|
What were the circumstances you came out of? I was born in Santa Barbara, California in 1947, to a couple who were and still are—at least the one of them who is still living—Catholic. I was the first born son, the first of five children. I have two brothers and two sisters. Not a well-to-do family, but we always got by. My dad worked two jobs sometimes to make that happen with such a large family. For most of the years when I was growing up he worked for Arden Farms Dairy—he was milkman, basically, and he became a manager for the company later on. It was a working class family. On the GI Bill my dad bought a tract home in 1955, and that's where I spent most of my years growing up. We had lived in a couple of other houses before that. What were your earliest musical recollections? I've always had a fascination for music. The earliest Christmas present that I remember getting was a drum—one of those little toy drums with paper heads and a pair of drumsticks. I was four or five, but I remember that gift, whereas I don't really remember any of the others. And I remember that I beat it to death, there was nothing left of the skins on either side—which was kind of a shame because then it wouldn't work as a drum anymore! After that as I was growing up I remember building these strange instruments, out of wooden crates, sort of jug band type instruments . . . Stringed instruments? No, they were percussive, they had can-lids and things attached. I would build these contraptions and I called them my "jazz bands," and I would play them and just banged the hell out of them. So maybe had I been born one universe over from this one I would have been a drummer. But as it happened I found a guitar in the attic of my grandmother's house when I was about eleven years old. Do you know who it belonged to? It was said to have been my mother's, but I think it might have been her brother's, my uncle's, because one day he came over and played a song on it. For some reason I think it was his, although my grandmother told me it belonged to my mother—maybe she just wanted me to believe that, I don't know. Was there any kind of musical tradition in the family? My mother could play a couple of songs on the piano, I guess she'd had a few lessons. But other than that there was no real music tradition in my family. My uncle at one point must have played guitar a little bit, since he played me a song that one time. On my father's side, both my grandparents were deaf. Other than singing in the shower, which he did with considerable passion, my father didn't bring any musical ability to my early years, or at least not any musical influence. Most of it was just my listening to the radio. Do you recall what you heard that got you excited? Rock and Roll, from "Hound Dog"—that was the first one that caught me. From that point on, it was wherever I could listen to Rock music. Later I branched out into other interests, musically, but early on it was Rock and Roll. I eventually wound up with the family radio. We had one table radio, but eventually my mom got a hi-fi stereo, one of those console things on which she would play Harry Belafonte and Johnny Mathis records. When she got the stereo I was given the family radio, but up until that point I had a crystal radio that I had built and it had a little earphone, and underneath the blankets I would listen to KISS radio all night. Every third or fourth song they played was a rock song, you had to listen through all this other songs . . . This was before Rock had really come to precedence. Yes, and Santa Barbara wasn't really a place that was on the cutting edge. How would you describe where you lived? At the time I heard one person characterize it as "a town for the newlywed or nearly dead." When I was first growing up there it was a pretty small town, only a couple of stop lights where the highway went through. Very quaint . . . the wealthy people were up in the hills, the less wealthy were on the flats, down at sea-level. There was Haley Street area, which was the black ghetto, and there were the barrio areas and then the upper crust in the Montecito and Hope Ranch areas, and various strata in between. It was a pretty nice town, and the beach was always great. I loved the ocean, and the mountains weren't too far away. Did you surf? I never really got into it. I did a lot of body-surfing and swimming. I think probably my life might have gone differently if I had been able to afford a surfboard, but they were kind of spendy back in those days and I never got into it. I wound up in more of a greaser mode—the hair falling down the center of the forehead and the ducktails.
More like twelve or thirteen. Did you listen to Rockabilly back then? I guess some of it was. One of my favorite artists back then was Ray Charles, "What I Say" and that mode . . . I really liked Rhythm & Blues and Rock, and actually I didn't know the difference. If it had a beat, it was Rock. Did you just begin to figure things out on the guitar by yourself? To begin with I taught myself. I've never had any lessons or formal training. In fact, the way I found the guitar, it was set up for Hawaiian style playing, intended to be played on the lap with a steel bar. There was a metal nut that actually went over the regular guitar nut, which raises the strings off the fingerboard. I found the guitar and the steel, and my first explorations were with the steel, so I would tune it up to intervals that sounded okay to my ears. I had no idea what I was tuning it to, and basically I was tuning it to a chord that sounded good. And then I would play these impromptu compositions. I've always been an improvisational player, still am, and always will be. You've always played by ear? Yes, but I'm not sure I would call it that by now. It's beyond "by ear" . . . it's spontaneous playing, by feel. Did you start by learning how to play Rock songs? Eventually, yeah, I realized that was not the normal setup for that guitar with that metal nut on it. So I took that off the guitar, and I found a place to play along with other musicians at Bonnie Langley's Music Store on State street. Bonnie was an older rotund lady, with a big mat of kinky hair, who let kids play the guitars and drums in the afternoons after school. She was deaf in one ear . . . I was wondering why she would allow such things to go on! That had something to do with it, because we were playing Rock. Sometimes it would get to be too loud even for her and she'd cut us off for a week or so. Then we'd come back much more timidly and play soft for awhile and gradually over the course of a few days it would come back up to its normal roar and then she'd cut us off again. So that was kind of the exchange that we had there. We helped bring people into the store apparently, it must have been good for business. She sold records, so people who were into buying 45s would come in. And these were electric instruments . . . She had electric and acoustic guitars. This was my first exposure to electric guitar. Of course I couldn't afford one at that point. But I did get to play with other musicians who could show me chords, how to tune a guitar, and I picked up things fairly fast. Sometime after I had learned a few chords and could strum a few tunes I was visiting my grandmother during the summer in El Monte, in the Los Angeles County area, and made friends with some, I guess, Rockabilly-oriented people. This was a Mexican barrio and a white ghetto, El Monte, with a lot of people from Arkansas and other places who had migrated to California looking for the economic "Grail," and found themselves in this low-rent district, pretty much a shanty town type of environment. I wound up hanging out at this gas station which a friend of mine helped his parents operate. It was a little run-down 76 station. He was about my age, thirteen or fourteen. His parents would spend most of the day in the bar, and he would for the most part run the gas station and we helped him, me and a couple of other guys. We all played guitar, so we spent much of our time sitting on old car seats behind the gas station playing "What I Say" or some stuff that one of the guys brought from Arkansas like "Under the Double Eagle" or "Wildwood Flower," all those kinds of things. I got into where I was picking notes instead of just strumming and I expanded my repertoire in a sense, or my techniques anyway. I had a blast doing that. Then I refused to return to Santa Barbara when it was time to go back to school—I wanted to stay there with my grandmother and hang out with my friends. That lasted for several months past the time I was supposed to have gone back to school . . . and then I got busted. It was just after Christmas and my friends and I went out in one of our homemade jalopies. We were building these cars and we usually took them down to this dry riverbed to race them—none of us were old enough to drive. One night we went out and got crazy and just kind of terrorized the neighborhood. One of the things we did was vandalize a lawn of Christmas decorations. We took all the cardboard reindeer and A hammered them up on the side of a truck van that was out behind the gas station, and turned it into a circus van with reindeer flying across the sides. About two hours later the Sheriff's Dept. pulled into the gas station and there the evidence was, in plain view, and we all got busted. I was sent to L.A. Juvenile Hall and then back to Santa Barbara. To make a long story short, I wound up in a kind of a reform school, a fire camp called Los Prietos, up in the mountains above Santa Barbara. My parents basically said that they couldn't control me any longer. Did you still get along with them? I got along with them okay. I had loving parents, and I had a good family—still do, my dad's dead now but my mom has hung in there with me through all of these years. It wasn't so much a problem with them as with me. I was just a freedom-bound person from when I was very young. I was very independent and the circumstances enhanced that proclivity—I moved out into the garage when I was nine, which was something I wanted to do, rather than share a bedroom with two other brothers, both considerably younger than me. So I built a little room out in the garage, and that gave me a situation where I could pretty much come and go as I pleased. I used to go down to the beach late at night. You weren't afraid to go out and do whatever you felt like. Exactly, and I wasn't doing anything criminal, but