West Coast Experimental Pop Band

West Coast Experimental Pop Band (mid 60's Cross Country Psychedelic Rock Tour)

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

and it was afternoon, San Francisco. And I make it all the way down and finally it flattens out and I go about another three blocks, because I'm going pretty fast and I finally slow down enough that I can make a right turn and I figure anybody saw me just do that they'd call the police and I got to get off this street as soon as possible, so I'm going to get arrested or something. So as soon as I could I made a right turn and I was able to go on over and rub up against the curb and come to a stop. Parked. Lucky me, I made it all the way through. Didn't kill, didn't hit nobody. Made a right turn. Just as I'm slowing down enough that I can get up into a parking spot along the curb--there was one there--I pulled in and I rubbed the wheels against the curb to stop. Came to a stop. I'd shown the car to my brother-in-law in the East-Bay, the day before I went over to Margo's so he's seen it, he liked the car.

So I called my brother-in-law, my sister's husband, and said, "You want the car? I paid a hundred bucks for it. Don't even worry about paying me back. It's yours--here's where it's parked. It has No Breaks and it almost killed me and I'm never going to drive it again.

So that was me getting out of the coastguard and moving to Margo's. I'm there for about a month, having a good time, maybe three weeks, and this band comes into town from LA, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. And they've got this guy named Bud White, and he's an instrument-rental guy from LA. He had put together this little light show kind of thing and it was one of the first bands to have their own light show. The only problem was Bud had a sort of a flourishing instrument-rental thing happening in LA and the band sucked and he just didn't want to be their lightshow guy. So they bought all the equipment from him. They booked it at the Ark in Sausilito and he said, "I'll get you there but I want to find somebody to--

He had tons of equipment. he had strobe lights, he had fog machines. He had a mirror ball, he had spotlights, he had four-carousel projectors, each with those sixty-seven rotating slide-things, and two 16-milimeter projectors, which I used to do in highschool instead of going to studies class I went to audio-visual study hall and I would show movies and home girl's ex and flirt with the girls while I'm showing them movies and stuff in high school. So I know how to run those kind of things and I was a sonar man in the coastguard.

Margo, the guy says"Yeah, Bud doesn't want to do it anymore and we got to find someone that is somewhat artistic and Margo goes, "Mazz! He's an artist. He's been a sonar man, I'm sure he could run all that equipment. So they ask me, I went, "Well, I'll show up at the Ark and Bud was there and he showed me how he had his light show structured and I went "Cool!" and I took the job. That's when I started my first gig were at the Ark in Saucelito and by then it was about the end of September. It wasn't October yet. But they had a light show and the Ark was an afterhours music-jam club and they didn't have any light show. Only Bill Graham and Chet Helms and the big guys in the city had light shows and they all had five or six guys running all the different lightshow stuff to fill the auditorium. But Bud had made this little plywood control panel. One man, one light show. So I took over and became literally the first one-man psychedilic light show. And then I went to the mid-West with that band in January 1st in 1967. I left the Ark in Sauselito. But while I was at the Ark, Lee Michaels was there, Janis Joplin was there, Moby Grape was there. They were all brand new, all starting. In fact, I was in the room at the Ark when Matthew Katz ran the Ark, and he originally put together the Jefferson Airplane, Skippy Spencer was the drummer at that time. Skippy didn't want to be a drummer. He liked guitar, he wanted to stand up and sing his songs and not sit back on drums, so he wanted to leave the Airplane and Bill Graham saw an opportunity because the Jefferson airplane were really starting to take-off in San Franscico. They were just beginning but they were getting a very quick, huge following. And so Bill Graham took the management of the Jefferson Airplane from Matthew. He said, "Come with me". And Matthew's a trip. I'll tell you stories about Matthew in a second here. Matthew and Skippy left the Airplane. Skippy because he wanted to, Matthew because he had no choice. And they went over to the Ark, and Matthew said, "I'm going to put together a band that's even bigger than the Jefferson airplane.

And Matthew had a stoke? to put together bands. He put together It's A Beautiful Day, he had things- he was co-working Tower-of-Power. He put together a lot of little bands. He was pretty good. He just wanted to own every single person's soul. He was kind of bald, he had black hair and sideburns and a goatee, a devil's goatee and bald on top and when he got really mad his whole bald head would turn red like the skin of the devil and these Z blood veins on the side of his head would start pulsing and these lightening bolts blood veins, and he'd be screaming and stuff. He did that with us and Moby Grape a lot because we were all mellow, getting high and having a good time and he was like "Gggrrrrh".

