Tony Visconti: The Autobiography: Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy. Morrissey
grandfather eventually lost his mind over losing his daughter.
With all my music interests I had little time for English, maths or history and I failed these subjects miserably. I barely graduated by the skin of my teeth. When I was fifteen I spent the summer working as a musician in the Catskill Mountains, and I assumed I was done with school. When I got back to New York City in September they sent round a truant officer to the house who said I had to be in school as I was still under 16 and not of legal age to leave. So very reluctantly I went to night school and completed two history classes that I had failed. Finally I passed the Regents exam and got my High School diploma, which made my mother very happy. For me it made no difference; I just couldn’t wait to get out into the world and be a full time musician.
Before all that happened and while I was still at school I had made my first real foray into the world of recording with a neighbourhood guy called Carl Pace. A songwriter and entrepreneur called Jay Fishman wanted to cash in on the duo thing; we were supposed to be the new fourteen-year-old Everly Brothers. Carl, who was being tutored by Jay, found me through the neighbourhood grapevine. Jay named us the Taylor Kids and took us to a small record company, Dorset Records, to cut a song called ‘The Kite’. Bob Lissauer, whose claim to fame had been discovering the Kalin Twins, who had a massive hit with ‘When’, ran the label. While this was not quite the Brill Building it was the next best thing; it was located in another music biz building around the corner on 55th Street between Broadway and 7th Avenue. The orchestrator who wrote the arrangement for the Kalin Twins arranged our record, which had the opening lines, ‘Upon my brand new kite right there in plainest sight, I went and painted your name in letters two-feet high.’ How could anyone forget a lyric like that?
Looking back it seems like a dream, so much so that I can remember very little of the recording session—which is a shame as it should have been something I’d always treasure. I do remember the guitarist in the band was Everett Barksdale, a prodigious session player who recorded with Art Tatum, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, Dinah Washington and Sammy Davis Jr.
This was not our first session for Jay Fishman, we’d done one about a year earlier—it was a disaster. Jay wanted us to do six songs in one day and quite honestly I had never worked so hard in my life. On top of which I was due to take my girlfriend, who was a year older than me, to her prom that night. After the session I took my hired tuxedo to her house to change, but before I could I was violently ill in her bathroom—there was some blood involved. A doctor came and put me to bed and I was diagnosed with a very mild case of tuberculosis, which was not helped by the fact that I was already smoking cigarettes. As an asthmatic with a history of bronchial troubles I shouldn’t have been smoking, nor should I have been working so hard. It forced me to slow down, temporarily.
This enforced break allowed me to spend time with my other passion, photography. I was around eight years old when I really got keen; my father had a great folding roll film camera that used what is now an obsolete size, 616. He showed me how to frame a picture in the viewfinder and to guess the exposure (a guide was on the box the film came in). I would take a few pictures on a roll and then wait maybe weeks for my Dad to finish the roll and get it developed at the drug store. As a treat I was given my own roll of film occasionally and I took some decent photos. He showed me how to take long exposures at night by setting the shutter to ‘bulb’ and resting the camera on a sturdy surface. When I was around nine or ten I was taking experimental photos by moonlight and streetlight.
When I was in my early teens I started to see ‘available light’ photos in magazines, mainly of jazz musicians. I could tell that no flash was used (I hated photos with flash). I started to buy photography magazines that had articles on the new, faster Tri-X film and that the speed could be ‘pushed’ during development. As luck would have it the flat underneath us was vacated by my uncle Eddie and a family moved in by the name of Rizzo. Frank Rizzo was a professional photographer and he took a keen interest in me. I told him I was so unsatisfied with the way pictures came back from the drug store and didn’t look anywhere near as good as pictures in Life magazine; he showed me to his darkroom and I was hooked. He showed me how to develop black and white negative film, how to load the film onto a developing reel in complete darkness, how to mix the chemicals from powder, how to heat them and maintain temperature throughout development—and how to ‘push’ the speed. As an old-timer he was completely against grainy black and white photos but it didn’t stop him from showing me how. Then he taught me how to ‘crop’ a negative, to enlarge only parts of it to make a better composition, and how to choose the right contrast paper to make the best print—all sorts of techniques. I saved my money and bought the cheapest enlarger I could get, but Frank said that the most important part was the lens and I didn’t chintz on that. I got the money from gifts from relatives and from my weekend work as a musician; by the time I was 14 I had a fully functional darkroom in my bedroom and I would fall asleep to the stench of chemicals after a heavy printing session.
When I went off to the Catskill Mountains it was a little like my own version of Dirty Dancing, only I wasn’t dancing. If you don’t live in New York, or even if you do and you’re under 40 years old, the lore of the Catskills will be a mystery to you. It was a great summer retreat, predominantly for Jewish families; there were literally hundreds of hotels up there. I say up there because it’s about a hundred and ten miles north of New York City. The first summer I was there, when I was 15, I played at the Granite Hotel in the odd-sounding town called Kerhonkson. The owner of the hotel was Irwin Gewurtz, a great guy. I was in a band called Ricardo and the Latineers. Ricardo, whose real name was Richard Ritz, was not Latin American, nor was Artie Butler or Bruce Karp, the other players in the band; they were all Jewish kids from Flatbush, Brooklyn. They loved Latin-American music, which was very popular in the late ’50s and early ’60s. They asked me to play guitar for the summer—it was a no-brainer. It got me away from my parents’ house for two and a half months and they paid me $50 a week, which was pretty good money back then. We got room and board and we had tax taken out so at the end my weekly salary was $39 and change. We worked six nights a week and on our night off we would drive back to Brooklyn.
Artie Butler went on to become a very famous arranger, producer, conductor and composer working with Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Neil Diamond, Dionne Warwick, Barry Manilow, Barbra Streisand and even Joe Cocker, whom I also worked with but at a different time. He was a phenomenal piano and vibraphone player. Ritchie Ritz was the drummer, a very tall, lanky guy. Bruce Karp was my best friend in the band, a fine flute and sax player. He was a student at Brooklyn College and like me he was taking the summer off to make some money. He and I had great philosophical discussions, lying beneath the stars outside the cottage we all slept in. We used to take our cots outside to see the brilliant starry night before we fell asleep, without the impediment of city lights. One night Bruce said, ‘Do you realize that this entire universe and all these stars in the sky, and us, you and me and everybody in the band and everybody in the world and everyone in the universe, we could be only one atom inside a dingle berry hanging off a dog’s arse in another universe, a bigger universe, and that universe could be an atom in a dingle berry hanging off another dog’s arse and on and on and on.’ This is actually an Ayurvedic concept from the Vedas of Hinduism. Bruce had heard of this concept before, but it was new to me and I started to sob.
Granite owner Irwin Gewurtz had a great idea to hire two female impersonators to bring in more bar business. He thought people would come into the bar and stare at them and end up buying drinks; unfortunately they just came to stare at Rick Carlson and Kim August. Kim went on to be an ‘actress’, even though he was a guy, playing female roles in some films including No Way To Treat A Lady with Rod Steiger. He turned out to be a good friend who spoke candidly about his sordid life. He was a handsome man when he wasn’t in drag, but he had to draw on masculine eyebrows as they were shaved. On a few occasions he’d let us watch him get dragged up for the evening. As more feminine makeup would be put on the higher the pitch of his voice became, until he put on the wig, turned around and there he was—a woman. At 15 years old this was all rather eye-opening. With Kim there was no sex involved and although Rick had a crush on me, nothing ever came of it. This overexposure to the drag queen world made me question my sexuality but I didn’t want to go down that route; there were too many sweet female Jewish young things to keep me on the straight, and not so narrow.
In