Face the Music: A Life Exposed (9 page)

Another night, Steve, a bass player named Marty Cohen, and I played a free gig at a coffee shop on Broadway and 111th Street called Forlini’s Third Phase. The place was lined with Styrofoam, and we played with a bunch of amplified gear. We played some originals and some covers, including Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen,” and the crowd got into it. Gene came to that gig, too, because Steve had borrowed some of his gear, and he was clearly impressed.

At some point after that, I answered an ad in the alternative weekly the
Village Voice
for a guitar player. When I rang the number, I found out the guy who had placed the ad, Brooke Ostrander, was the keyboard player in a band looking for a lead guitarist, not a rhythm guy like me. That was the end of that.

But not long afterward, Gene called me and asked whether I would come over to New Jersey and work on a demo tape his group was trying to finish. He wanted me to come for a day or two. I agreed. Strangely, it turned out the group was working at the home of their keyboard player, Brooke Ostrander, and this was the same band Brooke had placed the ad about. Brooke was already a school music teacher. Gene, too, bragged about some white-collar job he had that paid five dollars an hour—a fortune at the time. They had a home tape recording machine as opposed to something fancier that might be used in a studio, but we worked all day. Toward the end of the night, Brooke and I smoked some weed using a big fish-shaped bong. I was absolutely out of my head, and with the workday done, we listened to Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull until it occurred to me that I didn’t know where I was sleeping that night.

“Come on into the bedroom,” Brooke said to me.

Uh-oh
.

That was one of the longest walks I’d ever taken. I wasn’t sure what to do. But when he opened the door, I saw two beds in the room.
Phew! Thank you, Lord
.

Working with Gene like that, I could see that we had some things in common. His family were Holocaust survivors. He was smart and serious. Even though he and Brooke were working in New Jersey, Gene turned out to live only about fifteen minutes away from me in Queens. It also turned out that he’d had a band upstate during college, and they had played live quite a lot. He had a lot to offer. He could sing well and play bass well. He could write songs. Perhaps most importantly, Gene was focused.

One thing I had figured out by then was that talent, like everything else, was just a starting point. What counted was what you did with it. I knew I wasn’t the most talented guitar player or the best singer or the best writer, but I could do all of those things, and I had a complete
vision
of what it was going to take to succeed—a vision that included working, working, working.

Gene wrote a lot of very odd songs. Maybe it was because he was originally from another country? I wasn’t sure. He had one called “Stanley the Parrot” and another called “My Uncle Is a Raft.” He even had one called “My Mother is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.”

Um, okay, that’s a bit weird
.

Still, the more we played together, the better it got. Gene and I liked the same kind of music, and we could sing harmonies well together. I decided I wanted to work with him. I could see a bigger picture now, and despite his idiosyncrasies—as an only child, teamwork was not Gene’s strong suit—we both were intelligent enough to know how to harness ambition. And after all, it would be a lot easier to slay the dragon with a second person to help.

As we continued to rehearse together, Steve Coronel ended up joining us, too, and we slowly started to become something more and more like an actual band.

I
n June 1970 I graduated from the High School of Music & Art, finishing just a few dozen people from the bottom of a very sizable class. I was, in fact, amazed that I had graduated at all, given how little I showed up to class.

Graduating was a mixed blessing. I was glad to have school behind me, but I was scared shitless about being drafted. The Vietnam War was in full swing, and the last thing I wanted was to be drafted. I didn’t need to go to Vietnam any more than I needed to take acid.

During years of building fear, I had managed to accumulate some medical documentation of various problems—like back pain and other things I’d seen a doctor about. One day I went down to Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan with my draft card for induction. They reviewed my records and quickly dismissed me. All my fears, the years I spent anguishing over being sent to Vietnam, had been for nothing. I told my parents the great news, how I had taken all my medical records to prove I wasn’t fit for service. They looked at each other quizzically and said, “Didn’t you know you can’t be drafted?”

“Why?” I asked.

“You’re deaf in one ear.”

Aha
.

