Makeup to Breakup (7 page)

I even got that shit on the road. One time the Sounds of Soul were playing in upstate New York and we got hungry. We pulled into a truck stop, and they sent me in to get some food. I sat down, ordered some hamburgers to go, and these two huge truckers sat down on either side of me. One of them leaned over to the other and said, “I bet you I could punch him so hard that my fist could come through his brains.” Then the other guy described what torture he’d do to me. They started calling me Goldilocks, and I freaked out and ran out the door. And they ran after me.

Tommy was driving and he saw me running toward the van with these two huge truckers hot on my heels, so he started to take off. Meanwhile, Pepi opened the back door of the van and just as I caught up, he grabbed me and pulled me in. We turned around and gave those two assholes the finger.

The Sounds of Soul came to an end when our sax player, Tommy, got drafted and went to Vietnam. We were devastated, but we carried on. We wanted to play more originals, so we changed our name to the Brotherhood and began to slip some originals into our set. That didn’t go over too well with the uptown clubs.

“What the fuck was that sh as far as I was concerned.e had ” it?” the owner would storm over to us after
the show. “I told you guys I wanted to hear ‘Green Tambourine.’ ” And then we’d get fired.

Nineteen sixty-eight was a great time to be a musician. You could see the greatest bands in the world play in the East Village at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East and at the Anderson Theater down the block. I’ll never forget sitting up in the balcony of the Fillmore and seeing the Jefferson Airplane. I saw the Who premiere
Tommy
there. I saw Hendrix, the Doors, Savoy Brown, Arthur Brown, Van Morrison. My brain cells would just blow up hearing all that great stuff.

But the best was Steve Paul’s nightclub, the Scene. All us young musicians would hang out there in the peanut gallery and wait for all the stars to come in and jam. One night I went there with Jerry and I saw Hendrix jam with Buddy Miles and Johnny Winter. My fucking balls hit the floor. One night Janis Joplin walked in with Jim Morrison after they had played a double bill at the Fillmore and Janis pulled a bottle of Southern Comfort out of her bag and kept topping off the glass of bourbon she ordered.

Another time, Steve Paul had managed to get his hands on an advance copy of the Beatles’
White Album
. When I first saw the Beatles on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
I was not that crazy about them. I loved the Stones then. But then I really got into the Beatles and their lyrics, and they changed my life. I started to wear a Sgt. Pepper hairstyle, I grew a mustache like Paul McCartney’s, and then I got into the Lennon image, all in white with white sneakers and my hair long and straight down with the wire-rimmed glasses. Waiting for a new Beatles album was like waiting for a gift from the gods.

They locked the door at midnight and Steve Paul came out and said, “Shut the fuck up, everybody.” You could hear a pin drop in the whole nightclub. And he played that album from side one to side four straight through and it was like God was speaking through those speakers. We took those songs to be law.

We would make our own music too, informally. Every Sunday we’d meet up at the fountain in Central Park and there’d be people jamming with guitars and bongos, people talking about music and politics, passing around joints.

All of this propelled us toward wanting to do more originals. By
then, Pepi and I had connected with a guitar player named Kevin Reese and a bass player named Peter Shandis and we started a band called Nautilus. Pepi and I were the best musicians in the band; we kept the foundation solid. I wasn’t the front man, but I sang most of our songs. Kevin was half black and half white with green eyes. He was gorgeous. He couldn’t play that great, but he reminded me of a young Hendrix and he had great stage presence. In those days, it seemed that how you looked was almost as important as how you played. And he looked great. And so did Peter Shandis. He lived in the Village, and that was impressive in itself. He was a true hippie nonviolent love child, with one of those Byrds-type haircuts with the bangs. Great image, not so great a bass player. So we played the same club circuit, only with a heavier British Invasion–based sound.

We gigged all around the East Coast, but one of our mainstays was a club on Forty-second Street and Third Avenue called the Headliner. One afternoon in the fall of 1969 we were rehearsing there and this guy walked in accompanied by a knockout babe. He was in his thirties, blond, with thinning hair but really built, easily a two-hundred-pound guy. He had a bulldoggish look about him, like he was a as far as I was concerned.e had ” guy you didn’t want to cross. His girlfriend was a little bit younger, a flaming redhead with a gorgeous face and a knockout body. He introduced her as Kathy and said his name was Jack O’Brien, which was odd because he looked about as Irish as I was.

