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MOTHER TUCKERS YELLOW DUCK
Part 3 - Excerpt from the beginning of the
book, 'Listen Carefully to Everything he Says, Then Ignore it Completely',
by C. Livingstone.
(See here about the Book)
MTYD -- Part 3
While managing the rock band MTYD (Mother Tucker’s Yellow Duck) over the
years, I was also privy to a lot of behind the scenes rock and roll
idiosyncrasies not generally privy to the general public.
For example, while it’s not exactly front page news that many rock and
roll musicians are somewhat eccentric, just how eccentric the
manifestations are is not always public knowledge. It may be the
weather, or the special kind of kool aid these people drink, but the
fact remains that some of them are pretty far out there into the
kaleidoscopic world of whatevers.
The Mothers of Invention played in Vancouver one night. After the
concert, the daughter of the millionaire mentioned in the Book 1 who had
made his money selling Japanese electronic components all over North
America in little plastic baggies, held a party in their big showcase
home in West Vancouver. For reasons I’ll never know, for most of the
party, most of us stayed crowded into the kitchen. The only problem was,
that also put us all right smack dab into the middle of Frank Zappa’s
current latest thing.
Frank, not your average loaf of bread under even the most convivial of
circumstances, was always into some new current thing. His latest thing
at the moment was deliberately offending everybody with his body odour.
There’s nothing like a quick dash of Odorono under the pits for a quick
saving of face. But Frank apparently wasn’t interested in any saving of
face. His bass player told me that the tee shirt Frank was wearing
hadn’t seen soap or cloths line for at least six months. Neither had
Frank. He had never had it off the whole time. This was deliberate you
understand. So no one had any trouble getting the point he was making,
whatever it was.
Similarly, The Who hit town one night. I got invited to go along to the
after party at their hotel. Pete Townsend spent some time proudly
showing me his two pet piranhas in the hotel bathtub. The Who were
carrying the fish around with them on tour as a statement about who
knows what. Maybe they thought the two made good guard fish.
The Who were the group who broke up guitars on stage as the highlight of
their act. They weren’t however the inventors of this particular
crowd-frenzying event. The distinction went to the Yardbirds of whom I
knew a little about.
When the Yardbirds had hit town the three times I had booked them, they
had also broken up a guitar on stage every night as the grand finale.
Even the Yardbirds hadn’t exactly invented the patented ‘bust the
guitar’ routine though. Their original guitar player Jeff Beck owned the
honour.
In the early days of the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck played guitar and Jimmie
Page, of later Led Zeppelin guitar fame, played bass. If a guitar didn’t
cotton up the passages or sounds exactly as Jeff heard coming from the
cupboards of his brain, Jeffie blamed the guitar and would demolish it.
It’s amazing how man always blames the nearest inanimate object whenever
something doesn’t pull off like they’d planned. To the great dismay of
every road manager he had ever worked with, who had to keep coming up
with new guitars on the fly, Jeff was well known for this little
penchant of human nature.
The Yardbird’s road manager told me during one of the shows, that they
had been touring through North Dakota once. Jeff was practicing in a
hotel room on the second floor and the guitar amplifier wasn’t
performing up to snuff according to Jeff’s expectations. So he booted
the stupid thing right out the window. Fortunately nobody was on the
street below.
Like Elvis Presley realizing a good hip swivel when he found it, the
Yardbirds had continued on with the demolished guitar gambit which had
become a slick and integral part of their show. The busted guitar scene
in the movie Blow Up wasn’t a part from the script. It was why they got
the part for the script in the first place.
When Jeff Beck eventually left the Yardbirds for greener guitars, Jimmie
Page handed his bass playing chores over to a newcomer, and took as the
guitar playing dude, Including the responsibility to demolish a guitar
every night.
Since the busted guitar was now the grand finale of their whole
performance every night, the road manager always made sure there was a
twenty-five dollar guitar sitting behind Jimmy by the end of the show
every night. One night, Jimmie reached around and grabbed the wrong
guitar. He didn’t realize his mistake until he saw the neck of his prize
twelve hundred dollar original Les Paul Gibson sailing out over the
crowd, at 1966 prices,
The Yardbirds seemed to collect eccentrics. The drummer at one point was
so strung out on Lucy’s Sky Diamonds that he literally had to be led on
and off stage by hand. Once onstage and the music had started wailing,
he was fine. It was the other twenty three hours a day in between that
was giving him all the trouble.
The manager asked me after the third show if I had heard of Jimmy
Hendricks yet. “No”, I said. “You will”, he said. Sure enough, three
months later, Purple Haze hit the charts. Jimmy had spent the year
before in England honing up his new trio and the manager had heard him
playing in a small club in England just before coming over to North
America on the Yardbirds tour.
