In appreciation of the one with the wool hat 

We were Beatle fans and the idea of an upstart band, name deliberately misspelled to ape (sorry) the Beatles and starring in a weekly TV series seemed exploitative, even if nobody in the show’s pre-teen demographic range knew what that meant. But we watched anyway because there was nothing else on television Monday nights (Gunsmoke? Really?) and their first album had an awful lot of good songs. 

As things worked out, Micky was the most comfortable on camera and a lead singer with some R&B flair. You had to look a little harder to find something good to say about Davy and Peter’s contributions. There was nothing rock & roll about maraca-shaking Davy, whose drippy ballads forced you to get up and place the needle on the next song, while Peter seemed to play a pretty mean banjo when called upon. Their TV personas, cute guy with the British accent and eternally bewildered bandmate willing to trade everything for a bag of magic beans, were reliable plot engines throughout the show’s run. 

Which leaves Mike. He was always the Monkee who didn’t seem to be in the middle, a reluctant actor but veteran songwriter and performer who wrote two songs right out of the gate for their first album.

Concerned about the amount of musical content needed for a weekly show about a rock band, Don Kirshner was hired as “musical supervisor,” allowing him to choose the songs the Monkees recorded and who got to play on the sessions. Known by music insiders as a guy with a golden ear for his ability to pick hit songs, he also seemed to have an iron fist, not allowing Nesmith to play guitar on the band’s albums and rejecting a song Nesmith wrote called “Different Drum.”

“Different Drum” instead got picked up by an LA band fronted by Linda Ronstadt, the Stone Poneys, and it rose up the charts in late 1967 in parallel with “I’m A Believer” (#1 for four weeks while “Drum” stalled out at #13). Nesmith’s legitimacy as a songwriter was growing: around this time the Paul Butterfield Blues Band did a groovy cover of his “Mary Mary.” 

With tensions rising between the band members, mostly Mike, and Kirshner over artistic control, Nesmith led a revolt and Kirshner, who’d overstepped his responsibilities one time too many, was dismissed for violating his contract.* Released from Kirshner’s constraints, the band chose the material for their next album, Headquarters, and played most of the instruments. And as they had more say in the TV show, some episodes grew trippier and the band earned the kind of hip prestige that allowed Nesmith to hang out with the Beatles during their party/recording session for “A Day In the Life” and Peter to introduce the Buffalo Springfield at the Monterey Pop Festival.

Without Kirshner holding him back, Nesmith’s contributions were all over the place stylistically: psychedelic-jazz (“Writing Wrongs”), folk-rock (“Door Into Summer”), heavy rock (“Circle Sky”) – at least heavier than anything Monkee fans came to expect from their heroes – and country rock, where Nesmith can rightfully be considered a pioneer as much as Gram Parsons, who usually gets the “father of country rock” title. After the Monkees, Nesmith recorded several Nashville-meets-LA albums that gave him a cultish status.

(Ironically, Parsons and Nesmith came from wealthy backgrounds: Parsons from old money as his parents were Florida citrus-orchard royalty, while Nesmith’s mother, divorced and trying to make ends meet as a typist in suburban Dallas, invented Liquid Paper typewriter correction fluid. From my days working in an office supply warehouse, I can tell you we sold a lot of Liquid Paper).

Nesmith’s lyrics were sometimes idiosyncratic and felt way too labored over (“Darkened rolling figures move through prisms of no color,” “phantasmagoric splendor,” “a world that glitters glibly,” all from “Daily Nightly” about the Sunset Strip youth riots; maybe it doesn’t handle the subject quite as directly as “For What It’s Worth”). But his singing, writing and production is all over the band’s last two hit albums, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones, released in May 1967 (#1 for a week; Sgt. Pepper came out seven days later) and 1968’s The Birds, the Bees and the Monkees. To this day both records are more fun to listen to than those of many of their hipper contemporaries. All the Monkee albums were out of print through most of the 70s. When Rhino Records began re-releasing them in the mid-80s, and later on CD with bonus cuts, it was like welcoming back an old friend. 

After Peter died in 2019 (Davy died in 2012), Mike and Micky began touring as a duo borrowing the Brian Wilson model of playing plenty of deep cuts for the loyal fans along with the hits and backed by a group of likeminded musicians. I passed on buying tickets to see them locally several years ago but regret it now. You gotta see ‘em while you can. 

*In response to his experiences with the Monkees, Kirshner later declared “I want a band that won’t talk back” and he found one when he became the music director for the Archies, who only existed as a cartoon. Something else that possibly only I find interesting is that Kirshner and another vilified music executive, Allen Klein, the thuggish manager of the Beatles who drove a wedge into the band that eventually hastened its breakup, were both graduates of Upsala College.

 

 

 

 

Life, death and meter reading

At a house in Hillsdale I visited each month to read the electric and gas meters, there was an enclosed porch and sitting inside a ghostly old guy tethered to an oxygen tank worked jigsaw puzzles on a TV tray. He’d wave me in and never spoke, saving what air was left in his lungs for more important things, like breathing. He was there every month until one day he wasn’t.

An ancient, overweight golden retriever in Rochelle Park, whose white fur had overtaken the gold, dutifully lifted itself from his bed whenever I entered the house to follow me to the basement door in the kitchen, shedding fur with each step. During one visit, there was no sign of him except the empty dog bed, still covered in white hair.

Life is what happens between the 30 day visits from your friendly neighborhood meter reader.

Sometimes life happens on the day the meter reading is scheduled. As I stood in the rain at a back door in Bergenfield, an older woman indicated she’d be right with me. I waited a long while before another woman came into view and yelled for me to come back another time. A couple of minutes later, an ambulance pulled up to the house. I didn’t see what happened next and didn’t want to know. Maybe there would have been some sort of an emergency regardless of whether I was at the door or not, but my timing could not have been worse.

