Face the Music: A Life Exposed Read online

  OK, school lets out at three o’clock? Hey, how about more of the same at three-thirty from a different batch of kids? Great.

  PS 164 did have a glee club that interested me. A chance to sing! Every year they put on a musical, and they auditioned anyone who wanted to try out for a part. The first year, I decided to audition. When it was my turn, I stood up on the stage in front of other people, opened my mouth, and expected to sing. But all that came out was a little squeak. I ended up in the chorus, an able seaman in HMS Pinafore or whatever. Every year after that—fourth, fifth, and sixth grades—I wanted a role in one of those productions. But every year I choked at the audition—that same tiny voice was all that came out. I ended up in the chorus every time, despite the fact that when I sat through the auditions, I knew I could out-sing many of the students who managed to land the leads.

  PS 164 was also the home to a scout troop. After I saw a few schoolmates in their blue uniforms, I thought about joining. When a new friend of mine, Harold Schiff, showed up in his uniform, I took him up on an offer to go with him to a meeting. Harold ran with the mainstream kids but had also befriended a few loners, like me. He was tight with some other guys in the troop, like Eric London, who played in the school orchestra with Harold, and Jay Singer, who played piano. I had run across Eric and Jay in glee club, but their friendship with Harold was based more on attending Hebrew school together. I stuck to myself for the most part. Even when I joined something, I operated at the periphery.

  I realized that I was better suited to own a team than to play on one.

  Everybody in the scouts was trying to get merit badges—for tying knots or helping old ladies cross the street—but I didn’t give a crap about that stuff. The only thing that appealed to me was going camping. And sure enough, we took some weekend camping trips. But I had a problem when I lost sight of the other people when we were out hiking. That was really the first time I realized that being deaf on one side meant I had no sense of direction. I remember standing in a clearing listening to someone yell, “We’re over here!” I had no idea where the voice was coming from. Without the ability to triangulate the sound, it was impossible. I felt vulnerable because I didn’t know where I was—yet another way I couldn’t place myself.

  My instinct was still to cling to my parents. But whenever I got home from a situation like that looking for a sense of security, they let me down. “Ignore it and it will go away” remained the household mantra. Same old story. I would have loved more assurance and less hitting, but it just wasn’t going to happen. My parents steadfastly refused to acknowledge the trouble I was having despite the fact that it was so obvious. I sleepwalked at home. Sometimes at night I would sort of come to and realize I was in the living room. Sometimes I was aware of my parents turning me around and directing me back to my bed. They knew; they just never acknowledged it or tried to figure out what was wrong.

  I also had two recurring nightmares. In one, it was pitch black and I was on a floating dock in a huge body of water, far from any shore. I was stranded and alone. I started yelling for help.

  Night after night.

  I’m alone on a floating dock, far from shore, surrounded by darkness . . .

  I would wake up screaming in my bed.

  In the other nightmare I was sitting in the driver’s seat of a car barreling down a dark, empty highway. The car had no steering wheel. I had to try to maneuver it by leaning from side to side, but there was no way to control it.

  Night after night these nightmares left me suddenly awake, screaming, confused, deathly afraid.

  Things with my sister were going south, too. By the time I was in junior high, Julia was getting more and more self-destructive. My parents started periodically committing her to state mental facilities. After she bounced in and out of state facilities, my parents spent what for them was a fortune on an expensive private psychiatric hospital. When she was at home, she ran away a lot, and my parents could spend days looking for her. Sometimes I woke up in the morning to see that my parents had gone yet another night without sleep and I wondered: Will all of this kill them?

  Julia would hang out in the East Village and crash at people’s apartments and take drugs. Once when she was home, she stole a drawer of silver dollars my mother had been collecting and sold them to buy drugs. I know now that what she was doing would be called self-medicating, but back then I didn’t analyze it much. When she was gone, she was gone. And when she was there, I was scared.

