I had heard only John Philip Sousa and Elvis Presley
amplified on the tiny speaker of the record player my parents had received as a
wedding present. But music from Red Rovera and The Rockin’ Pneumonias at
DiCastro’s was like a call from another world. The sound had to be magic,
I later realized, because I never smelled the stale beer and cigarette butts
until the music stopped. And frankly, the music never did stop for
me. I fell totally head over heels in love with the fantastic idea of
becoming a rock and roll musician. There is not an iota of difference
between believing you can do it and falling completely in love with
yourself.
The few songs I had learned by ear on my mother’s piano in
our living room would be replaced after some serious self teaching work with a
few riffs, runs and rumbles. The effort was enough to get me into a
rock and roll band. I was ready to mount the stage and impress audiences
all over the county.
Soon my opportunity came along. But I must admit I
got the job only because a friend needed somebody … anybody … to play keyboard
for the group he started when we were 16. I learned my chords in various
keys from a boy who sounded out each note for me on his guitar until I could
see their structure and begin to pick them out myself. (Oh, yeah!
Two half tones down from the top makes a seventh!) Then I was lucky
enough to meet another kid who was in a real band and actually knew how to play
piano. He taught me a few bass lines. He also told me that
absolutely none of his 3 years of piano lessons helped him to play piano in a
rock and roll band. Although that was probably untrue, I believed
him. Since I’d never taken a single lesson, this knowledge helped bolster
my confidence.
An older teen I met at a friend’s house taught me how to
invert my chords. Little Richard’s 45 rpm records taught me to bang on
the keys way up at the high end of the keyboard. The music of the 1950’s
wasn’t very complicated. Chord progressions for the Top 40 songs were
almost always I, IV, V for the fast songs and I, VI, IV, V for the slow
tunes. (In the key of C that would be C,F,G and C, Am, F, G7
respectively.)
That’s all I learned about music before I suited up in my
bright red tux and gold cummerbund, ready to wow music lovers everywhere.
If I’d been a solo act without other band members playing louder than me, I
would have been in a lot of trouble. I didn’t continue to deepen my
knowledge of the piano at that time because I was in high school and I was
busy. Not with studies, but with day dreaming. I spent a lot of
time day dreaming.
Our first gig provided my initial jolt of that addictive
substance known as applause. It occurred at a dance our new band
played in South
Utica,
hosted by a local DJ. I can’t remember the number I sang that first time
in public, but the girls swooned and screamed and I was absolutely
hooked. For all I knew, the girls were screaming at rats
running across the floor. I didn’t realize at the time that teenage girls
would swoon over President Eisenhower singing God Bless America, if he hung a guitar over his
shoulder. And maybe wiggled his hips. This first job would spoil
us, it turned out. We didn’t know it that night, but things would get
worse before they got better.
We played at a gas station grand opening, at a hunting
lodge that almost burned down during our second set, in dingy bars where
as sixteen year olds we were propositioned by prostitutes, at high school
and college proms where the kids often got drunk and threw up on us or wanted
to beat us up, like the night in Canajoharie when we needed a police escort out
of town.
I can’t say any of us really liked playing in bars until
we were a bit older, but the money was union scale and much more than what we
received for proms and school dances. Mom and Dad knew I was in the band,
of course. Even a resourceful sixteen year old can’t leave the house in a
bright red tux without some kind of explanation. I told Mom our band
played only at teen dances in Church Halls. I don't think she believed
me. She just loved me.
We played in so many school gyms we should have made
sneakers part of our outfits. In fact the extra traction of the rubber
soles would have been helpful at all the Beer Bashes we played when the floor
would become slippery with spilled beer after a couple of hours. And I
still feel the sand in my shoes from all the summer gigs we played on weekends
at Sylvan Beach.
I knew enough musical techniques back then to keep from
getting fired. I liked the adulation that sometimes came from
audiences and our teenage rock and roll band certainly brought me more money
than I might earn delivering newspapers. Plus, I never had a paper route
customer scream with delight when I came to their door with the newspaper.
And it happened that I could sing, after a fashion. Although Brook Benton
and even Gene Vincent were surely not worried about competition from me,
my golden voice may be why the band didn’t fire me when I flubbed my keyboard
solos.
My desire to be noticed by girls as I played in the band
didn't work out quite the way I had planned. The ladies who came up to
speak to me between sets were older or drunk and they always advised me to find
a better crowd to hang out with, evidently including themselves in the
comparison. Some were more free with their charms. But the only
girl who ever swooned over me also threw up on me.
Still, playing to rowdy young women was a lot of
fun. I'm reminded of that when I occasionally sit in church while the
music ministry sing their hearts out or play the guitar or kazoos at a Folk
Mass. I assume they are enjoying themselves, but with no young women
screaming when you huff out your low notes, I can't imagine singing in the
choir is as much fun as belting out a song to dozens of beer drinking sorority
girls.
It is true I met my wife as a result of my short career of
fame in two small towns. She noticed me in the band one night and
recognized me from our college. When I approached her some months later,
it served as sort of an introduction and we hit it off, something that didn’t
always happen to me with many young women who understandably had second
thoughts about bringing a musician home to meet Mom and Dad. What I
needed and found was a very brave girl.
I had toyed with the notion of working seriously on my
playing and becoming a career musician, but no one in their right mind would
choose a life of wandering around looking for work and playing music in side
street pubs for people who expressed their appreciation by sitting there and
getting drunk. I didn’t want to find myself on a Greyhound bus every week
touring the worst parts of one town after another as I played out a career in
all the cheap dives on the east coast. Some of my band friends got
regular jobs and played evenings and weekends for extra money. That must
have cut into their family life.
An honest assessment of me as a musician would say I
wasn’t very serious and I certainly wasn’t very good. My time of being
almost famous didn’t last very long, only from my junior year of high
school until my second year of college. At age 19 I was done.
One hot and sticky night in July of ’62, after playing in
some crummy club at Sylvan Beach, I was odd man out when the
management gave us an overnight room that slept only four. I woke up on
the sandy beach at about 7 the next morning to a bright sunny day that was
giving me a terrific headache. As I rolled over and tried to get
comfortable, sand trickling down the back of my pants that were wet from the
dew, I sensed my life as a musician was over.
I sat up on the beach and looked around in the bright
sunlight. A young mother some distance away looked at me and instantly
called out to her young daughter to come to her. I should have paid for a
room somewhere instead of lying out on the sand.
I looked down the beach to DiCastro’s, where I had
fallen in love with the whole idea of becoming a rock musician. I wished
I had been invited to play there, but they were an upscale bar and never hired
us, preferring older bands from the Syracuse area. My old friend and
neighbor Petey got a great job with a band from Buffalo. Eventually he quit his
accounting work and took off for Nashville with them. Today he is a
studio musician and has credits with well known bands. His Aunt Dominica
left her bedroom and Uncle Angie and joined Petey down south. I never
knew what she was to Petey, aunt or lover. He calls me now and then and
asks me if I remember how many window panes were built into each of our houses.
For me, my musical ambition was limited and there were
other adventures in life to pursue and places to go. I wanted a life with
interesting work in computers, a terrific girl and kids and a house
in the country and money to spend. I'm pretty happy with the way my life
turned out, but it's fun to remember those golden days … some of them …
when I was a rock musician.
copyright 2012, David Griffin
