John Ware 1975-1982

John Ware 1975-1982

          Emmylou and the Hot Band didn’t just go on tour at first because two of the guys in the band were still playing for Elvis and one was playing for Neil Diamond. They played weekends, and gigs near Elvis gigs. They started recording in April 1975 at what was essentially a derelict house in Coldwater Canyon with a mobile unit in back of it.

          At the outset they were bigger in Europe than in the US. Three weeks after the band had formed they were playing major concerts in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, London, and Birmingham. Then they went on a tour with James Taylor. They toured. They recorded. They got big. And by some time in 1976 Ware got into cocaine.

          Before this he hadn’t been into controlled substances. Marijuana only put him to sleep, he hadn’t tried cocaine more than once or twice, and he’d never done acid. He abused beer and cheap wine, which can be nasty, but legal. Then, even though his nose was a mess, and packing alkaline powder into it just had to be unwise, he said to himself one afternoon on the way into the studio, “I’m gonna start doin’ this stuff. I want this rock and roll lifestyle. I want whatever it means, whether it means early death or somethin’, I want that. I want it to lead me to somethin’ else.”

          He caught on to the cocaine lifestyle quickly. The band would shlep their own bags and apply their out-of-pocket band expenses for valets — for carrying baggage in and out of airports, and from vans into hotels, and so forth — into blow. Ware, enthusiastically addicted, was the keeper of the vials. By the Spring of 1976 they had drug dealers on the road with them. They had FedEx packages of cocaine coming in almost every day on tour. They all knew that was stupid, but did it anyhow.

          In the summer of 1977 the Hot Band was touring with Willie Nelson. One night in August they had to ride their bus through the night to get to Memphis for a show, arriving at two-thirty or three in the morning. Their road manager was concentrating on crew work and Ware had started doing his familiar West Point Hippie jobs. He checked them into the motel and rolled everybody out of the back of the bus and into their rooms.

          After a few hours sleep he hauled himself up at about six or so, called room service for coffee and turned on the TV news. A story about a rumour that Elvis had some kind of a medical problem kept coming up and then going away. Then, shortly before seven o’clock, a TV reporter announced that Elvis was indeed dead. Then other reports confirmed the news.

          They were in Memphis, with Graceland just down the road, and three of the guys in the band worked for Elvis.

          Ware started with Glen D Hardin, the piano player. He tapped on his door and said, “Glen! Wake up!”

          Hardin responded with an early-in-the-morning mumble. Ware kept at it until Hardin sounded halfway lucid.

          Then Ware said, “Elvis is dead.” He said the ensuing silence was like a piece of rock: the sound of evaporating paychecks.

          Harris got pregnant soon afterward and they stayed in LA for a while, doing coke and recording albums. Then she miscarried and the band was unemployed for a while. Life on the road with cocaine had been taking its toll, and the Hot Band started going through personnel changes. When she’d recovered they hit the road with Version Two of the Hot Band in mid-1978. Not all the replacement players got on as well, at least with Ware, as the originals, but he stayed on.

          Although I was mostly unaware of it, the Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band phenomenon soared on. She won Grammy awards. They played with musical legends. They filled stadiums in the US and Europe, and Ware acquired a repertoire of anecdotes involving music, sex, cocaine, and big money.

          He came through San Antonio, where I was working as an advertising jerk, once in 1978. We got together and drove out to Medina Lake where John Kuehne lived, but Kuehne wasn’t home. I remember Ware taking pictures of Rancho Kuehne with a funky little instamatic and explaining that he didn’t have a nifty 35mm camera because, “Hell, I’m not Ansel Adams.”

          I thought that was a bit extreme. I reckoned a person doesn’t have to be the best at something to want to do it for fun. I guess that’s a difference derived from our divergent environments. Or else he was being Warholian on me and I wasn’t there with him on that then. Otherwise we yakked and yakked and it was okay.

          By 1979 he was doing most of Harris’s tour financial stuff, and one day he saw some paperwork sitting on a desk in the accounting office showing that Ricky Skaggs was on a regular salary, unlike everyone else in the Hot Band, and had been for a year or so. The rest got paid well when they worked, but not when they were off.

          He and the only remaining guy from the original band, Hank DeVito, were both enormously pissed off, and DeVito started making plans to move out of LA and back to New York to start doing other things. In order to try to keep them, Harris’s manager offered Ware and DeVito half his management share of the act. He told Ware that since he was already doing most of the work on the road he’d just give it to them. DeVito didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Ware decided to stay, and from that point on was Harris’s manager for live performances.

          He’d chosen the bucks: “And what bucks! It was a serious money change. I mean, the next time I saw Eddie [the manager], he said, ‘Oh, by the way, I got some money for you.’

          I said, ‘Oh. cool,’ because Hank and I had instantly gone on a salary.

          He said, ‘I’ve got a check. It’s in my briefcase. I’ll give it to you after the gig,’ and backstage after we played he handed me a check for like $35,000! Oh-yeah! I can get used to this!”

          So in 1979-81 Ware was running the Hot Band show. He contracted. He played. He did the paperwork. He ran the crews. He controlled merchandising. He started getting t-shirts made. He got out back to Claremont when he could.

          One time in 1979, Ware blew through San Antonio on some family business with some friends of his parents. Harris had just won a Grammy — he was calling her Grammylou — and he was on a roll. We met at his hotel and made a strategic retreat to a nearby bar. He was coming down and he wanted me to bring some speed to keep him going. I was devastated to acknowledge that I didn’t have any. We sat and drank and agreed about stuff and he told me about The Big Time.

          He told me about doing Harris’s business negotiations, about holding up concert promoters for huge sums of money and getting it, and he wondered if he was losing his soul to greed, but he said he didn’t think so. His clothes, as always, looked great; his hair was right-on. He carried himself with his usual easy confidence. The cocktail waitresses, I could see, were impressed.

          He told me that he’d begun to recognise that all the personnel changes in the Hot Band were killing him musically. As they started adding people who copied the people who played the original stuff, they became for him a technically proficient, highly-paid bar band. By 1979 he felt they’d become very professional and very slick, with everybody on stage, except for Harris and himself, playing somebody else’s parts, copying the patterns and riffs of the band’s original players. Then Ware started having to learn the parts again after time off — listening to the records to remember what it was that he’d played. He told me that he thought that copying himself was an unhealthy thing to do.

          In late 1979 I got a call from Ware that he was coming into San Antonio with the Emmylou Harris entourage to film a scene in a Willie Nelson movie at the Hemisfair Arena. I went with Kuehne, who was selling advertising for the same newspaper I worked for, down to the Hemisfair Plaza with my little dog Naomi, and Ware got us into the area where all the trailers were. He was only there in San Antonio for the movie with Harris because he was managing. He had nothing to do with the movie itself.

