Wisdom of the Aged by Craig Hattersley - HTML preview

The truth is, I do indulge myself a little the more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age of my life to do it; and, out of my observations that most men that do thrive in the world do forget to take pleasure during the time that they are getting their estate, but reserve that till they have got one, and then it is too late for them to enjoy it.

—Samuel Pepys

From its opening in April 1968, the Fillmore East faced something of an uphill battle. Because it was theater seating only, a strict set of fire laws that applied to movie theaters had to be enforced. And Bill Graham had a real fetish about things running smoothly.

In a theater holding upwards of 2,600 rock fans, one single lobby upstairs delimited the area where patrons could smoke. No dope, just cigarettes. The upstairs lobby and bathroom area, with sometimes as many as 500 smokers seeking relief, became a beat for two “ushers” to patrol. Zeroing the pot smokers in the cigarette haze was the easy part, with peering over the door of toilet stalls for people shooting up, the hard. When you did espy junkies tying off, a harsh bang on the door and a loudly barked “get outa there” served to freak them out sufficiently to ruin their routine.

The no-smoking law within the theater proper meant that the ushers had to pack flashlights to quell urges in their assigned sectors to revelers seeking to imbibe burning substances during the show. Telltale smoke or light from a patron brought an avenging beam of flashlight, embarrassing the offender into submission.

Other fire laws stipulated that the aisles and stairs had to be kept clear of people at all times. The interpretation: The customer rented the space in and in front of his seat for the duration of the show. That’s his space, not the aisle or in front of the stage or sitting on the stairs to the balcony. This caused some unpleasantness.

One of the primary assignments of the ushers down front, after seating customers and resolving ticket problems (uprooting malingerers seeking a better location), then became establishing a line of defense to prevent the crowd from rushing the stage, a common occurrence at wilder shows. On several occasions, it did get out of hand, jeopardizing expensive lighting equipment and monitors onstage. At that point, the command would be given to tighten the perimeter and link arms across the front of the stage to protect the equipment.

My first experience with these last-ditch measures proved to be almost my undoing. During a Saturday-night late show with the Chambers Brothers, riding the crest of their hit song “The Time Has Come Today,” all hell broke loose. From my assignment on the top of the left aisle, I saw the right-side aisle begin to fill with revelers. With a righteous youthful zeal I stood at the head of my aisle, spreading my arms to hold back a surging throng from invading the turf I was sworn to defend. This lasted a heroic short while. Three rowdy young Black Power acolytes elbowed their way to face me and allowed as how they were going to lead the mob down to the stage—over my dead body if necessary. In my polite way, ever the peaceful hippie (which probably saved me a severe beating), I explained to them that it was my job to keep the crowd out of the aisle, though the other aisle had long since filled.

They escalated. One began throwing karate punches at my open face, seeing how near he could come without actually hitting me. In my predicament—the British guard in file meeting the savage horde—I didn’t flinch. Show no fear. My resolve ultimately crumbled though under repeated assault, and I collapsed into an aisle seat. (Later, Ricky V. at work on stage said the hands there had all been aghast that some dimwit was attempting to stem the tide on the aisle. Who is that fool? Is that Craig?) Happily, the command soon circulated to ring the stage, and I returned to duty.

The throng surged to the front, constrained only by the linked arms of the beleaguered ushers. From his vantage point on the wings of the stage, Bill Graham roared commands and the stage crew scurried out to pull the monitors back from the brink. The Chambers Brothers finished their last encore to bedlam and began acknowledging the crowd behind my splayed form. Two of the brothers began taking off some of the bling adorning them and extending it towards their adoring fans. I didn’t see this because it was happening behind my head. All I saw were the elbows and armpits of the fans as they lunged over, around, and through me to get at the baubles.

Graham, to his credit, realized what his employees often had to put up with. He was a shrewd booker, so weekends usually featured a sold-out show, while anything he lined up for during the week had to have solid potential for a sellout. During one spring month, Graham booked 28 of 31 days possible, with probably 90 percent of the shows at or near capacity. Over the course of a year, the crews dealt with a lot of people. Many a grueling week was followed by a catered affair, where the staff, scruffy by choice, rubbed elbows with the uptown record-company execs (nearly all male at the time) and their foxes in $500 dresses.

