By Lynda Kraar
I don't know how long I'd been at the wheel until the radio host on the big band station announced the time:
“This is Danny Stiles on your dials: your vicar of vintage; your king of nostalgia; your maven of moldy oldies. The time now is 4 a.m. Why aren’t you precocious teenagers in bed? Here’s one by the Four King Sisters – The Jersey Bounce, on the Bluebird label. I’m sending it out to Al Duffy. He's at the Red Blazer II tonight with the boys.”
At four in the morning magical things happen -- things unknown to the sleeping world. From the well-lit highway I exited onto an old back road in western Monmouth County, listening to the strains of the Andrew Sisters, Slam Stewart, Charlie Christian and a cast of local musicians from a bygone era of whom I’d never heard.
The saplings along the side of the barely paved lane were donning their nighttime spring buds, revealing shades of emerald, forest, and cadmium green as the road ahead glistened a steely, crackled chromium in the moonlight. Like a deep-sea diver surrounded by the eerie shapes and sounds, I felt a rush of excitement about the summer, which, like sunrise, was just on the horizon.
The car rattled as I hit a pothole, and then another. I cracked the window to feel the damp night air. The brooding sky roiled and slept fitfully, laying in wait for the dawn song of the thrushes, starlings and robins. Moonbeams outlined the form of cumulus clouds, revealing a silver lining on the blue blackness. At that moment the heavens had a personality and colour known only to cops on the beat, revellers returning from their soirees, street sweepers, insomniacs, chauffeurs finishing up a run to Atlantic City, and to gigging musicians like me.
As the miles went by and I was swept up in the music, I felt a strange sensation like I was bending time, feeling the years melt away. Now I was in my pyjamas, nestled in my princess bedroom in my parents' house in Toronto, listening to the rock and roll station that was beaming in from far-off Fort Wayne, Indiana. Burning the midnight oil night after night, listening to this music, this wild abandon. It made me feel like a real Canadian kid in a house where accent-free English was spoken and parents listened to “cool” music, where dads wore sideburns and striped bell bottom suits, and moms in shag haircuts wore paisley silk shirts and go-go boots. I was trapped with these Eastern Europeans who insisted on a décor more reminiscent of the Tsar, complete with cobalt blue and gold leaf dishes on garish display in the living room, fuzzy wallpaper, and everything adorned in shades of amber, like a summer palace in St. Petersburg. We had both kinds of music in the house – opera and classical. WOWO 1190 Fort Wayne was my escape, even at the expense of bleary days in a parochial school classroom. I was flipping the dial one night and I found it. It came in clearest around midnight, when most of my school chums were having night terrors about the Leviathan, the Bible and Hell.
Through the static on snowy winter nights I’d hear Delaney and Bonnie singing “Only You Know and I Know.” Ocean was making a splash with “Put Your Hand in the Hand of the Man from the Galilee.” And Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” was fresh and exciting. I kept a notebook in my nightstand and wrote down lyrics as fast as I could every night. I memorized all the words of my favourite songs.
When I die and they lay me to rest
Gonna go to the place that's best
When they lay me down to die
Goin on up to the Spirit in the sky
CHORUS:
Goin on up to the Spirit in the sky
(Spirit in the sky)
That's where I'm gonna go when I die
(When I die)
When I die and they lay me to rest
I'm gonna go to the place that's the best*
Laura Nyro’s new album, “Eli and the Thirteenth Confession,” was making big waves. She was twenty-one when her hit song, the haunting rock ballad “Eli’s Coming,” was taking the place of her previous hit, “And When I Die,” which she had penned at the tender age of fourteen:
I'm not scared of dyin'
and I don't really care
if it's peace you find in dyin'
Well then let the time be near
if it's peace you find in dyin'
When dyin' time is here
just bundle up my coffin
cause it's cold way down there
CHORUS:
And when I die
and when I'm gone
there'll be one child born
in this world to carry on**
They survived Hitler, but my parents would not have tolerated my musical tastes. It was the early 1970s. Jesus was making a comeback. It was an era of beads, sandals and clear-eyed guys with long, blond hair and scraggly facial hair. Musicals like Kiss Me Kate and Applause made way for Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. Oy vey.
Of course, all of this was a cultural response to the Vietnam War. Even though I was too young to attend Woodstock, I was part of the revolution. In the evenings, my family would gather around the television and watch Irv Weinstein on Buffalo's Eyewitness News. They’d show pictures of soldiers in olive and khaki, looking terrified, but smiling.
