The Soul of It All

by Michael Bolton

  Without “Marky Doodle,” my youth would have been far less joyful. He was my confidant, my brother in music, and by my side during nearly a decade of our shared struggle to make it in music. The sound track of those years features Marc playing bass, guitar, and keyboards—and always playing them incredibly well. One of my favorite photographs shows Marc and me just after we’d opened for Leon Russell at a concert. He has a heavy black beard and long, thick, black hair, and we look like we just came off a pirate ship, or maybe an Amish carriage race. Marky Doodle Hamburger stuck with me through thin and thin—the very lean years—and I couldn’t have asked for a better friend. I often wondered in those years how anyone could always seem so happy—even without the assistance of his bong pipe. Marc found humor in every situation.

  Mellow to the bone, Marc is also among the most talented and versatile musicians I’ve ever played with. He still performs now and then, and I surprised him at a club in Los Angeles a few years ago. He astounded me that night because he was playing one of the most difficult instruments to master, the pedal steel guitar. He said he’d just decided to teach himself how to play it, and as always, he was great.

  First Marc and then Ribs, too, became my adopted brothers, bandmates, bodyguards, and partners in adventure. Marc is two years older than me. Ribs is seven years older, which may explain why I always thought of him as this huge guy and my boyhood bodyguard, even though he never grew to be more than five foot nine inches tall. Never known by his proper name, Richard, except by his parents, Ribs was a rebel who most of all rebelled from the idea of joining his father’s successful plumbing supply business. He wanted to make it in the music industry instead.

  Ribs, whose nickname derived from his skeletal torso as a child, had molded a physique more like that of a pipe fitter than a band manager—and that was a good thing for me. My long hair and bag-of-bones body seemed to attract the wrong sort of attention. For some, the sixties may summon memories of people saying, “Peace, brother.” For others it may be, “Make love, not war.” But for those of us who were the first to grow out our crew cuts, the oft-heard comment was “Are you a boy or a girl?” Or the drive-by classic, which people would yell as they rolled down their car windows: “Get a haircut, faggot!”

  Ribs, a martial arts student and weight lifter, became my defender against those taunts, whether they were hurled at me around New Haven or in diners, truck stops, or clubs when our band was on the road. Whenever some yahoo would target me, gentle Ribs transformed into his raging beast of an alter ego, “Rito the Madman.” He’d scream profanities and threaten severe bodily harm to my tormentors.

  Ribs also is fond of reminding me that the first time he saw me at the bowling alley, “I thought you were a girl myself.” He got over that. While Marc became my guitar teacher and bandmate, Ribs offered his services as my manager. He was one of my first true believers not related by blood. When I met the Friedlands I already had my first band, the Inmates, but we soon joined forces and formed a band with an existing group and called ourselves the Coconut Conspiracy. But I’m not sure I ever performed with that band because Marc picked his “other” best buddy, Bobby “Goody” Goodman, to be the lead singer.

  When I protested, Marc kicked me out of the band! At the age of twelve, I truly feared that my rock ’n’ roll career had ended, but in the sixties a new rock group formed every two-point-five seconds somewhere in the United States. New Haven was a hothouse for start-up garage bands. Along with the Shags, the town’s most successful group in the late 1950s and early 1960s may have been the Five Satins, a black doo-wop group whose biggest hit was “In the Still of the Night.”

  We were all inspired by hometown musicians and even more by what we listened to on the airwaves, courtesy of the trailblazing radio deejays led by New York’s top jocks, including Cousin Brucie (who later became a good friend) and Murray the K. New Haven’s own WELI radio station was one of the region’s first all-rock-format stations, offering the popular Jukebox Saturday Night. The rock ’n’ roll radio pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s usually took requests and played a wide range of music that included Motown, R & B, funk and soul, Memphis and Chicago blues, Southern rock, folk rock, California soft rock, country rock, the Beach Boys, antiwar protest music, psychedelic rock, and pop.

