by Joey Kramer
“Who the hell do you think you are?” he yelled.
He whipped that belt at me again. I ducked and ran across the living room, but he came after me. I ran around the dining table, and he was right there. I turned one way, and he went the other, and then he had me cornered, whipping me with this heavy leather strap. I tried to hit him back, but the harder I swung at him, the harder the belt came down on me. I was scrambling for my life, but I kept thinking about the joints rolled up in my pants. If they fell out, I was dead for sure.
In the end I just slumped to the floor and let my father whip me, and he did until he simply wore himself out. By the time he was done, my shirt was ripped, my shoes had fallen off, I was all black and blue, and my arms and my neck were bleeding.
“You get up to your room,” he said, breathing hard. “Then you stay there until I say you can come out.”
I wiped some of the blood off my face. I got to my feet and went up the stairs. I shut the door, and then I pulled down my pants to look for the joints.
Not there.
Now I was worried.
I listened. I heard my father climb the stairs and head down the hall. I needed to be sure he was in bed and down for the count. I didn’t feel like having a replay of what had just gone down. I was seriously afraid one or the other of us was going to wind up dead.
After about five minutes things got very quiet. I figured the coast was clear, so I made my way back down the stairs.
The lights were off, so with one hand brushing against the wall, I felt my way through the living room and then into the dining room. I got down on my hands and knees and started sweeping my hands across the carpets, trying to find the damn joints. Finally, out of desperation, I stood up and flipped on the light.
My mom was standing there looking back at me.
“Jesus…Mom, you scared the crap out of me.”
“What are you looking for?”
“The buckle fell off of my shoe. I’m just looking for it.”
She stood there for a couple of minutes longer, and I continued to look around in the corners and under the dining table, only now I was desperately trying not to find anything. Mostly, I was just going through the motions because I couldn’t even think straight.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Just get to bed.”
Suzy, Amy, Patty Bourden, and my sideburns, circa 1968
Courtesy of Doris or Joey Kramer.
I went up the stairs again, with her following me, and this time I stayed in my room. I took off my jeans and just fell onto the bed, but I don’t remember sleeping much that night.
The next day came, and I was still alive. My father hadn’t come in to kill me, so I figured they hadn’t found the joints. I had to go to summer school, and I got up too late to even take a shower, but I still tried to check out the front rooms again. My mother kept popping in and out, and I was afraid she was getting wise, so after a while I just said fuck it, grabbed my stuff, and took off.
That whole day in school I was miserable, trying to figure out what the hell could have happened to the joints. I couldn’t find any trace. I tried to console myself that I’d looked over that room pretty well and hadn’t seen them, so it was pretty unlikely that my mother would just stumble across them.
After class I went over to the Fort Hill Country Club to meet up with my friend Jerry whose parents were members. I went into the cabana to change into my bathing suit, and when I took off my pants, down there in the folds of my underwear were the joints. They had been safely tucked in there all night. It was such a relief that I could have lain down and cried. Instead, I sat down right there in that cabana and lit up a J.
I never really questioned the way my parents treated me—I was always too busy just trying to figure out how to get through the next couple of minutes. I did whatever I could to avoid catching shit and getting hit.
My dad was the judge and jury, and my mother was the warden. She would mess with my head by not talking to me for three days just because I didn’t agree with her about something.
But the thing that drove me craziest about my mother was the whole status thing she bought in to. I started arguing with her one day about school, and she started yelling back at me. I told her how I felt about having to move to Eastchester and how miserable it made me, and this really pissed her off.
“How can you say such a thing!” she said.
For her, moving to Eastchester was meant to make our lives better. But then I hit her with my best shot. I said, “The only reason we moved to Eastchester was so we could look down on all the people in Yonkers, even though all the people up in Bronxville still look down on us.” Pontificating as only a teenager could, I told her that all this keeping up with the Joneses was nothing but horseshit, and then I turned away from her and walked down the hall.
