Brillo

In June of 1962, when I was 9 going on 10, I was running across the school lawn to the yard behind to shoot some baskets. It happened to be Graduation Day at the school, a grammar school, and some guys were hanging out outside on one of the stoops of the doors. They were singing acapella, "As we stroll along to-oo-ge-e- ther..."...

I stopped in my tracks. I was transfixed. I think they were in high school, probably only freshmen, there to egg on some buddy of theirs graduating that night. I stood there, enraptured. When they were done I clapped. They threw things at me (like I think empty beer cans) and hurled insults at me, driving me off. I ran off to go shoot hoops. I didn't realize it then, but I had fallen seriously in love. With acapella.

Fast forward five years. The world had changed, particularly music. Doo-wop was long dead. White groups were all trying to be like the Beatles. But black music, "soul" music, still had singing, and harmony. I had abandoned the "white" radio stations (WABC, WMCA, WINS) back in 6th grade for the "black" ones - WNJR, WWRL and WLIB, primarily so I could still hear that vocal harmony.

Once again it was Graduation Night, this time my own, from 8th Grade, from the same school. One of the girls in my class had a party, so I went. It was pretty much a 45s make out party, a lot of dancing, that kind of thing.

All of a sudden, this girls shouts "Can I have your attention?" We stopped what we were doing and took the needle off the records. "My brother's group would like to perform a song for yiz."

We were down in the quasi finished basement and over by the cellar wall was a narrow staircase that emptied out onto a small landing. Down came these 4 white guys, "pressed out" as we used to say, in their banlon shirts and smoking jackets, pimpin'.

"I know you wanna leave me," one of them called out, holding his hand as if he were clutching a mike, "but I refuse to let you go-o-o". The other three were dippin' and divin' as he sang. Soon they were joining in, in unison, aping the Temptations.

I use the word "sang" loosely. The histrionics were great, but not only was the singing in unison, it was off key. They finished to rousing applause and went back upstairs.

I knew her brother. He had gone to Catholic school but hung out at the school yard at the other side of town, and I had played stickball and basketball with him. He was a nice guy and altho I feared him physically (his nickname was Bruiser, and he was quite muscular) he was very friendly to me and quite approachable.

More important - what they had done struck a chord with me. My old love of vocal harmony was rekindled. I ran upstairs after them.

Nowadays it seems things are different, but back then your grade in school was pretty close to your caste. You did not travel above or below except in rare circumstances. The fact that I was a newly graduated 8th grader and they were in HS magnified this. Me going upstairs to talk to these guys was an extreme broach of social etiquette, risking unnamed social consequences. To say nothing of humiliation and embarassment.

Nonetheless, my love for acapella won out. I would take the risk.

I went all the way up to the second floor of the house and knocked on Bruiser's door. One of the other guys opened the door and scowled, but Bruiser smiled and welcomed me in. "Hey, guys, that was great, but you should sing the background like this - " and I pointed out some harmony parts. The other guys didn't like the advice, but Bruiser was supportive. "Yeah, hey yeah, that's good." He patted me on the back and escorted me out the door.

You mighta thought that was the end of it, but a week later Bruiser called me up. "Hey, were starting up a new singing group and we'd like you to audition." This was a guy gonna be a junior in the fall, and I was a mere freshman. "Sure, you kiddin'? But what about those other guys?" He didn't want to bash them, since they were his friends, but it was clear he understood that when it came to real singing, these guys we'ren't gonna cut it. "We wanna move in a new direction". I jumped at the chance. "I can really help you out a lot. I know harmony, and music and..." He wanted to make sure I understood that it was just a try out, that I might not make it, that nothing was guaranteed. I understood.

The "audition" actually turned out to be he and I auditioning other guys, to see who could actually sing, actually hear. We wound up taking nobody.

Bruiser was confident that one of his original four, a kid nicknamed Fatty, would work out, as long as we could pry him from his social calendar. Fatty was a year younger than Bruiser and a year older than I was, but his easy going character and gregarious manner made him quite popular, even with older kids. Bruiser and he had played football together and they were two of a kind in the way in which they could get everyone to like them. It took a week, but Bruiser finally coaxed Fatty to "try out".

Fatty had the best ear by far of any of the guys we tried out, and by the end of the session the three of us were doing basic three part harmony, pretty well. Our voices had complimentary timbres and it sounded pretty good. I knew we had found our man. Bruiser was optimistic as well, but Fatty hesitated. It seemed like a big commitment. But Bruiser talked him into it. We needed a name - the Fabulons (my suggestion) were born.

We practiced all summer long, particularly under a bridge by the beach we all went to - that is, that the older kids like Bruiser and Fatty went to. We developed quite a tight harmony. Our singing gave us extra cachet with the girls, which was a plus for Bruiser and Fatty, but not for me, since I was clearly below caste. We got to sing at a couple of sweet 16's and things like that, using various personnel. But I sang lead in those cases, and the background clearly suffered.

When the fall started, fall of my freshman year in 1967, we had a really good and tight background, but no lead. You might have thought it would be easy to find a lead singer, given how reliably good we were and how much glamour was associated with it, but we spent almost all of the fall trying to find one. We found guys with personality that couldn't sing a note, and guys who could sing but had the personality of a polenta.

