Every year we come to Santa Barbara, California, I recall my younger impressions of it: plastic, lame, for the filthy rich... and oddly enough, these are largely still applicable. No one I know can afford to live right in SB, and the only reason we can afford to take some R & R time here is because Eve found an amazing bargain bed and breakfast several years ago. We stayed there for about three years running. It was inexpensive and run by a charming couple who had owned it for decades, apparently. They had free bikes, a great varied breakfast, a nice welcome basket, free wifi and most importantly, they loved being in the hospitality business. Then the husband passed away and Judy needed to sell and moved away.

Harbor House Inn was then bought by Karen, a ruthless, horrible woman who needed to get her loan paid back and didn't care what impression she made on her "guests". She was like a faceless corporation but in a single being. The prices doubled, the amenities disappeared. A "B&B" with no B? Hello? We were renting two units for a week and she was about as welcoming as a prison door. Needless to say, we never returned.

We were lucky to find a beautiful apartment to rent for a month. It's in a great and quiet location, is cheaper that the cheapest motels and has plenty of space. The terrace is bigger than the entire surface of the Paris apartment where we spent 13 years. We've been coming for three or four years now.

What first brought me to SB in the early 1970's was a gig in Goleta at a place called the Headband. Goleta was hip (UCSB campus) but Santa Barbara was the establishment... and still is. Anyway, we smoked that place out, everyone was under Sugarcane's spell and it was an amazing evening. That memory has lived in my mind as one of those gigs where even some of the improvised moments have still stuck. I can hear some of them if I relax and listen. [In fact, so can anyone right here.]  I can still picture the people looking up at the stage with their eyes almost projecting kaleidoscope patterns, yes, those were the days and I do remember them.

A second time, in 1976 or so, I came up to do the Laserium. It was my first show, the road version where they schlepped around a huge screen, assembled it and the projector and covered all the wondows to be able to darken the screen. It was a pretty amazing show and I remember one of the VP saying "half to company is up here watching it". It went well, and I later took over the flagship Laserium at Griffith Observatory.

One night up at Griffith, I came out of the planetorium, there was no one around, I was one of the last to leave. As I walked out to the parking lot, I saw that clouds had descended to the point where I was looking out, not over the smog-twinkling lights of L.A., but a sea of pearly white clouds. One of the most amazing natural sights I've even seen, right in the middle of Los Angeles.

Now, we're only a 90 minute drive from there and yet from what I've seen of L.A. a few years ago, I have no desire to get anywhere near it after calling it home for over 10 years. As the man said, "you can never go home".

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.