Today is the 75th birthday of Elliott Murphy; my favorite rock & roll songwriter of all time. In honor of that milestone I'm running this piece that originally appeared on Pencil Storm, a blogsite to which I now contribute stories. You certainly won't be sorry if you also check out that site.
I was 21 in 1973. I had already been listening to rock & roll for 16 years, thanks to the lucky break of my bother & sister being 10 & 7 years older than me and the fact that my sister Dianne LOVED spinning the radio dial of my sainted Italian father’s Oldsmobile, so that at 5 years old I was already clued in to the first wave of rock & roll - Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.
I thank my rock & roll gods and my Dad that he bought me my first guitar at 16 in 1968. I joined my first band only a few short weeks later. The first song I sang in public was Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” at a classmate’s basement rec-room bithday party. Life was good. By 1973 I had progressed through girl groups, surf music, the British Invasion, psychedelia, nascent heavy-metal, country-rock, sensitive singer-songwriters and prog-rock.
By that time, though, I was itching for a change. From my perspective of the rolling over of rock & roll every 10 years (Elvis Presley 1954 > The Beatles 1964) I was waiting for The Next Wave of Rock & Roll. For me, that next wave’s arrival was Mott The Hoople, The New York Dolls and Elliott Murphy. The Dolls were gonna be the New Rolling Stones, Elliott was gonna be the New Bob Dylan and Mott was gonna be the new Dylan backed by the new Rolling Stones. That didn’t pan out, of course: Mott and the Dolls had broken up by 1975, and I’m forced to admit that (other than with rock critics and rock aficionados) Elliott Murphy never really broke through in any meaningful way. (Though he remains my most prized & favorite rock & roll artist of all time and continues to record & perform to this day; as does Ian Hunter from Mott and David Johansen from the Dolls, 50 years later. Look ‘em up.)
By 1976 my dream of Rock & Roll Regeneration was over. Lee Abrams & his ilk jammed AOR radio down everybody’s throats; tight playlists came in, corprorate-rock (Styx/Journey/Foreigner) flourished, and the likes of Eagles and Fleetwood Mac towered over everything. Rock & Roll had gone from Little Richard to Don Henley in 20 short years. Rock & roll was now safe and neat & tidy. It made me wanna puke. (Of course at that point, punk had to get invented, but that’s a whole other blog for a whole ‘nother time.)
Fortunately for me, the producers of the Midnight Special - the early 70’s late-night rock & roll TV show (along with Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert) - fed a steady stream of the great (and not-so-great) rock & roll artists of the day into American television sets every Friday night. Now they have started putting their clips on YouTube. Here are some of my favorites of those clips.
These clips are not drawn from the Midnight Special, but NEEDED to be included here.
Ricki C. is 71 years old and has two drawers full of black rock & roll t-shirts, which he wears incessantly. He also has a hand-tooled leather hippie belt from 1972 that still fits. He has congestive heart failure and prostate cancer and KNOWS that all this rock & roll nonsense has to stop someday.
Ricki C. decided to celebrate the December 7th legalization of recreational
marijuana with a blog about his own history with illegal recreational
marijuana, dating back to 1977 and a run-in with KISS.
(Should this blog have been titled "KISS made me start taking drugs?" Yeah, probably,)
KISS was wholly & entirely responsible for me starting to smoke pot. In March
1977 I was 25 years old and had made it completely through the 1960’s and more
than six years of the 1970’s without partaking in weed. (And this was on the
West Side of Columbus, Ohio!) When My Favorite Band On The Planet Of The Time –
The Dictators – were pushed off the KISS bill for some lame-ass L.A. douchebags
called Legs Diamond I was so depressed at the show that when the stoner next to
me absent-mindedly mixed me up with his Cheech & Chong compadres and handed me a
joint, rather than going, “No thanks, maaaaan,” as I normally, derisively, Sex
Pistol-y would have done, I said, “Yeah, let me hit that.”
From the moment that smoke hit my brain by way of my lungs on that Sunday evening, however, it was
spring 1969 again and everything that had gone wrong in the 1970’s – mood rings,
streaking, Richard Nixon, The Decline of Rock & Roll and concomitant Rise of
Corporate Rock & Disco, my failing marriage, etc. – was gone and I was feelin’
good, Jack. I clearly recall saying out loud to myself, underneath the KISS din,
“I remember feeling like this all the time, without drugs.”
I was a convert.
I had a pretty good run with pot, indulging from that day in 1977 to the year 2000 and
the implantation of my first cardiac pacemaker. My cardiologist advised me to
take six weeks or so off from getting high – to let the pacemaker work in, because pot significantly increased my heart rate – and I never really got back into it.
