Culture at the Ritz

After celebrating Christmas 1980 with my family in Hartford, I called my friend Elihu Rubin, who lived in Bayside, Queens. Elihu and I had met one evening during my freshman year in college. We’d stayed up all night talking and arguing, and we’ve been talking and arguing ever since. He was my guru of hipness, as he was from the big town and fully absorbed by its history and limitless cultural options and possibilities.

Elihu had gone into songwriting full time after dropping out of Trinity and had had a disco hit, “Love Insurance” by Front Page, a studio group of ex-Harlettes put together by his co-writer Steven Plotnicki. After their partnership splintered, Steven went on to co-found Profile Records, sign Run-DMC, and retire early. Elihu decided that he didn’t enjoy the pressure of creating for hire or the claustrophobic world of the songwriting business. So at this time he was living at home and spending his days at the library researching the candy business, which he had decided would be his next venture. Elihu had always urged me to get out of Hartford if I was serious about music, and I had finally taken him up on it by going to Jamaica.

From the first time he had seen me play at a party our freshman year, Elihu had followed my musical adventures keenly, avidly rooted for my success, and was never short of advice. When he saw me wearing a polyester shirt one day, his comment was, “Andy, all those guys you see that came from small towns and got somewhere in the business? They all have something in common. They moved to New York and started wearing natural fibers.”

Now I couldn’t wait to check in with him and share some of my adventures, as well as get out of Hartford, which now looked smaller than ever after six months of Kingston street life.

“Can I come to visit? I’d love to see you before I go back to Jamaica.”

“ Sure, when were you thinking of coming by?”

“I should stay with my family another day or so. I’m going back in January. I’m going to be playing with Lloyd Parks and We The People. They’re great. I hope you get to hear them someday.”

“Cool. Hey, you know this group Culture, right? They’re playing the Ritz on Sunday night. Weren’t you going to be touring with them?”

“Yeah, I was supposed to. We had a meeting at their house and everything but the promoter never sent tickets for the band, just them.”

“Well, you remember Joy Rosen from college, right? She’s in town with her friend Susie Kepnes. I was looking for something to do with her, but she doesn’t want to strand Susie. Do you want to go see your friends and double date with Joy and me?”

Joy and Susie were two beautiful young Jewish women in our class who had been best friends at college. I had been in a few large classes with them and admired them from afar, but did not know them well. Joy was stylish and well-dressed, Susie favored corduroy jeans and embroidered peasant tops. I’d always wanted to know Susie better. I hadn’t realized that Elihu felt the same about Joy, or that he’d been in touch.

“Hell, yeah. I always thought Susie was really cool, but I thought she might not be into me because she’s Jewish, so I never asked her out. That sounds like a great idea. Let’s do it. I’ll come down on the bus Saturday.”

“I’ll call Joy and set it up. Call me when you know what bus you’re taking.”

“Great! See you then.”

Two days later we were in line with Joy and Susie at the Ritz, the coolest venue in Manhattan, buying tickets for Culture. I had never been to the Ritz, but I had read about it in both the Village Voice and the New Yorker, my conduits to the big world outside of Connecticut. Combined with the excitement of seeing Susie again, who was even more attractive than I remembered, I was ready for a great evening of music, watching my favorite reggae vocal trio. Any disappointment I felt about not doing the gig was minimized by the potential of the evening ahead.

We got there later than we had planned, and by the time we got inside, the floor was jammed. My personal preference for watching shows was to be as close as possible to center stage so I could watch the musicians, particularly the guitarists. But Elihu, wiser in the ways of the world, had other plans. “Let’s go upstairs and get a table.” The prospect terrified me. A table meant a waitress, and a waitress meant tipping. I might be an up-and-coming reggae guitarist, but that didn’t mean I had come to New York with very much money. And would Susie expect me to buy her drinks? I didn’t mind, but Susie was a bit of a feminist and I wasn’t sure about the proper etiquette.

