randulo’s unblog

Tracey was if anything, an entrepreneur. She was the perfect example of business acumen put to questionanble use, but we did share an apartment (two couples) just one house away from the beach. It's the only place I ever lived where you could hear the ocean, really loud, from your bed.
 
In those days, I worked steadily 6 nights a week in bar bands. Tracey waitressed at one of these and she was living with the bass player in our band. Beer was cheaper by the pitcher than by the glass, so Tracey came up with and generously shared a scheme with her fellow waitresses: she'd buy a pitcher, grab glasses and set them at the band's table. When
a customer ordered a beer, she'd come and pour it out iof the cheaper pitcher and serve it at the glass price. Gotta smile at that, right? Hey, the customer was paying the same price, Tracey and the others pocketed the difference.
 
Surprisingly, Tracey was also a pretty good seamstrees and she made all of the stage outfits of her man. I think he was the only one of us actually wearing anything specially meant for show business. The drummer hipped me right away to the idea that you could go to a cowboy shop in Fullerton or Anaheim and buy almost anything there to wear on stage. It was one of the best pieces of advice any-one ever gave me about how to dress for the gig :)
 
Camp Pendelton wasn't too far a drive from where we lived and worked and on the weekends Tracey would drive down there and sell "acid" to the Marines at the base, looking for a good time. I don't know what they paid for the pills, but Tracey was selling her birth control pills as "acid", at a high markup, since I believe the pills she got were free as part of some Planned Paranthood scheme. 
Tracey and my ex-girlfriend both eventually got mixed up with a Swedish hooker in Fresno. I never knew if they were just hanging out, a part of the "stable" or just on the fringe of the many unsavories that hung in that bar, selling dope and maybe fencing stolen goods once in a while. The owner was shot dead there one day and a book was eventually written about those
times in the San Juaquin Valley.
 

Gotcha, didn't I?
 
Listen to the song Girls, Please, Girls while you read this note.
 
It features some very classy playing by Freddy Roulette on lap steel guitar, Victor (Balco) Conte on bass and Nat Ginsberg on piano, both of whom played in the Herbie Hancock Monster Band, Victor played with Tower of Power as well, along with drummer Ronnie Beck.
 
Because of the (innocent to me) title of the song, the server it was on was brought to its knees by horny guys - ew the image- trying to see women get together and please each other. The title actually refers, in fact, to my plea as a band member to the wives and girlfriends sitting at the front tables night after night in bar we played in. That was in my single days of course. Anyone I wanted to be with had to pass the test with the other women at those tables. No wonder I like Sons of Anarchy so much! Bands are like motorcycle clubs without the chains.

Geneva, Switzerland, 1974
 
In between tours to Europe and Asia that year, some friends and I were hired to play in a club act for three brothers who danced and sang. We were recruited in Los Angeles and flown to Boston. After several days of rehearsal, we traveled from Boston to Geneva to play a show in a cabaret. Most musicians will tell you, there is nothing more boring than to play medleys, especially medleys with no solos. "O Holy Moses" modulates into "Proud Mary", and on and on for 40 minutes, then break time.

When musicians get bored, there are three possible cures: sex, drugs and alcohol and food. As we got done playing at around 4AM with nowhere open to eat, we'd look at each other during the medley and nod, "Salami sandwich in the room there boy, got some hanging out the window in a pillow case". Usually it's all three of the possibilities, just the order that might vary.

I won't go into the sex part here, but it will always be a factor in the business of making music and this was no different, except for the weird crowd in this place, women in fancy fur-lined coats drinking Champagne at $100 a glass (in those days). I had sent a train ticket to a girl I met in Zurich on a previous tour and she was to join me in mid week, so I wasn't looking.

So to the drugs and for legal reasons I won't go into who did what, although the statute of limitations is probably in force from 30+ years away, but still... Inquiry was made as to where to seek certain controlled substances and we were told, "Go to the fountain, man, the fountain is where it's at." And so it came to pass that we were looking around for someone who looked like they would know where to cop substance X and each time a likely candidate was seen, he was asked the magic question. Finally a positive nod and a transaction was made. We went back to the hotel.

Again, without the superficial details, something bad happened, a dose too strong, a tolerance too low, who knows, and one of us is slipping into unconsciousness, but with the lucidity to say the following astonishing sentence: "I saw some huge industrial garbage bags on the maid's cart this morning. Put me in one, drag it to the elevator and put me in the dumpster." One of us went to get the bag.

I won't ever tell what happened next. Go listen to http://tr.im/wwhite and it may become clear. What I will say is that as you travel and look upon the many, many beautiful places on the planet, places like the lake and fountain in Geneva, the bridges of Paris, the streets of Rome, the Hollywood Hills, you aren't thinking of it but many, many funky things have gone down there. Damn, it's good be home.

I am not capable of imagining what it would be like to be young and single today. Yeah, I can imagine staring endlessly at an iPhone, Tweeting and having a Facebook account. What I can not imagine is the challenge of fully living your sexuality today, as a single person.
 
