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heartbreak kid
chapter 1
Heartbreak Kid: on the streets of Hollywood in the 1960s
Chapter 1: Surfing, American Bandstand, and The Sunset Strip
Chapter 1: Surfing, American Bandstand, and The Sunset Strip
I was born right smack dab in the middle of the 20th century, in the very first month, on the day that is Inauguration Day, January 20th. Since 1986, it is also, sometimes, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. My birthday always follows the years: I was 10 in 1960, 20 in 1970, and I would be exactly a half century old at the turn of the new millennium.
I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, but my family moved to Pasadena, California when I was 4 years old. Even though we would often drive back to Phoenix to visit my grandmother, Nini, I considered Southern California my home. It would always be my home until many years later when I retired. I was a California boy, through and through!
The 1960s began, as I said, when I turned 10. That year our babysitter, Beverly, taught my sister Kathy and me how to dance the California Swing while we watched American Bandstand on Saturday afternoons, broadcast live on TV from Philadelphia. Boy, did I love to dance!
My sister and I went to the Saturday night dance every week at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. Her boyfriend was a surfer and his surfer buddy had a '49 Cadillac Hearse, with purple velvet interior. He painted it bright orange and it was their surf wagon. They would often show up at the Civic after the dance ended and we'd all pile into the back of it. We'd cruise Colorado Blvd. and end up at Bob's Big Boy, where we'd wait in line with the rest of the cruisers, until it was our turn to get into the carhop service. We'd all order burgers, fries and Cokes. They'd let you add extra flavors in your Coke if you wanted. I always had them add cherry and chocolate syrups. Cherry-chocolate Cokes were my favorite!
My brother Bob and I used to ride our bikes downtown to the Pasadena Bowling Alley, which was at Lake Ave. and Colorado Blvd., behind the Thrifty Drug Store. We'd bowl and order extra crispy french fries, with blue cheese dressing for dipping, from the kitchen. The dressing was from Bob's Big Boy Restaurants. It was the best blue cheese dressing in the world! Bob's was famous for it and they bottled it for sale. You could get it in almost any supermarket and the bowling alley used it too. We loved it way better than ketchup for dipping our fries in.
Sometimes my brother and I got to go to the beach in the hearse with my sister and her boyfriend. They'd always go to County Line (the L.A./Ventura county line) on Pacific Coast Highway, which was one of the best surfing spots in Southern California.
We'd watch the surfers catch the waves all day, while we'd swim and play and lay in the sun. In the summer of 1962, Mom let me spend a weekend with them at the beach. Mike, my sister's boyfriend, taught me how to surf and I stood up on a surfboard for the first time, riding a wave into the shore. What a blast!
In the evening, the surfers would build a big fire on the beach. They put all their surfboards around it in a big circle, stuck on edge into the sand, to create a wind block. Then, we'd all put our sleeping bags just inside the circle, so the boards blocked us from the wind. We fell asleep watching the fire.
Across the highway was a little restaurant named Mothers'. We'd go over there in the morning for breakfast. They had a pinball machine and I loved playing it. So did my brother. I became an expert at it and would often win game after game for free. Sometimes when we'd go down there to surf, I'd spend hours at Mother's playing pinball.
The 1960s would become a turbulent and exciting time in the U.S. and around the world, and my teenage years would totally encompass the 1960s.
My teens began innocently enough in the first month of 1963. At 13, I was in my first year of junior high school and had become a star southpaw pitcher in the Pasadena Little League. I used to practice my pitching in the backyard. Mom was always my catcher and coach, as Dad wasn't around much, being a traveling salesman for Collier's encyclopedias.
I remember one time when we were practicing; one of my pitches went wild and whacked Mom right in the knee! She got a knot on it that lasted for years. I don't think it ever went away, actually, but that didn't stop her from being my catcher. She was always encouraging me to do whatever I loved.
I was also 2nd trumpet in our school orchestra. I had started playing in elementary school, where I learned on a rented trumpet while Mom tried to decide if I was serious enough about it to continue. By the time I got to junior high, Mom & Dad bought me my own trumpet. They used to make me practice in my bedroom closet so I wouldn't drive everyone else crazy with the noise.
I had my first crush at 13. The Beach Party movies were all the rage for teens at the time, with Frankie Avalon & Annette Funicello or Sandra Dee in Gidget. Surfing, singing, and dancing on Southern California beaches, all on the big screen!
That summer, Ann Margret burst onto the movie screen in Bye Bye Birdie! The opening and closing scenes, with her singing and wiggling her breasts in that low cut dress, while shaking her long red hair on a plain, bright blue background—WOW! She was the be all and end all for me! I was totally infatuated and mesmerized by her!!! She was just totally amazing! The way she looked. The way she sang. Especially the way she danced! I think every teenage boy must have had a crush on her that year. That summer, I went downtown and saw Bye Bye Birdie at least a dozen times.
In school, I was an avid learner, full of optimism and excitement. I was a natural in math; it came very easily to me. I hardly had to study at all to ace my tests.
Everything looked rosy at age 13, but as it eventually turned out, my teenage years were destined to be tumultuous, just like the '60s themselves.
In November that year, President Kennedy was assassinated! I became politically aware well before the time I should have. Our whole country mourned the man who said, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
Then, only three months later, on February 9th, 1964, The Beatles burst on the scene, performing in the U.S. for the very first time on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was history in the making! It seemed as though every teenager in the country had their eyes glued to their TVs that night.
Beatlemania swept through America in an instant! With their appearance, a new optimism seemed to take hold. Their arrival especially changed things for my generation, and definitely for me in the years to come. The Beatles changed everything! It was an awakening!
Our family always watched The Ed Sullivan Show. Every week we'd all sit together in our living room in front of the TV and watch the many performers and original acts presented. We never knew what was coming next, but it was always exciting.
From that very first moment when The Beatles appeared on our TV screen, with their clean cut suits and mop top hair, my sister and I instantly fell in love with them and their music. My little brother was disinterested, as he was only 12, but my sister was 15 and I was 14. We were transfixed!
Later that year, we found out that they would be playing at the Hollywood Bowl. We had to go! We got tickets and in August of 1964 Mom drove Kathy and me to see The Beatles in concert.
There was energy in the air that I'll never forget. It was intoxicating and I felt exhilarated watching all those screaming girls in the audience, many crying and some even fainting. The screaming was so loud you couldn't even hear The Beatles playing. That concert and their music was a precursor to the music happenings of our generation that would define my life from then on.
Flash forward to the summer of 1965. I had just graduated from junior high school and would be starting high school in the fall. Little did I know it would be the last innocent summer of my life.
In the very first week of that summer vacation Mom let me take a backpack and sleeping bag and hitchhike to the beach for the summer with my friend, Gary, from school. I didn't know it then, but Mom already knew about the breakup coming in our family and that's why she let me go, even though I was only 15.
Many families of the richer kids from school had summer rental homes on the beaches of Southern California: Laguna, Balboa and Newport. Our plan was to hitchhike down there and party with our friends up and down the coast all summer.
First we hitched down to Laguna Beach, then worked our way north. We stayed with many of our friends and their families all through the summer, and sometimes we'd even sleep on the beach in our sleeping bags, which you could do in those days.
Our friends' families would sometimes feed us dinner, and sometimes, to get some breakfast, we'd wash dishes in a local restaurant at the beach or on Coast Highway.
All during that summer, one song echoed all along the beaches: "Like A Rolling Stone," by Bob Dylan. This was his first electric rock-n-roll song and the biggest hit of 1965! It became an anthem of our generation and some say it is the greatest rock-n-roll song of all time. What a summer it was!
It was the last innocent summer of my youth: going to school with all the same kids from kindergarten through junior high, and hanging out with the same friends from my earliest years till my middle teens.
1966, just one year before The Summer of Love, would be a life-changing year for me. In that one single year I would turn from an innocent high school teen, an avid dancer, and in love for the first time, into one of the first Hippies on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, working in a teenage nightclub, and protesting on the streets.
In September of the previous year, I had just begun high school at a brand new school in Pasadena, Blair High. I loved it and was excited to be in high school. Then in January Mom told me we were moving to Hollywood. I had just started, but now I had to leave everything I knew and start over in Hollywood, at Hollywood High School. I felt really discouraged!
I made the best of it, though, and right after I turned 16 I met Katie. She was also 16 and my first true love—a real, honest-to-goodness puppy love. She wasn't my first steady; that was Liz, who looked like Hayley Mills. I had met her when I was 13, at the Saturday night dance at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.
Liz and I went to different junior high schools but we'd meet there every Saturday. We loved dancing together and she was my girlfriend until she moved away to Mill Valley in Northern California and I never saw her again. We had kissed, we had danced, we had held hands, but never anything more.
But Katie—she was my first true love! We met at the teenage nightclub, It's Boss, on the Sunset Strip, where I worked as the doorman and DJ, spinning my 45 records in the DJ booth, between the sets of the house bands. She often came there with her friend, Karen. They lived in the San Fernando Valley, but would come over the hill to Hollywood because they both loved dancing, and It's Boss was one of the best clubs where teens could dance.
I had seen her a couple of times before and, even though I worked there, I was usually very shy when it came to girls. One night I saw her on the dance floor and I knew I just had to ask her to dance. I got up the courage to ask her and she accepted. We danced together all night long. We were great together and we both loved dancing so much. We became inseparable!
She was this gorgeous, petite Italian girl, almost pixie-like at five foot two, slim with piercing brown eyes and slightly teased, brown bobbed hair, which curled to a point on each side of her face.
She was the first girl I ever got to 2nd and 3rd base with. It happened one Friday night on our way home from Casey Kasem's Drop-In dance in Hawthorne, in the very back of a friend's '56 Chevy Nomad with Vibrasonic Sound.
After that, we couldn't keep our hands off each other and made out every chance we got, but we were aching to make love for our first time. We needed to be together and we wanted each other so badly!
Neither one of us was technically a virgin, as each of us had already been with one other person.
My only other time had been an awkward experience at a party when I was egged on by some friends, and it was with a girl I didn't even know, but she wanted to do it even though I didn't. We were drunk. It was awkward. All I felt after was shame and shyness.
Katie, likewise, had done it only once, with the boy she dated before me, but she also said it was awkward and she didn't really enjoy it. So we were really each other's first love, and aching to make love and be together totally for the first time.
Believe it or not, the first time we ever made love was under the pool table in her parents' game room when she invited me over for dinner one night. After dinner, we were watching TV in the living room with her parents. She told them we were going to go into the game room and play pool.
So there we were, playing pool. Then we started making out, and then we just couldn't contain ourselves. We did it! We were scared that someone would come in, but we just couldn't help ourselves. We wanted each other so bad and we just couldn't wait anymore!
