Читать книгу Tony Visconti: The Autobiography: Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy - Morrissey - Страница 9

Three men made the greatest difference to my career: Milton Anderson (also known as Drake), Dr Israel Silverman and Leon Block were my mentors, to whom I owe an enormous debt. But they came along a little later. First I had to survive early childhood.

From the area where I was born you can look across the Narrows to Staten Island where the Statue of Liberty is sited—you don’t come more New York than me. The area of Brooklyn where I was born is called Dyker Heights. I arrived on 24 April 1944 at Victory Memorial Hospital, I was a war baby. None of my family was involved in the fighting; my father was drafted too late. Avoiding war would be a tradition I would carry on when I avoided the dubious Vietnam War draft in my own unique way. My mother says that she named me for the British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden—the fact that Anthony was also my father’s name was irrelevant according to her.

In the early years of their marriage my parents were living in various homes with relatives, in Red Hook, Flatbush and, ultimately, Bay Ridge—all located in Brooklyn. My mother’s name is Josephine, her maiden name was Ciampo and she was born in America. My grandparents Gennaro and Rachela arrived from Italy in separate years, and came through Ellis Island in the early 1900s. Emigration from Italy was not the result of any one single event. Overpopulation, high taxation, unemployment and a wish for property of their own were all factors in driving the migration to ‘the land of the free’. From 1870-90 an estimated 355,000 Italians went to the United States. Many quickly sent word back home of the prospects that existed in America. Initially it was mostly people from Northern Italy who made the journey. In the spring of 1898 there were food riots in many regions of Italy after a smaller than expected wheat harvest the previous summer. Faced with increasing economic problems at home the steady stream of émigrés became a flood. Between 1890 and 1914 nearly four million Italians went to L’America.

When my grandparents arrived the Irish-American immigration officer couldn’t spell Ciampo so he shortened it to Campo; it’s something that happened to lots of immigrants. My grandparents bought a house in Red Hook (now called Boerum Hill), although when I was growing up it was simply known as ‘Downtown’ Brooklyn. My Dad, Anthony Ferdinand Visconti, was born in 1917 in Jersey City, New Jersey, very much a contemporary of Frank Sinatra. At some point in his early years his family moved to Warren Street in Brooklyn, which is where he met my mother. They became childhood sweethearts and stayed together all their lives until my dad passed away in 2005.

Like most people my recollections of my early years are patchy, although I do remember riding a tricycle when I was about two or three. One afternoon I rode my little tricycle around the corner and I got lost; I started crying. Someone came up to me and asked me my name. ‘I’m Simon Ackerman,’ I replied. A strange answer, but not so strange because at the time there was a radio commercial for an insurance company; the sign-off line for the advert was. ‘What’s my name?—Simon Ackerman.’ I had heard this so often that it seemed the obvious answer.

My idyllic life in sunny Ocean Parkway came to an end when my parents decided to move briefly to my grandfather’s house. He lived alone because my grandmother had been in hospital for about ten years having fallen out of a window. She was paralysed from the waist down and over the years dementia had taken hold to the point where she didn’t really recognize anyone and was kept alive by basic feeding and care.

Grandfather Campo could speak almost no English; he never bothered or needed to learn, living as he did amongst the Italian community in New York. He spoke in a strong Neapolitan accent and made a great living as a fruit salesman. He walked around Brooklyn all day with a big wooden cart full of fruit, mainly bananas, and used the few words of English that he knew. He would yell out at the top of his lungs, in a very raspy voice ‘BANANA’, he also knew the words for American money (‘ten-a cents-a’; ‘a quarter-a’). He was a feisty guy, full of spirit. He was fun to live with except that the neighbourhood where he lived was terrible; it was little more than a slum.

The house was rat-infested. We had this incredible cat called Tommy, a huge tabby with a scarred face from having been in too many fights. Best of all he was a champion ratter. He would regularly drop a big plump rat at the feet of my grandfather to show what a great job he was doing. I was very wary of rats as a little kid; I instinctively knew I was an easy target. When I was about five my mother went to the corner shop and for the first time left me at home alone for a few minutes. As soon as she was gone the rats intuitively knew I was alone. They could hear me or smell me and all of a sudden there was much scurrying in the wall cavities, and it wasn’t just a little bit of scurrying; I could hear what sounded like twenty to thirty rats. I thought they were coming to get me. I started to scream at the top of my lungs. Fortunately, a tenant of my grandfather’s, on the top floor of our three-storey building, came running down to see what was the matter. He wrote a note to my Mum. ‘The rats scared me I am upstairs in Dominic’s apartment’, signed Anthony. My mother never left me alone again. Shortly afterwards my father was asleep with his arm hanging over the side of the bed and was bitten by a rat; his finger became so swollen it looked like a small salami.

Many Italians lived on our street. Next door was a family of Sicilians and above us was also a Sicilian immigrant, a tenant. The older people only spoke Italian and really didn’t speak too much about the old country, one that held bitter memories. If anything they talked about America and making money. Italian music would pour from windows, either from 78-rpm gramophone records or from the non-stop Italian broadcasting on AM Radio; the DJs only spoke Italian. The smell of red sauce pervaded the air and more often than not Italian food was the main fare on our table every night. My mother’s mother was an excellent cook by all accounts and she taught my mother well. I remember that the Italians kept to themselves, yet there was an undermining class distinction amongst them. The Neapolitans (us) thought that we were better than the Sicilians; I was brought up to believe this too. But it wasn’t an issue because I played with the Sicilian kids next door, who were every bit as American as I am. In fact, I felt rebellious about the amount of peasant Italian culture that was forced on me and I held my ears shut when my mother or grandfather tried to speak Italian to me. It was different for my father as his mother never taught him Italian because she wanted her children to grow up as 100 per cent Americans.

Our neighbourhood was predominantly Italian but there were also Puerto Ricans living at the other end of the street, and a couple of Arab families. Back then it was a broken down working-class neighbourhood, today apartments there go for about half a million dollars and up.

My mother sang all day long when she was cooking and doing her housework; she would sing in both Italian and English. My Dad, a carpenter by trade, was an amateur accordion and harmonica player; he also sang bass in a barbershop quartet. The quartet sometimes rehearsed in our kitchen and the strains of ‘Sweet Adeline’ became ingrained in my young brain—all four parts.

When I was five years old my parents bought me a plastic ukulele. I had seen it in the window of a toy store and I wanted it. It was not just any old ukulele, but a Popeye ukulele, with transfers of the great man, Olive Oil, Wimpy and Swee’Pea on it. Each nylon string was a different colour—the A string was blue, the D string was red, the F sharp string was yellow and B string was green; with it was a book on how to play a dozen or so songs. Songs like ‘Ain’t She Sweet’, ‘Side by Side’, ‘Goodnight Ladies’—really old songs from the 1920s and 30s. Although I couldn’t read music the chord symbols were easy to read since the ukulele has four strings; the first chords you learn are all done within the first three frets, because most use open strings and require only one or two fingers to press the frets of the rest. The coloured strings corresponded to the coloured strings in the book. I taught myself every chord in the book; it only took an hour. I realize now that even as a five-year-old I had good powers of concentration.

Next I learned how to sing the songs, many of which I already knew. Before long I was strumming my ukulele and singing at the top of my lungs. My parents, and everyone who heard me, were impressed and for quite a few years afterwards I was a ‘party piece’. My repertoire of chords had increased to at least fifty, and by the time I was seven I was looking for a much bigger instrument. My ambition was to graduate to the guitar, but my father’s guitar was way too big for me and the strings were steel and too high from the frets. It was a better cheese cutter than a musical instrument. I just needed to become bigger, but in the interim I played the larger baritone ukulele.

Around the corner from our house in Warren Street was Wyckoff Street and the families that lived there were predominantly African-American; I didn’t grow up feeling a victim of racial hatred, but occasionally the young kids there felt bored or feisty and they would come around the corner and beat up the Italian or Hispanic kids. It wasn’t so much a racial thing as their street against our street. Conversely our back yard, about 20 by 10 feet, where my grandfather grew tomatoes, bordered on the back yard of an African-American family and my mum and the mother of that family were on great speaking terms.

