The Half Note Jazz Club - Page 8 of 9 - The Half Note Jazz club

I really groove over groovy people. When people would come to the bar, and they were groovy, and I had time to bull shit a little bit, I’d started telling my stories about the old bar. It really made me groove. It gave me a good feeling the people listen, get a kick out of it. You know. I guess maybe I felt like I was adding something to the whole scene. It was a good feeling some nights, especially if you had a good listener.

You got to remember one thing. Even after the change over from neighborhood bar to jazz joint, we were still a saloon, and we were serving alcohol, and alcohol does strange things to a lot of people. Some people get happy, some people can drink a whole bottle of whiskey and never bat an eye–like Art Farmer would drink 150 proof rum, double shots all night long, and walked out sober as a judge. He always reminded me of the good cowboy-like, that’s so-and-so-came in to clean up the town.

Then you got others like Buddy Catlett, the bass player —forget it! When this cat was sober, he was a beautiful cat, but when he was juiced… When he was working with Roy Eldridge at the club, we’d always try, “No drinks, man.” So when he worked with Roy–and they had Richie Kamuca on tenor and Eddie Locke on drums–he’d get no drinks at all because, at the end of the gig, we’d all sit around and talk, and we knew that if this cat had a few drinks in him .”Why is this! why is that!” Oh, man! He’d just get belligerent. He shouldn’t ever have been drunk. He cracked up his car a few times. It was poison to him.

Another guy who couldn’t drink was Eddie Costa, but he did, which finally cost him his life. In fact, he spent the last night of his life in the club drinking. On most nights that he was in there, either playing or just hanging out, once we closed, he’d head uptown on the West Side Highway. I’d be heading home in the same direction, and I’d stay behind him just to keep an eye on him because his car would constantly be weaving–actually, there wouldn’t have been anything I could do for him anyway.

Anyway, this one night, he comes in around 9 o’clock, and we’ve got Clark Terry and Bobby Brookmeyer, And Eddie says, “Jeez, I got a freebee today. They called me to fill in on a date where the piano player didn’t show, but by the time I got there, he’d showed up, so they just paid me, and I left.” So he spent the rest of the night drinking and listening, and then he went over to the Vanguard, and he closed that place down. And then, as we were packing up, he came back and had a nightcap and went uptown and fell asleep at the wheel. So he died. He got killed on the West Side Highway just around that curve on 72nd Street. On those nights when I’d follow him up to the bridge before he’d go, I’d try to argue with him, tell him, “Eddie, what are you doing? Stop this here, man. You can’t drive like that!” He would never let anyone drive him.

Then we could’ve gone into our other thing–Every once in a While lav some money out, put Hoody Herman’s band in or Basie’s–take a shot, man. We could’ve gotten one hundred people in the joint, and if we man three shows, three hundred people–even if you break even… But with a family, you can’t do this. If you’re single, you can. That’s the way to run a club where we were downtown, especially with all the years of people coming down. It could’ve wailed, man. It could’ve wailed more than it ever did. But, unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. For us, it was over.

It’s funny, but in that last year or so, we were still adding some great bands when we were getting pretty close to the end. We had so many good groups over the years, and I loved them all –well, almost all–but one that really grooved me was Buddy Tate’s Celebrity Lounge Band. Jimmy Rushing was the one who kept telling me what a great book they had. So we brought them in, a sextet the front line was Ben Richardson, a one-legged cat on baritone, alto, and clarinet; Pat Jenkins on trumpet–he was a part-time shoe salesman and Buddy, of course, on tenor. I forgot the names of the piano and bass players, but I remember the drummer was Jackie Williams. The opening night, they came in, all dressed in tuxes, and the music these six guys made sounded like the Basie band. They opened up with “Moten Swing,” and then Jimmy got up and sang with them and then said to me, “How do you like my band !” It was just incredible.

I’d give Ben Richardson a ride home every night to 147th Street in Harlem, and we’d have to stop at little ribs joint on 130th Street so Ben could take home some ribs, and he’d tell me not to worry for my safety because he always carried his gun with him. And Ben had lost his leg from diabetes, but he kept drinking pretty good, and once in a while, I’d get a call from him, wiped out, and I’d have to go get him at a bar on 30th Street and took him home.

