chapter nine “AW, NAH. NOT FOR US.”
Polychrome, credited to Nev Charles featuring Opal Jewel, was released by Rivington Records on November 10, 1970. The rushed date was suggested by Howie Kelly, who hoped to capitalize, just before Veterans Day, on the anti-war sentiment of “Yellow Belly” (the album’s first single). In addition to the American pressing, Nev contributed funds from his remaining contractual lump sum to cover a limited UK release. The album included “Red-Handed,” the final recorded track and Opal’s favorite of the replacement songs Nev dashed off after the nixing of “Black Coffee.”
Having blown his budget on the session players, Hize shortchanged other areas, particularly promotion and marketing. To create the album art, he hired another budget-friendly young student, this one a fine arts senior from Pratt Institute. Naomi Sigrin took photos of a colorful candy machine in a brightly lit campus studio, then captured separate shots of Opal and Nev making various facial expressions. After shrinking prints of the portraits down to size, Sigrin cut out the artists’ heads using an X-Acto knife and pasted them over a few of the candies, making it look as if they were trapped inside and available for a nickel. (To Kelly’s great relief, Opal did not go bald on the cover—she wore her Afro wig for the shoot, to mimic the roundness of a gumball.)
BOB HIZE:
We let it go and held our breath. We thought it was good but didn’t know whether that would matter. Rock music was still depressed at the time—we’d just had the one-two punch of losing Jimi and Janis, remember. And the Beatles packing it in a few months before that. If those bedrocks were suddenly gone, it seemed like everything in the industry was shaky, was subject to change with no warning. Anything could happen.
What happened was… not much. Hize’s efforts to generate publicity fell short, and initially the album failed to get much attention at radio stations or with critics. (Most ink at the time went toward George Harrison’s post-Beatles solo release, All Things Must Pass, which dropped later that month.)
However, Nev’s stint at university proved not to have been a total waste. Writer Stewart Fitzsimmons, a City, University of London alum who had attended the journalism school during the period Nev had flitted through, penned a critique that appeared in the British newspaper New Musical Express. In his assessment Fitzsimmons disclosed that, while they did not personally know each other, he had seen Nev play a pub or three around campus.
EXCERPT FROM “UNI TO THE USA,” NME, WEEK ENDING NOVEMBER 21, 1970
By Stewart Fitzsimmons
Since his days performing for a pint, Charles sings with more gravity. The nasal sound that often pushed his clever character studies toward irksomeness has been replaced with a bolder, richer tone—at times it may remind you of the one McCartney employs when singing of Lady Madonna or his darling headed for Golden Slumbers. Perhaps it’s a trick of studio magic, but no doubt a percentage of this change comes honest, from the grit New York City must have shoved underneath his fingernails….
There is also a new colour in Charles’s kit: the Negro collaborator who joins him on the album’s better songs and basks in a solo turn near the end (“Red-Handed”). She calls herself Opal Jewel and, according to the promotional materials NME received, was discovered wasting away in an amateur Detroit sister act. On the quiet romance “Evergreen,” a canon in two, Charles holds the melody steady while his eccentric partner experiments around him. She dips up, she falls down, she speak-sings…. She is not the strongest vocalist by any technical measure, but she won’t be accused of being snoozy.
I found Polychrome to be its most charming when the amps creep up. Should it get any attention in America, “Yellow Belly” will presumably annoy Mr. Nixon and his fogey contemporaries not only with its political message but also with its loud, ramshackle aesthetic. Similarly, “Chalk White” is an ear-piercer turned to 10….
Overall: worth a listen despite its lack of cohesion and its exceedingly silly packaging.
ROSEMARY SALDUCCI:
Bob had me make about a million copies of that article in the NME, and then I had to stuff ’em in envelopes and send ’em out to the same radio stations that he’d already begged so many times before. It wasn’t even a rave, but it was pretty much the only review that existed.
HOWIE KELLY:
I’m looking for the record sales, I’m looking for the airplay, I’m looking for something in Rolling Stone or the Voice or even a publication on the level of your shitty rag. [Laughs] Eh, I’m fucking with you. But I’m saying I would’ve sold my left nut for some real traction on this thing. Hizey comes to me all excited with this one puny review from somewhere twenty thousand miles away, telling me how incredible it is to be in the NME. And I say, “NME? What’s that stand for, Bob? ‘No Money Ever’?”
BOB HIZE:
I had thought the NME piece would lead to some more interest here in the States, but I barely got a shoulder shrug. I castigated myself over that cover art—I thought, Oh, God, people can’t get past it, they’re not bothering to open it up and have a listen, that’s why! Because I couldn’t conceive that the music was not compelling. I knew that it was.
