Of course we thought we were here to stay too. We entered our teens so proud that WE were the generation that had discovered sex and drugs in addition to rock and roll. Okay, so we were a little late to the party on the first two but you've got to give us the third. Rock and roll WAS here to stay. That music took over our lives as soon as we heard it. I remember an elementary school assembly in 4th grade when my entire row started singing "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog..." in our little squeaky voices as a rather bewildered-looking principal at the podium and our teachers glared, motioning fiercely for us to quiet down. I don't think we planned it; I think it just happened, a spontaneous outpouring of an anthem that said, we can do whatever we want and you can't stop us now....
As I descended into "real" life from the heights of adolescence I never could get this music out of my head, especially the ballads, Dream, Donna, Lonesome town, Love Letters in the Sand and of course the Doo Wop--In the Still of the Night with that seminal sax solo--and Maybe, that piercing wail by a teenaged girl that broke your heart even though it had never had a crack in it before; and Dion and the Belmonts, Roy Orbison, and American Bandstand with Dick Clark before all of that hideous plastic surgery, and The Locomotion, the Twist, Motown, Marvin, Aretha, Temps, etc. backed by the greatest R&B musicians in the history of the world, and then in 1963 the British Invasion, the Beatles, the Stones, their wannabes and then the birth of the Monster guitarists, Clapton, Hendrix, Beck, Richards, and then an ocean and a continent away in California the aching sweetness of the Beach Boys, the Byrds and Janis and the Dead and the Airplane and Neil Young and back in New York near my high school, the Village "folk" scene--Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Dave Van Ronk, Eric Anderson....
Way before all that I went to camp. I was 10 and played a little guitar around campfires sometimes trying out some Elvis tunes much to the delight of my snickering friends and the younger counselors. About a week into the summer I was leaving the dining hall heading towards pottery or whatever activity they had planned for us that evening when a magical sound floated from the back behind the kitchen. I didn't know it at the time but I had heard my Pied Piper. I asked my mates to tell the counselors I was back at the bunkhouse and wandered back behind the kitchen to see what was going on.
There was the camp cook, Johnny, a guy from Harlem. He was smoking a cigarette, sipping a Rhinegold and around his neck was the most startling thing I had ever seen--a golden alto saxophone. Johnny had always been friendly, giving us little winks and smiles as we watched him dish up his camp stews and stir the "bug juice" they gave us to drink. Sure enough he grinned, put down his cigarette, and started to play some jazz on that saxophone. He had a big wet growly sound. Maybe he was a player in New York cooking during the summers to make ends meet. But I wouldn't have thought that at the time since I knew nothing about anything. All I knew was I was going to stay there until night fell listening to him as he played what I later realized were be-bop licks and jazz standards like Misty, Autumn Leaves, Satin Doll.... I came back the following evening after dinner and since it was a reasonable camp, the counselors, seeing no harm in this, let hanging out with Johnny be MY evening activity more often than not.
A few days into it Johnny asked me if I wanted to blow the horn. I remember being a little scared as he strapped the shiny thing on my scrawny little neck and, my Jewish heritage never too far beneath the surface, I wished I had my own mouthpiece when I took that first tentative bite because his was wet with spit, but you want to play saxophone, you do anything to play saxophone. That night with a lot of patient coaching from Johnny I did get a sound out of that big golden horn. Every available evening after that (when we didn't have a hay ride or trip to a Pennsylvania Dutch fair) I would go behind the kitchen and try to learn how to coax notes out of Johnny's saxophone. He'd sit back in his chair as the evening sun went down, smoking and drinking his beer and in a few days he had taught me to play Mutton Leg, a simple blues lick. But my grand project was learning to play what was at the time my favorite Top Forty song....
Love Letters in the Sand by (God help me...) Pat Boone, with the bow tie and the two-tone shoes. My goal was to get it into a condition reasonable enough to perform at the talent show on Parents' Day at the end of the summer. I couldn't read music at the time and had to learn the song by ear, which in retrospect probably was good for me long-term, but which, alas, resulted in a gruesome performance at the show during which I actually halted mid-way through that tricky bridge in desperate confusion. The assembled parents were averting their eyes while mine were starting to blur. Up jumped Johnny in his white cook's outfit from the audience. He sauntered to the stage and said, "My friend Kenny is learning the saxophone and it's not easy but he's going to start again now...." I looked up at him smiling down and he said in his quiet voice, "Play Mutton Leg, man..."
When you can't do what you want to do, you do what you can do. So I did...with Johnny clapping rhythm behind me. I left the stage glowing like the golden sax around my neck, walking next to a horn player from New York whom I would never see again....
This is not an autobiography, only a hazy memory. Now, looking back at more than 50 years of playing this rock and roll music I never cease to be amazed how to this day I am still shattered by the sound of it....the Chantels--teenagers forever like those on Keats' Grecian Urn--crying "Maybe...." or the way those early Beach Boys harmonies still conjure up driving to Jones Beach in a convertible in high school.... "Round round get around I get around, get around round round I get around...."
I'm gray now but I still perform in bar bands a few nights a week playing some jazz but mostly rock and roll songs written by teenagers for teenagers. Sometimes I wonder if my love for this music hasn't teetered into a grotesque parody. Should a 63 year old man still be singing "Gimme some lovin' you got-ta gimme some lovin' " in public? Is this a good thing? Isn't there something at least vaguely pathetic about someone my age prancing around with a tambourine in the corner of a country bar shouting, "This could be the last time, this could be the last time...." Have I become that "poor little fool" I sing about in the Ricky Nelson song?
But it has slowly dawned on me that we will never stop singing these songs. Because the ones that were once about teenaged girls are now about something else we have lost. Now the one we yearn for is not a beautiful girl...it is our youth. War babies seeking our lost youth in vain. And today when I sing an early Beach Boys song it's suddenly a sky blue Saturday on the Saw Mill River Parkway in a gun-metal gray Chevy convertible. My best friend is driving. Two pretty girls are in the back seat separated by my guitar. There's a cooler full of illicit beer in the trunk, the radio is blaring, our hair is flying in the wind and we're on the way to Jones beach...during a summer that seems as if it will never end....
Alas, while it has become starkly apparent that, unlike rock and roll, we are NOT here to stay some of us did actually turn out to be pioneers if only because nobody in the history of the world has ever lived this long still singing rock and roll songs...nobody. Some of us have been playing this music for more than half a century. We're still younger than the Rolling Stones and we have even developed a new venue for our sacred music--long-term care facilities!
Let's get this party started....