We lived near the Gowanus Canal and on more than one occasion, when gang warfare broke out, we’d hear of a body found floating in the canal. My parents decided that the neighbourhood was getting a little too rough and so my grandfather sold the house and we all went to live at my other grandparents’ house; we moved in with the Viscontis.

My father’s father was Nicholas Viciconti. My father grew tired of kids making fun of his surname in school (Anthony Visit-The-Country). My grandfather told him that a long time ago the family name was Visconti, so my father changed our family name to Visconti when he was old enough. Nicholas, who was connected with the early Italian mobs, was a very talented violinist. He knew loads of songs and my father and I—I was about seven years old—would play with him at least once a week. Nicholas claimed that he played in bars with Jimmy Durante, a famous singer/comedian whose career stretched from the ’30s to the ’60s. Durante played piano and he had a sidekick called Eddie Jackson who did most of the singing and soft shoe dancing. It sounded like my grandfather did this on a regular basis and I had no reason not to believe him. But he never became a professional musician whereas Durante went on to form a vaudeville trio called Clayton, Jackson and Durante. He pursued a solo career and was enormously successful as a comedy actor and host of his own television show.

Nicholas was a sharp dresser; he made a lot of money in the wholesale vegetable and fruit business in what is now Tribeca in Manhattan—he operated from a large warehouse on Vesey Street close to the site of the World Trade Center. I have seen photos of him wearing a three-piece suit with a very thick gold watch fob and wearing white spats over his shoes, topped off with a white fedora on his head. That business was controlled by the Italian mob; Nicholas casually admitted to me one day that he had counted Al Capone as a friend.

He made enough money to keep a love nest in Manhattan with a beautiful, ginger-haired Irish mistress. He went home to Brooklyn at the weekend and gave my grandmother a weekly allowance to feed herself and the three small children; he would often beat my father and yell abusively at my grandmother. The stock market crash of 1929 ruined him. He took my uncle Eddie (as moral support, I guess) to his love nest and paid off the mistress to get rid of her; my uncle Eddie was only a small boy, but when he came back he told the rest of the family that she was a beautiful woman. Thereafter my grandfather moved back in with Elizabeth, his wife, and she nagged him every single day of the rest of his life. Nicholas was actually a very kind man by the time I was a little kid. He slept in his own room to escape the rants of my grandmother. His lucrative business was now reduced to just selling brown paper bags to the fruit merchants; he could never afford to build up his inventory of farm produce after the crash.

My grandmother, Elizabeth, came from a well-educated family in Rome, where her father was a judge and others in the family were lawyers; her maiden name was Cantasano. She became betrothed to my grandfather without ever meeting him. All she knew before setting out for New York was that her husband-to-be came from a wealthy New York Italian family. She was sent to New York. She arrived in America, with a big trunk, in which was a dowry. My grandfather was told by his parents to go and meet his future bride and bring her home. Off he went to the port, or so he pretended, before returning home without her, lying that she’d missed the boat. Having been born and raised in New York he did not want to marry an immigrant girl from the old country.

Ironically my grandmother was a very cultured woman. My great-grandfather was a very forward thinking man and had sent all his children to some form of higher education, and so she spent a year at university in Rome, which was very unusual for any woman in the early twentieth century. She spoke about three languages fluently, Italian, Greek and Albanian, and later on she picked up Yiddish and Spanish in New York working in a sweatshop—she was a very smart lady. Alone in New York, she went to an address she had been given of some relatives where she stayed for a few months. Eventually my grandparents met and they married, but it was no fairytale ending and proved to be a very stormy marriage.

Although my earliest memories of my grandparents were that they would fight all the time, constantly bickering and yelling, the sixty- to seventy-year-old grandfather I came to know was a lovely man, a real cool guy by then. He taught me how to play the mandolin and I have fond memories of my father, my grandfather and I sitting around the kitchen table playing old songs.

I was around six when we went to live with the Visconti family on 74th Street between 11th and 12th Avenue. It’s the area of New York that I think of as home, a very safe neighbourhood that I later learned was mob controlled. Most people who lived in this neighbourhood were simple Italian folk, just like back in the old country, and the traditional Italian hierarchy controlled everything. Many years later I asked my mother why there were hardly any other ethnic groups living in our neighbourhood. Most everyone was Italian, Irish and Catholic, with just a few Norwegian Lutherans; there was a conspicuous absence of other ethnicities.

‘Well, you know who lives down the hill don’t you?’

‘No, who does?’

She mentioned the name of a very prominent Italian family who have been known to indulge in many Soprano-like activities.

‘They ran the neighbourhood, even the real estate agents. If a Black family came to our neighbourhood and asked to see homes the estate agents would say that all the homes were taken and they had nothing even coming up on their books.’

This general neighbourhood is the one made famous in Saturday Night Fever. The opening scene in which John Travolta walks beneath the elevated train is 86th Street. The place where he bought a pizza is one where I bought pizza slices many times as a kid.

I wanted to be a pop star since before I was a teenager. I’ve got photos of me posing as Elvis and also—even though I didn’t need them—with horn-rimmed glasses posing as Buddy Holly. By the age of eleven my parents realized two things: I definitely had musical talent, and my hands were big enough for me to have a guitar. Being a precocious kid I used to play my ukulele at the drop of a hat, I had no shame. I remember one exasperated relative asking, ‘Do you always bring that ukulele with you?’ Getting a guitar coincided with Elvis Presley’s arrival on the scene, not that my parents were keen on my learning to play that kind of music, so they sent me to a very good guitar teacher in Ocean Parkway, Flatbush, called Leon Block. I would take the bus from Fort Hamilton Parkway carrying my new guitar in its cloth case for my weekly half hour lessons; from day one he began to teach me to read music. Within a few months my repertoire was hundreds of songs, having quickly relearned everything I knew on the uke. I learned from books that Leon Block had published which had simplified guitar arrangements of popular songs, like ‘Que Sera Sera’, ‘The Shrimp Boats are a Coming’, and ‘All Shook Up’. He wrote them in keys that were easier for a beginner guitarist to play.

After a few months Leon Block said, ‘I want you to try this out, you’re a good reader now.’ He opened a piano book called Two Part Inventions by J. S. Bach; this was a whole new level for me. They are quite difficult pieces for above average intermediate piano students. They have independent melodies for the left hand and right hand; each ‘invention’ was in a different key. The fifteen pieces teach independence for each hand, which is tricky on the piano, and even more difficult on the guitar, even though Segovia had adapted some. Leon Block would tell me to learn the treble clef part for the right hand and then he’d play the left hand bass clef part, so that we played a duet.

The first time I played one of these pieces my mind made a quantum leap—this was real music, I thought. During lessons I forgot about Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Buddy Holly. I had been quite unaware of the guitar’s versatility until Leon Block pointed out that it was capable of being a mini orchestra with almost the same potential as a piano. After we went right through Two Part Inventions I began learning the bass clef and we reversed our roles. During the two years I studied with Leon Block I got into classical music, flamenco and jazz—his musical influence, the first major one I’d had, has stayed with me always.

I worked away at home practising every day to improve my playing. My ear-training made it easy for me to learn the cute little solo on ‘Party Doll’ by Buddy Knox in a couple of minutes. The same was true of Buddy Holly’s songs, although the intro to ‘That’ll Be the Day’ took a little longer as it was quite tricky. At 13, I began playing in a couple of different bands, one of which was called Mike D and the Dukes, and played my first paying job with them, an Italian wedding for which I was paid five whole dollars.

Like most other kids growing up in this golden era of rock and roll I was riveted to the radio by the great music that was being played. I worshipped DJs Alan Freed and Jocko. I couldn’t wait to hear the next single from Little Richard, Fats Domino, groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and The Cleftones. I was thrilled by a song called ‘Little Darlin” because Freed would play the ‘white’ version by The Crewcuts and Jocko would play the ‘black’ version by The Gladiolas. Rock and roll was an alternate universe where I wanted to live.

