Whatever my father lacked, he did do wonderful things for me. When I was seven, Dad took me to Manny’s Music on Forty-Eighth Street and bought me my very first guitar, a Yamaha acoustic with a built-in pickup with volume and tone knobs on the front. He also bought me a little practice amp. I’d been studying the Fender catalogue for months and was dying for a curvy sunburst Stratocaster. But Dad explained that this guitar was a more versatile way to start. I couldn’t complain—and didn’t.
My first attempt to actually write music came through my friendship with a guy who lived across the street from me, Alex Weiner, a lanky kid with long hair. Alex’s family had this cool apartment that belonged in Greenwich Village, not the Upper East Side. His mom was a hippie who believed in artistic freedom. The atmosphere in the Weiner home was moody. Some walls were painted black, some covered with scrawling graffiti. Alex’s mother actually encouraged us to paint on the walls. I loved this place! Better yet, Alex owned the exact Stratocaster I was dreaming of, and a Fender amp. Together we wrote something called, “I Love You, Baby.” At that age, what did I know about love? But I did know that “love” needed to be in the lyrics.
We might have written the song on a contact high because Alex’s apartment always smelled of marijuana. That aroma wasn’t new to me; it was all over Bed-Stuy, too. It was also a fragrance present at the parties my parents took me to as a kid. Mom and Dad didn’t smoke, but a whole lot of their friends did.
Pot seemed harmless, but that wasn’t true of other stimulants. I watched a mother of a close friend waste away on prescription drugs. They lived in an enormous apartment at 1010 Fifth Avenue, a landmark building off Eighty-Second Street, just two doors away from us. Their place was a disaster: plates piled high in the sink, dirty clothes scattered all over the floor, trash cans overflowing. When I told Mom about it, she rushed over to investigate and ended up washing dishes, mopping floors, and opening up windows to let in fresh air. She even bathed the poor woman and put her in fresh clothes. She convinced her to get professional help. That was my mother: a rescuer of lost souls.
* * *
Mom loved music as much as I did. Two of her prized albums, Imagination, by Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, became childhood landmarks. I used to love performing Gladys’s record for my mother. I’d sing along to “Midnight Train to Georgia,” and she’d sit attentively and watch every move. She’d let me get through the whole album and never once take her eyes off me. Even today, a half century later, the beautiful warmth of Gladys’s tone comforts me. Gladys gives voice to my mother’s soul. Mom’s soul and Gladys’s voice are forever linked in my heart.
Stevie’s album was a revelation. It was the first suite of songs I listened to where I focused on each overdub as a separate entity. This was my first conscious introduction to the meaning of a musical arrangement. Even as a kid, I saw Innervisions for what it was: a work of great art. There was a technical marvel to the whole operation. Beyond appreciating the intricate construction of each song, I was breathing in Stevie’s spirituality. Later on in my life, as I listened to this album again and again, I visualized Stevie sitting in the palm of God’s hand.
* * *
In the summer of 1973, Mom and Dad sent me upstate for two months to Lincoln Farm, a sleepaway camp in Roscoe, New York. I brought my Yamaha, and one of the counselors who played guitar taught me how to play songs like John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Not wanting to be left out, I also joined the camp marching band. When Mom and Dad showed up on Visitors’ Day, there I was, playing acoustic guitar in a marching band. That had to have been a first. Mom and Dad called it the funniest thing they’d ever seen.
Once I was home from camp, Mom sent me to the Harlem School of the Arts for guitar lessons. I was nine. She taught me to ride the bus by myself up Madison Avenue and into Harlem. I loved that feeling of independence, and I was happy to be playing my guitar. I have to say that I wasn’t a natural when it came to reading music, but I could follow by ear. My ear always has been and always will be my saving grace.
ISLANDS AND ANCESTORS
BAHAMIAN RHAPSODY
Manhattan and Brooklyn—the first two locations that formed my character.
Then came the Bahamas.
They were, of course, Grandpa Albert’s roots. But once I saw them, once I felt them, once I breathed in that island air, they became my roots, too.
The first trip was the most thrilling. It was Christmastime. I was five. I woke up in our New York apartment, looked out the window, and saw that it was snowing like crazy. Mom had all the suitcases packed, and off we went! We took a cab through the storm to JFK for our flight to Nassau. In those days, air travel was not treated casually. You dressed up. Always properly attired for every occasion, Mom wore a bright blue ensemble. Dad was in a suit and tie. I had on a little sports coat and matching pants.
Passing by the TWA terminal was an adventure all its own. The building was straight out of The Jetsons, a futuristic piece of flying architecture designed by Eero Saarinen, with winged roofs and crazy-angled windows looking over the runways. Then, arriving at the Pan Am terminal, I saw our 707 as a time machine. Mom strapped me in my seat. My heart was hammering as we lifted off, piercing the clouds, climbing over the weather, watching the blanket of gray dissolve into radiant blue. I drank soda and flipped through Archie comic books. Dad read the New York Times. Mom studied her scripts.
Then, three hours later, the giant bird landed on an island bathed in sunshine. When the smartly dressed stewardess opened the door, a flood of sweet air filled the cabin. It was humid and smelled like flowers. We walked down the stairs, onto the tarmac, and into the terminal, where a steel drum band greeted us with welcoming sounds. The grooves were soft, the feeling relaxed. Mom’s cousin Esau, a handsome, laid-back Bahamian, was there with his twelve-year-old daughter, Jennifer: our beautiful Nassau family.
Sometimes Mom and I made the trip alone; other times, it was a bigger outing: Dad; Grandpa Joe and Grandma Jean; my sisters, Laurie and Tedi; and of course Grandpa Albert and Grandma Bessie. I also spent many summers there alone, living with Esau, Jennifer, and Esau’s mother, who we affectionately called Roker.
That first time, though, when it was me, Mom, and Dad, we stayed on Paradise Island. Nowadays, Atlantis has turned it into a Disneyland-like resort. But back then, it gave off an authentic old-school vibe. We checked into the Britannia Beach Hotel, the last holdout of James Bond sophistication, where men in tuxedos and women in gowns gambled in the casino and hung out in the TradeWinds nightclub to hear Ronnie Butler and the Ramblers. Great musicians, from Count Bernadino to Trinidadian Mighty Sparrow, performed all over the island. Peanuts Taylor, a percussionist who had once reigned supreme at the Tropicana in prerevolutionary Havana, ran his own club, the Drumbeat, where half-naked dancers breathed fire. As a kid, I got to see that heady combination of music, flames, and flesh.
Nassau wasn’t always paradise. The first time I stayed with Esau, I showed up with a huge Afro. Esau didn’t approve. It didn’t suit his conservative sense of style. Right then and there, he ordered me into the backyard and insisted that I sit on a stool. He then took a bowl, put it over my head, and sheared me like a sheep. I was enraged. But he was my elder, and I had been taught to obey my elders. Besides, I could never be angry with Esau for long. He was too beautiful a person.