They Call Me Baba Booey (21 page)

I read PSAs for them on K-Rock. One year I raised two hundred thousand dollars on the TV show
Don’t Forget the Lyrics
. The reason I was doing this, I soon realized, wasn’t to help me heal. It was to honor my brother. That became clear to me one afternoon when I spoke at a LIFEbeat event in Manhattan. Mary and our infant son, Jackson Steven, were in the audience. I wanted him to know that he had an uncle. And that he had been loved.

BETWEEN THE RADIO STATION
, school, and my internships I didn’t have much spare time. What little I did I spent at the Roosevelt Field mall. There was a great head shop there, with black lights and Pink Floyd T-shirts. And it also happened to be home to the greatest record store in the history of the world. Or at least Hempstead.

Record World was where my brothers bought all my Christmas gifts. It’s where I bought all the albums that filled the orange crates Steven left behind. In my junior year at college, a girlfriend gave me a two-hundred-dollar Record World gift certificate—an unheard-of amount of money. To the people that worked there I became the guy who had the gift certificate. I never spent it all at once; I slowly chipped away at it, being very selective about my choices. I didn’t want to waste a penny on stuff I’d listen to once and scrap. I bought Hall and Oates’s
Private Eyes
and the Cars’ first album. I was spending a lot of time there.

By my senior year, my internships had ended and I was rich with experience. I was also broke. My buddy Steve’s older brother worked at Record World and I asked if he could get me a part-time job there. Really, I just wanted to make a few more bucks to buy beer and even more records. A gig at Record World would let me do that while feeding my musical jones. None of my boys cared about music the way I did. But everyone who worked at Record World had that bug. They loved listening, talking, debating, and learning about records and musicians and sound. They were just like me. It was one more group of surrogates I could count on. Plus I got a 30 percent employee discount.

We were the quintessential record snobs, or nerds, depending on which side of the counter you stood. Think of the movie
High Fidelity
and that was my life at Record World. There was Ken, who only cared about the Beatles. As far as he was concerned, they were the greatest group of all time and any group that wasn’t them was automatically inferior. If you started talking about Earth, Wind & Fire you couldn’t finish a sentence before Ken would come sprinting across the store to say, “They recorded a version of ‘Got to Get You into My Life,’ you know?”

There was a woman named Mary McCann, but we used to call her Mary McTapes, because she worked in the tapes department. There was a cute girl, a quintessential JAP, who loved all the dance music.

Rob was a buddy of mine who was a little bit younger. We tried to be less judgmental of music and instead acknowledge the brilliance in all of it. Our philosophy—and we had one—was that a good song was a good song, whether it was rock or pop. He’s remained a great friend and we still have debates about music.

Karen Rait, who worked there, is still a close friend. She became a bigwig at Interscope, dealing with artists like Eminem.
When she brings guests to the show we’ll sit in the greenroom saying to each other, “Can you believe we get to do the shit we dreamed about doing all those years ago?” We joke about how when we were at Record World, we used to think that the people who had the coolest jobs were the guys who worked for record companies putting together in-store displays.

Then there was Leslie, whose brother Elliot Easton was the lead guitarist in the Cars. Leslie talked about the Cars all the time, dropping the fact that his brother was in the band at every opportunity. Most of us working there were college students making a little extra cash, but Leslie was older, so we gave him a hard time. One day we got so sick of him talking about the Cars that someone said to him, “Leslie, can’t your brother get you a job sharpening pencils for the Cars?”

Believe me, it hurt at the time.

We all had our specialties. Mine was that I was a wiz at ’70s pop music, especially the singles. It became like a game show in the store. Somebody, a grandmother, would come in asking for a record and she’d give you nothing, no hints at all. “My son said there’s a band …” Or somebody would come in tunelessly humming a song and having only a few lyrics, like, “Free, on my own is the way I used to be.” Inevitably, the other staff would call me over, repeat the lyrics or hum a bit of the tune, and I’d identify the song and artist. (“Fooled Around and Fell in Love” by Elvin Bishop, by the way.) There was no Internet; you didn’t go to play.it. There was a big book in the back of the store that listed every song ever made by title and artist. We were constantly adding pages, and replacing the ones that fell out because we thumbed through it so much.

We felt like we owned the place. And customers weren’t immune from our snark, either. People would come in and stare at me because they thought I was John Oates. I wore a blue vest and had a name tag with “Gary” written on it clearly. But once a guy came up to me, looked me up down and side to side, and
said, “Are you John Oates?” I said, “Yeah, that’s why I work at a record store making minimum wage.”

The store was long and narrow, with a cash register on either side of the aisle. The walls were lined with album covers, seventy to eighty on each side. Up front on the right were the 45s, in the back left was classical, which no one ever bought, and in the way back were cassettes. Down in the basement was the stockroom where we had lunch every day. We went to Woolworth’s and bought chicken salad sandwiches.

The front of the store was where all the action happened. That’s where the “boat” with the bestselling records was set up. If a new record came out and no one had heard of it then we’d get sent three copies from the label. If a band was well-known you might get twenty-five copies. With really well-known bands we got fifty. And with a supergroup like Bruce we were sent a hundred. I wasn’t there when Barbra Streisand released
Guilty
in 1980, but I’m told the response was insane. That had gone down as the single most harried day in the history of Record World.