After a sold-out week of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, for instance, a grand spread greeted the crew, the band, and the socialites—the crew and the band leading the way. After many a flagon of heady punch, members of the band and assorted other notables (including doorman Jay Benson, a mean keyboard player) launched into an extended drunken jam onstage. It had our motley crew dancing all over the empty theater, watched by the disinterested, the jaded, the bemused, and the longing. The uptown coterie didn’t share in our release from the drudgery we faced nightly, primly observing the bacchanal from on high.

For the net result of strict enforcement of the fire laws, as demanded by Graham to appease the political gods, was that the druggies always sent the chemicals screaming through their bodies before they came into the theater, a fair trade for keeping the joint open. With such strict application of the rules, however, came a rather odious reputation. An article in the Rolling Stone dubbed ushers in their emerald-colored Fillmore East football jerseys the “green-shirted goons.”

Well, we were sometimes not really crazy about the people we had to deal with, truth be told. We had a small employees’ lounge between floors to relax in when on break, aptly dubbed the “Bummer Palace,” as it usually filled as well with customers who’d OD’d on some drug or other and needed flight instruction from worldly employees.

One fond remembrance of such a person revolves around our struggles to transport her to the palace. During some raucous rock show or other, this six-foot-two-inch, two-hundred-forty-pound damsel in the throes of drug-addled distress writhed in the aisles down in front of the stage. Grappling with the top end of her tormented mass, a fellow usher on the other end, we hefted her and proceeded to lug her up the aisle then up the stairs as, all the while, she put every ounce of her unnatural strength in attempting to choke me to death.

In contrast to my harrowing experiences in crowd control, my life in art school provided an idyllic counterpoint. School itself proved pleasant enough, and I enjoyed the friendship of my classmates, but in the end it took up too much time. I understood all too well that my attempts at artistry were half-ass at best. I had other things on my mind.

Immersed in the rock’n’roll world, Ricky V., Carlito, and I practiced at being a band, much as did everyone in our generation who could carry a tune in a handbasket. We bought a lot of sheet music (mostly Beatles) and learned a bunch of songs. Fueling our efforts after a time, we were allowed to practice onstage at the Fillmore, with the light-show folks testing out their equipment while we played. As we tried to become more serious, this took up more and more of our waking hours.

At the same time, the grubby little apartment desperately needed something. For a while, we were content to live with dirty white walls in the front room and mattresses on the floor for sleeping accommodations, prototype of the hippie crash pad. We simply kept a felt tip marker handy and let visitors sign in on the wall. Many a word of wisdom adorned that room.

We soon tired of the décor, though. So when not in school or at work or at band practice, I painted the front room. It did so much for our self-esteem that I went ahead and painted the kitchen and the back room too.

Next, in my first encounter with speed, I determined that our bedding arrangements required upgrade as well. After a brief pep talk with the roommates, during which I extolled my own prowess with a hammer and saw (I had worked a month one summer as an apprentice carpenter on a high-rise project, after all), I ventured down and bought a half-ton or so of two-by-fours, four-by-fours, plywood, and nails, lugging all on my shoulders a half-mile to our apartment.

One night while the others worked a show, I popped a pill and set down to draw up plans. Soon abandoning that effort as fruitless, I had at it, nailing and sawing, bracing and re-bracing. When the gang returned, there it stood: a monolithic, gothic set of bunk beds in the back room. When my father saw my handiwork, he cracked up. He allowed as how the flood could come through and raze every building in Manhattan, but my bunk beds would still be standing.

With all the time spent on redecorating and work, my studies suffered. I was just not into school. I loved the people. We even had a blow-out party in our beautiful new apartment with a bunch of the students from school. But my schedule proved untenable, and something had to give. I dropped school because it ran dead last on my list of priorities. I didn’t even have time to notice this last small line I crossed. I was living the life.

With our jobs at the now-famous rock emporium, we had achieved some sort of major status in the eyes of our small-town Canandaigua brethren, longing as they were for a taste of the big time. Visits from upstaters, usually unannounced, ran on a highly irregular schedule. We averaged probably one visit a month, though some months it seemed like everyone and their cousin plopped in at once. As practitioners of the good-vibes tenor of the times, we felt good about being big, though. It was big of us to take in these travelers, one and all, without as much as a discouraging word. It was quite hip to be big. We had something we never came close to possessing in high school—bigness.

