Stash Wagner + Karen & Richard Clark

Stash Wagner

          In 1968, when I first moved into LA from Claremont, Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys travelled without a roadie, which for me meant no paid work carrying their stuff until they returned to town. I’d started hanging out with a couple of guys in the band, and when they went on the road, I still intruded on their scenes, in particular the piano player, Bill Martin.

          Stash Wagner and his teen-aged wife Sue were Martin’s neighbours on Beechwood Drive in Beechwood Canyon, the hillside directly beneath the big “HOLLYWOOD” sign that’s on all those postcards. I don’t think Stash was over 18 or 19 then, himself. His birth-certificate name is Lawrence.

          Stash was the lead singer and primary lyricist for a group called The Fraternity of Man, now almost entirely remembered, by those who remember them at all, for the song ‘Don’t Bogart Me’, usually referred to by its opening line, “Don’t bogart that joint, my friend.” Stash was a real funny guy. We got on great, and I started picking up jobs humping amps and stuff for that band, too. The band itself had Elliot Ingber, who formerly had played guitar on and off with the Mothers, and Richie Hayward, who would later be the Little Feat drummer.

          I don’t think Stash had a car at the time, and we’d run errands around Hollywood in my 66 VW bus. One time Stash and I were down on Fairfax on some business or other, and we ran into the guys from Canned Heat, who’d just finished recording ‘Christmas Boogie’ with Ross Bagdasarian, who was David Seville and The Chipmunks. And one thing led to another and somebody bet Bob ‘The Bear’ Hite that he couldn’t eat 25 tacos in the space of an hour. It was on and we were off to a nearby Taco Bell for the event, which Bear won.

          One time I drove Stash and one or two other guys in the band up to a rock festival at a race track somewhere inland from Oakland. I was officially road manager, which meant that I was the one who took possession of the paycheck for safe conveyance back to LA, and so on. And there I was at last, on the inside of the fence, with credentials, surrounded by famous people, with mobs of star-struck teen-aged girls on the outside of the fence, eager to be grateful to me for getting them through the gates.

          After I parked and unloaded the microbus I went to take a leak, and I realised right then that I had the clap. Must’ve picked it up from that groupie from Wisconsin with the truly lovely tits who’d picked me up at a F.O.M. gig at some near-the-beach dance hall the weekend before. I thought, Shit!!

          I went and finagled a team of three groupies into the compound anyhow, explained my plight to them, and they were sympathetic. They comforted me by being nice, and by stealing wine and dope from the various big-name acts and bringing it back to me.

          Stash was less sympathetic. “Hey, Rich,” he asked,  leering, “Does it hurt when you spit?”

          Somehow Stash met this Danish blues-harp guy named Lee Oskar. And somehow the three of us went out to Claremont to see John Ware. I think it was because Stash was curious about the songs I’d told him Ware and I’d been fucking around with writing, and only Johnnie knew the music to them. Ware sort of ran through one with his acoustic guitar, and then Stash took the piece of paper with the lyrics and chords on it and started singing, and Lee Oskar whipped out his harmonica for further accompaniment. It sounded good to me. I felt unworthy.

          Then I left LA for about a half a year in 1969. When I came back the Fraternity of Man was in the process of fizzling out. They put out another album, but it wasn’t the same. The record company had made Stash clean up the lyrics to a nasty song originally titled “Fuck Her”. Stash tried to put it in a positive light when he told me about it, but I could sense that everything was just Not Right, and that was that for the Fraternity of Man.

          A year or two later I was experiencing yet another low ebb, and I worked for a week or so as a projectionist at an all-nude strip joint. The dancers went starkers, not me. I just threaded silent 8mm porn films into rickety projectors and flicked a little lever back and forth when they jammed. I left when the dive got raided. The vice squad dick told me I could maybe make a defence on First Amendment grounds, or I could just walk. I walked.

          Anyway, Stash’s then-wife was dancing there, so things couldn’t have been going all that well for him, either. It was during a soul-frying LA heat wave, when the smog seemed thick enough to cut with plastic scissors. I went to hang out with Stash for a while. They’d moved out of Beechwood Canyon into a small apartment down in the basin that was like thousands of other small apartments down in the basin. Stash and I had a beer or two. He told me that he was spending several hours a day just standing in a cold shower, and that Suzi dancing at that sewer really brought him down. It was tough for either of us to be funny. That was the last time we saw each other.

          Toward the end of the 80s I saw his name mentioned in some gossip rag as being the ex of some starlet.

          In February, 2001 I tracked him down on the internet. He was living in Denver, doing an artist thing, hawking his paintings over the net, and designing websites. He told me, “I too have been married three times, divorced four times (one palimony). I guess I’m still a sucker for pretty women. I try to keep my artistic spirit alive, but have been known to work in more ‘human’ type jobs (music editor, PR, even sales <my acting experience comes in handy there>).”

          We sent emails back and forth fairly often for a while. I got the impression that he was a bit weirded out by having spent the previous third of a century or so being The Guy Who Wrote Don’t Bogart That Joint, as if everything else he had done and accomplished in his life paled before a song he’d written when he’d been 17. But he was still getting the royalties, and it had just popped up in another movie, to his surprise and financial gain (“That’s cool after 30 years to still get an income from that song.”).

          He told me that he wasn’t satisfied with his scene in Denver, feeling “like a fish out of water”, and was looking to move on. He’d done okay in the music and acting rackets — even working as a music editor and as a PR dude — for years in Hollywood, but had left, he told me, to move to Nashville (“Old rock-n-rollers don’t die, they move to Nashville.”). He’d been put off, however, by what he’d seen as the dishonesty of the people he’d been involved with in Nashville, and had moved on to Denver.

          For a while there he was considering coming out to New Zealand, but then he connected with a woman in Toronto who was involved in putting together a movie project. He moved to Toronto in late June or early July 2001 and told me that it looked like he was going to get married.

          Two years later he was back in Denver playing in a rock & roll band, the Toronto thing not having happened. Then, after a while, my emails to him started to bounce back to me.

          Eight or nine years later we reconnected via facebook. He now lives in a place called Lapu-Lapu, a highly urbanised city near Cebu in the central Philippines, noted for its beaches and the locale of a few upmarket resorts. He’s married to a Filipina and has two small children – and also a dog named Bogart. He is apparently involved in civic affairs involving the arts, is the sponsor of a local talent contest and, hobnobs with locally famous people.