I never lost a job or ruined a relationship with pot (though I did with rock &
roll); I was never arrested; and I ended my years as an alcoholic in 1980 (that began
when I was 16 in 1968) partly with weed’s assistance.
That being said, here is
stupidest thing I ever did when I was high.
It’s not exactly a State Secret that I was the model for Sean Richter in the 12-part I Love Distortion
mix of fact &
fiction novella that ran in Growing Old With Rock & Roll in 2013.
Here’s a re-run from a Sean Richter Chronicles follow-up in 2021.
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.
This episode slots in right around late May or early June, 1978, before
Nicole had called off her engagement to her fiancée 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. I never indiscriminately smoked pot. That set me apart from many of my brethren of
the day. I always had a REASON to get
high: to attend rock & roll shows; to listen to music at home; seeing
movies to make the cinematic experience more intense, etc. And then I met Greg.
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 Dostoyevsky;
"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. He
played semi-pro football. 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 before he kissed her.
Nicole showed up at our band rehearsal space later that
night after she dropped off her fiancée, 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.
(ps. Apropos of The Dictators mention in paragraph one of this blog, we just lost genius rhythm guitarist Scott "Top Ten" Kempner of The Dictators November 29th, 2023.
This blog is reprinted with the kind permission of Pencil Storm - the site where most of my blogs now appear - and is co-written with JCE, my best Virginia rock & roll friend.
THE SHOWS
Ricki, why don’t you kick things off?
There’s a BUNCH of entries earlier on this site about my favorite Boston band of all time, The Neighborhoods. (Two examples: Flying To Boston to See the Rock & Roll / The Neighborhoods “Cultured Pearls”.) Plus there’s an early forerunner of the 1X2 concept, a tandem blog with my good friend JCE from Pencil Storm in 2019 about the ‘Hoods (as they were affectionately known to their fans) linked here.
At some point, though, it occurred to me that many of those blogs were about how I GOT TO those gigs or what they meant to me more than they were ABOUT THE PERFORMANCES at the shows. This blog – again with JCE – will set out to correct that fault. (Plus we’re both gonna throw in some of our other homegrown faves from the early 80’s heyday of Boston rock & roll.)
THE NEIGHBORHOODS LIVE IN EARLY 1982 (TIM GREEN ON BASS)
My rock & roll-induced divorce was final in 1982 and occurred just as a marked decline in the quality of local Columbus r&r bands took hold. Thus, my live rock & roll sights began to turn increasingly toward Boston, MA owing to listings of gigs provided by the great Boston Rock magazine and the availability of cheap East Coast flights via People’s Airlines (see “Flying To Boston to See the Rock & Roll” linked above).
I entirely missed the pop-punk heyday of The Neighborhoods with John Hartcorn on bass, and my first trip to Boston to catch the ‘Hoods featured Tim Green on bass. This was the “noisy-post-punk-we’re-gonna-do-our-level-best-to-alienate-our-suburban-fans-who-only-wanna-hear-“Prettiest Girl” and ”Flavors”-period” of David Minehan’s mighty rock & roll assemblage.
The gig was at a small club in a kind-of strip mall in Boston that I can’t remember the name of. It had to be on a subway line, though, or I wouldn’t have been able to get there. In the early 2000’s – when I was tour manager for Hamell On Trial – I tried describing the place to Eric Law (who knows more about Boston rock & roll and its venues than ANYONE I have ever met) and even HE couldn’t pin it down.
That show was good-but-not-great as the band labored mightily to obliterate any pop sensibility from the set and hooks became an endangered species. I’m guessing I heard “Cash Dancing,” “We Don’t Do The Limbo” and “Drums Of Darkness” at that gig, but I can’t be certain. Here’s a video from that era that I find I enjoy a lot more now than I did the appearance I witnessed in ’82.
THE NEIGHBORHOODS LIVE LATER IN 1982 (LEE HARRINGTON ON BASS)
Okay, NOW we’re talkin’! I went to Boston in June 1982 to turn 30 by myself because I knew 30 was not gonna be easy for me, and I didn’t wanna subject anybody to my foul mood, in case that’s the way the birthday ball bounced. Either that visit or one later in ’82 was the first time I saw The Neighborhoods at The Channel club. I had been seeing shows at The Rat since 1977 (more on that below), but The Channel – capacity 1700 – was much more my cup of rock & roll tea, since I had grown up – literally, from the age of 16 – at The Columbus Agora, a 1300-capacity venue.
