You’re Different, Kid

I’m not an Army brat, but I moved around like one.

Bouncing back and forth from Miami to California for much of my young life, I suffered the indignity of being the “new kid” in school much of the time. Thankfully, I had a twin brother to share this burden with me. It was much better when we were in the same classrooms together. Sometimes, though, we got separated. Looking back, I assume this might have been a benevolent action in the part of the respective schools, offering a chance for identical twins to grow into separate identities.

But maybe I am being generous about that. Maybe they didn’t give a shit.

When it came to sports, I didn’t give a shit.

This likely didn’t stand me in good stead with some of the other boys, but they weren’t overt in their disapproval and for the most part didn’t bully me. Some picked on me, but by some fluke I managed to avoid the level of derision bestowed on many other kids.

I made friends easily. This helped.

I was a bookish kid. Shy.

When it came to English, I was a natural. I probably started writing when I was something like six, and there was always a typewriter in the house. My father was a writer, churning out screenplays after a moderately successful career as a songwriter and performer in South Africa and later the U.K.

Don’t ask me to diagram sentences, though.

The fact that my dad never sold a script was not the point. I read his screenplays and co-opted his style and learned how to format my own screenplays.

Mom tried her hand at writing, too. She submitted the occasional story and was the first person to introduce me to the possibility of freelancing.

I had a cool script called Kid Cops, and when I was in fifth grade, recorded some of this on my father’s old Roberts reel-to-reel. I cast Chris in the leading role and invited my chum Richie Imus to the session.

I wish I had that tape. Hell, it might be in a box in storage – but I bet it’s lost to time.

The point? My friends knew I was different and must have enjoyed my company.

In seventh grade, my brother and I hatched plans for a rock band with our friends Ramon and Matt in Miami. This came about after Ramon turned us on to KISS, especially the Rock and Rock and Roll Over album.

At the end of eighth grade, we determined that we’d come back for ninth grade after persuading our parents to buy us instruments.

But that summer, Chris and I convinced our father to let us live with him permanently in Hollywood, and the plans for that band were scotched.

But Dad got us those instruments, and our lives would never be the same.

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Growing Up Grove

I spent my early childhood in Coconut Grove, the oldest permanent settlement in the greater Miami area.

Born in 1963, my earliest recollections of The Grove are idyllic but spotty: Our low-slung mid-century modern house at the dead end of Tigertail Court, indigenous vegetation creating a canopy over it. The length of the home seemed to go on forever.

I’ll always remember our friend Jorge exclaiming “you have a long house” when he visited for the first time.

We met Jorge at Silver Bluff Elementary School in Coral Gables, along with a group of kids I can’t forget, some of whom we reacquainted with at St. Hugh Catholic School after we returned from Los Angeles for seventh and eighth grade.

I remember walks across Bayshore Drive to the area my dad called “The Bay” – long before it became David T. Kennedy Park. We threw pebbles into the water and explored this “wilderness” with abandon and for what seemed like hours.

It probably wasn’t hours.

The people on Tigertail Court: Mrs. Tobin next door, the Hensley kids on the other side – Mark, Jay, Johnny, Dougie. Somebody down at the corner of Tigertail Court and Kirk Street I only knew as “Mister ‘O’” because I heard my older brother Paul call him that once.

The crab holes in our backyard always scared the shit out of me – and the crabs themselves with their creepy sideways walk.

There was a weird sinkhole-looking thing back there too – you could look down that hole and its darkness implied that the chasm went on forever.

The collection of plastic plants in a rectangular planter as you got down the hall from the bedrooms at the precipice of the sunken living room. The rarely used dining room on the far side of the living room, with elegant and sleek table, chairs, china cabinet and a heavy liquor cart on wheels that I once pushed off the step into the living room…

I don’t remember who saw this debacle first, but I hid under the dining room table and repeated – “It wasn’t me. It was somebody who looked like me.”

I might have meant my twin brother, but it could have been that I wasn’t referring to him at all.

Just somebody that looked like me.

I remember the plaster shark spinning around in an enclosure just before heading onto the Rickenbacker Causeway on the way to Key Biscayne

I remember Pinocchio’s Pizza in the Grove, in the same complex as a convenience store called The Cold Spot. Walking barefoot inside the old A&P and coming home with filthy feet.

Royal Castle’s little square hamburgers…

The Five-and Ten.

The Florida Pharmacy in the Engle Building and a barber on that side of the street named Joe who used to cut our hair…

The old Texaco station.

