Vision Quest
The Key to Philly’s Musical Past? It’s In George Manney’s Basement.
Things could have been better for George Manney as the spring of 1992 approached. Just shy of 41, he had already spent more than half his life eking out a living as a drummer for dozens of bands in the Philadelphia rock scene. But the number of gigs was dwindling; so was his dream of ever achieving stardom beyond city limits.
Still, it wasn’t all bad. For nearly six years, Manney had been ringleader of the Last Minute Jam, a popular Tuesday night session at J.C. Dobbs on South Street that often attracted big-name surprise guests: Johnny Thunders, Spencer Davis, Ace Frehley and members of Bon Jovi and the Psychedelic Furs among them. And Manney had managed to snag a job as head buyer at Tower Records in the Northeast, not far from where he’d grown up, to help make ends meet. Things could have been worse.
And then one March evening—on a Friday the 13th—things got worse.
Manney was walking across Roosevelt Boulevard to make a bank deposit for Tower when a car hurtled into him. The entire left side of his body was shattered. His leg was wrenched from the socket, his ribs were crushed and a brain hemorrhage swelled his head to twice its size.
Manney spent a month in the hospital in critical condition, and another seven months confined to a hospital bed set up in the dining room of his two-story row house in Tacony. A nurse told him that he might have permanent memory problems.
“I was totally freaked out,” Manney says. “I couldn’t walk, my brain was fucked up, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to play drums again. I didn’t know what was gonna happen to me.”
Aside from the care of friends and family, what saved him, says Manney, was his music collection. Not just a batch of albums that lifted his spirits. An entire house overflowing with photos, posters, concert videos and audio tapes, handbills, instruments, buttons, fliers, newspapers, LPs, magazines, books, amplifiers, autographs, ticket stubs and tons more, lovingly and obsessively hoarded over decades. Boxes, bins and shelves filled with Manney’s own musical past and Philadelphia’s, too, helped him keep his memories and identity intact. “It kept me sane,” says Manney.
The next six years were a blur of rehab and recovery. Manney eventually made it back to his job at Tower—part-time, anyway, and with the help of a cane. He even started playing drums again once in a while, physically painful though it was. Things were slowly improving.
And then, in June of 1998, another cruel blow: Manney’s 72-year old mother Madeline was struck by a hit-and-run driver outside her house in the Northeast. Manney rushed to the hospital to see her, then immediately went out and bought a cheap video camera “because I wanted to get her on film in some sort of way. I was asking her how she was doing, about memories.” His mother died five days later.
“I was pretty messed up,” says Manney. “Sitting around, you think bad things about yourself. About your limitations. About your mother dying—you got hit and you’re still alive and she’s not and why did that happen? There was a lot of guilt. I needed something to do to keep myself from going crazy.”
Once again, Manney turned to his passion for music, and his deep love for Philadelphia and its rich, multifaceted music scene. He hatched a plan: To go around with his video camera and talk to as many Philly music figures as he could find. Musicians, producers, engineers and songwriters, from the legendary to the forgotten. Radio DJs, bouncers, bartenders, others involved in the scene, past and present. Anyone who’d tell him their stories before they, too, were gone. And then he’d combine that footage with his vast collection to create an epic film—the ultimate documentary about Philadelphia’s music history. It became his new obsession. “I had to talk to all the people that made Philadelphia a great music town and find out the truth directly from the ones that were there, instead of what’s in the books and the articles,” Manney says.
Thirteen years later, his 60th birthday looming, Manney is still working on his documentary. Now, he only wants two things in life: To finish the film, and to find a permanent home for his collection—a place where he can help maintain it until he’s gone—so it doesn’t all end up in a landfill. Problems stand in his way, and at the moment, both dreams seem nearly impossible. But Manney’s intent on seeing them through, because his mission to preserve Philadelphia’s musical legacy is also a deeply personal quest to find peace in a world of hurt.
“George has the world-class collection of Philadelphia music, every aspect of it, and he’s got so much passion for it,” says Michael Tearson, the longtime Philadelphia radio DJ who’s known Manney since the late ’60s. “Nobody else has what George has. Outside of what he’s got, a lot of it may not even exist anymore.”
