Not, it's not a search for the newest Vivid actress: It's the legendary Miss Long Island Pageant at The Bunkhouse in Sayville, to take place on Labor Day, Sunday, September 2. It will be an insane array of drag queens, fussing and fighting for thousands in prize money. Liquor will flow, and I will be your DJ. It's all too much for one mind to handle as the new and improved Bunkhouse kicks into gear with 70s, 80s, and 90s classics, the latest hits, hip hop, R&B, Reggae, and of course, some rock & roll! I'll see you there.
I came across an obituary for Frank "Sonny" Dallas and froze. I hadn't heard his name in years. Sonny was 75 years old, an acclaimed New York City jazzman who was revered in Long Island. He was a bassist who recorded with the likes of Lee Konitz and Elvin Jones for the legendary Verve label, as well as with The Phil Woods Quartet and other top artists.
Jazz was never my thing, but in the early 70s I found myself reviewing a concert by highly regarded jazz giants Thad Jones and Mel Lewis at Suffolk Community College, where I was newly enrolled. I wrote a piece entitled "Now I Know How My Mother Feels (When I'm Blasting Black Sabbath In My Bedroom)." I didn't knock the jazzmen; I just made the connection that the free-form, free style, mega-loud blasts of Jones and Lewis were a form of torture for me, like "being trapped in an S&M club against my will."
The piece caught the eye of Sonny Dallas, who taught music at Suffolk, and was waiting for me in the office of the college paper, The Compass. We chatted for quite a while, and he thought it was unusual that I'd refer to S&M in a jazz review. We came to like each other during this meeting, and he asked me a question: "If you could interview anyone in the music business, who would that be?" I knew he was expecting Paul McCartney or Mick Jagger, but I responded "Gloria Stavers" as a puzzled look appeared on Dallas' face. "She's an editor," I began to explain.
Dallas asked, "I know who she is, but why her?" I replied, "Because the stars come and then the go, but the star makers are there forever."
As a teen in the mid-60s, I grew up in the sticks on Long Island, with a transistor radio tuned to WABC 77-AM and a monthly trip to the stationery store to buy 16 Magazine to view a world that could have been on another planet. Here were The Beatles, Mark Lindsay, Bob Dylan, The Doors, The Monkees, everyone, all talking to, and hanging out with the hippest lady on planet earth, Miss Gloria Stavers. She would push the pop stars on the cover, and yet turn people on to Phil Ochs and Kahil Gibran, usually buried in the "Check This Out" paragraphs. What a magical world – but no one got to meet Gloria Stavers. She was sealed away in an office on Park Avenue with a rep for being an "ice queen."
Dallas leaned into me and said, "I know Gloria Stavers. I'll give her a call." As fate would have it, Miss Stavers was a patron saint to the New York jazz community, allowing the hippest musicians to jam in her penthouse while she churned out copy on Herman's Hermits and The Dave Clark Five. God knows what Sonny told her, but I was summoned to the offices of 16 Magazine, arriving dripping wet in a rainstorm with my held-together with Scotch Tape glasses falling apart. The exquisite Stavers greeted me warmly, spent hours answering my questions, and changed my outlook on life. This was my entree into the early 70s New York rock scene. I still have the letter she wrote to me on official 16 Magazine stationery, saying that the article I'd done about her was the best thing ever written about her – and she'd just been profiled in Vogue two months earlier.
Gloria kept in touch with me forever after that, asking me what was selling on Long Island (I was managing Sam Goody's in Lake Grove) and picking my brain until her death in the 1980s. How life changing for me that moment was when magic happened, and 16 Magazine was no longer on another planet. It was all because I wrote about a jazz show at the college and caught the eye of the brilliant Sonny Dallas, now gone as well. Keep yours eyes open, kids; you never know who you're talking to from day to day, and what it might mean in your life.
