Make your holiday reservations now!

If you haven’t already booked your plans for New Year’s Eve, here are three possible options you may want to consider:

Holiday Inn

Just off the highway in bucolic, perpetually snowing Midville, CT, this cozy, converted farmhouse offers ample parking, a full course dinner and funny hats for everyone. The local woods are handy when the only bathroom is in use.

The Dolemite Experience

Located on the wrong side of the tracks, with street parking only (customers are encouraged to not leave any valuables in their cars). The décor includes, basically, a lot of tables crammed up against each other. The popular floor show, featuring the club’s namesake, starts promptly at 10 p.m. (and kicks in at around the 30-second mark of the video).

Max O’Hara’s Golden Safari

No waiting for tables here as there is seating for hundreds on the floor or balcony in this room roughly the size of Rhode Island. Ever the showman, impresario O’Hara’s majestic mid-town club offers a jungle motif that includes lions behind a glass wall, full-size trees and vines. The quality of the entertainment can be erratic from night to night, with much improvisation and audience participation.

Eclipsed, overshadowed 

The time between November 22 and December 8 is a light-deprived couple of weeks bookended by dates that still darken many memories – the murders of John Kennedy and John Lennon. It also brings to mind the analogy, Aldous Huxley is to John Kennedy as Darby Crash is to John Lennon.

Huxley died on November 22, 1963, and as his obit was being written it was already shunted to the back pages of newspapers around the world. The author of Brave New World became a footnote and it’s likely more print column inches were devoted to the Dallas police officer Oswald shot and killed that day than to Huxley. As a sub-footnote, Huxley was tripping on his way out, after his wife, at his request, injected him with LSD on his deathbed.

The musical footnote to Lennon’s death was L.A. punk rocker Darby Crash, who picked the night of December 7 to intentionally overdose on heroin. His death wasn’t reported until the next day and then forgotten. On the wall of the room where he died, he supposedly scrawled, “Here lies Darby Crash,” possibly trying to be helpful to whomever would find his body. Nobody added, “And why not?” to the epitaph (Spinal Tap reference).

There are several other instances covering the phenomena of celebrities dying on the same day (or very close). I’m introducing a superficial, simple and subjective scorecard to rank these coincidences in order of magnitude based on a couple of point systems: A score from 1-10 to rank an individual’s lifetime legacy, added to a similar system that guesses at potential achievements (the “what if” factor) had that person lived.

John Kennedy/Aldous Huxley (25 points): JFK gets a 9 for lifetime achievements, docked one point for his

Huxley

incomplete presidency. His what if factor, however, is off the charts with a 10 score. Vietnam. Civil rights. Nixon. World history would have been shaped much differently had he survived. Huxley gets a 4 for writing Brave New World, plus a potential score of 2. Had he lived, he would have become a William Burroughs aging hipster type, his portrait immortalized on head shop posters, followed by an album with Jimi Hendrix playing guitar behind him as Huxley reads from his writings about acid and mind expansion.

John Adams/Thomas Jefferson (20 points): Founding Fathers, the second and third presidents, and possibly the two most famous men of late 18^th Century America died within a few hours of each other. They each get a 10 for lifetime achievements, but since they each lived remarkably long lives for the time, Adams dying at age 90 and Jefferson surviving well into his eighties, each receives a zero for what if. The greater, spooky irony is that they died on July 4, 1826, the 50^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Jimmy Stewart/Robert Mitchum (19 points): Stewart and Mitchum died in 1997 within 24 hours of each other. Stewart gets a lifetime achievement score of 9 (5 Oscar nominations, one win) and the underrated Mitchum an 8. They each receive a 1 what if score as there was always the chance for one final, art-imitates-life role (see the 87-year old Gloria Stuart in Titanic and the dying John Wayne playing a dying gunfighter in The Shootist) that would leave everyone cheering, while wiping away a tear.