          His facebook is a mishmash of the old Stash – pro-marijuana stuff, old Zappa anti-theocracy videos, insightful musical posts, occasional glimpses of the sense of humour that used to characterise him, some pro-refugee stuff, and so on – and a bewildering new Lawrence (Stash) Wagner, who espouses tea-party conspiracy-theory shit, other ignorantly off-the-wall right-wing chicken-hawk nonsense, contrived inspirational platitudes, and anti-refugee stuff. We’re all such complicated units.

          From his photos he’s still just about as good-looking as ever.

Karen & Richard Clark

         

         When I moved into LA from Claremont in the Spring of 1968 I found an apartment in an old house facing the Hollywood Freeway in the Echo Park District. Down one side of the hill from where I lived, on Sunset Boulevard near Rosemont Avenue, was a little cluster of hippie shops called Metamorphosis, one of a string of hippie-oriented businesses along Sunset in Echo Park and Silverlake called The Other End shops.

          The main shop at Metamorphosis was an upscale lapidary salon. There was also a head shop and a shop that sold hippie-esque women’s clothing. Upstairs over the shops were a lapidary workshop and some sewing machines. The whole thing was owned by a nerdy-looking rich guy named John, who seemed to enjoy playing Mr Bucks to a bunch of oddballs. He didn’t show up with his bemused-yet-lordly smile often.

          I found it easy to hang out with the Metamorphosis people, especially Richard Clark, the manager of the head shop, and his pregnant teen-age wife Karen. We became close friends, and I slipped into their circle.

          Richard was originally from somewhere out in the San Fernando Valley. He’d been into Hollywood/Echo Park scenes for a while. Karen was from Kansas City. She’d come out to LA to do the hippie thing. Life as an R. Crumb cartoon. She’d met Richard while she’d been selling the Free Press somewhere on Sunset up toward the Strip, and then, lo and behold, she was pregnant and living in back of a head shop in Echo Park.

          Since I was mostly unemployed, I had the time to hang out with them and their friends. We laughed and smoked pot and listened to music — that sort of thing. Richard was a cheerful, easy-going sort of fellow. We tended to see things in a similar way. Although the scenes we moved in were heavily populated by people with passionate devotions to one occult world-view (or bullshit superstition) or another, he and I both were sceptical but open-minded. Laughs mattered more than spiritual enlightenment to us both.      

          When I left LA at the start of 1969 and went to live back East for what turned out to be about six months, we kept in touch. Karen was about due when I left, and the baby was born soon afterwards, a little girl they named Psyche.

          In our exchanges of letters Richard found out that I was having trouble finding a connection in Delaware, so to surprise me he mailed me some weed in a package of incense. Seemed a big risk to me, but nothing bad happened.

          Later in the Spring I got a letter telling me that Richard had been busted. Through correspondence I followed the story of Richard’s arrest for selling hash, his trial, and his conviction. It’s a hell of a world.

          When I got back to LA early in the summer Richard was out on bail waiting to go in. He told me he’d sold five ounces of hash to a Fed. He told me what it had been like when they’d pulled large-calibre handguns on him. Not at all fun. He was a peace-and-love type, himself, and not into guns as a lifestyle. They sentenced him to five years at Terminal Island. One year for each ounce of hash.

          After Richard went in I did what I could for Karen, considering the demands of the job I had during half of 1969, in the way of being a helpful male friend who wouldn’t hit on her for nookie. In the Spring of 1970, when I was working on the production of a low-budget movie, I got Karen a job as night-watchperson at the set, which was in a warehouse in Burbank. She and Psyche had a good time wandering around the set before sleeping each night on the couch in the reception room in front. I believe Psyche appears in a dream sequence somewhere in the movie, but I never saw the final cut.

          One time, I guess it must have been in 1971, Karen’s sister came out to visit from Kansas City. Unlike hippie Karen, her sister (I forget her name) was all straight fashions and make-up — a former Miss Missouri, they told me, although not a Miss America pageant one. It’d been some other pageant. And whereas Karen was tall and fair, the sister was shortish and dark.

          Karen set me up to be her date. We went to a party in West-Central LA thrown by some friends of Alfredo’s. I found it difficult to relate to her, but I remember that on the way home, after hours of failing to connect on a human level, she decided that she wanted me to carry her piggy-back for a while, and it felt somehow intimate to me.

          By 1971 Karen and Psyche were living in an apartment on the top floor of a subdivided old mansion at the corner of Kent and Bonnie Brae Streets in Echo Park. It was a well-established address for people in our — and a few other —  bohemian circles, with one or two elderly non-freak tenants as well; I’d known people living there since I’d moved into L.A.

          Karen was selling Shaklee, an early look-alike of Amway, or trying to.

          Then Richard started getting out of Terminal Island on a day-release basis to take a wood-working course at LA Trade-Technical College. Sometimes he cut a class or two to visit Karen and Psyche at Bonnie Brae. I went down to have lunch with him at the college’s cafeteria a couple of times. He remained the same cheerful person he’d been before, but maybe he was just cheerful about being outside the walls. He had a few prison stories to tell. I got the impression that Terminal Island didn’t seem that violent a place — just profoundly boring and full of ass-holes.

          One of the ass-holes in particular irritated him. Owsley Stanley, the legendary San Francisco LSD chemist, producer of the best-selling Orange Sunshine and Purple Owsleys. “Bastard acts like he’s better than the rest of us, like we should treat him like he’s some sort of fuckin’ celebrity.”

          I think it was early in 1972 that Richard got out on parole. He and Karen and Psyche moved into an apartment on a hillside walkway leading down from Echo Park Terrace facing the other side of the park. It was just a bit more than a hole in the ground with a wall on the downhill side.

          Richard got a job at a factory in Glendale that made the cabinets for some brand-name speaker — the sort of job that nowadays would have long since been exported to Asia. He went off with a lunchpail in the mornings; sometimes I drove him there. He built the frame for a waterbed in the basement apartment I’d moved into under the house on Bonnie Brae. We resumed hanging out in the same network of friends.

          Richard saved his money and bought some tools and started making antique reproductions. He knew a gay decorator in Beverly Hills who started buying everything he could make. Then I left LA again, this time for good, and later, when the insanely jealous woman I was with destroyed my address book, we lost contact with each other.

