Every Night's a Saturday Night

THAT FIRST KNOX tour was sixteen weeks long, all across Canada and then across the Midwest. There was a week or so off in between. It went from Prince Edward Island, near Nova Scotia, to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, with every little jerk town in between, and there are a lotta jerk towns in Canada. That was Buddy’s bread and butter: the U.S. Midwest and central Canada.

I was nervous, scared to death—until I got onstage. Because onstage I knew what I was doing. Besides that, Buddy Knox had no saxophone on any of his records, which meant I only did the first part of the show. Back then, especially in these Midwestern ballrooms, they’d hire an artist and it would be billed “Buddy Knox Show and Dance.” Well, the band would come out, which was guitar, bass, drums, and me, and play for the dance section just doing honky-tonk stuff or whatever, and then they’d bring on the star of the show, Buddy Knox—“Here he is, Mr. ‘Party Doll’ himself!”—and, since there was no saxophone on that stuff, I’d kinda fade off to the side of the stage.

Of course, being the youngest guy in the band, I got the privilege of carrying the amplifiers and the two microphone stands and a Bogan PA amplifier and two big ol’ black Voice of the Theatre wooden box speakers and setting ’em up. Plus our lighting system, which was two spotlights with four different colored gels on a disk that would go around and around. I got to unload it and then I got to load it back up into our trailer—no bus, just a couple of cars and a trailer. But, you know, it was show business. It was my ticket outta town, and even though I went to a very cold place, I didn’t care. I was playing music, and this fella’s had records that’ve been on the “Hit Parade,” so, shoot, I was shittin’ in tall cotton and fartin’ in silk sheets.

Being on the road with Knox and going to larger cities, I hit a spurt there where I started to get pretty comfortable on the saxophone. I could actually think of things I wanted to play and I could play ’em, instead of just blindly blowing notes and tapping my foot. I don’t recall exactly what it was or if there was a parting of the clouds and the sun shone in and all of a sudden I was enlightened, but it was something like that, albeit without the flair. One day I just seemed to be able to play more than I could the day before. I don’t know how it came about or why—I suppose just from practicing and playing and getting used to the instrument. I’d also like to think there was some talent involved in there somewhere. Whatever it was, I was getting better.

Going on tour was teaching me other things, too. I remember learning how to break open a Benzedrex nose inhaler and cut the cotton filament out of it—the cotton that had the medicine in it—and chop it up and put it into a piece of bread so you could swallow it. That shit would keep you awake. But it made you belch really horrible-tasting gas outta you, too, unfortunately, and it made you kinda edgy, a little belligerent. ’Course, the other guys in the car were just like you, which made for a volatile situation. But, you know, I hardly ever thought about stuff like that back then. The only thing I thought about was playing the next gig.

I ended up doing two tours with Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids, two sixteen-week tours. On long tours like that there was usually a break around the middle, and when our week off came up on that first tour, Stuart Perry and I decided to take a little trip down south so we could drink as much beer as we could as cheaply as we could, and maybe visit a whorehouse or two. Stu was my best buddy on the road with the Knox band, he was my drinking partner, and he was the drummer for the Rhythm Orchids. He was also from Gibbon, Minnesota, and had never been south of the border so, after I’d spent the first half of the tour telling him all about my teenage high school adventures in Juarez, Mexico, and how you could go over there and buy anything for a dollar, he was all for it. So we got drunk and lit out from Gibbon in a red Corvair, a very little car, and headed out for Juarez and all the pleasures of the flesh that could be achieved. Back then we were into boozin’ and girls.

Gibbon, Minnesota, to Juarez, Mexico, is a long drive. I don’t really know how long because we were drunk when we left and pretty much stayed drunk till we got there. When we did, we left his car on the American side of the border and walked across, and our goal was we were gonna, by God, get drunk, go to a whorehouse, and buy a sackful of bennies to bring back. Bennies, or Benzedrine, by that point came in pill form and were used as stimulants—we were doing a lot of driving in those days and that was part of the equipment needed for long drives—but they were prescription-only in the U.S. Back then, though, you could go to any farmacia and buy fistloads, bucketloads of all these uppers.

