Hit Hard Page 4
Our whole family sat together and watched the Ed Sullivan Show every Sunday night. When the Beatles came on American TV that first time in February 1964, the whole country went nuts, and I was no different, sitting on the floor in front of our ratty, old, orange couch. My eyes were glued to Ringo up there on the riser in the center with a smile on his face, occasionally giving his head that signature shake. It was like he was sitting on top of the world, the coolest guy on the planet. His partners were spread out in front of him, and he was the man in the middle. I was mesmerized; I felt it. I imagined it was me at that moment on stage in front of all those screaming fans.
One day my buddy Sandy and I were standing outside the Midchester Jewish Center, and he said, “I’m going to grow my hair long to be like the Beatles.”
I said, “I’m not going to be like the Beatles, I’m going to be the Beatles.” I bought in to the program completely, I mean I knew this was what I was going to do.
No doubt millions of teenage guys in America were saying the same thing that morning. The difference between me and all the other kids was that I was willing to say fuck it, this is where I’m going, no matter what. I was making the commitment. Nothing else mattered as much. All my bets were on playing the drums.
They say that 74 million people watched Ed Sullivan that night. The Beatles took America by storm, and when they started doing interviews, their attitude got the kids completely juiced and ready to throw off the fifties straitjacket. Suddenly, the nightclub kind of entertainment my parents liked was headed for the dumpster, and a new growth industry was being born.
My parents just couldn’t see it and certainly couldn’t see me as part of it. My mother developed an “auditory condition.” She said she couldn’t handle having to listen to me play.
“Here’s the deal,” they told me. “You can play the drums in the basement when you get home from school. That’s from three o’clock until five o’clock.”
My parents were never going to accept that my playing the drums was worth taking seriously. But the more I played, the more I loved it; and the more they resisted the idea, the more determined I was to prove them wrong. This was what I cared about, what I did really well, and what expressed what I could identify with as who I was. Mostly, it just felt good, and I was going to hang on to that good feeling—no matter what.
I studied the drummers I saw on TV, like Dino Danelli of the Young Rascals and Dave Clark of the Dave Clark Five. I learned which sound of what part of the drum kit was associated with which hand, and then by listening, I could visualize what the drummer on the song was up to. I taught my ears to see, in other words, and once I could see with my ears, then I could pretty much figure out whatever I needed to figure out.
I always worked out what I wanted to play before I sat down at the drums. I’d hum the beat in my head and then play it on my thighs or in the air. That way I was able to translate what I saw and heard to what I was going to do myself, one hand and one foot at a time. Once I had the basics down for whatever song I wanted to learn, I would play to the record. I’d pretend to be in whatever band I had playing on the turntable. Sometimes I was Ringo, sometimes Dave Clark, but mostly I was Dino Danelli.
Dino was really my first drum hero, just like his was Gene Krupa from the Big Band era. Before Krupa, the drummer was just some guy keeping time in the back of the band. Krupa was a matinee idol as much as he was a technical drummer. He had the clothes and the shoes, the trademark of always chewing gum, and his hair always just so. Dino had the same kind of charisma with the clothes and the hair and everything—only early sixties style.
I didn’t want to spend any more time than I had to in my parents’ world. When the frustration of living at home just got to be too much, the physical outlet of banging away on those drums helped to keep me going. I could let off steam, and by drilling and drilling, I could enter into a state where my mind was completely elsewhere, completely in tune with the universe, completely happy. Music wasn’t only a world that I loved, but one where I could have things my way. Teaching myself felt like I was also discovering myself, and at the same time sort of inventing myself.
Within about six months I was in my first band, the Dynamics. I was only fourteen, so this didn’t amount to much, but then I was in the Medallions, a combo that was strictly instrumental. Somehow we wound up playing at the New York pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair out in Queens. There’s even some old 8 mm film of me playing “Wipe Out,” working up a sweat, only without any sound.
About this time I got to know some guys from the other side of town who were into the English bands, especially the Who. Johnny Ramp was a bass player, and he used to hang out at Jerry Elliot’s house, along with Paul and Tom Piscotta, Bobby Mayo, and Barry Schneidman. These guys were willing to really work and drill, which meant that they were into music on a much more serious level than anybody I’d played with before. When we got together, we started a group called the King Bees.
Every Saturday afternoon we played at the bowling alley lounge, called Café Gay Era, and over the sound of pins being knocked down and people cheering, I sang lead on Rascals stuff like “Good Lovin’” and “You Better Run.” We wore polka-dot shirts, red or yellow dots on black backgrounds. The owner paid us what he took in at the door plus free lunch in the café. We also played the sweet sixteen parties at the Jewish Center and at a lot of school dances.
Paul and Tom’s father, Sal Piscotta, took what we were doing seriously, just like those parents who support their kid on the football team or the debate team. He and Bobby Mayo’s dad were kind of our managers at the time, and they looked after things and made sure we got what we were owed. The best my parents could do was to be tolerant.
