Back home

Sunday, November 17, 2013

It was  like going home again, back to that converted barn called the Red Baron where we used to play most weekends and sometimes Wednesday nights, a dive to end all dives where nothing counted for nothing except what we scored between sets in the parking lot with the girls who came to see us, and sometimes, not even then.

All these years later, and I found it again in the back room of a veterans’ post in Bayonne and a pickup band that included one very famous guitarists, a local piano man, a very promising but shy woman singer, a steady young bass player and a drummer who ran the post.

They were tight most of the time, but they had heart, the guitarist, George Cummings, from a historic novelty band I hadn’t heard of since the 1970s when my best friend and I wandered through the landscape looking for a farm to build a commune on, and our band played David Bowie, Stones and other down and dirty music in that other dive to end all dives.

I found out about the pick up band after an unsuccessful venture searching for music a few weeks ago, and remembered George from passing during the intervening years.

He had played guitar for 1970s iconic pop band Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show, which started out in Union City – one more New Jersey-based band that had helped shape the pop charts for several decades during my younger days.

He had come from Mississippi to Bayonne, claiming he had taken a wrong turn on the Turnpike and ended up here.

As with the bands I worked with, Cummings and his band rose up out the hard-hitting, gritty club scene along Bergenline Avenue in Union City in the 1970s, which made its mark with a handful of hits before fading away – although the most famous was the song “Cover of the Rolling Stone,” which played over and over on FM and AM radio until it came true.

The band’s name was contrived while working in what was then The Bandbox in Union City. The owner asked Cummings and fellow members Ray Sawyer and Dennis Locorriere to come up with a name so they could post it on the sign outside. Cummings borrowed a pencil and wrote the band’s name out, based partly on Captain Hook from the children’s story “Peter Pan.”
This was similar to the band I worked with that for the latter part of its career served as the house band for the revamped Red Baron (reborn at Rose Buds) which changed its name weekly in order to make people think a different band played each week.

After checking out the usual places in Bayonne, including The Venice which had a solo singer performing to pre-recorded music, we made our way to 9th Street and found two of three of band members standing outside.

“We’re on break,” the man who turned out to be the bass player said. “Are you the key board player?”

“No,” I said. “We’re the audience.”

A joke apparently soon turned into reality when we got inside and found only one of a half dozen tables occupied.

The keyboard player arrived from another gig a short time later, and then with this rag tag group of variously experienced musicians, we all went down memory lane, as George and the rest played covers from my past, from Tennessee Ernie Ford and Nat King Cole to Neil Young and Johnny Cash.

I knew nearly every word of every song, although I didn’t always know who wrote them. George did, a played a kind of Jeopardy from the stage challenging us and the band to name the song writers.

At one point, George asked if I wanted to play, too. I declined.

This partly because I just wanted to soak it all in without getting back into the groove of sweat and labor music always meant for me – I play a song over and over and over until I get it. George and these guys knew how to pick things up as they went along for a jam.

I jammed over the years, but only with Pauly and Garrick and Hank, people who I knew so well they didn’t mind when I made mistakes.

But more importantly, much of what got played that night came from the record collection my uncle kept in the dinning room of the old house, stuff that I had listened to over and over and over until I knew them buy heart, stuff that I later put down when I met Hank and we started listening to Bob Dylan, The Beatles and other such stuff we thought was cool and this Americana stuff was not.

But last night, as all these songs got played, I felt the old feelings again and saw the face of my uncle Frank, whose records I played in the old house, and I heard him strumming out these same chords on his big bodied Guild, struggling to sing the songs that he let me sing instead, and for that moment, as George and this pick up band in Bayonne played them, in my head I was singing to my uncle’s guitar playing so many years ago.