John Lennon/Darby Crash (17 points): John gets a 9 for lifetime achievement and a 6 for what if. Chances are he

Crash

would have kept making records that were mostly hit or miss; it’s the other stuff that makes his what if score high (and wistful). We missed the inevitable reunion with Paul (brokered by MTV in a two-hour special edition of Unplugged, then again at the 9/11 tribute concert): the Daily News photo of John, son Sean and Darryl Strawberry at Shea Stadium with the Strawberry Fields Forever headline: trolling Trump on Twitter. I gave Crash a couple of 1 scores. Even by the standards of early punk, his singing and his band the Germs were pretty miserable.

Michael Jackson/Farrah Fawcett (15 points): Jackson gets 8 lifetime achievement points, docked 2 notches for relying on an army of songwriters, producers and arrangers for his solo albums, although he was a marvelous dancer. After he died there was no discovery of a trove of unreleased recordings, just vague talk from insiders about how he was “heading in a new direction.” We’ll give him a charitable 4 what if score. Poor Farrah gets a 2 for Charlie’s Angels and a 1 what if score for a possible role that would have required her to wear glasses or a false nose, allowing Hollywood to hail her bravery.

Lessons from a legend

Our first house was a converted summer bungalow, barely winterized, in a neighborhood that had once been a cheap weekend getaway spot for Newark businessmen and lawyers. In the summer, you could understand why. A decent private swimming pool, with the Rockaway River running beside it. Plenty of foliage. If you needed a dose of civilization, two downtowns, antique Boonton and the more-worldly Denville awaited, a mile’s drive west or east.

Outside of summer, it could be ugly. Unpaved roads, nowhere to push the snow, flooding and the occasional rat. So why would the world’s greatest football writer live there? We guessed, rightly I think, that there was a divorce, and this was where Paul Zimmerman landed.

I saw him at the pool one afternoon and recognized him right away, sitting in a lounge chair, holding court with two of those older Jewish guys who spent their summer by the pool, talking about old baseball players. I hovered nearby to listen, then moved on. The next time I saw him at the pool – if anybody can be said to look like they were reading something intensely, it was him, at that moment. I steered clear, remembering that irritability he sometimes played up in his writing and television appearances. It was part of his appeal, but I didn’t want to test it.

If I had, I might have told him about that earlier time at Giants Stadium when I shadowed him roaming the locker room, buttonholing two rookies, Billy Ard and Byron Hunt, a guard and linebacker. While he made them the focus of his article for Sports Illustrated that week, I came away from watching him with three observations that served me well in corporate communications: acknowledge those toiling behind the scenes, take an unconventional approach to storytelling and be professional, but conversational, when interviewing someone.

He’d eventually remarry and move to Mountain Lakes, a more-fitting landing spot for the world’s greatest football writer. One morning I saw him outside the Denville Smoke Shop, tearing apart the Sunday Times, throwing out the sections that were of no use to him. It seemed symbolic of his writing: no tolerance for bullshit, defined as anything that got in the way of telling the story, whether he was reporting on a game, the draft or a league meeting.

Paul Zimmerman, 1932-2018

Zimmerman was insightful and opinionated, with the kind of cynicism only a seasoned reporter can dredge up. He deciphered plays and game strategies. Discovered underrated players. Each season he wrote a column ranking every NFL announcing team. Today, there are entire websites dedicated to that kind of scrutiny. Once, he vented in an online column about some frustrations he was experiencing with customer service at my old company, Medco Health (I dutifully sent the link to my boss, with a note that more people probably read Zimmerman’s column than anything written about us in the Wall Street Journal).

One Friday in November 2008, he wrote his final column as a series of strokes left him unable to communicate. He couldn’t speak, write or read. Occasionally there was a story about his ongoing therapy or a colleague would write about a visit with him. His spirits were up. He had a great appetite at lunch. Nobody mentioned if he still watched football, or if it even mattered to him anymore. Was he still listening to each announcer and analyst, and somewhere in his head ranking them? We’ll never know.

Leaving the old world behind

Neil Young has a new album called Songs for Judy. It’s a collection of live songs from his 1976 tour and the title comes from one of Neil’s typical stoned raps from that period about running into Judy Garland that same night – keep in mind that in 1976 she’d been dead for seven years – as she asks him, “How’s the business going, Neil?”

