Eddie and the Cruisers Read online

  I stepped inside and headed straight for the bar, like a salesman who badly needed a drink. Oh? Live music tonight? I really hadn’t noticed. What’s on draft? I had a beer in one hand and a bunch of peanuts in the other before I faced the music.

  Sally was sitting behind the piano on a stage that was maybe a foot above a tiny dance floor. To his left, a drummer. To his right, two guitarists. He was heavier, for sure, and his hair looked like it had been combed to cover thin spots, Bill Haley-style, but he was still Sally. Steady work, food that stuck between the ribs, and no fuckin’ around.

  The Cruisers were dressed in the kind of dark, formal suits that would be Sally’s idea of class. Sal had an added touch: a white linen scarf around his neck.

  I didn’t recognize the first tune: a busy little warmup instrumental that musicians use when they’ve come onstage. It was the kind of tune you just break even on. The audience applauded politely, neither disappointed nor especially pleased. The next was different.

  “Shadows are longer now

  Where I go

  Sun is falling

  Down bloody and low …”

  It wasn’t Sally’s voice. It was Eddie’s. It came from the drummer, a gawky, nondescript kid who gave me a tingly thrilling sensation I hadn’t known for years. Close my eyes and it could have been Eddie, singing “On the Dark Side.”

  “Step to the dark side …

  Who needs light?

  Gonna feel my way, baby

  And it’s gonna feel right …”

  Eddie Wilson didn’t have a great voice. He used to kid about it—“Well, I’m no Frankie Laine.” And then he’d do a marvelous thing: a slow, smoky version of “Moonlight Gambler.” He treated it the way Ray Charles would have, turning a slap-happy anthem into—what?—a menacing invitation. When Eddie sang it, you knew that bad things could happen in the moonlight. No, you wouldn’t mix him up with Frankie Laine, but he had a voice that was his own. And like many such voices, once you heard it, you could imitate it. We all did passable Eddie imitations. But this kid had Eddie down cold.

  The audience loved him. There was a sprinkling of kids, but most looked old enough to have caught Eddie the first time around. That didn’t make them old, but they weren’t young either. Their bodies hinted of children at home.

  “Gonna feel for the dark side

  Don’t care what I find,

  My love’s gonna guide me,

  Gonna help me go blind. …”

  They cheered wildly for the kid, who bowed awkwardly when he was done, cast a guilty look at Sally, and ducked back behind the drums. Sally had the kid under tight controls, I saw, an Eddie puppet he dangled in front of the audience.

  “That’s the memory-lane voice of Eddie Wilson,” Sally said from behind the piano. He didn’t introduce the kid. “The original sound of the Parkway Cruisers.”

  The very name brought some cheers. They were ready to sing along, clap hands, dance, turn back the clock.

  “We were a bunch of kids from the Jersey shore. Any Jersey people here tonight?” (Hurray.) “You remember the feeling of the fifties? Sand in your shoes, ants in your pants, and a secret weapon in your wallet? Am I right? You made the babies, we made the hits. We’re gonna play ’em all for you.”

  More cheers. Requests. “Far-Away Woman.” “Down on My Knees.”

  “You’ll get ’em all,” Sally promised. “But you know, we’re Cruisers. And Cruisers don’t stand still. Gotta keep movin’ down that road, knocking off the miles.”

  He held up an album.

  “The Cruisers Now! Our latest. We’re still moving. At your record stores. In the lobby. Under your windshield wipers. You don’t buy it, we’ll cop your hubcaps. Like to do a few cuts for you. This next one I wrote myself. ‘Disco Boardwalk.’ Like to see some dancers in front of me.”

  Nobody danced. Nobody moved. Hardly anybody applauded. Not for “Disco Boardwalk,” or for Sally’s soon-to-be-released novelty tune about joggers, or for his impressions of Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Chuck Berry. Sally’s act didn’t fall into the toilet: it dove in and stayed there and pretended it was an Olympic-size swimming pool. It laughed and splashed and shouted, “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

  You could see the audience turn old and sour and disapproving. One moment they were young again; the next minute they were worried about their babysitters. “Uh … this was a mistake … not what we thought.” “Honey … it’s late … the kids.”

