When we – a handful of young rock & rollers in the mid-1960s – took our sound onto the streets of Paterson, the old black men used to shake their heads. While we thought we had hit gold with our imitations of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and later Led Zeppelin, Lou Reed, and David Bowie, the old black men, raised on the jagged riffs of the Paterson Jazz clubs, knew better. “You kids just don’t get it,” they used to tell us when we played in front of Paterson City Hall, the stone walls of the legal district making up for our lack of echo chambers and other fancy sound effects we otherwise heard only on the radio. “You kids don’t know a thing about being original.” These old men kept talking about roots, about where music like ours came from, about how the soul of music got washed out once white boys from England or America got a hold of the tunes. They kept talking about people like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, names we had heard in passing but had never paid much attention to. We knew, of course, that there were differences between the original black versions of the songs we sang and the versions by the white – even black – performers we heard on AM radio. We called the early versions the “dirty” versions and the new ones the “clean” versions, and when we could, we always picked the versions with the dirtiest lyrics. This was not the harsh stuff that would come later with rap, but a subtle sensuality or suggestiveness of sex that sometimes grew beyond suggestions, like the sexual innuendo of Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle and Roll.” Later, rock & rollers such as the Stones started writing “dirty” songs too, like “Star Star,” but it wasn’t the same. Club owners didn’t always believe how dirty the lyrics got, thinking we were singing “funky star,” rather than the much more obscene lyric. But even as we sang the dirty versions of “Louie Louie” and the assortment of Kinks songs, the old black men still only shook their heads. “You’ve got no roots,” they’d tell us. “It ain’t just sex.” We strutted on without taking their criticism to heart, boasting about how dirty we could get on the stage or at a party. We even bragged about how someone at a party for Prudential Insurance corporate employees finally caught on to what we were singing and threw us out. Years later, long after I had come to the conclusion I could not make it in rock or pop, I started listening to the older records, the ones that came before our generation – not the Frank Sinatra level of superstar, but Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Joe Turner, even Chuck Berry. I began to hear things in those older, less produced and less polished records that I’d never heard in the same songs done by more “authentic” rock and rollers. The old “Negro music” as it was once was deridingly called (or “rhythm and blues” as it was later called) had a texture of reality I couldn’t quite put a finger on – something that rose out of the slave fields of the far South, a sense of authenticity that the later versions by bands like the Beatles and Rolling Stones couldn’t capture. Oh, both white bands made their own mark with their own music later, but when they sang the songs of the old black masters, the white bands couldn’t capture the soul I heard in the older versions. For months turning into years, I played the tapes and eventually CDs in my car, becoming as intimate with their textures and tones as I was with the white versions we used to sing on the streets as kids. I even ventured to hum or sing along with the black masters who shaped a mood in me and my car that was so private and personal I greedily refused to play the music when anyone else rode with me. A few weeks ago, riding back to Hoboken from the Jersey City Medical Center, I saw an older black man standing guard near one of the factories just south of Newark Avenue. I had all the windows of the car open. I had the volume of the music turned up high, and I wailed along with John Lee Hooker and moaned along with Muddy Waters, and as I stopped to let someone cross in front of my car, I saw that black guard staring at me, his head tilted a little, his eyes gleaming with a connection in time and culture I could never have made as a kid. In the back of my head, I heard those old black men from Paterson cackling at me, their laughter cracking with great satisfaction: “You’re starting to get it, boy.” – Al Sullivan