J. Howard Duff Stills Sings For The Sake Of The Song
UP CLOSE
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J. Howard Duff
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UP CLOSE ⭐️ J. Howard Duff ⭐️
“Sometimes you sing for the money/
Sometimes you sing for the show/
Sometimes you sing for those dewey-eyed darlings
It still makes ‘em cry, don’t you know.
“One time you sang for the glory/
But the glory didn’t last very long/
Through the haze of the stage, you look back to the days/
When you used to sing for the song.” –Tom Paxton
J. Howard Duff is still singing for the song. His whole life. He started out in The Institution. They played covers, and got popular enough in the early-‘70s to open for Springsteen at Newark State College in Duff’s hometown of Union. I first saw him rock Aretha’s “Chain Of Fools” into submission at The Hofbrau House in Staten Island and never forgot it. They gigged at The Café Wha, Gildersleeves and Cheetah in Manhattan, and opened for Canned Heat, Roy Buchanan, McKendree Spring, Blackfoot and The Good Rats. David Johansen of The New York Dolls was a fan and told ‘em so.
In 1975, he formed a short-lived band called Grate with two members of The Rock Garden (myself and bassist Morris Cohen). We practiced in some dude’s house but someone stole all of our equipment so Grate died. “There had always been a flurry of activity at that house with some very undesirable people,” Duff remembers. “The shadiest characters you could imagine were going in and out. My contact who invited us there to practice was subsequently imprisoned in England a year later.”
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Duff soldiered on in a band called Gangster, toured the Midwest and once did a show in Dodge City, Kansas in front of 5,000+. In 1977, The J. Howard Duff Band was born. “I was sitting in a parking lot going over my bleak prospects for success. I knew I had to quit or try again. I wrote “The Glory Of Rock’n’Roll” in that car, took Gangster’s drummer, known only as The Elf, who knew a bass player, Tyronne Cleveland. The three of us got together in Tyronne’s Somerset County basement in Bound Brook to rehearse and it was magic to us. This time, we played MY songs, but did cover of “Connection” by the Stones, “You Can’t Do That” by The Beatles and Presley’s “Burning Love.”
The Elf had a contact: the owner of The Showplace in Dover [Morris County] who booked the band to open for Rick Derringer, The Troggs, The J. Geils Band, 10 Wheel Drive and Todd Rundgren. They signed a deal to record for Danny Weiss Productions. Weiss had an in with Vanguard, and ran a boutique studio in New York City right next-door to the infamous Chelsea Hotel—where Janis Joplin once gave Leonard Cohen a blowjob. “There was an equipment-loading elevator for the studio,” Duff remembers, “that required entrance in from the Chelsea. You had to push/carry your equipment down the hallway of the Chelsea, find the unmarked elevator, and go up a few flights. That’s where I actually saw Sex Pistol bassist Sid Vicious laying in the hall out cold! He was gone, man. As some Marshall amps were being wheeled down the hall, he was crumpled up and in the way. I’ll never forget it.
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The J Howard Duff Band
“Mercury had offered us a deal. We went in, did a demo, even recorded our Elvis cover—I still have it—but then the oil crisis happened and labels felt the pinch on all petroleum products, including vinyl, and we lost our deal. Labels couldn’t afford to gamble on new untested talent. We were totally discouraged. We even tried adding another guitarist but he was obviously using us as a stepping-stone and it got dicey. By ’79 it was over. Tyronne and I continued to record at Vanguard Studios at the behest of Weiss, but he had us doing disco tracks over a drum machine. Pure garbage. I remember standing there thinking, `what the fuck am I doing here?’.”
So I quit. Wound up going into Homegrown Studios in Roselle [Union County] with producer Bob Bontempo and girlfriend singer Dawn Gaye as Starbite, where I played all the instruments including drums. We won an indie song-of-the-year contest with my “Doin’ It ‘Til We Drop.” But I wanted to play out and put a cover band together with her that morphed into a punk band—Partners-In-Crime—with an album out on Mutha Records. It actually went #1 in a few Asian countries. Stateside, we reached #2 on a college station chart. It was a wild ride. I saw it sell on eBay for $400. We headlined City Gardens in Trenton. We opened for The Ramones, Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies and Jello Biafra. We sounded like the Stones on meth, but with a female singer. The songs were strong. The singer was sexy. Everything was played at jet speed. Dawn wore a cat suit.”
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Dawn had been a wild child who had climbed out of her friend’s bedroom window in August of 1969 to hit Woodstock running and stayed long after the fest was over. She was—and continues to be—Stevie Nicks crossed with Marianne Faithfull. In fact, her stories, truth be told, were censored out of my Back To Yasgur’s Farm Woodstock book, probably due to her 1969 age. She had Duff at hello and they’ve been married ever since.
Dawn Gaye
After the punk band ran its course, Duff did some solo gigs, played in cover bands, and hired a carpenter to turn a three-car garage into a Sussex County recording studio. Pure analog. “I had bands in there,” remembers Duff fondly. “Solo singer-songwriters, I did demos, and loved it.” Back then, Sussex County was like bumfuck nowhere in New Jersey. “There wasn’t anything else up there at the time,” Duff continues. “After my parents passed away, Dawn and I moved into the house of my youth in Union, I took a sales job, and nursed Dawn when a tumor was discovered in her spine. The prognosis was not good. Doctors told us the operation was 50-50 that she wouldn’t survive and even if she did, she’d be paralyzed for the rest of her life. It was a helluva time. But she got back on her feet and we moved to South Carolina due to New Jersey’s outrageously high property taxes. We had three kids by then.
“I found that in South Carolina, I could gig playing just blues standards and they’d love it. I hooked up with a blues-harp virtuoso and we were playing six nights a week as a duo. Making money. Being appreciated. Recorded a CD, Metro Blues. I set up a studio in the house, played a lot of solo gigs. Found a soul band, Chilly Willy, and lasted 11 years with them. The local Hilton Head newspaper had us as the #1 band in town. I also recorded an album called Thunder and Lightning where I played all the instruments and sang with Dawn. She sang lead on “Confessin’ The Blues,” the old BB King song that we knew from the Stones.
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“I recently left the Chilly Willy band. It’s funny, but as musicians get older, you’d think there would be less drama within bands. But it’s not true. In fact, there’s even more drama in bands with older guys. More ego. I had to be a father for these grown-up kids. Fuck that. Shortly after I left the band, Dawn was diagnosed with cancer. I didn’t work for over a year caring for her again. Went through the treatments with her. She’s cancer-free now. And here I sit today writing up a set list for a show at The Roasting Room here in South Carolina. I’m proud to say I did two shows there and sold the place out both times. I know we’ll do some Blues Project numbers and Kinks and Dawn will do some Patti Smith and Shangri-Las. It’ll be all over the map. All I know for sure is that it’s time to get going again. I’ll be 75 in a couple of months so this concert will either be a coming-out show or a farewell show, I just don’t know.”
Post Script: In 1977, I was lucky enough to get to go into Homegrown Studios in Roselle with engineer Bob Bontempo & The J. Howard Duff Band to record this record. it features Tyronne Cleveland on bass, The Elf on drums, and J. Howard on lead guitar and production. Duff’s spiraling solo makes the sound: starting off with a bold declarative lead line before he starts to shred, it ends on a one-note echo leading right back to the vocal: a magic moment for us that we’ve cherished privately for decades but never shared. Until now. The song is a 1956 Smiley Lewis hit that we knew from Elvis’s cover version. And speaking of the art of the shred, check out Duff in the video below.--Greenblatt