As years went by, they had to cut off his other leg, and I figured, boy, that’s the end of Ben! But Judy and I went down to the V.A. hospital where they did the operation, and he opened his eyes and smiled and said, “What are you doing here, sucker? Did you bring me some of that good eggplant parmigiana?”

Anyway, we asked him what he was going to do now. He said, “Don’t worry about me: I’m going to get a second wooden leg, and I’ll go out and at me some gigs, And he did work there. And Mel had a cymbal that Buddy Rich gave him, and Stanley walked out with it. They did get it back, but Mel wanted to kill him. Yeah, a hell of a guy, Stanley.

Basically, it was around people in the club that made me groove. The music, the atmosphere, the whole thing–like when I’d see the place really fill up, and the music was right, it was really a gas, man. It was what I grooved with, you know. Like one night, I told some stories about the old bar and everything to a couple of detectives who came in, and the cop said something to me after he asked me how old I was. “Well, I’m gonna be 40.”

He says, “Man, you’re talking about all those wild experiences and everything you really must’ve grooved on all of it. You looked like you thrive on it.” I thought about it for a minute, and I guess I really did groove on it. Being able to think about things that happened, having memories, like meeting the King and Queen of Denmark, and King-Hussein from Jordan, and the Maharani from wherever. In my situation, I could probably never have gotten out to see the whole world. Still, most of the world came to the club, all kinds of people, the Russian, the French, the Italians, the Egyptians, the English, the Germans, the Swedes, the Dutch, the Japanese, every kind of nationality that you could think of, And somewhere in the late ’60s I even started seeing people from Australia, and I hadn’t seen any of them before. People from every walk of life have walked into the club. Many celebrities, too, the English actor Trevor Howard would come by whenever he was in town, King Hussein of Jordan, Steve Allen, Judy Garland, Jack Kerouac, and some singers, not to sing, just to hang out. Tony Bennett, Betty Carter, Carmen McRae, Bill Henderson, Joe Williams.

This was my whole education, whatever that was because I never really got any schooling, my education came from saloon… For me, that’s probably pretty good, because, as I said, I met people of every calling. Actors, actresses came in–like Art Carney used to come down when Al the waiter was there: he gave Al $10 as soon as he walked in. He’d sit down, and I’d take care of him. He loved good music. One time I’m at the door, and he comes in and says, “Hi, kid, how’re you doing? Listen, put me in a corner somewhere; I don’t want to be in the fishbowl, you know, stick me in a corner where I’m hidden away from everything.”

Another time Steve Lawrence and Andy Williams came into the club, and Steve said they had come down to see a piano player somebody had told them about–Lennie Tristano. He was just putting me on, and he wound up sitting on a piano. It was nice to have him in the club. One night Trevor Howard came by with Bob Sylvester, and they hung out, which was nice, too.

The nicest of all was getting to meet all the musicians and all the people connected to the music. Like in Buddy Tate, but Roger and Sonny didn’t want to. So here I am uptown, behind the bar, and I don’t dig the set–up, and it’s tearing the heart out of me. It was like a musician who played. That club was my ax, and all of a sudden, I didn’t have it anymore. I’m in a place I don’t really like–we’re all wearing tuxedos, me, Sonny, my father; Judy’s not even working there. We had Getz working there, who I didn’t like as a person. And the whole place was so cold, man, like it was just a business, you know. Just a drag for me. So after 6 months, my pop says, “You know, you were right: downtown was better.”

I said, “Yeah, and you know what? We probably got about two years here, and then this is gonna end.” Meantime, we brought in every great jazz performer we could possibly get, but in doing that, we had to put a $5 cover charge on, whereas downtown once in a while, we’d have a $3 charge, but most of the time there was no cover. Now with all the convention people who came to 54th Street every night, I thought we could have filled the place up all the time if we had Buddy Tate– because that would cost us very little bread, and we could leave the doors open, let the music fly out and attract everybody in, like the old 52nd Street days. Instead, it became like a Basin Street East, and the convention people didn’t dig it, so we lost all those people from the hotels in the area, which was the most significant thing right there. So, now we were relying on a straight jazz crowd, and on 54th Street, it wasn’t like that–maybe it is today, with all of clubs midtown now. But back then, there were a lot of hookers.