David, Lee & Mike Quaglia (on drums) were BLAZING at those Channel shows. On a huge stage – with tons of room to move around, great lighting and a nicely-balanced BOOMING PA – those ‘Hoods gigs were more like concerts than just small-club shows. The video below is a good – but far-too-SHORT – illustration of how those shows played out, but what I wouldn’t give for a FULL-SET video from that era.
Over the next two years I saw The Neighborhoods at The Channel probably 4 or 5 more times. At least THREE of those gigs were as good as any rock shows I saw in the 1980’s, and that list includes The Replacements. WAIT; am I saying that The Neighborhoods were a better live band than Paul Westerberg & associates? Damn straight I am. (It’s no accident that David Minehan wound up in Westerberg’s 14 Songs touring band and later Replacements tours well into this 21st century.)
OVER TO YOU, JCE…..
THE NEIGHBORHOODS at Bunratty’s, 1987 or 1988
This club was on Harvard Ave. in the Allston neighborhood. I had seen the ‘Hoods play a number of times in Virginia, but the idea of seeing them rock out in their hometown was impossible to resist. The show was well attended, but not as packed as I thought it would be. If there was an opening act, I don’t recall one. All I know is that once they kicked into gear, The Neighborhoods were a force of nature. They played a great set. Actually, I think they may have played two sets. While my memory is faded, I vividly remember the crowd shouting for the song “The Pipe” which was a staple in the set during that time period. There’s not too much more I can say - it was a great show. This was the Minehan/Harrington/Quaglia lineup. I shot a few photos on my Kodak Instamatic camera, this was way before iphones…
NOT BUNRATTY'S, But Close Enough For Rock & Roll
THE TITANICS w/ THE JONESES at The Rat
If I could have only been to one club in Boston, I would have chosen The Rat. In high school, I had the vinyl 2-record set called Live at The Rat and I loved it. Luckily, I got there in the heyday of ‘80’s Boston rock. I wish I had seen the ‘Hoods or The Outlets, but the show I saw was killer. On this visit to see my sister in Boston, she set me up on a blind date. The girl picked me up and promised to show me the cool parts of Boston nightlife. We started at some new wave dance club where the music was bearable and we got on pretty well, but after an hour or so of getting to know me, she realized what would really resonate. Out of the blue she said “Let’s go to The Rat.” Hell yes. I didn’t know if anyone was even playing that night and neither did she, but we were in luck. The Joneses played first.
The band played to a good crowd that really seemed like it was just waiting for The Titanics. I thought The Joneses had a good crisp rock sound with a bluesy flavor—The Rolling Stones meet Bad Company. Not too long after this show, they released a record called Hard on a major label which I still play occasionally. (SIDE NOTE: There is a California punk band called The Joneses that is better known and very good - this is not the same band.) I was in heaven already when The Titanics hit the stage. Their front man came out in this big fur Daniel Boone looking coonskin cap and just ripped into it. They never slowed down and the crowd was really jumping. I had The Titanics record at home, so I knew their songs, but as is often the case, the live set was superior. My date was a bit out of her element, but I am grateful that she was cool enough to know about The Rathskeller, and to take me there. We were pen pals for years after. If you happen to be a fan of the band Upper Crust, they grew from the ashes of the Titanics.
THE CLUBS
JCE: Other clubs I wish I had been to would have to be The Channel, and maybe T.T. the Bear’s. I differ some from Ricki C. in this area - I love the little dark basement clubs.
RICKI C. Small clubs like The Rat in big cities confused me. The first time I visited The Rat in 1977 I couldn’t find the place, even though I knew the address and was standing right in front of it. After crisscrossing Kenmore Square a coupla times I went into Strawberries – the record store next door & above The Rat – and inquired WHERE the venue was. The ill-tempered clerk on duty at Strawberries pointed outside the window. “Where?” I repeated, looking UP for a club as big as my beloved hometown Agora, and the clerk pushed my head down and said, “DOWN THERE! Down that flight of stairs.”
The fact that The Rat – the premier Boston rock club for punk & new wave bands – was no bigger than the church basement coffeehouses where I had played halting solo acoustic gigs in the early 1970’s SEVERELY strained the credibility of rock critics who had been telling me in print that punk was gonna be THE NEXT BIG THING in rock & roll and wipe Styx, Journey & others of their corporate-rock ilk from the airwaves and concert stages. (It’s probably a good thing I never made it to CBGB’s back in the day.)
I bet this was a Saturday afternoon all-ages show The Rat used to present back in the day.
(The interactions between those kids to the left in the front row and the club bouncer never fail to crack me up.)
OTHER BANDS
JCE: Other bands that were high on my Boston list were Shake the Faith, Nervous Eaters, The Blackjacks, Classic Ruins, The Real Kids, The Lyres (saw them in VA though) and more than anyone else, the aforementioned Outlets (saw them in VA too). And definitely in the late 1970’s I would have loved to see The Cars in a Boston club.
