“Mosholu Parkway… in the Bronx.”
The guy laughed.
“I’m going to Bedford Park Boulevard. Hop in.”
Amazing. Bedford Park Boulevard was about five blocks from my house. What were the odds? I opened the door, slid into the front seat, and let the warm summer breeze fill the car.
“Guess it’s your lucky night, huh?” the driver said as he pulled away from the curb.
He didn’t know the half of it.
The craziest thing is, just three weeks later (August 6, to be precise) I went to another massive, daylong concert with multiple acts, and again found my way backstage. This event was known as the Festival for Peace, at Shea Stadium. And just like at Randall’s Island, they ended up putting me to work, juggling multiple duties. When Johnny Winter took the stage, I stood behind the band and fed sticks to his drummer. I was there, dumbstruck and wide-eyed, when Janis Joplin went strolling down the ramp to the stage, a half-empty bottle of Southern Comfort hooked between her thumb and forefinger (like Hendrix, she would be dead of a drug overdose within a few short weeks). I got to hang out backstage and shoot the breeze with promoter extraordinaire Sid Bernstein, the man who brought the Beatles to America in 1964, for Christ’s sake, essentially kicking off the British Invasion and changing rock ’n’ roll (and, by extension, my life) forever.
Best of all, I got to meet John Kay—again! This time he didn’t even say, “Who is that fuckin’ guy?”
It happened when I was backstage. One of the roadies asked if I knew anything about guitars. I didn’t want to brag, but… yeah, I’d played a little bit. He handed me John Kay’s guitar, a fresh pack of strings, and told me to get to work. There was something almost magical about that experience: prepping the instrument of a guy whose work I really admired; it brought me closer in some way to my dream of one day becoming the man onstage, as opposed to just another wannabe. While I carefully fed the strings, my attention focused entirely on the job, I heard a door open. In walked the man himself: John Kay.
I tried to play it cool. You know, act like a professional. A part of me (okay, a big part) wanted to ask him if he remembered meeting me at Randall’s Island, but that felt like such a pathetic fanboy thing to do that I decided to just keep my mouth shut. I figured the guy had probably met a million people since our paths crossed. What made me so special?
Worse, as he watched me stringing the guitar, I got the sense that he was critiquing my work, and that at any moment I’d be revealed as a fraud and a fake. I half expected him to say, “What the fuck does this guy think he’s doing?”
But he didn’t. Instead, Kay sat down next to me, introduced himself, and quietly picked up the package of guitar strings.
“You want to take over?” I asked nervously.
He shook his head. “No, that’s okay. You’re doing fine. Why don’t you finish up?”
Then you know what he did? John started feeding me strings. He would thread them through the bridge, and I would tie them off. We were partners, me and the founder of Steppenwolf, bound at least for a few short minutes by our love for the guitar, and our respect for how it worked, and the care it deserved.
If you believed in the notion of a karma bank (and who didn’t back then?), this represented either a massive deposit or a massive withdrawal. Depended on your point of view, I guess.
Not every concert experience ended so neatly, although a surprising number involved backstage banter with some of the biggest stars of that era. I don’t know how I pulled it off, but I did. Repeatedly.
The following summer, for example, I went to a Grateful Dead show at Gaelic Park in the northeast section of the Bronx (Riverdale). Situated on the north side of 240th Street, not far from Manhattan College (which later purchased and significantly upgraded the property), Gaelic Park wasn’t exactly the bucolic setting its name might imply, but rather a collection of dusty athletic fields separated from the surrounding streets and elevated trains by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The place was used primarily by Irish neighborhood folks for soccer and hurling, as well as the occasional concert. Usually they were smaller, more intimate affairs involving Irish folk bands, but once in a while, especially in the early seventies, more-ambitious ventures were undertaken.
Like the Grateful Dead.
This particular show occurred on August 26, 1971. It was my first Dead show and I certainly got into the spirit of things, drinking buckets of alcohol and smoking enough pot to qualify, at least for the day, as a Deadhead. No acid, though. As I said, I left that to the pros.