She took one step and yelled, “You ungrateful little brat.”
I muttered, “Go to hell,” just loud enough for her to hear it. She waited about a beat, and then she grabbed a mirror off the wall, caught up with me, and smashed it over my head. It was a round mirror, about the size of a hubcap. When it hit me, the pieces shattered all over the hall. The glass flew into the bathroom and bounced on the tile floor.
I thought I was going to pass out. Not just from the pain of being slammed in the head with a thick piece of glass, but because I was so stunned. It was like someone had thrown ice water all over me, only ice water filled with broken glass.
I ran up the steps to my room and sat there on my bed, thinking, Holy shit… There was a mean lump on my head, throbbing and getting bigger. What the fuck? My mother just hit me with a fucking mirror!
At that moment I knew I had to get out of there, but I really had no place to go. I was in a band, in addition to my lunchtime gig with the Radicals, called Strawberry Ripple, and we were making a little money playing local clubs, but not enough for me to support myself.
A few minutes went by, and then my mother appeared in the doorway.
“Get downstairs and clean it up,” she said.
My first thought, my first reaction, was to tell her to go fucking clean it up herself. I bit my lip, though, went downstairs, and swept the glass into the dustpan. I put it in the garbage, and then I came back upstairs, which, just as in our house in Yonkers, was my sanctuary. Being the only boy in our family, at least I had always been allowed my own bedroom. And here in Eastchester it was really big—an attic space that had been finished off. The walls were paneled, but they were short because the ceiling, which was really the eaves of the house, came down at a sharp angle. And that long expanse of sloping ceiling is where I created this massive collage, a kind of ode to teenaged angst. Every time I got sent to my room, I worked on it, taping up pictures, creating a montage that ultimately covered the length of the room—maybe twenty feet long. The pictures overlapped until you couldn’t see any of the wallboard. It took months for me to cover the whole expanse with images I’d cut from magazines, pictures of everything from girls to cars to drums to singers. It was like half the length of the back of the house, and it became like a shrine that all the other kids had to come see.
While my relations with my parents went from bad to worse, my relationship with Irv over at New Rochelle got more and more intense. We smoked pot every chance we got, and because his room was up on the third floor of his uncle’s house, also kind of in the attic, those chances came quite often. From the window you could climb right out onto the roof and sit up there in the treetops and listen to the birds and watch the sun go down. Which was nice, but we went out the window and onto the roof mostly so we wouldn’t smell up the place when we were getting high. And up on the roof is where the headmaster, caught us right then and there, toking away with not a care in the world.
Time for me to find another school once again. I was allowed to finish the term, but I was not invited to come back in the fall.
I was blowing through my educational opportunities at a pretty rapid pace, so it’s good I was
paying my dues in the music business. Strawberry Ripple consisted of me, Vinnie the keyboard player, Whitey the singer, and Jack Wizner the guitar player. We all got along really well, and we stayed busy working clubs and the college campuses, doing a lot of Young Rascals covers. But I had bigger ambitions. One day I said to Vinnie, “We’ve got to start writing our own songs.” As a cover band, we were going to be stuck in the frat houses and the bars forever.
But Vinnie was older than we were, in his early to mid-twenties and married—and as long as we had gigs, he didn’t have to have a day job, so he and the other guys were happy to do what we were doing. But I wanted to take it to the next level. If all I was doing was making pocket money, there were faster ways.
When I turned sixteen, it was time to start driving the car, but my father told me that if I wanted to drive, I’d have to pay the additional insurance. I got a gig working at Eastchester Music, a hole in the wall store in the center of town owned by two brothers, Sal and Mike Tardella. Sal was a guitar player, and Mike was a drummer, and they both gave lessons. At first I was just the errand boy, but after a while I started working behind the counter.
Coiff by Bobby Rydell, mid-’60s
Courtesy of Doris or Joey Kramer.
