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{{#seo:
|title=Stories by Mazzeo
|description=A selection of audio recordings by James Mazzeo 1944-2022
|keywords=mazzeo, psychedelic lightshow, psychedelic, 1960's, road manager, Neil Young, The Band, Rolling Stones, Steve McQueen, Andy Warhol, Mothers of invention, bob dylan, psychedelic artist,
|image=File:Mazzeo and Margo.jpg
|image_width=200
|image_height=300
}}
=== Recordings: ===
=== Recordings: ===
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v7WQsqHtQjloCYAzk1hNt_s5WHYQpHzF/view?usp=sharing Margo St James]
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1REilrpSZG6ZQWGAmjPEIRpIuoJnugI00/view?usp=drive_link Last Waltz /Ducks (Malibu, Santa Cruz Neil Young, The Band)]


[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h2d1qHdpuK4IiE3msMC4-nCzltSn9lJw/view?usp=drive_link CrossTown Bus]
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/11dBi98xo5mcXMlKGHFVr7LMhU38KBZGK/view?usp=drive_link West Coast Experimental Pop Band (mid 60's Cross Country Psychedelic Rock Tour)]


[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_uNs4IYZCWcNMBRcYddk5xNpqUibJcZl/view?usp=drive_link Coast Guard Years]
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ciMp6XQxf7Po1eYmHFiX3a2I_qG3Bkfz/view?usp=drive_link Broken Arrow Ranch (Neil Young Ranch in Santa Cruz Mountains)]


[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ciMp6XQxf7Po1eYmHFiX3a2I_qG3Bkfz/view?usp=drive_link Broken Arrow Ranch]
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k-I2KktEEQPLnu0h0_MfyYUwELlZKVJF/view?usp=drive_link Cross Town Bus (Boston Psychedelic Night Club)]


[https://drive.google.com/file/d/11dBi98xo5mcXMlKGHFVr7LMhU38KBZGK/view?usp=drive_link Experimental Pop #2]


[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NAjsBkWDuaQ86lSAMvXLzzinOUk4UGS6/view?usp=drive_link House on Fallen Leaf Lake]
<gallery mode="packed-hover">
File:Mazzeo and Margo.jpg
File:Druid Heights Hot Tub.jpg
File:MazzeoFog.jpg
File:ST JAMES INFIRMARY 1963.JPG
File:MaznJim.jpg
File:TheDuckswitholdcar.gif
</gallery>


[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CYcNydTzAva2DvKjkam_dsOSFPc4M5Sh/view?usp=drive_link Son]


[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v7WQsqHtQjloCYAzk1hNt_s5WHYQpHzF/view?usp=drive_link Margo]
==[[Transcriptions]] Excerpts below==
 
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1REilrpSZG6ZQWGAmjPEIRpIuoJnugI00/view?usp=drive_link Last Waltz Ducks]
 
== Transcriptions ==


=== Last Waltz Ducks ===
=== Last Waltz Ducks ===
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this Rancho Shangri la and it was a really big old house on top of a hill and it had a
this Rancho Shangri la and it was a really big old house on top of a hill and it had a


little corral down on the bottom when you first went in the road there's a little corral
little corral down on the bottom when you first went in the road there's a little horse corral there, where they filmed Mr Ed.


and the horse corral.


So I was talking about Rancho Shangrilla. And Neil and i were living down the road
So I was talking about Rancho Shangrilla. And Neil and i were living down the road
Line 77: Line 86:
bought it.
bought it.


So we moved down there and I'm down there and we did the Zuma album cover there
=== West Coast Experimental Pop Band ===
 
When I got out of the coastguard and stayed once again with Margo at her place at the time we were hiding Ken Kesey in her house.
and we'd go shopping for furniture, old antique furniture, and they'd fix up the beach
 
house and then I heard that The Band was living just down the road.We became
 
friends out on '74 CSNY tour because The Band, and when The Band didn't open for
 
us the Beach Boys opened for us. That's how big the CSYN tour was. We were
 
literally the American Beatles and that tour made more money than any other tour
 
had ever made. We broke history. We made 4.4 million dollars on that world tour
 
which was an all-time record back in 1974.
 
I got to be friends with all the guys in the band so I went down and said, "Hey--Neil,
 
I've got this house. And he said, "Ah, it's cool." So I sort of hang out with these guys
 
and then one day I went over there and then one day Robbie Robertson was there
 
and Robbie said (in those days I was "Sandy Castle", that was my rock 'n roll name),
 
"Hey Sandy, we are putting together a tour and it's going to be our last tour together.
 
They were calling it "The Last Watz Tour" and we are going to go all over the place
 
and see all our fans everywhere and just do one last show for everybody. It's
 
probably going to take a year and we know we can't afford a guy like you. But we
 
really like the way you were out on the road and we really think you'd be the perfect
 
guy to represent us because we have lots of friends all over the world and they are
 
going to come see us and we are going to be busy rehearsing and doing band stuff
 
but our friends and family are going to be there and you are the perfect guys. To
 
meet them, take care of all our friends, get them to the shows, and do everything.
 
Make sure everyone has a great time, as well as being our tour manager--road
 
manager. That would be your function. And Robbie goes, "Look, " (Robbie talks out
 
the corner of his mouth like a gangster) "Look, we know we can't pay you as much as
 
CSNY paid you but we can give you a hundred dollars a day for every day that you're
 
not on the road and then we're out on tour we'll give you $200 a day, seven days a
 
week. So that's $1400 a week in 1975-76. That's a lot of money. CSNY, I think I was
 
getting $300 a week. I think I got off that tour with about $4,000 in the bank. That
 
was the world tour. Robbie goes, "I know I can't pay as much." They offered me like
 
four times as much without even knowing it. And then he said, "But what we can do,
 
because you are going to be representing us, we will give you the finest suite in every
 
hotel that we stay at, because that's where our friends and family, you can invite them
 
to this really fancy suite and they can all hang out with you while we're rehearsing and
 
doing stuff like that. So wherever we are, you get the finest suite in every single
 
town, for a year!" I went, "Oh. Well, that'd be good, yeah--that would make for a fun
 
time for everybody. So I went back and told Neil, I said, "Listen, I'm going to take
 
about a year off from you and from what I was doing with Neil. I'd just done the
 
album covers so he was happy and he had other stuff planning Crazy Horse and
 
stuff. So, I said, "I'm going to go work for a year with Robbie and The Band. It's
 
going to be the last tour and everything and that, I told him the whole deal. He goes,
 
"Fuck, they're paying you that much?" I said, "Don't tell anybody!" So he said ok, so I
 
got his blessings and everything and I literrally moved from Neil's place over to
 
Shangrilla because Sahgrilla was this big old--I was telling you--at the bottom of
 
Shangrilla when you first drove in off the road was this corral, right? This lower part
 
of Rancho Shangrilla was flat and then you went up the hill to where the house was.
 
