randulo’s unblog

Every year we come to Santa Barbara, California, I recall my younger impressions of it: plastic, lame, for the filthy rich... and oddly enough, these are largely still applicable. No one I know can afford to live right in SB, and the only reason we can afford to take some R & R time here is because Eve found an amazing bargain bed and breakfast several years ago. We stayed there for about three years running. It was inexpensive and run by a charming couple who had owned it for decades, apparently. They had free bikes, a great varied breakfast, a nice welcome basket, free wifi and most importantly, they loved being in the hospitality business. Then the husband passed away and Judy needed to sell and moved away.

Harbor House Inn was then bought by Karen, a ruthless, horrible woman who needed to get her loan paid back and didn't care what impression she made on her "guests". She was like a faceless corporation but in a single being. The prices doubled, the amenities disappeared. A "B&B" with no B? Hello? We were renting two units for a week and she was about as welcoming as a prison door. Needless to say, we never returned.

We were lucky to find a beautiful apartment to rent for a month. It's in a great and quiet location, is cheaper that the cheapest motels and has plenty of space. The terrace is bigger than the entire surface of the Paris apartment where we spent 13 years. We've been coming for three or four years now.

What first brought me to SB in the early 1970's was a gig in Goleta at a place called the Headband. Goleta was hip (UCSB campus) but Santa Barbara was the establishment... and still is. Anyway, we smoked that place out, everyone was under Sugarcane's spell and it was an amazing evening. That memory has lived in my mind as one of those gigs where even some of the improvised moments have still stuck. I can hear some of them if I relax and listen. [In fact, so can anyone right here.]  I can still picture the people looking up at the stage with their eyes almost projecting kaleidoscope patterns, yes, those were the days and I do remember them.

A second time, in 1976 or so, I came up to do the Laserium. It was my first show, the road version where they schlepped around a huge screen, assembled it and the projector and covered all the wondows to be able to darken the screen. It was a pretty amazing show and I remember one of the VP saying "half to company is up here watching it". It went well, and I later took over the flagship Laserium at Griffith Observatory.

One night up at Griffith, I came out of the planetorium, there was no one around, I was one of the last to leave. As I walked out to the parking lot, I saw that clouds had descended to the point where I was looking out, not over the smog-twinkling lights of L.A., but a sea of pearly white clouds. One of the most amazing natural sights I've even seen, right in the middle of Los Angeles.

Now, we're only a 90 minute drive from there and yet from what I've seen of L.A. a few years ago, I have no desire to get anywhere near it after calling it home for over 10 years. As the man said, "you can never go home".

Don 'Sugarcane Harris'

I met first Don to jam in the basement of drummer Paul Lagos who had the crazy idea of putting together a group around "the Cane".

In the early days, Don seemed to be a normal musician, flamboyant, wacky, always saying weird things but when he picked up the violin, he seared your heart with every note. My liver still hasn't recovered from the Sugarcane days, but that's another story.

Don had a serious drug problem, one that unfortunatey wasted the huge potential he had. His talent was nurtured from an early age by a supportive mother who would do anything for him. He studied with a famous classicial violinist. Often he would whip out passages from the classics in a cadenza at the end of one of his signatures tunes, "Eleanor Rigby".

The most memorable incident occurred in Palo Alto (near Stanford) in a health foods restaurant called In Your Ear. We were playing crazy that night, with each of us on different highs. The crowd was going wild the entire set. It was after midnight when people started to learn that the doors were locked. There was a full scale, burning down riot in the streets and though no one could go in or out of In Your Ear, they didn't much care. It was an amazing night, a night of paisley stage carpeting and vegetarian pizza, beer and every forbidden substance avaiable from the science of chemistry of the 1970's. I'll bet few who were there ever forgot the spell of that night!

Yet, with all Don had going for him, two devils on his shoulders made it impossible to advance: heroin and cocaine.All through his career, he was in and out of jail, always broke, his violin in the pawn shop, yet he managed to play and record with Frank Zappa in a much talked about tour and album. The most moving thing I heard him play was "Directly From My Heart to You" (by Little Richard). Don and his longtime friend Dewey Terry wrote a lot of songs you may have heard of, the most played being "I'm Leaving it all Up To You". The way the music bussiness worked in those days, the rights for that song went into other peoples coffers, Don and Dewey getting a small stipend yearly.

Don died in 1999, at the age of 61, kneeling alone at his oxygen tank. Chronology is on Wikipedia.