John Kuehne

John Kuehne

          Sometime during the Autumn of 1969 John Ware showed up at my granny flat in the Wilshire District with the Stone Poney’s new bass player, a big (196 cm, or 6’-5”), fat guy with beginning-to-thin hair and a hick accent whom Ware introduced as John London. He had what Ware and I (plagiarising a Claremont potter named Bill Meeks) called Dunlop’s Disease: his gut done lopped over his belt. But the big guy was friendly enough, genial, even charming, with a rich baritone voice, and Ware gave me signals from behind his back to take him seriously.

          Over the years that he and I were to know each other I learned his story. His real surname was Kuehne — London was his Hollywood name. He’d been brought up in a military family in Texas and Germany. In high school in San Antonio he had fallen in with Mike Nesmith. He later told me about how he and Nesmith had worked after school in high school in the mid-1950s for Nesmith’s mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, who had invented Liquid Paper (Twink in NZ). They’d worked in her garage filling those little jalirs with funnels from the bigger vats she’d made the stuff in (She didn’t start to make a real living from the stuff until the mid-1960s — the big money came later).

          Anyway, they’d formed sort of a folk duo in high school, Kuehne on stand-up bass (“The bass was the natural instrument for big boys”) and Mike doing guitar and vocals. They called themselves Mikey-and-John. That, apparently, was how things went on in most things for them: Nesmith was the leader; Kuehne was the side-kick. They’d then gone on to San Antonio College (a two-year junior college I was later to get to know somewhat myself), where they won the school talent contest in 1963 (“hands down,” Kuehne told me) with ‘Fair Thee Well My Pretty Little Princess’. Having been judged #1 at SAC, they decided to go out to Hollywood to make the big time.

          The ‘London’ appellation had been Nesmith’s idea. As Kuehne put it, Nesmith had pointed out that from a show-biz point of view, ‘Kuehne’ just didn’t make it. Nobody could tell how to pronounce it (Keenie) when they saw it; nobody could spell it when they heard it. It was the mid-sixties: things British were happenin’. So ‘London’ it was. Over the years I’d take to calling him Jean Paree, Juan Madrid, Johann Berlin, Giovanni Roma, Jan Stockholm, Ivan Moscow, and so on.

          Anyway, off they went to Hollywood, and onto some small-dollar folk-club circuits, and “ate beans together,” as Kuehne always put it, for a couple of years before they answered the ad in the Daily Variety in the summer of ’65 for performers to audition for what was to become the Monkees.

          They went to the carpeted Hollywood office of whoever-it-was in order to fill out their formal job applications, which were — somewhat bizarrely — on standard, any-job-in-the-world application forms. Kuehne told me that he was busily filling out the form, trying to remember all the little penny-ante jobs he’d done to put down under ‘Experience.’ And he looked over at Nesmith to ask him about some gig they’d done at a folk club in Oklahoma, and Nesmith wasn’t writing anything at all. He was finished. And Kuehne asked him how he could be done so soon, and Nesmith showed him his app. He’d written the word ‘LIFE’ in large capital letters diagonally across the Experience section. Of course, it wasn’t Kuehne who got the job.

          But he did get to be the guy in the gorilla suit. Basically his job with the Monkees was as Nesmith’s stand-in. When the stars are off doing important things, like drinking coffee, the stand-ins move around for the production crews while they’re blocking shots. He also picked up pocket money as an extra, most notoriously as the guy in the gorilla suit when the script called for one. For a while he played bass with a group in fringed buckskin jackets called the Lewis and Clarke Expedition. They were supposed to be another Monkees, but didn’t get either real backing from Colgems or a TV show, and disappeared.

          When the Monkees TV show was cancelled in 1969, obviously the people who had jobs as stand-ins and extras, as well as people who had jobs as actors being Monkees, were out of work. Nesmith had written ‘Different Drum”, Linda Ronstadt’s sole hit at the time, so he was able to call up Ronstadt and get Kuehne the gig with the Stone Poneys when the guy who had been playing bass for her quit.

