Turning left at Greenland - the American Beatles

[BlackentheBorg]

Their names are given headspace with the likes of Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Elston Gunn as the forces that helped launch the ‘Allied Invasion’ of American rock n’ roll in the United Kingdom of England, and thus the rest of the world. They dominated the charts from early sixties with their smash hit “Because I Know You Love Me” all the way to the early seventies as they performed for the last time on top of the Capitol Records Building in Los Angeles. They burnt their draft cards, headlined Woodstock and shook hands with John F. Kennedy. If you asked any modern teenager, they might struggle to understand how Jack Lennon, Paulie McCartney, Joe Harrison and Ritchie Starkey, collectively known as the Moondogs, changed the American music scene forever. much less know where they are now. As the ten-year anniversary of their rooftop concert dawns, National Public Radio spoke to the surviving members about their memories of superstardom…

 

[BlackentheBorg]

James Paul McCartney, or ‘Paulie’ as he’s affectionately referred to by the locals in the vicinity of his farm in upstate New York, is a few pounds heavier and a fair bit hairier than when he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, dressed in an identical crisp three-piece suit to his partners and strumming a Höfner bass. Even so, he still retains his boyish charm and devilish grin, continuing to crack jokes as he hauls bales of hay for his livestock. He doesn’t eat any of them after their time has come, he insists, he’s been a practicing vegetarian for years now.

MCCARTNEY: “My mother Mary was a nurse, that much I remember. She would be off working at the Lower Manhattan (New York-Presbyterian Hospital) all day and all night, which worked out well, seeing as how this allowed me and my brothers to saunter about Greenwich Village. From a young age we were around those freaks, the long-hairs. All that poetry really rubbed off on me. Dad loved it, seeing as how he was already an amateur musician all to himself. So yes, I sure wasn’t gonna go to medical school."

While studying at Washington Irving High School, McCartney met and made friends with Joe Harrison, and, through a church fundraiser, his future songwriting partner Jack Lennon. After the three formed what would eventually become the Moondogs, he joined them in clubs across the Soho area, playing long hours into the early morning for what amounted to scraps. It was here that they caught the eye of Al Klein. Klein, who worked as a high-profile negotiator for assorted rockabilly artists such as Bobby Vinton, eventually used his notorious strong-arm technique to land the band’s first hit single, 1963’s ‘In Spite of All the Danger’, and eventually the chart-topping ‘Please Me’. From there, they stayed firmly atop their throne until their breakup, and clogged stadiums and concert halls with thousands of screaming young fans, in awe at their mere presence. McCartney quickly became a lyrical powerhouse, writing a large bulk of the band’s seminal hits, including ‘I Lost My Little Girl’, ‘All My Troubles’, ‘Miss Daisy Hawkins’, ‘Duffy Square’ and ‘Get Back Home, Loretta’.

MCCARTNEY: “Early on, back when we were sharing a freezing room in the back of the Endicott Hotel, we both swore that we’d credit our songs to the both us, whether or not one of us did most of the work. That was the agreement. We were teenagers, about fifteen or sixteen, in New York. Back then we were very optimistic and thinking we were gonna work together on absolutely everything. Then we grew up, of course.”

After the fallout of the early seventies, McCartney entered semi-retirement and began keeping to himself at his Kinderhook Farm home. While he didn’t exactly stop his songwriting, he doesn’t perform them himself, instead choosing to pay the bills by selling the original compositions to whatever labels will take them. Over the last ten years, McCartney has been silently responsible for many dents in the pop charts; we would no sooner forget the vocal performance from Aretha Franklin’s “Maybe I’m Amazed”, the blistering wall of sound in Grand Funk Railroad’s “Jet”, or even the jagged romp “Temporary Secretary” that Blondie still plays to open their live performances.

MCCARTNEY: “I almost, almost, started another band after the Moondogs broke up. But if we’re being honest, I wasn’t up to it. I wasn’t up to anything. I was depressed, I was drinking, smoking, all of it. I was spiraling. If Linda [née Eastman, McCartney’s wife] didn’t pull me out of it I don’t know what I might’ve done.”​

 

[BlackentheBorg]

Sitting cross-legged, folding his bone-thin form like a paper napkin, Jasoor al-Abbasi, known in his previous life as George ‘Joe’ Harrison, was harder to track down than McCartney. After his transition to Islam, Jasoor [who insists we refer to him as “Joe” to make things easier] quietly began to withdraw from the music world and deeper into himself. As we are led through his beachside villa in eastern Maui by Mary Brunner, one of his many live-in companions, Joe is found in the middle of his Asr prayer. Other than his lost weight and thinning hair line, he seems to be taking his chemo in stride, still full of an otherworldly energy.

