1/15/23
Newsletter #220
The Crack of Dawn
I received a call a few nights ago from an old acquaintance informing me that George Young had died. He was 86. George Young (whose real last name was Armenian) was a local, white guitarist who was an occasional member of Motown’s backup band, the Funk Brothers. Back in the mid-1950s, George was the leader of the house band at a popular Detroit nightclub, The Starlighter. Back in those days it was not uncommon for a nightclub to have a photographer who went from table to table taking pictures that they would then sell to the patrons. This entailed processing and printing the pictures immediately. The photographer at the Starlighter was 18-year-old Anna Gordy, and her 16-year-old brother, Berry, processed and printed the photos in the basement in the room next to George’s dressing room. George Young became friends with Berry and Anna. In 1958 George got drafted into the army and was stationed in Hamburg, Germany. He tried to woo the base commander’s cute, 14-year-old daughter, who wouldn’t give him the time of day. Soon thereafter, a new recruit arrived on the base named Elvis Presley. Both being musicians, Elvis and George became friends. George introduced Elvis to the base commander’s daughter, Priscilla, and the rest is history. When George got back to Detroit in 1960, Berry and Anna Gordy had just started Motown Records. They hired George to play on some of the earliest Motown recordings.
As I’ve mentioned at some earlier point, in the late 1970s I used to hang out at a decaying mansion in Hollywood on Lanewood Street, which dead ends into Hollywood High School. I was told that the house was built in 1916 and had belonged to a silent screen actress, but nobody knew her name. There were a half dozen hippies living there, all from Cleveland, and I became good buddies with a movie carpenter who lived there named Marvis, whom I’ve also mentioned.
One day I was hanging out there by myself when a thin, wired, manic, wide-eyed fellow of about 40 came wandering in. He knew everybody’s name who lived there, and though none of them were home, he was obviously quite comfortable making himself at home. Without further ado, this fellow took out a bottle of cocaine and began cutting lines on the glass coffee table. I was not a fan of coke, but I did do a line with him to show I was friendly. Then this fellow went off into a coke-fueled diatribe that lasted for two hours. As it turns out, his name was Dewey Martin and he was the former drummer for the band the Buffalo Springfield.
Buffalo Springfield existed for 18 months between 1966 and 1968, and had two hit songs: Mr. Soul, written by the lead guitarist, Neil Young; and For What It’s Worth, written by the rhythm guitarist, Stephen Stills. As Dewey (whose real name was Walter Midkiff) got more and more fucked up on cocaine, he went into his “regular routine,” as I would later find out. This was a bitter, endless diatribe against fate, changing-tastes, but particularly against Neil Young and Stephen Stills, who could cut him a break, and just wouldn’t. His point of pride that he would return to every ten or fifteen minutes was, “I was the best-dressed member of that band.” Between the effects of the cocaine, combined with Dewey’s angry intensity, and his seemingly endless supply of coke, I made some excuse, and even though I was supposed to watch the house, I fled into the bright blinding Los Angeles sunshine, never to see Dewey again. Dewey died in 2009 at the age of 68.
But soon after meeting him I was in a record store and checked out the Buffalo Springfield albums. Dewey is indeed the only one wearing a sport coat, and trying to look good.
And yet a new day dawns.