Sep 6 2008

09-06-08 (08.09.06.odt) Embarrassment is not the exact descriptive term for how I remember my musical-entertainer's more professional type first decade of—the only decade, really, wherein I played and sang for money at dance halls and bars with dance floors. It wasn't only for money, though. I desired the kind of 'recognition' (I felt that) I got from the audiences, am became 'addicted' to this, early on, in my career as a musician-singer-performer. It was because of them and how their images and responses, in effect, created that addiction. From around age sixteen until twenty-six, I only lived, or so it seems from a half-century later, for that addiction. Twenty-four 'day jobs' went by the wayside while I never stopped going to some gig with my similarly-addicted musical performer wannabe buddies for ten years in a row up to 1966. I had a wife and three kids, which one would surmise might take all precedence over any other interest so vital to the make up of a well-roundedness; but they went by the boards right along with those twenty-four attempts at being 'gainfully' employed in the normal married-with-children-and-a-day job sense. Even while working my way through about eight different boat/house/shop configurations and doing this while living aboard and aflpoat and not tied up to shore more than the day or two here or there at some event or party/music-making type gig; I always kept on playing ('pop') blues rock music with those friends I seem to have always had throughout the first forty-three years of my life—i.e: the last twenty-seven of those forty-three years. Though my greatest love is directed at the guitar, it was mostly my grasp of piano manipulation techniques that settled much of my musical undertakings and endeavors onto standing behind the piano, keyboard, or organ. Do you know—I've suddenly realized the memory of doing about five nights in a row on the Hammond B 3 organ, one week at Litchfield's Bermuda Palms 'motel', bar, restaurant, and extra large ballroom combination business on Highway 101 in San Rafael, CA. I was my friend, “King John” Allair's guitar player on that gig, but having worked, on and off, with and for him for all the years since he first hired me in 1956 to be his guitar player and I mostly did the saxophone parts on his astoundingly-accurate renderings of all the Fats Domino hits of those years of the mid-fifties. Now we had both become old enough to work in bars for pretty good money after all the years of ten and twenty, or no bucks per teen dance, high school rally, teen, and car club dances, and a few movie theaters. Being, then, Marin County's best, much acclaimed star singer-performer and excellent boogie-woogie and blues piano player, he had the choicest musician's job in Marin County then, there at the Palms; six nights a week, 9 PM to 1:30 AM. It had happened again: His guitar player had quit and he needed me to come and fill in for the guy who'd quit, and I must have been in between gigs for the band I was in, because there I was at the Palms and playing guitar again with and for John Allair. He knew and could render at the drop of the hat, any R & B hit from the late-forties and early fifties. Had grown up in a black community, and in rebellion to his parents' overbearing obsession that he learn classical piano, rebelled all the way into R & B and singing black guys (and gals') hits. He had excellent-to-total control over both his hands' independence from one another and the dexterity that only some years of classical piano lessons' training can instill; and accurately sang perfect mimmicks of Fats, Ray Charles, Louie Prima, Little Richard, could even do a pretty good Louie Armstrong, James Brown, and so many other older time black blues and rhythmists that I am at a loss to remember even a half-dozen of them. Through the years, I had become so familiar with most all of what he sang and played, and, having been there and done that with plenty of other band-grouping situations, it was a breeze—and one of the biggest thrills and joys to be able to do all of his stuff on the piano and B3 organ for the five days he had layringitus. One time only where I actually had the big musical beast that was the Hammond B 3 organ until electronic keyboards came on the market through the seventies and eighties. That truly crappy Farfisa (Italian made) electronic organ, with about the fakiest piano imitation ever! that I played on during the bar year gigs; for all of its horriblest of horrid horrors of lousey tonality and no timbre at all, earned me twenty-six hundred dollars in the year of 1964, after three years of maybe a thousand, and then two-thousand playing that damn organ of the sax player and band leader/organizer and job salesperson who kept me and my old drummer buddy, Larry, in constant employment for almost five years! I hated that keyboard with such a passion; and one that I had to contain and constrain from doing violence upon it sometimes. But I could put it in my car and carry from car to stage (and back again), which REAL pianos, sadly, do not allow—under normal circumstances. The Redlegs experience put pianos on the bacs of flatbed trucks twice that I remember; Once for a political campaign parade, and once to advertise a used car dealer's car lot sales event down on upper Market street end of downtown San Francisco. But that was after I'd quit being and thinking of myself as only a union musician who did covers of pop hits for money—for the hated ideology behind it and what all it inflicts upon the climate of emotional consciousness in people who, unknowingly, maybe, seem to have embraced its sneaky thievery and have let its damaging spread to their powers of reasoning and emotional even-keel-maintainability, much to all of our detriment, if I go to think about it too much—which I don't, or just plain flat won't, anymore.

     Today, and for the past many years since giving up on basing my music involvements upon monetary concerns, I look back upon those early years with mirthful ridicule and chagrin to realize what all, way out of whack, I had been doing for those years. I laugh at the images of the monkey in his monkey suit, banging and whamming away upon whatever ax he was using in any one particular rendering of some famous pop or blues legend's hit song or songs—doing covers. Yuck, ick, awfulest way to pursue a musical carreer, but one has to start some where, and I got hooked, probably in my own rebellion to the regimen of forced daily hour long piano practices, by blues, country, and the pop icons of the day. For my already-achieved level of piano and guitar and overall general musical understanding and sympathy, pop and blues and harder rhythms than my parents can tolerate was an easy assumption for me, as one heck of a very ignorant mid-teen; and I played it to the proverbial hilt for a decade of wild involvement with it almost rapture-like in its intensity-of- my-involvement and effect upon whatever spirit I had that was, essentiallly running the show in my young underdeveloped brain way back then, when I jumped all over the stage swinging and swaying to the music I was playing and gave it my all—which was never a justification for quitting my day job; but I always got fired or laid off by those day jobs—singing out the words in the right notes while playing accompaniments in the right keys and sets of chord progressions—Whew! I'm just getting tired only thinking about this huge force-field that mostly and nearly consumed me in all other areas, except boats. I gave up a lot of music-making opportunities in favor of my worry wort boat maintnence projects and dreams of future bigger, more solid, maybe even seaworthy ones that I was always keeping alive in my day-to-day boatlife fare. What a dreamer, I criticize myself when remembering all these highly illusory things and activities I chose (?) to let myself become involved with, in, from, and to.