But what immediately captivated us was that he said he was a close friend of Bob Seger, whose group, the Bob Seger System, had just had its first hit. He had helped produce the album and he was tight with all the music people in the Detroit scene, he told us. He and his girlfriend were living in New York now and he wanted to get involved with a group, maybe manage them like Brian Epstein had done with the Beatles, or maybe even sing with them since he was also a singer. He said he had heard us play and he liked what he heard.

So after buying us a round of drinks, he invited the band up to his penthouse apartment to continue the discussion. I took one look at his huge diamond ring, his gold Rolex and gold jewelry, and Kathy’s even bigger rock and I knew he was the real deal. This was the jump connection
we so desperately needed. We followed him past his doorman and up to his pad. Looking out the big picture windows, we saw a spectacular view of the cityscape. And we were lapping up everything he was saying. “I’m gonna get you guys a deal, you’re great,” he enthused. “First of all, we gotta get you a decent PA system. Then we’ll go out to our place on Long Island and you guys can hole up there and write and rehearse. I’ll be coming out periodically and I’ll sit in with you. We’ll put a show together and get a deal. And don’t worry, I’ll pay for everything.”

A few days later, Jack called and told us to get a U-Haul van. We met him and he told us to drive to some parking lot where he made us take the license plates off two cars and put one of them on our van. As tough as I was, I had never done anything like that in my life. It should have been a tip-off to us that Jack wasn’t who he appeared to be. Then he had us pull the van in front of Manny’s music store on Forty-eighth Street, where Kathy was sitting in a limo waiting for us. Both Jack and Kathy were wearing wigs that day and it struck us as a little strange, but we didn’t think much of it. And we certainly didn’t give it a second thought when two guys who worked at Manny’s schlepped out this great Altec Lansing PA system and helped us put it into the van. Then Jack gave us some pills that were like speed and downers at the same time. After we got the PA to Pepi’s dad’s warehouse, I felt so weird I thought I was going to die. I crashed big-time, but I still had this lingering feeling that something was really weird.

We took all our equipment, including Pepi’s B-3 Hammond organ, my set of drums, two big amps, some big Fenders, and the PA system, and drove out to Jack’s house on Long Island. It wasn’t a mansion by any stretch of the imagination, but the house was nice enough and he had a big basement where we set up our stuff. We started working on songs and Jack would come out every weekend, drop off some money for us, and listen to the stuff.

“Whaddya got?” he’d say, and we’d play him the songs. “That’s pretty good,” he smiled. We kept asking him to sit in and sing, but he kept putting us off. “I don’t feel like it this weekend, my throat is bugging me today. Next time,” he’d say. “But keep practicing. I like what I’m hearing.” Then he peeled some cash off his roll and dropped it on the table. This
went on for months and months. I was seeing Lydia then, and she’d come out occasionally to visit, but we were consumed with our music. This was our big break bottle of Dom Pérignon would ever and we certainly weren’t going to fuck it up.

After about five months of this, some doubts about what we were doing began to creep in. Every time we’d asked Jack to sing with us, he had some excuse. And we were getting cabin fever. We all wanted to get out and gig and try out the material we had been writing and rehearsing. Plus we started questioning just who this guy Jack really was. Every time he and Kathy would come out to the house, they were driving a different luxury car. And they’d retreat into their room, which had a huge padlock on the door. Plus it didn’t take a brain surgeon to realize that both of them were cranked up on meth most of the time.

We wanted to confront Jack, tell him that we wanted out of there, but we were afraid to bring the topic up. One day, just before Jack and Kathy were due out, we all smoked some weed and Pepi decided that he was going to talk to Jack. That night, we were all sitting around the dinner table. Me and Pepi and Kevin and Peter were stoned on pot, giggling, but Jack and Kathy were tweaked out on speed.

“Look, Jack,” Pepi suddenly said. “We’re getting tired of this shit. We came here to make it, but all we’re doing is rehearsing in the basement. We want to get out of here and play.” The table immediately grew silent. Pepi went on a bit more about how we were just going to leave. Jack just sat there and stared at Pepi.

