Anyway, we call ourselves the CoDependents with Pete on guitar and vocals, Iris on guitar, balalaika, vocals and percussion and me doing fancy flat-picking and Le Hot Club-style clarinet.  Iris writes haunting songs in a  Jillian Welsh vein.

We have a gig-demo CD, and I’m interested to see what kind of trouble the three of us can get into.

[Pictured here is the very year, model and color mine was. BTW, it cost $1777 out the door in 1966]

The Year I Rebuilt the Valiant

Hey, asshole, get off the road, your rings are shot!” were the actual words the biker used to convince me to rebuild my 1966 Plymouth Valiant. I know that sounds like a pretty big cave-in on my part, but he was a pretty big biker.

He’d been eating my smoke all the way down spiritual, twisting Laurel Canyon Road until he could pass me, which he did just above Sunset Boulevard, yelling and snarling and giving me the finger. I was lucky he wasn’t a Hell’s Angel. I considered it an omen.

My life right then was at a low-water mark. My ladylove (and partner in a house we’d bought together in the Hollywood Hills) had left me, my rock career had tanked, my bank account was empty. My student deferment was the only thing keeping me out of Viet Nam, and that was about to end.

But until it did I had to keep driving the ’66 Bermuda Blue Valiant with the maroon driver’s-side replacement-door and roped-down hood. It had over 100,000 miles on it, had never been serviced and smoking was not its worst habit, by far.

Nothing sucks like driving a car that is both unchic and decrepit in L.A. But since I couldn’t afford new wheels I had to do something about the Valiant. The problem was I knew nothing about cars and car repair. I was a member of a sub-section of the population not known for caring how things work or keeping them working: male, pre-law, Jewish.

And yet I wanted to do this, i.e., rebuild the Plymouth. And it was not just because I needed transportation. I wanted to be able to say things like, “Your exhaust manifold is loose,” or, “You’ll need a cherry-picker to get that engine outta there,” and know what I just said. I hated being dissed on the road and not understanding the insult. Worse, I am a hothead, and I hated not knowing what to say back.

I had a resource. Warren. Warren was a retired “salt,” an ex-Army tank driver, construction worker, machinist, gandy dancer, jobs that require using one’s back and hands. Which is not to say Warren hadn’t learned to use his head, too.

In fact, I know he thought of himself as a mind- over-muscles kind of guy. Whenever he’d hear me grunt with strain he’d look at whatever I was doing, bray like a mule, and say, “Muscles are for dummies.”

Not that he didn’t have them. Muscles, I mean. Warren was built like an old-fashioned fullback: thick, sinewy ropes connected his head to his body so that his upper limbs seemed to start at his neck. Popeye forearms and powerful hands spoke of years of picks and sledgehammers swung in short arcs, as is necessary in mining and railroad-tie spike-driving. I once asked him if he’d played football in school.

“Well, since they didn’t have no organized teams until the sixth grade, I guess not,” he’d answered.

In spite of his curtailed education he was a current events freak and had been one for so long he could probably qualify as a history freak, too. The small shack he shared with his wife across the road and down in a gully was bursting with books, newspapers, periodicals and any other non-fiction media he could lay his hands on.

“I was a Wobbly before the Russian Revolution,” he told me, fishing through his wallet and proudly showing me his I.W.W. card.

I’d never met a Wobbly, an Industrial Worker of the World, before, and I was impressed.

“Took some balls to join, didn’t it?” I asked.

He shrugged, but I could tell he was surprised I even what he was talking about. His blue eyes twinkled behind the thick lenses of his “seein’” glasses (he had another pair, very dark, that he couldn’t see out of; Warren was legally blind) and he sucked in the little rivulet of saliva that would always form at the corner of his mouth whenever he got excited.

“For a while there, we had enough members to scare the life outta those sumbitches up in Washington,” he said, winking at me conspiratorially, “you bet we did.

“But I unjoined when Comrade Lenin and Comrade Trotsky took over and tried to get our union to become Bolsheviks. I could see where that was goin’ and I didn’t want any part of it.”