When I grew up, it had only been a couple of decades since the Second World War. The 1970's happened nearly 40 years ago. My parents' generation vividly remembered what it was like during the war. The Americans who did not fight abroad probably can't imagine what it was like to live in Europe in occupied territory, though. Today, you can't totally grok what the warm sexual climate felt like in the 1970's. (Do people still say grok?) The stigma of sex out of wedlock has been dead among most western cultures for ages, but the serious risk of AIDS still hangs a dark shadow over spontaneous lovemaking. By the way, I'm not advocating that anyone throw caution to the winds. The age of which I speak is OVER. At least for now.
 
My older brothers lived their young adulthood in the mostly puritanical society of the 50's. Only a "tramp" would go all the way in those days, while men hypocritically wanted just that. How lucky I was to be a young, single adult during what was then called the Sexual Revolution.
 
When I was in high school, every male had a condom in his wallet. Few of us ever got to use them, but you had to have one just to show around. This was just before the said revolution, when the birth control pill had been invented but its use was not so common. What opened the flood gates of the 70's were birth control pills and the lack of serious sexually transmitted diseases.
 
Between the advent of ubiquitous birth control and that of AIDS, was this incredible period of sexual sans-souci. You didn't worry about things like reputation or disease, an entire society was exploring its sexuality.
 
In the next 50 years, what will become of the social networking paradigm? Will Facebook become rife with "disease", too dangerous to be practiced "unprotected"? Will something come into play that changes the entire way the Internet affects our lives the way AIDS has changed the way we view sex?
 
I'm trying to imagine how life will be better in 50 or 100 years. I'm guessing that another sexual revolution will be needed (and could well be stimulated by improved disease control relegating both the fear of disease and the horrible paraphernalia to the museum along with poverty and homelessness.) We're human beings and as much as we can do online, there will always be more to do in person.
 
I have always thought of Merlin Mann as one of the brightest lights on the Internetz today. He once said something like "Go out and do things, have sexual intercourse" but the closest link I found is here.

I recall being recruited to play in a band up in Fresno while living in Newport Beach (or was it Costa Mesa? I've lived in both.) I asked the singer if it was more like southern or northern California. He said northern, which is true to some extent. Fresno was a funky place in the way I would say Seattle is a funky place, in a good way. I've lived in Seattle, too. Great place!
 
I was renting a place two blocks from the gig, rooming with a fellow band member. It featured a railroad triage yard  about 1 block away. I recall the rent was $80 a month. This was a while back :) I discovered that even the noise of crashing freight cars in the middle of the night is a sound you get used to and can sleep though. I also met a friend I still love dearly who lived next door. He cooked dinner for the two of us 5 nights a week for $1 each. These were good times.
 
One night in Ara's Apartments, the bar I played in 6 nights a week, someone was buying us round after round of tequila shots. I was pretty hammered and John had snagged a woman to spend the night with, so as I left, Brady, the rent a cop at the door said "Careful, there's a lot of new boys on the force out there". I do not condone drunk driving, so I too found myself a friend named Eileen and headed home.
 
When blonde Eileen and I walked in the door, it was obvious that anything of value had been stolen. Tape recorded, studio equipment, an old amp, stuff like that. There was also something written in lipstick on the mirror: "SMACK, i.e., the Kiss!". We probably waiting until the next day to call the police and they made much of the mirror writing, but we later found out it was John's ex-girlfriend Kay, who had left town. It was in fact, unrelated to the theft.
 
A few days later, I ran into a different, brunette Eileen I had known for a while in Ara's. As we left that night, she told me she had a motel room nearby and since she didn't want to disturb her roomate, why didn't we go over there? Well, sure, so we did. And as I opened the door, here was all my stolen equipment! The room was rented by a local thug, Eileen obviously didn't know anything about the theft or she would not have brought me over there. I chose not to pursue the thing because of the Fresno society of which I was a fringe member. You see, the "thug" and a large number of other shady people used to use Ara's as a place to go make drug deals. The owners and the cops had to be in on the whole thing.
 
Several months later, I brought an old girlfriend up there to live with me. Later still, I left and she stayed and got even more entrenched in the "scene" with hookers, drugs and who knows what else. She worked as a bartender at Ara's. One night, she saw two guys walk in, go right to the poolroom and blow away the owner of the place. Scratch that. Here's the eyewitness account from Mark's book:

It was 6:30 p.m., and the bar was empty when two men walked in. They looked to be from out of town, something in their fringed leather jackets and gloves. They ordered two draft beers and headed to the back room to play pool. Just across the way was my father's office, the door open. He was sitting at his desk working on the quarterly taxes. They played a game of eight ball and walked out.

Ten minutes passed and the two men walked back in. The place was still empty. Lewis asked if they wanted another beer. One of the men gave her an odd look, and the other headed straight back to the office and began shooting. My father fought back with everything he had. It took both gunmen to bring him down.

She was the only witness to the event and she was either smart enough to duck behind the bar and disappear, or maybe she knew somehow she was not in danger. The crime was never solved.
 
Ara's son Mark, who we saw as a little boy once in a while, became a reporter at the L.A. Times and wrote a book about the whole Fresno context of the time, called  In My Father's Name