I came back from San Francisco to New York in a rainy and cold January of 1980, and went to live with Brian Muni at 21 1^st Avenue, a location that I called Foist & Foist. Brian, whom I had met at Brown a few years before when he was playing folk tunes in a college bar, was living with four or five roommates in a suite of rooms there. Before long, I found my own apartment on 12^th Street.

 

Brian was a descendent of the original Scarface, Paul Muni, an actor in 23 films during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Like his ancestor, Brian had dimples you could fall into. He had reddish curls that reflected nicely off his five-string clear plastic electric viola/violin. He also played inventive and rhythmic guitar and sang clearly like folk rather than affected or slurred like rock.

We were competent amateur musicians. We knew a sizeable body of sixties and seventies rock, folk, blues, soul, and pop. Brian sang well and passionately and in addition to a good grasp of harmony and theory, I contributed a lot of arranging, organization and marketing prowess. We’d both been playing since we were about 10 years old and we shared the same suburban white boy background.

I still had my Volvo 544 back then, a round-top that resembled a miniature pre-war Buick, with deep blue lacquer paint, a Swedish flag on the back, and a red leather interior. It had an electric overdrive 5^th gear and halogen headlights but no air conditioning. It was so cool that even New York drivers graciously let me cut in front of them. Zoot Sims once offered to buy it outside the Village Vanguard and I should have sold it to him. I used to park it with a Harley Davidson T-shirt in the back seat on the Hells Angels block, 3^rd Street between 1^st and 2^nd Avenues, where Sonny Barger had organized the infamous motorcycle gang into a headquarters comprised of several buildings that were renowned for rough parties. My favorite bike on that block had a fur-lined frame and a chrome plaque that read, “This bike belongs to a Hells Angel. Fuck with it and see.” When one happened to OD, the troupe would line up their bikes in front of a funeral parlor on 2^nd Ave near 2^nd Street in a display that was assured to get the deceased into biker heaven. The Angels were charming and like me, were regulars at the famous music club CBGB’s around the corner.

Brian and I went to the New Wave Festival in Madison Square Garden, which was perhaps the largest music business event of 1981. At night, there were shows like Squeeze but during the day, it was like a business conference, with panels about recording companies and business issues. We met Madonna, James Brown, Bill Laswell, Robert Fripp, and other stars. I remember some fellow had just given a talk about funk music. Madonna and James Brown were standing with Brian and me and I asked James, “Do you agree with the speech? Are there African rhythms in funk?”

James looked defiant, “Well I don’t know about that but where funk is, there I am!” and he executed a perfect split in his gray three-piece suit and jumped back to his feet, his hair perfect, his pocket square unperturbed. Everybody roared appreciatively.

Brian started hanging around with a woman named Marla. An attractive and energetic character from Tampa with jet black hair, Marla had tremendous joie de vivre and a great sense of style—think Warhol. She had the infectious laugh of a born party girl and struck a very different tone from the serious college girls whom Brian and I had met until then—think Expressionism. She played a Hofner bass and had good tone even if she used a pick, which method was not uncommon in rock anyway. She was friends with other bands around the Lower East Side like The Bongos.

I forgot what club we were at when we decided to make a band and what it would be called. The then popular African Burundi beat led to the name “Big Game”, which was supposed to conjure the pounding of tom-toms and jungle drums. Brian’s first hit tune for us, “Music and the Savage Beast,” took its concept from this theme.

Brian and I always aspired to Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli but we didn’t have nearly the musicianship to pull this off. Not that I didn’t study. I took jazz guitar lessons from a session guy who taught me scales, modes, and finger positions going up the neck. I studied with Bern Nix, an excellent jazz man, and with Jon Sholle, a bluegrass ace who had Bette Midler’s platinum records on his wall. Sholle had an unusual method—he charged $150 per lesson, which was a lot at the time, but the student could stay as long as he wanted—weeks if it came to that. I learned years of guitar technique in the 36 hours that I stayed.

