The Sean Richter Chronicles, part two: Sean and Greg the Roadie Visit Callie in the Hospital

The Sean Richter Chronicles will appear occasionally in Growing Old With Rock & Roll.  They are an adjunct to I Love Distortion (a rock & roll novel in 12 chapters) that played out in the blog throughout 2013.  Part two is contemporaneous with I Love Distortion: future installments will involve prequels, sequels, and stories that weren’t portrayed in those 12 chapters.

This episode slots in right around late May or early June, 1978, before Nicole had called off her engagement to her fiancee and before my wife had tumbled on our little affair.

Callie was a co-worker of Nicole's in the toy department of the K-Mart where we all worked.  Callie was an INCREDIBLY sweet young girl, who couldn't have found a clue with a stepladder.  When she got pregnant at 18 with her high-school boyfriend, all of us agreed that we doubted she connected the act of having sexual intercourse with said boyfriend with the resulting birth of their daughter. 

 This is an (unfortunately) entirely true & accurate account of our hospital visit following that birth.  

"Hey Sean," Greg the Roadie said to me as he parked the car on a street near Mt. Carmel West Hospital that late spring/early summer day, "you think we should smoke a joint before we go up to the room?"

Looking back I can't imagine HOW that would have been an appropriate - or even sane - question before a visit to the hospital on the happy occasion of the birth of a new baby, but then again, MANY of Greg's & my interactions of that period hinged on smoking joints in cars.  Plus, I have to admit at this juncture that Greg just had a way of making TOTALLY outlandish scenarios look, sound & seem COMPLETELY normal.  (On one occasion Greg had me drive the getaway car while he scaled an eight-foot barbed-wire topped chain-link fence to steal a muffler from an junkyard.  I hesitate to mention that, but I'm pretty certain the Statute of Limitations has run out on that heist.  I had never to that point - and have never since - participated in that sort of petty/grand larceny, but Greg just made it seem SO COMPLETELY normal I found I couldn't say no.)  

Anyway, my reply in the car that day?  "Yeah, I guess we should," though even at this point - more than 40 years later - I have NO IDEA how an affirmative reply was the correct one.  Plus it's important to remember that buying pot on the West Side of of Columbus, Ohio in 1978 was just a Chemical Crapshoot: one time you would get a substance that just gave you a Vague Headache and a Little Sort Of High Around the Edges; the next time it might just as well have been Angel Dust that would have you hallucinating for hours.  You just never knew.  To quote/paraphrase Mark Twain; "You pays your money and you takes your shot."

The other problem in that halcyon era was that we never did ANYTHING halfway.  "Moderation" was for chumps, and was not a part of our rock & roll vernacular.  There was No Such Concept of MAYBE smoking half a joint to test the potency, you just lit it up and rolled the dice.  I knew we were in trouble before we even got out of Greg's car, as I found I no longer knew how to work the car-door handle (and I had ridden in that car more than a hundred times).

We weren't even a block away from the hospital, but we STILL got lost finding it.  Then we couldn't figure out how to GET INSIDE the building and somehow wound up in a sub-basement.  By sheer luck we happened upon an elevator and managed to hit the "Up" button.  To our enormous relief when the doors opened there was nobody inside, the car was completely empty.  "Oh man, I am SO GLAD there's nobody on here," Greg said, "I am WAY too high to deal with any straight people."  

The elevator went up exactly one floor to the lobby, the doors parted, and maybe 15 people - including a couple of doctors & nurses - were waiting to get on.  They just stared at Greg & me for a second - I think we probably had a look of total panic on our faces - and then for some reason the Elevator Mexican Standoff just struck us both as hilariously funny and we started laughing so hard we couldn't stop.  "Are you guys all right?" one of the doctor's asked as I tried to catch my breath to say, "Yeah, we're good, we're fine," but all I could do was laugh 'til I was crying.  Greg was doubled-over, leaning on the wall, holding his stomach, then slid down the wall to a sitting position, laughing the entire time.

