George McClughan

George McClughan

          The day after I arrived in San Antonio in August 1972 to work for Star Attractions, the good old boys in suits at the office gave me directions to a tract house in an older suburb inside North-Central Loop 410, where a number of Star Attractions roadies stayed the one week per month they were in town. Management was eager to get me out of the hotel where they’d put me up. I met George McClughan, who was to be my partner, there at the roadies’ house.

          McClughan was a shortish, confident blond fellow with a strong chin and straight white teeth under a reddish-blonde moustache. Both his parents were retired Army generals, he told me. His mother had been one of the first woman generals. He had a sort of Colgin-esque, frat-boy-gone-wrong way about him.

          As I remember it, they sent McClughan and me out on tour the next day or the day after. I left my car (with cardboard boxes intact) and my little dog Naomi with John and Vicki Kuehne at their newly-built house outside Loop 410 (which was the far suburbs in those days), and flew with McClughan from San Antonio to Panama City, Florida, where the tour’s equipment was being stored. I found out that McClughan liked a bit of pot from time to time, so the job seemed like it was going to be cool. McClughan told me some fun stories about acts and tours of the past. I immediately began to yearn for the month I would work a tour with such T&A acts as the Gold Diggers or the Ding-a-Lings. McClughan’s favourite, he told me, was Jaye P. Morgan, because she was funny and cool and a lot of fun to tour with.

          Treevie Lang, the chief roadie, met us at the Panama City airport. Treevie was a recently-retired Army NCO club manager and had a colourfully thick Appalachian accent. He gave the impression that he was more at home drunk and laughing than sober and serious, and referred to all male humans as “swingin’ dicks”. McClughan thought he was a riot, and I had no reason to argue.

          McClughan and I took the company van and the company horse trailer loaded with light and sound equipment and went to a local hotel, where I learned about the way that nearby paper mills smell. Treevie took off in the company Lincoln Continental — the Star Car — to Memphis to meet that month’s tour’s star.

          When McClughan and I drove up to Memphis the next day, we had to pull over with a flat tire on some two-lane blacktop state route somewhere in rural Mississippi. The spare was flat, too. A redneck in a pickup stopped to see what was going on. There I was, bearded and Jewish and coming down off an hour-before joint and fresh out of LA and in the Deep South for the first time. I recall feeling apprehension.

          But the Bubba was more polite than anyone I’d encountered for years and, not only did he take our flat back to Mudville, or wherever, to get fixed, but he insisted on helping us put it back on the van when he returned. It was then that I became convinced of the overwhelming importance and beauty of Good Manners. We don’t have to like each other, Good Buddy, we may even despise each other, but we can mask our dislike behind Good Manners. If that’s our culture. If that’s the sort of people we are.

          In Memphis we met the acts we were touring with (Norm Crosby, the doubletalk comedian who had opened for Tom Jones, and Patti Something-or-Other, a 40ish Vegas-all-the-way singer-dancer-‘entertainer’. I quickly learned to handle the PA cables and to operate the spotlight, and we were off on tour. McClughan knew the circuit well — which places were cool, where the clubs and the groupies were, and all that. He didn’t look all that at-home in the blue suit he wore when we were working, but he could introduce the acts slicker’n shit, projecting a disc-jockeyish, smile-in-the-voice “It’s Showtime!” attitude that went well with his strong jaw and self-assuredness. He swam laps in hotel swimming pools whenever he could. He ordered steaks from room service and spread lavish amounts of butter all over them.

          The first time we drove from Biloxi to Montgomery we got out-of-it stoned, McClughan driving, on an arrow-straight two-lane state highway going across miles of flat Alabama cotton fields. McClughan put the van on cruise control, put his feet up on the dash, the steering wheel gripped between his knees, and we talked shit for a couple of hours. ‘Honky Cat’ by Elton John came on the radio, just released, and we got lost together for a few moments in the piano solo.

          Being on tour was all right. We worked hard when we worked, drank hard, ate well, smoked plenty of dope, and laughed a lot when we were free. We didn’t go wenching together, though, as I got involved early in the tour with the hotel desk clerk who’d checked us into the Sheraton Biloxi, named Helena. Toward the end of that tour McClughan figured out a way for us to have separate rooms in the hotels where we stayed, instead of having to share. He had an eye for beating the system, whatever it was. Cool.

          Back in San Antonio we split up. Before we did, we went out to the suburbs and I met his dad. They talked together like old club-mates. Pals. Chuckling over “the local talent”, nudge-wink, and all that.

          I took my loaded Ford Ranchwagon and Naomi to Biloxi to move in with Helena. McClughan picked me up in the company van on the way from Panama City to Memphis, where we met Treevie for the September tour. The headliner this time was Jimmie Rodgers, the one that did ‘Honeycomb’, not the Singing Brakeman and the Father of Country Music. That Jimmie Rodgers died in 1933, the year this Jimmie Rodgers was born. McClughan and I agreed that Norm Crosby had been more fun.

          Jimmy Rodgers was going through a rough patch. There had been an incident in 1967 in which he’d been beaten up with a tire iron by an off-duty LA cop. His eyesight had gone bad, and he’d got religion in a big way. He carried around a large-print version of the New Testament. McClughan told me that once when Jimmy had been getting out of the Star Car he’d seen him hit his head slightly against the door frame, and the sound, according to McClughan, had not been a natural one. Metal plate, with a knowing nod. Anyway, there’d been a court case, and I think some compensation. Jimmy had an entrepreneurial vision of forming a film company for producing wholesome family features, to be called ‘Kids’ Stuff.’ I don’t think it ever happened. The competition, and all that. As they say in Hollywood, “Don’t fuck with The Mouse.”

          When we got to Biloxi I stayed with Helena in our new rented house on Santini Street, rather than in the hotel, where she’d been staying our first time through. The morning after the last Biloxi show McClughan showed up with the van, a bit late. Jimmie Rodgers’s backup band was travelling in the van with us. No more getting stoned with the accelerator on cruise control and listening to music on the FM radio while the cotton fields had rolled by.

          Anyway, I got into the back seat of the van. McClughan, it seems, had been getting into some kind of stoush with the band’s drummer, who was on one of the middle seats. I think it was over the inconvenience of having to make the detour over to Helena’s house to pick me up. I didn’t notice at first the tension crackling between them.

