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[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1REilrpSZG6ZQWGAmjPEIRpIuoJnugI00/view?usp=drive_link Last Waltz Ducks]
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1REilrpSZG6ZQWGAmjPEIRpIuoJnugI00/view?usp=drive_link Last Waltz Ducks]
== Transcriptions ==
=== Last Waltz Ducks ===
It was '75. Moved to Malibu. The Band was just down the road from where we were.
they had bought Elvis Presley's old place, Rancho Shangri la. Actually Presley
owned it, Johnny Carson owned it after Presley. All these famous people owned
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
and the horse corral.
So I was talking about Rancho Shangrilla. And Neil and i were living down the road
at Broadbeach road on a street called Sea Leaval Drive. It was this old Cape Cod
cottage, right on the beach at the end of Sea Level Drive so there was no one on right
side of us except sand dunes. Except down on the right side of us, about a quarter
mile, was Carol King and then next to her was Cheech, from Cheech and Chong.
On the beach in Malibu. It was a really cool house. Neill saw it when he was
recording the Zuma album. It wasnt' called Zuma in those days but he dreams of
making this album and it was actually up on BirdView Drive right above Zuma Beach
and he'd go down and he saw this house, right? And it's just this Cape Cod, just
romantic little Cape Cod cottage right at the end of the road all covered in red
Bouganvilla. it was two lots. The first lot was just a brick patio area so we had this
big social area and then this cute little two-bedroom Cape Cod cottage that
Catherine Ross lived in. So he started asking around the neighbors, who is it?
whoose there? He goes, "Oh ah Catherine lives there." He goes, "I wonder if she
would ever sell it?" He said, "Oh, no,no. She'd never sell, no way."
Turned out she didn't own it. She was just leasing. So Neil told his lawyers about it
in LA, big powerful lawyers, they checked. they found the property owner and they
said, "They have a client who is interested in your house." And he just low-balled this
really ridiculous price, when you consider $285,000 for it. This was like 1974-75. The
guy must have lived in Kansas or something. He said, "Yeah, sure!" he could have
probably bought it for sixty grand, and he said, "Yeah, sure, no problem." So Neil
bought it.
So we moved down there and I'm down there and we did the Zuma album cover there
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
Ben Keith, Neil's steel guitar player. Bobby Charles is a friend of ours who wrote
"See Ya Later, Alligator". He was a song-writer's songwriter. Everybody Bobby
Charles, Bob Dylan--everybody sang Bobby Charles' s songs. He's legendary, and
he's a great guy, Cajun, from the swamp. We all hung out. We hung out there for
about a week-and-a-half in our bus because we were living in a bus across route 66
and there was an empty lot next to the Hall of Fame Museum in Nashville. There was
just this empty lot. We didn't even ask permission, we just parked in the empty lot
and Ranger Dave snuck an extention cord from the museum plug outside over the
fence and into our bus and we had electricity and just moved in there. It was a big
fancy bus and the museum just thought it was another rock or country-music star
[can't hear--something like "let us alone" ?]
So we're there, and we go shopping for guitars there in Nashville and we get turned
on to an opportunity to buy Hank William's guitar and his kid, Hank Williams Jr., who
does pretty good too. But as Hank Williams Jr., as a kid, he was a problem kid, and
his father was on the road and he died young himself, and Hank Williams Jr.
destroyed most of his father's guitars. So much so that one of the old-timer friends of
Hank's grabbed this Martin, that Hank had, and just got it out of the house, so he'd
already detroyed a couple of Hank's [stock?stuff?] . We got that guitar and we bought
a decoy guitar at Union Grove. It was an old Kay? that needed refinishing It was
beautiful. The guy did a beautiful job refinishing it. They only wanted fifty bucks for it
but it was so pretty. We bought it for $50 but they said, "This would be a good decoy-
(duck decoy--right!) and so we got it and when we set up the beach house in Neil's
livingroom I put the guitar stand and I put the decoy right there in the livingroom so
when the guys broke into the house they stole Neil's guitar, they stole the Kay but in
his back-bedroom closet, burried under some clothing, was Hank William's guitar, so
they missed that! So our decoy-thing worked! But it bummed out Neil that we got
broken into but that's what pretty much ended The Ducks, he went back to the ranch.
But the Ducks ended. I went to court and testified against the two guys and
identified my stuff.
So I became friends with the district attorney who later became a judge, which is
pretty cool. Anyway, that's pretty much the story of The Ducks, that's pretty good.
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