Ernie was about the best singer in the neighborhood. If the record industry worked just by talent, he would have been one of the biggest stars around. He could sing like Wilson Pickett, rough and urgent. He could sing smooth. He could sing opera, both pretty and powerful. But he couldn’t stand anyone telling him what to do, and he didn’t really have the personality to move forward into the business. He didn’t take risks and he didn’t take shit. He was so good, and he knew it, but that meant that he didn’t have the patience to get better. That’s how you end up with these guys who are legendary neighborhood singers and don’t go any further: it’s like the best playground basketball player in your neighborhood who does things that no one can believe but never breaks through at a higher level. He came out with us on the road later, when the Parliaments started to have hits, and he cowrote a little in the Funkadelic years. The truth was that his style was different, too. He sounded much older than we did. The singing he did was for adults: it was supper-club singing, real smooth. We were doo-wopping, singing for teenyboppers.
I was cutting hair but sometimes cutting out early to work on records. That was the beginning of a pattern that would pop up over and over again during my life: I was doing real good with hair, making lots of money, but I was putting all that money directly back into records and music. We had other groups we considered our competition, healthy rivals like Sammy Campbell and the Del-Larks. Ray Davis was in that group, and later he came over and sang bass with me. Ronnie Taylor was also in that group: he was really close to me. They released records on Ea-Jay and other labels around the area. We went to play with them in Perth Amboy and New Brunswick and even in New York.
Not only were we writing songs like crazy, but we were trying to keep focused on music in other ways, too. By that time, there was an up-and-coming younger generation of musicians in Plainfield. At first, that scene was centered around the Boyce brothers. Their father, Clarence, had been in the Carnation Jubilee Singers, and their mother had a group, too, called the Plainfield Five. The group included Richard, Frankie, and Jo Jo—Frankie was the middle one, and a real fantastic guitar player. The Boyce brothers played with lots of other boys who later became part of P-Funk: Cordell “Boogie” Mosson, Garry Shider, Eddie Hazel, Bernie Worrell. They were all Plainfield kids, and lots of them came by the barbershop at one time or another. Years later, the Boyces were drafted, and Frankie went to Vietnam and died there. This wasn’t until 1968 or so, but it was still a tremendous blow to everyone we knew.
The barbershop operated like a kind of community center—at the very least, it was a safe place where kids could come and hang out, less crazy and dangerous than other parts of the Plainfield streets. One of the first regulars was Billy Nelson, who lived right nearby. He came in early and came in often. Even at nine or ten years old he was the meanest little motherfucker you ever saw in your life. He fought with everyone, from little kids to grown men: two little boys might come around, four- or five-year-olds, on their tricycles, and Billy would slap them right off. He did everything he could to be tough. Sometimes he would go to Brooklyn and stay with friends in the projects, and he would come back thinking he was a gangster. He got on everyone’s last nerve: old men would leap out of their chairs to have the chance to throw his ass out of the barbershop. Sometimes the story gets told that he worked there, but at least at first, that wasn’t the case. He just showed up every day and didn’t do a thing. Other boys actually worked, while Billy just popped up all the time running his mouth from eleven years on. Years passed before he even picked up an instrument.
Newark was rough, with all the poverty and violence. Plainfield, though, was more middle-class—higher employment rate, higher high school graduation rate, more stable and more learned—but there was still some bullshit going on. Kids in Plainfield were robbing parking meters and pay phones, tapping them for change. We heard stories of gangs of teenagers going through the streets at night trying to get into stores to get into their registers. There was one story of kids hitting a store while one guy stood lookout outside. He saw the cops down the street. “Come on out, guys,” he called in a resigned voice before the police even reached the store. “They got us.”
There were many overlapping populations in Plainfield: hardworking men, bums, prosperous businessmen, pimps. We had old prostitutes wearing fox furs that still had their heads on. They did snuff, and when they came to say hello to you, you could see residue on their faces. These self-styled sophisticated types clashed with a newer world of people who came up from the country. My friend Ronnie Ford’s family came up from Georgia. Fuzzy Haskins’s family came up from West Virginia. They were so country they would shoot at you with a shotgun full of rice.
The men spent their time in barbershops and bars. We heard stories, saw stories, made new stories. Once a midget named Milton was making fun of another guy. Milton was only two and a half fucking feet tall, but his mouth was at least that big. “I was with your wife,” he said. “Hot Dog Willie and I were wearing her out all night long. She was screaming my name.” This guy looked at Milton for a long time, then took out a straight razor and sliced him straight across his belly. Milton went running out as another guy came in. “Hey, Milton,” he said. “Pull yourself together.” In the barbershop, you could make fun of everything, and did.
Hot Dog Willie’s woman was a little bitty thing named Peggy, but you needed to keep track of her. One day one of the barbers saw her on the other side of the street. “Here she comes,” he said. And then, in a blink, she was there. “Where he at?” she said. “I got my thirty-seven-cent pistol and I’m going to kill him.” She waved the pistol around, and that was bad enough. But she had something even more dangerous than the gun—a can filled with potash lye and Pepsi-Cola. If you held that in your hand it was so hot you couldn’t stand it. If you poured it on a car, the paint would peel right up. We told her to take her trouble right on out of our shop, but it was a while before she went.