Once we got across the border, we went into the first bar that we saw and started drinkin’, and pretty much maintained that pace throughout our visit. And even though it’s cheap, cheap, cheap, finally, at some point, you do run outta money. And we ran outta money. I don’t know what on—booze and pills and shit, I guess—but we ran out. We were at a bar and feeling very, very drunk and very, very broke, and I don’t recall how it happened exactly, but I got pissed off at the bartender for some reason and I threw a bottle at him. I remember it bounced off his forehead, didn’t break, and hit the mirror behind the bar, smashing it. So this guy pulls out his whistle and starts blowing his whistle and all of a sudden a bunch of guys, policía, just descended on us, man, and just wadded us up like old newspaper and toted us down to the fuckin’ slam. And this is in Juarez, Mexico. This is not a nice jail.

So we get in there and now I see that we have a problem. We’re broke and have no way out. I don’t remember exactly how it came about, but somehow I got a call in to my mother: “Momma, momma, your baby boy’s in jail in Juarez, Mexico, and I’ve got a friend with me and we’re broke and we need to get outta here, please!” Well, my mom came through. I don’t know exactly what that entailed, and it took a couple more hours before the wheels of Mexican justice spat us out, but we got out.

I didn’t think of it much at the time, but the fact that we weren’t killed, the fact that we were able to return to Minnesota and return to playing music seems pretty lucky to me today. It was one of those things that I used to get into blindly, willfully blindly. I’d just make a decision—whether it was wrong (and most of ’em were) or right—and just go for it, and the hell with whatever consequences may ensue, I’ll deal with that when the time comes. It was an attitude that worked for me for a long, long time, just relying on being lucky. And having a momma who could get you outta the hoosegow. Thank you, Mom.

Mexican jails are not fun. They weren’t then, and I’m sure they aren’t now. But what might’ve been even less fun was dealing with the fallout from our little escapade across the border. I’d been telling my mom up to that time—because my mom was the only person from the family who I really had any kind of contact with after my grandmother died—that her son was actually doing good, that he was coming up in the world, that he was making a good living and making an impact in the music world, only to have to call her up from a jail in Juarez. And then, of course, Stu had to call his parents and get them to wire us some money for gas so we could drive back from Juarez to Minnesota. Thank God we left the car on the other side of the border. I remember that car had no air conditioning, and it was hot, and I had, I think, the worst hangover I’ve ever had in my life all the way from Mexico to Gibbon, Minnesota. We tried to spin the story the best way we could, but it still boiled down to having to call your momma up to get you outta jail and send you money so you could get home.

I didn’t just rely on luck back then—sometimes it came and found me. At one point during the 1961 Knox tour we were in New York City and I got the opportunity to play on a session with Dion, who’d been a part of Buddy’s ill-fated Winter Dance Party tour. To be honest, I don’t quite remember how I weaseled my way into that session—just bein’ in the right place at the right time, I’m sure—but however it happened, I ended up recording the sax part, solo and everything, for “The Wanderer.”

Now, here’s the kicker: Unbeknownst to me until very recently, during my take of “The Wanderer” I was slightly out of tune, so they had somebody come in after me and copy what I’d done, but in tune. Well, I always thought that it was me because the solo on the record was exactly what I’d remembered playing. The licks were exactly the same. And it sounded really good. But it wasn’t me playing. After forty-five goddamn years, I found out it was somebody else playin’ my solo. Somebody else played it more in tune, I guess. And no one thought to tell me I’d hit the cutting room floor.

Another, more successful instance of being in the right place at the right time came in the spring of 1962 when, back on tour with Buddy, we had to make a detour out to L.A. Buddy was signed with Liberty Records, and for some reason they needed to see him. By chance, an old acquaintance from Lubbock, Glen D. Hardin, who’d moved to L.A. to become a songwriter and arranger, heard that I was in town. He was doing a session and the guy who was booked to play the session couldn’t make the gig, so Glen D. called me. Well, I wasn’t gonna turn down a recording session in an L.A. studio, so I said sure, even though I had no idea who it was for.