          Now, McClughan wasn’t one to rely on tact and diplomacy when faced with aggression. Stroppiness was not, however, the optimal tactic for him under the circumstances. He was driving. The drummer was behind him. The drummer was Sicilian, or at least Neapolitan, and therefore unlikely to take kindly to McClughan’s sarcasm or use of pejoratives. And, although the drummer was small, it’s generally unwise to mix it up with someone with arms that pound sticks on drums for two or three hours a night.

          I had to pull the drummer off McClughan. I was twice his size and used to humping amplifiers and p.a. speakers around, but it wasn’t that easy and he came off McClughan with a big handful of George’s hair. I wondered that the whole incident had happened in the first place. It seemed to be about me, but it had nothing really to do with me at all.

          And so we went on our merry way. The tour and the job ended in Atlanta, where we were playing in a hotel in the suburbs. The news came in that Star Attractions had lost its ass with a major tour of Air Force bases with the Supremes, who they’d signed right after Diana Ross had gone off on her solo career. No Diana, no full houses, as it turned out. Star Attractions owed money to everybody, including the hotel where we were staying. Bankruptcy was imminent, if not actually already the case. According to Treevie, even the paychecks he gave to McClughan and me were probably no good. McClughan and I figured that the best way to deal with our final paychecks from a bankrupt company was to cash them at the hotel desk and head off on the next Greyhounds going our way — his to San Antonio and mine to Biloxi.

          A bit less than two years later I found myself in San Antonio again. I was alone again and had a job with On Stage, a company trying to do what Star Attractions had done. On Stage, true to its model, went belly-up not long after I got there. One of the first things I did when I got to San Antonio, however, was look up George McClughan.

          He drove down to Laurel Heights and picked me up at the furnace-like furnished room where I stayed for a week or so when I first got to town. He had my brown felt, Phillip Marlowe-style fedora hat that I had left behind in the hotel room in Atlanta. Saved it for me somehow. He also had a pleasant blonde woman with him named Debbie.

           They were living in a place out in the country, but not that far out in the country, maybe 35 km (about 20 miles) from my place off North St Mary’s Street. It’s probably suburban sprawl by now. They had two Afghan hounds, which were getting in trouble for worrying some local cattle. Debbie apparently had two kids, and I think there was some problem with custody because of her relationship with McClughan.

          They seemed to be in love, but he described it to me in a way I thought odd. He was impressed with the way she handled business, she passed the test “in the looks department”, and so he’d decided, why not?

          Somehow, in the turmoil of my looking for a life in that city, we drifted apart after a while. Maybe it was him being so far out of town, I don’t know. I remember hearing something from somebody that he’d moved up to Austin.

          When I tried to get in touch with him in 2003 I got a letter back from his father. George “just keeled over” and died of a heart attack in 2002. He was 54 years old at the time.

          Spreading butter on steak?

Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski

  

          Early in 1970, after I’d stopped working full time for Zappa and Herb Cohen, a friend of mine who worked as a doorman at the Troubadour gave me a paperback book called Notes of a Dirty Old Man, by Charles Bukowski. It had a black-and-white photograph of a naked girl (tasteful: not full-frontal), amongst other things, on its cover. I thought it was porn and prepared myself for such. The first chapter puzzled me. It wasn’t porn, but I wasn’t sure what it really was. The second chapter, which was a short story, blew me away. It was, to my mind, the best thing I’d ever read.

          I devoured the rest of the book. I re-read it. I held on to it and did stupid things to retain it in my possession. It made me redefine the way I thought about life and about writing, two concepts which were then somewhat foolishly mixed together in my mind.

          Then, late in April 1972, my friend Susannah asked me one day if I wanted to go with her to meet Bukowski. The Bukowski. Charles Henry ‘Call me Hank’ Bukowski. The Dirty Old Man whose Notes were like sacred texts to me. She’d got an invitation to drop by and see him off an introduction from another ex-groupie who was a mutual friend. I could tag along.

          Okay. I’d read enough of his work by then (two more books of prose in addition to Notes) to know that he’d be pissed off if I drank his beer, and in a good mood if I’d bring a six-pack of half-quarts along with me. And I was right. We got along great. I took to driving over to his slummy little bungalow in the bowels of Hollywood, always bringing half-quarts, about once or twice a week. And we’d drink and talk and laugh. We engaged in laughter frequently. Both of us. The Master and his disciple; rather like Robert Crumb’s Mr Natural and Flakey Foont.

          At the time, his writing regime consisted of sitting down at his typewriter with a six-pack of half-quarts on a Friday evening and writing until the beer ran out. I don’t know how he did it. I’ve never been able to write at all when under the influence of alcohol.

          Once, when we were yakking, I’d told some story about some little shitty thing that’d happened lately, and Hank had laughed in a reassuring way and told me, in his hipster’s drawl, “It’s all ma-teerial, baby. It’s all just mateerial.” All this shit — y’know: life — is just stuff to write about.

          Of course, not all the advice that Hank gave me was what could reasonably be called good advice. For example, at my 26-years-of-failure party I’d met an intelligent and decorative woman named Lynne. She sang in a hey-nonny-no Renaissance music ensemble with another friend of mine, an Echo Park soul singer named Nolan Porter. I started seeing her at about the same time as I’d started seeing Bukowski. She lived right across the street from the studio where they filmed Let’s Make A Deal. Often when I’d go to see her I’d have to pass by battalions of people in bizarre get-ups queued up on the sidewalk, waiting to be let in to beg, “Choose me, Monty!” at the tops of their voices.

          Maybe it was mostly physical, but it seemed to me that I was becoming rapidly attached to Lynne. She had a little kid, who I also became fond of. But it must have dawned on her that I was an underemployed loser living in a grotty basement and going nowhere, and she decided we should Just Be Friends. And my emotions got in the way.

          I went over to Bukowski’s, and we drank maybe more than a few half-quarts of Schlitz. He advised me not to skulk away to lick my wounds, which is what seemed natural to me, but to let my hurt out as anger directed at her. Specifically, he advised me to hit her. But when I went over there with his instructions ringing in my ears, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I just snarled out something angry and spit on the ground in her general direction. She said, “Richard, I don’t think I like you any more,” and that ended that. At least no more Just Friends.

          When I told Hank about it, he thought it was enormously funny.

          After I left LA, I lost touch with Bukowski when my first wife destroyed all my contact information with everybody I knew from before.

Terry Wilcox; Martin & Murray

Terry Wilcox

          A month or so before Richard Clark got out of prison, a friend of his from Terminal Island had been released and had come to the Echo Park scene. He was skinny blonde guy, who looked like a drawing in an R. Crumb cartoon, named Terry Wilcox. He’d been a sailor in the Merchant Marine before getting busted in port and doing two years for smuggling.