The same thing, give or take, happened to my friend Ronnie. Ron was fifteen and he was going with a girl named Vi who was twenty-five. That girl, on finding out that he was running with other women, came in one night and sliced up all the barbershop chairs. When I came in the next morning and saw the chairs all cut, I thought my girlfriend had done it out of jealousy. I went to her house and started to scream at her. She turned state’s evidence immediately. “It was Vi,” she started screaming. “Vi!”
Ronnie’s father eventually killed Hot Dog Willie. Willie, while drunk, went outside to lie under a truck. Ronnie’s father didn’t know that he was there and backed out right over him. I thought Ronnie’s father might kill him one day, anyway, on general principle. He didn’t seem to care for him too much.
And then there was Pete the Magician. He was a neighborhood drunk, too, but when they arrested him they didn’t bother locking the jail door. He could walk right out of that place anyway. “Everything is an illusion,” he said. Pete sometimes came around to the barbershop and did these amazing tricks. He put a straight razor in his mouth and chewed it with no damage to his mouth. He chewed glass. He would take a needle and thread, eat one and then the other, and then when he belched it all out, the needle would be hanging off the thread. Once he brought a deck of cards into the shop and had someone pick one. Then, without looking, he put that card in a paper bag, took a scissors, and stabbed the bag so the card had a hole in it. Then he dumped the rest of the cards in and threw the bag at the front window of the shop. The bag broke and the cards flew everywhere inside the shop, except for one card that was outside on the ground by itself. A guy walking by picked it up, or one of us went out to get it, and it was the card that was picked in the first place. Pete the Magician would hypnotize people and make them bark like dogs, or snatch the shirt right off them. Once he asked me for a twenty-dollar loan. “I ain’t got no money,” I said. He told me to open my wallet and look; there were twenties stacked deep in there. I gave him one, and we talked about it for a few minutes, and when I ope
ned the wallet back up the money was gone and there were strips of newspaper. I didn’t really believe it. But it was the first time that I started to think in an organized way about what the mind can do when you alter it and how the mind can be shifted away from what it thinks it knows. One day Pete just disappeared, the way a magician should, leaving no trace behind.
Drugs weren’t big in the mid-fifties. I mean, reefer was around, always, but toward the end of the decade there was a substantial change, or a change of substance. It came after the downfall of the gangs, which followed a surge in street violence—there were beatings and worse, and one of my best friends got killed with a shotgun. When the gang phase waned, heroin stepped right in. All of a sudden there was heroin everywhere. My wife’s two brothers who had been heavyweight boxers both went to jail for dope. It was especially prevalent among the younger kids. If you went into a diner, into a schoolyard, into a movie theater, you saw people on smack. The local track team, which was one of the fastest in the world, was a spectacle: two or three of the people on the relay were doing heroin, and they would nod out on their knees when they were getting ready to run. Someone had to holler to get them up. Old people in their seventies were doing it. Teenagers were doing it. There was a guy I knew who worked on Wall Street. Friends would go into the city and see him there, in a suit, looking sharp. Then he would come home and start using and nod out right in the middle of dinner, in the diner, his nose down into his coffee. It was so prevalent you wouldn’t believe it. We used to get on people’s nerves by asking them, “Who died last night?” That’s how you said good morning.
Even the people who didn’t do it would practice how to make the faces to look like they were doing it. We joked that we were going to make a movie called My Favorite Nod, all about how people looked when they were on dope. It was a cool thing to act like you were high. Everybody knew how to do it whether you did it or not. You had to pretend that you were awake when you were asleep. A guy named Jimmy Mack used to come in and wear his addiction like a badge. “I’m a junkie,” he would say. “I’m a junkie.” He was so corny it was hard to take him seriously. But if we doubted him for a second he would bring his works and open them up right on the barbershop floor for everyone to see.
One day, I was finishing up with a customer when two skinny white kids from Jersey City came into the shop. They were carrying a box, looking to one side and then to the other, like they were scared to death. One of them knew one of the barbers who worked with me, and the kid made some kind of expression that the barber recognized, and the barber signaled me to get rid of the customer. After a little bit of small talk that was just as nervous as their looks, they set their box down on the counter and showed us why they were so jumpy. The box was full of counterfeit twenty-dollar bills that added up to about a million two. They were terrified, staring, slapping each other like Abbott and Costello, because whoever they had taken the money from was bad news and then some. I say that they were kids but they were nineteen and we were twenty, maybe. We heard them out and then we bought all that funny money from them for $2,000. I remember running through the neighborhood, borrowing money from everybody on the block so that I could buy the stash. By the time I told the people who did know, we had it well stashed.
