THE LEGACY OF TONY MARTS LIVES ON IN THE MUSIC
By Bill Kelly billkelly3@gmail.com
Tony Marts, Somers Point’s legendary nightclub, hasn’t physically existed in decades, but it’s musical spirit lives on as Anthony Marotta’s son Carmen continues to produce and promote the music at the weekly free Friday night Somers Point Beach concerts and on Wednesdays at Kennedy Plaza on the Atlantic City Boardwalk.
Now 67 years old, Carmen has retired from his day job at a law office and now has the time to concentrate on promoting the music that made Tony Marts famous and to write his memoirs, reflecting on his days growing up in one of the most popular nightclubs on the East Coast.
At first Carmen wanted to reach out to promote an upcoming act by The Weight Band that mainly plays the music of The Band, one of the many famous groups that performed at Tony Marts. The Weight Band schedule to play at Kennedy Plaza on the Atlantic City Boardwalk next Wednesday just happened to coincide with the episode of when The Band, as Levon and the Hawks, check into Tony Marts in the serialization of my novela Waiting on the Angels – the Long Cool Summer of ’65 Revisited.
Then Robbie Robertson, the lead guitarist and front man for The Band passed away, and many if not most of the obituaries and memorials to him mention days with the Hawks at Tony Marts, giving it national attention once again. In one Robertson himself is quoted as saying, “Tony Marts was an amazing crossroads on our journey, a really important thing for us.”
“I can’t put my finger on it why that time and place was so special,” says Carmen, “but it was a combination of things – Colonel Kudlets, Conway Twitty, Levon and the Hawks, it sort of just all came together. “
Today Carmen, along with his wife Nancy, produces the Friday night Somers Point Beach Concerts along with the Somers Point concerts commitee, as they have done for three decades now, along with the Atlantic City Boardwalk Mardi Gras AC shows on Wednesday nights, that have been on going for 12 years now .
Last Saturday afternoon Carmen sat in his car at the Somers Piont Beach while I sat in my car at a Pine Barrens lake and we talked on the phone for about an hour, reflecting on Tony Marts and its continuing, on-going legacy.
To start at the beginning, Anthony Marotta, Sr. was born in a small village in Sicily and began his journey to America on a banana boat that took him to Panama, where he worked as a laborer for two years to earn the money to get to New York. From there he made his way to Atlantic City, where others from his hometown had previously settled, where he met the women who would become his wife, who was from the same Sicilian town as he was. And it was Carmen’s mother who provides the family connection to the famous White House Sub shop.
Marotta opened his own sandwich shop on the boardwalk and with the money earned there he purchased Schicks Hotel on Bay Avenue in Somers Point. The old hotel had been popular with the ferry travelers to Ocean City, but with the trolley and auto causeway, business was slow, and the end of World War II was the end of an era, with a number of similar establishments changing hands at the same time including Gregorys, Charlies, the Anchorage and D’Orios.
Anthony Marotta took the old German Rathskeller on the first floor and made it a nightclub that would become Tony Marts. At first he brought in bands he knew from Atlantic City, but then slowly expanded. Eventually the room held a capacity of a thousand, with six bars and three stages for continuous music, so when one band finished a set another one kicked in.
“If you asked my father what was the band that made Tony Marts famous,” says Carmen, “he would say Len Carey and the Crackerjacks.” With a New Orleans schtick, “they threw crackerjacks into the crowd instead of beads.”
Len Carey, notes Carmen, played with Spike Jones, “who is mentioned in The Band’s song, ‘Up on Cripple Creek.’”
Tony Marts had a number of really good house bands that performed practically every night, including the Crackrjacks, the Fall Guys and Levon and the Hawks, who went on to back Bob Dylan, moved to Woodstock before the big concert, and where they became known simpl y as The Band.
All of the house bands that played Tony Marts get a chapter in Carmen’s memoirs, as well as the special guests and featured stars like Conway Twitty, Duane Eddie, Joey Dee and the Starlighters, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels – “It’s all in the scrapbook,” Carmen says of the scrapbook of newspaper ads, reviews and glossy promotional photos of the acts that played there. “The Somers Point Historical Society copied much of the scrapbook and has it,” he notes.
And in his book now being written Carmen will try to dispell some of the myths that keep getting repeated. “They are calling Robbie Robertson the leader of The Band, but he was the lead guitarist and handsome front man, not the leader,” Carmen says.
“My sister Tina was 17 at the time, and she remembers things better and recalls them telling dad that they didn’t have a leader and made decisions as a group.” But dad said, “you gotta have a leader, I need to pay someone.” And since Levon had been with Rockabilly Ronnie Hawks the longest, he became the nominal leader and they were billed as “Levon and the Hawks.”
While only a young boy at the time, Carmen recalls the Hawks clearly, watching them play on the second stage, as Conway Twitty had the main stage, he sat by the railing and watched the Hawks closely, from a few feet way, recalling “Richard Manuel was one of the top three blues and rhythm and blues singers ever, and to have three vocalist – Richard, Levon and Rick Danko in the same band was phenomenal.”