The show hosts would announce birthdays – “Barbara in Tonawanda is six today and would like to tell her dad, Private Mike Nowicki, that she loves him and can’t wait to see him at Christmas.” I could picture her father, in that uniform, sitting around a TV with the other dads in ‘Nam, watching this show. Canadian kids didn’t understand this.
But we did understand music, and the radio was our source of information and connection with the outside world. My mother was heartbroken that I kept the door to my bedroom closed. I had a little beige mono earpiece that came with the radio. I cherished it. I kept it hidden. This was not how you did things in our Eastern European house, where we shared practically everything.
My car hit another pothole, and I was startled from my pre-dawn daydream. Again, I was at the wheel, starting to get antsy and craving some coffee or something that screamed Dunkin Donuts, anything to distract me from the fatigue. I looked down at the wheel and saw the hands of an adult, but I still felt like a kid. How did this happen, this metamorphosis? When? It seems so long ago, yet, it really seems like yesterday. At this hour your mind starts messing with you.
I saw a familiar pink and orange sign on Route 9 in Howell, and I pulled into the lot. A night breeze blew the waft of freshly made sugary dough into my nostrils. I perked up. I entered the donut shop as I’ve done many times before. The bluish cast of the fluorescent lights pried my pupils open like a crowbar, giving me a gnawing buzzing in my head.
A Howell beat cop was at the counter with his partner, bantering with the waitress about her upcoming semester at Monmouth College. Economics. I took my seat at a deuce, and ordered coffee in a ceramic cup with a chocolate chunk cookie on a piece of wax paper.
As I swooshed the melting chocolate around in my mouth, I felt a soft, friendly hand on my shoulder, and turned around to see a man in a double-breasted blazer, white hair neatly coiffed. It was Al Duffy. I was surprised and a bit shocked to see this octogenarian out so late.
“What are you doing here, Al?”
“I had a gig tonight with some of the boys in the city. A jazz combo thing. They just dropped me off a little while ago,” he said, mischievously adding, “I didn’t feel like going straight home.”
Al was my neighbour. Even though everyone called him Al Duffy, his real name was Adolph Daidone. He was a classically trained violinist, but he called himself a fiddler. The “boys” he was referring to were probably the best musicians in New York. Their heyday was the 1930s and ‘40s, when Al was in the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, gigging at the NBC Studios in New York and making a lot of appearances -- the Kraft Music Hall, Chesterfield Presents, and the New Terrace Room of the New Yorker Hotel – long forgotten, acetates relegated to the musty archives by now. Al was part of an elite corps of Italian violinists and guitarists who made American jazz in New York City an institution.
“You expecting anyone?” he asked.
“Nah, Al, I’m just gonna go home. I had a gig tonight, too, but I’m sure not as amazing as yours must have been.”
Al was always so supportive of me and of the other musical upstarts who seemed to populate Monmouth County at the time. He believed that no gig was any less worthy than any other. He took all the work he was offered, and always made it classy. He was a great role model – our hero.
“Listen, go grab your guitar. I wanna show you some stuff you never heard before.”
Dutifully, and not to offend the great Al Duffy, I obliged, and retrieved my vintage Gibson L-50 archtop F-hole guitar out of the trunk of my car.
When I returned, Al, with his affable demeanor, was noodling on his ever-present fiddle for the impromptu audience. The customers applauded when I brought in the guitar case. We all laughed.
“Sit down, watch this,” Al said, with delight in his eyes.
He took apart his bow, unscrewing the frog and draping the horsehairs over the entire body of the violin and then tightening up the bow with the hairs caressing the cavity of the old fiddle.
“You know Joe Venuti? This is what he used to do. Remember that record, Four-String Joe? He used to play triple stops, you know – draw the bow across three strings, and even four. No one knew how he did it. So one day he showed me.”
Al played a few four-finger chords on the fiddle drawing his bow across all the strings, something you just can't do with a normal violin and bow. Then he played a few licks that sounded like two or three different musicians. I was in the presence of a master, and all I could do was to sit there and take mental snapshots.