After that, we looked for every opportunity to make love. We would mostly do it at my apartment when Mom was gone, but every so often there would be an opportunity to do it at her place, even though it was harder because she also had a younger sister who was around. We even did it in a swimming pool once, when we were visiting my friend, David, from school, who invited us over to go swimming in his backyard pool.
I went to Hollywood High and she went to North Hollywood High. I would ditch 6th period almost every day and hitchhike through Laurel Canyon to meet up with her after school.
"Light My Fire," the very first smash hit by local band, The Doors, would almost always be playing whenever we went through the canyon, whether on a radio or echoing out of someone's house down the canyon road. It was one of our favorite songs and if we were riding with some friends, everyone in the car would always sing along . . . "Come on baby, light my fire!" We were blissfully happy and it seemed like it would always be that way.
In high school, I had become a regular dancer on American Bandstand, Shebang and other teenage TV dance shows that were so popular then. Often I would take Katie on the shows as my dance partner.
Then, on one fateful night, after Katie and I had been dancing and reveling at the clubs until it became too late for her to go home, my very best friend who I grew up with slept with her. Jessie slept with Katie! Jessie and my first love betrayed me! I could not believe it happened!
I could not even comprehend how either of them could do that. We had been at the clubs, like I said. We were having so much fun and it got really late. We realized that Katie could not go home or she would be in deep trouble. She decided to call her parents and tell them she was staying overnight at Karen's house. She told them that, but actually there was nowhere for her to stay, as we were still in Hollywood and there was no way for her to get home or to Karen's in the Valley.
She couldn't stay at my place, 'cause Mom would never allow it. So we asked my friend Jessie if she could stay the night at the place where he was temporarily crashing, and he said it would be fine. I trusted them both, so there was never even a second thought. We were only trying to help Katie not to get into trouble.
I wish I could tell you how I found out, but that is one of those painful details from long ago that I just cannot remember, no matter how hard I try. All I remember is she broke up with me shortly after that.
Katie's betrayal was my first, deep heartbreak, and my little high school heart was crushed!!! I would never be the same . . . and life would never look the same to me again. It led to me smoking pot for the first time.
I had always believed it was the "devil weed" from Mexico that would drive you insane, just like they said in the PSA films they would show us at school. But with Katie's betrayal, I no longer cared whether I lived, died or went mad . . .
I smoked my first joint under the Santa Monica pier.
6/19/1966
you were my first love
it was me and you
my best friend
walked with us too
then one night
we stayed too late
you couldn't go home
we were too young
you stayed with him
the damage was done
now I walk the beach alone
---
wish there was someone
to talk to
what do you do
when you're 16
and your best friend
sleeps with your first love
they no longer
are the best friends
you can confide in
lost in the struggle
of the tumble
. . . alone again
just a heartbreak kid
with nowhere to turn
because of what she did
there’s no way to return
Katie had betrayed me, and the whole world weighed heavy on me. I was arguing with Mom and I hated her boyfriend, so I decided to run away from home. I hitchhiked to San Francisco, where I had heard about the Hippies in Haight Ashbury. When I got there, I was filled with wonder at the boys with long hair, the girls with no bras, bell-bottom jeans, pot and incense everywhere and the ideals the Hippies professed.
I needed a place to stay, and someone pointed me to a house where a group might help me. They were part of a free clinic and they directed me to a place with cots where I could crash for a few nights along with about a dozen other kids.
That night in my sleeping bag I got to thinking about the other time I had run away, at age 11. You see, my dad was a mean drunk and he often took it out on us, but especially Mom. He would beat on her sometimes.
I remembered this one morning when my sister, my brother and I were watching cartoons on TV early in the morning before school. It must have been around 6:00 am. Suddenly Dad came storming out of his bedroom—stark naked! "You kids stop making so much damned noise!" he screamed. He came towards us—and then stepped right into a pile of cat poo! He was so mad that he chased the cat around the room and tried to kick it. When he did that, he hit the edge of the rug instead, and broke his big toe! He was jumping around furious and yelled, "Get that cat out of this house!" We were all laughing, but not so he could tell it, and as soon as there was an escape route we hightailed it out of there and hid in our bedrooms.
Dad's drunken antics were upsetting to us all. My sister and I used to talk about it. One day, after a particularly bad night with him screaming at Mom and hitting her, my sister said to me, "If he does it again, we're going to run away." I said, "Okay" and we made a pact to do it. Of course it happened again, and that night my sister crept into my room and said, "Let's go! Let's run away and teach them a lesson." So we did. We hopped out my bedroom window and ran down the street.
Now, in Pasadena in those days, there were only a couple of police officers, so everyone knew them by name. We knew my brother would tell Mom and that they'd be looking for us. We went downtown near the police station and watched to see what would happen. Soon enough everyone was out looking for us. We kept hiding so the police wouldn't find us, first behind some trees across from the station, then in the nearby church where we'd go sometimes with Mom, but finally we let them find us.
The officers took us to the station and asked us questions about what was going on. We told them honestly about what happened and how sad and scared we were. They called our parents down to the station and had a long talk with them. We never found out what was said, but things got better, at least for a little while.
By the time I was 15, Mom had had enough from Dad. Early one morning, after a night of Dad's particularly bad drunken behavior, where he had belittled her, screamed at her, hit her and yelled at us kids, she just threw up her hands and said, "That's it!" She pushed Dad out the front door and out into the front yard. She told him to leave and never come back.
That was it! Dad moved out and got a place of his own in town. Our family totally disintegrated shortly after that. My sister Kathy left and got married, my brother moved in with Dad, and shortly after I turned 16, I moved with Mom to Hollywood.
Remembering it all was a bummer, especially because I wanted a family life that no longer existed. There was no home for me anywhere anymore, or at least that's how I felt.
I stayed in the Haight for a few days, then got desperate, as I had no money. I finally broke down and called Mom. She was so relieved and immediately drove up to get me. I felt better and promised her I would try to do better in school and never run away again.
The scene in Haight Ashbury had been a profound experience for me, so I became one of the original Hippies on the Hollywood Sunset Strip. Although I was a Flower Child, and truly believed in our Hippy ideals of "Peace, Love and The Brotherhood of Man," it was also true that, like most of our Counterculture tribe, I took to the streets when necessary and demonstrated against the Vietnam war and other atrocities that our government was perpetrating on us, even when it meant confronting police brutality.
There was one particularly violent Vietnam war protest I was involved in the following year, in 1967. President Johnson had flown into L.A. to give a speech in Century City. Thousands of us marched in the streets in protest, and the police were especially brutal that day. They must have wanted to impress the President. As we chanted, "No more war" they pushed into the crowd, hitting us with their billy clubs. I saw one woman sitting on top of a school bus with a baby in her arms. A Pig dragged her off and beat her with his club. Her head was bleeding and the baby was on the ground crying. There was lots of blood seen on protesters that day. Some of the shit the Pigs got away with was unbelievable!
Sometimes I would hitchhike up Pacific Coast Highway to Haight Ashbury to participate in the war moratoriums there. Hippies thrived in Big Sur as well, so I would often stop there and hang awhile on my way up or on the trip back.
I was a changed person. Gone was the boy who loved playing trumpet in orchestra at school. Gone was the "southpaw" star pitcher in little league baseball, the only sport I had ever loved. Gone were the friends of my youth, all those who I had played hide-n-seek with and gone to school with, right up to my first semester in high school.
And that first semester had been very interesting because it was in the fall/winter of 1965-1966, not even a year after the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. We had become one of the very first high school busing experiments.
You see, Pasadena was split in half, almost right down the middle, between White people on the east side and Black people on the west. We had our segregated high school, Pasadena High; they had theirs, Muir High.
When the Civil Rights Movement began, a third high school, Blair High, was built near the south end of town and sophomore students were bused there from both sides of town. My sister was in the very first class of only sophomores, then I was in the second. There was no freshman class in high school because, in those days, your last year of junior high, 9th grade, was actually your freshman high school year.
I loved Blair High. We kids, or at least those kids I was around, had never felt the color barrier the way our parents did. I had many Black friends, and it was great to have us all in it together at Blair. The color of our skin did not matter to us.
My first semester was also our first football year, with only juniors on the team, as there was no senior class yet. We won the regional championship anyway, as we also did the following year.
But no sooner had it all begun, then I was plucked out of all that. The streets of Hollywood became my new turf.
As I said, I lived with Mom and her boyfriend, who I hated. He was not my dad but was pushy towards me, which made me even more obstinate than I already was.
They spent their time skiing and partying with their friends. I was left to my own devices and Mom taught me how to do my own laundry, cooking and cleaning. Even though I was still in school and only 16, I was roaming the streets of Hollywood at night.
That's how I got into the teenage nightclub scene, where I could dance and forget my troubles. That's where I saw some of the local L.A. rock bands start their climb to fame: The Doors, Love, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Iron Butterfly, The Beach Boys, Canned Heat, The Mamas & Papas and Sonny & Cher. So many great bands!
They all played the various clubs on the Sunset Strip, including It's Boss, where I worked, The Sea Witch, Gazzarri's and Pandora's Box, which would become famous following a riot later that year. You could dance in these teenage nightclubs if you were at least 15, but you had to have a hand stamp showing you were 21 to drink.
Most of the clubs looked pretty much alike. They had a raised stage for the bands to play on and a dance floor in front of it. They had tables and chairs off to the sides and some had a bar area. It's Boss had the DJ booth behind the stage, where I did my thing. Some of the clubs even had disco cages up on the side walls, with female disco dancers in them.
Dancing had always been my thing. A friend at Blair High had gotten me onto American Bandstand to dance once. Now that I was at Hollywood High, I was only a few blocks away from where they taped the show. My friend got me on again and that's where I met Famous, one of the most popular dancers on the show. We became best friends instantly. He got me on as a regular dancer on both American Bandstand, with host Dick Clark, and Shebang, hosted by Casey Kasem. Then, because of my friend, Lauralee, at Hollywood High, I was able to get us both on 9th Street West, with host Sam Riddle, as her mom was the show's producer. I also got us on The Lloyd Thaxton Show, as I went to school with his son, Lee Thaxton.
American Bandstand had aired five days a week originally, when it was broadcast live in Philadelphia, but when it moved to Hollywood, it aired only on Saturdays and it was pre-taped. We would tape the show on Saturdays at the ABC studios on Vine St. We would tape several shows on the same day. We had to bring several changes of clothes so it wouldn't look like we were wearing the same thing week after week.
One of the best girl dancers was Toni. We danced together sometimes and became good friends. We still are to this day. As I said earlier, I took Katie there as my dance partner as often as I could, until we broke up.
