DW: You began recording in 1970, with Grinder's Switch?

GJ: I recorded that album in '69 and I believe it came out that year. I had been in a few different bands before that.  My whole musical experience started very, very young.  When I was four years old, I was already singing--not professionally, but I wanted to sing. I was already imitating the music I heard in my house. My folks would play records all the time--they were huge music fans, so I heard the best jazz could offer, between my Uncle Nat and my parents. 

My mom would play a lot of big band stuff--eventually she grew into Frank Sinatra and became a big Sinatra fan. Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington . . . there were all these band leaders--Chick Webb, even Glenn Miller. So I heard a lot of jazz and jazz singers growing up, and those singers really have influenced my voice. Those were the first real influences I had, especially Billie Holiday and Ray Charles and Nat King Cole.

Some people talk about the blues that they were really influenced by. I was really influenced by the great jazz singers. And Miles Davis and Charlie Parker--even though they weren't singers, they really made an impression on me.  Ella also had a big impression on me.

I remember when I was in kindergarten and first grade, I would sing a couple little songs that I had; I was already a performer. I already had a little style and wasn't shy in that way. And as time went on, in elementary school, teachers would ask me to get up and sing in class or a school play, things like that.

Then, in my neighborhood I began hearing and liking R&B, street corner music. I never called it doo-wop. To me, that was never the right phrase; it was acapella, it was street corner music. I would hear older guys who had these four-part, five-part harmony groups. There was this one guy, Davy Nichols; he could sing like Smokey Robinson; he had that real high, falsetto voice. And I would watch all these older guys and eventually, I was in my own groups.  I was the second tenor for backgrounds and harmony parts, and the lead singer on other songs. 

Those were the early days of my music, listening to groups and singers like Frankie Lymon, who was my main influence. He was my idol, alongside Jackie Robinson. But Frankie was my size. I wanted to be like him, I wanted to look like him, copy his style; we were the same age, so he was the perfect model. When you listen to Frankie Lymon's voice today, you realize what an incredible instrument he had. When he sings the song I sang on the Buckwheat record ("I'm Not a Know-it-All"), his voice is just so strong. When he sang ballads, he was just too brilliant. Remember when I played in the Ritz in '81? We started the show with a Frankie Lymon clip doing "Why Do Fools Fall in Love." It was fantastic.

I also liked the Harptones, the Cleftones, the Drifters--all those groups, mainly the black groups were the real groups for me, with the sound they had in the voice. There were just so many and you could listen on the radio to Alan Freed's rock-and-roll show and then eventually Jocko's Rocket Ship on TV. One of the big things on the show was the the dance, the "Slop"--it was the greatest, sexiest dance. It was sexy music, it was red light music . . . grindin' at the parties with your girlfriend or somebody's girlfriend or whatever. I would get home and watch "American Bandstand" every day when I was a kid, too. I was a big fan. I couldn't wait to come home and watch that show--it was that little world I could enter into. And then Jocko came on at 5:00. I'd watch them back-to-back.

Then along came the two forces that most influenced my writing: Motown and Bob Dylan. Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas, Mary Wells, and of course Smokey. I was transfixed by Dylan, his music and the sound of his voice and the incredible words. He's my Number One artist; he's just the master. Those first ten albums he did had a tremendous impact on me; I listened to them constantly--they were the work of a magician.

In the sixties, I was doing a few different things. I was going to some jazz clubs like Birdland and The Half Note. I'd see Miles, Charlie Mingus, Coltrane--I saw him at The Half Note play to an almost empty house. In '63, I went by myself to this place called The Jazz Gallery and next to me is this guy in a camel-hair coat.  He was very tall, so I look up and it's Sonny Rollins. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers were playing that night. Later on, in the seventies, I did a show on television called "Soundstage." Carmen McCrae and Sonny Rollins were my guests. We did "Nothing Big in Sight" together. Turns out Carmen McCrae was a distant relative of mine--we verified it at the show. She was just a wonderful singer.

I wound up going to Syracuse University because I was a big fan of Jim Brown, the football player. I later discovered he had a few aspects to his personality that I didn't like--the violence towards women. I was listening to Dylan and the Rolling Stones; I was not a big Beatles fan. Eventually I came around to it through Lennon, but, in the end, The Beatles just could not compete with Motown for me.

I met Lou Reed at Syracuse University; we were friends for a lot of years, from the early sixties. We don't see each other that much these days, though we did run into each other a few weeks ago at a fundraiser for Doc Pomus.

I lived in Florence in 1963 as an exchange student for part of that year, and it opened me up in a different way. It freed me from America. I'm a very big Italophile--been back many times. I was going to go to graduate school to study iconography and art; that was the plan. I quit after a week! I was going to be an academic but I really wanted to make some music. I put together a band with me and some friends who went to Pratt Institute, and then I put together some other bands--Train, one called Mandor Beekman. Lou was now almost pre-Velvets. One special night we were playing at the Balloon Farm (which later became the Electric Circus). Eric Burdon was onstage, Lou was playing, I sang a couple of songs, and I believe Gerard Malanga and John Cale, who would eventually be a part of the Velvets, were onstage, too. John Cale and I became friendly, because he was around at the time of the Grinder's Switch period.

After the Velvets broke up, I hooked up with John, because he asked me to write a song for his Vintage Violence album. I wrote this song called "Fair-Weather Friend" and we became friends out of that time. I was playing at clubs in the city (this was around '66-'68) and then I had the opportunity to put a band together. I have to say I was very influenced by the Band--the "Big Pink" period and all that kind of music. My band and I had a place not far from Woodstock, too.

We worked on our music--there was a guy named Stan Szelest in the band who was from Buffalo. Most of the band was from Buffalo. Stan was the original piano player with the Ronnie Hawkins band, before Richard Manuel. He was an amazing piano player.  I was really infatuated with that music and just went that way. It was almost like getting off the A Train. I took a little trip . . .

We all just hooked up and put a band together. I wrote the songs and we recorded an album for Vanguard. I have good memories of that experience because I had never done that before. The musicians I was working with were really good and I learned a lot. One of things I learned was that I'd rather be a solo artist than in a band.