I began writing songs in my teens. They were not very good songs. They were what you hear produced by the vast majority songwriters. Aside from being derivative (an excusable fault), they sounded forced and overworked. There is a naturalness to any good composition. It should sound as if it had always been there and the writer just happened to come along and find it. None of my first songs had that quality.
By the late 1980s I had abandoned songwriting. I was more interested in taking photographs. My routine consisted of shooting pictures of nightlife a few times a week. I would wander out to clubs, parties, black-tie benefits, biker festivals and anywhere else groups of people gathered and I would randomly take photographs. It was all fairly aimless but there were occasions when I shot a picture or two that made it seem worthwhile.
Around this time I started working for Jack Armstrong. He ran a small design firm and he hired me to do illustration work. As it happened, Jack and the group he associated with were world-class reprobates. A lot of it was fueled by heavy drinking and recreational drug usage which, after a time, became a little bit more than recreational. Except for an occasional drink, I never partook. I did, however, attend the parties and shoot pictures.
The first of these events that I attended was a bachelor party. It was for a friend of Jack’s. While later they used their offices for these get-togethers, this one was held at the Village Jazz Club. One of the event organizers was friends with the owners of the club and he got them to agree to reserve it for the night. As I recall, it was a Friday night in summer.
The Village Jazz Club
The Village Jazz Club was a dingy, dilapidated little venue in a drug-infested part of town. I would later find out that the club managed to stay afloat by serving as a neighborhood distribution point for cocaine. It was run by two Turkish brothers, one of whom was a straight-laced hard-ass and the other a profligate cocaine addict. The coke-head brother, at one point, was forced to leave the country due to drug-related charges. A lot of the staff at the club were hooked and traded their weekly wages for drugs. It was a unique business model. I knew none of this when I walked into the place.
In all, there were about 50 people who attended the party. Two strippers had been hired for the entertainment. The first was a forgettable skinny blonde. She left right after finishing her act. The second was also a blonde but there was a different quality about her. She had that uniquely American look. A vague shadow of the starlets of the 1950s combined with a suppressed madness that occasionally surfaced in a glance or an action. She was very striking and I shot a lot of pictures of her. I continued to shoot when she stayed on after her routine.
At a certain point in the evening – perhaps around 3 a. m. – the festivities moved to the home of one of the party-goers. The stripper from the club wasn’t there when I arrived but, at a little before sunrise, she showed up. She helped herself to a drink, took occasional hits off a joint or two and socialized with the handful of people who were still hanging around. I was on my way out when she stopped me to ask about getting copies of the photographs. She gave me her number and I promised to call her when they were ready. It wasn’t very long after this that we began seeing each other. In all, we were together for nearly three years and it would end up both initiating a return to songwriting and changing the type of songs I wrote.
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© 2013 by Maurice Mattei
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