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.

Jonathan Kundra & Cynthia Plaster Caster

Jonathan Kundra

          The people with whom I worked at Bizarre didn’t follow any single pattern. Kimberly the secretary was a good sort, a salt-of-the-earth type, a former member of the “Actors I have Fucked” club, and strongly devoted to her boyfriend, who was a recording engineer and a few years younger then she was. Besides Kim, Herb Cohen, and Joe Gannon, the office suite housed Leon Danielle (née Lenny Danofsky, a, well, decorative Hollywood type, he kept his perfectly tan skin supple with frequent application of a lotion, and had a wife who looked somewhat like he did), Grant Gibbs (a gentle sort of beatnik-type who handled difficult people well), and Dee Barnett, the straight-looking and usually-stressed-out bookkeeper. A tall Englishwoman named Pauline came in from time to time to deal with United Mutations fan-relations business. An office assistant named Liz, a teenaged Jewish groupie who was the daughter of somebody’s friend, also showed up sometimes, and for a while there was a semi-junkie publicist from New York, the former editor of a fan magazine called Circus, named Jonathan Kundra.

          I hung out with Jonathan some. He was a tall, bony-looking guy in his early to mid-20s. Liked to get stoned but, as I recall, took a dim view of acid. He told me that he’d got his job at Circus by lying about his qualifications, and that until he’d done it he’d had no idea about how to edit a magazine.

          Jeff Simmons told me after Kundra had taped an interview with him to promote the Naked Angels soundtrack album that he really didn’t know where Kundra was coming from. When the publicity came out Simmons declared it “too rank”, and had had some sport at the expense of some of the show-biz clichés in it.

          Kundra had a tall, lean girlfriend named Cathy. He was notably dark and Jewish; she was notably blond and shiksa. Nice couple. One evening Kundra, Cathy, a drummer from Seattle named Jon Keliehor, and I went in my microbus to Foster’s Blue Grotto, an old-style beatnik coffee house. Foster was an old friend of Alfredo’s who I’d met soon after arriving in LA. We had some coffee and snacks, listened to the jukebox, and played some pinball. We were in a good mood when we left, and Kundra was carrying Cathy across the street piggyback.

          Then a cop car cruised by slowly and one of the cops yelled out its window, “Hey! If you’re gonna grab ass don’t do it in the street!”

          Cathy jumped down from Kundra’s back and they dashed across the rest of the street to the sidewalk, where Keliehor and I were already standing, waiting for them. The cop car then did a squealing tight u-turn and varoomed up to where we were standing. Then the cop snarled, “Don’t run away from me when I’m talking to you!”

          And then they had Kundra and Keliehor and me up against the cop car, and one of them frisked us while the other one, a little bundle of strut and sneer out of some cartoon, hit on Cathy, asking her what she was doing with trash like us. And then they went through our wallets and radioed in to see what they could get on us. I, for some reason, had my car registration in my wallet, and they found that I had an overdue parking ticket. Five dollars. And then one of the cops showed himself to be promotion material by noticing that a VW bus with the same plates as my registration card was parked like two cars away. All this time there was probably crime going on somewhere in the district. It was the turf of the LAPD’s notoriously corrupt Rampart Division. Foster told me later that those two cops had been hitting on him for protection money, and were hassling his customers to put pressure on him to pay.

          Anyway, I ended up spending the night in jail and getting released the next morning without being charged. The others took the keys to my bus from my handcuffed hands and drove home. Keliehor picked me up in the morning. Kundra took it all in an irritated-but blasé manner, as befitted his New York cool.

          Having once edited a fan magazine, Kundra had a highly-developed sense of who was in what he called the “pop aristocracy” and who wasn’t. One who was pop aristocracy, in Kundra’s vision, was the notorious and truly bizarre Cynthia Plaster Caster, who had some kind of a contract with Bizarre, Inc.

          Cynthia was at the time without a regular plater, or person to administer oral sex to the rock stars in order to keep their dicks in shape for casting. Cathy thought it might be fun to have a go at being Cynthia’s plater, which freaked Kundra out (“I guess I’m a sexual hypocrite; I’m really more old-fashioned than I thought I was, after all,” I remember him saying with sadness and wonderment in his voice). As a result of the conflict inherent in this situation, Cathy left town and Kundra headed back after her to New York City.

