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MOTHER TUCKERS YELLOW DUCK
Part 5 - Continued 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 5
I had a bit of a similar situation in San Francisco later that winter back
in Vancouver. I had gone down to San Francisco and lined up a booking at the
famous Fillmore Auditorium, the hippie Mecca of the whole West Coast.
The Fillmore Auditorium was home of Bill Graham, the West Coast’s most
serious hippie rock promoter. He had at least fifteen phones on his
desk, all going on at the same time. Somehow he managed to keep them all
going and talk to me at the same time. Somebody watched him at work for
awhile and that’s where the term ‘multi tasking’ came from.
About a week before the contract was to arrive in the mail, Bill phoned
to tell me that someone in Vancouver had told him we were strictly a hit
parade cover band and the deal was off. I should have yelled bloody
murder again, but I didn’t.
That we were just a hit parade cover band was about as bum steer as you
could get. That way like saying the Beatles were a vocal quartet. The
someone in Vancouver was merely a ‘go for the jugular’ manager of
another local band who was trying to steal the coveted booking for
himself. I just let it pass, being the mild mannered patsy that I was.
I should have paid the phone tab for twenty better qualified
Vancouverites to get on the phone and straighten Bill up. Between the
two miscues, except for a number of times playing in Seattle, we never
did get to play in the States.
My trip to San Francisco had actually been my sixth trip south.
Vancouver and San Francisco enjoyed a direct due north south hook-up
through both the higher atmospheric vapours and the highway. Long
weekend trips from Vancouver to Frisco were one of Vancouver’s favourite
pastimes.
If you left right after work on the Thursday, and arrived back just
before work on the Monday and drove around the clock both ways, you had
a whole day to party in the big bay window. It took over a month to
recuperate, but Vancouverites loved it like nothing else.
My first time down to ‘Frisco was in the early Spring of 1964, when our
University of British Columbia rugby team went to Berkley to play a
rugby game against the University of California Berkley team. A third of
the way into the game I got clocked by a player from New Zealand playing
at Berkley on a rugby scholarship.
It seems he didn’t like my leaving his drawers behind at his position.
So he did what any self-respecting athlete on an international rugby
scholarship would do under the circumstances, and gave me an elbow which
broke a wing bone on my backbone.
It was my fault for being a strictly ‘play for fun’ and not as a ‘no
holds barred’ kind of athlete. I therefore failed to notice how beet red
his wounded pride was making his face. At any rate I went back to
Vancouver by plane the next day and into traction, and the rest of the
team went on to LA the next day and into their next game against UCLA.
The Berkley team had another player from New Zealand who was a lot more
impressive. He stood all of five foot four and in at about a hundred and
thirty pounds. He had been a New Zealand Moiri All Black. Despite his
extremely diminutive size for a rugby player, he was one of the
smoothest and most gifted rugby players I ever saw.
The New Zealand All Blacks, both Maori and the traditional version, were
New Zealand’s national institution, ahead even of lamb chops and wool.
The year before, our guy had been playing scrum half for the Maori All
Blacks.
After a particularly hard fought victory, the team convened to a large
prestigious New Zealand hotel to whoop it up in the time worn
traditional after every match and got blind stinking drunk. The
celebration got a little out of hand and our guy inadvertently caused
the hotel to burn to the ground.
Since the All Black rugby team was a national shrine, they couldn’t very
well ship him off to jail. So they shipped him off to Berkley instead on
an international rugby scholarship until the heat cooled down.
Our UBC rugby team had an assistant coach in 1963 who was also a Maori.
I have to admit, I like the Maoris. Like the Australian Aborigines,
these are very deep spirited warm fun loving people who don’t give a
whistle about airs.
My second trip to Frisco was in the summer of 1964. My friend Bob, who
had met Allen Ginsberg floor to floor one evening in the first book, was
now going to a seminary college in Portland Oregon. He asked if I wanted
to go to Frisco with himself, his now wife and year old son, plus a
friend of his from college. I bussed to Portland and we did the round
trip in three days in their Volkswagen Beetle.
The friend from college and I spent the whole trip in the back seat with
ours knees jammed to our chins waving away frequent diaper wafts from
the front seat.
