I was obsessed with rhythm. I’d tap my spoon and fork on a glass of milk or a dinner plate or the edge of the table. That would push Dave over the top. I never called him “dad” or “pop,” or even “father.” It was “Dave” as far back as I can remember.
“Stop your goddamn drumming on the table!”
My mother took my side when Dave was home.
“Well, Dave Levey, if you’d buy him a drum set, he wouldn’t take it out on the table!”
“You know how much a drum set costs?”
Their fighting was frequent and intense and usually ended the same way, with Dave withdrawing into his angry, silent self, and Stan’s mother secretly taking another drink.
For eight or nine years, they lived on Lindley Avenue off Broad Street, a lower-middle-class neighborhood in North Philadelphia. Their apartment building looked like all the others on the quiet, tree-lined street. In good weather, Stan would play a little stickball or half-ball with three or four of the neighborhood boys.
Cockroaches plagued every house on the block, but the Leveys’ small apartment was always clean. Essie was a diligent housekeeper. She was also a tasty cook, specializing in the stew recipes her mother brought with her from Lithuania. The linoleum-floored kitchen had a small, early model refrigerator with the coil on top. Every Sunday, Essie would dress up the dining area with a white tablecloth and serve homemade fried chicken.
The living room offered a touch of elegance in the form of a baby grand piano that Stan’s musically endowed mother could play by ear, if only in one key. Her tastes bordered on the sophisticated, with a wide-eyed admiration for Art Tatum. Nearby stood the radio, an old Majestic model that Stan loved to listen to when his parents weren’t using the room to argue. His favorite band was the Clicquot Club Eskimos from The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
I wait for that every Sunday, boy, my hands, wrists, arms moving to the swing beats. Traditional 4/4s, ratta-tatta, ratta-tatta.
Ever encouraging of Stan’s musical instincts, Essie brought home a used record player and a new record by trumpeter Erskine Hawkins. Stan’s father was not impressed.
“My old man used to call him ‘Irksome’ Hawkins,” said Stan.
At Essie’s urging, Stan’s father took his ten-year-old son to see Chick Webb at the Earle Theater. It was an electrifying event for the little boy, one he would remember vividly for the rest of his life.
Chick Webb was a hunchback who stood less than five feet tall. But the smallest man in jazz was a monster on the drums and the undisputed champion of the legendary big band battles, where competing orchestras set up on opposite ends of the bandstand and traded sets like counterpunches. The events were marketed like boxing matches and the stakes were just as high. A victory was as valuable to a bandleader’s career as a main event was to a boxer’s. The winner was generally the band that whipped the dancers into the most ecstatic frenzy of the night.
The Savoy Ballroom in Harlem was the Madison Square Garden of big band “boxing,” and Chick Webb defended his title from there, welcoming all challengers. The Amsterdam News described one of Chick Webb’s battles with Count Basie in this way:
Throughout the fight, which never let down in its intensity during the whole fray, Chick took the aggressive, with Count playing along easily and . . . more musically, scientifically. Undismayed by Chick’s forceful drum beating, which sent the audience into shouts of encouragement and appreciation and caused beads of perspiration to drop from Chick’s brow onto the brass cymbals, the Count maintained an attitude of poise and self-assurance. He . . . parried Chick’s thundering haymakers with tantalizing runs and arpeggios which teased more and more force from his adversary.
Webb’s epic battle with Benny Goodman required mounted police to manage the thousands who couldn’t get inside the overflowing ballroom. Chick gave Benny a beating that night. Goodman’s drummer, Gene Krupa, said that Chick had “cut me to ribbons.”
Stan didn’t know that Webb was a hunchback and was initially confused and astonished at what he was seeing, let alone what he was hearing. Webb’s drumming was a complete departure from anything he’d heard before. Stan was mesmerized, but not too much to notice the singer, a teenage Ella Fitzgerald. Little did Stan know that thirty years later she’d have him in her band—one of the most coveted and best-paying jobs in jazz.
But Stan’s life after seeing Chick Webb went right back to the alternating screams and silences of his family’s small apartment, which was penetrated only by Stan’s extended family.
I guess I’m Jewish, though religion sure isn’t a big deal in our house. Dave’s parents are Russian. Bessie and Herman. Herman is five feet tall and five feet wide with a big cigar—a character. My grandmother Bessie won’t let me call her Grandma. I have to call her “Aunt Bess.” They live close to us. And I meet my grandfather’s parents—they’ve just come over from Russia. I don’t know their names. They look like two little birds and their eyes are watering. I’ve never seen anybody that old and frail and it actually scares me. They die soon after.
Herman’s always tapped out for money. He owns the used car lot with my old man and he’s an inventor. Of course nothing ever works out for him, like this thing he comes up with to keep the beer moving. It has coils, so the beer would come up—keep it from getting flat. It doesn’t work.
Aunt Bess is big, strong, very blustering, very outgoing. Herman is beat down. She beats him up mentally. My father has two sisters who kind of disappeared. My mother has a sister and her husband. He’s in the automobile business and they’re struggling like us—just working people. They live right above us. Their son is Lenny, my first cousin, two years younger. He isn’t athletic, and we just do stuff like the string on the can, talking to each other. He tries to play the clarinet, but nothing comes of it.
Also on my mom’s side is Grandma Hoffman, a wonderful woman. Hates the fact that her daughter drinks, loves me and Lenny. Wonderful cook. Always cheerful. Lithuanian—speaks with an accent. She has her own hotel in Atlantic City, the Baronet, and she always gives my father money ’cause he’s always short. She’s the one person I can really relate to. She cooks for the whole hotel, about twenty rooms. Whatever she makes is good. She has an icebox, with the ice delivered. She makes everything, all the Jewish cooking—goulash, chicken. She cooks three meals a day for that whole hotel, maybe thirty, thirty-five people. And she makes cinnamon buns, man—best you ever ate. Heavy, very angelic face, good teeth, but she’s worn out from taking care of this hotel, cooking three meals a day. Her husband had died. Never met him. In the summertime she has me and my mother down. My father comes on the weekend. Lay on the beach. It’s great.
My mother’s a pretty woman, intelligent, tall, elegant, well-spoken. I’d show her off anywhere, if it wasn’t for the liquor. There’s those times she’s loud or belligerent or sloppy—shoes come off, hair mussed up, yells at Dave, swings at me, throws things, breaking, swearing—that’s when I know I love her but she’ll never do anything outside the house but embarrass me.
She has a friend he doesn’t like, Edna, and her husband, his name is Abe, he has money. And she’s a drinker, comes over at three in the afternoon and starts whacking it down and they get swacked. Funny thing is, I never see her take a drink, not a drop. I don’t know how much she goes through in a day.
Then he comes home. He’s always very tired. My old man was very quiet and did a lot of grunting. Cigar, you know. Comes home from selling used cars and she’s drunk, passed out on the sofa, and he starts screaming, “Why I gotta come home to this crap!” I go into my room. I don’t want to hear it. Screaming, things breaking.
Brought my buddy David over. Everybody knows about that family. He’s a lunatic; abuses his parents, pushes them around. That’s what I like—a rebel. He’s in charge. They’re the children, he’s the parent. Nine years old, David’s already nuts, really crazy. Abuses his parents, knocks his parents around, rearranges the furniture in his house. I like him. Does all the decorating;