Knockin' On Heaven's Door

Mismatched cups gather dust in the cabinet of my father’s kitchen. Alongside his sink, five “Class of 1950” mugs are lined up; an odd one with a picture of his grandson, Noah, breaks the rhythm. I know this detail is just one of many clues left behind, to forever remind me of how important both family and Rutgers were to my father, Al Aronowitz.

I will miss his shipment of Scarlet key chains, kitchen magnets, whistles, and other alumni paraphernalia, which arrived like clockwork, in a padded envelope each year addressed to Noah. I suspect his old classmates will miss him too, colorful character that he was, even back in the late forties while studying journalism. His classmate Norm Ledgin remembers him sporting “a brown suit and coat, and lugging a heavy, brown, accordion-style briefcase, always dashing to catch a train.”

Although my dad commuted to New Brunswick, he would occasionally spend nights in the Targum building even when he wasn’t winning in some poker game that he’d kept going for a day and a half. “He was one great bluffer,” remembers Ham Carson RC’50, former Targum editor, adding, “If Al had a home on campus, it was the Targum building.”

It didn’t make any difference if the topic was baseball or football; my father’s writing was considered “more thoughtful” by some of his other Targum buddies. His openings were “poetic” and “mellifluous” and he took forever to crank them out. Norm Ledgin wrote, “Some of his editors felt like butchers when they realized that tearing off his first two paragraphs with a straight edge left them with a perfect news story.” My dad had a hard time editing himself from the very beginning.
He wrote about the Beat Generation as a literary movement, certain one day their work would be studied in college classrooms. He was so “turned-on,” both literally and figuratively, that he could never again be content as merely a reporter and he used the tools of his trade, his colorful personality, and the great avatar of the day, marijuana, to hunt down culture heroes to write about. As a journalist, he went on to pen stories about Bobby Darin, Miles Davis, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Jerry Garcia, and Bob Dylan (to name a few). In the process, he befriended them and, like a visionary entrepreneur, introduced many of these icons to one another.

My father first met Dylan at Chumley’s, the famous literary hangout in the West Village, when the Saturday Evening Post assigned him to do a piece in 1963. His self-proclaimed “crowning achievement” happened the next year at the Hotel Delmonico on Manhattan’s Park Avenue on August 28. “The Beatles and their manager, Brian Epstein, had just finished eating their room service dinner when Bob Dylan and I pulled up in Bob’s blue Ford station wagon.”

As he wrote in his book, Bob Dylan and the Beatles (Authorhouse, 2004), “I still see that evening as one of the greatest moments of my life. Actually, I was well aware at the time that I was brokering the most fruitful union in the history of pop music. . . . The Beatles’ magic was in their sound. Bob’s magic was in his words. After they met, the Beatles’ words got grittier and Bob invented folk-rock.” My father took great pride in calling himself, “the link from Kerouac to the Rock Revolution, from the Beats to the Beatles.” 

I spent two weeks visiting him in the early part of July, while he was a patient at Trinitas Hospital suffering from an obstructed liver. My dedicated brother, Joel, delivered food, mail, and love each day. He begged my dad to sign the remaining copies of his Blacklisted Masterpieces of Al Aronowitz (a limited-edition, boxed-set collection of manuscripts he self-published on a Xerox machine), hoping one day they would be considered collector’s items.  My dad refused. “I’m busy,” he said.
“You’re busy?” My brother responded in disbelief. “You’re in a hospital bed, what are you doing?”
“I’m busy dying.”
Even on his deathbed, my father was quoting Dylan. I tried to contact the ever-elusive Bob through several people to let him know his phone call, perhaps more than any other, would give my dad a little peace of mind knowing he wouldn’t be forgotten. Bob had been my dad’s hero. For years he believed Bob was the Messiah. My dad wrote, “I adored Dylan too much to see him through critical eyes. I was too impressed with his hipness and too humbled by his artistry. He handled words with an economy that put me to shame and he aimed those words with the precision of a laser bomb.”

