“Children have a different convention of the fearful until they
have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.”
― John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids
Dan and
I started making music together when we were freshmen in high school. We were
both learning to play guitar, and we both believed playing guitar carried with
it the duty to play in a band. Each of us were confident, brash, and
egotistical show offs, a perfect combination of attributes for a couple of kids
seeking exposure and attention. Had anyone asked us, we would have described
ourselves as handsome, smart, handsome, talented, and handsome. Did I mention
we were egotistical?
Our
early musical efforts were strongly influenced by The Byrds, Bob Dylan, The
Lovin’ Spoonful, The Hollies, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and other bands
that were popular at the time. We tried to learn their songs and their styles
and with our limited equipment we tried to imitate their sounds. Our attempts
were probably pathetic, but we were only challenged to try harder when the
endeavor was difficult.
To say
a little about these bands as influences; In the spring of 1966 there was one
event that took place after Dan and I had come together musically, and it shaped
our musical lives significantly. The event was a concert in our high school
gym. The show started with The Dillards, followed by the Buffalo Springfield,
and capped off with an amazing performance by the Byrds. The Dillards would
later be inducted into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame, with The Buffalo Springfield
and Byrds into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Here were three iconic bands, all
playing in an intimate and up-close concert, in our own Covina High School
It
wasn’t long after Dan and I began being musical together that we started making music together. The two of us
were creative young souls and music was the perfect crucible in which to alloy
our individual ideas into one metal. We were not yet skilled guitar players,
but we were already experimenting with chords and lyrics and melodies. We were
naive enough that nothing was off limits. We were innocently unconstrained by
any notion of songwriting convention. Consequently, much of our early tune-craft
resulted in awkward chord progressions and vague, hookless melodies. Because
poetry came naturally to us, lyrics were probably our strongest element.
During
our high school partnership, Dan and I appeared in several band configurations.
We had a rotating cast to play the other instruments, but there was always one
constant; Dan and I were the core, and everything was revolving around that.
______________
“And I really got hot / when I saw Jeanette Scott / fight a
triffid that spits poison and kills.”
― Usherette, The Rocky Horror Show
In the
summer between our freshman and sophomore years, Dan and I spent a lot of time
together. One night, while watching TV at my house, we came across a B-grade apocalyptic
sci-fi movie: The Day of the Triffids.
Movies like these were a staple on late night Los Angeles
Now that
we had an awesome band name we needed an awesome band to go with it. That
seemed like the logical progression of events to us. It’s probably the reverse
from the way most bands do it, but I’ll bet we weren’t the first. To construct
this awesome band, we recruited members mostly from our closest friends. Dan
and I were playing guitar, he and I swapping lead and rhythm duties depending
upon what the song called for. We also had Rich on drums, Steve on the Farfasia
organ, and Kelly on bass.
Dan and
I were teaching Steve to play the Farfasia, which was an Italian made, cheaply
built compact organ. Farfasias were very popular at the time, and Steve was
able to borrow one from his next door neighbor. To Dan and me, the fact we
didn’t play organ didn’t matter, and it didn’t seem to matter to Steve. He was
game to give it a go. We figured we could teach Steve how to play chords and
simple riffs. After all, that’s how we were learning to play guitar. Ergo, if
Steve learned the chords to the songs we were playing, he could play along with
us. And after all, a little bit of keyboard goes a long way. So Steve was now a keyboardist, as much as we were guitar players.
In
those early days of playing in a high school band, there was a severe shortage
of drummers. Due to this habitual deficit, we were consistently in a state of
perplexed bewilderment trying to figure out how to find a drummer. This
regularly resulted in the same, seemingly idiotic, solution. Someone would say
“we need a drummer.” The response would be “let’s look for one at the mall,”
and off we went. Go to the mall to find a drummer? Why not? We thought we had a
better chance casually meeting someone at the mall, who might turn out to be a
drummer, than we did sitting around someone’s house waiting for a drummer to
fall out of the sky. It was probably true, and maybe that strategy was as good
as any. Drummers aside, the mall was a good place to meet girls during the
summer; it was a “two-fer”.
