Flaskaland

2012-01-18T19:47:00.000-08:00

Back to match box art. I'd heard about an engineer who used transistors and had made a miniature sound system, a fully functioning radio with a little dial set into a matchbox and speakers using match boxes as the speaker housing, all of which functioned and sounded just like a big grown up over-sized stereo system. (And I could be pretty certain he would pump up the volume to fill an entire room when showing off the muscle of his creation, to daze and amaze). Well, I couldn't do that and wasn't so sure I wanted to. Someone just had done that, and what music would come through the little speaker and how would it get there. So I made a small musical instrument, which was several small seeds I had found out on a walk, and rested them on top of a bit of puff cotton. When you shook the match box, quite close to your ear, it made a very soft, gentle sound like a miniature shaker or rattle. I'd realized later I must have heard about this instrument somewhere, too. Someone else beat me to the punch, and it took me a long time to realize I'd read about this instrument on the back cover of one of Sandy Bull's lesser known albums. Match box percussion. So everything comes from somewhere else, it seems, and it's all been done before. I still liked the sound it made.

2012-01-11T11:24:00.000-08:00

Frank got to know our family and learned something of our family history by being around us. My grandmother had been in vaudeville and once had boasted she had played the stages of the penultimate and the absolute epitome of vaudeville venues, the absolute queen of theaters, whose floorboards were reserved for only the very famous and topmost acts, the Palace in New York (which my mother maintained was not true.)

My mother did tell me once that after such a discussion, in the early 60s, Frank added to the conversation of the day. "He said he's going to play at Carnegie Hall." Which he eventually did do.

(Just found this after posting this retrieved memory:
http://www.carnegiehall.org/BlogPost.aspx?id=4294982782

(Palace Theatre,
New York Palace Theatre, New York, 1915. Copyprint.
Courtesy of the Theatre Historical Society
of America, Elmhurst, Illinois
My mother insisted my grandmother had not really "played" the Palace, despite a photograph of her and others lined-up and smiling while standing out front. "She and the others were just hired to dance there for a few weeks.")

2012-01-11T07:53:00.000-08:00

All That Glitters

In the early 60s, the world was treated to the first exhibition of the treasures of King Tut, and the exhibit had even made its way to a museum in the greater Los Angeles area. Frank and my sister went to this exhibit, as did I, though this was an expensive outing, and as I was young I only recall impressions of gold items detailed in jet black and dark blue stone. Though just feet away from me in the glass, because of the crowds I really couldn't see the items anywhere near as well as the Life magazine article featuring them. There were images, though, of young men with deep black hair and large eyes, and I must point out that it seemed Frank saw an expression of himself everywhere in the world, sometimes. The ancient Egyptian stick figures were wrapped in what looked like white pleated skirts, some figures with their bare chests adorned by heavy amulets. The museum I recall was packed with people, and uncomfortably so, and we'd had to hover for awhile in this viewing area to kill time until being allowed to stampede en masse into an exhibition hall for the hourly tour.

In that period, white pleated skirts were a popular outfit for girls in my geography. I owned one. They were difficult item to maintain, as it turned out. The first inkling I had that Frank was a most unusual person was when I returned home one way to discover that Frank with my sister's guidance had retrieved my white pleated skirt from my closet and had tried it on. Not only that, but he had worn it a bit around the living room, much to the hilarity of my sister, and she'd adjusted the waistband with a series of safety pins and a clothes pin to accomodate Frank's beanpole waistline. I could only ask if he were practicing to become King Tut. Frank Zappa sometimes wore my clothes .... at least once when I found him out, and on the sly, when I wasn't there to protect them. This is not something I would share with the world at large back then, and wasn't so sure what to make of it ... but my Mother seemed to think the incident was ridiculously funny, so it was okay. Though neither my mom or my sister and indeed probably no one at all could answer my inevitable question, "Why did he do it?"

2011-10-21T13:15:00.001-07:00

When Frank Zappa worked at Zale's as a salesman and potential management trainee, he was surrounded by many thousands of dollars of diamonds, gold, and other rare gems and valuable metals. (I really should have said many countless hundreds of dollars of diamonds, gold, and other rare gems and valuable metals.) For some reason, I remembered his story of his run in with some young men he was convinced were going to rob the store. He was at the counter in his suit and tie when some rough looking Asians came in ... Rough looking customers were a common sight in certain areas of the Pomona Valley, but Asians much less gangster looking Asians were rare in the vicinity ... or so I had thought as a child. This was the early sixties and this trio of young men dressed like pachucos, complete with low rider khakis, t-shirts, gold crosses, nylon windbreakers, and greased up waterfalls and duckass haircuts. They sauntered in and made a quick stroll up and down the counters peering into the displays, while one arched to stare blatantly down a hallway beyond the counters to see if any others were in the store. Then they soon huddled in front of Frank, talking to one another about an item behind the glass. Frank said he was certain and resigned himself to the fact he was going to be robbed.

They did not speak much English but Frank understood the leader of the trio, a heavy set fellow with a few deep pocked acne scars and a wide malevolent appearing grin, wanted to see a large heavy ornate ring adorned with a huge oversized jewel. An item which Frank did pull out from the case, and removed from its slot in the blue velvet tray.

The man looked at the ring as it lay on the counter, picked it up and tried it on and stared admiringly at it, soon waving his hand at his friends, speaking in another tongue loudly and laughingly ... Frank was sure he would bolt with it ... then he pulled and twisted the ring trying to remove it from his finger, but it seemed his knuckle was too large to remove the ring easily. He did pull it off, then cupped one hand around it and he held onto the edge of the display case with both hands, as if he were playing a shell game .... he stared Frank directly in the eyes for a long time and talked to his friends as he did so, becoming expansive and loud in his remarks, when suddenly he began tossing the ring back and forth quickly between his hands, then cupped it in both hands and shook the ring back and forth between his hands like it was a pair of dice, suddenly let go and threw it up into the air, and watched it land on the counter with a clink! Then he laughed and without a word, they all simultaneously turned and left the store. Frank just stared after them as they went out the front door to the street. He picked up the ring to see if there had been a switch, but it was the same ring with the same price tag. So he put it away. And then waited for another customer to come in.

For some reason I do not understand, I remembered his anecdote today of his time working at a jewelry store in the Pomona Valley. Maybe you'd like to know about the day when Frank said he felt vulnerable.

2011-07-03T01:20:00.000-07:00

I .... had a winky dink.

http://tiran.blogspot.com/2008/09/evidence-of-early-itv-surfaces-from.html

2011-01-20T13:30:00.001-08:00

A few years later as I explored Venice on my bicycle and on foot, I think I was on foot, and someone showed me where this guy was living because he was getting famous around town (a photo of his gourd tree was in the LA Free Press). Apparently, he regarded Venice of the time much as I did. The canals were sluggish and smelled bad many times. Venice itself was crumbling into decay. Mayor Yorty wanted to bulldoze the whole place and build anew, and real estate speculators hopped on board his bandwagon, realizing a few thin lines of poetry and bongo drums were all that separated them from lucrative beachfront. John Haag didn't like Mayor Yorty's plans, and everyone pushed back.

http://www.virtualvenice.info/music/partch.htm

On August 15, 1965, Partch signed a lease on an abandoned laundromat at 1110 West Washington Blvd. (now Abbot Kinney Blvd.), described then as "a noisy street in bohemian Venice." Sculptor Charles Mattox, one of the first kinetic sculptors in America, who had a studio nearby, had suggested the place. At the studio, rehearsals began for an evening of music called the Lone Pine Concert, which took place on August 29th. Partch then began what he later called "three months of turmoil" getting the place organized for his ultimate creative output.

During that autumn in Venice, Partch built two aluminum Cone Gongs, made from the greenish yellow nose cones of airplane gas tanks obtained from salvage at the Douglas Aircraft Company. He also built the Harmonic Canon II. And then he began writing his opus -"Delusion of the Fury" that November, which was completed on March 17, 1966, and premiered in January 1969 at UCLA. The piece is one of the best examples of Partch´s concept of "corporeality," or "total theater," integrating music, dance, stagecraft and ritual.

His famed work "And On the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma" was also written while he lived here in Venice.

West Washington Blvd. must have been a tough place to live in the mid-sixties. Many of Partch's letters reflect the noise, drunks, and danger. He also writes of a "terrible aloneness."

(I used to see Harry walking around a bit or standing near his place there, but I didn't know he was going to become a famous musician.)

2011-01-20T13:22:00.000-08:00

I can even remember the steps we were learning. Hupa!

2011-01-20T13:10:00.001-08:00

One time near my birthday, Frank, my sister and I went to Chinatown for a stroll. Because it was near my birthday, Frank bought me a small present, which was a shiny coin the size of a silver dollar. There was a fierce looking dragon on the other side, and the logograms were crisply struck and had deep outline.

Any one knew it was a counterfeit and a fake coin and had no value as currency or trade item, but I didn't care. I kept it for years and always carried it in my coin purse. Until one day at Lindley and Joyce's house, while we were all busy folk dancing, some rat went through everyone's purses and stole money and such. We all cursed when we found someone who was associated with us in some way had betrayed our trust, and called the thief every name in the book, that lowlife thieving damn junkie.

As a result, I have no keepsakes from Frank. Not a photo, nothing. My sister showed me a sympathy card from Frank when our Dad died. It was a simple card and he'd just signed "Frank". But I remember things, like this coin.

2011-01-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

John Haag wrote poetry, too.

History Lesson

That little ape that came down from a tree

and used a stick on his enemy

and called aloud to his family

to show what a great brave ape was he

made followers out of you and me.

That little ape that got caught in the rain

and used some branches to cover his brain

and thought up gods for rain and for tree

to explain away the mystery

made worshippers out of you and me.

That little ape that had more than enough

and didn’t know what to do with the stuff

and instead of handing it out for free

put others to work for a salary

made employees out of you and me.

That little ape that schemed and planned

and put a fence around some land

and told his followers they’d be free

if they fought his next-door enemy

made soldiers out of you and me.

That ape whose stick is his bravery

whose ignorance makes theology

whose avarice makes wage-slavery

and makes a cause for nationality

makes monkeys out of you and me.

2011-01-18T08:47:00.000-08:00

In 1965, Venice was a little quieter. I could walk among the columns and still see outlines of paint over abandoned stores left over from "A Touch of Evil" and there would be almost no one else walking around.

Bongo drums were outlawed. It seemed the Republicans were taking over. I could only imagine what it might be like at some point in the distant future when we found ourselves under the iron heel.

A few wise ass beats referred to the rundown boarding house John Haag was running as "Miramar". Named after the splendid mansion in Pacific Palisades where Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht stayed to avoid the careening Nazi beast.

(Aug. 24, 1980: Painted elephants and floats parade down the boardwalk during the 4th Annual Venice Beach Festival of the Chariots. The event, sponsored by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, was faced with cancellation when permits originally were not granted by Los Angeles city recreation and parks commissioners. Only after the Hare Krishna society filed a federal lawsuit did the commissioners relent and issue permits.

This image by staff photographer Bill Hodge was published in The Times as standalone art on Aug. 25, 1980.

The Festival of the Chariots continues to be held every August.)

2011-01-13T16:48:00.001-08:00

Were You At the Hollywood Teen Fair? they ask in print, as if to remind me and all of us who were there.

Yes, I was there at the Hollywood Teen Fair. At the Palladium. On Sunset. Just so you get the full gist of it, that's where the weekly Lawrence Welk television program originated from.

I went to the FIRST one, the Teenage World Fair in 1962. I was too young to drive, so my Dad dropped me and a friend off on his way to work.

Al Burton came up with the idea of the Teenage World Fair probably because there was a World Fair in Seattle that year and the Space Needle had been in Life with some regularity. (And how as a young person could you not think, "So they've got a space needle? Big deal. We have a record needle, because Los Angeles was nearly the recording center of the world, or so it seemed at the time.) Al Burton was also producing a tv music show that a person I knew appeared on. At that show, someone announced onstage the fair would be coming soon. Al was quite young to be a tv producer then. I thought so even at the time. As I was quite young, what would I know? I wasn't sure I wanted to go to the fair because Al as producer of the show was bossy and wouldn't let me run to the stage at the tv show. He seemed to have read my mind. He pointed his finger in warning at me as I stood up for the charge and I looked over and saw him shaking his finger at me and realized he was right, and so I sat down. Later backstage, I'd asked him for his autograph as he was watching me ask other people for autographs and it seemed like he wanted me to ask him for his, so I did. As the producer of the show.

But I ended up going to the Teenage World's Fair. I barely remember any of the fair except someone introduced me to a reporter, who told me and my friend we didn't seem like the other kids at the fair. That was probably because the young friend who I had taken with me usually introduced herself both with her name, and a followup sentence, "And my dad's an attorney for the ACLU and he collects Bessie Smith records."

But what the heck? We weren't just like the other kids there? Ummm, I kind of suspect I hoped that writer was right. That we weren't. Hey, I kind of knew that, anyway, looking at the kids. I was trying to become a folk singer or beatnik at the time, anyway. But I figured these men who were ruling Hollywood either ordered you around or made weird comments. Maybe I was right about the way I regarded them, as scant as the experience had been.

That reporter soon became famous as Tom Wolfe, but that's just an obligatory namedrop (I am writing about Hollywood after all). This is my own true story. I am willing to bet that Jan & Dean or some such were there at the teen fair onstage, but I honestly don't remember the music acts.

The fair was all so sweet and innocent, just like the you tube video and even the accompanying music though out of season seems strangely apropos. A little better heeled and age specific than the LA County Fair in Pomona. But I thought the fashion shows and beauty pageant angle were a bit odd even at the time. The cuisine was the usual carnival fare. The car show was interesting, and I was able to impress my young new friend that I already knew about Von Dutch and his pin striping, and for years prior, because I was so, you know, street wise about some things.

I'd walk around the cars and look at the tail pipes and say I was looking for the rollers, until I found some. Then I'd explain the cars were lowered so much they'd put rollers on the tail pipes so they wouldn't drag when they went down driveways or over railroad tracks. Though, I would add, sometimes they'd go fast and hit an unexpected bump and a little spark! would fly. And the long chrome feelies, and the inevitable fuzzy dice the car owner's girlfriend would knit with angora yarn with dots made of little skulls. Three hundred coats of lacquer paint, all hand rubbed between each coat, the paint so strangely reflective and deep just staring into it made you feel you were looking to the other side of the universe.

Back to the musician I had seen at the television show who I'd got to know a bit and such. His hit record, one hit record, had made enough money for him so he never had to work all the time he went to college. I told these things to Frank because it was important to know that it was possible to make money with music, and not just other people from distant Philadelphia like Fabian and Frankie Avalon and Bobby Rydell, all the Philadelphia ones on American Bandstand broadcast from Philadelphia, but people from other places who you actually met and knew.

Frank was funny. I'd be staring at a photo of that musician holding his black Gibson f-top, and I would sigh a bit falling in love with him and his music and yammer what I had been told by the musician about the guitar, and how it was good for jazz and rockabilly and rock and roll and all kinds of music, because it had a wonderful fretboard and why he thought it was the Gibson fretboard was so great. And Frank would be staring intently at the photo and he would be falling in love a bit, but with the guitar, and he'd eventually go out and buy one just like it.

The Hollywood Teen Fair became a big deal, and for many years. You probably know that Captain Beefheart's group performed there in 1965 and won a guitar. Isn't that absolutely great?! Truthfully, I wouldn't have gone to the Hollywood teen fair in 1965 even if I'd known that gig was happening. All those three years later, I felt I was "too old" to go to such a thing. And I was trying to pretend I was becoming a beatnik in Venice. And it was lucky I didn't hear about it then after the fact, with some people I knew performing there and not inviting me, or it would have given me one more reason to leave Hell-A.

2011-01-13T16:04:00.001-08:00

We'd watch reruns of "Boston Blackie", too. But Frank didn't like Boston Blackie too much, it was a fairly unimaginative detective show. You know, he liked my sister and we had a television. We also had a swamp cooler that would be up and running by nine am on those hot summer mornings where the temperatures would soar far past a hundred, sometimes as much as 113 even more! And the old wood frame houses he lived in at the time would hold the heat like ovens. So he'd probably just come over to chill out a bit, too.

Truthfully, even then, Frank reminded me of Boston Blackie. Not just because of the mustache he was growing, but because of the intro: " Danger! Excitement! Adventure! ... enemy of those who make him an enemy, friend of those who have no friends".

(It took me a long time, from when I was a kid til just now, to remember why I thought Frank was a little like Boston Blackie.)