  I was into my fourth beer. There were moments when going back to check out the Cruisers seemed absolutely right. It wasn’t the tapes. It was the idea of getting in touch with a time when I’d been part of something good.

  Now, once again, the pendulum had swung to the other side. I saw an aging audience out for cheap thrills and a pathetically out-of-step musician who refused to provide them. I felt terrible just then. It was too bad for everybody: for dead Eddie and misfit Sally, for the ripped-off audience and the cuckold English teacher at the bar.

  I checked out Mannheim’s table, wondering about how to break my promise to show up in Sally’s room. I ran straight into a stare and a sad smile from the girl. Susan Foley understands, I thought. I shrugged and waved good-bye. She shook her head. No, don’t leave yet. I know it’s awful, of course, but don’t go. So I stayed.

  Sally was in the middle of more “new material” when the audience got out of hand. I think he was doing something inspired by Star Wars, with lots of flashing lights and weird notes and clanging sounds. It reminded me of a Spike Jones routine, it was that bad.

  “Just play the hits,” a man shouted. “Fuck the kid stuff!”

  “Oldies but goodies,” cried a woman, and before long they took up the chant, stomping their feet and clapping their hands in unison. “Oldies but goodies! Oldies but goodies!”

  Sally tried finishing the space number, but it was hopeless. He motioned for the others to stop playing. Then he turned on his piano stool and faced the still-chanting audience, waiting for them to quiet down.

  “You been a great audience,” he said, and I hoped I was the only one who knew him well enough to spot the hate in his eyes.

  “Okay music lovers. Get on with the music! Time to rock and roll! Eddie Wilson time! Wendell Newton, Kenny Hopkins, Frank Ridgeway, and yours truly, keeping faith on the piano. Are you ready?”

  The audience loved him now, knowing they’d won.

  The Cruisers broke into a fast, angry version of “Down on My Knees,” with Sally singing lead.

  “Saying to you baby, baby please,

  What else you want

  When I’m down on my knees?”

  There were a dozen cuts on our one and only l.p., and Sally went through all of them. In order. On the demanding tunes like “Leavin’ Town” and “It’ll Happen Tonight,” he called on the drummer, but otherwise he took the lead himself, pounding out the songs with an angry competence that the audience mistook for conviction. How many times has Little Richard keened “Long Tall Sally”? Or Jerry Lee Lewis slugged his way through “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”? That many times and more, Sally had worked his way through Eddie’s dozen songs. And, to judge from his new material, the future held nothing but more of the same. Twenty years from now, he’d be held over in Sun City and St. Pete. They’d need a doctor in attendance.

  At last the customers were getting what they’d paid for, drinking hard, crowding the dance floor. The whole room felt like a high school reunion, with everyone out to demonstrate that they were still young.

  “Hold on, everybody,” Sally shouted when he’d almost worked his way through the album. “Time to light a candle.”

  Some dancers stayed on the floor, leaning against each other. Some retreated to their tables, holding hands. The Cruisers began playing “Those Oldies But Goodies Remind Me of You,” very slow and melancholy.

  “I wanna say a word about the past,” Sally intoned. “The past isn’t gone.” (Cheers for the past.) “The past’s not dead!” (“Y
ou bet your ass it ain’t!” someone shouted.) “Not as long as we carry the music in our hearts. Not as long as we remember the good things. I wanna tell you about one of the good things that happened to me.”

  A hush fell over the Holiday Inn. A few gasps. A reaching for handkerchiefs. They knew they were being set up. And they loved it.

  “You’d think it’d be hard to remember someone who’s been gone for twenty years,” Sally said. “Well, I got news. Not Eddie Wilson. He’s part of yesterday, sure. But he’s part of today, too, you’d better believe. And tomorrow … never doubt it.”

  Now the Cruisers were singing “Those Oldies But Goodies …” and Sally’s monologue sounded like one of those spoken passages that turn up in the middle of country-and-western records.