          Once, when l was talking to him on the phone after he’d returned to the East Village, he told me he’d just done up some smack and was getting ready to, “go and hit the street for an egg cream.” It was our last contact. All Google reveals of his subsequent existence is that he was still editing fan mags in the mid-to-late 80s.

Cynthia Plaster Caster

          One of the people whom I met at the offices of Bizarre, Inc. and who became a friend of mine was Cynthia Plaster Caster (her original surname had been Albritton). For those who have never heard of her particular niche in rock culture, Cynthia made plaster casts of the erect dicks of rock stars and others in the rock world. A recent brief check on her website reveals that she still does.

          I heard about Cynthia and her collection of plaster artefacts around the office for a few weeks before I met her. Pauline, the tall skinny Londoner who was more or less in charge of United Mutations (the fan-relations operation), had seen them and was rhapsodic about the size of Jimi Hendrix’s. “I couldn’t even get my hands around it!,” is what she told me, her elegant voice expressing wonder and awe.

          There’s something about a collection of plaster casts of people’s erect dicks that provokes people into some attitude or another. Art. That’s what the people in the office told me about why Zappa had brought Cynthia out from Chicago — to get her castings an exhibition at a major gallery.

          Anyway, we eventually ran into each other at the office. She was a cheerful, friendly, outgoing sort of person. Someone who likes a laugh. Shortish. A bit chubby. Midwestern accent. She seemed almost automatically to assume that we were peers, colleagues, friends.

          So we hung out some. I remember sometimes we got ripped with some other people — Herb’s secretary Kim Allen, notorious Hollywood scene-maker Rodney Bingenheimer, a queer groupie and his friends, and Dee Barnette, Bizarre’s bookkeeper — at Dee’s digs, where we watched TV, with Cynthia and the male groupie making comments on the various attributes and attractions of the rock stars on the tube.

          Cynthia was always ready to tell her tale of how she’d been a shy, non-glamorous-looking, virginal Catholic girl who’d taken up plaster-casting dicks, or ‘rigs’, as she called them, as a means of getting past the other groupies to meet rock stars. A queue-jumping technique, one might say.

          She referred to herself as the ‘Master Plaster Caster’. She and her former partner, Dianne Plaster Caster, had become notorious for their efforts in Chicago (to the point where Jonathan Kundra considered them to be ‘pop aristocracy’). Dianne had been the plater, keeping the rig in erectile mode by oral stimulation while Cynthia mixed the alginates (stuff dentists use to make casts of teeth) and made the cast. Dianne had gone back to Chicago, though, and Cynthia was on the lookout for temporary platers, which led to Jonathan Kundra’s anxiety situation over his girlfriend Cathy. She had me audition a couple of groupies to assess their plating technique — without my rig being cast, of course — for which I was ever so thankful to her. I remember in particular one young plater, an Australian woman who lived around the corner from the Café Figaro and who sang in musical comedies. Hearing her belt out the opening bars to “Ok-lahoma” in her Aussie accent was a hoot. Later she claimed to be feeling an epileptic episode coming on and injected herself with some thorazine, which I thought was creepy.

          Cynthia told me that how she really saw herself, and the career she really wanted, was as a curator.

          Her father, she told me, had been a postman, and she’d worn one of his old Post Office shirts as her smock when making many of her casts. For some reason she gave me that shirt, and I wore it for a long time before it disintegrated.

          She went back to Chicago about the time I left Bizarre, and we didn’t keep in touch. When I contacted her recently via her website she wrote back saying that she didn’t remember me, but she did remember the Post Office shirt.

Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa

           Of course I’d been a devout fan of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention since the first time I’d heard Freak Out in Jerry Kleiner’s apartment in DC back in 1966. I’d been most impressed to learn that John Ware had played with Zappa back in the early 60s, and that Paul Osborne had known him when they’d both been notorious local freaks in the Claremont-Montclair-Cucamonga-Upland-Ontario area. I was impressed when I found out that I was working for him when Herb Cohen hired me to work on the production of that Xmas concert in December 1968. But Zappa didn’t hang around the office, and I didn’t actually meet him.

          It was the first Mothers concert I’d ever seen, and, like most of the Mothers concerts I’ve seen, I saw it from backstage. One thing in particular about Zappa’s performance that evening made a deep impression on me. I think it was right before the band performed ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’. Zappa stepped up to the microphone, and in his deep voice and sardonic Southern-California drawl, said something like, “Now, I want you to help us out on this next piece. When I go like this” (at this point he gave everybody stage right of the central aisle the finger with his right hand), “I want everybody on this side of the auditorium to go ‘eeee!’, and when I go like this” (he repeated the gesture in the other direction with his left hand), I want everybody over here to go ‘awww’.”