“The stuff George has is ridiculous,” agrees Peter Humphreys, the one-time Sigma house engineer who assisted on David Bowie’s 1974 Young Americans sessions. He’s been a friend of Manney’s since childhood. “It’s as extensive a collection as you’re gonna see.”
Manney’s standing in his low-ceilinged basement—“The Bunker,” as Su, his wife of eight years, calls it. His reddish-blonde hair is thinning on top, but it’s defiantly styled in a ’60s Mod ’do. A small diamond earring in his left lobe sparkles. So do his pale blue eyes.
The basement is part studio and part storeroom, divided into three sections and lit primarily by a collection of lava lamps. A Yorkshire terrier scurries into the tiny antechamber, where there’s a mixing board, a computer workstation and an old reel-to-reel machine. “It’s OK, Ringo, it’s OK,” Manney says to the dog as he begins to bark.
Ringo scampers ahead. Manney moves a bit more slowly, one of the lingering effects of his accident. In the next room, posters and autographed photos of rock and R&B stars line one wall. Under dangling guitar-shaped string lights, old VHS and Betamax tapes sit on a shelf: Kenn Kweder at Ripley’s, 1982. Peter Gabriel at the Spectrum, 1987. Some have red stickers on them: “Master—Do Not Erase.” There’s audiocassettes and reels, too: The Who at the Spectrum, 1973. Elvis Costello at the Hot Club, 1977.
In the middle of the room there’s a waist-high mound of boxes and crates crammed with more tapes, plus amps, a couple guitars and pieces of damp cardboard. Manney apologizes for the mess as he points to a large gash in the plaster on the wall, near the tiny third room that houses his old drum kit. A pipe in the kitchen ruptured recently, flooding the basement. “A bunch of things got ruined, photos and negatives and things like that,” he laments. “But there’s a lot more upstairs.”
On the dining room table sits a bulky Putney VCS-3 analog synthesizer rescued from Philly’s legendary Sigma Sound Studios just before the new owners gutted the place. Manney heard it may have originally belonged to Pink Floyd. And there’s boxes and plastic bins everywhere.
He reaches into a box, pulls out a scrapbook and starts flipping through pages of photos he’s snapped over the years. A smiling John Lennon outside WFIL on City Avenue in 1975. The Who on the low stage of the old Electric Factory in 1969—the gig looks like a high school talent show. A bewildered Pete Townshend backstage at JFK Stadium a year earlier.
“Townshend and Roger Daltrey were fistfighting and me and my friend were standing there flipping out,” Manney recalls. “Next thing you know, Keith Moon walks in with a girl and throws her to the ground and starts trying to get her clothes off, and then this big, burly, baldheaded guy with a thick British accent is throwing us out. But I got a picture.”
Manney’s eyes dance as his hands fish out treasure after treasure.
Rare 45s of “Goodbye Baby” by the Temptones (Daryl Hall’s first band), recorded in 1965, and The Beatles’ “She Loves You”/“I’ll Get You,” issued by the tiny Philadelphia label Swan Records in 1963, back when the Fab Four was still struggling to get a U.S. distribution deal.
Decades-old show schedules from J.C. Dobbs, Grendel’s Lair, and the Khyber Pass, faded and frayed.
The Super-8 camera he used as a teenager to film the Kinks and Pink Floyd when they came to town, and the free summer concerts at the Belmont Plateau in Fairmount Park.
A Cameo-Parkway studio track sheet for the 1967 “Ain’t Nothin’ But A Houseparty” sessions by the short-lived Germantown soul quartet the Show Stoppers.
With nearly every artifact there’s a story. For the next couple hours, names and places and facts and anecdotes tumble out of Manney’s mouth, each remembered detail dislodging another memory, sending him deeper into his boxes and bins. He’s in the zone, like a musician onstage shutting out everything but the groove. It’s fascinating, if slightly exhausting.
Finally, with a flourish he dumps a plastic bag full of matchbooks onto the dining room table. The names on the covers form a nostalgic pile of bygone Philly hotspots: Dobbs, The Kennel Club, The Hot Club, Ripley’s, Revival…
Manney picks up one of the matchbooks, slowly runs his fingers over the raised type, and takes a deep breath, as if the last chord of his performance has been struck. Then he smiles.
“There’s way more stuff on the second floor.” Manney laughs. “Oh wait, one more thing—check this out.”
