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. And 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. 

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, snowblower, lawnmower, our first washing machine and dryer all at Sears.

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. People 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.