In '67-'66, it was real popular to dose people with LSD. You put a little bit on the side of a coke and say, "Here, have a slug of coke." And have a laugh twenty minutes later and hallucinating. that was sport, in a way, in those days. Matthew was deathly afraid that we were going to dose him. So whenever he would get mad at us, at the Charles Van Damme ferryboat at Gate 5 in Saucilityo which was an old abandoned ferry boat. We converted it into a semi-restaurant with a little stage and called it The Ark.

Up on the second floor there was offices and stuff and then there was the wheelhouse up there where the maintainence guy slept in the wheelhouse, and what happened was, there was a kitchen and they would make llevos Rancheros everyday at the Ark, and feed all the musicians who were at the jam club after hours at three in the morning they would get free Llevos Rancheros food for everybody, all the musicians, everybody.

So bands who were playing around the area when they go off their gig at ten or eleven at night would go to Saucelito, would all jam together, get high, and get free food at three in the morning. So that was our only salary. we never really got money but we were young and we didn't really need money. We got food. I had this funky old houseboat just down the docks from the Ark and everybody used it as a crashpad and stuff and it was horrible but it was ------------. But anyway, Matthew would have us up in the second floor yelling and screaming because he wanted to he owned the name, "Moby Grape", which I thought was a shitty name --it's a terrible joke: What's purple, hangs on a tree, and hums or some stupid joke like that -- and I just went, "Man, they got a really good band and they are naming it after this stupid joke, you know?"

So there was a little bit of ----

so when Matthew got really mad, he's be talking and lightening bolts going and he'd be looking like the devil. He'd pick up a glass ashtray. there's eight of us, sitting around this long table, he at the end, throwing a tantrum.. Picks up a glass ashtray and smashes on the table to make a point, I mean he did shit like that. We were like , "Woah--that's heavy" we sat in back, kind of mellow then he would grab somebody's glass of water on the table and take a swig because he was all worked up. and when he did we'd go "Oh Matthew--you didn't just drink out of Bob's bottle did you?"

And he goes, "Yeah."

And we'd go, "Oh no! That had a bunch of acid in it!" He go ---"EYYYGGGHH(throwing up noise) "Acid! How could you do that? What didn't somebody stop me!!" He gets all pissed off. and he'd run in the bathroom and we'd hear him at the toilet hunched over trying to vomit as if that would do anything. In fact it was really cool because whenever he really got mad at us, we could make him throw up any time we wanted to! so that was kinda fun.

So I'm in the room and Matthew brought in all these musicians from Seattle and from some clubs down in the peninsula, Bob Moseley was playing these clubs, down there, the bass player. And he put them all together and they became Moby Grape. I was in there the day they were setting up there, all meeting each other for the first time. And it's a five piece band. And I'm doing the light shows with the West Coast Pop Art Experimental band but they're not there, but Matthew had me stay with the lightshow equipment. So he got a lightshow and i got fed at three in the morning and got to hang out with a lot of much better musicians, even though I did have to go to LA on weekends to play with The West Coast Pop Art Band.

So I'm up there, and all these musicians get together to Moby Grape and they are all meeting each other for the first time, and it's a five piece band and I'm sitting there because I didn't have anything else to do and Matt said, "The guys are coming for my new band." So I'm sitting up there to see who they are.

And we're all sitting around this table, and they are just meeting each other. "Hi, I'm Bob Moseley,", "Hi, I'm Skippy Spence", Don Stevenson, Jerry Miller, dah dah dah. Some from Seattle, some are from the mid-peninsula, the musicians. And I'm sitting there, right? And they're going, "We are going to have this five piece band." And so they're counting them and there are six people there. And they are kind of like going, [funny look]. And finally, they all focus on me, you know, the drums, guitar, bass, guitar, and they are trying to figure it out. Bob Mosely looks over at me first time I'd ever talked to him and he goes, "Listen, are you the lead singer?" Because he couldn't figure out an instrument that I could have been playing. And I've thought, man, at that time, if I'd said, "Yeah, I am, and stay the fuck out of my light when I'm singing'" or something, I probably would be famous by now. But instead of that I went, "No, I'm the lightshow guy." And they went, "Oh-- Thank God!" and they all sat down, like, we don' t have to split another share of our money. so that was kind of a funny little moment.

I became real close with those guys, I lived with them, right up until I had to leave in January to go back to Chicago for six months. The WCPAEB signed a contract. They left their manager in LA and signed a contract with a booking agency in Chicago, and literally because we had a light show and there were no light shows in Chicago in the whole mid-West. And so I was literally the very first lightshow to be in the mid-West in 1967, from January until June. My six-month contract was up in June and those guys they hated me, the band, by that point because all our bookings were because of the light show. It wasn't because of the band.

