tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28677994829466580642024-02-20T15:59:08.062-08:00Ken DouglasJust a Few Random Ramblings, probably of no interest to anybody but myselfKen Douglashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03467370188058144339noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2867799482946658064.post-90920638732089670692010-04-16T18:14:00.000-07:002010-04-16T18:16:20.335-07:00<span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: lucida grande;">Vesta and I were in a Goodwill store, looking for bargains, books and baubles when I spied this way cool toaster. It looked both retro and from the future, something George Jetson might use. It was a T-Fal Avante High Speed Elite.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: lucida grande;"><a href="http://s1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/?action=view&current=ToasterNew.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/ToasterNew.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a><br /></div><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: lucida grande;">I had to have this. Besides, our old toaster, a pretty cool looking red Kitchen Aid guy, was on it’s last legs. Plus, the left side of the toaster only toasted the toast on the left side, so you got one side toast and one side hot bread.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: lucida grande;"><a href="http://s1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/?action=view&current=ToasterOld1.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/ToasterOld1.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a><br /></div><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: lucida grande;">Still it looked pretty cool on our retro round kitchen table.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: lucida grande;"><a href="http://s1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/?action=view&current=ToasterOld2.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/ToasterOld2.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" /></a><br /></div><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: lucida grande;">So, not only did I have to have this toaster because it looked like it had just landed from a futuristic retro restaurant, but I needed it. After all, who likes their sourdough toast toasted only on one side. Of course, once you piled on the penut butter you hardly noticed. But I knew, besides you didn’t get the crunch.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: lucida grande;">And this toaster looked brand spanking new. There was no price tag on it, so I scooped it up, found a guy who worked there and he confirmed it was new and it was $14.99.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: lucida grande;">“Great,” I said. We bought it, took it home and in the morning I put in four slices of sourdough, two for me, two for Vesta. And woe of woes. The two slots on the right don’t stay down. I can hold it down and it cooks, but who in their right mind wants to hold their toast down every morning while it’s cooking.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: lucida grande;">Sure the left side works, so in reality we’re better off than before, because now we get two slices completely cooked, but it just chaps my hide that I can’t four get slices cooked at once.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: lucida grande;">I went on line and Target sells this baby for $69.99. And they sell a two slice version for $49.99. I can take it back and get my $14.99 back. Which would probably be stupid. So, what’s a Jujuwalker to do? Keep it or not? I guess it all depends on whether or not I can live with a chapped hide.</span>Ken Douglashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03467370188058144339noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2867799482946658064.post-25997318195038867102010-03-19T16:56:00.000-07:002010-03-19T16:59:33.617-07:00It Coulda Happened this Way -- We Were Young and We Were Greedy<p style="text-align: left;margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">After I got the boot from the bootleg biz by Big Dub, Dub became known as Little Dub. I missed working with him, because he was good at putting the material together and I was not. I did the RAH record, sure, but an idiot could have done that.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I bought a 650 Kawasaki BSA rip of. British bikes were cool, but you had to always be working on ’em. The Kawasaki made the real deal seem golden, it was always apart, so I bought a new Triumph Bonneville, had the fork extended, got tall handle bars, I don’t remember what they were called back then, sort of like the Ape Hanger Bars you see on Harleys today. I was cool and I liked to ride.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">And one day I rode out to Riverside, about an hour from Long Beach on the new extension to the 91 Freeway. They had kind of an old town, walking type street and since I liked being a tourist, I touristed off and I found Betty’s Records. A stupid name, to be sure, but what a great store and they sold bootlegs.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I asked for the manager, who’s name I don’t remember, but the guy who ran the place was named Harry. He wanted to buy boots, but I only had the one, plus about 5,000 Donovan records in a friend’s garage. I wanted to sell these guys records and I reasoned that the Dubs would be glad to sell them to me if I paid the going rate, which was a buck fifty a record. They were more than generous and sold them to me for a buck which allowed them to double their money and I could sell them for a buck and half and do alright.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Vesta and I were back in school, because we weren’t working and being uneducated is just stupid. Every weekend I’d drive out to Riverside and I found a couple other stores to sell to out there where nobody knew me. I was still paranoid.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">But I wasn’t going to be paranoid for long, because the money was running out. We needed money, because we had two babies and we’d learned that we didn’t like going to work. So we tried out a swap meat, sold the records retail in front of God and everybody for three dollars each or two for five, doubles five dollars. We made a couple hundred bucks our first time out and for the next year or so that’s what we did. I bought from the Dubs and Vesta and I worked the La Marada swap meet at the La Marada drive in in La Marada, California (that’s a lotta La Maradas). We’d leave at 9:00 PM Friday night and wait in line till dawn, when they let us in. In those days those at the head of the line got the best spots.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Eventually I was working several swap meets. All at drive ins. I had two brothers, both also in school and a couple friends I was supplying with the records I was getting from the Dubs, but I knew it couldn’t last.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Now I have to back up here, In a previous post I talked about how Kay at Lewis Record MFG copied Dub’s stampers (which were really half mine) for me, but this, what I said above, was happening concurrently. I hadn’t gotten around to pressing any of his records yet, because I didn’t have any accounts. I suppose I could’ve taken over Dub’s and eventually I would, but at that point in time I was too dumb and stupid to think about it.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Besides, I was kind of doing okay, selling Dub’s records to my few stores and at the swap meets. But Dub was getting new stereo equipment all the time, Big Dub quit the Post Office and was stylin’, while Vesta and I were going to school and working our buns off. Sure we had new cars. Sure I had a great bike. Sure we had new furniture. Sure we had stuff. But we weren’t stylin’. We weren’t leaving twenty dollar tips for ten dollar meals. We weren’t taking long vacations. We weren’t dripping in money, rolling around in it. We wanted that.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Back to Betty’s. One day after I dropped the records off, they’d only ordered fifty or so, so I strapped them on the back of my Bonneville and drove ’em on out. Gary, that’s the name of the owner. Gary Sparger, I’m surprised I remembered that. He asked me if I’d like to stop by a friend’s house for a few drinks. That was back when drinking and driving was okay if you didn’t get caught and if you did you just got a slap on the wrist unless you killed someone, so I said sure.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">No girls there, just Gary, Harry and a couple guys I didn’t know. They were making Sangria. Years later, when I was living in Spain, I’d often look back when I was drinking it at an outdoor restaurant and remember their Sangria recipe. Here it is: You take a bottle of Spinata -- a cheap wine you could get back then, maybe you still can. You squeeze a lime in it. Add lots of fruit bits, heavy on orange slices and canned grapefruit with a little canned pineapple stirred in. Then you add two two hits of mescaline and two hits of acid. Then you stir briskly and smoke a joint while you’re waiting for the flavors to blend.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">After a glass and twenty minutes or so we were all doing alright. Somebody found a twenty-two rifle and several boxes of bullets, so we set up cards in a towel cabinet at one end of a hallway and started target practice. We did this till someone realized we’d drilled a hole through the back of the cabinet, through the wall into a bedroom and through the wall opposite. We’d been shooting out into the street. It’s a miracle we weren’t caught and taken away. But we weren’t.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">And Harry and I got to know each other a bit. Turns out he and a friend wanted to open a poster business and they thought they needed a third partner and they thought I’d fill the bill nicely. I never dreamed they could’ve wanted me because my dad, whose record business went bust, now had a poster one stop and was selling to all the hippy stores. Being young, dumb and maybe a bit stoned, I said okay.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">A month later, after we’d printed up our first batch and sold ’em to, you guessed it, my dad. Harry and partner dropped by my house unexpectedly one evening. Since Riverside was an hour away, I didn’t think they’d just happened to be in the neighborhood. I knew right away they were gonna give me the old heave ho. I’d been there before and could see it coming from clear across the room. But what they didn’t know was that I’d met the printer and had a plan to take bootlegs to a whole ’nother level and I’d planned on including them, we were partners, after all.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">But I was out now and Vesta and I were on our own again. We were young, we were greedy and we had a couple Beatle tapes.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">One of the posters my dad had in the new Saturn Poster One Stop was the Beatles’ Renaissance Minstrels one. If you haven’t seen it or seen the cover of the three records, (Ren III came later and was more of a counterfeit than a bootleg) it’s got a drawing of the Beatles garbed as one would imagine the Bard would have dressed in his day. Not being too original, I thought it would be a good title and a good cover. </span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="text-align: center;margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/00Minstrals.jpg" /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">But I’m getting ahead of myself. My dad still had his shrink wrap machine. This baby cost twenty-five hundred bucks, which was about what a new VW cost back then and it was bigger than a VW. On the right end of the machine was a roll of shrink wrap, you slid a record between two layers, pulled done on this bar, which had a heated wire on it, which cut the shrink wrap, then you flipped the record onto a moving belt, which took it into a heated tunnel. The record came out the other end, slid down a ramp he’d designed and into a record box. Do it twenty-five times and you sealed the box.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Though Saturn Records was no more, there were still plenty of crooks in the records business, from the store owners, to the one stops, to the distributors, to the record companies themselves. My dad used to say he told his mother he was a pimp, because he didn’t want her to know he was in the record business. That poly machine earned my dad a ton of cash.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Here’s how. The store owner sells used records and if he takes one in with a new looking jacket, he brings it into my dad’s, goes in the back room and makes it new again, paying the piper (my dad) on the way out. He then returns it to the record company as new. Or maybe to a one stop if he doesn’t buy direct. The one stops usually gave ten percent returns. The record companies were much more generous. So Mr. Record Store would pay Mr. One Stop, who might slip Mr. Record Company Rep a few bucks and that record got returned as new, only to wind up in some kid’s hot mits sometime down the line.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">This is why Jack (my dad) had that machine. But I reasoned that it could just as well shrink paper covers to bootlegs, thus making them look more attractive. And you could put the song titles on the cover. But I was still a little paranoid about getting caught, so I couldn’t just walk into any old printer, but there was that guy out in Riverside. An hour away, to be sure, but better safe than the hoosegow.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Now, where was I gonna get this baby pressed. I could go to Lewis, but I didn’t want to. Old Ted and Kay were drinking a lot, the plant wasn’t the cleanest place in L.A. The records were a bit thick. They tended to have clicks and pops in them even with the virgin colored vinyl and they weren’t the cheapest. Old Pete Korelich was cheaper. And Jack Brown, he was cheaper still, but the cheapest and the best independent pressing plate on the West Coast was without a doubt, Waddel’s.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">We did “LiveR” there, but when it got popular Chris got paranoid, there was a lot of that going around, so he didn’t want to go in there anymore and his stories of Horace and Bud had Dub and me to frightened to even think about it. So what to do? Then I thought of Malcolm. True, when those guys came out to shoot us up, Malcolm found somewhere else to be.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Wait! I have to stop here. Maybe ”Homogenized Beatles” came first? I don’t remember, maybe. It was the same as “Renaissance Two” and it was a sister record to the “Donovan Reedy River” record. They both had white covers with stickers on ’em with the title and song titles. Maybe they did come first. Yeah, they did. I remember now, we went to a printer in Bellflower and ordered a zillion stickers. We told him we worked for the Foundation for the Junior Blind and that this was a project to raise money for them. Gutsy liars we were, Vesta and me. We pressed those records at Lewis. I think, maybe Pete’s. They weren’t very exciting.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Back to the story. I asked Malcolm if he wanted a part of some bootleg action. He was a dope smoking student who liked fast cars and easy money. So he said sure. I told him all he had to do was take these tapes into Waddel’s, meet a guy named Horace and tell him he wanted ten thousand each. I didn’t think he’d be able to pull it off, but then I didn’t know Horace was just like me, just like everybody else in the record business. If he could make a buck and not get caught, he was game. Horace and I later on down the line would do mucho business together.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Anyhow, Malcolm, who about then changed his name to Mel, got the records and we couldn’t keep the bloody things in stock. Christ, did those things sell. It was LiveR all over again. Money, money, money, you gotta love it. Mel/Malcolm coulda made a killing, but he was greedy. I was greedy too, but I wasn’t a cheat. I never cheated someone I was doing business with. I never cheated a partner. We were thieves. We were crooks. But we weren’t cheaters. There’s rules. Well, there should be.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Though I stayed out of most of the stores, because of that paranoid business, there were a couple who were cool, who knew, who wouldn’t tell. One of those was Rare Records in Glendale. A guy named Ray Avery owned it. He did jazz boots way, way back. He turned me and Dub onto Cecil, a funny little man who had all the necessary stuff to master records in his garage. One day I was in Ray’s and he told me he sold out of the first batch of records Mel had brought by and that he’d bought a couple hundred more. What the F? Mel had forgotten to tell me about that and this time I was the one giving someone the heave ho. But now Mel was a bootlegger and he’d be doing it for a long time. I’d just trained up my competition.</span></span></span></p>Ken Douglashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03467370188058144339noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2867799482946658064.post-22801187610326087292010-03-10T13:07:00.000-08:002010-03-10T13:13:37.374-08:00It Coulda Happened this Way -- Not First, Not the Best Either<span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Dub and I mastered the Donovan record Reedy River a couple months before we broke up and we’d ordered 5000 copies, which I’d picked up and was storing in my friend Jim’s garage as Big Dub’s basement was pretty full. We’d put out some feelers about the record and it was looking like this one wasn’t going to be the runaway hit our other records had been. In fact, when I was over at Jim’s, I swear I could hear the gobbling of those turkeys, trapped fifty to a box out back in that garage, calling to me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Dub hadn’t been bugging me about the records and it was plain to see why. He’d heard that gobbling too. So, for the time being, those records were going to be on the back burner, maybe never seeing the light of day.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">After the I breakup I had two main things on my mind. One was getting and making new records and two was getting even. Growing up, my father told me time and time again the best way to get even with somebody was to do them in without them knowing you did it. This way you get the satisfaction of seeing your enemy twist in the wind, without turning him into a revenge seeking maniac.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">In that light I’d decided to keep making Dub’s records, but didn’t see any reason for letting him know I was doing it. Also, I didn’t have any inventory. Why I didn’t think half those records in Big Dub’s basement didn’t belong to me is beyond me. I guess because I was young and dumb, because it never occurred to me Big Dub was actually stealing something of mine. I guess because we were making so much money, I’d never given much thought as to the value of the inventory creating it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I did, however, have those five thousand Donovan records for all the good they were going to do me. Plus I had the original stampers for Great White Wonder over at Pete’s. So that was one record, at least, Dub wasn’t going to be making anymore.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">So I had GWW and Dub didn’t. Plus, I had access to all his stampers. But what I really needed was something of my own.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Something good.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Something they didn’t have.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I had the soundboard recording of Royal Albert Hall and to the best of my knowledge, nobody else, except Waterford, had it. I could rush it out. It was damn good, a very good soundboard recording, but it had been recorded from an acetate, it was mono and there were a few very annoying clicks and pops on it. I’d probably listened to that tape over a hundred times with headphones on and I personally knew every click, was acquainted with every pop. I’d tense up just before they happened and I didn’t want to put out a record with them on it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">So I was going to have to go back up to Waterford’s, because he claimed to have a version of the tape taken from the master tape. Plus, he’d said that the last three songs were in stereo. Much as I dreaded going up there again, I had to have that tape.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">But I didn’t want to go alone, so I called my friend Malcolm. True, he’d gone south on me during that fiasco with the R and B single, but this wasn’t a life threatening situation. Waterford was just annoying, probably the most annoying person on the planet, certainly too annoying for me to deal with by myself. If I was going to have to listen to him preach about how Bob was God, then have to spend the night in his bathroom, I wasn’t going to do it all by myself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Malcolm couldn’t go till the weekend, as he was in school. He was going to UC Irving and was earning extra money by selling bootlegs on campus. Saturday came, but he had a test to study for on the following Monday, so we put off the trip to Santa Cruz for another week, but when I called Waterford, he said he had plans with his new fiance and could we postpone for still another week. He assured me he would have the tape ready to go, no staying up all night in that bathroom.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Actually, you can’t record in there anyway,” he said.” I’ve moved and I don’t have a sound system in my new bathroom.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Really.” That was great news.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Yeah, I got a place where I can play Dylan loud as I want. The apartment was kind of a drag that way.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“I can imagine.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“See you when you get here.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Yeah.” I hung up and two weeks later Malcolm and I were on our way in his hot 1969 Firebird 400, which I’d sold to him for take over payments when I got the Healey.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">When we got there, Waterford was waiting on his porch with this yappy little dog, it had short hair, perky ears, a pointy tail, was mostly white, maybe grey, and barked like a three-year-old who wants cookies, but doesn’t know the words. It was every bit as annoying as Waterford himself. They were made for each other.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">His new place was a cabin type of affair in the woods just outside of Santa Cruz. He had electricity and water, but save for that, the place looked pretty much like it must have when it was built, sometime during the gold rush. The man was not into creature comforts. He had his trunks of Dylan stuff piled against one wall and told me he had others buried in the forest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Spooky.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Waterford resembled a sloth, the place looked like it hadn’t been cleaned, ever. There was dust and dirt, bugs and smells everywhere.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Creepy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“I got a couple sleeping bags, if you guys want to spend the night. I’ll be sleeping up in the teepee.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Not spending the night,” Malcolm said. Mal was just about the cheapest individual I’d ever met. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’s opted to sleep naked in the snow, rather than spring for a motel room. For him to give up the offer of a free night is a true testament as to how much Waterford’s place reeked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“So where you staying then?” Waterford wanted to know.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“We’re heading back tonight,” Malcolm said. “I gotta study.” And here I thought we might be staying in a motel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“I guess we better get copying then,” I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“First we have to set up the teepee,” Waterford said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“What teepee?”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“The one I’m getting married in tonight.” Though he looked like a grub, for a second there he almost looked angelic. “I’m gonna need your help setting it up.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“I’m not setting up any teepee,” Malcolm said. Not only was he cheap, he hated work, would do almost anything to get out of it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“We can make you the tape as soon as we have it set up.” Waterford was playing us. But if I had to go along with a little blackmail to get the tape, well, I’d do it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“I’m not—”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I cut Malcolm off with a glare.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“All right. We’ll help you set up the tent,” Mal said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Waterford made for the door, Mal and I followed, Yappy right on my heals.