As I’ve said to the point of exhaustion earlier in this narrative, I learned the ink-flinger’s trade by imitating my respectable and honored newspaperman father. Well, I was going through his papers over the weekend and found the story below. He wrote it for the Long Island Press, in the 1970s the nation’s fourth largest afternoon daily.  As the last act of his career he was editorial page editor. 

As for his Dutch Schultz story, I heard it many times while growing up. But I didn’t see the actual print version when it was published in 1974. Those years I  was busy slaughtering trees so as to print “The Six Million Dollar Man” books, which unaccountably were deemed worthy of slaughtering trees for. It recounts an event that occurred during the 1930s, a decade that was to him what the 1960s were to me. It was “storied.” Here’s one.

Dutch Schultz Remembered

by Joseph C. Jahn

During the Prohibition era, my town on Long Island was a port of call for rum runners, foreign and domestic. We also had a doctor without portfolio who patched up wounded gangsters.

So it is no wonder that one evening I went to Mike’s Soda Shoppe on Main Street and unexpectedly found myself sitting on a stool next to Dutch Schultz, the gangster, who, history should record, was sipping a chocolate malted.

So was his burly bodyguard, one stool removed, who had a bulge in his right hip pocket that was not caused by a hankie.

Although this was very early in my journalistic career, and my beat was sports, I was sufficiently aware of front page news to know that Dutch was on the lam because a rival thug, Legs Diamond, wished to rub him out.

Also, the Feds, who couldn’t shoot straight on a bet, were looking for Dutch, not because he didn’t keep up with protection payments — a city problem — but because he didn’t pay his Federal income tax.

Therefore, a stool next to Dutch Schultz at that point in time was no place for a clean-cut, well-bred, God-fearing and nervous country boy. So I concluded that I needed a haircut.

From the barbershop I phoned Bert Carey, local reporter and photographer for our mutual employer, the Brooklyn Eagle. Bert joined me almost before I hung up. There followed a stakeout of Mike’s Soda Shoppe, then a cautious tailing of Dutch and his companion to a hideout in an unoccupied mansion in darkest Oakdale

They were in a sleek, high-speed bulletproof Lincoln, we in Bert’s well-ventilated old flivver. Fifteen minutes later they were seated in a darkened room on a sofa facing burning logs in a fireplace, and we were peering through a partly opened window. Bert’s flivver was down the road, it’s motor running, which was a good thing.

“When I nudge you, rap on the window, and then run like hell,” Bert whispered, aiming his camera’s lens toward the shadowy figures. He nudged, I rapped, a flashbulb went off, and I took off for the car, one step ahead of Bert. Moments later we were westbound on Montauk Highway, throttle to the floor. Moments after that we heard the deep-throated roar of a high-powered motor far behind us, but gaining.

Well, I said to myself, this is a fine fix. And it would have been if Bert hadn’t known back roads that led to Bloody Mary’s speakeasy. He drove the flivver in her barn, and we burst into Mary’s kitchen.

“I’ll have a hamburger and a shot of rye,” an unflustered Bert said to a flustered Mary. He had several of both. So did I. Hours later we resumed our journey, taking back roads to Brooklyn, where Bert’s film was processed while he wrote the story.

So it came to pass that the next day the Eagle reported exclusively that Dutch Schultz had been found and had a photo to prove it. Admittedly, the photo was fuzzy, but who wouldn’t have taken a fuzzy picture under those circumstances?

I do not recall that Bert won any prize for that scoop. He certainly didn’t get a raise; just having a job was a triumph in those days. But Dutch Schultz didn’t win anything either. He had paid a good buck to a God-fearing local realtor to rent an old mansion he had to abandon. More important, within a month Dutch was completely deceased, having been rubbed out in a beer joint in New Jersey.

My reward for riding shotgun with Bert? Mike put a gold star on the stool I occupied so briefly that fateful evening. But that too was rubbed out. In fact, it didn’t last as long as Dutch.

[this story is copyrighted]

So there I was working on a bottle of vodka with Paladin, who was wearing a purple muu muu and who was trying to get Liberty Valence on the phone so we all could go shark fishing in Hawaii.

I wrote a syndicated column that the New York Times distributed to every major market except Washington, D.C., which apparently didn’t like me, which was fine with me. Richard Boone was in New York for one reason or another, and a bright-eyed young publicist called me to come meet him in his room at the New York Hilton.

