Joe Tate

12-14 Joe Tate was the rhythm guitar player in an eastbay (SF) band named Red Shepard and the Flock when I first came aware of him in the early sixties. We, our band, my band had gotten into one of the better venues in the (northern) east bay, playing for the drinking and dancing hordes of enthusiastic attendees 9 PM to 1:30 AM on a two week contract for Friday and Saturday nights. This was renewed, with the added job across the street in the after-hours joint from 2am to 6 am. We usually went to breakfast after our gigs before heading home. Somehow the grapevine informed us and made us curious to go see this band in this bar that had them wailing away starting at 6 am opening time until 10:30 am Red Shepard and his flock kept us awake and jumping, and even game to sit in with the band and so forth. One thing leads to another and we exchange gigs with Joe's band for a week or two, here and there around the scene, and this is from where my acquaintanceship with Joe began.  ¶  Fast forward to 1968, and after Joe's band, reconfigured as Salvation Army Banned with a recording contract and lots of free equipment to wail away upon. Got their first album done and were into number two when I visited their hideaway studio in the Simi Valley area northeast (?) of L.A. proper in late 1967. This was just before their manager absconded with the fifty-thousand dollars front money for to set up their next tour and the like. Well, when he split, all the goodies had to be returned and the band dematerialized; & then Joe had been hauled back to Kansas by his ex-wife for arrears child support & thrown in the hoosgow for a month til his girlfriend bailed him out & set him back up with a lot of love. By and by, Joe somehow ends up buying, for one dollar, a potential giagantic headache from the city fathers' point of view, but free and clear as far as Joe and all the rest of us who came to 'party' at his place were concerned. The prize was an ancient wooden 80 by 40 ft. gold dredge barge from somewhere up the Sacremento or American rivers, that had had large square steel tanks strapped all the way around the original barge. With 4 stories of increasingly smaller-dimen-sioned houses, 1 atop the other, squeezed in the space between the 4 gigantic wooden timbers that made the 60 feet tall “A”frame quadrapod for the derrick boom's upper guywire backstays, with the pilot house up on the 4th floor—if you count the full headroom basement bilges then it would be up on the 5th floor. & with its 100 feet long, 18 inch in diameter steel boom still hanging at a 30 degree angle on its guy and support wire cables. It was a gass to walk all the way out there and just sit for a spell at some 40 or 50 feet above the water, and eyeball everything below. For a dollar Joe had bought this place from the shortly-thereafter-died old nasty boatyard owner who had brought this eyesore of an elderly hulk into the picture windows of the Sausalito Yacht Club just to enrage the members--which included mayor and city council members who'd told him he couldn't park that thing—or the drydocks—anywhere near the Sausalito city limits & he got mad & went & towed these monstrous old hulks down from their upriver graves; parked & sunk them in the shallow waters right in front of all of his detractors--in their face. And then, sold it to Joe for a dollar just before he died. No clear title ever kept us from using the preponderously-immovable drydocks any old how or way we so pleased. And we had many orgies & parties, there, & fixed a lot of small boats on the drydocks decks, which never flooded in high tides or storm surges because the four 100 feet square thick, 12 feet deep wooden barges (with 80 feet high hollow towers on both sides of the main deck, all sunk in only 8 feet (average) of water—almost an acre of free space 300 yards from the nearest shore: Whatta dream. & the collective salvage efforts of us all must have yielded thousands of extra, essentially, if you don't count our labors, which we didn't, dollars. The unusually gigantic thick pump housings down in the bilges were built of brass & bronze, & sometimes took weeks to get taken apart by those brave enough to brave this dangerous work at slippery sea level, wielding large heavy tools. Marine transients & drug smugglers occasionally took refuge there. I used it as a way station or hideout (from inclement weather conditions) in addition to the time I spent in their  innards worrying some valve or piece of 880 volt copper cable loose from their encasement in unyielding steel conduits.