SHORT STORY : Cheers for the Other Guys

The Summer of Love was only a year old and Woodstock was only a year away when the five of us, known collectively as The Agents, rock and roll band with unlimited potential--that is, no established audience to speak of--decided to turn professional. We rehearsed for months in a basement storage room of the apartment building we all lived in, Matty (Apt. 3-N) and Ronnie (4-R) on guitars, Barry (2-R) on the drums, Richie (5-P) on the organ, and I (6-S) on the sax, wailing away the hits of the day--woodshedding, as real musicians like to say. In a room full of rusted baby strollers and kitchen appliances and abandoned bicycle parts, we honed our act and aimed for the upcoming Battle of the Bands contest at the local Y. But we were thinking past that when we decided upon “Journey to the Center of Your Mind” as the audition tune. We were thinking past first prize--a single recording contract with ABC-Paramount Records.

None of us had figured on coming in second.

None of The Agents could have imagined the conclusion of the Battle of the Bands contest when Cousin Brucie, the famous deejay and special celebrity judge, swept past our bandstand and anointed our rivals, The Deep Six. It was a slow-motion horror show for our band--the way Cousin Brucie paraded his frozen smile past us; how his eyes found the middle distance as he rounded in front of our platform and kept going; how the spotlight he had in tow graced us and then an instant later put us in shadows; how the words hung in the air with extra echo and reverb when that deejay voice announced the first-prize winners; all of which was capped by cheers for the other guys. Our reward for second place--an all travel-expenses-reimbursed nonholiday summer weekend tour of three minor Catskill hotels. I went home and considered studying for my SATs.

It took some convincing, but we decided to accept the second prize. Mostly it was levelheaded Ronnie who convinced us to be professionals, and Matty, who as always, thought it would be a great way to meet girls from out of the neighborhood. But when Julius Fu entered the picture and volunteered to serve as our tour accountant and roadie, then it seemed churlish and defeatist not to try it out. Julius Fu, nicknamed for his peculiar haircut (Caesar’s) and mustache (Manchu’s), already had solid credentials in the financial world for the brilliant way he could divide the check for eight at the Riverdale Diner in his head . And at seventeen he already knew he wasn’t clever enough to be a schemer, unlike any of the guys in the building, and he was a welcome presence despite his terminal squareness.

An assistant to Cousin Brucie at the radio station gave us our assignments--Friday night at the Grand Mountain Hotel “teenage lounge”; Saturday night at the Karmel Hotel; and Sunday afternoon at the East Pond “youth lounge.” We were to receive $20 for the first two shows and $10 for the third, and we had to negotiate our own transportation, keep receipts for everything, and take them to the station for reimbursement upon our return. Being New York City sixteen-year-olds, we didn’t own cars, or even have access to a car, so we had to negotiate with the first hotel contact to be picked up at the local Short Line bus station, and with the subsequent two employers to fetch us as well, which we did from a local pay phone Barry’d rigged up so we could make free calls. Once all the travel arrangements were set, and a vote was taken to offer a one dollar share per man of the bounty to Fu, we ganged up on our parents. My parents handled the news as if I’d said I was running away to a hippie commune. My argument to them, I recall, contained the buzzwords “freedom” and “civil rights,” and I didn’t at all pick up on their concern that my clarinet and their sweat equity in my classical music-school training would be left in the dust. I divided them and conquered. To my worried father I made a private promise that going “on the road” with a rock band was not a serious career choice and thus would not interfere with his dream of law school for his son. I told my mother that it would look bad for her son if he was the only boy forbidden to go. And so my parents allowed me to be a free Agent for a weekend.

Over the next two weeks, we thrashed out a playlist of songs we arranged for our first tour outside of our home zip code. The consensus was that summertime demanded fewer ballads and more up-tempo rockers, especially since the third leg of our tour was a Sunday afternoon appearance. So we dropped the Dave Clark Five’s “Because” (but kept the only other ballad we knew well enough, Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe,” since it was our lead guitarist’s romantic showcase number) and added “Tequila,” an instrumental I’d been lobbying for so I could finally play a saxophone part intended for the saxophone. We agreed on a final playlist that began with our signature song, “Secret Agent Man,” followed by the Young Rascals’ “Good Lovin’ ” and their version of “Mustang Sally,” “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” (the Vanilla Fudge version), “Tequila,” “Midnight Hour,” “Hey Joe,” and our rousing finisher, “Journey to the Center of Your Mind.” Twenty minutes or so of perfection, with a reprise of “Secret Agent Man” scheduled as the encore, should lightning really strike us for once.

On a dismally hot Friday afternoon in July, we pulled together our instrument cases, our tiny Vox amps (like the Beatles’, an important bonding detail), our friends, Matty’s latest girlfriend (Matty was the only member of our group to be so fortunate), and the send-off made us dewy-eyed again, and we talked ourselves into thinking that after this weekend nothing would ever be the same again, that somehow this odd turn would lead us to the lighted path of fame and fortune. At the same time I had the realization that the next generation’s voice in the wilderness wasn’t likely to be heard howling teenaged rebellion in a Jewish resort area in the mountains of upstate New York.

