No Regrets (8 page)

I was nineteen years old when I went to the New York Pop Festival, on Randall’s Island in the East River, in the summer of 1970. This was yet another mini-Woodstock, with an amazingly eclectic lineup of musicians that included Mountain, Steppenwolf, Jethro Tull, Grand Funk Railroad, Richie Havens, Sly and the Family Stone, Dr. John, Van Morrison, and Eric Clapton.

Oh, and one other person.

Jimi Hendrix.

The whole thing was kind of surreal. You have to remember, for a kid like me, who used to walk around Roosevelt High with a copy of
Are You Experienced?
under his arm, seeing Hendrix was like a Catholic getting to meet the pope. Hendrix was nothing short of godlike. By the summer of 1970, unfortunately, Hendrix was nearing not only the end of his career, but the end of his life; within two months he’d be dead of a drug overdose. Still, on that day at Randall’s Island (the last concert he’d ever perform in New York), he seemed at the peak of his powers—a living, breathing guitar hero.

I went to the show with some friends I used to hang out with at Poe Park, a little spot in the Bronx where Edgar Allan Poe lived out his final years, and where the Bohemian crowd around Fordham University used to gather. (I once organized a concert for one of my bands there.) But we separated shortly after we arrived. They were content to get high and listen to the music with the masses. I wanted to get closer. This had become a habit for me. Just as I’d managed to sidle up to Murray the K a few years earlier at the RKO Theatre, I suddenly found myself inching toward the stage at Randall’s Island.

Maybe it was because I looked like a rock star, even if I wasn’t one at the time. I was tall and skinny, with hair that went halfway down my back. I wore lemon yellow hot pants, a black T-shirt adorned with a snakeskin star, and checkered Vans sneakers. I fit in with the performers, more so than the crowd. As the day went on I kept my eyes on the entrance at the side of the stage, and I started to notice that some of the guys who had performed were walking out and watching other bands. In those days things were pretty laid-back. They didn’t distribute official passes or laminates to the band members and road crew. If you belonged there, you just went about your business. Most people abided by the rules.

Not me.

I watched musicians walking in and out, in and out, offering nothing more than a nod or wave to security as they passed by. Then it dawned on me.

Shit… I think I can get in there!

So I walked up to the stage entrance, bold as hell, and looked one of the security guys right in the eye. He gave me a quick, visual once-over, head to toe, and nodded approvingly. I returned the gesture, didn’t even smile (couldn’t break character, after all), and walked on by.

Just like that, there I was, backstage at the New York Pop Festival.

Now I had a dilemma: Watch the show from the best seat in the house, right next to the speakers? Or hang out backstage and try to chat up my idols?

A little of both, maybe?

Next thing you know, I was sitting at a cafeteria table with John Kay, the lead singer, songwriter, and guitar player for Steppenwolf. We only talked for a few minutes, and it was cordial enough, but as John got up and walked away, he passed a security guard and pointed back at me. I couldn’t quite hear him, but I could read his lips.

“Who is that fuckin’ guy?”

Not wanting to attract attention to myself, I slipped out of the room, exited the backstage area, and took a more discreet position in a hallway between the stage and the dressing rooms. It was all very loose and informal (and let’s be candid—a huge percentage of the people involved with the show, from performers to roadies, were high or stoned or tripping or drunk). I figured as long as I didn’t cause any trouble, no one would bother to kick my ass out of there.

This proved to be true. I fit in so well that after about forty-five minutes of hanging out, somebody came over to me and said, “Hey, man, what band are you with?”

I shrugged my shoulders, tried to play it cool.

“I’m not with any band. I’m just hanging out.”

The dude smiled a half-baked, pot-headed smile.

“You ever work as a roadie?”

“A few times.”

This was true, if you considered setting up your own equipment to be roadie work.

“Cool,” he said, gesturing for me to follow. “Let’s go.”

We walked down a hallway, through a curtain, and onto the stage, where I proceeded to set up drums for Mitch Mitchell, the vaunted drummer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience. I couldn’t believe it! This was like a dream job, handling the equipment for one of the best drummers in the world, and doing it just a few feet from where Hendrix would be standing a short time later. I tried to maintain my composure, even as Hendrix’s appearance drew near and the stage began to bustle with activity. I was working quietly with one of the band’s “real” roadies,
putting the kit together, when suddenly someone appeared at my side. A skinny white guy with a beard and a headband, he began tinkering with the kit, making subtle adjustments and occasionally tapping at the skins with his fingertips.

