Tito Mambo performs a riot
By Bill Kelly
It was early Saturday morning of Labor Day weekend when the girls – Lynda, the nurses and the mayor’s daughters – set up their blankets and beach chairs on the Ninth Street Beach next to the jetty. It was their usual spot, which gave them peanut gallery seats to the much anticipated appearance of Tito Mambo, the performance of miracles, as well as a free concert by his band, The Messiahs of Soul, formerly The Upsetters, one of Bay Shores’ hottest bands.
People arrived constantly so by 10 a.m. it was wall-to-wall beach blanket bingo, with lifeguard whistles and loud boat air horns sounding constantly, and guys throwing girls up in the air on their beach blankets like a trampoline.
But by noon Lynda got up saying she had to go to work in the emergency room of Shore Memorial Hospital, and would have to miss the miracles and The Messiahs of Soul.
Tito’s band was set up on the Music Pier balcony that overlooks the Ninth Street Beach, right next to the KYW-TV3 News crew, where Tom Snyder was doing daily weather reports all weekend. The KYW-TV3 helicopter would also make a pass, hover above and film the scene. The OCPD Special Services Unit was also filming from the second floor of Shriver’s Candy Store on the Boardwalk.
The authorities wouldn’t let the band play, or even let them turn on the microphone until they had a permit. The band kept putting them off by saying that Tito had the permit and he would be arriving shortly, and shortly he did.
Everyone, including the band, expected him to arrive in a coffin in the black hearse. It arrived, but when they opened it, Tito wasn’t there. The noise from the crowd alerted them that he was coming in from somewhere, but practically everyone was surprised to see him waterskiing behind Chris Montagna’s Flying Saucer PT boat as it came into sight from behind the Music Pier.
The old Italian fisherman who ran a fleet of fishing boats and Chris’ Restaurant at 10th Street and the Bay, also took tourists out in a PT boat, which he outfitted with benches for passengers. It was fast and everyone got wet with sea spray, but this time Chris had only one customer – Tito Mambo.
Tito was dressed in his Jesus white robe motif. He waved with one hand as he held onto a rope with the other. Skiing close to shore, he let go of the rope and glided in over a breaker and then rode another, right into shore without missing a beat.
As he walked in off the lapping surf he began to preach – “I am here to save you and to save rock and roll. I am here to save you from the bondage of commercialism and to save rock and roll from the greed and hypocrisy that has engulfed it.”
When people called out for miracles, Tito said he would perform miracles. He slipped on a pair of sandals, which had parts of a metal coat hanger beneath them which people couldn’t see, but gave the illusion that he was walking a few inches above the water.
He then said, despite it being 90 degrees, that he would cool things off by making people feel like they were in a freezer, and suddenly the crowd began to shiver and feel cold.
Tito was using some tricks that Kreskin the mentalist had taught him at the Purple Dragon coffee house earlier that summer. Kreskin, fresh from college, came down from Montclair in Essex County to try to help the police solve some crimes, including the murder of Copper Kettle Fudge owner, aka “The Fudge King,” Harry Anglemyer. Kreskin’s plan was to hypnotize witnesses and use other techniques, like Mandrake the Magician did in the popular comic strip.
But when the police weren’t interested, Kreskin became the Amazing Kreskin and began performing as an entertainer, first appearing at the Purple Dragon coffee house, where he passed along some of his mentalist tricks to Tito Mambo.
Now Tito was using mass hypnosis and the power of suggestion, subtle but useful techniques, to control the crowd and the cops. His band members also passed out a dozen or so leather flask pouches which he said contained water that would change into wine. As policemen, including the riot police, came into the crowd, they took swigs from the pouches and said it was water.
Tito also held up a piece of paper that he said was the permit for the band to play, so they plugged in and began performing. Tito said with a wave of his hand, “the water in these flasks is now wine, whatever flavor you want it to be.”
After taking a sip, one girl said it was cherry wine, but when a policeman grabbed it and tasted it, he said it was just water. And someone taking a sip from the same flask said, “Tastes like peach wine to me.”
And so it went, as the water was passed around, a public address system announced that, “If Tito Mambo does not possess a legal permit he will have to cease and desist from performing or face arrest.” Tito’s band continued playing while Tito waved both hands at the crowd, one holding a piece of paper, and told them to stay peaceful no matter what happened.
It turned out the flasks did contain water, but laced with lysergic acid diethylamide 25 – LSD, a strong and potent psychedelic drug which induces hallucinations. While popular with the counterculture on the West Coast, it was new to the East Coast, and still legal.
As the riot squad began heading across the beach through the crowd towards him, Tito said, “Do not respond with violence. The men should stay put and the women should use their most effective weapons, welcome and kiss the cops, hug them and use their fingers to tickle the riot squad through the edges of their vests and under their arms and on their stomachs and don’t stop until every officer is laughing uncontrollably.”
It wasn’t long before the police and the girls in bikinis were rolling around in the sand laughing.
Tito then turned around and, picking up a rope on the beach, waved to Chris Montagna, who was waiting in The Flying Saucer just off the breakers. Kicking off his sandals and slipping back into the water skis, Tito was pulled over a short breaker and was off, skiing away, waving as he went, leaving a crowd of hypnotized and drugged college kids rolling in the sand with members of the specially trained riot squad who had succumbed to the LSD and the kisses and tickling fingers of a bevy of teenagers and college coeds and were laughing uncontrollably.
One of the girls unintentionally set off a policeman’s teargas canister, which sent beachgoers scrambling, as the pile of heavily outfitted men in blue and scantily clad young women made its way across the beach like tumbleweeds in the wind.
With all chaos breaking out on the beach and the image of Tito Mambo in his Jesus mode waving as he water-skied away, the police who weren’t dosed on acid, were trying to arrest the band, chasing them around the Music Pier balcony, where Pittsburgh Paul the Poet – now nicknamed The Sheriff of Reality, picked up the open microphone and began reciting William Butler Yeats,’ “The Second Coming.”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The Federal Barbarian Task Force, who witnessed the whole spectacle from their second-floor command post above Shriver’s Candy Store, filmed it, too. They concluded in their report that while they were prepared for a Hell’s Angels biker riot, they were not prepared for this.
Tito Mambo they discovered had apparently utilized some group hypnotic tricks he learned from Kreskin the mentalist, and spiked the water he passed around with a potent liquid mixture of LSD25 that was not illegal in the state of New Jersey at the time, but has since been included among the dangerous and outlawed drugs like marijuana.
While they couldn’t arrest Tito Mambo for the LSD, they did issue a federal warrant for his arrest for inciting a riot under 18 U.S.C. &: US Code-Section 2101: Riots. (1) “Whoever travels in interstate commerce or uses any facility of interstate or foreign commerce, including, but not limited to, the mail, telegraph, telephone, radio, or television, with intent – (1) to incite a riot, or (2) to organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on a riot;…..”
Lynda Van Devanter, on duty at the Shore Memorial Hospital emergency room, was perplexed by the sudden influx of victims from the beach – mainly young policemen of the Riot Squad who it seemed, had inhaled and gotten teargas in their eyes, but for some reason couldn’t stop laughing. She gave them sedatives, but after calming down for a few minutes, they just looked at each other and started laughing uncontrollably again.
“Olie told me, I’m a fool, So I walked on down the road a mile
Went to the house that brings a smile, Sat upon my grandpa’s knee
And what do you think he said to me?
When you awake you will remember everything.”
From: “When You Awake” – Rick Danko of The Hawks and The Band
Next Up: The 99 Percenters Arrive and The Kelly Clan Play Games
To comment on this story or series email billkelly3@gmail.com.