          He was pleased as punch to see Naomi, family that she was, and picked her up and took her into Harris’s trailer to show around. Harris went ballistic about a dog being in there with wee baby Meghann, whom she was at that time nursing in the back. Ware told me that for months after Meghann had been born everyone had had to wear surgical masks when inside Harris’s house, even if only for a few seconds. Not to be in her room — just to be in the house. The little dog in a confined space put Harris way over the top. She shouted lots of “Get that dog out of here with the baby” things, and we tried to be reassuring with dignity without great success. Later the two Johns and I went to Mi Tierra, the big 24-hour Mexican restaurant in the city’s downtown mercado.

          By 1979-1981, Ware felt that Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band had sunk “into the oblivion of playing the same stuff over and over again, and spending all the money that we could possibly get on drugs.” They also had come to the point where they didn’t even like each other. It seems to me now that Ware at least was begging the question of life: he played on with the Hot Band because of the money, which he spent on cocaine so that he could get himself up to play on with the Hot Band.

          In 1980 the Emmylou Harris entourage made a tour stop in Austin, an hour’s drive up Interstate 35 from San Antonio. It was Big Time, more or less: a concert at the Superdrum and taping an Austin City Limits TV show.

          Ware was definitely managing the operation. When he had more or less done the things he needed to do we met at the bar of the hotel, some in-the-process-of-being-renovated Victorian structure, and had drinks. His nephew, who was a student at SW Texas State in San Marcos (about midway between San Antonio and Austin), was there. He was a nice kid.

          Vanessa, Emmylou’s wardrobe mistress, was there, too, a tallish woman with lots of frizzy reddish hair. She and Ware seemed to be hanging together some. I wondered if it had something to do with him managing things. Well, not directly. Vanessa had been his mistress since about the time he’d started managing the show, as I was to find out later.

          The shows went by slickly and professionally. The people in the audience all seemed to know the repertoire, but I didn’t. I’d never been an Emmylou fan.

          Backstage after the show at Austin City Limits Ware laid out some lines of coke on a make-up table, and since he’d given me a snort earlier, I queued up with the band for a reinforcement toot. Coke is like that; it doesn’t last long. But one or two of the guys in the band took umbrage at my presence in the line. They’d put down money for their dose of the Andean alkaloid. I wasn’t in the financial frame. But Ware told everyone that he’d paid for mine, and I went ahead.

          The high energy, the whisky, and the cocaine — to which I was unaccustomed — turned things blurry for me. I remember us wandering around the darkened hotel for a long time long after midnight, looking at the renovation work and talking trash.

          Then, in March 1981 I had a bit of money and some credit still on my MasterCard, so I made a sentimental journey out to L.A. It’d been more than eight-and-a-half years since I’d left. My second day there I drove my rental car out to Ware’s new house. He had at last more or less broken up with Linda Ware and was living, I believe, with Vanessa. The house was in some far northern fringe suburb of the Southern California megalopolis called La Cañada. It was bare and white and clean and concrete and modern and had a view — a real cocaine-ish house and a long way in many ways from Mills Avenue in Claremont.

          We went out for a drink at a local suburban franchise saloon. Ware was in that age-old pickle: he wanted his wife and he wanted his mistress, too. I couldn’t help him. He drove us into town to the Emmylou rehearsal hall compound and scored a bit of coke from a dealer who lived across the street and apparently made his daily bread more or less entirely from those working in or visiting the compound. Ware was feeling put upon by coke at this time. I remember him complaining that he was spending as much on coke a month as he was spending per semester on Vanessa’s son’s exclusive private school, apparently the same one Frank Zappa’s kids went to. ‘Good thing you got that much to send down the drain and still live well, Johnnie,’ I thought.

          Soon afterward he decided that if the Hot Band was to survive, it was going to have to be without cocaine. He quit coke himself in the Spring of ’81, which he told me was surprisingly easy, much easier than quitting tobacco, then put it off-limits for the rest of the band, telling them, “If you’re wired, you’re fired.”

          Ware had developed carpal tunnel syndrome to the point where his hands hurt so badly it was hard to finish the shows. The physical pain wasn’t all that was unpleasant. He couldn’t even stay in the same hotels with the band anymore. He booked them in. He went in the mornings and paid everybody’s bills. But he stayed elsewhere because although he’d made that rule about no drugs, he didn’t want to be there to enforce it. He didn’t want to be a cop.

          They finished the tour with the second of two shows at the Greek Theatre, did two or three encores, and then Ware ran up to the front of the stage, waved at the crowd, did a couple of bows, held Emmy’s hand, gave her a big hug, said “See yuh!”, and he was gone. 

Deborah C Grossman

Deborah C. Grossman

          My mother’s sister Goldie remained in the old home town, or what was then the countryside to the north of it, for several reasons, including her husband’s business and her love for her house, despite my mother’s toxic presence on the other side of town. Goldie was as tough as they come, though, and wouldn’t let her sister dominate. She had three daughters, two of them older than me and one of them, Debbie, a couple of years younger.

          I had two boy cousins closer to my age, but my mother’s psychopathic behaviour had helped influence her brother to settle far away in Tarrytown, New York, and to visit infrequently, and it cut off all but the most basic, unavoidable contact with my father’s sister, so I saw my boy cousins little.

          Deb and I had the sort of friendly-but-distant relationships that girl and boy cousins not quite the same age have. Our contact was mostly in the context of multiple family members getting together. My only vivid childhood memory of her is of visiting at Aunt Goldie’s house when I was a preschooler and she was a just-out-of-nappies toddler, and she dropped trou and peed in the back yard. I didn’t know that people were allowed to do that, but she did it as a matter of course. I’d also never seen a girl pee before, and wouldn’t do so again for decades.

          One time when I was home from the university and hiding from my mother at Goldie’s house I was amazed, of course, by how Deb had grown from being, as her mother had called her, the ‘little round one’ to a person who Goldie, always a lover of words, would accuse of being profligate for buying two new bras when she only needed one.

          As news dribbles through a family I learnt over the next few years that Deb was getting her degree in Library Science, had joined Mensa, and through Mensa had developed a thing with a genuine London Cockney named John Astell. The story came to me that Astell had visited from England, got his papers in order, returned to Delaware, converted to Judaism, and they’d married.

          In 1973, my first wife and I moved to Delaware and I reconnected with Deb and met John. Astell seemed to be somewhat flabby physically, but with an overabundance of self-assured Cockney cockiness. Deb, despite her role-model mother’s sassy stroppiness, seemed to be in his shadow, or at least conceded him centre stage, serving him unhealthy amounts of ice cream whilst he told me about his love of automobile graveyards.

          He also, as I recall, had one or two uncomplimentary things to say about the Irish. I personally thought this was somewhat silly, as I couldn’t tell the English from the Irish to look at them, and said so, but he pooh-poohed my naïvety with a reference to black hair, blue eyes, and thirteen kids following them down the street. Cockney ethnic-stereotype bigotry humour, I supposed. Anyway, he laughed.

