Zubin Mehta conducts a concert in Central Park in the 1970s. Bill was probably in the crowd. Image: New York Philharmonic Digital Archives
With his delicious mouthfuls of New York reminiscence - see them all at http://www.francesalut.com/not-a-native-new-yorker/ - Bill Taylor has struck a chord with readers. By which I mean they have enabled Salut! to get some.
'There's music on Clinton Street all thru the evening ...' sang Leonard Cohen. Bill remembers something of the same from his younger years in New York ...
The so-called Summer of Love was almost a decade behind us and had been centred, anyway, on the other side of the continent in San Francisco.
But New York in the mid-1970s, for all its financial travails and a concomitant angst that the social infrastructure was on the brink of implosion, somehow managed to maintain some of that “make love, not war” ethos.
And especially make music.
Music and musicians were everywhere in Manhattan. I lived just off Central Park West. I often used to see Art Garfunkel walking across the park and I once had a brief conversation – about nothing more profound than immigration – with John Lennon as we waited to cross the street to our respective homes. His was in the upmarket Dakota building, mine in the downmarket place behind it.
Over on the East Side, Woody Allen played clarinet with a Dixieland band most Monday evenings at Michael’s Pub. By the time the place closed down in 1996 this had become a big-ticket tourist attraction, but 20 years earlier it was just somewhere to drop in occasionally.
At weekends, every open space from Central Park to Washington Square in Greenwich Village was awash with buskers. Some were extremely good – a lot of professionals came out to hone their new material and pick up a few bucks by passing the hat (the occasional marijuana “joint” would be casually thrown in, too, raising not a single eyebrow).
There were shows several times a week in an outdoor skating rink at the southern end of Central Park sponsored by the Schaeffer brewing company. You had to pay to get in and tickets for the best acts quickly sold out. But there was nothing to stop you sitting on the rocks outside and listening.
The lineups were eclectic, from classic blues to avant-garde jazz and hard rock. Among the musicians I heard but didn’t see were Steeleye Span, José Feliciano, Manfred Mann and Judy Collins.
Meanwhile, punk rock was percolating. We’d head downtown to Greenwich Village and places like Max’s Kansas City (Andy Warhol called it “the exact spot where Pop Art and Pop Life came together”) and the notoriously hard-core CBGB to see up-and-comers who would become seminal in the movement: the Ramones, Patti Smith, Television… A couple of dollars to get in and the beer was cheap enough.
My girlfriend (now my wife) and I were thrown out of Max’s one Saturday night for dancing in the bar (Billy Lee Riley on the jukebox singing, “My gal is red-hot, your gal ain’t doodly-squat…”) and knocking over a table of drinks. Forty five minutes later, we were forgiven and let back in. And, as I recall, given drinks on the house because we spent a fair amount of money in the place.
That was another of the constant series of revelations about my new home. When you went out for a drink, you didn’t order a round, pay for it and put your wallet away. You and your friends left your money on the bar and the bartender would keep your glasses filled and take what was needed from each of you in turn. There was no question but that you trusted him or her. If you were there for a while, every third or fourth drink would be free. You left a decent tip at the end of the night but, as often as not, you came out ahead.
But back to music… best of all were the free concerts in Central Park by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by the likes of Zubin Mehta and Leonard Bernstein.
The park was a dangerous place at night – my apartment-mate and I were both quite hefty and not to be messed with but we wouldn’t think of setting foot in there after dark. On concert nights, though, well over 100,000 people would pour into the Sheep Meadow section.
This was community, or even communism, at its best. Before the show started, impromptu frisbee matches would start up and it was the accepted thing to share whatever you had, from food and wine to more controlled substances, with your neighbours. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need…
Two performances stand out in my mind: Bernstein sitting down at the piano to play George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, widely thought of as the perfect musical evocation of Manhattan; and Bernstein again, this time conducting Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture with, for the climactic cannons, fireworks exploding all the way up the Fifth Avenue side of the park.
He had a penthouse apartment a block away on Park Avenue and people joked that he was keeping his neighbours awake.
As the crescendo of sound peaked and died away, we whooped and howled our approbation. And then we filed quietly out of the park and went our separate ways and left it to the prowlers of the night.
The social infrastructure trembled but held true.
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