B005S8O7YE EBOK (7 page)

I didn’t know those things when I was at Madison. All I could do was keep trying to find my place in the social realm. As it happened, I wasn’t the only teenager attracted to the liberal arts in search of peer acceptance and self-expression. A remarkable
number of kids from my generation who attended high schools in Brooklyn went on to achieve success in music, film, TV, literature, journalism, theater, and the visual arts. Not only were we supported in such endeavors by our schools and families, but we were only a subway ride away from the array of opportunities awaiting us in New York City. It’s no wonder we were drawn to the city in search of artistic and material success.

Alongside the culture of material success existed a subculture of alienated, antimaterialistic nonconformists, the literary core of which included Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg on the East Coast, with Kenneth Rexroth, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, and Philip Lamantia on the West Coast. There was some coast overlap: the first reading by Allen Ginsberg of his avant-garde poem
Howl
took place in 1955 in San Francisco, and Kerouac drank too much on both coasts. Other characters in the Beat generation included Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who would become a bridge between Beats and hippies.

I had no idea why it was called the Beat generation. Later I heard that Jack Kerouac coined the phrase in the late forties. Some said he used “beat” in the street sense of cheated or down and out. Others said “beat” was short for beatitude, but with its meaning of exalted happiness and serenity, beatitude seems unlikely—unless Kerouac was being ironic, which is entirely possible. Either way, the subculture became known as the Beat generation, and its members were “beatniks.”

In 1957, when I was fifteen, the dominant style in the visual arts was abstract expressionism, exemplified by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Helen Frankenthaler. While visual artists created and displayed their work in Greenwich Village, jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Tito Puente, Thelonious Monk, and
Charles Mingus could be heard at clubs such as the Village Vanguard or the Village Gate.

That year I sneaked off to Greenwich Village with some of the more daring kids I knew. Unlike suburban kids, we didn’t need a car. We could get anywhere by bus or subway. Walking on Bleecker Street I half expected to see a strung-out junkie on every corner. Because everyone’s parents had seen
Reefer Madness
,
^*
I kept looking over my shoulder for my father, who I was certain would catch me and ground me for a year. After boldly trying to get into the jazz clubs, only to be turned away, we wound up in a coffee house with no age restriction. There we listened to poetry readings in a room full of people who looked like beatniks. Hanging out in the Village made me feel “cool.”

One night, notwithstanding my being fifteen and looking twelve, the woman at the door admitted my friends and me to the Vanguard. It was a propitious moment that expanded into a couple of hours of grace during which I witnessed two sets of jazz by players I didn’t know. The music was hot, cool, and mind-blowing. After the Vanguard, my friends and I went to someone’s apartment where they were smoking pot. Other than what I inhaled secondhand, I didn’t partake. I, too, had seen
Reefer Madness
. I was convinced that smoking pot would lead me to harder drugs and I would become a heroin addict. Luckily, nothing stronger than pot was offered that night, and even if it had been, I’ve never been tempted to try heroin in any form. At one point I wanted to leave the apartment, but my friends wanted to stay, so I people-watched
and listened to music on the record player. By default, soon I became the one who selected the records. I found the music a lot more interesting than watching other people stoned on pot.

My parents’ respect for the arts and the creativity they nurtured in me gave me a strong foundation from which to appreciate the music and art uniquely available in Greenwich Village, but their support most assuredly would not have included allowing me to go to the Village without adult supervision. After the night of the reefers I decided to stop risking a yearlong grounding. Instead I stayed in Brooklyn and prayed that a boy—any boy—would ask me out on a date.

I
had always been fearless about raising my hand to answer a teacher’s question. Sometimes I gave a wrong answer, but my confidence in that sphere remained unshaken. But as a fifteen-year-old high school junior among seventeen-year-olds, when it came to winning the respect of my contemporaries my daily mantra went from “I just want everyone to be happy” to “What’s wrong with me?”

Accepting a suggestion from my mother, I volunteered to contribute musically to the annual James Madison High School Sing. I found tremendous satisfaction in writing and arranging songs for the Sing, and I even performed some of the songs myself. But I really enjoyed teaching other students to sing what I had written. After the show, the applause lifted me to the point where I began to wonder what I could do next. Encouraged by teachers and classmates, I decided to start a singing group.

The Alan Freed shows had made me aware of the burgeoning number of street-corner groups, so called because they sometimes sang on street corners, subways, buses, or, depending on the size of the singers, anywhere they liked. They sang a cappella usually in
four-part harmony. Similar groups were forming in high schools all over Brooklyn. One such group was the Tokens from Madison’s rival Lincoln High School. After I heard Neil Sedaka and the Tokens perform
“While I Dream”
and
“I Love My Baby,”
cowritten by Neil and Howard Greenfield, I began to compose in earnest. Most of my songs had decent melodies, but my lyrics weren’t very good. It didn’t matter. The street-corner benchmark left plenty of room for mediocre lyrics.

Arranging classical pieces at Performing Arts had given me enough confidence to arrange some pieces for Mr. Jacobs’s chorus class. My arrangements were so well received that I decided to arrange some of my pop compositions for street-corner harmonies. Though the genres were considerably different, four-part harmony was four-part harmony. All I needed were a soprano, tenor, and bass. I would be the alto.

I recruited Iris Lipnick, Lenny Pullman, and Joel Zwick from Mr. Jacobs’s class. Lipnick, Pullman, Zwick, and Klein didn’t have quite the ring we were looking for, so we pulled a word from our trigonometry books and became the Cosines. It was a dreadful name, but it was ours. We worked on vocal arrangements, choreographed steps at my house after school, and then performed for free at dances and other school events. For some reason I’ve blocked out all memory of the names, melodies, and lyrics of most of our repertoire except one:
“Leave, Schkeeve.”
My God! Of all the songs we sang, I can’t believe that’s the one I remember. We wrote that song as a group. I had no idea what a schkeeve was, but it rhymed with “leave,” and that was all that mattered. Only a teenager with no social life would have put so much effort into arranging a song whose main lyric was “Leave, schkeeve / Bum doo-bee doo-wop.”

In those days I wrote exclusively on piano. I was really excited about writing that arrangement. I’ve always loved wrapping layers
around a melody. When arranging for voices with a band, usually I begin with a foundation consisting of melody, lyrics, and the chords and rhythm coming from my piano. Then I bring in the rhythm section: a drumbeat on a kit with three drums, several cymbals, and a pair of sticks, mallets, or brushes; a bass line that’s pretty close to what my left hand plays on the piano; a rhythm guitar that complements my piano; and sometimes a lead guitar to add accents and fills to the mix of piano, rhythm guitar, bass, and drums. Then I add vocal harmonies. And if I’m lucky enough to have the use of an orchestra, I add a final layer of orchestral instruments.

At best, the aggregate is an aural design that adds to the emotion of a song. But there’s a fine line: vocal and instrumental flourishes can make an arrangement more interesting, but they can also detract from the mood. As ambiance is to a room, mood is to a song. If you add too many lights and a pinball machine, the mood is lost. When my instinct is working well, it notifies me when I’m adding too many elements. When it’s working
really
well, I feel as if the arrangement is writing itself through me. Though on occasion I’ve overarranged, in general my guiding principle is “less is more.”

In the case of the Cosines, less didn’t need to be more because we didn’t have a lot of elements to begin with. Though most of my arrangements for the group were in the “doo-wop” style of the era, I arranged pop standards such as
“Once in a While”
and
“Young and Foolish.”
I was an artist in sound as I filled my sonic canvas with the colors and textures of vocal harmonies, which is why I preferred writing and arranging over performing. When I did perform, my preference was still to have someone else up there with me to attract some of the attention. As with Loretta Stone, this was the case with the other three Cosines, whose dance steps and humorous antics in the foreground would keep the audience’s eyes
on them while I sang and played piano in the background. That seemed to work for our audiences, whose laughter, dancing, and applause made us feel terrific. As Madison’s own singing group, we were a worthy rival for the Tokens and groups from other high schools.