I had an old baritone sax, which as it turns out was the reason I got the gig—I guess it was easier or cheaper or both to use a guy who already had a baritone sax. Anyway, I went down there and was immediately confronted with sheet music, which I couldn’t read except to see that I had the very first notes. The song started with the baritone sax. It was all written out, but it looked like a Chinese puzzle to me. So Glen D. played it for me on piano and I picked it up from there and played it, and then throughout the session, whenever I saw the formation of notes on the sheet music that matched what Glen D. had played for me, I knew that that’s when I was supposed to play. The rest of it was just playing the root notes of the chord changes.

Once I got the music down I started picking up on a strange vibe about the session but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. There was a big control room in the front but this was an overdub, so I was in the studio and there were no musicians in there with me. At some point during the playbacks, though, there was a sudden perceptive change in the air. I’d seen these people come into the control room booth, but they were on the other side of a glass plate, and I couldn’t really see that well because it wasn’t very well-lit. But I had a minute before I was expected to play so I squinted a little bit and there he was: Elvis fucking Presley. The song was “Return to Sender.”

I think I was told right after that, “Oh, didn’t you know this was for Elvis?” Fuck no, nobody told me anything! I mean, shit! Of course, suddenly I was very, very nervous, but it didn’t take that many takes and we got it. It wasn’t the first take, unfortunately. Or the second, or the third. It took a few times, but I got it down. The whole time Glen D. was saying, “It’s OK, man. Take it easy. It’s all right.” Stuff like that to calm me down. Elvis didn’t really say much.

But I met him. It was quick, but I met him. I remember he said something like, “I’d like to thank you, son. Oh, you’re from Texas, you knew Buddy?” I didn’t exactly get to sit down and say, “What kind of hair oil do you use?” or “Where’d you get them blue suede shoes?” Actually, he wasn’t wearing blue suede shoes. I looked.

No, I didn’t say much, man. I was a teenager, eighteen years old. I didn’t say anything. This was the king! The undisputed king of rock ’n’ roll, and I just played on one of his records, and if I don’t die of a heart attack before I get outta here it’ll be really cool. I mean, that was the coolest thing I did for a long time, in my mind, anyway. It’s still one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.

WITH KNOX, THERE were breaks from touring that were not always planned or to do with his record company. Knox had his Cadillac, and he and Donny Lanier, the guitar player—they were college buddies—rode in the Cadillac while the Rhythm Orchids, of which I was first chair saxophone player slash sound system and lighting roadie, followed in a different car that pulled the equipment trailer. But Knox also had a wife, and his wife wanted him to come home. Buddy was a good guy, but he had this young, pretty girl in Macon, Georgia, who I guess was the demanding type, and one day he just kinda left, and left me with a U-Haul trailer and a sound system and some pissed-off musicians who didn’t get paid.

I don’t recall which city we were ditched in that first time he left us, but I do remember, after we sold the sound system and the microphones, Stu and I went to Kansas City and got a gig in a place called Club Michael’s. Stu knew a bass player there who was looking for some musicians. And while it wasn’t the same as being on the road, it was a whole new chapter because these other guys, they were actually better than some of the guys in Knox’s band. And we played primarily black music, too—gone were the Elvis covers and all that other stuff. Now we were playing James Brown–type music, which I really, really enjoyed. For one thing, they have even more horns than they do in rock ’n’ roll music, so that was fine with me. And we played all the time—this ol’ boy who ran the place had us working all the shifts that he could possibly squeeze out of us. I learned a lot during that period.

But there was a catch. Club Michael’s was a strip joint part of the time, and part of the time it was like a supper club, people’d come in to eat. It was also, according to rumor, owned by this Kansas City mob guy who didn’t particularly care for music, or at least not our type of music. So the rule was, whenever the owner comes through the door, you stop playing. Not another note. You get off the stage, no questions asked. You didn’t want to piss him off because apparently he might beat you up or shoot you. I don’t know if that was really true or not, but that was the word goin’ around.