To get to the meters in a Baptist church in Hackensack, I had a key to the front door. Mid-morning sunlight streamed through stained-glass windows, which helped when I saw I wasn’t going to be alone this month; there was an open coffin at the altar holding a black woman. The door to the basement was just to the right of the altar so it wasn’t like I could keep my distance. I had to walk right past her. While rationally reasoning that there was nothing to be bothered by, I went downstairs, read the meter and got out as quickly as possible.

A couple of blocks over was a growling pit bull kept in a cellar cage (near the meters of course) or sometimes on a short chain leash. The homeowner always went downstairs with me, for which I was continually grateful. The dog was a beast and I was sure that if it ever got loose while I was down there by myself it would tear one of my legs off. One day as we went down the stairs she said, “Don’t worry. He won’t bother you no more.” Exact words. The dog was downstairs laying on its side, quite dead, a trickle of dried something coming from its body. I’m not sure what kind of life it led, but its death felt pretty recent. I hope it wasn’t painful.

Spanky the setter and his owner greeted me every month in front of their open garage door in New Milford. Spanky was friendly, the kind of dog who just wants you to pet him. One day as I walked up their driveway, the homeowner was outside alone. He started sobbing. “Your friend’s not here anymore,” was all he could get out. How did this dopey job get so complicated?

Not that it was all gloom and doom, the grim reaper lurking in the doorway of every home and business. One favorite moment was when a mother with a bunch of little kids in Bergenfield offered me a glass of apple juice, leading to this advice from her roughly three-year old daughter: “Apple juice makes you poop.” To which the mom replied, “Aren’t you a charmer?” You had to be there.

Finally, the meter reader’s wet dream. Summertime and I’m cutting through backyards in Washington Township calling out “Public Service” to let the neighborhood know I was around and not to come up on someone unexpectedly and scare the bejesus out of them. I cut through some hedges high enough to block out the view of the next yard and came across a woman with headphones on. (It was the 80s; maybe she had one of those cool new Walkman cassette players). She couldn’t hear me. She couldn’t see me because she was laying on her back sunbathing. Topless. More embarrassed than anything, I took a step backward behind the shelter of the hedges and quickly got away from her yard, lest anyone – especially the sunbather – think I was spying on her. An hour or so later, while working the other side of the street, I went over and tried her front doorbell. She answered wearing a robe. No need for modesty now, lady. If you only knew.

 

 

 

 

The Perfect Day: October 7, 1966

Back in April, we time-traveled to April 11, 1966 and spent – or maybe wasted – the entire day watching television. Six months later, and courtesy of an old issue of TV Guide (Front cover headline: The Vietnam War: Is TV Giving Us The Picture?) we’re back in my parent’s living room for 24 hours of television. Today is October 7, 1966. It’s a Friday, clear skies and temperatures in the low 70s.

6-7 AM: Your usual educational and religious time-fillers as the networks meet their FCC requirements. We yawn our way through Education Exchange and Sunrise Semester.

7-8 AM: An ancient rerun – even by 1966 standards – of My Little Margie is on Channel 7, before we switch over to Sandy Becker hosting cartoons on Channel 5.

Dancing Bear

8-9 AM: According to TV Guide, “Captain Kangaroo and Dancing Bear show films of their visit to Volendam and The Hague.” Did Dancing Bear really board a plane and fly to the Netherlands? He never spoke and always seemed kind of simple, happy to just dance. Did he avoid the red-light district in Amsterdam, where reprobates would have eagerly lined up to take advantage of him?  It could have been worse. The Captain might have brought the Banana Man over with him instead. 

9-10 AM: We’ll keep it on Channel 11 for this hour. Jack La Lanne is on at 9 and we again marvel at his tight jumpsuit and ballet slippers. At 9:30, there’s Biography, a half-hour of flickering newsreel footage of Charles De Gaulle.

10 AM–12:30: A long dry spell of dusty reruns (Racket Squad, Peter Gunn) and game shows (Concentration, Supermarket Sweep). At 10:30, and worth checking out, Channel 11 is showing Mack and Myer, a bargain basement Abbott & Costello often filmed on the streets of New York City.

There is a programming note in TV Guide that a World Series game could be played this afternoon if any earlier game was postponed because of bad weather. There would be no game today and the Baltimore Orioles wrap things up against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Sunday, the season over on October 9. Today, if all the playoff series get strung out to their maximum number of games, the season will end on November 3.

12:30–1 PM: Nothing could have been cornier or less cool than country music in 1966 (Top 40 crossover hit “Flowers on the Wall” by the Statler Brothers notwithstanding), but it’s time for Swingin’ Country on Channel 4, hosted by Roy Clark and Molly Bee. The show only lasted a few months, but marked a cautious start for country music on a major network. In ten years, we’d be besieged with shows hosted by Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, Mac Davis, the Mandrell Sisters and Mel Tillis, all of whom were mostly country, veering a bit toward the pop side, and photogenic enough to crack the mainstream.

1–3:30 PM: You can only avoid the endless sudsy stream of soap operas on weekday afternoons by trekking through the desert of buzzers, bells and free money: Let’s Make A Deal, The Newlywed Game, To Tell The Truth, House Party and Password.

3:30–6 PM: Daytime television phases into its next programming block, kid’s shows, and we spend the rest of the afternoon with New York City faves Sandy Becker (he worked a morning and afternoon shift), Chuck McCann, The Three Stooges and those Japanese science-fiction cartoons that were starting to show up on TV in 1966, Gigantor and 8^th Man, both obviously (and badly) dubbed and featuring a cast of annoying characters.

6–7 PM: For this hour we move upstairs to my parent’s bedroom where there’s a portable TV on the dresser that pulls in UHF stations. We play around with the antenna and bingo, it’s the legendary Disc-O-Teen on Channel 47. Imagine American Bandstand, hosted by Zacherle, recorded live in a studio in Newark with real teenagers, not those privileged LA kids on Dick Clark’s show or the professional (and hardly teenage) dancers on Soul Train. (Amazingly, Disc-O-Teen footage survives):

7-7:30 PM: It’s Friday, Sub-Mariner day on Channel 9’s Marvel Cartoon Show. (For the record, the rest of the week ran this way: Captain America (Monday), Hulk (Tuesday), Iron Man (Wednesday) and Thor (fittingly on Thursday). Barely animated and with seemingly the same actor and actress providing all the voices, this is the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Steamboat Willie.