PEARL WELMONT:
Opal mailed us a copy of the album and when me and Mama opened it up and saw her face on the cover, that gumball machine, ooh, we screamed and carried on like children! We ran over to Mrs. Dennis’s apartment to show her and also to use her record player. It was kinda funny when we let the needle drop, because Lord, that music was not what we were expecting. We skipped a couple of the songs, to tell you the truth, because Mama was getting a headache. But still, we were proud.
NEV CHARLES:
Dad rang to tell me that he had trouble locating the record in Birmingham but Carol, good ol’ Carol, she had tracked it down, and she and her friends from the sports club had enjoyed listening to it at their wine-and-cheese Wednesday. So yes, gaze in awe, because I was a smash with the middle-aged-tarts set.
OPAL JEWEL:
Claudia [Hize’s then-wife] invited me and Nev to Thanksgiving dinner that year. Normally I would’ve wanted to spend it with Virgil or Miss Ernestine, but they both went away to see their families, and I didn’t have enough money to travel anywhere. Bob and Claudia were so nice to have us, especially since it was their first big holiday with Melody, but sitting at the table across from Nev—it was sad. He was depressed about the record and still a little upset with me over “Black Coffee,” and I was homesick for the first time since I got to New York. I wanted my mama’s sweet potato pie and some macaroni and cheese, you hear me? I wouldn’t have minded going the rounds with Pearl if I could’ve had that. But there we were in New York, and it was freezing cold and we had put out a turd, and you know good and well white folks can’t make no collard greens.
Hize had little budget left, much less a convincing justification, for a supporting tour. The best he could do was arrange acoustic regional shows and hope that his duo could translate a portion of the energy from the vinyl to a live audience, maybe sell a few albums from the milk crate they lugged to each gig. But he was quickly confronted, once again, with the question that first crossed his mind during the recording sessions: Exactly who was this audience?
BOB HIZE:
We started out at some small rock clubs in the East Village. I had Opal and Nev come along with me so I could make introductions, and most of the white managers would take one look at Opal, even done up as wildly as she could do, and they’d say, “We don’t take R&B acts.” Which is very funny because these same places would’ve killed to have a drop-in by the Rolling Stones. Anyway, once you explained to them that it wasn’t exactly R&B, some of them might relent, but they’d book us on the bill first or second. There’d scarcely be anybody in the house, maybe Virgil LaFleur and his friends, maybe a few NYU students who weren’t valuable because they were too broke to buy drinks, and then when you rang the managers to see about another booking they’d say, “Oh, but you didn’t draw enough people.” Round and round in circles, burning through venues.
We didn’t have the same problem in Harlem and Brooklyn, not exactly, but those broke Opal’s heart in a different way.
OPAL JEWEL:
When we were first out and going to the white spots, the people would be so confused. [Laughs] Looking up at the stage with goofy-ass smiles and tilted heads, like they were trying to process what it was they were seeing. And after every gig it was guaranteed one of these fools would come up to me and raise a fist and say, “Power to the people,” or call me “sister” or something else that would let me know nothing—not the music, not the funny little banter, not even the clothes—was more worthy of comment than my being Black. Don’t misunderstand: Anyone who says they’re color-blind is a damn lie. But there is plenty of time between what you see and what you say. And their little comments, their trying to talk Black or whatever, to me that was them going out of their way to announce they were cool with me being there, cool with me participating in what they obviously believed was their scene.
Then we’d try the Black spots, and the people weren’t confused at all—honey, they’d already made up their minds when they saw Nev and heard that jangle. [Laughs] Sellout, Wannabe, Oreo, Two-Face… For a while, I had a whole new set of nicknames.
JIMMY CURTIS:
The music itself don’t have a color. It’s a continuum that starts with the drum and branches out from there. The industry and the money, that’s what can mess everything up. I understand where black folks are coming from. Rock and roll wasn’t nothing but a step away from the blues, but the whites acted like it was their brand-new bag and then had the nerve to cut most of us out when the money started rolling in. So we were like, Well, fuck it—that’s yours now, and this is mine, and don’t nobody have no business crossing lines. See, this is what I say about America—we always gotta be assigning shit, always labeling it and stuffing it in a box. Always dictating who’s allowed to own what. But end of the day, that don’t have nothing to do with the music, you dig? The music is fire and passion and soul, and however you express it is how you express it.
I get to play behind everybody and I love that, because can’t nobody figure me out. I get a lot of respect. Somebody like Hendrix, though, as visionary as he is, he has a hard time with us skinfolk. They look up at that stage, see all those white longhairs around my exceptional brother and they say, Aw, nah Not for us. Focusing on that when he can make that guitar holler, that’s a tragedy. But that’s what they assume, you know—This child is lost.
