houses, but I’d never been in a huge open park where there was literally a pot stench. When I got up to the line a fat slob with a hairy belly dished a spoonful of watery stew on my plate and said, “Peace, Brother.” I couldn’t believe he was serious. I was afraid to eat anything. I figured that anything anybody gave me for free had to have LSD in it.
I took my plate over to a tree behind the stage where Glen and Dick were talking to a hippie with daisies stuck in his furry hair.
“It’s true man,” he was saying. “They come in off the freeway. They use the freeway as a landing strip, see? And then they steal people out of their houses for experimentation.”
Dick said, “This is Sergeant Garcia, and he knows a lot about flying saucers.”
“Don’t they land on any cars when they hit the freeway?” Glen asked him.
“That’s the thing man!” Garcia said, his face suddenly contracted into a ripple of nervous twitches. “They crush dozens of cars every night, and the government tries to cover it up so the people won’t panic. It’s our job, man, to spread the word.”
I learned from Dick that Sergeant Garcia had just been released from a psychiatric hospital and felt attracted to us because we were crazy, too. He gave us his address and phone number if we ever needed a place to sleep and even helped us load the equipment into the station wagon when the gig was over.
The next day we walked into a club on the Strip cold and asked if we could audition. The owner, who wore beads around his neck and smoked cigars, was surprisingly pleasant and told us to come back the next night at seven. Just as we set up our equipment he opened the doors to the club. He said he wanted to see what the public thought of us. This was the first of many scams we were to have perpetrated on us in LA. We “auditioned” for three hours that night, to a fairly crowded club, and when it was over he told us we didn’t sound just right but thanks anyway.
We went back to Phoenix and finished up some jobs; a prom in Gallup, New Mexico, one in Albuquerque, a rock concert in Riverside, California. But we couldn’t stay home another week after that. We decided to change out name to the Nazz, one of those arbitrary decisions that seemed very practical at the time. We were each able to save up forty dollars from our salaries and again we piled into the station wagon and headed for LA.
We checked into six-dollar-a-night cubicles at the Sunset Motor Inn and set off for the Hullabaloo Club. In 1967 the Hullabaloo was one of the most important clubs in the country. It was a showcase for new talent that spawned hundreds of rock musicians. Like the Scene and Max’s Kansas City and many other famous clubs, the Hullabaloo provided the space, setting and ambience for rock people to meet and make deals. The Hullabaloo worked an after-hours policy, running live acts from midnight to dawn. While Los Angeles withdrew, another world was just beginning to buzz at the Hullabaloo. The place was filled to capacity every night with record company A&R men, managers, groupies, publicists, and the whole rainbow of drug dealers, con artists and homosexuals that appear wherever rock and roll is.
If you were a known group with a record label, you were paid one hundred dollars to play. The Doors played the Hullabaloo often, even after their hit single, just to get off playing for a hip crowd. But most groups played for free, and we were lucky to get the chance. Being seen at the Hullabaloo was a ticket to heaven. We signed up for two nights and lucked out with a good time — four A.M.
I guess we expected a talent scout to come running out of the audience and offer us a million-dollar contract. We didn’t even get applause. By the end of our second show we were thoroughly depressed. The audience was completely indifferent to us. The speakers might as well have been turned off. All our money was gone and we couldn’t even afford the six-dollar-a-night motel. We had to leave Los Angeles again the next morning after only a five-day stay, and I couldn’t believe we had been devoured so quickly. We hadn’t.
As I glumly watched the equipment being loaded in the station wagon, I saw a woman with red lipstick and matching frizzy hair pushing her way through the crowded backstage area towards me. She grabbed hold of my jeans, dragged me to a corner and said her name was Merry Cornwall, and she was the booking agent for the Cheetah. The Cheetah was the hottest discotheque on the West Coast. It was hardly a year old and already a rock and roll legend. The interior design of mirrored chrome and flashing lights made it the hippie acid palace of the decade, and I would have given my right arm to play there.
