From a very early age, I was infatuated with rock music. I had the biggest record collection of anyone in the kindergarten. I loved Kiss and the Eagles and later, groups like Hall and Oates, The Police and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Though I’m not a Catholic anymore, I had my fill of it as a kid, receiving my sacraments, attending 13 years of Catholic school and when I was still young enough to be forced, going to mass on Sunday. It’s amazing how even at the earliest ages, I was using rock and roll as reference point in my life, even in church.

When I was 5 or 6, in my mind, I always compared the altar and congregation at church to the stage and an audience. Daydreaming about my musical heroes was a great way to get through the dreaded Sunday morning rituals. My church had a microphone on a stand like Paul Stanley used. They had what I thought were really cool gray PA column speakers mounted in the choir loft. You’d hear them pumping out the sound of the organ, which would play when we reached that point in the show. The altar had a backstage area called the Sacristy that you needed a connection to get into. In the 70s, our church also had a felt banner behind the altar that took up the entire wall. It usually had a stylized depiction of a biblical scene and a quote. It was really progressive for a Catholic church as I understand them now and it didn’t last, but that was an important part of their stage set. The felt banners were always designed with earth tones, browns and oranges. Christ, even the sanctuary carpet was orange.

Masses also had the audience participation you find at rock and roll shows. People would answer in unison when prompted by the priest. He’d hold his arms up to the heavens periodically, reciting some prayer while the folds in his elaborate costume hung loosely, forming a rough silhouette of wings. In those days, rock stars were superheroes to me. Though the priests weren’t, they got my attention with their histrionics too. Since I got so used to seeing them from the pews, I felt just as removed from them as Kiss.

However, for all the ways in which the showmanship of the Catholic mass worked on my psyche throughout my childhood, it never prepared me for the fact that priests were human. I learned that when I became part of the corps of altar boys in the fourth grade. Though I never experienced any molestation at the hands of a priest, which is so fashionable now, these guys could still be really creepy when you saw them up close. Sunday after Sunday, I sat twenty rows back spending at least an hour looking at these guys, but when I got finally got close enough to the show as an altar boy, the oddness of these characters fueled a very cautious curiosity and a fair amount of confusion.

Father Al, the altar boy director, was the youngest priest in our parish. He was probably creepy before Holy Orders, but by the time we met him, he’d kicked it up more than a few notches. He wore glasses and had a serious comb-over that seemed almost to compliment his crooked front tooth. His hands were the most delicate I’d ever seen on a man. They showed no signs of hard labor and the nails were perfectly rounded. When we poured water over his hands during mass, he moved his fingers very differently from the way my old man would when he washed up at the kitchen sink. Even at ten years old, I could sense that he was in conflict with my idea of what a man was.

Al was definitely the archetypal “holier than thou” priest type. He spoke often of his mother, who routinely embroidered new vestments for him at the change of the church seasons. Al was sure to tell you when he was donning the handiwork of his mother, who no doubt deserved some of the blame for Al’s somewhat condescending and self-righteous nature. He embraced all the ceremonial pomp a Catholic priest could get away with. All of them had to say the same things to celebrate a mass, but every priest had a different style. Al’s style was to chant every prayer he possibly could, lengthening the mass easily by twenty minutes or more. I suppose it was his right, but it even got on my mother’s nerves. We always knew we were in for it when Father Al came parading up the aisle with his girly hands held high. We knew there was no way we were getting home by lunchtime.

Al’s sanctified veneer first weakened at the church fair. They had a Pac Man machine, which of course was very exciting for the kids. When we all left the machine unattended to go off and scrounge for more quarters, Al took it. He was so into his game that the force with which he worked the joystick moved the entire machine. It wasn’t a violent motion but an over-exaggerated, deliberate one that caused the machine walk corner to corner, alternating on its rubber feet. That unnecessary intensity creeped me out and confused me. That kind of ill-founded passion for a video game never came from the adults we knew, let alone from the priests, so it seemed misplaced, and quite suspect. Is he a man? A kid? A priest? The answers were all “No.”