Shebang, my favorite of the dance shows, aired five days a week after school, and both Famous and I were on that show several times a week. We also got together to go to different dances all around Southern California: Casey Kasem's Drop-In dance in Hawthorne; Pasadena Civic; Harmony Park in Anaheim, where Dick Dale and the Deltones were the house band; Gunn Park in Whittier.
Famous and his mom lived in South Central L.A., on Crenshaw Blvd. He'd often invite me over for dinner and sometimes to stay overnight. His mom always welcomed me into their home and cooked a great meal. I especially loved her fried catfish and fried chicken!
I wish I could say that Mom returned the favor, but Famous wasn't welcome in our apartment because he was Black. She said she was worried about what the landlord or the neighbors might think. She was a single, working mom, raising me alone, and she said she just couldn't take any chances. I was upset that she thought that way. However, I do not think she was racist.
Actually, I think she was liberal, particularly for someone who grew up in Arizona, where diversity was not accepted as much as it was in California. She had always accepted my Black and Mexican friends when I was younger, and of course, all of us kids were color blind. We never thought about the color of our skin, and Mom never said anything or did anything to change our acceptance of each other. So, I think she was just scared.
The Civil Rights Movement would help bring about some much-needed racial equality on television in the late 1960s, but especially in the 1970s, with more Black family shows appearing, such as Bill Cosby and The Jeffersons. These changes were also being reflected on the dance shows we participated in. Take American Bandstand for example. When it had originally been in Philadelphia, Black teenagers struggled to have a place on the show. When the show moved to Hollywood it became more integrated, but they still would not let us do integrated dancing. White dancers had to have White dance partners and Black dancers had to have Black dance partners.
(The struggle Black dancers had to go through to be on the show in Philadelphia would be portrayed years later in the movie and Broadway show Hairspray.)
It was the same policy on all the TV dance shows we were on. But when we went to the dances around SoCal on the weekends it was anything goes. We could dance with anyone we wanted and no one bothered us or seemed to care. The same was true at It's Boss. Famous often came to dance there while I was working, and his dance partners were not limited by race.
I loved working at It's Boss. After the club closed at 2:00 am, we would all head for one of the after-hours spots. One night after work, I was sitting in Barney's Beanery at around 3:00 am, hanging out with friends, drinking coffee and having breakfast. Along with Ben Franks on the Strip itself, and Canter's Deli on Fairfax, Barney's was one of the main hangouts for Hippies after-hours, after dancing in the clubs all night.
That night, I saw Jim Morrison, drunk, stagger out of Barney's door with two Hippy chicks, one on each arm, and head across the street to a motel. I thought he was so lucky because he could get any chicks he wanted. But it was really his prowess, his sheer magnetism! The Hippy girls just surrounded him wherever he went, strutting his stuff in his black leather pants.
One of my friends on the Strip was Lizzy. We went to Hollywood High together and would always run into each other. One night, we were hanging out when another friend, Rodney, found out the Rolling Stones were recording at RCA Studios over by Sunset and Vine. A bunch of us went over there to check it out. Sure enough, The Stones came out of the studio, got in their limo, and headed west on Sunset Boulevard. We all followed them to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Several of us snuck around back to where the bungalows were and tried to find which rooms The Stones were in, but we couldn't. Then, a security guard caught several of us. He told us all to sit right there, on the grass, and left to round up some others. While he was gone, we got the hell out of there, quick!
Jim Morrison. The Rolling Stones. And Cher! The Goddess of Pop was just beginning to get famous, not only for her singing but also for the psychedelic Hippy clothes she designed. Yes, she herself designed those multi-colored giant bell-bottom pants she often wore.
Cher had her own clothing boutique in Hollywood, at the corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset, where she sold the clothes she designed. One night she showed up at It's Boss and asked some of us who were regular dancers there if we would like to participate in a fashion show she was doing at our club.
She let our girlfriends wear her outfits while we all danced on stage, and that was the fashion show. Afterwards, she let our girlfriends keep the outfits they had worn.
(Many years later, I would have a career in stage production in television and live theatre. One year, when I was working on the Academy Awards, Cher was one of the presenters. Backstage, I reminded her of that fashion show back in the '60s. She said she remembered it well, then giggled. We had a nice conversation, reminiscing about it and about those times.)
Kitty corner from Cher’s boutique was one of the other teenage nightclubs, Pandora’s Box. In November of that year (1966), it was the site of the infamous Riot on Sunset Strip, which was epitomized the following year by the film of the same name, with the title song performed by rock-n-roll group, The Standells.
I was right in the middle of that riot. I was involved in a Hippy protest against a new curfew law that had just been imposed by the L.A. County Sheriff's Metro Squad, a special new police squad set up to control the Hippies on the Strip. Besides the curfew, the powers-that-be were threatening to change the admission age of all the teen nightclubs on the Strip to stop teenagers from attending, as a way to try to control us. They believed the Hippies had taken over the Strip and they, along with many local business leaders, didn't like it.
Pandora's Box had already been boarded up, slated for demolition. I was with some others right in front of the club when the riot broke out.
The police were hitting us with billy clubs and arresting us. Some protesters started rocking a big police bus they were trying to use to haul us to the station. More people joined in and they actually turned the bus over on its side, then lit it on fire. I got scared and took off at that point.
A police bus on fire! That made the news. That was all over the news the next day.
Later on, I heard that Stephen Stills, of Buffalo Springfield fame, was there that night. He wrote a song about the riot titled, "For What It's Worth." It was an instant Hippy anthem and became a hit around the world. It also became our rallying cry . . . "Somethin's happenin' here/What it is ain't exactly clear/There's a man with a gun over there/Tellin' me I've got to beware/Think it's time we stop/Children what's that sound/Everybody look what's goin' down" . . .
I know I said earlier that my 16th year would be life changing. As you can see, it surely was. In addition, in 1966 I dropped my first acid (LSD) while it was still legal, bought over the counter at a Hippy head shop on the Strip.
1967 was a lot about music. My love of dancing got me involved with a band named Shades of Dawn, a local band who played at one of Hollywood's teenage nightclubs, Gazzarri's West. I found out they were in need of a new drummer and told Jessie about it, who was a really good drummer in my eyes. I told him he should audition, but he was reluctant because he was only 17 and a runaway at the time. I finally convinced him and got him an audition. They hired him on the spot!
Jessie and I started hanging out with two of the band's members, Pat and Sterling. Pat was the rhythm guitarist, and had a knack for chicken-pickin' that really rocked! It was a unique guitar picking sound in rhythm-n-blues and he was really good at it. Sterling was the lead singer. He strutted and sang in a similar manner as Mick Jagger—the way he shook his legs while playing his maracas, and the way he played with the microphone and mic stand as he sang. Later in life, he created The Musician's Contact Service in Hollywood, a business that helped other musicians find gigs in town. It was very successful and he still has it online on Facebook.
I became like a roadie to them, helping the band load and unload their equipment, as well as helping them set up on stage. Some of us who were regulars at Gazzarri's West started hanging out together more as a group, in support of the band. Sometimes we'd go behind the club in the alley and smoke joints when the band was on a break. There were several people in our core group, and we would often travel wherever the band was playing to support them.
There was Peggy, who I also went to high school with. We were in art class together at Hollywood High. Her sister, Katie (not my Katie, a different one), also hung around with us sometimes. They were both really cute and had blonde hair. Peggy was taller, so everyone always thought she was the older one, but she was younger than Katie.
Then there were Yolee and Linda, two beautiful sisters of Spanish heritage, with silky, long black hair. Their brother, Bob, became the band's keyboard player later on. He had played for a while in Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, and he was married to folk singer, Judee Sill. Jessie and I saved their lives once and I wrote a long poem about it years later (2015), but that's another story.
Later on, Yolee married Chuck Findley, the famous trumpet and trombone player who played and recorded with many of the greats in the music industry. He started out playing with the Jimmy Dorsey band, before joining the Buddy Rich band, then became a regular player in the Tonight Show Band. He also recorded and played with B.B. King, Steely Dan, Jackson Browne, George Harrison, Elton John, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stones and many others.
Linda liked to create things with leather. She handmade a leather wallet for me that was heavyweight and just right on! That was so cool of her, and I still have it.
As I said, we'd all support the band at their gigs. Peggy and I, along with Linda and Yolee, would always be the first ones on the dance floor and the last to leave it at the end of the night. We loved to dance and always helped to get the crowd going. We had our own saying when we were excited and having a great time: WORK!!! It was our own secret saying.
It is hard to explain how much music meant to me. The Beatles, particularly, influenced my entire generation. It wasn't just that they influenced all music going forward. We all knew that would happen, because we could see it happening in front of us in real time. But we also knew we were in the midst of something truly phenomenal.
There had never been anything like The Beatles before, and there has not been since. Everybody copied them and everyone wanted to be like them. Boys grew their hair long just like The Beatles. Girls screamed and giggled and talked about which one they wanted to marry: Paul, the pretty boy; John, the sly jokester; George, the quiet one; or Ringo, the silly one with rings all over his fingers.
It is hard to express to people now what it felt like then; to know that, not only in the US and UK, but all over the planet, kids of every nationality waited, literally with bated breath, for the next hint of a new Beatles record. It didn't matter whether it was a new single or an album. People just waited anxiously for anything new.
Everyone yearned! Everyone was impatient! And when a new single or album was about to come out, the news spread like wildfire. Girls just about peed their pants and boys pretended like they didn't care. But we all did. We all cared a lot!
Then, in 1967, something happened that would really change everything.
Pat, from Shades of Dawn, lived with his old lady, Mary, in an apartment in Hollywood. It was the central gathering place for several members of the band, along with our core group.
We would often sit in a circle in the front room or around the dining room table, with lit candles and incense, smoking pot while we listened to the latest albums that had just come out by our favorite bands. We would all sit quietly, passing a joint and listening to a whole album at once, all the way through with no interruptions. It was almost a spiritual thing. This is what Hippies all over the country and world were doing.
Hippies didn't really sit around watching TV together—that was something you did at home. When we gathered we would sit quietly, getting high, while listening to groovy music, and especially listening to albums all the way through. Of course, there was much partying too, but listening to music was a ritual.
I hope you can picture that, because that is the setting where we all first heard Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in May of 1967. Listening to it was like being transported magically to another dimension. We had never heard anything like it! We listened to it over and over, from beginning to end, transfixed. The music traveled through you, around you, back and forth, side to side, completely engulfing you. It was incredible! Absolutely mind blowing!
