Every day was another day to get high. Going to Cleveland to see the Paul Butterfield Blues Band was all the incentive we needed to search out the necessaries. And, as an added bonus to our magical mystery tour, we were about to have our first encounter with the world-famous Heavy Bikers, they of the famous patch, they of the fear-inducing winged-skull motif, they of the red-and-white colors. Ohio was second only to California in terms of motorcycle registration. We had the open roads and a “Bikers Are Us” mentality. The Heavy Bikers acted as security guards for all the coolest bands. They got to stand in front of the stage, see the show up close and ensure that no one so much as placed a finger on the band or the stage, and then escort the whole crew back to their clubhouse to party. It was part of the backdrop of the sixties—the Heavy Bikers and the best bands. And they had the drugs. Well, c’mon, if anyone had drugs, it was them.
We’d heard all sorts of crazy shit about them, like the Red Wings badge was suppose to mean eating a girl out on her period. Did people really do stuff like that? My girlfriends and I had absolutely no firsthand experience or any idea.
I would have taken a ride on a Harley any day over overseeing an altercation in some thug’s jeans, but we just followed whatever Zap Comix had in its pages. Written by sex obsessives Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson, Zap offered very little for even the most twisted imagination to speculate on. If Crumb or Wilson hadn’t drawn it, it probably hadn’t happened to a human. We didn’t know what the “missionary” position was, but the idea of injecting cum straight into a vein and growing a bulging wanger seemed pretty doable, according to Wilson.
Oh yeah and the Heavy Bikers had a rule about heroin: they weren’t allowed to use it. I read that too, somewhere. Well, they could sell it but not take it. Not officially. That’s always been the deal with dealers. Heroin wasn’t on our agenda anyway. Not yet.
Bikers drank beer. But these guys were nothing like the football-toting, beer-swilling jocks at Firestone. Booze and tobacco were legal, so not considered drugs. We bought it hook, line and sinker, as you do once you get addicted. “Those aren’t drugs!”
(Heh heh—yeah, they are.)
The Heavy Bikers were vying for control of the drug trade from coast to coast—trying to wrest it from the domain of the Mafia, who ran Cleveland like a racehorse on steroids. This would prove to be a deadly pursuit. The big money that flooded the drug trade would further corrupt the already corrupted, to whom murder was literally just a walk in the park.
The RICO Act, a law brought in to tackle organized crime, would eventually subdue the Heavy Bikers, and they would no longer be seen roaring through cities, brandishing their patches; they would have to go underground or legitimate. But the sixties was their heyday.
In my gang, I was the most impressed by them. A great big “Fuck Off” was their message as far as I could tell, and I liked it. They were more antiestablishment than anyone we knew. I loved the bikes and I loved the way they talked about honor and loyalty and brotherhood—and I loved the fact that they knew all the cool bands. I would have been happy to polish chrome all day long if only I’d been asked. (And one day I would get my shot at it—and much, much more.)
Butterfield. My friends and I inadvertently wandered into the backstage area while looking for our balcony seats—and straight into Paul Butterfield himself. That was my first time rubbing elbows with a real star. I shyly asked for his autograph. What to say in a moment like that? How much I had listened to East–West? We’d even snuck a portable record player into the girls’ lav next to the art room and listened to it there. I had one other autograph on a rubber baseball—Bubba Phillips, star of the Cleveland Indians. Someone had got me that, though. I’d never met a famous person before myself.
We watched some of the band mime a game of ping-pong (like a scene out of Blow-Up)—how cool! We didn’t even know what backstage was. We were still looking for our seats when someone in the entourage must have thought we were cute, because we were taken right up and seated next to the stage. Fantastic—we could watch the band up close! And the band could watch us.
I can see with hindsight how they must have found it amusing that their dirty brand of Chicago blues had reached the pubescent flower children of northeastern Ohio. My gang and I were too naïve to be groupies for the Butterfield band. Not to mention we were underage, which must have been apparent up close to them and their “security guards.” It wasn’t worth the trouble to mess with jailbait. Only a dumb-ass high school teacher would make a mistake like that.