Whether he was just trying to be ironic or acknowledging that although separated by a generation he and Judy settled on the same career choice, Young always seemed to have an affinity for old show business. On another album, Live at the Roxy, he mentions performing on the same stage where stripper Candy Barr once danced. When we saw him at the PNC Arts Center a few years back, he talked about a backstage area being named after Frank Sinatra, “where Frank, Dean and Sammy used to party their asses off,” he mused, knowing that nothing gets an old-school concert crowd cheering louder than the phrase, “partying your ass off.”

And maybe there is some unspoken, ghostly camaraderie between the generations when you consider the Rat Pack as the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young of its day, or Judy Garland’s rock star death by a barbiturate OD, or that at one point in the Seventies, Neil and Sinatra were the only two artists signed to Reprise Records.

Old show business, on the other hand, treated rock like a panhandler with leprosy. Steve Allan used to get big laughs by solemnly reciting the lyrics of songs like Get A Job (“Oh, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, get a job”). Peter Sellers, before he discovered acid and became friends with George Harrison, had a routine where he recited the lyrics to A Hard Day’s Night in thespian tones. In 1957, Sinatra’s over-the-top reaction to rock was to call it “the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.” 

I recently watched an episode of The Judy Garland Show from January 1964 – what passed for adult entertainment one month before ground zero, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Judy and her guests, presidential pimp Peter Lawford and the unfunny Martha Raye, strike mock-serious poses and an academic attitude to sing silly Top 40 stuff like the Beach Boys’ Be True to Your School, a song Brian Wilson probably dashed off while waiting for a red light, and Dumb Head, a tale of teenage angst sung by a girl who thinks she’s missed her chance with a guy she likes – a dopey record, but with an emotional hook anyone could understand. The show’s dancers jump about like they’re being zapped with electric cattle prods to Shirley Ellis’ The Nitty Gritty.

Earlier in the show, Rich Little carts out fossilized imitations of Jimmy Stewart, Orson Welles, Ed Sullivan and John Wayne. In what they used to call a musical skit, Lawford, playing a smarmy playboy, attempts to bed an uncooperative Garland, who sings, “I’m just an old-fashioned girl.” The Beatles’ plane couldn’t land soon enough.

Déjà vu

The first Baby Boomer nostalgia boom occurred in the Eighties when, if you had cable, you could find The Addams Family, The Munsters, Donna Reed and My Three Sons, among many others, during primetime – not at hours when only shut-ins and truancy cases might be watching. I ran our VCR ragged taping The Outer Limits and weird shit like Camp Runamuck and Lancelot Link.

The second boom is happening now. We have several new channels dedicated to old shows, a virtual senior center airing mostly programs I don’t care about: hours and hours of black and white Westerns, and seemingly every dopey fantasy sitcom from the sixties. But if you watch the schedules closely, the occasional gem – more weird shit – surfaces.

Like Mack and Myer For Hire, a bargain-basement Abbott and Costello. Pistols and Petticoats, a cross between The Munsters, F Troop, The Wild Bunch and an NRA promotional film. The Lucy Show, where the only male the man-hungry widows Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance ever seem to encounter is the fussy Gale Gordon.

Also on view are shows dating to the Paleolithic Age of television that offer subtexts I didn’t get when I was a kid. Like My Little Margie, with daughter Margie left to protect her 49-year old widowed father from preying women. “After all, he still looks good in his tennis shorts,” muses Margie, as the show takes a weird turn. Or Topper, where the ghostly couple George and Marion Kirby are not only dead and childless, but dedicated lushes.

GET-TV has been running old variety shows, those singing, dancing and comedy shows that hit the wall hard at some point in the seventies and never got up. Reruns of the Judy Garland Show are a reminder that at one time an army of energetic young men made a living leaping about in these shows, mimicking (and mincing) to song lyrics and always smiling. The heyday of male variety show dancers is long gone.

I’m also reminded of how the older Judy Garland scared me. Big head, spindly body, like Dorothy Gale in a funhouse mirror. Her shaky singing, like she was going to burst into tears at any minute. Plus, I knew, because I read The Daily News and WNEW-AM was always on in the kitchen, that she kept overdosing or trying to cut her wrists. Scary adult stuff.

