City Kid

by Nelson George

  After my comfy college years, the real world hit me with three swift, hard, gut-busting blows. The only relief in this bad news was that Rocky Ford was getting an apartment in Jamaica, Queens, and was gracious enough to allow me to be his roommate. At least I wasn’t starting my adult life living in my mother’s basement, which I’ve always thought was for lazy losers, neither of which I had any intention of being.

  I filed for, and got, unemployment via the Am News. It came to about forty or so bucks a week, beating a blank, though it did little for paying my half of the rent. So I lived the hustling life of a freelance writer, crafting press releases for publicists and writing four to five articles a week for as little as fifty dollars a shot. Rocky had hooked me up with a nice gig writing music news every month for Musician magazine, while I also ground out profiles for teen rags like Black Beat. Rocky was subsidizing my half of the rent with his Billboard money and a record-label advance for a 12-inch single by Harlem MC Kurtis Blow. Rocky, along with another Billboard friend, J. B. Moore, had decided to invest their money and time into making a novelty Christmas record with Blow, feeling that the rap scene in New York was a trend they could use to establish themselves as record producers.

  But, while hip-hop’s journey from street style to recordings was being hatched in our living room, I was struggling to make ends meet. It was a battle I’d wage from the summer of ’79 right through all of 1980. During the many months when I questioned both my ability and my dreams, New York sustained me. By plugging into its places and spaces, I felt like the city was keeping me afloat. One asset was my relationship with Birdel’s record store, a classic mom-and-pop store located in Brooklyn, at the corner of Nostrand and Fulton, near the A train.

  Birdel’s speakers were a daily announcement of the newest grooves in R&B and gospel. Inside was a narrow room with a low ceiling, covered top to bottom with racks of records, posters, top ten lists, flyers for concerts, autographed photos of singers, and a fine dusty mist created by the steady decomposition of the old albums in the racks and the foot traffic from the street. Birdel’s high priest was Joe Long, a raspy-voiced man with black-framed glasses, a thick mustache, a modest Afro, and thick hands that either held 45s hooked around his index finger or rapidly racked up sales on the cash register. Ask him if Gladys Knight & the Pips had a new record, and his answer was always, “Right here!” and he’d turn around to where the latest 45s lay stacked like pancakes. If you said, “I don’t know who made it, but it’s about fishing in the sea,” Joe would say “Marvelettes,” and place the record on the miniturntable near the counter and “Too Many Fish in the Sea” played for you on a Saturday afternoon.

  Joe dated a friend of my mother’s, so I’d always looked forward to stopping, knowing there could be a free 45 in it for me. When I became a reporter, Joe became a source of info about the contentious, often poisonous, relationship between black mom-and-pop stores and the major companies that took over black music in the seventies and eighties. Those labels gave big retailers all the discounts, and, because they bought in bulk, better billing terms. Slowly, the combination of competition from bigger retailers, the conflicts with the major labels, and the decay of the business strips in the Bedford-Stuyvesant community ate away at Birdel’s business, forcing Joe, and his peers nationally, to abandon competing in pop and R&B music and to begin emphasizing gospel, Caribbean, Latin, and other niche markets.

  Early in their existence, rap records created one of those niche markets. I have a vivid memory of traveling out to Bed-Stuy in the fall of ’79 to gauge the impact of “Rapper’s Delight.” When I arrived, the Sugarhill Gang was on the speakers outside, and the store was filled with a steady stream of people asking for the single. The 12-inches didn’t even have the blue Sugar Hill Records label—just orange labels with Sugarhill Gang in black type. Joe was behind the counter, making change and selling this hot record like it was the glory days of Motown. My understanding of hip-hop’s early appeal came from watching customers buy “Rapper’s Delight” at Birdel’s.

  Just as influential in helping me keep my musical instincts sharp was J&R Music World on Park Row across from City Hall. Back before superstores and downloading, tasteful, full-service record stores kept the culture going, and J&R, located in a few cramped basements, was one of those places. I bought lots of jazz and blues at J&R. I’d read Charles Keil’s Urban Blues or an article by Robert Palmer in the New York Times or Gary Giddins in the Village Voice, and I’d go to J&R to buy Bobby “Blue” Bland’s Two Steps from the Blues or John Coltrane’s Giant Steps.

