Sept. 21, 1974: Rochester's Armand Schaubroeck

 

Rochester’s maverick music merchant makes a move on Buffalo. 

Sept. 21, 1974 

Prison Rock Opera – Step to Freedom 

“YOU WANT GET TO THE PEOPLE, you oughta try a billboard,” Armand Schaubroeck proposes.

          Billboards work for Schaubroeck. His first ones in Rochester in the mid ‘60s got him pictures in papers from here to Seattle. It was an answer to the “Beautify America – Get a Haircut” signs. It said: “Grow It Long.”

          “Today it sounds corny,” he says, “but then it was a big thing. I got a lotta radio things, debate things. The store made it on the publicity. My customers were the freak type and they dug it.”

          Presently he has 25 billboards in and around Buffalo. “The Warden’s Circus now in town,” they proclaim next to a picture of Schaubroeck peering from behind the wire mesh of a prison cell.

* * *

“THIS MUST BE a pretty big town,” he estimates. “I wanted 25 percent exposure, so 25 percent of the people would see it and it took 25 billboards. In Rochester, we needed only 12. Syracuse took eight.

          “I’ve put 20 billboards in Albany,” he says, “and I’ve never even been there.”

* * *

“WHEN YOU first get there,” Schaubroeck says, “they give you interviews to decide when you’re gonna see the parole board. It’s mass production. The psychiatrists are quick and hard. They wanta see if you get violent. I can’t blame ‘em, but I’m sayin’ that’s what happens.

          “Psychologically they definitely convince you you are dangerous. They shackle you when you move. You’re counted every hour. They’ve got machine guns on the walls and they’ve got the dogs, that kinda security. After a while, you believe it.

          “You know, 70 percent of the guys in prison go back again, 50 percent of them for a harder crime. You learn crime in prison. If I didn’t make it with the store, I woulda done something sooner or later.

* * *

“ANDY WARHOL’S an amazing guy,” Schaubroeck recounts. “When he’s done with a conversation, he’ll turn around and walk away without any warning, just like that.

          “He wanted to make my album into a play. I couldn’t see that, all that work seven days a week. I wanta make it into a movie.

          “I could explain more in a move. I could get heavy like I couldn’t do on the record. We had arguments about it.

          “‘Play,’ he’ll say. ‘No, movie.’ ‘Play.’ ‘Movie.’ We do that until he up and splits.”

          He served nearly 18 months of a three-year sentence in Elmira Reformatory as a youthful offender before he was paroled.

          “I was punky and gang-like and I made it outa there all right,” he says. “I sorta deserved to be there.

* * *

“BUT I’D SOONER be in Attica than Elmira. The state prisons get more money than the reformatories. They’re better off.”

          He talks about the suicides, the brutal sexuality, solitary confinement, troubled inmates, the threat of being killed or attacked or being locked away in a mental hospital.

          “Going over-religious, that’s one way of flipping,” he says. “You’re totally isolated from society. There are no contacts whatsoever. You know, it doesn’t make sense to put someone that far away, ‘cause someday he’ll have to come out.”

* * *

SCHAUBROECK was born Jan. 20, 1944, and grew up in Irondequoit, an eastern suburb of Rochester, watching the town fill in with a postwar flood of Eastman Kodak executives.

          The war left his father a permanent patient in a VA hospital. His mother worked in a factory to support the kids. The welfare workers threatened to take him and his younger brother away, he says, until one day his gang scared them off.

          “We called ourselves the Del Boys,” he says. “There was a deli and we usta hang out on the steps. We had rules and morals. It was a game for most of us, a way of making it, I guess.”

          He has no idea how many burglaries, safecrackings and random thefts the Del Boys committed. When he was arrested, he was charged with 14 and suspected in 21 more.

          He says they he never got caught at the scene. The thing that did it was returning a timing light to a kid they knew. It was on a police stolen property list.

* * *

SCHAUBROECK had his prison rock opera in his head when he walked out of Elmira. He recorded it once in 1968, then taped again last summer with friends in straight takes.

          Released on his own Mirror label, it’s a six-sided stream of consciousness tale. The music is mid ‘60s punk rock – like the Seeds or the Standells – a bit crude, though it has some high moments. Where the impact comes is in the feelings. They’re for real.

* * *

HE STARTED selling guitars in his mother’s basement while still on parole (“She usta kick my customers out,” he says), made it a success by out-discounting everybody. He still does. His $6.98 records go for $3.98.

          His store, the House of Guitars, occupies the biggest building in Irondequoit and does more business under one roof (excess of $4 million) than any other music outlet in the nation.

          He ran for State Senate in 1972 and this year he’s the third man in an Assembly race. His issue is a two-point prison reform.

* * *

HE THINKS prison shops should bid on private contracts, pay inmates a minimum wage instead of a nickel a day and teach them marketable skills which they’ll have experience in when they’re released.

          Secondly, he thinks prisoners should get to see wives and girlfriends. This, he says, would reduce fights, sexual assaults and the bitter toll of social isolation.

          Currently he and his salesman-publicist, a roly-poly man with the unlikely name of Dick Tomato, are on a cross-country promotion tour. He’ll be home in time for the election.

          “I’m gonna give you a scoop too,” he says. “I’m gonna do another record. It’ll be oldies or else a rock opera based on the life of George Eastman, who founded Kodak.”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: Armand Schaubroeck in front of one of his Buffalo billboards.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: This would not be Armand Schaubroeck’s only billboard campaign in Buffalo. When he put out his debut album, a three-disc monster entitled “A Lot of People Would Like to See Armand Schaubroeck … DEAD,” motorists like me northbound on South Elmwood Avenue were confronted by a giant reproduction of the cover that was a headshot in more ways than one.

In all, Armand has put out five albums, abetted musically by his brothers Blaine and Bruce. A retrospective of his work by critic Ira Robbins in Trouser Press notes that “Schaubroeck is no raving looney – his records are intense but they’re sane, and ambitiously conceived and executed. And while his musical and songwriting skills have grown by leaps and bounds over the years, he has never mellowed – his fifth album is more intense and gritty than any of his others, save the first.”

His brothers also collaborated on the House of Guitars. Armand promoted it in Rochester with an endless succession of witty and provocative radio and TV commercials (closest equivalent in Buffalo were the ads for Mighty Taco). The store, which has spread out into three interconnected buildings jam-packed with musical gear and music on records, tapes and CDs, is an Irondequoit landmark and well worth a visit. Like Armand, it’s pretty overwhelming.  

Among his activities these days is a radio show which airs from 3 to 5 p.m. Saturdays on WRFZ 106.3 FM, Rochester Free Radio. The first show every month is dedicated to Upstate New York musicians. It’s podcasted here at https://www.mixcloud.com/ArmandSchaubroeckSpins/stream/.

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FURTHER NOTE: All of these transcripts of old feature articles about the Buffalo music scene can be found in a somewhat more legible and searchable form on my Blogspot site: https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/4731437129543258237.