Boone famously played Paladin, the educated, sophisticated and cultured Old West mercenary who hired out to settle disputes, often with a sidearm, in the 1950s series “Have Gun -- Will Travel.” You’ll know the theme:

“’Have Gun -- Will Travel’ reads the card of a man
A knight without armor in a savage land.
It’s fast gun for hire he’s the calling wind
A soldier of fortune is the man called Paladin.”

The lyric ignores the fact that Paladin’s home base was a posh San Francisco hotel, where he had a Chinese lackey named Hey Boy and who was sometimes seen as being a dandy. Not that many gunfighters lectured villains on their “rough way of talking” and left calling cards with the chess knight on them and the legend “Have Gun -- Will travel. Wire Paladin, San Francisco.”

I don’t remember why Boone’s young PR man invited me to meet him. I only remember the man looking terrified when he opened the door to let me in.

He sat me on the couch. After a few minutes of rustling around in the other room, Boone appeared. He was wearing a floor-length purple muu muu and looked like he had just spent three days in a San Francisco hotel, this one in the Tenderloin.

He said hello and faced me, squinting through a haze, the famous lines on his face looking like trenches. He asked, “Are you a drinking man?”

Those days I was and said so. He trudged back into the other room, and after bit of rustling around, he appeared carrying a bottle of vodka. He slammed it down atop one of those shoulder-height dressers that hotels must buy by the trainload. He stared at the bottle for a minute, then turned back to me and raised an index finger and flashed the “help me out here” look.

I said, “Glasses?”

He said, “Glasses,” and went back into the other room.

After more rustling around he reappeared carrying two glasses. He slammed them down atop the dresser next to the bottle and turned me again. Again came the index finger and the look.

“Ice?” I said.

“Ice,” he replied and went back into the other room. More rustling around. Then he reappeared. He said, “No fucking ice” and poured two glasses of room-temperature vodka.  He downed his, a half glass of it, in one blast. I did the same. I could do that in those days.

Over the lips and past the gums, look out stomach, here it comes.

The PR man went into stage three cardiac arrest.

Anyway, most of the afternoon and most of the bottle later Paladin and I were the best of friends and we were talking about fishing, which I hadn’t done since moving to New York but remembered well enough from having grown up by the sea.

Boone lived on Oahu, explaining both the muu muu and the fishing. He had bonded so closely to his island Pandora that he was offered the role of McGarrett in “Hawaii 5-0.” He turned it down and Jack Lord got the part.

I don’t know why Boone turned it down. Maybe because he would really suck in a pompadour.

Back to fishing. One of his fishing friends was Lee Marvin, who among many roles played the villain in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence,” with James Stewart and John Wayne. Not too shabby. Marvin was so fond of fishing that he was offered the role of Quint in “Jaws.” He turned it down, and Robert Ryan got the part.

We know why Marvin turned it down. He said "What would I tell my fishing friends who'd see me come off a hero against a dummy shark?"

Well, there’s Paladin on the phone trying to reach his fishing buddy Liberty Valence to introduce him to his new friend Mike Jahn so we all could get on his boat, docked in Oahu, and go shark fishing.

I saw myself adrift in shark-filled waters with the two biggest drunks in Hollywood. I don’t remember the rest of the Richard Boone episode except that I went home to write it up for my column. I didn’t wind up eaten by a shark and neither did Lee Marvin. What happened to Paladin I don’t recall.

I hope he found ice.

I knew a lot of currently dead rock stars.

 This year marks the 41st anniversay of my becoming the first full-time rock journalist of The New York Times and, as such, the first full-time rock journalist of any major American newspaper or other form of major media. It was a dirty job -- forget Mike Rowe's sewers, septic tanks and oil spills -- but someone had to do it. Why was it dirty and depressing? Because I've known, abused substances or otherwise rubbed shouders with a lot of rock stars who have become deceased, rung down the curtain, ceased to be, kicked the bucket, croaked, shuffled off this mortal coil, or in one way or another joined the choir eternal. The number stands at 27.

It's tempting to think that drugs were behind most of these abrupt departures. However, in many cases death came via largely unrelated medical problems -- heart attacks or cancer, mainly. A number DID die of overdoses of either drugs or alcohol, sometimes both. Others succumbed to crashes by planes, cars, and skiing into trees. There also were murders and one suicide, possibly to avoid death by any of the aforementioned. 

If you are adding up and tracking deaths per band, that would be three-fifths of Canned Heat, half of the Who, two-fifths of MC5, one-third of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Peter, Paul & Mary, and a quarter each of the Beatles and Doors.