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“The dog bites me, he dies,” I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“He won’t bite.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I’d been around big dogs all my life, got along with them fine, but there was something about me this guy I didn’t like. I couldn’t help feeling he wanted to rip my Achilles tendon out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Waterford led us down what looked like an animal trail of some kind to a clearing where there was some bundled canvas and three poles that looked suspiciously like the poles I’d hated so much when I was in bootcamp. These things were about fifteen feet long. The drill instructors would assign four or five guys to a pole and we’d be picking them and putting them down for about an hour or so. Sometimes they’d line us up four abreast and we’d do curls with those poles, or overhead presses. I hated those poles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Okay, let’s get this thing set up, so we can get out of here,” Malcolm said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Oh, we’re not having the wedding here.” Waterford pointed. “We’re having it up there.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I did remember he’d said he would be sleeping in the teepee on a hilltop.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“I’m not moving that!” Malcolm said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Then you’re not getting the tape!” Waterford said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I wanted to strangled them both. I needed that tape, so I pinned Malcolm with another glare.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“All right!” Mal said. “Let’s get it over with.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Waterford was shorter than us and he took the middled, Malcolm took the front and I brought up the rear. We shouldered the pole, Malcolm and I bearing most of the brunt, and started up the hill. Twice I almost fell. It was heavy, the footing precarious and Waterford wasn’t doing his share. The little shit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">It was back breaking work, getting that pole up that hill. Once there, we saw that brush had been cleared away, stones had been set up for a fire.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“This is gonna be great,” Waterford said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“So the wedding’s tonight?” Malcolm said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Yeah. It won’t strictly be legal, cause she’s not quite old enough.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Really?” Waterford looked about thirty, reminded me of a snake and there was no way I could imagine a seventeen-year-old girl, no matter what she looked like, ever being interested in him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“So how can you get married then?” Malcolm said as we started back down the hill.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“I have a friend who is a Universal Life Science minister,” Waterford said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“No shit,” Malcolm said. “So am I.” He’d sent away for the card in the mail, anyone could do it back then. It was a scam. Some people thought it would help keep them out of the draft, others liked to be called reverend and thought a card you could get for twenty bucks gave them the right. Malcolm told me it got him to the head of the line when he was flying back east once. He also said it helped him get hippie chicks in the sack.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Let’s just get this over with,” I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">We took the canvas up next, then another pole. One more to go and I didn’t think I was going to make it. The climb was steep, the poles heavy. I picked my way up the hill with the pole digging into my shoulder. I had to shit, thought I was going to blow, because I was so worn out I didn’t think I’d be able to hold it back and no way was any bathroom inside of that place Waterford lived in gonna ever see my naked butt. I needed a place in the woods, needed it now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I saw the top, soon this ordeal was gonna be over. A quick trip behind some bushes, then back to Waterford’s, copy the tape, a fast drive to Long Beach and in the morning I’d get the tape mastered. This one was was gonna be LiveR all over again. I felt it in my blood.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Finally we reached the top.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Oh fuck!” Waterford screamed. He’d stepped into a beehive. Somehow it had falling from a tree, was waiting there on the ground, like a land mine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">The dog howled. It was covered in bees, looked black now. Malcolm screamed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">We dropped the pole.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I whirled around, jumped off the edged of the hill, slid down on my backside, with a swarm of those stinging bees hot after my hide. I made the trail below, still hadn’t been stung. I started running, pumping my arms like I’d never pumped them when I ran track in school.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I couldn’t hear the bees, but I knew they were there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Up ahead I saw a group of people, five or six girls and guys out for a walk in the woods. I ran toward them, chugging air for all I was worth, legs working overtime, feet slapping the forest floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I ran into the group, zapped straight through them. Somehow I knew the bees wouldn’t follow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Thanks a lot,” motherfucker one of the guys said as the women screamed. I kept going, running like the wind. The path turned, I slowed, stopped, turned. Sure enough the bees hadn’t followed. I headed off the trail, found some privacy, took care of business.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Back on the trail, I made my way back to Waterford’s only to find him, Mal and the dog already there. The dog got the worst of it. He was covered with lumps and didn’t look like he was going to make it. Waterford had been stung several times, Mal only four. Who knows how many times the group in the forest got nailed. I came through scott free.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Waterford was not happy. He told us to come back around sundown and we could copy the tape then, but for now he had to take care of the dog, plus he was in pain. Mal, to his credit, bore it well.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">We went to a pharmacy in Santa Cruz and the pharmacist there told Malcolm to scrape the infected areas with a credit card to get the stingers out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“The stinger is hooked on to a venom sac,” he said. If you pull it out, you’ll just get more of the venom in you.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">After Mal scraped those stingers away, he used alcohol supplied by the friendly pharmacist to clean the infected areas. Mal had no allergy problems and aside for a little pain, followed by a little itching, was good to go in no time at all. I could only imagine how Waterford was fairing. And the dog, I didn’t want to think about that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Sundown and we were back at the cabin. Waterford had a couple lumps on his neck, some on his harms, but he seemed in no pain. Drugs, I thought, but I couldn’t be sure. The dog, he said, was at the vets. He was going to survive.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“So let’s start copying then,” I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Gotta pick up my fiance first,” Waterford said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“What?”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“I don’t have a car and she doesn’t drive.” He crossed his arms. “As soon as we pick her up, we can copy the tape for you.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Christ,” Malcolm said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Sure, why not.” I really wanted that tape.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">We got in the car, Waterford in back. It was getting dark as he led us to an upper middle class area. Two story homes, nice lawns, three car garages, big lots.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Stop there,” Waterford said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Malcolm stopped.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“C’mon, I gotta get out.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I opened the door, got out, held the seat for Waterford so he could get out too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">A girl opened the back door of the house, rushed to the car.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Hurry!” Waterford said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Boy my parents are gonna be pissed.” She jumped into the back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Oh Christ,” I said. She looked like she was fourteen. “We’re in trouble.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“We gotta get out of here!” Waterford jumped into the back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Get in!” Mal said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“We’re not going anywhere!” I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“You’re going to jail if you don’t get in,” Mal said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I got in and Malcolm peeled on out of there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“What’s going on here?” I could’ve ripped Waterford’s heart out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“She’s very mature,” he said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“I don’t care.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Just drop us at my place,” Waterford said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Malcolm drove like the wind and in just a few minutes we were at his cabin.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">“Get out of my car!” Mal wasn’t happy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Waterford got out, again Mal burned rubber. Soon we were on the freeway, without the tape.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I got home around two in the morning, went straight to bed, got up early and took the tape I had, the one that was recorded off the acetate to DCT studios near Sunset. That’s where I did the MLK speech record. The guy cutting the record knew right away he was cutting a bootleg. He thought it was cool. Even with those few clicks and pops it was a pretty darned good tape and I was convinced it would put me right on top of the bootleg biz.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">It didn’t.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I took the acetate into Lewis as soon as it was cut, as they made the masters, mothers and stampers on site. After a few minutes with Kay I wandered around the plant, saw that Dub had copied GWW and was doing it on colored vinyl. That was gonna sell. In fact, everything he was doing now was on colored vinyl.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Then I saw a record that wasn’t on colored vinyl and my heart sank.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">Somebody, not Dub, had beat me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">And he was making a lot of records.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I took one of these Royal Albert Hall records home and to my dismay, it was better than mine. Those annoying clicks and pops were conspicuous in their absence. I did not, however, stop production of my record. I sold a lot, would have sold a lot more had I put my version out earlier. Then to make matters worse, Dub came out with his own version and it was even better yet. And he had those last three songs in stereo.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I felt like driving up to Santa Cruz and shooting Waterford, but I didn’t go back up there. I don’t know what happened between him and the child he wanted to marry. I never saw him again, never spoke to him again and when I saw his books in the bookstores, I turned away, refusing to acknowledge them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: lucida grande;">I was so sure I was going to be the first with this record, so wanted mine to be the best. But I’d failed in both, this new guy beat me to the punch and Dub creamed me with quality. It this case, his version truly lived up to the name Trade Mark of Quality.</span></span>Ken Douglashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03467370188058144339noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2867799482946658064.post-36475641065870462822010-03-02T18:17:00.000-08:002010-03-02T18:19:24.553-08:00The Great White Wonder Stamps<span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">I've gotten a couple e-mails about this rubber stamp business on "Great White Wonder", so I went looking for this sheet that I made up a long time ago. It was in a folder with a lot of other stuff from when Vesta and I were kids. Here it is, the three incarnations of the GWW stamp. Of course, there are more, because the record was widely copied.</span><br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/00GWWStampImpressions.jpg" /></span><br /></span></div><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-size:100%;" ><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">The first one is my first copy of the one Dub and I did together. I had one of the originals, but we were selling so many that I wanted more, so two or more people could stamp at once. As I said in my last post, Bob didn't get them right. The bottom one is the original. The top one is thicker and the middle one is similar to the top one, but the lettering isn't as thick.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">If you look at the bottom one you can see it's a similar font, I didn't know what a font was back then, the serifs extend outward, rather than straight down. If you have a record with one of the top two stamps, especially the top one, you've got something very rare, because hardly any got out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Still, it goes without saying, any copy, especially the gatefold ones, are rare and I hope this clears it all up.</span></span>Ken Douglashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03467370188058144339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2867799482946658064.post-87805667010179315832010-03-01T13:39:00.000-08:002010-03-01T13:42:15.748-08:00It Coulda Happened this Way -- Big Dub, Bad Stamps and a Horny Dog<span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Record stores all over the country wanted our records and we needed a way for them to get in contact with us. Giving out our phone numbers wasn’t an option. Or addresses also, we weren’t too keen on handing out. Getting a post office box wasn’t a good idea either, because you have to give the postal people your address to get the box and the FBI, cops and PIs could get that info and then they’d be right at our doors. And besides, even if the post office people would guard our addresses from those who wanted to put us permanently out of business or in jail even, it wouldn’t make much difference, because all they’d have to do is simply wait for us to pick up our mail and they’d have us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">We wouldn’t last long with a PO box, that was for sure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Not unless we could figure out some way to give the mail people a fake address and be guaranteed they wouldn’t ever verify it. And not unless we could figure out a way to get our mail without ever going to the post office, because there were going to be watchers watching that box.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Enter Dub’s dad.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Big Dub had worked for the Postal Service his whole live. A veteran mailman he was. He got us a box in the Glendale Post Office, and he picked up the mail every night, from inside the post office, so the bad guys (or good guys on the other side, depending on your point of view), could wait till the cows come home, but they’d never catch us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Big Dub brought us the mail everyday, with a smile and a twinkle in his eye. He just loved the fact that he was helping us put something over on the man. Not only did he bring us the mail, but when our business got bigger and it was no longer convenient for us to work out of our homes, he let us store the records in his basement, which had been Dub’s room when he lived there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Actually it wasn’t really a basement, because the house was sort of on a hill. The front of the house faced an upper middle class Glendale street, the back of the house was actually down a level and opened on a large backyard. Dub’s old room was the whole bottom floor of the house and had its own entry from the back. You could also get to that large room, which we converted into a warehouse, with record bins on all the walls, by taking the stairs down from the kitchen above.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">This moving the business to the basement didn’t happen overnight, it was sort of a gradual thing. I was there a lot and Big Dub, Virginia and Tammy the poodle, who ate better than most humans, all made me feel like I was part of the family. Well, Tammy didn’t make me feel like I belonged. She actually hated me. But the feeling was mutual.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">This pampered poodle got a bath at the vets at least twice a week, was talked to by Virginia and Big Dub as if it were a baby, cuddly and cute, and she was cute, but she was evil. Virginia was a good cook, I know, because I ate an awful lot of meals with them before Dub and I would retire down to the basement to pack and ship records. But before she cooked for the humans, Ginny cooked for the dog, grinding her steak just so, not too chunky, not too fine, then cooking it just perfect for Tammy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">And if she didn’t make it just the way Tammy liked, the pedigreed pup would turn her nose up and Dub’s mother would dump the food in the trash and start all over again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">One day Dub surprised his parents with a month long holiday in Europe. One of those motor-coach affairs, where if it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium. They were going to see the Continent in style. First class all the way for Dub’s folks. Dub wasn’t cheap. As the time drew near to day when they were supposed to get on the big airplane, Virginia got more and more nervous.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“What about poor Tammy,” she would whine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Tammy will be fine,” Dub would answer. “Don’t worry.” I think, like me, Dub hated that dog, only he couldn’t say it out loud. Well, actually I couldn’t either, not if I didn’t want to incur Ginny’s wrath.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">In the end, Virginia didn’t trust us to take care of the dog, so she found a kennel that sort of met her approval. One of those places where the stars took their pets. This was a wonderful gift Dub had given his folks. I don’t think they’d ever been out of the States. However, four days later they were back. Ginny had called the kennel while they were in Rome and learned that Tammy wasn’t eating regularly. Apparently those kennel people didn’t sauté Tammy’s steak just so.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">I swear, and may lightning strike me dead if I’m lying, that dog went around the house for the next weak or so with a smug look of satisfaction on its poodle face. I think Dub would have killed the dog if he could have gotten it alone, but that wasn’t possible, Ginny was in constant attendance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">One day shortly after Big Dub and Virginia got back from Italy I went by Lewis and picked up a couple hundred copies of Birch and Freeze Out. The records without covers were packed fifty to a box, so I had eight boxes of records in the back of my small car. I drove straight out to Dub and Virginia’s to off load the records. Which was normal. I figured on dinner, then a couple hours stamping covers and stuffing records, then I’d planned on hitting the freeway, getting home around 8:30 or 9:00.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">But that’s not what happened.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">When I got there dinner wasn’t on the table. Virginia was out walking Tammy. Dub wasn’t home.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">But Big Dub was there and he wanted to talk. He told me he thought Dub was responsible for the records being as successful as they were, because of all of his state of the art stereo and recording equipment. The records were actually assembled in Dub’s old room and Big Dub was the guy who was paying the rent, so to speak, for storing our records. In fact, the way he saw it, I wasn’t really doing very much at all. I wasn’t carrying my weight, it wasn’t fair to Dub. Dub needed a partner who could move the business forward. I was dragging him down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Bottom line, I was out, Big Dub was in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">To this day I don’t know why I didn’t attack the man, then burn down his house with him in it. But I didn’t. I got in my car with those four hundred records in the back seat and drove home, getting angrier and angrier as I sat in bumper to bumper rush hour traffic.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">When I got home I’d calmed down some. I told Vesta what happened. My friend Dick came over and I told him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Richard MacPartland, was just about the best friend I ever had. He was raised in Boston, was an incorrigible kid whose parents took him to reform school when he was eight years old for stealing a pack of Oreos. And there he stayed till he was sixteen.</span><br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/00RichardMcPartlandVesta.jpg" /></span><br /></span></div><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-size:100%;" ><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Out, he got involved with the wrong kind of people and he shot and killed a man with a flare gun. Dick’s story was that there were three guys who wanted to take him down, after he shot the one, the other two fled, but he was caught by the cops and sent back to reform school without a trial.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">He got out again on his eighteenth birthday. A couple weeks later he saw a man beating a dog with a cane. Dick pushed the man over a row of hedges, took the dog and set him free a few blocks away. However, unknown to him, beating your dog was not against the law, but dog napping was and so it was back to jail for skinny Dick MacPartland till he was twenty-one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Out again, he figured he should get as far away from Boston as possible, and you can’t get much farther away and still be in the United States, than Los Angeles, so that’s where he headed. In L.A. he met some guys who were into counterfeiting and in no time Dick was hawking counterfeit copies of Smoky Robinson’s My Girl. My dad bought a lot of ’em, knowingly or unknowingly, I never knew, but my father took a liking to Dick and he sort of became part of the family.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">However, Dick was always going away on vacation for small peccadilloes like, Interstate Transportation of Counterfeit Securities (he’d moved up from Smoky Robinson forty-fives to American Express traveler’s checks), Grand Theft Auto (he was part of a car theft ring), Drug Smuggling and a host of lesser crimes. During theses enforced vacations my brothers and I would send him cigarettes and fifty or sixty bucks a month. Dick was out at the time and when he heard about what happened, he wanted to go out and pay Big Dub an immediate visit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Once, when I was working for my dad, I forget to order the third Doors LP. Dick said he needed to borrow my car. He took it (without my knowledge) over to Cal Racks, a major rack jobber, parked it next to one of their trucks that was about to make a delivery and off loaded a couple hundred Doors records from their truck into my trunk. He’d committed a daylight robbery, just so my dad wouldn’t know that I messed up and forgot to order the hottest record in America, and he got away with it. Dick got away with a lot of stuff back then. But he got caught for a lot of stuff too, which is why he spent so much time behind bars.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">I was mad at Big Dub, but I didn’t want him dead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“But I need to help somehow,” Dick said. “What do you need?”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“If I could borrow your car tomorrow, that would be good.” I needed jackets for the records. Big Dub kind of fucked up, he should have waited till after I unloaded those records before instigating his coup.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“No problem.