As a singer I joined a doo-wop group on my street called The White Bucks, named after the shoes that Pat Boone made popular. Our best song was also called ‘White Bucks’. Besides singing doo-wop I loved dancing to it, especially the slow songs, and particularly with a girl named Rosemary. We were part of a little neighbourhood gang of kids, not a real gang, but just a bunch of friends; there were about a dozen of us. On Friday nights we would go down to my friend’s basement and unscrew the white light bulb in the ceiling and screw in a red one. We’d play 45 rpm records and dance. Two songs I particularly remember dancing to were ‘In the Still of the Nite’ by the Five Satins and ‘Pledging My Love’ by Johnny Ace, probably due to the fact that they aided my erotic stimulation. They were played over and over again and we would dance ‘The Fish’ which evolved to ‘The Grind’, which leaves nothing to the imagination. You would just hold your girl as close as possible and grind your hips together while pressing your chest against her chest; it was as close as I got to real sex at twelve.

Best of all was the chance to dance with Rosemary. She had very rounded hips, an Italian beauty with dark curly hair, a sweet face and very ample breasts (us guys would debate whether they were a C or D cup—a favourite pastime). It was always a fight to get to dance with her and she knew it—we all knew it. One or two dances with Rosemary in an evening were the closest thing to heaven. I once casually, and totally accidentally, brushed my hand on the side of her breast while we were dancing and she slapped me in the face so hard, I heard bells and saw stars. It was okay to grind erotically but not to touch. It was at an early age I started learning the rules of sexual etiquette on the dance floor. It was at this time in my life that I learned what ‘blue balls’ were. I will always associate slow dowop with teenage sex—or lack of.

Alan Freed would host rock ‘n’ roll shows at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre. I went as often as I could, as soon as I could take the subway by myself. I usually went in a mixed group and we had to queue from about 6 a.m. to get into the first show, which started at 9 a.m. We would be kicked out after the show because there was a new group queuing for the second show. On one occasion I managed to hide in the men’s room and saw the show all over again. I saw Fats Domino, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry all in the same show. With hindsight I find it totally amazing that these guys performed show after show all day long. Usually it was six shows a day with each of them performing a couple of numbers. Sam the Man Taylor led the house band, which was more like a Count Basietype band playing Be Bop, big band and jazz. They would back artists like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, The Cleftones, Mickey and Sylvia and The Cadillacs. Many of the ‘cats’ were top session players who played on the original recordings made in New York.

Most of these records were 12-bar blues or the famous ‘Heart And Soul’ chord changes. C-A minor-D minor-G7—no one played them better than these guys. Of course not everyone was backed by Sam the Man’s house band. If in the darkness you heard a buzz from an amp on the stage you knew it was either Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley because someone was plugging in their guitar; kids would scream because they knew that one of your three guitar heroes was about to come out. If it was Buddy Holly he would come running on stage followed by Jerry Allison and the other Crickets and launch into ‘That’ll be the Day’, or ‘Oh Boy’. Afterwards we would go around to the backstage door to try and get autographs: I got Little Richard’s and Mickey ‘Guitar’ Baker’s; Mickey and Sylvia had a big hit in 1957 with ‘Love is Strange’. Later these shows moved to the New York Paramount and so it was a longer subway ride. Alan Freed stopped doing the shows and Murray the K, another DJ, took over. Both venues have since been torn down, but I’m left with vivid memories of an exciting and magical time in our musical history.

In High School I auditioned for the orchestra and was assigned the double bass. I picked it up immediately because the top four strings of the guitar are the same tuning, it was a no-brainer. We played Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess suite in an arrangement for a high school orchestra. Besides the orchestra I played in the marching band but instead of plucking I was blowing, I played the tuba. During the lunch period in my senior year I took a string class and I would sometimes play the cello, which I taught myself. However, most of the time there were too many cello players and I would be the only bass player, which meant I played the cello part of a string quartet, but an octave lower.

In my second year I took music appreciation classes with Dr Israel Silberman who would play us classical music and tell us why we should like these pieces. He really was a great guy who also gave the string classes during the lunch break. In Music Theory class he would play us a string quartet and then say, ‘Now listen to the next sixteen measures carefully. I want you to write out the second violin part. Ignore all the other parts, the first violin, the viola, the cello part, write the second violin part.’ This was fantastic training for my ears. I had three glorious years of this, while everything else about school was horrible—I hated it. If it had not been for Dr Silberman I’m not sure I’d be in the music business today. He was the second greatest musical influence in my life.

We did an annual show called Sing. I was the leader of the pit band in my sophomore and Junior years and then in my final year I was President of the senior Sing—I was in charge of the whole thing. A friend of mine, David Geffen, who later formed Geffen Records, Geffen Music and Geffen Films and generally became an all around music industry legend, took the role of treasurer. One of the main guys in Sing was Gary Lambert, a talented trumpet player. He was so handsome; girls adored him. Tragically, like a lot of my friends, Gary died in the Vietnam War. His father was a top New York session violinist and I’m sure Gary would have become one of the world’s greatest trumpet players. (He died of a heroin overdose in Vietnam; ironic, really, as he never used heroin before being drafted.)

In my senior year I met my teenage sweetheart, Bunny Galuskin. She came from a Jewish family and for the next four years we lived our version of West Side Story. Although my family loved her, our relationship had to be kept a secret from her parents. Ironically her aunt ran off with an Italian boy and the family held a funeral for her, sat Shiva. Her grandfather eventually lost his mind over losing his daughter.

With all my music interests I had little time for English, maths or history and I failed these subjects miserably. I barely graduated by the skin of my teeth. When I was fifteen I spent the summer working as a musician in the Catskill Mountains, and I assumed I was done with school. When I got back to New York City in September they sent round a truant officer to the house who said I had to be in school as I was still under 16 and not of legal age to leave. So very reluctantly I went to night school and completed two history classes that I had failed. Finally I passed the Regents exam and got my High School diploma, which made my mother very happy. For me it made no difference; I just couldn’t wait to get out into the world and be a full time musician.

Before all that happened and while I was still at school I had made my first real foray into the world of recording with a neighbourhood guy called Carl Pace. A songwriter and entrepreneur called Jay Fishman wanted to cash in on the duo thing; we were supposed to be the new fourteen-year-old Everly Brothers. Carl, who was being tutored by Jay, found me through the neighbourhood grapevine. Jay named us the Taylor Kids and took us to a small record company, Dorset Records, to cut a song called ‘The Kite’. Bob Lissauer, whose claim to fame had been discovering the Kalin Twins, who had a massive hit with ‘When’, ran the label. While this was not quite the Brill Building it was the next best thing; it was located in another music biz building around the corner on 55th Street between Broadway and 7th Avenue. The orchestrator who wrote the arrangement for the Kalin Twins arranged our record, which had the opening lines, ‘Upon my brand new kite right there in plainest sight, I went and painted your name in letters two-feet high.’ How could anyone forget a lyric like that?

Looking back it seems like a dream, so much so that I can remember very little of the recording session—which is a shame as it should have been something I’d always treasure. I do remember the guitarist in the band was Everett Barksdale, a prodigious session player who recorded with Art Tatum, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, Dinah Washington and Sammy Davis Jr.

This was not our first session for Jay Fishman, we’d done one about a year earlier—it was a disaster. Jay wanted us to do six songs in one day and quite honestly I had never worked so hard in my life. On top of which I was due to take my girlfriend, who was a year older than me, to her prom that night. After the session I took my hired tuxedo to her house to change, but before I could I was violently ill in her bathroom—there was some blood involved. A doctor came and put me to bed and I was diagnosed with a very mild case of tuberculosis, which was not helped by the fact that I was already smoking cigarettes. As an asthmatic with a history of bronchial troubles I shouldn’t have been smoking, nor should I have been working so hard. It forced me to slow down, temporarily.

This enforced break allowed me to spend time with my other passion, photography. I was around eight years old when I really got keen; my father had a great folding roll film camera that used what is now an obsolete size, 616. He showed me how to frame a picture in the viewfinder and to guess the exposure (a guide was on the box the film came in). I would take a few pictures on a roll and then wait maybe weeks for my Dad to finish the roll and get it developed at the drug store. As a treat I was given my own roll of film occasionally and I took some decent photos. He showed me how to take long exposures at night by setting the shutter to ‘bulb’ and resting the camera on a sturdy surface. When I was around nine or ten I was taking experimental photos by moonlight and streetlight.

