My premonition had “foregone conclusion” written all over it as I sank back in my seat and tried to hide like a naughty dog who’d been caught with a shoe in its mouth. I wasn’t even wearing anything cool: a polyester dress, the top half blue-and-red stripes, divided at hip level with a plastic belt graduating into a blue A-line skirt; just awful, something my mother had got me at Lowry’s Children’s Clothes at Wallhaven, the XX size—the last thing I could fit into from there. I’d completed the hideous look with a pair of black penny loafers. Just a shame, really. Gloria, on the other hand, was far more mature-looking than me—blonde, certainly more of a goer and probably up for it. But for Gloria it wasn’t meant to be. I prayed to be passed over, but instead was lifted from my seat like a rag doll, the muscular arms of Jackie’s man raising me to the stage like a sacrificial lamb too paralyzed with embarrassment to protest. A hush fell over the audience, the collective intake of breath nearly pulling me back into my seat. I guess that was my first kiss, although there might have been one poorly aimed Juicy Fruit–flavored peck at a fun fair courtesy of a friend’s older cousin, but no match for the salty, experienced lips of Jackie Wilson.
I also saw Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs on that same hallowed stage. Tons of shows had our attention as long as we could get someone’s parents’ car for the night. Usually the Plymmy, courtesy of Mary’s dad.
La Cave in Cleveland was particularly good for blues bands, usually of the popular white variety like the Blues Project, which featured Danny Kalb, Steve Katz, Al Kooper, Tommy Flanders and Roy Blumenfeld. I had their album and played it over and over, and tried to learn the whimsical “Steve’s Song” on the guitar. Every guitar player in America was onto it if they had an acoustic guitar, and “Flute Thing” was a classic of its time, kind of an anthem for those of us still in the thrall of the waning jazz scene that had been hijacked by tinkly bells and incense.
The Castle was a barn in Medina, out in the sticks, that the Brambles, Akron’s own bar band, played regularly, and featured light shows of slides and strobes—a new medium, and just what the doctor ordered if you were tripping or smoking pot.
Head shops were thriving and every city in America had one. They were the only place you could get rolling papers. Pipes, hookahs and bongs were very popular, mandatory even. Everyone under thirty in the United States smoked a bong. Everyone. And who didn’t have a roach holder?
Guys wearing love beads were hippie code for “hop on.” When Blossom Music Center opened, one of the first outdoor pavilions of its kind (the “sheds”), we especially loved going because you could always find a variety of dealers at every entrance and score, drop, then park yourself on a grassy hill and wait to get off.
Before Janis Joplin even hit the stage I was remarking to my friends how incredible the light show was. “Chris, the show hasn’t started yet,” they replied. But on three different tabs of acid, guess what, the show HAD started.
We went to see Canned Heat but they didn’t show, so only the support band, the Velvet Underground, played that night. New York bands were more “arty” than the Midwest and West Coast bands (who were drenched in psychedelics), but the Velvet Underground had one of the first trippy light shows anyone ever saw. And singer Lou Reed was bookish-looking but pulled it off by being sexy as hell. Those onstage were automatically ten times sexier than anyone in the audience. Drummer Moe Tucker had a unique style of playing and, as she was a girl, well, that was always a welcome change. There weren’t so many chicks in bands. The new “not having children” thing hadn’t quite sunk in yet. Grace Slick, Cynthia Robinson (Sly’s trumpet player), Janis and Joni—you could count them on one hand.
Sly and the Family Stone were big favorites, but becoming as famous for not showing up as for their music. Cancellations all the time, the drugs starting to work against the interests of the artist, which would be universal in a few years—Sly always ahead of the curve…
The Alice Cooper band played rough outdoor stages in fields and eventually in theaters. They played all the time. They were one of the more musically astute bands, and singer Alice was into a theatrical Gothic horror show thing that we adored. He’d have a guillotine onstage, and when they played the Akron Rubber Bowl a helicopter dropped paper underpants on the audience, which fell like rain next to my eyes where I lay facedown in the dirt, too stoned to stand up. Glen Buxton, the guitar player, was from Akron. We were all so proud of that.
