There was always lots of music at my house. When my dad was younger, he had been a drummer in a jazz band. My mom loved Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, and I did too. When I was thirteen, I started playing harp. I had a friend named Susan who played, and whenever I went to her house, I’d sit down and pick out songs on her harp. The sound was so beautiful; the instrument connected with me on a profound level. There was a two-year waiting list to get an orchestral grand harp, so we rented a smaller troubadour while we waited for my personal instrument. I’ll never forget the day it arrived in its huge wooden crate.
I was a good student in high school. I was shy, but I was also popular—I was a cheerleader and I was on the student council. I played harp with the school orchestra. Normally, they have the harpist at the back, but they put me in front by the cellos. Later I realized that was probably because I wore short skirts.
I had a couple of high-school boyfriends: One of them gave me my first Doors album, Strange Days, but he opened it and played it before he gave it to me. Typical musician. I went on dates where I didn’t know what to say: One guy told me, “Just talk about anything—current events.” My junior year, I went to a teen club to see this band of brothers called the Tree Stumps, and I met the father of the band, who was also their manager. He thought I would be perfect for one of his other sons, Kevin. I didn’t feel shy around the family, and Kevin ended up being my high-school sweetheart.
After I graduated high school in 1970, Kevin and I lived together for a little while—he was going to college, studying urban planning. He was one of the first people to be in that field; years later, he ran for mayor of Atlanta. I was pursuing music with my harp, modeling for painting classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art, and working at the Cleveland Playhouse. One day, a gorgeous boy with Lindsey Buckingham hair and green eyes came to the playhouse and told me, “I’d like to do a painting of you.” I bought that line, and suddenly, I wasn’t with Kevin anymore. That was my first real downfall with my choice of men—I was such a sucker.
One night, I went to the Viking Saloon to see Eli Radish, this great country-rock band. I decided I’d love to jam with them. Even though I was trained classically, I wanted to do more rock ’n’ roll. I tried to figure out who was the boss, and decided it was the bass player, Danny—I told him I wanted to jam with them on harp. He said, “Okay, come next week.” So I borrowed a van from a girlfriend of mine, and when I got there, I asked the roadie, Airborne, to help me with the harp. He looked at me strangely—when I said “harp,” they all thought I was going to play the harmonica. The gig was a disaster—you couldn’t hear the harp, and I played so hard just to hear myself, my fingers started bleeding.
I tried playing with Eli Radish again a couple of weeks later, in Kent. It was the middle of winter, so I wanted to keep the harp warm in the van: Extreme temperatures put a lot of stress on the strings, and sometimes they can snap in the cold. My brilliant solution was to wrap up the harp in blankets to keep it warm in the van. Well, that doesn’t work—a harp has no body heat. I got straight A’s in my high-school science classes, but sometimes I look back at things I did, and I can understand why people thought I was a dumb blonde. The Kent gig was canceled, so we all went to a party. I talked to Danny for a while, and we hit it off—he seemed so worldly to me. When he was fourteen, he had a band called Spontaneous Corruption that got a major-label deal, and opened up for the Who and the Doors. Danny and I became a couple, and he ended up being my manager. I was so malleable. “Go play this gig.” “Sure, Danny, whatever you say.”
Danny and I developed this technique of using a butter knife on the strings of the harp—it made it sound like a slide guitar. We moved around for most of the ’70s, trying to do music in different towns: Nashville, back to Ohio, Massachusetts, Tennessee, then back to Cleveland. I wanted to live in New York, but Danny hated the cold, so we went to L.A. We drove across the country in June 1979 in an MG Midget with a big trunk on the back. We took the southern route; I cooled off with a spray bottle the whole way through the desert.
Alan:
I grew up in Mountain Brook, which is kind of the Beverly Hills of Birmingham, Alabama. I lived on the other side of the tracks; my mother and father got divorced when I was seven, so we led a very middle-class life. I didn’t know until I was an adult that my parents got married twice—to each other. The first time, they lasted about a year, until my dad moved to New York to pursue his dreams of being the next Perry Como. After a year, he felt guilty and came back. They got remarried and stayed together for the next fourteen years.