Then there was a rerun of The Merv Griffin Show, with Xavier Cugat and Charo. The unctuous Griffin leans in close to Cugat (whom he calls “Coogie”), who explains there’s nothing wrong with a 66-year old (like Coogie) marrying a 21-year old (like Charo). This was another weird adult thing. I was 12, had some idea about sex and couldn’t get my head around the idea of Coogie and Charo in bed. Same with Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra, and Hayley Mills and that old British fart she married. My parents were born 12 years apart and I could accept that, but the rest confused me to no end.

Thank God Arthur Treacher, the ancient, chain-smoking Sphinx sitting at the end of Merv’s couch, didn’t marry some 20 year old.

Plugged in: 1968

In 1968 I had a transistor radio to listen to when delivering papers or shooting baskets, and one of my parents’ discarded kitchen radios in my bachelor pad bedroom for kicking back with the ladies (whom I lured upstairs with promises of showing off my collection of Doc Savage paperbacks).

On Tuesday afternoon, Dan Ingram would reveal the week’s new standings before Cousin Brucie would do a more formal countdown Tuesday evening. Yes, I used “Cousin Brucie” and “formal” in the same sentence. On Wednesday I turned to WMCA for its weekly survey, always a broader playlist than ABC. Each Thursday, I’d take a sheet of notebook paper and labor over my own personal Top 20.

I was totally plugged in as radio got radically eclectic in 1968; here are some of the reasons why:

Words

The Beatlemania tsunami that swept the charts in early ’64 sunk two musical styles. One was surf, the other instrumentals. Eight instrumentals made the Billboard Top 100 for the year 1963. Then, between 1964 and 1967, only seven instrumentals charted among the total of 400 top songs for those collective four years. But 1968 marked a comeback, with five in the year’s Top 100 – heck, five in the top 30 – Love Is Blue (#1 for five weeks!); Grazing in the Grass; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (I overlook the grunting chorus and count it as an instrumental); The Horse; and Classical Gas. It sparked a brief trend: in 1969, five instrumentals charted in the Top 100 for the year; the following year, the number dropped to one.

Born To Be Mild

Easy listening songs always lurked on the outskirts of the Top 40. Sinatra always had a presence as Strangers In The Night went to #1 in ‘66, and Summer Wind and It Was A Very Good Year made the Top 40. The Beatles’ early spell on the charts was broken when Louis Armstrong’s Hello Dolly, and later Dean Martin’s Everybody Loves Somebody, both inexplicably went to number one. In 1968, however, Love Is Blue, Honey and This Guy’s in Love With You all finished in the Top 10 for the year and collectively spent 13 weeks at number one. The Mills Brothers, missing in action since the Eisenhower administration, returned to the Top 20 with Cab Driver. For the year, Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 had two records in the Top 100, while Little Green Apples, Valley of the Dolls and Those Were the Days finished in the Top 20. As an easy listening instrumental, Love Is Blue, with its harpsichord and oboe, had to be the most unlikely hit record of the decade.

Both Sides Now

This was the year of the Great FM Crossover. White Room coming on the radio right after Chewy, Chewy? It happened that November when they were both in the Top 10. Hello I Love You, Fire, Born To Be Wild, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Magic Carpet Ride, Sunshine of Your Love, Hurdy Gurdy Man, Hush and You Keep Me Hangin’ On were all “heavy rockers” that made it to the Top 100 for the year. Others that didn’t finish in the Top 100, but did all right anyway included All Along the Watchtower (which charted as high as #20), In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (#30), Time Has Come Today (#11), Suzie Q (#11), Piece of My Heart (#13) and Summertime Blues (#14). Even the faux psychedelia of Just Dropped In went to #5.

