My brother Al and I also had our first real friends in Westchester, Mark and Arnie Levine. That side of my childhood was pretty idyllic. Mark was my age and Arnie was Al’s. It was cool. We’d play catch and talk about the Dodgers. We had another tree house, too, only this one had a secret hiding place for the special magazines that we’d lift from the barbershop while we were making discount deals to sell our used comic books. I came of age, so to speak, while rocking back and forth to the radio and thumbing though my mother’s paperback copy of Peyton Place. I remember the line “She moaned as if she were hurt.” I had no idea what that meant.
FOUR
Destiny Calls
Mr. Ferguson had a battered old silver alto saxophone that sat on a stand in the corner of the practice room upstairs at Westchester Music. During each lesson, as the patient tutor led me through the rigors of “Clarinet Polka” or some such old persons’ music, I fixated on that ancient sax. In my mind, I was hearing “Tequila” by the Champs. Yes, I had been playing Dixieland jazz with a group of locals for veterans or at the shopping center, but that wasn’t it—there was no passion in Dixieland. I wanted the raunch. I wanted to make the music that I found myself listening to. The sax solo in Bobby Lewis’s “Tossin’ and Turnin’” was holy to me, and the Coasters’ “Yakety Yak”—well, that was the way music was supposed to be. A person certainly couldn’t get far in music in those days if he was wearing lederhosen.
So I persuaded Mr. F. to loan me the silver sax on an overnight basis. And he thought that if I continued with my clarinet, learning saxophone, with its similar fingering, wouldn’t send me directly to hell. I think I wound up honking on that funky old horn for all of about three weeks when I received the phone call of destiny.
“Who is it, Howard?”
“It’s Destiny, Mom.”
And I answered.
The call was from some dude I had never met by the name of Chuck Portz. He explained that some friends were putting together a rock ’n’ roll band. He’d heard that I played saxophone, and asked if I was interested in joining. Hell, yeah!
♦ ♦ ♦
The band, and I use the term loosely, was called the Nightriders—quite an attitude adjustment from the austere business cards that my mom had printed for our Dixieland band, the Belvederes. I know, I know. The name was not my idea. I still don’t know what a Belvedere is.
But I did know that the Nightriders was a name to be reckoned with. And, as anyone alive or dead could tell you, a band’s name is half of its success. So the band was me, honking away on alto sax; Chuck Portz, the guy who had drawn the short straw and made that call to me, on bass; Al Nichol, newly transplanted from Ohio and now living in Westchester with his parents, two USC professors, on lead guitar; and a redheaded lanky-bones named Glen Wilson on drums. We played music that Al had glommed from Midwestern rockers like Johnny and the Hurricanes, who had enjoyed national success with an instrumental version of “Red River Valley,” and songs by the Ventures, like “Walk Don’t Run.”
It was a guitar-oriented band, for sure. I honked through the chords and, once a song, got to play an improvised solo of my own too. I learned quickly. I loved rock ’n’ roll. We never got too many paying jobs, but we knew that we were headed in the right direction.
One afternoon, we were all watching this local teen dance party. It was live from Pickwick Park in Burbank and was hosted by a DJ of some repute named Bob Eubanks. Hell, we thought, we can do that, and knowing no fear, we called the show’s office. Yes, we do court local bands, we were told—but only if they have a record out. Um, so if we had a record out, we could play on TV too? That’s right, said the man. We borrowed $125 from Al’s dad, went to a little Hollywood studio, and recorded two sides that sounded amazingly identical. One side was called “Radar” and the other was “High Tide.” We sent the record to the television office and we played on Bob Eubanks’s Dance Party the following week. Or, more truly, we lip-synced. It was amazing. I still have that record. It’s still terrible. But now the bug had bitten.