Most of the time visitors were people we wanted to see anyway. They knew when they came that it wasn’t the Waldorf Astoria—but we had it. Sleeping bags served for spillovers, though the girls, of course, had the option of sharing a resident’s bed. Ground rules: Resident always slept in resident’s own bed.

Occasionally, though, these visits ended rather poorly.

A couple acquaintances, Steve and friend, dropped in for a weekend one time. Quite the drug dealer back upstate, he brought along some mescaline for all to sample. With everyone quite alight, we decided to take the boys out to a fancy restaurant and show ’em the ropes. We chose an elegant, romantic Italian place in the West Village. A rather upscale establishment, we had to spiff up and slop down with cologne. The restaurant, a very fashionable haunt of the upper middleclass and intelligentsia, best typified the image we wished to portray to our friends from the sticks.

The world-weary patrons ignored these somewhat shabby interlopers, as we were squired in and seated, directly adjacent to a couple obviously celebrating some occasion. He wore a full-dress tux and she a beautiful evening gown. We felt rather vulgar when we ordered a pitcher of beer before supper and tried to keep our conversations to a polite mumble.

Unfortunately, after the first pitcher and well into the second, Steve began to loosen up considerably. He allowed as how he was in such fine fettle because he was tripping, drinking beer, and at the same time not getting sick—a most disquieting thought. Steve said that usually when he tripped, if he drank any beer he got sick and threw up. We nervously checked his eyes to make sure he looked okay.

There was a brief pause in the action as our neighboring celebrants were served an elaborate meal, complete with flames and sizzling platters.

Then Steve continued his soliloquy. He was interrupted a brief moment as he turned to the celebrants and greeted them—with a beautifully arcing geyser of vomit sousing the tux, the dress, and the flaming repast. He then turned back and resumed talking. We beat a hasty retreat from the establishment, needless to say.

Success depends on three things: who says it, what he says, how he says it; and of these three things, what he says is the least important.

—John Viscount Morley

By that time, the Fillmore had established an uneasy peace with the denizens of the Lower East Side, a balance of power given the size and might of the outside bouncers. In the spring of 1968, when the Fillmore first opened up, most of the trouble with the bikers happened. The first few months of 1969, I too had to man the fire exits and help repel Motherfucker attacks, but the Hells Angels soon moved in and made peace.

The Angels’ moving in and consolidating the rival gangs generally eased the tension level at the Fillmore. The only problem we ever personally had with them was in the proximity of their lair to our humble abode on Third Street.

Carlito’s brother Spud and Sis, classmates in Canandaigua two years younger than we were, had moved to the city and assimilated into the Fillmore as well. They had the unfortunate experience of discovering the Angels’ arrival on the scene while making their way west on Third Street one day. On the block just across Second Avenue from ours, they came upon an impressive array of motorcycles—so impressive that Spud stumbled going by on irregular pavement. Because of this indiscretion, he and Sis found themselves immediately surrounded by a towering horde of Angels, quite perturbed that one such runt could have stumbled so close to their steeds.

Allowing as how this commotion had mightily disturbed their afternoon, the Angels seized as reparation Spud’s spankin’-new $40 real-leather Jimi Hendrix hat. Never having grown to much over five-foot-five-inches tall, Spud politely inquired how he might get his hat back. The proffered alternatives—fisticuffs or an outright trade for the woman—offered little hope.

To make it all legal, the shaggy behemoth claiming his hat gave Spud two joints (skillfully rolled papers resembling joints, anyway) and sent them on their way, unhappy but unmaimed.

Bill Graham once described this atmosphere quite appropriately: “New York is gutter warfare. Industrial psychology. There’s no salt and pepper for me. . . .”

Evidence of this abounded. And Bill Graham never backed down. One night in 1968 (the wild and woolly days), as the crowd filed out of a show, a nonaligned biker type looped a bike chain over the heads of several customers to crack Graham on the nose, bloodying it. Graham wheeled and roared into action, beating the shit out of him. Bill was no pussy.