Ricki C. : Oh man, SO MANY other great bands; Willie “Loco” Alexander’s Boom Boom Band, DMZ (later The Lyres), The Nervous Eaters, The Real Kids, Reddy Teddy, Thundertrain, La Peste (later The Peter Dayton Band), Mission Of Burma, The Atlantics, Salem 66, and The Del Fuegos, just off the top of my head.
JCE FAVES THE OUTLETS AT THE SAME ALL AGES SHOW AS THE NEIGHBORHOODS ABOVE, 9/14/1985
THE CITY
JCE: The city itself is pretty excellent, or at least it was then. My sister would be working, and I would just get on the ‘T’ and ride all over the city by myself going to every frickin’ record store I could possibly find. There were so many record stores, like Newbury Comics. I had a real blast finding all these local releases I never would have found at home. I didn’t feel unsafe or anything either, although I did once get stopped by a young woman, who was apparently a sex worker, who flashed me. There were some great radio stations too, willing to play all the local bands.
Ricki C. : Everything I always hated about New York City I loved about Boston. (Then again, I never read a book that scared me about Boston like Hubert Selby’s “Last Exit to Brooklyn” scared me about New York. I read that book when I was 17 in 1970 - on the “recommendation” of Lou Reed in an intervew when I first discovered and fell in love with The Velvet Underground. I read it again during the pandemic and it STILL scares me.) Boston never intimidated me like that. And I admit; I’m a smalltown Midwest boy at heart with an innate mistrust of Big City Life. (Cue The Atlantics here.) But just like JCE mentioned above, I never gave a second thought to riding the Boston subways anytime of the day or night. It just felt like my home away from Columbus.
PARTING WORDS…
Ricki C. : There are probably more blogs to be done on Boston rock & roll. For one; the excellent 70’s & 80’s fanzines - The Boston Groupie News (STILL active!), Frenzy, The Noise (which I got to write for in the mid-80’s when Boston bands would play in Columbus on the van-tour circuit). For another; the time I bought a Mission Of Burma record from Aimee Mann (then in The Young Snakes, later leader of ‘Til Tuesday) when she worked behind the counter at Newbury Comics, Boston’s premier “alternative” record store, which also published Boston Rock. And finishing up; a compare & contrast blog on seeing The Del Fuegos here in Columbus and at The Rat only a couple of months apart in 1984, to illustrate the effects the (grueling) van-tour grind of the mid-80’s had on nascent “alternative” bands.
JCE: Those two shows (The ‘Hoods at Bunratty’s and Titanics at the Rat) are the best of my live rock n roll experience in the city of Boston. I did also see another show at Bunratty’s - The Cave Dogs, who were a Boston power-pop band. All four bands I saw were Boston local bands. I love the city for a number of reasons, dating back to my childhood, but I won’t go down that rabbit hole. Let’s just sum it up by saying that I have been to see the Red Sox at Fenway, I’ve been to see The Neighborhoods in their hometown, and I’ve been to The Rat. I’m all good.
JCE, or John to his friends, became a fan of the Boston Red Sox when his hometown Senators left Washington, and a fan of Bean Town in general when his sister moved there to attend Boston University. But it was the music coming out of the city in the 1980’s that sealed the deal. He counts himself lucky to have gotten to spend just a little time immersed in that music scene at the height of what he considers to have been a golden era.
Ricki C. began his love affair with Boston rock & roll when his best friend Dave Blackburn intentionally flunked out of Ohio State (note; not THE Ohio State University), moved to Boston and saw The Modern Lovers play AT A HIGH SCHOOL. That love affair continued through Willie Alexander’s “Kerouac / “Mass. Ave” single (see note below), The Nervous Eaters’ “Loretta” 45, DMZ’s e.p. on Bomp Records (among many others) and culminated in The Neighborhoods.
Today is December 22nd, 2022, exactly 20 years to the day of the death of Joe Strummer.
This isn't gonna to be a long blog, or in-depth, or me belaboring my usual points; just a few remembrances, some videos and a song I wrote in tribute to Joe the week after his passing.
Just some things to remember him by.
I was in New Jersey on December 22nd, 2002, to spend Christmas with my lovely wife Debbie and her family. I was in the car on the way to some grocery store when I heard on the car radio that, "Joe Strummer, lead singer & songwriter of The Clash was found dead today in England." When I got back to the house my friend Ed Hamell (aka Hamell On Trial) for whom I served as road manager called and confirmed the news.