So because it was summer and hot inland where we lived, and because who knows why really (maybe the subliminal mind absorbed the sign above the cabdriver's head saying "Harbor Cruises to Catalina") and we knew it would be cooler along the coast, we'd start working on my parents to take us all to Catalina for a day, where they could have fun, too, and they'd eventually give in and we'd all go to Catalina one weekend.

But not on a harbour cruise, the fast little boats. On the big ocean liner that was like going to Europe. And you'd debark for the day and have some adventures, and Frank and my sister took off on their own with a reminder from my Dad to be back to the pier before 4 o'clock or you'd be stuck all night on the island. At 4 o'clock the steamship sounded its fog horn blast and it seemed half the island was running towards the ship. Not us, we were all back together standing by the big ropes ready to board.

Jesus, I was a lucky little kid!

2011-01-13T15:49:00.001-08:00

When "Alky" came on the screen, Frank would sit there seriously absorbed as if he were pondering great art. With good reason, as getting those little clay figures to move, with time lapse photography, was rumored to be a difficult process developed by George Pal. Sometimes I would hear about a television show coming up that I knew Frank would like, like when they were going to reveal some of the secrets of the old Puppetoons and claymation, I'd tell my sister she should call Frank and invite him over to watch the show, and he'd come over.

Frank liked puppets. One time we even watched some old reruns of Fearless Fosdick, and because Frank was trying to grow a mustache, and because Fearless was wearing not his usual black suit but a gray one and was sitting or standing near a desk without his hat on, I told Frank he looked like Fearless Fosdick, which he accepted as a great compliment. I think it was Fearless Fosdick.

He'd watched all these shows, too, when he was younger and they were televised. So we'd talk about important things, "Remember when they finally showed Beanie's legs?" (when Beanie flew through the air in an episode) and he would remember that particular episode because it was so culturally significant.

2011-01-13T14:52:00.000-08:00

Some people want to know so much about artists, they recreate visits with other artists to determine influences, and determine exact dates of visits. They write big books, tomes usually, about their excavations, which usually end up being a little dry reading.

Don't you ever wish you could sort through the detritus of daily living of some artists, to come up with a clue, that might tell you where the important art came from? Aren't you glad you can't, and that it all remains a mystery to you and something to think about now and again and wonder over.

Frank came over to take my sister to the movies in Pomona and I got to go along. We were going to see a George Pal science fiction film, and matinees were cheap (my price was 35 cents, as I still wasn't a "junior").

This was a special outing, and my sister made a great party meal, a brunch. With Aunt Jemima buckwheat cakes and some syrup. We'd kept the metal log cabin for a few years on my insistence, and always emptied new bottles of syrup into it. So it wasn't just "pancakes" you see. We even had pink napkins.

So Frank, my sister, and I had pancakes before going to the movie. On the television commercials of a recent time, Aunt Jemima pancakes were the sponsor for a television show and Aunt Jemima herself had appeared at a theme park I went to at a restaurant named after her. I'd seen her there in person, in real life when I was a kid. I was proud she'd started up a restaurant and at the time I just didn't get what the other hub-bub was about. My sister would even pull down a package of Uncle Ben's rice and set it next to Aunt Jemima and try to explain it to me. All I knew for sure is my mother who had come from the South herself said she didn't like the high voice of Butterfly McQueen. And I was use the words "Aunt Jemima" or "Beulah" very cautiously, less they be misconstrued.

So we went to the George Pal science fiction movie.

At home, when Frank watched television with us, he would zero in on the Alka Seltzer commercial ("Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is").

I would call the claymation character "Alky" because I knew some adults sometimes dropped a few fizzies in a glass to better cope with a morning after. Although when I was a kid, I had a transparent bright red rocket ship powered with alka seltzer and after pumping it up, I fired it high into the air, but I soon lost it on a neighbor's roof.

This is exactly the kind of conversation Frank listened to when I was around and felt I had something to offer to the general conversation of the day.

The name "Alky" made Frank laugh.

2011-01-13T14:37:00.001-08:00

Sometimes even school books reminded us we were in the land of entertainment, and hinted strongly about Hollywood and broadcast.

2011-01-13T13:10:00.000-08:00

Television was a lot better way back then. Even people whose fathers drove from state to state installing every television station everywhere in the world will tell you so.

Television only had a couple of channels. And they'd turn it off at 8 or 9 o'clock weeknights so it could go to bed and get some rest to get ready for broadcast the next morning.

When the station was off the air for transmission but still broadcasting, they showed the Indian.

2011-01-13T11:01:00.000-08:00

Los Angeles was rich in local music talent and televised music treasures. Town Hall Party, Johnny Otis Show, and even Korla Pandit. (I understand "Korla" soon became a favorite name for people with Siamese kittens who needed names).

Not everyone was put into a trance by Korla Pandit. I'd help my mom clean house while Korla was playing on the television, although the usual household chores took on a more meditative quality. You couldn't help but sway in time as you dusted, and you'd start moving in time with the music, holding the dust rags with both hands above your head like a scarf as you danced the dance of the Seven Veils.

And like that part in "Miserlou" when he plays with his right hand the short doubling sound of the rhythm (da da da DA da da da DA), like a little sandpaper, I'd dust the counter back and forth in time with that ... and I'd imagine every housewife and daughter in every household throughout Los Angeles was doing the same thing.

Other times, I knew it, as I pulled my wagon or rode my tricycle up the sidewalk, I could hear Korla's music coming softly out the window of a neighbor's house, so I knew she watched his show, too.

Sometimes my mother would hold a rag in each hand over her head and just ..... spin.
And I would follow her into the kitchen by walking like an Egyptian.

2011-01-13T10:19:00.000-08:00

Berkeley because of an accident of weather and geography always seemed to have a lot of fleas. Back in the early days of the Fish House, the fleas got bad there during the summer especially and because of the carpets. ED and Gloria took to wearing red rubber rain boots in their apartment. One time I saw them walking down Telegraph still wearing their rain boots in Summer. And John Fahey, obviously a visitor, was with them, wearing taller black rubber rain boots and cut off levis. Just out for a stroll. So we walked around a little bit together that day.

I was teasing and told John he had beautiful legs. He had a publicity photo taken of himself wearing his rubber boots and cut offs. I wish I could show you a copy of that photo!

2011-01-12T13:28:00.001-08:00

I've heard only two songs today. I've heard two new songs today. I like them both. This is my afternoon's favorite:

your clear eye
is the most beautiful thing
like sunrise
over the sea

and when you smile with the day
your eyes are the warmest thing
you shed yesterdays skin
and a new day begins

CHORUS
so even when clear skies
seem so far away
why go chasing rainbows
rainbows from your door

coz even all the clear skies
won't bring back yesterday
so why go chasing rainbows
rainbows from your door

those who have seen
seen the phoenix rise
say even from the pyre
the dawn can still be beautiful

the sound of your sunrise
carries on the four winds
you shed yesterday's skin
and a new day begins

TO CHORUS...
sometimes we want to run away
from a place long gone
sometimes we want to throw away
what we need for what we want
when it's time to move on, move on...

("He chose his pseudo in tribute to Bob Saint-Clar, the hero of the film Le Magnifique, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo[citation needed]."

2011-01-10T11:18:00.000-08:00

So Frank's friend Don as everybody knows by now used to make up stories about the monkeys on the candy bar wrappers when he was a kid and eventually make up songs and sing about them, and then he'd make albums but the candybar company wouldn't let him use the advertising checkerboards from the original candybar. So what do you expect?

I completely understand I think just as you do because I used to make up small stories to amuse my friends, too, like everybody does.

I'd tell them this story that you've already heard from me now:

"And another reason I left Hell-A for the mountains ... I'd be standing at a bus bench on Wilshire waiting for a bus, and guys in cars would assume I was a prostitute and pull to the curb and proposition me. Which made me mad.

And then sometimes I'd be standing at a bus bench on Wilshire waiting for a bus, and guys in cars would assume I was a prostitute and slow down to take a better look and then they'd speed off. ... "

(But at the end of the story,

I'd follow the "Z" with my finger
and make a noise zz-zzzz-zzz (through my teeth)
all done in time with the three swoops of the letter "Z"
and then swoop up my finger and underline "uckys" as I said "Uckys!")

(I'd have to time it carefully to sit next to someone and work it carefully into the conversation. This kind of planning and timing and artfulness sometimes take awhile to bring into being, well, things don't just happen overnight, you know, so only a few people in the Venice environs heard that joke.)

2011-01-10T09:40:00.000-08:00

I was pretty pissed off after being kidnapped by the neo Nazis on my way home from a folk music concert. They were everywhere, then. They had members on the Pomona police force because they had "infiltrated" in an attempt to "influence and control" the regular police force. Where I went to college, the chief of police was soon caught because the paramilitary teenagers he would train would shoot up the desert hillsides, and he was a little Nazi-like, or so it struck me at the time.

The neo Nazi leader would be on radio talk shows regularly and also was allowed on television to further spread his hateful spiel.

There were Nazis, Nazis everywhere
(March off a cliff
Fall through the air)

2011-01-09T08:46:00.000-08:00

I wasn't the only person in the world who mixed up names. One time in distant 1964, somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area ... when I was young and with a budding composer. We were sitting in the living room on the couch awaiting the always pretentious classical radio announcer on KPFK to finish droning on about the piece he was about to play.

It was to be a famous suite by Handel, but he flubbed the name, mixing Handel's "Music of the Royal Fireworks" with Handel's "Watermusic", announcing it would be "Handel's 'Waterworks'".

I don't remember which suite he played, I nearly peed from laughter.

2011-01-09T08:01:00.000-08:00

The blues club I worked in really was a tough place. Too tough. Tougher than life. Boss Mama who ran the joint let Chris Brooks bring in some poetry readings all the better to literize the young 'uns.

As a young 'un myself, I was made happy by the letter E.

They read poetry by a musician, John Cage. He was famous for the piano that wasn't played. Later, at another school, I watched a performance of the paper orchestra where people just folded and crumpled their scores and threw them on the ground. I was familiar with Cage even though I was a young 'un. He'd gone to school in Claremont and hated it and ran away, kind of like me.

Chris Brooks was reserved and usually sat in the back on a couch having quiet conversations with Boss Mama Mary. I was the one who started calling her Boss Mama.

So one early Sunday evening before the bands performed, I think it was usually Sunday as no one had too much energy left after the weekends with the bands onstage, the actors read a John Cage poem.

This was an old poem he'd written in 1957, a cross word poem, with the name of the artist's works who inspired the poem as the "spine" of the piece and of course everyone onstage was kind of familiar with it. (Sorry, I can't remember the name of the poem or who inspired it)

I'd been able to talk the actors into having a light show with the poem. They wouldn't announce the name of the poem. The actors would read a line, when the moment arrived that the letter arrived that would eventually spell the name down the spine, a small letter was flashed on the wall next to them, like a small butterfly. Just for a second or two.

That was hard to do, to bring that idea into being. But how it was done reminded me exactly of Bruce Brown reading scripts at his surf movies in high school gymnasiums.
There was a small gooseneck light so the "spine lighter" could follow the reading along with the actor onstage. When the moment arrived, a pen flashlight beam went through a letter stencil (like they used to sell at stationery stores to make print letters) et voila! The letter "E" was illuminated on the backstage wall.

So clever these artists.

2011-01-06T21:06:00.001-08:00

By 1967, seems that monkey Babette had really gotten around.

2011-01-06T20:47:00.000-08:00

1967 was an odd year in Berkeley. People were beginning to believe all sorts of things. There was a rumor underground that Icarus was going to plunge into the sea. That was baloney, as it turned out. He's already done that, I'd argue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1566_Icarus

2011-01-06T11:44:00.000-08:00

Joan Baez gave me a ride home in her Jag-u-ar and she was wearing a trench coat. Nobody else in the world at the time knew she even had a Jaguar. They thought she walked barefoot all the way to Selma and would eat beans. She probably did eat beans, but she had a cool car that no one would suspect she had.

I'd seen her, I did remember at the time, once before performing in Claremont a few years prior to 1963. I went with some friends and wasn't sure what or who I was watching, I was so young. All I remembered was her clear high singing voice.

So in 1963, I wondered if she were in town for a concert I hadn't heard about yet. I'd asked her at the Chase's house where I ran into her if she was going to perform again. She laughed and was referring to Dorothy and Charles when she said, "They won't let me."

We were standing in Dorothy's kitchen at the time.

Later, Joan told me about a bus trip she and her sister Mimi had taken, buying tickets and riding the Mexican bus all the way from the border thousands of miles through the desert all the way down to Todos Santos, at the very tip of Baja. They'd get off the bus along the way, and rent a room, and the lady who would show them the room used too much fly spray as they were considering the price of the rental.

Even now, though I realize I must have seen one of her first performances in town if indeed anywhere, I can barely remember it. I could barely remember the show a few years later. I must not have been paying real attention, not knowing that would be an event of significance for some.

2011-01-06T08:56:00.000-08:00

Although having heard Jim Morrison on the underground radio late very late at night for the first time, singing the song that made everyone fall in love with him for a moment, I could completely understand where "groupies" might come from.

"Before you slip into unconsciousness
I'd like to have another kiss,
Another flashing chance .... at bliss ....."

But even he couldn't get me, not for long. I honestly didn't like too much of the Doors I heard. I'd remembered reading somewhere Mick Jagger called them "The Bores". He might have been right about that.

I'd listen to the Doors music as it came across the radio at night, just like everyone else was doing, and the deejay would spin sometimes a whole brand new album.

The piano part would stumble and stagger like a drunk.

" I tell you we must die ...

Oh, moon of Alabama"

("Hey ..... That's Brecht," I'd announce to myself intrigued but it would take me all the way until "Alabama" to catch on where I'd read the lyrics of this song and to dredge out the name.)

"The gate is straight, deep and wide
Break on thru ... "

"Oh, he's read Malraux," I'd tell another friend. I'd catch on quickly sometimes, or so I thought.

"Shit! I mean GIDE," I'd have to correct myself.

I'd laugh and say, "Nevermind."

2011-01-05T21:56:00.000-08:00

John Fahey was a hell of a guitar player. He didn't just play the kind of music he made popular on his records, the intricate fingerstylings. He had a vast reservoir of knowledge and skill.

Sometimes a song would come across the radio and I mean underground radio of the 60s. So it was an electric guitar part on a song neither of us and probably none of the other people in the room had ever heard before. And John would listen to the thing as it played, hearing it only once and for the first time and he immediately could play it note for note. And did -- on an acoustic steel string he'd been casually holding. He'd hold a guitar across his belly as he leaned back on a couch and he was a bit slumped as he listened to the radio. How can he do that, I'd wonder.

If you've never heard of John Fahey, nor read his early liner notes nor listened to his music especially the Great San Bernardino Birthday Party you may really be missing an experience.

http://www.johnfahey.com/pages/v4note.html

2011-01-05T19:03:00.000-08:00

Also in 1967, John Fahey suddenly interrupted what had been a pleasant conversation and called me a "groupie". Again, it sounded like he was only half way joking. He knew I went to a few music events and that I happened sometimes to be around when Chris Strachwitz was taping Lightning Hopkins or Mississippi John Hurt in a public venue. And that I would hoover up information about music of certain kinds but I usually maintained interest in all music wherever and whenever.

I'd never heard the word "groupie" before, and later when I found out what that meant .... which at the time only had the most pejorative sexual connotations ... boy, was I mad at him.

2011-01-05T16:44:00.000-08:00

In 1967, a KMPX (or maybe it was KSAN by now) deejay announced that Sandy Bull had died of an overdose in Tangiers and never corrected the story on the air that I know of. A bit later in that same year, I went to see Sandy at the San Francisco Folk Festival that also had the Chambers Brothers and the Staples Singers. At that show, Sandy had recorded overdubs of himself playing and would step on a pedal and activate a tape player next to him on the floor periodically.

At a door leading to "Backstage" I told Sandy he had something in common with the Rolling Stones and told him about the premature death reports. In 2001, I ran into a guy and mentioned Sandy Bull, and told him Sandy had died and he looked at me like that was really old news ... "Oh, that guitarist who died in Tangiers of an overdose." I said yes, but he'd died again more recently.

I could really like Sandy. I'd go over to his house a few doors away from where I was living to say hi or see if he wanted anything from the store. When he didn't answer a knock one time, I ran into his landlord who told me Sandy was home but "probably asleep" and went on to tell me it seemed Sandy was "always sleeping".

