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.