Consider
our dilemma. How would a couple of kids in the mid ‘60s find a drummer if they
didn’t already have one as a cousin or a next door neighbor? Every drummer we
knew of was already in a band and playing with musicians that were more legit
than we were. So we scratched those drummers off the list. The competition between
bands was so tough that other musicians wouldn’t share knowledge of known
drummers because they wanted them for themselves. So we didn’t bother to ask other
bands. There was no internet, Craigslist, bandmix.com, or Facebook to scour. So
we couldn’t use a non-existent technology. We concluded the best bet for us was
to go to the mall and walk around looking for a drummer, seriously! Utilizing
this methodology, we actually once found an available drummer.
Fortunately
for Dan and me we eventually hooked up with Rich. Rich had skills, and he came
to us under the radar so other bands were unaware of him. We got a hold of him
and kept him to ourselves. He became the one horse in our stable of drummers. It
was a very small stable, but if we only had one drummer to call on, we were
lucky that happened to be Rich. He had his own drum kit, and we could count on
him to reliably and competently lay down a backbeat appropriate to our songs. He
liked hanging around with us, and later Rich and I would become good friends.
For now he was our drummer, and we didn’t share. That’s the way it was back
then.
We
still needed a bass player, but that problem was easy to solve. No one could
have been tighter in our group of friends as Kelly was. In fact, our posse
probably spent more time hanging out in Kelly’s garage slash bedroom than at
anyone else’s house. Kelly had acquired a bass from somewhere I don’t remember.
I seem to recall it was sort of a long term loan arrangement, but he may have
bought it. It wasn’t very attractive. The body was a kind of worn out dull
grey. I don’t recall what brand it was. That was all unimportant; it was a
bass. And by virtue of the fact that Kelly had possession of a bass, he received
automatic and instant membership in the band. Owning a bass overruled the liability
that he didn’t actually know how to play a single note. That could be overlooked.
Kelly would someday become a very accomplished guitar player, singer,
songwriter, and performer, but at this point he didn’t even know how to tune a
bass. Dan didn’t know how to tune a bass
either, but he thought he did.
None of
us knew anything about bass guitar, but somewhere along the line Dan had gotten
the notion that a bass guitar’s strings were tuned G, C, F, Bb, instead of the
correct tuning of E, A, D, G. Being ignorant of all things bass, nobody
questioned Dan’s certainty. Kelly tuned his bass according to Dan’s
specifications, and he commenced to learn it that way. He sounded great to us.
He had natural ability and picked it up fast. When we played a chord, he
quickly learned where the root note was on the bass and played it confidently and
right on the beat. Kelly was learning fast, unfortunately, he was learning
wrong. Learning the bass in the wrong tuning was going to come back to bite us
someday… someday soon.
______________
“It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and
comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" --
that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.”
― John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids
A
“battle of the bands” was a popular event in the sixties. Usually sponsored by
music stores to grab attention and generate traffic to their business. The
premise was to have a bunch of local bands perform for a prize, or more often, bragging
rights. A battle of the bands, or, if you were good enough to pass and
audition, a high school dance, was the most common way for teenage bands to
find an opportunity to play. Fred’s Music Center
When putting
our song list together we should have played it safe (and smart) and chosen
enough easy tunes from the radio to learn and fill our half hour slot. But Dan
and I were “songwriters.” We decided to write as many originals as we could. We
wrote our originals at a couple of practice sessions at Allan’s house, and also
at Rich’s. The weird thing about Allan’s house was that he wasn’t a member of
the band, he wasn’t a close friend. He was just a guy we all knew going back to
elementary school. And weirder yet, he wasn’t even around at the time. Maybe he
was on vacation, I don’t remember, but he wasn’t there. He made his place
available to us because he had some guitars and amps that were cool to play. I
remember writing new songs during a session at Allan’s house, and I remember being
productive; productive, but not necessarily good. I only mention the sessions
at Allan’s house because it was strange to me at the time, and stranger to me
now since the actual facts, like why were we there, have become foggy with the
passage of time.
