B009HOTHPE EBOK (10 page)

The black acts always had great names: The Royals, The Drifters, The Miracles, The Majestics. The Anglos had all these demeaning names like The Crickets, The Spiders, The Beatles, The Animals, The Zombies. None of them had a name that would generate any respect. What were they thinking? Reverse pride, I guess.

Cool clothes—on and off stage—were an absolute necessity: your shiny, sleek body armor, your second skin. The first buck you got went to get that custom-made shirt, the suits, and the perfect tie. We wanted to dress elegantly—you had that one suit that you protected with your life. Your focus in the beginning was to buy clothes you couldn’t afford. You had to have the high collar, so you’d go down to Sy Devore’s, the suit and shirtmaker in Los Angeles. Slowly my fashion sense evolved. I became very alert; dressing in cool threads was an absolute necessity. When I was a kid I went to a guy in New York, Lew Magram, or to Nat Wise on the West Coast. I’m small enough that even as an adult I would go to the Saks kids’ department to get clothes. I needed the custom-made look, because the other stuff didn’t look good on me. We all became very aware of carrying ourselves that way. French shirts, Italian suits, gold cufflinks.

Bobby Darin and I, we used to all talk about clothes all the time. What it came down to was emulation of the Rat Pack. As kids we looked at them and said, “We wanna be like those guys.” They were always immaculately well dressed, coiffed out to the max and done up. We knew they were the coolest, suavest cats on the planet and that was the look we had to get. Bobby Darin idolized Sinatra, although his first song, “Splish Splash,” was one song that Sinatra would never have been caught dead singing—especially in a bath tub the way Bobby did it on TV.

People tend to forget that when I started out, hard rock hadn’t hit yet. The Beatles hadn’t hit, so it was up to me and Darin to find a way to reinvent ourselves. What we came up with was, “We gotta be like those guys—Sinatra, Sammy Davis—put on that tux, do those cool Rat Pack songs. We gotta gotta gotta.” That’s what we kept telling each other. That was our whole motivation back then: “We’ve got to Sinatra-size ourselves—or we’re dead.”

I was always in a suit, a shirt, and a tie. You look at all of my older photos, the historical stuff, and I’m pretty much in the same Rat Pack junior outfit, always kind of the same thing—dressed to the nines as I stepped out the door. Lights, camera, action and I’d be ready. Every now and then I’d get a white suit or a casual outfit. Then there was the “at home” look. Back then, for all of us, the teen idols, Frankie Avalon, Fabian, it was sweaters for the relaxed photo shoot. Then shirts and ties for most of the group shots, everybody on the rock ’n’ roll package dolled up like we’re going to a wedding. Chuck Berry had his own look, even Fats: tuxedo, bow tie, maybe a blue sequin jacket. They were all up for the colors and the other flashy stuff. It was really something when they piled off that bus, climbed out of their Cadillacs, and into those backstage areas. The locals at most places we played had never seen anything like us—it was like the circus coming to town.

Backstage, it was a riot to see us all lined up, working on our hairdos. Hair was the next big priority—it had to be flattened, straightened, and sculpted. I don’t know how we didn’t blow the electricity with all those hair dryers going at the same time and the pomade—it was unbelievable. Everybody with the goddamn pomade and hair dryers!
Wooowoooo.
The comb doing the do. Ducktails, flips, pompadours.

On stage James Brown seemed like a wild man, but everything had to be perfect, offstage and on. Shoes shined, suits pressed, hairdos duded up to the copacetic nth degree. He’d fine the band if they played a wrong note. He’d fine them if they forgot shirts, shoes unlaced, if they swore. And I feel the same way! When one of Brown’s bands started to complain he just got rid of them in the middle of a tour and had another one sent out from Cincinnati. It was like boot camp. He was tough on his guys. We always had the Sam Taylor band on those tours, an all-black orchestra—Sam Taylor and Paul Williams were the two band leaders.

Little Richard, on the other hand, was a hoot on these trips—a real crazy. Full-on crazy shuck ’n’ jive talk, dirtiest jokes you ever heard. “Oh my, honey, didn’t recognize you with your clothes on! Now, my sound, the Angeltown sound, make the knees freeze, the liver quiver, oweeee!” And then he’d lurch off into one of his possessed raps.