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">The next day Dick came over bright and early. He’d been out to Dub’s with me a couple of times and he’d been out to Big Dub and Virginia’s as well, so I don’t know why I was surprised when that’s where he headed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">However, when we got there nobody was home and that was a good thing. So, next we went out to the pressing plant, because I wanted to talk to Kaye.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">We got there right after Big Dub left. He’d been there to inform Kaye not to press any records for me. He was his son’s new partner and he and his son were the only people who were going to be making bootlegs there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Kaye was an alright old gal. I never went there to pick up records without spending time with her. She had a smoker’s voice and maybe she drank too much on occasion, but she had great stories she liked to tell and I liked to listen. I had some stories too, and she liked to listen to mine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Dub, when he went there, just grabbed the records and went. He was a nice guy, one of the nicest people I ever knew, but he had faults, faults he’d inherited from his parents. He talked about Catholics and Jews as if they were inferior. He didn’t mean it, he just didn’t know any better. He acted like he was superior to others as well. Again, he didn’t know any better. But when Kaye met his Daddy, who was not such a nice guy, she learned straightaway why Dub was the way he was.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">She and Dick were like two peas in a pod. After only a few minutes together, they’d worked it out that Kaye would make me mothers of everything Dub had in there, stampers too. And she’d do it for free. Plus she’d keep pressing for me. And that deal went on forever. Whenever Dub took something in there, she’d make me a set of plates gratis. When he ordered records, she’d ask me how many I wanted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Okay, so I was still in business, thanks to Big Dub’s arrogance, Dick’s smooth talking and Kaye’s sense of what was right and what wasn’t. We left Lewis and went to pick up the jackets and with them safely in Dick’s trunk, we got on the freeway and lit up a joint.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Back then you went to jail for a long time if they caught you smoking dope, so we figured the safest place was on the freeway at about seventy-five miles an hour. If a cop pulled up behind you, you could toss it out the window. Fat change a cop was gonna find it. What could they do, shut down the freeway?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">We got home around 3:30, easily beating the rush hour traffic which is a big deal in L.A. However, after we off loaded the records, we realized we had another problem. I didn’t have any rubber stamps. Pigs I had plenty of, because we used to make up the records in my living room. But I needed a Birch and a Freeze out stamp pronto.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“I know a guy,” Dick said. He asked me what I wanted the stamps to say, then he made a call. “We can pick ’em up in a couple hours. He’ll call when they’re ready.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">The kids were at my fathers for a couple days. Vesta used to do that, drive them out there and leave them for three or four days, because my dad and his new wife had a girl a year older than my son and a year younger than my daughter. They loved it, because they spent most of the time in his pool. We didn’t have a pool.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">So without the kids we had no reason to maintain. We had a couple hours with nothing to do, so we fired up a joint, put "Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues" on the turntable and waited for that call. About halfway through side one Dick mentioned that he had a hit of acid and maybe we could split it three ways.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">This is the kind of suggestion that under normal circumstances one would laugh off at 3:30 on a Thursday, especially if you have to go outside and deal with normal people. But we were already stoned and besides, we were gonna split it three ways, what could happen? So I went out to the kitchen, got a coke, popped the tab and Dick dropped the acid in. Vesta got the rum out from the cabinet on top of the refrigerator, got three glasses and made us each a drink.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Funny thing about LSD, I don’t think it’s the amount of the drug you ingest, but how easily it is to open that doorway. You know, the one in your mind most people like to keep closed. We were all veteran drug takers and we were all pretty used to seeing what wasn’t there. In fact Dick used to be a junkie, but my brothers and I introduced him to acid and he never went back. So, really a third of a hit, three hits or four, it made no difference, our doors were blown right off the hinges and we had no business going outside, much less getting inside of a moving vehicle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">However, when that phone rang we piled right into Dick’s old car like it was the most normal thing in the world. And he drove us down to the Pike. The Pike was an old amusement park full of barkers, hustlers, carny people, tattoo parlors and it sported the greatest roller coaster on the planet, "The Cyclone" or as those not from Long Beach Called it, "The Cyclone Racer".</span><br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/00Cyclone.jpg" /></span><br /></span></div><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-size:100%;" ><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“We’re going to ride the coaster.” Vesta sound enthused.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“No we’re not.” I might have been floating above all that’s holy, but I wasn’t so stoned that I didn’t know that we’d never get off that beast alive if we got on it in the condition we were in. It had killed before, I didn’t want it killing tonight.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Dick parked in front of a tattoo place and lead us to the business next door where he introduced us to Bob, a guy with a Santa Claus white beard that attempted to hide a ruddy drinker’s face, but Bob’s bulbous, blue veined nose gave the game away. Bob wore a sailor’s hate just like the Skipper wore on Gilligan’s Island.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">He held out his hand, I shook it, was about to say I was pleased to meet him when something clamped itself around my leg.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“What?” I looked down and son of a gun if Tammy’s twin wasn’t dry humping my right leg.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“His names Brucie, he likes you,” Bob said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“I don’t care. Get him off!” Tammy and I never hit it off and I could see that Brucie and I weren’t starting off on the right foot either.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Down, boy,” Bob said, but that just got Brucie humping harder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Knock it off.” Bob grabbed Brucie by the scruff on his neck, tossed him across the room. This dog wasn’t mollycoddled, but he had a problem with no, because in an instant he was right back on my leg. Bob grabbed him again, went behind the counter, set Brucie on it. “Behave!” he said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Then he handed us the stamps.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">They were horrible. Neither stamp said GWW on it. The Birch stamp didn’t have the square outline around the title. The printing was too small. The typeface was different.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“We can’t use these,” I said. Though we did use the Birch one a few years later, probably stamped five or six hundred records with it, but the Freeze Out stamp never saw ink.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“I made ’em just like you ordered,” Bob said to Dick. And that was true. Dick told the man what he wanted the stamps to say over the phone and Bob made ‘em up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">I explained our problem and Bob was very understanding, especially since I told him we’d pay for the bad stamps. Bob said if we could get him an impression, he could have the stamps made up the way we wanted in a couple hours. He’d stay open, do ’em special tonight. You can’t beat that for service, so we drove back home, a major feat in our condition, got a copy of each of the records for Bob.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">So here we were, three very stoned people at the Pike. The last time I’d been here I’d been arrested by the Shore Patrol for being in uniform without a tie. I’d been drinking too, so they turned me over to the cops, which under normal circumstances isn’t a very nice thing to do. But they were sailors and saw a chance to stick it to a Marine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">The cops handcuffed me, one of them put his hand on my head, guided me into the back seat. This wasn’t good. They drove away from the Pike, then the officer riding shotgun turned around and smiled.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Where’d you park?”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Not my car. I had a 1960 Ford Starliner, candy apple red, white tuck and roll, 352, Holly four barrel, Hurst four speed on the floor, racing slicks. Not the fastest car in Southern California, but I’d won my share of races on Cherry between those two big cemeteries, the Catholic All Souls and Forest Lawn. We raced in the dead of night, the dead cheering us on. I really loved that car and now these guys were gonna tow it away. I felt like shit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Relax, Ken, we’re not taking your car.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">How’d this guy know my name? We hadn’t been introduced. He hadn’t check my ID when they chucked me into the car.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“So where’d you park?”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“John?” It was John Ogden. Though he was a cop, he also owned Ogden’s Judo and Karate School on Cherry and Anaheim. Unlike most of the Marines at the Pike that night, my home was local and my brother and I had studied Shotokan Karate under Kaylor Atkins at John’s school. I only stuck with it for about six months, but it was like a religion for my brother.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“So, I’m not going to jail?”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Think you can drive home without wrecking the car?”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Yeah.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“You are going home, not to Pendleton, right?”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Yeah, home, I go back tomorrow.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">They dropped me at the car. I was with a couple other guys that night, but they’d seen me stuffed into that cop car, so I didn’t think they were counting on me for a ride back. Because I was going to Camp Pendleton that night. However even back then I wasn’t a complete idiot, I took the car to my mother’s and she drove me to the Greyhound Bus Station, where I met my pals, who were, needless to say, pretty surprised to see me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Now, I was back at the Pike with my wife and my best friend and we were all flying Trans Love Airways. We had a couple-three hours to kill. Vesta still wanted to ride the Cyclone. Dick knew of a crap game we could get in. I didn’t like either of those ideas. If the Cyclone didn’t kill us, Dick’s illegal pals were for sure going to slit our throats and take our money. At least that’s what my drug indulged brain was telling me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“You decide, Ken,” Dick said. Dice or the Coaster.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“I vote for pinball.” There was a pinball arcade right across from Bob’s. We wouldn’t have to go very far at all. I headed to the arcade, hoping they’d take my lead and follow. They did.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">I cannot say enough about the virtues of pinball when you’re on acid. It’s more fun than you could ever dream of. Plus it tends to keep you rooted to one spot. The game is always changing, every ball different, so you don’t get bored. I mean if you can trip out on a few grains of sand on the tip of your shoes, imagine what you can do with bells, whistles, targets popping up and down, flippers and the Who’s Pinball Wizard playing around in your head. Fun, fun, fun, that’s what you get when you mix pinball and LSD.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Things were going good, I’d managed to master the art of grabbing the ball with a flipper and holding it in place, taking aim and getting fairly close to what I wanted to hit. We stayed on one quarter eating machine, getting to know it well. After a couple hours we were all pretty good, then something grabbed my leg.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Brucie,” I said. “Get away.” But the dog was humping to beat the band. I wondered if he smelled Tammy on me. Maybe that was it, he thought I was a big, attractive poodle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Trouble here?”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Oh crap,” Dick muttered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">It was the cops.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">And that’s just about the last thing you want to see when you’re out having a good time on acid.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Are we in trouble?” Vesta said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Ken is that you?”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Don, Don Berans?”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Yeah, it’s me.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">I’d met Don in the service. We were clerks. Yeah, a lot of Marines carry a rifle, but Don and I, we could type and back then they didn’t have computers or even Xerox machines. We used carbon paper and you had to be a dead on typist, because if you made a mistake, especially on a promotion, or anything remotely important, you had to do it over. We’d never been pals, but we’d worked together, been drinking together.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">I don’t know if he knew what kind of condition we were in. I hadn’t seen him in years. I’d changed a lot. I had long hair, a beard, was obviously part of the counter culture and he was obviously part of the establishment. But he seemed so dammed glad to see me. He pumped my hand like we were long lost brothers. Then he wrote out his address on the back of some kind of business card, said we should get together sometime.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">Twice in my life I’d had a close call with the cops at the Pike and twice I’d gotten away by the hair of my chinny, chin, chin.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Don, do me a favor,” I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“What?”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Shoot the dog.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">He laughed, then he and his partner left.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“The stamps might be done by now.” I pulled the dog off my leg and we went back to see Santa Claus Bob.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Finished.” Bob handed me the stamps and I handed over his dog.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“Perfect,” I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">And they did look perfect, but when we were back home, still flying Trans Love, Vesta noticed something wrong as we were stamping the records.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“They’re different,” she said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“They’re not,” Dick said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">“The quote things on "Birch", they’re straight and the type on the others is off.” She was right. We stopped stamping the records, because I wanted the stamped covers to look exactly like Dub’s.</span><br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:lucida grande;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/00JohnBirch.jpg" /></span><br /></span></div><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-size:100%;" ><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">The next day Dick and I drove out to Glendale, where Dub and I had the original stamps made. I ordered another Birch and Freeze Out, plus I ordered a new one. GWW Royal Albert Hall, and I paid him for all three stamps. The stuff on Burn Some More was the last Dylan stuff that I got from Waterford that I gave Dub, actually I mastered that one. I’d held back RAH because I wanted to listen to it a bit, before we put it out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">The next day I went back to pick up the stamps. The guy there wasn’t happy to see me. Big Dub had been in and told him not to make any more stamps for me. The guy gave me the three stamps I paid for, then told me not to come back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">On the way home I wondered if he told Big Dub about the stamps I’d made there and if he’d told him about Royal Albert Hall. I could only assume he had, but Big Dub wasn’t into the music. He wouldn’t have know how important that record was going to be. How necessary it was to my comeback that I have it and he didn’t.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:lucida grande;">But what I didn’t know was that I wasn’t the only bootlegger in L.A. with that tape.</span></span>Ken Douglashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03467370188058144339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2867799482946658064.post-39265951820789338362010-03-01T11:14:00.000-08:002010-03-01T11:18:24.673-08:00It Coulda Happened this Way -- Dub Dubbed the Rubber Dubber<span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-family:lucida grande;font-size:100%;" >Things were ticking along okay, Dub and I were making our records in colored vinyl now. We both had good cars, Vesta did too. Dub got to buy lots of cool electronic toys. We ate out all the time, bought lots of records. Life was good.<br /><br />Norty and Ben were out of the picture. Sure a couple other people were making boots, but they were insignificant, they didn’t affect us. I didn’t care. We didn’t own Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin or Jethro Tull. They hadn’t signed contracts with us.<br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-family:lucida grande;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/00RubberDubber.jpg" /><br /></span></div><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-family:lucida grande;font-size:100%;" ><br />Rubber Dubber was making his records and I ran into him at Rare Records in Glendale. He introduced himself right off. He seemed like a nice guy, invited me to his home in Sherman Oaks. I went, met his wife. They drove matching BMW motorcycles, which I thought was kind of cool as I had a Triumph Bonneville. Scott Johnson was a guy with a story for every occasion and some of them were a little much, so I excused myself, said I had to go to the bathroom, where I checked out the names on the prescription bottles in the medicine cabinet. Sure enough, he was who he said he was, at least that part was true.<br /><br />During the course of my afternoon there, Scott showed me the bamboo growing in the backyard, said he used it to disguise the fact that he was growing marijuana behind it. Well I was a dedicated dope smoker, who was constantly supplied by a younger brother whose two main goals in life were to stay out of the draft and to grow the perfect marijuana plant. What Scott was growing behind that bamboo, just looked like more bamboo to me, but I didn’t say anything.<br /><br />I ran into Scott and Richard, a guy he called his enforcer, a lot in the next couple of months. He was always trying to figure out where we got our records made and I was always trying to figure out where he got his done. He told me he had them done in a moving truck, a secret warehouse where he’d set up a couple presses and that he’d been paying off the people at Capitol to make them at night. He didn’t tell me these stories all at the same time. Every time I asked, he had a different tale. Still, he was a nice guy.<br /><br />His favorite story, one he told me just about every time he saw me, was where he claimed to have friends at Warner Brothers and they knew who he was and liked what he did. He said Warner’s called Rubber Dubber the unpaid advertising arm of Warner, Electra Atlantic. Or maybe he said Warner, Reprise, I don’t remember if they owned Electra at the time, but you get the picture.<br /><br />Then he did the Stones European Tour, or maybe he’d done it earlier and Dub just got around to finding out. Whichever, it really pissed Dub off. Apparently he thought we had the rights to the Stones. They were our band. Bootleg Dylan, Zep and Hendrix if you want, but leave the Stones alone. I tried to tell him it was no big deal, but Dub wasn’t having any of it.<br /><br />One morning I showed up at his place to find that he’d mastered Scott’s record. Copied it straight from Scott’s double disc, got all the material crammed onto a single disc, improved the sound with his equalizer (Dub was one of the first people on the planet to actually have one of those in his home. They were expensive, new and most people had never heard of them).<br /><br />“This is not a good idea,” I said.<br /><br />“We’ll sell as many as LiveR.” He was excited. “Nobody’s going to buy his double record any more.”<br /><br />“We’re doing to Scott, what Norty and Ben did to us.” This from me, a guy who would go on to copy any and every bootleg he could get his hands on in just a few short years. But then I still had a few morals. I knew we were crooks, but I truly believed you had to be honest if you lived outside that law. And that meant no copying.<br /><br />“No, it’s not,” Dub said. “We invented bootlegs. It was our idea.”<br /><br />I didn’t agree with his reasoning, but I didn’t fight him too hard when he got the record mastered. I’m not stupid, I was more than happy to take my half of the money, even though I thought it was wrong.<br /><br />I was disappointed when the record came out, because it sounded pretty awful compared to LiveR, but then YaYas sounds pretty awful compared to LiveR, too. However, it was more than that, European Tour just sounded like something I didn’t want to be associated with. Sort of like some of those Dylan tapes I’d listened to in Waterford’s bathroom.<br /><br />The record had only been out a few days when Scott called me and he was pretty upset, told me Richard was coming right over with a friend. They wanted to talk. You know, when you’re sending someone over to “talk sense” to a rival, you shouldn’t call the person first.<br /><br />That was dumb.<br /><br />Malcolm happened to be at my house when Scott called. I told him what was happening, that there was likely to be a confrontation. I could tell he wanted to leave, but he’d japped out on the business with those bad guys from back East and he wanted back into the bootleg business in the worst way. If he ducked out on me now, that was never gonna happen and he knew it.<br /><br />I told Vesta that now might be a good time for her to take the kids over to my mother’s and she agreed. After she was gone, I went to the bedroom, reached under the bed and took out my father’s service revolver, that same forty-five auto I’d held in my shaking and a quivering hands during that escapade at Saturn, where we almost blew away my father and half the black record store owners in L.A.<br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-family:lucida grande;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/00045.jpg" /><br /></span></div><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-family:lucida grande;font-size:100%;" ><br />“You think it’s going to come to this?” Malcolm’s eyes went big when he saw the gun.<br /><br />“Probably not, but Richard looks like a pretty tough guy.”<br /><br />“So you’re going to shoot him?”<br /><br />“Not if I don’t have to.”<br /><br />“Shit!” Now Malcolm really wanted to go. To his credit, he stayed.<br /><br />I had a sofa on one side of my living room, two chairs in front of bookcases on the other side. Vesta and I have always been voracious readers, every house we ever lived in was jammed full of books. Our boat was stuffed full of them. Reading is important.<br /><br />I checked the clip, put it back in the weapon, chambered a round, made sure the safety was off, because it’s stupid to have a gun that won’t shot when you pull the trigger.<br /><br />“Oh fuck!” Malcolm looked like he was going to wet himself. But he hung in there, even though he wasn’t liking it very much. “What if you shoot him? What are you gonna do then?”<br /><br />“That’s what you’re here for. You’re gonna put the bodies in your trunk and take ’em out to the desert.”<br /><br />“Oh fuck!”<br /><br />“You already said that.”<br /><br />“It’s the middle of the day!”<br /><br />“I was kidding, nobody’s gonna shoot anybody.”<br /><br />“Then how come you did what you did?”<br /><br />“What?”<br /><br />“Checked the bullets.” He was sort of bouncing on his toes. “Oh shit, they’re here.”<br /><br />“That was fast.”<br /><br />“Oh, shit.”<br /><br />“It’s gonna be fine. Just stand behind me and try to look tough.” I put the gun on the third shelf of the bookcase, so it’d be close at hand when I sat in one of those chairs.