It wasn't a big hill, it was only about a hundred feet high from the lower part. But he
 
drove up the driveway, up to the upper big old, spread-out California Ranch House.
 
But on the end, Elvis Presely had built a whole row of cottages, just like a wing of a
 
motel off of one end of it, and each one was a little cottage with it's own bathroom and
 
everything. I guess that's where his band and stuff would all stay. Each one had their
 
own room and everything. Robbie then gave me the end room out of all the whole
 
rows the end, which looked right down this beautiful canyon out at Zuma beach. So I
 
had this just beautiful ocean view and everything. It was really cool. Down at the
 
bottom where the corral was, before Elvis, then it was a TV program called "Mr. Ed,
 
The Talking Horse" did you see that? Mr. Ed lived in the barn, in the corral at the
 
bottom of the road! It was Mr. Ed's corral and they actually filmed him there with the
 
little house and he'd be coming through the door and talking to Wilber and stuff, and
 
that is where they actually shot Mr. Ed! We were teenagers, when that was
 
happening. And so when I'm living there we had about --I moved in there about the
 
end of <nowiki>''</nowiki>75 and the two of us were going to start to --oh like February of '76, so we
 
had like three or four months before we actually got on the road, just kind of putting
 
things together and everything and Robbie was arranging for the last show that was
 
The Last Waltz on Thanksgiving Day with Bill Graham and stuff and Scorseisie, the
 
film director, he did that film and it was incredible, it was the best rock film, I think,
 
that's ever been made. I designed the stage sets in The Last Waltz. Bill Graham and
 
I, Bill's an old buddy of mine, and he did a whole lot of this of The Band's Last Show.
 
He did a whole lot of CSNY shows the year before, so Bill and I had been out on the
 
road a bunch doing the shows and when we went to do The Last Waltz we got there a
 
week early and Bill goes, "Hey Sandy, come with me, we're going to go down to the
 
San Fransciso Opera Company's warehouse and we're going to pick the sets for the
 
stage for The Last Waltz. You see the chandeleers and the big curtains on the stage-
 
-that's all from La Proviado (Traviata} operas-- "Well, we'll take this, this, and this..."
 
we'd put it all together so but--we had so much before we went out on the road and
 
we grew some pot in Mr. Ed's corral where Mr. Ed had been shitting for twelve years
 
and the ground was really fertile and the plants just took off--they grew like fourteen
 
feeet high and they grew higher than the hedges and stuff. They were like sort of
 
blocking the filming for Mr. Ed and the road--they grew way up above that--all the way
 
down Malibu has like a hundred and fifty cops that just keep patroling. Malibu's a
 
mile wide and twenty miles long and they just have cops all the time--it's the '70s--
 
you-d go to jail for pot and stuff. Our pot plants they just grow so high that you could
 
literally see them from Highway 1! And there is a stop sign right at Morning View
 
Road and the cops had plenty of time just to stop and glance up the canyon and see
 
the pot plants, there were only like two football fields away and everybody's going,
 
"Oh my God, man--we were going to get busted but it was SO good pot--it was just
 
incredibly good pot and we could just smell how good it was and I went, "I'll handle it."
 
And I went down to a craft's store and I bought four hundred dollars worth of red and
 
orange artificial flowers [who?] on wider? stems and me and the sound engineer who
 
actually lived in Mr. Ed's that was converted into a little tiny cottage that our sound
 
engineer lived in and it was in his front yard is where we'd grown all the pot. So I got
 
four hundred dollar worth of big red and yellow flowers on wire. and we just wired
 
them to the plants so all the plants had red and yellow flowers just all growing all over
 
and son-of-a-gun! It no longer looked like pot plants anymore. I thought, "God, you
 
know, I ought to just buy artificial flowers and put them in a plastic sack--bang--two
 
hundred worth of artificial flowers and sell it for fourteen dollars to the pot guys so
 
they could disguise their plants all around the whole United States...
 
Anyways that was a fun little thing.
 
So that's how I ended up managing The Band for that whole year and we finished it at
 
Bill Graham's place at Winterland on Thanksgiving Day. We fed five thousand people
 
and we fed them and I had my mom and my sister come, I sent a limo over to
 
Freemont to pick them up and bring them there and everything. It was like one time--
 
it was like the only time they ever came to any of my shows. And we had a special
 
section for our friends and family and stuff and I became friends with Rodney Wood
 
and Keith Moon while I was The Band's manager and Tony Curtis and Larry Hagman
 
and just all these amazing people and so Woodie --Keith Moon moved in and Woody
 
and Keith and I became really good pals just jamming around. Neill and I went down
 
and for some reason I decided I wantted to get a little trailer because every now and
 
then we would have like Dr. John or these other guys come and use the studio to
 
make their little projects? Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, and stuff. In fact when
 
Clapton was there--
 
Kirk: So Neil had a studio there?
 
No, no. The Band had a studio in Shangrilla and it was a whole studio in one section
 
of the house. Really a nice studio. They'd been there for a few years and so
 
everybody, all these other people would rent the studio and sometimes they'd have to
 
use the "Star" you know would want my place with the ocean view and so I'd have to
 
sacrifice--so we decided that I would just get a little cool little fourteen foot trailer and
 
keep it in the parking lot at Shangrilla up next to the house and I'll go hang out in
 
there. So I'm just doing that every now and then. And I was friends with Woody and
 
Keith and they are just crazy English guys, right? Usually if they're not drunk they're
 
high on something, just having as much fun or trouble as they could get into. and
 
sometimes I'd be sleeping in my little trailer and about three in the morning all of a
 
sudden I'd hear commotion around the trailer as I'm sleeping in there and I'd hear
 
Woody and Keith going, "Oh my God--Oh my God! It's an earthquake--it's an
 
earthquake!" And they'd start shaking my trailer, right? So they'd wake me up--"We'd
 
better wake up Sandy! --The trailer is going to go over the cliff! Oh no! It's going over
 
the cliff! Quick---Sandy! Get up!" And I'd go, "Wha...what...what? and I'd come out
 
and they'd all go nuts and I'd go over to Keith's house and we'd get high for the rest of
 
the night or something. They were really--that was really fun stuff. But then I invited
 
Neil because The Last Waltz was all these famous musicians that always loved The
 
Band, it was their chance, Van Morrison, all those guys, to do their stuff with The
 
Band backing them, right. That was the whole premise of The Last Waltz--the
 
concert film and everything. And Neil did the song "Helpless" in The Last Waltz film
 
and Joni Mitchell and Rodney Wood and then Rodney Wood brought Ringo and a
 
bunch of different people and so with Neil we are back stage for The Last Waltz and
 