  My trips to J&R provided more than musical adventures. These Saturday trips to that record store introduced me to a discovery of lower Manhattan. After buying albums I’d walk past City Hall and across on Chambers Street to West Broadway where I took to eating souvlaki at Adelphia, a Greek diner. Thus fortified, I’d head uptown through the aging warehouse area that wasn’t yet called Tribeca. It was just adjacent to City Hall, and neither fashionable nor cool.

  More memorable was Soho, which was not yet an arty destination, more just a gateway to the West Village. It’s impossible for anyone who wasn’t in New York back then to understand now how dark and unpopulated the old industrial area between Canal and Houston was at the dawn of the eighties. I remember shafts of light cutting through the thick air on Mercer and Wooster, and the pad-locked doors on innumerable gray, cast-iron factory buildings. I’d walk into art galleries on occasion, where I’d see carefully mounted rocks or odd shapes on wood floors. It was mystifying to me how these galleries survived.

  Just as confounding were the sounds of music that would float down from open loft windows and catch my ear. Soho’s empty industrial spaces attracted art dealers and jazz musicians. Unlike the mainstream players at the Village Vanguard and the Village Gate just a few blocks uptown, these loft jazzmen tended to be younger, lesser known, and more experimental. A spot I often visited was Studio Rivbe, owned by painter/musician Larry Rivers, where I saw unknown players as I sat on the floor and leaned against a bare wall.

  One of my first long music pieces was about the loft jazz scene in Soho, which I penned for the Amsterdam News. I focused on a duo called Double Dark, a sax-and-drum combo composed of the magnificent reedman David Murray and the loquacious Stanley Crouch on skins. Murray was a prodigious player of passion and skill, who’d go on to have a prolific career as a bandleader and composer. Less distinguished musically, but with a lot to say nonetheless, was Crouch, who’d already started writing for the Voice, and was booking bands at a Bowery club called the Tin Palace. Today Stanley is a pillar of jazz as the “American classical music” world, institutionalized inside the black reflecting glass of the TimeWarner building at Columbus Circle. But back then, sans the suits and the awards, he was a fixture in the avant-garde scene blossoming downtown.

  For me, as for most folks then, Soho was very much a place to move through and not to linger in. The West Village—now that was a destination. In the summer, as it had been for generations, Washington Square Park was a gathering place for kids from all over the city, where you flirted with the opposite sex, bought drugs, joined the buskers leading sing-alongs, or checked out the comedians telling jokes by the fountain. The days of Bob Dylan and the folkies were long gone, but everyone was still turned on by the idea that he’d been there.

  Then over to the basketball courts on Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. In the days before multimillion-dollar contracts were common, NBA players, college stars, and street ball legends regularly risked life and limb in the summer league before crowds four deep on Sixth Avenue. Afterward I’d venture over to Eighth Street, where you got a gas-inducing hot dog at Orange Julius (where Russell Simmons found work one summer), and checked out the funky clothing stores or a movie at the Waverly Theater, where The Rocky Horror Picture Show made its original midnight run.

  But winter or spring, especially during that period when my career was in peril, I’d venture over to Sheridan Square (past the already legendary
Stonewall gay bar, and all manner of homoerotic clothing stores) to a downstairs bar/restaurant named the Lion’s Head. I’d read about the Lion’s Head in books about Norman Mailer and articles about an eccentric New York Giants fan, Frederick Exley, who’d penned a cult classic titled Pages from a Cold Island. The Head was a literary hangout, and I, a precocious wannabe, was drawn to it. So after J&R, the Greek spot, and a walk through Soho and the Village, I often ended up descending into the Lion’s Head to feel the vibe.

  Across from the bar, book jackets were hung like trophies. Mailer, Exley, and Sports Illustrated staffer Dan Jenkins were among the many names saluted there and envied by me. Many of the men and women bending elbows at the bar were real-life published authors. Too intimidated to hang at the bar, I’d sit in the back, usually at a table underneath a jauntily dressed frog in a red convertible.

  Rolling Rock became my Lion’s Head passion. It came in a round green bottle, and tasted cool and crisp in a way the Ballantine and Rheingold beer sold in Brooklyn never did. Going to the Lion’s Head made me feel part of the larger writing world. Instead of pressing my face against the glass, I walked in and had a beer and a hamburger. I’m sure the regulars wondered who this skinny black kid was, since the crowd was as white as a politician’s handkerchief. But the odd glances didn’t bother me, especially after a couple of Rolling Rocks.

