City Kid (18 page)

Just as confounding were the sounds of music that would float down from open loft windows and catch my ear. Soho's empty industrial spaces attracted art dealers and jazz musicians. Unlike the mainstream players at the Village Vanguard and the Village Gate just a few blocks uptown, these loft jazzmen tended to be younger, lesser known, and more experimental. A spot I often visited was Studio Rivbe, owned by painter/musician Larry Rivers, where I saw unknown players as I sat on the floor and leaned against a bare wall.

One of my first long music pieces was about the loft jazz scene in Soho, which I penned for the
Amsterdam News
. I focused on a duo called Double Dark, a sax-and-drum combo composed of the magnificent reedman David Murray and the loquacious Stanley Crouch on skins. Murray was a prodigious player of passion and skill, who'd go on to have a prolific career as a bandleader and composer. Less distinguished musically, but with a lot to say nonetheless, was Crouch, who'd already started writing for the
Voice
, and was booking bands at a Bowery club called the Tin Palace. Today Stanley is a pillar of jazz as the “American classical music” world, institutionalized inside the black reflecting glass of the TimeWarner building at Columbus Circle. But back then, sans the suits and the awards, he was a fixture in the avant-garde scene blossoming downtown.

For me, as for most folks then, Soho was very much a place to move through and not to linger in. The West Village—now that was a destination. In the summer, as it had been for generations, Washington Square Park was a gathering place for kids from all over the city, where you flirted with the opposite sex, bought drugs, joined the buskers leading sing-alongs, or checked out the comedians telling jokes by the fountain. The days of Bob Dylan and the folkies were long gone, but everyone was still turned on by the idea that he'd been there.

Then over to the basketball courts on Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. In the days before multimillion-dollar contracts were common, NBA players, college stars, and street ball legends regularly risked life and limb in the summer league before crowds four deep on Sixth Avenue. Afterward I'd venture over to Eighth Street, where you got a gas-inducing hot dog at Orange Julius (where Russell Simmons found work one summer), and checked out the funky clothing stores or a movie at the Waverly Theater, where
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
made its original midnight run.

But winter or spring, especially during that period when my career was in peril, I'd venture over to Sheridan Square (past the already legendary Stonewall gay bar, and all manner of homoerotic clothing stores) to a downstairs bar/restaurant named the Lion's Head. I'd read about the Lion's Head in books about Norman Mailer and articles about an eccentric New York Giants fan, Frederick Exley, who'd penned a cult classic titled
Pages from a Cold Island
. The Head was a literary hangout, and I, a precocious wannabe, was drawn to it. So after J&R, the Greek spot, and a walk through Soho and the Village, I often ended up descending into the Lion's Head to feel the vibe.

Across from the bar, book jackets were hung like trophies. Mailer, Exley, and
Sports Illustrated
staffer Dan Jenkins were among the many names saluted there and envied by me. Many of the men and women bending elbows at the bar were real-life published authors. Too intimidated to hang at the bar, I'd sit in the back, usually at a table underneath a jauntily dressed frog in a red convertible.

Rolling Rock became my Lion's Head passion. It came in a round green bottle, and tasted cool and crisp in a way the Ballantine and Rheingold beer sold in Brooklyn never did. Going to the Lion's Head made me feel part of the larger writing world. Instead of pressing my face against the glass, I walked in and had a beer and a hamburger. I'm sure the regulars wondered who this skinny black kid was, since the crowd was as white as a politician's handkerchief. But the odd glances didn't bother me, especially after a couple of Rolling Rocks.

If I had enough money or, even better, was on a record company guest list, my last stop of the day was back across Fourth Street and Washington Square. The Bottom Line was where I, and generations of New Yorkers, kept up with the cutting edge of pop music throughout the eighties. From my college years through my retirement from full-time music criticism in 1989, I saw more music and experienced more life there than at any other venue in New York, including the Apollo and the Garden.

