Eddie and the Cruisers Read online

  That’s when he unzipped his knapsack and I spotted the tape recorder inside.

  “I’ve got to get this,” he said. “Is there an outlet? You must show movies or something.”

  “Wait a minute. Haven’t you forgotten something?”

  “I hope not,” he said, still rooting around in the bag. “I think it’s all here, but these contraptions always make me nervous.”

  “Like your name. And who you’re with. And what you want.”

  “Oh! I forgot! I’m sorry. I smuggle myself into your classroom, start interrogating, and you don’t even know who I am.”

  “Should I?”

  “I guess not. Elliot Mannheim. From the City. I’m a freelance journalist. I specialize in music writing.”

  “You write music?”

  “About music.”

  “Who for?”

  “Rolling Stone. Crawdaddy. The Voice. But I have a feeling this’ll be a book before it’s over. A rock-and-roll version of The Boys of Summer. Eddie Wilson and the Parkway Cruisers are going to be very big. You can just feel it happening, can’t you?”

  “I can’t feel a thing,” I answered. I walked over to the window, where I could see across the lawn and parking lot to Springfield Avenue and the strange society of past-three-o’clock hangarounds: library grinds and baseball players, car thieves and makeouts, clinging to the periphery of a place they seemed so impatient to abandon. Maybe their eagerness to be gone was already infected by nostalgia. No matter. Like it or not, they left, the prodigies and the morons alike. And I stayed.

  “Could you please tell me what the hell all this is about?”

  “I’m sorry if I—”

  “It’s nothing you said. I just want to know what’s going on.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Not much. An old song on the radio.”

  “That’s it?!”

  “Except for that, I’m lost. Look, I’m a thirty-seven-year-old married high school teacher. I’ve been here for twelve years. It’s been that long since I picked up a guitar, or tried a lyric, or stepped inside a music store. I don’t go to concerts. I avoid chaperoning dances. And I’m sorry to say that I don’t keep up with the publications you mentioned. I don’t know anybody who does. So, please … enlighten me.”

  “I never thought you’d be so …”

  “Out of it?”

  “Well, yes … unconnected.”

  “And you’re the man who’s going to plug me in,” I said, plumping myself behind one of the front-row desks. Mannheim responded by leaning against the teacher’s desk.

  “There’s chalk and pointers in the desk, if you need them.”

  It had started at Christmas, with the incredible success of a British musical group called The Funky Company. I’d never heard of them, but Mannheim assured me they were “humungous.” A sold-out coast-to-coast tour, complete with jammed arenas, airport riots, gutted hotel rooms. A quadruple platinum album, or something, and three singles in the top ten. Delinquent bravado and nose-thumbing insolence and yet … and yet … a curious touch of reverence.

  “You had to see it,” Mannheim said. “Near the end of every show. The lights dim and Nick Kapp, the lead singer, just stands in front of the mike, stands and waits till there’s not a sound in the arena. Not a cough, not a scream, nothing. Sometimes it takes ten minutes. Then … this is incredible … he tells the audience there’s to be no applause after this next number, and if he hears as much as hand-clap, it’s curtains. No more show, no encores. Can you imagine? He’s got thousands of people paralyzed. Then he goes into his rap, low and slow, so the audience is leaning forward to catch every word.

  “‘People die,’ he says, ‘and some die young. Some of them, we remember. Especially the music-makers.’ Then he recites a whole list of dead singers, and how they went. Janis Joplin with a needle, Jimi Hendrix choking in his own vomit, Elvis black in the face on his bathroom floor. Eddie Cochran’s car crash, Buddy Holly’s plane crash and Otis Redding’s, and Johnny Ace shooting himself, and Sam Cooke getting shot, and Frankie Lymon overdosing. He goes on and on. It’s eerie.

  ‘We remember them all,’ he says. ‘Some more than others. And one group more than most. You make your choice of memories. We’ve made ours. They paid the dues. We pay the tribute. Ladies and gentlemen, they say we left them down the road. Don’t believe it. They’re with us tonight. Living fast. Driving hard. Making music. Eddie Wilson and the Parkway Cruisers!’ Bedlam! They go right into ‘Far-Away Woman,’ segue to ‘Some Kind of Loving,’ and wind up with ‘Fast Exit.’”

  After that, it happened fast, Mannheim said. Immediate reissue of “Far-Away Woman,” with other songs to follow. Reissue—with sound enhanced for stereo—of the Cruisers’ one and only album. And rumors about a movie, The Eddie Wilson Story. Everybody loved us. Everybody always had, it seemed.

  “That’s it,” Mannheim concluded. “I still can’t believe this is the first you heard of it. No one else has found you?”

  “Are they looking?”

  “I guess I’m the first,” Mannheim said, pleased with himself. “But I’ll bet I’m not the last.”

  He wasn’t. I wish he had been.

  Elliot Mannheim said he wanted to tape an interview, and I agreed on the condition that the questioning be confined to my experience with Eddie Wilson and the Parkway Cruisers, that my current address and occupation be omitted, and that I receive a copy of the transcript, not for editing or approval but simply for my own records. He agreed.