          I remember going to see him in the furnished room he was living in as soon as he got out. He seemed to know his way around the social underbelly. He knew, for instance, where to hide his greenbacks in a furnished room in a fleabag building.

          Terry had one of the most extreme minds I’ve ever encountered. He was almost illiterate. Notes and other stuff that Terry wrote looked like they’d been written by a six-year-old. He had a limited vocabulary and talked kind of charmingly dumb. But he was as at home as hell with advanced calculus and physics and stuff, things that were way beyond my aptitude for mathematical abstraction.

          He’d spent his whole stretch in the joint studying chess books. He told me that since he’d had a broken foot when he’d gone in, he’d had the luxury of lying in his bunk all day, instead of “doing one of their bullshit jobs they try to make you do.” Once his foot had more or less healed, he’d continued with this inactivity, only with chess books. He hadn’t actually resisted the guards, he told me. He’d agreed with everything they’d told him, (“yes, boss.” “Sure thing, boss.”) and then lay in bed reading chess books.

          He could always beat me at chess in less than eight moves. He called it the “fried liver” opening. Apparently there was one way to counter it, which all chess crazies know, but since I didn’t know it, it beat me promptly every time. Terry seemed to find this amusing. What he couldn’t figure out was why I couldn’t figure it out.

          He had me take him to Foster’s Blue Grotto to try to hustle somebody up to play him chess for money, but that was, naturally, futile. It was fun to watch him try, though.

          He linked up almost immediately after he got out with the girl, named Chris, I was after at the time. Oh, well.

          He organised a deep-sea fishing excursion out of San Diego once for himself and me. I drove us down there. On the way we stopped at his parents’ house in a middle-class subdivision in Orange County. His father was addicted to World War II memorabilia. He and his dad seemed to get along great. There didn’t seem to be any bad feelings about his time in Terminal Island.

          The rest of the way to San Diego he looked at the fishing reports in a newspaper. The word “anglers” seemed to amuse him greatly. On the fishing expedition itself I didn’t catch anything but a sunburn. I’ve almost never caught anything fishing. Terry landed two albacore tuna, which he left with his parents on the way back up to L.A.

          Terry also had a sister, who lived in some working-class suburb in the eastern part of LA county. She was nice, but she didn’t smoke pot, and her husband was in some kind of trouble. I never felt very comfortable when I drove Terry out there.

          On the occasion of my 26th birthday, when Susannah threw my big 26-years-of-failure party, Terry phoned me in the early afternoon, just after John Ware had left to go play drums at the country-music bar in Glendale (leaving me a bit drunk), and invited me over to the little bungalow he was sharing with Chris. Various advanced books on calculus were lying around, along with sheets of paper covered with symbolic calculations written in Terry’s crude hand with a dull pencil. Out from between the pages of one of the math books he withdrew my birthday present: a small amount of brown heroin that someone had smuggled to him in prison, but which he’d never felt like taking. I snorted it up, but, combined with all the other controlled-substance presents I got that day I can’t say it, the one sniff of heroin in my life, was that noticeable to me.

          When I left LA a few months later we kept in touch for a while, Chris writing the letters for both of them. They moved up to somewhere in Northern California for Terry’s further studies in advanced mathematics, and got caught up in playing the well-known university games: “fresh flesh” was the way Chris put it. The woman I was married to by then wasn’t amused. She took it as an invitation to go look them up and join them, and she destroyed all copies of their address, and that was that.

Martin & Murray

          Martin and Murray lived in the first-floor apartment right next to Susannah’s at Bonnie Brae and Kent in 1972. They were hard-drinking, upper-gulping, outlaw independent long-haul truckers, not at all averse to driving the back roads so they wouldn’t get weighed, and all that other subversion of ICC monopoly-protection legislation. When Little Feat came out with the song Willin’, they loved it.

          They shared a rig. When Martin was on the road, Murray stayed in LA, and the other way around. They usually weren’t both in their apartment at the same time for more than a couple of days at a stretch, the first of these generally being party time, all neighbours invited. For some reason Murray usually liked to cook salt pork for these parties. Then it’d be time to wash and do maintenance on the rig, and then for the other to head out.

          Martin was a Hungarian refugee. Martin Plavity. He was a good-looking guy with regular features who wore his hair straight back. As he told the story, he’d been one of those on the rooftops shooting at the Russian tanks in 1956. He’d managed to escape to Italy, but he’d been thrown out of Italy for pimping. They couldn’t deport him back to Hungary for humanitarian and political reasons, but England had been willing to give him a go. He’d promptly gotten into some sort of trouble there, I think it was pimping again, and the Poms had sent him to the most staunchly anti-communist country in the world, and therefore the only country willin’ to take him: the US of A. Southern California. The only place for him.

          Anyway, Martin trained as a machine-tool grinder, and was proud of his absolute accuracy in this skill. Once he showed me his kit of precision tools and told me about how some of them required him to be accurate to something like one one-thousandth, or maybe it was one ten-thousandth, of an inch. Alas, he also fell into pimping again (I think he’d done some time for it, but had remained safe from deportation). Then he’d met Murray and fallen for the lure of the open road.

          Murray never told anybody I knew if ‘Murray’ had been his first name or his last. He’d been a math teacher in a small town in central California. He had a red-neck accent and speech patterns, and, generally, a country, good-ole-boy way about him. I thought all this was a scam, because once I got to know him he didn’t seem that way to me at all. Well, not much. He seemed more like a former high school teacher on uppers. Anyway, the classroom had been giving him claustrophobia, and he’d taken to what looked to him like a life of freedom. I mean, long hours in the cab of a semi could conceivably give someone — someone else, that is — claustrophobia, I suppose. Not, however, Murray.

Usually.

          He did tell me a story about how he once scored a handful of black mollies (biphetamine sulphate, I think 20 mg) from an acquaintance at a truck stop, swallowed them down with his coffee, shared another joke or two, and then returned to his rig and its load of fresh produce (in his trucker slang, “garbage”) bound for Seattle. “I must have been 20 miles down Interstate 5,” he said, “when, I don’t know, I just had to pull over onto the shoulder, stop, run around the rig ten or twelve times, hop back in, and head on down the road.”

          Bon appetit!