I've been gone from Neil for a year, so this was our chance to do a gig together again
 
so I was mostly--I was taking care of everybody else, all The Band friends too, but I
 
was hanging out with Neil and Joni a whole lot, you know. We're back stage. We
 
had a whole room back stage called Le Couquteau the French artist Coucteau room
 
where everyone would go in and snort their cocaine. This was 1976, the whole world
 
was on cocaine in '76. So we are back there. They give me the bag of coke to hold
 
for everybody. Meanwhile Joni and I --everybody's out, the show's going because
 
they don't come out until about the middle and the show's all going on and everything
 
and Neil and Joni are going back there and Neil goes, "Oh! We're on next! Sandy--
 
some coke!" "So I'd go, "Okay, here." and there's a big rock and I'd go, "Okay, listen,
 
I've got to chop it up, you know?" so I've got a mirrers there were mirrors on tables
 
and [ can't hear--coke to a room?] everything all set up. And so I'm chopping it up,
 
right? and Neil's going, "Hurry--hurry" because they've got to get out there, you
 
knew. And I go, "I am, I'm going as fast as I can! Ladies first." I set up Joni a little
 
hit of stuff that was really nice and chopped up like I needed more for Neil, so I get
 
another one and start chopping it up. And he said, "Naw, that's okay. I think I'm going
 
to go." So he just took a big snort and the rocks were kind of still big you know, and
 
they stuck in the hairs of his nose but he left so fast I wasn't able to catch it or
 
anything--[did voogoo gone?] In the movie, Scorcese's doing super hot close ups of
 
Neill, right? which in film is little tiny pictures but in a giant movie theatre, Neil's face
 
is like twenty feet high and twelve feet wide and his nostrils are like four foot circles
 
with big white chunks of cocaine hanging out of them. So Rodney and Scorcese saw
 
the problem and they had to literally take that footage and take it into Hollywood and
 
hand paint each frame of the film--handpaint the coke out of his nose. it took them an
 
extra week and a half to do the whole song, you know. And Rodney came back to
 
me a couple weeks after that, we were off the road and I still have a place at Shanghi
 
still there. And Bobby comes and says, "Sandy--I just wants you to know that I just
 
paid $4,650 for a rock of cocaine that big! I've never paid so much money for cocaine
 
in my entire life! I told him, "No problem." We didn't talk about my first tour but we
 
had fun covering [can't hear---] then after that, the next day, we did The Last Waltz
 
and we're all sitting at the Japansese hotel The Miyake Hotel in Japan town in San
 
Fransciso. It's a really fancy Japanese hotel, I didn't know Japantown over there and
 
each room has it's own hot tubs and all kinds of cool stuff. So we stayed there and
 
whenever Neil and I had been out on the road on all our previous tours and stuff we
 
always had breakfast together the next morning and so we're having breakfast the
 
next morning, after The Last Waltz, and it was a late morning because we had got in
 
a long night the night before, and so we're having breakfast, coffee and eggs and
 
stuff and Neill goes, "So what are you going to do now?" And I'm really happy with
 
The Band, you know, I'd been with them for a year. I got my place at Shangrila and
 
everything. And I go, "What do you mean, what am I going to about..." He goes,
 
"Last night The Band just announced to the entire world that this is their last show!"
 
And I went, "Yeah?" He goes, "So that means they're not going to be playing
 
together anymore." And I went, "Yeah?" And he goes, "That means they're not going
 
to be going on the road anymore." And I went, "Yeah?" And he says, "You're their
 
road manager." I went, "...Oh." [ Laughs. ]
 
He said, "Look, I've got this big hundred foot boat in the Carribean that's moved up--I
 
had to move it up to Fourt Lauderdale. They've got it --I want it rebuilt because down
 
below, it's a 1911 Eighty-five on deck, a hundred and four feet over, all baltic rig,
 
[gaffrig catch?] from the Baltic Ocean, right? and he said they belong to some
 
millionaire down in the Carabean and Europeans, down below you've got modern
 
formica white formica so it could all be kept really clean all down below and
 
everything, very "boatmanlike"kind of but sparse. He goes, "That'a not me." he goes.
 
so we are going to design the whole inside of the boat. It's 24 feet wide and 86 feet
 
long made out of timber that's like the hull was like four inches thick by fourteen inch
 
plank oak and stuff. 180 ton boat. Big big boat. So he said, "It's in Fort Lauderdale.
 
They've got it all hollowed out. And they've sand blasted it. All of the inside. It was a
 
granite hauler orinially before the millionaire put his stuff in it originally it was to haul
 
granite from Norway, where they have lots of granite and they would motor up the
 
North Sea, load this giant hull in front of the whole front of the boat was this big empty
 
hull where they would fill with granite in the center of the boat and then they'd turn
 
around and put up the gaff sails and they'd sail back down because the prevailing
 
winds were blowing that way. And so it was a granite hull. And so the inside of the
 
main salon in the middle of the boat was an inner lining of big giant heavy planks
 
because they didn't want the stone to break through the hull, right? So they had a
 
second sort of loose hull but big enough for giant chunks of granite. And all the
 
granite had scarred the wood, really deeply, like an inch, you know, an inch deep, but
 
the wood was like, three inches. So it had all these scars and stuff. So when they
 
sand-blasted it all the scars were really beautiful so we just all kept that and then
 
designed the whole boat with other wood we got these big slabs from this rancher,
 
wood slabs that we'd made from the redfwood forest for countertops and tables. We
 
bought a big French butcher block that they would butcher meat on and stuff. That
 
was sort of like a coffee table in the main salon the thing weighed about six hundred
 
pounds, it was huge. Everything was big. We went to the Hemmingway museum in
 
Key West and they had --Hemmingway was a hunter, right? He liked to go hunting
 
and he had the world's biggest elephant's tusk. It was like 12 or 14 feet long and
 
about 12 inches in diameter tappering down. Big curved hunk of ivory. Solid tusk.
 
And we bought it. And we put it down in Neil's --Neil took the whole forward third of
 
the boat and then the middle section was like the salon and the galley area and then
 
there was -- it had a brand new Caterpiller engine in it and a captain's room way at
 
the back of the boat. it had like staterooms off of the main salon and stuff. The
 
elephant tusk, we took the hull, it's kind of curved, right? Inside --so we took the tusk,
 
just put it off the hull and made that like a guest bed in Neil's stateroom for his kid to
 
sleep in and something like that. Just this beautiful Ivory tusk. So we had like,
 
treasures, down below in his boat and a pump organ right at the front of Neil's
 
stateroom where it' [sudd--] to the bow--it got smaller right at the very end of it. Not at
 
the pointed end because there was a paint locker and stuff up there but like a four or
 
five foot wall section at the front is tappered to about four foot wall and we put this old
 
pump organ, an old antique one Neill could play, it was really cool. So we left The
 
Last Waltz and went to the Ranch, got everything together and decided to go up route
 
66 for a week or two working our way across the country to Fort Lauderdale with the
 
boat. So we lived on the bus. It took us about nine days to get to Fort Lauderdale.
 