I persevered because I could really like Sandy when he was awake, as he was a sweet and gentle guy, but quite sensitive to anything he heard as criticism, especially newspapers and their harsh and ill-informed and usually badly written criticism of him or his music. A quirk of personality that would be hard to balance if ever he were to find himself in the cold harsh glare of a greater fame's spotlight, you see. He and I had a lot of fun talking about music, though, especially the pop stuff, the Beatles a bit and the Rolling Stones in particular. And a little about Frank Zappa and how he'd push on in spite of everything life had to throw at him to compose and play.

So Sandy and I would laugh about fame, he had a good sense of humor I think, and I'd ask him if he was ever going to get famous. One time, we went up to the Army & Navy store on University (the one a few long blocks South of Tingo's, the hamburger stand and on the same side of the street as the Army Navy store) and I helped select a new shirt for a new publicity photo which actually found its way onto one of the back covers of his albums. A snappy brand new air force issue shirt, but priced at below second hand, bright blue with epaulets. And I think it was tagged at something like 67 cents.

Long about 1988, I stumbled across his newest release. It had been probably close to fifteen or twenty years since he'd made a record. I got to hear how he'd progressed on Sho-bud, his pedal steel, and I liked that album a lot. Then came "Vehicles" and a few years later "Steel Tears", more Sho-bud and a little of Sandy singing. He covered a song the Rolling Stones had made famous, "Can I Get a Witness" which made me laugh like hell, but it was kind of an in joke between Sandy and me way back when.

2011-01-05T14:39:00.000-08:00

I'd actually worked on the ranch a couple of summers before I moved there in 1965. Clearing the land of weeds around the log cabins and other structures. Summer in the mountains of Southern California is hot, and clearing the land by hand is hard work, because the soil is baked hot and flat, and dust flies as you hoe, the air is hot, and the sun grows hotter still.

I'd get up early, just about daybreak, and take a walk way up the road through the ranch and meet up with some deer who'd gotten to know me and would let me walk with them. They'd graze, and I'd stand there. They'd move a bit and walk over somewhere else to graze and so would I. Then I'd go do the clearing for hours until an hour before noon when it was already too hot to work much more. You'd have to carry a bucket of water with you to drink from. And finally that wouldn't be enough, and I would head for the stream when I was baked through and through and plunge. The water even in summer at first would be so cold, you'd nearly pass out, an icy snow fed stream was still cold even in summer.

There were still wild mules on the land then, left behind by some miners. And they'd come to visit sometimes. And rumors of a few big horned sheep, which I was certain I had only seen once and at a far distance, but their sightings were so rare, I wasn't convinced I'd really seen them. The ranch was so old, all the materials for building the cabins and house had been brought in by muleback.

But even in Berkeley I carried around memories of the ranch within me, like a small diorama of treasured times that I could take out and look at, I could remember and look at the place whenever I wanted to. I can even recall the rich smell of wild buckwheat and the sweetness of ceanothus. And the refreshing aroma of mountain bay laurel, which always seemed to grow in shadier spots by a trail exactly when you needed to stop walking for a bit and cool off and take some deep breaths in the shade.

2011-01-05T13:30:00.000-08:00

People were just artsier back then. I thought about the wood sculptures I used to see along the freeway in Berkeley, you'd see them even from the windows of the bus to the city sometimes.

So I went looking for a picture of the Dinosaur, or the Viking (who I remember was wearing a helmet that looked like his head was the sun radiating)

All I found was this:

—does anyone remember?—the Mudflat Sculpture in the tidela nds beyond the Eastshore Freeway before it was expanded and “improved.”

At high tide much of it was underwater. But if you happened to be driving to San Francisco at low tide, you could see Don Quixote on his rearing horse, a prop plane ready to take off from what looked like a buoy, a huge hand rising from the swampy tidelands clutching at the setting sun—and dozens of other creations that appeared and disappeared, made from driftwood and trash and whatever people could manage to cart out there in defiance of “No Trespassing” signs.

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2005-06-07/article/21570?headline=Commentary-Mudflat-Sculpture-Art-to-Remember-By-DOROTHY-BRYANT

(And I tell you, those mudflats were stinky even on the bus going past, and once in they were slippery and you'd slide through green mud. That fish and the dog and the guy waving were there the same time I was. I'd always wave back to the guy, the one on the right with little bits of wire and strung wood as his face, who was waving his long stick fingers at me: "Hello!" even going past on the bus, but on the bus I would have to be a bit constrained. I'd put my arm across the bottom of the window and give him a little surreptitious wave.

Back in a distant time, and an ancient place called "tidela nds". Perhaps a typo for tidelands.)

2011-01-05T13:14:00.001-08:00

Wow, Jeff has a gallery in Paris now!

(Figures, that's pretty much where all the bohemians came from back before they became beatniks in San Francisco or Venice)

http://www.jeffberner.com/text/newsOLD.html

I'm gonna tell all my friends to go there because they show free movies!

2011-01-05T11:39:00.001-08:00

Walking down Telegraph across from Shakespeare's Books I think much, much later, 1971 I was still using that Avenue to get places. Even though I didn't like it then, because it was getting funky and it seemed everything had just fallen to ruin.

And I saw this weird guy gliding up the sidewalk towards me. He had short hair cut and was wearing a light blue sports coat and he kind of reminded me of the crazed guy in the air force jacket who had punched out General Wastemoreland all those years before. And he had a big stuffed frog on his shoulder with long legs dangling down the front of his jacket.

I was sidling past him, but he looked familiar, and he was stopped then and turning to enter some kind of bread and soup place. When I saw another musician I recognized, who was falling apart in laughter just watching the expression on my face.

And I realized the guy wearing the frog was James Gurley (of Big Brother and the Holding Company). And I thought, "Oh my GOD!!!!"

The casualties would stroll along Telegraph, too. And a friend of mine, Gloria, who was the wife of a manager of a once famous psychedelic band of the era who was in a position to know, when I told her about this encounter, said "It's amazing he even survived. Nobody thought he would."

Eee-ww. James Gurley had been in the newspapers, which would have been in my knowledge banks at the time, because he'd been arrested on a charge of murder because his wife had died of an overdose of heroin that he had administered. He was still fighting the charges when I saw him on Telegraph that day. And as I said above, taken with all the other news of the day, everything on Telegraph seemed funky like everyone and everything had fallen to ruin.

2011-01-05T10:17:00.000-08:00

And sometimes I did busy work with my hands to keep me busy. I used to make miniature god's eyes as far back as 1965, out of toothpicks and regular thread. With lots of colors, and a big diamond shape (Diamond was the name of some matches, too, remember).

And that small knotting was difficult to do for me, I had to use tweezers to tie such small knots to hold the different color threads together, and tension throughout had to be perfectly applied or the thing would collapse in your hand.

The items were perfect in size, I could slip one very carefully into the cellophane wrapper that surrounded my Pall Mall's. Then if someone asked me for a cigarette, as they always did, they would see something beautiful as I offered them one. I gave away many many little toothpick god's eyes to friends and people I happened to encounter here and there. I thought I might still have a photograph of somebody wearing one, which he'd punched through the threads of his sweater to hold in place, but I don't.

I always used a lot of brilliant primary colors, red, and yellow, and blue and green, but sometimes I would feel obliged to separate one color from the next with a boundary of black thread, as the mood hit me. As if there had to be some kind of stop or a pause before the next thing began.

I preferred Pall Malls (pronounced "Pell Mell" in America) even though the short Camel pack of the time framed the god's eye better. And I liked the message on the Pall Mall package, "Ad astra per aspera" which I translated as "Through difficulties, to the stars" (as I had studied a more Germanic Latin), a motto which seemed lofty and inspiring.

(I just remembered a funny conversation I had with the manager of a blues club once about cigarettes. He sat down at a table and replayed his part in the tobacco commercial he'd played in, the one that paid his way through college. And we both laughed ourselves silly over the ungrammatical success of, "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should".)

2011-01-05T09:57:00.000-08:00

Back then when I was in San Francisco and Venice, I was a little more arty. I didn't own a camera and was always walking around, very peripatetic.

And I always had a little box of matches in my pocket. So if I found the perfect discard fortune cookie saying littering the sidewalk in front of a Chinese restaurant, I would save it in the matchbox until such time as I'd used up the matches. Then later, I would use a bit of glue and cut the fortune to fit and put it on the matchbox.

If I were near a typewriter, I would type a small short phrase I happened to think of (obviously "matchbox holds my clothes") and stick it on another matchbox.

Or if I had a penny for one of the fortune teller machines in a restaurant, I would use that strip of paper on a matchbox, too.

Sometimes I would find an old discarded matchbox and would use that as a little drawer to hold a miniature metal Coors can I had actually found rolling around on the street one day. And you could open the drawer and find a little can of beer, you see.

Or I'd carefully cut one of the pages from those religious comic books people would hand out then and glue it on the matchbox, but I'd have to wait until I found the perfect one, so I was always picking up those little tracts and going through them.

At the ranch I'd found a very old box of matches for the wood stove. One time there I envisioned a great possibility, and I just felt I was better heeled and a bit more stable in my existence there, and I'd had the money to buy the giant version of a box of matches if I needed or wanted one to replace the one I was about to use up. By the time I'd used every match in that old box, the emory strikers were more scarred and the paper even more torn and frayed. Sometimes a match had ignited and flared up too close to the strikeplate and there was a brownish burn mark. And for awhile, an ancient hint of sulfur. I eventually typed up the word "SUCCESS" and stuck it on that box.

In San Francisco once, I found a matchbook from what someone later told me was a "male homosexual bar", and I folded the cover and wrote "Arty" inside (because that really was the name of the guy in the high school boy's gym class, the one the football players would beat up because he was such a little fag). It still had matches in it, too, and I didn't use any.

It's not like these small things popped out in an instant. Or like something on assembly line. I would have to wait until the perfect moment, when I found the perfect object one that had some significance to me.

One time long about 1967 or 1968, I found a miniature 38 special keyring on the rack for maybe as much as a buck. I tested its heft and weight in my hand. I had to buy it because I knew it would fit into a matchbox. And that way I could tell my friends I had a gun in the drawer at home and nobody better mess with me.

(I never used any like the one in the photo here, but you get what I mean)

2011-01-05T09:38:00.000-08:00

At some point, a few years after Leviathan had left, I saw a funny artfilm that Jeff Berner and his girlfriend made. They were sitting on a bed talking about poetry and just started bouncing up and down like little kids excited and jumping up and down on a bed imagining they were in a story and imagining things but they were seated and bouncing up and down and talking about poetry. So excited about poetry they were. It was funny!

2011-01-05T08:05:00.000-08:00

In those days, I'd encounter people I'd known in San Francisco over in Berkeley, especially around Telegraph Avenue.

One was Jeff Berner, a poet I'd met back in 1963 in the city who was trying with some difficulty to become a publisher of small volumes of poetry. So I bought a copy back then and we chatted and he eventually gave me his picture, which he had used on the back of one of the books. We met up originally outside of City Lights and talked about his poetry books, but he didn't have any with him nor were they in City Lights just yet. Or maybe they had been in City Lights and he'd had to collect most of them because they weren't selling as well as some of the other volumes and just taking up too much room on the tables, or something. So we rode on the bus together to go retrieve a copy of the poetry book. For some reason his photograph has survived the rigors of my stewardship to this very day, although many other photographs have been lost to me. I'm sure I kept it to remind myself that publishing books and such was a possibility because in 1963 I'd actually known someone who'd done just that.

(Stylists please note, men's beards were getting a little wilder just five years later in the later 60s)

A little earlier than Leviathan, in 1964 or maybe 1965 I'd encountered Jeff again at the Mediterranean Coffee House and he gave me a nickle. Maybe a quarter.

He gave me a small coin and asked me to put it in the parking meter across the street by the light blue sports car once the red flag came up. He warned me to be careful.

So I went across the street and was turning the crank, and the ratcheting turn of the crank, then the metallic sound of that coin hitting the small basket of other metal coins inside the head of the meter meant the coin had dropped and been accepted and more time was allotted. When this man in a suit came up and started harranging me about "feeding the meter" and what I was doing was illegal.

"That's a violation of the law!"

The man yelling at me was then (as it turned out) a Berkeley city councilman and he had taken it upon himself as an extension of his councily duties to patrol Telegraph Avenue and look for parking violators, maybe direct parking, and otherwise police the vehicular traffic in the area. Not just vehicular traffic, it seemed, as he was shouting at me, too, remember, so he was out to somehow control people's behaviors, too, and kick us all into line, and he had no compunction about using loud, rude behavior and words to do so. Then he threatened to call "parking enforcement" (and he actually began twisting and turning to see if he could locate a meter maid who might be in vicinity or driving by) so I just left, because my current mission in life (a small favor for a poet I knew) had been accomplished.

That man who yelled at me reminded me of all the cranky little old men who used to sit on the city council in Claremont before I left who passed their laws for themselves down there. The ones who outlawed the electric golf carts the retired missionaries used to drive into town. They're everywhere, I said to myself.

2011-01-05T07:52:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine and I were walking up Haste Street in Berkeley a few years previous, and we were about to jaywalk and so turned our heads to scan busy traffic. We saw Leviathan looming up Haste, taking up the whole street, slowly moving up the road. We recognized the bus, but she knew the bus and people better than me, and we waved and shouted hello, running and skipping along side as if we were kids following a circus wagon. Leviathan lumbered on and up the grade slowly, crossed Telegraph, and settled into a huge parking spot. That was the day People's Park was beginning to be planted with flowers and gardens.

I would miss seeing Leviathan, you see.

(And under those circumstances, how could I help but sing softly "too much, the Magic bus, ch-ch the Magic Bus" and my friend turned and smiled at me like I had finally caught on)

2011-01-04T18:39:00.001-08:00

I would miss seeing Daniel, even though his visits were now only occasional and growing rarer.

2011-01-04T13:14:00.000-08:00

John Lithgow's old enough now to play Charles effectively. Do you think we can get him?

2011-01-04T12:03:00.000-08:00

I was a poor, struggling student at Berkeley in 1969. I was working my way through school wiping spilled beer off the tables in a tough blues club. I was so lucky to land a job. I was lucky to even find a place to lay my head at night, as in Berkeley rentals were hard to come by with only a 1% turnover in vacancies. And if you found a place, the rent would be steep. So I was lucky to find a little place to rent.

http://www.springmansion.com/

2011-01-04T10:52:00.000-08:00

Frank never drank. He'd come to our home for a fancier sit-down meal and would even wear a tie. My dad would raise a toast. Frank, ever dramatic, would stand and wave his glass at my father's glass, all while holding down his tie which had begun to flutter he had to reach so far across the table. Frank would say, "Prost!" and sit back down, setting his glass on the table and not drink his wine.

As I was young, much younger than Frank or my sister, I once knighted Frank at that very table. He kneeled before me and I tapped each of his shoulders and then his head with a butterknife. "Arise, Sir Frank."

2011-01-04T10:40:00.000-08:00

I knew Frank Zappa and everybody else so very long ago, it was back when Coors had a smaller more delicate can of beer on the market for the ladies with delicate appetites and who might worry about their waistlines. It was shaped just like a regular can of Coors, and opened the same, even tasted the same as what was in the bigger cans, but it was a six-ounce size. Remember those?

2011-01-04T08:53:00.000-08:00

As a young student, I'd had to prepare carefully for my entrance to a prestigious western school like Berkeley. My young life and perceptions of the world were forever shifted.

2011-01-03T15:47:00.001-08:00

At that bookstore back then I also found a copy of Henry Miller's "Air-Conditioned Nightmare" and I read his on the road story, which I thought was much better than Jack Kerouac's.

Frank borrowed books from me and read them.

Can you guess why he was intrigued by the table of contents?

Air - Conditioned Nightmare
CONTENTS;
GOOD NEWS! GOD IS LOVE!
VIVE LA FRANCE!
THE SOUL OF ANAESTHESIA
THE SHADOWS
DR. SOUCHON: SURGEON–PAINTER
ARKANSAS AND THE GREAT PYRAMID
LETTER TO LAFAYETTE
WITH EDGAR VARÈSE IN THE GOBI DESERT
MY DREAM OF MOBILE
DAY IN THE PARK
AUTOMOTIVE PASSACAGLIA
A DESERT RAT
FROM GRAND CANYON TO BURBANK
SOIRÉE IN HOLLYWOOD
A NIGHT WITH JUPITER
STIEGLITZ AND MARIN
HILER AND HIS MURALS
THE SOUTHLAND

2011-01-03T14:36:00.000-08:00

There were a number of bookstores in the village. One was a few doors down from the drugstore run by the spinster sisters, across the street from the watch repair place and just up the street from the bakery. A much older man owned and ran the store and selected the merchandise. He wore glasses always and usually wore an older Woolrich gray plaid wool shirt and tan chino workpants. He was great, you could browse and read as long as you wanted, while he busied behind the counter piled high with books. Sometimes he sat in a chair and read one himself, as it wasn't really such a busy town or store. He had the interesting imported books like the Evergreen and New Directions series.

