Al Singer: Roll On Buddy...............

The last photo I shot of my buddy, Al Singer: San Diego, May, 2011.

       It had to be on a Sunday afternoon in Washington Square Park that Al Singer and I met. It was 1959 or maybe 1960. I can figure the year by the fact that the drinking age in New York at the time was 18 and neither of us was old enough to buy beer. As such things go, it was soon enough that I turned 18 and got to be the one who bought beer for us. And along with beer, we shared a love for folk music which is how we came to be at the fountain in Washington Square on that Sunday; and how we came to meet up there for many Sunday’s to follow.

A bit of history: during the 1960’s Washington Square – and Greenwich Village – became the folk music center of the world. There were a dozen of coffee houses around the Village, mostly on MacDougal Street, that provided an ongoing music venue. Most rarely charged an admission unless there was someone famous doing a few sets. Anyone who hung around with an instrument usually got a chance to perform. It was about as informal a music scene as ever happened in New York.

For us, Sunday afternoons was the time it all came together and the place was the fountain in the center of Washington Square Park. On any given Sunday you might hear Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk, Tom Paxton or any one of dozens of other famous folk musicians. Of course you also ran the chance of hearing me and Al.

Al had “borrowed” $75 from his Mom to buy a Gibson guitar at a local pawnshop; I had a 12 string Stella guitar that I think was made of plywood. We had arrived.

I had dropped out of school, bummed around a bit and in time came to share an apartment on the Lower East Side. That was before it became the “East Village.” Rent was $75 a month and I split it with another guy. It was around then that I got a job at the firm of Jules Moskowitz & Sons. It was a textile house on 8th Avenue. Al had quit school too and by then I was sort of running the place. My first executive posisition.  As it happened, we needed an extra guy, so I hired Al. It was another wonderful chapter. The job was easy enough, we never made much money, but needed even less. We worked together in this dusty loft, packing orders, pushing hand trucks loaded with hundreds of pounds of fabric along 8th Avenue and not taking anything too seriously. The place was near Times Square and this was back when Times Square was probably at the height of its raunchiness. Hookers, porno shops and massage parlors abounded. Everything was cheap; lunch there usually left us with change from a dollar. There were wonderful burgers to be had for a quarter at Grant’s on the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, and there was a spaghetti place near by that charged .75 for a huge plate of pasta. Like I said, we didn’t need much. On occasional long weekends, we took off to hike and camp along the Appalachian Trail.

In 1963 I left Moskowitz & Company for California, ostensibly to go to school; the real reason was named Nora. And that is another story for another time. Al hung on at Moskowitz for a bit then switched to selling candy at Macy’s. We tortured him about his new job: check out the lyrics of “Candy Man” ……… The year passed.

The following spring he wrote to tell me that I could work at this summer camp where he was going to be the waterfront counselor. Things weren’t working out for me and Nora and I was loosing interest in school so this seemed like a perfect career move. I packed my guitar, loaded up my Lambretta Motor Scooter and headed back east.

The camp was Pioneer Youth Camp and folk music was as much an activity there as softball. Seemed like half the staff were folkies. At this point Al was really getting to be a good guitarist and we picked and sang our way through that summer:

Pioneer Youth Camp, Summer of 1964: Left shot, that's me (note sideburns!) Al and another camp counselor, Bruce Goode, doing what we did for most of the summer.  Right: Al "on stage."


In no time at all another winter had passed and we had our counselor jobs again, but before that it seemed like a fine idea to take a month to ramble. We decided to hitchhike to California. We traveled the interstates to Chicago, stayed at another PYC counselor’s house for a few days then followed old Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica. Mostly we camped out along the way. Once we slept in the jail in the fair city of St. James Missouri:



Al sent me this shot a few years ago.  Said a friend of his shot it.  Place looks pretty much the way I remember it: the jail cells were in the back.  Both of 'em.  Anyone been there lately?

........as guests, not as prisoners. Really.

 As I rcall, it was raining that day and we were under a highway overpass, shareing that shelter with this hobo.  He suggested that we head for the jail and see if they'd let us spend the night. We did and they did.  There were 2 cells. Al and our guide each took one.  I slept on the floor of the City Hall, which was the front part of that room.  The next day the sherrif brought us coffee.