          About 40 years later Karen found me on facebook, and we’ve been in friendly correspondence since then. She and Richard broke up some time in the 70s, and she told me that she hasn’t seen or heard from him since Psyche’s high school graduation. I’ve been unable to contact him. Karen wrote me that, ‘He's living in Los Osos near San Luis Obispo with his wife, Gretchen. They've been together pretty much since he and I split up. They have one son, Jesse, who is college age now.’

          Karen herself remarried in 1981 and the union seems to have thrived. She frequently posts photos of herself, with long white hair, and spouse Jerry, with long white beard, going thither and yon all over North America in a camper and undertaking long and arduous hiking (NZ: tramping) expeditions. I don’t know where the money comes from and I haven’t asked. Psyche has become a professional dog breeder and has showed at least one champion golden retriever.

Herb Cohen

Herb Cohen

          In 1968 Linda Ronstadt’s manager was Herb Cohen. Herbie was something of an underground show-biz legend at the time. He’d started out as co-owner of a folk club on Sunset Boulevard in the mid 1950s, serving up a beatnik’s brew of espresso, live music, poetry readings, and comedy. Then he’d disappeared from the scene for a while. People said that he’d been a mercenary soldier and a gun-runner in the Caribbean. I don’t know if either of those things were true, but they didn’t hurt his image. He’d met Lenny Bruce when Lenny had performed at his club, and became his manager, or so I heard. There were stories of him duking it out with a deadbeat club manager out on the sidewalk on the Sunset Strip in order to obtain payment for one of his acts.

          He was short and burly, wore guayabera shirts, had a narrowly-trimmed beard, and always seemed to have a pained expression on his extraordinarily round face, even when he was smiling.

          Anyway, my VW microbus work for the Stone Poneys got my name and phone number on the Rolodex in Herbie’s office, high on about the 15th floor of a building on Wilshire Boulevard: I was a big fellow with a van. I started getting calls to do jobs here and there around L.A. for some of Herbie’s other acts. You may have to google what a Rolodex was.

          Herbie was fun to work for, if your taste appreciates cynicism, as does mine.

          Herbie seemed to like me, and by November he signed me on as assistant producer, or, sometimes, assistant to the producer (titles were always vague in Herbie’s organisations), for a big concert that Frank Zappa, another of Herbie’s clients, was having with the Mothers of Invention and a bunch of freak acts he’d signed for his new record label, Bizarre. It was set for just before Xmas in the Shrine Auditorium in downtown LA.

          The producer was an individual named Joe Gannon, who was from Philly and had prematurely grey hair, and who told me any number of times over the next few years that being afraid “to make waves” is the worst thing there is. A show-biz dude all the way. He looked and talked show-biz and had a reputation for sailing close to the wind, in the grey areas, as it were.

          Joe and Herbie had me running all over the LA basin — chasing down the materials for building and decorating the stage, meeting out-of-town acts at the airport, making sure the various acts’ equipment was in the right places, taking care of details. Then Herbie decided that I was just the one to mother-hen people like Captain Beefheart and Wild Man Fisher, who nobody else in the office wanted to mess with.

          On the night of the concert it was my job to pick up the unpredictable Wild Man at his flea-bag rented room, calm him down a bit, and drive him to the auditorium. Then I saw to a bunch of details and when the doors opened helped watch the entrance. People were trying to get in with phoney tickets, and so on. I remember this one young woman trying to just breeze past without a ticket. When I more or less challenged her she told me that she didn’t need a ticket, she was Suzy Creamcheese.

          It flooded back to me, lying on my back on the floor of Jerry Kleiner’s roach-hotel apartment in Foggy Bottom, stoned to the gills, my then-girlfriend by my side, freaking out pleasantly to the Suzy Creamcheese pieces (‘Return of the Son of the Monster Magnet’ and ‘Help, I’m A Rock’) on Freak Out!, the Mothers’ first album (with the endorsement letter from Suzy Creamcheese on the back cover). I looked at her. Delusions were In that season, after all. It was December, 1968.

          I said, “Yeah. Right.”

          She said, “Go check with Herbie.”

          I went and found Herbie, who was covering another part of the entrance and told him there was this chick who wanted to get in free because she was Suzy Creamcheese. He looked over at her, then at me. “That,” he said, “is Suzy Creamcheese.” His pained half-smile. “Let ’er through.” And in she breezed.

          While the bands were playing I had the chance to stand next to Herbie and watch and listen. Herbie kept asking me what I thought. Alice Cooper at that time sounded awful. It was the name of the band as well as its star. They performed wearing frocks over jeans and T-shirts. It was all feedback and — to my perceptions — patternless and irritating noise: the lead guitarist running his metal bracelet up and down the strings, and so on. I told Herbie I thought they were crap.

          “Yeah,” he said, “but I think I can sell ’em.”

          A band from Seattle called Ethiopia sounded good to me. Good, basic rock & roll with close harmonies, á la Buffalo Springfield. I told Herbie I thought they were a good find.

          “I can maybe use the bass player,” Herbie said.

          Anyway, the concert ended and a day or two later we’d taken everything down and returned it or otherwise disposed of it. The Stone Poneys were on the road, and in those days they travelled without a roadie or a crew. I went to see Herbie, and he told me that he couldn’t think of any work coming up for me to do until at least February or March, if then.

          I ended up leaving LA to go back to Delaware to work for my step-father. Not long after I arrived in Delaware I got a phone call from Herbie. He hired me over the phone to help out Dick Barber, Zappa’s road manager, with some stuff at a gig the Mothers were set to play at some hippie dive in Philadelphia. When the show went on to the next city, I went back to my job on the survey party, feeling empty.

          Late in the Spring of 1969 I wrote a letter to Herbie, lamenting my being trapped amongst “the cossack rube hordes,” and asking him to let me know if anything came up that I could do. I got back a letter saying that if I could find my way back through the cossack rube hordes, he was sure he could find something for me to do. Surprised the shit out of me. He must have liked that phrase. So I drove back to LA around the first of July and went back to work for Herbie.

          Technically I was working for — being paid by — something called Bizarre, Inc. I don’t know exactly who owned stock in it other than Frank Zappa. From the way they behaved I assumed it was Herbie, his lawyer brother, Mutt, and a guy in New York named Neil Reshen. Zappa was the president; Herbie was the executive vice president.

          Herbie ran the show. I’m sure he couldn’t have overruled Zappa on anything, but Zappa didn’t want to run the show. He wanted to make music and play with tape and film. When it came to the business, Zappa made the decisions he needed to make, but Herbie ran it. In other words, Herbie was my boss, but if Zappa wanted something done, that came first.