I was class of ’75 at Mountain Brook High School. It was all white, and full of cliques, starting with the cool kids who smoked cigarettes out back and wore braided leather belts and penny loafers without socks: They were the future lawyers, doctors, and frat-boy ne’er-do-wells. There were also the jocks/cheerleaders, the band/choir kids, and the Jewish contingent (hardly outcasts, but definitely in their own pod). I wasn’t a member of any of the tribes, but I got along with all of them because I participated in everything, starting with sports: baseball, basketball, football. I was a star football player—wide receiver, punt returner—and I dated the head cheerleader, my first love, Mary. But I was also in the school choir and all the theater productions, shows like Paint Your Wagon.
Mary and I dated for three years, starting in tenth grade. I was the envy of my friends because, to be perfectly honest, I was getting some. My senior year, Mary and I broke up for about three weeks. I needed to sow my wild oats, but none of the other girls in school would date me, because they loved Mary too much.
My senior year, the Spartans had a great football season. The last game, the coaches told us, “This is the last game you’ll ever play in your life—you think about that when you’re lollygagging around the field.” We got killed in that game—but I caught the last touchdown and was quite pleased about that. Everybody was weeping in the locker room, but I had a bigger perspective.
I applied to eight colleges and got into all of them. I had spent forty dollars a pop of my mom’s money to apply to these schools, and didn’t get off my ass to visit any but one: Millsaps, in Jackson, Mississippi. Mary’s sister went there, so we took a road trip to visit. It looked fine to me.
Mary wanted to follow me—that was my first experience with willfully saying goodbye to somebody. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. My mom made me take a vocational test in high school; the results said I was best in social sciences, I had a creative spirit, and I had very low marks in organization. I took that to mean I should go into something like psychology, so that’s what I majored in. I didn’t have any desire to go into the entertainment business—my father’s failed singing career spooked me a little bit.
I had a lot of fun at Millsaps. Like in high school, I was into everything: the choir, theater, student government. I checked out the local ballet school for the exercise—and because there were hot chicks there. They gave me a scholarship and I stuck with it for a couple of years. It was an internationally known school, run by a Russian lady. I was the only guy who could lift the women, and she would tell me, “You are strong as bull.”
I met my future wife, Jan, early on. We didn’t like each other at first; I thought she was a bitch, and she thought I was a pervert. I’ve always been a joker, and I had a reputation for saying inappropriate things—or, from my perspective, voicing what everyone else was thinking. Jan told me later, “You talked about sex all the time. We all figured you weren’t getting any and that was why you talked about it so much.” One night we had a real conversation outside the local beer joint, and connected. She was pretty and vivacious and theatrical—we had a common bond in our love of movies and musicals. And we were in the Troubadours together, which was the school’s elite special-forces singing group. The music was square, and we had to wear these black Elvis jumpsuits with rhinestone piping, but I liked the discipline of it all. Some of the members were devout Christians—which didn’t inhibit them at p
arties when we started drinking and playing spin-the-bottle.
Jan and I started dating my sophomore year, and my senior year, we got married. We honeymooned in New York City, spending a week in a friend’s apartment. We went to see A Chorus Line, my first Broadway musical, and I was smitten; I started considering a life in the theater.
We spent another year in Birmingham, doing children’s theater, and then came back for a summer in New York, attending the Circle in the Square drama school. Jan was a musical-theater person; she wasn’t into the angst of Method acting classes like I was. I thought being a “serious” actor meant diving headfirst into life, whether it was good, bad, or ugly. It wasn’t easy to do that if you were married, so my De Niro goals were hobbled from the start. But then, I was never going to be De Niro.
Back then, you could live in New York for five hundred dollars a month. We were subletting an apartment on Seventy-second and Broadway, and I could smell this restaurant downstairs, the Copper Kettle. We were living on grits and oatmeal—I wanted so badly to be able to afford a meal at that restaurant. But at the end of the summer, we committed to pursuing our dreams in New York.
