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  I wasn’t really conscious of the sexuality in Elvis’s gyrations at first, or the controversy that his dance movements caused. There was no negativity toward Elvis in my home. Both my parents thought he was phenomenal. I was completely unaware that church leaders were writing to J. Edgar Hoover to warn the FBI that Elvis was a threat to morality and a danger to national security. Or that whites in the segregated South who didn’t like what they called the “race music” coming out of Elvis’s mouth were smashing his records to pieces in public. To me, at eight years old, it was simply about just how good music could make you feel.

  I’d come home from Catholic school and change out of my uniform into black chinos and a leather jacket, take my sister’s eyebrow pencil and draw sideburns over my temples, pump up my pompadour, and put on sunglasses to walk around the block. But there was one thing that I could never figure out. How did Elvis get that bluish tint in his black hair? To this day it’s still a mystery to me.

  There were only three major television networks—CBS, ABC, and NBC—at the time. That limited the opportunities we had to see Elvis and made each one even more special. Television shows were not just television shows when Elvis appeared. They were events that we waited for all week. Sixty million people crowded around black-and-white television sets with rabbit-ear antennae to watch Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956. That’s three times the number of people who now watch American Idol—and it came at a time when the country had roughly half the population it does now.

  There was a lesson that Elvis ingrained in me from the very start, even though I didn’t understand it as a lesson at the time. I saw it as a succession of hits. “Heartbreak Hotel.” “Blue Suede Shoes.” “Hound Dog.” “Don’t Be Cruel.” “Love Me Tender.” All in the same year. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Years later, when I was running Sony, I would seek to duplicate that whenever I could. Introducing that same strategy actually created friction between me and Mariah Carey, but that’s for a few pages down the road.

  It may seem odd that I started to play the trumpet around the time that Elvis exploded across America. But when you hear why, it’ll make sense. My sister Mary Ann married a guy named Joe Valentino, who sort of became a mentor for me at that time. Sometimes I’d stay with Mary Ann and Joe on weekends. I tried to emulate my brother-in-law in many ways. He played the trumpet and told me about Harry James, so it seemed like the thing to do. Before I had a chance to think about playing the guitar, there was a trumpet against my lips. I got good at it, so I got stuck with it. I became first trumpeter in the school orchestra, played all the solos, and was given a music scholarship to Iona Grammar School after attracting the attention of the principal, who never stopped kissing my ass after my father paid him a visit and who, as it turns out, was a trumpet player himself.

  The trumpet came easy to me even though I eventually considered it torture. I began to study Arban’s Complete Conservatory Method For Trumpet, which has been in print since 1864 and, for a kid, is the definition of demanding. I had to learn all the notes and the signatures as well as music theory. It put me that far ahead of the game musically, even as I began to grow and realize that trumpet players didn’t get the girls. Singers, guitar players, and actors got the girls. And if you could do all three like Elvis…

  The concept of cool got closer still when Dion and the Belmonts came out with “I Wonder Why” and “Teenager in Love.” The band’s name made a doo-wop monument out of Belmont Avenue in the Bronx. All our friends worshipped Dion and seemed to know him or somebody attached to the group. As Bruce Springsteen once said, Dion was definitely the link between Frank Sinatra and rock ’n’ roll. Elvis was everybody’s. But Dion was ours.

  I continued to play the trumpet during grammar school. But I began running home every afternoon to watch Dick Clark and American Bandstand. I would watch that show intensely. The beauty of American Bandstand was that Dick Clark programmed it as if it were a radio station. He counted down the top hits like a DJ—only it was on television. The show was based in Philly. But it featured a huge cardboard cutout map of America that the camera zoomed in on to show cities and promote the call letters of television affiliates. Dick might read a letter from a kid in Akron and tell you she listened to WAKR. It was interactive TV long before the word interactive ever became famous, and it made every teenager who watched feel connected to something larger. When Buddy Holly sang, you knew you were getting a piece of Lubbock, Texas, and when Smokey Robinson came on, you understood what was going on in Detroit.

  I can remember the stars that I saw on that show: the Big Bopper using a phone as a prop onstage to perform “Chantilly Lace.” Jerry Lee Lewis banging the keys to “Great Balls of Fire.” Chubby Checker doing “The Twist.” Fats Domino, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke, Bobby Darin, Jackie Wilson, the Temptations, the Marcels, the Duprees, the Coasters, the Drifters, the Shirelles (sha-la-la la-la la-la), and, of course, James Brown and the Fabulous Flames. That’s just a short list off the top of my head, and it doesn’t nearly convey the world that show opened for me.

  There were some really great weekly shows, too, like Shindig. But American Bandstand was so ahead of its time. I’d study the fashions of the teenage dancers. I knew every kid who was dancing off against every other kid. It was almost a model for shows like Dancing with the Stars. The music on American Bandstand not only opened a door in my mind, it evoked my dreams and pointed me toward where I wanted to go. And Motown, the music that was about to change the world, was not even in full bloom yet. Sometimes after the show ended I’d head out with my mother to pick my father up from work at the train station. Seeing him come home the way he did, same time, every day, day after day, made me start to question whether l ever wanted to follow him into his business. One thing was for sure: I no longer wanted to play the trumpet in the school orchestra.