When I was in my early teens I started to see ‘available light’ photos in magazines, mainly of jazz musicians. I could tell that no flash was used (I hated photos with flash). I started to buy photography magazines that had articles on the new, faster Tri-X film and that the speed could be ‘pushed’ during development. As luck would have it the flat underneath us was vacated by my uncle Eddie and a family moved in by the name of Rizzo. Frank Rizzo was a professional photographer and he took a keen interest in me. I told him I was so unsatisfied with the way pictures came back from the drug store and didn’t look anywhere near as good as pictures in Life magazine; he showed me to his darkroom and I was hooked. He showed me how to develop black and white negative film, how to load the film onto a developing reel in complete darkness, how to mix the chemicals from powder, how to heat them and maintain temperature throughout development—and how to ‘push’ the speed. As an old-timer he was completely against grainy black and white photos but it didn’t stop him from showing me how. Then he taught me how to ‘crop’ a negative, to enlarge only parts of it to make a better composition, and how to choose the right contrast paper to make the best print—all sorts of techniques. I saved my money and bought the cheapest enlarger I could get, but Frank said that the most important part was the lens and I didn’t chintz on that. I got the money from gifts from relatives and from my weekend work as a musician; by the time I was 14 I had a fully functional darkroom in my bedroom and I would fall asleep to the stench of chemicals after a heavy printing session.

When I went off to the Catskill Mountains it was a little like my own version of Dirty Dancing, only I wasn’t dancing. If you don’t live in New York, or even if you do and you’re under 40 years old, the lore of the Catskills will be a mystery to you. It was a great summer retreat, predominantly for Jewish families; there were literally hundreds of hotels up there. I say up there because it’s about a hundred and ten miles north of New York City. The first summer I was there, when I was 15, I played at the Granite Hotel in the odd-sounding town called Kerhonkson. The owner of the hotel was Irwin Gewurtz, a great guy. I was in a band called Ricardo and the Latineers. Ricardo, whose real name was Richard Ritz, was not Latin American, nor was Artie Butler or Bruce Karp, the other players in the band; they were all Jewish kids from Flatbush, Brooklyn. They loved Latin-American music, which was very popular in the late ’50s and early ’60s. They asked me to play guitar for the summer—it was a no-brainer. It got me away from my parents’ house for two and a half months and they paid me $50 a week, which was pretty good money back then. We got room and board and we had tax taken out so at the end my weekly salary was $39 and change. We worked six nights a week and on our night off we would drive back to Brooklyn.

Artie Butler went on to become a very famous arranger, producer, conductor and composer working with Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Neil Diamond, Dionne Warwick, Barry Manilow, Barbra Streisand and even Joe Cocker, whom I also worked with but at a different time. He was a phenomenal piano and vibraphone player. Ritchie Ritz was the drummer, a very tall, lanky guy. Bruce Karp was my best friend in the band, a fine flute and sax player. He was a student at Brooklyn College and like me he was taking the summer off to make some money. He and I had great philosophical discussions, lying beneath the stars outside the cottage we all slept in. We used to take our cots outside to see the brilliant starry night before we fell asleep, without the impediment of city lights. One night Bruce said, ‘Do you realize that this entire universe and all these stars in the sky, and us, you and me and everybody in the band and everybody in the world and everyone in the universe, we could be only one atom inside a dingle berry hanging off a dog’s arse in another universe, a bigger universe, and that universe could be an atom in a dingle berry hanging off another dog’s arse and on and on and on.’ This is actually an Ayurvedic concept from the Vedas of Hinduism. Bruce had heard of this concept before, but it was new to me and I started to sob.

Granite owner Irwin Gewurtz had a great idea to hire two female impersonators to bring in more bar business. He thought people would come into the bar and stare at them and end up buying drinks; unfortunately they just came to stare at Rick Carlson and Kim August. Kim went on to be an ‘actress’, even though he was a guy, playing female roles in some films including No Way To Treat A Lady with Rod Steiger. He turned out to be a good friend who spoke candidly about his sordid life. He was a handsome man when he wasn’t in drag, but he had to draw on masculine eyebrows as they were shaved. On a few occasions he’d let us watch him get dragged up for the evening. As more feminine makeup would be put on the higher the pitch of his voice became, until he put on the wig, turned around and there he was—a woman. At 15 years old this was all rather eye-opening. With Kim there was no sex involved and although Rick had a crush on me, nothing ever came of it. This overexposure to the drag queen world made me question my sexuality but I didn’t want to go down that route; there were too many sweet female Jewish young things to keep me on the straight, and not so narrow.

In the middle of that summer I got a call from a guy I knew who was in a band called The Crystals. A guy named Jimmy Nebb managed them and was going to finance a recording of a single. I was the only bass player in Brooklyn they knew and despite my insistence that I would not join them on a permanent basis I agreed to the session. There was only one problem; it was a Tuesday night, which wasn’t my night off at the Granite. The other Latineers had no problem with me having a night off but I had to go to Mr Gerwurtz and ask permission—it was not something I relished, as he had a very stern side to him.

‘Mr Gewurtz I have this opportunity to go down to New York and do something really big time.’ Looking back I can’t believe I actually said ‘big time’. ‘I have been asked to play bass at a recording session next Tuesday night.’

‘You have Tony? That’s great, what kind of music is it?’

‘It’s rock ’n’ roll Mr Gewurtz.’

‘Hmmm, well, if it is the chance of a lifetime I can’t be heartless, so I’ll give you the day off.’ Then he added, ‘I’ll have to dock you one day’s pay.’

The upside of having my pay docked was a promised session fee of $25. The name of that song was ‘Malegeuna Rock’, based on the Spanish classic Malageuna. The bass part followed the main melody of the song, which is why they desperately needed a bass player. It was very exciting to record in a really nice recording studio in Manhattan, although I can’t remember its name (and it’s probably not there anymore). This was my first encounter with a record producer. We weren’t allowed in the control room, but a man’s voice kept coming over the talkback speaker giving us feedback like, ‘Hey, bass player. Your E string’s flat!’ I didn’t like his tone and found his interjections very annoying.

After the session Jimmy Nebb said, ‘You were really great kid, we love the way you play bass. Would you like to join the group?’

Maybe it was the euphoria of playing on a session, maybe it was the idea that we might have a hit on our hands, whatever it was I agreed to join The Crystals after the summer.

‘Right,’ said Jimmy, ‘as you’re now a member we’ll not be paying you a session fee.’

There was no point in arguing; it was simply a case of welcome to the music biz.

After returning to the Catskills for the rest of the summer I was soon back in the city playing with The Crystals. In October 1960 Jimmy Nebb secured a gig for us on a TV show called The Saturday Prom on NBC television; the host was Merv Griffin who was just beginning to be noticed on TV. He was in competition with Dick Clark’s American Band Stand and the show went on the air on a Saturday evening. A weekly feature of the show was to run a contest to form The Saturday Prom band made up of New York teenagers. The first week they discovered a trumpet player, whom they found legitimately from somewhere, but then they also added Johnny Syvertsen, the sax player in The Crystals. The first week house musicians from the show’s orchestra augmented Johnny and the trumpet player.

‘Well, we’ve found our first two band members,’ said Merv. ‘Next week we’ll add another.’

That was none other than our drummer Frank Steo. In the following weeks Jim Petricionne, our piano player, and Joey Strobel our guitar player were added. In the final week it was my turn.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, here’s our bass player Tony Visconti.’ In my week we played ‘Lullaby Of Birdland’ in a Latin/Jazz style.

The week I joined the star of the show was one of my idols—Fats Domino; his ‘When My Dreamboat Comes Home’ was the first record that I ever bought. There was another bonus from being on the television. The studio audience were often friends of NBC employees, and many were wealthy teenage WASPy girls that came from uptown New York City—5th Avenue, Park Avenue, Madison Avenue. Through them I got invited to a couple of teenage society parties; I was out of my social depth, but flirtation knows no boundaries. Several firsts happened as a result of joining The Crystals. We got a gig on a TV show in Detroit and we flew there in an eight-seater aircraft—it was my first flight. We got another gig in Washington DC and that was my first road trip. I had only ever been as far as Indiana and Florida on family holidays. I was not quite 16, but I’d met the Fat Man, flown in a plane, been ‘on the road’, and met some rich girls—life was good.