          On the subject of bon appetit: once when we were neighbours Murray met an old friend at a truck stop who was driving a tank truck loaded with cheap brandy, and the friend had offered to trade or give Murray some of it. The only problem was that Murray had to provide his own containers. The only stuff in Murray’s load that was in containers was cooking oil, so he’d dumped a couple of ten-gallon tins of oil down the truck stop drain and filled them with cheap brandy tapped from the tanker. And he brought it home. And he gave me a half-gallon wine jug filled with this ghastly mixture of cheap brandy and little globules of vegetable oil. And I actually tried to drink it! I mean, as it turned out, I couldn’t drink it, but, heaven help me, I tried.

          Murray had a girl living with him. I’d guess she was about 20. Her name was Diane. He said she was the daughter of a friend of his. She had an absolutely perfect model’s face, but she was apparently what used to be called Not Quite Right In The Head. Spooky, actually. Susannah told me that when Diane had her period she used cloth diapers for feminine hygiene. Murray said he was taking care of her for his friend. She usually rode with him when he was on the road.

          When Murray wanted to send me a message, or wanted to borrow something, he always sent Diane. Susannah thought this was disgusting, manipulating me with her pretty face, but I didn’t mind.

          As the summer set in and my economic condition became ever more perilous, Murray decided to teach me how to be a truck driver. He took me with him once as he drove the rig down to some produce-distribution centre in Orange County to pick up a load of ‘garbage’. I remember trying to learn by watching how to shift through 15 gears while driving, and it didn’t seem to be as simple as Murray said it was.

          Rolling along the freeway, Murray gestured toward the expanses of Southern-California residential subdivisions stretching out into the distance, right and left, and told me, “You know what those are? Concentration camps! And the people in them don’t even know what they are! I’ll die before I’ll let anybody put me in one of those!” Murray tended to end his spoken sentences with exclamation points.

          At the depot Murray backed his rig into one of the bays at the loading dock more quickly and easily than I could have backed in my Ford Ranchwagon Six. I knew at once that backing a rig up like that was something I’d probably never be able to do. We hosed out the trailer, which had carried cedar shingles down from Seattle on Martin’s return trip the week before, and loaded it with produce. The refrigerator unit hummed as we worked, keeping things cold. I wondered at this trucking life.

          Murray dropped me off in Echo Park and picked up Diane for the drive North. I got a job offer from John Kuehne in Texas soon afterward, so my training on the Big Rig ended before it ever really began.

Susannah Campbell & Leda

Susannah Campbell

          The woman who lived with Jon Keliehor in the court on Fountain went by the name of Susannah Campbell. She turned out to be one of the best friends I had during the time I lived in LA.

          Susannah Campbell wasn’t her birth name. She was the black sheep of some old New England family with old New England money. Horses. Polished hardwood yachts, and all that. She was short and blonde and round-faced and very femme and a few years older than I was. Her home decor always seemed to have a beatnik Beatrix Potter thing about it. Lots of frills and arty knick-knacks. She always seemed to thrive on being busy with cosy little domestic stuff. The architectural style of the court on Fountain suited her fine.

          She’d been something of a groupie in the early sixties. She told me groupie anecdotes about Chick Corea and some other high-profile jazzbo, and a trip to Greece with the Donovan entourage. She’d had a series of doomed affairs with other creative types, who usually treated her badly. She wrote songs and sang fifties-style jazz in a light, airy voice. The overall impact was that of a Yankee Billie Holiday, right down to the affinity she had for heroin. She had a fine critical taste for music and art and people.

          After Keliehor went away she had a rock & roll photographer named Danny Seymour staying there with her for a short time. I only met him once, briefly, but she was devastated when he did her wrong. Later he was to feature in a legendary but unreleased documentary about the Rolling Stones’ 1972 North American tour called Cocksucker Blues, and still later I heard that he had been mysteriously murdered on a yacht off Mexico. After he left Susannah I comforted her and we kissed. It was a nice kiss, but we never became a couple. Over the years we got to bed maybe twice, but both times when one or both of us were too drunk to be satisfied or satisfying.

          Once in mid-1970 I got her a job singing in a sleazy nightclub down on Olympic Blvd, but my career as her manager never really got off the ground. A few weeks later, when I moved out of my granny flat in the Wilshire District, my little dog Naomi and I slept in my VW bus in Susannah’s assigned carport space behind the court on Fountain Ave. She didn’t have a car and wasn’t using it.

          Some months later she moved to a place near Elysian Fields, east of Echo Park, where she was badly burglarised of her wonderful record collection. Then the blues got to be too much for her and I remember visiting her at some heroin rehab place where she was doing crafts.

          When I returned to LA in January 1972, I slept for a month or so on the couch in the front room of Susannah’s place-at-the-time, a little hillside house on Glendale Boulevard near Alvarado Street in northern Echo Park, almost to southern Glendale, not far from the old Mack Sennett studios. It was right beneath the transmission tower of one of the big top-40 radio stations, and odd things in the house would pick up the signal. Susannah complained to the radio station when she plugged in her iron and it started talking to her, an event that apparently did ill to her nerves.

          A week or two after I began staying there I scored some weed and, feeling it was proper to contribute to the household, I dumped it into the pot stash she kept in a shoebox. I was mortified when she came home and thrashed me with an emotional scolding for diluting the sacred top-grade Acapulco Gold that Michael Bloomfield, the guitarist, had given her. But she forgave me.

          I don’t recall ever having a clear idea of what Susannah did to make a living when she wasn’t being a housewife. I seem to remember her having a shit job once as a waitress, but it didn’t last long. I gave her some money toward the rent when I was staying at her place on the hillside, but I recall things there being tight. Once when I was living there she went out on a date that had been set up by a girlfriend. She came home with some money, but she was miserable. When I made tolerant noises, she told me that she felt as if her soul had been damaged.

          Not long afterwards I moved into a ratty basement apartment under the big house on Bonnie Brae where Karen Clark and Psyche had lived toward the end of Richard’s confinement. I knew the basement flat was coming vacant because I’d known the guy who was moving out of it, a motorcycle racer named Don, for years. Susannah moved into the same address shortly afterwards, but into a much bigger and nicer place than mine, up on the ground floor.

          It was there, in Susannah’s apartment upstairs from mine, that she threw a big birthday party for me, celebrating “26 years of failure”. It was also there that she tried to set me up with a nelly-gay friend of hers who was crashing there for a few days. He gave me deep, penetrating looks and told me that he had a rare form of throat cancer that required fresh semen for treatment. Susannah expressed amazement that I turned him down. Sorry, not my type.