We also
did some song writing over at Rich’s house, but mostly rehearsing there. For
the life of me I don’t remember any serious, structured preparation for the
show. Just sitting around with guitars, writing songs, and singing a few
covers. I’ll never forget one of the covers was “Hang On Sloopy.” Why, oh why
did we choose that song? I can’t stand hearing it to this day. More on that
later.
With
our new band, our new songs, and a handful of cover tunes, we prepared haphazardly
for two weeks prior to the battle of the bands. We were proud of our originals.
Dan and I did most of the composing, but everyone in the band had a creative
role in the new songs. I’m giving the other members credit, but I’m not giving
everyone in the band blame for the
new songs. That was on Dan and I.
______________
“When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by
sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.”
― John Wyndham, The Day of
the Triffids
 |
| Steve, Dan, Me, Rich - Gayle, Deb As The Cold Knights (Post Triffids) |
We
arrived confident that there would be enthusiastic admiration for our original
songs. It felt good to feel confident. And who couldn’t feel confident on a
sunny, southern California
The
band that was playing when we showed up was really good. We were impressed with
their professionalism, even if we were unappreciative of their style. It was
sort of a Detroit
They
were in the middle of playing an instrumental number when we got there. It was
loud and fast, and the band had a bit of choreography to go along with the song.
Their rhythmic movements were shaking the portable stage back and forth. A
friend of ours, Gayle, was holding the stage, along with a few other people
associated with the event. They were trying their best to keep it from over
undulating and going into total collapse. But even in the face of eminent stage
failure the band was undeterred. Their show went on.
Gayle worked
for Fred’s. It was her first job and she was proud of it. There she was, dressed
up in a blue blazer, smiling nervously to her cohorts and doing her best to
keep the stage from becoming a crumpled casualty. She was a hero for the
moment.
The
band played a couple more tunes, and though they played very well, their music didn’t
appeal to us. Then a familiar song started up. It was the song they were
playing when we arrived.
“Gayle, we’re going into our theme song,” the singer said. It was
a signal to Gayle that the choreographed stage quaking was going about to erupt
again.
Gayle
and a couple of helpers grabbed hold and again did their best to keep the
flimsy stage under control. This routine repeated itself once more at the end
of the swinging band’s set. Though it was touch and go for awhile, the stage
did not collapse, so the show would be able to continue as planned. Now it was
our turn. They were a weird band for us to follow. I don’t know about my other
band mates, but I didn’t even think about that. I was focused on what we had to
do next.
______________
“We all have our youthful follies, embarrassing to recall.”
― John Wyndham, The Day of
the Triffids
We took
the stage and donned the nice instruments provide by the good folks at Fred’s Music Center
Kelly
strapped on the bass. It was out of tune, and it wasn’t even close to the
tuning Dan had taught Kelly to use. The thing was, this bass was set to the
standard tuning any bass player would be familiar with. Kelly didn’t know this
until we got on stage and started our tune up. At first he thought there was
something wrong with the bass, maybe a broken neck, then it dawned on us – all
of us – the bass was tuned correctly! Kelly had learned to play bass in the
wrong tuning. A feeling of terror passed through the band like a contagious
fever. What was Kelly going to do? To make matters worse, I was having issues
of my own trying to get the twelve-string tuned up. Twelve-strings are a lot of
strings, and I didn’t have that much – or any - experience tuning one. It was
probably already tuned close enough and I was no doubt just making it worse.
