Dec. 1, 1997
All Jimmy’s talk of Ginger this
year made me think of the old days when Jimmy was completely over his head in
love with her.
In the summer of 1972, Ginger
went to California to visit her sister, Mary, leaving Jimmy, Alf and initially Frank
to make plans to follow. Jimmy, Frank and I made a tape to send ahead of that
journey, a wondrous piece of silliness I found in the drawer the other day.
No, not the original. That we did on a
reel-to-reel tape recorder I had borrowed from my ex-best friend at the time,
David Fetterman. The tape I found was a hastily made copy that I had to fight
to get, patching two channels into a cheap cassette recorder that I had brought
along in case we had time for a copy. The tape, purchased in the discount rack
at Korvettes in West Orange, shouldn't have survived twenty five years, yet somehow,
it bounced around in drawer and box, moving with me from Paterson to Montclair,
Montclair to Passaic, back to Montclair, back to Passaic, then to East Rutherford,
Hoboken, then Jersey City.
I found it lying in my collection of tapes
with the felt tipped name of "Ginger" jotted hurriedly onto it. I was
curious. I had forgotten about the copy if not the original.
I remember the night Jimmy suggested it after
discovering I had access to the reel to reel. He missed Ginger terribly and
insisted on making a tape to send to her. Jimmy had developed an attachment for
taping events since his trip to Nova Scotia with Frank and Rob the previous
summer. On that trip he had acted the part of a radio reporter, interviewing Frank
and Rob, and when they ceased to talk into the microphone anymore, Jimmy sought
out nature and interviewed a cow. After their return, Jimmy got it into his
head to send me a tape. I was on the run from the police at the time, living in
Portland, Oregon under an assumed name. He presumed correctly that I missed New
Jersey and my old haunts, so gathered together all of our friends for a
Christmas Eve event at his and Ginger's apartment in Parsippany. The event was
remarkable, but that tape was lost over the years, and I arrived back in New
Jersey before he could actually manage to send it.
The tape we recorded for Ginger, however, we
did send, and created a hit in San Francisco, where Mary's lover played it in
his head shop, shocking locals who thought it the 1970's version of an electric
Kool aid acid test.
My copy, of course, had fared badly because of
the cheap tape, the sound quality deteriorating over the years so that I could
barely hear the music and conversation when I played it straight on a portable cassette
player. But boosting it through an equalizer, brought the signal up to a
respectable quality, and playing it brought back the events of that night: How Jimmy
insisted Frank drive down to the Paterson house where I was living at the time
to pick me and the reel to reel up, and how Jimmy made Frank stop at the local
music store so he could purchase a high quality reel to reel tape on which we
could record our masterpiece, and how after which we drove (via the longest,
backroad route Frank could find) from Paterson to Pompton Lakes where Jimmy had
moved in with his parents and sisters earlier in the summer.
Jimmy had inherited a corner of the basement,
of which he constantly complained, saying that it smelled of mildew. But he was
equally disturbed by the coming and going of his sisters who little respected
his privacy and often crawled around or over his drawing board, even when he
was drying a watercolor on it. Jimmy insisted that this was a temporary
arrangement, something he took up after he and Ginger moved out of Parsippany,
but he would return to the basement room even later when he came back from his
trip west, he would find a job nearby designing the pattern on women's
clothing, and would remain at it until laid off during the economic downturn in
1973, when finally -- after talking Ginger into it -- he would move to Montclair
and take up a job in a book store, living and working with Ginger.
Jimmy's sisters -- four of five of them anyway
-- looked strangely at us when we hauled the reel to reel into the house and
then down into the basement, wires trailing, cheap ceramic microphone sticking
out of my back pocket. I set up on the floor, leaving space for Paul and Frank
to sit before the microphones. We all knew it was another special moment, one
of those times we would remember later even if the tape did not survive. Frank
had taken to recording everything in much the same manner as Jimmy had in Nova
Scotia, yet Richard Nixon style, having me perched in the back seat of his
Dodge Dart to record every conversation during various trips into New York
State. But Jimmy had to consent for music tapes like this, and Frank was
thrilled to be a part of it, even though Jimmy warned him again and again to
not sing unless instructed.
The reel to reel recorder had tracking capabilities,
and for the first two songs, Paul did rhythm guitar and lead vocals, then
followed up with lead guitar and fill in vocals. Frank, unable to resist or
take a hint from Jimmy's glares, sang off key on both, making the tracks less
than perfect, and yet, lending them depth they would have lacked without him,
and a place in the catalogue of Garley historic events. The reel to reel
recording was of much better quality, but even hearing the cheap and quick copy
I made twenty five years later brought back chills, for it marked a major
transition in our lives, an exact moment when Frank, Jimmy, I moved into the
next phase, a period when life seemed remarkable tedious, and yet -- looking
back -- may have been the best years of our lives.
Jimmy took off for California two weeks later.
Frank, who had just started a new job a month earlier, asked our boss for a
leave of absence. The boss howled, then told him to get back to work. Jimmy was
forced to travel west with Alf, as Frank and I trudged on. Less than a week
after Jimmy's departure, our boss fired Frank. The reel to reel tape went west
ahead of Jimmy, was appreciated by the freaks there, then vanished.
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