But as 1969 wore on into May, things began to settle down a bit. The inside and outside crews had all worked together for a while, and the shows ran smoothly. And the people Graham had running the East Coast operation all proved first class.

Kip Cohen, Graham’s top dog then, had a knack for deportment in crisis situations. Heavily into meditation, he had a way of smoothing out even the biggest problems. Before each show, he’d emerge from his darkened office reflecting a meditative halo of calm, ready to face the show. (He later went on to work for A&M Records.)

J.P., house manager at the time, excelled at keeping the show rolling. If there was a problem the ushers or even head ushers couldn’t handle, he’d take over. Rumor had it he had been a hit man for the Mafia, and nothing in his comportment belied that. The guy always had a beautiful woman on his arm. If there ever was anybody that just had to get in a fight with somebody from the Fillmore, he might eventually run into J.P.—and wind up out cold. I quickly did my best to suck up to J.P. at the Fillmore.

With such a blend of finesse and know-how radiating down to the staff, the shows began to take on a professionalism heretofore unknown in the jungle of the East Village. Many of us on the inside crew, hippies looking to forge some new way of life through yoga or meditation, aspired to the cool and calm radiating from Kip. These pseudo-biblical aspirations—to be “gentle as a dove but wise as a serpent”—were sorely tested in those occasions when emotions raged nearly out of control.

On one night, May 16 of that year, The Who played to a sold-out Friday-night show before a rabid crowd of druggies and drunks. By midway through a fanatical set, the crowd, up to the top of the second balcony, pranced on their seats dancing and swaying. Now, standing on your chair was a no-no at the Fillmore, but events had spiraled out of control. Heading out to the final flourish, the band launched into a full-throttle, kick-ass version of “Summertime Blues,” sending the crowd into paroxysms of boogie mania.

About that time, the ushers (we were the few that retained sense) began commenting to each other that they smelled smoke. And lo, soon thereafter wisps of smoke began drifting into the theater and forming a fog bank in the dome—which gave us considerable cause for alarm. Finally the order came to begin evacuating the customers. It seems that street people had liberated the store sharing the building with the Fillmore, contending that the store was over-charging, and torched it.

So how to carry out this mass evacuation? Obviously, it wouldn’t be cool to start yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. But every person I approached to talk to, yell at, or attempt to cajole off a chair fought me off—they were too far gone into “Summertime Blues” oblivion.

There I fretted for a moment, agonizing over having to get into fights with people to save their lives. Just then, not halfway through the big song, some guy came bounding down the aisle and jumped onto the stage, grabbing the microphone away from Roger Daltry.

Now, The Who often in their long and illustrious careers had to deal with rowdies . . . and reacted accordingly. Daltry seized the interloper from behind, and Pete Townshend kicked him in the balls, sending him careening off the stage. Having disposed of the problem, they ended the song—only to find that the interloper was a plainclothes cop. After cops swarmed the stage, evacuation proceeded smoothly, but Townshend spent the night in the can. (I never saw the ID that the cop said he flashed when he jumped onstage.)

In the two years I worked at the Fillmore, I saw The Who probably twenty-five times and never tired of them. Something crazy always happened with the early bad boys of rock. Keith Moon, the drummer, was famous for trashing his drums during the encore—he was crazier than a shithouse rat. At a party before one set of shows, Moon got drunk and on a dare ate a Styrofoam cooler.

One night, following a rousing performance, Townshend threw his guitar, a $350 instrument, into the audience to end the show. So the next night, Spud and Ricky V. crouched at the front of each aisle with giant butterfly nets concealed before them. The grand crescendo came, and the boys gripped their nets in anticipation of snaring a thrown guitar, but Townshend smashed his guitar in a million pieces and threw the shards into the audience.

Another band popular enough with the staff to be almost considered the house band at one point was the old Savoy Brown, with Lonesome Dave, Kim Simmonds, and gang. They had a particular affinity with the guy who swept up the backstage area and helped on set changes, a hulking bear named John Ford Noonan. His ratty old blue-jean coveralls, full beard, and pirate scarf made him look like a Kodiak gypsy. Whenever Savoy Brown played, John came alive.