So much has been said about Sgt. Pepper's through the years. Many believe it was The Beatles masterpiece, maybe even the greatest rock-n-roll record of all time. But instead of trying to get into any of that, I will just leave it here, with my own personal experience of how it happened into my life. I'll never forget it! Like all The Beatles records before it and after it, I played it repeatedly and never grew tired of it.
One day at home I was listening to Sgt. Pepper's on my little portable record player. When it came to the end, I heard this weird noise, like a loud mixed up chattering, and it wouldn't stop. It just kept going! I looked at the record and saw that the needle had reached the center label after finishing the last song, "A Day In The Life." Evidently, The Beatles had inserted some weird chatter after the last song, right at the label. If you had a normal stereo record player, the record would eject after the last song, so you would never hear it. But because I had this little portable record player that didn't eject a record, it just drifted to the center after the last song, and there it was!
How ingenious! The Beatles had recorded a secret message that you could only hear if your record didn't eject. And it played over and over, continuously! It wouldn't stop until you took the needle off the record. Wow! It blew my mind!
I immediately called some friends to tell them about the secret message on the album. If they had a regular stereo, they would have to manually place the needle near the center label to hear it; otherwise, it would just eject. Then I found out something even more amazing! None of my friends had it on their record. Not one of them could hear it. They couldn't understand it and neither could I.
Then I remembered something. When I had bought my record, there were two versions. They both had the same picture on the cover, but one had a shiny cover and the other had a matte finish. I liked the shiny one so that's the one I bought. As it turned out, that was the UK version on Parlophone Records, and the chatter was only on that version, not the US version, which was on Capitol Records. All my friends had the US version. I was the only one who could hear the secret message! Later on, we all had fun listening to it together and trying to figure out what The Beatles' magical message was!
The Beatles released another album later that year, Magical Mystery Tour. It was another awesome album for me to get lost in.
I think I got my love of music and dance from my mom and dad. They loved the big band music of the 1940s and could dance the jitterbug with the best of them. Dad played the bongos and harmonica, and he had even written a couple of songs when he was young.
We had a hi-fi system in our living room when I was growing up. It was big, like a piece of furniture. It was a polished oak cabinet with long legs, about three feet high. It had a record player on one side and multi-band radio on the other,
with storage for records in the middle, and two huge built-in speakers.
Mom would always play the big band music on it, which was some of her favorite music. I especially loved the Harry James records. He's the one that made me want to learn how to play trumpet. Mom and Dad also used to dance the jitterbug in the living room and show off for us kids.
Then, Mom also loved to play Christmas records during the holidays. She would have Christmas music on all day long during the holiday season. I remember a couple of her favorites were, "Little Drummer Boy," by the Harry Simeone Chorale and the Christmas Carol music by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
When we moved to Hollywood, Mom got a newer, big stereo hi-fi system for our living room, with two giant, separate speakers, one on either side of the room.
In November of 1967, when Magical Mystery Tour came out, I bought the record, brought it home and put it on the big stereo. I set the speakers in the middle of the room, right close to each other. I turned the volume up loud, lay down between the speakers, and let the Beatles legendary stereo effects travel through my head, back and forth. It was a mind-blowing experience, especially since I was high on pot!
The Beatles, by far, were my favorite band. My second favorite when I was 17 was Smokey Robinson & The Miracles. Smokey's soulful voice sang the sad laments, giving voice to the deep feelings that we teenagers felt, and he especially resonated with me. Smokey was one of the founders of Motown Records, and he wrote songs for many of its most popular bands and artists. Heck, even The Beatles did one of his songs, "You've Really Got A Hold On Me," on one of their earlier albums when they were still recording songs from other artists.
Earlier that year, Mom had bought me that little portable record player. It would play both 45s and LPs. It was like a small suitcase. You could close and lock the top, which had a handle to carry it, so I could take it with me to a friend's house if I wanted. I used to love to lay on my bed at night, with the door closed, the lights off and just a candle lit. I would put on Smokey's, Going To A-Go-Go album and listen over and over to, "Ooh Baby Baby" and "The Tracks Of My Tears." "Ooh Baby Baby" had come out shortly after my first steady, Liz, moved away to Mill Valley, and it always reminded me of her.
That summer Mom sent me to Arizona to spend a couple of weeks with her mom, Nini, who had moved from Phoenix to Seligman, AZ, in the middle of nowhere on Route 66. Nini had moved because her new husband owned the Standard gas station there. I took my portable record player with me and as many of my 45s as I could get inside it, as well as some LPs in my suitcase.
I had never been to a small town like Seligman before. It had a Post Office, a market, a train station, one gas station (my grandpa's), one school (kindergarten through 12th grade), a barbershop and a highway hamburger stand. That was about it!
Whether you stood in front or behind grandma's house, you could see the horizon in every direction. I had only ever experienced this vastness when we traveled from California to visit her in Phoenix when I was younger. But standing there in the middle of the world, wow! It was breathtaking! To the west, you could see some mountains, but they were so far away it was actually just a crooked horizon line. Then, in every other direction, it was just flat!
Behind Nini's house were the railroad tracks. If you lay down and put an ear to them, you could hear a train coming before you could ever see it on the horizon. Then, when it finally got nearby, the sound was so enormous that it baffled the mind. The silence of a vast desert, then bam! It was fantabulous!
That year the graduating class from Seligman High was the biggest in the school's history: seven.
I learned there were some local teenagers around my age, because they hung out at the hamburger stand, which had a jukebox. So I would go there most afternoons or evenings after dinner to hang out and hear music. Believe it or not, several of the teens recognized me from American Bandstand and Shebang, so I became a local celebrity that summer. They invited me to go with them out into the desert at night to their favorite spots, where they would build fires and just be together. I brought my records and portable player, and we all danced in the desert sand.
If you wanted to go to the movies, you had to drive to the next town, which was 70 miles away. Nini let me use her car and go one time while I was there, and I took a couple of the local kids along. It was really exciting driving fast through the desert, down the straight, flat line of Route 66.
There was a clock radio in the room where I slept. Lying in bed at night, I'd try to find some rock-n-roll music on it. I could never find any FM stations but, surprisingly, I was able to get Wolfman Jack on AM. He was legendary and seemed to be able to broadcast to anywhere from some giant broadcasting tower nobody could ever find. I could always pick up his station in L.A., but to hear him out in the middle of the desert in Arizona just blew my mind!
It rained some that summer, and the rain was warm, like shower water. You could see lighting strike all the way to the ground, way out in the desert, far away.
Mom had let me take the train to Nini's. It was quite an adventure to begin my summer vacation, as I'd never been on a train before. I wish I could have taken the train home, too, but at the end of my vacation my sister and her husband came to visit, and they took me home. On the way home, heading west on Route 66, I made my sister stop on the side of the highway, and I got a Route 66 sign off a pole out in the middle of nowhere! I couldn't have done that if I'd taken the train. Oh, I still have the sign today!
Back home it was time to get ready for my senior year at school. Of course, I had to go to the Strip and check out what had happened while I was gone. Things had definitely changed. Most of the teenage clubs had raised their age limit, just as they said they would, so I no longer had my job at It's Boss. What a bummer! However, changing the age at the clubs did not stop the Hippies from congregating on the Strip. It was our turf and no one was taking it from us!
The times were changing, though, for sure, and I didn't feel the same about some stuff. I stopped dancing on the TV shows, as I was a Hippy now, through and through. I had long hair, down past my shoulders, and did not want to wear a coat and tie anymore. To me it was like being the establishment. The dancers on the TV shows were still clean cut high schoolers and that was just not me anymore.
Our Hippy idealism would often facilitate long discussions about the differences between our generation and our parents. Hanging out on Sunset Blvd., we often talked about the failures of The Establishment: no ideals other than materialism, a consumer society concerned with little other than the acquisition of wealth. Our parents, meanwhile, talked about the Generation Gap. The younger generation had long hair (we liked it. It was natural. What could it hurt, except maybe the barber?). They said we had no responsibility (that's how they characterized our lack of materialism). But in the face of strong criticism and sometimes even police brutality, we stood up strongly for our beliefs!
I started writing poems about the Hippy culture. Most of my first poems, the ones I had written from ages 12-17, were gone forever! I had kept them all in a notebook, but I lost them one day hitchhiking to the Strip. I was dropped off at the Sunset Blvd. on-ramp to the Hollywood Freeway. After I got out of the car, I suddenly noticed I didn't have my notebook. As I watched the car enter the freeway on ramp, I realized I would never see those poems again. I would incorporate some from memory into later writings, but from that day forward, I dated everything I wrote and guarded all my work closely.
4/6/1968
we’re all here together . . .
we’re waitin’ to hear
if we wait long enough
it might all disappear
they say we’re corrupt
and our morals are wrong
but what they don’t know
is together we’re strong
so sing it together
let’s all sing along
if we keep loving each other
our hang-ups will be gone
the cops . . . some are Pigs
they beat us . . . and how
they’ve pushed us too far
they lie to us now
the government’s strong
but their power will fall
we are younger and stronger
and we’ll outlive them all
so let’s sing it together
yes now . . . sing it again
if we keep making love
then you know we will win
a new world is coming
for you and for me
a world full of beauty
where we all will be free
no more hang-ups
no more hang-ups
no more hang-ups
5/15/1968
a biker is the carefree one
he’s always on the run
he loves it
and he’ll never stop
he’s having so much fun
he proves his feelings
every day
he has to know he’s right
if someone tries to knock him down
he’ll end up in a fight
he cares for them
that’s close to him
he’ll never let them down
they’ll never have to run with fear
whenever he’s around
he’s a criminal
a no good bum
most other people say
but he’s happier than they’ll ever be
in each and every way
In the waning years of the '60s, things happened fast and furious. In late June of 1968, on the day I would have been graduating high school, I was attending a demonstration protesting the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles just two weeks earlier.
Two months before that, on April 4th, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis, then Robert Kennedy two months later on June 6th in L.A. RFK was the hope of so many in our generation, just as MLK had been the hope of Black people. So many dreams were stolen that year!
Two months later, in August, the police riots exploded in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention.
The streets were on fire in 1968! Hippy riots, anti-war protests, protests over the assassinations of MLK and RFK — these were all defining political moments in the last years of my teens, and I was directly involved at street level!
Oh, where would we go from here?
In an ironic and strange twist of fate, Sirhan Sirhan, the man who shot RFK, was from Pasadena. He had gone to the same junior high school as I had and had been in my sister’s class. His brother, Muniur, was in my class and was a casual friend. Muniur, another of my friends named Mark and I, all aged 13, had smoked our first cigarettes together, behind a sandwich shop owned by Mark's family. I even remember the brand, Pall Mall, filterless cigarettes.