in the middle of the night I liked to take my dog and go down to the cliff overlooking the ocean, which was just a couple of blocks from where we lived. I'd spend hours down there. Sometimes I would just walk the neighborhood streets at night, and that kind of oriented me to being very independent. And you preferred El Monte to Santa Barbara. My grandmother had cancer, and so when I was visiting her I didn't want to leave her alone—she'd been pretty much discarded by the family—and at least that was part of my rationalization, that I wanted to stay there with her . . .and to be with my friends and learn more about playing guitar, and take the old jalopies down to the riverbed, all those kinds of things. I was having more fun in that little shantytown called El Monte than I was in Santa Barbara, where I really didn't fit because I couldn't afford a surfboard. My parents had four other kids to deal with, and I'd made my own bed so to speak, so my parents let me lay in it and they signed the papers to let me spend some time in Los Prietos Boys School. It actually did a number of things for me. One, I got physically strong—I grew up a lot there. It was a good transition from boyhood to manhood, and it was pretty grueling at times. As far as work? Work, and dealing with a bunch of hard-headed kids. They definitely put a guy through his paces. They had a kind of boot camp training, and they really put you through it. One of the things that you did was to go up on the shale hill and break up the shale and then load it onto a flatbed truck, which would go over a tiny bridge and dump it on the other side of the creek. You asked what you were doing this for, and they would tell you, "We're moving this hill over there, to the other side of the creek." This was something you did, and you spent a lot of hours doing it in the heat. It was not that they were trying to kill us. They were trying to make men out of us. And it did serve that purpose for me. Do you remember what state of mind you were in then? There was a part of me that resented it—I didn't like being there and I wanted to go home—but at the same time I was getting tougher, and that was good. And I'll tell you the truth though, I didn't really notice it until I got out. I didn't realize how different I had become from other people. It was something that had taken place over a period of ten months or so. There were some changes that took place. I hated having my hair cut short like we had there, and I promptly started growing my hair as soon as I got out. This was pre-Beatles, pre-hippy, it wasn't a fashionable decision at that point. Were you cut off from music when at the boys camp? I did have an opportunity to play a little guitar when I was there, but it wasn't something that was normally allowed. The way that worked out was that I got into the glee club—there was this guy who was one of the camp counselors, and he wanted to start a glee club. I joined the glee club and after trying to sing a cappella with these guys for awhile, I convinced him that some musical accompaniment would be needed. He had an old guitar in the cabin where he lived and he brought it out, so I got the opportunity to play a few chords along with the glee club songs. The action was so high on this guitar that it was excruciating to play, especially when I'd already lost my calluses. But at least once a week I could grip the neck of a guitar and do a little bit with it. When you got out did you still have your guitar? I lost my guitar in El Monte—it stayed down there after I got busted, and there was no way to retrieve it. So I didn't have a guitar when I got out. But when I'd been in Los Prietos during the summer months there were fires, and this was a fire camp. We didn't actually go out on the fire lines, but we would follow the path of the fire to put out the smoldering stumps, or during the fire we would sometimes load the liquid fire retardant that the fire planes dropped. We would fill the same planes with grass seed after the fire, for re-seeding. They paid us by the hour and I made quite a bit of money—I had almost $300 by the time I got out. So when I got out I had almost enough money to buy a guitar and pay cash for it. I got a little help from my mom . . . Were guitars that expensive back then? The one I wanted was, although by today's standards it was extremely inexpensive considering what it was: a Les Paul signature SG Gibson, cream white, 3 gold pickups—just a gorgeous guitar, with a nice hard shell case. I paid $269 for it, plus the case, and today that guitar would be worth probably ten grand! So I had this really cool electric guitar and I started going back to Bonnie Langley's just to have somebody to play with, and because I didn't have my own amplifier yet. I got to play a little bit there, but she wasn't allowing that as openly as she had been before. Also I had evolved and the people I had grown up with had not, I don't know how to describe it any differently than that. I had gone through all this stuff and I didn't fit in. It doesn't seem like you ever really fit in, in Santa Barbara . . . No, I guess not. I would not have stayed around as long as I did were it not that I was afraid of getting busted again. So I tried to mind my P's and Q's and hang in there as long as I could, but I just kept getting more and more distant from myself and the kids in town. By the time I was not even sixteen I was pretty much living with a girl in an apartment, she was about four or five years older than I was. How did you find her? She was the sister of a friend of mine. We just hit it off. Like I said, I was beyond my years, at least in my attitudes and thinking and how I carried myself. Part of the reason why I left Santa Barbara was that she became too dependent on me, too obsessed with me. So eventually I left and went to stay with my cousin for a little while in Sunland, down on the outskirts of L.A. County. I was headed down a shady path I guess, although not in a criminal sense. My favorite cousin who I had gone to stay with turned out to be kind of a dip. He really didn't take care of his family very well. It's a little embarrassing, but at the same time it's part of the story here—I wound up sleeping with his wife. He left, and I ended up living with her. I got a job at the Travel-Eze Trailer Company, building trailers, supporting his wife and kid, and sleeping in his bed with his wife. And again, she was quite a few years older than I was. I was only sixteen. And you were supporting this family? She was working too, we both were. I had no experience doing that, but I grew up in a family where my dad worked two jobs. So as far as understanding a work ethic and supporting a family, I had no problem with that. I just did what came naturally. I've always had the ability to work, to do real work. I kept my job easily enough. Actually I had not quite turned sixteen yet. I had a learner's driving permit, which you're allowed to get at fifteen and I'd doctored it so that I appeared to be sixteen—that had allowed me to get a job at the trailer company, and it also allowed me to drive. I bought a car, a '50 Ford with an Olds engine in it, and a hydromatic transmission. I loved that car! So I was beginning to do adult things. Then my grandmother died, the whole family was notified. Of course I had been very close to my grandmother. I went to the funeral, and it turned into a very ugly situation. My cousin went to my family and told them I was sleeping with his wife. It got really weird. My father was trying to lay down the law all of a sudden and take me home, to make me tow the line. And he'd got one of my uncles backing him up . . . And this is at the same time you're torn up over losing your grandmother. Right, and I basically told them all to get fucked, and I took off. I went to Hollywood. You didn't return to your cousin's wife? No, I had to get out of Dodge or risk another clash with the juvenile authorities. I went back just long enough to get some clothes. Actually during this time I didn't take my guitar with me, I'd left it underneath my parents’ bed at home. But anyway, I didn't know where else to head but L.A. While living in Sunland I used to go on the weekends to a club called the Red Velvet with my fake ID card, and go listen to Rhythm and Blues. By chance I had discovered this club, and there were a lot of bands, not real famous ones, from the East Coast, Motown music. Every once in a while the Righteous Brothers came in and did a little guest thing, particularly Bobby Hatfield. One of the performances that I saw was completely spontaneous—the guy came in, just to have a few drinks with his fellows, and the band got him up on stage. This band was from Baltimore, a black R&B band. He did an impromptu version of "Summertime" that just blew me away. Bobby Hatfield is the high voice in the Righteous Brothers. That was one of my more memorable nights out there. Did you start to talk to these people? Not really, I was still too shy. I had a $1.98 sportcoat on. I didn't know how to dress or how to behave around these kinds of people. All I used to do was go into the non-drinking section with a cherry Coke and listen. Every once in awhile I'd get up the courage to ask a girl to dance. That was about it. Anyway, I moved to L.A., and I fell in with a girl by the name of Bridget. This was a whole new scene. This was right after the release of "Tambourine Man." The Byrds had just been on a fairly successful tour to England, long hair was beginning to emerge, so I fit right in. It was fate, no doubt. Bridget was the seamstress for Sonny and Cher—she made all their fur vests and striped bell-bottoms. So being teamed up with her for a bit, I naturally took on a whole new way of dressing. She introduced me to Pot, and LSD. Was that all pharmaceutical LSD? Yes, Sandoz, the going thing at the time. It came from Switzerland, for the most part. This was before Owsley, and nobody has ever made LSD better before or since. It was a shock, the first time I took LSD she and I were alone. It was very eye—opening and a very beautiful experience. How common was LSD at that point? It was just beginning to be common, barely. Just the very edge of the expanded consciousness movement. What had you heard about it? I knew nothing. I'd heard about Pot, and actually down in El Monte I'd tried it once and got really silly. I think it was just seeds and stems that I'd been smoking anyway, but I didn't know the