I had been listening to jazz records since I was 12 years old and from these I learned how to imitate bass lines from the likes of Milt Hinton and Charlie Mingus. I got to sound pretty convincing when I played with a drummer like Frank Steo—one of the best drummers I’ve ever worked with. We became good friends and I would lug my bass over to his parents’ apartment and we would play for hours and hours on end. We would discuss the merits of playing in front of the beat, in the middle of the beat, or behind the beat. I was really fine-tuning my jazz chops and at the same time developing big thick calluses on my right hand; my little party trick was stubbing out a cigarette on my callus. The Crystals were also jazz players; pianist Jimmy Petricionne also played alto sax and we would jam in his parents’ basement in Brooklyn. I still have tapes of Frank Steo, myself, and Danny Kalb, a guitarist—he went on to form the Blues Project with Al Kooper—and we sound great; almost like a Blue Note recording as it was done so well. I had a three-channel mixer into which I would stick three microphones, balance it and send the signal to my Dad’s mono tape recorder; I got a really good sound. It was the beginning of my interest in the recording process. Jazz was my calling at this point, rock ‘n’ roll and whatever else I did, I did for the money. It wasn’t until I heard the clarion call of the Beatles that I knew rock was the place to be. If people were going to write songs with chord changes like that, I wanted back in.

My best friend, Bruce Tergesen, whose family was one of the few Norwegian families in our neighbourhood, made the mixer for me. Bruce was two years older than me and we had become friends when I was about ten years old. Bruce was also the first person I knew who had a transistor radio. He went to Brooklyn Technical High School and he was an electronics genius. He modified and improved the sound of a couple of vacuum tube radios for me, and also my Fender guitar amp and the tape recorder on which I made my early demos. Bruce had a brother called George who was ten years older than us; he and his wife Ruth introduced us to jazz.

My enthusiastic musical endeavours earned me a devastating ultimatum from my father. In the words of the do-wop classic by the Silhouettes—‘Getta job.’

‘But Dad, I have a job.’ I had a standing arrangement with a society band organizer, Lester Lanin, the big name in the world of society events bands. Each weekend I’d play weddings and bar mitzvahs; at 16 I looked pretty cool in a tuxedo. I’d play the standards on my conventional bass and then come out to the front and play and sing rock songs with my guitar. My father, who was working as a carpenter, couldn’t get to grips with me lying on the couch during the week watching TV while he went out to work—it infuriated him, despite the fact that I was earning $100 a weekend—about the same as he was earning from working all week.

‘Junior, you either get a job or you get out of this house. You can’t rely on music, it’s not steady work, what are you going to fall back on?’

I was offended, because I felt I was a professional musician with a union card, but no argument from me would convince my dad, it all fell on deaf ears.

With this ultimatum hanging over me I got a phone call from one of my society musician friends. ‘There’s a job going at Ben Maksik’s Town and Country Club,’ he told me.

This famous Brooklyn nightclub was run by Ben Maksik, who had worked in Las Vegas before deciding to bring Vegas to New York, and while he couldn’t bring the gambling he could bring the opulent shows with high-kicking dancing girls, and singers such as Tony Bennett and comedians that included Buddy Hackett. The bass player in the house band had left and my friend, who didn’t know how old I was, suggested me. But there was a problem, you had to be 18 to work in a nightclub and have a clean criminal record. Of course the latter was no problem and despite the age issue I still went for the audition with the leader of the house band, Ned Harvey. He had worked with just about everyone, and liked my playing very much. From my school experience I learned to sight-read Schubert’s Symphony No 1 and Finlandia by Sibelius, so reading some simple band arrangements for bass was a breeze. As soon as I had auditioned I came clean.

‘There’s a bit of a problem here because I’m under eighteen.’ I admitted.

‘Just borrow somebody’s card and then you can work here’, was Ned’s simple solution. As luck would have it a friend of my father’s had a cabaret card but didn’t use it any more, and so for a year and a half I was this guy. My money increased to $150 a week, and it was enough to convince my father that I had a proper job. I also got to play for a vast range of performers. There was Sophie Tucker, Robert Goulet, Jackie Mason, The Ritz Brothers, and even Milton Berle.

Uncle Miltie and I became great backstage friends—and yes, his penis is a foot long, and he willingly showed it to all and sundry. I had taken up karate and had lessons for a couple of years and one day he saw me practising backstage on a break and asked if I could teach it to him. I said, ‘Sure, can you teach me some one-liners?’ He was trained in burlesque and was a master of the one-liner. (‘You’ve got some great material, too bad it’s all in your suit.’ ‘You’ve got some great lines, too bad they’re all in your face.’) My parents and their friends came to see the cabaret show one night. I told ‘Uncle Miltie’ (his nickname) that they would be sitting next to the stage. He spotted them instantly because, I guess, my dad and I resembled each other. He asked them to take a bow and pointed to me saying, ‘These are the parents of the Karate Kid.’

Because he could never remember my name he always called me ‘the karate kid’. This was 1960, years before the film was even written, or probably even thought of. He made my parents take a bow—it certainly convinced my Dad that I was now, at last, a real professional.

Tony Bennett came to the Town & Country club to play for several weeks. He brought his own rhythm section, piano, bass and drums, so I never played for him. Instead I’d wander around the club with my camera, armed with the fastest colour film available and a 135mm telephoto lens. One picture of Bennett came out really good and I showed it to him. He loved it. He invited me to meet him at Columbia Records the next day. He was releasing a new LP, and he wanted this photo for his cover. For an 18-year-old amateur photographer this was tantamount to winning the lottery. Next day I met him and the company’s art director, a very smug, overtly gay man. He took a quick look at the transparency and said, ‘Can’t use it, we have so many like this already’, and he walked off. The meeting lasted 15 seconds. Bennett turned to me, slightly embarrassed and said, ‘Gee kid, I’m sorry. That’s how it goes.’ I was crushed but managed to hold back the tears. A few minutes later I was back on 7th Avenue in Manhattan and walked aimlessly downtown. I found a movie house playing Mondo Cane, a gross film about gross things, and sat in the darkness fuming and aching.

In the summer when the nightclub closed down Ned Harvey’s band would play the Catskill Mountains. With Ned I played the Hotel Brickman, a glorified Kochalain, a Yiddish word for a collection of sprawling bungalows that seemed to have been thrown together—far from fancy. The Brickman was more than that; it was a proper hotel with a lobby, outdoor swimming pool and tennis courts. The band lived in a drafty wooden building with two bathrooms that were shared by about thirty of us. The Brickman is now an ashram run by Siddha Yoga Dham of America Foundation; the hotel closed down in the 1970s when New York’s Jewish community found other places to vacation. Back then when people would enquire at what age the Brickman took children their proud boast was, ‘If the kid breathes we’ll take it.’

For three summers I would migrate the 110 miles north to what was popularly called the Borscht Belt, or the Jewish Alps, in upstate New York. Only nine of us made up the Ned Harvey Band during the summer, in New York the band numbered fourteen players. This was another fantastic period for my musical education during which I learned to write arrangements. Milton Anderson, a.k.a. Milton Drake, a baritone sax player was the band’s arranger as well as a composer (he cowrote, ‘Mairzy Doats And Dozy Doats And Liddle Lamzy Divey’). He not only taught me how to write arrangements, he also showed me how to hold the italic pen correctly, and how to copy music from a pencilled page to a very professional-looking inked page and how to mix the ink. He had a very secret formula for mixing India ink with another ink so that the notes were embossed on the page. I owe this other Uncle Miltie a lot, and when he died he left me his darkroom equipment.

In the Catskills I met many great players. Most Tuesday nights there was a jam happening somewhere. I got to play with jazz pianist Mike Abbeny and Eddie Gomez, a bass player with whom I felt great rivalry (I’ll bet he never noticed me). There was also a great alto sax player called Artie Lawrence and all these guys went on to have stellar success in the jazz world. Eddie played with Bill Evans, and even turned down a job with Miles Davis. During my third summer in the Borscht Belt another band was working the hotel. The Del Capos, a five-piece band led by Speedy Garfin, an amazing sax player, which included a girl singer. They were so hip and cool and they did a lot of Louis Prima and Keeley Smith material, because it was Speedy’s goal to head a Las Vegas lounge band.