I bought a copy of this from him back in 1962 and I still had it on my bookshelf in Venice. The people who owned the cabin I stayed at used to know Dylan Thomas and he'd stay at their house when he was visiting in the area. These poets and writers and artists could become real for me, you see, once I realized they were real people and not just a name on a page. And in a way, it seemed to be a very small world. Like every artist knew or had a connection in some way to every other artist in the world. Or at least in our village.

I realize now that I say "Dylan Thomas" and as he's a poet, many people might not have heard of him. So I can now say, "The guy who Bob Dylan named himself after" and maybe people still know who Bob Dylan is, so there is a connection, you see.

To this day, if I were to be in Claremont, some people of my vintage would ask me (as if I would know) if so and so is the really the lovechild of Dylan Thomas, and I don't know.

There were also music teachers in abundance in town, and Frank started taking lessons in composition with one. So I'd see Frank sitting on the small chairs at Little Bridges for student recitals. Elsewhere, I'd have to listen to Shostakovich records (not my favorite), and hear a bit about Shoenberg's twelve-tones for composition (which was far too advanced for me to appreciate). And to show I knew something I'd talk about the records I was listening to in music appreciation class, and I thought Ferde Grofe was actually quite adept at painting a golden sunrise musically (which I did). But most of the time, you know, I was happy just to have Frank around and I'd just be happy as a bug in a rug to see him and my sister sitting together in the garage at the piano. And there was always a big basket of laundry on the pink washing machine near them. You won't believe this, but it's true, Frank helped us clean out the garage once and sweep up all the junk on the floor, and when he came out he was totally smudged in the face. He was nice, you see, he'd help us with some chores.

2011-01-03T13:47:00.000-08:00

(Stuart Brotman had some time signatures down pat. Hear his influence?)

Everybody I knew would shout "hopa" for real back in the early 60s, as we'd clear some space in the pottery studio for folk dancing with real ethnic records at Joyce and Lindley's house. Those were the good old days.

2011-01-03T13:16:00.000-08:00

(This sitar business with Kenny and all the things we'd talk about back then reminded me of an old blog post I made in 2005. But it has to do with Ravi Shankar and sitars very early on, 1961 or so.)

Frank Zappa's Travels into the Future

I hate trying to do this blog sometimes.

Do you notice, as I do, when you take a look for music in the major press most days they're just discussing stock options for technologies and i-pods and stuff? Over brunch today, a friend suggested I might be interested an upcoming geekfest. And why not? The modern world seems to be completely head-over-heels in love with technology, and that infatuation has just grown over time. But that impending brainfest for young supergeeks just reminded me (and you knew it would, didn't you?) of another tech-fest I attended, a long time ago.

Imagine the times as they were then. This is going to be about a car trip on the weekend. Back when gas was less than a quarter a gallon, and in times when parents willingly acted as chauffeurs for their offspring and their friends. A family outing in the family car, and nearly every family has memories of these.

One weekend, my sister and her friend encouraged my dad to come along and see the sorts of things that interested them ("them" meaning, really, her friend, Frank Zappa, the budding musician.) Turnabout is fair play, and Frank had previously joined us for one of the great expeditions of that year's summer, a family adventure involving transport on a luxury liner steaming through Pacific waters, all twenty-six miles across the sea to Santa Catalina Island, "the poor man's Hawaii." On that voyage, the dolphins and flying fish sometimes joined in and seemed to race the bow wake. And once the vessel arrived at the docks, the island boys would dive for coins tossed by passengers waiting to debark.

We were going someplace else, not to the ocean this time, and I was invited along. We drove far across the prairies and into the heat of the summer day. In these distant times I am speaking of, air-conditioning in automobiles was newfangled and thus prohibitively expensive, and a luxury afforded only by those who had the means to purchase a new Cadillac. Everyone else drove with the windows cranked all the way down, allowing the winds not buffeted aside by the wind wings to whip through the car. The radio would have been hard to hear because of the wind.

As the heat beat down and the distances extended, the sparse opposing traffic was sometimes fast approaching, other times barely seemed in motion, like a slow-moving mirage. The oncoming dusty cars looking like the sturdiest of pioneers, wearing canvas canteens slung across their radiators. We slipped past hot desert townlets. We whisked through deserted townlets. We seemed to pause to reflect as we passed sleepy Loma Linda, a small place filled now with Seventh Day Adventists, vegetarians by religious conviction, the same place where once a young quaker boy named Richard Nixon was obliged to work in the family's butcher shop. We roared past signs saying "Ruby-doo", and all the way into distant San Berdoo.

It was there, at the San Bernardino County Fairgrounds, where the residents celebrated seasonally with their own Orange Fair, that we all stared the future straight in the eye. We were headed to a showcase of stereophonica, a strange place where art and science converged and intersected.

Why I put so much description in the opening paragraphs is because I really don't remember too much of what went on at this exhibition, being as young as I was, and with everyone's attention focused on the displays and exhibits.

Anyway, I do recall one pavillion's event. A billowy tent had been erected inside an exhibition hall and an immense, overlarge wooden speaker was suspended down from the ceiling. Stereophonica replete with woofers, subwoofers, and crossovers and tweeters, and cones, oh my, and exotic music from other countries was being broadcast to the people seated in the folding chairs. All we needed to make the experience really complete was a pair of green-and-red glasses to wear while now listening to recorded music that finally sounded full and completely three-dimensional. The music I heard that day was my first introduction to Ravi Shankar, but it was the drums I listened to the most, as I'd never heard hand drumming before, or not like that, (aside from the relatively sharp sound of bongos.)

There was a small table off to one side of the foyer that offered a small selection of connoisseur records on audiophile labels sporting exotic names like World Pacific and HiFi (short for "High Fidelity", then considered the epitome of audio experience). While Hi-Fi Records offered better known artists like Arthur Lyman, World Pacific seemed a little different, recordings of rather obscure musicians from faraway places and with a bit more ethnic flavor it seemed. And the records there were pricey by the everyday standard. When albums in stores cost between two and three dollars, the one I was holding in my hands was five big ones. (I had to borrow some money from my family to get the first dazzling jazz LP I ever purchased, Richie Kamuca's "West Coast Jazz in HiFi".)

Frank got a couple of records, too, a real extravagance on his part (truthfully, it was a real extravagance on everyone's part -- this was when gasoline was less than twenty-five cents a gallon, remember -- and my family members were most reluctant to part with even a loan). So he bought two records, but I can't remember what they were. The HiFi company seemed a bit fussy about their product. The engineers concerned with public wellbeing suspected the cardboard album covers might scratch the vinyl during shipping, so inside, the record was sealed into and nestled in a soft protective plastic bag rather than the usual paper sleeve. You had to open the bag with scissors.

It wasn't until I was much older that I learned people at that time generally thought anyone who listened to jazz (even on jazz records) as being a weirdo. Although, I had one friend who told me years after the fact that she thought my listening to jazz way back then meant I was cool. I had never so much as suspected that before, and I'm not too sure I believe it now.

Anyway, World Pacific eventually provided the easy-listening (Bud Shank sound, kind-of) soundtrack to some Bruce Brown surfing movies, so I got to hear lots of that music in the auditoriums, too. This was back in the days when Bruce would provide the soundtrack music from a reel-to-reel tape recorder he'd brought along for the occasion, and he'd push the button at the appropriate moment, while other times during the feature he would narrate live, his voice amplified by a handheld microphone, his script illuminated with the aid of a flashlight he'd also have to hold, or sometimes a subdued gooseneck lamp. All these technical assist items seemed quite low-tech like they had been pulled from the shelves of the audio-visual department of whatever high school he was showing his film at.

And while Ravi Shankar still may not exactly be a household name, many people by now have heard of him, though I'm sorry to say I can't recall the name of his drummer of the time. Though Richie Kamuca has not exactly gone down in history, I still think that an exceptionally fine record of West Coast jazz. And even those Arthur Lyman records seem to have made an influence on people, because a few of the dance tunes he covered ("Hava Nagila" and "Miserlou") made their way into Dick Dale's surf guitar repertoire, although I don't know for sure the real influences there and that may be stretching a point.

And Zappa, a lot of people are familiar with his name and reputation. I have since heard he eventually went on to do a little work with some of the World Pacific jazz musicians he was drawn to (he obviously continued following the label and their offerings) and surf music since has become rather well known. And all gaining renown from such humble and amateurish beginnings.

So that's how it was. We couldn't afford a Cadillac with air-conditioning, and stereo equipment (unless you built it at home yourself) was horrendously out-of-reach, too. And truth is maybe some of us still can't afford those things. Yet somehow, with a little ingenuity, people managed to make do with what they had.

I was going to try to write a little bit about community here, but I think you may have got the drift. Frank at that time was just another friend in town. And this would have been a fairly generic version of things I did last summer except for his famous name.

You know, I probably should have waited to write about this, as the recounting seems the equivalent of a black and white photograph viewed in a technicolor world. But some memories are like that. As to why I wrote about this today, I dunno, I guess I figured somebody other than me one day might be interested in the swirl of influences. I mean, basically, on the surface of things, all that happened is we had driven 35, 40 miles just to listen to somebody play us a record.

And as to the influences and local color thereabouts, look at a book review over on Amazon, one I wrote awhile back. I was going to recommend getting the book, "Cruising the Pomona Valley, 1930-1970", but in just a few years it's OOP and an expensive collector's edition already. Anyway, Phoenix looked back at the vicinity, a geography where many things offered locally were touted as the World's Most Superlative Anythings. If that happens to remind you, as it did me, of a "cult classic" movie title recently referenced here, that surely must be the most amazing coincidence. And while the story line (as I read it in the article) at first seemed loosely based on an improbable real life character in our environs who was talked about in shushed tones in our geographical radius, um, I dunno, really -- all those radio and tv evangelists sometimes seem to have gone to the same school or something.

Before I forget, and as an historic aside, Frank, as a young man hard strapped for cash, put a couple of those puppets he'd help make up for sale at Raku, the local arts store. The puppets had elegant hand-printed price tags affixed with slender black ribbons and I only recall seeing his name as the artist.

That's all I can remember about that summer. Though maybe next time I will tell you about Frank's adventures working at the local greeting card factory, if I can dredge up some colorful anecdotes that is. I could call him a printer's devil and really try to spice it up somehow. Or I could tell you about a boy I knew who grew up to be a poet laureate here in the United States. Which story do you think you would you rather hear? (I think I knew Frank better, so that might be slightly more interesting, you know).

(update 7/4/05 "OOP" and an expensive collector's edition per the major online retailer. The good news really is: if you want a copy of "Cruising the Pomona Valley 1930-1970", get directly in touch with the author and get one straight from him. Jump to Charles Phoenix from here.)

2011-01-03T13:03:00.000-08:00

We were all, all literate people. I was just reminded that Kenny Edwards worked in playing the sitar on the first Stone Poney's record. They named that song "Evergreen" after the poetry review of the same name, and even gave it a Pt. 2 (because always the best songs, if there was a part 1 and a part 2, part 2 was the better version).

2011-01-03T11:46:00.000-08:00

In Venice, every single vet, especially ones from the Korean War, had a blue cotton bathrobe hanging somewhere in the pad. These were hospital-issue from the military or VA hospitals. I used to think about writing a play where beatnik conversations and philosophizing took place around a table with a few characters sitting in those robes and drinking small cups of espresso. The robes had changed color and style through the years. In the second world war, they were striped and long. For the Korean vets, probably because of budget cut-backs they were one color, a slightly darker than robin's egg blue, and a little shorter, around knee length. I used to imagine writing such a play because it seemed that's what was happening anyway in some of those beatnik pads.

There was a big VA hospital in Santa Monica, just one town over from Venice. And that's why in part I think so many vets found their way to Venice and the beach.

Most of the guys had ongoing problems and to get any kind of help, they'd sometimes have to enlist the aid of an organization known as "Veterans of Foreign Wars" which they would join and pay small dues and everyone would sometimes have to gang up on the hospital just to get treatment. And sometimes there would be a report that so and so finally got his foot surgery, so it was hurrah! a small victory there to be celebrated.

And the war in Viet Nam was beginning to take off, and here were people from the last one still waiting around to get in line at the hospital.

(So of course one of the characters, named "Tommy", would have to wear a legionnaire's hat with havelock* just like Captain Gallent of the French Foreign Legion. Hey ... wait a minute! That might just have some currency today. Let's stick in another character a psychologist named "Ellis" just to keep the literary pretensions going .... Of course nowadays they would have to meet at a Starbuck's)

But, really, I was sensitive to these issues as my mom seemed to be brought up in a household in the South were the cast offs from society were sent to live with each other and help each other through life. The blind grandmother. The unwanted child of vaudevillians. And soon another relative appeared, a grandfather or an uncle, nearly destitute who'd lost his leg in the first world war (which was a recent war when my mom was a kid), and he would experience horrid pain around the lumps of the amputation. And my mom's job would be to sit at his feet as a child and he had his pant leg rolled up and pinned and she would gently massage his painful lumps with cloths dipped in warm water. From the great war to end all wars then (WWI) to the big one in between (WWII), to the war a little later (Korea) to the war that was happening then in Venice (Viet Nam), it was mind-boggling to consider the veterans from WWI were still alive when Viet Nam was beginning to rage.

Ever after, for the rest of her life, my mother always donated a small amount of money to disabled veterans. She'd buy the red paper poppy for a dime. Or she'd mail a little in to a disabled veteran's organization of some kind. Even when she didn't any money to speak of herself.

Everybody had these relatives and these experiences, because there was a draft back then.

*A 'Havelock' is the name for the piece of cloth that hangs from the back of a hat to protect the neck from sunburn. First worn by soldiers in the Indian Mutiny and named after a British commander involved in the campaign: Major-General Sir Henry Havelock.

2011-01-03T09:39:00.001-08:00

The cabin was in the mountains with a little clearer air.

Back when I was a kid growing up in Claremont (let's say 1957-58), you could see the mountains and hills every day and smell orange blossoms on the air. By the early 60s, smog was coming in. The mountains would be hazy and obscured as if concealed by smoke, as if there were a forest fire raging somewhere. Smog. I swear sometimes you could smell it, like the gassy exhaust smell from a car.

And the smog and pollution went high into the atmosphere. Everyone noticed it and complained about it ... even the little folk music shop would sell postcards depicting the smog bank, that you sometimes flew through and was so noticable when traveling by plane. The postcard showed a photograph of a big black cloud, and there was a clear line where the smog stopped, and then it was bright blue skies and clear on the other side. We were still on the other side of the smog belt, but that stuff was creeping in.

My sister and I both had asthma. I used to run through town as a kid to get places faster. But when that smog came in, my sprint ended suddenly with a stabbing pain in my chest, and even when I walked around town on such days, sometimes my chest would constrict and hurt. Her asthma was much much worse.

She kept asthma medication at the ready in the fridge for such days. The atomizer was clear glass and had small and large corks. You'd have to pour the medication in carefully to a delicate little bowl on the side and put a cork in. The solution was a pretty amber color, like the Blanton's or like honey. Then you'd squeeze a large bulb to beginning building up pressure. Then the medicine was ready, and you'd pull out the big cork and the medicine would be delivered into your mouth through the large end which had small holes to make a mist. And you'd have to prepare yourself, exhale all the air in your lungs, and inhale as deep a breath as possible as you squeezed the bulb to get the medicine down into your lungs.

So we'd sit around the kitchen table on bad days when our eyes were red and itchy, and our lungs would be crackling, and we'd pant for breath and wheeze between words in conversations, and cough, and take turns inhaling through this contraption in order to breathe better.

Frank would come over on days such as that. And we'd all sit at the kitchen table, and he'd say, "What's that?"

So I'd tell him it was a Da-VILLE-biss (as that was how it was pronounced) nebulizer.

And Frank would say, "A nebulizer" as if he were impressed by the very word.

And of course because my sister's nebulizer was a much more modern version than the one in the photo here, because she'd moved up through the years to that model, so I'd say it was the coupe de ville, the cadillac of atomizers. The company made bottles to hold fancy perfume, too.