difference since I didn't know what it was supposed to look like. I remember I went swimming in the pool at some apartment complex and tried to do a bunch of silly things, triple somersaults and stuff like that, but I think I was more amped up on the idea of smoking the notorious Reefer than anything else. The experience in Hollywood with Bridget was a totally new thing for me. That was my first real exposure to any mind--altering substances, and it had a profound effect on me. Also just meeting the types of people that I was meeting, had a profound effect on me. There weren't so many long—haired musicians at that point, the Byrds were about it, and there were a few Folk groups who were beginning to sport long hair. The Byrds were originally Folk artists too, who followed suit when Dylan took up the electric guitar, and "Tambourine Man" was one of his songs . . . Had you heard much Folk music? There was a little bit of prior experience for me in the Folk scene. This was in Santa Barbara after I'd gotten out of the Boys Camp and I had my live-in girlfriend and that whole situation. I was going to a club called the Rondo, which had things called hootenannies. So I was getting exposure in the Folk scene, and I was playing on the weekends on hootenanny night. Of course it was a whole different thing when I got to L.A. . . Did you start playing music with people when you arrived in Hollywood? I kind of laid back. I was feeling kind of shy, because I was freshly out on my own. I felt like this was a scene where I belonged, but at the same time I didn't really know where I was and I didn't know anybody yet. So I checked things out. I went dancing at Ciro's. The second time I took LSD I went and saw the Byrds for the first time. I really dug them. The whole electric band experience took on new dimensions, under the influence. It brought it to a whole new level. I'd always loved music, but there were parts of it I'd never really heard before. So I became exposed to that. To be on LSD and hear for the first time an electric twelve-string played by Jim McGuinn . . . I can see how that experience could have changed everything. It did. One of the bands that opened for the Byrds one night was called The Grass Roots. This wasn't the Grass Roots that most people would be familiar with; this band later became a group called Love. I saw them and it was also the first time that I'd ever seen music of that type played by integrated musicians—a couple of black guys, a couple white guys playing together. Some of the R&B bands were integrated, but none of the California Rock bands had been. So this was a whole new thing in and of itself, and also the talent of the people in the band, I really dug the band. I'm familiar with the Love records, but how did they sound at this earlier stage? They were still doing a lot of renditions of Stones songs. Arthur Lee was playing the harp and covering a lot of Stones tunes, but he was beginning to write his own material when I first saw him. I saw a tremendous potential with them. I had tried to tentatively form or join a couple of bands during this time, one of them was called The Weeds. I remember going to places where there were bands forming and trying out as a guitar player. I still hadn't gone back to Santa Barbara to get my guitar, as I was a little bit reluctant to do so. I was using borrowed or rented guitars. One day I went to Arthur Lee and I told him I thought he needed a rhythm guitar player in the band, so I tried out for him. They were getting ready to play a gig at a place called the Brave New World. It was a gay bar, although they didn't know it at the time—or at least I didn't. But it was a gig that was coming up, and one that Arthur didn't expect too much attendance at, so he decided I could get on stage with them. I'd already played impromptu in front of him, but he thought he'd try me out in context, so I could learn the songs as I went along, as we were performing at the Brave New World. I made a rush trip to Santa Barbara to get my guitar. I snuck into my parents’ home when I knew they weren't there and my father would be at work. I got my guitar, but my father caught me just as he was coming home for lunch or something, as I was leaving, so I didn't get away scot-free. He was flabbergasted when he saw me—I had long hair, I was wearing very, very strange clothes compared to anything he'd ever been exposed to. He didn't know what to make of me, and the only words he said were: "I don't know you anymore." But I got my guitar, and by that time I had a dog too, a white dog by the name of Snofox—I mention that because he got to be a famous dog, and together he and I got to be fairly well known. So I had my guitar, I had Snofox, and I had a gig in a band. I had everything I needed. I started playing the Brave New World, and it was a good combination—Arthur saw the potential in having some pretty white guy in the band, apart from the musical potential. The first couple of nights we played there, for the first sets anyway, it was all gay people. It was actually a private gay club, so you had to be a member. But obviously we didn't want to be playing gay bars, we weren't oriented for that. By that time I'd been on the street in Hollywood for close to a year, and I'd gotten to be familiar with just about everybody on the street. Everyone knew me and my dog. Were you still living with Bridget? Oh no, no. That only lasted a few weeks or a month. I was still friends with her, but we weren't an item or anything. I'd probably had a bunch of girlfriends by that time. I just kind of hopped from one girl's house to another, sometimes I had a little place of my own. It wasn't that hard to live hand-to-mouth in those days. I very rarely worked; there were a couple times when I took up a few odd jobs here and there, but I was determined to make it as a musician. The first few months were spent just exploring this new world. The Grass Roots had a name for themselves in L.A. then, right? They began to. When I first saw them they didn't have much of a following. I was probably the most enthusiastic fan they had. Then we got this gig at the Brave New World, where we were playing for this private gay audience, we've got men dancing with each other, which was not what we wanted to do. So after I played a few sets over a few evenings, I went up on the Strip one night on our break. I just got tired of the situation—we were all tired of it, we wanted an audience. So I went out on Sunset Strip and told everybody: this is where it's happening, and I gave out directions to the club. By the time I got back to the club, people were already starting to arrive, and between that set and the next, the place was packed. With a whole new crowd. . . A totally, totally different crowd—in fact, that was the last night that it was a gay bar. There was a huge caravan of cars which came down from the Strip. It was just the right time, right place, right people, I guess. It was great, because we had our own place. It wasn't some sleazy club owner taking advantage of the hippy kids—of course at that time they weren't called hippies, this was a couple years before the term was coined. It was the colorful people—or the "freaks" as we were often called. The place was packed from that point on, and Brave New World was a happening thing. So it was transformed into a straight Rock club. Yeah, although it still maintained its private club status for quite awhile. It was just a matter of paying a “membership fee" when you came in, which was really not any different than a regular admission fee. It was a blast. At some point after a couple months we were going to take a break for awhile because the Brave New World was moving to a larger place. The last night we played at the old venue, I got invited to take a trip to San Francisco with Bridget and a friend of hers, a guy from New York who was a friend of Dino Valenti of the Quicksilver Messenger Service. Dino Valenti had gotten busted for Pot in San Francisco and he'd been doing time. Bridget was in love with him, and Dino's friend came from New York and invited her and whoever she wanted to bring to come up to his houseboat in Larksburg, near Sausalito. So Snofox and I went along for the ride, in this big, huge brand—new Thunderbird, smoking Pot and listening to Ravi Shankar the whole way up the coast. Things were shifting into the hippy era . . . Oh yeah, it was definitely picking up steam at this point. We went through Big Sur, and all of a sudden I'm seeing a lot more long-haired people. I began to see distinctions in the cliques of long-haired people. I was in my gigging clothes, I had on skin tight pants and a blousy crepe shirt with ruffles. I had the nickname of "Cupid" back in those days. It came from the period when I was playing with the Grass Roots and this girl, Linda Moss, began making shirts for me. I had a mop of hair and these blousy crepe shirts she would make for me, so I got the nickname Cupid. The fact that people were listening to Ravi Shankar sounds like an early example of that interest in Eastern culture that became so pronounced in the later years of the '60s. This was the first time I was exposed to Ravi Shankar, I'd never heard of him before. This was something that was happening in the Village in New York I guess, and this guy had brought it with him. That was my first exposure, and I really liked it because Shankar was a guy that played spontaneously. I was in awe of this—and here I am exposed to a form of music that is based on this entirely. It was mind-boggling for me. But we stopped at Big Sur and I'm stepping out of this great boat of a car in my tight pants and here's all these earthy-looking people in worn clothes—beards and long hair and faded jeans and work boots. It was whole different mode, and they're kind of looking down their noses at me, and I'm thinking, "Do I belong here?" I was a little embarrassed. So I became aware that there were differences within this new generation of people which I thought I was a part of. What was it like when you got to San Francisco? I loved that city from the moment I got there, I loved everything about it. We drove through Golden Gate park, and through the streets of San Francisco with all these houses piled up next to each other. I went with Bridget to visit someone who was a wife or girlfriend of a member of the Quicksilver Messenger Service, and it turned out to be a girl I knew in Santa Barbara, at the Rondo. So you begin