          Bizarre sometimes billed itself as an “underground conglomerate.” Well, I don’t know about underground, being 15 stories up, but Kimberly Allen — née Eloise Peacock — our genial secretary, must have had the stationery of a dozen or two different companies in her right-hand desk drawers. There was Bizarre, Inc., of course, and Bizarre Records, and Straight Records, and NT&B Advertising & Youth-Market Consultants (NT&B stood for Nifty, Tough, and Bitchin), and Third Story Music, and Fourth Floor Music, and a couple other music-publishing companies, Herb Cohen Management, United Mutations (a fan-relations and marketing company), and others. Cohen and Boyle, Mutt’s law firm, was one flight up. On the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard called the (yawn) ‘Miracle Mile’, the offices that had views looked north, away from Wilshire and the street, up across the gentle, smoggy slope of the LA basin to Hollywood and the Hollywood Hills.

          Along with the various acts that we had one thing or another to do with — living ones such as Captain Beefheart, Linda Ronstadt, Tim Buckley, and others less successful — Herbie had the rights to some previously unreleased tapes by Lenny Bruce and Lord Buckley, two great icons of beatnik-hipster comedy cool, both dead. I’d only been back from Delaware for a couple of days when Herbie handed me a bunch of Lord Buckley tapes and some old publicity stuff and said, “You’re a writer, right?”

          And I mumble-shuffled some kind of answer like, “Well, I try to be.”

          And he told me to write the liner notes for this Lord Buckley album that was in there with the tapes. I’d never heard of Lord Buckley. He was before my time and not a topic for discussion in any circle I’d ever been in. So I said, “Sure. When do you want it?”

          And Herbie said, “Yesterday.”

          I got the job done in about two days, working around my lift-and-carry duties and commuting back and forth to Claremont, where I was staying with the Wares while I looked for a place to live. Herbie liked it. Used one of my phrases (“an immaculately hip aristocrat”) for the album’s title. Kimberly hated it. Said it sounded pompous; she’d liked the letter I’d sent about the cossack rube hordes better. But, shit, that was Lord Buckley, I told myself, and I was too amazed that Herbie didn’t think it was shit to care. I’ve always been amazed when people seem to like stuff I do. Always.

          I saw something on the net about Lord Buckley when I went online that referred to those liner notes, and to me as somebody “who appears to be an expert” on the subject.

          Also during my first week or two of full-time employment at Bizarre, Herbie sent me on a few errands to the house Zappa had just moved out of — this giant log cabin in Laurel Canyon that had been built by Tom Mix, the old-time cowboy star. Some of Zappa’s friends and associates and groupies and hangers-on were still living there, although I believe they were at that time under some pressure to move out.

          There was a blow-up when Herbie instructed me to pack up Cal Schenkel’s art studio from the log cabin and move the stuff to some place in the San Fernando Valley. It was, first of all, an impossible job. The art studio contained, in addition to lots of the more common art supplies, thousands of bizarre little bits and pieces of this and that, which Cal and his assistant used for the assemblages that appeared for years on various Mothers album covers and other promotional photos. Cal, of course, went ballistic, but Zappa interceded on my behalf, me having been an ignorant innocent caught in the middle of other people’s conflicts.

          A few times I had occasion to go to Herbie’s house, usually to do some kind of work for him. He had a beautiful, youngish wife who became pregnant. Herbie said that he was going to name his kid either Ice Cream Cohen or Genghis Cohen, but I’m sure he didn’t. He and his wife were both keen collectors of oriental rugs and knew a ridiculous amount about them.

          Herbie rented a building on LaBrea to use as a rehearsal hall and storeroom, and gave me the keys. I remember he hired Lowell George to do the carpentry work involved with burglar-proofing the windows and whatnot. I ended up being on call pretty much around the clock to let people in and out, or to move equipment in or out of the storeroom.

One time I had to do keys for this biggish band called Sweetwater, who had been the first band to play at Woodstock, after Richie Havens’s opening solo act. I was particularly impressed by the tall girl who was their lead singer. We got to know each other a bit more later.

          I didn’t travel with the acts, but when they returned from touring their road managers turned their shit over to me at the rehearsal hall, and I handled most of their LA-area gigs. I remember once Herbie telling Neil Reshen, in for a quick visit from New York, that my title was “West Coast Schlep.”

          After I’d been working for Herbie for several months a rash on my arm started to be a real drag. The long hours, the miles and miles of driving around in LA traffic every day, sexual frustration, the drink and the pills, all were having unsurprising effects. My left arm was itching and oozing and staining the upper left sleeve of all my shirts. I wasn’t sleeping worth shit.

          Kim, the secretary, recommended a shrink that she’d gone to. Oscar Janiger. She said he was Allen Ginsberg’s cousin. Office in Beverly Hills. Not somebody I could afford on $100 a week, but I talked my mother into covering the cost. After a few sessions he told me that I wasn’t particularly crazy and that he wasn’t particularly interested in shrinking me, but suggested that maybe I should quit my job and concentrate on writing. He’d certify me for government disability payments. So I went to Herbie and told him about it. I figured a substantial raise would relieve my stress and reflect the amount of work I was doing, but he said he couldn’t afford it, and maybe I would be happier writing away on disability.

          Over the next few years I did a few jobs for Herbie. Bizarre moved out of the high-rise on the Miracle Mile and into a high-rise up in Hollywood. I wrote bios for acts such as Lobo and Dion and schlepped equipment for Little Feat before they got going and for various acts that never made it that Herbie or Frank or somebody else in the office was nurturing.

There was, however, one job that was not out of the usual cookie-cutter. I was, oh-so-briefly, a private dick for Frank Zappa. Someone had been selling bootleg Mothers albums. A customer with a conscience (or trying to curry favour with the star) had given Zappa the PO box number the bootleggers were using. I spent a day and a half hanging around at a suburban post office waiting to observe someone using the box in question. Someone finally did. I followed him to his car and jotted down the license plate number and the make-and-model. When I got into my bus to follow him, I noticed that he’d spotted me paying too much attention to him. My ’66 VW bus not being James Bond’s Aston-Martin, I drove off with my jottings, gave them to Herbie, and later learned that they’d been sufficient to locate the bootlegger.