He darts into the living room and comes back holding a copy of My Soul’s Been Psychedelicized, the new book by venerable Philly concert promoter Larry Magid that celebrates 40 years of Electric Factory concerts. Manney has known Magid for all of those 40 years, and admits he’s a little disappointed that Magid didn’t include some of his photos in the book. “Maybe they aren’t professional enough,” he says. But Manney’s not bitter, especially in light of the inscription on the first page: “To George, Keeper of the Flame.”
“That’s pretty cool, right? Keeper of the flame? Larry’s a really important guy, so for him to write that …” says Manney, his voice trailing off. “I dunno. It’s probably not that big of a deal. A lot of people collect stuff, right?”
George Manney got his love for music, his passion for collecting and his stubborn determination from his mother. Growing up in Juniata Park, Madeline decided as a teen that she wanted to play guitar—practically unheard of for a woman in the 1930s. Manney remembers her telling him about the time she was outside strumming and her father grabbed the instrument out of her hands and smashed it over her head. “Apparently it was an embarrassment having a woman play the guitar in front of the neighbors,” says Manney.
Undaunted, Madeline honed her skills, began playing theaters and nightclubs in Philly and New Jersey, and eventually developed a following. Rock ’n’ roll pioneer Bill Haley became a family friend, and Manney recalls one night after a gig at the 500 Club in Atlantic City (George was 4 at the time) when Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis dropped by to listen to his mother play guitar. His mom also began keeping all of her press clippings, along with a growing collection of vinyl.
Manney’s father, Art, was a drummer, though he worked by day as an inspector for the Department of Licenses & Inspections. Most weekends, the couple hosted raucous, drunken jam sessions with musician friends in their basement in the wee hours of the morning, after Madeline got home from a gig. Sometimes, Manney would watch in amazement, and after briefly taking accordion lessons, young George gravitated toward the drums and soon started taking part in the jams. He was also a Beatles nut, and started collecting any piece of Beatles vinyl or memorabilia he could get his hands on, or could convince his parents to get for him.
By the time he arrived at Lincoln High, Manney had become such a good drummer that he was the envy of his musician pals in the Northeast, including future Nazz singer Robert “Stewkey” Antoni, Nicky Indelicato (who became the singer for Philly’s American Dream) and Frank Stallone (younger brother of Sylvester). “He was on the leading edge of professionalism for us teenagers,” Humphreys recalls. “Everyone felt he was going places.”
Manney started a garage-rock duo called the Outcasts, which eventually morphed into Stone Dawn—a psychedelic quartet styled after Pink Floyd. They quickly moved up the Philly rock ladder, playing shows at Magid’s just-opened Electric Factory at 22nd and Arch streets. “We’d wrap ourselves in brown paper bags that we broke out of onstage,” says Manney. “We’d come out on pogo sticks and tricycles. We even had our own newspaper, The Tuesday News .” Manney kept everything—every Stone Dawn press clipping, show flier and set list. And the connections he was making allowed him better access to shoot photos, tape shows and to get his hands on some primo gear and music memorabilia for his own growing collection.
Hearing from a British pen pal that the Beatles were looking for fresh talent to sign to their Apple Records label, Manney sent a letter to Paul McCartney in January 1969. Eleven days later, he got a reply from Beatles assistant Peter Brown (Manney, of course, has the letter and envelope prominently displayed in one of his scrapbooks) requesting he send a Stone Dawn demo to Apple.
Manney was so excited that he called the phone number on the letterhead, and found himself on the line with McCartney. “He was really nice but told me he ‘didn’t really have much to do with this kind of thing,’” Manney laughs. Stone Dawn cut a demo and sent it to Apple, but nothing came of it and the band called it quits in 1970.
It was the first in a string of personal disappointments and career near-misses for Manney. In 1973, he married his former Stone Dawn bandmate, singer-guitarist Penny Stubbs, but the turbulent union—which produced a daughter—lasted only 11 months. The following year, Manney heard that a promising new singer from New Jersey named Bruce Springsteen had just fired his drummer and was looking for a replacement. The 23-year-old Manney—by then a well-regarded area drummer—secured an audition, but canceled at the last minute because he was going through a tough time with his divorce and new fatherhood. “I’m not saying I would’ve gotten the gig, but you never know,” says Manney.