And that didn’t set sit well. I mean, who wants to play in a club whose owner doesn’t want to hear you make a sound? So after a while, as much as I loved playing all that R&B, I started looking for a way out. It was during that time that I met a guy who was a pool hustler. Back then, I thought I was a shit-hot pool player, which I wasn’t when it came down to really playing, but this guy, Steve Bankston, truly was. So when I’d had enough of being at the mercy of the musical whims of this mafioso guy at Club Michael’s, I took up driving Steve Bankston around. I was a pool hustler’s driver, caddy, and all-around aide-de-camp.

Turned out Bankston needed a driver mostly because he was a drunk. But he gave me fifty bucks a day, which was more than I was making playing at Club Michael’s, so it seemed like a worthwhile proposition at the time. We’d go to these places, these little towns like Sioux City, Iowa, or Dubuque, find the VFW halls and little pool halls and do a small-town hustling thing. He’d go in and play some nine-ball or play some fourteen-rack call and lose—win some, lose some, win some, lose some, but always lose a little bit more than he won so he could leave there saying, “All right, you gotta gimme a chance to win some of my money back.” And then he’d come back the next day and just clean everybody’s plow. Where I came into the equation became apparent very quickly—as soon as things got ugly, which they almost always did, we’d have to make a quick exit outta the VFW hall and into his Buick and hit the road hard, with folks running out the door after us with guns and shit, cursing and threatening us.

So I did that for a while. And people actually took shots at us—not a whole lot, but it did happen. (I will never set foot in the town of Mankato, Minnesota, again for as long as I live.) It was probably only a couple, three weeks. It wasn’t a long period of time, it was just one of those times when I didn’t have a saxophone gig. I was finding out that being a professional musician didn’t always mean you’d be playing music. Not every night ended on a stage. Sometimes you had to take a job driving the getaway car for an alcoholic pool hustler just to make ends meet. So I tried to look at it as an adventure. And it was an adventure, but in the end it wasn’t furthering my saxophonic career any. Plus, I didn’t like getting shot at.

I did manage to finagle one pretty significant gig during this break from Knox: my first major rock ’n’ roll show in New York. King Curtis got me the gig. It was with the house band for an Alan Freed rock ’n’ roll show at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre. They had two concerts a day and a double feature, one of which, I remember very clearly, was “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” with Michael Landon.

The band onstage for this particular show was a couple of trumpets, trombone, and two saxes—a baritone sax and myself. We were sitting behind these little orchestra setups, stands that were kind of like podiums where you put your music. And then they had one microphone set up at the front of the stage for solos. If you had a solo, you got up from your little spot behind the stand and went up to the microphone to play your solo. And I had a solo during Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion.”

Before the show, all the guys from the other acts were backstage in the dressing room—Little Anthony and the Imperials, Major Lance, Round Robin, guys like that. And Ernie Wright, from the Imperials, he was back there with the guys smokin’ pot. I’d never smoked pot before, but when I walked in and saw what they were doin’—and smelled what they were doin’—I figured out what they were up to. So Ernie Wright turned around and looked at me and said, “Hey, Texas, you want some of this?”

Well, I’d never tried marijuana before, but I was in New York and I didn’t want to appear to be the clodhopper from the panhandle, so I said, “Sure, yeah, I do this all the time!” So he passed me the joint and I took a big drag on it and exhaled immediately. I didn’t know how to do it. Ernie said, “No, no, Texas, lemme show you how to do this. Try it my way.” So he tore off the back page of the program—there were a bunch of the show’s programs laying around—and rolled it up into a giant straw. Then he held it up to one end of the joint, gave me the other end, and told me to suck in as much as I possibly could, like I was gettin’ ready to play a sixty-four-bar solo without takin’ a breath. So I did. I wolfed it back, man, sucked it on down, and held it till my eyes started buggin’ out. Then he suggested that I do it again, so I did it again. I did it about three times.

