Broke - Down in the Basement - Me and Mickey couldn't find a place to live at first, because the organ was so huge it way took up way too much room in any apartment or house. When I say ‘too much’ I am talking physically not aesthetically - I mean over half of the whole apartment space, the size of a concert grand piano. So much room that one close friend suggested that the only way we could all fit would be if Mickey and I slept on the floor underneath the Hammond! So, we sold the Hammond, but still didn't have enough money for any place, until at last we discovered this very cheap basement three-room flat.
But if you DIDN'T open the windows, to keep the exhaust fumes out, the three rooms (kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and a hallway ‘room’ between kitchen and bedroom) soon became stiflingly hot, like being in a steam bath. This was because a huge pipe ran through the middle of the main room. Through this pipe ran the hot water for ALL of the apartments in the building - over five floors of apartments, meaning lots and lots of hot water and steam running through that pipe from around five in the morning until midnight (and small amounts running through in the other hours, for those tenants who were awake in the small hours).
All things considered - lack of air, lack of sun, a choice between stifling heat or stifling exhaust fumes, a gauntlet of scary looking winos and addicts to get to our front door, and the smells of our front door alcove, the public toilet for the down and out – it was not the ideal spot for a studio! Hence, I didn't get very many students, no more than 4 at a time. Our income, in addition to this minute amount from students, was based on Mickey's work in short-order takeout stands, and the small dribble of family money coming to me, after most of it went in alimony and child support to Carole and little Jason.
But - look on the bright side! Piano students had to be really really motivated to come for lessons to our 'beneath the underground' pad - and so while there were only a few, they were select - dedicated to rock or jazz, really smart, and great company. It's been over 50 years, so I have forgotten all of their names except two - two absolutely remarkable women, "Dauntless" Anne McCarthy and 'Ginny' H. These were two super-powerful personalities that I will remember on my deathbed even if I have forgotten everyone else! (As the terminal stage of Parkinson's is supposed to slowly but certainly wipe one's mind clean). So let me pause to give a brief presentation:
a) 'Dauntless' Anne McCarthy and her following – Dauntless Anne started lessons when we were still living in Frosty’s old apartment in Allston-Brighton. Anne was a classic Irish-American redhead, lush, beautiful, with a delightful sprinkle of red freckles over her face and plump arms. She was one of the most brilliant people I ever met, and was full of energy almost all the time. She was friendly, down to earth, and loved creative people. So, it was no accident that she had a following of poets, musicians, painters, and bohemians in general.
Of her following I especially remember Lyle Guyer the poet. I liked him because he was the only person I knew who was broker than me. His only income was from aid for the mentally disabled, so, since he had almost no money, he would pay for room and board with poems. He generated dozens of poems a day, usually of superior quality. He lived with me and Mickey for a while when we had moved to Beacon Hill. He would shamble around our apartment in a daze, then sit down and dash off a poem, then ask for a hamburger or a sandwich. Lyle gave me the invaluable gift of being able to give charity and feel magnanimous even when I was the brokest I ever had been or would be! His poems weren’t bad either. And he had no writer’s block at all. His poems would effortlessly flow out of his pen or pencil onto his writing pad. (I wish I still had a few, but Lyle always kept all of his work. He would recite it or let us read it, but the physical copies always stayed with him).
Mickey and Anne hit it off right away – both Boston Irish, both rebels, both loving to party. Anne was already a medium level pianist when she started with me = in fact, she had more chops (technique) than I did! - but she loved my ideas and presentation of blues, jazz scales, chord progressions, and so on,. Annestayed on as a student well into the Beacon Hill era. Hi Lyle if you read this I know someone who would publish some of your poems – he’s a journalist and poet himself, Email me bro (ceelee123@msn.com)
b) 'Ginny H.' - from Rags to Riches via the Keyboard - The other student from that era who I will never forget was Ginny H.
Ginny was a black-haired, blue-eyed handsome woman – I think she was from a family that would have been called ‘black Irish’ back in the day. Like Dauntless, she was highly intelligent, but unlike Dauntless, Ginny was a Lesbian.
And as I discussed in an earlier chapter [not yet written – will describe some of the beatings and murders of gays and lesbians in Boston, and parts of my poem about Boston as ‘Queen Kali’, a closet queen who likes to paint her lips ‘with faggot blood’, make earrings from their faggot bones, and then go into the closet where no-one can see her and party, ‘because I am Queen Kali and I love to dance!” hope I can find the original
She was one of the most dedicated students I ever had, super at practicing, drilling every new concept into her mind and fingers until it was totally nailed. In the middle of what was to be our final lesson, I suddenly stopped talking or teaching. Ginny watched for a minute, and then said with amusement, ‘Well, Lee, why did you stop? What’s happening?” And I told her “Ginny, I have nothing more to teach you. I’ve taught you every bit of theory I know, every type of chord, scale, and improvisation, even every joke and story I know. I have nothing left to teach.” And I didn’t. I had taught her everything I knew except fugal counterpoint and bebop, neither of which she was interested in, and I had told her every anecdote I knew about musicians, including me.