Martha:
I grew up in Ossining: home of Sing Sing prison, about an hour north of New York City. My best friend Carol and I, pretty much every day after school, would go to one of our houses and play Beatles albums over and over. Every single Beatles song, I know the harmonies by heart.
If you ever hear me say, “I got the music in me!”—well, I got it from my mom, Nina Pattison. She started playing piano in 1931 and is still playing today—she can sight-sing any piece of music, with perfect pitch. My dad, David Conrad Quinn (my middle name is also Conrad), was a trial lawyer who knew everything there was to know about Shakespeare. Completely self-taught: Not many of his neighbors in the Bronx were into King Lear. A World War II rescue pilot, he was funny and charismatic—at a wedding or a graduation, he was the guy making a toast. My brother Dave is a lawyer; my brother Chris was a navy pilot; I’m a performer. We all took aspects of David Quinn as our life paths.
My parents divorced when I was five years old. They sat me down in the living room and told me my dad was going to move out. I knew just what to do: I ran to the front door and locked it so he couldn’t leave. Isn’t that sad? My dad moved into New York City and got an apartment; I visited him every other weekend. It was the ’60s: I was the only kid I knew with divorced parents. When I went to Carol’s house, I would see her dad’s red leather chair in the living room, and wonder what it would be like to have a father around.
A few years later, my dad married a young writer named Jane Bryant Quinn. She wasn’t a bestselling author and financial expert yet—she was working in the mailroom at Newsweek. Later, she got a column at Businessweek, but had to use J. B. Quinn as her byline because they didn’t want people to know she was a woman. Jane had a son, Matthew (my stepbrother), and she and my dad had a child together, Justin. Jane worked her ass off to be successful. Whenever I hear people say a celebrity is “lucky,” I think of Jane and I know it ain’t luck.
When I was in eighth grade, my sister-in-law Barbara saw me walking down the street in a granny dress and a sweatshirt and boots. (There was actually a period of time where gingham and calico Little House on the Prairie dresses were popular.) Barbara said, “Oh my God. She needs help.” She whisked me off to Bloomingdale’s and picked out a powder-blue leotard, a light coral skirt, and a sweater that had both powder blue and coral in it. This was a revelation. Looking back, Barbara was my first stylist—I’m still much better off when someone else pulls together clothes for me!
I’m proud to be an Ossining High School girl. When OHS made the national news for race riots, my dad begged me to move to the more genteel Chappaqua school district, but I stayed. I was decent in language arts and history, but got a genuine F in geometry, and in science, I was a lost cause by the time I hit chemistry. I wasn’t concerned, because I always assumed I was going to be an actress. I did all the school plays, from the chorus of Damn Yankees to the lead role of Anna in The King and I. Then for a class, I started to work on the school radio station, WOSS, and I loved all nine watts of it. I thought, “Whoa, I can just sit here and play music and talk. This is much easier than studying lines!”
I hung out with the Zappa-lovin’ musician crowd, and didn’t think of myself as being popular. That said, I was class president my junior year, and vice president my senior year. (I didn’t want to have to plan the prom!) But, oh, the sadness—I tried out for the cheerleading squad and didn’t make it.
I’d had a crush on a boy, Tony, since third grade, when I looked over at this new kid and thought he looked like a rock star. I spent many years chasing Tony’s approval, while he broke my heart again and again. I kept going back to him, no matter how many times he broke up with me; my entire sense of self-worth hinged on this guy’s opinion of me. I would sit on the OHS stairs leading down to the cafeteria, crying because he didn’t love me.
When I was in eleventh grade, Richie—this guy from Tarrytown, the next town over—took me to see Paul McCartney at Madison Square Garden, the Wings over America tour. It might have been a date in his mind, but nothing ever happened with Richie. In fact, after the concert, I had him drive me to Tony’s house. I was so bad—but I really wanted to see Paul McCartney. Sorry, Richie!
