Is That All There Is?

(Excerpted from SUPERSTAR: Life and Times of an Underground Rock and Wrestling Icon)

 

Is that all there is?

That may have been one of the questions I asked myself three and a half years after that fateful day during the summer of 1981. I was standing on a flatbed stage overlooking a sea of faces at the Court Street Carnevale, the scene of the Ducky Boys’ greatest victory a year earlier. Back in June of 1980, we were the self-proclaimed South Brooklyn Heavy Metal Champions, styling and profiling before over two thousand fans, at the peak of our careers. This time around, it was different.

            Last year’s show, sponsored by the local music store, featured the Boys as the main event. This year I had envisioned a Punkfest sponsored by Miguel’s Hair Salon featuring three other punk bands beside us. The music store was far more adept in managing the event than I was and it turned into a comedy of errors, in a series which resulted in the end of the Ducky Boys and my departure from NYC.

             One of my ‘rivals’, Tumbleweed (AKA Malcolm Tent), deliberately stretched his thirty-minute set to nearly an hour which, combined with the delays and setbacks on that dismal day, cut our own performance time to about ten minutes! The flatbed was surrounded by the NYPD as I took the stage and launched into “Bloody Sunday”, our best new song which was developed too late to make our recently released EP. Ironically, we were set up right across the street from O’Beirne’s Pub on Court and Wyckoff in Cobble Hill, an Irish pub which helped inspire the spirit of rebellion behind the tune.

            I sang my heart out and posed for some memorable photos, but when it was over… well, so was the Carnevale. Our guitarist, Al Catraz, desperately launched into “Hooked on Junk”, our hardcore finale, but I had barely gotten out the first line when one of the cops literally pulled the plug on the show, the amps dying out in unison as drummer Eddie Havoc flailed away.

            Eddie quit right after the show, something he had plotted long before that afternoon. He thought it would break our backs but we survived until 1982, and I floundered until 1984 when I went into self-exile, hoping that the Lord would resurrect my dreams and allow me to return victorious to the ‘Invisible Empire’ I had left behind.

 

(To be continued...)