Somehow, yes, I ended up backstage again. As usual, security was lax, and I just wandered around, looking and acting like I belonged; soon enough an opening occurred and there I was, hanging out with Jerry Garcia. (I know—you’re probably thinking that I’m stretching credibility at this point, but it all happened. Seriously. I have no reason to make this shit up. For a while there I was the Zelig of the American rock scene, popping up randomly alongside the biggest stars in the business.)
I don’t remember the exact details of my meeting with Jerry; instead I recall dreamlike bits and pieces of a trippy conversation. I can hear myself asking Jerry, “How’s it going, man?” And I can see him standing there, smiling through that beard.
“Good, man, good. We’re taking it to the people tonight.”
I think I might have thrown a “Right on, brother” back at him.
Jerry was exactly as advertised: a laid-back hippie who seemed less like a rock star than a guy you’d see strumming his guitar outside a subway station, case open, bumming for quarters. He was a god at the time, but you’d never have known it by watching him. Even onstage he was content to just stand there and jam, his demeanor no different in front of 10,000 fans (or 100,000) than it was when he played in Bay Area coffeehouses. You had to admire that about him. The guy was genuine.
The weirdest thing about that day was not my meeting with Jerry, however, but the way it came to a close. At some point in the evening, after many hours of drinking, I passed out. When I woke it was four o’clock in the morning. I rolled over and looked across the Gaelic Park lawn, which had been utterly crammed with people just a few hours earlier. Now, though, it was almost empty. And by “almost” I mean I was the only person there. Not another soul. Just me, adrift in a sea of empty cans and bottles and paper cups—an assortment of garbage that gave the place a post-hurricane feel.
Where the fuck did everyone go?
I still have no idea what happened—why none of my friends roused me from my slumber (maybe they tried), or why the security guards left me there. They had to have known, right? They couldn’t possibly have not noticed. Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe this was the way things went down at a Grateful Dead concert. Regardless, I was on my own, locked inside the park.
I shambled over to the main gate. Locked. I tried another gate. Also locked. Very quickly I came to the realization that I was either going to spend the rest of the night outdoors, sleeping on the lawn, or I was going to have to climb over the fence. Like a convict breaking out of jail, I scaled the chain-link fence, pausing briefly near the top to catch my breath and to assess the likelihood of shredding my balls when I went over the barbed wire for the last few feet. I glanced back down at the park, at all the garbage and the empty bandstand. I knew what was involved in breaking down a stage after a concert—the noise and the barely controlled mayhem. I had slept through that?
Unbelievable…
I decided to go through the barbed wire, rather than over it, so that I could maintain my balance by hanging on to the chain link. A few careful moments later I was on the ground, walking home, my first and last Grateful Dead concert now officially in the books.
Thanks to the generosity (or at least the tolerance) of my parents, I still lived at home during this time period. (In fact, I didn’t move out until after I joined KISS.) We’d stopped fighting by this point about what I was going to do with my life. I’d appeased them somewhat by going back to school, and I think
they figured I was probably safer under their roof than bouncing from place to place, bumming off my friends. I wasn’t home all that often, anyway, and when I did come home, it would be late. I pretty much used the house as a crash pad. There wasn’t much dialogue going on between us. They were getting older and had less energy to deal with the disparities in our lifestyles. I’d throw them money once in a while to help with rent, which made things better, and at least the cops weren’t bringing me home at night. It could have been worse, and Mom and Dad knew it. Basically I just tried to keep the peace. Any insanity—or at least most of the insanity—I tried to keep outside the house.
All of my energy went into playing music. I was in multiple bands at any given time, juggling gigs, rehearsals, sometimes playing two different venues in a single night. I did whatever I had to do to make some cash and hone my craft. If that meant throwing on a tux and playing a wedding or bar mitzvah, then that’s what I did. If it meant driving up to Kutsher’s or one of the other resorts in the Catskill Mountains and playing for families on vacation, then I did that. There was dignity in all of it. Sometimes there was fun to be had, too.
