What I feel inside I can't explain. That John Entwistle should die in his late fifties is totally unthinkable. He was the indestructible one. He was the rock. He was the island. He was the fulcrum on which it all hinged.
(Mick Farren, Deviant)
John was the best. He made "My Generation," along with the other lads, one of the greatest records of all time.
(Peter Noone, the Artist formerly known as Herman)
Learned how to play bass playing along with "Happy Jack."
(Rick Harper, www.Rickenharper.com)
In his songs The Ox spent a lot of time playfully - and not so playfully - mapping types of hells, but that's just to say that beyond question his real place is in Heaven.
(Jeremy Gluck, original Barracuda)
For all bass players everywhere, it was Big Johnny Twinkle who opened the gate and let the horses out of the barn...for good.
(Mick Hargreaves, my favorite Jersey area bassman)
I think John was the pivotal member of the most exciting rock band to emerge on the British music scene in the Sixties.
(Brian Auger, Trinity)
There is a Zen expression that the way to go through life successfully is to "move like a cow" or, in this case, an ox.
(Chris Butler, Waitress)
RIP John Entwistle, I hope you are dancing somewhere with Peg Leg Peggy right now.
(Scott McCaughey, original Young Fresh Fellow)
Great rock groups are miracles of human chemistry. Without the solidity and musical instincts and unique personality of John Alec, we would not have had the outrageous creativity and genius and maximum rock and roll of Keith and Peter and Roger ...or The Who at all. So we must thank him for making modern music as we know it possible.
(Paul Williams, Crawdaddy Magazine)
Yes. Thank You, John. And as you yourself promised, You only die once in a lifetime.
(Gary Pig Gold, www.GaryPigGold.com)
TOO TOUGH TO DIE: GOD SAVED DEE DEE RAMONE AND PUNK ROCKERS EVERYWHERE
“His speech was inarticulate;
His songs were not.”
(Carl Cafarelli, "This Is Rock ‘N’ Roll Radio")
“Dee Dee was the most important musician in the history of punk rock,
and probably the most overlooked.”
(John Holmstrom, editor/publisher, PUNK Magazine)
Seven years since his passing, with (punk) rock now routinely reduced to yet another noxious niche within the gigantic corporate crime-scheme of things, it does seem all too easy to forget the indelible impact Dee Dee and his fellow Ramones truly wrought upon a terrifyingly wide swath of humanity. Yes, their sound was forever first and one-two-three-foremost within their arsenal. But the band’s look, posture, taste, aroma and very thorn-in-the-craw omnipresence offered vital inspiration, and delivered desperately needed hope by the dumpster-load, to all of us who just refused to take Frampton Comes Alive or even Rumours lying down.
Lest we forget too that, within mere months of that first Ramones long-player, Paul McCartney finally discovered the overdrive position on his amp, half of Led Zeppelin and even The Who tightened up their pant-legs (not to mention song structures) considerably, and even the mainstream media itself was sufficiently baited to pounce upon what in retrospect we can see to have been the last great (Caucasian) threat to the melodic status quo.
No mean feats, were they, for four seeming Carbona-heads straight outta Queens, NY. And with all respect due to Joey’s Brill Building genetic programming, it was in fact Dee Dee who, just as Dennis Wilson provided his musical family, gave the Ramones their identity, spirit, and genuine sneakered, black-leather credibility. As no less a kindred spirit as George Tabb of New York Press perfectly stated, "Dee Dee was the bad-ass of the Ramones. The one who really took the drugs, sniffed the glue, hung out at 53rd & 3rd and WAS practically a teenage lobotomy."
Plus, need we neglect, Dee Dee’s musicianship duly inspired all the coolest Fender far-from-Precision bassmen of the time, from Sid Vicious all the way on down to my fellow budding Canadian pop scribe B.F. "Mole" Mowat (then skipping high school whenever possible to swing the bottom end for a dorky ELO/Alice Cooper cover band). Why, even acclaimed psycho-twangstress Elena Skye of that Demolition String Band, never once loathe to draw that simple pedal-to-the-floor connection between P-rock and Bill Monroe, admits to being "warped for life" after having first encountered the Ramones during her most impressionable dorm years: "I immediately cut my hair like Dee Dee's, with the bangs and all. I put my mandolin away, bought a black Rickenbacker with black and white checker binding, lowered the strap so it hit my knees and didn't look back for about twelve years!"
But don’t just take it from these good folk: "I believe Dee Dee influenced every kid playing bass that saw him perform," as no less an expert on the subject as Johnny Ramone stated for the obitual record.