Kirk: Were they a very good band?

No! In fact, you might want to hear them, you could listen to them. You could get them on Youtube and stuff, and listen to it.

No--their biggest thing, the apex of their entire show was "Help I'm A Rock" by the Mothers of Invention, which is the song where Zappa just goes, "Help! I'm A Rock--blooey blooey--Help, I'm A Rock-blooey blooey".

Their father was a famous composer, Roy Harris, the two brothers of the WCPAEB, was Sean Harris and Danny Harris. Their father was Roy Harris. He wrote the American Folk Ballets. He's in the encyclepedia for being one of the , he was a music professor at UCLA. Very, very established. Very upper level. He had a full Baldwin sponsorship. He could get anything and he got his kids in on the sponsership. so we had Baldwin exterminator amplephiers, Baldwin guitars, any kind of Baldwin, anything Baldwin made, we could go in, anywhere in the United States. Walk into a place with a Baldwin dealership and say, "We'll take that--that--and that." and they would give it to us. We'd sign for it. Never give them a penny, and leave.

So they would destroy the ampliphiers during the psychedelic part of the stage. These exterminators in 1967 were going to outdo the Marshalls, so they were five and a half feet tall, these big giant blue exterminator speakers. We had two of them on stage at all times. They would take right in the middle, they would throw them off the stage, push them over. Cause them to destort themselves to blow themselves up--"because it was psychedelic, man!" You come out and have the strobe lights going and the fog machine and all the kids would be--I put the strobe lights over the dance floor, which was right in front where my table with all my projectors were going on the stage.

So I could hit the dance floor with the fog machine and fog up the feet of the dancers, the r--- lights and then the strobe lights, everybody in the psychedelic strobe fog would be dancing. The kids loved it. They thought it was really cool. Meanwhile the band is up there. They are just like putting their guitars up next to the amps, letting them distort and feedback and then go out looking for girls to make out with while the six minutes psychedilic things happening. It was horrible. But anyway...

They destroyed a lot of equipment. by the end of six months they started to say, "We are the band, and your the puke that's gonna run the lights, and so you have to clean up the trailor and do these tasks, you got to puke for us if we are gonna go out on the road."

I said, "Okay, yeah, cool." And I never give them one. Once I got out and realized what was happening, we opened up for The Animals, the first time The Animals played in the U.S. was in the NorthWestern University in Chicago. Our booking agency booked it and they booked it because they had a light show for the Animals and the Animals wanted to have a light show. They loved it. Ten-fifteen -twenty years later Eric Burden got a hold of me and said, "You know, your light show in Chicago was the reason why we put together a light show after that. We had a light show for about five years after that, everywhere we went."

The winter of '67 in chicago was the worst blizzaard in forty-seven years. the snow was eight feet high in town in Chicago. the agency rented us a penthouse on the corner of Delaware and Rush Street on this old three-story hotel that had a penthouse on the roof. So we had a penthouse. And Delaware and Rush was the cool section of Chicago. You could literally buy a matchbox full of pot you couldn't get pot anywhere in the mid-west except for Chicago or Lawrence kansas. Lawrence Kansas was a University and it also has something very rare in Kansas, called "a hill". [chuckles] And there are houses on the hill and all these long-haired hippy guys had this big old Victorian up there. We did shows in Lawrence, because it was a cool place.

But after the show I'd take the light show equipment up to the house. And we''d put up the strobe lights and we'd party all night long. Lawrence was a culteral oasis in the mid-West. Everywhere else in the mid-west in '67 we were long-haired hippies bringing LSD to the children, and they did NOT like long-haired hippie people. We got run off the road by drunk truckdrivers. We wouldn't get served in a restaurant. I'd even go to the cops that were doing the security for the concerts that night--I'd go into a restaurant with them after we did our sound checks, we'd all go to eat. I'd go sit with the two uniform cops. and the waitress would come up and say, "Well, I'll serve you and you, but no way in hell am I going serve him."

I got tickets for walking across the street in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, because this woman rolled down the window and started yelling at me that I was this horrible thing in her hometown and the devil was going to get me. And all of a sudden, while she's yelling, the guy in front of her stops and she hits the guy. And I kinda cheered, serves her right, ya old biddy! And there's a cop kitty-corner across the street, he comes over ,he's talking to her, he's talking to the guy she hit, all three of them are talking. then they all look up and they look at me, and I'm a half-a-block away by that time. The cop comes over and he gets me and he writes me a ticket for "unruly appearance creating an accident".

