ROBBIE ROBERTSON RIP
It seems like now I only get to write about music is when a musician dies, though I/m looking forward to getting out and about again checking out some live shows sometime soon.
When it comes to music, I guess I've seen B.B. King more than any other act, and The Band comes in a close second.
I still remember when I first heard The Weight over the radio, on a Sunday night on WXPN - 88.5 University of Pennsylvania station where the student jocks played songs they wanted to, and later heard the whole album Music From Big Pink on WMMR, when they first played what they called Album Oriented Rock (AOR). Those songs got me hooked on music, and they have stayed with me.
At Camden Catholic High School I kept a copy of an ad for the Band taped to the door of my locker.
In the fall of 1969, while a freshman at the University of Dayton, Ohio, I drove with a carload of other students to Cleveland, where we saw The Band at an old War Memorial auditorium, the first of many concerts i would catch of them. The thing that caught me attention was how they switched instruments, and even the drummer Levon Helm, picked up the mandolin on occasion.
Later I also saw them perform at the Academy of Music and Spectrum in Philly.
I guess I first wrote about the Band playing at Tony Marts as Levon and the Hawks in my first music column in the late 70s in the Ocean City Broadsider Magazine, a glossy color cover city mag owned by Marion Talese, Gay's sister, and edited by Kurt Loder, who went on to fame at Rolling Stone Magazine and MTV News.
I got the basic scoop on Levon and the Hawks at Tony Marts but Kurt added a few touches, as he actually saw them play before going to German in the Army.
Sometime later I went looking for a story and went to Tony Marts, where I found Anthony Marotta sitting in the corner, raised bar by the front door, smoking a cigar and sipping a drink. Sure, he said, he remembered Levon and the Hawks, "the last of the gentlemen," he called them. "They were all animals who came after them."
He instructed me to return the next day, during the day, and he would show me the Scrap Book. I went in, and followed a cleanup guy through the club with stools and chairs upside down on the bars - there were six of them, and three stages, so the music was constant. Out the back door, through a cavern of kegs of beer and cases of whisky we went into an office where Mr. Marotta sat at a desk with his back to the wall. He stood up and pulled a thick Scrap Book from a shelf and let me peruse through it, full of newspaper ads and black and white glossy photos of acts who had played there over the years, since Tony bought the place near the end of WWII in the mid-1940s.
There was a 8 by 10 glossy black and white photo of Levon and the Hawks, with their head shots, that he let me borrow, and after I took some notes, and got some quotes, I wrote a short three page story I took over to the free weekly Atlantic City Sun newspaper in Pleasantville and presented to the editor, who also took the photo.
The story ran at the bottom of the front page, and when I stopped by to pick up the photo to return to Tony, and pick up a $10 check, the editor told me that most people read the headlines and first sentence or two, and then drop off. But my story was good enough to hold a lot of people from beginning to end, and that takes talent. I never forgot that, so in my future columns I tried to put a unique twist at the very end, and when someone mentioned that to me, I knew they read the story from beginning to end.
When I dropped off the photo of the Hawks at Tony Marts, I found Tony where I had met him, sitting at the elevated corner bar smoking his cigar. He motioned for me to sit down next to him, had the bartender, Doobie Duberson, give me a beer, a long next Budweiser, and slipped me a white envelop that I opened later and found a $20 bill. He said that was his way for thanking me for such a good story on the Hawks.
From Tony Marts, the Hawks signed on to back Bob Dylan, were booed at Forest Hills in New York and everywhere they went on a world tour because the old folkies didn't like Dylan plugging in and "going electric." Levon even backed out and was replaced by the drummer for the Monkies.
While Dylan was recovering from a motorcycle accident at his manger Albert Grossman's vacation retreat at Woodstock, New York, the rest of the group, under contract and being paid by Grossman, also moved to Woodstock, known as an "artists colony" for decades. There Rick Danko rented a large split level pink house in nearby East Saugerties, that they called Big Pink. Garth Hudson set up his organ and tape recorder in the basement garage and they met there an began recording sessions that included Dylan as he got better.
Someone put a notebook on a table with a pen where they began to take turns writing songs lyrics, a joint project, but in the end, one for which Robbie Robertson would take major credit for and copyrighted most of the songs. Since the song writer got most of the royalities, Robertson got the credit and the royalties.
After catching The Band a half dozen times, I didn't like the fact that they were breaking up, or so the rumors went, but glad they filmed their final performance together as The Last Waltz, which is rated one of the top concert movies of all time.
But it turns out that it was all Robbie Robertson's idea, as he was tired of performing on the road, the drugs, the excesses and knew it had to end on a good note, and he tried. But the rest of The Band, especially Levon, wanted to carry on, and they began to tour solo and as duos, and then eventually as The Band, with a fine fill in for Robertson's lead guitar.
Then one afternoon in the mid-1980s, I was with Jody Kish at Marks News on 8th street in Ocean City, and we talked about bringing The Band back to Somers Point for a Tony Mars Reunion.
Camden attorney and prosecutor Harris Berman and his brother had sold a Florida hotel and had to spend the profits within a certain amount of time in order to avoid paying taxes so Berman bought Bay Shores, tore it down, and built the Waterfront, a large wood trimmed bar and restaurant that he had an architect design as a ski resort for the Poconos that was never built.
Then Berman went across the street and made a deal with Anthony Marotta, who was basically retired and let his sons, Tony, Jr. and Carmen run the business. Berman bought Tony Marts, tore it down and built Egos, the most gregarious disco on the East Coast.
I contacted The Band's business agent and he said they needed $7,000 plus rooms for a one night show, something we could pull off.
Kish and I went with Berman in his limo to New York City, where we saw The Band play at the Lone Star Cafe, and convinced Berman we could four-wall it, just take the ticket money from the door. Then convinced Levon, Rick, Garth and Richard to do the show, and set a date a few months away.
In the meantime, I attended a show that included Rick Danko and Richard Manuel as a duo at the Chestnut Cabaret in Philly, and afterwards helped them load their equipment in a van and talked to them about their Tony Mart days. Richard then went into an Anthony Marotta mode, mimiking his heavy graveled voice, "You boys stay away from the go-go girls, they're too young for youse...."
Richard said they were looking forward to the Tony Marts Reunion but unfortunately, in Florida, Richard hung himself in a motel shower, putting a real damper on everything.
But the show in Somers Point went on, and I got to know Rick Danko the best, he stayed at my family house while we got the rest of the band rooms at Berman's boardwalk motel, but he screwed us, and didn't provide the rooms he promised, so I had to pay for them with my mother's credit card.
It was a great show, I got country Larry Hickman to open for them, and they really kicked butt, putting on an amazing performance, but their manager took all the money, and the video tape we paid to record the show. The next day I remember reading about the show on the front page of the Press of Atlantic City while eating breakfast at the College Grill.
While driving Rick across the causeway to Somers Point, he asked me to write the real history of The Band, and I thought it would be an honor, especially to get their cooperation, but later decided it was too sad a story to write.
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