Then I got a really shitty report card. My father took one look at those Ds and Fs and said, “I’m taking your drums away. I’m taking ’em apart, and I’m locking ’em up in the attic.”
I wanted to kill him. He was taking away the thing I cared about most. Looking back now, I know I was crazy with rage, but I had no access to the anger, no way to express it, let alone process it. The pathway from my feelings to my conscious awareness was closing off, and at the same time some survival mechanism in me started taking over, telling me, you can’t win these fights, pal. Better just shut up, put your head down and plow on through the best you can.
The inability of my parents and me to communicate about this stuff and maybe their embarrassment about who I was and what I wanted to do and their disappointment with what I was not just reinforced their fear and frustration. I think they had me pretty well sized up as being on the road to wrack and ruin unless I gave up this music shit and got serious about something that made sense to them, like becoming a dentist or a plumber.
At Walt Whitman Junior High we had a “battle of the bands” coming up. The King Bees were supposed to duke it out with Frankie Rae’s band, which was going to be a real chance for me to shine, doing what I cared about and what made me feel like me. Only now I didn’t have any drums.
Barry Schneidman, our bass player, had an older brother, Henry, who played guitar in another local band called the Dantes. These guys were all a little older, and they were doing some major gigs around the area, so they were like the varsity to our junior varsity, and every once in a while they’d come over and check out our rehearsals.
One of those afternoons when they dropped by, Barry talked to Henry, his older brother, and Henry arranged for me to borrow a set from their drummer. Then on the day of the contest, Henry came to see us, along with the drummer who’d loaned me his stuff.
Their drummer, this guy named Steven, was already a local legend, the best singer of anybody we’d ever been around. He showed up wearing plaid pants, zipper boots, and a fur vest, with this gorgeous girl on his arm who was creaming over the fact that the Dantes had just been lined up to open for the Beach Boys. So from our perspective, this dude was The Dude, the man who could walk on water, which made it all the more mind blowing when he agreed to
sing lead on a couple of our songs in the contest. I came out-front and sang “Route 66,” and then he came out and nailed a couple of Stones songs—“19th Nervous Breakdown” and “Around and Around.” This guy could really tear up the vocals, so naturally we won, but then there were all sorts of protests because he was a ringer, this older guy from the Dantes. His name was Steven Tallarico, and over the years that followed, he and I would continue to make music together. What I didn’t know back then was that not only would Steven and I—and three other guys—change the face of rock ’n’ roll, but Steven himself would become my mentor as well as my hero and (one of) my demons. He would serve as a kind of surrogate father figure for me in a dysfunctional dynamic that continued the pattern of confusion I felt between love and abuse as a child. It would be a central part of our relationship—and it would torment me for years.
Family grows in the Bronx, Davidson Avenue, 1950
Courtesy of Doris or Joey Kramer.
Courtesy of Doris or Joey Kramer.
IS THAT A BELT IN YOUR HAND OR ARE YOU HAPPY TO SEE ME?
2
Bands are all about collaboration, and the quality and the commitment of the guys you’re with. I’ve always been lucky to have some great partners, starting with the Piscotta brothers. Their parents were completely open to the whole idea that their sons were going to play music for a living. Their father, Sal, was a stage director at NBC working on Shindig, one of the first music shows to take the American Bandstand idea and bring it into the sixties, so rock ’n’ roll as a career for his kids made perfect sense.
But just as important as their support of our dreams, the Piscottas were open to having everybody hanging out at their place. They had this big, unfinished basement where we could rehearse. So one day after my drums had been locked up in the attic for a while, I simply went up and sneaked them out of the house and set them up at Paul and Tom’s down the street. My parents never even noticed.
At the Piscottas, I had free access in and out of the basement door, and they let me come in and play whenever I wanted to. I can remember us all sitting around the record player upstairs in their family room, listening to songs we were trying to learn. Bobby Mayo was such a natural that he could sit in front of the turntable, listening to a song for the first time, and call out all the chord changes as the music went rolling by.
The fact that my parents never noticed that the drums were gone, that they never even asked, was very much in character. They also never asked me—admittedly, not many parents would—if I wanted to move, which is what we did about this time. With the King Bees I had set up a pretty solid business proposition. We were good, and we were committed, but then all of a sudden there was a new obstacle in my path: we were living in Eastchester instead of Yonkers, almost five miles away, and it was a real pain in the ass to get back and forth to my basement rehearsal space. But it wasn’t like I was going to give up easily. When I couldn’t get a ride, I walked all the way back to Yonkers, which took about an hour and a half.
“What did I do now?” Eastchester, NY, 1968
Courtesy of Doris or Joey Kramer.
Moving also meant that I had to transfer to a new school. For any kid, getting uprooted during your first year of high school can be a social disaster, and for me it was that much worse because I was Jewish, and Eastchester was tightly knit Italian. I caught so much shit that I started skipping out, writing notes to my teachers and signing my mother’s name. Mr. and Mrs. Piscotta were pretty relaxed about school and homework and all that, so I was able to make good use of my time. Instead of getting crap at school, I was over in Yonkers with my musical brothers, practicing.
