The Arrival
From Seattle to San Francisco, 1966-67
1965, an interesting year for a 17-year-old from Walla Walla, WA. In June, I graduated from high school, took a deep breath and wondered what the rest of my life was going to be about. Oh yeah, I had some things I loved to do. I loved to write; I loved to play music, and I loved theater, but I had no idea how to put those all together in a way that would make a living for me. In fact, I wasn't even thinking about making a living. I just wanted to get away from home and see the world.
So with nothing really on the horizon, I went down to Fresno, California, and worked for my dad. My job was a helper on a paint crew. I spent most of that summer on top of the Pacific Telephone Building in downtown Fresno looking down the wall at a crew of guys spray painting the side of the building. My job was to keep the sand blaster loaded and manage the scaffolding for them. Most of the time, I just looked over the wall and watched. Pretty dull, except for the time I was down in the alley moving the scaffolding over to paint the next swath up the side of the building and walked a steel cable into a 25,000 volt high tension line. Fortunately, I wasn’t burned to a crisp. In fact, I didn’t feel a thing. The charge went up the cable and in the spot where it lay over the top of the wall, the cable melted down through a half-inch steel plate and five inches of concrete. A very close call, but I lived. I don’t think it affected my brain at all…
Other than that little incident, things were fairly tame in Fresno. We worked at night, so it was basically hot summer nights and keeping the sand hopper filled, then sleep during the day. I had a lot of time to listen to music on my little transistor radio. The summer of 65 was a turning point where music made a real break from the past. I was listening to all these really cool songs like "I Can't Help Myself," King of The Road," "My Generation," "Stop In The Name of Love," and a bunch more. Then Bob Dylan came out with "Like a Rolling Stone" The Beatles did "Day Tripper," and the Byrds recorded "Tambourine Man.” Whoa! I loved the folk-rock sound. I remember one night, Paul Revere and the raiders played at a ballroom downtown and I walked five miles to check them out. At the end of the summer, I took my hard-earned cash and bought a Farfisa organ and a Fender Twin Reverb amp. I was armed and dangerous.
That fall I went to college at Whitman College in Walla Walla. They also accepted me at both The University of Washington and the University of Oregon, but I was playing in a band with a guitar player from Whitman I met when I was a senior in high school, so I went there. Pretty dumb reason to pick a school, although I really enjoyed playing with that band, Boss Tweed. We played a lot of rolling Stones, Blues and R&B.
After my introduction to the folk-rock scene in Fresno, I got the band to play more folk stuff. Then, that winter, I went up to Spokane with my friend Ken Wilson. He and I played in our first band together and he had been working with a talented songwriter named David Stumph. Ken organized the trip and the three of us went to Sound Recorders, now a legendary studio, and we recorded three songs. Irene Carter was the engineer and Ned Neltner from Junior Cadillac supervised the session. The entire recording process fascinated me and the final cuts came out sounding pretty good. (I still have them in digital format, thanks to Terry Martin, the bass player on the session.) I was captured by the music, hook, line and sinker, like a big ol’ bass on a breakfast worm.
During that first year of college, I was in a daze. I was not doing well in school because I had become wrapped up in music and being in a band. I had also discovered all night poker games and the demon rum. After school was out, I was living in an apartment downtown, bagging up Walla Walla onions at a local plant and casting about for something to do with my life. My high school friend, Burl Barer, a guy that I had done a radio show with for a couple of years in high school, had moved to Seattle and gotten a job as a disc jockey at KJR, the big rock station. I went up to Seattle to apply for my FCC radio license so I could become a DJ, too. A life-changing decision, because I never went back to Walla Walla, except to visit.
When I got to Seattle, I met another old friend, Paul Trousdale, a guy I had played in bands with in Junior High and High School. He got me into his band, Brave New World, and found me a place to crash, but that only lasted a few weeks. Pretty soon I needed to make some bucks, so I started hanging out in the "U" district, up by the University of Washington, where the Fringie scene was going on. Fringies were pre-hippy hippies who hung out on the "Fringe" of the U of W in the “U District” and there was an early counter-culture scene going on up there. I had an old Yamaha 12 string and I would go down to the coffee houses on University Avenue and play for "the hat" and make a few bucks that way.
The summer of 1966 was fun, but then winter in Seattle came along and it started raining. It rains every day in Seattle in the fall and winter and by then I had run out of money, had my car stolen and was living on the streets. It was the most miserable time of my life. I spent a lot of time in the Laundromat on University Ave. keeping warm by the dryers and writing songs. I wrote a bunch of songs and tried them out at the coffeehouses, where I met with a modicum of success and eventually made the connection that took me off to San Francisco.
Things were looking pretty grim, and I was thinking of going home, but one night in late 1966 at a coffeehouse, I met Jeff LaBrache and Kristopher Larsen, who had a band called West Coast Natural Gas. They had seen me before on the Ave and liked my original songs, especially one called "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." One of their guys had left the band, and they asked me if I would be interested in singing for them. They already had two guitarists, so they didn't need me to play an instrument, so I sold my Farfisa and joined the ranks of 60s frontmen, right up there with Mick Jagger and Marty Balin–yeah right. The band included Jeff and Kris, Steve Mack and David Burke. I started earning a few dollars, got a room in a house with some other musicians up on Capitol Hill, and pretty soon I was on my way. The band was already playing gigs with The Daily Flash, The Chrome Cyrcus, The Magic Fern and other "psychedelic" bands and so I went from street musician to local rock personality and jumped right into the heart of the music scene in Seattle.
When I first came to Seattle and was bumming around on the streets, I met Jon Keliehor, the brilliant drummer for a very popular Seattle Band, The Daily Flash. He was a great encourager, and it was Jon who really championed my tunes in the early days and kept me from quitting music and going home. Now, as the singer for WCNG, I was playing gigs opening for Jon's band and it was swell. They were really creating a sensation in Seattle and their song, "The French Girl," is still one of my favorites. Jon introduced me to guys like Billy Roberts, Danny O'Keefe, Jim Valley, Doug Hastings and Steve Lollar. Jon and I still FB together fifty years later, even though he's in Scotland and I'm in Idaho.
Meanwhile, West Coast Natural Gas climbed up the musical food chain in Seattle and after the Flash moved to LA, we became the top "Hippie" band in town. We were doing well and making steady income and then, for some entirely ridiculous reason, we decided to go down to California and test the waters in San Francisco. We arrived there on July 7, 1967, and two days later we were playing in Golden Gate Park with Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Steve Miller Blues Band. I was hooked again, but this time with a triple gang hook. I essentially disappeared up the hyperspatial tube of the 60s and didn't come back until 1984.