          I’d been away from LA for almost nine and a half years when I made a sentimental journey back to Hollywood in March, 1981. While I was there I went to see Herbie. He and Zappa had broken up and he was in a comfy garden office in mid-Hollywood. He was in a friendly mood. He was in the mood to chat.

          He shared some of his views about people in his business environment: “Y’know, some of these people — they think because they can carry a tune, or play an instrument fast, or string a few words together in a rhyme, they think they’re better than other people. And they’re not.”

          And he shared some of his views about the larger picture, which was something like: “The way I see it, I got maybe ten or maybe 15 more years of doing what I’m doing, and then I start getting old, and then sick, and then I die. And that’s it.”

          I lost touch with him after that. From the internet it appears that he went on to manage Tom Waits for some time, then George Duke, then a Russian rock band called Autograph. He died in 2010, fairly close to the target he’d told me about on my last visit.

Papa Dee Allen & Linda Ronstadt

Papa Dee Allen

          One day when John Ware and I were sitting at a table in one of the rooms of his house, playing cards and drinking wine, I looked out the window and saw a big, fat black guy knocking on the door to my place across the driveway. I signed off from the card game and went to investigate. The guy looked at me when I asked him what he wanted, and then acted glad to see me. He told me that he’d just arrived on the Coast from Delaware himself, found himself in Claremont, seen the Delaware license plates on my VW bus in the carport, and thought he’d check out who I was.

          Then he said, “Shit, baby, I was afraid you coulda been some old folks or somethin’. Got any shit?”

          So we went into my place and I got out my stash and we smoked some. His name was Dee. It took me a pause or two to figure out what he meant when he said it, that it wasn’t just an initial or something. He was a musician. Played the congas. Had just quit, after many years, something called Manny Klein’s Society Orchestra. And I remembered them playing at my high school Senior Ball, and seeing a big black guy up front stage left playing hand drums.

          I put some head music on my new component stereo set-up, and he just went wild. He’d been into jazz and mainstream so thoroughly that he’d never even heard of the Mothers of Invention, let alone heard them. I don’t think he’d even heard Sgt Pepper, just soft-jazz covers of one or two of the tunes. And it just knocked him out.

          I took Dee over to meet John Ware. He seemed to Ware like an old guy. Ware told me he thought, “Okay, here’s a black guy who says he plays hand drums, but he doesn’t have a gig.” Ware just wasn’t overly impressed. He liked Dee. Dee was a pleasant guy. But he really wasn’t ready to accept Dee’s talk about getting a band.

          A couple years later, after he’d made it big playing in hit after hit with War, Dee was always glad to see me if I’d come to see one of their gigs, and always thanked me for steering him toward rock music. He and Ware got to be fairly friendly, too, I think because of Ware’s friendship with Lee Oskar. Ware told me Papa Dee had always asked him how “that crazy Jew” was getting along when he ran into him.

          Dee died in 1988, on stage, playing hand drums. John Ware told me about it, saying, “I should be so lucky.”

Linda Ronstadt

          When John Ware told me that he was going to be the new drummer for the Stone Poneys, all I knew about them was that during the summer before they’d had a big enough hit for me to have heard about it. “Stone Poneys” had been printed under ‘Different Drum’ on all the jukeboxes, but if I’d ever heard the recording itself it hadn’t made enough of an impression for me to remember it. I’d stopped listening to top-40 radio.

          As before with the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Ware helped to get me paying gigs shlepping equipment for his new band, which seemed to spend most of its time rehearsing. There had actually once been a band that was the Stone Poneys, a sort of more-folk-than-rock outfit, but by the time Ware plugged in it was in reality a case of Linda Ronstadt and hired musicians.

          The first time I met Linda Ronstadt I went up to a rehearsal hall they were using to move some equipment. The room was upstairs from something to do with the LA Opera, on Beverly Boulevard. Ware told her who I was and she smiled and said hi. Polite but not that interested in yet another burly amp-shlepper.

          Over the next few months I got to be friendly with some of the guys in the band, and a bit more friendly with Linda. When they went on the road  they travelled without a roadie, which meant no paydays for me when they were out of town.

          Ware tried running the songs he and I were writing by Linda. I had high hopes, as by this time I was, like everyone, in love with her. She was nice about it, but didn’t think the songs were for her.

          When I returned to LA after living in Delaware during the first half of 1969 I worked full-time for Herb Cohen, who was then Linda’s manager. As well as shlepping and setting up amplifiers and instruments, I did a lot of personal work for her, chauffeuring her to and from the airport and taking her car to the garage to get worked on and other miscellaneous jobs, and we got to be fairly friendly.

          I remember in particular working this gig that the Stone Poneys played in Orange County at a place called Musicland, across the road from Disneyland. Everything out there was something-land. They’re clever in Orange County. It was for something like three or four nights. They were on the bill with Jose Feliciano and, headlining, the Righteous Brothers, who at that time were composed of Bobby Hatfield (the high voice) and a low-voice guy he’d hired, Bill Medley having moved on.

          I remember Linda complaining of not knowing what to say to the audiences between songs, and me giving her a second-hand piece of patter that she used: introducing ‘Different Drum’ as “a medley of our hit.”

          One afternoon a few months later Linda, under the influence of some alcohol, came up to me at a gig and said, “Richard, I know you like to play the fool and make a joke out of everything, but I think you always have a point and there’s something serious in just about every silly thing you say.” It was one of the nicest things anybody has ever said to me.

          One day I got a call to open up a rehearsal hall on La Brea that I was managing for Herb Cohen. It was for Linda and the Poneys, Linda having just returned from somewhere back East with a new song that had some promise that she wanted to rehearse. And I knew as soon as she’d run through it just once with John Forsha on acoustic guitar, that the joke about the medley of her hit was over. ‘Long, Long Time’ just had “hit” written all over it. I knew right away it was going to be pretty big, and within a few months it was.

          Shortly after ‘Long, Long Time’ hit the charts she did a three-night gig at a club in Long Beach, as Linda Ronstadt, not the Stone Poneys. On the last night of the gig Linda got a bit drunk, which was no big deal. Only she came up to me and sort of leaned her shoulder against me while the opening act, some forgettable local band, was doing its second set. She asked me which one I thought she should ball after the show: their guitar player or their bass player?

          Now, I, of course, had had a massive crush on Linda from the time I’d met her, I guess almost two years before. Not unusual. Linda made lots of guys horny. Only I’d done a bunch of work for her and she’d always been nice to me. We’d always got on real fine. So I said something like, “Why one of them? How about me, instead?”

