If you could look in on someone famous without getting caught…..would you? Don’t say you wouldn’t too fast….

(from the 2018 blog)

July 28, 2018

I can’t believe I’ve lived in Calgary for as long as I have and have never ever been to the Calgary Folk Music Festival. I’m not sure exactly why that is: time of year, crowds and the inherent hassle that comes with a big event (not that that’s stopped me before), a lineup that hasn’t frozen me in my tracks–you know, the kind of acts where you say that’s nice, but is it worth the effort?

So this year, when the lineup was announced, I looked, as I always do, and one of the headliners caught my eye.

Joe Jackson. No, no relation to Michael, as I had to explain to my mother. Joe Jackson, the British Blues-jazz-new wave-all around talented musician was coming to the Fest.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’d seen him…

(What follows is a modified version of a short piece I wrote about a year and a half ago; Yes I’m a little… what word do I want… embarrassed, uncomfortable, self-conscious? telling this story but, I think it’s a good one… and hell, I was in my 20s and up for anything… and in fairness, the blinds were up).

Flashback: 1981 or ‘82… somewhere in there. I was living on the east side of Manhattan, not really the Lower East Side, not really the East Village, not even Gramercy Park, or Stuyvesant Town or Peter Cooper Village, the complex of residential towers spanning from 14th to 23rd Street, from the edge of the East River to 1st Avenue, and containing more than 11,000 apartments. Nope, my street was sort of a no man’s land in between them all.

I lived on a tree-lined block with mostly low- rise apartment buildings–no more than seven or eight stories high, most of them tenement buildings, as they are called, some were private houses (rumor had it that Stevie Wonder lived somewhere on the block, but I never saw him), but most of us lived in walkups and small living spaces, window air conditioners and fire escapes front and back, a stoop where you caught up on the neighborhood gossip and comings and goings in the morning with a coffee or at night with a beer in a paper bag (back then you had to hide your alcohol in public- no idea what the rules are now), a “tar beach” on the roof and fire hydrants up the block that, when the temperatures spiked in the summer were opened with regularity (if you’ve never run through a fire hydrant, you should try it sometime).

My place was at the end of the back of my building on the second floor, a little two room railroad flat (one room after another), kitchen and living space in the front room, single window that looked out into the brick wall of the building next door; long hallway with a bath and then a small bedroom with a loft bed and a burglar-bar covered window looking out onto the weedy backyard below. And a lot of cockroaches. A LOT. Blech.

I worked just a few blocks away in a neighborhood bar and restaurant with the police precinct station house right around the corner and the police academy down the next block.

So there were cops, yes, and firefighters and paramedics too, but there were also a lot of neighborhood people, who represented a little bit of everything: actors and actresses, guys who worked for the papers, professional photographers, stockbrokers, blue collar types, transient construction teams, a bookie or two and other people up to things that weren’t exactly legal; well-dressed men and women who came from their midtown and uptown and Wall Street jobs each day back to their home base for a beer or glass of wine and some friendly company. Many of us became family-away-from-family; we hung out together and we always had each others’ backs. It was a good time in a good place.

The bar is gone–closed down less than a year after I left the city. Makes me kind of sad; it’s like your parents moved as soon as you left the house, or they tore your high school down when you went away for college… so I’ve always felt a little rudderless when I go back to New York.

But when I do go back, I do still try to stroll the neighborhood on occasion and very early on Easter Sunday last year, when it was quiet and the sun was just beginning to spill over the rooftops of the Stuytown buildings and onto the streets, I found myself wandering down Second Avenue, carrying a hot black coffee in a hard-to-find Greek-style diner cup…hard to find these days, but once a standard of takeout.

My building is still there but it looks as though maybe someone has bought it and tried to clean it up, most likely reflected in rents I can’t even fathom. Or maybe someone paid a million bucks for a couple of rooms, who knows?

That morning, I headed a little further down Second, looking at the space that used to be Dan Lynch, a very famous blues bar until it wasn’t anymore, and then turned a corner, heading west into a block that felt familiar, and I remembered in a flash that I once knew people who lived on this particular block.

My dear friends Paulie (rest in peace) and Kenny lived in a walk up apartment halfway down the street. Roommates- I think they met in the bar- Paul was a graphic designer and Ken was a a freelance writer from Canada (yes, put two and two together; he is the one who talked me into moving to Canada).

I’d only been there to hang out with them once as I can recall–must have been 30 or 35 years ago. The buildings at that end of the block are still there, which is a miracle in itself.

So back to the early 80s we go: one night at the bar, the three of us were sitting around drinking and talking. It was a quiet evening, probably a Monday, as I would have had the night off. We may have been the only three people there, and I remember I used to like to sit back on the barstool, kind of slumped into the bucket of the chair, my back curved and my knees jammed up into the bar rail (oh, to be flexible again), so I was probably doing that, between sips of my beverage and tokes on my cigarette, the silent TV above the end of the bar showing some sporting event and the usually loud and active juke box taking a breather–Monday night, after all–most likely the radio on low on some FM station, and, depending on who was behind the bar, it could have been oldies, or jazz, or light-ish rock–me, I was WNEW all the way). So…the three of us were looking for some level of amusement we obviously weren’t finding in the bar, and we got into a discussion about what else there was to do in the neighborhood, without much success.

You know, it was one of those frustrating, “what do you want to do?”, “I dunno, whatever you want to do…” kind of conversations. And it went on for awhile. Until one of them, I can’t remember which, said “well, you wanna go watch Joe Jackson?”

What? Like, on stage somewhere? I wasn’t feeling going out beyond the bar, and I certainly wasn’t dressed for a club.

Nope. Turned out these guys happened to look out their apartment windows one night and, across the street in the building directly across the way, lived Joe Jackson.

Well, this sounded very intriguing, and it was certainly more interesting than what we were doing so… we bought a six pack (and I don’t know, maybe some other stuff too) and we climbed the stairs to their apartment, plopped down on the edge of one of their beds and popped open our beers and turned out the lights.

Sure enough, a short time later, there he was, walking into his place. Joe Jackson. Definitely him. Now, this was when he had just become famous, so this was pretty cool.

He looked tall, and thin, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with a black jacket on over top. His hair was short and he smoked. A lot. He was alone.

He just walked in, tossed his keys down, and moved back and forth, in and out of his rooms, doing normal things.

We only watched him for a little while, probably because a) it was little creepy and most definitely voyeuristic; b) it was kind of boring, because he was normal; and c) we had most likely run out of beer.

I mentioned this to Kenny just a couple of years ago when we sat down and caught up. While what I remembered was watching Joe Jackson by himself, all he could remember was the stunning, long-legged models who were often entertained by Jackson. Of course he lived there, so I’m sure he saw a lot more of him than we did that night.

That’s it; that’s the story as I remember it. And it all came back to me that Easter Sunday morning on the Lower East Side.

OK, so back to 2018. My chance to actually see Joe Jackson perform, and he was wonderful. Played for more than an hour and a half, voice as strong as ever- some songs I knew and some I didn’t, really great vibe from the crowd… makes me wonder why I waited so long to see the Folk Fest.

And Joe Jackson.

(Sorry I was leaning on the fence and people were dancing all around, hence the shakiness…yeah that’s what it was… ) I wanted to share this piece, Is She Really Going Out With Him because I thought the lyrics were particularly pertinent to this post… because when he sings about his street and the activity that takes place there, I wonder if it’s a particular spot on the Lower East Side of Manhattan…and I like to imagine that it is.