Paul Butterfield had one of the great bands of the sixties, taking traditional Chicago blues and “whitening” it up a notch by adding scorching electric guitar with a white singer who was a blues-harp virtuoso, Mr. Paul Butterfield. For white kids this lightening of black music made it more relatable. After all, we weren’t from the Delta and we weren’t mature men, impoverished and dealing with adult problems. Even black kids weren’t listening to the blues in the sixties. If there was a gig by one of the real-deal bluesmen, the audience would be predominately, if not totally, white.
The Rolling Stones almost single-handedly turned millions of white kids into blues aficionados. We listened to the Stones and then went on to explore the roots. That was the beauty of rock—it was one big exploratory carousel. You fell in love with a record and it opened the door to all its influences. All the English bands—the Moody Blues, Procol Harum, Cream, the Beatles, Manfred Mann, the Dave Clark Five and Dusty Springfield too—had roots in black American blues. When the likes of Otis Redding first went to play in England they were stupefied by the reaction they got. They were treated like kings. It wasn’t like that back home, where they often still couldn’t get rooms in segregated hotels.
I dreamed of playing harmonica like Butterfield, as did Cleveland’s own Bill Miller, who played with aplomb in his own Mr. Stress Blues Band. Blues had overtaken jazz now and was the biggest influence on bands on both sides of the Atlantic.
Mose Allison, Mississippi’s jazz-based, boogie-woogie piano-playing songwriter, practically wrote the “how to” song guide for the Who and the Kinks. Without Allison there would be no “My Generation” or “You Really Got Me.”
John Hammond and Johnny Winter were making blues sexy to teenagers like yours truly. None of it was making chart positions, but that didn’t matter anymore. We bought albums and studied them like early explorers studied maps. More white guys were playing blues now than anybody. It was a mixed bag—multiracial. Sly Stone spelled it out loud and clear: “It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white.” Not in his band. Not in any band. Music was colorless.
Jimi Hendrix obscured and even transcended racial categorization more than anyone. Never once did you hear Hendrix referred to as a “black” musician. His expression, influence and virtuosity were so great that his color was overlooked altogether. Like Charles Mingus described in his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, musicians lived on a “colorless island.” When the Chambers Brothers had their massive hit “Time Has Come Today,” nobody batted an eyelid at a black gospel group who played rock and roll dressed as cavalry soldiers singing, “And my soul has been psychedelicized!” And the Staple Singers, the groundbreaking gospel group and voice of black pride, were socking it to white audiences. Marvin Gaye was writing the book on how to live as a human: forget racial distinction. Otis and the Stones—who actually did write “Satisfaction”? Nobody knew or cared. Janis Joplin was another white singer who took her influences from black soul. Although she was big pals with the Heavy Bikers.
The Heavy Bikers were the only ones among us who were steadfastly racist, but they kept that quiet when partying with the kids who bought the drugs. American code numero uno: the customer is always right.
But back to Butterfield: we watched the band; the “security guards” watched the band; we watched the security guards; they watched us. After the show the band invited us to a party. A party with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the security guards’ clubhouse? Yes, please!
I never equated not feeling threatened with the fact that we were jailbait. No one came too close to us and we thought nothing of it. It was peace and love, so we assumed. We were hanging out with my favorite band and the world-famous bikers, and they had some killer weed. Except it wasn’t weed. We’d smoked hash before, but this wasn’t hash.
“They can’t hold their mud!” chortled one of the pill-mashers as Angela, Becky, Nita, and Mary did some weird free-form and, frankly, pretty frightening dance around the Cleveland HQ—fueled on what we later realized was opium.
But not me. I left them to their twirly “Go Ask Alice” dancing because I’d been invited upstairs by Buzzy Feiten, Butterfield’s teenage hotshot guitar player. Intuition must have told him that I worshipped at the altar of rock guitar more than the others. (The others including the rest of the girls in the whole country, that is.) Feiten handed me a bottle of beer, not normally my tipple but I accepted graciously. I was on a learning curve.
