“They were the name on the street,” Prewitt says. “There was the establishment, then there were street people. They were a ‘power to the people’ band, right in the thick of it.”
Stan Bronstein, a saxophone player and veteran of Tito Puente’s orchestra, and drummer Rick Frank had formed the group in 1967, leading a rotating cast that briefly included Carly Simon on vocals. One story among many in Elephant mythology was that Carly left after members of the band threw her boyfriend down a flight of stairs; they were that kind of group, born in strip bars and befriended by motorcycle gangs.26
Inexplicably, the Elephants were initially promoted as a bubblegum pop group on independent label Buddah (sic) Records. In spite of the label’s lighter reputation, the 1969 Elephant’s Memory LP featured a time-capsule-worthy photo of the band—including lead singer Michal Shapiro, who replaced Carly in the female vocalist spot—covered in groovy body paint instead of clothing. The album met limited success, although two songs—“Old Man Willow” and “Jungle Gym at the Zoo”—were featured on the soundtrack of Midnight Cowboy. (The gritty portrait of New York street life was originally rated X when released yet garnered critical acclaim, including a Best Picture Academy Award. It was also one of the top-grossing films of 1969 and helped launch the careers of actors Dustin Hoffman and John Voight, serving as a wake-up call to Hollywood studios that—along with the cultural shift of rock music—a new day in cinema had dawned.)
Notable tracks, but hardly the formula for hit records. No second album plans were made at Buddah Records, and the group continued with a revolving-door lineup.
“That’s all right too, because they weren’t so hot back then,” wrote Toby Mamis in 1971.27 Mamis was an underground boy wonder, a teenage editor of an alternative high school newspaper called the New York Herald-Tribune who would later work public relations for Apple Records. Mamis had written that the band’s early sound was “an obnoxious sort of cross between Blood, Sweat and Tears and Melanie. They bombed out everywhere they played, and in the record racks as well.”
For a new decade the band reclaimed its gritty, from-the-streets approach that matched their lifestyle but hadn’t yet translated into the music. The Elephants “resurfaced,” Mamis reported, and again paid the dues needed to land a record contract; they performed at festivals, high schools, or wherever they could find an audience.
The Elephants returned to Magnagraphics with a new attitude and songs to match. A 1970 album on Metromedia, Take It to the Streets, presents tunes pretty much guaranteed to avoid mass-market radio. The lyrics describe starting fires and killing police officers (“pigs”). One notable track, “Tricky Noses,” ends with what a reviewer described as “a sudden blast of gunfire.”28 A modest hit from the album, “Mongoose,” brought the Elephants a new level of attention and landed them a weeklong gig at Folk City in July 1971.
“Elephant’s Memory Mixes Radicalism and a Rough Sound” read a headline from Mike Jahn in the New York Times: “Usually the most political statement made by a group consists of ‘V’ signs and a modest ‘power to the people’ now and then. A group shouting ‘off the pig’ can expect to find difficulty in dealing with the music business establishment. Elephant’s Memory . . . is one of the latter.”29
The Times cited the group’s previous incarnation as providing “a mild form of good-time jazz rock,” but the new lineup of Bronstein, Frank, bassist Gary Van Scyoc, keyboardist Adam Ippolito, and guitarist Crow Eisenberg played “an aggressive, rough and loud rock, punctuated by indignant radicalism.” Their attitude screamed as loud as the music: “The group is one of the few New York bands with the courage to persist despite lack of great success.”