          That summer she got back into heroin. Once again I was a disappointment to her: my aversion to even the sight of a syringe meant that I was unable to assist her either with tourniquet or works when she was giving herself a fix. Then she got a new boyfriend some years younger than she was, who was also into smack. His name was Gray. She told me how much better heroin is when she was all strung out than when she’d just been joy popping; it became just one long mellow cruise. She also told me how she and Gray kept infecting each other with the same gonorrhoea, as they couldn’t get it together to get to the clap clinic at the same time.

          Soon after I left LA at the end of August I got a letter from her telling me that she and Gray had gotten married. Then I got married. Then she wrote me that she’d had a daughter. We exchanged a few more letters before my wife destroyed my address book and all my letters. About thirty years later a mutual friend, who’d reconnected with me via facebook, told me that somewhere along the line Susannah had “made the transition. Drugs.”

Leda

          In the autumn of 1970 I moved out of Yabo’s place in Beechwood Canyon into the spare bedroom of the apartment of a young guy Yabo knew named Jim Coblentz. Jim aspired to be a film editor. The place was on — I loved this — Normal Avenue, across the street from LA City College.

          At the time I was also hanging out a bit with an Italian-American guy from New York named Nicky Lampe who was also a friend of Yabo’s. He did a bunch of the carpentry work on the set of Yabo’s movie. He said he’d learnt the trade from his father and his grandfather. He was also a dab hand at the 12-string and sang in the style of Jesse Colin Young and post-Belmonts, post-heroin Dion. He had ambitions as a singer, but was about to go inside for a while — something to do with dope.

          Anyway, Nicky introduced me into a social circle that hung out at a smallish mansion in central Hollywood. It had one wall that was a giant aquarium. I did a yard-work job there. And of course there was this girl. Her name was Michelle. She had good-looking boobs and talked about her mother a lot, but I didn’t get the drift of what she was getting at. Anyway, she gave me her phone number. And I called her. She was staying at, of all places, the Bel Air Hotel. She told me to pick up her mother and come out to Bel Air to get her. Once again I proved useful as a chauffeur.

          Her mother was a woman named Leda. She wasn’t her biological mother. She was her spiritual mother. Leda looked like she was in her thirties, but that was probably deceiving. She turned out to be an acquaintance of an ex-girlfriend of mine who had been more than twice my age, but who hadn’t looked her age, either.

          Leda was a notorious Hollywood character and publicity-seeker. She went around in astrology gowns talking all sorts of spiritual-esque rubbish in the medieval-to-pagan vein. She popped up from time to time as spiritual adviser to various phonies with sort-of-familiar names. I remembered seeing her picture, with a good-sized caption, in a copy of Esquire. It’d been in a Manson-inspired article about Hollywood heaviosity-sleaze. The picture had been of her simulating (I would perhaps incorrectly assume that she was simulating, that is) having sex with a live swan. Hi, Mom. The cover blurb said that Lee Marvin was afraid of her.

          She lived in a biggish house downhill and on the other side of Beechwood Canyon from Yabo’s place. I picked her up some time in the middle of the day and drove her out to Bel Air. As I drove, she filled me in a little bit on what was going on. She wasn’t easy to follow.

          On the one hand she was obsessing about another of her daughters, who had been attached to John Phillips, formerly of the Mamas and the Papas, in what sounded to me like a groupie relationship. Anyway, this daughter had been reduced to dancing in a nude go-go bar in Long Beach. And this other guy named John, the one who’d bankrolled Metamorphosis in Echo Park, where Richard Clark’s headshop had been, was involved in what to Leda was some nefarious way as well, but Leda failed to make clear exactly how. What Michelle was doing at the Bel Air Hotel, and why she was running up a big tab that she had no way in hell of paying, was also left vague. It seemed to have something to do with making someone Leda had a grudge against do the paying. We smoked a joint or two on the way out, and I was a bit high when we got there.

          Michelle was staying in a large one-and-a-half story bungalow that reeked of luxurious expensiveness. I got the impression that she’d been staying there for several days. She produced some large, white capsules that she swore were organic mescaline, and we each popped one. I was keen to escape Leda and go for the brass ring with Michelle, but they decided to go have a late lunch — on the tab — out by the pool. And who was I to tell someone she shouldn’t have lunch with her mother?

          I was aware by this time that Michelle was ripping somebody off — either the hotel or someone else — bigger’n Dallas. And I was a bit hesitant to participate directly in the scam. I was the chauffeur, and I was probably going to be the getaway driver (my fantasies of mescaline-enhanced dealings with Michelle’s boobs and better guaranteed that), but I felt a block against stealing anything directly. Not that that would’ve counted for much if it became a matter for the criminal justice system, but there it was. And I had my little dog Naomi with me. Naomi probably wouldn’t have been welcome at the poolside restaurant.

          So Naomi and I hung out for a while at the bungalow and then we went for a stroll around the landscaped grounds. But I got thirsty, so I went back to the bungalow, put Naomi in the VW bus, and went to the pool area to look for Michelle and Leda. I sat down to join them and ordered a beer, which I paid for out of my own pocket, rather than putting it on Michelle’s tab. They were drinking champagne. And we sat and chatted. Mostly about that ghastly business with John Phillips and John the eminence gris and the wayward daughter. I guess it would have been more accurate to say that Leda and Michelle continued their chat while I looked around at the social milieu poolside at the Bel Air Hotel. It wasn’t a society in which I ordinarily mixed.

          It was late October, and the sun went down fairly early. We went back to the bungalow and Leda helped Michelle pack in preparation for doing a runner. As I recall, Leda helped herself to a number of items that clearly were hotel property — ornaments, bed linens, and the like. They packed Michelle’s and the other stuff into the back of the bus and got ready to take off. At the last minute, though, Leda disappeared. I thought it’d be a good time to make a move on Michelle, but it wasn’t.

          A few minutes later Leda emerged from the darkness with something large stuffed into one of the hotel’s pillowcases, jumped into the back seat, and told me to take off. She’d stolen a swan from the hotel garden’s pond. Why I was surprised, I don’t know. This was a woman with a large and warped ego, zinging on mescaline and champagne and who knows what else, who led a clearly delusionary life even under ordinary circumstances. I moved Naomi closer to me on the bench-style front seat, shifted the bus into first, and my mind into neutral.