          He then proceeded to give each half of his audience the finger alternately several times, and thousands of young people screamed as directed as loudly as they could, each side seemingly trying to outdo the other for volume. Then Zappa stepped back and waited for silence. It didn’t take long, the way he was looking at them. Then he stepped back up to the microphone and softly and slowly spoke directly into it: “And then you wonder how the nazis are able to run your lives!”

          Not long after the concert financial considerations forced me to leave LA and return East to work for my stepfather. Soon after I arrived in Delaware I got a phone call from Herb Cohen at my mother-and-step-father’s house, and 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 dive in Philly.

          I did that job. I remember, among other things, Zappa’s satiric monologue — which was of course brilliant, if vulgar (“How many girls in this room would give Dick Nixon stinkfinger?”) — and walking past the dressing room at intermission and listening to Zappa giving the band hell: “Okay, now, no more fucken mistakes! There’s only one standard and that’s perfection! That’s all I ask for. Is that asking too much? Not here it isn’t,” and so on. Like a Marine Corps drill sergeant.

          When I returned to LA some months later to work for Zappa and Herb Cohen full time (at $100 a week), within a week or so I finally met Zappa. Herbie’d sent me to some recording studio to pick up a couple of amps to take to where the Stone Poneys were rehearsing. I was just standing there, asking this guy where the amps were, when Zappa came striding up forcefully and got right into my face, demanding to know who I was and what the fuck I was doing there.

          Two things here. First, Zappa was a very powerful and charismatic personality. He cultivated a fierce visage — flashing dark Mediterranean eyes, that moustache and little strip goatee going down his chin from the middle of his lower lip, and all that. He had that cuttingly expressive baritone voice. The clear intent, the expectation, was intimidation. Secondly, although I certainly was surprised and set back a pace, I’d long before acquired the habit of turning bland when physically confronted. When things get uncool I basically just automatically shift into neutral.

          So that’s what I did. Cool, bland, neutral — emotionally unresponsive — I answered his questions. I was Richard Selinkoff. Herbie had sent me over to pick up the amps for the Stone Poneys. I’d been moving stuff for them for some time.

          Zappa wanted to make sure: “I thought you were union. You looked like a union guy. You’re not with the musicians’ union?”

          No. I got the job with the Stone Poneys humping drums for John Ware (remembering Ware’s tales of playing with Zappa back in Cucamonga).

          And it worked. Zappa broke out into a big grin. “Johnnie Ware! How’s he doin’?”

          Just great. Playin’ with Linda.

          Of course.

          And off I went after my amps.

          That had been just before lunch. Late that afternoon Herbie gave me an envelope and street directions, and told me to deliver it to Zappa’s house up on a street just off Mulholland Drive near the top of Laurel Canyon. When I got there, I was directed to the backyard pool, next to which Zappa was relaxing on a chaise longue. He took the envelope, apologised for trying to intimidate me, and vented some spleen against the musicians’ union. Then he invited me to pull up a chair and hang out, and let me know that I was welcome pretty much any ole time. I thought about when I’d been lying stoned on the floor of Kleiner’s student pad, freaking out to Freak Out! on the headphones.

          Over the next year or so I hung out some at the Zappa residence. Usually Zappa would be hard at work in his huge basement studio, or out on a tour, and I’d drink coffee with his wife, Gail, and her friends up in the kitchen. Gabby Ferguson, who Gail referred to as Moon Unit’s governess, was usually there. And there was this guy who’d been on the edge of the Mothers, apparently for years, named Kansas. We drank coffee and smoked cigarettes.

          Gail had taught Moon Unit, who was then about two or three, to do a trick. She’d tell her to “make a Herbie face,” and Moon would put on a pained half-smile that was spot-on. It always cracked everybody up.

          Downstairs, Zappa would be drinking obscene amounts of coffee, chain-smoking Winstons, eating peanut-butter sandwiches, and being a workaholic. I suppose it was the Winstons that did him in in the end. Often I’d have to deliver some documents or remastered tapes or suchlike to him. I’d knock on the exterior door to the basement studio three quick knocks, a beat, and then two more knocks, and Zappa would call out, “Who’s that knocking ‘Louie, Louie’ on my door?”, knowing of course that it was me.