  We had plenty of live music, too, thanks to all the college bars around the Yale campus and the New Haven Arena, which managed to bring in many of the biggest bands in the 1960s, although our hometown concert venue will forever be remembered for canceling a 1964 Rolling Stones concert due to lack of ticket sales. The Arena’s other claim to rock shame was a 1967 Doors concert. One of New Haven’s finest police officers came upon a couple going at it in a bathroom shower stall before the concert. The cop ordered them to leave, not realizing that the male was the lead singer for the Doors. Jim Morrison told the lawman to “eat it.”

  The cop brandished a can of Mace and repeated his order, saying, “Last chance.”

  Morrison’s retort, which went down in rock ’n’ roll history, was “Last chance to eat it!”

  The cop sprayed his Mace and Morrison went down, delaying the concert for an hour. Once the Doors did take the stage, Morrison went off on a rant, berating New Haven’s men in blue with obscenities, which provoked them to drag his ass offstage, arrest him, and haul him off to jail. A riot ensued, leading to the arrest of thirteen others. Charges were eventually dropped, but Morrison immortalized the event in the song “Peace Frog” on the Doors’ classic 1970 Morrison Hotel album. The lyrics included the phrase “blood in the streets in the town of New Haven.”

  Bloodied but unbowed, the New Haven Arena survived to hold many more concerts that I attended, including the rescheduled Stones concert, finally held in 1965. I went with friend and fellow longhair Johnny, who, like me, dared to publicly declare himself a fan of both the Beatles and the Stones, which was rare because fans tended to split on them just as they did on the Yankees and Red Sox in our part of the world.

  During that concert Mick Jagger threw his tambourine into the crowd, and Johnny snatched it out of the air. Before he could celebrate, a woman charged him, grabbed the tambourine, and chomped down on his hand until he let go of it.

  While the Stones rocked onstage with “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” Johnny turned to me with a horrified look and screamed, “She bit me, man!”

  Ah, sweet, sweet rock ’n’ roll. Apparently concerned parents and cultural critics were right. It had turned us all into savages!

  Credit: Friedland Family Collection

  Chapter Four

  Coming of Age

  Music was everything to us. We were immersed in it, listening to the radio, the record player, or to live performances in clubs and concerts. Being in a band made me feel part of all that was going on around us. Making music and singing won me acceptance in an older, cooler crowd, and there were other fringe benefits. Girls started showing interest in me after I became the singer in a rock band. A lot of guys joined bands to get girls, but I wasn’t one of them. I honestly had no clue that playing in a band would make me somehow more attractive to the opposite sex.

  Not that I complained when that blessed bit of magic worked. My first experience of sex actually involving another person took place in an apartment on the Yale University campus, where I was never a scholar but often a visitor. Our first encounter was at a friend’s place, a typical ’60s den of sin with black-light posters, Day-Glo decor, and walls of stereo speakers.

  I don’t think we planned to do the deed. I didn’t even know what “the deed” was. We were just messing around, teasing, kissing, and suddenly, wondrous female nakedness was unleashed all over the place. She shed her clothes so quickly my eyes had trouble focusing. I had to take a moment. Was this really a living, breathing girl? If so, this was the greatest gift I’d ever received, though I really didn’t have a clue what to do next. She was two years older, a couple of inches taller than me, and beautiful.

  Nature took its course. I
was thankful my parts fit her parts. Afterward, I thought, Wow, no wonder everyone makes such a big deal about this!

  Unlike Santa, the tooth fairy, and the Easter bunny, sex was real. Soon other girls were more than willing to get naked with me. I was stunned at my luck. I’ll be forever grateful that My First was a patient, kind, gifted, and enthusiastic instructor. Once she’d introduced me to the glories of sex, I realized what I’d been missing in my first precious thirteen years of life. I had to make up for lost time. So I immediately asked when we could do it again.