As the band cranked up their boogie, John would edge out onstage, beckoned by Lonesome Dave, and do the “noonan” with the lead man. The noonan, as best as can be described, is something like a cross between a Mau-Mau rain dance and the stoned-chicken grind. The real action, though, transpired backstage between shows. Noonan would lay in wait for some uptight, uptown groupie to slink backstage after the band. As one such approached backstage center, he slouched up and seized the damsel frontally and, lifting her off the floor, humped her unmercifully. A real blow to the ego—and the source of much hilarity for the crew in the days long before the “Me Too” movement.

While working at the Fillmore, Noonan actually wrote a play that won the Eugene O’Neill Award (The Year Boston Won the Pennant). But he was better as the gypsy pervert entertaining the backstage gang.

Bands like Savoy Brown tended to be weekend headliners. Graham shrewdly booked those acts that played to packed houses—two shows each night on Friday and Saturday. He was slightly more conservative for weeknight shows. If the band didn’t have the drawing power for the given day, he wouldn’t book it. Good poker players play their winners and dump their losers.

The difference between the character of one sold-out show and that of another in the next week depended on the nature of the headlining acts. Thus, if he booked Jefferson Airplane you could count on a boisterous, hard-to-handle crowd, with some real upagainstthewallmotherfucking radicals tossed in—never a fun bunch to deal with.

Frank Zappa crowds, on the other hand, tended to be half crazy, and you could never be sure if they were serious or joking. During a break between songs in one memorable Zappa set, someone in the crowd yelled out, “Fuck you, Frank,”

To which Zappa calmly replied: “Oh yeah? Fuck me, hunh? Okay, how about ten minutes of dead air?”

With that, Zappa and the band lit up cigarettes and leaned on amps for exactly ten minutes, casually checking their watches occasionally. Nobody else offered any such comments during what remained of the show.

Occasionally things went bad when all seemed right with the world. Sly Stone and the Family Band played several times during their heyday, and they were fairly well liked by the staff. But on one particular night, Sly got carried away on hit song “Higher.” At the end of the early show, the crowd was gettin’ down, so Sly paraded the entire lot of them out the side fire exits in a pulsating conga line, then back in—along with a thousand miscellaneous speed freaks, winos, and street people. It took the crew the better part of an hour and a half to clear the place out for the second show, a task that usually took twenty minutes, including cleanup. Graham swore to the crew that he’d never book Sly Stone again. And he didn’t.

Some of the most annoying crowds came to see the heavy-rock groups. All the punks from Queens in plastic jackets, tight pants, and mod haircuts would grace the Fillmore with their smart mouths and serious ’tude. We gritted our teeth for these shows and stuffed cotton in our ears when ear-splitting metal bands like Mountain and Grand Funk Railroad played. Even working in the second balcony, high above the action, you’d leave with a headache at the end of the night.

But probably the hardest crowd to handle showed up for Grateful Dead concerts. They were pretty generally tripping out of their gourds, and it can be hard to convince anyone so wasted to remain in one place, one seat. A tripping crowd is set adrift from any normal mental processes, seeking only to go with the psychedelic flow. Attempts at reasoning fall on deaf ears.

During Dead shows, crew members had to have their wits about them to maintain a modicum of control in the mayhem while trying to enforce the rigid fire laws. Therefore you didn’t drink out of any sodas you didn’t yourself open. Acid-laced drinks circulated widely during Dead concerts. Then the people spluttered so far out of control at times that you’d welcome the presence of reinforcements from the outside security gorillas. If you couldn’t reason with a blasted reveler, hippie to hippie—brother, these are the rules the man makes us live by—imploring him to, say, move from the forbidden zone, you just gestured for the big guy, who would the impel the interloper back to his assigned seat.

Tripping people are much more responsive to gorillas. A gorilla’s logic is inescapable. If they won’t listen to long-winded explanations and polite entreaties, they’ll sure step to for brute force.

I heard the Dead probably twenty-five times as well and never liked them, always too wound up dealing with the crowd to actually stop and listen. All the little fire laws we were charged with enforcing seemed flat-out petty to zoned-out Dead crowds. Well, they were pretty petty, truth be told. But they were the rules that the Fillmore had to abide by in order to stay open. And it’s not like you could just say to Bill Graham, “I don’t really want to do that.”

