-day seekers.
Most nights we rehearsed electrified versions of Roberto's songs. They're hard to describe, as is much original music. Let's say, folk/country/blues, by way of Haight-Ashbury, with colorful melodies and lyrics. Roberto was the best writer I ever played with, and he was a decent singer and guitar player, too.
Roberto said that if you went to a music publisher's office and there were ten aspiring songwriters waiting in the lobby, there would be ten Bob Dylans. Roberto refused to listen to Bob, knowing that his act was so compelling that he, Roberto, might get sucked into it. He was afraid that he, too, might start sounding whiny, or pretentious, or grandiose.
That's how powerful Dylan's voice was in the 1960s. Some writers consciously tried to imitate him; the rest consciously tried not to.
Despite my increasing taste for the garage and the street, I continued to attend formal, sit-down musical events. On one occasion, Panzer and I dropped into one of the venerable Greenwich Village nightclubs, possibly the Bitter End or the Cafe au Go-Go. On the bill that night were Karen Dalton, the blues singer, and Tim Hardin, a talented folk singer whose songs have been covered by such major artists as Bobby Darin, Rod Stewart, and Johnny and June Carter Cash.
After Dalton's set, the lights were lowered and the room quieted as Hardin staggered onstage. If a man may be said to be three sheets to an alcoholic wind, then Hardin that night was about nine sheets to a ferocious narcotic gale. He was in his late twenties at the time, but he looked much older. Panzer declared in a low voice, "Holy Shit." Hardin leaned precariously toward the mike and said, "'Holy Shit.' I heard that out there," and began his set.
Dalton, who never achieved commercial success despite critical acclaim, died of AIDS after years of declining health and occasional homelessness. Hardin would tragically die a few days after his thirty-ninth birthday.
The days of being able to hear Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and other seminal artists in an intimate coffeehouse setting were long over, however. As folk music gave way to rock, the musical action shifted from the Village clubs to the Fillmore East theater on lower Second Avenue. The latter wasn't the best-paying job for a band, but it became so well known nationwide that it was a must-play for any serious rock band. (According to one source, more than thirty live albums were recorded there in its three-plus years of existence.)
A converted movie theater, the Fillmore seated about twenty-six hundred, including the balcony. There were two shows each night on Friday and Saturday. Not being a late-night person, I usually went to the early, 8:00, show. The 11:30 shows had a reputation for being even more fun, however, because there was no strict time limit and the musicians were able to extend their jams into the wee hours.
Tickets went for the grand sum of $3.50, $4.50, and $5.50 each. There was no service charge. That's roughly $20, $25, and $30 in 2009 money. Tickets at the Fillmore were affordable for ordinary wage earners like me.
The master of ceremonies was Bill Graham, the owner, or Kip Cohen, the local manager. Bill split his time between the two concert halls he had founded, the Fillmore East and the Fillmore West in San Francisco. He was a controversial, larger-than-life character. A gifted impresario, he had no use for us hippies, except, of course, that we bought most of the tickets to his shows. He thought nothing of driving a gaudy Mercedes-Benz at a time of widespread contempt for conspicuous consumption. Nevertheless, he was The Man when it came to putting on great shows, and he quickly earned at least the grudging respect of the concert-going crowd.
Shows at the Fillmore started and, in the case of the early show, ended on time. Taking a page from his experience in the theater, Graham put each of his acts' equipment on its own separate dolly. This greatly reduced the turnaround time between acts. A Bill Graham show was marked by top-level sound and lighting and by meticulous attention to detail and to the overall patron experience. People flocked to his shows.
We saw Led Zeppelin there in May, 1969. It was their second appearance at the Fillmore and their first as a headliner. Robert Plant, the lead singer, and John Bonham, the drummer, were both younger than me. The musical exchanges between Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page were priceless.
On another weekend, the members of the Mothers of Invention ran up and down the aisles during their set. Meanwhile, Frank Zappa, the band leader, talked from the stage in his usual dry, sarcastic way about being under pressure from the music industry to bring his band up to "professional standards."
The best show I saw was The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, who were on a bill with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. A masterful entertainer, Brown made his stage appearance on what appeared to be a construction crane. Though his set was divided into individual songs, it seemed one continuous, high-energy piece of music.