There Was A Time

Hey Jude (#1 for nearly the entire autumn of ‘68) and MacArthur Park (which hit #2 that summer) both clocked in at more than seven minutes. You have to go back to 1965, with Like A Rolling Stone and You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling, to find two records that ran over four minutes that did as well. How did AM stations, where every second was tightly orchestrated – song, jingle, DJ banter, jingle, ad, ad, ad, DJ banter, song – cope with the possible loss of revenue that came with playing music that sucked up time usually reserved for three or four commercials? WABC shaved precious seconds off both songs by slightly speeding them up – standard practice for them – and by fading them out early. On the flip side were the records which had to be cut from their long album versions to make them radio ready: Time Has Come Today, Suzie Q and In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (from nearly 20 minutes to three).

The End of Our Road

Not an example of the eclecticism of ’68, but an observation. I’m always amazed at how quickly some bands lose their touch, when they turn the handle and suddenly there’s only a trickle where it once gushed. There were three prime examples in 1968. The Monkees sold more records than the Beatles and Stones combined in 1967. They hit #3 with Valleri in the spring of ’68 and were done. The Association couldn’t come up with a follow-up hit to Never My Love and hit the wall. Like the Monkees, their reliance on outside songwriters wasn’t sustainable to any long-term success. (BTW, they turned down MacArthur Park). The beloved Rascals, who only a year ago were being compared with the Beatles (at least by me), had a 1968 #1 hit with People Got To Be Free (for five weeks), while A Beautiful Morning went to #3. Bickering, leading to Eddie and Gene leaving the band, left them stranded, and they never returned to the Top 20.

The Vanishing Point on the Edge of Town

Somewhere along the line, Bruce Springsteen must have seen Vanishing Point, the 1971 movie about a guy drifting through life’s disappointments who finds consolation – maybe even discovers his life’s work – driving a supercharged Dodge Challenger through the mountains and deserts from Denver to San Francisco.

(I’d like to think Bruce caught the flick at that long-gone drive-in by the Driscoll Bridge where the screen faced the Garden State Parkway. Catching a few seconds of some film from a speeding car was always a highlight of the drive home from the Shore).

After the cinematic, operatic, Wagnerian – pick one or all three – Born To Run landed him on the covers of Newsweek and Time, Springsteen spent more than two years waiting out a lawsuit forbidding him from entering a recording studio, a forced retirement that left him to write the Darkness on the Edge of Town album; hits for other artists – Because the Night, Fever and Fire; and several dozen other songs that he and the E Street Band later recorded, then discarded. All in all, a remarkable output.

It’s the Darkness song at the end of Side 1 that brings Vanishing Point to mind. The film and the song, Racing In the Street, are concerned with finish lines, literal and existential, and the connection only came to me when TCM showed Vanishing Point around the same time I was listening to the Darkness on the Edge of Town CD collection.

The narrator of Racing in the Street finds some spending cash, local notoriety and a girl racing like-minded motorheads on summer nights. By the song’s end, he’s three years older, but no wiser, still running cars while his girl sits at home alone wondering just how and when her life slipped by. All to the accompaniment of autumnal, elegiac keyboards that make the characters’ inability to fulfill the promises of youth feel like a longing that never goes away.

The driver in Vanishing Point, Kowalski, a Vietnam vet, has lost his job on the police force and his girl. Juiced on amphetamines, he ignores speed limits and the highway patrol’s attempts to pull him over. Leaving Denver in the early hours, his focus is only on getting the car to San Francisco by 3 p.m. to win a bet. Even a “naked girl on a motorcycle,” as she’s listed in the credits, can’t move him.

A vanishing point is the spot where the outside lines of the highway seemingly converge at the horizon. An illusion, to be sure, and no matter how hard you push or how fast you go, the vanishing point is always out of reach. Kowalski meets his personal vanishing point when the police set up a wall of bulldozers on the highway, and rather than stopping, he hits the accelerator, crashes into the barricade and goes up in a ball of flame. In Racing in the Street, the narrator keeps fumbling his way to a finish line he’ll never reach. His girl, on the other hand, vanishes a little more each day.

In my last post, I listed Racing in the Street as the best song of 1978. Its maturity is amazing to this day, and I’m not even getting into how its lyrics celebrate summer and acknowledge Motown’s Dancing in the Streets.