Joe’s father worked as a taxi driver, who intended to get his son an apprenticeship if he got in well enough with his bosses. But Joe was already taken by the lure of the guitar, being taught by a local musician by name of Stephen Friedland in biweekly sessions. Then it was a chance meeting with Pleasant Paulie, then Jumping Jack, and eventually Ritchie Rings. After that, their first single, albums, superstardom, movie deals. After their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, and their reputation as the bringers of ‘Moondog Mania’ assured, the band began dominating the album charts with each new release; Moondogs On Safari, Abracadabra, A Doll’s House, Turn Ups, Inclinations. Through all of them, the indomitable duo of Lennon and McCartney reigned, usually pushing the tentative songwriting capability of Harrison down a notch. Not to mention the demands of being the most eligible rock n’ roll band known the world over. In fact, it was Joe that was the first Moondog to put pressure on Klein to stop the touring. The manager was extremely hesitant, seeing as how any stage with the band on it was guaranteed millions, but he caved when the band argued that going like this any longer was likely to kill them.

AL-ABBASI: “I had no ambition when I was a kid other than to play guitar and get in a rock 'n' roll band. I don't really like to be the guy in the white suit at the front. Like in the Moondogs, I was the one who kept quiet at the back and let the other egos be at the front. But even that got to be all too much for me to take. Every night you’d get up on stage and you couldn’t even hear yourself play over all the screaming.”

As the tours grew longer and the crowds grew larger, the band were pushed to even more exhausting lengths in order to meet the demand. This was, so the story goes, how members of their entourage began introducing them to drugs – Pentobarbital to stay up, hash to calm you down, acid to space you out. This pharmaceutical influence doubled when the band decamped to the California coast to film their second feature film, “Shades of a Personality”, having repeated ‘accidental’ run-ins with the Merry Pranksters and their multicolored bus. Of course, for Joe, this all stopped after a staged meeting with Muhammad Ali, who first got him interested in the Qisas Al-Anbiya. Post-conversion, Joe subsequently swore off intoxicants, even his precious Gitanes that he’d been puffing on since his early teenage years. While his sound solidified into an eloquently folkish rock, his bandmates shot out into the universe as the new age of psychedelia was rung in anew. Tensions were already fraught by the difficulty Joe had to go thru just to get a feature on a new album, but these were exacerbated by the band’s compositions getting increasingly more complicated and pretentious. While many look to 1967’s Admiral Halsey’s Eligible Bachelors Club as the band’s magnum opus, Joe personally cares little for it.

AL-ABBASI: “I was losing interest in being a dog at that point. A lot of the time it ended up with just Paulie playing the piano and Ritchie keeping the tempo, and we weren't allowed to play as a band as much. Before long it was an assembly process. Even that writers retreat to Hawaii in ’68 didn’t help.”

By the time the band had gone its separate ways, Joe did attempt a flirtation with a solo album. In the early seventies he brought his guitar into the studio and recorded a handful of demos, intent on polishing them for eventual release, the resulting recordings, tentatively referred to in bootlegging circles as OHNOTHIMAGEN, is reportedly so sublime that it can make the most jaded critics weep in absolution. However, the recordings remained stuck in their demo phase as Joe decided it’d be better to commit himself more to his growing interest in the faith than put continue with this musical life of his. I mean, look at what it did to his bandmates…​

 

[BlackentheBorg]

He is as close to the Lone Ranger as they come – tall, gruff, sharp haircut -- but Richard ‘Richie’ Starkey still has a noticeable British lilt. Yes, even tho the oldest Moondog has spent most of his life in the busy streets of New York like the rest, and before that a year or two hitchhiking around the bible belt, evident the occasional wearing of Stetson boots and greeting friends with a hearty ‘howdy’, the fact remains – Starkey immigrated from the United Kingdom when he was eighteen, hellbent on finding a musical escape from the dull factory work of his native Liverpool.

STARKEY: "All the music we loved came from America. I emigrated to Houston to live next to Lightnin' Hopkins. I almost didn’t go because of the forms. They gave me a load of ‘em. I filled 'em in, took 'em back, and then he gave me more forms. As a teenager, you don't have the patience, I almost gave up. But I stuck to it and they gave me a ticket. I traded the factory floor for an oil rig. And I never even met him [Hopkins]. So, I moved for a second time, up state to New York, hitchhiking.”

It was in New York that Starkey found pittance (“money for jam”) as a session drummer, which is how he found his way into the Moondogs, following the departure of the band’s first drummer Peter Criss. Whereas the other three had their wits sharpened to a point as a result of being raised in the faced-paced New York, Starkey was hearty and came with smoother edges. He was the one who was easily different from the rest, in his nature to be sentimental and somewhat reserved, leaving McCartney enough room to pose for the press core, Lennon to rattle off some snide remarks, and Harrison to offer the occasional counter-opinion. However, this arrangement wouldn’t go entirely without sacrifice.

