Joel Lewis
from: Frownland: A Memoir with Music
If you have decided to pick up and read this piece, you are probably half-expecting one of those redemptive “music saved my live when I was growing up” memoirs that are plentiful enough across all quadrants of the internet. I suppose the kicker in this essay/memoir is that is written by a Child of A Holocaust Survivor (we prefer to call ourselves “2G” as in Second Generation). Hey, I hopefully would like to hear some editor say, this is a new angle on the Shoah! But here’s the thing, talk of redemption & healing messages gives me shpilkes (try “the willies” as an English equivalent.). I tend to agree with my friend, fellow Jersey-bred 2G guy novelist Melvin Jules Bukiet that we really learn nothing from the Holocaust. But I’ll amend Melvin’s observation by noting that more than one regime has learned something from the Holocaust --that the political aims of genocide –eliminating an ethnic group or a particular class from the body politic far outweigh any retribution or punishment to the aggressing party. Post-WW2 West Germany was administered by ex-Nazis, especially its judiciary who often levied parking violation level fines for genocidal crimes deserving of long prison terms. And do I need to get into the cases of Rwanda or the Khmer Rouge (among many suitable candidates) to drill my argument deep into the ground?
As far as music goes, as much as I’ve been deep into it for over 50 years, I think popular music is more a mirror to the moment than a useful barometer of social consciousness. I bet if you wade into the crowd at a Trump rally, you’ll find a Woodstock veteran, someone who saw “Jimi” play at Winterland, or danced in a mosh pit to Flipper. And what music did for me is that it gave an unfocused kid some focus, and something to organize a life around when nothing else was really forthcoming. It is simple as that.
I was a fat kid, with tendencies towards isolating behavior. I grew up in West New York, NJ, a town on the Hudson Palisades opposite midtown Manhattan. It was a safe & fairly placid working class town, but I hardly had any friends in the neighborhood as I went to a Jewish day school in a nearby city where the kids I was friends with lived bus rides away. I spent my off hours and weekends, reading comic books & Mad magazine indoors or walking along Boulevard East, watching the railroad car floats being pushed across the Hudson by tugs. Sometimes, I would play Chinese handball by myself using the wall of the two-family apartment building we lived in, accompanied by my six-transistor radio blaring a Yankee game.
Summer brought some respite from this tedium when we load up the car & head up to the Catskills where I’d spend the summer hanging out with a gang of kids – many of whom were my classmates at my Day School. But then the bankruptcy of my father’s Schiffli Lace embroidery factory put an to such summer idylls.
The group of Holocaust Survivors who settled in our area became involved in what they called “the embroidery business”. The industry was centered in the North Hudson community where we resided. The heavy machines that produced the embroidered patterns that found there way onto wedding gowns and brassieres were brought to our area by Swiss and German immigrants in the late 19th century; then successive immigrant communities worked in the small mostly one or two machine shops that seemed slipped between the one and two-family homes that made up our community.
After a few years of working with a partner, my father decided to strike out on his own. The garment business was still strong in Manhattan in the late 50s before the rise of the cheaper Asian markets. His one machine shop was named after his hometown in Poland, Koval Embroidery, and was located on Harrison Place in West New York,. My mother did the books, my father hired a “watcher” (nomenclature was not sophisticated in the business) and his seamstress was the wife of a local cop -which came in handy when he needed to run the machine on a Sunday against local ordinance.
