Judy Mayhan

Judy Mayhan

          When I was easing into adolescence I was attracted to all the superficial aspects of the beatnik thing that had managed to filter through to a 13-to-15-year-old in suburban Delaware: Bob Denver as Maynard G. Krebs; pictures of Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, if not their music. I knew that beatniks liked jazz, but jazz was hard for me to come by. It certainly wasn’t on the radio.

          I just thought it would be wonderful to be a beatnik. I wanted to wear a beret and sit in dark basement-like places and play the bongos and listen to poetry and jazz that my mother and ninth-grade English teacher couldn’t like. I wanted to drink red wine and smoke pot. Of course, Wilmington’s northern suburbs in 1959-61 was no place for a pre-pubescent-to-pubescent middle-class Jewish boy to have even the foggiest notion about if or how pot might be available. Maybe I would have if I’d kept in touch with Bobby DiGiacomo.

          Delaware! Thelonious Monk got busted for pot just passing through Delaware on Route 40.

          Instead of jazz, what the local beatnik-types were doing commercially in the Very Late 50s was folk music. I think this was partly because folk music was more easily accessible than jazz to middle class punters in search of some night life, but I think it was mostly because folk music is enormously more easy to play than jazz.

          We may not have been up to our eyeballs in beatniks in Delaware, but middle-class artsy-fartsies and left-wingers (called ‘liberals’ in the US) ye have with ye always. Delaware has been a hotbed of Quaker activity, for instance, for hundreds of years. Lefties were close enough to beatniks to count. I tried learning to play the guitar at least a half a dozen times without the slightest success, and settled for beatnik-image bongo drums, which I played with embarrassing ineptness. I bought a beret but couldn’t wear it because I’m allergic to wool.

          In about 1960 I started hearing about a folk-music coffee house somewhere in downtown Wilmington called The Attic. It was upstairs over top of something else. It was supposed to be real beatnik, with acts that came down from Greenwich Village!, but at 14 I had neither the means of transport nor the independence to choose my night-time activities, and I’d heard that it cost more to go there than I could afford, anyway.

          Then, in 1961, I got that summer job from Howard, and by the time school started again I’d built up a little bank account. I got a part-time after-school job for a few months putting stock up on the shelves at Happy Harry’s Discount Drug Store, then a tiny place in a suburban strip centre not too far from where I lived in Green Acres. Then The Attic moved from downtown Wilmington to a place in the next strip centre up the road, less than a hundred yards from Happy Harry’s. I saw the ‘Now Playing:’ board change every week. I saw the people. They were beatniks.

          I went a few times to watch the shows and drink orzata soda, and then during my senior year at Mt Pleasant High I started hanging out there. Eventually they gave me a job as cashier and helper on weekend evenings, ‘they’ being Kalif and Judy Allen. Kalif sometimes went by the name Kalif Baghdad and Judy sang under her maiden name of Judy Mayhan. Kalif was a short, egocentric ectomorph with greasy hair, a little moustache, and a beatnik variation of the short-guy-with-too-much-testosterone syndrome. Judy was a short, round-faced, bespectacled, pregnant Kansan with long, straight, Irish-blonde hair and a soprano voice. She also played the dulcimer.

          Judy’s performances were pretty good, if you liked quiet, sensitive-folk-singer acts. And Judy was nice. She was clearly an adult, and my boss, and pregnant and all, but she talked to me and the girl who worked weekends with me as if we were just people like her. She’d comb her long, straight, Irish-blonde hair forward, put her glasses on over top of it, and make people laugh.

          All sorts of acts playing the East Coast folk circuit came through. My favourites were Patrick Sky, Buffy Sainte-Marie, a guy named Ted Staack, and the Holy Modal Strings, who later became the Holy Modal Rounders. They’d formerly been part of the legendary Village Fugs, and did non-euphemistic satirical material unlikely to be to the taste of my mother or ninth-grade English teacher. Another, small-name act there was Peter Torkelson, later Tork, who later became a TV star. I got to hang out a little sometimes with the performers, although I didn’t intrude and was never offered any of the pot I knew that they and Mike — who had a beard and both worked and slept in the kitchen — and Kalif were smoking out back.

          I went off to college, and The Attic, which was always on the edge of going broke, went out of business. Seven years later, in the autumn of 1970, I was living in LA and going through a period of unemployment. I went to a party at the place of a friend of my friend Alfredo’s, down in the LA Basin somewhere. There were many people at the party I knew a bit through Alfredo. And then I saw Judy Mayhan, happily drinking and toking and chatting away. Strangely, she remembered me, too. How, I don’t know. I mean, a person’s appearance can change between age 17 and 24. And, in addition to growing older and burlier, I’d grown a full beard and longish, bushy hair. But there you are. She was still performing: singing mostly. And her car had been stolen while she’d been doing a gig at the park earlier that day, so she asked me to drive her home.

          Now, home was notably bizarre. She was living in what she told me was WC Fields’s old mansion. It was on the uphill side of Franklin Avenue, which is the northernmost straight-line east-west thoroughfare in Hollywood before the rise of the Hollywood Hills starts getting steep. She invited me in for something to drink, Kalif being apparently then a part of her past. She took me down to the basement, where we got smashed while she played the piano and sang for me. It was lovely. Very romantic. Too bad that we got so stoned that my memory of later on, when we went upstairs to bed, is less clear than I would like it to be.

          The next morning she got a phone call from the cops wanting an inventory of what’d been stolen along with her car: some performer’s gowns, some equipment, and so on. It must have been for insurance purposes. Like most people in LA, she didn’t expect the LAPD actually to do anything about a crime like that. While she was on the phone with them, I had a bit of a gawk at the giant, empty ballroom off the main entry hall. Great rehearsal space, I thought. Then Judy had to go about her business — getting her kids back from her sister? the babysitter? Kalif? — and she made it clear that it’d been trippy and fun, but I really wasn’t in her long-range plans. Cool.

          The punchline is that the next and last time I saw her, which was many months later, she was doing her record-company week at the Troubadour in West Hollywood to mark the release of her album, and her backup band was a group of musicians for whom I’d moved some equipment back when I’d been working. Two of them I’d known slightly from previous bands I’d worked for: Lowell George and Richie Hayward. They were about to become Little Feat. These things happen. Judy didn’t sell tons of records; Little Feat, of course, did.