Makeup to Breakup (6 page)

Our first love was jazz. We’d dress up in our three-piece suits and slick back our hair and go to the Village Vanguard to see people like Brubeck and Mingus and Monk. But then as our musical palette expanded and Motown was coming in, we got into the Temptations and the Four Tops. Then Phil Spector blew me away. When I heard “Be My Baby,” my balls hit the floor. The sound he got on drums was unbelievable compared to any recorded jazz drumming.

After a while, we started hanging out in Washington Square Park in the Village. Now, instead of suits, people were wearing sweatshirts with the sleeves cut off and chinos with sandals. We’d go to the coffee shops and you’d see Bob Dylan walking in, or Joan Baez. I got to meet the Loving Spoonful, and we’d sit in and play with them at the Night Owl Café. The Village was the place to be.

That’s where we realized that Vietnam was
not
the place to be. People were going thousands of miles from home to die in some jungle. For what? We were savvy enough not to fall for that war. So when Jerry and I got our draft notices, that letter that began with “Greetings,” we were petrified.

“Let’s say we’re gay,” I suggested.

“Let’s say we’re junkies,” he countered. “They’ll never take us.”

So we stuck needles in our arms, putting pinholes in the veins, and reported for our physicals at Whitehall Street. Jerry, being an army brat, had connections, and he was the only son in the family so he immediately got out on a hardship thing. But I was stuck. So I filed in and saw the army shrink.

“Are you gay?” he asked me.

“Absolutely,” I said.

“Do you have any issues with carrying a gun?” he asked.

“Nope. If I had a gun I’d shoot the captain before I went over any hill.”

I was full of bravado, but in the end what got me out of the service were my flat feet.

While I was exploring the city’s musical scenes, I hooked up with a band back in Williamsburg. The Barracudas used to practice in the cellar of a building that the bandleader’s parents owned. His name was Carlos Cancel, and he was about twenty-one. Carlos and his friend Alan Rosen both played guitar and they had a sax player and Carlos’s brother played drums. I was only made my life a living hell would ever about seventeen, but I would stand outside and listen to them practice. One day I got to meet Carlos, and he told me that his brother had just gotten married and was quitting the group.

“Come on down and play with us,” he told me.

I lived about fifteen blocks from them, so my mother helped me bring my drums over to the cellar. She waited outside on the street while I auditioned, and finally I came out.

“Ma, I got the gig!” I said.

Our first job was a bar mitzvah. I had to wear a yarmulke on my head and play “Hava Nagila.” We got paid twenty-five dollars and we got to eat. It was great, my first professional gig. Of course, I gave my mom half of my earnings.

After that we played bars, weddings, everything. Eventually we got a steady job at a local Mafia hangout called the King’s Lounge. The guys would come in with pinkie rings. “How you doin’?” they’d say, and they all had their gal with the big boobs.

Little did Carlos know it, but it was because of him I finally decided that I was going to make music my career. One night, he and I went up to see Joey Greco and the In Crowd play at the Metropole, on Broadway and Fifty-eighth Street. The Metropole was one of the hottest places to see music in the city. There was a long bar at the front of the place with a floor-to-ceiling mirror behind it and a bandstand where both the bands and these go-go girls would perform. It was nonstop music from morning to night, and a huge crowd would gather outside on the sidewalk to watch the girls and listen to the bands.

When we got there, I was talking to Joey, who I knew from the Village. He told me that his drummer broke his leg and asked if I’d replace him for this gig, which was going to run the whole summer. I didn’t even care
about the $125 a week I could earn. I was ecstatic because Gene Krupa was playing there at the same time.

Krupa was my idol. It was my dream to meet him, and now I had a chance to open for him! To me he was the gold standard, the greatest drummer in the world, greater than Buddy Rich, greater than Joe Morello, greater than Louie Bellson. I must have seen his biopic
The Gene Krupa Story
a hundred times. I used to go home and slick back my hair and try to move like him.

I started the gig and I got to see him up close. He was one of the nicest gentlemen you’d ever want to meet, but you could tell he was not happy at this juncture of his life. This was not the Krupa who played with Benny Goodman’s big band, not even the Krupa who had his own forty-piece band. He had been busted for pot, for possessing two joints, in the forties, and he’d spent most of his money fighting the charge but still had to do a three-month sentence. That took a lot out of him. Then the swing era faded but he still did well in the bebop period. So now he was fifty-two but he looked like sixty-two. His hair was graying and he seemed a little bit broken. I remember walking past his dressing room one night and he was sitting in front of the mirror, smoking and drinking from a bottle of J&B scotch, slowly putting his bow tie on because he always wore a tux. It was a haunting, melancholy image, to see my hero like that. How the mighty could fall.

But I was still in awe of Gene. I must have been a pain in his ass, telling him how I worshipped the ground he walked on, but he was always cordial. He showed me a few things on the drums and he always encouraged me.

“You got it, kid,” he’d say. “You could be something someday.”

My heart swelled">predicament.” s” to hear that coming from his lips.

That was all I needed to hear. About halfway through that gig, I confronted my mother. I was in my second year of high school then.

“I want to quit school. I want to play in a band and I promise you, I’ll make it,” I said.

“You don’t have to give me a whole spiel,” she said. She really didn’t have a problem with me not going back to school. She knew I hated it. She knew that playing in clubs would keep me off the streets. And she
remembered a pledge I had made to her one day when we were walking past Madison Square Garden: “Ma, I’m going to play that hall someday,” I vowed.

My father went along with it, too. He hated the aggravation of me going out late at night, not knowing where I was, especially when I came home with cheap wine on my breath and an attitude.

I
had a taste of Broadway, but after the gig at the Metropole was over
I was back at the King’s Lounge in north Williamsburg, playing for the boys with the pinkie rings. One night a guy came up to me during a break.