“Shit, there aren’t any tables open.” Elihu was annoyed, I was thrilled. Maybe we could just stand up and watch the show. “Andy, you know these guys. Go backstage and ask them to get us a table.” The ladies looked at me with polite surprise. “I think the dressing room door is right in front of us.”

I thought I would vaporize from surprise and mortification. It never would have occurred to me to use the fact that I knew somebody to get a table at a show. That wasn’t done in my family. One waited patiently in line. What if they said no? I was pretty sure that Elihu’s opinion of my stature, however flattering, was grossly exaggerated. If I was that important to Culture, I’d be on the tour, not in the audience.

Even worse, what if they said yes and the Ritz staff officiously took a table from someone else who was already there in order to seat us? I would feel dreadful either way. But, as so often happens in human history, hormones trumped embarrassment. The double vision of Susie Kepnes and Joy Rosen looking at me with polite skepticism propelled me forward. I knocked on the dressing room door. It opened, to my horror.

“I’m sorry, you can’t come in now. The band is just about ready to go on.” My way was blocked by a polite but very solid-looking red-headed American who obviously meant business. There would be no table for our crew. I could see a number of unfamiliar musicians getting ready over his shoulder. Then Joseph Hill, Culture’s dynamic leader, suddenly appeared, blotting out the view. He recognized me and he broke into a huge smile.

“Andy! Whaa?? Yuh deh! Come nuh, mon! We have a next guitar for you! Show fe start!” Before I could react, he had pulled me past the startled road manager and into the dressing room. I didn’t even have time to look back. Kenneth and Albert, the other members of Culture, also recognized me and smiled. But the band regarded me with a variety of expressions ranging from outright hatred to open astonishment. Who was this white guy, and what was Joseph doing?

“Andy, this is Ras Ipa, our guitarist. Ipa, lend Andy your spare guitar. Him a go play tonight.” Ipa, a handsome Rasta in a tam, was fortunately one of the astonished rather than the resentful. He looked at Joseph for a couple of seconds. Then he opened a guitar case containing a black Les Paul copy and graciously nodded to me. I picked it up and fingered a couple of chords. It was in good shape. I tuned it quickly by ear to Ipa’s open strings.

“Come, mon, time fe go!” We hurried down the stairs to the stage, where fortunately there were two guitar amps waiting. As the crowd caught sight of me, I could see people pointing at me and talking to each other. As with the band, their facial expressions ranged from outright hatred to astonishment. I hadn’t had time to think about what kind of reception I might get. I had other, more immediate problems.

I plugged in and said to Ipa, “What are we playing?”

“International Herb, in Bb. Do you know it?”

“Well, I have the album.”

Ipa shrugged. There was no turning back for either of us. I He couldn’t have been happy, but he hid it well. “I’ll hold the rhythm. You play lead.”

As I looked at the crowd again, the totality of my situation finally hit me. I was onstage at the Ritz in front of a sold-out crowd with a band I had never played with or even seen before, backing one of my favorite groups without a sound check or even a set list. Was this how it worked? The whole thing was surreal. I had a fleeting thought of Elihu, Susie, and Joy upstairs wondering what had happened to me. Then the drummer counted off the first tune and it was survival time.

I had learned enough about the music in the past four months of hustling sessions to know that I needed to think mostly about doubling the bass line. I had no idea if Joseph wanted anything more than that. So I concentrated on picking up the bass lines, just as if I was on a session, and trying to remember what the lead players on the albums had done. If I remembered that a tune had guitar fills, I threw some in.

Joseph gave a fantastic, commanding performance. The band, which I learned from our introduction was called Zion Initation, was nowhere near as good as the Roots Radics or the other session players I had been working with, but they were well rehearsed and held their own. For the most part they avoided looking at me, except for Ipa, who told me what was coming next and in what key. After a ninety-minute set and the encore of “Two Sevens Clash,” one of my all time favorites then and now, we went back to the dressing room. I returned the guitar to Ipa with thanks, after wiping it down, and he said, “Irie.” I figured that was as good as I would get. The others said little or nothing. Dilly, the trumpet player, glared at me.

