B005S8O7YE EBOK (15 page)

Gerry got Bob immediately. He heard the call to revolution and was enthralled. The more he listened to Dylan’s songs, the more frustrated he became. While Gerry had been commuting from the suburbs and achieving financial success with pop ditties about teenage love and dancing, Dylan had been honing his craft on Bleecker Street. Now Bob was exhorting young people to reject the path their parents had laid out for them and look deeper for the true meaning of life. Gerry didn’t believe he could find that meaning as the person he was. He wanted to be Bob. Short of that, he wanted to know Bob.

From the day Aronowitz promised Gerry a meeting with Dylan, my husband was as inexorably drawn to Aronowitz as a boulder to the bottom of a lake. As Gerry was drawn, I was repelled. I thought that at thirty-six, with a wife and three children in Summit, New Jersey, Al was too old to hang out all night like a groupie with artists, poets, and writers at theaters and parties in hotel rooms and clubs. But such people and settings were exactly what Gerry hungered for. He found Al’s invitations to be part of that scene irresistible. He didn’t share my opinion that Aronowitz was trying to hold on to his youth and his currency as a member of the pop scene by associating with the likes of Brian Jones, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and now Gerry.

It was more instinct than logic that informed my perception of Aronowitz as a threat to my family. I wanted to fight this man with his moon-shaped face, scraggly red beard, and a knowing smile that always made me feel as if he knew what I was thinking. He
probably did know. It wouldn’t have been difficult to discern my dislike of him or my fear that he would entice my husband away from Louise, Sherry, and me. But how could I fight someone who was not only a path to Bob Dylan but a bridge between the Beats and the new intellectuals?

Maybe the times would have tugged at Gerry even without Aronowitz. When we married in 1959 we were twenty and seventeen. Three years later we were the parents of two children. By the dawn of 1964 the responsibilities of marriage, family, and a suburban home were weighing heavily on Gerry. The dramatic societal changes that year only made him more aware of what he was missing. I thought it was my fault because I was an equal breadwinner instead of a traditional wife who stayed at home and took care of her man. But traditional wives and husbands weren’t exempt from the turmoil of the period. Gerry and I were part of a larger phenomenon in which one spouse enthusiastically embraced the new mores while the other was slower to accept them or didn’t accept them at all. While one member of a couple experimented with drugs, extramarital sex, or both, the other couldn’t understand why his or her spouse was abandoning previously shared values.

Had I been forty-two and Gerry forty-five, I might have understood his yearning for the bohemian lifestyle he’d never had. But I was a twenty-two-year-old wife and mother losing my twenty-five-year-old husband to avant-garde ideas. I wanted my life back. Unfortunately, yesterday had a no-return policy, and today wasn’t where I wanted to be. I could only hope tomorrow would be better.

I was understandably opposed when Aronowitz suggested early in 1965 that Gerry and I partner with him in forming an independent record label. When Gerry wouldn’t be deterred, I applied the maxim “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” and agreed to the plan. We called the label Tomorrow Records to
memorialize our first hit and augur a successful future. Now we needed an artist. Aronowitz had a group in mind.

The King Bees were a band of five New Jersey high school seniors from Summit, Plainfield, New Providence, and Berkeley Heights who had acquired a following playing at school dances and community functions. The band consisted of lead singer and lyricist Dave Palmer; guitarist, vocalist, and composer Rick Philp; organist and vocalist Danny Mansolino; Mike Rosa on drums; and Charlie Larkey on bass. All were eighteen.

If Aronowitz thought the band would be of interest to Gerry and me, he was right. Their music had an edgy sense of urgency. Dave’s lyrics and vocal presentation moved us intensely. Rick’s inventive guitar parts complemented the dynamic energy of the rest of the players. The band’s talent was raw but unmistakable.

Gerry couldn’t wait to sign and produce the King Bees, but before we could close the deal, we ran up against a minor legal problem. A band in Martha’s Vineyard had established prior use of the name “King Bees”; therefore, the New Jersey King Bees would have to change their name. Some of the Martha’s Vineyard King Bees would later become part of the Flying Machine. With the changing of i’s to y’s and vice versa then in vogue, whether in honor or mockery of their suburban roots, they became the Myddle Class. In that spirit, though there was no conflict with any other Mike Rosa, Mike changed the spelling of his first name to Myke.