“I want my nephew to sit in and play,” he said.

I was a cocky kid then. I had a Beatles haircut and I was wearing a black vest with a polka-dot tie and a white shirt and tight pants and Beatles boots.

“Nobody sits in on my drums,” I dismissed the guy.

He threw a fifty-dollar bill on my bass drum. “The kid is going to sit in,” he said firmly.

And then he gave me a look that could kill.

“No problem,” I said meekly, and pocketed the bill.

It was harrowing playing at a Mob joint. I almost expected to see a bomb come in through the window. Every time the door opened and someone walked in, I was scared it might be a guy who was going to take a machine gun out from under his jacket and just level the joint. But one night in the summer of 1966, someone special walked through those doors. She was a tiny little thing with long, silky, beautiful black hair and a really cute face. I’d like to jump on that, I immediately">
We talked between each break and she told me her name was Lydia DiLeonardo, a nice Italian girl. The next day was the Fourth of July, so I
invited her to go to Coney Island with me. We got to the beach and I tried to be very cool. I lit a cigarette, the ash blew back in my eye, and I felt like an idiot. But once I got her on the sand, I was all over it. We were making out like crazy. I don’t think it was love at first sight, but we kept seeing each other. She would come down on the weekends and see me play. We’d go to movies and hang out.

Eventually I asked her to go steady. Why not? She was really smart, going to school for bookkeeping. Back in Brooklyn, if you were going to bring a girl home to Mom and Dad, you wanted an Italian or an Irish or even a good Jewish girl. And Lydia to me was the Bella Donna, the Mother Mary. A real beauty. My parents loved her.

Her parents were another story. They were real Italians from Sicily. They had three sons and Lydia. She took me home for a Sunday dinner one night to meet them and it was right out of
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
The whole family was around the table, which had an abundance of food on it. Her dad was sitting at the head of the table with a gallon of homemade wine in front of him. Her mom and dad and her brothers kept looking me up and down. And they were seeing a skinny kid with hair down to his breast and they weren’t liking the picture one bit. I may as well have been black or gay. I was the enemy. They despised everything that my long hair stood for. What’s worse, I wanted to be a musician—not a dentist, not a car mechanic, not even a plumber. I was a bum in their eyes.

But we didn’t care. After we started going steady, we had sex for the first time in Jerry Nolan’s mom’s bedroom. Then sometimes Lydia would cut school and come to my grandmother’s house and we’d make love in the daytime. We had to keep things undercover back then, because if her family had found out they would have killed both of us.

And if Lydia had found out about Linda, she might have killed me. While I was dating Lydia, I was sneaking off to have fun with a foxy little blonde whose mother owned a funeral parlor. Linda was just sixteen, two years younger than Lydia, and I was crazy about her. I would take Lydia home, then sneak off to the funeral parlor where Linda and I would make out in the coffins, bizarre but true.

When I wasn’t sneaking off to see Linda, I’d sneak off to see Jerry
Nolan. Lydia’s parents lived just blocks from Jerry in Queens. After a date, I used to tell Lydia I was going home and then I’d go over to Jerry’s house. We both wanted to be famous and we knew that image was everything, so we’d sit in front of a tanning lamp, then give ourselves facials with the creams and lotions that Jerry had. Jerry had gone to barber school and he’d razor-cut my hair. We looked like two gigolos!

When I met Lydia, I was still playing with the Barracudas. But that was getting old pretty quick. We were still playing instrumentals like “Tequila” and “Wipeout,” along with some Motown and some Beatles and Stones. I was pushing to play Procol Harum or Hendrix. But Carlos was older, twenty-four or so, and he just didn’t have that feel. He liked Motown but he wasn’t that crazy about the British invasion bands.

Around that time I went to see my friend Joey Lucenti’s band and he had a guy named Pepi Genneralli who played a mean Farfisa organ. Pepi was a great-looking blond, blue-eyed Italian chick magnet. He wasn’t happy in his band either">
We played all over the city. Trudy Hellers, the Night Owl, Café Wha?, the Purple Onion. We worked constantly, playing a month at each club. After a while, we all wore matching double-breasted suits and ties, and we looked sharp. We even got gigs out of town.

Back in 1967, it was amazing how much hatred and disdain you could generate just by wearing your hair long and dressing like Jimi Hendrix. But I didn’t care. I wanted to look like a star all the time. Jerry called it “profiling.” We’d sit in his apartment figuring out what to wear so that people would stare at us. We were total nonconformists, total rebels. In a way, we had just graduated to a different gang.

I’d leave my apartment wearing a purple satin shirt, gold pants, and a velvet jacket and walk to the subway. All along the way, the Puerto Ricans would whistle at me and call me
puta,
which means whore, or
paco,
which meant gay. They’d make kissing sounds and go, “Paco, paco, suck my dick, baby.” But I didn’t care. I was cool, as far as I was concerned.

Coming home it was a different story. My parents had moved to Greenpoint and they lived over a bar. I was back living with them and I had a cool room. I painted the ceiling black and put stars on it so it looked like a galaxy. My mom and dad even grew pot for me on their roof—that’s how cool they were. (Of course, when I finally told them that that leafy green plant they were having so much fun cultivating was pot, they freaked out.) My dad would meet me at the subway at four in the morning when I was coming back from my gigs in the Village and help me with my drums. We had to push the drums fifteen blocks, and the Polish drunks who were coming out of the bars would ridicule me. If I didn’t have a gig, if I had just been clubbing in the Village, they would chase me all the way home and if they caught up to me, they’d push me around and pull my hair, pull out a switchblade and threaten to cut it off. I used to think, You motherfucker, five years earlier I would have fucking broken your knees with a bat. But now I wanted to be a rock star, so I had to endure it.