“Sam” (not his real name), the Del Capos’ piano player, was a heroin addict and this was the first time I came face to face with hard drugs, something of an occupational hazard. An affable pot-head called Freddie Klein had exposed me to marijuana during my first Brickman summer; he worked the hotel diner flipping burgers. Larry Rosen, the drummer from Ned’s band and I would hang out with Freddie. Larry would later become the R in GRP Records, the highly successful jazz label he co-founded with Dave Grusin. The first time I smoked a joint we went back to the diner and watched Freddie at work. In the middle of eating our burgers and drinking our cokes through straws, disaster struck—the ‘high’ kicked in. For some unaccountable reason we looked at Freddie and began to laugh. We laughed so hard into the straws that it caused all the coke to be displaced and fly all over our clothes and all over the place. Freddie started laughing from behind the counter. Larry and I were laughing so uncontrollably we had to go outside and roll around on the forest floor, because we couldn’t stand up.

Sam was a different proposition altogether. He had spent three years in London, which was where he became addicted to heroin. He got heroin on the National Health Service, which you could do very easily in those days, but was arrested in London for possessing marijuana. He spent about six months in prison before being unceremoniously deported back to New York. Sam became one of my music idols; he could play piano like Oscar Peterson, he was so cool—even down to his cool haircut. He was laconically cool, not at a real loss for words, but stoned on heroin. I didn’t know that at first. There was another guy I befriended at this point called Frank and later I discovered he too was a heroin addict. This was the beginning of a very dark period in my life. I was 19 and heroin and I gradually became acquainted.

When I first took the ugly drug I had a very bad experience. The buzz lasted all of five minutes and then I spent the next few hours just vomiting uncontrollably. I vomited because I wasn’t yet an addict. I was encouraged to take it again by Sam and Frank, to give it a chance. From then on I didn’t vomit, which meant I was getting what was called a ‘Jones’. I would say that I flirted with heroin for a while, and was addicted for about a three-month period. There was a doctor in New York who would prescribe methadone but only enough to use through withdrawal (a seven-day supply). It was expensive. I managed to keep it a secret from my parents for most of the time, although eventually my mother did find my hypodermic needle (you can’t hide anything from Mum); she discovered my ‘works’ in a hollowed out book and she was wise enough not to tell my father, who would’ve beat me to a pulp—he was very old-school and behaved exactly as his father had done when it came to discipline. She saw me through one methadone programme and I managed to stay off the drug for a long time.

There was another risk about being an addict in New York City. It meant that to acquire heroin you needed to go to some very bad neighbourhoods. Sometimes I used to go up to Harlem, but only when things were really desperate. For a young white guy it was a very dangerous place to go. I was nearly mugged on several occasions and came close to being arrested once. My main procurer was a waiter, who exacted a high price for his services and would slowly and cruelly fix in front of me before I was able to use his works. A typical hazard of addiction is to overdose, it happened to me twice; luckily both times I was with friends who knew exactly what to do. They injected a saline solution into my veins to nullify the effects of the heroin and walked me around the room so I didn’t die. Many people in a similar predicament were not so lucky, either their friends would panic or wouldn’t know what to do. I heard stories of overdosed users who were dragged up stairs onto an apartment roof and left to die.

Despite the horrors of heroin there was, bizarrely, in my case a positive that came out of all this. Many of my friends from high school had already gone to fight in Vietnam, and a number of them had been killed in combat. When I was twenty I got the letter I had been dreading from Uncle Sam. It said ‘Greetings you have been selected to fight in the armed forces of America.’ ‘Great, now they’re going to make a man out of you,’ was how my Father greeted the news.

I went to the appointed place, at the appointed time, and sat in a room full of men all about my age. In came this US Army sergeant who began yelling at us.

‘Everybody, listen up! You’re in the army right now. You’re about to take an IQ test. If you fuck up this test you’re in the army anyway, but you’re going to spend the next four years of your life doing KP, that’s kitchen patrol, so you better not fuck up on this test, you better do your best. If you do your best you are going to get promoted quickly, you might even apply for private, you might be a private first class in six months.’

People pay thousands for motivational speakers like this these days! He was on a roll. ‘You’re going to have a blood test first and while it’s being analysed you’re going to take the IQ test, which is about two hours long.’

This confirmed what I had already decided to do the night before. I didn’t want to join the army and die in Vietnam. Like millions of Americans I saw this war as unnecessary and immoral. If we were under attack as a nation I would volunteer to defend my country, but I wasn’t having any of this. I wasn’t prepared to leave anything to chance. By this point in my life I was, strictly speaking, off heroin. However, I shot up with a friend the night before, I had heard that the army was rejecting addicts yet this was a big risk. I thought I could be reported to the police if things went wrong. After I had the blood test I took the IQ test and answered the questionnaire. I admitted to using drugs. I was standing in line in my underpants with about 500 other inductees, waiting for our physical examination when I heard, ‘Visconti, get dressed and follow me.’

I was ushered into an office where a man in a suit, sporting wire-rimmed glasses and a goatee, an aspiring Sigmund Freud who turned out to be a psychiatrist, turned to me and said in a thick German accent, ‘You have passed your IQ test.’

That was lucky I thought; maybe the blood test wasn’t foolproof? What was I doing here talking to Dr Freud?

‘You seem to have scored high, but on the questionnaire you indicated here that you have frequent and terrifying nightmares and you take drugs. Which drugs do you take?’

‘All of them.’ I said.

‘What?’ he said. ‘Which drugs?’

‘Well, everything, barbiturates, amphetamines, marijuana, heroin.’

‘Are you an addict?’

I hesitated; maybe it was a trick question. ‘Yes,’ I carefully admitted.

‘Would you like to not be an addict? Would you like to quit?’ he asked.

This was the $64,000 question. If I say yes, what is he going to do to me? Am I going to be arrested, or sent to some kind of institution? If I say no I might be arrested anyway, would he tell the police, because I didn’t cooperate? My brain was short-circuiting. But I thought I might as well play out this drama as planned.

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, to what?’ he asked me.

‘Yes I’m an addict and yes I’d like to quit.’

The truth was, this was the truth. I had already tried using methadone, which I had to acquire illegally, but I continued to use heroin occasionally. The German psychiatrist started writing some stuff down and said, ‘Well since you are being so candid with me and you want to quit I will put down that you are rejected from the army because of neurological reasons.’

Even though there was a box for drug addiction he ticked the box that said ‘neurological’ and showed it to me. ‘It will go on your permanent army record that you are a 4F classification, which means you are unable to serve. You will never be allowed in the army!’ With this he concluded my session and sent me downstairs to meet a colleague.

‘There, they’ll make arrangements for your rehabilitation.’

This sent me into a flat spin, I had a gig that night, and there was no time for rehabilitation. Feeling trapped by my own actions, I trooped downstairs to see a very nice woman who had the demeanour of a loving mother. She was thin, with her hair piled on top of her head in a big bun and wore overlarge horn-rimmed glasses. She looked at me kindly and compassionately and said, ‘President Kennedy is appalled that fifty per cent of the men called up to serve are ineligible. The two main reasons for this are drug addiction and homosexuality and the United States government now had a programme that will cure young men of both, and then try to rehabilitate them.’ I understood being rehabilitated for drugs, but was baffled by curing homosexuality. The US Government still thought of it as a disease. She went on to ask me lots of questions about why I used drugs.

‘It’s an occupational hazard. Everywhere I turn in the music business I see drugs. If it’s not marijuana it’s amphetamines or heroin—I just got unlucky,’ I explained.

‘Do you think drugs make you play better?’ she asked.

‘Well, they made Charlie Parker play really good,’ was my quick retort.

‘Yes? But imagine how Charlie Parker would have sounded if he didn’t use drugs,’ she countered. She had a point. I still felt cautious about what I should or shouldn’t say. I wanted to debate further but I thought it best to get out of there unscathed. I was told I had automatically volunteered to attend group therapy sessions and I agreed. That was it; I walked through the door and out into the street.