The most interesting thing on the trip was North beach which we hit the
first evening in town. North Beach was the old entrenched beatnik jazz
and poet enclave of the West Coast. Bob was hoping to find the place
abuzz with the personalities whose names were being passed around the
intellectual circles of his college as agogs.
North Beach though, had become somewhat wound down. We were told that
the true-blue dyed-in-the-hew beatniks, had all moved the year before
over to new digs in an area called Haight Ashbury near the Fillmore
auditorium. We never went over to check it out. But time certainly
proved it out to be true because flowers eventually started popping up
everywhere around the Haight.
Bob’s friend from college likewise eventually popped up everywhere in TV
sets around the country as Robin from the campy Batman and Robin series
of the latter sixties. Holy cod pod, Batman, are these shorts
ever tight. On the way back Robin also couldn’t stop telling us non stop
about the wonderful weekend he had just had cutting a swath both wide
and long through San Francisco’s well known band of Merry men.
My third time to Frisco was a year later in 1965. Four of us drove down
in a Volvo for a long weekend. The drive was much more comfortable this
time as Volvos are not Volkswagens. On the way back, as we headed north
out of Frisco, I fell asleep in the back seat.
About four hours later one eye popped open just in time to see a sign
sliding by that said, ‘Los Angeles 450 miles’. That kind of caught my
attention as Vancouver was due North out of San Francisco about 1,300
miles, and LA was due South. In other words, either the magnetic poles
had finally shifted or we were going one hundred and eighty degrees in
the wrong direction.
Sure enough, the driver had apparently been hugging the right hand lane
of the freeway and not paying a whole lot of attention to what he was
doing. In the lazy kind of driving that freeways at night can sometimes
inspire, the highway had come to a big overpass and he had gone straight
around on the right hand off ramp, business as usual and straight up
onto the cross highway without even noticing.
After due course it had happened again. Since ninety degrees and ninety
degrees equals one hundred and eighty degrees, we were now on the main
California inland Interstate going straight south into Los Angeles
instead of due North into Canada.
If I hadn’t popped awake when I did, I might easily have woken up in the
City of Angels instead of the city of the North. This was the one and
only time in my entire life when I actually caught someone trying to go
south on me.
The fourth time down was during my mining days with Fluorspar Minerals.
Not much untoward happened on this trip except that I flew down and
rented a hot brand new Mustang convertible which were blazing car
dealers records at the time. And I did it up in style.
I had gone to Frisco to continue a meeting with one of the sons of one
of San Francisco’s great patriarch families. The family name was De
Tristan. The great great Grandfather had been one of the world’s most
formidable whalers of the nineteenth century.
Not the most illustrious way of making a buck given all those poor
critters who got the hook over a measly few dollars worth of blubber.
But to his credit, Mark was now in charge of the family estate and was
trying to do as much good works with it as he could. At the same time he
was keeping a good eye on investment possibilities to keep the money
rolling in.
He had picked up a few shares of my mining company while on a brief
visit to Vancouver and wanted to sit at leisure and learn more about it
down in his home town of Frisco for a potentially much bigger
investment.
His best friend John, a real Crocker of a son of the then world famous
third largest banking family in the US, was also slated for the meet. No
doubt about it, I was moving up into heady company. Shortly after I
arrived, Crocker John called to say that he couldn’t make the meet. So
De Tristan Mark postponed his end too and we set up another tentative
date for a few months down the road.
The meeting down the road never got to transpire. In the ensuing passage
of time, Mark had discovered a gold panning operation in Oregon, had
bought it out lock, stock, and sluiceway, and was going to pan it
himself for a little relaxation and meditation within the quiets of
nature. Like I said in the first book, you only get one pull at the
ring. I decided to salvage the trip anyway and took a few badly needed
days off from the grind myself.
The Mustang was a nice little car, worth every penny of the sizzling
press it was receiving at the time. I drove down the coast as far as Big
Sur. Unlike the car, Big Sur was a huge disappointment. Everyone who was
hip and happening in Vancouver at the time had been talking about how
Big Sur was where all the really hip and happening in California were
supposedly holing up. I went down expecting to see big things by big
hipsters going on.