The Folk City engagement raised the band’s profile, and Billboard magazine took note of the counterculture attitude they brought to the stage: “They perform with irreverence for musical convention and are sometimes oblivious to the audience. But they convey a good musical sense and a hard driving beat . . . a return to rock and roll.”30
For the cover of Take It to the Streets, the first album’s flower-power nudity was replaced with a grainy black-and-white image of the band tearing it up at a protest rally. Hardly teenage heartthrobs, their lack of onstage appeal was described by one fan in Rolling Stone as “uglier than a Grateful Dead with five Pigpens,” referring to the Dead’s drummer. Offstage, club owner Mickey Ruskin said the players maintained some time-honored traditions in lieu of current trends: “It’s interesting to see a band that’s strung out on booze for a change.”31
Ruskin owned Max’s Kansas City, a Park Avenue South music staple where the Elephants were among the core regulars. The band somehow fit the unconventional world of art, culture, politics, and music at Max’s. The Velvet Underground dominated the fabled backroom, and the music at Max’s reflected diverse tastes and temperaments: the Elephants in all their ugly glory; gender-bending glam rock pioneers David Bowie and the New York Dolls; and more than a few of the Village’s most visible political activists.
The Elephants’ five-man ensemble gained considerable experience with the additions of newcomers Van Scyoc and Ippolito; although younger by several years they brought respectable talent to the group. Van Scyoc first found success in his native Pittsburgh with the Dynatones, a pop group on the Hanna-Barbera label that landed a 1966 hit, “The Fife Piper,” before disbanding. Van Scyoc made the move to New York in 1968, bass guitar in hand for everything from commercial jingles to stage auditions including a near-miss with the hot new musical, Hair. The experience was enough to convince Van Scyoc which way his fortunes lay: “The music business was good for me, better than acting.”
Van Scyoc next joined Pig Iron, a New York group of jazz-blues roots that included Ippolito on keyboards; the band’s self-titled Columbia album in 1970 included a rendition of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You.” The exposure brought Van Scyoc studio work at Atlantic with top-shelf talent including Neil Sedaka, and after the band dissolved he quickly landed with the Elephants in early 1971. A solid band, Van Scyoc thought, one with established credentials, a band that could go places so long as the lineup of current band members stayed put.
“The two main guys, Stan and Rick, they were the band,” Van Scyoc says. “Stan had all the talent and Rick had all the business. They had a couple different lead singers, a raft of guitar players; I remember going through five guitar players that first year.”
When a keyboardist was needed to fill the Elephant ranks, Van Scyoc suggested Ippolito, a New Jersey native destined for a life in music thanks to both dad and grandpa being drummers. Ippolito had followed his Pig Iron days with a brief stint in the musical Soon, which closed after just three performances at the Ritz Theater on Forty-Eighth Street. (Notably, the cast featured the debuts of Richard Gere and Nell Carter, and included Barry Bostwick.) “[It was] a rock opera about a band and their managers and groupies,” Ippolito says. “I was in the pit band. After that, I was looking around and Gary invited me to play with Elephant’s Memory.”
Fans may pay allegiance to one genre of music or another, but musicians—those looking to make a dollar with their talent—are open to and understand a range of styles, tastes, and backgrounds. Ippolito was originally schooled in jazz, his passion when he graduated from high school in 1964, the year of “Beatlemania.”
“I didn’t really think much of the Beatles, to tell the truth,” Ippolito says. “In my sophomore year of college a good friend of mine was a voice major and turned me on to the Beatles, the Beach Boys. By the time I got into that, I wanted to be in music.”
With Elephant’s Memory, music wasn’t necessarily the only factor in an audition. “Rick was probably the political driving force, although Stan happily went along,” Ippolito says. “The first night I went down to play with them they asked me what I thought of their politics.”
Whether they believed the band could represent the Movement, both Van Scyoc and Ippolito said
the group’s chances for commercial success improved with the addition of their newest, youngest member, Texas-born guitar player Wayne “Tex” Gabriel.
Gabriel and his mother, Marian, left the Lone Star State while he was an infant in the early 1950s to escape an abusive, largely absent father. Gabriel spent his youth in Detroit’s Highland Park, where high school ambitions on the football field were sidelined by an injury. While recuperating, Gabriel took to the guitar with dedicated, natural ease.
Gabriel’s first nontelevised look at Lennon was at the Beatles’ 1966 Olympia Stadium concert. At the live show, however—as the Beatles themselves realized by then—Gabriel says the music was difficult to judge: “You couldn’t hear anything because of the screaming girls. I mean, they were . . . screaming!”