These sessions were on Saturday mornings, in downtown Brooklyn, close to where I had grown up. The first thing they did was to give me a prescription for methadone. For the first time in my life I had a legal prescription, and I didn’t really need it; I was totally committed to not taking heroin anymore. The army induction episode scared me. More than that, I started to scare me. If I hadn’t made up my mind to quit, the experience I had to face up to would have done it for me. Everyone in the group were still hard-core addicts, most of the guys were thieves. They would interlace their stories of shooting up heroin with how they had broken into a car the night before or how they stole anything they could; I just sat there wide-eyed. The most appalling thing were the girls, who were my age and younger; they all entered the world of prostitution. I was sitting in the company of girls describing painful anal rape and guys bragging about stealing hubcaps—it was surreal.

When it came time for me to speak I repeated what I had told the psychoanalyst.

‘It’s an occupational hazard. I’m a musician. I don’t steal. I earn money by playing music, I just like to take drugs, that’s all.’

Without exception they looked at me with utter disgust, including the group leader. I hardly ever spoke again in the group. After six months in the programme I told the group leader that I truly felt I had been cured. During that time I never once touched heroin. He gave me a deep look and simply said, ‘OK.’ Three per cent of addicts never go back on heroin. I was one of the lucky—and determined—ones.

That’s the happy ending to a very dark and horrible period. I had been spending all my money, my entire salary, on the drug. I had even borrowed money from my grandmother on occasions. I never stole, but I had some very, very desperate, dark moments when I was a millimetre away from the bottom of the barrel. Using heroin is not clever, it’s not creative and rock ‘n’ roll has mythologized its use. Those therapy sessions exposed the reality of ‘heroin chic’ for me.

I would only tell this story to confidants over the years; I was very embarrassed about this period of my life, about using heroin and loads of other drugs. I was off heroin when I had to go up in front of the Draft board, but I was determined not to go to Vietnam, so this was a very drastic measure for a 20-year-old. Believe me, I was scared shitless on that day.

The group therapy was so God-awful it sorted me out. My heroin-using friends hated me for stopping, as I was one of the few amongst us that worked steadily and I could always be relied on for a fix. But when I quit I had the wisdom to never tempt myself again so I stopped seeing those friends completely. I told my parents that I was not drafted for ‘neurological reasons’, the same excuse the psychiatrist used on my military record for volunteering for therapy. My father turned to me in disgust and said, ‘That’s a shame. The army could’ve made a man out of you.’ My mother, though, was overjoyed; this was a time of conscription, so lots of young men my age were drafted for that war, and I lost a couple of friends.

My friendship with Speedy Garfin and the rest of his band continued when we returned to New York. I ended up joining the band, replacing both the girl singer and Sam the piano player. To me Speedy was a kind of rock star and being the fourth member in a group with him was far more rewarding artistically. I sang the girl’s part, in a high falsetto, but instead of playing bass I played the guitar. We played a nightclub on the East Side of Manhattan run by one of the ladies referred to in the song, ‘Lullaby Of Broadway’: ‘she’s a classy broad,’ as Sinatra would have said. She was brassy, sassy and on the wrong side of fifty, but she commanded respect. The club boasted a varied clientele, including the local priest who came in once a week to drink at the bar, only leaving after he got a donation for his church. There were people that worked in the neighbourhood, actors and actresses, members from other bands; we also had the Mob drop in fairly regularly.

‘The Don’ would always arrive with eleven or so of his closest friends—mostly guys but also a few women as well. I only knew him as ‘The Don’ and he always brought with him a handsome young guy of about eighteen or nineteen. Speedy had a party piece—‘Come Back To Sorrento’—during which he would drop down on one knee and play his soprano saxophone with great intensity. The very first time we played it ‘The Don’ sent one of his ‘friends’ to us who said, ‘He wants you guys to have this.’

He handed us a $100 bill, which was a lot of money in 1963, even when it was split four ways. The next time ‘The Don’ was in we played ‘Come Back To Sorrento’ and we all got down on one knee, threw our heads back and looked as passionate as we could. We got another $100. This ritual was played out many times.

One such evening ‘The Don’ himself got up from the table and came up to me. This was most disarming because he was a very large man with unquestionable dubious credentials.

‘Hey kid can I talk to you.’

I gulped and said, ‘Sure.’

‘You know that kid I always bring with me,’ said ‘The Don’, pointing to the young boy at the table. ‘He’s an actor. He’s my protégé. He likes guys, and he likes you, and he wants you to come home with him tonight, is that OK with you?’

‘Well, I—I—I don’t know,’ I stammered. ‘I’m really not that way, I’ve never done anything like that before.’

‘Hey, come on, how old are you kid?’

At this point ‘The Don’ moved even closer to me and I was eclipsed by his height and girth. I told him I was nineteen and this caused him to become somewhat exasperated.

‘You’re nineteen, you know when I was nineteen I didn’t know if I liked boys or girls. I mean, you know, what’s the difference, what’s the big deal? Come on kid are you going to go with him or not?’ He was practically shouting in my ear.

I was getting to the point I could barely speak; I couldn’t believe that this was happening to me.

‘I—I—I—I don’t know.’ But he was not taking no for an answer.

‘Hey listen, he was just with Tony Curtis the other night’ (this couldn’t be true, he was just trying to impress me) ‘…this kid is a good looking guy he can have anybody he wants.’

I was terrified and confused. I’d be damned if I do and I’d be damned if I don’t. They’ll throw me in a car and I’ll end up with a pair of cement boots. I had no idea what to do; my brain simply froze with ‘The Don’ hovering over me waiting for a decision. In the middle of this sleazy Zen dilemma, Buddy Monticelli, our bass player, appeared from behind the curtain where he’d been listening to the conversation.

‘Can I have a word with you?’ says Buddy to ‘The Don’, in Italian.

He nodded his head and casts me a dirty look. Buddy took him aside talking to him all the while in Italian. Within a minute ‘The Don’ came back over to me and said, ‘It’s okay kid, I didn’t know you were married.’

Buddy, thinking on his feet, fabricated a story that I married a nice Italian girl very young and we had kids. As I was in that most sanctimonious of Catholic Italian institutions I was excused from ‘The Don’s’ plans of debauchery with his protégé. As beautiful as the song is, ‘Come Back To Sorrento’ will always remind me of that frightening evening.

We did gigs in other parts of America, including six weeks at a Holiday Inn in Scottsdale Arizona—it was fantastic. The band was no longer called the Del Capos, instead we were The Speedy Garfin Quartet and, given our leader’s ambition, our repertoire was Las Vegas lounge-style that included songs like ‘Jeepers Creepers’ and ‘(Your Kisses Take Me To) Shangri-La’—all in four part harmony. We played instrumentals and lots of Sinatra’s songs because the drummer, Tony De Mar, could really nail Frank. Buddy Monticelli also had his own version of a Sinatra voice; we were a very versatile group.

While I was in Arizona I would often take the bus to downtown Phoenix, a world apart from Brooklyn or anywhere on the East Coast. I even went ‘native’ and bought myself a cowboy shirt and a belt with a silver buckle. I slept out under the stars at Camel Back Mountain one night and was dwarfed by 14-foot saguaro cacti in the daytime. I shared a room on this trip with Speedy who would often go off to stay at the home of a girl he had met. One day while he was away Tony and Buddy were with me in my room when Tony noticed Speedy’s wallet on top of the TV. Tony cheekily opened it and inside the wallet there was a note saying ‘Tony you are not worth the paper this note is written on. You stole the money from my wallet and may you and the other two guys in the band go to hell.’ The three of us froze; we were innocent. I had no idea that there had been a theft in our room, but from here on the morale of the band went downhill. When Speedy came back I told him it wasn’t me, and even to me the explanation of how we discovered the theft seemed dishonestly shallow. He just said, ‘Don’t talk to me.’ He was totally contemptuous of me.

On that sour note we went back to New York to play a month’s residency at a nightclub in Queens, New York. Two weeks before the run ended Speedy said, ‘That’s it, I’m breaking up the band at the end of the run, and this is your two weeks’ notice.’ With that he slammed our week’s salary on the table and walked out.

