I quit my junior high school teaching gig around this time and started a Masters at NYU. C was still working as the primary night bartender at Downtown Beirut. Most nights she worked the whole place by herself. Posted above is a video that gives an impression of what that was like. I used actors for parts of it but all the dialog was based on stuff she'd seen or heard.

In 2021 I tore the video apart and reedited the whole thing. I added more shots in some places and cut other sequences shorter. Audio recorded directly from the juke box (a very loud jukebox) was added behind a lot of the action to bring back the experience of trying to talk to other people in an East Village punk bar. Watch for my cameo (hint: blue shirt).

In 2022 the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival gave me a nice award for the editing. Unfortunately the Metropolitan Transit Authority conspired with my enemies and made me miss the ceremony. Ninety minutes into a trip that should have taken an hour I was still at the Broadway-Lafayette station and no closer to my destination in Sunset Park. If The Art of Brooklyn Film Festival ever makes it to this page, I want to let them know how much I enjoyed getting an award.

After a seven-mile hike up Mt. Leconte we stayed ovenight in a small cabin operated by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The cabins surrounded a dining hall; supplies were brought by llama.

It never warmed up; there was something wrong with the small stove that heated the space. Even under five layers of blankets I couldn't get comfortable. Rushing out of the cabin in the morning to get to breakfast my feet slipped out from under me on the ice-covered steps. I landed on my back on the steps with the air knocked out of me. It was nothing like passing a kidney stone but it hurt.

On May 17th of our first year married C and I went up to Radio City Music Hall to see Frank Sinatra. It was essential to me to see him, not only because he’d played such a huge part in world music but also because of my dad’s devotion to the guy. Sinatra was seventy-four at the time and The Voice wasn’t the same as the baritone heard on the string of masterpiece 78s and LPs he’d recorded for Capitol in the 50s. He was the best microphone singer of the twentieth century, working a fabulous Neumann U47—he used nothing else after 1950—that rewards intimacy and makes the right singer sound like they’re sitting on the couch with you. Want to pick up a used one for your home studio? I saw one on ebay recently for $28,000. Fran and I were lucky enough to sing into the similar Neumann U87 for our Telstar recording and every legend I'd heard about these mics turned out to be true.

The Nelson Riddle arrangements on Songs for Swinging Lovers, the songs chosen, the meticulous recording, the session players, and Sinatra’s performance make it one of the best records ever released. Some writers like to claim it as the first concept album, every song with similar heartbeat tempos perfect for a pair of relaxed dancers. Most of the Capitol albums recorded in those years stand as similar achievements: Come Fly With Me, Come Dance With Me, In the Wee Small Hours, It Might As Well Be Swing—they’re all great.

Though Sinatra was one of the ultimate pop vocalists, he remained a favorite among jazz players; he was a musician’s singer. He was especially attuned to drummers and always placed the drum kit on stage so it was directly behind him. He depended on the drummer’s beat as he ran curlicues around the rhythm with his rubato. His phrasing, in other words: where he puts the words and where he puts the pauses, when he delays and when he catches up, somehow always making it sound natural and selling the lyrics like they just came into his head.

My father was a drummer. He began playing in big bands in high school and continued for years, right until Columbus GOP bigwigs made him stop. After he got out of the Air Force in the mid-fifties and returned to Ohio, he began to play with smaller ensembles that did lounges at night and weddings and bar mitzvahs on the the weekends. Often the gigs were a critical part of the family budget, especially in the beginning when his day job was moving voting machines at the Board of Elections. These parallel paths, one in politics and one in music were happening throughout my childhood.

I vividly remember sitting on the steps that led down to a basement lounge called the Knave’s Cave. The club was part of a Holiday Inn where the ensemble had a long engagement; management gifted us a couple of rooms over a weekend and I could even take a friend. We felt sort of grown-up listening to this adult music through the closed doors; we weren’t allowed in the club. I remember the cigarette smoke on his suit; my mother hung it outside to get rid of the smell. I remember him complaining about having to play certain songs, ones the drunks always requested, stuff like “My Funny Valentine”.