 It was Al’s first trip to the West Coast. We had the kind of great time that could only happen when you are 20 something and totally carefree. A few years later, Al would relive that trip over one long evening in my apartment, recalling every single ride, dinner, truck stop and place we slept. It was Al’s first and (I am pretty sure only) acid trip.

 A few weeks before we headed west, I had “introduced” Al to a lady I knew named Linda. I only found out years later that their paths had crossed before. Seems nothing much happened that first meeting, but I always figured that my touch was gold: I don’t think Al ever looked at another woman again. It was 1965. Al went back to school and got his social work degree. A few years later, Al and Linda and their 2 kids moved out of New York City and set down roots in San Diego.

We lost track for a bit and then one day we reconnected and it was like we picked up the conversation in mid sentence.

Al invited me to join him and an eclectic group of friends who camped out in the Ansa Barango desert every year. They called the gathering The Cave Howl. There were 2 rules: 1. You had to be invited, and 2. No women.

It was a lot of years later, but there we were sitting around a camp fire, singing the same songs. Only difference was that Al had become a really, really good guitarist. OK, maybe we had both packed on a few pounds and maybe picked up a few grey hairs.



 In the years that followed I became a regular “Howler.” I flew out to San Diego every year. Al kept my pack in his garage. We loaded sleeping bags, coolers of beer and an assortment of food that middle aged guys shouldn’t be near into his car and headed out to the desert. Those were the absolute best of times ever. We had years to catch up on and stories to tell and re-tell. The years slipped away and the stories got better with each retelling. Some evenings, sitting around the fire and singing, it wasn’t all that hard to see those same two teenage buddies.

Between trips, we exchange e-mails by the dozen, no, more like the tens of dozens - probably a good thng that neither of us got into Instant Mailing or texting or whatever......There was little that passed in our daily lives that didn't rate a cyber word or two. Al was finally doing what he had always wanted to do: be a folksinger.  I was shooting pictures, often of tattooed babes and occasionally traveling to places I’d only dreamed of. Al began performing regularly and put out several CD’s. He used one shot I did of him out at the Howl for his cover photo. He put up a web site with more photos, some of them going back to our camp counselor days. His e-mails often included posters and ads for concerts he was doing. Mostly we just shared daily trivia

For his 60th birthday, Al and Linda came to New York. His Mom, who still lived in the same apartment Al lived in when we met, threw a party for him, complete with pastrami sandwiches from the Second Avenue Deli.  Later we spent a day walking through our old haunts: the Village and the Lower East Side.  We ended up shareing huge plates of greasy noodles at Wo Hop's, out favorite restaurant in China town back then and still serving stuff we both remembered :

                       Forty years later and the chow fun still tastes exactly the same........

We wandered through the park at Washington Square where our paths first crossed half a century ago.  Seemed like every block we had to stop and look around, recalling a place from another time and beginning sentences with: ”Remember the time we………?”  It was one hell of a trip.


It was on the evening of September 17, 2011 that I got a call from Al’s brother Marc. Al had suffered a massive heart attack. That huge heart of his stopped a few hours later and my dear, dear friend was gone.

Al Singer

 November 7, 1944 – September 17, 2011

             

Roll on buddy………

 

........... On that last visit to New York, when we were wandering around our old neighborhood, one of the places we stopped in to was my friend Mike’s tattoo shop, Fineline Tattoo on First Avenue.  Mike is even older than me. He has been tattooing since for ever. He did my first tattoo when tattooing was still illegal in New York City. Now his shop is not only legal, it is the kind place you can stop into and immediately feel comfortable hanging out for a bit.  Anyway, Al had no tattoos, but mentioned there was one design that he always liked.  Mike showed him some drawings. Al allowed that he just might be back for that tattoo. It didn’t happen. Yesterday,  April 10, 2012, I had this memorial piece done. This is the design that Al liked. I added his name.

.......... a few links that I hope will work:

        http://allensinger.com/ 
  http://www.facebook.com/people/Allen-Singer/1080366343

http://www.sandiegotroubadour.com/2011/10/a-heart-of-gold-remembering-allen-singer/