          Sometimes when I did this he’d be in the mood for a break. Instead of me going upstairs to have coffee with the gang he and I would have some coffee and chat for a while. Now, if John Ware’s self-assuredness had laid influence on me hot and heavy, Zappa’s personal power overwhelmed me with a tsunami of influence. He had about the clearest, strongest intellect of anyone I have ever met, and I’ve been a university lecturer, in addition to the bizarre sense of humour — which was surprisingly warm one-on-one — for which he was famous. I just about came to the point where I would judge each of my viewpoints and tastes by how closely they resembled Zappa’s — even when we disagreed (I dug the poetry of Bob Dylan’s amphetamine-era lyrics and Zappa didn’t, for instance). He helped me make clear in my mind the distinction between music and entertainment, and I understood why I had laughed when John Ware had told the phone company that he was an entertainer. It was definitely a life-changing experience.

          Unlike most of the people in the Hollywood entertainment industry, Zappa had very little appetite for intoxicants. He told me that he’d tried pot a few times when he’d been younger, but it had just made him sleepy. He’d thought it was weird that, “everybody else’d be getting, y’know, euphoric. The way I was without it.” He had great disdain for LSD and other “products of San Francisco chemical engineering.” He rarely drank alcohol. I only saw him do so once, slowly sipping a whisky-and-soda one time when Alice Cooper came by to visit and tell tales.

          Once I saw Zappa, usually the platonic ideal of coolness and cynicism, visibly excited about something. He got in touch with me to do a rush job moving all his amps to this glitzy-sleazy place in central Hollywood called Thee Club. He’d met this freaky French fiddler named Jean-Luc Ponty who’d just blown into town, and they’d jammed together a bit, and they were going to stretch out on some of Zappa’s tunes for a one-night stand at this dive.

          “I can’t believe it,” Zappa said, “My music isn’t good enough for this guy to be playing it.”

          After I’d known Zappa for about a year, and about a half a year after I’d stopped working for him and Herbie full-time, I was mostly unemployed and staying mostly in the spare bedroom of a friend’s house in Beechwood Canyon. I’d screwed up my courage to the max one day a month or two before and had written a query letter to Esquire magazine about the possibility of doing an interview with Frank Zappa for them. Much to my surprise, I got back a letter telling me to go ahead. I got in touch with Frank, and he was glad to chat with me over a tape recorder. We had the chat, and it was great, and I transcribed it. Frank took a copy of the transcription. So far so good.

          And then I went on a fucking-up binge. I decided to work the interview into a story, rather than submit it in Q&A form. And a wild woman I was involved with at the time gave me some speed to help me to do it. Crystal methedrine, not pills, as had been my experience before then. Several grams of it. I wasn’t used to it and went off into interminable digressions of pointlessly boring detail and pre-computer cutting-and-pasting, and what I had in front of me kept getting worse and worse. With every stroke of the typewriter I progressively turned gold into a pig’s breakfast. I ended up never even sending it in. I don’t know what Zappa thought. He remained friendly, though, right up to the time I left LA.

          I went to see Zappa and the Mothers when they came through San Antonio in 1975, when I was getting by on a subsistence level as a minority partner in a headshop in a working-class neighbourhood. I phoned Herbie in Los Angeles and gotten a free ticket, and talked with Zappa on the phone at his hotel. It was a comfortable chat. I felt foolishly reassured by this evidence that my rapidly fading past was indeed real and not hallucinatory. The concert itself, at San Antonio’s antique Municipal Auditorium, had been predictably brilliant.

          I don’t think Zappa played South Texas again until late ’81 or early ’82, when I was a cab driver-and-freelance writer, etc. Anyway, I heard and saw publicity that he and his band of merry musicos were signed to play a gig at the Superdrum up in Austin, and I phoned around and got ahold of someone at Barking Pumpkin, as his company was called then. I told them who I was and that I thought it’d be a good idea for a story for my newspaper if Frank and I could get together for a chat about how things had changed since the Old Days. Real human-interest stuff, y’know?

          A few days later someone got back to me and told me that Frank was working on some music and wouldn’t be doing any interviews on this tour, but that they would reserve a couple of free passes for me at the door — for the preferred seating, up front.