BOB HIZE:
Everything dried up faster than you could blink. All prospects dead by the New Year.
OPAL JEWEL:
Of course it was painful, but it was a pain I already knew—I never managed to fit in anywhere but the freak bin. The only reason it got to me is because of how it was affecting Nev. He flapped his gums all the time about being proud to be different, but in his heart of hearts, ooh, that man is cocky. He expected to drop this record and immediately be huge—he wanted the love and the money and a big stamp of approval right across the forehead. Nev used to play at being different, but I don’t know if he ever understood what being different really means. That the regular people like to beat back what’s different, because it scares them half to death.
NEV CHARLES:
I became disillusioned with America, with popular music, with people’s snap judgments and their stereotypes and their willful lack of imagination. But I want to make it clear that despite whatever creative differences came later, I never regretted for one instant working with Opal. I absolutely do acknowledge her role in my career, as part of the reason I am where I am. She helped me bring to life music of which I am extremely proud, and I believe that a place that couldn’t accept the concept of us together was a place I had no business being. So when we hit those early bumps, there was never a question of me switching partners or styles, or going on my own again—it was whether I wanted to even bother trying at all.
OPAL JEWEL:
Naturally my instinct was just to keep moving, moving, moving like I always had, but my partner had gone quiet on me. So I started going down to Ninety-Sixth Street to see about him, see if he wanted to rehearse or let me try out any new songs he might have.
He didn’t want to cut on the heat in his apartment, so he’d come to the door wearing about twelve sweaters and mittens and one of those wool hats with the ball on top. You’d talk and vapor would be pouring out your mouth. He’d have lines on his face from his bedsheets—he’d just be getting up, three o’clock in the afternoon. You’d open his cabinets and all you saw was Campbell’s soup. Not vegetable or chicken noodle or anything that would keep his system up, but the cheap cans you dump into casseroles—cream of mushroom, you know… cheddar cheese. Just nasty.
I figured he’d be too proud to take whatever spare change I had in my pocket, so I started showing up with leftovers from Miss Ernestine’s, or sometimes a pint of pepper steak from this cheap Chinese spot near his place. And I’d tell stories about where I got it and he knew it was lies, but he’d pick at it and then he’d say he was tired and he’d see me later.
It didn’t worry me much at first because you can get by, being poor—in my case it made me more stubborn, more creative. What had me bothered was when he stopped scribbling down lyrics, stopped fooling around on the guitar. It was like it was getting colder outside and everything inside Nev was freezing up too. I went to Bob and I said, He’s not right.
BOB HIZE:
I struggled with guilt over Nev, because we had all got his hopes up and it hadn’t worked out; maybe I had spent the money incorrectly when I should have thought more about the business, and now Howie would surely want to abandon him. I talked to Claudia, who had a deep fondness for Nev and, for as long as she could stand it, a certain patience with me, and she agreed that we could stretch for a while to accommodate him, make his last months in New York at least comfortable. I came up with a ludicrous reason that I needed him around—he could have the sofa in exchange for music lessons for Melody, even though she was only a year old and obviously didn’t yet have motor skills. But that was the ruse we all lived under for a couple months, while he got his pride together—either got a proper job or left to go back to England.
NEV CHARLES:
It was hilarious, really: I had come all the way to America just to turn into George bloody Risehart. I thought about that as Melody banged away on her toy xylophone, thought about my dad and his lady friend, this Carol person, thought about my poor dead mother, and I laughed to keep from falling apart.
As Nev hibernated, Opal blossomed. Artists of all stripes, attracted by her outer wrappings, hovered in her sphere. The New York scene in which she and Virgil immersed themselves could be glittery and confusing, but her social experimentation distracted her from the disappointments of Polychrome and, I imagine, her ongoing affair with my father.
OPAL JEWEL:
Giving up never did anything for anybody. I just figured, Well, this project didn’t work out—on to the next. Plus, I still had a way to go on my contract, and I’m nobody’s freeloader. So I kept myself busy during the downtime. I started drawing out the shows we were gonna have one day, literally making sketches of the stage designs in Nev’s lyrics notebook, and daydreaming with Virgil about the clothes.
VIRGIL LAFLEUR, OPENING AN OLD PHOTO ALBUM:
The winter look was about layers and textures. We used a lot of plush felt, and once even figured out how to tease a purple blanket into a quilted poncho. I threw a belt on it and voilà!—instant chic.