          And Linda said, “Oh, Richard, be serious! You’re my friend! Come on, tell me: which one do you think?”

          After I stopped working full-time for Herb Cohen I saw her less and less, especially in the interludes when Ware wasn’t drumming with her. I’d maybe run into her at Cafe Figaro and exchange a crude joke or two in passing. Old pals on different orbits. Then I drifted out of LA and she started becoming a big star.

          By 1975 I was living in San Antonio, keeping myself alive with a minority interest in a headshop – a dope-accessories store. I went to see a concert featuring Linda opening for Willie Nelson in the auditorium at Trinity University.

          It was strange, seeing Linda sing without John Ware behind her with the drums. It was also strange to hear her sing, instead of a medley of her hit, one hit after another for an entire show without once doing ‘Different Drum’. During the break between shows I was walking by one of the doors to backstage and ran into Kenny Edwards from Linda’s band. He remembered me from before.

          Kenny took me backstage for a beer. Linda was nice to me, of course, but the warmth of friendship that had been there six or seven years before was just absent.

John Ware 1967-1971

John Ware 1967-1971

71

          So there we were, in Southern California in the seasons following the Summer of Love, in the arid and smoggy atmosphere, me pretending to study government in a PhD program and Ware being an artist and a househusband and a rocky-roller. We drank cheap red wine (often cut with club soda to make it less nasty) and played cards and watched TV and agreed about entirely too much. Ware has a way with a viewpoint that was for me utterly convincing. I was inclined to agree with his artistic and general opinions anyway, but his total and easy self-confidence — his self-assuredness — would have been impossible for me to challenge even if I’d wanted to.

          I used to feel genuinely apprehensive about cruising across the driveway as often as I did in order to see if Johnnie wanted to play, but he always seemed genuinely gracious and friendly about it all. I think Linda may have resented it a bit, though, even though we constructed the living metaphor that they were the George and Gracie and I was the Harry Von Zell. Sometimes she’d call us the “two sots.”

          Ware was really into being dapper, and his clothes just about always looked good on him. Except once when he suckered and bought a couple of Nehru jackets. Hell, Nehru jackets never even looked good on Nehru. He particularly liked to dress up for holidays. He’d put on a tie before sitting down to watch TV football on Xmas. His hair, however bushy, always seemed to be magically in order.

          Ware admired Andy Warhol and it showed in their house’s interior decor. The large front room was dominated by his piano, but also featured a row of four fold-up theatre seats John had reupholstered in big white polka dots on a dark blue background. One or two of his large, brightly-coloured abstract impressionist paintings graced the walls. There was, as I recall, a little bronze plaque by the front door that said. “The Warehouse”. He also clearly had some mana in the art world thereabouts, judging student art shows, setting up a Frank Stella exhibition on La Cienega in Trendsville, West Hollywood, and stuff like that.

          Two days before New Year’s Eve 1967-68, their dog Henry had puppies. I got one, the black female, whom I named Naomi and who stayed with me, with a couple of intervals, for 17 years.

          Meanwhile, Ware painted away on large, colourful acrylic-on-stretched-canvas pictures based on cutaways of perspective studies of rectangles. I have one — one that I watched Johnnie paint — on one of my walls today, and I have another, somewhat three-dimensional one (that was my 22nd birthday card) on the wall of my office.

          He had some sort of an involvement with a large-scale art happening at the Cucamonga winery, where an old Jaguar became The Jaggernaut and was induced somehow to self-destruct whilst rolling down a ramp into those assembled, to much cheering and popping of firecrackers. As part of that happening he played with a couple of different pick-up bands. One of them was a sort of post-bebop cool jazz ensemble. Later he told me how much he hated playing jazz. It wasn’t him. He was a rocky-roller.

          Somewhere in there I started taking Ware’s drum kit in the back of my VW bus to some of the Pop Art Band gigs. I was a help in carrying stuff, being kind of burly and all, but I turned out to be hopeless when it came to learning to set the drum kit up properly. What I remember of the Pop Art Band was lots of feedback, the bass player basically hiding back among the amps, the lead singer jumping around a lot but not making a big impression on me, and Ware tossing his hair from side to side a few times — during fills, I believe. I couldn’t keep from laughing when he did, because it seemed out of character, but, after all, he was an entertainer, and a little showmanship doesn’t hurt.

          The Pop Art Band began to look unlikely as a means for Ware to retire by the age of 25, which was his stated ambition. One day his friend Chris Darrow came to tell him that there was a girl in LA who had some kind of folk band that was about to break up, but they’d just had a hit record, and she needed to find a drummer for a touring band to go out and support it. Ware followed up the lead and ended up knocking at the door of a little house in Santa Monica. The person who greeted him was the little girl at the rehearsal place back when he’d been with Junior Markham and Eddie Davis and Levon Helm. She stared, then said, “I know you!” It was Linda Ronstadt. Ware auditioned, but the audition was probably over when he walked in the door, and he became the first drummer for the new Stone Poneys.

          I remember him coming back from LA that day in what was for him a somewhat agitated condition. He told me he was going to be the new drummer for the Stone Poneys. I’d heard the name. They’d had a big enough hit for me to have heard about it some months before, called ‘Different Drum’, but if I’d ever heard it, it hadn’t made enough of an impression for me to remember it.

          Anyway, Ware got the brushes out of his drum kit and started fucking around with them. He told me they were going to do a country-rock sound, and for that he’d have to use the brushes a lot. I was dubious. I had the East Coast urban Jewboy’s reflexive aversion to redneck music. But Ware was confident. He was always confident.

          The new Stone Poneys played gigs around LA Ware helped to get me paying gigs shlepping equipment for Linda and the Poneys in my microbus. I remember once they played for a few days at a place called Musicland, which was near Disneyland. The other acts on the bill were Bobby Hatfield and some guy he’d hired to replace Bill Medley — performing as the Righteous Brothers — and Jose Feliciano. I was surprised at how square Hatfield presented himself, and about how clearly bitter Feliciano was. When we returned the equipment after this gig to the rehearsal studio, which was upstairs in a building on Wilshire otherwise occupied by some opera company, nobody had a key. It took us about 20 minutes, and a whole lot of noise, to break into the place — ineptly — and leave our stuff there, and the cops never showed up to see what was happening.