Jimmie had also come out swinging with a neat new guitar gadget called a
‘wah wah’ peddle. The manager asked me if I’d ever heard of a wah wah
peddle. I said, “No, what does it do”. He looked at me for a minute
trying to figure out exactly how to explain it. Then said, “Well ah, it
kind of goes, um, wah wah”.
Jimmie was also the first to come to play with the idea of using a
Berlin Wall sized bank of speakers to get his moments of inspiration
across. Not hard to be inspired with nearly forty thousand watts of raw
sound power pressing against your butt.
We played a concert with Jimmy once, and if you even so much as just
swoosssed by his guitar with your pant cuff, a very big deep low ominous
‘Woooooooossshhh’ sigh of sound ensued from the wall of speakers. Kind
of like Godzilla waking up and taking in a big deep slow breath of ocean
air in the back reaches of his cavern every morning before getting to
work trashing the nearest town.
A few years later, in 1970, Cheech and Chong came out of nowhere. Like a
lot of things out of the later sixties, Cheech and Chong weren’t
planned, they just happened. It happened all of a sudden one night from
a complete cold stop at a small nightclub in Vancouver where their band
was playing. I knew Tommy Chong casually from being around the Vancouver
clubs scene. Tom wasn’t a hippie, but he was a petty good guitar player
and always had a pretty good little rock and roll band on the go.
His were never bands with their own agendas trying to make a name for
themselves like we were. Rather they were always very good cover bands
playing rock hits to non hippies in nightclubs and cabarets as a lot of
professional musicians do.
Tommy would have a really good band for a while, and then not so good,
then a good one again as the good sidemen and not so good ones came and
went. For a while in the spring of 1970, Tommy had one of the best ever
‘get down’, ‘good ole’ stomping boogie’ blues bands I’ve heard then or
since. It was mostly because of the drummer.
Duris, unfortunately, was an unhappy sort of, well a lot more like an
always. restless kind of guy. So he never stayed long in one place for
very long. One day the drummer was gone and the band was ready to start
a new gig at the small club with a new drummer. By this time, the other
guitar player was also fairly new. A recent arrival from Edmonton
Alberta by name of Cheech Marin.
While the first set was getting ready to begin, the musicians were
tuning up, playing riffs, checking the mikes, the usual kind of stuff.
To break the awkward silence which always accompanies such necessary
tune ups, one of them suddenly fast rapped the other in a mind blown
hippie kind of way. The other dry lined right back like a snapped
garter. The audience fell backwards right off their seats howling with
laughter. It had come right out of the blue and was about as right on
the money a hippie stone spoof as any amount of money could want it.
So they quickly shot a fast rap back and forth a few more times again.
The new drummer sat patiently with drumsticks on lap waiting for the
first song to begin. It never did. The two just kept fast rapping
through the whole first set, not even bothering to put finger to fret.
When they came back out for the second set, they just carried on where
they’d left off, back rapping constantly right off the top of their
heads. They did the same again for the third set. They ended the whole
night without playing a single note.
The audience was so weak from laughing they could barely make it to the
exits. Again, like finding a good hip wiggle that worked, everybody just
knew that these two guys were onto a good shtick that would stick. When
the band was taking down their equipment for what would turn out to be
the last time ever, the drummer said, ‘well looks like I’m out of a gig
again’. Nothing like being hip to the scene when the scene just became
hip.
The funniest part about the whole Cheech and Chong thing, is that
neither of them are in any way like the fundo characters they portray.
Both are basically straight as dies in the sense of not being stoned out
of their minds as the alternative. Hip yes, stoned no.
Why it worked so well was that anybody who has ever been even in the
slightest way tangent to the hippie world, knows at least one or more
characters exactly like at least one or another of the two stoners
portrayed on stage. I knew a couple of both.
In fact, the characterizations in their work touched many levels. One of
the most unforgettable characters in their first movie as you may recall
if you saw it, was a border guard named Abe Snedenco. Abe Snedenco was
in fact the real name of a real live narcotics detective in the real
live Vancouver branch of the real live Royal Canadian Mounted Police
drug squad division.
I even played rugby against Abe a few times in my pre-hippy athletic
days. The reason why Abe had acquired such a sufficiently narked
reputation as to become immortalized in a movie, was that the drug squad
had a penchant for coming feet first through the door of your house at
six thirty in the morning yelling, ‘don’t anybody move’.
I had a chance to yak with Abe for an hour one night during a club gig
our band was playing. To his credit, Abe was completely sincere in what
he was doing, and wasn’t just in it for the pushing of people around.