A folk trio called the New Journeymen played for a fair at Litchfield Junior High School. They had a beautiful girl singer and I was impressed by a joke the guy singer made about existentialism. How cool was that? They got another girl in and changed their name a year later to the Mamas & the Papas.
I saw Tim Buckley play in a bowling alley. My friend and I waited in the parking lot afterwards so we could get a glimpse as the band left. I managed to awkwardly tell Buckley, “You were great.” I wanted to say so much more. He in turn slapped the hood of the station wagon they were loading and said, “What do you think of the paint job?” (He must have found compliments in the parking lot as embarrassing as I would myself one day.)
I patrolled the underground parking deck for an hour after Led Zeppelin’s Cleveland Arena concert, calling, “Jimmy…Jimmy,” just in case he might wander through.
Becky Keene almost stole the show from the Who at the Music Hall in Cleveland when she started spinning and flailing her arms in a weird version of what Townshend was doing onstage. She was up and down the aisles, and it was obvious that no one in the audience had seen that dance before. She was a bit of a hero that night.
Janis walked back out onstage at Blossom after the lights went up, the band having long since finished the show, and invited any Heavy Bikers who might be present to go backstage. To see her with the lights up like that as the crowd was leaving, me out in the field still tripping, felt like a personal one-on-one encounter, even though she didn’t see me, a mile away.
Every band I saw took a piece of me with them back into the night. Bands were everything; nothing else mattered.
7
WANTING THE WORLD
We were looking for adventure. We lingered long on Love Street. We had too much to dream last night. We wanted the world and we wanted it now. We were born to be wild. We were stone free.
We were stoned.
We didn’t think of ourselves as “innocent.” We read books; we devoured music; we smoked everything and dropped anything. Technically speaking, we were virgins, but we’d been around the world a few times by now, if only in our heads.
We’d seen them around Cleveland’s Coventry and Akron’s underbelly, the Portage Lakes, in Life magazine and in the pot-smoker’s bible, Zap Comix. Those who looked like hippies on motorcycles with their outlaw colors, one percent badges, leathers, beards, engineer boots and dirty hair flattened under German helmets. Those of the loose swagger and commanding demeanor of…of…well, we didn’t know of what exactly, but we wanted to find out.
At a glance, we could see they had experience; more than we did—a whole lot more. And that’s what we wanted more than anything. When Jimi Hendrix sang “Are You Experienced?” we wanted to be able to say, “Yes Jimi—we are. WE ARE!”
The Heavy Bikers looked like an entirely different species from the buttoned-down-collared Firestone Falcons blushing under virulent swathes of acne in class every morning. No, our greasy-faced student body had nothing on them. From a purely aesthetic point of view, you couldn’t come up with a better look than the bikers had. But they weren’t hippies with motorcycles like I’d assumed they were. Hippies didn’t slug chicks in the side of the head, forcing them to suck-off a whole colony of gorillas before throwing them down stairwells. But what difference did that make to us in Boredsville, USA? We just didn’t care. These were the characters S. Clay Wilson portrayed, marauding through his pages, fighting and plundering and tripping their brains out while drinking Tree Frog Beer, wrestling demons and defiling witches. Plus, they rode great big fuck-off Har
ley-Davidsons and listened to Moby Grape. Well, surely they listened to Moby Grape. We all did. We all listened to the same music.
We were explorers. We read the Tao Te Ching and books on Zen Buddhism. We ate brown rice, George Ohsawa style. We learned about Eastern mysticism, like the beatniks, and read poetry. The poet Gregory Corso was the kind of guy to get a crush on, with his unruly hair and manly forearms. Poetry, beat-style, made the notion of growing up and joining the adult world seem noble and brave.