to see how small this whole thing is really, and later as years went by I kept running into people who I knew growing up, even people from El Monte would show up in places like San Francisco. It was an interesting process. Anyway, I just fell in love with the Bay Area. I spent about a week up there on that first trip. What was it like in comparison to L.A.? A breath of fresh air. L.A. had always seemed superficial . . . It still is! Yes, it is that. Frank Zappa, another guy I made friends with in L.A., was a really interesting guy to me. In fact I was on his first album, just as a guest—the Freak Out album. I was one of the people yelling "Help, I'm a rock! Help, I'm a rock!" "We are the brain police!" and all those things. He just came and got me and a few of my friends off the street and put a microphone in front of us and had us do that. Frank Zappa came to the scene lampooning that sort of superficiality: "Brown Shoes Don't Make It," "Plastic People, You've Got to Go Now". . . that was the L.A. scene. Then you get up to San Francisco and people are a lot more real, more down-to-earth. There was still that sort of elitism with some of the long-haired people there, but for the most part it was a breath of fresh air after L.A. Was the music you were hearing at that point a lot different than what you had been playing yourself? In some ways, yes. Love, for example, became heavily psychedelic. Yeah they did. And they fit in real well when they came up to San Francisco later on. What was some of the music you were exposed to in San Francisco? I saw the Jefferson Airplane, before they "made it." This was later on, not that first trip to S.F., but shortly after that I went back up there and I went to the Avalon Ballroom, and I saw Janis Joplin's very first appearance with Big Brother and the Holding Company—she only sang half a set because she only knew a few of the songs. She was just mind-blowing in that performance—this was before her voice got hoarse. You should have heard this girl—just piercing, and then Jim Gurley, and he's got this screaming guitar and she's screaming right along with him, trading licks. How was your state of mind as far as the emerging "hippy" attitudes. Did you fit in with all that? No, I didn't. I got to where I would pointedly tell people, "I'm not a hippy—I'm a barbarian. That's great! Well, it's the truth. I hated it, I hated that term "hippy." I was there when it was coined, when somebody told LIFE magazine, "We're hippies," and I didn't like it. It was one of the two brothers who owned a place called the Psychedelic Shop, which was the first head shop that I'd been exposed to. As self--appointed spokesperson he told that to LIFE magazine and it really irritated me. The youth movement had never been a fashion thing, that's not what the point was. And if it became a fashion thing, you had missed the point. And it did turn into that. Of course it did, and it was inevitable that it would, so it's kind of silly and naive of me to have taken real exception to it. But you asked me how I thought about it, and I didn't think a hell of a lot of it, to tell you the truth. I didn't like it. I wanted to be thought of as something other than that. Did these ideas about peace and love and all that ring true at the time? Yes, they did. That was genuine. It was extremely naive, and I was part of that naivete—I was subject to it, I was young and idealistic and all that. But when it began to become cliched, we saw that that's what it was. It became something marketable. Right, exactly, and then I began to distance myself from it. Then it was no longer representing me. To get back to your story, you returned to L.A. . . I went back down to L.A. and found out that I'd been replaced in the band, and the reason was that I was too young to play in many of the clubs, legally. I was also still learning to play. I could play a real good rhythm guitar, but there was somebody who had more experience at that. His name was Brian MacLean and he took advantage of the opportunity—I wasn't there—and made a pitch to the band, and beat me out. I wanted to be real gracious about it, and I'm still to this day kicking myself in the ass for it. I should have been showing up at some of the rehearsals that we were supposed to have had, but I'd been gone and had gotten hung up in San Francisco. So this guy took advantage of the opportunity and I can't say that I didn't resent that. But you stayed on good terms with Arthur Lee and the band? As time went on, yes. I never did make peace with Brian MacLean. I never really cared for him, I knew him before, and he really put on the "pretty" thing, whereas with me, I couldn't help it. I didn't have any choice because I wasn't shaving yet and I had that kind of face, I guess. But this guy put it on, it was a cultivated image. So he moved in on my spot in the band and got it. I wanted to be gracious about it, and I'm trying to figure out, how do I behave in this situation? I'm young, wondering what I should do. What I wound up doing was loaning Brian my guitar. He didn't have an electric guitar, he'd been a folk player. So I loaned him my guitar, and then I went back up to San Francisco and got myself established up there. Having lost your position in the band you didn't really have any reason to stick around in L.A.? No, I didn't. It was perfect timing in a way, because I had fallen in love with the Bay Area, although I probably would have stayed in L.A. if I'd kept my place in the band. Had they changed the name from the Grass Roots to Love yet? No, that was a little bit later. It had happened by the next time I came down to L.A., which was to collect all my stuff, including my guitar. That was some months later. I went back up to the Bay Area and just kind of bummed around. I didn't really know where I was going, and I didn't really know anybody. I knew that one guy who owned the houseboat and there were a couple of other people I'd met there, and in some cases I'd met people and I didn't even know how to even find their places again. So I went to Berkeley for awhile, I bummed around in North Beach for a time, and finally found my way into the Haight-Ashbury. It took awhile, because Haight-Ashbury was not known then for what it later became. The Haight evolved into that . . . Yes, and it's unfortunate that it turned into what it did, because it was really a nice little community. It was actually a ghetto; it was just outside the Fillmore district, which is the ghetto. It was a low rent district, right next to the park. As far as the scene goes, there was just a handful of artists and musicians living in the area. The Grateful Dead lived in the area, and The Charlatans—two bands—lived there, and some artists. There was the Haight-Levels, which was a Jazz club. You could go in there twenty four hours a day and listen to Jazz music. Then there was the Psychedelic Shop and the Donut Shop, and that as pretty much it. Were you taking lots of LSD at this point? I never really took "lots of LSD." I never really went looking for it. In L.A. I'd had a real serious bummer one time, being in the midst of too many people—it was just the wrong way to do it. Of course you learn from your mistakes, and I learned that LSD is not a party drug. I took the attitude that when it comes to me, that's the time. And I never really went looking for it. Pot, on the other hand, I smoked pretty much every day, but not a great deal. If I smoked a joint a day, I was perfectly happy with that. That was the extent of my drug involvement. I never got into heroin. I experimented a little bit with uppers and downers, to see what they were—and didn't like 'em. Actually I liked the Speed, in pill form, but it ran my health down so bad. I got really sick one time. Luckily I've always had a good "landing"—some girl would take me home and take care of me. I was always real fortunate that way. But I'd gotten real sick after a run of uppers, so I got out of that scene, and tried to discourage anyone I knew from doing that. I lost a lot of friends to crank and heroin. Could you see a clear point where things shifted in those directions? You mean as far as the types of drugs? Yes, after the so-called Summer of Love in 1967 . . . and by the '70s it was in full-swing. It reached a peak in the '70s, but as far as the shift occurring, it happened in '66 and '67. There's a legend about where the name Love came from, that it was a tip of the hat to you. Well, at least that's what Arthur Lee told me. I'd gotten a gig in another band in San Francisco. I'd found my way into the Haight-Ashbury, fell in with this nice community, and this girl I'd befriended told me there was a band which practiced down at the Straight Theater—which was still called the Haight Theater at that time. It was an old theater that was renovated by a couple of guys called the Resner brothers, and they were going to re-open it as the Straight Theater. But it was a long ways away from that and there was this band practicing there called The Outfit. I joined the band. It was San Francisco Rock, all original music, a pretty good little band. I didn't last long with them. My problem with many of the bands that I took up with—and I think this had some bearing on my situation with Arthur Lee—was that I had a tendency to upstage my fellow band members. That happened with The Outfit, and it lead to difficulties . . . Did you upstage them in your playing? It was the attention that would be brought to me when I was on stage, because I moved, man—I didn't just stand there playing the guitar. I moved with it, I danced with it as I played it. The parting of the ways happened with the Outfit when I got offered a contract, and it didn't include the rest of the band. There weren't that many Rock clubs in those days. There were a few coffeehouses that were being converted over into Rock clubs, and then there was the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium, that was pretty much the extent of it. We were playing a gig at a place called the Piano Bar, and some guys from Sun Records wanted to sign me up and take me to Vegas—on my own. They weren't interested in the rest of the band. But back to Love for a moment—what was the explanation you heard for their name change? This occurred some time after I had joined The Outfit. I was still commuting between the Bay Area and Los Angeles every so often, although I'd set up home—base in San Francisco. Once I had joined The Outfit, I needed my