SDC OmniMedia Group Magazine

The year was 1965, September to be exact.  My first year at
Rosamond High School.  It was going to be one tough year.  Even thought I had gone to school with the majority of these students all of my life from first grade, the atmosphere was different. While most of them returned to Rosamond High in the temporary trailers before the doors open, I elected to remain at Antelope Valley, so I guest, I was looked upon as a “traitor”.  but one thing was for sure, I could play me some football, and tear your head off.
 In our tiny little town, we did not have all of the benefits of a MacDonald’s, or the theaters that Lancaster had, and yet I would have to make the very best of it.  And so Reggie, Ricky, Lynn, Rusty and the lot of us hung out at the Foster’s Freeze. Playing football, as I did at AV High School was going to be the same.  I decided I would move from the backfield to the line as a guard, and a linebacker.  I was very good. I went out on the town to recruit a band.  The first member of the group was Terry Lambright.  He had a twelve string Rickenbacher guitar, and he could play it like the wind.  My second choice was Buddy Wampler.  He played bass.  Buddy started out well, but as time went on, I found that he had a problem with the tones.  He would not hear the notes, and we always were playing off key. After several months of this, Buddy, finally admitted he was deft in one ear, and would not here the notes at all.  I was left in a dilemma.  With nothing else to due, I had to make a choice. I decided to go over to my old friend’s house, Paul Martinkovic, and I borrowed a bass guitar from him, and had him placed stickers of the notes on the top frets of the bass.  He showed me what I needed to get started.  Here there, I would practice late in the night, using my Webor tape recorder as an amplifier, and I would play with the songs of the radio. My first song that I learned to play was by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. “Young Girl” was what I learned to play and sing at the same time.  It was very exciting, and yet, it was very hard. When the season was over, I wanted to start in on the musical in of the business.  I first enlisted Ricky Perrine.  He was a drummer and had his very own set.  Ricky, Terry and I practiced together for over six months before we got Rollyn Zink as our singer. Merrell’s part time job was at Cliff Rohr’s’ Music Box.  Cliff had  a small recording studio in the back, and Merrell would give guitar lesson there and record demos for the local artists, placing them on a four-track cartridge. All of the local musicians would hang out there — it was the spot. Don had just finished recording his first demo at Goldstar Recording Studios.  All us guys t set back as Cliff placed the needle on the captain’s new acetate.  The song was “Who Do You Think You’re Fooling” and the old blues rendition of “Diddy Wah Diddy”. I had a chance to attend the first Hollywood Teenage Music Fair held at the Hollywood Palladium with Captain Beefheart as a “roadie”.  My group was not yet ready and I was looking for anything to do. Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) would practice in his father’s garage. His father was the local Fritos-Lay distributor, and we would get free knacks from his dad during practices. So when the Magic Band played at the Hollywood Palladium, I got a chance to sing one song.  Bob Krasnow and Richard Perry where at the fair, and they immediately signed the band to  Alpert’s and Moss’ new A&M Records.   Rick Jarrard was the vice president at RCA Records.  He was producing a new group called Jefferson Airplane.  I had a couple of songs that I had recorded at my house, and Jarrad wanted to know if anything I had recorded could be used for this group. Jarrard listened to the tape, and he didn’t hear anything for the group, but he was interested in me as an artist.   Jarrard make a couple of telephone calls for me and before I knew it I was at the office of A&M Productions.  Alpert owed one more deal to RCA and Jarrard figured I was a good catch, and asked A&M to produce my first single.  My meeting with Jerry Moss and Herb Alpert was in their garage in South Hollywood.  We talked about the future and what I wanted to do.  Alpert suggested that I go back home and attempt to write all kinds of songs, but songs that would fit me and other artists.  I must have made twenty trips to that garage over the next few years. At the RCA Recording Studios they had just installed a brand new Ampex Four Track Multi-recording machine.  The first one in the country.  Multi-track recording, that was so unique for our time.  All recording was done at the same time on a full track recorder.  For once, you could cut the tracks, add various sweeting, such as strings, horns, background vocals, and then the lead vocals. Too get more tracks, you would  “ping pong” or marry the tracks together on another machine and then record them back to the four track, or you could marry two tracks together on one track, then erasing those tracks, leaving one combined track and recording on the blank tracks. This was the first time that I had experience making a record without all the band and singers and special effects were all in the same place.  When I finally got a chance to record, I was in the studio all by myself with the engineer.  Alpert was hitting the charts with The Lonely Bull, A&M’s first big selling record.  Then Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band was the next release with Diddy Wah Diddy.  