We couldn't believe it. Strummer was on a roll right then; fronting The Mescaleroes, his best band since his heydays with The Clash. I remember saying to Ed, "How will his family ever celebrate Christmas again?" the genesis of my song below.
So 20 years have passed and sometimes I find myself thinking that God and the gods of rock & roll took Joe home when they did so he wouldn't live to see what became of his beloved rebel music. (Bruce Springsteen charging $4000 for a concert ticket? Please. Really?)
So right at this moment I'm picturing Joe on some astral plane with a lit spliff dangling out of a corner of his mouth, trading licks with Chuck Berry and Tom Petty.
Joe, I'm still listening to your songs.
(For me, the main acid test of punk-rock music is, "Does it make me wanna break stuff?" On that basis, when I listen to the music of The Clash, it ALWAYS makes me wanna break stuff.)
inspirational verse; "And I'm not here to mourn Joe Strummer. I'm here to try - however palely -
with this acoustic guitar to honor his memory, to try to be worthy of his legacy,
to beg for just a bit of his bravery, to try to escape the slavery of all that which is not righteous,
of all that which is not the rock & roll" - Ricki C. / January, 2003
This blog originally appeared (in a slightly different form) on Pencil Storm.com.
WARNING! As befits a blog entitled Growing Old With Rock & Roll, this post contains whiny-ass Baby Boomer musings from a 69-year old individual who saw Bob Dylan & the Hawks live in 1966; The Doors and The Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1968; The Who in 1969; and Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band in 1978 on the Darkness On The Edge Of Town tour, and can’t seem to let ANY of us ever forget it. We guess the fact that he also saw and loved The Strokes in 2004 and The White Stripes in 2007 should indicate that he still has an interest in rock & roll music in the 21st century, but it remains a sad fact that those shows were 15 years ago at this point in 2022.
I witnessed these two videos on T.V. the same night - Saturday, January 15, 2022: Alejandro Escovedo on the 7th Annual Austin City Limits Hall of Fame presentation and Bleachers as the musical guests on Saturday Night Live. And they coalesced a lot of my feelings about what passes for “rock & roll music” these days and the presentation of that music on television.
Escovedo’s tune - “Put You Down” (originally released on his With These Hands record in 1996) is - if you will excuse my French - a fuckin’ masterpiece of song & performance. As this song was unfolding in front of my eyes on my Samsung, I found myself thinking, “I haven’t seen a musical presentation this powerful in YEARS.” Part of that is due - of course - to the Covid-19 pandemic’s sabotage of live rock & roll for almost the entirety of the last two years. The larger part of it is due, though, to the fact that Alejandro Escovedo is a musical genius, and actually STILL CARES about the PRESENTATION of his songs.
It’s all there: Escovedo’s “I wish I was a soul singer from the 1970’s and you better RECOGNIZE” stage attire; how incredibly TIGHT the combination of a core band, string section, and trio of backing singers are; the whisper-to-a-scream DYNAMICS of the song, from the string intro to the raging steel guitar and 6-string solos (by Lloyd Maines - father of Dixie Chick Natalie Maines - and David Grissom of John Mellencamp’s band, respectively), culminating in Alejandro’s Pete Townshend-derived windmills on the guitar at the conclusion to the tune. And that’s saying NOTHING about the impassioned vocals and stunning lyrics to the song. I must repeat; a fuckin’ masterpiece.
Bleachers’ presentation on Saturday Night Live - on quite the other hand - kinda left me cold. Much of my exposure to new music these days (because I don’t subscribe to Pandora or Spotify and the only things I listen to on Sirius/XM in the car are Underground Garage, The Tom Petty station, and the Bruce Springsteen station) is from late-night T.V. shows; Colbert, Seth Myers, SNL. (I refuse to even consider watching either of the Jimmy’s; Fallon or Kimmel.)
At least Bleachers seemed to be playing LIVE on SNL. These days precious few of the musical acts I see on T.V. can even be bothered to PRETEND they know how to play an instrument or sing in tune or in time. Questionable lip-synching abounds. And drummers? Fuggetaboutit. Jim Johnson would be appalled at how poorly these indie-rock and/or rap drummers PRETEND to be hitting those skins. These youngsters couldn’t find the (pre-recorded) beat if it fucked ‘em in a closet.