Here's the list.

SPIRITS OF ROCK STARS PASSED [sic]

Sonny Bono -- January 5, 1998, of skiing into a tree.

Harry Chapin -- died July 16, 1981, in a car accident.

Jim Croce -- died in a plane crash September 20, 1973.

John Denver -- died in a plane crash October 12, 1997.

John Entwistle -- bassist for the Who, died June 28, 2002 of a heart attack also involving cocaine and a prostitute. In Vegas, naturally.

Rory Gallagher -- Irish blues rocker, died June 1995, of complications of a liver transplant.

Jerry Garcia -- died August 9, 1995 of a heroin-related heart attack doubtlessly aggravated by his lifelong taste for junk food.

Jimi Hendrix -- died September 18, 1970, of a drug overdose. He would be humiliated by his surviving family's messy fight over his estate.

Bob Hite: six-foot, 300-pound singer for Canned Heat, died of a heart attack April 5, 1981.

Janis Joplin -- died of a heroin overdose October 4, 1970.

Ronnie Lane -- of the Faces and Rod Stewart and Faces; died June 5, 1997, of multiple sclerosis.

John Lennon -- murdered on December 8, 1980, outside his apartment building, New York's 19th century landmark the Dakota, which also was the setting for "Rosemary's Baby." He would have enjoyed the subsequent deification.

Linda McCartney -- one-time photographer and part-time, sort-of backup singer; died April 17, 1998, of breast cancer.

Keith Moon -- the Who's wild man drummer; drowned in his own vomit following a drug overdose on September 7, 1978, surprising no one.

Jim Morrison - died July 3, 1971, by one account of a heroin overdose and choking on sweet and sour pork, surprising even fewer than were surprised by Keith Moon. He would have enjoyed the postmortem idolatry.

Felix Pappalardi, of Mountain, April 17, 1983, murdered in the building where my dentist worked.

Elvis Presley, August 16, 1977, drug overdose aggravated by too many fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches. He would have been embarassed by the deification.

Billy Preston - R&B keyboardman who became famous for his work with the Beatles, died June 5, 2006, of kidney failure.

Fred "Sonic" Smith -- of MC5, later husband of Patti Smith (no blood relation). died November 5, 1994, of heart disease.

John Stewart, of the Kingston Trio and a long solo career that included writing "Daydream Believer" for the Monkees, January 19, 2008, of a stroke.

Mary Travers of Peter, Paul & Mary, September 16, 2009 of cancer. The only folkie to come out of the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene who actually was native to Greenwich Village.

Rob Tyner -- singer for MC5, died September 17, 1991 of heart failure while driving home from the grocery store.

Dave Van Ronk - "the Mayor of Macdougal Street" and early nurturer of many folksingers; died February 10, 2002, of colon cancer.

Henry Vestine -- guitarist with Canned Heat; died October 20, 1997, of a heart attack.

Alan Wilson -- guitarist with Canned Heat. He killed himself in Bob Hite's backyard September 3, 1970.

Frank Zappa -- rock's cranky innovator and first-amendment advocate who clashed famously with anti-rock activist Tipper Gore over censorship of rock lyrics; died of prostate cancer on December 4, 1993.

I remember Leonard Cohen well from the Chelsea Hotel. This story has sex in it.

Not between me and him. Between him and a woman friend of mine who I’ll call S. To be honest, though, there was no sex in that there was no happy ending in the traditional sense. She was hardly a blushing flower and in fact had the terrible habit of picking up guys in the subway. She picked up him in the Spanish restaurant that I believe still sits downstairs. They went up to his room, but she wasn’t equipped to deal with the prodigious size of Cohen’s member. She couldn’t complete the act.

No wonder his songs are so bitter.

If the act was completed by the usual other means, she didn’t say. All I know is that the blow job described in his song “Chelsea Hotel #2” was delivered by Janis Joplin.

In the early 1990s he did an interview in which this Q & A occurred:

“Who are your best male friend and your best female friend?”

“My 12-inch dick.”

According to S, that was no exaggeration.

Now, how does that take us to me? In the early 1970s, probably 1972, I interviewed  him at the Chelsea Hotel, which is famous as the place where rock stars stayed while playing New York as well as for being the hostelry where hip New York guys scurried off to while escaping wives and girlfriends. Or to murder them, as in Sid and Nancy.

And a host of literary figures too, something that is easily found on Google.