My father’s business reversal marked our entire family as a failure. Everyone else’s father had some sort of embroidery related business, ranging from selling supplies to “jobbing” out assignments from the Garment District textile firms to the gritty work of manufacturing the trimming that would be eventually affixed to women’s garments. My dad ended up working for his former business partner. The sort of situation in which men “go out for a pack of cigarettes”, running out on their family, with other men fathoming the desperation of their decision
Coinciding with my family’s slide down the monkey bars of capitalism was the emergence of the Beatles. It almost seemed that all of us in the Yeshiva of Hudson County school yard were possessed by British dyybuks. One day, we were just 8 year olds playing frozen tag, then the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan & by next morning we were all yammering about Liverpool, the River Mersey & growing our hair long. Soon, we were collecting Beatle trading cards). We spoke in Carnaby Street slang like “Fab”, “gear”, “birds”, “boss” &, after a long day at Yeshiva, proclaim, “I’m fagged out!” Sandy Alter, a shammes’s son, suddenly started speaking in a British accent to match the collarless Edwardian jacket he began wearing to school every day. And we all shared an enduring belief that Ringo was Jewish! After all, he had a big Jewish-type nose, as well as having changed his name from Richard Starkey to Ringo Starr – similar to what many Jewish families had already done. My family had gone from Lcyzzki (which I was born as) to Lewis. I sometimes thought we should change our names again and go somewhere where our friends didn’t look down us as schleps.
I was among my fellow Yeshiva bochers possessed by the Limey kinehora. After burning out too many nine volt batteries on my father’s Westclox alarm clock radio, I began saving up my allowance, cashing in soda bottles and hanging onto every quarter any relative gave me in order to get my own 6-transistor radio.
While everyone else seemed to be a Beatles fan (jeez, my mom thought Paul was cute!), my band was the Rolling Stones. What was it about the Stones that appealed to me as a grade schooler? I knew nothing about their deep roots in American blues, rock n’ roll & r n’ b. Their leering sexual innuendos sailed over my head &, frankly, they really were not aiming their music at my demographic – the band’s original fan base were students at the University of London who admired their early set lists that consisted of nothing but obscure black American music.
I think their outsider status appealed to me. Unlike the other British bands that doffed matching band outfits & worked very hard at appealing to both young girls & their mums, the Stones showed up on national TV in a motley array of sweatshirts, denim jackets & Teddy Boy cast-offs (save for their immaculately dressed drummer Charlie Watts). There were no Rolling Stones comic books, Rolling Stone bubble gum cards or a Rolling Stone movie (& when Jagger & Co. took a stab at celluloid they sure weren’t going to do another Hard Day’s Night – they first tried to acquire the rights to A Clockwork Orange but were outbid by Stanley Kubrick. They then purchased the rights to Dave Wallis’ 1964 novel “Only Lovers Left Alive” -- the premise of which is that all the adults commit suicide & the kids are more than just all right, they take over the planet!
It never occurred to me to learn an instrument. Simply, I knew my parents really couldn’t afford to pay for lessons & I had enough self-awareness to realize how undisciplined I was. It was also hard to imagine myself, even in my daydreams, to be onstage performing without people laughing at me
2.
By High School, I was spending my after-school time and weekends haunting record shops. I had gotten an FM radio as a 8th grade graduation present & discovered the world of “underground” rock that come into the youth mainstream in the wake of Woodstock. My station was WNEW-FM & its uber-hip d.j.s so inspired me that I decided that I wanted to become an underground d.j. when I grew up! To help launch myself onto this career path, I actually joined the staff of the school radio station “WNBHS”, which piped music into the school cafeteria (a true captive audience as we could not go out for lunch) & was given a slot as I had developed something of a reputation as “a music guy”. My stint was brief, I think two weeks, as kids intensely disliked my sets which included helping of Soft Machine, The Stooges’ “Funhouse” & Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew” – this in the heyday of Grand Funk Railroad. After my brief water rocket to stardom, I retreated back to the basement among my numerous LP jackets and back issues of Rolling Stone, Circus & Crawdaddy
I had a round of record stores I used to visit. I would take the #54 Manhattan Transit for the ride up to the Sam Goody’s at the Garden State Plaza. This was North Jersey’s only full service record store & had a deep selection of jazz as well as imported LPS from the UK – which were heavily collected during the heyday of progrock. I hung about there so much, that one of the clerks gave me a “courtesy card” which allowed me a permanent discount when I visited.