  We were never a couple, but we coupled off and on for the next two or three years. And yes, I’m fairly certain that being in a band and losing my virginity were related incidents, and I didn’t hate that part of my life at all. Sometimes I’d sneak her into our house while my mother was sleeping. Most nights I could have opened our doors to the Yale Precision Marching Band and Mom would not have stirred. She was exhausted from working as a secretary while trying to wrangle three teens bent on breaking every parental rule and crossing every boundary.

  TURN ON, TUNE IN, DROP OUT

  Somehow, around this time I convinced my parents that my career as a rock star was so promising I really didn’t require any further public ejication. I never became a high school dropout, technically, but only because I never dropped in. My contention was that record company scouts were circling and I needed to practice with the band. To my everlasting shock and awe, my parents did not reject the idea out of hand. Instead, they countered with a tutor to homeschool me.

  My guess is that the high school board kicked in to help pay for the tutor rather than have to deal with my rebellious ways. Still, the poor guy hired for the job of teaching me high school freshman courses at home never had a chance. He quickly realized that my focus was on an entirely different three Rs (rock ’n’ roll and reefer) than those mandated by the state of Connecticut.

  I did all of the homework my tutor assigned and earned As and Bs, but there were more than a few times that my homeschooling was more like homefooling. Sometimes, my designated homeschooler couldn’t get in the front door of my home. We’d moved from the big house with the big yard on Boulevard, first to a little apartment and then to the lower half of a two-family flat on Elm Street, which is where all hell broke loose—from my parents’ perspective, that is.

  With Mom working long hours and Dad relegated to the visiting team, we lived in the designated parent-free smoke zone for all my bandmates, buddies, and our girlfriends. By the time the tutor came calling each morning, I was often too stoned to hear the doorbell. Marc Friedland and other co-conspirators frequently joined me in hiding behind the couch, giggling between hits on a joint, while the tortured tutor stood on the porch. I reasoned that I couldn’t let him in because the entire house reeked of marijuana smoke. Many times we watched out the window, tears of laughter running down our faces, as he returned to his car and drove away in surrender.

  Thus ended my formal education. I was about to enter a much bigger classroom in the world of music, a course of study that continues today. I also embarked on a lifelong effort to educate myself by reading English literature and philosophy, which would continue to inspire and enrich my passion for writing. I probably have enough hours in English literature to qualify for a degree by now.

  I certainly recommend that people get as much formal education as they desire. I read a lot of great writers and poets on my own, and that helped my songwriting a great deal. I tried to study music so I could read it, but even that took too much time away from songwriting and performing. I am proud of what I achieved without a formal education because I immersed myself in what proved essential for my life’s work. At a very young age, I began putting in twelve- to fourteen-hour days, honing my talents as a songwriter, producer, and performer. Still, the abrupt end of my schooling also meant there was no fallback from music, other than hard labor or washing dishes. I went all in.

  MY MOMENT

  I believed singing was my destiny, especially after I had my first “moment” onstage. In 1967, the Nomads were playing the Exit, a college bar on the Yale campus in New Haven. Something happened to me that night while performing a raw B. B. King song, “I Got a Mind to Give Up Living,” which was also recorded by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and many others.

  This big, slow blues song is very demanding to sing and, at fourteen years old, I was still finding my voice, trying to figure out who I was as a performer. Up to that point, I’d thought of myself more as a band member than a true singer, but that night my perception shifted. A minute or so into the song, the bar banter hushed. Suddenly I could hear my voice clearly. Startled, I looked out through the haze of smoke and realized that the college students and locals, all of them much older than I was, were actually listening to me. I could see the girls and women moving with the music. Whoa!

  This powerful feeling came over me, better than any high I’d ever experienced. The audience was connecting to my music and to me. I felt powerful, appreciated, and grateful to my audience for listening, so I let it rip, wailing with all the vocal strength I could muster. When the music stopped, everyone in the place jumped up, cheering and applauding.