Even before Bruce Springsteen played his storied week of gigs there in 1976 and established his legend, the Bottom Line was already the top talent showcase in the city. If Warner Bros. or Columbia or RCA had a new band or singer who they wanted radio programmers, concert promoters, and magazine editors to know, they'd either headline or open at this modest cabaret. Really wasn't much to it. A long side bar, a cluttered little stage, and dark wood seats and tables, most of which were organized into tight, barely passable rows. The best seats were in the back and faced stage center, because the two thick columns often obscured side views. The food? Always awful, but since the labels usually picked up the tab, I ate a lot more of it than I should have.

Though it was no palace, the Bottom Line was my home away from home, a place I'd visit as many as four nights a week starting in 1980. There were so many gigs. There are so many memories. I got an education in the art of the backbeat from watching the Meters. I was moved by the surprising soul in the voice of the late Lowell George of Little Feat. I was frustrated watching Branford Marsalis play brilliant sax in front of a room of Japanese tourists, and then, two days later, seeing Kenny G play woefully for a sold-out show of worshipful African Americans. I happily caught Valerie Simpson's earring when it popped off her ear during an Ashford & Simpson show, and gave it to my date.

I was using these visits to write pulp magazine features and get free meals. My dream, however, was to contribute to the
Village Voice
's Riffs section. At the Bottom Line I'd look into the back-row seats for Robert Christgau, who was, according to himself and others, the “dean” of American rock critics, figuring he was headmaster of the school I wanted admittance to.

Back in the seventies, when opinionated, visionary rock critics walked the earth, and celebrity journalism hadn't yet totally exterminated theoretical thinking in the pop press, I had begun reading the
Voice
music reviews, falling under the sway of Lester Bangs, Vince Aletti, and Christgau. Their ideas about music, and the connections made to the larger world I read about in the
Voice
, jibed with how I saw the world, though I hadn't figured out how to articulate it yet. Even as I sat out in the boondocks of Brooklyn, I was hoping there was more to reality than what I saw every day. The Riffs section, somehow, some way, confirmed that I was right.

I submitted my first reviews to Christgau and the
Voice
back in 1976, my first semester in college. It was about a big funk-soul concert at the Nassau Coliseum. Christgau wrote me a very nice rejection letter, full of criticism and condemnation that gave me hope. I sent two more reviews. With one came another typed letter, but after that two form letters followed, and, for a time, I licked my wounds.

During my year and a half in the freelance wilderness, now older and with some credits, I began calling Christgau whenever I could. Still no assignments were forthcoming. Far as I knew, only a few black writers had cracked the
Village Voice-Rolling Stone-Circus
magazine world of rock writing: Pablo Yoruba Guzmán, former Young Lord and future TV news reporter, and Vernon Gibbs, an erudite journalist and future A&R executive. Other than that, people of color were scarce on that circuit.

One night at the Bottom Line, I spotted Christgau and walked over. I knew what he looked like from a photo that accompanied a piece in the
Voice
on the rock criticism establishment of which he was “the Dean.” His pale face was dominated by ever-present glasses and unruly hair that combined to make him look intense and unkempt, scholarly and judgmental. I stepped up to him about some work, and he told me, in what I'd later find out was his typically brusque but quite loving manner, “Nelson, you're not ready.”

Lots of people would have taken that as an insult. Me? I just assumed he meant that eventually I would be ready. Maybe I was hearing what I wanted to hear. Still, I didn't take our meeting as a dis but as an opportunity. Christgau knew who I was. He knew my work. It was only a matter of time. Walking toward the subway at West Fourth Street for the long ride home to Queens, that's what I told myself.

Queens was a bedroom I slept in more than a place I called home during my five years there. My professional life was in Manhattan, and my heart was still in Brooklyn, though my education as a critic continued in the home borough of the Mets. Combining the records of my roommate Rocky Ford and my collection, we easily had over two thousand disks, so I was always listening to new stuff and catching up on the old. For example, one night we got new albums by three of our favorites—Steely Dan's
Aja
, Stevie Wonder's
Hotter Than July
, and Earth, Wind & Fire's
All 'N' All
—and sat on our living-room floor analyzing the songs, arrangements, production, sound, even album graphics. Rocky, who was a budding producer, helped me hear music in a much more sophisticated manner in listening sessions that developed my ear and fueled my criticism.