          That edition of the Stone Poneys travelled without a roadie, and Ware took on most of the roadie’s usual administration jobs. They’d fly into New York, for example, and there’d be nobody waiting for them. So Ware would go to the car-rental counter and rent a car with his American Express Card, which was on his father’s company account. Then, after the bill came the next month, a sort of steamy letter would show up from his dad and he’d go in to Herb Cohen’s office and give him the bill, and he’d give Ware a check.

          Ware and I wrote some songs together — me 60s-ish words and him country-ish music — that we were unable to sell to Linda Ronstadt or to anybody. By mid-1968 I’d moved into Echo Park in LA, and we weren’t next-door neighbours anymore, but we did get a chance to joke around a bit at Stone Poneys gigs, and I made the drive out to Claremont for social or songwriting purposes from time to time.

          Through a mutual friend I introduced him to a Danish blues-harp player named Lee Oskar, who didn’t have a place to stay at the time. He ended up sleeping on the floor of Ware’s front room for a while. Ware enjoyed him being there, as he really did live and breathe music. If Ware sat down and played a boogie-woogie left hand on his piano, Lee Oskar would immediately pick up his harp. That’s all the guy wanted to do — that and eat large amounts of food. Soon after that he joined a band called War with Eric Burdon and Papa Dee Allen.

          Ware and I kept in touch when I went back East for the first half of 1969. The Stone Poneys changed, as such bands do. John Kuehne, a friend of Mike Nesmith’s (Nesmith had written “Different Drum”), took, over at bass. Chris Darrow left the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and joined them, as did Jeff Hanna. Bernie Leadon, who went on to fame later with the Eagles, also came on board. I returned to LA in June, 1969 and stayed at the Ware house while I looked for a place to live.

          Ware met Mike Nesmith through Kuehne, and they became friends. They toyed with the idea of Ronstadt’s backup group becoming a band, with Nesmith wanting to produce whatever it was. They got into the studio and made some tracks. Ware told me that Nesmith had some kind of a deal with one of the ABC companies, and he got them a deal there, too. They called themselves the Corvettes because they thought it was about as stupid a name as they could come up with. They put records out that never did anything.

          On one of the many coast-to-coast drives I undertook for one reason or another I stopped off for my mid-continental nap at the Ware family home in Okie City. I remember John’s mother showing me a painting he’d done as a teen of the family’s African American cleaning person. She clearly thought the painting was marvellous. She also said that the painting deeply embarrassed Johnnie and she couldn’t see why.

          Ware and Kuehne were playing with Ronstadt, and hanging out at Nesmith’s house almost every day when they weren’t on the road. Nearly a year after the Monkees had ended, Nesmith still had a mansion overlooking Bel Air and every toy he’d ever dreamed of having. He had a Lamborghini Estrada and a Cadillac limousine. He had a manservant. His wife had maids. Then the industry went through Monkee backlash and the money was gone.

          Thugs jimmied his estate’s electric gate and start repossessing things as Ware, Kuehne, and Nesmith drank beer in the afternoon. The repo men took cars, furniture, and musical instruments. Ware insists there was gunfire at least once, and described it to me as “a cheap movie.”

          One day Ware went to see Nesmith early, instead of in the afternoon, so they’d be alone. He had an idea. He sat Nesmith down and told him that they needed to do a band with Kuehne and Red Rhodes, the pedal steel guitar player at the Palomino Club, who’d given Nesmith pedal steel lessons. They called Rhodes at his house, and he said yes, and they became the First National Band. They all signed contracts — initialled every paragraph — with RCA.

          They had me up to the mansion to see about the roadie job, which they ended up giving to, I think, Kuehne’s brother-in-law. It was a strange place and a strange visit. Nesmith had his gold records on the wall in the loo. Nobody talked to me while I was there, and I played on one of his pinball machines.

          Ware told me they did a whole album, including mixing, in something like eleven or twelve days. The band’s first single, ‘Joanne’, was released just before Nesmith moved out of his mansion. They were sitting on Nesmith’s living room floor, because the sofas were gone, when he got a phone call from somebody at RCA to tell him that the Drake Stations, the most powerful Top-40 stations in the country, had picked up ‘Joanne’ as a single. Ware was surprised that Nesmith got extremely sullen about that. It had happened too fast. It was Monkee stuff. The song was clearly going to be a hit, and this clearly freaked Nesmith out badly.

          Then Nesmith arranged for them to move to London in late 1970, without their wives. RCA leased a townhouse for them. They had chauffeurs and Jaguars and Rolls Royces, and played some gigs. But the Monkees TV show hadn’t happened in London, so hardly anybody noticed, as far as Ware could tell. They played some workingman’s bars. And while they lived there ‘Joanne’ went to number one in the U.S.

          Ware told me that Nesmith didn’t really know all the people — John Lennon and Ringo and so forth — they were hanging out with. Ware thought it was heady, but a horrible thing to do to their wives, not to mention being a horrible thing to not be out supporting that single in the US, because of fear of Monkee backlash.

          A few months later, just about the time that ‘Joanne’ faded from view, they flew back to the US and tried to pick up their lives and finish a second album. Ware thought it was time for a payday. He’d taken nothing in the way of an advance but a weekly allowance from RCA in London, and they’d sold a lot of records. But there was nothing, and the RCA accountants informed him that he’d be wasting his time to try to get anything, because the band didn’t have a contract. Only Nesmith had a contract. Ware said he did have a copy of a contract with his name at the bottom and two RCA executives’ names at the bottom and initials on every paragraph. They told him that those were all favours that Nesmith had done to make the band feel good, and that the contract was between RCA and Mike Nesmith, and Screen Gems and Mike Nesmith, and that was it. Merry Christmas, 1970.

          The First National Band, in ill humour, made its second album. Ware conceded that it “was actually a pretty good piece of work” (I liked it), and credited Nesmith with “spawning creativity in the studio.” They did some touring, once again without me, but Ware felt it was pointless, and he quit.

Alfredo Valentino

Alfredo Valentino

          At one of the parties at the stone houses I got my first of not many tastes of LSD. It was late autumn, the season of the Santa Anna winds, and the dry, clean, sweet-smelling evening desert breezes blowing in from the East, tinkling the stained-glass wind-chimes scattered about the property, made magic for my magic-vulnerable senses. The first Pink Floyd album, then just out, played “Interstellar Overdrive” over and over from somewhere nearby. A woman joined me on my interstellar adventure around the stone houses. She was an old-time beatnik, out from LA, about twice my age, on her umpteenth acid trip. She told me the exact number, which I thought was rather pretentious; I never did acid often myself over the next few years, but I didn’t count the times, either. She told her friends who’d driven her out from Silverlake to take off without her, and I drove her home early the next afternoon.