7:30-9:30 PM: The Wild, Wild West on Channel 2 at 7:30 always maintained a high standard, stayed true to its original concept (James Bond on horseback) and had exceptional production values. Can’t say the same for The Man From U.N.C.L.E. at 8:30 on Channel 4. This is the show’s third season, when its producers became enamored with Batman (and its high ratings) and gave the show a campy, lighter tone. Boy, it sure didn’t work and the show was nearly cancelled before it got credible again, although the damage was already done. All you need to know about tonight’s episode is that the guest stars are Shelley Berman and Carol Wayne.

9:30-10 PM: T.H.E. Cat (acronyms were all the rage back then) was a cat burglar whose last name was also Cat. Everyone remembers the one essential detail (T.H.E. stood for Thomas Hewitt Edward, our hero’s given names), but nobody can recall actual episodes – only the image of Robert Loggia as Cat, tossing a hook tied to a rope over a wall and then scaling it, something that happened every week. Tonight, Cat “investigates the mysterious knifing of a singer’s press agent.”

10-10:30 PM: The three networks are showing Laredo, a Western movie and Twelve O’Clock High. We’ll pass on all three and go with Mike Douglas, who now has a Friday night show in addition to afternoons. What he doesn’t have are guests who might make a Friday night more interesting. Tonight’s top-billed Dr. Joyce Brothers isn’t going to cut it. Not that it matters because at 10:30 we’re switching over to Channel 11.

10:30-11 PM: It’s The Allie Sherman Show, with the embattled New York Giants head coach looking for silver linings as the team goes head-first down the tubes on its way to a 1-12-1 record, including a loss to a first-year expansion team and a defense that will give up 501 points. That’s an average of 35 points a game. One highlight is Sherman’s inexplicable Southern accent, this from a guy who grew up in Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn College.

11 PM-6 AM: Another slog made more difficult because we’re getting sleepy. There’s news and college football highlights from last weekend. Johnny Carson’s guests are Rose Marie and Roger Miller. Merv Griffin is somewhere in the mix as well. A couple of black and white movies from the 40s, none very promising. The last station to go off the air is CBS at 5:30 a.m.

I need to get out of here before someone catches me, a full-grown adult nobody knows asleep on the couch.

 

 

 

Serve Somebody (dance remix version)

Back when we were young and dumb, there were two music-related events we couldn’t get our heads around: Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity and the rise of disco.

Aside from Dylan, the born-again Christian thing seemed like a fad at first. It swept through my then-circle of friends like a pandemic, taking two couples and a cousin with it. Actually, it happened so quickly, involving changes in personality and relationships, that it felt more like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It was difficult to understand and seemed counter to where we were in life: in our early twenties, with personal freedoms we could only wish for in high school, and now everyone who had fallen under the spell was taking a step backwards, afraid to face the future without some ethereal presence placing its hands on their shoulders and directing them.

In Bob Dylan’s case, it was equally hard to figure. The “spokesman for a generation,” raised Jewish, chastising audiences as non-believers and making what amounted to gospel records. It felt like losing a cool uncle to a cult.

Even while all this happened, the distant thump-thump-thump of disco started being heard. At first, it seemed more than a bit corny and a mutant strain of the R&B we’d grown up with, 1001 songs that sounded the same, 975 of them about dancing, the rest about sex.

Donna Summers

It spread fast, quickly becoming the soundtrack in bars, hair salons and car rides. It didn’t matter one bit that much of the music was being made by black musicians or embraced by gays. What bothered us was that disco, like being born again, translated into a lifestyle we didn’t understand or aspire to. On the outside at least, it seemed hollow. It was about perfect hair, flared pants and dancing, for God’s sake – not flannel shirts and sneakers. (Although for both sides it was all about wearing the right uniform for the army you’d volunteered for).

But once you got past the fashion, the unspoken secret of disco was that we began gravitating toward it. There was plenty to like. The dynamic guitar solo on Donna Summers’ “Hot Stuff” (played by Elliot Randall, also responsible for the lead guitar on Steely Dan’s “Reeling In The Years”). The undeniably cool synthesizer workout that ruled Summers’ “I Feel Love.”

John Lennon claimed to be a fan of Shirley and Company’s “Shame, Shame, Shame” (we were too, but just didn’t want to admit it). Neil Young confessed his admiration for Donna Summers’ “Bad Girls.” When rock groups began appropriating the disco sound, we were all in. Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” was unbearably dumb, but appealing. I played the extended dance remix of the Stones’ “Miss You” – the version you’d hear in gay clubs and the discos we’d never set foot in – to death.

The golden age of disco was relatively brief, and it was probably done in by general overexposure and crap like this. I’ve read it was white rock fan backlash that killed disco, but if that’s true the jokes on them as dozens of English bands took to synthesizers, drum machines and the unmistakable dance beat as the foundation of new wave music.

Bob Dylan, as he always has, stayed away from any sort of stylized music like disco. His Christian phase lasted only a couple of years (at least as far the public is concerned). The two albums he made under the influence were – another unspoken truth – among his better efforts from the decade.

 

 

 

 

When you're a Jet

I used to approach each upcoming New York Giants football season with boundless naivete, overlooking their legion of slow running backs (“they run hard”), undersized offensive linemen (“scrappy”) and the overall defense, a who’s who of mediocre NFL journeymen (“experienced veterans”) and deciding that with the right breaks, the team could be a contender.

When it was announced that the Giants and Jets would meet for the first time in an August 1969 preseason game, there was the same silly optimism. Who cares that the Jets won the Super Bowl eight months earlier? It was a fluke, and Spider Lockhart will get a couple of interceptions off overrated Namath, and Homer Jones can beat any of their defensive backs, and on and on.

