Face the Music: A Life Exposed (10 page)

It could be maddening, but I paid him back sometimes. We often ate at a cheap Chinese restaurant on Canal Street where you could get a scoop of whatever dish you selected from the menu over rice or noodles for $1.25. One afternoon Gene and I ordered plates of food and cans of Coke. The place was empty. When Gene went to the bathroom, I grabbed the squeeze bottle of hot mustard and squirted a big dollop into his Coke. When he returned, he put the straw to his lips and took a big swig. I just waited. All of a sudden, his eyes bugged out of his head and started watering, and he screamed, “Oh my God!” He was three years older than I was, and I played pranks on him like a pesky little brother.

Our funds were limited to a few dollars each back then—at most. One day we wanted to get some food while we were practicing but didn’t have any money between us. So we took our guitars and went out onto Hester Street in front of the loft and played Beatles songs. The bucket filled up quickly, and we had our meal ticket. We made so much money that day we figured we’d try again. But the next day, almost as soon as we started to play, the cops chased us off. That was the end of our busking career and our dream of unlimited moo shu chicken.

I realized early on that Gene had been taught to value and appreciate money. Sometimes it worked out nicely—I often gave him my old shoes, for instance. Other times, I stirred up shit. I threw pennies into the street in Chinatown because I knew he would run out and retrieve them. I used to just stand on the curb and fling them. And he would run into the gutter to get the coins.

Whatever the disparities in our lives, Gene and I found common ground. We shared some touchstones—we both came from Jewish immigrant families, we both lived in Queens—but I think it had mostly to do with our style of work. He and I both gave 100 percent. The other guys in the band didn’t seem driven in the same way. Tony, the drummer, was in the band for one reason only: he was a dead ringer for Geezer Butler of Black Sabbath. He wasn’t much of a drummer, but he had a huge set of Ludwig drums and looked the part. He viewed himself as some sort of intellectual. He once came to rehearsal with a drawing that he thought would be perfect as a record cover if we made an album. The image showed the earth and a flower in outer space, crying. He looked at me and said, “You get it?”

“No,” I said.

“Yeah, you get it.”

“I have no idea what that is. A flower crying on the earth? Okay.”

Because Brooke Ostrander played flute as well as keyboards, the band worked out a cover of “Locomotive Breath,” a brand-new song by Jethro Tull. But Brooke sometimes had a problem when he sang—saliva would go down the wrong pipe and he would double over coughing. He might be singing one second and then suddenly drop out. I’d turn around and see him choking.

Lead guitarist Steve Coronel and I didn’t always get along. After one argument, he started yelling at me. “Do you think you’re special or something?” he shouted.

“Yeah, actually I do,” I said. “I have an aura.”

From the look on Steve’s face you would have thought I had just shot his mother. “You think you have an
aura
!?”

Steve was incensed. Then Gene spoke up.

“He’s right, Steve,” Gene said. “He does.”

W
e played a gig in early 1971 billing ourselves as Rainbow. A community college in Staten Island hosted the gig—and I got crabs for the first time.

You can get crabs from a bed. You can get them directly from a person. But I didn’t get them from a bed or a person—which might have helped make it at least a little worthwhile. Instead, I got them from a toilet seat at that community college. Soon after the gig I started itching, but it took a while before I put two and two together. I finally realized I had crabs when I found what looked like bread crumbs in my underpants. Upon closer inspection, the crumbs were crawly things. There must have been a hundred of them. It was revolting thinking they had been living on me, feeding off my body. It was the middle of the night when I figured out what they were, and I woke up my parents and told them I was going to the emergency room. I wasn’t going to wait an instant longer to get treated—and it wasn’t like there were twenty-four-hour pharmacies back then.

My mom was horrified that I might spread them though the house. “Honestly, Stan,” she said, “what kind of dogs are you sleeping with?”

Once I had overcome my revulsion to the critters, I found it all very funny. And the fact that my parents were disgusted and revolted by my lifestyle was a source of pleasure to me. I might never get the approval and support from them that I so desperately sought, but hey, at least I was getting a rise out of them.

In April 1971 the band played another show up in the Catskills, about two hours north of New York City, this time with a new name: Wicked Lester. We played fewer covers and more of the songs Gene and I had written.

Back home in Queens, one day I popped into Middle Earth to say hello. The owner pulled a piece of paper out of the register and handed it to me. “A guy from Electric Lady was here, and we got him to leave his number,” he said. “Electric Lady” meant Electric Lady Studios, the facility built by Jimi Hendrix on Eighth Street in Manhattan. To a musician it was like Israel to the Jews. It was hallowed ground.

I examined the note, which had the name “Ron” and a phone number scrawled on it. I couldn’t believe they’d gotten this number for me.

I dialed it and said, “Can I speak to Ron, please?”

“Which Ron? Shimon Ron or Ron Johnsen?”

Well, Ron Johnsen sounded more promising somehow. “Ron Johnsen.”

“Please hold.”

Ron Johnsen was a producer at the studio. I was connected to his secretary and left a message with her about my band, his leaving his number at Middle Earth, the whole spiel.

I called back the next day. Same story: Ron wasn’t available. I called back over and over again, day after day, until finally I told his secretary, “You tell him that it’s because of people like him that bands like mine break up.” That got him to the phone. And he agreed to come to our rehearsal space to listen to the band.

Only later did I learn that the person who had left his number at Middle Earth was actually the other Ron, Shimon Ron, who was head of maintenance at Electric Lady.