Shocked, I thought of all the times I had brought up the subject of the draft during high school. Every male approaching draft age was concerned with what was to come. I had made my fears clear to my parents on many occasions. That was one fear they could have laid to rest for me if they had ever told me I was ineligible for the draft.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” I asked.

They turned to each other, looked back at me, and shrugged their shoulders. Ten more points for my parents.

It was true that I couldn’t tell the direction of sound, but I had never put two and two together. And nobody else had ever put two and two together for me.

At that time, New York state had decided to make college available to any resident, and I thought that despite my bravado about making a career in music, I had better apply to the city college system. I had already stacked the deck so much against myself—maybe this new opportunity could be the safety net I might still need.

Since I hadn’t taken any of the preliminary tests and I had terrible grades, I was admitted to Bronx Community College. I got a student loan and promptly used it to buy a second-hand blue Plymouth Fury to replace my broken-down Rambler.

When I showed up for the first week of classes, I didn’t think many of the people looked like what I considered “college material.” They probably thought the same about me.

Despite the change of scenery, college quickly proved to be a continuation of everything I had hated about school. I still had the same basic problem: I couldn’t hear well enough to follow what was going on. And it wasn’t as if classes took up an hour a day; I was supposed to be there nearly all day. And then there were assignments on top of that. When I thought about the time I would have to devote to college, I began to see it as an obstruction. I was willing to put that much time—and more—into reaching my goal, but this wasn’t helping me do that. In fact, it was detracting mightily from it. It made it impossible. And for what? I was never going to succeed in the classroom. It was just a waste of time, and time, I reasoned, was the most precious thing I had.

This is just more of the same. I don’t belong here
.

This is not for me
.

I thought about the new band, the fact that I was no longer going it on my own. I thought about the ideas I had discussed with Gene—about getting a full-time rehearsal space. Sure, Gene had grown up an only child, his mother telling him he was God’s gift to the world, and Gene believing it. Sure, he had his quirks. But then again, we had real chemistry, and the two of us together were much stronger than either of us on his own. We had a battle plan.

This is not for me
.

To leave yourself no Plan B is a dangerous thing to do. But going to college was taking away from my focus. For a band, focus was success. I needed to live it twenty-four hours a day, not just nights and weekends. Wasting time at Bronx Community College was sabotaging what I was trying to accomplish. I had my Plymouth now, which meant I had transportation to get to and from rehearsals at all hours.

This is not for me
.

After the first week of classes, I never went back.

Out on the street for a living

G
ene Klein lived with his mother and her husband in Bayside, Queens. She called me “the bum.” The three of them lived in a three-story house: a tenant lived on the ground floor, and Gene and his family lived upstairs. One day I was standing in the front yard talking to Gene, who was hanging out the window. His mother leaned out and, in her thick Hungarian accent, said, “Stan, please, this is a quiet neighborhood.”

In other words, I was from the wrong side of the tracks and didn’t understand that things were different here in this nice area of town.

In his mother’s eyes, Gene could do no wrong. If I happened to call when he was in the bathroom, she would say, “the king is on the throne.” Even when he was on the toilet, she believed he created masterpieces. I, on the other hand, couldn’t get a compliment out of my parents if my life depended on it. They went out of their way
not
to compliment me—I think they thought they were toughening me up that way. Gene could do no wrong; I could do no right.

Of course, when you considered the particulars of my situation, it wasn’t so surprising that Gene’s mom thought I was a bum.

My sister and her boyfriend drove around in a van apparently selling drugs and also dropped acid daily, sniffed glue, and did whatever else they did. Ultimately she got pregnant, but by the time she gave birth, she had separated from the guy. I was at the hospital with my parents when my niece, Ericka, was born.

My sister was in no shape to raise a child. She was still struggling with mental illness and still heavily self-medicating. One weekend my father and I rented a van, drove to Boston—where she lived in some sort of commune—loaded all the baby things into it, and carted it all back to my parents’ apartment. The baby was already living with my parents anyway.