After a few weeks I had so many absences that the school administrators became suspicious. They called my house one day and wanted to know where I was. My mother had to admit she didn’t know. “Well, what about all these days where you wrote notes for him?” they asked her. “What notes?” she said.
I thought my mother was going to implode. Her habit was to hold the anger in, but this time she was like a black hole that sucked all the negative energy toward her, tighter and tighter. Given her reaction, I knew I was going to have to face my father on this one and that this might be what finally got me killed. I was ready to kiss my ass good-bye, but for whatever reason, when we had our “little talk,” he did not beat the crap out of me. I tried to explain that the kids in Eastchester had all been together since elementary school, maybe since first or second grade, and that I was doing my best to fit in but was getting ridiculed and rejected for being an outsider, and especially for being a Jew. I’m not sure this excuse cut any ice or that it was even necessary. It seemed as if my parents were simply overwhelmed. Here they were, with all their first-generation American social insecurity, working hard and doing everything right, trying to fit in, and they had a son who cut school and forged signatures? No matter that this kind of thing was going on in every school in America. I think they were so embarrassed that, for once, my father couldn’t even access the rage and the violence that were his first picks from the child-rearing toolkit.
As for any confusion about what to do next, Eastchester made it simple. They suggested that I might do better by getting my education elsewhere. My parents’ solution was New Rochelle Academy—a jacket-and-tie private school that they hoped, I suppose, might support some behavioral modification.
Truth be told, aside from having to wear a tie every day, New Rochelle wasn’t all that bad. I met a guitar player named Tom, a bass player named Tony, and a keyboardist named Ray, and we started a band called the Radicals. The headmaster allowed us to bring our instruments to school and set up in the cafeteria and play during lunch.
I’d been forced to let go of the King Bees, so I was no longer hiking back and forth to Yonkers, but now every other morning I hauled all my drums onto the bus and took them with me to school. When I got there, I’d set them up in the cafeteria and just smile, knowing that we were going to get to play. From my first class in the morning until noon, I would work out our set list and go through the drum patterns in my head. Then during lunch, none of us would eat because we just wanted to play. The kids at school loved it, which turned us on to the music that much more. Tom, the guitarist, was also an artist, and taking a hint from the Rascals logo on the front of Dino Danelli’s bass drum, he copied the same design onto the front of my bass drum, only instead of Rascals it said Radicals.
I felt more at home sitting in that lunchroom playing music than I’d ever felt in my parents’ house. The other kids were digging me because of my music, and I was digging being a part of something that felt like me. The only problem was the hair.
In the mid-sixties it was hard for me to feel like I was really a part of the music scene with a “boy’s regular” haircut, paid for by my mother. But in my parents’ eyes, any male with long hair had to be a degenerate.
“How come I can’t have long hair?” I asked.
The response: “Because I’m your father and I said so.” Or, “Because I’m your mother and I said so.”
“Just do as I say, no discussion,” was not a great technique for winning the heart and mind of this teenager. It was, however, an excellent way to foster rebellion, which was, of course, exactly what it did.
I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but I’m sure the demand for blind obedience made me look even more to my drums for my identity, and it drove me that much further into the scene I was already slipping into. I might not be able to look the part quite as much as everybody else in the band, so I was determined to be just that much better musically.
To the extent that my going to New Rochelle was about upward mobility and family image, an unintended (and very opposite) consequence was my meeting Irv Goetz, who happened to be the nephew of the headmaster. Irv was from Boston, one year older and a year ahead of me. We became good friends and started hanging out together all the time. He slept at my house, and I slept at his house—his uncle’s house, really—and that is where Irv introduc
ed me to drugs.
It was summertime, and during the summers I often had to go to school to make up for whatever I had failed during the regular term. This meant that I had to be home by ten o’clock, but I didn’t think, or care, about following the rules except to the degree I could slide by.
One night, our keyboard player, Ray, went down to 181st Street to cop nickel bags and to get a little fucked up on the way home. It must have been about eleven on this particular night when Ray dropped me off at my house. All the lights were off inside, and just the one porch light was on out front. So far so good. I walked up to the entrance and opened the door. I knew I was late and, of course, that my father could act like a maniac whenever I was late. But I was sort of having this “looks like it’s cool,” tension-releasing feeling. I’d made it to home base, and everything felt like it was okay. But, just in case, I took the joints I had in my pocket and rolled them into the elastic inside my pants.
The house seemed quiet. I took a breath and stepped inside.
Behind me the front door seemed to close by itself, and then my father was standing there.
“Summer school’s tomorrow,” he said. “It’s eleven o’clock. You’re supposed to be in at ten.”
He stepped forward from where he’d been waiting for me behind the door. I looked at him, he looked back at me, and for a second I couldn’t breathe. The scariest thing was how he was trying to be so very controlled. I saw the belt in his hand. Then I heard it come swinging past my head.