  I’m twelve years old and my sister fourteen years old in front of our apartment on 75th Road in Queens . . . dressed to star on The Sopranos.

  One afternoon after my parents brought Julia home from an institution where she had received electroshock therapy, they left us home alone. They just dropped her off and left me with a violent nutcase only a few hours removed from a mental hospital—who just happened to be my sister. While they were out, Julia got angry at something and started chasing me around with a hammer. I was terrified. I ran into a bedroom and locked the door. I sat there listening at the door, swallowing hard, praying my parents would come home.

  Oh, God, please come home.

  Then I heard a crashing sound as Julia started swinging the hammer wildly at the door. She kept at it.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  The wood cracked and splintered, and the hammer began to wedge its way through the door as she continued to flail at it with all her strength.

  Then suddenly she stopped. The hammer was lodged in the wood and everything went quiet. I curled up and counted the minutes and then the hours.

  Will they come home before she starts up again?

  They did.

  “What happened here?” they asked.

  I told them that Julia had come after me with the hammer. But then they lashed out at me, as if it was my fault. They yelled at me. Then they hit me. I had been so scared, and now my head reeled in confusion.

  You left me with her! That was your choice, not mine!

  She tried to KILL me!

  School continued to be a challenge, too. When I was in grade school I had tested my way into the “gifted and talented” track. At the start of junior high I was once again placed with the gifted children. I wouldn’t have made it on the basis of my grades—I was never a good student. But entrance to the gifted track was gauged purely on some sort of intelligence test. While my IQ apparently qualified me, I remained at the bottom of the class. I was the one they scratched their heads about—I guess they thought I didn’t want to learn. What they failed to realize was that my ear put me at a terrible disadvantage. I simply couldn’t hear a lot of what was said in class. And if I missed a sentence, I was lost. Once I got lost, I surrendered. I gave up because I’d lost the thread.

  At parent-teacher conferences the teachers always told my parents the same things: “He’s bright but he doesn’t apply himself,” or, “He’s bright but he doesn’t work to his potential.” No teacher ever told them, “He’s bright but he can’t understand what I’m saying.” Back then, kids didn’t benefit from the recognition of learning disabilities.

  But my parents knew I was deaf in one ear. And yet, after every parent-teacher conference, they came home and admonished me: “God gave you this wonderful brain and you’re not using it.”

  I cried. I felt guilty. “Tomorrow I’ll turn over a new leaf,” I vowed.

  Which was all well and good—until I went back to school the next day and still couldn’t hear. At which point I couldn’t follow what the teacher was saying. And there I was, feeling like a quitter all over again.

  I knew that if I didn’t do something, things were going to end badly. Did that mean failure? Did that mean taking my own life? I wasn’t sure. To live in misery, to live a lie, to take it out on other people—I knew this was all bad. And I knew it was untenable. I didn’t know where it would end, but I knew it would end badly.

  It was a horrible situation, and I stewed over it at night. In addition to the nightmares and sleepwalking, I beca
me a hypochondriac—in the extreme: I believed I was dying. I would lie awake at night, afraid to fall asleep lest I never wake up. Eventually I would doze off, unable to keep my eyes open any longer. It was the same every night.

  You’re dying. You’re in trouble.

  Then, lo and behold, I got my first transistor radio. It opened an entirely different world, a separate place where I could go whenever I put the single earpiece in my functioning left ear. Music once again became my sanctuary, giving me at least a fleeting sense of safety and solitude.

  And in February 1964, a few weeks after my twelfth birthday, I saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. As I watched them singing, it hit me: This is my ticket out. Here was the vehicle I could use to rise out of misery, to become famous, to be looked up to, to be liked, to be admired, to be envied.

  And with no rational basis, I convinced myself: I can do that. I can touch that nerve. I had never played a guitar in my life, and I certainly had never written a song. And yet . . . this was my ticket out.

  I just knew it.