The
clock was ticking; the twelve-string was out of tune, and worst of all we were
perplexed about what to do with Kelly’s bass. Dan was trying to help Kelly and
I was doing my best to ignore them. I didn’t want to assume any responsibility
or blame for something being dreadfully wrong with the bass tuning. That wasn’t
very helpful, but I subconsciously rationalized that if I didn’t look at them
then they weren’t even there. My own nerves were becoming frazzled on the twelve-string
and my coping skills were breaking down rapidly. I’m not sure what the solution
to the bass ended up being. I think they originally started to try to tune it
up to the pitch Kelly had learned on, but that wasn’t going well. So then they
decided to put it back down where they started, and that didn’t go well either.
There were no digital tuners in those days; we just tuned one instrument
relative to another that we thought was in tune. It was past time to start, I
wasn’t really in tune, and the bass was a total catastrophe.
Everything
was already going to holy hell in a broken bucket! On stage was a scene of
utter confusion, with five previously confident boys now suffering from
something greater than the worst stage fright imaginable. It was stage terror!
But, ready or not, we started our set anyway, with the twelve-string out of
tune, Kelly struggling with the impossible bass tuning, and the band members shell
shocked before we ever played a single note. The bass was now somewhere in
between the weird tuning Kelly had learned all of our songs with, and standard bass
tuning. But maybe that wasn’t even the worst part!
The
worst part may have been our songs. We started out with one of our originals.
As proud of our efforts as we were when we practiced them, for some reason our
first original didn’t sound all that good now in front of an audience. From the
corner of my eye I could see Kelly looking at his bass like “what the hell?”
and Dan trying to point something out to him, maybe where to put his fingers in
the “new” tuning. I don’t know. But at least we were playing now. Things had
just had to get better. Or so I thought.
We slogged
through the first song and lo and behold the next song was also an original. I
was either not paying attention to the audience’s reaction or I was ignoring it
(I was told about it later – people laughing – throwing pennies – yelling “get
off the stage”). I don’t know how I could be oblivious to it when it was so
blatant. Fortunately for my psyche, I had them blocked out and continued to
focus on playing and singing. I suppose I thought it was going ok if not a
little shaky. When the second song was over I heard mild applause from the
audience. I didn’t hear the heckling and laughter.
Our day
in the sun was quickly turning into a bad movie. In fact, it was turning into a
very bad B-grade movie. Our day as The Triffids was turning into something worse than The Day of the Triffids, and it was a lot scarier.
Gayle,
who was also a bass player, came on stage between songs and tuned Kelly’s bass,
but of course she put it back to standard tuning. Kelly was understandably mortified
having his instrument tuned for him in front of an audience. It was doubly hard
on a teen age boy to have a girl do it for him. That was humiliating for Kelly!
Now his bass, though “in tune”, was back in a tuning he didn’t know. Poor Kelly
was totally lost and incapable of playing a correct note. And still, we trudged
on, racing headlong into an inevitable train wreck.
Three songs
into our list we came to “Hang On Sloopy.” This should have been a relief for
the audience. It was a bonafied, popular cover tune. They must have heard it on
the radio a thousand times. However, there would be no comfort in a familiar
song this day. “Hang On Sloopy” is where the engine finally jumped the rails.
The
song got underway, and I immediately was having trouble reaching the notes;
they were all too high. It was funny how
this song had always been in my vocal range before, but now it was suddenly in
a register too high for me to reach comfortably. Maybe the guitars were tuned
higher than we tuned at home. Maybe our earlier stumbles had frazzled my nerves
and caused a vocal-chord-spastic-contraction. Who knows? But I guess I didn’t
have enough experience to let it bother me because I just sang on. It should
have been a warning, because when we came to the chorus the notes got even
higher. I’m talking really high. But I just clenched all my muscles and went
for it. I began screeching out:
“Hang on, Sloopy. Sloopy
hang on!”
And, as
if once isn’t enough, these remarkable lyrics repeat themselves.
“Hang on, Sloopy. Sloopy
hang on!”
Veins
were popping out on my temples and sweat was squeezing out of every facial pore.