Gabriel did some paid work in Michigan before testing the New York waters in 1970, a trip recalled mostly for a classic car-broke-down-just-west-of-the-Lincoln-Tunnel story. He went home and worked for a few months with Mitch Ryder’s Detroit, a revamped Detroit Wheels fronted by the “Devil with a Blue Dress On” singer. The New York dream remained, though, and in the summer of 1971 Gabriel returned to Manhattan for another shot. His mother had died a few months earlier, and was unable to share the good news when Gabriel auditioned for and landed a gig with Elephant’s Memory. A promising opportunity, but still very much a struggling-musician existence.
“Tex first moved into Stan’s apartment, but it was like a homeless shelter for animals there, dogs and cats and whatnot,” Ippolito says. “Wayne had two dogs, so he came to live in my apartment. Wayne slept in the living room, sometimes in the kitchen, but I’m not sure why.”
Musically, Van Scyoc said that Gabriel was the answer to the band’s prayers.
“When Tex came in from Detroit I said, ‘We gotta get this guy,’” Van Scyoc recalls. “He loved the band, we loved him. He was such a phenomenal player, I remember telling my wife we found a new Eric Clapton.”
Among his first gigs with the band was their return engagement at Folk City. The impression he made on the group was echoed by the press.
“Wayne Gabriel has only been with Elephant’s Memory for a couple of weeks,” reported Variety on December 8. “He fits in well, even having his own tune, ‘Life’ included in the set. Elephant’s Memory’s reputation is starting to grow.”
The brighter spotlight, Van Scyoc points out, was a dubious benefit. The music-for-the-masses crusade had become a strain and he was considering other options as 1971 drew to a close.
“I was really tired of doing no-money gigs,” Van Scyoc admits.
• • •
What a waste of human power,
What a waste of human lives
Shoot the prisoners in the towers
Forty-three poor widowed wives.
—John Lennon, “Attica State”
On December 16, only a week after he played before thousands of concertgoers who partied and rallied on behalf of a jailed poet in Michigan, Lennon filmed an episode of old friend David Frost’s talk show, now broadcast from New York. Lennon and Yoko took their seats at the edge of a circular riser in an intimate theater, the audience before them just feet away.32
Small talk gave way quickly to “Attica State.” Lennon played acoustic guitar, accompanied by Yoko and Rubin on bongos and two guitarists from the Lower East Side band.
The topic was fresh in the minds of New Yorkers. Just three months earlier, the headlines had been dominated by a riot at Attica, an upstate prison. In a response to the shooting death of California inmate George Jackson, more than 1,200 New York prisoners had seized control of Attica to demand prison reform. Governor Nelson Rockefeller sent along upward of 1,700 troops to take control by any means necessary, and the ensuing battle ended in a controversial bloodbath.
Singing about Attica before Frost’s studio audience, Lennon went further with his lyrics than he had in previous songs and peace anthems. “Attica State” was blunt and specific as it reported the body count from the victims’ perspective: “Forty-three poor widowed wives.” Lennon sang that the “media blames it on the prisoners,” but word on the street held that “Rockefeller pulled the trigger.”
The song ended with Lennon repeating the chorus lyric: “We’re all mates with Attica State.” Polite applause followed.
For many New Yorkers, the suggestion that “all they need is love and care” was not a practical solution, not in a city with crime rates that ranked among the highest in the world. It was a tense time on both sides of the law: Frank Serpico—a longhair hippie cop who lived in the Village—told the internal investigation Knapp Commission in May 1971 of the near-epidemic graft and kickbacks in the NYPD. Serpico’s one-man crusade had ended earlier that year when he was shot during a February drug raid, an ambush likely choreographed by fellow officers.
John Lennon challenged the Manhattan audience. Many were unabashed Beatles fans and in full agreement with one of their generation’s leading spokesmen. They loved John, and might agree with him about civil rights, women’s liberation, gay rights and ending the Vietnam War—but didn’t quite see eye-to-eye with him about Attica.