Early on, Springsteen got saddled with the “New Dylan” label, but while Dylan wrote often-inscrutable lyrics about personal relationships. Bruce was writing short stories about people trying to reconcile their past with the future. A few weeks after Darkness came out, Dylan’s album Street Legal hit the stores. The title refers to a car that is roadworthy – most cars used for racing are just street-legal enough to get from a garage to where the next race is. Maybe it was a comment on Dylan’s durability versus that of the new kid. Maybe not. But in this case, the student took the teacher to school.

It’s a generational thing, the radio

The audience for pop music and, by connection – at least at one time – AM radio, seems to run in cycles that last maybe five years or so. My time, when pop meant the most to me and my radio, ran from 1964 to 1969, bursting out of the gate with I Want to Hold Your Hand, ending with the embarrassing Sugar Sugar.

By 1978, pop had moved on to a generation still in grade school while I was graduating college. It made for a rough ride if you were trapped in a car with only an AM radio, or hanging in a bar with a hit-bound jukebox as a soundtrack. It was an endless loop of Blue Bayou and white people neutering  Motown – anybody up for Rita Coolidge’s The Way You Do The Things You Do? I didn’t think so. You Light Up My Life. Andy Gibb. Chuck Mangione. Eric Clapton, light years from Cream, with the dreary Wonderful Tonight. Copacabana. The Stars War Theme. The Wiz. Grease. Saturday Night Fever.

Thankfully, as you get older your horizons widen, as do your options. Albums and FM radio become the coin of the realm. And while regular radio was no place to seek refuge, if you looked hard enough, or were interested enough, 1978 was a pretty decent year. Looking back with 40 years of hindsight, this was a hip Hackensackian’s top 40 for 1978.

1.     Racing in the Streets (Bruce Springsteen)

2.     Shot By Both Sides (Magazine)

3.     Because the Night (Patti Smith)

4.     Miss You (Rolling Stones)

5.     Number One (Rutles)

6.     Public Image (Public Image Ltd)

7.     Ca Plane Pour Moi (Plastic Bertrand)

8.     I Need to Know (Tom Petty)

9.     Pump It Up (Elvis Costello)

10.  Jocko Homo (Devo)

11.  Senor (Bob Dylan)

12.  Take Me To The River (Talking Heads)

13.  Disco Inferno (Trammps)

14.  Lawyers Guns and Money (Warren Zevon)

15.  On the Air (Peter Gabriel)

16.  Badlands (Bruce Springsteen)

17.  Roxanne (Police)

18.  Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (Santa Esmeralda)

19.  Stay/The Load Out (Jackson Browne)

20.  Every 1s A Winner (Hot Chocolate)

21.  I Wanna Be Sedated (Ramones)

22.  And So It Goes (Nick Lowe)

23.  The Big Country (Talking Heads)

24.  Navvy (Pere Ubu)

25.  David Watts (Jam)

26.  Good Times Roll (Cars)

27.  Look Out For My Love (Neil Young)

28.  Breakdown (Tom Petty)

29.  Hanging on the Telephone (Blondie)

30.  Punky Reggae Party (Bob Marley)

31.  Running On Empty (Jackson Browne)

32.  Prove It All Night (Bruce Springsteen)

33.  One Nation Under A Groove (Funkadelic)

34.  Sultans of Swing (Dire Straits)

35.  Baker Street (Gerry Rafferty)

36.  Love Is Like Oxygen (Sweet)

37.  Take Me I’m Yours (Squeeze)

38.  Wavelength (Van Morrison)

39.  FM (Steely Dan)

40.  Walk And Don’t Look Back (Peter Tosh)

BEST SUPPORTING PRIMATE

In 1942, Donald Crisp won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. I don’t know Donald Crisp and I’ve never seen the movie he was nominated for, How Green Was My Valley. The other nominees included Walter Brennan (the gimpy Grandpa on The Real McCoys), Charles Coburn for the Devil and Miss Jones (no, not The Devil In Miss Jones) and Sydney Greenstreet for the Maltese Falcon (whom Peter Lorre refers to in the movie as “you bloated idiot”). 