One Saturday morning Sal and Mike were both downstairs teaching. I was taking care of the store upstairs by myself, and business was slow that day, so I completely rearranged the whole place. When Sal and Mike came upstairs, they flipped out, but in a good way—they loved what I’d done. So they began to have more confidence in me. But more than that, because I was playing in local bands, they started asking my advice about guitars and amplifiers and other equipment. So I started helping Sal and Mike with inventory. They began stocking Marshall amps and Gibson guitars and the other stuff that the younger guys wanted.
The new equipment sold, so Sal and Mike thought I was the shit, and they started to take me out to dinner to ask me more about what I thought about this or that. After about eight months I was managing the store. So I started buying clothes and dressing the part—there was a haberdashery just down the street—and now that I had money to buy insurance, I was a big dude on wheels—driving my mother’s station wagon.
At that point my parents instituted something that, to this day, still baffles me. Moving to Eastchester had been all about moving up and appearances, and that extended—at least for a while—to our having a live-in maid, a not unattractive young lady from Haiti, maybe twenty-five years old. In this case, my mother’s obsession with order and control worked in my favor. I mean here I was a horny teenager, and they put our young, female help in the next room? All that separated me from her was a set of louvered doors. But in my mother’s mind, this particular room next to mine was simply where the maid should go, and moving the kids around was just not going to happen.
So I spent hours staring at this young woman through the slats in those doors, watching her change clothes or get ready for bed. One night, while I was watching, she started sort of touching herself. It was so hot I could hardly believe it. All the other times, watching her change, taking off her clothes, it would be way too much of a turn-on for me to just watch so I’d always play with myself. But this time she was running her hands over her breasts and slowly, what seemed like teasingly, over her belly and down into her underpants. I was kind of freaking out and thought, maybe, just maybe she knows I’m watching and she’s putting on a little show for me. So, and I have no idea where I got the balls, I walked around and knocked on her door. She opened up, let me in, and then she opened up and let me in…
Unfortunately, this was a one-shot deal, but over the next couple of years I spent many a happy night reliving that scene—in my mind. Just about then, however, I was discovering another form of female companionship that turned out to mean a lot more to me in the long run.
Thornton-Donovan was the next lateral step on my way through high school, and there I met a girl named Patty Yellin. We were both in tenth grade, but I was a year older because I had to repeat a year. Her parents were very wealthy and never home, so we had the run of this huge mansion they lived in over in Scarsdale. I used to hang out there all the time after school, with Patty and this other girl, a friend of hers named Gretchen. We were like the three musketeers, but Patty and I were really like brother and sister. We ate, smoked pot, and watched movies. Patty’s dad was the chairman of the board of P. Lorillard, a big tobacco company. They made Kent cigarettes and Tabby cat food and Reed’s candies. Day to day, Patty was looked after by servants, a couple who took care of the house. Their names were Cledo and Singh, and every day when I got to Patty’s house and went into the TV room, they would have it all set up for us. There would be a plate piled high with a little mountain of tuna sandwiches, cut in quarters, with all the crusts cut off, like tea sandwiches, very neatly piled in a circle, with probably twenty sandwiches around the bottom, and then eighteen, and then fifteen. And right next to that mountain of food there was always a tin filled with fresh chocolate-chip cookies just the way I liked them—still warm from the oven and soft in the middle. So being over at Patty’s was like heaven. There were no parents to fuck with us at Patty’s house, no authority figures smacking me in the head. Instead, Cledo and Singh were at our beck and call. If I wanted something to eat, I could have it whenever I wanted. If I needed to spend the night there, no problem. I would be in class in Thornton-Donovan, bored, totally not into it, but the thing that would keep me going was knowing that after school I was going to go over to Patty’s house to listen to music and eat tuna sandwiches and chocolate-chip cookies.
Eventually, I started bringing my friends over. We all hung out at Patty’s and listened to music. As it turned out, her brother Burt was in the rock ’n’ roll business—he used to manage the Remains and the Barbarians, a couple of bands from Boston, so Patty had a main line to what was going on in the business. She turned me on to bands like Nazz, Todd Rundgren’s group, and artists like Harry Nilsson.