J. J. moved to Los Angeles in the early ’70s, where he was the afternoon “drive time” DJ at KLOS-FM for nine years, and then held the same slot at KWST-FM. He also worked for the local ABC-TV affiliate, and was credited with conducting the first TV interview ever with Bruce Springsteen. He was good friends with many major rock bands, including the Who, Queen, and especially Led Zeppelin.
J. J. (in 1999):
I saw them in Los Angeles at the Inglewood Forum in 1973. Led Zeppelin wanted to play their very best wherever they went, but L.A. was always extra special to them. They really tore up the house that night. And then it was party time, at the home of a prominent L.A. radio station owner. We got out of the Forum in a big hurry, which was going nuts, demanding more encores when we were going down the road, I’m sure. When we got there, all in high spirits, of course, it was a beautiful home, complete with a swimming pool, and everyone was partying like crazy.
I was standing in the kitchen, talking to some people. The place was packed inside and out. Suddenly, it sounded like there was a riot going on and then a big splash. Bonzo [Zeppelin drummer John Bonham], who loved to play pranks, and some others were starting to throw people in the pool. Everyone was laughing hysterically at the hijinks. I was wearing a new suit that night that I had just bought. I wasn’t making a lot of bread in those days as a DJ, so there’s no way I could afford to have it ruined.
I could see Bonzo was whirling around, looking for new victims to get hold of and throw into the pool. So I quickly ducked out of sight by hiding behind the kitchen curtains, hoping he wouldn’t set his sights on me! I hid there for quite a while, praying I wouldn’t have my new clothes ruined by going for an unwanted dip. I managed to escape him, but I was pretty anxious behind the curtains for quite some time, let me tell you!
Nina:
I found a job playing harp six nights a week at the Hyatt near the L.A. airport. It was a beautiful room with stained glass and a round bar—they had me up on a pedestal in the middle of the room, under a gorgeous stained-glass skylight. I also played weddings and parties. That was my main source of income, along with voice-overs and commercials for clients like Dodge and JCPenney. I was just starting to get my acting career together. I wasn’t on camera; my commercial agent told me I wasn’t salable because I looked too much like Janis Joplin. I didn’t think I looked like Janis, but welcome to Hollywood.
Danny and I put together demos for two radio shows that we were trying to get syndicated. One was Teen Tips—I was a lot closer to being a teen at the time—and the other was a talk show called Woman to Woman. I also took acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Institute: Amy Madigan and Rebecc
a De Mornay were in my class. My favorite part that I played at Strasberg was Laura in The Glass Menagerie. That character resonated really deeply with me. I don’t think I’m damaged like she is, but I related.
I wanted to do acting with substance, but people kept warning me that lots of casting agents would just want me for hooker parts. And sure enough, the first feature film that I was in, I played a hooker. It was in Vice Squad, which became a cult film. My character was Ginger, a naïve hooker who gets killed. Her pimp Ramrod comes by her hotel room—after he throws her across the room five times, she just asks, “You gonna beat me again?”
I met a brilliant, eccentric guy named Michael Seinhardt, an avant-garde video artist. He had a gibbon named Opal—at the time, it was legal to keep a gibbon as a pet. That ape was like his daughter, and she’d flirt with men, but she was very jealous of females. Michael and I started putting together a pilot for a TV show called K-Punk. We filmed in Chinatown—that’s where all the new-wave and punk bands were. We showed videos and I did man-on-the-street interviews with the punks. It was the early seeds of being a VJ. I rolled up the sleeves on my T-shirt, and I had a fake tattoo that read BAD. Watch out! Nina Blackwood, she’s bad!
Mark:
Carol Miller was a DJ at WMMR, doing weekends. She had been a student at the University of Pennsylvania; she applied for a job at the station on a dare, and promptly got hired. Not long after, Philadelphia magazine voted her the sexiest woman in Philadelphia. By the time I got to MMR, she had moved back to New York. I knew about her, but we didn’t actually meet until 1980, when I was offered a job at WPLJ, the top rock station in New York. Carol had been working 10 P.M. to 2 A.M. at WPLJ; they juggled the schedule, moving her to 6 P.M. to 10 P.M., and hiring me to do her old shift.
VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV's First Wave Page 3
