George McClughan

George McClughan

          The day after I arrived in San Antonio in August 1972 to work for Star Attractions, the good old boys in suits at the office gave me directions to a tract house in an older suburb inside North-Central Loop 410, where a number of Star Attractions roadies stayed the one week per month they were in town. Management was eager to get me out of the hotel where they’d put me up. I met George McClughan, who was to be my partner, there at the roadies’ house.

          McClughan was a shortish, confident blond fellow with a strong chin and straight white teeth under a reddish-blonde moustache. Both his parents were retired Army generals, he told me. His mother had been one of the first woman generals. He had a sort of Colgin-esque, frat-boy-gone-wrong way about him.

          As I remember it, they sent McClughan and me out on tour the next day or the day after. I left my car (with cardboard boxes intact) and my little dog Naomi with John and Vicki Kuehne at their newly-built house outside Loop 410 (which was the far suburbs in those days), and flew with McClughan from San Antonio to Panama City, Florida, where the tour’s equipment was being stored. I found out that McClughan liked a bit of pot from time to time, so the job seemed like it was going to be cool. McClughan told me some fun stories about acts and tours of the past. I immediately began to yearn for the month I would work a tour with such T&A acts as the Gold Diggers or the Ding-a-Lings. McClughan’s favourite, he told me, was Jaye P. Morgan, because she was funny and cool and a lot of fun to tour with.

          Treevie Lang, the chief roadie, met us at the Panama City airport. Treevie was a recently-retired Army NCO club manager and had a colourfully thick Appalachian accent. He gave the impression that he was more at home drunk and laughing than sober and serious, and referred to all male humans as “swingin’ dicks”. McClughan thought he was a riot, and I had no reason to argue.

          McClughan and I took the company van and the company horse trailer loaded with light and sound equipment and went to a local hotel, where I learned about the way that nearby paper mills smell. Treevie took off in the company Lincoln Continental — the Star Car — to Memphis to meet that month’s tour’s star.

          When McClughan and I drove up to Memphis the next day, we had to pull over with a flat tire on some two-lane blacktop state route somewhere in rural Mississippi. The spare was flat, too. A redneck in a pickup stopped to see what was going on. There I was, bearded and Jewish and coming down off an hour-before joint and fresh out of LA and in the Deep South for the first time. I recall feeling apprehension.

          But the Bubba was more polite than anyone I’d encountered for years and, not only did he take our flat back to Mudville, or wherever, to get fixed, but he insisted on helping us put it back on the van when he returned. It was then that I became convinced of the overwhelming importance and beauty of Good Manners. We don’t have to like each other, Good Buddy, we may even despise each other, but we can mask our dislike behind Good Manners. If that’s our culture. If that’s the sort of people we are.

          In Memphis we met the acts we were touring with (Norm Crosby, the doubletalk comedian who had opened for Tom Jones, and Patti Something-or-Other, a 40ish Vegas-all-the-way singer-dancer-‘entertainer’. I quickly learned to handle the PA cables and to operate the spotlight, and we were off on tour. McClughan knew the circuit well — which places were cool, where the clubs and the groupies were, and all that. He didn’t look all that at-home in the blue suit he wore when we were working, but he could introduce the acts slicker’n shit, projecting a disc-jockeyish, smile-in-the-voice “It’s Showtime!” attitude that went well with his strong jaw and self-assuredness. He swam laps in hotel swimming pools whenever he could. He ordered steaks from room service and spread lavish amounts of butter all over them.

          The first time we drove from Biloxi to Montgomery we got out-of-it stoned, McClughan driving, on an arrow-straight two-lane state highway going across miles of flat Alabama cotton fields. McClughan put the van on cruise control, put his feet up on the dash, the steering wheel gripped between his knees, and we talked shit for a couple of hours. ‘Honky Cat’ by Elton John came on the radio, just released, and we got lost together for a few moments in the piano solo.

          Being on tour was all right. We worked hard when we worked, drank hard, ate well, smoked plenty of dope, and laughed a lot when we were free. We didn’t go wenching together, though, as I got involved early in the tour with the hotel desk clerk who’d checked us into the Sheraton Biloxi, named Helena. Toward the end of that tour McClughan figured out a way for us to have separate rooms in the hotels where we stayed, instead of having to share. He had an eye for beating the system, whatever it was. Cool.

          Back in San Antonio we split up. Before we did, we went out to the suburbs and I met his dad. They talked together like old club-mates. Pals. Chuckling over “the local talent”, nudge-wink, and all that.