          John had secured himself a job teaching English at some public school, Cockney accent and all, thanks to Goldie’s efforts through the placement agency where she was then working. Deb had come up with some job with the Dupont Corporation, which wasn’t that surprising, since most people in Delaware work for the Dupont Corporation, or so it seems, and it sorta made sense for them to need a librarian, being a research-oriented organisation.

          We saw Deb and John a bit socially, which in those days meant drinking, but not that often. When my beloved’s mental health broke down intolerably – and, well, schizophrenia is often more than challenging to live with – I slept on their couch once or twice.

           By the time I just couldn’t take it any more and left Wilmington and spouse on a Greyhound bus, Deb had become part of what Dupont called its Integrated Data Processing group, retrieving technical information via punch cards – remember them? This was in 1974, before the acronym IT had been invented.

          Over the years I learnt that Astell had become a part of her past and that Dupont had eventually moved her to facilities it owned in Mississippi and various parts of California, eventually in Silicon Valley, moving from computers to human resources, where she felt more comfortable.

          By the early part of this century she had retired, comfortably, from what she calls ‘Uncle Dupy’, remarried, and resettled in Pleasanton, an affluent town in the hills about 20 km east of the southern part of San Francisco Bay. She helped Goldie with her autobiography, My Golden Childhood, in 2000, took up poetry, had a book published in 2006 called Goldie and Me that contained stuff by both her and my auntie, and had served a tenure as Pleasanton’s Poet Laureate.

          More significantly, from my point of view, she has made her way into the wonderful world of writing about food and wine, and, mostly via facebook, she has treated me to a series of photos with her in various parts of the world with wine glasses in her hand and goofy, this-aint-my-only-glass-today grins on her face. She was tasting some upmarket plonk at a winery in Chile when the big earthquake hit in 2010, and other thrills.

          She’s also taken to genealogy and has organised an association of our extended family (Yiddish: mishpukha; Kiwi: whanau) on facebook. We two have grown a bit closer over distance over the past dozen years or so. The importance of family – and family relationships – runs deep in many ways.

Barry Ellis; Norma, Frances, & Eileen

Barry Ellis

          The expat haole teachers at what was then Inarajan High School were, of course, a hodgepodge of misfits, zealots, adventurers, surfers, and so forth. One fellow, however, stands out in my mind as being truly bizarre, a teacher of Spanish and English named Barry Ellis.

          Barry was a converted Catholic, which was helpful on Guam, where the Spanish-style Church is suffocatingly powerful, and a committed celibate, which — and I obtained this information from an impeccable source — even the Inarajan parish priest wasn’t.

          He told me that before he’d become a Catholic he’d been a, well, y’know, a nothing. Yes, I did know. He took it seriously. He became extraordinarily fond of me rather quickly, because he thought my witticisms witty, but then became aghast when I told one of my more blunt God jokes, and informed me that God could forgive any sin except blasphemy, and that no matter how much good I did for the rest of my life for penance, he knew that I was forever damned. That didn’t mean, however, that we couldn’t still be friends.

          He was largish, but not as tall as me, and softish-looking: kind of narrow in the shoulders and kind of wide at the hips. He had a chubby face and a naughty smile, and lived in a small apartment in a high-rise building in Guam’s urban centre of Tamuning, which was a bit of a commute to and from Inarajan.

          He knew Spanish from having lived in, of all places, Panama, and had tales to tell about his time there, mostly about personal relationships and status. He’d enjoyed being called Don Barry.

          He sometimes told me about his mother. She had, he told me, been unbearably dominant, possessive, controlling, and even abusive. I felt a connection with him right there.

          She’d made him wear hot clothes in the summer and to stand for long periods in one place when he’d been naughty. She’d also used food as a weapon, which may have been why he never, ever ate anything coloured green, getting his fresh-produce nourishment from fruits and vegetables of other colours. As horrid as she had apparently been, he’d still adored her, and had stayed with her, pampering her whims and submitting to her domination, well into his adulthood.

          Somehow, then, his commitment to celibacy wasn’t surprising. From what he told me I doubt if his mother would have approved of him at all if he’d chosen otherwise. Maybe, however, it was because he was both swishy as hell and believed the Church’s teaching that homosexuality is a most horrendous sin.

          He was also, unsurprisingly, a devoted fan of Liberace, and was devastated when he found out that his idol was dying from AIDS, which in the mid-1980s still Meant Only One Thing to most people. He couldn’t believe that Liberace could have been homosexual. It seemed impossible to him. Liberace, after all, had doted upon his mother!

          Although the kids at Inarajan had a way of torturing teachers who they thought deserved it, they tended to give Barry a fairly easy time of it, which I thought was strange, but nice. Maybe because he was so gentle and inoffensive and would have made too easy a target. I don’t know.

          I lost touch with Barry when I left Guam. I haven’t been able to find him on the internet. As with most of the haole teachers at Inarajan, he could be just about anywhere.

Norma, Frances, Eileen, & Inarajan Girls’ Basketball 1986

          I’d developed a liking for coaching basketball when I’d been at Wrenn in San Antonio, and had learnt enough about its technical aspects for it to fascinate me. I sorta considered it to be like choreographing a ballet with half of those dancing at any one time trying to disrupt what those under my direction were trying to do. I also enjoyed the challenge of putting a group of distinct individuals together into a cohesive team that utilised their individual skills communally.

          When I started teaching at Inarajan High School I pre-empted the school custodian, who had been coaching the girls’ team, as teachers had priority. Coaches on Guam received payment for the time and effort involved. In money. He kept the boys’ team. I managed to put together a team that at their best were remarkable, I thought, for a rural school on a remote island. Most of the girls bought into the system I tried to sculpt for their abilities, and at their best they played with devastating precision.

          That ‘at their best’ bit covers a lot of ground. They were, after all, adolescent girls deeply engrained in the fabric of their particular culture and their chosen places within it. We played our matches on Wednesdays and Fridays. We won most of our Wednesday games and, if I remember correctly, lost all of the Friday ones.

          Norma was the team leader. She was just medium height, but her strength, reflexes, mental speed, and aggression made her play much larger. When she ripped down a defensive rebound and took off on the dribble for a coast-to-coast it would have been a brave girl indeed to get in her way, and few did. She was lethal penetrating to the basket from the wing, and in additional to her bruising rebounding averaged about 30 points per game on Wednesdays.

          Fridays were a different story. Throughout the rest of the year, Norma would meet up with her friends on the beach on Friday after school and put away a couple of six-packs, and she saw no reason to change this just because she was supposed to play power forward at seven-thirty on Friday during basketball season.

          Norma with a belly full of beer was an entirely different basketball team. For one thing, she kept signalling me to sub her off so she could go pee. Often. Instead of her Wednesday-evening disciplined position play she’d be all over the court, colliding with her teammates and leaving big holes on defence. Her shooting wasn’t worth shit.