He reminded me a little of Harry Truman right then. He had the clean, square lines of Truman’s face, and his rimless “seein’” glasses focused the sunlight into bright patches under his eyes, just as “Give-’em-Hell” Harry’s did.

“Nosiree. That’s where I disagreed with Big Bill Haywood. He was the Union’s leader, y’see. ‘No sir,’ I told him, ‘you can be a free-thinker and still be an American.’ That’s what I said then, and it’s what I say now.”

He also said he’d be glad to help me with the Valiant, but that I shouldn’t be surprised if it needed to be, well, rebuilt.

I was ecstatic. Up until then I had avoided even using the word, let alone bringing it into a sentence that included me and the Valiant. I half-wished the biker were there, so I could say something like, “It’s not the rings, dickhead, it’s the rocker arm panel (I’d seen that parts description once, by accident), so we’re gonna rebuild the engine.”

And so, one hazy L.A. morning, we parked the Valiant in the dirt field next to my house, jacked it up and put it on blocks (wooden blocks, because concrete blocks can break while you’re under the car, and then you’re just another chuckling auto shop teacher’s story about someone who didn’t take his course).

You could almost hear the neighbors groan when they saw all four wheels of the car leave the ground, because they also knew that moody, Jewish, pre-law draft-dodgers weren’t likely to be handy with tools, and cars up on blocks in front yards may be fine in Georgia and Mississippi but not in the Griffith Park section of Los Angeles. I am sure they prayed every night for Warren’s continued robust health.

You’ve got to understand one or two things about Warren: As I said, he was almost blind. Also, because of some speech impediment or habit, he talked a little like Walt Disney’s Goofy. What he said was almost always clever, but the presentation was sometimes a little comical.

It also may help to understand that I was, as I have said, a monumental hothead with a quick temper and a big mouth, “full of sound and fury, etc.,” but full of shit.

So, what the engine-rebuilding process might have looked and sounded like to the casual observer was Goofy the Dog telling Donald Duck how to build a spaceship.

But the partnership worked, and Warren and I became good friends as a result.

Warren would sit ramrod straight in a kitchen chair that I would set next to the part of the car I was working on, and say things like, “That hose is going to be held onto the pipe with either a spring clamp or a screw clamp. Which one is it?”

“I don’t know,” I’d probably say.

Then he’d say, “It’s a spring clamp; even you would recognize a screw clamp.”

Then we’d go across the street and down into his gully to a rusted-out 1932 Model-A Ford that served as his toolbox, to get a special pliers for removing spring clamps.

This process took time, but I had plenty of that. Also, it was entertaining. For one thing, the tool we’d be looking for almost always came with a story.

“I got these pliers when I was pouring cement for FDR’s Redwood City aqueduct,” is the one that came with the spring-clamp pliers.

“Now, Franklin Roosevelt,” Warren said, looking up from his rummaging, “he was sly dog. He never let the right hand know what the left was doing. The Redwood City dam wasn’t built anywhere near Redwood City, y’know. It was built in Wyoming, a thousand miles away.

“Old Roosevelt, see, he couldn’t get Congress to give him the money for the project in Wyoming—people were still bitching about Teapot Dome; you know what that was, don’t you?—so he renamed the project for Redwood City, in Oregon, raised the money and built the dam in Wyoming.

“Here it is,” he said, holding up the spring-clamp pliers and cackling with glee over FDR’s little hijinx.

Another thing: finding and using special tools for special tasks turned out to be a real confidence builder for me, because it made so many more jobs do-able.

But mainly, special tools brought me closer and closer to the amorphous fraternity of people who can do things with their hands. I loved being able to say, “I think we’ll need a half-to-quarter-inch swivel-drive to get to that tie-rod,” and know what I was talking about.

One day, when the last mount bolt was finally off, and the engine had been pared down to just the naked block sitting inside the motor well, I actually heard myself say to Warren, “We’re gonna need a cherry-picker to get that sucker outta there.” What a moment.

There were other, slightly less glorious moments.

There was putting the water pump back on without a gasket, thereby inventing the first self-contained, under-the-hood, high-pressure car wash.

And then there was the great Pin-bearing Panic of ’73, performed in front of a live audience at sunset, Warren sitting on my lime-green kitchen chair next to the rear fender, me under the back axle, proudly removing the universal-joint while several of my friends watched.