Throughout the ’70s and into the ’80s, Manney played drums with literally dozens of local acts, including Kenn Kweder, Beru Revue and the Alan Mann Band, though none of them really made a splash outside the Philly area. He embedded himself in the local scene, and he kept collecting, collecting, collecting—not only his own clippings, but anything and everything relating to Philadelphia music that piqued his curiosity.
In 1986, Manney founded the Last Minute Jam, and it was a hit. Everybody in town knew Manney, and some knew about his collection. He began evolving from collector to curator as people started handing him rarities to “look after” and enjoy—master tapes (video and audio) of professionally recorded concerts from both local and national/international acts, plus photos, negatives, and other one-of-a-kind items. When a guy who went by the name of Tiki—who regularly shot concerts at Dobbs throughout the ’80s—passed away, someone got ahold of Tiki’s videos and gave them to Manney (years later, going through one of the boxes, Manney discovered the original VHS master of Nirvana’s storied 1989 performance at the club).
“Everybody always trusted George,” says David Ickes, who spent 17 years behind the bar at Dobbs. “I’m so glad he’s the one that has the Tiki tapes.”
“People felt totally comfortable giving him things like that because they knew George would never try to sell or bootleg that stuff,” says Humphreys. Manney is one of only a precious few people who’ve been entrusted with a copy of Humphrey’s near-mythic Young Americans rehearsal/outtakes tapes. “They’ve never gotten out,” says Humphreys. “Not even Bowie has it. But George does.”
By the early ’90s, Manney’s collection was massive and impressive.
And then, the accident. His mother’s death. And the genesis of Manney’s magnum opus.
Down in the Bunker, Manney’s playing some of his interview footage on his computer. There’s Philly soul singer Len Barry talking about how he got paid in booze and sex instead of royalties when he was a hit-making teenager singing with the Dovells. There’s late West Philly singer and Motown A&R man Weldon McDougal—who’s credited with discovering the Jackson 5 and others—ranting about how Cameo-Parkway Records blatantly ripped off the Motown sound.
Manney started his documentary odyssey by shooting old friends like Stewkey and members of the American Dream. Then he made a long wish list of people he wanted to talk to, and he thoroughly researched each person’s career so he’d come across as knowledgeable as possible to his subjects. “I was nervous, it was awkward for me,” he says. “I’m not a reporter. Some people wanted to know who the hell I was.”
He managed to convince lots of notable names to chat candidly, at length, on video: Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, Chubby Checker, Larry Magid, Linda Cohen, Larry Gold, David Ivory, Dee Dee Sharp, Joel Dorn, Tommy Conwell, Charlie Gracie, Robert Hazard, and over 100 more. “He really knew his history, and he was a hell of a nice guy, not a schmuck like some others—what more could you want from a fella?” the 75-year-old Gracie, a rock ’n’ roll pioneer from South Philly, says of Manney. “I was happy to talk to him.”
Manney says he’s got members of Gamble & Huff’s MFSB house band saying the real reason most of them didn’t play on the Young Americans sessions, rather than “scheduling conflicts,” is because they thought Bowie was “queer as a three-dollar bill and they didn’t want to give him their sound.” He’s got Dorn (the last interview he did before he died) talking about how he’d regularly smoke at least five joints before going in to tape his “Masked Announcer” commercials that were ubiquitous on Philly TV stations in the ’60s. And he’s got the Orlons’ Stephen Caldwell talking about how Dick Clark—reviled by some to this day for keeping African-American dancers off American Bandstand —quietly supported scores of black Philadelphia musicians financially and demanded equal treatment for those artists, particularly when they played the segregated South on Bandstand ’s “Caravan of Stars” tours.
“There’s controversial stuff, funny stuff, really interesting stuff that no one’s ever heard, from the people who lived it,” says Manney. “I’ve just gotta get it out there.”
But, he says, “it’s turned into an even bigger monster than I thought it was gonna be.” Indeed, after more than a decade of steady work, there’s no end in sight. Much of the footage has yet to be logged. He’s had to teach himself, slowly, the software and techniques to properly edit video. The scope of his idea is so large, he’s having trouble developing a cohesive narrative, and he frets over having to leave so much as one good clip on the cutting room floor.