          Her natural aggression, however, spilled over the top; she kept trying to start fights. It became almost a ritual for the school principal to summon me into his office on Monday mornings, where I’d have to plead on behalf of the team not to kick her off – and the team always did line up solidly in her support. Of course, sometimes my pleas were to no avail and he’d force me to suspend her for the game the following Wednesday, such as after she’d got into the face of one of the nuns attending our game against Our Lady and called her a “fuckin bitch”.

          Frances, our starting centre, was the tallest girl on the team, a bit taller than me, even. I don’t think that she’d ever played basketball before, but she was intelligent and a quick learner. She pulled down even more rebounds than Norma and mastered everything I taught her about playing defence; she delighted in blocking several shots every game. She just didn’t want to handle the ball, which meant that she was quick with her outlet passes, but useful on offence strictly as a decoy and rebounder. One time one of her teammates actually threw her a pass. She threw it right back, shouting, “Don’t throw it to me!”

          Her problem with Fridays was her boyfriend, who wanted to go out with her on all weekend evenings and had no time for her to play basketball instead. Guam, after all, has a male-dominated, exaggeratedly macho culture, and Frances was indeed a fine-looking young woman.

          With Frances missing on most Fridays, Eileen had a chance to get in some court time. Eileen was somebody to whom I could relate, being far from a natural athlete and the possessor of a self-effacing personality, undoubtedly coloured somewhat by her being the team’s Fat Girl.

          Anyway, one Wednesday we went to play the number-one team on the island, JFK High, which is located in the most urbanised, multicultural part of Guam. The JFK girls came onto the court as if they’d won the game before it started, but my team came on like a typhoon with the high-pressure, trapping defence and breakaway offence we’d practiced. We ran out to big lead.

          Then, in the second half, our defensive aggression built us up some foul trouble, and one by one our starters began to foul out, letting JFK claw themselves back into the game, especially after Frances fouled out. Then, with about eight seconds left in the game they made a basket that put them in front for the first time – by one point.

          Norma, who somehow hadn’t fouled out, scooped up the ball and threw a half-court inbounds pass to one of the subs, who threw another half-court pass to Eileen, who made the winning basket with one second left. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more ecstatic happiness on a person’s face than on hers at that moment. It didn’t matter that she’d been there because she hadn’t made it back on defence the play before. Her reserve disappeared and she, leading her mates, shouted and sang nonstop on the long bus ride to the other end of the island.

          She’s a middle-aged woman now, probably a grandmother. I wonder if she ever reflects back on that moment and relives the joy. I think she might.

Dave & Sue Hendricks

Dave & Sue Hendricks

          Guam is, really, two islands joined together. This is so both geologically and socially. On maps it looks like a peanut with a narrow waist. From about this waist to the north Guam tends to be fairly flat, relatively sophisticated, urban, multicultural, and cosmopolitan. About half or more of the people in central and northern Guam are Filipino in origin, but there are still a goodly number of Chamorros there, as well as haoles, Japanese, Koreans, Taiwan Chinese, Vietnamese, and such other Micronesians as Trukese, Kosraeans, Yapese, and Belauans. This is where the commercial and government centres are, and where the tourism and military-service industries provide employment. The South is overwhelmingly hilly, rural, and Chamorro — about 90% or more. Inarajan is a village near the far southern tip of the island.

          When my wife Smoky and I first reported to Inarajan High School (now Inarajan Middle School), the principal directed us to the library, from whence Mary Ann Crisostomo, the library secretary, ran most of the school. As with most Pacific Island cultures, for Chamorros the extended family is everything, and Mary Ann was related to everybody a person around there needed to be related to. She also had the energy and intelligence and enthusiasm to use these connections to get things done. She loved being a macher, which is a Yiddish word but it applies here.

          With Mary Ann in charge, we rapidly found a place to live and had a phone connected. Other new teachers we met who hadn’t had the benefits of Mary Ann’s assistance had to wait six weeks or more before Guam Telephone connected their phones. We only had to wait a day or two. Mary Ann found us a place to live in Ipan Talofofo, which is a stretch of the main north-south road in the southeast quarter of the island. We were right across the road from a little beach with a small coral reef.

          Our apartment was the upstairs part of a two-story duplex. The landlady, a devout, somewhat elderly woman named Cathy, lived downstairs. The tenants for some years before us there had been some Sisters, Cathy told us reverently, usually before complaining about how much noise we made walking around, and eight-month-old Ruth banging on things, and stuff. I guess nuns float. We put socks over the bottoms of the legs of the chairs we bought so as not to disturb her every time we pulled away from the table, but she remained unsatisfied.

          With Cathy becoming increasingly grouchy, we put out feelers through the school grapevine for another place. The family of one of Smoky’s students was moving out of a place back in the hills, so we made arrangements to move there. The place was in a California-looking subdivision called Baza Gardens (known locally as Bozo Gardens), near the hill village of Talofofo.

          The yard had a cyclone fence set in a low stone wall all around it, which we thought was a good idea, as Ruth was into the maximum-mobility-minimum-sense stage of development. We moved there on her first birthday, and within a week she was able to climb over the fence. The house was built of reinforced concrete, as were just about all houses built on Guam after some terrible typhoon in the 70s, and was a beastly hot place to sleep at night when the power was out and the air conditioner therefore didn’t run. The power would usually black out a couple dozen times a month.

          From the time we first moved into Baza Gardens we’d been curious about our neighbours one door down on Margarita Street. Wasting away. They were haoles about Smoky’s age with a boy and a girl in elementary school. They had people over often who would strum and sing hip music out on their back lanai. We figured they’d be friends once they got to know us and then we could hang out in the evenings drinking beer and watching the kids play and maybe getting high and singing along if we felt like it. And we were right. Soon after our second daughter Abbie was born our two little families cruised into the same lane.

          Dave was the musician. He had a day gig as a nurse. At the time he was at the operating room at Guam Memorial. Later he took on a more laid-back gig as a school nurse at Guam’s special-education school. He was about my size, but had a troublesome back. He was conventionally good-looking, with preppy-longish blonde hair and one of those droopy blonde moustaches that emphasise the upper teeth. He used his eyebrows when he talked in his smooth, somewhat sonorous voice and bland West Coast accent.

          He played on his lanai, and in gigs in local bars, in the rock & roll and bluegrass traditions. He played guitar and sax and mandolin and bass and sang with conviction. Years before, back in Seattle, he’d been a big fan of the Daily Flash, my late pal Don MacAllister’s band before he’d left for Hollywood and death. Not long before leaving Seattle Dave had actually seen the Rivingtons, creators of the original, sacred ‘Poppa-Oom-Mow-Mow’, playing at a roller rink. I was impressed. And he was of course a big fan of Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band. We got on great. Once or twice I even got to sing the bottom part of ‘Poppa-Oom-Mow-Mow’ while Dave sang the top part. He seemed to be grooving in heaven one Xmas after Sue had given him a Rockman. He’d sat, transfixed, on the lanai, playing away on his guitar with a solid, if virtual, group, and sending barely any sound into the environment at all. The next major present was the soprano saxophone, which also sent him into another world for at least the first few weeks.