<br /><br />Through the window I saw Richard and a big guy get out the car. Richard wasn’t so big, but he was kind of scary, the big guy didn’t look so scary, but he was big. It looked like he was just for show, but I wasn’t sure.<br /><br />I went to the door, opened it as they were coming up the porch steps.<br /><br />“Hey, guys, come in.” I showed them my back, went to a chair, sat down.<br /><br />Malcolm took the other chair.<br /><br />Richard and Big Guy took the couch. Richard got tense all of a sudden.<br /><br />“What are you going to do with that?” He didn’t have to say what he was talking about. I knew what he meant and he knew I knew.<br /><br />“Just being cautious. You would be, too.”<br /><br />“Scott’s not happy that you copied his record.”<br /><br />“But we didn’t,” I lied.<br /><br />“Oh, come on.”<br /><br />“It’s like with the Zeppelin record, independent tapes.”<br /><br />“You’re full of shit.”<br /><br />“I’ll show you.” I got up, moved away from the gun, went to my records. I had them stuffed in alphabetical order in old wooden seven up crates. They took up a whole wall, stacked three crates high. My stereo system was on top of them.<br /><br />“You got something to drink. A coke maybe,” Big guy said.<br /><br />“Out in the kitchen.” I pointed. “Lots of stuff in the fridge.”<br /><br />Richard seemed surprised. I was across the room, well away from the gun and I’d just let the big guy go out into the kitchen by himself. That really was pretty stupid of me, but I was playing it as it went. However, I sort of wished now that I hadn’t chambered a round. In fact I sort of wished the gun wasn’t loaded.<br /><br />“What are you doing?” Richard was still sitting, was watching me and not the gun.<br /><br />“Here it is.” I pulled out the record. “You’ll see now what I’m talking about.” I put the record on the turntable, cranked the volume on my McIntosh Amp up loud, dropped the needle on the disc and Mick’s voice blared through the living room, singing Sympathy for the Devil.<br /><br />Richard started bobbing his head up and down as the big guy came back into the room with his coke.<br /><br />I turned it down.<br /><br />“See what I mean?” I said.<br /><br />“Yeah,” Richard said, “different tape.” But it wasn’t a different tape, because Dub had just plain copied their record. I don’t know if he and his EQ work made it sound different enough to fool Richard, or if my playing it loud fooled him, or if it was just the power of suggestion, or if he just didn’t want to take it any further.<br /><br />“So we’re cool.” I looked over at the gun. Richard did too. He was closer.<br /><br />“We had it out first,” Richard said.<br /><br />“We had Zeppelin out first.”<br /><br />“That was different.”<br /><br />“Yeah, you’re probably right.”<br /><br />“So, we’ll check with each other in the future to make sure something like this never happens again.”<br /><br />“Absolutely.” I walked over to him, held out my hand.<br /><br />“That’s good.” He shook it and they left.<br /><br />The big guy sort of smiled, gave me the high sign with his coke.<br /><br />“That went okay,” Malcolm said as they drove away. He’d never gotten out of his chair, didn’t say a word the whole time they were their, didn’t even bother to look tough. Still, he was there. That was something.<br /><br />A few days later I went out to Scott’s, because a customer of ours wanted some of his records. We’d done a few trades in the past and it worked out okay for everybody. But when I got there the house was vacant. He was gone, so was his stuff. I looked in back. The bamboo was still growing, but somebody had pulled out some plants from behind. So I guess it had been marijuana after all.<br /><br />I never saw Scott or Richard again.<br /><br />But I read an interview he gave Esquire Magazine a few months later. He told how he made his Rubber Dubber records in a semi truck, always moving it around so the FBI couldn’t find him. What a typical Scott Johnson story. The Esquire interviewer bought it all.</span>Ken Douglashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03467370188058144339noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2867799482946658064.post-38945521161208517162010-02-17T13:38:00.000-08:002010-02-17T13:39:00.984-08:00It Coulda Happend This Way -- Cool Hand Luke and a Dylan Collector<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Vesta and I had been working late, stamping GWW covers. They littered our living room floor. Our hands were ink stained, our eyes bleary. Our kids were asleep on the couch. It was a bit before midnight and we were just getting ready to carry them off to bed, when the phone rang. Right away we knew it was trouble, because nobody ever calls at that hour, unless it involves a heart attack, car crash or jail.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">It was jail.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">My brother was on the other end of the line, talking a mile a minute, cursing cops, courts, Nixon, Agnew, the war and Paul Newman. But mostly it was cops he was mad at. Seems he and a pal were arrested in Santa Cruz for felony destruction of city property, theft of city property, possession of marijuana (among other drugs), resisting arrest and assault on a police officer, or rather officers.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/011John.jpg" /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">He was in serious shit.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I tried to calm him down, finally did and found out he wanted me to come up and get him of there.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I could understand that. Jail is a bad place to spend the night. I called Joey, who gets calls all night long, and asked her if she knew somebody up there who could help.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Joey, of Joey’s Bail Bonds, was my bail lady. I learned from my father that if you live outside the law, it helps too have a bail person up to speed on your life. You don’t want to call one cold at 3:00 in the morning, not unless you want to take out a second on your house or sign over the pink slip to your car.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Right after Great White Wonder took off I went down to downtown Long Beach, looking for a bondsman, because if I was ever arrested, I wanted a number to call that got me out pronto. A good bondsman, or in this case bondwoman, can get you out of any jail anywhere right after they book you, unless, of course, you shot someone or were arrested high.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I had it set up that if I was ever arrested, I used my one call to reach out and touch her. She could spring me from any hoosegow, because bail people reciprocate. She bails me out and shares the ten percent bond fee with the local bondsman she called. Me, I just have to know her.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">She was the fourth bail person I checked out. The first three were all seedy guys with baggy eyes who looked like you could trust them about as much as you could trust the stubby cigars in their mouths to stay lit in a downpour. Joey, on the other hand, was a lady. I told her my problem, filled out a credit app, had a cup of coffee with her, smoked a couple cigarettes and became her customer. One of the wisest things I’d ever done.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">She told me she knew a guy up there, a retired judge who now did bond work. She gave me his number, said he’d be expecting me.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">So, hours before the sun, I took off in my recently acquired 1967 Austin Healey MK 3000, with the top down. What a car, red, the way a sports car was meant to be. Four on the floor and an electronic overdrive on the dash, flip the switch and you were flying. It was summer, at least I believe it was, because I remember the breeze was warm.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/012Healy.jpg" /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I was tired, having not had any sleep, but that breeze whipping my hair around, smacking it into my face, kept me awake. I did seventy-five up Highway 5 the whole way making the three hundred and eighty five mile trip in five hours, the Healey purring like Vesta’s Jaguar the whole way. Yeah, one of the advantages of being a bootlegger was that you got to drive good cars.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Since I beat the sun and nothing would be open, I started looking for a motel. This was sometimes not an easy task for a kid driving a red sports car, who had a full beard and hair almost as long as Crystal Gayle’s. Well, not that long, but long. Plus my Marine Corp utility shirt with the patch sewed on the left breast pocket that said, “War is not healthy for children and other living things,” probably didn’t help. After four or five refusals, I decided to drive down to a parking lot overlooking the beach and sleep in the car.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/013Ken.jpg" /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Given everything I’d heard about Santa Cruz, it was a town of peace and love, a beachside town with almost as many hippies as the Haight Asbury district in San Francisco, one would have thought I’d have received a better reception, but I guess the peace and love business started from the ground up and hadn’t worked it’s way up to motel desk clerks yet.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">After a couple hours of fitful sleep I drove to the center of town where I found the Judge’s office. He wasn’t a judge anymore, but I addressed him as your honor. We had coffee, talked. He seemed like a nice guy. He told me not to worry about a thing, he could take care of everything and just the way he said it, I knew I was in good hands.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">And what do you know, by noon he got all the felony charges dropped, including that pesky resisting arrest and assault on a police officer business. The deal he struck was that John and his friend Mike plead guilty to a misdemeanor account of defacing city property, pay a fine right now, and the rest of the charges would go away. Jeez, what a deal. I couldn’t pony up the money fast enough. And the man never asked for a cent for himself. And since there was no bail, neither he, nor Joey made a dime on the deal.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Sometimes you just get lucky.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">It took a couple hours before they were able to spring them, something about them still being too high to let loose on the general public, so I hung out with the Judge, had more coffee, smoked cigarettes, talked politics. He was an okay guy.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">When John and Mike were finally released they were dying to tell me about this guy they met named Steve Waterford, who had a ton of Dylan tapes. Studio tapes, live tapes, great tapes, tapes I just had to hear.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Well, well, I thought, maybe this cloud had a platinum lining, after all.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">They’d met Waterford at Odyssey Records.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">This guy was short, maybe five-four, had wandering eyes, thinning hair, talked a mile a minute and he thought Bob Dylan was God. Literally. I think he prayed to the man. He was researching a book on Dylan, paid a clipping service to send him anything in print. He had a trunk with his valuable clippings buried out in the forest. He seemed like he was high on something, but I don’t think he was. I just think the very mention of Dylan’s name got his endorphins kicking in.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">After spending a few minutes with Waterford in that record store all I wanted to do was get in my car and drive. I could still make Long Beach by dark if I left right away. I was just about to make an excuse to get on out of there, no tapes were worth this, when Waterford said. “I have Blonde on Blonde out takes.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Say again,” I said.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Blonde on Blonde out takes. Hours of them.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Now I was excited. Waterford had just become my new best friend.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I bought ten reels of good tape at the record store and we made arrangements to meet later that evening, then John, Mike and I went out to get something to eat. Over the very late lunch I learned that they’d ingested a fair amount of mescaline, were having a bit too much of a good time, so they decided to take in a movie. This way they could enjoy themselves away from prying eyes. Something about drugs, they seem to make you paranoid. They found a theater, bought tickets, without knowing what they were going to see. It wound up being “Cool Hand Luke”.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">The movie starts out with a drunk Paul Newman attacking a parking meter with a pipe cutter, to get the nickels inside. My brother and his pal were on the road, touring America in a beat up van. It’s true they were just starting out and hadn’t made it very far, but they were already running short of cash, and they thought this might be the answer to their problems.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Parking meters were everywhere, just begging to be plundered, an endless source of spare change. Maybe if they’d stayed around and saw what happened to Paul after the cops got their hooks in him, they might’ve had second thoughts, might’ve stayed out of trouble, but they didn’t. Instead, they left that theater in a hurry, asking everyone they encountered for directions to a hardware store that sold pipe cutters.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">By now everybody in town was alerted to the fact that there were a couple drug crazed loonies on the loose and the cops had been notified. The pair of would be city property defacers found a hardware store, but a pipe cutter they could not get, so they settled on a couple hacksaws, then they made their way to the local amusement park where they had their van parked with a couple cops tagging along behind.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">When they got to the van, they went to work on the meter, taking turns sawing away, mindless of the cops watching them. By the time they’d finished they’d attracted quite an audience. Needless to say, they didn’t get to make a Butch and Sundance getaway, however, they didn’t go quietly to the jail house. I guess in their drug induced brains they thought they had superpowers or something. They didn’t, but the story about their resistance and their time in the slammer made for an amusing meal.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">After we ate we walked around the amusement park until it was time to meet Waterford. It was dark, around 9:00, when we finally hooked up with him. He had a dingy upstairs place over a business, I don’t remember what. He played us some of his stuff. Dylan with the Band in Sweden, quality was awful. I could barely make out the words, but Waterford’s eyes were aglow.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Just think,” he said, “We’re listening to Bob Dylan and the Hawks in Sweden.” He sighed. “Back in 1966.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Jesus, who cares, I thought. If he didn’t get to the Blonde on Blonde stuff pretty darned fast I was gonna kill the son of a bitch and go home. I was bored shitless, however my desperado comrades seemed to be really into it. Christ, the cops searched their van, confiscated their drugs, but apparently they didn’t find all of them.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Acid, shit. I figured that out pretty quick. No wonder they were having such a good time. So now I was stuck, I couldn’t exactly walk out and leave them with Walleyed Steve, not in their condition. So I stuck it out, listened to one crappy tape after another. I really did want to kill someone.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Then, sometime after midnight, Waterford says he’s going to bed. We could listen to the tapes in the bathroom, he said, but we had to be quiet. Yeah, the guy had a reel to reel tape recorder, amp and speakers in his bathroom. Guess he wanted to be able to listen to his shitty tapes when he was taking a sh*t. Me I woulda run some speaker wire to the bathroom, but that’s just me.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“The bathroom, groovy,” Mike said. Yeah, they said groovy back then, even I might have said it a time or two.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Yeah,” Waterford said, “I get a lot of people coming over to listen to my tapes, so I got a set up in there so that I can get some privacy.” Well that answered that question.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">So, there we were, me, my drug enlightened companions and endless hours of Bob Dylan trying to make himself understood through all the tape hiss.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Then, when I thought all was lost, Mike flipped the switch to play after having just put in another tape.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">And Bob Dylan’s young voice rang through that bathroom in all it’s crystal clear glory.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“What’s this?” I looked at the label on the tape box. Bob Dylan: Town Hall 1963. Well, well, well. I got up, went to the living room, where I’d left that tape I’d bought earlier, unplugged the tape recorder Waterford had there and brought it into the bathroom.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“What are you gonna do?” John said when I came back and stopped the tape.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“What’s it look like?” I flipped the switch to rewind, then started hooking up the tape recorder.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“You can’t do that,” Mike said. “It’s stealing.” This from a guy who was about to go up the river for who knows how long had it not been for me.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“The motherfucker was right there when I bought the tape. Did he think we didn’t have any in LA, that I was stocking up?” I cracked the seal on a tape box, threaded it into the machine I’d brought in from the living room.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“He’s got a point,” John said, which was good, because apparently I was going to need some help with Mike. I saw a bad trip a comin’ but at this point I didn’t particularly care if the guy fried his mind or not, just so long as I got the tapes.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“This isn’t right,” Mike said again.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Calm him down or kill him. I don’t care, just so long as you keep him quiet.” But I needn’t have worried, because just as soon as the tape started Mike got right into it, smiling and rocking as he listened to brother Bob.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Now that I realized there was gold in this pile of tapes, I didn’t feel so bad about being there. I checked the levels, saw the copy was being made okay, saw that John and Mike were content. I listened to the tape along with them.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">When it was finished, I put in another, didn’t sound good, tried another, again no joy, then bingo, Bob’s voice from 1966, but not like that crappy Swedish tape we’d heard earlier. This was an acoustic set from Dublin and it was glorious. I copied it. By the time I was finished the sun was coming up, my hippy comrades were coming down and I was ready to crash. So I took the tape recorder back out the the living room, where I met a yawning Steve Waterford.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“You didn’t copy any of my tapes!”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“I did.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“What the fuck!”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Hey, you knew who I was, what I did for a living!” I stared him down. “Did you think I wanted to come up here to spend the night in your bathroom?”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“You’re not going to put them out?”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“I am.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Really?” His eyes lit up, then he closed them. If Bob Dylan was the second coming, then Steve was his John the Baptist, only Bob didn’t know it. I could almost see the halo. He opened back up his glowing eyes, was smiling saintly. Yeah, that’s right, like a saint, that’s what he looked like. “Could you call it Bob Dylan Approximately?”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Well, yeah. I could do that.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Because I was thinking that would be a great name for a Dylan record. What do you think?”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“I think it’s perfect.” Was I hearing right?</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Really.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Oh yeah!”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">This was not how I expected it to go down at all. I’d expected the typical collector reaction. You know how collectors are, they have this rare tape they listen to at night, but they can only enjoy it if they know nobody else has it. Once it’s out there for all the world, then they don’t want to listen to it anymore. Waterford was apparently not that way and for me, even back then, that was refreshing.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Could I come down to LA with you and see how it’s done?”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Not right now.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Why not?” Oh lord, I’d created a monster. I told him we wouldn’t be making the record straightaway, that I had a wife, kids and obligations. But he wanted to be around when the first record came off the presses, wanted to stamp the first one with that Bob Dylan Approximately stamp.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I told him I’d call him, rounded up my outlaw, hippie, cohorts and the three of us got into my Healey, Mike crammed in the back. and we scrammed on out of there. I took them back to their van, where they promised to drive on out of town till they could find a good place to pull over and sleep for a week.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Then I started back toward Southern California, knowing that sometime in the not two distant future I was going to be back in that bathroom, because I still hadn’t gotten those Blonde on Blonde outtakes.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I coulda gone straight home, but Dub’s wasn’t too far out of the way. I got there around 11:00. He was just leaving to go out for breakfast, he sort of liked to get up at the crack of noon. I told him I had line recordings of Dylan in ’63 and ’66 and all of a sudden he decided he wasn’t hungry anymore. I left the tapes with him and went home.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">The next day I drove up to his place to find he’d already mastered the record. He put the Town Hall stuff on Side One and the Dublin Stuff on Side Two. Me, I’d’ve made two records out of those tapes, but Dub managed to get it all on one disc, losing only one song from the Dublin set. Of course, we still hadn’t learned that when you squeeze more than twenty-five minutes or so on a record that the quality suffers a bit.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Dub was excited about this Winkelhoffer name he’d come up with for the name of the fake record company on the label. I didn’t care about that stuff. Dub was the artistic one, after all. Dub wanted to call the record While the Establishment Burns, I’ve already talked about that, but Waterford wanted to call it "Bob Dylan Approximately".</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/014Establishment.jpg" /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“No problem,” Dub said, “We’ll make two stamps.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Yeah, that could work,” I said, never thinking how outraged Waterford would be when he came across one of the records that didn’t have his preferred title on it. Well actually the only records with that Approximately title were the ones going to Walleyed Steven, the rest of them were going to have Dub’s title, so I should have figured on a confrontation sometime in the future, but I didn’t.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Later that week I called Waterford, told him we’d turned the record in, that it was coming out next week, that we had his Bob Dylan Approximately stamp just waiting for him to stamp that first record. He called me back an hour later, told me when he was coming in. He was eager.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Dub had just moved from his little apartment above his grandmother’s to a spacious house in the Hollywood Hills. It was one of those cliffside places with giant stilt like steel supports holding the back of the house up, so that it didn’t fall over the cliff.