Zwerling In Space

By Ed Ward

Oh, no. Andy's up on the roof again.

The last time the world saw Andy Zwerling on the roof of his suburban Long Island home was on the cover of Spiders In The Night, his first album. That was in 1971. I see that someone's web page describes it as an "obscure psychedelic masterpiece," but really, only the first word applies. Weird as he is, Andy Zwerling has never taken any drug more powerful than white sugar, and as for masterpiece, well, he's done better.

In fact, he's done much better just recently: Hold Up The Sky, his third album in 37 years, is now available after several years of scrambling to get it done. And on the cover, there he is, on the roof, holding up the sky. "It's what you do when the sky's falling," he notes.

This explains why, although the jangly pop melodies he's noted for among his dozens of fans remain, the songs are a bit darker, a bit more...well, one might say, in touch with the times. Although that's not fair, really: Andy Zwerling has always been in touch with the times, but the times just haven't taken notice. The Times, as in the New York newspaper, did, when I wrote an article for them back in 2001 on the occasion of Andy's releasing Somewhere Near Pop Heaven, a double-CD of demos, private recordings, and much of the content of his second album, Opportunity Rocks. But not even having a picture of Andy and his sister Leslie slapped across the front page of the Sunday Arts & Leisure section did much for them.

Wait, I'm wrong: they went top ten in Croatia.

As you might have figured out by now, this is no normal career we're talking about here. Andy's been writing songs since his mid-teens, as a way of requiting his love of rock and roll. Another thing he did was write record reviews: when I started at Rolling Stone in 1970, Greil Marcus, the previous reviews editor, handed me a sheaf of unpublished and unsolicited reviews by various writers, and warned me that two of them were insanely prolific, and needed to be handled with care. One was Andy, the other was Lester Bangs, his polar opposite.

We stayed in touch through the ‘70s, and a voluminous correspondence followed, supplemented by wads of lyrics sloppily typed on onionskin paper and the occasional cassette of living-room recordings. In 1976, he decided that law school would be a good move and enrolled at Hofstra, since despite having good relations with the music industry -- Richard Robinson, who had produced Spiders for Kama Sutra, went on to RCA but wasn't able to sign him, and the late Paul Nelson, who went to work for Mercury after a spell at Rolling Stone, loved his work and let him cut some demos at a Mercury studio but couldn't get him a deal, either -- he wasn't getting anywhere. And unfortunately, one of the side-effects of getting a law degree was learning how to read a contract. Looking over recording contracts made it crystal clear that a major-label deal was an invitation to get screwed. Plus, of course, there was the zeitgeist: Robinson signed Lou Reed at RCA, and Nelson signed the New York Dolls. Andy's cheery pop songs resembled neither, to put it mildly.

In 1980, a neighbor and fellow Hofstra student, Elissa Epstein, came upon Andy and Leslie walking along the beach near their home singing one of Andy's latest compositions. She was impressed, and asked him if he needed financing to make demos to get a deal. Together, they formed Opportunity Rocks, Inc., and Andy put up a notice on the Hofstra student bulletin board looking for musicians for a band. They rehearsed in his living room and soon had worked up an album's worth of material and went into the studio and cut it. The original idea was to make some cassettes their lawyer, Howard Siegel, the author of the definitive law text on entertainment contracts, could circulate, but they discovered something interesting: it would be cheaper to press up records.

Thus was born Opportunity Rocks, the record, issued under the name Andy and Leslie Z, which fit the New Wave ethos. They showcased in all the major New York clubs -- CBGBs, Hurrah's, Trax -- but nothing happened. Short of money, and facing a two-hour drive to the city for each gig, they couldn't keep up the momentum, and apparently record companies were terrified of Siegel. "With a lawyer like that," Andy told me in 2000, "you either get a great deal or no deal." Nor did a set of sessions in 1986 produce the desired effect. Leslie, tired of the whole thing, left the band, and the musicians, who were all superb, went on to other things.