Everyone believed that the flipside of the record Who Do You Think You’re Fooling was going to be the hit side.  Only KUTY and KRLA played both sides of the single in Southern California.   Diddy Wah Diddy hit the top one hundred records on Billboard Magazine’s list.  Don started living in Topanga Canyon and with their first royalties, he purchased a black Cadillac Hearst for the band. Back at the Music Box with Merrell and Don there.  The place was just packed with all of the high school kids as were listened to KUTY count down the top forty songs, and at the number five position was Merrell’s record Can We Get Along, and at the Number One position was Diddy Wah Diddy. Don started passing out free tickets for their concert at The Hollywood Bowl.  He didn’t have that many, but I got my ticket to see the Magic Band.  The promoters of the concert had a new group that was going to open for them.  This new band had not played in front of a crowd yet and they had a strange name – The Doors? Back in Rosamond Ricky, Terry and I continued to practice and practice and practice. However, back at the Music Box a couple of new groups begin to show up there.  One of the groups was from Edwards Air Force Base.  They were called The Dartells.  Their song was called Hot Pastrami  a record with very little words and a lot of heavy drums and organ.  It was very commercial and you could dance to it.  This record stalled out in Billboard’s top ten singles at number nine.  They never recorded another record. The other group was called Count Five and they were former servicemen who were stationed at Edwards also.  Count Five’s recording was entitled Psychotic Reaction.  The very first commercial Psychedelic record to every go national. Frank Zappa had left Antelope Valley College and moved to Hollywood. He returned to Lancaster a couple times a month to visit his mother and father.  Don and Frank remained friends, but they didn’t do the same kind of music anymore, not like in their former bands, the Nomads and the Omens.   Frank’s band The Mothers of Invention has just released their first album Freak Out.  There were no danceable songs on this long playing album.  It was something, you just listened too. My record did not come out until two years later.  The single sounded like a James Brown “sound-alike”.  It was just terrible.  I knew that it was just a contractual thing with A&M and RCA.  They were not listening for a hit record from me, but just to finish an obligation, and I was the way out of it.  When asked who were the players on the record, all I  could remember, was the rhythm guitarist being Glenn Campbell and Hal Blaine on the drums.   KUTY only played the record once.  They were brave.  I hated it. I just wanted the record to go away real fast, and I never ever talked about it.  But it didn’t take long for a couple of my classmates to find my record and query me about it. I was in denial.  When I received 100 copies of that record in the mail, I remember going out into the desert behind my house, and playing flying saucer with them.  Little did I know that 25 years later, I would pay $15 for just one copy of my own record just to give to my daughter. People ask, what did you do with all the money you made from those records?  It’s not hard to show them.  On a typical record deal, the artist, producer, and publisher split 1/2 cent at minimum four different ways.  I remember my deal with RCA and A&M being only an advance of $1,000 for one single.  After the repayment of studio time, publishing demos, mailings, copyright fees, etc., I was lucky if I got $200. Rosamond was getting to be something. It had two bands.  Sunny Motion which was under Lynn Henson and Purple Olive, our band.  We played from time to time for free at the Rosamond Community Park.  Our music was not quite good, nor was it bad.  We like the idea of performing our own songs, and we did. Our first paid gig was at Jayne Reynolds Park for a group of girl scouts.  The place was packed, only because we had this song called “Journey To The Center Of Your Heart” on a demo disk, and the radio station was playing it all the time.  The song was not commercially released, but we were getting a lot of mileage with it. We were going through with our regular practice at Ricky’s house, now our practice place, when Lynn showed up at the house one day.  He just kind of hung around, and then after practice, he wanted to talk to us.  He wanted to joint our group.  It really took us all by surprise, because Sunny Motion was a good group, and they were more musical and tighter as a group then we were. On a unanimous vote, Lynn was in the band.  He was the much needed punch that we needed to get the music across to the audience.  Lynn really made the different to the band. The two years went by in a flash, and I found myself graduating from high school, and going back to Lancaster this time as a freshmen at Antelope Valley College, and again, I was undecided between playing music and playing football.  I decided that I would do both. As time went on, I also found myself on the executive student council and as a co-editor on the school newspaper.  I did not realize how much power that I had at this time. I was given the real crazy projects that had failed miserably for other administrations.  My job title on the council was Director of Publicity, and later the double duty of Director of Publications. My first project was the annual Christmas Ball.  