In late November, 1970, the Jefferson Airplane performed at the Fillmore on their farewell tour, just before disbanding and later reforming as the Starship.
Though a businessman first, Bill Graham, to his credit, succeeded in introducing his Baby Boomer audiences to the American roots music.
Chuck Berry had a habit of traveling solo to his gigs and working with a local pick-up band. I remember him stomping his feet on the Fillmore stage, trying to get the band to pick up on the beat. There's nothing worse than having to fight your own rhythm section.
I was able to wrangle a front row seat for the Albert King show in November, 1970. He walked onstage and set up just a few feet in front of me. A left-hander, he was playing a guitar that was strung for a right-hander. He announced, "I just drank a bottle of wine — you know I've got The Blues," and launched into a scorching set. I've never heard anyone crank up a down-home electric blues guitar like that, before or since, and I've seen most of the greats.
BB King was the king of smooth, polished big-city blues, and a great showman.
Other acts I saw, many of them heavily influenced by the Blues, included the Nice, Argent, Taj Mahal, the Moody Blues, Bobby "Blue" Bland, John Hammond, Jr, Ten Years After, Johnny Winter, Jethro Tull, the Buddy Miles Express, Buddy Guy, Lee Michaels, Savoy Brown, the Elvin Bishop Group, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, NRBQ (the New Rhythm & Blues Quartet), the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Mountain with Leslie West.
I saw many shows, and I have the hearing loss today to prove it. A typical band opened its set with a slow- to mid-tempo blues number, paying their respects to the roots music and getting their fingers warmed up. Then they went into their own music. Most of the British bands featured a disciplined form of musical craftsmanship that almost gave the impression of musical literacy. As a rule, the American bands were a bit more rough-and-tumble, more physical, and could pound out some great rock-'n'-roll. I generally preferred the Brits.
In August of my first year in the city, I caught a ride with my friend John Rossi and his friend Vicki Webb to the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in upstate New York. The crowd was enormous, well beyond anyone's expectations, and there were few amenities. On the contrary, we were all sitting in a corn field miles from the nearest town. My friends had had the foresight to bring a tent, but I was woefully unprepared for the rain. I ended up sheltering in John's car for most of the weekend.
The logistics were a challenge for the bands, as well. The state highway was closed, and they had to be flown in by helicopter. As a result, there was often a three or four hour wait between acts.
Despite the problems, the vibes were exceptionally mellow all weekend, and the spirit of cooperation was palpable. Woodstock was unlike anything we had seen before or would see again.
The sclerotic mass media covered the event as little more than a muddy curiosity, yet another silly excess of a spoiled generation that had known neither the economic deprivation of the Great Depression nor the bloody sacrifice of World War II. With or without official approval, however, our generation had begun to assert itself, to define the contours of our own culture and values, and even to create a bit of our own history.
The following year, a song written by Joni Mitchell and a feature-length documentary movie with accompanying record album (all of them titled "Woodstock") were released to widespread acclaim. The event would enter into the popular imagination as a musical and cultural high point of the 1960s. Sadly, however, the popularity of large events and festivals like Woodstock ultimately meant the demise of the more intimate venues like the Fillmores.
Restless, Panzer and I decided to fly to San Francisco and check out the scene, before it was too late. (The Summer of Love had happened more than two years before.) A day or two after our arrival, my mother showed up unannounced on the streets of Berkeley, wearing a peace medallion around her neck and giving us the peace sign. She was there to visit Merle, a friend of hers from work who was about my age. We argued about the musical Hair. My mother liked the show, but Merle thought it was for "them," the straight people, the old people. I've never seen the show or the movie, but I do know that I hate the music.
A few days later, we subleased an apartment on Bonita Avenue in Berkeley, where we would stay for the last month of the decade of the 1960s. The regular tenants, a couple, were out of town for the holidays. We figured that they must have been communists, or socialists, or some such thing. Who else would have the complete works of Karl Marx in their bedroom?