I figured he was just another member of the crew, until I heard the other roadie say, “Hey, Mitch. Which snare you want to use tonight?”

And then it dawned on me.

Are you shitting me? I’m setting up Mitch Mitchell’s drums… with Mitch Mitchell himself?! How cool is that?

You’d think a kid who worshipped all things Hendrix would have recognized the guy’s drummer, but I knew Mitch mostly from album jackets and other photos, most of which had depicted him with a towering white man’s afro. Apparently he’d opted for a style change shortly before the New York Pop Festival.

I stopped everything and dropped the smooth façade.

“Mr. Mitchell…,” I stammered. “Man, I love your music.”

He smiled, gave me a cool little nod, and put out his hand for me to shake.

“Thank you,” he said.

And that was it. We finished putting together the kit, and the show went on. The entire time I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. I mean, just two years earlier I’d gotten my first Hendrix album; played it till it warped. Now here I was, at the side of the stage, just a few feet from the man himself, having helped set up the equipment for his drummer.

It was almost like I was part of the show. I was so starstruck that I could have died on the spot and gone to heaven happy.

As the show went on I totally lost track of time; I also lost track of the people with whom I had come to the show, a development that bothered me only at the end of the evening, when I realized I had no way to get home. At that time of night there was no public transport readily available from Randall’s Island, and I didn’t have the money for cab fare. So I walked out of the Downing Stadium parking lot and put
my thumb in the air. The very first driver that went by hit his brakes and pulled over.

“Where to, buddy?”

“Mosholu Parkway… in the Bronx.”

The guy laughed.

“I’m going to Bedford Park Boulevard. Hop in.”

Amazing. Bedford Park Boulevard was about five blocks from my house. What were the odds? I opened the door, slid into the front seat, and let the warm summer breeze fill the car.

“Guess it’s your lucky night, huh?” the driver said as he pulled away from the curb.

He didn’t know the half of it.

The craziest thing is, just three weeks later (August 6, to be precise) I went to another massive, daylong concert with multiple acts, and again found my way backstage. This event was known as the Festival for Peace, at Shea Stadium. And just like at Randall’s Island, they ended up putting me to work, juggling multiple duties. When Johnny Winter took the stage, I stood behind the band and fed sticks to his drummer. I was there, dumbstruck and wide-eyed, when Janis Joplin went strolling down the ramp to the stage, a half-empty bottle of Southern Comfort hooked between her thumb and forefinger (like Hendrix, she would be dead of a drug overdose within a few short weeks). I got to hang out backstage and shoot the breeze with promoter extraordinaire Sid Bernstein, the man who brought the Beatles to America in 1964, for Christ’s sake, essentially kicking off the British Invasion and changing rock ’n’ roll (and, by extension, my life) forever.

Best of all, I got to meet John Kay—again! This time he didn’t even say, “Who is that fuckin’ guy?”

It happened when I was backstage. One of the roadies asked if I knew anything about guitars. I didn’t want to brag, but… yeah, I’d played a little bit. He handed me John Kay’s guitar, a fresh pack of strings, and told me to get to work. There was something almost magical about that experience: prepping the instrument of a guy whose work
I really admired; it brought me closer in some way to my dream of one day becoming the man onstage, as opposed to just another wannabe. While I carefully fed the strings, my attention focused entirely on the job, I heard a door open. In walked the man himself: John Kay.

I tried to play it cool. You know, act like a professional. A part of me (okay, a big part) wanted to ask him if he remembered meeting me at Randall’s Island, but that felt like such a pathetic fanboy thing to do that I decided to just keep my mouth shut. I figured the guy had probably met a million people since our paths crossed. What made me so special?

Worse, as he watched me stringing the guitar, I got the sense that he was critiquing my work, and that at any moment I’d be revealed as a fraud and a fake. I half expected him to say, “What the fuck does this guy think he’s doing?”