Instead, Big Sur was nothing to see but a big Rock. Not even a fish and
chip joint condescended to grace the landscape. There was however, a
surreal silent majesty to this huge giant rock sitting all by itself a
few hundred feet off shore. Like how the heck had it got there.
The big goings on, on the other hand, all turned out to be insider
spiritual things going on strictly inside the houses of the hip and
happening sitting back out of sight off the highway.
Big Sur turned out to be a euphemism for ‘place where great and mellow
things are happening behind the scenes’, rather than a truism for,
‘place where ultra hip restaurants and mega trendy shops are splayed all
over the place for every tourist to get trapped by’.
Turns out Carmel California was the actual place where ultra hip
restaurants and mega trendy shops were splayed all over the place for
every tourist to get trapped by.
You have to go past Carmel on the Monterrey peninsula to get to Big Sur.
Here was where the hip and happening were actually out in full colour in
full view in droves in front of everybody. If you ever get down near
Carmel, make it a point of seeing it. I stopped to have a coffee in a
truly quaint English Tudor cafe.
As I was leaving, a busload of tourists had just disembarked and were
heading into the cafe for a bus break. Right in the middle of the crowd
was a rugby player acquaintance from Vancouver and his new bride. Turns
out the two were honeymooning via a group travel plan to California. One
of those funny little ‘what are the odds’ again.
My fifth time for San Francisco was in the summer of 1966. A hippie
poster artist friend from Vancouver and I went down by bus. He was on
the way down to make some contacts for his poster art.
I was going down to see about the possibility of importing some of the
better known San Frisco dance posters into Canada on a regular basis.
The rock concert and club posters were fast becoming all the rage in the
wake of psychedelics. I ended up getting the rights all right, but
before I could get anything properly set up to start importing them, I
had started to manage the rock band so let it drop.
On the bus on the way down, Bob sketched out an idea for a new rock
poster for back in Vancouver. It featured a ‘Hall of the Mountain King’
type character sitting on a throne wearing turquoise fish scaled pants.
You couldn’t help but think of the poem ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy
toves‘ from Alice in Wonderland when you saw it.
When we hit Frisco, the first thing we did was to go see the poster
distributor. And guess who it was. No only had Bob caught the physical
essence of the man, but the personality, because he treated us exactly
like he though he was a mountain king we weren’t. Or else he was role
playing. How Bob had managed to pull that one through I never knew, and
I tried not to think about it a whole lot because it always kind of gave
me a headache.
Also while in Frisco, another extremely minute but interesting piece of
arcane history tapped me on the shoulder passing by. After our meeting
with the distributor, we had been directed to the Drug Store Cafe on
Haight Street as the place to go to make all our hip and happening
contacts. As we walked in, everybody was crowding excitedly around the
jukebox and somebody was hastily jamming a quarter into the slot.
Buffalo Springfield’s first single, ‘For What It’s Worth’, had just been
released. And just minutes before, somebody had brought a copy into the
Cafe for everyone to hear. That was the song in case any of you didn’t
know, that officially broke San Francisco out of musical obscurity and
into the world of lime-light and glitter for a fortnight.
The Buffalo Springfield single was quickly followed by a slew of
Jefferson Airplane hits. Then of course, Janis Joplin and Big Brother.
Then of course came the more commercial bands like Harper’s Bizarre, who
weren’t bizarre at all but as straight as apple pie and ice cream.
One of the people I met at the Frisco poster distributing business was a
hippie haired dude from Arkansas. Jim’s parents were Irish but he had
been raised in Arkansas. Between the two linguistic influences, he ended
up with the funniest accent you ever heard. It was impossible to
understand what the hell he was saying even when he repeated himself
real slow for you. It almost sounded as if he had a permanent mouthful
of marbles.
Nonetheless, he did manage to tell us one day about a time he had been
hitch hiking through the Ozarks. There’s an odd kind of symmetry to the
people in the Ozarks. The Ozarks are the part of the country where
everyone wears those tall thin stove pipe hats which stand straight up
over their heads, and also have beards hanging down equally long to
their knees in the opposite direction.
There’s nothing on the planet like a long white beard to make you look
sagely. The trick of course is that you have to keep your mouth shut.
