LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘Just borrow somebody’s card and then you can work here’, was Ned’s simple solution. As luck would have it a friend of my father’s had a cabaret card but didn’t use it any more, and so for a year and a half I was this guy. My money increased to $150 a week, and it was enough to convince my father that I had a proper job. I also got to play for a vast range of performers. There was Sophie Tucker, Robert Goulet, Jackie Mason, The Ritz Brothers, and even Milton Berle.

      Uncle Miltie and I became great backstage friends—and yes, his penis is a foot long, and he willingly showed it to all and sundry. I had taken up karate and had lessons for a couple of years and one day he saw me practising backstage on a break and asked if I could teach it to him. I said, ‘Sure, can you teach me some one-liners?’ He was trained in burlesque and was a master of the one-liner. (‘You’ve got some great material, too bad it’s all in your suit.’ ‘You’ve got some great lines, too bad they’re all in your face.’) My parents and their friends came to see the cabaret show one night. I told ‘Uncle Miltie’ (his nickname) that they would be sitting next to the stage. He spotted them instantly because, I guess, my dad and I resembled each other. He asked them to take a bow and pointed to me saying, ‘These are the parents of the Karate Kid.’

      Because he could never remember my name he always called me ‘the karate kid’. This was 1960, years before the film was even written, or probably even thought of. He made my parents take a bow—it certainly convinced my Dad that I was now, at last, a real professional.

      Tony Bennett came to the Town & Country club to play for several weeks. He brought his own rhythm section, piano, bass and drums, so I never played for him. Instead I’d wander around the club with my camera, armed with the fastest colour film available and a 135mm telephoto lens. One picture of Bennett came out really good and I showed it to him. He loved it. He invited me to meet him at Columbia Records the next day. He was releasing a new LP, and he wanted this photo for his cover. For an 18-year-old amateur photographer this was tantamount to winning the lottery. Next day I met him and the company’s art director, a very smug, overtly gay man. He took a quick look at the transparency and said, ‘Can’t use it, we have so many like this already’, and he walked off. The meeting lasted 15 seconds. Bennett turned to me, slightly embarrassed and said, ‘Gee kid, I’m sorry. That’s how it goes.’ I was crushed but managed to hold back the tears. A few minutes later I was back on 7th Avenue in Manhattan and walked aimlessly downtown. I found a movie house playing Mondo Cane, a gross film about gross things, and sat in the darkness fuming and aching.

      In the summer when the nightclub closed down Ned Harvey’s band would play the Catskill Mountains. With Ned I played the Hotel Brickman, a glorified Kochalain, a Yiddish word for a collection of sprawling bungalows that seemed to have been thrown together—far from fancy. The Brickman was more than that; it was a proper hotel with a lobby, outdoor swimming pool and tennis courts. The band lived in a drafty wooden building with two bathrooms that were shared by about thirty of us. The Brickman is now an ashram run by Siddha Yoga Dham of America Foundation; the hotel closed down in the 1970s when New York’s Jewish community found other places to vacation. Back then when people would enquire at what age the Brickman took children their proud boast was, ‘If the kid breathes we’ll take it.’

      For three summers I would migrate the 110 miles north to what was popularly called the Borscht Belt, or the Jewish Alps, in upstate New York. Only nine of us made up the Ned Harvey Band during the summer, in New York the band numbered fourteen players. This was another fantastic period for my musical education during which I learned to write arrangements. Milton Anderson, a.k.a. Milton Drake, a baritone sax player was the band’s arranger as well as a composer (he cowrote, ‘Mairzy Doats And Dozy Doats And Liddle Lamzy Divey’). He not only taught me how to write arrangements, he also showed me how to hold the italic pen correctly, and how to copy music from a pencilled page to a very professional-looking inked page and how to mix the ink. He had a very secret formula for mixing India ink with another ink so that the notes were embossed on the page. I owe this other Uncle Miltie a lot, and when he died he left me his darkroom equipment.

      In the Catskills I met many great players. Most Tuesday nights there was a jam happening somewhere. I got to play with jazz pianist Mike Abbeny and Eddie Gomez, a bass player with whom I felt great rivalry (I’ll bet he never noticed me). There was also a great alto sax player called Artie Lawrence and all these guys went on to have stellar success in the jazz world. Eddie played with Bill Evans, and even turned down a job with Miles Davis. During my third summer in the Borscht Belt another band was working the hotel. The Del Capos, a five-piece band led by Speedy Garfin, an amazing sax player, which included a girl singer. They were so hip and cool and they did a lot of Louis Prima and Keeley Smith material, because it was Speedy’s goal to head a Las Vegas lounge band.

      “Sam” (not his real name), the Del Capos’ piano player, was a heroin addict and this was the first time I came face to face with hard drugs, something of an occupational hazard. An affable pot-head called Freddie Klein had exposed me to marijuana during my first Brickman summer; he worked the hotel diner flipping burgers. Larry Rosen, the drummer from Ned’s band and I would hang out with Freddie. Larry would later become the R in GRP Records, the highly successful jazz label he co-founded with Dave Grusin. The first time I smoked a joint we went back to the diner and watched Freddie at work. In the middle of eating our burgers and drinking our cokes through straws, disaster struck—the ‘high’ kicked in. For some unaccountable reason we looked at Freddie and began to laugh. We laughed so hard into the straws that it caused all the coke to be displaced and fly all over our clothes and all over the place. Freddie started laughing from behind the counter. Larry and I were laughing so uncontrollably we had to go outside and roll around on the forest floor, because we couldn’t stand up.

      Sam was a different proposition altogether. He had spent three years in London, which was where he became addicted to heroin. He got heroin on the National Health Service, which you could do very easily in those days, but was arrested in London for possessing marijuana. He spent about six months in prison before being unceremoniously deported back to New York. Sam became one of my music idols; he could play piano like Oscar Peterson, he was so cool—even down to his cool haircut. He was laconically cool, not at a real loss for words, but stoned on heroin. I didn’t know that at first. There was another guy I befriended at this point called Frank and later I discovered he too was a heroin addict. This was the beginning of a very dark period in my life. I was 19 and heroin and I gradually became acquainted.

      When I first took the ugly drug I had a very bad experience. The buzz lasted all of five minutes and then I spent the next few hours just vomiting uncontrollably. I vomited because I wasn’t yet an addict. I was encouraged to take it again by Sam and Frank, to give it a chance. From then on I didn’t vomit, which meant I was getting what was called a ‘Jones’. I would say that I flirted with heroin for a while, and was addicted for about a three-month period. There was a doctor in New York who would prescribe methadone but only enough to use through withdrawal (a seven-day supply). It was expensive. I managed to keep it a secret from my parents for most of the time, although eventually my mother did find my hypodermic needle (you can’t hide anything from Mum); she discovered my ‘works’ in a hollowed out book and she was wise enough not to tell my father, who would’ve beat me to a pulp—he was very old-school and behaved exactly as his father had done when it came to discipline. She saw me through one methadone programme and I managed to stay off the drug for a long time.

      There was another risk about being an addict in New York City. It meant that to acquire heroin you needed to go to some very bad neighbourhoods. Sometimes I used to go up to Harlem, but only when things were really desperate. For a young white guy it was a very dangerous place to go. I was nearly mugged on several occasions and came close to being arrested once. My main procurer was a waiter, who exacted a high price for his services and would slowly and cruelly fix in front of me before I was able to use his works. A typical hazard of addiction is to overdose, it happened to me twice; luckily both times I was with friends who knew exactly what to do. They injected a saline solution into my veins to nullify the effects of the heroin and walked me around the room so I didn’t die. Many people in a similar predicament were not so lucky, either their friends would panic or wouldn’t know what to do. I heard stories

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