And that was really a fun trip going on route 66 because it was really delapidated still
 
and everything in those days. They still had the old tee-pee section you could back in
 
wherever it was like, pretty cool in the '50's, you know.
 
I had this idea that route 66, they built a super highway next to 66, right? And that's
 
why 66 became sort of like a ghost town that nobody went to because the highway
 
just took everybody faster so it was really funky and it wasn't very prosperous so I
 
thought, "This is where the artist community from Santa Monica all across the
 
country, the middle of the country could just be Art! Sculpters could live in this
 
section-- painters here, galleries and museums living in the old cement TeePees and
 
you know, whatever. I just thought, that would just be an incredible thing, just to turn
 
route 66 because artists love cheap rent, right? I mean, that's SoHo and all those
 
great artist spots that are now very expensive. It used to be the cheapest places
 
around, right? I just thought this is perfect for artists, man. It would just be incredible
 
and the whole middle of the nation be nothing but creativity and stuff. Anyway, we
 
had some pretty good times. Then we went to Fort Lauderdale and this was after '76
 
in November we got to Fort Lauderdale in January. We did Christmas at the ranch,
 
Rodney Wood and people all came up to the ranch for Christmas and stuff. And then
 
right around February we decided to go live on Route 66 and across the country.
 
Kirk: Who went with you?
 
This is Neil and I and a guy who was my assistant out on the 74 tour used to be a
 
ranger up in Tuscadero, used to call Ranger Dave. The guy was really good detail
 
man. Every little detail of everything we had to do, Ranger Dave was on top of it.
 
He's the kind of guy, he worked at the San Matteo memorial park up above
 
Tuscadero (Pescadero?) there's a big park up there and he was a ranger up there.
 
He got famous for picking up cigarette butts off the side of the trail. He was so
 
efficient. So he went with us and the three of us, which is great because we could
 
share the driving. Your driving a forty foot silver Eagle, you know, it's pretty trippy,
 
pretty fun stuff. So yeah, he went with us.
 
We get to Fort Lauderdale and start working on redesigning the boat and Neil had
 
hired all the best wooden boat builders on the East coast. He had a whole team of
 
them. Just shortening the wheel house and just doing all the stuff. When we finished
 
the boat and got it running, Archeticural Digest Magazine did a fourteen page spread
 
of down-below. They didn't say who the boat belonged to, they just showed every
 
little thing.
 
Kirk: What did they name the boat?
 
Yeah, well we named the boat after---the whole boat was named after Neil's family,
 
the whole boat was named The WN Raglan that was his mother's father who was a
 
Canadian birdguide, hunting up in Norther Canada who could call down ducks and
 
call down the geese and stuff. And people would hire him to go bird-hunting and stuff.
 
He was like this world-famous Canadian bird guide and so we named it the WN
 
Raglan, which the nickname for this giant sailboat was "rags" which was the perfect
 
name for a big sailboat, ox-blood sails and everything.
 
But down below, all those little staterooms for the guests and stuff--each one the main
 
salon was name "Pearl". Pearl was Neil's maternal grandmother that was married to
 
WN Ragland, right. So the main salon was Pearl. And then there was "Rasees?"
 
which is his mother and his mother had two sisters, so each of the staterooms was
 
named after the daughters and then there were two heads. There was a head up in
 
Neil's place and then a head in the salon for everybody else to use. There were
 
showers in there and he goes, "What are we going to call them?" And I says, "The
 
head--the heads." And I said, "Well, we've got your grandfather and your
 
grandmother, we got their children, did you have any pets?" And he said, "Yeah, they
 
had two dogs." And I said, "What were the names of the dogs?" He said, "Bonnie
 
Pie and Stinky-poo!" There you go! Perfect. I'll take Bonny Pie and you can take
 
Stinkypoo out there!" (Laughs) So anyway, that was really fun.
 
So we're hanging out and -Oh- while we were there, Neil decides to go buy this 1936
 
Matherson-Trumpy riverboat, because there's inline canaals on the East coast and
 
they made these mahogany riverboats, kind of, houseboats, basically but they are
 
like, two-stories and everything, like a big kind of house, I mean these are about forty-
 
five feet long, it was a nice size, and antique, it had antique curtains and lace and
 
stuff in the windows. It was really cute. It kind of leaked a little but we got the got the
 
bilge pump going all the time. So he bought that and we moved on that while we
 
were working on the big boat, that's where Neil and I lived. And I think Ranger Dave
 
had to go back to California after awhile so it was just Neil and I.
 
So we are in Fort Lauderdale and then one day Stephen Stills has a big mansion on
 
an island off in Miami and he invites Neil and I to come down and in the Matherson-
 
Trumpy and he's got a big dock in his backyard and hang out. So Neil goes, "Let's
 
go!" I was in the Coast Guard so, you know, Neil felt safer than I did. So Neil made
 
me the temporary Captain. So we get her fired up. It's always fired up. The only
 
problem is, it has an electric bilge pump. It didn't have a battery-powered bilge pump
 
so once we unplugged from Fort Lauderdale we had about twenty-six miles of inland
 
canaal to go down to get to Stephen's place which is about three or four hours of
 
cruising at four and five knots and by the time we got to Stephen's we were low in the
 
water. Then it occurred to me, "Oh my God, I'd better check the bilge. I looked at the
 
bilge. Bilges were full. Just full. And I said, "Fuck man, we could fucking sink!" And
 
we still had like six more miles and another hour to get to Stephen's place and I just
 
go, "Come on, we got [can't hear-something?] we gotta go, we just--we may make it,
 
we may not make it." So we get to Stephen's place and we were so low in the water
 
it's almost coming up through the floor boards. The bilge was about three and a half,
 
four feet deep, so it was a lot of water, swimming pool basically. We get there and we
 
were so low in the water, Steve's going, "A-Hoy, there!" "Here take the ropes, get us
 
some tied up along side of the road, we need a power cord! Get a power cord ready!
 
Get us plugged in!"
 
