Chapter 60 – The Last, Last Autograph

IT WAS VALENTINE’S Day 1988. I had been broken up with Maria, my punk-rock, Finnish born, German raised model, for over a year—but I had still not gotten over her. After being sober for forty-five days and going to AA meetings, I was at my Mom and Dad’s house on Canton Drive, playing the piano and waiting for them to go out to dinner to celebrate their love. They left and I noticed my father had left a half-finished scotch on the coffee table. I wanted to alleviate my pain so I downed the drink and then thought— what the hell, I had broken my sobriety so I might as well get wasted. I poured another drink then went upstairs to my mother’s medicine cabinet and “borrowed” a couple of her Ativan. I took one and stashed the others in a rolled-up piece of toilet paper. I figured I would feel the effects when I got home which was a fifteen-minute drive, so I piled my two dogs into my 1969 TR-6 and left. What I hadn't figured was, being sober for more than a month my resistance to drugs and alcohol was severely diminished. I fell asleep at the light at Cahuenga and Vineland and crashed my sports car into a parked car right in front of a playhouse with a crowd of people waiting in line to enter the show. I was a mess, but not injured, but my car was totaled. I was slouching on the curb waiting for the police and fumbling through my pockets to remove the pills from the toilet paper when I heard a woman yelling, “He’s taking something out of his pocket.” She might have thought it was a weapon. The cops came and before they dragged me off to county jail, I begged them to call my friend Blair. I said, “I don’t care what you do to me but please let me call a friend to pick up my dogs.” Thank God they weren’t injured.

I spent a week in L.A. County Jail, and when I got out I was back on the program. I felt I needed to go back to my roots to trace the life I had led up until that point. I went to New York and stayed with my parent’s longtime friends, the Meltzer’s again. It was a beautiful March day, clear and cool, so I decided to take a walk. First I headed up the west side and when I got to 96^th and Amsterdam I saw a sign that read: “Psychic Reader” on the second-floor window. I walked up the staircase and buzzed the button. Less than a minute later, a voice that sounded like sandpaper rubbing against an iron skillet shrieked out through the two-inch speaker by the door. “Yes?”

 “I came for a reading,” I said noncommittally. She answered, “Go to 33^rd and Madison.”

I didn't think too much about it since I really wasn't sure I wanted to spend a whole lot of money on a reading in New York where it cost almost fifteen bucks for a couple slices of pizza, the best pizza in the world, mind you. I found myself walking south, and before I knew it I was nearing the Empire State Building which was very near the place where that scratchy voice told me to go. I walked to the designated spot and saw the same sign in the window I had seen a couple of hours earlier. I rang the buzzer and what I thought was the same voice answered. “Yes,” Was this the same woman, and if so, how did she get here so fast? These were the thoughts that circled through my head like smoke rings. I was being buzzed in., I gingerly made my way up the stairs to apartment 1A and knocked on the red door ornamented with Egyptian symbols and a wooden cross. I could see a gray, clouded eye looking at me through the peephole and I was asked to enter. I stood there frozen, being in two minds about what I was doing. Did I really want to subject myself to what might be a rouse, or could this person have some real insight? I chose the latter decision and entered the apartment.

She was ancient woman, about ninety or so with long, thin gray hair tied back in a ponytail. Her name was Mama and she spoke with a thick Eastern European accent. She invited me into her kitchen, and I sat down on a wrought iron chair facing her. She took out an Aquarian deck of Tarot cards, lit a red candle and the first strange thing I noticed was the flame. It was slanting at a ninety-degree angle to the left. It didn't take her long to get down to business. “I see you have two dark spirits that have been following you for some time now,” she said as she closed her murky eyes while waving her arms over her head then cupping them over her nose and mouth. “Do you ever notice that in your music you have a little success and then it all falls apart after a while?” I nodded.

“In your love life, you get together with a girl and then it also falls apart after a year or two. Am I right?”

I was taken in by her spiritual acumen even though I knew all about the parlor games psychics play, but this woman was different. She was half Romanian and Iroquois Indian and I had the feeling she was totally authentic—the real deal.