I was still a real nobody in high school. I was just that porky guy with the A average who wore sweater vests and hung out with my buddy John Laughlin instead of the popular kids. Those ample-bosomed babes who ate their school lunches sitting in the stands of the football field and feeding grapes to athletic seniors were just things to gawk at. They were so out of my league. Even Sherry the Mouseketeer, who now was doing movies and television, had moved on, so to speak. I was in scholastic social limbo. The one girl I really liked, Linda Gunderson, indulged me and would actually talk to me in the hall, but when it came time to ask someone special to the prom, Linda had herself a college man and I was broken. Then, bless her heart, at the last minute, she offered up her younger sister, Jane, to be sacrificed. I treated that pretty little kid like a queen. We did the entire limo-and-corsage thing and afterward, I treated her to dinner and a show at the Crescendo on the famous Sunset Strip, where this new young comic, Bill Cosby, was delivering the laughs.
Double foreshadowing here.
I took her home, kissed her good night, and didn’t see her again until 2009 at some show. She looked great.
But mostly, I kept my head down, concentrated on school, and found myself daily looking forward to my favorite new class, a cappella choir, taught by the best teacher I ever had, one Robert Wood. So influential was Mr. Wood on my life and my music that many years later, my partner and I would name our ASCAP publishing company Mr. Wood’s Music. He was just that good. The music was difficult and Robert Wood demanded perfection. My years with Mr. Ferguson went a long way in this class, as we spent a great deal of time sight-reading new musical charts—wonderful practice and invaluable lessons here. We’d have guest directors. One year, a gentleman by the name of Jester Hairston conducted us in his arrangement of the African-American classic “Hold On.” It had soul. At least, it had as much soul as could be wrung from the throats of a hundred or so white-ass beach kids.
This, after all, was Westchester High, a flagship destination for Wonder Bread adolescents from L.A.’s beach communities. Hell, sometimes we’d go back to class after lunch and sometimes we wouldn’t. With the beach only half a mile away, most afternoons were spent goofing off or watching some highly touted action between two rival surfing clubs as they battled it out at the Trees, which was literally just that—a group of trees that had sprouted up on Manchester Avenue on the way to the ocean. The battles were little more than excuses for beer parties, and even outsiders were allowed to root for their favorites with no pretense of popularity. Many of the surfers who belonged to the local clubs weren’t even that serious about surfing. The club was the thing. Acceptance in high school was the name of the game. So there were many pretenders hanging out—gremmies, they were called by actual wave riders. Some were really good surfers; others were clowns.
♦ ♦ ♦
One day, during a cappella choir practice, I found myself standing and singing next to one of those guys. He was a clown, all right—the class clown, in fact: an olive-skinned, frizzy-haired, bespectacled surfer kid who was even portlier than me. And he was a crack-up. Honestly. Mark Volman was the last kid in the row of male first tenors and I was the first kid in the row of male second tenors, singing just a bit lower on the scale. So we stood next to each other. We shared the same music sometimes. And we broke out laughing constantly. In fact, between us, we found a way to get thrown out of almost every class we shared. But I was an A student and Volman was barely a C student, and wise Mr. Wood knew that it was in the choir’s best interest if we both took a powder on afternoons when he actually wanted to teach. Mark and I would wander the halls with legit passes almost daily. We both got As in choir anyway. Mr. Wood was pretty strict about testing, and he didn’t want to lose his two best tenors.
Mark and I hit it off instantly, and during one of our first conversations he asked me about the Nightriders. The conversation went something like this:
“So I hear you’re in a rock ’n�
�� roll band.”
“Yep.”
“Um, do you think I could join it?”
“Well, what do you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nope.”
“Sounds good to me. I’ll ask Al.”
And that was how Mark got to be in our band. He was telling the truth. He couldn’t do anything. We weren’t a vocal group; we played instrumentals. I, of course, was the esteemed saxophonist. But we really could use a roadie, I told him, someone who could haul our instruments around and get us sodas while we played. And that’s exactly what Mark did. Eventually, his father, Joe, got really pissed off at this arrangement. He’d say, “What the hell, fellas? You guys are all making money playing at these little shows and Mark’s not getting a penny. How come?”
“Because your son doesn’t do anything, Mr. Volman. We play instruments.”