Dick Christian saw me talking to Merry Cornwall, and when he found out who she was he began laying on the bullshit thick and heavy. In ten minutes she started giving us boy-I-would-love-to-fuck-you looks. I had never really gotten those looks from an older woman before. (Merry, it turned out, was only twenty-three years old. I was nineteen.) And I was a virgin to boot, but I understood how to play the game. She told us that she adored the group and would try to book us at the Cheetah. She wanted to know where we were living so she could get in touch with us. Since we were supposed to be leaving the next day we took her number and promised to call. Merry Cornwall’s promise was enough motivation to get in touch with our only LA contact, Sergeant Garcia.
Garcia was on welfare, nearly as broke as we were, and lived in a tiny apartment in downtown Los Angeles. He took us in like long-lost inmates. We waited by Sergeant Garcia’s phone for Merry Cornwall to return our phone calls, but she never did. We got more depressed every day, dragging Sergeant Garcia down with us. John Speer played drill instructor every morning, dragging us up off the mattresses and making us set up our equipment to practice. The noise drove Sergeant Garcia out of his apartment. He would either walk the streets or go to see his psychiatrist at the welfare center. Sometimes he would wake up screaming in the middle of the night, “Harriet, take it out! Take it out!” He was starting to flip out again. This was the first time I had been exposed to somebody that crazy, and I tried my best to act natural. I made jokes about Harriet, which he didn’t laugh about, and about our being stuck in his house for the next five years, which he did laugh about. One day he came home from his shrink and told us that he had finally told his psychiatrist we were living with him, but the psychiatrist thought he was making it up and threatened to put him back into the hospital. He asked if one of us would go to his next session with him so his psychiatrist would know there were really eight people in his apartment. We thought this was very funny and drew straws to see who would go to Sergeant Garcia’s shrink the next session. Charlie Carnal won.
Charlie came back from the doctor’s and told us that when the shrink stuck his head out into the waiting room, he took one look at Charlie with his short hair and one side and long on the other and closed the door. Forty minutes later Sergeant Garcia emerged and told Charlie that his psychiatrist insisted that we move out for Garcia’s own good.
By the end of the week we were flat broke and couldn’t find a paying job anywhere in the city. We made plans to leave Sergeant Garcia’s and head back to Phoenix in three days’ time, and Dick went scurrying out into the streets for the last two days to hunt up a job so we could stay in LA. He was able to get us one more booking at the Hullabaloo Club, but again for no pay. We packed all of our things, loaded them into the car, thanked Garcia and went to the Hullabaloo Club for a farewell gig.
Dick disappeared around midnight, and just before we were supposed to go on he came back with a sharp- looking older guy in his thirties named Robert Roberts. Dick had gone to a bar, ordered a beer with his last sixty cents, walked over to the first person he saw and told the guy our whole story from Phoenix on. Bob Roberts offered his living room to sleep in, and again we were saved.
Bob Roberts lived just off Sunset Boulevard on Wetherlee Drive, not far from the Whiskey-A-Go-Go where we also dreamed of getting a gig. The neighborhood was called Evil Hill, which I thought was a very neat name for a neighborhood and I didn’t question it any further. We slept on a mattresses across the living room floor, all except for Dick Christian, who had wrangled his way into the mater bedroom. We weren’t at Bob’s a week when Mike Bruce went outside on the lawn to stretch out in the sun one morning. He was back inside in five minutes.
“There was this old guy who came out of the house next door, and kept yelling inside, ‘Bernard, get the kids and come outside! Bernard? Are you going to take the kids for a walk?’ Then this other guy comes out of the house with four poodle dogs and the first guy is yelling, ‘C’mon, kiddies, mama gonna take you to the corner.’ A couple of minutes later I was lying on the lawn with my eyes closed, and I got this eerie feeling somebody was watching me. I opened one eye and there was this guy sitting on a car, grinning at me. Finally he said, ‘Hi, fella, you got nice arms.’
We shrugged it off as weird LA people, but the following day while Mike was out on the lawn again, an older distinguished man started a conversation with him, and Mike told him about the band. The guy offered to discuss managing the group if Mike had dinner with him. Since we were practically starving and the chances were that Mike could take home a doggie bag, we insisted he accept the invitation. The man picked Mike up in a Cadillac, and we all stood in the doorway of the house grinning and waving and trying to make a good impression on our potential manager.