To this day I did not go to court on that, and I am a wanted man in that town. If I ever go back to Iowa, they could put me away for a day and a half or two.

Kirk: Did you have long hair?

Oh, fuck yeah! I wore psychedlic glow-in-the-dark pants that were phlorescent acryllic so when the black lights were on I was all glowing. I had these T-shirts where I got Amerian flags and I sewed them upside down on the front of my shirt. We stopped at a tourist place along the road somewhere and they had cedar branches, slices of cedar branches with pictures of Jesus painted on them that I wore one of those around my neck. Yeah.

That band was so bad they never had a real drummer. The whole time we were in the mid-West they would go to the Union halls of the area we were playing, and pick a Union-scale drummer. All the y had to do was play a four-four beat and it didn't matter if it was good, bad, or anywhere because even bad fit right on into what they were doing. If it was good the guy never lasted --at the break he would take off...

So that was my very first tour. And it was a challenge. We played in Peoria, Illinois, we played at Jackie Gleason's bowling Alley Bar in Peoria, Illinois. they paid us $3500 for a week. We had to play six shows, six nights. But Jackie Gleason owned it. But their big guy, that they used to pay that money to, was Wayne Cochran. I don't know if you remember Wayne Cochran, he had this big bouffant kind of blonde weird ducktail ho-dad yahoo-do greaser haircut and he sang some rock and roll songs, he had a couple rock and roll mid-west hits. Rock-a-billy kind of shit. and right over, on the stage was like up behind the bar, about four feet up was the floor of the stage and the stage was it only had about a six-foot high ceiling. The lead singer could just get his hairdo underneath it. but above where he would sing, there was a square whole there and they would put in sheet rock. Just sheet rock because of Wayne Cochran sets, they loved him at that bolling alley, boy he was huge. And what they really loved, when he finished a set, on his very last note of his last song, he would hold his mike dramatically, take his fist, and punch it through the ceiling and everybody went nuts. It was like nuts! It was like "Wow! He went through the ceiling again! He loves us!" It was like huge!

With us it was like, "What the hell are those long -haired hippie-dudes doing with their psychedelic bullshit. Check your drink, it's probably got acid in it. Let's kill 'em. Let's get 'em at the trailers out back!" They're making plans on doing us harm and shit.

The bartender was instructed to have this sawed-off baseball bat, about two-and-a-half, two feet long, that he kept behind the bar and when these guys--and I usually would be back behind the bar, shooting on the stage. He said, "No, you're not safe out there. You have to be with me, set up with me and shoot real close to 'em because I need to get between you and these guys. so I'm behind the bar with that guy, squeezed over in the corner trying to do my stuff. And these guys would get drunk and they were like mobsters. They dressed like these little mobsters-guys, right?

And they had these Polish girlfriends with big blonde bouffant hairdo's. Their hairdo's were as big as their boobs. Sitting at the bar. Sometimes they would get drunk and they would deside to impress their girlfriend by climbing over the bar and killing me. and they'd start to climb over--once or twice this happened--the bar tender would pull out the baseball bat and he'd just hit 'em over th e head and push 'em back into their seat, and they'd be fucking unconcious and they'd go "John--wake up!" their girlfriends and stuff.

I'd be going, "Oh my God!"

So we finished the gig, it's a horrible gig. We are out in a blizzard. In the snow. We're pulling a thirty-four boiler trailer, we had a brand new Chrysler station wagon everywhere. We did have two engines program? on the station wagon. But we're all squeezed in that thirty-three foot trailor, the band. And one of the snowbirds,

Kirk: Oh,it was like Wintertime!

Oh, January, February. The worst blizzard to hit the mid-West in thirty-seven years. Yeah. As if things weren't bad enough! So we finish up, and we're done, it's the last gig. So Sean and i go back into the manager's office to get our check, you know, $3500 bucks. We go back there, and the manager's there. and there is a sheriff sitting with him.

We were "Okay, we're done, we're just gonna pack up and take off here, we just came to get the check."

And he goes, "Wait a minute, this officer needs to talk to you."

"Guess what we found in your trailor while you were in here?"

And we went, we didn't hardly have any pot or nothin' you know? We had a St. Barnard puppy. "Did you find our dog?"

They said, "No, we found these two girls." And they say, "Come on in."