Next, I called my old friend from my hometown of Teaneck, New Jersey, Phoebe Snow, and asked her for an introduction to a singing teacher. David Sorin Collyer was a trip and a half. He had taught Broadway actors, pop singers, and actors who starred in musical films. To relax me, he would have me jog in place and shriek, “Khun-gee-ka-kee!” repeatedly. He once said impishly to me, “Relaxation is the secret of everything, Michael.” Then he drew his eyes startlingly close to mine, “Everything!”

Brian and Marla met our drummer E.J. Rodriguez playing congas for spare change on the front steps of the New York Public Library at 42^nd and 5^th Avenue, right under the lions. I used to visit his home on Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn, which was a pretty tough neighborhood in the ’eighties. In fact, I called it “Bushwhack Avenue.” A slight man of athletic build, there was no rhythm that he couldn’t lead on timbales or regular traps. E.J. had a scroungy beard and his favorite term for women was “freaky”, whatever that meant. His mother worked as a night nurse at Brooklyn General Hospital and during the day would occasionally cook us delights like ropa vieja stew or fried sweet tostones plantains. She sold Amway products door-to-door to supplement her income, which was fine but we all hated the miserable Amway coffee and insisted on Bustelo. E.J.’s brother had a mental disability but he sang like an angel and played congas to E.J.’s timbales and my limited clave playing. Claves are two wood sticks that you clack together in time with the music. It’s the most basic instrument in salsa and it gave me what education I gleaned in that very difficult rhythmic art. At that stage, Big Game wasn’t so skilled in getting gigs so we played a bunch of benefits and street fairs.

Juan Muñoz had moved out of my apartment and another Spaniard moved in. Ignacio Perez Piño’s job in those days was to call in a report on New York’s club scene to a radio station twice a week. That and his beautiful girlfriend kept him busy. I always marveled at how swarthy Ignacio, or Nacho for short, could fascinate his lovely blonde artist pal Lynda but as they say, opposites attract. When Nacho got us gigs in Spain for the summer of 1982, E.J. said he couldn’t go because he had started to play with Kid Creole and the Coconuts, a great band. You may not remember their hit, “Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy,” but it was a brilliantly written and wonderfully executed translation of salsa to U.S. English. At any rate, E.J. couldn’t accompany us so I ran an ad in the Village Voice.

The drummer who answered the ad and became part of our band was Joe Poliseno, whose name translates to “Joe Citizen.” And he was. Honest, hardworking, and clever, Joe continued my musical education and is my friend to this day. At the time, he was just a beautiful boy of 22 and an emotional and well-trained drummer. Joe had toured America with his previous band, “The Fast.” Two of the members were gay and the other was devoted to his girlfriend so Joe got every woman groupie all across America and back to New York.

We composed and recorded music for Tim Miller’s dance performances at PS 122. We played Club 57 at 57 Saint Marks Place, the Mudd Club, and then the Ritz on 11^th Street, which was a pretty big gig for us. Of course, we played CBGB’s and fed cocaine to their insane lighting tech to ah, grease his wheels. He did well by us in turn, teetering on a tall ladder to adjust the gels and swinging from the pipe racks to focus the spots. An unsung hero of that terrific institution, he had done lights for all the great bands of the day and even though he was crazy as an outhouse rodent, he was like a monk of contemporary music.

My favorite memory of those days was a party at some Spanish friends’ loft in Tribeca. We had the crowd of about 150 dancing like crazy. I was slightly high from a sliver of LSD I had taken but didn’t expect the phenomena that I witnessed. I waved my guitar at the crowd and they all bent their knees in unison but they hadn’t seen me wave. Fascinated, I jerked the neck to the left and the left side of the room jerked while dancing. This mysterious, numinous, and nearly religious moment gave my atheist mind such a schreck that I just played normally and finished the set. I have no explanation for what I experienced that night.