Unknown to my parents, I used to take the bus into Manhattan and visit the record shops in midtown. Being of limited means, I favored the King Karol Sales Annex on 10th Avenue & 42nd Street. The large store was brimming with $1.99 “cut-outs” (Records that did not sell were often sold to rack jobbers rather than being returned to the distributor. The jobbers placed these records in “cut-out” bins often found in Woolworth’s, supermarkets & other discount stores.) I was able to acquire most of Frank Zappas’s output on the Verve label quite cheaply, as well as building the basics of my budding jazz collection. Occasionally, I’d go over to their main store east on 42nd, near 6th Ave. At the time, Karol’s could make good on their boast that they kept every in-print US LP in stock. Sadly, their prices were beyond my means. However, I did make friends with a record clerk named Ric Colbeck, a British jazz trumpeter who was recently rescued from absolute obscurity when Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore put his lone solo effort, The Sun Is Coming Up, on his list of top ten great “out” jazz classics.
As a young jazz tyro, I was thrilled to know a real live jazz musician. And, mutually, Ric saw a repository for his heaps of bullshit. Ric told me how Miles Davis stole the idea of the electric trumpet from him, how hard it was to survive as a European among the Black avant-garde scene & darkly muttered about “heavy scenes in the Bronx.” I didn’t really care what he told me, as he seemed to take me seriously. No one really knows what happened to Colbeck, other than he is no longer alive.
My main record store hangout was “The Music Scene”, located a long walk down Bergenline Avenue in West New York. They had a deep inventory, a great & an ever-changing cut-out bin; a knowledgeable staff & prices far lower than other shops in the area (only years later did I learn the shop was mobbed up).
Soon, I became a regular, coming by once or twice a week & the staff not even minding if I didn’t buy anything. I became particular friends with one of the clerks, Eddie Abahoonie, who was my age and lived in nearby Weehawken. He was a tall kid, with the sort of unmanageable brilloed hippie hair that makes so many of today’s teens crack-up when they peruse their parent’s high school yearbooks. “Dad, did you really look like this back then?” Eddie & I hung out outside of the record shop, usually a ‘session” at one of our houses playing treasured tracks to enlighten one another.
It was late in May and, as usual, I walked down to West New York to peruse the cut out bins of The Music Scene. Eddie came out of the back with a stack of Yes’s Tales of the Topographic Ocean. “Hey, wasn’t it just your birthday,” he asked with a big grin on his face. When I affirmed, Eddie said, “Well, I have a birthday present for you.” He put Yes’s latest opus onto a table , then shoved his hand deep into the nether regions of the understock and pulled out an album: “Happy Birthday,” he announced – from Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band!” Eddie had handed me a copy of “Trout Mask Replica” (TMR) The album, released when I was freshman, had a legendary status among serious rock fans, especially fans of Frank Zappa – which was as far out as you could get in the early 70s. Trout Mask had been instantly proclaimed a classic upon release – with Rolling Stone magazine featuring a long profile on the artist & assigning Lester Bang the honor of reviewing the masterpiece. Although I owned other Beefheart records and was fond of the TMR tune “Ella Guru” from a Warner Brothers sampler collection, the album was a double record & was out of my price range. I suspect Eddie had done some inventory shrinkage on my behalf so I could become one of the initiates of the Beefheart cult.
I only saw Eddie one more time, a mid-August afternoon a few months later at the Paramus Sam Goody’s . I was looking for Terry Riley & John Cale’s recent but now out-of-print “Church of Anthrax.” Eddie was on the prowl for ex-Yes & current Flash guitarist Peter Banks’s second solo offering Two Sides of Peter Banks. “It’s got Jan Akkerman & Steve Hackett on guitar & Phil Collins plays drums,” he exclaimed. “Sounds cool,” I responded.
After a bit of mutual perusing of the import bins. Eddie piped up “ Hey, Joel, whadidyathink of Trout Mask?” I assumed a sorta basso tone: I quoted a Beefheart line that was almost a password to the initiated. Eddie, without missing a beat, gave me the countersign. We cracked each other up and wished each other well in our college journeys. Eddie was on his way to Boston University to study business and I was heading off to a low-rent state college.
