In the 1970's, I was living for a time with a friend's family. It was R, his wife, his parents, his daughter and a young boy whose connection I don't recall, a very cool little man. I was the token Caucasian of the house. Many stories happened in this place. Half the time it was like living "Sanford and Son", sometimes it was "Soul Food". One time it was NYPD Blue, but not Murder One. It was never "Leave it to Beaver", though. One of the things it proved to me was that folks are pretty much the same at the kernel of their being. The rest is cultural.

I met a lot of diverse people from the area, none of them royalty, but many of them fit into the other categories I mention in my description of these memoirs. One of them was Snake, let's imagine a guy who looked something like Will Smith because that's how I remember him looking.

Snake had a proposition, but he never tried to hide the true nature or goals involved.

People, be suspicious of politicians whose agendas are always based on hate speak and innuendo. Politicians who want the job bad enough to purvey hatred don't care about your interests at all, only their own, and they will do anything to get the power and money they crave. Don't drink the koolaid.

Be skeptical of the media clowns, many of whom have openly admitted that they are entertainers in the competitive world of news-as-enertainment. They make no bones about the provocation they enact, it's just a part of their act, like Lenny Bruce used to do. Unfortunately, Lenny Bruce was provocative, yes, but he never incited anyone to violence or hatred, only a mild derision meant to make you think about things in a new light.

Whether it's politicians or media clowns you're listening to, try to think - what is it this person is after, exactly? A better world for you and me, or their own career advancement at any price?

Started a new Remembering Paul site for people who'd like to contribute to his memorial

On the night of our 30th wedding anniversary I learn of the death of Paul Lagos, a man who had a tremendous influence on me musically since our first meeting in the early 70's. Paul and I were born on the same date, but different years.

Paul played with Kaleidoscope and recorded with Leo Kotke, did a lot of recording in L.A., played in the Johnny Otis Revue and then went on tour with John Mayall, John Klemmer, did a bunch of gigs in Los Angeles with jazz and blues players. We toured together in the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1972.

Yes it was a long time ago, when you got on stage with instruments; drums, guitars and a sound system and made music, sounds you heard in your imagination and then translated through your limbs to skins and guts.

Paul taught me about Miles and Coltrane and Joseph Schillinger, about Joe Henderson and Thelonius Monk. We were kids, Victor Conte and I, and we lived in his basement with his flea-infested Great Dane, "Gretta", and we were privileged to meet the likes of the brilliant saxophonist Richard Aplanaugh and Don 'Sugarcane' Harris - who, with Dewey Terry, wrote "I'm Leaving it All Up to You", one of the most played songs on the radio for years. Paul was a GIANT, I'll miss him.

The last time I saw Paul was on a tour for my own CD in about 1995 in France and Switzerland. Ironically, Paul and I played in Geneva in 1974 with a band called the Curtis Brothers. That gig was the inspiration for my song "Woman In White" which was linked to by a nurses' site but in fact the woman in white wasn't a nurse but a powder. Oh, the irony of the Internetz...

Paul, I didn't get to tell you that I loved you man, and now I can't even find out how to contact the woman you lived with to tell her how much your life and advice meant to me. Maybe someone will read it here.

We shared a short period of music nearly 40 years ago, I feel "we hardly knew ye". Thanks for Trane, Miles, Bird, Monk and yes, the blues I feel tonight in learning of your passing.

Please take a moment to listen to this song. It isn't Paul on drums, he would have played it a lot better, but he was there when this moment took place and we laughed about it many times - because we survived it.

The Woman in White

I had a dreamIn the blue of the nightI was caught in the schemeOf the Woman in WhiteLong agoThrough the mists of the pastShe blackened my soulIt all happened so fastDown Cadillac ValleyI copped me a dimeDid it in the alleyTo save a lotta timeWhen I almost died...As I slid to the groundI heard kind of cryLike a siren soundAnd I rememberMoments of blissThe scent of a smileor the color of her kissBut seeds of sorrowLay buried deep withinAnd I'm never going back Never goin' back thereEver againI woke with a screamIn a stone cold sweatI know that meansThat I'll never forgetThat she got my moneyNearly took my lifeIt's time I stopped runningFrom the Woman In WhiteAnd I rememberMoments of blissThe scent of a smileor the color of her kissBut seeds of sorrowLay buried deep withinNever going back Never goin' back thereEver again

