Chapter Twenty-Nine
The journalist Alfred Gilbert Aronowitz was born in Bordentown, New Jersey, on May 5, 1928. His articles and columns about the Beats and, later, his regular column in the New York Post called “Pop Scene” had a sense of immediacy and irreverence that resonated with readers who had come of age around the end of the fifties. Aronowitz first captured my husband’s attention when Gerry learned that Al had known Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Gerry’s interest was further piqued by Al’s relationship with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But perhaps Aronowitz’s most compelling credential was that he was a confidant of the man who had written “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
Released by Columbia Records in January 1964, Bob Dylan’s album The Times They Are A-Changin’ was a collection of self-composed, sparsely arranged, and lyrically unsettling songs that connected with mainstream audiences. While the executives at Columbia saw huge potential income in selling the concept of rebellion to a nation of willing teenagers, other men in positions of power and influence saw Bob as a threat. That he was. Bob Dylan was empowering young people to refuse to be a cog in the military-industrial machine, and they were listening.
At twenty-two, I should have understood Bob’s appeal, but I didn’t appreciate until much later the social significance of his lyrics or the allure of his dry humor and unpretentious musical presentation.
Gerry got Bob immediately. He heard the call to revolution and was enthralled. The more he listened to Dylan’s songs, the more frustrated he became. While Gerry had been commuting from the suburbs and achieving financial success with pop ditties about teenage love and dancing, Dylan had been honing his craft on Bleecker Street. Now Bob was exhorting young people to reject the path their parents had laid out for them and look deeper for the true meaning of life. Gerry didn’t believe he could find that meaning as the person he was. He wanted to be Bob. Short of that, he wanted to know Bob.
From the day Aronowitz promised Gerry a meeting with Dylan, my husband was as inexorably drawn to Aronowitz as a boulder to the bottom of a lake. As Gerry was drawn, I was repelled. I thought that at thirty-six, with a wife and three children in Summit, New Jersey, Al was too old to hang out all night like a groupie with artists, poets, and writers at theaters and parties in hotel rooms and clubs. But such people and settings were exactly what Gerry hungered for. He found Al’s invitations to be part of that scene irresistible. He didn’t share my opinion that Aronowitz was trying to hold on to his youth and his currency as a member of the pop scene by associating with the likes of Brian Jones, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and now Gerry.
It was more instinct than logic that informed my perception of Aronowitz as a threat to my family. I wanted to fight this man with his moon-shaped face, scraggly red beard, and a knowing smile that always made me feel as if he knew what I was thinking. He probably did know. It wouldn’t have been difficult to discern my dislike of him or my fear that he would entice my husband away from Louise, Sherry, and me. But how could I fight someone who was not only a path to Bob Dylan but a bridge between the Beats and the new intellectuals?
Maybe the times would have tugged at Gerry even without Aronowitz. When we married in 1959 we were twenty and seventeen. Three years later we were the parents of two children. By the dawn of 1964 the responsibilities of marriage, family, and a suburban home were weighing heavily on Gerry. The dramatic societal changes that year only made him more aware of what he was missing. I thought it was my fault because I was an equal breadwinner instead of a traditional wife who stayed at home and took care of her man. But traditional wives and husbands weren’t exempt from the turmoil of the period. Gerry and I were part of a larger phenomenon in which one spouse enthusiastically embraced the new mores while the other was slower to accept them or didn’t accept them at all. While one member of a couple experimented with drugs, extramarital sex, or both, the other couldn’t understand why his or her spouse was abandoning previously shared values.
Had I been forty-two and Gerry forty-five, I might have understood his yearning for the bohemian lifestyle he’d never had. But I was a twenty-two-year-old wife and mother losing my twenty-five-year-old husband to avant-garde ideas. I wanted my life back. Unfortunately, yesterday had a no-return policy, and today wasn’t where I wanted to be. I could only hope tomorrow would be better.
I was understandably opposed when Aronowitz suggested early in 1965 that Gerry and I partner with him in forming an independent record label. When Gerry wouldn’t be deterred, I applied the maxim “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” and agreed to the plan. We called the label Tomorrow Records to memorialize our first hit and augur a successful future. Now we needed an artist. Aronowitz had a group in mind.
The King Bees were a band of five New Jersey high school seniors from Summit, Plainfield, New Providence, and Berkeley Heights who had acquired a following playing at school dances and community functions. The band consisted of lead singer and lyricist Dave Palmer; guitarist, vocalist, and composer Rick Philp; organist and vocalist Danny Mansolino; Mike Rosa on drums; and Charlie Larkey on bass. All were eighteen.
If Aronowitz thought the band would be of interest to Gerry and me, he was right. Their music had an edgy sense of urgency. Dave’s lyrics and vocal presentation moved us intensely. Rick’s inventive guitar parts complemented the dynamic energy of the rest of the players. The band’s talent was raw but unmistakable.
Gerry couldn’t wait to sign and produce the King Bees, but before we could close the deal, we ran up against a minor legal problem. A band in Martha’s Vineyard had established prior use of the name “King Bees”; therefore, the New Jersey King Bees would have to change their name. Some of the Martha’s Vineyard King Bees would later become part of the Flying Machine. With the changing of i’s to y’s and vice versa then in vogue, whether in honor or mockery of their suburban roots, they became the Myddle Class. In that spirit, though there was no conflict with any other Mike Rosa, Mike changed the spelling of his first name to Myke.
Duly renamed and respelled, the band was now free to go into the studyo.
The Myddle Class album was definitely of its time, yet the band’s powerful presentation can still be appreciated today. Their well-written songs and fully committed performances embodied the tenuous freedom and impulsive energy of young men across America who knew that they could be sent overseas to die for their country at any moment. Even then, I considered Dave Palmer’s lyrics on a par with those of lyricists of greater maturity. I’d like to believe that Gerry and I added value to the Myddle Class’s album, but there was a reason that they already had developed a following. They were compelling. Though Aronowitz’s omnipresence continued to be challenging, the one thing he brought into my life for which I will always be grateful was that band.
There would be other products of my association with the Myddle Class, but the best of them would not emerge until the early seventies.