At the very least, a win over the Jets would be some response to the long winter and spring following their Super Bowl victory, when you couldn’t escape Namath or his teammates. They showed up on Ed Sullivan, Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett, The Kraft Music Hall. Namath got his own Saturday night talk show on Channel 5 (co-hosted by Dick Schaap, there to ask Namath’s guests all the serious questions).

Joe Namath and Dick Schaap

But as August drew closer, It was obvious that the Jets weren’t treating this like another preseason game.

The Jets, at least the guys who’d been with the team the longest, truly resented the Giants’ haughtiness and sense of entitlement over which team owned New York City. How the Mara family was looked upon like royalty. How the Giants cut Don Maynard, the Jets star receiver, years earlier for refusing to get rid of his long sideburns and cowboy boots. Maybe even how Frank Gifford got all those Jantzen swimwear ads and that the Giants players got better service at P.J Clarke's

Each year I sent away for the Giants yearbook, with its inevitable staged shot of a player, dressed in a suit and with an attaché case, waving goodbye to his wife (always holding a baby) as he leaves for his off-season job as a stockbroker. It was a team image the Giants eagerly promoted and protected.

At the same time, it was obvious that many of the Jets seemed to have a different attitude. Some dared to wear their hair on the longish side. Namath had his Fu Manchu mustache. Don Maynard’s sideburns were still intact. In the summer of 1969, these things mattered to kids questioning how society worked. I had a vague idea of what I wanted in life, but it sure wasn’t being a stockbroker. Two uncles owned Giants season tickets. One was an insurance agent, the other an office manager. Was that my future too?

It was hard to face the notion that the Giants were “The Establishment,” while the Jets were crossing the moat and kicking down the doors to the castle.

One week after Jimi Hendrix closed Woodstock and four days before my 15^th birthday, I spent a long afternoon listening to the game on the radio, 17-0 Jets before the Giants even got a first down. Final score: 37-14. This from the Daily News: “In his best Super Bowl form, Namath hit on 14 of 16 passes for 188 yards and three touchdowns before trotting off the field with hands raised joyously in triumph after his third scoring toss with 7:10 left in the game.”

Wellington Mara could accept his team’s overall lack of talent, but not a loss to the Jets. Two weeks later, he fired head coach Allie Sherman. The Giants went 6-8 that season, including a disastrous seven-game losing streak. Over the following ten years, the entire decade of the 70s, they won just one-third of all their games.

Today I seem to be a card-carrying member of The Establishment if defined by age, skin color and lofty position in corporate America.  Honestly though, I keep the card hidden away. The Giants’ fortunes, however, I still wear on my sleeve. 

 

 

The Willingboro Olympics 

It’s no wonder I was late to the meeting. To get to the Medco Health Automated Pharmacy in Willingboro, NJ, you needed to get on the Turnpike South to Cherry Hill, then several local highways before a turn off into an industrial park.

The pharmacy was a huge facility, a converted department store built to impress potential clients with high-tech machinery and a conference room with a long table and windows that overlooked a maze of conveyor belts and technicians emptying jars of pills into automated dispensing systems. I sat off to the side of the conference room and scoped it out. Seated around the table were a couple of Medco execs, some folks from an outside marketing agency, plus Mark Spitz, Greg Louganis, Al Oerter, Peggy Fleming, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Bruce Jenner.

Wow.

During my ten years there, Medco went from Merck subsidiary to the Fortune 100. Management craved  some sort of big national advertising campaign and hiring a group of gold medalists with chronic health conditions to hype our mail order pharmacy and lower prices, seemed like a good way go. There were even whispers about a possible Super Bowl ad. (The crucial caveat that everybody seemed to overlook was that a consumer couldn't just order medicines from Medco. Your health plan had to be using Medco as its pharmacy benefit managers.).

There was a presentation, then a tour of the pharmacy. Jenner’s gold medal performance had been 31 years earlier, but he was a big dude with broad shoulders and easily recognizable (even with the facelift – nobody but Jenner knew he was on his way to being reincarnated as a real-life Roberta Muldoon) and the pharmacy techs on the floor were walking away from the kind of machinery that requires a watchful eye just to shake his hand.

Watching the group dynamics during breaks, the athletes gravitated together into smaller groups. I imagine that when astronauts got together it was the same thing -- the natural camaraderie of people who'd experienced something the rest of us will never get close to.  

The meeting broke out into smaller sessions as the agency people and some of us from Medco went over campaign speaking points and answered the athletes' questions.  I sat in with Greg Louganis and Peggy Fleming. I corrected her handler on one point and answered a couple of questions she had. All I could think of was getting this issue of Sports Illustrated in the mail when I was 13 years old:

That morning in Willingboro may have been the high point of the campaign. For whatever reasons, Fleming dropped out. Al Oerter’s chronic health condition turned out to be cardiac related and he died suddenly a few months later of heart failure. (Oerter may have owned the most impressive Olympic achievement, four consecutive gold medals in the discus between 1956 to 1968). He was replaced by Bob Beamon, who broke the world long jump record by an astounding 22 inches during the 1968 Olympics.

In the end, the campaign wasn’t podium worthy. Beamon and Kersee made a few personal appearances at client meetings or gave talks to employees. I don’t recall Jenner being very active. Things fizzled out quickly, with only Spitz appearing in a couple of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ten-second TV ads that got sandwiched into commercial breaks during late afternoon talk shows. Later, he sued Medco for using his image after his contract expired.

Two years later, Medco was gone after merging with its biggest competitor.

Spitz, Beamon, Louganis, Kersee and Jenner in their Medco track suits 

 

Another retail eulogy 

I found my destination, located among shops that sold pagers and had window signs in Spanish, on a main boulevard and tried to park as close as possible to the storefront. Irvington was a pretty iffy place, part of the New Jersey cradle of crime, along with Newark, Elizabeth and East Orange. But unlike most white suburban guys, I wasn’t there to score drugs, but records.

Despite the name, Vintage Vinyl primarily sold new records and in the days before internet shopping, it had an amazing selection crammed into the confines of a pretty small space. I spent a small fortune that afternoon coming across stuff that you’d never find in any shopping center record store, including double albums by Husker Du and the Minutemen – at least that’s what I remember buying. There was more.