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">While I was away Dub had mastered My God, by Jethro Tull which was mostly B sides added to a couple live songs he record in Long Beach with his shotgun mic. We'd moved away from Pete's, because he was just too slow, and taken our business to a place called Lewis Record Manufacturing, where we dealt with a wonderful woman there named Kaye. She was old enough to be my grandmother and she kind of reminded me of a woman who would have been comfortable with the likes of Bonnie and Clyde in her youth. She wasn't afraid of anything. It was to her that we handed My God and Establishment and these were our first records on colored vinyl which the growing number of bootleg fans really seemed to like.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">A Note: Some names have been changed, sorry, but it just seemed prudent.</span></span></span></p>Ken Douglashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03467370188058144339noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2867799482946658064.post-16691616942386299592010-02-17T13:22:00.000-08:002010-02-17T13:24:25.988-08:00It Coulda Happened This Way -- A Couple Hitmen & Blueberry Hill<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">After his success with LiveR Dub was eager to try his hand with the mike again. Led Zeppelin was playing the Forum. He asked did I want to go, but I'd heard their first record and didn’t like it. This was a band that wasn’t going anywhere. That’s what I thought anyway, but Dub was convinced they were going to be as big as the Stones, maybe bigger. Everybody else I talked to about it seemed to agree with him. In fact, as the show got closer I was beginning to rethink my opinion, but the last thing I wanted to do was admit I was wrong, so I didn’t go.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Dub got a phenomenal tape, so too did a guy named Scott Johnson, who would be busy mastering his Rubber Dubber version even as Dub was mastering ours, but more about him later.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Dub designed a great cover and we had it printed up at a place in Glendale. No rubber stamp for this one. Dub wanted it to be different, and it was and I was into the record now, convinced we had another LiveR on our hands. And it was a double record. Twice the profit. I liked that.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="text-align: center;margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/008Blueberry.jpg" /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">But I didn’t like it for long. Dub and I shared the money for his re-master of Stealin’ and for Birch and we kind of liked dividing the money by two, it went so much farther. However we were running into problems with this record. Pete wouldn’t be able to do the quantity. So, like with LiveR, we were going to have to go to Waddell. And like with LiveR, we didn’t want to go in there, so we were going to have to find a partner, because Chris was officially retired.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Dub had this friend named John who was into the music, wasn’t afraid and I had this friend from school named Malcolm, who wasn’t afraid of anything either. Somehow, I don’t remember how, they wound up being our front men. They’d get the records, they’d take ’em to the stores, Dub and I would split half the money.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Seemed like a good idea.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">John was a comic book collector and had them neatly wrapped and organized in cellophane in his apartment, which wasn’t too far from Dub’s. It was a joy just going through his stuff and seeing what he had.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Back when I was in high school I used to collect DC Comics and baseball cards. I had World’s Finest one through I dunno, a hundred and something. I had the first Green Lantern, Flash, Supergirl and loads of issues after those first editions, plus, gobs of Superman, Batman, and Action and Detective Comics galore. I pretty much had two copies of each, one I’d read and reread and one I wrapped in wax paper for a distant future.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">However, when most of my high school class was getting ready for the prom, I was on a bus to San Diego. Boot camp was where I was going. And while the drill instructors were telling us to line up alphabetically according to height (something that isn’t possible), my mother back home in Lakewood was busy gathering up all my comics and baseball cards and taking them to the Saint Cyprian’s white elephant sale.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Yep, God got my comics and cards, so like I said, it was a joy seeing John’s. Kind of a gut ripper too, when he told me what they were worth. My mother gave away a pretty penny. Ah, well, they only cost a dime each, so what if they woulda been worth thousands had I still had them. Can’t look back. Besides, we had a Led Zeppelin record coming out soon. I was gonna make way more than I ever woulda got off those comics.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Plus, there was no risk in this for me.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Life was good.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I loaded my new Firebird up with fifty copies of Blueberry Hill and jumped on the 605 Freeway and headed south toward the water.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Seal Beach was a great community, the first place I’d done acid. What a night that was, Walt Disney’s Dragon and I went out on the beach one morning and watched Columbus discover America. We were having a great conversation, the dragon and I, when a cop car come tooling up onto the sand.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“What are you up to?” one of Seal Beach’s finest said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Not much, just watching the ships come in.”</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“You on something?” the cop wanted to know.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“The dragon and I, we took a little acid.” I couldn’t lie under the stuff, but I also new acid was legal (they didn’t outlaw it in California till late 1969).</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Beach is closed,” the cop said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">The dragon wanted to know what time it opened and since the cops couldn’t see him, I asked for him.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Six,” one of the men in uniform answered.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“I’ll wait.”</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“You’ll wait in jail if you don’t vamoose,” the other one said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“We should go,” the dragon said and so we beat it on out of there with those cops following us till we were off the sand.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">That early morning in Seal Beach was about the closest I’d ever come to going to jail. Everybody in that town was cool, even the cops, though I’m pretty sure I’d tried their patience.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Now I was headed back to that cool little beach town where I almost whet to jail, because there was this combination head shop record store there I thought would just love to carry our new Zeppelin record. Plus, I had yet to make my appearance in a record store. I didn’t want Dub thinking I was chicken. Besides, this was a brand new store. These folks had gotten into the record business after I’d left, so they wouldn’t know me.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I parked the blue Firebird down the street, grabbed five copies of the record and started toward the store. It was bright and sunny out, a good day to go to the beach.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">They had thick strings off beads covering the door and once inside you were assaulted by the pungent smell of incense. The place was lit by blacklight and there were blacklight posters on the walls.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I went up to the girl behind the counter, showed her my records. She said she just worked there and wanted to know could I come back later. Confident this was the perfect place to sell boots, I told her I’d leave the records and come back in a few days. If they sold them, the owner could pay, if not I could take the records back if he didn’t want them. She said that was fine and I left.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Two days later I was back, Vesta with me this time. Again I parked down the road. Again I grabbed some records.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Don’t you think you should see if they want them first?” Vesta said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“They’re gonna want them.”</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Cops across the street,” Vesta said as we got close to the store. Sure enough, two uniforms sitting in a black and white.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">We coulda turned around, but one thing I’d learned in the service is that you don’t turn your back on your enemy. Besides, they didn’t know who we were or what we were about.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Pretend you don’t see them,” I said and we went in the store, pushing our way through the beads.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">There was a short bald-headed guy in a suit and tie talking to the hippy girl behind the counter. He was out of place in the store. He heard us come in, turned to look.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">The girl recognized me, showed me her palm, shook it back and forth. I got the message real quick.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“You wanna buy some used records,” I said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Put the box on the counter, the owner will look at it when he gets back from lunch.”</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">So I set the box down right in front of Mr. Suit and Tie, started to go.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“I’m going to have to take those records with me.” Suit and Tie was pointing to a couple of the Blueberry Hills I brought I the other day. They were in a wire record rack behind the counter.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“I’m sorry,” the girl said. “But that piece of paper you have doesn’t say you can take anything, so you’re not going to.”</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Think you can stop me?” he said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Excuse me,” I said, “why don’t you just get outta here.”</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Why don’t you mind you’re own business.” He just didn’t look like a cop.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“You don’t get now, those cops out there are gonna to take me to jail for breaking your head open.” I didn’t raise my voice, but I could feel Vesta tense up.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“fuck you,” the guy said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“That’s it,” I started toward him.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">He backed up through those beads faster than a jack rabbit can jack. I went after him. He turned and ran. I swear, his legs were moving so fast, he looked like Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck when they were on the run from Elmer Fudd’s shotgun.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I gave the cops across the street a look. One of them waved, they were both smiling. Turned out Baldy was a process server and apparently his ilk wasn’t so popular with the Seal Beach cops. They were good guys when the dragon and I were watching those ships come in and they were still good guys.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Back in the store I found out that they had just been served. The subpoena listed several unknown stores and unknown persons. It seems that Atlantic Records knew their hot new band was going to be bootlegged and they were ready with a bunch of these John Doe subpoenas.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I took this information back to the partners and somehow it didn’t faze them very much at all. However our next record would faze them plenty.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">After a visit to my father at Saturn I came up with this great idea. If we could sell rock and roll we could clean up with R & B. I grew up in the record business, more specifically the black record business. Most of the independent black stores in LA got their start with a line of credit from my father. Saturn was the place they came first to buy their records. And, you know, when times got hard for my dad, every one of these stores came through for him. None of them beat him out of any money. I wish I could say the same for some of the hippie type rock stores, some of them burned him big time. One, owned by a famous DJ, stuck him for eight grand. Another chain of rock stores stuck him for more, then opened their own one stop.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">With my knowledge of these black stores, I came up with this really stupid idea. We could take the number one and two R & B songs, put them back to back on a single, then take them around to the stores. We’d clean up.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Dub thought this was about the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. John was neutral on the idea, Malcolm loved it, more money for the partners. Money, money, money, that’s what it was all about.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">So we took Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “The Onion Song” and the Moments’ “Love on a Two Way Street” and put them back to back. Two hot selling R & B A sides. We were gonna be millionaires. Dub mastered them, against his better judgment, and Malcolm and John took them to the R & B stores. Again, I couldn’t go into any of these places, because they all knew me.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Our Blueberry Hill partners left with a trunk full of records, were gone about three hours, came back dejected and depressed. They’d hit all the stores on my list and only managed to sell twenty records. Seems those black store owners didn’t want anything to do with our rip off forty-fives. In fact, unknown to us, Barry Gordy (who owned Marvin and Tammi) and the powers at Stang (who owned the Moments) had already heard of us.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">The next day a couple rather large black guys visited all the pressing plants in LA. Pete’s was on the list and there they found pressing rejects. They pushed Pete around a little and I guess he gave me up. That night they barged in on my father at home while he was having dinner with the black promo guy at the Electra Distributorship on Pico Boulevard.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Fred, the promo guy, was a big man and he got up to show them the door. One of the goons swung an axe handle, got Fred in the gut, put him on the floor. My dad got up, he was always armed back then, slept with a gun under his pillow, but that didn’t make any difference. They backed off, because as mad as they were at me for ripping them off, they knew better than to mess with Jack, because there wasn’t a black record store in LA that hadn’t been in his debt on more occasion than one. Not a black store owner my dad had ever turned away when they were in trouble and this was 1970, black businessmen, even in LA, got in trouble a lot.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">If they’d have hurt Jack their lives wouldn’t have been worth very much. However, the same could not be said of me and my Blueberry pals. These guys told Jack they wanted all the money I’d made, plus the stampers and all the records I had left. If I turned these things over to them tomorrow at Saturn at noon, they’d go away and pretend like none of this ever happened.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">My dad called me at home, told me what happened. I told Vesta.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“This is not good,” she said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“No, it’s not.”</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I called Malcolm, told him I’d need some backup tomorrow. He said he had a test to take. He was going to Cerritos Junior College. “Any other time.” He said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">John too, had somewhere else to be. However, unlike Malcolm, he hadn’t made a point of telling everybody who would listen how tough he was, how he wasn’t afraid of anything.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I called my brothers. They both said they’d be there.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Saturn was a big old building stuffed full of records. Record bins on the floor, record racks hung on pegboard on the walls. When my dad took over the building, he framed up a wall, nailed pegboard to it, so he’d have a back room where he could have his office and a shipping area away from the customer’s prying eyes. He also had a shrink wrap machine back there, so he could make used records new again, after he had them cleaned up, of course.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">That wall went across the with of the store, so if you were in the back room, you could look through the holes in the pegboard that weren’t blocked by records on the other side and see what was going on in the front of the store.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">By the time Dub and I got there, my brothers had already drilled holes through the pegboard just large enough for our gun barrels to fit through. My brother John had a WW II M1 carbine with the seer filed and a thirty round banana clip, with it’s twin brother taped to the bottom, so when he ran out of ammo, all he had to do was eject the clip, reverse it and he was good to go for another thirty rounds of illegal automatic fire. My brother Tom had a thirty-eight and me, I had a forty-five auto, not very accurate at distance, but you hit something and it went down and pretty much stayed down.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Dub was a little uncomfortable with all this fire power, but then he was fairly knew to this crook business. You wanna be a crook, you gotta be prepared. Wait, I think that’s the Boy Scout motto, well, it works for crooks too.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">After I was good and convinced we could handle these tough guys from back east, I went out to the car and brought in the records and the stampers, much to the amusement of about fifteen or twenty black record store owners, who all seemed to think high noon on this day was a good time to be buying their records.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">King Cotton was there from Cotton’s Record Shop. He was sixty-something, going on a hundred and something and he looked like every blues song ever written. Andy from Ideal Records was there. He was a big man with a heart of gold and hands that could crush coal. Compton Bob was there. He was a little guy with a record store in Compton. He wasn’t afraid of anything, get in his face and your were in trouble. Jeff of Jeff’s Records was there. He was an old guy who had been fighting for civil rights his whole life. There were others too and It didn’t take an IQ much higher than three for me to figure out my adventures had made the rounds of the R & B record stores in LA. These guys were here for the show.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">I set the records down by the counter, gave my dad an envelope with about twelve hundred dollars in it. It’s true our Blueberry partners only sold twenty records, but I didn’t want to insult these hoods from back east. I was hoping they’d take the stuff and the cash, be true to their word and go, but we were ready, just in case they didn’t.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Quarter to twelve and a couple more store owners came in. At first I was a bit ticked off, thinking they’d come in just for the show, but then I figured it out. That wasn’t it at all, these were the guys I’d been delivering records to for the last couple years when they couldn’t get their cars working, or they had a sick kid who they couldn’t leave alone, or they couldn’t scrap together gas money. These guys lived day to day and they needed their records everyday and I was always there when they needed ‘em, now they were here for me.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">What this crowd of store owners didn’t know was that my brothers and I had it covered, had them covered too. We had the fire power. We were young and dumb and very afraid and we had guns.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Noon came and these two big guys came in right on schedule. My dad was behind the counter, several record store owners were behind him. The goons nodded to my dad, he pointed to the records and they took them out to their car. They came back in, my dad handed over the envelope and one of the goons put it in his pocket without counting it.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“We’d like a word with your son now,” he said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“That’s not part of the deal,” Jack said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“It is now,” the goon said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Hey, nigger, the man said it’s not part of the deal,” King Cotton said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">The goon looked up, surprise written all over his face.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“You should mind your business, old man.”</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“And you should respect your elders, boy,” King Cotton said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“And maybe you should look around some.” Compton Bob pointed to the back of the store.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">The goons eyed the back wall. I almost felt like they could see right through it. However, the only thing they saw was those three gun barrels, and I know they saw them, because their eyes got real big.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Might be time for you boys to go,” my dad said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“He makes any more, we’ll be back,” one of the goons said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Best bring a lot of friends,” King Cotton said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Or what?” the goon said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Or you’ll be dead.” My dad opened his coat so they could see the shoulder holster.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">A couple of the store owners did the same. Apparently my brothers and I didn’t need any guns, after all.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">The goons left, couldn’t get outta there fast enough and I never heard from them again. Of course, I never messed with that kind of music again either. Isn’t it funny, process servers, cops and the FBI were all after us at one time or another and all it really took to track us down was a couple thugs from the east coast with an axe handle.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“What about John and Malcolm?” Dub asked after it was all over.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“They’ve retired,” I said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Well at least they made some money,” Dub said.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Yeah, Malcolm made enough to buy my Firebird.</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“You sold your car?”</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Vesta want’s a Jaguar?”</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“So we’re not quitting?”</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“I don’t wanna quit, you?”</span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">“Shit no, we’re just getting started.”</span></span></p>Ken Douglashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03467370188058144339noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2867799482946658064.post-73310453444160731562010-02-17T13:01:00.000-08:002010-02-17T13:28:45.621-08:00It Coulda Happened this Way -- LiveR Than You'll Ever Be<p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">Chris was tall, lean, had black wavy hair that hit his shoulders, didn’t do drugs, but moved as if he’d been popping bennies. He was Dub’s friend and he was always around. He liked Dylan, but was passionate about the Rolling Stones. Dub liked them too. Me, I was a Beatles guy, but Chris was always playing the Stones, talking up the Stones.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="text-align: center;margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/009Chris.jpg" /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">Both Dub and I bought new cars, but I had kids and a wife, rent and bills. Dub did not, so he spent a good portion of his new found wealth on toys. Toys that made the music sound better. There was this high priced stereo place called Radio Lab in Glendale he’d go to for the latest gear. I was never surprised when I got to his place and found him setting up a whole new system. One week it was top of the line McIntosh, the next Marantz. Chris was always there, helping him with the set up, wanting to hear the Stones through the new speakers that not only rocked Dub’s small apartment, but could’ve rocked all the way to downtown LA if Dub had wanted.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">I remember one time I got to Dub’s place in the middle of the afternoon and he had this huge, orange, egg shaped, fiberglass chair with a stereo built into it. Chris was ensconced in the egg, listening to the Stones, lost in Mick and Keith land.