The Dead were so notorious for late-running shows that Graham booked them one time for a week, beginning each night at midnight (“The Dead at Midnight”). We’d stagger out after the shows each night to blinding sunlight of a new day, the city bustling off to the morning’s work. It took several weeks to get back to a normal sleep schedule.

Sis, always a Dead fan, delighted in those shows. When she and Spud moved to the city, they quickly joined the staff, as the joint welcomed these “nice” people from Upstate into the fold. Sis scored a somewhat safer job working in one of the concession stands. The Fillmore sported stands upstairs and down, serving pastries, yogurt, juices, and the like. No alcohol. That was for the best, though; crowds proved hard enough to handle drugged up.

Because of its theater status, the Fillmore couldn’t sell booze anyway, but discerning drunks on the staff could usually sniff it out. Graham provided coolers of beer for the bands (those that partook) and the backstage crew, as well as satisfying any extra requests (“riders”) from the stars. Janis Joplin’s dressing room was always well stocked with Southern Comfort, for example.

It was so well stocked on one occasion (enough also for the soiree afterwards), it overflowed on Ricky V., who sipped copious amounts at his command post on the backstage entrance. We later learned the extent of his tippling when Janis came back to the office between shows and asked, “Who’s that cute little drunk running around backstage?”

Ricky V. was relieved of his duties for the evening and, shortly thereafter, carried bodily back to the apartment after passing out. And he missed the big party. The parties were a good way to let off steam, both for the staff and bands. The chic and the hangers-on served as jaded witness.

Early on at the Fillmore, Jim Morrison of the Doors got plastered during sound check before the show and had crew members hoist him up on a light boom, dangling by his knees high above the stage. All feared for his safety and his blossoming career, not the least of whom was bandmate Ray Manzarek, who troubled about, muttering, “There goes the act.”

Not all of the rock stars proved so problematic, of course, and their fans behaved in a much more civilized manner. Some of the easier crowds to manage came to see groups such as Procol Harum, the Byrds, Traffic, and The Band. Class acts drew a classier crowd. The Band concert, single shows all week, came during the climax of a busy spring. Coming off the release of their debut album,
Music From Big Pink, The Band was heralded as the group backing up Bob Dylan. By that time, the staff worked as a smooth-running unit and spirits ran high. During this short-lived era of good feeling, the crew felt like it inhabited an island of sanity in the midst of all the chaos erupting in the outside world.

Once again, the bonhomie of the times saved Ricky V.’s neck from the chopping block. For The Band shows, all the uptown bigwigs showed up. Albert Grossman, who handled stars like Dylan, Joan Baez, and The Band, happened to be hanging out backstage watching the set. Ricky V. approached Grossman as he strayed into his sector and asked him if he had the obligatory pass for his backstage area.

“Why, no. I’m Albert Grossman,” he replied.

“I don’t care who you are, pops. If you ain’t got a pass, you gotta go.”

Ricky V. had a penchant for stumbling into trouble. Sometimes it seemed like he only opened his mouth to change feet. He had a similar run-in with Abbie Hoffman, darling of the revolutionary set, when he tried to slide in backstage without a pass. Hoffman, never the master of politesse, responded to Ricky V.’s rebuffs with pointed remarks about finding someone with some authority, and ventured that Ricky V. “should clear up your acne, kid.”

At which point Ricky V. allowed as how he wouldn’t let Hoffman backstage even if he came back with God himself. But, as Ricky V. recounted later, Hoffman returned with an even higher authority: Graham.

But Ricky V. did get the last laugh. He was working onstage during the Woodstock performance of The Who, when a formation of planes flew overhead to drop supplies. Hoffman rushed the stage and grabbed the microphone, purportedly intent on telling the crowd that the planes were sent to bomb the hippies. He ostensibly had some notion about mobilizing the half-million people into an army.

Pete Townshend may or may not have recognized him, but it’s doubtful if it mattered. He swung his guitar in a mighty arc and conged Hoffman over the head, sending him flying off the stage into the audience.

Alas, regardless of their doom,

The little victims play!

No sense have they of ills to come,

Nor care beyond today:

Yet see how all around ’em wait

The Ministers of human fate

And black Misfortune’s baleful train!

Ah, show them where in ambush stand

To seize their prey, the murderous band!

Ah tell them, they are men!