If you have decided to pick up and read this piece, you are probably half-expecting one of those redemptive “music saved my live when I was growing up” memoirs that are plentiful enough across all quadrants of the internet. I suppose the kicker in this essay/memoir is that is written by a Child of A Holocaust Survivor (we prefer to call ourselves “2G” as in Second Generation). Hey, I hopefully would like to hear some editor say, this is a new angle on the Shoah! But here’s the thing, talk of redemption & healing messages gives me shpilkes (try “the willies” as an English equivalent.). I tend to agree with my friend, fellow Jersey-bred 2G guy novelist Melvin Jules Bukiet that we really learn nothing from the Holocaust. But I’ll amend Melvin’s observation by noting that more than one regime has learned something from the Holocaust --that the political aims of genocide –eliminating an ethnic group or a particular class from the body politic far outweigh any retribution or punishment to the aggressing party. Post-WW2 West Germany was administered by ex-Nazis, especially its judiciary who often levied parking violation level fines for genocidal crimes deserving of long prison terms. And do I need to get into the cases of Rwanda or the Khmer Rouge (among many suitable candidates) to drill my argument deep into the ground?
As far as music goes, as much as I’ve been deep into it for over 50 years, I think popular music is more a mirror to the moment than a useful barometer of social consciousness. I bet if you wade into the crowd at a Trump rally, you’ll find a Woodstock veteran, someone who saw “Jimi” play at Winterland, or danced in a mosh pit to Flipper. And what music did for me is that it gave an unfocused kid some focus, and something to organize a life around when nothing else was really forthcoming. It is simple as that.
I was a fat kid, with tendencies towards isolating behavior. I grew up in West New York, NJ, a town on the Hudson Palisades opposite midtown Manhattan. It was a safe & fairly placid working class town, but I hardly had any friends in the neighborhood as I went to a Jewish day school in a nearby city where the kids I was friends with lived bus rides away. I spent my off hours and weekends, reading comic books & Mad magazine indoors or walking along Boulevard East, watching the railroad car floats being pushed across the Hudson by tugs. Sometimes, I would play Chinese handball by myself using the wall of the two-family apartment building we lived in, accompanied by my six-transistor radio blaring a Yankee game.
Summer brought some respite from this tedium when we load up the car & head up to the Catskills where I’d spend the summer hanging out with a gang of kids – many of whom were my classmates at my Day School. But then the bankruptcy of my father’s Schiffli Lace embroidery factory put an to such summer idylls.
The group of Holocaust Survivors who settled in our area became involved in what they called “the embroidery business”. The industry was centered in the North Hudson community where we resided. The heavy machines that produced the embroidered patterns that found there way onto wedding gowns and brassieres were brought to our area by Swiss and German immigrants in the late 19th century; then successive immigrant communities worked in the small mostly one or two machine shops that seemed slipped between the one and two-family homes that made up our community.
After a few years of working with a partner, my father decided to strike out on his own. The garment business was still strong in Manhattan in the late 50s before the rise of the cheaper Asian markets. His one machine shop was named after his hometown in Poland, Koval Embroidery, and was located on Harrison Place in West New York,. My mother did the books, my father hired a “watcher” (nomenclature was not sophisticated in the business) and his seamstress was the wife of a local cop -which came in handy when he needed to run the machine on a Sunday against local ordinance.