  Immediately I started to grow my hair out, aspiring to a Beatles mop-top. Partly I did it for style, but it was obvious why the style appealed to me: I could cover the stump I had instead of a right ear. Somehow, this was lost on my parents. They badgered me as my hair grew out and threatened to cut it.

  One afternoon, not long after I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, I bumped into a kid from my neighborhood named Matt Rael. He told me he had an electric guitar and played music. He was a grade behind me in school, but I was very impressed. All I needed now was an electric guitar and I, too, could start playing music. And I thought I knew how to get one. For the next eleven months—as the British Invasion quickly brought not only the Beatles, but the Dave Clark Five, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, the Searchers, Manfred Mann, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Animals, the list was endless—I pestered my parents for an electric guitar for my thirteenth birthday.

  “It means the world to me,” I told them.

  3.

  On the morning of January 20, 1965, I woke up excited. My birthday had finally arrived. Finally, an electric guitar! “Look under your bed,” my mom told me. I leaned over excitedly and peered under the bed. I saw a big alligator-print cardboard case—it looked like an acoustic guitar.

  My heart sank.

  I pulled it out from under the bed and opened the case. Sure enough, it was a used Japanese acoustic guitar with nylon strings. The top had been cracked and shoddily repaired. I was crushed. I closed the case and pushed it back under the bed. I didn’t want to play it.

  My parents came from families that emphasized the need to keep kids down rather than lift them up. That was how they thought kids should be raised. They had made a point of not giving me something I wanted before—despite the fact that it would have been just as easy for them to do. They didn’t want me to get a big head, I guess.

  Once I had rejected the guitar, they made me feel guilty about it—never acknowledging their role in this enormous disappointment.

  My friend from scouts, Harold Schiff, did get an electric guitar for his birthday a few weeks later—a powder blue Fender Mustang with a mother-of-pearl pick guard. He immediately started a band. And he asked me to be the singer!

  Harold’s friends Eric London and Jay Singer, whom I knew casually from glee club and scouts, soon joined. Eric played bass in the school orchestra and just plucked the same instrument as a stand-up bass. Jay, who already knew how to play piano, had recently gotten an electric keyboard—a Farfisa organ. Harold got another kid he’d gone to Hebrew school with named Arvin Mirow to be the drummer. It turned out that I recognized him from glee club, too. Then I suggested we talk to Matt Rael, who lived next door to Eric. So Matt joined as the lead guitar player. Matt and I were the only ones in the group whose parents weren’t doctors of one kind or another.

  Harold and Matt lived in houses as opposed to apartments—their places had basements. Matt’s older brother Jon already had a band, too, and his parents were pretty tolerant about noise. Harold’s mom didn’t mind the noise, either, and we’d have the Schiff’s basement to ourselves, so that was where we set up first. Harold’s basement was finished—the walls were lined with knotty pine wood paneling, there was a linoleum floor, and even a window. There was a door to the backyard, too, which was below street level.

  Harold and Matt would plug both of their guitars into one amp, and my vocals went through the amp used by Jay Singer’s keyboard. I often banged a tambourine as I sang—that was something you saw singers on TV do a lot. Eric just had to pluck the bass as loud as he could. We ran through “Satisfaction,” by the Stones, and other songs by British Invasion bands like the Kinks and the Yardbirds. And to take advantage of Jay’s Farfisa sound we learned “Liar, Liar,” by the Castaways.

  I loved it from the start. And even though all the kids had vague dreams of being rock musicians at that time—given the frenzy over the Beatles and the Stones—their parents had their lives planned out for them. These kids were going to become dentists and optometrists like their parents, and for them the band was a lark.

  But I kept telling them, “I am going to be a rock star.”

  Matt Rael and I started hanging out a lot at his house. In addition to practicing together, sometimes we got to sit around during rehearsals of his brother Jon’s band. Matt and I played music so much at his house that his mother eventually proposed a deal: if we refinished an old bookshelf she had bought upstate, we could officially call the basement our practice space. So we stripped the white paint off that old bookshelf and kept playing.