Some voiced their opinions from the balcony and main floor. Lennon and Frost peered up, tried to see who was speaking through the glare of stage lights, and wanted to make sure they understood the question.
“We can’t hear you up there,” Lennon said. “Why don’t you come down here?”
Frost stood, repeated the invitation, and made room near the stage. A woman and a man, both in their midthirties, took seats in the front row, eye-level with Lennon.
The fourth wall between audience and entertainer came down. Few artists had ever stood as elevated by their audience as the Beatles; fewer still could sit with the same fans in casual comfort. They might as well have been in a living room with friends watching and discussing the evening news.
Of course Attica was a tragedy, the woman said, but Lennon’s song “made it sound like the only worthwhile people in this world are people who committed crimes.”
The “forty-three poor widowed wives,” Lennon replied, included everyone affected by the deaths. “We’re talking about policemen’s wives, anyone who was hurt there.” The word “prisoners” was used in broad terms: “Free the prisoners, free the judges, free all prisoners everywhere.”
New Yorkers, the woman said, couldn’t afford such an approach. “I’m in prison, living in New York,” she added, describing a life spent clutching her purse and “being afraid to walk into my home.” These problems were not as simple as Lennon made them out to be; they weren’t curable by people saying “peace and love.”
“You’ll solve it by bringing up children differently,” she said, “or by having a better penal system. But not by making heroes out of people who hold knives to people’s throats.”
Lennon admitted that there was no easy solution.
“I understand that society hasn’t worked out what to do with people who kill, and violent people,” Lennon said. “We’re not glorifying them. This song will come and go, but there will be another Attica tomorrow.”
The topic—Attica—was specific, Lennon said, and was one of several contemporary issues that he wrote about as a form of musical journalism, the traveling minstrel weaving melodic folktales.
“We’re like newspapermen, only we sing about it,” Lennon observed.
There were few things New Yorkers loved more than weighing in on the day’s headlines. Angry letters to the editor read the same whether in print or addressed to an ex-Beatle on a talk show.
“Wait till they kill your son or daughter or your mother or father,” the man shouted. “You talk about what society’s done to them. Walk through one of those neighborhoods at two in the morning. You wouldn’t be singing about the people who ended up in jail for mugging you.”
Frost moderated the back-and-forth objectively, gave equal time to
opposing views, and raised a variety of related topics along the way. Lennon, Frost said, brought intelligence and passion to his new work, as he always had.
“This is an example of the fact that John is writing songs, passing on what he cares about,” Frost remarked.
Lennon seemed frustrated, if undaunted, and was eager to get back on more comfortable ground.
“Let’s sing another song,” Lennon said. He sang of John Sinclair, and of the troubles in Northern Ireland with “Luck of the Irish.” He’d come to America to do just that, to find places and reasons to sing. He told the Frost audience about his next gig, a benefit to support the families of Attica victims at Harlem’s landmark Apollo Theater.
“We’ve been invited to play the song and just go there to show that we care,” Lennon said. “We’ll go along and sing it if they want us to or just say hello, just to show people that we don’t live in an ivory tower in Hollywood watching movies about ourselves, and that we care about what’s going on.”
The night after recording the Frost show, Lennon appeared as promised at the Apollo, where he basked in the spotlight along with some of the musicians that had most inspired him. John and Yoko—again backed by Rubin and Lower East Side guitarists Chris Osbourne and Eddie Mottau—were a last-minute addition to the program and seemed to surprise the audience. Gasps were heard when an announcer stood before the curtain “to introduce a young man and his wife who saw fit to put down in music and lyrics so that it will never be forgotten . . . the tragedy of Attica State.”
Lennon said it was “an honor and a pleasure” to be at the Apollo, and counted down the beat before launching into “Attica State.” The audience didn’t question the lyrics or position, and signaled their agreement that “Rockefeller pulled the trigger” with spirited shouts and applause. Lennon played just three songs—“Attica State,” “Sisters O Sisters,” and “Imagine,” which he introduced as “a song you might know” while he strummed the opening chords on his guitar.
The Walrus and the Elephants Page 4