Somebody got overlooked. Check out this soliloquy from Tarzan’s New York Adventure, a 1942 feature that obviously needed to pad out a couple of minutes.

In the same movie, there’s also this scene, played with an actor named Mantan Moreland, whom Moe Howard tried to recruit for the Three Stooges when Shemp died in 1955. The studio, as you could guess, nixed that idea pretty quickly. 

Cheetah’s role in the Tarzan movies evolved from Tarzan’s brother in Tarzan of the Apes in 1932, to child surrogate once Tarzan hooked up with Jane, to surefire comedy relief. I’m ignoring the reports that several chimps played Cheetah over the course of the Tarzan movies, or that the 80-year old chimp purported to be Cheetah who died a few years back may not have been the real deal. There wasn’t an actor of his generation more fun to watch.

THE INNER GROOVE, PART 2

Here’s part two, looking at some great record stores.

Disc-O-Mat (River Edge): Like any good record store, Disc-O-Mat was the proverbial rabbit hole, but in a literal sense as well: black walls, no windows and the store itself circular shaped. It offered a great selection, priced right, with no space wasted on classical or jazz; Disc-O-Mat knew its audience: all rock and R&B. Two moments stand out. Public Image Ltd. was scheduled to make an appearance on American Bandstand, highly anticipated as a seismic event as two worlds collide – Johnny Rotten meets Dick Clark – and someone who worked at the store brought in a television. (I left in time to watch it at home). While I’m sure the kid who lugged in the TV only wanted to share this moment with his coworkers, his bigger contribution was creating a connection with the customers and building a sense of community. He should have been named Employee of the Month. The other Disc-O-Mat moment came with Born to Run blasting over the store’s speakers. My brain, which has heard the song 3,000 times, pushes it into the background. But then something pulls it forward. When I expect the song to end, the last note goes on, and on, then morphs into the droning note that opens Roger Daltrey’s It’s A Hard Life (don’t worry, nobody else remembers it either). The two notes are in the same key and if you appreciate that sort of thing, it was really well done. The staffer responsible for this turntable wizardry walked out of the back room of the store triumphant and to the high fives of his coworkers. Another shoo-in for Employee of the Month.

J&R (New York City): My friend Paul and I made annual pilgrimages here, always on the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving, to start the Christmas season by giving gifts to ourselves. The Macy’s of music, J&R offered two entire floors of records, plus an auxiliary store a few blocks away that specialized in jazz. The stock spoke to the kind of diversity you’d expect of a record store in Manhattan, with major sections devoted to third world music, electronic and 12” inch dance singles. The blues department had a record bin divider labeled “The Blinds,” to cover Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell and all those other sightless guys who felt their way through music careers in the twenties and thirties.

Midnight Records (New York City): If you still had money left after J&R, it was a quick drive up to West 23^rd and the remarkable Midnight Records. Think about the guys in the orange aprons at Home Depot or the dudes posing inside Abercrombie & Fitch. If you

had a store with the largest stash of imports, punk and garage rock records, maybe in the world, what kind of staff would you hire? At Midnight, you brought the empty album jacket to the counter, where the guy would look up from a cloud of cigarette smoke and wordlessly hand the jackets to this sullen, scary, hardcore-looking punk I thought was just hanging out, sitting in the window drinking a 16-ounce beer. He took the jackets, went to the back room, got the records. Nothing said. No eye contact. Did I mention their stock? Large enough that Midnight had a mail-order catalog the size and heft of The Daily News.

Sam Goody (Paramus): Famous for the following: 45s stocked in their cubbyholes in the same order as that week’s Billboard Hot 100. The staff’s album reviews of offbeat import records, written on index cards and taped to the jacket. The old guy who worked in the classical section and smoked a cigar, which you could smell throughout the store. Great selection, but expensive.

Korvettes (Paramus): Ask anybody who remembers and they’ll tell you that for a soulless discount department store, Korvettes had an amazing record department, with label sales every week. Until Disc-O-Mat opened, this was the place to go. I don’t even know what the rest of the store looked like. I always entered through the pedestrian bridge that crossed Route 4, which took you directly into the record department.

Upstairs Records (Morristown): Right on the Green and up a steep flight of stairs, it existed for a year or two in the nineties. The owner chain-smoked like mad and there was a carcinogenic fog hanging over the store (actually a converted office). Mostly older, second-hand albums, but also a bootleg nirvana. You had to steel yourself for the checkout, which could take up to 45 minutes as the owner, who was probably lonely sitting there all day by himself – I never saw any other customers – talked music. I’m sure the longest conversation I ever had with anybody anywhere about the Souther, Hillman, Furay Band was with him.

Relic Rack (Hackensack): My friends and I are in a bar across the highway from Monticello Raceway, watching a woman with a big snake dance to Soul Makossa, the record that briefly dropped into the Top 40 in 1973. Reminded of the song’s greatness, I needed to buy it. The next day, I went to the Relic Rack. Located downtown on Main Street, it stocked every 45 in the history of civilization, including Soul Makossa. As with Disc-O-Mat, there was a tribal sharing: on Saturday afternoons a bunch of older guys would hang out in the store, listening to oldies. I went there looking for some record on May 10, 1982, the day WABC switched to an all-talk format (also known as “the day the music died” and ironically the day my father died) and the owner was on the phone frantically telling his wife to “just keep taping” WABC.

Harvest Festival (Denville): Each October, St. Clare’s Hospital thanked the harvest gods for the season’s fruitful bounty with a festival that featured a truck selling funnel cakes and yards of second-hand stuff – toys, books, furniture, clothes and records – for sale. Three garage doors would swing open on a Saturday morning and tens of thousands of albums saw the light of day for the first time in seemingly decades. The stuff I found there was amazing. The Folkswingers. Friar Tuck’s Psychedelic Guitar (sealed!). The Thunderball soundtrack. The Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV soundtrack. The stuff at the back of the garage was shot from moisture and mildew, but it was also the piles of records people had been picking over and rejecting for years, Mantovani and 20 Italian Favorites, stuff like that. The hospital still has a used book store, which is as chaotic as those garages full of records were.

Vintage Vinyl (Woodbridge)/Princeton Record Exchange: The two heavyweight survivors. Vintage Vinyl is a huge store with a great selection, if heavily tilted towards “alternative” bands (and probably genres) I don’t know. Situated across the street from a major PSE&G substation, I’d park a company car at the substation, then cross the street to the store. The PREX, probably shouldn’t be on this list since I’ve only bought CDs there. Princeton has a surprisingly lousy selection of new CDs, but a tsunami of second-hand discs. Look hard enough and you’ll always find something unique; you’ll also spot trends. The kids who owned a Nickelback or Collective Soul CD in the nineties did not keep them into young adulthood. Seemingly every Howard Stern fan who bought the Stuttering John Band CD had buyer’s remorse. All those bleak acoustic albums Springsteen kept making in the nineties? They’re all collecting dust in Princeton. The PREX was famous for its cool kid staff, who would often sneer at the stuff you were buying. Somebody must have noticed and nowadays you’re always greeted with a smile.

Honorable Mention: Crazy Rhythm (Montclair) had a sparse selection but interesting bootlegs. Sound Exchange (Wayne) was crammed with albums, but it was the owner’s pop culture museum in the store that made the trip. Every board game and character lunchbox from the sixties and the only box of Space Food Stix left on Earth. Flipside Records (Wanaque) was a hoarder’s attic of haphazard records and tapes. The Villages at the Bergen Mall (Paramus) was a weird collection of storefronts in the lower level. The record store was the size of a bathroom and sold bootlegs and “collector’s items” like the obligatory John and Yoko’s Two Virgins and the Bee Gees’ Odessa, with the red velvet cover. Igor Records (Teaneck) was run by a couple of Eastern European brothers; I’m sure one of them was Igor. Tower Records (Paramus) rivaled J&R in size and scope, and published a free magazine every month full of articles and reviews. Singers (Paramus) was a great place to browse as a kid while Mom looked for clothes patterns.