My father’s business reversal marked our entire family as a failure. Everyone else’s father had some sort of embroidery related business, ranging from selling supplies to “jobbing” out assignments from the Garment District textile firms to the gritty work of manufacturing the trimming that would be eventually affixed to women’s garments. My dad ended up working for his former business partner. The sort of situation in which men “go out for a pack of cigarettes”, running out on their family, with other men fathoming the desperation of their decision
Coinciding with my family’s slide down the monkey bars of capitalism was the emergence of the Beatles. It almost seemed that all of us in the Yeshiva of Hudson County school yard were possessed by British dyybuks. One day, we were just 8 year olds playing frozen tag, then the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan & by next morning we were all yammering about Liverpool, the River Mersey & growing our hair long. Soon, we were collecting Beatle trading cards). We spoke in Carnaby Street slang like “Fab”, “gear”, “birds”, “boss” &, after a long day at Yeshiva, proclaim, “I’m fagged out!” Sandy Alter, a shammes’s son, suddenly started speaking in a British accent to match the collarless Edwardian jacket he began wearing to school every day. And we all shared an enduring belief that Ringo was Jewish! After all, he had a big Jewish-type nose, as well as having changed his name from Richard Starkey to Ringo Starr – similar to what many Jewish families had already done. My family had gone from Lcyzzki (which I was born as) to Lewis. I sometimes thought we should change our names again and go somewhere where our friends didn’t look down us as schleps.
I was among my fellow Yeshiva bochers possessed by the Limey kinehora. After burning out too many nine volt batteries on my father’s Westclox alarm clock radio, I began saving up my allowance, cashing in soda bottles and hanging onto every quarter any relative gave me in order to get my own 6-transistor radio.
While everyone else seemed to be a Beatles fan (jeez, my mom thought Paul was cute!), my band was the Rolling Stones. What was it about the Stones that appealed to me as a grade schooler? I knew nothing about their deep roots in American blues, rock n’ roll & r n’ b. Their leering sexual innuendos sailed over my head &, frankly, they really were not aiming their music at my demographic – the band’s original fan base were students at the University of London who admired their early set lists that consisted of nothing but obscure black American music.
I think their outsider status appealed to me. Unlike the other British bands that doffed matching band outfits & worked very hard at appealing to both young girls & their mums, the Stones showed up on national TV in a motley array of sweatshirts, denim jackets & Teddy Boy cast-offs (save for their immaculately dressed drummer Charlie Watts). There were no Rolling Stones comic books, Rolling Stone bubble gum cards or a Rolling Stone movie (& when Jagger & Co. took a stab at celluloid they sure weren’t going to do another Hard Day’s Night – they first tried to acquire the rights to A Clockwork Orange but were outbid by Stanley Kubrick. They then purchased the rights to Dave Wallis’ 1964 novel “Only Lovers Left Alive” -- the premise of which is that all the adults commit suicide & the kids are more than just all right, they take over the planet!
It never occurred to me to learn an instrument. Simply, I knew my parents really couldn’t afford to pay for lessons & I had enough self-awareness to realize how undisciplined I was. It was also hard to imagine myself, even in my daydreams, to be onstage performing without people laughing at me
2.
By High School, I was spending my after-school time and weekends haunting record shops. I had gotten an FM radio as a 8th grade graduation present & discovered the world of “underground” rock that come into the youth mainstream in the wake of Woodstock. My station was WNEW-FM & its uber-hip d.j.s so inspired me that I decided that I wanted to become an underground d.j. when I grew up! To help launch myself onto this career path, I actually joined the staff of the school radio station “WNBHS”, which piped music into the school cafeteria (a true captive audience as we could not go out for lunch) & was given a slot as I had developed something of a reputation as “a music guy”. My stint was brief, I think two weeks, as kids intensely disliked my sets which included helping of Soft Machine, The Stooges’ “Funhouse” & Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew” – this in the heyday of Grand Funk Railroad. After my brief water rocket to stardom, I retreated back to the basement among my numerous LP jackets and back issues of Rolling Stone, Circus & Crawdaddy
I had a round of record stores I used to visit. I would take the #54 Manhattan Transit for the ride up to the Sam Goody’s at the Garden State Plaza. This was North Jersey’s only full service record store & had a deep selection of jazz as well as imported LPS from the UK – which were heavily collected during the heyday of progrock. I hung about there so much, that one of the clerks gave me a “courtesy card” which allowed me a permanent discount when I visited.