His way of dealing with hippies, oft plied was albeit heavy-handed. Not
from piggishness though, but rather from a sincere desire to prevent, or
at least interfere with, the migration of soft drug users toward hard
drug use.
People used to scoff at the prospect and not without good reason. The
gateway theory doesn’t hold true in most cases. Vancouver unfortunately
was a major Pacific rim seaport and subject to all that goes with it. So
the gateway in Vancouver was rather large. In the city of Vancouver at
least, the prospect of migration had a somewhat grimmer edge of
probability about it than in most places.
When I lived around the open scene in hippieville the summer before the
band, at least a couple of familiar faces weren’t there in the morning.
Dead because of heroin overdose. Not funny. These weren’t hardened pros.
Just kids who had gone the next step too far. Not that everybody was
into it. Fortunately, very few actually were. But the few that were made
it scary for everybody.
Trust me. That stuff’s every bit the walking death it’s billed to be.
Just stick around for a couple of hours with someone who has recently
shot up and watch them melt slowly into a puddle in the middle of the
floor and you’ll know exactly what I mean. Hedonism is a very perilous
mistress.
Hard drugs however, while being the most expedient, weren’t the only way
for taking oneself out of the picture. A big rock concert came through
Vancouver in the spring of 1970. Janis Joplin was doing a farewell tour
with Big Brother. She was already putting together the beginnings of her
next big band to be called ‘The Full Tilt Boogie Band’.
This was her big official sayonara tour with Big Brother, last night
ever. The backup band on the tour was a completely unknown group out of
Chicago, not surprisingly called ‘Chicago’.
‘Chicago’ was quite impressive. Not yet the show stoppers they were
quickly to become, but quite impressive nevertheless. What was most
impressive about the band though was the skill and richness of its horn
section. While horn sections had been the staple of Motown styles rhythm
and blues bands since the fifties, they were not yet a known thing in
hippie styled rock and roll bands. Chicago had made it work and were
working it very well.
At the inevitable party up after the show, Janis was all over the horn
section. You see, she had in fact been planning to integrate the exact
same kind of horn section into her own new boogie band. She was
eventually successful in enticing two of the musicians to jump ship and
join her crew. That ship jump has to go down in history as one of worst
career moves ever.
Only six or seven weeks later, Chicago’s first album hit the streets and
the rest was history. The Full Tilt Boogie Band had barely gotten out of
the starting gate and Janis was gone from a drug overdose. The rest was
also history along with the two aspiring troubadours from Chicago.
A big switcheroo of another kind also happened that summer. Vanilla
Fudge of modest rock fame came through Vancouver with an unknown new
band in their wake called Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin was Jimmie Page’s
new band after the demise of the Yardbirds. Vanilla Fudge was the
headliner, Led Zeppelin was the backup. A couple of weeks later
Zeppelin’s first album came out.
Six weeks later the tour came back again in the other direction. Led
Zeppelin was the headliner and Vanilla Fudge was the backup. Led
Zeppelin you’ve heard of; Vanilla Fudge was never heard of again.
In fact the enticing back half of Stairway to Heaven was recorded in
Vancouver on the first time through. It had been done one morning in a
hurried emergency session as the band was breezing through town. They
had happened on the riff and wanted to get it down before the unique
flavouring was lost, thankfully for all.
Vanilla Fudge wasn’t the only band to begrudge the Zeppelin. I heard
that Steppenwolf had refused to go on stage one night after Led Zeppelin
had torn the audience apart as the opening act.
Also just getting into the recording business by now, was my old
Vancouver recording engineer chum Robbin of the famed ‘Tree in South
West Saskatchewan’ story from the first Book. Robbin had opened a
recording studio on Third Avenue. So of course before long, and in due
course, MTYD was in to record an album. I was in the studio one
afternoon listening to some takes from the night before when a cheerful
youngster showed up.
Jay had only been in Vancouver a couple of weeks and someone had
suggested he check out Robbin’s studio. Turns out he was an extremely
talented sixteen year old singer, guitar player, and writer. Turns out
he had a briefcase full of songs he wanted to record.
In due course, a fairly quick due course, the recording was on. Jay and
Robin worked on it for about half a year. When it was finished it was a
very slick piece of work. A concept album along the line of the
Beatles’s Sergeant Pepper which was still a very advant garde way to go
at the time.
Just about exactly the time he finished, Jay’s Mother started calling
constantly from the States. She wanted him to come back home and help
her with a new cosmetics business she was just starting up which was
making very Mary incomes for anybody that had said ‘O’Kay’ enough on the
promotions to get in on the multi-level marketing plan.