I had no idea what my last teenage year would be like, but given the final months of my 18th year, it felt like it was going to be a doozy! But right now, I was fondly remembering and pining for my time on the TV shows, my DJing on the Strip and all the fun I had, even mixed with all the turmoil.
There were just so many interesting things I had experienced on the Sunset Strip and working at It's Boss. And, of course, that's where I had met Katie . . .
I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, but my family moved to Pasadena, California when I was 4 years old. Even though we would often drive back to Phoenix to visit my grandmother, Nini, I considered Southern California my home. It would always be my home until many years later when I retired. I was a California boy, through and through!
The 1960s began, as I said, when I turned 10. That year our babysitter, Beverly, taught my sister Kathy and me how to dance the California Swing while we watched American Bandstand on Saturday afternoons, broadcast live on TV from Philadelphia. Boy, did I love to dance!
My sister and I went to the Saturday night dance every week at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. Her boyfriend was a surfer and his surfer buddy had a '49 Cadillac Hearse, with purple velvet interior. He painted it bright orange and it was their surf wagon. They would often show up at the Civic after the dance ended and we'd all pile into the back of it. We'd cruise Colorado Blvd. and end up at Bob's Big Boy, where we'd wait in line with the rest of the cruisers, until it was our turn to get into the carhop service. We'd all order burgers, fries and Cokes. They'd let you add extra flavors in your Coke if you wanted. I always had them add cherry and chocolate syrups. Cherry-chocolate Cokes were my favorite!
My brother Bob and I used to ride our bikes downtown to the Pasadena Bowling Alley, which was at Lake Ave. and Colorado Blvd., behind the Thrifty Drug Store. We'd bowl and order extra crispy french fries, with blue cheese dressing for dipping, from the kitchen. The dressing was from Bob's Big Boy Restaurants. It was the best blue cheese dressing in the world! Bob's was famous for it and they bottled it for sale. You could get it in almost any supermarket and the bowling alley used it too. We loved it way better than ketchup for dipping our fries in.
Sometimes my brother and I got to go to the beach in the hearse with my sister and her boyfriend. They'd always go to County Line (the L.A./Ventura county line) on Pacific Coast Highway, which was one of the best surfing spots in Southern California.
We'd watch the surfers catch the waves all day, while we'd swim and play and lay in the sun. In the summer of 1962, Mom let me spend a weekend with them at the beach. Mike, my sister's boyfriend, taught me how to surf and I stood up on a surfboard for the first time, riding a wave into the shore. What a blast!
In the evening, the surfers would build a big fire on the beach. They put all their surfboards around it in a big circle, stuck on edge into the sand, to create a wind block. Then, we'd all put our sleeping bags just inside the circle, so the boards blocked us from the wind. We fell asleep watching the fire.
Across the highway was a little restaurant named Mothers'. We'd go over there in the morning for breakfast. They had a pinball machine and I loved playing it. So did my brother. I became an expert at it and would often win game after game for free. Sometimes when we'd go down there to surf, I'd spend hours at Mother's playing pinball.
The 1960s would become a turbulent and exciting time in the U.S. and around the world, and my teenage years would totally encompass the 1960s.
My teens began innocently enough in the first month of 1963. At 13, I was in my first year of junior high school and had become a star southpaw pitcher in the Pasadena Little League. I used to practice my pitching in the backyard. Mom was always my catcher and coach, as Dad wasn't around much, being a traveling salesman for Collier's encyclopedias.
I remember one time when we were practicing; one of my pitches went wild and whacked Mom right in the knee! She got a knot on it that lasted for years. I don't think it ever went away, actually, but that didn't stop her from being my catcher. She was always encouraging me to do whatever I loved.
I was also 2nd trumpet in our school orchestra. I had started playing in elementary school, where I learned on a rented trumpet while Mom tried to decide if I was serious enough about it to continue. By the time I got to junior high, Mom & Dad bought me my own trumpet. They used to make me practice in my bedroom closet so I wouldn't drive everyone else crazy with the noise.
I had my first crush at 13. The Beach Party movies were all the rage for teens at the time, with Frankie Avalon & Annette Funicello or Sandra Dee in Gidget. Surfing, singing, and dancing on Southern California beaches, all on the big screen!
That summer, Ann Margret burst onto the movie screen in Bye Bye Birdie! The opening and closing scenes, with her singing and wiggling her breasts in that low cut dress, while shaking her long red hair on a plain, bright blue background—WOW! She was the be all and end all for me! I was totally infatuated and mesmerized by her!!! She was just totally amazing! The way she looked. The way she sang. Especially the way she danced! I think every teenage boy must have had a crush on her that year. That summer, I went downtown and saw Bye Bye Birdie at least a dozen times.
In school, I was an avid learner, full of optimism and excitement. I was a natural in math; it came very easily to me. I hardly had to study at all to ace my tests.
Everything looked rosy at age 13, but as it eventually turned out, my teenage years were destined to be tumultuous, just like the '60s themselves.
In November that year, President Kennedy was assassinated! I became politically aware well before the time I should have. Our whole country mourned the man who said, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
Then, only three months later, on February 9th, 1964, The Beatles burst on the scene, performing in the U.S. for the very first time on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was history in the making! It seemed as though every teenager in the country had their eyes glued to their TVs that night.
Beatlemania swept through America in an instant! With their appearance, a new optimism seemed to take hold. Their arrival especially changed things for my generation, and definitely for me in the years to come. The Beatles changed everything! It was an awakening!
Our family always watched The Ed Sullivan Show. Every week we'd all sit together in our living room in front of the TV and watch the many performers and original acts presented. We never knew what was coming next, but it was always exciting.
From that very first moment when The Beatles appeared on our TV screen, with their clean cut suits and mop top hair, my sister and I instantly fell in love with them and their music. My little brother was disinterested, as he was only 12, but my sister was 15 and I was 14. We were transfixed!
Later that year, we found out that they would be playing at the Hollywood Bowl. We had to go! We got tickets and in August of 1964 Mom drove Kathy and me to see The Beatles in concert.
There was energy in the air that I'll never forget. It was intoxicating and I felt exhilarated watching all those screaming girls in the audience, many crying and some even fainting. The screaming was so loud you couldn't even hear The Beatles playing. That concert and their music was a precursor to the music happenings of our generation that would define my life from then on.
Flash forward to the summer of 1965. I had just graduated from junior high school and would be starting high school in the fall. Little did I know it would be the last innocent summer of my life.
In the very first week of that summer vacation Mom let me take a backpack and sleeping bag and hitchhike to the beach for the summer with my friend, Gary, from school. I didn't know it then, but Mom already knew about the breakup coming in our family and that's why she let me go, even though I was only 15.
Many families of the richer kids from school had summer rental homes on the beaches of Southern California: Laguna, Balboa and Newport. Our plan was to hitchhike down there and party with our friends up and down the coast all summer.
First we hitched down to Laguna Beach, then worked our way north. We stayed with many of our friends and their families all through the summer, and sometimes we'd even sleep on the beach in our sleeping bags, which you could do in those days.
Our friends' families would sometimes feed us dinner, and sometimes, to get some breakfast, we'd wash dishes in a local restaurant at the beach or on Coast Highway.
All during that summer, one song echoed all along the beaches: "Like A Rolling Stone," by Bob Dylan. This was his first electric rock-n-roll song and the biggest hit of 1965! It became an anthem of our generation and some say it is the greatest rock-n-roll song of all time. What a summer it was!
It was the last innocent summer of my youth: going to school with all the same kids from kindergarten through junior high, and hanging out with the same friends from my earliest years till my middle teens.
1966, just one year before The Summer of Love, would be a life-changing year for me. In that one single year I would turn from an innocent high school teen, an avid dancer, and in love for the first time, into one of the first Hippies on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, working in a teenage nightclub, and protesting on the streets.
In September of the previous year, I had just begun high school at a brand new school in Pasadena, Blair High. I loved it and was excited to be in high school. Then in January Mom told me we were moving to Hollywood. I had just started, but now I had to leave everything I knew and start over in Hollywood, at Hollywood High School. I felt really discouraged!
I made the best of it, though, and right after I turned 16 I met Katie. She was also 16 and my first true love—a real, honest-to-goodness puppy love. She wasn't my first steady; that was Liz, who looked like Hayley Mills. I had met her when I was 13, at the Saturday night dance at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.
Liz and I went to different junior high schools but we'd meet there every Saturday. We loved dancing together and she was my girlfriend until she moved away to Mill Valley in Northern California and I never saw her again. We had kissed, we had danced, we had held hands, but never anything more.
But Katie—she was my first true love! We met at the teenage nightclub, It's Boss, on the Sunset Strip, where I worked as the doorman and DJ, spinning my 45 records in the DJ booth, between the sets of the house bands. She often came there with her friend, Karen. They lived in the San Fernando Valley, but would come over the hill to Hollywood because they both loved dancing, and It's Boss was one of the best clubs where teens could dance.
I had seen her a couple of times before and, even though I worked there, I was usually very shy when it came to girls. One night I saw her on the dance floor and I knew I just had to ask her to dance. I got up the courage to ask her and she accepted. We danced together all night long. We were great together and we both loved dancing so much. We became inseparable!
She was this gorgeous, petite Italian girl, almost pixie-like at five foot two, slim with piercing brown eyes and slightly teased, brown bobbed hair, which curled to a point on each side of her face.
She was the first girl I ever got to 2nd and 3rd base with. It happened one Friday night on our way home from Casey Kasem's Drop-In dance in Hawthorne, in the very back of a friend's '56 Chevy Nomad with Vibrasonic Sound.
After that, we couldn't keep our hands off each other and made out every chance we got, but we were aching to make love for our first time. We needed to be together and we wanted each other so badly!
Neither one of us was technically a virgin, as each of us had already been with one other person.
My only other time had been an awkward experience at a party when I was egged on by some friends, and it was with a girl I didn't even know, but she wanted to do it even though I didn't. We were drunk. It was awkward. All I felt after was shame and shyness.
Katie, likewise, had done it only once, with the boy she dated before me, but she also said it was awkward and she didn't really enjoy it. So we were really each other's first love, and aching to make love and be together totally for the first time.
Believe it or not, the first time we ever made love was under the pool table in her parents' game room when she invited me over for dinner one night. After dinner, we were watching TV in the living room with her parents. She told them we were going to go into the game room and play pool.
So there we were, playing pool. Then we started making out, and then we just couldn't contain ourselves. We did it! We were scared that someone would come in, but we just couldn't help ourselves. We wanted each other so bad and we just couldn't wait anymore!
After that, we looked for every opportunity to make love. We would mostly do it at my apartment when Mom was gone, but every so often there would be an opportunity to do it at her place, even though it was harder because she also had a younger sister who was around. We even did it in a swimming pool once, when we were visiting my friend, David, from school, who invited us over to go swimming in his backyard pool.
