Zet and I recently went to see the fascinating exhibit of historical art and artifacts from Coney Island, currently on display at the McNay Art Museum. In addition to providing a colorful overview of an extraordinary slice of American 20th century culture, this show gave us a delightful chance to relive the memories of our first visit to Coney Island on August 7,1982, which proved to be a particularly memorable, pivotal moment in my personal and professional life.
DREAMING BIG
We'd moved to New York in June because, like countless other performers before me, I was eager to try taking my music career to the next level in the Big Apple. We arrived with big dreams and $1,000 in cash, neither of which lasted very long in the crushing heat and crowded streets of the Lower Eastside Village. Fortunately, I was able to book a few coffeehouse/bar gigs, and earn some cash by singing for tips on the sidewalks in Central Park. And then, by a minor miracle, Zet and I got hired to produce the first Whole Life Expo scheduled for Thanksgiving Weekend, although it didn't pay much, either. So it was pretty exciting when Kenny Handwerker, owner of the legendary Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs restaurants, happened to hear me performing on the street one day and liked my music enough to offer a slot on the main stage of the Coney Island Festival, an event that his legendary restaurant company was sponsoring that same weekend.
The pay was only $50 plus all the Nathan's Famous hot dogs and french fries I could eat (I was a vegetarian), but here, at last, was my first big break - so off we went to Coney Island. I can still remember the excitement of emerging from the subway into a surging crowd headed toward the beach on a hot, Saturday afternoon. Schlepping my heavy guitar case and amplifier for what seemed like forever, past row after row of carnival rides, food booths, barkers and souvenir shops, part of me wanted to stop and look at everything, but mostly I just couldn't wait to go strut my stuff at my first big show in New York!
FEELING SMALL
But, when we finally got there, the stage was packed with breakdancers and hip-hop musicians, engaged in a heated dance contest. The genre was still relatively new at the time, and I'd seen a few isolated dancers working out their moves on sheets of cardboard in the streets with big boom boxes blasting. But this was a totally different scene, with live DJs spinning records, multiple MCs rapping and a whole host of dancers going wild in front of a sizable audience that seemed to be getting larger and louder by the minute.
Meanwhile, I was standing backstage with my acoustic guitar strapped around my neck, wondering how the heck this crowd would respond to my folk-punk songs, delivered by the only fair-skinned performer in sight. I couldn't have looked, sounded or felt more out of place had I been an alien from Mars, a fact which was clearly underscored when the huge crowd melted away within the first two minutes of my first song. Where there had been a boisterous throng pulsing along with the raucous music moments earlier, suddenly there was just a small handful of surly looking faces to greet my second tune, and I felt thoroughly deflated. I truly "died out there on stage" - just like the old show business adage says. That song seemed to drag on forever and then some.
DOING MY BEST
But, since this festival was being billed as a "Celebration of Life and Love For Humanity" and Kenny had specifically hired me to sing my original songs - I just plugged on. After all, I told myself, I'm a professional performer and I've already been paid, so the show must go on - even if it's just for a handful of folks drawn in by their curiosity, rather than any musical virtuosity on my part... Somehow, I managed to finish my half-hour set as scheduled, feeling totally humbled by the way I'd stumbled musically, but still proud of having done my small part in lifting up Kenny's vision of the festival. Having fifty bucks in my pocket also helped a lot, plus, Zet and I even split one of those famous hot dogs (and lots of French fries) afterwards.
Over the course of the next four months, I went on to perform a dozen more shows at various venues in and around the city, before the success of the Whole Life Expo enabled us to move to San Francisco-Berkeley to help work on the subsequent WL Expos in San Francisco, Boston and LA. I didn't know it at the time, but that day on Coney Island, the old would-be-rock-star-Rudi had literally died on stage, only to be replaced by a different version of me who would gradually be drawn into a whole new way of writing and performing from a dawning spiritual understanding - a voyage that continues to this day. And for that, I am deeply grateful.
Rudi
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