          So I set up Kuehne’s amps for him when he played in LA for a couple of years, as one of the Stone Poneys, then the Corvettes, then the First National Band, and we got to know each other a little. He got so used to playing in a rhythm section with Ware that he said his job was to keep his right thumb in time with Ware’s left foot.

          Then, after the First National Band dissolved in acrimony, he went back to Texas. In August 1972, Ware phoned me with a roadie job Kuehne had told him about, wondering what I was doing. I was then doing little but wretching. Kuehne was working for a tour-booking company in San Antonio called Star Attractions. All I had to do was call him and the job was mine. I did and it was.

          I gave away everything that wouldn’t fit in my ’66 Ford Ranchwagon Six, drained my waterbed mattress and left it on the lawn for whoever would want it, gathered up my little dog Naomi, said good-bye to my friend Alfredo, and headed for the Lone Star State.

          Star Attractions put me up in a hotel called the El Tropicano on the San Antonio Riverwalk for two or three days until shooting me out on a tour. The day after I arrived I went out to Star Attractions’ office in a newish glass office building on a circumferential freeway called Loop 410.

          I’ve always liked the word circumferential.

          Star Attractions was basically in the business of buying acts — preferably acts people would recognise, however vaguely, from TV — at their monthly rate and booking them in as many different country clubs, dinner clubs, and military clubs as possible at their nightly rate, then providing transport and stage production. Another roadie and I were responsible for lights and sound on the tours.

          Kuehne was in the office when I checked in, all smiles and warm South Texas richness in his voice, sounding like Governor Connolly, selling some act over the phone to some club manager, smiling and winking at me as he did so. It looked like a piece of cake.

          I left my car (with cardboard boxes intact) and my dog Naomi with Kuehne and his wife Vicki at their newly-built house outside Loop 410 (which was the far suburbs in those days) and flew with my fellow-roadie from San Antonio to Panama City, Florida, where the tour equipment was being stored. When I came back a month later to get Naomi, my car, and my stuff to take to my new digs in Biloxi, Mississippi, I learned that Naomi had chewed a hole in a favoured bedspread of Vicki’s. Naomi was forgiven. I was somewhat less forgiven, but forgiven nonetheless.

          Star Attractions folded soon afterward, and Kuehne and I really weren’t in touch with each other again until the Spring of 1974. Things were going badly for me again, as usual. I was living in Wilmington, Delaware, my job situation was shit (as usual), and my first marriage was falling apart. When Ware had been through with a Linda Ronstadt tour a few months earlier he’d told me that another company was trying to pick up the ball that Star Attractions had dropped. Trying to give myself some hope, I phoned Kuehne in San Antonio. And Kuehne had said yes, there was a new outfit called On Stage, and he was positive, encouraging even, about my prospects with it.

          The night my first marriage folded I called Kuehne in San Antonio and he said Come on down. When the bus got me to San Antonio I based myself at first for a day at Kuehne’s house in an upmarket in-close neighbourhood called Monte Vista before finding myself a cheap place to flop, and at first my social life centred on the Kuehnes — watching sports on TV over a beer, and other normal stuff.

          He told me that after Star Attractions folded he’d got a job as a nightclub manager through the hustler who’d been Star Attractions’ CEO, but he hadn’t liked it. “Counting cocktail napkins and toothpicks!”, as he put it, his face filled with disgust. He considered himself lucky when somebody else had lined up a job for him at the newspaper.

          Sometimes he’d get out an acoustic guitar and play around with it. I remember at about this time him writing the start of a country song that went, “Two red downers and a yellowjacket / Make a man feel better when he just can’t hack it / In the cit-eee”. But by this time Kuehne wasn’t even smoking pot anymore. As he put it, “All I need is for my mother to be by visiting the grandchildren and then the cat walks in carrying a bag of weed.”

          What had really dismayed, however, was when his classic Porsche sports car had been stolen.

          Chez Kuehne did differ from other houses in Monte Vista, at least in part, by having a large number of large abstract expressionist paintings by John Ware on the walls and in the storage shed out back. He gave me the one I had watched Ware paint and that I still have.