“Really?” he finally said. And then he picked up his glass and threw it at Pepi, hitting him square in the forehead. The glass shattered and Pepi began to bleed profusely.

“Anybody else got something to say to me?” Jack stared at Kevin and Peter and me. We were in total shock. I’ll never forget his piercing, weird eyes.

“Hey, man, that wasn’t cool,” I managed to protest.

“Shut the fuck up,” he snapped at me. “You ain’t fucking going nowhere. That’s the way it’s gonna be. My way or no way.”

The four of us freaked out.

Jack and Kathy retreated into their locked room, and when they came out, Kathy was wearing a wig and an outfit that made her look like a fifty-year-old
woman and Jack had a mustache that made him look completely different.

“You guys just stay here and play,” he said, and then they left.

I called Lydia and said, “We’re going to get out of here. My buddy told me about a gig up in Kennebunkport, Maine. We could be the house band for this fraternity, and they’ll pay us a salary. We’ll live in the back of the bar, they’ll feed us. We’ve just got to get out of here—this guy Jack is dangerous.”

We snuck out, rented a truck, loaded it up, and took off and drove up to Maine. We were thinking, “Wow, we’re free, we got away from this fucking guy, thank you Jesus! That’s the last we’ll ever see of Jack.”

About halfway through the summer, we were playing one night and I looked out at the audience and sitting there at a table was Jack and Kathy. We all turned as white as ghosts. I remember Pepi saying, “Holy shit, he’s in the audience.” I didn’t know what to say. It was probably the worst we ever played, everything was out of key, and you could hear our voices trembling when we sang. When we finished, the waiter came over and said, “There’s a guy over there at the table who wants to buy you a drink.”

So we went over to the table and we sat down and Jack said, “You guys a little uncomfortable.ened him weren’t home when we got back. What’s the matter?” I said, “Well, you hit Pepi with a glass. We were there already four or five months working with you, you never really sang with us, you said you were going to help us get a record deal. We wrote all these new songs, we wanted to try them out on an audience.” I was going on and on.

“Well, don’t worry now, everything has changed,” Jack said. “I’m going to sing in the band, I got us a deal, we’re going to go to Detroit and do our first recording.” He had everything nice and rosy again.

“When are you finishing up here?” Jack asked.

“A couple more weeks,” I said.

“Good, I’ll come back up with Kathy and we’ll help you bring the stuff back to Long Island. I want you to meet some of these new producers I got.” He had it down.

So we decided to try it again. We went back to the Long Island home, and as soon as we had loaded everything back in, he looked at us and said,
“Guess what? Now you can’t go fucking anywhere. You think you could fuck Jack O’Brien over and escape out of here?”

His whole disposition had changed. The next day, after Jack and Kathy left, we broke the lock and went into their room. We wanted to know just who we were dealing with. The first thing we saw was this big machine that looked like a counterfeit printing press. Our suspicions were confirmed when we opened up a drawer and saw piles of big-denomination bills taped up and stuffed into bags. Then we opened another drawer and there were stacks of checkbooks there, each one with a different name on it—Mr. Jerry Jones, Mr. and Mrs. K. Lawton, on and on. We opened the closet and there were wigs, fake beards, fake mustaches, old people’s clothing, and makeup. Then we opened up one more drawer and found his arsenal. He had six Winchester rifles, a shitload of .38s, .45s, and 9-millimeters.

That night, Jack and Kathy returned. When they saw that we had broken into their room, Jack came back out with a cocked Winchester.

“All you motherfuckers are going to sleep together on the fucking living-room floor tonight. I tell you what, I’ve even got something to make sure you don’t leave.” And then he went into the room and came out with these two big Doberman pinschers. I have a fear of dogs, so I instantly just started shaking and freaking out. Pepi was like, “You’ve got to relax.”

“Fuck you, look at these fucking dogs,” I said.

Imagine how I felt, cowering on the living-room floor with a cranked-up maniac right out of
Justice Files
clicking his Winchester as he walked around and his large, vicious Dobermans circled their prey. Every so often Kathy would join the scene, and even she was packing a .38 in her blouse. I was now convinced that they were just going to cut us up, bury us in the backyard, and steal our equipment. I figured that they had done this before to other unsuspecting ambitious bands.