Carmen said that most of the songs they played at the time can be found on the Moondog Matinee album, he recalls on song that the crowds really enjoyed, “Little Liza Jane,” and sure enough, I found that they actually recorded a 45 rpm single of “Go Go Liza Jane” in 1965 on the Atco label, with a Robbie Robertson song “He Don’t Love You (And He’ll Break Your Heart)” on the flip side.
Among the myths that Carmen corrects concerns Dylan. “Bob Dylan never came to Tony Marts,” he says, “but the Hawks were playing there when Dylan called, and it’s probably the most important phone call in the history of rock and roll.”
Carmen says, “The call came in over the old wooden public phone booth,” but there’s some dispute over who answered the call. The consensus is that Levon answered, telling the others, “It’s Bob Dylan,” and putting his hands over the phone asked, “Whose Bob Dylan?”
As Rick Danko said he explained that Dylan was a folk music guy from the Greenwich Village scene, who wrote the song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” that was then a top ten hit covered by the California rock band “The Byrds.” The popularity of that song probably encouraged Dylan to seek a rock band and “go electric,” as they say.
Levon recalled Dylan asking if they could play the Hollywood Bowl and Carnege Hall with him, and Levon asked “Who else is on the bill?” and was incredulous when Dylan replied “Just us.”
Carmen says his dad, “let them out of their contract that required them to play through Labor Day,” and they went on to get booed by the old fashioned folkies at Forrest Hills for Dylan plugging in and “going electric,” but his then new song, “Like A Rolling Stone,” took the electricity and rock and roll to another level.
For their replacement over Labor Day 1965, Colonel Kudlets, the Toronto based talent scout and booking agent sent Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, who then had a hit on the charts – “Devil with the Blue Dress.”
The heydays at Tony Marts, like all of the Bay Avenue clubs – Bay Shores, Steels Ship Bar, the Anchorage, was the fifties and sixties, and carried over into the early seventies, but eventually Steels burnt down and things slowed down on Bay Avenue. When their father retired, Carmen and his brother Tony, Sr. took over management and learned how difficult it was to keep the business going.
When Robbie Robertson decided that he could no longer travel with The Band, he organized The Last Waltz concert at Winterland in San Francisco that was famously filmed by Martin Scorsese. Carmen believes and many agree that The Last Waltz is one of the best live concert documentaries ever, along with Woodstock, a close second. Although the Woodstock concert was originally planned for the town of Woodstock, mainly because of the presence of Dylan and The Band, the town decided they didn’t want such an influx of people so it was actually held at the nearby town of Bethel, New York, where the historic marker and annual concerts are held today. And the musical myths keep fading away.
Another myth that Carmen disputes is about Eddie and the Cruisers, the 1983 movie that was filmed at Tony Marts and captured the place for posterity on celluloid before its era ended.
“There was no band called Eddie and the Cruisers,” says Carmen, “they were a Hollywood invention,” but the music wasn’t, as it was by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown band that he calls one of the most underrated rock and roll bands from the East Coast. They had three top ten hits from that movie – “On the Darkside,” “Wild Summer Nights” and “Tender Years” but only sax player Michael “Tunes” Antunes made it into the movie, and he dies of an over dose and was replaced by sax and jazz bagpipes player Rufus Harley. Carmen brings “Tunes” back to play the beach concerts on occasion, usually sitting in with the Billy Walton band, unarguably the best new band around.
While attending the New Orleans World Fair in 1984 Carmen went over to Bourbon Street in the French Quarter and says, “It was just like Bay Avenue in it’s hey day.” Carmen fell in love with the place and the music, and even started his own nightclub with Levon as a partner – Levon Helm’s All American Café, that he now calls an “Ill fated” venture. It did however, give him a real taste of the New Orleans music scene and he got to know many of the musicians personally, bringing some of them back to the Jersey Shore to play, either on the beach or the boardwalk, where the Wednesday night gigs are called “Marti Gras - AC.”
One of the bands booked for both the Atlantic City boardwalk and the Somers Point beach in early September is Cyril Neville with Omari Neville of the famous Neville brothers, the first family of New Orleans.
Besides attending the annual New Orleans music festival, Carmen and Nancy also visit his family’s hometown village in Sicily, where he still has family and friends. “I took them out to dinner and 30 people showed up,” and laughs, and notes that the food there is really good.
Although Carmen doesn’t usually book tribute bands, The Weight Band, set for the AC boardwalk next Wednesday, is different, as they not only play the music of The Band, but include Jimmy Weider – the Woodstock native and lead guitarist who replaced Robbie Robertson in the post-Last Waltz Band. They also include a number of guys who played with the Levon Helm Band, including his last Atlantic City gig headlining the Borgata shortly before he passed away. The Weight Band also plays some original tunes that have the same gritty sound as the original Band.
Band organist Garth Hudson, at 86, is now the last Hawk standing and still lives in Woodstock today. Levon’s daughter Amy Helm has her own band that tours regularly and often plays in their Woodstock barn.
Besides his main shows on the beach and boardwalk, Carmen also books bands at The Point, the quaint outdoor bayside Tiki Bar on the site of where Bay Shores and the Waterfront once stood, where the Billy Walton Band is featured every Thursday night during the summer.
While the buildings are gone, the stage is still there and Carmen says the music is still alive and really hot, and he will continue producing the music he loves as long as possible.