It's an old slogan, I even recall a store in Minneapolis that used the name "Life Socks". The pessimistic ode reminds me of the story of 'D', a young woman I met years ago. D was probably less than 18 when she began hanging out with musicians. She was sexually active in a day when everyone was, but she never really had a relationship with one guy for the first few years of her adult life. She had a sweet disposition and got along with everyone. She didn't seem to mind being used and always acted like this was her role. Then she got into hard drugs. What was unique, was that her personality didn't change, she was still sweet, never put anyone or anything down and didn't resort to stealing to feed her habit, although she did widen her sexual network to include more users, in order to get off.

At one point, we were in different cities and exchanged letters for a while. One day she wrote me saying she had finally realized she had to clean up, she wanted to change her life, and she went to rehab. As is often the case, she met her soul mate in that program. This often is not a good thing, but they both turned their lives around to the point that they got married and had a child. They embarked on a "normal" life, jobs, raising the kid, etc. I never met D's husband or saw the child, but from what I heard, they were doing allright, until the day her husband died in a car crash. Not too long after I heard that news, another piece of news came in, D herself was also killed in an auto accident. I never heard what had happened to the child or whether he or she had even survived.

Somewhere on the planet, an orphan of these two extremely unfortunate people lives (I hope). You probably have no idea how hard it is to escape from heroin addiction, but these two people somehow managed to do it against enormous odds and they were headed for a (hopefully) full life. A life outside of what we used to call the merry-go-round, the cycle of addiction where you live to cop illegal drugs and will do absolutely anything to get them.

D made a lot of people "happy" in her short lifetime and that life, more than any other, makes me hope that somehow our essence (soul, if you will) is recycled in the cosmos somewhere.

Some of my most poignant musical memories took place in a club called
Shelley's Manne-Hole, in L.A. I lived there in the early 70's, way after
a deceased friend wrote about it as "a green and groovy place to be". It
was already a smoggy and brown place to be, but there was excitement as
a young musician trying to hook up with gigs and recording dates.
 
"Cop and blow" was always a big thing, go look at the people who changed
the idiom, like Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, McCoy Tyner (Trane was
already dead and I never saw him play live) and lots of locals like
Bobby Hutcherson. In a jazz club, then as now, while brilliant talented
people compose gems live for you on stage, materialistic conversions
between dealers and hookers and their public go on unhindered.
 
Why "poignant"? Because in the case of Bill Evans and Monk, both were
visibly at the end of their tethers, tired, sick and almost beyond the
reach of the ecstasy that such artists must have felt in their earlier
gigs when they were moving up, not only in fame, but in power of
expression.
 
Wow, that seems so heavy I need to insert an anecdote that might make you
laugh as it does me when I recall it. This was in another jazz dive, The
Lighthouse in Redondo Beach. The band playing was Airto. He always had
to say, "Ey, Ear, Toe" and point to the body parts. Good musician and a
spirited human. His (wife?) was Flora Purim, remember she sang on Chick
Corea's Return to Forever version of Spain and all that. Another
far-reaching music innovation. So anyway, Airto and Flora are standing
next to each other at their mics and they each had a marked round pot
belly. The Brazilian music they were playing was loud and had a lot of
breaks to mark the rhythms. Conversation was impossible (not should one
want to converse) but my saxophonist friend Richard A. turned to me and
said, exactly at the moment of a four beat break, when the entire
crowded room was absolutely silent: "Can you imagine them shtupping?"
and then the music started up again.
 
 
Here's a link to a much earlier Bill Evans recording at Shelley's

Tracey was if anything, an entrepreneur. She was the perfect example of business acumen put to questionanble use, but we did share an apartment (two couples) just one house away from the beach. It's the only place I ever lived where you could hear the ocean, really loud, from your bed.
 
In those days, I worked steadily 6 nights a week in bar bands. Tracey waitressed at one of these and she was living with the bass player in our band. Beer was cheaper by the pitcher than by the glass, so Tracey came up with and generously shared a scheme with her fellow waitresses: she'd buy a pitcher, grab glasses and set them at the band's table. When
a customer ordered a beer, she'd come and pour it out iof the cheaper pitcher and serve it at the glass price. Gotta smile at that, right? Hey, the customer was paying the same price, Tracey and the others pocketed the difference.
 