So we'd move into the living room to watch television as you couldn't go out and she'd carry the atomizer carefully on kleenex over the small turquoise plastic bowl to prevent drip of expensive medication or to avoid dripping on the couch.

And Frank would sit there watching television with us, but he'd crack up about the atomizer, and my sister thought it was funny, too. Neither one of them said a single word that could be considered risque in anyway, but they thought it was. But I was young and didn't really understand. I just knew they were laughing about something.

Events like this burrowed into Frank's memory banks forever and for all times. He would always remember stuff like that.

So, you thought "Fast and Bulbous" as a song title was a double entendre or even outright obscene .... or was talking about ....

And we'd pass this contraption back and forth every few hours as we watched television. First you had to squeeze the bulb a bit slowly to build pressure, and then pressure would build and then you could squeeze the bulb really fast and the atomizer made a funny huffing sound as it built up pressure. Then you put the thing in your mouth and kind of rolled your eyes because the atomizer end was big, about 2 inches around, and took a deep breath to huff the medicine in, and then set the atomizer down and say, "Relief at last." Well. You see.

And we'd even laugh about what seemed like lousy English usage on the package. "This is "a" inhalant ... " spoken in a rednecky drawl.

2011-01-02T23:22:00.000-08:00

I could be snotty, too, when talking about certain kinds of musicians, the ones on stage who were on stage performing and getting gigs because of their connections to show business and endless music lessons and stage parents and agents and managers and career management, and who once up there really couldn't do anything. I'd dismiss them cruelly, with the word "Wunderkind" (straight out of Carson McCullers), and I wouldn't even have to say it aloud or write it down. I could be cruel. And I could be contemptuous.

("They think they're good here," I'd think to myself. "Let's see how they play in Cincinnati.")

2011-01-02T22:23:00.000-08:00

And another reason I left Hell-A for the mountains ... I'd be standing at a bus bench on Wilshire waiting for a bus, and guys in cars would assume I was a prostitute and pull to the curb and proposition me. Which made me mad.

And then sometimes I'd be standing at a bus bench on Wilshire waiting for a bus, and guys in cars would assume I was a prostitute and slow down to take a better look and then they'd speed off.

I'd give them both the finger and straight up their tail pipes every single time, but still, I didn't know which was worse.

2011-01-02T22:03:00.000-08:00

Frank made up a saying to advertise "The Pit".

"Fall into the Pit."

(He even wrote a theme song, one note for each word that he played onstage there on his guitar. He played
"Fall"
"In"
"To"
"The"
"Pit"

each note a step down descending. Even now I could sing that for you.

And I'd put one word in big letters on a piece of paper, and thumbtack each one to a telephone pole on Mills Avenue so it read like a Burma Shave haiku.

I had a bit of a creative streak under the right circumstances.)

2011-01-02T21:35:00.000-08:00

Somebody told me once I should write like this:

"And suddenly a shot rang out, and my life was changed forever."

(Well, I couldn't and it wasn't, you see. It only means I limp a bit when it rains or is close to freezing. So why melodramatize?)

2011-01-02T21:13:00.000-08:00

One Christmas time, I forget which Christmas, but that's when I usually went to Los Angeles to visit family, and while walking I ran into Frank in a very fancy shopping district. The holiday lights and displays were out, the loudspeakers squeaked out subdued and slightly tinny Christmas songs, and the small expensive shops were decorated with lush green garlands and red ribbons. We were passing the liquor store, and I saw a beautiful item in the window. A small bottle of very expensive whiskey, about the size of a large hand grenade, holding a rich amber-colored most exquisite liquor. It was a beautiful presentation on its own, and I hovered to peer more closely.

The bottle had a horse on top. So I went in to look at the item on the shelf. And then I had to go to the shelves where the other bottles were. Each bottle had a horse, but upon closer examination each bottle had a small letter as well, held in a delicate oval frame by the horse's rear foot. And each horse was slightly different as were the letters. "Here's an A, Here's another A, here's an N" And I was so keen, then, I could look through the bottles and not even a third of the way through, like in a flash tell him each letter was for a barrel and the letters spelled out

B-L-A-N-T-O-N-S.

And I laughed and said, "That's cool .... " And then, "but where's the apostrophe?"

(Did you ever hear that one before, where another song title might have come from?)

2011-01-02T20:34:00.000-08:00

The people who owned the place were nice. They knew things about me not many people knew, not all in a line at once.

They knew I had been shot at and wounded after a small civil rights demonstration in the summer of 1963.

They knew I had literally been kidnapped by armed, dangerous, and uniformed members of the American Nazi Party on my way back home from the UCLA Folk Festival in 1964 and I had managed to wriggle free.

They knew I had been temporarily detained in the Tijuana jail while I was trying to get a cello player for Frank Zappa.

They knew I wasn't making it on my own.

They said sure, you can use the cabin.

(As the New Lost City Ramblers sang, "Take me home, rock of ages, cleft for me")

2011-01-02T20:16:00.000-08:00

The cabin was remote, tucked far behind a town in the mountains, and even farther away than that, beyond a ridge and way back into a canyon. The only road in was a fire road, 8-miles long and behind a locked gate that only a few people had keys for.

There was running water to the cabin once, but now the water came from the creeks, carried by bucket.

The wood stove needed a little attention and that's what I cooked on after cutting the wood.

In the cupboard was a can of Meals for Millions Food. Developed by Mr. Clifton, who'd owned the cafeteria in Los Angeles where my sister worked one summer.

http://www.soyinfocenter.com/HSS/meals_for_millions.php

May I stay here forever, please?

2011-01-02T19:40:00.000-08:00

I bought a book on Linear A and Linear B, and studied as best I could on my own, but it was slow going for me.

2011-01-02T19:32:00.000-08:00

I'd liked "The Red Balloon" as a kid. While I was near Venice, I went to see another of his, "I Dream of Wild Horses".

When the horses first run, they're moving in a dreamscape slower motion. Then they begin to fight. And there was music. Then you realize they're in danger and running from a fire towards the ocean and there might be no escape for them.

("The Dream of Wild Horses" (1962) by Albert Lamorisse, who had previously made the children's favorite "The Red Balloon" (1956) was a lavishly photographed display of wild horses running through a fire set at the ocean's shore (Kodak was one of the film's corporate benefactors). The imagery was essentially a stylish, technically proficient skin, stretched over a framework of run-of-the-mill Late Romantic dream symbology.)

http://www.maniform.com/prolix/lynch.htm

2011-01-02T18:26:00.000-08:00

Or which really came first, Magic Sam's "21 Days in Prison"

Or Leiber & Stoller's "10 Days in Jail"

The answers to such questions can seem more accessible now, but not so easy then when you were only hearing such music intermittently with a span of time separating the events and familiar motifs, or hearing one on the radio and just hearing someone tell you the title of the other.

2011-01-02T17:50:00.000-08:00

And people at the UCLA ethnomusicology department, kind of like me, would ponder universal truths.

Like, which came first?

Elmore James "Rattlesnake"

http://www.amazon.com/gp/recsradio/radio/B000002O90/ref=pd_krex_dp_001_010?ie=UTF8&track=010&disc=001

or

Mae Thornton's "Hound Dog"

http://www.amazon.com/Hound-Dog-Big-Mama-Thornton/dp/B000002OM2/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1294019665&sr=1-1

(written by Leiber & Stoller)

http://www.amazon.com/Leiber-Stoller-Story-Vol-Angeles/dp/B00028FL40/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1294019979&sr=1-2

(We already knew it wasn't Elvis Presley's)

But the students there had access to better record libraries and many times could figure things out a little faster than I could sitting in my crappy low rent apartment. This was long before the days of too many collections on long playing records, or if there were collections, you had to wait a long time and hope the right one arrived in the mail.

2011-01-02T16:24:00.000-08:00

Polly Bergan, who was married then to a cowboy actor type who appeared on Disney fare episodes of "Mike Fink, Keel Boat Man" was somewhat ashamed her parents lived in Compton in the mid-50s. She'd tell them, "Don't say anything about me. I don't want people to know my parents live in Compton. They'll think I'm a hayseed."

Now, doesn't that kind of change your impression of Compton a bit? Worried about being seen as a white trash hillbilly just by mentioning the name "Compton"? Name any of a million Southern towns, or even a thousand Southern California towns, sure. That immediately equals hayseed. But Compton?

That's because a famous country and western show "Town Hall Party" was filmed each week in Compton and broadcast throughout the greater Los Angeles basin.

2011-01-02T10:13:00.001-08:00

As I stared into what might be my future there, on the edges of the beach, I could only see that it would be pretty much the same. Endless rows of soundless bongo drums lining the beach. With a policeman for every drum, kicking the drum over. I couldn't see that by staying there anything would be appreciably better for me in any way.

Like Lawrence in the Razor's Edge, I left Venice and Los Angeles far behind and went to live in a cabin in the mountains. Venice was gone for me. The whole surrounding area, the geography, the people, the cars, the buses became an environment I didn't want to be.

Before I left to live in the mountains, I was having a hard time finding a job. I got a small job as a paid picketer for the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The strike went on so long the artists had to take on other small jobs in restaurants to feed themselves and they couldn't afford to take time off from work too often to picket themselves. I was walking back and forth with a sign in front of a gas station (part of the secondary boycott of advertisers that the opposing lawyers would complain about and file lawsuits over) when a guy tried to run me over. And I was depleting my savings by paying a relatively high rent for a place that had two burners on an electric cooktop and you had to wash your dishes in the bathtub.

My supposed friends in the music industry preferred performing at "better attended benefits" in support of the strike because everyone important would be there and they would be seen and recognized as being supporters of the strike and people would recognize how wonderful they were to be on stage supporting the strike. And they were snotty about it, because they were becoming important entertainers.

And other friends lived so very far away I could never see them. One time I tried hitch hiking to visit one, and a Mexican guy picked me up and because he didn't speak English, he completely misunderstood the name of the town I was trying to get to. I even had a map and said "hey! here, turn here" and waved it at him, but he drove miles too far before he swung left. He drove me all the way to Simi Valley. He went far out of his way to try to get me to a place he thought I was going. And then he drove me all the way back near to where he had picked me up. He gave me a slightly confused glance as I got out of the car, but I knew he was thinking "Dumb gringa" as he drove off. By then it was nightfall, and I must have taken a bus ride home in the dark or I wouldn't be here now typing this up.

The Hell with this place. I couldn't get to where I wanted to go even if people were willing to help and go far out of their way to get me there, you see. But that was the whole place.

The landscape was full of pervs, creeps, leatherboys, dope dealers, crazy men and just generally not my kind of guy. If you didn't like pervs, creeps, leatherboys, dope dealers, treacherous people, thieves, selfish people, or crazy men and that's all there were, then it's time to move, too. Or at least those types seemed to greatly outnumber every one else. Nazis! There were those Nazi-types, there, too.

After the Venice West, the other places farther away seemed phony baloney to me, though real enough to the people just beginning their experiences. I tried, Lord knows. I went to the "Fifth Estate" coffeehouse which was painted a stark white and which down a flight of stairs and in the backroom held another more political newspaper office, which was the fourth estate, really, but they called it "Fifth Estate" after the coffeehouse. I just smelled mildew and must like the place was an old bookstore with third hand publications nobody wanted. It was just ROT! I went to the LA Free Press office, which was in the same floorspace a few desks over, and that was slightly better, but then later Mother Neptune's as a coffee house sucked. And Cantor's was overrun by music industry types and who'd want to go there.

The neon sign for the "Goody Goody" drive-in that would sometimes sputter out to spell out "G-o-o-y G-o-d" just wasn't funny any more.

Those were just some of the reasons I left. My writing back then was so much more colorful. I wove in poetry, and music, and the dialects of the current day, but nobody too much read it except me.

He hesitated behind the wheel as he stopped at the driveway into the gas station and I saw him and could even catch a glance from his eye through the windshield. I misread his intent and began walking again with my picket sign, then he stepped on the gas and VROOMED through with tires squealing and I swear I even smelled burning rubber. I had to jump backwards and then looked down at the little black marks his tires had left behind on the pavement.

All you fuckers, all you ingrate fuckers, all you selfish phony used to be friends, you're the biggest fuckers. Goodbye, fuckers!

2011-01-02T09:01:00.000-08:00

Many times, I don't remember too much about the time I spent near Venice. The past is like that, as it recedes into the distance and is overlaid with new experiences. Especially a distant past, concealed perhaps, opaque certainly. I wonder sometimes but not too much why I am trying to reconstruct and revisit these times.

I don't believe it's a simple affliction of the nostalgia manque, although that might be part of it.

The Venice West was a rundown coffee house even at the time. They served coffee in small chipped cups. The smell of Picayune cigarettes was in the air, though sometimes that was replaced by the sweet stink of Faros. Cheap folding checker boards defaced with a large printed number in black crayon or a cribbage board with the price tag from the Salvation Army store were strewn about on the tables.

And there were books with well worn spines on the shelves, and the books had their small prices penciled in on the front page (also from the Salvation Army store). Ten cents for "The Razor's Edge." Imagine that.

John left it there for the Korean War vets in the area. Most were shattered, I could tell by seeing them.

You know, I borrowed that book to read and I was profoundly affected. I tried to return it to John's place, honest. Reluctantly, I admit, as I wanted to treasure that experience and feeling for all time. When I went to the Venice West to give it back to the tables and shelves there, the Venice West had closed and gone out of business. I carried the book for years, it held a special place on any of my bookshelves. I carried it in a suitcase when I traveled sometimes and wanted to reread certain parts. I even carried it for courage. I wanted to hold on to it and hold it close, as if the story would somehow rub off and go straight into me.

I eventually gave it to someone to read, I believe he was an actor or had something to do with the stage, and I told him it was a very special book, a little of its history in my stewardship, how I came to acquire it, and why I was passing it along to him at this time. I promised him he would have a metaphysical experience just reading the book.

My copy of the book, the one I handed on, had a slightly darker green as the cover.

2011-01-02T07:39:00.000-08:00

And believe it or not, when I once went up to UCLA I had a taste of the metaphysical I was wishing for. I ran into a couple who were on their way to visit someone at the anthropology department, which is where a person I knew studied, so I could show them the way there on campus. They had a brief meeting with a man named Carlos Castenada and I hung around after asking permission from everyone. He took us all for a small short walk around the department, then we stepped outside, and within a few steps he showed us a huge wood sculpture through a window. The sculpture looked like a modern sculpture of a tree. As I walked, I became clouded and dizzy, and thought I was having a low blood sugar attack. Then he lead us away and said goodbye in a doorway. I think that's what he did. As we exchanged notes later when he seemed to just disappear, they were feeling the same way as I. And none of us could ever find that statue again. I went back several days later in an attempt to find it, to retrace my steps here and there, and I simply couldn't.

2011-01-02T07:36:00.000-08:00

I also read "Harry the Rat With Women," and learned the important concept of "rat fuck" as in how to screw someone over. But in a humorous way, as this is Jules Feiffer after all.

2011-01-01T17:54:00.000-08:00

Kenny Edwards was fun, too. We'd make fun of some of the new "folk" groups and their renditions of songs. He did a great imitation of a New Lost Christy Minstrel singing "San Francisco Bay Blues" right down to the "bay-HEY" which could put you in stitches. And I would then do an upbeat recitation of the "Ballad of Reading Town Gaol" but with a bit of a high kick and spin like an Irish step dancer. So we had talent shows in the living room, too, you see.

One time we went to see the Kentucky Gentlemen, and the mandolin player picked up his mandolin to change instruments and his hands must have been sweaty and his mandolin went sailing through the air. A Gibson F-4, too. (The crowd went "oo-ooh")

Kenny also played cello. And quite well. We were visiting someone who had a cello, and Kenny asked if he could play. And the mom (as it was her cello) said sure. So Kenny settled into position, and adjusted tension on the bow, and prepared himself with a most serious classical music face and started playing "Louie Louie", which under the circumstances I thought was priceless.

I was thinking about that and how my path soon lead again to Frank Zappa and one of my musical notions that ended up on what eventually became "Freak Out" but along the way ... some very odd things happened to me, and Frank rather than selecting Kenny as cellist opted for a higher register shall we say.

2011-01-01T16:31:00.000-08:00

Frank was fun. He was so non-judgmental. He even got my mom to talk about music because she was the one with all the Art Tatum records. And she would say she didn't like the way Johnny Otis played vibraphones, that he didn't know what he was doing. She'd bang the air with invisible mallets like she was playing the vibraphone as she spoke. And Frank could even get my mom to participate in the family living room talent show by singing a song!