          The swan was, obviously, distressed, but Leda did her best to calm it down by cooing soothing words at it. She gave me on-the-fly directions (“Turn left here; now turn right here,” etc.) to a mansion in Benedict Canyon. It was Papa John Phillips’s house. While I drove her over there she was busy writing and drawing shit all over the swan’s pillowcase in lipstick. Occult warnings of some sort, I would imagine. I was hoping I wasn’t getting involved in some Manson-esque ugliness. I stayed, mentally, in neutral, but I was nerving myself to come down on the side of goodness and animal welfare if Leda got violent. But she didn’t. Not really.

          Anyway, what happened was that I parked in sort of a courtyard in front of the Hollywood Olde Englishe house. Lots of probably fake half-timbering. Leda and Michelle gathered up the pillowcased swan and headed for the front door. I turned the bus about so it was facing the way out. Way out, indeed! Then Leda and Michelle came running noisily back from the house, giggling like adolescents, climbed into the bus — Michelle in the front passenger seat and Leda in the back seat — and told me to take off. Now, a ’66 VW bus was not a vehicle for flashy displays of torque, but I did my best as they laughed and loudly remembered the looks on Phillips’s and his friends’ faces when she’d released the swan into his front room.

          And, goddamn it, Leda had kidnapped Phillips’s dog, a big old placid thing — some kind of a retriever, I think. She was ecstatic. The dog had a tag with Phillips’s phone number on it. She’d phone and tell him that she’d found his dog. At the hotel. Then maybe he’d do right by her daughter! I saw in the rear-view mirror that the dog looked bewildered and scared. I headed for Hollywood.

          I pulled Naomi closer to me and said something like, “You’re not going to hurt that dog, are you?” in my cold, calm, in-neutral voice.

          Leda answered me in a normal tone of voice, with nothing of the phoney goddess about it. She assured me that she had no intention of doing harm to any innocent creature. Then she started cooing to the dog, as she had the swan in the pillowcase.

          Michelle, if I remember correctly, was dozing off, her cheek against the window. I didn’t know how many days she’d been awake.

          Leda and I had something resembling a sane conversation for a while there as I drove along, about people and values and things like that. When we got to Leda’s house, I carried Michelle’s bags inside. Leda took the dog into the kitchen to phone John Phillips. It wasn’t that late — maybe nine or ten o’clock.

          Michelle went upstairs. I was wondering whether to go up after her or to wait for her to come down when there was a knock on the door. Some rich Hollywood *faggola was there. It was somebody I knew slightly. He had a date with Michelle for a party at somebody’s house. Michelle came breezing down the stairs and headed with him to his sports car. I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t fucking believe it.

          I must have been standing there with my jaw hanging down to my belly when Leda came out and bad-mouthed the dude and Michelle for me (“He’s nothing but a party-boy — and I do mean boy — nothing at all like a man like you”), but that didn’t help much. Leda then told me that she’d called Phillips, and that he was coming for the dog, and that she had to prepare the room — throne, candles, incense, music, and so on — to be properly imperious and intimidating for his arrival.

          Not a scene into which I would fit, obviously, so I drove back to Normal Avenue with Naomi. I must say that it did take me a while to get to sleep. I never saw Michelle again. I ran into Leda from time to time, but I never asked her what happened after I left. At least the cops never came looking for me.

________________________________________

*faggola was I term I devised to describe a certain Hollywood type: relentlessly heterosexual decorative males who prettified themselves in the extreme and behaved in a flutteringly camp and traditionally feminine manner in order to attract decorative Hollywood females.

Yabo Yablonsky

Yabo Yablonsky

          One evening in February or March 1970 I’d been at Jeff Simmons’s place, getting smashed and listening to him make up songs, but he was leaving to go somewhere, and Melody Hastings came across the court and asked me if I’d drive her to a party up in Beechwood Canyon. Melody Hastings was the wife of Doug Hastings, formerly of the Daily Flash and (briefly) the Buffalo Springfield. He was constantly on tour with his new band, Rhinoceros, so I never met him. I was hopelessly in lust with Melody, who was friendly but, as far as I knew, faithful. Anyway, when she asked me to take her to that party my response was — hey, would the Pope like to do a bit of praying?

          So off we went. And it was a good party with plenty of booze and dope, and I was cookin’. In a mood. I remember making up this manic comedy routine as I went along, something about Lithuanian dwarfs. And this sawed-off little bearded guy with a Brooklyn accent was laughing his ass off. My genial host. His maiden name had been Harold Yablonsky, but his dad had always been known as Yabo and he’d grown up as Little Yabo. When he’d gone Hollywood he’d changed his first name legally from Harold to Yabo. His parents had called him Heshie. He was fifteen years older than I was,  the same age as Alfredo. Yabo and I became friends. He sort of adopted me as his common-law nephew.

          Yabo was a working, but not exactly big-time, film director. He was just in the pre-production phase of making a movie off a screenplay he’d written, called B.J. Lang Presents. Terrible name, I thought, but who was I to say? In 1989 I saw a video of it (then called The Manipulator) in a video-hire store in a rural New Zealand town called Otorohanga, but I didn’t have access to a VCR at the time, and by the time I did it was gone. I finally found it online, where it is free to all.

          Anyway, Yabo hired me on as a sort of personal assistant and assistant to the art director, and made sure the producer paid me in non-traceable cash, so as not to jeopardise my still-pending disability claim, which had been pending for about three months at that point.

          The movie starred Mickey Rooney, who was a bizarre character. I mean, here was this white-bearded guy about 50 years old who’d been a movie actor since he’d been a little kid. I got the impression that he had trouble making sense if nobody gave him lines to say. One scene that impressed itself on my mind was Mickey sharing a couple of joints with the crew and going on and on about what a great man J. Edgar Hoover had been. Sheesh!

          The female lead was an underweight actress named Luana Anders, who’d been in Easy Rider. She was a good enough actor. I remember that she was into Namyoho Renge Kyo, a crackpot belief that if you chant the three words in the belief’s name as a mantra, over and over and over and over, all the time, obsessively, not only would all your troubles melt like bubbles, but all your material cravings would end up satisfied. You want a new Mercedes-Benz? Just chant Namyoho, &c. night and day and one will be yours. You want some hanky-panky with your neighbour’s gorgeous wife? Same deal. She called it Buddhism.