It took a vampire to revive Andy's career. Even a casual listen to his output will reveal his affection for silly pop culture, and he'd become a fan of (John) Zacherle, the late-night horror-movie host, who, it developed, was another neighbor. Hearing that Zacherle was thinking of making a record, Andy wrote "Overdrawn at the Blood Bank" for him, and the old ghoul loved it and recorded it. To put it mildly, it didn't do as well as Zach's 1958 hit "Dinner with Drac," but in 2000 a bunch of Zacherle fans decided to compile a Zacherle's Greatest Hits CD and sell it over the Internet. Intrigued, Andy looked at the business plan and the next day he registered opportunityrocks.com and began making plans to do his own "greatest hits." He contacted Media Recording, a local studio owned by an affable gentleman named Steve Young, and brought him his tapes. Young was horrified: they'd been badly stored and were on the verge of unplayable. But they lovingly "baked" the tapes and spent two days digitizing them: the raw material was safe.

After many more adventures, the double-disc retrospective, Somewhere Near Pop Heaven, was released. Once again, promotion was a problem, and with Internet marketing in its infancy, sales were slim. The Times article helped some, as did articles by other fans, including Dave Marsh, but the main result of the Internet's world-wide reach was that they started to get tons of airplay in Croatia. One of the country's top DJs, Nina Zoricca, was mad for the record, and played it constantly. One of the songs, "Someday Forever," went into the top 20 and Andy did an on-air phone interview with Zoricca, who urged him to come play a festival, but for someone without a band -- and whose band, when he had one, had found it hard to get into Manhattan -- it just wasn't going to happen. With a bit of regret, Andy went back to his law practice.

Then, in 2006, a friend was diagnosed with cancer. He fought it, successfully, only to succumb to an infection which attacked his depressed immune system. "It hit me very strongly that anyone can go at any time," Andy says by e-mail, "and so I decided to record soon. Steve Young was planning to sell his studio and I wanted to record with him and my friend Bruce Malament." He played some of the new material for Malament over the phone, and he agreed to start work with Steve and Andy as soon as his current touring commitment with Terry Reid was over after the SXSW festival in March 2007. Studio time was booked for late April. On April 1, Malament suffered a massive coronary and died.

A week later, Andy walked into the studio and recorded "TV Pizza," the opening track of Hold Up The Sky. It's a statement of optimism charged by the two tragedies. "I wanted the album to reflect how I feel about life and death," Andy told me by. "Everyone has to die, but even though there is horrible human misery for billions of people while they're alive, there is also a huge amount of joy that people should be able to have while they still here. It's always Life Over Death for me, even though I know I'm going to croak." Steve Young wound up playing a bunch of instruments, a woman named Lynn Portas came in to sweeten with keyboards and strings, David Turinsky did a couple of horn charts, and, late in the game, Leslie listened to the tapes and decided they didn't sound so hot without her. And you know what? She was right.

If anything, the darkness has given a new depth to Andy's songwriting, a new maturity. Some of the old themes are still there -- his attraction to extremely intelligent women, his offbeat irony (check "Public Radio," which he says is about a dentist who wants to listen to Howard Stern, but is blocked by his wife) -- but they're joined by some serious meditations on the human condition, cloaked in the inimitable Zwerling sensibility. Hold Up The Sky ends dramatically, with the self-explanatory "Love is Not Safe," "Flight Pattern," a complex number that sounds inspired in part by 9-11 and contains the lyrics "We live in the flight pattern/We know the sound of leaving" (Zwerling does, in fact, live very near JFK Airport), and concludes with two incredibly upbeat songs, "String Theory" and the title track. In fact, that last track is a bit of a shock because it's so short. "'Holding Up the Sky' is a coda," he explains. "It hits the theme I started in ‘TV Pizza' one more time. I know it could have been a four minute song, but I realized I said all I wanted to in six lines, so that was it."

And that is it for the moment: Andy's back working on a gigantic court case that's consumed the better part of a decade, and he's put another record out there. Will it make any difference? It has for him, and it has for me. Maybe it'll be the album that rockets his fan-base into the four-figure range. Or maybe it'll just show up on another website in ten years as an "obscure masterpiece." I'm glad I've heard it, and since the miracle of the Internet allows you to listen to it for free, maybe you should check it out, too.

(Andy Zwerling's Hold Up The Sky is available on cdbaby.com, eMusic, and other digital retailers, or you can order an actual physical CD from andyzwerling.com. He's also got a MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/andyzwerling.)