Our friend Jim didn’t have a beard but he sure enough had hair to his
shoulders.
Jim caught a ride one day and ended up sandwiched between two Ozark boys
with all due stovepipe hats and beards to their knees. They drove along
for the first couple of minutes in complete silence. Then one of the
fellows shot Jim a quick furtive glance. After a while, the other did
the same.
This continued for some time. Not a word of conversation ensued. But
these quick little furtive glances kept coming. After about twenty
minutes, one of them said out of the corner of his mouth without even
turning his head, “You kin to them Beatle folk”. There’s no doubt about
it, if you can make it in the Ozarks you can make it anywhere.
Speaking about ‘For What it’s Worth’ and linguistic differences, for
what it’s worth, here’s one for the linguists. The English language has
a number of nice little descriptors for words of a feather. For example,
palindromes are words which are spelled the same way coming and going.
For example, pop, dad, and mom. Probably because the kids always have
them coming and going at the same time.
I have discovered a class of words which do not yet have a category that
I’m aware of. These are words which if you don’t start off saying them
correctly, your tongue gets tied and you can’t finish them. The four I
remember at the moment are, ‘Mississippi’, the very tough ‘Adirondack’
Mountains of New York State, Metropolis, and of course everyone’s all
time favourite, ‘aluminum.’
My sixth trip was the one mentioned on behalf of the band that ended up
in the messed up booking. I was travelling with a Hungarian friend from
Vancouver who was going down to visit his Mom. She had been living in
Frisco ever since the Russians had driven backwards out of Hungary one
night so they could shove it back into forward again and stay forever.
I had agreed to split the gas and off we went in Egon’s 1955 Dodge
station wagon. We were about a mile and half before Eugene Oregon just
before midnight. I was at the wheel. Suddenly the oil light whacked on
red and steady. Egon looked over and said, “Maybe we should stop for
oil”. Which was the most amazing of all helpful coincidences because we
were in the very act of driving by a service station at that very
instant, on what was otherwise a completely desolate stretch of highway.
Being the wise, sagely, and practical fellow I am, I said, “we’re only a
mile and a half out of Eugene. Let’s wait. We can get oil, gas, and eat
up all at the same time”. Wrong. A mile later the windshield suddenly
went black from oil. A rod had come straight up though the top of the
engine and out the hood of the car.
My friend negotiated a five buck deal for the car from a reputable
Eugene junk yard dealer and we did the rest of the trip by bus. That
was, and still is, my last trip ever to the city by the bay.
After arriving in Toronto in the late Spring of 1968, we had only been
in Toronto a short while when I lined up a two week booking at a hot
little club in downtown Montreal. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were right in
the middle of their ‘Give Peace a Chance’ campaign and were holed up
nude in a Downtown Montreal hotel. Half the world press was in
attendance hoping to get a glance.
Two of our band guys got to see them for a short while. Consequently I
met some PR types from Capitol Records who were all over the hotel like
ants at a picnic. When we got back to Toronto, I called up the Canadian
branch of Capitol Records and started negotiations for a record deal for
MTYD.
Almost immediately I received a phone call from the President of
Atlantic Records in the US. He had tried to reach us earlier in
Montreal. We had stayed at a French Canadian motel and he hadn’t been
able to parley vous Français enough to get a message through.
Why he called was that Atlantic had just signed a new group called
‘Crosby Stills and Nash’ and was looking for a backup group to go on the
road with them as package. He had heard some of our demo tapes and
wanted to know if we would be interested.
I told him thanks but I was already talking to Capitol Records at the
time and would call him back if it fell through. I didn’t have the
stomach at the time for pitting two or more companies against each other
in a bidding war. Too bad because Capitol eventually didn’t do much, and
what they finally did do was way too little way too late. Atlantic
Records on the other hand made Crosby Stills and Nash, well you know,
pretty famous, and MTYD wasn’t very much behind of a lesser talent.
I have to suspect therefore that something similar could have been in
store for us. The other side of the coin is that the band might never
have survived Crosby’s well known penchant at the time for hard
partying. The other side of the coin about that is, that maybe we could
have purveyed upon his better half and helped pull him out of it. That’s
the fun part about maybes, always lots of possibilities.
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