Little Richard, now there’s a case in point: He wrote some great songs, but he essentially wrote the same songs four or five times. They were a little repetitious, but no one cared because that was the crazy x-factor of rock ’n’ roll. When Richard saw that white singers were trying to cover everything he did he just made his songs faster and faster. His songs got so fast, that Pat Boone couldn’t cover them anymore. “Let that Pat Boone in his saddle shoes try to do this one—he’ll get his tongue in a twist like it don’t exist.” It wasn’t all that easy white-ifying Little Richard’s roller-coaster raps or Fats’s gumbo-mumbo, but there was a huge market out there for deracinated rock ’n’ roll—and we were there to give it to them.

In the beginning most of the rock ’n’ roll artists were black: The Platters, Frankie Lymon, Chuck Berry, The Drifters. Then along came The Everly Brothers, The Crickets, and Frankie Avalon. It kind of fluctuated. For the most part, the white acts were the younger element on these tours. The black acts were mostly older, more experienced, more polished, and professional. They were the older statesmen of rock-and-roll. Then there were the Southern boys: the Everlys, who would merge with Buddy and the Crickets, and Jimmy Bowen, and all that group. And then there was Buddy Knox, another Southern guy, with “Party Doll.” It was quite a mix of people.

Eddie Cochran was a typical rock ’n’ roll kid from California, but had the same aspects as the Southern guys. He was a quasi-cowboy, a cool cat. He had that swagger about him, the James Dean look. There was a definite attitude to that whole Southern contingent. Not red-necky: it was more that Southern-drawl-hang-out-drinking-beer thing—almost had their own language. They came from their own world, but we still all communicated. Eddie Cochran had his first hit “Sittin’ in the Balcony” and then had been in the movie,
The Girl Can’t Help It.
He kind of mumbled like Marlon Brando and Dean, and was a hard drinker. Eddie Cochran was fun to be around, a delight. He was a ladies’ man, a good-time party guy. You’d think that he was going to be late when his cue came out to go on stage and play; you thought he wouldn’t get there on time. Then the door would pop open and there he was. He wore his overcoat in the European style over his shoulders like they do in foreign movies. He’d walk straight through the stage door, drop his coat, and in one full swoop pick up his guitar and walk on stage, never missing a step and being right on time. Buddy was tight with Eddie Cochran. They had a lot in common, except the drinking.

Then there was the Northeastern contingent: Avalon, Bobby Rydell, the Fabian crowd from Philly. All those guys were in the same bag. Very Italian-family-type stuff. The difference between us was that with those guys, the teen idol types, there was always the manager hovering, telling them how to dress, what to say, how to act. The Bob Marcucci–type manager. They were well behaved because they’d had a good upbringing, close-knit families. They had a definite focus on behavior and the look and the Italian upbringing, which was totally the opposite of the Southern boys, where there were no hovering managers and the skies were not cloudy all day. I loved hanging out with them—they were all really warm people, especially Fabian and Frankie Avalon. We’ve all remained in touch, close friends to this day.

There we were all these different cultures mixing and melding: the older black cats, the groomed Italian
ragazzi
, and the Southern rebel boys—it was our own United States blend. On the bus you could hear people swapping different stories of their backgrounds in the Bronx, or from West Texas.

The conflicts when they erupted would happen between the Southern rock ’n’ roll boys, from Buddy Holly to Jimmy Bowen to Jerry Lee Lewis. With these guys, there was a real difference in terms of attitudes and upbringing. A lot more drinking, more volatile, and more opinionated would be a polite way of putting it. Jerry Lee Lewis himself was off the charts. I can’t even explain how abusively unpredictable this guy could be. His whole lingo and attitude were redneck obnoxious—it was just nothing like I’d ever seen before. Now we’re hip to bad behavior; it’s almost a requirement in the movies and the music business these days. But back then it was just off the wall: white trashy spew, that’s what it was.

Jerry Lee eventually got raked over the coals by the English press for marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin, but Chuck Berry was the biggest offender in that respect. He wound up in jail at the end of one tour. Buddy Holly was the only one who knew how to deal with Jerry Lee. Buddy was utterly unshockable—the worst that Jerry Lee Lewis could throw at him, Buddy had already heard in gutbucket Texas bars his whole life. Jerry Lee’s behavior didn’t faze him one bit. He’d fish Jerry Lee, totally soused, out of bars, drag him back to the hotel, put him under the shower, and get him to the theater on time.