As the dressing room filled with fans, I saw Joseph deep in conversation with a dark-haired, bearded man in a green Army jacket. He gestured for me to come over.

“Andy, meet Mike Cacia. Him is de promoter for de tour.”

We shook hands. Mike said, “Joseph wants you to come along with us for the rest of the tour. There are only four more shows, and we don’t have room for you in the van. But if you can get yourself to the shows, we’ll cover your expenses.”

“What does the gig pay?”

“Well, we didn’t budget for you when we set up the tour. But I can give you $30 a show.”
I thought about it for all of ten seconds. Hanging out at my parents’ house in Hartford or going to play gigs with Culture. Thirty dollars a night was what I had been making in the bars a few years earlier, and obviously not enough money. But, not for the last time, I made a decision based on art rather than commerce.

“OK, I’ll do it. Where is the next show?”

“We have two shows at Jonathan Swift’s in Boston tomorrow night. Then we have a show at My Father’s Place, and then the Mudd Club afterwards. Can you find places to stay? We don’t have a hotel room for you.”

“I’ll manage.” My friend Howard Kruger was in pharmacy school in Boston and I had a standing invitation at Elihu’s house, as Mrs. Rubin was quite fond of me.
He gave me a copy of the itinerary. “We’ll see you at soundcheck at Swift’s at five.”

I had no idea of what to do next. There was no road map, and no one to ask. I knew that I had to budget carefully. Who knew when I would get any work? Or even if there was any work to get? The music business in Kingston operated according to its own set of rules that related only tangentially to what I knew about the business in America.

As far as I understood things, if you wanted to be a working musician, you got in a band with other people you knew, based on liking somewhat compatible types of music. Then you decided whether you wanted to play in bars, play hotel lounges, or do weddings. Once you made up your mind, you rehearsed a night’s worth of music, found an agency that could book you the kind of gigs you wanted, and went to work. If you wanted to do anything more creative, you wrote your own songs, tried to sneak them into sets during your regular gigs, and eventually recorded a demo of them somewhere to send to people in the business to get a record deal. I had never been in a band that had gotten that far. The closest I had come to a record deal was sitting with Horace Andy in Island’s offices talking to Lister Hewan-Lowe about doing a record for Lister’s label, which is how I had gotten there in the first place.

Although I hadn’t really figured out how the business in Jamaica worked, it was obviously nothing like what I had grown up with. I was meeting lots of people whose names I recognized from album covers. And yet they were hanging out in the same alley I was, for the most part. Every so often, some would disappear for a morning, an afternoon, or a day or two. But they always came back.

So I summed up what I knew, and began to develop a plan of action, based on what Jimmy had told me. The musicians I wanted to meet, and hopefully play with, rarely played live in Kingston, contrary to my expectations. There were plenty of bars and nightclubs, but hardly any of them featured live bands. My heroes were playing in the studios, doing recording sessions for different producers and artists. So—if I wanted to play with them, I had to play sessions too.

This realization presented a number of difficulties, but also the outlines of a plan of attack. Although I had already played on several recording sessions, I had pretty much bluffed my way through them, without knowing what worked or why. I was terrified by the very idea of recording. I had never liked my playing and nothing about hearing it played back through the studio monitors made me like it any better. When recording, I operated on a level of consciousness well below that of the verbal—the part of the brain that enables a fighter to continue to stand up and look menacing while out on his feet. (I would grow much more familiar with this part of the brain as time went on.)

But there really didn’t seem to be any choice. I’d tried playing the hotel circuit, which had its charms. I liked being near the water, playing six nights a week, having a steady paycheck with lots of time to practice, eating good food, and not having to lift any equipment. But it wasn’t what I wanted to do musically. The hotel bands played more top 40 American R&B and soca than they did reggae, as the managers, who were middle class, considered it disreputable and unsophisticated music. They only allowed it because a lot of the tourists asked for it. More important, Sly and Robbie and the Barrett brothers weren’t doing hotel gigs.