Duly renamed and respelled, the band was now free to go into the studyo.

The Myddle Class album was definitely of its time, yet the band’s powerful presentation can still be appreciated today. Their well-written songs and fully committed performances embodied the tenuous freedom and impulsive energy of young men across America who knew that they could be sent overseas to die for their country at any moment. Even then, I considered Dave Palmer’s
lyrics on a par with those of lyricists of greater maturity. I’d like to believe that Gerry and I added value to the Myddle Class’s album, but there was a reason that they already had developed a following. They were compelling. Though Aronowitz’s omnipresence continued to be challenging, the one thing he brought into my life for which I will always be grateful was that band.

There would be other products of my association with the Myddle Class, but the best of them would not emerge until the early seventies.

E
vents taking place in disparate areas of American life in 1965 provided a context for the coalescence of various movements for social change.

With the United States increasingly on the offensive in Vietnam, and more American troops being sent into combat, antiwar protests grew more numerous and more vociferous.

Undeterred by beatings, bullwhips, and tear gas, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and hundreds of demonstrators continued to march for civil rights until the Voting Rights Act was signed into law on August 6, 1965.

Alan Freed passed away with little notice.

Malcolm X was assassinated and mourned by millions.

The Beatles’ albums
Help
and
Rubber Soul
soared to the top of the pop charts, with Bob Dylan, Sonny and Cher, the Byrds, and Wilson Pickett close behind.

Mainstream audiences rediscovered jazz through artists such as Bill Evans, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane, and they embraced Brazil’s soft, sexy samba and bossa nova tunes recorded by Stan Getz, João Gilberto, and Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Some of the most popular films that year were
A Patch of Blue
,
Doctor Zhivago
, and
Thunderball
. Though quirky movies garnered the best reviews, the tremendous box-office response to
The Sound of Music
reinforced the contention of the conservative contingent that not everyone wanted to be a hippie.

Eddy Arnold, Sonny James, Jim Reeves, Kitty Wells, and Marty Robbins dominated the country music charts.

Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters took LSD.

So did Gerry.

I don’t believe Gerry knew he was dropping acid the first time he ingested it. I believe someone who thought he was doing him a favor slipped it into his coffee. It wasn’t a favor. After that, Gerry took LSD many more times on his own. He lost touch with reality at first for days, then for weeks at a time for many years afterward, with intermittent periods of lucidity, creativity, and wisdom. The appeal for Gerry and others who sought to “expand” their minds was the notion that lysergic acid diethylamide would make them more creative and metaphysically aware. But people on acid found it difficult to communicate and function in a world dominated by people not on acid.

When Gerry initially showed signs of paranoia, I saw nothing illogical in that. A person on acid would naturally be paranoid considering that taking LSD was illegal and officials existed whose job it was to catch and incarcerate people who’d taken it. Then he started to exhibit other symptoms of mental illness about which I should have been more concerned, but I was completely unsophisticated about such things. Apart from my brother’s disability, I had never experienced mental illness in myself or anyone else. And the mental health specialists I would eventually consult knew a lot less then than is known today.

When Gerry’s behavior started to become more irrational I was afraid he’d do something he’d regret later. At that point I was still
thinking in terms of embarrassing rather than dangerous. I wasn’t afraid he would hurt our children or me because he had never manifested violent or abusive behavior and wasn’t doing so then. He just kept saying things that almost made sense but didn’t, and doing things rational citizens may think about doing but don’t. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when he climbed up on a ladder and painted “Love Your Brother” on the side of our house. However, when he attempted (and thankfully failed) to seriously hurt himself, I knew it was time to call for help.