  If I had enough money or, even better, was on a record company guest list, my last stop of the day was back across Fourth Street and Washington Square. The Bottom Line was where I, and generations of New Yorkers, kept up with the cutting edge of pop music throughout the eighties. From my college years through my retirement from full-time music criticism in 1989, I saw more music and experienced more life there than at any other venue in New York, including the Apollo and the Garden.

  Even before Bruce Springsteen played his storied week of gigs there in 1976 and established his legend, the Bottom Line was already the top talent showcase in the city. If Warner Bros. or Columbia or RCA had a new band or singer who they wanted radio programmers, concert promoters, and magazine editors to know, they’d either headline or open at this modest cabaret. Really wasn’t much to it. A long side bar, a cluttered little stage, and dark wood seats and tables, most of which were organized into tight, barely passable rows. The best seats were in the back and faced stage center, because the two thick columns often obscured side views. The food? Always awful, but since the labels usually picked up the tab, I ate a lot more of it than I should have.

  Though it was no palace, the Bottom Line was my home away from home, a place I’d visit as many as four nights a week starting in 1980. There were so many gigs. There are so many memories. I got an education in the art of the backbeat from watching the Meters. I was moved by the surprising soul in the voice of the late Lowell George of Little Feat. I was frustrated watching Branford Marsalis play brilliant sax in front of a room of Japanese tourists, and then, two days later, seeing Kenny G play woefully for a sold-out show of worshipful African Americans. I happily caught Valerie Simpson’s earring when it popped off her ear during an Ashford & Simpson show, and gave it to my date.

  I was using these visits to write pulp magazine features and get free meals. My dream, however, was to contribute to the Village Voice’s Riffs section. At the Bottom Line I’d look into the back-row seats for Robert Christgau, who was, according to himself and others, the “dean” of American rock critics, figuring he was headmaster of the school I wanted admittance to.

  Back in the seventies, when opinionated, visionary rock critics walked the earth, and celebrity journalism hadn’t yet totally exterminated theoretical thinking in the pop press, I had begun reading the Voice music reviews, falling under the sway of Lester Bangs, Vince Aletti, and Christgau. Their ideas about music, and the connections made to the larger world I read about in the Voice, jibed with how I saw the world, though I hadn’t figured out how to articulate it yet. Even as I sat out in the boondocks of Brooklyn, I was hoping there was more to reality than what I saw every day. The Riffs section, somehow, some way, confirmed that I was right.

  I submitted my first reviews to Christgau and the Voice back in 1976, my first semester in college. It was about a big funk-soul concert at the Nassau Coliseum. Christgau wrote me a very nice rejection letter, full of criticism and condemnation that gave me hope. I sent two more reviews. With one came another typed letter, but after that two form letters followed, and, for a time, I licked my wounds.

  During my year and a half in the freelance wilderness, now older and with some credits, I began calling Christgau whenever I could. Still no assignments were forthcoming. Far as I knew, only a few black writers had cracked the Village Voice-Rolling Stone-Circus magazine world of rock writing: Pablo Yoruba Guzmán, former Young Lord and future TV news reporter, and Vernon Gibbs, an erudite journalist and future A&R executive. Other than that, people of color were scarce on that circuit.

  One night at the Bottom Line, I spotted Christgau and walked over. I knew what he looked like from a photo that accompanied a piece in the Voice on the rock criticism establishment of which he was “the Dean.” His pale face was dominated by ever-present glasses and unruly hair that combined to make him look intense and unkempt, scholarly and judgmental. I stepped up to him about some work, and he told me, in what I’d later find out was his typically brusque but quite loving manner, “Nelson, you’re not ready.”

  Lots of people would have taken that as an insult. Me? I just assumed he meant that eventually I would be ready. Maybe I was hearing what I wanted to hear. Still, I didn’t take our meeting as a dis but as an opportunity. Christgau knew who I was. He knew my work. It was only a matter of time. Walking toward the subway at West Fourth Street for the long ride home to Queens, that’s what I told myself.