  “He was a kid, like any other kid. Like you and me used to be. … He was one of us, always, and that’s how come he wrote songs that reached out and touched us, touched us where we live. …

  “People ask me, how come this group is still called Eddie Wilson’s Original Parkway Cruisers. Is it for the money? Publicity? Let’em think what they want, because down deep I’ve settled that one for myself. Because Eddie Wilson is as much a part of this group as I am. We’re still together, him and me. Never a day passes, I don’t think he’s around somewhere. Down the road a ways. Around a corner. In the neighborhood. Not far away at all. …”

  You can guess what happened next: a sudden silence, a dimming of the lights, and the sound of Wendell Newton’s sax leading into “Far-Away Woman.”

  No point in calling for an encore. “Far-Away Woman” ended the show like an anthem or a hymn. There was nothing left for Sally to play and nothing for the audience to do but head home.

  I took time finishing my beer. I needed time to calm down. Granted, there was an integral sleaziness in Sally’s act. It reminded me of a show we’d seen at Disney World, where they have moving, talking, life-sized replicas of U.S. presidents onstage, and Abe Lincoln delivers a snatch of the Gettysburg oldie-but-goodie. That’s the kind of act that Sally had. I didn’t envy him. He shared the stage with robots, a ventriloquist upstaged by his dummies. He invoked Eddie’s ghost and made a living out of it, but he was that ghost’s dependent. The least stir of independence and his audience was gone.

  And yet, how could you account for the overwhelming magic of those songs? The singer was dead, and the songs were two decades old. But look at what had happened tonight! The songs were part of people’s lives, milestones and measuring sticks. They turned people into dancers, brought tears, evoked memories, made them young again. Where books and movies didn’t reach, Eddie’s songs arrived so effortlessly, riveted in time and place and yet … transcendent. I could see him now, lifting his hands, an amazed look on his face, just like after I’d dug out a poem he liked: “Holee shit!”

  Eddie never figured he was writing classics. His songs were the offspring of moods: a knockout girl in Cape May, a hangover in Absecon. He tossed them off and they met their fates in the most transient of trades, a Number Eight or a Number Eighty. An upward curve and an inevitable downward fall on the Billboard list. And that was it. Nobody listened to “golden oldies” back then. We didn’t get nostalgic about dead singers and disbanded groups. Russ Colombo? Glenn Miller? We looked ahead, to tonight, this weekend, next summer. Now, everybody was looking back. Even the kids. That was the difference between then and now. Something had changed in the land, and Eddie’s music was part of the change.

  “You’re coming, aren’t you?”

  Mannheim had sent Susan Foley to fetch me.

  “Yeah. I’ll be there.”

  “How’d you like the show?” she asked.

  “Mixed emotions.”

  “I could see them on your face.”

  “What about you?”

  “I was glad I saw it,” she said. “But I wouldn’t come back.”

  “Do you think I could buy you a drink before we go?”

  I was ready to step over to a table, but she hopped right up on a bar stool and seemed perfectly at home.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “I mean, I was a Cruiser. A historic Parkway Cruiser. That’s my excuse.”

  “I need an excuse?”

  “Excuse me. But I’m still curious. Is it Mannheim? Or the music?”

  “School’s out.”

  “I wasn’t sure of that. I pegged you as a graduate student in … I don’t know … sociology or American studies. ‘A Typical Musical Group of the Nineteen-Fifties.’ Another writer, like your boyfriend.”

  “I’m not a writer.”

  “And?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend. We went to college together, back East. I’m a graduate student now. And my thesis has nothing to do with the Cruisers. Unless you sang about martial law in the Philippines.”

  “Political science?”

  “Law.”

  “I’m sorry. I ask a lot of awkward questions. That is, I ask them awkwardly.”

  I’m not sure my apology was needed. Susan Foley seemed more amused than offended. My clumsiness amused her.

  “What were they doing when you left?” I asked.

  “Elliot had started taping. Your name popped up, by the way.”

  “Mannheim didn’t tell Sally?”