guitar. I was playing lead guitar now for the first time, because that's what the opening in the band called for. I became a lead guitar player really fast in order to get myself settled into a spot in the band. I knew going into it that it would be an interim arrangement. I liked the band, but it wasn't something that I felt myself staying with for a long time. I needed to go down to L.A. and settle my affairs, and to get my guitar, so I borrowed an old VW Bug and made a trip down there for a couple of weeks. While I was there this situation emerged with the other band called the Grass Roots from the Bay Area coming to L.A. They'd just had a hit record. They pretty much captured the band name by being the first to record using that name. So there was kind of a war going on when they got to L.A., with people taking sides over "who is the real Grass Roots?" At that point, Arthur Lee's Grass Roots were playing at a club called Beato Lito's. I went to the club and I waited until the band took a break and then I told Brian that I needed my guitar back. He got real surly about it. That was still his only guitar at the time? Apparently so, but I'd given him plenty of time to use it, and get one of his own. I probably would have been amenable to him at least finishing the gig that night, and after that he could go and rent a guitar, which was pretty standard practice in L.A. There are music rental shops everywhere there, and you can rent good guitars. I'd given him plenty of time with my guitar, so I wasn't feeling too guilty about asking for it back. I had planned to at least let him finish out the night using it, but when I asked where it was and he pointed it out to me, it was leaning against the drum kit on the stage. I went up and looked at it, and he'd just treated it like shit. It had been this beautiful, immaculate guitar and now it had big gouges in it. The case for it was lost, and it was in really bad shape. So it almost turned into a fight out in front of the club, but I just took my guitar and split. He was pissed off because I was taking it in the middle of the evening, but after I saw the way he treated it . . . Meanwhile this controversy over the band's name was still brewing. I spent a couple of weeks down there, picking up my clothes—I'd left stuff scattered all over the place, with different friends. Now that I was going to be staying in the Bay Area, I went around saying my goodbyes and letting people know where I was, saying farewell to friends. Also trying to figure out what to do with the guitar, because I didn't want to keep it anymore. Every time I looked at the thing it left a bitter taste in my mouth. I traded it in for an Epiphone, a hollow body, which was a real trade-down. Also thrown into the trade was a student model sitar. That was my first sitar—it wasn't very good as it didn't have any sympathetic strings on it, but it gave me a way to practice the scales and learn the basic technique. Also I found another instrument in a different music store as I was shopping around. It was a Greek bouzouki, and really, really cheap. It had been sitting in the window forever and it needed a little bit of work. Were you picking up these more exotic instruments just for the pleasure of playing them, or did you have something specific in mind to use them? I hadn't any real clear idea where I was going to go with it, but I was beginning to evolve an idea for a band of my own. I wanted to use new instrumentation, I didn't want to use the same Rock band instrumentation. I was listening to Middle Eastern music, I was listening to Jazz—I used to go to the Haight Levels and kick back and listen to Jazz played in the mode of Coltrane and Mingus, all those guys. I was listening to classical, I liked Vivaldi and Mozart . . . Your interests had gone beyond the typical four piece Rock band. What I wanted to do was play Rock music with all these other elements being a part of it. I didn't want to lose the hard, driving rawness of Rock, but I wanted to bring in this sort of "universal" music concept that I was evolving, a multi-cultural, multi-disciplined sort of thing. It was extremely vague at this point in my conception. It was something that was just beginning to emerge as I was listening to these other types of music. So I began to pick up other instruments: a dulcimer, the student model sitar, the bouzouki, an acoustic guitar. But while all this was going on there was the controversy over the band name Grass Roots in L.A., and eventually it was decided that the band I'd been part of was going to change their name. Just before I went back to San Francisco I was at one of the hang-outs on the Strip, a place called Ben Franks, a "standard fare" eating establishment, let's say. But it was a convenient spot, and the colorful people used to go in there for coffee and cake, to hang out. I was there by myself, getting ready to leave, and Snofox was out front. Arthur Lee came in, and sat down with me. He told me that he'd decided to re-name the band Love in honor of me, alluding to the Cupid nickname that I had. I felt honored. It kind of healed the hurt feelings. Did you keep up with what Love was doing after that point? Oh yeah. Not religiously, but I heard the records—the Love album, with "Little Red Book" which was a hit. I was glad for them. The first album had a song called "Signed, D.C.". Arthur wrote a lot of great songs, with a lot of personal emotion and experiences. At first hearing a lot of it sounds like typical hippy psychedelia, but there was a darker current underneath a lot of the lyrics . . . "Signed, D.C." was a really well done piece of music, for the statement that it made. "D.C." was Don Conka, who was the drummer when I was with the band. He had gone the way of the hypodermic needle and died, an overdose. Arthur wrote the song as if it were a letter from Don. And this was prior to that shift we were talking about, that slide down of the youth movement into heroin and the whole suicide thing that happened. This was right on the edge of it, and he was telling that story . . . and he went down that path himself, Arthur did. Johnny too. Did you see that shift or shadow of the harder drugs coming over everything? It had always been on the fringes. It had always been lurking around the edges of the youth movement, because it had always been part of the Jazz and Beat scene, which in some ways had been the precursor of the youth movement of the '60s. So it wasn’t hat far away or that unknown. I began to see it much earlier, even while I was still living in L.A. there were people getting strung out on crank. There was a very little bit of heroin use, and of course there were the pills. People didn't really draw the distinction between the different types of chemicals, they just sort of got mixed up with one another. It was all part of this "new experiment" that a lot of kids got involved with. We all laughed when they said that marijuana would lead to other things, the old Reefer Madness line—but in a sense they were right. You have to start somewhere. Well, it's just that there was nobody there to tell us what these different chemicals did—how they work, and which ones did something that we would want to experience and which ones we'd want to stay away from, and why. Nobody was there to tell us any of these things. You have to find out for yourself. Exactly, the hard way. It was real easy to take the attitude that if you had a good experience smoking a joint of marijuana, then you could drop some pills and it would be equally beneficial in terms of experience. And it wasn't, it was a completely different type of thing. It was real easy for some people to fall into this crank trap. I lost some friends right off the bat, even before I went to San Francisco. That's exactly what it was for me, a loss of friends. Because they were no longer my friends, it was as if they had died. They didn't literally die . . . . . . but they became these paranoid, back-stabbing people—their whole personalities changed, and all the things that I liked about them as people and made me want to be their friend, those things were gone. That was really bad for me, and I made the decision very early on that I wasn't going to go down that road. Was that due to awareness of what happened to other people, or was your disposition something that didn't tend toward those substances? Heroin I decided about early on. I had a friend and he was a singer in an R&B band. When I was in L.A. I'd still continued to go out to the Red Velvet once in awhile, to listen to some R&B. The other kids—the Freaks or whatever they were being called at that time, the people wearing the colorful wild clothes—most of them didn't go to the Red Velvet, it was a whole different kind of scene. But I still liked the music and there was a guy that played there fairly frequently, and I really liked him. Then one day he showed up at Ben Franks and I looked into his eyes and he looked like he had just come out of the grave. There were tombstones in his eyes. I went and tried to talk to him, and I knew what it was, that he had just shot a fix of heroin. I tried to talk to him and I said, "Man, this isn't you," and he wasn't there. He didn't hear me, he just said, "Hey Bobby, how 'ya doin'” I wasn't there. And I made that decision, I'm not going there. You can't straddle that fence either, in your life. You're either into that scene with them, or you're a victim to them. And if you're in it with them you're a victim to them anyway, so it's a set—up, once they've gone down that road. Although I do know people who've been down that road and have come back, they've learned from it. I'm glad I didn't have to go down there to learn myself what it was. They'll always be addicts, they'll always have that. It will always be a matter of will power, and decision, and choice. They'll always be struggling against it. In a more positive sense, what effect did the newly emerging drug culture have on the music? Oh god, it had a profound influence on the music from the very beginning. From the very beginning when I got involved with it, "Tambourine Man" was about LSD, you know . . . it was the first song, the first exposure that I had to the scene, to the so—called youth culture, to that whole emergence of the '60s youth movement and being turned on to Pot and LSD. So perhaps my own personal observation of the lifestyle that I was living was influenced and skewed in the sense that I was primed to receive