"I remember seeing the Ramones at the Bottom Line after Sire Records signed them," recalls Ira Robbins, whose Trouser Press was essential in providing the band with early, pinpoint coverage. "It was their big up-from-the-underground-into-the-mainstream-light gig, and Johnny still had to tune Dee Dee's bass for him – onstage – after they came out. Now THAT’S the Real Deal, innit?" Yessir, hardly averse to being d-u-m-b whenever the situation warranted, Dee Dee employed his lowly four strings to replant an authentic, cranial-deep root back into the Rock and the Roll, while effortlessly penning several legendary additions to Pop’s under-three-minute/ less-than-four-chord canon along the way ("Rockaway Beach" alone must qualify the man for somebody's Songwriters’ Hall of Infamy, no?)
As if this wasn’t all more than well enough already, in his latter post-Ramone incarnation Dee Dee gamely cut a few new albums, wrote a couple’a books, and was even beginning to delve into the finer graphic arts alongside longtime henchman Arturo Vega when his number cruelly cropped up. But right til the very sordid end he kept his instrument close at hand, and would never fear to strap it on whenever the call to provide some genuine R ‘n’ R arose within earshot.
Finally, Dee Dee remained the coolest-looking (and talking) Ramone by far, even as he and his brudders crashed their final socio-musical barrier to become inductees into the so-called Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame circa Spring 2001. Wearing an entirely Bowery-worthy wine-colored jacket, and fresh from hunting down Gene Pitney for an autograph backstage, Dee Dee confronted all of the industry’s most pseudo-powerful within the wholly inappropriate Waldorf Astoria that night, and as every Ramone but Joey stood proudly alongside uttered these final, all-encapsulating words of characteristic rare, raw wisdom:
"Hi, I’m Dee Dee Ramone, and, uh, I’d like to congratulate myself, and thank myself, and give myself a big pat on the back. Thank you, Dee Dee. You’re very wonderful. I love you."
Believe it or not, the very first "real" concert I was ever allowed to attend as a wee Canadian tyke was The Jimi Hendrix Experience at Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens, May 3, 1969.
I'd already been a fervent fan for a couple of years, having spent most of my Grade 8 art class making swirly sketches of Jimi in charcoal. Plus the Are You Experienced? album was right up there – almost – with Monkees' Headquarters on my 1967 Most-Played List.
Fast-forwarding, Christmastime '68 was spent, between runs down the local tobogganing hill, digging all eight vinyl sides of The White Album AND Electric Ladyland and, most likely as a direct result, my gym-class rhythm section and I were just starting to assemble our very own semi-power trio when word filtered along the groupvine that the Experience were planning to stop by our very neighborhood in a few months as part of their possibly-Farewell World Tour.
In a word then? WOW.
My most-trusted pal Ric scored two tickets in the Gardens' nosebleed section and I fibbed to my parents that we were off to a hootenanny (!) for the evening. Yet no sooner had we approached the venue that word began a'buzzin' that our hero had just been busted for carrying a batch of non-pharmaceutical mood enhancers into Toronto Airport. Hmmm…
Undaunted, we climbed skyward to our seats, sat on sonic needles and pins through both opening acts (the pretty cool Cat Mother & the All Night Newsboys, whose big hit "Good Old Rock n Roll" my little band was already struggling to learn, followed by none other than, uh, Fat Mattress) til the one and only Jimi Himself sauntered on stage, miraculously only a few minutes late.
Now considering all the man had already been through that day I guess it was no real surprise the evening's set consisted of mainly down-cast tunes a la "Red House," though Jimi did graciously treat the teenage throng with a quick encore full of that fabled, fiery Foxey Purpleness of yore.
And then, suddenly, he was gone. Experience and all.
James Marshall Hendrix returned to town briefly that December however, just long enough to be completely exonerated of all narco-charges ("Canada has just given me the greatest Christmas present ever!" he exclaimed to the Toronto Daily Star), but I suppose one could question if, or why, that life lesson ultimately went unheeded. And I suppose it does say something that out of all the delicately detailed minutiae forever etched upon my grey matter concerning that momentous concert forty long, long Toronto May’s ago, I can still most vividly recall EXACTLY what Jimi was wearing (all Harlem-Asbury chic all the way!), what I was wearing even (don't ask), the appropriately brilliant weather, the commuter train Ric and I snuck on after we told our parental units we'd just be folking around ...hell, I even remember the proto-Bowzer moves Cat Mother & Co. deployed whilst performing their one hit wonder!
But do I recall a single sliver of the sounds and/or stylings of the Noel Redding-fronted Fat Mattress performance of that same, utterly magical night? No sir, I do not. Which reminds me: Mr. Redding himself passed onward and upward to that great big Gardens in the sky six years ago May 11th.
And the moral, perhaps, to this all? Well, I still find myself revisiting Electric Ladyland on almost as regular a basis as I do the Monkees’ Headquarters. So you see some things, I guess, shall never change.
"Jersey City Annie
She's not that pretty
She rides the No. 5
to Jersey City"
The Number Five was a bus that went back and forth from Jersey City to the Port Authority station near Times Square. The Number Five carried people to Manhattan for a lot of reasons, or course. But a disproportionate number of riders were going over to bet at the OTB—in the thirties it was Manhattanites coming to Hudson County to see the burlesques, but in the seventies the tide was in the other direction. See, New Jersey didn't have Off-Track Betting, but New York did. And New York wasn't blind to this fact—inside Port Authority, there was not one but two OTBs—one on the upper level and one on the street level. They knew how to grab the Jerseyites as they were coming through—including my father.
All the diners in Jersey were owned by Greeks, who were inveterate gamblers. The diner closest to my house was owned by three Greek brothers. Two of them would close the diner at night and go straight to Manhattan and lose their nights’ money at OTB.
There was one gaming table in Atlantic City, a craps table, that was just Greek and Chinese—not a word of English was spoken at the table. For the Greeks—in New Jersey, anyway—gambling was a hobby the way bowling might have been for Americans. We bowled, they gambled. With us, gambling might come third or forth.
At another table in Atlantic City, I once watched a couple slowly push the chips of their neighbor into their own pile of chips—a few at a time. The most cowardly take-over plot I ever saw. The plan hinged on having the glass ashtray right next to their chips; that made it easier to mask what they were doing. So, I kept moving the ashtray to another corner of the table, as if I was doing it absent-mindedly. They were very surprised that their ashtray kept migrating—they finally got upset and left the table. Me, I never smoked a day in my life.
There's an old joke, "I knew a man who was extremely lucky in Atlantic City. He went down in a $10,000 car and came back on a $100,000 bus!" I took the bus down to begin with.
* * * *
In 1975, I was living alone in the family house in Jersey City. That cold winter I got put on jury duty, and whaddya know, the defendant was charged with taking illegal bets on the numbers.
The jury was against him when we first went into private deliberations—which is to say, they thought we had to convict him, based on the evidence. But I didn't think we had anything more than coincidence. If a coincidence can go one way, it can go the other: The cops had overheard him saying in a phone call, "What have you got for me?" Well, he could have borrowed money, and wanted it back. They found betting slips folded in a newspaper in his house. So, they could be someone else's slips in a newspaper he bought. Not to mention, everyone in the city was involved with the numbers. I asked one older woman on the jury, "Mrs. McGuire, do you bet on the numbers?" "Yes, I do." "Case closed!" I said. I turned the jury around, and we sent the fellow home a free man.
The defending attorney, who looked like Groucho Marx in his bow tie and moustache, went around with a bewildered smile and shook our hands. At first he didn't even understand that he won, and when he did, he couldn't believe it.
Everyone bet on the numbers in those days. One time, my father was making a bet in the rear of a bar, when the police raided the place. The bar walls were being repainted at that moment, by a crew of house painters. So, my father just put on one of the painter's hats, picked up a bucket and walked out with the crew. He got home in time for supper.
One of our neighbors in Jersey City Heights was an elderly German woman (she was well into her eighties) who was collecting bets for the numbers. My mother used to go to this woman and place bets. Well, this woman had a caged parrot in her home, and the parrot lived in the parlor where the housewives would come in and place their bets. So the parrot got to repeating the conversations. "314 straight! 314 straight!" As the police were driving by, they kept hearing this parrot screaming the numbers, "314 straight! 314 straight!" They finally put two and two together, and nabbed the German woman. They shut down her game, and arrested her for being a bookie.
My mother used to dream the numbers, and then go place her bets. And she'd win! She was up six or seven thousand dollars. My mother was always a bit of a clairvoyant, and her sister, too. One day the phone was ringing. My mother was walking across the room to answer it, and she yelled at the phone, "Hold your horses!" When she picked it up, her sister on the other end said, "What do you mean, hold your horses?" There were all these incidents like this.
Once it was at night, I was a child and I had already gone to bed. My mother had gone to bed; but she was awake waiting for my father to come home. She heard footsteps come all the way up to the door, and then they stopped. Naturally, she thought it was my father. But no one opened the door—their bedroom door was at the top of the stairs. A few minutes later, the telephone rang, and she went downstairs to answer it. It was her family calling to tell her that her elder brother had just passed away at the hospital.
My father used to call her "the witch." My father would bet at the track, but first he would study the racing papers, he'd look at the horse's record, he'd try to figure out who had the best jockey, and this sort of calculation. At the track, he'd have to bet twenty or thirty dollars in order to win two hundred. In reality he'd go to the track and lose a hundred dollars, and my mother would win a thousand, just sitting in the neighborhood and betting illegally on the back stoop. While he was furrowing his brow over the papers, she would dream a door with a number on it, and that would be the day’s number—the last three digits of yesterday's take. It drove my father a little crazy.
You’ve heard of the Pyramid Scheme? I knew a fellow who had a Circle Scheme going. He borrowed money from everyone to pay everyone else back, and he tried to stay a little in the black the whole time. This was Jersey City, a town full of small-time numbers bets, compulsive card players, and minor hustlers.
For those who've read the most recent issue, Richard contributed a piece called "You Could Make a Bet on a Street Corner As Easy As Buying a Newspaper." Those who've not can do so here. (Part one of three)
You Could Make a Bet on a Street Corner as Easy as Buying a Newspaper
By Richard Leck with Karen Lillis
"News Boy" Moriarty was a Jersey City eccentric. In a town full of mobsters, he was not connected to any mob, he was his own operator. He got the name "News Boy" because he was always hanging around the newsstands in Jersey City: his game was taking numbers. He'd go all over the city taking bets on what the last three numbers of the daily take at the racetrack would be—this was a figure they published in the paper everyday, the day after. He walked up and down the block, knocking on doors, and the housewives all over would place bets with him. If you bet two dollars and you got the numbers right, News Boy would give you back two thousand.
News Boy Moriarty dressed to look like a working man, to avoid trouble. You could mistake him for a window washer or a clean-up man. He wore baggy workpants, so he could stuff all his dollars in the pant legs. Sometimes he might have five hundred singles in his pocket, but he didn't want to create suspicion, to have a bulge.
The bigger numbers games were run by the Italians, but News Boy was a crazy Irish loner—he ran his game alone, he'd been doing this for years. He had his routine, which included a fleet of old cars all over town. No matter where he was, he had the keys to a car nearby so he could make a getaway or stash his earnings in the trunk. He had about a half dozen of them, parked here and there—these were beat up cars that would have cost a couple hundred dollars at the time, the fifties.
Then one day, two painters were sent to paint an old wooden garage. Inside, they found a '47 Dodge sedan. In the trunk, they found a suitcase with two and a half million dollars—in small bills! That was an awful lot of money in those days. Well, the painters got nervous, so they took the suitcase to the police. The police tagged News Boy Moriarty for it, and News Boy went to jail. After about a year and a half, News Boy fell ill, and so they let him out for poor health. But News Boy still had money hidden all sorts of places around Jersey City—that was only one of his suitcases they'd found! He left town and bought his mother a mansion on the Jersey Shore.
News Boy's reign ended in ended in about the late sixties, early seventies.
A band that comprises
current/former members of established acts is a great addition to the
Six Degrees of Steve Albini game, but doesn’t always speak to
how the group sounds. Mikael Jorgenson, the full-time keyboardist
for Wilco, formed Pronto with Greg O’Keeffe and a cast of
musicians snagged from the ranks of Iron & Wine, Cat Power,
Childballads, and Califone among others. If “indie Americana”
is screaming at you right now, put on the breaks. Or at least start
coasting. It’s a solid line-up, but what it amounts to when
you throw in the album is that this is simply a group of
professionals. Not an up-and-coming bright-eyed band, not a
“one-off” project. This stuff is well executed 1970s AM
gold, sincere in it’s intent and successful in their endeavor.
Nicely layered vocals, keyboard (natch), and gentle (but not wimpy)
guitars glide out of the speakers very evenly. It’s a
pristinely mixed album, with no one facet dominating over the others.
Fans of the quintessential John Sebastian or the sound more modernly
mined by the Webb Brothers will dig this release. There’s some
fluff/pap/rock-lite material but overall it’s pleasant, and
when the band connects with some rich melodies (“When I’m
On The Rocks”) and hooks (“Monster”) it’s
going to perk up your ears like only a classic radio hit does (or
used to do).
Late one night in very late 1976, a singer acquaintance of mine burst into the (condemned) house I was then sharing with the local bar band, shouting "You will never believe what I just saw in Toronto tonight! These four guys with Brian Jones haircuts wearing drainpipe Levis, singing all these really fast, short songs. Lots of em, too! And the best part? NO GUITAR SOLOS!"