That was Frank. And about those vibraphones .... I mean here it is, forty, fifty years later ... people from the area still talk about Frank. Some bitch about him. One woman, older than I, who I encountered in a foreign country used to live in the area. She said Frank bought a xylophone from her former husband, some kind of jazz musician, all those many years ago and never finished paying them for it. What could I do at that point but shrug. I'm sure the statute of limitations has run out on that one.

That's Frank. You either loved him or hated him.

Next time I was thinking of telling you of some of the ideas I had for Don and his group early on, and where they eventually got picked up and used. But you'd probably think I was fibbing or trying to make my role too large. Or even some of the things I helped Tina Turner with and when, but ditto same thing, you'd probably think I was .... well, you know.

Anyway, one day I'd noticed that my mom seemed to be drawn to blind jazz pianists. She had Art Tatum, Errol Garner, Oscar Peterson, and even liked Ray Charles a lot. I figured that also was because she was raised by a blind person while her parents were touring on the vaudeville circuit. As a child onto early adulthood, she'd see her parents quite seldom, and barely knew them. Frank knew all this about our family, too.

2011-01-01T14:57:00.000-08:00

I'd kind of grown up around Frank and I had the feeling he essentially accepted me for who I was. I didn't have to put on any airs or pretentions. How could I? He'd seen me as a kid watching Jungle Jim on television, and he'd be watching it, too, with the whole family. And Captain Midnight. And Captain Gallent of the French Foreign Legion because the theme song was good and there were a lot of desert shots with sand blowing around, even the show was filmed in French Morocco until it got too dangerous.

I thought Jungle Jim was a bit crass. If it were a white explorer in the jungle, of the two available to me at the time I much preferred Ramar of the Jungle. And I'm here to tell you this is where one of Frank's early song titles came from. But you probably already knew that by now, didn't you? Just me mentioning Ramar of the Jungle made you immediately think of the wily native Willy and his pet monkey, Babette, didn't it.

In one episode, I know not which, I think this was it: Willy was asleep under mosquito netting and Babette chirping as small monkeys do stole in under the curtain and settled next to him on the pillow, and began gently cuddling and kissing him awake. And Willy was enjoying the experience until he opened his eyes fully and discovered his sensation was arising from his little pet monkey, a somewhat romantic rhesus in that scene at least.

http://dtaylor.tripod.com/

Frank changed Babette into a dog for his song.

2011-01-01T14:35:00.001-08:00

Somewhere, I think at Wallach's Music City, I found a collection of Jelly Roll Morton tunes. Everybody I know was already singing "Hesitation Blues" onstage so I opted for his instrumental record and I also was getting a little tired of hearing just guitars everywhere. My favorite was the way he could run up the keys on "Darktown Strutter's Ball". He makes it seem so effortless.

http://www.amazon.com/Darktown-Strutters-Ball/dp/B0010V5IFA

(In this little sample, during a glide, do you hear the opening melody for "Oh You Beautiful Doll"? A song written in 1911? That's the kind of stuff the UCLA ethnomusicology department was absolutely made of)

2011-01-01T13:49:00.000-08:00

In reading a bit here and there recently about this l965-66 period in Los Angeles, I'm struck how many people wax poetic and write, sometimes successfully, energetic and colorful vignettes about the two-days they spent being a beatnik or a hippie and the eccentric characters they encountered before they went back to whatever they were doing before.

The people of that era to me were just people, and as for the beats, it seems fitting that most of the footage is in black and white. Look at this little film clip ... these are just people. They don't seem particularly far out, do they? The artist in this film, a sensitive man, was essentially crushed by being arrested on a charge of obscenity, and his friends noticed his art ever after was affected by this experience.

http://www.beatera.org/venice/venice.html

In 1966, bongo drums were outlawed in Venice. Or I should say it was now illegal to play bongo drums anywhere outside.

2011-01-01T13:18:00.000-08:00

One of the highpoints of my time during that period near Venice was to find and buy an album by Fats Waller, which I proceeded to play to death.

2011-01-01T12:33:00.000-08:00

I mean I could understand why he might want a career in show biz. As a teenager, he'd worked in a gas station at night and got to see the nightly parade of weird LA night people come through the station. One car, a group of young women. And when he flipped open the lid to fuel their tank, he read the sign they'd painted on the inside of the small door: "We trade ass for gas".

And he had a bout of hard manual labor shoveling gravel and sand for a friend's father, who had started a landscaping business to fill out the lots of the new big houses being built in the Valley. And not wanting to shovel gravel and sand any longer, he took on a job selling cars at a car lot. But before that because he got along with animals, he took care of dogs at a laboratory that was developing Ritalin and other pharmaceuticals.

None of us in any kind of way were suited in any way for everyday life. Every day life was full of stupid jobs, if not backbreaking labor or cruel work. More so especially if, like this young man, there was no college degree or skill set in hand to fall back on. We were all just like Harry Haller in a way, in terms of being misfits, just like Harry except for the transcendant metaphysical part that we were all secretly wishing for. Harry was lucky, I would say to myself. At least he had a Magic Theater.

2011-01-01T06:48:00.000-08:00

We were all literate people and everyone I knew read a lot of books. Books were amazingly inexpensive, you could buy a new paperback of a classic for 35 or 50 cents. The New Directions books were priced slightly higher. Even so, we'd pass books around like a private lending library to share with each other.

At this moment in time, I was reading some Carson McCullers in Venice when I met David Carradine, and he seemed genuinely interested. I was a little selfish, because I was racing my way to the conclusion, or I'd probably even have given him my copy of "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter". I told him where I was in the book, though (which was hard because the book just went on and on and on with conversations and everyday events, like everyday life, and I had to carefully bookmark the pages with a matchbook cover.) "They're having a coca cola together," I said. And we talked about poetry and such. That was long before any movies, or the television show that made him famous, or any that I knew of. He went on a few years later to make a folk music record and use the book's title for a song. I met David at Jeff Bridges house, and got to know these people a bit because the fella who eventually became the Beefheart manager knew Jeff from high school. Everyone had heard of John Carradine, famous character actor and difficult man, and even something of how his life and personality had traumatized and scarred his children because of old gossip newspapers.

These young men were not like me, nor really were they like my other friends. One of the people I'd gotten to know a bit up North was putting himself through Berkeley by working in the peach canning factory down in Hayward, and he'd also had buy a car to drive all the way there because jobs were so scarce in Berkeley.

These guys weren't like that. They came from wealthy families in the Valley. The fella who became the Beefheart manager was just slightly past 21 and even before that he had a fancy English sportscar (1954 MG TA with ragtop) painted the usual English racing green, a fancy imported motorcycle (BMW R-69), and a Ford Model A that he had rebuilt and restored with his Dad's help or interest or pocketbook. Until he turned 21, he lived with his parents in the Valley in private cottage or guest house they had on the grounds of their home. The Dad had been in "business" of some kind, though my friend pointed out that his Mom had helped his Dad a lot with that business, whatever it was. Now, the Mom worked in a gallery on Melrose, the same gallery that brought Andy Warhol's art to Los Angeles for the first time, so there was a familiarity with artists.

I'd met his parents once, at their home in the Vally, and truthfully they were a little rude to me. Even the St Bernard was growly and snappy towards me. This after my family was kindly to the Beefheart manager, and he felt comfortable enough to call in the middle of the night after leaving our home because he'd had a car accident on the way home. My Dad, who had to get up at 5 am to drive to work in Los Angeles, had answered and drove almost all the way out to LA to rescue the young man, and return him to our home where he spent the night. At 2 am my Dad and he were talking in the kitchen. And the young man didn't seem to think a thing of asking for a special favor, or even consider this request might be a little bit out of somebody's way. So I wondered why he didn't call his own family to be rescued. I understood why his dad couldn't come for him, but he said his mother was at her boyfriend's and he didn't want to call her there.

He did at least shake hands and thank my Dad in the morning as he was leaving for work. I think my Dad even carried him along and dropped him off to tend to his vehicle. This was not his first car wreck. Sometime later he got in another accident, this one a motorcycle wreck, and he had a terrible red scar on his face when I encountered him in Venice.

And even at 21, though he was a personable young man, he seemed a bit "young" to me. When he shaved off his moustache at junior college, before he dropped out of school, he shaved off half and walked around for a day because he thought that was "cool". And he'd even taken photos of himself for a quarter in one of those photo booths with half a moustache. And when he was much younger, let's say 20, he'd gone surfing nude because he thought it was a "cool" thing to do. He walked around on his tip-toes, too, never seeming to set a heel on the floor, perpetually alift, a little like I'd seen the engineering nerds do on their way to classes at Harvey Mudd.

So these young men came from completely different backgrounds, and they weren't too much like me or my friends.

I'd only encountered these people because I was walking down Wilshire, poised midstride somewhere between the liquor store and the bell jar. I happened to glance in the window of a western wear shop and spied someone I thought I recognzied. He was standing and giving the once over to some clothing laid out on some tables. So I just wanted to say hello to a friendly face in a new and unfriendly town seemingly too full of Nazis and leatherboys, so I walked in just as he was scooping up a tan cowboy shirt with pearly snaps and matching gabardine trousers. And as he was about to rush to the fitting room, he hadn't time for a proper hello. He just didn't seem to want to talk to me, and acted somehow embarrassed. His friend appeared, who as it turned out was Jeff Bridges, though I didn't find that out til a few days later. I didn't want to embarrass myself, either, so I just left.

Then a few days after that, I'd been riding my bike around Venice and wrote a poem for a big black saloon Jaguar and stuck it under the windshield. It turned out that was Jeff's car, and he and my friend who wasn't speaking to me walked out to see what I was doing.

So they eventually invited me in after we chatted a bit. And I found out why my friend had been buying the cowboy suit, although a bit later. He was going to go to work for the Byrds doing something for them, as he lived near them and thought they were "cool" guys. It was the manner in which he said "the Byrds" that irritated me, like I should fall down and worship them or immediatey be impressed, which as I had heard their version of "Mr Tambourine Man" by then, I wasn't, not really. And though he did not to my way of thinking have a single musical bone in his body, he wanted a career in music biz.

And he at this critical juncture in time wanted a career in music business because of a news broadcast. The Rolling Stones were reported to have gone down in a plane accident (just like Buddy, Richie and the Big Bopper, though members in our family especially mourned the passing of Richie), and though this was completely untrue he was riveted by the major news story, and followed it on the LA radio as he drove along until it was announced the Stones were alive and well. He told me all this because he'd realized how "important" the Rolling Stones had become in the short year since we had seen them at their first show in the U.S. And I confess at that moment I was thinking if that plane HAD gone down I wouldn't have had to experience that creepier feeling at Scorpio Rising.

Anyway, he was telling me in his own way that I had introduced him to something that was becoming important in his life.

These people, none of them, not a single one ... they were not like me and the people I knew. The ones I knew were fun, arty, and more like regular people I'd want to be around. Frank Zappa and I already had some wonderful adventures and he hadn't even made an album. And Don, his friend, was even more understandable to me, too, really. He'd bring some of the band over to my folks house in Claremont (I remember making fun of a guy named "St. Clair" as his name had the French pronounciation "San Clair") and we'd do things that people would do -- although I admit they sometimes they stole small tins of food from my mother's cupboard that I would have to replace because my parents kept tally and counted each banana.

We'd take walks around town, and once we hopped in the car and drove far into the mountains behind town just to sit by the river at night, amidst the tossed boulders and the small white pebbles leading to the river contained some quartz and sparkled slightly even under the night sky. While some of the guys were just like musicians and seem to be happy with a can of beer for the moment, I would try to push them a bit, "Be more like Superman, be a little bolder." I said these things to encourage them.

When I'd got to know Don a bit when Frank brought him by, we'd talk about books there, too. I'd describe what I was learning from J.P. Donleavy's "Ginger Man", which was part of the new English/Irish wave of literature coming across the waters to us at the time. And I'd even read from the critics who were writing about Donleavy, as they all seemed to promise in some way a guidebook or story on how to better get through life.

When my friend eventually got the job as Beefheart tour manager, he came by and asked me very nicely if I would help him, and I turned him down, and he was pressing me to accept and I turned him down for a number of reasons, and I told him he should probably get his mom to help. Which he did do.

2010-12-31T20:53:00.000-08:00

The beatniks used to joke that the goats came from Eden Ahbez, who was still near enough in vicinity that people at the coffee houses knew his lesser known songs by heart. They wouldn't sing "Nature Boy" the song Nat Cole made famous, but another one Eden had written for his wife, "Anna Was Mine". Later, a guy I knew from Pomona when he was starting out (Arthur) had moved to Los Angeles and actually lived near Eden in the hills and went and took photographs of his music group near the Gong. I'd see Arthur once in a very great while in Venice when I was there.

And when I tried to describe the weird foreign accent I'd overheard and was laughing about the cirsumstances of it all and wondered who it was, somebody teased me and shouted, "Akim Tamiroff" as Akim had been in this old movie shot in Venice and apparently he was still hanging around the area a bit, maybe he'd made a friend or listened to jazz, or maybe he liked having a cup of coffee by the beach, who knows.

2010-12-31T19:45:00.000-08:00

1967-1968. Does anybody but me remember seeing that new band "The Grateful Dead" on a local Let's Go Bowling television show? Where the Grateful Dead, or at least Jerry Garcia, bowled for the camera?

Or when in that same era the Berkeley Free Store on San Pablo Ave won a coupon for a free chicken dinner after being called by random by some local television host and answering a simple question?

And that was just daytime local television. Just try to imagine the other kinds of shenanigans that went on ... Those could be some great fun times.

2010-12-31T18:36:00.000-08:00

I was a kid in Compton and the slightly older kids were heavy into R&B (and I also mean even the junior high and high school marching bands seriously kicked). The older kids went to the roller rink and for thirty-five cents plus the price of skate rental would roll around an oval wooden track to the beat of their favorite records, and I went a few times. Fortunately the rails were padded as awkward skaters gaining too high a speed would lose control and they'd aim their bodies at the rails to bring themselves to a stop, which was less harmful to the body than hitting the hard wooden floor and risk other skaters rolling over or in other ways colliding with them. Couples would skate together, their arms linked across their chests as if they'd studied the gliding graceful moves from Ice Capades. Some of those kids could skate backwards, and others could propel themselves forward at high speed when crouching like young roller derby stars in training for a double jam. Eventually, a promoter brought in a live band to play for the roller skaters.

2010-12-31T16:51:00.000-08:00

I used to make jokes when listening to the radio driving around with people in the little foreign cars with manual transmissions. I'd tell them even your car is musical, man, "Four on the floor."

(Especially if the car backfired, "Boom", "Boom", "Boom", "Boom").

2010-12-31T16:02:00.000-08:00

When I was there living near Venice, I'd take the bus up to UCLA sometimes and hang around the Ethnomusicology department and chat up Bess Hawes. John Fahey was studying there at the time as was a guy later to be called "Owl", though I never saw either one of them there.

Nearer where I lived was McCabe's (this is their old location now) and my friend Kenny Edwards had a job there repairing mandolins and stringing guitars and selling instruments. He eventually met up with some of the UCLA people as they'd be drawn to McCabe's like bees to honey ... and he joined up with the early Canned Heat. They were really solid and GOOD! Kenny played me some tapes (I'm pretty sure at his house where he was living in Mar Vista), but he told me they were from a band called "Truck". Also at the Ethnomusicology department was a fellow named Stuart Brotman, and I got to know Stuart a bit. One time we went to the beach and he played flute the whole time. One time I went to the UCLA campus and ran into Stuart who was on his way to his friend's lab, they were engineering or rocket scientists, and we drank some of the alcohol they distilled in the lab from pure lab alcohol, it was 180 proof. I have no idea how I got home, but I recall staring out the window of some kind of vehicle but the stop lights were all blurry and I had a case of the whirlies.

They might have already known him, but I mentioned Stuart to some musicians I ran into at a Lightning Hopkins concert and Stuart later got involved with the Kaleidoscope as he had some ethnic time signatures down majorly pat.

Within a short time, within the blink of an eye it seemed as life moved so fast for some, Kenny had dropped Canned Heat (or Truck) and had tied in with Bobby Kimmel and a friend of Bobby's named Linda Ronstadt.

The last time I saw Kenny there, he and I went to Cantor's and he pointed out Frank Zappa to me, and Frank was wearing a brown satin Tibetan Lama's outfit complete with a little peaked hat ... I recognized him by his nose. And Kenny said, "Frank Zappa" because he knew I knew Frank. I was surprised, as I had no clue that Frank was anywhere in the vicinity.