  After I left elementary school my brother in-law started taking guitar lessons, and, following his lead, I picked one up when I was about eleven.

  I started with a cheap one—I think it was a Harmony—that you could get at Sears for about thirty bucks. As I began to get good, I asked my parents for Fenders—the solid-body electric guitars that were becoming the rage. I got a Telecaster, a Stratocaster, and then a Jazzmaster. I became obsessed. I knew everything about these guitars. Fender guitars were geared toward mass production, and I’d known how to take them apart and put them back together. But I wish I’d known enough to keep them, because the same $300 Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster that I was messing around with are each worth about $50,000 today.

  I started playing in two or three different garage bands at other kids’ houses. And as I began to meet more experienced musicians, word spread that I was pretty good. Out of the blue I got a call from somebody asking if I’d like to audition for the Exotics.

  The Exotics! Oh, my God! The Exotics! The hottest local band in New Rochelle. They played covers of the latest hits at school dances and at country clubs over the summer. You could not be a teenager in New Rochelle in the early sixties without knowing about the Exotics. When one of the members left the group, the audition fell in my lap.

  I walked in nervous, anxious, cocky, and assured—if you could be all that at once. I was at least four years younger than the other guys in the band. But as I started playing along with them, I noticed them all looking at each other, as if to say, Hey, check this guy out.

  After we finished playing, the leader said straight up: “Do you want to join the group?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You’re in.”

  I was so excited I ran home to tell my parents. They were excited, too. They had no idea that I was going to age four years overnight. At least it seemed that way to them.

  My first stop with the Exotics was the tailor, to be outfitted for my new group jacket. If you were an Exotic, you had to look like an Exotic. Even though the other band members were only eighteen, they had the air of hardened professionals and they were very particular
about their look: “Fit him like this…” I got collarless sport jackets in three different colors, which came down over white shirts, a skinny tie, tight black pants, and pointy Flagg Bros. shoes. I most remember the royal blue jacket. Once I put that jacket on, I felt official.

  The Exotics began treating me as if they were my older brothers, but they were not the older brothers that my parents wanted for me. They were street kids living in apartments on the other side of the tracks. When they showed up at my suburban house to pick me up, the disparity was clear to my parents. These guys were mesmerized by the fact that I actually lived in a nice house.

  It wasn’t any particular band member that bothered my parents. It was the energy around all of them. My parents just didn’t like where they were taking me. I had been raised to assume my father’s business, or to become a doctor, or a lawyer. In their eyes, the Exotics seemed to be pulling me back toward everything on the other side of the tracks they had worked so hard to cross.

  The guys in the Exotics had no curfew. Their parents let them do whatever they wanted. You’re playing music, that’s great. So go make some money! Soon I was making two hundred bucks for a Friday night gig. Hanging out with these guys, whether we were playing music or not, was fun and exciting for me. When my parents would go out I’d sneak off in my father’s Caddy and drive it down to the College Diner to hang out with my friends from New Rochelle High. They were so much cooler than the guys I went to school with at Iona Prep. Also when my parents were out, I’d bring my girlfriend home and fumble around with her on the living room couch. Funny, the stuff that you remember. Just when you were trying to get from first base to second or, if you were really, really lucky, to third, you were always sliding off that couch because it had a plastic slipcover, and it would blow the mood.

  Before long, I started to ask my parents to let me out of rigorous Iona Prep so that I could hang with all of my new friends at New Rochelle High. The Exotics’ rehearsals and gigs became more and more frequent and my arrivals at home later and later into the night. My parents did set a curfew, and when I started to break it they began to worry that I was headed into a world of danger, drugs, or whatever and wherever their imaginations took them. Looking back now, I certainly understand their concerns. I was only fourteen years old.

  They tried to reel me back in, but I fought them. Over about a year, the conflict built to a crescendo that peaked at a high school gig.

  We were performing our best show ever that night. As I was playing and singing, I could see the impact on the faces of some of the kids who were dancing. A few of the girls’ heads were tucked on their boyfriends’ shoulders, but their eyes were looking up at me. It was an unbelievable feeling. It reminded me of watching Elvis on TV when the girls were looking up at him—which, of course, like any teenage boy at that time, was all I wanted in life.

  My parents showed up early to pick me up that night and watched this magnetism unfold from the side of the stage. When I first noticed them, I was happy. I thought they finally understood where I was at, and where I wanted to take my life. The performance ended, and a few girls started coming over to me on the bandstand. They wanted to know my name and were looking for a way to give me their phone numbers. My mother pushed straight through them.

  “Get in the car!” she yelled.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Now!”

  “But I want to hang around for a little while!”

  “That’s it, Tommy. Let’s go!”