“Come on, Minor Swing in C. Don’t forget the two-five change. I’ll cue you. Let’s go: One, two, one-two-three-four…”
Chink-chink-chink-chinka-chink-chink-chink…
Minor Swing was a song made famous by Django Reinhardt and his Hot Club of Paris in the 1930s. Django was a Belgian Romani – a gypsy. By the time he was 18, he was already an accomplished violinist. One night a candle toppled in the caravan where he was living, and it burst into flames. Django was pulled out by a few family members. The accident left him with a crippled leg and disfigured hand. The fingers of his fretting hand were fused together in an ugly mess. He would never again play the violin.
Django turned to the guitar. Because his ear was trained to hear violin, he compensated for the loss of his ability, and taught himself to make arpeggiated runs on the fingerboard with his two working fingers while chording with the mangled ones. It sounded much like the gypsy violin style. He was actually creating a new genre that would come to be known as gypsy guitar. Django was an innovator.
Before World War II, Django would meet the French-born Italian violinist Stephane Grappelli in a nightclub. They became musical partners and artistic soul mates, forming the Hot Club of France and becoming EMI recording artists in Paris. But it was a dark time in Europe, especially for minorities. By 1941, with the Nazis on a murderous rampage to eradicate Gypsies, Jews, and other undesirables, Django fled to North Africa to wait out the war.
And now, in Dunkin' Donuts in Howell, New Jersey, I could feel the presence of Django and Stephane as I played the guitar in the gypsy style, taking my cues from Al. He was at least fifty years my senior, but in this moment Al was my contemporary as we brought the music of his own heyday to life again.
Outside the sky was changing. More pinks, more pastel greens, yellows and gentle shades of violet.
In the middle of the song, Al shouted over to me, “Hey, did you ever hear the head on this tune?”
“This tune has a head?” I asked, struck by the question. I thought I knew everything about the song.
“Gimme A minor. Stay on it but you can riff on the passing chords. I’ll call out the other changes.”
Chink-chink-chinka-chink.
From some special, magical place, a stirring melody emerged unlike anything I had ever heard, yet, it was precisely as I had always imagined that Stephane might have played it: ornate swells -- familiar, romantic, mysterious. Was something coming down from the heavens? The sky had gone from a churning cauldron to a stunning spectrum of pastel blue-violet.
The onlookers were frozen in place. The cook was standing in the doorway where the waitress stood, motionless, watching. The cop was awestruck. All eyes were on Al as I quietly strummed the chords in gypsy style as he called them out to me.
Chink-chink-chink-chinka-chink-chink-chink.
A crescendo here, an arpeggio there. Back into the rhythm. Then Al cued me to go back to a basic A-A-B-A form of the song, and he bowed that fiddle as though he were channeling Stephane Grappelli. My wrists were loose and I was played with less inhibition than ever, more of a light spectrum than soundwaves. Laura Nyro, when she was recording, used to say to the session players, “Can you make that tone more purple?” My chords were gypsy shades of aubergine and teal, draped in smokiness; then lime green as I played a staccato while Al exploded in a flourish of cascading minor key notes.
As the sun peered out from behind a yellow and pink cloud, it dawned on me – time could be bent and old things could be very new.
The music of my heyday was already outdated, replaced by new sounds, new voices. The voices of a new generation. I longed for the golden days, the days of Danny Stiles, the days of Al Duffy, the days of Django and Stephane. It was okay to love American music without detesting European music. They could meet in the middle and become new and fresh – a new dawn. It was possible to see a new day on a planet that was billions of years old.
There was a fragrant new batch of donuts on the racks. A fresh pot of coffee was brewing. We had been sitting in the donut shop for nearly three hours, riffing on the tunes, swapping stories and bending time the way Uri Geller could bend a spoon.
As old as I felt then, the years continued to pass, and in the blink of an eye, it was twenty-five years later.
Adolph Daidone died on Dec. 22, 2007. He was 100 years old and had been a member of the New York City musician’s union since 1924. His credits included luminaries like the Dorsey Brothers, Bobby Hackett, Dinah Shore and Jimmy Durante. He was survived by eleven great-grandchildren.
I always remember our night together. I still feel the presence of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli who came to call on me that night and never left me. I think of Laura Nyro, who sang “And When I Die,” then died too young.
I’d tell you more, I’d reveal the long-lost heads of other famous songs as they were revealed to me, but I have a gig tonight in the city. At the Red Blazer II. With the boys. Maybe next time.
Time. Ahh.
* Spirit in the Sky (c) 1969, Norman Greenbaum, for Reprise Records
** And When I Die, (c) 1967, Laura Nyro, for Verve Records