From that point on, interaction with Julia almost completely stopped. There was still fear and uncertainty about whether she would try to take Ericka back or start a custody battle with my parents. Once, Julia came to the house to visit and was clearly not well. She was holding Ericka, and suddenly I heard the front door bang open and saw Julia running down the street with the baby. We had to run after her and grab Ericka back. It was terrifying.

As part of my parents’ philosophy of not acknowledging problems, my niece grew up calling my mom—her grandmother— “Mom.” And because my dad wasn’t comfortable choosing what to be called, he became by default “Honey,” which was what my mom called him.

Whereas Gene was a college grad earning good money as an assistant teacher or a clerk—he held several jobs during the first few years I knew him—I had bounced from gas station to deli and dropped out of college. Now I was getting ready to take the exam to become a part-time New York City taxi driver. While other kids in our neighborhoods were studying to get credentials for long-term careers, I had left myself no alternative but to succeed in music. I had no choice but to spend twenty-four hours, seven days a week, plotting how I was going to accomplish that. For me, it was all about work. You can gauge how important something is to you by how hard you are willing to work to get it.

Fortunately for me, despite his mother’s opinion of me, Gene seemed to agree that he and I were better together than on our own. I think our partnership meant more to me at the time, though. With a modicum of approval and somebody to hang out with, I eventually stopped going uptown to see my psychiatrist, Dr. Hilsen. Gene, on the other hand, seemed to have more going on in his life than I did, whether it was girlfriends or jobs or whatever. On the surface, he also seemed more content than I was, more happy-go-lucky. From my perspective, I saw Gene as important to the plan—and the plan was all I had in my life. I had realized after being rejected by publishing companies that I needed a band as a vehicle to get my material out there. On my own, I was at least three people short of the team I needed. In Gene, I felt I had found another key member of the team.

By that stage I had met or seen a lot of people who wanted to be musicians and said they were going to be stars, but most of them didn’t have the discipline and weren’t willing to commit to doing the work. Talent was all well and good; the people who won, however, were the people who worked the hardest. Gene had a work ethic like mine.

Once I landed a job driving for a taxi company called Metro, based near Queens Plaza, I had money when I needed it but still had near-total flexibility. I drove a big Dodge sedan with a flimsy partition between me and the backseat. The business was at a turning point at the time, with fewer and fewer classic cabbies. The old guys with cigars were being displaced by people like me—actors and musicians, people who needed a source of income and a certain amount of freedom. I quickly figured out what the company looked for as a minimum take for a shift, so I could work to the minimum if I felt like it—basically, how hard I worked determined how much I made. I also figured out where the wires were that lit up the bulb in the rooftop “for hire” sign. I learned how to twist it apart without looking under the dashboard. That meant I could take a fare off the meter without risking being caught by a taxi inspector who might see passengers in a cab with the “for hire” sign still lit up—a giveaway that you didn’t have the meter on.

Gene and I rented a rehearsal space on Hester Street in Chinatown, just above Canal Street, in lower Manhattan. The building was what we called “tender wood”: if you lit a match, the whole thing would have gone up. But it was great because we could leave our gear there instead of lugging it around all the time. The full band—me, Gene, Steve Coronel, Brooke Ostrander, and drummer Tony Zarrella—rehearsed there three times a week. But Gene and I were there a lot more than that.

Although I hadn’t initially been too impressed with Gene’s songs, as we gelled, we started to write very effectively together. It was exciting to have a collaborator, someone creative and intelligent to volley ideas with. A writing partner! I didn’t feel alone anymore.

Gene was also a terrific bass player. He could play intricate, interesting runs and sing at the same time—something most people couldn’t do. And his ability to come up with melodic parts to complement chords was a huge plus. Still, although I valued the partnership, I didn’t necessarily value the way he dealt with things. He showed up late to rehearsal a lot of the time and never apologized. It wasn’t unusual for me to wait more than an hour beyond our scheduled meeting time at a subway to go together to the rehearsal space. He was very much about himself.