And Lawrence Ferlinghetti, writing about reality in “Dog.” We thought we had a different view of reality than everyone who came before us. We thought we invented it. Allen Ginsberg serving Reality Sandwiches. Yeah, we definitely understood reality in a way that our parents didn’t. But then, our parents weren’t dropping acid.
It said right on the cover of Alan Watts’s book Psychotherapy East and West, “Now is eternity.” C’mon! Who didn’t want eternity? And anything with the word “psych”—it, like “reality,” was ours too. Psychology, psychotherapy, psychedelics, psychosis and, yes—why not? Psychopath.
We read Ramparts magazine, which felt subversive. I subscribed under a pseudonym, feeling like an undercover agent when I retrieved it from the mailbox.
The Black Panthers were prowling the political landscape to the sound of the Last Poets. LeRoi Jones, forerunner of rap, spoke what sounded like true prophecy. Sly Stone really was taking us higher with his interracial band of virtuoso loonies dispelling just about every stereotype going while getting the nation to stand up and dance to the music. We were all in on it—it was a family affair. Even Miles Davis was going psychedelic.
James Brown? Okay, maybe that’s pushing it. I don’t think anyone actually wanted to imagine the Godfather on acid. But even he was flying the freak flag and lost the conk to an afro.
It was a rite of passage to get close to our people, whatever it took, by taking whatever they took. We were game. We were naïve, though. Come and get us, boys! Guys like Cincinnati’s own Charlie Manson must have thought it was Christmas.
We had no sexual experience but we had Robert Plant. Anyway, why would anyone want to get it on with some schlub at school if it meant taking time out from listening to a skinny guy in a string vest who played guitar in an English band. Or a West Coast band. Or any band!
It was all about the music. If the drugs took us to the music then it was about the drugs en route to the music. Anyway, that part was nothing new. Contemporary music was defined by drugs and always had been. Dean Martin without a drink? Johnny Cash without amphetamines? Billie Holiday without a fix? Or Chet Baker? Judy Garland without a script? (Prescription, that is.) The lineup was endless. They might call it self-medication. They might call it a way to endure oppression, discrimination, cruelty or domestic abuse. But never mind the whys and wherefores—we wanted the drugs.
We were natural-born followers, copying whoever seemed the most rebellious. The Pill created a virtual smorgasbord of post-pubescent girls offering themselves up to anyone with a length of tool at the ready. The most studious professor, unsuspecting gasstation attendant, farmhand, shopkeeper or civil-rights activist wasn’t going to turn down the entire student body of America offering themselves up to get experience.
We thought being “inhibited” was the opposite of being free. We wanted to be card-carrying members of the revolution. But we were too stoned to get serious about sex and, even if we wanted to, the mechanics of it were nigh-on impossible when you opened the bathroom door and faced a 200-foot drop through clouds, a dazzling rainbow, and had no feeling in your hands.
We were taking up philosophies from what we could interpret of the musings of twenty-three-year-old guitar players. We were the new generation of guitar worshippers. Electric guitar was the Holy Grail, the pinnacle of our culture; we thought anyone who could play like Rick Derringer or Johnny Winter was touched by divinity.
Drugs were the glue that stuck us to the same page. Musicians led our consciousness. Freedom was the thing to aspire to. Hendrix was always on about it: “Freedom!” Martin Luther King: “Free at last!” The Stones, too: “I’m free to do what I want any old time.”
Never once did money or material gain enter a conversation. Hendrix articulated the way we felt better than anyone: “White collar conservative flashin’ down the street…you can’t dress like me.” Nobody wanted to be part of the establishment.
Our parents had never considered all this “otherworldly” stuff. They were preoccupied with mundane concerns like providing for their families. Suckers! We didn’t have to do that now. We didn’t have to do anything we didn’t want to do for the first time in history now and eat it with lashings of extra cream. We were the Love Generation—especially if an English accent was incorporated. “Have a go on this, luv,” would be received by a frenzied scrum from all quarters. This was, of course, all still conjecture to us little stinkers in the suburbs.