Vintage Vinyl eventually moved to Fords, right off the Parkway and Route 1, into a much larger store that allowed for an even greater selection of records. When I worked for the electric utility, I’d check out a company car, park next to the big substation across the street from the store (nobody was going to question a PSE&G car) and spend some time there. (When Forbidden Planet, the NYC comic book store, briefly opened an annex next store to Vintage Vinyl, it was like the call of the Sirens).

Nirvana right off the Garden State Parkway

The store’s tagline was “From the obscure to the obvious” (or maybe it was the other way around). When I heard some weird independent music on WFMU that I needed to have, there were two options. Order it from Midnight Records in NYC and wait two weeks for delivery or drive over to Vintage Vinyl and have it that afternoon. That covers the obscure. On a summer Friday in 2014, I left work early to buy the CSNY ’74 live boxset, which had come out that week, at the Princeton Record Exchange. New, much-hyped set by a major group. They didn’t have it. I was already in Central Jersey and I wanted the thing, so I found my way to Vintage Vinyl. There it was, just waiting for me. Obviously.

Vintage Vinyl is closing at the end of this July. It looks as if the owner is closing the store on his own terms and it’s not another of those pandemic-related or nobody’s buying physical music anymore stories. He kept it going for 42 years, a great run for a record store in this day and age. 

Right now, at my current job, I’m only twenty minutes or so from Vintage Vinyl, which is having a storewide sale. I could drive over at lunch and maybe park in the substation lot for old times, but I don’t work for the utility anymore, and I’d probably get a ticket. I will get over there soon.

 

 

The first, best, worst, etc.

I came across this exercise about live music in another blog, and realized I stumbled across an easy way to update my own blog without having to burn through too many brain cells.

First concert: After my mother won tickets in a WNEW drawing, we saw Tony Bennett perform at an outdoor bandstand at FreedomLand Amusement Park. My memory of this show is a little vague; I’d guess it was sometime in ’63 or ’64.

Last concert: Dwight Yoakam at the Morristown Center for Performing Arts in August 2019 – which means we’re coming up on two years without live music.

Best concert: It changes all the time, but today it’s the Talking Heads in 1980 at the skating rink in Central Park. Held during a memorable New York City heat wave – the temperature hit 97 degrees that afternoon and guys were selling “Welcome to The Baked Apple” t-shirts in the street – the weather perfectly suited the Heads’ new music, which was somewhere between urban funk and African pop. The band was expanded to include musicians from Funkadelic, plus avant-garde guitar virtuoso Adrian Belew of King Crimson. The entire show was cool enough that after a while you forgot how hot and heavy the air was.

I wish I'd picked up one of these

Worst concert: A tossup between Frank Zappa at the Palladium in the early 80s – a bore, plus one of the worst audiences ever and an overflowing toilet in the men’s room – and the Allman Brothers at Roosevelt Stadium in 1974, who couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge the audience. Even a “Hello, Jersey City” would have been nice.

Loudest concert: Not so much the concert as the opening act for Radiohead at the Prudential Center, a band called Caribou. The place was only about a quarter full when they came on and their music, loud to begin with, just reverberated off the mostly empty concrete stands.

Seen the most: Ten times for Neil Young. Once solo, with four different backing bands (including Crazy Horse twice), paired with Stephen Stills and three times with Stills, Crosby and Nash. We had tickets for an eleventh show at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, NY, before a band member mangled his hand (caught in a closing tour bus door was the story) and they had to cancel.

Most surprising: In the days before YouTube and setlists.com, you seldom knew just what to expect when you bought tickets for a show. I may have had some knowledge of the details around Neil Young’s 1978 Rust Never Sleeps show at the Garden, but the Alice in Wonderland meets Star Wars meets Woodstock theme that ran through the evening was at times spectacular, and strangely endearing.

Rust Never Sleeps: Neil Young surrounded by giant amps

Not a live show, but seeing a grouchy-looking Lou Reed in the audience at Carnegie Hall for a Brian Wilson concert was kind of surprising. 

Wish I’d seen: I had tickets for George Harrison at the Nassau Coliseum in 1974. I also had a mid-term exam the following day in a class that I guess I wasn’t feeling too confident about, so I sold the tickets to a friend and stayed home to study. I guess I had my priorities straight at the time, but in hindsight, yeeesh. Did I mention Ravi Shankar opened the show?

Unfulfilled bucket list: Bob Dylan, Otis Redding …

Next concert: Who knows?

 

 

There’s more for your life

At some point during the horror show of 2020, I found myself actually getting wistful about the 80s – a decade of personal satisfaction and professional growth but culturally soulless and the start of a political shitstorm we’re still caught in. It was a great decade for football and basketball however, so I indulged my nostalgia watching DVDs of vintage pro football games.

During the original broadcast of the 1983 USFL championship game between the Philadelphia Stars and the Michigan Panthers, this commercial popped up:

Seems like a fun place, doesn’t it? Despite the looks of the models cast in the commercial, Sears was solidly blue collar. And practical. No kid ever looked forward to a visit to Sears during the Christmas season.

Just before we got married in 1983, we went with my mom to the Sears in Hackensack and bought a refrigerator for our apartment. I applied for my first Sears credit card and in time we found more for our life – generally all the big-ticket stuff like tires, a snowblower, a lawnmower, maybe our first washing machine and dryer, I don’t remember.

Fast forward to last August. Although we had nothing planned and nowhere to go, I took a week off from work. On one miserably depressing day, clammy, humid, an overcast sky spitting rain off and on, I went for a drive and ended up, as I inevitably sometimes do, back in Hackensack. Driving by Sears, with its art deco tower a city landmark since 1932, was a banner declaring, “Store Closing Sale.” Facemask on, I had to go in.

The smell of roasted nuts always greeted you at the Hackensack Sears; you could buy them there, along with weird candies that only old people ate, like Swedish fish and bridge mix, whatever that was.

