Face the Music: A Life Exposed (7 page)

Me at sixteen with my mom and dad in our apartment on 75th Road.

Home felt like an even more dangerous place after that. It would be decades before I finally found out what was going on, but I knew right there and then that our house had become a potentially deadly whirlpool.

I’m drowning
.

It was bad enough picturing myself barreling down the road in a car with no steering wheel, or alone on a floating dock, far from shore, surrounded by darkness. Now it felt as if the floating dock was sinking.

Whatever was going on with my sister was being exacerbated by my parents; whatever was going on with me was being exacerbated by my parents. My home felt as fraught with danger as school and other social situations. I could not escape a pervasive sense of fear. I was only fifteen years old and I was losing it. And I had nobody to talk to.

Nobody. Totally alone. Petrified.

What should I do?

I could sense that it was going to end very badly if things went on like this.

Am I going to take my own life? Am I going to go nuts like my sister?

Julia had reacted to her profound issues by choosing a path that led to self-destruction and numbing herself. Obviously, that was a road to ruin. How I dealt with things was up to me. Sure, I was on my own, but I had choices. If I did nothing, that, too, was a choice—and I knew the consequences would be dire.

I refuse to be a victim.

I wanted to fix myself. I wanted to roll up my sleeves and get my shit together. I wanted to make things work, to transform my world into one I liked.

But how?

I was riding my bike when it hit me. As I turned the corner near our house, a thought hit me like a sledgehammer.

I need to get help
.

Otherwise, I suddenly realized, I wasn’t going to make it. Otherwise, I was going to make bad choices. Or no choice. I would just keep spiraling downward.

Do something
.

Then one night I overheard a friend of my sister’s talking about an outpatient psychiatric clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. Here was something concrete. A place you could go. It had a name and an address. I looked the hospital up in the phone book. I waited until nobody was home one day and called the psychiatric clinic. I made an appointment.

On the day of the appointment, I took two subways and a bus to get there. I walked in, alone, and said, “I need help.” They had me sign in. Fortunately, I didn’t need parental authorization. And it cost only three dollars.

Someone took me back to meet a doctor wearing a white lab coat over his clothes. I didn’t know anything about therapy. I just hoped someone would tell me how to live. I was surprised when all I got during our first conversation was questions, not answers. Everything was turned around. I wanted the doctor to tell me what to do, and instead he basically turned my questions back on me. It would be quite a while before I realized this was the basis of therapy—it wasn’t about someone leading you through life by the hand.

This doctor, a complete stranger, kind of furrowed his brow and looked away when I talked.

Is he looking at me like I’m crazy?

After that first session, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Still, I decided to try it again. Whatever it took.

Roll up your sleeves
.

The next time I went, though, I asked to see a different doctor. Thankfully, they obliged. The second doctor was named Jesse Hilsen. I didn’t feel self-conscious around Dr. Hilsen. He didn’t look at me like I was nuts. He quickly made me realize that even though I thought the rest of the world was “normal” and that I was the outlier, that wasn’t true. Plenty of other people had issues that plagued them, too. I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t the one person in a million who felt his world caving in, felt himself imploding. Thank God. This was progress.

I was still yearning for some support and reassurance at home, and I told my dad that I had started seeing a psychiatrist. He was dismissive. “You just want to be different,” he scowled.

Then he got angry. “You think you’re the only one with problems?” he shouted.

No, I knew I wasn’t. My sister had problems. And I suspected my dad did, too—though who knew what he was talking about that night when he wanted my forgiveness. But I wasn’t going to succumb to my problems or surrender in the face of them. I was going to try to tackle them. I was going to fight.

I started meeting with Dr. Hilsen every Wednesday after school. I would stop at a deli near the hospital, buy a turkey sandwich with Russian dressing, sit on a bench in Central Park, and eat it—and then go see Dr. Hilsen. Each afternoon when I left, I was already looking forward to the next week. Talking with Dr. Hilsen represented a rope I could hold on to.