“Okay, well, what if I buy Mark an instrument?”
“Then he can make money too.”
The next day, I accompanied Mark and his dad to a music store in downtown Los Angeles, where he purchased an alto sax. By now, I was honking on my own tenor, and together, provided that I could teach Mark to play, we had a nifty little horn section going. It was mind-numbingly coincidental that for many years, Mark had been taking clarinet lessons at Westchester Music with no one else but the sainted Mr. Ferguson himself. This was truly kismet. We learned choreography together and began doing steps onstage as we rocked and rolled. We were sounding pretty damned good, actually.
The band now consisted of me on tenor sax and vocals, Mark on alto, Al Nichol on guitar, Chuck Portz on bass, Jim Tucker from Torrance on rhythm guitar, and Don Murray from Inglewood playing drums; Don designed our logo, too. Volman sang a little in the very beginning on the dirty songs and played tambourine. Al and Chuck liked having Mark in the band because a) he was hilarious and b) he knew all the surf kids. Instantly we had a built-in audience, and besides just loving to dance, these kids ruled the community.
♦ ♦ ♦
This exact band would soon enough become the Turtles but for now we were the Crossfires. We had righteous cool business cards printed in yellow and red with a burning Iron Cross motif, and booked our first shows as I was about to turn sweet sixteen. First, I had to get my driver’s license. We only had one car in our family, as my mother didn’t drive. It was a 1951 four-door Chevy with a standard column shift, and my dad drove it to work at nearby Hughes Aircraft every day. So I wound up taking my driving test in Al Nichol’s push-button automatic Dodge Dart, a car I had never driven before. No problem for the Kid. My father bought another Chevy, gave the ’51 slush bucket to me, and the next day I drove to my first real show as a Crossfire at a fraternity house party at nearby UCLA.
The frat guys had tubs filled with this amazing concoction called the Red Death, which, I later learned, was nothing but Hawaiian Punch mixed with everything alcoholic and poured over smoking dry ice. Volman had a few glasses and fell down the stairs with an armload of guitars. We all laughed. I downed one or two potent cups before I was told that my Chevy was blocking the driveway and that I would have to move it. Well, it was rush week at UCLA, meaning that all of the campus houses were packed to capacity with hopeful freshmen and there weren’t any parking places for miles. I felt no fear just the same. In fact, I’m not sure that I felt anything. But I had to move the car. Yep. Had to move it. I thought I saw a space up ahead and I thought that I could fit into it. Didn’t see that other car backing up. Yikes! You got it. I crashed. Big-time. I gave the other driver my information, though his car looked pretty good. My car, on the other hand, was toast. I coasted downhill to the nearest Mobil station, called my dad, and had him pick me up. In the days before cell phones, I had no way to get in touch with the band guys, so I just went home. My night sucked. I paid to have the car fixed and painted it canary yellow.
I had begun my obsession with the Kingston Trio, and on top of the rock stuff that we had been doing, Mark, Al, and I became the Crosswind Singers, along with a girl from the choir named Betty McCarty. I wrote folksy tunes, Al played guitar, and the four of us sang. We sounded pretty good for that time and place and were chosen to open the show when national folk heroes Joe and Eddie played in the auditorium. My songs were called “Let the Cold Winds Blow” and “Wanderin’ Kind”—both of these would be recorded later as the Turtles became a national act, but for then, we were just happy to be on a real stage.
The Crossfires were gaining in local popularity. We were playing a dance at the Westchester Women’s Club when our devoted high school followers showed up to cheer us on. This group of rabid fans called themselves the Chunky Club, named after a song of ours called “Chunky.” It was just a standard four-chord rocker with a break where everyone yelled the word chunky arbitrarily. It meant nothing. But these kids showed up with huge soupspoons and ladles. They were dirty dancing, making obscene gestures with the kitchen implements toward the genitalia of their female dancing partners. It was perverted, but it was hilarious to watch from the stage. The Women’s Club thought otherwise and we were famously banned from working in our own hometown. For a local band, this might have been a devastating blow.