          Sue was a flight attendant with Continental Air Micronesia, the oldest one working for them at the time. The others called her ‘Grandma’. She was blonde, too, with longish, bushy hair, an engaging smile, and a face that showed how much she enjoyed playing in the sun. Continental was always messing with her because she was involved with the union and had taken a visible role in a strike some years before, but they couldn’t get rid of her. Still, she loved the life, and as far as I know she’s still flying. Otherwise, she was a passionate scuba diver and wind-surfer.

          Now, I was always eager — in my mind — to give wind-surfing a try, but I never did. Sue did take Smoky out once. Smoky told me that she encountered the predictable problems with coming about, as I believe turning around is called. The interesting part came after the lesson. There was some sort of incident, somebody almost collided with someone else, and they’d met these guys who were the crew to an obscenely expensive yacht that was moored for some reason in Apra Harbor, paused en route from somewhere fancy to somewhere else fancier.

          And they invited us all over to tour the yacht (I don’t know how thrilled they were that a husband showed up), and, yeah, it was big and fancy, but I wasn’t all that impressed. I don’t know why. Maybe because my step-father Howard’s cabin cruisers had seemed somehow ordinary to me when I went on them. What did impress me was the boat it was moored outside of, that we had to cross to get to the rich boy’s toy. It was a Korean fishing boat. The crew were on the aft deck as we crossed it. They were eating maguro (raw albacore tuna), as freshly caught as can be, with wasabi and Heinekens, and laughing and talking in Korean. They indicated with gestures that we were invited to their party, too. I had a bit of fish and it was about as good as anything I’ve ever eaten. And there was so much of it there, not just artsy little strips like in the sashimi palaces for Japanese tourists along the high-rise hotel row of Tumon Bay or in the urbanised village of Tamuning on Guam’s northwest coast.

          The Hendricks’s two elementary-school-age children, Crystal and Derek, were also blonde and good-looking. Ruth adored Crystal. Derek, about a year younger, was very much into boy stuff. Sue and Dave sent them to St John’s, Guam’s upmarket private school. St John’s is run by the Episcopalian Church on a Catholic island. Later they attended a smorgasbord of other island schools. Ruth developed a strong, almost idol-worshiping, attachment to Crystal.

          And the days rolled by. Sue would be gone for a while on her Hawaii route and Dave would cope with the job, bands, and kids. Then Sue would be back and it would be party time. Dave would meet me or Smoky back at the end of the hibiscus hedge that separated our back yards after the sun had gone down — what he called “attitude adjustment hour” — for a toke or two most evenings. Sue had to be more circumspect due to the airline’s drug-testing policy. Sue would take Smoky or both of us boonie stomping (what we in New Zealand call bush walks). Dave sculpted an acacia tree that grew like gang-busters in his front yard, and tidied up the jungle sloping steeply down behind his property toward a small river at the bottom of the gully. Kids played with water and giant soap bubbles. Much beer eased its way down throats in the tropical evening air, or in air-conditioned houses when the mosquitoes got too bad.

          From time to time members of their families would come out from Seattle or California, and with Sue’s employee discounts on Continental they visited family back in the states fairly frequently, too. Dave’s dad, Dan, often came out to Guam for extended periods over the Northern winter, and seemed to fit right into the scene. A beekeeper by trade, he eventually came to keep the hives for the University of Guam.

          Sue eventually moved from Continental, who were apparently a bunch of bastards to work for, to Air Micronesia, a subsidiary of Continental, where, as she put it, she got to travel around the islands of the western Pacific and get paid to do it.

          When Smoky received permission to apply for jobs in New Zealand she quit her gig at Inarajan, flew to Auckland — leaving the toddlers with me — and after a couple of weeks got a job offer from Otorohanga College, a small rural high school in the central part of the North Island. I spent the next two weeks making arrangements for moving our stuff, selling the car, closing down our various accounts, caring for the girls, and working, which I did up until about two days before leaving. Sue Hendricks, along with Crystal and Derek, helped me a bit with Ruth and Abbie, and organised a clean-up brigade for after we moved out.

          Our plane reservations to leave Guam were for the day before Ruth’s third birthday, and I arranged to have a party with a cake and so forth for her at her day-care place, the Infant Development Center. The party came off just fine, Sue showed up with Crystal and Derek in their Mitsubishi Chariot (needed to carry the wind-surfing rig) right on time to drive us to the airport directly from the IDC.

          We kept in touch for a dozen years or so. We got a yearly Xmas card with a family photo on it and a yearly this-is-all-the-neat-stuff-we’ve-done-this-year letter, first in hard copy and later via email. The kids grew up. Derek developed acting ambitions. Crystal turned out to be the musical one.

          In 2005 a scuba-diving website wrote about Sue and Dave: “They're aging west-coast beach bums, really, who took off for the tropics ‘back in the day’ and never came back. Now, they are taking the increased responsibility that goes with home-ownership and child rearing without growing up and becoming old at heart.” Sounds like not much had changed.

          We’ve reconnected on facebook. They still dive the ocean almost obsessively; Dave’s become a dive instructor. Dave still works as a nurse despite passing retirement age. Sue seems to have definitely retired from the air at last, but remains active in the union. Both have taken whole-heartedly to grand-parenting, as Crystal and Derek are both parents approaching – but not yet quite reaching – middle age.

          Dave, of course, is still gigging every chance he gets. Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow.

Bill Safer

Bill Safer

          After two years at ET Wrenn Junior School, my wife and I took our baby daughter Ruth and the foetus that was to be our daughter Abbie and went to teach high school in the Guam public education system. We were assigned to positions at Inarajan High School, a rural school near the far southern tip of the island, with pupils who came mostly from Chamorro, or the local islander, families.

          Inarajan High School was a place where student academic motivation was a personal matter. Those who wanted to learn what we were teaching did; those who didn’t had no reason to. The way of life that evolved in the south of Guam over the centuries required little advanced literacy. The fruit of the reef, the coconut-palm, and the jungle were still available to those who knew how to take them; the Government provided jobs or assistance for the acquisition of more world-economy needs like pickup trucks and cigarettes and boom-boxes and beer; and the church and the extended families provided social structure and support.

          Guam’s original, indigenous name, ‘Guahan’, means ‘we have’.

          The school was on a hill looking down on a little village with a postcard church, the ocean extending endlessly beyond. It was a large, two-story, concrete structure with external hallways. We joked that the kids at Wrenn would have been throwing each other over the rails of the upstairs passageways. The gym had no walls, just pillars, on two and a half sides, presumably to let the trade winds cool those sweating within it.

          The kids at Inarajan were highly sceptical about haole (honky; anglo; pakeha) teachers in particular, and I don’t blame them. Not only were they accustomed to these statesiders showing up and trying to impose their own, foreign ways on them for maybe a year, maybe less, and then shooting through, but the imported teachers were also, to put it kindly, a motley bunch.

          The Chamorro teachers were, with one or two exceptions, fairly stable, well-adjusted people, educated on the mainland — or at least Hawaii — but absolutely comfortable within island culture. They were the local educational success stories, who had returned to their villages to try to help: they knew the score and had little enough to prove.

          There were also a few Filipino teachers, hired as scabs during a teachers’ strike a few years previously, apparently self-conscious about their Tagalog accents and doggedly ingratiating towards those in authority. I remember once, a month or so into the school year, when the Governor announced that he was coming to Inarajan H.S. to dedicate the new wing. It had been finished for more than a year, but it was an election year and his handlers had identified this as a primo photo op. They told us the day before and made it clear that we were to let our students out of class to be background scenery for the TV cameras. The Filipino teachers went home and came back the next day with huge platters of expensive and meticulously prepared fiesta food for the Governor’s reception — entirely without being asked.

          The stateside teachers were universally — as far as I could tell — bent in one way or the other. There were those who came to Guam for the surfing or scuba-diving or sail-boarding. There were the born-again, fundamentalist bible-thumpers who came to save the natives from the curse of Papist idolatry, Guam being well over 90% Catholic of the sixteenth-century Spanish variety. But most were uncategorisable one-of-a-kinds — adventurers and misfits who had used their teacher certifications as passports to exotic (but comfortable and relatively safe) lives.

          Clearly the most popular teacher in the school was Bill Safer, a tall, lean, loud lefty (just a touch to the left of his hero Fidel, and an admirer of the Soviet Union) with a flowing grey beard. Safer was a science teacher, but, as he put it, “Most of these kids don’t need to know this bullshit they teach as science; I teach revolution, comrade!”

          He had an endearing way of calling everyone “comrade”.

          What he did in the way of classroom teaching was show movies. He gave the kids a list of 25 or so things to do in the semester, if they wanted to, and let them give themselves their own grades.

          Sometime during the first week or so of the school year, I was sitting in the non-smoking teachers’ lounge when Safer came in to use the photocopier. All of us present were just joking around about something, and Safer responded to some comment by saying, “Yeah-yeah,” in a little singsong, the first ‘yeah’ being about three notes higher than the second. And it sounded familiar. I knew I’d known somebody else once who’d yeah-yeah’d the same way. In a few seconds it came to me and I just casually asked him, “Bill, did you ever know a guy named Yabo Yablonsky?” [See #24 in this series]

          Safer looked at me as if somebody had just stuffed an ice cube up his ass. Finally he said, “Yabo Yablonsky and I were on the same swimming team in Brooklyn in 1948!”

          I still had Yabo’s phone number and I urged Safer to call him, but he refused. All he would say was, “What would I say to him?” When I contacted Yabo and told him about running into Safer, he said pretty much the same thing.

          Safer had seen combat in the Korean War and had hated every second of it. “I shit my pants with fear more than once,” was what he had to say about his wartime adventures. He had, however, plenty to say about war in general, none of it complimentary.

          Inarajan High School had a Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) programme with a proud tradition of winning close-order drill competitions, the team doing all kinds of fancy things with their dummy M-1s. I thought of them as the boys’ baton-twirler squad. Calling it an ‘officers’ training operation struck me as a cruel joke. The poor kids spent so much time drilling they were rarely in class, and most of them seemed headed for trouble meeting what were then the requirements to enlist in the Army as privates, let alone as officers.

          The teacher in charge of ROTC was an Army major. He used to march about the school in his officer’s dress uniform. It had large amounts of braid. I couldn’t help but salute him when we passed each other in the school’s covered outdoor corridors, and he’d salute me back. Once, unaware of the symbolism of what I was doing, I saluted him with my left hand. He announced loudly that he wasn’t going to return a left-handed salute.

          Then Safer came up, louder than the Major. “I’ll salute you,” he barked. “When I was in the Army they told me to salute the uniform, not the man. But I’m saluting you because everyone deserves respect. I’m not saluting your uniform. The uniform sucks. It doesn’t deserve any respect at all.”

          Before coming to Guam some years before, the Safer family had been living in various parts of the Caribbean, their last location before Guam having been Guyana. They had known the people at Jonesville, the place famous for its mass suicide. Safer refused to believe they’d committed suicide (“Primo people, Richard! Beautiful people!”). He strongly suspected that they had all been murdered, probably by some agents of the U.S. government who had come with the congressman who got killed in the incident. “And,” he concluded, “they were just sharing, gentle people who were no threat to anybody.” I asked him why, if they were out in the jungle and no threat to anybody, anybody would want to kill them all. He conceded that that was a good question.

          Bill’s wife, Brenda, was closer to my age than Bill was. They had two boys in elementary school and a girl a year older than Ruth. The boys were named Adam and Pol. Adam was blonde; Pol was Micronesian. The girl, Amanda (whom Brenda called ‘demanda’), was also blonde and confidently bolshie, rather like her dad.

          Safer was fond of telling a story about how shortly after Adam was born, the doctor had offered to circumcise him. “‘I’ll circumcise your mother!’, I told him!,” he more or less shouted, and launched into a lecture on the evils of circumcision. When I pointed out to him that his father had had him circumcised, he said, “Ah, but he was ignorant, comrade, and I’m not.”

          One place where he did seem to have a bit of conflict and doubt was in the area of bringing up his kids. Although he despised Western Civilisation in general and the colonial mindset in particular, it bothered him that Adam was growing up like an island kid who felt no reason to learn school stuff. The second school year we were on Guam he and Brenda sent Adam to a church-run private school that emphasised academics. I can remember him hectoring the poor kid: “You’re there to learn the subjects! Ignore the bullshit religion they teach you!”

          An avid anti-colonialist, as one might expect, but living in a colonial environment, he spoke the Chamorro language as best he could. To my untutored ear, however, his Chamorro vocabulary seemed to be limited to a few idiomatic expressions and swear words, but he ladled contempt on the haoles on the island who didn’t even try.

          Safer was at the core of a beatnikish social circle, which meant the availability of what on Guam is called songi. They lived in what people on Guam call a boonie house in Merizo — called ‘Malessu’ by people speaking Chamorro —  a somewhat isolated village on the island’s far southwestern coast. It was a slapdash affair with a big, open lanai; I’m sure it was built before the typhoon-proofing requirements came into Guam’s building code. The feeling it gave me was of adjusting closely to nature rather than of dominating it. Its big lanai seemed to be almost always filled with people.