My memory of Al as a pathetic little man was pretty much cemented on my first and last altar boy trip to the Jersey shore. I don’t know what I was thinking at the time, but I think of Al as pathetic now. All of the altar servers, ranging from fourth to eighth grade (and some older, now that I think of it), were  packed into two yellow school buses on a summer day, tooling down the Garden State Parkway bound for Seaside Heights. I was probably 10. I was in the middle of the bus. I was not sophisticated enough to be in the back, where presumably you could elude the watchful eye of the driver and chaperones and do cool things like make obscene gestures at cars following behind the bus.

I was gazing out the window, lost in my thoughts as I churned with anxiety about what the day would bring. Then the eighth graders started making some ruckus about girls in a car behind us, flashing their breasts. I couldn’t see anything, but apparently neither could Father Al, who with a giddy smile and wild eyes bombed down the center aisle of the bus to get to the back window.

I couldn’t sort it out at first. I wasn’t allowed out of my seat, but this guy could not only move about freely, but completely forget himself and act like an overgrown adolescent. Even then, I knew he was a hypocrite, though I’m not sure I knew the word for it. This guy, who had boundless energy for browbeating alter boys in training about genuflecting, holding his damn prayer book, ringing bells and handling the Eucharist was actually just a boob man. At that age, I would’ve really enjoyed seeing a pair of boobs, but my experience was confined to being insulted by the phony that old Al turned out to be.

I suspected every priest of being full of shit after that. I still got into the microphones and columns speakers in church from a purely technical point of view, but the pious behavior of the priests became an act that I felt I was always seeing through.

Eventually, I learned that many rock stars were just doing their act too. Some of them even started to look foolish to me. My old man turned out to be human (Never saw that one coming, even when he warned me…), but at least he was never doing an act. When I recognized these truths about life, I never felt like I’d been had. I only felt a little wiser. With Al, I definitely felt like I’d been played for a fool.

I managed to put together my first original band when I was about 20 or 21. I’d been trying to do it for a long time before that, but never found the players to do what I wanted to do. In my quest to be the musical magician with the golden ears and the soul of the ages, I tried to do something completely superlative right out of the gate. My first original band had nine pieces. Since we were playing my material at my direction, it wasn’t an easy thing to keep going, since I had minimal people skills and grand ambition.

It’s very telling that the next ensemble I formed was a trio. However, for a split second on the timeline of human existence, I had a very impressive band. Though I never quite got it to settle in and tighten up, I still saw us as the Jukes on the cover of This Time It’s For Real. I had a three-piece horn section and a guy who played only secondary percussion. I had a piano player and one of the guys on guitar could double on bass and organ so we were able to change things up whenever we wanted. We had more people than Chicago or the E Street Band! We barely fit into the room we rehearsed in at the drummer’s mother’s house in Wayne, NJ.

A rock band with horns is not simple. Rock guys were used to playing from memory, but the horns had to play off charts so they could play together as a section. I loved that I was skilled enough to hand out charts to players for my own songs. I would sit up late at night and at every spare moment filling up page after page of manuscript paper thinking so well of myself. I thought I was doing something so special. I mean, Steve Van Zandt just sang the horns their parts on “10th Avenue Freeze Out,” but I wrote charts with a pencil like Big Crosby in Holiday Inn. Trumpet and sax in Bb and trombone in C. (I had an alto for about 5 minutes, but I never finished his stuff.) Horns drifted in and out of the band for the next year or so, some of them taking my original charts with them. I soon learned to make photocopies before distributing anything.

The first time I wrote an arrangement for a song in that group, it was actually for someone else’s tune, a guy playing guitar in the band at the time. I did a DeVol-type horn thing that I had to have copped from the soundtrack of the Brady Bunch. Watch the credits. Music by DeVol. It was great stuff that combined the instruments of many different genres. A rock rhythm section with mallets and horns. DeVol even used the hip keyboards that were modern at the time. Clavinets and Wurlitzer electric pianos and Vox Continentals. That was my inspiration.