          Kuehne had a job in the real estate advertising section of the classified display department at Rupert Murdoch’s first U.S. newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News, and seemed to be making a grown-up’s living. Sometimes I’d see him stopping off for a moment with a camera on his way to take a photo of some house that was for sale, and he’d be smiling like he’d just won big in a poker game.

          After I’d been in San Antonio for a few weeks Kuehne drove me out to some place in the suburbs that’d advertised a cheap ’59 Karmann-Ghia for sale. I bought it for $200, and it sure was a $200 car. But when I sold it a few years later I got $215 for it.

          When I got married again in March, 1976 Kuehne provided a big vat of his special, secret-recipe chili for the reception. He had a big, roll-top desk then — one with seemingly dozens of little drawers and pigeon-holes and compartments. He kept the chili recipe in a locked drawer. The chili took all night and morning to slow-cook, as I remember, and it was wonderful. No beans.

          In early 1977 my job situation was once again in a perilous condition, and Kuehne came to my rescue one more time. He told me about a job that was open selling advertising at the newspaper, and said to use him as a reference. I got the job.

          I think it was later that year that Kuehne moved out to a house on the banks of Lake Medina. He had to commute about 45-minutes-plus, depending on traffic, each way to work and back every day, but he loved it. He and Vicki had been having some problems (I don’t think she liked living that far from town), but I think they were still together at this time. I went out to visit a few times — rode around in Kuehne’s boat; ate barbecue (Kuehne’s special recipe, of course) and drank less bourbon than he did. We talked about people at the newspaper and, I’m afraid to say, the Old Days back in Hollywood. Once, at about the time he was moving in there, we’d gone through an old cardboard carton of clippings and fan shit from his days with the Monkees and Lewis and Clarke.

          In 1978 a couple of the editors I knew at the Express-News got the idea of using me as a photographic model for the cover of the Weekender, their Friday entertainment tabloid insert, comedically illustrating the week’s lead story. This was just after I’d broken up with my second wife. Kuehne phoned me the evening after the first Weekender cover came out. He and Vicki were having drinks with their former next-door-neighbour, Cheryl, who had just broken up with their still next-door-neighbour, Randy, and she’d seen my picture on the Weekender cover, and she thought I looked cute, and was it okay for them to put her on the phone? Sure. And we made some kind of date, and I was launched into the first of a depressingly similar series of six-week affairs.

          I think it was fairly soon afterward that Kuehne and Vicki broke up. One of his former groupies in Hollywood had made contact with him and had flown out to San Antonio for old times’ sake. I made what I thought were the expected that-must’ve-been-a-hot-time noises, but he disagreed vehemently. “It was nothing! It was awful! It was that Hollywood shit! No love. No children. No point.” Then he hooked up with a well-upholstered Texas girl named Lana, and there were barbecues with bourbon out at the lake again.

          When Ware came to San Antonio for the filming of Honeysuckle Rose, and went with Kuehne and me to Mi Tierra, the big 24-hour Mexican restaurant in the downtown mercado, San Antonio’s touristy Mexican market, we ordered enchiladas and cabrito and beer. After the waitress brought us our Carta Blancas and we’d filled up our glasses, Kuehne lifted his glass and said, “Here’s to good friends,” right out of some tacky beer ad. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

          Kuehne had this picture of me as being somehow kinda show-bizzy and Hollywood. Maybe it was something he kept in his mind to activate nostalgia. Anyway, in the Fall of ’79, he left the Express-News and took a job as publisher of the program guide for a microwave-broadcast pay-TV movie channel, called Showbiz. He asked me if I wanted to leave the paper, too, to become his advertising manager.

          I went out to the featureless suburban office park where the operation had its headquarters to meet the guy who owned the channel. I’m afraid we made negative impressions on each other. I must have struck him as a small-timer. He struck me as a spoiled rich kid who didn’t know what he was doing and was full of shit. We were probably both right.

          But Kuehne was smooth, and the guy made me a formal job offer, and I felt as if I owed Kuehne enough to take it. The money was good but the job wasn’t real. Cable TV was about to come in, and the station had neither numbers nor cachet. The Express-News ran its program listings weekly. Sales did not come thick and fast, but the pressure did.

