Happy 60th, Edward, We Miss You, We Love You

Eddie Ekis’s mom worked at the local Five & Ten store on First Avenue. You know, the one with the mechanical jalopies and "Ride "Em Cowboy!" outside the store - a dime did it. On Friday nights, Asst. Manager, Ellie Ekis closed the store at 9pm. This put Mrs. Ekis home at 9:15.

our first album cover, Ed, Buddy, teepee

Sometime in 1969, on one Friday the cocktail lamp was lit at 5pm and the first wave would roll in. There were eight to ten regulars, a poker game always got going, and the music blasted. J Geils, “Looking For a Love,” “Floyd’s Hotel,” Jeff Beck, "Truth," Humble Pie, “Thirty Days In The Hole,” Black Sabbath, “Paranoid,” Black Oak Arkansas, “Jim Dandy,” Jacksons, “Never Can Say Goodbye,” Led Zep, “Everything,” The Who, “Who’s Next,” “Quad,” Beatles, “Rubber Soul & Revolver”, Sly, “Everything, “Billy Preston, “Outer Space,” and every worth while 45 single from 1962 and forward. O



Eddies' older brother Ginter had a doctorate in Entomology, the scientific study of insects. Eddie bought into science and loved exotic animals. Fall 1970, Ginter came home from a research trip to India with a gift for his brother - two Rhesus monkeys. Eddie named them Chiquita and Toto. Eddie caged in the tiny tar roof of the beauty parlor under his second floor apartment. They loved beer and lived in a cage in the kitchen and had a terrace out the window when the weather was nice. A porch for everybody. If the weather was right we’d move two chairs and a bottle of Yago Sangria out there and hang out with the monkeys, but if they didn’t like the music they went cuckoo crazy nuts and pulled our hair. We carefully made our record selections. Toto & Chicata hated Black Oak Arkansas.

At five to nine everyone knew the drill. The brown bags came out and all the empties into the garbage. Ekis ran to the turntable for our “Go out,” last song. We'd march out of the building, on our way to somewhere that was never as much fun as Ekis's house.We sang along:

I'm looking, I'm looking, I'm looking,

Somebody help me find my baby!



Happy Birthday Eddie, we miss you brother, miss you so much it hurts. 

Yvette, Joe & Eddie

Eddie warming up

Gerard, Eddie & Karl

Chris, Gerard, Nick & Eddie 1966

Ed, Gerard & Arlene

look pretty happy to me, Ed & Arlene

Buddy, Ed, tp

Lamstons, 1958

3 Idiots

1977 Ed & tp St. John's Rugby Club

tp, Ed, Jeanne Aument

Yesterday's party

 St. Stephen's Pineapple Bowl winners ~ 1974 Yorkville's Football Champions. 

1974 Yorkville Football Champions

St. Stephen of Hungary Champs

Yorkville Champs

Beck's Bolero

Middle of 1969, my freshman year of high school at LaSalle Academy on the Lower East Side, I heard Beck's Bolero for the first time and lost it, literally lost it. When this song came on a radio, I'd stop whatever I was doing and move to the speaker source like a wayward space craft being magnetically pulled into the mother ship.

This instrumental tune off Jeff Beck's album, Truth shook my core. It featured Beck, Jimmy Page, Nicky Hopkins, John Paul Jones, and Keith Moon on drums. Moon snuck into the recording studio to avoid pissing off Pete Townshend. This Lp album, including my favorite versions of Shape of Things and Morning Dew, triggered the most stringent money saving effort in my life. I needed to hear this music the way it needed to be heard. Loud and clear. Working 30 hour weeks after school and Saturdays for three months, I earned $350 delivering groceries at Daitch Shopwell, allowing me to buy a high end Lafayette stereo receiver and a pair of Criterion 100s, Lafayette's best speakers. I bought the gear at the Lafayette store on 87th Street & Lexington Avenue. I usually got thrown out of the store for not buying nothing, so it was odd to be there with lots of money, ready to spend, and the staff was ignoring my friend, Ekis and me. To attract attention we began to play Saluggi with a portable record player. This immediately brought the sales help we sought.

I timed my purchase to coincide with an evening I'd have our family apartment to myself until 11pm. I got in the house at 7pm. I wired the speakers to the receiver and the receiver to my low end Garrard turntable. I laid the speakers on the floor facing each other two feet apart, I lowered the needle onto Beck's Bolero, I turn the volume knob up three quarters, I laid on the floor with my head in between both speakers pointed towards my ears. When the song started I had two thoughts: this was bliss & a firm belief that my decision to keep the volume at 75 percent was a prudent choice preventing me from blowing the speakers out on their first use. The deep bass vibrations rattled the bedroom window panes like a train hurtling along an imaginary El outside.

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Beck's Bolero:

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmO0OZC6Ifk

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