The doors closed again without anybody - sensibly - getting on, and we continued up to the 7th floor where the Maternity Ward was.  Any Sane Person - or Persons - would have just cut their losses right then & there and gotten their asses OUT of that hospital, but apparently we were functioning on some kind of Cannabis Automatic Pilot at that point: we had COME to this building to visit Callie and her new baby, and we were damn well GOING to visit Callie and her new baby.

We ducked into the first restroom we came to so we could take a break and try to gather ourselves a little bit (and to stop laughing).  "Holy shit this is good pot," Greg said, "we hit the jackpot this time."  "Yeeeaaah," I said, a little less enthusiastically, "it IS good, but we still have to get through this."  The High had taken a turn now, we were functioning better, but now time seemed to be slowing down rather alarmingly, and Greg was starting to flag a little.  

When we got to Callie's room I couldn't believe my eyes; the room was CRAMMED with people.  Callie's mom & dad were there, her boyfriend's parents were there, Nicole AND her fiance were there (and that guy was NOT a big fan of mine), plus two or three people we didn't know.  EVERYBODY was just staring at us, open-mouthed, and Nicole - promptly & properly Sussing the Situation with Greg & I - was so simultaneously angry and frightened of what was going to happen next she had tears starting in her eyes. 

Greg broke that little tableau by walking over to the bed, saying, "Callie, congratulations," and KISSING HER ON THE MOUTH.  With her boyfriend AND his parents standing RIGHT THERE.  "Oh, my God," I thought to myself, "This is getting out of hand, I should put a stop to this," but I found myself rooted to the spot, incapable of action.  Before anybody could do anything, Greg then announced, "Man, I'm so tired, I've just gotta lay down for a minute," and climbed into the hospital bed WITH Callie.  The entire situation had now clearly gone Train 'Round the Bend, and I knew I had to do SOMETHING.  Breaking my drug-induced paralysis, I walked over to the bed, took his arm, said, "Greg, come on," and tried to pull him up.  He yanked his arm away and YELLED, "GET OFF me, Sean, I'll fuck you up."

Greg was a Big Guy.  I'd seen him in fights.  I'd personally witnessed him beat people senseless, and I realized that if I couldn't de-fuse this situation quickly there was going to be carnage in that hospital room and Greg & I were going to jail, possibly for a VERY long time.  "Greg, Greg, Greg," I said, a little quieter each time, and stared in his eyes, "you have to get up off this bed and we have to get OUT of this room RIGHT NOW before Security comes, do you understand?"    

I think something about the word "Security" cut through the haze of The Big High to reach Greg, and he let me guide him off the bed and out of the room.  "Sorry, everybody," I said over my shoulder to the assembled families, "wrong room," even though Greg had called Callie by name. 

Nicole showed up at our band rehearsal space later that night after she dropped off her fiance, and the first words out of her mouth before I could even begin to apologize were, "What THE FUCK is wrong with you?"  She was as angry at me as I'd ever seen her and she was so frustrated she started slapping me on the head & shoulders.  I got her wrists and said, "Nicole, I'm really sorry.  We NEVER should have gotten high before we came up there."

"Yeah, and exactly whose idea WAS it to get high before visiting Callie in the hospital," Nicole asked, whirling on Greg.  Greg put his hands up before she could start pummeling him, and said, "Nicole, I'm sorry too, but getting high just seemed like a really good idea at the time."  Greg had such a sincere, little-boy-caught-with-his-hand-in-the-cookie-jar look on his face that Nicole actually burst out laughing, much like Greg and me in the elevator.     

"You guys are such CHILDREN sometimes," Nicole chided, "I bet Callie's daughter has more sense RIGHT THIS MINUTE than both of you put together."  "Come on, let's go outside," she said, grabbing my hand, "you're gonna take me for a walk to get some fresh air."

I guessed things were going to be okay.

© 2021 Ricki C.

In Memoriam: Sylvain Sylvain - 1951-2021

This blog originally appeared on the Pencil Storm blogsite, January 23rd, 2021.

Today - Valentine's Day, 2021 - would have been Sylvain's 70th birthday.