STARKEY: “The one caveat to letting me play with the guys was Klein wanted me to play up the Texan angle and keep the English in me covered up. I was supposed to be as American as Apple Pie, like the rest of ‘em. I was encouraged to put on ten-gallon hats and carry a flintlock on stage. While I was playing drums! I spent more time in bloody Tucson than I did in Houston. I might as well have been a performing monkey. On tour I’d play it up for the press, talking about rattlesnakes and bourbon, but then I’d go and have beans on toast and a cuppa. That was one of those pressures we all had, I had to suppress my British nature and play cowboy.”

So much so was this illusion meant to be kept that when the band launched their ‘Allied Invasion’ of England, to bring rock and pop to the neatly-dressed tightlips on the British Isles, Starkey was all but kept from making time for his beloved mom. This made the drummer furious, only adding on to the umpteen stresses the band had faced on tour. Back home, he found himself falling into a repetitive and entirely directed position, told what drums to hit and when as the all-encompassing songwriting magnitude of Lennon/McCartney reached its zenith. Starkey was, in his own words, a simple man; he had nowhere near the patience to be enthused by a concept album. As his compatriots got lost in their own worlds of superstardom, drugs and new-fangled religions, he continued to become more and more mentally uninvested until he slipped out of the band entirely. With the heart gone, the rest of the group quickly followed suit…​

 

[BlackentheBorg]

Jack Lennon, unlike his contemporaries, is a lot easier to find. He remains where he has been for the past few years – six feet beneath the Woodlawn Memorial Cemetery in the heart of the Bronx. Many fans argued that he should have a lot allocated in the middle of Tompkins Square Park, the patch of green that shared an eponymous name with the highest-selling double A-side of 1967, inspiring a virtual flood of flower children to begin camping there. The night the artist was found on the floor of his hotel room, having overdosed on heroin, the shantytown had entered a hellish rancor, an unsettling mirror image of the lively hippie encampment that had once taken its place. While the squatters have been cleared out, the garden still retains an eerie feel, like an empty hospital.

Ever the silver-tongued jester, quick with his wit and all too eager to spin a tale, Lennon had infamously been guarded with his personal history, becoming increasingly barbed with each probe made by the brownnosing journalist of the week. On public record, the earliest mention of a John ‘Jack’ Lennon was an information form scribbled out at the New York Foundling foster home in Brooklyn. The specific cause for the then five-year-old boy turning up at the catholic boarding home’s doorstep was listed simply as ‘abandonment by Father’. Mother Marie, an aged and steely nun still attending to the home, claims to remember a feisty young child who’d sooner doodle what she called ‘obscene imagery’ before writing down written exercises. The next appearance was an arrest for a fifteen year-old-Lennon on charges public intoxication and disturbing the peace, giving his name as ‘Winston Leg-Thigh’. Then nothing until he’s photographed jumping around bar tables with his guitar slung around him like a weapon of war in 1959, playing shows for drunkards and strip club clientele. Johnny and the Moondogs would lose the eponymous prefix a few years later. Then there would be plenty of biographic accountability for young Jack.

Lennon was self-taught guitarist, fighting tooth and nail for a binned Gallotone Champion and having listened patiently to pirate radio broadcasts on his portable radio, mimicking the chords and ad-libbing the lyrics as best he could. He then showed off his skills on street corners, subway stations, stoops. When he couldn’t earn enough spending money for records through his performances, he’d often resort to pickpocketing. Understandably, Lennon was often truant from any form of education, opting to eventually earn a GED instead of putting in the time to get a real education. Whereas he wasn’t academically gifted, Lennon won favor with his street smarts. This is the specific, world-weary humor that won favor with the equally intense Al Klein, to which Lennon felt an immediate likeness. His tangent for wordplay and working-class approach to expletives found its way into his lyrics, complementing nicely with the basic four-cord compositions he penned with McCartney before moving onto more experimental ventures. By the time the Moondogs began working on their penultimate album Turn-Ups, Lennon wound up on the FBI’s watchlist for his association with New York-based counterculture icons and taking part in the Columbia University protests of 1968. After falling in with an avant-garde artist called Annie Warhol, his interests finally began to drift away from interests in his band. Less than a week before he was set to perform at a campaign fundraiser for President Evers, Lennon was found unresponsive on the floor of his apartment. His death was ruled an accidental overdose, but rumors continue to swirl about foul play.​

 

[savemase]

This is great, I love the background you have given each of the moondogs.

As I have said before, you can never have too many Beatles related timelines

How far & indepth are you looking to take the timeline, out of interest?

 

[danmartin73]

Woah, this is quite the departure from OTL. Sounds like a pretty sad TL, but still incredibly fascinating.

 

[God-Eater of the Marshes]

This is super interesting. Just a small note: pentobarbital is a barbiturate, it's like Xanax and tends to put people to sleep rather than "stay up". The OTL Beatles used Preludin (phenmetrazine) and Benzedrine (amphetamine) to stay up.

 

[Colonel Zoidberg]

I thought Paul McCartney’s actual first name was James, not John.