Periodically my dad would pile everyone in the car and drive two or more hours to Woodstock so he could hang out with Bob and his wife, Sara. We spent plenty of time in their cold, spacious home in Woodstock, and I remember a little pond with a rowboat that we used to play in until we discovered leeches on the seat, the oars, and our legs; a star-studded Thanksgiving potluck in this same home with George Harrison and the Beatles’ road manager, Mal Evans; as well as plenty of time spent listening to music as it emanated from “Big Pink,” the famous house where The Band lived and rehearsed. 

We also paid many a visit to Albert Grossman. Albert, a music entrepreneur best known as Bob’s manager, made overseeing the careers of Peter, Paul and Mary, Janis Joplin, Gordon Lightfoot, and The Band look so easy, my dad would try unsuccessfully to manage a roster of musical acts he’d discovered, including The Velvet Underground and David Bromberg. My brothers and I loved visiting Albert because he looked like Benjamin Franklin with his wide face, wire-rimmed spectacles, and long silver hair tied in a ponytail.

My favorite memory from that time was the summer my father found a large beach house in Bayberry Dunes, east of Davis Park, Fire Island, to share with the Dylan family. A circular staircase wrapped around a ship’s mast was the centerpiece of this rustic house with no electricity. Instead, we relied on hurricane lamps of kerosene and propane to light the house at night. My mother, already in the middle of her battle with cancer, would watch us play on the beach during the day and listen as Jean Shepherd lulled us to sleep with his crazy stories on WOR-AM at night.

One weekend, my dad arranged for Paul Simon to join us and we built elaborate sandcastles made from a bunch of plastic molds, complete with parapets and towers, designed especially for this purpose. As a final step, we dripped sand on the castle making our creation as fairy-tale looking as the colorful wax drippings on an empty bottle of Chianti. 
Then we blew the entire thing up with an M-80.

My father’s dreams faded in May of 1972 with the death of my mother. By the end of that year, the New York Post dropped his “Pop Scene” column citing “conflict of interest” over his efforts to manage his own musical acts. Many of his “friends” began vanishing, too. My dad began to submerge himself in a drug culture so dark, it was hard even for me to talk to him. But after he’d been forgotten, it was his brother-in-law who helped him find refuge in Elizabeth, New Jersey, less than five miles from Roselle where he grew up, raised by an immigrant family of chicken butchers. My great-grandfather, Louis, had raised the money to bring his six children to America by selling baked sweet potatoes from a pushcart in New York. My grandfather, Moishe, loved art, music, and sports and shared his optimistic dreams of success and patriotism with his only son, my father. Alfred G. Aronowitz was the first member of his family to go to college. I realized how proud he was of that accomplishment when he gave me another clue, by passing on his Phi Beta Kappa key to me. My father had wanted to be a writer since he was a kid, and never forgot how his family and alma mater helped him realize his dreams.
Writing, the thing he’d learned at Rutgers, was the one thing that kept him alive for the last twenty years. When he resurfaced in Elizabeth, he used the Internet to rehabilitate himself by creating The Blacklisted Journalist http://www.theblacklistedjournalist.com, an ongoing collection of monthly cyberzines, featuring a lead story by my father, as well as contributions by other writers. The Blacklisted Journalist gave my dad a way to quell his own madness and once again attract what he’d wanted most all his life, readers.

In the end, my father still thought he could win the lottery and beat cancer. He knew with conviction that people would eventually recognize his pivotal role in the evolution of contemporary music. I don’t think he ever gave up hope that Bob Dylan actually was the Messiah either.
His companion, Ida, recently told me that my dad radiated with pride as he carried the Class of 1950 banner along College Avenue in New Brunswick during the 2000 alumni parade. “Your father loved Rutgers,” she said. “He would sit in the rain, refusing to leave a football game even though the stadium was almost empty. Finally, when he realized he was too wet, cold, and uncomfortable, he gave in and bought sweatshirts and raingear, and you know what color he bought? Scarlet red … of course.”

This article appeared in the Winter 2006 issue of Rutgers Magazine, the magazine for alumni and friends of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and appears here with the magazine's permission. To view the published version and accompanying photos click here for the .pdf file.