that information which permeated the movement. It seemed like from the very beginning that the consciousness expanding substances were always a part of it, and it wasn't so much the drugs but rather: we are finding out who we are. That's what it was about, because that's what the drugs were for. I hate to categorically define all these substances as "drugs" because they don't belong all lumped together. I wouldn't lump marijuana together with heroin; in actuality they are very different substances and have different applications. It's unfortunate that we didn't have some sort of way to know in advance that if we are going to go down this path of finding ourselves, which things we should stay away from and why, and which things may be some catalyst in this emerging understanding, this quest. Was this "quest" also occurring with the music itself? I don't know how you could have separated it. It was part of it, the music was the voice of it—the uncensorable voice of what was happening, this awakening that was occurring to the human species at that time among a certain group of people, on a worldwide basis. It was a really astonishing thing that happened. Sadly, it gets cliched to death in the whole hippy fashion thing, and gets buried under that. The hippy fashion superceded it . . . At least in the awareness of the media and the mainstream population, yes. Were you conscious of this at the time, how the whole quest you spoke of was unfolding? Absolutely, that was what it was for me. When it became fashion, and became bracketed under this term "hippy" I resented it—it didn't represent me. When people talked to me about it I told them, "I'm not a hippy." That's not what it was for me. It was always that quest. It was frightening, it was moving, it was inspiring. It was crazy, it was extremely humorous at times, it was tragic at times. It was all those things that that kind of on-the-edge quest is. Was there a feeling that all rules had been cast aside? Absolutely. That's really what it was. There was so much that we had discovered was invalid in the social structure, in the mainstream . . . but like with the drugs, we were out there fending for ourselves. Nobody could take us by the hand and lead us down the path and say: this is what you do, this is what you don't do, and why. Nobody was doing that, and we could only learn by trial and error. The whole thing was like that. It's so difficult to characterize that whole event . . . How do you look back on it now, since obviously some of what you're saying is with hindsight. For example, a lot of those people who made themselves out to be against the system, not part of the mainstream, and created that aura around themselves—they later just became the system. People like Abbie Hoffman, who were such agitators back then, only to end up working on Wall Street. I understand what you're asking, but I'm not sure how to answer it, and one reason is because I didn't go down that the road that they did. I didn't care for them at the gate, I didn't think they had a hell of a lot to say that I wanted to hear. You weren't really sucked into that aspect . . . I wasn't trying to declare a war against the United States, and I didn't believe in this idea of "Go kill your parents"—those kinds of statements were extremely irresponsible. I understand where it comes from, I was young too, and I can get out there and play guitar until it makes your ears bleed, hang my emotions out there on the line for everybody to see. I don't have any problem doing that, but it's me playing music, not me telling you to go out and kill your parents, or making statements that are possibly going to influence other people in acting out behavior that would effectively put an end to the quest that I was on. I didn't like that scene. On the other hand, we all became part of the system. We all were absorbed in one way or another. In my case I was just another one of the '60s casualties, only I'm still alive. That same disillusionment which led some people to heroin addiction, led me to prison. It was that same reaching the bitter end, and realizing there wasn't any escape. I might have had fantasies about sailing away to Jamaica and living on the beach for the rest of my life, but they were only just fantasies and you finally realize that, and there's nothing left to do but knuckle down. It's not going to be as easy as you thought, and you're going to have to go down the same road that your parents did, in a sense. You have to experience the processes they went through. It'll be different, because this is a different time and awareness in certain areas, but still, we all were absorbed in one fashion or another. As one gets older you become wiser and you can see that wanting to kill your parents when you're 15 years old is probably a universal thing, and something you quickly grow out of. It absolutely is, but in a figurative sense. If only we had the ceremonies that many cultures do which ritualize that process of killing your parents. The rite of passage where in order for a boy to become a man he must metaphorically kill his father. It's a metaphor, and it's not meant to be taken literally, but it literally does happen in the internal mindscape of the person coming of age. You need to come out from under that authority and then become that authority. Exactly, in order to be the individual. It's part of who and what we are. It's a necessary part of simple survival and continued adaptation, because you can't just follow this mold, you have to be your own individual. To emerge as your own individual you have to say goodbye to childhood, and become your father, and the only way you can do that is to figuratively kill the father figure that you have been looking up to. It seems to me there was a phenomenon in the late '60s where you had a lot of people who were incapable of growing up and taking responsibility for their actions. All the rules had been broken, and they were adults, but they were still running around like children, not feeling like they needed to take any responsibilities. Did you see that going on, where people didn't really want to be strong and assert themselves in a responsible way? [laughs in acknowledgment] Yes, but it catches up with you! If you go down that road, it's going to come down on you hard. It sets you up. Maybe that's the way to do it for some people, I don't know. It will set up circumstances that really bring home the process of growing up. To continue to hang onto that childhood irresponsibility, to try to sustain and live it for a length of time, it catches up to you. It's not that that's a bad thing—it's what happened to me. I was so adamantly hanging on to that, to the point of desperation, hanging onto that high youthful spirit, that I killed a man. In the process of trying to hang onto that I killed a man and brought myself to prison. That brought the responsibility home to me in a very definite way, and there was no way to squirm away from it. It's like being held up against the wall and someone telling you, "You're going to stay there until you figure it all out, until you make it work, until you accept your responsibility, until you emerge as the man you're supposed to be." That's what it's like, and when people hang onto that irresponsible life they will eventually put themselves into a situation where they must deal with the realities. And if they don't go to it, it's going to come to them. Exactly. It's usually a way of really bringing it on as a challenge, because the events that occur that make it necessary to do that are generally the kind that really slap you back. San Francisco must have been a very different scene than you had been used to in L.A. It was very different. The people seemed much more down to earth—but maybe that's the wrong term since some of them were pretty "out there"! But in one sense it seemed more real. The L.A. scene had been so superficial, and that veneer was pretty much stripped away from the people who were involved in the youth movement up north. I'm not sure why, maybe it was just the ambience of the city, where there was a lot of Old World influence, even in the architecture. In L.A. you look around and everything is cardboard and stucco. In San Francisco it's old rotting wood, old stone . . . What about differences in the music scene? The music was in a sense more adventurous. San Francisco had its own style and sound. It was much more diverse, the people were more open to new influences in the music. You had the main bands with the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, and The Charlatans. The city had influenced the musicians, you could tell. For example The Charlatans, they dressed in 1920s clothes-. They had this cross between psychedelia and then a 1920s thing, and their music was like that, it had a '20s sort of boogie-woogie piano roll to it. They had those flat straw hats, some of them, and they dressed the part, but yet they were a rock band. There was a lot of that kind of thing going on. The soul of the city got into the people. How did you come to form your own band there? As I played with The Outfit, I realized it wasn't what I wanted to do. It was pretty much a stock Rock and Roll band. I brought as much innovation to it as I could. It was good for me as I got an opportunity for more performing experience. I took to the stage like a fish to water, naturally. I loved performing for people; I was comfortable and it wasn't anything I had to force at all. I became a lead guitar player, more melodically oriented as opposed to just strumming chords, during the period when I played with The Outfit. I was experimenting a lot more with that because I was also playing sitar, which is strictly a melodic instrument, and I was doing some experiments with the bouzouki. I had no idea how to play the bouzouki in the traditional way, and I still don't! I simply adapted my guitar playing to it, made up my own tunings, which came to be an open D tuning. I applied whatever I had on guitar and other influences to it. It definitely gave my bouzouki playing a Middle Eastern kind of sound, because of the scales I was playing and the tuning. Since there were some similarities between the bouzouki and the mandolin, I applied what I had heard or seen other people do with the mandolin. I developed this "thing" I did with fretted instruments, which didn't come from any tradition. It came from whatever I had pulled out of the environment, and what