“Son, you gotta be real careful when you get the plate off the joint; you don’t want to drop those pin-bearings,” Warren said, in a loud, clear voice.

“What are pin-bearings?” I said back.

“Well, they’re right under the plate you’re taking off. They’ll look like a row o’ needles, but they’re just stuck in there with grease, so if you’re not careful as a cat, they’ll—”

“Oh, I see what you’re—Shit!”

I saw what he was talking about.

Certainly the best moment of all had to be a warm, golden October afternoon with all the cherry-pickers and pin-bearings and gaskets back where they were supposed to be, neighbors on porches and front lawns pretending not to notice what was going on in the dirt lot at the end of their road.

Orville Wright (I)  was behind the wheel, Wilbur (Warren) was hovering over the open engine compartment, nose to carburetor, ear to distributor.

“Okay, turn ‘er over,” Wilbur yelled to Orville.

Orville turned the key, and…

“Rhurrr-rhurrr-rhurrr,” went the Valiant.

Wilbur held up his hand immediately for Orville to stop.

He did. It took everything he had not to look up and catch the neighbors’ head-shaking and eye-rolling that had to be going on.

But Wilbur was too busy to notice. In a moment, he held up his hand and twirled his index finger in the air.

Orville turned the key again.

“Rhurrr-rhurrr-rhurrr-rhur-rhur-rhur-rhr-rhr-rh-rh-r-r-r-RHOOOOMMMMM!” went the Valiant.

We had ignition! It was only for a moment, and a very rough ignition it was, the car lurching and pitching in place like a cartoon jalopy. But the engine did turn over, so we knew we’d got most everything back in its place, which to me was tantamount to squaring the circle or curing cancer.

Now I chanced a look at the neighbors. The Chinaman pretended to be going back to raking a leafless front lawn, and the two old gals who lived together at the top of the hill made like they were inspecting the roofline of their red raised-ranch cottage. The little knot of kids that had come out of somebody’s living room where they were probably watching TV were guileless in their lack of pretense.

“Run outta gas?” one of them said, as I let the engine die. “My dad said you don’t know the difference between a screwdriver and a chainsaw.”

Warren signaled me to get out of the car and join him at the engine well.

“This is the part you need eyes for,” he said, handing me his homemade timing light. “I’ll crank the engine and you do what I told you.”

He got behind the wheel while I took off the distributor cap to expose the points. (Just saying these things now gives me chills of excitement.)

“Remember,” he reminded me, “you gotta hold the light steady, or it won’t strobe. Tell me when it’s doin’ that.”

“It’s doing that.”

“Okay,” he said, killing the engine and handing me the key, “get back in the car.”

I did. I turned the key, the starter motor turned the engine, the engine turned the crank shaft, the crank meshed with the universal, etc., etc., and we were off.

Several of the neighbors had overcome their skepticism and were clapping. Mac, who lived across the street and up a couple of houses from me and always seemed to be fretting about neighborhood real estate values, seemed to be crying.

As we took off down the hill I saw another “pre-owned”-type vehicle coming at us, left front fender crushed, muffler ruined, smoke billowing up behind it. It was a winding, narrow street, and when I rolled down my window my face was no more than two feet away from the other driver’s.

I smiled and said, “Hey, asshole, your rings are shot. You really should get that fixed.”

Then I sped off down the hill. Even slumped behind the wheel the guy looked pretty big.

Pictured here is my 1990 Martin D41 dreadnought. I bought it about 6 mos. ago from a friend of Pete’s. Yay. Mission accomplished. One bell.

The next time I saw Jerry after the truck op I told you about (see “Truckin’ with Jerry,” four posts back) was at this dump somewhere in LA. He and the rest of the Grateful Dead were renting a big old wood frame rooming house in a seedy part of city, but that’s all I remember about it’s location and architecture. This would have been sometime in 1965.

Someone else besides the band rented rooms in the house: Stanley Owsley. At that time Owsley was the biggest name in LSD R&D and distribution, at least in So. Cal. I did not know who he was at the time, and it wouldn’t have made a difference if I did; I was already committed to ingesting only the best product around: Window Pane, Orange Sunshine, Purple Haze, et al.