          Now, this “couple” of free passes presented me with something of a problem, as I was then going through a stretch of unattachedness. I got set up with an Air Force nurse who had read my stories in the Weekender entertainment section of the Express-News and wanted to meet me. She was, I was assured, a real honky-tonk type from Georgia. I phoned her up and we made arrangements for me to drive her up to the Zappa concert.

          She brought a couple or four six-packs of beer with her. While I drove my little Toyota up Interstate 35, she drank beer and entertained me with stories. She started a number of times to tell me about how she and some of her friends got into a Letter-to-Penthouse trip when she’d been based at Homestead AFB in Florida, but she never developed the story to the point of details. Still, things sounded promising. By the time we got to Austin, however, she was already stumbly drunk.

           The concert started out strongly. It was pretty much the group that had been with Frank since Sheik Yerbouti, and they were playing, like all Frank’s bands, incredibly tight and fast, seamlessly segueing between numbers and putting on a hell of a show. But the nurse wasn’t interested in the music or the satire. Or the show. She was too drunk. And she was trying to talk to me over the Zappa-level of volume (we were sitting quite close), which meant that she was shouting in my ear. Even so, I couldn’t make out was she was shouting over the sound of the band. And I couldn’t follow the sound of the band over her shouting. I tried to get her to shut up so I could follow the show, but she seemed incapable of going for more than about a minute, maybe a minute and a half, without shouting in my ear again.

          It was when she started shouting racist crap about the black guy who was singing the high parts and playing rhythm guitar in that version of Frank’s band that I got up and dragged her out of there. I missed the rest of the concert and never saw Frank again. Out in the lobby, I told the nurse why we’d left and what I thought of the way she’d acted, but she seemed unperturbed. Back in the Toyota she seemed relieved to be reunited with her by-this-point warm beer, and on the way back to San Antonio she fell asleep, the remains of her last six-pack cradled in her arms.

          It was the last contact I had with Frank Zappa.

          I didn’t buy many Zappa albums after I stopped getting them for free. I heard them here and there, but have only taken a few home.

          Frank died when I was teaching at the Waikato Polytechnic here in Hamilton, New Zealand in the early 90s. I wrote the following little piece on the subject then:

26 March 1994:

          I'm sorry to say that it has shocked me, reading in the Herald about Frank Zappa dying. I’m embarrassed to say that I feel a strong sense of bereavement. Embarrassed because it’s such an inappropriate feeling, considering how little patience Frank had with sentimentality, and embarrassed because it’s a feeling that speaks so much more loudly about my relationship to myself than it does about any Motherly Love toward a fellow mortal human I once sorta knew.

          I feel as if I should send a letter or something to Gail, as I really spent more time hanging around with her and Gabby than I did with Frank, but part of the problem is that we have long since fallen out of touch — Helena, my first wife, got rid of all my Hollywood addresses more than twenty years ago during one of her all-too-many insanely jealous rages — and I don't know how to get a message through to the House of Zappa now that wouldn't have to pass the test of secretarial screening.

          This isn’t the place for anecdotes of experiences I had in my occupational and social interactions with the Zappa family. What I should be doing here is eulogising the Great Man, utilising insights I may have gained in my conversations and observations at the Zappas’ place, but I don’t know if I can do that, either. It was a long time ago. Frank always sneered at heaviosity, anyway. And, of course, I have to be honest.

          And being honest right now means acknowledging that what presently preys on my mind and spirit is what all this has to do with me, not with Frank.

          He’s dead now, anyway.

          Spending even a little time with him long ago had a serious effect on the way I see things.

          I’d always assumed that Frank and I’d run into each other again some day; now I know that we won’t. Frank’s death, and my distance from it, has been a blunt reminder to me of my own isolation in the world, my isolation from others and my isolation from huge parts of my self. In order to relate at all to the people in my immediate environment I have had to suppress my awareness, my consciousness, of much of my experience. Other people could have no possible idea of the influence that involvement with such a powerful and non-conventional intellectual and aesthetic force has had on the way I perceive and enjoy the world. Involving this experience at all overtly in my daily life would set me up as a tiresome old bore stuck in the past (‘Come back again and visit us in 1969’), but I know that the validity of the viewpoints resulting from that experience is as solid now as it was then.