Sadly, that’s the extent of my (limited) praise for Bleachers. It seems like the lead singer guy can’t decide whether he wants to Jonathan Richman of The Modern Lovers in 1971 (a white t-shirt & blujeans as a stage outfit, really?) or (God help us) Bruce Springsteen in some unidentifiable time period. Either way, he fails rather spectacularly miserably. And the band as a whole is just a mess, sartorially. It seems like the young lady playing bass is the only member who gave even ONE MOMENT’S THOUGHT about what she was going to wear on national television. I am SO TIRED of seeing these rag-tag indie/modern rock acts take the stage in whatever clothes they woke up in that morning. I’ve been through this trend at least TWICE in my rock & roll existence so far; from The Grateful Dead and all those San Francisco bands in 1968 to Nirvana and the grunge guys in the 1990’s. (I think whoever manufactures threadbare t-shirts & nondescript ill-fitting pants decides who gets signed these days.)
Musically, “How Dare You Want More” just ISN’T A VERY GOOD SONG. And when lead singer John Antonoff and that sax player started doing pseudo-vintage Springsteen/Clarence Clemons trade-offs I found that I really just needed to avert my eyes in order to not change the channel or put a bullet through my T.V. Elvis Presely-style. I get the feeling Bleachers might’ve watched the E Street Band No Nukes performance on their tour bus while they were all high on weed & ‘shrooms and said, “Hey, WE could pull this off.”
I think Bleachers might believe they’re tapping into some grand long-lost rock & roll tradition that they can update and present (or peddle?) to a younger generation, but I’m afraid they just might be confusing imitation with inspiration, and artifice with art.
In summation, ladies & gentlemen of the jury, on the one hand - with Escovedo - you have passion, power & purpose; on the other - with Bleachers - you have pomp & play-acting. Just watch the videos and make your own choices.
ps. In my 2000-2010 capacity as road manager for Hamell On Trial I was lucky enough to get to meet and have a long conversation with Alejandro Escovedo backstage at a festival show both acts were playing. If you like and have a spare few minutes, you can read about that encounter here…….
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."
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
“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!)
Right before I folded Growing Old With Rock & Roll the first time, back in 2013, I wrote a four (really five, including an appendix) part series about Columbus, Ohio, rock & roll genius Willie Phoenix. I wrote that series because I couldn’t imagine NOT honoring Willie’s contributions to local Columbus rock & roll and – indeed – rock & roll in general before signing off Growing Old. If I hadn’t met and befriended Willie in February 1978 I wouldn’t be HALF the rocker I am today. I learned more from Willie about songwriting, about rehearsing a band, about attaining a sense of STYLE in rock & roll than from probably anybody else in my life.
That being said, it wasn’t like all that rock & roll education came as a chore. Willie – and the rest of Romantic Noise: Greg Glasgow, John Ballor & Dee Hunt – and I pretty much had a BLAST all through 1978. And it’s not like all this stuff is ancient history; my association with Willie continues to this day. I found the piece reproduced below just this week while researching an article I wrote for Pencil Storm – my good friend Colin Gawel of Watershed’s blog – about the vinyl release of a single by Colin’s project The Willie Phoenix Tribute Machine.
About that 2013 series: You really need to promise me you’ll check those blogs out in tandem with this one. Those were the meat & potatoes of the Willie Phoenix story, this blog is a dessert. Here’s some links: The Ballad Of Willie Phoenix – Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four. (appendix to The Ballad of Willie Phoenix, the songs of Romantic Noise and The Buttons is also cool, and you should check it out.)
For the 21st century PC-minded among you, please keep in mind these stories played out in 1978: before sex could kill you; when being a member of a rock & roll band carried some weight; before FUN was disallowed in rock & roll. I have often said that the two greatest things ever invented in the United States are: 1) the electric guitar, and 2) the American teenage girl. In 1978 Willie and I had the utmost affection & respect for both, when we was kids.
(Romantic Noise, 1978)
(reprinted from Pencil Storm blog: Three Random Willie Phoenix Stories; March, 2015)
I
When I first met Willie in 1978, when he was leading Romantic Noise, the band (Willie, Greg Glasgow on bass & vocals, John Ballor on lead guitar & vocals, and Dee Hunt – the pride of Beckley, West Virginia – on drums) all lived together in a house on 4th Street, right around the corner from that little strip-shopping center on Summit, near Oakland, where Café Bourbon Street and The Summit are now located. (To be exact, I’m not sure Willie lived there all the time. As always, his living arrangements were and are a mystery to me, but he was consistently there whenever I dropped by to visit.)
Frequent visitors to the 4th Street house were The CookieBakers: three teenage girls – Erin, Kim & Cindy, by name – who came to all the bands’ gigs and, true to their name, baked cookies for the boys. It was all really quite innocent & charming; the girls really did bake cookies and bring them to the house. They weren’t groupies exactly, but Kim and Willie “dated” for quite some time and Erin later married and still later was divorced from Greg, so more than chocolate chips were exchanged, if you get my drift.