We get plugged in. We hang out at Stephen's place for about two or three days with -
 
--you can only take so much of Stephen Stills so after about three or four days, Neil
 
goes, "Let's go down to Coconut Grove because that's where all the clubs were and
 
all the party time and some pretty girls and everything. He said, "Let's go down to
 
Coconut Grove and I can get us a slip down there." So we did. So we left and we
 
went over to Coconut Grove and we lived in Coconut Grove for about two weeks and
 
we are going up by car, we run up to Fort Lauderdale to check on the boat but who
 
lived in Coconut Grove was Freddy Neil, the singer-songwriter, Fred Neil. He wrote
 
"Everybody's Talking" the theme to the cowboy movie. [Urben Cowboy?] What's-his-
 
name sang it, made it famous, was the other guy [Glen Campbell?]. But Fred Neil
 
wrote it. Fred Neil was a real famous folksinger and it was the guy who actually took
 
young Bob Dylan off of the streets and started introducing him to the clubmembers in
 
Greenwich Village. When Bob first started it was Fred Neil that actually got Bob
 
going, you know, from Minnasota to you know...
 
And Fred Neil writes great songs. He wrote, "I've Been Searchin' For The Dolphins In
 
The Sea", the Linda Rondstat made famous. All kinds of people sang Freddie Neil
 
songs and they were all beautiful hits and stuff. And Freddie was a heroin addict and
 
had his own thing, but he was really a super nice guy. And his best friend in Coconut
 
Grove was Vinny Marty? [Martin?] and Vinny Martin had had a hit in the ' 50s, called
 
"Marianne: .....works down by the seashore, sifting sand...Even little children love
 
Marianne....down by the seashore sifting sand..." That was a huge hit in 1957 or
 
something. And so Vinny and Fred would come over to --we named the houseboat
 
the Evening Coconut, right? So they would come over to the Old Evening Coconut
 
and Vinny--I think Vinny went back to New York--so then mostly it was just Fred Neil
 
would come over with his guitar and Neil and him would sit on the back fantail in the
 
houseboat every evening around sunset, I'd make up a blender full of Margaritas and
 
we'd sit back there and they'd jam together. And Freddy Neil has a really low, deep
 
beautiful velvety voice, just incredible. And Neil has a really high voice and hearing
 
these two guys singing--it was like, Holy Shit, what a combination of voices. It was
 
amazing. And I was like the whole audience, it was an audience of one, me! It was
 
just so cool. Really nice, really cool. And I became friends with Fred and everything
 
and he was a good guy.
 
Send? Neil down at Coconut Grove at one of the clubs one night. I think I had a date
 
or something. He went off to some club. And he met some guy, you know, with a
 
gold chain around his neck, and has really got it--[fingers snapping] and Neil just
 
kinda got into this guy's trip, because it was just not kind of like us from the ranch or
 
anything, and the guy goes, "Let's go down and look at cars!" (because Neil is a car
 
guy). And the guy takes him to this Ferrari place, right? And he's trying to talk Neil
 
into buying a brand new Ferrari. Neil's a '48 Buick-guy. You know? Maybe a '57
 
Caddy if it's a convertable with fins. But he's not a Ferrari , in fact, he had an old
 
1932 Bentley and he got rid of it because it was just a little too sporty. And he
 
started---you know, they're into the blow and they're into the club scene, and I'm
 
staying at The Evening Coconut, and I'm kind of seeing what's happening, and Neil's
 
like really falling for this guy's rap and Neil's thinking, "Yeah Man, I can get a Ferrari."
 
And finally, I just went, "Man, Neil's just turning into this person that's not him, and
 
I've never seen him before, so one morning at breakfast I just went, "Look, I have to
 
tell you something. I've seen you hanging out with what's--his-name and it seems like
 
the more this guy kisses your ass, the more you bend over and smile." And I said, "I
 
can't take it. I don't want to be around it. I'm going back to California. You go buy
 
your Ferrari and have fun with your new friend and I'll just see ya. I'll be back in
 
California." And I split.
 
And I come back and I didn't want to go to the ranch because it's empty, Neil's back in
 
Florida. And so, I'm a Santa Cruz guy, so I phoned Jeff Blackbird? and Bob Moseley
 
from Moby Grape that used to play at the Ark where I had my very first light shows--
 
right? I told you about the Ark and Sauselito when I got out of the Coast Guard. And
 
those were my old buddies right there, Lee Michaels and stuff. But Blackbird lived in
 
Santa Cruz --and still does, and Bob Moseley lived down here and Johney Carviato
 
[spelling?] which is this drummer friend of ours, who makes really beautiful snare
 
drums, he wasn't back in those days, this was 1977, I moved back to Santa Cruz
 
from Florida, and Blackbird (Blackman?) had an old one-and-a-half acre--it used to be
 
a farm, it was that water tower on 38th Avenue, just a block from Pleasure Point. So I
 
still had my little tiny trailer from Malibu. So I went down, I picked up my trailer, it was
 
over at a friend's house, I'd stuck it over at a friend's place in Malibu and I went over
 
and I picked it up and I brought it back up to Santa Cruz and parked it on Buck's
 
property there, and was just getting ready--Buck and Johnny and Mosely--guitar,
 
bass, and drums, were going to put together a little trio and play over the Summer,
 
they were going to call themselves "Buck 'n The Odds" (Buckin' the Odds) and so
 
they said, "Cool man, you could be our manager!" Yeah, it's good, we're all pals. I
 
went, "Cool." So I move right in and it's kind of fun, I'm back in Santa Cruz and it's
 
really nice and I'm going for about two weeks and all of a sudden Neil shows up--and
 
he just drives in. I didn't even know how he found us but he did. And he drives in and
 
I go, "Oh". [Snide voice] "Where's your Ferrari?" and he goes, "Yeah, Mazz. Mazz,
 
I've got to tell you something." He goes, "I don't have many friends that can just
 
come and tell me the truth and how they see things. Most people just want to
 
accomadate me all the time and say yes to everything. You're a real friend. I just
 
have to let you know that I really value that." And I went, "Cool. Good." And he goes,
 
"So what are you guys doing?" And I said, "Well, we got a little three-piece band, we
 
started playing some clubs around town here, you know, Moseley and Blackburn [?]
 
and Johnny Gravianno. And he goes, "So you got, let's see, bass and--Blackburn's a
 
great rhythm guitar player and you got Moseley on bass and Johnny on the
 
drums....Sounds like they need another guitar player." And I went, "Sure!"
 
