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.

SCARY STUFF

Here is what nightmares are made of when you're an impressionable seven-year old and you catch the following on Channel 9's Million Dollar Movie. Everything your mother ever warned you about, from talking to strangers to being careful on your bicycle, gets broken here. And never mind that it's obviously a doll being thrown out of the car. This freaked me out for a long time. It still bothers me. The scene comes from a film about corruption in a town in Alabama, the Phenix City Story (1955):

REMEMBERING DENNIS EDWARDS

The last thing I want this blog to be is about people who died. But I do think it’s worthwhile to note the occasional passing of someone like Dennis Edwards, who died February 1 at age 74.

In the late sixties, with society reaching some sort of boiling point, James Brown recorded the revolutionary and unhinged seven-minute Cold Sweat. Otis Redding sang Dock of the Bay with lyrics that were contemplative, almost brooding. Sly and Family Stone, out of groovy San Francisco, were making a mess of everything, shifting from R&B to rock to doo-wop, sometimes in the same song.

Motown, once the hippest cat in the room, was slowest to change. Still capable of releasing great singles in 1968 – For Once In My Life, I Second That Emotion – it still hadn’t figured out how to capture the spontaneity of a James Brown record or write lyrics that reflected the black experience. With a few exceptions, like Gladys Knight’s raucous I Heard It Through the Grapevine or the Marvelettes’ nutty My Baby Must Be A Magician, the label was more Sidney Poitier than H. Rap Brown.

When David Ruffin left the Temptations to start a solo career, Motown used the opportunity to recast the group and brought in Dennis Edwards. A Southern soul shouter in the same league as Redding or later, Edwin Starr and Teddy Pendergrass, Edwards did all the choreographed moves Motown insisted on, but on stage he was placed apart from the other four singers. Clearly, he was the new point guard on this team. 

With Edwards in the lead, the new Temptations came out of the gate with Cloud Nine. Opening with a kaleidoscope of doo-wop voices and distorted guitar, Edwards sings, with urgency and passion, “Childhood part of my life wasn’t very pretty,” and it’s like the scene in Being There when Peter Sellers, who has only known the inside of the mansion he grew up in, finally walks out the front door to find he’s been living in the middle of the inner city. Goodbye sweet soul, hello misery.

Here are some of Dennis Edwards’ greatest moments: counting down the start of Ball of Confusion with, “one, two, one, two, three, ow!” The frustrated “Ahhhhhhhh, Great Googa-Mooga can’t you hear me talkin’ to ya” that comes out of nowhere and serves as the bridge in the same song. The memorable opening line of Papa Was A Rolling Stone, which follows, on the album version, several minutes of percolating bass and strings, “It was the third of September/A day I’ll always remember.”

And let’s not forget Runaway Child and Psychedelic Shack and I Can’t Get Next to You.

The Ring was a boxing magazine and every month it ranked each weight class with, in order, the recognized champion followed by the top nine contenders. At one point, maybe because the heavyweight class was mostly black guys and I’m plagued by a need to organize stuff into lists, I thought about a monthly ranking of soul singers based on chart performance. From 1968 to 1972, Dennis Edwards would have either been my monthly champion or top contender. Like Ali, who spent a lot of time atop The Ring’s rankings, Edwards was the greatest. 

THE RUN-OUT GROOVE

Watching the CBS special on the 1968 “Game of the Century” between unbeaten UCLA and the University of Houston basketball teams got me remembering watching the game on the portable TV in my parents’ bedroom, probably on Channel 9 since the networks barely acknowledged the existence of college basketball back then.

Even for those days, the buildup was intense. UCLA had won 47 straight games and was ranked first, Houston second. Lew Alcindor missed the two games leading up to the showdown with a scratched cornea. And just to pump things up to an impossible level, the game was being played in the Astrodome. The Astrodome! Our minds reeled with the thought of a basketball court anchored in the infield with the fans, I don’t know, like five miles away from the court.

During the special, Elvin Hayes, the Houston center who completely outplayed Alcindor that night, reminisces that he and Alcindor were friendly and had once gone “record shopping.”

Record shopping.

I went record shopping with nearly every friend I had from high school on. With Mary when we were dating. After we got married. When I worked for the utility, I would take a company car and skip out for an hour or two to hit a record store across the road from one of our substations, where I’d park the car. Company business.