AFTER YOU’VE GONE

That move uptown was painful, even though we moved to a classier location, a much larger joint, with enough money from Roger to fix it upright. The place we found had old garage doors I wanted to keep, make it feel a little like the downtown club, but instead, they refurbished the whole joint spent a lot of money. And initially, I wanted to just bring in Buddy Tate’s Celebrity Lounge Band, a great old-time swing band, and I thought we’d keep the garage doors open and get all the convention people from the nearby hotels to come in, and we’d charge no cover. But there was too much money involved, and Sonny and Roger wanted to get the big-name groups, so I said, “Why don’t you go up there, and I’ll stay downtown.” But my father, who worked so hard down there all those years and had a couple of heart attacks, said, “No, you gotta go, you’re all involved in the music and everything,” and I said O.K. and some guy who used to come in every night and drank a lot was at the bar one night, and I told him, “You like this place; how’d you like to buy it?”

He says, “How much you want?”

“I’ll tell you what we’re gonna move uptown, we’re gonna take the name with us; you can’t use the name, but I’ll sell you the joint with all the fixtures for $15,000.”

He says, “You got a deal.”

So we just walked out the door, left everything, all those pictures, all the album covers. But uptown, we had 6:9 expenses–higher rent–and I thought we would bring night Life magazine took that picture of Al Goldman at the bar, and you can see, behind Al, Moody is wailing up on the stand.

One guy who helped us a lot in those last years was Tony Bennett. He’d come down, and he’d sing and just hang out a lot. And even after the club closed, we continued to be good friends. A few years ago, he was singing on some boat in lower Manhattan, and I went to see him, and we were reminiscing. I told him, “You know, Tony, when you sang at the club, sometimes you’d sing the same tunes from one night to the next, but you always made it sound different– your singing reminds me of Zoot in that way,” he said, “Man, I thought that’s the best compliment anyone’s ever paid me.” shorter he had been a very tall guy. I said, “Man, they cut you down to my size,” and he said, “Yeah, but I can still whip your ass!” Anyway, I wish I could’ve hung out with him more later on, but I got so hung up in my life, trying to get my shit together…

But one of my greatest regrets was that I didn’t get Buddy’s band to followed us uptown to 54th Street, have him as the house band, and have all kinds of cats came by and sit in. I know that would’ve brought the crowds in, and it would’ve been a wide groove. But…

Another one of our regulars in those last few years was James Moody. I first hired him through an agency, but going way back, I always loved Moody. I sing “Moody’s Mood for Love” when I was a young kid in the Navy, and Judy and I still sing it once in a while. But the opening night, I was painting the signs “James Moody Quartet” to put outside when Moody walks in and says, “Gee, someone must really love me to be doing that!” and I said, “Yeah, man, me— I really love you.” And that’s the way it was almost everyone who worked the club immediately became part of our family –with my father, my mother, with everybody–there was a closeness with these people.

And Moody drinks a lot of wine in those days, and my mother would tease him, “Now listen, Moody, don’t drink too much of that wine, And he would drink his wine and go around telling people, “Smell my beard, and he’d get up, and he’d play, and never, ever was there a problem with James Moody. He would just come in and play his buns off, and Eadie Jefferson would work with him and sing “Moody’s Mood for Love,” and Judy would sing the female Dart. And Moody worked for his for a couple of years, and I remember one.

I remember we had one decent shot to save the club. It was right after Judy, and I fixed the joint up. Put sawdust on the floor, flowers on the tables. So I was getting flowers at this one place on 6th Avenue and Waverly Place, and that’s when I ran into you (Bob Gold), standing on the corner. You hadn’t been in the club for a while, living out in jersey for a few years. So we hadn’t seen each other in quite a bit, And we started talking, and you told me about that friend of yours

You and Albert Goldman were right because when he came down, the place was really glowing. After all, we had Zoot at his best, man. Zoot was really cooking, and we had a very nice warm feeling, and it looked groovy. We were all pushing to make it work again, you know, and when Albert Came in, he just fell right in love with it. The rest is that he gave us all the publicity–the New Tork Times Arts Leisure section, Life magazine, New York magazine, the Atlantic Monthly–and he started to bring in a lot of business for us, but the place back together again.

But in the long run, it didn’t help enough, and it broke my heart, but we had to make that moved uptown. But we could have gone straight ahead down there for a hundred years if things had been a little different. Now, if I had had some money to back me up, we could have made it. But when you’re with a family, you can’t do as many things as you should because you’re cautious. In club business, you always have to be doing things. Without money, I did it for a while by being lucky, pulling out the right thing at the right time. But without a family to consider, I could’ve booked in a hot group for a week, promoted the club, charged a little more money.