At first the doctors diagnosed Gerry as schizophrenic. Then they decided he was manic and treated him with massive doses of Thorazine to bring him down. Not unpredictably, he went into a deep depression. Though his doctors adjusted his medication this way and that and brought him in for psychiatric sessions, Gerry remained in a severely depressed state. The next treatment the doctors recommended was electric shock therapy. Because their patient was incapable of rational thought—hence the need for such a drastic remedy—the decision to give consent was legally in the hands of his young wife. To say that this was one of the most agonizing decisions I’ve ever had to make is to grossly understate the difficulty. I was twenty-three, Gerry was twenty-six, and our daughters were five and three. I didn’t see how I could possibly decide something of this magnitude on behalf of someone else, especially when every muscle in my heart, throat, lips, and tongue wanted to shout, “NOOOOOOO!” But the doctors assured me that all the less intrusive options had been exhausted and a shock treatment would restore my husband to his normal state.

I didn’t feel that I had a choice. I signed the paper, left the facility, and cried all the way home.

A decade later, Jack Nicholson would give a stunning performance as Randle Patrick McMurphy in Milos Forman’s film
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, based on Ken Kesey’s novel. The film
gave moviegoers, in excruciating detail, a heart-wrenching insight into the treatment I had consented to put my husband through. Nicholson gave a terrifying portrayal of what it was like to receive electric shock therapy. In Forman’s fictional production, excessive wattage and frequency of shock treatments were used to manipulate the behavior of mental patients. I have no reason to believe that was the case in Gerry’s circumstance, but I couldn’t help but imagine him in McMurphy’s situation. I didn’t think I could make it through the entire film, but because I had been the one who signed the paper allowing Gerry to undergo shock treatments, I made myself watch every frame. Weeping for the young couple we’d been, I lived through Gerry’s suffering and the pain of my decision all over again.

Shock therapy helped Gerry for a while in 1965, but the circumstances that had led to his ingestion of LSD in the first place had not gone away.

The summer of 1965 found Gerry in a calmer frame of mind. We were at a band rehearsal when two of the Myddle Class arrived late. Rick and Charlie talked animatedly over each other, words tumbling out of their mouths, until they calmed down enough to report the experience they’d had the night before. The act they’d gone to see at the Café Wha? in the Village was a trio featuring a young black man from Seattle who sang and played guitar in a manner unlike anything they’d ever seen or heard before.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Rick said. “The guy played guitar with his
teeth
!”

Charlie chimed in to describe how the guitarist had turned his amp all the way up and transformed the electronic feedback into an otherworldly musical experience. The guitarist, Jimmy James, would later become known to the world as Jimi Hendrix.

That summer, to the dismay of traditional folk fans, Bob
Dylan plugged his guitar into an amplifier and “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Later in the year he performed on electric guitar with a group known as the Hawks. I related more to Bob’s electric music. Evidently, so did mainstream America, but Bob’s purist fans remained adamantly vocal in expressing their displeasure. At one of Bob’s electric performances in 1965 with the Hawks, when someone in the audience shouted, “Judas!” Bob told his band to play louder. No problem. The Hawks would later achieve renown as the Band.

In San Francisco, Bill Graham electrified audiences at the Fillmore Auditorium with Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and the new visual art form of psychedelic light shows. Bill’s acts and the light shows were best appreciated under the influence of the omnipresent pot smoke at the Fillmore, where a contact high was unavoidable unless you literally didn’t inhale.

In Los Angeles, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys released an album called
Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!)
. I didn’t become aware of the Beach Boys’ music until
“California Girls”
and
“Help Me, Rhonda”
migrated to East Coast radio. After all the hours I spent in the ensuing years enjoying the Beach Boys’
Pet Sounds
and other albums, I could see how
Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!)
foreshadowed the Beach Boys’ future work, particularly
“Good Vibrations”
—which brings me to my encounter more than three decades later with Brian Wilson in the year 2000, when we were both fifty-eight. We were at a Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony. I had come to induct James Taylor. Paul McCartney was going to induct Brian. As Brian and I waited backstage together, someone asked which of us had first used a chord that we both use frequently in our songs. Musicians know the chord as “IV over V.” In the key of C, it would be F with a G bass. In the key of G, it would be C over D. I’ve heard people call it “the Carole King chord” or
“C over K.” But Beach Boys fans might just as easily call it “the Brian Wilson chord.” Whatever its nomenclature, musicians and nonmusicians alike will recognize it as the climactic chord in “Good Vibrations” when the vocals come together to create a singular, glorious, unforgettable moment: