Peter’s transition into the Big Thing wasn’t as smooth as we would have liked. He was tremendously skilled, but also a complicated individual. Peter came from a strong Catholic blue-collar family from the South Side of Chicago. Earlier in his life he had studied in the seminary to become a priest and had a clearly defined sense of morals. Terry certainly didn’t take to him right away. He may have been easygoing most of the time, but Terry also had a strong personality and wasn’t ready for Peter’s level of self-confidence. Walt, Lee, Jimmy, and Bobby didn’t have as much of a problem with him because they tended to go with the flow more often than the rest of us. I acted as referee and peacemaker. Overall, the band went through a feeling-out process and had to learn to adapt to the newest member of our family. Fortunately, everyone was able to warm up to each other over time.
The band met with Guercio and put a new plan together. We decided to continue performing our original arrangements of cover songs, but also gradually introduce original material into our sets. There was no future in covers unless we were going to move to Las Vegas or Atlantic City and become a show band. To break through, the band had to concentrate on writing music in order to develop our own identity. But our new direction proved to be a problem. Initially, we struggled to find an audience. It was difficult to understand, because our sound was better than ever. If we couldn’t break through with a band of this caliber, it wasn’t ever going to happen.
The year 1967 was a crucial period in music, and major bands were blowing onto the national scene. The psychedelic era was in full swing and things were starting to explode. There was no shortage of groundbreaking groups releasing albums: Jefferson Airplane with Takes Off and Surrealistic Pillow, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Are You Experienced? and Axis: Bold As Love, and the Doors’ self-titled debut LP. Everyone in our band felt like we also had something to say and contribute.
The political climate was changing too. There was a new consciousness coming up among young people everywhere brought on by frustration over the Vietnam War. The civil rights movement was reaching a fever pitch. There were weekly protests on the streets of Chicago and National Guard troops patrolling the city. If you were young and weren’t outraged, then you weren’t paying attention.
Before returning to California to manage his other projects, Guercio suggested we listen closely to the new music being released, especially the songs of a band called Vanilla Fudge, who had just hit it big with their hit single “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” a slowed-down psychedelic rock cover of the Supremes’ original. Overall, their music was similar to the direction the Big Thing had already been going in. And what do you know? They also had a great drummer who was Italian, Carmine Appice.
Our band kept rehearsing and playing four or five days a week. As it turned out, Bobby had a folder full of songs he’d been working on for years. None of us had fully realized what a proficient composer he was until he began breaking out all the original material he had written. Still, the audiences in the Chicago clubs had a hard time accepting the new path our band was on. Club owners were used to us performing our unique arrangements of cover tunes and wanted nothing to do with the original songs we started including in our nightly set. Our new course proved to be a major financial strain. The Big Thing had made a decent living as a cover band, and now we were turned away from clubs for not drawing an audience. It wasn’t long before we started getting outright fired from gigs.
Walt, Peter, and I were all married and the drastic cut in weekly income wasn’t helping any of us. I was seriously feeling the effects because it wasn’t only Rose and me anymore. My daughter Krissy was born on January 11, 1968, one of the happiest days of my life. Not only was I blessed with a beautiful baby girl, but I was also being given an opportunity to make amends as a parent. The guilt of being an absent father for my daughter Maria had stayed with me and I wanted to get it right this time around. I got a second chance at fatherhood and I didn’t want to make the same mistakes. But with my income dwindling and the gigs drying up, it wasn’t going to be easy.
Everything continued taking a turn for the worse. In the past, whenever we played the Club Laurel on a Saturday night, the place was filled to capacity, but all of a sudden we couldn’t attract more than twenty people into the bar area. It was like performing in an abandoned building. At the end of the night, the manager called us over to his office and told us not to come back.
“You’re nice guys and everything, but you need a show. Right now, you got no show,” he explained.
When we returned to Club Gigi in the suburbs, we had to stick with a couple of Four Seasons numbers to get any kind of reaction from the crowd. The club owner, Nate Pisaro, met us out in back of the building as we were packing up our equipment. Nate might have run the joint, but it was really owned by Sam Giancana, one of the biggest mobsters in the country at the time. All the Outfit guys regularly hung out there. Nate was another manager who liked to come up and sing with the band. They called him “the singing hypnotist” because he invited people up onstage as part of his act and put them into a trance. He always had plenty of suggestions for our band.
“What you should do is develop some kind of a show,” Nate told us.
It sounded familiar. We started hearing similar feedback from other club owners. “You got no show,” they told us. The Mob had a “show” with an energetic frontman prancing around the stage. We didn’t do routines or tell interesting stories or jokes in between numbers; we simply played what we considered good music. I didn’t twirl my drumsticks in the air and our horn section didn’t really have choreographed dance routines. Although over time, Jimmy Pankow did manage to perfect what we called his “South Dakota flip,” a spastic dance move he did onstage with his trombone that always made everyone in the band smile. He was developing into the real ham of the group. But overall, what we were providing wasn’t considered entertaining enough for the venues.
The Big Thing was close to a household name at the Attic in Milwaukee. We packed the venue every time we performed. But on a cold March night our original songs confused the crowd. The club owner, a big Greek guy named Zoey, didn’t like the direction of our performance. When we played a trippy Frank Zappa ballad called “How Could I Be Such a Fool?,” Zoey stormed the stage.
“What the fuck do you think you guys are doing?” he screamed. “You call that music? You’re a real asshole, Walt.”
Since Walt was our go-between with most of the managers of the clubs we played, he routinely had to deal with the fallout. On this night, he didn’t know what to tell Zoey. But Bobby certainly had something he wanted to say. He suddenly lunged from the stage, swinging his piano stool over his head. “Get the fuck out of our faces, Zoey!” he shouted.
“Don’t tell me what to do! You’re all fired!” Zoey yelled back.
The audience was shocked by Bobby’s outburst, but the band had reached our breaking point. We were running out of venues to play and the pressure was wearing on us. The audiences we had always relied on to support us stopped coming to our shows.
It was official: the Big Thing was stiffing. The end looked like it was in sight.
6
Hollywood or Bust
It was no secret that everyone in the band was losing the desire to continue grinding it out in the regional club circuit. We had hit the proverbial wall. The group may have been running on all cylinders creatively, but we were barely making enough money to survive. The time had come to put a call in to Jimmy Guercio to check on his offer. We had to let him know if he wanted to bring the Big Thing out to California, he’d better do it soon. We had run out of options in Chicago.
After a string of calls back and forth to the West Coast, Jimmy finally gave us the green light to make plans to move out to Hollywood. He said he just needed a few weeks to get everything in place. I couldn’t have been happier to hear the news. Guercio had come through in
the nick of time. I went back to my parents’ house and started packing that same night. The move was going to be hard on Rose, and I promised to send for her and Krissy as soon as I was able. To her credit, Rose knew how passionate I was about making it as a musician and understood that the band had no other options. It was the end of the line—Hollywood or bust.
My family was sad to see me go, but they understood this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pursue my dreams. My parents were still relieved that I had tangled with the gang lifestyle in Chicago and made it out the other side. Those days were a distant memory. Surprisingly, my sister Rosemary broke out crying after hearing about my impending relocation to the West Coast. Because of our four-year age difference and all my wild behavior growing up, our relationship had always been strained.
“You’re never coming back here again,” she said through her tears. “You’re leaving forever, Danny.”
A part of me knew Rosemary was right. Once I left town, I had no intention of moving back to Chicago. I wanted to follow the path as far as it would take me until I achieved my musical goals. In that moment of saying farewell to my family, I understood there was no going back. It was time to turn the page and start a new chapter in my life.
Walt and I decided to make the drive west together in his four-door Plymouth towing a U-Haul trailer full of our luggage and equipment. Peter set out in his Volkswagen Beetle convertible, and Jimmy Pankow drove with a couple of our buddies from the city, Mellow Mel and Mickey Sax. Terry, Lee, and Bobby skipped the road trip altogether and spent their money on plane tickets. Before we left Chicago, Guercio gave us the number of a guy named Larry Fitzgerald, who would be managing the band when we got out west.
Jimmy, Mellow Mel, and Mickey Sax weren’t playing around. They packed their car with plenty of drugs for the ride. Walt and I weren’t as aggressive. We expected it was going to be a grueling trip, so we scored a bunch of benzedrine uppers, or “bennies,” as they were called. We popped a few pills each to get a running start and set out on the road. Walt and I caravanned with Peter and Jimmy for the first few hours of the drive across Illinois, but halfway through Iowa we lost sight of Peter’s Volkswagen and got separated from the rest of the group. Neither Walt nor I wanted to spend the money to stay in hotels along the way, so we were determined, with the assistance of our stash of speed pills, to drive straight through until we reached the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.
Starting out, neither of us understood the reality of the distance we were traveling in Walt’s old Plymouth. With the aid of the bennies, we even found the drive through the endless fields of Nebraska exciting, probably because we were high out of our minds. I balanced my practice pad on my lap and feverishly worked on my drum rudiments while Walt nodded along to music on the radio. We spent hours talking excitedly about what the scene would be like in Los Angeles. Neither of us could wait to finally get out west.
And then we hit the desert in the middle of the night and ran out of the bennies.
“Damn, what are we going to do?” I asked, turning the pill bottle upside down and giving it a shake. “I’m already starting to come down.”
“Me too,” Walt said.
As the next hour passed, it was tough to keep my eyes open. I was beginning to crash. To make matters worse, I started to hallucinate.
“What the hell was that?!” I suddenly yelled.
“What?” Walt asked, flinching behind the wheel. My outburst scared the hell out of him.
I could have sworn there was an animal on the side of the road, but at second glance it was gone. “I don’t know,” I told Walt. “It must have been a coyote or something.” The lines of the road looked like they were shifting in place. My vision was blurry.
“We have to get off this road,” Walt told me, regripping the car’s steering wheel with both hands.
I agreed. The morning sun was just coming up above the desert sands when he pulled the car into a hotel just off of Route 15 in Barstow, California. Unfortunately, the place didn’t have any available rooms. We slinked out of the office hanging our heads. Walt absentmindedly left the driver’s side door open when he started to back out of the parking spot and it got caught on a concrete pillar. The door hinge bent back with a high-pitched squeal, sending Walt into a frenzy. He sprang out of the car and stormed off across the parking lot.
“I can’t take this shit anymore!” he yelled out into the desert. “I want to go home!” He was losing it in dramatic fashion. I followed after him, trying my best to calm him down.
“It’s all right, man,” I told him. “Everything’s going to be okay. We’re both burnt out from the drive. We just need some sleep.”
And then the desert wind kicked up and both of us fell silent. Almost instinctively, Walt and I glanced back toward the car just in time to see the piece of notebook paper with Larry Fitzgerald’s phone number shoot out of the front seat and skip across the asphalt. We took off in a full panic, chasing after it onto the street, but another gust pulled the paper out into the brush. In an instant, it disappeared.
“Oh God,” Walt screamed. “What the hell do we do now?!”
We made our way back to the car and drove in silence to another hotel down the street. Walt had to hold the driver’s door closed shut the whole way. Luckily, this hotel had a room for us. There was no way we were going to make it another mile on the road. I lay in bed that morning, uncertain of what we would find in Hollywood. We had set out from Chicago full of expectation and now we found ourselves crashed out in a hotel in the middle of the desert.
After we managed a few hours of sleep, Walt and I duct-taped the car door shut and set back out on the road. The three-hour drive to Hollywood felt more like six. In our delirious state earlier, we had put so much importance in losing Larry’s contact information that we had forgotten we also had the phone number of a girl named Kiki, who some of the other guys in the band were staying with in Los Angeles. All was not lost! Walt and I had a good laugh as we drove about our freakout scene in the parking lot.
Turning off of Laurel Canyon onto Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood for the first time was like passing through a portal into a new world. The Hollywood sidewalks served as catwalks for the wildest fashion I had ever been exposed to. Girls passed by in next-to-nothing skirts with fluffy boas around their necks and colorful flowers woven into their hair. The guys strutted around in flamboyant paisley shirts, pin-striped pants, and leather moccasins. Everyone wore cool dark wraparound shades or circular frames with colored lenses. It was an emerging scene that I knew little about, but couldn’t wait to explore—a culture of hippies, artists, and musicians who shared a revolutionary way of thinking. Needless to say, performing in our tailored band suits from Smokey Joe’s was a thing of the past. There was no shortage of creative fashions I couldn’t wait to check out.
Once Walt and I reached Kiki, we were able to get in touch with Larry Fitzgerald and the other guys in the band. For the next couple of nights, I crashed at Larry’s apartment and slept on his couch. Walt stayed with another one of Jimmy Guercio’s business associates, a guy named Mike Curb. I had never met Larry or his wife before, but they were nice enough to welcome me in. Larry was a musician and new to the business side of the industry. He talked a little fast for my liking at first, but his friendly and outgoing personality made him very appealing. I was confident our group was in good hands.
Unfortunately, Larry had a large Alaskan malamute dog that constantly gnawed on the furniture. An upright bass Larry had standing in the corner became a chew toy. I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of the thing biting the legs of the couch. It was nearly impossible to get a wink of sleep.
Guercio eventually agreed to pay the band forty-five dollars a week each and moved us in to a small two-bedroom house on Holly Drive in Hollywood. Anything to get away from Larry’s dog, I thought to myself. The living room of the house was designated for the band to set up our equipment in, so the six of us were left to fend for our personal crash
space in the rest of the house. Walt, Peter, and I set up air mattresses on the floor of one of the bedrooms. These “mattresses” were supposed to be for floating in backyard pools and not for sleeping. We blew them up every night before bed, only to find them completely deflated in the morning. Waking up on a hard floor took some getting used to. Bobby was the smart one. He hooked into a foxy young girl very quickly and moved into her apartment. Jimmy Pankow put together a makeshift bed on top of the dining room table of all places. It was decided that Walt’s brother-in-law, Jack Goudie, was going to be our road manager/roadie, so he came out a few weeks later and joined us in the house as well. Jack was really dedicated and agreed to work for next to nothing. He and Lee took the back bedroom while Terry slept in a small alcove off the living room no bigger than a walk-in closet.
Our neighbors on Holly Drive were Guercio’s other protégés, the Illinois Speed Press. They were riding a wave of recent success opening up for premier bands like Steppenwolf and Led Zeppelin. While our band rehearsed day and night, the guys in the Speed Press partied like rock stars with the most gorgeous groupies I had ever seen. They blasted music all night and did drugs until the early hours of the morning. There was a never-ending flow of women in and out of their pad. We attended more than a few of the Press’s bashes, but only after our band felt satisfied that our work was done for the day. As excited as we were to experience the wonders of the Hollywood scene, we weren’t going to do it at the expense of the dreams we had for our band.
Freddy Page, the drummer for the Speed Press, and I sat together for hours trading stories of playing drums and comparing our techniques. I sensed that Freddy didn’t have a great deal of confidence in his playing, but I still considered him a solid, straightforward rock drummer. Being so far from home, it was comforting to have yet another friend from Chicago to talk with. From that point on, we became very close.
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