Anyway, one day in early spring ’78 we were all at the house and Erin was telling an elaborate story about something that had happened at high school that day. She was wearing a longish skirt, but the skirt was also really sheer and once the setting sun starting pouring in the picture window in the front of the house, she might as well NOT HAVE BEEN WEARING A SKIRT AT ALL. So Erin’s jumping around, acting out the story and the guys and I are all stifling laughs, just staring at her essentially naked from the waist down form, when Kim walks back in from the kitchen and yells, “ERIN, WHAT ARE YOU DOING??!!!?”
She pulls a confused Erin out of the sunlight while the rest of us just fall over laughing. Erin turns beet-red and flees the room, pulling her skirt tighter well after the fact and Kim soundly reads us the riot act: “That wasn’t funny, you guys, that was just mean.” I think she might have actually cuffed Willie on the head, and then she spun on me, saying, “I would have expected this from these guys, Ricki, but I really expected better behavior from you.” What the hell? Was my twelve-years-of-Catholic-school-upbringing really that apparent, even at that late a date?
“I’m just one of the boys,” I said to a livid Kim, “you’d best not expect that much of me.” That became only truer and more accurate as the year went on.
II
It’s after a Romantic Noise gig at either the Drake Student Union on the Ohio State campus or a club called Cafe Rock & Roll, I can’t exactly recall which. I’m packing up gear and Willie initiates a conversation with my lead singer & girlfriend Nicole, whom I’ve brought along to the show that night:
Willie – “Hey Nicole, why don’t we go out to my car?” Nicole (feigning naivete, she’s seen this Willie show before) – “What would we do in your car, Willie?” Willie – “Oh, we’d just talk and stuff. It’d be no big deal.” Nicole – “Well, we could talk right here, Willie, we’re talking right now.” Willie – “Yeah, but in my car, we could listen to music, or we could talk more private. Or do more private things.” Nicole (in a tone like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth) – “Oh, I’m not sure Ricki would like it if we did more private things, Willie.” Willie – “Oh no, Ricki would be cool with that. Ricki’s a cool guy.” Ricki – “WILLIE, I’M STANDING RIGHT HERE.” Willie (glancing briefly in my direction, and then totally ignoring the outburst) – “So, whattya say, should we go outside?” Nicole – “We’re not going out to your car, Willie.” Willie – “Okay, just give it some thought,” patting Nicole’s hand and walking over to a random girl standing by the bar, “Hey, why don’t we got out to my car?”
(Willie Phoenix & Dee Hunt: May, 1978)
III
Drummer Dee Hunt, Willie & I are having a bite to eat at that Wendy’s on High Street across from campus by where Schoolkid’s Records used to be and Willie starts telling us – apropos of not much – that the night before he scored with a Hare Krishna girl he picked up at the airport. Dee & I exchange a glance, and then Dee says, “You made it with a Hare Krishna girl?” “Yeah,” Willie says, nonchalantly, like this is an everyday occurrence in the little rock & roll circles in which we move.
“Didn’t it creep you out that she was bald?” Dee asked, in those long-ago pre-Sinead O’Connor days of the late 1970’s.
“Well, I made her wear a hat,” Willie deadpans, and I laugh so hard that some of my Frosty comes out my nose.
My sainted Italian father - Al Cacchione Sr. - died 50 years ago today, of a heart attack, at the age of 56, when I was 17 years old. I decided to re-post this blog - which originally ran June 30th, 2013 - today, in his honor, and to add a song at the end, in tribute to him. I miss him to this day.
Birthday Blog 2013
It's my birthday today. I'm 61 years old. I worked a rock & roll show today, serving as a roadie for Colin Gawel & The Lonely Bones, my good friend Colin's side-project band when Watershed is not taking the stage. That appearance was at Comfest, a local Columbus hippie fete that I have attended as an observer since its inception in 1972. In some capacity (roadie, performer, volunteer, stage manager, etc.) I have participated in Comfest since 1978 when - as a roadie for Romantic Noise - I helped bassist Greg Glasgow limp onto the stage after a forklift driver drove over Greg's foot at his warehouse temp job the day before the gig, and put Greg on crutches. (Ah, the glamorous rock & roll lifestyle.)
But that's not what this blog entry is about.
This blog entry is about my dad, traveling, hotels and growing old with rock & roll.
My dad was the greatest person I have ever known. He died of a heart attack at the age of 56 when I was 17 years old, in April of my senior year of high school. I myself am on my second cardiac pacemaker and have so far outlived him by five years, but only with the bonus benefits of technology.