I'd heard and what I invented. I knew that I wanted to do something other than the traditional, and as I listened to music and let these concepts knock around in my brain for awhile, I came up with this idea of forming an electric orchestra. I wanted to keep the raw electric thing happening. But when you were playing the bouzouki and sitar, these must have been acoustic, right? Actually I wasn't performing with them. At this point I was still with The Outfit, only using electric guitar. On my own time I was playing these other things, and my vision was eventually of course to electrify them. At that time, I had no idea how to do that—there really wasn't much available. But I was not content to do this straight instrumentation. I wanted new instrumentation, I wanted to bring in new sounds. I wanted to continue to do Rock, but to bring all these new influences and timbres into the music. The only way I could see to do that was to form a band of my own. I couldn't join a band and expect to offer a major change in direction and get everyone to go along with it. I could see the writing on the wall and I began evolving the concept for an electric orchestra. There wasn't anything at the time that I knew of like that, bringing in new instrumention, although George Martin was introducing unusual instrument voicings in some of the Beatles recordings. What I did was to put ads on bulletin boards wherever I could find them, saying that I was looking for musicians to form the first electric symphony orchestra as I called it. I was putting the word out in general, and the first member to join the band was David LaFlamme, who went on to form It's a Beautiful Day later on. He was a violin player with some classical training, but he wasn't really doing anything with himself. I got the impression he had been singing in a gay bar wearing tight velvet clothes, with his violin playing "Turkey in the Straw" and singing songs. Something along those lines. He was kind of a straight guy when I met him, but he was inspired by the idea of being able to bring his violin into the youth movement, it was an opportunity for him. He was at loose ends, looking for something. Together we rented an old warehouse on Page St in the Haight district and got it ready to use as a place for rehearsals. It wasn't ideal, it was cold, it was just a big corrugated steel warehouse. We got some carpet pads and hung them on clothelines to form a studio area and had kerosene heaters, which of course stank, to warm the place up a bit. Shortly after David hooked up with me other people began showing up. A cellist, another violinist . . . So these are acoustic instruments. At that point they were, but my intention all along was to electrify them all. Everything was going to be "electrified." That was the word I used—it wasn't 'electronic' or 'processed' or any of those things that I might call it now. I didn't even really know how I was going to go about it. I had no knowledge of any music technology beyond my guitar amp, but I figured that if I was resourceful I would come up with a way to do it. I've had a lot of confidence in my ability to make things happen, to pull together. I don't know where that comes from—it was largely simply being young and very naive—but it seemed to be the right approach because I did in fact do the things that I set out to do. As I would have some success in the process of doing that, of course, I'd have more confidence about being resourceful. It seemed to work out. The electric orchestra was, needless to say, an ambitious idea, and had I been older or wiser I probably never would have attempted it. I think I was just beginning to turn eighteen at that point. Were you effected much by philosophy that was floating around at time, like Aleister Crowley's slogan of "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". Not really at all. It was just the way I was. I wasn't involved in any sort of doctrine, whatsoever. I liked the idea of magic, but it was more persona than anything else, it wasn't discipline. It was like my music. My music came from no discipline—I didn't study music, I didn't know how to read music, I was never given any lessons. It was just something I did. There's a certain discipline in that. You taught yourself how to play. But for me it wasn't discipline. It wasn't work, it was play. It was something I did because it gave me pleasure, and because I really wanted to know what would happen if I put these two notes together. It was a whole process of losing myself in play. I approached everything that way, I felt the same way about magic, and when I say that I don't mean "occult" magic, because I knew nothing of the discipline, but yet I believed I could make things happen—things that had never been done before. That to me was magic. It didn't come from any form of discipline, because I hadn't been on the earth long enough, or had the opportunity or inclination, to really study anything. There are often references to the resurge of mysticism and such during this period, but how many people were serious about Occultism then? It's style and persona. That's what it largely is, it's a search for identity. "This has to be part of my identity because it's got color," that kind of thing. I saw that a lot, and it was fine. It was all part of the individual personal theater to me. I recognized that, and I would style myself. A lot of people in later years got this notion that I was somehow into the "occult" or something. Never. Never in my life did I care one whit about the so-called "occult." But I did style myself, theatrically, as somebody that had some sort of arcane knowledge or wisdom. I never said that I did, but with my behavior I knew that I could create that which had not existed before. In that sense I was able to practice a form of magic. I guess that's where that came from, other people's ideas impressions, came over to this idea that I had some arcane knowledge and was into Aleister Crowley. It never happened, never once. I do know a little bit about him, I've since read some stuff that he's done and so forth, but at that time I didn't. Kenneth Anger seemed to feel you instinctively represented something along those lines. Exactly. The phrase he used was "natural magician." That's what he saw. I didn't care, really, because I wasn't looking in the mirror all the time, thinking "Oh you see what I wanted you to see." I didn't give a damn, I was just doing what I was doing. I don't think a flower grows thinking of itself and how good it looks. It just does what it does, and of course it does look very good. |
How far did the Orkustra get?
Exactly, just completely in a whole new paradigm. We eventually whittled
the numbers down to five: oboe, violin, upright bass, percussion, and me
playing guitar and bouzouki. We became known as the Orkustra, but because
we are only a five piece, I didn't feel comfortable spelling "orchestra"
in the way it is supposed to be, so we came up with the variation in spelling.
The Orkustra became pretty well-known, we played all the major venues numerous
times. A lot of people liked us. We started off in coffee shops until we'd
built a large enough following that we were called for gigs at the Fillmore,
the Avalon Ballroom, Carousel Ballroom . . . 
It's a large mansion on the corner of Scott and Fulton, right across the
street from a little park. It had once been the US embassy for Tzarist Russia.
Great place. Someone owned it at that time that I was living there, who planned
to restore it—apparently a fairly moneyed person. I met him one time. We
were just kind of holding the place, Kenneth and I. It was a beautiful old
Victorian, with a 360-degree view of the city from the tower. There were
three levels. It was covered with peeling white paint and you could see the
old gray weathered wood underneath. But you really couldn't look at it without
seeing the elegance in the dark wood panelling and the angel frescoes, arched
ceilings, and the cornices with the art nouveau faces on them. But it was
weathered and in disrepair.
I did lose Snofox when I got back to L.A., he disappeared. It broke my heart
of course. I wound up with another dog from a girl who I had given one of
Snofox's puppies to—he had fathered a litter of pups with a white Shepherd,
and I'd given one of them to a girl by the name of Gayle in San Francisco
when I was living there. On one of my trips to the Bay Area I ran into her
again, and she decided to come along with me, and she still had the dog.
His name was Hocus. So he and I became fast pals, and he kind of replaced
his father. He was a great dog too, he carried on the tradition. We'd go to
places like Glen Ellen, or Mendecino to the Sea Gull Inn, and I could always
go in there and play. The girls were colorful, and I was colorful and I'd
go in and play the bouzouki or the guitar. I was writing a few songs then,
although it was mostly still instrumental. The girls would pass the hat,
and we got by. Whenever I was in the L.A. area I would stop by and see Charlie
and his little commune. That was kind of what I was doing: commune hopping.
A lot of the places where I would stop and stay were places where counter-culture
people gathered. Naturally in the L.A. area the same was true, and one of
the places I would stop was Charlie's place.
Then I traded both of them for a boat in the Santa Barbara harbor. I lived
there for awhile, with no girlfriends, for six or eight months. My plans
were to leave the country, I was going to fix the boat up and sail to Jamaica.
Of course it was a childish fantasy, because I didn't know anything about
sailing when I started out, although I learned fast from people who could
tell me anything. It was a little sailboat and had the distinction of being
the smallest sailboat that was ever sailed single-handedly from the United
States to Hawaii. This had been in 1956, and it turned out that the hull was
too rotted to make any kind of long journey. So I wound up with this thing
that was okay for living in, but it wasn't going to be good enough to do
what I wanted to, and it was going to cost way more than I had in resources
to fix it. It was called the "Island Girl." It was featured in two issues
of Yachting magazine—I had the actual issues because they came with the boat.
Did you have a completely new trial?
Nixon declared him guilty before his trial had begun, which was really bizarre
and highly unethical for a lawyer, even moreso for one who had become president.