Luckily, we had gotten an offer to play in adjacent Inglewood for teen dances at Darby Park Recreation Center and brought our following, intact, with us. More and more kids started showing up and our reputation grew. When we saw an advertisement in the local paper for a battle of the bands at a teen club in Redondo Beach, about ten miles away, we came, we played, and with the help of our Chunky Club fans, we conquered. Almost overnight, we became the house band at Reb Foster’s Revelaire Club at 312 South Catalina Avenue. Reb was a big-time DJ on KRLA, the very same station that employed Bob Eubanks. (In fact, Eubanks was the first DJ to promote a Beatles concert in Los Angeles. He brought the Fab Four to the Hollywood Bowl in 1964.) Reb really didn’t know much about us at first.
It was his cousin, Bill Utley, who actually ran the Revelaire, but Reb’s name was used both at this club and at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Orange County, where another group, Eddie and the Showmen, held down the house band position. It was a great gig, really. We played on Friday and Saturday nights, three sets a night and—this is the best part—we got to back up all of the national artists who came to perform as guest stars on a weekly basis. We learned all of their songs and were quite prepared to have the big stars simply walk out onstage and do their shows with our accompaniment. And, when necessary, Mark and I would put down the saxes and sing the background parts. We performed with the Coasters and the Drifters, Dick and Dee Dee, Bobby Vee, the Rivingtons, and countless other soul groups and surf bands. We were getting to be instinctive players, learning different musical styles and testing our flexibility. Bert Bertrand, father of Eddie Bertrand—of Eddie and the Showmen—became our de facto manager. He also managed a girl singer by the name of Nita Garfield, who was simply breathtaking to the young me. I vowed to have her, much to the amusement of the band. And I did. We remained an item for several years. Check me out: in a rock band and with a girlfriend—and a rather spectacular one at that. The turning point had been reached and passed. The potato of a guy was on his way to being Spud of the Year.
♦ ♦ ♦
I was feeling much better about my place in the food chain as 1964 washed up on shore. Then the Beatles came along and everything changed. Mark and I put the saxes away and began using our natural vocal gifts to sing rock ’n’ roll. Oh sure, we had always done “What’d I Say” and “Money,” those classic dance songs that merely require audience participation to work, but now we were singing “From Me to You” and “You Really Got Me” and “Glad All Over.” It was bloody wonderful! And, not to throw a sexual light on the procedure, but the ladies that were now waiting backstage and hanging around after the show took our little band to a new level of showmanship. “What the road ladies do to you” are the words that Frank Zappa would have me sing many years later, and this was my first taste o
f it. They made us better.
The Crossfires learned the hits of the day and spewed them back at a waiting public with great accuracy and passion. We loved it, man. We sang everything. As college loomed ahead and I took the SATs, I knew that I was already past it, at least psychologically. My parents, however, took a slightly different stance on the matter.
UCLA is the single most intimidating place on the planet. It’s been forty years since I attended that college, and the statement still remains true. I had graduated from high school early, having won the Bank of America Fine Arts Award for music and literature, and had won a full ride to the University of California, which made my parents extremely happy and proud. Neither of them were graduates, my father having enlisted in the Army Air Corps as World War II began. I was the shining hope of the clan, but I started my days of higher learning already full of doubt. The classes were tremendous: There were often 2,000 students in the lecture halls. Then the classes broke down into smaller work groups, about 150 students. Too big. Too fast. Too much. I was freaking out. The shock of being an A student in high school and receiving a D on my first anthropology exam shook my world.
My only solace was to be found in the student union building. That place was like a mall: great food, a wonderful atmosphere that didn’t choke me, and a curious blue index card on the corkboard asking for student DJs for the campus radio station. Now here was something that I could get into. I walked into the radio station and right into the general manager’s office. He slapped me on the air that very day after hearing me introduce a Beach Boys single. I knew their names, I knew their dad, and I had hung out with them and hit on their girlfriends. I was in and Howie the K. was born.
Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc. Page 4