But the rest of us didn’t frequent bars or hang out or get into that, because we were these clean little white boys who were watched day and night, told what to do and what not to do. We weren’t masters of our own destinies—we were just going along with the program.

The Philadelphia pop singers were all of Italian descent—they referred to themselves as “meatballs.” Fabian was discovered on a stoop, supposedly. Or anyway that was part of the mythology. Unfortunately, he had no control over his pitch. He just had a basic punkish grunt, but even with his failings as a singer, teens identified with him. Most of his early songs were written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. Then there was Dion DiMucci from the doo-wop streets of New York. He had been in the notorious Fordham Baldies gang and had started using heroin at age fourteen.

Marcucci would look after the Philadelphia boys and Irvin Feld was looking after me. We were given a menu of behavior. For one thing we couldn’t take girls up to our rooms. As a seventeen-year-old, you couldn’t just invite a girl up from the lobby. Impossible. You’d have to sneak them in, meet them somewhere else. I only started to get adventurous when I got to the continent, in France, parts of South America, and even that was tough (let alone the fact that there were two thousand kids outside your hotel room every day).

One of my first romantic ventures was with an Iberian Airlines stewardess I met going to Chile—a beautiful girl, Jenny, I think her name was. Every time she’d fly in or I’d fly Iberian, we’d hook up. That’s usually the way it happened.

Then there was June Wilkinson in Great Britain. She is usually described as a model and actress, but her main claim to fame was her boobs—she had the biggest tits in the world—which is how she got the nickname of “The Bosom” after her first “pictorial” in
Playboy
in September 1958. She was a big, healthy girl with a great sense of humor and huge tits. She was taller than me so I loved to dance with her, her boobs bouncing in my face. They sort of had a life of their own. Later on she was in a bunch of silly films and in the early ’70s married NFL quarterback Dan Pastorini. I got introduced to her by Lew and Leslie Grade, British impresarios who began as music hall performers, became superagents and the producers of shows on ITV and on movies like
The Exorcist
and
Sophie’s Choice
and the early Muppets movies—with his jowly face and big cigar, Lew was a kind of Muppetish character himself. When I knew them they worked out of a tiny one-room office, straight out of a vaudeville routine. I was the one who brought June Wilkinson to the States—and they were just as crazy about her impressive endowments over here as they were in the UK.

But, hard as it is to believe, it was generally really tough to meet girls, and bring them into the hotels. We’d go to Scandinavia, thousands of kids—they’d sneak in, you’d find them in your closet or under the bed. You never knew how they got in there. They were very adept at watching the doors and hiding in broom closets. One of these Swedish girls who hid under my bed ended up in Vegas as a showgirl.

Fabian was a nice kid, a wonderful guy to hang with, but his career had pretty much been manufactured by Bob Marcucci. We all knew he was an invention because we were with the same label. The guy just didn’t have the vocal chops. He wasn’t a singer in the true sense, he was a pretty boy. That’s what was selling at the time. Being with the same label you knew who had the talent and who didn’t. We understood what was happening. We all recorded at the same studios, Bell Sound, and once I saw what seemed like a hundred pieces of tape they’d spliced together to get one good take for him. It was all monaural in those days so it was done with razor blades and tape. To his credit, Fabian admitted he wasn’t really a singer—he was very honest about it. We all knew it, but the public didn’t and that was the difference. Frankie Avalon was another sweet guy I really got along with; of all the Philly group we stay in touch. Frankie worked hard on his singing to get through the tapes, but there was no way Fabian could stand there and just sing it straight through. He listened to the management, Bob Marcucci, and the little girls loved him. Was there a future in it? Obviously not.

Now, Bobby Rydell, he was talented, he had a good voice, he could really sing—maybe the most vocally gifted of the Philly lot. He also played the drums, different things. Frankie Avalon played trumpet, too, but Bobby Rydell had the best shot, from my point of view, of really evolving into something. His big problem was he didn’t write his own songs. All of those guys—their material was written by others.

Neil Sedaka wasn’t part of the Philly crowd. He was strictly a New York cat, a Brill Building kind of guy, who wrote his own stuff, mostly melodies. Howard Greenfield supplied the lyrics. That was the difference between him and me.