This Friday I turn 63. I’m not sure how to feel about it. Impressed I made it this far? Worried about going much further? This is not a milestone birthday, so it seems odd to get reflective or philosophical about it. If I make it to 65 I can indulge some of that bullshit. Instead, let’s go back 50 years to September 1975 when I was 13 and see what newly-teenaged Chris was up to...
I was a year into a growing guitar obsession, begun when I first heard Whole Lotta Love, decided I wanted to make the same sounds Jimmy Page did and dropped my original instrument: trombone. The blonde Harmony Stratotone H47 family friend Rodney left at our house was reclaimed and – having taken the inaugural Junior High guitar class and gotten hooked – I talked my grandmother into buying me a Kay SG copy and amp at Roosevelt Field Mall.
Junior High is also where I met Glenn Katz, who became my best friend, and Mike Nicolosi (RIP) , who’d go on to form the Nihilistics with me.
Through Glenn I met Billy Kammerer, who became my Cobra bandmate. Cobra was our cover band, doing the most atrocious covers you’ve ever heard of what’s now called “classic” rock.
Burgeoning guitar-geekdom coexisted uneasily alongside my model-building. I’d still ride my brown Schwinn Continental east along Montauk Highway (Merrick Road to the locals) to hit the Lindenhurst Hobby Shop just west of Wellwood for new kits or paint but would more often play the jukebox or run the slot cars.
My mother and father had split and dad fucked off to Westchester around 1973. Mom took up with an old high school friend, Justin – who was married – and he became a constant presence. The two of them liked their Screwdrivers and cigarettes.
Physical Graffiti – still my favorite album – came out in February of 1975 and I bought a bootleg 8-track copy from Ye Olde Shoppe Village in West Babylon where the Woolworth’s or some other department store used to be. Ye Old Shoppe Village was a co-op, with lots of little stalls filled by vendors peddling all manner of crap. The “record store” where I bought the bootleg also part head-shop. When the tape in my 8-track would break I’d repair it myself with Scotch tape and a razor blade. Until I bought the actual LP I listened to the songs on Physical Graffiti interrupted not only by the periodic THUNK of the program changing tracks but by gaps of 5 or 10 seconds due to the splices.
My mother took us to see Jaws at the Bay Shore Theater, also on Montauk Highway, and it scared the living shit out of me. As a fat kid I never liked the beach or swimming in the ocean that much: Jaws convinced me to stay the hell out of the water.
Things at home were not great. There was the aforementioned Justin, a chain-smoking Masonic blowhard (who was an actual mason) with a combover who – to his credit – gave me rides in his white Pontiac Catalina (he’d get a new one every two years) and would loan me money or give me odd jobs to do at his house in Amityville or his mother’s place in Massapequa.
I rarely if ever saw my father. After the divorce he’d swing by on the weekends but the visits became less and less frequent. He later complained to me You kids were never around when I’d show up. Or if you were you didn’t want to go do what I had planned. My sister’s take? We were teenagers and we wanted to hang out with our friends. We didn’t want to drop everything on a weekend to go off with him. When my dad was around I got the definite feeling he wasn’t thrilled with me due to my weight. I suppose I embarrassed him.
My brothers and I mostly fought. Mario (RIP), four years older than me, was usually not around and his torments were largely verbal. But Marc – a year older and on a bodybuilder/weightlifter track – seemed to despise me and took special delight in making me his punching bag. The mental and verbal abuse was non-stop and would often shade over into physical abuse.
I had little-to-no interaction with my sisters, who had begun dating and seemed to exist in their own world.
My aforementioned grandmother, Evelyn, and my Aunt Isabel were a bright spot and saving grace. Their house in Copiague was a refuge and I could often be found there doing chores for a few bucks or cadging a ride from Isabel. I’m convinced they were a couple (Aunt Isabel was not related to us by blood) but neither my surviving sister nor brother see it that way.
Another refuge was Glenn Katz’s house on the newest block in Lindenhurst, so new the utility cables all ran underground, like some street you would’ve seen on The Brady Bunch. Glenn’s refrigerator was always stocked with Diet Pepsi and his parents, Harvey and Sheila, were kind to me.
I’d discovered cleavage via I Dream of Jeannie and had seen my first naked ladies in a bunch of Playboy magazines found at the bottom of my parent’s bedroom closet. Those purloined magazines would soon join me in the privacy of our basement when no one was around.
My sense of humor was beginning to emerge, informed by Mad magazine and Monty Python. I tended toward the sarcastic, the absurd and the juvenile. How little things change...
Getting onstage with Cobra led to feeling comfortable onstage in high school theater, yearning to be someone else and learning to nurture my inner ham.
1975 and turning 13 feels like my true origin story, the arrow pulled taut on the bow, shot high into the air, arcing toward a target I couldn’t see at the time. The ingredients were all there – alienation, abuse, puberty, sexual frustration, feeling an outcast, the love of rock & roll, guitar as talisman and vehicle, a twisted sense of humor, the ability to perform in public – for my entry into radio via WFMU when I moved to NJ. WFMU proved central to all that followed, including a career in talk radio and meeting Sweet T. Little did I know then but I embarked on the path to the rest of my life 11 years earlier in 1975.
Now here’s a curated alphabetical list of everyone with whom I share a September 5th birthday:
Al Stewart
Aleksey Tolstoy
Alexandra Kerry
Arthur C. Nielsen
Bob Newhart
Buddy Miles
Carol Lawrence
Cathy Guisewite
Chip Davis
Cornelius Vanderbilt III
Darryl F. Zanuck
David “Clem” Clempson
Dweezil Zappa
Freddie Mercury
George Lazenby
Loudon Wainwright III
Louis XIV (The Sun King)
Jack Valenti
Joe "Speedo" Frazier
John Cage
Jesse James
Michael Keaton
Paul Volcker
Raquel Welch
Rose McGowan
Sunnyland Slim
William Devane
Werner Erhard
Werner Herzog
For extra points, see if you can guess which four I interviewed.