There was nothing quite so welcoming this time. The place had the vibe of the last helicopter leaving Vietnam. Hispanic women rooted through racks of unwanted children’s clothes. Hangars were thrown on the floor. Every wall was bare, with one cash register open. I took a loop around the store, which now seemed small and wounded, and quickly left.

It was raining harder as I left and took off for home. This was one visit to the old turf that I truly regretted.

It might have been nice to get one last ride on the store’s escalator, but it was blocked off. Watching scenic footage shot by drones reminds me of riding escalators as a kid, rising silently above all the activity below. Looking over the railing, a panoramic view of the entire store, changing as you go higher and higher!

I’m reasonably sure that a psychiatrist would tell me that I keep going back to Hackensack because I’m looking for something that may not exist anymore. Maybe all I need to do is ride an escalator.

 

 

 

 

One person’s treasure

One of a meter reader’s underrated skills is the ability to move quickly through other people’s worlds, sometimes sweeping through nearly 100 homes in a day. There were the regulars with whom I kept up a running conversation for months. Old ladies in housecoats. Retired guys who would wait for me like it was the highlight of their day – at least until the mailman's arrival. A woman I went to high school with, now married and with kids who, if she recognized me, never let on. The woman with her elderly parents in side-by-side hospital beds in the living room. The older couple who always apologized for the state of their basement with references to the Collyer Brothers. We’d carry on our brief monthly conversation, then say pretty much the same things 30 days later.

Otherwise, I spent most of each day in basements, garages, closets hidden behind knotty pine paneling, apartment house laundry rooms – the places where people left the stuff they didn’t want to look at, deal with, had no room for, outgrew or forgot about.

In an ancient basement in Bayonne, old comic books spilled haphazardly out of a plastic garbage bag. Old Marvels from ’61, ’62. Early issues of the Fantastic Four. Spider-Man. The Hulk. I thought about returning to the house and claiming I was in the neighborhood looking to buy old stuff and did they have anything, maybe old comic books, they wanted to sell? It was a fleeting fantasy. I could never find the house again, let alone find my way to Bayonne.

A shuttered candy store was another Bayonne treasure palace. A grim black woman accompanied me inside and stood watch as I read the meters. It wasn’t until I looked around that I realized the reason for the high-security paranoia. The place was literally a step back into time, with old soda and tobacco advertising signs and so much stuff on the shelves I couldn’t make it all out. But for sure, there were boxes of old baseball cards and freaking Disneyland trading cards – rare as hen’s teeth as a coworker used to say. Places like that just don’t exist anymore, at least not on the East Coast.

Somebody in Washington Township had albums in a box under the meter. Right in front was Sgt. Pepper with the yellow band across the top stating it was MONO, which nobody bought; everyone wanted the stereo version. The stuff of legend back in the 80s (the mono version offered different mixes so that some instruments and other effects were more pronounced) today the album exists on YouTube for your listening enjoyment.

Scattered on a table in Hackensack was the record collection of another woman I’d gone to school with, all Motown and Stax singles, each with her name written on the label.

And there were the magazine hoarders. Stacks of LIFE in a house in Teaneck. Over to horny Hillsdale where one guy had boxes and boxes of porn (heterosexual) in the basement. Just down the street – and fittingly in a closet – a neighbor kept his stack of gay porn near the gas meter.

An inexplicably random Supercar Golden Book next to a meter in Hillsdale. Cartons of junky knockoff toys in a Teaneck basement (G.I. Jeff figures anyone?), probably overstock from a five and dime store. In an industrial maintenance supply store in Hackensack that always smelled of floor wax, a sign in the basement for Hobby Land – a remembrance of what the store had been in the 50s and 60s, with its memorable electric train layout.

In a well-lit, neat cellar in Maywood, there was a dead raccoon stretched out on the floor. When I told the homeowner, he replied, “I know.” I shrugged and moved on to the next house.

 

The Perfect Day: April 11, 1966 

Time travel. It ain’t here yet, but when it does, it’s gonna be something. Another shot at revenge or redemption. A chance to spend extra time with friends and family who left too soon. An opportunity to right wrongs. Imagine the line of people outside Mark David Chapman’s nursery waiting to smother him in his crib. Or those willing to pay the greens fee to rent a golf cart and run over a young Donald Trump. Nothing serious, maybe just a case of severe head trauma. 

One of the great deals on eBay over the years has been the ability to grab old issues of TV Guide. For a throwaway periodical that served its purpose after one week, it’s amazing how many are still floating around. I have several New York Metro editions and sometimes I’ll go through a single day and try to figure what I’d watch for 24 hours, starting at 6 AM (where TV Guide’s daily listings began each day). Admittedly lame, but it keeps me out of the pool halls. 

Our time travel trip takes us to Monday, April 11, 1966 and my parent’s living room. 

6:00 AM: We’re limited at the start of the day, with only NBC broadcasting and leaving us with no choice but “Education Exchange” and time to look out the windows and watch it grow lighter outside. If we’re lucky, it’s trash pick-up day and we get to watch the garbage trucks come through. 

6:30 AM: Staying with NBC, there’s “Bwana Don,” a syndicated nature show featuring a guy wearing a safari outfit. 

7:00 AM: A Jurassic-era “My Little Margie” rerun on ABC. The “Today Show” is on NBC, but with a promised look at “medical corpsmen in Vietnam,” I’ll pass. 

7:30 – 9:00 AM: An onslaught of cartoons on WNEW, hosted by Sandy Becker, and ABC. 

9:00 AM: “Girl Talk” with the perfectly coiffed Virginia Graham. Today’s panel is a winner:

Hermione Gingold; Trude Heller, whose Greenwich Village club bearing her name was a hipster destination of 1966; and the alluring Hullabaloo dancer Lada Edmund Jr. 

9:30-11:30 AM: Following a rerun of “Leave It To Beaver,” we go with three straight games shows: “Eye Know,” “Concentration” and a personal favorite, “Supermarket Sweep,” with John Bartholomew Tucker. Maybe it will be one of the episodes filmed at the Bergen Mall Food Fair. 

