Walking past the Carnegie Diner on 57th Street and 7th Avenue recently, I spied this Stones concert poster for a Carnegie Hall double gig on June 20th (my birthday), circa 1964, hanging in the window.
It was for the Stones’s first-ever appearance in NYC.
What was I doing on that red-letter June 20th birthday up in my hometown of Syracuse, NY?
As mentioned, I was only dimly aware of the Stones at that point. It wasn't until "The Last Time" featuring Brian Jones's immortal hypno-riff came over the airwaves in March '65 that the Stones' actual music drilled itself into my adolescent consciousness.
Actually, on the evening of June 20th, 1964, I was watching a revival of Roger Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) with my birthday crew at the Westcott Theater in Syracuse and laughing my ass off at Seymour Krelborn reacting to the giant plant Audrey Jr.'s command: "FEED ME!!"
I dug the Beatles from catching their very first Ed Sullivan Show appearance in February '64 (the Swinging Sixties, as we recall it, actually started there, truly)—but absolutely adored the IDEA of the Stones as the Anti-Beatles (without hearing a note of their music) when I heard ABOUT them later that year at summer camp—Camp Kennebec to be precise. By the summer of 1965, the Stones were all over the airwaves worldwide with "Satisfaction." But in the summer of '64, they were more of a rumor.
Three days later, on June 23rd, 1964, I was shipped off to Camp Kennebec (oy!).
Kennebec was a prominent (established in 1907 by three Jewish intellectuals from Philly) summer camp in North Belgrade, Maine. A rugged, competitive, tradition-bound, and sports-oriented eight-endless-weeks-long sleep-away summer camp.
God, I hated that camp! ("It's an odd-boy who doesn't like sport"—Bonzo Dog Band). I was bullied and teased there for not being a jock. The accent on sports…feh!
Yet somehow, I managed to have a pretty decent time despite the competitive rah-rah rough-rider vibe permeating Kennebec.
I would spend long hours at night perusing handwritten diaries that went back to 1907 housed in their Library archive in the woods. I was especially fascinated by entries circa World War One. Sad to read how many camper alumni had enlisted and were sent into harm's way only to tragically fall. A life lesson learned.
Another refuge deep in the Maine Woods was Kennebec's excellent Theater Guild program, where I acted and performed on guitar in several elaborate productions—including Edward Albee's The Sandbox and Lionel Bart's Oliver! (it was a non-Kosher but very Jewish summer camp!).
Some famous showbiz folks sent their kids to Kennebec. English film producer Walter Shenson shipped his son Ricky there, and thus, we got to see a pristine print of A Hard Day's Night without any screaming girls in the crowd drowning out the soundtrack (which happened earlier that year when I went to see the flick in Syracuse's Loew's State Theater).
Then there was the Rifle Range. Now, THERE was a sport I could excel at!! I quickly discovered I was a crack shot, which led me to join the Yale Rifle Team some years later.
In trawling through some online reminiscences of this camp, I found the photo circa 1964 below. I am the little shaver on the far left in the bottom row. I, for one, will never forget the motto Uncle Earl Ferguson (top row far right) instilled in us at the Rifle Range:
"This is my Rifle (miming holding a .22 in the standing position), and this is my Gun (gesturing crotch-ward).
One is for Shooting--the other for Fun!"
Best of all, I did make some good friends there—including New Orleans-based R&B writer/Hackberry Ramblers manager Ben Sandmel—who turned me on in a big way to the Stones post-Carnegie Hall in that seminal summer of '64.
FYI: This particular Stones concert advertised (the 2:30 p.m. matinee show anyway) was written up by Tom Wolfe in his Girl of the Year profile of Warhol It Girl (pre-Edie Sedgwick) Baby Jane Holzer, which appeared in Wolfe's 1965 anthology The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. It is a great read, as is his account of The Teen Tycoon of Rock, Phil "To Know Know Know Him is to Love Love Love Him" Spector, in the same book.