          So, what is this attitude? Oh, bits and pieces of existential- and various other -isms. It involves things like trying to be the kid who blurts out that the Emperor is buck naked and has a tiny dick, trying never to convince myself that bullshit isn’t bullshit, even when it’s my own bullshit and much beloved, to be open to that which is dissonant, and to recognise mysteries for what they are: mysteries. Part of it is an internalised appreciation of the absurd: enjoying and toying with the ineffable without trying to eff it, except to say f it. This seems to be associated with a deep loathing of the savage, bullying intolerance and assertive superstition of organised religion, which, of course, has no appreciation of absurdity at all.

          When I went out the afternoon I saw the story about Frank dying, I took with me to play in the car a tape I’d made some time before of most of Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar. Later, my wife got into the car with me. The tape was still in. When we’d gone about a kilometre she reached for the stereo controls, visibly irritated even to my peripheral vision, saying, “Richard, I’m sorry but I just can’t stand that!”

          I didn’t doubt her for a minute. I learned long ago that Frank had a highly particular musical voice that, well, maybe most people can’t stand. I can, though.

          Let me tell you, Zappa’s music, whether it’s Hot Rats from 1969 or Jazz From Hell from 1986, never sounds exotic or bizarre to me. It just sounds like Frank. Now, there’s a musical voice for you.

Captain Beefheart & Jeff Simmons

Captain Beefheart

          I met Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet, when I was helping out with the 1968 Xmas show, but we didn’t really get to know each other until I started working for Bizarre full-time in mid-1969. There was a matter of some tympani, I believe it was, that Beefheart had rented for the making of Trout Mask Replica but had apparently not yet returned. I think the rental was in the name of Straight Records, but there were several issues in dispute I made it my business not to learn. I was told that Beefheart had imperiously ordered away several crews sent to retrieve them. Herb Cohen thought that Beefheart might treat me more kindly.

          I drove out in search of the wayward tympani to a remote, almost wild, area of Woodland Hills, on the Valley side of the Santa Monica mountains, dead North of Malibu, far from Hollywood. Parts of Los Angeles provide an amazing illusion of being rural. It seemed that the whole Magic Band lived in the big house. Out back were some fantasy gardens that were the most artistic I’d seen since Paul Osborne’s stone houses in Montclair. Inside was a jumble of furniture and some odd paintings. Beefheart, under his birth name of Don Vliet (he’d added the Van later), had been something of a child prodigy as an artist.

          Beefheart was in one of his periods of feuding with Zappa, with whom he’d been involved since they’d been teenagers. Nonetheless, he greeted me warmly, told me he appreciated my position in this thing, got me stoned, and gave me a tour of the house and grounds. He had an amazing voice, even when talking: a full baritone, both rough and melodious. We laughed and did impromptu poetry back and forth. I sang him a song I’d half-plagiarised, half improvised, which he made a big display of finding amusing. I was able to load one of the kettledrums into the back of my VW bus that trip.

          Over the next few months I went out to Beefheart’s place a few more times, having been appointed the person in the organisation to deal with him. I drove him into Woodland Hills’ commercial area on errands. He told me in detail about how he’d written Trout Mask Replica in one huge outburst of creation over about nine hours one night on mescaline. He gave me his own copy of Safe As Milk from the stack of LPs under his stereo. I still have it.

          Later, during a time when I was unemployed and Beefheart was being managed by Grant Gibbs, a friend of mine from the Bizarre Inc. organisation, Grant hired me to do a couple of jobs shlepping the Captain’s band’s equipment. I remember in particular one of the recording sessions for Lick My Decals Off, Baby. Beefheart composed most of his music note for note, but in a sort of free-verse form, with only occasional reference to key or time signatures. Very free-flowing; not easily accessible to the everyday music consumer.

          “The music’s just out there,” Don told me once. “All I do is bring it in. I feel bad about taking money for it, because where I get it, it’s free.”

          (Once when I was working for Bizarre-Straight, a San Francisco radio station mailed the [double] album cover of their promotional copy of Trout Mask Replica back to our office with a note that said something like, ‘Enclosed please find the album cover of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s latest release. We have no further use for it. The records, however, make dandy ashtrays.’)

          Anyway, for a person not ready for it, some of Beefheart’s arrangements could sound like a bunch of random noise. What was remarkable about that recording session was that, after the band had played two or three minutes of this seemingly random noise, Beefheart would call a cut, correct one of the musicians for missing a phrase or something, and then they’d start all over and repeat that two or three minutes again just about exactly, as far as I could tell.