And so Neil literally moved into Buck's ranch with us, because it was a little apartment
 
off one side and all overgrown and we kind of cleaned it out and he moved in and we
 
drove around town and started figuring out what we were doing and we said, "Well,
 
we like doing these things called "Art Attacks" and so we are just going to just
 
consider this a Summer Surf band. Which is actually going to be an Art Attack in
 
disguise. And Neil goes, "Okay, but here's the deal. We are not going to play outside
 
the city limits of Santa Cruz. We're not going to play Cappatolla. All we did was city
 
limits of Santa Cruz. And they had about five or six live clubs going in 1977. There
 
was The Catalyst, which we never really wanted to play because it was too
 
[organized?] but they had these little tiny clubs. There was one called The Backroom,
 
which was [little off-of-London?] hotels off of SoCal Ave. There's one out on Harvey
 
West Park called The Steamboat, another one out there called The Crossroads,
 
which was a biker-beer bar--but they all had music. And there were bands, there was
 
The Snail Band, which was a local band, there was another band called The
 
Artichokes, and there was one that did nothing but 50's rock 'n roll stuff from San
 
Jose, played over here all the time at the beach and stuff. So there were five or six
 
little clubs that we could play, all just bouncing around. And one day we're driving,
 
one day Neil brought down this '48 Packard Woody station wagon which we made the
 
band car and we'd all drive around in the Woody from town over to Pleasure Point.
 
And we'd go by Twin Lakes, where the habor is, and the lagoon. And i was thinking,
 
"What are we going to call the band?" And we were throwing out all these names:
 
"Thunderhead!" All these different things...
 
And we go down into the Lagoon and there's a duck crossing from the beach over the
 
lagoon and they had a sign right in the road that said "Duck Crossing!" with this little
 
plywood cop and we'd been shouting out all these names and we come down the hill
 
we get to the lagoon and there's a little crosswalk and we kind of slow down and we
 
go "Oh, duck crossing...." and Neil goes, "That's it--Ducks! That's the perfect name!
 
Because in the grocery store and in the bakery shops, all over Santa Cruz at that
 
time in '77, they had big boxes of stale bread with signs saying, "Feed the ducks".
 
The whole town was into ducks! There was even a story about one of our surfer
 
buddies when I was in highschool named Dave Pussinger. Pussinger had this old
 
black Packard hearse. Really sinister old hearse. And Pussinger was about my age
 
and we were all juniors and seniors in high school and surfing at Pleasure Point and
 
Cals[?] Beach.
 
And Pussinger, one day, we didn't really didn't realize right at the time but we found
 
out later that when Pussinger's father was at Duck's Unlimited, right? He was a duck
 
hunter. And he had duck plates on the diningroom table, duck wallpaper, and
 
Pussinger's bedroom: Ducks--his whole--Pussinger grew up with ducks and his
 
parents didn't get along all that well, right? So one day, Pussinger is driving down by
 
the lagoon in his black hearse and this little family of ducks is waddling across from
 
the beach over to the lagoon and Pussinger steps on the gas and runs over and kills
 
six ducks and he's the only old black hearse in town, so it's pretty easy to figure out
 
who did it because there were witnesses. He gets arrested. This is years before we
 
got the band. Many years before. And he gets arrested and it's in the newspapers
 
and everything--"He's a duck killer!" and he gets up in front of the judge and the judge
 
sentences him to jail and says, "A day, a duck." So he had to go to jail for six days.
 
So when we had the ducks when I told them the story about Pussinger, and we
 
turned into "The Pussinger Curse", right? The only problem, in Santa Cruz, when
 
Pussinger killed the six ducks, there was Old Master Mallard [can't hear] he was like a
 
shaman duck. And he put a curse on the town that couldn't be broken unless
 
everybody in town quacked like a duck. And that would break the curse. So the
 
whole Summer thing was for the ducks to get everybody in town to at least once in
 
the Summer quack like a duck to break the curse. So we would have shows--the
 
ducks--and anybody that came with a duck call could get in for free. Anybody who
 
came up to the cash register--we decided to only charge $2.50 at the door because
 
when we all first met each other in ' 66 when I had my first light show at The Ark, that
 
was how much it cost to get in to see the shows, is $2.50. And by that time it was up
 
to four or five bucks, in '77 from '67. But we decided, let's have ten-year-old prices.
 
So these guys are getting Neil Young for $2.50 and so--crowds, just everybody--
 
beautiful girls--and just everything.
 
So we got everybody to quack like ducks at the concert. And we also got Mulligan,
 
from the ranch, who was a recording engineer. We got a truck set up with recording
 
equipment, a mobile truck. So we had Mulligan come down everynight from the
 
ranch up in by Half-Moon Bay, come down and wire up wherever we were going to
 
play in the afternoon and we recorded every single show we ever did for the entire
 
Summer. And I think that we're the only band that ever existed literally recorded
 
every single show that they ever did from beginning to end, we did like twenty-six
 
shows over the Summer. And we have all those records, all those recordings. We
 
kept them all. Neil's doing his archives now and he just had me do a take-off on the
 
Zuma album cover but there is also a duck album too, from the making of the duck
 
recordings. Then we started to pick, just the best take of this one, basically the duck
 
set, but the best of all the different shows, the best recordings to put together for the
 
record and I told Neil, I said, "No, man. What we should do is offer every single show
 
that we did from the time The Ducks started to the very last show. Then everybody
 
could go to every single show and listen to every single show, they'd have twenty-six
 
albums to listen to, you know? So, I don't know where they are at with that, because
 
it hasn't come out yet, but that's what I'm kind of hoping for, because that would be
 
like a truly historic thing, really historic.
 
So that was the -- we moved over by --you know where the museum over off Sea
 
Bright Beach is, with the Whale on the front lawn? Across from that museum are two
 
little cottages right on the cliff. Neil and I rented those. We rented them for $400 a
 
month. We moved out of my traier and out of funky Blackburn's--we called it Duck
 
Landing over on 38th Avenue. We moved off of Duck Landing and he and I got these
 
really cool places right on the cliff. The band would come over and there's a lawn at
 
one of the places right at the edge of a cliff and down off the cliff is Sea Bright Beach.
 
It used to be called Castle Beach in the old days. So we'd set up on the lawn and
 
every afternoon the band would play and practice for that night. First thing--I'm their
 
road manager--so first thing, they'd go, "Well, tonight we want to play The Crossroads
 
Club and I'd phone the Crossroads but they're all booked, right? They're booked.
 
They've got bands that are going to play that night. So I call The Backroom or The
 
Crossroads or whatever clubs they told me they wanted to play at, I'd call the club:
 
"Oh, The Artichokes are playing tonight." I'd say, "Well, give me their phone number."
 
So I would get their phone number and I'd go, "So you guys are playing The
 
Crossroads tonight, huh?" And they go, "Oh yeah." And I said, "Uh--how much
 
money do you think you're going to make tonight?" And they said, "Are you guys
 
playing in town?" I go, "Yeah". They'd go, "Not much!" Because everybody's going to
 
be to see us, right? And I'd say, "What do you think? A hundred bucks, a hundred
 
fifty bucks? How much?" And they'd say, "Yeah, if we're lucky we would make a
 
hundred bucks." I said, "I'll pay you $150 not to play. We'll take your spot tonight."
 