Sylvain Sylvain – lynchpin guitarist, songwriter, & fashion mobster of The New York Dolls – passed away on January 13th after a two and ½ year battle with cancer.

After I wrote that first sentence I followed it about five different ways: the biographical route (Sylvain – born Sylvain Mizrahi in Cairo, Egypt on Valentine’s Day 1951, fled Egypt with his family to escape anti-Semitism – jeez, I GUESS you would flee; if you think it was easy being Jewish in 1950’s Egypt you better think again, mofumbo); the musical route (trying to explain how Sylvain and Johnny Thunders worked like TWO guitarists – and I mean this in an entirely complimentary way – with only ONE brain & one set of hands); the historical route (bringing in Sylvain’s post-Dolls solo career, his time in the David Johansen Group, the 21st century resurgence of the Dolls, etc.).   

But you could read any & all of those things anywhere on Google, so I decided to tell you how The New York Dolls saved my rock & roll existence and how badly music sucked in 1973, before the Dolls’ first album came out.  Wikipedia tells me that first, self-titled album was released July 27th, 1973.  I’m pretty sure I bought it the first week it came out, if not the first DAY – record stores didn’t always HAVE every new release the first day they came out back then – because I had been reading about the Dolls in Creem magazine, my Rock & Roll Bible of the time.

First off, the front cover sucked: the Dolls done up in full gay/transvestite mode (teased bouffant hair & platform shoes dominated).  I’m sorry, but I was a born & bred West Side of Columbus, Ohio, boy – meaning blue-collar/lower-middle-working class – and that image was JUST NOT gonna fly with my rock & roll brethren.  But OH MAN when I dropped the needle on the record that first day and “Personality Crisis” came roaring out of my cheap-ass Sears & Roebuck speakers – keeping every promise rock & roll had made to me throughout the 1950’s & 60’s – I was in fuckin’ HEAVEN.  “Looking For A Kiss” came next, was even BETTER a song, and goddamn if there wasn’t one weak cut on the album (a critique I don’t throw around lightly).   

I’ve written elsewhere that previous to the Dolls my favorite “rock & roll” band was Loggins & Messina, and how that was the saddest sentence I’ve ever written, and that is exactly & entirely true.  How I could have put the purveyors of atrocities like “Vahevala” and “Your Mama Don't Dance” in the same musical UNIVERSE as the Dolls remains a mystery to me to this day.  Except it’s NOT a mystery, it was just the times.  In the early 70’s all of my music-loving friends – who had cut our rock & roll teeth on the likes of The Who, The Yardbirds, and The MC5 – were now hippies (or THOUGHT we were hippies, we pretty much all had jobs).  And we now all listened to Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Eagles and all that country-rock crap, or singer/songwriter ephemera like Batdorf & Rodney or (God help me) Pearls Before Swine.

Anyway, a picture – or in this case, to be more exact, TWO pictures – is worth a thousand words, so here is Ricki C. (five years before “Ricki C.” was actually invented) before and after The New York Dolls’ first record.  If I’ve said it once since 1973, I’ve said it dozens of times: If it wasn’t for The New York Dolls, today in 2021 I would have a gray ponytail halfway down my back and still be listening to Grateful Dead bootlegs on my stereo.

A PRETTY GOOD SEVEN-DAY RUN OF ROCK & ROLL SHOWS IN COLUMBUS; MAY, 1974

Let’s close with a story: The New York Dolls played my home town on Sunday evening May 19th, 1974; only 9 days after their second album – Too Much Too Soon – was released, so I’m not sure I even had it yet.  Pat & I drove to Veteran’s Memorial – a 3000-seat venue on the west edge of downtown Columbus where I had previously witnessed The Turtles, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Bob Dylan’s first electric tour with The Band, The Doors, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Who, and many others thanks to my sainted Italian father, who worked a second job there in the ticket office – for the show that Sunday night, and the parking lot was essentially empty.