Now, this being the absolute height of Frampton Comes Alive, it's hard to completely fathom today the socio-musical import of that final kernel of information. But of course I was hooked, and the next time the Ramones landed in Canada, I made sure I was there.
The Dead Boys were opening: Sure, Stiv was alotta fun crawling over and across the drumkit during "Hey Little Girl" I suppose, but the headliners truly were, in every aspect of the words, The Real Thing. So I duly invited myself backstage to conduct their first interview on Canuck soil, and despite nearly getting bounced for taking a snap of Danny Fields writhing beneath a fridge in search of a runaway pencil, I was made to feel totally at home by the band's deep-rooted, deep-seeded LOVE of all things Rock and especially Roll: Johnny's coming-of-age watching Elvis' Ed Sullivision debut as a child, Dee Dee bemoaning the fact that it was hard getting the band going "coz rehearsal halls wouldn't let us in, ya know," and Joey. Dear, sweet Joey. He asked all about my record collection, claimed Peter Noone and Ronnie Spector as his two primary vocal idols, then wondered where a good place was to go see some local bands play later that night.
How utterly, disarmingly Refreshing, to say the least!
So we drove the R. brothers straight over to Toronto's Crash and Burn club to see Teenage Head throttle some old Eddie Cochran and Swinging Blue Jeans tunes, ran into Phil Lynott somehow lurking by the bar, then we all went out for some classic Canadian pizza slices (...mainly crust 'n' cheese, Tommy was complaining). Through it all, and then during subsequent fleetful meetings, Joey remained every inch the diehard, gentle man FAN of Our Music, and despite the fact that he and his bandmates literally Changed The World, I simply prefer to remember the man instead as nothing but the tallest, and needless to say coolest Herman's Hermits fan I ever did meet.
Joey passed away eight years ago this month. Gabba Gabba, good sir, wherever you are.
Glance over the ranks of Go Metric contributors past and present and
you'll find few tattoos. Our idea of permanence doesn't go much beyond
the initials we Sharpie on our undershirts. But when we do get some
ink, we do it right. GM contributor Chris Gethard. Morrissey.
Although as a toddler Mom and Dad were already helping send me to sleep with their Big Band 78’s (plus I later learned to print by copying their labels onto the nearest Crayon-friendly surface), I didn’t really encounter a true musical awakening of my very own til Summertime, 1963.
Banished for two weeks that August to my Aunt Jenny’s cottage, and trapped inside her Guest Room with nothing but an old stand-up radio long past dawn every single morning, it was only a matter of time, I suppose, before I stumbled upon the raucous strains of Toronto’s Number One Top Forty station, mighty CHUM 1050 AM.
I am not exaggerating: My life has never been the same since.
Faint prior memories of "Telstar" in my cousins’ rec room notwithstanding, I’d soon made lifelong friends with Elvis ("Devil In Disguise") and even Allan Sherman ("Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah"), and Aunt Jenny to this day wonders whatever I was doing in that room those entire two weeks!
But one wacky one-hit wonder in particular, The RanDells’ immortal (Billboard #16) smash "The Martian Hop," became my closest friend that endless summer. Then, thirty-five long years later (thanks to that damned internet), none other than head RanDell Steven Rappaport Himself tracked me down upon reading yet another of my many on-line RanDell Reminiscences.
Most sadly, Steven passed away on the Fourth of July, 2007.
Returning from my Aunt’s care with an entirely new lead on life, my parents were soon forced to re-negotiate my weekly allowance (I now demanded one 45-RPM record per week in lieu of my regular 50 cents), and it was right around then that those Beatles arrived...just in time to save me from another month of Davy Crockett and Peter Paul & Mary singles.
For my ninth birthday, I was blessed with my very first BIG record (as in album) ...just like those shiny ones Dad carefully kept filed near the Home Entertainment Center. I hearby proudly proclaim that my initial twelve inches of monophonic bliss was something called The Beatles Twist And Shout [WARNING. Fab Four Fan(atic)s and/or Collectors out there, Don’t Bother Me: this is a LONG out-of-print collection of early tracks unique to Capitol Records of Canada].
However, I must admit that none other than the third Monkees album, Headquarters, made even more of an impression. Why? Because it was in something called STEREO. Meaning that when I lay my head under the console record player to listen (this was before my parents knew enough to strap headphones onto me), both of my ears began receiving totally different pieces of sound. Mike’s guitar over there; Micky’s voice way over there! COOL!
Within a year of that particular sonic revelation I’d acquired the first in an endless parade of cheap tape recorders, and you know what? I’ve been happily eeking out a living of sorts in Stereophonic Sound ever since!