After our dismissal from Speedy’s band Tony, Buddy and I became the Crew Cuts. That’s to say we joined original member Rudi Maugeri on the road. They had had a No 1 record in 1954 with a cover of the Chords hit ‘Sh-Boom’, and a year later went top three with ‘Earth Angel’, a song originally recorded by the Penguins. There are some people prepared to argue that ‘Sh-Boom’ is the first rock ‘n’ roll record, but that would definitely be stretching a point. Rudi kept the group going after the others had drifted away. We played a seaside concert hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Our last gigs were played in the Far East— The Philippines, Japan, Korea and Okinawa, mainly at US armed forces bases. I turned 21 during this period. Our first gig as the Crew Cuts was playing a five-day residency at a club in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Tulsa was a strange place. There were no public bars then, you had to buy a bottle from an off licence or a state liquor store and then you gave it to the bartender and he would write your name on it. Every time he poured you a drink he would make a mark; this was the law. On our first night in Tulsa the owner poured us a round or two from his bottle, but we had to buy our own bottle of tipple the next day. When we had our first drink with him he said we would have no problem finding ‘poontang’ in his club. We didn’t know what he meant by the word, but we soon worked it out.

The crowd was middle aged, the Crew Cut generation, but two beautiful, younger women were sitting by themselves and making eyes at us. Two of us in the band introduced ourselves and were invited to sit with them. One of the women was about my own age, her name was Siegrid and I found out that she was recently separated from her husband. She was blonde, elegantly dressed, had pronounced Nordic cheek bones, cat’s eyes and a beautiful figure. She told me she had married very young, and she too had just turned 21. The other woman turned out to be her sister-in-law, who was also estranged from her husband.

I discovered later that Siegrid had married a wealthy uranium prospector who was twenty years her senior. Despite having everything money could buy, their marriage was not working out. They lived alone in a building he owned made up of nine apartments, all of which were empty except the one they lived in and another where Siegrid’s cats lived.

For Siegrid and me it really was love at first sight. The following night she and her sister-in-law were there again and afterwards I took her back to the hotel where I was staying. We talked all night, we felt like we had so much to say to each other. This was the woman I had been waiting for, an intelligent, beautiful soul mate.

We talked much about philosophy and spirituality and I confessed to having had some remarkable spiritual experiences with LSD. I had taken two acid trips to date. She listened wide-eyed. ‘I have two doses with me,’ I told her. ‘Oh goody, let’s take it right now,’ was her immediate reaction.

Within an hour the drug had taken effect and we were surfing the cosmos together, my first time with another person. We were having the same symbolic experience, a total appreciation for each other as the female and male principles, the Yin and the Yang, transforming visually into Hindu gods and goddesses. We could both hear the music of the cosmos and see colours beyond the range of human experience. We were melting into each other.

It was one of those great acid trips—no down moments, no bummers, and no bad heads, nothing negative. When the sun came up we were so happy we got in the car and drove to the roof of a supermarket, a car park as large as the supermarket beneath it. We were the only people there. We got out and spontaneously sang songs from West Side Story and danced around the roof. We were inseparable after that and consummated our relationship on the third night.

On the last night that Siegrid and I spent together she said she was going to leave her husband. I told her I was going to break up with my girlfriend Bunny immediately by telephone and I did. We phoned each other everyday for three weeks and Siegrid announced that she wanted to come to NYC to live with me. My parents didn’t know what to think, but they agreed to have Siegrid live with us. We spent a year of bliss in the converted loft atop my parents’ apartment, which I helped my father and uncle to build for me when I was 16.

Unfortunately life wasn’t pure bliss. We needed money because I quit working with the Crew Cuts. There was no question of getting a normal job, this was the ’60s; it was unthinkable. A partial solution was Siegrid’s valuable jewellery, which she sold without telling me. We were able to live off that for a while. One morning, after what was probably our twentieth acid trip, we were listening to the radio and said almost simultaneously, ‘We can do better than that!’ We were so disgusted with the current songs on Pop radio. We started writing songs together that day. I taught her how to sing harmony, and sometimes she would take the lead and I would do the more difficult harmonies. We wrote for two voices almost always, for us to perform. Soon we were doing gigs around New York as Tony & Siegrid.

After surviving a couple of abortive attempts at securing a manager and a dreadful audition with songsmiths Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, we somehow ended up at The Richmond Organization (TRO). Company boss, Howard Richmond, had started in the business as a publisher; his first published song, ‘Put Another Nickel In The Nickelodeon’, became a huge hit. He later signed many successful American songwriters including one of my favourites, Pete Seeger. We were assigned to a publisher/manager called Marvin Caine who had an A&R friend, Danny Davis at RCA Records, and that’s how we ended up with a recording deal. We wrote what we thought were some really good songs, and till this day I still wonder if we had had a more sympathetic A&R man and producer then maybe we could have achieved something much greater. Unfortunately, out of the whole batch of songs that we had written Danny picked a quasi hillbilly song called ‘Long Hair’. We wrote this song as a novelty/comedy song for our live shows. It was kind of our ‘fuck you’ song to rednecks, albeit the Brooklyn variety. Back in ‘65 it wasn’t easy having long hair. ‘Are you a boy or a girl? Are you a boy or a girl?’ I have heard many men of my generation brag that the proper retort was, ‘Suck my cock and find out!’ I am dubious that you would escape without a severe beating if you said that in a diner in Kansas. I’d hear this question over and over again every day and when we travelled anywhere out of New York City it would be even worse. We seemed threatening and we were threatened, sometimes with implied violence.

As a debut single I detested ‘Long Hair’; it’s an awful song.

Long hair, long hair so you think I’m queer,

Well hush up your mouth and chugalug your beer,

Because I don’t really care what you think of my long hair.

It was a wordy song with intentional ‘r’s in them so we could sound like real hillbillies. ‘Long hairrr, long hairrr’—we’d stretch out those ‘r’s for as long as possible. Ironically it started to get airplay on New York radio. One guy who loved it was a DJ called Zacherly. As a ‘VJ’ in the 1950s he would dress up as a ghoul on late night television and introduce horror films from the 1930s and ‘40s. He would cut in scenes of himself into these films where he would do things like chop a slimy cauliflower in half, pretending it was a human brain. But he loved ‘Long Hair’ and played it so much it became a minor local hit. I think it reached the 30s in a local singles chart for a week before it dropped out.

Having saved a little money, Siegrid and I left my parents’ house and moved to 50 West 88th Street, which was only half a block from Central Park. Here we continued to drop acid and sometimes communed with nature in the park. At New York’s first ‘Be-In’ (the precursor to ‘Love-Ins’), about 10,000 of us descended on the park where we openly smoked pot and formed a long human daisy chain. We held hands and ran through the park screaming and laughing. We wore beads and had flowers in our hair and our trousers were flared. We witnessed in awe Alan Ginsburg and his lover Peter Orlof sitting on a big boulder openly smoking a joint. The New York police were powerless; it wasn’t that they didn’t dare do anything, they were just bemused by it all—one or two cops even had flowers stuck in their caps.

Being signed to TRO meant I was spending more time there than writing songs and I was getting into some production work. I used to make demos in a little studio that was in the same building as Atlantic Records, which is where my childhood friend Bruce Tergesen had gone to work. Bruce came to my 9th floor studio one day and said, ‘Yeah, that sounds really cool. Let me have your tape and I will go down and play it to Tom Dowd.’ Dowd was the electrical genius that put Atlantic Studios together and also became a legendary producer. Now and then Bruce would sneak me into Atlantic Records, so I could sit at the back of the room to witness a few recording sessions. One such session, not long before I met Denny Cordell, was when Arif Mardin was adding the orchestra to Aretha Franklin’s ‘You Make Me feel Like A Natural Women’; it was fantastic to see an orchestral overdub session, my first. At some point Mardin came into the control room for a playback and was not pleased. He seemed to address everyone in the room in his Turkish accent, ‘Something’s not sounding right, what’s not sounding right?’

I tapped Bruce on the shoulder and whispered to him that the French horns were out of tune.

‘My friend Tony here said the French horns are out of tune,’ said Bruce. I thought I was going to die and be evicted for being so bold, in that order. Instead Arif had it played again and said, ‘Your friend is right.’

By the way, through Bruce I got a pithy answer from Tom Dowd regarding my own demo: ‘Tom says, “More bass”.’