My father gave me my whole world. When I was 13 years old in 1965, dad started to get me into the rock & roll shows he worked as a ticket agent for Central Ticket Office, an early forerunner of what Ticket Master would become. It was my father's nighttime job after his main occupation at Columbia Gas of Ohio. My mom and dad both worked two jobs. They were children of The Great Depression and carried to their graves a legacy and a fear of not knowing where their next dollar was coming from.
Dad saw how interested I was in rock & roll and started bringing me along with him to shows at Veteran's Memorial or the Lausche Building on the Ohio State Fairgrounds. I was an incredibly shy, introverted child and I think the fact that I was willing to leave the shelter/womb of our house on the West Side to see a rock & roll show heartened my dad so much he'd have brought/driven/conveyed me anywhere, let alone the three or four miles it was from home to Vet's Memorial.
At first it was package shows like The Turtles with Neil Diamond and Every Mother's Son ("Come On Down To My Boat") opening; or Paul Revere & The Raiders with The Standells and Sam the Sham & The Pharoahs. But then, as The Sixties got into full swing I saw Bob Dylan's first electric tour with The Band (when they were still called The Crackers), The Doors, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Janis Joplin & the Full-Tilt Boogie Band, Cream and - most crucially - The Who on November 1st, 1969. (sidenote: Not one of those shows sold out the 3000-seat Veteran's Memorial. Dad would bring me to the show, wait for the opening acts to start, then pull me a single unsold seat somewhere. Advance sales to The Who show in 1969 were so slow that dad pulled me FOUR SEATS; one each for my best friend and our dates, a date I almost certainly would never have had but for the grace of my dad and of the rock & roll.) (Tickets for that Who show, by the way, were $3.50.)
Dad gave me other stuff: he instilled in me a love of traveling. In 1962, when I was 10, a coupla years before The Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and Changed Everything, dad had started to take my older brother and I to Cleveland Browns football games. This was in the Browns' heyday, when fullback Jim Brown was a true star of the National Football League and the Super Bowl hadn't been invented yet. We would stay at the Sheraton Gibson Hotel right off Fountain Square. The Sheraton Gibson, and hotels in general, became MAGICAL to me. You could LIE IN BED and watch television. You could TAKE SHOWERS. (Our bathroom at home sported only a claw-foot bathtub.) You could look out the 20th floor window and see all the lights of the city spread out under you. I felt like a king. (sidenote: When Pete Townshend's first solo album, Who Came First, was released in 1972 with a track called "Sheraton Gibson" I was BEYOND THRILLED that I had once occupied the same building, the same square footage, as my Number One Rock Hero of that time.)
I remember very clearly one night in 1965 on the way home from Vet's, when dad was explaining the concept of touring to me, that musicians had to be on the road all the time. I just looked at him wide-eyed and said, "You mean all these guys do is play guitars & drums in a different city every night and stay in hotels in between?" I was incredulous. I was dumbstruck. Dad couldn't have possibly realized what he had just done. He might just as well have stamped Unfit For A Normal Job Of Any Kind across my 13-year old forehead right at that very moment.
My dad never got to travel much: those trips to Cleveland, our family summer vacations to the likes of Cedar Point Amusement Park in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, an annual autumn trip to South Bend, Indiana, to see a Notre Dame football game with his Columbia Gas buddies. One time when I was 12 he took my sister and I to Florida. It was my first time flying and I was so nervous I threw up on the plane. I was such a miserable little kid. Dad, I wish I could have been better for you.
When my father died I think I had a little nervous breakdown. I can't really remember much of anything from April or May of that year, but by June 1970 when I graduated from Bishop Ready High School I had decided two things: 1) I was never ever going to have a job where I had to wear a suit & tie to work; and 2) I was going to travel and describe to dad all the things I saw.
It's my birthday today. I'm 61 years old. I accomplished the first goal by working in warehouses most of my adult life and discovering that bluejeans and a black t-shirt will get you through most days quite nicely. On most of my vacations from work I traveled to see rock & roll bands; to Massachusetts, to Texas, to California, to a lotta points in between.
I accomplished the second goal by becoming a rock & roll roadie in my 40's and crisscrossing the length & breadth of these United States (multiple times) with Hamell On Trial and Watershed.
Dad, you were with me every step of the way: every new sight out of every car, truck, bus, van & airplane window; every street of every city & town; every mile of every tour. This blog is for you. It's a happy birthday.
Except for the first verse - which I wrote in room 435 of an Austin, TX. Red Roof Inn in the mid-90's while attending the South By Southwest Festival - I wrote this song in the car on Father's Day, 2002, on a freeway near Virginia Beach. I couldn't slow down or stop to write down the lyrics, so I just had to try to remember them 'til I got to that day's gig, somewhere in the South that I can't/don't recall.