For all the kicking and screaming that band did when I tried to get them to do anything, there were a few sublime moments that I’ll always remember. Playing the first tune at the first rehearsal with the horns was one of them. Everyone was eager to see what working with horns would be like. As I handed out the parts I’d written, it almost felt like some of them were holding their breath. None of them knew what all of the little notes on the pages sounded like, not even the guy who wrote the tune.

When trumpet, tenor sax and trombone made their entrance, it brought forth a naked musical power that no one in the rock band section had ever experienced playing bad covers of the Who and Led Zeppelin in their high school days. I had the records of rock bands with horns and I knew it could work, but I never felt it “for real” either.

The smiles on everyone’s faces were worth their weight in valve oil to me. They kept playing, but they had a giddy amazement in their demeanor and I was thrilled. I was the architect of this thing and for that moment at least, I had pulled it off. I had actually affected people with music for the first time. It was the band, not an audience, but I didn’t care. It was the pure joy that I had gotten into music for.

I remember the drummer’s expression the most. Arthur was the toughest nut to crack in the band. His position on most issues was the one that caused the greatest amount of grief. When I talked about how we should set up the stage for the band, he would say things like that we should set up in a circle, no different than at rehearsal. Who cares if we face away from the audience? The music was the only thing that mattered. I think I know now what was really going on with him, but it really irritated me then. He could be difficult, but this time, Arthur was grinning from the sheer excitement of the new, powerful and unexpected sound enveloping everyone in the room.

I could be euphoric at that time in my life because I’d longed for a band for so many years. I could also be ready to crack. I wanted everything so badly. I tried so hard to write songs and charts and to juggle all of these people and personalities. I wanted to make records like the Jukes. (For historical perspective, Nirvana was just about to get huge. Yes, at 21 I was a textbook anachronism.) No one in the band seemed to have the same dreams I did. One of them told me flat out that I should stop talking about stardom and records because it was never going to happen. Geez…

It was much bigger than anything I had ever organized. I had no idea what I was doing. I got the group together, but then had no idea how to get it out gigging. What a disaster! It was such a surprise that I got the thing rolling that I hadn’t foreseen what it would take to keep it together. After all, it was my first original band. Some of the guys in the band were experienced enough to have been gigging a lot. I thought they might contribute some of their experience and help me get the band on stage, but that didn’t happen very much.

Lou, the percussionist in the band, became the drummer in The Automatics, the trio that followed the horn experiment. The Automatics were the first great band in my original music career. The other drummer, Arthur, ended up playing on a couple of tracks on my first album. He and the guitar/bass/organ guy had a band in high school with a guy named Brian Fitzpatrick, with whom everyone knows I now play in the Band of Brothers.

Brian wasn’t right for the horn band, but he was the only one whom I ever remember truly encouraging me. He took me outside once at a rehearsal with the horn band that was getting very difficult. I was so intense then, but that never put Brian off. He leaned against my car and said that I didn’t need to push so hard. He told me that I needed just to let it happen because what I was sitting on with what I’d created was a bombshell, something no one could ever compete with. I didn’t have the ears to hear all of what Brian was trying to tell me, but I needed the boost and I never forgot it. It felt so great that someone could appreciate what I was trying to do, and got it. I was all about competition in those days. I really didn’t get it.

No, that would take a little longer.

The last random memoir was about when I purchased my first copy of Destroyer by Kiss. This one is a bit of a continuation.

Opening a new record was always a great experience. It was a treat for all of the senses and never the challenge or disappointment that opening a new CD can be today. By the time I purchased my copy of Destroyer, I had mastered the proper technique.

The procedure you follow to open a new album depends upon whether you’re right-handed or left-handed. Assume for our purposes that you’re left-handed like I am. Turn the album over so that you’re viewing the back cover. Grasp the top left corner firmly with your right thumb and forefinger. Now, slide your left thumbnail along the cellophane in the channel between the front and back of the album jacket. Most cellophane wrappers on record albums part after only a couple of up and down passes in this fashion. When the plastic has been split, you can get a better grip and remove it completely from around the record jacket. Some who imagine that they’ll be preserving the cover leave the cellophane intact except for the slit, which still allows the record to be removed. This preservation is a myth. Failure to remove the cellophane is a pretentious move that completely eviscerates the experience of opening a new album. The pretension is in the offender’s belief that his record jacket will remain pristine as everyone else’s becomes worn and faded from being stored and retrieved over the years between two other jackets in the record rack. In truth, the cellophane will tear irregularly and eventually wad against the cover at an inopportune time, creating unsightly gaps between the spines of the records in your storage rack. The cellophane preservation fallacy breaks down even sooner when dealing with a double album with a folding jacket.