“OHHHH MAN, the show must be cancelled,” I whined to Pat as we got out of her orange Chevy Vega.  (I didn’t have a driver’s license or a car until I was 28 years old.)  We walked up the big stone steps to Vet’s to get our refund – rock & roll shows got cancelled at the drop of a hat back in those pre-Ticketmaster/Live Nation days – and ran into Chet, one of my dad’s old buddies, working the door.  “Hey Chet, is the show cancelled?” I asked.  “No, it’s not cancelled,” he said.  “Then why are there no cars in the parking lot?” I continued.  “Because there are no people in the venue,” Chet replied nonchalantly, flipping away a cigarette.

Damned if he wasn’t exactly accurate.  I had bought front-row balcony seats for the show as was my custom back then, when I would put a little Panasonic cassette recorder on the lip of the balcony to tape the shows without any crowd noise and to get GREAT sound coming right off the stage.  When we got to our seats, there were only two other people in the entire balcony, and that couple moved downstairs during the opening set by Isis – a long-forgotten all-female horn-driven funk/rock band from NYC that the Dolls had brought on tour with them.

While the houselights were up in the break between Isis and the Dolls I counted the “crowd.”  There were 151 people – counting Pat & I in our own private balcony – in an auditorium that seated 3172 (an exact figure I knew from all the years my dad had worked there).  The first ten rows of Vet’s weren’t even full.  I was crushed.  I’m not ashamed to admit that I very nearly cried.  I was ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that The New York Dolls were going to be “The Next Big Thing” and render the likes of The Rolling Stones quaint & redundant.  Creem magazine HAD TOLD ME THAT.  The media wouldn’t LIE TO ME, would they?

I further believed that Elliott Murphy – who had also debuted in 1973 with the masterful Aquashow album – was going to be the New Bob Dylan and that Mott The Hoople – who I had liked since 1969 but LOVED since “All The Young Dudes” in ’72 – were gonna be the Stones AND Dylan rolled into one.  Rock & roll was gonna roll itself over in 1974 and rejuvenate itself just like The Beatles and the British Invasion had done in 1964.

But I was wrong.  Within two years Lee Abrams and Classic Rock Radio had ossified rock & roll into truly endless re-plays of the Allman Brothers, Pink Floyd and Bachman Turner Overdrive that PERSIST TO THIS DAY.  And Corporate Rock – your Styx’s, your Journey’s, your Kansas’ (or is it Kansai?), your Boston’s, your Foreigner’s – were poured into the arenas of the Midwest & elsewhere to suck up all those stoned-out Teenage Wasteland dollars. (Thank God for Aerosmith: my salvation of one-word-name 70’s hard-rock bands.)

Does any of this mean I love Sylvain Sylvain and that first New York Dolls record one iota less, 47 years later?  Does any of this mean I didn’t love Sylvain’s solo ventures with The Criminals following the original Dolls’ break-up?  Does any of this mean I wasn’t thrilled when Sylvain turned up in David Johansen’s first solo band in 1978?  Does any of this mean the second incarnation of The New York Dolls featuring Johansen and Sylvain from 2004-2011 and the three great albums they recorded are ever far from my CD player?  Does any of this mean I’m not gonna miss Sylvain Sylvain and his heart, soul, guitar, piano & songs until I join him, Johnny, Arthur & Jerry?  Not on your life. – Ricki C. / January 20th, 2021   

ps. By the way; As the Last Doll Standing, I wish David Johansen good health & a long life in our Rock & Roll Universe.

FEAST YOUR EYES ON THESE, LADIES & GENTLEMEN……

“Teenage News” a David Johansen/Sylvain Sylvain co-write, intended as the first single from the never-recorded THIRD New York Dolls album.

The David Johansen Group, featuring Sylvain Sylvain, in all their rock & roll glory. I know the tag says 1980, but I say this was from 1978.

The 21st Century New York Dolls, rhyming “anthropomorphize ya” with “perversely polymorphosize ya.” Let’s see Mumford & Sons try that.

(My buddy Kyle & I saw this incarnation of the Dolls in 2006 at The Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland, and they were KILLER!)

     © 2021 Ricki C.