Tony Visconti: The Autobiography: Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy. Morrissey
that I was not drafted for ‘neurological reasons’, the same excuse the psychiatrist used on my military record for volunteering for therapy. My father turned to me in disgust and said, ‘That’s a shame. The army could’ve made a man out of you.’ My mother, though, was overjoyed; this was a time of conscription, so lots of young men my age were drafted for that war, and I lost a couple of friends.
My friendship with Speedy Garfin and the rest of his band continued when we returned to New York. I ended up joining the band, replacing both the girl singer and Sam the piano player. To me Speedy was a kind of rock star and being the fourth member in a group with him was far more rewarding artistically. I sang the girl’s part, in a high falsetto, but instead of playing bass I played the guitar. We played a nightclub on the East Side of Manhattan run by one of the ladies referred to in the song, ‘Lullaby Of Broadway’: ‘she’s a classy broad,’ as Sinatra would have said. She was brassy, sassy and on the wrong side of fifty, but she commanded respect. The club boasted a varied clientele, including the local priest who came in once a week to drink at the bar, only leaving after he got a donation for his church. There were people that worked in the neighbourhood, actors and actresses, members from other bands; we also had the Mob drop in fairly regularly.
‘The Don’ would always arrive with eleven or so of his closest friends—mostly guys but also a few women as well. I only knew him as ‘The Don’ and he always brought with him a handsome young guy of about eighteen or nineteen. Speedy had a party piece—‘Come Back To Sorrento’—during which he would drop down on one knee and play his soprano saxophone with great intensity. The very first time we played it ‘The Don’ sent one of his ‘friends’ to us who said, ‘He wants you guys to have this.’
He handed us a $100 bill, which was a lot of money in 1963, even when it was split four ways. The next time ‘The Don’ was in we played ‘Come Back To Sorrento’ and we all got down on one knee, threw our heads back and looked as passionate as we could. We got another $100. This ritual was played out many times.
One such evening ‘The Don’ himself got up from the table and came up to me. This was most disarming because he was a very large man with unquestionable dubious credentials.
‘Hey kid can I talk to you.’
I gulped and said, ‘Sure.’
‘You know that kid I always bring with me,’ said ‘The Don’, pointing to the young boy at the table. ‘He’s an actor. He’s my protégé. He likes guys, and he likes you, and he wants you to come home with him tonight, is that OK with you?’
‘Well, I—I—I don’t know,’ I stammered. ‘I’m really not that way, I’ve never done anything like that before.’
‘Hey, come on, how old are you kid?’
At this point ‘The Don’ moved even closer to me and I was eclipsed by his height and girth. I told him I was nineteen and this caused him to become somewhat exasperated.
‘You’re nineteen, you know when I was nineteen I didn’t know if I liked boys or girls. I mean, you know, what’s the difference, what’s the big deal? Come on kid are you going to go with him or not?’ He was practically shouting in my ear.
I was getting to the point I could barely speak; I couldn’t believe that this was happening to me.
‘I—I—I—I don’t know.’ But he was not taking no for an answer.
‘Hey listen, he was just with Tony Curtis the other night’ (this couldn’t be true, he was just trying to impress me) ‘…this kid is a good looking guy he can have anybody he wants.’
I was terrified and confused. I’d be damned if I do and I’d be damned if I don’t. They’ll throw me in a car and I’ll end up with a pair of cement boots. I had no idea what to do; my brain simply froze with ‘The Don’ hovering over me waiting for a decision. In the middle of this sleazy Zen dilemma, Buddy Monticelli, our bass player, appeared from behind the curtain where he’d been listening to the conversation.
‘Can I have a word with you?’ says Buddy to ‘The Don’, in Italian.
He nodded his head and casts me a dirty look. Buddy took him aside talking to him all the while in Italian. Within a minute ‘The Don’ came back over to me and said, ‘It’s okay kid, I didn’t know you were married.’
Buddy, thinking on his feet, fabricated a story that I married a nice Italian girl very young and we had kids. As I was in that most sanctimonious of Catholic Italian institutions I was excused from ‘The Don’s’ plans of debauchery with his protégé. As beautiful as the song is, ‘Come Back To Sorrento’ will always remind me of that frightening evening.
We did gigs in other parts of America, including six weeks at a Holiday Inn in Scottsdale Arizona—it was fantastic. The band was no longer called the Del Capos, instead we were The Speedy Garfin Quartet and, given our leader’s ambition, our repertoire was Las Vegas lounge-style that included songs like ‘Jeepers Creepers’ and ‘(Your Kisses Take Me To) Shangri-La’—all in four part harmony. We played instrumentals and lots of Sinatra’s songs because the drummer, Tony De Mar, could really nail Frank. Buddy Monticelli also had his own version of a Sinatra voice; we were a very versatile group.
While I was in Arizona I would often take the bus to downtown Phoenix, a world apart from Brooklyn or anywhere on the East Coast. I even went ‘native’ and bought myself a cowboy shirt and a belt with a silver buckle. I slept out under the stars at Camel Back Mountain one night and was dwarfed by 14-foot saguaro cacti in the daytime. I shared a room on this trip with Speedy who would often go off to stay at the home of a girl he had met. One day while he was away Tony and Buddy were with me in my room when Tony noticed Speedy’s wallet on top of the TV. Tony cheekily opened it and inside the wallet there was a note saying ‘Tony you are not worth the paper this note is written on. You stole the money from my wallet and may you and the other two guys in the band go to hell.’ The three of us froze; we were innocent. I had no idea that there had been a theft in our room, but from here on the morale of the band went downhill. When Speedy came back I told him it wasn’t me, and even to me the explanation of how we discovered the theft seemed dishonestly shallow. He just said, ‘Don’t talk to me.’ He was totally contemptuous of me.
On that sour note we went back to New York to play a month’s residency at a nightclub in Queens, New York. Two weeks before the run ended Speedy said, ‘That’s it, I’m breaking up the band at the end of the run, and this is your two weeks’ notice.’ With that he slammed our week’s salary on the table and walked out.
After our dismissal from Speedy’s band Tony, Buddy and I became the Crew Cuts. That’s to say we joined original member Rudi Maugeri on the road. They had had a No 1 record in 1954 with a cover of the Chords hit ‘Sh-Boom’, and a year later went top three with ‘Earth Angel’, a song originally recorded by the Penguins. There are some people prepared to argue that ‘Sh-Boom’ is the first rock ‘n’ roll record, but that would definitely be stretching a point. Rudi kept the group going after the others had drifted away. We played a seaside concert hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Our last gigs were played in the Far East— The Philippines, Japan, Korea and Okinawa, mainly at US armed forces bases. I turned 21 during this period. Our first gig as the Crew Cuts was playing a five-day residency at a club in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Tulsa was a strange place. There were no public bars then, you had to buy a bottle from an off licence or a state liquor store and then you gave it to the bartender and he would write your name on it. Every time he poured you a drink he would make a mark; this was the law. On our first night in Tulsa the owner poured us a round or two from his bottle, but we had to buy our own bottle of tipple the next day. When we had our first drink with him he said we would have no problem finding ‘poontang’ in his club. We didn’t know what he meant by the word, but we soon worked it out.
The crowd was middle aged, the Crew Cut generation, but two beautiful, younger women were sitting by themselves and making eyes at us. Two of us in the band introduced ourselves and were invited to sit with them. One of the women was about my own age, her name was Siegrid