          The audiences at Beefheart’s performances were populated by many odd-looking people, but not of the ordinary Hollywood oddness — they tended toward being various manifestations of the spaced-out-nerd variety. And a large percentage of them seemed to know all these difficult songs by heart.

          I lost contact with Beefheart when I left LA. I’ve read that in the 80s he gave up music and moved back out to the desert to concentrate on his painting, then moved to coastal Northern California. He became seriously ill with multiple sclerosis in the 1990s, and died in 2010.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6roEf9RpWBM&feature=youtu.be 

Jeff Simmons

          Early on in the process of helping out with the Mothers of Invention’s 1968 Xmas show at the Shrine Auditorium, Joe Gannon sent me out to LA Airport to meet a band from Seattle that Zappa had signed called Ethiopia. I was told to look for a tall guy with a red ’fro hairdo. No problem. There, standing about looking like a band, were four or five guys, one of whom was tall and had a big bush of kinky red hair sticking out from his head. So I walked up and said, “Ethiopia?”

          The guy with the hair’s name was Jeff Simmons. He later told me he’d thought I was freaky, just walking up looking the way I did and saying that one word. Me? Freaky? Anyway, I did end up chauffeuring them about a bit, including an excursion out to the stone houses in Montclair.

          When I came back from the East Coast to work for Bizarre in mid-1969, Ethiopia was gone, but Jeff was under some kind of contract with Zappa or Herbie or both. He’d been the bass player from Ethiopia that Herbie had decided to keep, sending the others in the band packing to Seattle. He had a new band, most of whom were also from Seattle, and was working on a solo album.

          He had also, almost as a sideline, done the sound track for a B-movie biker opus called Naked Angels with another musician named Randy Sterling. Jeff’s soundtrack really rocks, and the obviously improvised-on-the-spot lyrics to “Vegas Boogie” are pure Jeff and subtlely funny as hell. I especially liked the bit with the lug nuts.

          I schlepped Jeff’s band’s stuff, of course. At one memorable gig at some dive in El Segundo, a particularly dreary beach town. I took the flack as the middle man between the irate saloonkeeper, who wanted the amps turned down because the neighbours had called the police, and the guitar player, a tough little nut named Craig Tarwater, who went ballistic at the thought of his amps being turned down. I don’t know how I made it through that one, but I did. And the police didn’t bust us, although I imagine that would have given the band some needed publicity.

          Jeff was then staying in one of the apartments at a charming, funky old court on Fountain Avenue west of La Brea. It must have been built in the 1920s in a modified California-Arts-And-Crafts style. Now, for people unfamiliar with the California court as a form of residential architecture, it consists of smallish duplexes or quadruplexes or rows of flats set facing each other across a central walkway, which is usually landscaped with trees (unless the place is decidedly downmarket), at a right angle to the street, similar to what the Brits call a mews. The one where Jeff was staying had quadruplexes: one-bedroom places upstairs-and-down and side-by-side, I think three or four quads on each side, with long carports at the far end of the walkway away from the street, and driveways around the whole thing. It had good-sized shade trees along the central walkway. It seemed to be inhabited entirely by show-biz types and other assorted weirdos, many of them, like Jeff, from Seattle. There was a community atmosphere about, and I wound up being pretty close with a bunch of them.

          Hanging out with Jeff was to be involved in his intense creativity. With some people it was a matter of wine and weed and listening to music; with others it was a matter of wine and weed and playing music. With Jeff it was getting ripped and writing music. Or comedy. Jeff was a devotee of the punch line and the zinging adjective. It was great keeping up with him — or trying to.

          He and the other guys in his band — Tarwater and a Seattle drummer named Ron Woods — had what I assumed were the usual assortment of in-jokes with which band members indulged themselves. I got the feeling most of these in-jokes originated with Jeff.

          One in particular that I remember was an emphasis on the word ‘rank’. Their invariable assessment of anything assessable, whether a joke or a song or a meal or something that somebody did, was either, “How Rank!” or “Too Rank”. They’d invented an imaginary person named ‘Hal Rank’, based on the first of the above-mentioned expressions. This of course led to the time-honoured pastime of playing with names with other meanings. Dick Hertz. Mel and Collie Baybee. And so forth. The only aspect of life and culture that escaped being classified as Too Rank, apparently, was Pink’s 24-Hour Chili Dog stand on La Brea, which they deemed to be Just Rank Enough.

