Authors: Gary Dell'Abate

They Call Me Baba Booey (8 page)

BOOK: They Call Me Baba Booey

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Later on, I would report to my dad on everything I learned about each song from Casey. “Dad, did you know that Dionne Warwick and the Spinners got together to make a record?” I don’t know if he cared or not, but he always pretended to listen.

To this day, when I know something about a song, Howard will say to me, “Who are you, Casey Kasem?” They make fun of Casey on the show a lot. One year a tape leaked out of Casey in the studio, recording his dedications. This one was about a listener’s dog dying and, in the middle of reading the fan’s letter, Casey screwed up and got really pissed. “You come out of these up-tempo numbers and it’s impossible to make those transitions. Fucking up-tempo record every time I do a death dedication! Someone use their fucking brain and not come out of an up-tempo record when I gotta talk about a dog dying.” The first time I heard those tapes I was shocked. I had bought into Casey’s sincerity, hook, line, and sinker. I thought that clip must have been a fake that had been edited together, because Casey wouldn’t talk like that about a dedication. Those things were sacred to him. Still, whenever Howard calls me Casey Kasem and he thinks he’s ripping me, I take it as a compliment.
One time Corey Feldman came on the show and brought along his girlfriend at the time, Casey’s daughter. She was pretty good-looking. When she was in the greenroom I snuck in to tell her how much I loved her dad. I was kind of embarrassed and didn’t want anyone on the show to catch me fawning. I still think it would be cool to meet him.

Anyway, I used all the money I earned mowing lawns and delivering newspapers to buy records. It was an obsession that began when I was five years old. Anthony was ordering some albums from Columbia House record club and my mom said to him, “You gotta let your brother pick one.” I had seen Gary Lewis and the Playboys on Ed Sullivan, and since his first name was Gary and mine was Gary, I decided I liked him. The record came to our house as part of a big package; everyone in the family got something from Columbia House. Since Anthony was the one who placed the order he handed the record to me. It was shrink-wrapped and I tore the plastic off and just stared at the cover, which was green and had the name of the band written in pink letters across it. I couldn’t wait to play their big song, “Everybody Loves a Clown,” but I had to wait; Anthony got to the record player first.

Gary Lewis was my first record, but the first 45 I bought was “Valeri” by the Monkees. It was during the summer of ’68 and I was at my cousin Pat’s in Bensonhurst. We went up to the big record store on Kings Highway and they were having a special: six 45s for one dollar. Pat told me I could choose one. So I did. The B-side of “Valeri” was “Tapioca Tundra.” The stupid shit we remember …

I did my music scouting at Tom’s Coffee Shop in Uniondale, a decrepit, decaying place. Tom was a miserable old fuck who had no business being in a service industry. Over the magazine rack hung a sign:
Free reading material can be obtained at the library
. But we kids never bought anything, magazines or otherwise. It was so dirty you wouldn’t even want a doughnut. We
went there because Tom had a killer pinball machine and a jukebox loaded with new music. That’s where I first heard the song “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes, which even then I could tell was as close to a perfect pop song as possible.

I’d play Bally’s Eight Ball on the pinball machine and listen to the jukebox, then go out to Korvette’s and buy the 45s I liked best for ninety-nine cents a piece. When I came home I stacked all my 45s on a shelf in my room, right next to my bed, in alphabetical order. If I had two 45s by the same artist, they were placed chronologically.

If nothing else in my life could be orderly, at least my music would be.

Because my dad was an ice cream salesman, we took all of our family vacations in winter. (Summers I went to Brooklyn for six weeks to visit my mom’s brothers and sisters. I may have been the only kid on Long Island who actually moved
into
the city when school ended.) It was ironic, since the most we could afford to do was drive to the Poconos for skiing—and no one in my family actually knew how to ski.

My dad didn’t own a ski coat, ski gloves, or ski boots. He was never a suburban guy; he was just a guy from the city who happened to raise a family in the suburbs. If he could have, he would have skied in his brown double-knit pants and a pair of black leather shoes. He probably would have looked more comfortable.

The most memorable ski vacation we took was in the winter of 1970. It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Uniondale to the house we rented in the Poconos. To a nine-year-old kid it seemed like ten hours. We were piled in my dad’s red Chevy Impala, a company car, and we listened to WABC on the radio.

Normally my dad liked listening to WOR talk radio in the car. That was my first education in radio. I still can recite the
lineup for WOR: Bob Grant was the original angry, abrasive conservative guy. He was Glenn Beck before there was Glenn Beck. He would argue with the callers, yell at them, and tell them they were stupid. Then he’d invite them to come down for a fight. “I’ll beat you on the head,” he’d yell. My father would laugh. It was like professional wrestling. It was riveting. Long John Nebel would come on late at night. He’d tell insane stories about spaceships landing on the roof of the WOR building.

But on family road trips we’d listen to WABC, which was the station everyone in New York tuned into and everyone in the country followed. Programmers from Cleveland or Dallas would come to New York for a week, stay in a hotel, listen to WABC, copy the jingles and the station breaks and the pacing, and then take it all back home. Anywhere you went in the tri-state area and beyond, you could listen to WABC, which was a 50,000-watt AM station. We call stations with signals that powerful flamethrowers. Back then, with fewer channels, you could get WABC as far away as Boston. We definitely didn’t have to change the channel on the way to the Poconos.