All of a sudden, or what seemed like all of a sudden, I heard the cue for Little Eva to come up onstage, so I had to hustle my ass onto the stage. I barely made it behind my little stand. Meanwhile, I noticed going up the stairs to the stage that everything around me was different, just looked slightly different than anything I’d seen before in my life. Anyway, I skidded out onto the stage just in time and I was playin’ away and eventually it got time for my solo. I was really having to concentrate on my movements by this time, and, man, the lights were brighter than they’d ever been and more colorful than I’d ever seen ’em. And so I walked up to where I thought the microphone should’ve been, but I couldn’t see anything but the lights, so I walked right on past it into the area where the footlights were, where I fell forward off of the damn stage into the damn orchestra pit—Crash! Bang! Wallop! Bam!—and ended up in a kind of ball down on the orchestra pit floor with a broken saxophone and a wrecked ego, wondering what the hell happened—’cause I had no idea.

Anyway, an usher picked me up and carried me back and people were asking if I was all right and what had happened, and I just said I got blinded by the light. But there were a few of ’em who knew exactly what happened, and they enjoyed it thoroughly. I did, too, once I got over it. And it certainly didn’t deter me from havin’ another puff. Of course, Ernie and the boys were always only too happy to oblige, hoping to get a repeat performance.

I was back out on the road with Knox and the Rhythm Orchids not too long after that on another sixteen-week tour. This time we made it as far as South Dakota before Knox’s wife called him back home in the middle of the night. We had to get this guy from Tulsa to drive up in a pickup truck and pick us up. There were three of us, so there were four of us riding from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, back to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it was cold as a son-of-a-bitch in that pickup truck. It was wintertime. I remember that. The other guys were gonna go home, but I stayed there in Tulsa. That’s how I got swept up in the Great Okie Musicians’ Migration to Los Angeles, California, a year or so later. It’s also where I nearly got inducted into the army.

I got hooked up with a guy named Jimmy Markham, a singer and harmonica player. Jimmy and I established a friendship that carried on from Tulsa through Los Angeles and all the way up to today. When I first met him, though, he didn’t have a sax player and I was ready to go, so I started playing gigs with him. I don’t know if they were actually looking for a saxophone player or not, but I was a saxophone player and I was there. And because I had a miniscule, teeny-weeny bit of a resume from being out on the road with a guy who had a couple of hit records, it gave me a little bit of credibility. We were playing a lot at a place called the Fondalight Club, and Charlie Daniels was actually playing there at the time, too. This was back when his band was called Charlie Daniels and the Jaguars. It’s also when I met guys like Leon Russell and Johnny (J.J.) Cale for the first time. Tulsa had an impressive number of good musicians back then.

I supplemented my living expenses at that stage by living with a barmaid from the Fondalight. I don’t think we ever made $100 apiece. I think it was more in the neighborhood of $25 to $40. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it didn’t matter. When we weren’t at the Fondalight, Markham would book us at a couple of NCO clubs at army bases around Tulsa or wherever else he could. But it was work. It was great. Nobody bitched or complained, except maybe about the condition of some of these clubs, which were a little less than extravagant.

It was a notice saying I had to show up to take a physical and be classified. Which, of course, I didn’t show up for because I didn’t know about it because I didn’t get the letter. So when I didn’t show up for that, they sent me another letter saying, essentially, “OK, you are being inducted. You just come right on down and we’re gonna give you a nice, pretty, autographed uniform and a gun and a helmet and you’re in.” And of course I didn’t show up for that. So they sent another nasty letter saying they categorized me as a draft dodger. That I was a wanted man, basically, is what my grandfather conveyed to me. I asked my grandfather why he never sent me any of those letters but, of course, he never knew where to send ’em.

Back then, you had to sign up for the selective service. So I called up the guy back in Slaton, Don Crow, who owned the Chevrolet dealership there, who was also the selective service contact, and I said, “Don, this is Robert Keys. I’ve talked to my grandfather and he tells me that I’m in trouble with the government. I’m not trying to evade the draft or anything, but what can I do to get this straightened out?” He said, “Well, the only thing you can do is join the army before they find you.”

Oh, God. All right. This was before Vietnam, but it was getting close. We were involved in Laos, I think. So I went down to volunteer in Tulsa because I thought it was either that or Leavenworth. I remember I had to get there at five o’clock in the morning, get on a bus, and the bus went somewhere outside of Oklahoma City where the induction center was.