We were ushered into a room adorned with crossbows, nunchaku, swords, bullwhips, brass knuckle-dusters and all sorts of pain-inflicting knickknacks, along with some Nazi paraphernalia and an antique pistol or two. But a framed “Wanted” poster claimed pride of place. The handsome, albeit psychotic, stare featured on the poster was on the face of the Heavy Biker now sitting on the bed across from me. According to the poster he was wanted in some Southern state for the rape of the governor’s daughter. Evidently an accolade worth framing.
“I got reds, blues, yellows, uppers, downers—whatever you want,” said he of the devilishly dark, authoritatively good-looking, jaw-grinding grimace who wore an oddly pointed leather hat that nodded to the sartorial sensibility of a warlock. He was one fine example of a governor’s daughter’s rapist, like a brooding mix of every member of Steppenwolf montaged into one police sketch of a sex offender.
He wasn’t talking to me, though. All comments were directed at Paul Butterfield exclusively. I was to understand, even with my lack of experience, that women in that neighborhood did not speak unless spoken to.
It would prove to be a lesson hard-learned. Perhaps you can imagine how that didn’t work out in my favor at first. It took me awhile. Maybe not on this underage jaunt, which I didn’t realize at the time afforded a certain amnesty from getting covered in a variety-pack of jism.
Every “brother” had a position and was decorated with the corresponding badge, kind of like Boy Scouts for psychopaths, but I’m glad I was too overwhelmed and high at the time to articulate that thought or I doubt I’d be writing this now.
While Butterfield and his hosts were busying themselves with pleasantries concerning the volume of uppers and downers they could shift, Feiten and I were oblivious to all else but the radio, which was tuned to WMMS. When the last chord of Buffalo Springfield’s epic “Bluebird” ricocheted around the room we had one of those mutual hallucinogenic experiences so common in the mid- to late sixties and were splayed in ecstasy at the sound of the chord by the light of a lava lamp in a haze of marijuana, strawberry incense and smoke swirling around and intermingling with the unfamiliar but soon to be run-of-the-mill odor of manly B.O. Then, abruptly, we were jolted back to reality—bliss terminated.
“TIME TO GO!” yelled the scar-faced keeper of the keys manning the door. It turned out that Angela had tried to come up the stairs, enticed by the acrid smell of weed, and got yanked off the bannister and hurtled back down, her dazed, not-quite-fully-knowing-what-was-going-on look (which on anyone else would be attributed to the drugs, but in her case was always like that) changing not one iota.
The clock on the wall was talking.
9
KENT STATE UNIVERSITY
It was 1969. I would have loved to do a runner the minute I was released from Firestone, but at seventeen I was still under the mental and financial control of my parents, maybe legal too. We couldn’t even vote till we were twenty-one.
I didn’t pay much attention to the way it worked, but I knew it would be too much grief not to play along with them on this one. I’d just have to get into a university and bide my time until I figured out what I was going to do for the rest of my life. What an ingrate I was! We all were.
I had no sense of trying to better myself by getting a degree in anything. The whole idea of having a career was anti-antiestablishment. Even the word “goal” was a kind of treason. I just wanted to listen to music and smoke pot. It was already obvious to me that I’d never stick it in any kind of establishment.
I was a forerunner to what would one day be loosely referred to as “an underachiever.” White kids who have nothing to prove and can’t be bothered to prove it. This dropping out was something I took seriously. But none of us knew what we were dropping out into. It didn’t take a degree in psychology to work out that this general apathy was inherent to dope smoking. I was already a cliché.
I’d been browsing for colleges through a stack of catalogues that my folks had sent off for. Some had horse riding—out of state. How cool would that be, to finally learn to ride and jump and all the stuff I’d imagined back at Fairlawn? Funny how it seemed so important back then, but now…I was changing.
The truth was, with my flunky grades no schools were going to take me. I guess my folks thought it might give me some incentive to look, or maybe they were still delusional enough to think I might turn out to be who they wanted me to be. No doubt they had higher hopes for me than I did. My only incentive was to get out of their house.