  My mother practically dragged me out of the place by my royal blue jacket in front of all these girls and the other band members. I couldn’t have been more stunned and embarrassed. She marched me straight into the backseat of the car, while my father sat behind the wheel in silence. She got in the front, slammed the door, turned around, and said: “That’s it. It’s over. You’re not going to hang out with those bums anymore. You’re not going to play the guitar anymore.”

  My father drove us home. When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t believe it. All of my guitars were gone.

  The loss of my guitars led to my first deal. Looking back, it was one of the hardest deals I ever made. You could even say that every deal that came after it was easier because of it.

  I went through every closet in the house, searched up in the attic and down in the basement. But I couldn’t find those guitars.

  Over and over I asked my parents when I could get them back.

  The only answer I got was: “We’ll see.”

  Then one day toward the end of summer the house became quiet—conspicuously quiet. Almost everybody had left, and I was alone with my father.

  “I’d like to talk to you,” he said.

  He was solemn and his eyes were teary. I knew something was about to happen. Whatever it was, it was not going to be easy for him.

  We went to the living room. He took his special chair, the large recliner. I sat on the couch. There was no reclining for him. And there was no slipping on the plastic for me.

  My father started to speak. He was very firm, but gentle and calm. I don’t remember his exact words. But he started by saying something to the effect of: This is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you. And he knew it was going to hurt me plenty.

  You know how in a movie you see a scene from a character’s point of view, and then something happens so that the character can still see everything around him but suddenly the sound is gone. That’s just the way it felt—like the blood was rushing out of me.

  My father and mother had enrolled me at a military boarding school in New Jersey.

  When the sound came back I was shouting, “No, no, no! I’m not gonna go!”

  But my father was prepared. It was sort of like an intervention. Everything had been arranged.

  Tell him.

  Pack him up.

  Then drive him to the institution.

  I ran up to my room. I was infuriated. No, I was beyond infuriated. I was apoplectic. That’s the word. Apoplectic! A lot of that day is blocked out of my memory, but I do recall phoning my sister Mary Ann and her husband, Joe, for help. There was no getting out of it. They were behind my mother and father.

  “It’s gonna give you some boundaries,” Joe said, “and the academics are really going to help you.”

  Looking back now, I can understand how my parents were thinking. I was fourteen going on twenty, hanging out on the wrong side of the tracks with greasers who were a lot older than me and had no curfew. All of my parents’ giant aspirations for me were dissolving right before their eyes. I seemed to be going headstrong in the other direction, even trying to squirm out of Iona Prep, my private school, and into nearby New Rochelle High because that was where my friends went. In their eyes, I was on the road to becoming some kind of show business bum.

  So they’d asked around and been assured that the discipline at Admiral Farragut Academy would set me back on the right course. It wasn’t long before I was being guided into the backseat of my dad’s Cadillac. The very same Caddy that my friends and I used to fill with laughter on our way to the College Diner now felt like a hearse.

  My dad drove to Toms River in New Jersey, and through the gates of what looked like a miniature Annapolis. If you ever dreamed of becoming an astronaut and going to the moon like Alan Shepard, this was a great place to be. But for a guy like me, Farragut Academy was Mars with prison gates.

  From the moment I stepped on campus I was stripped of everything I cared about. With words, I’ll never be able to make you feel in your belly what I felt in mine the moment I stepped into the campus barbershop with some of the other newcomers. The best I can do is a scene from the movie Saturday Night Fever. Remember when John Travolta is eating dinner with his family, and his father is angry and takes a swing at him from across the table. Travolta says something like: “Don’t hit my haih!” Like, you can hit me in the face, but don’t touch my hair. Your hair was your signature—more than that, it was everything that made you you. Which wa
s probably why it was the first thing Farragut Academy wanted to take away. I heard the buzz, looked down, and saw the black strands that I had Brylcreemed to perfection for twenty minutes at a time every single day lying in thick clumps on the floor. It felt like my heart and soul had been cut out of me all at once.

  Every turn I took on that campus was a reminder of something else lost. Meeting my three new bunkmates let me know just how far away I was from my buddies and my girlfriend. And just when I thought things couldn’t possibly get worse, they did. I remember going to the dining hall for the first time. My mother’s home-cooked meals were replaced by some sort of bread, with some sort of fried ham and cream on top that the cadets called SOS—shit on a shingle. As an underclassman, you couldn’t even eat until you were told. We’d have to sit in the cafeteria with our arms crossed—shoulder to the elbow straight out, then arms folded in front of the chest, one overlapping the other. The arms were supposed to be six inches apart to make it more difficult. You didn’t get to eat until it hurt. Then when you did it was shit on a shingle.

  Late nights of music were replaced by nine o’clock curfew. And at five in the morning, the damn bugle was outside the door—

  Duh, duh, teh-deh-duh

  Duh, duh, teh-deh-duh…

  Those notes ripped us out of bed, a bed that had to be made so crisply that a tossed quarter would bounce off it, and if the quarter didn’t, the inspecting officer would strip the bed, throw it on the floor, and have you make it up in front of him until it was perfect.

  If the usual rituals of military school weren’t maddening enough, there was one upperclassman from Staten Island who delighted in constantly looking for new ways to make my life miserable.