When Ron showed up, he liked what he heard. “You guys could be as big as Three Dog Night,” he said. There might have been a
tiny
morsel of truth to the comparison. We played a hodgepodge of styles. So, sure, one song might sound like Three Dog Night. But the next sounded completely different. To be honest, Wicked Lester had no real style, no real focus.

Even so, Ron Johnsen said he would record us and then shop the tapes to get us a contract with a label. He presented us with something called a “producer’s agreement.”

Things were suddenly happening fast.

I took the contract to Matt Rael’s dad. He was a businessman and I trusted the family. “This is a completely one-sided contract,” Matt’s dad told me, “not in your favor.”

We signed it anyway. This was a chance to get a record contract, to record at Electric Lady, to put out an album. We were not going to mess it up.

Once we signed the production deal with Ron Johnsen and started to record our songs, he began to line up auditions for record labels. One was with a newly formed label called Metromedia. Afterwards, Ron came to us and said, “They passed.” We broke into huge grins and gave big thumbs-up. “Yes! We passed!”

“No,” said Ron drily, “
they
passed.”

Finally Epic Records told us they would sign Wicked Lester on one condition: we had to get rid of Steve Coronel. It was the first instance when we had to decide whether this was about friendship or about success. We decided to let Steve go. It fell to Gene to tell him.

The label replaced Steve with a session guy named Ron Leejack. And then Epic signed us to a record contract. We were going to put out an album! For a major label! We even got a modest advance. I bought my parents a washer/dryer with my share of it. I was still living at home, after all.

Ron arranged for us to record cheaply, taking advantage of unbooked time at Electric Lady. If a band’s session ended at noon and another band wasn’t coming in until later in the afternoon, we went in and worked on our record. Often, we waited around late at night, hoping a band might pack it in by one or two in the morning, giving us time to record. It was always a bit of a crapshoot—sometimes we sat around for an entire day before getting a chance to work for a few hours.

The first time I ever saw cocaine was during those sessions. An extremely well-known band was recording in studio A one night when we were in studio B. I managed to talk my way in to hang out while they worked. At some point one of them said, “I need some fresh air.” The guy pulled out an Excedrin bottle, poured some powder out of it, and snorted it.

Later the same guy came into our studio to listen to a playback of something we had just put vocals on. Since his band was known for its stellar vocal harmonies, I was hoping for some advice on our track—the harmonies on our song were questionable and clearly needed work. He still had his Excedrin bottle with him. He listened to the song and said, “Man, that sounds good.” He came down a few pegs in my mind that night because I
knew
it wasn’t good. Maybe it was the blow talking. I don’t know.

Then one of his bandmates came in and asked whether any of us could set him up with a girl. I couldn’t believe it. These were major stars. One was asking random people at a studio to find him a date, and the other had a vial of coke and couldn’t tell that a tune was crap . . . this was the life of a rock star?

Once we started recording—albeit sporadically—we didn’t need to rehearse at our own space as often. But one afternoon we all dropped by the Chinatown loft. “Where’s the mic stand?” I said. “Where are the amps? Where are the drums? Holy shit, everything’s gone!”

We knew people sometimes got into the building. We’d even had a huge, wild-eyed mental patient in a green hospital gown and no shoes barge in on a rehearsal one night after escaping from a local facility. But we didn’t expect someone to jimmy open the metal cover over the window leading to the fire escape. A plate steel cover and padlock protected that window. Or so we thought.

The air went out of the room. I don’t know what went through the heads of the other guys, but all I could think was,
Okay, how do we get past this?

Was this a setback? Sure. But I never lost sight of the bigger picture.

We don’t really need that stuff anyway—we’re in Electric Lady Studios making a record! We’re lucky!

We could borrow guitars if we needed to. We could use cardboard boxes as drums. We didn’t need to rehearse at the moment anyway. We were at the studio all the time, using equipment that lived there.

I definitely needed more money, though, to replace all that gear. Gene and I also wanted to buy our own PA to be able to play live shows on our own terms. So I started working more taxi shifts. One of my favorite fares had always been dropping people at Madison Square Garden, the legendary arena in midtown Manhattan. As things were going downhill for Wicked Lester, Elvis played four shows there, in June 1972. I picked up a group of people one of those nights. “Where to?” I asked.

“Madison Square Garden,” they said. I smiled.

And I’ll never forget pulling up to the curb in front of the Garden that night. Because in the midst of all the turmoil, one clear thought rang out in my head as those folks got out to go see the King in all his sequined splendor:
I will be here someday, and people will be taking taxis to come see me
.

B
y the end of the summer of 1972, we completed the Wicked Lester record. We had recorded some of our own songs but also a lot of songs Ron brought in from publishing companies. Some of the songs had wah-wah pedal, others had horns. We had done what we were told, basically, and the result was awful.

Gene and I both hated the album. We sat down together, just the two of us, and decided we didn’t want to release it. In fact, we didn’t want to play with this band anymore. It wasn’t working as we had hoped. So we decided to scrap the record and part ways with the other guys. That proved more easily said than done. Tony, the drummer, said he wanted to uphold his end of the record contract. So Gene and I quit the band.

At that point, we had no band, no label, and virtually no gear. But what had made us start working together in the first place shined through at that moment, as we both had the same response to the setbacks.

No band, no label, no gear?

No problem.

First off, Gene and I needed a new rehearsal space. We didn’t plan on replacing our gear and leaving it to be stolen again. We found a place at 10 East 23rd Street called Jams. We initially rented space on an upper floor by the hour. We didn’t have any gear to store there anyway—there was no immediate drawback to taking our acoustic guitars in and out with us. Soon, though, a space a few floors below became available to rent by the month. We took it.