Kent State University, being a state school, was obliged, despite my poor academic record, to take me as I was a full-fledged Buckeye. (That’s what we were called: Buckeyes from the Buckeye state, after the Ohio buckeye tree. Every state had a tree representative.)
That was fine by me. Kent was a cool university, famously bohemian, known for its art and cinematography departments and anti–Vietnam War stance—and fifteen miles away from Akron. Far enough for now.
I started as soon as I could, two weeks out of Firestone. It was the summer term, three months shy of my eighteenth birthday. My parents dropped me off at my assigned dormitory, Fletcher Hall. I was going to be sharing a room with an Italian girl (they called themselves Italians then, not Italian-Americans) from Cleveland. She had big bouffant hair, which she set in those rollers that I’d stopped using way back when I went “Beatle chick.” She looked like a singer out of a group like the Shangri-Las; she wasn’t flying her freak flag in army fatigues like me.
I waved goodbye to my folks, never for a moment stopping to wonder how they felt about it all. Terry had moved out a few years earlier and was also at Kent. Was it a sad day for them? It never occurred to me to think about it. My relationship with them was now on permanent disconnect. I was only interested in getting serious about the one thing I was good at: goofing off.
I had my little corncob pipe and, as soon as Miss Italy went out, I flared it up. First things first, then I went to the record store on Water Street in downtown Kent.
Kent was charming and old and had a train that ran right through the middle behind the bars on Water Street. It looked just like any town out of a cowboy film. The only thing missing was horses tied up outside. The sound of the train whistle always had an underlying feeling of promise to it: “Come away.” There is no other sound like it, haunting and imploring and mysterious. Come away.
I’d just got Neil Young’s solo album and was about to invest in Happy Sad, the latest by Tim Buckley. And I do mean invest. I looked at the back cover for half an hour in the shop, unable to unlock my eyes from his doleful gaze. Tim! He was looking right into me, Mona Lisa of the day. Then I forked out and took that baby back to my room, where I listened to it over and over and over again.
Our heroes, like Young and Buckley, did not court attention outside of the underground arena. They did not seek publicity or fame. They did not want to be discussed, be controversial or have anything to do with the general population. We had to go out of our way to find them. And we did.
Buckley had a unique voice, which could soar like a bird—my favorite singer of all time. He wrote about things I’d never done, but I thought I knew how he felt anyway. I knew exactly how he felt. A good singer can do that. Longing. He expressed a lot of longing. He was a soul singer.
Young was the other one. After “Helpless” came out, the whole underground nation was in love with him. Now, Young’s first solo album was never off our turntables. It had to be heard several times a day.
It was a perfect summer. Music was everywhere. I had my little pipe and would walk to downtown Kent every night after toking up, my head full of songs. Led Zeppelin would be releasing their second album soon. I’d be getting that, fresh off the press. Jeff Beck’s was out. Tim Hardin. Richie Havens. Johnny Winter. Pacific Gas & Electric. Cream. The Velvets. Captain Beefheart.
The Beatles had seen us through the last eight years, guiding and uniting us. Abbey Road soon. Janis had left Big Brother and gone solo, so we weren’t worried about her leaving us. Jefferson Airplane were getting more and more political—still tripped-out, though. You could always rely on the Airplane to be musically inventive and crazy as fuck at the same time. Well, with Grace Slick leading the charge you knew you were in for a ride through the funhouse.
Hendrix remained as steady as the third stone from the sun, and the Stones were now super-powers. Let It Bleed. We felt cosseted in the camaraderie of the best our generation had to offer, articulating every feeling we had. We thought it would never end.
I loved being in Kent. There were people walking the streets like in a real town. This was human pageantry on display where it should be. Being vegetarian was to inform everything, the course of my destiny. I was baffled that the entire hippie nation hadn’t become vegetarian en masse. It made no sense as eating meat went against the whole dialogue. Were the hippies just as hypocritical as the rest of them? I couldn’t admit that but I understood why I loved songs like “The Loner” so much. I didn’t want to be like the majority anyway. The majority were always wrong.
Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629) Page 6