Again it was my friend Lonnie Feiner who greased the skids for this visit with Jerry, tho’ I didn’t realize yet there were skids to be greased; the Dead were still in pupa stage, tho’ emerging ever faster toward adulthood. But Jerry was a nice, unpretentious guy, and he seemed glad to hang with Lonnie and me. I don’t remember a whole lot from that nite, tho’ Lonnie tickled my memory a bit in our last phone conversation.

I remember bringing my guitar, I think a Fender Mustang but I’m not sure, to the party. I’ll come back to this later, and then, if you would help me, please, i.d. the model from my description, I would send you a PowerPickers flatpick as soon as their out of the mold: ross.alp@verizon.net.

I’d just gotten it, the guitar, fresh out of the window of Eagle Loan, a pawnshop in downtown LA, and I was really proud of it. I’d wanted a red Strat(ocaster), but the pawnbroker didn’t have one right then and convinced me that the beige instrument he did have exuded more quiet confidence than the garish, flamboyant one I’d thought I wanted. So, beige Mustang(?) it was.

Anyway, it’s the axe I took to the Dead’s dump that nite, and the one I was using with the Fender Super Reverb amp I’d also just bought and was now breaking my ass schlepping up a flight of stairs. Super Reverbs have four ten-inch speakers and sound great but they were very heavy and clumsy, which fact was brought home to me big time when I had my own band a couple years later, and I had to carry it across parking lots and up and down stage stairs and venue back entrances.

Anyway, we plugged in, Jerry, Lonnie and me, tuned, fired up a joint and started playing a 12-bar blues, the instrumental music meditation everybody who’s ever played pop/jazz/folk music knows ¬¬¬¬and loosens up with.

The tempo Jerry set was a little too soulful [translation: slow] for me, but we played on for at least a half hour, which I now see it was a harbinger of Dead jams to come. For me it was an average “pick”, meandering and repetitive. But finally we put our axes down and signaled each other with slow, soulful nods of approval that it was a successful jam and passed the joint around again.

I mentioned that Jerry’s tone seemed to be cleaner and clearer than mine, and he said yes, he’d noticed that. What I actually said was, “I sound like hammered shit.”

“Let me see your guitar, man,” Jerry said. He took it, gave it a quick once-over and handed it back to me. “Man,” he said, “you may be the first guy ever to try to play Rock n’ Roll with Bluegrass strings.”

“So? I said.

“Man, bronze doesn’t conduct,” he said. “You’ll never get enough output to drive an amp with bronze strings.” He took a long toke on the joint and handed it to me, index finger to index finger style. “And big, fat strings have nothing to do with Rock. You still think playing with heavy strings is macho? No way, man. You gotta get Super Slinkies” [really light-gauge strings] “with unwound thirds” [the third string on a guitar, used for bending notes] “to rock.”

I‘m sure I blushed, because I knew what he was talking about. In Bluegrass you use an acoustic guitar, big, with a high action, and you string it with jumbo bronze strings for maximum volume and tone. It gives a big (for acoustic guitar), warm sound. The downside is that the high action and big strings make it hard to play. (One of the reasons Doc Watson is as good as he is that he’s big and strong. He’s also monstrously talented).

Part of why I put the big strings on the Fender was that I already had them, even tho I knew better. In those days you couldn’t play any kind of guitar and not know that Ernie Ball Super Slinky strings were the real deal. But I didn’t say anything, just took a really deep, defensive drag on the shrinking joint.

“You can’t bend heavy-gauge strings,” he went on.
[Bending strings, i.e., changing the pitch of a note by stretching the string, is a signature sound of Rock ‘n Roll.] “Check it out on mine, man. Try to ‘wow’ (another word for bend) the third string as much as you can.”

We exchanged guitars, for me a gesture of defeat and supplication in memoriam to my resistance to learning Rock ‘n Roll, an idiom I loved but that scared the shit out of me to try to play. Now I was facing both the threat and the opportunity to do so right there.