So I would pay them $150 and I'd say, "You're our guests, you know. Come and hang
 
out, have a good time." And so that's how I would do it, everyday I just phoned a
 
different band and they'd say Backroom tonight, or The Steamboat, a different place
 
everynight. And we just bounce it around. And I'd just phone whatever band that was
 
playing and we'd bump 'em, pay them not to show up, kind of farmers growing
 
soybeans or something.
 
Kirk: So the band would decide where to play the same day that they were going to
 
play.
 
Yeah, in the morning. They wouldn't even tell me until the morning, right? But
 
nobody's going to say no, because it's Neil Young and he's legendary in '77 he's got a
 
big rep. And the whole town's going nuts, everybody is quacking like ducks at the
 
concerts and stuff. Not everybody knew that if they just winked and said, "Cool
 
Duck." they could get in for free. Just people who we'd say, "Here, just tell the
 
cashier "cool duck" and wink and then [can't hear: Then they'd duck call?]. So on the
 
tape you hear people quacking like ducks all the time in between the songs. We'd
 
drive down the road and people would quack at us as we drove across town. India
 
Joe's was this restaurant in town that was a late-night restaurant so after the gig we
 
would go to India Joe's. But we never had much money. We'd be lucky at the end of
 
the night if we each made $2.50 each. They only held like a hundred fifty people,
 
seventy-five to a hundred fifty. Two hundred people was a big crowd. That's only like
 
$400 for Mulligan, and the soundtruck? and you know--we'd be lucky to end up with
 
$200 each at the end of the night. So we'd go to India Joe's and people would know
 
that we went there after the gig so that place was just rockin' like at one in the
 
morning [can't hear next word] because they were doing such good business, right?
 
Because we were there everynight, that the owner of the place, I'd tell 'em I'd say,
 
"Yeah, you know, we're a little short on money..." And they'd say, "Don't worry about
 
it!" I said, "Here's our check." He goes, "Just sign it 'Ducks'". And so I'd just write
 
"Ducks" on our bill and the guy started pinning them up by the cash register. He had
 
a whole wall. He said, "Yeah, it's deductable!" It was a business investment because
 
his business was making so much money from everybody else. So we ate for free. It
 
was really fun.
 
Then two motorcycle guys, near the end of the Summer, we were going pretty strong
 
and living at those places on the cliff. But we're off doing a gig one night and these
 
two motorcycle guys, a couple days before that last gig, went to the Crows' Nest with
 
guns and laid down everybody in The Crows' Nest, robbed The Crows' Nest--they
 
robbed The Sky-View drive-in movie theatre. They were on a binge, they were two
 
little outlaw motorcycle guys. They robbed the drive-in one night. They robbed the
 
Crows' Nest the next night. I think they did two or three robberies and then one night
 
they came over and broke into our house and stole a bunch of shit from us--BUT--
 
we'd had all Summer here, you know, and we'd go down to Union Grove to The
 
Guitar Shop and Neil would look at Guitars, and look at stuff. Just goofin' around
 
during the day. We bought bicycles. We'd ride bikes across town. it was really fun.
 
One time at Union Grove, right at the beginning, when we moved into the cliff house,
 
we went to Union Grove. When we'd crossed the country going to Miami, going on


route 66, we stopped in Nashville, Tennesee and hung out with Bobby Charles and
I got out in August of '66, from the coastguard. I bought a 1949 Packard for $100 as I got off the coastguard base and there was a car lot with a '49 Packard. It just didn't have any brakes. It made it over the bay bridge pretty good. I got to Margo's and she was up on top of Alpine Terrace, way on top of this hill with this little streak of giss fifteen blocks down to Market street in San Francisco, down on DuBois street.


Ben Keith, Neil's steel guitar player. Bobby Charles is a friend of ours who wrote
So I park up there and I park it over and the next day, Kesey's there. I got this really cool flat there? with a kingsize bed and a swimming pool. She was like my sister at that point, I'd been living with her since 1963. My whole four years in the coastguard I was living with her and three other $1,000-a-night call girls. I was their little sailor-artist-love toy and everynight I'd think, "Wow! I wonder what all the other sailors are doing tonight."


"See Ya Later, Alligator". He was a song-writer's songwriter. Everybody Bobby
So the second day it's parked up on the hill and no problem. Next day I hop in and I think I'll go down to Fishman's Wharf or something, I go to the street, I turn right, down Dubois, straight on down, start to go down--big heavy car--no brakes. Zero brakes. and it has a transmission but you could either push these buttons or use this weird shift. Packard had weird kind shifting devise where you could automatic or stick. It got caught between that and neutral.


Charles, Bob Dylan--everybody sang Bobby Charles' s songs. He's legendary, and
So I'm going down this hill in a three-ton vehicle, seventeen blocks and there's stop signs and crosstraffic and all kinds of shit, and I couldn't jump out of the car. It weighed so much I knew it would kill somebody--be out of control. Going down seventeen to twenty blocks straight on down this hill. A cable car would have a hard time getting up and down of it. So I just had to ride it out. I screamed the worst swear words I possibly could out of the top of my lungs and rode it and steered it. And somehow, I made it through every intersection without hitting anybody.


he's a great guy, Cajun, from the swamp. We all hung out. We hung out there for
=== Broken Arrow Ranch ===
He he he bought the ranch and he and his his roadie from South America, came up to kinda get settled into the ranch. And they're driving up Skyline Boulevard and they see these two really cute hippie girls, and they pull over. Neil's got one of his old cars you know what I mean because he'd been doing pretty good he'd have some hits in '69 and '70 and the first song he ever had that made him a million dollars was a song called Broken Arrow. So he called the ranch Broken Arrow Ranch. And, so he picked they pick up these two hippie girls and and Neil goes, hi.


about a week-and-a-half in our bus because we were living in a bus across route 66
I'm Neil Young. I just bought a place down the road. You know, girls wanna come on down and see the place. And they said, oh, hi, Neil. He said, see, you just moved into the neighborhood.


and there was an empty lot next to the Hall of Fame Museum in Nashville. There was
And they said, yeah. I said, well, have you met Sandy Castle yet? And he goes, Sandy Castle? I changed my name to Sandy Castle. And so it's a commune, you know, McCracken became Mossy Grotto, and I became Sandy Castle.


just this empty lot. We didn't even ask permission, we just parked in the empty lot
Right? And we're building this artist retreat. I don't know why we did it, but when we left Boston to head to to head out to up to the property to the the sawmill, just as, we're getting out of town, Matt just looks over at me and goes, boss. Boss and Bossy Grotto. Bossy Grotto is six hours there.


and Ranger Dave snuck an extention cord from the museum plug outside over the
That's that's that's my name now, Mossy Grotto. And I went, oh. And then I thought about Castle Beach here in Santa Cruz, which is where Seabright Beach is, but it used there used to be an old castle down there. You know, remember the old castle? They were selling hot dogs out there and shit.


fence and into our bus and we had electricity and just moved in there. It was a big
Well, in my senior year, the place was empty. In 1962, they had emptied it out because the state took it over and they were gonna they bulldozed it down. But for six months in my senior year of high school, it was empty. And so all me and my surfer buddies, we broke into it, and that was where we would crash and sleep when the surf was good. It was like our first beach house.


fancy bus and the museum just thought it was another rock or country-music star
And so when he said, I just thought of the sand all the sand on the floor in that old castle where I've been to the, you know, and I was Sandy, Sandy Castle. So that's how that happened. So Neil, they said, come on. You gotta meet Sandy. You know?