The Catskill gigs represented my first taste of the road life, and I didn’t find it unappealing. The Jewish girls up there loved us (and we loved them!), although I’m not sure how their parents would have felt… had they known what went on after hours. We’d go up for a few days or a week, serve as the house band, get free room and meals, and a small stipend for our efforts. Not bad at all. It was a like a free vacation—with girls and alcohol and great food. All we had to do was play a couple of sets per night. That could get a little tricky—blending material that wouldn’t offend parents with the stuff we really wanted to play. But the same was true when you played weddings. I always managed to sprinkle in an assortment of songs that I liked, a cross section of popular music from Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Beatles, and Stones, along with more album-oriented rock from Led Zeppelin, Cream, Grand Funk Railroad, and Hendrix. Mostly songs you’d hear on the jukebox, punctuated with edgier, harder stuff. Once in a while the resort manager would give me a hard time, but I was always able to talk my way through it. The thing is, there was no way I could get up onstage and not play at least some of the music I really loved. I knew too much about the music scene—about what really mattered—to play nothing but Top 40 covers. Shit, I was at the Fillmore East in 1969 when Zeppelin made its first New York appearance. Incredible though it might seem now, they opened for Iron Butterfly that night, and absolutely blew the headliners off the stage. I can still see half the crowd walking out, disillusioned, midway through Iron Butterfly’s set.
No reason I couldn’t play “Whole Lotta Love” for the folks at Kutsher’s; they’d get over it.
The most professional and polished (and overtly ambitious) of the bands with which I played in those days was undoubtedly Molimo. The name of the band, as I understood it (though I’ve never verified), was taken from a Portuguese word that could loosely be translated to mean “music of the forest.”
I also recall one of the guys in the band saying the name was an African word for an instrument used during sacred tribal initiation ceremonies.
So who knows? Either way… totally sixties, right?
I didn’t know what to expect the first time I showed up to rehearse with these cats at their loft on Canal Street in lower Manhattan. Conceptually speaking, Molimo was an odd little hippie band that modeled itself after Jefferson Airplane. We had two lead singers—one male (Tom Ellis), one female (Christine Murphy)—who alternated at the microphone. It was totally out of character for me, unlike anything I’d ever done before. And to be honest, it didn’t interest me much. But they’d written some good songs, and as a result had landed solid management and a speculative recording deal with RCA Records.
I remember how exciting it was the first time we went into the RCA building in Midtown to put together our demo—walking into the very same studio where Frank Sinatra had recorded. If you care about music, that kind of history is palpable; you can feel it the moment you enter the room. I was twenty years old and trying to become a professional musician. Working with Molimo was as close as I’d ever been. We played a few shows, including one at the Fillmore East, and it seemed then that we were right on the cusp of hitting the big time (until RCA pulled the plug, midway through the recording of our first album).
For me, though, it was a mercenary pursuit. I got involved with Molimo not so much because I fell in love with their music, but because I saw it as an avenue to become more deeply involved with the music business, particularly the recording end of it. I considered it a gig, not a passion; simply put, I did it for the bread, and that’s about it. You do what you have to do to make ends meet.
I liked the people in the band, though—a diverse bunch that included not just male and female singers, but a New York City cop who was moonlighting as a keyboard player. He used to comb his hair straight back when he went to work and tuck it up under his cap. When he’d show up to play with Molimo, he’d comb it forward and let it hang down over his collar. I also became friendly with the drummer, Dave Polinsky, and the bass player, Barry Dempsey; in fact, at the same time that we were working in Molimo, we formed a power trio designed to fulfill our hard rock desires and to put some extra money in our pockets. The name of that little group?
The Muff Divers.
I shit you not.