From what I had gathered, this project was the kiss of death to anyone who attempted to make it fly. First of all, the student body had no money, and was in debt to the school board to the tune of $25,000 dollars.  Our football team, which I was a member was down on its luck, and we no wins and looking at our ninth loss.   Student body card sales were less then one percent.  Help?  It did not take long to figure out I was in trouble, and I was going to sink to the bottom of well like a rock. One thing about playing in a band, you get to play.and secondly, you have a lot of friends that will support you.  The majority of all the bands in the Antelope Valley were friends, and they played gigs with each other from time to time, and used each other’s equipment.  As in our case, our brother band was Boobla, a group headed by Bobby “O” Ormsby in Palmdale.   From time to time, Bobby “O” would borrow our public address system to play a large dance at one of the high schools.  And that meant that our group members and girlfriends got in free.  After all we had the PA equipment. This was our first gig with Bobby’s group.  And we heard something that we never heard before.  Our music was very soft.  On the other hand, Bobby’s musical choices were hard and cutting.  They were playing songs that we never heard on the AM dial. And these songs were never heard by anyone on the dance floor either, but did they get a resounding approval from the crowd. After the gig, I asked Bobby where did he get these songs?  What happened, that most of our school mates fathers were in the military, and they were stationed thought out the world.  So the kids would purchase the local records and ad them to their collection bringing them back to the states.  Such friend’s name was Arnie Athos.  He was a jazz drummer, and he had a lot of records in his collection.  His father was an engineer for NASA and they traveled all over the world. I went to visit Arnie one day after school, and to my surprise, he had over 800 LPs in his bedroom.  And I mean he had everything.  He had artists that I never even heard of.  B.B. King, Lowell Fusom, Albert King, Freddie King, Etta Jones, Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald and Robert Johnson. Also in his collection were new groups that were not even released here in the states, Cream, Eric Clapton and Powerhouse, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Ten Years After and others.  I was over the Arnie’s house every night for about a month, and he let me record his albums on my Webcor recorder, and yes at the slow speed to conserve tape. We learned a lot of these new songs, and the irony of it all, was when we did these songs at our paid gigs, the people would stand around and just listen to us play them.  They were not sure if you could dance to it, or what.  Sometimes it would take the first full set to get the crowd to dancing, and by then, it was total chaos.   They crowd would not let us leave the stage. After awhile, we would just go into our own songs, and they blended right in with everything else, and you never new these groups songs from our own.  We were really hot. Back to the school dilemma of the Christmas Ball.  Well, having discovered the real English sound, and having some success with it, I started hanging out at KUTY’s radio station.  I was the Director of Publicity, and I wanted to change a couple of things. And so it started. By now, I had no money to work with, but I did have the Inter-Club Council headed up by Kathy Holodnick and others.Noting that our students were not coming to the school dances, unless it was a big local group, I was left with the task of bringing back these kids that went out into the desert to drink at their private parties and have sex orgies.  It was a task at hand. I remember going to the high schools, and taking to the executive student council members, and I assured them that if their students came to our dances, we would honor their student body cards, and they would be permitted to come to  our dances for free. Of course, our executive student council did not see the light at first, but with the help of George Kappers, we showed them how this might work. The first step was coming up sooner then I had imagined.  It was our home coming dance.  For some reason, I felt that we might win this one.  I asked the council for hot dogs, buns, sodas and hamburgers.   Over the radio waves at KUTY, I asked Captain Don Imus to impress upon the audience that  the school dance was free to all college and high school students with student body cards.   We won the game, and the place looked like a refuge camp.  In one night, I managed to make over $5,000.  To say the least, this was just the beginning of how the ball game was being played. By the beginning of the next school semester, we had surpassed our debt and were in the black to the tune of $250,000. Student body card sales had exploded at the college as well as the local high schools. Because of this great success experienced by us, our conference schools wanted to know what we did to make things work, and so begin our networking practice that carried over into the four year schools. Don Podolor was an owner of a booking agency that booked the acts that his brother Richie Podolor produced.  One of his group’s was Three Dog Night for Dunhill Records.  Yes, Don and Richie were friends of mine! After the first year at AV College, I decided that playing football was not for me, and I just wanted to work on being a journalist and writing music for anybody.