[can't hear--something like "let us alone" ?]
There's the oh, this is great. There's this whole commune. You know? Right? So they came up and and Neil came over and, you know, said, hi.


So we're there, and we go shopping for guitars there in Nashville and we get turned
I'm your new neighbor. You know? Neil. I said, yeah, Neil. I said, I did a light show for you guys at the arc, you know, a couple years ago in '6 in '66.


on to an opportunity to buy Hank William's guitar and his kid, Hank Williams Jr., who
He goes, you're at the arc? I said, yeah. I did. I I did the light show. And he goes, goes, wow.


does pretty good too. But as Hank Williams Jr., as a kid, he was a problem kid, and
You know? I never met Neil because he he wasn't talking to too many people in those days. Steven and Neil and Dewey, like, were the three big guys in the band and and and Bruce and, Bruce and, Dewey, the drummer. Bruce Bruce was a bass player. And, but the drummer and the bass player and I with the ark we smoked a lot of pot and had a really good time and became friends with them.


his father was on the road and he died young himself, and Hank Williams Jr.
But Stephen was like up on this high horse you know and Richie was you know the other high horse singers you know, they were out in the front. And apparently, they the the arc was the first place that Buffalo Springfield played when they left LA. They were playing they were real popular with the whiskey. They were doing good. And Steven said, let's go up to San Francisco and see how we do outside of LA, you know, and start playing up there.


destroyed most of his father's guitars. So much so that one of the old-timer friends of
So that they came up, but Graham couldn't get him in there for about three days. So for the first three days, they just hung out at the ark all the time and and Moby Grape was just starting. And Moby Grape was doing five part harmonies. Five guys in the band, and they were all singing and doing these incredible harmony things. Buffalo Springfield, Neil, they had told Neil down in LA that Steven goes, I'm the guitar player.


Hank's grabbed this Martin, that Hank had, and just got it out of the house, so he'd
You know? He goes, I'm the guitar player, and your voice sounds like shit. So, Dewey so, so, what's his name? Richie. Richie Fury.


already detroyed a couple of Hank's [stock?stuff?] . We got that guitar and we bought
=== Cross Town Bus ===
And I'm, you know, I'm headed back to California. And he goes, well, you know, Frank just got us this theater for the whole summer in New in Greenwich Village. To me, Greenwich Village was like the holy grail of Yeah. Being wanting to be a beatnik, you know, and stuff. He said, yes.


a decoy guitar at Union Grove. It was an old Kay? that needed refinishing It was
We're all staying at the Chelsea Hotel. He was I got my wife and kids, but we we got enough room. We'll fix you up at the place in the living room. You know, come on and hang out with us, You know? And, hang out in in Greenwich Village.


beautiful. The guy did a beautiful job refinishing it. They only wanted fifty bucks for it
So I, you know, it was only $70 to catch a plane to New York and, you know, a hundred and 30. Yeah. That was a so I said, cool. And, I went to New York and hung out and moved in with those guys. And I was I lived with them for about, just almost not quite maybe a month, maybe five or six weeks.


but it was so pretty. We bought it for $50 but they said, "This would be a good decoy-
Not not a really long time. But it was fun every night. We we played, you know, they played all night long. They got up at ten in the morning and rehearsed from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon every single day, seven days a week. That's dedication.


(duck decoy--right!) and so we got it and when we set up the beach house in Neil's
Zappa was a control master. You know, you could literally raise one finger and the band knew what to do. You know what I mean? He had it everywhere. On his music and how how it was produced.


livingroom I put the guitar stand and I put the decoy right there in the livingroom so
He had two drummers, Jimmy Carl Black and Billy Mundy. So he had two different two different drummers. And, So he had two different two different drummers and, and a pretty big size band. So I went there and hung out, and Zappan did all these crazy things. He'd go down to the down to the fisherman, wharf section in New York and buy a basket full of live lobsters.


when the guys broke into the house they stole Neil's guitar, they stole the Kay but in
And then he'd take this basket of live lobsters up on stage with him. And, while he's doing his his show, at at some party, just, like, pull out the basket and pull out a live lobster and literally rip it apart and throw it at the audience. You know, you know, this is kind of a day sort of a lot of people in the audience are on acid and stuff, you know. It's just like, woah. Lodge to pieces, finance.


his back-bedroom closet, burried under some clothing, was Hank William's guitar, so
Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes they they actually showed up with with, like, ponchos and stuff because they knew they were gonna get something thrown at them from from Zappas when the word got out. You know? So we had good fun like that.


they missed that! So our decoy-thing worked! But it bummed out Neil that we got
But Paul Butterfield hung out a bunch, and he and I became really good pals. And then, watching the show at at night, you know, some clubs and stuff. And, he was intrigued with me because I had the, you know, like, this first psychedelic light show in the Midwest. And, he knew these three kids these three guys in Boston, wealthy kids of wealthy successful people. They wanted to build a psychedelic night club in Boston.


broken into but that's what pretty much ended The Ducks, he went back to the ranch.
And, he said he goes, oh, yeah. I know these guys. You'd be perfect. They're looking for somebody like you. You know?


But the Ducks ended. I went to court and testified against the two guys and
Psychedelic nightclub. And, so he got it. He he made the introductions. I got the gig, and New York up to Boston and checked in with those guys. They got me a place.


identified my stuff.
And I met James McCracken who later on became a really good, close partner of mine. What was he? He was doing posters. He was doing posters? For the club.


So I became friends with the district attorney who later became a judge, which is
Like art posters? Yeah. Art posters. Yeah. The club posters.


pretty cool. Anyway, that's pretty much the story of The Ducks, that's pretty good.
Okay. And then, also, while we're building the club, my friend Jimmy Phillips here from Santa Cruz, he does the blue hand and all that stuff, and he did all this late skateboard barfing guts. Sorry. Yeah. Well, Phillips and I, we'd surfed in high school together at Pleasure Point in all around Santa Cruz.
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