          I took my loaded Ford Ranchwagon and Naomi to Biloxi to move in with Helena. McClughan picked me up in the company van on the way from Panama City to Memphis, where we met Treevie for the September tour. The headliner this time was Jimmie Rodgers, the one that did ‘Honeycomb’, not the Singing Brakeman and the Father of Country Music. That Jimmie Rodgers died in 1933, the year this Jimmie Rodgers was born. McClughan and I agreed that Norm Crosby had been more fun.

          Jimmy Rodgers was going through a rough patch. There had been an incident in 1967 in which he’d been beaten up with a tire iron by an off-duty LA cop. His eyesight had gone bad, and he’d got religion in a big way. He carried around a large-print version of the New Testament. McClughan told me that once when Jimmy had been getting out of the Star Car he’d seen him hit his head slightly against the door frame, and the sound, according to McClughan, had not been a natural one. Metal plate, with a knowing nod. Anyway, there’d been a court case, and I think some compensation. Jimmy had an entrepreneurial vision of forming a film company for producing wholesome family features, to be called ‘Kids’ Stuff.’ I don’t think it ever happened. The competition, and all that. As they say in Hollywood, “Don’t fuck with The Mouse.”

          When we got to Biloxi I stayed with Helena in our new rented house on Santini Street, rather than in the hotel, where she’d been staying our first time through. The morning after the last Biloxi show McClughan showed up with the van, a bit late. Jimmie Rodgers’s backup band was travelling in the van with us. No more getting stoned with the accelerator on cruise control and listening to music on the FM radio while the cotton fields had rolled by.

          Anyway, I got into the back seat of the van. McClughan, it seems, had been getting into some kind of stoush with the band’s drummer, who was on one of the middle seats. I think it was over the inconvenience of having to make the detour over to Helena’s house to pick me up. I didn’t notice at first the tension crackling between them.

          Now, McClughan wasn’t one to rely on tact and diplomacy when faced with aggression. Stroppiness was not, however, the optimal tactic for him under the circumstances. He was driving. The drummer was behind him. The drummer was Sicilian, or at least Neapolitan, and therefore unlikely to take kindly to McClughan’s sarcasm or use of pejoratives. And, although the drummer was small, it’s generally unwise to mix it up with someone with arms that pound sticks on drums for two or three hours a night.

          I had to pull the drummer off McClughan. I was twice his size and used to humping amplifiers and p.a. speakers around, but it wasn’t that easy and he came off McClughan with a big handful of George’s hair. I wondered that the whole incident had happened in the first place. It seemed to be about me, but it had nothing really to do with me at all.

          And so we went on our merry way. The tour and the job ended in Atlanta, where we were playing in a hotel in the suburbs. The news came in that Star Attractions had lost its ass with a major tour of Air Force bases with the Supremes, who they’d signed right after Diana Ross had gone off on her solo career. No Diana, no full houses, as it turned out. Star Attractions owed money to everybody, including the hotel where we were staying. Bankruptcy was imminent, if not actually already the case. According to Treevie, even the paychecks he gave to McClughan and me were probably no good. McClughan and I figured that the best way to deal with our final paychecks from a bankrupt company was to cash them at the hotel desk and head off on the next Greyhounds going our way — his to San Antonio and mine to Biloxi.

          A bit less than two years later I found myself in San Antonio again. I was alone again and had a job with On Stage, a company trying to do what Star Attractions had done. On Stage, true to its model, went belly-up not long after I got there. One of the first things I did when I got to San Antonio, however, was look up George McClughan.

          He drove down to Laurel Heights and picked me up at the furnace-like furnished room where I stayed for a week or so when I first got to town. He had my brown felt, Phillip Marlowe-style fedora hat that I had left behind in the hotel room in Atlanta. Saved it for me somehow. He also had a pleasant blonde woman with him named Debbie.

           They were living in a place out in the country, but not that far out in the country, maybe 35 km (about 20 miles) from my place off North St Mary’s Street. It’s probably suburban sprawl by now. They had two Afghan hounds, which were getting in trouble for worrying some local cattle. Debbie apparently had two kids, and I think there was some problem with custody because of her relationship with McClughan.

          They seemed to be in love, but he described it to me in a way I thought odd. He was impressed with the way she handled business, she passed the test “in the looks department”, and so he’d decided, why not?

          Somehow, in the turmoil of my looking for a life in that city, we drifted apart after a while. Maybe it was him being so far out of town, I don’t know. I remember hearing something from somebody that he’d moved up to Austin.

          When I tried to get in touch with him in 2003 I got a letter back from his father. George “just keeled over” and died of a heart attack in 2002. He was 54 years old at the time.

          Spreading butter on steak?

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.