          Sugar cane grew between the house and the driveway, which was usually blocked by Safer’s sailboat when he wasn’t fishing. A huge mango tree between his garden and the next provided marvellous shade, a place from which to hang a swing, and an enormous number of mangos in season. Chamorros like their mangos green and hard and bitter, sliced up, salted, and soaked in a mix of rice vinegar, raw sugar, garlic, ginger, and super-hot boonie peppers. They don’t seem to like them sweet and ripe.

          The house was close to the neighbours as well as to nature. The smell when they were singeing the hair off a pig they’d just killed was a potent experience when we were downwind from them. Safer assured me that the sounds that came when they’d killed the pig before I got there had been truly horrible.

          Still, the inside part of the house was hot and damp and far from mosquito-free. It was a place where a person would sweat copiously when no breezes could be found. Some people said that Safer had a permanent case of body odour, but I didn’t notice.

          The only part of the house that was air-conditioned was the little room where Brenda kept her computer. In 1986 the computer age was just beginning, and just by being able to use one Brenda was able to bring in money. Brenda was also into homeopathic therapy, the first person I recall having met who was, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Alfredo Valentino had dabbled in it without mentioning it. It seemed like hogwash to me.

          Safer, however, smoked cigarettes (then quit, then started smoking again); he knew how to get the alcohol down and wasn’t above a bit of pride in how strong and healthy he was anyway. Guam’s climate and soil are not conducive to dairying, and at least in the mid-1980s all dairy products were imported in one form or another, mostly from Australia and New Zealand. When at last a milk-reconstituting plant on Guam started turning out full-cream milk he was in heaven. “This is real milk, comrade!” he gloated, a white moustache on his grey one. No wussy fear of saturated fats and cholesterol for him. I didn’t get the point.

          He had highly refined woodworking skills. I think he told me once that he’d worked as a carpenter building Hollywood movie sets after surviving the Korean War. Another teacher, named Mick Subbert, worked out some kind of deal with Safer to build a hardwood sailboat from scratch on Mick’s back lanai. It was a fascinating process to follow.

          When at last my wife got the job in New Zealand and I was preparing to leave, I was astounded by how much Brenda knew about New Zealand politics, which were then going through intense turmoil. I knew next to nothing then.

          We kept in communication on and off for a while after I left Guam. Then Safer retired and the family moved to Tinian, a somewhat smaller, less-developed, and less-populated island to the north of Guam, and we lost touch. An April, 2005 Google search revealed that Mrs. Brenda Safer coordinated this year’s Tinian Elementary School Poetry Contest.

          In about 2013 or 2014 Brenda joined facebook. She posts mostly items of interest on Tinian and solid leftwing articles.

John Ware 1971-1975

John Ware 1971-1975

          After the demise of the First National Band Ware returned to the house in Claremont and that arty way of life. He painted. He started playing the Hollywood Living-Room Circuit, which he described as, ‘this loose-knit group of about 20 or 25 guys who played backup for West Hollywood’s I-can’t-make-it-but-I’m-cool folk-rock guys. Hoyt Axton. John Stewart. People like that.’

          Early in 1971 a character in Herb Cohen’s office called Leon Danielle steered him into producing Nansi Nevins (as she spelt it then), the former lead singer with Sweetwater, the opening band at Woodstock. She’d been badly hurt in a nasty car smash, her voice was affected, and she was out of a contract. Ware got me some work doing strong-back-weak-mind stuff for Nansi, cleaning junk out of the back yard of the place where she was rehearsing. Ware thought she was really brilliant, a really good songwriter, but so far off into her own little world that after working with her for the better part of a year he didn’t think he got anywhere. He did eventually do some demos for Warner Brothers, who just dismissed them out of hand.

          Ware then spent almost a year as a sit-down drummer in a six-night-a-weeker playing country standards at a bar in Glendale. It was, he told me, ‘a hideous gig, but it put money in the bank.’ I went to see him once at this gig in 1972. The bar was a barn-like place in a truly dismal neighbourhood. It wasn’t an impressive experience.

          Then a guy he knew from just being around the scene for years approached him about playing drums for Johnnie Tillotson in Las Vegas. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t a fan of late-50s-early-60s white bubblegum pop, but he’d had it with the LA folk-rock-psychedelic music scene and the dive in Glendale, so he and his old high-school bass player from the Continentals, John Selk, started playing some gigs with Tillotson. He spent the summer of 1973 playing with him.

          “Playin’ Las Vegas. Playin’ the Flamingo. Playin’ the Tropicana. Playin’ the Sands. In the lounge. I’d go on stage at ten to ten-thirty, and then I’d go on stage again at about two. It was just awful. I can’t tell you how many times I played ‘Poetry in Motion’ to six people. Sometimes it was six people, one of whom was like Johnnie Carson, with two bimbos de soir, but essentially I was playing to fat, lower-middle-class, drunken gamblers.”

          Whilst engaged in this labour he ran into Kenny Edwards from the Stone Poneys in LA. Edwards had been back in contact with Linda Ronstadt, who was selling tons of records by that time, had a tour lined up with Jackson Browne, and, according Edwards, needed to get serious about a band. A few phone calls later Ware had an audition. He said it felt strange to audition for someone he’d already played with, but he got the gig.

          He loved working for Ronstadt again. He thought she was singing wonderfully, and the band she’d put together was fun to play in: Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Bobby Warford, Kenny Edwards, and Andrew Gold. Jackson Browne also had a band Ware thought was great. They toured for a year of hardly ever being home, both acts travelling on a Continental Trailways bus. It was hardly a rock & roll bus, until they started ripping seats out and getting blow-up rafts from army-navy surplus stores.

          In the autumn of 1973 I was living in Wilmington, Delaware, working for my step-father — just as in 1961 — and married to a woman who had mental-health problems with which I was having difficulty coping. I was wallowing in a sort of beaten-down-by-dead-end-job, terrorised-by-wife state when I heard that Linda Ronstadt was coming to Wilmington, and would be playing at my old high school’s gym. Ware and I were still in touch with each other fairly regularly, and he let me know when the entourage were likely to be arriving at the Hotel Dupont in downtown Wilmington.

          My wife appeared to be in a bit of a quandary over this one. Ware was, manifestly, not a woman about whom she could make a pretence of being jealous. She was, however, intensely jealous over anything and everything that had to do with my former life in Hollywood. She finally made it plain that she would tolerate — barely — me catching up with Ware, but any contact at all with Linda Ronstadt, including going to see the show for free, even if she and I went together, would almost certainly provoke a savage reaction.

          So, after some disruption when Ware — the West Point Hippie and, it seemed, always the unofficial roadie — moved the entourage from the Hotel Dupont to a suitable suburban motel and checked out the concert venue, he and I went out and about on a bit of what in rural New Zealand is called a tikitour. I took him by request to the Duponts’ Winterthur Museum. He seemed to sympathise with my bedraggled state, but he clearly had problems relating to it.

