My friends and family have repeatedly told me,” You should write a book about the things you have seen and done”. I have considered it, but I will skip over a few chapters to get to this. Realize that I have to change many of the names to protect the guilty. I wouldn’t want to ruin anyone’s chance at being elected president here. I have had the dishonor of standing in close proximity to some really messed up individuals and witness the folly that they were going to inevitably purvey.
So, to start with the early years and make it fast. I was born in Tipton Indiana, then moved to Nashville, TN then to LA, California and lived a year in Chicago. I grew up, for the most part, in Dayton, Ohio. During the 70s it was mostly an industrial town manufacturing items for the auto industry. Many people I knew either made car parts or tires for a living and when these plants laid off, drinking booze and taking drugs seemed to be the natural pastime to take up.
My first experiences playing live music came when I wasn’t doing too well in math at school. I was assigned an older smart kid to help me out as a tutor; I was 13 or 14 then. His name was Bill Cook. I can use his real name because he wasn’t guilty of anything I know of. Well, math tutoring kind of went out the window. Bill had a photographic memory as far as anyone could tell and actually more like a digital music copier. If he heard it once he could play it on guitar. He was left handed, but played the right hand positioning putting his best hand on the neck. He had grown up next door to the Isley brothers. Bill didn’t own a guitar, why I don’t know, but I had 2 so we headed for my house after school the first day we met. He started showing me things immediately and by Friday he was asking me if I wanted to play a gig. I wasn’t really prepared in my book, but I agreed to go along with him. His advice was if you don’t know what to play just turn down the guitar and pretend, a trick I used many times.
Of course, neither one of us had a car at that point so we talked my mother into dropping us off at this house. We set up in the garage and people started showing up to this party. I realized right away this wasn’t like sitting in my bedroom playing the old Teisco. Cool kids were offering me beer and girls that had previously not been able to give me the time of day were ready to get naked for me. I was hooked. Bill and I played together a lot more and eventually had a full band. We did all cover tunes and played most of the schools in our area. We named the band “The Force”; this was before Star Wars and seemed way cooler back then.
One 4th of July we played an outdoor show at a band shell at our local community park. Our drummer, Mark Sugimoto (not guilty), was Japanese; his parents and grand parents had been entered in the camps during World War 2. In preparation for this big gig we had all decided we needed a backdrop. We all agreed that the atom bomb was the biggest yet known man-made force we knew of and we all proceeded to paint a mushroom cloud on a giant black piece of cloth. We rigged the thing so the drummer could yank a cord and the thing unrolled.
At showtime, the MC announces us, the crowd applauds. The audience was a mixed group of older people and their kids and people from our high school. Every member of the community was there. Anyway, the crowd is going nuts, our drummer yanks the cord and unfurls the giant mushroom cloud. Well it must have been a pretty sight with our Japanese drummer sitting up there on his riser in front of the biggest picture of the Hiroshima blast ever painted. Did I mention the strobe Light?
We played the show and it went well, we thought. When the local paper came out, well the review concerning the gig wasn’t really written with a positive tone. Apparently, we managed to offend quite a few pillars of the community with the giant mushroom cloud combined with our Japanese drummer all on the 4th of July. We, of course, were innocent and never saw any evil symbolism with the thing. Needless to say, it pretty much ended us getting to play in that part of town.
We ended up with a manager for a while who did get us some gigs with local colleges and he changed the band name to Midnight Celebration. By that time the band even had a horn section and we were doing every conceivable cover tune including songs by the Ohio Players and Play That Funky Music White Boy by KC and The Sunshine Band. One gig turned out to be an elderly singles pool party and we played the Bunny Hop for about 2 hours straight while single old people trailed each other around the room. Well, the band was starting to NOT get me laid so the singer, Mike Lester, and I decided it was time to break from covers and do original music. We had been writing the tunes since we were kids anyway so he and I made a band announcement about the change. Everyone quit and Mike and I formed our first original band, WindowPehn.
This band got to play a more seedy side of the available gigs. We played some go-go bars with wild drunk naked chicks everywhere and we built up a pretty good biker gang following.
My graduating year of high school (I was 18 by then) a nerdy fellow from the glee club approached me and asked if my band could play an outdoor show during school hours the final week of school. I lived down town in my band house, none of the others went to school by then and I drove myself to school every day for a few classes in an attempt to graduate. Well, Mr.Glee club guy had probably forgotten the 4th of July scandal and we agreed to play. The day of the show we were at the house preparing, smoking some, uh well, smoking. We were getting ready to leave for the school when a guy there who I didn’t know said,”hey let me call my dad, the chief of police, and I will get you guys delivered to the stage in a police patty wagon”. Well, we thought that might be cool so he made the call and sure enough a patty wagon pulled up out front 10 minutes later. We all pile into the back and the doors slam shut and away we go. Our bass player at the time leans over and informs me that he had dropped acid before the gig and was getting paranoid because he had outstanding warrants. He was an older guy I didn’t really know too well. We got him from a newspaper ad. I felt bad for him, but hey I was comfortable, I had seen the view many times as a youth. The driver turned on the siren and pulled up to the stage and let us out. Two cops drag our singer in handcuffs to the stage and let him free.
We start playing our music and it’s going fine other than it was probably the hottest day in Ohio history and it was triggering the PA to shut down. Glee club guy had requested a few cover tunes one of which was Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones. We start into the song toward the end of our set. Just about the time the song is hitting the “Just like a black girl” part the PA starts blinking from the heat again. Every time it blinked off I could hear Mike, the singer, say, “Aw Fuck”. Out front as the PA blinks on and off what the people are hearing is a mixture of ‘black girl’ and ‘aw fuck’. Anyway, as the show ends, we are immediately shuffled to a room for a good ass chewing by the school principals for chanting what they thought was “Aw Fuck A Black Girl”. I can’t ever forget the look of the head guy as he turned purple with anger, clenched his fists in the air and started jumping up and down screaming ”For God sakes you shouted Aw Fuck A Black Girl 20 times”. I am sure 2000 watts of the word FUCK at a school function was inappropriate and I could understand their disappointment, but I can’t help but laugh about the fact that our bass player was sitting there tweaked on LSD watching these people ream us a new one.
As I left chew fest, and walked to the parking lot looking for a ride home, three black girls approached me,. I was sure they were about to let me have it, too but instead they said ”hey great show you guys rocked out’. So ,put that on my permanent record.
I stopped by the office a few days later and picked up my diploma. I didn’t go through the cap and gown thing, that made Mom cry, but I did drop by with a few of my drinking buddies and pop my head in long enough to hear my graduation song, Dust In The Wind.