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Look what I got.” Dub held up this flute-looking affair and for a second that’s what I thought it was.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Wonderful,” I said trying to hide my ignorance.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Sennheiser shotgun mike.” He waved it around the way Obi Wan would wield a light saber a couple generations later. It was obviously very expensive.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“I always wanted one of those,” I said.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Who wouldn’t?” Dub hadn’t heard a drop of the sarcasm in my voice. He was like a kid who’d just found the present of his dreams under the Christmas tree. I half expected to hear Brenda Lee break out with ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ as he handed the mic to Chris.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Neat, isn’t it?” Chris said from the chair as Mick started out on ‘Honky Tonk Woman.’</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“I don’t know about the mic, but that chair looks pretty fuckin’ neat.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Try it.” Chris jumped up holding the mic like a sword.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">I got in the chair and I must admit, the sound from that baby was just about the best you could hope for. The Stones were blasting away in my little world, but outside that chair they didn’t sound much louder then a clock radio. Amazing.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“That’s enough.” Chris grabbed my hand, jerked me out of the chair. He really did like the Stones.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Got this too.” Dub pulled a small tape recorder out of a box that was sitting next to his latest Amp. “Uher 4000 seven-and-a-half inches-per-second reel to reel tape recorder. State of the art.” Those were Dub’s favorite words in those days, “State of the art.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“What are you gonna do with that?”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Chris and I are gonna record the Stones. Got tickets for five shows.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“You and Chris?” I shook my head. Recording our own show was something new. It was one thing to get a tape and put it out, but actually going to the concert and recording it, this was heady stuff and it sounded dangerous.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“I know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry, I’m gonna paint the mic flat black. No one’s gonna see it in the dark.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">I looked down at Chris in that chair and I swear to heaven and all the angels above, nobody had ever worn a wider smile. I didn’t know if it was the music or the prospect of seeing them live. Probably both.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">So Dub and Chris went on tour with the Stones. They recorded the Los Angeles, San Diego, Oakland and Phoenix shows. In fact, they were on the same plane with the band when they left Phoenix. Chris couldn’t have been happier.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">I sat around and watched them work when they got back. I was good with a splicing bar, Dub was better. There was a lot of fighting, arguing, wrangling about what songs were gonna go on the record. There wasn’t enough for a double LP and Dub didn’t want to cram so much music on the disc that it would lose quality. Unlike me, Dub was a perfectionist, he wanted this record to sound like you were really there.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">And he had the equipment to do it. He was the first kid on his or any other block to get an equalizer. I remember when he brought it home from Radio Lab. I also remember how upset he was when it didn’t perform the way he thought it should. He fired off an unflattering letter to the company, saying that he was gonna come over and tell them in person what they could do with the turkey they’d developed. Immediately he got a reply back from one of the engineers, saying that he had a two-by-four waiting to crack over Dub’s head the second he showed up.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">He took the machine back to Radio Lab, got another that worked the way he deemed it should and used his magic ear to make ‘LiveR Than You’ll Ever Be’ the best live LP released by any band, ever. To this day, nobody, not the Rolling Stones themselves, or anybody else, has been able to match that record for sheer presence. The music is violent. It rips from the speakers, cuts to the soul. Dub belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for that record.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">You can hear his meticulous attention to detail the second you put your needle down on the vinyl. The amps blew out during the first show, apparently surprising Mick, because he said, “sh*t, hang on a minute. Can you hear that?” Dub thought that would be a great way to start the record, so he cut it out of the first show and stuck it before ‘Carol,’ the opening song, a masterpiece of rock and roll editing.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">With the tape ready to go, Dub wanted the best when it came to mastering the record, so he and Chris found a place on sunset. I remember sitting in there late at night while they put on the tape. Like when Ted and I did Stealin’, everybody knew what was going on, but they did an outstanding job with the master.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">So now we had a master, but we had nowhere to get it pressed. Again I thought of Jack Brown at Rainbow, but he was too closely connected to my father, so we decided to go to someplace new.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">But other than Pete’s, or maybe Jack’s, I didn’t want to go into a pressing plant and neither did Dub. That left Chris and to his credit he was willing and able. After all, he figured, nobody in the biz knew him, so the worst thing that could happen was that they would say no.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“I don’t think that’s a problem,” I said, “because you’ve got a better chance of finding an honest man in the record business, than you do of finding water on the sun.” I knew the first place he went, would do the record, especially if he offered a little more than they charged the real record companies. Everybody in the business in those days was a crook. I remember one of the distributors used to say that if someone who worked for you made you more than he stole from you, then you couldn’t afford to fire him.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">Of course, Chris was in for a third of this record. He was the one going to the new plant, after all, and he’d gone on the recording tour with Dub. A new partner, we didn’t care, not in those days. There was more than enough money to go around, besides we were hippies, well kind of.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">With the record mastered the three of us climbed into Dub’s Camero and headed out toward Burbank, so Chris could meet the Waddell Brothers, Horace and Bud. We parked outside their pressing plant while Chris went in. It was nail-biting time. Could he pull it off? Twenty minutes later he came bouncing toward the car, hopped in with a laugh and a smile.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“How’d it go?” I asked as Dub started the car.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“He took the money.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“When do we get our records?” Dub turned out of the parking lot onto Olive.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Next week.” Chris looked over his shoulder, out the back window, checking to see if we were being followed. It had taken a lot of courage for someone as paranoid as him to go in there and order those records. I was surprised he was able to do it, but then, he really liked the Stones.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">A week later Dub and I were up in his tiny apartment waiting for Chris and our new title. We heard him bounding up the stairs. Dub was ready to put the record on the turntable.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="text-align: center;margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Times; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/007LiveR.jpg" /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“You won’t believe this,” Chris said as he burst into the room.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“What?” Dub and I said in unison.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Our record is being pressed at the same plant that’s doing ‘Let it Bleed.’ He set the box of records he’d been carrying next to the stereo.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“You’re kidding,” I said.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">Dub just smiled.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Think of it,” Chris said. “The Stones’ real record and the bootleg being pressed together, side by side.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“This can’t be good,” I said as I checked out the box Chris had brought up. Sure enough it was a London Box.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Why not?” Dub wanted to know.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“He’s worried about someone from London going to the plant and seeing our records there,” Chris said.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“It won’t happen,” Dub said. “Those guys are so lazy. They just wanna sit back in their plush offices and count their money.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“I don’t know,” I said. “It could be anyone, a driver for example.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“You’re worried about nothing.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Besides, there’s nothing we can do about it,” Chris said. A statement that was remarkable coming from him, paranoid as he was.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">Dub and I weren’t nearly as paranoid as him, but we were getting there. More and more we were meeting people we didn’t know. Underground types, criminal types, people living on the edge, drug dealers too, because they thought selling bootlegs was safer than dope.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">We came up with this grand plan, we’d give ourselves alter egos. Our real names would be our secret identities, sort of like Superman and Batman. We were, of course, still wearing our buckskin jackets, still standing out like Hollywood pimps, and that bright orange Camero of Dub’s was anything but low key.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">Chris didn’t need an identity, because he would pick up the records, meet me and Dub somewhere in the middle of the night, transfer the records to the Camero and get himself out of the picture. Back then I wouldn’t have traded places with him for all the cereal in Battlecreek, but that was before I knew Bud and Horace Waddell. You didn’t want to mess with Horace, but if you were straight with him, you didn’t have anything to worry about.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">One night after the record had been out for a while, Chris met us in a parking lot close to Tommy’s at nine straight up with a car full of records. There was no moon, clouds closed off the stars. I smelled rain in the air, something else too, the cooking beef from Tommy’s wafting on the wind, mixed with a healthy dose of fear. Chris was even more jumpy than usual. Soon he would be out of the business. It was too much for him.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">His paranoia was contagious, all of a sudden shivers knifed up my spine and all I wanted to do was go home, but we had records to deliver, so we set up a chain, Chris tossing the boxes to me and me to Dub, who tossed them into the Camero. By the time we were finished the Camero was stuffed with the brown boxes, trunk and back seat both.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Drive’s like a sled,” Dub said as we pulled out of the parking lot.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“No fast getaway for us.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Not tonight.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">We drove to a residential neighborhood in North Hollywood, where we were supposed to meet the guys buying the records. We’d never met them before, Chris had set it up.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“There,” I pointed, “that’s the address.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">Dub pulled up in front of the house, parked.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Now what do we do?” he said.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“I don’t know, get out and knock.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“It’s dark, doesn’t look like anybody’s home.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Let’s go.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">Someone came up from behind, rapped on the window.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“sh*t!” Dub said.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">It scared me too.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“We’re in the van across the street,” this big guy said. He had an accent, Italian kind of. And he was speaking loud enough for us to hear him with the windows up. He was sure of himself.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Let’s get this over with,” I said.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">Dub rolled down the window.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“We’ll pull up behind you.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Okay.” The guy sauntered back across the street, a big Marlon Brando from one of those early biker films.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Who are we tonight?” I said.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“I’ll be Rick, you be Terry.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Got it.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“I just want this to be over.” Dub shut the engine off behind a dark Ford van.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Me too.” I got out of the car.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“You got everything we ordered?” Brando asked, only now he didn’t look like Marlon anymore. Up close I could see he had a pockmarked face. He also had dark eyes that said don’t fuck with me and a bulge under his faded Levi jacket that I didn’t want to know about.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Come on, Terry,” Dub said.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">I ignored him.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Terry, Terry?”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">Still I ignored him.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“I think your friend’s taking to you.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Me?” All of a sudden I remembered who I was supposed to be. “Yeah, yeah, okay, Rick.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">Marlon opened the back of the van and we got those records in there as fast as we could. Finished the guy reached for that bulge and I was sure this was going to be a rip off, but instead he pulled out a wallet stuffed full of hundred dollar bills. He grabbed them out of the leather pocket.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Want me to count it out for you, or what?”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“That’s okay,” I said. “We trust you.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Sure you do, Terry.” The guy handed over the money, got in the passenger side of the van and the drove off. We never did see the driver.</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“I don’t know about you,” I said once we were safely back in the car, “but I never want to see that guy again.”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“And I never want to shift records around in the middle of the night like this. What if a cop would’ve come by?”</span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><br /></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';">“Right, never again.” I didn’t know it, but I’d just lied. I’d be shifting records around in the dark of night for a long time to come.</span></span></span></p>Ken Douglashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03467370188058144339noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2867799482946658064.post-78514056413658170322010-02-14T13:58:00.000-08:002010-02-17T13:30:53.277-08:00It Coulda Happened this Way -- Bookies & Crooks<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">Vesta and I were watching this program on Television with Gene Barry and Susan St. James called ‘The Name of the Game,’ sort of a liberal leaning Friday night series about the newspaper business when Ted from Records and Supertape called me up. He had these soundboard Dylan tapes I just had to hear.<br /><br />“When?” I said.<br /><br />“How do I get to your place?” He was excited and I gave him directions. He was living in the back of his Record Store on Pico off Robertson in Santa Monica and I lived in Lakewood, a long way to go on a Friday night just to play someone a tape, but his obvious excitement told me there was something about these tapes that couldn’t wait till daylight. Besides, if he was going to drive all the way to my place, then I was going to stay up and listen.<br /><br />It was almost midnight when he showed up. He was a stocky guy, about five-six or seven, with hair to his shoulders, who didn’t know how to frown. In my life I’ve never met a guy so up. Even when he was down his smile told the world life was great. That night he was higher than you could ever get on drugs and he was juggling a reel of tape back and forth in his hands like it was white hot.<br /><br />“Put this on.” He handed the tape over.<br /><br />“I’m all set up.” I took it and felt an electric energy ripple from my fingers to the back of my neck. His mood was infectious and I quickly caught it.<br /><br />“What do you think?” he said after about a minute of ‘Killing Me Alive,’ an electric outtake from Highway 61.<br /><br />What I thought was, “How in the world did he get this tape and why wasn’t this song on the album?”, but what I said was, “Let me hear a little more.” Dub was going to have a cow when he got to hear this. Two more songs into the tape and the mask started to slip off the Lone Ranger. “This stuff has gotta get on vinyl,” I said. Up until then, I’d been pretty low key. Nobody in the record business, except my father and Pete at the pressing plant, knew of my involvement with the Dylan bootleg. I wanted to keep it that way, but if I wanted those tapes, I was going to have to decide pretty quick about telling Ted.<br /><br />“We need to find the Great White Wonder guys.” Ted bounced on the balls of his feet as he paced my living room.<br /><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/002GWW3.jpg" /><br /><br />“You found ’em, Kimosabe.” The mask had been whisked away, the decision not hard to make at all, the desire to have the tapes greater than my desire for secrecy.<br /><br />“You?” He turned, stared at me through the dark. Vesta and the kids were asleep. I had a green lava lamp on. Ted looked ghostly.<br /><br />“Ya wanna master it right now?” I was good with a splicing bar, fast and accurate.<br /><br />“Yeah.”<br /><br />A couple hours later and after a lot of wrangling about which songs were going to go on the record, we finally finished and took off the headphones. Now it was time to see how well we’d done. We sat back to smoke a joint and listen to our effort. We played the tape low, so as not to wake anyone, each lost in our own thoughts when ‘Stealin’’ came on.<br /><br />“I didn’t say to put that on there,” Ted said.<br /><br />“I didn’t want it on there either,” I said.<br /><br />“Let’s take it off,” he said.<br /><br />“Okay.” I got off the couch to get the splicing bar.<br /><br />“Wait!”<br /><br />I stopped.<br /><br />“What a great title. Stealin’. It’s fate,” he said. And the song stayed on.<br /><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/003Stealin1.jpg" /><br /><br />The next day Ted and I met with Dub and played the tape. There were some songs left over that Ted let us have and Dub had managed to get ‘Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues’ and ‘Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie’ which were taken off Freewheelin’ and a couple other songs, so Birch must have already been percolating in his brain when he agreed to take Ted on for a third of Stealin’.<br /><br />So now we’ve got this great tape, mastered and ready to go. But we needed somewhere new to get it pressed. Pete never seemed to have more than two presses working at any one time, despite the massive amount of machinery he had in his plant, and oftentimes only one was in production, plus he had regular customers. We needed to go elsewhere.<br /><br />I knew Jack Brown at Rainbow, but was reluctant to go there, as he’d been involved in a court case with my father, the two of them against a record company that accused Jack Brown of over pressing and selling the illegal over runs to Jack Douglas at Saturn. Go figure. The last thing I wanted to do was get caught at his plant and bring them both more grief.<br /><br />Then I remember this black guy named Harry. He was a heavy set man who used to come into Saturn all the time looking for that pot of gold with a new single he’d just recorded, usually black acts, but the last time he’d been in he had a white girl from USC in tow and she’d done a cover of ‘Proud Mary.’ She was pretty good, but nobody’s as good as Tina, so I knew right away that song wasn’t ever going anywhere. What stuck out about Harry was that in addition to being able to get records pressed, he ran an illegal sport’s book. No way would a bookie turn us in. So we decided to give him a call.<br /><br />Harry was almost as excited as Ted when we met at his apartment. Yes, he could get them pressed, for an equal share. So now, like with Great White Wonder, we were four, Harry, Ken, Dub and Ted. Four didn’t work out so well the first time and Dub didn’t think it was going to work this time either. There was a prickly sensation in the air when he and Ted were together and an icy chill when he and Harry met. Dub could be stubborn, Ted unpredictable and Harry, well Dub and Ted had no experience dealing with a smooth talking hustler like him. Dub wanted Stealin’ to come out and he wanted the extra songs, so we agreed that I’d deal with Harry and Ted. Ted and Harry didn’t like each other from the get go. Harry ignored Ted, pretending there were only three partners. Ted thought Harry was a crook. He was, but weren’t we all?<br /><br />Ted and I got the acetate for Stealin’ cut at Goldstar Studios in Hollywood. We just went in one day with the tape, asked if we could master a record and this guy took us back into the studio, put on a blank acetate, qued it up, put on the tape for a sound check and Bob Dylan’s voice blasted through the studio. Everything else that was going on there stopped and people started to crowd around as this guy started to work.<br /><br />“Sounds like Bob Dylan,” someone said.<br /><br />“It is Bob Dylan,” someone else said.<br /><br />There must’ve been fifteen or twenty musicians and engineers enjoying themselves as we made that record. Listening to the tape loud through their sound system sent chills up my back. I was on edge. Of course, thinking the cops were gonna come busting in and cart us away at any second might’ve had something to do with that. But the cops didn’t come and that night I met Harry and gave him the acetates. It was going to happen. We were doing another record, Dub and me.<br /><br />A couple weeks later Harry showed up with records.<br /><br />“What’s this?” I took the first record out of a box and held it up for Harry to see, pointed at the fictitious record company name on the label.<br /><br />“HarKub,” Harry said. “It stands for Harry, Ken and Dub.”<br /><br />“Christ, Harry, it’s supposed to be a secret. We don’t want anybody connecting us to this.”<br /><br />“Relax,” he said, but I couldn’t. I suppose if you’re a bookie and used to dodging the law, making a few thousand copies of an underground record wasn’t a big deal.<br /><br />Ted’s perennial grin slipped when he saw the labels. I didn’t have to tell him what HarKub stood for, he wasn’t stupid. No part of his name was in there and he wasn’t too happy about that. And he was less happy when he figured out that Harry was pressing extra copies for himself and underselling us all over L.A. My father was still struggling along with Saturn and Ted had arranged a meeting with Harry in the alley that dead-ended behind the one-stop. He’d told Harry that he needed several hundred records and he was going to meet him with a gun and just take them.<br /><br />“Bad idea,” I said.<br /><br />“Bad Karma,” Ted said. “Just give me some records and I’m out of the deal.”<br /><br />“I’ll do what I can.” And I did. I met Harry, paid him for the records, gave them to Ted and now there were three of us.<br /><br />But Dub too had learned of Harry’s stupid double-cross and didn’t want anything more to do with the man. Harry denied it, but how many fast taking, chunky black guys could’ve been out there selling Bob Dylan bootlegs to the hippy record stores. While I was telling Harry the partnership was over, Dub was remastering Stealin’ along with our next offering, John Birch Society Blues. Harry kept on selling the HarKub Stealin’ for awhile, but eventually he gave up and Dub and I were back on our own with three titles now and we were keeping Pete’s antiquated pressing plant very busy.