We loaded the equipment onto Julius Fu and departed for the Port Authority bus station, prepared to scale the Catskill Mountains. First stop: the small town of Kerhonkson, New York. Other than an understanding that we were first going to play the “teenage lounge” at the Grand Mountain Hotel, not one of The Agents had a secure picture of what the job was going to be like. We got a better sense of it when we were met at the bus station by the assistant to the hotel’s social director, an old man wearing a snap-brim cap, a Ban-Lon shirt-jac, Bermuda shorts that reached his kneecaps, and sandals with calf-high stretch socks.

“So you’re Secret Agents,” he said with a quizzical air and a strong Eastern European accent, as we stumbled of the bus. “I’m Izzy Faber. Call me Izzy. What are those boxes?” he asked. Fu was unloading the amplifiers. “You can’t use them,” he said.

“Do you have a house PA?” asked Ronnie.

“No electric,” said Izzy. “It’s Shabbas. The Sabbath. You’re Jewish boys, no? You won the contest from the YMHA, yes? So you play the guitars normally.”

“But we play rock and roll, Mr. Faber,” we protested. “We play electric guitars. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

“It’s Shabbas. Didn’t anyone tell you ?”

The ride in Izzy’s station wagon to the hotel grounds was long and silent. We passed verdant, lush lawns, rolling, soft hills, a big blue-and-purple sky nearing sunset. Inside Izzy’s ramshackle Ford station wagon, it was not so beautiful. Izzy finally reached the hotel grounds, and he swerved dramatically onto the circular driveway in front of the main building. He turned off the ignition and waited for the engine rattle to quit before addressing us. “I’m sorry, boys, I know you’re disappointed, but look what a big success Theodore Bikel is with a guitar and no screaming. You’ll see. The show must go on,” he said, wrapping the quotes around it like a noose.

After the guests at the Grand Mountain Hotel had eaten dinner and recited and sung a lengthy post-dinner grace, the show did go on--in a plywood-paneled recreation room that had been cleared of Ping-Pong and bumper-pool tables and was lined with metal folding chairs. Izzy reappeared in front of the assembled group and served as the unamplified emcee.

“Boys and girls, this is a rock and roll group Cousin Brucie the famous deejay thinks is just what the Pepsi Generation wants to hear, only tonight they’re not going to hear them so good. Here are the Secret Agents.” The gig, as we desperately wanted to regard it, was attended by a number of preteens and toddlers, who made their presence felt. There were maybe twenty-five sons and daughters of the hotel’s clientele, who found the occasion ripe for relieving themselves of a little rancor for having been dragged to their parents’ kosher retreat, only to find themselves entertained by a group of disorganized boys strumming unplugged electric guitars, over which the sound of the bar-mitzvah-quality saxophone and all of us singing without the mercy of microphones must have been unbearable. We didn’t have a chance. But we did play our encore number--only because we rushed through our playlist at breakneck speed and felt obliged to fill out our twenty minutes, which we did, if you count what felt like eighteen solid minutes of gleeful booing. At the end of the show, we packed up, and in a sullen single file we were led into the kitchen, where Fu was handed a sealed envelope by a black man in a soiled apron. Acknowledging Fu, Izzy said, “This is for all of you,” adding that we should not open the envelope until after sundown Saturday night, in accordance with the Sabbath observance; but in the privacy of our overnight room next to the dishwashers’, the five of us and Fu couldn’t resist our first roadshow payday, so Ronnie carefully opened the envelope and discovered not twenty but twenty-five single dollar bills, and Izzy’s business card. Fu was exultant, and he counted them out three or four times. The five of us wanted to commit suicide, and here Fu was contemplating a career. We turned on him cruelly until he threw his five dollars on the floor. No one would touch it; in the morning Fu picked up the money, the amps, and the overnight bags and dropped them in Izzy’s station wagon and sat there stewing while someone placed a telephone call to the Karmel Hotel and arranged for our bus to be met in Kiamesha Lake.

The Karmel was not, thank God, an observant hotel. It was kosher-style , said the beefy-faced man who introduced himself as Carl when he picked us up in his station wagon, a mid-sixties model DeSoto with push-button transmission. The Karmel had big-name nightclub entertainers on the weekends, he told us, listing a number of people with names that sounded like the names of entertainers. We relaxed. This place had electricity. Show business history. “The Capris played here, and so did The Jesters,” said Carl. “And now you guys. Are you any good? I hope so. I gotta tell you, I wish you didn’t wear your hair like fairies.”