The bills were super crisp, with bright green ink. We had to put them in coffee to give them a used look: after that we’d flatten them out and stick them to the wall in the back of the shop. It was like we were hanging money out on the wash line. After a little while, the bills looked as good as not new, which meant that they could be put into circulation, and that’s exactly what happened. We used it locally, or when we traveled. I furnished the shop with new $3,000 barber chairs. I paid for recording-studio time in New York. I told the musicians it was counterfeit but instead of $200 I would pay them $1,000. They didn’t seem to mind. Belief in the federal green is strong, even when it’s not real.
At around that time, the town was busted for dope. Even though heroin was still growing as a local plague, most of the barbers didn’t use. We were in that age group that wasn’t as affected: not as old as the jazz generation, not as young as the My Favorite Nod generation. But plenty of customers used. People nodded out in chairs. There was a local guy—I’ll call him Sam—and he used to hang around the shop with everyone else. He was a regular kind of customer, maybe a little more interested in what we were doing. He even got with one of the mothers of one of the local kids. Nice enough guy. One morning, maybe five thirty, we were in the shop fixing up the money—soak, crumple, flatten, hang—and Sam showed up in a state trooper’s uniform. A state trooper? It didn’t make any sense except it made perfect sense. He had been working undercover. He stuck around that day and ran in maybe thirty people for using dope.
Afterward, he was standing there in the back room, talking to the few survivors of the bust. He had a soft spot for us because of what we were doing with the kids, letting them play music, giving them a safe place in the neighborhood. He glanced around at all the barbers, and didn’t look up at the money on the wall, though the way he didn’t look up was more intense than any stare. “Word to the wise,” he said. “I heard there’s some funny money around here. If I was a person who knew something about that money, I would do myself a favor and get rid of it.” Then he tipped his hat and went out the door. Right then and there I started calling people and telling them to unload the money. “Don’t bring it around here,” I said. “We don’t want it anymore.” We still had plenty left, maybe around $200,000. We disposed of it through what you might call resale channels.
Maybe two or three years after that, I was reading the newspaper and saw an article about an older man who was in prison for counterfeiting. He was talking about how his grandkids had found printing plates and a huge stash of cash in Jersey City and made off with it. He didn’t know what had happened to it, and the grandkids weren’t talking. I had some idea. And about two or three years after that, I opened up a drawer and found a couple thousand dollars. It was almost like wallpaper at that point, an old pattern from a room I used to live in.
I’M INTO SOMETHING AND I CAN’T SHAKE IT LOOSE
By the end of the fifties, everyone who loved doo-wop could sense that it was winding down. We were sad to see it go, but also excited. We were perched on the edge of our seats for the next big thing. I was determined, though, not to pay much mind unless it was the next best thing, also. When “The Twist” came out in 1960, for instance, it hit the first mark but didn’t come near the second, by a long stretch. I was already familiar with the song from the Hank Ballard and the Midnighters version, which had been released about a year before. The Chubby Checker hit, huge as it was, was kind of corny. But everybody did it, and they did it again a year later, when he released “Let’s Twist Again.”
Motown was something entirely different. You had Berry Gordy, who I knew because I had a habit of reading record labels obsessively. He had done some songs with Jackie Wilson, and you could hear that influence in the early Motown songs. I loved everything the label was doing: “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes, and then “My Guy” by Mary Wells. But then you had Smokey Robinson, and that was another rung up the ladder. “Shop Around” came out in 1960, and it had a weird long credit on the label: “The Miracles featuring Bill ‘Smokey’ Robinson.” I knew the name a little bit from other label productions, but that song cemented my obsession with him. My feeling about Smokey was more than love: I studied him. He was a hell of a songwriter, the slickest one around. He had tons of hooks, puns up the ass, but somehow managed to resolve everything within the song. He could sing like a motherfucker. He had a hell of a group, too: the Miracles burned everyone up bad in the early days of Motown.
But to call him a triple threat undersold him by half. What really got me was the way he worked with different artists, how he could take a group that was already established and elevate them just by attaching them to the right song, or by developing their image in a certain direction. He was a shape-shif
ter, a magician. He could see what the other group needed, give them something, and then stand back and watch as his vision came true.
Take what he did with the Temptations. Even before they got to Smokey, they were already the best-looking and best-sounding group, doing songs like Curtis Mayfield’s “Gypsy Woman.” The only act that got near them was Junior Walker, who wasn’t the coolest but was undeniable, an old professional who embarrassed some of the younger groups when he got onstage. But when Smokey got to the Temps, they went up a notch. He paired them with “My Girl,” and everyone else in the game was suddenly in last place. They were the power pack. And then Smokey turned to Marvin Gaye and did just as well with him. He had this uncanny ability to take a measure of other people’s artistry and focus it, strengthen it, make it more than it ever could have been without him. That was one of the most important lessons I learned: when you’re writing songs, don’t limit yourself to one emotion. Don’t think that your only goal is to be confessional: this girl hurt you by leaving you, this world is getting you down. Don’t think that your only goal is to be aggressive, or wounded, or jubilant. Instead, express everything that’s in you, and then find multiple singers and musicians who can help you articulate those emotions in different contexts. There are any number of thoughts and feelings that are valid at any given time, and the goal is to get them all out into the world. Smokey Robinson taught me that.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 3