<br /><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/005Birch.jpg" /><br /><br />Soon after Birch came out we were approached by this guy named Joe who claimed to manage someone called Alice Cooper. He wanted us to do a half Alice, half Dylan Bootleg to help kick off Alice’s career.<br /><br />“Come to the Ice House,” he said. “Alice is going to kill a live chicken on stage. It’ll really be something to see.”<br /><br />We declined, both the offer to see Alice live and the bootleg deal, but I’ve often wondered what would have happened if we’d done the record. Alice Cooper undoubtedly would still have gone on to become what he turned out to be, but he’d’ve forever been associated with bootleg records. Would other acts have gone that route? It certainly wasn’t the last time we were approached by a budding rock star or even the real deal and asked to bootleg them.<br /><br />Joe wasn’t dismayed that we’d turned him down, on the contrary, he turned out to be our biggest customer to date. He bought records in the hundreds, paid cash and did business like a businessman. No clandestine meetings somewhere on Sunset in the middle of the night, he had us deliver the goods up to his apartment in Hollywood, had us up for cokes, a joint (not for Dub) and television. I remember one night when we were up there they had a Holocaust documentary on. We’re sitting around stoned, counting the cash, pigging out on cardboard snacks as we’re watching these Nazi films. It didn’t seem right somehow, but nobody turned the channel. I think it might have been the first time some of that stuff was aired. After a bit we put the cash away, the dope too. We couldn’t eat anymore, not and watch that.<br /><br />It makes you wonder, the Holocaust, what it’s all about. At the time the war in Vietnam was getting hotter as the months dragged on. Billions in bombs, young lives on both sides. How could we have come through Hitler and the Holocaust and not learned anything at all? I suppose that’s one for the politicians and not us mere mortals.<br /><br />About this time someone stole that tape from John Lennon in Canada and put out a Beatles bootleg. Someone else put out a Dylan/Band thing called Troubled Troubadour and Dub and I weren’t alone anymore. Norty and Ben had been captured and were out of business, but they weren’t tuned in to the counter culture, didn’t know how to hide in plain sight.<br /><br />Joe didn’t seem to be hiding either. He was buying more records from us than ever and taking them to his apartment was starting to be a hassle, so he had us deliver them to the airport. Not the freight dock, but the passenger terminal. We’d drive up with three carloads of records, the skycap would ask to see a ticket and Joe would hand him a hundred dollar bill, then we’d load the boxes onto the curb as the skycap made out a baggage claim for each and every one. Joe would put a black X on the last box, put the claim tickets in it, tape it up and we’d be off. His customer in New York would meet the plane with a hand truck or two, load them up, open the Xed box for his claim checks, thus saving hundreds of dollars in freight bills, not to mention that there were no records of the shipments.<br /><br />I remember one night, this young skycap refused Joe’s ticket.<br /><br />“Get your boss out here,” Joe said. Not angry, but in a way that let the skycap know he meant business.<br /><br />“What seems to be the problem?” this old black guy in a skycap uniform said.<br /><br />“Your man here doesn’t like my ticket,” Joe handed him the hundred.<br /><br />“He’s a fool.” The old guy snatched the money and we unloaded the records.<br /><br />This went on for quite awhile. We were eating out every night. Dub got a new orange Camero, I got a blue Firebird 400. We were stylin’. We bought hundred dollar leather jackets with lots of fringe that the rock stars were wearing. We looked like Davy Crocket and Daniel Boone.<br /><br />Then Joe came to us with an offer from some guys in Toronto to buy a set of the Stealin’ and Birch stampers for twenty thousand dollars. This was serious money. Real serious money. The deal was, we’d make them a set of stampers and we got to keep making the records ourselves. These guys, whoever they were, were gonna make the records in Canada, not interfere with us at all. We told Joe we’d think about it. Joe left, we talked it over, but not for long.<br /><br />“Free money,” Dub said.<br /><br />“Free money,” I agreed, “let’s do it.”<br /><br />So we got in Dub’s Camero that night, went to Joe’s, told him the deal was on.<br /><br />“Great,” he said. “Now all you have to do is fly to Toronto, deliver the stampers and collect the money.”<br /><br />“What?” I said.<br /><br />“They want to meet you,” Joe said.<br /><br />“But we don’t wanna meet anybody,” Dub said.<br /><br />“That’s right,” I said. “We’re anonymous.”<br /><br />“We’ll think about it,” Dub said and we left.<br /><br />“How come they’re paying us twenty grand when all they have to do is copy the records like Norty and Ben did?” I said as soon as we got into Dub’s car.<br /><br />“I was wondering the same thing.” Dub keyed the ignition and we drove around in silence for awhile.<br /><br />“Think it’s a setup?” Dub said.<br /><br />“Nobody’s gonna pay that kind of money for a couple sets of stampers.”<br /><br />“How come we didn’t see it before?”<br /><br />“We were stupid.”<br /><br />“Stupid.” Dub pounded the steering wheel.<br /><br />“We gotta be more careful,” I said.<br /><br />“You’re not kidding about that.”<br /><br />So there we were, Davy and Daniel sans coonskin caps, driving around Hollywood in the middle of the night in a bright orange Camero, wondering what our next move was going to be. We must’ve looked like a couple white pimps, but we were cool, oh so cool.<br /><br />Meanwhile the Rolling Stones were getting ready to go on tour.</span></span></span>Ken Douglashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03467370188058144339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2867799482946658064.post-38481564476005049642010-02-14T13:25:00.000-08:002010-02-17T13:35:45.968-08:00It Coulda Happened this way -- There was Money There<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">After Jim came back to Saturn with the cash, we had a meeting, Dub, Sam and me. All of a sudden we were seeing dollar signs. If one store could take four hundred copies of our Dylan record, how many could we sell? Sam thought lots and was willing to finance us, for a third. Dub and I still couldn’t go around and sell them and Sam was almost as well known by the record store owners as we were. The answer was right in front of us and we cut deserter Jim in. Sam’s share dropped to a fourth, as did ours.<br /><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/SaturnRecords.jpg" /><br /><br />The next day I drove out to Hollywood and Korelich Engineering to order more records. Pete had a rambling set of buildings on Highland, between Melrose and Sunset. I used to love the drive from L.A. up to there. The rich houses on Sixth Street, then Highland Avenue. The great trees that blocked out the sun. It was as if I were driving through another world. So close, but so far from the Los Angeles teaming with millions of people, scratching, working and hustling out a living that I knew.<br /><br />I parked my 1957 two door Ford station wagon in front of Pete’s pressing plant. I’d paid twenty-five dollars for that car from my friend Malcolm’s father because he was going to junk it and that was the going price from junkyards in those days. I drove that car for two years, shifted a lot of bootlegs around in it, before the transmission finally gave up the ghost in Downey, where I coasted off the freeway and sold it to the guy pumping gas in a Texico for five bucks, enough for cab fare home.<br /><br />Pete’s pressing plant was like a walk through an alien place. A musty, dusty place where machines once ruled, but were conquered, dismembered and stowed for a future use that would never come. He had parts of machines in there that nobody alive had ever heard of. You could get lost in the metal maze. One wrong turn, starvation, one wrong move, lean on the wrong thing and something made of cast iron could fall and kill.<br /><br />It was after closing time when I got there, as it would be most times when I did business with him. His band of illegal employees had gone home. The sun was going down, casting mechanical shadows throughout the place.<br /><br />“Hey, Pete,” I shouted.<br /><br />“Back here.”<br /><br />“I followed the sound of his voice to an office I’d never been in. Pete was flat on his back on a couch, one leg in the air, a rope around his shod foot leading around some kind of high bar he’d rigged up over the end of the couch to a couple coffee cans full of cement tied to the other end of it.<br /><br />“It looks serious. Why?” I said.<br /><br />“Traction, I hurt my back.”<br /><br />“You’re kidding?”<br /><br />“No, I read about it. This is supposed to make it better.”<br /><br />“How long are you gonna be this way?”<br /><br />“A few weeks.”<br /><br />“How are you gonna work? Or eat?”<br /><br />“I won’t do it during the day.”<br /><br />“Ah.” I nodded, tried not to smile. Did he live there? I looked around. It didn’t look like it, but you never really knew with Pete. He could live in a mansion, at the plant or anywhere in between. He didn’t give anything away. You took him as you found him and for me that was easy to do. He was eccentric, but he was easy to like.<br /><br />“I need more records.”<br /><br />“You sold all those?” He tried to sit up, couldn’t, those cement cans were holding him down.<br /><br />“Did somebody help you into this thing?”<br /><br />“Did it myself.” He was actually beaming. I shook my head, maybe he got hooked up by himself, but I couldn’t see how he’d get unhooked without help.<br /><br />“Want me to—?”<br /><br />“No, I’m fine. How many more records?”<br /><br />“How about a thousand?”<br /><br />“Each?”<br /><br />“With white labels this time.”<br /><br />“Really?” He was on his elbows now, still hampered by the cement. For a few seconds there I thought he was going to get up and press them straightaway, but he fell back down. “Two days.”<br /><br />The next day Bill Bowers was in Saturn, holding court before a bunch of record store owners. He was a funny guy, a great story teller and the story he was telling was about this guy who’d come by Vogue and sold him a load of Dylan bootlegs. A fold open double white cover with stupid labels on ’em. It was the first time I’d heard the word bootleg associated with a record. We’d invented ’em, Dub and me, rock bootlegs anyway, but we didn’t know what they were called.<br /><br />Bill was like our unpaid advertising arm. I don’t know if he knew it, but he’d started the rumor flying. There was a Bob Dylan bootleg out there and all those guys wanted them in their stores. The record had only been out a day, had yet to be played on the radio. Nobody new it existed and already it was in demand. If we’d’ve been a little sharper, we coulda got rich, but we coulda got caught, too, so maybe it was a good thing we were a little stupid.<br /><br />By the end of the week I was back at Pete’s with Sam’s money to pick up the records. I delivered them to Dub and he took Jim around to the record stores to sell them. It took an afternoon. That night we went to the Free Press Bookstore on Fairfax and we saw our records displayed under a sign calling it the Great White Wonder Record, because it was marketed in a white jacket, not because Bob Dylan was the Great White Wonder.<br /><br />Dub loved it, the next day while I was back at Pete’s ordering two thousand copies, much to Pete’s delight, Dub was out ordering a rubber stamp. Four thousand records would take Pete a few days to do, so I picked them up as he made them. It seemed for a month or two that his pressing plant was my second home. When I showed up at Dub’s with the first batch of our third pressing, he and Jim surprised me with the stamp. Dub was a genius. The slipshod way we did the record, the limited way we made it available, Dub’s stamp, the disappointing Nashville Skyline, all this combined to turn our record into a phenomenon.<br /><br />In days it was all over the underground FM stations in L.A. and KRLA, the station that tried so hard to be the hip AM station in Los Angeles was all over it, too. Some of the Dylan/Band stuff was out there by the Band and other people, Julie Driscol had done a song, I remember that album, Julie Driscol and the Trinity. They did a great version of Donovan’s ‘Sunshine Superman’ on it. Mimi Farina did a cut, too, but it was Manfred Mann’s hit recording of the ‘Mighty Quinn,” I believe, that woke everybody up to the fact that Bob Dylan had done something significant between that motorcycle accident and John Wesley Harding.<br /><br />I don’t know if Nashville Skyline was a big record for Colombia, but it was a turkey for Saturn. I think I bought ten thousand copies from them (somehow my father had turned me into the rock buyer), sold three and returned seventeen. How a one-stop was able to return more records than it actually bought back in those days is another story and one that deserves telling, but not here. It’s enough to say that there were crooks in the music business back in those days. The ’60s were sort of like the wild west in the record business.<br /><br />If we’d’ve been older, knew the law or had an attorney, we might have gone big time, but weren’t and we didn’t. We stayed small and our record became an instant collector’s item. And so to answer the question for all those collector’s that I’ve seen posed at all these bootleg sites I’ve recently discovered on the net. The original, the real original Great White Wonder, came in a double fold white jacket with the Rocoulion labels on them that Pete had lying around his plant, there were four hundred made. The second batch, without the rubber stamp, had white labels. There were a thousand made. From then on all the records we did were stamped with the rubber stamp. How many of those did we do? Who knows, a lot, we weren’t keeping track.<br /><br />But one thing’s for sure, Norty and Ben made a lot more.<br /><br />Norty Beckman was my father’s friend. Mine too. He was a big man, liked to eat. He had a big head, lots of curly hair. You could hear him breathe when he talked. He used to write short stories and bring them around for me to read. He had a store not far from the Free Press Bookstore on Fairfax, called Norty’s Records. He was in Saturn most everyday, as were a lot of record store owners.<br /><br />Ben Goldman owned Ben’s Records. He was Norty’s brother-in-law. He called himself a big man. To me he seemed fat and out of shape, but he used to tell me about how he put on his kimono and did his karate workouts. One of my brothers was a karate guy. They didn’t wear kimono at his dojo. Ah well, maybe Ben studied a different kind of karate. But if he did, he had to do it between his wizard stock market trades. If the market went down yesterday, he’d sold just before. If it went up, he was there on time. He was single and bragged about his dates and girlfriends. “Why get married when you can have the cow for free,” he was fond of saying.<br /><br />The third pressing of Great White Wonder had only been out a few days and Ben was in Saturn telling any store owner who would listen how David Crosby had been in his store. How he bought Great White Wonder. “The rock stars love the record,” he exclaimed. Dub and I just stood their deadpan. You never knew about Ben, but this was a story we wanted to believe.<br /><br />While Dub and Jim were meeting reporter Jerry Hopkins in the Platerpuss Record Store in Hollywood one night, the brothers-in-law, Norty and Ben were conspiring to make their own record. A copy of ours. In those days, it didn’t take long for something said on the street or in the back of a record store to appear in Rolling Stone. Jerry’s story about GWW made Sam go ballistic.<br /><br />“We gave the Rolling Stone guy fake names,” Dub said. “We called ourselves Vladimer and Patrick.”<br /><br />“Boy that fooled ’em.” I’d never seen Sam angry before. He turned to me. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”<br /><br />“Think he was upset?” Dub said after Sam had gone.<br /><br />“I think so.”<br /><br />Sam and I used to meet for breakfast at a diner on Pico. He liked Cream of Wheat. He used to spoon the hot cereal onto toast. When I showed up that morning, he told me right off he wanted out.<br /><br />“Dub’s a good kid,” Sam said, “but he can’t think. We were supposed to be low key, now everybody in the world knows about that record. And Rolling Stone knows what he looks like, it’s only a matter of time before they find out who he is and when they do, they’re going to come straight for us.” This was in September of 1969.<br /><br />A month later, Rolling Stone was back on the street with a multi-page story by Greil Marcus about unreleased Bob Dylan recordings. Dub was ecstatic. Never had a human been so enthusiastic about anything.<br /><br />“We have to get all this stuff.” His heart must have been pumping three hundred beats a minute. “We have to put it all out.”<br /><br />“Yeah,” Rhonda, his girlfriend said. “All of it.” Rhonda was a ’60s flower power girl. Pretty, free, uninhibited. I remember going to eat with them at a Chart House restaurant once in the middle of the week. She wore this see though flimsy chiffon type blouse you could see right though and nothing underneath. Her nipples stood right out, captured everybody’s eye in the place. Our waiter was overly attentive and not because he was looking for a big tip.<br /><br />Sam had been gone for a couple months. Saturn was going bankrupt, my father was supporting too many record stores and the record companies refused to support him, so Dub and I were out of work. The FBI had been around to Jim’s house again, looking for him and again he passed himself off as his brother, but he was getting worried. The war was going strong, people were dying for no good reason and he didn’t want to go, so he went to Canada. Dub and I were unemployed and on our own. We were now full time bootleggers.<br /><br />We would stop by Saturn on occasion and see my dad, ask how things were going. He’d smile and say he thought he was going to make it, but it was obvious to everybody but him that his business was dying a slow and ugly death. It was during one of our visits that a customer came into the back room, I don’t remember who. We were sitting on boxes of records my dad was trying to return to the record companies instead of cash, drinking coffee and this guy shows us his Great White Wonder record, then told us he just bought a couple hundred copies.<br /><br />“Isn’t that interesting,” Dub said.<br /><br />“Yeah,” I said as I looked at the record. It wasn’t one of ours.<br /><br />“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” Dub said after the guy left.<br /><br />“It’s not like we own Dylan,” I said.<br /><br />“Maybe it’ll take the heat off us,” Dub said.<br /><br />But it didn’t, instead it ratcheted it up. The two unnamed bootleggers were getting blamed for everything, and Sam was right, it wasn’t long before they got Dub’s name. A private detective, process server started coming around his grandmother’s place. She managed a small group of apartments in Glendale, Dub lived in one of the upstairs units.<br /><br />I got served one night as I was getting in my car to go home. He was looking for a long haired guy and I had long hair. Bastard refused to believe I wasn’t Dub. I went to Dub’s grandmother’s, called the cops, identified myself, said I was served a subpoena for someone I didn’t know and the server wouldn’t believe me. They said they’d handle it and not to worry. I hung up, but I worried plenty.<br /><br />The next day I went by Saturn. It was sad to see the great record one-stop as a only a shadow of her former self. Customers still came in, though now it wasn’t for the selection. My dad was trying to hold on by selling what he had left cheap. I hung around for the day and told Mike from Platerpuss that Dub had moved to Vancouver to avoid the draft and opened a gas station. Three weeks later it was in Rolling Stone. They reported the gas station story word for word as I’d told Mike. We expected that, but maybe not so fast.<br /><br />As luck would have it, the day after the story came out, Dub and I were again back at Saturn when Ben and Norty came in madder than hell. Norty had recognized Dub’s name in the article and figured out I had to be in on it.<br /><br />“We’re friends,” he raged. “How come you didn’t come to me with the record idea? How come I had to go and knock it off? We could’ve been partners. We could’ve made a fortune. I have lawyers. This isn’t something kids got into. I’m twenty-five years older then you, wiser.”<br /><br />“Jeez,” Dub said after they’d left, “those two old farts are the ones.” He laughed. He wasn’t the least bit upset that they’d copied the record. And why should he have been. We didn’t have Bob Dylan under contract. But Ben hated Dub from that moment on, hated me too. Norty ignored me, but Ben bragged around that he was practicing up his karate, getting ready to settle with us.<br /><br />Dub and I considered the source and ignored this talk, but not Rhonda. It pissed her off plenty that they’d copied our record. Ben’s saber rattling pushed her over the edge. She picked up the phone, called Colombia and turned them in.<br /><br />They blamed me and Dub. Now we had enemies.</span></span></span>Ken Douglashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03467370188058144339noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2867799482946658064.post-38180325970961184902010-02-14T13:20:00.001-08:002010-02-17T13:36:07.826-08:00It Coulda Happened this Way -- Great White Wonder, the Beginning<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">When I worked at Saturn Records in 1968 my father was sort of the unofficial distributor of King Records and to my recollection they only had one act worth mentioning, James Brown. I don’t remember the exact date, but Martin Luther King was still alive. James had somehow insulted the station manager at KGFJ, the R & B station in L.A. and in retaliation they’d decided not to play his records.<br /><br />Bad news for James Brown. If they didn’t play him on KGFJ they didn’t hear him in L.A. James and his manager, a guy named Bud Hobgood, came to town to fix it. I remember the four of them, James, Bud, my dad and his partner, a guy named Jack Frost, no lie, that was his name, sitting in my dad’s office trying to decide what to do. I sort of drifted in and out, so I don’t really know who got the idea, but, when the meeting was over, all of a sudden James was gonna be the righter of a horrible wrong. Not only was KGFJ not playing him, they weren’t playing Bill Medley’s, “Brown Eyed Woman” and Jose Feliciano’s, “Star Spangled Banner,” either. They had a policy back then. Only black acts on their station. Mr. Medley and Mr. Feliciano didn’t fit the bill. But they probably didn’t care, as every other station in America was all over those records. But James cared, nobody in L.A. was playing his.<br /><br />Their idea was to round up a bunch of black kids and make a record with them. James would sing, they’d chime in on the chorus. They’d take an ad out in the black papers, linking James with Bill and Jose, call the station raciest, force them to play James’ records.<br /><br />So Godfrey Kerr, a local DJ on a small FM station, and myself took Jack’s kids, (Jack was—and if he’s still alive, still is—a white guy and one of the greatest human beings to ever grace God’s earth. His wife was black though, Eunice of Gene and Eunice fame, so his kids qualified.) and a load of their friends to Vox studios in Burbank. They were so excited, they were going to meet James Brown.<br /><br />When we got there the band was already set up. They had chairs for us and the kids. The kids sat. The band tuned up. Then James came in. Mr. Electricity himself. It doesn’t make any difference if you like his music or not, when you see him in a room, you like him. There’s an aura about the guy that sucks you right in. An audience of one or a hundred thousand, it makes no difference, when James Brown is on, he’s got you by the guts, you’re his till he lets you go, but you don’t care, because the ride’s worth it.<br /><br />He started right in on this new song. We were told that whenever he sang out, “Say it loud,” we were to shout back. “I’m black and I’m proud.” Godfrey and I were the only two white faces in the studio, but we shouted along. James noticed us in the middle of the song, stopped the music, came over, shook our hands and said, “It’s okay, sing it out.” The guy might’ve had problems, but he was a class act.<br /><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/JamesBrown_SayItLoud_ImBlackAndP-1.jpg" /><br /><br /><br />A couple weeks later, “I’m black and I’m Proud” was out and James was back on the radio in Los Angeles. Not only that, KGFJ started playing Bill and Jose, too. This was my introduction to how records were made.<br /><br />The record business didn’t exist in a vacuum. There was other stuff going on in the country, the world. Garbage workers were striking in Memphis. Martin Luther King, on his way to somewhere else, stopped by to lend his support and there he lost his life.