IT WAS NOW Sunday, June 5, 1976 (my sister’s birthday).
Stephen and I got right down to business and our singing was starting to improve.
We played music all day while waiting for Steve to show up and we had also composed
a song list for this makeshift band to perform. By seven o'clock that evening
the rest of the so-called band showed up with a new keyboardist who had brought
up a Fender Rhodes and rehearsal began a half an hour later.
The phone rang in the kitchen,
and it was Blair calling from Sausalito saying that Kathy, Yadi and Richie had
gone back to LA because Richie couldn't find a place to stay in San Francisco,
his hometown. Blair had remained there with Bambi and was staying with a friend
who lived in Marin County in a place with a 360-degree view. He could see the
fog rising over the bay revealing the top of the bronze beauty, the Golden Gate
Bridge. He had visited the Record Plant up there and ran into Bill Halverson
and Gary Kellgren (co-owner of the studio). He described the studio in detail
saying that they had it built where you could play right in the control room, a
design that would be used in future studios. Kellgren was ahead of his time. He
had the singers performing on raised podiums and the piano was hung from wires
that hovered ten feet off the ground. Blair said it looked insane but sounded
great. Dubbed The Pit, it was a 140-square-foot acoustically dead room
that had the engineer's controls sunk ten feet into the foundation of the
building surrounded by a ground level area intended for the musicians. Its
appearance was futuristic, with bright maroon plush carpet on the floors,
walls, ceiling, and stairs. Psychedelic murals and embroidery added to the
visual atmosphere. There were no windows between the control room and the main
studio area, previously considered a fundamental method of sound separation;
instead, there was a partial cowling circling the control pit, also carpeted.
The quirkiness of the
studio extended in many directions; for transporting musicians, Stone owned a
limousine with the custom license plate DEDUCT, while Kellgren kept a purple
Rolls-Royce displaying GREED on the license plate. This was the same Rolls that
Jon Gries drove to Tower Records to purchase the Beach Boys record Don't
Worry Baby in 1974. As in Los Angeles, the studio contained a jacuzzi, but
Sausalito's conference room had a waterbed for a floor. For the musicians'
meals, there were chefs ready to cook organic food, and for their sleeping
quarters there were two guesthouses next to each other, five minutes away in
Mill Valley. In the back there was a basketball hoop, and in the nearby harbor
a speedboat was kept ready. The studio obtained industrial-grade nitrous—oxide
pure, not mixed with oxygen as it is for dental anesthesia—from a local
chemical supply company under the pretext that the gas was critical to the
recording process, and fresh tanks were delivered weekly. Gas masks hung from
the ceiling for those who wished to get intoxicated on “laughing gas”. Al
Kooper wrote that during the few days that he was helping Nils Lofgren lay down
tracks for the album Cry Tough he was so taken with the novel drug
experience that he wheeled one of the tanks around and kept it next to him for
refreshment between takes. He breathed in so much of it that acid collected in
his stomach, aggravating his ulcers, and for a few days he was too sick to
work. Kooper said that the studio's fun with nitrous oxide was stopped forever
when a friend of Kellgren's was found dead from asphyxia under one of the
tanks, the tube still in his mouth.
Gary said he was building a replica of
the Sausalito studio in his house in the Hollywood Hills, and he had invited Blair
to help build it. In return he was promised to get studio work as a keyboardist
and would also try to get Richie a job as an engineer. Blair was back in the
hustle and bustle of LA again while Stephen, Ric and I remained in Aptos trying
to get this new band together.
I found out that Carl Faust was an ex-con who
was given the opportunity to run this halfway house as a condition of his
parole. he told us of how he had fatally stabbed this guy who was sleeping with
his old lady while he was high on LSD. Another resident of the mansion was this
guy named Don, who told me he had murdered two people and had once shared a
cell with Charlie Manson. That night I slept on one arm of the L shaped couch
while Don slept on the other arm. I didn't get a whole lot of sleep that night
and I came down with a mother of a cold.
Things were getting bleak.
Now the phone had been turned off as well as all the power was at the mansion.
It was time to get the hell out of Dodge, or Aptos as the case may be. We
wanted to get back to LA because there was going to be a rebroadcast of Helter
Skelter on TV and we wanted to be there so we could promote the band not to
mention the probability of getting laid after bragging about our successes in
the parking lot of the Rainbow Bar and Grille at 2 am. Stephen and Ric were in
agreement, the only trouble was we only had about ten dollars in cash between
the three of us. At this time, Steve and his entourage had left the place and
we had to find a way to get money to fill up the gas-guzzling Continental. I
wasn't going to sell my guitar or anything like that but while rummaging
through the desk in Carl's office I found a roll of stamps.
I took the roll of stamps to a local
bank in Aptos where they gave me face value which was a whopping thirteen
dollars (stamps in 1976 were 13 cents). It was enough to fill the tank of that
beastly Lincoln as gas prices then were about sixty cents a gallon. I was
feeling a lot better when we headed out of town to visit Stephen's father. We
stayed there for a few hours, but I was getting anxious to get back to LA.
Chick gave us another twenty dollars and we thought it would be just enough to
make it back home. While coasting down the perilous hill at the grapevine on
Highway 5, the needle was on empty. We finally got to Oakhurst Drive on mere
fumes then I went in the house and borrowed another twenty from my mom and gave
it to Ric for gas. Sanctuary at last.
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