 “Here’s what I want you to do. Tonight, I want you to take a carton of eggs and put them under your bed when you sleep. Tomorrow morning at ten, I want you to come back here and bring the eggs. Can you do that?”

 I said I would and asked her how much I owed her for the reading. She said not to worry about it today and I could pay her twenty dollars after the reading tomorrow. I wondered down to a local deli on the East Side and bought a carton of eggs and a coke. That night I slept with the eggs under the bed in the Meltzer’s guest room.. I was glad the bed had legs since it would have been awkward to sleep with the eggs stuffed between the mattress and the floor.

Back at 33^rd and Madison, I entered her apartment with the eggs tucked firmly, but gently under my arm, then sat back down on the same iron chair in the old woman’s kitchen. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how she did it. I didn't see her get up from the table except to get a bowl from the cabinet watching her every move like a hawk. She placed the bowl on the table and cracked open the first egg. I could feel my hair standing up on the back of my neck as I looked down into the bowl. The yoke was jet black. She took another egg and broke it open into the bowl. It was also black. She cracked open a few more eggs but they were normal, as yellow as the late winter sun peeking through her small kitchen window.

“The two black yokes represent those two evil spirits that have attached themselves to your aura,” she said. I was flabbergasted—it was a shock to say the least. I wondered how she was going to help me since I had to fly back to Los Angeles the next day. She told me not to worry because she had a daughter, Paula, in Van Nuys, California, who was also a psychic.

 “Is that very far from you?’ she asked. I told her it was relatively close, and it would be no trouble for me to drive there—as long as it wasn't rush hour.

When I got back to L.A., I would visit Paula and get readings from her while she lit special candles and prayed for my career and love life. At that point in my life, I was more interested in love. She said I was going to meet a pretty blonde girl with a round face and blue eyes.

On the Fourth of July 1988, I got a call from Paula. “You have to get out of the house today. You are going to meet her.”

“Her?”

“Yes her, the blonde with the blue eyes and round face.”

I was living two blocks down from the Hollywood Bowl on Camrose Drive. That day I met not one, not two, but three women with blonde hair, blue eyes, and round faces. I went back home to sort it all out. I had a 1958 Austin Healey 100-6 that I was restoring and was covered from head to toe in oil and grease. My Grateful Dead T-shirt was ripped, and my gray loafers had holes in them and were coming apart at the stitching. I weighed about 130 pounds soaking wet, when normal weight for me was around 155. It was starting to get dark, so I decided to go down to the Hollywood Bowl and check out the fireworks. I was standing in the courtyard by the ticket office when I noticed the sign read: sold out. I didn't really care since it was Andy Williams performing that night. I only wanted to witness the fireworks display and I could see that perfectly fine from the parking lot.

Suddenly, I heard a sweet lilting voice speaking in a Scottish accent. “Oh no, Shelley, what are we going to do it’s all sold oot?” I turned around and saw a young woman with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a pleasing round face. She reminded me of Haley Mills.

“Excuse me lassie, where are you from?” If she was all alone she never would have followed me, but since her friend Shelley, a compactly built specimen, was with her she felt safe. I said I knew a secret way into the Bowl, and I promised them I would get them in to the show. All they had to do was walk right through the front entrance and then get in line at the concession stand; if you have a coke or a hot dog in your hand they are not going to bother you, especially on Independence Day. I rushed ahead thinking they were right behind me, but they had slowed their pace and were twenty feet behind me. I guessed they were discussing the situation. They told me later they thought I was a homeless person sleeping on the benches in the park, but they decided that I was harmless.

“Come on,” I said, “Just act like a roadie.” The pretty blonde looked at me blankly and said,

“What’s a roadie?”

“It’s someone who carries the equipment for musicians. Just act like you work here, that’s all.”