The first time I heard the term “groupie” was from Monti Rock III, with his band Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes on an afternoon talk show on television. The smooth-talking Puerto Rican showman with his irrepressible dance anthems—disco was still an underground and curious phenomenon—talked about “groupies,” and though we weren’t quite sure what he meant we planned on finding out.
Groupies were a new social category. Girls were now counting their number of conquests, just like guys. Leon Russell wrote “Superstar,” a big hit for the Carpenters, but its original title was “Groupie Superstar.” It described a groupie’s love for a musician who had moved on. The problem was that groupies really did fall in love with guys who came to town, played a show, got lucky and then cleared off like a flock of Canada geese. There are women around the globe who still hold a candle for sex god Jim Morrison. That was the problem with thinking we were like guys. We were falling in love before they even had time to rinse it off and make their excuses for the rest of the week.
So-called women’s lib was rather misled by the Pill. Women weren’t in control of their bodies; the drug was. Taking procreation out of the equation was turning women into sex toys. No one seemed to mind. I know I didn’t.
A common addition to our book lists was The Physician’s Desk Reference, which was a thick textbook listing every pill going, including full descriptions of effects, side effects and illustrations of the pills or capsules. On pot you could read it and check off the ones you’d tried for hours.
We were hippie versions of Alfred E. Neuman, with “What—me worry?” philosophies, long-haired, freckle-faced and goofy, having grown up on Mad magazine, Dobie Gillis and Maynard G. Krebs. But, indeed, what did we have to worry about, as long as we could stay in school and not get drafted and find something to smoke?
Self-anointed gurus—charismatic, intelligent, power-hungry, narcissistic, twisted and egocentric—intercepted runaways by the bushel basket and were moving out west. It was good work if you could get it—raise hell while getting your knob sucked.
The whole nation was becoming a melting pot of music, experimentation, belligerence and sloppy sex. The drugs were going to get serious once the profits started rolling in. It was going to take more than a few decades to get fumigated.
—
A guy from Cuyahoga Falls, Mark Mothersbaugh, was putting a band together. My brother knew his brother. He was a bespectacled oddball, but then Ohio was a breeding ground for oddballs. I was asked if I wanted to be the singer. I guess I had that kind of personality, or maybe I just looked the type. The band was called Sat Sun Mat.
I couldn’t practice in the same room as the rest of them, though. I couldn’t let them see me—no confidence, insecure, shy, all the standard stuff every lead singer bigs up in interviews years later—so I shut myself in the laundry room with a cord stretched under the door in his parents’ basement, and sang from atop the dryer. We learned “40,000 Headmen” by Traffic and “You Shook Me” by the Jeff Beck Group, favorite album tracks of the day kind of stuff. We got one gig in a church hall in Cuyahoga
Falls. I was unnaturally unnerved with stage fright—I just hated the whole thing. Terrible experience. Greg Burnett, my chopper-riding magician, showed up after a well-meaning friend informed him about my big debut. I died a death. The band was good though.
8
PAUL BUTTERFIELD AND THE SECURITY GUARDS
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was playing in Cleveland. There was no possibility whatsoever that we weren’t going to be there. We lied to our parents and piled into Plymmy. We loved Plymmy like a family pet.
Off to Cleveland we went. We were going to wail! We hoped we’d find someone hitchhiking who had pot, and could squeeze them into our own Merry Pranksters’ bus while listening to the radio and singing along to every song.
Music was now written in a subterranean language only comprehensible to the initiated. The charts were laden with drug references and we spoke the native tongue. In traditional rhythm & blues, which was where all our music came from, drug references were hidden, coded in love songs.
“My love is growing stronger, as you become a habit to me,” sang Otis. Drug or love? Who knew for sure? That’s the beauty of a song—the meaning is defined by the listener. But by the time of flower power the guesswork was taken out of the equation: “Excuse me while I kiss the sky.” Jimi saw and queried the difference between tomorrow and the end of time. Eternity was now everywhere.
Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629) Page 5