But he didn’t. Instead, Kay sat down next to me, introduced himself, and quietly picked up the package of guitar strings.

“You want to take over?” I asked nervously.

He shook his head. “No, that’s okay. You’re doing fine. Why don’t you finish up?”

Then you know what he did? John started feeding me strings. He would thread them through the bridge, and I would tie them off. We were partners, me and the founder of Steppenwolf, bound at least for a few short minutes by our love for the guitar, and our respect for how it worked, and the care it deserved.

If you believed in the notion of a karma bank (and who didn’t back then?), this represented either a massive deposit or a massive withdrawal. Depended on your point of view, I guess.

Not every concert experience ended so neatly,
although a surprising number involved backstage banter with some of the biggest stars of that era. I don’t know how I pulled it off, but I did. Repeatedly.

The following summer, for example, I went to a Grateful Dead show at Gaelic Park in the northeast section of the Bronx (Riverdale). Situated on the north side of 240th Street, not far from Manhattan College (which later purchased and significantly upgraded the property), Gaelic Park wasn’t exactly the bucolic setting its name might imply, but rather a collection of dusty athletic fields separated from the surrounding streets and elevated trains by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The place was used primarily by Irish neighborhood folks for soccer and hurling, as well as the occasional concert. Usually they were smaller, more intimate affairs involving Irish folk bands, but once in a while, especially in the early seventies, more-ambitious ventures were undertaken.

Like the Grateful Dead.

This particular show occurred on August 26, 1971. It was my first Dead show and I certainly got into the spirit of things, drinking buckets of alcohol and smoking enough pot to qualify, at least for the day, as a Deadhead. No acid, though. As I said, I left that to the pros.

Somehow, yes, I ended up backstage again. As usual, security was lax, and I just wandered around, looking and acting like I belonged; soon enough an opening occurred and there I was, hanging out with Jerry Garcia. (I know—you’re probably thinking that I’m stretching credibility at this point, but it all happened. Seriously. I have no reason to make this shit up. For a while there I was the Zelig of the American rock scene, popping up randomly alongside the biggest stars in the business.)

I don’t remember the exact details of my meeting with Jerry; instead I recall dreamlike bits and pieces of a trippy conversation. I can hear myself asking Jerry, “How’s it going, man?” And I can see him standing there, smiling through that beard.

“Good, man, good. We’re taking it to the people tonight.”

I think I might have thrown a “Right on, brother” back at him.

Jerry was exactly as advertised: a laid-back hippie who seemed less like a rock star than a guy you’d see strumming his guitar outside a
subway station, case open, bumming for quarters. He was a god at the time, but you’d never have known it by watching him. Even onstage he was content to just stand there and jam, his demeanor no different in front of 10,000 fans (or 100,000) than it was when he played in Bay Area coffeehouses. You had to admire that about him. The guy was genuine.

The weirdest thing about that day was not my meeting with Jerry, however, but the way it came to a close. At some point in the evening, after many hours of drinking, I passed out. When I woke it was four o’clock in the morning. I rolled over and looked across the Gaelic Park lawn, which had been utterly crammed with people just a few hours earlier. Now, though, it was almost empty. And by “almost” I mean I was the only person there. Not another soul. Just me, adrift in a sea of empty cans and bottles and paper cups—an assortment of garbage that gave the place a post-hurricane feel.

Where the fuck did everyone go?

I still have no idea what happened—why none of my friends roused me from my slumber (maybe they tried), or why the security guards left me there. They had to have known, right? They couldn’t possibly have not noticed. Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe this was the way things went down at a Grateful Dead concert. Regardless, I was on my own, locked inside the park.

I shambled over to the main gate. Locked. I tried another gate. Also locked. Very quickly I came to the realization that I was either going to spend the rest of the night outdoors, sleeping on the lawn, or I was going to have to climb over the fence. Like a convict breaking out of jail, I scaled the chain-link fence, pausing briefly near the top to catch my breath and to assess the likelihood of shredding my balls when I went over the barbed wire for the last few feet. I glanced back down at the park, at all the garbage and the empty bandstand. I knew what was involved in breaking down a stage after a concert—the noise and the barely controlled mayhem. I had slept through that?