  It was the first time we’d ever brought down the house. I’d been more accustomed to indifference and even the occasional “Get that kid out of here.” So I was stunned by this response. And in that moment, I was hooked for life. Forever compelled and powerfully driven, I’d found my purpose.

  COMING OF AGE

  Just as my formal education was ending at the age of fourteen, I signed up for a different sort of class. Once again, I followed Orrin down this path. He’d been into martial arts for a while and he’d taught me some moves. I loved the kicks especially, and I thought they might come in handy. I was taking some flak for having long hair, since crew cuts were still the more socially acceptable style. I figured that Ribs couldn’t always be there to defend me whenever some bozo threatened to cut my hair or kiss me, so learning self-defense seemed like a smart move.

  Orrin introduced me to his instructor, Bill Haughwout, a thirty-year-old guy who owned the Connecticut Karate Association’s dojo above our favorite source of music, Cutler’s Record Shop in downtown New Haven. Bill was a stand-up citizen and a serious martial arts master who trained the local cops in self-defense. He also worked with underprivileged kids to build their self-esteem and confidence through martial arts. This was a few years before Bruce Lee’s movie series—and long before the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—incited a boom in the martial arts in the United States. Bill’s dojo was ahead of its time, and considered one of the most advanced along the East Coast.

  In the typical Hollywood scenario, two long-haired, pot-smoking musician brothers who signed up for karate classes with a hard-nosed, clean-living, martial arts sensei would be whipped into becoming disciplined, respectful, productive members of society and future presidents of the chamber of commerce. In the Bolotin real-life scenario, things didn’t work out that way. Bill drank our Kool-Aid. He grew his hair long, got a divorce, and became the roadie for our band.

  Seriously, when we first met Bill, he was a pillar of the community, with a wife, a house, two dogs, and an aquarium. Within a few months of hanging with our band and our bongs, even Bill’s fish bailed on him. Our dojo master moved over to the dark side—the sensei-milla side, if you know your weed buds. Bill’s dojo even became our rehearsal hall a couple of nights a week. He embraced the sixties lifestyle once his divorce came through. At one point, he started dating a really cute girl whom I had once dated. That was a little strange even for me, especially given that she and I had once rendezvoused in the basement of the Jewish Community Center when our band played there. I always hoped that Bill didn’t find out about my earlier dalliance with the girl who became his girlfriend. I feared he might take it out on me during a sparring session and with one kick make my demise look like “an accident.” Fortunately, we remained friends, and my bandmates and I were glad to hang out at his house, w
hich was an adult-free zone. The fun was dampened, though, when no-neck Gino showed up. He wore black shirts and white ties and had no interest in the martial arts, the music, or the parties.

  Gino was somebody somebody sent. Bill had apparently borrowed money from a student who had “connections.” When our dojo master failed to make prompt repayment, Gino, the muscle, was dispatched. I don’t know if Gino ever collected what Bill owed, but he went away after a week or so. He did seem to enjoy listening to our practice sessions. I like to think he was our first wiseguy fan.

  SPARRING PARTNER

  My best friend and sparring partner at the New Haven Karate Club was Bruce “Bree” Belford. His father was a prominent local lawyer and liberal. He and Mrs. Belford always welcomed us into their huge home. When I married a hometown girl, the ceremony was in the Belfords’ backyard. An excellent student and a friend to everyone he met, Bree wasn’t a musician, but we both became vegetarians at a young age and also shared an interest in Eastern philosophy and religions and, of course, martial arts.

  Bree wasn’t a big guy, but his martial arts skills brought him big respect. He was among the top students at our dojo, and I had benefited from sparring with our teacher, a third-degree black belt with shins made of iron. Bree and I were highly competitive, so we always sought each other out as sparring partners. We are close friends to this day, even though Bree lives in Australia and we see each other only a couple of times a year. Our friendship grew beyond the dojo in part because he was one of those rare people I trusted instantly, someone with integrity, someone whom I could talk to about anything and he would get it.