I went to Hollywood High and she went to North Hollywood High. I would ditch 6th period almost every day and hitchhike through Laurel Canyon to meet up with her after school.
"Light My Fire," the very first smash hit by local band, The Doors, would almost always be playing whenever we went through the canyon, whether on a radio or echoing out of someone's house down the canyon road. It was one of our favorite songs and if we were riding with some friends, everyone in the car would always sing along . . . "Come on baby, light my fire!" We were blissfully happy and it seemed like it would always be that way.
In high school, I had become a regular dancer on American Bandstand, Shebang and other teenage TV dance shows that were so popular then. Often I would take Katie on the shows as my dance partner.
Then, on one fateful night, after Katie and I had been dancing and reveling at the clubs until it became too late for her to go home, my very best friend who I grew up with slept with her. Jessie slept with Katie! Jessie and my first love betrayed me! I could not believe it happened!
I could not even comprehend how either of them could do that. We had been at the clubs, like I said. We were having so much fun and it got really late. We realized that Katie could not go home or she would be in deep trouble. She decided to call her parents and tell them she was staying overnight at Karen's house. She told them that, but actually there was nowhere for her to stay, as we were still in Hollywood and there was no way for her to get home or to Karen's in the Valley.
She couldn't stay at my place, 'cause Mom would never allow it. So we asked my friend Jessie if she could stay the night at the place where he was temporarily crashing, and he said it would be fine. I trusted them both, so there was never even a second thought. We were only trying to help Katie not to get into trouble.
I wish I could tell you how I found out, but that is one of those painful details from long ago that I just cannot remember, no matter how hard I try. All I remember is she broke up with me shortly after that.
Katie's betrayal was my first, deep heartbreak, and my little high school heart was crushed!!! I would never be the same . . . and life would never look the same to me again. It led to me smoking pot for the first time.
I had always believed it was the "devil weed" from Mexico that would drive you insane, just like they said in the PSA films they would show us at school. But with Katie's betrayal, I no longer cared whether I lived, died or went mad . . .
I smoked my first joint under the Santa Monica pier.
6/19/1966
you were my first love
it was me and you
my best friend
walked with us too
then one night
we stayed too late
you couldn't go home
we were too young
you stayed with him
the damage was done
now I walk the beach alone
---
wish there was someone
to talk to
what do you do
when you're 16
and your best friend
sleeps with your first love
they no longer
are the best friends
you can confide in
lost in the struggle
of the tumble
. . . alone again
just a heartbreak kid
with nowhere to turn
because of what she did
there’s no way to return
Katie had betrayed me, and the whole world weighed heavy on me. I was arguing with Mom and I hated her boyfriend, so I decided to run away from home. I hitchhiked to San Francisco, where I had heard about the Hippies in Haight Ashbury. When I got there, I was filled with wonder at the boys with long hair, the girls with no bras, bell-bottom jeans, pot and incense everywhere and the ideals the Hippies professed.
I needed a place to stay, and someone pointed me to a house where a group might help me. They were part of a free clinic and they directed me to a place with cots where I could crash for a few nights along with about a dozen other kids.
That night in my sleeping bag I got to thinking about the other time I had run away, at age 11. You see, my dad was a mean drunk and he often took it out on us, but especially Mom. He would beat on her sometimes.
I remembered this one morning when my sister, my brother and I were watching cartoons on TV early in the morning before school. It must have been around 6:00 am. Suddenly Dad came storming out of his bedroom—stark naked! "You kids stop making so much damned noise!" he screamed. He came towards us—and then stepped right into a pile of cat poo! He was so mad that he chased the cat around the room and tried to kick it. When he did that, he hit the edge of the rug instead, and broke his big toe! He was jumping around furious and yelled, "Get that cat out of this house!" We were all laughing, but not so he could tell it, and as soon as there was an escape route we hightailed it out of there and hid in our bedrooms.
Dad's drunken antics were upsetting to us all. My sister and I used to talk about it. One day, after a particularly bad night with him screaming at Mom and hitting her, my sister said to me, "If he does it again, we're going to run away." I said, "Okay" and we made a pact to do it. Of course it happened again, and that night my sister crept into my room and said, "Let's go! Let's run away and teach them a lesson." So we did. We hopped out my bedroom window and ran down the street.
Now, in Pasadena in those days, there were only a couple of police officers, so everyone knew them by name. We knew my brother would tell Mom and that they'd be looking for us. We went downtown near the police station and watched to see what would happen. Soon enough everyone was out looking for us. We kept hiding so the police wouldn't find us, first behind some trees across from the station, then in the nearby church where we'd go sometimes with Mom, but finally we let them find us.
The officers took us to the station and asked us questions about what was going on. We told them honestly about what happened and how sad and scared we were. They called our parents down to the station and had a long talk with them. We never found out what was said, but things got better, at least for a little while.
By the time I was 15, Mom had had enough from Dad. Early one morning, after a night of Dad's particularly bad drunken behavior, where he had belittled her, screamed at her, hit her and yelled at us kids, she just threw up her hands and said, "That's it!" She pushed Dad out the front door and out into the front yard. She told him to leave and never come back.
That was it! Dad moved out and got a place of his own in town. Our family totally disintegrated shortly after that. My sister Kathy left and got married, my brother moved in with Dad, and shortly after I turned 16, I moved with Mom to Hollywood.
Remembering it all was a bummer, especially because I wanted a family life that no longer existed. There was no home for me anywhere anymore, or at least that's how I felt.
I stayed in the Haight for a few days, then got desperate, as I had no money. I finally broke down and called Mom. She was so relieved and immediately drove up to get me. I felt better and promised her I would try to do better in school and never run away again.
The scene in Haight Ashbury had been a profound experience for me, so I became one of the original Hippies on the Hollywood Sunset Strip. Although I was a Flower Child, and truly believed in our Hippy ideals of "Peace, Love and The Brotherhood of Man," it was also true that, like most of our Counterculture tribe, I took to the streets when necessary and demonstrated against the Vietnam war and other atrocities that our government was perpetrating on us, even when it meant confronting police brutality.
There was one particularly violent Vietnam war protest I was involved in the following year, in 1967. President Johnson had flown into L.A. to give a speech in Century City. Thousands of us marched in the streets in protest, and the police were especially brutal that day. They must have wanted to impress the President. As we chanted, "No more war" they pushed into the crowd, hitting us with their billy clubs. I saw one woman sitting on top of a school bus with a baby in her arms. A Pig dragged her off and beat her with his club. Her head was bleeding and the baby was on the ground crying. There was lots of blood seen on protesters that day. Some of the shit the Pigs got away with was unbelievable!
Sometimes I would hitchhike up Pacific Coast Highway to Haight Ashbury to participate in the war moratoriums there. Hippies thrived in Big Sur as well, so I would often stop there and hang awhile on my way up or on the trip back.
I was a changed person. Gone was the boy who loved playing trumpet in orchestra at school. Gone was the "southpaw" star pitcher in little league baseball, the only sport I had ever loved. Gone were the friends of my youth, all those who I had played hide-n-seek with and gone to school with, right up to my first semester in high school.
And that first semester had been very interesting because it was in the fall/winter of 1965-1966, not even a year after the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. We had become one of the very first high school busing experiments.
You see, Pasadena was split in half, almost right down the middle, between White people on the east side and Black people on the west. We had our segregated high school, Pasadena High; they had theirs, Muir High.
When the Civil Rights Movement began, a third high school, Blair High, was built near the south end of town and sophomore students were bused there from both sides of town. My sister was in the very first class of only sophomores, then I was in the second. There was no freshman class in high school because, in those days, your last year of junior high, 9th grade, was actually your freshman high school year.
I loved Blair High. We kids, or at least those kids I was around, had never felt the color barrier the way our parents did. I had many Black friends, and it was great to have us all in it together at Blair. The color of our skin did not matter to us.
My first semester was also our first football year, with only juniors on the team, as there was no senior class yet. We won the regional championship anyway, as we also did the following year.
But no sooner had it all begun, then I was plucked out of all that. The streets of Hollywood became my new turf.
As I said, I lived with Mom and her boyfriend, who I hated. He was not my dad but was pushy towards me, which made me even more obstinate than I already was.
They spent their time skiing and partying with their friends. I was left to my own devices and Mom taught me how to do my own laundry, cooking and cleaning. Even though I was still in school and only 16, I was roaming the streets of Hollywood at night.
That's how I got into the teenage nightclub scene, where I could dance and forget my troubles. That's where I saw some of the local L.A. rock bands start their climb to fame: The Doors, Love, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Iron Butterfly, The Beach Boys, Canned Heat, The Mamas & Papas and Sonny & Cher. So many great bands!
They all played the various clubs on the Sunset Strip, including It's Boss, where I worked, The Sea Witch, Gazzarri's and Pandora's Box, which would become famous following a riot later that year. You could dance in these teenage nightclubs if you were at least 15, but you had to have a hand stamp showing you were 21 to drink.
Most of the clubs looked pretty much alike. They had a raised stage for the bands to play on and a dance floor in front of it. They had tables and chairs off to the sides and some had a bar area. It's Boss had the DJ booth behind the stage, where I did my thing. Some of the clubs even had disco cages up on the side walls, with female disco dancers in them.
Dancing had always been my thing. A friend at Blair High had gotten me onto American Bandstand to dance once. Now that I was at Hollywood High, I was only a few blocks away from where they taped the show. My friend got me on again and that's where I met Famous, one of the most popular dancers on the show. We became best friends instantly. He got me on as a regular dancer on both American Bandstand, with host Dick Clark, and Shebang, hosted by Casey Kasem. Then, because of my friend, Lauralee, at Hollywood High, I was able to get us both on 9th Street West, with host Sam Riddle, as her mom was the show's producer. I also got us on The Lloyd Thaxton Show, as I went to school with his son, Lee Thaxton.
American Bandstand had aired five days a week originally, when it was broadcast live in Philadelphia, but when it moved to Hollywood, it aired only on Saturdays and it was pre-taped. We would tape the show on Saturdays at the ABC studios on Vine St. We would tape several shows on the same day. We had to bring several changes of clothes so it wouldn't look like we were wearing the same thing week after week.
One of the best girl dancers was Toni. We danced together sometimes and became good friends. We still are to this day. As I said earlier, I took Katie there as my dance partner as often as I could, until we broke up.
Shebang, my favorite of the dance shows, aired five days a week after school, and both Famous and I were on that show several times a week. We also got together to go to different dances all around Southern California: Casey Kasem's Drop-In dance in Hawthorne; Pasadena Civic; Harmony Park in Anaheim, where Dick Dale and the Deltones were the house band; Gunn Park in Whittier.