At the Karmel, the setup was indeed more professional. They had an on-premises nightclub called the Club Oasis, which had a sound system that would let us use our amplifiers, house microphones, and a real stage ringed by tiers of tables, so that you could play down, up, and side-to-side. It also had a neon sign out front, and I don’t think that the group ever experienced a higher state of well-being than at the moment the neon lit up and cast a pale pink glow over the cardboard signs tacked onto the portal posts: “Teenage Lounge To-Night From NYC The Agents 8 PM Showtime.” At that hour the club was perfectly lit, tested for sound, poised for an evening of professional entertainment, and absolutely empty. By nine o’clock, only three people had wandered in, and they informed us that our appearance had coincided with Teenage Go-Kart Night at an amusement park in the next town. They were dispatched to find Carl. Carl returned, more amused than apologetic, and shrugged it off. “I tell you what. You hang around, and I’ll let you play a couple of numbers tonight before the big show.” The big show, featuring a supposedly famous “blue” comedian, was the show the hotel weekenders lived for, what they cut their summer Saturday workday in half and spent the rest in a two-hour mountains-bound traffic jam for, what they spent their day preparing their hair for, what they dragged their jewelry across state lines for. And although The Agents really lived in the moment when we believed that playing for an adult audience of show business aficionados could be an epiphany we’d relive forever, the reality was--and we observed it very quickly when we stepped out on-stage--that here was a crowd that was not going to be amused by the raucous scratchings of a bunch of fairies their children’s age. In a moment of crystal-clear show business savvy, we agreed to play “Tequila” and get the hell out of there. We’d never experienced such expert rapid-fire heckling, nor had we ever found ourselves surrendering the stage to guys at tables turning around to their friends sitting at other tables and shouting insults about us, joined by the emcee, who had an open microphone throughout the song. Our exit was followed by a comment from the oil-haired master of ceremonies, which, though we couldn’t make it out, brought a wave of laughter that echoed all the way out the door and poisoned the clean night air.

“That’s it, we’re going home tomorrow. This sucks,” said Ronnie. We all agreed.

It only took another minute or so to come to the irrevocable conclusion that we would break up as a band, as friends, as neighbors, go to different colleges in different towns, marry strangers, and never phone or write to each other.

The next morning Carl pulled up in his DeSoto and we piled in, only to discover en route that he had planned to offer us a kind of reparation for our suffering by driving us directly to our final stop at the East Pond Bungalow Colony. How or why he remembered this bit of information upon our arrival escapes me, since he couldn’t remember Teenage Go-Kart Night, but now he was compounding the pain by making it impossible for us to pack it in. We arrived at East Pond, and the only one making a move out of the car was Carl. “Isn’t this right?” he roared. He drew the attention of a man who looked like a puffy Jack Klugman, sitting in a white Adirondack chair on the porch of a large wooden barnlike structure at the center of an encampment of smaller cabins.

“You’re the boys from so-and-so,” said Jack Klugman, mentioning the name of the radio station assistant. “Where’ve you been? You’re supposed play in fifteen minutes.” It was quarter to eleven in the morning.

“I thought we were supposed to play this afternoon,” said Ronnie. “We were told around three.”

“These people are here for a weekend,” he said, “and some of them leave to beat the traffic in the afternoon. Don’t worry; there are plenty of kids who’re waiting for you. Plenty. Bring all your stuff to the casino.” He pointed to another barnlike building next to the main office. To Carl, whom he had greeted familiarly, he said, “You hear these kids? any good?”

“Oh yeah,” said Carl, “The kids love this long-haired stuff.”

There were plenty of kids waiting for us. Plenty around the ages of eight to ten, a sure sign that their older siblings wouldn’t be caught dead in the same place. The bungalow colony, which didn’t seem that large, had produced an audience of about twenty-five kids, and maybe ten more young, square-looking parents of the youngest kids. And though The Agents were a committed rock and roll band, we found our will utterly eroded, so that when we were asked to conduct sing-alongs of “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” and “Kumbaya,” with the addition of some guy from the bungalow colony on acoustic guitar, we didn’t object. But when we finished, the guy with the acoustic guitar left, and lo and behold, with him went all of the younger children. For a moment we didn’t know what to do. Then a couple of teenage kids who had been loitering around the entranceway, unbeknownst to us, wandered in and helped us locate the electrical outlets in the room, we plugged in our Voxes, and a single microphone, and heralded our arrival with a solid keening jolt of audio feedback before launching into “Secret Agent Man” with a fury. We followed the playlist and the kids followed us, and a few cut loose and began to dance during “Mustang Sally.” By the time we hit the Amboy Dukes’ high-voltage opening to “Journey to the Center of Your Mind,” the audience had swelled to forty--believe me, we counted them--and they were ours, clapping in time and singing the chorus of the song out loud like drunks at a baseball game. Lots of guys who said they were from Brooklyn and Queens came over and shook our hands and asked us about what else we played and who we listened to, and Matty got into a deep conversation with a girl who went to Art and Design High School downtown. Ronnie signed an autograph for a shy little girl, and then everyone slowly filtered out the door and back to their parents’ cabins, to pack up and head back to a weekday summer in the city.

Soon, we too were on the road again, on the Short Line back to New York City, exchanging single dollar bills to even out our weekend’s take, and handslaps for a job well done. Eventually, we got around to discussing a few ideas for the band’s future, plans that would take us well into August.

“Cheers for the Other Guys,” copyright 1990 by Stanley Mieses. Reprinted from “Summer,” edited by Alice Gordon and Vincent Virga. Published June, 1990 by Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.