11:30 AM: The Dating Game is the choice over yet more cartoons at WNEW. 

12:00 – 1 PM: We’re tempted by “Jeopardy” with Art Fleming and the manually operated answer board, but “Romper Room” beckons, a strange hour of educational segments, songs, commercial plugs for Romper Room toys and old cartoons. Plus, the added charm of the live audience of little kids, who would sometimes get fresh with each other, cry or talk over Miss Mary Ann. 

1:00 PM: An ad in TV Guide says “PDQ” is “television’s fastest and most exciting word game” and our decision is made. 

1:30 – 3:30 PM: The early afternoon is dominated by games shows and it doesn’t make any sense to watch a soap opera since tomorrow we’ll be back in 2021. We’re going with “Let’s Make A Deal,” “Password” – with Barbara Feldon and Brian Kelly of “Flipper,” followed by an Art Linkletter doubleheader, “House Party” and “People Are Funny.” Let’s also keep in mind that the Mets are playing the Reds on WOR this afternoon and we can always switch over to that. The ’66 Mets were pretty miserable. 

3:30 – 4:30 PM: School’s out and WNEW has Soupy Sales and Chuck McCann back-to-back. At this point both were a little past their prime as kid’s show hosts but they’re certainly worth our attention here. 

4:30 PM: “Where the Action Is” with guests James Brown and Mickey Rooney Jr., representing the last gasp of the trend of movie stars’ kids trying to build off dad’s brand as rock singers, some successfully (Gary Lewis, Nancy Sinatra, Dino, Desi and Billy) and some not so (Noel Harrison and Rooney Jr.). 

5:30 – 6:30 PM: As we hit the back half of our wasted day, it’s the Three Stooges on WPIX, 

hosted by our favorite uncle, Officer Joe Bolton, followed by Paul Winchell on WNEW (According to TV Guide, “Knuck makes everyone panic when he can’t be found”). 

6:30 PM: We have the option of staying with Paul Winchell (at least until we find out where Knuck has been hiding) or “Surf’s Up” on WOR, a half-hour of surfing films. 

7:00 PM: Reality time with the news. The pick is NBC with the reliable law firm of Huntley and Brinkley, over Cronkite on CBS.

7:30 PM: Primetime starts and it’s an easy choice of “Hullabaloo” over “12 O’Clock High” or the “New York television debut” of Abbott and Costello’s “Jack in the Beanstalk” on the Million Dollar Movie – although it’s difficult to get excited over the lineup of Peter and Gordon, the Cyrkle, Lesley Gore and host Paul Anka. 

8:00 – 9:00 PM: When people try to tell you that TV was better back then, they never sat

through a night like this. At 8, the best choice is “To Tell the Truth” and a half-hour later we get to choose from “The Lucy Show” and “Jesse James” with James Dean-whisperer Christopher Jones. We’ll go with the Western. 

9:00 – 10:00 PM: For seemingly decades, was there ever a single week when Andy Williams wasn’t on TV? Here, he’s hosting the Kraft Music Hall. One of the bits is a “send up,” as they used to say, of “Flower Drum Song” with Andy playing an “Oriental criminologist” … sounds like something that isn’t about to repeated anytime in the next century. 

10:00 – 11:30 PM: We’ll go with Merv Griffin on WNEW, whose guests include Tab Hunter and Totie Fields, making one of her 59 appearances on Merv. For the record, she was on the Mike Douglas Show 71 times. 

11:30 – 1:00 AM; Johnny Carson, with guest Woody Allen, who will surely make many jokes at his own expense about in his inability to “score” – to use the 1966 term – with women. Possibly a show that isn’t about to be repeated anytime in the next century. 

1:00 – 2:30 AM: ABC shows “The Trap” with white guy Sidney Toler as “Oriental criminologist” Charlie Chan. Once ubiquitous, I couldn’t tell you the last time a Charlie Chan flick ran on TV and I don’t believe it’s going to happen anytime soon. 

2:30 AM: We’re on life support here, with most of the stations off the air. CBS is showing a 1935 movie called “Bolero” with George Raft and it’s the only raft available to ride through to the end of the perfect day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Losing My Religion

When they first came on the scene in the early 80s, R.E.M. was the best new group around. They had a sound that combined punk and Americana – before anybody even knew what that was – with indecipherable lyrics that, when you could make them out, were abstract, dream-like mumbles, adding extra significance and meaning to the band’s name.

The cover of their first album, Murmur, pictured a field overrun with kudzu, a commentary on an invasive junk culture threatening to take over not only the South and their home state of Georgia, but regionalism in general. These guys were smart and subversive; the overall vibe was one of Andy of Mayberry on acid.

We saw them at the Capitol Theatre in June 1984, a strange concert that was being filmed for MTV. (Strange on three counts: it was held on a really hot night and the Capitol didn’t have air conditioning; MTV handlers were milling around on the lookout for girls they could fill in the front rows with; and the opening acts were John Sebastian, Roger McGuinn and Richie Havens, each of whom, according to MTV, influenced R.E.M.’s folk-rockish sound. The band apparently disagreed and pointedly opened with a cover of a Velvet Underground song).

Here, they perform “Radio Free Europe” from that night. This is a band firing on all cylinders, and maybe because they made so many videos, did we watch them age over the next 20 years or what?

 

As R.E.M. grew to become an international force of nature and entered a long-term residency on MTV, I started to lose interest. It felt like there were too many people in the room and their music began to change direction. With the inescapable and bleak “Everybody Hurts,” and the bubblegum nursery rhymes “Stand” and “Happy Shiny People,” I was already backing away.

Around the same time, I had similar reactions to a couple of other favorites, Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello.

Springsteen began to take on some sort of Dust Bowl affectation, with a lot of desolate ballads, usually addressing someone as “sir” and sung with, I guess, a Western accent. His zillion-selling Born In the USA album was four good songs and the rest filler – if things fall in my favor, I’ll never sit through “Glory Days” ever again. In Costello’s case, I kept buying his records well into the 90s before I realized the music had become not just overly crafted but utterly joyless.