Famous and his mom lived in South Central L.A., on Crenshaw Blvd. He'd often invite me over for dinner and sometimes to stay overnight. His mom always welcomed me into their home and cooked a great meal. I especially loved her fried catfish and fried chicken!
I wish I could say that Mom returned the favor, but Famous wasn't welcome in our apartment because he was Black. She said she was worried about what the landlord or the neighbors might think. She was a single, working mom, raising me alone, and she said she just couldn't take any chances. I was upset that she thought that way. However, I do not think she was racist.
Actually, I think she was liberal, particularly for someone who grew up in Arizona, where diversity was not accepted as much as it was in California. She had always accepted my Black and Mexican friends when I was younger, and of course, all of us kids were color blind. We never thought about the color of our skin, and Mom never said anything or did anything to change our acceptance of each other. So, I think she was just scared.
The Civil Rights Movement would help bring about some much-needed racial equality on television in the late 1960s, but especially in the 1970s, with more Black family shows appearing, such as Bill Cosby and The Jeffersons. These changes were also being reflected on the dance shows we participated in. Take American Bandstand for example. When it had originally been in Philadelphia, Black teenagers struggled to have a place on the show. When the show moved to Hollywood it became more integrated, but they still would not let us do integrated dancing. White dancers had to have White dance partners and Black dancers had to have Black dance partners.
(The struggle Black dancers had to go through to be on the show in Philadelphia would be portrayed years later in the movie and Broadway show Hairspray.)
It was the same policy on all the TV dance shows we were on. But when we went to the dances around SoCal on the weekends it was anything goes. We could dance with anyone we wanted and no one bothered us or seemed to care. The same was true at It's Boss. Famous often came to dance there while I was working, and his dance partners were not limited by race.
I loved working at It's Boss. After the club closed at 2:00 am, we would all head for one of the after-hours spots. One night after work, I was sitting in Barney's Beanery at around 3:00 am, hanging out with friends, drinking coffee and having breakfast. Along with Ben Franks on the Strip itself, and Canter's Deli on Fairfax, Barney's was one of the main hangouts for Hippies after-hours, after dancing in the clubs all night.
That night, I saw Jim Morrison, drunk, stagger out of Barney's door with two Hippy chicks, one on each arm, and head across the street to a motel. I thought he was so lucky because he could get any chicks he wanted. But it was really his prowess, his sheer magnetism! The Hippy girls just surrounded him wherever he went, strutting his stuff in his black leather pants.
One of my friends on the Strip was Lizzy. We went to Hollywood High together and would always run into each other. One night, we were hanging out when another friend, Rodney, found out the Rolling Stones were recording at RCA Studios over by Sunset and Vine. A bunch of us went over there to check it out. Sure enough, The Stones came out of the studio, got in their limo, and headed west on Sunset Boulevard. We all followed them to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Several of us snuck around back to where the bungalows were and tried to find which rooms The Stones were in, but we couldn't. Then, a security guard caught several of us. He told us all to sit right there, on the grass, and left to round up some others. While he was gone, we got the hell out of there, quick!
Jim Morrison. The Rolling Stones. And Cher! The Goddess of Pop was just beginning to get famous, not only for her singing but also for the psychedelic Hippy clothes she designed. Yes, she herself designed those multi-colored giant bell-bottom pants she often wore.
Cher had her own clothing boutique in Hollywood, at the corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset, where she sold the clothes she designed. One night she showed up at It's Boss and asked some of us who were regular dancers there if we would like to participate in a fashion show she was doing at our club.
She let our girlfriends wear her outfits while we all danced on stage, and that was the fashion show. Afterwards, she let our girlfriends keep the outfits they had worn.
(Many years later, I would have a career in stage production in television and live theatre. One year, when I was working on the Academy Awards, Cher was one of the presenters. Backstage, I reminded her of that fashion show back in the '60s. She said she remembered it well, then giggled. We had a nice conversation, reminiscing about it and about those times.)
Kitty corner from Cher’s boutique was one of the other teenage nightclubs, Pandora’s Box. In November of that year (1966), it was the site of the infamous Riot on Sunset Strip, which was epitomized the following year by the film of the same name, with the title song performed by rock-n-roll group, The Standells.
I was right in the middle of that riot. I was involved in a Hippy protest against a new curfew law that had just been imposed by the L.A. County Sheriff's Metro Squad, a special new police squad set up to control the Hippies on the Strip. Besides the curfew, the powers-that-be were threatening to change the admission age of all the teen nightclubs on the Strip to stop teenagers from attending, as a way to try to control us. They believed the Hippies had taken over the Strip and they, along with many local business leaders, didn't like it.
Pandora's Box had already been boarded up, slated for demolition. I was with some others right in front of the club when the riot broke out.
The police were hitting us with billy clubs and arresting us. Some protesters started rocking a big police bus they were trying to use to haul us to the station. More people joined in and they actually turned the bus over on its side, then lit it on fire. I got scared and took off at that point.
A police bus on fire! That made the news. That was all over the news the next day.
Later on, I heard that Stephen Stills, of Buffalo Springfield fame, was there that night. He wrote a song about the riot titled, "For What It's Worth." It was an instant Hippy anthem and became a hit around the world. It also became our rallying cry . . . "Somethin's happenin' here/What it is ain't exactly clear/There's a man with a gun over there/Tellin' me I've got to beware/Think it's time we stop/Children what's that sound/Everybody look what's goin' down" . . .
I know I said earlier that my 16th year would be life changing. As you can see, it surely was. In addition, in 1966 I dropped my first acid (LSD) while it was still legal, bought over the counter at a Hippy head shop on the Strip.
1967 was a lot about music. My love of dancing got me involved with a band named Shades of Dawn, a local band who played at one of Hollywood's teenage nightclubs, Gazzarri's West. I found out they were in need of a new drummer and told Jessie about it, who was a really good drummer in my eyes. I told him he should audition, but he was reluctant because he was only 17 and a runaway at the time. I finally convinced him and got him an audition. They hired him on the spot!
Jessie and I started hanging out with two of the band's members, Pat and Sterling. Pat was the rhythm guitarist, and had a knack for chicken-pickin' that really rocked! It was a unique guitar picking sound in rhythm-n-blues and he was really good at it. Sterling was the lead singer. He strutted and sang in a similar manner as Mick Jagger—the way he shook his legs while playing his maracas, and the way he played with the microphone and mic stand as he sang. Later in life, he created The Musician's Contact Service in Hollywood, a business that helped other musicians find gigs in town. It was very successful and he still has it online on Facebook.
I became like a roadie to them, helping the band load and unload their equipment, as well as helping them set up on stage. Some of us who were regulars at Gazzarri's West started hanging out together more as a group, in support of the band. Sometimes we'd go behind the club in the alley and smoke joints when the band was on a break. There were several people in our core group, and we would often travel wherever the band was playing to support them.
There was Peggy, who I also went to high school with. We were in art class together at Hollywood High. Her sister, Katie (not my Katie, a different one), also hung around with us sometimes. They were both really cute and had blonde hair. Peggy was taller, so everyone always thought she was the older one, but she was younger than Katie.
Then there were Yolee and Linda, two beautiful sisters of Spanish heritage, with silky, long black hair. Their brother, Bob, became the band's keyboard player later on. He had played for a while in Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, and he was married to folk singer, Judee Sill. Jessie and I saved their lives once and I wrote a long poem about it years later (2015), but that's another story.
Later on, Yolee married Chuck Findley, the famous trumpet and trombone player who played and recorded with many of the greats in the music industry. He started out playing with the Jimmy Dorsey band, before joining the Buddy Rich band, then became a regular player in the Tonight Show Band. He also recorded and played with B.B. King, Steely Dan, Jackson Browne, George Harrison, Elton John, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stones and many others.
Linda liked to create things with leather. She handmade a leather wallet for me that was heavyweight and just right on! That was so cool of her, and I still have it.
As I said, we'd all support the band at their gigs. Peggy and I, along with Linda and Yolee, would always be the first ones on the dance floor and the last to leave it at the end of the night. We loved to dance and always helped to get the crowd going. We had our own saying when we were excited and having a great time: WORK!!! It was our own secret saying.
It is hard to explain how much music meant to me. The Beatles, particularly, influenced my entire generation. It wasn't just that they influenced all music going forward. We all knew that would happen, because we could see it happening in front of us in real time. But we also knew we were in the midst of something truly phenomenal.
There had never been anything like The Beatles before, and there has not been since. Everybody copied them and everyone wanted to be like them. Boys grew their hair long just like The Beatles. Girls screamed and giggled and talked about which one they wanted to marry: Paul, the pretty boy; John, the sly jokester; George, the quiet one; or Ringo, the silly one with rings all over his fingers.
It is hard to express to people now what it felt like then; to know that, not only in the US and UK, but all over the planet, kids of every nationality waited, literally with bated breath, for the next hint of a new Beatles record. It didn't matter whether it was a new single or an album. People just waited anxiously for anything new.
Everyone yearned! Everyone was impatient! And when a new single or album was about to come out, the news spread like wildfire. Girls just about peed their pants and boys pretended like they didn't care. But we all did. We all cared a lot!
Then, in 1967, something happened that would really change everything.
Pat, from Shades of Dawn, lived with his old lady, Mary, in an apartment in Hollywood. It was the central gathering place for several members of the band, along with our core group.
We would often sit in a circle in the front room or around the dining room table, with lit candles and incense, smoking pot while we listened to the latest albums that had just come out by our favorite bands. We would all sit quietly, passing a joint and listening to a whole album at once, all the way through with no interruptions. It was almost a spiritual thing. This is what Hippies all over the country and world were doing.
Hippies didn't really sit around watching TV together—that was something you did at home. When we gathered we would sit quietly, getting high, while listening to groovy music, and especially listening to albums all the way through. Of course, there was much partying too, but listening to music was a ritual.
I hope you can picture that, because that is the setting where we all first heard Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in May of 1967. Listening to it was like being transported magically to another dimension. We had never heard anything like it! We listened to it over and over, from beginning to end, transfixed. The music traveled through you, around you, back and forth, side to side, completely engulfing you. It was incredible! Absolutely mind blowing!
So much has been said about Sgt. Pepper's through the years. Many believe it was The Beatles masterpiece, maybe even the greatest rock-n-roll record of all time. But instead of trying to get into any of that, I will just leave it here, with my own personal experience of how it happened into my life. I'll never forget it! Like all The Beatles records before it and after it, I played it repeatedly and never grew tired of it.