          So I busted ass working on that movie and taking care of Yabo, who was responding to the pressures of directing his own script by consuming unwise quantities of Fundador Spanish brandy (Yuck, but different strokes, and all that). Yabo had gone into wild-man mode. He shouted. He purred. He strutted. He roared with laughter and tears and every other kind of emotional display that any occasion could call for. He stomped around declaiming about this and that. It made little difference if he was on the set or off. He came from a generation that took Hemingway and Picasso seriously, more for their flamboyantly macho lives than for their artistic accomplishments. He loved bullfights and all they imply, and hated salads and all they imply. He seemed to radiate a vibration of excitement and macho energy that was almost visible in itself. And although he was not religious at all, ethnoculturally he was very, very Jewish. Only one kind of salami would do, and it wasn’t Danish, as I learnt after running an errand to a delicatessen for him.

          In addition to being Yabo’s errand-boy and nanny, I was seconded to Larry, the art director, and shlepped all over LA scoring props (I borrowed the old-fashioned wheelchair that Mickey kept Luana tied to in the movie from Frank Zappa, who had used it after being thrown from a stage in Europe by a deranged fan, and who usually kept it in the basement studio of his house). I was even able to score some work for a friend of mine who had a VW pickup. I helped to dress the set.

          Somewhere in the middle of all this I remember getting involved with the woman who lived downstairs from my friend Susannah and across the courtyard from Jeff. Next door to Melody. Her name was Patti. She was tall and worked as a nude dancer in some dive out in the San Fernando Valley. My, oh my! After about a month of shooting, Yabo called it a wrap, and that night he had a party on the somewhat surrealistic set we’d built. And the party turned into an orgy. And Patti ended up with Yabo, for a day or two. I did all right at the party myself, but Patti and I were through.

          It was at about this time that I, along with my little dog Naomi, moved out of the little guest house in the Wilshire District where we had been living and into my VW bus. We slept parked in the unused carport assigned to Susannah out behind the court on Fountain. Susannah let me shower at her place. Not wanting to take too much advantage of Susannah, I also took a shower or two at Yabo’s place up in Beechwood Canyon. Then Yabo invited me to live in his spare bedroom.

          In exchange for Naomi and me staying there rent-free, I would continue to function as his PA while he organised post-production for his movie. And the rest of the time I could write. Or, as he put it, the job required that I: “Sweep up the place every day, wash the dishes, run a few errands, and drag me up the hill from the street when I’m too drunk to make it myself.” This was a canyon-side house. Then he added, “And throw away the stuff that gets broken when Sue and I have a fight.” Yabo’s fling with Patti had been both brief and surreptitious, and he was back with his long-time girlfriend, Sue.

          I remember many days when I’d be sweeping the leaves from the back patio, music coming through the sliding doors from inside the house, and taking time to dance with Naomi, who truly did love to dance.

          Yabo and I, however, did not have such a congruent taste for music. He, of course, liked his sounds flamboyant and, to me, a bit overdone. At the time his favourite was Finlandia by Sibelius, which he played over and over again. I was into the music of the people I knew and what they liked. Yabo liked his pop music a bit schmaltzy, such as The Mamas & the Papas. He hated anything that sounded at all country-ish, or even by singers with even a trace of a Southern or country accent. He even hated The Band. It had something to do with him having been to boot camp in Mississippi during the Korean War. Later that year, after I moved out, when we went together to see Zappa and the Mothers perform Zappa’s music with the LA Philharmonic at Pauley Pavilion, he didn’t think much of that either.

          When in his cups, Yabo often enjoyed telling tales of his early days in the tough Jewish street gangs of the Brownsville district in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Yabo was a physically active and highly dramatic story-teller, even more so with a snoot full of Fundador.

          My favourite Yabo story, though, was one he told of an event in the early 50s. He was back from Korea and was living with his immigrant parents from Brownsville, getting into the intellectual-artist-beatnik thing, and reading all the right books. One of those books was The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley. So Yabo found out how to send off somewhere for psilocybin mushrooms, did it, and had a wee munch. He spent a night without sleep floating about Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, revelling in the splendour and wonder and beauty of it all.

          Shortly after dawn he came home, looking as if he’d been doing what he’d been doing. He parents were concerned. So he said, “Mom. Dad. I love you very much. I feel the greatest love for you both. I’ve eaten some mushrooms I read about.” Here he ran to his room and brought out The Doors of Perception to show them. “See, it’s in this book by Aldous Huxley, the famous philosopher. So it’s all right. It’s nothing to worry about, and I want you to know that I love you both very much ...”

          And his mother and father looked at each other silently for a moment. Then his mother said, “Heshie, dot’s nice. But next time, no more mushrooms.”

          Yabo’s relationship with his girlfriend Sue complicated my tenancy agreement somewhat. Yabo told me, “Look, Richard — when Sue comes by you’re gonna have to stay somewhere else. We’ll be, like, fucking in the fireplace and fucking on the kitchen counter and stuff like that, y’know?” Cleaning up the day after Sue’s stays at Yabo’s house usually took me at least an hour. Especially if they’d had a fight. I remember one time in particular when she’d broken his riding crop and poured all his Fundador — several bottles of it — and a half-gallon bottle of Jim Beam down the kitchen sink.

          The somewhere else I stayed was with a cheerful young red-haired woman with no visible means of support named Donna, who lived three or four houses down the hill from Yabo’s place. I don’t know what to write about Donna without seeming pornographic.

          Eventually I moved completely out of Beechwood Canyon, but I still hung with Yabo from time to time. His agent found me a cruddy job as a delivery boy for a Jewish deli on Beverly Boulevard when my unemployment compensation ran out.

          Later, when I signed up briefly with a talent agency, I got an interview with a guy who was a friend of Yabo’s, but he ended up telling me to write a screen treatment with a story line like that of a movie called The Grasshopper that was just out and which I hadn’t seen. Thanks.

          B.J. Lang got finished and went nowhere. The people who’d put up the money either didn’t know what to do with it (Yabo’s theory) or just didn’t think there was anything they could do with it. Yabo moved out of Beechwood Canyon to some place in a semi-rural fringe of LA. I went out to see him there once, early in 1972. He was writing away at various speculative projects. People were talking about the My Lai massacre.

          I managed to keep in touch with Yabo after I left LA. He did the screenplay for another movie, a 007-esque opus called Jaguar Lives! in 1978-79. I never saw it, but he sent me his novelisation of the screenplay.

          In the early part of 1981 I had a bit of money, and for some reason I still had plenty of credit on my MasterCard, so I decided to make a sentimental journey out to LA from San Antonio. I went in March. It’d been more than eight-and-a-half years since I’d left. My next-door neighbours were glad to mind Naomi for a few days while I was gone.