The second most important stimulus I came to associate with a new Kiss record, aside from the sounds in its grooves, was the smell. The smell of a new Kiss record was one that I ranked on the high side of paradisiacal, competing with the smell of new Star Wars figures. As far as I can imagine, the smell of new Kiss records had something to do with the ink used to print the covers and sleeves. Though this is completely unconfirmed, in my mind that smell is associated with the black ink specifically. The first whiff of that smell was always the best, but it was strong enough to remain long into your possession of the record. That ink smell would linger in my nose as I played the record for the first time and stared at the cover art, listening hour after hour.

The best cover art, and this is something that has been said by many people but bears repeating anyway, created the perfect mood for the music you were hearing for the first time. This was especially true for Destroyer. CDs offer very little in the way of graphic art. CD art is often too small to appreciate in a tangible way like an album jacket. Even with larger CD insert designs, the art is obliterated by those unsightly folds across the center of the flimsy paper. Some of the print on CD inserts actually holds a permanent finger print. What a mess. Having little or no access to video footage, what could’ve been better than a picture of your favorite band, huge in your five-year-old hands, suitable for framing? Not much by my estimation.

The Magnavox

The only place for me to play records in my house was in the dining room, where my parents kept their Magnavox console stereo system. It was one of those self-contained jobs that looked more like an oversized sideboard or serving piece than a piece of hi-fi equipment. It housed an AM/FM radio and a turntable with jacks in the back for connecting tape recorders, if you were so inclined and were of sufficient means to own one. They were probably designed for a reel-to-reel that ran quarter inch tape at 71/2 inches per second. We never had one of those.

Across the top of the enclosure were two sliding panels. (Unlike the picture I found, they all dark pine.) One revealed the turntable and radio tuner, and the other, a compartment which was supposed to be for a tape machine lying down. Next to the tape machine compartment was a slot that held a stack of LPs.

The glass radio tuner scale pointed straight up at the ceiling. You could spin the Tuner dial and the wiper would glide behind the glass telling you what frequency you were tuned to. The measure of radio quality to me in those days was whether or not the tuner would hold momentum when you gave it a spin. My little pocket radio required that you edge the tuner wheel along with your thumb, but this one had mass to it. It would continue spinning after you let go of the wheel.

In the front and sides of the stereo cabinet were speakers. Four of them, protected by a scratchy brown weave of grill cloth. The front grill cloths were layered like shutters. Why two speakers were mounted in the sides of the cabinet, pointed to the left and right was beyond me, but the two in the front, near the floor over the casters, always sounded the best to me. When you turned the beast on, the speakers would pop and the radio tuner pilot would glow to let you know that you were powered up.

So I’d mount a new LP on the record changer post and move the support arm into place, suspending the record over the turntable. When the time was right, I’d snap the spring-loaded twist switch to start the changer. Sweet anticipation would well up inside me as the tonearm went into its all too familiar series of mechanical sounds whose rhythm I could still tap out on the table today if called upon to describe the sound of our stereo starting. The motor would start and the record would drop onto the spinning platter. If the stars were aligned, the tonearm would come to rest on the edge of the record with a rumble and I’d wait for the first sound, wondering how loud it would be and what this amazing new record would be like.

~

Becoming a record freak as a little kid in the 70s, I was spoiled by good records. Every new album I managed to buy was potentially another force that would change my life permanently. I still use the same barometer for quality. In the years since I bought my first copy of Destroyer, the barometer has been activated for such albums as Born To Run, Something/Anything?, Innervisions, Minute By Minute, Houses of the Holy, Court and Spark and Music From Big Pink to name just a few. It happens more seldom now.