Surprisingly, Tracey was also a pretty good seamstrees and she made all of the stage outfits of her man. I think he was the only one of us actually wearing anything specially meant for show business. The drummer hipped me right away to the idea that you could go to a cowboy shop in Fullerton or Anaheim and buy almost anything there to wear on stage. It was one of the best pieces of advice any-one ever gave me about how to dress for the gig :)
 
Camp Pendelton wasn't too far a drive from where we lived and worked and on the weekends Tracey would drive down there and sell "acid" to the Marines at the base, looking for a good time. I don't know what they paid for the pills, but Tracey was selling her birth control pills as "acid", at a high markup, since I believe the pills she got were free as part of some Planned Paranthood scheme. 
Tracey and my ex-girlfriend both eventually got mixed up with a Swedish hooker in Fresno. I never knew if they were just hanging out, a part of the "stable" or just on the fringe of the many unsavories that hung in that bar, selling dope and maybe fencing stolen goods once in a while. The owner was shot dead there one day and a book was eventually written about those
times in the San Juaquin Valley.
 

Unfortunately, this test in not very portable, but it could be installed at all police stations, in minivans or possibly the back seat of patrol cars.
 
The principle is simple: the testee is asked to thread a 16mm movie projector. Since these are becoming hard to find, I suggest that certain Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorders might also work.

One of the awful things about a long life with a lot of different careers, lifestyles and and endless stream of cities, towns and countries is that you begin to notice people dropping away. Here's a short shout out to to those who fell by the wayside, leaving this mortal coil.

 
He got a lethal disease that some say can be caused by sulfites in the white zin he drank to excess. Most wine lovers would say that drinking any amount of white zin is an excess. He was horribly politically incorrect, making fun of people with deformities, handicaps or any other thing he could grab hold of. I met his dad, who was blind and I guess this is where that came from; RIP Lou.
 
He was a Navy fighter pilot who died of AIDS in his 40's, a creative and intelligent guy. He also pissed me off when as my boss, he yelled at me for no reason. Then I quit. RIP Gene.
 
He was larger then life, yet never fulfilled the potential because of drugs which eventually caused him to need an oxygen bottle to drag around. He was found dead kneeling at that bottle trying to adjust the valve. RIP Don (see the Unforgettable Sugarcane Harris)
 
With Don (above) he co-wrote a song heard literally millions of times in so many versions: "I'm Leaving It (All) Up To You". Don is "Harris" and Dewey was "Terry" on the song credit. These guys got totally screwed out of all the royalties of the song, which made zillions. Here's a bit more about Don & Dewey.
RIP bro, you were a good man.

 He was a prolific painter, father of three boys and a musician. As a painter, he leaves behind many works considered to be some of the most brilliant work in the genre of "fantastic realism". I hope you've found peace, Judson. Here's more about him and an idea of his work.

I remember him as a sweet guy if not a good musician. Easy to get along with, great looking Portuguese girlfriend. Chuck, a drummer I played with years ago blew himself away in a shed, depression got the best of him.

My uncle Harold just passed away a few days ago. He has no wikipedia entry, nothing on the Internet at all I'll bet, but he was a good man and an inspiration to me. Funny, in the last part of his life, he suddenly wanted to be called Charlie. I'll always remember him as Uncle Harold.
 
My step father, my oldest step-brother (listen to doctors when they tell you how not to kill yourself), my father and then my mother all left the building that is this Earth where I've spent 22,300 days.

Don 'Sugarcane Harris'

I met first Don to jam in the basement of drummer Paul Lagos who had the crazy idea of putting together a group around "the Cane".

In the early days, Don seemed to be a normal musician, flamboyant, wacky, always saying weird things but when he picked up the violin, he seared your heart with every note. My liver still hasn't recovered from the Sugarcane days, but that's another story.

Don had a serious drug problem, one that unfortunatey wasted the huge potential he had. His talent was nurtured from an early age by a supportive mother who would do anything for him. He studied with a famous classicial violinist. Often he would whip out passages from the classics in a cadenza at the end of one of his signatures tunes, "Eleanor Rigby".