Finally, I was doing something—taking charge of my destiny and improving myself. I was rising to the challenge.

I
n early 1968, not long after I turned sixteen, Scott Muni’s
English Power Hour
broadcast a new hit on the British charts called “Fire Brigade,” by the Move. It was about a girl who was so hot that you need to call 9-1-1—run and get the fire brigade.

Now, I was a dyed-in-the-wool Anglophile, and the Move was one of my favorite groups. And what I was doing at that point in terms of song writing was taking inspiration from songs I remembered from the radio. When I heard “Fire Brigade,” I loved the concept. So I sat down and began to hash out a song of my own using the same idea. I hadn’t heard the song enough to actually copy it musically, but I had grasped something that I really liked, and my chorus went like this:

I called the song “Firehouse.” This was real progress. With every new song I wrote, my sense of purpose grew stronger. I may not have had a social life, but I had music and a dream.

So many people are miserable. They need someone to entertain them. Why can’t it be me?

One day at high school a teacher pulled me aside. “Why aren’t you showing up for class? Why aren’t you applying yourself?” he asked me.

“Because I’m going to be a rock star,” I said.

As the guy looked at me, his face betrayed his thoughts:
You poor fool
. Then he forced a half-smile and said, “A lot of people want to be rock stars.”

“Yeah,” I told him, “but I
will
be one.”

Outside of my band, the Post War Baby Boom, I didn’t have anything else in my life—just my guitar, my stereo, and, more and more often, concerts. I envied the kids who had social circles and weekend get-togethers, but I didn’t have any of that. I had not figured out how to be part of things. So I often went to shows by myself. It was something fulfilling.

In 1968 I saw Jimi Hendrix live in a small auditorium at Hunter College on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I saw the Who, the Yardbirds, and Traffic. I saw Otis Redding and Solomon Burke. I saw Hendrix a second time. Virtually every weekend there were multiband bills at the Fillmore East or Village Theater where I could see three bands for three or four dollars. I found myself bathing in music every weekend.

There was a debauched kind of elegance to the British bands: they had great haircuts, they wore velvets and satins, and they were cohesive not only in their musical style, but in their attire and personas. They had individual identities but also a band identity—band members were stylish in a way that complemented one another. They also had a sexuality that American bands of the time didn’t have.

I saw a lot of those American bands, too, like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Most of those groups looked like bums who had just rolled out of bed, alone. Seeing some fat guy with pigtails didn’t appeal to me. When I saw a band with a bearded guy in it, I thought,
What’s Sigmund Freud doing in a rock band?
I think the initial reason for the lightshows they used onstage was to focus attention on the pulsating oils and colors on the screen instead of on a bunch of slobs who looked like they had just finished panhandling. Most American bands looked like a commune gathering. It just didn’t work for me. Combine the look with the way they sounded, and it’s no wonder people took acid at their shows.

I knew, however, acid was not for me. I saw a few people freak out on it at concerts, and I saw a kid from my neighborhood committed after he took it. I figured I was a prime candidate for a one-way ticket to the insane asylum. Better to stay in control. I had too many issues eating at me—too much turmoil—and I’d seen what drugs had done to my sister. I had a steadfast belief that losing control like that would lead me down a bad, bad path.

The British bands became part of the template for what I wanted to do moving forward. And that template became more and more complete in the coming year or so as I saw Humble Pie, Slade, and Grand Funk Railroad, who all created a churchlike atmosphere, a religious connection to their audience. A frontman like Humble Pie’s Steve Marriott was leading a congregation, evangelizing for rock and roll.

I believe!

Of course, while I felt the music in my blood, I needed money to buy concert tickets and guitar strings and imported English music magazines, like
Melody Maker, New Music Express,
and
Sounds,
which I bought at specialized newsstands after taking the bus and subway to Greenwich Village. But jobs were hard to find. So when my mother’s cousin, who owned a Sinclair gas station off the Palisades Parkway, offered me a job at his station, I took it. The first thing I did was buy a rickety old Rambler from him so I could drive to the job after school. I had to go from Harlem, where Music & Art was, across the George Washington Bridge and up to Orangeburg, New York, where the gas station was, work a shift, and then drive all the way home to Queens, several times a week.