II can see the drum case as clear as if it were in the room, with all its cymbals and the snare, the brushes, the sticks, the foot pedal for the bass drum. It was a black box with wheels and straps, always going into and out of the station wagon in the driveway. Once I found a porno mag at the bottom of the case, the first one I’d ever encountered. I don’t think dad had much interest in these magazines but I’m sure he sat around in a lot of dressing rooms that had piles of them. The men all had their socks on; the women were all skinny, like junkies, and everybody had tattoos. When tattoos became a larger part of contemporary culture they always made me think back to that magazine.

Porno wasn’t the only thing found in those dressing rooms. Musicians drink, as much as writers or sailors or anyone else famous for drinking. When Nero’s lyrist withdrew from the Emperor’s presence (walking backwards) he probably went straight to the wine shop. He might even have had it mixed with a little opium; the milk of the poppy has had its own ancient appeal.

For dad it was always booze. It turned out he had an addictive personality, and the drug closest to hand was alcohol. It got worse every year until the family had an intervention around 1980. When he drank he became personable and joyful and wanted to indulge the thing he loved most—music, and the records of Frank Sinatra in particular. I tried to avoid him when he drank; the whole family could read his moods pretty well and you could tell where things were headed. He’d entrap you if he had the chance; you’d end up on the couch listening to him tell stories about Frank or the musicians playing behind him. He played the records really loud.

It was no surprise to anyone when he began to lose his hearing, between the records and all the band work. A big brass band like his favorite, Stan Kenton’s, can get really loud, as loud as any punk outfit in a club (except maybe The Ramones or in a earlier era, Blue Cheer). Years later I’d play my albums pretty loud, too; I once had my band’s PA system set up in my basement bedroom. I rigged up a headphone jack from my little stereo, then fed that to the PA. I played the current favorite, “Whole Lotta Love” from Led Zeppelin II, and the Jimmy Page slide that happened after each repetition of “I wanna whole lotta love”—panned from left to right in the mix—travelled across my room at about the same decibel level a jet airliner makes descending onto a runway. I blame the bands, the amplifiers, the headphones, and all those speakers for my own hearing loss. Truth be told we’ll all lose it if we live long enough.

If I tried to avoid jovial dad and go to bed, the mood could turn and turn very quickly. Suddenly he was a bitterly sarcastic man, a dad with a gift for ferreting out the weak points, all the fracture-lines in one’s personality. I’ve seen myself do this when I’ve had enough to drink and I am denied something; it's way too easy to get nasty. Tommy Enright wasn’t really a bad guy, he was just a drunk and he could get mean. Everyone in the family had to deal with it, and all of us had injuries—though I did see my brother just laugh at him sometimes. I cringed while I watched him do it. I could never muster enough courage for that. I just wanted to get away, get away as far as possible. First down to Cincinnati, which turned out to be not far enough. Then New York, but of course around then he quit drinking.

The takeaway, as biz-speak puts it? Even after learning in terrorized circumstance all the Capitol Sinatra albums by heart (and half of the Reprise discs) I have to say, finally, that I still love the guy. Even after all the crazy shit happening around those records, I still love him.

C and her folks at the Dairy Queen in McPherson. The town has about 12,000 residents and the tallest structure is a grain elevator. It's named after a Civil War general; the second syllable is pronounced "fur." As the locals say, there is no fear in McPherson.

This is my favorite picture of my in-laws L and N with C. It’s quintessential Kansas: the punishing summer sun, a family, the Dairy Queen franchise. I love C in her East Village finery and her six-foot-two dad’s tee-shirt with Chinese characters. He was an American history professor at the local college and I felt a deep affinity with him the moment we met. In many ways it was easier for me to talk with him than my own father.

He died young, of a heart attack while jogging; L ran every day years before anyone else was running for their health. He’d survived an earlier attack because the blood flow in his veins and arteries was so robust. He was a fascinating guy, reticent, perhaps a little shy, possessed of a deep bass voice sometimes singled out for solos in the church choir. On school breaks he pursued his hobby driving alone—N decided early on this was not for her—following obscure highways throughout the country. Gas station maps littered his office.