4.

I began to try to write songs as soon as I had the electric guitar. Somehow it just seemed like the natural thing to do—playing the instrument and writing songs went hand in hand. Whenever I heard songs I liked, I tried to emulate them. One of my first attempts was an homage to the Who’s “The Kids Are Alright.”

I also studied the song structures of Brill Building writers like Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Songs with a verse, chorus, and bridge, with great hooks; songs so catchy you knew them already by the time the second chorus arrived. They were about melodies and telling a story.

Harold Schiff’s basement band had stalled, but Matt Rael and I jammed together constantly once I got my guitar. Sometimes a kid named Neal Teeman would join us on drums. We called ourselves Uncle Joe and continued to add songs to our repertoire. Matt was having problems of his own, however, and at some point his parents enrolled him in a private school in Manhattan.

My hair was really long now, but it was very curly. At the time, I hated the curls because the style was straight hair. So I’d buy a relaxer cream called Perma-Strate—it was available in nearby black neighborhoods. Perma-Strate smelled like ammonia and heavy chemicals, and it burned your scalp like nobody’s business. You had to apply it to your hair, comb it back, let it sit, and then comb it forward. On occasions when I left it in too long, my scalp would bleed. Sometimes I’d iron my hair, too. Anything to straighten it out. The mother of another kid I became friends with, David Un, called me “Prince Valiant” because of the look. My dad, meanwhile, had taken to calling me “Stanley Fat Ass.”

I’d met David Un at Parsons junior high, and his family, like Matt’s, were nurturing and artistic. His dad was a painter, his mom a teacher. Like me, David had really long hair. Sometimes when I skipped school to go into Manhattan and haunt 48th Street, he went with me. He was big into music, too. David and I also started mixing as best we could with the budding counterculture.

One day, walking down Main Street in my neighborhood, I noticed a new shop called Middle Earth. It was a head shop, selling water pipes and glass bongs and all sorts of drug paraphernalia. The people behind the counter inside had long hair, too.

Maybe I would fit in here?

I didn’t fit in with normal people, that was sure, but here, right in my own neighborhood, was an alternative. I started to hang out there and talk with the owners as well as a few of the customers who came and went. It wasn’t about the drugs—though I did start to smoke pot once in a while—it was about seeking acceptance. To an outcast, or someone in a sort of self-imposed exile, Middle Earth felt comfortable. Eventually I started taking my acoustic guitar to the shop and playing it while hanging out.

One girl in my school, Ellen Mentin, treated me with an extraordinary amount of patience and understanding. I trusted her enough to try to explain some of my inner demons, but hinting at my problems didn’t reduce my anxiety. Ellen wanted us to become a normal junior high couple—go to the movies together or whatever—but I was incapable of doing things with her in public. It felt too risky, too suffocating, too claustrophobic.

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“Be-in” at age fifteen in Central Park . . . blissed out with a little help.

What if someone started making fun of me while we were together?

I also couldn’t understand why she wanted to be with someone like me—with or without the long hair, I was a freak after all. I even asked her, “Why do you like me? Why do you want to be around me?” It made no sense to me at all.

Ellen and I stayed friends, but being with someone who was steadfastly caring was all but unbearable. Even riding the bus together to go see a movie involved risks I couldn’t get myself to take.

My dad decided to give me his version of the birds and the bees around that time. Out of the blue, on one of our walks, he said, “If you get someone pregnant, you’re on your own.”

Did that mean I’d be out on the street at age fourteen?

Great.

I barely knew how to get someone pregnant, but now I knew it was a one-way ticket to getting thrown out.

As if I’m not already on my own.

I spent the bulk of my time on my own, at home, in my room, shutting everything out and immersing myself in music—listening to my transistor radio, playing guitar, reading music magazines. My mom, feeling guilty about the way my sister’s plight was consuming all her time, also bought me a stereo.

I became an avid follower of Scott Muni’s radio program, The English Power Hour, one of the early FM radio shows to highlight the latest sounds from the UK. In the spring of 1967, Jimi Hendrix, who had moved to the UK, was dominating the English scene and charts, and his music started to filter back to the States on shows like Muni’s. When his first album finally arrived, it hit me like an atom bomb.

I loved to put the Jimi Hendrix Experience album on my new stereo and lie down and press the big speakers against both sides of my head. Even though I was deaf on the right side, when I pressed the speaker against my head, I could hear through bone conduction. I also painted my room purple and strung a set of flashing Christmas lights along the ceiling. I played my guitar and looked at myself in the mirror, lights flashing, and tried to perfect jumps and windmills like Pete Townsend of the Who.

But perhaps the greatest effect Hendrix had was on hair styles. His hair was teased up in a huge puff, and soon Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page had done the same to their hair. Suddenly that became the look. I remember the first day I blew out my hair. No more Perma-Strate for me. As I emerged from my room and got ready to leave the house with my hair now exploding around my head like my heroes’ hair, my mom said, “You’re not going out like that, are you?”

“Yep, see you later.”

It was time to let my freak flag fly.

As junior high neared the end, I auditioned for the High School of Music & Art, a public alternative school on West 135th Street and Convent Avenue in Manhattan. I had been one of the best visual artists in my junior high—drawing was my thing. But equally important, I hoped this specialized school would be a more comfortable environment than the meat grinders I had attended up to that point. I had gone from being stared at for something beyond my control—my ear—to being stared at for something of my own making—my outlandish hair and clothes. Most schools still had dress codes in those days, but the philosophy at Music & Art was that it didn’t matter what you came to school wearing as long as you came to school.

As I saw it, instead of being the freak in school, I’d go to a school of freaks.