          Despite all this camaraderie the band couldn’t survive the lack of commercial response to the album, which was released in February 1970, and broke up. Then Zappa hired Jeff to play bass and do some singing with the Mothers in the Spring of 1970. He played in the Mothers’ Pauley Pavilion concert with the L.A. Philharmonic. He told me he was disgusted by being misquoted (under the name of Swoovette Simmons) in a story about the concert in Newsweek. Otherwise, I didn’t see much of him while he was with the Mothers.

          I was surprised when he quit the Mothers early in 1971, just as they were starting to film the movie 200 Motels. He never did give me a clearly understandable reason why he gave all that away, but my impression was that he’d just felt that what he was doing there wasn’t what he wanted to be doing. He seemed to be particularly bitter about the lack of understanding and support he got from some of his friends in the band at the time.       

          He then started paying with various LA musos of the spaced-out variety — with Albert Lee at one point, for example. At about this time his creativity seemed to go through the ceiling. He began changing his name to match whatever style of music he was writing. I remember him becoming Little Junior Turlock and also Kent Dubçek. Sitting with him in his place, getting wrecked, and listening to his newest Little Junior Turlock compositions (I remember in particular one that began “It was back in the alley and nobody saw ...” and another that began “Used car in the morning light ...”) was a profound artistic experience.

          His wife and daughter, about whom I’d never heard him speak, came down from Seattle and he moved into a duplex in the flat part of Hollywood next door to Danny O’Keefe, another Seattle player who later became a one-hit wonder with ‘Good-Time Charlie’s Got The Blues’. He kept his high rate of creativity and energy, but was going nowhere in the LA music business.

          I don’t which of us left LA first, but when we did we lost touch until I found him on the internet and we re-connected in March 2001. In the intervening 29 years he had, as best as I could find out through the net, been playing music and cutting up on stage in the Seattle area, acquiring a heavy reputation, but never staying with any one act for very long. He’d taken such names as Darvon Willis, Jetsims, and Little Bobby Sumpner (aka Robert Sumpner Jr., the Janitor of the Blues). Some of the bands he played with included the Reputations, the Backtrackers, the Shimmering Guitars, and Cocktails for Ladies.

          When I got back in touch with him he was trying to get a new Jeff Simmons CD out. He updated me about it:

          “the scene: Jerry's Famous Deli, Coldwater and Ventura, Studio City California ... Enter one Robert Sumpner Jr. self-proclaimed ‘janitor of the Blues’ for a sit- down kosher power lunch with Herb Cohen. the date: April 9th 2000 ... thirty-two years after you picked Phil and I up at LAX with little Naomi [my dog] in tow.... anyhow between huge glorping bites of piled-high tuna and various ethnic relishes Herb offers: ‘for you to come back to Hollywood ....at your age ? ... would be delusional ... besides your record didn't exactly sell a million copies did it?’ needless to say this has been a challenge to my rancid present day demo ‘Adventures in the White Blues Era’ ... please send 17.95 today and I won't release my second albumen.” I’d given him the line, “Adventures in the White Blues Era”, in an earlier email.

          By December 2001 the album was still imminent:

          “‘How green was my valet?’, these and other classic proposed titles are battling with ‘adventures in the white blues era’ for the nome de plume of my CD ... ready for my luck to change ... concierge to the blues ... the right reverend, Robert Sumpner”

          By October 2003 he was still busy with getting that second solo album out. In late 2004 there it was on the internet: Blue Universe, released by Blue Fox Records. I sent him an email asking about it and received a reply saying, in part, “your weirdship, please visit www.bluefoxrecords.com, a luxurious portal of self-aggrandizing bulljive, pedantic overstatements and questionable intent. ... due to unforeseen calamity ‘blue universe’ was released this June 2005 ... pardon my radio silence ... send digits and will gift you w/disc.”

          It eventually arrived via parcel service. I haven’t heard from him since. His page on facebook is ‘automatically generated based on what Facebook users are interested in and not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with the topic’ – a line I imagine he’d enjoy satirising, and so many people named ‘Jeff Simmons’ have facebook accounts that I said fuck-it at the idea of going through them. My guess is that joining facebook isn’t something he’d do, anyway. I’d be surprised if he weren’t still gigging around Seattle, playing bass and being weird. The grand old man of the local music scene.

          Of course, I could be wrong.

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.