Cohen didn’t give interviews those days, but he gave one to me, probably because I wrote a good review of one of his concerts either that year or the one before in the New York Times. I met him in his room, the same room he took S. The Chelsea rented out a large proportion on a semi-permanent basis to artists.

They rented one to me for a summer, but I didn’t stay longer than that. I left after making a mistake while lighting the gas oven and blowing myself across the room and burning all the hair off the front of my body. Luckily I had pants on.

When I took the room I had the choice of either an air conditioner or a set of the famous French doors opening on the famous wrought iron balcony. Of course I took the doors. It was wretched hot in the summer of 1971 and I slept with the doors open. The guy next door, also a long-term renter, had two golden retrievers who had the run of the balcony and used to visit me with their wet noses in the middle of the night.

Fortunately, I grew up on a farm and was accustomed to wet noses.

So, Leonard Cohen. I went up to his room, which was on the opposite side of the building from me, the south side. He had one of the artists’ (artists as in painters) rooms into which amazing light poured through large windows.

The room was single and large. The only furniture was a small kitchen table with two straight-backed chairs, and a bed, which was unmade. There was smoke and dust in the room, and a vertical shaft of brilliant light bisected the room, making the smoke and dust glow like a light saber. Leonard took the two chairs and arranged them facing one another, looking across the shaft of light.

Tell me about theater.

That was how we talked. We talked about his habit of using real peoples’ names in his songs. There was a Suzanne. There was a Marianne. And we talked about a song he had just written, “Chelsea Hotel #2.” As you recall, the first verse goes

“I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.

“Those were the reasons and that was New York,
we were running for the money and the flesh.
And that was called love for the workers in song
probably still is for those of them left.”

He recited the verse to me, adding emphasis at two points. When the line came about the unmade bed, he nodded in the direction of the unmade bed. And when he recited “that was called love for the workers in song, probably still is for those of them left,” he gave me a little smile and a knowing look.

There were few workers in song left in the early 1970s, few good lyricists. He sensed that I knew. New York Times rock critics are expected to know these things. The disappearance of them was one reason I gave up the rock beat a few years later to write mystery and suspense novels. What workers in song were there? Give me a good literary analysis of “YMCA.”

The complaint thought stuck with him. Much later, in the song “The Future,” he mentioned “the lousy little poets comin' round tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson."

So Leonard Cohen of the enormous talent and even bigger dick was really ticked off about how few if any others could match him, at least in the first.

We hit it off, and when we were done talking he locked up the room and, without luggage which I presume he sent ahead, he got into a cab for Kennedy Airport. He was on his way to the Aegean, where he either had a place or stayed with someone and doubtless there was a Suzanne or somebody else to write songs about. I took his picture in the back seat and he dropped me off in Midtown, where I worked.

I never saw him again. I never saw S again either. I have picture of both. But not together, which would have been priceless.

Today we had a sumptious lunch for two at a Pakistani restaurant ($27), bought seven scarfs and four dresses from an Indian shop ($5 and $8, respectively, and picked up a wheelie cart from a Bangla Deshi across the street ($18). Satisfied that we weren't American undercover cops, he steered us to a guy from Guinea in West Africa. He took us a couple of blocks away and to the top floor of an office building. He led us into his inventory room and sold us two Dolce & Gabana bags for $25 each. All this in two hours in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan, specifically Broadway and 30th, aka Blade Runner East. Do I love New York or what?

And the Republicans say that immigrants are bad for the American economy! These were the best bargains since Wall Street sold millions of bargain mortgages.

I took a picture of JFK when I was 17 and working as a photographer for the Suffolk County News. That's Suffolk County in New York and not the one in Boston, though the latter might be more appropriate.

It was the end of the 1960 campaign when he flew into McArthur Airport and addressed a small rally by climbing atop a car. You could climb atop cars in 1960. You also could be an unknown teenage photographer with no press credentials and walk up to the future President carrying a large metal box, specifically a Crown Graphic camera of the sort stereotypically associated with the press photographers of the time.

Crown Graphics and their larger brethren, Speed Graphics, were on their way out, being replaced by single lens reflexes. But not entirely replaced. My fellow photographer Carl used one to get through crowds and police lines at murders, using the thing to bully people out of the way. He did this shouting "press!" And when he got to the scene of the crime he would put down the Graphic and whip a Leica out of his shirt pocket and get the shot of the corpse.