Obviously, with a name like the Muff Divers (and I forget which one of us came up with the name, or why we thought it was appropriate, although you can probably guess), we weren’t particularly concerned with commercial success or the likelihood of securing a record contract. The Muff Divers just wanted to play hard, fast rock ’n’ roll. Molimo played only original material, so it was limited in scope. I’d been in Top 40 cover bands before, playing songs people recognized, and so had Dave and Barry. So when Molimo wasn’t working as much and we all needed extra bread, we went out as the Muff Divers.
Any chance to play was all right by me. The name of the band? The venue? The size of the crowd or even the size of the paycheck? All irrelevant. I tried to treat every performance in every dive club as if I were headlining Madison Square Garden. Arrogance was not part of my makeup. If anything I was insecure. I never considered any gig to be beneath me. If someone wanted to pay me (even if it was just a few bucks), and people were willing to listen (even if their numbers barely reached double digits), then I was more than happy to give them my best effort.
Some nights, naturally, were more memorable than others, though not necessarily because of anything that happened onstage. There were the occasional bar fights, for example. They’re unavoidable when you’re playing in shitholes, with loud, drunken customers challenging you for the crowd’s attention. Usually they ended benignly, with barely a punch being thrown. Once in a while, though, the band was equally loaded, and when that happened it didn’t take much to provoke a violent disagreement.
There was the time in Paterson, New Jersey, when I was invited to sit in with Tommy Doyle’s band because they were short a guitar player for the night. I expected a typical Jersey bar, filled with guys in T-shirts and jeans, smoking and hanging out with their girlfriends, tossing back bottles of Rolling Rock. Instead I stumbled into a place that looked more like a mob lounge, very laid-back and moody, with guys in suits accompanied by ladies who probably were not their wives. It was most definitely not a rock ’n’ roll venue, but I didn’t care. I started drinking early and hard, and kept right on pounding through the night; with each successive beer my guitar playing became, if not necessarily sharper, definitely louder.
Much louder.
It’s probably fair to say that I failed to exercise the appropriate level of respect or restraint, given the nature of the clientele and ownership. When the owner approached me during a break and complained about the volume, I blew him off. By the end of the night he’d had enough. And I’d had one (or ten) too many. As we broke down the stage and packed away our inst
ruments, I asked Tommy if we’d been paid. He explained that the band had in fact been paid its fee, but that the owner had originally promised a little something extra for me, since I filled in on short notice. That way Tom wouldn’t have to pay me out of pocket, and the other guys wouldn’t feel shortchanged.
So I found the owner, who was working behind the bar, and asked him (rather impolitely, I’m sure), for my money.
“Fuck off, asshole. You already got paid.”
That was probably the least hostile thing either of us said in a profane exchange that lasted roughly five minutes, and ended with the owner reaching over the bar and leveling me with a right hand so solid that at first I thought he’d cracked a beer bottle against the side of my skull. But he hadn’t. The guy had simply used his fist to shut up a drunken guitar player, and he’d done it effectively. The next thing I knew, the guys in the band were carrying me across the parking lot and stuffing me into the back of a van. They drove me back to the Bronx, brought me upstairs to my room, and put me to bed.
I woke the next morning feeling like utter shit. My face was swollen and bruised, and my right eye was so red that it looked as though blood was leaking into the socket. Coupled with the natural awfulness of a twelve-pack hangover, these symptoms left me feeling like I was on the brink of death. But it was when my mother saw me that I realized just how bad it must have been.
“Oh, my God!” she screamed, putting both hands over her mouth. “You need to get to a hospital.”
When your mother doesn’t even ask for an explanation, but simply tells you to get medical help immediately, you know you’re in trouble. So I went to see our family doctor, who immediately ordered an X-ray. The diagnosis: a shattered cheekbone.
“The whole thing is crushed,” he explained. “You need plastic surgery or you’re going to have problems with breathing and eating for the rest of your life.”
He paused.
“Not to mention, you’ll look like shit.”
No Regrets Page 6