Or maybe the last time I saw Kenny there was when we drove up to some coffee house in Hollywood (Fred C Dobbs on Sunset Strip, I think it was on Sunset) and were stopped by the police on the way back. The police pulled a "funny one" on the driver. They made him get out of the car and he was talking to them at the rear of the car, then one of them came to me and asked to see the registration which I pulled out of the vehicle glove box and handed to him. Then the other cop talking to the driver asked him to produce the registration, and he came to the car and opened the door and looked in the glove box and pulled out the little book he usually kept the papers in, and I was trying to tell him the other cop had it, but he was walking back to the other cop with the little book in his hand confident he could show the registration. So he couldn't produce the registration to the cop who was asking for it and he was given a ticket. And as the cop was writing out the ticket, which I couldn't see as they were behind the car, the other cop came and handed me the registration through the window, and I put it back into the glove box ... so with that traffic citation, it was an expensive outing. He even hit the steering wheel with both fists when I told him what had happened on the way home.

They still liked pushing beatniks around. Seemed fitting. Fred C Dobbs got pushed around in the movie and by people who didn't need no stinking badges.

The guy I'd talked to Stuart Brotman about got stopped by the police, too, one night and he had to explain why he had a beer bottle neck in his guitar case. He played slide guitar and they assumed he was concealing a deadly weapon in his Volkswagen bug.

I thought it strange but telling that people in LA would name their coffee house after a character in a movie. A number of years later, 1967 or so, Kenny brought the tapes up to the Bay Area and I heard them again on KMPX broadcast. They were still good.

2010-12-31T14:46:00.000-08:00

You know, I'm gonna have to look at these years more carefully. As I went to the VERY FIRST ROLLING STONES SHOW in the US ....

http://books.google.com/books?id=croxYiKYxz0C&pg=PR15&lpg=PR15&dq=rolling+stones+%22first+US+tour%22&source=bl&ots=9XD-H8YDrb&sig=kQz6PfmIj3sBIRmSWNeWZcjX-oQ&hl=en&ei=WFweTcnzDoqcsQON5uCJCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CFsQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=rolling%20stones%20%22first%20US%20tour%22&f=false

This was right after we'd had Bob Dylan out to perform. Ok June 5, 1964. That's when I met Mick.

I'm becoming somewhat addled in my decrepitude.

2010-12-31T10:34:00.000-08:00

There were Nazis, Nazis everywhere nor any drop to drink!

The beginning of 1966 near Venice. That was so very long ago, that the liquor store on the corner actually had a delivery service. Can you imagine? And the clerk would drive around with bottles of booze, sometimes cases for the well to do, other times a near-daily single quart of gin carried up two flights of stairs in downtrodden hotels where aging alcoholic actresses lived out their remaining days in their bathrobes.

Down the street from the liquor store, was some kind of investment place that actually had a stock ticker that was held in something that looked like a large bell jar that you could see from the window outside, with streams of perforated paper unreeling like streamers for a parade feeding into a wastebasket waiting below. The strips were punched out with strange little symbols. It looked like they were in constant production printing sets of encyclopedia for the blind.

And there were little places to stop and rest (I usually rode my bicycle around town). After seeing Scorpio Rising, I stopped somewhere at a cafe near the beach and was drinking a soda as you had to buy something to sit there usually.

The boardwalk back then was nothing like the freak show it is now. Just some pensioners playing checkers at tables near the beach. And the POP tram was still running though the amusement park that was growing day by day every bit as worndown, shabby, and neglected as its neighboring town Venice.

So I was sipping through a straw and turning the pages of the LA Free Press, when a group settled in behind me ... and they were young men just coming into a cafe and talking about stuff, but then suddenly one spoke with a thick "Chur-man ogg-zent" und after der cinema mit all the Nazi flags waving and Nazi soldiery superimposed over leather boys, this too gave me the creeps.

And I casually turned my head around, to see if this accent was a put-on or what, and the guys were beefy and well muscled and in appearance at least reminded me somewhat of the Blue Velvet boys in the movie as this was near the old Muscle Beach ... Austrian accents were everywhere in Santa Monica, but I'm fairly certain that was Arnold Schwartzenegger, you know, who used to hang out at Gold's Gym down there maybe even about that time. Later, I saw this guy come into Zucky's, a Jewish deli around the corner from me. I saw him come in as he was noticably handsome and somewhat charismatic, and I was worried lest his thick Germanic accent might freak out the staff. I'd like to think this was Arnold himself, as I'd hate to believe there were two of him.

So there were people hanging in the area with careers about to take off once they moved away from the beach I guess.

I saw quite a bit of the sights and heard the local lore. The Merry-go-Round near the pier was supposed to be haunted by the ghost of someone who had been murdered there.

Where the horse race track used to be. The canals. The old columnades in Venice proper, and elsewhere a funky kind of smoke stack. The Pillar. Stan Laurel lived in the vicinity. Debbie Reynolds mother lived in such and such hotel. People surfing at Venice Beach and riding near the pier. The wooden lifeguard stands. Rusty dumbells. Olivia's cafe. At the bottom of a steep street slightly up North in Santa Monica, there was a huge 3 or 4 storey building on the beach with Synanon painted in large letters. I heard the name "Claire" floating in the air of someone else's conversation. I met beatniks and political types. One of whom was both, and he ran a commune in town where transients and beatniks lived as well as the local Venice West Coffee House. He eventually ran for Governor of California on the ticket of a new political party in 1968, the Peace and Freedom Party which he had helped found.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/01/old-venice-west-cafe-gets-landmark-status-.html

http://dogtownink.com/27/the-venice-west-cafe/

http://www.paultanck.com/venicefirsts/atruevenicelocation/

I'd been there a few times in the previous years, they sold Picayune cigarettes from Louisiana and Faros from Mexico at the counter where you got your coffee. I saw the man who could write upside down and backwards with both hands simultaneously -- exactly the same sentence and the same sentence was a mirror image of itself. I'd heard poetry and sometimes music.

A few doors down, a man ran a left wing bookstore and he was something of a local celebrity, a raconteur on KPFA radio. I got to know him a bit.

http://www.archive.org/stream/kpfkfolio2691965kpfkrich/kpfkfolio2691965kpfkrich_djvu.txt

I even encountered a very weird guy who owned and played a national guitar who was eventually written about by none other than Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer, in a long letter the author had composed to the FBI:

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/2860/the_strange_tale_of_solarcon6.html

He had the reputation even then of trying to lure young women into posing for "naturist" magazines ("nudist" beach parties scenes, or "nudists playing volleyball on the beach") and he also had the reputation in certain circles of being a light-fingered type, stealing from people whose gatherings and parties he went to and from acquaintences and friends. One person said a gun was missing after he'd been by. Other people were missing money. Some paranoid types thought he worked for the FBI as an informant. Before I learned all that about him, he had given me an 8x10 photograph of beatniks in Washington Square Park, which he autographed on the back: "To Babs, May you always be in love. Sincerely, Loveable Ol' Doc Stanley." He said he had taken the photo. At the time, I thought he meant "as the photographer", but now I'm not so sure what he meant. "Loveable Ol' Doc Stanley" was his stage name, and he even had a small folk act he performed with a blond woman where they sang old timey songs as a duet and played guitars. They were serious about that act, and even had 4x5 publicity stills made up.

I looked at that inscription once in awhile. But especially then, in that current moment in time, it was such a mock.

You know, I actually ran into him in the Bay Area a few years later when I was over in San Francisco trying to connect with Chester Anderson and the Communication Company, and he walked me around for a few blocks and showed me the very first Free Store the Diggers had brought into being.

(Everybody knows by now that not only the club called Jabberwock in Berkeley but also the Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco had drawn their names from the same Lewis Carroll poem, and the meter the poet struck often echoed that of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner ... yes? Basic stuff. And the club in Berkeley on San Pablo called the Albatross likely took its name from the Coleridge poem. Weren't people more literate then?

They sure were. A fellow I met in Venice, a car mechanic by trade, had named his piece-of-crap, sputtering, and occasionally running Fiat, the car he could never fix, "Harry" after Harry Haller in Steppenwolf.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Haller)

RAND, I'd ride past RAND and sometimes hear the skirl of bagpipes as the LA police bagpipe squad marched and practiced on a large lawn near there.

Trouble in Mind -- Barbara Dane

2010-12-30T19:42:00.000-08:00

2010-12-29T08:19:00.000-08:00

So, screw those underground movies, too. I thought. Some aren't so great. As we rode along the streets I told my friend driving about a really crappy Japanese film I'd suffered through at some student showing, that just kind of went on and on. It was so boring, the projectionist probably fell asleep and couldn't keep track of the reels and mixed them up. So the audience had to sit through an entire reel they'd already seen, with shots of factories and stuff, but because the movie was like that anyway, some long drawn out existential repetitive boredom that was about the long existential repetitive bordeom of modern life, almost nobody noticed.

2010-12-28T21:10:00.001-08:00

The Real Last Date

So Mick was in the area. I was living near Venice and getting to know some more of the remnants of the beatniks in the area and having some adventures. I was having a little trouble finding a job, which I thought would be more plentiful in the greater Los Angeles area and I was living off meager savings that I had hoped would accumulate and help pay for more semesters at college.

I had seen a poster of some "underground" movies that were to be shown, and it was a double bill put on by The Moving Finger (which itself is a line from a poem, "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on" ... the Rubaiyat ... I feel a need to tell you that, and that the line means taking responsibility for your actions). A double bill of "Freaks" and a Kenneth Anger film "Scorpio Rising".

I'd been seeing a lot of arthouse films in the area at that time, "Woman of the Dunes" and some Japanese films at UCLA so I was happy there were going to be some films close by to see.

So I think I met him at the theater and we sat together to see "Freaks" which was wonderful. I'd seen it before, and thought it was great, worth re-seeing.

And then the extremely weird Anger film. Now I realize that people all have their own individual experiences when watching films. But the Scorpio Rising was uncomfortable with all the Christ images, homoeroticism and bikers and Bobby Vinton singing "Blue Velvet" ...

and another song called "Torture", a hokey little song that when placed in this context of visuals was just a little creepy to me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuXZy6TkiqQ

so I was getting uncomfortable watching this, as it was just a very different sort of film .... and once in awhile I'd glance at Mick sitting next to me and he was ... he was just sitting there watching all this like it was a movie! Quite casually watching this and seeming to enjoy it immensely. Which made me more uncomfortable, you see.

And the scene at the very end, and thank God the movie was at its conclusion, the scene where some weird leather guy stands with his legs apart over a traffic cone .... that was a long held shot, and Mick turned and gave me this really creepy smile ... you know? And I was thinking oh shit, now what?

(I'd hoped that was the concluding scene, but it WASN'T! That film went on and on, it seemed awfully, unbearably long for a twenty minute film)

The lights came on and people started rustling and standing up ... Amazingly I saw a woman I knew seated a few rows down, and I bolted down and asked for a ride home.

You know, I'd just broken up with my boyfriend and I just thought it would be nice to have someone to go to the movies with. But as we putted along that evening in some kind of little foreign car, with the windows down, I decided I didn't mind not seeing that guy again ... neither of them. And I could justify not being around Mick quite easily, as I even recalled the time he had been a bit rude to my mother.

2010-12-28T20:43:00.000-08:00

You know, my family tried to be nice to Mick because he was my guest in the house. One time I'd arrived home and my mother had actually let him go to my room and take a nap because he was tired from driving. He was still asleep when I'd arrived late in the afternoon. He was actually driving a car with a small trailer behind it, an open trailer carrying a small load of some of their band equipment all covered with a brown oilskin tarp and roped tightly down.

2010-12-28T20:28:00.000-08:00

Ieri, oggi, domani by any other name

So it's maybe still 1965 now, maybe early 66, and everybody's going through a lot of changes, they're growing their hair long and facial hair and wearing different kinds of clothes and the war is escalating. I was still in the vicinity of my parent's home and Mick stopped by again, this time driving a pink Cadillac. I wasn't home when he arrived, I saw the car parked across the street as I walked back to the house and thought somebody in the neighborhood must be buying cosmetics. And Mick was there on the couch waiting for my impending arrival. So we chatted and he was wearing a seer sucker suit but with thin pink stripes. He pulled out a ringbox, a deep very expensive looking blue velvet box, and set it on the table. I picked it up and opened it to see a beautiful emerald cut diamond ring ... I think it was a diamond, or a clear white transparent stone that flashed an occasional dazzling yellow as if powered by a miniature sun embedded in the stone sitting atop immensely shiny gold band and bezel. My sister walked in as I was examining the ring, and I said, "Oh, this is so sudden!" as a total joke because I knew it was for someone else. He'd just bought it and was going to give it to his girlfriend, Marianne. But truthfully I was quite amazed as that was a most valuable piece of jewelry.

And I started thinking about things, you know. Because in the few times I was out exploring with Mick, it always seemed like I was the one holding up the conversation about all the interesting things, and I was at that time a very very shy person. But I figured what the hell. I used to talk with him about some of the musicians I knew. Frank Zappa ... who didn't have too much of a following then ... and when I mentioned Stone Poneys Mick asked me to introduce him to Linda Rondstadt, like he wanted to go out with her. I said, "I'm no pander." But word got around, I guess, and they eventually got together.

2010-12-28T19:39:00.001-08:00

So, it's still 1965 (I think it's 1965), but it has to be summer, because summer is when the single local theater would show "foreign movies". And Mick came out to where I was staying in Claremont to my parent's home. We sat around on the couch for awhile, and decided to go to a movie, and checked the single listing for the single movie theater in town aptly called The Village Theater. There was one choice and he decided we would go see a foreign imported film with Sophia Loren called "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow".

I went off to change into something more suitable for a "date" but only at my mother's and sister's insistance. I still rebelled, and though I wore a tan sheath skirt I was wearing a blue work shirt, which horrified the ladies when I came out. And I was horrified that my mother, who should have known better, had decided to offer Mick a bottle of beer and he had actually accepted it and was on the couch casually sipping from a bottle of my mother's own Miller's High Life ("The champagne of bottled beer").

Mick liked Sophia Loren, you see, that's why we went to that film. The only thing slightly unusual that happened was that the popcorn vendor was my arch rival in high school, the girl who not only had a job in this small town but who was awarded every single available scholastic award and scholarship. I didn't think I'd run into anyone I knew on a quick trip to a small movie house at night in a small town. And she was surprised to see me in town, as I wasn't living there any more you see, and asked for an introduction to my friend. And I hated that town so much, and everyone in it, so I said, "This is my new friend from England, Linnie."

Then we went home and Mick drove back to Los Angeles. The film was not memorable, and in reading about it just now I figured Mick and I probably liked different parts. He probably liked the prostitute part and I am fairly certain I preferred the black market cigarette part.

2010-12-28T17:58:00.000-08:00

In late 1963, I had visited the Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco, which was located right in the heart of North Beach, a short walk down the alley behind Vesuvio's Coffee House which was next door across the alley from City Lights Bookstore.

I knew of the owner Muldoon as his ex-wife Bernie lived in Claremont. So I wanted to see his gallery.

In 1964, I had Muldoon's home address at an apartment in North Beach and impolitely went there to see him, he politely offered me a cup of Yerba Santa tea and apparently his gallery was closed and would not reopen until after the trial. "The trial?" I asked ....

http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/thirdpage/busted2.html

I'll tell you a secret now that I've told no one else. I got to know Mick Jagger a bit a very long time ago. Like friends, we would pal around and go places, not very often, but once in awhile. To a movie. Or two. Out to eat. To a gallery. Nothing people would find very interesting.

When I first met Mick, I made a ridiculous first impression (as I usually do). A group of friends and I had decided to go to hear this new group the Rolling Stones over in San Bernardino in 1965. Tickets were five dollars. So there were benches kind of like a football stadium benches, with empty space behind them. Suddenly as we were sitting there, my friend said, "Oh, my purse!" and she noticed her purse was missing, must have fallen through the cracks down to the walkway far below. Someone would find that purse and steal it, so I dashed down the stairs into the hallway and ran towards the purse ... when I saw some uniformed guards kind of looking at me and starting to walk towards me like I was an opportunistic thief stealing the purse ... and I was pulling the purse towards me by the strap and I got it in hand and was at last holding it ... and the cops were walking towards me now ... and I was explaining, "This is my friend's purse, honest!" And the cops were walking faster towards me and I bumped into someone, who had longish hair, and I turned and thrust the purse into that person's arms, and said, "Hey, Linnie, here's your purse!!" Just then my friend appeared in front of us and skidded to a halt, and looked at the person holding her purse, and she said, "Oh, my purse .... THANKS! .... Wow .... hey .... helloo ...." like she was starting to flirt. I'd handed off the pass to Mick Jagger. He was out walking around checking out the crowd I guess. I didn't know who he was.