Check out the new releases, then the cut-out bins to see if anything cool had found its way there. And there was the internal discussion with the record hound in your head. Was this the time to buy the only Beatles record I was missing, the Yellow Submarine soundtrack? (not this time). This two-record greatest hits set by the Marvelettes, does it have “My Baby Must Be A Magician”? (buying it). Time to finally check out that Wes Montgomery Trio disc? (pass). Am I interested enough in this Springsteen cash-in, Welcome to Asbury Park, with songs by Jersey Shore artists, to buy it? (another pass).

When the first CD store opened around here (Square Circle at the Garden State Plaza in 1986) I entered cautiously and got the same feeling I have today when I drive through Hackensack. Everything is familiar, but somehow misplaced. There are houses and stores I recognize, but the context is out of whack. At Square Circle, albums were reduced to a size that fit in a coat pocket. And they were charging $18.99 for a disc? Seriously?

But it was more than just losing the end-product, the process was wrecked as well. Shopping for CDs had no mystery, no drama. All the stock was new, so you weren’t going to come across some weird, marked-down record like Drums of Passion by Olatunji. There were no CD 45s, no import section. The thrill was gone – and if you wanted the 45 version of BB King’s The Thrill Is Gone, you were going to have to look pretty hard to find it.

I’d hit the run-out groove, the dead space on an album between the last track and the label.

Those couple of years from the mid-eighties into the nineties marked a rocky transition if you were into these kinds of things. Ironically, there has been the comeback of vinyl albums, although I often suspect that story is more hype than anything. Their price today is pretty close to the $18.99 Square Circle once charged for CDs and those measly album displays in places like Barnes and Noble, and Bed, Bath and Beyond (Jesus, does anybody want to buy records there?) give them the feel of impulse buys, like the cold soda Home Depot sells by its checkout registers.

Too late for me. I moved on to CDs when their prices eventually dropped and the market for used CDs became a major retail sales driver. It was the music, the songs, I wanted, but when the record hound scratches nowadays, I just go online.  

Coming up: Part Two – the greatest record stores of all time.

PLUNGING INTO THE NEW YEAR

The WABC Top 100 of the Year, played exclusively from the day after Christmas to New Year’s, was the 100 songs you spent the last year cheering on, hating or tolerating just to hear what was going to come on the radio next.

I have a CD with parts of Bruce Morrow and Bob Lewis’ shows from New Year’s Eve 1967 and the fun is in how random the playlist is. There are no algorithms here based on time of day or demographics. Sometime after 1 a.m. Bob Lewis plays To Sir With Love (#1), The Happening (#19), Somebody to Love (#55) and Winchester Cathedral (#77). While counting down to midnight, Cousin Bruce played, in order, C’mon Marianne (#73), Sunday Will Never Be the Same (#56), Pleasant Valley Sunday (#34), Portrait of My Love (#96), Release Me (#63) and To Sir With Love (#1). (Admittedly those aren’t great stretches of music, but it gives you some idea of how sprawling the playlist was. And apparently WABC’s broadcasting license was at risk if they didn’t play the number one song at least once an hour.)

I played Top 100 bingo. On a sheet of paper numbered to 100, I filled in the blanks as I heard songs played during the week. You could get the top 20 pretty quickly, since they were played most often, but I don’t think I ever ended with a complete list; there were always a few elusive songs that only seemed to be played when my radio wasn’t on.

As somebody, somewhere in the tri-state area was taping WABC that night so it could be played back on a computer in 2017, my family was visiting our friends, the Kannars, for a New Year’s Eve party. That afternoon I watched Green Bay edge Dallas in the final seconds for the NFL championship, although today the storyline is more about the weather the game was played in. Forecasts in Green Bay called for highs in the 20s, but overnight the temperature dropped nearly 30 degrees, from 13 above to 16 below. Factor in blustery winds, and wind chill dropped to 36 below zero at kickoff. (BTW, not a good month for Wisconsin weather. On December 10, Otis Redding was killed when his plane tried to take off in a sudden, fierce storm in Madison, 135 miles away).

New Jersey was having its own weather problems that night. Listening to the news on the WABC tape, it was snowing or sleeting depending on where you lived. The roads, said the newscaster, were “extremely dangerous.” When we left the Kannars’ party well after midnight, there were several inches of snow on the ground and no plows in sight as our Nova fishtailed home.