So I went through the written exams, the physical, and everything else, and at this point I was really trying to get into the army because I thought the only other option was jail. After all of the testing was done, I was sitting in a waiting room with a bunch of other guys who’d gone through the process. Every once in a while the recruiting sergeant would come out and say, “OK, Jones, Smith, Brown,” whoever, and then take the guy into this one room. By the time he said, “Mr. Keys, come with me,” I knew what was supposed to be happening and I realized it wasn’t—he was taking me into a different room! To me, that meant only one thing: They found out I’d been evading and I was going directly to jail and that’s all there was to it. I don’t recall ever having been as panicked in my life up to that point.

“Robert, sit down, I’ve got some bad news for you,” I remember the sergeant saying said to me, and I thought, Oh no, I’m goin’ in for life! Then he said, “Robert, I’m sorry, but due to your medical history of ulcers, we’re not going to be able to accept you—we don’t have a special diet, everybody eats the same thing.” I’d had ulcers when I was a kid, and I’d written it down—I wrote everything down, I was 100 percent truthful because I was actually trying to get into the army—and now it turned out that my honest efforts had gotten me denied. I said, “Really? I can’t join?” and he said, “No, sir. I’m sorry, Robert. I’m sorry to dash your hopes like this, but you’re not qualified.”

Well, all right! I thanked the sergeant for letting me down gently and then went immediately out to a phone booth and called Don Crow and said, “Look, I tried to get in, now they won’t take me. What do I do now?” He said, “Well, have your recruiting sergeant there send the papers showing that you tried to join but were deemed unacceptable, and we’ll see what happens from there.” So that’s what I did. And I never heard from ’em again.

Aside from my brush with the army, Tulsa was fun, but after a while I was itching to get back out on the road. It’s hard to explain. I wasn’t driven by the lure of easy money because the money wasn’t easy. There weren’t any riches except for the few folks who made records and sold records and made a name for themselves that way. I just seemed to have this drive to make music and to keep experiencing things, to be someplace different almost every day. Pretty soon I got my chance.

Buddy Knox’s booker was a guy named Jimmy Thomas—he booked all our gigs throughout the Midwest. Myron Lee Wachendorf, from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, meanwhile, had a band that Jimmy managed, and Buddy and the Rhythm Orchids would sometimes play gigs with Myron Lee because he had a following up there, a regular gig at a place called Shorty’s. Myron Lee would open up and we’d go on and close it out. Shortly after this period, Myron Lee and his band hooked up with Bobby Vee to play Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars tour. The Caravan of Stars tour brought together six or seven of the top rock ’n’ roll acts of the day, put ’em all together on a bus, and drove ’em around the country, and Bobby Vee had a bunch of hits at the time, “Rubber Ball” and “Take Good Care of My Baby” and some others. I don’t know what exactly happened, but the guy who played saxophone for Myron Lee, a guy named Fred Scott, couldn’t make the gig or got fired or quit, and all of a sudden I had an offer from Myron Lee to go out and do this Dick Clark tour with Bobby Vee. So once again I was an afterthought—or maybe once again I was in the right place at the right time.

Being in Bobby Vee’s band, we also had to back up the other acts on the show that didn’t carry bands on the tour. The headliner got his band and then there were six or seven supporting acts. And the supporting acts, I thought, were cooler than Bobby: Little Anthony and the Imperials, Major Lance, the Shangri-La’s, the Detergents, Billy Stewart, Round Robin, Freddie Cannon, they were all really good. Aside from the debacle in New York City on the Alan Freed show, these were my first really big gigs—they weren’t actually that big, but they were bigger than the dance halls and the places where I played with Buddy Knox.

Ever since my grandmother had died, I didn’t keep in touch with my family all that much. I’d call my mother occasionally, but my father couldn’t have cared less. My family was really the guys I was playing with on the road. My buddy Stu Perry, for instance, who also lucked into the Caravan of Stars gig, was with me. I’d left Texas. There was no reason to go back. I didn’t wanna go back, I wanted to keep doing what I was doing. Which I did. I had a Samsonite suitcase with my clothes in it, a suit bag with a black mohair suit, a couple shirts and a tie, and my saxophone. And that was it. Very economical traveling. But it was all I needed.