Last Date
(Also an instrumental by Lloyd Kramer, so you can play that in your mind as you read along)

http://s0.ilike.com/play#Floyd+Cramer:Last+Date:137815:s11801830.8123311.87716.0.1.6%2Cstd_143071d0ab4a84eaacba2b1db8fd8968

So I eventually got to know Mick Jagger a little bit, though I sometimes called him Linnie as a tease. Anyway, we talked about everything that was current or we found interesting. Music mostly, the haps, gossip, politics, books, etc. And I had small passing familiarity with show biz and radio and tv and such, enough to fill a thimble, really. But I wanted to show him there was something other than the Plastic America that I suspected he was being treated to on the circuit. I wanted to show him what was left of the beatniks. Like a living history tour.

So I think it was 1965 and the Vorpal had reopened and had the Kama Sutra exhibit reinstalled back in place and I was in the Bay Area for a bit, and "Linnie" appeared so I took him on a tour of North Beach. This was back in the days that he drove himself places. So he drove us over from Berkeley in a rental car, we saw the Vorpal, City Lights, Vesuvios, and walked through China town, where we stopped and looked at curios and where we stopped and had a small meal.

I ordered won ton soup and all he said during the meal was "You're going to get fat" (which ticked me off, because that was a snotty thing to say, especially when it might be true, and also in part I had ordered a bowl of soup as I planned to pay for it myself and I hadn't much money). Then I walked him all the way down to a little Chinese museum in China town and we went through that looking at the small exhibits, and then on the long walk back to the car, I suggested we stop into the Vorpal again to see the Boise sculptures as they were so rare. Which we did do.

And I was still a little miffed, and Mick was still ignoring me and lost in conversation with the clerk who was probably was trying to pick him up, and I peered at the tiny statuary and said, "Hey, these aren't very expensive, are they?" (Maybe I misread the teeny price tag of $400, or I had a speck of dust in my eye and thought I saw a decimal point), so I gathered three of the little pieces up and carried them to the counter and asked Mick if I could borrow some money "til I get home and get my allowance". Mick blanched. Of course we didn't get any of those statues, but I was strangely satisfied.

I'm fairly certain this was 1965.

This is the exciting world of rock and roll as I knew it.

Next time I'll tell you about our next "date", where we went to see a movie that Mick picked out himself. Bring your own no-doze.

(Or you can listen to Last Date by Sandy Bull. I kinda lied when I said I hadn't told anyone this story. Sandy thought it was funny.)

(1.16.12 In re-reading this, I realize I did not pick up the small sculptures. There were small signs on the display area asking people not to touch the delicate sculpture, like a museum's commands, so I had to beckon a person standing by the wall and point to them. I was, however, allowed to touch and even encouraged to touch and play the musical instrument Ron had fashioned which was also pushed back to a wall, as it tall as I remember)

2010-12-27T19:30:00.000-08:00

Well, I used to know Frank Zappa in the far distant old days. Most of my early memories of him basically involve him coming over for a visit at my home and what would happen. He was a familiar figure in our home and he felt welcome and at home there. He glanced at a pile of incoming mail we always held on top of the television 'til my Dad returned from work. Frank spotted the little return label on one of the letters, a distant relative of ours writing from far away, which read CDRE Jim Guy, U.S.N. Our relative was a commander in the Navy, and I told Frank he'd never become an Admiral because he had risen through the ranks as an enlisted man, and that was as high as he could go in his career without going to Annapolis. So now he was thinking about working at the Pentagon. Frank thought the name so funny ... "But his name sounds so ordinary .... a GUY" .... and he even knew another "Guy" named "Guy". Frank at that time was writing a song about "Mr Clean".

http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/pid/6759734/a/Cucamonga.htm

Jeez, these are the ancient of days. Was I ever really that young?

2010-12-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, in 1957, I heard about the successful launch of sputnik and I even watched the satellite arc through the night sky for several evenings through a pair of binoculars.

On December 14, 1962, at Mirasound Studios in NYC, John Hendry Blair (Johnny Cymbal) recorded his self-penned, "Mr. Bass Man", for the Kapp label ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZkar0wMypE

In 1964, The Holy Modal Rounders wrote a parody of Mr. Bass Man called "Mr Spaceman" which was funny as hell:

http://www.lyricsvip.com/The-Holy-Modal-Rounders/Mr.-Spaceman-Lyrics.html

In 1966, some Hollywood squareballs named the Byrds got hold of the idea of "Mr Spaceman" and made a truly terrible recording by the same name which became a big hit for them. So bad it was, I was tempted to not link to that dreck here, but I will.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzkU_ckRXHY

In 1969, I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon on television in Berkeley at the Chinese scholar's house.

In early 1970, I read aloud from "Of a Fire on the Moon" for a radio broadcast on KPFA in San Francisco.

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/enews/2009/july/moon.html

In 1979, Tom Wolfe wrote a book called "The Right Stuff" an account of the pilots who became the first astronauts.

In 1983, a successful movie was adapted from the book, "The Right Stuff". A fella I knew back at the time of the moon walk snagged a bit part in that movie.

In 1988, I met and worked with astronauts and scientists who have since become famous in science. Funny, isn't it? I'm just trying to put some order in my life today.

2010-12-26T21:30:00.000-08:00

In Los Angeles, because entertainment is an industry, everybody knew somebody who was on television, in the movies, or in commercials, or who were on records. Or you'd run into these stars everywhere it seemed, or at least anyplace that they happened to be. And somebody (consider them a member of the audience when spotting the star) always recognized them and said, "Oh, look, there's so and so, the one who (is on TV in such and such a show, usually calling the actor by the character's name he'd made famous) or that movie ("You know the one I mean"), or in commercials (and they could recite the actor's lines about whatever product), or on record (and they knew at least a line of a song the person had currently made famous).

Now that Captain Beefheart manager I told you about before. He went to school with and knew the children of a man who had a famous underwater television series. They were such close friends, they'd even given him a pick of the litter, a St Bernard puppy dog.

Lucky bastard.

But not only THAT .... just imagine this incredible stroke of good fortune from sheer propinquity to Hollywood. When the Beefheart manager was but a teenager and wanted to ride motorcycles, who was it who taught him how to ride?

A real life motorcycle policeman. And not just any motorcycle policeman, as was soon pointed out to me, but one who rode very well indeed. In fact, he could wire a short piece of chalk onto the handlebar grip and ride his Harley Davidson around an oil barrel leaving an uninterrupted chalk mark, all without putting his foot on the ground.

Imagine that! And to thrill you more, this motorcycle policeman had appeared on an episode of "You Asked For It". That was a weekly television show where people wrote in with strange daredevil requests ("A viewer from St Louis, Missouri writes in saying, 'I've heard about a man who can drive his convertible blindfolded. Are people pulling my leg or is there really such a man?' And Art Baker, the host with silver hair and sometimes small checks on his sports jacket he wore out into the field, would assure the viewers that there is indeed such a person, and they'd show a film of the guy driving in a convertible down the freeway blindfolded). So the television show honored the request by televising the stunt in action.

That story alone should make you hold your chin in your hand as you shake your head in disbelief and say "Damn!" Yes, even the local policeman was a television star in Hollywood.

On this show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZorF_YUWLM

So even when you were stopped by the police, and the cop was writing out a ticket, you could imagine the credits rolling over his head.

2010-12-26T20:22:00.000-08:00

The theater was near an appliance store that in the evenings had a large neon white star on a sign out front. At that very same theater where I'd watched the Saturday cowboy matinees and assorted serials, one summer under new management they began showing foreign films. I saw the "Red Balloon" there and also Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast" each of which made a major impression on me even as a child and both remain to this day two of my favorite films.

2010-12-26T19:34:00.000-08:00

Not only was I a daredevil bicycle rider as a child, I had an artistic bent. As but one small example, I drew a color picture of Sparky the Firedog and they showed it on television, all through Los Angeles, on a major broadcast by Fireman John.

I also watched the Sid Cesar Show with my parents. And I would write fan letters to Imogene Coca on large lined pieces of school paper used to practice handwriting, a faint green in color with an inch between each line, using a different color crayola for each letter. One time, someone from the studio called and asked that I send in another letter. So I did. Unbeknownst to me, the staff would tease Imogene Coca mercilessly about these fan letters, which she was convinced the show's own staff of comedy writers were writing themselves just to give her a hard time .... and one time they even worked my fan letter into a skit on television. The guy who called and spoke with my mother way back then in the 50s was named Woody Allen. My parents thought the situation was hysterically funny. But the humor of it was above me. From what I understood from their conversation, as a kid, I kind of thought those tv writers and even Imogene were making fun of me, and I silently swore revenge. So, on one level, I said to myself as a child, maybe I can even write jokes for television someday. Not bad for a six year old child, hey?

And I got to meet some celebrities right in Compton. One was Polly Bergan, a singer, whose family lived in Compton near us (her sister and my sister were the ones pretending to babysit, remember, before meeting friends at Metrick's Market and sneaking off to stand around outside Johnny Otis's club to hear Big Jay McNeeley play saxophone).

Another was Captain Jet, who I had to travel to another town with my parents to meet and shake hands with and do the Zooom moooz hand jive. And I even met the man who broke the sound barrier in the 1940s, Chuck Yaeger, whose brother ran a Cadillac dealership in a neighboring town and who had invited Chuck out to meet the folks in the hopes they'd buy a Cadillac. Onstage at the local movie house right in Compton, Lash La Rue dressed all in black from head to toe, from black hat to black cowboy boots with a black satin shirt and black trousers in between, would do lariat and whip tricks. Ca--rack! And one time, Monty Montana came on a Saturday to the movie house and he rode his big white horse onstage, and his horse reared on his hind legs and Monty took off his hat and waved it in the air!

But meeting Rin-Tin-Tin himself was the best. The absolute best! I even got his autograph, on a postcard they'd made up in advance, like a dog had put his paw on a black ink pad and pressed it onto the postcard. Someone else had even signed his name for him, "Love, Rinty".

2010-12-26T18:35:00.000-08:00

People always tend to think of Compton now as a crowded urban area, because that's what it has become. When I was a kid there, people knew other people by sight. My sister would point out Charles Mingus walking down the street, and he would be wearing a Chinese hat woven from straw (we called those "coolie" hats back in the
50s). He lived in kind of a funny looking house on stilts. Which was good because the area flooded quite often back then. One of the streets I lived on there ran so heavy with rainwater one year, I watched neighbor boys go down our street in a canoe. I walked into the flood waters, up to my chest into our big backyard, because I thought I heard our cat Maggie crying outside. She was inside as it turned out, and I was scolded for getting so wet.

When the rains came like that, later in a field about 10 blocks away a pool of quicksand would develop.

The street I lived on at that time was quite close to the Los Angeles River, not that that made a difference in the rainy season because the river came down our street. On a corner a few blocks away, a donut shop opened, and I was there for the grand opening when a trapeze artist in a sparkly blue bathing suit swung back and forth in the hole of the immense donut. Actually she came on second. A small black boy had climbed the ladder first, he couldn't resist, and made a few quick short swings back and forth before he was removed from the trapeze. The Big Do-Nut eventually became Randy's Do-Nut, and a Los Angeles landmark of sorts.

The concrete walls of the Los Angeles river were steep, but as a daredevil child I learned to ride my bike at an angle down the wall and go all the way down from the top to the bottom. I just couldn't ride my bicycle back up the wall.

2010-12-17T21:24:00.000-08:00

Goodbye to Don Vliet

I first discovered Captain Beefheart was someone I knew when I heard a song from his album being played on the loudspeakers in a record store in Berkeley and they played it on request from a customer, and Beefheart was already kind of famous by then. I didn't know Captain Beefheart was that someone I had known some in my past. And my previous brush with him was quite limited. But as I knew the person who acted as major domo and manager for the Beefheart group, a person I brought into the mix myself, a trustworthy and eventempered sort who said he wanted a career in show business, I have an anecdote about Capt Beefheart.

The Captain and his wife Jan tried I think to escape what they saw as the madness that was Los Angeles music biz by moving far into the Northern Coastal reaches, where as the folk song aptly has it "North Coast, the wild coast, is lonely..." They'd moved farther North than that, even up past the Lost Coast, onto a little promentory, a squiggle on the coastal outline called Trinidad. They chose Trinidad because the place was said to remind them of Mendocino, but also mentioned was that (then, at least) it wasn't as expensive or exclusive as Mendocino. Well, things weren''t going well for them there. They were nearly starving by all reports as money or royalties weren't arriving as expected. And, truthfully, having a history of metro living, they were quite unsuited to the kind of planning needed to survive much less ease the rigors of rural coastal living. They hadn't so much as pulled in a stick of firewood for the cold rainy winter months and had they remained much longer, they in all likelihood may have soon fallen ill if not frozen to death.

So there might be some difficult characters in show biz, see? Anyway, the major domo/manager was as I said a pragmatic sort when dealing with odd or unusual behaviors and he played some sort of role in rescuing the couple from the inclement though scenic Trinidad. In his formative years, my friend, the domo, had been forced to take on the role of guiding adult in the family home as his own dad had for years suffered and deteriorated from myasthenia gravis, a nerve disorder. The major domo later went on to tour every body from Manhattan Transfer to Ry Cooder for the record company. He ended up with nearly a lifelong career in the music biz, managing tours for Beefheart, then managing the Beefheart group, then the Beefheart ensemble called Mallard. He had an office in London, at least a house or two in the Canyon, and (accustomed since childhood to the traipings of upper middle class wealth) wore fancy suede jackets. I heard he died a few years back from picking up a virus that attacked his heart muscle from some soil that was delivered for his organic garden.

Keep in mind here, too, that I think the good stories come from the past. Don loved Mendocino, and I even had wandered around the sand dunes with him a bit one day. He loved Trinidad because the dunes and coast were like Mendocino's. I'm glad he finally got back up there to live in a place he loved.

Tonight, I'll raise a toast to all the Trinidaddians and all the Trinimammians.

2010-12-16T10:57:00.001-08:00

Other times John Fahey could be quite witty. He liked an idea I came up with, so he went out on the "Win A Date with John Fahey" tour, a direct rip off from a teenybopper magazine to "Win a Date with Bobby Rydell" (or some such person). He had a sign made up and it would be posted at the concerts.

2010-12-16T10:06:00.000-08:00

Hard to believe now that music once came on vinyl records, small, medium, and large in size. And to listen to music on anything but a radio, that meant acquiring a record player. In those old days of 64, all anyone with ears wanted was a MacIntosh amplifier and preamp as the clarity was so remarkable. You could spend a ton of money and buy one assembled, or for a lesser amount of money MacIntosh offered a kit with parts that you could assemble yourself.

All to listen to the New Lost City Ramblers warble,

"Here's an old lady hanging out the wash
And now she's hanging a macintosh"

Chris Strachwitz likely couldn't afford the new UHER tape recorders that folk loricists from universities used for some of their field recordings and oral history projects. They were smaller, more portable which meant more easily transportable, and resulted in astonishing sound quality. Those were very expensive items. Almost nobody could afford those. Eventually Frank Zappa had one.

2010-12-14T16:20:00.000-08:00

That summer of 64, I also went to a concert featuring "Mississippi John Hurt" at some coffee house on San Pablo, I believe it was the Cabale. Chris Strachwitz was there recording the show on a big reel to reel stand up recorder and everyone had to be quieter than normal. Only snapping fingers for applause in that beatnik-style coffee house. Mississippi John Hurt did a different style of "Candyman" than Dave Van Ronk or the later Donovan version. And by 1964, Hurt had been performing that song quite a lot during the folk music craze (He first recorded it in 1928!) "Candyman" is a naughty little tune if you listen carefully to the lyrics, but the alternating bass line is what caught me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMG_6xa0qRA&feature=related

In hindsight, there is something a little weird about a teenybopper girl smiling to what sounded like a harmless little ditty when an old black man was singing about the size of his penis and sexual prowess. John Fahey thought so even at the time.

And John occasionally shared his views on the matter, from events which he said he'd observed, or from witnesses or first hand accounts, and from the amount of data he'd acquired, it was as if he were gathering evidence for some future treatise. He had a long string of stories about Rev Gary Davis, for instance, who toured regularly on the folk music circuit. All of which would be quite funny in the retelling, but they were John's stories not mine. The problem was that Fahey seemed to be entirely serious about the matter. And he would warn me away from these "pervs".