And these two fifteen-year-old girls come in and they say, yeah we found these two girls in your trailor and you guys are going to jail for a long, long, time. "Are these the guys?" and the girls go "Yes." And he goes, "You guys are going to jail."

And the club manager goes, "Wait a minute officer, let me talk to them. Look it, I can get you out just--I'm not going to give you your check, just get the hell out of here right now. Just leave."

And I went, "Ok! Good deal--we're gonna leave--I'm cool--let's go!"

And Sean, the leader of the band, goes: "No fucking way! We're not going to leave! Send us to jail! We've got lawyers! Send us to jail. You owe us that check--we are not leaving here until we get that check! We worked our butt off for a week to get that check and we're not leaving here without --"

And I'm going, "Oh my God, he's getting us killed. We're going to end up in the snowbank here...they won't find us until Springtime....

He pulled it off though. The guy finally looked around, and he and the cop -------------and apparently the two girls were the owner of the club's nieces. He was going to keep that $3500 bucks for himself. $3500 in 1967 was a lot of money. and those were the kind of things that happened to me, and because of that, later on, when I'm roadmanaging famous bands, they all went, "Oh fuck--you were in the mid-west in '67?"

Yeah, I played a folk gig, didn't think I'd get out alive, you know. I don't know, we were there for six months. at the end of six months, the Mothers of Invention which I was friends with earlier and my relationship with the Pop-Art band in LA, which I'll tell you about--those are fun stories too but--the Mothers of Invention came through, and I'd just had my last argument in June, my contract was up in June. This was like June fifth or something. I didn't want to be with these guys so I just--the Mothers came through and said, "What's happening?"

I said, "I guess I'm going back to LA and finishing up with these guys." And Jimmy Carl Black, one of the drummers with the Mothers, a really cool guy, he goes, "Frank got us the Geary Theatre in Greenwich Village, we're all going to go there, we are going to live at the Chelsea Hotel. I got my wife and kids but you can stay in our room, we can fix you up a place in the living room. Come on, come with us!"

And I went, "Cool!" And so I took of there and went to New York and from there I met Paul Butterfield, who turned me on, we became really good friends. Paul Butterfield Blues Band. and he hooked me up with some rich kids who wanted to go to a psychedilic nightclub in Boston and that's when I went up to Boston.

Kirk: So you went straight from that roadtrip in Chicago to New York and hung out at the Chelsea Hotel with the Mothers for about two weeks and Butterfield was showing up because the Mothers of Invention all these great musicians loved him, right? and the Chelsea hotel was filled with amazing people, you've probably heard stories about the Chelsea hotel. Fabulous place to be. And because I was the lightshow guy, the three rich kids that wanted to go to a psychedilic nightclub in Boston. He said, I know a guy that does, the first one-man psychodelic light show so they hired me and I went up and that's when I started doing the Boston thing. We can talk about that, the next one. And also we can talk about the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band when I was going from Sasalito with Moby Grape and those guys on weekend to play the try the clubs in LA. we played the Daisy club, and another club called The Other Place. Friday night, the Daisy Club, Friday club for actors and actresses became friends with Jim Morrison before he was even in a band or anything. All these incredible people. And then Saturday nights we go down to Santa Monica and do the other place which was a private club for directors and producers of movies. So the actors and actresses had their private club, we played Friday nights, and the producers and directors had their private club in Santa Monica that we played. Both clubs were full of LSD. Everybody was taking acid. I would go to Sauselito and hang out with Moby Grape and those guys. I take these really sloppy florescent paintings--chew--chew-chew and eagle and weird shit, just anything and I'd take two or three. The clubs are all black and dark in side except wherer my lights. So I put black lights on the black wall of the black club where all the most stoner people were always at the back of the club, in a safe place.

So I put black light in there and hang up my psychedilic paintings, the phlorescent ones and people would have religious experiences with LSD. At the end of the night when the lights came on I'd go and start taking the paintings down and show that some rich guy would go, "Oh no! I have to have that painting! That painting's been talking to me. How much do you want for it?" I'd go, "Three hundred bucks." I got paid fifty dollars a night for doing the shows but I'd make three hundred selling one or two, three to six hundred bucks. The most I ever got was $300. Mostly I'd get a $100, $150. How much money do you have?

But I'd always make abou twice what I'd make --I'd always make at least a hundred bucks out of it. So I'd go back and I'd have two or three-hundred bucks until the next weekend and I'd go back down again. At $300 I could feed Moby Grape, I'd help house people, it was a bank. And it wasn't for my wealth. It was for all of us to keep going on. Back in the sixties in was one for all and all for one.