And consider this: the Mi Lai massacre trial of Lieutenant Calley was going
on simultaneously with the Manson case. Of course I was already on Death Row
at that point, and I watched the whole thing from the television across the
tier from me. I was able to see it for myself, I watched all those events:
Lt. Calley and Manson both tried at the same time for massacres, one under
the auspices of the United States of America, and the other under this so-called
megalomaniac "hippie cult leader," both convicted at the same time. And also
at the same time all this was happening there was the massacre of college
students at Kent State by the National Guard, the Chicago Seven trial, and
of course the wholesale lockup of leaders from the black community. A lot
of things were going on, all at the same time—the dinosaur struck back.
What happened after you were sentenced? 
That's the thing, and of course for the first number of years that I was
in prison, it was a violent world and I felt like I had to be violent, in
order to survive. In the long run I've realized that I really didn't have
to do that. But, I don't know, maybe I did—those were really insanely violent
times. The prison system was not the huge monster that it is now, where there's
lots and lots of staff. There were less guards in proportion to the number
of prisoners back then, and the way they kept control to a large extent was
by allowing, and sometimes instigating, conflict between the prisoners. As
long as they could keep the prisoners at each other's throats they would
have less to worry about with general prison uprisings. 
There are definitely moments where the sound and image mesh together
perfectly. 
About five years prior. The earliest incarnations of the device were analog,
and the concept evolved from the E-bow, from playing guitar with the E-bow
and being able to sustain a string indefinitely. Having studied synthesizers
and the use of voltage-controlled amplifiers, filters, and envelope generators,
I realized I could sustain the sound from a string and then use these processors
to control the timbre and amplitude. In other words, you wouldn't hear the
sound from the vibrating guitar string until the envelope generator was triggered,
which then opened the voltage-controlled amplifier and allowed the sound
to pass through. What I had essentially created with this idea was a variation
on the subtractive analog synthesis technology that was prevalent in those
days—the basis of the Moog synthesizer—using filters and amplifiers, controlled
by envelope generators that variously opened and closed them to allow the
sound of oscillators to pass through. In this case, however, the oscillator
was not an electronic circuit that was in oscillation mode, but rather a
guitar string that was being driven by the feedback with an E-bow type of
circuit. 
The design was featured in Polyphony magazine a bit later. At that time synthesizers
didn't have velocity response, and that was something I found essential. I
didn't want to try to play a guitar that didn't have the dynamics, that wouldn't
respond to variations in playing dynamics. I needed that range, so I designed
a circuit that used piezo transducers, combined it with a circuit for a touch-switch
I found in a book, and called it the Dynamic Touch Controller. I mounted
two of these devices on the instrument to control the triggering and the
amplitude of the envelope generators. I wanted to use the dynamic response
of the piezo sensors in combination with the envelope generators, and in
order to do that I had to create some tricky mixing circuits to control the
output value of the envelope generator with the signal from the Dynamic Touch
Controller. It worked out, extremely well in fact, and the instrument made
some great sounds. I would send the output from the two strings to individual
processor chains of filters and analog delays—anything I could think of to
modify the sound. You would not have believed the box I built to house all
the processing circuits . . . 
Yes, it was absolutely stuffed! It was a rat's nest inside, there was an
unbelievable amount of wiring in there. And the repairs when things malfunctioned
were a nightmare! The wires weren't marked, and I'd have to go in there and
try to figure out, what did I do three months ago—which of these wires is
connected to which circuit? God, it was a mess inside! But it worked.
When did you find out that there were other people developing instruments
along a similar continuum as your Dream Machine? 
Once again I had the equivalent of one "string," and it controlled a monophonic
synthesizer, but I used the concept of being able to transpose a single line
using multiple strings by simply having multiple right-hand triggers that
were tuned to different intervals, say fourths apart, like on a guitar. If
I was playing a run that would normally be played on multiple strings on
a guitar, I would simply change from one right hand trigger button to another,
instead of from one string to another. And I would change my left hand fingering
pattern to correspond as if I were changing to a different string. That worked
great. It's a little difficult to keep it straight in your head at first,
but once you got used to it . . . suddenly I could sustain a note as long
as I wanted and I could do these very rapid runs in the same way as on a
guitar, but at the same time controlling a synthesizer and having that diverse
sound-making capability beyond what is possible with a guitar. I had a working
prototype that did the job really quite well, and I used a monophonic synthesizer
that I purchased from Paia as a kit, a Proteus One, and it worked great.
It was a little buggy at times, but mainly just because of the types of touch
switches I'd used. If the contacts for the switches got too moist from my
fingers they would become somewhat erratic, and I had to clean them frequently.
I knew I needed a better type of switch, and I also found that I needed tactile
feedback—that's the problem with a touch-switch, you really don't have tactile
feedback that lets you know when you are actually making contact. I discovered
that that was important. 
No, not much. I held it like a guitar, and I could strap it on like one,
but there was only this one ribbon on the neck and all these buttons on the
body for the right hand controller. There were LEDs for position markers
on the side of the neck that would light up as I was playing that particular
position, and if I was sharp or flat the color of the LED would change—so
I had visual as well as tactile feedback. That worked out pretty well. The
thing was great for playing leads with lots of bending, slides and natural
vibrato. That was the first and last Syntar prototype. I continued designing
on paper, but I was unable to continue getting any further due to tightening
of security in California prisons. Besides, I couldn't get the materials
that I would need to take it to another level. I needed microprocessors and
somebody who could program and write code, so that I could develop a MIDI
version, because that was the next step. MIDI had arrived, and I knew right
away that that was the only way to go. MIDI had all of the parameters that
I needed for controlling all sorts of aspects of synthesizers, in fact far
more than most synthesizers accommodate. It was all there and all I needed
to do was take my concept and translate it into a MIDI language that would
allow it to control any synthesizer—man, that opened up the whole world!
But I was stuck, because I was in prison and couldn't develop it any further,
and certainly couldn't do it from prison, trying to work through someone
else. But years later, as it happened, I saw a product announcement in Electronic
Musician for a device called the Z-tar. It even had a name similar to the
Syntar, and in the picture it looked very much like my original digital version
of the Syntar. It had buttons all over it, no strings. I saw the product
announcement a couple of years before I made contact with the guy who developed
it . . . but I'm getting ahead of myself. 
I met Barbara in a rather interesting way, which came as a surprise to me.
I've had a few other relationships with women while I've been in prison that
sometimes seemed to be borne of desperation—on both sides. Of course I learned
from those experiences. Meeting Barbara was a revelation, leading to a relationship
quite unlike those other relationships. 
People who buy my music through White Dog Music will get it in the highest
quality, they'll also get the imagery that goes with it, and the revenues
will contribute to supporting the artist rather than just ripping the artist
off. That's the intent, and we have plenty of foundation in place for it.
There are three CDs done and a fourth is in the works. I'm also planning
to distribute singles using the mp3 format, which I think is going to be
the hot ticket—I think it's going to pick up where the old 45 single left
off. When I grew up as a kid, people bought singles; the radio was playing
singles and if you liked a song you could go pick up the single for a buck,
and if you still liked it after a few playings you would buy the album. I
think that's what mp3 is going to do. 
You can sell a song for a small amount of money, and if someone likes the
mp3 version, chances are pretty good that they're going to buy the CD. It's
a good way to get the music out there. There's a lot of talk about mp3 and
piracy and certainly that's going to go on, but that will go on with any
format, it always has. We all live with that, and hopefully we'll all come
to respect artists more and not just rip each other off. That's what it really
comes down to, because you can't legislate against piracy very effectively.
Yes, and from the perspective of other prisoners as well. I've got footage
of the cell blocks, the death- chamber, wall and gun towers, the words of
a dozen prisoners, and music to go with it. It's about two--thirds complete
and it's very, very moody. This is such an insane thing, this invention of
prison . . .There’s getting close to being a couple of million people in
prison in the United States. That's a lot of people. And it's only exacerbating
the crime problem, because at best it's a band-aid solution, and at worst
it is creating the next crime-wave. The resources that would normally go for
education and social service programs are being funneled into building prisons.
The reason is that they've become very profitable. The bill of goods being
sold to the public is: "We're protecting you," but actually the public is
being fleeced. It's a tragic thing all the way around, and hopefully this
current social apathy about all this will break at some point and people
will take an interest in what's going on all around them, because they're
really being harmed. The social fabric is being damaged by this in the long
term, and people don't realize this.