To each his suff’rings: all are men,

Condemned alike to groan;

The tender for another’s pain,

The unfeeling for his own.

Yet, ah! why should they know their fate,

Since sorrow never comes too late,

And happiness too swiftly flies?

Thought would destroy their paradise.

No more; where ignorance is bliss

Tis folly to be wise.

—Thomas Gray

Guff: How Not to Not Take Any

The West Fourth Street station of the Eighth Avenue subway lets you out on Third Street in the West Village, home of the old Night Owl Café. By that time, however, it had been made over into a poster shop, with the run-of-the-mill black lights and day-glo posters.

Ricky V. and I hurried from the subway east on Third Street, bound to the East Side to the offices of the East Village Other, where we had contracted to paint their walls, top dollar. As we made our way to the intersection, the noon pedestrian traffic clogged the streets, and our being late for our contractual obligations had in no way added to the humor of the situation. As we buzzed along, just across the street from the Night Owl, a five-foot five-inch nondescript (no sleazier than the norm) black dealin’ man accosted Ricky V., grabbing his arm and saying, “You wanna buy some grass, man?”

In his familiar, genial manner heightened by our tardiness, Ricky V. jerked his arm away and replied, “No, I don’t want any of your fucking grass.”

Continuing through the crowd and crossing McDougall Street, we noticed that our insistent entrepreneur had then taken up following us, to what end aroused our curiosity. Turning to meet him on the corner, Ricky V. was greeted by your basic I’m-gonna-kick-yer-ass shove.

With my typical upstate charm, bolstered by my aborted stint on the Canandaigua wrestling team, I stepped in between the two: “Hey, don’t do that.”

The quick smooth flash of fist to jaw told me that our man wasn’t buying true grit this year. Six feet, one inch and a hundred ninety-five pounds of me, momentarily stunned with this dastardly attack by such an obvious lightweight, recoiled swiftly with all the agility acquired in months on the Syracuse basketball courts. Seizing the little rat bastard, I grabbed him and prepared to wrestle him into submission. Sooner or later the boys in blue down the street or some of the crowd will break it up after I’ve worked him over a bit.

Alas and alack, the immediate sounding thunder of cavalry hooves on the pavement proved to be yet more Indians, ye verily the tribe of my intended pummelee.

“Well, hell,” I seem to remember thinking as a war club of some devise knocked the swagger and most of the sense out of me, dropping me to my knees. “This ain’t fair.”

I vaguely remember looking up through the haze of semi-consciousness as Ricky V., the offender, was smacked from brother to brother—John Wayne, barroom-brawl style—with the final roundhouse delivered by our entrepreneur turned avenging warrior, sending Ricky V. in a slow-motion pirouette off the ground and flat on his face in the middle of the street.

Busy as it had been elbowing our way through the crowds seconds earlier, the din of battle had produced deserted streets momentarily, as if the noon rush paused to take shelter from a sudden downpour. With the final KO, however, business as usual resumed, with our five ravagers slipping into the concrete.

Unsteadily picking myself up and wending my way through a fog, I helped Ricky V. up from in front of a line of honking cars, and stopping our wounds, we headed unceremoniously east. Ten times on the way home, I had to tell Ricky V. what had just happened to us. To this day, he still can’t quite remember what went down.

Laugh and the world laughs with you,

Weep, and you weep alone;

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

But has trouble enough of its own.

—Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Summer in the city is a bitch. My father used to joke that the first thing city kids learn to do is open fire hydrants for a quick shower, and the first thing cops learn is how to shut them down. Sooty sweat is bad enough, but the concrete holds the sun’s heat to make sure you’re uncomfortable all night, as well. During summer nights, half of the city sits on the roof or the fire escape. In the packed confines of the Fillmore, changing into t-shirts and shorts gave little relief to the crew. The ancient air-conditioning system could barely manage a whisper of relief—not enough to stir the cigarette haze that hung over the second-floor lobby.

So Graham worked a deal with the management of Tanglewood, an eighty-eight-acre classical-music venue in far-western Massachusetts and summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Though the site served primarily to present open-air symphony concerts, the owners agreed to let Graham book a few rock shows. To ensure a turnout, Graham would line up two or three name acts together—the first such featured The Who, Jefferson Airplane, and B. B. King.