In Ginny’s case, her now strong keyboard skills enabled her to land the position of keyboardist with New England’s top feminist/lesbian rock band. From here she made connections in the construction business, and then rebuilt a house. The profit from her construction work and house sale must have been high, because she bought a townhouse studio apartment on Worcester Street, in one of the most expensive neighborhoods of Boston. When I came to visit in 1984, she picked me up at the airport in a sleek black limousine. No more taking mass transit to the typing pool, for sure! At dinner Ginny told me that she was going to architecture school. In a later letter she told me that “The creative principles I learned in music hold true in architectural design.”
While her lessons paid off big-time, bringing her from the typing pool to wealth and architecture school, she hardly touched the piano anymore except for an occasional jam with friends.
Alas, that visit was the last contact I had with Ginny. Virginia H., if you read this, please email me at ceelee123@msn.com! And also, if Anne McCarthy reads this, I would love to hear from you!
Anyway, I had this one student who was a real problem case. A young bohemian in his early 20s, he was skinny, not good looking, and was so nervous that he had the worst case of ‘body odor’ I ever encountered – before or after! My usually not very fastidious roomates would spray the whole apartment with air freshener every time he came over for a lesson. And he sweated so much that I literally had to towel down the piano keyboard after his lesson, to wipe up around an inch of water that he had sweated out of his fingers during his half-hour lesson. He was a slow learner and never played better than a shaky blues. His massive insecurity insured terrible playing in all ways, of course. It was easy to see that was where his sweating and stink came from.
He finally learned how to play a basic rock blues in C. Then I didn’t see him for three months – I was down in Baltimore living the rock star life with Kelly St, John (see Chapter X). When I returned to Boston in September I called him up to schedule a lesson.
I was waiting for him to show – usually right on time, now he was a little late – when I heard the roar of a high-powered motorcycle coming up our street. Sure enough, it was my former sad-sack student. He was looking sharp in biker black leather, and accompanied by a lush blonde young woman, also dressed in biker leather. He walked right over to my piano, and without sitting down, blasted out a fast, technically perfect blues in C. “Hey,” I said, “I don’t think you need any more lessons!” He nodded his head, and he and his blonde companion strode out of my apartment and down the stairs to his bike. They roared off into the distance, and I never saw him again.
By December we had managed to save enough money to move from our subterranean dwelling into another low-rent area of Boston, Beacon Hill.
Beacon Hill is very close to Government Center, the hub of Boston politics. Despite all the government buildings near there, Beacon Hill was another poor
neighborhood, populated mainly by gays and student bohemians. Mickey had gotten a new job at a chicken take-out place (“Chicken Out!”), and worked long, hard shifts, coming home often reeking of chicken grease and spotted with cooking oil. This was possibly physically the hardest gig Mickey ever had, but it had a compensation. Being in the middle of a major gay ghetto, Mickey was surrounded by gay customers and gay friends, several of whom wound up working with Mickey at the deep-fat fryer and the cash register.
While more fun than our former locale, it was just as run-down, just as much a semi-slum. The main difference was that now, instead of living down below, we were living up above. Sometime in the past the Boston city government issued a regulation that any apartment building in the Beacon Hill area that was more than four floors high had to have an elevator. As long as it was only four floors high or less, just a stairway was fine. As might be expected, all of the apartment buildings in our area were four floors high. They all had flat roofs, so if you climbed up the stairs to the fourth floor roof door and walked out, you could look around and see a level plain of apartment roofs stretching for a half-mile or so in all directions.
This rooftop scene was a real bonus. During Boston’s boiling hot summers (high humidity and two months of 90 to 100 plus temperatures) tenants would sunbath on their roof, stretched out on a towel, with a sunshade umbrella protecting them from the worst heat. And this scene led to one of the most enjoyable jams of my life.
By the time we had moved to Beacon Hill, I had become really tight with my teachers and friends at the Cooperative Artists Institute, so one summer day they decided to have a ‘Good for the Head’ jam party on my rooftop. Since I was still suffering from my back injury, they obligingly carried my keyboard and amplifier up the final half-stairs from our apartment to the roof, along with their panoply of instruments – conga and bongo drums, shakers, whistles, and so on. We started jamming and people on the surrounding rooftops looked, listened, then brought out their own guitars, horns, and other instruments and started playing along with us. What an experience! A square quarter-mile of instruments, spread over the burning hot rooftop beaches, the umbrellas, towels, and blankets making a vary-colored desert sand, and all those instruments playing in many different keys, but the sound smoothed out despite the dissonance by the wide spread of the ‘orchestra’ and the open unenclosed rooftop bandstand letting the sound pour our into the sky …. what fun!