Zoot would just get very happy. He could drink a bottle of whiskey, you know. Once in a while, you’d see him get a little mad, a little belligerent. But usually, he was beautiful, sometimes when he got stoned, he’d be really full of laughs. We’d have a lot of fun, joking around all the time.

I remembered one night, with Zoot playing just beautifully, some guy at the bar called California and held the phone just so his friend could listen to Zoot blow. In fact, I used to get people calling me from different parts of the country. I didn’t even know who they were. “Hey, Mike, who’s playing, man?” If it was Zoot, “Hey, let me hear for a while,” so I’d put the phone down and let them listen. One guy from Georgia, another guy from Cleveland, has different things from out of nowhere. Somebody in some bar in some lonely town thinking about who’s at the Half-Note: they call up, listen to the music, say, “It sure sounds good, man! wish I was there.”

Funny, that went back to what most people think: the grass is always greener somewhere else. The musicians did that. They all ran over There (California), then they’d wish they were back here. Like we lost all the talk shows-Carson, Merv Griffin-they took many of our musicians out there, a lot of our good friends, Dave Frishberg said he went out to California for “Funny Things” or “Funny Face’; he did a thirteen-week series as musical director. It got him out there to look around, and the next thing he was living out there. and he said, “Man, the Halt-Note was the talk of California–moving uptown (in 1972), all the guys saying, “Man, they’re finally moved into town!” –it wasn’t a real music place.

So I was looking for all kinds of outs. A friend of – Goodwin, mine back then, Dick Gibson, President of the Johns Manville Corporation, took Judy and me out to Colorado a couple of times after moving the whole company out there. And he wanted to promote the JPJ Quartet, which was Budd Johnson on tenor, Dill Jones on piano, Bill Pemberton on bass, and Oliver Jackson on drums. He would take them wherever he had one of his plants. They’d play at a school, and the Manville company would pick up the tab.

He flew me out just after the company bought a great big ranch, 10,000 square acres. We went out in his private jet, Budd Johnson and I. First, we went to a place

in Denver, then we jumped in a helicopter and flew through the Rockies to a mansion that looked like something out of “Gone With the Wind,” and cowboys were running around. That night we had a great party at the house. But I said to Dick, “Hey, man, I gotta get back to New York, to my family. What am I doing running around out here?”

He says, “Why don’t you look around out here, see if you’d like to open a club, and we’ll see if we can work out a deal with the banks.” So he got a limousine to take me to downtown Denver, and I walked around until I was almost out of town (back then, it was just a cowboy town; today it’s different, it’s much more cosmopolitan). I looked around, and I found one place that looked good

on Larimer Square, but then I thought, No, this place ain’t for me. So I went back, and I said, “You know, Dick, I love you for all you’re trying to do, but this is not for me. I’m a New York guy, and if I’m gonna do anything, it’s got to be in New York because I feel I just don’t belong out here.” The only thing is, now, looking back on it, I think it was a mistake; I think I should’ve gone out there because I think we could probably have put a friendly club together.

In the meantime, our 54th Street club was really bugging me. Then, Red Balaban, the bass player started talking to me about a plan he had to open a club on Lexington Avenue and chat he’d like me to come in with him–they’d be using Eddie Condon’s as the name for the club. I told Red that nobody would come out to Lexington Avenue to hear many Dixie 1 and players, and I told him there was a joint opposite us on 54th Street that the owner wanted to sell because it had become a prominent hooker place. And, sure enough. We made a deal with the guy, and we had great rent very cheap, with about a ten-year lease; Red paid the cat $100,000, but it was a great location. And I told my family that I would leave because that scene wasn’t working for me: So, whatever I owned (I think it was.20%), I just signed the papers, and Red and I opened Eddie Condon’s across the street.