The most memorable incident occurred in Palo Alto (near Stanford) in a health foods restaurant called In Your Ear. We were playing crazy that night, with each of us on different highs. The crowd was going wild the entire set. It was after midnight when people started to learn that the doors were locked. There was a full scale, burning down riot in the streets and though no one could go in or out of In Your Ear, they didn't much care. It was an amazing night, a night of paisley stage carpeting and vegetarian pizza, beer and every forbidden substance avaiable from the science of chemistry of the 1970's. I'll bet few who were there ever forgot the spell of that night!

Yet, with all Don had going for him, two devils on his shoulders made it impossible to advance: heroin and cocaine.All through his career, he was in and out of jail, always broke, his violin in the pawn shop, yet he managed to play and record with Frank Zappa in a much talked about tour and album. The most moving thing I heard him play was "Directly From My Heart to You" (by Little Richard). Don and his longtime friend Dewey Terry wrote a lot of songs you may have heard of, the most played being "I'm Leaving it all Up To You". The way the music bussiness worked in those days, the rights for that song went into other peoples coffers, Don and Dewey getting a small stipend yearly.

Don died in 1999, at the age of 61, kneeling alone at his oxygen tank. Chronology is on Wikipedia.

  
Listen to Temptation

 I was drinking whiskey
She asked for soda water
I was pushing fifty
She could have been my daughter
Temptation, You're a terrible thing
If you can't resist it
You might just wind up losing
Everything.

 It was a nickel for a quarter
I never got her name
When I asked the old night porter
She was gone... or so he claimed
Temptation, Temptation got me in a bind
If I can't overcome it
I'm surely going to lose my mind

 (solo)

 They got my wallet where they found her
They dragged her body out of the Seine
Somebody's gone and drowned her
I just couldn't stand the pain
Or Temptation
Temptation pushed me around the bend
If you let it get the best of you
You're gonna wind up paying
In the end
Yeah, I let get the best of me
I know that I'll be paying
In the end

 Until I was able to record Temptation, I didn't sleep a wink. The drummer and bass player are from Tom Waits' group of time of the recording, sometime in 1993.

Geneva, Switzerland, 1974
 
In between tours to Europe and Asia that year, some friends and I were hired to play in a club act for three brothers who danced and sang. We were recruited in Los Angeles and flown to Boston. After several days of rehearsal, we traveled from Boston to Geneva to play a show in a cabaret. Most musicians will tell you, there is nothing more boring than to play medleys, especially medleys with no solos. "O Holy Moses" modulates into "Proud Mary", and on and on for 40 minutes, then break time.

When musicians get bored, there are three possible cures: sex, drugs and alcohol and food. As we got done playing at around 4AM with nowhere open to eat, we'd look at each other during the medley and nod, "Salami sandwich in the room there boy, got some hanging out the window in a pillow case". Usually it's all three of the possibilities, just the order that might vary.

I won't go into the sex part here, but it will always be a factor in the business of making music and this was no different, except for the weird crowd in this place, women in fancy fur-lined coats drinking Champagne at $100 a glass (in those days). I had sent a train ticket to a girl I met in Zurich on a previous tour and she was to join me in mid week, so I wasn't looking.

So to the drugs and for legal reasons I won't go into who did what, although the statute of limitations is probably in force from 30+ years away, but still... Inquiry was made as to where to seek certain controlled substances and we were told, "Go to the fountain, man, the fountain is where it's at." And so it came to pass that we were looking around for someone who looked like they would know where to cop substance X and each time a likely candidate was seen, he was asked the magic question. Finally a positive nod and a transaction was made. We went back to the hotel.

Again, without the superficial details, something bad happened, a dose too strong, a tolerance too low, who knows, and one of us is slipping into unconsciousness, but with the lucidity to say the following astonishing sentence: "I saw some huge industrial garbage bags on the maid's cart this morning. Put me in one, drag it to the elevator and put me in the dumpster." One of us went to get the bag.

I won't ever tell what happened next. Go listen to http://tr.im/wwhite and it may become clear. What I will say is that as you travel and look upon the many, many beautiful places on the planet, places like the lake and fountain in Geneva, the bridges of Paris, the streets of Rome, the Hollywood Hills, you aren't thinking of it but many, many funky things have gone down there. Damn, it's good be home.