I couldn't afford a Leica or a SLR, but I had a hand-me-down Graphic. I climbed onto the car next to JFK's, and all of seven or eight feet away from him took that shot. Soon after, I processed it in the darkroom I had built into my bedroom closet and brought the print to my dad, who was editor of the Suffolk County News. He paid me $2. That's about the equivalent of $20 today.

( I can't figure out how to post it here, but have a query into someone who does. Check back)

I could have killed Kennedy. Three years later someone else did just that, and from much further away. I didn't even shake his hand, though he thrust it in my direction later on when we both were down off our car roofs and he was walking down a reception line of sorts. "Shake his hand, shake his hand," my father yelled. But I was working. And carrying a Graphic, which wasn't easily put down in the middle of a crowd. I was afraid that someone would trip over it. My father shook JFK's hand. He was accustomed to presidential familiarity. Four years earlier he drank bourbon with Harry Truman (see my first post, "Jimi, Harry and Me" (http://mikejahn.moxietype.net/index.php?story=story090413-133217).

Thus developed my special bond with the Kennedy dynasty. Eight years later I shed a tear over Bobby, and just now shed a tear over Teddy. (I also was stunned and disappointed when Jacki married Ari, but that's another matter.) Teddy, Teddy was special, especially since he outlived the rest by decades. I took that picture in late October of 1960, nearly half a century ago.

I've been beating up on the legend of Woodstock pretty good lately. As much as I downplay the value of the festival itself, I’ve never doubted the accomplishments of that generation. It showed that mass action can stop a war, it launched the organic food and healthy living movement, and in its quest for global information sharing (as in The Whole Earth Catalog), set the tone for the creation of the Web.

Bruce Pollock has written 12 books on music, interviewed a couple of hundred musicians, written several hundred lyrics, turned out at least 100 columns for a newspaper in New York, produced nearly a hundred record compilations, founded and edited exactly 100 issues of a top music magazine, and published an annual reference book on songs for 17 years. He wrote the following in celebration of his book, “By the Time We Got to Woodstock: The Great Rock Revolution of 1969.”

“It was a time of euphoria and devastation, freedom and assassination, revolution and retribution, moonwalks and sit-ins, love-ins and race riots, sex, drugs and guns. It was the 1960s. The Kennedy coronation in 1960 promised glamour, hope and change; the return of Richard Nixon in 1968 ended all that silliness. In state after state idyllic college campuses became terrorist cells, inner cities went up in flames, families were torn asunder, as the drumbeat of

“Popular music tried to drown out the drums of war. Graduating from high school in 1963 and ‘64 and ’65, the rock and roll of sock hops and malt shops, surfing and going steady gave way to an edgier, angrier sound, foretelling the end of innocence and the eve of destruction. For the first rock generation, the times were a-changing and we wanted the world…now! Starting late in 1966, FM radio carried this message from coast to coast, working its way up from underground, on the back of the expanding album market, with AM radio and the 45, the outmoded status quo, giving way in its wake. Through the visions and violence of 1968, the cracks in the dream turning to chasms, it held out the last remaining olive branches of hope—or was it refuge—to its burgeoning constituents, broadcasting the music of the future from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Byrds, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix, Sly & the Family Stone, the Doors, the Dead, the Airplane, Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, Mother Earth, Moby Grape, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Velvet Underground, the Mothers of Invention, the MC5, Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin, Richie Havens, Funkadelic and the Fugs.

“After sitting out the decade on the sidelines, Richard Nixon’s mission upon election was to restore order to the chaos, even if, as his crony in the governor’s mansion in California told a cheering throng, “It took a bloodbath.” And so, as the bloody year of 1969 unfolded, Aquarius fell on the counter culture. While the crucial musicians still issued albums like manifestos, as their draft eligible brothers tried to live the music in the streets, the government escalated its assault, here and overseas.

“Holding to the last to the music that was supposed to set them free, at one mad outdoor party after another, from Miami to Denver and from Woodstock to Altamont, at least it could be said, and nowhere better than in this blistering book, that a generation went down swinging.”

He’s wrong on that last point. That generation isn’t gone. Every time you vote in opposition to the Iraq War or munch an organic carrot while surfing the Web, you’re feeling its influence.

Earlier this week I was one of three reporters who covered the Woodstock Festival 40 years ago to sit down and audio roundtable “popcast” that the Times Recorded. I wrote in another post that it was going up. Well, it’s up. And here it is.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/weekly-popcast-woodstock-at-40/