Touring back then was much different than it is today. We were on a regular bus, for one thing. Not one of these tricked-out tour buses they have now that have bathrooms and beds and television sets and stereos, but a regular bus. And while they were miserable, I thought they were great, too, because here in one place were all these acts that’ve got these hit records out . . . and I’m with ’em. It was pretty cool. There was a lotta gambling going on in the back of the bus, a lotta shootin’ dice. There were occasional disputes, and a couple times knives were drawn. There was always a bottle being passed around on the bus—wasn’t supposed to be, but what else were we gonna do? We’d be driving for hours and every seat’d be taken. It’s not like there was anyplace to go sprawl out. And this was before Walkmans, before anything like that. This was when there were transistor radios, that’s about it. So on the bus you’d either sit there and look out the window or you’d talk with the other guys in the band or the guys in the other groups. I mostly listened. I didn’t do a whole lotta talking because I was still young, very young. I was just soaking it all up.

That tour was great. We played a lot—we did matinees, we’d do two shows a day. We didn’t have any days off that I can remember. Dick Clark himself would be on certain legs, the ones in the bigger markets like Philadelphia. He even rode on the bus a couple of times, or at least once that I remember for sure because I remember everyone saying, “Hey, Dick Clark’s up there, you can’t smoke, you can’t gamble, put those dice away!” Dick was a very clean-cut boy, just the way he was portrayed. I remember we always had plenty of Dr. Pepper. They were one of the sponsors of the tour. We had loads and loads of Dr. Pepper, but beer was not allowed on the bus. ’Course, that was what was said, and while it’s true there wasn’t a lot of beer on the bus, there was plenty of whiskey and plenty of wine.

This was a whole new experience for me: a whole bus full of rock ’n’ roll musicians. Sometimes I’d find myself thinking, Man, not long ago I was listening to these people on the radio and now I’m sitting here watching ’em shoot dice and drink wine and we’re all having a good time rollin’ down the highway. Pretty soon, though, I got the feeling that there was something of a caste system, although it wasn’t spoken out loud. There were the guys in the backup band, like me, and then there were the stars. I mean, I knew there was a reason for the division—these were the guys and girls who people paid money to come and see. They didn’t pay a dime to come and see the guy from Slaton, Texas, playing saxophone. And although most of ’em were nice, there were a couple of guys who were snooty. Usually they were the least talented of the acts.

At this point in my life, I played all the time. I used to shine my saxophone every day. My saxophone guy was still King Curtis, even though the music I was playing didn’t call for any King Curtis–style solo playing. In fact, I didn’t have any solos period. I’d play lines. King Curtis used a lot of tonguing and a lot of phrasing that was more like a country fiddle-playing-type approach. It was very precise, very difficult to do. He didn’t play any jazz notes at all, just straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll. Hardly any blues notes—sevenths, fifths. He had such a distinctive style, really up-tempo. It was fun music. To me it was, anyway. Years later he’d end up getting stabbed in his doorway. Some asshole wanted some free money. I played on his last album, I was on a track called “Ridin’ Thumb.”

I was starting to feel good about my playing on the Caravan of Stars tour. It wasn’t hard at all. I felt relaxed. I felt good. And I felt particularly good when I had a little buzz going. It was during that time when I really developed a fondness for pot, reunited as I was with Ernie Wright and Clarence Collins from the Imperials. This was before the hippie movement, way before peace and love, way before the Vietnam War. These were New York fellas who used to just go down to the candy store and get a $5 brown bag of ganja.

This time around it was Clarence Collins who offered me a toke, saying something like, “This is African black ganja. You better watch out, Texas boy, ’cause it’ll kick your ass!” I didn’t know if it really came from Africa, but that’s what he called it, so, hell, that’s what it was. Ernie Wright, Sammy Strain, and Clarence Collins, they were the Imperials. Sammy also sang in a spiritual group, so I don’t think he smoked pot. Maybe he did, I don’t know. But I know for sure I smoked a lot of pot with Ernie and Clarence.

