I’d been living in New York maybe almost a year, having relocated from Baltimore in January of sixty-five, doing my best to insinuate myself into the music business. Yes, kids, The ShowBiz. I was working with a group – David, della Rosa & Brooks and while we’d played a few gigs in The City and a few on the road, we mostly rehearsed. Long hours every day. For lots of days. We were living in two apartments at ‘The Cezanne Apartments’ on the corner of Jane & Hudson streets in The West Village. My partner Hod David had a two bedroom on the 15th floor and it was there while we were hard at work…the lights went out. And didn’t come back on. Tuesday. November 9th, 1965 at about…5:30pm.
 

IT'S THE RUSSIANS! IT'S THE RUSSIANS!

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My partner Hod David was always way too dramatic. He’d always find the histrionic in every situation. So I pointed out: “Hod. Bubula. Hold yer water. If this is in truth a Russian invasion…and Elite Commie Paratroopers have landed in Central Park, and The Gangs haven’t beat them unconscious and stolen their weapons, why would said Rooskies walk from Columbus Circle at 59th Street, all the way down town…that’s 45 – 50 blocks on 9th Avenue to Jane & Hudson, enter the Cezanne Apartments lobby, walk up 15 flights of stairs because the elevator won’t work without electricity…to your apartment?

All he said was, “pretty dumb, huh?”

So we put the guitars up. Cooked some steaks. Opened a bottle of wine. The three of us. And later we went out to see what was happening in The City with no lights. I had a 1960 Beetle and so we piled in and off we went to MacDougal Street to check out Greenwich Village in total darkness. First stop? ‘The Kettle of Fish’, a local musicians bar where on

one night you might knock back a few drafts with Pete Thorkelson, a folk musician proficient on five

string banjo and most other stringed instruments. Pete also wrote really clean ‘lead sheets’ too. Couple

years later Pete turned up in California as Peter Tork, one of 'The Monkees'. Yes, Virginia, nice guys do

sometimes win.

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The Kettle was on MacDougal above ‘The Gaslight’, one of the seminal folk music clubs in The Village.

Everyone from Cosby to Dylan to Freddie Neil to Phil Oaks, Tim Hardin all worked ‘The Gaslight’ at one

time or another. And if you’ve seen ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ on Prime you’ll remember ‘The Gaslight’.

That streaming series brought back a lot of memories for me about New York in the 1960’s.

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I'd moved from Baltimore to New York City in January of 1965 with my two musician-partners

Dianne della Rosa and the aforementioned Hod David to make our mark in The ShowBiz and here we were,

eleven months later at ‘The Kettle of Fish’, suckin’ down Rheingold drafts in a room crowded with

other musicians who were trying to make their mark in The Showbiz. By candlelight, no less.

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                                              We made the rounds to see how the other clubs were doing and I must say, surprisingly well.

                                              'The Cafe Wha' was open, 'The Bitter End' around the corner on Bleeker Street was open too.                                                 I really enjoyed the simplicity and the camaraderie brought on by either a natural                                               disaster or a Russian Invasion. I like to think The Big Blackout of ’65 provided us all with a little                                                   taste of what The Big Covid-19 of 2020 would bring us. Problem is…The Blackout was over in

                                              13 hours while the current Covid Plague will last 13 months…if we’re lucky.

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The rest of the evening was spent in my VW cruising the streets of Manhattan where it seemed every celebrity was partying on the dark street corners to helping people who were lost or stoned or otherwise fucked up. I remember the actor Tony Perkins was directing traffic at 63rd & Lexington. Doing a pretty good job too.

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There was  - for a very short time – a coming together of people in The City who generally didn’t even look at each other much less care about each other – all pulling together to help. There was a simplicity of it all that I liked very much. I had grown up in a very small town and the move to New York City, while exciting and cool, was also distant and impersonal and this one night in The Big City with no electricity, no lights, no tv, and humans who were showing things like kindness and  empathy was very refreshing. Of course all that went out the window by noon the next day and we were back to flipping birds at cab drivers and ignoring each other.

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So here’s the reality of the 1965 East Coast Blackout: this event affected parts of Ontario in Canada and Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. Over 30 million people and 80,000 square miles were left without electricity for up to 13 hours. And while everybody believed that the birth rate in New York City increased exponentially nine months after the blackout….it didn’t. I'll leave it to the readers to draw the conclusions.

 

I like to think that on a cosmic level we sometimes have our worlds stopped for a while just so we can all remember how wonderful life can be when we live a simpler life. Karma of course dictates how long our world will be stopped. In November of 1965 our world came to a halt for 13 hours. Fifty-five years later karma is giving us a larger cosmic dose. Maybe if we take a moment to look at all we are facing as we un-stop our current world we'll gain a greater understanding of our lives...and how fucked up we have become. And how much cosmic dues we will have to pay to make it right again.

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As for my Con Man friend, years later he was apprehended by The Feds as he stepped off a plane in Miami. Crossing state lines with the intent to write bad checks. Probation, of course. He's a con man. Last I heard he'd made a ton of money selling insurance and retired to Oregon at age fifty. So much for karma....

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Now if you will excuse me...I'm gonna' turn the lights off for a while...........

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