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a dozen or so songs. Songs like ‘Ain’t She Sweet’, ‘Side by Side’, ‘Goodnight Ladies’—really old songs from the 1920s and 30s. Although I couldn’t read music the chord symbols were easy to read since the ukulele has four strings; the first chords you learn are all done within the first three frets, because most use open strings and require only one or two fingers to press the frets of the rest. The coloured strings corresponded to the coloured strings in the book. I taught myself every chord in the book; it only took an hour. I realize now that even as a five-year-old I had good powers of concentration.

      Next I learned how to sing the songs, many of which I already knew. Before long I was strumming my ukulele and singing at the top of my lungs. My parents, and everyone who heard me, were impressed and for quite a few years afterwards I was a ‘party piece’. My repertoire of chords had increased to at least fifty, and by the time I was seven I was looking for a much bigger instrument. My ambition was to graduate to the guitar, but my father’s guitar was way too big for me and the strings were steel and too high from the frets. It was a better cheese cutter than a musical instrument. I just needed to become bigger, but in the interim I played the larger baritone ukulele.

      Around the corner from our house in Warren Street was Wyckoff Street and the families that lived there were predominantly African-American; I didn’t grow up feeling a victim of racial hatred, but occasionally the young kids there felt bored or feisty and they would come around the corner and beat up the Italian or Hispanic kids. It wasn’t so much a racial thing as their street against our street. Conversely our back yard, about 20 by 10 feet, where my grandfather grew tomatoes, bordered on the back yard of an African-American family and my mum and the mother of that family were on great speaking terms.

      We lived near the Gowanus Canal and on more than one occasion, when gang warfare broke out, we’d hear of a body found floating in the canal. My parents decided that the neighbourhood was getting a little too rough and so my grandfather sold the house and we all went to live at my other grandparents’ house; we moved in with the Viscontis.

      My father’s father was Nicholas Viciconti. My father grew tired of kids making fun of his surname in school (Anthony Visit-The-Country). My grandfather told him that a long time ago the family name was Visconti, so my father changed our family name to Visconti when he was old enough. Nicholas, who was connected with the early Italian mobs, was a very talented violinist. He knew loads of songs and my father and I—I was about seven years old—would play with him at least once a week. Nicholas claimed that he played in bars with Jimmy Durante, a famous singer/comedian whose career stretched from the ’30s to the ’60s. Durante played piano and he had a sidekick called Eddie Jackson who did most of the singing and soft shoe dancing. It sounded like my grandfather did this on a regular basis and I had no reason not to believe him. But he never became a professional musician whereas Durante went on to form a vaudeville trio called Clayton, Jackson and Durante. He pursued a solo career and was enormously successful as a comedy actor and host of his own television show.

      Nicholas was a sharp dresser; he made a lot of money in the wholesale vegetable and fruit business in what is now Tribeca in Manhattan—he operated from a large warehouse on Vesey Street close to the site of the World Trade Center. I have seen photos of him wearing a three-piece suit with a very thick gold watch fob and wearing white spats over his shoes, topped off with a white fedora on his head. That business was controlled by the Italian mob; Nicholas casually admitted to me one day that he had counted Al Capone as a friend.

      He made enough money to keep a love nest in Manhattan with a beautiful, ginger-haired Irish mistress. He went home to Brooklyn at the weekend and gave my grandmother a weekly allowance to feed herself and the three small children; he would often beat my father and yell abusively at my grandmother. The stock market crash of 1929 ruined him. He took my uncle Eddie (as moral support, I guess) to his love nest and paid off the mistress to get rid of her; my uncle Eddie was only a small boy, but when he came back he told the rest of the family that she was a beautiful woman. Thereafter my grandfather moved back in with Elizabeth, his wife, and she nagged him every single day of the rest of his life. Nicholas was actually a very kind man by the time I was a little kid. He slept in his own room to escape the rants of my grandmother. His lucrative business was now reduced to just selling brown paper bags to the fruit merchants; he could never afford to build up his inventory of farm produce after the crash.

      My grandmother, Elizabeth, came from a well-educated family in Rome, where her father was a judge and others in the family were lawyers; her maiden name was Cantasano. She became betrothed to my grandfather without ever meeting him. All she knew before setting out for New York was that her husband-to-be came from a wealthy New York Italian family. She was sent to New York. She arrived in America, with a big trunk, in which was a dowry. My grandfather was told by his parents to go and meet his future bride and bring her home. Off he went to the port, or so he pretended, before returning home without her, lying that she’d missed the boat. Having been born and raised in New York he did not want to marry an immigrant girl from the old country.

      Ironically my grandmother was a very cultured woman. My great-grandfather was a very forward thinking man and had sent all his children to some form of higher education, and so she spent a year at university in Rome, which was very unusual for any woman in the early twentieth century. She spoke about three languages fluently, Italian, Greek and Albanian, and later on she picked up Yiddish and Spanish in New York working in a sweatshop—she was a very smart lady. Alone in New York, she went to an address she had been given of some relatives where she stayed for a few months. Eventually my grandparents met and they married, but it was no fairytale ending and proved to be a very stormy marriage.

      Although my earliest memories of my grandparents were that they would fight all the time, constantly bickering and yelling, the sixty- to seventy-year-old grandfather I came to know was a lovely man, a real cool guy by then. He taught me how to play the mandolin and I have fond memories of my father, my grandfather and I sitting around the kitchen table playing old songs.

      I was around six when we went to live with the Visconti family on 74th Street between 11th and 12th Avenue. It’s the area of New York that I think of as home, a very safe neighbourhood that I later learned was mob controlled. Most people who lived in this neighbourhood were simple Italian folk, just like back in the old country, and the traditional Italian hierarchy controlled everything. Many years later I asked my mother why there were hardly any other ethnic groups living in our neighbourhood. Most everyone was Italian, Irish and Catholic, with just a few Norwegian Lutherans; there was a conspicuous absence of other ethnicities.

      ‘Well, you know who lives down the hill don’t you?’

      ‘No, who does?’

      She mentioned the name of a very prominent Italian family who have been known to indulge in many Soprano-like activities.

      ‘They ran the neighbourhood, even the real estate agents. If a Black family came to our neighbourhood and asked to see homes the estate agents would say that all the homes were taken and they had nothing even coming up on their books.’

      This general neighbourhood is the one made famous in Saturday Night Fever. The opening scene in which John Travolta walks beneath the elevated train is 86th Street. The place where he bought a pizza is one where I bought pizza slices many times as a kid.

      I wanted to be a pop star since before I was a teenager. I’ve got photos of me posing as Elvis and also—even though I didn’t need them—with horn-rimmed glasses posing as Buddy Holly. By the age of eleven my parents realized two things: I definitely had musical talent, and my hands were big enough for me to have a guitar. Being a precocious kid I used to play my ukulele at the drop of a hat, I had no shame. I remember one exasperated relative asking, ‘Do you always bring that ukulele with you?’ Getting a guitar coincided with Elvis Presley’s arrival on the scene, not that my parents were keen on my learning to play that kind of music, so they sent me to a very good guitar teacher in Ocean Parkway, Flatbush, called Leon Block. I would take the bus from Fort Hamilton Parkway carrying my new guitar in its cloth case for my weekly half hour lessons; from day one he began to teach me to read music. Within a few months my repertoire was hundreds of songs, having quickly relearned everything I knew on the uke. I learned from books that Leon Block had

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