Fun as it was to learn new backgrounds and groove on how good we were, it was getting to be a drag not being able to sing out due to the lack of a lead. This led us to take several risks. We even tried out a guy who was several years older than we were, who turned out to be an ex-con and way too full of himself for us.

Finally, around Christmas, Bruiser suggested a kid that he had gone to Catholic school with, a guy with a dead on beautifully strong voice, with an equally legendary, flighty temper. He was half Jay Black, half Huntz Hall. And he was all Jake LaMotta.

An FBI (full blooded Italian), he had a big curly head of hair, a "whi-fro". Bruiser called him Brillo-head. This was shortened to just Brillo.

We sounded really great with Brillo, between our background and his lead, altho he never complimented us. Practicing with him was dicey - he didn't always go to school, and when he did he was in the shop program, while the other guys were college prep. His father wanted him to know the value of a dollar, so he worked nearly every day after school at his uncle's glass business, which limited the days we could sing together. And when he had an off day he was more interested in being with his girlfriend than spending time with us, understandably.

The hard work was in the background, and since he never sang background he would have to wait, fidgeting, while we worked things out. All he had to do was show up and show off, while we had to make sure we blended and followed properly. Basically, it was a drag for him to come to practice, and a drag to sing without him.

Finally, his father decided if his son was gonna sing with us we had to get something going. This guy was not a doctor or banker; he was a cab driver, and where we lived most decent, middle class people drove. The only people who needed a cab were the indigent, the welfare mothers who went shopping once a month with their food stamps, the guys who couldn't get a license, primarily since they had just gotten out of jail, the mentally dubious. His work wasn't exactly glamourous, and not exactly stable. We didn't know the details, but in the circles he frequented there were people who needed various favors from time to time, and we speculated that this cab driver supplemented his income in that way.

That's unfair, since we had no proof, but he did set us up at his favorite bar to sing a coupla numbers. It was a cold night in early February, 1968. We were pumped to finally be performing. That was lost as soon as we walked in the joint.

First of all, it was very, very dark, except for a small light above the pool table, and smoky. The place was populated by all men, and this wasn't a gay bar, not by a long shot! Fatty in particular was spooked by the place, fearing the "rough crowd" of the place. Bruiser wasn't too pleased either. Brillo was keyed up, in that Huntz Hall cum Jake LaMotta way. Me, I was just worried about everybody doing their parts right, oblivious to the surroundings. At first...

So Brillo's father herds us into the place, proud as can be, speaking words of encouragement to us and batting away his son's over-the-top argumentative comments. We slouched into the main barroom and stood against the wall. We were all underaged but no one noticed. The bartender asked us if we wanted a drink. Brillo was all set to order a scotch and soda when his father intervened and said "Get 'em all ginger ales!" He then stepped up on a little riser that was in the corner of the room. "Hey, yous guys, lemme have your attention, hanh?"

The patrons pretty much continued what they were doing, altho a few looked up, not impressed. "C'mon, hanh? I ain't gonna bite cha..." He persisted until he got the attention of the reluctant crowd, such as it was.

"These kids here, my son and his cohorts, they wanna sing for yiz, so give 'em a hand here!" He started clapping and a few in the crowd gave unenthusiastic applause as well. We mounted the riser nervously - Brillo out of aggression, Bruiser and Fatty out of worry, me out of concern for our performance.

We started singing "Till Then", the old Mills Brothers song, updated to the doo-wop style of the Classics. Brillo sounded beautiful. It was our custom in the backgroud to face each other in a small semicircle and that helped calm the other two guys, which helped them hit their parts well, which helped me relax. The Fabulons were on their way!

During the first release, for whatever reason, some old guy near the pool table began to heckle us. "That ain't the way the song goes!" Brillo was annoyed by this but kept on singing. The heckler didn't relent. "Hey, keep quiet when they're singin'!" Brillo's father yelled. The guy at the pool table waved his hand in disgust.

Maybe we shoulda been smart and end the song after the third verse, but the arrangement called for two releases, and there was no way we were gonna be able to stop easily. Besides, we sounded, to my critical ears, really good. But altho the heckler had seemed to retreat after his wave, he reemerged once we went back into the release. He actually started to boo us.

Brillo's father began to object to this. "Aaah, siddown an' shaddap!" "I ain't gonna shaddap. This is bullshit!" "Don't tell me that! You don't know music, ya deaf bastard!"

Then all of a sudden, just as he was supposed to sing "But pray that our loss, is nothing but time" Brillo lost it. Unlike his father, he didn't resort to words. Instead, he charged the guy, who had to be 40 years older than he was. Brillo's old man tried to restrain him but by then Brillo is barking right in the face of the guy, his curly hair bobbing up and down as he spit out his words.

Next thing you know, somebody picked up a chair and broke it. Things started flying, including fists. The bartender calmly ducked under the bar to wait out the melee. "Holy shit!" yelled Fatty and tried to push by me to get out of there. I was just stunned. I had not anticipated the chaos and just stood there, mouth agape. "We better get going" Bruiser said as he ushered me out the back door.

We didn't wait around for Brillo or his dad, our ride, but instead walked the 3 mile home in the cold winter night. Needless to say, that was the last time we sang with Brillo.

And we were back to not having a lead...