One of the first things I did was to get rid of the hookers that came to the old joint (I think it was called under the Clock); I told Red I didn’t care if we got sued to do it, but we were not going to let any unaccompanied woman sit at the bar, I’d tell her she had to go to a table. Most of the time, they’d refuse to go to a table. They’d just leave, so we managed to wipe the place clean of hookers. It took a couple of months, but we finally got rid of all the hookers. I know some mothers probably got pissed off at me that they couldn’t go to the bar, but I’d say, “That’s the way it is. I’m just trying to clean the place up.” The final thing was. About five months later, we were sued by women’s Liberation; I think we had to pay them $500, and then we changed the rule so that women could sit at the bar–still, we had no hookers from then on. But some guys upstairs opened a massage parlor, so I said to them, “Look, we’ll remain friends, but I don’t want any of your people coming into my joint downstairs.”

Anyway, Eddie Condon’s was exactly what I wanted to do. Every night the place was packed. You couldn’t get in. Every week a new convention, every night packed, packed, and packed. So really, it was kind of a drag that our family had our own club and couldn’t do that, and here I went across the street, and every night I’ve got a packed house. And it had a nice kind of feeling. I was behind the bar, Judy was working the checkroom concession, all the musicians would come by and hang out–it was like a Jim & Andy’s.

However, I made a deal with Red that I would bring in the music on Sundays: Zoot & Al, Bob Wilber & Kenny Davern, Jackie Paris,& Ann Marie Morse, and some other groups that used to work the old club. One day this young kid came in with a tenor saxophone, looked like he was right out of high school, and played his buns off–it was Scott Hamilton. And I was listening to another young trumpeter, Warren Vacné, and I told Scott and Warren individually that I’d like them to play together, and I introduced them and booked them in on a Sunday. And then, Benny Goodman picked up on them, and Concord Records picked up on them and recorded them and also had them taking a lot of solos alongside Rosemary Clooney on a whole bunch of her records.

Meanwhile, the place is doing poorly across the street, and they turn it into a girlie place, topless–anything to bail them out. My father would come across the street and sometimes worked with me at the door, and I’d feel terrible for him because he could see what was happening, and after all those years…..

Now, Condon’s is going along good, and one day the building owner asks Red if he’d like to buy the building. Red says, “No, man, I don’t want to be a property owner.” (I thought at the time it was a foolish move, but… Then the owner asked me if I’d like to buy it–I think the asking price was $200,000, and I didn’t have any money I never did have). But I told the guy, “Sure, I’ll buy the building,” and I go out and talk to a few people, see if I can raise the money. And I even convinced Red to just play his music, and I’d take care of the business worries and even give him a share of the building ownership. But I couldn’t raise the bread.

Then, Red’s trumpet player, Ed Polcer, inherits some money and he wants to buy in, and they figure what do they need me for anyway: they’ve got the place off the ground, so Red says to me, “Man, we’re gonna have to ask you to leave because there’s no room for you here.” Which was a drag, man; it really pissed me off. After all those years downtown, I am there, and now I’m forty-something, and I’ve got no job.

Now I’m contacted by the owner of Jimmy Ryan’s, and he asks if I’d like to come in with him, but I got the idea that he only wants me to get rid of some of the help in his joint, and I couldn’t do that kind of thing.

So. Judy and I are both out of work, although everybody knows me from the Half Note, that’s not helping us much. Finally, Judy gets a job as a hatcheck girl down Barrow Street, the Paris Bistro, and we need the money from that because we were flat broke. And Judy would give me some money just so I’d have carfare to run around looking for a bartender’s job.

One day I ran into my friend Big Harry Whiting, and he told me he’s opening a place on 10th Street 7th Avenue–it was a place that must’ve been there a hundred years, an Italian restaurant called Lombardi’s. Harry had already hired all the help he needed, but he did give me one of the off-days for the help, a Monday, I thought. It was a funny place: one night all detectives, another night all lesbians. The food was good, but for some reason, we didn’t do good business. We tried to save the place by putting together some jazz programs–with Jimmy Rowles, Turk Mauro, and many other good players–but that didn’t work, and Harry wound up selling the place.

So, I’m back on the street again with no job. Judy is still coat-checking. Meanwhile, my brother Sonny took the job at Jimmy Ryan’s and got some work at the New York Hilton, and he was able to ace me in there to work special parties for about four hours at a stretch. But that wasn’t steady. Luckily, through some old friends, I got a job at the Knickerbocker, tending with one other bartender, who was a real juicehead that was pretty good for a while. Still, they had a big fire in the kitchen (I could save their bread for them, get it all into the cash register before we emptied the place out). Still, the place had to close down for a while, so I’m out of work again, just picking up an odd job here and there, but not very not just the most prominent names, which is what sol and Harry Wanted), I even went on TV for them: Stuart Klein did a story on the club for even Channel 5, and sol should’ve been the one to be interviewed, but he was embarrassed for some reasons, so I went on for him.