On Jerry’s guitar I immediately starting playing licks I’d never played before. They came to me automatically. My hands went to the right notes on their own.

“Try that with those trans-Atlantic cables you got on yours,” Jerry said. “Also, there’s something else funny about that guitar.” He took a toke. “Lemme see it again.”

“You’re already holding it,” I said.
“Outtasight,” he said. He put it up against his own guitar, face to face, fingerboards kissing. “Dig, man,” he said, nodding at the necks. “Look at the difference between the two fingerboards. In fact, the whole guitars.”

He didn’t have to say any more. The neck on my guitar was at least two inches shorter than his, nut to saddle. My whole guitar was almost a hand’s width smaller than his.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“Man, it’s a three-quarter guitar, man. You’ll never get the sound you want—you do want to play Rock, don’t you?—with this.” I probably nodded, but I was smarting from all this. “This is a shortened scale,” he went on. “The pickups won’t resonate right with the strings unless the scale is…
I dunno, I don’t understand it, but I know I’m right. Ask anyone.” He paused. “Man, I think they sold you a girl’s guitar. He looked at Lonnie. “You gonna hold that J forever?”

“So, what you’re saying, man,” I said, trying to recover, “is that my guitar’s too small, my strings are too thick and I’m a fairy. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Let me see your flatpick.” He took it and handed it right back. “What the fuck is that, tortoise shell? You need a thin flatpick, like this,” he said, showing me a wafer no stiffer than a matchbook cover, “so you can, you know, flog the strings like a whip.” He showed me on his guitar.

I was impressed. You can’t play full chords really fast with a Bluegrass pick. They come out in a spray of notes, a little like flamenco. I mentioned that, upon which he seemed to meditate for a moment.

Then, “Hey, I wonder what that would sound like? Flamenco rock, I mean. I’m gonna write something in flamenco rock.” Then, to me: “Heavy, man. Mucho obbligato. Here, man, take this pick; keep it.” It had “Grateful Dead” on it. “Tell you what,” he said, getting up off the floor.

He went over to a bunch of cases on the floor, opened a couple and came back with a Martin D-28 (your top-of-the-line Bluegrass guitar) and a gleaming Gibson banjo. (BTW, if your wondering where Lonnie was in all of this he had fallen asleep right after the jam; grass did that to him). Jerry handed me the Martin. “Wanna pick?” he said, Bluegrass talk for “let’s play.”

We picked for at least another hour, him on five-string banjo, me on his Dreadnought guitar. He was a little sloppy, a little out of practice, I guess, but authentic and exciting, anyway. He was always pretty good at your basic hard-charging Earl Scruggs three-finger sequential torrent of notes. You could tell he’d once put in the time and work necessary to master that technique, and, in his case, with a missing finger on his right hand, to boot. [I did a blog on this, but I don’t want to look it up right now. You can find it in the index.]

And God knows, he had the right axe: a Gibson Mastertone [model you tell me], probably from the late ‘Forties, with a raised tone ring and whatever were the right strings. Ya think that instrument might have been the right length?

So for a few minutes I was back in my comfort zone. But I’d wandered into Rock n’ Roll land and broken my hymen. And they say the Titanic was a nite to remember.

Keith was playing on a BBC Orchestra recording (Keith Moon?!
Studio gig? BBC Ork? Yeah, right. OK, I said it was apocryphal)
when the conductor stopped the music in the middle of a rundown
and said, to the percussionist, “What can you do to give me a
little more magic?” As I heard it, Keith said, “Abracafuckin’ Dabra.”

Here’s another Brit percussionist story, I don’t remember if it was
about Keith or not, and again, hereay.

The BBC Orchestra (is there such a thing?) or some other British
recording association, was running down the charts for some legit
piece or another. At one point the music called for a GP, general
pause, an intense rest to inject extra drama into a piece with
sudden, unexpected silence.

But the percussionist somehow or other misread the chart, and,
when all the other musicians suddenly stopped playing, right in
the middle of the rest, hit the triangle, hard, like you would in
a marching band. rest.

The conductor stopped conducting, the musicians stopped playing,
and everyone just glowered at the percussionist.