A day of eating crackers, dip and pepperoni put me in the bathroom when we got home and I promptly clogged the drain trying to flush too much toilet paper. It was nearly 2 a.m., tomorrow was a holiday, we had no plunger and only one toilet. A phone call to the Kannars. Yes, they had a plunger. My father and I were back on the road, where the plows still hadn’t come through. He didn’t seem happy with me as we swerved through the neighborhood. And while the party was long over, it didn’t stop him and Mr. Kannar from having a nightcap, while I sheepishly held the plunger and hoped to God it would work.

Finally back home, I anxiously stood in the doorway of the bathroom as my father plunged, then hit the flush lever. In the earliest hours of 1968, the reassuring whoosh of water making its way down through the house was a sound that was, for me at least, already at #1 for the year. 

LIVING WITH THE GIANTS, PART TWO

A couple of more adds to the last blog on favorite Giants from the past 50 years.  

FRED DRYER: The anti-Giant. On a team loaded with southerners and guys who worked as stock brokers or insurance salesmen in the off season, Dryer was a southern Californian who spent his time away from New York living in a van parked on the beach. He was vocal about the slipshod ways of the Giants organization, wouldn’t conform to front office dictates about hair and dress codes, and criticized the Giants’ sainted patriarch Wellington Mara. Whatever I said out loud, in my heart I knew the Giants were wrong in their inability to overlook the sandals and sideburns, and in letting that overrule the fact that Dryer was an exciting talent they could build their defense around. They traded Dryer as far from the beach as they could in 1972 (exiling him to the Patriots, back then the Siberia of the NFL). He went on to the Rams, All-Pro recognition and Hollywood.

HARRY CARSON: I’m sitting in a lounge area off the Giants locker room, working up the nerve to walk in, corral some player and interview him. And then Harry Carson walks in, sits across from me and starts talking, and talking, and talking, about how a chiropractor was helping him deal with his midseason aches and pains, and about a television interview he was going to be doing with Jayne Kennedy, and God knows what else. I only had to ask him a question or two and my article wrote itself. Thanks, Harry. (He was a pretty great player as well).

TERRY JACKSON: Jackson was starting at cornerback as a rookie when he came into Dresher’s Office Supply, looking to have business cards made. I played it cool, didn’t make a big deal about who he was and certainly didn’t ask for an autograph. We designed the card and I had the printer add an image of the Giants’ helmet, which he liked. Jackson said he would send some other Giants over for cards, but it never happened. I should have asked what he intended to do with the cards. Maybe use them to introduce himself to the opposing team on Sunday afternoon?  

GEORGE YOUNG: The Giants’ general manager credited with building the championship teams of the eighties hosted a luncheon for NJ business executives on the weeks following Giant home games and my Uncle Nick would occasionally attend and invite me. Young’s public persona, built up through appearances on Mike and the Mad Dog, was that of a sort of football savant/curmudgeon. In person he was a big, rumpled guy, who seemed to sweat a lot, but he possessed a dry wit and the luncheons were usually pretty entertaining. During one Q&A, Uncle Nick asked Young if the Giants were interested in signing a local-boy linebacker named Rob McGovern, whom the Patriots had cut that morning. Young seemed taken aback by the question, and after the luncheon he made a beeline to our table. “Is McGovern really available?” he asked. And how did Uncle Nick know? (He was friends with McGovern’s parents). Leaving the luncheon, I wound up following Young’s car out of the parking lot. At a light I could see him wiping down his face with a towel, probably wondering how the backyard grapevine worked better than the NFL waiver wire.

BILL PARCELLS: Two scenes that stand out. One is the December 1990 game when Parcells checked himself out of the hospital that morning to coach despite being in obvious pain from a dislodged kidney stone. It was a cold day and he looked absolutely miserable, but it was one of those moments of truth, of setting an example for the team. They won a division title that afternoon and Parcells checked back into the hospital after the game. The second was a soundbite on a TV interview in late December 1986. The Giants were crushing opponents and the Super Bowl just felt inevitable. An interviewer asked Parcells about how he was celebrating the holiday and he responded, “Christmas? I hadn’t noticed.” Right on, Bill. Let lesser coaches worry about decorating trees and buying presents. Here was a guy who was obsessed with winning a title. And he was a Giant.