In 1965 I was miscast as a Virginia teenager dropped into the last chapter of Up The Down Staircase when what remained of the family house band reconvened in New York City, first in Manhattan at The Roger Williams Hotel and then on 113th Street in Forest Hills. It was there, as an outsider in a town filled up with outsiders - Jews, immigrants, Holocaust survivors, Irish doormen and Italian shopkeepers and a thousand other misfits - that I met a kid no longer known as Harold who introduced me to an entire subset of uber misfits: teenage boys who were the children of those same outsiders. One of those misfits is in the news today. He was one of those persons whom I have been unable to forget even though we spent a very short period of time in each others company. Harold got me the gig to be the manager and backup singer for a thrown together Forest Hills band that was playing a Jewish singles weekend in Eastern Pennsylvania, and so we all made our separate ways to a bus parked on a sidewalk in the West 40s for a Pocono weekend. Harold Duhan on bass, George Goodrich on Farfisa, cant remember the drummer, and Tommy Erdelyi on guitar. I was surprised by how cohesive we sounded, but also by how amazing Tommy was as a guitar player. We later got kicked out of an audition at the Cafe Wha when we made fun of the act on stage, Justin Deveraux (sp). And that was that, disbanding on a sidewalk in The Village on a rainy November night in 1966. And then we were done. I left New York on a January night in 1967, and Tommy went on to the Tangerine Puppets, a job at The Record Plant and then The Ramones. When I bumped into him walking down the Mall here in town in 2008 I approached him and introduced myself. He was polite, with a cadence that resembled Christopher Walken. He remembered the singles weekend in the Poconos and busted audition at The Cafe Wha, but not me, didnt remember me, which was perfect. Rest In Peace, Tommy. And contrary to what the news reports say, he was younger than 65. He was a kid among kids in that band.
Posted on: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 14:16:39 +0000
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