  KINGS FROM QUEENS

  Queens was a bedroom I slept in more than a place I called home during my five years there. My professional life was in Manhattan, and my heart was still in Brooklyn, though my education as a critic continued in the home borough of the Mets. Combining the records of my roommate Rocky Ford and my collection, we easily had over two thousand disks, so I was always listening to new stuff and catching up on the old. For example, one night we got new albums by three of our favorites—Steely Dan’s Aja, Stevie Wonder’s Hotter Than July, and Earth, Wind & Fire’s All ’N’ All—and sat on our living-room floor analyzing the songs, arrangements, production, sound, even album graphics. Rocky, who was a budding producer, helped me hear music in a much more sophisticated manner in listening sessions that developed my ear and fueled my criticism.

  It was while living in Queens that I was introduced to a soon to be great friend and sometime teacher. I don’t remember when I first met Russell Simmons, but my first memory of him occurs in 1980, my first year living just off Parsons Boulevard in Jamaica. At that point Rocky was already working with Kurtis Blow, and Russell was acting as his manager, though Blow was more interested in having Rocky and his partner, J. B. Moore, handle his career. That was understandable, since he saw Rocky and J.B. as responsible adults, while he’d seen Russell, a City College classmate, doing angel dust in the student lounge.

  I know I met Russell before but, for whatever reason, I didn’t connect with him until one afternoon, when Rocky handed me the phone, exasperated with Russell’s constant chatter. In fact, when I took the phone and identified myself, I don’t believe Rush paused or shifted gears. As his nickname indicated, he just rushed on. I’d never heard anybody talk so fast who wasn’t a cartoon character.

  Russell was always excited, always enthused, and always selling, selling, selling. Though he’s changed considerably in the three-plus decades I’ve known him, it’s very rare that Russell isn’t promoting something. There was a popular book back in the seventies called The World’s Greatest Salesman by Og Mandino (a favorite of Michael Jackson), and, as far back as his twenties, Russell was a challenger for that crown.

  That afternoon in 1980 Russell was rambling on about a
party he was promoting to publicize one of Kurtis Blow’s early singles, as if it was the most important gathering ever, a party so essential that everybody needed to be there for their own good. This ability to invest his words with a seductive urgency, to sell without a modicum of shame, drew me to him as it would scores of others.

  From that phone call on, Russell was more than an irritant on the phone, but a great friend, though not a constant one; there would be gaps in our friendship, and many months when we didn’t speak at all. Yet when I see him on the street, call or accept an unexpected invite to a party or show, it’s like I saw him yesterday. I imagine it’s like that for most of Russell’s ever-expanding universe of best friends.

  Russell was born about a month after me in 1957, and when we started hanging out we were both young men trying to make a mark. Russell gave me access to the art of selling a culture that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. What Russell got from me, especially in those early days, when rap had few believers, was access to newspapers and magazines that spread his name and those of his clients. It never felt like a cut-and-dry trade, but this dimension of enlightened self-interest bonded us.

  Despite our symbiotic relationship, many of my earliest memories of rolling with Rush involve being left behind. Working as a record promoter to club DJs to pay the bills, Russell was out every weekend and most weeknights. If you were “running the track” with him you’d get a serious education in dance music. The challenge was keeping up. Russell was notorious for entering clubs and either not telling the door person you were with him or seeing someone he wanted to “jock” (aka talk to) and forgetting about you. I found myself on the pavement quite a few times issuing the tired complaint “Yo, I’m with him!” from the bad side of a velvet rope.

  In 1981 Kurtis Blow released his follow-up to “The Breaks,” a single called “Throughout Your Years,” which was Rocky and J. B. Moore’s attempt at crafting another pop crossover single. To promote it in Queens and Long Island, Russell booked the MC into four clubs on one night, so he’d do a short set, and, with Russell and some roadies, pile into a van to hit the next spot. I was tagging along one night, ’cause I had a girl in Hempstead I wanted to see. We hooked up at the club, went outside to her car, which had a roomy backseat, and got busy. Before I left the club I told Russell, no matter what, don’t leave without me. Maybe I stayed too long. Maybe he just forgot about me. Either way, the van was gone when I got back to the club, and I spent a long night curled up on a Long Island Rail Road bench, having missed the night’s last train back to New York.