I was stretching my neck to tense my vocal chords. I’m sure all the dog’s in a
two mile radius were either howling or whelping in their painful death throws. The
audience was tasting blood now and ramping up their insults, actually throwing
pennies at us. Kelly’s cousins, Bill
and Jean, were in the crowd really hurting for us. Bill put a paper cup on
stage and made a show of stuffing a ten dollar bill into it to shame the throng
of rude hooligans.
In the
middle of the next squeally “HANG ON SLOOP…”, Dan kicked Bill’s cup off the
stage, then reached up and turned off my microphone while I was in mid word –
“SLOOP…” I was still playing my guitar but went into instant shock.
“What are you doing!” I said in a total freak out, my eyeballs flashing
question marks.
“We’re getting out of here.”
“What?” I said in complete astonishment.
“We’re done.”
From
the corner of my eye I saw the other guys already hustling down the stairs. The
boys had been making their escape while I was still shrieking out the words
“HANG ON SLOOPY.”
In that
instant reality hit me like a sucker punch, and everything that followed seemed
to happen all at once. The hot blood in my head quit flowing out, but it
continued to flow in. Cranial pressure built up so fast I thought my head might
blow up. My face was hot, and I’m sure it turned beet red. I was now seized in
the full-on crushing grip of embarrassment and could not look at the audience.
I just looked straight ahead at the back of Dan’s light blue shirt. I noticed
his black tie sneaking out from under his collar (why was I looking at that?) Now
Dan was blocking my way and I started pushing him from behind. I was in a
sudden panic-stricken hurry and didn’t feel like I could get off the stage fast
enough. I wanted to disappear. Poof! But I was the last one in line. It took an
excruciatingly long time to get off the stage and I felt everyone in Los Angeles County
Finally
the audience was applauding in earnest. Was it their final insult? Maybe it was
a congratulatory atta-boy? Most likely they were just happy to see us go. The
gruesome bloodletting was finally over.
We
gathered by the edge of the stage to take off our borrowed guitars and give
them back to Gayle. The catastrophe that just happened had left my brain in a fizzle.
I was embarrassed for leaving the
performance in mid song. I needed to be
educated, since the real reason to be embarrassed was because we just did the most
awful performance in music history. I knew we ran off stage, I just couldn’t
get a grip on the concept why. I still felt weird about the abrupt exit. I was in
a confused state, still thinking quitting was a mistake. In an emotional flush,
I lashed out at the band for stopping the show in mid song!
“What are you guys doing?” I admonished.
“We were terrible,” came a reply from all the band members.
“We can’t leave in the middle of a song!” I scolded; feeling
committed to the maxim “the show must go
on.”
“We had to get off before they threw us off,” Dan said.
“Or before they killed us,” Kelly chimed in.
“They were laughing at us, Charlie! And throwing pennies at us!”
Dan added seriously, looking into my eyes to make his point.
“Wait a minute,” I thought,
“isn’t throwing money at us a good thing?”
Then I
figured out the insult, and that was the key to understanding everything.
Enlightenment came as a painful shock. All of a sudden it was important to be
far, far away.
“Let’s get out of here.”
I didn’t
have to say it twice. In a flash we were putting as much distance between us and
the audience as quickly as we could, except for Kelly. Kelly stayed behind to hang
out with his cousins and listen to the next band. The rest of us didn’t have
cousins; we disappeared.
Dan’s
mom was supposed to pick us up at a prearranged time, but things got kind of
weird in a way only Dan could contrive. At the mall, we ran into some guys we
knew: Mike, who was one of the kids from school, and a couple of other boys. I
remembered seeing Dan talking to them before the show. Now, for some reason,
Dan was leaving with them, apparently to fight Mike over some grudge the rest
of us didn’t know anything about. Maybe Dan was frustrated and angry about our
performance and was taking it out on Mike. Whatever the motive, Dan left in a
car with the other guys, ostensibly for a bit of adolescent pugilism. About the
time Dan left, Kelly showed up.
“Where’s Dan?”
We
tried to tell Kelly about Dan and Mike and something vague about a fight, but
it was pretty weird, and it was hard for Kelly to comprehend our explanation.