That was the best, and possibly the only really nice moment, of our stay on Beacon Hill. Those four flights of stairs were as tough on my student enrollment as
the stifling smoke and stinking entry way of our basement home had been. Dauntless Anne stayed with her lessons for a few months, but then found her Vietnam vet pacifist hero and vanished into domesticity. Lyle Guyer stayed with us for a few months, still paying rent in poetry. And I remember Ginny being present at the rooftop jam, sitting and listening with glowing eyes and total attention, absorbing all the music as she did at her lessons.
This was also when I started lessons with Charley Banacos and Dr. Norden (see Ch. ___). And this was when my financial hardship ended when arouind 1974 Ben Petrucci hired me as the regular keyboardist for his band (see Ch. ___). But for the months before Ben hired me, despite the wonderful moments of learning from and composing for my two great teachers, this was a pretty miserable experience. Little heat, no air conditioning, cockroaches everywhere (the landlord just ignored our requests for an exterminator, and store-bought cockroach poison was just a pate de gras for these fierce suckers), and almost no money. At this point our income came almost completely from Mickey’s gig at Chicken Out.
And the nadir of my existence came when I fell down all four flights of stairs
with my amplifier landing on top of me, when I was getting ready to play some anonymous low-rent gig. Down the stairs I went, and down came my amp on my back. Somehow I made it back to the apartment – the gig was a lost cause – and a few days later to a clinic, where the doctor told me that I had to stay in bed as much as I could, that it would take months before I could walk and work as before, and, worst of all, that this back injury was mine for life! Alas, his diagnosis was on the mark. It took two months before I could travel and work. And my back was usually in a state of pain, usually mild but flaring up every so often. His only error was in saying it was life-long. When I moved with my spouse Dr. Baldoz into Seattle in 1991, it went away, so much so that I forgot it was supposed to be there. But in the around 20 years between the injury and the Seattle move, my recurring back injury cost me plenty of gigs and was a constant hassle.
To make things worse, Mickey and I started fighting. He was tired of being almost the sole support of our finances - although to give him credit, he never missed paying his share of the month’s rent, and we never ran short of fried chicken! – and he had begun a more serious than usual affair: far from a one-night stand, this led to our living in separate apartments by the end of the summer.
So when Mickey did show up, to help with the rent or bring some food, I was angry from days of loneliness and abandonment. Unable to even play piano., my emotions had no outlet except to scream and curse at Mickey and try to throw our refrigerator at him (which last of course aggravated my back injury).
My only joy at this time came from lying in bed, reading, and then daydreaming about beautiful sounds I could bring from the piano, and a new concept, that I would be backed by – or partnered with – a congero who would know my musical desires while at the same time adding his own, different but complementary, musical ideas. I kept daydreaming, fantasizing about this ideal musical duo. Little did I realize that in three years this would become real; and that the congero partner of my dreams – Mel Wiggins - was actually living in Cambridge at that very time, less than 10 miles away from me – and planning to move to LA to get away after some anti-black guy threw a brick through Mel’s car window. And Mel wound up living in an East Hollywood apartment right next door to where Michaell Gullage was to move us in 1976! And the songs we played and recorded for the next 40 years were the foundation of my music life! Providence, providence, thank you Lord.
After I recovered, I still kept this musical ideal in my head: constantly re-invigorated by my wonderful times, jams, and lessons with Charley and Curtis at CAI.
And in September this whole episode of my life was over. Mickey moved to Provincetown, I moved into an apartment back in the music school area of Boston that I shared with two other young music students (a saxophonist and a guitarist) for the first time in two years, a decent place for a music studio. And so, music students started pouring in, and with the gigs I had with Ben, I was solvent once again.
Although we never lived together again in Boston, Mickey kept in touch – by phone, by visit, and during my Baltimore summer (see Chapter ____), by letter. And it was Mickey who first made the move to Los Angeles – partly financed by me- and set up the apartment where I would live when I gave up on New York. Without Mickey, I never would have moved to L.A., never would have met Mel Wiggins, never would have gotten my M.A. and college teaching experience, so never would have had the background which made me a teaching success in Seattle.
So – despite all the drink and drug excesses he led me into, despite the occasional abandonments, despite all the negatives – I owe Mickey big time.
And so here I want to thank and praise him, for his ultimate fidelity, despite everything; for his never-failing, eternal belief in my music. G. bless and thank you, Michael Gullage!
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