The good news for Easterners in California was that the traffic stopped in both directions for pedestrians in the crosswalk. The bad news was that the cops gave tickets for jaywalking. In contrast, the attitude of the New York City police seemed to be, "If you think you can make it to the other side, be our guests, go ahead and try."
Hitchhiking was easy and relatively safe, if you were male. There seemed to be a lot of guys simply driving around town at night in their junkers, picking up freaks and taking them wherever they were going. A free taxi service.
The social life in California was fluid and spontaneous. If you said, I'll meet you tonight at six o'clock, and they were late, it was assumed that something else more compelling had come along, and you would continue your trip without them. There was almost no such thing as a social faux pas.
Likewise, the living arrangements in the Bay Area were different. We found it amusing that one might, for example, easily find a biker living next door to a nuclear physicist, next to a cop, next to a flower child. And nobody seemed to mind much. By choice or by necessity, people gave each other an enormous amount of space.
The Fillmore West in San Francisco was a big ballroom with wide open spaces in front of the stage. The West had a dance format, as opposed to the more formal reserved seating at the East. Like the East, there were four shows per week at the West, but they were scheduled for one each night from Thursday through Sunday. This gave the bands more opportunity for extended jams, as was the style on the West Coast. The shows were usually over by midnight, in keeping with the tradition of earlier bedtimes in California.
At the West, Bill Graham himself sometimes took the tickets at the door. He would never do such a thing at the East.
One of the most infamous rock concerts of all time, the Rolling Stones show at the Altamont Speedway in the East Bay, and subject of the movie Gimme Shelter, happened soon after we arrived. As the story goes, the Stones had hired the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang as "security." They beat up anyone who got too close to the stage, and even killed a young man who dared to fight back. We didn't go to the show, thank goodness, but we did see several black-and-blue concertgoers the next day on the streets of Berkeley.
Altamont was another turning point for the Movement. Woodstock was on its way to becoming a symbol of peace through music, the best of our ideals, and Altamont quickly came to symbolize the excesses. The drugs, the arrogance, and the stupidity of it all had caught up with us and turned on us.
In late December, we went to see Sly and the Family Stone at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. After the show, Panzer took me into the dressing room and introduced me to Sly.
At the end of the month, the communists returned. The apartment was by then overrun by all the house cats we had befriended in the meantime. Panzer and I grabbed our bags and sheepishly slipped out the door, tripping over a few panicky kitties on the way.
Despite the problems associated with the commercial star system, the rock concert had emerged as the most important public art form of the 1960s. These shows were often the only places we freaks and misfits saw each other. We felt a sense of belonging in the electrically charged atmosphere of a rock show, a feeling we felt few other places. A typical rap from the stage between songs went something like this: "This is our country, man. It doesn't belong to them — it belongs to us." Forty years later, I still believe these things.
In the old days, we were all lowercase children of god, charged with the simple yet grand task of caring for each other without regard to differences, as often happens within marginalized, outsider groups. We believed that our highest ideals could be the template for what America could become. A nation that takes care of its own people and, not coincidentally, of its natural resources and natural beauty, too.
In the late 1960s, however, a base strain of religiosity began to infect the youth culture. The cults came along, including a pseudo-Christian group, a spitting insult to the mainstream church, let alone to the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Calling themselves the Children of God, they did street-corner recruiting in the major cities. This may have been a hip thing to do at the time, but it turned out that COG advocated child rape and forcing its women members into prostitution.
That was the end of that. Opportunists, and worse, had hijacked our language and our movement, enslaved our sisters and brothers, and traumatized our children. So it remains today. Many of the cults from that era are still in operation.
Back in New York, I moved from the 29th Street loft to my own apartment, a walk-up in the "East Village" (a real-estate marketing term for the Lower East Side). The apartment was above a used-tire store on Tenth Street between First and Second Avenues. The neighborhood was a Puerto Rican barrio. My building was narrow and deep, much like the other tenements on the block. There were four identical one-bedroom apartments on each floor, two in the front and two in the rear, with a urine-stained stairwell in the middle. Each apartment had a bathtub in the kitchen. Mine was on the fifth, and top, floor, overlooking lovely Tenth Street.