Dan had left without revealing many details. We didn’t know exactly what Dan
was up to, or where he went, and now he was gone. The other guys were probably
going to kill him, or so we allowed ourselves to imagine.
Dan’s
mom showed up and we explained the situation to her the best we could. She had
us get into her car and we drove around looking for Dan. Frankly, I was
thankful Dan had created the diversion – who wanted to think about what had
just happened at the battle of the bands? We were driving down Citrus Avenue
“There he is!” Kelly said loudly, pointing Dan out.
Dan was
walking fast and with a purpose.
“And he’s not even dead,” I said, only half joking.
We
pulled over to let him in.
“Dan! Get in!” I called out.
“I don’t want to get in,” he said sternly and he kept walking.
“Come on Dan,” “Get in, Dan,” “Danny, come on!” we were all
encouraging.
He turned
around and got in the car sullenly. He was ok and didn’t even look like he was
beat up, although he was in a foul mood. We asked if he got in a fight. He said
yes, and he said no. His story was vague and changing in a cloudy, in a Dan
sort of way (he still has a talent for obfuscation – it’s his gift). I don’t
think he ever said definitely whether he got in a fight or not, but he let on
there was some unfinished business between him and Mike. We ended up at Dan’s
house and focused our conversation on his escapades. We talked very little
about the battle of the bands and The Triffids and the out of tune bass. Thanks
to Dan’s timely distraction, the train wreck was behind us and our wounds were
healing. We never performed as The Triffids again.
______________
“And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from
a vanished past.”
― John Wyndham, The Day of
the Triffids
The
next day I left for two weeks with my parents. We went on a family vacation to Texas
Not all
the songs we wrote in those days were stinkers. One successful song Dan wrote
was called “A Man with Limits.” I loved it. Every once in a while, “A Man with
Limits” gets stuck in my head, and it sort of rambles around in there like an
old friend come to visit. At least the chorus gets stuck in my head. Well, ok, four lines of “A Man with Limits” get
stuck in my head. I wish I remembered the whole song, because it is one of the
best songs ever born.
Sometimes,
“Hang on Sloopy” gets stuck in my head. I don’t have anything good to say about
that.
______________
Postscript:
I
contacted Gayle, Kelly, and Dan to help me out with this story. I wanted to
make sure I was treating the memory of my old friends with respect. I wanted to
make sure I wasn’t slanting the story or omitting important details.
 |
| Kelly and Me |
Kelly
getting a bass
We
still needed a bass player, but that problem was easy to solve. No one could
have been tighter in our group of friends as Kelly was. In fact, our posse
probably spent more time hanging out in Kelly’s garage slash bedroom than at
anyone else’s house. And by virtue of the
fact that he just acquired a very nice Vox bass guitar, he received automatic
and instant membership in the band. Owning a bass overruled the liability that
he didn’t know how to play a single note. That could be overlooked. Kelly would
someday become a very accomplished guitar player, singer, songwriter, and
performer, but at this point he didn’t even know how to tune a bass. Dan didn’t know how to tune a bass either,
but he thought he did.
Kelly
realizing his bass had been tuned wrong
Kelly’s
bass was out of tune and it wasn’t even close to the tuning Dan had taught
Kelly to use. It so happened Kelly had
loaned his bass to Chris, a friend from school, the night before. Chris was an
actual bass player, and he had re-tuned Kelly’s bass to the standard tuning all
other basses were tuned to in order to play it at his gig. Kelly didn’t know
this until we got on stage and started our tune up. At first he thought
there was something wrong with his bass, maybe a broken neck, then it dawned on
us – all of us – Kelly had learned to play bass in the wrong tuning. A feeling
of terror passed through the band like a contagious fever. What was Kelly going
to do? To make matters worse, I was having issues of my own trying to get the
twelve-string tuned up. Twelve-strings are a lot of strings, and I didn’t have
that much – or any - experience tuning one.
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