Nacho had scheduled our tour and I found charter flights, only about $200 per person round trip on something called Spantax, a Spanish charter airline. Nacho was a fine agent, better than we deserved, but in fact, we didn’t have any gigs yet on our arrival. Nacho’s business plan, such as it was, seemed to be to take us to see the owner of Pacha, a chain of clubs with eight locations around the country. We ascended to the area near the sound and lights boards, a control room where the owner had set up a mini club, which he was enjoying with some wine, women and song. Nacho introduced me as the business guy because I spoke the best Spanish.

“This is Ricardo,” Nacho smiled. Ricardo and I toasted some red wine in a friendly way while eyeing each other warily. He seemed in some doubt as to our abilities and I regaled him with some slightly fantastic stories of our fame. Finally, I decided we’d beat around the bush enough. “Look, Ricardo, you’ve gotta hire us. We’re an actual international act. If you don’t hire people like us, what you’ve got here is just another bar.”

Nacho was a little shocked but Ricardo seemed to like my spunk. “This guy says I just have a bar. Haha!” I shrugged, not realizing that Ricardo’s little club would soon be the flagship of a media empire in Spain, with hotels and restaurants in addition to clubs in a dozen cities. “OK, Big Shot, you can play in Ibiza and then here a week after.” It wasn’t as many gigs as I wanted but I didn’t push my luck and left it at that.

While we waited for our first gig, we started going to after-hours clubs and night clubs that opened at midnight like El Sol. We hung out on Recoletos at Café Gijon and other cafés on that strip, which was apparently essential for being cool. Nacho got us rooms at a house for the duration of our tour. It was a large wooden 5 BR with a huge main staircase and a very serviceable kitchen, owned by a sociology professor from the University of Madrid. It had a patio where a maid served lunch and then prepped a dinner, and a swimming pool by an in-law apartment where an excellent pianist lived.

For me, the best feature of the arrangement was an aspiring movie star named Rosa. One day the weather was just splendid. We finished lunch and Rosa announced it was time for a dip in the pool. She went with us to the pool area, peeled off her clothes revealing her exquisite pulchritude, and jumped in. Joey nearly passed out on the grass. Everyone peeled down and splashed around with her.

While the nights brought torrid romance, the days brought our introduction to the music business on a scale we hadn’t experienced yet in the Lower East Side. We botched a radio interview spectacularly. Brian and Marla spent lots of time talking about what a wonderful car mechanic I was and I inadvertently criticized our agent Nacho. Upon our return to the manse, Nacho let us have it. He wasn’t mad about being maligned by me. He insisted that we be more professional musicians and leave our mechanical exploits for an interview after I became a famous auto mechanic. I agreed that we had perpetrated a gigantic fallo de concepto, a failure of concept.

Our next concern was where to stay during our time in Ibiza. Shelling out for a hotel would have broken the budget but Nacho had a card up his sleeve. He contacted the former owner of a competing club, who agreed to put us up. Nacho told us that our host Manolo was a well-known translator whose father had been consul to England and Lebanon. He assured us that Manolo’s English was adequate. He had worked in a consulate in Central America for a while, mostly marrying people, but he hated it so he returned to Spain. With a professor friend, he opened a rock club called “Amnesia”.

Ibiza is divided into the western part, with the medieval walled city of Ibiza and the tourist trap of San Antonio, which serves as a lunchroom for British college kids all summer, and an eastern part of the island, which is mainly fig, avocado, and orange farms and large, splendid houses. Our taxi from the airport drove east to a bar in the lonely town of San Carles, population about 700 but maybe 20,000 during the summer months. We went in and asked for Manolo and he stood up. His white cotton clothes set off a lobster red tan and made the backdrop for piercing blue eyes. His intelligence was obvious, and he looked every centimeter the civilized European gentleman, slim, well-mannered, and kind. He smiled politely, said, “Follow me,” and walked out to his Citroën Deux Chevaux.