When I moved in, the apartment had no electricity. This meant, among other things, that we couldn't plug in our amps. I did, however, prevail on my next-door neighbor, Señora Inocencia Díaz, to let us use one of her outlets. She had two pictures on the wall of her front room: Jesus Christ and John F Kennedy.
She gamely put up with us awhile, but not being much of a rock-'n'-roll fan, I guess, she pulled the plug on us in mid-practice. I had to go down to Con Edison and get the power situation straightened out. The previous tenant had apparently left without paying the bill.
Same with the telephone. I had no phone service, so my friends and band mates had to leave messages with poor Mrs Diaz.
She lived by herself and must have been a little lonely, as she often stopped me in the hallway for a chat, not minding that my Spanish was even more rudimentary than her English.
I haven't been back to East Tenth Street, but I'm told that the neighborhood has since been Yuppified with Häagen-Dazs stores and the like. (I guess the "East Village" marketing ploy worked.) My brother kids me that had I stayed, I'd be a millionaire by now. Maybe so. Nevertheless, my advice to neighborhoods that find themselves in such a situation is to Just Say Nope to Yup. My advice to Yuppies is, keep your distance until you get a real job, a blue-collar job, or get old. The combination of young, urban, and professional is way too much for any self-respecting working-class neighborhood to handle.
It is often said that New York has several of whatever other cities have one of, and this is true of ghettos as well. There were at least four large human disaster areas in the wealthiest city in the country: Harlem, of course, Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, the South Bronx, and our neighborhood, the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Roberto's wife Annie joined him in the City. On their way home from the Village in their flowing hippie clothes, they cut striking figures as they swept along St Mark's Place near the Cooper Union cube sculpture. Annie made beautiful clothes from antique velvets and other fabrics bought at garage sales.
Roberto and Annie lived on Eleventh or Twelfth Street between Avenues A and B. Their block made mine look like Mr Rogers' Neighborhood. The Avenues A, B, C, and D, which lie between First Avenue and the East River, are now known as Alphabet City, or sometimes to its detractors as "Adventure, Bravery, Craziness, and Death."
There were gunfights in Roberto's neighborhood nearly every night, and the cops refused to go there. There was no water, hot or cold, in their building, nor did the landlord require a lease. It was like camping out, but in the City. Without locks on the doors, one could expect frequent robberies. If you wanted to keep your dope or money, you had to hide it somewhere a thief couldn't find it. Anything left in the open inside your apartment was considered fair game.
The landlord would come by once a month and collect whatever rent he could from each tenant. Sixty bucks would usually buy him off. The citywide standard was at least a hundred a month for a legal apartment with working utilities and your own key. (I was paying about $140 for my walk-up.)
Most of the front doors I had seen outside of New York had two locks. One cheapo lock in the doorknob, which a thief could quickly and easily defeat. The second lock would typically be a dead-bolt, which takes a skilled thief several minutes to pick. For additional protection, you could reinforce the door and jam with metal strips. In the City, that was just the beginning. Most people had one or two additional locks, often including a three-eighths-inch-diameter iron bar that braced the door from the inside.
The important thing was the intimidation factor. The thinking was, if your door had four locks on it, then people would be less likely to mess with it than with a door down the hall or down the block that only had three locks.
People often played their radios loudly when they were out of their apartments, in the hope of creating the impression that someone was home. You don't want to barge in on someone in New York. They'll kill you.
On one occasion, I took the subway down to the warehouse district to meet Roberto at a drug dealer's loft. Few people lived in the neighborhood, but this guy had an incredible setup. High ceilings and what seemed like acres of floor space in a notoriously cramped city. A few years later, the world would discover SOHO loft living, and the rest is history.
The housing market in the late 1960s and early 1970s was tight, but the job market was good. Roberto, however, was on welfare, and the welfare office had begun to pressure able-bodied men to get jobs. They found him a prospective job as a messenger. He had to interview for it or face losing his check. The interviewer asked him two questions: Do you know the City? Roberto said, no. Have you ever worked as a messenger before? Again, Roberto said, no.
They hired him anyway, and for the next several months, Roberto spent his days riding busses around Manhattan.
New York | Musical Interludes | Vancouver | Bibliography