I still wasn’t being asked out on dates, but I was no longer lonely. I had finally found my niche in the social structure. With music as a path to peer recognition, I had become cool. But as rewarding as it was to perform with the Cosines, I wanted to hear my songs on the radio. In between homework, school activities, and household chores, I wrote prolifically and wondered if there was any way I could meet Alan Freed.

I
was still fifteen when I confided to my dad one afternoon that I wanted to play my songs for Alan Freed. My father sprang into action. All a New York City firefighter had to do was show his badge and he would be admitted as a V.I.P. anywhere in the city, from the finest restaurant to a museum, movie theater, or radio station WINS.

I don’t know if Alan really thought I had talent or if he was just being nice to the fireman’s kid, but he listened attentively to my songs, and he even took time to explain how the process worked. He told me to look in the phone book under “Record Companies,” make an appointment, and play my songs live for the A&R man in charge of finding artists and repertoire (a fancy name for songs). Usually a label had its own publishing company. If an A&R man liked one of my songs, he might offer me a contract and an advance of twenty-five dollars. The contract was simple. The publishing company would own the copyright and receive all the publishing income. The writer would get a standard writer’s mechanical and sheet music royalty minus the advance and the cost of recording a demo in one of the nearby demo studios such
as Associated, Dick Charles, or Bell Sound. Alan chuckled when he said Atlantic Records didn’t use an outside studio. “If Jerry and Ah-mond like a song,” he said, “they’ll set up a mic in their office and record a demo on the spot.” That’s what I thought he’d said: “Jerry and Ah-mond.”

I would soon learn that Alan had said “Jerry and Ahmet,” referring to Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun, partners in Atlantic Records whose sharp intuition and lifelong love of jazz, blues, and other black music would bring career longevity to both. In 1957, at forty and thirty-four, Jerry and Ahmet were zealous in their quest for men and women of exceptional talent who might contribute even further to Atlantic’s success. They went to jazz clubs in big northern cities, churches in small southern towns, and bars wherever they found them. Their roster included Solomon Burke, Ruth Brown, Clyde McPhatter, and Ray Charles.

I didn’t know any of that when I opened a Manhattan phone book to “Record Companies” that night and wrote down the address for Atlantic Records. All I knew was that Alan Freed had spoken the name, which made it as good a place as any to start. Rather than call for an appointment and risk rejection, I thought I would just go there and see if someone would listen to my songs. The next day, less than ten minutes after the last school bell had rung, I was on an express train from Kings Highway to Manhattan wearing a pink sweater set, a black felt skirt with a pink poodle on it, a ponytail, white bobby sox, and a pair of white sneakers. Along with my schoolbooks in one hand and sheet music in the other, I carried the belief that I was as good as anyone out there. I still had that feeling when I got off the BMT at 57th Street. Someone was going to get her songs recorded. Why not me?

The elevator in the building on West 56th Street must have been the slowest elevator in New York City. My family could have eaten an entire meal in Patsy’s Restaurant before I reached my
floor. On the way up I thought about my presentation. Since my dad’s wire recordings were sonically, shall we say, not the best way to present a song, I had come prepared to play my songs in person. In those days every A&R man worth his salt had a recently tuned piano in his office. They were so eager to find new talent that most were willing to listen to young people playing live in their offices.

Finally I arrived at the door that said Atlantic Records. I turned the knob, walked in, and nearly bumped into a desk with a woman seated behind it. She might have been a secretary, a bookkeeper, or a receptionist. Probably she was all three. When she looked up and asked, “May I help you?” I answered with a question.

“Is anyone available to listen to my songs?”

Before she could decide between saying no or asking her bosses if they wanted to listen to a teenage girl who had just wandered in off the street, Jerry and Ahmet came out and escorted me to the piano in their office so quickly that I didn’t have time to get nervous. Their shared office contained a piano and two catty-corner desks. A room next to theirs was both the office of Nesuhi Ertegun (Ahmet’s brother) and the art department.