He’s struggling in other ways, too. Money’s scarce. On disability since the late ’90s, Manney gets a small check every month; his wife Su supports the couple with voiceover work. “I know he’d do the same thing for me,” she says. “We do the best we can. It’s like that for a lot of people right now.” Forget about funds to pay for help logging and editing his footage, or for pricey music licensing fees—Manney’s had to sell off cherished parts of his collection (an ultra-rare Syd Barrett autograph, an amp that belonged to the Beatles circa Magical Mystery Tour, some of that precious vinyl) just to put food in the fridge and keep their electricity and phone from getting shut off.
And aside from his friends and a handful of local music industry folks, few people these days seem to know or care about Manney’s remarkable collection. He says he’s reached out to Temple University and some Philadelphia arts organizations about housing or exhibiting his archives, but so far he’s been rebuffed. “I guess some people think it’s just a bunch of junk,” Manney shrugs.
During the time he’s been working on the film, Manney’s sidetracked himself with two shorter documentaries, made partly in the hopes of attracting the attention of potential financial backers for “the big film.” There was 2007’s Pipes of Peace, a profile of late, eccentric Philly jazz bagpiper Rufus Harley. And his new Meet Me on South Street—an hour-long look at J.C. Dobbs that’s packed with great music, interviews and archival goodies—screens at the Franklin Institute on June 23 as part of the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival. Manney says both projects—while time-consuming and difficult to craft in their own right—have been labors of love. “After I interviewed him, he became a very good friend of mine,” Manney says of Harley, who died in 2006. “And Dobbs, that was our CBGB’s—that history’s got to be celebrated.”
Su, who’s sitting nearby, believes in her husband’s vision and she thinks he’ll finish the big documentary someday, but she worries about how his long, stressful hours down in the Bunker are affecting his health. “He works all day and all night. I’ve seen him fall asleep at the board, with his hand on the controls. He’ll go without eating. I’ll call him on the phone from upstairs—‘You comin’ to bed?’ And because of the accident, if he sits too long in one position he can’t walk when he stands. It’s not good.”
She also fears that if something happens to Manney, she won’t be able to properly maintain his collection. She hopes that some university or museum will eventually see its worth and give it a home. “Even though it’s housed here and George dotes over it like a mother hen, you can’t take it with you. It would be great if it stayed all together in a place where people could go and learn from it and say, ‘This was the collection of George Manney.’”
She looks over at Manney and smiles and, bashfully, he returns the gesture.
He’s been playing the drums more lately. Ex-Replacements and current Guns N’ Roses bassist Tommy Stinson, who Manney met through a mutual friend, came to the Bunker earlier this year to cut some tracks, and Manney played a gig with Stinson at the North Star. Manney will also spend his 60th birthday drumming with Charlie Gracie during a live appearance on WHYY-TV on June 4. Outwardly, he seems cheerful and upbeat. But inside, he admits, he’s hurting in a lot of ways.
Each time he plays drums, it takes him a few days to recover physically.
He still gets panic attacks whenever he crosses an intersection, and has nightmares about oncoming headlights.
He hasn’t been able to bring himself to watch the footage of his mother in the hospital since he shot it.
Worst of all, perhaps, he’s beating himself up over missed opportunities and bad fortune.
“I dunno, sometimes I feel defeated,” says Manney with a heartbreaking half-smile. He’s quiet for a moment. “Maybe that’s not the right word. I just feel like I never really got anywhere. I feel very unsuccessful sometimes. But I’m not gonna stop trying. I guess I’d just like to do one really good thing before I die.”
“There’s no way George Manney is a failure,” says Humphreys. “I think he’d like to be recognized for contributing something to this world, like we all do. He’s a sweet soul. He’s gone the distance but maybe he didn’t break the tape at the finish line. I think he’d like to do that just once and say, ‘I won this race.’”
[Text originally published in Philadelphia Weekly, May 25, 2011]
Note: Not long after this story was published, George was contacted by Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Curatorial Director Howard Kramer, who had read the piece. A number of items from George’s collection now have a permanent home in the R&RHOF Library and Archives. George is still working on his film.
Michael Alan Goldberg is an award-winning crime reporter for Digital First Media, as well as a long-time music journalist and professional photographer. His work has appeared in SPIN, Village Voice, The New York Times, Fuse, MTV, Pitchfork, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @mg_thereporter.