  Matt’s parents were sort of proto-hippies. His mom had actually sung on the first Weavers recordings and was friends with Pete Seeger. She had babysat for Woody Guthrie’s children. By the time I got to know his parents, his mom was still booking prominent folk and blues musicians for hootenannies in Manhattan—people like Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Lead Belly, as well as Seeger.

  I listened obsessively to the radio and knew the pop hits of the day, but at Matt’s place I was exposed to his parents’ amazing collection of folk music. They had tons of country blues and old-time music and lots of contemporary folk by the likes of Bob Dylan, Eric Andersen, Tom Rush, Phil Ochs, Buffy St. Marie, and Judy Collins. Eventually I pulled my acoustic guitar out from under the bed, and Matt showed me some chords. Then I took a couple lessons from a woman who had placed an ad in the local paper. The first song I learned to play was “Down in the Valley.” Soon I had a harmonica around my neck and was trying to mimic the folk music I now knew from Matt’s house.

  The band continued to practice, too, and that summer of 1965 we got our first gig. There was a mayoral election that year, and John Lindsay’s campaign had a local office in our neighborhood. It was housed in a storefront—just an open room with bright lights. Harold was volunteering for the campaign, distributing pamphlets—I think he thought it was something mature and cool to do. And one day the guy in charge of the office was talking about some kind of party or rally, and mentioned they needed entertainment. Even though he hadn’t been talking to Harold, Harold piped up: “Um, I have a band.”

  They invited us to play at the event. I guess it looked good for the Democratic Party to have neighborhood kids playing. We didn’t get paid, and not many people were there, but still, it was a gig. My first gig!

  Sometimes when the band practiced, I got Harold to show me barre chords on his Fender Mustang. The basics came pretty easily, but if I had realized then how long it would take me to become a somewhat proficient guitar player, I probably would have given up on the spot. At the time, though, it just drove me on; messing around in the basement was fine, but I wanted to get an electric guitar of my own and get serious. I started taking the subway into Manhattan whenever I could to scour the music stores on 48th Street for affordable guitars.

  Those trips into town became pilgrimages for me. Between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, independent music stores lined both sides of 48th Stree
t. And a block up, on 49th Street and Seventh Avenue, was a sandwich shop called Blimpie’s. I’d get a sub sandwich there, or a Texas chili dog—covered in gooey yellow cheese and chili and onions—at Orange Julius, and then I’d wander the music stores. Back then you weren’t allowed to touch anything. If you wanted to play an instrument, they asked, “Are you buying today?” And if someone didn’t look the part, like me, they’d say, “Let me see that you really have the money on you.”

  So those trips to 48th Street were not about playing but about soaking in the trappings of rock and roll: drum kits, guitars, basses. And once in a while I spotted a musician I recognized from TV or from the music magazines I was starting to collect. I was in heaven.

  As junior high progressed, I started skipping school more and more to hop the bus to the subway and head for 48th Street. I would arrive early in the morning, before the shops were open—so this Jewish kid would go sit in a pew in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on 49th Street and Fifth Avenue, and wait. I also found a record store a block from the cathedral, called the Record Hunter, where they let you listen to records. They had banks of turntables with headphones, and you could have them open anything up and play it. That became my idea of a perfect day—waiting in the cathedral for the record store to open, listening to music, having a chili dog, and looking at guitars.

  Exploring closer to home, I found that if I took the southbound Q44 bus from my apartment to the last stop in Jamaica, Queens, there was a huge, two-story record store called Triboro Records. They had thousands of albums. And since it was a predominantly black neighborhood, I was able to pick up things I had not been exposed to before: James Brown, Joe Tex, and Otis Redding, as well as black comedians like Redd Foxx, Pigmeat Markham, and Moms Mabley. I didn’t always have money to buy something, but just being able to hold the records and look at the covers was enough to make it worthwhile.