          The people she’d come out to Montclair with were Alfredo and Neri Valentino, long-time friends of the Osbornes’ from the beatnik days. A few weeks later the Osbornes utilised my VW bus to take them and their entourage to a party at Casa Valentino in East Hollywood/Silverlake. It was a cool, beatnik party in a cool, beatnik house. I spent much of the evening in the back garden singing oldies with a girl named Andrea — who turned out to be the previous year’s Playmate of the Year — until her date found us.

          There were more parties at the Valentinos’ place, and parties at other places where I’d run into them, and I gradually grew into friendship with them. Alfredo and I were fairly close for the next three or four years.

          Alfredo’s fifteen years older than I am. He was a man of many enterprises. He was a hairdresser with good Hollywood connections (Andrea, the Playmate of the Year, was one of his clients). He was a sometimes actor. He was an artists’ model. He was a landscaper/gardener. All sorts of things he could do under the influence of marijuana and for which he could be paid in good ole non-reportable cash. He was a lean and elegant Chicano, about my height, with a pointy goatee. He had an easy-going, laid-back way about him, but seemed always to be working at some needed job or another.

          Neri (pronounced Neddi), was a light-skinned African-American woman from Seattle. She pretty much had her hands full with six kids, and one soon to follow — Denise, Christina, Miles, Diego, Nicole, and Dominga, and then Alegra; I still remember each face and personality clearly — not to mention a full, active social life. She was sharp, intelligent, and very hip.

          When I moved into L.A. from Claremont I originally relied on Alfredo and Neri to put me into the scene. Neri introduced me to one or two of her girlfriends. One of these girlfriends took me off for an amazing and puzzling one-night stand soon after I arrived. Why did she pick me out from all the people at the Valentinos’ party the week before, when I hadn’t remembered meeting her? Why did she drive me for such a long distance through the San Fernando Valley before going back over the Hollywood Hills to see Alfred King play the Troubadour? Why did she dismiss me the next morning without an explanation? Neri didn’t know, either, or wouldn’t tell me.

Another of Neri’s girlfriends moved into the little ‘efficiency’ under the stairs of the funky old house on the Hollywood Freeway in Echo Park where I lived on the second floor. This one was a jumpy old-time white beatnik who’d apparently been a friend of Lenny Bruce’s. She was bone-skinny and apparently strung out, and worked intermittently as a manicurist. Her moods shifted, but in general she disapproved of me.

          A few months after I shifted in the Valentino family moved to a ramshackle old mansion just a block or so off Sunset on the edge of where Echo Park and Silverlake segue into each other. They had lots of neat parties attended by lots of neat people there. If I could I’d try to get to Alfredo’s by late afternoon if he’d told me they’d be entertaining. There was always work to do in the yard or garden or house, or in the kitchen, or running errands.

          The party food was generally a mixture of ethnic and health food. Alfredo made huge and varied salads.

          Most of the people who came to the Valentinos’ arrived fairly late. There were Hollywood people. There were people who intrigued Alfredo’s “interest in the occult”, as he put it. Of course there were artists. There were friends of the kids. Lots of them. There were exotic women. There were people from the health-food fraternity — Gypsy Boots, TV’s “Clown Prince of Health”, was one of Alfredo’s close friends.

          There were jazz people, and usually a jazz jam would develop. Generally someone would arrive some time in the evening with a drum kit. Later, when Denise Valentino developed a relationship with Herbie Hancock’s cousin, Chop — himself a sax player — Herbie would show up from time to time and sit down at the piano.

          In one corner of the big front room Alfredo kept a large and growing piece of junk sculpture. It was basically just a stack of interesting-looking, mostly metal junk piled onto an old wooden barrel. Whenever he would come across a nice piece of junk he’d find a place for it on the sculpture. He invited friends to do the same.

          I met one of Alfredo’s brothers, who was named Ricardo. He worked as a limousine chauffeur and had nifty tales to tell out of school about his famous passengers. I remember in particular those about a cute-little-boy TV star who liked cocaine and hookers with him there in the back of the limo. Ricardo was the only person I ever heard call Alfredo Freddy.

          In late 1969 or early 1970, when I was living in a tiny guest house — what we in New Zealand call a granny flat — in the Wilshire District, I got a phone call from another close friend of the Valentinos telling me that Neri had died.

          With all those kids. And little Alegra still a baby.

          Alfredo took it all with what seemed to me to be serenity, choosing to take a spiritual approach to the situation. He shined on. The older kids took care of the younger ones, friends helped, and things continued.

          He soon became attached to a new, somewhat part-time girlfriend named Helen. Helen was noticeably older than he was, and was as far as I ever noticed an extremely nice person. She was a semi-amateur artist with apparently a sufficient amount of money: she lived in a converted church in Santa Monica and had a nice vacation place out in the Mojave Desert at a place called Desert Hot Springs.

          Alfredo was really in his element in Desert Hot Springs, presiding over the nightly campfire out behind the house, wrapped in a thick woollen Mexican sweater against the chill of the starry desert night, surrounded by family and friends, maybe with a bit of mescaline tickling his veins, his dog (a German Shepherd named Lobo) doing dog stuff loyally by his side.

          From time to time after Neri died, during periods when I didn’t have a regular job, Alfredo would find work for me to do with him, sometimes for Helen, sometimes for other people — cleaning up people’s yards, moving heavy objects with my back and my van, modelling for art classes. It was always mellow, and the company and the weed were always good.

          Alfredo was about the last person I saw in LA before I left to do a roadie job in the Southeast in 1972. He came to see me off from the dingy basement flat I’d been living in that year. I saw him again when I made a three-day sentimental journey to L.A. some seven or eight years later. He had moved to another house a bit deeper into Silverlake, but it was definitely an Alfredo house. Most of the kids were grown and living off on their own by then.

          I tracked him down again around the turn of the century and we had a bit of a chat over the phone. He was about 70, living with one of his daughters and her family. He was about to “embark on a new phase” of his life, he told me, and leave LA at last. Most of his kids were living in the Pacific Northwest, and he said he thought he’d go and see what that part of the world has to offer.