  Janitors start moving through classrooms right after school, emptying baskets and waxing floors, so I suggested we use the teachers’ lounge, overlooking the gym. Nominally designated for lesson preparation, it’s a sanctuary of intramural backbiting, sports chatter, and, when girls’ gym classes romp below, unfettered voyeurism. By late afternoon, it’s a sorry sight: Styrofoam cups, discarded newspapers, stale, smoky air.

  While Mannheim tested his tape recorder, I paced back and forth among the wreckage. My private joke was over. Things were stirring in my life again.

  3

  EM:

  Okay, I’m with Frank Ridgeway, a surviving member of Eddie Wilson and the Parkway Cruisers. He now is a …

  FR:

  Skip it. Remember?

  EM:

  Right. He’s with me here now. I guess we’ll start at the beginning. How and when did you meet the late Eddie Wilson? And how’d you come to join the group?

  FR:

  It was 1957, I met him. By accident. I joined the Cruisers the same way.

  EM:

  Sir?

  FR:

  By accident. A place down the Jersey shore.

  EM:

  Look, this is fine, but do you think you could be a little more expansive. I’ve got plenty of tape. Take the first meeting with Eddie Wilson, the first time you laid eyes on him. Describe it, as much of it as you can remember.

  FR:

  As much as I remember. (Laugh.) You must think I’m losing my faculties. I remember everything.

  EM:

  Good. That’s what I want to hear.

  FR:

  Well, I was … what? … seventeen? … that summer, with one year of college behind me. I’d skipped a couple grades in grammar school, so I got to college early. Too early …

  Never mind the name of the college—which, in any case, is best known for a literary quarterly it no longer publishes. What happened to me there, on that small, all-male hilltop in Ohio, could have happened anywhere. It wasn’t bad grades, or misconduct, or cutting classes. I wish it had been. Then my parents might have understood. No, I was unprepared in other ways, it seemed to me. I’d never worked, or traveled, or slept with a woman. I’d never done anything, and now I was spending what ought to be the best years of my life in musty library carrels and dorms that smelled of masturbation. After one year of college I strained for wildness and adventure and romance without having the vaguest idea where to find them. But I knew they were somewhere else.
So I arranged for a perfectly honorable withdrawal before I came home that summer. The result was a family horror show too hackneyed to recount. Hackneyed, but the feelings were real, theirs and mine. So I left home.

  With one suitcase and a couple hundred dollars, I considered myself a drifter. Not that I drifted very far. A three-hour bus trip took me from New York to Atlantic City, where the father of a high school friend who’d enlisted owned a bar. I was too young to drink, or serve drinks, or even be on premises, but the Jersey shore got crazy during the summer. A lot of Philadelphia kids drinking a lot of beer. Vince paid me the minimum wage to sweep up after closing, restock coolers, carry out the empties. A “porter”—that’s what he said I’d be, and that appealed to me because I recalled the drunken porter from Macbeth. Being a porter seemed just fine that summer. I had a cot in the back room—the office-storeroom—and a hot plate. In the morning I could cross the street and swim in the ocean. I was happy being a porter. Nothing exciting had happened, but I was ready, and I was sure I’d recognize adventure when it came along.

  EM:

  A summer job in a bar?

  FR:

  Yes. The sort of odd job they give alcoholics in exchange for free drinks. Thank God, my parents never knew about it.

  EM:

  What was the name of the place?

  FR:

  Vince’s Boardwalk Bar.

  EM:

  Does it still exist?

  FR:

  I don’t know. I haven’t been around there since Eddie died.

  EM:

  It’s not far. I don’t—

  FR:

  Understand? Why I haven’t gone back?

  EM:

  Yes.

  FR:

  I thought you’d have it figured out by now. I’m not the type …

  … who keeps in touch. Why didn’t I come right out and say it? I lived my life in compartments, a chapter at a time, with no overlaps, no connections. Remember those special dining plates they made for finicky kids, with little dikes walling off the mashed potatoes from the broccoli, from the meat and gravy? That’s how I’d been living my life. That was then, this was now. Well, I was as wrong about life as I was about that plate. Mother was right: it all goes in the same stomach.

  EM:

  I can guess the next part. The bar had a live band, right? Every night, or just weekends?

  FR:

  Every night but Monday. That’s the first time I saw them. In June sometime, they came in around closing one Monday night, to set up and practice for the coming week. They could have done the same thing Tuesday morning, I guess, but Eddie always worked nights. He was a night person, or at least he loved the idea of being a night person. All-nighters and truck stops and crazy ideas at four in the morning. Sudden insights over steak and eggs at a greasy spoon. He got that into a song … some of it …

  EM:

  “Leaving Town”?

  FR:

  Yeah. Anyway, there they were at two a.m. Vince ran home. He was very into Julius La Rosa. I was supposed to lock up when they finished rehearsing. But they were there to stay, and nothing I could do about it. Remember, I slept in back. I wiped down the bar, cleaned the taps, dusted the liquor bottles, washed the mirrors till Vince’s Boardwalk Bar looked like … I don’t know … the Oak Bar at the Plaza. Still, they were barely getting warm. So I opened a beer and came around the front of the bar, watching and listening. I didn’t resent being kept up. I wasn’t tired. I was just glad to be sitting in a shore bar at three a.m., listening to a bunch of unknowns. Can you beat that?