We listened to music in her room, sitting under this print she had on the wall of van Gogh’s Starry Night. This was the first time I ever saw it, the last painting he did before he killed himself, and it really stuck with me; I wondered, Do you really have to be so tortured to be creative? And even now, every time I hear certain cuts off the first Blood, Sweat and Tears record, Child Is Father to the Man, or Buffalo Springfield, I think of Starry Night and van Gogh.
I especially loved listening to Nazz, because it was no bullshit rock ’n’ roll with sweet vocals over the top of it. They might have been just a bit too far ahead of their time, so not a lot of people knew about them, but the fact that they had only a cult following made them seem that much cooler, and us that much cooler for liking them. Which got me to talking about how I was going to put my band together and make it and be big and famous. And Patty asked me, “What would you name your band?” I said I didn’t know. So we started kicking around ideas. And then one day we were listening to Aerial Ballet by Harry Nilsson. Aerial inspired us to come up with Aero . And then we started matching Aero with other concepts: Aerocross, Aerofish, Aerocandle, Aerophone…Aerosmith! And I said, “Yeah, that’s it. Aerosmith. Aerosmith. Aerosmith.” A “smith” is a master craftsman. Aerosmith would be the masters at getting you off the ground, getting you up, getting you high. I wrote it all over my books in school, and from then on, that was the name that stuck with me.
Patty took me seriously. She supported me, even though I can’t say how much emotional support she got from me in return. I think she was lonely with her parents never being around, so she reached out to my parents to fill what was missing in her life. Patty spent time at my house just hanging out and, unlike me, she was able to connect with my parents. Patty became especially close with my mom and would try to explain to my parents what it was that music meant to me and how important it was for me to be in a band. I loved having Patty in my life, having her support me the way she did, and it felt good to me thinking that, because my parents seemed to respec
t her, she might be able to get through to them and get them to see me and what was important to me with some respect. But the way my parents looked at the world, there was no room in their eyes for my life to be about me. I was an embarrassment to them. I failed to support the image of the successful, middle-class American family they worked so hard to be and to project. Their image of the Kramer family did not include having a son who was a long-haired rock musician.
Johnny Ramp, a friend of mine who also played in bands, had a ’67 Plymouth Barracuda, green with black leather, four-speed on the floor. Johnny loved to drive, and I loved his car. We spent a lot of time just cruising around the neighborhood. We checked out the selection of girls and hot cars up and down Central Avenue, up and down Roxbury Drive, up behind Nathan’s on Patton Drive, and on Eisenhower Drive. And sometimes we went over to Ray Tabano’s. Ray was always the “go to” guy for getting high because he always had the best hash, which we called “chunko.”
One day we went over to Raymond’s place on Mountain Dale Road. His mother let us in and said, “They’re upstairs.” We made our way up to Raymond’s room, and there he was with his sister Dottie, his brother Les, and a couple of the local neighborhood guys, Pip and Guy Gillette. They were all kind of lying around the bedroom, smoking a hash pipe, getting high and just sort of groovin’ out.
We told Raymond that we wanted a “weekend kit.” This was Raymond’s brilliant marketing concept, a survival kit that consisted of a little piece of hash, a couple of downs, some speed, and some acid. Johnny and I both immediately went for the speed. Then we started smoking the hash to smooth out the speed-head. When the drugs kicked in, we looked at each other and said, “Time to ride.”
Just then the door opened, and in walked the cool, slightly older guy who had loaned me the drums for the battle of the bands, Steven Tallarico. He was already a local hero because he was the best musician around, with bands like the Dantes, and William Proud, and Fox Chase. On this particular day at Raymond’s, he was also way ahead of the rest of us when it came to experience with drugs. Steven drifted in completely stoned with an album in his hands. High as a kite, he told Raymond, “You gotta hear this record. You gotta hear this record.”