          I rented a car at the LA airport and drove directly to Echo Park, where I got a couple of burritos from the Burrito King and a half-quart of beer from the deli next door, all of which I consumed there in the little parking lot. Eventually I drove up to the Hollywood Hills to see Yabo.

           Yabo now owned a place of his own on a high and leafy hillside looking down on the Hollywood Freeway going through Cahuenga Pass. I’d arranged in advance to stay with him, but when I got there he wasn’t home. I hung around for a while — went for a walk around the neighbourhood, and so on — until he got there. We smoked some pot and yakked. Yabo had just finished having a script of his shot into a feature with Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, Max von Sydow, and Pele — a WWII/soccer epic called Victory. A very Yabo-ish title. He gave me his novelisation of it, and I saw it much later on video.

          We went into Hollywood for dinner with an agent at some flashy Asian restaurant. They talked real Hollywood stuff, mostly about business, but the other guy went on a bit about famous actresses he knew who were lesbians. There went all my illusions. I paid more attention to the food than they seemed to.

          The next evening, after I’d spent the day hanging out with John Ware, Yabo and his girlfriend, a former nun from Belgium, took me to a Hollywood Party. It was a good party. Lots of Hollywood People were there. I wasn’t one of them. I was a cab driver and an artists’ model and a small-time food and featurette writer from San Antonio.

          I flew home the next day.

          We kept in touch loosely over the years until recently.

          In his early seventies he finished writing a new play, called Jews without Money, about the tough gangs he hung out with in the 40s. It received mixed reviews in the States, but was apparently well-received in Britain.

          Yabo died of cancer on February 10, 2005, the same day as Arthur Miller. Yabo would have been thrilled to have been married to Marilyn Monroe, himself, I’m sure. He was 73.

Don MacAllister & Jon Keliehor

Don MacAllister

          At least three of the units at the court on Fountain Ave where Jeff Simmons lived in 1969 were occupied by former members of the Daily Flash, Seattle’s first major underground rock band.

          One of those living on Fountain was a multi-instrumentalist named Don MacAllister. He’d been playing around in the LA music scene for a few years. I’d first heard of him when I’d been living in Delaware during the first half of 1969. He was on the credits of an album I’d bought by Jackie De Shannon (“What the world needs now is love, sweet love”). I used to read liner notes credits back then.

          MacAllister and I hit it off together pretty well from the start, and formed an almost immediate bond. He hadn’t been having too easy a time of it for a while. The Daily Flash was a thing of the past, and he’d been having trouble getting any regular work. His wife, he told me, had gone into a love affair with Jackie De Shannon when he’d been playing for her, and left him. He started getting into smack. Pawned his autoharp (I got it out of the pawnshop and bought it from him; I had it for years).

          He’d run out of money more than once. One time he’d tried to pick up food money by performing — with mask and cat o’ nine tails — in an old-style S&M fuck-flick. They’d paid him only $40, but let him keep the mask, though. It freaked him out. Jeff Simmons wrote a song about all this — called ‘I’m In The Music Business’ — that’s a killer.

          Once I drove him and some equipment down to USC to play with a pick-up band at some fraternity party. I remember feeling out of place around the frat boys and their girls, and that MacAllister started the set with a fantastic version of Dylan’s ‘Queen Jane Approximately’, a song I’d always loved and have never heard covered by anyone else, before or since. I later found out that it had been almost a signature tune for the Daily Flash.

          He’d done some playing during the previous year with Mack Rebennack before getting fired in New York over the heroin thing. Shortly after the USC gig Mack took him on again to play mandolin for his Doctor John the Night Tripper act at the Whisky á Go Go. I went to see it, and it was amazing. Maybe a bit over-theatrical, but so visually busy it would’ve taken a real bore to spend much time noticing — and the music was wonderful.

          I met Mack one night the following week at MacAllister’s apartment, but he didn’t meet me, being thoroughly nodded-out on heroin. All he said was, “Y’all aint gonna leave fo’ the pawty widdout me, are ya?”, and it took him close to a minute and a half to say it. Anyway, about a week later MacAllister died from an overdose. I was told that Mack kicked the habit, at least for a while, not long afterwards.

          MacAllister’s spirit has come back to haunt me once or twice in moments of extreme fatigue, when such illusions can happen.

Jon Keliehor

          Also at that court on Fountain lived a drummer from Seattle named Jon Keliehor. He’d been with The Daily Flash, too. He’d played percussion for some symphony orchestra and had played some jazz before getting into alternative rock. After leaving the Daily Flash he’d played sessions and so forth around LA with groups like the Doors and the Byrds before settling in with a new band called Bodine, who were putting together an album for one of the record companies.

          Everyone in Bodine played better than most, but it ended up going nowhere. Keliehor’s woman at the time described their rehearsals as five talented musicians arguing about what’s the best way to sell out. Jeff Simmons thought that they copied the Beatles’ riffs too much.

          Keliehor was a short and colourlessly blonde person with thick glasses — shy and intelligent and educated and reasonable and with a finely cynical view of show business. We got along great and started hanging out together a bit.

          One time I drove him and his drum kit to a charity gig Bodine was playing at Carl Reiner’s house in Beverly Hills. Keliehor was wearing an enormous 10-gallon hat, and when I kidded him about it he said that it was the first gimmick that had come into his mind for just attracting attention. After dropping him off I had to go to do a job somewhere else. When I returned to pick him up I had to manoeuvre my way through the forgettable celebrities to get my VW bus to the part of the lawn where the band had been set up. Keliehor was falling-down drunk, but as far as I know he’d played flawlessly. Reiner at least was luxurious with his praise.

          Later, as Bodine’s single was going nowhere and the band was becoming increasingly less of a real thing, I took Keliehor to the Aquarius Theatre one afternoon to audition for the band playing for Hair. The Aquarius Theatre was on a run-down section of Sunset in mid-Hollywood, and I wasn’t much impressed by either it or by Hair. The commercialised, pop-culture version of hippiedom tended to nauseate me. Keliehor agreed, but needed the money. He didn’t get the gig.

          I left my job with Bizarre about the time Bodine ended. Keliehor left town and I never saw him again. I later learned that he’d gone to Britain, where he’d got involved in composing and performing music for most of the modern dance companies in London. After returning to Seattle for a while, where he was involved in a school of art and a gamelan troupe, he went to Venezuela, where he created full ensemble percussion music in live interaction with a dance company. He has since returned to the UK and now has a music production company in Glasgow called Luminous Music. We’ve re-contacted recently via facebook.