They followed along and did what I had told then to do. We rushed to the concession stand and I bought us all a hot dog and coke. Then we sat down in the middle section of the outdoor venue and listened to Andy Williams sing Moon River, and a few other of his hits. After the show, we wanted to get a drink. As we walked past my apartment on Camrose, she noticed the lights were left on and it appeared that the TV was on, too. I told her that my dogs felt less lonely if there were human voices around and that’s why I had the TV on. I knew I had scored point number one with her. The night was mild and clear, so we walked all the way to The Cat and Fiddle and got a table outside in the courtyard. I ordered a gin and tonic and she and Shelley ordered the same. While I was sitting, a scruffy looking cat had wandered up to me and jumped on my lap. I was cleaning out its ears with a napkin –I noticed they were in pretty nasty shape. Although she thought it was a bit gross, I felt I had scored point number two with her. I found out her name was Donna, and she was from Fife, Scotland, and had been living in Joliet, Illinois for the last few months on a one year working visa and was due to go back home to Scotland that December. I got the phone number where she was staying in L.A. and I also got her home number in Joliet, in case we didn't have a chance to hook up while she was on vacation.

On the day she was heading back home, she called to thank me for the nice time on the Fourth and wanted to say goodbye. I had to think fast. “You have a rental car, don’t you?” She said it was Avis. I told her that Avis Rental place was over a half mile from the airport, and I would be more than happy to escort them to the gate. She agreed. That morning I took a nice, long, hot bath and washed up like never before. I clean up well. Later that day, I pulled my TR-6 into the parking lot at Avis, and I spied the two of them sitting on a bench outside the office. Squinting their eyes at me, they probably wondered if I was the same guy they had met a few nights ago. Donna had a stuffy nose, and we had a congested and awkward kiss goodbye at the gate.

A few days later, I called her, and we had a delightful conversation. She had a great sense of humor and was worldly as any woman I had ever met at the tender age of twenty-four, like most European women, not that most European are twenty-four but they are more worldly and sophisticated than American women, in my humble opinion. The next day she called then I would call her and it went on like that for a more than a week. By the second week we were talking two times a day. She then said out of the blue, “I am coming back out there to see you.”

“Come on, really,” I said, “I’ll make a date with a girl to meet me at the local bar and they usually don’t even show up, but you’re going to come all the way from Joliet after a month and I am supposed to believe that?”

“Be there on August 20^th, American Airlines flight 1970 at 8 pm.”

I went there thinking she might not be on the plane. But she was the second one off the plane, looked great and seemed to have lost five pounds of baby fat, not that she was fat or anything. I had put on about five pounds and was starting to look almost healthy.

We went to Magic Mountain, (which I failed to get to three times with Marly) Catalina Island and the Queen Mary, but it wasn't until we drove to the Laundromat on Fountain; the mounds of dirty socks and holes in my underwear were piled up in the rumble seat, I knew, yes I knew, she was the woman for me.

She went back to Joliet, and I went to visit her there in September. We had decided that she was going to move in with me at the apartment on Camrose, so I started cutting out physical therapist job positions from the newspaper and would mail them to her. This was the day before email and fax machines were only seen in office suites, banks, and insurance agencies. She had contacted several physical therapy clinics and had six appointments lined up by the time she got off the plane and decided on Centinela Medical Clinic. Two days before the tragic incident at Lockerbie, we, along with her best friend from Scotland, Irene, who arrived at Camrose with her friend Fiona on the way to Australia, spent Christmas together. We all wore funny paper hats, they called crowns, pulled Christmas crackers, and ate our Yule Tide dinner from a blue table without legs on the floor since there weren't enough chairs in my humble apartment.

The year before, I had broken my ankle by sliding into home plate at a pick-up softball game at the park right underneath the Hollywood sign. The doctors had put in a plate and screws, and I had them removed right before Donna came out to L.A., so I couldn't drive my stick shift car. Donna drove and did an exemplary job at it. After all, she is from Britain and learned how to drive on a manual transmission.