          It was easy for me to explain to Kuehne and his boss and the consultant his boss hired why the ads weren’t flowing in, when they challenged me on it, but they had no time for things like offering value for money. Kuehne kept telling me that I just had to be flashy and Showbiz (which was the publication’s name), and just put down the “soggy old newspaper on the front lawn” in favour of our slick magazine. They all coached me to avoid specifics, to concentrate on bullshit, and to sell blue sky, while wondering aloud what my problem was. Only advertisers weren’t buying blue sky. They wanted numbers. Then I found out that the circulation figures I’d been using, the ones that hadn’t been impressing anyone, were themselves gross fictions. The rag was a bigger loser than I’d thought. Anybody I did sell an ad to soon found out I’d been ripping them off.

          Things came to a head when Kuehne had me into his office one day. He seemed a bit uncomfortable. He started out going over how far back we went together, then said something like, “I know this doesn’t sound too good, and you’re probably going to take it the wrong way, but, well, aren’t you maybe being a little bit too honest for this job?” I reckoned that if he had to ask the question, I most certainly was. The next day I went to my old boss at the Express-News, who was glad to hire me back. I’d been with Showbiz Publications for two months.

          Kuehne and Lana got married in late 1981 or early 1982 — had a real do in one of those huge and flashy Baptist churches that dot the San Antonio suburbs. Alcohol-free reception. It didn’t seem at all like him, being the beer and bourbon-lover that I knew him to be. I wondered what he was up to, but he seemed smiley enough. I’m not sure, but I think he went to work for his father-in-law for a while.

          After I left the newspaper, I remember him getting me a job with his father-in-law moving some stuff out of a warehouse. I’d been more drunk the day and evening before than I was accustomed to being, and was so hung over that I just worked a half a day and split.

          And then he was divorced again, and he was staying at his parents’ house. And then he got back together again with his Baptist wife and moved to the Gulf Coast: an address on Padre Island, maybe ten or fifteen minutes down the beach road from Port Aransas. I went down there to visit in 1983.

          He was working on promoting a real-estate development, a high-rise beachfront condominium to be called The Dolphin. The colour scheme of the decor in the sales office, and on the glossy brochures and whatnot, was mauve and puce.

          It wasn’t funky Port Aransas, that’s for sure, and I’m sure that old Padre Island hands, lovers of funkiness and fishing, were pissed off as hell at the prospect of something that would look like Miami Beach going up just down the road.

          The money behind the project was Nesmith’s. Kuehne told me a story about finding an old coffee cup when he’d been moving out of his lake house. The cup had some sort of symbolic value from their days as a duo. Now, I don’t think Kuehne and Nesmith had talked to each other since the demise of the First National Band, lo those many years before. But Kuehne decided to send Nesmith the cup with a note with what he told me was “some sort of corny shit” about how the memories in the cup more than filled it, and he and Nesmith had achieved a rapprochement. Then Nesmith had suggested that they get together on a project, with him providing the capital and Kuehne the creativity. The result was The Dolphin.

          Kuehne and Lana were living in a tightly laid-out apartment high up another high-rise not too far down the beach from where The Dolphin was planned. Security at their building was tight, but the mosquitoes were horrible. We went out to dinner at a steak house in Corpus Christi. I was supposed to spend the night, but between the mosquitoes and Naomi having to stay out in the car (no dogs allowed in the building), I gave up on it about midnight and drove back to San Antonio.

          Some time later I heard that with a drop in oil prices and fluctuations in the Gulf Coast luxury real-estate market, the Dolphin project fell through. And Kuehne and I gradually lost touch with each other. I heard that he was back selling newspaper advertising.

          Then, in mid-2000 John Ware mentioned in an email, rather incidentally, something about “since John Kuehne died”. I wrote him back demanding more information. He told me that Kuehne had been having some health problems due to his weight, but seemed to be cruising along okay. Then, one night in February, 2000, he and Lana went out for some pizza and beer. When they got back home he sat down on the edge of the bed and complained of indigestion, and then it was all over. He was 58.