The “Fillmore’s Finest Forty,” as billed in the programs, provided security: keeping interlopers and freebooters out and order within. A nine-foot-tall chain-link fence bounded the entire area, not much deterrent to the determined gate-crasher and a whole lot of fence to guard with forty people.

For the first of the rock extravaganzas, we spent hours in a meeting setting up a tight walkie-talkie communications system to link vital sectors on the fence with internal pavilion security. Naturally, once it was underway, that fell to shit and you were on your own out on the perimeter. This first show took place before Woodstock ushered in a proliferation of outdoor rock concerts, and we didn’t think there’d be any more than a few thousand people to contend with—about the average Fillmore crowd. But on that occasion, twenty-five thousand fans showed up, the most ever seen at Tanglewood.

For that premier engagement, Graham leased a bus to drive the staff out to the country, complete with a beer keg and innumerable joints (a good time was had by all). He arranged for us to stay in dormitory rooms of a nearby college that had emptied for the summer. But, having been cooped up in the city for so long, some of us figured it’d be real neat if we slept out under the stars. The thrill of the great outdoors had long since been replaced by the chill of the country air when I was awakened from a fitful sleep at five in the morning by the chattering of Spud’s teeth. Before I could drift back off, the soothsome sounds of a police bullhorn shattered the quiet, ordering us off the hill we occupied. We were trespassing. Next time out, we went with the dormitory rooms. For the first show, we received a box lunch consisting of a cold piece of chicken and assorted sides, greeted with a chorus of grousing and griping to Graham. Next time out, after the success of the first, he provided a catered buffet complete with steaming chafing dishes and the works.

For that first outing, I worked the outside fence in one front corner. Several dilapidated storage sheds squatted in the corner, adjacent to a gate that served as an employee vehicle entrance. In my solitude, even my official walkie-talkie with the hours-before-the-concert gab and tomfoolery crackling the airways couldn’t ease my mind. I fretted about having to defend by myself this pivotal point in such an expanse of wilderness.

Working fast, I established a command post on top of the largest shed, right on the corner, carrying up a pile of rather menacing chunking rocks for long-range firepower. I had no intention of actually throwing them at anybody, but I dreaded the thought of being at the mercy of miscreants on the outside not so inclined. Scouring the other buildings, I came upon a formidable array of combat weapons: an axe handle, some stout staffs, and a good-sized lead pipe that hefted like some monster Viking club.

Setting up my new-found arsenal at various points along my sector, isolated as it was from any other security person, I selected the pipe for companionship. Definitely a two-hander and rather cumbersome, it nevertheless lent me just the right sinister touch. Anybody venturing into my domain to sneak in would think twice when they saw this crazy-looking bastard with the pipe. We hadn’t ventured so far from the city that the people didn’t have some street sense. Making myself comfortable with a book, perched at the pinnacle of my command-post building, I warily passed the hours before the onslaught.

My attentiveness was soon rewarded. Five guys suddenly burst from the cover some fifteen yards outside the fence, heading towards command central. I roared down the roof with a fearsome growl to where they had gained a hold on top of the fence and smote the fence top a mighty blow with my war pipe.

Hands abuzz, they dropped like Evil Knievel jumping a canyon, amid questioning of my ancestry and general hubbub. They soon responded to my snarling and warlike posturing by trailing off morosely to bless someone else’s sector.

The afternoon dragged on in endless display of muscle and pipe up and down my length of fence, dramatically calling into the walkie-talkie (to dead white air) for reinforcements when overrun—winning a few, losing a few more. The trick lay in intimidating intruders before they made it over the fence. No sane person would tempt fate or a lead pipe (without any assurance that I wouldn’t really crown them). Once they made it over the fence in force, it was walkie-talkie time.

“Hey, you guys. Get outa here.”

“Yeah, sure, asshole.”

We breathed a sigh of relief as light faded and the picket lines were pulled inside to the pavilion for the final blow-out. The Fearless Forty sat in aisles to forestall any attempts to rush the stage, cudgels left behind at the perimeter.

At these Tanglewood shows, incidentally, Graham became one of the first to utilize videotape equipment at rock concerts. Cameras up front filmed the action and it was projected on a giant screen so the people sitting in back could see up close what was happening onstage.