  Can you beat that? I could see that Mannheim wasn’t especially impressed. It was no thrill for him, hearing musicians play till dawn. But my life had been lived in daylight. It still was. And, sitting in that tired old teachers’ lounge, the memory of a bar at three a.m. was the image of liberty to me.

  EM:

  Yes, well, who was there that night? The names, and maybe you could describe them.

  FR:

  Well, Eddie was there, of course …

  EM:

  Yes …

  FR:

  I’m sorry. I’m not good at this.

  EM:

  I have the picture on the album cover.

  FR:

  Forget that. They decked us out like a bunch of hoods, put us in a hot rod, and told us to look like James Dean. No … Eddie was medium height, on the thin side, black hair that wasn’t long—not by current standards—and eyes that were, I guess, green. Not especially handsome or especially tough or artistic-looking. A kid off the streets. Not mean streets. Any streets. Mostly I remember his eyes. Not the color, so much, but the way he used them. The alertness. Never could decide whether he was watching out or just watching.

  EM:

  Good. What about the others?

  FR:

  Well, Sally of course. Long Tall Sally. Sal Amato. He’d known Eddie longest. They’d played Virginia Beach the summer before, and Navy bars in Norfolk during the winter. Just the two of them. The others were newcomers, but Sal and Eddie went back a long ways. You should try to find him.

  EM:

  Do you know where he is?

  FR:

  No.

  EM:

  Well, tell me about Sal.

  FR:

  Loud and lively, in a Philadelphia Italian way. Protective of Eddie, like a big brother.

  EM:

  But little brother was the boss. Was that a problem?

  FR:

  Well, their approaches were different. I could see that right away.

  EM:

  How so?

  FR:

  Most of this you should get from Sal. He could be touchy. Even after this long, I wouldn’t want to hit a nerve.

  EM:

  I understand. Is there anything at all you can say?

  FR:

  Just that, yes, they were like brothers. But they came from different places. Sal was a Philadelphia Italian. He joked about it—the same neighborhood that produced Fabian, and Mario Lanza. These days he’d probably add … what’s his name? … In the T-shirt … Rocky …

  EM:

  Sylvester Stallone.

  FR:

  Yes. That was Sally. Is. I doubt he’s changed. His approach to music was … I guess you’d call it conventional, hard-working. Every note he played came with the union label on it. Know what I mean? We’d be playing a club someplace, and if we were going good, Eddie’d never dream of taking a break. But Sally got worried and fidgety, like we were violating some principle of his. There was a meter running inside his head, clicking away like a yellow cab. One night, he approached me. “Working with a break we made seven-fifty an hour. Working without a break knocks us down to four-seventy-five. Jesus, Frank, we get much better, I’ll be workin’ for nothin’.”

  EM:

  He came to you with this?

  FR:

  Sure. Maybe he was looking for an ally. Or just sympathy. But he never had much to say to the other new guys. And he’d never go directly to Eddie with something like that. Never. Close as they were, Eddie intimidated him. Besides, with new people coming on, Sal was just another one of the guys in the band. The situation was changing, and I guess that worried Sal. I’m sure he had feelings. He always said he did. “I got feelings too, you know.”

  EM:

  Okay. I understand where Sal was coming from. What about Eddie?

  FR:

  That’s harder …

  EM:

  Anything you recall could help. Believe me, he’s been dead a long time. After all these years, it’s hard to bring him into focus. Back then, there was no serious journalism about rock and roll. I’ve checked. The clips tell me his favorite color was green, he liked peach ice cream, and he thought he’d like to visit California. Anything you give me has got to be better than that.

  FR:

  I know what you’re up against. … My problem is different … I remember so much.

  EM:

  Just l
et it flow.

  FR:

  No.

  EM:

  If there’s something off-color, personal, illegal, whatever, we can always—

  FR:

  He meant a lot to me.

  EM:

  Maybe if we just talked about his musical approach and put aside the rest.

  FR:

  Okay. That might work. Give me a minute. Turn it off. …

  Mannheim excused himself and went to the john. It felt good to be alone again, however briefly. Outside, the last rays of sunlight slanted through New Jersey’s richly polluted air. I’d be home late. I should have called. Too late now, though. Might as well finish. Wrap it up, shake hands, and drop him at the bus station. Funny, about Eddie, how some people didn’t stay dead. Not me. When I died, I’d stay dead forever. …

  FR:

  I think I’ve got it now. Anyway, this will have to do. I hope this … revival … doesn’t get out of hand and turn Eddie Wilson into a James Dean or an Elvis. To me, the wonderful thing about Eddie Wilson, what made me feel so good about the guy, was that he was, in so many ways, so typical. Background, taste, outlooks. Check out his parents down in Vineland. His father was a dentist! Typical. That makes it all the more striking that in a few ways—just a few, one or two—he was exceptional. You asked about his music. You’ve heard the records. The instruments sound ordinary enough, don’t they?