She still wasn’t used to the cold on her bare scalp, so we played with hats—this one is just a pleated turban with a Japanese folding fan hot-glued to the side, see? Ingenuity! Yes, and that one had a salad bowl as the base. We lined the inside with flannel, turned it upside down, and built it up from there…. It had a chinstrap but she had to wear it cocked to the side and hold her head just so—it could not be a windy day. The lip became plum, the eye bronze. Gorgeous. I took a photograph of her every day for a while. My portfolio.
OPAL JEWEL:
I felt like… otherworldly. Like walking art. Whatever I wore was my shell and nothing outside it could touch me. I attracted so much attention just strutting down the street. All that energy—horror, delight, sex, disgust—it would warm me up and then bounce off. Whatever you gave to me, I threw it right back at you, and every day was a performance. Me and Nev couldn’t get a decent crowd anywhere, but I imagined that playing to a giant audience, all those people focused on you and cheering, could give you that feeling two thousand times over. So honey, I was in rehearsals for the role of intergalactic showstopper, and everybody in New York City was on notice.
VIRGIL LAFLEUR:
There was usually a party somewhere downtown on a Saturday night, and if your papa had obligations elsewhere Mad would be my date and we would be the hit. She left an impression. If I went out the next week alone people would ask, “Where’s your fascinating girl?”
OPAL JEWEL:
An art dealer we met somewhere wanted to give me money to show up at his gallery opening. I said, “What do you want me to do, sing?” and he said, “No, just be as fabulous as you are right this moment.” So me and Virgil get there and we walked around and around this gallery, drinking champagne and pretending to look at the paint splatters. Everybody was glamorous and rich and cold, and none of them talked to us much but you could feel them staring out the corners of their eyes. At the end of the night the man gave me fifty bucks and thanked me for coming. I thought, Well, isn’t that interesting.
VIRGIL LAFLEUR:
Our home address fluttered onto someone’s list, and we started receiving invitations. More galleries, concerts, a higher echelon of artists…
OPAL JEWEL:
Sometimes it did get boring. I didn’t mind the attention, but some of these party-party scenesters could be as phony inside as they were out, and besides that they were half-crazed on speed and their own huge egos. You’d try to hold a conversation with these people about something, anything—politics, music, what you ate for breakfast—and they’d be nodding like they were listening, but their eyes would be spinning out of their heads.
Virgil suggested I start smoking weed, God bless him, so I could relax and make it through the nights. He promised something big was gonna happen. For him that meant meeting Miss Diana—Vreeland, not Ross, although he wouldn’t have been mad at that either. For me, it meant getting me and Nev booked for a show at Max’s [Kansas City, a restaurant and club near Union Square].
Now that was a decent place—a wild, drugged-out place, yeah, but a hot spot for freaks and any artist who loved them. By the time I started making that scene, Andy Warhol had stopped showing up, but his vibe still lingered in that back room he ruled—you know, the feeling that you could be a nobody weirdo one day and then pop out of Max’s a glam superstar the next. Everybody who went had a quality about them, a buzz, and the connections were legendary. I wasn’t surprised, when Blondie got big, to hear that Debbie Harry had once waited tables at Max’s, or that Iggy Pop first met David Bowie there.
The summer before I started going, they’d flipped the upstairs into a venue for parties and concerts. The Velvet Underground had done a residency, the last shows before Lou [Reed] left the band, and after that the upstairs only got hotter. You never knew who might show up. Celebrities, yeah, that was always a given. But also maybe [music executives] Ahmet Ertegun or Clive Davis [who signed Aerosmith after a 1972 show at Max’s]—money folks who might be useful to me and Nev if Rivington did decide to drop us.
I was trying to learn how to work the place. My MO was to act the same way Lou sang, or like my favorite, Rose Stone, on “Everyday People”—cool and casual, you know… unbothered. I couldn’t walk up in there demanding to talk to [Max’s concert booker] Sam Hood, or pass out the record and beg for a shot. So I made my way around. I smoked, drank my wine, studied the people and the shows they put on. I made conversation with the ones around me and they thought I was funny, I guess, and maybe I looked extra interesting in the red light [emanating from a backroom sculpture by Dan Flavin]. And then I casually slipped in that oh yeah, I do music, me and my British partner…. Ooh, I wanted a shot at that upstairs so bad! “Nev Charles featuring Opal Jewel at Max’s Kansas City”: I was already drawing up the flyer, honey, I was visualizing!
But we never did make it to Max’s, because Rivington Showcase happened before we had the chance. Imagine if our first big show had been there instead: Maybe I wouldn’t be talking to you today. I’d like to think I would, though. I’d like to think that we couldn’t help but get famous, just because we were that good. I’d like to think that folks didn’t have to end up destroyed for Opal & Nev to have made a name.