  “No. He didn’t say you were coming. He asked him to appraise the musical talent of the original Cruisers. He mentioned you first, like you were the easiest to dispose of. ‘Well, there was that Ridgeway kid on guitar. A José Feliciano, he wasn’t. He could make a guitar sound like a ukulele!’”

  I laughed at that, and she did too.

  “Maybe we better head over there,” I said, “and save my reputation.”

  We walked out of the lounge together. She was good-looking enough to turn some heads, I saw, and nice enough to take my arm.

  “That’s not all Sal said,” she told me as we passed the deserted swimming pool.

  “Oh no. Let’s hear it. Count on Sally to get in with the low blows.”

  “This wasn’t. He said you were quote some kind of genius with words, a regular whiz kid, close quote. He said you helped Eddie Wilson write a lot of the songs. Like ‘Far-Away Woman’ and ‘On the Dark Side.’ Is that true?”

  “I helped. Eddie had the ideas and some of the words. But they took a lot of organizing and smoothing out. That was my job.”

  “It sounded like a lot more than that. And those are great songs. I’m no nostalgia buff, but I know when a song gets under my skin. Those are great. Did you ever follow up?”

  “Follow up?”

  “After Eddie Wilson died. Didn’t you write any more songs?”

  “No.”

  “Or poems or books?”

  “No.”

  “What did you get into?”

  “Teachers’ college.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I’m sorry.” I paused, sensing that she was waiting for an explanation, but there wasn’t much I could add. “That part of my life stopped dead when Eddie died.”

  “So then—pardon me—but why are you here?” I guessed she had me there: a solitary thirty-seven-year-old man who drove six hundred miles to catch a lounge act at a motel in Ohio. For what?

  She persisted. “You said that part of your life had stopped dead. So what’s your excuse?”

  “I wanted to see how things turned out for some old friends of mine,” I said.

  “That’s all?”

  “No. …” The next part came hard. It was the first time I’d put it into words. “I wanted to see how things … how things might have turned out for me.”

  7

  “Son of a bitch!” Sal shouted. “Look what comes walkin’ through the door. Wordman himself!”

  I offered him a hand, but Sally wouldn’t settle for anything less than a bear hug and a spin around the room. He smelled of beer and pizza and cigars. He always smelled like that. Pot wasn’t his style: it made you do crazy things and maybe miss work.

  “What
’d I tell you?” he shouted to Mannheim, who was sitting on a couch with his tape recorder on the coffee table. “When you’re hot, you’re hot! You know who this guy is?”

  I didn’t have time to tell him Mannheim and I were introduced. Mannheim didn’t try to clue him in either.

  “It’s the Wordman! Frank Ridgeway! One of the original Original Cruisers!”

  He turned to me in a mock aside.

  “See that kid in the corner? He’s a writer for Rolling fucking Stone! Came out to interview me!”

  “We were talking about the old days,” Mannheim said. “Maybe you’d like to join in, Mr. Ridgeway, since you were part of it.”

  I wondered why Mannheim kept acting like this was our first meeting. I guessed maybe he was protecting Sally’s feelings, pretending that his first priority was talking to the Cruisers’ current leader. So I played along.

  “I was just a go-fer,” I said. “Hot coffee and cold beer. Sal here knew Eddie way before I did. He goes back to the beginning.”

  “The old days!” Sal exclaimed, throwing himself into his chair. “All he wants to talk about is ancient history. Kid acts like he just opened up a grave. I keep telling him I got an act that’s ready to move. The best of the old days and the best of the new.”

  “I was getting to that, Mr. Amato,” Mannheim said. “I want to hear about your plans. But I thought we’d start from the beginning.”

  “Sure. Humor the old man. Three reels of tape for what’s dead and a half a reel for what’s alive.” He sat there stubbornly, swigging his beer. But the moment of rebellion was brief. Sal knew he was a prisoner of the past. “Okay, junior, where were we?”

  “We were up to the time Eddie went to Lakehurst.”

  “Where’d you hear about Lakehurst?”

  “I did some homework, checked your bookings. There’s a month off. No club dates, no nothing. That’s all I know. A vacation?”