And Then What Happened
I met Antonia in the fall of 1962 and moved in with her Christmas Day. She had the radio on constantly, day and night––pop and R&B during the day, Symphony Sid in the evening and then pop all night long. She had a long history of night horrors and the radio helped to keep them at bay while she slept. I quickly got used to it and it didn’t interfere with my sleep.
I had always liked jazz, but I was not as deeply into it as I was into rock ’n’ roll and folk music. At the time I liked Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane––the usual suspects––but didn’t buy any jazz records. What blew me away on the Symphony Sid show was something entirely new to me: Latin music. Tito Puente! Mongo Santamaria! Joe Cuba! Some people at the time though Symphony Sid was a traitor to jazz by playing Latin music, but jazz and Latin music went way back. Jelly Roll Morton spoke of the “Spanish tinge” in jazz, and Ned Sublette’s remarkable book, Cuba And Its Music, goes into fascinating detail about the specifics of the connection. I urge anyone with an interest in music to check out that book. The Latin music sounded so much more moving than the jazz, both melodically and rhythmically. The use of multiple drums was so much more interesting than a single drummer, no matter how good he was. There were more repeated figures, more long notes, and most of the songs had words instead of being instrumentals. It was simply all a lot more catchy. And it was made for dancing. Put another way, it had more spirit.
But pop radio was the real shock. On Antonia’s radio during our courtship I was hearing “Sherry”, “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Walk Like A Man” by the Four Seasons; “Telstar”; “He’s A Rebel”; “Desifinado”; “Do You Love Me (Now That I Can Dance)”; “Wibble Wobble––that’s Les Cooper And The Soul Rockers. Check out their even more fantastic “Let’s Do The Boston Monkey” from 1965––“Tell Him”; “Chains”; “He’s Sure The Boy I Love”; “Cast Your Fate To The Wind”; Our Day Will Come”; “You’ve Really Got A Hold Of Me”; “Up On The Roof”; “Two Lovers”; “Don’t Make Me Over”––Dionne Warwick’s first––“Little Town Flirt” and “Surfin’ Sufari” by the Beach Boys, who I didn’t actually adore until “Fun, Fun, Fun.”
Antonia and I kept trying to convince our hip friends that pop music radio was flat out amazing and everyone should listen. The anti-popular feeling back then was totally dismissive. We found it was easier to convince others if there was a radio to listen to. And even easier still if we brought over some records. We brought some records over to Dave and Terri Van Ronk in mid-1963. The only two I can remember are “Come And Get These Memories” and “Be My Baby”. The first was the second recording and first hit of Martha and the Vandellas––and my all-time favorite of theirs, loving it even more than “Heat Wave”. Dave disparaged the da-dum, da-dum, da-dum riff that came between some verses, but couldn’t deny “Be My Baby”. Who could? I understand that Brian Wilson was driving a car when he first heard it, and that he was so overcome he had to pull the car over and just sit awhile. Like I said, it helped to get people to listen to pop music if you brought records over.
The common take on pop music in the early ‘60s has been that before the Beatles came along, it was pretty much a wasteland. But 1962 was a watershed year for pop music. Besides the Beatles’ first #1, the Rolling Stones formed, The Beach Boys and the Four Seasons arrived; Bob Dylan’s first album came out, Girl Groups and Phil Specter were burning up the charts. The Beatles were an effect, not a cause, although, in a number of ways they did change everything. For one thing, when they hit, I thought I don’t ever have to cut my hair again, although I finally did cut it again in early 1966 because by then long hair had gotten way too common. One of the biggest changes due to the Beatles was disproving the notion that only crap sold, that quality had no chance. They blew that idea up. You used to hear, “That’s a piece of shit. And it’s such a piece of shit, it’s going to sell.” The Beatles were not only better than anything in pop, they sold better than anything in pop. And between the coming of Dylan and the Beatles, there was a call––a new assumption––that you were to write your own songs.
At this time, I was playing at a coffee house on the north side of 3rd Street, between MacDougal and Sullivan. It’s NYU housing now. Then it was Charlie Washburn’s Third Side, or as we used to call it, Charlie Washout’s Turd Slide. I was playing and Antonia was reading her poetry there. The other people on the bill were Phil Ochs and Tiny Tim. We all passed the basket. Tiny Tim, in that pre-long hair era, had shoulder length hair. That was impressive. Equally impressive was that he carried his ukulele in a shopping bag, along with a few other things. It was great to hear him, I loved to hear the old songs. Phil and I bonded over the fact that we had both just gotten the clap. (Not from the same woman, that would have been too much bonding.) It was some show. Charlie Washburn was a real dick. He fired Antonia when he saw her using her asthma inhaler and thought she was using cocaine. He was the first “Dianetics Clear” I ever met. Charlie Washburn was 30-40ish and bald, wearing a beret inside and out. Across the street was the Café Bizarre, which long ago had been Aaron Burr’s stable. It’s gone now, too.
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