<br /><br />A couple days later Bud Hobgood showed up at Saturn with a tape of MLK at some convention in Cincinnati. Bud was the kind of guy that could sell you a new Lincoln when you showed up at the car lot to buy a used Ford. He was excited, he wanted to be the first to hit the streets with a King record. It never dawned on me that he had his own record label, why’d he have to come to L.A. Ah well, maybe it was all on the up and up, I don’t know. Anyway the two Jacks (my father’s name was Jack, too) arranged for him to have it pressed at a plant in Los Angeles. But none of them wanted to go to the plant and pick up the records, so they sent me. Then they sent me out to pick up the black and white covers they’d had printed up. And then they had me stuff the records into the jackets. They sold a lot of that record, what happened to the money, I don’t know, but I know this, my education was complete.<br /><br />I remember Bobby, tears in his eyes as he spoke the eulogy at Martin’s funeral service. It was dark, raining I think, his voice cracked. A few months later a guy that worked for Bud was in L.A. doing some business for James. My dad delegated me as his driver. Before taking care of business, he wanted to stop by the Ambassador Hotel and maybe get a look at Bobby. We were there, then at the hospital, then at the Hyatt on Sunset, a zoo. There were people from all walks of life crammed in there on that sad night. Anyway this black guy talked to us for a few minutes about Aretha Franklin and what a great voice she had. When he left, the guy I was with said, “Aretha, you should meet her, that woman does what she wants, when she wants to do it.” Then he said, “I wish I had that kind of courage.”<br /><br />I don’t know if he really knew Aretha, but he worked for James Brown, so maybe he did. But whether he did or not, I thought he did and I thought what he said was true. I was living in sort of an LSD induced haze at the time, so those words seemed perhaps more profound then they should’ve. I wasn’t on drugs that night, thank God. But most nights I was. And from that night on, for about a year, whenever a joint or a hit of acid would come my way, I’d think, what would Aretha do. Stupid, I know now, and I guess I knew it then.<br /><br />Vesta didn’t like me taking drugs, well on occasion it was okay, if I did it with her, but this business of doing it on the freeway to and from work and coming home stoned more nights than not was getting to her. She had a point, she was at home with the kids all day and I was out working, stoned, having fun, living the rock and roll life from the sidelines. I was on the fast track to nowhere and I was about to become unemployed. I’d lost the job I’d had at the Gas Company, fixing heaters and stoves, because I was incompetent. That’s what they said, incoherent’s closer to the truth. I probably would’ve wound up as a janitor somewhere, but my dad gave me a job. I guess he felt he owed it to me, because right after I turned seventeen he tricked me into joining the Marine Corps. I wasn’t a bright kid. And I was screwing up the best job a kid cold possibly have at the end of the 60’s. He was gonna fire me, I knew it. It was just a matter of time.<br /><br />Then I met Dub.<br /><br />Dub Michael Taylor. He worked for one of the record stores that bought at Saturn. Six feet, thin, hair down his back. He knew records, nothing else, but nothing else mattered, so we hired him. Ask him about the Lakers and he’d answer back, I don’t follow baseball. But he followed Rock ’n’ Roll. He moved in kind of a slow way around the one stop that drove my dad nuts. It was like he didn’t care if it took him half the afternoon to get a Pepsi out of the fridge. It seemed he was stoned all the time, but he wasn’t. His mind worked, just not the same as anybody else’s.<br /><br />I was beginning to like the music. Dub showed me how to love it. And he made me look good at work, that’s what I really liked about him. My work habits hadn’t improved, it’s just that he was so much more screwed up then me, that I kind of looked normal. And the really amazing thing about him was that he managed to be that way without taking any chemicals.<br /><br />Oh sure, he had flashbacks, but who didn’t?<br /><br />Until Dub came to work at Saturn I used to go missing in action a lot. Someone like Ted from Records and Supertape would show up and we’d take off to somewhere like Dodger Stadium and smoke a couple joints, then my work for the rest of the day would be in the toilet, but after Dub arrived on the scene I mostly stayed at work, cut way back on the grass and stopped LSD altogether.<br /><br />Coherent now, I started to take in the world around me and it was all about music, mostly John Wesley Harding and why it wasn’t any good. I loved that album right from the get go. This was how the electric Bob Dylan was supposed to sound. Dub, however, was a Highway 61 and Blond on Blond person and we used to argue about that all the time. Somebody gave him the 61 Minnesota stuff. He called me late at night and played some of it over the phone. I liked the acoustic Dylan, Dub liked the electric, it was something else we used to argue about. Dylan wise we couldn’t agree about anything, as far as I was concerned he could’ve gone right from the acoustic half of Bringing it All Back Home straight to JWH. Dub though JWH better left on the studio floor. However when Nashville Skyline came out there was finally something we could agree on. We didn’t like it.<br /><br />So we started to conspire.<br /><br />At first it was, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had this stuff on a record? That way it’d last forever.” We thought vinyl was permanent, a much better medium for storing rare stuff on than tape. We were in the back of Saturn, doing returns for the majors and talking about this when Sam Billis came on back.<br /><br />“It could be done,” he said, after eavesdropping for a few minutes. Sam later went on to open the Soul City One Stop after Saturn went out of business. Who knew how high he’d rise. Soul City turned into Sound Music Sales and they sold more records than Saturn ever dreamed of and Saturn was big. “All we have to do is find someone to master it.”<br /><br />I thought about taking it out where James Brown did, “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” but it was Bob Dylan, everybody knew what he sounded like. They’d call the cops, we’d all go to jail. That was a bad idea. We knew where to get it pressed, where to get the jackets, but getting the master was a problem. Then Sam saved the day.<br /><br />“There’s this guy Jewel, that comes in here a lot. He can get it done. Jewel, at least I think that was his name if my memory serves me, was a slightly overweight black guy who never took off this huge white Stetson. He’d had this hit single, “The Birds and the Bees.” I think that was the name of it. He’d sing it on occasion as he moved about the one stop. “Let me tell you about the birds and the bees, and the flowers and the trees—” well, you get the picture. Anyway, Sam said he could get it done for four hundred bucks. We didn’t know it then, but that was about four times what we shoulda paid. Anyway, Sam figured out how much the whole shebang would run, mastering, mothering, plates, records and jackets and he loaned us the money.<br /><br />Now all we had to do was figure out what to do with the things after we got them. We needed to sell four hundred double records for Dub and I to get five copies each, get Sam’s money back and maybe make a few bucks. Easier said than done. We were convinced this was some kind of heinous crime, so we couldn’t just walk into a record store and offer them for sale. Everybody in L.A., everybody that counted anyway, knew us. I was willing to go to the pressing plant and the jacket place, Dub was too, but we weren’t going into any stores. Dub solved the problem. His friend Jim was fresh out of bootcamp and decided he didn’t like the Army and would probably hate Viet Nam. So he deserted by moving in with his parents. When the FBI came looking, he said he was his brother and that he hadn’t seen himself in months. Really, how do they ever catch anybody?<br /><br />Having faced down the FBI on his doorstep, Jim was more than willing to take the records around to the stores. However, we still didn’t think it was going to happen till Jewel came in one night before closing with the master. We sat around and drank beer, not Dub, he didn’t drink either, and talked about how we were so slick. I got a little drunk, I didn’t do that a lot, because you do stupid things when you drink too much. I pulled off Jewel’s cowboy hat and we went a little crazy. Turns out he was bald and didn’t want anyone to know. I’ve seen ugly rugs, but a white hat the size of Texas, that’ll hide it.<br /><br />The next morning my splitting headache and I drove them out to Korelich Engineering and gave the masters to Pete.<br /><br />Pete seemed old even then. He’d always seemed old to me, was old twenty years later when I showed up at his plant again to make records, but back then nobody’d ever heard of a bootleg, heck we hadn’t either, hadn’t even thought of what we were doing as bootlegging.<br /><br />“What are you gonna use for labels?” Pete asked me.<br /><br />“We hadn’t thought of that.”<br /><br />“Can’t make a record without labels.”<br /><br />“Put on anything you’ve got lying around.” I meant for him to reverse them so that the labels would be plain white, but he didn’t understand.<br /><br />“You can sell them that way?”<br /><br />“I don’t know. We’ll find out.” And for years Pete would introduce me to his other customers as the guy who made music so good he doesn't need labels. He never did understand that it was supposed to be a secret.<br /><br />Five days later I went to pick up the records and was shocked to find Rocoulion labels on them, with song titles I’d never heard of, that nobody’d ever heard of.<br /><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/Rocolian-1.jpg" /><br /><br />“You said anything I had left over.” Pete looked at me, arms wide, palms open.<br /><br />“Yeah, I did. Don’t worry about it.”<br /><br />“I won’t.” Pete never worried about anything. He was that kind of man.<br /><br />I handed the records over to Jim the deserter. His first stop was Vogue Records on Hollywood Boulevard. Bill Bowers bought them all and I’d forgotten to take out the copies for me and Dub.<br /><br />We were gonna have to do it again.</span></span></span>Ken Douglashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03467370188058144339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2867799482946658064.post-38993239144405568362010-02-12T07:56:00.001-08:002010-02-17T13:37:07.675-08:00It Coulda Happened this Way -- In Our Hearts<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">For me the bootleg saga was a wild ride, twisting one day toward the music, the next toward the cash. The story is full of heroes and villains, cops and crooks, idealists and shysters and the music, always the music. We did it for the music, but we spent the cash.<br /><br />Clinton Heylin got some of it right in his book, Bootleg, but he missed the heart of it. The soul too. We were people bonded together by this business of being on the outside. We liked, but didn’t trust each other. We ran from the law, but our egos had us at record meets all over the world, standing in front of the crowd, showing our wares. We were complex. We were stupid. We were brave.<br /><br />Someday I hope the real story gets told, because it’s so much more than a story of seedy, greedy guys robbing fists fulls of cash from rock legends. It’s a story of wonderful people who put their morals on hold, grabbed the music by the chords, put it out there and damned the consequences.<br /><br />In our hearts we knew it was Stealin’, in fact that’s what we called our second Bob Dylan album, the one we put out just after “Great White Wonder”. Stealing yes, but we had the tapes and didn’t have much money, so we told ourselves we were modern day Robin Hoods, and who better to rob than Columbia Records. That we put our sub-standard stuff Mr. Dylan might have wanted forgotten never entered our minds.<br /><br />We didn’t know we were spawning an underground industry that would span decades, make people rich, send some to jail, other to their graves. We didn’t know the record industry would see us as a threat, would call us everything from misguided to evil. We didn’t know they’d hire private investigators, would have process servers chasing us, would have the FBI knocking on our doors. We were kids.<br /><br />It’s years later now and as I’m writing this, the winds is howling through the rigging. It’s three o’clock in the morning and Vesta and I are at anchor in rocky, roly Simpson Bay on the Dutch side of St. Marten, hunkered down on our sailing sloop aptly called, “Great White Wonder”. We named the boat after that first record and after a decade in the Caribbean, not one person has figured out where the name came from. In the weeks following our 1969 release of that unnamed double album, we got swelled heads, thought we were important. Who could blame us. Rolling Stone wrote about our record, wrote fabricated stories about us. Pretenders claimed to be us. B. Mitch Reed played it all the time. We were famous, even if nobody knew our names. But now, looking back, I see maybe we weren’t so important, after all. Sometimes we get an odd look or two from the customs officials when we check into some of these West Indian Island countries.<br /><br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><img src="http://i1005.photobucket.com/albums/af173/douglasongww/Blog%20Shots/001GWW.jpg" /><br /><br />“Where’d you get the name, Skip, after a big shark?” They call everybody with a boat out here, Skip.<br /><br />“Did you name it after yourself, Skip?” That’s one of their favorites.<br /><br />If we would’ve been important, if we’d’ve been doing something that made a difference, these guys wouldn’t have to ask, they’d know.<br /><br />Every time we check in they write the boat name in my passport, then stamp it. Thirty years ago I heard two customs officers talking about “Seems Like a Freeze Out” when I was clearing Customs at LAX. That was our fourth Dylan Boot, the one that had that great unfinished recording of “She’s Your Lover Now,” on it. CBS/Sony later put it on the Bootleg Series. I knew they were there for me. I knew I was going to jail, but hard as it was to believe, one of them was a collector.<br /><br />But I’m getting ahead of myself.<br /><br />In 1969 Dub and I worked at Saturn Records, my father’s one stop. In those days the record companies sold to the one stops, the one stops sold to the stores. We liked Dylan, sure, but we weren’t fans, not the kind that worshiped the ground he walked on kind of fans anyway. I owned all of his records, but I owned a lot of records. I didn’t have to pay for them. Did I think he was the second coming, no. Did I go to his shows, no. I’d never seen him live, thou Dub had. I liked his records, but I didn’t look between the lines, the man wrote good stuff. It was enough, he didn’t have to be a god.<br /><br />Sitting here, listening to the wind howl, I’m trying to remember where the tapes came from for that first album and I’ll be damned, but I can’t. Except for “Living the Blues,” I recorded that. I remember critics chastising us because of the poor quality and because we didn’t release all of the Big Pink stuff, but with the exception of the other two songs done on the Johnny Cash Show, we put out everything we had.<br /><br />The Johnny Cash Show, that takes me back. He had Doug Kershaw on that first show. That guy could play. I remember kicking myself for not recording him, but I didn’t. I had a big RCA color television that had no audio out plug. Could you even get a television with one of those in the ’60s? I had to take the back off and attach a wire to the speakers that I ran to the back of an old tube McIntosh amp to get the material.<br /><br />It’s true we didn’t think we’d make much money, but a lot of the other stuff that was written about us is just wrong. Dub and I never went to Canada to avoid the draft, never opened up a gas station. That was a story I told a record store owner who was asking too many questions one day and damned if it didn’t appear in Rolling Stone a few weeks later. Those were crazy days. Life Magazine even did an article on one of our records, heady stuff for a couple of guys like us.<br /><br />After “GWW”, Ted, who owned a store called Records and Supertape, called me at home. He didn’t know Dub and I were the guys, but he suspected we might know them. He had these amazing Dylan tapes. “Stealin’” and “Birch” were born. The outtakes from “Bringing It All Back Home” on “Stealin’” were so good they made you want to cry. And to this day CBS/Sony hasn’t released the version of “Talking John Birch Society Blues” that” appeared on “Birch”. That song was originally on “Freewheelin’ and should’ve stayed there. The guys that jerked that song, were, do I have to say it, jerks.<br /><br />These records were every bit as good as anything Columbia had put out and we quickly followed them with “Seems Like a Freeze Out” and “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Massacre Picnic Blues”. Two more great albums. Good Stuff. We were proud, though we had no right to be, the stuff came right out of Columbia’s vaults. We didn’t record it, we stole it.<br /><br />Now tapes were starting to come out of the woodwork. There’s some pretty screwy guys out there. Imagine having such a hard on for Dylan that you’d go through his trash, sift though his kid’s diapers. Steve Pickering was one of those, though it was A.J. Weberman, I believe, who waded thought the soiled pampers. My brother was arrested for cutting off a parking meter in broad daylight in Santa Cruz. He was on drugs, had just seen Cool Hand Luke and thought it would be a good idea. I flew up to bail him out and met Pickering at a record store there. This guy knew more about Dylan than Jimmy Swaggart knew about God, read his books if you don’t believe me. And he had tapes, the acoustic half of the 1966 Dublin Show and the Carnegie Hall Show Colombia was supposed to put out, but didn’t, so we did, and called it “While the Establishment Burns”. That title came from a poster advertising Colombia Records. It depicts three or four kids sitting in a circle. The girl is topless, I think, but we only see her back. They’ve got headphones on. Outside the window you see fire and the caption on the poster says something like, “They’re listening to Colombia Records While the Establishment Burns.” Funny thing, those folks at Columbia didn’t turn out to be so anti-establishment after all.<br /><br />Sometime between “Birch” and “Freeze Out”, Dub and his friend Chris took some of the money we‘d made and went on tour with the Rolling Stones. Dub used a Nagra with a Sennhauser shotgun mike and recorded several shows from the audience and when he got back he mixed a masterpiece. Listen to “Yayas” it can’t light a candle to “Liver”. We did very well with that record and by then there were a lot of new guys out there copying it. If I remember right, and I’m writing this over three decades later, without notes, Rolling Stone even certified it gold.<br /><br />Dub used the same setup to record a new band he believed in at the Forum. I didn’t like them, so I didn’t go. I thought it was a waste of effort, the band wasn’t going anywhere. A couple albums and they’d be history. But I was wrong and Led Zeppelin’s “Live on Blueberry Hill” was a great record for us. It also brought out the cops. If it happened today, we’d’ve probably quit, but you have to remember what was going on back then. The Vietnam war was raging. Dick Nixon was the enemy. The good guys had long hair, the bad guys didn’t. And God knows why, but we still thought of ourselves as modern day Robin Hoods, though we gave not a cent to the poor. Dub did however, one time drop a hundred dollar bill in a blind man’s cup outside of Licorice Pizza on Sunset Boulevard. True story, I was there.<br /><br />After that record the fun sort of went out of the bootleg business. Till then the clandestine meetings in the middle of the night somewhere in Hollywood were, if not fun, exhilarating. We looked out of our rearview mirrors, gave ourselves different names, worried about our phones being tapped, but we never did anything about it. After “Blueberry Hill” I started carrying around a pocketful of dimes.<br /><br />We didn’t quit. No, we didn’t do that. We soldiered on, making record after record. Dub and I split up. He made more records. I made more records. A host of others got into the act and they made records. I quit the business, moved to France, then Spain. I wanted to grow up with my kids.<br /><br />I probably should’ve stayed away, but after the kids were grown, I came back. I was older now, not a kid anymore. I knew what I was doing. There was no fun in it the second time around, no illusions. It was in it for the money. I was a stealer of the music, a pirate. A record pirate.<br /><br />Bootlegs were a big business now. They even had their own publication, the annual Canadian book Hot Wax. They rated and reviewed them all, year after year. Our records had full color covers now, the FBI couldn’t tell them from the real deal. How these guys got Dillinger is anybody’s guess. Luck, I believe, because they never figured out about looking up in the upper left hand corner of the record jacket for the logos for, Columbia, Capitol, or any of the other real record companies. I could bore you to tears with stories told me by record store owners, about how our federal law enforcement officials would raid a tore and take out only the white records with the rubber stamped covers or none at all when, in fact, the Dylan, Beatles, Stones and Zeppelin slots would be stuffed full of albums on Toasted, Phoenix or a host of other made up companies.<br /><br />The FBI regularly checked one of the pressing plants where I made my records, but they never caught me, they couldn’t, because they don’t start work till eight. I made my daily pickup at five-thirty in the AM. For three years I dodged those guys. Imagine staking out a place form Nine to Five. How dumb. I truly believe if John D. would’ve robbed at night and slept during the day, he’d’ve died of old age.<br /><br />How come the FBI couldn’t catch us. I could’ve caught us. There were only four or five places in L.A. where we could’ve been making the bloody things and we were at three of them. The pressing plants called me at home all the time. How hard would it have been to look at their phone bills, see who they called? For the longest time I had my own FBI agent, he found out about me because somebody told. We met, he told me he was going to catch me with the goods. We talked on the phone a few times, but I stayed free.<br /><br />Records died, CDs were born and still I was a pirate. But finally, after years, local cops and the the FBI started catching people. A few times they got closer then I like to think about and I started having this reoccurring nightmare. There’s a knocking at my door, loud, like a cop with one of those stick things they beat up Rodney King with. I open it and there’s Bob Dylan with a couple really big bully types and he says, “That’s the guy, get him.” So I quit and moved back to Europe. We spent a couple years in Spain, then a year in New Zealand. Then we bought a boat, named it “Great White Wonder” and I started writing sailing stories and we never looked back.<br /><br />I have no records now. I kept nothing from those days, save one of the original Great White Wonder rubber stamps. In the cruising world, that’s what we call ourselves, us over the hill new millennium hippies, cruisers, we stamp every book we read with our boat stamps so that when we get to a marina somewhere we can check the bookswap and see who’s been that way by going through the books. Vesta and I stamp all our paperbacks with that stamp. And still no one has figured it out.<br /><br />Looking back, was what we did so wrong? Stealing, yes, but Napster made anything we did a pebble before a mountain.<br /><br />Six or seven years ago my daughter mailed me the hard cover book (rare for a guy who lives on a boat) “Bootleg, the Secret History of the Other Recording Industry” by Clinton Heylin. It chased us around the Caribbean for a couple of months, finally catching us in Trinidad. It had been so long since I’d thought of those days, so I was able to read it as if I were reading about someone else. I knew all those guys who were quoted in that book. Funny how all those other bootleggers, the ones Mr. Heylin interviewed, were such good guys, only in it for the music, and the one money grabbing whore was the one guy who was unavailable. But that’s the way it goes, we all remember things in the light that shines on us best. Actually it was sort of cathartic, looking at myself through their eyes. If that’s the way they saw me, then maybe that’s the way I was. Anyway I kept the book. Maybe I’ll read it again in a few years. Maybe to my nieces and nephews if I ever get back to L.A.<br /><br />And will I ever go home? In the ’60s we just knew that when we were old enough to govern, things would be better. Marijuana would be legal. They wouldn’t take a girl to jail because she took her top off at the beach. Medicine would be free. Guns would be controlled, better, gone. There would be no more war, peace would be everywhere.<br /><br />But it didn’t happen. America has five percent of the world’s population but twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. One out of every eight black men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five is in prison. Our last president didn't think carbon monoxide was pollution. The DEA is looking for drugs everywhere, even here. The cost of medicine is through the roof. Every bad guy wannabe gets a gun and becomes a bad guy for real. War is everywhere. Peace is a word used only by politicians who want to get elected. Girls still gotta keep their titties covered at the beach. Christ, we couldn’t even fix that one. We should be so ashamed.</span></span></span>Ken Douglashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03467370188058144339noreply@blogger.com3