His mom was a musician who had had a successful trio in the later
fifties and early part of the sixties. She even had a couple of small
hits under her belt. No doubt where her son had got his talent.
Either Jay really was really the son and Mary Kay had gone from making
music to making faces, or Jay had strung us along with the best of them.
I never found out for sure because he left one day and nobody ever heard
of him again, or his music. Just another little stroke in my history of
little brushes with history, maybe.
By the Spring of 1968, we had finally got around to finishing up a demo
album for MTYD. We decided to trek to Toronto to look for a recording
contract. The rhythm guitar player Donnie, was from Winnipeg. So we
stopped off in Winnipeg on the way through for a couple of gigs.
One of the gigs was for the final high school dance at Benito Manitoba.
Benito was a small town about two hundred and fifty miles up in the
Northwest populated edge of the province.
The town was just at the end of the rich Swan Hills wheat growing area,
the extreme eastern edge of Canada’s prairie breadbasket where the Great
Canadian Shield suddenly plunged to the south cutting the bread basket
off at the gullet, going down almost to Winnipeg. The bread basket then
eased over a bit past Winnipeg to the east to its last and final
conclusion at the Sandilands Forest Reserve of south east Manitoba and
beginning of the great ‘Lake of the Woods’ watershed system that extends
deep down into Minnesota.
Some parts of the border along the shield through mid northern
Saskatchewan and Alberta are really well defined. To the south, rich
rolling wheat fields extend as far as the eye can see. To the north,
nothing but jack pine trees stand just like a wall. In some places it
actually looks like a giant swather had been working a giant wheat field
and then just stopped, leaving the wall of pine trees standing as the
uncut wheat to the north.
In some places along the stretch, you can literally see pine tree
forests starting just a foot or two on the other side of fences along
the north edge of the wheat fields. It’s kind of eerie to think that
some of these tree stands continue north unbroken from where you see
them until they run into the tundra in the far Arctic.
Just as eerie to think are that the wheat field counterparts on the
south side of the fences extend all the way south. Meaning no more pine
trees until the mountains of New Mexico. The reason for this incredibly
abrupt change is that the rock underneath changes from that of the
shield to that of the prairies exactly under the fences.
The shield rock is the wrong pH or whatever factor it is that’s good for
farming. Farmers have long ago converted any useful land around to
agriculture. Given the wily natures of man in fact, nearly every square
foot of land in North America that’s suitable for farming has already
long since been converted to farming.
The same kind of thing’s now going one in tropical forests around the
world, where crops are sprouting a thousand times faster then trees ever
could, and trees are the sorry looser in a madcap runoff to oblivion
with the almighty dollar wielding the whip.
What’s really eerie along the shield line, is when you get to stand
along the demarcation line and see the division line literally almost as
distinct as a line drawn on a piece of paper in some places. I
eventually came across all of this amazing stuff in the latter seventies
during my flower selling days.
Benito and Swan Hills were just a tiny bit west of the wall of pine,
just as it started to plunge south along Manitoba’s west side before
swinging East just north of Winnipeg and then south again into the Lake
of the Woods region and into Minnesota. Look at any geographical map of
North America, you will see the line almost in black and white because
where the shield starts, crowded peopleness stops.
Our gig in Benito went fine. Then just as we were finished packing up
and getting ready to leave town, we were suddenly surrounded by a
contingent of RCMP police. For hippies, paranoia tends to rear itself up
rather quickly in situations like these. Not to worry though, turns out
these were friendly cops for our protection. Word had leaked that the
homeboys from Swan Hills were setting up a roadblock on the highway out
of town and were intending to do us harm.
This was apparently their particular wont as regards the so called
hippie band freak infestations which were coming north into their area
from Winnipeg from time to time. Something about the same old story from
times immemorial about some of their gal friends going gaga over the
musicians, and their not being able to handle the not-so-subtle implied
put-downs against their self immortalized state of Manitoba manhood. At
any rate we sailed out of town under a full escort of cops to the front
and rear.
Talk about the good, the band, and the ugly. The ugly must have seen the
flashing lights of the good coming though, because when the band sailed
through ground zero there was no visible signs of anyone in wait. Had it
been a no show, or had they just laid low as we passed because of the
heat. Who knows? However, much better to have been saved than sorry at a
time like this I always say.
In general like most hippies, we often took abuse on the chin, feeling
quite properly that the problem was with those who saw the world through
the eyes of yellow jaundice and prejudice rather than the eyes of
reality. Our general attitude served us well against the general
rectitude over the years.
None of the servings however, was ever so black and white as one night
in Portage La Prairie Manitoba just west out of Winnipeg.
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