Unknown to my parents, I used to take the bus into Manhattan and visit the record shops in midtown. Being of limited means, I favored the King Karol Sales Annex on 10th Avenue & 42nd Street. The large store was brimming with $1.99 “cut-outs” (Records that did not sell were often sold to rack jobbers rather than being returned to the distributor. The jobbers placed these records in “cut-out” bins often found in Woolworth’s, supermarkets & other discount stores.) I was able to acquire most of Frank Zappas’s output on the Verve label quite cheaply, as well as building the basics of my budding jazz collection. Occasionally, I’d go over to their main store east on 42nd, near 6th Ave. At the time, Karol’s could make good on their boast that they kept every in-print US LP in stock. Sadly, their prices were beyond my means. However, I did make friends with a record clerk named Ric Colbeck, a British jazz trumpeter who was recently rescued from absolute obscurity when Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore put his lone solo effort, The Sun Is Coming Up, on his list of top ten great “out” jazz classics.
As a young jazz tyro, I was thrilled to know a real live jazz musician. And, mutually, Ric saw a repository for his heaps of bullshit. Ric told me how Miles Davis stole the idea of the electric trumpet from him, how hard it was to survive as a European among the Black avant-garde scene & darkly muttered about “heavy scenes in the Bronx.” I didn’t really care what he told me, as he seemed to take me seriously. No one really knows what happened to Colbeck, other than he is no longer alive.
My main record store hangout was “The Music Scene”, located a long walk down Bergenline Avenue in West New York. They had a deep inventory, a great & an ever-changing cut-out bin; a knowledgeable staff & prices far lower than other shops in the area (only years later did I learn the shop was mobbed up).
Soon, I became a regular, coming by once or twice a week & the staff not even minding if I didn’t buy anything. I became particular friends with one of the clerks, Eddie Abahoonie, who was my age and lived in nearby Weehawken. He was a tall kid, with the sort of unmanageable brilloed hippie hair that makes so many of today’s teens crack-up when they peruse their parent’s high school yearbooks. “Dad, did you really look like this back then?” Eddie & I hung out outside of the record shop, usually a ‘session” at one of our houses playing treasured tracks to enlighten one another.
It was late in May and, as usual, I walked down to West New York to peruse the cut out bins of The Music Scene. Eddie came out of the back with a stack of Yes’s Tales of the Topographic Ocean. “Hey, wasn’t it just your birthday,” he asked with a big grin on his face. When I affirmed, Eddie said, “Well, I have a birthday present for you.” He put Yes’s latest opus onto a table , then shoved his hand deep into the nether regions of the understock and pulled out an album: “Happy Birthday,” he announced – from Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band!” Eddie had handed me a copy of “Trout Mask Replica” (TMR) The album, released when I was freshman, had a legendary status among serious rock fans, especially fans of Frank Zappa – which was as far out as you could get in the early 70s. Trout Mask had been instantly proclaimed a classic upon release – with Rolling Stone magazine featuring a long profile on the artist & assigning Lester Bang the honor of reviewing the masterpiece. Although I owned other Beefheart records and was fond of the TMR tune “Ella Guru” from a Warner Brothers sampler collection, the album was a double record & was out of my price range. I suspect Eddie had done some inventory shrinkage on my behalf so I could become one of the initiates of the Beefheart cult.
I only saw Eddie one more time, a mid-August afternoon a few months later at the Paramus Sam Goody’s . I was looking for Terry Riley & John Cale’s recent but now out-of-print “Church of Anthrax.” Eddie was on the prowl for ex-Yes & current Flash guitarist Peter Banks’s second solo offering Two Sides of Peter Banks. “It’s got Jan Akkerman & Steve Hackett on guitar & Phil Collins plays drums,” he exclaimed. “Sounds cool,” I responded.
After a bit of mutual perusing of the import bins. Eddie piped up “ Hey, Joel, whadidyathink of Trout Mask?” I assumed a sorta basso tone: I quoted a Beefheart line that was almost a password to the initiated. Eddie, without missing a beat, gave me the countersign. We cracked each other up and wished each other well in our college journeys. Eddie was on his way to Boston University to study business and I was heading off to a low-rent state college.