We drove up some precipitous hills in the dark and got to a luminous whitewashed adobe structure. About two miles over the coast with a terrific view, some rather heavy Guatemalan furniture, an appetizing chessboard and clock on a table, and homey old cushions on the sofa, it had been an olive oil factory 500 years ago and he had converted it to his family home. Manolo came back into the living room holding something and said, “Would anyone like some Colombian flowertops?” Marla fainted on the couch, “Ohh! This man!” That was her Gone with the Wind act—she fancied herself a Southern belle. She didn’t smoke pot or do any drugs at all, for that matter.

Manolo’s wife Carmen cooked fantastic gazpacho and paella. Her alioli, a garlic mayonnaise, was out of this world. In fact, they owned a restaurant on a little island called Tagomago—you had to take a boat to get there. The deck was populated with Riviera-style topless women. In those days, my back was healthy enough to wind-surf despite the workout that Rosa was giving it. After a while, Manolo and I sat down to play some chess…and got up about two days later. I made it to the gig, where we set up behind a swimming pool, which oddly recalled to me my very first gig at a country club. Lots of the customers danced.

We got some news that helped make sense out of the psychological difficulties that we had in consistently creating interesting and vital music. We knew that Brian was a bit kooky, and got off on tangents and feverish interests periodically but we just thought him artistic. But the results of a medical test that he took just before leaving New York were relayed to us via a phone call from his mother. He had Type 1 diabetes. Going forward, he would need to have a quiet life if he wanted to live long. We understood very well that this probably meant the end of our band but it was good to finally know he wasn’t merely insane.

Meanwhile, Pacha Madrid commissioned a lovely painted backdrop of New York for our performance. The press was excellent, thanks to Nacho’s team, and all our supporters and friends turned up to cheer us on despite the predictably thin crowd. I really enjoyed playing in the huge room and we finished with my encore version of James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)”.

 

Finally, all the n’s were crossed with wavy lines and the i’s accented, we’d been paid, fed, and kissed, and we went to the airport to take our charter Spantax airline back to New York. At the airport, Brian got hungry so he and Marla went off to find a sandwich, which took them a good hour. And Mr. Organized Mikie couldn’t find his passport. I tore apart all the bags and gear, found an instruction book I had been after for years, broke a few delicate amp parts, but finally had to take the attendant’s offer of a bounce to a plane an hour later or a delay of a week for the next Spantax flight. I found the passport in its usual pouch about thirty seconds after agreeing to this swap.

My only excuse is that I was tired. By this time, I was good and tired of being the uncle of the band. “Did you bring your extra strings? Do you have the set list and charts? Yes, here’s an aspirin. Do you know the third tune? When will your passport expire? Have you eaten? Marla, do you have enough Spantax?” “Oh, that’s so clever.” The writing, copying, arranging, making charts, equipment research and procurement and hauling, the promotion and getting of gigs. And every task had a hundred tasklets attached to it. You couldn’t just make a promotional tape, and never mind the sound issues. There was a host of information that needed to appear on the jacket, well-designed—legible but cool. Each task is typically assigned in a record studio to some functionary who has been at his job about ten years and whose job I would have given a lot for, but we had to add it to the list and do some version of it, however bad. The appearance planning and procurement of clothes or costume. And on and on. No wonder rock performers took drugs.

We boarded a TWA and landed without incident but then some reporter stuck a mic in Joe’s face and asked, “How do you feel about missing the plane that crashed?” The Spantax flight had made a quick stop in Malaga to pick up passengers but it crashed on takeoff. My mother still has the New York Post headline, “Fireball of Death, fear 77 dead on flight to New York,” and the front-page picture of the plane broken in half, with a long line of wounded staggering away from it. I would have been in the smoking section, for sure. I got a frantic call from Nacho and then called around to all our friends in Spain reassuring them.