Yet there’s hope. For the longest time I felt the same way about Paul McCartney. His post-Beatles output seemed to be based more on “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “All Together Now” than say, “Penny Lane” or “Hey Jude.” His ill-advised teaming with Michael Jackson and the embarrassing videos that followed drove me out completely. But right around the start of the century, Paul seemed to remember he was a Beatle, not a Bay City Roller, and began – and continues – to record albums that play to his many strengths and make me glad he’s still around writing and recording.

R.E.M. broke up a few years ago and when I can find them, I check the latest albums by Springsteen or Costello out of our local library. I always give them a hopeful listen, but we seem to be growing ever-further apart.

The Adventures of Superman: The Stolen Costume   

This entry is part of the Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon hosted by A Shroud Of Thoughts

While mostly remembered today as a kid’s program, the first season of The Adventures of Superman could be downright dark and disturbing. I couldn’t have been the only kid watching the syndicated reruns who was creeped out by the discovery of the dead dog in “The Deserted Village” or the loony wax museum proprietor who “prophesizes” the death of several Metropolis civic leaders, then cages them in her basement, in “Mystery in Wax.”

“The Stolen Costume” was one of the more memorable stories from that first season, offering some truly noir-ish elements and an unforgettable ending.

The Metropolis police are baffled by a burglar who lowers himself by rope into windows. Despite this, Clark Kent leaves his bedroom window wide open and, with the police in pursuit, the thief ducks into his apartment, where he stumbles across the greatest secret in the free world: in a hidden closet, draped on a hangar as if it just came back from the cleaners, is Superman’s costume.

(One of the more interesting sidebars in this episode is its view into Clark’s apartment: primly decorated, Felix Unger-neat and colorless, with the secret closet as the only personal touch).

Fleeing with the costume, the burglar is shot and finds his way to the front door of Metropolis hood Ace and his moll Connie (Dan Seymour and Veda Ann Borg). The burglar, whom Ace recognizes as a local “two-bit punk,” dies on their couch but not before revealing Clark Kent as the costume’s owner.

Candy and Clark -- not to be confused with Candy Clark

His worst nightmare realized, the normally cool and collected Clark is visibly upset, anxiously pacing his apartment. While he can’t say what’s missing, he has a private investigator pal named Candy (Frank Jenks) dust for fingerprints. “What did you have hidden in here, the family jewels?” asks Candy when Clark shows him the secret closet. “No, something a lot more valuable to me,” Clark answers. 

Ace needs more solid proof that Clark is Superman and breaks into his apartment, jimmying the front door this time – Clark may as well start charging admission – to rig an explosive. Ace’s logic? If the bomb goes off, Clark will “either be dead, or we’ll be sitting on top of the world,” a statement that falls well into the category of being careful what you wish for.

The bomb goes off, Clark is alive and a meeting with Ace and Connie is arranged. But earlier in the episode Connie mistook Candy for Clark and when Connie and Ace find him outside Clark’s apartment house, they take Candy away at gunpoint to their apartment.

Clark sees the three drive off and instinctively begins to loosen his tie, then stops when he realizes there’s no costume underneath his street clothes. Moments later, he breaks through Ace and Connie’s front door, then coldcocks Candy so he won’t hear or see what happens next. Ace and Connie threaten to divulge Superman’s secret identity. “How are you going to stop us?” sneers Connie. “Everybody knows Superman doesn’t kill.” “You’re not going to tell anybody,” says a grim Clark, adding, “put on some warm clothes.”

Back in his work clothes, Superman flies Ace and Connie to the summit of a remote, rugged mountain – Ace’s “top of the world.” Superman tells them there is no way down, but there’s a cabin nearby they can call home for now. “You’ll have to stay here until I can think of some way to keep you from talking,” he says before flying off to gather some supplies.

Ace, Connie and Superman on top of the world

Certain that Superman has left them for dead, Ace begins working his way down the mountain. Reaching an icy ledge, he yells for Connie to follow, telling her, “It’s a cinch.” Well, not if you’re wearing a dress and heels. Connie slips and takes Ace with her as they plummet to their deaths.

The episode ends with an obviously relieved Clark, his secret safe and still well-kept.

“The Stolen Costume” moves along briskly with lots of snappy dialogue and interaction between the four characters. The script was written by Ben Peter Freeman, a veteran of the Superman radio show who wrote eight first-season episodes of The Adventures of Superman, including the aforementioned “Mystery in Wax” and “The Deserted Village.” Freeman left Hollywood a year later and changed careers, joining his brother’s construction company.

With the focus on Clark – Superman only appears in its final minutes – George Reeves, always appealing and underrated, gets to bring a bit more emotion than usual and his concern and anxiety feel real. Another sidebar: Of 104 episodes of The Adventures of Superman, this is the only one without Lois, Jimmy, Perry or Inspector Henderson.

Reeve’s supporting cast of Dan Seymour, Veda Ann Borg and Frank Jenks all had long movie and television careers as character actors. Seymour made a living primarily playing gangsters, most famously as one of Edward G. Robinson’s henchmen in “Key Largo.” He would hit the TV Superhero Daily Double 14 years after “The Stolen Costume” with a role in an episode of Batman.

The ending of “The Stolen Costume” neatly resolved what looked like a no-win dilemma for Superman, although it left some ethical and legal questions. Was he planning on holding Ace and Connie hostage on the mountain forever? Was Superman guilty of kidnapping? Did he anticipate the crooks would try to climb down the mountain – a nearly impossible feat – and just looked the other way?

Maybe the last question is the answer. Superman may have rationalized his actions, or lack of action, this way: Having my secret identity revealed could jeopardize the lives of my friends, coworkers, maybe all of Metropolis, and possibly even compromise my mission here on Earth. If I need to realistically balance the lives of two hoods who are likely beyond reform or redemption with that of all mankind, this end justifies the means. Ace and Connie made their choice. My hands are clean.

And with that, Superman finds the moral wiggle room he needed to keep fighting his never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way.