It was while living in Queens that I was introduced to a soon to be great friend and sometime teacher. I don't remember when I first met Russell Simmons, but my first memory of him occurs in 1980, my first year living just off Parsons Boulevard in Jamaica. At that point Rocky was already working with Kurtis Blow, and Russell was acting as his manager, though Blow was more interested in having Rocky and his partner, J. B. Moore, handle his career. That was understandable, since he saw Rocky and J.B. as responsible adults, while he'd seen Russell, a City College classmate, doing angel dust in the student lounge.

I know I met Russell before but, for whatever reason, I didn't connect with him until one afternoon, when Rocky handed me the phone, exasperated with Russell's constant chatter. In fact, when I took the phone and identified myself, I don't believe Rush paused or shifted gears. As his nickname indicated, he just rushed on. I'd never heard anybody talk so fast who wasn't a cartoon character.

Russell was always excited, always enthused, and always selling, selling, selling. Though he's changed considerably in the three-plus decades I've known him, it's very rare that Russell isn't promoting something. There was a popular book back in the seventies called
The World's Greatest Salesman
by Og Mandino (a favorite of Michael Jackson), and, as far back as his twenties, Russell was a challenger for that crown.

That afternoon in 1980 Russell was rambling on about a party he was promoting to publicize one of Kurtis Blow's early singles, as if it was the most important gathering ever, a party so essential that everybody needed to be there for their own good. This ability to invest his words with a seductive urgency, to sell without a modicum of shame, drew me to him as it would scores of others.

From that phone call on, Russell was more than an irritant on the phone, but a great friend, though not a constant one; there would be gaps in our friendship, and many months when we didn't speak at all. Yet when I see him on the street, call or accept an unexpected invite to a party or show, it's like I saw him yesterday. I imagine it's like that for most of Russell's ever-expanding universe of best friends.

Russell was born about a month after me in 1957, and when we started hanging out we were both young men trying to make a mark. Russell gave me access to the art of selling a culture that I wouldn't have had otherwise. What Russell got from me, especially in those early days, when rap had few believers, was access to newspapers and magazines that spread his name and those of his clients. It never felt like a cut-and-dry trade, but this dimension of enlightened self-interest bonded us.

Despite our symbiotic relationship, many of my earliest memories of rolling with Rush involve being left behind. Working as a record promoter to club DJs to pay the bills, Russell was out every weekend and most weeknights. If you were “running the track” with him you'd get a serious education in dance music. The challenge was keeping up. Russell was notorious for entering clubs and either not telling the door person you were with him or seeing someone he wanted to “jock” (aka talk to) and forgetting about you. I found myself on the pavement quite a few times issuing the tired complaint “Yo, I'm with him!” from the bad side of a velvet rope.

In 1981 Kurtis Blow released his follow-up to “The Breaks,” a single called “Throughout Your Years,” which was Rocky and J. B. Moore's attempt at crafting another pop crossover single. To promote it in Queens and Long Island, Russell booked the MC into four clubs on one night, so he'd do a short set, and, with Russell and some roadies, pile into a van to hit the next spot. I was tagging along one night, 'cause I had a girl in Hempstead I wanted to see. We hooked up at the club, went outside to her car, which had a roomy backseat, and got busy. Before I left the club I told Russell, no matter what, don't leave without me. Maybe I stayed too long. Maybe he just forgot about me. Either way, the van was gone when I got back to the club, and I spent a long night curled up on a Long Island Rail Road bench, having missed the night's last train back to New York.

If you managed to get in the club with Russell, and also managed to stay close to him, you gained entry, not simply to a disco but to a network of strange relationships. At that time there was a lot of racial/cultural segregation in New York music circles, where Euro disco, funk, punk, and glitzy R&B all existed in separate worlds. Through his record promotion gig, and his own careerism and curiosity, Russell sampled them all. Sure, he hit the hip-hop spots in the South Bronx, Harlem, and Queens, but he also cultivated relationships at punk rock and new wave clubs like Hurrah's and the Peppermint Lounge, as well as black upscale Midtown hangouts like Leviticus and Othello's.