          He really tried to help by telling me a few obvious truths — such as, for instance,  happiness comes from staying at it — and then apologising for sounding smug. He said he was handling continuing life on the road by checking out museums and by practising his drumming constantly, often on a wood-block, to maintain and increase his level of professional competence. He came to the house for a bite to eat and to meet my wife, and then it was off to the concert for him, and a strong bourbon-and-soda and early to marital bed for me.

          The Ronstadt-and-Browne show played in Washington, DC in late 1973 or early 1974, not long after Gram Parsons died. Ware had heard about a girl named Emmylou Harris that Gram had been hanging out with, but he’d never heard any of her music. He met her in a backstage drink-up there.

          “Playing with women is different, backstage. The backstage people are mostly weird. It’s not groupies. Not even groupies for girls. There were, for instance, all those goddamned months that Jerry Brown was on the road with us. Yeeesh! Jerry Brown, governor of the fucken state of California, and his bodyguards, on the road with us. Sitting around in the back of the dressing room kind of wistfully, with moon-struck puppydog-eyes. I couldn’t figure that shit out.”

          At the end of 1973 the tour took a break and Ware took his wife on a three-week vacation to Ireland. When they returned he received a phone call from Peter Asher, who was then managing Linda, telling him that the Heart Like A Wheel album was done, and it was time to go on the road — first class this time. Ware wondered how the album could be done if he hadn’t played a note, himself.

          Asher told him that Gold, the rhythm guitar player, had played drums on the record, that he’d learned Ware’s drum parts by listening to live tapes, and that he’d played on Ware’s drum set, which he’d taken out of the storage hall because that’s the sound that everybody wanted. Asher was mystified that Ware was pissed off, but he was, and he quit.

          About a week later somebody called him and told him that Ian Matthews, who’d been with Fairport Convention, Matthews Southern Comfort, and Plainsong, was back in LA and was looking for a band. Ware knew him from when he’d been in London with Nesmith, made a couple of phone calls, and took the gig. He moved to New York to play with Matthews’s band, which Matthews was calling Plainsong again. They played in England and New York. Ware enjoyed it, but was still earning about $200 a week, plus per diem, and mailed it all, in cash, to Linda Ware in Claremont from a tobacconist on Third Avenue.

          In late 1974 Ware and Matthews were back in LA, looking to put together another band. They fell to networking the bars and recording studios. Ware ran into an old friend named Bobby Warford, who’d been playing some gigs backing up the Everly Brothers, along with Warren Zevon on piano. After tensions with the Everlies had come to a head (Phil Everly smashed his guitar and stormed off the stage midway through a concert), Coleman started looking for country-rock players to come in and play the San Fernando Valley. A scene grew out of this at the Sundance Saloon in rural Calabasas. It was a fairly small dive, but eventually there were six or so bands playing there each week. Each night had a different band, made up of people from major bands who, when they returned to LA from the road, gathered to play with their gang of Tuesday Nighters, or Wednesday Nighters, or Thursday or Friday Nighters, playing only for beer.

          Ware was in the Tuesday Night band at the Sundance for a few years, when he was off the road. Don Everly was the lead singer, and it included Skunk Baxter, Bobby Warford, John Selk, John Hartford, Sneaky Pete, and Albert Lee. If enough people were off the road there were a dozen people in the band, playing behind Don Everly.

          Meanwhile, Ware and Matthews ran into a songwriter named David Palmer in a bar in Pasadena. Palmer had just finished writing all of Carole King’s Jazzman album. Matthews and Palmer didn’t combine well, but Palmer hooked Ware up with Charlie Larkey, who was Carole King’s husband. Larkey was a bass player, playing with Bobby Keys, the legendary sax player.

          Ware started playing a few nights in bars with Larkey and Keys, and whatever their pick-up bands were — usually some of the loose guys from the LA part of the Rolling Stones’ touring band. Keys didn’t like Ware’s playing style (“too simplistic”), but Larkey liked it, and invited Ware up to his and Carole King’s house. Ware went. Then he dragged a set of drums up there. Then David Palmer started falling by.

          After they’d been up there for a few thousand cans of beer, Palmer started bringing songs up. Then King and Palmer were singing together, and they added a couple more people, and started having auditions for more people, and there was a band going, with a talented keyboard player-singer named Michael McDonald. They moved out of the house and into the Alley Rehearsal Halls in North Hollywood, where they worked hard for several months, calling the band Honor Bright. Ware thought it had more than promise, and that in the studio it was a killer. Lou Adler, King’s manager, was excited and chasing record companies.

          But Honor Bright either just was never meant to be, or didn’t happen fast enough. King seemed to Ware to be losing interest in the band and in Larkey. Then the lead singer of the Doobie Brothers OD’d, and in a panic the Doobies called Michael McDonald and asked him to come join them for the rest of that tour, and he left Honor Bright. After two days of what Ware called “acrimonious snivelling about Michael leaving us,” he ran into one of the roadies from the Linda Ronstadt-Jackson Browne tour at the rehearsal hall. The roadie asked what Ware was doing and he told him. The roadie then told Ware that he was just starting work with Emmylou Harris, and she’d been calling around trying to find out who the drummer was downstairs, because that was the sound she wanted.

          That night Ware got a call at home in Claremont from Eddie Tickner, Harris’s manager. He asked if Ware would like to come play drums for her. Ware mentioned Honor Bright and Tickner told him who else was playing with Harris, all of them people Ware thought were great players. He couldn’t say no. He called Palmer and signed off, and two days later they started rehearsing the Hot Band.

          The first gig the Hot Band played was April 15, 1975 in San Francisco, and Ware’s life changed forever on that night. He was staggered. The playing was hotter than anything he’d ever experienced. When Harris ran out of songs, Rodney Crowell jumped up and sang. They’d never rehearsed. There weren’t any rules. They just played.

          After finishing the first 115-minute show, with another show to go, Ware estimated that he’d probably already lost eight to ten pounds (3-4.5 kg) in sweat. It was all over the floor underneath his drum kit. He ran back behind the curtain and sank to the floor, almost passing out. He looked next to him and saw that Crowell was there doing the same thing. They looked at each other and both said, “Wow! What was that?” And they embraced. Out front, the crowd went insane. Close to three years of what for Ware was the most staggering music possible followed.

          I remember sitting in my dismal little “garage apartment” in San Antonio Texas, where I was eking out a miserable living as a waiter in an overpriced steak house, reading a letter from Ware in which he told me that he had just joined this new outfit called the Hot Band, which was more fun than anything he’d ever done before in his life. They were playing behind some singer named Emmylou Harris. I think I’d maybe heard of the name, but she really wasn’t in my frame of reference. I wasn’t plugged into that stream of popular music in the mid-to-late 70s.