I hung out with them a lot. I think I was tolerated by them because I was sort of a novelty—this young, white Texas boy who had a taste for ganja. All I know is I loved hanging out with them. They were the coolest act on the stage. They all dressed alike and had three different tuxedo options: One was wine-colored, another was dark blue, and then they had the real special white tuxedos. They were really smooth. They were like the Temptations, but before the Temptations.

Stu Perry was my other pot-smoking partner on the Dick Clark tour. He was the only guy I let know about my new pastime. I remember one time we’d gotten a couple of joints from a friend in Tulsa before heading to New York with Bobby Vee to do a Dick Clark gig. I put the joints in a vial for some pills or something, and I’d also put some poppers in there—amyl nitrate, which came in a little capsule encased in cotton and mesh. Poppers were officially for people having heart attacks—you broke the mesh and inhaled, and it gave you quite a rush. It was a vapor. You’d break it and smell it. Like smelling salts. It was a liquid in glass surrounded by cotton and mesh, and you’d smell it and go, “Whoo-hoo!” But I didn’t know that it had a detrimental effect on pot. So I’d put three or four joints in this prescription bottle with this used amyl nitrate and somehow or other it effected the pot. I remember getting to New York and heading up to our room thinking, We’re gonna get high in New York City and hang out of the window and watch all the taxis! But the shit didn’t work. It tasted bad and put us in a bad mood.

We finally did score, though. We were at the Hotel President—either the President or the Roosevelt, I don’t remember which—and we were sitting up in the room getting stoned and looking out the window, down at our bus and Myron Lee’s station wagon and trailer with all of our shit in it parked down below. As we were doing this, Stu sees somebody start to run off with his drums. We were on the twentieth or thirtieth floor of this hotel and somebody was stealing his drums outta the back of the trailer. So we were up there screaming, “Hey you! Hey you!” And we were stoned. So we went downstairs and told the other guys that somebody was stealing our shit, and someone said, “Get a cop!” and we said, “No! Don’t get any policemen, we’re high!” The other guys in the band were trying to tell us it was OK, but Stu said, “No, no, no! I’d rather get more drums! I can’t let my parents know I’m high!”—like as soon as the cops saw us they’d have known we were high, as if there was a neon sign above us that said STONED! STONED! STONED! So the drums were stolen, and Stu had to buy a new set.

One of the first places we went on that tour was to Hershey, Pennsylvania. I remember smoking a joint and getting off that bus and, I mean, the whole town smelled like chocolate! The air was just permeated with chocolate. Talk about the munchies. I wanted to just jump in a vat of chocolate and eat my way across. It’s funny, but back then it was considered a real sin to smoke pot, although I never had that opinion. I never felt like I was sinnin’. To me it really didn’t seem like there was a damn thing wrong with it. It sure did make fried chicken taste better than it had ever tasted before. I still to this day religiously smoke.

I used to smoke cigarettes, too. I had a bad cigarette habit until I realized I couldn’t finish playing a solo on one breath that I used to be able play on one breath. I found out it was affecting my playing, my breathing, and I shut it down. I didn’t need any patches or anything because I knew if I blew the gig with the saxophone, I was fucked. I had no plan B. Outside of crime. I just remember finding myself having to take a gulp of air when I didn’t use to have to take a gulp of air, and that really impressed me. Man, if you got no lungs, you got no gig, and if you got no gig, you are up shit creek without the proverbial paddle. Because I didn’t have any other skills. Other than being a tightrope walker. A drunk tightrope walker.

Those were some good days, though, on that Caravan of Stars tour. I remember looking around at the people riding on the bus and thinking, Entertainers, when they’re not onstage entertaining, they look different. On the bus they just looked like ordinary people. Sometimes when I looked at ’em I’d think, OK, now, that’s Freddie Cannon—but he doesn’t look like the Freddie Cannon that you see in pictures in Hit Parade magazine. It was a trip. Other times I’d think, Two years ago I was sitting in Slaton, Texas, doing nothing, wondering how I was gonna get my girlfriend back, and now I’m on a bus going down the road with guys who have hit records in the Top 10 and Top 20, and I’m playing in front of all these people. It was like a rock ’n’ roll dream come true. And then I met the Rolling Stones.