I’m priming the pump, and the memories are coming.

If you grew up in The Grove, what memories stand out for you?

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The Folk Scene in Miami, 1960s

Above: Dad with Switchblade: From “Once Upon a Coffee House”

In 1964, my father and uncle owned a couple of coffee houses in Miami – one was called The Hootenanny and the other simply The Coffee House. These venues featured dozens of performers from the folk scene, which was at a crescendo at that time, soon to be overshadowed by the British Invasion

At that time, a young man who owned a recording studio down the block from The Hootenanny was a frequent visitor. His name was Fred Berney.

At some point, Berney got to talking with Dad and Uncle Roger about the possibility of shooting a movie around the folk scene in Miami – the vibe, the characters, the singers and the venue, which in this case was The Hootenanny.

The original Yale Brothers took that idea and ran with it.

The eventual film was originally called “Once Upon A Coffee House.” In the intervening years it was re-titled as “Hootenanny A Go-Go” – basically the story of a young rich guy who falls in love with a barmaid and winds up buying the coffee house but was essentially a vehicle for the performers featured in the film.

Of note is the fact that this was the first-ever screen appearance by Joan Rivers.

Although Dad’s script didn’t get used, the film was based on his original story and with certain exceptions, the songs were his.

My brother and I discovered an old LP when we were little boys – “Night at the Hootenanny Coffee House” – when we were given free reign to rummage through old records left from our older brother and sister. We vaguely knew about the coffee houses, but we were only babies during their time.

I remember seeing the name Fred Berney on that album.

We know much about our father’s career in show business, especially the fact that he and Uncle Roger were performers and songwriters in England – kind of like a Bizarro version of Martin and Lewis with tap shoes – and they had a successful music publishing enterprise called Yale Music. They also had a radio show in South Africa called “The Castle Beer Show.”

But the coffee house era has long been a blind spot.

Until now. 

Check out episode 65 of The Yale Brothers Podcast HERE.

The Enduring KISS

Original KISS Sticker on My Brother’s Old Suitcase (Photo: Chris Yale)

When I was thirteen, I started to see kids with KISS shirts for the first time.

This was at McMillan Middle School in an area of Miami called Kendale Lakes. I think it was called McMillan Junior High School when we attended in the seventies.

I had no idea what those shirts were, but the kids who wore them seemed proud of them somehow.

I’m sure my twin brother noticed those shirts too.

I can’t speak for him, but I didn’t like my time at McMillan. In retrospect, some of the classes were really cool, like photography class (I learned how to develop film there) and a comedy class that was part of the English curriculum – but I didn’t like the kids. I found this horde on the whole to be mean-spirited and cliquish.

But I digress, kind of.

We had moved to Kendale Lakes from Coconut Grove, and it was logical that we’d go to a closer school. But we made it abundantly clear that we hated it. We also missed our small group of friends from seventh grade, some of whom we knew from the third grade before we moved to California for a time.

It wasn’t until our mom allowed us to go back to our previous school, St. Hugh, that we discovered the meaning behind the shirts.

Our friend Ramon was already listening to KISS – and if memory serves, had at least the Rock and Roll Over album, which included the song, “I Want You.”

I don’t know how we came to hear it. Maybe it was during the coolest detention ever, where we were allowed to play records and eat lunch in Mr. Shemp’s air-conditioned classroom – a way better deal than eating outside in the sweltering Miami heat.

And so it began – the KISS indoctrination.

It continued when our now long-dead older brother Paul took us into a record store and told us we could have any album we wanted. Our choice was obvious: KISS’ Alive!.

“That’s for kids,” Paul judged in his opiate-addled voice. But we pressed him and he relented. After all, that choice counted as “any album we wanted.”

KISS fans have long suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous judgment, and Paul’s criticism wasn’t the last time we’d hear that KISS was for kids.

We didn’t care.

Later, when we saw KISS for the first time, our dad was with us. He said something like, “Boys…that’s Kabuki Theatre.”

Yes, Dad – if you add pyrotechnics and Marshall stacks. You had a point.

That show was at the Los Angeles Forum – a stop on the Love Gun Tour with Cheap Trick opening and portions of Alive II being recorded at the venue.

Cheap Trick deserves more love in a future blog post.

We finally got those (no longer mysterious) T-shirts that night, along with “I WAS THERE” badges – and down the KISS rabbit hole we went.