Anyway, I wind up back on the street again without a job. Now, I thought maybe I need four or five jobs at the same time. I figured if I had enough jobs, I couldn’t get fired from all of them at once– it was like protection. If you lose one job, you always have another. So, I went over to see Mary Gravine Schwartz, who ran Struggles over in Edgewater, New Jersey, and she gave me a weekend job. Next, I went up to Defemio’s in Yonkers and got a few weekdays there, and I got the Hilton for a day or two and the Waldorf for a day or two.

But the only one of those jobs I enjoyed was Struggles, because of the music (Defemio’s didn’t have any music during the week, only on weekends, when I wasn’t there). And Mary Schwartz grooved on the music the same way I did. And business at Struggles was good until they passed that DWI law, and then our business went right down the tubes, people were coming from New York, and they were stopping them at the bridge to see if they were drunk, people be getting locked up for having a couple of drinks. Finally, she had to close the place, couldn’t keep it going anymore.

Now I’m back on the street again, and I ran into my friend Jim DeAngelis, who told me about this woman in Montclair who will open a place, and he has her call me and she’s very enthusiastic about all the things she wants me to do. So I went out to Montclair and met the woman, Emily Wingert, from a very wealthy family, and she’s bought this building and will completely refurbish it. So here we go again, with architects and lighting and the rest much. While I was at the knickerbocker. Judy had gotten the hatcheck gig at a nice French restaurant on 13th Street, where she would finish at 12; now, I didn’t finish until 2, so she’d come in and sit quietly at a table for two hours waiting for me. But the owner said she couldn’t do that, that she’d have to wait for me in her car. So I didn’t like the guy, and when he was about to re-open after the fire, I refused to help him fix the place up, and he fired me.

This was the late 70s, and once again, there I was with no job. Then, just opposite Bloomingdale’s, around Lexington Avenue 80th Street, a trendy Italian restaurant called Gino. They had these two old Italian bartenders from the old country who had been there forever. And Gino hired me as a fill-in bartender while these guys were on vacation. It was hard work because the place was always packed, and Gino had a screwy set-up that he was too stubborn to ever change (you had to run down to the basement for everything), but the money was good.

But one day, I got a call from my old friend Big Harry, and he’s planning to open a club with jazz. And I meet the money man, Sol Harris, and Big Harry comes up with a friendly name for the club, the Blue Note: the place is on 3rd Street, near 6th Avenue (It had been some kind of Israeli strip club). They don’t know anything about the jazz scene, so I hip them to it, and I took care of that end of it. So, now I’m making a good living behind the bar, and Judy’s doing very well in the checkroom. It might have bugged them that she was doing that well because suddenly they decided they wanted to take her out of there, So we had an argument about it, and sol said we had a personality conflict, so there went my job at the Blue Note after we had helped build the place, bringing in all the good players and that’s how things went for me after the Half-Note, in and out. I’d try one thing, and it might work out for a while, then something goes wrong, and I’d be out on the street again. Then something else would turn up, but… And on and on.

I guess the one nice thing–maybe the only nice thing–Was that I kept the friendships going with musicians. one night for a private party at a New York Hilton penthouse, Tony hired Bobby Hackett’s Quintet to play and invited Judy and me. It was a beautiful place, with a special elevator, a spiral staircase and all-glass overlooking the city; all the celebrities were there–Ed McMahon, Steve Lawrence & Edie Gorme, Johnny Carson, and a bunch of others–and Tony spotted us coming in, and he brought us down and introduced us to everybody. The party was terrific.

Sometimes, back in the Half-Note days, people would come into the club and tell us that the reason they came was that Tony Bennett had told them what a great place it was. He’d always put in a plug for us, help us out that way. I was so glad he’s got a renaissance going now because he deserves it. He worked so hard through the years to get to that point.

One night Tony came down to the club, and Peewee Russell and his wife were at the bar, and as usual, they were drinking up a storm. Now, Peewee when he drank, he was cool, he’d just get high, but his old lady, when she drank, she’d be jumping up and down and screaming, and when she looked up at the bandstand and saw Tony up there, she screamed, “What the hell are you doing here?!”