New York’s haven for aging musicians keeps more than tradition alive

Where I come from everybody's poor
Even Reverend Jason's
Got a rent sign on the door
And every Sunday morning
He'd pass around the plate
Say he's making sure
That the sick and shut ins ate

-- Jimmy Norman, "Back Home"

The uptown dinner crowd at Roth’s Steakhouse was ready to turn in for the night. By the time Jimmy Norman took the stage on this warm October Saturday, an hour before midnight, they had already gnawed, swallowed, paid, and taken those first-date kisses.

That left twelve, not counting the bartender: a few serendipitous strangers, but mostly just an overcrowded table of family-like friends dead center. Jimmy Norman — the man who wrote The Rolling Stones-covered hit “Time Is On My Side,” smoked weed with Jimi Hendrix the night before he left for London, and taught an unknown 23-year-old Rastafarian named Bob Marley about American R&B — was playing a full set to an almost empty house. Once again, Jimmy Norman was an aspiring musician.

At the table of friends, a woman named Wendy Oxenhorn, the executive director of the Jazz Foundation of America, sat closest to Norman. His eyes tenderly sealed, he dedicated “My Funny Valentine” to Oxenhorn, his guardian angel. Norman’s words hung in the beats of silence, touching the rims of wine glasses with their vibrato.

“She saved my life,” Norman announced in his low-register, deep-wisdom voice as the final notes hung, his eyes right at Oxenhorn’s. “I mean it,” he says to her table of friends. “Without her I wouldn’t be alive today.” Her eyes never turned from his to the table in embarrassment, and her smile did grow — she was like a daughter full of family pride. Then he began to sing.

That night, Jimmy Norman, 73, performed five songs from his first album in 11 years, titled Little Pieces; it’s composed of songs he wrote more than twenty years ago. Thread by thread, he has been pulling his performing career back together. “I’m still able to do my craft,” he said later. “As long as I’m able to do that, I’m cool. I don’t expect to live in a mansion and drive a Mercedes-Benz.”

Jimmy Norman armors himself with a pressed black suit and four-piece band. What photographs might mistake for a corona stage lighting is actually his charisma, a quality that will never be measured in album sales or contract bonuses. For those still left sitting at the bar, Jimmy Norman’s voice, and the honesty that permeates it, was enough to make one forget about the whiskey sours and any other troubling thing beyond those steakhouse doors.

Only a few years ago, Norman was just a byway of music history. Some of the reasons were physical: his lungs would not allow him to sing more than one song in a set. He would become heavily winded even through the first tune. Three years before, Norman couldn’t walk several feet from his bed to his front door. He was recovering from bypass surgery, following his second heart attack in seven years. The singer’s lung capacity sagged to 40 percent of what it had been. He couldn’t breathe lying down, so his doctor ordered him to sleep sitting up against a plastic chair.

But the ability to sing at all still felt like a blessing. As his body fought from within, Norman found himself embattled from without. His landlord was again trying to evict him from his home of 30 years, an apartment on West 70th Street. He’d been taken to court by his landlord so many times, they knew him as Jimmy at the courthouse.

Then Wendy Oxenhorn, and the Jazz Foundation of America, came into Jimmy Norman’s life. Days before his final court date in 2005, Norman called Oxenhorn at a friend’s suggestion. Oxenhorn, not a lawyer, showed up in court for Norman. She won a rent extension after speaking to the landlord’s attorney about Norman’s dismal health. (Without insurance, Norman was also paying his own hospital expenses.) Thanks to Oxenhorn’s intervention, Norman still lives in the same apartment today, and the landlord’s lawyer has done volunteer legal representation for other musicians who’ve sought assistance from the Jazz Foundation of America.

And Oxhenhorn’s work still wasn’t done. She sent two of the foundation’s staff, Lily Morton and Jeni Lausch, to Norman’s apartment to clean the clutter of an entrenched pack rat. Among boxes ready to be thrown out, the two found books of lyrics and songs Norman had written, some of which would later be recorded for Little Pieces. There was also a tape he had recorded with a not-yet-famous Bob Marley in 1968.

Norman and Marley had spent a day at Norman’s apartment, then in the Bronx, recording each other’s songs. The session convinced Norman to spend seven months in Jamaica, recording with Marley and Peter Tosh. After the discovery, Norman was able to sell the worn cassette tape for more than $10,000 at auction.

Today, the BMI Songwriters Database includes about 150 songs credited to the name of Jimmy Norman. He has also written countless tunes for other artists — including Marley, the Chargers and his own band of thirty years, the Coasters — for which Norman was never given credit. Today, he receives only a small percentage of the residual payments he should be owed.

Norman’s most famous song, “Time Is On My Side,” was written for New Orleans singer Irma Thomas in 1964. Norman received no credit for the song, which was mislabeled, with credit given solely to a co-writer named Norman Meade, the pseudonym of songwriter and producer Jerry Ragovoy. Ragovoy also wrote several songs for Janis Joplin.

The song was first recorded by jazz trombonist Kai Winding and his Orchestra in 1963. For that recording, “Time is on my side” was the only lyric Ragovoy had in mind. Jimmy Norman was brought in a year later by arranger H.B. Barnum to write the remaining lyrics for Irma Thomas to perform.

That same year, it became a huge international hit when it was recorded by the Rolling Stones. Their version became a number 6 hit on the U.S. Billboard Singles Chart. The song has since entered the public domain. Jimmy Norman has never received any payments for the song’s success. Ragovoy, as sole songwriter, received the royalties.

“I haven’t gotten it yet, and there’s good reason to think that maybe I won’t get it,” Norman says of the royalty payments. He says he’s at peace with the way the dollars flowed. “If I did without it this far,” he says.” I ain’t got much of a problem.”