I had sold my second TR-6 to John and Marion Hamilton and all I had left was my 1958 Austin Healey. I used to drive the back road loop around Camrose without a valid license just to keep it in good running condition. Other than that, Donna did all the driving until I got my driving privileges back a few months later. Then tragedy struck and my father got cancer in August of 1988 and was going downhill fast. He died on November 18^th and a week later I said: “Why don’t we go downtown. I want to buy you a ring.” That was my marriage proposal. She said yes, and we got married on June 9, 1990.

Although I have recorded four solo albums, and finishing up my fifth, I still think about Silverspoon and how it formed the basis of my musical education. I am happy to say that I am still friends with Blair and Stephen, although they don’t speak to each other over a falling out over a bad business deal. Stephen almost checked out of life about a year and half ago and was pronounced dead, but somehow survived, and is rehabilitating with Portia in Venice, the same house they have lived in for more than twenty-five years. Although I have gone back to L.A. many times in the thirty years since I left, nobody from Silverspoon has ever come to Nashville to visit—but my door remains open.

It is sad that we had lost so many members of Silverspoon along the way: Doug Fieger, Michael Kennedy, Joey and Jeff Hamilton, Peter Gries, Mikel Japp, Marshall Battjes, Louis Jordan, Richie Moore and many other colleagues and mentors: Tom Gries, Mal Evans, Keith Moon, George Harrison and John Lennon, and all the friends and lovers: Patricia Chilcote, Christa Helm, Caroleen Fisher and Carrie Hamilton who were along for the ride. It was a great ride—the best and most unbelievable musical and friendship experiences of my life. Although we never became famous—I still believe that Silverspoon was the world’s greatest band that nobody, or at least few people, ever heard, but we touched the lives of more people than I thought possible, especially since I have heard from so many of you and your recollections of those amazing and fabulous days.

When I think of Silverspoon now, I see Stephen hiding behind his long, blonde hair and never knowing what sounds would emanate from his screaming guitar. I think of Blair, smoking his trademark Marlboro Red (which, by the way, quit smoking a decade ago) and drinking a shot of Jack Daniels at the Rainbow. The night we sang oldies in the Crow’s Nest on top of that infamous club with Keith, Ringo and Mal and in the morning, after only two hours of sleep, I got the call from Mal that Keith was doing an album at the Record Plant, and I (along with Stephen) were to transpose the song, write the charts and lyrics out for the icons of rock who soon would be entering the friendly confines of studio C. I think of Bum and Super-bum (Stephen and Blair) sitting at the Old World restaurant on Sunset and wondering if Stephen would still be wearing his gold ring or had left it in the cash register in payment for a hamburger and gallons of coffee. I think of Joey, poor Joey, who never did realize his potential as a singer, but did have some glorious moments—the one where he sang Final Bow while I accompanied him on George Gershwin’s piano in Rosemary Clooney’s living room, and her telling him that his pitch was perfect. I think of BJ and all of our escapades together—the wheel falling off of Rafi’s Porsche and rolling into a supermarket. If it weren't for BJ, this story might have never been told—he was the one who coerced me to write something about him which eventually led to all this. I think of Miguel, and how I laughed when I heard him playing his “Hawaii Five-0 drum fill on Be My Baby in Between. I think of Chas and all of his parties and connections and how we went out to the desert to find God, or desert women. I think of the Robins’ in our lives— Stephen’s, Blair’s and mine with their countermelodies, timely influences and momentary shelters from the storms, both external and internal. I think of all the friends, the women, the drugs—some almost lethal—some very lethal, the other-worldly experiences, the hanging out at parties with the cream of rock and roll society and especially the music and the recordings of that music, the comradely, the petty jealousies, the laughter, and the tears. It was a privilege (and believe me, we felt privileged) to be part of a band that had as its goal to be as great as The Beatles, at least in its songwriting and vocal prowess. If we came close to that goal, reached one tenth, or even one iota of the musical aptitude of our mentors, then we succeeded.

No, Silverspoon never made it to the big-time, but if this story makes it to the “show” and if I did my job properly and the fickle finger of fate points once again in our direction, there is still hope and the music, which springs eternal will remain eternal.

 

The End for now—December 28, 2023.