He glowered back, and without missing a beat, said,
“Dinner is served.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

I met Ralph about 40 years ago, in LA, when he was the traveling percussionist with Harry Belafonte and I was lucky enough to be in the band playing with him, et al, on the tracks of one of Harry’s many albums (vinyl days, you understand). So I have a few personal Ralph stories in my repertoire. Here’s one of them, briefly.

(This is Ralph and me at his home in Mt. Vernon, NY, July 4, 1975. Arthur Ashe is about to win at Wimbledon, and the crowd at Ralph’s is about to go wild)

Shortly after I came East to New York, in 1975, and Ralph was showing me the town, he got a call to go out to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Jersey to overlay percussion on some tracks Creed Taylor was producing of/for someone, I think it might have been Patty Austin, but it could also have been George Benson or neither of them. But when Ralph and another friend, Arthur Jenkins, and I got out to the studio Creed and Rudy told Ralph that actually they’d run out of all but one of 24 tracks and that was earmarked for (illegally) double-tracking the strings to further enlushen a sound that was already pretty rich, tho not necessarily very interesting.

They apologized to Ralph for promising him a gig when there wasn’t one, and Ralph was characteristically generous about letting them off the hook. But before he did, this is what went down:

“No problem, guys,” Ralph said, “don’t worry about it, shit happens. But I’d like to hear the track, anyway,  long as I’m here.”

Creed said fine, asked Engineer Rudy to put up the track so we could hear it in the control booth. We listened for awhile, then Ralph said, “Gimme a headset and I’ll just play along with the track in the studio. What can it hurt?”

Creed shrugged, Rudy shrugged. I guess they figured they owed him something for the trip he’d made from Manhatten to Buttfuck, NJ, and maybe they figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to humor him, since they did use him on a lot of their product. Who knew?  It would be good for the relationship, race relations, whatever.

“But you do know we’re out of tracks, Ralph,” Creed said, as Ralph was rummaging around in his percussion kit, “just so’s you don’t…” But Ralph was out of the control booth and onto the studio floor with his kit before Creed could finish. He grabbed a stool, took it to the to the center of the studio where there was a mic and a headset, put the headset on and motioned to Rudy with a twirling finger to run the tracks.

The tracks began to play, very big, lots of instruments. I don’t remember anything about them, which tells you something right there, I guess that there might not have been much to remember.

Anyway, Ralph put on the headset, perched up on the stool, seemed to listen ferociously,  like an an air traffic controller might do as he lands three or four big liners at the same time. Then, after maybe the first verse, he picks a tambourine out of the kit and starts playing it. I don’t remember what he did with it–actually, I do, but it would be too hard to try to put into words,  except maybe in a music arranging class–, but it suddenly got everyone in the control booth’s attention, like a hooker on a troop-train.  The tracks came to life. Their whole focus changed. The string and horn figures seemed to now make more sense, now, like they actually belonged in the arrangement.

The playback stopped abruptly after another verse, and Creed or Rudy or both hit the talkback. “Uh, Ralph, why don’t we try a take? It might make some sense to have it in the can in case we need it.”  For this, please read: “Shit, get this on tape, and fuck the strings.”

So they recorded Ralph and his tambourine in two takes, sent out for pizza and we all kissy-faced and talked shop or pussy or anything except the incredible show this ex-numbers-running street-ball point-guard from Harlem and his calypso rhythm tshatchki had just put on, which brought verve and soul to some tracks which were dying without them.

Ralph didn’t say anything about it on the way back home, which was in keeping with his style, but he had to be thinking something like: “MutherFUCKer!  I just took out a big bad string section a bunch o’ white guys payed good money for and now can’t use and made it look like a blindfolded layup. Kiss my ass.”

Anyway, that’s my RMD story for today, and now I have to go to an AA mtng.

Needless to say the simple existence of the tape shocked, then pleased me since the music on it was not that bad and the fidelity surprisingly good. It was apparently one of the last sets this band ever played, and was recorded at the Cabale Creamery, a cabaret in the flats of Berkeley that became the center of the folk/roots scene in the East Bay at a time when that music was gestating into what would become an important part of the Rock Revolution.

