Music When I Was A Kid

In terms of music, I was one very lucky teenager. If I liked a musician or a band, I would book them to play my college, Stony Brook. I was chair of the Student Activities Board and much of the music we brought to the school was fairly unknown but on the verge-- like Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, the Four Tops (they were already famous), Big Brother, Grateful Dead, Otis Redding, the Blue Oyster Cult (the Soft White Underbelly then), Ravi Shankar, Joni Mitchell, Smokey Robinson, The Band... Bands were so inexpensive to book back then and I had what appeared to me to be an unlimited budget. $400 for the Doors, $1,500 to $3,500 for bands from England, $50 for a random folk singer who had nothing better to do that night.

Me then-- 1965 on the left, 1969 on the right, after 4 years of drugs

Besides the ones who became famous there were lots of others that never became really broke through but who I thought were fantastic and worthwhile. Some I booked as opening acts-- like two kids I met at a Velvet Underground performance in Manhattan, Tim Buckley (for the Doors) and Jackson Browne (for Judy Collins)-- and others I booked to play informal pop-up concerts in the dorm lounges, like The Fugs and Tom Rush.




I spent a lot of time listening to bands in New York and asking them to play my school, an hour away. It's how I met Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, neither at all really known at the time, as well as Eric Anderson, Tim Hardin and Richie Havens, dozens more. And I'd get everyone out to Stony Brook. Some of the students loved what I was doing and some hated it and hated me for it. Most of the kids were too busy studying to notice.





I met John Hammond at the Cafe Au Go Go and talked him into coming back to Stony Brook and play (for $50). When I was driving him down the Long Island Expressway, his fingers were so steady that he found stations on my car radio that I never knew existed. I had seen him when Jimi Hendrix's band (Jimmy James and the Blue Flames) was his backup band. This is the album he released while I was a freshman:





The bands that were always playing at the Cafe Au Go Go all played Stony Brook-- Paul Butterfield, the Blues Project-- and any band that came to the East Coast I'd co-book with Howard Solomon, the guy who ran the place, like the Youngbloods and Love. And you know what made me think of spending tonight on music? Sandy Bull. I was just in Thailand last week and Sandy Bull's music popped into my head while I was meditating in a Vietnamese temple. The music that was playing just brought Sandy Bull up. Give him a listen. He never got real famous but he was an inspiration for me:





One more thing. I was on acid one time and someone turned me onto an album, The Classical Music of Pakistan by Salamat and Nazikot Ali (usually called the Ali Brothers). I wanted to book them to play so bad. I would listen to that album whenever I got high (basically everyday). But I could never find a way to get in touch with them. I played the album for the Jefferson Airplane when they stayed at my house before a concert. The next album had a song clearly influenced by the Ali Brothers. In 1969 I bought a VW van in Germany and drove to Pakistan to find them. When I got to their small rural village in the mountains I found out they were playing in India. Bummer! A few years later I was working in the restaurant at the Kosmos, the meditation center in Amsterdam. I had just finished washing up and was dead tired and couldn't wait to get home and go to sleep. A friend came down and said, "There's this great band playing upstairs you have to see." I whined about how tired I was and he said I should go to sleep on the floor while listening to them. I didn't have the strength to resist and he dragged me upstairs. It was the Ali Brothers. It was magic.

Penn Badgley Campaigning For OWS Congressional Candidate George Martinez

Although one of my closest friends, David Kahne, was the head of A&R at his label and never stopped raving about what a star he was, I never met Jeff Buckley or saw him perform. And his father, Tim, was a friend of mine. I met Tim-- along with Jackson Brown and Steve Noonan-- at a Velvet Underground show in 1967 and invited them all back to my school, Stony Brook, where they spent a good part of the semester. I was the school's concert chairman and in October I gave Tim the opening slot for a breaking bad I had met that summer, The Doors. (Noonan I put on with Phil Ochs and Jackson opened for Judy Collins.) The stories-- intertwined because they were father and son, who only met once-- are of two young me who were both extraordinary singer-songwriters and who both died so very young and so very tragically. It was a time and a place-- or two times and two places. But I was transported back by watching, of all things, a campaign video (up top) from Occupy Wall Street activist and congressional candidate George Martinez.

We met George back at the beginning for the month when we were encouraging him to run for Congress in my native Brooklyn (born'n'bred). Now he is running and last week he was out in Williamsburg getting petitions signed when neighborhood luminary Penn Badgley stops by to help him bum rush the vote. Badgley, who plays Jeff Buckley in the upcoming film, Greetings From Tim Buckley, reminded me so much of Tim that I was stunned.

And even though he wasn't wearing a hoodie, maybe if he shaved and dressed a little nicer, Penn would have gotten more signatures on George's petitions. Anyway... thanks for putting up with my reminiscences. Reward: two old Tim Buckley live videos from back when I was a kid: