NO SLEEP TIL BROOKLYN: MY DAY CIRCA LATE '70S
Days and Nights as a Young Journalist/College Intern
The Big Apple late ‘70s. The city is broke as a dead beat Dad. Corrupt cops. Disillusioned teachers. White flight. Ethnic antagonism. The .44 caliber killer. Reggie, Billy and George of the Bronx Zoo Yankees. Studio’s glamour and coke. CBGB’s stink, punk and heroin. Times Square’s porn, pushers and penny arcades. Subway graffiti. JVC ghetto blasters. Woody Allen’s magical city of jokes in dialog with Scorsese’s metropolis of pain. The Blackout. A desperate place of dreams.
I was in college, an aspiring journalist, living with my mother and sister in Brooklyn, attending college in Queens and traveling between Harlem, Times Square and the Village in search of music, women, and a place in the world. From 1977 to ’79 my days and nights were spent at the university of New York City. This a taste of my days and nights.
Wake up in a small room in East New York to the sounds of Ken Spider Webb announcing the colors of the day on WBLS. My sister is the next room, struggling to get ready for another day at high school in an hostile Italian neighborhood. My mother is in the kitchen downstairs, getting out the cereal and going over the lesson plan for the children at a Crown Heights elementary school. Toss on clothes. Walk by row houses across the street – passed the house full of 5% sons (names True God, Powerful, Knowledge) and the Jehovah’s Witness family with the fine ass daughter who would never come out to party.
Jump on the bus on Pennsylvania Avenue with is filled with tough kids headed to Thomas Jefferson High, one of the city’s roughest. Up past Atlantic Avenue to the transit hub of Broadway Junction, where the A, C, J, Long Island railroad and numerous bus lines converged. Elevated and rickety, the J is elevated. I watch Brooklyn give way to Queens at the ass end of the city. Get off by the Jamaica bus depot (referenced in Tom Browne’s “Jamaica Funk”). Black, white, Latino, Asians etc. gather in and outside of the depot. A melting pot of blurry eyed, purpose driven folks.
I pile onto the Q44 bus headed to St. John’s in Jamaica Estates. Professors share the ride, including one occasionally drunk Priest I have in period three. We ride up to Utopia Parkway and depart onto a windy campus built on a low hill. The morning is jammed with history of jazz, theology, philosophy, and communication arts. Inside the cafeteria in Marillac Hall, I sit in “the black corner,” where couples practice the hustle, gossip and even study. I sit with a few guys and talk music. The college radio station programs a steady diet of Dan Fogelberg. We talk hostile takeover.
Along with my friend Jared, I hope a bus to the E and F train to take us “into the city.” Jared is headed to his internship Daily News copy boy on 42nd and 2nd Avenue. I’m heading to mine at the Amsterdam News. The D train is mixed until 59th Street, then all the white folks get off. Arrive 125th Street is a carnival of street vendors, cluttered stores, bars and record stores blasting gospel and soul. The Amsterdam News on St. Nicholas is a four story walk up with classified on one, executives and advertising on two, accounting and publisher on three, and editorial on four. I get my daily exercise sprinting up the steps on twentysomething legs. The old school folks hate it.
Editorial is manned by a colorful cast. Mel, the entertainment editor and cartoonist, is a witty man, who sometimes seems exhausted by the gig. There are two Nigerians – Willie and Simon, who smoke pipes (and habit I pick up to everyone’s amusement). Tex is the inquiring photographer, who sports a beret and a lecherous look, befitting the “cheesecake” shots that adorn his cubicle. Across from my desk is that of the legendary Les Matthews aka Mr. 1-2-5 Street, the most cynical man I’ve ever met, who is calling the morgue to see if a dude “iced on 135th Street” has been processed yet. Art Rust Jr., a pioneering black radio and TV broadcaster, is sports editor while he looks for a better gig. When not talking sports, Art preaches about the wonders of Duke Ellington’s music.
At the Am News I did a little bit of everything. Calling the precinct for details on a shooting. Rewriting press releases. Art sends me to games (Knicks, Yankees, Mets) where I quickly decide that interviewing half-naked men after a game is not my future. Music is covered by several regulars, so there’s no room for me there. But there hasn’t been a regular film critic since the blaxploitation era, so I get Mel to let me try my hand. (In this period I’d go to the premieres of Star Wars, Close Encounters, Saturday Night Fever, Apocalypse Now, American Gigolo and get a free trip to Vegas for the now forgotten football drama North Dallas Forty.) Finished for the day I hit 1-2-5 Street, going to the Blimpie’s just past the reopened Apollo (now owned by heroin kingpin Guy Fisher) and clothing stores featuring the colorful Eleganza line of suits and shoes. As I eat at Blimpie’s a kid walks by with a boom box, blasting some kid talking rhyme over a beat. Sounds interesting. Will check out the flyer he handed me later.
Take the A train down to Times Square and Forty-Deuce. Port Authority bus depot on Eight Avenue. Across the street the Show World pornography emporium. Across from the New York Times on 43rd Street is an all-night diner favored by Times reporters, pimps, showgirls and Cops. In Billboard’s offices on the 39th floor of 1515 Broadway, I look out the windows where you can see all the way up to Central Park on Broadway and west out to Jersey and Giants Stadium. I check in with my many mentors. Roman, the balding, round and bespeckled talent editor, assigns me to review Ted Nugent at the Garden with this young band AC/DC opening. Nobody wants to review heavy metal, so why not the eager black intern? Anything for a by-line. Radcliff, a short, petite, black cherub with a pipe and a goatee, was the merchandising and disco editor (the later a gig he detested) and he sends me to interview the owners of the disco label Salsoul records.
In the production department was Rocky, who’d gotten me into Billboard after we met at Graham Central Station concert at the Beacon Theater. By day he worked on advertising layouts. By night he reviewed concerts for Billboard and interviewed acts. He’d been hearing that uptown DJs had been buying massive amounts of “cut outs” aka discounted albums at places like Times Square’s Downstairs Records. One of these jocks, named Kool Herc, was spinning in a park in the Bronx on Saturday. We made a plan to go check it out. (Rocky would go on to producer Kurtis Blow’s classics “Christmas Rappin’” and “The Breaks.”) Before leaving the office, I did my rounds of all the reporters for discarded vinyl or albums they had doubles of. On a good day I’d leave with about many as twenty or thirty albums.
At the crowded Times Square station, I hopped the New Lots line for the long ride from the city to far end of Brooklyn. With the records stacked under feet and my head on a swivel looking out for cute girls and stick-up kids, I would pull out my long reporter’s notebook out of my back pocket and scribble. School work. Am News movie reviews. Billboard interview notes. Ideas for story pitches. Parts of short stories. That long ride home was one of the only times in the day I paused.
It's late afternoon when I get back to East New York. I change from sneakers to slip on loafers with a tassel. Splash on some Old Spice. Put on a lime green shirt and Kelly-green pants. Back on “the iron horse” to Times Square. I have a ticket to a movie screening at the Loew’s Astor Plaza on 45th Street. It could have been any film – I went to many those years - but I remember seeing ‘Star Wars’ in ’77. Arriving late I had to grab a seat in the first row as the words scrolled up the screen. I don’t remember much about the film itself, but I recall the crowd rocked through the whole film.
After the screening I dash back to the Times Square subway and take the A to West 4th Street to catch the Meters at the Bottom Line, which was then the premiere talent showcase nightclub in NYC. There I was a record label tab, so I had a hamburger and fries – these free meals kept me alive during my college years. After the gig I made a beeline for Bob Christgau, Village Voice’s esteemed music editor. I’d been sending him story pitches since my senior year in high school. He told me firmly, “You’re not ready Nelson.” (It wasn’t until ’81, after I’d graduated, that he gave me an assignment.)
It's after 11pm, but I am too pissed to go home. Lingering outside the Bottom Line I start talking to a tall, attractive light skinned girl Kerri. She’s with a woman friend and her boyfriend. We vibe. They’re heading over to a loft jazz gig on Great Jones Street in Soho (though it wasn’t known widely as Soho yet). I’m down. The spot, between Broadway and Lafayette, is called Studio Rivbee. Owned by the musicians and painter Sam Rivers. Unlike the Bottom Line, this is modest Mom & Pop atmosphere with cushions for seats and wooden folding chairs. The group is called Double Dark. On sax is David Murray, a prodigious player. On drums is a dude I know from his writings named Stanley Crouch. Murray and Crouch play off each other with spirit as I continue flirting with Kerri.
It’s well after midnight but, in the late ‘70s, the NYC night is young. Our little posse walks over to the east village and then the Lower East Side, which is alive with bars, live music and the occasional rat crossing. Drinking Rolling Rock beers, I bar hop with them into seedy places where I keep my back to the bar to scope out the room. Kerri, a painter/actress is amused by me, but not sure if this is a one-night stand possibility or a potential girlfriend or nothing.
We end up at Save the Robots, an afterhours spot that opened at around 3am and went well into the next day. I’m nursing beers. Kerri and her friends start doing coke. At tables around us people are lighting up alumni foil and pulling put pipes for the opium vapors. Do any I want any? I do not. Amid the cajoling to try something stronger than beer, KerrI shows me scars on her wrist from a suicide attempt. I excuse myself to take a leak. I sneak out the front door. The sun hits my eyes like a smack.
I change a couple of subways until I can find the right one home. I’m leaning back in an empty car when the door opens and a gust of wind blows a crumpled newspaper against my leg. I look down and it’s a copy of the Amsterdam News. I look down and two of my by-lined stories are under my feet. Damn. I kick it away. There’s no sleep til Brooklyn.
Great read. 👍🏾