The recordist may have been Eric Thompson, a local guitarist who, incidentally, may have copped our s arrangement of “John Hardy” for a band he was, the Black Mountain Somethings (I’ll look it up later) with Jerry Garica et al. The Cabale showcased such performers as Janis Joplin, Jim Kweskin, Toni Brown (Joy of Cooking), and, I think, Jerry and others whom I’ll insert here as I think of them.

I gotta go and sheetrock my bathroom, now, but I’ll be back to elaborate on what I’ve posted here.

I’m also doing my “classical” (baroque, really) thing, continuing to play with my own woodwind quintet, the Quints, a couple other wind ensembles and an occasional one-shot, like the trio performance I did a couple weeks ago with two other members of the Quints. It was for the National Committee on Child Poverty, or something like that, at the Roosevelt in NY. It was 8 in the morning, so that was a bitch, but it also included a moment with Yankee outfielder Nick Swisher, the NCCP’s jock celebrity, which we got by playing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” behind him and a bunch of starfuckers (including us) who were trying to get to him. He cracked up when he realized where the music was coming from and and came back to take pix with us, while function biggies looked on. Only fair, since some of us (me) got up at 5AM to do this for for free.

Scott Hambly sent me a cd of something he, Pete Berg and I did as the Redwood Canyon Ramblers 45 yrs ago at the Cabale, a club in Berkeley. It’s better than I would have guessed, with me singing Ruby way too high, but on key and auguring possibilities for the future, never realized. (The Doc Watson days were yet to come, and when they did I forgot about singing for many yrs. thereafter. Bad idea, but there it is/was.) I will try to figure out how to get this onto the blog. Try this link, http://www.computerhope.com/clouds.mid Redwood’s Last Stand, tho you may have to download it one tune at a time, but it’s not hard. Don’t know if this will work, but I did manage to find a photo. That’s Scott on mandolin, Pete on banjo, and me on what’s left. Best bet is that it’s from 1962. I was back in LA by ’63.

In other news, did I mention in the last post that I finally placed a couple short storie with Prick of the Spindle, a literary review? Felt good, even if it wasn’t quite the Paris Review. If you’re interested you can go to their eponymous website, look for the March 23rd issue and go to Non-Fiction. It should be there. It was last time I looked. One good chunk of fallout from this is that I’m sending out rewrites of things I’ve done in the past to reviews that were the least bit encouraging when I sent stuff to them last fall and winter. It’s got me starting to write again, which can’t be all bad.

In the meantime, I guess that’s it for April/May for Power-Pickers of the ‘Sixties.

Anyway, it’s another thing I learned from Doc Watson, at his feet,  in my living room, eat yer hearts out, country guitar addicts. He used to stay with me when he played in Los Angeles. This here is  also a test for me remembering how to link to YouTube, in this case with  Country Al Ross performing a Doc Watson Song. This was done Sat before last, March 12,  at the Pleasantville Circle of Friends. You might want to turn the bass up a tad on your audio delivery system.

Anyway, I have a personal Dr. John story. It’s entitled High and Inside with Doctor John and I posted it sometime last year, what month I don’t remember, but I’m pretty sure about the title.

In other news… Stanley Owsley died over the wknd.  For most of you this is a name you’ve never heard of,  or if you have,  it’s probably from your parents, and, anyway, you don’t give a shit in the first place. But, boy, was he big in the ’60′s.  Owsley was the refiner and distributor of the purest, smoothest, safest LSD that ever came down the mellow brick road.

It was  called Sunshine or Orange Sunshine or, most often, just Owsley, as in “I did two Owsleys over the weekend and I’m still ripped.”   He deserves a whole post, and I’m going to give him one, but in the meantime go to “Truckin’ with Jerry/Driving Lessons” in these pages, for a whiff of the man in another life he lived.

And, once again, I apologize for abandoning any and all traces of currency with my posts. I can only continue to plead semi-professional pre-occupation. With performing. For little or no money, but lots of EBU’s (Ego Building Units).  I’m beginning to think maybe I have only enough creative energy to fuel one side of my brain at a time, and right now it’s  the right side. Or is it the left? I can’t  remember. Anyway, more TK.