Every year, during the last two weeks of the year, WABC would do a Top 100 countdown, only it would play the songs all out of order. The DJ would play No. 50, then No. 72. That was the hook to make you listen. You could send in a self-addressed stamped envelope when the two weeks were up if you wanted the whole list in order. But in the Chevy Impala on the way to that vacation in 1970, the year the Carpenters’ “Close to You” became a massive hit, Steven showed me a different way to keep track.

He bought a composition notebook and, before we left the house, listed the numbers 1–100 in the margins of the first few pages. For the next two and a half hours we listened to WABC intently, filling in all the songs as we went along. We never finished it (sorry, this isn’t a Capra movie), but it did teach me new
ways to obsess over music. Soon after that vacation I was studying it and collecting it in a passionate way. First I’d put a record on my parents’ record player. Then, after a verse, I’d lift the needle and write down the lyrics in my composition notebook. I repeated the process over and over, for hundreds of songs.

I also began to study liner notes. I liked knowing who guested on which track. It was important to me to see that on one of Linda Ronstadt’s songs Andrew Gold did the claps in the background. Amassing a record collection became my all-consuming hobby. From an early age I thought of myself as a collector. I even used my mowing money to buy rock-and-roll trivia books and plastic sleeves for all my albums. Look, if you wanted them to sound good, they had to be handled correctly.

When I was in seventh grade and Steven moved out of the house, he gave me the collection of records he kept in orange crates. I put every piece of music I owned into the crates—alphabetically by artist, then chronologically. I can still picture the cover for the Allman Brothers’
Eat a Peach
, because that was always the first album in the pile.

Steven’s gift left me with hundreds of new records to thumb through and listen to and learn about. I sat on the floor at our record player for hours listening to the most obscure stuff and reading liner notes as if they were holy scripture. That era, the early to mid-’70s, was the height of the storytelling songs, like “The Night Chicago Died” and “Billy Don’t Be a Hero.” These were bad songs with bad stories, but every verse advanced the narrative. You had to listen to the whole song to figure out what happened. The collection in the orange crates was the greatest gift anyone had ever given me. (Until Steven topped it for Christmas 1975 when he bought me all the records on my wish list: Jefferson Starship’s
Red Octopus
, Pink Floyd’s
Wish You Were Here
, and the record that changed my life, Springsteen’s
Born to Run.)

I didn’t realize how singular my passion was until late in seventh
grade, after nearly a year of picking through Steven’s collection. I was in an art class and it was close to the end of the 1974 school year. Our teacher was a hippie who had the windows open and music playing on a radio. I looked totally cool that day in a pair a flame red bell-bottoms, and I was about to prove I was so much cooler. As we were painting and listening to the music, the song “Band on the Run” came on. The cute girl at the easel next to me said, “Who sings this song?” Without hesitating I said, “Paul McCartney and Wings.” Then “Benny and the Jets” came on and she asked the same question. “Elton John,” I said. I wasn’t showing off. I wasn’t even all that nervous when I answered. The responses came as naturally as breathing. Finally, the song “Be Thankful for What You Got” came piping through. “Who’s this?” she asked. “Oh, that’s William DeVaughn,” I said.

“Wow,” she said. “You listen to a lot of radio.” I don’t know if she was impressed when she said that or if she meant something more like,
Wow, you loser, you must stay home and listen to the radio a lot
. But I took it as a compliment. I liked that I had a lot of knowledge about something and that someone recognized it. It made me proud. And it still does.

Sometime in 2004, we had Adam Duritz, the lead singer for Counting Crows, on the show and he was claiming to know everything about ’80s music. We had just been sent a collection of twenty CDs loaded with ’80s classics. So we started playing hits from those days and quizzing Duritz as well as a guy who called in and claimed to be an ’80s music trivia whiz, too. The first song was “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield. Duritz knew the performer and the song; the caller did not. Next was “867-5309” by Tommy Tutone. Same results. The third song was “Harden My Heart” by Quarterflash. Again, Adam got it and the caller didn’t. Finally, for a challenge, we played “Believe It or Not,” the theme song from the TV show
The Greatest American
Hero
. Adam knew the song title but not the performer—Joey Scarbury. But I did.

We had been looking for another fan-centered segment like “Win Fred’s Money,” in which listeners competed against Fred to answer rapid-fire trivia questions to try to separate him from his cash. During a break that day, I said to Howard, “I could do a music trivia game. We should make a bit about it on the show.”

“Okay,” he said. “Set it up.”

We called it “Stump the Booey” and the premise was simple: Beat me in a five-question contest about ’80s music trivia and you win ten thousand dollars. I rarely lost. One of the highlights was when a guy took me into four overtimes—nine questions—before it was finally settled. I won on the song “Lawn Chairs Are Everywhere” by Our Daughter’s Wedding. My reaction when I won: “You’d know the song if you bothered to turn on the radio during the 1980s.” Pretty soon I was getting hate mail for being such a jerk.

I love being “that guy” when it comes to music knowledge. I was once at one of my son Jackson’s baseball games when a father from the opposing team approached me. He introduced himself and said he was a fan of the show, but that’s not why he wanted to talk. He was working on a graduation video for a relative and wanted to know who sang the song “I Can See Clearly Now.”

I told him, “It depends. Are you looking for the original version made famous by Johnny Nash in the seventies or are you looking for the Jimmy Cliff remake for the movie
Cool Runnings?”

He walked away happy. For a moment I felt like I was back in seventh grade.