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.