One day at home I was listening to Sgt. Pepper's on my little portable record player. When it came to the end, I heard this weird noise, like a loud mixed up chattering, and it wouldn't stop. It just kept going! I looked at the record and saw that the needle had reached the center label after finishing the last song, "A Day In The Life." Evidently, The Beatles had inserted some weird chatter after the last song, right at the label. If you had a normal stereo record player, the record would eject after the last song, so you would never hear it. But because I had this little portable record player that didn't eject a record, it just drifted to the center after the last song, and there it was!
How ingenious! The Beatles had recorded a secret message that you could only hear if your record didn't eject. And it played over and over, continuously! It wouldn't stop until you took the needle off the record. Wow! It blew my mind!
I immediately called some friends to tell them about the secret message on the album. If they had a regular stereo, they would have to manually place the needle near the center label to hear it; otherwise, it would just eject. Then I found out something even more amazing! None of my friends had it on their record. Not one of them could hear it. They couldn't understand it and neither could I.
Then I remembered something. When I had bought my record, there were two versions. They both had the same picture on the cover, but one had a shiny cover and the other had a matte finish. I liked the shiny one so that's the one I bought. As it turned out, that was the UK version on Parlophone Records, and the chatter was only on that version, not the US version, which was on Capitol Records. All my friends had the US version. I was the only one who could hear the secret message! Later on, we all had fun listening to it together and trying to figure out what The Beatles' magical message was!
The Beatles released another album later that year, Magical Mystery Tour. It was another awesome album for me to get lost in.
I think I got my love of music and dance from my mom and dad. They loved the big band music of the 1940s and could dance the jitterbug with the best of them. Dad played the bongos and harmonica, and he had even written a couple of songs when he was young.
We had a hi-fi system in our living room when I was growing up. It was big, like a piece of furniture. It was a polished oak cabinet with long legs, about three feet high. It had a record player on one side and multi-band radio on the other,
with storage for records in the middle, and two huge built-in speakers.
Mom would always play the big band music on it, which was some of her favorite music. I especially loved the Harry James records. He's the one that made me want to learn how to play trumpet. Mom and Dad also used to dance the jitterbug in the living room and show off for us kids.
Then, Mom also loved to play Christmas records during the holidays. She would have Christmas music on all day long during the holiday season. I remember a couple of her favorites were, "Little Drummer Boy," by the Harry Simeone Chorale and the Christmas Carol music by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
When we moved to Hollywood, Mom got a newer, big stereo hi-fi system for our living room, with two giant, separate speakers, one on either side of the room.
In November of 1967, when Magical Mystery Tour came out, I bought the record, brought it home and put it on the big stereo. I set the speakers in the middle of the room, right close to each other. I turned the volume up loud, lay down between the speakers, and let the Beatles legendary stereo effects travel through my head, back and forth. It was a mind-blowing experience, especially since I was high on pot!
The Beatles, by far, were my favorite band. My second favorite when I was 17 was Smokey Robinson & The Miracles. Smokey's soulful voice sang the sad laments, giving voice to the deep feelings that we teenagers felt, and he especially resonated with me. Smokey was one of the founders of Motown Records, and he wrote songs for many of its most popular bands and artists. Heck, even The Beatles did one of his songs, "You've Really Got A Hold On Me," on one of their earlier albums when they were still recording songs from other artists.
Earlier that year, Mom had bought me that little portable record player. It would play both 45s and LPs. It was like a small suitcase. You could close and lock the top, which had a handle to carry it, so I could take it with me to a friend's house if I wanted. I used to love to lay on my bed at night, with the door closed, the lights off and just a candle lit. I would put on Smokey's, Going To A-Go-Go album and listen over and over to, "Ooh Baby Baby" and "The Tracks Of My Tears." "Ooh Baby Baby" had come out shortly after my first steady, Liz, moved away to Mill Valley, and it always reminded me of her.
That summer Mom sent me to Arizona to spend a couple of weeks with her mom, Nini, who had moved from Phoenix to Seligman, AZ, in the middle of nowhere on Route 66. Nini had moved because her new husband owned the Standard gas station there. I took my portable record player with me and as many of my 45s as I could get inside it, as well as some LPs in my suitcase.
I had never been to a small town like Seligman before. It had a Post Office, a market, a train station, one gas station (my grandpa's), one school (kindergarten through 12th grade), a barbershop and a highway hamburger stand. That was about it!
Whether you stood in front or behind grandma's house, you could see the horizon in every direction. I had only ever experienced this vastness when we traveled from California to visit her in Phoenix when I was younger. But standing there in the middle of the world, wow! It was breathtaking! To the west, you could see some mountains, but they were so far away it was actually just a crooked horizon line. Then, in every other direction, it was just flat!
Behind Nini's house were the railroad tracks. If you lay down and put an ear to them, you could hear a train coming before you could ever see it on the horizon. Then, when it finally got nearby, the sound was so enormous that it baffled the mind. The silence of a vast desert, then bam! It was fantabulous!
That year the graduating class from Seligman High was the biggest in the school's history: seven.
I learned there were some local teenagers around my age, because they hung out at the hamburger stand, which had a jukebox. So I would go there most afternoons or evenings after dinner to hang out and hear music. Believe it or not, several of the teens recognized me from American Bandstand and Shebang, so I became a local celebrity that summer. They invited me to go with them out into the desert at night to their favorite spots, where they would build fires and just be together. I brought my records and portable player, and we all danced in the desert sand.
If you wanted to go to the movies, you had to drive to the next town, which was 70 miles away. Nini let me use her car and go one time while I was there, and I took a couple of the local kids along. It was really exciting driving fast through the desert, down the straight, flat line of Route 66.
There was a clock radio in the room where I slept. Lying in bed at night, I'd try to find some rock-n-roll music on it. I could never find any FM stations but, surprisingly, I was able to get Wolfman Jack on AM. He was legendary and seemed to be able to broadcast to anywhere from some giant broadcasting tower nobody could ever find. I could always pick up his station in L.A., but to hear him out in the middle of the desert in Arizona just blew my mind!
It rained some that summer, and the rain was warm, like shower water. You could see lighting strike all the way to the ground, way out in the desert, far away.
Mom had let me take the train to Nini's. It was quite an adventure to begin my summer vacation, as I'd never been on a train before. I wish I could have taken the train home, too, but at the end of my vacation my sister and her husband came to visit, and they took me home. On the way home, heading west on Route 66, I made my sister stop on the side of the highway, and I got a Route 66 sign off a pole out in the middle of nowhere! I couldn't have done that if I'd taken the train. Oh, I still have the sign today!
Back home it was time to get ready for my senior year at school. Of course, I had to go to the Strip and check out what had happened while I was gone. Things had definitely changed. Most of the teenage clubs had raised their age limit, just as they said they would, so I no longer had my job at It's Boss. What a bummer! However, changing the age at the clubs did not stop the Hippies from congregating on the Strip. It was our turf and no one was taking it from us!
The times were changing, though, for sure, and I didn't feel the same about some stuff. I stopped dancing on the TV shows, as I was a Hippy now, through and through. I had long hair, down past my shoulders, and did not want to wear a coat and tie anymore. To me it was like being the establishment. The dancers on the TV shows were still clean cut high schoolers and that was just not me anymore.
Our Hippy idealism would often facilitate long discussions about the differences between our generation and our parents. Hanging out on Sunset Blvd., we often talked about the failures of The Establishment: no ideals other than materialism, a consumer society concerned with little other than the acquisition of wealth. Our parents, meanwhile, talked about the Generation Gap. The younger generation had long hair (we liked it. It was natural. What could it hurt, except maybe the barber?). They said we had no responsibility (that's how they characterized our lack of materialism). But in the face of strong criticism and sometimes even police brutality, we stood up strongly for our beliefs!
I started writing poems about the Hippy culture. Most of my first poems, the ones I had written from ages 12-17, were gone forever! I had kept them all in a notebook, but I lost them one day hitchhiking to the Strip. I was dropped off at the Sunset Blvd. on-ramp to the Hollywood Freeway. After I got out of the car, I suddenly noticed I didn't have my notebook. As I watched the car enter the freeway on ramp, I realized I would never see those poems again. I would incorporate some from memory into later writings, but from that day forward, I dated everything I wrote and guarded all my work closely.
4/6/1968
we’re all here together . . .
we’re waitin’ to hear
if we wait long enough
it might all disappear
they say we’re corrupt
and our morals are wrong
but what they don’t know
is together we’re strong
so sing it together
let’s all sing along
if we keep loving each other
our hang-ups will be gone
the cops . . . some are Pigs
they beat us . . . and how
they’ve pushed us too far
they lie to us now
the government’s strong
but their power will fall
we are younger and stronger
and we’ll outlive them all
so let’s sing it together
yes now . . . sing it again
if we keep making love
then you know we will win
a new world is coming
for you and for me
a world full of beauty
where we all will be free
no more hang-ups
no more hang-ups
no more hang-ups
5/15/1968
a biker is the carefree one
he’s always on the run
he loves it
and he’ll never stop
he’s having so much fun
he proves his feelings
every day
he has to know he’s right
if someone tries to knock him down
he’ll end up in a fight
he cares for them
that’s close to him
he’ll never let them down
they’ll never have to run with fear
whenever he’s around
he’s a criminal
a no good bum
most other people say
but he’s happier than they’ll ever be
in each and every way
In the waning years of the '60s, things happened fast and furious. In late June of 1968, on the day I would have been graduating high school, I was attending a demonstration protesting the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles just two weeks earlier.
Two months before that, on April 4th, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis, then Robert Kennedy two months later on June 6th in L.A. RFK was the hope of so many in our generation, just as MLK had been the hope of Black people. So many dreams were stolen that year!
Two months later, in August, the police riots exploded in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention.
The streets were on fire in 1968! Hippy riots, anti-war protests, protests over the assassinations of MLK and RFK — these were all defining political moments in the last years of my teens, and I was directly involved at street level!
Oh, where would we go from here?
In an ironic and strange twist of fate, Sirhan Sirhan, the man who shot RFK, was from Pasadena. He had gone to the same junior high school as I had and had been in my sister’s class. His brother, Muniur, was in my class and was a casual friend. Muniur, another of my friends named Mark and I, all aged 13, had smoked our first cigarettes together, behind a sandwich shop owned by Mark's family. I even remember the brand, Pall Mall, filterless cigarettes.
I had no idea what my last teenage year would be like, but given the final months of my 18th year, it felt like it was going to be a doozy! But right now, I was fondly remembering and pining for my time on the TV shows, my DJing on the Strip and all the fun I had, even mixed with all the turmoil.
There were just so many interesting things I had experienced on the Sunset Strip and working at It's Boss. And, of course, that's where I had met Katie . . .
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