Until December 12, 1983: the day
Thriller
was released.

Records came in boxes of a hundred. Before we could put them on the floor we had to unpack them all, make sure we received the right amount of copies, and then label them with the sticker price. We must have gotten a thousand copies of
Thriller
that day. I remember coming up one afternoon carrying a box full of albums—a hundred albums are heavy—and there was a crowd waiting for me at the entrance to the basement. They’d heard I was down there with new
Thriller
s. People started pulling them off the pile before I could get to the boat. By the time I got there I had two albums left. This was a narrow fucking store. I didn’t know it could hold a mob a hundred people wide. When the day ended, out of the thousand
Thriller
albums we started with, we had just six left, enough to last the first hour or so of the next morning, until we got the next shipment.

When the new music came out we were all over it, loving something when no more than three other people in the country were into it. That was part of why we liked it so much. No one else knew as much as we did. But as soon as a group became popular, we dropped them. European New Wave was big back then and I was responsible for ordering all those records. I was the guy who imported “99 Luftballons” to Record World.

We fought about what record would get played over the in-store loudspeakers (we’d let the album play through full length). This is back when albums told stories, as movies do. Pete Townshend’s
All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes
. Joe Jackson’s
Night and Day
. Rush’s
Signals
. We didn’t skimp on a single track. Then we’d have to play some Top 40 hits—store policy—before the fight started all over again about who had next. Some nights we put on the strangest records we could find, hoping to entice browsing customers into buying it. When they did, we’d say to one another, “Chalk it up to in-store play.” And when we closed the store at the end of the day we drove around Long Island to see the local bands we loved.

The great thing about Record World was that if you worked there and you owned an album that was in good condition, you could trade it in for one of equal value. When I started working there I had two full orange crates of records. But a lot of them were Steven’s that I wanted to get rid of. I was constantly trading out funky crap for classics. It took eighteen months before I ran out of records to trade in and got my collection to a state of perfection.

I was on my way to graduating with a 3.79 grade-point average. And because I was always hanging around the Adelphi communications department, I won the award for most outstanding student in my class. They called it the Richard C. Clemo Award. I actually had no idea what it meant until years
later when Steve Langford, one of our Howard 100 News reporters, did some digging. Turns out this guy Clemo founded our department. If not for him, I’d be a photographer.

Naturally, with the internships, a high GPA, and the Clemo Award in my arsenal, I was thinking I’d kill it in the real world. But I wasn’t quite ready to get a real job. I’d spent so much time working in college. When I was a junior I took a class called The Italian-American Experience, taught by Sal Primeggia. Honestly, I don’t remember a thing about the course, but Sal was a very animated speaker, always waving his arms and doling out grand pieces of advice during his lessons. The one thing he said that stuck with me: “After you graduate, go do what you always wanted to do. Go to Europe. Because when you get that first job you will be working for the rest of your life.”

A real pick-me-up. But it had a profound effect on me. My senior year, when I saw an offer on one of the bulletin boards at Adelphi for an all-inclusive, monthlong trip to Italy after graduation, at a cost of eight hundred dollars, I jumped at it. My parents gave it to me as a graduation present and then threw me a party, too, where relatives handed me envelopes stuffed with cash to take on my trip. So Italian. (It took me years to get someone a real gift for their wedding or graduation, rather than just handing them a wad of cash.)

These parties were always tough on my mom. She’d spend a month cleaning and getting ready. You couldn’t go near her or offer any help, just like when she was cooking a holiday dinner. It was real manic behavior. Then when it was over, she would feel blue for days, as if coming down from the event was hard. In this case, it probably didn’t help that her baby was graduating from college and heading off to Italy.

I saw Perugia. I saw Rome. Halfway through the tour, a few of us decided to ditch the program and travel on our own. We
spent a couple of days in Bologna, then we hit Venice, and went on to Switzerland. We stayed in cheap hostels and pensiones and partied. The trip was exactly what I wanted it to be. And then it was time to go home. On the plane back I was thinking about my future. I wasn’t arrogant, but I told myself I had more work experience than most kids my age, I had great grades, and, while it might be hard to get a great job, I thought I’d be able to land a decent one before the summer was over. I figured I’d hit the beach for a few days and then throw myself into the search.

While I was in college I had bought a cheap, beaten-up Firebird that did exactly what it needed to do: shuttle me from job to job. Before I left for Italy, Frank told me he and Vinny would clean it up a little bit while I was away. On the day I got home, the two of them picked me up at the airport and, as we walked out to the curb, Frank headed for this souped-up Firebird. It had a fin and an emblem and fancy seats. When he stopped in front of it, I said to him, “Why are you stopping here? Where’s the car?”

“You don’t recognize it?” he said.

“Recognize what? Where’s my car?”

He tossed me the keys. “This is it. I told you we’d clean it up. Happy graduation.”

It was the nicest gift anyone got me. Now I had my kick-ass car—and nothing but my adult life ahead.