It was hard work, partly because of the distance, but also partly because I knew absolutely nothing about cars. I was the most un-mechanical, un-handy person. On one of my first days at work, a car pulled up and the driver said, “Check the oil.” So I opened up the hood and pulled out the dipstick—I knew how to do that. And I knew how to read it. “You’re down a quart,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, “go ahead and put in a quart.”

“Sure,” I said, and I got to work.

After a few minutes the driver asked, “Hey kid, what’s taking so long?” Well, I had a funnel poised above the dipstick hole and was trying to drip the oil in there. I didn’t know there was another place for adding oil. Despite my initial difficulties, this arrangement worked fine for a while—there was even an attractive female attendant whose regulation jumpsuit unzipped as quickly as mine.

Then one weekend, one of the local newspapers—which cost five cents a copy—ran a Sinclair ad with a one-dollar voucher toward gas. Readers could present the voucher for a buck of gas, then the gas station owners would send in the vouchers to get the dollar back from Sinclair. My mom’s cousin had me buy as many copies of the paper as I could, transport them to his station in a borrowed station wagon, and cut out the vouchers. He planned to claim the dollar from Sinclair’s corporate office without ever pumping the dollar’s worth of gas. In exchange, he said he would reimburse me for all the five-cent newspapers I bought and pay me a cut of the money he got from the gas company when he redeemed all the vouchers. I brought in many carloads of papers, and he made thousands of dollars, but he never paid me back for the papers, much less a cut of the money he made. Swindled by my own relative. So I quit.

After that, I got a job at an upscale deli called Charles and Company. It specialized in gourmet cold cuts, cheeses, and canned goods and had locations all around New York. I had to wear a wig to hide my hair. It was tight and gave me a headache, but I worked behind the counter, preparing sandwiches and putting salads and spreads in containers, so it was necessary.

A district manager of the chain came in one day, and after he had conducted his business, he came over to me and said, “You know, you could wind up a manager of one of these stores one day.” I think this was his idea of a motivational speech, but it had the opposite effect on me. I knew this wasn’t where I belonged. God, no. Anything but that.

In the fall of 1968, at the start of my junior year of high school, I learned that the Post War Baby Boom wasn’t where I belonged, either. At least they didn’t think so. Jon Rael and the other members had gone off to college, most of them to Bard and SUNY New Paltz—upstate but not at the ends of the earth. I had figured we might keep playing during their breaks and that maybe I would go up on weekends and play with them. They had other plans. They didn’t tell me I was out of the band; I figured it out when they came home one weekend with another guy—who was a guitar player.

They were still playing together up at college, and this new guy hanging around was part of it now. That hurt, especially because they didn’t tell me. I took stock of the situation and thought about what to do.

I’m going to become a better guitar player
.

But just as important:
I’m going to keep writing songs
.

No, there was something more to it than that:
Make the most of what you have
.
There’s no reason to wait for a band
.

So what if I didn’t have a band? I had songs, and I was writing more of them. By this point I had a reel-to-reel tape recorder I used to make recordings of my songs. With me, the music and melody had always come first, and I filled in the dots—including the lyrics—from there.

Maybe I can get other people to record my songs?

Some of the magazines I bought, like
Hit Parader
and
Song Hits,
printed song lyrics. And at the bottom of the pages where the lyrics were printed was always information on the publishing company and the songwriter.

Well, if I’m a songwriter and need to find an outlet for my songs—and don’t have a band—I guess I need a publishing deal
.

I was such a loner that making a career in music on my own somehow made perfect sense. So I spent a good deal of my junior year calling around to publishing companies and talking my way into auditions to showcase material. The one I remember best was at the Brill Building, because the place was already legendary to me. I went in with my guitar, sat in an office opposite someone who had agreed to meet me, and played songs to this stranger.